Division .8.54-3 Sectioa THE FOURTH GOSPEL THE HEART OF CHRIST BY EDMUND H. SEARS " It is seldom borne in mind that without constant reformation, that is without a constant return to its fountain-head, every religion, even the most perfect, nay the most perfect on account of its very perfection more even than others, suffers from its contact with the world, as the purest air suffers from the mere fact of its being breathed." Max Mullhr TENTH EDITION BOSTON AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 1908 PRELIMINARY. ** It has always happened that in the ranks of the scientific army some have been found who refuse to credit the marvels which obser- vation is continually revealing on every hand. Despite all the known wonders of the universe the circumstance that the sole available inter- pretation of observed facts involves some surprising conclusion, is held by such men to be a sufficient reason for rejecting the observa- tions of the most trustworthy. The value of scientific observation seems enhanced in their eyes precisely as its fruits are insignificant.*' — R. A. Proctor. PREFACE. •' npHE fourth Gospel is the Heart of Christ," is the -L euthusiastic language of Ernesti, from whom we borrow the words of our title-page. Expositors both an- cient and modern, who regard the four Gospels as veri- table history, have generally manifested the same pref- erence. " Written by the hand of an angel," says Herder ; and Schleiermacher, who with his school delighted in " the mystic of the four Evangelists," says that his soul must have been pervaded by eternal childlike Christmas joys. But sentiments of admiration are not evidence to other minds who do not find through John those depths of living water which those who are more contemplative have ever found. No book has been the subject of a more search- ing or a more adverse criticism than the fourth Gospel. The history of the controversy, with the motives of it, is exceedingly interesting and instructive, and I had sketched it in two chapters of this work, but was obliged to omit them in order to bring the volume within convenient size. It is the controversy of half a century between some of the ablest theologians and profoundest scholars. The his- torical evidence was first seriously assailed by Bret- schneider in 1820, who then published his " Probabilia," and who contended that the author of the fourth Gospel be- longed to the first half of the second century, and wrote it IV PREFACE. with a dogmatic purpose, namely, to propagate the doc- trine of the deity of Christ. He was ably answered, and the only change which the whole discussion then produced was a new value placed upon the Gospel of John. Bret- schneider himself retracted his doubts. But the Critical Philosophy, dating from Kant, and running by a swift and irresistible logic into Pantheism, gave birth to a new school of Biblical criticism ; a criti- cism vastly more ingenious than the old rationalism, and wrought of finer threads than it had ever spun. It finds its ablest expounder in Ferdinand Christian Baur, an Hegelian of the left wing, that is, the pantheistic, who breaks up the whole New Testament Canon, and runs it anew in pantheistic moulds, fortunately with the calmness and the icy clearness by which his style is distinguished. He furnishes Strauss, we think, with all the ideas and arguments which a Christian believer would care to no- tice or answer. Whatever we say of his criticism, and the philosophy that determines and inspires it, his three works, the History of the Christian doctrine of the Trin- ity, of the Atonement, of the Christian Gnosis, place the student of Christian history under immense obligations. Where learned men have disputed, unlearned men are jipt to think there must be hopeless uncertainty. They do not remember that when learned men dispute with theo- ries predetermined, their disputes are only the play of hypotheses, and that the verdict of the common under- standing is better than theirs. That the hermeneutics of the Tubingen School are a dance of this sort, is shown by the constant shifting of its positions and its mutually destructive theories. There was a pre-determinatioa to PREFACE, V make Christianity serve as a mould of Pantheism with its nomenclature unchanged. Meanwhile as the dust of the controversy clears off, the calm wisdom of Neander, who put in a plea for entire freedom of debate, and who saw what the result must be, becomes apparent. No one went into it with a spirit more sweet and beautiful than his. To his name must be added a list long and illustrious, to enumerate which would be to suggest works of learning and scholarship, the most profound and reverent of this age or any other, especially in the departments of Christian history and evidence. Never was it more signally shown how great is the service of doubt and denial in rendering faith and affirmation clear, pronounced, and intelligent. Not only the sand was cleared away, disclosing the old foundations more deeply and broadly, but new facts were brought to light, and new fields discovered, running down like sunny glades through opening mist to the Personality which the Chris- tian ages date from. The result is that by the verdict of the best scholarship of modern times not predetermined to Pantheism, no facts of equal antiquity, judged by the reasonable rules of historical evidence, stand out in surei prominence than the fundamental facts of the New Testa- ment narratives ; no heights of history thus remote lie on the horizon in mellower sunlight or clearer outline. Among the names in this great debate of half a century, whether disclosing the external grounds of Christianity or its divine contents, are, along with that of Neander, Ullman, Dorner, Tholiick, Schaff, Julius Miiller, Giesler, Olshausen, Jacobi, Hengstenberg, Bunsen, and Tischen dorf. Vi PREFACE. It is not in my plan to write a book of Christian evi- dences merely, but to evolve the contents of the Johannean writings, which clearly apprehended are their own evi- dence, and prove Christianity itself a gift direct from above and not a human discovery. But the exposition would not be at all satisfactory, especially after past discussions and denials, if we left out the historical ground of the fourth Gospel, or left it to be suspected that this ground had been shaken or disturbed. We shall see that this has not been the case. Indeed, it is very difficult to make a sharp line of division between external and internal evidence, and show where one shades off into the other, as much as it is to tell where the soul and body are joined together. Brought home to us in their all-reconciling power, the es- sential truths of the fourth Gospel imply and necessitate the form and covering in which they appear ; or conversely beginning with their historic basis, the evidence grows and brightens all the way inward to the central light which shines out, encircles, and irradiates the whole* CONTENTS. PRELIMINARY. fAQI I. The Supernatural . . . , ^ , 3 II, Miracles . . 16 III. The Immanence of God ... • 3* PART I. THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT. CHAPTER I. Gnosticism 39 II. Saint John at Ephesus 51 III. The Johannean Writings 64 IV. The Scope, Purpose, and Spirit of the Apocalypse 91 V. The Witnesses of the Second Century . . 112 VI. The Witnesses of the Second Century . , 131 VII. Christianity as a New Influx of Power . . 165 VIII. The Pause in History 184 PART II. HISTORIC MEMORIALS. I. The Four Gospels in Organic Unity ... 197 IT Jesus of Matthew is the Logos of John . . 220 III. The Mystery of Birth 226 IV. Nazareth 239 V. The Forerunner 247 VI. The Homes of Jesus 255 VII. Jesus in the Desert 266 VIII. The Last Meeting by the Jordan .... 285 Vlll CONTENTS. PART III. THE PRIVATE MINISTRY OF JESUS. CHAPTER PACK 1. The Wedding at Cana 295 II. The First Visit at Jerusalem 304 III. The Second Visit at Jerusalem . . . . 319 IV. Removal to Capernaum 328 V. The Third Visit at Jerusalem .... 338 VI. The Fourth Visit at Jerusalem .... 352 VII. The FiFfH and Last Visit at Jerusalem , . 370 VIII. The Night of the Last Supper . . . .379 IX. Calvary 387 X. The Reappearings of Jesus 394 XI. The Person of Jesus Christ 404 PART IV. THE JOHANNEAN THEOLOGY. I. The Cosmology of Plato 415 11. Its Character and Influence 429 III. The Johannean Cosmology 442 IV. The Transparencies of Nature .... 456 V. The Word made Flesh 467 VI. The Logos Doctrine 484 VII. The Johannean Atonement . . i • . 501 VIII. Converging Lines 512 IX. The Thrones in Heaven. Conclusion . . 525 APPENDIX. A. The Easter Controversy 537 B. The Birth of Christ . 544 C. The Preexistence 546 D. Personality and Personification .... 550 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. THE SUPERNATURAL. A LL the great religions acknowledge at least two •^^^ ranges of existence. This material plane of being which we apprehend by the organs of sense, we must believe in, as it nourishes and enfolds us from our cradles. No one ever denied it. Philoso- phers dispute about the essence of matter ; about what is behind these natural phenomena, and whether anything at all ; but no one denies tha^ the phenom- ena themselves exist. Those who deny the existence of matter only deny that it exists in itself, or in other words that it has any substratum of its own. The world of sight, sound, and fragrance that lies over against the senses and through them becomes an object of perception, is believed in alike by peasant and philosopher, and this by common consent we call NATURE or THE NATURAL WORLD. In this natural world there is nothing stable. All is mobility and change. Not only the animal and vegetable life on its surface constantly disappear and 4 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, reappear, but the rocks become disintegrated and enter into other forms of existence. Going back through longer reaches of history we find that the oceans and the mountains have been subject to vast changes by subsidence and upheaval, and that the aspect of the earth is transformed from one epoch to another. The very same elements by changes of combination produce the most diversified forms ; and the minerals, the waters, the forests, the flowers of the field and the winds that blow over them, are those same elements commingling by new affinities and proportions, giving the endless ebb and flow which we delight to witness around us in the sea of matter. Man himself is involved in these perpetual revolu- tions. He appears on the surface of nature, is dom- inated by it through the stages of his threescore and ten, and then melts into its bosom and disappears. The order of sequence, according to which all these changes take place, we call by universal consent the LAWS OF NATURE. To discover these changes and recombinations by patient observation or by subtile analysis is the business of science ; to group them in theii class and order and so determine their law of sequence is the business of natural philosophy. The Christian believer acknowledges another and higher range of existence. Nature, we said, discharges man from her keeping and domination, and all that the senses knew of him dissolves and recombines in her earths and ethers and flowers. So one hundred THE SUPERNATURAL. 5 generations have passed away since Christ appeared upon the earth. More than three hundred genera- tions have come and gone since the creation of man, all of whom nature nursed on her bosom and then received back their crumbling forms and sent them anew into her unending circulations. The number of human beings then who exist at this moment on the surface of the earth, compared with those who have existed, is only an insignificant fraction of that whole which we call humanity ; only as a single page of one great volume ; only as the last cluster of leaves that flutter in the great forest that has shed its foliage. If man lives only within the conditions of nature and is only returned into her endless circulations, then the natural world is the only one that exists to him, and he may expect to know of nothing beyond its phenomena. But Christianity affirms that when nature quits her grasp upon him, he still lives on, that only his visible coverings dissolve and recombine with the natural elements, while the man himself emerges beyond her sphere, subject no longer to her conditions and laws. It follows, of course, on the Christian theory, that the three hundred generations of human beings whom this natural world has dis- charged from its domination are still alive and active. Hence Christianity affirms a sphere of life above nature, more vast and more thronged with people, and whose empire is ever enlarging, since the stream of existence has discharged its immortal contents foi 6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. more than six thousand years into those endless abodes. This higher range of existence is called by common consent the supernatural, because it is above the dominion of natural law. This is what men generally mean when they speak of a supersensible or supernat- ural world. This preeminently is the sense appre- hended by Christian faith when it transcends the sphere of natural change and sees the things that are invisible. Every one has a right to make his own definitions, but he is bound consistently to abide by them when made, and not confound things eternally distinct in themselves. The word nature doubtless is made to have other significations, and indeed passes through an extended range of secondary meanings. We sometimes speak of the nature of man as meaning the whole aggregate of human qualities which make him what he is. Then again we discriminate and speak of his physical, in- tellectual, and spiritual natures. One who is disposed to play with words may call all beings and things from the mineral up to the highest angel created natures^ and then by this definition he may deny that there is anything above nature except God Himself. Or he may follow up this game of words yet farther. Cicero writes a treatise, " De Natura Deorum," and fve speak familiarly of the Divine nature, meaning the SJm of Divine qualities and attributes ; and one who should be so disposed, and could afford the time for THE SUPERNATURAL, 7 such logomachy, might place all beings and things, including God Himself, under the category of nature ; and then of course it would be very easy for him to prove that the supernatural has no existence. Plainly nothing is gained by these tricks of lan- guage. The words 7iature and supernatural y or the nature-world and the spirit-world, whether put in contrast or correlation, have a meaning fixed and well apprehended in the popular judgment, and we gain nothing but confusion when we try to disturb it. Herein moreover the popular judgment and the most philosophical are in perfect agreement. With both alike, the nature-world is this range of existence con- ditioned by time and space, and subject to the laws of space and temporal change ; whereas the range of existence conceived as out of time and space, and therefore beyond the dominion of natural law, is the supersensible or supernatural world. Thus Kant uni- formly discriminates these two spheres of being, — nature, the realm of sensible phenomena condi- tioned by space ; and a cogitable world above space defecated of sense and free of natural law, and there- fore supersensible and supernatural.^ Of these two ranges of being thus discriminated, how they are related and how contrasted, which is the substance and which the shadow, there is an immense divergence of opinions and beliefs. By the 1 See chapter iii. of Scrapie's Metaphysic of Ethics ; or see Kant'f ^ritik of Practical Reason^ passim. 8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. Christian theory man is the connecting link between them. He lives in both. He is the child of nature, and at the same time the heir of immortality. But that is first which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. He is born with only a natural conscious- ness, and the heavy wrappages of sense become the first basis of his existence. He is involved in nature, and he may even pass through all her transformations from the infant to the man, with hardly a dream of aught else than the natural life. Then the supernat- ural will be to him a phantasy and a chimera. He may honestly deny its existence altogether. Domi- nated by sensible appearances what more strange than to suppose a man can be alive after he is dead } Beyond sense the imagination " stretches out the stones of emptiness," and to think of that infinite vacancy as our final abode, or as capable of yielding a revelation to us out of its eternal silence, is to such a man the most hideous of all absurdities. Men have lived and passed away from this plane of being with no belief in any other, simply because none other than the natural consciousness was awakened within them ; or, in other phrase, because they only lived and died as natural men. Just removed from this state, and rising out of it, are the first faint dawnings of the supernatural, the first guessings and gropings towards it. But as yet it is apprehended only as dim and spectral. Thus the ghosts of Homer live in the underworld depleted THE SUPERNATURAL, 9 of all that fresh and throbbing life which they lived on the earth, and are described as the fleeting shades of what they were. What a contrast between the Greece. that flourished on the sun-bright hills and plains and breathed her transparent ethers and de- veloped into graceful and glorious manhood, and the Greece of her spirit-world reduced to its pale and ghostly existence, and pining for terrestrial air ! Not yet did the common mind or even the minds of the poets themselves come to any practical faith in the Supernatural. For with individuals and peoples not yet evolved from the despotic grasp of nature, this world is the substance and the other is the shadow. Removed somewhat farther from sensuous unbelief, and indicative of a higher intellectual culture than blind instinctive gropings, is that faith which comes from the deductions of the reason but which refuses to affirm aught else than the simple fact of the super- natural. This is the position of Kant, who declines to accept the doctrine as the gift of revelation, but only as his own conclusion from a well-constructed syllogism. He does not pretend to prove it with " apodictic certainty," and he protests that we have no right to envisage it to the eye of faith, for then ;ve f y off" among the chimeras of the fabulists and poets. We must cogitate the supernatural and de- scribe it only by negatives. It is the absence of nature ; it is spaceless and timeless ; it is the perfect defecation of all sensuous life, and beyond this, says Kant, the reason has no right to go. lO THE FOURTH GOSPEL. A more full and affirmative faith than this is quite conceivable. It is conceivable, that is, that the su- pernatural may not only be believed in as the result of a syllogism and a balance of probabilities, but may be envisaged to the eye of faith ; that man no longer involved completely in nature but evolved in part from her despotic grasp, and having a higher con- sciousness clearly and divinely opened, may be so brought front to front with super-sensible realities that their gleaming ranks and far-dissolving perspec- tives shall lie on the soul as brightly and surely as Nature does on the organs of sense, and that the consummation of our religious faith and Christian culture shall give us, the supersensible world the eternal reality and Nature its feebler adumbration, — that the sun-bright substance itself, and this the mov- ing shadow projected on the dial-plate. But is there any probability that such a disclosure as this will be given to mortals } Let us see. Once admit the simple truth of man's immortality, and how vast and far-reaching are the conclusions that flow from it ! How dull and laggard are our minds in coming up to the reality ! There are to-day about a thousand million human beings upon the eaith. At the end of a year, twenty millions will have passed away from it and twenty millions new- born will have come in their places. Hundreds are going and hundreds coming while I write these sen- tences. In less than fifty years, a number equal tc THE SUPERNATURAL, II the whole thousand millions will have put on immor- tality, and an equal number will have filled up the earthly ranks thus broken. The successive genera- tions that have passed on within eight thousand years, the time during which man has probably been an inhabitant of the earth, would number by a mod- erate computation, one hundred times a thousand millions of people. This great multitude, moreover, are our own kith and kin ; our brethren elder born, whose hearts have throbbed with the same passions and yearnings and aspirations. And unless the mighty prophecies that go up from our collective hu- manity are a mockery and a lie, unless the groan- ings of the creation and its travailings in pain fail eternally of deliverance, then that great company of these uncounted millions who aspired to a better state, have had their hopes fulfilled ; have risen to an existence which has been brought into nearer communion with the Divine, and been enriched and ennobled by being freed from our earthly incum- brance. How immeasurably then in height, in breadth, in dignity, and power, does the supernat- ural transcend the natural ! And when we speak of humanity only as pertaining to the race on earth, how do we narrow down the conception and de- grade it ! If those uncounted generations of men and women have not been disrobed of their human- ity by death, but if on the other hand it throbs with a diviner love, then the pulses of their being stiU 12 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, beat in harmony with ours as one family of the living God, and like God Himself, are nearer to us on the spiritual side, because there are no walls of flesh between us. " But then our concern is only with the practical ; with our duties here upon the earth, and our fellow- beings who share with us its trials and sorrows. We must relieve the burdens which we can touch now and here, and nut follow our imaginations into realms which are uncertain and remote." Only with the practical ! Do we become practical only by bending prone and working mechanically with our hands, without any faith to inspire our in- dustries and turn them to works of love or alle- luiahs of praise } Does the practical consist only in finding the swiftest methods of locomotion in the barter of commodities, in changing money, and in handling dirt t And when you speak of our fellow- beings as part of the great orb of humanity in which we are all insphered and involved, must we think of it only as it rounds outward and downward among Africans, Patagonians, the Chinese, and the Esqui- maux ; or must we think of it also as it rounds upward into light, and expands in those continents vaster and more densely peopled which lie in a bioader and warmer sunshine from the eternal throne 1 " The burdens which we can touch now and hire. ' What were the burdens which lay on the THE SUPERNATURAL. 1 3 minds of the two thousand of our fellow-beings who have died since I began this chapter an hour ago ? What are the burdens on the minds of the three hundred and fifty thousand whose feet are now stumbling on the last verge of mortal existence which they will quit forever before eight days have elapsed ; whose failing eyes look for the twinkle of some star in the darkness of the infinite Be- yond ? What are the burdens on the minds of the twenty millions who are crowding after them and will follow them before the year has closed ? What are the burdens now and everywhere on our toihng, hoping, and aspiring humanity, conscious of the rapid changes of time, and groping for a foothold on the solid floors of eternity ? They are not bur- dens which any " practical " man can touch unless he has stood himself where the clouds have been rifted above him and disclosed those higher and broader continents reposing in the peace of God. " Our concern only with duties here on the earth." Yes, — but very possibly a view from the earth's illumined summits rather than its hollows and flats will show us what those duties are. Some centuries ago the philosophers thought that this earth was the centre of the universe and the most important part of it ; the sun, moon, and stars being lamps for phi- losophers tc see by. Even Plato thought the earth was the first and oldest of the sidereal gods, and at the centre of the axis of the Cosmos regulating the 14 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, movement of the whole. They did not imagine that the earth, and the whole solar and planetary system to which it belongs, were but the lackeys of vaster systems which wheel them at will through the fields of space, and that the radiance of our brightest sum- mer's day would be but a dimly lighted candle in the near presence of those monarchs of the skies whose thousand-fold blaze would turn us to ashes if it were not cooled and softened by distance. Very possibly it may be found in like manner when the sphere of our knowledge rounds upward as well as outward and downward, that it will show us relations and harmo- nies of which before we had never dreamed ; and that we should find the supernatural realms of being run- ning into the natural, and controlling the latter with attractions and repulsions which we should be much wiser and better for knowing. Who shall decide be- forehand and deny the probabilities as to whether the Divine Providence will openly disclose to us those supernatural realms where our humanity is glorified, compared with which all our little day on the earth is but the prologue of a mighty drama ! Once admit that man is immortal, and that death is only a physical change, and we shall find that many oi the fallacies of naturalism are speedily dis- pelled Naturalism, for example, scouts the idea of a " personal devil " as one of the chimeras of super- stition. But personal devils have trod the earth for a^es. What is the essence of deviltry but the inver- THE SUPERNATURAL. 1 5 sion of the powers of man, turning them against God, against society, and against humanity? What but this has gendered the wrongs, the murders, the cruel oppressions which have afflicted the world ? Men who incarnate deviltry here leave this world by the hundred every week simply by dropping their mortal coverings. If death has not extinguished their being, it follows by the plainest and shortest logic that the personality of the devil, whether individually or in the complex, is one of the stern facts of the universe both on its mortal and immortal side, and that those who deny it slide into the very superstition which they charge upon orthodoxy, viz., that there is some moral magic in death-beds to change sinners into saints. Possibly when the supernatural shall disclose itself as that other hemisphere of our humanity, where it culminates continually, we shall find that our ascetic and our blindfold theologies alike will have their su- perstitions sifted out of them ; and that to split the universe by a horizontal line and leave the natural below to itself, is to leave it to bewildering fantasies, or, what is quite as bad, leave it to gravitate heavily into dust and mire. II. MIRACLES. A LIVING writer defines a miracle thus : " An ^^" event inexplicable from the effect and concur- rence of finite causes ; which appears as the in- working of the supreme infinite cause, or God, for the purpose of proving to the world God's nature and will ; especially of introducing a Divine Messenger, of holding him to life, guiding him in his work and authenticating his credentials with men ; this divine wonder-working so shaping itself as to operate through the messenger as a power conferred upon him once for all to bear witness concerning Him ; its efficacy connecting itself with an appeal to God on the part of the wonder-worker, so that God Himself on his account breaks through the chain of natural events and lets the supernatural come in." The writer cites alleged examples of such Divine interference : the miraculous birth of Christ, his exceptional childhood, the scene at his baptism, and his ascension.^ A most lame and lumbering definition, implying all through that miraculous power is one superim- posed from without, standing apart by itself, as in 1 Strauss, Leben Jesufur dar deutsch Volk bearbeitet^ p. 146. MIRACLES, 17 some sense hitched on, not rather the exaltation of the faculties themselves under the action of universal laws, natural, spiritual, and divine. We hold this definition utterly unwarrantable from any claims which Jesus ever made in his own behalf, no way applying to the events cited or to any facts of the New Testament, practically false and philo- sophically absurd. If God is immanent in nature and in man, and the supernatural is involved in the nat- ural, there can be no such thing as "interference" or " breaking through." Nature is the perpetual efflores- cence of the Divine Power ; the natural is the unbroken evolution of the supernatural ; history from the first man to the last is the progressive unrolling of the plan of the infinite Providence in which great events and small are taken up and glorified. Who but an atheist doubts "the inworkingofthe supreme infinite cause.''" And who but those who ascribe the authorship of nature to a mechanic and not a Creator, believes that this inworking is exceptional and not universal, inter- mittent like the winding of a clock and not fi-eshly creative every hour ? Who among the myriads of messengers which God has sent into the world, ever came without being " introduced " and " authenti- cated " by the Divine power operating through Him and passing into works that bore witness to his message } A miracle, as we apprehend it, is exactly what is implied in its etymology, — a surprise. It is an event 1 8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. SO unlike anything in our previous humdrum and shallow experience that we cannot group it under any law of sequence, and so it stands forth as \ wonder. If a child who had never heard the thunder, were caught in the field by a tempest and involved in a blaze of lightning, he would think " the chain of natural events " broken through, and very likely be- lieve as they did in the childhood of the race that God had spoken from the clouds. The white men told the Indians that on a certain day and hour the sun would hide his face, and the earth at mid-day be covered with darkness. The hour came and the darkness came ; the Indians fell on their faces in terror and worshipped the white men as endowed with supernatural knowledge. A man who had been dead four days opens his eyes and rises from his coffin, and strikes dread into the standers-by. A young woman dying at Naples, describes a wed- ding scene exactly to the life and at the moment of its occurrence in the dear old home across the Atlan- tic, hears delightful music perceived by no one else, looks up and exclaims, *' How beautiful ! " and passes away from earth. What is the work of science but to group all the miracles in the natural world under the laws of matter, and what is the work of philosophy but to group all other miracles under laws intellectual and spiritual t Law is simply the order of sequence which governs til phenomenal changes, whether in the realm of MIRACLES, 19 matter or the realm of mind. When we say that the laws of nature or of spirit are " uniform," we mean not that they give a monotonous sameness thro'igh all the centuries, but that the same antecedents being given the same consequents will be given also. Like causes under like conditions will be followed by like results. If I planted corn last year and reaped the harvest, I have a right to expect that the same seed this year, in the same soil with the same culture and the same climatic conditions, will produce the same harvest again. But if the harvest should totally fail this year while all the antecedents appeared the same as the year before, it would be sheer stupidity in me to imagine that the chain of natural events had been broken through and not rather that some of the antecedents had eluded my intelligence. The con- sequents I can cognize, for they stand out palpable before me, but what conceit must that be which claims to cognize all the antecedents which lie hid in the secret laboratories of nature, which run back to the birth of time and into the unknown eternities themselves ! If by " the uniformity of the laws of nature " we were to understand only an unchanging series of phenomena repeating itself age after age, coming round and round in the same cycles, we should have a theory of the creation utterly belied by the facts of the case. Looking out from our little moment in time, and our lit^Je mole-hill in space, we might per- 20 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. haps affirm this kind of uniformity, for the seasons revolve, and even and morn alternate now just as our fathers and grandfathers had described them. But how was it in that period before the seasons began their flowery circuit ; before Day lit up its solar splen- dors, or Night quenched them with cooling shade ? How was it when our earth hung in space as a mass of molten lava, or when the seas covered its whole surface boiling hot and void of organic life, or when the Laurentian hills peered above the surface and lifted slowly their drenched and solitary heads above the boundless waste of waters, the first born children of this habitable world ? ^ Looking back, not through our own little day, but through nature's periods and cycles, we see her moving not in a " uniform series," but RISING WITH SPIRAL MOTION from lower to higher, never repeating herself, never completing one circle except on a loftier plane than the previous one, and toward which all previous ones were the prophecy and aspiration. The Positivists will have it that tem- poral change succeeding to temporal change, phe- 1 What we call " the New World is in fact the Old World," says Agassiz. " The Western Continent was the earliest upheaval ; and the first land that peered above the waters was not the highest mountains, which are of later date. Along the northern limit of the United States, bordering upon Lower Canada, there runs a low line of hills known as the Laurentian Hills. They are insignificant in height, buf the earliest land that lifted itself above the waters. The earliest forms of organic life may now be studied along what was then the beach ol An almost boundless sea." — Geological Sketches^ chapters i. and ii. MIRACLES. 21 nomenon antedating phenomenon, exhausts the idea of causality, thus affronting our intelligence with the doctrine that the effect can rise above the cause into a new and loftier series. For if nature herself gives us instead of a monotonous circuit in the same grooves, a constant movement out of them into higher ones from indistinguishable chaos through the ascending scale of life and order up to man, the majestic coronal of all, then when we speak of the " uniformity of nature " we only talk foolishness for the purpose of blinking the glories of the Godhead, immanent in phenomena and authenticating all their vanishings and reappearings. A miracle is a surprise, — but to whom ? Not to higher intelligences who see the interiors of nature and know what is about to be from the unbroken links of the ascending series ; not to Him who fills those interiors with reality and floods them with his life ; but to us who see but one link of the chain ; who are ignorant of the long line of antecedents and who stand where the result first breaks upon human sight. An eclipse was a surprise till the laws of planetary motion were discovered and revealed it in accord with the harmonies of the spheres ; the first advent )f man on the green earth was a surprise to the brutes below him ; the first angel-appearances to men were a surprise to the infant race, and every Divine epiphany on a higher plane than a previous one, ^'hich should date a new dispensation or a new 22 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, cycle of the endless years, would be at its com- mencement a surprise to the subjects of it, whether angels or men. But what dullards must we be to stare into the heavens and declare the laws of the universe broken through simply because we could not see those infinite antecedents and their unimagi- nable consequents, which make up the supreme order of the creation whereby it ascends and reflects the Adorable Perfections with nearer and brighter refulgence ! The changes of a single day are miracles to the ephemera that swarm into existence and die between sunrise and sunset. Supposing them endowed with some sort of puny intelligence, what a surprise it must be to them when they emerge from the surface of the water and bathe their wings in light ; when the wind sweeps them from the air ; when they ex- pire in the sun's last rays and the three hours that span their insect life are closing ! The changes of the four seasons are miracles to the tribes that live and perish in their annual revolutions. The transit of the earth from one epoch to another is miraculous, seen from our finite or merely natural side of things. Every new epoch transcended all the experience of a former one, and came upon it as a surprise. The shell-fish of the silurian beach, if they could have thought and spoken as expounders of naturalism, would have treated as incredible the first rumors of four-footed beasts and creeping things, for would not MIRACLES. 23 mollusks and bivalves have been to them the finale of this lower creation, not buffaloes and stags with antlers ? And then the mammals of the tertiary period, who inhabited the green earth and cropped its herbage alone for unknown ages, would have been equally surprised when man came as the lord of all. As if quadruped existence and not biped were not conformable to all experience, and the highest to be conceived or desired ! As if any other were not anomalous and monstrous and a " breaking through " of the laws of nature ! And the new race of men, looking from the natural side only, ignorant of aught else than their own short epoch of a few hundred years, might perhaps claim themselves as the last and highest evolution of Divine energy ; and if by some new epiphany a style of life not animal, nor human merely, but essentially Divine, should appear upon the earth with attendants and environments tran- scending all past experience, and inaugurating a new series of years and centuries, they might very likely think the order of the universe disturbed and its laws broken through, and try to sink the fact from its appropriate rank, and shut out the solar splendors of the Godhead. What can be more childish than to make the ex- perience of what has been the measure of all that shall be? And yet this is the whole pith of Mr. Hume's argument against miracles which Strauss has served up anew as unanswerable. The alleged 24 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. facts of the Gospel narratives — the birth of Christ from no human paternal line, his exceptional child- hood, the angels that attended him, the healing dis- eases by his touch, his raising the dead, his own resurrection and ascension — are unlike any former experience, and therefore incredible. They are vio- lations of nature's laws, and cannot be proved by tes- timony. The answer plainly is, How do you know the laws of nature except from phenomena t And whether such phenomena have taken place is the very question in hand. If they did take place, they are consequents palpable to the eye, but whose antece- dents belong to the infinite laws of order which you cannot measure, since they are out of sight. The same consequents were never given before because the same antecedents were never given. If we are told that Jesus raised the dead, and restored the blind, and walked the waves, the credibility of the alleged facts will depend altogether upon the question. Who was Jesus .'* and that again must be decided by the amount and quality of moral and spiritual power with which He moves upon the world, and possesses and changes the heart of humanity. Behold the man, and look before and after, and then say, Does he inaugu- rate a new epoch ; is here a transition period in the ascending Divine series t Is here a new Divine epiphany through the interiors of nature whereby it ever rises and becomes the more transparent type and robe of the Divine Wisdom, I^ove, and Power ? MIRACLES. 2^j If SO, we may well expect it will have some attend- ants and environments which belong not to any fore- gone history, — just as the sun new risen gives shapes and colors to the breaking and purpling clouds which they never had under the colder and feebler lustre of the morning star. If a miracle is that which " lets the supernatural come in," what are all the on-goings of nature but miracles, unless we take the position of blank athe- ism ? They are the continuous enunciation of some vast intelligence, which is a perpetual wonder, be- cause it transcends our highest thought and compre- hension. The highest significance of the miracles of the New Testament consists mainly in the fact that they show more entirely the control of mind over matter, or the sovereignty of spiritual volition in nat- ural things. The same is verified in our experience every time a muscle moves at the touch of a human will, and more divinely and grandly whenever a new phasis of nature evolves freshly the volition of God. The works of Jesus which '' let the supernatural come in," are after the analogy of all human works in which mind is plastic over matter, or in which the higher subordinates the lower. The difference is that in Jesus Christ, as the New Testament describes Him, there was a degree and quality of spiritual power, such as we do not find in ourselves nor in ^^eople around us, and therefore the subordination of external nature was more signal and complete, and breaks upon us as a surprise. 26 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, Law, seen from the Divine side of things, is not the order of sequence which governs the phenomena of days and years only, but of the ages and cycles of endless existence. Even if it be true, as some theorizing astronomers tell us, that the planetary orbits are growing less, and that the travellers of the heavenly spaces must one day mingle in the solaf fires out of which they came, who would doubt that the grand winding up must be as much under the laws of the supreme order as the folding up of a flower at evening ; preparatory for a new unwinding of the system of nature ; of its higher and sweeter efflores- cence out of the immanent life of God and a more sublime procession of the heavenly travellers on their endless way ? A miracle is a surprise, — but to whom ? To those, of course, all whose habits of thinking have been formed within narrower boundaries, or on a lower plane of existence than the one which the mir- acle breaks open to their gaze. Plough into the earth deep enough and turn over the furrows, and the earth-worms writhe in their distress, brought too suddenly into the light and air. So with us when a higher realm of truth breaks upon us too suddenly. There are habits of culture which only develop the natural mind ; that is to say that order of the facul- ties which hold us in close relationship with the nat- ural world. Those faculties may be sharpened to an indescribable keenness, till the intellect penetrates MIRACLES, 27 outward into space and downward towards the monads, and imagines that the mysteries of the uni- verse are well-nigh solved. A man, perfected exclu- sively in this sort of culture, never thinks of the uni- verse as more than one story high. A whole people or a whole period of time may be educated mainly to habits of natural thinking. The progress of the collective human mind is not on a narrow and straight line ; its progress is like that of a .noble ship freighted with the wealth of all the zones, but which tacks to every gale and makes a broad belt that ripples the whole surface of the sea. The ancient supernaturalism was without science, one-sided and baseless, and so running into driveling superstitions. It must always be so when the supernatural is not complemented by the natural, or does not rest upon its solid floors. For the last two hundred years, the van of discovery has led the way down deeper and deeper into sense, till the great verities of immortal- ity seem like a floating and vanishing tradition, and miracle is synonymous with monster. The supernat- ural, no longer evolved in the disclosures of an irre- sistible Providence, is left very much to those who knock at the closed doors or rap out responses upon tables. Meanwhile, it requires small gift of prophecy to foretell the result. As surely as the supernatural rests on the natural as its solid flooring, so sure is it never to fall through, but gain security by all the explorations of natural law. As surely as body 28 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. involves spirit, and the natural world involves and exfigures the spiritual, so surely is the most perfect knowledge of natural law to become the ground of a supernaturalism reformed, illustrated, and purified of old superstitions and errors. The age has veered so far senseward that we may conclude it has touched its boundary line. There are indications that the tacking and veering towards the opposite quarter have begun already, and the only apprehension is that the refluent wave may be too sudden and vio- lent. That we are on the verge of a new epoch when the Spirit of God will utilize the accumulated knowledge of the modern age, taking up science, art, philosophy into a higher unity, there to make them resplendent with a light which is not their own, and the servitors of a more comprehending and adoring faith, there are tokens already both in the earth and the sky. And in that day, when the supernatural and the natural, no longer halved and sundered, are harmonized in one, we shall find the latter the me- dium through which the other appears more per- fectly ; and then special miracles will cease only because the whole Cosmos is miracle, and more intelligently and completely than to the eye and ear vf Plato reports the mind of the Supreme and the music of the upper spheres. The tendency of our modern thought has been to narrow in the domain of miracle, and finally enclose It by the boundaries of Palestine and the first and MIRACLES. 29 last decades of the first century. Within that little province of earth and in that Long Ago you may be- lieve miraculous power was adjoined to a few men so as to enable them to prove certain doctrines of re- ligion, and especially the resurrection and the future life. Ever since all demonstrations from a higher world are to be ruled out as pretense and imposture touching on the special domain of the New Testa- ment. Meanwhile the small space of earth and the small fragment of time made sacred by miracle, re- cede in the dim and vanishing past, and become alto- gether spectral to the natural common mind ; and so the idea of the resurrection and immortality belong to the speculations of ancient days. And in what way has this growing skepticism been prevented from eclipsing the faith of mankind altogether } The personal history of those who have been caught up nearest to the heart of God would perhaps show that the disclosures which Strauss calls " inter- ference," have never ceased in any age of the world. Miracle, — regarded as that inner and open door where " the supernatural comes in," — always has been and always will be. Its form and its methods may change as the world changes, but the substance and reality are preserved. Just in the degree that an age becomes shut in by sense, the sphere of miracle Is withdrawn from the gaze of the street and the market-place, and from all physical demonstration, to that realm of spirit, where only the heart of God 30 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, beats audibly to the heart and ear of our redeemed and regenerate humanity. He will not strive nor cry amid the coarse dissonance of earthly sounds, only to be rejected and scorned. But the work of the Holy Spirit in the spiritual nature of man, melting through its depravities and evolving a new creation out of its primal chaos, giving to it ever clearer openings, — this has been the miracle wrought ever anew through all the Christian ages. Said Jesus to the people who were amazed at his power of healing the sick. Greater works than these will the Father do that ye may marvel ; referring to that life whose throes were already commencing in the spiritual graves. Those who have been caught in- ward by the Spirit of God and sealed by its power, will often tell us, not aloud, but in tears and in trem- blings, lest the world outside should hear and laugh, of the guidance of a Divine hand never out of sight, and the mouldings of a Divine power more wonder- ful than that which projected the forces of nature. The moral creation, though rising unseen to carnal eyes, is quite as miraculous as the natural. It is very interesting, sometimes, to hear not only individuals, but families, recount their history ; how events have been shaped and unified by tractations which none but they could see ; how mountains have been re- moved, and brazen bars cut in two, and victories achieved in answer to the prayer of faith ; how amia conflicts and temptations and the clouds of dust MIRACLES, 31 which have risen over them in the race of Hfe they have had tokens of the power that insphered them, tenderly moving behind a veil lest its too great glory should drown their human personality, yet making rents here and there where watching faces looked through ; above all, in those hours of supreme trial when families break up and the last adieus are spoken, seeing the gates flung wide, where the steps lead away from earth and mortality into climes where death shall be no more. When science looks upward instead of downward, and becomes transfigured in a light higher than its own, and sees all its facts taken up and rearranged under laws of a wider and more comprehending unity, the earth will reflect the peace of heaven and mirror its verities anew, repeating, though on planes of existence vastly broader and more secure, the times of which Wordsworth sings, when the Divine Messengers crowning the sovereign heights of the world — "Warbled for heaven above and earth below, Strains suitable for both. ' III. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD. T F, as Christianity assumes, man while involved in -*- nature and clothed in its forms, is at the same time intrinsically immortal, and as such is to be evolved out of nature and rise above it, it follows that he is the subject now and here of both ranges of existence. He is natural and supernatural. By his natural organs he is placed in open and neces- sary relations with time and space ; by his immortal faculties he is placed in necessary relations with a supersensible world. He is not always conscious of these higher relations. The babe is locked fast in sense and knows only of sensuous things. There are those, we have said, who scarcely in this life get released from this despotic grasp. But a spiritual nature with its unmeasured possibilities, is in abey- ance, securely enfolded, and ready under the appli- .ince and culture adapted to it to open down into the consciousness and arouse the soul to aspirations and Teachings towards what lies beyond nature and is in- dependent of her growths and decays. Hence the iiivolution of the sitpeTuatural in the natural and the immanence of God in humanity. On the first awak- THE IMMANENCE OF GOD. 33 cning of a consciousness, higher than that of mere natural life, all men have intuitive notions of spirit- ual and divine things. Then into every soul comes an influx of the supernatural, and breathings from the Lord, which are deeper than all human teachings, and without which all human teachings were in vain. Our minds open inward as well as outward, and thence run along into our souls as on electric wires the tidings that are not of earth ; inspirations of God of a moral law and of a life to come. Were it not for these inspirations, the eternal life might as well be preached to trees and animals as to human beings. Granted Mr. John Stewart Mills' theory of " associa- tion " and cumulative traditions ; they must have had a clear solid ground to start from, a native stock to be grafted upon, or they might just as well have started from the coral or the oyster as from a human soul. There was at the beginning the involution of the supernatural in the natural, else we might teach and preach to all eternity and get no evolution ; there must be the immanence of God in man, and he must be capable of becoming conscious of it, else we might just as well offer symbols of worship to the bats and owls as to men and women. With all alike this is the prime ground of culture, from the first bishop of Christendom to the half idiot savages of Sidney Cove. These divine instincts, therefore, pos- sible or actual, are in every man ; for every man as to his interior mind belongs to a spiritual world and 3 34 Tim FOURTH GOSPEj^. is capable of being placed in communion with eternal things. But let us discriminate. When we say that God is immanent in humanity, we do not mean that the Divine Substance is included in man. The Christian conception of God, as we apprehend it, is, that from the Divine Substance and personahty are the forthgoing energies that fill the circuit of his universe, so that all things in their inmost nature are receptive of them and exist by them. This influx from the Divine Personality is not to be confounded with that personality itself If God were present per- sonally in nature and not by influx, then nature itself were one great Fetish, and the idolaters were right who worshipped the sun and the stars. If God were in man personally or by his own essence, man him- self would be God, and not his dependent creature, receptive of Divine inspirations. In man and in na- ture alike, in the child at play and in the flower which he plucks from its stem, there is the unceas- ing influx of the Divine, and out of this they draw their breath, and suck the life that warms and feeds them. But nature is not conscious of this Divine life out of which it grows and blossoms ; man, when his higher consciousness is opened, has convictions, de- sires, and aspirations, which he knows must come from Divine imbreathings and urgencies ; and so he bows and worships and returns to God the love which he receives. This distinction between influx and personality, between the Divine immanence and THE IMMANENCE OF GOD. 35 the Divine essence, though sometimes lost sight of, we think is plain and obvious. It should be kept steadily in view, as we shall see by and by, if we do not see already in the naked statement itself that the distinction saves us from fetishism when we make God immanent in nature, and from pantheism when we make Him immanent in both nature and man. It hence becomes very plain, too, what we mean when we speak of intuitions of God, or inward be- holdings of the Deity. Construed literally it has no meaning whatever, except to the pantheist himself. Intuition is simply the survey which one takes of the contents of his own consciousness. It is to the in- ternal phenomena of mind, what perception is to the external phenomena of nature. Perception, if it be clear and accurate, gives you what lies without you in sharp outline and just perspective ; intuition, if it be clear and accurate, catalogues aright the facts of consciousness in your experience, intellectual and spiritual, and gives the soul's perspectives to itself. Of course there can be no intuition of God, since He is not included in the contents of consciousness, and could not be, without the destruction of the human identity and personality. Our mental perspectives, present or possible, opened already, or which may be opened, give us our own, and the limit where they fade off and dissolve in darkness, is precisely where our identity and personality terminate. 36 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, But though God Himself can never be the content of the human consciousness, his highest and best work can be. My consciousness at one time may give me an inward scene of moral ruin and disorder. I may see a creation rise out of this chaos more goodly and fair than the order of external nature ; changes may be going on within, more auspicious than all the ongoings without ; experiences more rich than the regalements of sense ; a sunshine from the divine face more bright than summer glories ; a peace more sweet than the tranquillity of the morning ; af- fections purged of self and enlarged to universal love ; calls to duty more loud and clear than matin bells ; strength to suffer and to do that comes by prayer ; a power back of my personal volitions, transfusing my whole being and creating it anew ; convictions of truth growing bright to the perfect day ; all these may come within the range of my intuitions, and beget a faith in God which nothing can shake, and a knowl- edge of his goodness and power worth more than all the deductions of the understanding. It comes not from inward beholdings of the Deity, but of what He does ; beholdings of such work of grace and power as I can ascribe to neither man nor angel, and which bring repose under the shadow of his wings. PART I. THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT. 'One do I see and twelve ; but second there Methinks I know thee, thou beloved one ; Not for thy nobler port, for there are none More quiet-featured. Some there are who bear Their message on their brows ; while others A look of large commission, nor will shun The fiery trial so their work is done. But thou hast parted with thine eyes in prayer, Unearthly are they both ; and so thy lips Seem like the porches of the Spirit-land; For thou hast laid a mighty treasure by Unlocked by Him in Nature, and thine eye Burns with a vision and apocalypse Thy own sweet soul can hardly understand." CHAPTER I. GNOSTICISM. 'THHE problem of evil has always been the most -*- stubborn and difficult, whether without Chris- tianity, or within it, and under its resolving light. No Pelagian theories can relieve the burdened conscious^ ness from the fact of inhering corruption. It has existed under every form of religion, from that of the Hindus down to the last modification of New Eng- land Calvinism ; and the wit of man has been taxed to the utmost so to dispose of the fact as to clear the divine character of all responsibility about it. It was this laudable motive which gave rise to the most daring system of speculation known in the his- tory of opinions. That system began to appear soon after the ascension of Christ, and grew into gigantic proportions by the middle of the second century It was the most formidable heresy that threatened Christianity, and overlaid its first purity ; and though finally thrown off, and left behind, it imparted to Christianity a direction and coloring which it had for centuries, and of which it is not wholly relieved to this day. There are unmistakable allusions to it in Paul's epistles ; it is a clearly established fact that 40 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. the Apostle John came in contact with it ; it is openly assailed in the epistle which bears his name ; and portions of the fourth Gospel, quite unintelligible otherwise, are tolerably well understood when we know that they were written with the haunting pres- ence of this growing heresy. The argument for the genuineness of the fourth Gospel cannot be seen in its entire force without some knowledge of the con- temporaneous Gnostic opinions. Gnosticism was a composite of at least four other religions, — Parseeism, once the dominant religion of Persia ; Hellenism, as modified by Plato ; Judaism ; and Christianity. These four were variously com- bined ; and, according to the proportions of the mix- ture, the new compound very much resembled Chris- tianity, and did not greatly obscure its essential truths ; or it so distorted and annulled them that their native simplicity, power, and beauty, were en- tirely gone. Gnosticism was an attempt to combine Dualism with Christianity. Dualism asserts the doctrine of two original eternal principles of good and evil ; hence two primal uncreated realms of Light and Darkness, of immaculate purity and essential de- pravity. One was the realm of pure spirit, at the head of which was God Himself; the other was the realm of matter, — dark, chaotic, and evil. These two eternal, original principles lie at the foundation of the Parsee religion ; and with equal distinctness GNOSTICISM, 41 though with less active antagonism, they are the basis of Plato's philosophy as developed in the Ti- maeus. This DuaUsm invaded Christianity, — from Persia through Syria and the Syrian Theosophists ; from Plato's philosophy through Alexandria and its Platonizing Jews and Christians. They formed a composite which we will briefly describe, inasmuch as it has an important bearing on the exposition and evidence of the fourth Gospel. For a long period the boundary line between these two kingdoms of Good and Evil had not been passed over. Each existed apart in its own isolation, — one in its transcendent excellence and glory ; the other as the outlying chaos, conceived sometimes as inert and dead, sometimes as seething with corruption, always as disorderly and wild. But it was inevitable that the kingdom of light should approach nearer and ever nearer the kingdom of darkness. For God — the primal infinite good — was ever sending out emanations from Himself These at length hypos- tasized in the angelic powers that circled Him about and stood nearest to his throne. But out of these highest and nearest of the heavenly powers came forth emanations in turn, and these hypostasized far- ther out and lower down. From these latter came forth other emanations ; and, with every remove from the infinite original source, the eternal perfections were reflected more dimly. Of course these waves of emanation can be extended indefinitely ; and you can 42 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, cogitate any number of heavens to suit your fancy, — from the inner circle, most resplendent about the throne, to the outermost limit, the Chinese wall of the upper celestials that bounds them from chaotic darkness and death. These powers thus created suc- cessively were called ^ons, and the whole realm, from the centre to the circumference, was the Divine Pleroma, because within these limits God reigned in the fullness and completeness of his perfections. Thus far there was no mixture of the two realms. But at length the emanations streamed over the Chi- nese wall into the realm of dark, dead, chaotic mat- ter. The angel on the outermost limit rayed into it, and fructified it. Hence a new world arose, — this world we l»ve in of mingled good and evil. It was not created by God, the supremely good, who never appears directly and openly in it ; it was formed by the angel who was lowest down and next to it ; whose emanations streamed into it, and took on a covering of matter. Hence this angel was called the World- former. Or, again, he was called the Logos, or Word, because a ray from his reason pierced the realm of matter, and took its clothing thence. Hence the complex nature of man. His most external nature is material. It is the hylic coat which he wears, always corrupt and poisonous, the seat of all his temptations ind woes. Within this is his soul, which is an ema- nation from the angel World-former, and therefore his psychical or soul-nature is a ground of communion, GNOSTICISM. 43 not with the Supreme Good, but only with the World- former who made him and ranks just above him. There is in man, however, as in the ^ons or angels above him, an inmost principle of the supremely good and perfect. Because every tier of being which cre- ates a next lower one is a medium, though uncon- sciously, of the infinite and primal life, and that hfc therefore is immanent in all created things. But, before it has reached man, it becomes imbedded un- der so many strata that it comes not generally into the consciousness. Hence the Logos, or World- former, who made us and all terrestrial things, and who is the immediate ruler of this lower sphere, while he thinks he made it and rules it from himself, is really and unconsciously the organ and instrumen- tality of the Supreme Divinity. Hence man has a threefold nature, — the hylic or fleshly one, which is outermost ; the soul-nature, which is next inward, and which is an emanation of the World-former ; and the deepest and inmost of all, buried far beneath the consciousness of common men, the spiritual or pneu- matic nature, which is the pure emanation of God himself. The sum is, this is too bad a world to be regarded as the handiwork of a perfect Being. The essential evil of matter, and hence the utter depravity of the ileshly nature, lie at the foundation of all the Gnostic systems. It will be seen at once how Christianity, on the 44 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. side of Judaism, holds out an irresistible lure to the first theosophist who might choose to dovetail Gnos- ticism into it. The wonder is that they did not in- terpenetrate so tenaciously as to defy the wit of the Ch irch fathers to break them off from each other and keep them asunder. The problem of evil, if not solved, was at least artfully dodged, at a time when it was the hardest and the sorest ; when the whole cre- ation was groaning and travailing in pain. The Di- vine character stands clear of all responsibility touch- ing its origin. Not only so, but the Old Testament history, and the whole dispensation of Judaism, the stumbling-block of the Christian believer, can now be fitted in with Christianity with marvelous symmetry. Nothing is easier. The God of the Old Testament, sternly just, sometimes with changeful passion and consuming anger, was not the God of Christianity, but the World-former himself, ruling his own king- dom and trying to hold it in its wild disorder. Con- fessedly, the Being who fashioned this world, arid governs it, is the Jehovah-angel of the Old Testa- ment. See thus how the threefold nature of man is marvelously displayed ! The heathen — lost in thick darkness, and worshipping devils — are those on whom the hylic coat of sense and matter hangs thick and heavy ; and the soul-nature, even, is lost under it, and comes not into consciousness. Only a few chosen people have had this consciousness awakened and so brought into acknowledged relations with the CNOSTlCliiM. 45 World-former who governs them. These are the Jews, — not the chosen people of the Supreme God but of the World-former, who has parted them off, and, with constant watching and sore trials of his patience, keeps them in external order by rigor- ous commandments and temporal judgments. The World-former, with his Jews, expected a Messiah ; but it was only a temporal one, who was to extend, not his own reign, but that of the World-former him- self The Messiah was to be his subject and con- quering vicegerent. A few, however, there were whose pneumatic or deepest natures had been touched and vitalized. Beneath the covering of flesh and sense, beneath even the soul-nature itself, a chord was touched in their profounder contemplations whose vibrations thrilled beyond the World-former, even up to the First Good, First Perfect, and First Fair, and gave them communings with the Highest. Such minds were choice and few ; but they waited and watched for the true Christ, and they indicated his possible achievement in human nature. By this clever dovetailing, Christianity is relieved of all diffi- culty arising from its connection with Judaism, and Judaism adjusts itself easily in a grand system of the Universe. The World-former does not know that there is a sovereign hand that uses him and turns him whither it will. He thinks he is acting only from himself and for himself, and never dreams that he is preparing 4^ THE FOURTH GOSPEL. the way for a higher ^on to come and supersede him. But such is the fact, and in the fullness of time the pneumatic Christ appears. But He must not t«ike upon him our flesh and blood. Nothing could be more abhorrent to Gnosticism than to bring the Highest in contact with corrupt and poisonous mat- ter. His immaculate purity must be kept clear of its stains. How, then, can the Christ, either as the Highest himself, or as his first -^on, get introduced into this bad world to save it .? In either of two ways. Jesus Christ was, in fact, two persons in one. Jesus was a mere man of Jewish descent, born like any other man. But he was of pious disposition, and went to the Jordan to be baptized. Then the ^on Christ descended, and entered him, and acted and spake through him ; and so from that period his marvelous history unfolds, and the wisdom of God drops from his lips. The Jews arraigned and cruci- fied the man Jesus. They thought to have killed the Christ, but him they could not touch. Before the crucifixion the iEon Christ re-ascended to his skies, and only a man like us died upon the cross. Hence his exclamation in that awful hour after the God had gone up and left him, " Why hast thou forsaken me ? " Or there is another way by which Gnosticism, always abhorring the touch of matter, eludes the aifficulty. Some Gnostics held that Jesus Christ was GNOSTICISM. 47 one person, but that there was no incarnation at all; that He did not come in the flesh, but only in divine shapes that took its image and likeness. The angels of the Old Testament, they said, were not material forms, but celestial substances taking on the appear- ances of the human figure. Even so the Christ that appeared in Palestine was not clothed in veritable flesh and blood, but only in its semblance and effigy ; for it is in the power of God at any time to evolve this appearance out of Himself, and project it into this lower world. The Jews thought they crucified a man : but therein were they deceived, and their impotent rage defeated ; for the agony and the death were only phantasmic, while the real Christ within the outward semblance was untouched by the spear and the nails. Not all men can rise out of hylic darkness, or out of the hard service of the World-former, to the knowl- edge of the pneumatic Christ and communion with the Highest. It is only those whose inmost natures have been quickened and unfolded. These can ap- peal to their highest consciousness. They have done with the poor outward letter of the Jewish World-former, and have intuitions of the supreme Deity. They look down with pity upon those still held in bondage, whether to the Jewish letter or to the poisonous coverings of flesh and sense. Gnosticism prevailed extensively during the second century, and did not become extinct before the mid- 48 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. die of the fourth. Men of wealth, nobility, and in- telligence, embraced Christianity under some Gnos- tic form ; for it fostered mightily that serene self- complacency which makes men well-pleasing to them- selves, and lifts them above their fellows. It exerted, however, other and more lasting influences. Its prime article, the essential evil of matter as the dead- liest foe of the internal man, led on to asceticism and the maceration of the flesh. It made marriage odious, ^M all sensual pleasure corrupting and vile ; it made afl nature but a blight, an incumbent curse upon the spirit ; and either its direct influence, or the ground principle out of which it grew and flourished, sent the monks into the monasteries or the deserts, doomed the priests to celibacy, and wrenched human nature itself into frightful distortions. The Church excluded Gnosticism, but not till its virus had entered her veins and exerted a potent influence in shaping both her theology and institutions. Augustine, her great- est theologian, came into the Church out of one of the forms of Gnosticism, and through him it flings its long shadow down the centuries, even over the theology of the modern age. Not only the orthodox, but the heretic theologies were sometimes determined either directly by Gnos- tic influence or by the fundamental principle from which it comes. Arianism is not a system of dual ism : it does not assert an eternal primitive matter ; but it abhors to bring God in contact with matter GNOSTICISM. 49 and so makes Christ a sub-deity or ^on under him, created out of nothing, that he in turn might create the world and become incarnate in time. Therefore nature would not lead us directly up to the supreme God, but to the sub-deity who created nature, who became incarnate within it, who intercedes for us, while the Supreme himself dwells apart, never pass- ing over into the finite except through the mediating Christ and his angels. The Gnostics began to appear soon after the ascen- sion of Christ, and during the second century their spread was rapid and wide. Gibbon says they " cov- ered both Egypt and Asia." They were polite, learned, and wealthy, and highly self-exalted. They had their congregations, their bishops and doctors, and some- times mingled imperceptibly and extensively among the congregations of the faithful. They condescend- ingly accepted Christianity in full ; but, as they drew it up and absorbed it in their own pneumatic con- sciousness, they held it sublimed in a higher Gnosis, — a very different religion from that of the vulgar Christian multitude around them. They were shy of martyrdom, and could evade the authorities. They could not always be distinguished from the Catholic Christians, with whom they had no hesitation to com- mune and worship ; but there was one subject by which they could generally be discovered and sifted out. If questioned touching the resurrection of the dead, they would " look foolish," says Tertullian, and 4 50 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. finally disclose themselves. The resurrection of the material body was abhorrent to their whole system of faith. Of course such a system, ramifying into the most vital part of Christianity, adhering as a parasite, and threatening to suck its life-blood, was not ex- truded and left behind without sharp and persistent controversy. The controversy begins with Paul, who gives a side-blow here and there at the incipient heresy ; John stops in his exhortations of brotherly love to launch his anathemas against it ; Polycarp, the disciple of John, and the saintly martyr, ascribes it to Satan ; Irenasus, the disciple of Polycarp, wrote to refute it ; and Tertullian, at the close of the sec- ond century, employed his rough and fiery eloquence to denounce it. CHAPTER II. SAINT JOHN AT EPHESUS. *pERHAPS no country on the face of the earth has been the centre of influences more subtile and pervading than Ionia, so far as those influences have been extended by means of Uterature. It shaped the intellect of the world in its finest moulds, for it was plastic over the mind of Greece ; it has deter- mined most profoundly its religious culture, for those writings of the Christian canon which appealed to the deeper consciousness were produced within its trans- parent and inspiring ethers. In our gross and sleepy occidentalism we constantly lose sight of the educa- tive power of nature under conditions such as we have never experienced and hardly imagined, over those minds which have produced the master-pieces in art, in literature, and in religion. This little Greek province of Ionia has given us Homer and the Iliad, and made all other poetry but a broken strain ; it has given us the fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse, which find us at the close of eighteen centuries veiling our sight before the too burning disclosures of the Godhead. It has given us a language whose sound is music and whose touch can bring the 52 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. subtlest thought within its soft and delicate shadings. If it is bad philosophy to say with Mr. Buckle that man with his culture and his religions is the mere product of his environments, so it is equally bad to say that God is only a great Magician, who works without means and without law, and not the Infinite Providence who works both within man and around him by his immanence in both nature and humanity. Ionia lay upon the western coast of Asia Minor, mainly between two rivers, though extending a little beyond them ; the Hermus on the north and the Meander on the south. It was about one hundred miles in length, and less than half that average dis- tance in breadth, therefore comprising less territory than the little State of Massachusetts. Two beauti- ful islands belonged to it, separated from it by narrow straits ; Chios towards the north, and Samos towards the south. Besides the two rivers already named, there is a third, the Cayster, which flows between them, at whose mouth stood the city of Ephesus. These three rivers find their way to the sea through valleys of surpassing fertility, and the coast from river to river is skirted by a belt of land, winding with the winding coast, fronting the islands which lie off as gems upon the sea, teeming with luxuriance and gleaming in the gorgeous beauty of an oriental clime. Its climate, though the most charming in the world, is not one which melts and debilitates. Its brilliant atmosphere taken into human lungs, is a ST. JOHN AT EPHESUS. SI perpetual stimulus, sparkling through the blood and through the brain, and thence through the soul itself, to sharpen its faculties and inspire its imaginative powers. This was Ionia ; colonized from the selectest por- tion of the Greek race, a thousand years before Christ. Twelve Greek cities rose along the coast, and upon the two islands, confederate for the pur- poses of government and religion, and the common life and culture which give birth to art and literature. Architecture attained here its finishing grace in the Ionic column. Genius not only sung its sublimest epic in the Iliad, but language itself, newly modu- lated, had a breezy lightness and softness in the Ionian lyrics which became the models of Greece. Mark the indentation of the coast and the islands by which Ionia opens towards the ^gean, and in- vites the commerce of the world ! Mark the three rivers winding through fertile meadows by which it opens into the interior of Asia. By a magnificent Roman road which crossed the table-lands of Phrygia, and passed over the ridge of Taurus even to the river Euphrates, the cities of Ionia became the marts of an immense trade which set from the interior to- wards the Mediterranean sea. Consequently this little Greek confederacy, though small in territory, became the centre of a widely-extended influence upon oriental life, religion, and manners. Ephesus was the metropolis of Ionia, and under 54 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. the Empire was the chief city of proconsular Asia. It stood at the mouth of the Cayster, on the southern bank of the river, extending over a wide plain and up the slopes of a mountain ridge called Coressus, which shut it in from the south, and up the slopes of another ridge on the right, called Mount Prion, which shut it in from the east. Within this brief space the oriental Greek wantoned and reveled, as if life were given for a perpetual holiday, and its main business were to enjoy the charms of earth and sky, and breathe the exhilarating airs. Near the banks of the river northeast of the city, rose the temple of Diana, one of the seven wonders of the world, with its one hundred and twenty-seven columns sixty feet high, each the gift of a king, and in which the Ionic style of architecture culminated in its highest perfec- tion. On the side of Mount Prion was the theatre, with its immense circular rows of seats rising one above another, open to the brilliant sky, crowded often with the vast multitudes, not always like the mob who shouted " Great is Diana of the Ephesians," but answering with acclamations to music and song, sometimes perhaps to works of genius in a language whose vowel sounds made it the softest and sweetest that ever fell upon human ears. Southeast of the city and between Coressus and Prion was the gymna- sium, where the exuberant life overflowed in athletic games. The annual festival held in honor of Diana, exhibited the rites of the Greek oriental religion SAINT JOfIN AT EPHESUS. 55 What a contrast to our Puritan solemnity and sobri- ety ! It was called " the common meeting of Asia." It was held through the month of May, and it drew throngs of devotees with their wives and children, no I only from along the coast but from far away in the interior, who came for dance and song, for the amusements of the theatre and the gymnasium, for the rites of Diana, whose image was enshrined within the long, brilliant rows of colonnades, where came the vast and winding processions of joyous worshippers. The Asian Diana personified the all-fructifying and nourishing powers of nature, and hence her festival was held in the vernal season, when all nature was storming into life, and it made the days and nights of the month of May " one long scene of revelry." ^ Partly within the limits of Ionia, partly just be- yond in the neighboring provinces, were the cities which were to contain the seven churches, holding "the seven golden candlesticks," to bear aloft the light of Christianity to this portion of the eastern world. Not very far off is the little island of Pat- mos, unlike the others which gem the waters with green, but rising as a bald and barren rock out of (he ^gean sea. We have said enough fully to possess our readers Arith the idea of the vast importance of Ephesus as one of the strongholds of the pagan religion, one of the keys of its position which Christianity would be 1 Conybeare and Howson's Life of St. Paul, vol ii. p. 79. 56 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. likely to take and hold. Notwithstanding the stim ulating powers of nature amid which they lived, and the glorious traditions that urged them from behind, and the models of intellectual beauty which charmed their imaginations, the Asiatic Greeks sank into de- generacy and decay. An effeminate and voluptuous race read of the heroes that thundered through the Iliad without a spark of heroism in themselves. Re- ligion itself became to them, not a light which leads upward into life, but which lured them downward into death. It was made to throw its consecrating veil over the most brutalizing sensuality, and the sacred groves concealed abominations which would bring a blush upon the face of the open day. We do not know that the groves of Mount Prion, like the groves of Daphne near Antioch, were consecrated to lust, but it is very certain that manhood and womanhood in the oriental Greek cities were infected with the common leprosy and sank down in Asiatic effem- inacy and corruption. The cities of Ionia were not an exception. Their history illustrates the great truth that without a religion which brings life and health to the soul, the most illumined page of nature will grow dark to it and the most brilliant atmos- phere, though drank as a constant elixir out of heaven, will not save it from consumption and death. It is certain that the Gospel was preached at Eph- esus by Paul soon after the middle of the first cen- tury, and that a church was gathered there whose SALXT JOHN AT EFHESUS. 57 influence extended rapidly through the neighboring: country. Its converts were drawn first from the Jewish synagogue, but afterwards and mainly from the Greeks and orientals, more curious to know and more quick to receive and understand the truths of the new religion, and doubtless yearning towards the light out of the depths of their own degrading su perstition. At the end of three years even the mag- nificent temple of Diana began to be deserted of its worshippers, its long processions to be thinned out, which shows how deep was the hunger of the multi- tudes and how directly Christianity went to their sorest needs. We find the Apostle John, as early as a. d. 6o, according to the New Testament narratives and epistles, a colaborer with the Apostles in or near Jerusalem. He then vanishes from history ; but he reappears at Ephesus towards the close of the cen- tury, where memorials of unquestionable authenticity fix the last scenes of his life. We cannot mistake the exigency which brought him hither. Christian- ity had broken away from the synagogue, had shiv- ered in pieces the Jewish shell which sought at first to confine it, and thrown itself on the vast floating- waves of gentile peoples as a religion for humanity itself, which it was to renovate and redeem. It had already penetrated far beyond the limits of Ionia, and its leaven was fermenting and heaving the masses with life. "The seven chun^hes that are in Asia" 58 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. had arisen and were flinging their constellated light through the darkness. We knew from the letter of Pliny to Trajan, written soon after the close of the century, how wide and deep throughout this region the influence of Christianity had become. "The contagion of this superstition," says he, "has not only seized the cities but the villages and open coun- try. The temples are well nigh deserted, the sacred rites for a long time have been intermitted, and vic- tims for sacrifice are rarely purchased." But just in the degree that Christianity extended its influence would its native purity be liable to be over-clouded and its sharply cut lines of demarcation to become wavy and dim. This was the case among the Asiatic Greeks, and especially at Ephesus, the heart of the country whence the tides of life were constantly flowing, and into which they constantly returned. Metaphysical, subtle, curious, both analytical and constructive, and imaginative in the highest degree, with a language flexible to all the ranges and reaches of thought, the Greek mind was now to receive and act upon Christianity, and give it all its possible changes and combinations. Gnosticism was already at Ephesus. Cerinthus, a Hellenistic Jew, had come from Alexandria and adopted Christianity into his all-absorbing system of belief. Judaism had before been received into it. He made Jesus and Christ two persons. Jesus was a man like other men, with a human father and mother, but at his baptism the SAINT JOHN AT EPHESUS. 59 higher ^on, Christ, descended and entered him as the Holy Spirit, but ascended again and left him before his crucifixion. Cerinthus would hear and know nothing of a suffering and dying Messiah, but only of a heavenly one whose splendor was un- dimmed and untarnished by flesh and sense, and of whom the man Jesus was not an incarnation but only the passive organ and vehicle. This man was at Ephesus in the last decade of the first century. Almost everything else was there at this conflux of the Eastern religions and superstitions. The arts of magic which are always in vogue where there is no enlightened faith in the supernatural, were prac ticed by strolling astrologers who infested every prin- cipal city from the Euphrates to the Tiber. They, too, were at Ephesus, exorcising demons by charms and incantations. The worship of Diana of the Ephesians had become a species of sorcery. The silver shrines bearing the image of the goddess with magical letters — the famous " Ephesia grammata " — were worn as charms and amulets by votaries from all the provinces of lesser Asia. Moreover, a •nore fantastic Gnosticism than that even of Cerin- 'hus had been imported and diffused from Syria. A.bhorring the idea that God could appear in this bad world directly and thus stain with matter his immaculate purity, it made God himself a great ma- gician who could bejuggle the senses of men by pro- jecting appearances upon them, which appearances, 60 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. though not matter, were the semblance of it without its substance. It is certain that John was in Ephesus in the last decade of the century presiding over the constellated churches of that region, purging them from corrup- tion and guarding their purity. It is certain that he here met Cerinthus and opposed him. The imme- diate disciples of John so reported, and there is not the least reason to question their truth. Many anec- dotes are told of him ; of his meeting Cerinthus at a bath and fleeing instantly away from it ; of his apos- tolic watch and tender care over the churches of Asia ; of his going into the fastnesses of the mountains to reclaim a young man who had apostatized and joined a gang of robbers — such as is well-known infested the provinces when fleeced by the Roman proconsuls ; of his serene and beautiful old age, when too weak to walk alone he was borne into the assembly and out of it with exhortations to brotherly love ever upon his lips till the monotony tired them ; of his banish- ment to the island of Patmos in the persecution under Domitian, and his return thence in a. d. 97 ; of his death about the close of the century when past the age of ninety ; of his burial-place which Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, towards the close of the second century, speaks of as a sacred spot well known in his day to the Christians of that region who cherished tenderly the local traditions of the be- loved disciple. The anecdotes are strikingly charac* SAINT JOHN AT EPHESUS. 6 1 teristic, allowing in the details for some additions and colorings, just such as a fond and gossipy tradi- tion would be likely to give.^ That the Apostle was called to a post where Chris- tianity was centralizing its forces at the most fearful crisis of its history, — a post which needed the per- sonal presence and commanding authority of one who had not only seen and heard the Lord Jesus in the days of his earthly life but who held open con- verse with Him still ; that not only the exigencies of the times called him there, but the Divine Provi- dence openly manifested to protect the nascent church and the rising faith, — is perfectly plain, we think, from all the memorials of this period both sa- cred and profane. It is convincingly evident when you study the Johannean writings and character and regard them as a collective force, thrown in at one of the most perilous conjunctures in human develop- ment to control it and guide it and hold it under be- nign spiritual laws. Christianity had escaped one danger and had fallen upon another vastly more threatening, and was in the breakers already. It had broken the bondage of Judaism, thanks to the intrepid power and inspired logic of Paul ; and the poor and vanishing sect of the Ebionites which the Church had fairly thrown off was the last fragment of the broken chain. It had cleared the synagogue completely, and on the side of the Jew the peril was 1 Eusebius H. E. iii. 23, 31 ; iv. 14. 62 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. past. Not so on the part of the Greek whose nimble intellect and soaring imagination could put all the philosophies and religions of the world together and fuse them through every changeable and gorgeous shape which could captivate the fancy of man, inflame his passions, or flatter his pride. Christianity, left to its natural course as a mere human system evolved out of the common and seething mass of opinions, would not have brought down the proud imaginations and humbled the philosophies of this world at its feet. It was in imminent danger now of being drawn up and absorbed by them ; of serving as the fringe of a new Pantheism, or having a place in a heathen Pan- theon enlarged and decorated for its reception. Such plainly was the crisis when John went to Ephesus. John lived ''to the times of Trajan," says Euse- bius ; and others say more definitely that he died in the third year of that emperor's reign, that is, in the year loo, at or near to its close. His death at least could not have been earlier. This does not rest on any uncertain tradition. We know it from other data. Polycarp, a disciple of John, who had drank deeply of the same spirit, was placed by him over the neigh- boring church at Smyrna, one of " the seven churches in Asia," the light of whose golden candlesticks the Apostle watched from Ephesus and labored to keep undimmed. There Polycarp lived and preached ever after, and there he suffered martyrdom in the year 167. He was then eighty-six years old, as he says SAINT JOHN A T EPHESUS. 63 to his persecutors when they urged him to abjure his Saviour : " Eighty-six years have I served Him." This is contained in the letter of the church at Smyrna, written by eye-witnesses describing the beautiful and triumphant death of that aged bishop and reporting his words. ^ This would give barely twenty years of his life as falling within the first cen- tury. He could hardly have been younger than that when John placed him over the church at Smyrna, and it becomes more probable that the Apostle lived past the century than that he died before its close. We know from Pliny's letter to Trajan already re- ferred to, written close upon this time, that Chris- tianity had then become widely diffused in Asia Minor, and that the heathen temples were becoming deserted of their worshippers. 1 This letter has some marks of embellishment from a later hand, but we regard its facts and dates as authentic. It is given by Eusebius. CHAPTER III. THE JOHANNEAN WRITINGS I THEIR CONGRUITV, INTE- RIOR RELATIONS AND IDENTITY OF AUTHORSHIP. TAKING for our present purpose the fourth Gospel, the Catholic Epistle, and the Apoca- lypse, and the memorials of John found in the sy- noptics, a character rises before us sketched and shaded with marvelous symmetry, consistency, and grace, and a class of writings present themselves, whose interior relations are of a most extraordinary kind. The character is such that no writer of that age would have created it as fiction, and the relations of these writings are not only impossible, but unim- aginable on any theory which does not make them the production of one mind and genius. To suppose a set of myth-makers of opposite opin- ions and tendencies, scattered through half a century and half of the then civilized world, to have left a mass of documents, partly forged, partly compiled from uncertain tradition, partly made up of imaginations taken unconsciously for facts ; that these were thrown hap-hazard together, and that out of them emerges a character of such freshness and originality as that of John, of tints so rich, and varied, and delicate, and THE yOHAA'NEAN WRITINGS. 65 yet so harmoniously blended, — to suppose this would be supposing no less than a moral miracle. We are not saying that this character is unimaginable or beyond the reach of creative art under a single and very skillful hand ; we are saying that such compilers could no more have produced it, and that by acci- dent, than a hundred Greek slaves could build the temple of Diana by throwing down at random their cart-loads of stone and mortar. The character of John is composed of two vastly differing elements, rarely found in such combination except under the transfusing power of the Christian spirit, but found there in its perfection and consum- mation. These two elements are very great mascu- line strength, joined with affections so overflowing and tender, that the strength is concealed under their profusion, except when occasions and emergencies bring it to the test. The granite is hidden under the tendrils that overhang it with flowers. It is only by assuming that these two elements are inconsistent with each other that the critics have raised their ob- jections against the congruity of the canonical Jo- hannean writings, whereas to blend them together is the great achievement of Christianity in human na- ture, and the blending is most perfect when the dis- ciple leans most intimately on the bosom of his Lord. The combination does not impair the masculine in- trepidity, but preserves it and tones it, though con- cealing it sometimes under the mildest of womanly 5 60 THE FOUHTn GOSPEL. gentleness. That there was this native hardihood in the favorite disciple, intensified even to savageness, there are indications which cannot be mistaken. The two sons of Zebedee were called " thunderers," and that the surname was descriptive of natural traits, is shown by the fiery zeal which prompted them to in- \^oke the lightnings to blast the Samaritan city which refused them hospitality. This, it must be remem- bered, was in the first stages of discipleship, while as yet they understood the Messiah's kingdom to be one of temporal power and magnificence, and aspired to its chief honors and rewards. Not yet had the deep and abundant fountains of love been called forth to their overflowing. But even when this is the case, and when they trickle forth in all their tenderness, spreading everywhere the most delicate verdure and bloom, we are never allowed to forget the rock-ribbed back-ground which supports the whole. Something reminds us even in the softest refinement and spirit- uality of the favorite disciple that these come not out of weakness and shallowness. When Jesus was ar- rested in Gethsemane, the disciples dispersed and fled for their lives. But there was one exception. We follow on, and in the open court of the High Priest's palace where Jesus is brought for insult and tnockery, appears the youthful John who had kept close to his Master. Peter follows cautiously at a distance, and is let in through John's intercession , but Peter's courage soon gives way amid the appal- run JOIIANA'EAN- WRITIA'GS. 6/ ling scene. At the cross again, under the storm of rage, and amid the scoffs and wagging of heads, Jesus looks down and sees a single discip e standing close by. It is John again, — the same who drank in the divine love on his breast with a tenderness which was more than woman's, and who when the storm came which sifted his followers like wheat, evinced a greatness and strength of character beyond that of common men. It shows us, what history and ex- perience teach alike, that in the most trying emer- gencies, the gentlest natures are the strongest, pro- vided the divine gentleness has made them great. There are three principal documents extant which the churches ascribe to the beloved disciple, — the fourth Gospel, the Catholic Epistle, and the Apoca- lypse. That the first two were written by the same hand, is shown from internal evidence which cannot be resisted. An imitator or forger might have strung together phrases culled out of the fourth Gospel such as occur in the Epistle, but he never could have so made it live as to preserve the spirit that breathes through it spontaneously and gives fragrancy to the whole. The theology of the fourth Gospel, the doc- trine of the Logos, is here set forth, not only in the terms but with the unction known only to the be- (oved disciple> But this is not all. The very atmos- phere of Ephesus is felt in every chapter of the Cath- olic Epistle. Through every one there is an outlook apon the Gnostic heresy confronting us in some 6S THE FOURTH GOSPEL. shape. In the opening passage we have it full in the eye, as if in the first stroke of his pen the writer was refuting the false teacher who turned the Christ into some intangible unreality or phantasm, " that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have I'ANDLED of the Word of Life." Every sense that can testify is appealed to. Not only so. We have it asserted and reiterated that " Jesus is the Christ," and he who denies this is a " liar." This finds its point and burden of meaning when we have Cerinthus in full view, asserting that Jesus was not the Christ, but that He was one person, and Christ who never came in the flesh was quite another person. By this, says the writer of the Catholic Epistle, ye shall try the spirits and distinguish them. " Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come ifi thefiesh is of God, and every spirit that says Jesus Christ is not come in the flesh is not of God, and this is that spirit of anti-Christ whereof ye have heard it should come, and even now already is in the world." That " sin is a transgression of the law," and that " he that doeth righteousness is righteous," sound very much in our modern ears, like saying sin is sin, and virtue is virtue. Not so in presence of a heresy which allowed men to grovel in the stye of sensuality, and yet promised to keep their inmost souls separate and immaculate before the Highest. In the whole cast and style of this Epistle we not only know that THE JOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 69 ihe spirit that gave form and coloring to the fourth Gospel is with us, but that the very same moral at- mosphere which lay upon lesser Asia at the close of the first century, is all around us. But the comminghng of the two elements in the Catholic Epistle is such as nature and not art must have given them. Through the abounding tender- ness, whose language is ever reiterated, breaks the most severe and wrathful denunciation. Almost in the same sentence come the blessings and the curses. The words " little children," which should rather be rendered " my dear children," with fond allusions to the divine love and fatherhood, alternate with " mur- derer," " liar," and " anti-christ," and " children of the devil," applied to the heretics of his day. In the disciple leaning on the divine breast and drinking its love, we never quite lose sight of the darker back- ground of character in the man who invoked light- nings on the Samaritans. But more remarkably and unmistakably do we find all this in the Apocalypse brought out in such wise as no human imagination could have invented. It is no part of our work to expound the Apocalypse, but we affirm that its congruity with the other Johannean writings is most remarkable, and they run into each other by relations exceedingly subtile and pervasive. This fact we know is not generally acknowledged, but it will be obvious to the reader the longer he studies the contents and interior relationships of Vbese writinsfs. yO THE FOURTH GOSPEL. The Apocalypse as is now generally conceded is the writing of John the Evangelist. Doubts, it is true, were entertained on this point in the third century, and there were some Greek churches which did not receive it. But there were obvious reasons 1^'rom the nature of its contents it was not read Ir the churches, and therefore was not so publicly known as the four Gospels. But it was early attested and commented upon ; and modern investigation and criticism render a verdict in favor of its genuineness which is emphatic and substantially unanimous. Perhaps, however, the Tubingen critics would not have been quite so swift in claiming the Apocalypse as the work of John, had not its contents on super- ficial examination indicated a different hand from the one which wrote the fourth Gospel, and afforded therefore new ground from which to assail the genu- ineness of the latter. Both, so we are told, could not be the productions of the same mind, so totally diverse are they in matter and style. One has an artless or else exceedingly artful simplicity ; the other an unwonted gorgeousness and grandeur ; one is in comparatively pure Greek ; the other is in bad Greek, and constantly violates the structural rules of the language. A comparison of these two works reveals some of the most profound and subtile of psychological phe- nomena, and those which are the most infallible of aV circumstantial evidence. When we open the Apoca- THE JOB ANNE AN WRITINGS. 7 1 lypse, we are called upon to recognize at once a new mental condition and one professedly abnormal. It is the state of seership, out of which some of the old prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel for example, and David sometimes, prophesied and wrote. It was produced from a state described by the author himself as Iv tticJ- /aart. No critic who refuses to take this into the ac- count can say anything of the Apocalypse, whether of its form or essence, which is of the least value whatever. No critic, we think, who does take this into the account and understand its bearings, will rise from his investigation with any doubt that the same hand wrote this book that wrote the fourth Gospel and Catholic Epistle, and that the same per- sonality and lines of character which appear in the latter two, are intensified in the former to their sub- limest consummation. Says Mr. J. J. Tayler in his treatise on the fourth Gospel, "No living writer has exhibited a more re- markable change of style in the course of his literary career, than Mr. Carlyle ; yet if we compare his 'Life of Schiller' with his 'French Revolution,' or his * History of Frederick the Great,' notwithstanding the great disparity of form, every reader of ordinary discernment will recognize the same fundamental characteristics of his peculiar genius in his earlier and his later works." The same, he says, is true of Milton. " Apply this standard to the two books now under consideration, and the conclusion," he says, 72 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. " will be irresistible, that if the Apostle John be the author of the Apocalypse, he cannot have written the Gospel ; if he wrote the Gospel, he cannot be the author of the Apocalypse."^ He then goes on to prove that the Apostle John did write the Apoca- lypse, the early testimony being nearly unanimous on that point, and therefore he did not write the fourth Gospel. Theodore Parker, and more recently, Pro- fessor Davidson, come to the same result, and they echo the Tubingen critics generally. It never seems to enter the conception of any of these writers that there is any such condition of the human faculties as seership, or if it does that it is anything else than a normal exercise of the imagina- tion, as in the case of Milton and Carlyle. The very stand-point from which John says he wrote the Apoc- alypse, and which determines the very nature and style of his production, they ignore altogether, or have not the remotest idea of, and so their volumes of criticism do not touch the heart of the subject. There are three modes and degrees of apprehend- ing truth. It may be reasoned and proved argumen- tatively by strong intellection like that of Paul ; it may be perceived intuitively under the inspiration of the heart, or it may be visioned objectively by repre- sentatives and symbols, when the prophet becomes a 5;eer. The deepest and clearest intuition is nearest to the state of the highest seership, and if John drank 1 Pages 13, 14. THE JOHAXNKAN WRITINGS. 73 the deepest and clearest draughts of the divine love he would be the one of all the twelve on whom the Apocalypse would open its magnificent scenery. We do not say this, believing that the seership of the Apostle was a natural development of his facul- ties, but simply supposing that the Divine Provi- dence never acts by magic ; that the Spirit does not select its instrumentalities arbitrarily, but those best prepared naturally and psychologically for its highest inspirations and disclosures. The evidence we are about to unfold, however, is all the same, whatever view we take of the inspiration of these writings. When the mind of a speaker or writer passes from its normal state to that of seership, two things are to be observed. He speaks thereafter not from himself, not according to his own tastes and models. His will no longer determines either his style or matter, but both are determined by the uncontrolled spon- taneities within him. Hence the higher prophetic style is never that of simple narrative or voluntary utterance. But neither again is it a style arbitrarily induced upon the writer, and altogether foreign to him. Be- cause in the seer his subjective state becomes objec- tive. The truth that lay in his mind, or was bodied in his speech in the form of metaphor, now passes cut of his mind, and the metaphors become the living beings and the moving panorama of an objective world. Therefore, while the seer docs not speak from 74 ^-^^-^ FOURTH GOSPEL. his own persor.ality but from a consciousness deeper than his natural one, his personality, nevertheless, •loes not disappear. Rather it reappears, though changed and sublimed, in a higher order of mental and spiritual phenomena. The Spirit that breathes through him and makes him its organ, takes the things of his memory and the whole treasury of his imagination and experience, and recombines them with the figures of its own more vast and illuminated perspectives. Consequently, the idiosyncrasies, men- tal, moral, and spiritual, the characteristics of the individual in his normal condition, are to be traced always in the seer, though heightened and intensified. Ezekiel is not Isaiah, and these prophets never retain their simple narrative style when they rise into the heights of seership, though their character- istics are sublimed without being lost. David passed the years of his youth tending his father's flocks on the plains of Bethlehem, and so afterwards in his highest moments of inspiration his figures of speech are drawn from a shepherd's life and from pastoral fields. If his inspiration had become vision, un- questionably his figures of speech would have taken form and coloring, and unrolled to his eye an objec- tive world showing in mystic light " the green pas- tures " and " the still waters." Now let any one compare the fourth Gospel with the Apocalypse, and he will be surprised to find how ';on«tantly the metaphors of the former pass into the THE JOHANNEAN WRITINGS, y$ latter and become the living figures of its ever shift- ing panorama. This is the more remarkable as these figures of speech are altogether peculiar and strictly Johannean. The fact is illustrative of a profound psychological principle, but it is a principle which no fabricator of that age would ever have dreamed of availing himself of. We will give some very striking examples. The first chapter of the fourth Gospel, in that por- tion of it which opens the personal biography of Jesus, describes a scene which evidently glowed viv- idly afterwards in the imagination of the Evangelist. The Baptist, seeing Jesus coming, waves his hand, and says to his disciples, " Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." The mind of John dwelt fondly upon the image, for the same is repeated soon after and graphically described. The next day the Baptist stood, and two of his disciples, one of whom was evidently the Evangelist himself. Looking on Jesus as He walked, he saith, " Behold the Lamb of God." By none other of the Evangel- ists is Jesus ever called the Lamb, and with a single exception the figure is used by no other writer of the New Testament. It occurs in i Peter i. 19. But at the beginning of the fourth Gospel, it evidently de- scribes Jesus as the coming sacrifice, and implies as well a certain grace of person and charm of manner which had won at first sight the heart of John. A lamb offered in sacrifice is a beautiful figure of 76 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. self-oblation, but not likely to be selected by any writer under ordinary conditions, as the symbol of regal power and authority. But we open the Apoca- lypse, and lo ! the image of the Lamb reappears, not now as a figure of speech, but in living objective form, and around it all the figures of the moving panorama are grouped in their rank and order. And when the ritual of heaven is described, and we look up through "the ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands," and the angels about the throne, and the four-and-twenty elders that cast down before it their crowns of gold, and the eye at last sees the central figure of this ascending homage, it is not an oriental monarch sitting in regal splendor, but A LAMB AS IT HAD BEEN SLAIN. The figure OC- curs more than twenty times in the Apocalypse, but now always hypostatized. The figure stands con- spicuous at the opening of the fourth Gospel, and tones it throughout ; the figure hypostatized deter- mines the whole drama of the Apocalypse, and draws around it the heavenly alleluiahs. The doctrine of the Logos, or Word, is not peculiar \o the Johannean writings, but its form of statement is. Nowhere else in the New Testament except the Johannean writings, nor indeed in any writing of the first century is Jesus Christ called the Logos. In the proem of the fourth Gospel the Logos is distinctly personified, and in such wise that it has baffled the commentators ever since ; and in the very first THE JOIIANNEAN WRITINGS. 7/ verse of the Catholic Epistle it is personified again in like manner. It ceases to be an abstract term, and is something which men have "seen" and "handled." This is specially and emphatically Johannean, and, as we shall see by and by, was designed to turn the divine truth with its boldest and brightest front against the Gnostic heresies. We should naturally expect that the Logos would reappear in the Apocalypse. It does ; and it is not only hypostatized, but dramatized, and goes forth as a fierce warrior and an almighty King, armed against the enemies of truth, and riding them down with garments crimsoned with their blood. " I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse ; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns ; and he had a name written that no man knew, but he himself And he was clothed in a vesture bathed in blood : and his name is called the Logos of God. And the armies in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations ; and he shall rule them with a rod of iron : and he treadeth the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he had on his vesture and on his thigh a name written. King of kings, and Lord of lords." ^ 1 Ret. xix. ii-i6. 78 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. It is alleged by some of the critics that the Logos doctrine was borrowed from the later Platonists, and that it fixes the date of the fourth Gospel towards the middle of the second century. Here in a work acknowledged to be John's by these same critics, the Word is not only hypostatized already, but clothed with Divine attributes like the Word of the Golden Proem. Our next illustration is of even more remarkable significance. The opening chapters, both of the fourth Gospel and of the Catholic Epistle, describe the Word as the Beginning and the Ultimation ; as existing h> ap^ii, — in the prime central principles of Divine being ; and again as the Word made flesh — fxapt iycvcTo, — as existing in the lowest and outermost things. In the Catholic Epistle it is, " That which was m the Beginning!' and, " That which our eyes have seen and our hands have handled!' This goes to the profoundest metaphysics of the New Testa- ment. Moreover it is in a form exclusively and intensely Johannean. The thought may be gathered and deduced elsewhere, but it never runs into this peculiar mould. But open the Apocalypse, and this profound metaphysic becomes the grandest objective reality, rising on the sight in glorified form and with overwhelming power and effulgence. The Beginning and the Ultimation, the Alpha and the Omega, ap- pears as one like unto the Son of man, his counte- nance as the sun shining in his strength, his hairs as rilE JOHANNEAN WRITIAT.S. 79 white as wool, and his feet like brass refined and burning, — that is. He is divine not only Iv apxfj — in first things, but in their lowest natural forms and ultimations. The conception was not only above the age, but above all the ages. Its formulation, as found in the Johannean writings, is not only original and peculiar, but it transcends the profoundest deep of Greek metaphysics and the loftiest flights of poetry. Another figure which has become common cur- rency in the speech of Christendom, but which is altogether Johannean in origin, is that of water not used as the symbol of baptism, but as representing the power of truth to refresh the soul and slake its thirst ; and of bread to satisfy its hunger ; making Jesus Christ, by a bold metaphor, both water and bread from heaven. There is nothing of this in the synoptics, but it characterizes the fourth Gospel throughout. The imagery clung delightfully to the mind of the beloved disciple, and those discourses and conversations of Jesus in which it abounds are fondly remembered and reproduced in all their tenderness. In the conversation with the Samaritan woman, the Christ is " living water," or, again, a fountain of water in the believer bubbling up unto everlasting life, — that is perpetually, and diffusing verdure and bloom over all the scenery of the soul. He offers Himself as food and drink, and so merges the literal sense in the spiritual, that some of his followers mis- understand Him and go away. "Who can hear such 8o THE FOURTH GOSPJiL. sayings ? " And in the last jubilant day of the Feast of the Tabernacles, when the long winding procession brought water from the springs of Siloam, circling the altar and pouring it out as they chanted, " Behold, we draw water from the wells of salvation," a loud voice startles the crowd and commands them. Evidently there was a prophet-tone in the words that broke in upon the ceremony and arrested it. Jesus ** stood and cried," " If any man thirst let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water." Turn to the Apocalypse, and what before was bold metaphor and graphic description passes into the objective scenery of the seer. It is no longer in the mind, but visioned as out of the mind ; unrolled as the land of Paradise through which crystal streams are flowing, between rows of trees, margined with eternal green. The streams flow out of " the throne of God and of the Lamb," along the streets of the New Jerusalem, and on either side are rows of the tree of life. The figure often recurs, but now as actual water visioned and flowing clear as in the last fervent invitation, " Let him that is athirst come, and whosoever will let him take the water of life freely," reiterating the very invitation of Christ in the Gospel, " If any man thirst let him come unto me and drink." The whole is intensely Johannean, and could no more have been fabricated by some writer of the next century than Lear's jester could THE JOIIANNEAN WRITINGS. 8 1 have fabricated a second Iliad. It is beyond the range of poetic imagination, and beyond Homer himself. The Good Shepherd, and the flock as the sheep of his pasture, have been the favorite imagery under which the Church in all ages has delighted to repre- sent the relation of Jesus Christ to his followers. But whence is this imagery derived } Not from the twenty-third Psalm, though it occurs there, David himself having been called from pastoral life. The Church derives it from discourses of Jesus reported in the fourth Gospel, and which are not found in the synoptics, not merely because they were most congenial with the Johannean spirit, but because John only of the evangelists was an ear-witness of their utterance. The parable of the good shepherd was not one of the public proclamations of his minis- try in Galilee ; it was uttered in the more private colloquial intercourse which he had with the people that gathered around him in and about Jerusalem, whither He had gone up to attend one of the festivals. The Jews were watching Him, and seeking cause for arresting Him. "My sheep," said He, "hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I am the good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine." And at the next festival He repeats what He had said before : " Ye believe not because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and 1 know them, and they fol- 82 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, low me. And I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of m}^ hand." And again, as the door or gate of the field, he says, " If any man enter in he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." The appendix to the fourth Gospel — for such we regard the closing chapter — was probably added by John's personal disciples from traditions of his dis- courses preserved at Ephesus. In it the same imag- ery occurs again with the injunction of the Master, " Feed my sheep, feed my lambs." It is easy to imagine why this imagery passed thus fully and spontaneously into the discourse of our Saviour. He was brought up at Nazareth ; and the vast plain of Esdraelon, with its brooks murmuring towards the sea, dotted over with flocks of sheep, the shepherds going before them, calling the leaders by name, carrying the lambs in their arms, conducting them to green spots by the brook-side, dr into the sheep-fold by night, and into the cool shade at sultry noon, must have been the most familiar scenes which Jesus looked upon through his youth and opening manhood. They arrest the notice of the traveller to-day, and bring the peaceful imagery of the fourth Gospel freshly to his mind. It would be very strange if we did not find it re- produced in the visions of the New Jerusalem. It is there ; the vales of Esdraelon idealized and glowing in mystic light become the fields into which the Chris? THE JOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 83 as the Shepherd of the fold shall lead his flock washed in his blood and made white and clean. " They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them nor any heat ; for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from theii eyes." Light, as the symbol and representative of truth, is a figure of speech found in almost all classes of writing, but it is found in the fourth Gospel as no- where else. Jesus Christ is there presented, not ;nerely as a teacher to enlighten the minds of men with his doctrine, but He becomes the impersonation of Light itself, and the very sun of the moral uni- verse. This mode of speech characterizes the entire fourth Gospel to such an extent that it has seemed to many to give it a Zoroastrian tinge, and it is difficult to avoid the inference that it has not some tacit ref- erence to the Gnosticism of that day. The Baptist is a light local and temporary, but the Logos which was in the beginning with God, and was God, comes into the world as The Light to enlighten every man, and John and all other lights pale before it. The figure used in this way occurs nowhere in the synop- tics, and nowhere in the Epistles, except in the first Epistle of John, where God Himself is " Light in whom is no darkness at all." ^ In one of the most 1 I John i. 5. 84 Tim FOURTH GOSFEL. Striking passages of the fourth Gospel the personifi- cation is employed early in the morning as Jesus was teaching in the temple. At the hour when the sun was just rising and flinging his beams aslant the gilded dome and roof, and the white marble columns possibly suggesting the figure, Jesus declares, " I am THE Light of the world." ^ We open the Apocalypse, and in the very first chapter we find that the figure of the Proem is hypos- tatized as the sun itself of the higher mystic world. The Logos which came before as The Light to en- lighten every one, appears now as one like unto the Son of man, his countenance as the sun shining in his strength, standing in the midst of the constel- lated churches, which like golden candlesticks, bor- row their light and trick their beams from Him. The figure recurs again and again, but it is no longer metaphor. It becomes the central luminary itself, diffusing warmth and glory throughout the New Jerusalem, which needs no candle, no sun, and no moon, because " the Lamb is the Light thereof." We cite one more instance of a most remarkable kind. John alone of all the twelve followed Jesus to the cross and stood under it to witness its agonies. Therefore he gives details which all the others omit. None of the synoptics mention the piercing with the spear, but John does it with asseverations which show how deeply the sight affected him. 1 John viii. I2. ^ Rev. i. 13-16 ; xxii. 5. THE yo I/A AWE AN WRITINGS. 85 '* One of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came thereout blood and water ; and he that saw it bare record, and his record is true ; and he knoweth that he saith true ; that yc might believe," — evidently referring to the doceti- cism of the Gnostics, who denied the real suffering of the Christ. And then follows the citation of the prophesy, " They shall look on Him whom they pierced." ^ This quotation is from Zech. xii. 10, and the lan- guage, as there applied, has no direct reference to Christ, but to the enemies of Jerusalem in her con- flict with the heathen nations. John applies it in a secondary and mystical sense to the men who cruci- fied the Lord. In the reappearings of Jesus, in two successive scenes, John alone remembers what had so vividly impressed his senses, and through them his imagina- tion at the cross. "Jesus showed them his hands and his side." Turn now to the Apocalypse, and the same thing reappears in the vision of the seer, sublimed and intensified. The fact, of which John alone of the twelve was the eye-witness, is recalled. Not only so, but the same passage from Zechariah is cited in the same secondary and mystical sense, and the imagery and language of the passage are employed with greater fullness and amplitude. "Behold He com- 1 Johtt xix. 34-37. 86 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. eth with clouds and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him, and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him. Even so, Amen." Both quotations from the same prophecy, made with such peculiarity, point indubitably to one and the same writer.^ The fact which had impressed the senses of John so deeply and tragically, passes into the imagery of the seer, where that same Christ coming to judgment shall compel those who pierced his side to look upon Him in his open and over- whelming majesty. Dr. Davidson tries to parry the force of this point in a course of remark whose per- tinence we are unable to see. The personal characteristics of the favorite dis- ciple are portrayed not less in the Apocalypse than in the other Johannean writings. Both the prime elements of his character are strongly contrasted, but exalted and toned beyond the power of any human imagination to commingle and harmonize. No chambers of imagery ever opened such treasures of wrath, such storm-clouds, forking lightnings, or showering down fire and hail and bloody rain. The destruction, not of a Samaritan city, but of all the enemies of Christianity, both Jewish and Roman, is seen through the opening ages, and the New Jeru- 1 The text is rendered in the Septuagint, — /col iiri^X^y^nvTai vpot fit o»'0' &v Karapx-hcavTo, — " they shall look on me whom they have mocked." In both cases, in the quotation in the fourth Gospel and in the Apocalypse, the original is changed from the first person to the third. THE JOIFAXNEAN WRITINGS. 8/ salem descending beyond adorned and beloved as a bride. The grand and terrific heightened to super- human intensity, set off in contrast with images of peace more sweet and lovely than the earth alone car. furnish, all are there. But the critics mistake, we think, when they suppose the personal feelings and passions of the writer are in the Apocalypse. In the seer they have passed beyond that stage alto- gether. His personal genius is there superhumanly exalted and idealized, for he speaks not himself but is spoken out of; and the divine pencil takes its col- orings from a human treasure-house, where they had been abundantly stored up, and paints the realities which w^ere to be, and whose future the course of Christian history has ever since been filling up. The style of the Johannean writings, — a subject on which the critics have grievously stumbled, — is exceedingly variant. But it varies as the psychologi- cal condition of the historian differs from that of the seer. One writes from his own natural conscious- ness. The other writes from a profounder conscious- ness than the natural one, and the style is not his own, though colored by his native genius. One may be perfectly simple and prosaic ; the other, when es- sentially prophetic, is raised to a sphere of thought where the wing of imagination never dares to play, and his style may assume a mystic grandeur beyond that of ordinary poetry. But we come to another peculiarity of the Apoca- 88 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. lypse, and one v/hich seems at first to distinguish it strongly firom the other Johannean writings, we mean the " bad Greek," which the critics have made so much account of. This, too, when narrowly scruti- nized, remands us to one of the profounder principles of mental action. When men pass from a normal to a trance con- dition, or one essentially abnormal, and speak from pure spontaneity, they almost always speak in their vernacular tongue, seldom in a language which has been acquired later. If a German who had acquired English should somnambulize, he would inevitably fall back upon the speech which he learned from his mother's lips, and to which his organs and his inte- rior thought had always been attuned. The reason is plain. In these abnormal moods the voluntary powers are in abeyance, and the involuntary are in full play, and will determine to no speech which is foreign to them and artificial, but only to their own native forms and idioms.^ It is a very remarkable fact that the bad Greek of the Apocalypse is Greek which has been Hebraized. It is full of Hebrew idioms, which have led the critics strongly to suspect that it was composed originally in Hebrew. Bishop Middleton says that if this could 1 Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia, who practiced among the German population, said that people who had not spoken their native tongue for thirty years, on their death-beds, with the eternal scene drawing nigh, would talk and pray in the language of their childhood. THE yOIIAAiVEAN WRITINGS. 89 be admitted all the difficulties on this score would vanish at once. It may not only be admitted, but assumed as ex- ceedingly probable, that the Apocalypse, if written by John Iv Tri/eu/xart, was produced in one of the He- brew dialects. The Syro-Chaldee was his vernacu- lar, the same which he spoke on the shores of the Galilean lake, and associated with which all the memories of his childhood, youth, and early man- hood, and the natural imagery which enshrined them, were stored away in the treasuries of his mind. All his intercourse with Jesus had been in this language, and all the discourses he had ever heard from Him were in the same dialect. It would be strange indeed if after the ascension of Jesus, when intercourse with the beloved disciple was renewed, it had been in a foreign language, and not in the one which they used together when he leaned on the Master's bosom. Inevitably, and by psychological laws, when he wrote kv TTvevfjiaTL, that is, not by his own will, but out of a profounder spontaneity and under the dictation of the very lips that charmed his younger manhood, the Divine Spirit would not flow into Greek forms, but mto the forms of his native tongue. The congruity of the Johannean writings with each other and with the character of the favorite disciple, is important not merely as a most decisive argument for the genuineness of these writings, but as helping QO THE FOURTH GOSPEL. greatly in their mutual interpretation and in that of the whole New Testament. For it cannot well be denied that the Johannean theology is inmost like the soul in the body, being the central light which penetrates, involves, and transfigures the whole. CHAPTER IV. THE SCOPE, PURPOSE, AND SPIRIT OF THE APOCA* LYPSE. T T 7E reserve for a separate chapter a difficulty • ^ raised by modern criticism pertaining to the congruity and identity of authorship of the Apoca- lypse and the fourth Gospel. It is this : The temper of the one is wholly unlike that of the other. The temper of the fourth Gospel is sweet and beautifully Christian ; the temper of the Apocalypse is fierce, vindictive, and Jewish. Baur sees in the Apocalypse abundant evidence for his theory of two hostile par- ties in the primitive Church, — the Jewish party, at the head of which was Peter ; the Gentile party, at the head of which was Paul ; and of course John wrote in the interest of the Jewish party, recognizing throughout the Apocalypse only twelve Apostles, ignoring the thirteenth, telling the churches that Paul claimed to be an Apostle when he was not, and was a "liar" (Rev. ii. 2). We enter not into any examination of Baur's theory, which a late writer we think has put forever at rest,^ but the purpose and ^emper of a writing, which comes to us from the man 1 Fisher's Essays on the Origin of Christianity^ specially Essay IV. 92 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. who shared most fully the confidence of the Lord Jesus Christ, becomes to us a subject of the deepest interest. At what time was it written ? is a question of some importance, and bears incidentally on its interpreta- tion. On this point the traditions of the primitive Church are all in one direction : the Church, that is, of the century succeeding the apostolic age ; tra- ditions so early that they almost become the testi- mony of ear-witnesses. It was written, according to the earliest testimony, during the reign of Domitian, or about a. d. 96. Irenaeus, a contemporary of John's disciples, says the Revelation " was seen not long ago, almost in our age, at the end of the reign of Domitian." MeUto, bishop of Sardis, one of the churches to whom the Apocalypse was originally ad- dressed, writes as early as a. d. 177, and receives the Apocalypse as that of John ; and Justin, writing in 140, and at the city of Ephesus, the scene of John's last labors, and when hundreds were alive who had seen and heard him, refers to the book, and quotes it. Tertullian, about A. d. 200, says, " We have churches which are disciples of John ; " and re- ferring to the Apocalypse, " The succession of bishops traced to the original will assure us that John is the author." Clement's testimony is to the same purpose. The churches which had the best means of knowing, not only testify unanimously to the Johannean au- thorship of the Apocalypse, but also to its date ; and SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE. 93 the testimony begins so early that it is virtually that of men who had seen the beloved disciple, hung upon hie lips, welcomed him home from his banishment in Patmos, and saw him laid in his final rest at Ephesus. It is concurrent to the same result. — John's banish- ment was in the persecutions under Domitian, at which time he had his visions ; that is, about a. d. 96, the last of that tyrant's reign. Why have subsequent criticisms, some of therr. ancient but most of them modern, endeavored to set aside this early testimony } Almost solely for the reason that the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse is supposed to refer to Jerusalem and the temple as if they were yet standing. Jerusalem was destroyed A. D. 70. Therefore — such is the logic, — the book must have been written before that time. The ban- ishment to Patmos must have been during the perse- cutions of Nero, or about a. d. 66. We shall see that the supposed reference to Jerusa- lem and the temple is an argument which has not the least validity. Aside from this, it is to be observed that the persecution under Nero was local, and there is no historical evidence that it extended to Asia Minor. Then there is no probability that John was at Ephe- sus so early as 66, or that the seven churches, with the exception of the church at Ephesus, had even an existence. Paul preached at Ephesus a. d. 55, and gathered a church there. About three years after (^ 8), on his return to Jerusalem from Corinth, he meets at 94 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. Miletus the elders from Ephesus, when occurred that scene of tenderest pathos which Luke has described. In the year 62 Paul writes his letter to the Ephesians from Rome. In the year 6^ he is at Ephesus again, and writes thence his letter to Titus. In the year GK he is in prison again at Rome, where he was beheade posed gaps in the narratives. This was attempted very early, and hence arises a New Testamejit apoc- ryphal literature ; forgeries got up by pretended friends of Christianity which they tried to circulate under apostolic or highly honored names. Tischen- dorf, the prince of scholars in the history and puri- fication of the true text, has made this apocryphal literature the study of years, and they furnish, he says, the completest proof for the earliest reception of our evangelical canon. This holds especially true of two writings : the " Gospel of James " and the " Acts of Pilate." The spurious " Gospel of James " stands in such relation to our Gospels, which it tries to supplement, that the latter must have been a long time in circu- lation before the forgery was attempted. There are passages in the writings of Justin Martyr, whose first "Apology" dates as early as 138, which can only be traced to the " Gospel of James," and which show clearly that the work was in his hands. This being so, it must have been written in the first decades of the second century, and therefore Matthew and Luke, which it tries to supplement in matters pertaining to the birth and parentage of Jesus, must fall, beyond question, within the first. 152 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. The " Acts of Pilate " refer not only to the synop- tics, but to John's Gospel. For this also our oldest witness is Justin. In his first " Apology " he refers to various things foretold concerning the crucifixion, and of Christ's miraculous healing. He gives an account of the trial, death, and resurrection of Christ, and adds, "All this has Pilate, driven by his con- science to become a Christian, reported of Christ to the emperor Tiberius." We have the same in Ter- tuUian given in more detail. A writing answering entirely to these ancient cita- tions, and bearing the same title, has come down to our time in many old Greek and Latin manuscripts which Tischendorf identifies as the very work quoted by Justin and Tertullian. The work presupposes the records of our first three Gospels, and that of John beyond all question ; for while the report of the cru- cifixion and the resurrection refer to the former, that of the trial of Christ is essentially the report of the latter. An apocryphal book then was in existence in the year 138, based on the synoptics and the book of John. It must have been written some time be- fore to have obtained credit with such a man as Jus- tin. It carries us up towards the beginning of the second century, and therefore the Gospels on which it was based must have originated in the first. " It falls," says Tischendorf, " not as the lightning flash- ing through impervious darkness, but it is one of the clearest among many rays of light out of the post- WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 1 53 apostolic age streaming down to us over the weight- iest question of Christendom." ^ But in quite another way these apocryphal gospels furnish evidence of the true ones. The true ones in their more than Doric simplicity and divine path(^s, in moral dignity and ethical tone, and in their direct appeal to the inmost consciousness of human nature, stand forth in contrast with the spurious ones even as God's work in nature stands in contrast with the contrivances of men. This is not a matter of indi- vidual taste and judgment. Individuals, as Tertul- lian and Justin, were deceived. The churches were not, and in no case can it be shown that a forged Gospel was foisted into the canon of Scripture to be generally received. The same spirit that breathed through the letter of the Word breathed also through the heart of the Church, and made its faculty of recognition in the main unerring and its vision clear. The apocryphal Gospels show us indubitably what our New Testament writings would have been if they had been the productions of the second cen- tury. All that gave the spurious ones local and tem-. porary currency was the grains of gold filched from the evangelic narratives to incorporate with their tinsel and sand. An epistle, if very brief, might pos- sibly escape detection. But when forgers undertook to write gospels, though they borrowed from the true ones, their own despicable puerilities showed more 1 Wenn wiirdcn unsere Evangelic Jt vtrfasst, pp. 29-40. 154 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. surely in the contrast. They tried the experiment repeatedly. They invented their " Lives of Christ," and these compare with the simple, subUme concep- tions of our Gospels, and especially the fourth, as the murky bonfires of midnight compare with the stars that shine in eternal serenity and beauty above them. IV. The heretics of the Church are a company of important and independent witnesses. There was a class of Gnostics, as already intimated, who did not take their position outside the Christian Church and assail it, but claimed their position within it. They might the more easily have maintained it after the death of the Apostles if there had been no Canon of Scripture by which their notions were to be judged, but only loose and floating traditions. But if there was such a canon of Scripture, of course their first object would be to pervert it and bend it to their purpose. We know just what they did since Ire- naeus wrote to refute them ; and Hippolytus who wrote in the beginning of the third century has given an account of their opinions, and how they de- fended them, and the works of both these fathers are in our hands. Irenaeus says, " So firmly are our Gospels established that the heretics themselves bear witness unto them, and appeal to them to confirm their own doctrine." These heretics belonged to the first half of the second century. Irenaeus wrote about twenty years after their time. His words give the pronounced judgment of the second half of the WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 1 55 second century on the first half ; and more than this, we have detailed accounts of the writings of these heretics which confirm the judgment. Among these heretics Valentine stands conspicu- ous. He came from Egypt to Rome before the year 140, and passed some twenty years in that city. Throughout his whole system he borrows his ter- minology from the fourth Gospel. Irenaeus expressly asserts that the sect used this Gospel to the fullest extent, and grounded their doctrines upon the proem. The Word, the Only Begotten, Life, Light, Fullness, Truth, Grace, were the train of hypostatized -^ons which, with God, made up the famous octave of Val- entine. That the author of the fourth Gospel bor- rowed from Valentine is fantastically absurd. That Gnosticism should try to get the fourth Gospel out of its way by taking it up into its omnivorous recepta- cle and translating it, somewhat as the ass translated Bottom the weaver, comports with its whole genius and history. Hippolytus confirms Irenaeus. He gives several instances where Valentine had quoted John's Gospel, always perverting it and trying to dovetail it into his own system. The disciples of Valentine followed up the work. Ptolcmseus was one of them who quotes Matthew sev- eral times, and once the fourth Gospel, naming it as the work of an apostle. " The apostle says, that all things were made by Him, — the Word, — and with- 156 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. out Him nothing was made." Heracleon was an- other disciple and a distinguished one. He was con- temporary with Valentine. He did not merely quote John, but wrote an entire commentary upon the fourth Gospel, fragments of which are preserved by Origen, in which it is plain that he sought ingeniously to gnosticize the whole book from beginning to end. But Valentine's school had a still earlier founder in Basilides, who also comes from Alexandria in Egypt. He flourished as early as 125. He wrote twenty-four books on the Gospels ; and that our four Gospels are the ones thus designated as a whole is nearly cer- tain. He quotes Luke and John word for word, and tries to bring their expressions into accord with his system. He also refers to the star of the Magians in Matthew. Moreover the divine octave, named from the principal terms of John's Proem, is at the basis of Basilides' whole scheme, and Valentine must have found it there.^ Here then we have a false and fantastic theory of Christianity elaborated by its authors, all through the second quarter of the second century, appeal- ing constantly to the four Gospels as authority, specially anxious to subsidize John and bend that to their purpose, and for that end writing a whole 1 For these citations by the Gnostic heretics read Tischendorfs Wen zuurden, etc., pp. 19-23. For other citations see Bunsen's Hip- polytiis tind seine Zeit, vol. i. pp. 63-66. For quotations of Basilides, and of his heresy generally, see Eus« '#ius 2i E. iv. 7. WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 1 57 commentary upon the book ; involving so vitally the themes of that book, that sharp and bitter controversies took place between two parties in the Church, — the Orthodox and the heretics of that day, — and which continued down to the close of the century. Both parties appeal to one canon or rule of faith in which the Gospel of John is conspic- uous, for in its interpretation its grand themes were vitally concerned. There are men who try to make us believe that right in the midst of this debate, when appeals were made by keen-eyed controversial- ists to canonical Christian Scriptures, a new and spurious book, involving more than all the others the very matter in dispute, was foisted upon the Chris- tian public, received by everybody without a murmur of dissent, elevated to a place in the sacred Canon, and spread through various languages into all the Christian communions as of like authority. We will put a parallel case. We are separated by nearly one hundred years from the declaration of American independence, and the stirring events which led to the formation and adoption of the Con- stitution of the United States, the political canon of the country. After its adoption parties grew up, both appealing to its authority, both grounded on opposite interpretations. Suppose that just before our civil war broke out, the State Rights Party, not finding secession in the Constitution so plainly as they wished, got out a new chapter, added it to the old Constitu- 158 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. tion, and proclaimed it as a genuine portion of the fundamental law ; and forthwith, and without dissent and simultaneously throughout the country, it is so regarded by all parties, quoted as such in Congress, cited in the courts of justice, and no trace of contro- versy about it was ever known or heard of A more monstrous violation of all the laws of historical evi- dence and probability, and even of the first principles which determine human conduct, could not well be conceived. And yet the parallel fails in two particulars to give the argument in its unconquerable strength. We are one people, and speak and write in the main one language. The early Christian communions were separated by the barriers of dialect and nation which would render a simultaneous or general recep- tion of a forgery a more violent impossibility. Our fundamental law concerns us only in our temporal affairs. Their fundamental law concerned them, so they thought, in their eternal well-being, and deter- mined the conditions of heaven and hell. V. We come to a species of evidence already in- dicated, which Tischendorf gives as the crowning portion of his argument for the New Testament canon. We have said that translations of the New Testament were made into other languages, for the use of the churches, and that these translations were the identical old Latin Itala and Syriac Peschito which have come down to us. They must have been made soon after the middle of the second century. This is WITA^ESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 159 certain from the quotations of Irenaeus and Tertul- lian. How is this ascertained ? The manuscripts of the New Testament were copied and recopied for the hundredth time, and it was inevitable that some mistakes would creep in. The mistakes do not affect the main substance and doccrine of the New Testament, but they run down into countless minutiae, such as the variation or omission of particles. Sometimes a word or a whole sentence has fallen out ; sometimes a word or sen- tence, which might have been originally a gloss in the margin, has crept into the text. Not ten years would have elapsed after a manuscript had been dis- missed from the hand of an apostle or his amanuensis to be copied and recopied, before these various read- ings would begin to appear. Of course the nearer we get towards the autograph of the writers the purer our text will be. Moreover it will be easy to see that this department of investigation furnishes the most absolutely certain of all circumstantial evidence to identify the received canon of any specified period, because the evidence branches into such delicate and interi finable veins. The prince of scholars in this department is Tischendorf, who has made the explo- ration of it the main business of his life. We have said thai the Greek text which preceded and formed the basis of the translations of the second century is clearly identified in the Codex Sinaiticus, including our New Testament with its four Gospels. l6o THE FOURTH GOSPEL. We identif}^ it, therefore, as the New Testament of the churches in the year 150 ; not of one church but of all ; not alone at Rome but at Carthage, where Tertullian used the Latin translation made from it : at Lyons in Gaul where Irenaeus used the same thii ty years before him ; at Antioch in Syria, where Theophilus must have used the old Syriac version or its basis in the year 1 70 ; at Alexandria in Egypt, where Origen wrote, whose quotations are in striking agreement therewith. But the argument does not stop here. The Greek text in general use in the year 150, thus clearly iden- tified, though the purest we have is not absolutely pure. It had already been a great while in use, for it is clearly demonstrable that a rich text-his- tory LIES BEHIND IT. There is unmistakable evi- dence that it had already been copied and recopied and long passed from hand to hand. Tischendorf claims this as one of the most important and certain of the results of his labors. " If this is so," he says, " and there lies a long course of the text-history of our Gospels before the middle of the second century ; before the time when canonical authority, along with a settled church order threw up a strong barrier against private modifications of the sacred text, — and I pledge myself to give complete proof of this in its proper place, — then we must demand for this history the space at least of half a century. Must we not date, then — I will not say the origin of the Gos- WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. l6l pels, — no ; but the beginning of the evangeUcal canon about the end of the first century? And is not this result so much the more certain because all the historical facts of the second century which we have brought forward are in harmony therewith ? " We have exhibited in the two preceding chapters an outline of what is known as the historical or exter- nal evidence of the four Gospels. If the reader has imagined that it depends on uncertain traditions he will probably be surprised, if he has now surveyed it for the first time, at its cumulative and irresistible strength. He will ask, if there is not another side to the argument. There is undoubtedly another side, but there is none that we know of which can change the aspect of the case unless we say that all history is baseless and fabulous. We notice briefly two objections which may be supposed to break the force of the historical argument as we have stated it. I. The Alogians, a small and obscure sect, ap- peared in Asia Minor soon after the middle of the second century, who rejected the fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse. Montanus and his followers who claimed the special gift of the Holy Spirit, and an- nounced the coming of the millennium, had appealed to John's Gospel to support their fanaticism, claim- I62 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. ing for themselves the promise of the Paraclete and its realization. This extravagance the Alogians op- posed. They met it with a denial that John wrote the fourth Gospel, asserted its inconsistency with the other three, and ascribed it to Cerinthus, the con- temporary of John, Baur makes much of this fact. What does it really prove ? Two things : — First, that the Gospels were generally appealed to as canonical authority in the Church at the middle of the second century, and that the fourth was univer- sally received as genuine, — a small sect who could not believe its doctrines because of their own ration- alizing tendency being an exception to a general rule. Second, that the fourth Gospel as then known ^\\(\ received, was not a recent book, for the very men who seek to set aside its authority, assign its origin to the times of John, though most absurdly to Ce- rinthus, whom John opposed. The fact argues not against the genuineness of the book, but strongly in its favor, and absolutely annihi- lates the pretension that it could have originated after the middle of the second century. 2. Another ground of objection is as follows : The verdict of the second century touching the genuine- ness of historical works, cannot be accepted as final, because the laws of historical evidence were not then understood. Learned men even were credulous and easily imposed upon. Works were then received which we know now to be forgeries, and quoted by WIT.VESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 1 63 such men as Justin and Tertullian ; and there are writings in our Canon at this time, such as the Epistle of Jude and the Second of Peter, which were not written by the men whose names they bear. There are two plain answers to this. One may be as completely disqualified by skepticism as by credulity for applying the laws of historical evidence. The habit of doubting, caviling, perverting, and emptying words of their meaning, in order to suborn the facts of history to suit our theories, may even bring mist and darkness over a whole province of his- tory which lies else in peaceful sunlight. We have no right to assume as a foregone conclusion, that the supernatural can only appear in the natural, as we have seen it, and then make our assumption an axiom of universal criticism. Yet this is what Strauss ex- pressly and Baur impliedly have done. Allowing that there is a spiritual world, and therefore that the class of facts which the New Testament records, is possible, writers of the second century may be vastly better qualified to judge the record of them impar- tially, than those of the nineteenth, whose minds are darkened by a narrow or one-sided philosophy. Writ- ers of the Alexandrian School, to name no others, such as Origen, Clement, and Pantaenus so far as he is known to us, were learned men, not unskilled in historical criticism ; and added to these qualifications were intuitions made quick and clear by the breath- ings of the Holy Spirit to discern the Scripture that throbbed freshly with its life. 1 64 I^HE FOURTH GOSPEL. But in addition to this, there was the communis sensus of the Christian Church when its glory was unstained by worldly ambitions or sectarian strifes. The Christ of Scripture then glowed warmly as the Christ of consciousness. Spurious documents might obtain temporary or local currency. But they would differ from the genuine as a daub from a landscape, and though individuals might be deceived, the Church Cathohc would shed them off by the Power that reigned alike in its Bible and in the souls which it had redeemed and purified. But the argument does not proceed solely under the authority of these writers of the second century, nor that of the church to which they belonged. It is various and cumulative, gathering strength and vol- ume with every new investigation and every new discovery of documents. Our supposed better knowl- edge of the science of history, and more sure ap- plication of the rules which apply to it, do not bring the subject of the New Testament canon into greater doubt and difficulty, but bring it rather within the resolving power of a surer and more enlightened criticism. CHAPTER VII. CHRISTIANITY AS A NEW INFLUX OF POWER.* FROM the close of the second century up to about the year 50 there is an order of phenom- ena not dwelt upon in profane history, nor much in popular histories of any kind ; not because they are less authenticated than any other class of events, but because historians writing from the view-point of naturalism do not know what to make of them, and ignore them. They are not confined to the period above indicated. They belong in some sort to the more interior history of the Church in all ages. But during the period indicated they are marked and palpable, and unmixed with papal legends and im- postures ; for the hierarchy had not then arisen, and the Church was in her bridal robes. They were then new, taking the Church itself by surprise, un- known to the old effete religions as then existing, whether Jewish or Pagan. This new order of phenomena may be described 1 The principal authorities for this chapter beside the New Testa- ment are Origen, Tertullian, and Justin. They are cited and en- larged upon by Neander in the first section of his Church History^ and in his Memorials of Christian Life, Part i. ch. i. l66 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. as a disturbance everywhere of the old eqiiilibriuin of forces, social, moral, and spiritual. There were i:)erturbations in the old system of statics like those which the astronomers observed among the planetary bodies, while yet the orbit of Uranus was supposed to be the boundary of our solar system. There must ])e the proximity, said Leverrier, of some body or system of bodies which we have never taken into the account ; and so marked and decisive was the influence that he directed his telescope with the ut- most confidence that the unknown disturber would swim into its field. The disturbance, however, in the field of history is so great as not only to produce irregularities of motion but to break up the old sys- tem of forces altogether and direct them anew. We get a very poor and inadequate conception of the introduction of Christianity into this world when we imagine its Apostles going about and making an exhibition of miraculous performances as proofs of their message. The miracles did not cause the sj^read of Christianity, but were simply its outcome on the plane of nature. Christianity came only when the spiritual heavens were brought in closer and more naked contact with the human mind, and hence pro- duced a NEW INFLUX OF POWER in human nature itself In comparing two coterminous periods of history, it is easy sometimes to see the second in the first, and to regard one as simply a development of the CHRISriANITY A NEW INFLUX OF POWER, i^j Other. Thus the Protestant reformation was heralded a century before it came by signs which announced its approach, — to use the rhetoric of Coleridge, — as clearly as the purple clouds of the dawn announce the approach of morning. It is the past developing into the future. Let the historian scan the age of Augustus Caesar and he will find there the science, the philosophy, the jurisprudence, the natural culture, and the religions, Hellenic, Jewish, and Roman, of the two centuries follov/ing ; to be modified as they might be by the ordinary forces of human develop- ment. The cause of the disturbances which we are about to notice he will not find ; and unless he re- sorts to celestial observations he will set his glass in vain. The new influx of power is traceable as one of the divine signatures of Christianity generally, but is found all through the second century, and always in connection with and within the circle of Christian ideas and the Christian communions. We mean by the influx of power, not the voluntary and normal forces of education and culture, but a new force, and one before unknown in the world, lying back of all human volition, producing a new creation out of the old chaos and transforming human nature itself. This is manifest in various ways. r. First and on its lowest plane of operation, there is a new power of mind over matter, of the spirit over the body, found principally in a healing and 1 68 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. cleansing divine life, flowing downward and outward into its lowest forms. Of course this would be seen first in the cure of nervous diseases, because the nerves are the inmost texture kj\ the physical body and join it with the spiritual, but it is seen in a restor- ative hand laid on all the diseases of the human form. This was called " miracle " in the language of the times, because it came as a surprise, but it was in conformity with universal spiritual laws operating within the natural as the heavens were pressing anew into the affairs of earth. For these phenomena we depend on no uncertain and private testimony, and they are altogether different in kind from the lying miracles of the monks of the middle ages. Origen appeals to them as matters of common experience. Grievous diseases and states of insanity, which had withstood all other means of the healing art, disap- pear when the subjects of them are brought within the circle of Christian truth and influence. No tricks of jugglery were used, but healing power ran down through the mind and the nerves and the whole phys- ical frame, the entire outward man being recreated from within. Tertullian and Justin Martyr make the same appeal. They cite these facts as notorious- " That the kingdom of evil spirits," says the latter, " has been destroyed by Jesus, you may even at the present time convince yourselves by what passes be- fore your own eyes ; for many of our people, of us Christians, have healed and still continue to heal in CHRISTIANITY A NE W INFL UX OF PO WER. 1 69 every part of the world, and in your city of Rome, numbers possessed of evil spirits, such as could not be healed by other exorcists, simply by adjuring them in the name of Jesus Christ." Irenaeus says the same, and declares that many came into the Christian pro- fession because the evil influx which we call insanity, and which then held so many minds in baleful eclipse, receded and went out before the reviving glory of the inflowing Christ when the subjects came to them- selves and rejoiced in their right minds. So full and vital was this new influx of power that sometimes the apparent dead were brought back to life. We say apparent dead, for we will not assume as yet to know the exact line which divides the mys- terious realms of life and death in putting off" mortal- ity, or that turning back and recrossing the line is a possibility within the supreme divine order. We only say that those who to the common apprehension had died, sometimes had a reviving consciousness within the sphere of Christian influx, and lived years afterwards as well known witnesses of it in the Chris- tian Church. To this fact Irenaeus bears unexcep- tionable testimony. But it is only one class of facts among others, notorious and well attested through the whole period in review, showing that the healing Jind restoring mercy was not only in first things but last things, not only Iv dpxf}, but in the ultimations of the natural world. 2. A quickening of the interior perceptions re- I70 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. suiting frequently in open spiritual vision, is another remarkable phenomenon of the period under review. It is found as late as the times of Origen, but it is continuous and more intense as we ascend the stream. As we find it in this period it has nothing in common with the visions of the monks, real or pretended, of a later age. It often came unsought, and to those outside the communion of the Christian Church, and ignorant of its system of faith, yet bear- ing in upon them gleams and intuitions of the same truths that lie at the centre of the Christian system. We mistake altogether when we suppose that a few unlettered men, merely by means of personal persua- sion and eloquence, spread the Gospel laterally from Palestine throughout the Roman empire, as we find it in the second century. No wonder that Mr. Gibbon is nonplussed when he tries to account for its rapid, almost simultaneous diffusion, as if it had spread of itself There is a large class of facts perfectly well attested, even while we keep within the track of com- mon history, showing that the descending heavens were urging their transcendent realities into all re- ceptive minds, sometimes with power so great that their scenery lay visibly upon the opening soul. Tertullian says the majority in his time came to a knowledge of the true God by visions {e visionibiis) \ that is, they came into the Christian Church not be- ':ause its truths had first been urged upon them from vithout, but because they had been borne in from CHRISTIANITY A NEW I NFL UX OF PO WER, i y j above. Tertullian probably exaggerates, as he was wont to do, but Origen affirms the same class of facts not only as well known in the Christian communions, but as within his personal knowledge and experi- ence, and calls God to witness the truth of what he sa3^s. These testimonies are important, not only as accounting to us for the rapid diffiision of Christian- ity in this early time, but for its invincible grasp upon the common mind, showing it a religion which prevailed, not so much by propagandism as by its outcome from the heart of God into the heart of humanity, prepared by some new agency for its re- ception. 3. Closely connected with the order of phenomena just named was another not less remarkable. The realities of a super-sensible world through all this period within the Christian communions are not so much matters of faith as of knowledge. Lying on the general face of society throughout the Roman empire there is darkness on this subject that might be felt. The philosophers did not believe their own speculations, nor the poets the creations of their im- aginations, much less did the common mind have any intelligent convictions whatsoever. The Roman Senate might be said to represent the best culture and intelUgence pertaining to religion, philosophy, science, and morals, which their times afforded. In the debate as to what disposition should be made of Catiline's conspirators, Julius Caesar, then the High 172 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, Priest of the national religion, rose and opposed cap* ital punishment, on the ground that death was the extinction of conscious existence, and therefore was not so much punishment as a release from it, thus publicly in the face of the Senate denying the immor- tality of the soul. Cato was there ; and Cicero, who wrote the Tusculan Questions, was there. Both re- plied, and their replies are reported, but on this all important point they made no distinct issue with Caesar, showing that even with the best minds the doctrine of immortality was only an airy hypothesis. There had been no change in this respect in the times which we have under review, except that they present the following remarkable phenomena. In the dense and general darkness we see little communions called churches, dotting the regions of night Uke spangles of gold and silver, gradually enlarging their circuit, while into each the heavens were open, and tidings of God and immortality were flowing free. Here was something which the age itself could not understand, and which we shall understand just as little if we suppose that this new faith subliming into knowledge was merely wrought by preachers who proved their assertions by miracles, or by reading the New Testament documents. Any one must see that such causes merely operating ab extra^ were quite in- adequate to produce such results. 4. But perhaps more remarkable yet was the new transforming power over human nature, everywhere CHRISTIANITY A NEW INFL UX OF PO WER. 1 73 lifting it up and cleansing it. It is not merely the reformation of manners that now meets our obser- vation. It is the new and original types of charac- ter, and what is quite as remarkable, they were evolved out of the very material which a philosopher would have passed by as worthless. And more re- markable yet, they were evolved very often without the will, and even against the will of the subjects themselves, when those subjects were brought within the circle and operation of the new influence. There was some power lying behind all personal volition, and choice, transfusing the subject's whole being and bringing a new creation out of it which astonished himself as much as any one. Undoubtedly there was some preparation in the experience of such men, which made their natures ductile under the new su- pernatural influence ; they were not made subjects of it by arbitrary selection ; what we mean to say is, it came to them without their seeking ; they did not go after it and find it, but it came and found them, and lifted them out of the grooves they had moved in, with a force they no more thought of resisting than the sea-weed torn up by the roots would resist the swellings of the tides.^ Celsus, who wrote against Christianity, evidently 1 Origen says in his treatise, Contra Celsus, " Many, as it were, against their will, have been brought over to Christianity ; since a certain Spirit suddenly turned their reason from hatred against Chris- tianity into zealous attachment even at the cost of their lives, and presented certain images before the soul either awake or in vision." 174 '^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. with great subtlety and acumen, makes it one of his sharpest points of objection that it professes to ac- comphsh impossibilities ; that the idea of changing human nature, and making it over is utterly absurd. " It is manifest to every one," says he, " that it lies within no man's power to produce an entire change in a person to whom sin has become a second nature, even by punishment, to say nothing of mercy, for to effect a complete change of nature, is the most dif- ficult of things." To this the Christian apologists replied in substance : Come and learn for yourselves. Come into our assemblies and see what and who we are, and from what ranks and conditions we have been gathered. See how the old savagery and hate have been expelled from us, and how we can now love our neighbors as ourselves, and forgive our enemies and render good for evil, and blessing for cursing. We have two scenes presented to us : one in Lyons, and one in Smyrna of lesser Asia, in which the new type of character is brought in vivid contrast with the depravity of the age out of which it had been won. We mean the persecutions and martyrdoms described in the letters sent out by those churches making known their calamity to sister churches. We make all due allowance for the enthusiasm inspired by Christian faith, but even then we witness virtues and graces of character and examples of a renewed and sanctified human nature wrought out of the low- CHRIS riANITY A KL IV INFL UX OF PO WER. 1 75 est and roughest material, far more illustrious than any other miracles that we know of. It is magnan- imity, faith, love, patience, heroism, and the sweet- est spirit of forgiveness appearing like an " orb of tranquillity " in a general storm of hate, revenge, and cruelty. To their tortures by racks, by pincers, by faggots, by the tossings of wild beasts, by being seated in burning chairs that the fumes of their roasting flesh might come up about them, amid scoffs and jeers from the rabble and when a word of retrac- tion would have saved them, " They went on joyful, much glory and grace being mixed in their faces, so that their bonds seemed to form noble ornaments, and like those of a bride adorned with various golden bracelets, and impregnated with the sweet odor of Christ, they appeared to some anointed with earthly perfumes." ^ These great changes were not developments out of the age, but of a Power which was reversing its tides. They were wrought everywhere in the name of Christ, and within the influence of Christian ideas and the Christian communions ; very often the new influx from within meeting the presentation of truth from without as by a stroke of God. Thus from the ruins of a reversed and degraded humanity as a background they bring out these portraitures of an- 1 For an account of these martyrdoms given in the Letters of the Churches of Lyons and Smyrna, see Eusebius, lib- iv. c. 15 ; also lib. V. c. i. 176 THE FOUR r II GOSPEL. gelic life and beauty. The change in these persons could not be better described than by saying " the Holy Ghost fell on them ; " for not any voluntary agency had wrought the change, but a sudden in- come of power through the consciousness. These phenomena occur as you ascend along the second century into and towards the middle of the first, and they appear in the moral world like those you would witness in the natural if you went out at mid-winter when the ground was covered with snow and the forests tinkled with ice, amid which a few trees scat- tered here and there were appearing in the bloom and the greenness of their summer glories. Any mind of the least philosophical bent and untram- meled by false theories, ascending the stream of his- tory, would conclude that " something had happened," and that this something was of a very extraordinary character thus to turn the stream out of its course. Ascending through this series of phenomena we come to the times embraced in our New Testament canon. The reader will see that the earliest of our ecclesiastical history does not stand forth as excep- tional ; that the annals of the Church for more than a century afterward, to come down no further, give us a continuation of the same order of events described by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, and of the dispensation of the Spirit inaugurated on the day of Pentecost. The current of history as we ascend, prepares us for the events they record CHRISTIANITY A NE W INFL UX OF TO WER. I J J SO that they break upon us without surprise. We ascend and note the perturbations with expectant minds, — Hke Dr. Kane's men travelUng northward and watching the flight of summer birds and the growing evidence of some mysterious and warmer cHme, till the open Polar Sea broke on their sight, its waters shimmering in the sun and its waves dash- ing at their feet. Ascending this stream we come to a literature un- questionably genuine, bringing us into the very at- mosphere of the warm open sea. There is one man who appears as the central figure of this literature ; whose writings and personal history, while they are entirely congenerous with the history we have been now tracing, fling a light over the whole, disclosing the causes, and the only adequate ones, of these mys- terious perturbations. There was a man who started from Jerusalem towards Damascus on a mission of persecution, proud, cruel, and vindictive ; he came from Damas- cus with a heart yearning towards all mankind, with the humility of a child, and with affections as tender as a woman's love. He went towards Damascus with an intellect narrowed down to a rapier's point and harder than its steel ; he came from Damascus with an intellect broadened and fused with divine fire, and with a logic so invincible, and with its links so warm with the Holy Ghost, that it moulded the thousfht of the world for eighteen centuries What 178 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. does his change date from ? Epileptic fits, says Dr. Strauss.^ I met Jesus Christ on the way, says Paul, in a light from heaven which dimmed the Syrian noon. We are brought to the earliest literature of the Church in the authentic letters of this most distin- guished among the converts to the Christian faith. Some of them were written not more than twenty years after the death and ascension of Christ. Four of them, — and those the most important, — the most exacting criticism has never called in question. Nine of them are conceded as genuine in the criti- cism of Renan, who is sufficiently exacting and fas- tidious for the most refined scepticism. Thirteen we regard as genuine beyond all reasonable doubt or cavil ; and only the Epistle to the Hebrews, so called, popularly ascribed to Paul, has been shown very clearly from evidence internal and external to hi»ve emanated from some other source. Later than these letters, we have the history as- cribed to Luke, — the Acts of the Apostles, about half of which is a record of Paul's life and labors. The first chapters Renan considers as legendary be- cause of the supernatural events there narrated, which by his theory cannot come within the range of authentic history. The " tendency theory " of Baur makes the whole book a compilation of the second century. The critics of the anti-supernatural school 1 lu his last Leben Jesu, p. 302. CHRIST! A NJTY A NE W INFL UX OF PO WER. 1 79 agree together as to the status of Paul. "The Christ," says Renan, who gives him personal revela- tions, " is his own phantom ; it is himself he hears while thinking he hears Jesus."^ Their criticisms of the book of Acts are futile so far as designed to shut out and keep out the super- natural. Those letters which Renan concedes were written by Paul beyond all reasonable question, con- tain the essential elements of the book of Acts, in- ckide in their range the most important events which it records, while at the same time leading us up to the very spot where the gates open and the new in- flux of power comes in to sweep down the Christian ages and carry the old land-marks of history before it as drift wood upon the waves. If you tamper with the book of Acts you may just as well keep on and tamper with all the history that follows in continuous stream for more than three hundred years. It were as if Dr. Livingstone, in following up the Nile to its origin, should come to a thicket out of whose shad- ows a copious flood of waters is swelling free, and should say. Here, I think, we have found its source. We will go no farther, for the river has come to an end. Paul had never seen the Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh. He tells us, too, that he conferred not with flesh and blood ; he did not receive Christianity from any other persons who had seen the Lord Jesus in 1 Life of Saint Fault ch. xxi. l8o THE FOURTH GOSPEL. the flesh. How then did he receive it ? He says that after his conversion he went into Arabia, and thence returned to Damascus, and only after three years went up to Jerusalem.^ Meanwhile he gives us to understand that the Christianity he was to preach and expound he received by direct revelation from Jesus Christ, and in such completeness and integrity, and with such grasp on its interior truths, that some who had been with Christ all the days of his mission on earth were left far below him, sticking as yet in the mere letter, and only to be released from its scales as he had been, by the new influx of power from the risen and glorified. This Jew, imprisoned of late in the hardest Jewish shell, appears suddenly with the shell shattered in pieces under his feet, looking down upon it in triumphant scorn, much as we may suppose the immortal spirit new-risen in glory looks down on the body which lately incum- bered it. Moreover, a whole system of truth, diviner and lovelier than he had ever dreamed of, he now holds and expounds as a concrete reality, involving a new doctrine of God, of man, of justification and redemption, of the resurrection, of the Church as a universal brotherhood, and the kingdom of Christ as the universal reign of righteousness on the earth. All this, he says, " I neither received of man, neither was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." Not only so, but the ordinances of Chris- 1 Gal. 1. 11-24 CHRISTIANITY A NE IV I NFL UX OF PO WER. 1 8 1 tianity which were to symbolize its truths forever, he says, were given him direct from the Lord Jesus, and the scene of the Last Supper is described, and the language repeated by which the ordinance was first estabHshed, coinciding substantially with the account which the synoptics gave some time afterwards from their own memory of the scene.^ Moreover, in times of perplexity and fierce opposi- tion from unbelievers when difficulties seemed to close him round as a wall of adamant, he says the Lord Jesus stood by him to cheer him on, or his angels encircled him in bright array, and an open path was then made for him, or the prison doors opened and he went triumphant on his mission.^ Not by seductive eloquence, not by human logic alone, often by simple prayer and the laying on of hands, came the influx of power involving all present in a sphere of new life and of transforming grace, and lifting up their interior minds to quick-coming con- ceptions of truth that shamed all the philosophies of the age. Moreover, this Paul, once so hard and bit- ter with theologic hate, becomes under the new in- flux as tender hearted as a child, and writes that chapter on charity which has been a sweet lyric of the heart, and tongued its highest inspiration to the present hour. 1 Compare i Cor. xi. 23-26 and Matt. xxvi. 26-29; Mark xiv. 22-25 ; Luke xxii. 17-20. 2 Compare Romans xv. 18, 19; 2 Cor. xii. 1-12 ; Gal. ii. 2 ; Acts xvi. 25, 26. 1 82 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. Those things in the book of Acts at which the skeptical critics boggle most, the speaking with new tongues, the visions of supernal realities, the miracu- lous healing, the incoming of the Holy Ghost at the name of Christ, are all found in Paul's unquestioned letters to the churches, and we are cornered up to two alternatives in tracing Christianity to its origin. The system of truth and influence which in its broad- ening course raised Europe out of barbarism, found England a horde of savages, and made it the England of to-day, shattered the Roman empire, and on the ruins of the old paganism to which the heavens were nearly closed, formed the Christian communions, into which tidings of immortaUty came full and free, — this system, followed up in history to the earliest literature which attempts to account for its origin, is found in the writings of a man who had epileptic fits, or swoons, in which he saw a phantom which he called Jesus, — or else to a real Jesus Christ, through whom the heavens were opened, and swept the in- most chords of our human nature with the sovereign grace and transforming power of Almighty God. It has become fashionable of late to decry Paley and " the Paley men." His unpardonable sin is the perfect transparency of his style and thought. What he saw he saw in sunlight, though he did not see very deep and far ; and he had the rare faculty of making his reader see exactly what he saw himself. He never pretended to tell what he did not see, and CHK/STIA:VITY A .VE IV hVFL UX OF PO WER. I ^^ call his subjective fog-shapes the advanced thought of his age. Hence his offense to theology. He wrote a little book, which may still be found on the neglected shelves of old libraries, which is a masterly demonstration through internal circumstantial evi- dence and mutual corroboration of the authenticity of the book of Acts and the Pauline letters. It has never been answered, for the excellent reason that it does not admit of any answer. As respects the Epistles and the book of Acts, Mr. Andrews Norton very well says Paley has " put the matter at rest." ^ 1 Paley's argument in the HorcB Paulina, and the kind of evidence which he exhibits, may be illustrated in this way, — A piece of paper was once found which had served as the wadding of a musket. Unrolled, it was found to be part of a newspaper which had been torn in two. If the missing portion could be found in the possession of certain parties certain facts of great local interest could be established. Another piece was found, but how could it be iden- tified as the missing one ? Why, the torn edges fitted exactly to- gether. Not only so, but the torn words also came together so as to make sense and meaning along the whole line of separation. Nobody *'^Mbted, of course, that the two pieces made originally one whole. This gives some idea of the way in which the facts and allusions of the book of Acts and the Pauline letters fit together and interpene- trate, as belonging to one historic whole. They run into minutiae and delicate coincidence which no forger would have dreamed of and no mere compiler could have happened upon. Paley's argument must be icad to be appreciated, and when read it gives the go-by to the boundless guessings of P>aur's "tendency theory and" the critique of Renan on the four letters which he rejects as spurious. CHAPTER VIII. THE PAUSE IN HISTORY. IN the last chapter we ascended the stream of Christian history through the first two centuries of the Christian era. Let us reverse this process. Let us come down from the other side and see what forces there were out of which Christianity could have been developed in the natural course of human progress. The Greek culture and philosophy had their con- summation in Plato four hundred years before Christ. We should anticipate were we to describe here that marvelous achievement of human genius. We will only say now that nowhere else do we find a system wrought out by the human intellect which anticipates so nearly the truths of Christianity. Nowhere before or since that we can discover has human culture ad- vanced so far or caught brighter gleams of the higher realities. If humanity was to come by development into the open light of a spirit-world, it should have been from the Hellenic rehgious consciousness. Hence onward, however, its course in this Ime of development is ever downward. At about 150 c. c. Greece was merged in the THE PAUSE IN HISTORY. igr Roman empire and became a part of it. In the wide- spread servility of the empire there is a dreary desert varied only by changes from unbelief to superstition, and from blank despair to a kindling hope that some divine interposition might be nigh. From the Acad- emy to the Lyceum, from the Lyceum to the Porch, and from the Porch to the New Academy, the gravi- tation is sure and continuous towards Nihilism, — the crumbling away of all the foundations of faith and knowledge. Plato lived in the future ; he was the child of hope and aspiration. He saw an interior way which led the soul upward to God, and to a per- sonal immortality in her native star where once more she shall hear the music of the heavenly spheres. All this is fantasy to the intensely logical and prac- tical mind of Aristotle. He scouted the ideals of Plato. He started from sensuous phenomena as the prime ground of human knowledge, and from this the steps of his logic did not conduct him to the im- mortality of the soul. Aristotle acknowledges the Supreme Reason, the God of Plato ; God and the World have had an eternal co-existence. But they have no such inexistence as Plato had taught. The Cosmos has a potentiality of its own, and God is in it only as a foreign element. Its changes are not a Continuous progress from lower to higher towards some goal of ideal perfection, but oscillations back and forth within its own limitations. With Aristotle there is no ever-bri^htenino: future for the v/orld or 1 86 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, for humanity. The stoics who build upon him do not Uke him separate the world from G It may be the silence of death, or it may be something of which no conception can be formed. 192 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. Incessantly haunted by such thoughts, which came \ know not whence, I was sorely troubled so that I grew pale and emaciated, — and what was most ter- rible, whenever I strove to banish this anxiety as foolish, I only experienced the renewal of my suffer- ings in an aggravated degree. I resorted to the schools of the philosophers, hoping to find some cer- tain foundation on which I could repose ; and I saw nothing but the building up and pulling down of theories, nothing but endless dispute and contradic- tion ; sometimes, for example, the demonstration tri- umphed of the soul's immortality, then, again, that of its mortality. When the former prevailed I re- joiced ; when the latter, I was depressed. Then was I driven to and fro by the different repre- sentations ; and forced to conclude that things ap- pear not as they are in themselves but as they hap- pen to be presented on opposite sides. I was made more giddy than ever, and from the bottom of my heart sighed for deliverance." In this distress of mind Clemens resolved to visit Egypt and hunt up a magician to summon a spirit from the other world* but some sensible philosopher dissuaded him. Such was the hunger of human nature in this solemn pause of history. The wide spread decay of the moral sentiment and the frightful corrup- tion of manners, were a necessary consequent of the paralysis of the spiritual faculties. The amuse- ments of Roman ladies were the cruelties of the THE PAUSE IN HISTORY. 193 amphitheatre, and the shrieks from rows of cruci- fied slaves fell on the iron ears of spectators with whom the throbs of pity were a childish weakness. If the moral sentiment found cheap utterance in poetry, or in moral codes, it was where the rights of humanity were trampled out without remorse. " I am a man and anything pertaining to man concerns me," brought down the applause of a Roman theatre, where the day after the groans of the dying gladiator might have been applauded with equal glee. Ap- plauding noble sentiments in the theatre was the cheap commendation of virtues which only lived in history. A play of Atticus was brought out dur- ing the games, and some passages which expressed hatred of tyranny were loudly cheered. This was when the very spirit of liberty had departed and the gloom of despotism was thickening to its midnight ; and Cicero remarked that it gave him sorrow that the people employed their hands in clapping at a theatre instead of defending the Republic. Seneca could write charmingly in praise of poverty and self-sacrifice. " What have you done with the tons of gold piled up in your cellars } " came back to him in the jeers of the multitude. Tacitus, who saw only the ruin and desolation, stands as one under a midnight sky, whose darkness has fallen as a continuous blot upon the landscapes. Human nature itself is in decay ; virtue has died out ; servility and rapacity are universal ; despotism 13 194 I'HE FOURTH GOSPEL. has become a necessity ; and he describes the face of things as if he were the last man who stood self-con- tained, wrapped in his mantle and surveying the ruins. " What is unknown," he says, " is thought grand and mighty ; but no longer is there any tribe beyond us ; nothing but waves and rocks, and Ro- mans fiercer than they, whose unrelenting cruelty you would vainly escape by obedience and good be- havior. Plunderers of the world, after the land fails from their ravage, they grope into the sea^ being greedy of his wealth if the enemy be rich, imbibing his servility if he be poor ; men whom neither East nor West can satiate. Alone of mankind they covet alike men's affluence and men's indigence. Theft, butchery, and robbery, they falsely name empire, and where they make a desert they call it peace." On such a field as this Jesus Christ appeared, some say the product of his times. He must have been the product of the times, very much as a Lap- land spring bursting from the bosom of an arctic winter, is the product of its ice and snow. Chris- tianity appears in the next century in the form of little communions called churches, emerging as a thousand glittering islets out of this sea of blackness, the islets enlarging their area till they touched each other ; very much as the geologists say Europe rose from the deep, first in spots of emerald that lay as scattered gems on a wilderness of waters, but which grew towards each other till they formed a great con tinent clothed in luxuriant £rreen. PART II. HISTORIC MEMORIALS. ** We regard them as a child might regard the stars, as chance gparks of heavenly light, because we have not observed the law which rules their order. However far one evangelist might have been led by the laws of his own mind, it requires the introduction of a higher power that four should unconsciously combine to rear from different sides a harmonious and perfect fabric of Christian truth."— Westcoit CHAPTER I. THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. '' I ^HE New Testament has four classes of writings -*- which we must carefully distinguish : the biog- raphy of Jesus ; the history of the churches founded on his life and word ; letters to those churches for- mulating the Christian doctrine ; and prophecy, which forecasts the final triumph of Christianity. Every one must see, however, that the biography contains the revelation. The history, the letters, and the vision of prophecy, are commentaries upon it, and il- lustrations of its divine power in its operation upon human nature. It is not necessary to suppose that the commentaries, however important, are final and exhaustive, or that its operation may not still be variant and progressive. Indeed, if the four Gospels embody a Divine Life, and the Divine Word made flesh, no exposition of their contents can be taken as final and exhaustive. The relation of these four remarkable biographies to each other, and especially of the first three to the fourth, is a subject which has been investigated with a thoroughness worthy of its exceeding interest. 198 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. Before we speak of their connection we wish to say a few words of them separately.^ The order of time in which they were written, in the opinion of most critics is the order in which they stand in our Canon. Some place Mark first, but gen- erally both in the ancient canon and the modern, not only the four Gospels but all the books of the New Testament fall into the order as we have them, or nearly so, as if by some intuitive discernment of their pervading and organic unity.^ We place the date of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark not far from each other, and not much before the year 60. We place Luke's Gospel later, and not far from the year 65. These dates are not merely conjectural. We can see no reason, after the most searching criticism, for adopting any statement es- sentially different from that of Irenaeus (a. d. 170), which agrees in the main with that of Papias (a. d. 1 It is no part of our plan and purpose to exhibit at large the his- torical evidence for the synoptics. We give what we consider the fair results of investigation. For the process the reader who chooses may read Norton, Fisher, Tischendorf, and the popular work of Westcott on The Study of the Gospels, and on the skeptical side Davidson's Introduction, and the last Leben Jesu of Strauss. It will be seen, however, that to establish the genuineness of the fourth Gospel is to prove the genuineness of all the others, inasmuch as it supplements and so far indorses them. Lange's learned and ex- haustive work gives the matured results of investigation from the orthodox point of view. * See this subject finely treated in Bernard's Progress of Doctrine , Bampton Lectures, pp. 231-236, note. THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 1 99 116), and with Clement (a. d. 200), and with Origen (a. d. 225). John's Gospel must be placed in the last quarter, and probably in the last decade of the first century. All its contents confirm the state- ments of Irenaeus and Clement, that John wrote it at the solicitation of his friends to supply a growing want in the Church of a more full knowledge of tlie earlier life and miracles of Jesus, and of what per- tained less to the " body " and more to the spirit of his religion. That the original Matthew's Gospel was written in Hebrew, and that ours is a Greek translation of the same, is generally admitted in accordance with the early tradition, and with internal evidence in the Hebraisms which are found in it. Mr. Norton gives cogent reasons for beheving that the first two chapters in the received version were no part of the original Hebrew Gospel, but were compiled from tradition, and given first as a preface to the Greek translation, to satisfy a natural craving of the reader for some knowledge of the birth and child- hood of Jesus, and that the preface found its way afterward to the body of the narrative, as it inevitably would do. The flight into Egypt and return seem inconsistent with Luke ; the intended return to Beth- lehem as if that were His home and not Nazareth, seems out of keeping with both Gospels. The whole cast of the narrative up to the third chapter, has not the usual traces of Matthew's pen, which, as we read 2CX) THE FOURTH GOSPEL. him, has a rare gift for historical narration. We can- not agree, however, with Mr. Norton, that the preface, even though not Matthew's, is to be set aside as of no value. We think it has very great value, and has just the authenticity which such a preface, if made soon after, would be likely to possess. The miracu- lous conception and birth agree with Luke's history, and with what seems to have been the uniform belief among the personal disciples of Jesus while his mother was yet alive. The story of the Magians might have been a variation of that of the shep- herds mentioned by Luke, or it might have been real history ; for numerous instances might be cited to show that angels were described under the image of a guiding star. The alleged murder of the chil- dren by Herod might have had some ground of fact. It was preserved long afterwards in the traditions and even the histories of his bloody reign, for a pagan writer of later date plainly refers to it in a passage in which it is manifest that the writer had not found his authority in the New Testament but somewhere else.^ Assuming that Matthew's Gospel proper begins with the third chapter, and with the words, " In the days of 1 The passage is fron\ Macrobius, a writer whose date is not far from the close of the third century, and is as follows : " Cum audisset inter pueros quos in Syria Herodes, rex Judaeorum, intra bimatutn juisit inlerfeci, filium quoque ejus occisum, ait : Melius est Herodig porcum esse, quam filium." — Saturnalia, ii. 4. THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 201 Herod appeared John the Baptist," ^ it proceeds with a unity and power swelUng on to its close, unmatched in all literature for its simple majesty. We cannot understand the state of mind that genders such crit- icisms as those of Strauss and Schenkel. Nothing shall convince us that here is not an eye-witness of the events he describes, and an ear-witness of the dis- courses he reports ; whose mind has been lifted up and greatened by the subject-matter beyond all ordi- nary inspiration. It is the highest inspiration where the writer entirely disappears in his theme, and such a theme as this. We do not remember a personal allusion or the expression of a personal feeling of grief or admiration thrown in by the writer himself, as if such things were profane in the awful hush of emotion produced by his narrative. The discourses are often reported at length, and generally in their natural connection with the events that are grouped so as to synchronize with them. The opening ser- mon on the mount inaugurates formally the public mmistry of Jesus as the multitudes thronged about 1 The third chapter of our version opens : " In those days Came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judaea." In what days .'' The text just before relates to the infancy of Jesus. A writer like Matthew would hardly leap a chasm of thirty years in a single paragraph after that fashion. It ought to be said, however, that the preek ei/ 8e rdXs r)/xepais has in narrative more latitude of construction, and may only mean " in course of time." Supposing that Matthew compiled rather than composed the preface, and afterwards added it to his history, all difficulties would vanish. 202 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, him throbbing and swaying with excitement, expect* ing the first summons of the wonder-worker to battle for his temporal kingdom, when the words, " Blessed are the poor in spirit " broke on the ears of his dis- ciples. The discourse that followed is plainly the report of an earwitness, and none of it could have been invented afterwards and put into the mouth of Jesus unless human wit had attainments then never reached before nor since. The hush of the soul be- comes more profound, as the narrative moves on, with almost insupportable grandeur towards the consum- mation. It is plain that the order of events is here preserved, for one scene leads on to another and pre- pares the way. Who that did not hear the sentence of doom pronounced upon the " Scribes and Phari- sees, hypocrites," in the last discourse of Jesus that rang through the temple courts, could ever have re- ported it as Matthew has done } And who that did hear it and have those words burned into his memory would ever forget it } And who that did not hear the discourse that followed on the slopes of Olivet, where the scene opens up to the eternal judgment, could ever have imagined it } And with what natural sequence do the scenes of Gethsemane, of the trial, and of Cal- vary hasten on ! " The fragmentary character of these narratives ! " If that means that they are fragments out of the whole life of Jesus, it is doubtless true, but we cannot imagine a work better arranged for unity of impression growing deeper to the end, producing THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY, 203 Without any art the effect of the highest art, than we find in Matthew's Gospel. There is a point wliere human passion and emotion, having gained their height, go down again and give place to the noon-day stillness inspired by the divine presence. That state must have been gained by Matthew when he wrote his description of the crucifixion. All of fear and agony that can wring human hearts he had experi- enced as an eye-witness of the scene ; he totally dis- appears from it in his narrative. To call his history dramatic would be borrowing the language of the stage. It is dramatic only as nature is in those awful moods when man seems as nothing before the on-goings of Omnipotence.^ The Gospel of Mark we regard as in fact the Gos- pel of Peter, bearing the impress of what may well be supposed to have been the features of his mind. Papias, Clement, and Origen are excellent authority for ascribing the second Gospel virtually to this Apostle. Papias knew and conversed familiarly with the personal followers of Jesus. " I made it a point," 1 Mr. Norton rejects from Matthew's Gospel a passage in the de- scription of the crucifixion found in chap, xxvii., verses 52, 53, but without a shadow of external authority. " Many bodies of the saints that slept arose." If, as was certainly the case at and after the res- urrection of Christ and long after his ascension, the inner sight of his followers was touched, and opened, there would be appearances to them, not of Christ alone, but of some of his disciples lately deceased, not in their natural, but spiritual forms. In the darkened pneu- matology of the times they would inevitably have been reported as •* coming out of their graves." 204 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. he says, " to inquire what was said by Andrew, Pe- ter, or Philip, what by Thomas, James, John, Matthew, or any other of the disciples of our Lord." He says he was informed by John the presbyter that Mark wrote as the interpreter of Peter ; and Clement says further that, being the companion of Peter, he was moved by the hearers of the latter to write out the substance of Peter's sermons, and leave them a mon- ument of the doctrine thus orally communicated. This agrees with the traditions of the Church so early, direct, and universal, that they would not be mistaken, and it agrees with the contents of the second Gospel. Papias says, "Mark wrote with great accuracy," but not "in the order in which it was spoken and done by our Lord ; " and Clement says it had Peter's authority for being read in the churches.^ The second Gospel, then, is a faithful report of Peter's historical discourses. Of course, the first preaching would be fundamentally historical. Mark wrote down the most striking and important things he had heard in Peter's narratives, and strung them together separately without any single continuous his- torical thread. This we conceive is sufficient to ac- count for the character of the book and for its abrupt close, without resorting to Mr. Norton's extraordinary and improbable hypothesis.^ For there can be no 1 Eusebius, H. E.y ii. 15 ; iii. 39. ** Mr. Norton imagines that Peter might have been preaching dur- THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY, 205 reasonable doubt, we think, that the best critics are right — among whom are Norton and Tischendorf — in saying that the genuine Mark closes with the eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter, and that the following twelve verses are an appendix by some later hand. Conformably to this early history of the second Gospel we find it a series of most vivid historical pictures, such as none but an eye-witness ever could have given. It has no such majestic sweep and flow as we find in Matthew, and while it gives fragments only of the discourses, and those often out of place, it details matters of fact with minute and graphic delineation, but with no subordination of parts to one great idea. Little details are often thrown in found nowhere else, which could not possibly have come from imagination, but from reality alone. Peter's narrative — for so we have a right to call the second Gospel — has two characteristics which are quite peculiar. It gives us glimpses, which are sometimes exceedingly vivid, of the personal manner of Jesus and the expression of his countenance. Again, incidents are thrown in, very homely and almost unseemly in their nature, which others leave out, and which no romancer would ever have inserted ; for instance, the poor demoniac whom Jesus was to cure lay on the ground gnashing his teeth, and " wallowed, foaming at ing the persecutions of Nero, and that Mark stopped short in his report when Peter was arrested. 206 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. the mouth." The whole seventh chapter is intensely Petrine, both in its report of what Jesus said to the Pharisees and in the explanatory passage concerning their customs in baptizing, cups, benches, pots, and kettles.^ The second Gospel shows that the narrator had not the deepest spiritual insight of the mean- ing of his own story, but it gives us the most exter- nal life of our Saviour with every mark of downright and sturdy honesty. We say, with every chapter, these things were seen and heard on this earth, and are matters of fact, and not of imagination. Luke was not an eye-witness of what he relates, but his narrative is doubly interesting from his having been the companion of Paul. There was an early tradition that he was one of the seventy, which is confirmed by the fact that he alone has recorded their mission and work. There is evidence, too, that he had the confidence of John, and that he relates things upon John's authority. This evidence is so strong, that we shall consider portions of his history as substantially that of John. We will state the evi- dence and the reader can judge. I. No historian, of the rare qualifications which Luke certainly had, would be likely to undertake such a work as the third Gospel without availing him- self of the best sources which he could command. But there are portions of his narrative, as we shall see, where John certainly was the only eye-witness, 1 ix. 20 ; vii. 1-23. THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 20^ and there are other portions where this was probably the case. It is tolerably certain that John had not left Palestine when the third Gospel was written, and we positively know that Paul met him at Jerusalem and found him a " pillar of the Church " very near the time when Luke became a companion of Paul.-* It is hardly conceivable that Luke should not have been brought into personal intercourse with the disciple who had the most intimate relations with Jesus. 2. Luke in his preface, more than intimates that he wrote on the authority of eye-witnesses, and did not receive his facts at second hand. " Since many," he says, "have undertaken to arrange a narrative of the events accomplished among us, conform- ably to the accounts given us by those who were eye- witnesses from the beginning, and have become min- isters of the Word, / Jiave determined also, having accurately informed myself of all things from the beginning, to write a connected account that you may know the truth concerning the narrations which you have heard." ^ The conclusion is tolerably cer- tain that he wrote on the testimony of men whu heard and saw. 3. John heard and saw a great deal which ihe other writers did not. He was a disciple and in- timate friend of Jesus, as we shall see, for a year or more before the twelve had been chosen. He trav- Gal ii. 9, 10. '^ Luke i. 1-4. 2o8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. clled with the Master, stayed with him at Nazareth, witnessed his miracles, went up with him to the Jew- ish festivals, and heard his conversations and parables, some time before Jesus took up his abode at Caper- naum. Any writer who undertook " accurately to inform himself of all things from the beginning** and report thereon, would be strangely incompetent if he did not resort to John, a living witness close at hand. 4. Mary the mother of Jesus, was the adopted mother of John, and a member of his household from the day of the crucifixion. The main facts in the first chapter of Luke could come only from two possible sources : direct special revelation or the word of Mary. Luke's own statement precludes the former and necessitates the latter, and strongly im- plies his intercourse with John and his family. His entire introduction relative to the birth of Jesus and the Baptist has an air of historic certitude in details which Matthew's preface has not. The visit of Mary to Elizabeth, their conversation together with the whole subject-matter, are what women who had been mothers, and such mothers, would have fondly kept in memory and related afterward, but what would have originated in the head of no man to put into history. The chapter is intensely natural ; the angel visits, under all the circumstances, are not unnatural or incredible ; and John in his introduction, gives the spiritual and divine side of the same series of facts THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 2O9 as if complementing what Luke had already written. Moreover, Luke's account of the childhood of Jesus, including his dispute with the doctors in the temple and the search for him by his parents, could only have come from his mother. Mary might have been liv- ing when Luke wrote ; but whether so or not, John, adopted as her son under circumstances of bereave- ment unparalleled in any story of human sorrow, would be the person to whom she would have confided such facts as are detailed in Luke's first chapter ; and any writer must have been strangely remiss and careless if writing on such subjects he would not eagerly avail himself of such authority. 5. Luke in portions of his narrative is intensely Johannean. Where he relates things in common with Matthew and Mark, there is a general indefinite- ness, and except towards the close a want of his- torical order. The great discourses are broken up, and striking passages from them combined and dis- tributed anew, and without any reference to the time and place of delivery. Important sayings are reported as being in " a certain place," or " a certain village," or " one day," or " one of those days," or " one day as he was teaching." Things are inserted in the fore- part of his Gospel which belong to the latter part in the order of time.^ But in one kind of narrative Luke is unrivalled. Those parables which search the inner hfe most thoroughly and go to the deeper ' See chap. ix. 44, 51. 14 2IO THE FOURTH GOSPEL hunger and thirst of the soul, are reported by Luke alone ; and some of them plainly, all of them pos- sibly, belong to that section of the ministry of Jesus which antedates the residence at Capernaum, but includes the sole discipleship of John and one or two others along with him. There are five of these parables preserved only by Luke : the Prodigal Son, the Unjust Steward, Dives and Lazarus, the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican. They differ from the parables properly so-called and freely reported by Matthew, inasmuch as they are not drawn from the analogies of nature but from hu- man life, sometimes in its dearest and sweetest re- lations, and touch a tenderer chord of sympathy and love. They symbolize a more intimate relation between the heavenly Father and the human child, and they represent the universal brotherhood of the race. The beggar in Hades resting in Abraham's bosom ; the publican justified above the pharisee ; the man robbed and half murdered in the city of priests, to be cared for by the despised Samaritan, show un- mistakably the Saviour in conflict with Judaism in its own capital, where his ministry commenced with John and one or two others as his fellow disciples. They show Christianity thoroughly cleared of Juda- ism. These parables, where it is divinely embodied, could have come only through an eye and ear wit- ness, and they are most congenial with the spirit of Johu. THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 2 1 T 6. There are events of which John of all the twelve was the sole spectator or presumptively so, and which Luke reports ; and though elsewhere he is often vague and fragmentary he is wonderfully dis- tinct and graphic here and has the scenic minute- ness of an eye-witness. We cite two of these in- stances ; one given by the other synoptics in more general terms, the other omitted altogether.^ Again, there are cases where Peter, James, and John were the only spectators and where Luke's narrative is much more graphic and detailed than that of the two other synoptics and, twice at least, lets us more interiorly into the spirit of the scene in the very style and method of the favorite disciple.^ The relation of the first two Gospels to the third and the first three to the fourth, becomes a subject of exceeding interest and importance. It has been the common method to study these four biographies as parallel. How much we may be confused and nonplussed by any such attempt, those who have used the "Harmonies" can bear witness. The Harmonies leave us with a painful impression of fragments jumbled together, but not joined. The truth is, these narratives are not parallel, and cannot be made to appear such, and yet taken together they have a unity which is not fortuitous but providential and vital. It is like the unity between the body and 1 See Luke xxii. 63-71, and xxiii. 6-11, and 26-44. 2 See Luke ix. 28-36, and xxii. 41-46. 212 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. the soul that warms and inspires it. They are not parallel but introjacent, and the more we study them as such the more shall we see that organic complete- ness and correlation. One lies within another. We begin with the most external, — the sheer natural life of Jesus, — and we are carried successively to the heavenly and thence the divine heights of his being. Matthew and Mark dwell upon the ultimate facts, describe the outward life, the physical sufferings and death of Jesus. They do it with graphic power and more than Doric simplicity, as only an eye-witness could. It is true they do more than this. But the humanity of Jesus is put foremost and made in- tensely real, and the first two Gospels seldom tell us anything which an outside looker-on could not have reported.^ Luke, on the other hand, relates with much detail his supernatural conception and birth ; and he reports sayings of Christ without regard to chronological order, often with reference to some other series of doctrine or some other province of duty. And he gives us entire discourses and para- bles, as we have shown, which reflect the mind of Jesus in more spiritual hues, and the relation of all men to God in a more intimate and filial communion. But in the fourth Gospel we are carried up to the divine heights of the being of Jesus. We enter the " circle within the circles." Things are related ^ The account of the temptation, and the agony in the garden, are exceptions, Malt. iv. i-ii, and xxvi. 39-45- THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 213 which serve to complement what had gone before, supplying from the divine side of his being, that which gives congruity to the whole. It is not credible that a child should be brought into this world without any human father, and the statement of Matthew's preface or Luke's genealogy standing alone is be- yond the grasp of rational thought. John's Proem gives us, however, the same fact seen on the thither or divine side, and if one is true the other must in- evitably be. One is only the basis or earth-side of a transcendent divine reaUty which alone can glorify it, and make it a perfect living whole, only to take on the ghastliness of death by being picked in pieces. There is a wonderful Providence in the formation and development of the Christian canon of Scripture. What the nascent Church needed first of all things to know was the fundamental facts, the natural life, so to say, of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what the ear- liest preachers would at first be at pains to present. Little else would then be hkely to be understood. The Apostles would not begin the grand fabric of Christian doctrine at the top and build downward to the ground ; they would begin at the ground and build upward into the skies. Hence the striking ,rerbal coincidence between Matthew and Mark, as if the Apostles had been accustomed to recite to their hearers over and over again the fundamental facts in the biography of Christ, until the very words had be- come stereotyped in their memories. The new con- 214 ^^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL, verts, whether Jewish or heathen, would need at the start to be thoroughly possessed with that biography as exhibited to the senses, " what the eyes had seen and the hands handled of the Word of Life." How absolutely necessary this was is shown by the base- less and fantastic speculations of Gnosticism which soon followed, which ignored the natural life of Jesus altogether, and which would have made Christianity only a gorgeous and ever-shifting cloud-castle float- ing in air. That the Church should have begun with the fourth Gospel, and ended with the first, is not conceivable. That it should have begun with the first, and from its secure foundations been drawn up to the celestial and divine heights of the third and fourth, accords with the facts of the case and the nature of things. And it accords with our individual experience. We learn Christ after the flesh before we learn him spiritually and divinely. We must see him and know him on the side of his natural humanity, a partaker of our nature, a sharer of all our woes and sufferings, or he will not touch our human sympa- thies and our tenderest love. But we are not likely to rest here. That it is not merely the carpenter's son who has found us and melted the flint from our hearts by such friendship and philanthropy, and such self-abnegation as the world had not known, we be- gin already to perceive, and when the fourth Gospel draws us upward to a vision of his unveiled divinity, THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY, 215 and oneness with the Godhead, we are made con- scious of no incongruity in his h'fc and character, but rather of their majestic proportions and har- mony. How utterly futile the objection becomes, that the fourth Gospel omits things which are contanied in the first and second, and contains very important matters which we miss in the others, must be obvious from these considerations. Why should John repeat what he knew the churches already possessed, un- less for the purpose of showing its relation to a higher series of truth and doctrine, which he some- times does ; or why should Matthew, or Peter through Mark his amanuensis, undertake to pour all the treas- ures of the new revelation upon minds just opening towards it out of Jewish formalism and heathen su- perstition } The objection too that each of the four Evangelists has his own pecuHar style, and that the fourth Gospel throughout is chromatic with some mind and genius altogether foreign to the other three, not only is without validity, but suggests a most won- derful and providential guidance. Each writer, of course, would select and give forth that in the life of the Master which was most in adaptation to his own mind and capacity to receive and reproduce, — and Peter of all others would be the man to set forth the ultimate facts and physical environment ; the life of Christ as addressed to the senses of men. Hence his Gospel has such an air of reality that Schenkel, 2l6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. who sees Christ only as a man of natural growth and development, receives only Mark as an authentic book, though the external evidence is not a whit stronger than that of the fourth Gospel. John of all others would be the man to set forth the inmost series both of fact and doctrine pertaining to the life of Jesus ; to describe the new temple of truth, not in its outer courts and granitic foundations, but in the holy of holies, where the glories of the Highest are without symbol and veil. The writer just referred to, in his attempted " por- traiture of Jesus," rejects the fourth Gospel as un- historic. In that shuddering dread of supernatural light which characterizes minds of his class, he rules out this book as the work of some fabricator of the second century tinged with the Gnostic theosophy. Only Mark is authentic. But the writer becomes conscious that his portraiture must be incomplete from Mark alone. He sees even from his point of view that here is a foundation whose superstructure towers into the tranquil heavens beyond the clouds that hide it, and quite beyond his view, and he is compelled after all to resort to a book which he had rejected as unhistoric and spurious, in order to pre- sent the life he is depicting in its symmetrical and crowning perfections. He says of the writer of the fourth Gospel, '* He has elevated into the region of eternal thought, and invested with the transfiguring glory of a later century, a selection of reminiscences l^HE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 2\J from the Christian traditions, taken out of the frame- work of their history in time. He has done this with an understanding of the interior being, and the loftiest aim of the hfe of Jesus, as it could not have been done at an eariier, and morally considered, nar- rower time. The fourth Gospel, therefore, serves as a really historical authority, for the representation of the moral being of Jesus, but in a high and spiritual sense of the word. Without this Gospel, the un- fathomable depth, the inaccessible height of the idea of the Saviour of the world, would be wanting to us, and his boundless influence, ever renewing our col- lective humanity, would ever remain a riddle. In the several particulars of his development, Jesus Christ was not what the fourth Evangelist paints him ; but he was that in the height and depth of his influence; he was not always that actualized, but he was that in truth. The first three Gospels have shown him to us still wrestling with earthly powers and forces. The fourth Gospel portrays the Saviour glorified in the victorious power of the spirit over his earthly nature. The former show us the son of Israel, struggling in his humanity up towards heaven ; the latter the King of Heaven, who de- scends full of grace from the throne of eternity into the world of men. Our portraiture of him must not disregard the natural, earthly foundation of the first three Gospels if it aims to be historically real ; but It can be an image of Jesus, eternally true on)y 2l8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, in the heavenly splendor of the light which streams Trom the fourth Gospel." This writer will not believe that John, who leane pearance of Jesus to his disciples. "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye there- fore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatso- ever I have commanded you : and lo ! I am with you alway, even to the end of time." (rov aiwi/o?.) The passages we have cited are not exceptional in Matthew's Gospel, but with others of similar import they connect themselves organically with the whole narrative. The fact then stands thus : that the tirst 224 Tim FOURTH GOSPEL. Gospel dwells primarily on the humanity of Jesus, for it comes first in the order of time. The whole doc- trine of the incarnation is baseless without it, and would only be a Gnostic theosophy floating in air. But Matthew, in consequence of those very qualities of his mind and style which give his narrative this intense and uncompromising reaHsm, has also made the Divinity of Christ stand out with corresponding distinctness of outline. John writes thirty years afterwards with the synoptics before him, professedly to complete them. He does complete them, not un- dertaking to lay the foundations anew, but telling us a great deal about the Divinity of Christ, which ex- plains, illustrates, and enlarges what the others had reported, showing the sublime peaks of doctrine which they had left in rugged outline, bathed in a sweeter and softer splendor from the morning sky. If the reader, however, is in any doubt as to whether the Jesus of the first Gospel is the Christ of the fourth, if he thinks the first may be a man de- veloped like other men out of the culture of his times, while the other was the factitious invention of a later day, he can easily bring this matter to the test Summon the best man you can find, the most ad- vanced prophet of to-day, and let him stand in the position of this same Jesus, the mere man of the first Gospel. Let him see if he can grasp his thunders. Let some prophet of to-day who ought to have grown up to the stature of Jesus, — the mere human devel- JESUS OF MATTHEW THE LOGOS OF JOHN. 225 opnient, declare in the face of the world that no man knoweth the Father but himself, and those to whom he shall reveal him ; let him assume to sit on a throne of glory with all the holy angels around him, and part the nations to the right hand and the left, to everlasting punishment or to life eter- nal ; let him announce that all power is given to Jibn both in heaven and earth ; let him put his own name into a formula of baptism, and charge his followers to make disciples, in the name of the Father and the Holy Ghost, and — himself. Would the world be con- verted by such preaching at the rate of three thou- sand in a day ; or would they regard it as self-conceit and self-assertion, passed into the stage of monoma- nia, and fit only for an asylum for the insane ? "5 CHAPTER III. THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH. T3 IRTH, from any view we can take of it, is a pro- -^ found mystery. There are two kinds. There is the birth of species, or ascent from a lower plane to a higher one ; and there is the propagation of the same species successively on the same plane of ex- istence. In the former, the Divine power operates immediately through the matrices of nature ; in the latter, through finite parentage. That any new spe- cies or new style of life was started mechanically by the Creator, or " made out of nothing," not only shocks the reason, but lacks all confirmation in any known facts of natural history. Theology is strangely fearful lest the Darwinian hypothesis of development should sink us in atheism. Should it ever be verified it would only be to write out a chap- ter of a new book of Genesis, wonderfully confirming the old one, showing in succession the birth of spe- cies, and the ascent through six days of creation till man appeared upon the earth. Nature only affords matrices for the all-fructifying spirit. If we attempt to trace to its beginning a new type of life we find, of necessity, that it abuts upon THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH. 22/ sometbiug- both higher and lower than itself. On the natural side it has been produced from something lower ; animal life, for instance, has been evolved from vegetable. But to suppose that the vegetable kingdom inoimted tip of itself into the animal, would be to shock the reason more violently than the most mcclianical and potter-like theology has ever done. The same is to be said of the assumption that ani- mals climbed up into manhood, the monkeys rubbing off their tails, and otherwise improving their condition, till they found themselves spiritual beings possessing immortal souls. But the idea that the human species at its origin abuts upon something both higher and lower than itself, seems almost a necessity of the reason ; upon the matrices of a lower life in its se- lectest forms on the natural side, and on the paternal side on nothing less than the brooding Spirit of God. Development from lower to higher species is not self- evolution. Every creation of a new type of being is a conception and a birth, having only nature on the maternal side, and the immanent Deity on the pa- ternal necessitating no finite fatherhood between. Suppose, then, it should turn out as one of the discoveries of natural science that man was not manufactured de novo by direct interposition of God, but that there is a vast system of evolution climbing a]3\vard, from the nebula to the mineral, from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the animal, and from the animal to man, — the frlorious flower of 228 777i? FOURTH GOSPEL. the whole opening upward into the light of immor- tality, for whom everything beneath serves only as root and stem, I can conceive of nothing more wor- thy of the Divine wisdom and omnipotence. And that wisdom is none the less adorable that its creation rises not through breaks and divisions where we can insert our dissecting knives, but in unfolding grace and order as the seed rises up into the palm tree, and then flowers forth towards the sunbeams. Every new type of life draws up into itself the next lower one, including that and — something more. The mineral is not the nebula, but it takes the neb- ula into its organic structure ; the plant is not the mineral, but it draws up the mineral into its compo- sition ; the animal is not a vegetable, but he takes up the vegetable, and decomposes it in a higher vitality ; man is not an animal, but he must take up and in- clude the animal as the basis and background of spiritual existence. Each includes what is below it and something more, and that something more comes from above nature, unless the stream can mount higher than its source, and unless all our talk about the nexus of cause and effect is without meaning. And if it be true that man was not extemporized by his Creator, but that a million years were employed in making him, we do not see that the workmanship is any the less wonderful and superb on that account, for what are a million years but as the tick of a watch in the eternity of God ? THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 22<) Climbing up from these analogies we are ready to say that if a higher type of hfe than the human, in- cluding that and something more, is to be produced upon this earth, it will not probably descend exter- nally out of heaven, and stand among us in its insu- lation. Neither again will it be manufactured. It will be born. And it will be born of the brooding Spirit of God on the paternal side and of our human nature on the maternal, with no finite fatherhood in- tervening, and the product of such conception and birth would be a style of Divine Life into which men do not develop by natural progress and self- improvement, but which would express to them more completely and openly the moral perfections and glo- ries of the Godhead. This is precisely what three of the New Testament writers affirm respecting the birth of Jesus Christ. Two of them affirm it mainly from the natural or maternal side, one of them from the supernatural and divine. It is easy to do this. Other writers had done like things before, putting in the claim of super- natural parentage and birth for the heroes of their narratives. But they do it at their peril. The prog- ress and the ending of such a life must answer to its beginning, and be congenerous with it. He who puts up such a porch as this imposes upon himself the task of making the building correspond to it. If he resorts to invention and imagination at the begin- ning, so he must in the progress and the ending, and 230 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. he is perfectly sure to overwhelm himself with confu- sion and disgrace. For a man can no more imagine and depict out of his own subjective state a style of life organically above it and divinely human than he could himself beget it or create it. To say that he could pre-determine and describe the hero of such a narrative, would be saying that he was himself the hero, or else that he occupied the same plane of existence with him. An elephant or a monkey could have just as easily imagined what was to be the style of human life before man existed on the earth. And so we find that before the birth of Jesus Christ all the stories of heroes with pretended superhuman birth and origin make their lives and characters more decidedly sub-human than those of common men. The very effort to make them more than hu- man, or more than natural, renders them all the more inhuman, unnatural, fantastic, and absurd. The commingling of the two streams of life, mater- nal and paternal, and the divine life within them both, is one of the inscrutable mysteries. The laws which govern it are as yet very imperfectly understood. The paternal life is wrapped within the maternal, the lat- ter — the maternal — prevailing through the years of infancy and on into childhood, and serving to weave the garments of flesh and blood and the exterior qualities of mind and soul ; all, in fine, that go to make up the external man. The maternal life is sometimes vigorous and dominating to such an ex- THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 23 1 tent that the paternal never appears externally, or, if at all, only feebly and dimly. It is held within the other, and held in abeyance. Unless, however, it is dominated in this way, it appears, though later than the other ; the paternal qualities coming forth witti greater and greater fullness, while the maternal re- tire before them, and sometimes disappear altogether, having served as the scaffolding of the intellectual and spiritual man. Hence we often find that while the resemblance to the mother at first is very great, in mind, feature, and disposition, it grows less and less with increasing years, while the features and the mind and passions of forefathers, sometimes for gen- erations back, break through and become envisaged in all their strength and brightness. Our paternal humanity is within our maternal, sometimes never invading the consciousness or shaping our exteriors till infancy and childhood have had their day, but nevertheless prevailing in the end, and descending through lines of ancestry for hundreds of years. Within our entire humanity, deeper than all its wrappages and layers, is the immanent Deity himself. But He never invades our consciousness as God. He never is within us as any part of our proper selves. Behind and within our voluntary powers He is the inspiring energy on which we ever draw, and out of which we breathe the breath of life ; but the limit of our self-consciousness is precisely the limit where humanity ends. When his life becomes our life it is 232 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. no longer Divine but human, and within the reach of our voluntary agency, to give back to Him in self- renouncing service, or pervert to selfish and ignoble ends. Supposing it possible, however, for a being to be bom into our earthly degree of existence with a finite maternal humanity on one side and the Divine Spirit on the other, with no finite fatherhood between, then it is conceivable that as the maternal humanity waned and the paternal dawned and brightened through the consciousness, it would image forth to us the Divine perfections on a loftier plane of existence than man and nature had ever done. Such a person would not speak and teach and act merely from a finite and fal- lible intelligence, but as the inmost Divine waxed and the outward and finite waned, he would speak and teach and act from the Divine reason itself. Such would not be a case of mere prophetic inspiration which is temporary and vanishing, but of Divine incarnation, in which the voice of the Divine Reason is the normal dictate of the soul. It would not be right to say that such a being is God, if you mean that God is limited to any outward symbolization, but it would be true that the finite maternal humanity, waning and disappearing, God would be revealed to us in a higher degree of life, and in more perfect and unclouded glory than inanimate nature or sinful men could ever reveal Him. And though what is called "the hypo- static union " is beyond our comprehension and anal* THE MYSTERY OF BIRTL'. 233 ysis, so also is any union of the infinite with finite natures. In man God is one degree nearer to us than in the animal, but in a more perfect union of natures He would be nearer still, and with a personality more openly brought to view. In a person more divinely human there would be nothing unnatural, but some- thing more than natural ; there would be nature transfigured and exalted. There would be nothing inhuman, but something more than human ; human- ity made perfect, and therefore the most clear and spotless mirror through which the divine attributes shine forth upon the world. We can conceive that there might be a necessity in the course of human advancement for such a revelation of the Divine Per- fections ; that sinful men, however developed, are no adequate representatives of God ; that there was an appropriate time for some knowledge of Him above the light of nature, above depraved human instincts, above legal codes and verbal declarations ; that these instincts themselves might have been yearning for- ward in expectation of a nearer divine epiphany, as when men watch the reddening streaks of twilight ; until God should appear as a new sunrise, to light up the dark annals of the earth with diviner glow. We are assuming nothing here. We are only de- scribing the rational possibilities and probabilities of the case. Men might find God partially in nature and in themselves, for He is immanent in both, but in such a divine epiphany He would be revealed in 234 "^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. a higher degree of life and illustrate both nature and man more perfectly from the divine side of all created things. By the immanence of God, in us, we might surely recognize such an advent of the Lord when it takes place. But we should not be likely to master its psychology, since we know it so little in the lower degrees of life, where infinite and finite interpenetrate in nature and in ourselves. We have three narratives which describe the birth of Jesus Christ, those of Matthew, Luke, and John. The first, describe the human, the last the divine side of this one event, from which a long and marvelous history was to take its rise. Matthew, or whoever wrote his preface, says He was born of Mary, a Jew- ish virgin, and was begotten of the Holy Ghost with- out any intervening human paternity ; and he shows the lineage of Joseph, afterwards her husband, in its descent through David from Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation. Mary's line, though not traced, runs into that of Joseph, as she belonged probably to the same tribe ; so that although Jesus had no human father, yet on the side of his maternal humanity he would inherit the proclivities of the Jewish race from Abraham downward. Luke also gives the birth of Christ without any human or finite fatherhood, trac- ing the line inversely from Joseph to Abraham and beyond him to Adam, the son of God. Both these genealogies were probably copied from public records. The names in the two genealogies do not coincide^ THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 235 and much criticism has been brought to bear upon the supposed discrepancy. But there is no discrep- ancy that can be discovered. These names do not stand for individuals merely, but many of them for houses or families through a long lineage, the head of the line being preserved where it runs into another line, several intervening links being left out. Jewish genealogies were recorded in this way. Thus Matthew says, ^ Joram begat Ozias. But Joram was not the father of Ozias, but his an- cestor removed four degrees from him, as any one will see by tracing the genealogy in the books of Kings and Chronicles. Three links are there re- corded which Matthew leaves out. All that can be said is, the missing Hnks of Luke's genealogy do not synchronize with the missing links of Matthew's. There might have been reasons which do not appear on the surface. The only reason for giving the gen- ealogy at all was to represent the qualities in its several degrees upward of the humanity inherited and impersonated in Jesus Christ. So, too, the ob- jection that Mary's genealogy, not Joseph's, ought rather to have been given, has no validity. Men, not women, represented tribes and lines of descent, and Joseph's name probably stood in the tribe to which Mary belonged and through which came all the an- cestral blood that coursed through her veins. Matthew's account, as we have said, has been chal- 1 Chap i. 8. 236 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, lenged as no part of the genuine first Gospel. But the genuineness of Luke's narrative is unquestioned. The most fastidious criticism does not attempt to mutilate the record. Still its story of the conception aild birth of Christ is called " legendary " by easy assumption on the part of that class of writers who arbitrarily sift the record till the residuum leaves only a man of natural birth and endowment. We show elsewhere, as we think, excellent reasons for regard- ing Luke's account as coming direct from the lips of Mary, or at most with only one intervening witness, that of John her adopted son. John's testimony is at one with that of Matthew and Luke, and only rounds and complements it. His record assuredly of the birth of Jesus interpenetrates their's from the divine side of things. They had described from the earthly side and from Mary's point of view, the ma- ternal humanity with all its inheritance of Jewish proclivities, and of human proclivities from Adam down. John supplements them by saying that the Word, which was eV a.pK?^ with God, and in its first principle divine, descending into this world to sub- due and save it, took this humanity for its cloth- ing and was the soul of its soul and the life of its life. Legendary ! A legend is a cumulative accretion ot hearsays around a nucleus of common fact, clothing It in the garb of fable ; and the common fact here was the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of Joseph and THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 237 Mary. Legendary! the story might appear so, if you isolate it and make it stand alone. But why do you isolate it ? Read on, and at the farther end of the biography we come to the death of this person quite as exceptional as his birth. The flesh thus as- sumed as the investiture of a divine life did not become a corpse, like the bodies of other men to see corruption in the grave. It was extruded by a living process, through the abounding energy within, when the divine man it had served ascended to his place on high. If you make his ingress into this world as here given legendary, why not reduce his egress from it into the same category } If you shut the divine portal through which He came in, why not also the divine portal through which He went out } Then just sit down and scan the facts that lie between and see what can be made of them. The life between constantly forecasts just that exit from this world ; it courses its way on planes of being far above those on which we walk, and subsumes just such a birth and death. You must run the legendary theory through that also, till all the history is disorganized and tumbles into chaos. And even then you have only just begun. This life of Christ on earth was preliminary and preparatory to a deeper and broader life in humanity, coursing through the history of eighteen hundred years. The record goes on to say that he appeared after his resurrection as the guar- dian of those communions called churches, and that 238 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. the Holy Ghost through him "fell on them" and gave them their conquering power. The Christian Church ever since, conscious of his presence and in working divine energy, has originated, led on, and inspired all the advanced civilizations of the world, and is lead- ing them still. Legendary ! Why not make all the after-history legendary too, and the world's progress starting from fiction and always proceeding under it ! This Ufe, dating from that birth at Bethlehem, has continued ever since, and it spans our lowly history and floods it with more than rainbow glories, one foot of its celestial arc resting at the manger where Mary lay, and the other on in the future, for aught we can tell at the end of time. Legendary ! Is it necessary to abstract such a birth from its relations and reduce it to the conditions of our own baby- hood ? 1 1 See the Appendix B, on the Birth of Christ. CHAPTER IV. NAZARETH. WE have only one chapter in the childhood of Jesus, and that is Nazareth. This, however, is an exceedingly important one, and better probably than any accounts which his mother or his teachers would have given us of his education. The only written statement which we have respecting his child- hood is given by Luke, and seems to have come from Mary his mother, perhaps through John who became her foster-son. It is exceedingly general ; and after relating the journey to Jerusalem and his staying behind to converse with the doctors of the law, we are told that He returned to Nazareth, was subject to Joseph and Mary, and that while he grew in wisdom and stature he grew also in those divine affections which won the favor of God and man. That Mary had much more to relate respecting the childhood of Jesus is an unavoidable inference from our knowledge of the instincts of maternal love ; that the evangelists have treated it with a most severe reticence shows how providentially they were guided. They might have gratified our cu- riosity ; but it is not likely the childhood of Jesus 240 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. differed greatly from that of other children ; and probably Luke tells us about all that is to be said when he implies this increasing grace of person and behavior with the increasing wisdom that shone through it. But all about Nazareth lay the open book which He read, and it lies there yet. Paul went up from Tar- sus to Jerusalem and studied Jewish lore at the feet of Gamaliel, in the most famous theological school of his times ; and his writings bristle all through with Jewish terminologies. Jesus was soon to have the thick-coming thoughts, for which no human school could furnish adequate language, but only the types and images in the infinite treasuries of nature. Nazareth, though a despised country town, was of all places the most propitious for an education of this kind. It hes in a small basin of northern Palestine imbosomed in hills. The basin extends about a mile from west to east, and about half as far at its greatest width from north to south, narrowing toward the east into a deep ravine, giving the basin the shape of a pear with a long stem. This ravine leads out into the noble plain of Esdraelon, which spreads out so far below that a transparent mantle of sky-blue is resting upon it. The hill at the west end of the basin rises abrupt and precipitous ; along the north- ern side the ridge is depressed somewhat, and along the south and east it sinks still lower. The town Itself lies at the western extremity of this basin, NAZARETH. 24 1 cowering under the bluffs or clinging to their feet and sides. It has three thousand inhabitants, about the same number probably as in the days of Joseph and Mary, presenting a similar external appearance of low houses with flat roofs, looking like cubes of stone. As you enter the basin through the narrow opening on the east and come into the town, you are greeted at this day with a more friendly welcome even from the Jewish population than is usual in Pal- estine. A fountain, whose waters percolate through the veins of the western hills, is conducted into one of the streets of the village, and falls into a stone reservoir. Over the fountain itself stands now a Christian church consecrated to the Virgin, because monkish legends will have it that her house was near by. With more probability and with tolerable cer- tainty, they might say that here she was wont to come, with the other women of the city, bearing their pitchers on their heads. You would see at this day a crowd of women around the reservoir each waiting for her turn, and you would notice among them a peculiar native beauty after the Syrian type, and a peculiar gracefulness and friendliness of manners, partly owing to the buoyant health they breathe in among the mountains. But as you ascend " the brow of the hill whereon their city is built," and which in one place breaks off in a perpendicular wall forty or fifty feet in height ; as you gain the summit of the ridge that curves 16 242 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. round it on the west like a protecting arm, a most enchanting panorama is unrolled suddenly to your view, every fold in it being a rich historic page. On the west stretches the long line of Carmel, beginning far away south towards Samaria, but extending north- westward to where he seems to plunge suddenly into the sea. This ridge is not bald like some of the mountains of Judaea, but crowned with forest, over whose depressions the Mediterranean gleams here and there in silver curves. All the history of Elijah, the Tishbite, is given back to your memory as you gaze, up to the time when he disappeared in his chariot of fire. Look northward and the scene va- ries. Near by stretches one of the most beautiful plains of northern Palestine, watered by a stream which divides it like a glittering thread on its way to the Kishon, where Elijah slew the false prophets. Beyond this plain northward the ridges rise one be- yond another like ascending stairs, each taking on a deeper tinge of blue. The mountains of Safed, twenty miles away, overtop all between, and there, lifted up into the sky, you see the place itself, " a city set upon a hill." But Safed is backed by still higher ridges, and they roll in ascending billows sixty miles away up to Mount Hermon himself, who looks down on the whole in cold and scornful majesty from under his crown of snow. If you turn towards the east and southeast, another plain, the magnificent plain of Esdraelon, spreads out NAZARETH. 243 its long level floors of green, under their mantle of sky-color, sprinkled more sparsely with signs of pop- ulation, with valleys winding like dissolving views among the hills. Out of this plain rises Tabor, rounded like a hemisphere, little Hermon, and Gil- boa, where " the shield of Saul was vilely cast away ; " and through a depression north of Tabor you look into the valley of the Jordan, and over the high plains away beyond to the hills of Peraea which shade off into the Orient. South towards Jerusalem rises a spur of the ridge of Carmel, and over it loom up Ebal and Gerizim, from which the curses and the blessings answered to each other. Nearer by, and forming the heart of Palestine, spreads out the vast plain of Esdraelon with its gentle undulations ; fields covered over with corn, interminable flocks and herds ranging in luxuriant pastures ; — the granary of the surrounding country, rich in natural produc- tions and voluptuous beauty ; rich, too, in historic memories, as the scene over which the most decisive battles had rolled back and forth. Such is the hori- zon of Nazareth, more crowded with life and in- dustry when Joseph and Mary lived there, but whose paradisical enchantments have not yet faded out. To know all its loveliness and magnificence you should see it in the morning as the sky reddens beyond the hills of Peraea, till the sun crimsons the snows of Hermon and then lights up peak after peak below him as with a torch ; or you should see it at even^ 244 "^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. tide, as the sun drops behind Carmel and dissolves in the sea, turning Kishon and its affluents into burn- ing threads, turning the vapors of the Mediterranean into new " chariots of fire and horses of fire " for other ascending EHjahs, and thence diffusing over the broad panorama of the GaUlean hills and valleys a purpling softness like the more tender and brooding mercy of the Lord. And why do we open these beautiful pages ? Be- cause it is certain they were the study of Jesus for thirty years ; because the infinite Word that was al- ready dawning through his higher consciousness was here to find its language. This vast treasury of type and imagery was to be drawn up into discourse and parable, as the embodiment of truths for which no language of books could furnish an appropriate set- ting. Not only nature in all her lights and shadows, but human life in all its busy ongoings, was out- spread within the horizon of Nazareth. The keepers of vineyards pruning their vines ; the shepherds leading their flocks a-field ; the husbandmen sowing their grain ; the plains over which the breezes as they swept made waves in the fields of wheat and tare ; the reapers at their work over the vast surfaces of P^sdraelon and El Battauf; the prognostics of storm coming up from the sea, or of fair weather when the sky at evening reddens over the ridges of Carmel ; the Light of the World coming out of the east to enlighten every man ; — all these and much NAZARETH. 245 more were daily in sight over that " brow of the hill " whereon the city of Nazareth was built. Two processes were going on in preparing the Christ for his work, — one of Spirit and one of sense. Higher truth than men had received or known was coming down through the heaven of his mind ; better and more universal types were drawn up from earth through the senses to meet it and body it forth. The Son of God was also the son of Mary ; the Word was made flesh to find a dwelling-place in the midst of men.i 1 Renan's description of the scenery of Palestine is picturesque, though distinctness of feature is often sacrificed for brilliancy. Rob- inson is both picturesque and exact as line and compass. After an excellent description of the horizon of Nazareth he thus indicates the associations of the place, looking from the plateau above the town : " Seating myself in the shade of the Wely, I remained for some hours upon this spot, lost in the contemplation of the wide prospect, and of the events connected with the scenes around. In the village be- low the Saviour of the world had passed his childhood ; and although we have few particulars of his life during those early years, yet there are certain features of nature that meet our eyes now, just as they once met his. He must often have visited the fountain near which we had pitched our tent ; his feet must frequently have wandered over the adjacent hills, and his eyes doubtless gazed upon the splendid prospect from this very spot. Here the Prince of Peace looked down upon the great plain, where the din of battles so often had rolled, and the garments of the warrior been dyed in blood ; and He looked out, too, upon that sea over which the swift ships were to bear the tidings of his salvation to nations and to continents then unknown. How has the moral aspect of things been changed ! Battles and blood- shed have indeed not ceased to desolate this unhappy country, md 246 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, gross darkness now covers the people ; but from this region a light went forth which has enlightened the world and unveiled new climes ; and now the rays of that light begin to be reflected back from dis- tant isles and continents, to illuminate anew the darkened land, where it first sprung up." — Researches^ vol. iii. pp. 190, 191. CHAPTER V. THE FORERUNNER. THERE was nothing in the established ceremo- nies of the Jewish national religion which was worthy of the name of preaching. That religion was administered mainly in the temple, the synagogues, and the theological schools. The synagogues were the parochial churches. They existed in every town in Judaea. The most elevated sites which could be ob- tained were chosen for them, and it violated all sense of Jewish propriety and sacredness to see any other building overlook the synagogue. Ten men were considered a sufficient but indispensable number to organize a synagogue, which word, like our word " church " came at length to signify either the eccle- siastical organism, or the building in which they as- sembled for worship. In any principal town or large city these buildings were multiplied indefinitely, all of them constructed after the same pattern. We may form some idea of their number when we consider that there were twelve in Tiberias ; and since the erecting of syna- gogues was a mark of piety and passport to heaven, we need not be surprised that there were no fewei 248 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, than four hundred and sixty in Jerusalem alone. They were long rectangular structures, and always consisted of two parts. The icel, or sanctuary, by way of eminence, was in the most westerly part, cor- responding to the most holy place in the temple, and in it was placed the ark or chest which contained the Book of the Law and the Sections of the Prophets. The other part was the body of the church, where the congregation assembled. At one extremity of this department was an elevated platform, on which sat the officers of the synagogue, facing the congregation, and on which was a desk or pulpit for the readers and the minister. The congregation sat facing the officers. They did not sit promiscuously, but the men were separated from the women by a screen which divided the body of the church lengthwise as far as the elevated platform. The chief officers of the synagogue were three rulers, the readers, and the minister. The rulers had a general care and direction, told the readers when to begin and the people when to say amen. The readers were seven in number, and took turns in reading the lesson of the day. Any one in the congregation, however, could be called to this ser- vice. How important and laborious it was may be judged from the fact that the Law and the Prophets, comprising the bulk of our Old Testament Canon, were required to be read through once a year in the public ritual, and for this purpose were divided into THE FORERUNNER. 249 fifty-two portions, one of which must be despatched every Sabbath-day. It must be read in the original Hebrew, and therefore there must be a translator to render it verse by verse into the language of the peo- ple, which in our Saviour's day was the Syro-Chal- dee. Besides this, several prayers must be recited. If we may credit Buxtorff, there were not less than eighteen belonging to the regular service, which fact gives us a vivid apprehension of our Saviour's words denouncing the greater damnation against men who for show make long prayers. After the prayers came the repetition of their phylacteries, which was done mentally and individually, out of regard for the law of God and as a guard against evil thoughts and evil spirits. These were texts of Scripture attached to their garm^ents and worn generally near the heart. The synagogues were opened not on the Sabbath alone but on two other days during the week, which were regarded as a kind of fast-days, but the same lesson which was droned on these week-days was repeated on the Sabbath following for the benefit of the laboring class who could only attend during holy time. The superlative merits of the Pharisee who fasted twice a week, can hence be estimated. He despatched one fifty-second part of the Law and the Prophets three times during every seven days, to say nothing of his phylacteries and the eighteen prayers which swelled still further the amount of his meritorious works. The readers, who were selected 250 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. for their devotion or intelligence, were at liberty to throw in running commentaries of their own, though the stated duty of expounding the Scrip- ture devolved upon the minister, otherwise called the Angel of the Synagogue. This was done after the readers had got through, and with how much unction and enlargement may be judged from the fact that he generally spoke sitting in his seat. What torpor and spiritual death must at length overtake a people buried under such a load of ritual- ism as this ! We may well imagine how the startling news broke in upon the everlasting droning of the synagogue, when a man suddenly appeared of such fiery eloquence that he shook the whole valley of the Jordan from one mountain range to the other. Such was John the Baptist. The memorials of him, though few, bring him before us with great distinctness. The account given of him by Josephus, harmonizes remarkably with all that is said of him in the New Testament. His mother and the mother of Jesus were cousins-german, and John must have known something of his great kinsman by personal acquaint- ance ; but they did not reside near each other, and there is no reason for supposing that his inspiration came from that intercourse. His education was mainly in the desert. That is to say, like the Essenes, he withdrew in disgust from the hollow ritualism of the synagogues and the pedantry which loaded down the theological schools, and away in the THE FORERUNNER. 25 1 silent places of contemplation, the power of God came upon him in over-measure, and clothed him as with a robe of flame. He must have known the Es- senes, as we said, for they were close by him on both sides of the Dead Sea, with the same doctrines of righteousness, the same disgust of Jewish hypocrisy, and the same baptism by immersion symbolizing re- pentance and newness of Hfe. But John, in spirit and method, differed vastly from the Essenes, and did not belong to them. They were quietists aiming only to keep their own garments white, and to get to heaven by a secret way. John was aggressive, as the fire on a prairie swept by a mighty wind. Up and down the valley of the Jordan, where the desert skirted the line of cities and towns, he went in the power of the Lord, and poured his denunciations against hypocrisy and injustice. He was clothed in the coarse garb of the old prophets, with a leathern girdle about his loins. He lived in the very haunts where Elijah had lived, and ate the food of the desert. No greater man, said our Saviour, had been born of woman, and though the last of a long illustrious line of prophets, their moral power and grandeur culmi- nated in him. The Jews of his day had seen and heard nothing like him. Of course it was not long before the sleepy synagogues waked up and emptied themselves into the desert. They came at first, doubt- less out of curiosity, to see a seven-days' wonder, but the truth shivered through them like the lightning, 252 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, and converts were multiplied. People came not only from Judaea, but from remote Galilee. " What shall we do ? " said they, searched by the preacher's words. ** Let him who has two tunics give one to him who has none, and let him who has food, do likewise," was the answer, rebuking the prevailing covetousness and rapacity. It was a time of war between Herod and Aretas, King of Arabia, and soldiers were quartered in the land. These, too, came under the strokes of the preacher, and asked, " What shall we do } " " Be satisfied with your wages, and stop plundering the people." Tax-gatherers came, a hated and pestilent class of men, to whom some patrician in his palace at Rome committed the farming of the revenue, with unlimited license to peel the people of his province. " And what are we to do } " " Exact nothing but what is your due." Jerusalem itself was shaken. The travelled road through Jericho from the capital was choked with a living stream emptying itself into the desert. John himself seems to have been sur- prised to see them. " Have you come, too, you brood of vipers, out of your serpent's nest } Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance. Boast not of your de- scent from Abraham, for I declare to you that God out of these stones could make better children of Abraham than ye are." His fiery rebukes, however, not only smote the heart, but melted it. He made disciples, and founded a school, which survived long after his death. He impressed his great and earnest THE FORERUNNER. 253 mind upon the mind of his nation, and the whole people cherished his fame as theirs. He was more than prophet ; as we shall see presently, he had the gift of seership beside. He was one of those great minds like the Grecian Demosthenes, in which the national life gathered intensity for a last effort, and flamed up with expiring brilliancy. Coming at the approach of a great crisis, and elevated far above the plodding interests of the hour, his ear heard distinctly the steps of the coming doom. Within the wider horizon which he swept with his eye, a great woe was in sight, and hourly drawing nearer. Hence his " cry in the wilderness " to repentance, as an escape from the wrath to come. But he belonged to the old dis- pensation and not the new. He was Hebrew through every fibre of his being. His call was to repentance, to the unchangeable morahty, to the eternal justice which had been set aside for a pompous ecclesiasti- cism that filled itself with inhumanity and self-con- ceit, as a sponge imbibes water. But repentance and reformation were all he could preach. That opening of the heavens through which the Spirit was to come for a new creation and a new consciousness of God in human nature, was not given to him, and he knew it. But he knew that this, too, must come, and he watched for its prognostics in the faith that he was sent to prepaie the way. CHAPTER VI. THE HOMES OF JESUS. np^HE idea we get of Jesus from a cursory and •*" superficial reading of the Evangelists, of a homeless wanderer, with no place of permanent abode, roaming about Palestine with twelve men, liv- ing by miracle, or claiming the hospitality of stran- gers, soon melts away on a more careful study of the records. He had his abiding-places, whence he went forth on his mission, and into whose shadows he ever returned either from the glare of notoriety, from the heat and burden of the day, or from the threats and persecutions of those who sought his life. Indeed, much of his time was passed in this retirement in preparation for his public work, which seems to be the reason of a common mistake, — that this work was all crowded into the last two or three years of his life. The homes of Jesus were three. These are very distinctly traced. It is necessary always to keep them in mind if we would contemplate his life in its unity, and understand the coherence with which the Evangelists have described it. It is from want of attention to this subject that some writers talk of THE HOMES OF JESUS. 2$$ discrepancies, especially between John and the syn- optics, where they only interlock each other in a con- sistent whole. The home of his childhood and earUest manhood we have already described. That Joseph and Mary belonged neither to the highest nor the lowest rank, but to the robust and healthful middle class of Jewish society, is abundantly evident. There was a school attached to the synagogue, in which Jewish children were taught to read and write, and also instructed in the canonical writings of the Old Testament. Jesus must have been educated in this school. That he at- tended any higher one, is very improbable ; indeed, it is implied in the narratives, that he did not. " Hav- ing never learned," means that he never had been a scholar in those higher schools of the Rabbins, where he would only have imbibed the intolerable pedantry embodied in the " Talmud " at a later day. The law and the prophets which he learned to read at the synagogue, and the great book of nature spread out gloriously from the plateau just above, must have been the sources of the lore which he acquired at his home in Nazareth. There was another home which he occupied after- ward, and during a part of his public ministry. It was at Capernaum, on the northwestern shore of the lake of Galilee, some seventeen miles from Nazareth. The narrative warrants the inference that acquaint- ances and kinsfolk of his mother's family resided 256 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. there, as they went thither on a temporary visit be- fore a final removal of residence.^ It is certain that a married sister of his mother resided in Galilee, the wife of Alphaeus, otherwise called Cleopas, two of whose sons, Jude and James the less, afterwards were numbered among the chosen twelve. She might have resided at Capernaum or its neighborhood, as she is found afterward associated with women who belonged there. The Sea of Galilee has been called the Geneva of Palestine, on account of the picturesque beauty and sublimity of its scenery. It is about sixteen miles in length, and half as many in breadth, deep set within a cordon of lofty hills. Through these hills there are two openings, one on the north for the ingress of the waters of the Jordan, another on the south for their egress. They make a current through the middle of the lake, but elsewhere lie in their deep basin, still as glass, and giving back as truly the skies above them and the scenery around, except when some sudden gust finds its way over the hills, which is very sel- dom. The hills are now brown and stripped of for- est ; but if we may trust Josephus, this region, in the times of our Saviour, was so luxuriant, that nature seemed to work here a perpetual miracle. Fruits which required a hot climate, and others which re- quired a cold one, grew and flourished side by side. " One may call it," he says, " the ambition of Nature, 1 John ii. 12. THE HOMES OF JESUS. 2 $7 where it forces those plants that are naturally ene- mies to each other, to agree together." ^ On the west- ern side of the lake the hills trend away from the shores, and along its margin stood five cities, or towns, whose names have become immortal. Near the head of the lake stood Bethsaida and Capernaum, which had become noted stations for fisheries ; far- ther south, probably, were Chorazin and Magdala, and farther still, Tiberias, built by Herod the Te- trarch, the murderer of John the Baptist, and often occupied by him as one of his capitals. Along the shores of this peaceful lake, Jesus went forth from his home in Capernaum, on his heavenly errands. Here he found most of his twelve disci- ples. Here he wrought those wonderful cures which blazoned his name through the country, so that the crowds flocked about him whenever he appeared abroad. Galilee contained a mixed population, not Jews only, but people of heathen religions and of no religion, Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians, and though more ignorant and boorish than the pure orthodox of Judaea, they had much less of the flint of Jewish big- otry and pride. Almost the whole narrative of the synoptics is taken up with the work of Christ in Gal- ilee, as it radiated from his home in Capernaum. There were personal reasons for this, as we shall see. Matthew and Peter, who were eye and ear wit- nesses of what they relate, resided at Capernaum, 1 Wars, iii, x. 8. 17 258 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. and their own work as missionaries was mainly in Galilee. But there was another locality which was also one of the homes of Jesus. It was such before he went to Capernaum. To understand this portion of our Saviour's life, we must divest ourselves at once of a good share of our occidental notions about re- ligious culture. We are the least given to contem- plation, solitude, and introversion, of any people on the face of the earth. We rush into crowds, hold meetings, din each other with sermons and exhorta- tions, which sermons and exhortations are generally the common places of the sect we belong to ; and the shallow draughts from each other's well-nigh empty pitchers, we call getting religion. It was not so in the East. They drew from deeper wells. All but the book-men and the pedants who only reproduced each other in geometrical progression till the tra- ditions were too heavy to bear, drew their deepest draughts from the springs of divine grace in the meditative soul. Long before Jesus appeared, what was best in re- ligion, what was highest and purest in morality, was withdrawn from public view. The Essenes, if we may credit Josephus and Philo, — the former of whom dwelt among them three years to learn of their doc- trine and manners, — preserved about the only cultus which existed in the East, purified from idolatry, su- perstition, and hypocrisy. Near the western shores THE HOMES OF JESUS, 259 of the Dead Sea, a community of these people ex- isted in seclusion, disgusted with the knavery and petrified selfishness which lurked under all the forms of the popular religion, and there they maintained a lofty devotion, a pure doctrine of God, immortality, and retribution, with an unselfish morality and un- corrupted manners. They had all things in common. They had ramified into other communions of like faith which existed in the deserts and sometimes in the cities and towns, receiving the books of Moses, which they interpreted allegorically, never going up to the Jewish festivals, nor appearing in the tem- ple, but "gazing on the bright countenance of Truth," in their own quiet contemplations. They dwelt on the love of God, denounced every kind of dishonesty, and insisted on justice, piety, and neighborly love. Baptism by immersion was a common practice among them, not only for keeping the body chaste and wholesome, but as the symbol of a clean heart. Their constancy was brought to the severest trial ; for Herod put them to cruel tortures, which they would not only meet with serenity, but with a smile of triumph over pain and death, radiant with the hope of immortality. There is no evidence that either Jesus or John the Baptist ever visited these people, but there is abun- dant evidence that both of them combined the rites, the morality, and some of the doctrine of the Essenes with their own. John must have known of them, for 26o THE FOURTH GOSPEL. he preached and baptized in their immediate neigh- borhood, where he thundered forth their maxims of truth and justice. Admitting that Luke's Gospel and Matthew's pref- ace give us the true account respecting the concep- tion and birth of Jesus, it must be obvious that there were twofold reasons for his withdrawment betimes from the disturbances of outward things. The Word that was to be given him was to come neither from human teachers nor from the external world. It was to come down through the opening heaven of his own mind as soon as the sensuous nature which he re- ceived through the maternal humanity had drawn up from earthly things the types and images which were to serve as the prints and copies of the heavenly. Necessity was, therefore, laid upon him by the con- stitution of his being, to pass away from the outward till the heavenly realities filled and possessed his consciousness. The whole nights spent in prayer, away from his disciples and on the lonely mountain heights, must not be understood as time occupied in verbal petitions to God. We shall see presently that nothing of the kind is signified. The great Ghor, or valley of the Jordan, extends from the lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, through some seventy miles. Throughout it presents the same phenomena. Two ranges of hills and bluffs bound it on either side, — that on the west skirting Galilee, Samaria, and a part of Judaea ; that on the THE HOMES OF JESUS. 26 1 east skirting the land of Peraea, the country beyond the Jordan. From the summit of one of these ranges you look across to the other. Sometimes they ap- proach each other to within five miles, sometimes they trend away to eight or ten. They are rocky and precipitous, and rise over two thousand feet above the bed of the river. This great valley is cut by the Jordan unequally. As it issues from the lake of Galilee it leaves most of the valley on the east, but before entering the Dead Sea it leaves two thirds of it on the side of Palestine, creeping nearer the Peraean hills. The great valley itself is composed of two plains, an upper and a lower one. The lower one is a mile in width, making the bed of the river itself, filled to the outer edge when the river is swollen, but offering quite a margin when, in times of drought, the river shrinks within its channel. This margin of the lower plane, therefore, being alternately wet and dry, is covered with reeds and bushes, and sometimes with tall trees, which harbor wild beasts of prey. Here lurked the lion who "came up at the swelling of Jordan" from his lair. The upper plain, extending from this reedy margin to the bluffs, is a barren waste of marl and ashy soil, presenting a scene of awful desolation. It is from two to four miles in breadth on either side. Sometimes, where the upper plane »,erminates with the bluffs, springs of water percolate through the rocks, making little oases, as is the case 262 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. Opposite Jericho. Sometimes the bluffs are rent by steep gorges which are the beds of rapid rivers in wet seasons, and in dry become cavernous and shaggy ravines. What we have now described was known as the Desert or the Wilderness. The valley " on this side Jordan" from Samaria to the Dead Sea was "the Wilderness of Judaea," some twelve miles in length. As soon as you enter these profound solitudes you leave man behind, and the blandishments of his hypocrisy and the noise of his battles are heard no more. The exceptions to this solitude are only found where springs and rivulets trickle through the moun- tains and make oases at their base. Most fa- mous among these are " The Fountains of Jericho." Jericho is gone, and only dirty Arab hovels now occupy its site. But the fountains are still there ; and what would be an oasis is there if it did not run to bushes and sedge. But here in our Saviour's day rose the goodly city itself, called sometimes the City of Palms. It stood within the great valley, but hugged the base of the mountain, commanding a fertile plain covered with groves and gardens which the fountains had rescued from the desert. Through a gorge of the mountain lay the road to Jerusalem twenty miles off, leading around splintered rocks and through gloomy and shaggy defiles, the haunt of thieves and robbers. Jericho was a city of priests and Levites, THE HOMES OF JESUS. 263 it being a favorite resort of the officials at Jerusalem when not on duty in the service of the temple. Passing through this road from Jerusalem and en- tering the desert through Jericho, the traveller, in our Saviour's time, would soon leave the palm groves and gardens behind. As he travels towards the Jordan he passes over five miles of desert and comes to a ferry, by which the Jordan must be crossed. If he is in quest of a solitude still more profound, or an isolation from Jewish priestcraft still more perfect, he will cross over by this ferry into Peraea beyond the Jordan. There is no village on the opposite side, but only a ferry-house, with perhaps a few buildings. This is the place anciently called Bethabara, which means simply the ford, or place of passage, but which seems afterwards to have taken the name of Bethany-over- the-Jordan. Coming hither, the traveller has put both the Jordan and the wilderness of Judaea between him- self and the busy Jewish world. But he has only come into a remoter solitude and into wilderness still. It is desert for two miles between the Jordan and the mountains of Peraea and all the way up and down the river. Opposite are the hills from whose summit the promised land broke on the rapt vision of Moses, and this Bethabara is the identical ford which his knights of the Ram's-horn crossed over to take Jericho. And in this vicinity was one of the dwelling-places of Jesus for some time before he went to Capernaum, 264 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. and to ^\^hich he resorted again and again, both for the opening of the inner heavens and for escape from the snares of men.^ He did not merely come hither to John's baptism ; he was dwelling here while that great preacher was declaring his message. He came hither from Judaea when tired of Jewish bigotry and hypocrisy. He made this his abiding-place till re- plenished anew from the Divine armory, when he went forth for fresh strokes on the flint of Jewish malice and hate. Up to the time of John's arrest and imprisonment, when he left for Galilee, this was his most frequent place of retirement and abode, and this was his starting-place for new journeys into Judaea, His ministry began at Jerusalem agreeably to the theory of Scripture that salvation should come out of the heart of Judaism and thence extend over the world. After John's arrest, and his ministry had changed its circuit for Galilee, still he came hither to his retreat in the valley of the Jordan, as if its springs 1 See John i. 38, 39 ; x. 40 ; xi. 54. Compare Matt. xix. 19 ; Mark X. I, 46. In the passage (Matt. iv. 13) where Jesus is said to dwell in Capernaum, we read, Kar^Kr^a-eu, — he housed there. But where he is said to dweU in the desert we have (John i. 39), ytieVet, — he remained there, suggesting a less fixed abode, perhaps in movable tents. The town called Ephraim, near the desert where Jesus went and dwelt (5t€Tp