LIBRARY i F CONGRESS. 
 Shelf X-2.- 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
JESUS 
 
 HIS OPINIONS AND CHARACTER 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES 
 
 A LAYMAN 
 
 %^ Sc*W SoJUU* 
 
 'Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another ? " — Matt, xi., 3 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 GEO. H. ELLIS, r 4 i FRANKLIN STREET 
 
 1883 
 

 Copyright, 1883, 
 By GEORGE H. ELLIS. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SOURCES OF EVIDENCE, 1 1-43. 
 
 Brief risumioi what is known of the life of Jesus, 11, 12. He did 
 not write, nor authorize the writing of his life, or of his doctrine, 12. Few 
 traces of the human career or character of Jesus in the Pauline and other 
 canonical Epistles, 13, 14; in the "Acts of the Apostles," 15, 16. Distinct 
 and irreconcilable traditions of Jesus in the first three and in the fourth 
 Gospels, 16. Story of Jesus as told in the latter, 17-22. Story of Jesus as 
 told by Matthew, 23-28. These narratives but questionable data of history ; 
 intrinsic improbability of the events told in them, and their inconsistency 
 with other events in the same narratives, 29. Hence an unreasonable srep- 
 ticsm as to the existence of Jesus, 29. Influence of Christianity upon 
 civilization a personal influence, and implies a Christ, 30. Slight impression 
 of deeds and sayings of Jesus on the mind of Paul, 30. Slight mention of 
 him by Josephus, 30. What the historic Gospels, the apostles, and primi- 
 tive disciples concur in imputing to Jesus probably formed a part of his 
 faith and philosophy, 31. Reasons why the Fourth Gospel cannot be con- 
 sidered historical, 32. Question of miracles an embarrassment, rather than 
 an assistance to modern faith, 33. Substantial variances between the First 
 and the Fourth Gospels, 34.. "Jesus gained more influence by intellectual 
 than by magical powers, 35. Matthew Arnold's adhesion to the Fourth 
 Gospel considered, 36-38. Few points of agreement, many points of dis- 
 agreement, between Fourth and Synoptic Gospels, 38. Arrest and condem- 
 nation of Jesus as told in Fourth Gospel incredible, 3S-40. Mainly 
 concurrent statements of Synoptic Gospels concerning the same natural 
 and probable, 41, 42. The general historic credibility of the Synoptic Gos- 
 pels assumed, 43. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS, 44-69. 
 
 Ideas and character of Jesus must be considered in their relation to his 
 dominant idea, 44. His dominant idea, the kingdom of heaven, 45. Promi- 
 nence of this idea in his preaching, 45. His ethical precepts relate to it, 45. 
 The kingdom of heaven at hand the sole message of his sent-out disciples, 
 47. Significance of his title of Son of Man, 47, 48. Kingdom of heaven the 
 chief theme of the parables, 50. Disclosures in the conversation at Cassarea- 
 Philippi, 51. Symbolic character of the procession of palms, 52, 53. Lit- 
 eral exposition of the doctrine of the kingdom of heaven in Matthew xxiv., 
 
ii CONTENTS 
 
 xxv., 54-56. Kingdom of heaven most prominent in the discourse of Jesus, 
 56, 57. The idea not wholly original with him, 57. The expectation of 
 the people of his time with reference to it, 57, 58. Derived from the 
 national prophecies, 58. Passages in the law and in the temple songs con- 
 sidered Messianic, 5S, 59. Restored kingdom and power of Israel mentioned 
 by Isaiah, 59. By Jeremiah, 59. By Ezekiel and other prophets, 60. The 
 promised era of peace was the peace of conquest — of the subjection and 
 punishment of enemies, 61-63. Real nature of the prophetic writings 
 political and didactic, and relating to the exigencies of the times, 63-65. 
 Not predictions of future events, 66. The prophetic king to come not 
 immortal, 67. The Jews of the time of Jesus believed the prophecies to be 
 predictions of a restored monarchy, and of a domination by their nation of 
 other people, 67, 6S. How far Jesus shared the belief, 6S, 69. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS, CONTINUED, 7I-96. 
 
 Didactic method of Jesus, 71. His Messianic character gradually and 
 diffidently assumed, 71. The conquering and the suffering Messiah of the 
 prophets, 72. Jesus considered th it there were not two Messiahs, but two 
 comings of one Messiah, 72. Popular idea an empire of Israel ; Jesus' idea 
 an empire of the elect, 73-75. The popular expectation was of material 
 prosperity, that of Jesus of spiritual, 76. The retribution in the dispensa- 
 tion of Jesus was more complete than in the prophetic. The former had 
 no mercy for enemies who submitted, 76, 77. The prophetic kingdom a 
 kingdom of the priesthood and of the permanence of the Mosaic laws, that 
 of Jesus ignored the priesthood and the ecclesiastical laws, 77. Why Jesus 
 believed the kingdom of heaven at hand, 78. Are the prophecies of Jesus 
 capable of a purely spiritual interpretation ? 79-81. The sense in which his 
 first followers believed those prophecies, 82. The kingdom of heaven in the 
 writings of Paul, 82-86. Paul's peculiar theory of the resurrection, 86. 
 The kingdom of heaven in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 88. In the Epistle 
 of James, 88, 89. Of Peter, 89, 90. Of John, 90, 91. Fuller details of 
 the kingdom of heaven in the Apocalypse, 91-93. Wherein it differed 
 from the original tradition, 93, 94. Disappointment of the Christian ex- 
 pectation, 95. Recapitulation of the argument that the kingdom of heaven 
 was the dominant idea of Jesus, 95, 96. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS, 97-126. 
 
 Indicated generally in his dominant idea, 97. He repressed the struggle 
 for life, 98. Radical character of his reforms, 99. His hostility to existing 
 governments, 100. His national prejudices not strong, 100, 101. Did not 
 sympathize with popular aspirations for independence, 102. His ideas of 
 poverty and wealth, 103; as disclosed in his precepts and parables, 104- 
 106. Not mere sentiments, 106. He practised his own principles, 107. 
 He required their practice from his followers, 10S. The wealthy young man, 
 109. His antipathy to the rich reappears in the Epistle of James, 109. Sen- 
 timent of justice not strong in Jesus, no. Real import of parable of Dives 
 and Lazarus, 112, 113. Worldly occupations of men seemed impious to 
 Jesus, 114. His ideas of property quite consistent with and explicable by 
 
CONTENTS 111 
 
 his dominant idea, 115-118. Necessity of returning to secular pursuits and 
 cares after defeat of expectation of the end of the world, 117. Paul the 
 first to abate the rigor of the political ideas of Jesus, 118. Communistic 
 character of the first Christian society, 120. The Church at Jerusalem 
 maintained by subsidies from heathen converts, 121. Traces of the early 
 communism surviving in monastic establishments and the minor sects, 122. 
 Reversed attitude of the modern Church, 123. Effect of poverty and wealth 
 upon personal character considered, 123-125. Antagonism betwixt ideas of 
 Jesus and those of his own race, 126. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS, I27-160. 
 
 Absence of a systematized statement of his ethical ideas, 127. His 
 generalizations sometimes inconsequential and contradictory, 128. Instances 
 given, 128-130. Two aspects of divine beneficence, 131, 132. Difficulty of 
 reconciling the two characters, 132. Blessedness of sorrow, 133. Salutary 
 influence of this lesson, 134. Blessedness of forgiveness, 135. Strict ideas 
 of sexual purity, 136. Counter influence of Mohammedanism, 137. Jesus 
 no ascetic, 138. Influence respectively of the temperance of Islam and the 
 chastity of Christianity, 139. Murder and all personal injuries condemned 
 in the malice that incites them, 140. Difficulty of controlling anger, 140. 
 Not always himself true to his lesson, 141. Effect on character of indis- 
 criminate almsgiving, 142. Provisional application of this lesson, 143. 
 Jesus ignored the rights of property, which were the basis of the older 
 cultus, 145. Major and minor morals distinguished, 146. The proscrip- 
 tion of all oaths considered, 146, 147. Uncertain attitude toward the 
 Mosaic ritual, 14S. Omissions in the ethical code of Jesus, 148. Patri- 
 otism, 149. The marital, parental, and filial duties, 149. Defect supplied in 
 ethics of Paul, 150. The Teutonic influence on manners, 150. Pity and 
 tenderness toward animals not characteristic of the ethical system of Jesus, 
 151. Rule of conduct toward brethren different from the rule toward 
 other men, 152. Rise thence of ecclesiastical government, 153. How 
 far the ethical ideas of Jesus were original, 153. The sect of the Essenes 
 and their origin, 154. Respects in which their ideas differed from those of 
 Jesus. Their regard of the old scriptures and the Sabbath, 154; of labor, 
 155. Their strong sentiment of justice, 155. Their separation from the 
 wicked, their prayers, 156. Their washings and baptisms, 156, 157. Their 
 hostility to war and slavery, 157. Their veneration of age, 158. Respects 
 in which their principles agreed with the doctrines of Jesus, 158. Their 
 requirement of virginity, 158. They forbade oaths, 159. They inculcated 
 love of God; they confined their most esoteric doctrines to the brother- 
 hood; they required the extirpation of anger; they forbade scientific studies; 
 they expected the Messiah, and the kingdom of heaven, 160. Jesus accepted, 
 modified, and gave currency to the ideas of the Essenes, 160. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS, l6l-l86. 
 
 Difficulty of generalizing them, 161. The poetic and philosophic 
 temperament incompatible, 162. Jesus taught that God was beneficent 
 according to the human standard, 162. The fatherhood of God a psycholog- 
 ical fact, 163. Difference between his and the Jewish idea of a divine 
 paternity, 164. Courses of nature the appointment of God, 164. Opposite 
 
IV CONTENTS 
 
 view of nature in Johannic Gospel, 165, 166. Doctrine of Holy Ghost sug- 
 gested, not developed, by Jesus, 167. Exigencies developing the doctrine, 
 167, 168. How the word "spirit" is used by Paul, also by John, 169. New 
 occasions required new revelations, 170. Christian ideas not derived from 
 Jesus, 171. Words, which denote the intrinsic character of men, 172. The 
 aversion of Jesus for bad men; his tolerance of publicans and sinners, 173. 
 He believed in devilish possession, 174. Illustrations of his belief from the 
 Gospels, 175. His scheme of nature, 176. The evil in the world due in 
 part to devilish possession, 177. Wicked men children of the devil, 177, 
 178. The fatherhood of God as held by Jesus and by the Israelites, 179. 
 His feeling toward men not disciples, 1S0. His opposition to the distinc- 
 tions of rank, 181. No service of duty entitled to reward, 183. Self-depre- 
 ciation and self-consciousness how regarded by him, 184. The import of all 
 serious speech, and the indications of the moral sympathies, 185. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS, 187-208. 
 
 Whether there be gods a question of philosophy, — how to placate 
 them a question of religion, 187. Worship corresponds to the conception 
 of God, 187. With the beginning of the moral sense, righteousness became 
 a service of worship, 18S. Pagan idea of God human and cheerful; He- 
 brew idea, pure and stern, 188, 189. Scepticism as to Israel being the 
 chosen people in certain of the old scriptures, 190. Jesus thought the rela- 
 tion of Israel to God was a conditional and temporary one, 191, 192. His 
 assumption of authority over the Mosaic law, 192.' His neglect of Sab- 
 bath observance, 193. His position as to the Mosaic code uncertain, 194. 
 Prayer not a service of worship, 195, 196; but a familiar intercourse, 197. 
 His aversion to fasting, 198. His slight regard of baptism, 199. His 
 memorial service called the Last Supper, 200. His form of prayer con- 
 sidered, 202. The thoroughness of his precepts, 203. The forgiving and 
 vindictive aspects of the divine character, 205. He placed no obstacles in 
 the way of passing from the evil to the good character and state, 206. How 
 the apprehension of the end of the world modified his religious ideas, 207, 
 208. Sudden conversions come to impetuous natures; growth the general 
 law of righteousness, 208. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HIS IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE, 209-236. 
 
 The question of a future life a question of philosophy, 209. The final 
 destiny of men not beyond ultimate discovery, 210. Why religion has 
 asserted exclusive jurisdiction over this subject, 21 r. The jews had origi- 
 nally no ideas of immortality, 212. The Jews acquired belief in immor- 
 tality during their captivity, 215. An established belief before the time of 
 Jesus, 216. Popular opinions concerning immortality among the Jews and 
 among the Greeks and Romans contrasted, 216, 217. Traces of the beliefs 
 of the time of Jesus among his own people, outside of his own teaching, 
 217-220. Idea "of day of judgment and its origin, 220, 221. Ideas of Jesus 
 as to the future life traced in his literal and allegoric teachings, 221, 222. 
 The resurrection a terror to all but the righteous, 223. Deplorable condi 
 
CONTENTS V 
 
 tion of the non-elect dead, 224-226. Imagination and tradition the source of 
 all our knowledge of a future life, 227-229. Jesus' method of investigating 
 the question philosophical and human, 229. In the Fourth Gospel, his 
 teachings are from intuition and direct knowledge, 230, 231. In the Synoptic 
 Gospels, quite otherwise, 232. Paul's revelations much more detailed and 
 particular, 233. The colloquy with the Sadducees concerning the resurrec- 
 tion, 234, 235. The scheme of a future life in the mind of Jesus modified 
 and supplanted by his dominant idea of a kingdom of heaven, 236. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES, 237-276. 
 
 Considerable part of events related in Synoptic Gospels improbable, 
 237. The miracles, if performed, must be proved by testimony of the 
 highest validity, 238. Paul's character as a witness, 239. Did he witness 
 the crucifixion ? 240. Controversy in the early Church as to his apostleship, 
 241. His silence upon the miracles, 242. Did the divine power attributed 
 by Paul to Jesus imply a power to work miracles ? 243, 244. Silence of 
 Paul concerning miracles irreconcilable with the Johannic miracles of Jesus 
 in Jerusalem, where Paul lived, 244, 245. No mention of Jesus' miracles in 
 the canonical Epistles, 246. Testimony of the Synoptic Gospels. Matthew 
 and Mark evidently copy each other, 247. None of the Gospels extant 
 while Paul lived and wrote, 24S. At best, the evidence of the Gospels is of 
 a low grade, 249. Detail of miracle-working as given by Matthew and 
 Mark, 250-252. Difficulties encountered in giving it credence, 253-255. 
 Detail of miracle-working as given by Luke, 255-257. Discrepancies in 
 the testimony, — how far they are explicable, how far irreconcilable, 25S-260. 
 Paley's principle of weighing testimony applied to the testimony of the evan- 
 gelists, 261. The miracles of the Fourth Gospel explained, 262-264. How 
 the evangelical narratives were created, 264. Multiplicity of Gospels, and 
 rule of selection among them, 265, 266. Such miracles as the evangelists 
 record would, if performed, have obtained some mention in secular history, 
 267. They would have produced greater effects upon the communities 
 where performed than the evangelists describe, 268-270. Jesus probably 
 ^had a certain magnetic power of allaying nervous disorders, out of which 
 the story of the miracles grew, 270-272. What the exorcization of devils 
 actually was, 273. The raising of the ruler's daughter — the foundation of 
 all the stories of raising the dead — not miraculous, 275. The inconsistent 
 reasons given for the cessation of the miraculous powers of Jesus, 276. 
 The real reason surmised, 276. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH OF JESUS, 277-33I. 
 
 Whatever may have been the providential plan, causes of his death to be 
 sought in the order of known events, 277, 278. How came he to be obnox- 
 ious to his nation, 278; not as a healer of the sick, 279; not as a teacher 
 of a sublime system of ethics, 279, 280; not by his claim to be the Messiah, 
 281-2S3. Tolerant attitude of scribes and Pharisees toward Jesus, 284. 
 His intolerant attitude toward them, 284-286. His first contact with them 
 in Galilee, 286. Jesus in no peril while he stayed in Galilee, 287. He went 
 to Jerusalem, in fulfilment of prophecy, to be put to death, 287-290. Offen- 
 
VI CONTENTS 
 
 siveness to the priests and rulers of the procession of palms, and the driv- 
 ing out of the sellers of victims from the temple, 290, 291. The spirit in 
 which Jesus prosecuted his controversy with the rulers and elders, 292, 293. 
 Mode of life of Jesus and his company in Jerusalem, 294. Strange confu- 
 sion of identities in the story of the woman with her offering to Jesus, 295. 
 The chief priests and elders, ignorant of the person of Jesus, are compelled 
 to hire a disciple to point him out among the strangers, 295, 296. Un- 
 certainty as to the feeling toward him of the Jewish populace — consequent 
 caution of his enemies, 296. The populace take sides against him; subse- 
 quent boldness of his enemies, 297. The narrative of the crucifixion most 
 probable part of the synoptic narratives, 297. How the facts were probably 
 learned by the writers, 298. Had the council of the Sanhedrim power to 
 try and punish Jesus ? Political condition of Jerusalem and Palestine con- 
 sidered, 299, 300. The Sanhedrim had power to try and punish at least all 
 ecclesiastical offences, 300. The trials of Peter and John and Stephen, 301. 
 Two essays in the Contemporary Review, on "Trial of Jesus," briefly re- 
 viewed, 302, 303. Only one trial, and that before the Sanhedrim, 303. The 
 matter only came to Pilate to get his warrant for the execution, 304. Two 
 reasons given why the Sanhedrim wished to involve Pilate in the responsi- 
 bility of putting Jesus to death, 304, 305. Proceedings against Jesus violent 
 and illegal, 306, 307. The adjuration by the High Priest, and how Jesus 
 made it the occasion of insuring his own condemnation, 308. The proba- 
 ble course of the proceedings, 309, 310. Was the judgment against Jesus 
 one which a just Jew might approve? 310, 311. Jesus had in fact claimed 
 divine powers and authority, 311. Strictness of the Hebrew law of blas- 
 phemy, 312. His claim, however, would not have subjected him to prosecu- 
 tion, if he had refrained from provoking the priests and elders, 313. Laws 
 against blasphemy ought to be executed with discrimination, 313. If Jesus 
 had divine attributes, he studiously concealed them from his judges, 314, 
 315. His bravery and reticence at his trial and under his torture, 316. 
 Totally different account of the arrest and trial in the Fourth Gospel, 317. 
 They took place according to it before the Passover, 318, 319. The trial 
 not before the Sanhedrim, but before Pilate, 319. Undignified bearing of 
 Jesus before the latter, contradictory of his noble silence, as told by the 
 Synoptics, 319-324. Slight variance in Luke from the story of Matthew 
 and Mark not to be followed, 325. Complete isolation of Jesus in Jerusa- 
 lem, 326. Indignities heaped on him during his trial and execution, 326-329. 
 Matthew and Mark's picture of his last hours compared with Luke's, 330, 331. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 HIS PERSONAL PRETENSIONS AND CHARACTER, 332-381. 
 
 To be considered in answering these questions : What he thought of him- 
 self? What his age thought of him ? What was he ? 332. Implication of name 
 Son of Man, 333. Jesus claimed divine inspiration and authority from the 
 first, 334. Impression that he was the Christ not original with him, and not 
 at first accepted by him, 334. Crisis of self-consciousness at Caesarea-Phil- 
 >PP'» 335- Recapitulation of the conversation there, 335, 336. Obscure origin 
 of all such self-consciousness, 337. Prevalent sadness of his temper, 338. 
 Opinion concerning Jesus among his fellow countrymen, 339. Indifference 
 of the people of Nazareth and Capernaum, 339. Probable alienation of 
 his own family, 340. Paucity of his followers, and slight allegiance of the 
 twelve, 341. Number of adherents at his death, 341. Number in Jerusa- 
 lem and Judea, 342. Effect of excessive eulogies of Jesus to obscure his 
 personal traits, 342. General accuracy of the synoptical descriptions of 
 
CONTENTS Vll 
 
 his mental peculiarities, 343. The parables and apothegms of Jesus easy 
 to retain long in the memory, 343. Not easy to remember his longer meta- 
 physical discourses, 344. Wit, wisdom, and moral emphasis of many say- 
 ings of Jesus, 345. He appreciated wit in others, 346. His fondness for 
 intellectual puzzles, 347. Figurative character of his common speech, 348. 
 How far he shared the false beliefs of his age, 349. His belief in angels, 
 349. In devils and a prince of devils, 350. Blending of truth and poetry 
 in his mind and teaching, 350. The Hebrew scriptures to him a divine 
 revelation, 352. The divine oversight of the world to him arbitrary and 
 moral, 353. His courage more conspicuous than his meekness, 354. Thor- 
 oughness of his ethical methods, 355. Purity of his character, 356. His 
 chaste ideas of marriage, 356. The highest modern conceptions of love 
 not wholly the fruit of Christianity, 359. His rigorous rule of repression 
 of anger, 360. Not himself true to it in his treatment of the Pharisees, 
 360. General upright character and salutary influence of the Pharisees, 
 362. Testimony of Paul, 363; of Josephus, 363. Early prejudice of Jesus 
 against the Pharisees, 364. How it increased and expressed itself before his 
 arrest, 366. Justice of his invectives, 367. Stress laid by him, in his later 
 teaching, on faith and discipleship, rather than on righteousness, 369. His 
 early and his later delineation of the day of judgment and the grounds 
 of its sentences, 369. His indifference to common men, his antipathy to the 
 heathen, 371. Character of Jesus to be studied, not in its typical and 
 prophetic ideal, but in its historic significance, 373. His benevolence, 374. 
 Capricious and propagandist exercise of the miraculous power attributed 
 to him, 376. His reproach of Peter, and imprecation against the fig-tree, 
 377. His expectation of a kingdom of heaven not realized, 378. He inspired 
 a new religion, 379. His religion and himself compared with the other 
 great religions, and the men who revealed them, 380. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION, 382-426. 
 
 Best supported by evidence of all the miracles, 382. Two distinct ex- 
 planations of the resurrection in the New Testament, 384. Great stress 
 laid by the Galilean tradition on disappearance of the body, 385. Grave 
 differences in the attending circumstances as told by the evangelists, 385. 
 They all insist that the appearances of Jesus were material, 386. The 
 more spiritual conception of Paul, 387. The Pauline idea of the resurrec- 
 tion explained, 389. Its inconsistencies, 390. Events following the death of 
 Jesus ; his burial, and the visits to the tomb, 393. Who visited it, at what 
 time, what did they see and hear? substantial discrepancies in the report, 
 
 394. The communication by angels, as told by Matthew, by Mark, by Luke, 
 
 395. The Galilean and the Judaic tradition, origin of each, 396. Did Jesus 
 after his death show himself alive to any man at Jerusalem ? 399. Did he 
 show himself to Mary Magdalene or to any woman ? 399. The showing of 
 Jesus to the two travellers to Emmaus, 401. The showing of Jesus to his 
 disciples in Galilee, 403. Fatal differences in the accounts of it, 404. Im- 
 mense consequence of Jesus' last words, and improbability of their being 
 forgotten, 404. Entire disagreement in form and substance in the three 
 evangelical narrations, 405. Legal effect of such difference in the proba- 
 tive character of the testimony illustrated by a verbal will devising prop- 
 erty, 405. The message, as told by each evangelist, recapitulated and 
 considered, 407. How local prejudices among the disciples affected the 
 report, 408. How the story of the resurrection gathered details in the 
 
Vlll CONTEXTS 
 
 telling by the evangelists, 408. Further details given in Acts, 409. Paul's 
 account, 410. Singular failure of the early Christians to agree about the 
 manner of the resurrection or the communications of Jesus, 410. Summing 
 up of the five different accounts, 411. Cross-examination distasteful to un- 
 critical minds, 412. A resurrection not in the apparent plan of Jesus, 412. 
 Did he foretell it? 413. Explanation of the sign of Jonas, 414. If he had 
 foretold his resurrection, it would have been expected by his disciples, as it 
 evidently was not, 415. Vapidity of ghostly messages, 416. Those ascribed 
 to Jesus not an exception, 418. The substance of the message was that 
 the gospel was to be preached to all nations, 420. The early Christians 
 disclosed that they knew nothing about any such message, 420. In the case 
 of the centurion Cornelius, 420. In the controversy about admitting the 
 heathen to the promises of the gospel, 421. Singularity of the opinions 
 attributed to Jesus after his death, 423. His doctrine of baptism, 423. Of 
 the Trinity, 423. Different schools of believers have injected their favorite 
 dogmas into communications ascribed to Jesus after his death, 424. What 
 was real in the resurrection of Jesus, 425. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 INFLUENCE ON HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL AND JOHN, 427-471. 
 
 Much of what is called Christianity the accretion of thought of the 
 Christian ages, 427. Primitive Christianity to be studied in its scriptures, 
 
 428. The Synoptic Gospels unauthorized reports of unlearned men, 429. 
 Primitive Christianity found, after Jesus, two men of marked ability to 
 construct and propagate it, — Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel, 
 
 429. In the expected crisis, no adequate provision made to record the 
 life or sayings of Jesus, 430. Paul, — his ability, training, and mental and 
 moral traits, 431. His genius, as disclosed in his speeches and letters, 431. 
 Epistle to Romans his body of theology, 432. His speculations upon the 
 resurrection, 432. His homily upon charity, 433. Two fragments of his 
 speeches preserved in Acts, 434. His defects, 435. His false philosophy 
 and bad logic, 435. His Jewish narrowness, 436. How he fitted the per- 
 sonality of Jesus to his scheme of the divine providence, 437. Paul the 
 author of the Christian theology, 437. His scheme essentially Jewish, 
 438. Exalting Jesus to Heaven, he takes his place on earth as teacher 
 of the Church, 438. His courage and love of leadership illustrated by his 
 shipwreck, 439. Summary of the Pauline theologv, 441. Paul did not 
 learn it of Jesus, 441. How he varied the ethical teachings of Jesus, 442. 
 His attitude toward the State, 442 ; toward the rich, 442. He supplemented 
 the teachings of Jesus, 442. Jesus a recluse and iconoclast, Paul a man of 
 the world and compromiser, 443. Paul's ideas of woman and of marriage, 
 445. Advantage he gained over Jesus by getting into literature, 445. His 
 influence, thwarted bv the pillar apostles, revives after his death, 446. 
 Greatly dominant in Protestantism and since its rise, 446. With Paul's 
 interpretation alone, Christianity a barren dogmatism, 446. A man of 
 mystic insight and cipable of poetic emotion required to give it impulse, 
 an 1 found in so-called John, 447. Purpose of Fourth Gospel didactic and 
 not historic, 44S. A development of Pauline ideas 44S. Not written by 
 John the apostle, 449. Its eschatologv unlike that of the Synoptics, 451. 
 It composed controversies among the Christians, 452. More than Paul, the 
 writer idealized Jesus, 453, 454. Like Paul, he apologizes for the Pharisees, 
 
 454. Vividness of its descriptions, 455. Deficiency of its dramatic power, 
 
 455. Defects of its style. Superfluous statement's; instances given, 456^ 
 
CONTENTS IX 
 
 Vulgar expletives,— instances given, 457. Quite foreign to the manner of 
 Jesus, 457. Irrelevant and inconsequential reasons given for statements; 
 instances, 458. Mixed metaphors; instances, 459. The writer incapable of 
 true allegory, 459. Rudeness of language; instances, 459. Paucity of ideas 
 and wealth of sentiment, 460. The writer quite capable of the best thoughts 
 he imputes to Jesus; instances, 461. If Jesus said what the Fourth Gospel 
 reports, he could not have uttered the Sermon on the Mount and the par- 
 ables, 461. Theologic and philosophic ideas of Fourth Gospel, 462. Cir- 
 cumstances that enhanced its reputation, 463. A parallel in Shakspeare's 
 dramatic "Henry VIII.," 465. It presents the heart of Jesus, 466. It 
 was in the New Scriptures what the Psalms were in the Old. The author 
 the forerunner of the mystics, 467. His work a free-handling of the annals 
 of the Synoptics, — the beginning of all the rehabilitations of Christ, 468. 
 Jesus the fountain-head of Christianity, Paul and John its two great rivers, 
 Tigris and Euphrates, 468. Their methods to be adopted rather than their 
 conclusions, 469. The form of Christian doctrine must not cramp the 
 Christian spirit, 469. Christianity interrogated on the side of intelligence 
 and of morality. It must answer wisely on both sides, or give place to a 
 gospel that can answer, 470, 471, 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 It had been for many years a cherished purpose of the writer of 
 the following chapters to examine, without prejudice or prepos- 
 session, the authentic documents in which are found the traditions 
 of the origin of Christianity, and to ascertain what they indicate in 
 reference to the character, opinions, and controlling purposes of 
 Jesus. Engrossing occupation in professional employments, while 
 requiring the postponement of the undertaking, better qualified 
 for its successful performance, by knowledge acquired of the most 
 approved methods of analyzing and formulating evidence, and of 
 determining its probability and strength and the conclusions of fact 
 which it compelled. The leisure of the last few years brought to the 
 writer the opportunity to attempt the realization of a task which may 
 perhaps be deemed beyond the scope of his scholarship and critical 
 powers. 
 
 The many books upon the same subject that have appeared within 
 the last few years in this country and in other countries, where 
 thought is active and free, indicate that, so far from being exhausted, 
 the life of Jesus has only begun to be studied. Most of these books 
 have been written with the purpose, more or less confessed, of 
 strengthening and confirming the devout prepossessions by which 
 they were inspired. Of the fewer of them written in a historic spirit, 
 and regarding Jesus,' his character, teachings, and influence as 
 normal developments of a civilization that has advanced, not only 
 by steady growth, but by strong impulses given to it by the incursion 
 of great men and the spring-tide of great epochs, some have been 
 m.irrc 1 by lack of method in their study and of consistency and 
 probability in the character they have delineated; some by arbitrary 
 marshalling of the traditions to support a fanciful mythical theory; 
 and still others by the confession, everywhere virtually expressed in 
 them, that the barren compliment of sentimental adulation was to be 
 offered to a dethroned Deity in compensation for degrading him from 
 the height of worship where reason had ceased to recognize him. 
 
 What seemed to be called for was a judicial and critical study of 
 the traditions of Jesus, which should find, in the nobleness of his 
 character and in the peculiar national sentiments of the race t> 
 
which he belonged, a reason for the daring ambition that drove him 
 to the accomplishment of his destiny ; which should explain how a 
 new religion, the element of excellence and permanence in which 
 was its system of esoteric ethics, should have subjected its author, 
 through the general disaffection of his countrymen, to a premature 
 and cruel death, and what peculiar conditions of the world and what 
 co-operating agency of kindred minds contributed to give new vitality 
 to that religion, after it had been, apparently, overthrown by his 
 murder and the scattering of his disciples. If the present attempt 
 has to any extent outlined a chief person of human history, the 
 incidents and issue of whose life flowed naturally, as other men's do, 
 from the force of his character and the direction of his activity, 
 whose dominant idea once understood gives a general consistency 
 and symmetry to all his ideas and to all his conduct, some approach 
 has been made to the naked veracity of history, even if men like 
 Matthew Arnold, to whom what is rational and intelligible seems to 
 be suspicious, should satirize the method as " rigorous and vigorous." 
 
 The range of investigation, though narrow, is fairly within the 
 scope of the inquiry undertaken, it having been confessed by the 
 most accomplished scholars, that there is next to nothing that can 
 throw light upon the character and work of Jesus outside the canon 
 of received Scripture. Nearly all the discussions, from a rational- 
 istic point of view, of the supernatural phenomena asserted to have 
 produced or attended the introduction into the world of the Chris- 
 tian faith, have impugned, to a greater or less degree, the trustworthi- 
 ness and credibility of the Christian documents. The genuineness 
 of those documents has been assailed and their imputed authorship 
 denied, whereby the evidence which they contain has been degraded 
 from the first hand testimony of eye-and-ear witnesses of the events 
 they undertake to narrate to the second or third hand report of what 
 artful partisans have heard others say. 
 
 The writer of these papers — beginning with the assumption that 
 the Christian documents are authentic and a bona fide setting forth 
 of the career of Jesus, as it was believed by the writers of them to 
 have occurred, and that the question of authorship, arising, as it 
 does, between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and certain later adherents 
 of Jesus unknown, but not a whit less obscure, illiterate, or unau- 
 thorized, is a question of secondary importance — has set himself to 
 the task of ascertaining what the documents themselves seem fairly 
 to prove. 
 
 His method of procedure was to draw up, by reference to the 
 original texts of the Synoptical Gospels, every declaration reported 
 
PREFACE J 
 
 to have been made by Jesus during his life, together with such of 
 the res gestae as might be considered, along with his language, 
 as expository of his thought. After an exhaustive list of these had 
 been accumulated in the order of their narration, an attempt was 
 made to classify and arrange them by subjects, placing in the same 
 category whatever Jesus was believed to have said upon each special 
 subject, or that might seem legitimately to relate to it. Finally, a 
 finding or summing up — such as is imposed upon the judicial mind 
 in determining, from a mass of notes of oral testimony or of docu- 
 ments and papers, what are the facts upon which, under the proper 
 rules of law, the rights of litigants are to be determined — was 
 undertaken, and a statement drawn up of what Jesus seemed to have 
 believed and taught. 
 
 The only prepossession the writer is aware of in approaching the 
 study of which these chapters are the record is that the great, 
 dominant purpose of Jesus was to proclaim and prepare for the 
 kingdom of heaven, although the nature of that kingdom and when 
 it was to be expected to begin only became apparent after a complete 
 review of the testimony. Upon all other points, the writer confesses 
 he had no prepossession, and was himself, in many instances, sur- 
 prised at results that contradicted the prejudices in which he had 
 been educated, though his later reading has shown him how widely 
 these conclusions have been arrived at by other minds and how little 
 claim he has to any priority of discovery. 
 
 At the very outset, the alternative presented itself between the 
 validity of the Fourth Gospel and that of the other three. All 
 attempt at reconciliation and harmony of the two conflicting narra- 
 tives, for reasons fully set forth in the text, was necessarily aban- 
 doned. In electing to follow, generally, the statements of the three 
 witnesses and to discredit the one, the writer believes he has fol- 
 lowed not only the judgment of the most conscientious and compe- 
 tent scholars, but complied with one of the fundamental canons of 
 the law of evidence. 
 
 So far as any criticism or adverse judgment has been ventured in 
 reference to what seemed to have been the opinions of Jesus, — espe- 
 cially as to the speedy end of the world, to the incompatibility of 
 property with personal salvation, and of marriage with the perfection 
 of righteousness, as to indiscriminate almsgiving, to absolute non- 
 resistance, to the hostility of political society to the order of the 
 kingdom of heaven, — it is no personal criticism or private judgment: 
 it is, rather, the deliberate judgment of Christendom against Christ. 
 It is the sober second thought of the educated and fully developed 
 
5 PREFACE 
 
 age in reference to the enthusiasms and overfaith of the mind that 
 introduced it. 
 
 The following propositions in reference to Jesus, believed to have 
 been established by the investigation, may be considered as well 
 verified as any events of ancient history. They are stated in the 
 order of the validity and cumulation of the proofs upon which they 
 stand : — 
 
 i. There lived in the beginning of the present era, in Palestine, in 
 Syria, a teacher, prophet, and holy man, from whom the great world- 
 religion, called Christianity, is named ; and who, though not the 
 author of its prominent ideas and doctrines nor the inventor of its 
 dogmatic form, was, in some sense, its inspirer and source. He was 
 put to death by his countrymen, who mainly rejected his personal 
 claims and repudiated his peculiar doctrines. 
 
 2. He believed and taught that the end of the world, both as to 
 its internal economy and physical constitution, was impending; and 
 that, after his own death, which, if he did not provoke, he took no 
 pains to avert, he would return to establish on the ruins of the old 
 order a new kingdom of the righteous to endure forever. 
 
 3. He taught the blessedness of poverty, the incompatibility of 
 wealth with the spiritual well-being of mankind, and that to enter the 
 kingdom of heaven men must forsake and surrender their posses- 
 sions, and forego all care for their physical existence. 
 
 The first of these propositions is based upon the concurrent testi- 
 mony of the four extant written versions of the original tradition 
 published somewhere after the year 55 and before the year 180 of 
 the Christian era, upon the extant writings of the first Christian 
 missionaries of whom Paul is the best known : it is asserted in 
 secular history, and the reputation of it would have survived to our 
 times without any mention in history. 
 
 The second proposition has all the same supports, except that 
 secular history takes no notice of it ; and its tradition is only pre- 
 served among obscure sects. 
 
 The third proposition, maintained in the most reliable traditions, 
 is not supported by the Fourth Gospel nor by the adhesion of Paul, 
 though the other apostolic writings, emphatically that imputed to 
 James, affirm it. 
 
 The following propositions, not absolutely verified, are fairly 
 probable and only deniable by a severe and rigorous scepticism : — 
 
 1. Jesus taught rules of personal conduct requiring, among other 
 things, universal and indiscriminate beneficence, the absolute for- 
 giveness and sufferance of injuries, simplicity and directness of 
 
speech, avoidance of censoriousness, chastity and self-denial to the 
 point of extirpation of natural instincts, and the repression of 
 ambition. 
 
 These rules, however, are given with fundamental discrepancies in 
 but two of the Gospels, and are wholly omitted in the other two. It 
 is not certain that they are quoted in any of the writings of the 
 apostles, whose rules and sanctions for personal conduct are some- 
 what different. Finally, they were not always conformed to by Jesus 
 himself. 
 
 2. He had a certain power of allaying and curing mental maladies 
 and those physical disabilities resulting from impaired nervous action. 
 The great miracles of raising the dead, multiplying food and wine, 
 walking on the sea, and whatever else is imputed to him outside the 
 known scope of human powers, are not proved, on account of the 
 material variances in the testimony of the evangelists concerning 
 them ; of the settled consensus of the competent to reject all miracles, 
 when told in connection with other religions or as occurring in any 
 age later than the first century, upon testimony more concurrent and 
 trustworthy than that upon which the New Testament miracles have 
 been believed ; and on account of the feeble and doubtful confirma- 
 tion they receive from the apostolic writers, and of the impossibility 
 that the Jewish people, or any people, could have contemptuously 
 rejected and cruelly slain a person who had, in their sight or knowl- 
 edge, done such awe-inspiring works of divine power. On the other 
 hand, some mysterious power must be attributed to Jesus to account 
 for the influence he had over a certain class of simple and illiterate 
 men, not likely to be attracted by the uncompromising severity of 
 his ethical doctrines. 
 
 3. He did not originate nor give any special stress to the doctrine 
 of personal immortality. It was believed in by the leading classes 
 of his people and by the nations of Asia and Africa ages before his 
 time ; and the details of the life of men after death are given with 
 much more minuteness and vividness by Paul, who never heard 
 Jesus, than by Jesus himself. His scheme of a future life was 
 swallowed up in his scheme of an impending kingdom of heaven. 
 
 4. As to the doctrines of the trinity of the Godhead, the complete 
 and natural depravity of man as such, the condemnation of the 
 human race for the sin of the first created pair, the expiation of 
 the sins of those who believe in Jesus by the divinely appointed 
 sacrifice of the Son of God, though germs of such ideas appear in 
 the apostolic writings and later in the Fourth Gospel, they are no- 
 where discoverable in any accredited sayings of Jesus. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 SOURCES OF EVIDENCE. 
 
 " We must look for the apostolic root of the whole movement in the 
 Synoptical Gospels, and more especially in those of Matthew and Mark ; for 
 Luke already betrays an approach to the Catholic tendencies of Paul. 
 Here, we get the truest idea of Christ and his works as historical verities." — 
 John James Tayler. 
 
 Nearly nineteen hundred years ago there appeared in 
 Galilee, a province of Palestine, then subject to Rome, a 
 man whose teaching and character, aided by certain ad- 
 ventitious circumstances, powerfully affected the human 
 race, and opened a new epoch in its history. After he 
 became famous, it was claimed for him that he was a lin- 
 eal descendant of David and the early Jewish kings ; but 
 the genealogies given in two of his brief biographies are 
 too contradictory in their details to establish the royal 
 lineage of Joseph, — a fact of no account, as those biogra- 
 phies maintain that Joseph was not his father. The 
 imputation of his parentage to the Holy Ghost is robbed 
 of its grossness, when it is considered that it was the 
 effort of a reverent imagination to- account for the phe- 
 nomenon, by no means rare in human history, of a man 
 born into the world whose grandeur of genius transcends 
 all the apparent capabilities of his ancestors. 
 
 The name which he has given to history was Christ ; 
 but that Greek title, which obtained among his followers, 
 seems to have been little used in his lifetime, he being 
 known in his family and among his people as Jesus, a 
 which signifies Saviour, but which is the same name as 
 Joshua, and, like other words indiscriminately used to 
 designate indifferent individuals, would soon lose in the 
 popular apprehension all association with ideas. He 
 seems to have belonged to quite a large family '' among 
 the artisan classes, and, until lie assumed the character 
 
12 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 of prophet, is said to have followed his father's vocation of 
 a carpenter. The amazement which his wisdom excited 
 in the popular mind was increased by an impression that 
 he was illiterate, and had never been taught to read. a 
 Whether this were so or not, a devout Jew, brought up 
 in attendance upon the weekly reading and explaining of 
 the Jewish law, ritual, and history in the synagogue, is not 
 to be considered uneducated. 
 
 His whole career, after he emerged from the industrious 
 obscurity of his early manhood, is not claimed to cover a 
 period of more than three years ; and the events of au- 
 thentic occurrence, which are told in a consecutive order 
 in what are called the Synoptic Gospels, might all have 
 occurred, and apparently did all occur, in a single year. 
 
 What Jesus was, what he thought and believed, what 
 he taught, and what he did in that brief career, the whole 
 world are intensely eager to know. And, to satisfy this 
 intense craving, it has recourse mainly to three brief 
 histories, which, so far as they agree, seem to have been 
 copied from each other, the authorship of which is doubt- 
 fully imputed to obscure persons, whose relation to Jesus 
 is so remote, and whose authority to publish his faith is 
 so questionable, that everything in them, probable even 
 in itself, must be read with misgiving as to its actual 
 occurrence. 
 
 There is a fourth biography, imputed to a confidential 
 friend and disciple of Jesus ; but this gives us a character 
 and history so wholly different from the other three, that, 
 instead of throwing light upon a subject already obscure, 
 it enhances the doubt and perplexity that surround it. 
 
 Mohammed and Confucius carefully committed to writ- 
 ing a summary of their respective doctrines. Socrates, 
 coming in an enlightened age and among an enlightened 
 people, was happy in the discipleship of two cultivated 
 men, Plato and Xenophon, who gave to the world the 
 different phases of his philosophy. Even Sakya Mouni 
 was more fortunate than Jesus, in that he finished his 
 career, and lived to see his ideas practically adopted by 
 great communities of men, and to give his own sanction 
 to the teachings of disciples. But Jesus was interrupted 
 by a violent death in nearly the beginning of a prophetic 
 
 n John vii , 15 ; Luke iv., 22. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE I 3 
 
 course ; nor does he seem to have had in his mind a com- 
 pleted system of religion and philosophy, such as Chris- 
 tianity, as it came to be developed in the hands of his 
 followers. It will be necessary to discover, if it can be 
 done by a careful study of his ideas, why no other pro- 
 vision was made for an authorized exposition of his doc- 
 trines than the volunteer biographies imputed to Matthew, 
 Mark, Luke, and John, and why the propagation of the 
 gospel among the Gentiles was intrusted to the apostle, 
 who never had seen Jesus alive, and who, in all his 
 writings, has scarcely mentioned any of the incidents of 
 his life. 
 
 The personality of Jesus seems to have made but little 
 impression upon Paul. He is to Paul not so much an his- 
 torical person as a celestial functionary, performing an 
 office, mainly through the efficacy of his death and blood, 
 in the accomplishment of the salvation of the elect. The 
 crowning fact, all the fact deemed worthy of considera- 
 tion by the dogmatic apostle, is the resurrection ; and, 
 upon that fact, he predicates the whole scheme of a new 
 ailtus and a new order of the universe. Accordingly, we 
 fail to find in any of Paul's writings the remotest allusion 
 to any wonders of healing or other miracle-working clone 
 by Jesus, or to any of his acts of human charity and 
 beneficence. The sententious and striking utterances by 
 which Jesus was wont to command the ready attention 
 of men everywhere, the vivid imagination which enabled 
 him to embody, in allegories and parables, a metaphysical 
 idea or a didactic lesson, are never quoted nor imitated. 
 And though, like Jesus, Paul develops a system of ethics, 
 and gives minute directions as to outward conduct and 
 the control and development of the interior temper, his 
 system is, in form and substance, unlike that of Jesus, 
 and not only contradicts it in fundamental respects, but 
 is based upon different sanctions. 
 
 Equally unsatisfactory is our search through the other 
 apostolic Epistles to find definite data, out of which to 
 complete our picture of the personal traits of Jesus or 
 the incidents of his life. If these writings are properly 
 attributed to Peter, James, and John, his trusted disciples 
 and kinsfolk, this absence is quite remarkable. Paul, a 
 Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in Jerusa- 
 
14 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 lem, — who docs not claim to have seen Jesus, except after 
 his death, in a vision, writing, when the memorabilia of 
 Jesus, now embodied in the Gospels, were only traditions 
 communicated from one believer to another, — might have 
 chosen to ignore all those traditions. He seems even to 
 have done it studiedly and with a purpose. The spiritual 
 Christ, in his fervid soul, had so overshadowed the Christ 
 after the flesh, that he did not care to recur to an image 
 which had become to him carnal, earthly, and temporal. 
 But why should not Peter and John and James, if they 
 were indeed the authors of the canonical Epistles attrib- 
 uted to them, have given us some of the impressions, which 
 intimate association with a presence so attractive as their 
 great Master's was must have made upon their vivid memo- 
 ries ? Why, using copiously the words and deeds of patri- 
 archs and prophets to illustrate in their sermons and 
 letters the lessons they taught the new Church, did they 
 so nearly omit the acts and sayings of Jesus himself, so 
 much more edifying . and authoritative for the same pur- 
 poses ? Paul, indeed, alludes to the ceremony of the sym- 
 bolical eating of bread and wine enjoined by Jesus, and 
 imputes to him words not differing so much from those 
 reported in the Third Gospel as they differ from those 
 reported in the First and Second Gospels. a James gives 
 with emphasis the prohibition of all oaths and of all indi- 
 rectness of speech, in phraseology like the Sermon on the 
 Mount, but strangely omits to enforce the lesson by 
 attributing the prohibition to Jesus. b The writer of the 
 Second Epistle of Peter c corroborates the account given 
 in the Synoptic Gospels of the voice from heaven, to affirm 
 the divine origin of Jesus upon the mount of transfigura- 
 tion. But, when the writer of the First Epistle of Peter d 
 has occasion to cite the example of Jesus to be followed 
 by his disciples, instead of giving his own recollections 
 of what he had seen or heard, or any tradition of him 
 that afterward found place in the Gospels, he contents 
 himself with a prophetic sketch derived from the Old 
 Testament, supposed to foreshadow his functions as a 
 Redeemer. In the First Epistle imputed to John are 
 repeated several of the declarations which the same 
 
 a I. Cor. xi., 24, 25. 1) James v., 12. 
 
 ell. Peter i., 17, 18. «I. Peter ii., 22-34. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 1 5 
 
 writer as an evangelist imputes to Jesus ; but this iden- 
 tity has another import, to be considered hereafter. 
 
 In the narrative called the Acts of the Apostles, purport- 
 ing to be the production of the writer of the Third Gospel, 
 we should naturally look for some vivid pictures of the 
 human life of Jesus. But there, as in the Epistles, we find 
 Christ in his office of mediator, intercessor between man 
 and God, and bringer of salvation from sin and eternal life 
 to those who believed on him, rather than Jesus the man, 
 the teacher, disclosing new conceptions of the relations of 
 man to God, reinforcing virtue by new motives and sanc- 
 tions, and prescribing for conduct a wider and deeper con- 
 formity to an ideal righteousness. As in the Epistles, 
 the great stress is laid upon the efficacy of his blood and 
 death, and the vindication by his resurrection of a power 
 effectual to the salvation of all believers. 
 
 Peter indeed, on the occasion when the new believers 
 assembled together on Pentecost day were kindled with 
 an enthusiasm that seemed so marvellous to themselves, 
 speaks thus to the people of the man they had a few 
 days before scornfully rejected and crucified : " Ye men 
 of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man 
 approved of God among you by miracles, wonders, and 
 signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye 
 yourselves also know : him being delivered by the deter- 
 minate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, 
 and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." a In this 
 declaration, the manhood of Jesus is emphasized, and his 
 miracles are spoken of as done through him by God. 
 Later, welcoming to the hopes of Christianity the devout 
 Roman soldier Cornelius, the same apostle asserts that 
 Jesus of Nazareth was anointed by God "with the Holy 
 Ghost and with power"; that he "went about doing 
 good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil " ; 
 and that he, Peter, and his fellow-disciples are witnesses 
 of all the things which Jesus did in the land of the Jews 
 and in Jerusalem. '' 
 
 Paul is represented as quoting, in an address to the 
 Jews at Antioch, John Baptist's testimony, that Jesus 
 was greater than he.'' Exhorting the converts at Ephesus 
 to be diligent in laboring, that they may have some- 
 
 ,22,23. l»Acts x., 38, 39. "Acts xiii., 35. 
 
l6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 thing to support the weak, he reminds them of a saying 
 he imputes to Jesus, though none of the Gospels report 
 it, — "It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" 1 
 
 Of Jesus, it was said that he spake as one having au- 
 thority, and not as the scribes ; and the evangelist repre- 
 sents him as speaking of the fundamental precepts of the 
 Mosaic law in the decalogue as traditions of them of old 
 time, and either false or inadequate. But his disciples, 
 including even the bold and eloquent Paul, speak of Jesus 
 in an apologetic tone, and scarcely mention his acts and 
 never his distinctive words. Doubtless, they were com- 
 pelled by the hostile prejudices and inveterate bigotry of 
 the Jews to find for Jesus a place in the Hebrew dispen- 
 sation as its supplement or fulfilment, and to claim faith 
 in him rather on the score of prophetic foreshadowing 
 of his character and office than for his living work and 
 words. Believing, as they did at first, that the gospel which 
 Jesus brought was for the Jews, they everywhere appealed 
 to the Hebrew Scriptures as setting forth his character, 
 his death, and his resurrection, and asserted that the king- 
 dom which he was coming with his angels to establish 
 on earth was the consummation which Israel had been 
 for ages waiting for. This strictly national and sectarian 
 aspect in which his immediate followers seem everywhere, 
 in this fragment of the Acts of the Apostles, to have pre- 
 sented the phenomenon of Jesus, is not a complete nega- 
 tion of the stupendous acts and the new ideas which the 
 evangelists impute to him ; but it is an unmistakable index 
 of how little impression those acts and ideas had at that 
 time made upon the multitudes that dwelt in Judea and 
 Jerusalem, and upon the Jewish communities scattered 
 through the Greek cities. 
 
 When we come to the gospel narratives as sources 
 of information concerning the history and character of 
 Jesus, we are met at the outset with the general similar- 
 ity and concurrence of the first three and the indepen- 
 dent and conflicting details of the last. 
 
 The author of the Fourth Gospel does not mention the 
 birth of Jesus or any incident of his life earlier than his 
 baptism by John. He calls him Jesus of Nazareth, b and 
 speaks of Joseph as his father, Mary as his mother, and 
 
 "Acts xx., 35. •> John i , 45, 46. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 'I J 
 
 names his brothers. According to this writer, John the 
 Baptist was baptizing in Bethany, a place somewhere 
 upon the eastern side of the river Jordan in the wilder- 
 ness or wooded country about its banks, when Jesus 
 came first to him. The following day, John saw Jesus 
 again walking, and pointed him out to those who were 
 with him as the Lamb of God, upon which testimony two 
 men, one of them Andrew, one of the twelve apostles, 
 attached themselves to Jesus as disciples. Andrew im- 
 mediately procured his brother Simon, afterward famous 
 as Peter, to join the new prophet also. The day follow- 
 ing, Jesus went into Galilee. So that it is fairly inferri- 
 ble that this first sight of Jesus by John and this adhesion 
 of two chief apostles happened in the wilderness country 
 beyond Jordan and somewhere between the Sea of Galilee 
 and the Dead Sea. Nathaniel, who with Philip became 
 his disciple, on his return to Galilee calls him Jesus of 
 Nazareth ; and his residence in that city seemed well 
 enough known in the neighboring cities to give him a 
 special identity among the many persons of the Jewish 
 race, who in all that region bore the very common 
 name of Jesus." 
 
 Returning to Galilee from the Jordan wilderness, Jesus 
 next appears as a wedding guest at a marriage in the city 
 of Cana, at which his mother and probably his brothers 
 were also present. There, it is told of him that, when the 
 wine failed, he miraculously changed water into wine of 
 such excellent quality that the governor of the feast spe- 
 cially complimented it, while reminding the bridegroom 
 that a poorer article would have complied with all the 
 requirements of custom in the latter stages of the drink- 
 ing. 15 Then, the narrator affirms, "This beginning of mir- 
 acles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth 
 his glory; and his disciples believed on him." c As disci- 
 ples, they have hitherto believed in him as a prophet. 
 Henceforth, he is to them the representative and Son of 
 God, — -the Christ who was to come. From Cana, in 
 company with his mother and brothers, he came to Caper- 
 naum, but continued there not many days. The Jewish 
 passover being at hand, Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and 
 expelled from the temple those who were there according 
 
 "John i., 28, 35-42, is. b John ii., 1-10. c John ii., 11, 13-17, 23. 
 
l8 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to wont and to a permission of the Mosaic law to sell 
 beasts and birds for temple sacrifices to the worshippers 
 coming from a distance. While at Jerusalem on the feast 
 day, it is asserted that he did miracles and gained many 
 disciples. This statement is confirmed by Nicodemus, a 
 leading Pharisee, who during this first visit to Jerusalem 
 visits Jesus by night, and opens the conversation by 
 avowing that "no man can do these miracles that thou 
 doest, except God be with him." a After these things, — 
 that is, after the coming to Jerusalem to the passover, 
 the casting out of the money-changers from the temple, 
 the unnamed miracles at Jerusalem, which had gained 
 disciples and attracted Nicodemus to him, — Jesus goes 
 from Jerusalem into the country of Judea apparently east- 
 ward and northward ; for he goes to Enon b on the Galilean 
 border of the Jordan. And although it is asserted that 
 they, Jesus and his disciples, were baptized there, the 
 whole testimony of the evangelist fairly implies that only 
 the disciples were baptized, Jesus having been baptized 
 before ; for John Baptist had testified that he was the 
 Lamb of God, while asserting that he knew that only 
 from the fact, that the dove had lit upon him at his bap- 
 tism, which must thus have already taken place. 
 
 Following the slender thread of narrative with which 
 the writer of the Fourth Gospel illustrates his monologue 
 of Jesus, we learn next that Jesus pursued his northward 
 journey through Samaria to Galilee, holding a remark- 
 able conversation with a woman at Jacob's well. Here, 
 he exercised a power of thought-reading or divination, 
 such as is claimed by modern spiritualists ; for he told the 
 woman incidents of her past domestic life not altogether 
 reputable, and gained not only from her, but from her 
 friends, the reputation of being a prophet. 11 
 
 Two days later, Jesus comes to Galilee, where he is rep- 
 resented as, up to that time, not being of any great 
 repute. But it is told that the Galileans received him, or 
 accepted him, not on the score of anything done, among 
 them, but liaving seen all the tilings that he did at Jeru- 
 salem at the feast, for the Galileans also went unto the 
 feast? This declaration accords perfectly with what had 
 
 a John iii., 2. •» John iii., 22, 23. c John iv. ( 3-5, 16-19. 
 djohn iv., 39. e John iv., 45. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 19 
 
 been told previously. He had done but one miracle in 
 Galilee, the vinifaction of the water at the wedding, which 
 was unknown to all but the servants ; and Jesus' impa- 
 tient exclamation to his mother implies that he wished to 
 have this miracle concealed. But he had done conspic- 
 uous miracles in Jerusalem. To make this more explicit, 
 the evangelist proceeds to tell the healing of the noble- 
 man's sick son in a Capernaum ; and then, to do exact and 
 numerical justice to Galilee, as the theatre of the works 
 of the great prophet, — about which, it is easy to believe, 
 there were dissensions among the believers, each party 
 claiming distinction for their own country, — he adds these 
 words: "This is again the second miracle that Jestis did, 
 when he was come out of Judea into Galilee." b 
 
 After this the occurring of another Jewish feast, the 
 passover brought Jesus again to Jerusalem, and there he 
 healed a lame man lying at the pool of Bethesda d on the 
 Sabbath day. Although he was at first obliged to hide 
 himself from the Jews, who threatened punishment for a 
 violation of the Sabbath, he reappeared, showed himself 
 in the temple, boldly avowed his act, appealed to the 
 works which he had done as the credentials of a divine 
 mission, and told the Jews that, if they really believed 
 Moses, they would believe in him, for that Moses had 
 foretold him. e 
 
 He next returns to Galilee, and in the neighborhood of 
 the Sea of Tiberias so multiplies a few loaves of bread 
 and two fishes that they feed to satisfaction five thousand 
 people/ The multitude who saw this miracle believed 
 that he was the prophet promised to their nation. In 
 their enthusiasm, they wanted to make him a king ; but 
 he withdrew into a mountain^ and the night following, 
 walking on the surface of the sea, rejoined his disciples, 
 who had embarked to row to Capernaum across the lake, 
 and terrifying them with the fear that he was a spirit. 
 We are next told of a discourse he held, suggested by the 
 miraculous feeding in the synagogue at Capernaum, with 
 the people who had followed him from the other side of 
 the lake. h In the face of the palpable miracle, they 
 
 n John iv., 46. bjohniv., 54. cjohnv., i. 
 d John v., 9, 10. e John v., 36-46. f John vi., 10-13. 
 K John vi., 15, 19. h John vi., 25. 
 
20 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 demand a sign ; and he tells them he is the manna of 
 heaven 11 sent down to give them life. Many, who had 
 been his disciples here, turned from him ; and he expressed 
 doubts about the fidelity of the twelve. b 
 
 He avoided visiting Jerusalem for some days after his 
 disciples went thither to the Feast of the Tabernacles and 
 tarried in Galilee ; c and it is told that, even after these four 
 Galilean miracles, his brothers did not believe in him. d 
 In the midst of the feast, which lasted several days, Jesus 
 himself appeared in Jerusalem, and taught openly in the 
 temple. 6 It was notorious that the leading Jews sought 
 his life. He himself had avoided Jerusalem for fear of 
 them ; and the only reason the writer gives why his ene- 
 mies did not take him, when he appeared among them, 
 was that his time was not yet come. 1 He is represented 
 as making some impression upon the people of the chief 
 city by this discourse, since many asserted that he must 
 be the Messiah ; but to the assertion of the orthodox 
 Jews, that there was no Scripture warrant for receiving a 
 Galilean as a Messiah, it was nowhere, by any adherents, 
 maintained that he was in fact born in Bethlehem, s nor is 
 such fact ever asserted by this biographer. 
 
 It is next related that Jesus went to the Mount of 
 Olives, but returned early in the morning to the temple, 
 where, after he had released from her accusers the woman 
 taken in adultery, he held another discussion with the 
 Pharisees, in which he gave offence to some of the Jews 
 who believed on him by telling them that they were not 
 the children of Abraham, but the children of the devil. 
 The Jews became so exasperated at his claim, as they 
 understood it, to have been contemporary with Abraham, 
 that they were about to stone him ; and he hid himself, 
 and escaped from the temple. 11 On his way, Jesus met a 
 blind man, and restored his sight. As this was done on 
 the Sabbath, many Jews insisted that Jesus was not of 
 God ; but others asked, How can a man that is a sinner 
 do miracles?' The colloquy with the Jews proceeded; 
 and the time and place are given as in Solomon's porch 
 of the temple, and in winter time. It thus appears that 
 
 n John vi., 32, 41. bjohn vi., 60, 64. c John vii., i, 2. 
 
 '1 John vii., 5. ejohn vii, 10, 14. f John vii., 25, 26, 30, 31. 
 
 Rjohn vii., 42, 52 hjohn viii., 1, 2, 11, 31, 33, 44, 50, 59- "John be., 1, 6, 7, 16. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 21 
 
 Jesus had come to Jerusalem in the midst of the Feast 
 of Tabernacles, which was in October, and had remained 
 there till winter. 11 But now, being again in danger of 
 arrest, he betook himself to the Jordan wilderness, where 
 John at first baptized. b Some indefinite time after, it 
 must have been a short time, — for the disciples speak 
 of these attempts of the Jews to stone him as events 
 of late occurrence, — Jesus again comes into Judea, c and at 
 Bethany performs the miracle of raising from the dead — 
 in the presence of his sisters and many Jews, their friends 
 who had come from Jerusalem to condole with them — the 
 man Lazarus, who had been four days buried. The effect 
 of this miracle in winning converts among the Jews was 
 said to have been so great that the chief priests and 
 Pharisees in council feared he would seduce the nation 
 from its allegiance to Caesar, and bring on a war that 
 would destroy it ; and, from that time, they studiedly 
 plotted the death of Jesus. d The catastrophe was avoided 
 by his withdrawal to the city of Ephraim, in the neigh- 
 borhood of the wilderness, and within the limits of Sama- 
 ria, where he stayed with his disciples. 
 
 Now approached again the Feast of the Passover, which 
 occurred in April. There had been three of these annual 
 feasts during the public career of Jesus ; and he had not 
 failed to be present in Jerusalem at any of them, besides 
 going up in the autumn of the previous year to the Feast 
 of the Tabernacles. His coming to these feasts was so 
 well known that the people speculated whether the known 
 purpose of the Pharisees to compass his death would 
 induce him to break a punctilious habit. He came, how- 
 ever, but evidently depressed with a manifest foreboding 
 of his death. When Mary, whose brother Lazarus he 
 had restored to life, anointed his feet with a costly oint- 
 ment, he said it was for his burial. Many Jews believed 
 on him, on account of the miracle of Lazarus ; and, on his 
 riding into the city, they met him with palm-branches 
 and shoutings of Hosanna to the king of Israel/ The 
 people that had seen Lazarus resuscitated testified of the 
 fact ; and the Pharisees, in despair, exclaimed that they 
 prevailed not at all against him, and that the whole world 
 
 "John x , 22, 23. '• Jolin x., 39, 40. Cjohn xi., 7, 8. 
 •I John xi., 17, 43—45, .17, .|S, 55, 56. c John xii., 7, S. f John xii., 0, 12, 13. 
 
22 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 was gone after him. a This success did not reassure him. 
 The shadow of coming death broods over his spirit, and 
 gives an indescribable pathos to all his last acts and words. 
 He withdraws more and more to the society of his trusted 
 disciples. After the feast, while they were yet seated, he 
 rose, and, girding himself with a towel, with his own 
 hands washed his disciples' feet, — as he assured them, to 
 give them a lesson of humility and affectionate service. 6 
 He then proceeds to exhort them in those words of simple 
 and touching eloquence which have been cherished and 
 repeated with reverent gratitude, through eighteen centu- 
 ries, by generations of devout disciples, as the affectionate 
 expression of the divine compassion ; and finally, having 
 comforted and strengthened his followers by a memorable 
 prayer, he submits to the soldiers, who, under the author- 
 ity of the high priests, present themselves to his privacy, 
 and hurry him away to his hasty trial and terrible death 
 on the cross. 
 
 Here is related a career covering the recurrence of 
 three annual passovers, or more than two' whole years, 
 mainly passed in Judea and Jerusalem. It is said that 
 Jesus made three visits to Galilee in that time ; but it is 
 denied that his abode in Capernaum, where Matthew as- 
 serts that he lived, continued for many days.' 1 While in 
 Galilee, he did the miracles of making water into wine, of 
 healing the nobleman's son, of walking on the sea, and of 
 feeding the five thousand people with five loaves and two 
 fishes. Only the last of these was so public and indis- 
 putably supernatural as to coerce general attention ; but, 
 after them all, his own brothers did not believe his pro- 
 phetic pretensions. It is asserted that the Galileans, 
 who believed on him, believed only on the report of 
 miracles done in Judea f and Jerusalem. In the latter 
 region, it is not only related that he did many miracles, 
 which won converts, which were conceded by the people, 
 and which the high priests who conspired against him did 
 not deny, but that, with the utmost publicity and before 
 many reputable Jews, he healed the impotent man at the 
 pool -of Bethesda, restored sight to one born blind in the 
 neighborhood of the temple, and called Lazarus alive from 
 
 a John x i i . , 17-19. b John xiii., 1-10. c John xiv., xv., xvi., xvii., xviii. 
 , 12. ejohnvii., 5. f John i v., 45 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 23 
 
 his grave, after he had been buried four days, in Bethany. 
 Besides this, all his principal discourses, both with the 
 people and his disciples, were at Jerusalem. 
 
 Turning to the narrative of Matthew, the history of 
 Jesus appears to be as follows : He was born in Bethle- 
 hem in Judea, of Mary, betrothed but not yet married to 
 her husband Joseph.* Herod, the king of Judea, in- 
 structed by a Hebrew prophecy of his advent, had all 
 the children of Bethlehem murdered ; b and the parents of 
 the infant, under a warning in a dream, escaped into 
 Egypt, and remained till Herod's death. Returning after- 
 ward, on learning that his brother Archelaus had suc- 
 ceeded Herod, they quitted Judea finally, and went to 
 live in Nazareth in Galilee. There, the young child grew 
 to manhood. When John the Baptist appeared in the 
 wilderness of Jordan/ Jesus went to him and was bap- 
 tized; but, after John's imprisonment, he came into Gali- 
 lee, and changed his residence from Nazareth to Caper- 
 naum. 6 Then, he went about all Galilee, teaching in the 
 synagogues, announcing the kingdom of heaven at hand, 
 and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of dis- 
 ease among the people. His fame went abroad through- 
 out all Syria, and they brought to him a:// that were taken 
 with divers diseases and torments, and those that were 
 possessed of devils, and those that were lunatic, and 
 those that had the palsy ; and he healed them. And there 
 followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee and 
 from Decapolis and from Jerusalem and from Judea and 
 from beyond Jordan/ 
 
 Seeing these multitudes, and apparently to avoid them, 
 he went up into a mountain, and, seating himself, pro- 
 nounced to his disciples the immortal Sermon on the 
 Mount.' Coming down from the mountain, the multi- 
 tude again beset him ; and he cured a leprous man, that 
 from the crowd invoked his power. Then, he came to his 
 residence, Capernaum ; and a centurion besought his aid 
 for a servant sick of, the palsy, and he healed him at a 
 distance by his spoken word. He cured Peter's wife's 
 mother of a fever ; and, when it was even, they brought 
 many persons possessed of devils to him, and he cast' 1 
 
 • Matt, i., 18. •> Matt, ii , 16. Matt, ii., 13, 14, 21-23. * Matt, iii., 13. 
 
 • Matt iv„ 13. 'Matt, iv., 23-25. B Matt, v., 1, 2, 3. & Matt, v., 5, 13-16. 
 
24 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 them out, and healed all that were sick. Passing across 
 the Lake of Galilee, he was asleep while a storm arose 
 which terrified his disciples ; but, being aroused, he re- 
 buked the storm, and a calm succeeded.* Arrived on the 
 other side, he cast devils out of two possessed men ; and, 
 conjuring the dispossessed spirits into a herd of swine, 
 the herd rushed into the lake and were drowned. 15 Com- 
 ing back to his own city, he healed a palsied man, and 
 held a colloquy with certain Pharisees, also with some of 
 John's disciples. c While still speaking, a certain ruler 
 came to ask his intervention in behalf of his daughter, 
 who had apparently died ; and he went and took her by 
 the hand, and recalled her to life. On his way to the 
 ruler's house, a woman diseased with an issue of blood 
 obtained immediate relief by touching his garment as he 
 passed. d The fame of the raised daughter of the ruler 
 filled all the land. Going out of Capernaum, after having 
 given sight to two blind men who followed him, and cast 
 out a devil from a dumb man, he renewed his preaching 
 the kingdom of heaven and teaching. He healed also of 
 every sickness and every disease among the people, and 
 obtained the following of a multitude of people. 6 
 
 The next event in the career of Jesus, as told by Mat- 
 thew, is the sending out of the twelve apostles. No 
 other message is given them but to declare the kingdom 
 of heaven at hand. Besides this, they are to heal the 
 sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and cast out 
 devils. They are to make no provision for their support, 
 but to subsist upon the voluntary bounty of those who 
 receive them. In giving them this commission, he ex- 
 horts them to boldness, and assures them that their fidel- 
 ity shall be rewarded in the kingdom of heaven/ 
 
 After this sending out, Jesus himself went into the 
 cities apparently of Galilee, to renew his preaching; and 
 he is declared to have appealed for proofs of his Messiah- 
 ship to the facts generally known, that the blind receive 
 their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the 
 deaf hear, and the dead are raised.- He also spoke of 
 three Galilean cities, Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida, 
 as distinguished above others as the theatre of many and 
 
 • Matt, viii., 23-27. ''Matt, viii., 2S-34. c Matt, ix., 1-7, io-:3, 14-17. 
 d Matt, ix., 20-26. 'Matt ix , 35. 'Matt. x. E Matt, xi., 1, 5. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 25 
 
 conspicuous miracles." On a certain Sabbath, he justified 
 to the Pharisees the conduct of his disciples, in plucking 
 and eating the growing corn, b "and cured a man whose 
 hand was withered. The Pharisees deemed these acts 
 unlawful, and sought to destroy him ; and when Jesus dis- 
 appeared, to avoid their machinations, the multitudes fol- 
 lowed him, and he healed them all. d They brought to 
 him a man possessed of a devil and dumb ; and he cast 
 out the devil, and the patient's speech returned to 
 him. e He next went to the seaside, and from a ship 
 told the multitude on the shore many parables, among 
 them that of the sower and the seed, of the mustard- 
 seed, of the leaven, of the hidden treasure, of the 
 costly pearl, and of the net and the fish, all in illustration 
 of his dominant idea of the. kingdom of heaven. When 
 he had finished these parables, he returned from his 
 seclusion, apparently to his own city, Capernaum ; and 
 there he confessed that his prophetic claims had not been 
 honored by his fellow-citizens, and refrained from doing 
 many mighty works because of their want of faith in 
 him. f 
 
 Now occurred the cruel death of John the Baptist, 
 whom Herod had kept for some time in prison ; aad when 
 Jesus heard of it, apparently under apprehensions for his 
 own safety, he went by ship to a desert place apart, still 
 followed it is said by the multitudes, and still exercising 
 upon all their sick his wonderful gifts of healing. g In 
 this desert place, where there were five thousand peo- 
 ple unsupplicd with food following him, if not with 
 belief, with wonder, he performed the miracle of multiply- 
 ing the five loaves and two fishes, and came walking on 
 the sea to his disciples, who were in a ship, as told by 
 the writer calling himself John. Sending the multitude 
 away, Jesus came by ship to the east side of the Lake 
 of Galilee, and there healed by the touch of his garment 
 all the sick that came to him.' 1 Some Pharisees of Jeru- 
 salem now came to him ; and he held a controversy with 
 them about purification, insisting that defilement was a 
 thing of the heart, and not the neglect of outward wash- 
 
 1 Matt, xi., 20-23. b Matt, xii., 1, 2, 3-8. c Matt, xii., 10-13. 
 '1 M.itt. xii., 1 (, 15. e Matt, xii., 22. * Matt, xiii., 5.1, 57, 58. 
 ' M itt. xiv., 3, 10, 12, 13. l»Matt. xiv., 15-21, 25, 34-36. 
 
26 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 ing. After this, Jesus went into the coast of the old 
 Phoenician cities, and not only healed the daughter of a 
 Canaanite woman, but great numbers of lame, blind, 
 dumb, maimed, and many others, to the amazement of 
 the multitude. There, also, he repeated the miraculous 
 feeling of a large company, who had been three days 
 without food, upon seven loaves and a few little fishes." 
 
 We next find Jesus on the coast of Magdala, a city on 
 the Galilean lake, south of Capernaum. Some Pharisees 
 and Sadducees there asked him to show a sign; and he 
 told them no sign should be given them but the sign of 
 Jonas, the prophet. At Cesarea Philippi, in the upper 
 Jordan, he sounded his own disciples as to what they 
 deemed him to be ; and, after Peter had declared that he 
 was Christ, the son of the living God, 1 ' he announced to 
 them that he must go to Jerusalem, be killed there, and 
 be raised the third day. c Six days afterward, Jesus with- 
 drew into a mountain, with only Peter, James, and John ; 
 and there two angelic forms seemed to converse with 
 him, and a voice out of the clouds declared him to be 
 "my be'oved son." Returning to the multitude, he re- 
 stores sanity to a lunatic. Still tarrying in Galilee, Jesus 
 made his disciples exceeding sorrowful by renewing to 
 them the prophecy of his delivery into the hands of men, 
 his violent death, and his resurrection. He was, how- 
 ever, still at Capernaum, his own city, when the tribute 
 was levied, which, after some hesitation, he concluded to 
 pay. From this time, he appears to seek no longer the 
 multitude, and to confine his teaching to the little band 
 of his disciples. These he instructs, both by direct pre- 
 cept and by parable. d 
 
 Journeying now toward Jerusalem, he comes into the 
 Jordan wilderness ; and again the multitude resort to 
 him, and he heals their sick. The Pharisees accost him 
 with questions about divorce, and he gives to his disci- 
 ples his ideas of- the true relation of the sexes. The 
 coming to him of the young rich man gives him an occa- 
 sion to explain his ideas of the incompatibility of wealth 
 and the kingdom of heaven. He tells also the parable 
 of the laborers in the vineyard/ Still going toward Jeru- 
 
 nMatt. xv., 17-20, 21-30, 37, 39. bMatt. xvi., 4, 13, 16. c Matt, xvi., 21. 
 dMatt. xvii., i-8, 14, iS, 22-27. c Matt, xix., 1-12, 16-30. ''Matt, xx., 1-16. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 2J 
 
 salem, the foreboding of his death growing stronger, he 
 again, in the most direct and intelligible language, tells 
 the disciples of his crucifixion and of his resurrection. 
 Arrived at Jericho, two blind men importuned him as the 
 Son of David to open their eyes ; and he touched them, 
 and their sight came to them. a At Bethpage, he orders 
 an ass to be taken ; and, being placed thereon, he rides 
 into the holy city, the company of disciples casting their 
 garments and branches of palms under the feet of the 
 animal, and shouting, "Blessed is he that cometh in the 
 name of the Lord!" Then immediately followed the 
 driving out of the money-changers and sellers of victims 
 from the temple, which the Pharisees, though sore dis- 
 pleased, could not resent ; for the very children kept up 
 the cry with which his disciples had entered the city, 
 " Hosanna to the Son of David / " b Jesus himself took 
 no timid or apologetic course, but boldly proclaimed him- 
 self the Son of God, about to establish the kingdom of 
 heaven on earth, and offering its grace and glory to the 
 descendants of Israel first, but determined to reject Israel 
 and give the kingdom to the Gentiles, if its new king 
 were rejected. These declarations he covered in the 
 parables of the man and his two sons, of the householder 
 and the husbandmen, and of the king's marriage feast; 
 but the Pharisees saw the implications clearly enough to 
 be greatly incensed. They, however, first sought to 
 lessen his influence with the multitude by perplexing him 
 with difficult questions, which he not only triumphantly 
 answered, but, in his turn, plied them with questions 
 which they were not able to answer. d Then, he launched 
 against them that terrible invective in the twenty-third 
 chapter of Matthew, perhaps never equalled in severity in 
 any known human speech, in which he denounced the 
 men, whose claim to sit in Moses' seat he had acknowl- 
 edged, as hypocrites, oppressors, extortioners, murderers, 
 children of hell, a generation of vipers destined to damna- 
 tion. When his disciples came to him after the oration, 
 he told them of the destruction of the temple, and, in 
 answer to their importunity, explained the future events 
 which they were to consider signs of the destruction of 
 
 "Malt, xx., 17-19, 30-34. •> Matt, xxi., 1-11, 12-16. c-.Malt. xxi., 2S-41. 
 'I Matt, xxii., 1-1.), 15-46. <• Matt, xxiii. 
 
28 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Jerusalem, of his own coming, and of the end of the 
 world ; asseverating that that generation should not pass 
 till all these things should be fulfilled, and adding that, 
 though heaven and earth should pass away, that declara- 
 tion of his should stand." Rising into that allegorical 
 treatment which seemed the confirmed habit of his mind, 
 he went on to depict the coming of the Son of Man 
 as Judge, in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, 
 and of % the lord and the servants intrusted with his 
 money ; and declared everlasting life the reward of those 
 who had ministered to him and to his followers, and ever- 
 lasting punishment the fate of those who had rejected 
 and neglected them. b 
 
 During these last few days, it seemed to have been the 
 habit of Jesus to withdraw for the night to one of the out- 
 lying villages, generally to Bethany, where Mary and 
 Martha lived; but, though the anointing by the former 
 is told substantially as by John, the fact that she was a 
 sister of Lazarus, and that he had died and was called out 
 of his grave alive by Jesus in the presence of a concourse 
 of sympathizing visitors, on one of those very days that 
 preceded the arrest of Jesus, is strangely omitted by 
 Matthew, as it is also by Mark and Luke. Indeed, the 
 latter intimates that the woman who in the house of 
 Simon anointed Jesus' feet with precious ointment was a 
 disreputable person, whose character Jesus, if he were a 
 prophet, ought to have known. d 
 
 The eating of the passover with his disciples ; the lonely 
 and ejaculatory prayer in Gethsemane, so different from 
 the fervent and long prayer reported by John ; and the 
 coming of the officers of the law, guided by the treacherous 
 Judas, follow, and the hasty trial and public crucifixion 
 close the scene. The incidents of the life of Jesus as told 
 by Mark are substantially the same. The variances in the 
 Third Gospel need not now be considered. 
 
 The first impression which these narratives, including 
 the Fourth Gospel, make upon the sincere mind, is of 
 their unreliability as data of authentic history. There is 
 in the telling of these stupendous events such an absence 
 of detail as to time and place as would create doubt as to 
 alleged occurrences in themselves less improbable. Then 
 
 » Matt. xxiv. I' Mai;, xxv. c Matt, xxvi., 6-13. <1 Luke vii., 39. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 20, 
 
 how can we reconcile the statements made in one place 
 with what, with equal positiveness, is affirmed in another ? 
 Let a few examples of this inconsistency be cited. How 
 could a man have gone about all the cities of Galilee, 
 followed by a multitude from Galilee, Decapolis, Jeru- 
 salem, and Judea, and from beyond Jordan, and healed 
 all the sick, cured all the deaf, blind, and lunatic, and 
 in one or two instances restored the dead to life, the 
 fame of such miracles extending through Syria, and yet 
 his own brothers, as John states, have remained without 
 faith in his prophetic pretensions ? How could the people 
 of the city where he lived, and where such mighty works 
 had been done, have contemptuously rejected him? If 
 Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region round about 
 Jordan betook themselves to John the Baptist, and re- 
 ceived his baptism confessing their sins, as Matthew 
 declared, how could Jesus have afterward asked the 
 Pharisees in Jerusalem, "Why then did ye not believe in 
 John the Baptist " ? In what age of the world and among 
 what people could a man have been shamefully crucified by 
 the civil government under the accusation of the ecclesi- 
 astical authority, and with the fierce concurrence of the 
 populace, who had done such works as were by either 
 of these writers ascribed to Jesus ? 
 
 There seems to have been in all the ages, beginning 
 with the apostolic times, a sweeping and impatient scepti- 
 cism, that upon these or some other grounds has denied 
 the historic existence of Jesus, and has insisted that his 
 life, character, and works, as handed down by tradition, 
 are the creation of the fervid imagination of the early 
 Christians. Such a doubt, however, seems to have been 
 pushed beyond the verge of reason. 
 
 That there was manifested in the world, somewhere 
 about the beginning of the present era, a faith for which 
 martyrs endured persecution and death, and, if not posi- 
 tively new conceptions of duty, new sanctions for and an 
 increased devotion to virtue, is accredited by records left 
 in literature and secular history, and by such monuments 
 of a tidal wave of world-enthusiasm as the Christian 
 Church, with what human genius under a devout impulse 
 has done in art and architecture to make it and its teach- 
 ings impressive. There is no great enlightenment of the 
 
3<D OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 race, no forward starting in the movement of civilization, 
 no incursion of great ideas that have not been due to the 
 advent of some man of transcendent genius. 
 
 The French astronomer, Leverrier, predicated the exist- 
 ence of the planet Neptune upon certain irregularities in 
 the motions of Uranus ; and not only its existence, but 
 also its probable place in its orbit, its distance, and its 
 mass. The appearance of the conjectured body in the 
 place assigned to it, and its observed motions, fully con- 
 finned the a priori conclusions of science. In the uncer- 
 tainty of tradition, one famous figure stands conspicuous 
 and assured in the very age to which the marvellous 
 career of Jesus is assigned, — that is, Paul of Tarsus, the 
 zealous missionary of a new faith that has nearly con- 
 quered the world, the mould of whose mind and character 
 in his still extant letters literature preserves. The most 
 obvious fact about Paul is that he was surcharged and 
 saturated with an immense admiration and deference for 
 a person whom he called the Lord, Jesus Christ. How 
 largely this person was ideal, how few reminiscences he 
 had of his actual sayings and deeds while he lived, Paul 
 himself most distinctly discloses. But the ideal points to 
 an actual, the affection and reverence to a veritable ob- 
 ject ; and we have no more reason to deny the existence 
 of Jesus, and make him to Paul what Egeria was to Numa 
 or Jehovah to Moses, than to conclude that Socrates was 
 the venerable daemon in whose name Plato and Xeno- 
 phon taught philosophy to the Athenians. 
 
 But there is another unquestionably historic personage in 
 the very position to have been powerfully affected by such 
 a character as Jesus : Josephus, whose writings are still 
 extant. He was a man of evident probity. He lived in 
 Galilee a few years after Jesus, and wrote a history, giving 
 a minute account of the prominent personages and events 
 of his age. He is nearly silent about Jesus; for the only 
 direct notice of the great prophet now found in his works 
 is believed to be an interpolation, and is altogether inade- 
 quate to the impression Jesus must have made on his 
 times, if he was the widely known miracle-worker followed 
 by crowds through all the cities of Galilee, as told by the 
 synoptics, or the eloquent disputant at Jerusalem, who 
 raised the dead to life and gained converts among the 
 priesthood and rulers, as told in the Fourth Gospel. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 3 1 
 
 What the conditions require is a Jesus that shall win 
 the faith of Paul, but not of such commanding power as 
 to disturb the candid indifference of Josephus. To be 
 still more precise, there is demanded a Jesus whom Paul 
 shall first recognize only as an impostor and blasphemer 
 to be persecuted, but who shall be able to win the re- 
 spect, admiration, and life-long devotion of his better sen- 
 timents and better instructed mind. 
 
 Asking after this personage, whose light gleams 
 through the ages, who and what manner of person 
 he was, there are some strong grounds for maintaining 
 that his proportions exceeded all the conceptions of him 
 held by his disciples ; that, as he was an apparent enigma 
 to them while he lived with them, — they always mistaking 
 his spirit and misapprehending his language, — so neces- 
 sarily, after his death, they could but travesty a character 
 and career wholly above their comprehension. To carry 
 this method to its logical result, however, is to deprive the 
 human life of Jesus of all historic reality, and in idealiz- 
 ing to lose his personality. If we may consider him better 
 and greater than the words he is said to have spoken and 
 the acts he is said to have done, we create him from our 
 ideas, and, instead of a normal place and office in human 
 history, he becomes an ever-enlarging influence running 
 through history, toward which all progress tends. Paul 
 betrays mental tendencies toward such a conception of 
 the Christ, and it largely affects the theologic philosophy 
 of modern Christianity. An ideal of excellence and wis- 
 dom separated from all that men have believed of Jesus 
 is a phenomenon difficult to account for, since nothing 
 can be found in the world except that conception itself ; 
 and the basis of that conception must be the evangelical 
 tradition of Jesus, however freely it may have been han- 
 dled, and however much its grossness and imperfection 
 may have been tempered by devout fancy. 
 
 It may on the whole be safely affirmed that what the 
 gospel histories, that are really histories, the Apostles 
 and the early Church all concur in imputing to Jesus, 
 formed a part of his faith and philosophy, and that, when 
 these sources of testimony do not concur in any state- 
 ment with reference to his thought or deeds, that state- 
 ment is not historically verified. 
 
32 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 We come back then to these narratives, from the ne- 
 cessity of the case, and accept them with all their inac- 
 curacies, all their indefiniteness, their extravagances of 
 statement, their irreconcilable details, not to speak of 
 the coolness with which they assert things in themselves 
 incredible as the only historical data we have of the life 
 of Jesus. 
 
 Is the narrative called John's Gospel to be included in 
 this category ? To exclude it relieves our inquiry of the 
 chief difficulty. The career of Jesus, as sketched by the 
 writers now known as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, had for 
 its theatre Galilee, with occasional excursions into the 
 Jordan wilderness, across the lakes of Gennesaret to the 
 other side, and northward and eastward to the borders of 
 Phoenicia. He goes to Judea and Jerusalem only to fulfil 
 the prophecies that declare that he must be rejected of 
 his nation and crucified. John, on the other hand, gives 
 us a life of more than two years passed mainly in Jerusa- 
 lem and Judea, with three excursions into Galilee during 
 that time. The synoptics declare that Jesus went through 
 all the cities of Galilee, healing all manner of sickness and 
 disease, restoring the blind to sight, restoring the lame 
 to wholeness, casting out devils, and raising the dead. 
 Besides this assertion of miracle-working in a comprehen- 
 sive way, — boldly challenged by himself as proof of his 
 divine mission, and acknowledged by his enemies, — there 
 are given in detail, for nearly every day of his public 
 preaching, individual cases of supernatural power put 
 forth by him, including two cases of the restoration to 
 life of persons who were believed to have died. All this 
 occurs in Galilee, or outside of Judea. Approaching the 
 latter country, his miraculous power seems to pass from 
 him with the healing of the two blind men at Jericho, 
 unless we give credit to the story told only by Luke of the 
 cure of the servant Malchus, whom a disciple had mutilated 
 with a sword at the time of the sudden arrest of Jesus. 
 He not only does no miracle in Jerusalem, where of all the 
 places it was desirable that he should work divine works 
 to show his divine origin, but, when asked to show a sign, 
 he says emphatically that no sign should be given to that 
 wicked generation but the sign of his own resurrection. 
 
 John enumerates but two miracles done by Jesus in 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 33 
 
 Galilee, but afterward details two others, four in all,' and 
 asserts that the Galileans received him as a prophet on 
 the occasion of his returning to them from Jerusalem, 
 hearing of the miracles he had done in Jerusalem and 
 Judea. On the other hand, John declares that many- 
 persons believed on Jesus at his first going to Jerusalem 
 to the passover, when they saw the miracles he did there. 
 And he enumerates and particularly describes the heal- 
 ing of the impotent man, the restoration of sight to the 
 man born blind, and the raising from the dead of Lazarus, 
 as done in the presence of many Jews, and well known to 
 all the people of Jerusalem. 
 
 But it is apprehended that there are few candid and 
 well-instructed believers in Jesus, who will not confess 
 that, while they defer to the veracity of the Christian 
 Scriptures so unreservedly as to accept as credible the 
 account of the miracles in all the Gospels, they feel em- 
 barrassed by this demand upon their faith. The story of 
 the miracles they will acknowledge, so far from being 
 the ground of their faith in Jesus, or even helping 
 toward it, is the weak point in the case, the part of the 
 doctrine to be apologized for and explained. Had the 
 miracles been done in the presence of the people of 
 Galilee or of Judea, or were the historic evidence of their 
 having been done indubitable, they would powerfully sup- 
 port the supernatural pretensions of Jesus. But, coming 
 to us in the very records that avouch their improbability, 
 they compromise the character of Jesus, just as it would 
 compromise the character of Socrates, if all the authentic 
 biography we had of him narrated that he talked with 
 the devil on the top of the Acropolis; just as the legend 
 of Mohammed riding through the air to Jerusalem closes 
 our minds to the wisdom of much that he said and wrote. 
 So that a judgment on the two distinct biographies of 
 Jesus contained in the Gospels, based upon the question 
 of miracles alone, would incline to favor the Johannic 
 rather than the synoptic, because the wholesale healing 
 of every manner of sickness throughout populous Galilee, 
 in the latter, shrinks in the former to four miracles in 
 Galilee and three in the vicinity of Jerusalem. But dis- 
 crepancies of a more serious kind turn the scale of deci- 
 sion quite to the other side, — discrepancies involving the 
 
34 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 presentation of two distinct personalities, holding different 
 ideas, possessing different intellectual and moral traits, 
 and leading different careers in different countries. 
 
 Matthew says the Sermon on the Mount and all the 
 principal parables were spoken in Galilee, where also 
 Jesus preached and explained in all the synagogues his 
 characteristic doctrine of the kingdom of heaven. At 
 Jerusalem, indeed, he is brought in contact with the Phar- 
 isees ; but the controversy is not of his seeking. He an- 
 swers their questions; but he turns from them to address 
 his disciples and the multitude that follow him, and never 
 lays aside his allegoric method nor forgets the great bur- 
 den of his prophecy, the kingdom of heaven. John gives 
 us no Sermon on the Mount, no parables, no special gospel 
 of a kingdom of heaven, but exhibits Jesus holding long 
 disputations with the Pharisees in the temple, which were 
 succeeded by pathetic and confidential conversations with 
 his disciples interrupted by his arrest and trial. 
 
 How different as a dramatic representation is the Jesus 
 of John from the Jesus of the other Gospels is manifest at 
 the most cursor)- glance. Mention has been made of the 
 disposition of Jesus, as represented in the synoptics, to 
 conceal his didactic purpose under figures and imagery, — 
 a disposition which seems as characteristic of his intellect 
 as the dialectic method was characteristic of the intellect 
 of Paul. It was truly said of him that without a parable 
 spake he not unto them. In all but his later conversa- 
 tions there is but little self-assertion : he stands behind 
 his message. His word of wisdom strikes direct to the 
 human reason and conscience, and wins its sway over both 
 by its intrinsic truth rather than by authority. Against 
 all traditions, even the tradition of the fundamental law of 
 the tables, he opposes the reasonableness of a deeper or 
 larger law upon the simple authority of I say unto yon. 
 There was a certain vigor, clearness, comprehensiveness 
 of thought, admirably embodied in language that was 
 direct, and forms of expression that had the relish of wit, 
 which made his answers so effective, and gave rise to 
 the saying of his time, Never man spake like this man. 
 In this later age, the sovereign man, the man who com- 
 mands a hearing and gains adherents, is the man who 
 with pen or tongue can most aptly embody the domi- 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 35 
 
 nant thought, the intellectual tendency of his age. In 
 the age of Jesus, as in the age of Socrates, men were 
 not allowed the deliberation of studied and premeditated 
 speech. The great man was challenged as he walked ; 
 and he must solve the riddle of life to the first asker, 
 and from his own resources, without time to consult 
 an oracle or a volume, or to verify his conjectures by the 
 authority of a great name. On a priori grounds, it may 
 be fairly inferred that the influence which Jesus gained 
 among his contemporaries was more due to those traits 
 of genius and intellect by which he responded to the 
 demand of his time for a wise word, than to any thauma- 
 turgic works by which he impressed their devout imagi- 
 nations. 
 
 One can but be struck with the absence of all these 
 intellectual traits in what John gives us of Jesus' conver- 
 sations. He talks much, he multiplies words, often en- 
 feebling and obscuring some obvious idea. It is difficult 
 to disenchant words that have been reverently repeated 
 by thousands of devout lips through eighteen centuries of 
 the glamour of inspiration they have drawn from deeply 
 moved souls. If that could be done, we should ask 
 ourselves whether there were real eloquence in those 
 formally balanced sentences, whether there was any log- 
 ical order in those sequences only of sound, whether 
 details often trivial did not mar the simple dignity of 
 the thought, and whether the inferences and conclusions, 
 connected with the antecedent statement by a for or a 
 wherefore, did not introduce elements of strangeness and 
 confusion. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, in his God and the Bible, while cling- 
 ing to the Gospel of John as the truest indication of the 
 mind of Jesus, admits that its historical data are nearly 
 valueless, and contends that, though the form and style of 
 the discourses imputed to Jesus in that Gospel are those 
 of the Greek redactor who wrote the book, the ideas — 
 elaborated and often misunderstood by the editor, and 
 intermixed with his own irrelevant and unauthorized 
 comments — are logia, or sayings, of Jesus reported by 
 his confidential disciple John. 
 
 Why does Mr. Arnold cling to his prepossession against 
 the conclusions of the most careful English and German 
 
36 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 scholars ? Simply to give effect to the tradition, first 
 found in the so-called Canon of Muratori, dating about 
 A.D. 175, in this form : "The fourth of the Gospels is by 
 the disciple John. He was being pressed by his fellow 
 disciples and bishops; and he said : Fast with me this day 
 and for three clays, and whatsoever shall have been revealed 
 to each one of us let us relate to the rest. In the same 
 night, it was revealed to the apostle Andrew that John 
 should write the whole in his own name, and that all the rest 
 should revise it." Clement of Alexandria, who wrote 
 later, says: "John last, aware that in the other Gospels 
 were declared things of the flesh and blood, being moved 
 thereto by his acquaintances, and being inspired by the 
 Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel." 
 
 Must the good sense and good scholarship of Christen- 
 dom surrender themselves without question to this unau- 
 thenticated fragment of an idle legend ? What is more 
 natural than that these ancient writers should be easily 
 persuaded by the dramatic illusion, under which the 
 writer of the Fourth Gospel succeeded in veiling his 
 dogmatic purpose? In an illiterate age, when the very 
 data of history were unattainable, the fervid admiration 
 of a speculative and mystic convert might easily impute 
 marvellous deeds as well as the subtilties of his own 
 thought to Jesus as a part of his history and doctrine. 
 How easy it is already to idealize the characters and 
 actions of Washington and of Napoleon, and that, too, in 
 an enlightened age, and when all historical documents 
 .are so carefully recorded and so critically studied ! 
 
 Even if the tradition be accepted as testimony, it gives 
 little countenance to Mr. Arnold's conclusion, that the 
 nucleus of the Johannic Gospel is the record of real say- 
 ings of Jesus preserved and disclosed by John. Why 
 should John, if he had such sayings in his memory, have 
 withheld them till his old age, and then made them 
 known, as it were, upon compulsion ? Was he not a wit- 
 ness of Jesus, under orders to tell among all nations 
 what his master had said? Why should a faithful wit- 
 ness of the truth have maintained silence, while all 
 manner of unauthorized volunteers, who knew nothing 
 at first hand, were filling the young Church with unedify- 
 ing gossip about the revered teacher whose memory he 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 37 
 
 loved ? Above all, why should the tried and tempted 
 and persecuted brethren in Asia, Africa, and Europe, be 
 kept from the strength and consolation which the touch- 
 ing and tender words of Jesus before his arrest would 
 have given them in their sufferings ? 
 
 While believing the tradition, Mr. Arnold in effect 
 repudiates it, when he acknowleges that a gospel, instead 
 of being written by John, dictated by the Spirit, and 
 revised by the survivors of the twelve apostles, has no 
 historic validity, is in its rhetorical form the composition 
 of a Greek scholar other than John, and is largely made 
 up of the comments and explanations of that scholar; 
 and that such sayings of Jesus as it contains are not in 
 the form or language that Jesus used. Why should John 
 and Andrew have given their sanction to the minutely 
 told story of the raising of Lazarus, which, if Mr. Arnold 
 is correct, they must have known to be a pure invention ? 
 
 Finally, the tradition itself virtually asserts that the 
 Fourth Gospel is not a veritable narrative of incidents in 
 the life of Jesus, held to old age in the memory of one of 
 his three confidential friends, but the fruit of a special 
 spiritual revelation. John is not represented as sitting 
 down to recall what he could of Jesus' sayings and acts, 
 but as proposing that he and his fellow-disciples shall fast 
 three days, and see what after that would be revealed to 
 them. The book was such revelation. Clement confirms 
 this in saying, " In the other Gospels were declared things 
 of flesh and blood." They alone were the real " jlesh-and- 
 blood" life of Jesus, — his actual life. "John, inspired by 
 the Spirit, wrote a spiritual life," or, to use terms of 
 modern significance, an idealized life of Jesus. Not only 
 is this the popular significance of the contrasted phrases 
 flesh and blood and spiritual, but, singularly enough, al- 
 most similar contrasted phrases are used in the Third 
 Gospel in the same sense, wherein Jesus, after his resur- 
 rection, is made to say, " It is I myself," my flesh and 
 bones, and not a spirit/ 1 
 
 So that the oldest tradition about the Fourth Gospel is 
 that it is not an actual, but an ideal life of Jesus, as these 
 chapters maintain. True, it attributes the authorship by 
 implication to John, the apostle ; but Mr. Arnold himself 
 
$8 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 acknowledges that that apostle had neither the talent nor 
 culture for such a work, while the prologue and the First 
 Epistle, evidently the author's own achievement, show 
 that such a creation lay within the scope of his powers. 
 
 In the Jesus of John, we find no love or even notice 
 of the works of nature, no doctrine of the blessedness of 
 poverty nor of the incompatibility of wealth with the order 
 of the kingdom ; no doctrine of meekness, non-resistance 
 and self-denial, or of giving all possessions to the poor ; 
 no superiority to the narrow ideas of the Hebrew cultus. 
 But we do find Jesus standing within those Hebrew ideas, 
 and urging upon the Jews that more liberal interpretation 
 of the national prophecies which would permit the recog- 
 nition of himself as the Messiah therein foreshadowed. 
 We find a doctrine of regeneration by baptism of water, 
 of Jesus purchasing salvation for men by his death, of 
 the Holy Ghost and his office and relations ; and exhorta- 
 tions to love as the great test of genuine discipleship, 
 always coupled and contrasted, however, with an intima- 
 tion, that death, condemnation, and darkness are the doom 
 of those who reject the grace offered to them in Jesus. 
 The book is redolent of the controversies of the Church 
 that sprang up in the lifetime of disciples that had seen 
 Jesus ; and the unmistakable peculiarity of style and 
 mode of thought characterizing the three Epistles at- 
 tributed to John show that it has with them a common 
 authorship. It is the work of a man who, putting his 
 thought of Jesus into a dramatic form, is not able to give 
 him or any other character a distinct personality, but 
 makes him repeat the writer's own sentiments in lan- 
 guage that betrays their origin ; for no matter who 
 speaks, Jesus, John the Baptist, or the disciples, one 
 and all express themselves in the unmistakable, mystical, 
 involved, and illogical dialect of the Greek convert, the 
 author. 
 
 The Jesus of John is an essentially different character 
 from the Jesus of the three other evangelists — as differ- 
 ent as is Paul, Moses, or Mohammed from him and from 
 each other. The sketches are alike, in that they portray 
 a person, who was reputed to be a Galilean, and the son 
 of Mary ; who was a master with twelve chief disciples, 
 though their names and identity are not agreed upon ; 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 39 
 
 who performed miraculous works, who allowed himself to 
 be called the Son of God, and claimed divine appointment 
 as a prophet, messiah, savior, and founder of a new order 
 on earth or in heaven ; who provoked the hostility of the 
 Jewish rulers, and was by their procurement put to death, 
 and was believed to have shown himself alive after death. 
 Here, the agreement ends. John's Jesus is wholly unlike 
 Matthew's in his intellectual traits, in his style of speech, 
 in the philosophy that he held, and the doctrines that he 
 taught, in all the principal incidents of his personal his- 
 tory, and in the very region of the earth, in which he 
 made himself known to his fellow-countrymen. 
 
 But the chief objection to the acceptance of the narra- 
 tive called John's, as historic, is that, according to it, the 
 arrest, condemnation, and crucifixion of Jesus are utterly 
 unaccountable. According to this narrative, Jesus had 
 been a very familiar figure in the streets of the sacred 
 city, and in the precincts of the temple for two or three 
 years. He had charmed a credulous and devout populace 
 with many conspicuous works of healing, and even, in one 
 instance, had raised from the dead an individual, who be- 
 came almost as popular with the multitude as himself. 
 He had interrupted the solemnities of the national wor- 
 ship by long discussions with the chief priests concerning 
 his own Messianic pretensions. In the main, those dis- 
 cussions had been on his part deferential toward their 
 legitimate authority to sit in Moses' seat as the civil and 
 ecclesiastical magistrates of the nation ; and only once, 
 in the bitterness of his spirit, had he declared explicitly 
 that they were the children of the devil. His most ques- 
 tionable proceeding, that of whipping the money-changers 
 from the temple, had happened years before, and had 
 been forgotten ; and the breach of the Sabbath, in healing 
 the blind man, had been condoned, — excused, as it was, by 
 many of the orthodox. He had fairly outlived his unpop- 
 ularity ; and the raising of Lazarus had effected so power- 
 ful a diversion in his favor, that his enemies confessed 
 they could make no headway against him, and that the 
 whole people seemed inclined to believe on him. And 
 yet, in the very flush of that popularity and success, the 
 evangelist surprises us with the recital, that Jesus was 
 beset by the police, captured without an attempted res- 
 
40 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 cue or the slightest demonstration of resistance on the 
 part of his friends and was carried away, condemned and 
 crucified, because that very populace, upon whom he had 
 made such a favorable impression, fiercely demanded his 
 death, after the executive power had strenuously sought 
 to effect his pardon and release ! The council of the 
 chief priests and elders, with some show of fairness, de- 
 liberated over his accusation, and arrived at the conclu- 
 sion, with no appearance of dissent, that he was worthy 
 of death ; although a large body of intelligent citizens, 
 some of whom may have sat in the council that con- 
 demned him, had been present a few days before, when 
 a man four days buried had come forth from the grave 
 alive at the invocation of the man put upon his trial, and 
 although it was generally believed in Jerusalem, at the 
 time of his arrest and trial, that he had done this stupen- 
 dous and beneficent miracle. If it is required to believe 
 that these things were done as a part of a supernatural 
 machinery, which brought about the death of Jesus for 
 foreordained heavenly ends, we are not required to con- 
 sider human probabilities. The possibilities of human 
 conduct, when ordained by the supernal powers, are infi- 
 nite. But, if human nature is substantially the same in 
 all ages, and human conduct is governed by intelligible 
 motives, then it is impossible to understand how the 
 death of Jesus was brought about under such conditions. 
 The Jewish people, who sat in the Sanhedrim, and who 
 composed the multitude that clamored for the crucifixion, 
 in fine who created the public opinion which made it 
 impossible for even the authority of the Roman governor 
 to effect the deliverance of the victim, must be con- 
 sidered to be no more sceptical and no less susceptible 
 to superstitious influences than are ordinary men. If it 
 had been believed that one of the prisoners put to trial 
 during the Reign of Terror, a few days before his trial, 
 had in the environs of Paris restored a dead man to life, 
 neither could the revolutionary tribunal have condemned 
 him, nor would the mob have permitted his execution. 
 It cannot be believed that there is a government so im- 
 pious, or a mob so cruel, or a horde of robbers or savages 
 so degraded, as not to be awed with reverence or para- 
 lyzed with terror by the very presence of one who had 
 shown himself capable of raising the dead to life. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 4 1 
 
 On the other hand, the mainly concurrent testimony of 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke, presents a perfectly probable 
 and intelligible explanation of the judicial murder of 
 Jesus. According to them, he was a Galilean, a dweller 
 in a remote and disreputable province. If he had been 
 born in Judea, it was during a visit of his mother, which 
 under no circumstances could give him a right to claim 
 that province as his country. He had passed his whole 
 lifetime in Galilee. Though a rumor of his miracles had 
 reached Jerusalem, and the ecclesiastical rulers had sent 
 a deputation down to that region to inquire about them, 
 the conclusion the messengers arrived at, that all the 
 miracle-working was by the power of Beelzebub, showed 
 that, in the inveterate prejudice of the orthodox Jews, 
 Jesus was less, rather than more, esteemed at Jerusalem 
 for these questionable practices. Heresies and fanati- 
 cisms had been no unusual phenomena of the times, and 
 Galilee had before been the theatre of them. Josephus 
 relates several popular religious and political outbreaks ; 
 and the learned Gamaliel recites, in the fifth chapter of 
 Acts, how Theudas and Judas of Galilee had successively 
 come forward with Messianic pretensions, and much 
 larger following than Jesus had, and had been brought 
 to nought. 
 
 At length, this unknown provincial fanatic, with a 
 feeble following of illiterate fishermen and women, not all 
 of them quite respectable, ventures to come to the sacred 
 city itself. His person is unknown, he has no friends in 
 the city and cannot even lodge there over night. He 
 may have done miracles in Galilee. He does none here. 
 Challenged to do them, he peremptorily declines. He 
 enters the city with a most offensive ovation, — a clamor 
 of the Galilean converts, mostly children, proclaiming 
 him the son of David coming in the name of the Lord. 
 Of course, the implication of this cry was revolutionary 
 in the extreme. It was a threat both to Ccesar and to 
 the High Priest and the rulers. What, to the astonished 
 Jews, must have looked like a mob, at once blasphemous 
 and fantastic, proceeded in open day to the temple itself, 
 where Jesus, armed with a whip, drove out the money- 
 changers and sellers of doves. When we consider how 
 little he had to do with the ceremonies of the national 
 
42 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 worship, that he was believed to have spoken contemptu- 
 ously of it and of its priesthood, and that the very practice 
 of selling victims for sacrifice was not only a necessary 
 and decent convenience for those worshippers who came 
 from a distance, but was specially sanctioned by the 
 written Hebrew law itself, the anger which this proceed- 
 ing aroused among the leading Jews becomes quite intel- 
 ligible. Jesus, however, was in no mood to let their 
 anger cool. His evident purpose in coming to Jerusalem 
 was to precipitate this controversy. He takes care of 
 his life and liberty by going out at night to find safe 
 lodgings in the country, only that he may declare to the 
 full the denunciation that had been for many days swel- 
 ling in his heart. 
 
 His next demonstration is in the temple itself, where 
 he chided the Pharisees for their rejection of John; told 
 against them the parable of the two sons, of the wicked 
 husbandmen and of the rejected wedding guest; and 
 wounded their self-love by a triumphant answer to all the 
 knotty points of legal casuistry, in which they sought to 
 entangle him. After they had thus been fairly put to the 
 worst, and had left him master of the situation, holding 
 the very temple itself, from which the people were wont 
 to receive in silence from their lips the authoritative ex- 
 positions of the will of God, Jesus launched against them 
 that masterly invective of the twenty-third chapter of 
 Matthew, unequalled for its severity in the literature of 
 the world. Of course, the whole city were on fire with 
 indignation and passion. Public sentiment turned de- 
 cisively against the Galilean reformer. His very disci- 
 ples forsook him ; and those who had come up from 
 a remote province to see their master take possession 
 of the throne of David, and give them honored seats on 
 his right hand and on his left, denied that they ever 
 knew him. For such a state of popular feeling, it is 
 easy to see that Matthew and his copyists give an ade- 
 quate reason ; and under that feeling, sweeping all before 
 it, it was perfectly easy for the Sanhedrim to get Jesus 
 arrested without any attempt at rescue, to get him con- 
 demned in a hasty and illegal way without a dissenting 
 vote of a single ruler, and even to draw the populace 
 around the Roman palace, to defeat by their fierce hatred 
 the avowed purpose of Pilate to release him. 
 
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE 43 
 
 Enough has been said in this preliminary chapter to 
 indicate why such historical data, as will be appealed to 
 in this discussion, will be taken exclusively from the Syn- 
 optic Gospels ; while the Fourth Gospel, an undoubtedly 
 genuine and legitimate literary creation of the awakened 
 thought of the first and second centuries, will be some- 
 times cited, as a drama, poem, or review might be to-day, 
 as giving a better exposition of an historical situation or 
 character than the annalists, who had more literally fol- 
 lowed the incidents or the documents. In presenting in 
 detail the ideas of Jesus, further confirmation will be 
 found of the position already taken, while a more careful 
 critique of the Fourth Gospel itself, as indicating that 
 culture and tendency which has adapted Christianity to 
 expanding civilization, will be added to complete the 
 whole subject. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS. 
 
 " Whoever can read the New Testament with a fresh eye must be struck 
 with the prominence everywhere of the Messianic idea. It seems to be the 
 ideal framework of the whole, — of history, parable, dialogue, of Pauline 
 reasoning, of apocalyptic visions. 'Art thou he that should come ? ' This 
 question gives the ideal standard by which on all hands, and on the part of 
 disciples,"relations, enemies, of Saul the persecutor and Paul the apostle, 
 the person and pretensions of Christ are to be tried. His birth, his acts, his 
 sufferings, are so disposed as to fulfil what was spoken by the prophets, so 
 that the whole programme of his life would seem to have pre-existed in the 
 national imagination." — James Martineau. 
 
 "The Messianic faith is the soul of the entire New Testament, giving 
 unity to the Gospels, Epistles, and Apocalypse, and making Christianity 
 a vital organism." — Francis E. Abbot. 
 
 Every great historical personage, to be understood, 
 must be studied in connection with his dominant idea. 
 While a man puts into his dominant idea a certain 
 force and quality of his own genius, it in turn reacts 
 upon and modifies his character. No one would under- 
 take to comprehend the distinctive character of Luther, 
 without making himself acquainted with the controversy 
 into which Christendom was drawn between him and the 
 Pope, and with the protest made in the interest of a 
 reformed religious faith against the doctrines and prac- 
 tices of the Catholic Church. Copernicus, Laplace, and 
 Newton without their investigations and discoveries in 
 reference to the mechanism of the celestial bodies, Shak- 
 spere without his dramas, Beethoven without his music, 
 Wilberforce and Garrison without the abolition of slavery, 
 would be characters of no historical significance and of 
 no definite identification. 
 
 The dominant idea of Jesus, by which all his ideas are 
 to be examined and entertained, and by which his charac- 
 ter and pretensions are to be estimated, was his doctrine 
 of the kingdom of heaven. Not to understand, at least in 
 some general way, what his system was of a new order of 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 45 
 
 things to begin in the world, known to his thought as the 
 kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, is not to under- 
 stand his true function in history ; and until this central 
 idea of his, around which was grouped all that he said 
 and taught, is appreciated, only confusion and incertitude 
 will be attained in trying to master his system of ethics, 
 or his theory of the future destiny of the world and of 
 mankind, or to properly determine the order of being to 
 which he belonged. 
 
 Of all the words recorded by Matthew as having been 
 uttered by Jesus in his lifetime, more than one-fourth are 
 directly upon the subject of the kingdom of heaven ; and 
 -much of what is original and peculiar in his ethical teach- 
 ing can only be understood or made capable of practice, 
 by accepting it as the law, not of the human society of 
 his time or of our time, but of that new order which he 
 believed himself about to inaugurate in the place of such 
 society. When it is considered how much of the conver- 
 sation imputed to him related to incidents of his daily 
 experience, how much of it was in answer to persons inter- 
 rogating him upon subjects prominent in their thought, 
 rather than in his, it becomes more apparent how sponta- 
 neously his mind reverted to the theme which seemed to 
 possess and inspire it. 
 
 Of this doctrine of the kingdom of heaven, the earliest 
 writers of the Gospels have more to say than the later. 
 It almost disappears from the narrative of John. When 
 the time had passed, plainly indicated by Jesus for the 
 kingdom of heaven to begin, with unmistakable signs of 
 great physical catastrophes, the believers naturally began 
 to accommodate their faith to a scheme of things allowing 
 a greater security, and a longer endurance of the old order 
 of the world, and to lay less stress upon what related 
 to the coming kingdom of heaven. The expectation re- 
 mained, but it was less vivid ; and cares for other and 
 urgent things diminished its pressure upon attention. 
 As all the narratives of the evangelists are supposed to 
 have been written, after the expectation, created by the 
 words of Jesus of a change, which should put the secular 
 power more into the hands of believers, had been weak- 
 ened by frequent disappointments and delays, it is proba 
 ble that those narratives contain less rather than more of 
 what Jesus actually said relating to his dominant idea. 
 
46 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 When Jesus left the privacy of his humble life as an 
 artisan and went out among his countrymen in the capa- 
 city of a prophet, this is what he is reported to have said, 
 not in one place or at one time, but as the comprehensive 
 summary of what he said in all places and at all times : 
 " Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." After- 
 ward it is said, he went about all Galilee, teaching in 
 their synagogues, healing diseases indeed, but preaching 
 the gospel or good news of the kingdom, i.e., of heaven* 
 When he taught his disciples apart upon the mountain, 
 his opening declaration was that the poor shall possess 
 the kingdom of heaven. b The beatitudes which follow 
 all relate to reward and compensation in heaven and in 
 the heavenly state, oftener called kingdom. Continuing 
 the same discourse, he speaks of ranks of eminence in the 
 kingdom of heaven, of the standard of rectitude which 
 will qualify to be received into it. c In the prayer he dic- 
 tated for use by his disciples, the petition for the coming 
 of the kingdom of God is the first and chief petition.' 1 
 The abstention from anger, the reconciliation of all enmi- 
 ties, no matter if purely the fault of another, the termina- 
 tion of all controversies are required; the obliteration, if 
 necessary, by excision, of all lustful desires, the absolute 
 forgiveness of injuries, the meeting of all exaction and 
 extortion and affront by concession and courtesy, an abso- 
 lute carelessness of all that concerns the sustenance of 
 life, an omission of all thought and foresight, are de- 
 manded, on the ground, that in the kingdom of heaven 
 there is ample reward for all suffering, ample compensa- 
 tion for all loss and wrong, and in the large economy of 
 God all the physical wants are amply provided for. The 
 kingdom of heaven, however, is not for the crowd. Jesus 
 preached no doctrine of the virtue of the people ; and his 
 kingdom was not open for the masses, whom revolutions 
 and seditions have always nattered. The way into it was 
 by a narrow gate, which only a few found, while a broad 
 road led to destruction/ Many even of his nominal dis- 
 ciples would be driven from its portals as workers of 
 iniquity, and in the near end the rains, floods, and winds, 
 
 a Matt. iv., 24 ; ix.,35; Mark i., 21, 39; Luke iv., 15, 43, 44. 
 
 bMatt. v., 3. cMatt. v., 19, 20. dMatt. v i., 10. 
 
 eMatt. v., vi. f Matt, vii., 13, 14. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 47 
 
 emblems of some secular catastrophe, would sweep to their 
 final fall all who had listened to his words without obey- 
 ing them. a 
 
 When the Roman centurion, whose servant was sick, 
 told Jesus, that he might cure the invalid without incur- 
 ring the trouble of a personal visit, he was so pleased at 
 such an exhibition of faith, that he declared that strangers 
 and aliens from the East and West should come and sit 
 with the patriarchs in the kingdom of heaven, while the 
 children of the kingdom should be thrust into the outer 
 darkness. 1 ' Again, when he saw multitudes thronging to 
 his proclamation of the kingdom, he wished for more 
 helpers to proclaim it, c and, fired with this thought, imme- 
 diately afterward commissioned his twelve chief disciples, 
 and, besides giving them power to heal all kinds of dis- 
 ease, authorized them to declare only what had been the 
 burden of his own preaching, — "The kingdom of heaven is 
 at hand."* He gave them no other message. He told 
 them they need not meditate beforehand what they should 
 say, if brought before the civil tribunals as seditious per- 
 sons." He told them they should be ridiculed, hated, and 
 persecuted ; that they must not resist, but flee from city 
 to city, always bearing the proclamation of the impending 
 heavenly order. And he comforted them with the assur- 
 ance that their heavenly Father would care for them, and, 
 if slain in his cause, would recognize and honor them, 
 when his kingdom was established ; and he asserted that, 
 in their fleeing from persecution from city to city, as ad- 
 vised, they should not have gone over the cities of Israel 
 before the Son of Man should come, — that is, in his king- 
 dom/ This title, Son of Man, by which he began to des- 
 ignate himself, was used by the prophet Ezekiel through- 
 out his prophetic rhapsody as the medium by which 
 Jehovah communicated in vision his purposes. It was 
 also used by Daniel, a prophet then and ever since held 
 in highest repute, because, more definitely than any of 
 his class, he is believed to have possessed the power of 
 soothsaying, always a most fascinating talent, to have fore- 
 told with rare precision the successive ascendency and 
 destruction of the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman 
 
 Man. vii., 2i-2.?, 2.}, 27. 
 
 1) Matt, vii 
 
 i., 11. 
 
 cMatt. ix., 36-3S. 
 
 'i Matt. >.., 7. • Matt. 
 
 x., 17-19. 
 
 1 Matt 
 
 x., 22, 23, 26-33. 
 
48 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESTS 
 
 empires, and to have stated in some cabalistic and insolu- 
 ble figures the term of the whole present order of the 
 world. Daniel, however, does not mean by Son of Man 
 a prophet, but some angelic, immortal, and divine being, 
 greatly honored by the Ancient of Days, and to whom 
 was given dominion and glory, an everlasting and inde- 
 structible kingdom over all nations and all languages. It 
 is difficult to determine in which sense Jesus used this 
 title ; and it may have been in both senses, and under the 
 belief that he was at the same time the true-sighted 
 prophet, to whom Jehovah communicated his purposes, 
 and the coming king, whose authority all nations were to 
 acknowledge. 
 
 The more Jesus talked with his disciples upon his in- 
 spiring theme, the loftier rose his confidence and enthu- 
 siasm. He told them not to expect peace and acquies- 
 cence, but dissensions, hatreds, wars, and martyrdoms." 
 They were not to be dismayed even by death itself. To 
 lose life in such a cause was to find it again in the coming 
 kingdom, in which even those who had given a disciple 
 a cup of water were not to be without their reward. b He 
 assured them that whosoever believed them believed him, 
 and that to take up the cross and follow him was the only 
 way to make themselves worthy of him. This so aptly 
 described the modes of thought by which the disciples of 
 the earlier centuries must have comforted and strength- 
 ened themselves under the martyrdoms and persecutions 
 of the Jews and of the Roman emperors, long after the 
 death of Jesus, that there is a strong suspicion that these 
 words, particularly this allusion to the cross, were injected 
 into the conversations of Jesus after the crucifixion. But 
 as this suspicion, carried into its details and its conse- 
 quences, as has already been shown, will rob us of nearly 
 all historic data concerning Jesus himself, it must be 
 repressed. 
 
 Jesus had already with fulness and detail unfolded his 
 ethical ideas in the hearing of his disciples. But the 
 principal apostles gave afterwards such lamentable exhibi- 
 tions of their utter misconception of his spirit and inca- 
 pacity to understand his philosophy, that he would only 
 have compromised himself by intrusting them with the 
 
 a Matt, x., 34, 39. b Matt, x., 41, 42. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 49 
 
 discretion of teaching them ; and their attempts on 
 several occasions to apply his principles and communi- 
 cate his doctrines had involved him in difficulties that 
 had tried his temper/ But any messenger could com- 
 municate the startling intelligence that the kingdom of 
 heaven was at Jiand, and that a catastrophe was impend- 
 ing over the human race, against which precautions that 
 required an amendment of character were processes alto- 
 gether too slow. Taken all together, this commissioning 
 of the apostles indicates a firm prepossession in the mind 
 of Jesus of a conflict between the order of the kingdom 
 of heaven and the secular order, internecine and irrepres- 
 sible, in which his personal friends were to be active 
 agents, and which was to end in the triumph of his 
 adherents, and their reward in that period in which they 
 lived. b 
 
 A short time after these events, Jesus declared to the 
 multitude about him that John Baptist, then awaiting 
 death in prison, was the last of the old prophets ; and that 
 with him terminated the old order ; and that, greatest as 
 he was of all prophets, the least in the kingdom of heaven 
 was greater than he ; and that from John's time till then 
 men are rushing into the kingdom of heaven and making 
 its blessedness their own by a kind of violence. As all 
 the qualification of the messengers seemed to be to have 
 tongues to tell the startling message, so, he said, all the 
 qualification of the listeners was to have ears to hear it/ 1 
 Remembering how the respectable and intelligent people, 
 who in his own home, Capernaum, and in the neighboring 
 cities, Chorazin and Bethsaida, had coldly disdained his 
 pretensions and the glories of his coming kingdom, he 
 declares that, in the day of judgment they shall be 
 brought down to hell. He blessed the simple ones, who 
 had been able to see what the wise and prudent over- 
 looked ; he invited to him the laborers and the oppressed, 
 and declared that all things were given to him of God, 
 and that he only had the true knowledge of God, and 
 could communicate it to whom he would. 1 
 
 When certain Pharisees attributed to demoniac agency 
 his manifest power to cast out devils, he assured them 
 
 "Matt, xv., i 6. >> Matt, x., 7-23. c Matt. xi. F 7-14. '1 Malt, xi., 15. 
 
 e Matt, xi., 20-24. f Matt, xi., 25-30. 
 
50 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 that Satan would not be likely to cast out himself, and 
 that, if he (Jesus) had cast out devils by the power of 
 God, then it was manifest that the kingdom of God had 
 come unto them, — the heavenly order had indeed already 
 begun/' 
 
 When afterward the multitude thronged about him, he 
 took his stand upon a small vessel, and addressed them, 
 grouped upon the shore, in a series of allegories, all repre- 
 sentative of the kingdom of heaven, its incidents and 
 leading features. 1 ' These parables were not all intelli- 
 gible, even to his disciples ; and he condescended to give 
 them personally some explanations; for, he said, it was 
 lawful to communicate to them the mysteries of the king- 
 dom of heaven. As to the multitude, he declared his 
 purpose not to enlighten them ; and he said they were the 
 people doomed by the prophet Isaiah to blindness and 
 dumbness, lest God should convert and heal them. c In 
 these allegories, those who heed his proclamation of the 
 kingdom of heaven, and for that blessed estate joyfully 
 sacrifice every other advantage, are called the children of 
 the kingdom :• they are also called the just and the right- 
 eous, as the rest of mankind are called the wicked and 
 the children of the wicked one. His disciples are not to 
 be disheartened by the present aspect of all the world 
 being against him. Small as the leaven is, it will leaven 
 the world ; and, from the little seed he is planting, a tree 
 shall grow, in whose branches the birds of the air shall 
 lodge.' 1 Quietly as these two classes now live together, 
 and so much alike that only the discriminating eye of the 
 Judge can detect whose are his, in the near end of the 
 world they shall be separated like tares from the wheat, 
 like bad fish from among the good, and those who are 
 not his shall be cast into a furnace of fire, where shall 
 be wailing and gnashing of teeth. "Then," he declared, 
 quoting from a vision of the prophet Daniel, "shall the 
 righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their 
 Father." It is not absolutely necessary to infer that 
 Jesus had in his thought a conception of a gross and 
 material destruction by fire of those, who at his coming 
 had not believed his message ; but when, after the assur- 
 ance of a purpose to explain confidentially to his friends 
 
 "Matt, xii., 24-28. l> Matt, xiii., 1-3. c Matt, xiii., 1 1-17. <• Matt, xiii., 18-52. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 5 I 
 
 what he had avowed he intended to disguise from the 
 multitude, he uses language that he knew would convey 
 to them images only of a physical and summary destruc- 
 tion and punishment, there is only an a priori prepos- 
 session, upon which to entertain the conjecture that he 
 had nothing in his mind but a picture of a purely spir- 
 itual condition. Of some impending changes (and he 
 doubtless had in his mind that coming of the Son of 
 Man with his angels during the lifetime of some of his 
 auditors), he thought there were so many palpable signs, 
 that he told the Pharisees, if they were as prescient, as 
 they were about the harbingers of the weather, they 
 would readily discern them. a 
 
 Some undeclared time after the telling of these para- 
 bles, Jesus was with his disciples at Cesarea Philippi; 
 and there he is said to have disclosed to them his purpose 
 to go to Jerusalem. But he announced that the chief 
 priests and elders would persecute and put him to death. 
 He told his followers, as he had before, that they must 
 not be afraid of death, nor try to save their lives, but must 
 follow him, if necessary, in his crucifixion ; to save their 
 lives was to lose them, to lose their^ lives for his sake was 
 to find them, — i.e., in his kingdom/ For what profit is it 
 to gain the whole world, he asked, and lose one's own 
 soul? For the Son of Man — that is, himself, who was 
 to be killed at Jerusalem a few days hence — shall come 
 again in the glory of his Father, with his angels, and 
 then shall reward every man who had made sacrifices for 
 him ; and truly, he said, closing this impassioned exhorta- 
 tion, there be some standing here which shall not taste 
 of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his king- 
 dom. b This mood of exultation and expectation did not 
 leave him ; for, a few days later, he expressed impatience 
 because his disciples could not cast out a devil, and 
 assured them, if they had faith, they might say to a 
 mountain : c Be moved to yonder place, and nothing should 
 be impossible to them. The kingdom in his fervid 
 thought had already come; and the powers which he 
 would confer in the new order to do great works, to lay 
 down and take up life, would be given now by the new 
 king to those who had great faith. 
 
 * Matt, xvi., \. I'Mntt. xvi., 13-28. cMatt. xvii., 16, 17, 20. 
 
52 OPIXIOXS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 When his disciples asked him who was greatest in the 
 kingdom of heaven, he told them whoever should humble 
 himself and believe on him as a little child was the 
 greatest, and that whoever should offend such a trustful 
 believer had better have been cast into the sea with a 
 millstone about his neck ; that to enter his kingdom 
 they must not hesitate to sacrifice an eye, a hand, or a 
 foot ; and that every little one of his had an angel in 
 heaven always looking upon the very face of God. a He 
 commended those who for the sake of the kingdom of God 
 had been celibate ; he told his disciples it was scarcely 
 possible for the rich to enter that kingdom ; and soothed 
 his disciples, who asked what reward they should have for 
 leaving friends and property and all things for his sake, 
 by promising that, when he should sit in the throne of his 
 glory, they should sit on thrones judging the twelve 
 tribes of Israel, and should, for all the possessions they 
 should give up, receive back a hundred-fold and inherit 
 eternal life. b 
 
 Fired by the ever-present vision of the kingdom of 
 heaven, this question of the disciples roused his spirit to 
 new disclosures of its scenes and solemn compensations. 
 For, said he, continufng the conversation, the kingdom of 
 heaven is like a man who was a householder, that has no 
 true scale of wages, but gives to the latest laborer the 
 same reward as to the earliest, and allows no man to 
 claim, in the day of recompense, that he was the earliest 
 convert or the oldest disciple. 
 
 On his way to Jerusalem, he again declared his death 
 and resurrection ; and, when the mother of James and 
 John came to ask that her sons might be viceroys of the 
 new kingdom, he did not deny that there were such 
 places to be filled by those for whom the Father had 
 prepared them ; but he said the scale of rank in his king- 
 dom, unlike the kingdoms of the world, was the scale of 
 service, and not princes, but servants, obtained chief 
 precedence in it. c 
 
 Besides the direct way of promulgating an idea or de- 
 claring an event about to happen, besides Jesus' charac- 
 teristic way of foreshadowing these in a parable, there 
 was what may be called the national way. The old 
 
 a Matt, xviii. , i-ii. bMatt. xix., 3-30. c Matt, xx., 1-28. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 53 
 
 prophets were wont to resort to physical demonstrations 
 by way of making their warnings and vaticinations more 
 impressive to their hearers. Thus, Zedekiah, in the time 
 of King Jehoshaphat, made horns of iron, as it turned out, 
 only to give rhetorical emphasis to his prediction, that 
 the king should prevail against Syria. " Thus saith the 
 Lord," was his message, "with these thou shalt push 
 Syria, till she be consumed." 11 Hosea declared, on two 
 different occasions, that he was commanded to cohabit 
 with an adulterous woman, that he might illustrate the fals- 
 ity of Israel in leaving Jehovah, her true husband. b And 
 now Jesus, not with any serious expectation of ushering 
 in the kingdom of which he was to be king, — for he seems 
 to have believed his rejection by the Jews and his tempo- 
 rary death are to precede that event, — but to give an im- 
 pressive physical demonstration of what he had been 
 repeating to a stolid and indifferent people, prepares the 
 triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and has himself an- 
 nounced to the daughter of Zion as her king, coming 
 meek and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an 
 ass. The narrative does not attribute to Jesus the de- 
 tails of this affair. But as he directed the animal to be 
 procured upon which he intended to ride, as he entered 
 cordially into the character assumed by him of the 
 prophetic king of Zion, and as Luke narrates that he 
 justified his disciples for this ostentatious ovation in lan- 
 guage which showed that he was acting under the press- 
 ure of an intense enthusiasm, it is just to infer that the 
 whole demonstration was premeditated by him, to give 
 impressiveness to the message he was bringing to the 
 sacred city itself of the coming of the kingdom of heaven.' 1 
 He must have been somewhat disappointed. To the 
 decorous and conservative Pharisees, the spectacle was 
 offensive, and prejudiced them in advance against the 
 gospel he came to promulgate. From this time to the 
 end, he evidently anticipates his rejection, and withholds 
 a message that he has assured himself will only be de- 
 spised. The temper of the city is such that, after the 
 imposing entry into it, followed up by his driving from 
 the temple the money-changers and sellers of victims, he 
 
 "II. Cliron. xviii. . 10. '» Hosea i., 2-3; iii., 1-3. cMatt. xxi., 1-16. 
 
 '1 Luke xiw, 39, 40. 
 
54 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 deemed it not safe to remain there over night, and up to 
 the day of his arrest went every night into some outly- 
 ing village to lodge." To the Pharisees and their adhe- 
 rents, he declared afterward only the punitory and de- 
 structive aspects of the coming of the kingdom of heaven. 
 He told them, the publicans and the harlots go into 
 the kingdom, while they refused, 1 ' that in persecuting 
 and slaying him they were killing the son of the husband- 
 man, just as they had slain his servants, the prophets; 
 and that they were drawing down upon themselves a 
 miserable destruction. "The kingdom of God," he said, 
 " shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing 
 forth fruits thereof." To his own disciples, he spoke with 
 exceeding bitterness against the scribes and Pharisees, 
 whom he charged with keeping themselves out of the 
 kingdom of heaven, and not suffering others to enter it. 
 He declared that the damnation of hell awaited them, 
 that all the evil deeds of themselves and their fathers 
 would be visited upon them, and that the woes he had 
 uttered should come upon that generation. Invoking 
 Jerusalem in tones of mingled indignation and pity, he 
 announced that the city should not see him again till it 
 should say, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of 
 the Lord," evidently reflecting with some disappointment 
 that the city had not joined in that hosanna, and believ- 
 ing that when he came again in the clouds with his angels, 
 in the glory of his kingdom, every knee would bow, and 
 every tongue would confess him.' 1 
 
 Relieved of the contradictions and contempt of the 
 Pharisees, by which his spirit seemed much disturbed, 
 Jesus, on the eve of events which he felt assured and 
 which even to any intelligent observer betokened his 
 speedy death, reverts to the society of his followers, and 
 in answer to a direct request by them, to tell them what 
 should be the sign of " thy coming, and of the end of the 
 world," proceeds to unfold with great fulness and preci- 
 sion the whole scheme of the kingdom of heaven, as it 
 was then shaped in his anticipation. 
 
 The twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew has been some- 
 times considered a prediction by Jesus of the destruction 
 of Jerusalem, which took place about forty years after 
 
 ■ Matt XxL, 17, 18. b Matt. xxi., 2S-46. cMatt. xxii., 1-15. dMatt. xxiiL 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 55 
 
 his crucifixion. Concerning this, it must be said, however, 
 that Jesus never manifested the slightest interest in secu- 
 lar history. Nothing that he ever said indicated that he 
 had any knowledge, outside the annals of his own people, 
 of the changes of empires in the past, or that he built any 
 hopes upon beneficent political changes to occur in the 
 future. His destitution of patriotism and of the national 
 feeling, his profound indifference to the shame of being 
 subject to the Roman sway, and his light estimate of the 
 glories of the earlier times and of greatness of the proph- 
 ets, kings, and patriarchs, were rather conspicuous. Then 
 there was nothing remarkable about the capture of Jeru- 
 salem, which was not so much destroyed by Titus as it 
 had been by Nebuchadnezzar; in fact, it has never been 
 destroyed, but always has been inhabited as a city. The 
 destruction of Carthage, of Babylon, of Nineveh, of Tyre, 
 of Sidon, of Memphis, of Baalbec, of Ephesus, and of very 
 many Greek and Roman cities, was far more complete and 
 summary than that of Jerusalem. Jesus himself warned 
 his disciples that it was not mere secular revolutions, such 
 as are always going on, such as were rife in his age and in 
 that following and preceding it, of which he wished them 
 to take note. " Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. 
 Nations shall rise against nation ; there shall be famines, 
 earthquakes, pestilences," — he might have added, as 
 there always have been, — but the end is not yet. It is 
 not of these events or their like that I wLh to speak, but 
 of that consummation indicated by the abomination of 
 desolation standing in the holy place, which is the sign, 
 which he that readeth may well understand, — the sign for 
 instant, precipitate flight, the sign of the coming on of 
 tribulation, such as never was since the beginning of the 
 world, and from which the elect of God can hardly be 
 saved. Heed not those who shall then proclaim Christ 
 to be here or there, and go not forth to find him ; for, as 
 the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth unto the 
 west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be. Imme- 
 diately after, the sun shall be darkened, the stars shall 
 fall from heaven, all the heavenly powers shall be shaken, 
 and the Son of Man, coming in the clouds of heaven, shall 
 gather his elect from the four winds of heaven ; and he 
 declared, with the most solemn form of asseveration he 
 
56 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 ever used on any occasion, " This generation shall not pass 
 away till all these things be fulfilled." * Heaven and earth 
 may pass away : this, my word, shall not pass away. His 
 very hearers, the men then living and standing with him, 
 he conjured to be vigilant ; for they could not tell when 
 he, their Lord, should come, and he promised that the 
 faithful servant, found watching for the coming of his 
 Master, should be made ruler over all his house. Then, 
 resuming his allegoric method, he said : The kingdom of 
 heaven shall be likened unto ten virgins waiting by night 
 for the bridal procession of their Lord, the prudent ones, 
 who had provided themselves with oil, to be let in to the 
 marriage feast, the improvident ones, whose lamps had 
 gone out, to be refused admission. b It is like a proprie- 
 tor leaving his property to trustees, and returning after a 
 journey to reward the thrifty with gifts and honors, but 
 to punish the slothful and wasteful by consignment to dun- 
 geons and torture. And finally, dropping his allegory, he 
 declares that, when he so comes in his glory and sits upon 
 the throne of his kingdom, all nations shall be gathered 
 before him, and that he will separate them as goats are 
 separated from sheep, the sheep being those who received 
 and ministered either to him or his followers, the goats 
 those who had rejected or neglected them. The sheep 
 he will receive into immortal life, the goats shall go away 
 into an endless punishment. In drinking wine with the 
 twelve just before his arrest, Jesus said that he would not 
 again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when 
 he should drink it new with them in his Father's king- 
 dom ; and, when interrogated by the High Priest, this was 
 his reply : "Hereafter shall ye see the Soji of Man sitting on 
 the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven,"* 
 From this recapitulation, it becomes apparent how 
 much the expectation of the kingdom of heaven was in 
 the thought of Jesus, and how large a topic it was of his 
 discourse. Are we not fully justified in the inference 
 that it was his dominant idea? It was the theme upon 
 which all his characteristic teachings were based, the 
 underlying image which all his parables disclosed to the 
 faithful and childlike disciples, but designedly concealed 
 from the apprehension of the critical and the wise. It 
 
 » Matt. xxiv. b Matt. xxv. c Matt, xxvi., 29, 64. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 57 
 
 was the favorite subject, to which, when left to the 
 promptings of his own mind and not diverted by the 
 questions of those about him, he always recurred. As he 
 began his public career by announcing that the kingdom 
 of heaven is at hand, so he closed it by declaring to his 
 affectionate and devoted followers with touching pathos 
 what was equivalent to saying, The next time I eat and 
 drink with you, it will be in the kingdom of my Father; 
 and to the chief of his enemies, the High Priest, You who 
 condemn me to death now shall see me sitting on the 
 right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven. 
 
 It is very rare, perhaps it is impossible, for a single per- 
 son to import into the world a wholly new idea. Before 
 the seed of a great thought can take root and bear fruit, 
 the ground must be prepared. Every great discovery, 
 every germinal truth, proclaims itself in the anticipation 
 of seekers, in the blind gropings of those who feel after it 
 without quite apprehending it. Newton's discoveries in 
 physics were foreshadowed and anticipated by his pre- 
 decessors and compeers. Columbus discovered America 
 through the provocation of other adventurous voyagers in 
 unknown seas. Garrison demanded immediate emancipa- 
 tion after the humanitarian spirit had begun to permeate 
 modern civilization. 
 
 It is not surprising that the dominant idea of Jesus is 
 not found to be wholly original with him, but to have 
 been anticipated by men who lived before him, and to 
 have been shared by his countrymen and contemporaries. 
 John the Baptist preceded Jesus in the specific procla- 
 mation, " The kingdom of heaven is at hand."* Luke men- 
 tions a priest, Simeon, as a just and devout man, waiting 
 for the consolation of Israel ; and a prophetess, named 
 Anna, who conferred with those in Jerusalem, looking 
 for redemption. 1 ' And Mark speaks of Joseph of Arima- 
 thea, by whose liberality the body of Jesus obtained hon- 
 orable sepulture, as one waiting for the kingdom of 
 heaven.' 1 The two disciples walking to Emmaus after 
 the crucifixion are represented by Luke as speaking of 
 Jesus, as the one they had hoped would redeem Israel.' 1 
 They might have derived this hope from what he had 
 said; but there is evidence that, besides all he taught, 
 
 • Matt, iii., 1-2. b Luke ii., 25, 36, 38. "Mark xv., 43. ALukexxiv., 21, 
 
58 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the expectation of some deliverance for the Jewish nation 
 and its sudden elevation to great glory, accompanied by 
 the overthrow of the Gentile powers, had widely pervaded 
 the popular heart. There had been fanatics and advent- 
 urers, who had taken advantage of this national feeling 
 to incite sedition, and to make themselves leaders of 
 popular revolutions. 
 
 The golden age of the Greek was in the remote antiq- 
 uity. The Jews, like the modern peoples, saw their 
 golden age in the future ; and that which in the devout 
 mind paints itself as the millennium, and which comforts 
 the popular heart under trials and privations as the- good 
 time coming, to the Jews of all ranks was the sceptre of 
 David restored to a prince of his house, under whose sway 
 God would restore them to prosperity, and punish with 
 destruction all their enemies. 
 
 The expectation which we find affecting the priesthood, 
 the common people, the devout and enlightened classes, 
 John the Baptist, Jesus and his disciples, was based upon 
 the vaticinations of the national prophets, whose writings 
 in highly ornate and poetical language, a unique collec- 
 tion among the literature of antiquity, were carefully pre- 
 served, and read and chanted as a part of the national 
 worship every Sabbath in the synagogues. 
 
 There was a certain extravagant method of interpreta- 
 tion adopted by the Christians of the first and second 
 centuries, and which appears in the evangelists, by' which 
 passages from the Pentateuch and from the Psalms came 
 to be considered as predictions of the coming and office 
 of Jesus ; but the most casual reading shows that they 
 had no such purpose or significance. In fact, it is open 
 to debate whether the Messianic expectation in the form 
 in which it was held by Jesus and his followers, or as 
 held by his countrymen, the Jews, had any reliable basis 
 in prophecy. It is certain that some of the so-called 
 Messianic prophecies and what the early Christians, the 
 evangelists, and apostles, and Jesus himself, confidently 
 considered predictions of the Messiah, clearly related to 
 early historic persons, and to political events nearly 
 contemporaneous with the time of their writing. 
 
 Making all allowance for the extravagance begotten of 
 the fierce controversies between the adherents of the new 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 59 
 
 faith and the orthodox Israelites, by which even Moses 
 was claimed to have foretold Jesus, and temple songs in 
 honor of Jehovah attributed to David were assumed to be 
 pre-recognitions of Christ, there still remained among the 
 priesthood and the common people a well-defined expec- 
 tation of a glory to come to their nation, a restoration to 
 it of more than its primitive prosperity, the subjugation 
 and defeat of the powerful heathen empires that had suc- 
 cessively oppressed it, and a sovereign of the lineage of 
 David brought back to reign in Zion, who, if not person- 
 ally immortal, was to have a kingdom, to which there 
 should be no end. 
 
 Isaiah had sung that Jehovah should choose again 
 Israel, and set him in his own land, and that there he 
 should hold captive those who had held him captive, and 
 have rest from sorrow, fear, and bondage. 11 At the blow- 
 ing of a trumpet, they who were ready to perish in 
 Assyria, and the outcasts of Egypt, should worship Jeho- 
 vah in Zion in Jerusalem. b The ransomed of Jehovah 
 should return to Zion with songs and perpetual joy. e The 
 feeble nation should become strong.* 1 Israel should eat of 
 the riches of the nations, and boast himself in their glory ; 
 and aliens and strangers should become his servants."' Je- 
 hovah should delight again in Jerusalem, and take from 
 her the voice of weeping. In great prosperity, her citi- 
 zens should build houses and plant vineyards, and live, 
 saint and sinner, a full lifetime of one hundred years. 1 
 
 The gloomy and unpatriotic Jeremiah, who had been 
 put in prison for falling off to the Chaldeans, and depress- 
 ing the national courage by his counsel to make no resist- 
 ance to the hosts of the Assyrians, had indicated a time, 
 when Israel should not speak of Jehovah as his deliverer 
 from the slavery of Egypt, but as he who led him out of 
 the North country, and from all countries whither he had 
 driven him, to dwell again in his own land." Jehovah 
 should bring him again from Chaldea to his own land, and 
 plant him there not to be plucked up.' 1 Jehovah should 
 gather Israel as a shepherd gathers his flock. Israel 
 should rejoice on Zion in the plenitude of wine, of oil, of 
 
 " Isaiah xiv., 1-3. h Isaiah xxvii., 13. [saiah xxxv., 10. 
 
 "1 Isaiah lx., 22. L ' Isaiah lxi., 5, 6. f Isaiah Ixv., 19-22. 
 
 5 Jeremiah xxin., 6-8. h Jeremiah xxiv., 5-7. 
 
60 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the young of flocks and herds. The priest should be 
 satiated with fatness, and the people with the goodness 
 of Jehovah. 1 Israel should be to Jehovah again a name of 
 joy, and all the nations should fear and tremble for the 
 goodness and prosperity his God should procure him. b 
 
 Ezekiel had declared, speaking in the name of Jehovah. 
 " I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you 
 out of all countries, and will bring you into your own 
 land"; and ye shall dwell therein, and be my people, and 
 I will be your God. c Amos had written that Jehovah 
 should bring again the captivity of his people Israel, that 
 they should prosper greatly in the land whence they 
 should never again be expatriated;' 1 and Zephaniah that 
 the restored and ransomed people should be a name and 
 a praise among all the people of the earth. 6 
 
 In spite of the contemptible character of many of their 
 kings, the Jews had always looked back to their monarchy 
 with longing regret, and could not consider themselves 
 as either free or prosperous under any other government 
 than that of their own sovereigns of the lineage of David. 
 Their sacred writings expressed and kept alive this national 
 aspiration. A child should be born upon whose shoulders 
 the government should be, to be called "Wonderful, Coun- 
 sellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince 
 of Peace," whose kingdom should increase forever, and 
 who should sit upon the throne of David to establish it 
 forever and ever/ The days should come when Jehovah 
 would raise unto David a righteous branch, who should 
 reign a king and prosper, and execute justice in the earth.- 
 My servant David, Jehovah had said, shall feed my flock 
 and be their shepherd ; and I will be their God, and my 
 servant David shall be a prince among them. h Israel and 
 Judah shall be one, and they shall have one king and 
 one shepherd, even David, my servant. 1 The kingdom 
 to come was to be an everlasting kingdom, not to pass 
 away or be destroyed ; and its king all people, nations,- 
 and languages should served 
 
 There was to be an era of peace, the peace of glory, 
 prosperity, and content for the Israelites, the peace of 
 
 a Jeremiah xxxi., ,<>-,.,. >' Jeremiah xxxiii., 9. c Ezekiel xxxvi., 24, 2S. 
 
 d Amos ix., 14, 15. •' Zephaniah iii., 20. f Isaiah ix., 6, 7. S Jeremiah xxiii., 5. 
 
 h Ezekiel xxxiv., 22, 23. > Ezekiel xxxvii., 22-24. J Daniel vii., 14- 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 6 1 
 
 subjection and docility for all the other nations. Out of 
 Zion in Jerusalem, the destined king should judge nations 
 and rebuke many people; and they should beat their 
 swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning- 
 hooks, and learn war no more. n Of the peace his reign 
 should inaugurate there should be no end. The very 
 wild beasts should lose their ferocity, and nothing should 
 hurt or destroy in all the holy mountain. 15 Violence 
 should no more be heard in the land, nor wasting nor 
 destruction.* 
 
 The peace, however, was to be the peace of conquest, 
 the peace after a struggle, victory and triumph over all 
 enemies. This was quite in accord with the savage tem- 
 per of the times, the fierce spirit which the exterminators 
 of the Canaanites continued for ages to cherish. Here is 
 the way this feeling flashes out of the sombre, national 
 literature. David had been a man of blood whom the 
 sacred poetry of his people represented as singing praises 
 to Jehovah for teaching his hands to war and his fingers 
 to fight. In his old age, the blood he had shed, not 
 always even in legitimate warfare, sat heavy on his soul ; 
 and his tender conscience restrained him from building 
 and consecrating a temple to the God of righteousness. 
 So the new David was to be a warrior, and was to sit 
 down upon the right hand of power, after he had made 
 his enemies his footstool. 
 
 The kings of the earth take counsel against Jehovah, 
 and against his anointed (king), saying : Let us break their 
 bands and cast off their cords. Jehovah shall laugh, and 
 sitting in the heavens, shall have them in derision. He 
 calls the anointed his Son, and promises to give him the 
 heathen for an inheritance, the uttermost parts of the 
 earth for a possession, that he might break them with a 
 rod of iron, and dash them to pieces like a potter's vessel.' 1 
 Jehovah at the right hand of the anointed, sitting with his 
 feet on the neck of his enemies, shall strike through kings 
 in the day of his wrath. He shall judge among the 
 heathen, he shall fill the places with dead bodies, he shall 
 wound the heads over many countries. Say to them of 
 a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not, your God shall come 
 
 » Isaiah ii., 3, 4. >> Isaiah xi., 6-9. c Isaiah lx., 18. 
 
 <1 Psalms ii., 2-9. e Psalms ex., $,(•. 
 
02 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 with vengeance and retribution. a It was the Messiah, clad 
 in garments glorious with blood, who was represented as 
 declaring : " I will tread them in mine anger, and trample 
 them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon 
 my garments, and I will stain all my raiment. For the 
 day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my 
 redeemed is come." b "For, behold, Jehovah will come 
 with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render 
 his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. 
 For by fire and by his sword will Jehovah plead with all 
 flesh ; and the slain of Jehovah shall be many." c "He shall 
 smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the 
 breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked."' 1 "Every 
 battle ... is with confused noise, and garments rolled in 
 blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire. For 
 unto us a Child is born," etc. The harvest is ripe, the 
 press is full, the vats overflow ; for their wickedness is great. 
 The day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. The 
 sun and moon shall be darkened, and the stars withdraw 
 their shining. Jehovah shall roar out of Zion, and the 
 heavens and earth shall shake; but Jehovah shall be the 
 strength and hope of the children of Israel. 1 The day of 
 the Lord cometh ; for, said Jehovah, I will gather all 
 nations against Jerusalem to battle, and it shall be taken. 
 Then shall Jehovah go forth and fight against those 
 nations. His feet shall stand on Mount Olivet, which 
 shall be cleaved by a great valley running east and west. 
 It shall be light in the evening as in the day. Living 
 water shall go out by Jerusalem, half to the Mediterra- 
 nean, half to the Dead Sea. All the south land shall 
 become an elevated plain, and the land of Israel shall be 
 peopled and never more destroyed, and Jehovah shall be 
 king over the whole earth. And this shall be the plague 
 wherewith Jehovah will smite all the people that have 
 fought against Jerusalem : their flesh shall consume away 
 while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall con- 
 sume away in their holes, and their tongues shall consume 
 away in their mouths. A great tumult from Jehovah 
 shall be among them, and they shall lay violent hands on 
 each other. And Judah shall fight at Jerusalem, and 
 
 i Isaiah xxxv., 4. •> Isaiah lxiii., 2-4. c Isaiah lxvi., 15, 16. 
 
 d Isaiah xi., 4. l ' Isaiah ix., 5. f Joel iii., 13-16. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 63 
 
 gather there the wealth of the heathen — gold, silver, and 
 apparel — in great abundance. And everyone that sur- 
 vives of the nations, that went against Jerusalem shall 
 become worshippers of Jehovah, and come up there yearly 
 to celebrate his feasts ; and whosoever among them shall 
 not come up to these feasts shall be punished with drouth 
 upon their lands. Everything, even the bells of the 
 horses, shall be consecrated to Jehovah : among the 
 nations, that come up to the house of Jehovah to cele- 
 brate his feasts, however, the accursed Canaanite shall be 
 forever excluded/ "The day cometh that shall burn as 
 an oven ; and all the proud, all that do wickedly, shall be 
 stubble." "Ye shall tread down the wicked; for they 
 shall be ashes under the soles of your feet, in the day 
 that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts." 13 
 
 So fixed in the prophetic mind was the idea of a grand 
 retribution, convulsion, and reversal of situations between 
 the chosen people and their powerful and numerous ene- 
 mies, whose prey and spoil they had been so many years, 
 that they came to mention it as that day, the grand assize, 
 the judgment and condemnation of the nations, the vindi- 
 cation of the right of Jehovah to be worshipped as the 
 chief among the gods, — an idea which, modified by Chris- 
 tian eschatology, became the modern day of judgment. 
 
 It may not be strictly pertinent to this discussion to 
 inquire what is the real value and significance of this 
 prophetic literature. The prophets appear to have been 
 a school of devoted patriots, who adhered more to the 
 monotheistic idea and the ritual of national worship, than 
 they did to the fortunes of the reigning kings, or to the 
 tendencies of the popular sentiment. Of this lower type 
 of patriotism they were, as a class, quite destitute. Jere- 
 miah had incensed and disheartened his countrymen with 
 his melancholy vaticinations of defeat and subjugation. 
 Indeed there seemed ample reason for his gloomy fore- 
 bodings in the magnitude of the Assyrian empire, and m 
 the petty resources of the miniature kingdom of Judea, 
 as well as in the fate that was known to have befallen 
 nations much more able to resist so great a power. All 
 the prophets were too plain-spoken and too little flatterers 
 of the national pride to be popular. They had suffered 
 
 "Zech.iriah xiv. >> Mnlachi iv., i-r 
 
64 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 more or less persecution, and some of them had been 
 put to death. Their writings, however, were true to the 
 national spirit : they all recognized what every Israelite 
 believed, that his fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were 
 chosen men of God, and that their lineage was favored 
 among the races of the earth as the chief beneficiaries 
 of the Deity, the only nation that he had not given over 
 to work evil and inherit destruction. They all flattered 
 the national hope — born of their calamities, defeats, and 
 enslavements — of a restoration to more than the glories 
 of David, more than the wealth and prosperity of the 
 patriarchs. So that, when the generation which the 
 prophets had denounced for their vices and idolatries 
 was dead, and especially when a remnant of the captives 
 returned from Babylon with chastened hearts and more 
 enlightened minds to rebuild Jerusalem and re-establish 
 the national worship, it is not surprising, that the pro- 
 phetic writings came to be cherished by the people, and 
 their poetic fervor to be ascribed to the direct inspiration 
 of Jehovah. 
 
 It is a modern conception that the world is subject to 
 general laws, and that society and government develop 
 their existence and are maintained by a compliance with 
 certain principles. The ancient mind, if capable of form- 
 ing such an hypothesis, had scarcely data enough upon 
 which to base it. To the ancient observer, if one coun- 
 try, kingdom, race, and city prospered, grew rich and 
 populous, and subdued its neighbors, it was not because 
 it was peopled by a more brave and intelligent race, or 
 had advantages of soil, sea-coast, or mines, or a stronger 
 and better organized government, but because it had a 
 more powerful god than its neighbors, or had been careful 
 to propitiate him by a more punctilious performance of 
 worship. This idea runs through the whole ancient 
 literature of the Jews, is in fact the one. doctrine taught 
 and reiterated in it all. 
 
 The writings of the Hebrew prophets possess for us 
 the quality, which all serious literature has in a greater 
 or less degree, of supplying incentives to piety and virtue. 
 They are, as Paul aptly expresses it, "profitable for 
 correction and instruction in right living." But we shall 
 best understand the influence and function of these 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 65 
 
 poet-prophets in the development of the national char- 
 acter of the people for whom they wrote, if we perceive 
 that they were primarily political writers. They wrote 
 upon political subjects. Their inspiration was their 
 patriotism, and their object 'the public good. As the 
 French or American political pamphleteer believes that 
 universal suffrage, legislation by a popularly elected gov- 
 ernment, free-trade, common schools, public morality, are 
 all essential elements of national prosperity, so he will 
 write, with what eloquence and zeal he is capable of, 
 in advocacy of these measures. Such views, in the age 
 of Isaiah, Hosea, and Ezekiel, were quite inconceivable. 
 The only assured opinion to which they had come was 
 that national prosperity, abundant harvests, wealth of 
 gold, silver, and raiment, brave and victorious armies, 
 conquests over rivals and enemies, were the gifts of 
 Jehovah, made generous and propitious by worship, sac- 
 rifices, and decorous conduct. Accordingly, they advo- 
 cated a faithful adherence to Jehovah, in a style suited to 
 the rude temper of the times and the rude fervor of their 
 own spirits. Their style to a cultivated taste seems 
 extravagant, the everywhere obtrusive illustration of the 
 worship of alien deities indecent, and the callous indiffer- 
 ence of the writers to the most horrible suffering and 
 absolute extermination of all people, who were not He- 
 brews, and would not become their servants, as incon- 
 sistent with the merciful instincts of good men. But we 
 look in vain for the humanitarian spirit of our time 
 among this primeval people, whose literature is to be 
 studied in connection with a study of the people who 
 produced it, and the age in which it was produced. 
 
 Returning to the illustration of the patriotic pam- 
 phleteer, who devotes his pen to the advocacy of educa- 
 tion, popular morality, and good government, — as he draws 
 illustrations and examples from the past, so he does not 
 hesitate to forecast the future, without claiming any en- 
 lightenment other than what comes of a close observation 
 of the course of history and the natural results of human 
 conduct. He feels authorized to declare with as much 
 assurance as if the truth had been revealed to him by a 
 divine oracle, or the voice of God speaking out of a cloud, 
 that a government systematically ignoring the interests 
 
66 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 and rights of the people, as represented in a legislative 
 assembly, will inevitably become an oppressive despotism ; 
 that the neglect of popular education will be followed by a 
 loss of liberty, and that, through the decay of the national 
 morality, luxury, effeminacy, corruption, conquest, and sub- 
 jection ensue, and consume a nation. The prophets had 
 a single remedy for all the evils of their times, a single 
 safeguard against all the perils of the future ; and, so far 
 as the faithful service of Jehovah related to conduct, and 
 to the practice of such virtues as temperance, chastity, 
 industry, frugality, honest dealing, and truthfulness, the 
 remedy and the safeguard were certainly efficacious, and 
 the truth of their revelations absolute. They did not work 
 out their teachings in an ethical, didactic way. If they 
 had attempted that, they would have been more unheeded 
 by their countrymen than they were. They gave them in 
 a poetic form, to seize the imagination of their hearers. 
 They concealed their didactic purpose and ethical impli- 
 cations under vivid pictures of the material prosperity 
 that should attend a patriotic attachment to the national 
 religion, and of the horrors of slavery, slaughter, and 
 mutilation that should befall them in the invasion of 
 heathen nations — become the ministers of Jehovah's ven- 
 geance for the rebellion of his people. 
 
 It is by no means probable that the prophetic writers 
 among the Hebrews claimed any knowledge of the future, 
 other than of this kind. The changes of empire in the 
 East had been so rapid and summary that it is as safe to 
 predict the downfall of a luxurious, populous, and corrupt 
 city or kingdom, as to predict of youth, exulting in the 
 plenitude of its powers, that old age will weaken and 
 death destroy its strength and beauty. 
 
 All the more remarkable and precise prophecies, which 
 have been claimed by the early and later Christians to be 
 applicable to the Messiah, are plainly applicable to persons 
 and events contemporaneous with their utterance. Those 
 prophecies, which, like the visions of Daniel, have been 
 considered foreshadowings of the course of world-history, 
 may correspond in some general way with what is now 
 known of the prominent events of the age, and before 
 the age, when they are believed to have been written. 
 All semblance of accord, however, between these vague 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 6 1 / 
 
 and indefinite visions and the actual sequel of events dur- 
 ing the Christian era wholly disappears. The changes of 
 empire from Chaldean to Persian, from Persian to Greek, 
 are sketched with tolerable accuracy. The prophetic eye, 
 in peering into the modern world, saw only dim shapes 
 which the most devout ingenuity has utterly failed to 
 find even typical representations of the growth and decay 
 of states that have succeeded the Roman Empire. 
 
 It may likewise be remarked that giving to the pro- 
 phetic declarations, of which a concise summary has been 
 in these pages recapitulated, the full force of a divine pre- 
 diction, they do not necessarily imply a divine or even 
 immortal king of the new kingdom which was to over- 
 throw and make subject all other kingdoms. Isaiah had 
 indeed said, he shall be called — not shall be — Wonderful, 
 Counsellor, the great and mighty God. Such epithets 
 were quite consonant with Oriental exaggeration, with 
 the adulation and deification of kings among the Egyp- 
 tians, Assyrians, and even the Romans. The kingdom 
 was to be an everlasting kingdom. The king was to 
 be born, was to be a child, was to be of the lineage 
 of David ; but, as it is plainly said that men were to live 
 out their days to a hundred years, it is implied that 
 there was to be a perpetual succession of wise and good 
 kings, each gathered to his fathers in a good old age, after 
 a glorious and prosperous reign. Indeed, while the Per- 
 sians on one side of them and the Egyptians on the other, 
 in their literature and their monuments, were indicating- 
 how much the thought of a future life and a judgment, 
 which fixed the fates of men in it, affected their daily 
 conduct ; while even the pleasure-loving Greek had his sad 
 and pensive moods, in which he bewailed the brevity of 
 youth and life, — the practical Hebrew, from his great law- 
 giver, Moses, down nearly to the advent of Jesus, con- 
 temptuously ignored all such considerations, and insisted, 
 even in his most spiritual moods, that life was good enough, 
 if there was enough of it, and if he could have a fair 
 chance in it, quite content after such fortune to be gath- 
 ered to his fathers. 
 
 But what is chiefly to be considered is not what the 
 significance of the prophetic writings is, but what it was 
 held to be by the countrymen of Jesus at the time he 
 
68 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 lived. Everything in the New Testament indicates that 
 the belief was general that these writings were predic- 
 tions, made upon the authority of the Supreme Being, of 
 events that were to occur. All these prophecies, so far 
 as they related to a restoration of the Israelites to their 
 own land, and the glory of their new kingdom, were 
 uttered after the principal part of the nation had been 
 carried into captivity ; and the more explicit and definite 
 prophecies were uttered during the continuance of the 
 captivity of the remnant of the nation in Assyria. The 
 feeble political existence which the restored Jews main- 
 tained for a few years, under the sovereignty of the suc- 
 cessors of Cyrus until the conquest by Alexander, was 
 too transient and too wretched to be accepted as the 
 realization of the extravagant promise of an everlasting 
 dominion, established at Jerusalem over all people and 
 nations and languages, though this was the restoration 
 which the exiled patriots had in their mind, and pictured 
 in the glowing imagery of their hopes and of their in- 
 domitable pride of race. So they waited for the consola- 
 tion and redemption of Israel, and have waited through 
 all the succeeding centuries till the present day, the most 
 touching and pathetic, but not the only instance in his- 
 tory, of a race cherishing from generation to generation 
 an aspiration which often becomes the enthusiasm and 
 force by which it is realized. 
 
 Jesus himself evidently shared this expectation of his 
 countrymen, and derived it from them. The phrases, king- 
 dom of heaven and kingdom of God, are not found in the 
 Old Scriptures, that set forth the glories of the golden age 
 to which the Israelite looked forward. But as the king- 
 dom is represented to be set up by God himself, and as 
 the sovereign was to be the Son of Man coming in the 
 clouds of heaven, the name kingdom of heaven was of very 
 natural derivation, and probably had become a popular 
 term before John the Baptist used it or Jesus adopted 
 it from him. The kingdom of heaven by that name must 
 have been everywhere familiar in the popular thought, or 
 the disciples in the very earliest stages of their disciple- 
 ship would not have been commissioned to go and make 
 everywhere proclamation that it was at hand. It is fairly 
 inferrible that the Jewish people had as distinct idea of it 
 as Christendom has to-day of the millennium. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 69 
 
 It must then be considered that Jesus derived from his 
 times the name kingdom of heaven, and that it represented 
 a sequence of secular events, among which were promi- 
 nent the recognition of a chosen people by Jehovah, their 
 establishment in a perpetual kingdom which should domi- 
 nate the kingdoms of the world, with Jerusalem for the 
 seat of empire, the hostility of the nations against this 
 kingdom, their total defeat and overthrow, with a rem- 
 nant saving their lives by submission and servitude and 
 by the adoption of the true religion. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS. 
 
 "No less remarkable is the over-faith of each man in the importance 
 of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for 
 what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong 
 and self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be mistaken 
 that 'God himself cannot do without wise men.' Jacob Boehmen and 
 George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial 
 tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the 
 Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, 
 and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such 
 persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, and it gives heat, 
 pungency, and publicity to their words." — Emerson's Essays, second series. 
 Essay on Nature. 
 
 In endeavoring to learn how much Jesus remodelled 
 in his own mind the national aspiration for the kingdom 
 of heaven, we must not disregard certain indications that 
 he came gradually to his own conceptions, and that he 
 accepted with hesitation and diffidence the impression 
 that at last forced itself upon him, that he was himself the 
 Son of Man, the heir of the kingdom of the world. It is 
 in the early part of his career, and mainly in the Sermon 
 on the Mount, that what Matthew Arnold denotes as the 
 characteristic of the mind of Jesus, "his sweet reason- 
 ableness," becomes apparent. He seemed to the people 
 to speak with authority, but that was because he appealed 
 directly to their moral sense and did not quote Scripture, 
 which seemed to be the peculiar didactic method, they 
 had been accustomed to in the preaching of the scribes. 
 He did not make himself prominent, nor exact any homage 
 to or belief in himself. So peculiar is this method in 
 contrast with his later teachings that we hesitate to 
 accept as a part of what he actually said, " Many will say 
 unto me in that day, Lord, Lord," a and believe it may 
 have been injected afterward into a discourse so wholly 
 impersonal and self-forgetful. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS Jl 
 
 Still, it must have been not only the inspiration that 
 the kingdom of heaven was near, and that he must join 
 John the Baptist, and reinforce himself with disciples, 
 and go everywhere and be its herald, that urged Jesus 
 in his remarkable career, but the conviction that he him- 
 self hag! some larger function to perform in the stupen- 
 dous events about to strike the world with awe. 
 
 It was with real diffidence that he received the frank 
 declaration of Peter, that he believed him to be the 
 Christ, the Son of God, that he rebuked the possessed 
 persons, who loudly imputed to him a divine nature,'' 1 
 and that he begged his disciples to tell no man that he 
 was the Christ. b 
 
 It is hard to account upon rational principles for any 
 high enthusiasm, or for the determination of the soul 
 toward any special study or achievement. It comes to 
 the spirit of men by those mysterious movements of the 
 spirit which have been called genius and inspiration. In 
 Jesus, the conviction that he was a divine and providen- 
 tial person, which he undoubtedly had, may have sprung 
 from the consciousness of a substantial exemption from 
 the sensual appetites and sordid ambitions that determine 
 the ordinary quality of humanity, of a clear insight of 
 moral truth, and of an eloquence in illustrating and con- 
 veying it which all who listened to his speech seemed 
 to have attested, and lastly of a certain power over de- 
 pressed and nervously diseased and enfeebled persons 
 to relieve and cure them, out of which the legends of the 
 miracles grew. 
 
 In coming to the conclusion that he was the national 
 Messiah, — a claim, by the way, other men made before 
 him and after him, — the mental processes might have 
 gone on thus : How can a man who was born of human 
 parents, who remembers his uneventful, humble, labo- 
 rious youth of thirty years, whose brothers, sisters, and 
 mother all the people know, be the person whom Jehovah 
 calls my Lo?'d, and invites to sit at his right hand ? How 
 can he be the Son of Man, brought to the Ancient of 
 Days upon the clouds to be the crowned king of the 
 nations ? How can a man who has patiently borne all 
 insult, and whose faith it is to resist not evil, come up 
 
 • I, ukc iv., 34, 35. b Matt, xvi., 20. 
 
72 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 from Edom with garments gloriously reel with the blood 
 of enemies he has trampled to death in his fury? 
 
 But Esaias had declared : My servant, my elect, 
 upon whom Jehovah has put his spirit shall not strive 
 nor cry, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street ; 
 but the isles shall wait for his law. a " He is despised and 
 rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with 
 grief." He was despised, and we esteemed him not. He 
 was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our 
 iniquities. Jehovah hath lain upon him the iniquity of 
 us all. He was oppressed and afflicted. He is brought 
 as a lamb to the slaughter. He was taken from prison h 
 and from judgment. He was cut off from the land of 
 the living, and his grave was made with the wicked. 
 Daniel, too, had explicitly announced that Messiah should 
 "be cut off, but not for himself." And Zechariah, 
 whose descriptions of the kingdom of heaven had been 
 fuller of details than the writings of any of the prophets, 
 had in prophetic vision invoked the daughter of Jerusa- 
 lem to behold her king coming to her, just, and having 
 salvation ; lowly, and riding upon a colt, the foal of an 
 ass.' 1 And, again, he had summoned the sword to awake 
 against the shepherd and companion of Jehovah, and 
 smite him, so that the sheep should be scattered. 
 
 So, then, there is a Messiah coming in the clouds, 
 coming red with the blood of his enemies and in the heat 
 of his fury, and a Messiah coming lowly upon an ass's 
 foal, a man of sorrows, to be oppressed and afflicted, to 
 be tried and imprisoned, and cut off from the living, and 
 buried with the wicked. Are there, then, two Messiahs ? 
 No, Jesus reasoned, but two comings of one Messiah. 
 And, as the glorious king cannot be rejected and slain 
 after he has come in the clouds to sit on the throne of 
 an everlasting kingdom, his life of sorrow and death of 
 shame must precede all that glory. 
 
 Jesus told the Pharisees in Jerusalem a few days before 
 his arrest a parable which discloses with great particular- 
 ity his idea of the connection between these two comings. 
 Jehovah was a householder, who had a vineyard, with a 
 wine-press enclosed with a hedge, and defended with a 
 
 "Isaiah xlii., i, 2, 3. b Isaiah liii. c Daniel ix., 26. 
 
 <1 Zechariah ix., q. e Zechariah xiii., 7. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS J^ 
 
 tower. The Jews were certain husbandmen to whom 
 he let the vineyard, expecting to receive its income. The 
 prophets were his servants, whom he had sent from time 
 to time to collect the dues, whom the wicked husband- 
 men had beaten, stoned, and slain. Jesus himself was the 
 husbandman's son, whom they caught, cast out of the 
 vineyard and slew, but who should be the head stone of 
 the corner in the new kingdom of heaven, falling on his 
 enemies and grinding them to powder."- The Messiah 
 comes first to do the same office as the prophets, and to 
 invite to repentance. He meekly submits to obloquy 
 and death, and makes no appeal to his divine power; 
 but, rejected, he becomes the avenger and punisher of his 
 persecutors. 
 
 It was an essential feature in the popular idea of the 
 kingdom of heaven, that it was to be the empire of Israel. 
 All the prophets, who were believed to have predicted the 
 event, assigned its glory and prosperity to the favored 
 nation as their heritage and recompense. Daniel, speak- 
 ing in a Syriac tongue, and before the Babylonian court, 
 had affirmed that the people of the saints of the most 
 high God should possess the kingdom ; but, as Jehovah 
 obtained in the royal proclamation of the Assyrian mon- 
 archs the title of the "Most High God," h it is probable 
 that his auditors understood by Daniel's language the 
 sacred, elect, consecrated people of Jehovah, or, in other 
 words, the Jews, excluding from the promise, perhaps, 
 those who had in the captivity lapsed into the worship of 
 other gods. 
 
 It was quite alien to what is told of the character of 
 Jesus that he should entertain an anticipation so narrow 
 and national. Though he told the Syro-Phcenician woman 
 that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of 
 Israel, that was evidently to test the strength of her faith. 
 His real sentiment was early expressed in the declara- 
 tion: "Many shall come from the east and west, and 
 shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in 
 the kingdom of heaven;' 1 but the children of the king- 
 dom shall be cast out." He had but little patriotism: 
 the national pride and exclusiveness of his countrymen 
 
 » Matt, xxi., 33-45. >> Dan. vii., 27 ; iii., 26; iv., 2. 
 
 c Matt, xv., 24. «' Matt, viii., 1 i. 
 
74 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 excited his contempt. The Roman domination he had 
 no controversy with. He paid taxes to it, fully recog- 
 nized its secular authority, treated its officials with a 
 courtesy and respect which he habitually withheld from 
 the accredited successors and representatives of the old 
 hierarchy, that held to the national traditions and main- 
 tained with great strictness the national worship. He 
 never, by word or deed, gave the least sanction to those 
 seditious risings of over-zealous patriots, which vexed the 
 peace of the country, and of which his own native prov- 
 ince, Galilee, had been the principal theatre. 
 
 With such sentiments, it is not surprising that the 
 teachings of the prophets became at length considerably 
 transfused by his own ideas, and that, if in the beginning 
 he believed, that Scripture could only be fulfilled by a 
 kingdom universal and perpetual given to the people of 
 his nation, he came later to the belief of the utter repudi- 
 ation and rejection of his nation, and of a kingdom trans- 
 ferred to those who should accept him as a deliverer and 
 sovereign. Nor was this idea at all alien to the general 
 tenor of the Hebrew Scriptures. All the Hebrew writ- 
 ings had represented the choice of Israel as provisional, 
 and conditional on his obedience and faithful devotion. 
 Rejection had been the steady discipline, by which the 
 idolatry of the earlier ages had been punished. Every 
 successful invasion, every waste of territory, the domina- 
 tion of Philistine, Egyptian, Syrian, Assyrian, Greek, and 
 Roman powers, was always represented as Jehovah's re- 
 sentment of their falling away from his worship. Moses 
 himself was represented in Deuteronomy — though the 
 book is now believed of comparatively modern composi- 
 tion — to have set before the Israelites a blessing, if they 
 obeyed the commandments of their God, a curse if they 
 went after other gods. This is the one lesson of all the 
 historians, the inspiration of the poets, and the burden of 
 the prophets. 
 
 In the memorabilia which are preserved of Jesus, he 
 does not seem to have given to what may be called the 
 national party a locus penitentiae. Toward the Pharisees 
 and Sadducees he always demeaned himself, as if he had 
 adopted the intolerant thought of his master, John the 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 75 
 
 Baptist, who had said to those classes, " O generation of 
 vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to 
 come?"* It is one of the indicia of the unreliability of 
 the Johannic Gospel, that it represents Jesus as holding 
 long and feeble controversies with the scribes and Phari- 
 sees at Jerusalem, for the purpose of maintaining his 
 claim to a place in the divine dispensation in reference to 
 the peculiar people ; while the other evangelists represent 
 him as hostile to the Pharisees from the first, and meet- 
 ing even their courteous overtures with suspicion and de- 
 nunciation. Arrived at Jerusalem, he weeps over it. and 
 says : If thou hadst known the things that make for thy 
 peace, but now they are forever hid from thine eyes. 
 The judgment has already come, the rejection of the 
 daughter of Zion is complete. 1 ' 
 
 But shall the rejection of Israel pi event the establish- 
 ment of the divine kingdom on earth ? Not at all. 
 My oxen and fatlings are killed : the wedding feast is 
 prepared, and let the servants scour the highways and 
 hedges, and compel everybody they meet to come in, 
 that my house may be furnished with guests. " Children 
 of Abraham, indeed ! " exclaimed, in his indignation, the 
 clear-sighted John: "God can make out of the common 
 dust, out of these stones on the surface of the wilderness, 
 children of Abraham." "The poor have the gospel 
 preached to them." The babes see that to which you 
 wise and prudent are blind, said Jesus ; and every one is 
 blessed that does not take offence at me.' 1 So, instead 
 of the Israelitish nation taking the kingdom of heaven, 
 and ruling the remnant of the nations forever, the Israel- 
 itish nation, by rejecting him, their shepherd and king, 
 have filled the measure of their iniquity; and the kingdom 
 is given to the poor, to babes, to the children of the king- 
 dom, to the righteous, to those who have received Jesus 
 and ministered to him, or to the little ones that believe on 
 him. ' 
 
 -V scarcely less radical modification of the prophetic 
 conception, as kept alive in the popular feeling, is trace- 
 able also to the known character of Jesus. The glory 
 of the restoration was long life, peace, power over the 
 
 a Matt. iii., 7. b Lake xix., 41, 42, c Matt, iii., 'i. 
 
 •I M.ut. xi., 5, 6. i' Matt, xi., 25. 
 
j6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 heathen — the wealth of the nations in gold, silver, and 
 raiment poured into Jerusalem. To Jesus, life was noth- 
 ing. He held his own ready to lay down for his hope. 
 He roused the dull souls of his followers by telling them, 
 " He that saveth his life shall lose it : he that loseth his 
 life for my sake shall save it." Fear not them that kill 
 the body : fear only him who can kill both soul and body 
 in hell." 1 ' He cared nothing for wealth. The first words 
 of his Sermon on the Mount were a beatitude upon the 
 poor. He denied that a rich man could enter his king- 
 dom of heaven. He told a young man, whose correct 
 morals won his love, that he must give away all his 
 possessions to have treasure in heaven. He gloried in 
 having no property, not even what the birds and foxes 
 had, — a place to lay his head. d Power over other men 
 was to him a snare and a reproach : the great man was he 
 who was servant of all. 6 Accordingly, Jesus eliminated 
 from his doctrine of the kingdom of heaven all the ele- 
 ments of secular prosperity, and gave no pictures of its 
 wealth and luxury to excite a merely sordid and sensuous 
 imagination. Some ideas of recompense for the priva- 
 tions they had suffered, some recognition of his perse- 
 cuted disciples sitting in judgment on their persecutors, 
 evidently lingered in his promise of a hundred-fold more 
 houses and lands than they had given up, and of the 
 twelve thrones, on which his twelve chief friends should 
 sit, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 1 
 
 Terrible in vengeance and fire and blood as was the 
 great day, which all the prophets had foreseen in vision, 
 not all the enemies of the chosen people were to be de- 
 stroyed. The heathen nations were to be ruled over by 
 the victorious Israelites, and only those, who had fought 
 against Jerusalem and Jehovah, were to be miserably de- 
 stroyed. The rest of mankind were to become proselytes, 
 and yearly to come up to Mount Zion to perform rites in 
 recognition of the world-sovereignty of Jehovah. We 
 look in vain in the scheme of Jesus for this mitigation 
 and mercy. Though the redeemed, the saved, the blessed 
 of his Father were the poor, the little ones, that had be- 
 lieved on him, and though to this class no hard test of 
 
 a Luke ix., 24. '> Luke xii., 4, 5. cMatt. xix., 16, 26. d Matt, viii., 19, 20. 
 
 «'Matt. xxiii., 10, 12. f Matt, xix., 27-29. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS JJ 
 
 discipleship was applied, no searching analysis of the 
 genuineness of conversion, no metaphysical inspection of 
 a grace, the counterfeit of which eludes the careful scru- 
 tiny of all but divinely aided experts, — nothing, in fine, but 
 giving a cup of water to one, or ministering to the physi- 
 cal wants of one, because he is a disciple of Jesus, — yet 
 nowhere in all the conversation of Jesus is any purpose 
 disclosed to exempt those, who shall disbelieve on him, 
 or neglect to minister to him or the humblest of his fol- 
 lowers, from complete rejection and perpetual punishment 
 and destruction. After the judgment, their submission 
 was declared to be too late. a They are not to be ser- 
 vants even in the new kingdom. 13 Their doom, like the 
 kingdom prepared for the blessed of the Father, is pre- 
 pared for them from the foundation of the world. 
 
 The chief feature of the prophetic restoration was the 
 re-establishment of the Mosaic worship, the honor of the 
 priesthood, and the punctilious observance of the feasts 
 and sacrifices of the temple. But, of these, Jesus enter- 
 tained a very light estimate. According to his three 
 more credible biographers, he never went up to Jerusalem 
 to the annual feasts until on the eve of his death, and 
 then with quite other views than to be a humble commu- 
 nicant. The priesthood he held in such contempt, that 
 his animosity toward the order is the one riddle of his 
 character ; and of the laws of Moses, even of the ten com- 
 mandments, he spoke slightingly, as the traditions of them 
 of old times.' 1 Accordingly, there is no glorified Jerusa- 
 lem, no temple worship to which all nations come up, 
 and no priest nor priestly order, no scribe nor Pharisee in 
 his kingdom of heaven. 
 
 It is thus apparent how much the genius of Jesus had 
 modified the national anticipation of a glorious epoch, 
 which was believed to be foretold by the poet-prophets 
 of an earlier age. It is not surprising that the great body 
 of well-taught scribes and, following them, the mass of the 
 Jewish people, failed to see in Jesus any similitude of their 
 hero king and deliverer; rejected his idea of two comings 
 of the Messiah, neither of them bringing any restoration 
 to Israel as such, or making the worship revealed through 
 
 "Matt, xxv., 10-13. bLukc xiii., 25. c Matt. xxv.. 34, 41. 
 
 (IMatt. v., 2i, 27, 33. 3«, 43- 
 
/8 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Moses the cultus of the subdued Gentiles ; and would not 
 accept, as the salvation promised to their race, what was 
 offered on such cheap terms to wayfarers in the highways 
 and hedges, and to the Israelite only as he virtually fell 
 off from Moses and the Jehovah of their fathers. 
 
 Why did Jesus believe the kingdom of heaven to be at 
 hand, and, though he declared he did not know the day 
 nor the hour when the Son of Man should come in thj 
 clouds to establish it, yet stake his whole veracity upon 
 the prediction that that generation should not pass until 
 all that he had affirmed in reference to it, should be ful- 
 filled ? :l We can discover two reasons which probably 
 contributed, with other impressions too private and subtle 
 for conjecture even, to this fixed prepossession of his life. 
 John the Baptist had preached repentance as a necessary 
 preparation for the kingdom of heaven, which he declared 
 to be at hand. Those who came to his baptism — and 
 they were undoubtedly many, even if we consider Mat- 
 thew's statement that Jerusalem and all Judea and all the 
 region about Jordan were baptized by him, 1 ' an obvious 
 exaggeration — believed his prediction at the time. When 
 afterward Herod laid hands on him, kept him in prison at 
 his will, and had him murdered without any popular com- 
 motion, without any tokens in earth or sky of the displeas- 
 ure of heaven, the fickle multitude, ready to be alarmed, 
 easy to be reassured, doubted if anything unusual was 
 about to happen. Not so Jesus : in his sincere and ear- 
 nest soul, that revered John as a prophet, a conviction once 
 fastened would abide. He believed in his old master none 
 the less loyally after the ruling powers had suppressed 
 him, and after his treacherous converts had forsaken him. 
 
 When once he had accepted the belief, that the pro- 
 phetic era of a reign of righteousness was on the eve of 
 beginning, upon the faith of John's declaration, there 
 was much in the character and opinions of Jesus to con- 
 firm and intensify that belief. Jesus had lived a blameless 
 life. Free from the taint of sensuality and sordidness, he 
 had preserved a tender moral feeling, highly sensitive to 
 the contact of evil. When he came out of the seclusion, 
 in which his youth had passed, in pious meditation and 
 devout communion with what was to him the personal 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 79 
 
 presence of the paternal God, and with a marvellous intui- 
 tion of character looked upon worldly men, — the corrupt, 
 licentious, and extortionate Roman place-holders, courtiers 
 and soldiers with their base retinue of male and female 
 profligates, the priesthood zealous and punctilious in the 
 performance of worship, but formal, undevout, and un- 
 charitable, if not extortionate, oppressive, and vicious, — 
 when he came to learn, that everywhere reputable and 
 honorable men gave themselves shamelessly to the prac- 
 tice of acts which he had found it easy to exclude from his 
 thought, it is not surprising that he came to believe that 
 humanity had sunk to its dregs, that the last stages of 
 wickedness had been reached, and that the sin-drunken 
 world was staggering to its doom. Thus ever does the 
 observation of life in its excesses of evil sadden and shock 
 that rare feminine type of purity to which he belonged ; 
 while the experience of years, travel, and especially famil- 
 iarity with the history and literature of other ages corrects 
 our despair of our own age, and either makes us cynical in 
 the familiarity with conditions which seem to affect society 
 nearly alike everywhere, or philosophical in the confidence 
 that, in the midst of outcropping crime that ruins individ- 
 uals, humanity, by slow accretions, is gaining in virtue and 
 moral sanity. Had Jesus visited Alexandria, Athens, 
 Rome, had he known by familiarity with the history and 
 literature of earlier times the refinements and debase- 
 ments of iniquity, that had distinguished the luxurious 
 capitals Babylon, Nineveh, and Memphis, he might have 
 believed that the industrious, frugal, and devout people 
 of his own provincial Galilee were not the wicked and 
 adulterous generation " of whose evil ways the heavens 
 had grown weary. 
 
 It is, perhaps, generally believed in the Christian 
 Church, now that nearly nineteen centuries have inter- 
 vened without any coming of Jesus in the clouds of 
 heaven with a retinue of angels to gather his chosen into 
 an everlasting kingdom, and to consign all other men to 
 an everlasting punishment, that Jesus did not mean by 
 the words he uttered with so much emphasis of assevera- 
 tion to indicate any outward and physical changes in the 
 constitution of nature or the order of human society. It 
 
SO OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 is held that the kingdom of heaven is a highly figurative 
 expression, and denotes not so much a catastrophe or new 
 order of civilization, as the introduction into the old order 
 of a new and spiritual force, whereby the world is, 
 through long and gradual processes, to be renovated and 
 made the fit abode of regenerated and purified men. 
 Such passages as these are cited in support of this view : 
 When he was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom 
 of God should come, he answered, "The kingdom of God 
 cometh not with observation : neither shall they say, 
 Lo here ! or Lo there ! for, behold, the kingdom of God is 
 within you." a The parable of the mustard-seed and that of 
 the leaven are also believed to typify the gradual and quiet 
 evolution of the kingdom of heaven. The conversation 
 of which the first declaration forms a part, according to 
 Matthew, was not held with the Pharisees, but with his 
 own disciples. b A detailed account of the method and 
 time of the end of the age given to his disciples by Jesus 
 in answer to their specific question, is broken into two 
 narratives by Luke, and part told to his disciples and part 
 to the Pharisees in answer to their demand when the 
 kingdom of God should come. The probabilities seem 
 to favor Matthew's correctness. The Pharisees are not 
 shown ever to have reached a stage of docility and confi- 
 dence, to make it probable that they would ever ask such 
 a question. His determination to exclude from a knowl- 
 edge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven all to 
 whom it had not been given to know them, would prevent 
 Jesus from making such disclosures to the Pharisees. If 
 he used such language to any questioner, it must b. 
 reconciled with what he said before and afterward. 
 Luke declares that he went on to say : As the lightning 
 shineth from one part of the heaven to the other, so shall 
 the Son of Man be in his day. Every eye shall see him. 
 But still the kingdom cometh not with observation, or, 
 as it has been better translated, with outward show of its 
 coming. This translation accords with what he emphati- 
 cally insisted upon. Even I do not know the day or the 
 hour. There is no premonition that I can give. It 
 comes like lightning from the sky, like a thief in the 
 night : the only safety is to be always watching and ex- 
 
 a Luke xvii., 20-37. •'Matt, xxiv., 3-5. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 8 1 
 
 peering it. Only Luke reports that he said the kingdom 
 of God is within y on. Another translation gives among 
 yon, and this makes the statement harmonize with what 
 Jesus said on another occasion : " Behold, a greater than 
 Solomon is here " ; a and on still another occasion to the 
 Pharisees : " If I cast out devils by the spirit of God, 
 then the kingdom of God is come unto you." '' Even if 
 he said to the Pharisees, The kingdom of God is within 
 you, it might well have been with the significance, Until 
 you are changed within, for you no kingdom of God is 
 possible. If it was said to his disciples, it might have 
 been to rebuke their interest in mere outward splendors, 
 and in the glory and authority they would have under the 
 new order, and to insist, as he always did, that the right 
 heart, the devoted faith, were the essential condition of 
 their salvation, without wishing to disaffirm what he had 
 promised them of honor and dominion in his kingdom. 
 
 The growth of the mustard-seed and the leavening of 
 the meal were both quite rapid processes, and might well 
 express the progress which his new religion had made 
 and was to make under the preaching of his apostles, 
 from the time they were appointed, until their Lord 
 should come to bring them their reward and make them 
 ruler of his household. 
 
 Finding a belief in the speedy occurrence of a great 
 catastrophe, that would involve the world in its social 
 order and in its physical constitution, common among the 
 first believers in Christianity, the hypothesis is possible 
 that they, in attempting to report the conversations of 
 their master, injected into them their own prepossessions. 
 He himself might have been a man of such transcendent 
 genius, and his philosophy, so much beyond their com- 
 prehension, might have been so purposely veiled in the 
 enigmatic form of his usual teaching, that his disciples 
 ignorantly mistook a scheme of a gradual amelioration of 
 mankind in personal character and social conditions, under 
 a physical order of things substantially like what it had 
 been from the beginning, for a violent crisis, judgment, 
 and segregation of mankind into good and evil, and a 
 sudden and complete and lasting destruction of the latter 
 class in a general overthrow and reconstruction of the 
 
 "Luke xi., 31. bMatt. xii., 28. 
 
82 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 visible universe. Such a method of reasoning, however, 
 utterly defeats every sincere effort to discover a proper 
 historical basis for the character and for the existence of 
 Jesus. If we may believe that all that the New Testa- 
 ment narratives impute to Jesus, as his doctrine of the 
 kingdom of heaven, was never said by him, or was said 
 in a sense entirely different both from the obvious import 
 of the language and from the significance of it in the 
 minds of those who heard it, then we may with equal 
 reason believe that his teachings of non-resistance, of the 
 blessing of poverty, were all misapprehensions of his apos- 
 tles, and that he himself was hot-tempered, hasty to 
 avenge injuries, avaricious, and subservient to the rich. 
 Nay, we may hold that all his intellectual and moral traits 
 were the creation of his biographers, and that he himself 
 was dull, commonplace, envious, and ignoble. 
 
 Immediately after the death of Jesus, a body of men 
 and women go out from Jerusalem, and in a few years 
 penetrate into nearly every region of the then civilized 
 world, proclaiming that the world is about to come to an 
 end. They accompany this message with expressions of 
 devotion and subjection to Jesus, to whom they award an 
 authority and character substantially divine; and they say 
 that they make this declaration mainly on the faith of 
 what he had told them in his lifetime. They differed 
 about many most fundamental things, such as the validity 
 of the Mosaic law and revelation, and as to whether good 
 conduct or faith alone was the essential agency in effect- 
 ing salvation. But that the day of the Lord, the day of 
 judgment, the coming of the Son of Man with his angels, 
 the separation of the saints from the wicked, was at hand, 
 all sects and schools of the early believers seem to have 
 taken for granted. 
 
 Paul had written to the converts at Rome, describing 
 the sinner as treasuring up wrath against the day of 
 wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, 
 who will render to every man according to his deeds, in 
 the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus 
 Christ, according to the gospel which Paul had preached. ■ 
 He had comforted them with the assurance that, having 
 suffered with Jesus, they should be glorified with him, 
 
 ;> Romans ii., 6, 16. 
 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 83 
 
 and had described their earnest expectation of the mani- 
 festation of the sons of God and of the redemption of 
 their bodies/ He had, in allusion to what Jesus had so 
 earnestly urged, that they should watch all night for his 
 coming, that might be at midnight and might be at cock- 
 crowing, apprised them, that it was high time to awake 
 out of sleep, the night was far spent, the day was at 
 hand, and their salvation was nearer than when they 
 believed. 1 ' 
 
 To his Corinthian converts, he had written as those 
 waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, who 
 should strengthen them, to the end that they might be 
 blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. He told 
 them not to judge him in reference to conduct he 
 deemed it unnecessary to explain, in fine to judge nothing 
 before the time, until the Lord came, who should bring- 
 to light the counsels of all hearts.' 1 He used the phrase, 
 "the day of the Lord Jesus Christ" as if its import as 
 the day of his final coming was already familiar, as it 
 doubtless was in the minds of all believers, from the fre- 
 quency with which its approach had been impressed upon 
 their minds. He warned them that the time was short : 
 married or not married, in affliction, in pleasure, possessing 
 this world's goods or not, it mattered not ; the fashion of 
 this world passeth away/ All the relations and interests 
 of a state so transitory were of trivial account. The 
 ends of the world, he said, had come upon him and his 
 contemporaries/ By the communion of the bread and 
 wine, he told them they showed forth the Lord's death 
 "till he come."- In a fuller detail of his views of the 
 resurrection, he explained that Christ was the first fruitage 
 or product of the resurrection, and that after him all that 
 were his at his coming would rise, and then the end 
 should be, when death should be destroyed, and Jesus, 
 having put down all rule, authority, and power, and all 
 enemies under his feet, should deliver up the kingdom to 
 God. This consummation was in his view so near that 
 he spake of himself, though now verging upon old age, 
 and of his Corinthian correspondents, as likely to be alive 
 at the time, and to be changed without dying into the 
 
 •Romans viii., 17, 19, 23. b Roman! xiii., 11,12. B I« Cor. i., 7, v 
 
 *I. Cor. iv., 5. "I. Cor. vu., 28-31. 'I. Cor. x., 11. %\. Cor. »., 26. 
 
S4 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 immortal and incorruptible form." Indeed, though Paul, 
 writing from his prison in Rome, sometimes anticipated 
 his own death, as well he might under such a cruel and 
 capricious tyranny as that of Nero, yet he as often spoke 
 of living to the general resurrection and of going up from 
 active life to meet the Lord in the air. 
 
 He exhorted the Philippians to be sincere and without 
 offence till the day of Jesus Christ : h he said he should 
 rejoice over them as fruits of his no vain labor z'/,? that day." 
 Our conversation, he writes, is in heaven, whence we look 
 for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change 
 our vile body, and fashion it like his glorious body, d — 
 which is another anticipation of the coming of the Lord 
 before his body shall have wasted in the grave. Finally, 
 he urged them to be moderate, to care for nothing, be- 
 cause, he assured them, that "the Lord was at hand." e 
 
 He begged the converts at Colosse to be thankful that, 
 they had been deemed worthy to be partakers of the in- 
 heritance of the saints in light, and avowed that he was 
 the minister to them of a mystery hid for ages, but then 
 revealed by him, which was the hope of glory in Christ/ 
 and charged them to be faithful and hearty in their ser- 
 vice of the Lord, as they expected to receive of him the 
 reward of the inheritance.^' 
 
 Writing to the church at Thessalonica, he commended 
 them for turning from idols to the true and living God, 
 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from 
 the dead, even Jesus who delivered us from the wrath 
 to come. 11 "What," he asks, "is our hope, or joy, or 
 crown of rejoicing? Ye are in the presence of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ at his coming."' He told them not to 
 be in hopeless sorrow for those of their members, who 
 had died ; for he assured them on the word of Jesus him- 
 self that, when he should descend from heaven with a 
 shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of 
 God, the believers who had died should rise, and then 
 that himself and the living disciples would be caught up 
 with the raised saints to the clouds to meet the Lord in 
 the air, and ever afterward be with him. j As to the time 
 
 » I. Cor. xv., 24, 51, 52. b Phil, i., 6, 10. c Phil, ii., 16. d Phil, iii., 20, 21. 
 
 ePhil. iv., ■;• f Col. i., 12, 27. g Col. iii., 24. h I. Thess. i., 9, 10. 
 
 I I. Thess. ii.. 19. II. Thess. iv., 14-17- 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 85 
 
 when this stupendous event would take place, he reminded 
 them that they knew perfectly " the day of the Lord cometli 
 as a thief in the night,"* words of Jesus well known to 
 the whole Christian community. It would come suddenly, 
 and the destruction of the wicked outside world could not 
 be avoided : wherefore he charged them, just as Jesus had 
 charged his disciples, to be sober and watch. He closed 
 his letter with a devout prayer that their whole spirit and 
 soul and body (evidently expecting that the body in which 
 they lived on earth would survive to partake of the trans- 
 formation) be preserved blameless, until the coming of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. b In a second letter to the same 
 church, he comforts them under persecutions with the 
 assurance of rest with him, when the Lord Jesus shall be 
 revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming 
 fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God and 
 that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who 
 shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the 
 presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power, 
 when he shall come to be glorified in his saints and to be 
 admired by all that believe. Aware that they might have 
 been troubled by his first letter with the apprehension 
 that the coming of the Lord might be momentarily ex- 
 pected — and such indeed was its import, and his own im- 
 pression when writing it — he tells them that there is to 
 be a falling away first, a man of sin, a son of perdition to 
 come. c There had been an apostasy among the believers. 
 Things looked less prosperous in the young church. 
 False teachers had come in. It was the custom of the 
 zealous apostles to deal in no mild terms with men, who 
 viewed the Christian scheme or the Christian history dif- 
 ferently from themselves ; and the terms anti-Christ, son 
 of perdition, man of sin, were the vigorous epithets, which 
 they applied to these heretics. Jesus, in his details of the 
 process of the kingdom of heaven, had told his disciples 
 there should be false Christs, false prophets, doing great 
 signs and wonders, almost deceiving the very elect.' 1 Sev- 
 eral of the apostles seemed to have shared with Paul the 
 expectation of this time of trial. But he evidently ex- 
 pected that this interval would be short, for the mystery 
 of iniquity, he said, doth already work ; and he who hin- 
 
 I Thess. v., 1-3. I' I. Thess. v., 23. oil. Tlicss., ii. -l Malt, wdv., 23, 24- 
 
S6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 dereth the coming of the man of sin will be taken out of 
 the way, when the man of sin will be revealed, whom the 
 Lord will consume with the breath of his mouth and with 
 the brightness of his coming. 
 
 Writing to his own disciple, Timothy, he exhorted him 
 to abstain from covetousness and to follow after right- 
 eousness, and to keep that commandment without spot or 
 rebuke until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 which in his time the King of kings would show." In a 
 second letter, he probably quotes words of Jesus as then 
 reported, when he says, " If we be dead, we shall live ; if 
 we suffer, we shall reign ; if we deny him, he will deny 
 us." 1 ' He exults in the near prospect of the crown of 
 righteousness which the Lord shall give to him in that 
 day, and to all that love his appearing ; and he declares 
 that, when Jesus appears in his kingdom, he will judge 
 the living and the dead. To Titus, he declares that his 
 looking for the glorious appearance of the great God and 
 of our Saviour Jesus Christ is his blessed hope. 
 
 Paul seems to have maintained with much pertinacity 
 and eloquence a peculiar theory of the resurrection. To 
 Paul, the resurrection was a power or process achieved 
 wholly by Jesus through his death. By descending into 
 the world of the dead, he had overcome Death and won 
 from him the power of eternal life, first for himself, after- 
 ward for his elect. Hence, Paul everywhere declares 
 his gospel a gospel of life and immortality brought to the 
 world by his master, Jesus. That Jesus had overcome 
 death was proved by his own resurrection. So completely 
 did Paul stake the whole scheme of faith and salvation 
 upon the actual physical resurrection of Jesus that he 
 declares, if Christ be not risen, there is no resurrection 
 and faith is vain.' 1 These views he asserted against nomi- 
 nal disciples, some of whom affirmed that there was no 
 resurrection of the dead, and some that the resurrection 
 was already past. Christ's rising, Paul asseverated, was 
 the cause of all resurrection. In Adam all die. Only in 
 Christ are all made alive." This may be called peculiar, 
 because as a Pharisee Paul should have believed with his 
 sect in spirits, and in the spiritual existence of the right- 
 
 "I. Tim. vi , i), 15. I>II. Tim. ii., 11, 12. II. Tim. lv., 1, 8. 
 
 d I. Cor. xv., 12, 13, 17. e I. Cor. xv., 22. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS Sj 
 
 eous dead ; and because, upon the Pauline hypothesis, the 
 argument by which Jesus sought to prove to the Saddu- 
 cees the continued life after death of Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob, had no basis whatever." According to Paul, Abra- 
 ham, Isaac, and Jacob, had, like the good dead of his own 
 age, slept with Jesus, and were to be brought with him 
 into his kingdom, made alive after his resurrection. 
 
 The hand of Paul or some of his school is plainly seen 
 in a gloss given to Matthew's account of the phenomenon 
 of the bodies of many of the saints rising under the 
 general shock which the earth felt at the instant of the 
 death of Jesus on the cross. How could Jesus' resurrec- 
 tion be the cause of the resurrection of dead men ? How 
 could he be the first product of the resurrection, if certain 
 buried saints actually rose from their graves on the Fri- 
 day afternoon preceding the Sunday morning when Jesus 
 rose ? It would have been discreet, like Mark and Luke, 
 to have omitted the legend. But it was too clear to the 
 wondering converts. So it appears, with the clumsy addi- 
 tion, " Many bodies of saints which slept arose, and came 
 out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the 
 holy city, and appeared unto many." 1 ' Alas poor ghosts! 
 Their graves were opened and they rose, but decorously 
 waited upon the etiquette of precedence, two days, to 
 come out of their graves and appear to their friends in 
 the holy city. 
 
 The Epistle to the Hebrews, which purports to be 
 written by Paul, but which careful scholars have found 
 reason to impute to some other of the earlier disciples, 
 speaks of Jesus' crucifixion, as having taken place in the 
 end of the world, — that is, in the world's last days, — and 
 declares that, to those that look for him, he will appear the 
 second time without sin unto salvation. It describes the 
 then status of Jesus himself, crucified and believed to 
 have passed into the heavens, as seated at the right hand 
 of God, and expecting continuously till his enemies be 
 made his footstool, 11 or, in the very condition in which 
 Jehovah is supposed in the Psalm to have addressed him, 
 of waiting for the catastrophe, which was to bring his 
 enemies under his power. It advises the Hebrew con- 
 verts to exhort each other to good works, and so much 
 
 "Luke xx., 37. i'Matt. xxvii., 52, 53. c Heb. ix., 26, 28. <1 Heb. x., 12, 13. 
 
88 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the more as they see the day approaching," evidently 
 considering that even unenlightened persons c6uld dis- 
 cern in passing events signs of the coming on of the end. 
 It begged them to hold fast their confidence and to be 
 patient, that after doing God's will they might receive 
 the promise, " for yet a little while, and he that shall 
 come will come, and will not tarry." 1 ' Before this re- 
 markable Epistle ends, it gives with great precision an 
 embodiment of the conception which the believers of the 
 first century derived from the prophecies, particularly 
 those of Zechariah as modified by the explanations of 
 Jesus and his apostles. In the vividness of the descrip- 
 tion, the day so near is considered already come, and it 
 is affirmed: "Ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto 
 the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and 
 to an innumerable company of angels, to the general 
 assembly and church of the first born, which are written 
 in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits 
 of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of 
 the new covenant." When Jehovah spake to your 
 fathers from Sinai, his voice shook the earth. When 
 he speaks from Mount Zion, it shall not only shake, 
 but overthrow the earth ; and only the uncreated things, 
 that cannot be shaken, shall remain. Wherefore, receiv- 
 ing a kingdom which cannot be moved, they were to 
 serve God with reverence and fear, who was to be a 
 consuming fire to all who served him not. 
 
 Thus far have been traced the opinions which Paul held 
 in reference to the second coming of Jesus and the end of 
 the world, and which the Pauline adherents of Christian- 
 ity in Asia and Europe must have received on the faith 
 of his writings. Let us now see whether substantially 
 the same opinions were entertained by those propagan- 
 dists of the new religion, whose head-quarters were at 
 Jerusalem, and who looked at Paul with suspicion and 
 seriously, and with some bitterness, controverted the dog- 
 mas, which he taught with such confidence of conviction. 
 
 James, who was Jesus' brother, in the only Epistle pre- 
 served of his, urges the converts among the twelve tribes 
 to be patient unto the coming of the Lord, to be patient 
 as the husbandman who waiteth for the coming up of his 
 
 *Heb. x., 25. b Heb. x., 37. c Heb. xii., 22-29. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 89 
 
 planted seed, "for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh " ; 
 to have no controversies nor unkind feelings against 
 brethren, for behold the judge standeth at the door/ 
 evidently having in his memory the words of his brother : 
 " Be ye like men that wait for their Lord, . . . that, when 
 he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him im- 
 mediately." 1 ' 
 
 Peter, the confidant of Jesus, in a letter to the converts 
 among the heathen in Asia Minor, affirms that he and 
 they are begotten unto a lively hope to an incorruptible 
 inheritance in heaven, reserved for them, in the anticipa- 
 tion of which they rejoiced through present trials, and 
 that their faith would redound to their glory at the 
 appearing of Jesus Christ. This salvation for which they 
 hoped, he declared, the prophets had predicted, and the 
 very angels had interested themselves in; but they must 
 hope for it with soberness till the revelation of Jesus 
 Christ. d He declares that Jesus is then ready to judge 
 the living and the dead, and that the dead have had 
 the gospel preached to them, that they may be judged 
 by the same standard as men then living. Peter evi- 
 dently did not share Paul's peculiar views about the res- 
 urrection. To him, as to his countrymen generally, in- 
 cluding Jesus, the patriarchs and kings and prophets 
 and people of Israel were alive in the underworld, were 
 spirits in prison, to whom it would be just to carry the 
 intelligence of the coming of the kingdom of heaven, 
 which all that were worthy would accept and rejoice 
 in. The end of all things is at hand, he asserts : be 
 therefore sober and watch. He says, however, a fiery 
 trial is to try them : the falling away is to come, the 
 false Christs : all but the elect will be deceived, but 
 they will only be partaking of Christ's sufferings, and, 
 when his glory shall be revealed, their joy shall be ex- 
 ceeding. The time has come when judgment must begin 
 at the house of God ; and, if the righteous are barely 
 saved, what must be the fate of the sinner? He calls 
 his converts the flock of God, and assures them that, 
 when the chief Shepherd appears, they shall receive an 
 unfading crown of glory/ 
 
 aJamesv.,7-9. b Luke xii., 36. 1. Peter i., 4, 5» 7- 
 
 «il. Peter ii., i2, 13, 17, 20. el. Peter iv., 5,6. ' L Peter iv., 5, 7. «*. '3. »7-»9- 
 
90 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 In a second letter, the authenticity of which, however, 
 is questioned among Biblical critics, Peter maintains that 
 he was not following cunningly devised fables, when he 
 made known the power and coming of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, that he himself heard a voice declaring Jesus the 
 beloved Son of God ; and that they have in the Scriptures 
 spoken by holy men, moved by the Holy Ghost, even a 
 surer word of prophecy than that attestation of his." The 
 frequent disappointment of the expectation of the Church, 
 strained to utmost tension by these notes of warning 
 everywhere sounded by the preachers of the new religion, 
 had begotten its natural fruit. Scoffers and sceptics had 
 come, saying : Men live and die, and the world goes 
 quietly on as it was wont from the first ; and where is 
 this promise of his coming? Ah ! just so quietly went on 
 the old antediluvian world, sleeping between the great 
 surrounding oceans with no premonition of change, till it 
 perished suddenly in the engulfing water. By the same 
 token, he says, these heavens and this earth are kept in 
 store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and 
 perdition of ungodly men. The day of the Lord will 
 come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall 
 pass away with a great noise, and the earth and its works 
 shall be burned up. Expecting that catastrophe, he 
 exhorts them to holy conversation and godliness, and 
 declares that he and the disciples of Jesus (on his prom- 
 ise) look for a new heaven and a new earth, wherein 
 righteousness shall dwell. 1. 
 
 The Epistles of John betray a common authorship with 
 the evangel standing in his name. By whomsoever they 
 were written, they indicate how extensive was the expec- 
 tation of the immediate return of Jesus from heaven ; and, 
 if they were not written till the second century, they indi- 
 cate how tenaciously that expectation was cherished by 
 believers, after all the events to attend that return had 
 long happened or become impossible. " Little children," 
 the Christian father writes, "it is the last time ; and, as 
 ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now 
 are there many antichrists, whereby we know that it is 
 the last time." c "Abide in him, that, when he shall 
 appear, we may not be ashamed before him at his 
 
 all. Peter i., ii, 16, 19. Ml. Peter iii. c I. John ii., 18. 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 91 
 
 coming." a "It doth not yet appear what we shall be; 
 but, when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we 
 shall see him as he is." b 
 
 Scholars have agreed that the Revelation, so called, is 
 a genuine and early product of the literary spirit that 
 kindled with the first Christian reformation. Like the 
 twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of Matthew, it is 
 an elaborate exposition of the kingdom of heaven. But it 
 is not, like those chapters, by a master hand ; and, in place 
 of the severe simplicity and solemn dignity of the concep- 
 tions of Jesus, we have much trivial detail, many extrava- 
 gances, that are more grotesque than awful, redeemed, 
 however, in the last few chapters, by soothing and pa- 
 thetic descriptions of the rest and consolations of the 
 righteous, that have always deeply affected the human 
 heart. There is less creative power in this curious prose 
 poem than at first seems apparent. A fervid convert, 
 susceptible to the sublime imagery of the Hebrew proph- 
 ets, thoroughly imbued with those terrific and exul- 
 tant expectations of convulsions, falling heavens, deluges 
 of fire, slaughter and torture of unbelievers, which the 
 early Christians must have recounted in their assemblies 
 to each other with blanched cheeks and glowing eyes, 
 might have woven together in his sleeping and waking 
 visions just such fancies. The seven golden candlesticks 
 were borrowed from Zechariah, the description of the 
 Son of Man was taken from Daniel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. 
 The description of the throne, of the book, of the four 
 beasts, of the slain lamb, of the four horses, are all repro- 
 ductions of the symbolisms of the same prophets. The 
 beast with seven heads and ten horns had appeared be- 
 fore in the visions of Daniel ; Isaiah had told of the down- 
 fall of Babylon ; and Ezekiel had given the topography 
 and measurements of the holy city. In fine, this com- 
 position of a man of inferior genius takes, imperfectly 
 remembered and understood, the ideas of Jesus, of a 
 kingdom of heaven, that involved the destruction of the 
 world, the punishment of the wicked, and the gathering 
 into renovated Jerusalem of the saints, collated with the 
 poetic exaggerations of the prophets, and sets them forth 
 as verities of the future. The fact that it was written, 
 
 ■ I. Join, ii.,28. hi. John iii., 2. 
 
92 OPINIONS VXD CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 was read and cherished and wondered at, shows how 
 deeply the idea of the end of the world possessed the 
 early Christian mind. 
 
 It purports to be a revelation made through John from 
 Jesus Christ of things which must shortly come to pass. 
 "Behold," he says, "he cometh with clouds; and every 
 eye shall see him : and they which pierced him : and all kin- 
 dreds of the earth shall wail because of him." He sends 
 messages to several churches, and announces that he is 
 coming like a thief in the night, and they must watch. 
 Him that overcometh he will acknowledge before God 
 and the angels, and clothe in white raiment, will write on 
 him the name of the holy city and his own new name, 
 and make to sit down with him on the throne of his king- 
 dom. Then follow details of the plagues of the earth, 
 the destruction of its inhabitants, the stars falling, the 
 sky rolled together like a scroll, the islands and moun- 
 tains displaced, the selection of the saved, — a specified 
 number from each of the tribes of Israel, an unnumbered 
 multitude from other nations, who had been persecuted 
 for Jesus' sake, — the opening of the bottomless pit and the 
 woes that issued from it; the wicked earth, although the 
 heavens have been rolled up and the stars are fallen, still 
 keeping up the warfare against the heavenly powers, and 
 suffering fearful slaughter and torture. At last, the 
 Lamb appears on Mount Zion ; and, after the contest 
 between him and the kings of the earth, in which they 
 are aided by the beast with seven heads and ten horns 
 and by the old serpent or dragon, and by the woman city 
 Babylon, Satan is imprisoned, and the souls of the mar- 
 tyrs who had been faithful to Jesus live with him on earth 
 a thousand years. After this, all the dead are raised, and 
 all who are not inscribed in the book of life are consigned 
 with the dead to a lake of fire. The new Jerusalem comes 
 down from a new heaven to a new earth, where God shall 
 reign with his saints in a world where there shall be no 
 more death, sorrow, crying, or pain. It is difficult among 
 the incoherences and grotesque horrors of this composi- 
 tion to find even this consecutive order of events ; for 
 details, often trivially minute and unimportant and utterly 
 irreconcilable with any chastened imagination, are given 
 in chapters, that are evidently recapitulations of what had 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 93 
 
 been told before. The pictures are like those which 
 harass a sickly sleep, when no person or thing retains 
 its identity, and a locust becomes a horse with the head 
 of a man and having his chief power in his tail. The 
 two resurrections with an interval of a thousand years 
 are an idea for which the prophetic descriptions, the 
 delineations of Jesus, and the traditions of the apostles 
 furnish no authority. So marked a distinction, even 
 among the elect, might well have fired the heart of 
 the persecuted Christians to bear with patience and wel- 
 come with exultation the martyrdom, which was to be 
 so indemnified and honored in the kingdom of heaven. 
 After the coming of the Lord, and after his victory over 
 the rebellious race of man had become so complete as to 
 have Satan bound and cast into the bottomless pit, he is 
 again let loose to deceive and seduce the world to their 
 final terrible doom ; but this gratuitous improvidence on 
 the part of the heavenly powers is not reconcilable with 
 any scheme of eschatology hinted by Jesus, his disciples, 
 or their forerunners, the prophets. 
 
 The controversial force of such a work in a supersti- 
 tious age must have been considerable. The idol wor- 
 shippers, pleasure-seekers, mere busy, worldly men, the 
 pagan philosophers, the obstinate adherents of the old 
 religion as well, as the heretical teachers of the new, are 
 denounced, punished with plagues, and finally consigned 
 to the lake of fire and brimstone, it being implied that 
 they are the great majority of the human race, with an 
 absence of all commiseration and of all feeling except 
 exultation, that shows that the author was very little 
 touched with the better spirit of the humane character of 
 Jesus. Slight honor is it to Jesus to make him the con- 
 spicuous champion and contriver of the cruel tortures for 
 mankind, which are only not harrowing to read, because 
 by their coarse grotesqueness they excite the ludicrous 
 side of human sensibility. It must be said, however, that 
 the hell of the Apocalypse, the hell of Paul and of Jesus, 
 and the catastrophe that befalls the Gentiles in this pro- 
 phetic forecasting of the coming of the Messiah, merci- 
 less and indiscriminating as they are, will not compare in 
 unthinkable horrors with the physical hell of Dante, of 
 Milton, and of Robert Pollok, nor with the hopeless, 
 
94 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 never-ending mental agony, which is accepted as the 
 fixed fate of a large portion of mankind by refined and 
 educated modern evangelicism. 
 
 According to Jesus, the righteous only were to be re- 
 ceived into eternal life, while the wicked were to go away 
 into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 
 but this language carries with it the implication that the 
 fire is to be effectual to their everlasting destruction. 
 Paul declares that those who obey not the gospel shall 
 be punished with an everlasting destruction, which fairly 
 implies, that from that destruction there shall be no rema- 
 nent life or resurrection. So in the fire-pictures of the 
 writer of Revelation, only Satan, the beast, and the false 
 prophet are to be tormented day and night, forever and 
 ever ; while the mass of men, whom they had deceived, 
 were to be cast into the lake of fire, and there experience 
 a second death. It accorded doubtless with such an idea 
 of a complete and just retribution, as even a Jew in the 
 first century might entertain, that only the ringleaders 
 in a rebellion against the new sovereign of earth and 
 heaven should be tortured forever, — perhaps because 
 they were endowed with a nature not capable of death, — 
 but that the great crowd of their mortal, defeated fol- 
 lowers should be summarily destroyed by fire, an agency 
 intimately connected with the coming of the Lord in all 
 the Old and New Testament prophecies. 
 
 It has thus been seen, by a careful examination of the 
 authentic Christian records, how deep and paramount and 
 universal was the conviction in the minds of the witnesses 
 and confidential friends of Jesus, who became for the 
 world and the Church the media of communicating the 
 traditions of his life and doctrine, that the kingdom of 
 heaven, drawing after it, in a series of supernatural and 
 stupendous events, the end of the order of the world, the 
 overthrow of all secular governments and societies, the 
 destruction of the opponents of the gospel, and the estab- 
 lishment of an everlasting kingdom of the saints, rein- 
 forced by the resurrection of the good among the dead, 
 was so near its fulfilment, that the great duty of every 
 man was to watch in prayer and soberness for its sudden 
 appearance. While so many passages are found in the 
 writings of all the apostles and New Testament contribu- 
 
THE DOMINANT IDEA OF JESUS 95 
 
 tors directly affirming this conviction, it is the underlying 
 sanction of all their exhortations to virtuous conduct, the 
 secret fire, at which all their zeal for the new doctrine was 
 lighted, the solution of the otherwise incomprehensible 
 patience and exultation, with which they encountered per- 
 secutions, beatings, imprisonments, and cruel deaths. 
 
 As Jesus had discouraged all industry, all forethought 
 to make provision for the wants of the body, refused with 
 disdain to interest himself in disputed rights of property, 
 spoken disparagingly of the ties of family relationship, 
 and challenged those, who would be greatly honored in 
 the kingdom of heaven, to arrest, so far as they could, the 
 generation of the human race ; so Paul thought, in the 
 narrow margin of time that was left, it was entirely inex- 
 pedient for the unmarried to marry or for the married to 
 be divorced. Had Paul been assured that the world was to 
 go quietly on, as it had from the beginning of history, for 
 two thousand years, that wars were to continue, kingdoms, 
 dynasties, and republics to rise and fall, intelligence, virtue, 
 and civilization to ebb and flow over different regions and 
 among the different races of the world, that nations that 
 had never accepted or had apostatized from Christianity, 
 and men that disowned it, would live as virtuously and as 
 prosperously, and contribute as much to the civilization of 
 the world, as the nations and men that were true to his 
 traditions of Christianity, he might have exclaimed with 
 his accustomed impetuosity, " Then is my preaching vain 
 and your faith vain." 
 
 The historical fact, that the early Christians expected 
 the end of the world in their lifetime, few intelligent per- 
 sons will deny. But it will be denied that this expecta- 
 tion had a justification in the teachings of Jesus, rightly 
 understood, or that it stands now in any prominent view 
 in a comprehensive summary of the doctrines and opin- 
 ions of the New Testament. It will be said, that it was an 
 unimportant misapprehension of those who undertook to 
 report the words of Jesus, in no wise compromising his 
 omniscience or divinity ; that it was, even if they accepted 
 it, a mere blemish of their human intelligence, which did 
 not incapacitate them from being instruments of a divine 
 revelation to the world of the truths of the gospel, which 
 are in no wise complicated with this misapprehension. 
 
0/6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Does it not rather seem that this expectation of the end 
 of the world was derived by the first believers from what 
 Jesus had himself taught ? He had not taught it casually 
 or incidentally. It was his kingdom of heaven, to pro- 
 claim which he believed himself appointed ; it was his 
 dominant idea, to which every thing else in his mind and 
 in his teaching was made subordinate. To accept Jesus 
 as a revelator of the will of God, as the introducer of a 
 new order into the world, and then to reject his revela- 
 tion ; to deny the new order to have come or that it is 
 ever to come, what is this but to be disobedient to his 
 gospel, and to incur the fate which Paul declared awaited 
 that class ? A historical theory is possible and has been 
 accepted that accepts Jesus, but denies his doctrine of a 
 kingdom of heaven. A like daring of sceptical criticism 
 acknowledging the existence of Christopher Columbus 
 might insist that he was a professor at Salamanca, who 
 had such a horror of the water that he could never be 
 induced to set his foot in a vessel or a boat ; or yielding 
 to the force of the evidence that there was a German, 
 who lived in the sixteenth century named Martin Luther, 
 might maintain, that all that is said about his controversy 
 with the Papacy is a fiction, he having been all his life a 
 devout Jesuit and advocate of Papal infallibility -md 
 supremacy. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS. 
 
 "To me, it is much more animating and encouraging to see that, in nat- 
 ural course and by ordinary operation of universal faculties, prophets and 
 saviors arise, and will doubtless continue to arise, than to believe that, by a 
 special intervention, one Redeemer was once sent whose influence has cer- 
 tainly thus far not been adequate to so singular an occasion and office." — 
 Harriet MartineatCs Eastern Journal. 
 
 The social relations of men, the rights and duties 
 which the marital, family, tribal, and national ties imply, 
 and the instincts, affections, sentiments, and principles 
 which they develop and inspire, have very largely con- 
 tributed to the culture and growth of the human mind, 
 and to the progressive evolution of civilization. Accord- 
 ingly, the laws of the social relations, the principles, 
 which underlie the structure of communities, cities, and 
 states, and by conformity to which, public order, the 
 ascendency of justice, the protection of the weak, the 
 security to the greatest number possible of the substan- 
 tial and prime goods of life, can be preserved, have 
 always deeply engaged the thoughts of the most liberal 
 and highly endowed men. 
 
 The political notions of Jesus have already been indi- 
 cated in his dominant prepossession of an immediately 
 impending kingdom of heaven. His scheme of a perfect 
 social order was summary and comprehensive. It was to 
 tear down the effete, decayed world, the rejected Jerusa- 
 lem, and to receive from heaven a new Jerusalem, a city 
 having foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 
 
 Government is the application of political economy, the 
 law of the house or of the social order to the struggle for 
 life, whereby the strong, while taking, in the right of their 
 strength, a superior share of the goods of life, shall not 
 deprive the weak of their smaller share. Jesus not only 
 rebuked the greed and violence of the strong, but he 
 
98 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 sought to repress the very struggle for life itself. He 
 said: Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, 
 what ye shall drink, with what ye shall be clothed. Live 
 like the birds, which the heavenly Father feeds; enjoy 
 your life like the lilies, careless of what may befall them ; 
 leave the care for property to the Gentiles, the world's 
 people, who have always troubled themselves about such 
 things, and seek only the kingdom of heaven, in which 
 the supply of the bodily wants is the minimum of the 
 divine foresight' 
 
 Of what use is political economy in such a faith ? Why 
 should law be invoked to make men contend fairly with 
 each other for food, drink, and clothing, and all the for- 
 tune that is an equivalent for them? "Who made me," 
 he asked impatiently, "a judge or a divider over you ?" b 
 If thy brother has cheated thee out of thy share of a 
 paternal inheritance, do not appeal to the law : only the 
 Gentile, the law-loving Roman, the modern Englishman, 
 whose highest idea is fair play, care for justice. Give 
 him an acquittance of the whole inheritance. Has a 
 thief entered thy hall and taken thy Sunday overcoat ? 
 Seek him out, — not to hand him over to the police, but to 
 bestow upon him thy blessing and thy cloak. Not only 
 resist no evil, but seek no indemnity for it afterward. If 
 thou art knocked down by the blow of a ruffian, if it was 
 upon the right cheek, offer to his not yet appeased wrath 
 the left cheek also. And wealth, — useless in itself in 
 the approaching destruction of all things, — what does it 
 represent but the lawless striving and worldly thrift that 
 went into the getting of it ? It is as impossible, with such 
 a burden, to enter into the kingdom of heaven, as for a 
 camel to enter the eye of a needle. Sell all that thou 
 hast and give it to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure 
 in heaven. d 
 
 When it is considered that human society, like the com- 
 plicated communism of ants, bees, and beavers, and the 
 looser aggregation of all the higher animals, so far as it 
 has not been superseded by the care or broken up by the 
 hostility of man, has for its prime object the procure- 
 ment of subsistence and the common defence against 
 
 » Matt vi., 34-34. M.iikexii , 13, 14. c Matt, v., 3*-.^. 
 
 <1 Luke xii., 33 ; Mark x., 21, 25. 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 99 
 
 attack from without, it will be seen, how revolutionary is a 
 political scheme, that makes it a prime principle not to 
 seek subsistence and not to resist attacks. When it is 
 remembered, that out of society have grown all the senti- 
 ments and affections of men that are developed beyond 
 beastly instincts, out of resistance to evil have proceeded 
 a sense of justice, many of the ideas of right and wrong, 
 together with nearly all the patriotism and enthusiasm, 
 which have made human life in all ages heroic, it can be 
 seen how complete was the challenge of Jesus to all the 
 virtue of the world. 
 
 A reformer he most certainly was, but not a reformer 
 who acknowledged, that any good had been achieved 
 before him, or that, by any of the methods, by which the 
 world had seemed to have progressed, any further prog- 
 ress was possible. If he never spake the words imputed 
 to him in John's Gospel, they fitly describe his exclusive 
 spirit, — " All that ever came before me are thieves and 
 robbers." :1 He was the most uncompromising of inno- 
 vators. He demanded new forms for the new spirit, new 
 bottles for the new wine, no patching of the old garments 
 with new cloth. So far as mankind had gone, it had gone 
 all wrong. It must be born again. The old order must 
 perish. The ideal city, the perfect political state, could 
 not grow up out of a corrupt mankind, or be built of any 
 materials the growth of the bad earth. It must come 
 down from heaven ; and happy were those, who, listening 
 to him and believing, should be thought worthy to be 
 made citizens of it. 
 
 Nothing was farther from his thought than to work 
 with the spirit of his age, or of any age — to promote as 
 much as possible all the good tendencies of the times. 
 The spirit of the age, the tendencies of the times, were 
 all toward evil and toward doom ; and the earth, replete 
 with wickedness, was waiting for the manifestation of the 
 wrath of God in its destruction. Suppose ye, he once 
 exclaimed, that those Galileans whom Pilate slew in the 
 midst of their sacrifices, or those eighteen upon whom 
 the tower of Siloam fell and killed them, were sinners 
 above other men, because they suffered such things ? " I 
 tell you, Nay : but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise 
 perish." b 
 
 " Jc.lm \., 8. i' I, nk.- wii., 1-5. 
 
IOO OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 The hostility of Jesus to the existing political order is 
 manifest in many of his reported words. In sending his 
 disciples forth to teach, he said they were sheep going 
 among the wolves. The wolves, who would devour them, 
 were "the councils, governors, and kings" before whom 
 they would be brought. He begged them to be wise and 
 harmless, and assured them that their persecution 
 should be a testimony against the nations and govern- 
 ments. 11 
 
 In the earlier period of his career, Jesus seems to have 
 shared with moderation the national prejudices of his 
 countrymen. He charged his disciples, in sending them 
 out to proclaim the approach of the kingdom of heaven, 
 to avoid the houses and cities of the Gentiles, and even 
 of the Samaritans ; and it is quite certain that, during 
 his lifetime, he did not afterward remove this interdict, 
 or by precept or example disclose, that his message of 
 repentance had any relevancy at all for other people than 
 the Jews. b After his death, Paul justified his preaching 
 to the Gentiles, not by any tradition of Jesus, but by a 
 direct commission from the resurrected Master, who met 
 him journeying to Damascus ; and Peter, by words that 
 he heard from heaven in a vision he had at Joppa. When 
 Jesus was in Phoenicia, though this must have been not 
 quite serious, he told the woman whose daughter he healed 
 that the Phoenicians were dogs only, while the Israelites 
 were Jehovah's guests, seated at his table. 
 
 But the cool incredulity of the learned and clerical 
 classes, who controlled the intelligent public opinion in 
 Galilee, and still more in Judea, contributed to weaken 
 these prejudices, never very strong. To the Jew of his 
 time, Moses was a great leader and law-giver, who, like 
 the greatest of the prophets, had passed into heaven 
 without having suffered death ; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 
 were great princes, who had held familiar conversations 
 with Jehovah ; David was an heroic king, and an inspired 
 poet, beloved of the Lord. For the books of the law, es- 
 pecially the ten commandments, there was everywhere a 
 veneration amounting to absolute awe. The Psalms and 
 the prophecies were only in slightly less repute. We, who 
 consider it nearly sacrilegious to speak otherwise than 
 
 a Matt, x., 16-18. bMatt. x., 5. c Matt, xv., 24, 26 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS IOI 
 
 with respect of Washington and his compatriots, who 
 hold to the Declaration of Independence as embodying 
 axioms of absolute truth, and for whom a citation of the 
 Constitution is an end of all political disputation, can under- 
 stand how, when to the Jews the Church and State were 
 one, and the principles of government were at the same 
 time a standard of faith and a rule of conduct, the mem- 
 ory of the great leaders of the nation, the sanctity of their 
 State papers and civil codes, and the authority of their 
 politico-ecclesiastical annals and literature should have 
 grown in reverence in the fifteen centuries of their na- 
 tional existence, far more than the corresponding attach- 
 ment for our heroic men, heroic annals, and national 
 documents has grown in a single century. 
 
 Jesus seems to have been considerably emancipated 
 from this veneration. In the Sermon on the Mount, he 
 quotes two of the fundamental precepts of the decalogue, 
 the prohibition of murder and of adultery, not as the laws 
 of God, not even as laws of Moses, or as imperative stat- 
 utes of the national code, but as traditions of them of old 
 time. He puts them in the same category with the direc- 
 tion to hate one's enemy, which is not a precept of the 
 Hebrew law at all, only an implication and inference, 
 which an orthodox Jew would probably have denied and 
 resented, even in his time. It is true he declared, in 
 the same discourse, that he came not to destroy the law, 
 and that not a jot or tittle should be taken from it; but he 
 asserted that he came to fulfil it, — a process that must have 
 seemed to his hearers quite as revolutionary, and which, 
 oupled with the sweeping implications of the utter inade- 
 quacy of even the moral features of it to influence 
 character and form correct conduct, must have seemed 
 eminently unpatriotic and sacrilegious to the conservative 
 Jews. Doubtless, he shared John the Baptist's contempt 
 for the exclusiveness arrogated by the children of Abra- 
 ham, and broke up the prestige, which was accorded to 
 the patriarchs in the kingdom of heaven, by intruding 
 upon their select privacy a crowd of aliens from the four 
 corners of the world." He was called the son of David. b 
 He never so styled himself, and his frank avowal that he 
 held himself greater than Solomon may indicate what he 
 
 « M .nt. viii , 1 1, i.' : iii , o. I' Mall, w., 22 ; xx., 30, ji. 
 
102 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 thought of that royal lineage." While allowing that the 
 scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses' seat and that the ob- 
 servances they required were fairly binding upon the con- 
 science of the Jewish citizen, he denounced their personal 
 characters: he denied that, though Moses' representatives, 
 they were to have the title or obedience of Rabbis, — him- 
 self being the real master. He satirized their excessive 
 devoutness, and the minute and formal character of their 
 worship, which was only minute and formal, in the fidelity 
 with which it followed the pattern laid down, as they be- 
 lieved, by Moses himself. 1 ' 
 
 The Jews bore the Roman yoke as impatiently as they 
 had borne any earlier foreign domination. There were 
 among them in Jesus' time, and before and afterward, 
 strong aspirations for the restoration of their ancient 
 autonomy, which had passed away forever, not so much 
 on account of their especial corruption or lack of intelli- 
 gence and bravery, as because the fashion of the world 
 had been constantly changing. The earlier legends of the 
 Hebrews represent the Semitic people as under kings 
 whose kingdoms were only a single tribe or city. Greece, 
 in the time of the Trojan war, was dominated by as many 
 kings as it had principal cities. It was the tendency of 
 progress for these separate sovereignties to melt into the 
 greater empires of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome, 
 each in succession enlarging and extending its sway, till 
 the old civilization perished under the incursions of the 
 barbarians. Barbarism manifested itself again in disin- 
 tegration, and in the multiplicity of sovereigns and gov- 
 ernments, and only in modern times is the old process of 
 coalition and absorption resumed. The Jew had in his 
 national literature an unusual stimulus to revolt against 
 any attempt to subjugate him to the power or the law of 
 other nations. He was naturally seditious ; and the priest- 
 hood, his natural leaders, aided his revolutionary purposes, 
 whenever they had the faintest prospect of success. 
 
 Jesus kept himself wholly aloof from this feeling. To 
 the Pharisees, he was obnoxious as destitute of love of 
 country. Their question to him of the lawfulness of pay- 
 ing tribute to Rome was evidently designed to prejudice 
 him with the mob as an unpatriotic citizen. His evasion 
 
 a Matt, xii., 42. '> Matt, xxiii. '' Matt, xxii., 17, 21. 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS IO3 
 
 of it has always been commended for its readiness and 
 sagacity, rather than as a logical solution of a difficulty. 
 On the other hand, it is plain that the Roman aristocracy 
 never considered him other than a Jew, and doubtless as 
 ripe for sedition. Pilate, at the crucifixion, seemed at first 
 to have been considerably influenced by the insinuations 
 of the chief priests to believe that Jesus' real object was 
 political, and insisted, against strong remonstrances, in 
 affixing to the cross the superscription, "Jesus of Naza- 
 reth, the king of the Jews." 11 This suspicion of both 
 parties of him showed how fairly he had maintained his 
 neutrality, the solution of which is already given in his 
 doctrine of the kingdom of heaven, and gives further con- 
 firmation to the impression, that that was his dominant 
 idea. He was not of the Jewish party nor Caesar's friend, 
 because, as he is declared to have told Pilate, " If my 
 kingdom were of this world, then would my servants 
 fight"; but it is not thence. 1 ' 
 
 It seems proper to class with his political opinions the 
 ideas of Jesus concerning wealth and poverty. Political 
 economy has been fitly termed the science of wealth ; and 
 a large part of the functions of civilized governments are 
 those which pertain to the protection of men in their ac- 
 quisition and possession of property. Jesus opens his 
 earliest discourse, if the chronological order of Matthew 
 be followed, with a benediction upon poverty. "Blessed 
 are the poor," he said, "for theirs is the kingdom of 
 heaven."" Matthew reports it, indeed: "Blessed are the 
 poor in spirit." Poorness of spirit or poor-spiritedness 
 has always been considered contemptible among mankind, 
 who require of a man to be always superior to his fortune 
 and, however narrow and restricted his possessions may 
 be, demand that his soul shall be large and affluent. It is 
 not to be believed that Jesus intended to pronounce a 
 benediction on a quality, that all noble minds have agreed 
 to consider despicable. Adding the words, "in spirit," 
 the ordinary explanation of commentators is that the poor 
 in spirit, whom Jesus blessed, are the humble, the meek, 
 those who had overcome all pride and self-estimation. 
 But, as he pronounced a benediction on the meek, and 
 on those who patiently suffered persecution, it is not 
 
 "Johnxix., 19-22. l>John xviii., 36. 'Matt. V., 3, 
 
104 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to be supposed that he intended to mar the rhetorical 
 excellence of these striking apothegms by such obvious 
 tautology. Luke undoubtedly gives the true version of 
 this saying, when he reports : " Blessed be ye poor, for 
 yours is the kingdom of God," and makes it certain 
 what class was meant by adding the converse, " Woe 
 unto you that arc ricli ! for ye have received your consola- 
 tion." ' In Luke's hands, the beatitudes become altogether 
 more practical; and outward conditions are more regarded 
 than metaphysical qualities. The poor in spirit, the pure, 
 the merciful, the meek, those hungry for righteousness, 
 are not mentioned ; but the poor in property, the hungry 
 for food, those who weep and are hated and persecuted, 
 are comforted with the assurance, that their reward in 
 heaven shall be great, and that the rich, the sumptuously 
 fed, the prosperous and gay, shall exchange conditions 
 with them. 
 
 While it has been agreed among the most careful 
 scholars that the general details of events, as given by 
 Matthew and Mark, conform most nearly in sequence of oc- 
 currence with the facts, it is not so generally believed that 
 the fragmentary manner in which Jesus' conversations 
 are distributed through his career by Luke — the Sermon 
 on the Mount being partly uttered, when he first began to 
 preach, partly midway of his ministry, and a portion of it 
 at Jerusalem just before his arrest — may not be the true 
 arrangement. It seems more probable that Jesus avoided 
 long discourses, as less effective than brief colloquies. A 
 love of system seems to have guided Matthew or his 
 editor in putting together all his ethical teachings, which 
 were not pertinent to some incident of his life, and in 
 arranging in a consecutive order the parables spoken to 
 the disciples, and those spoken to the scribes and Phari- 
 sees, after it had become impossible to determine the 
 special time or occasion when they were in fact delivered. 
 
 Jesus charged his disciples not to be thrifty or careful 
 to accumulate property. Lay not up for yourselves treas- 
 ures upon earth, but rather lay up for yourselves treasures 
 in heaven ; for your hearts will be where your treasures 
 are. 1 ' There was to be no compromise about this, no dili- 
 gence in business and fervency of spirit, as Paul after- 
 
 a Luke vi., 20, 24. b Man. vi., 1 j-34. c Rom. xii., ii. 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS IO5 
 
 ward taught, no looking for the wealth of the kingdom of 
 heaven with a prudent care for the things of this world. 
 No man, he said, can serve two masters. If you love 
 Mammon, you will hate God. Therefore, I say unto you, 
 Take no thought for your life, to preserve which all prop- 
 erty is sought. The life is the essential thing, food and 
 raiment are the mere adjuncts of life. Take no thought 
 even for life itself, nor for what you shall eat, drink, or 
 wear. Do the fowls of the air sow, reap, and harvest 
 crops ? yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Do the 
 lilies toil or spin ? yet they are more beautiful than Sol- 
 omon in his glory of royal vesture. What utter lack of 
 faith to think the grass of the field, which blooms for a day, 
 is thus cared for, and ye, the children of God, are not 
 cared for ! Let the people of the world seek such things. 
 Leave to your heavenly Father the provision for you, 
 and seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, 
 and all such things shall be given besides. Do not even 
 prepare for to-morrow, which will take care of itself. 
 The illustration of the birds was not quite satisfactory to 
 him. The fowls of the air, though they are not anxious 
 for the morrow, are certainly exceedingly diligent, not to 
 say sordid, in their pursuit of what to eat during the 
 entire day ; and, if they do not gather into store, as the 
 thrifty squirrels and many of the rodents do, for winter 
 supplies, they take thought of the morrow so far as to 
 migrate from cold to warm regions, long before actual 
 scarcity of food compels them. Men must be more abso- 
 lutely careless even than that : only the lily, rooted to 
 the ground, cares not for the juices that shall nourish it, 
 nor forebodes the scythe that shall consign it to the oven. 
 This must be the true type of the children's confidence in 
 the bounty of their heavenly Father. 
 
 But meantime, until the kingdom of heaven shall have 
 come, what are his disciples, who have left all their indus- 
 tries and discontinued their foresight for to-morrow's 
 wants, at his invitation, to do? He had considered that 
 ton. They arc to ask whatever they want of the heav- 
 enly Father. Ask, he said, and ye shall receive ; seek, 
 and ye shall find ; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. 
 This he reiterate! and emphasized. It is really, he 
 believed, the method now. It is not the diligence of the 
 
106 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 bird, that finds the casual food in the lonely forest. Never 
 entertain such a godless supposition. It is God, who, 
 caring for the birds, his creatures, has with viewless hands 
 scattered the food in the way of their guided flights. 
 Are not men of more account than birds ? Every one 
 that asketh receiveth ; he that seeketh findeth ; to him 
 that knocketh, it is opened. If a child asks bread of 
 a father, he will not give him a stone. If men, who are 
 evil, still give to their children good things, shall not the 
 heavenly Father give good things to his children for the 
 asking ? a 
 
 These were not, as has been generally regarded, mere 
 sentiments of Jesus : they were the fundamental practical 
 ideas of his living as well as of his philosophy. He found 
 some of his disciples engaged in earning their livelihood by 
 fishing. They left their nets, and followed him. This he 
 seems to have required. 1 ' Whosoever forsaketh not all 
 that he hath cannot be my disciple. Why should they 
 go back even to take care of the nets ? They will need 
 nets no more. He will make them catch men, and save 
 them in the kingdom of heaven.' 1 Let the people of the 
 world care for the nets, and pursue their old acquisitive- 
 ness. The disciple has learned a new and easier road to 
 more enduring wealth. 
 
 He directed his disciples to sell their possessions and 
 to bestow the proceeds in alms, to provide for themselves 
 money-bags which would never grow old and a treasure 
 in heaven. The abnegation of all worldly possessions, the 
 cessation from all care for their accumulation, even for 
 the daily necessities of living, was to be immediate and 
 complete. When one inchoate disciple wanted leave of 
 absence to attend his father's funeral, and another to take 
 leave of his family and household, he would not accept 
 their adhesion to him upon such terms. No man, he said, 
 is fit for the kingdom of heaven who postpones it for any 
 service however dutiful, or any leave-taking of affection 
 however tender. It is putting one's hand to the plough 
 and looking back with regret/ He invited men away 
 from their bodily toils to share his methods of living, like 
 the birds of the air, upon the provided bounty of God to 
 
 "Matt, vii., 7-12. t> Mark i., 16-20. <• Luke xiv., 33. * Matt, xix., 27-30. 
 e Luke xii., 13-40. f Luke ix., $<r-(<2. 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS IO7 
 
 be had for the asking. Come unto me, ye that are bur- 
 dened with labor, and find rest. Take my yoke upon you, 
 which you will find light, and my burden, which is easy. a 
 
 He himself seems to have lived in strict conformity to 
 these principles. He had no house, no home, no prop- 
 erty. He made it a boast that, in respect to possessions, 
 he was worse off than the birds and the foxes. These 
 had nests and holes : he had not where to lay his head. 
 It is said of the band of devoted -women who followed him 
 out of Galilee to Jerusalem previously to his arrest -and 
 crucifixion that they ministered to him of their sub- 
 stance. 1 ' It is probable that, after he abandoned his 
 father's service and vocation and became a prophet, his 
 friends charged themselves with his maintenance ; and 
 the woven garment mentioned in the story of the cross 
 was doubtless the gift of the affectionate admiration of 
 the Galilean women, who clung to him with a fidelity 
 exceeding that of his chosen apostles.' 1 The curious pro- 
 vision of nature which leads one animal to befriend and 
 provide for another of its own or even some other spe- 
 cies, when blind, lame, or in infancy, happily character- 
 ize- the associations of men. Some men have tastes so 
 delicate or ambitions so lofty, that they disdain the ordi- 
 nary prudence and thrift, that seem an instinct of the 
 race. Jesus was one of these, and admiring and liberal 
 patrons felt themselves honored and compensated in 
 charging themselves with the sustenance, which an ab- 
 sorbing enthusiasm had made to him contemptible. 
 
 When the apostles were sent out to preach the coming 
 kingdom of heaven, the question of subsistence came up 
 in his mind. True to his principles, he makes it an ab- 
 solute condition of their mission that there shall be no 
 provision of money, food, or raiment.'' He had sedu- 
 lously charged his disciples, in language which he thought 
 it necessary to repeat and emphasize, that they should 
 take no thought of their lives or for what they should eat, 
 drink, or wear. Shall he shrink now from a practical 
 application of his own principles? He has no such pur- 
 pose. Enter with boldness any house, no matter whose. 
 Salute it with a benediction of peace, and there remain, 
 
 ft Matt, xi., 38-30. b Luke viii., 3. oLuke xxiii., 49, 55; Johnxix., 24. 
 
 '1 Matt, xxvi., 56, 'Matt, x., 9. 
 
108 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 eating and drinking such things as the inmates give you ; 
 for the laborer is worthy of his hire. a The least reward 
 they can give for the tidings of the kingdom of heaven, 
 and how to obtain an entrance into it, is to feed and 
 lodge the messengers. Doubtless, the disciples did not 
 readily adopt these suggestions. It is a part of the 
 instinctive nature of man to make some provision for 
 journeying among strangers ; and it required some empha- 
 sis and some repetition to satisfy these peasants, who had 
 perhaps prided themselves on paying in honest toil for all 
 that they had consumed, that the direction " Put money in 
 thy purse" had become superfluous, and that they were to 
 live freely upon the bounty of those, whose guests unin- 
 vited they should constitute themselves. Jesus seems 
 himself to have challenged them to acknowledge the 
 complete success of his commissariat. "When I sent 
 you," he asked at Jerusalem, " without purse and scrip and 
 shoes, lacked ye anything? And they said : Nothing." b 
 Still, though they did not quite regret the throwing away 
 for the kingdom of heaven's sake their property and their 
 family ties, they were disposed to exaggerate a little the 
 meritorious sacrifice they had thus made. Peter on one 
 occasion thought fit to remind his master of his obliga- 
 tion ; and Jesus, with a delicate and generous consideration 
 for the infirmities of his followers, exclaimed: "Verily I 
 say unto you, there is no man that hath left house, or 
 parents, or brethren, or wife, for the kingdom of God's 
 sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present 
 time, and in the world to come life everlasting." c 
 
 It is related that a young man of singularly blameless 
 character came once to him, and asked what he should do 
 to obtain the eternal life. Jesus first told him to avoid 
 those sins which are prohibited in the law, and which, in 
 that time, as in our time, the great body of reputable 
 people find it easy to avoid. The young man professed 
 that he had never stolen, nor borne false testimony, nor 
 committed adultery nor murder; and that he had loved 
 and honored his parents and dealt fairly with his neigh- 
 bors. Then Jesus told him that, to enter the kingdom 
 of heaven, he must sell all his property and give the pro- 
 ceeds to the poor, and come and follow him, and obtain 
 
 o Luke x., 5-8. I' Luke xxii., 35. c Matt, xix., 27-29 
 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS IO9 
 
 treasure in heaven. The young man, who was rich, with- 
 drew in sorrow. a Here is a very plain and practical 
 direction that, to be a disciple of Jesus, a man must dis- 
 possess himself of his property in favor of the poor. It 
 is generally said by many, who claim special reverence for 
 and allegiance to Jesus, that, in this declaration, he was 
 not serious ; that the young man was a hypocrite, and 
 Jesus, who saw through him, wished to rally and expose 
 him. There is not the slightest foundation for suspecting 
 the young man's integrity. Jesus did see through him, 
 and, believing in his sincerity, loved him, and sought not 
 to repel him, but to win his discipleship. It is entirely 
 foreign to that serious enthusiasm, which characterized 
 the mind of Jesus, to suspect him of mere levity under 
 circumstances, which should call out only the most fervent 
 and sincere feeling. The truth is, Jesus was unusually 
 earnest and serious. The interview affected him, as it 
 had the young man. After he had gone, Jesus said 
 with great deliberation to his followers : " Verily I say 
 unto you," — a form of speech he always seemed to use 
 when he wished to s?y something fundamental and mem- 
 orable, — "that a XlJci man shall hardly enter into the 
 kingdom of heaven." And still dwelling upon the theme, 
 though no one meantime had spoken : " Again I say unto 
 you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a 
 needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom 
 of God." b 
 
 The same hostility to the rich, and rejection of them 
 as candidates for subjects of his kingdom, appear in 
 several of the prominent parables, particularly in some 
 told only by Luke, who, from the prominence he gives 
 to all the anti-property opinions of Jesus, may be called 
 the evangelist of the poor. Indeed, the rich, as a class, 
 are more frequently made the subjects of his satire than 
 any other class, not excepting the Pharisees. It is not 
 at all surprising that James, who was his own brother, 
 and must have been conversant with his antipathies, uses 
 this vigorous language in his Epistle : " Go to now, ye rich 
 men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come 
 upon you ! Your riches are corrupted, your garments 
 moth-eaten : your gold and silver are cankered ; and the 
 
 » M.ut. xix., 16-22; Mark x., ax, >> Matt, xix., 23-26. 
 
I 10 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat 
 your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasures to- 
 gether for the last days."' 1 * 
 
 In the parable of the sower and the seed, some seed 
 fell among thorns, or, as was explained to the disciples, 
 among men occupied with the cares of life, or, as Paul 
 would say, quite respectfully, diligent in business ; and 
 the deceitfulness of riches, the canker of gold and silver, 
 choke the seed, and it will not bring forth the fruits of 
 righteousness. b 
 
 It seemed to Jesus a grievance, not worthy of the inter- 
 ference of a just man, that one should be defrauded by 
 his brother out of his father's inheritance; and the dis- 
 honest heir must have derived much satisfaction from the 
 rebuke, which fell upon the brother who had suffered, 
 rather than upon the brother, who had committed the 
 fraud. It is of no consequence, thought Jesus ; and went 
 on to say : There was a certain rich man, who, when he 
 had harvested a great crop, said to himself (not even to 
 his intimate friend) : I have not room for my fruits. I will 
 pull down my barns, and build larger ; and I will say to 
 my soul, Thou hast much goods laid up for many years, 
 take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. To whom God 
 said : Thou fool ! this night shall thy life be required of 
 thee. Whose, then, shall be those things thou hast pro- 
 vided ? c This parable plainly implies that, to Jesus, all 
 providence for the future, all satisfaction in business pros- 
 perity, however fair and just, were not only wrong, but 
 impious. 
 
 Indeed, we are compelled to entertain the suspicion 
 that the sentiment of justice was only feeble in Jesus, 
 and greatly encroached upon by his general sentiments 
 of pity for the weak and the poor. He told a story of a 
 dishonest steward, who had committed defalcations upon 
 the trust property of his master, which he was employed 
 to manage, who, when he was detected, sought to make 
 friends with his master's debtors by falsely altering the 
 
 a James v., 1-3. 
 
 • Luther, and many others in the Church of scarcely less eminence, have doubted the 
 authenticity of this Epistle. To such as share their suspicions, these words can of course 
 bring only' the authority which a writer, evidently of the school of James, and sharing fully 
 the ideas he is known to have maintained antagonistic to the teachings and tendencies of 
 Paul, deserves to have. 
 
 h Matt, xiii., 22. c Luke xii., 13-23. 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS I I I 
 
 ledgers to their advantage. It is even said that Jesus 
 commended the shrewdness of this proceeding, without 
 condemning its injustice, and uttered by way of improve- 
 ment that puzzle of all preachers and commentators : 
 " And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the 
 mammon of unrighteousness ; that, when ye fail, they may 
 receive you into everlasting habitations." a 
 
 It is but just, however, to say that, in Jesus' rules of 
 conduct, the question of justice, of what is exactly due to 
 another, has but little place. To petty, rigid justice, he 
 opposes, not injustice, but loose and liberal charity. It is 
 as if he should say : You are exceedingly careful to render 
 to every man his due. Render him more than his due. 
 Overpay your debt. Shame his narrow scale of exacti- 
 tude by your overwhelming bounty. In liberal natures 
 like his, the sentiment of justice is apt to be feeble. 
 Hence, to him, the servant that kept his lord's talent 
 wrapped in a napkin, neither lessening nor spending it, 
 was an unprofitable servant, to be bound hand and foot, 
 and cast into outer darkness. His master was hard and 
 extortionate; but it was by bounty, and not by justice, 
 that his obdurate heart was to be touched.'' 
 
 He said the courtesies and civilities of society were not 
 to be extended to those that could return them. Gifts did 
 not create obligation. Debt and credit are not to be kept 
 in beneficences. When thou makest a feast, invite not 
 thy friends, brothers, kinsmen, nor rich neighbors, for 
 they will invite thee in turn, and thy good deed will 
 have been cancelled ; but invite the poor, the maimed, 
 the lame, and the blind, who cannot recompense thee, 
 and thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of 
 the just. c 
 
 To the wedding feast, — his frequent illustration of the 
 kingdom of heaven, — were invited a prosperous land- 
 holder, a large owner of cattle, and a bridegroom, all types 
 of the successful and the wealthy classes. Too much 
 occupied with their good fortune, they sent polite excuses. 
 Then, the angry master of the feast hurried in the poor, 
 the maimed, the halt, and the blind, and, as there was 
 still room, actually compelled the loiterers in the high- 
 
 » Luke xvi., 1-12. b Luke xix., 12-27. 
 
 c Luke xiv., 12-14. 
 
112 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 ways and by the hedges to come in. a The rich came in 
 by the favor of invitation, the poor in the right of their 
 poverty; and there is a still lower class, upon whom the 
 honor is actually thrust. 
 
 To the covetous Pharisees, he told the parable of Dives 
 and Lazarus. '' This parable is still told with fearful im- 
 pressiveness to the tender apprehension of childish minds, 
 on account of the vivid picture it has of the dismal condi- 
 tion of those who are punished in hell. This, however, is 
 a mere incident of the story, and by no means its chief 
 lesson. Doubtless, Jesus accepted the traditional, con- 
 ventional idea of hell, which his countrymen generally 
 held. It seems to the sensitive modern mind incredible 
 that the Hindu, the Jew, and the Christian should, in 
 their several methods, entertain a vague idea of a place of 
 indescribable and perpetual misery, and, in their thought, 
 coolly regard it as the inevitable fate of their neighbors 
 or their enemies, of, in fact, the whole race of mankind 
 outside of the circle of their sympathy and fellowship. 
 But history compels us to believe, that the human mind 
 can entertain such a conception without forfeiting its in- 
 stinctive cheerfulness. Jesus was telling his story in his, 
 and in the vivid Oriental way. The story, like all his 
 moral allegories, needed a catastrophe : it was not impor- 
 tant what the catastrophe should be. And so he took 
 the conventional hell of his age, just as Shakspeare in 
 the drama of " Hamlet " takes the conventional purga- 
 tory of mediaeval Catholicism, that he may inspire fresh 
 pity for the murdered king condemned to such a fate. 
 In either case such dramatic use of a popular notion does 
 not of itself imply the author's faith in it. The real ani- 
 mus of the famous parable is its imputation against the 
 rich and its comfort for the poor, whom it is intended to 
 console with the assurance of compensation. It puts 
 into an allegory what stood before in an apothegm : 
 " Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 
 Woe unto ye that are rich ! for ye have received your 
 consolation." Of Dives, it is simply said he was a rich 
 man, who clothed and fed himself according to his con- 
 dition. It is not said that he was a vicious man, an 
 impious man, an oppressive or even a proud man. The 
 
 a Luke xiv., 16-24. ** Luke xvi., 14, 19-31. c Luke vi., 20, 24. 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 113 
 
 fact that he suffered a poor wretch, whose diseased 
 condition made him a disagreeable and even loathsome 
 object, to lie at his gate and be fed with fragments 
 from his table, indicates rather more humane feeling, 
 than is found in the average religious man of our time, 
 who would contrive to rid himself speedily of Lazarus' 
 presence at his front door by having him removed to 
 a public hospital or almshouse. The artistic structure 
 of this allegory not only exhibits the genius of Jesus, 
 but there gleams through the lurid horrors of the picture 
 flashes of the humor, with which, to a certain extent, 
 the grave enthusiasm of his character was tempered. 
 For in hell Dives is made to exhibit traits of character 
 that fairly coerce our admiration. It is one of the marks 
 of a gentleman that he shall not magnify his personal 
 inconveniences, and shall accept with thanks the most 
 trivial alleviations. Could anything exceed the modesty 
 of his request that Lazarus, who he doubtless thought 
 would go with alacrity on such an errand to please his 
 old patron and benefactor, should be sent with a drop of 
 water to cool his tongue ? With a cool tongue, with 
 which to continue the conversation, he will be too polite 
 to think of remonstrating against the other considerable 
 discomforts of his situation. When this small indulgence, 
 purely, as it seems, on the score of physical impossibility, 
 is denied, he does not roar nor blaspheme, nor, for a 
 single moment, lose his heroic patience or cheerfulness. 
 With a disinterestedness which, in his situation, is per- 
 fectly sublime, he passes at once to thinking of his five 
 brothers, who have doubtless inherited his dangerous 
 wealth, and bethinks himself how they may be warned of 
 their liability to the same place of torment. Abraham, 
 who henceforth befriends Lazarus in heaven, as Dives 
 was wont to do on earth, explains to the amazed rich 
 man how the change has come about. " Son," he says, 
 — there was a palpable sarcasm in thus making him a 
 devout and orthodox Israelite, whom even Abraham rec- 
 ognized as of his seed, — " Son, remember, that thou in 
 thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise 
 Lazarus evil things ; but now he is comforted, and thou 
 art tormented." Dives is in hell, because he was one 
 of the rich, who could not enter the kingdom of heaven 
 
I 14 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 any more than a camel could pass through the eye of a 
 needle. On the other hand, Lazarus, who is sheltered 
 in Abraham's bosom, is not described as a good man, 
 a pious man, or even a believing man. Blessed are ye 
 poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven, in virtue of 
 your poverty. The poor have the gospel preached to 
 them. The rich, who cannot enter the kingdom, need 
 not even be invited. 
 
 It is not difficult to trace the consecutive order of 
 Jesus' thought. He had been telling his disciples that, 
 they must forsake, nay, even hate, father, mother, wife, 
 children, brothers, sisters, all their possessions ; a that 
 they must do this deliberately, carefully, counting the 
 cost beforehand. Then, he had told three parables, 
 which indicated, that he preferred repentant prodigals, 
 men who had come back from deep experience of dissi- 
 pation and excesses, to the just persons that need no 
 repentance, to the careful and prudent who had saved 
 their patrimony by economy and self-denial. 11 From this, 
 he had passed to speak with qualified commendation of 
 the steward who had plundered his master, who was rich, 
 but had made himself friends by fraudulently understating 
 the debts of those who owed him, because they were 
 poor. c And when the Pharisees, who were covetous, 
 derided him, he startles them with this exaggerated 
 picture of the compensations, which, in the kingdom of 
 heaven, are provided for the rich and for the poor re- 
 spectively.* 1 
 
 To the mind of Jesus, the ordinary avocations of 
 human life, to which men go by the uncontrollable in- 
 stincts of their nature, were impious. In his description 
 of the suddenness of the opening of the new order of 
 things, he said, it would be as in the time of Noah's 
 flood, and of Sodom's destruction by fire and brimstone, 
 when men ate and drank, bought, sold, planted, builded, 
 married and were given in marriage. Like the rich man 
 in the parable, the calamities fell upon these ancient 
 people, not more to punish their sins, than to punish their 
 secular carefulness about life and property. And so, 
 above all, he counselled them against that human instinct, 
 which, in fire and shipwreck, prompts every hand to save 
 
 « Luke xiv., 25-33. b Luke xv., 11-32. c Luke xvi., 1-13. <l Luke xvi., 14, iq 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 115 
 
 what is possible of possessions/ 1 He that is on the 
 housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come 
 down to take it away, nor he who is in the field return to 
 save his treasures. 13 It is impossible to overlook the fact 
 that Jesus warred strenuously against the property in- 
 stinct in man, as hostile to that state of mind, which 
 was a fit preparation for the kingdom of heaven ; and 
 that this teaching is a fundamental principle in all his 
 teaching. 
 
 Outside of the circle of his disciples, and in portions of 
 Palestine where he had never been, his gospel seems to 
 have been understood as a gospel of poverty. When he 
 was passing through Jericho on his fatal journey to Jeru- 
 salem, a rich publican named Zaccheus, who might have 
 been a Jewish proselyte, but was not probably a descend- 
 ant of Abraham, was moved to become his disciple. 
 Jesus hears of his purpose, and visits him at his house. 
 Zaccheus does not wait to be challenged, as the young 
 man had been : "Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto 
 the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven ; and come, 
 follow me." He apparently understands from public 
 rumor that this is the everywhere prescribed condition 
 of discipleship. He makes tender at once of all his prop- 
 erty. One-half, he says, I give to the poor forthwith ; 
 out of the other half, let restitution be made fourfold, if I 
 have taken anything by false accusation, as, in his odious 
 office, he doubtless believed he had. Jesus accepts the 
 offer, and declares that he is a true son of Abraham, and 
 that the salvation which was promised to Abraham's seed 
 has come to him and to his family.' 1 Nowhere in the 
 record is found such an absolute commendation of a 
 convert. It was because no convert had so wholly em- 
 braced his ideas. 
 
 The harmony and interdependence of the ideas of Jesus 
 now begin to be quite apparent. From the belief that the 
 world itself, in all that relates to the structure of human 
 society, in the condition and destiny of its human inhabi- 
 tants, is about to be suddenly brought to an end, natu- 
 rally proceeds the conclusion, that all care for subsistence 
 is superfluous, and that wealth, which is the result of past 
 labor and prudence, and the assurance of future subsist- 
 
 »Luk<j xvii., 26-30. b Luke xvii., 31. oMatt. vi, 32, 33, <1 Luke xix., 1-10. 
 
I l6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 ence, is no longer desirable. Jesus seems to have con- 
 cluded that there was wealth enough, already earned, to 
 last the world till its dissolution, and that all devotion 
 thereto was a distraction, which wholly unfitted men for 
 the preparation to meet the catastrophe. He admitted 
 the necessity of food, clothing, and shelter; but he had 
 two resources, either of which was an ample provision. 
 His first resource was the free bounty of the heavenly 
 Father, whose gifts were to be had for the asking. Will 
 even an unkind father give bread to his children, and 
 will not a good and perfect God ? Will the beneficent 
 God feed the birds of the air, and clothe in beauty the 
 grass doomed to the scythe, and will he not feed and 
 clothe his children? 11 Besides this, the destitute were 
 to share the free gifts of the rich, b who, coming into 
 the kingdom of heaven, must show the sincerity of their 
 repentance by forsaking all things, selling their posses- 
 sions, d and bestowing the proceeds upon the poor, already 
 in the kingdom in virtue of their poverty. 
 
 If such a catastrophe as Jesus apprehended was im- 
 pending, no prudence, or forethought, or industry was 
 necessary to provide for the wants of the brief interval 
 of human life. The catastrophe, which he had asseverated 
 with a verily, verily, would occur in the lifetime of that 
 generation, 6 did not occur, and up to this last period of 
 the nineteenth century has not occurred. If Jesus came 
 again after his death, it was not with a glittering escort 
 of angels, the splendor of his appearing flashing from 
 one side of the heavens to the other. He came not to 
 shake/ still less (as the apostle believed) to remove the 
 earth, preparatory to the new earth and new heavens, in 
 which righteousness should dwell. If he came at all, it 
 was in no official character, clothed with no divine powers, 
 doing no more any works of healing or dispossession of 
 evil spirits, and, what is most perplexing of all, without 
 that fine power of uttering pithy and vigorous words 
 which characterized his human intellect. He does not 
 confront the High Priest, nor awe with the glories of 
 his risen state the high social and ecclesiastical circle of 
 Jerusalem, that had disdained him as a Galilean enthu- 
 
 ,7-12. h Matt, v., 42, 45 ; Luke vi., 30-34. c Luke xiv., 33. 
 
 "Luke xii., 33. * Matt, xxiv., 34, 35. f Heb. xii., 27. 
 
 J 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 117 
 
 siast. Like a poor ghost only, he manifests himself, 
 chiefly to susceptible Mary Magdalene; or, most pri- 
 vately, to a small circle of his chosen followers, and 
 some even of them did not hesitate to express their 
 doubt that they had indeed seen him at all. 8 
 
 But whatever occurred in the invisible world, or in the 
 policy or counsels of the heavens, of which nothing can 
 be known, it is certain that the secular order went on. 
 The sun rose in the east as before, not darkened nor 
 changed into blood. 1 ' Not a star was missing in its place. 
 The quiet movements of the heavenly bodies revealed no 
 shock, and no sympathy with any new force or will in the 
 mechanism of the universe. That mysterious power, call 
 it nature, call it law, call it God, by which all things 
 subsist and by which all things are controlled, utterly 
 declined to be turned out of its ancient courses and to 
 forsake its long-observed methods, to promote any new 
 order of things, or to usher in with imposing scenic phe- 
 nomena a new era of human or angelic society. It is 
 only in a poetic sense that the sun, moon, and stars, and 
 the aspects of the sky, sympathize with the profound 
 sorrows or the profound yearnings of the deeply moved 
 human spirit. It is the extravagance of enthusiasm that 
 commands the sun and moon to stand still, that the great 
 struggle we have on our hands may go on to victory. 
 
 What became alike necessity and duty under the 
 changed expectation ? Evidently, just what not only the 
 world, but the disciples and worshippers of Jesus, actually 
 did. They returned to their work; they prudently saved 
 the earnings of their labor; they planted, they builded, 
 they married and were given in marriage, and gradually 
 the sense of impiety in so doing faded away. 
 
 There may be genial regions of the globe where the 
 free bounty of nature invites man to repose, and abates 
 the intensity of the struggle, by which mankind have 
 maintained their existence against the encroachments of 
 various and petty forms of inferior life, and against the 
 rigor of climate. Palestine, where the fig and olive grew 
 wild, and where wild honey and edible insects abounded 
 in the wilderness, doubtless offered life to men on much 
 conditions than does Europe and America to-day. 
 
 "Man. xxviii. , 17. I'Matt. xxiv , z<>. 
 
Il8 OF IX IONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 But how does the precept, Take no thought of the morrow 
 mock the wretched tenants of crowded northern cities, 
 whose whole life is a painful thought of to-morrow's 
 subsistence, and how to make adequate to it the scanty 
 income of to-day ? How applicable is the economy of the 
 kingdom of heaven to the dwellers within the arctic circle, 
 who, in an atmosphere that inflicts sudden death upon 
 all not shielded by the skins of the most cunning ani- 
 mals, or not warmed by intense fires, which, in that tree- 
 less zone, only animal oils supply, must brave the perils of 
 ocean and frost to gather every day their food and fuel ? 
 The law of life is substantially the same everywhere. It 
 is only by taking intense thought for life that men can 
 preserve it. Not all the ravens are fed. If the sparrows 
 do not fall to the ground without the heavenly Father, 
 they do nevertheless fall. With all the power of associ- 
 ated man to help his race, with the great advantage which 
 the social state, rising into the more complex structures of 
 cities and governments, gives to individual men in sys- 
 tematizing and making effective their diligence to obtain 
 sustenance ; with the large surplus which industrious peo- 
 ple accumulate ; with the organized charities which form 
 a part of the voluntary or legal institutions of all civilized 
 communities, men do starve to death in Ireland as well as 
 in America, India, and China. Cover it up with what 
 sentiment we may, there stands for all men the primeval 
 law, — In the sweat of thy forehead shalt thou cat bread. 
 
 Paul himself, with an admiration for his master almost 
 idolatrous, was one of the first of his followers to awake 
 from the dream of a life without labor, and a subsistence 
 as precarious as the birds. Peter, true to the maxim of 
 Jesus that the laborer was worthy of his hire, that they 
 who preached the good news of the kingdom were not to 
 provide purse, nor scrip, nor extra clothing, but were to 
 be fed by the bounty of converts, so far enlarged that 
 bounty as to share it with a wife and a sister, made com- 
 panions of his mission. Paul nobly relinquished alto- 
 gether this perquisite of apostleship." He found time, 
 while exhorting to faith and repentance, to work at his 
 trade, and not only to support himself, but to have some- 
 thing to give to relieve the necessities of the sick and 
 
 a I. Cor. i.\., 5, 6, 15. 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS II9 
 
 disabled. He urged his followers diligently to work, that 
 they might have something to bestow upon the distressed, 
 and might escape the scandal that would fall upon idle- 
 ness and dependence. Those among the disciples that 
 would not work he denounced as disorderly and busy- 
 bodies/ He thought less of men that did not earn the 
 bread that they ate ; and, so far from encouraging the 
 habit of taking no thought for what they should eat, he 
 acknowledged that his remedy for such an unscrupulous 
 way of living upon the bounty of others was to cut off 
 the supplies of every able-bodied man, who thought him- 
 self exempt. from the condition of labor.'' 
 
 Paul does not seem to have shared James' antipathy 
 to the rich, nor to have held, with Jesus, that they could 
 not enter the kingdom of heaven without dispossessing 
 themselves of their wealth. Wealthy men had accepted 
 his gospel, and been received by him among the believers ; 
 and these, in a letter to Timothy, he fully recognized 
 as heirs of the promise of the kingdom. " Charge them 
 that are rich," he writes, "in this world, that they be not 
 high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the 
 living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; that 
 they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to 
 distribute, willing to communicate." Thus, wealth, in- 
 stead of being an impediment to salvation, was God's own 
 gift, richly given, freely to be enjoyed. 
 
 While the apprehension of the overthrow of all things 
 was vivid in the minds of the early Christians, as it 
 continued to be during the lifetime of the apostles, the 
 contempt of labor and the repudiation of property, as 
 something offensive to the coming king, continued among 
 them. It is related that, after the death of Jesus, the 
 disciples were together and had all things in common, 
 and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to 
 all as every man had need, and continued every day with 
 one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house 
 to house, eating their food with gladness and singleness 
 of heart. 11 After they became a multitude, they remained 
 of one heart and mind, neither said any of them that 
 aught of the things which he possessed was his own ; but 
 
 all. IK '■ 1. 'I'll •, 1, ii., ., ; [I. Cor. xi., 9; Acts xx., 33, 34. 
 
 ol. Timothy vi., 17, iS. d Acts ii., 44-46. 
 
120 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 they had all things in common. Jesus' methods proved 
 confessedly successful, even after the little flock had 
 grown a powerful community. After his death, they 
 were constrained to answer the question, which, in 
 modest self-reproach, they did not answer when he put it ; 
 •• When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, 
 lacked ye anything ? " a The new economy is successful. 
 There were none among them that lacked anything ; "for 
 as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, 
 as Jesus had commanded them," and brought the prices of 
 the things that were sold, and laid them down at the 
 apostles' feet ; and distribution was made unto every man 
 according as he had need. b 
 
 The church at Jerusalem seems to have been estab- 
 lished and maintained upon the plan of confiscating the 
 property of the rich converts for the benefit of the poor. 
 When this resource failed, as in the nature of things it 
 soon must have done, the believers subsisted upon the 
 donations of those gathered into the faith in the populous 
 and wealthy Greek and Roman cities, mainly through the 
 successful propagandism of Paul. And, indeed, suspicious 
 as the leaders at Jerusalem were of the dogmas and 
 practices which Paul held and taught — as is most manifest 
 from the New Testament records — or in reference to his 
 indecorous habit of working as a mechanic, to his admis- 
 sion of rich men to the communion of the saints without 
 compelling them to surrender their wealth to be divided 
 among the poor, and to his frequent exhortations to 
 converts to labor diligently for the purpose of having 
 something to bestow upon the needy, they could not very 
 consistently condemn what redounded to their own ad- 
 vantage. For the Jerusalem church, under the strict 
 regime of Jesus himself, seems to have come into an elee- 
 mosynary relation with all the other churches, and to 
 have been supported all through the apostolic period by 
 collections gathered wherever a new Christian community 
 was planted. It is not known whether this relation was 
 maintained until the capture of the city by Titus, and the 
 scattering of the Church, or whether the Gentile converts 
 under the teachings of Paul — in which a vein of satire is 
 not wholly absent — grew weary of supporting their idle 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 121 
 
 brethren, and at last applied to them the rough method 
 which he ordered adopted at Thessalonica, — " If any will 
 not work, neither shall he eat." a 
 
 For a world not suddenly ending, as had been confi- 
 dently believed, but persisting in going on, and going on 
 in much the old way, the Christians found it necessary to 
 modify the strictness and scope of the command of their 
 master, to forsake and hate houses, lands, and all their 
 possessions, to become his disciples. The common be- 
 liever might, and, as Paul insisted, must be not slothful in 
 business. He might even propose, as an end of his dili- 
 gence, the reward of money even to the extent of wealth. 
 He might accumulate property to give of its income and 
 surplus to the necessities of the saints. b He would be 
 worse than an unbeliever, if he did not accumulate suffi- 
 cient to provide for his own household. Rich men came 
 into the churches without scandal; and it was not long 
 before the churches, instead of levying from them at the 
 very door the surrender of all their riches, flattered and 
 courted them for their patronage ; and Lazarus fed from 
 the crumbs of the table of Dives, without the rude re- 
 minder that, after death, the former should rest in the 
 bosom of Abraham and the latter howl in torment. 
 
 But so fundamental a part of the system which Jesus 
 sought to establish, and died to consecrate, could not 
 be lost. The Christian priesthood gradually rose. The 
 missionaries of the gospel, to the earliest of whom great 
 reverence and authority were accorded, as the witnesses 
 of Jesus' words and works while alive, and of his resur- 
 rection after his crucifixion, were universally considered 
 to be elevated above the drudgery and degradation of 
 toil. Let the preachers of the gospel at least live of 
 the gospel. Even sturdy Paul would not give up this 
 prerogative of his profession. Besides this class — quite 
 large when compared with the body of believers — all who, 
 as Jesus had said, would be perfect, all who would insure 
 their entrance into his kingdom, when it should come, 
 continued to adopt his ideas about property, as they did 
 also his ideas of the relation of the sexes. They became 
 
 •UI.Thess. iii., ,., 
 
 t> Acts xL, 30; xxiv., 17; Rom. kv., 25,26; I. Cor. svi , 1-3; II. Cor. viii., a 
 
 c I. Tim. v., 8. 
 
122 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 monks and nuns, making themselves celibates for the 
 kingdom of heaven's sake, having their goods in common, 
 and were supported by the donations of those, who were 
 awed by the austerity of their piety. 
 
 The attitude of the modern Christian Church toward 
 property and wealth is quite the reverse of that of the 
 early Church. All through mediaeval time and down to 
 the present, Christianity has been the great bulwark of 
 property, and pronounces benedictions upon the rich. It 
 has not in terms transposed the beatitudes of Jesus, and 
 said : Blessed are ye rich, for yours is the kingdom of 
 heaven ; but it has practically said so. A sentiment is 
 still cherished, which respects the virtuous poor, and the 
 places of Christian worship are nominally open to them ; 
 but, more and more, the fellowship of the Church confines 
 itself to the prosperous classes. The old meeting-houses, 
 such as were open fifty years ago to all classes in New 
 England, have one after the other fallen into decay ; and 
 their places have been supplied by small and costly tem- 
 ples, whose whole interiors are occupied with expen- 
 sively finished and upholstered pews, where the weekly 
 accommodations for a family cost more for persons of 
 small means than the rental of a dwelling-house. The 
 poor are not excluded from these religious assemblies, 
 but no seats are provided for them. The whole aspect 
 of the place as effectually excludes them as would an 
 opera house or a private club house or a wedding in an 
 aristocratic family, where not only the cost of admission, 
 but the rigid etiquette of dress and manners, interposes 
 barriers which the sensitive poor cannot pass. 
 
 In assemblies from which the classes, that made up the 
 wedding feast, the type according to Jesus of the king- 
 dom of heaven, are carefully excluded, the preacher of 
 the gospel, such as eighteen centuries of contact with 
 the influences of civilization has made it, cannot repeat 
 with any fervor or directness the denunciations of the 
 rich, which form so considerable a part of the recorded 
 discourses of his master. He is expected, with rhetorical 
 ingenuity and delicate tact, to refine and explain them 
 away. How can he denounce, as outside of the kingdom 
 of heaven, those who, already in possession of its out- 
 works, hold the purse and scrip, and can testify their 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS I23 
 
 disapprobation by withholding his support, and leaving 
 him no resource but that which Jesus said was sufficient, 
 — to ask of the heavenly Father whatever was needed ? 
 
 The communistic principle, which, as has been seen, 
 was the natural outcome of the property ideas dissemi- 
 nated by Jesus, has lasted considerably longer than those 
 ideas themselves. From the primitive Church, it passed 
 to various monastic orders, that still perpetuate it in con- 
 nection with celibacy. In modified forms, it has appeared 
 in the economy and creed of several Christian sects, like 
 the Moravians and the Shakers. But the generally ac- 
 credited Christianity comes more and more to disown and 
 antagonize it ; and to-day, both in Europe and America, 
 the bodies of men who hold the tenets of Jesus in refer- 
 ence to property, and who are seeking or have sought to 
 embody them in a new social order recognizing the com- 
 plete equality of men, are generally decried as antichris- 
 tian and atheistic. 
 
 This departure of the ostensible followers of Jesus from 
 the principles which so widely formed the structure of 
 his system, so far as it was a system fit for a subsisting 
 world, is not mentioned to condemn it. There have been, 
 since the first century of our era, many hundred genera- 
 tions of men, upon whom the effect of the passion for 
 possessing property in its influence upon character has 
 been carefully watched and noted. If the successors of 
 Jesus lack the prescient accuracy of his judgment, they 
 have judged upon much larger data, and with the oppor- 
 tunity of correcting a too hasty generalization by delib- 
 1 and concurrent consideration. 
 
 There are certain faults of character which the posses- 
 sion of wealth seems to aggravate. Pride, arrogance, 
 indifference to human suffering, are apt to attain a rank 
 growth in the over-prosperous man; while two dangers 
 beset his path, — cither, that the sordid habits he formed 
 while he was painfully and with self-denial accumulating 
 money by grovelling labor or narrow saving, shall pinch 
 his soul and make it hard and base, or, that the consid- 
 eration of having much goods laid up for many years shall 
 invite to sensual indulgence. Ordinarily, the first danger 
 becomes fatal to the men who themselves, by slow 
 industry and painful methods, acquire wealth : the latter 
 
124 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 besets especially those, who inherit it, or come to it by 
 fortunate enterprise. 
 
 On the other hand, more insidious and more deadly 
 perils beset the poor. The poor, especially in the pres- 
 ence of the pomp and luxury of the rich, become morose, 
 vindictive, envious, and censorious, a prey to more subtle 
 vices, and harder to eradicate from the soul, than sen- 
 suality, often a taint of the blood. In the struggle for 
 life, the steadily unsuccessful grow exasperated ; and the 
 most upright principles yield many times before the press- 
 ure of an adversity, that is suggestive of a malignant 
 ill-will, provoking to retaliation. The daily necessity for 
 labor to the full extent of the bodily powers, to support 
 the necessities of life, is, for myriads of human beings, 
 an effectual guarantee of temperance and chastity. The 
 self-denial which men begin to exercise to acquire food 
 for their offspring becomes a habit, a strength, a con- 
 scious power of the soul. The man who can labor after 
 fatigue and pain learns first what duty means. He says, 
 / wish I could do this, but I must do that. The more he 
 does what he must, rather than what he wishes, the 
 more of a civilized, moral, religious creature he becomes. 
 When he has followed duty in one direction against 
 inclination, he has learned the mystery of noble living, 
 and is in the royal road to all virtue. These high influ- 
 ences sanctify labor, and make the beginnings of the 
 acquisition of wealth salutary and even sacred. Nor the 
 beginnings alone ; for, carefully to note our own obser- 
 vations, their net result would be that • more men are 
 made generous, public-spirited, refined, lovers of pure 
 and simple pleasures by becoming rich, than are made 
 humble, patient, magnanimous, and upright by long 
 and hopeless poverty. This is proved by the statistics 
 of most civilized countries, in which, though the prosper- 
 ous, particularly the suddenly prosperous, classes would 
 be found tainted with crimes of oppression, fraud, and 
 profligacy, the great army of the criminal classes, with 
 which society has constantly to maintain a warfare to 
 insure its own preservation, is recruited from the ranks of 
 the poor. The best wisdom of his race was not at all in 
 accord with that of Jesus, when it uttered from the I 
 a cynical king the prayer, " Give me neither poverty nor 
 
POLITICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 25 
 
 riches ; feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full, 
 and deny thee, . . . lest I be poor and steal, and take the 
 name of my God in vain." a 
 
 In nothing, however, did Jesus show the original force 
 of his own mind, and its impatience of dominant, national 
 and conventional ideas, more than in his opinions concern- 
 ing property. As Moses, brought up under the intense 
 other-worldliness of the Egyptians — than whom, it is prob- 
 able, no race of men ever lived with death, judgment, and 
 the retributions of eternity so awfully impressed upon 
 their imaginations — came to have a supreme contempt for 
 a faith that had palpably failed to make men either virtu- 
 ous or happy ; and determined to base a new religious cul- 
 tus on sanctions, limited wholly to the life of this world, 
 so Jesus, a man also of transcendent genius, determined 
 to strike at the very root of the religious cultus of his race 
 and time. The Jews preserve to this day the dominant 
 trait of the national character in their devotion to wealth. 
 Abraham was great in the extent of his fields and past- 
 ures, in silver and gold, in flocks and herds, in depend- 
 ants and servants. Jacob, out of the line of the first-born, 
 the father of the nation, was great in the ingenious con- 
 trivances of his thrift. All the law of Moses was built 
 upon the sanction, not of rewards and punishments in 
 an after-life, but of large possessions, and prosperous 
 fortunes in a long human life, if men should keep its 
 precepts; but if they failed to keep them, of famines, 
 drouths, pillage and enslavement. The very ten com- 
 mandments were promulgated mainly in the interest of 
 property. It is of the nature of the reformer, that he 
 is profoundly disappointed in the results of the culture 
 that has gone before him, and distrustful of the ideas 
 that underlie that culture. Behold the fruit of the 
 Mosaic dispensation, — of the soul of man oblivious of 
 the life to come, turned sordidly upon this world, wealth 
 and long life its chief goods ! Let the pendulum swing 
 again to the other side. What is the value of life ? Of 
 what advantage is it to gain the whole world ? He that 
 seeketh his life shall lose it. A man's life consisteth 
 not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth. 
 Jesus sought to restore to life its mystery, its seriousness, 
 
 » Prov. xxx., 8, 0. 
 
126 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 its awful import, as a threshold of an immortal life, the 
 gate of entrance to the kingdom of heaven. The Chris- 
 tian cultus, almost lost now in the accretions of an insid- 
 ious civilization, that it could not resist, is the fruit of his 
 enthusiasm. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS. 
 
 " Let us beware of awarding to the founder of the Church any honor 
 which a subsequent time may be compelled to recall. The only service the 
 human race can render such a being as Jesus is to study the actual facts, and 
 not the desirable facts, of the great historic page of his life." — Prof. David 
 Swing. 
 
 Closely connected with the political ideas of Jesus, 
 and in some directions blended with them, are his ethical 
 ideas, the principles which he declared should regulate 
 conduct. It were most desirable to present them in a 
 system, to indicate the axioms, upon which they rest, and 
 the scheme of an ideal life of which they formed the 
 elements. If we could find, in the memorabilia of Jesus' 
 life, his system unfolded by himself, if he had declared 
 the primal truths, upon which his soul rested, and to 
 which he confessed allegiance, it would be very easy to 
 express his ethical precepts in a creed or in a philos- 
 ophy, and to consider them under his weighty and august 
 authority. That his mind was capable of such generaliza- 
 tion his conversations plainly imply. For, while com- 
 mending virtuous conduct rather upon its reasonableness 
 than upon his own, or the divine authority, his habit 
 seemed to be to find the underlying principle consonant 
 to the human reason, which is the sanction of the 
 virtue enjoined. 
 
 Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount, when he pro- 
 nounces a certain condition of life or state of the heart 
 good or blessed, as the poor, the sorrowing, the meek, 
 the pure, and the persecuted, he feels called upon to 
 give, as a reason for his estimate, the temporal or 
 spiritual advantage, that shall befall them in conse- 
 quence of such condition or affection. They shall enjoy 
 the kingdom of heaven, they shall be comforted, they 
 shall see God, they shall inherit the renown of the perse- 
 
128 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 cuted prophets. He said his followers were to be heroic 
 in their suffering of evil, ascetic in the repression of appe- 
 tite and resentment; and that they were to meet violence, 
 not by resistance or remonstrance, but by inviting new 
 assault, because the grade of goodness taught and prac- 
 tised by the strictest piety of his time was not a quali- 
 fication for entrance even into the kingdom of heaven. 
 Daring and sublime must be the flight of the soul in the 
 higher atmosphere of an ideal nobleness to reach the 
 heavenly blessedness, and no easy or commonplace con- 
 formity to the standard of the scribes and Pharisees, or of 
 the philosophers, could be accepted as a commutation 
 of the rigid self-denial, the vivisection of all- the instincts 
 of the animal nature, which he made the discipline of a 
 soldier of the cross. He said that enemies were to be 
 loved, because God gave the blessing of light and rain to 
 bad and good men alike ; and that men must be perfect 
 — that is, sublime in their love of those who injured and 
 hated them — in order to be like God. Prayer and alms 
 were to be in secret, that God, and only God, should openly 
 reward them. Treasure was not to be laid up on earth, 
 lest men's hearts should tend earthward to their treasure, 
 instead of heavenward to God. No anxiety was to be had 
 for subsistence, because God supplies it to men as to 
 birds. The strait gate was to be sought, not because it 
 was open to all, but because it was narrow and obscure, 
 and only a few intense strivers would ever be able to find 
 it. This disposition of Jesus to confirm and illustrate all 
 his ethical precepts, by a reason based upon the absolute 
 verities of the universe, may fairly be assumed as the 
 characteristic of his mind and the peculiarity of his ethi- 
 cal system. 11 
 
 Why, then, may we not adopt his own generalizations, 
 and deduce his moral system from his own accredited 
 words ? Because we are perplexed by the inconsequen- 
 tial and contradictory character of these generalizations. 
 A few of the more striking instances will justify this 
 assertion. 
 
 Jesus had enunciated the doctrine that enemies were 
 to be loved, that blessing was the due return for cursing, 
 and kind wishes and prayers for cruel usage, because, in 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 129 
 
 that high strain of perfect love, men put on a likeness to 
 the heavenly Father, whose equal gifts of light and rain 
 to good and evil expressed his equal love to all, not less 
 to the disobedient than to the obedient. 11 When asked 
 afterward how many times an injury was to be forgiven — 
 a real and intentional, injury being referred to — and if 
 seven times would meet his requirement, he promptly 
 answered, Forgive seventy times seven, — that is, indefi- 
 nitely. 1 ' And this men are to do, because God does it. 
 Plainly, this generalization implies that God forgives 
 wicked men even, and not only forgives, but blesses 
 them. But later, in the same conversation, Jesus de- 
 clares that his heavenly Father will say in some near 
 future day to many who had prayed to him, and in some 
 way derived power to work miracles in his name : Depart 
 from me, workers of evil, — a sentence which he after- 
 ward supplemented with the indication of the place of 
 their departure — into everlasting fire prepared for the 
 devil and his angels. d 
 
 Indeed, this forgiving and universally blessing Deity of 
 the Sermon on the Mount is not the permanent concep- 
 tion of Deity which Jesus dwells upon. Much oftener, 
 particularly in the later part of his career, God is pre- 
 sented as a being to be feared, because he can destroy 
 soul and body in hell. 6 Indeed, taking the whole thought 
 of Jesus and attempting to reconcile the being, who is 
 imitated by rendering blessing for cursing and good for 
 evil, with the being who says : Depart, ye accursed, into 
 everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels, we 
 find a suggestion in the words of Jesus himself, which 
 gives something like consistency to his conception. In one 
 of his parables, he represented good and evil men under 
 the figure of wheat and weeds growing together in a field. 
 When it was proposed to root up the weeds, that was for- 
 bidden, lest the wheat should suffer. The forbearance 
 with the weeds was not at all on their account ; for after- 
 ward, as soon as they could be separated, they were mer- 
 cilessly burned. So, Jesus affirmed, should it be at the 
 end of the worldly order and the beginning of the heav- 
 enly/ The unjust then have the rain and the sunshine, 
 
 "Matt, v., is, 16. h Matt, xviii., 21, 22. c Matt, vii., 22. d Matt, xxv., (o. 
 
 • I, nice xii., 5. f Matt, xiii., 24-30, 36-43. 
 
I30 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 because, being with the just, they cannot be prevented 
 from participating in a good condition designed only for 
 the latter. But that very incongruity demands a separa- 
 tion, so that the evil shall receive, not sunshine and rain, 
 but fire and the outer darkness, which is their fitting 
 allotment. 
 
 The Christian ages, reverencing Jesus as divine, and 
 accepting as absolute truth all he is believed to have said, 
 have been seriously perplexed by this twofold presentation 
 of the divine character, as something to be imitated. 
 Must we imitate the heavenly Father returning good for 
 evil, or returning evil for evil ? or imitate him in return- 
 ing good for evil for a time, and indemnify ourselves 
 afterward by the completeness and excess of our ven- 
 geance? One order of souls, endowed with natural pity, 
 have, in all ages, learned the earlier lesson. Another 
 order, in whom the sentiment of justice overweighed 
 natural pity, have insisted that evil-doing shall be rig- 
 orously punished. It can hardly be claimed that the 
 humane instincts of mankind have been, on the whole, 
 stimulated in the direction of mercy and beneficence by 
 the whole doctrine of Jesus, or that they who have 
 deferred specially to his authority have been distin- 
 guished among mankind for the mildness of their meth- . 
 ods with offenders against the social order of the world. 
 
 To take another example. Jesus, in enjoining secrecy 
 and brevity in prayer, had declared, as if from an intimate 
 knowledge of the Deity, that he knew already what men 
 needed, and so was not informed or influenced by much 
 speaking. 11 But, later, he declared that men ought to 
 importune God for what they needed ; and that, though 
 he would not grant their requests to their necessities, of 
 which he had knowledge, or from his benevolence, he 
 would grant them, to rid himself of the annoyance of 
 their persistency. 1 ' Wherever a low and a lofty concep- 
 tion of the divine character is presented to the immature 
 minds of men, it is not surprising that they should seize 
 and appropriate the former. So we see that it was the 
 anthropomorphic idea of a God capable of being wearied 
 by much speaking, rather than the more dignified idea of 
 a God knowing beforehand the wants of men, and giving 
 
 » Matt, vi., 5-7. 1' Luke xi., 5-8; xvii., 1-8. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS I3I 
 
 heed to their prayers on the side of his affection and pity, 
 as expressions of their confidence and piety, that has de- 
 termined the devotional practice of Christendom. For 
 the liturgies of every form of Christian worship have ever 
 abounded in much speaking. Repetitions, the wearying 
 power of which upon God can only be judged by their 
 wearying effect upon the men that listen to them, form 
 the body of prayers, so long and so often repeated, that 
 to recite them has demanded a special order of function- 
 aries, and fairly furnished them with regular employment. 
 
 Let us consider, as an instance of inconsequential gen- 
 eralization, the direction about the secrecy of alms and 
 prayer. If men prayed in secret, Jesus affirmed God 
 would reward them openly. 11 Why openly, and why 
 reward? Is prayer, then, a grateful homage to the Deity, 
 for which, as a courteous return, some reward is due ? 
 
 Jesus also said, If we forgive not the person who has 
 wronged us, neither will God forgive us for wrongs done 
 toward him. b This thought he afterward elaborated in 
 a parable, in which a certain master released a heavy 
 debt to his servant, because he was poor. But, learning 
 afterward that his released debtor had exacted by impris- 
 onment a small debt due from a fellow-servant, he was 
 angry, and ordered his debtor to the torture till he should 
 pay the last farthing. " So," added Jesus to the parable, 
 "likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if 
 ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother 
 their trespasses." c 
 
 Does God then render evil for evil, when men do like- 
 wise ? Is his beneficence caprice or character ? Does 
 it not degrade God to think of him, whose perfection 
 all rational souls are to imitate, as an imitator of the 
 cruelty of the evil, and as delighting in the severity with 
 which he can surpass them in retaliation? Jesus had 
 declared that it was a small effort of the soul to love only 
 them that loved us, to salute those who saluted us. The 
 publicans even, men who made no pretensions to a high 
 grade of nobleness, could do as much as that ; d but, to 
 be perfect like the heavenly Father, we must love those 
 who do not love us, we must forgive the trespasses of 
 
 "Matt. VI., '>. '"Matt, vi., 15. « Matt, xviii., 25-35. 
 
 J Matt, v., 46. 
 
132 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 those who do not forgive our trespasses, nor those of our 
 fellow-men. 
 
 There is an immense challenge to the spirit of man in 
 this imitation of God in the perfectness of love. Jesus 
 never spake anything so far-reaching in its implications. 
 Christianity does not contain an idea so sublime. But 
 the older conception fairly crowded it out, even, of the 
 poetic mind that uttered it. The older conception was, 
 " Vengeance is mine, I will repay! '" Not that vengeance 
 is not due and is not to be taken, but that it is to be 
 waited for at the hands of its lawful minister, who only 
 can make it summary and effectual. So the world, stirred 
 for a moment by the daring presumption, that by a com- 
 plete forgiveness it can imitate God, recoils from the 
 splendor which opens before it, and, while uttering an 
 earlier and lower inspiration, comes to believe that, in 
 the vengeance with which it punishes and retaliates the 
 trespasses of evil-doers, it is itself forgiving, while acting 
 as the minister of a heavenly Father who will not forgive 
 the unforgiving. 
 
 In no part of the study here undertaken is the tempta- 
 tion stronger to repudiate the statement of general prin- 
 ciples as given in -the gospel narratives. The writers of 
 those narratives' might perhaps be trusted to give the 
 historical incidents of the life of Jesus, they might 
 faithfully reproduce his parables and his direct ethical 
 precepts ; but, when they undertake to disclose his philos- 
 ophy, the primal ideas upon which he based his ethical 
 precepts, there, if anywhere, their acknowledged inca- 
 pacity to comprehend him would be most likely to mislead 
 them. All, therefore, already said, or that may be said, 
 in criticism of this underlying philosophy of the Great 
 Teacher, must be said with modesty, and with the mis- 
 giving that the record is not true to the integrity of his 
 thought. It can only be insisted, that the method of 
 investigation proposed requires just this treatment; and 
 that, upon any other assumption than that of the substan- 
 tial accuracy of the language imputed in the Synoptic 
 Gospels to Jesus, we have no data from which to deter- 
 mine his character or his doctrine or, in fact, upon which 
 to predicate his historical identity. No other course is 
 
 "Rom. xii. 19; Deut. xxxii., 35. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 33 
 
 then left for the sympathetic critic, who has not come to 
 the study under the prepossession of discipleship, but to 
 state the ethical ideas of Jesus as nearly as possible in 
 his own words, as historic tradition gives them, modified, 
 limited, or contradicted only by himself. 
 
 Such of the precepts of Jesus as related to poverty and 
 non-resistance have already been elaborated in a previous 
 chapter as coming under the category of political ideas, 
 though they have an intimate relation with the specific 
 subject of the present chapter. 
 
 Jesus affirmed also that a state of sorrow was a blessed 
 and wholesome condition. Blessed, he said, are they that 
 mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are ye that 
 weep now, for ye shall laugh. Woe unto ye that laugh 
 now ! for ye shall mourn and weep. a Undoubtedly, the 
 ministry of sorrow, if not too long and hopeless, is salu- 
 tary to the soul. It chastens pride ; it moderates desire ; 
 it abates the standard of enjoyment to the measure of a 
 rational contentment ; it disciplines and refines the pas- 
 sionate instincts of the heart ; it gives entrance into the 
 deeper secrets of the moral and spiritual life, by making 
 the sufferer a participator in the higher experiences of 
 his race, since it is mainly by suffering, and the striving 
 which it stimulates, that human nature has passed upward 
 from bestial conditions and satisfactions to the realms of 
 pure thought and spiritual power. Since the whole sen- 
 tient world has for all the ages lain, and still lies, under 
 the shadow and discipline of sorrow, Jesus spake no word 
 that has thrilled more deeply the universal human heart ; 
 and this tone, once struck by his gentle touch, vibrates 
 through all the Christian ages, its purity and pathos pro- 
 longed in echoes that bid fair to outlast the world. Fresh 
 as the agony of bereavement, the languor of prolonged 
 sickness, the weariness of imprisonment and exile, the 
 pang of constantly defeated effort, the long aching that 
 comes of monotonous toil or care, is the tonic word that 
 even conventional Christianity has not forgotten to repeat 
 in its pristine power, " Blessed are they that mourn." 
 
 Not that Jesus believed that sorrow was the normal con- 
 dition of the human soul. " For they shall be comforted." 
 All sorrow is suffering, and all suffering: is evil. His 
 
134 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 scheme of compensation embraced a reversal of all condi- 
 tions. Just so much joy, so much grief. Those that 
 laugh now must weep hereafter, while the weepers shall 
 laugh in the assurance that God shall wipe away all tears 
 from their eyes ; and there shall be no more death, neither 
 sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain : 
 for the former things are passed away. - 
 
 In this blessedness of sorrow, in this consecration and 
 deification of suffering, made memorable by the pathetic 
 story of the cross, and the man of sorrows that agonized 
 upon it, we may find the principal power of the religion, 
 which has named itself after the name of Jesus. History 
 may be said to have disclosed two methods by which 
 society has striven to elevate itself and enlarge its capaci- 
 ties and achievements. One is the revolutionary method, 
 which seeks to ameliorate external conditions, which 
 promises to man emancipation from his rulers, more 
 rights, larger liberty, greater possessions, and happiness. 
 The other may be called the religious method, prominent 
 and distinctive in Christianity, but present, too, in the 
 great Oriental religions that preceded it, and the secret 
 of their success. This method comes to comfort and 
 cheer men, not by delusive hopes of escaping the inevi- 
 table woes of life, the sufferings out of which man has 
 gained his moral nature, but by strengthening him to 
 bear them ; and it is on this side, and not on the side 
 of its doctrines or disclosures of the fate of men in a 
 future life, that Christianity has not only maintained 
 itself, but retained the allegiance of the noblest and 
 purest minds. 
 
 Jesus pronounced the pitiful blessed.' 1 One of the 
 chief accusations he brought against the scribes and 
 Pharisees was that they were over-punctilious in bring- 
 ing the lesser offerings — mint, anise, and cumin — while 
 neglecting to be merciful. The cruel servant, who, in the 
 delay of his master's coming, beat his fellow-servant, wa 
 cut asunder suddenly by his enraged lord, and consigned 
 to a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. d He would 
 receive into the blessedness of the Father's kingdom 
 those whom, to their modest surprise, he had separated to 
 his right hand, because, they have been pitiful to those 
 
 aRev. xxi.,4. l>Matt. v., 7. c Matt, xxiii., 23. '1 Matt, xxiv., 49, 50. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 35 
 
 of his followers who had been sick, poor, and imprisoned/ 1 
 He recognized, as modifying the divine justice, the ele- 
 ment of mercy, and taught men to pray for the forgive- 
 ness of their sins, assuring them that God would forgive, 
 at least the forgiving. 1 ' 
 
 He characterized the cultus under which his nation 
 had been trained as something radically different from 
 this. The old idea had been an eye for an eye and a 
 tooth for a tooth ; but his word was : " Resist not evil." c 
 But to us, who have the Christian and Hebrew systems in 
 their written records, the contrast between them is less 
 striking. Along with that characterization of Jehovah as 
 a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon 
 the children to the third and fourth generation of them 
 that hate him, which is an original commentary upon one 
 of the ten commandments, is the converse declaration, — 
 showing mercy unto thousands of them that love him and 
 keep his commandments. 11 The pity of the Deity is as 
 emphatically expressed in the Old, as in the New Testa- 
 ment, and it is in the former that we find that touching 
 expression of the kindness of God, "As a father pitietJi 
 his children, so the Lord pitietJi them that fear him"* The 
 old idea was that the jealous God, visiting iniquity with 
 punishment, involving the children and grandchildren 
 of the wrong-doer, pitied and forgave those who feared 
 him. And this substantially is the idea of Jesus, who 
 declared with severity : " If ye forgive not men their tres- 
 passes, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your 
 trespasses." f 
 
 Purity of heart, according to Jesus, brings man to the 
 consciousness of the divine presence ; and in this idea we 
 come to a feature of Christian ethics in sharp contrast 
 with the cultus that had preceded, and in advance of the 
 moral standard of modern civilization. The older religion 
 of the Jews had introduced the Deity as pronouncing a 
 blessing upon the reproductive function. The first coun- 
 sel, according to its teaching, given to the newly created 
 man was : L ' "Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the 
 earth." A marriage barren of offspring was regarded as 
 a token of the disfavor of God, to be averted by prayers 
 
 'Matt, xxv., 33, 34. ''Matt, vi., 14, 15. cMatt. v., 38, 39. «1 Ex. xx., 5, '.. 
 • Ps. ciii., 13. ' Matt, vi., 15. BGen. 1., 38 
 
I36 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 and sacrifices; while children swarming around the family 
 table were considered olive branches, alike the ornament 
 of human life and the pledge of the loving partiality of 
 Jehovah. The word of Jesus was : He that looketh upon 
 a woman to desire her hath committed adultery with her 
 in his heart. a He said the only defilement of which a 
 man was capable was the defilement of adulterous and 
 wicked thoughts. 11 The natural affections, out of which 
 the relations of the sexes grow, were to be repressed as 
 sins. To the plea that they are human and assert them- 
 selves with the sanction and strength of nature, he said : 
 Well, then, extirpate nature itself. If thine eye offend 
 thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. It is better to 
 enter into life one-eyed than, having two eyes, to be cast 
 into hell. He commended those, who, for the sake of 
 the kingdom of heaven, had applied to themselves this 
 process of extirpation, and declared that, in the new and 
 heavenly order which he was about to introduce, human 
 beings would be like the angels, and neither married nor 
 were given in marriage. This declaration had no force 
 to meet the dilemma of the woman who in her human life 
 had had in succession seven lawful husbands, if it did not 
 imply that in the resurrection state not only no new mar- 
 riages are contracted, but all pre-existing marriages, with 
 all the special relation and affection which belong to 
 them, are ignored and blotted out. In strict conformity 
 to these ascetic ideas, he himself, though of a tender 
 and affectionate disposition, which attracted to him the 
 companionship and confidence of women, never in word 
 or action indicated that the kinship of marriage was 
 compatible with his modes of thought and feeling. 
 
 Jesus went no further than to affirm that sexual desire 
 was inherently evil, and that sexual relations did not 
 belong to the perfect man. He recognized marriage as 
 a condition of the earthly, human life; and, while chal- 
 lenging those, who would be perfect, to celibacy in thought 
 and life, he only stipulated that those who married should 
 not be divorced for other cause than fornication. 
 
 Historic Christianity has been, on the whole, faithful 
 to the principles of Jesus in this department of nature, 
 
 aMatt. v., 28-30. bMatt. *\'-> ", 1S-20; xxii., 29, 30; xix., 10-12. 
 
 cMatt. xix., 9. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 37 
 
 although stopping far short of his ideal. Out of his pure 
 precepts have grown monogamy, and a resolute opposi- 
 tion to divorce, which fairly distinguish the Christian 
 ages and races, as well as that proscribed celibacy,, for 
 those who are the recognized teachers and exemplars of 
 religion, and the general honor in which absolute chastity 
 is universally held. Against monastic vows and the prac- 
 tice of celibacy, mainly perpetuated by a large body of 
 men and women who have inherited the singular purity 
 of Jesus, there have been many powerful protests and 
 reactions. Mohammed, exhibiting in himself that by no 
 means unusual blending of the sensual and devout — a 
 type highly favorable to poetic susceptibility and power, 
 like what was exhibited in Israel's favorite king — gave 
 to his disciples an ideal of a kingdom of heaven as un- 
 like as possible to the state in which they neither marry 
 nor are given in marriage. The completeness with which 
 his lower ideas supplanted those of Jesus in the very 
 countries to which his gospel came, and by which it was 
 first received, shows how much more thoroughly human 
 Mohammed was than Jesus, and how much better he 
 understood the capacities and tendencies of the Semitic 
 races. 
 
 The same reversion to primitive and natural notions, 
 the same reactionary resentment of the rigorous yoke, 
 which Jesus endeavored to throw upon animal instincts, 
 reappears in Mormonism, and in those groups of eccentric 
 Christians, who in communities have sought to combine 
 a recognition of the supremacy of right, with the recogni- 
 tion of such law as human nature discloses. 
 
 When it is thoughtfully considered how much social 
 misery and personal degradation have grown out of the 
 ill-regulated appetites of man, and that his superiority 
 over the beasts, and over the savage types of mankind, 
 from which he has progressed, consists mainly in the 
 moral power he has gained by imposing restraint upon 
 instincts before which they are helpless, it cannot be de- 
 nied that Jesus was profoundly right in what he believed 
 Lught ; and that the heavenly order, if not to be 
 reached by the rapid :inc\ summary transformation, which 
 he anticipated, is only to be attained by the daring of self- 
 denial and sacrifice, rather than by the effeminacy of in- 
 
I 3 S OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 diligence ; and that all schemes of social regeneration are 
 but steps downward, and in the direction of degradation, 
 that do not propose for individual man a higher law of 
 purity. 
 
 Still, Jesus is not to be considered as an ascetic. He 
 went to feasts, and never seemed to have annoyed his en- 
 tertainers with scruples either of appetite or conscience 
 as to his entertainment. 11 It is fairly inferrible that the 
 rule he gave his disciples was the one that regulated his 
 own conduct as a guest. He told them to tarry at the 
 houses, to which they might be invited, eating and drink- 
 ing such things as were set before them. 1 ' John's Gospel, 
 to which we do not have recourse for authentic history, 
 tells of him that at a marriage feast where he was pres- 
 ent, when the wine failed, rather than have the harmless 
 hilarity suspended, he miraculously produced wine of 
 a quality and quantity which more than met the demands 
 of the occasion." The story would not have been told, if 
 scruples on his part about wine-drinking itself had ob- 
 tained any currency in his times. Indeed, his habits and 
 principles upon this point are fairly disclosed by his own 
 authentic declaration that, whereas John's asceticism had 
 fallen on that age like the lamentation of a mourner, his 
 own liberal manners were as merry as the notes of a piper. 
 He did not resent, or declare libellous, the saying of his 
 countrymen, which he himself reported, that he had come 
 eating and drinking like a gluttonous man and a wine- 
 bibber. The wisdom of his free living and of John's ab- 
 stemiousness, however, he said, the wise would know how 
 to appreciate.' 1 
 
 Two forms of sensuality have infested and degraded 
 humanity, the one leading to drunkenness, the other to 
 licentiousness. The religion taught by Mohammed seems 
 to have set for itself the task of eradicating the former, 
 while tolerant of the latter. The religion inspired by 
 Jesus turned its pure eye in stern reprobation of sexual 
 desire, while it chose as the emblem of its saving grace, 
 the instrument of its only distinctive ceremony, the liquor 
 which Islam proscribed as accursed, and' which has been 
 in all ages the principal stimulant of intoxication. Alco- 
 
 "Matt. xi., 19; Luke xi., 37 ; xiv., s. I'l.u'. 
 
 cjohn ii., 1-11. 'l.M;itt. xi. , 16 19. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 39 
 
 holic drunkenness has ever been the moral stain and weak- 
 ness of the Christian peoples ; and, when the danger and 
 misery which it wrought came to be appreciated by the 
 awakened humane sentiment of a recent age, good men 
 were perplexed to find how equivocal were the teachings 
 of the Christian scriptures upon the subject, and how 
 little sanction for total abstinence was furnished in the 
 example of the founder of Christianity himself. 
 
 Fairly to present the ethics of Jesus in reference to the 
 purity which he practised and blessed, it must be said 
 that he disclosed it rather as an ideal than a practical at- 
 tainment. He challenged men to follow him in a strain 
 of virtue that he admitted to be beyond the attainment 
 of all but the loftiest spirits. 1 ' Paul, who came after him, 
 may be said to have supplemented his delicacy with 
 plainer speech, to have accommodated the ideal virtue of 
 his master more nearly to the decent practices of civilized 
 society, and to have found in the permitted order of the 
 world a place for an instinct, which, according to Jesus, 
 obscured in the soul of man the vision of God. If it be 
 said that the faith of Mohammed was more powerful in 
 countries over which it prevailed in repressing drunken- 
 ness, than the faith of Jesus has been in Christendom to 
 repress licentiousness, let it be remembered that drunk- 
 enness is an invention of a comparatively recent civiliza- 
 tion, while the sexual appetite springs from the methods 
 of human existence, and strengthens itself by relations 
 with the whole progress of animal life. Let it be remem- 
 bered, too, how much the ideal purity, which Jesus en- 
 joined and exemplified, has clone, through the centuries 
 sin :e he lived, to exalt the sentiment of human love, and 
 to introduce into the social relations of men the chaste 
 satisfactions of an angelic state. 
 
 In considering offences against persons, Jesus thought 
 the proscribing of murder exceedingly inadequate and 
 elementary. He disdained to enumerate the minor 
 violences of mutilating, wounding, and beating, and every 
 form of bodily harm or manual assault, and passed at 
 once to combat the causeless resentments out of which 
 all injuries flow. Whosoever is angry with his brother 
 without a cause is in peril as a wrong-doer. If he ad- 
 
I4O OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 dresses him in terms of contempt, he is advanced a grade 
 deeper in guilt and danger ; and, if he insults him with the 
 epithet thou fool, he is in danger of hell fire. a 
 
 It is not to be concluded that Jesus intended to con- 
 demn natural anger, and the just resentment that acts 
 of cruelty or of treachery excite in all sensitive minds. 
 He himself, as might have been supposed from the 
 delicacy of his mental organization, was strongly suscep- 
 tible to anger; and several instances are related when he 
 gave his resentment expression. 1 ' While acknowledging 
 that anger degrades and exposes the soul, and holding 
 up self-control as the true law of blameless conduct, the 
 difficulty has always been, in the sudden access of anger, 
 to measure dispassionately the injury that provoked it. 
 But meantime, while the judgment of reason is disturbed 
 or overthrown, the act of retaliation has been done, the 
 bitter, biting reproach has been hurled, and the enemy, 
 who might have been conciliated and made magnanimous 
 by love and forgiveness, has been provoked to a fresh 
 aggression. Or, if the overt act or word has been sup- 
 pressed by a supreme effort of patience or for want of 
 opportunity, the pent-up anger, which utterance might 
 have relieved, remains to torture and depress the soul, 
 and shut out from it all the serene influences of virtue. 
 
 Jesus himself was not aware how hard he might find it, 
 with his delicate and sensitive spirit, to bear the contra- 
 dictions and malicious suspicions of those who took 
 offence at him, and the stupid misapprehensions of those 
 who thought they loved and understood him. We are 
 compelled to adopt an explanation of his language that 
 shall exclude the scribes and the Pharisees and all evil 
 and indifferent persons from the category of kindness and 
 forgiveness, and to say that Jesus forbids anger and oppro- 
 brious epithets only toward brothers, the brothers of natu- 
 ral kinship or the brothers of our faith and school ; or else 
 to conclude that, when he said afterward of the scribes 
 and Pharisees that they were a generation of vipers who 
 could not escape the damnation of hell, he was not mani- 
 
 a Matt, v., »j-a6. 
 
 bMark iii.,5; Matt, xii., 27, 32,34»39; xiii., 15; xv., 1-20; xvi., 1,4,6, 12..- 
 17; xxi., 19. 
 c Matt, xxiii. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 141 
 
 festing the spirit of the Highest, who is kind unto the 
 unthankful and the evil, nor conforming to the principle 
 of conduct he himself ' prescribed, when he said : "Judge 
 not, that ye be not judged ; for with what judgment ye 
 judge ye shall be judged." a Even if we restrict to the 
 narrow limits of relationship and discipleship the obliga- 
 tion of a forgiving love, and so sink the moral standard of 
 Jesus far below the best pattern of virtue that older 
 philosophers have given, and to which ordinarily good- 
 natured men find it not difficult to conform, we cannot 
 understand why he should hurl into the little circle of 
 the brotherhood itself, and upon the head of the only too 
 ardent and enthusiastic Peter, a name of so much more 
 evil significance than foot. To call a man a fool is only 
 to impute to him some unwisdom, and, unless he is very 
 humble, to undermine his self-conceit. To call a man 
 Satan is to charge him with hopeless and inveterate evil. 
 Later in his experience of mankind, Jesus might have 
 learned, from watching his own spirit, how hard is the 
 struggle of a virtuous purpose with those defects and 
 insanities of the soul, which form types of character 
 among mankind, and which are largely the effect of he- 
 reditary influence. A man may break away from an old 
 external habit, as of drunkenness, gluttony, impure 
 speech and action, neglect of worship of God, idleness, 
 pursuit of pleasure, wealth, or ambition, without effort 
 greatly disproportioned to his moral powers. But to ob- 
 literate a subtle envy, to soothe a fierce impatience, to 
 counteract a profound melancholy, to combat successfully 
 with evil inclinations that he never wittingly cherished, 
 the discovery of which in his heart surprises and alarms 
 him like the unbidden and unwelcome presence at his 
 table of some foul and ghastly shape, to overcome morbid 
 moral feelings, which, if he be wise, he finds to be a taint 
 of the blood, since he has learned that they marred the 
 fine quality of his ancestry, — this # is a more difficult and 
 longer task. Reasonably successful is that human life 
 which has maintained a fair fight with these tormentors, 
 and lessened their power of mischief. Out of the effort 
 of virtue comes strength. The heroic man may hope to 
 bequeath to posterity along with hereditary tendencies 
 
 "Matt, vii., 1, 2 ; Luke vi., 35; xvi., 23. 
 
142 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to evil, the full strength of the protest and resistance he 
 has made against them ; and may have the assurance, 
 that, what the aroused will resolutely and persistently 
 confronts, will at last be conjured from the slowly 
 regenerated family of man. 
 
 Jesus enjoined an absolute, unconditional, and universal 
 alms-giving. The effect of this practice upon society and 
 the maintenance of the political order I have already 
 alluded to in a preceding chapter. It remains to consider 
 the precept of benevolence and free giving in its ethical 
 effect upon the moral character of the giver and of the 
 receiver. 
 
 How sweeping and absolute the precepts are, will be 
 perceived by recapitulating the familiar words : "Give to 
 every man that asketh of thee, and of him that taketh 
 away thy goods ask them not again." Do good, and lend, 
 hoping for nothing again. Lend to those from whom you 
 do not hope to receive. "Give, and it shall be given unto 
 you : good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, 
 and running over, shall men give into your bosom." a The 
 incongruity in the same juxtaposition of this giving to 
 those from whom nothing is hoped in return, and giving 
 that a fuller measure shall be given back to our bosom, 
 seems somewhat difficult of explanation. In both pre- 
 cepts, the giving is enjoined for the sake of the reward. 
 The reward is made very prominent ; and the giving to 
 the generous is distinctly discountenanced, because, when 
 they return the donation, we are paid and can hope for 
 no reward. It must have been the whole thought of 
 Jesus that men should give freely and largely, not to the 
 honest and just who would return their gifts, but also to 
 the indolent, the thriftless, the dishonest, the fairly appar- 
 ent impostor, who would not return, and who was not ex- 
 pected, to return the gifts. In the former case, they 
 would be rewarded by the bounty of men whose gener- 
 osity they appealed to*: in the latter case, they would be 
 rewarded by God in the kingdom of heaven. For it 
 was a prominent consideration with Jesus that good 
 deeds, even prayers, were to be offered, not so much 
 from an impulse of feeling, as for the sake of the 
 reward. b Indeed, he had given such prominence to this 
 
 a Luke vi., 30, 33-35, 38. b Matt, vi., 1, 6. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS I43 
 
 consideration that we are not surprised when his disciples 
 ask him, and he goes on, with the detail of one careful to 
 be complete in his generosity, to tell them, what shall be 
 the reward for the ardor of their attachment and the 
 losses that had befallen their discipleship. 1 
 
 No precept of Jesus, as has already been attempted to 
 be shown, is so inapplicable as this to the maintenance of 
 the present order of the world and the natural succession 
 of human society. The obvious incompatibility of such 
 inconsiderate beneficence with the welfare of mankind, 
 with the preservation of the conditions respectively of the 
 rich and poor, and with the perpetuation of the human 
 race, has justly arrayed in protest against it, not the polit- 
 ical powers, not the philosophic unbelief of the world, but 
 the whole official sentiment of the organized believers in 
 Jesus, at the head of whom stands his greatest disciple 
 and apostle, Paul. It is Christianity itself that repudiates 
 and protests, against a primary precept of Christ. 
 
 In the expectation of the speedy end of the world, Jesus 
 came, and said : Take no thought to make any provision 
 for the sustenance of your earthly lives. Give without 
 stint or expectation of return to every one that asks of 
 you. He that forsaketh not all that he hath cannot be 
 my disciple. His followers in a later age, while revering 
 his sacred character, while even elevating him in their 
 profound regard to the grade of a divine being, yet pre- 
 sumed to apply to these directions of their Lord and 
 Master, the modifications compelled by the indefinite post- 
 ponement of the expectation upon which they were given. 
 
 If the old order is to go on for some centuries and ages, 
 it must go on in its old methods, and subject to its old 
 laws. God scatters not upon the surface, but here and 
 there, in places only accessible to toil and effort, not lav- 
 ishly, but in limited supply, the sustenance of all living 
 creatures. There are always living creatures enough to 
 exhaust this supply. Nay, more, at the gates of life, of all 
 life, stand an innumerable crowd of potential creatures, 
 watching that limited supply, to see whether their poten- 
 tial life can become actual life, who are shut out from 
 the crowded tables of God, because there is not room for 
 a tenth of them, livery day, the inequality between the 
 
144 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER 0¥ JESUS 
 
 guests and the supply must be readjusted by the painful 
 process of death, and the dismissal of the superfluous. 
 You may take your portion of this bounty of nature, and 
 appropriate it to the sustenance of your life ; you may 
 generously bestow it upon another life and forego your 
 own. When, for the mere asking, you take the bread 
 that is to sustain your children, and give it to an un- 
 known man to sustain his children, what assurance can 
 you have that the universe has been enriched, and 
 God's grand plans promoted by the gift ? If you leave 
 your food to the rats, have you improved the quality of 
 life on the globe ? Will the rats imitate in their turn 
 your disinterestedness, and bravely choose starvation, 
 that the race of ants may thrive and multiply upon their 
 charity ? If the ants in their turn, smitten with this fan- 
 tastic politeness, pass the food still lower at the divine 
 table, the fungi will revel in it, and build their cells and 
 spores out of it, and the glad vegetables suck at its rich 
 decay with eager throats. The struggle for life gives life 
 to the strongest and the best ; indiscriminate alms gives 
 life to the weakest and the worst. 
 
 There is a sphere for pity and fellow-help, everywhere 
 more and more recognized by the expanding benevolence 
 of men. The patient workers who, by some natural ca- 
 lamity or political revolution, or the fraud or violence of 
 others, have lost the wages of their toil, must be helped 
 by the strong and the successful ; but giving must be dis- 
 criminate, and upon some better claim than want or the 
 importunity of asking. "It is not meet to take the 
 children's bread, and to cast it to dogs," was a later saying 
 of Jesus, when dogs signified an alien race of men." It is 
 not meet to take what one man has saved by denying his 
 lusts and laid in store to feed children that will inherit 
 his chaste and temperate nature, and give it to another 
 man to expend in gratifying his lusts, or to sustain a 
 progeny that will perpetuate his sensuality. Strip life of 
 its primal condition of labor and patience and self-denial, 
 by which the spirit is chiefly strengthened and chastened, 
 and "give to every one that asketh of thee," and who will 
 take the long and thorny road to achievement and self- 
 support, when the easy door of charity is open to every 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 145 
 
 one that has speech or gesture by which to beg ? You 
 destroy character, fatally and fast, at both ends of the 
 process ; and such a charity is least like that which 
 blesseth him that gives and him that takes. 
 
 Is the rule for all ? Then, if I give to-day all my store 
 because my neighbor asked it, must he not to-morrow 
 give it back to my asking ? We have not increased the 
 store by bandying it back and forth in a vain effort to 
 make what was provision for one suffice for two, and have 
 lost all the time not expended upon one side or the 
 other in adding to the store itself. 
 
 It is easy to see that, given the necessity of labor to 
 produce wealth, that is not only the justest but the most 
 economic distribution of wealth which gives the property 
 produced to the producer, and that this law of distribu- 
 tion most favorably affects the moral development of 
 individual men. 
 
 Looking into any code of criminal law or into any com- 
 plete treatise upon ethical science, we note how large a 
 place laws in support of the rights of property occupy. 
 That part of the Jewish law which was considered distinct- 
 ively moral — the ten commandments of the Old Scriptures 
 — was nearly all of it in defence of the right of property. 
 Thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not 
 falsely testify against thy neighbor, are all prohibitions 
 against invasion of property. Adultery was forbidden 
 more in the interest of the right of the neighbor to the 
 exclusive society of his wife, than in the interest of per- 
 sonal purity. In perfect accord with the ideas of Jesus 
 about property, which have been fully considered in 
 another chapter, he ignores the whole subject of these 
 property regulations ; and, in giving the law of adultery, 
 gives that new statement of it, which regards the very 
 aspect of the offence, which they of old time had wholly 
 overlooked. How could he, even by indirection, give the 
 sanction of his voice to that prevalent passion for posses- 
 sions, which the whole Hebrew cultus stimulated and 
 sanctified ? It was at that very point that he antag- 
 onized the old ideas, and sought to introduce the new. 
 So we find no prohibition against theft or false testi- 
 mony or fraud. "Who made me a judge or divider over 
 you?" he said impatiently." Give way to the oppressor 
 
 " T.uku xii., 14. 
 
I46 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 and the robber. If a man has relieved thee of thy pos- 
 session, he has done thee no real disservice, but has 
 opened for thee the door of the kingdom of heaven, into 
 which he that hath riches can only enter by a possibility 
 of which only God has knowledge.' 1 
 
 Thus far, the teachings of Jesus have been studied in 
 the department of what may be called' the major morals — 
 that sphere of human conduct, where men are accredited 
 as good or evil, as virtuous or vicious, in the judgment 
 of the general human reason. The discussion must be 
 pursued into' the department of minor morals, — to those 
 lines of conduct, where the sentiment of the world has 
 uttered itself in a more uncertain way, — in fine, to those 
 modes of action which belong rather to manners than to 
 morals, and over which preside good taste and the sense 
 of propriety rather than the paramount obligations of 
 duty. Very confused must be the ideas of that mind 
 which estimates the malicious murder of a man, as of the 
 same turpitude with a profane or superfluous speech ; 
 which places in the same category of guilt the fraudulent 
 breach of a public trust, and the profanation of a holy 
 day ; and thinks it as wrong to assume the obligation 
 of an oath, as to tell a lie. It is with a different standard 
 of moral valuation distinctly in view that the remaining 
 ethical theses of Jesus must be considered. 
 
 He said oaths were not to be taken, either to fortify 
 the will in performing some definite purpose, or to 
 strengthen the truthfulness of some consequential, delib- 
 erate and official statement, or to give undue vehemence 
 and emphasis to ordinary conversation. He swept away, 
 with that integrity of application, which characterized 
 his ordinary dealing with a rule or principle of conduct, 
 the vow, which in earlier times formed so large and 
 solemn a feature of the intercourse of men with the 
 divine powers, the judicial oath, that enters so largely 
 into all modern official procedure, and every form of 
 rhetorical or vulgar exaggeration, that deforms and dis- 
 torts literary expression and colloquial speech. He said 
 it made no difference whether the oath or imprecation 
 was to God, or heaven, or earth, or a man's own head ; 
 any invocation, anything beyond a simple assertion or 
 
 » Matt, xix., 23-26. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS I47 
 
 denial, came of evil. a Certainly, Jesus never said any- 
 thing that was characterized with more thorough good 
 sense, or more clearly disclosed a wise man's perception 
 of the laws of the human mind, than these words. One 
 is strongly moved to defend their sagacity and propriety 
 against a disregard of them by the Christian world which 
 seems almost contemptuous. For it is undoubtedly true 
 that the use of oaths in judicial proceedings, and to 
 sanction and strengthen the obligation of official trusts 
 and official declarations, is chiefly due, not only to the 
 religious sentiment in men, but to that type of religious 
 sentiment which is distinctively Christian. In pleading 
 against the practice of oaths, one must not only ask to 
 have the proceedings in which they are used dissociated 
 from the sanctions of religion, but that such proceed- 
 ings shall be conducted in disregard of an obligation im- 
 posed by considerations which Jesus himself especially 
 emphasized. It is claimed, against the authority of Jesus, 
 that the office of the oath is to put men upon their 
 fidelity and conscience, to make them serious and sin- 
 cere, to bring into the performance of a human duty the 
 consciousness and the law of God. 
 
 The attitude of Jesus toward the Mosaic forms of wor- 
 ship has been much discussed. It has been claimed for 
 him by many, whose mental portrait of his character is 
 drawn from the Christianity of Paul, and from still more 
 modern conceptions of its central purpose and spirit, that 
 Jesus came as a reformer and protestant against the for- 
 mal and outward imposition of sacrifices, fasts, prayers, 
 priestly interventions, ceremonies of dress, prescription 
 of holy days and of clean and unclean practices, into 
 which the simple Jehovah-worship of his nation had de- 
 generated in his age. His denunciation of the scribes 
 and Pharisees, his disregard of the Sabbaths, the stress 
 he laid upon virtue, mercy, and faith, his insisting upon 
 pure motive as alone the reality of a pure act, are cited in 
 evidence of this protest. 
 
 All these acts and words are quite consistent with a 
 decorous conformity to the whole letter and spirit of the 
 ecclesiastical law of his time. He declared to John the 
 Baptist that it became men who expected the kingdom 
 
 "Matt, v., 33-37. 
 
14^ OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 of heaven, to fulfil all pious rites. 1 ' He Carefully pro- 
 tested, that he had not come to destroy the law or the 
 prophets, which would stand and be binding upon the 
 human conscience while heaven and earth stood, and 
 till they were perfected in his kingdom of the heavens. 
 Meantime, he that should break one of the least com- 
 mandments of the law, and teach men so, should be the 
 least in the kingdom of heaven. h The scribes and Phari- 
 sees, he said, sat in Moses' seat, and, whatever they bid, 
 men must observe and do. c If he seemed to speak sar- 
 castically of the tithes of mint, anise, and cumin which 
 they were so careful to pay, he told his disciples they 
 ought to do these things also, while not neglecting the 
 weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faith.' 1 
 His kinsmen and most trusted disciples scrupulously con- 
 formed to the ritual of the national worship ; and even 
 the erratic Paul, though boasting of the unsectarian spirit, 
 — which he had maintained among the Greeks, that he 
 might win them to discipleship,^when he came to Jerusa- 
 lem, and saw Peter and Jesus' own brother zealously per- 
 forming the vows and keeping the fasts and sacred days 
 of the Jews, was constrained to succumb to their ex- 
 ample. 
 
 All the fundamental ethical precepts of Jesus have thus 
 been considered save those, which can be more properly 
 viewed as a part of his philosophy, to be discussed in a 
 later chapter. They are not comprehensive of the whole 
 sphere of human conduct, and there are conspicuous 
 omissions in what may be considered the standard of 
 the completed man. 
 
 It is already apparent why whole lines of human action 
 could not be consistently entertained by Jesus. His 
 expectation of the speedy ending of the social and politi- 
 cal order necessarily rendered superfluous all political 
 duties. Patriotism, bravery in the defence of one's 
 country or its institutions, loyalty to the sovereign power, 
 whether monarchical or republican, were virtues he dises- 
 teemed and ignored. If men learned and practised them, 
 it was from other teachers and other inspiration than his ; 
 and, while enjoying the consideration and applause they 
 
 a Matt, iii., 15. b Matt, v., 17-20. c Matt, xxiii., 2, 3. 
 
 d Matt, xxiii., 23. ■ Acts xxi., 26. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS I49 
 
 won from secular minds, it was all the time with the mis- 
 giving that they were, in the estimation of Jesus, unsanc- 
 tified virtues lightly esteemed of God. In the severe 
 judgment of men wholly influenced by his spirit, the 
 patriots who have died in defence of their country, the 
 heroes who have led suffering and oppressed nations to 
 independence and honorable peace, the faithful public 
 ministers who have with good counsel and high integrity 
 served their rulers or the state, the reformers who by 
 their eloquence and constancy have rid the world of 
 chronic political abuses, have misdirected their efforts, 
 and earned only a pagan glory that will turn to darkness 
 before the brightness of the coming of the Son of Man. 
 
 Scarcely less conspicuous is the omission of the 
 marital, parental, filial, and fraternal relations of men, 
 of the natural affections that pertain to them, and of the 
 duties that grow out of them. Jesus was oblivious of 
 natural ties. If we are not required to believe that he 
 ever addressed his mother as John represents in the story 
 of the wedding feast of Cana, a we can find in no part of 
 the more reliable records any incident of his tenderness 
 and respect for her; and we remember how, on a public 
 occasion, he declined to be accosted by his mother and 
 brethren, and in the elevation, of his enthusiasm declared 
 that he that did the will of God was his brother, sister, and 
 mother. 1 ' Half-questioning himself the purity of ties that 
 bind the human race in families, and affirming that they 
 who would be perfect were not entangled in such ties, 
 and that in the kingdom of heaven they are neither mar- 
 ried nor given in marriage, how could he follow men into 
 such temporary and questionable relations, and fix from 
 his high ideal their laws and duties? It was Paul with 
 his political training, with his secular spirit, with the feet 
 of his common sense firmly planted upon the world, and 
 with his determination to make it orderly and decent for 
 the brief interval that it should stand, who exhorted hus- 
 bands and wives, children and servants, to the practice of 
 those virtues that their position demanded, and supple- 
 mented the meagre code of his master by a brief sum- 
 mary of political duties. It is Paul also who contributes 
 to the form of the Christian doctrine nearly all the pre- 
 
 ajohn ii., 1. ''Matt, xii., 48-50. 
 
150 OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 cepts that it has, regulating the social intercourse of 
 men, — all that fine courtesy, that delicacy of mutual con- 
 sideration, which is the expression of a refined spirit — 
 and which a chivalric nature like his readily takes on, by 
 mingling with the morally well-educated. Jesus had said, 
 nr atonies. Paul remembered that love was none 
 the less due to friends, and gave us that fine precept 
 to regulate the social intercourse of equals. " Be kindly 
 affectioned one to another with brotherly love, in honor 
 preferring one another." " 
 
 The modern mind has no better word than gentleman 
 to define its idea of perfected manhood. The idea is a 
 composite one, having for its constituents the meekness 
 and patience under injuries, the spirit that returns bless- 
 ing for curses and offers the other cheek to the smiter, 
 which are the inspiration of Jesus, the brotherly courtesy 
 which gives the friend the preference of honor enjoined 
 by Paul, and what may be called the Teutonic influence — 
 that chivalric feeling which accepted the Christian cultus 
 with essential modifications. Not abject or insensate 
 under the affront of wrong, this chivalric feeling exhibits 
 its magnanimity sometimes by the completeness of its 
 forgiveness, sometimes by the moderation of its retalia- 
 tion, sometimes by waiting for the violent deed to 
 recoil of its own force upon the offender. Not hasty or 
 vindictive in resenting personal injuries, this feeling 
 inspires no restraint upon indignation provoked by attacks 
 upon woman, upon children, upon the weak and the 
 unfriended, and finds a place for the masculine virtues of 
 courage in shielding from wanton cruelty those who 
 cannot defend themselves. 
 
 In Egypt and in India there were types of religious 
 faith which emphasized the relationship between men and 
 the lower order of living creatures. The hunting and 
 slaying of animals endowed with strength, cunning, or 
 swiftness to stand at bay, or flee, or hide, while it gave 
 the barbarous man a keen delight, ministered to the 
 development of his cruel instincts, and kept him closely 
 akin to the beasts he pursued. Even the more decent 
 practices of civilization, that localize, specialize, and cover 
 up the slaughters that inaugurate our feasts, leave us 
 
 ■ Romans xii., 10. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 151 
 
 compromised with the reproach that our lives are largely 
 supported by the violent and premature deaths of sen- 
 tient creatures, whose rank in the order of nature below 
 our own may have been fixed only by our own conceit. 
 
 The Israelite cherished no sentimental tenderness 
 toward the lower animals. He honored the dumb races 
 only by eating them, and looked with aversion upon 
 those he deemed unclean, — that is, unfit for food. The 
 aversion to dogs, which appears in the older and later 
 literature of that people, is one entirely in keeping with 
 a national trait, which is scarcely intelligible to those 
 more sympathetic races who have made that sagacious 
 and affectionate creature the companion of their toils 
 and their pleasures. Jesus spake of the animals some- 
 times, to illustrate his thought, but never in a spirit dis- 
 cordant with the national antipathy. He spoke of aliens 
 as dogs, and asked, How much better is a man than a 
 sheep ? Cast not your pearls before swine, which after 
 trampling them will tear you. The legend of the devils 
 and the herd of swine is an illustration in part of an unsym- 
 pathetic aversion to brutes, in part of a local and partisan 
 repugnance to the repulsive diet of an alien race, which 
 must have characterized the school of men, who came 
 under his special influence. 
 
 Germs of a civil polity for the community of the 
 believers appear in Jesus' directions as to the treatment 
 of offences by the brethren. His rule seems quite differ- 
 ent from that given for offences received from persons 
 outside the fellowship of discipleship. In the latter case, 
 it was : "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek 
 offer to him the other also." If any man will sue thee 
 at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy 
 cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a 
 mile, go two miles with him." 1 ' For wrongs, affronts, 
 and exactions received from ordinary men, from men not 
 of your faith, the remedy is silent suffering, the meek 
 surrender of yourself to their violence, the wearing out 
 of their malice by your patience. But how about offences 
 received from those who walk with you in the same 
 meekness and blamelessness, — when they happen to give 
 offence, what shall we do ? They will not smite again, 
 
 1 Matt v., 39, 40. ''Matt, v., 41. 
 
152 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 nor exact the cloak or the coat, nor compel us to walk 
 even a furlong. The question was asked of Jesus, If my 
 brother trespass against me and come with his penitent 
 regret, how many times must I forgive him, — seven 
 times ? Yes, seventy times, said Jesus. But if he does 
 not come to acknowledge his fault or to ask forgiveness? 
 Then go to him, said Jesus, and rebuke him. The 
 brother must not be left in his sin, as you leave the or- 
 dinary man. Rebuke him with privacy. If he is of the 
 right spirit, he will see his fault, and you shall have saved 
 his soul. But, if he is perverse and obdurate, do not 
 give him up. Take one or two more with you, that from 
 a disinterested point his offence may be shown him. 
 Even if he will not hear the remonstrances of two or 
 three, still let the whole brotherhood, the assembly of 
 the elect, add their remonstrances ; and, if the offending 
 brother is still unmoved, let him be to thee a heathen and 
 a publican. Cast him out of the category of discipleship. a 
 The necessity for these directions in the personal dis- 
 sensions arising among the early Christians, must have 
 been very imperative. The inclination is very strong to 
 look upon their recapitulation as an interpolation of the 
 biographers of Jesus ; but the rule of selection hereto- 
 fore adopted compels us to accept these as parts of his 
 authentic teaching. The spirit of his followers was not, 
 even in the brief period of their personal attendance upon 
 him, so completely under his control as to make it im- 
 probable, that he was called upon to indicate some rule, 
 by which their dissensions among themselves might be 
 settled. What surprises us is the absence of reference 
 to himself and his authority. If a brother had offended 
 a brother, why should not there have been a reference in 
 some stage of the attempted reconciliation, to the author- 
 ity of the master ? Or did Jesus give this direction late 
 in his career, and when, in anticipation of his own de- 
 parture, he wished to indicate some tribunal, that would 
 remain during the interval of his absence ? That he 
 feared some outbreak of a quarrelsome temper among 
 his own disciples, in that interval, is evident from his 
 caution, But if that servant ''shall begin to smite his fel- 
 low-servants and to cat and drink ivith the drunken, the 
 
 : ' Matt, xviii., 1 5- 1 s, 21, 22. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 53 
 
 Lord of that servant shall come in an hour that he think- 
 eth not, and shall appoint him his portion with the hypo- 
 crites." a 
 
 Out of these few and doubtful words has sprung the 
 whole complicated and imposing structure of the Chris- 
 tian Church, so terrible in its power and in its punish- 
 ments, so minute and universal in its surveillance and 
 jurisdiction. These words must be considered doubtful 
 because they are so foreign to the general ideas of 
 Jesus, that contemplate no organization of believers, 
 and nothing like government or discipline, however 
 temporary, before the new economy, which was to be 
 from heaven, should create a new heaven and a new earth 
 for the elect of God. 
 
 The same question occurs in reference to the general 
 ethical ideas of Jesus as in reference to his dominant idea 
 of the kingdom of heaven, — how far were they his own, 
 how far do we find them or germs of them in the times 
 that immediately preceded his own ? 
 
 Besides the Pharisees and Sadducees, the two principal 
 sects that divided, the Jewish world, there was a smaller 
 body of devotees called the Essenes, whose influence 
 upon the ethics and practices of Jesus and his followers 
 is now generally acknowledged. The origin of this sect 
 is lost in obscurity. No distinct traces of them are found 
 in the Jewish scriptures. Though thoroughly national in 
 their attachment to the Mosaic ritual and in their vivid 
 expectation of a Messiah, their manners and morals have 
 in them something foreign. Very great must have been 
 the germinal power of the doctrine of Sakya Mouni, the 
 Hindu reformer, in the first fervor of conversion. We 
 know that, besides powerfully affecting India, it spread 
 Eastward, and became the dominant faith of China, Japan, 
 and Thibet, as well as of many islands of adjoining seas. 
 Although kept out of Persia by strong military and eccle- 
 siastical authority, it is not impossible, that, the zealous 
 propagandists that penetrated every part of Asia, in spite 
 of opposition and persecution, might have indoctrinated 
 some of the captive communities of Hebrews in exile 
 under the Assyrian and Persian kings, and that these 
 latter might have brought back to Palestine, along with 
 
 a Matt. xxiv. , .(-'. i , 
 
154 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 their devotion to Jehovah and their attachment to Jeru- 
 salem and its stately worship, some of the ideas of the 
 Hindu reformer. The tradition of Jesus is the story of 
 a good man, born in a stable, whom the rulers of his 
 nation had persecuted and crucified, but who through the 
 power of God had risen from the dead, shown himself' to 
 his disciples and ascended to heaven. Belief in this 
 tradition gave wings to the ideas and doctrines of Chris- 
 tianity, and set them flying over the world. It was the 
 equally touching and romantic legend of a man born a 
 wealthy and powerful prince, who was so deeply moved 
 by the sufferings of the poor and the miseries that em- 
 bittered human life, that he voluntarily laid aside his 
 royal state, and in toil, poverty, and privation spent his 
 life in alleviating the sufferings of the wretched, till in 
 his old age he was rewarded with the supreme bliss of 
 heaven, that sent a new faith — singularly destitute of 
 promise or satisfaction to the human heart — buoyed up 
 by the enthusiasm and martyrdom of its converts over 
 two-thirds of habitable Asia. 
 
 Many scholars, however, insist that' Essenism was an 
 essentially national development, natural enough among 
 a people whose genius was religion ; and that the sect, 
 which obtained notice from the writers of the first cen- 
 tury, was a sect of the Pharisees — a later development of 
 the devout and ascetic feeling, which tinged the character 
 of several of the Hebrew prophets, and which was mani- 
 fested in the orders of the Nazarites, Reccabites, and 
 Chassidim of the ante-christian period. 
 
 From the distinct pictures of Essenism found in the 
 works of Philo, Josephus, and other writers, it is easy to 
 determine how much it contributed to the ethical system 
 and to the philosophical ideas of Jesus. 
 
 The Essenes had a great reverence for the old script- 
 ures, and were most strict in their observance of the 
 Sabbath. It has been seen that Jesus read and quoted 
 the Hebrew scriptures, and was evidently very familiar 
 with them. He also persistently maintained that he had 
 not come to destroy the least tittle of the law, and 
 exhorted his disciples to do whatever the scribes and 
 Pharisees taught or required as observances and cere- 
 monies of worship. But he evidently anticipated that his 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 55 
 
 teaching would be supposed antagonistic to the Mosaic 
 code ; and spoke of its most fundamental prohibitions, as 
 of murder, as a tradition of them of old time, and of the 
 whole moral law of the ten commandments as wholly 
 inadequate to define the character of a righteous man, 
 or to form a standard of conduct for the least in the 
 kingdom of heaven. His attitude toward the Sabbath 
 was unequivocally contemptuous ; a and he asserted his 
 personal authority to make the ,day the minister to his 
 convenience and necessity. 
 
 The Essenes believed in labor. The community was 
 industrial. Industry was as much insisted upon among 
 them as devotion. It has already appeared that Jesus' 
 prime direction, Take no thought for yotcr life, abolished 
 the incentive of labor ; and that his invitation to his 
 hearers was : Leave your toil, your care for subsistence ; 
 forsake houses and lands, and come to me, who have not 
 where to lay my head, and you shall have rest. 
 
 The Essenes insisted upon strict justice to all men 
 and faithful obedience to rulers. In Jesus, as has been 
 shown, the sentiment of justice was feeble. He thought 
 it a small matter, not worthy his interference or even 
 rebuke, that a man should defraud his brother of an 
 inheritance. His attitude toward rulers was equivocal. 
 He paid taxes, while protesting that they were an unwar- 
 rantable exaction, because he would not offend. He 
 thought Caesar's coin, which an inheritor of the kingdom 
 had no business to possess, and must give to the asker, 
 might be given to Caesar. But he nowhere helped the 
 secular arm by the sanction of voice or act, and gave no 
 exhortation to his followers which indicated, that he held 
 what the Essenes held, and what Paul so emphatically 
 taught, that the rulers held their power as the ministers 
 of God. b To him, they were the wolves who would con- 
 spire to shed his blood; and who after his death would 
 ,c the flock of which he was the shepherd. 
 
 The Essenes discountenanced association with the 
 wicked, and formed a separate community to avoid con- 
 tact with the unclean. Jesus promulgated a higher prin- 
 ciple. He held no man ceremonially unclean. To him 
 the only defilement was the defilement of a wicked dis- 
 
I56 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 position, and he did not sever himself from evil men. 
 He obtained the reputation of associating with the pub- 
 lican and the harlot, the extortioner and the sensualist, 
 the two types of evil of his time ; and several of his most 
 pronounced disciples were gained from these classes. 
 Strong in his own integrity, he did not seem to have 
 thought it necessary to impose upon weaker and baser 
 natures a constraint and segregation, that might become 
 necessary to maintain their feeble virtue. 
 
 The Essenes had substituted prayers for sacrifices. 
 Jesus clearly taught that men were to ask freely and 
 simply for whatever they needed ; but he is not to be 
 considered as insisting much upon prayer, and never as 
 insisting upon it as an act of worship or expression of 
 allegiance towards the Deity. When ye pray, he says to 
 his disciples, Enter into your closet, — that is, if you pray, 
 pray only thus ; just as he had said, When thou fastest, 
 anoint thy head and wash thy face. In neither case did 
 he command men to fast or to pray. ;1 Indeed, it appears 
 that, up to a certain period of his teaching, he had not 
 taught his disciples to pray ; and that they reminded him 
 of an omission in his doctrine by citing the example of 
 John the Baptist. b In the sense of asking of God any 
 good gift, Jesus taught that his disciples should have 
 frank, open, and frequent access to the heavenly Father ; 
 but that God is not to be annoyed with repetitions. He 
 knows what men want before they ask him ; and prayer 
 is never to be used ostentatiously, as an edifying exhibi- 
 tion of devoutness, or to impress others as a manifesta- 
 tion of piety. Jesus spoke of the long prayers of the 
 Pharisees — probably much shorter than the modern 
 Christian prayer of our public worship — as a pretext 
 for extortion. 
 
 The Essenes believed in bodily washings and baptism. 
 Jesus seemed to have apologized for being himself bap- 
 tized ; (1 and there was some disfavor in his mind to the 
 rite, which confirms the saying in the Johannic narrative, 
 that Jesus left all the baptizing to his disciples, and may 
 have suggested Paul's boast, that he never baptized but 
 a single family/ The saying of Jesus, that not eating 
 
 <» Matt, vi., 3, 5-7. 1> Luke xi., 1. c Matt, xxiii., 14. 
 
 dMatt. iii., 15. ejohn iv., 2. f I. Cor. i., 14-17. 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 157 
 
 with unbaptized hands, but wicked and lustful thoughts, 
 worked real defilement, 11 harmonizes with this estimate on 
 his part of baptism. 
 
 The Essenes gave an emphatic testimony against war 
 and slavery. The doctrine of Jesus, that men were to 
 suffer with patience and meekness and without retaliation 
 all injuries, is the extreme statement of the principle of 
 peace; and must be taken as bis rule of conduct not only 
 for individuals, but for associations, communities, and na- 
 tions. With what view he on one occasion directed his 
 followers to arm themselves with swords, it is difficult 
 to determine. He evidently contemplated no formidable 
 physical demonstration, since, when but two weapons 
 could be procured, he declared the armament sufficient ; 
 and when the enemies, whose arrival he had every rea- 
 son to anticipate, actually appeared, he promptly forbade 
 any forcible resistance. Whatever may have been the 
 teachings of the apostles or the practice of the earlier 
 Christians, the hostility of Jesus to all war and violence 
 is clear and unmistakable. With regard to slavery,- in 
 his time an established usage of society, practised among 
 his own people, his teaching was nearly silent. The 
 ideas of brotherhood and equality, which he insisted 
 upon as the social condition of the little band of disci- 
 ples, his command to them to call no man master and to 
 esteem him greatest who did the lowest forms of service, 
 utterly excluded from the Church the claim of mastery 
 or ownership. The outside world, however, was never 
 reproached by him for oppressing, buying and selling 
 fellow-men, with anything like the severity with which he 
 denounced the merely rich. He never said that, to enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven, it is necessary to emancipate 
 one's slaves. It was quite consonant with the tolerance 
 of slavery on his part for Paul to exhort converted slaves 
 to be obedient, even to wicked and cruel masters, and to 
 recognize them among the classes, whose duties he pre- 
 sented by the side of those of the other social conditions 
 — husband and wife, parent and child. 1 ' 
 
 The Essenes cherished a special reverence for age, sup- 
 plying to the aged celibates in their communities the 
 tender consideration and affection which even children 
 
 "Matt, xv., 20 j Luke xxii., 36. •> Eph. vi., 5, 6; Col. iii., 18-25. 
 
I5« OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 are not wont to render toward superannuated parents. 
 If Jesus taught any similar duty, his biographers have 
 made no record of it. That peculiar sect hated every 
 form of falsehood, and the speaking of truth under all 
 circumstances was enjoined as a most imperative duty. 
 Falsehood is the taint of all the decayed and hopeless 
 races, the prime badge of their degradation. Cruelty and 
 sensuality can be bred out of savage men by the slow 
 culture of civilization, but falsehood is a degeneration 
 that precedes national extinction. The Jews, who had 
 their great law against bearing false testimony against 
 the neighbor, had no prohibition against the lie helpful to 
 one's neighbor or to one's self. The national character, 
 which honored every form of advantageous duplicity, and 
 which imputed to Deity itself the deceit of making false 
 revelations to ensnare men into punishment, was not 
 above the necessity of some new doctrine of truthfulness. 
 In the comparatively trivial matter of the indirectness 
 and exaggeration of the forms of speech, we are per- 
 plexed to miss the requirement of the essential matter, 
 that, whatever be the forms, only truth must be spoken. 
 Jesus himself indulged in indirectness of speech, and 
 avowed the purpose of so uttering his most fundamental 
 doctrines, that, all excluded from the knowledge of the 
 divine mysteries, might make shipwreck of their faith." 
 
 It may thus be seen in what respects Jesus taught 
 either in direct opposition to the principles of the Es- 
 senes, or laid little or no stress upon doctrines which to 
 them were essential. But, on the other hand, how closely 
 he reproduced their ideas may be seen from the following 
 recapitulation. 
 
 Like them, he taught that the sexual desires, if not 
 absolutely sinful, were indicative of a low stage of virtue, 
 and that all who would be perfect, who in purity of heart 
 would attain the vision of God, must abstain from mar- 
 riage. b It was an Essenic rule that the brotherhood 
 must give up their property upon entering their commu- 
 nity to be administered for the benefit of the whole, and 
 that thereafterward the convert must not lay up any 
 treasure for himself. What he had he must give to the 
 brother asking for it, expecting nothing again. All traffic 
 
 11 Matt. xiii. , u-15. '' Matt, v., 8, 28, 29; xix., 10-12; xxii., 29-30 
 
ETHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 59 
 
 in the sect itself was unlawful. No man was to be master 
 or to be so called. There was no recognized priesthood, 
 no external sacrifices, no ritual of worship, other than that 
 which every humble believer might practise and conduct. 
 Jesus' rule of ecclesiastical discipline, already alluded to, 
 of first making a personal appeal to an offending brother, 
 then renewing it with the support of one or two associ- 
 ates, then submitting it to the assembly of the faithful, 
 and if all remonstrances failed to bring the offender to 
 penitence, casting him out as a heathen and a publican, 
 was the exact regulation of the Essenes. 
 
 They enjoined abstinence from all oaths, and, like 
 Jesus, said all speech that exceeded mere denial and 
 affirmation came of evil. Though scrupulous in their 
 washings and linen clothing as preparations for their 
 common meals, considered by them sacraments, they 
 required ordinary garments to be worn out before they 
 were changed or laid aside. Jesus forbade his disciples 
 to provide more than one coat, or one pair of shoes, or 
 any money for their journeys. a This, too, was a uniform 
 injunction upon the Essenes on similar occasions. Ab- 
 staining generally from marriage, they depended, like 
 the modern Shakers, upon waifs from other sects, mostly 
 children, to keep up their numbers. To these forlorn 
 children they were indulgent and affectionate, and were 
 wont to say before Jesus repeated it, " Of such is the king- 
 dom of heaven y 
 
 The blessing upon meekness, and the characterization 
 by Jesus of himself as meek and lowly, though singularly 
 undescriptive of the spirit of his later days, was Essenic. 
 The Essenes, too, placed love of God before worship and 
 sacrifice. Jesus made God dear to the human heart by 
 calling Him his, and our Father in heaven, and applauded 
 the saying of the wise scribe, who declared that to love 
 God with all the heart was better than all whole burnt- 
 offerings and sacrifices. It was unlawful among the 
 Essenes to promulgate their higher doctrines to persons 
 outside the sect ; and, in strict accord with this idea, 
 Jesus declared that it was not given to the multitude who 
 heard his parables to understand the mysteries of the 
 kingdom of heaven, but only to his disciples. The 
 
 "Matt, x., 9, .0 
 
l60 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Essenes enjoined an excision of anger and malice. Jesus 
 declared anger endangered the soul, and that God would 
 accept no worship from a heart cherishing malice toward 
 a brother. Miracle-working, particularly curing diseased 
 persons and casting out devils, power that extended even 
 to raising the dead, was a claim of an advanced stage of 
 Essenism. It was quite manifest that Jesus could gain 
 no high estimate as a prophet and Messiah, until he had 
 created for himself a similar prestige. The Essenes 
 forbade scientific studies and all irreverent scrutiny 
 into the laws of God, as destructive of salutary piety. 
 Jesus boasted that not many wise men had been attracted 
 by his preaching, only the simple ones and the babes in 
 reason and intelligence." The doctrine of the Holy 
 Ghost promulgated by Jesus, and which grew into such 
 large proportions in the early Church, first appears among 
 these forerunners of Christianity. Finally, it was the 
 Essenes that, of all the Jews, had chiefly studied the 
 Messianic prophecies, kept their promises alive in the 
 national heart, and indicated in the Teachings of their 
 faith the nearness of the time for their expected fulfil- 
 ment. So that when John first, and Jesus afterward, 
 began to preach in Palestine, and to say, Repent, for the 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand, they threw a spark into the 
 vigilant hope of all devout souls which could but kindle 
 into a vital and spreading enthusiasm. 
 
 Thus, it is seen that, in his ethical ideas, Jesus accepted 
 and repeated the doctrines of a singular sect that he 
 seems to have converted and absorbed, — accepted them 
 as he had his faith in the coming of the kingdom of 
 heaven, not blindly, as a mere convert and copyist, but 
 putting his own original genius into them, modifying 
 them by his own powerful thought, and giving them the 
 wings of his own enthusiasm with which to fly across 
 the world and down to the latest centuries. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS. 
 
 " Systems of thought should be studied sympathetically, but critically, — 
 from the outside as it were, and never from the stand-point of discipleship. 
 Those philosophers who have had no distinct 'school' are best under- 
 stood." — From a summary of Wundfs Physiological Psychology in the Nation. 
 
 In a preceding chapter has been stated and illustrated 
 the perplexity in which the sympathetic critic is involved 
 in attempting to deduce a system of morals, an ethical 
 philosophy, from the generalizations with which Jesus is 
 reported to have explained his specific precepts relating 
 to conduct. The perplexity mainly proceeds from the 
 inconsequential and contradictory nature of those gen- 
 eralizations. To make the survey of the words and acts 
 ascribed to Jesus complete, to embrace in the analysis of 
 his character all the data that a reasonably probable 
 tradition has supplied, the effort must be made to collect 
 the prominent principles of his philosophy. 
 
 If he was an intellectually and spiritually complete 
 man, — still more, if he was a being whose traits entitled 
 him to a divine rank, — a harmonious conception of nature 
 and of its meaning might be expected from him. It 
 would be assumed that he had the knowledge of the truth, 
 that all his authentic utterances were more or less com- 
 plete expositions of a scheme of knowledge absolutely 
 infallible. All seeming inconsistencies and errors in the 
 words imputed to him would require to be attributed 
 either to the incompleteness of his own declaration or to 
 the misconception and mistakes of the report. But if it 
 be assumed that Jesus was a man, it does not surprise us 
 to discover, that he was affected by the beliefs of his age, 
 and that his conceptions of nature and its laws were 
 limited by the scientific knowledge of his times. It is 
 not to be expected of a poetic mind kindled by an enthu- 
 
102 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 siastic temperament, that it should also be either logical 
 or comprehensive. Such intellectual types rarely meet 
 in the same individual. 
 
 When, therefore, a chapter is devoted to the philo- 
 sophical ideas of Jesus, it is not to be implied that he 
 taught a distinctive philosophy, since the tendency of his 
 thought seemed to be to discredit all philosophy, and to 
 invite men to distrust their critical faculties, and to sur- 
 render their minds to the prepossessions of a childlike 
 faith. It is rather a concession to our own logical facul- 
 ties that can only consider a character or a system, as 
 they bring it to the standards of those ideals and axioms, 
 which the human understanding has established. When 
 a poet, a prophet, a reformer, such as Jesus was, utters 
 the vital message which burdens his soul, he thinks of 
 some more instantaneous and powerful result than flows 
 from any new philosophy. Jesus may never have used 
 the words, nor reached the conception expressed by them, 
 imputed to him in John's Gospel, — " The words that I 
 speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are /ife": a but 
 they admirably describe the influence of his teachings 
 upon those who listened to him, and which has been 
 perpetuated in the report of them. But though he had 
 no thought of promulgating a mere system of philosophy, 
 and felt the consciousness of a more direct spiritual 
 power than such system could have, it is not impossible 
 to construct a philosophy more or less complete out of 
 the ideas and conceptions his words imply. Meagre and 
 unsatisfactory as the data are, this is what the symmet- 
 rical portrayal of his character requires to be undertaken. 
 
 Jesus taught in general the Divine beneficence. He 
 measured the goodness of God by the standard of good- 
 ness in men, and affirmed that, if men who were evil — that 
 is, who were unpitying and indifferent and selfish — gave 
 out of natural affection to their own children, much more 
 God, who is good, pitiful, and self-forgetful, would give 
 good things to those who asked him. 1 ' The old Jewish 
 scriptures had affirmed the goodness of God, and had 
 repeatedly spoken of the relation of God to his chosen 
 people, as that of ;i father to his children. Very tenderly, 
 too, had they given expression to the paternal affection of 
 
 » John vi., 63. I'Matt. vii., 11; xxiii. , <j. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 163 
 
 Deity in the saying: " As a father pitieth his children, so 
 the Lord pitieth them that fear him." a Still, to the Jewish 
 mind, the fatherhood of God ever remained a figure of 
 speech. It was never accepted as a real relation, but as 
 only an illustration of the divine care and affection. To 
 Jesus, it was evidently something more. The fatherhood 
 of God to him, if not a physical, was a psychological fact. 
 By his spirit, man was veritably a child of God ; and he 
 sought to emphasize the relation, and make it displace 
 the human relation, which to him seemed only physical 
 and secondary. He told his followers explicitly: "Call 
 no man your father upon the earth ; for one is your 
 Father, which is in heaven." h This was in perfect accord 
 with that ignoring of the ties of natural kinship, which 
 he expressed in the declaration that, in the kingdom of 
 heaven, the marital relation, the foundation of all the 
 natural relations, would no longer exist, with the impa- 
 tience he exhibited when a man inclined to discipleship 
 proposed first to attend his father's funeral/ 1 and with 
 his assertion, when on a public occasion his mother 
 and brothers desired to speak with him, — "Whosoever 
 shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the 
 same is my brother and sister and mother." 6 
 
 So far as possible, Jesus evidently wished that the 
 affections to spring out of conscious sonship to God 
 should take the place of the human affections. His fol- 
 lowers were not to be children of their parents, kindred 
 of their kinsmen, compatriots of their fellow-countrymen ; 
 but children of the Highest and brothers in the faith. 
 The new faith was to plough through families, break do- 
 mestic ties, and separate mother and daughter ; and a 
 man's foes should be they of his own household. 1 ' 
 
 The decorous and conservative Jew shrank from this 
 realistic application of a metaphor. While Jesus taught 
 his disciples to address the Almighty God as our Father, 
 while he endeavored to habituate their thought to the 
 relationship as one that was actual and not figurative, 
 no offence was taken by the orthodox teachers of 
 the old monotheism ; but when Jesus began to speak 
 
 I' <iii., 13. '• Matt, v., .15; xxiii., .,. c Matt, xxii., 30. 
 '1 Luke ix., 5<i, 60. cMatt. xii., 50. 
 
 1 Matt, ■•■.. • ; 
 
164 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 more frequently of God as his father,* and place himself 
 in a relation to him superior to that of the prophets, as 
 that of the son of the owner of the vineyard, while they 
 were the servants," when too, perhaps, his natural birth 
 came to be denied by admiring disciples, and his descent 
 from the spirit of God came to be told, as it might 
 have been in his lifetime, the scribes and Pharisees 
 conceived that the pretension had become criminal. 
 They sought to make him commit himself explicitly to 
 such a pretension ; and, when they had on his trial 
 provoked him to reiterate it, they thought they had found 
 a sufficient warrant for condemning him as a blasphemer. b 
 
 Jesus taught that the courses of nature are the special 
 appointment of God, and that a minute providence en- 
 virons the lives of good and pious men. The rain and 
 the sunshine, he declared, to be divinely directed ; and 
 the fact, that the just and the unjust alike enjoyed them, 
 clearly manifested the care and love of God, not only 
 for those who loved and worshipped him, but for those 
 who hated and neglected him. It is, he said, the heavenly 
 Father who feeds the fowls of the air and clothes the 
 flowers of the field with beauty, and gives to all men 
 what they ask of good things. Not a sparrow falls to the 
 ground without the knowledge of the Creator, whose over- 
 sight is so minute that he does not suffer a hair to fall 
 from the human head without noting and permitting it. c 
 
 These are fragments indeed of casual discourses ; and 
 it may not be wholly just to strain to all their logical 
 conclusions the breathings of a trustful and sanguine 
 spirit, overcharged with the reverence of a paternal God. 
 It is legitimate, however, to indicate the corollaries and 
 deductions from such inferences of the divine benefi- 
 cence and paternity, without imputing the inferences to 
 the authority of Jesus. A partial view of nature presents 
 certain aspects in harmony with the theory that a benefi- 
 cent agency controls it ; and these aspects, seizing hold 
 of devout and hopeful minds, lead them to affirm that 
 
 *It may be remarked (hat from the time Jesus disclosed to his followers his purpose to go 
 to Jerusalem as the Messiah and son of David, he only twice spoke of God as the father of 
 his disciples, though previously to that, in addressing his followers, he had sixteen times 
 called the Highest your father. Only live times before that time had he called God his 
 father, but thirteen times afterwards. 
 
 a Luke xx., 10-13. b Matt. xxvi., 63-66. c Matt, v., 45; vi., 26-28; Luke xii., 7. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 165 
 
 nature is good. Sad and despondent men find other 
 aspects, which drive them to the conclusion that nature 
 is evil. Perhaps a more comprehensive view, from which 
 the disturbing influence of personal feeling is carefully 
 eliminated, leads to the conclusion that nature — neither 
 good nor evil — utterly refuses to be estimated by a 
 standard, which a morally trained man has been wont to 
 apply to his own conduct. 
 
 We come upon another distinction here, which com- 
 pels us to elect between the Johannic narrative and the 
 three others in substantial agreement with each other. 
 In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus appears as assuming 
 that the courses of nature, the general order of the 
 world, are directly under the control of God, and that its 
 aspects and changes represent and express his benefi- 
 cence. In the Johannic Gospel, Jesus is represented 
 as invariably surrendering the world to the enemy and 
 to malign powers, that administer it antagonistically to 
 God. It is therein declared that, though God made the 
 world, when Jesus who is the true light came to it, 
 the world knew him not." Jesus is made to say that the 
 world is under condemnation, and can only be saved by 
 faith in himself. 1 ' The world hates him, because he had 
 testified to its wickedness. The spirit of truth the 
 world, not capable of recognizing, can never receive ; but 
 Jesus will manifest himself to his disciples in the world, 
 though not to the world.' 1 The prince of the world, the 
 ruling power in human society, has nothing in Jesus. 
 The world hated Jesus : it will hate all those who abjure 
 its spirit for the faith of Jesus.'' But the world is to be 
 reproved, and the prince of the world brought to judg- 
 ment ; and Jesus will overcome the world.' For the 
 world, recognizing its necessary hostility to himself, Jesus 
 will not even pray.* In the condemnation in which he 
 finds it, he leaves it. It had been said of him by John 
 the Baptist, " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away 
 the sin of the world ! " h Jesus himself does not so declare 
 his mission, — not to take away the sin of the world, he 
 says, but to save out of the world, for which he will not 
 
 »Johni., 10, b John iii., 16, 17. ejohnvii.,7. <1 John xiv., 17, 22, 27, 30. 
 
 ' John , 18, >')■ ! John xvi., 8-1 1 ; xvii., 6, 9, 14. 
 
 gjohn xvii., 9, 15. h John i., 20. 
 
l66 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 even pray, those whom the world hate, because they are 
 not of it. 
 
 The word "world" is sometimes used in English to de- 
 note the earth in its physical condition and under its 
 organic laws. The word " nature " fitly embodies the 
 idea expressed by it, save that nature, being applicable 
 to the whole cosmos, has a wider signification. When so 
 used, the world means the earth and its immediate en- 
 vironments of sea and atmosphere, together with all the 
 living creatures, animate and inanimate, including man, 
 belonging to it. But it is proper to use the word "world" 
 to denote human society, the temper, influence, and char- 
 acter of the men of the world taken in the aggregate. It 
 is easy enough to see that the antagonism of the Johannic 
 Jesus to the world is not to the courses of nature, but to 
 mankind taken in the mass. And yet in the Synoptic 
 Gospels, though the implication is always that nature is 
 orderly, harmonious, and good, — a manifestation in its 
 changes of the beneficence of the Creator, — it is nowhere 
 affirmed that human society is naturally and hopelessly 
 antagonistic to God. Jesus utters indeed a woe upon the 
 world, but only on account of the offences of evil men:' 
 The world itself is good, but it will necessarily suffer in 
 the punishment of the wicked. 
 
 It is not to be expected that the writers of those nar- 
 ratives kept in their minds the distinction between the 
 world as nature and the world as society. The critical 
 student is able to make the apparent antagonism between 
 their conceptions less pronounced, by calling to mind a 
 distinction, which it nowhere appears that they were 
 careful to make, even if they entertained it. The philo- 
 sophic idea underlying the teachings of Jesus, as given in 
 the first three Gospels, seems to be that nature — that is, 
 the earth, with its forces, and the living organisms upon 
 it, from which man is not excluded — is in a state of 
 harmonious conformity to the law and will of God. If 
 man as a class seems to be outside of this harmony, he 
 fell out accidentally, in a manner for which what appears 
 to be the hypothesis of Jesus seemed to have offered an 
 explanation. John represents Jesus as denouncing the 
 world, as recognizing its utter and irremediable aliena- 
 
 "Matt. xviii., 7. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS l6'/ 
 
 tion from God, and as saving his disciples from the evil 
 in it, and to come upon it. While the evil, according 
 to this writer's view, seems to be in society rather than 
 in nature, the control of the divine beneficence over 
 nature is nowhere asserted by him : no kindly or appreci- 
 ative eye is ever once turned upon nature ; and there is no 
 reservation or exception of nature in the doom that is to 
 befall the world, out of which the elect of God have been 
 rescued by a miracle of the divine mercy. 
 
 The doctrine of the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit may 
 properly be considered among the philosophic ideas of 
 Jesus. The full development of this doctrine can only 
 be found in the primitive Christian literature. As all 
 schools of the disciples seem to have received this doc- 
 trine, as it is a prominent feature of the Johannic Gospel 
 — entitled to consideration as an expression of early 
 Christian thought — its first suggestion may be fairly 
 imputed to Jesus, though he did not develop it in any 
 complete and systematic way. If we then find Peter and 
 Paul and the writers of the apostolic Epistles and Gospels 
 holding concurrently to a belief in the existence and 
 agency of a Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, it may be 
 assumed that they derived that belief from the teachings 
 of Jesus, though it is not quite so certain that he should 
 be held responsible for the precise form in which the 
 conception shaped itself in their minds. 
 
 After the death of Jesus, the body of his followers, no 
 one of whom could rightfully claim precedence over the 
 rest, and all whose efforts for a spiritual vice-royalty had 
 been rigorously repressed by Jesus," needed some sanc- 
 tion for the immense political, moral, and spiritual author- 
 ity they soon found themselves compelled to exercise 
 over the assembly or church of the believers. Under the 
 inspiration of their master, they had learned to regulate 
 their conduct, to a large degree by a law of righteousness. 
 They had been taught to restrain anger, to control lust, to 
 repress ambition, to live above sordid cares and anxieties 
 for merely earthly goods. In their simple and guileless 
 souls, the peace and moral power, of which, in these 
 endeavors after pure and noble living, they had become 
 conscious, had seemed to them like some visitant from 
 
1 68 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 God. While Jesus was with them, they had disheartened 
 him by their moral stupidity, their want of appreciation 
 and spiritual discernment. But his terrible death, com- 
 ing suddenly, after the most extravagant expectations of 
 triumph and glory which they had hoped to share, touched 
 their affectionate hearts with a new sensibility, and 
 brought out in vivid lines the lessons of virtue, which 
 seemed to him at the time of utterance to have fallen on 
 dull ears. Never does the power of a good life manifest 
 itself in the hearts of men so grandly as when that life is 
 just ended. Every sensitive conscience, melted to tender- 
 ness by sorrow, vows to be the upright, faithful, and 
 virtuous soul that has just become a divine image in the 
 heart. This is man in his highest and best moods, and 
 man at his best is divine. It is a noble self-abnegation 
 of man, that he cannot believe his best thoughts and 
 noblest choice come from himself, but are the prompting 
 of a spirit of God. Jesus had taught his followers to call 
 this influence the Holy Ghost, and that they were to trust 
 and obey it implicitly. 11 
 
 Accordingly, when he was dead, the Holy Ghost be- 
 came sovereign in the kingdom of the watchers for the 
 return of their real Lord. The manifestations of Jesus 
 after his death seem to have been of a somewhat uncer- 
 tain character. It came to be believed that his form 
 had been seen and his speech heard ; but this belief dif- 
 fered fundamentally, both as to modes and places of 
 those manifestations, and as to the communications that 
 had been received. That Jesus communicated with his 
 followers after his death was firmly believed, and so they 
 told that the commandments he had imparted to them 
 were not by oral speech, but through the Holy Ghost. 
 The Holy Ghost was to descend upon the believers as a 
 baptism, giving them new powers to authenticate their 
 mission as witnesses for Jesus throughout all the earth. 
 The Holy Ghost had inspired the old scriptures, and 
 made them a divine communication. 1 ' The gift of tongues 
 was a gift of the Spirit, to descend upon all believers and 
 be a sign of salvation from the impending destruction. 
 
 This new power in the world was not a mere passive 
 influence : it held judicial authority, and executed ven- 
 
 aMatt. x., 19, 20. b Acts i., 2, 5, 8, 16. c Acts ii., 17, 38-40. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 69 
 
 geance on deceit and hypocrisy. a The Holy Spirit mi- 
 nutely controlled the movements of the early apostles, 
 directing them in what cities they should preach, to what 
 prominent men they should appeal, and even in what 
 houses they should lodge. b It was the Holy Ghost that 
 fixed the canon of morals, which it was agreed should be 
 imposed upon the converts from the pagan communities, 
 who, somewhat to the surprise of the disciples, began to 
 come into the Church. c 
 
 Paul seems to have used the terms Spirit of God, 
 Spirit of Christ, Holy Spirit, and Holy Ghost to desig- 
 nate divinely conferred influences never very critically 
 analyzed in his own apprehension. Oftener, when he 
 speaks of the Spirit or the Holy Ghost, he seems to refer 
 to the internally - manifested presence of the crucified 
 Jesus. Thus, in a single Epistle, he declares the incon- 
 gruousness of fornication in a regenerated person, whose 
 body has become the temple of the Holy Ghost ; and 
 also that Christ is the soul that animates even the body 
 of the true believers, in which, as in a shrine or temple, 
 the divine Spirit is worshipped.* 1 
 
 In the dogmatic drama of John, the distinct identity of 
 the Holy Ghost appears more clearly ; for, although Jesus 
 is represented as saying that the Comforter, whom he is 
 to send, is himself, who is to come, he oftener speaks of 
 the Spirit of Truth, as an influence and a personality 
 other than himself, whose coming to, and stay in, the 
 world is to be a substitute for his withdrawn presence. 
 This advanced development of the doctrine of the Holy 
 Ghost, far toward the ultimate conception of the tri- 
 personal Divinity to which the Church in a few centuries 
 came, may be taken as another proof of the late produc- 
 tion of the Johannic Gospel. 
 
 Nothing appears more natural and consistent than the 
 growth in the Christian mind of this conception. There 
 fell to the new movement a jurisdiction so much larger 
 than Jesus himself seemed to have contemplated that new 
 principles, new precepts, and an enlarged philosophy were 
 necessary to give it completeness, and to organize it as 
 
 "Acts v., 3, 5, g, 10. >> Acts viii., 29-39; "•> '9> 2 °i x '-> I2 > '3 i x "'-> 2 > •*> 9-n- 
 
 c Acts xv., 2H; xvi.,6, 7; xix., 2-6; xx.,23; xxi., 4. 
 
 ' I ' or. iii., 16, 17; vi., 15. 'John xiv., 16-26. 
 
170 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 a system of faith and life for mankind. The imperfect 
 and provisional religion, which was sufficient for a world 
 about to come to an end, was not adapted to a world 
 developing into a larger civilization. More and more, its 
 teachers and missionaries found themselves met by per- 
 sonal and social contingencies which Jesus had not con- 
 templated. They had to enlarge his code, to supplement 
 his ideas, to utter oracles that he had not spoken, and 
 even to qualify, limit, and contradict many of his absolute 
 commands. It may be said that it is the peculiarity and 
 vitality of Christianity, that its ideas were never formu- 
 lated in definite and irrepealable statutes, that it was a 
 spirit rather than a code ; that it was the awakening of 
 the human moral sense, and sending it upon its long 
 quest of truth, rather than the subjection of conscience 
 to the authority of a revelation. The freedom which it 
 gave was a freedom to question all authority, to criticise 
 and to handle Jesus himself as he had handled Moses. 
 
 How shall Paul and Peter and the witnesses of the 
 gospel of Jesus, carrying new doctrines over the world, 
 authenticate their mission ? Jesus had written no Bible, 
 taught no complete system of philosophy or ethics, 
 uttered no comprehensive canon of conduct. Of what 
 he had taught, so far as tradition has preserved it, Paul 
 seems to have been nearly ignorant. Yet he is never at 
 a loss. He has eloquent and exhaustive discourses for all 
 the different communities of the Roman world, in which he 
 preached the gospel of Christ. To the Jew, he is a Phar- 
 isee of the Pharisees, blameless in all the requirements of 
 the law." In his intercourse with the cultivated and philo- 
 sophic Greek, he lays open his liberal and comprehensive 
 mind. b Before the common worldling, lover of pleasure, 
 lover of wealth, he reasons of righteousness, temperance, 
 and judgment to come. He teaches the fervent disciples, 
 and by his frequent letters edifies the faith of all the dis- 
 tant churches. How is all this original power consistent 
 with his unbounded deference for the name of his crucified 
 master ? Did Jesus teach all that he preached and wrote ? 
 This is more than he could say, — much more than to us 
 seems probable. His answer is : I teach as Jesus would 
 have taught, if he were here. It is his spirit, the spirit of 
 
 "Acts xxiii., 6; xxvi., 5; Phil, iii., 5. b Acts xxii., 22-31. c Acts xxiv., 25. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 171 
 
 God ; for in spirit he was one with God, who inspires me. 
 The gospel I bring is not mine, but Christ's, working 
 within me his will and pleasure. 11 
 
 More and more, as the new religion developed, Jesus 
 exalted into the heavens became worshipped as divine ; 
 but, for the very reason that the worship of his disciples 
 had elevated him to the heavens, it had banished him 
 from the earth, and from practical control over their 
 faith and life. The Spirit takes his place on earth, while 
 the Church waits for his promised second coming ; and 
 now it begins to be discovered that the Spirit was always 
 in the world ; Peter finds that in all ages men who feared 
 God and wrought righteousness were accepted of him ; b 
 Paul that they who are without law are a law unto 
 themselves, and the metaphysical poet, who wrote the 
 Johannic drama, that Jesus was but a manifestation of 
 the light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into 
 the world.' 1 
 
 Xow, it is not to be believed that this doctrine of the 
 Holy Ghost, as it shaped itself in the creed of mediaeval 
 Christendom, or as it is disclosed in the speeches and 
 letters of the apostles or in the later expressions of the 
 Johannic Gospel, originated with Jesus, or scarcely had 
 the sanction of his authority. The germs of it, however, 
 appear in his discourses. There is a Holy Ghost, more 
 awful in his sanctity than even God himself, of an ineffa- 
 ble dignity, with which the name of Jesus was not to be 
 ranked, against whom it was fatal to the soul to commit 
 sin ; for that sin had no forgiveness in this life nor the 
 life to come." When he told his disciples that they need 
 not be careful what defence they should make, if brought 
 before rulers and kings, for their faith in him, that the 
 spirit of their Father would speak within them/ it is not 
 :nt that he wished them to believe that that spirit 
 was a special influence, still less a divine personality, or 
 any other than the communication by God himself, who 
 is spirit, of the words the occasion might make fitting. 
 So too, when he is made to say, The good Father is more 
 ready to give the Holy Ghost to them that ask for it'-' 
 
 "Romans viii., 1 ; [. < !or. in., 16 J xv., 1-4; Gal. i., 9, 12, 15, 16. •> Acts x., 34, 35 
 
 c Romans ii., 14. <1 John i., 9. c Matt. xii. , 31, 32. fMatt. x.,20. 
 
 K Matt, vii., 11 ; Luke xi., 13. 
 
172 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 than earthly parents are to give bread to their children, it 
 is probable the later prominence of the doctrine of a Holy 
 Ghost has distorted the report, given more correctly by 
 Matthew ; " If ye then, being evil, know how to give good 
 gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father 
 which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him ?" 
 Jesus seems to have taught that character is determined 
 by the ruling love, and that men are to be judged by their 
 words. As the eye is the light of the body, so is the 
 heart of man the light of his soul. The words "heart," 
 "soul," "spirit," and "mind" were used by Jesus as they 
 were by his more cultivated disciples, with none of the pre- 
 cision which modern metaphysical discussion has rendered 
 necessary ; and it is not always easy to determine what the 
 exact conceptions of Jesus were in reference to the moral 
 faculties of man. Taking into view all that he said, it 
 seems probable that he recognized a radical difference in 
 the moral attributes of men. The good man out of the 
 good treasure of his heart brought forth good things, the 
 evil man evil things. The good tree could but produce 
 good fruit, the bad tree bad fruit. How can ye, being 
 evil, he once asked, speak good things? He held, too, 
 that the word was the expression of the character. It 
 is not to be inferred that he underrated the power of 
 self-control and hypocrisy, or was easily deceived by per- 
 sons who came to him with professions of elevated and 
 devout sentiments. 11 On the contrary, there are signal 
 instances given where, with a keen insight, he detected 
 the imposture of such assumptions, and exposed the evil 
 principles underlying plausible professions. By words, by 
 which a man was to be justified or condemned, he meant 
 only genuine or sincere words, — perhaps more than this, 
 the expression of conduct as well as of speech. By words 
 in that large sense, — that is, by all the spontaneous ex- 
 pression of the character, — men were to be judged in the 
 great day of judgment. For men tainted with moral evil, 
 men blind to the influence of the divine light, and who in 
 their perversity imputed good deeds and pure words to 
 corrupt influences, he seemed to have had no hope of 
 repentance. 1 ' He wished to withdraw himself from them, 
 and to leave them to the fruit of their own evil growth. 
 
 "Matt, vii., 22, 23 ; xii., 33-37. h Matt, xii., 31, 32. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1/3 
 
 With instinctive and intense aversion to bad men, 
 whose very presence inflicted a pang upon his sensitive 
 spirit, we have to reconcile another class of declarations 
 equally authentic, that he was a friend of publicans and 
 sinners, a that he came not to call the righteous but sin- 
 ners to repentance, b and that there is more joy in the 
 heavens over a sinner repenting, than over many just 
 men who need no repentance. The joy over the repent- 
 ance of a sinner may be accounted for because it is so 
 difficult and rare an achievement, the natural and gen- 
 eral law being for the corrupt tree to bring forth corrupt 
 fruit, and the evil man to be incapable of doing good 
 things. If we may consider the character of some of 
 his disciples, it will probably become apparent that cer- 
 tain forms of sensuality, growing out of natural temper- 
 ament, often a taint of heredity, might, in Jesus' esti- 
 mation, more readily yield to remedies from without 
 than the more subtle vices of the soul, such as envy, 
 malice, ambition, and impiety. The judgment of the 
 world corresponds to his, and notes that intemperance, 
 licentiousness, and even a rash and angry temper may 
 be controlled by moral considerations, by favorable influ- 
 ences, and by a resolute will; while those infestations of 
 natural baseness return in force, after the strongest self- 
 condemnation, and intrude themselves into the selectest 
 privacy of the most favorable environments. In this 
 connection, it is hard to reconcile a very marked pre- 
 science in Jesus to detect under professions of piety 
 unci virtue men who were really base with his indis- 
 criminate preference for the poor, unless he had come to 
 believe that the state of poverty was itself a state so con- 
 genial to virtue that only the good were to be found in 
 that condition. It is hard to account for the harshness 
 with which he repelled the advances of the Pharisees, — 
 a sect so well accredited in history, — under whose influ- 
 ence such an eminent character as Paul had been reared. 
 
 Looking further for the philosophical ideas of Jesus, it 
 is found that he believed in devilish possession, and that 
 diseases and infirmities among men are due to the mali- 
 cious agency of an evil spirit. It seems to have been the 
 belief of the age of Jesus that insanity was a possession 
 
1/4 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 by evil spirits or devils, the intensity of the diseased 
 mental condition being due to the greater number of 
 demons employed in the infestation. It has been claimed 
 for Jesus that he did not share in this superstition, and 
 that the narrative of his life, in dealing with his cures 
 of the insane, necessarily conforms to the ideas of the 
 nature of insanity prevalent in the world in his lifetime ; 
 and that, if he seemed to give some sanction to those 
 ideas in the language he sometimes used, it was only in 
 deference to the popular mode of thought, and to make 
 his beneficial agency intelligible to the persons relieved 
 and to the people who surrounded him. 
 
 This explanation cannot fairly be entertained without 
 doing such a violence to the veracity of the record, as to 
 leave it an untrustworthy foundation for any definite con- 
 ceptions of the character, opinions, and even of the exist- 
 ence of Jesus ; and, accordingly, it must be excluded from 
 this study. It seems scarcely possible for those who 
 believe his recorded words authentic, or those even who 
 find themselves obliged to accept them as reliable data 
 of his history, to doubt that he shared substantially the 
 prevalent opinion on this subject of his countrymen and 
 of his times. He declared in his Sermon on the Mount 
 that many in the day of judgment would say, with appar- 
 ent truth, that they had cast out devils in his name, 
 whom he should not recognize as his followers. 11 He 
 gave his sent-out disciples, who were in his name to 
 proclaim the kingdom of heaven at hand, power against 
 unclean spirits to cast them out, and charged them to heal 
 the sick and cast out devils. 1 ' When the Pharisees heard 
 of his power over people generally believed to be pos- 
 sessed with fiendish spirits, they imputed it to diabolic 
 agency. The devil himself, they said, helps him. But 
 Jesus turned most effectually their imputation, by asking : 
 Can Satan then cast out Satan? Will the devil thwart 
 himself?" — a saying that would have no force or perti- 
 nency, unless he himself believed in demoniac possession. 
 
 Luke tells that, once in a synagogue of Capernaum, 
 there was a man who had in him the spirit of an unclean 
 devil, — that is, according to our ideas, a form of insanity 
 well known, under which the patient gave utterance to 
 
 ■ Malt, vii., 22. l>Matt. x., 18. c M a it. xii.. 24-27. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 175 
 
 obscene language. When this spirit invoked Jesus as the 
 Holy One of God, he rebuked not the man, but the spirit 
 in him, and bade him be silent and come out. a 
 
 The disciples whom Jesus had sent forth to cast out 
 devils found a man conjuring by his name, and forbade 
 the unauthorized worker ; but Jesus rebuked them, and 
 recognized as of his party all who were doing his work. b 
 When the seventy disciples returned from their mission 
 and reported to Jesus that, through his name, they found 
 even the devils subject to them, he greatly exulted, and 
 said: "/ beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven! 
 Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents 
 and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy." 
 But he told his disciples not to rejoice because the 
 spirits were subject to them, but because their names 
 were written in heaven. c On another occasion, he gave 
 with minuteness some of the laws of demoniac posses- 
 sion. He said that a cast-out spirit betook itself by some 
 weird propensity to dry places in quest of rest, and had 
 longing to get back, as to its home, to the soul whence 
 it had been expelled. Finding that soul empty, swept 
 and garnished, it will associate with itself more wicked 
 spirits — their number seven is specified — and returning 
 to the doomed man make his last worse than his first 
 state. d Scarce an instance can be found elsewhere in 
 the recorded sayings of Jesus, where he seems to have 
 undertaken the exposition of a general theory. Such a 
 disclosure of the recondite rationale of spirit-infestation 
 could hardly have proceeded from one who disbelieved it. 
 When told that Herod was plotting to take his life, 
 Jesus called him a fox, and said that for three days he 
 must continue to do cures, and cast out devils, within 
 which time it was not possible that a prophet could be 
 destroyed. In vindicating himself for giving straight- 
 ness to the woman who had a spirit of infirmity, a work 
 done on the Sabbath, he said : Ought not this woman, 
 whom Satan hath bound these eighteen years, to be 
 loosed from her infirmity on the Sabbath? 6 
 
 With these data, it is possible to construct in some of its 
 details Jesus' conception of the divine providence in the 
 
 a Luke iv., 33-35. b Luke ix., 49, 50. c Luke x., 17-20. 
 
 d Luke xi., 24-26. <•■ Luke xiii., 16, 32. 
 
I76 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 world. The world is God's ; its changes are his appoint- 
 ments ; its laws, mainly beneficent, are the expressions of 
 his goodness. He sends the sunlight and the rain. He 
 gives to the flowers their beauty, and to the birds of the 
 air their food, in the mere bounty of his beneficence. 
 
 These are indeed but glimpses of the universe as it 
 looked to him; but they seem fairly to imply, that he 
 thought of nature, as well under the control of an overrul- 
 ing benevolent will, and of living creatures, as following 
 in their instincts the controlling purpose of God. He did 
 not seem to consider men in harmony with this divine order. 
 He never overlooks the radical distinction between good 
 and evil men. From each proceed words and actions 
 according to their kind. It is nowhere found that he 
 held that God is the father of all men. It was to his 
 disciples only, after he had withdrawn himself from the 
 thronging multitudes, for whom the mysteries of the king- 
 dom of heaven were not open, that he allowed the rela- 
 tionship, which permitted them to approach the Highest 
 with the address, "our Father in heaven." - There were 
 many, even of those that strove, who would not enter into 
 life ; b and the multitudes crowded the broad thoroughfare 
 to destruction. With those even, who so far recognized 
 his mastery as to call him Lord, and who could cast out 
 devils and do wonderful works in his name, he should in 
 the end deny his relationship, as workers of iniquity. 
 Only they who were the light and salt of the earth, they 
 whose righteousness exceeded that of scribes and Phari- 
 sees, were recognized by him as children of the Highest.' 1 
 The poor were the children of God and inheritors of the 
 kingdom, not solely on account of their poverty, but 
 because he seemed always to impute to the estate of 
 poverty a certain humility, meekness, and self-control, 
 compatible with the heavenly state. The rich were not 
 excluded, but the test of their sincerity was the surren- 
 der of their property ; and from this class he almost de- 
 spaired of winning subjects for the kingdom of heaven. 6 
 The sensual and intemperate were not despised. Con- 
 scious of the strength of his own purity, and almost 
 exempt from the temptations that assailed them, he be- 
 
 a Matt, v., :, 2; vi.,9. I'Liike xiii., 24. c Matt, vii., 22 ; Luke xiii., 24. 
 d Matt, v., 13, 20. cLuke xviii, 22. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS I 77 
 
 lieved that there were periods of moral revulsion from 
 sensual indulgence, promotive of sincere repentance. So 
 he sought the society of such persons to invite them, 
 when under the compunctions of an aroused conscience, 
 to virtue and temperance." For proud men, oppressors, 
 the malicious, the evil-minded, for hypocrites and formal- 
 ists, for the cunning and self-confident, he had only repro- 
 bation, sometimes expressing itself in language exceeding 
 the moderation which he prescribed as a rule for other 
 men. b 
 
 The wickedness and evil which he could not fail to find 
 in the world, it is certain that he imputed in part to the 
 agency of evil spirits. He always associated the curing 
 of disease with the dispossession of malignant powers. 
 He believed that, in healing the sick and restoring sanity 
 to the mentally deranged, he was warring with Satan, and 
 bringing his kingdom to an end. c It was Satan, and not, 
 as modern devout thought would conceive in a like case, 
 the mysterious providence of a good God, that had bound 
 the daughter of Abraham for eighteen years with an in- 
 veterate infirmity.' 1 According to his theory, the physi- 
 cally diseased, the paralytic, the blind, and the maimed, 
 arc prisoners of the devil ; and it is the mission of a di- 
 vine redeemer to effect their relief. e When multitudes 
 are healed, when reason returns to the insane, he sees 
 Satan as lightning fall from heaven, and the malignant 
 spirits that had infested the world driven out before the 
 power of the coming king. Thus, Jesus seemed to think 
 that men had fallen out of the order that pervaded nature 
 as a whole, partly because the mass of mankind were 
 genetically wicked, partly because they were suffering 
 from an infestation of evil spirits, whose malign influ- 
 ence manifested itself in physical infirmity and in mental 
 derangement. 
 
 While it is fairly presumable that Jesus never sanc- 
 tioned the extension of the divine fatherhood to the whole 
 human race, it is equally probable that he believed evil 
 men were children of the devil. £ Such became unques- 
 tionably the distinct Christian conception after his death. 
 The Johannic Gospel, which may always be cited as an ex- 
 
 » Matt. XL , 19. '> Matt, xxiii. OLukex.,18. dLuke xiii., 16. 
 ■ Luke iv., iS. ' John viii., 44, 49. 
 
178 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 pression of the opinions of the Christian converts of the 
 first centuries, distinctly imputes to Jesus the declaration 
 that the Pharisees were children of the devil. John the 
 Baptist had called the Pharisees and Sadducees, even 
 when showing some purposes of repentance and right- 
 eousness by seeking his baptism, a generation of 
 vipers," and had declared that it did not lie within his 
 mission to give them any warning against the wrath to 
 conic. Jesus had repeated this most denunciatory epi- 
 thet on two different occasions, and in addition called the 
 Pharisees serpents, whose escape from damnation of hell 
 was virtually impossible. 1 ' 
 
 The serpent, the old serpent, the dragon, were names 
 used by the New Testament writers to designate Satan, c 
 the chief of the evil spirits, of which the Jewish people 
 had had a distinct conception for several centuries before 
 the time of Jesus. When, therefore, Jesus addressed the 
 Pharisees as serpents and the progeny of vipers, he fairly 
 imputed to them a devilish origin ; and the Johannic 
 drama did no violence to his thought, in making the rela- 
 tion as actual as the paternity of God in reference to the 
 followers of Jesus, and in declaring that it was as natural 
 for the Pharisees to do the lusts of their father, the devil, 
 as it was for Jesus to do the works of his Father, God. 
 
 It is not quite apposite to this discussion to consider 
 the conception of modern Christendom of the universal 
 fatherhood of God, otherwise than to say it is an unau- 
 thorized inference from the teachings of Jesus and of the 
 New Testament writers, and that the universality of the 
 relationship necessarily destroys it. Of a father, we have 
 no other idea than of one exercising toward his children 
 that special preference and favor that grows out of natural 
 affection. When the relationship of father becomes so 
 broad as to include all men, the possibility of preference 
 and favor, which are of the essence of paternity disap- 
 pears. But we are compelled to enlarge the regard and 
 affection of the supreme will, so as that it shall cover 
 all sentient beings, and to consider it impartial. What 
 nature thrusts everywhere upon intelligent observation 
 is the impartiality of God, — that God does not prefer 
 men to sheep, that he allows the struggle for life to go 
 
 "Matt, iii., 7. bMatt. xii., 34; xxiii., 33. c Rev. xii., 9; xx., 2. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 79 
 
 on between the meanest and noblest forms of creation 
 without intervention, giving to the latter not always the 
 advantage, never an advantage not due to their superior 
 equipment of faculty. Mankind, sedulously studying the 
 problem, has not yet been able to determine that the good 
 man competing with the bad man has any extrinsic suc- 
 cess, any reward or help not an adjunct of his own virtue. 
 
 It may also be questioned whether Jesus, in emphasiz- 
 ing the divine sonship of good men, in making the father- 
 hood of God a psychological fact instead of a figure of 
 speech, really elevated the old idea very distinctly enun- 
 ciated by the Hebrew prophets and by the Greek sages 
 before his time. That which is named integrity, virtue, 
 righteousness, is conformity to the law, order, and plan 
 of nature. Out of this conformity springs highest wel- 
 fare, deepest peace ; so that man, under the correction of 
 his moral sense, has come at last to learn that the path 
 of virtue is the path of the progress of the universe, and 
 that goodness, rather than pleasure, is the goal toward 
 which all spiritual life advances. Now, the ancients had 
 come to express this in this striking figure : " Like as a 
 father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that 
 fear him," or regard the highest good. Like, the com- 
 parison is preserved, as between things not identical. God 
 is other than man, something higher than man at his best. 
 Could man get a stronger motive than this for righteous- 
 ness ? True, it comforts the struggling good man to be 
 told he is a son of God ; but it compromises his idea of 
 God to infer that, since he is then a son of God, God is 
 like his child. Pressing the relationship beyond the sanc- 
 tion of a motive and the uses of an inspiration, and com- 
 paring the reverence of a sincere and devout Pharisee 
 with the arrogance and presumption of whole sects and 
 generations of Christian saints who say our Father, might 
 it not be feared that we have exchanged an elevating, 
 spiritual conception for an anthropomorphic and personal 
 Deity too nearly related to us to be reverently worshipped ? 
 
 It already appears that Jesus classified men according 
 to their kind, as children of God, and not children of God; 
 and we have been able to determine some of the prom- 
 inent characters embraced in this description. What 
 
 ■ i's. ciii., 13. 
 
I SO OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 were his own relations of regard and estimation toward 
 these classes ? 
 
 Among the beneficent words of Jesus that are especially 
 remembered are these : " The Son of man is come to 
 save that which was lost." n There is more joy in 
 heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety 
 and nine just persons that need no repentance. b Jesus 
 is called in the Church the friend of sinners, and his 
 message to the world of its destruction and the coming of 
 the kingdom of heaven is called the good news. Jesus 
 said, when rebuked for tolerating the society of openly 
 vicious persons, that he had not come to call the righteous 
 but sinners to repentance ; c and he declared that God was 
 more pleased with mercy than he was with sacrifice,' 1 leav- 
 ing it plainly to be inferred that the mercy he loved in 
 men he would not fail himself to exercise toward the 
 penitent. But we must consider, in connection with these 
 declarations, others of a different character. He called 
 the civil magistrates and political authorities who would 
 prosecute his disciples wolves. 6 He said his mission was 
 only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and that it 
 was not proper to give to heathen dogs the food the 
 master had provided for his children.* The excommuni- 
 cated disciple was to be to his brethren like a heathen 
 and publican ; that is, outside of their fellowship and 
 charity.* The foolish virgins in the bridal procession, 
 types of the non-elect, the rejecters of his mission, like 
 the pretenders who had followed him, working cures and 
 calling him Lord, he would profess that he never knew. 
 The goats, representatives of those not his followers, 
 and who had ministered neither to him nor his disciples, 
 were to go away into everlasting punishment. 11 All mere 
 worldly men, they who eat, drink, buy and sell, plant 
 and build, they who are occupied with business, were 
 all to be destroyed, when the Son of Man was revealed, as 
 were the inhabitants of Sodom.* The importunate prayer 
 of the elect should bring down upon the wicked not 
 blessings, not repentance and salvation, but speedy ven- 
 geance and punishment. 3 
 
 "Matt, xviii., 1 1. b Lukexv.,7. c Luke v., 32. d Matt, xii., 7. 
 
 «Matt.x., 16, 17. fMatt. xv., 24, 26. gMatt. xviii., 17. 
 
 li Matt, xxv., 2-i2, 23, 46. > Luke xvii., 26-30. j Luke xviii., 7, 8. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS l8l 
 
 Recurring now to the parables of the lost sheep, the 
 piece of silver, and the prodigal son, which have been 
 accepted as expressions of the universality of Jesus' be- 
 nevolence, we find their scope considerably restricted. 
 The lost sheep was still one of the hundred that belonged 
 to the fold of Israel. He represented not an outside 
 sinner or heathen, but only a lapsed disciple, over whose 
 defection the angels wept, and for whom the good shep- 
 herd was searching among the mountains. It might still 
 be true that the good shepherd, as he said, was only sent 
 to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.* The woman 
 must find her own lost piece of silver. No strange coin 
 could fill its place. 1 ' The prodigal was still a son, and 
 heir of his father's wealth. No alien and no servant was 
 to receive the kiss of the reconciled father weeping* on 
 his neck. c 
 
 So when Jesus said the Son of Man was come to save 
 that which was lost, it was in reference to one of the lost 
 little ones or believing disciples whom he warned his 
 followers not to despise, and whose angels always stood 
 before God to defend them. It is the Father's will, he 
 said, that not one of these little ones should perish. d But 
 like the fatherhood of God, carefully restricted by Jesus 
 to righteous men and believers, the love and saving pur- 
 pose of God toward the lost of his fold have been pre- 
 sumptuously extended to all men. 
 
 Nothing was more original and characteristic in the 
 moral philosophy of Jesus than his exaltation of service 
 and his reprobation of ambition, of love of precedence, 
 and even of self-estimation, however just. He himself, 
 though he called himself master and even lord, came, he 
 said, not to be served and honored, but to do service and 
 even to give his life for others. In all secular govern- 
 ments, it was the prince who held and the great who 
 exercised all authority/ In the economy which he should 
 establish, the really great should be the servant of all 
 the rest. The contentions for rank and distinction 
 excited his indignation. He censured the scribes and 
 Pharisees because they chose the uppermost rooms at 
 feasts and the chief seats in synagogues, and to be 
 
 a Matt, *., 5, 6 ; xv., 2|. b Luke xv., 8. c Luke xv., n-32. 
 
 <1 Matt, xviii., 6, 10-34. u Matt. xxiii., 8. 'Matt, xx., 25-28. 
 
l82 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 greeted by their fellow-men with the title of Rabbi." In 
 the Church, he said, let the greatest be servant, and let 
 him that exalts himself be abased. He gave directions to 
 his followers that, when invited to a feast, they should not 
 arrogate their own dignity by taking the most honorable 
 places ; but, choosing the humblest, the host himself would 
 measure their rank, and, inviting them to a higher seat, 
 give them honor before all the guests.'' The sheep who 
 were placed in the grand separation at the last day on his 
 right hand, and admitted into everlasting life, were awarded 
 that felicity, not more because they had ministered to him 
 and the least of his followers when sick, destitute, and in 
 prison, than because they had done these deeds of benefi- 
 cence in utter unconsciousness and had forgotten the 
 doing of them. When once there rose a strife among 
 the disciples which should be greatest, Jesus placed a 
 little child before them, and said whoever received that 
 child as his follower received him, and that the least 
 among them should be greatest. No one could enter the 
 kingdom of heaven till he had been converted and become 
 a little child ; that is, till he had unlearned that ambition 
 for precedence and honor, and reverted to the guileless 
 innocence and unconsciousness which is a trait of infancy.* 1 
 Of his personal attachment to his disciples, who with 
 artless and uncritical faith had accepted him, he spake 
 with earnest warmth. Better be cast into the sea with 
 a millstone fastened to the neck, than give offence to one 
 of these. Of these blessed ones, a guardian angel stands 
 ever before the face of God ; and it is his will that not one 
 shall perish. 
 
 Blessed, he said, are the meek : they shall inherit the 
 renovated earth. 6 Even spiritual gifts and personal in- 
 tegrity were not to be arrogated ; nor was any good ser- 
 vice, however great, to claim its reward. Will a man 
 thank his servant, who for hire ministers to him ? When 
 ye have done all, ye are but unworthy servants/ The 
 moral man, who in his prayer remembered his good life, 
 though to thank God for it, was condemned; while the 
 wicked man, who bowed his head and acknowledged that 
 
 "Matt, xxiii., 6, 7. •> I.uke xiv., 7-11. c Matt, xxv., 36-38. 
 
 dMatt. xviii., 1-6, 10; Mark ix., 34. <•' Matt, v., 5. 
 
 f Luke xvii., 9, 10. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1 83 
 
 he was a sinner, went down from the temple justified.* 
 In the same connection, Jesus put a light estimate upon 
 the wisdom and culture of the world, as he did upon its 
 virtue. The innocent and uncultivated child was to him 
 the brightest type of manhood. While the critical faculty 
 listens and doubts and rejects, the childish faith sees, be- 
 lieves upon report, and is blessed. What the Father has 
 hid from the wise and prudent he has revealed to babes. 1 ' 
 This love of children is an amiable personal trait in 
 Jesus, that has endeared his memory to the tender heart 
 of the human race. Painters have depicted it, and enthu- 
 siastic disciples have seized upon it to mitigate the aus- 
 terity of a sublime and elevated character, stern in its 
 devotion to duty, uncompromising in its rigorous and 
 crucial dealings with all the weaknesses and appetites of 
 nature. But those who have reared children know that 
 infancy has aspects other than the morally picturesque; 
 that their innocence is rather the absence of these pas- 
 sions, the force of which could not be trusted to their 
 feeble powers of resistance ; that they assert all the 
 natural appetites they have without the will or power to 
 control ; and that virtue, which is the victory over pas- 
 sions regulated by conscience and reason, is a grade of 
 character far beyond the innocence which precedes the 
 impulses that drive men to sins. It were indeed a most 
 deplorable picture of the human condition, if the very 
 process of human life resulted in degeneration and moral 
 death. If to live is to fall into fatal sin, why should we 
 wish that, our children should survive their infancy, and 
 why should we labor to surround them with sanitary con- 
 ditions, which, saving their human lives, imperils at the 
 same time the life of their souls ? A just estimate of the 
 opportunities of life satisfies us that it is, on the whole, a 
 salutary discipline, that all its usual and legitimate expe- 
 riences are promotive of virtue, and that, bad as society 
 is, faulty and deceptive as are individual characters, the 
 tendency of growth is toward self-control, toward temper- 
 ance, toward love of others, toward justice, mercy, and 
 piety. Society demands and expects of aged men and 
 aged women, those who have had the widest experiences 
 of human fortune and the most unrestricted careers 
 
 » I. Hi- «vn!., 10-u. ii M.ut. x i., 25. 
 
184 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 of earthly prosperity, a strain of integrity and rectitude 
 never asked of the young. With many deplorable excep- 
 tions, the demand is generally met. 
 
 It were better for the world if the followers and wor- 
 shippers of Jesus had given better heed to his counsels 
 concerning rank. They have, for the most part, set them 
 aside as summarily and contemptuously, as they have his 
 ideas about property. In no department has the struggle 
 for power and precedence been so keen as in the Church 
 calling itself Christ's. The democratic spirit, not a little 
 inspired by the words of Jesus, has been able, in many 
 communities and among many nations, to overthrow 
 distinctions merely political, and to reduce society to a 
 practical equality ; but the ranks of the priesthood, the 
 titles of reverence which they demand, the vestures and 
 badges with which they are decorated, stand upon such 
 an authority of custom, that the ministry has ceased to 
 be a synonym of service, and they who represent the Son 
 of Man come no more to minister, but to be ministered 
 to by the deference, the compliments, and tithes of the 
 disciples. 
 
 The example of the self-accusing prodigal is less com- 
 mended by the good sense of this age than by Jesus. 
 Not the confession of sin alone is acceptable to God. 
 When the prodigal comes too frequently with his smitten 
 breast and cravings of mercy upon his sin, we begin to 
 ask that the confessed sin be abandoned. Perhaps all 
 the Pharisee said of himself was true ; and there might 
 have been those who knew the publican, and had been 
 the victims of his extortion, who could have uttered a 
 hearty Amen to all that he said. Not always self-con- 
 sciousness and self-praise are to be condemned : a man 
 may rejoice over a well-achieved work. While we demand 
 modesty in measuring one's own worth or work, we 
 demand truth more. David washing his hands in inno- 
 cency, Paul exulting that he had fought the good 
 fight and kept the faith, and Milton in his blindness 
 boasting of his noble work with which all Europe rang, 
 are more heroic figures than a defaulting cashier standing 
 up in church-meeting and repeating, God be merciful to 
 me a sinner. 
 
 It has been seen that Jesus judged human character by 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF JESUS 1S5 
 
 the ruling love. In accordance with this internal inquisi- 
 tion into character rather than by the test which human law 
 applies to outward conduct, Jesus held that evil thoughts, 
 and not the omission of external purifications, defile a 
 man. Out of the heart, he said, proceed evil thoughts, 
 murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, and 
 blasphemies. 3 No teacher has been more searching in 
 analyzing the very springs of conduct, and finding in 
 motive and natural impulse the basis of character. Not 
 the fatal blow, but the malicious purpose, is murder ; and 
 he who is angry without just cause with his fellow-man 
 has entered upon the path that leads to homicide, as he 
 who cherishes and enjoys lust has committed adultery in 
 his heart. 15 
 
 The gravity and seriousness of his character, that rigor 
 of mental integrity, which he prescribed to himself, and 
 made a rule of living for others, was manifested in the 
 great import which he attributed to all human speech. 
 According to Jesus, no man must sport with his convic- 
 tions, or advocate what he does not fully believe and feel 
 the assurance of, out of levity or for the sake of argument, 
 or to conceal an unpopular or dangerous conviction. All 
 such tampering with the light of God in the reason of 
 man was to him blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. It 
 was when the Pharisees said, without conviction and 
 with a dishonest purpose of turning against him a popular 
 prejudice, that the devil helped him to cast out devils, 
 that, after showing the falsity of the assertion, he went 
 on to say : All blasphemy shall be forgiven but the blas- 
 phemy of the Holy Ghost. They thus speak, because an 
 evil heart cannot speak good things. But, for every false 
 and frivolous word that man shall speak, he shall give an 
 account in the day of judgment, and he shall be justified 
 or condemned as his words have been good or evil. 
 
 He thought, too, that a man was known by his moral 
 sympathies. The man who loved, as well as who did, rec- 
 titude was blessed in his regard. The ruling love is still 
 the test of character. The good man in the strife be- 
 tween good and evil takes always the side of the good. 
 As Paul fitly expressed it afterward : " He rejoices not in 
 iniquity, but he rejoices in the truth." The figure of Jesus 
 
 a Matt, xv., 1 1, 1 8. t> Matt. v.. 21, 22. 19. Matt, xii., 24, 31-37. 
 
1 86 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 is still more striking, when he says, The man, whom God 
 shall bless, hungers and thirsts after righteousness. If, 
 for the sake of a righteous deed he has done, or done by 
 another he has approved and applauded, he shall suffer 
 persecution, his very persecution, in the peace it brings to 
 his soul, shall be a manifestation of the favor of God, and 
 an assurance of the blessedness he shall inherit. They, 
 too, who reconcile the offended, who make peace between 
 those engaged in or ready for strife, showing to souls 
 blinded by anger the better way of forgiveness and con- 
 cession, and how an exaction and an oppression may be 
 overcome and turned to justice by submission, are espe- 
 cially blessed. b They not only live for themselves and 
 enjoy the peace that comes from virtue, but they have 
 carried the light of their own lives into the darkened 
 minds of other men, and taught them by the experience 
 of forgiveness the satisfactions of charity. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that Jesus felt confident that 
 all violent and angry men would yield to these influences. 
 There were still some natures so rooted in evil that the 
 pearls of good actions were not to be thrown away upon 
 them. c They would trample in derision the mild and for- 
 giving spirit, and turn like swine to tear the hand that 
 interposed to arrest their wrath. 
 
 a Matt, v., 6; I. Cor. xiii., 6. b Matt, v., 9, 10. c Matt, vii., 6. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS. 
 
 " It is the work of Religion to sift the primitive instincts and expectations 
 of mankind, and see which of them can have a place in the critical intelli- 
 gence. . . . The more of God you collect in the facts which he causes, the 
 more consistent and sublime becomes your faith. . . . Why, at the very 
 moment when Religion's first opportunity has come to make the finite 
 prove the infinite, which she presumes, need she continue the old prescrip- 
 tion of church extension, Bible-worship, miracles, and parish life ? " — John 
 Weiss' Immortal Life. 
 
 Questions relating to the first cause, including the 
 problem of the being of God, belong to the domain of 
 philosophy. Religion, in its stricter sense, concerns 
 itself with considerations how fitly to placate, honor and 
 serve the Deity. Next to the philosophical ideas of 
 Jesus, it becomes important to comprehend what were 
 his religious ideas ; what, by precept or practice, did he 
 inculcate as a religious cultus and mode of worship. 
 
 In all ages the ideas, which men have held in reference 
 to the character of the gods, have dictated the forms 
 of their worship. The savage, whose god is scarcely 
 human — rather a monster whom he never thinks of 
 loving or even respecting — whom he fitly represents as 
 pent, a dog, or a lion, and whose power and malice 
 lie socks to propitiate, will be worshipped by the offer 
 of victims. Accept this slaughter, this torture of my 
 enemy, my son, my cattle, and spare my life, is virtually 
 the prayer of the terror-stricken devotee. When a milder 
 and more human nature came to be imputed to the gods, 
 worship consisted in bringing to them fruits and the 
 incense of roasted flesh, in celebrating before them 
 games in which they might delight as spectators, or in 
 imitating the actions which tradition had imputed to 
 them. Such conceptions of God could but react upon the 
 worshipper who lived, and spoke, and thought as his gods 
 were believed to have done. 
 
188 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 But, before historic times, man had acquired a moral 
 sense. This acquisition was, however, an inevitable step 
 in his progress. Until he had acquired the faculty 
 of considering his own actions, and approving or disap- 
 proving them, man was not likely to make any record 
 of his living, or to leave any monuments whereon his 
 thoughts could be expressed. When conscience began 
 to assert itself in men's living, they began to impute 
 to the gods the moral judgments, which they passed 
 upon themselves, and upon each other. Before the dawn 
 of history, before any records were made, out of which 
 history could be constructed, religion had become moral. 
 If, in the primeval time, the gods had been violent, 
 revengeful, or licentious, they had all at a later epoch 
 reformed, and a moral order had been introduced into 
 the ideal heavens. Mixed up with mythological concep- 
 tions involving the gods in treachery, falsehood, murder, 
 and debauchery, there had arisen in enlightened minds 
 among the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Persians, and the 
 Greeks the faith that truthfulness, justice, purity, benevo- 
 lence constituted the basis of the divine character, and 
 that the gods were fairly on the side of righteousness. 
 
 The Egyptian and Phoenician ideas of God, which, in 
 modified form, were perpetuated in the paganism contem- 
 porary with Jesus, were more cheerful and attractive than 
 the more abstract and spiritual conception which the 
 Hebrew and some other of the Semitic tribes had cher- 
 ished. The Olympus of the Greeks was a family and a 
 home, as well as a royal court. A god married and living 
 on terms of domestic confidence — albeit not always har- 
 monious — with a goddess, feeling a partiality for and 
 conferring special advantages upon his own children, was 
 a picture which gave reality and form to the faith of the 
 Greek. The very multiplicity of gods — a godhead capa- 
 ble of degrees of power and wisdom, shaded down 
 through inferior deities, demigods, and heroes to man — 
 mitigated the awful intensity and incomprehensibility of 
 his idea, and better accommodated it to his feeble mental 
 capacities. 
 
 The Hebrew stood at the head of an entirely different 
 cultus. It cannot now be studied in its roots and princi- 
 ples, but rather in its full development in the Old Testa- 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS 1 89 
 
 ment, and in the Jewish religion. It is attributed to 
 Moses ; and, as all great ideas, that have considerably 
 affected civilization, are found to have their source in the 
 mind of some great genius, it is quite probable that the 
 Hebrew religion had its essence, and the germs from 
 which it grew, in the inspiration of a single mind. The 
 best summary of it may be found in a declaration ascribed 
 to Moses himself : " Thou shalt prefer no gods to me ; for 
 I am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers 
 upon the children to the third and fourth generations, and 
 snowing mercy to thousands of them that love me and 
 keep my commandments." a 
 
 For the family god, for the deities that ruled the 
 heavens and the earth with complicated intrigue, and not 
 a little strife among themselves, who, though they had at 
 last attained order, by mutual submission, by a reasonable 
 self-control, and by abstaining from the excesses of their 
 youth, were originally preternaturally sensual and cruel, 
 the devout Hebrew substituted a god without father or 
 child, always pure, and raised above the appetites of men, 
 but jealous of other gods, eager for worship, placable by 
 gifts and offerings, and vindictive in his punishments. 
 Such an image could inspire in men little else than fear; 
 and, indeed, the fear of God was declared to be the prime 
 sentiment of religion, the beginning of all knowledge. 1 ' 
 To accommodate an idea of God so spiritual and abstract 
 to the low culture of his people, Moses had two devices : 
 one was a mode of worship with its organized and conse- 
 crated priesthood, its minute prescription of sacrifices, of 
 holy clays, of purifications and ceremonies so exacting 
 and imposing as to keep the imagination occupied and 
 awed, if not with the thought of God, with the zeal of 
 his service ; the other was by associating their God with 
 their worldly thrift and prosperity, which he was believed 
 to promote, and by connecting him with all their family, 
 tribal, and national ambition, so that he came tobeconsid 
 ered by excellence the tutelary deity, the power that gave 
 them success in their invasions, victory in their battles ; 
 and that forsook them and allowed them to be defeated 
 and enslaved, when they neglected or corrupted his wor- 
 ship. 
 
 • Ex. xx., 5, 6. b Ps. cxi., 10; Prov. i., 7; Eccl. xii., 13. 
 
I9O OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Thus, Moses, or, to speak more assuredly, the Mosaic 
 spirit, as manifested by a succession of leaders and proph- 
 ets, pulled down and married to human nature a spiritual 
 idea of the godhead, not, as the Phoenicians and Egyp- 
 tians had done, by concessions to sensuality, but by 
 concessions to family and national jealousies, and by culti- 
 vating that idea in an outward worship of sacrifices, deco- 
 rations, and ceremonies. Among both races, however, as 
 is shown by the testimony of their extant literature, the 
 tendency was, as the moral sense became developed, to 
 eliminate from this notion of the deity whatever was sen- 
 sual on the one hand, and jealous and vindictive on the 
 other hand ; and to shape the divine conception into 
 something corresponding to man's best conception of 
 goodness, virtue, righteousness. God is not propitiated 
 by libidinous rites, but by chastity and pure affections, 
 taught the philosophers and poets among the Greeks. 
 God is not pleased with whole burnt-offerings and sacri- 
 fices, but with mercy, justice, and integrity, taught the 
 Hebrew prophets, growing more clear in their conviction 
 and more emphatic in their declaration, as the nation 
 ripened in intellectual and ethical culture. But, even in 
 Jesus' time, the superfluous sacrifices were not omitted ; 
 and Jesus himself, when comparing the weightier matters 
 of justice, mercy, and faith with the petty prescription of 
 tithes of mint, anise, and cumin, could go no further 
 than to say, "These ought ye to have done, and not have 
 left the others undone!' B 
 
 It is probable too, from the sceptical tone of parts of 
 the Book of Job, and of the prophecies attributed to 
 Jonah, that the idea that Jehovah was the tribal God of 
 the Jews, and had treated them with special favor among 
 the nations, had been seriously shaken in thoughtful 
 minds by the succession of heavy calamities that had 
 fallen upon that people. These calamities, involving the 
 total destruction of three-fourths of the nation, and 
 making the remnant the sport and spoil of the great con- 
 quering races of the world, seem to have fallen heaviest 
 upon them at the very period when they had come to be 
 most assiduous and punctilious in their cultivation of the 
 Jehovah worship, as well as most careful in maintaining 
 
 "Matt, xxiii., 23. 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS IQI 
 
 the integrity of their personal conduct. The Hebrews 
 were ever a stiff-necked people, slow to abandon a na- 
 tional prejudice. They held to sacrifices after the proph- 
 ets, whom they chiefly honored, had assured them that 
 sacrifices were an offence to the Deity ; they believed 
 themselves the chosen people of God, after, in the eyes of 
 all the world, they had become the most forsaken and 
 down-trodden of the nations. 
 
 Jesus placed himself by the side of the greater prophets 
 of his race in declaring the excellence of righteousness 
 over worship; and in rebuking the national pride in 
 Jehovah as their exclusive god. He said that upon 
 supreme love to God, and equal love to man, rested all 
 the law and the prophets. 11 It was doubtless in deference 
 to his well-known opinions that an "enlightened scribe" 
 once said to him, The love of God is better than all 
 whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices. b Jesus said that a 
 man at enmity with his brother should be reconciled 
 before he came to the altar of God with gifts ; and also 
 that God was propitiated by mercy rather than by sacri- 
 fice. But, on the other hand, he said that he came not to 
 destroy the law, and that whoever should teach that the 
 least of its commandments might be broken should be 
 least in the kingdom of heaven/ 1 He declared that the 
 scribes and Pharisees inherited the authority of Moses; 
 and told his disciples to observe and do whatever they 
 taught. Petty as was the tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, 
 it was to be punctiliously paid ; and, though the duty 
 of reconciliation to the offended brother preceded the 
 offering of a gift at the altar, he was careful to say that, 
 that prime duty done, it was right to go afterward and 
 offer the gift. 
 
 In the chapter on the Political Ideas of Jesus his 
 judgment with regard to the pretensions of the people 
 of his nation to be the peculiar people of God has 
 been already considered. He had in the first of his 
 career distinctly admitted that pretension. He said he 
 was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, 
 and that the heathen were dogs that were not to be fed 
 from the master's table/ But, later, he had announced 
 
 Mark xii., 28-34. •> Matt, xxii., 40. c Matt v., 23, 24; xii., 7. 
 
 '1 Matt, v., 17-19. e Matt, xxiii., 2, 3, 23. f Matt, xv., 23, 26. 
 
1 92 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the rejection of the Jews, and the choosing of a nation 
 that would bring forth the fruits of righteousness. 8 He 
 had declared Zaccheus, who had with such heartiness 
 accepted his ideas of the kingdom of heaven, a son of 
 Abraham, b and had consigned Dives, a type of the 
 covetous children of Abraham, to a place of torment. 
 
 After he had fully possessed himself of the belief that 
 he was the prophetic king of the new kingdom of heaven, 
 he began to exercise authority commensurate with that 
 dignity, and to deal with the law of Moses with more 
 freedom. He used violence in expelling from the pre- 
 cincts of the temple the money-changers and the sellers 
 of sacrificial victims/ 1 A refined and humane sensibility 
 might have been unpleasantly affected by the noise, the 
 cruelty, the reek and ordure that necessarily accompanied 
 the constant 'slaughter and roasting of animals, — the 
 religious offering of an entire people collected within the 
 enclosure of a single temple and its appurtenances. A 
 mind that had been able to overcome its wholesome nat- 
 ural repugnance to such a spectacle, by the sense of its 
 sacredness, need not have been offended at arrangements 
 which, on the whole, tended to mitigate the horrors of 
 a great public slaughter and sacrifice. It was this very 
 mitigation, however, that Jesus, armed with a. whip, in 
 apparent disregard of his lesson of suffering rather than 
 giving blows, undertook to abate. 
 
 His kingly prerogative of suspending or modifying the 
 divine and civil law is asserted in his declaration, in reply 
 to a charge of Sabbath breach, that he was Lord also of 
 the Sabbath days/ The institution of the Sabbath was a 
 distinguishing and fundamental article of the ecclesias- 
 tical law. The Jews believed that its imposition had 
 been contained in the lex legum, the central summary of 
 the national statutes, the ten commandments written 
 upon the table of stone, miraculously given to Moses upon 
 Mount Sinai/' Even the most moral of the prophets, 
 who had spoken disparagingly of sacrifices, insisted upon a 
 punctilious observance of this weekly holy day/ 1 Among 
 the Jews, however, the essence of the observance con- 
 
 aMatt. xxi., 43. •> Luke xix., 9. c Luke xvi., 14, 15, 19-31. 
 
 dMatt. xxi., 12. «Matt. v., 39. t Matt, xii., 8. 
 
 P Ex. xx., 8-1 1. h Ez. xx., 12 ; Isa. lvi., 22. 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS 193 
 
 sisted in a cessation of labor. There was no such auster- 
 ity and rigor of silence and devotion as has made the day 
 so dismal in the households of Scottish Presbyterians and 
 New England Puritans. Amusements and relaxation 
 were quite in accordance with the character of the day. 
 It is therefore unlikely that Jesus gave any offence to 
 his countrymen by travelling about the country, and 
 going through the grain fields on the Sabbath, or by 
 accepting an invitation to a feast upon that day, so large 
 and so promiscuous, that the guests occupied different 
 stories of the house, and contended among themselves for 
 precedence. 1 Since it was a Pharisee that prepared the 
 feast, and gave the invitations, it is presumable that the 
 customs of the most religious people were in strict 
 accordance with his act. But the abstention from labor 
 was insisted upon to an extent that to us seems quite 
 absurd, not only by a whimsical public opinion, but ap- 
 parently by the letter of the law itself. A tradition had 
 found its place in the Pentateuch of a man found gather- 
 ing sticks to kindle a fire upon the Sabbath day, who had 
 been stoned to death by order of Moses. b One of the 
 greater prophets had declared the unlawfulness of carry- 
 ing any burden on the holy day. c What the punctilious 
 Jews objected to — and surely they stood fairly upon, the 
 better opinion — was not that the disciples went through 
 the fields of corn on the Sabbath or even ate the corn, 
 but that, in preparing the food by rubbing it in the hand, 
 and blowing away the chaff, they had worked on the Sab- 
 bath, just as the man had worked, who had gathered 
 sticks. Jesus himself does not seem to have been able to 
 maintain an argument against these sound opinions of 
 the scribes. Virtually, he acknowledges that they have 
 reason. Virtually, he admits the Sabbath breach, and jus- 
 tifies it, on account of his own mastery of the law. He 
 cites to the Jews instances in which David on a certain 
 occasion did, and the priests in the temple habitually do, 
 tilings that the lazv forbids, and yet are morally blameless.' 1 
 David and the priests may suspend the law. This is the 
 plain implication. Much more may the Son of man, Lord 
 of the Sabbath days, suspend the law of the Sabbath. 
 
 n Matt, xii., i ; Luke xiv., 1,7. b Num. xv., 32-36. 
 
 ejer. xv., ai. <l Matt, xii., 3-8. 
 
194 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 As the record stands there is an inconsistency in the 
 example and precept of Jesus in reference to the obliga- 
 tion of the law of Moses. He had taught that every jot 
 and tittle of the Mosaic law was to be observed; and he 
 had called it all a tradition of the elders." He had said 
 mercy was better than sacrifices ; and yet he had directed 
 that the pettiest sacrifices should not be omitted. He 
 had denounced the Pharisees for their long prayers and 
 their punctilious devotions, as children of vipers doomed 
 to damnation ; and had told his disciples to honor them, 
 and fulfil their requirements, as the lineal successors of 
 Moses. He had excused the breach of one of the ten 
 commandments, and had justified himself as a sovereign 
 might, who should suspend his own decrees. 
 
 The equivocal position of the master was destined to 
 involve the little band of his followers in a real difficulty. 
 When converts presented themselves from among the 
 heathen, passing all the tests of discipleship, full of 
 faith in Jesus and zeal for the gospel, and ready to comply 
 with any rule of conduct, as a manifestation of their re- 
 pentance, what law must be given them, by what code 
 must their external life be regulated ? If Jesus had dis- 
 tinctly taught that the law of Moses was either binding 
 or abrogated, if his attitude in reference to it had been 
 more distinct and intelligible than it now appears to 
 us in the evangelical traditions, Peter, James and John 
 would have stood up to declare his commandment, and 
 his authority would have closed discussion and delibera- 
 tion. But there was evidently no distinct tradition either 
 way as to his judgment. So the apostles entertained the 
 question among themselves, trying to decide it upon just 
 and rational grounds, aided by a liberal interpretation of 
 ancient scripture, and devoutly and humbly imputing 
 their own chastened good sense to the dictates of the 
 Holy Spirit, and concluded, "that it seemed good to the 
 Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden 
 than these necessary things ; that ye abstain from meats 
 offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, 
 and from fornication, from which if ye keep yourselves, ye 
 shall do well." h Of these four requirements, three are 
 trivial and pertain to customs, only of importance as con- 
 
 a Matt, v., 17-19,21,27,33. '> Acts xv., 28, 29. 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS I95 
 
 nected with a culture especially Jewish. They were 
 directions not given by Jesus, nor had he ever indicated 
 that he thought such matters worth serious consideration. 
 His comprehensive declaration, that not what went into 
 the mouth, but what proceeded from it defiled a man, 
 showed that he thought lightly of the religious value of a 
 special diet. The fourth requirement alone is funda- 
 mental and moral, and had the sanction of Jesus' precept, 
 and of the ethical principles in which the Jews, and even 
 the pagans, had been educated. 
 
 There is, besides his treatment of the Sabbatical impo- 
 sition, another incident in the career of Jesus, which shows 
 that he considered the law of the old covenant merely 
 provisional and liable to revisions by himself, when his 
 authority in the heavenly kingdom should be definitely set 
 up. Coming to John to be baptized, it is told that John was 
 quite awed by the dignity of such a proselyte, and mod- 
 estly remarked, that it would be more becoming for him 
 to accept baptism from Jesus rather than to confer it on 
 him. The august disciple by no means repels the del- 
 icate compliment, but says : Suffer it to be so for the 
 present. It is proper that we should fulfil all the rites? 
 
 On the whole, it seems fairly to be inferred from the 
 precepts and example of Jesus — as noticed by a casual 
 observation — that he held to the obligation of the 
 national worship, even its least and most trivial prescrip- 
 tions. It was in force as a provisional arrangement, and 
 until he himself, in his new kingdom, sovereign over the 
 law, should revise it and complete and fulfil it. But he 
 ably supported the opinion of the most eminent and 
 enlightened of the prophets in declaring, that if these 
 least things should be punctiliously done, mercy was 
 better than sacrifice, faith was higher than worship, to 
 do righteousness was more pleasing to the Deity than 
 prayer, and supreme love to God and brotherly love to 
 man were more religious than all whole burnt-offerings. 
 
 In an earlier chapter, two distinct notions imputed to 
 him in regard to prayer have been incidentally remarked 
 upon: one, that it must be without vain repetition or 
 much speaking ; the other, that the Deity might some- 
 times be moved to grant to importunate and persistent 
 
 a Matt. iii. , 13-15. 
 
I96 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 asking, to be relieved of a personal annoyance, what he 
 would not accord from his wisdom or his benevolence. 
 It is somewhat singular, that Jesus' own tastes, if such 
 an expression is allowed, did not lie in the direction 
 of verbal devoutness. Not without satire, in the Sermon 
 on the Mount, he had spoken of the hypocrites, who love 
 to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corner 
 of the streets. It was the practice of the heathen to 
 arouse the attention of their preoccupied gods by loudly 
 calling their names and by the repetition of petitions. 
 Nothing is finer in the Older Scripture than the contrast 
 between the priests of Baal, calling from morning till 
 noon, in the monotonous invocation, "O Baal, hear us," 
 and the simple one request of Elijah, prophet of Jehovah, 
 followed by the divine response. 3 In the enlightened 
 spirit of the writer of the legend, Jesus affirmed that 
 prayer was not needed to make human wants known to 
 God, and that men were not heeded for their much 
 speaking. b God is the heavenly Father, he said. Will 
 not any good father give to his children what they need, 
 at least, for the asking ? Prayer is not a service that 
 God needs. It is not an honor and compliment, the 
 omission of which will offend him. Go to the heavenly 
 Father for what you want, and when you want. Simply 
 ask, that is all. There is no account of any formal or 
 periodical prayer practised or taught by Jesus. He did 
 not have an evening or a morning prayer ; a Sabbath 
 clay's, or a new moon's, or a new year's season of sus- 
 tained and continuous devotion. His personal practice 
 seemed strictly in accord with the idea, that the relation- 
 ship of God to good men was a natural and psychological 
 relation ; and that the intercourse between children and 
 father should be that suggested by such a relation. If 
 one wants from a father food, raiment, fav.or, forgiveness, 
 counsel, he goes and asks. He has no set times or pre- 
 scribed modes of paying court to his father. So when he 
 wants of God daily bread, deliverance from temptation, 
 help or patience in sorrow, forgiveness for an offence, the 
 occurring want, not an occurring season is the occasion 
 and reason of his prayer. It is related of Jesus that he 
 
 a I. Kings xviii., 26-39. b Matt, vi., i, 8. 
 
 c Matt, vii., 7-1 1. 
 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS IO,7 
 
 went apart occasionally to pray. a Some of his ejaculatory 
 petitions in the midst of his followers are given, some- 
 times taking the form of addresses to God, sometimes of 
 communings with himself." In the great struggle and 
 darkness that involved him just preceding his arrest, when 
 he seemed to be hesitating whether to remain and con- 
 front the evil powers, trusting only to the divine assist- 
 ance, or to evade the danger by escape — which seemed 
 easy enough, and was quite in accord with the direction 
 he had given his followers, " When they persecute yon in 
 one city, flee to another" and with his own previous course 
 — he prayed most earnestly, but still not formally, utter- 
 ing one simple request for deliverance or strength, and 
 each time using the same words. c The intercourse of 
 Jesus with the invisible divine spirit, which he always 
 called his Father, seems to have been of a realistic rather 
 than of a poetic and ideal nature ; and this characteristic 
 method of Jesus was the new cultus he gave the world. 
 
 Only great and pure souls like that of Jesus can bear 
 this familiarity with the Infinite without compromising 
 or abating its ideal perfection. The development of the 
 Jewish cultus, as depicted in the Old Testament, was 
 from a primitive contemplation of God, that presented 
 him in human aspects, and imposed upon him low offices, 
 up to a conception of him as transcending the compre- 
 hension of the human understanding. Canst thou by 
 searching find out God? was the questioning of early 
 piety. But the tendency of this habit of thought is, that 
 it banishes from the phenomena of nature the creative 
 and energetic agency of Spirit, and from the conscience 
 of man the controlling sovereignty of Will. On the other 
 hand, the fruit of the realistic idea, especially in minds 
 deficient in reverence and poetic susceptibility, is to bring 
 Deity to the human level, and make God the patron and 
 promoter of personal ambitions and antipathies. 
 
 One of the evangelists seems to assert that, having 
 given explanations of the divine beneficence and omni- 
 science, and of the human relationship to God, Jesus had 
 omitted any precept as to the method of prayer. The 
 
 "Matt, xiv.,23; Luke xi., 1. 
 ■'■ Matt, xi., 25, 27; I.ukc xiii., 34, 35; nx., 41-44, 
 oLukc xxii., 39-46. 
 
I98 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 disciples once said to him, reminding him of the omis- 
 sion, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his 
 disciples."' 1 It was only then, that Jesus dictated the 
 brief and memorable ejaculation which has been repeated 
 through Christendom as the Lord's Prayer. It consists 
 of a god-speed for the kingdom of heaven, a petition for 
 daily bread, for forgiveness in the measure of man's for- 
 giveness, and for delivery from temptation, and the power 
 of the evil one. 
 
 Fasting was a service of religion in much repute with 
 the devout classes in the time of Jesus. His old master, 
 John the Baptist, seemed to have been rigorous in the 
 imposition of fasts upon his followers, so that the differ- 
 ence in the two schools of adherents to the new kingdom 
 of heaven was remarked upon, and explanation of it de- 
 manded of Jesus himself. 11 Primarily, the joyous character 
 of the life of Jesus with his disciples, as contrasted with 
 the asceticism of John, must have been due to the natural 
 tastes of the former. He had not denied even the impu- 
 tation of being a wine-bibber, a familiar of publicans and 
 loose-living people. He gladly went to feasts ; and coun- 
 tenanced by his presence entertainments given among 
 the class of the stricter religionists upon .the Sabbath 
 day. His infrequent attendance on the temple service, 
 if, indeed, he ever participated in it, and the satirical 
 spirit, in which he described the precise formalism and 
 long prayers of the Pharisees/ show that his direction 
 to his disciples : When ye fast, be not of a sad counte- 
 nance, that ye may appear unto men to fast, but anoint 
 your head and wash your face, sprang from a low 
 estimate of the religious edification of fasting. It can 
 scarcely be said that this direction, standing alone, is 
 equivalent to saying, When ye fast, do not fast ; but 
 such an inference would not be wholly .illegitimate, if 
 the fact were considered that, from his example and 
 precepts, the cessation of fasting came to distinguish 
 his followers from other religious schools of his time. 
 When, however, John's disciples asked the reason of 
 such a peculiarity, he said that, while he, the bridegroom, 
 was with them — while the King was present with his 
 
 *Luke \i., 1-4. i' Matt, ix., 14. cMatt. xi., 19. 
 
 J Matt, xxiii., 14. « Matt, vi., 16-18. 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS 1 99 
 
 subjects — feasting and not fasting was an appropriate 
 demonstration/ Let them fast when I shall be with- 
 drawn from them. There will be a period of separation 
 after these festal occasions, and until I drink with you 
 again in my Father's kingdom. His dominant idea — the 
 expectation that more and more occupied his soul — was 
 the explanation he himself gave of a practice, that with- 
 out such explanation might have been attributed to the 
 natural cheerfulness of his character. 
 
 In reverting to fasting again after his death, the Chris- 
 tian believers were, on the whole, justified by the tradi- 
 tion, as it stands. The bridegroom had been taken from 
 them, and his return had been delayed. He said that 
 during his absence they would fast. And they are still 
 fasting and waiting. 
 
 Baptism was a religious rite, which was, in the time of 
 Jesus, and still is, esteemed of great utility and sanctity 
 in the external service of religion. Both Matthew and 
 Mark impute to Jesus, manifesting himself after his death, 
 the requirement of baptism as a test of discipleship, — a 
 test so rigorous that it excluded from salvation the unbap- 
 tized. b In discussing hereafter the tradition of the resur- 
 rection, reasons will be offered why none of the conversa- 
 tions imputed to Jesus after his death can be treated as 
 having any historic significance. 
 
 The probability seems to be that, as to all the external 
 rites, whether of sacrifices, fasts, prayers, or baptisms, 
 Jesus was somewhat indifferent. They did not comport 
 with that stress he laid upon righteousness or good con- 
 duct — a righteousness that comprehended the underlying 
 motive and principle as well as the overt action. The 
 writer, called John, reports — what tradition may have pre- 
 served — the statement that, though Jesus accompanied 
 his disciples to their baptisms of converts, he did not him- 
 self baptize. John Baptist had declared that his baptism 
 of water was merely emblematical of Jesus' greater bap- 
 tism of the Holy Ghost. ,; To such capacious minds as 
 those of Jesus and Paul, mere ceremonies and rites of 
 religious service were trivial and non-essential; for Paul 
 thanked God that he had never baptized, save in the 
 instance of two persons and a single family. God, he 
 
 "Matt, ix., 15. 1' Malt, xxviii.,19: Mark xvi., 15, 16. <-• Matt, iii., II. 
 
200 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 said, had called him to preach the gospel, not to baptize." 
 Still, Jesus had himself submitted to the rite of baptism. 
 Doubtless, he expressed no dissent or adverse comment 
 on the baptisms, on which his followers were insisting ; so 
 that, after his death, his messengers and missionaries, 
 who, with the exception of Paul, were incapable of the 
 large generalizations and logical inferences, with which the 
 ethical and philosophical ideas of Jesus should have been 
 applied, found it easy to reinstate baptisms, fastings, 
 prayers, and even sacrifices in the ritual of the Christian 
 Church. 1 ' When solicited, indeed, Jesus had given his 
 followers a brief form of prayer ; but he had expressly 
 forbidden public and social prayer, and prayers with much 
 speaking and repetition. He had declined to appoint 
 fasts, as incompatible with his presence among his follow- 
 ers ; and, though submitting to baptism, that he might be 
 blameless as to rites, he had left no place for baptism 
 among the services he desired to be observed. 
 
 One formality, if anything so impromptu and unpremed- 
 itated as well as casual and natural, can be called a formal- 
 ity, it is quite evident he appointed, — the commemoration 
 of himself, and of his death, by eating bread and drink- 
 ing wine. It was evidently the suggestion of the instant. 
 He had eaten and drunk at one of the annual festivals 
 with his chosen apostles. He must have had other dis- 
 ciples and adherents — certainly many women believed on 
 him, and their fidelity, perhaps because it was less peril- 
 ous to them, outlasted that of the men at his public trial 
 and crucifixion. Believing children, too, had followed him 
 from Galilee. But all these women, children, and the 
 general body of disciples, were excluded from this last 
 festival ; and each narrative asserts that only the twelve 
 sat down with him in the upper room to celebrate this 
 last passover. Art, that has perpetuated the scene in 
 the memorable painting of Leonardo da Vinci, corrobo- 
 rates and perpetuates the tradition of the evangelists. 
 After the feast, he takes the common food and drink — 
 the universal bread and wine, then as now the diet of 
 
 a I. Cor. i., 14-17. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 l> Acts ii., 38, 41 ; viii., 
 
 '3.36,38; 
 
 ix., 18; x. 
 
 47. 48; xiii 
 
 , 2 
 
 xxi., 33. 
 
 c Matt. x. ; xvi., 5, 6 
 
 Luke xxiii 
 
 , 49; Mat 
 
 t. xxi., 15 ; x 
 
 xvi 
 
 , 20-2 ;; Mark \ 
 
 .i- xxii., 14. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS 201 
 
 whole races and generations of men — and asks the twelve 
 to drink and eat once more in memory of him — the wine 
 typical of the blood he is about to shed, the bread of 
 the body to be bruised and broken by the hands of cruel 
 men. He asks them to do this simple act ever afterward, 
 till he shall come again. He evidently contemplated 
 only a brief separation. He believed, as he had said, 
 that the next time he drank wine with them it would be 
 in his Father's kingdom, not many days afterward. The 
 act was as casual and spontaneous as it could well be, 
 not a formal religious ceremony to be held in a temple or 
 a synagogue, and to be performed with music, prayers, 
 and sacrifices, but an after-part, as it was an after-thought 
 of the family meal, the gathering of intimates at a gen- 
 eral or special festival. It is doubtful if this tradition 
 justified the establishment of a religious ceremony that 
 has so far outlived the expectation upon which it was 
 founded. It is more doubtful if a request to twelve 
 personal friends, selected out of the mass of his acknowl- 
 edged disciples, to do a certain act in memory of him 
 till his return to them justifies the whole mass of nomi- 
 nal Christians, uninvited, in perpetuating the act as a 
 sacrament. 
 
 Everything, however, that was external, everything that 
 appealed to the senses and emotions in the practices, 
 which Jesus originated, or to which he conformed, or 
 which without a sharp and incisive reproof he only toler- 
 ated, his followers seem to have seized upon, perpetuated, 
 and exaggerated. So this casual and unpremeditated 
 expression of affection between Jesus and a few confi- 
 dential friends has grown into one of the most solemn, 
 imposing, and elaborate ceremonies of our modern wor- 
 ship of Christ. Fitly to celebrate it requires an order 
 of consecrated and decorated priests, and temples so 
 costly that the wealth gathered by centuries of human 
 toil is lavished in their construction and luxurious furni- 
 ture. To be excluded from participation in it is a mani- 
 fest token of rejection and damnation ; n while a subtle 
 and mysterious grace emanates from its decorous perform- 
 ance, which it is believed changes a licentious, cruel, 
 oppressive, and deceitful man into a saint worthy the 
 
202 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 society of angels and the everlasting communion of God. 
 While thus we find little in Jesus' words or acts, that 
 sanctions the elaborate forms of worship, which have been 
 for centuries perpetuated in his name, — perpetuated 
 because of conventional ideas, the growths of earlier 
 religions, and because his example was somewhat equivo- 
 cal, and his teaching not wholly consistent with itself, — it 
 must not be overlooked, that what he did most emphati- 
 cally teach and insist upon as essential was, that the 
 divine mind is best placated by human virtue. 
 
 Prayers have always begun with ascriptions to God of 
 all those attributes deemed by man the noblest and the 
 best, — power, wisdom, glory, justice, mercy, and holiness. 
 These qualities are ascribed to the Deity, not because 
 men think God is pleased with a grossness of adula- 
 tion, that would be offensive even to a man of diseased 
 vanity^ The ascription is not so much to placate God 
 by praise, as it is to help the rude and feeble mind of 
 man to some adequate conception of the greatness of the 
 Being with whom he presumes to seek intercourse. He 
 enumerates to himself the features of the dim ideal, which 
 he strives to make present and real to his thought; and 
 it is not till he has recited and reminded himself of the 
 perfections and completeness of the divine nature, that 
 his own mind is brought up to its highest powers, its 
 clearest perceptions, its most virtuous purposes. The 
 prescribed prayer of Jesus, brief as it is, does not omit 
 these strenuous efforts of the soul to lift itself toward 
 the highest possible conception of God. " Hallowed 
 be thy name is a self -exhortation to reverence, as are 
 the ascriptions with which, without much speaking, the 
 worshipper retires from the august and serious inter- 
 view: "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory 
 forever."" But no mere reverence, however genuine ; no 
 ascriptions of honor to the divine name, however just, — 
 will take the place of well-doing. God is more pleased 
 when men practise virtue than when they honor him 
 with their words or with their offerings. Not those who 
 have said, Lord, Lord, Jesus taught, but those who have 
 done the will of God, will I, when I come in my Father's 
 kingdom, recognize as loyal and favored subjects.* 1 On 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS 203 
 
 a certain occasion, Jesus said those were his nearest kins- 
 men, who did the will of the heavenly Father. 11 Forgive- 
 ness of injuries, the reconciliation of offences, is of more 
 pressing urgency than any religious service. " First be 
 reconciled to thy brother," he said, " then come and offer 
 thy gift." b To be meek, merciful, pure, a maker of peace, 
 a lover of rectitude, is to be blessed of God — to be 
 his elect ones, to whom is given the kingdom of heaven. 
 Men were not to take the moral law forbidding murder, 
 theft, false witness, adultery, in a mere legal and literal 
 sense ; they were not to watch for its omissions and 
 defects, as permissions and sanctions of appetite and evil. 
 They were to outrun the literal sense of the requirement 
 with the integrity of their well-doing. They were to deal 
 with evil deeds at the very impulse and motive whence 
 they sprang ; to arrest murder in the unreasonable anger 
 which begat it ; and to anticipate adultery in the ungov- 
 erned lust that incited it. 1 ' The good-living which, he 
 declared, the new order of the age demanded, was not the 
 literal conformity of the conduct to an outward decency, 
 such as satisfied the scribes and Pharisees, but a charac- 
 ter with which evil-thinking, evil-wishing, as well as evil- 
 doing, were incompatible. All violence was to be disarmed 
 by submission, all exaction by generosity, and by thus 
 imitating God, who sent only good upon just and unjust 
 men/ his followers were to become the children of the 
 Highest. 
 
 In this emphasizing virtue, in placing character above 
 mere conduct, Jesus was working in the direction of the 
 most enlightened men of his own race ; and was teaching- 
 more plainly than had the great sages of remote antiq- 
 uity, and the poets and philosophers of his own times, 
 that the upright man is he that merits the divine favor, 
 and that, as Matthew Arnold has epitomized the lesson 
 of the gospel, God is "the eternal not ourselves that makes 
 for ncrJitcousness." But, like all these teachers, Jesus 
 understood that the life of virtue was no easy road. It 
 i^ easier to follow the natural passions and appetites 
 toward indulgence, excess, and oppression, than to curl) 
 and control them. A broad road accordingly leads to 
 
 a Matt, xii., 50. t'Matt. v., 24. cMatt. v , 5, 6, 9. 
 
 d Matt, v., 22, 28. 'Matt v.,2o. f Matt, v., 39-45. 
 
204 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 destruction, and the thoughtless many throng it. A 
 strait road leads to life, and few there are that find it/ 
 It is this desperate chance of salvation, that makes the 
 effort for its attainment such an invigorating stimulant 
 to brave souls. Jesus seemed well to have compre- 
 hended that it is ever by the survival of the fittest, by 
 contending at fearful odds against environments substan- 
 tially evil, that men have attained what they have won 
 of mental and moral superiority to the brutes. So 
 onward toward the' angelic and divine the way is still 
 the same. The masses perish : elect souls, striving with 
 the might of desperation, conquer a higher life. 
 
 In an earlier chapter some misgivings have been 
 expressed at accepting in its absolute form the im- 
 putation that God imitates men in their resentments 
 and vindictiveness. Jesus distinctly made that imputa- 
 tion, in language not easily misunderstood. The only 
 comment he made upon the prayer, the form of which 
 he prescribed, was in reference to the petition for 
 forgiveness, made conditional upon the forgiveness of 
 the suppliant. It was in these words : " For if ye for- 
 give not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly 
 Father forgive your trespasses." 13 Jesus not only taught, 
 that men should forgive wrongs indefinitely and abso- 
 lutely, but that, in so doing, they became like God, who 
 did the same. But he said also that God severely pun- 
 ished the unforgiving. He told a parable of an indebted 
 servant, whose debt, on account of his poverty, his 
 master had unconditionally released, but who pursued 
 his own debtor for the last farthing with exaction and 
 imprisonment. Then, the before mild and merciful 
 master became angry, cancelled the gift bestowed un- 
 worthily upon a sordid man, and put him to the torture 
 to wring from him his once-forgiven debt. " So like- 
 wise," said Jesus, most explicitly, "shall my heavenly 
 FatJier do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive 
 not every one his brother their trespasses." c 
 
 The lord of the parable cast off and consigned to a 
 place of weeping and gnashing of teeth the servants 
 who, while watching for the return of their master, began 
 to eat and drink and smite their fellow-servants, or who, 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS 205 
 
 in other words, took occasion to punish with blows their 
 fellows who had done them injury. But the lord of the 
 servants was the type of himself, who, coming in his king- 
 dom, would consign to fearful punishment the revengeful 
 and unforgiving.* 
 
 While we are compelled to approve of mercy and for- 
 giveness, and perceive that it is better to bless than to 
 curse, better to reward evil with good, we also see how 
 hard it is, by a threat of punishment, to bring the heart 
 to that gentle mood which makes such virtues possible. 
 Against threats only obduracy and implacability rise in 
 an undisciplined temper. A magnanimous forgiveness, 
 an unexpected patience under affronts, breaks down 
 resentment, and carries a germ of gentleness even into 
 a base soul, quite likely to grow into some word or act 
 of mercy. But no genuine love was ever begotten by the 
 compulsion of an exaggerated and fearful punishment, 
 threatened as the alternative of its exercise. 
 
 But while, upon the philosophic side, this view of the 
 character of the Deity seems to jar upon the integrity and 
 dignity of our conceptions, on the side of worship and 
 religion it is salutary. No passion is more inveterate in 
 human nature than revenge. For its gratification, men 
 have submitted to all kinds of self-torture ; and no lust has 
 been sweeter to the depraved thought, than this of de- 
 ferred but complete and excessive vengeance. The relig- 
 ion, which Jesus taught, combated this gigantic passion 
 in a gigantic way, and by considerations, which the 
 victims of it could easily appreciate. So uncontrollable is 
 this passion, that, in all ages, men have boasted of it as 
 the very measure of their manhood. Social practices, 
 codes of statutes, systems of religion have accommodated 
 themselves to it, as a fact of nature — something so 
 deeply imbedded in the conditions of human life as to 
 be restrained and regulated rather than to be obliterated. 
 
 Jesus, true to his thorough and radical treatment of 
 evils, commanded extirpation, and left no forgiveness 
 possible for the vengeful. As if he had said : Well, since 
 it is nature to hate those that hate you, to render an eye 
 for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, act out the natural 
 impulse ; but know that God, though loving and good, 
 
206 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 will leave you out of the sphere of his mercy in the catas- 
 trophes that await the soul, as it goes on to its destiny of 
 weal or woe. 
 
 This lesson of mercy, just as it stands, has been a potent 
 influence in the culture of the human race. None of the 
 leading principles of Jesus have been on the whole so 
 deeply impressed upon historic Christianity ; and it must 
 be confessed that none have exerted so powerful a control 
 over the rude and savage natures, which in the Christian 
 era one after another have come under his influence. 
 There have been among races of men, nominally Chris- 
 tian, wars, invasions, massacres, cruel punishments and 
 vengeances, both public and private ; but the image and 
 memory of Jesus have always come, first or last, to counsel 
 forgiveness, and to hold up a minatory finger threatening 
 the mysterious divine wrath against the heart that bars 
 out charity from its sentiments. If there have been 
 prayers for calamities to befall enemies, heretics, and evil- 
 doers, they have been less inspired by the wo.ds and 
 spirit of Jesus, than by a conception of God drawn from 
 other and older teachers — a God visiting the iniquity of 
 the fathers upon the children of the third and fourth 
 generation/ 
 
 Though Jesus had taught the intrinsic distinction be- 
 tween good and bad men, and had emphasized with start- 
 ling precision the different estimates in which they were 
 held by God, and the enormous disparity in the fates that 
 awaited them respectively, he by no means exaggerated 
 the difficulties which lay in the way of an individual pass- 
 ing from one condition and destiny to the other. Strive to 
 enter into life, he said; but with striving it is possible. 11 ' 
 The favor and help of God are bestowed upon evil men, 
 when they become penitent. There is, he declared, 
 more joy in heaven over a sinner repenting than over 
 many just persons needing no repentance. When the 
 profligate turned his back upon his loose life, and, with a 
 purpose of becoming a faithful servant, returned to his 
 father, the father not only received him, but rejoiced over 
 him, and astonished him by the warmth of his affection 
 and the magnificence of his gifts.' 1 Penitence with Jesus 
 was, however, much more than confession or sentiment. 
 To gain the divine approbation, the profligate must be- 
 
 "Ex. n., 5. I'M. m. vii., 13, 14. Luke xv. ,7. <l Luke xv n-32. 
 
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF JESUS 20J 
 
 come pure, the oppressor humane, the envious man mag- 
 nanimous, the rich man must give up his riches. 
 
 Human laws have not yet been able to adopt in its 
 absoluteness the idea, that penitence, even if sincere, is 
 to be a substitute for punishment ; nor have moralists 
 gone so far as to hold that repentance restores to the 
 lost integrity, what has gone out in evil-doing. The 
 reclaimed drunkard is not so noble a man, as the man 
 whose reason and conscience had, from his first respon- 
 sible acting, easy control over his appetites. There is 
 danger, as well as falsity, in the doctrine that an experi- 
 ence of sin is salutary, in that it brings the sinner nearer 
 to the affectionate heart of the Father in heaven. The 
 law of nature seems to be, that all departure from the 
 line of rectitude is evil in itself, and its fruits evil ; and, 
 however grateful the human or the divine forgiveness 
 may be, the punishment belongs to the sin, and must be 
 borne with patience as a part of it. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, the ideas of Jesus must be accepted 
 as of a somewhat provisional character. He had in his 
 mind the catastrophe of a world about to perish under the 
 retributive vengeance of its creator. It might almost be 
 said, that, in the immediate apprehension of such a calam- 
 ity, he had to a degree lost his presence of mind. A 
 system of religion, leading and keeping pace with the 
 cosmical movements of society, and the gradual prog- 
 ress of men toward a more complete and symmetrical 
 character, would have better fitted the actual conditions 
 of existence. The crisis, the day of judgment, so prom- 
 inent in the apprehension of Jesus, has been mercifully 
 postponed far beyond his apparent expectation. There 
 arc no indications in the heavens or in the earth that 
 the crisis is any nearer our own age. No real good 
 result will be attained by gathering up the wayfarers of 
 the highways and hedges, and filling the kingdom of 
 heaven with mere recruits, because the good things 
 of the feast have been provided for this time, and can- 
 not be kept. Such scouring of the byways for guests, 
 in utter disregard of their characters, is sure to turn out 
 ill; and not one, but many so gathered — the most of 
 those so coerced — will be found not having the wedding 
 garment, and fit only to be excluded from the feast. 
 Not sudden repentance, not a momentary faith, that 
 
208 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 cries in shallow adoration, Lord, Lord, but doing the 
 will of God from a good conscience — which is impos- 
 sible except for natures trained in the practice of virtue, 
 till it has become a habit and instinct of the soul — is 
 the salvation, of whose gradual growth Jesus himself 
 seemed to have a distinct perception, when he said : 
 "First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn 
 in the ear.'* "An evil man out of the evil treasure of 
 his heart bringeth forth evil things." ' 
 
 Undoubtedly there are natures like Paul's, like Augus- 
 tine's, like Loyola's, that with passionate earnestness 
 begin and follow courses of evil, believing that they 
 are good. Some great revulsion, a vision of the truth, 
 arrests them : they are converted, and carry the force of 
 will and the fiery zeal, with which they pursued pleasure 
 or persecution into the propagandism of a holy religion ; 
 but these are exceptional cases. It is better to be a just 
 person that needs no repentance ; for, if the angels will 
 not rejoice over such a one, they have a certain unde- 
 monstrative confidence and respect for him, which does 
 him no less honor; while in their joy over the lost sheep 
 they cannot repress the misgiving, that straying is apt to 
 become a habit, and that the sheep that has been lost 
 once may be lost again. Rectitude is to the reclaimed 
 sinner a struggle and a warfare against all his propensity 
 to do evil But by steadily repressing the propensity 
 to do evil, and by doing the strange and repugnant good, 
 the yoke of duty grows lighter, and more and "more 
 adapts itself to the spontaneous movement of the soul. 
 Nor does the work of regeneration end with life. By 
 the disuse of evil, man has weakened the power of evil. 
 That which was duty in the father becomes the habit of 
 the child. At last a trained and strengthened moral 
 sense becomes the trait and type of a better race, that 
 even temptations cannot seduce from a hereditary integ- 
 rity. But for these cosmical changes whereby mild and 
 moral races have been in the long epochs developed from 
 brutal and cruel savages, there was not time in what 
 seemed to Jesus and his immediate followers " the ends 
 of the world." 1 ' 
 
 'i Matt, xii., 35 ; Mark iv., 26-20. b I. Cor. x., 11. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 » IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 "Let us reject all the human interpretations of this tendency to suppose 
 a future life. Do not try to organize it for pain or bliss. Do not fresco our 
 ceilings with its imagined scenery: it only draws upward our eyes to dis- 
 cover gaudy colors on a surface of flatness. The closeness of such particu- 
 lars is stifling to the soul, who prefers the impossibility of grasping one of 
 the midnight stars, who shuns even their far-travelled hints, and plunges 
 from their silvery coasts into wells of blackness, where not one planet roves 
 to measure the depth of eternity. When you bring me reports from a Here- 
 after, I begin to lose my faith in it." — John Weiss' Immortal Life. 
 
 " The nobility of the Hebrew race began when it left behind the Egyp- 
 tian creed of another life, and entered on the wilderness of wandering and 
 pain, believing only in the present Deity; when it cast aside the 'Book of 
 the Dead,' with all that solemn ritual and imagery, and the grave judg- 
 ments of Osiris beyond the dark river, and, accepting instead for its sole 
 portion the Ten Commandments, began its bleak but valiant march." — 
 Joseph Henry Allen. 
 
 Speculations about the destiny of men after death, 
 strictly speaking, belong, too, to the department of phi- 
 losophy. They are closely kindred to conjectures with 
 reference to the pre-existence of men, whether in the 
 human, angelic, or bestial form. Religion, which in its 
 limited sense is the cultivation of the divine powers, 
 viewed as higher than and external to man, or of the 
 ideals shaped by his imagination controlled and informed 
 by his moral sense, takes no direct cognizance of the 
 states out of which men came to their human lives, nor 
 of the states to which they pass upon surrendering their 
 human lives. Both states will continue fascinating fields, 
 inviting the exercise of the speculative fancy, till our 
 minds, capable of looking before and after, shall learn 
 their destiny. Philosophy that has found means to bring 
 reliable intelligence from remote stars along the beam of 
 light, that connects them with our sight, has found means 
 to explore backwards and forwards upon the path of 
 human progression, noting in the growth of the individual 
 from birth to maturity, and thence to decay and death, 
 
2IO OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the rise and development of faculties, sentiments, and 
 ideas. Data have been gathered, upon which the just 
 and legitimate deductions are still matters of investiga- 
 tion and debate. Whatever opinions from these data 
 have been reached have been fairly reached by the exer- 
 cise of human faculties in their normal activity. It may 
 not be presumptuous to believe, that, by the patient dis- 
 cipline and exercise of the same faculties, men may yet 
 master the problem of their existence in its end, as well 
 as in its origin, with a degree of confidence quite equal 
 to that, with which they believe the accredited facts of 
 the physical universe, — that is, upon the basis of conjec- 
 tures more or less verified by observations concurrent and 
 repeated of uniform phenomena. Hints as to the when 
 and how of the advent of humanity to the world are being 
 rapidly noted and collated ; and the accumulating data 
 are rapidly evolving themselves into a science, which, if 
 not yet acceptable as absolute knowledge, has already 
 become, a competent working theory, upon which nature 
 may be observed, and by which individual conduct may be 
 regulated. It is an expectation justified by history, that 
 a highly endowed genius may yet be born among men, 
 kindred of the great souls, whose names are pronounced 
 with reverence and worship through successive genera- 
 tions and by various races, who will be able to draw an 
 outline of a scheme of the stage of being lying next 
 beyond the mortal life, and of the mode, by which man- 
 kind in its totality or as individuals, is connected with it. 
 A careful scrutiny of the analogies of nature and of the 
 tendencies and directions of human progress may be able 
 to verify and establish this hypothesis. 
 
 That nature, having produced, after tentative efforts 
 continued through countless ages, a creature so mani- 
 festly incomplete, so unsatisfactory to himself as man, 
 will stop, satisfied with a result so inadequate to its cost, 
 is highly improbable. The alternative thought of those, 
 who hesitate to accept as verified knowledge the popular 
 theories of the immortality of the individual, very rarely 
 has justice done it. It is bitterly denounced as hopeless, 
 irreligious, and atheistic, — as springing from a germ of 
 evil and itself a germ of evil in the mind. A profound 
 study of the problem of the destiny of man, not disturbed 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 211 
 
 by the hunger of mere animal instincts, may yet discover, 
 that this alternative thougnt is more hopeful to all mag- 
 nanimous souls, that have become capable of preferring 
 greatest good to personal happiness, and more consonant 
 with what we can see of the cosmic order, than a scheme, 
 which rashly stakes the whole success of the creation and 
 the reputation of the Creator upon the perpetuation of the 
 one creature, who, of all sentient existences, has thus far 
 most signally failed in achieving any worthy ends of his 
 being. 
 
 Religion has always claimed as its own province all in- 
 vestigation of the problem of a future life, and has re- 
 buked as irreverent and irreligious all purely philosophical 
 inquiries in the direction of the after-world. It has this 
 justification for such claim of exclusive jurisdiction. Con- 
 duct is or may be affected by the beliefs, which are enter- 
 tained as to its consequences in a life to come after this. 
 We can forecast the result of good or evil actions as they 
 may affect our prosperity and happiness in this life, by 
 observing the fortunes of other men, and by reading 
 the history of people that have lived before our time. 
 Society has been built in the interests of morality. The 
 greatest good is attainable only by conforming to lines of 
 conduct, that the world has agreed to call virtuous. To 
 do with patience, and in spite of fatigue, an equivalent 
 share of the work of the world, to control greediness, 
 anger, and lust, to respect the property, peace, and happi- 
 ness of other men, to help the sick, weak, and disabled, 
 and to educate and cherish the affections and sentiments, 
 through which such good actions become spontaneous — 
 these belong to the category of duties, the doing of 
 which the moral sense of mankind requires and approves, 
 the omission of which it rebukes. But to men, especially 
 to men of strong passions, and with enfeebled or degraded 
 conscience, the sanctions of duty are largely reinforced by 
 anticipations of rewards or punishments. They see and 
 feel the predicaments, in which a life of fraud, violence, 
 sensuality, and indolence involves them, and those depen- 
 dent on them ; and derive from the observation salutary 
 lessons which arc great helps to virtue. When these are 
 powerless against the stormy irruption of the passions, 
 a new safeguard is found in the anticipations of prolonged 
 
212 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 suffering for ill deeds in hell, or of lasting joys for denied 
 indulgences in heaven. But the ideas of a life after death 
 are so vague and unreal in the minds of common men, 
 that to make motives brought so far at all efficacious, the 
 horrors of hell and the delights of heaven have been in 
 all ages depicted with an exaggerated vividness, that has 
 tasked the most enthusiastic imagination. 
 
 It is a curious but indisputable fact, that what the Jews 
 in the time of Jesus had come to believe in reference to 
 a future life, they had not derived from their own script- 
 ures, or from any communication believed to be a revela- 
 tion from Jehovah. From the fact that their literature 
 is singularly destitute of allusions to the immortality 
 of man, and abounds in distinct affirmations that death 
 terminates his career, it is fairly inferrible that the ideas 
 of a resurrection, which begin to appear in the produc- 
 tions of the later poets and prophets, are to be accounted 
 for by the contact of the people in the relation of subjects 
 and captives with neighboring nations, who are known 
 to have had distinct beliefs in immortality. It is very 
 apparent from the memoranda we have of the conversa- 
 tions of Jesus that, with the exception of a small 
 sceptical sect called Sadducees, the notions of the Jewish 
 people in reference to a condition of existence after 
 death were not unlike those of their immediate neigh- 
 bors, the Egyptians and the Persians, and substantially 
 similar to the views now entertained by all the civilized 
 races of mankind. 
 
 It is a matter of debate between scholars, where the 
 "legendary traditions of the Jews leave off, and where the 
 historic data begin ; but all archaeologists agree that, as 
 a distinct people, the Hebrews came out of Egypt, where 
 they had been held as slaves. Even if we reject as not 
 historical the biography of Moses, the Biblical story of 
 his expedition and preparation for the invasion of Canaan, 
 the several distinct codes of the national and ecclesiasti- 
 cal law embodied in the Pentateuch, and the speeches 
 and exhortations with which they were explained and 
 enforced, we can gather from other data the conjecture, 
 that the revolt from Egypt was a religious, as well as a 
 political revolt. 
 
 It is probable that this revolt had a leader, and that 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 21 3 
 
 tradition has preserved his name. Egypt, in the time of 
 the Hebrew exodus, was a civilized country, with a highly 
 complex form of religion, of which the doctrine of a 
 future life with rewards for virtuous living, and terrible 
 punishments for evil deeds, was a distinctive feature. 
 Connected with its theories of the nature of the deity 
 or deities was a minute system of ethics, not substan- 
 tially different from that believed in by modern Christen- 
 dom. Though Moses in his ten commandments seems 
 not to have departed from the ethical ideas by which the 
 Egyptians endeavored to regulate their lives, he utterly 
 rejected the distinctive dogma of the Egyptian cultus of 
 a restoration of life after death, and of a heaven for the 
 souls of good men, and a hell for evil men. In all the words 
 and writings imputed to him, no motive is drawn from an 
 anticipation of any life after the present life, or from any 
 consequences to result in that life from the conduct of 
 this. The rewards for virtue, and for obedience to the 
 commands and the practice of the worship of the national 
 god are all length of life, prosperity, and large posses- 
 sions in the human state. Knowing now how the belief 
 in heaven and hell had become popularized, and how it 
 had entered into all the literature and daily thought of 
 the two powerful races that surrounded the Hebrews — 
 the Egyptians upon one side, and the Assyrians and 
 Persians on the other — we can only account for the 
 marked absence of such ideas in all the primitive litera- 
 ture of the Jews by the supposition that Moses — said to 
 have been instructed in all the science of the priest- 
 hood — broke away from the doctrines of the immortal- 
 ity of man, with something like the repugnance of an 
 apostate. 
 
 Prior to the Babylonian captivity, the Jews seemed to 
 have believed the condition of the dead, great and small, 
 was a condition of suspended animation in an under- 
 world, not unlike the Greek Hades. In this realm of 
 inanition there was no moral discipline. One lot befell 
 alike the good and evil, from whose permanent condition 
 ...is no resurrection. This is the language of the 
 Hebrew poets in the golden age of the national liter- 
 ature: "As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, 
 bo he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no 
 
214 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 more. He shall return no more to his house, neither 
 shall his place know him any more." a "That which 
 befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts ; even one thing 
 befalleth them : as the one dieth, so dieth the other ; yea, 
 they have all one breath : so that a man hath no pre-emi- 
 nence above a beast. All go unto one place: all are of 
 the dust, and all turn to dust again." b "All things come 
 alike to all : there is one event to the righteous and to 
 the wicked ; to the good and to the clean, and to the 
 unclean ; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacri- 
 ficeth not : as is the good, so is the sinner. A living dog 
 is better than a dead lion ; for the living know that they 
 shall die : but the dead know not anything, neither have 
 they any more a reward ; for the memory of them is for- 
 gotten. Also their love and their hatred and their envy 
 is now perished ; neither have they any more a portion 
 forever in anything that is done under the sun." c 
 
 But it is doubtful if the human mind has ever fairly 
 mastered the real conception of death. Consciousness 
 once begun cannot know or take note of unconsciousness : 
 it is unthinkable. Our conception of death, as of a condi- 
 tion entirely beyond experience, is inadequate. The near- 
 est we ever can come to it is remembering some profound 
 and dreamless sleep ; but, if the sleep was really a suspen- 
 sion of all mental activity, the memory passes over the 
 interval to the succeeding waking, and brings us no idea 
 of the sleep. We can think of ourselves as dead, and of 
 others regretting or missing us ; but consciousness cannot 
 attach itself to the fact of our death, but vaults over, 
 through a force of our own imagination, to the living 
 thought of those that survive us. Lastly, we think of 
 ourselves as wasting away in the grave ; but that, too, is a 
 conception of our own living thought taking note of an 
 apprehended physical condition of what was once our 
 body. All these, it is easy to see, are ideas not of death, 
 but of life. 
 
 So it is found that among nearly all races of men, civil- 
 ized and savage, there are expectations of a life after 
 death ; the more palpable and distinct, perhaps, in uncul- 
 tivated men and people, least capable by intellectual 
 training of abstract thought. Ideas so consonant to the 
 
 a Job vii., 9, 10. b Eccl. iii., 19, 20. c Keel, ix., 2, 4, 5, 6. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 215 
 
 human mind as those of immortality and retribution 
 Moses seemed to have succeeded in keeping out of the 
 minds of his people by their isolation, and by exciting in 
 them an antipathy toward a scheme of religion, which, 
 while it had failed to make its votaries virtuous, had made 
 them oppressors. To maintain this isolation and antipa- 
 thy, he stimulated a fierce patriotism, that regarded all 
 association with other tribes as an abomination, and all 
 their rites and customs as impious. After the Israelites 
 lost their national independence and became the allies, 
 subjects, and captives of powerful races, among whom the 
 sanctions of a future life were powerful incentives to con- 
 duct, the isolation could not be maintained ; and the primi- 
 tive and eccentric faith took on a popular modification, 
 save as it was conserved among the small, intellectual sect 
 of the Sadducees. 
 
 Accordingly, in the apocryphal scriptures, which ante- 
 dated Jesus but little more than a century, we find dis- 
 tinct disclosures of a belief in a life after death, with fates 
 for good and evil men according to their moral characters, 
 and a confidence in a heaven of everlasting happiness 
 strong enough to make men heroic and even exultant 
 under the cruellest tortures. When Jesus came, the idea 
 among his countrymen of the future condition of the 
 human race in an endless heaven or an endless hell, ac- 
 cording as they had been approved or condemned by 
 God, seemed to be quite as fixed and definite as it is 
 to-day. There was a small body of sceptical men, who 
 rejected this innovation upon the teaching attributed to 
 Moses, whose numbers and influence were less than that 
 of the scientific materialists, who with them say to-day 
 that there is no resurrection, neither angels nor spirits. 
 
 John the Baptist had spoken of a wrath to come, from 
 the doom of which he declared he had not come to warn 
 certain Pharisees and Sadducees, that thronged with 
 others to demand baptism at his hands. He also an- 
 nounced that the axe of judgment was laid at the root of 
 every tree, and that every tree, that bringeth not forth 
 good fruit, should be hewn down and cast into the fire. 
 The Messiah about to come, he announced, would sift 
 men like grain, "gathering the wheat into his garner, 
 and burning the chaff with unquenchable fire." tt All his 
 
 "Matt, iii., 7, 12. 
 
2l6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 message was terrible with the proclamations of vengeance 
 and destruction upon a portion of mankind, but whether 
 the catastrophe was one which was a part of the general 
 order of the divine government, or whether it was a spe- 
 cial judgment to accompany the appearance and reign of 
 the Messiah, whose kingdom was about to be established, 
 can only be conjectured. 
 
 The doctrine of a 'resurrection of the dead and of an 
 endless life, in which the good are blessed, and the wicked 
 punished or destroyed, whenever taught or alluded to by 
 Jesus, did not seem to excite any surprise among his fel- 
 low-countrymen. Everything indicates that he was speak- 
 ing from ideas generally accepted and understood. The 
 question asked, perhaps by a disciple, perhaps by a casual 
 listener, and which he condescended to answer literally, 
 "Are there few that be saved ?" a evidently implied a con- 
 jecture, too intelligible to need any special explanation on 
 the part of the narrator, that there was some calamity of 
 a grave character impending over the race of men, quite 
 other than the casualties of famine and sickness and 
 death, from which calamity a saving or exemption, for at 
 least a part, was possible. So, too, when the young ruler 
 asked, what he should do to inherit eternal life, 1 ' he evi- 
 dently had in his mind some good estate in the life to 
 come, and not an exemption from death that had befallen 
 his fathers, and would in the end befall himself. 
 
 By way of contrasting a system of beliefs, which were 
 wholly new to the people before whom they were ex- 
 plained, with these teachings of Jesus entirely in accord 
 with the popular faith, we have but to recur to the recep- 
 tion which Paul met in unfolding to communities of 
 Greeks, who, as we know, had not accepted the Phari- 
 saic doctrine of a resurrection and judgment and of an 
 eternal retribution. To some of the Epicurean and Stoic 
 philosophers, who listened to his daily disputations with 
 Jews and devout persons in the market-place of Athens, 
 he seemed a setter-forth of strange gods, because he 
 preached of Jesus and the resurrection. When, after- 
 ward, these philosophers brought Paul to the Areopagus, 
 and asked him to explain his system of belief, they seem 
 to have listened in respectful silence till he came to the 
 
 i Luke xiii., 23. b Luke xviii., 18. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 217 
 
 assertion, that there would be a general judgment of the 
 dead by Jesus, who had himself been raised from the dead; 
 and then they broke out in contemptuous derision, — a 
 so alien to the cultivated Greek mind was the idea of a 
 life after death. Some time later in his career, in Jeru- 
 salem, where the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees 
 had long given character to the popular ideas, Paul en- 
 countered a Jewish mob furiously excited by the suspicion, 
 that he had apostatized from the customs of the fathers, 
 and had taught the converted Gentiles to forsake Moses ; 
 and was in imminent peril of assassination. With won- 
 derful self-possession and sagacity, the brave missionary 
 threw himself upon the popular sympathy, and fairly 
 turned the predominant party in the mob to his side, by 
 suddenly crying out : " Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, 
 the son of a Pharisee : of the hope and resurrection of the 
 dead I am called in question." 15 We see, too, in how 
 different an atmosphere we stand, when, leaving the mate- 
 rialism of Athens, we come to Cesarea, in Palestine, and 
 listen to Cornelius the centurion, who, though a stranger 
 from Rome, is a devout man, who has been attracted by 
 the simplicity, purity, and grandeur of the Jewish relig- 
 ion. When Peter asserts the resurrection of Jesus, and 
 that he is a witness to it, Cornelius expresses neither 
 doubt nor surprise. In the old literature of the people 
 whose faith he had adopted, the resurrection was no 
 impossibility. Elijah and Enoch, perhaps Moses, had 
 passed into an immortal state without the taint of death. 
 It was a destiny none too exalted for such an august 
 person as Jesus, the Christ. 
 
 Before examining the doctrines of Jesus himself con- 
 cerning a future life, it is desirable to trace further in the 
 early Christian literature the contemporary sentiments 
 .of his age and country. For it is by no means certain 
 that all that the apostles and evangelists wrote upon this 
 subject, they wrote upon the authority of their Master; 
 nor could they have clone so, unless he told them much 
 more than the memorabilia of his life have preserved for 
 us. As the doctrine of a state of retribution after death 
 is found well developed among, not only the educated, but 
 the general people of Judea in the time of Jesus, as the 
 
 "Acts xvii., 17, 18, 32. ''Acts xxiii., 6. '"Acts x., 40-48. 
 
2l8 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 hints and explanations concerning the future life given by 
 him seem to have been received without surprise, dissent, 
 or ridicule by those who heard him, — as the same sugges- 
 tions evidently were when made known to the enlightened 
 Gentiles, — it is fairly inferrible that the writers of the 
 New Testament, in what they give us of the doctrine of 
 an eternal life, spake as well from the beliefs of their 
 time as from the special teaching of Jesus. 
 
 Paul, in writing to the Romans, speaks of a " day of 
 wrath, and revelation of the righteous judgment of God," a 
 — expressions derived rather from John the Baptist and 
 the older prophets than from Jesus. Wicked men, he 
 declared, were so made by God, like vessels of wrath 
 for destruction, that he might show the glory of his 
 mercy on vessels of mercy made for his glory. b Through- 
 out his letter, though he professes unbounded reverence 
 and worship for his master raised from the dead, and 
 speaks of his own commission to preach the gospel, as 
 bearing the sanction and testimony of the Holy Ghost, he 
 carries us back to the ideas of the Hebrew scriptures, 
 and uses illustrations and arguments relevant and con- 
 vincing only to those, who shared the modes of thought 
 derived from his own training as a Pharisee. 
 
 Writing to the Corinthian church, he declares that 
 " the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God" 
 and makes the declaration explicit by enumerating the 
 classes of evil-doers included in his term "unrighteous." c 
 He says he keeps under the lower passions, lest he should 
 become a castaway, or one of the lost,' 1 believing, as 
 Jesus had taught, that eternal life was the reward of in- 
 tense striving. It is a Gentile and not a Jewish church ; 
 so quite naturally, even among the converts, there are 
 some who do not readily receive the Jewish idea — rather 
 the Oriental idea — of a resurrection ; and their doubts he 
 sets himself to combat with reasonings which will require 
 more than casual examination. In a second letter to the 
 same people, he unfolds his faith in these words : " We 
 must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ, that 
 every one may receive the things done in his body, ac- 
 cording to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad." c 
 
 a Romans ii., 5. '> Romans ix., 22, 23. c I. Cor. vi., 9, 10. 
 <1 I. Cor. ix., 27. »IL Cor. v., io, 11. 
 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 2ig 
 
 Knowing this terror, we persuade men to believe. That 
 there are those who will be lost he implies in a declara- 
 tion that, if his gospel be hidden or unintelligible, it is so 
 to them that are lost ; a while he depicts the blessedness 
 and reward of the saved in these well-known words : 
 " Our light affliction which is but for a moment, worketh 
 for us a more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. " b 
 " If our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, 
 we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, 
 eternal in the heavens." c 
 
 In a letter to Philippian converts, Paul conveys the 
 belief that inasmuch as only the happy resurrection is at 
 all desirable, and to be anticipated otherwise than as a 
 terror to the soul, he had labored diligently to acquire 
 the virtue of faith in Christ, " if by any means he might 
 attain the resurrection of the dead," — that is, the resur- 
 rection, which was introductory to a life of blessedness. d 
 
 The second Epistle attributed to Peter speaks of the 
 present physical world, including the heavens over it, as 
 kept in store by the divine power, reserved unto fire at 
 the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men, and 
 declares, that the unjust are reserved unto the day of 
 judgment to be punished/' 
 
 Regarding the narrative named as John's, as an at- 
 tempt to throw into the form of dramatic fiction the mod- 
 ified Christian dogma of the second century, it will not 
 be pertinent to examine it for indications of the common 
 opinions of the contemporaries of Jesus in regard to a 
 future life. But even the novelist takes some pains to 
 attribute to his characters only such opinions as they 
 were believed to hold, and the literary excellence of this 
 wholly legitimate fiction has justly earned for it the 
 celebrity and confidence it has ever maintained in the 
 world. Indeed, it is its literary excellence, mainly exem- 
 plified in the vividness of its descriptions, truth to life 
 of its impersonations, and felicitousness of its conversa- 
 tions, that have gained for this marvellous production a 
 regard that unfriendly criticism has not been able to 
 destroy. So when Martha says to Jesus, who on meeting 
 her had told her, " Thy brother shall rise again" " I know 
 
 • II. Cor. iv., 3. 1»H. Cor. iv., 17. II. Cor. v., 1. 
 
 d Phil, iii., 8-1 1. •!!. Pet. iii., 7. 
 
220 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF [ESUS 
 
 that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last 
 day," a it is apparent that the writer has skilfully imputed 
 to a commonplace person — one not in the intimate confi- 
 dence of Jesus, so as to reflect his thought — an opinion 
 which was the prevalent opinion of her country and her 
 time. 
 
 Reviewing these citations from the early Christian lit- 
 erature taken mostly from Paul,' whose mind seems to 
 have been singularly destitute of impressions attributable 
 to the personal influence of Jesus — whom he had never 
 seen — the conclusion is fairly forced upon us that the 
 Christian dogma concerning a future life, and the distri- 
 bution of its fates to good and bad men, substantially the 
 same as it has been held throughout the Christian era, 
 came to its maturity independently of the teaching of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Following our inquiry, we are now ready to examine 
 the words imputed to Jesus, setting forth his ideas of a 
 future life, its incidents, its duration, and the permanence 
 of its conditions. The Persians believed that there was 
 a judicial separation made between good and evil men 
 after death, — the former to be received into bliss, the 
 latter to be consigned to torture. In the Egyptian 
 scheme of the future fates of men, the day of judgment 
 was a most prominent feature. Before the stupendous 
 doom to heaven or to hell was pronounced, each human 
 soul submitted to a searching inquest into its deeds, 
 motives, and character: so that the justice of the final 
 sentence was conspicuously exhibited before the attend- 
 ant spirits of all men, and to the conscience of the per- 
 son himself upon trial. When the Jews modified their 
 own creed and against the protest of the more strict and 
 orthodox disciples of Moses, admitted the fearful sanc- 
 tions drawn from a life after death, they, too, had a judg- 
 ment, and, as we have already seen, a day of judgment, 
 which so awed their minds by its solemnity, that it came 
 to be spoken of in literature, and doubtless in their 
 common speech, as that day. Their prophet Daniel had 
 told them of the kingdom of the world arrayed against 
 the kingdom of the saints of the most high God, but that, 
 after a time of glory and success permitted to them by 
 
 a John xi., 23, 24. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 221 
 
 God, the judgment should sit, and the dominion should 
 pass to the saints, who should reign forever. a 
 
 Following the popular language, Jesus, in closing his 
 first discourse on the mount, declared : " Many will say 
 to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in 
 thy name ? and in thy' name have cast out devils ? and in 
 thy name done many wonderful works ? And then will 
 I profess unto them, I never knew you : depart from me, 
 ye that work iniquity." b So searching should be the 
 inquisition into character on that day, that not only the 
 ostensibly wicked should be in imminent peril, but even 
 many, who had acknowledged him as master, and drawn 
 from the association power to do wonderful works, should 
 find their claim to be his elect publicly disavowed, when 
 the disavowal meant their everlasting destruction. 
 
 Afterward he told his twelve disciples, whom he sent 
 out to proclaim the near approach of the kingdom of 
 heaven, that the cities that refused to hear that message 
 and to receive them, should receive in the day of judg- 
 ment less lenient consideration than Sodom and Gomor- 
 rah, anciently destroyed by fire for the excesses and bes- 
 tiality of their licentiousness. c Indignant at the indiffer- 
 ence of the people of two cities, Chorazin and Bethsaida 
 neighboring to Nazareth, his birthplace, and to Caper- 
 naum his home, to the mighty works he had done in their 
 sight, he declared, that it should be in the day of judg- 
 ment more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon — wicked cities 
 of the heathen, which had perished, as it was believed, 
 for their sins — than for them. And his own Capernaum, 
 exalted to heaven in the privilege of being his home, 
 should in the day of judgment fare worse for its con- 
 tempt of him than Sodom itself.' 1 
 
 In explanation of the parable of the tares and the wheat, 
 to his questioning disciples he announced, that, at the end 
 of the world, " the Son of Man shall send forth his angels 
 and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that 
 offend, and them which do iniquity ; and shall cast them 
 into a furnace of fire : there shall be wailing and gnashing 
 of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun, 
 in the kingdom of their Father." The same segrega- 
 
 « Dan. vii., 25-27. b Matt, vii., 22, 23. c Matt, x., 15. 
 
 'I Matt. xi. ( 22, 24. «Matt. xiii., 4»~43. 49> 50. 
 
222 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 tion of the wicked and their destruction was typified 
 by his parable of the good and bad fish as explained by 
 himself. On another occasion, when announcing that 
 the Son of Man would come in his kingdom before the 
 death of some that heard him, he said, " The Son of Man 
 shall come in the glory of his Father and with his angels ; 
 and then he shall reward every man according to his 
 works." a 
 
 Answering his disciples, who had asked him for the 
 signs of his coming, and of the end of the world, he ex- 
 plained, that he would " send his angels, with a great 
 sound of a trumpet ; and they shall gather together his 
 elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the 
 other." b It was doubtless these remembered words of 
 the master that fixed in the minds of the disciples an 
 incident of the judgment, of which they felt a strong 
 assurance. Paul, depicting with glowing fancy the details 
 of the general resurrection, seems to be treading on 
 firmer ground, when he insists in emphatic parenthesis : 
 "For the trumpet shall sound" c He assures the Thessa- 
 lonians also that the unmistakable signal of the great 
 crisis will be "the trump of God!' & Further on in the 
 same discourse, Jesus gives a graphic picture of the great 
 judgment itself, himself sitting by the divine appointment 
 upon a glorious throne, with an attendant multitude of 
 holy angels, and all the nations of mankind gathered 
 before him for judgment and separation. He even gives 
 their treatment of himself and of his disciples and ad- 
 herents as the test which is to be applied in that stupen- 
 dous proceeding to determine the ultimate condition of 
 all souls. e 
 
 It is a habit of modern thought to speak of the condi- 
 tion of the dead as one of happiness and blessedness, at 
 least of rest. From this cheerful expectation, only a few 
 criminals and wicked men, dying suddenly in the very 
 flagrancy of their sin, are excepted ; and even these, when 
 they have expressed some contrition for their evil lives, 
 or have been moved by the fear of death to some words 
 or feelings of devotion, are let into the good condition, 
 in which the general dead are contemplated. Jesus does 
 
 a Matt, xvi., 27. •> Matt, xxiv., 31. cl. Cor. xv., 52. 
 
 '1 1. Thess. iv., 16. e Matt, xxv., 31-46. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 223 
 
 not seem to have shared this feeling, or to have uttered a 
 word upon which such vague hopes for the well-being of 
 the ordinary dead can be based. He plainly taught that 
 salvation was discriminate, and by no means universal. 
 Not all the invited would be received as guests at the 
 banquet of everlasting life. Many were called : few were 
 chosen." In sending calamities upon the world, particu- 
 larly those calamities that precede and forebode the end of 
 the world, he declared God had no consideration for the 
 sufferings and terrors of mankind in general. But for 
 the sake of his chosen ones he would destroy all flesh ; 
 and only for his elect's sake, who to some extent must 
 share the terrors of the rejected ones, would he shorten 
 the period of distress. The Son of Man, coming as 
 judge, avenger, and ruler, would send his messengers 
 throughout the world to gather together his elect; for 
 only an angelic intelligence can detect those delicate 
 shades of character, which mark the favor that had 
 chosen certain men for salvation. 5 To the common obser- 
 vation, these two men working together in the field, those 
 two women grinding together in the mill, are alike. The 
 judgment of the world has made no distinction between 
 them. But God has chosen one man and one woman to 
 the honor of an eternal life, and left the other man and 
 the other woman to shame and everlasting contempt. 
 What availed the afterthought of the foolish virgins ? 
 They were never reckoned among the wedding guests. 
 The lord of the feast said unto them at last, "/ do not 
 know you.'" d The distinctions between all nations of men 
 of elect and non-elect, he declared, were as palpable to the 
 divine eye, as was the shepherd's perception that he had 
 both sheep and goats in his flock ; and he could place the 
 bad upon his left hand as easily as the shepherd could 
 separate the sheep from the goats. 6 He told his hearers 
 not to commiserate the fate of certain Galileans, whom 
 Herod had murdered in the midst of their worship, or 
 those others who had been killed by the fall of a tower, 
 for without repentance they would perish, referring of 
 course not to a death by a like casualty — which was most 
 improbable — but to the perishing of all the unrepentant 
 in the after-world. l 
 
 a Matt, xx., 16; xxii., 14. •> Matt, xxiv., 22, 30, 31. c Matt, xxiv., 40, 41. 
 <1 Matt, xxv., 1-13. v Matt, xxv., 32. f Luke xiii., 3, 5. 
 
224 OPINIONS -VXD CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 All literal exposition of his serious thought, as well 
 as the figurative and poetic imagery, in which he sought 
 to illustrate and convey it, depict the fate of ordinary 
 men as baleful; and the rescue of any as a favor con- 
 ferred by his procurement upon those whom he chose, 
 either on account of their intrinsic excellence, or on 
 account of their penitence, or on account of their faith 
 in him. If this law of discrimination is found uncertain, 
 it is an uncertainty due to the varying character of his 
 own utterances. This much, however, is obvious. The 
 exemption from the calamities that impended over man- 
 kind was not indiscriminate, nor was it to be exercised 
 toward the mass of men. 
 
 He charged his followers to wait for his coming again 
 in the terrific glories of his everlasting kingdom, abstain- 
 ing from drunkenness and sensuality, and from absorp- 
 tion in the cares of business; "for as a snare shall [the 
 day] come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole 
 earth." a His coming, though with power and great glory, 
 was to be an event at which all the tribes of the earth 
 should mourn. His disciples once asked him — evidently 
 prompted to the question by the sombre tenor of his own 
 speculations upon the future life — " Are there few that 
 be saved ?" b and he said: "Strive to enter in at the 
 strait gate ; for many will seek to enter in, and shall 
 not be able." He also declared that the road to destruc- 
 tion was broad, and many walked in it. Few found the 
 narrow road leading to life ; c and these few were sharply 
 interrogated at the gate, and some, who supposed them- 
 selves disciples and even did mighty works in the name 
 of Jesus — some of the very train of friends who watched 
 all night for the bridegroom's coming — were either pub- 
 licly repudiated as workers of iniquity/ or, coming too 
 late, and after the master of the house had impatiently 
 risen, and shut the door, were driven away, because their 
 repentance had come too late. e 
 
 Seeking to know what was the idea of Jesus as to the 
 condition of the non-elect dead, in what their misery con- 
 sisted, and what was its duration, we must try to gather 
 the implications of these words of his : " It is better for 
 
 "Luke xxi., 34, 35. b Luke xiii., 23-25. c Matt, vii., 13, 14. 
 
 dMatt. vii., 21-23. eMatt. xxv., 10; Luke xiii., 25. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 225 
 
 thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having 
 two hands, or two feet, to be cast into everlasting fire." a 
 " His Lord was wroth, and delivered him — the unforgiv- 
 ing debtor — to the tormentors, till he should pay all that 
 was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father 
 do unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one 
 his brother his trespasses." b " He will miserably destroy 
 those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other 
 husbandmen." "On whomsoever it — the rejected stone, 
 himself — shall fall, it will grind him to powder." d "Bind 
 hand and foot — the unwelcome guest at the marriage 
 feast — and cast him into outer darkness ; there shall be 
 weeping and gnashing of teeth." e "Ye serpents, ye gen- 
 eration of vipers — addressed to the scribes and Phari- 
 sees at Jerusalem — how can ye escape the damnation 
 of hell?" f 
 
 Most of these images are images of destruction and 
 death. The rejected of Jesus are spoken of as the lost 
 in distinction from the saved. The evidently literal and 
 solemn sentence, that concludes the grand assize of *the 
 judgment as depicted by Jesus, "These shall go away 
 into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life 
 eternal," B does not necessarily imply the conscious exist- 
 ence of the punished. The contrasted condition of life 
 everlasting is an ever continuous death, — a death from 
 which there shall be no resuscitation or resurrection. Even 
 the figure of fire, by which the horror of hell is so often set 
 forth, brings to our apprehension an element of destruc- 
 tion. The duration is affirmed of the fire : it burns per- 
 petually ; it is not quenched ; it is not cooled ; it is not 
 removed ; but it destroys effectually and forever what is 
 cast into it. In one conversation, it is plainly implied that 
 only the good, the elected, experience resurrection, the 
 rest of the human race being consumed, as to whatever 
 there is of their physical and spiritual identity, in the 
 conflagration of the world; and that is the conversation 
 held with the Sadducees, as to the manner of the resur- 
 rection. " They wJiich shall be accounted worthy to 
 obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, 
 
 "Matt, xviii., 8, 9. b Matt, xviii., 34, 35. c Matt, xxi., 41. 
 d Matt. Jtxi., 44. e Matt, xxii., 13. I Matt, xxiii., 33. 
 
 sMatt. xxv., 46. 
 
226 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 neither marry nor are given in marriage." 11 But other 
 figures less frequent bring before us a picture of con- 
 scious and continuous suffering. Six different times, in 
 speaking of the doom of rejected men at the judgment, 
 Jesus added this delineation of the horror of their condi- 
 tion : "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth," 1 ' 
 — a fearful image of vain sorrow and impotent rage. 
 
 It is not surprising that the prevalent conception of a 
 hell of conscious and acute and perpetual suffering finds 
 sanction and authority in language as vigorous and ter- 
 rible as this. And such has been the conception of 
 Christendom with scarce a protest or dissent for nearly 
 nineteen centuries. Hell has been modified and allevi- 
 ated in our own age, not by the spirit of historic Chris- 
 tianity, not by the teachings of the primitive disciples, or 
 what the world has preserved of the teachings of their 
 master, but by the spirit of modern civilization. That 
 enlarged humanity, which takes heed of the woes, wants, 
 and sufferings of men, of the enslaved, the overworked, 
 the Oppressed, the sick, the insane, and the bereft of the 
 faculties of sense, has carried forward its benevolent feel- 
 ing to the conditions of a future life, and insisted that the 
 inexorable and dreadful fate of the masses of mankind 
 shall be made more tolerable to a rational contemplation 
 of the providence of God. To be entirely true to the 
 influence of Jesus, let it rather be said that the intolerable 
 hell of the Christian creed, which is also the hell of the 
 thought of Jesus and of his age, has succumbed, so far as 
 it has succumbed, to a spirit born of the early teachings 
 of Jesus, his sublime doctrine of the fatherhood of God, 
 and of the perfection of his love, which flows forth to the 
 unkind and unthankful, the evil as well as the good, 
 before he had himself retracted these utterances under 
 the disturbing and ambitious presentiment of his destiny 
 to be the Son of Man, that was to come in the clouds 
 of heaven, to receive dominion, glory, and the kingdom 
 over all people, nations, and languages. 
 
 There are two sources of the surmises and speculations, 
 which the reflecting portion of mankind have entertained 
 concerning the prolongation of the individual life after 
 
 "Luke xx., 35. bMatt. viii., 12; xiii., 42, 50; xxii., 13; xxiv., 51; xxv., 30. 
 eDan.vii.,13,14. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 227 
 
 death, — tradition and imagination. We have taken what 
 other men have believed concerning an existence beyond 
 the grave, and believed it upon their credit ; and we have 
 enlarged and developed these ideas by the powers of our 
 own imagination. It is not certain that these traditions 
 have any other basis than the imagination of some highly 
 impressible person or persons, in whose minds the con- 
 ception first took form, and who were so overawed and 
 impressed by it, that they accepted it as an intuition or 
 revelation, and so proclaimed it as a truth of the deepest 
 significance and importance. It is not certain that such 
 impressions may not have proceeded in some inexplica- 
 ble way from a divine, angelic or superhuman communica- 
 tion. There has ever been a tendency in the mind of 
 man to impute to inspiration his best and most sponta- 
 neous thoughts, those flashes of cognition, those feats of 
 artistic performance, into which he has put the least con- 
 scious effort. The philosopher, upon whom falls some 
 instantaneous solution of a law or process of nature, the 
 moralist, who has embodied in a maxim of universal valid- 
 ity a law of conduct, the poet, who in the frenzy of an 
 intellectual passion has expressed in musical and eloquent 
 language a great thought, and the painter or sculptor, 
 upon whose brain an image of ideal beauty is suddenly 
 projected — in the modesty of nature, in the mystery 
 which hides the methods of our highest mental activities, 
 in that exaggerated, maternal admiration for intellectual 
 progeny, which accompanies birth, have ever been ready 
 to impute the origin of a work so surpassing the scale 
 of ordinary achievement to something above themselves. 
 It is the muse, they say ; it is the demon ; it is an angel 
 or a God speaking. 
 
 But such is not the necessary solution of the origin of 
 the traditions of a future life. We are not only capable 
 of conceiving of a continuance of our consciousness after 
 death, but it is the obvious, natural, and necessary con- 
 ception. Indeed, as has been before stated, it is impos- 
 sible for a living mind to master the idea of a cessation 
 of consciousness, that being a condition of which it has 
 not and cannot have any experience. Hence, it follows 
 that the belief in continuous existence has been nearly 
 universal among mankind ; and was quite as vivid and 
 
22S OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 definite among people, whose lives antedated the whole 
 epoch of what is called divine revelation, as it is among 
 the most Christianized nations of the present age. All 
 pictures of states of reward and punishment, which are 
 preserved in the books and traditions of the great relig- 
 ions of the world, betray their human origin, in that they 
 are conditions of human experience projected on the dark 
 wall that separates the dead from the living. The feasts, 
 the harps, the singing, the society, the worship, the rest, 
 the ecstasy of heaven, are all images of the clearest and 
 purest joys we have known in our experience, or observed 
 or imagined in the experience of more favored men. 
 The fires, the tortures, the mourning, and grinding of 
 teeth, are projections of the miserable experiences of a 
 world, whose manifold sufferings have never been able to 
 make it less sensitive to suffering. To a certain extent, 
 we can indulge our imaginations in the hopes and fears, 
 which those anticipations beget. We can give such de- 
 tails to these surmises as our experiences can furnish us 
 with, and we strive in vain to press beyond these limits. 
 Why should we believe that our fathers, our ancestors, 
 the men of earlier ages, could do any more ? All that we 
 have received from them is very like what we may con- 
 jecture upon the same data. 
 
 What we know of astronomy, of chemistry, of physi- 
 ology, we have learned by studying phenomena, and by 
 accepting the results of the studies and experiments of 
 men, in whose judgments and good faith we have confi- 
 dence. What we think we know of a future life, do we 
 know on any other authority? Nay, is not this science in 
 a more primitive and incomplete stage — the same stage 
 as when, during the Middle Ages, our fathers were grop- 
 ing blindly in the departments of medicine and astrology 
 among theories that had no basis but tradition or assump- 
 tion? They had neither the trained faculty nor the logical 
 method correctly to note the operations of nature, nor to 
 comprehend its laws. Those pseudo-sciences had even 
 this advantage, — that their principles could be confirmed 
 by plausible experiments. The sick sometimes got well 
 in spite of irrational therapeutics ; and now and then the 
 fortunes of men conformed to their vague, astrologic fore- 
 casting. No instance, however, has been given, in which 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 229 
 
 the momentous revelations relating to a life after death 
 have been attested to by any intelligence, that has returned 
 hither from that country, to which such a concourse have 
 migrated. Our situation is not unlike that of the people of 
 the Eastern hemisphere in reference to America, before its 
 discovery by Europeans. There were oracular and poetic 
 revelations of an Atlantis ; and philosophy was beginning 
 to speculate that the globe must be balanced by a conti- 
 nent upon its dark side ; but no voyager had returned 
 from it, and nothing known to be its product, whether of 
 living man or animal or the works of either, of shrub or 
 tree or fruit, had come across the ocean to confirm its 
 existence. So, now, philosophy may say : to round out 
 our human life, to balance the unjust and unequal condi- 
 tions of human existence, there must be a life beyond — a 
 world of retribution, compensation, and completion. The 
 universal instinct of the soul of man cannot be mistaken 
 or denied, that has in all ages refused to believe that 
 death is the end, and that the earthly discipline of suf- 
 fering, by which the race has been raised from bestiality 
 to intelligence and a capacity for disinterested benevo- 
 lence, could have been expended upon a result so trivial 
 as the transient life of men. 
 
 From a careful perusal of the authentic words of Jesus, 
 it is not fairly to be inferred that he approached the prob- 
 lem of a life after death in any other method than in the 
 human and philosophical method. But when the Chris- 
 tian thinkers of the first centuries adopted the theory, 
 that the resurrection was a new process in the divine 
 economy, a new law of nature introduced by Jesus him- 
 self, a consummation, in the divine order, that had awaited 
 his coming and his conquest of death — which, till his time, 
 had ruled over the race of men from the beginning 11 — it 
 was natural that they should seek to support it by his own 
 declarations. Paul first gave striking expression to this 
 theory in his well-known words, in which he speaks of 
 Jesus, as of him " who has abolished death, and brought 
 life and immortality to light." The world had a right to 
 require of a being sent from God with such a commission, 
 that he should speak from his own knowledge of the 
 stupendous concerns of the heavenly state, whence he had 
 been sent. 
 
 <i Romans v., 12-21. 
 
23O OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 The Fourth Gospel, evidently the product of a time not 
 only after the Pauline conception had been published, 
 but after the considerably later time, when it had become 
 incorporated into the faith of the Church, fairly met this 
 requirement, and may well have been written to meet it. 
 The Johannic Jesus speaks familiarly of his own pre- 
 vious existence as an immortal and divine being, of the 
 heavenly state, which he left to take upon himself a 
 m.-rtal, human nature, of his fellowship with God, and of 
 the relations of rank, dependence, and affection, which 
 subsisted between them. He flashes upon us glimpses of 
 the condition of the happy dead. 
 
 The Jesus of John tells his disciples, that they should 
 see heaven opened, and angels of God descending upon 
 himself and returning from him to heaven." He says 
 he was sent into the world from God, his Father, to 
 save those who should believe on him. b He assures the 
 Pharisees that he had lived before Abraham, the vener- 
 able ancestor of their race. Everywhere throughout the 
 Fourth Gospel, Jesus speaks in perfect harmony with this 
 claim to have been the companion and equal of God, of 
 whose existence there had been no beginning. All that 
 he tells of God, all of the unknown past or the unknown 
 future of man, he tells as a revelation from the sphere of 
 a complete and divine intelligence. All that he confides 
 of the conditions of the eternal life he communicates at 
 first-hand, and from a personal experience. He tells Nico- 
 demus directly, that he spoke what he knew, and testi- 
 fied what he had seen. "Why," he asked him, "shall I 
 tell you, as I might, of heavenly things, when you are in- 
 credulous of the earthly things I have told you?"' 1 And 
 this knowledge, from which he spoke, was exclusive and 
 peculiar; "for no man," he added, "hath ascended up to 
 heaven, but he that came clown from heaven, even the 
 Son of Man, which is in heaven." He said at another 
 time that such was the love of God toward himself, that 
 all the divine counsels were shared with him, and in order 
 that all men might honor the Son, the Father had deferred 
 to him the authority of being the judge of mankind. 
 When Martha spoke to him at the grave of Lazarus of 
 
 •John i., 51. bjohniii., 16, 17. cjohn viii., 58, 
 
 djohniii., 11-13, e John v., 20-23. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 23 1 
 
 the hope which she, as a pious Pharisee, had, that her 
 brother would rise at the resurrection of the last day, 
 Jesus interrupts her with impressive warmth : " The res- 
 urrection ! I am the resurrection : he that believeth in 
 me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and whoso- 
 ever liveth and believeth in me shall never die ! " a He 
 had told the Jews on another occasion, that, "if a man 
 keep my saying, he shall never see death." h As he had 
 spoken of his birth as his coming from God, so he spoke 
 of his death as going back to him ; and in a conversation 
 memorable for its pathos, and dear to the human heart 
 for the hopes it has fed, he gives this picture of the 
 heavenly state to which on leaving the world he expected 
 to return : "In my Father's house are many mansions : if 
 it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a 
 place for you." c 
 
 Although he sometimes betrays the inventive character 
 of his work, through faults of style and exhibitions of a 
 moral culture, far below the grade of Jesus, the author 
 carries out with admirable completeness his dramatic 
 purpose. Jesus, though he sometimes demeans himself 
 in his methods of expression, is always true to the r61e 
 assigned to him of a divine pre-existent and immortal 
 being ; and, when he is made to speak of the conditions 
 of a heavenly existence, he speaks as a revelator rather 
 than a reasoner. He does not grope his way, as men do, 
 in the darkness of an impenetrable mystery. He nar- 
 rates with the confidence of knowledge, and testifies with 
 the positive assurance of an eye-witness. He is Colum- 
 bus, after his return from his first voyage, telling with 
 details too natural and minute to be fancied the sights he 
 has seen, and confirming everything by the testimony of 
 his companions, and by specimens of men and things 
 brought back from new discovered lands ; whereas every 
 other revelation of the unseen world is Columbus before 
 his voyage, with his traditions of early navigators, his 
 theories of a compensating continent and a round and 
 bounded earth, over which all but the enthusiastic shake 
 their heads. 
 
 Now, it is just this character of positiveness, this 
 directness of communication as of an eye-witness, that 
 
 ■ John m., .• \-.:',. '■ John viii., 51. John xiv., 2. 
 
232 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the disclosures of Jesus in the more reliable biographies 
 lack. There is a vivid picture of the great judgment, 
 there is a perpetual allusion to a great separation and 
 segregation of mankind into two classes, sometimes of 
 righteous and wicked, sometimes as elect and non-elect, 
 sometimes as believers and unbelievers — with the cate- 
 gory of the former generously enlarged, so as to include 
 those who had sincerely, and out of consideration for him- 
 self, done even trifling services to his followers, or only 
 not opposed them — to which classes widely different fates 
 are assigned. But there are no details of the joys and 
 glories of heaven, and only brief, striking, and terrifying 
 epithets to indicate the horrors of hell. If Jesus knew at 
 first-hand, and from a pre-existent experience, of which 
 the scenes of an invisible world were familiar data, a wise 
 reticence might have restrained his disclosures. On any 
 other consideration, we are left to the conclusion, that 
 some men who had preceded him, and many who have 
 followed him, have taken far higher flights into the sub- 
 lime regions of devout fancy than Jesus was capable of, 
 or than he allowed himself to indulge in. This is by no 
 means to be said in disparagement of his genius or his 
 wisdom. The Egyptian and Persian day of judgment, 
 with its searching inquisition into character and into the 
 very springs of voluntary conduct, impressed the people, 
 who lived in hourly anticipation of it, more powerfully 
 than the meagre glimpses of the same stupendous pro- 
 cedure furnished in the words of Jesus impressed the 
 minds of his auditors. It is Paul, who, modifying and re- 
 applying the words of an ancient prophecy, has given 
 for the consolation of Christendom those fascinating reve- 
 lations, so full of a soothing hope in what they declare 
 as in what they withhold : " Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
 heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the 
 things which God hath prepared for them that love him."' 1 
 It is the inspired imagination of Paul, that bequeaths this 
 picture, like an heirloom of faith, to the world : " For we 
 know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were 
 dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made 
 with hands, eternal in the heavens." b Indeed, when now 
 we stand, as mankind have always stood, dismayed and 
 
 »I. Cor. ii., 9. 1>II. Cor. v., i. 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 233 
 
 appalled at that chasm of death into which has just fallen 
 some fellow-creature — it may be linked to us by ties which 
 it is a long agony to sunder — and beat our aching hearts 
 against the impenetrable wall, that separates him from 
 our ken, it is to Paul rather than to Jesus that we resort 
 for consolation. We read at the open grave Paul's argu- 
 ment for immortality. He, too, claimed no special revela- 
 tion or knowledge. Like Plato, like Cicero, he reasons 
 out the problem of a life after death upon such data as 
 his mind was furnished with. He confesses himself, he 
 has staked the whole question upon the physical resurrec- 
 tion of the body of Jesus after his crucifixion and burial, 
 an incident which even a part of the twelve apostles at 
 the time doubted to have happened, and which philoso- 
 phy can only accept as something outside of the order of 
 nature. Corollary to this confidence is the analogy de- 
 rived from the generation of plants from buried seeds, in 
 which the fervid advocate fails to observe intelligently, 
 when he declares with warmth that no seed can germinate 
 till it die, whereas it is well known, to even unscientific 
 persons, that no seed, that has parted with its life, can 
 germinate." 
 
 But, whatever the analogy of vegetable reproduction 
 may imply or require, it is all fulfilled in the generation 
 of living progeny, not from dead but from living parents, 
 by processes of reproduction which the laws of botany 
 and physiology, wholly unknown in the age of Paul, have 
 indicated to be substantially alike in vegetables and 
 animals. But it was not to examine Paul's philosophy 
 of a resurrection, but to indicate that, with his creative 
 fancy, Paul allowed himself to dally boldly with the the- 
 ories of a future life, made present daily to his anticipa- 
 tion by a perilous mission which exposed him to daily 
 death. The Christian imagination has certainly imposed 
 no restraint upon itself in that direction, since, from 
 Paul's time to the present the elaboration of the scenes 
 of the final judgment, pictures of the employments, de- 
 lights, and associations of the happy dead, and details of 
 the sufferings and the wretchedness of the lost, have been 
 themes to invite the supreme effort of the genius of the 
 poet, and which the preacher and moralist have chiefly 
 
234 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 relied upon as the terror of the Lord, to win men to re- 
 pentance and piety. Indeed so productive have been the 
 intellectual labors of mankind through the Christian cen- 
 turies in this dread but fascinating field of inquiry, that 
 the heaven and the hell of the popular faith with their 
 furniture and incidents are not derived so much from the 
 scriptures of religions, as from the conceptions of Dante, 
 Milton, and Robert Pollok — an English poet whose repu- 
 tation is confined to a strictly theological public. 
 
 Now, going back to our annals of Jesus, we find him 
 repeating the traditions of his forefathers ; and we can 
 reasonably infer whence they were derived, without 
 enriching or enlarging them with a single product of his 
 own creative faculty. In Luke, he is represented as 
 holding a colloquy with the Sadducees, who thought that 
 a woman several times married to brothers of each other 
 who had died would be embarrassed by a relation, the 
 nature of which was exclusive, if all the husbands should 
 at once assert their marital claims. The answer of Jesus 
 was ready, if not quite complete. "There is no marrying 
 nor giving in marriage in heaven," he said. But this did 
 not quite meet the point. It was not a relation that was 
 to be, but one that had been. Undoubtedly, Jesus meant 
 to say, not only is there no marrying in heaven, but no 
 recognition of any marriage, that had been on earth. 
 The relation was earthly; and belonged to the necessities 
 of an earthly order. In the resurrection, all will be as 
 the angels. Husbands will not be the husbands of their 
 wives, nor children of their fathers, nor fathers of their 
 children — for all this is implied in the denial of the 
 fundamental relation of human life — and individuals will 
 hold relations to each other of affection, of service, of 
 precedence, not based upon priority of birth or participa- 
 tion in parentage, but upon the laws of that life, as those 
 Other relations are built upon the laws of the human life." 
 
 So far, the answer was complete — an extinguishment 
 of the Sadducees, and a philosophical statement that will 
 stand the criticism of all sceptics, that may come after 
 them. But he went on to add that even Moses showed 
 that the dead are raised, when he called God the God of 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob : for God is not a God of the 
 
IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE 235 
 
 dead, but of the living : for all live unto him. It is not 
 easy to see how God is not the God, as well of the dead, 
 as of the living, since all are in his power ; and since 
 another scripture has declared : If I make my bed in the 
 grave, God is even there. Nor would the declaration to 
 Moses in any ingenuous mind imply anything but that 
 God, who had in their lifetime befriended and blessed 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for their faith would befriend 
 and bless Moses for his trust in him. So far from imply- 
 ing that the patriarchs were still alive, its impressiveness 
 would largely spring from the fact that they were dead, 
 that their record was complete, and that no after calamity 
 could change their happy human lot. But what is 
 remarkable about the argument is that, just as Paul was 
 laboriously working out the solution of his great hope, 
 by observing the analogies of vegetable reproduction, 
 and by assuring himself that the crucified Jesus had 
 been seen alive by five hundred disciples, many of them 
 then living, and by himself on his way to Damascus, 
 so Jesus was laboring to find in a scripture, not obviously 
 implying such a thing, and in a declaration to the first 
 prophet of his people — who certainly made no such infer- 
 ence from it himself — the ground of faith in what he had 
 no first knowledge of, and nothing but his hopes and 
 reliance upon tradition to support. It may be said the 
 argument, subtle as it was, was apposite to the scepticism 
 of his questioners, who only had faith in Moses, and to 
 whom the words of Moses were divine oracles. This 
 is doubtless true, and would be a complete answer to 
 the objection, if Jesus had anywhere else, in teaching 
 the doctrine of a resurrection, unfolded any positive 
 grounds of a knowledge of a life after death. Besides, 
 from men whose genius and insight place them in the 
 order of Socrates, Pythagoras, Confucius, and Zoroaster, 
 we have a right to expect something more comprehensive 
 than an answer which is a mere argument to the man and 
 to the verbal form of the qliestion, — an answer good for all 
 time, and that shall be valid from every point of view. 
 To avoid being entangled in a sophistical dilemma shows 
 resources of wit ; to discover a great truth in the data of 
 nature shows resources of wisdom. 
 
 Finally, the investigation leads back to the dominant 
 
236 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 idea of Jesus of an end of the world, a separation of the 
 saved and the lost, a reign of himself as Messiah over the 
 former, and the destruction or perpetual punishment of 
 the latter. Of the day of judgment, of heaven and hell, 
 Jesus thought and taught less than is taught in several of 
 the older religions, less than his apostles and the poets 
 and preachers of the Christian Church. He took up the 
 prevalent beliefs upon these subjects, and modified them 
 by his own grand idea of the impending kingdom of 
 heaven. The end of the world will be presently : the 
 resurrection I shall myself first achieve, and bring back 
 with me to life those thought worthy. The judgment 
 implies the judge, which I, the Son of Man, am; and 
 heaven is the kingdom of my Father, in which I shall sit 
 down with all whom I have chosen in an endless life. 
 Jesus gave definiteness and date to what men had hoped 
 or dreaded of a future life, and the words he uttered with 
 emphasis and staked his whole veracity upon were these, 
 which each evangelist repeats: " Verily, I say unto yon, 
 This generation shall not pass away till all these things be 
 fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words 
 shall not pass away." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES. 
 
 " In truth, the world has become mistrustful, and does not believe things 
 till it has seen them." — Pascal. 
 
 "At the stage of experience where men are now arrived, it is evident, to 
 whoever looks at things fairly, that the miraculous data of the Bible have 
 not the unique character of trustworthiness; that they, like other such 
 data, proceed from a medium of imperfect observation and boundless cre- 
 dulity." — Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Hitherto, the only difficulty that has beset this inves- 
 tigation of the historic data concerning Jesus has been the 
 uncertainty of knowledge, springing out of the contradic- 
 tory declarations that seem to be imputed to him by the 
 most trustworthy of his biographers, leaving to us the 
 alternative of questioning the accuracy of the reports, or 
 of believing that he was either careless to maintain opin- 
 ions in harmony with each other, or that in some crisis 
 of his life he changed his views and modified his teach- 
 ings accordingly. But a very large part of the narratives 
 named of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are taken up with 
 transactions, which, though they evidently impressed the 
 writers as most important, are entirely outside of the 
 probabilities that avouch ordinary events. In a sincere 
 quest for truth, no one is bound to believe these transac- 
 tions upon anything less than the strong, cumulative, and 
 accordant testimony of intelligent and credible persons. 
 The miracles come under this category. 
 
 What is here said upon a theme so much discussed 
 needs no statement or even implication of a theory. 
 Whether the laws of nature are mathematically and 
 invariably uniform, whether a divine agency by which the 
 visible world exists and is controlled may or may not 
 inject into nature other methods of activity than those 
 which mankind have concurrently observed, need not be 
 even considered. All that need be assumed is that men 
 have not hitherto been able to walk upon the sea; to mul- 
 
238 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 tiply five loaves of bread and two small fishes, so that they 
 shall feed to repletion five thousand men with an uneaten 
 surplus far exceeding the original supply ; nor to instantly 
 restore to health and wholeness by a word a maimed or 
 diseased person, whose infirmity was due to other cause 
 than some hysterical or nervous defect in the apparatus 
 connecting volition and action ; nor by similar means to 
 bring back to life a man, who, having been some hours 
 dead, was being borne to his burial ; nor to do several 
 other wonderful things that Jesus is related to have done 
 habitually and without apparent effort. If Jesus did such 
 acts, it is proper to require that the fact be attested by 
 the serious, if not sworn, testimony of intelligent persons 
 of integrity, given with all the solemnity and sense of 
 responsibility of judicial proceedings. The different 
 statements of those persons should substantially agree, 
 differing only in those details and circumstances, about 
 which it is always impossible for even careful and consci- 
 entious witnesses to agree. 
 
 It is not intended to approach in any flippant or irrev- 
 erent spirit the inquiry into these claims for the founder 
 of the Christian religion to have been gifted with super- 
 human powers. Indeed, the propriety must be obvious to 
 every one of treating with respect and consideration what 
 a great majority of the best and most cultivated minds 
 have believed and still believe. 
 
 It has been already explained why we are compelled 
 to accept Jesus as a veritable person of history ; and the 
 purpose of this writing is to work out, feature by feature, 
 the details of his character and his actions, with a view 
 of justly estimating his weight and worth. Thus far, the 
 task has proceeded by considering the progress of history 
 as generally uniform and natural, by regarding the men of 
 the first century as men of "like passions and like infir- 
 mities with ourselves, and by applying purely human judg- 
 ments to declarations and conduct not presumably outside 
 the influence of human motives. The result has been the 
 dim outlines at least of a remarkable, highly endowed, 
 and heroic soul, self-confident, self-sustained, mainly con- 
 sistent with his own ideal, and pressing forward to death 
 amid opposition and danger in the achievement of a high 
 destiny, which he believed appointed for him, but at the 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 239 
 
 same time a human soul sensitive to reproach, eager for 
 appreciation, and saddened by the limitations with which 
 human nature on every hand confronted his inspirations. 
 In the same spirit, and by the same method, let this 
 assertion of the power to work miracles be examined. 
 What do the most reliable documents say, what do they 
 omit to say ? How do their statements harmonize with 
 each other ? The earliest and most authentic Christian 
 documents are conceded by scholars to be the epistles of 
 Paul. Paul is a witness of eminent credibility and respect 
 among his compeers. Born in Tarsus in Cilicia, while it 
 was a province of Rome, and by that birth entitled to the 
 consideration and privileges of a Roman citizen, he was 
 in nationality and religion a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and 
 betook himself to Jerusalem, the sacred city of his race, 
 to be brought up there at the feet of one of its most cele- 
 brated Rabbis in the strictest principles of Pharisaism. 
 He bore the name of the first king of his nation, in the 
 early period of its independence and glory, selected from 
 his own tribe of Benjamin. But he was compromising 
 and politic enough to change his name to a familiar and 
 distinguished Roman protonym, or else, when the change 
 had been made by his acquaintance, readily to adopt it. 
 He was the first considerable convert the new faith had 
 made among the class of cultivated men of the world ; 
 and to his conversion it seems fairly due, that Chris- 
 tianity did not survive save as a secondary Jewish schism. 
 When Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned to death for 
 preaching the faith of Jesus in Jerusalem, Paul, who was 
 an active leader in the violence, was called a young man, 
 but as he styles himself in his letter to Philemon, be- 
 lieved to be written in the sixty-fourth year of the era, 
 "Paul the aged," a he would hardly have been so known 
 and designated, if he had been younger than that era. 
 This would make him thirty-four or thirty-five, when he 
 assisted in the execution of Stephen, and not younger 
 than Jesus himself. Here, then, is a witness in the best 
 position to give testimony concerning the career of Jesus, 
 if Jerusalem was its theatre ; an enthusiastic, eloquent, 
 but carefully educated scholar, who has learned some- 
 thing of logic, and understands the force of an argument ; 
 
 "Phil. 9. 
 
24O OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 who is as nearly impartial as he can be. in that he was a 
 fierce partisan in succession of the Jewish and of the 
 Christian faiths, while at the same time he was thoroughly 
 imbued with such ideas, as might have been derived from 
 Roman citizenship, travel, and the study of pagan poetry 
 and philosophy. 
 
 If Jesus came to Jerusalem for the first time a few days 
 before his arrest, trial, and execution, as the narratives of 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke plainly imply, the brief excite- 
 ment, which attended those events, might all have oc- 
 curred while Paul was absent in his native province of 
 Cilicia or upon some of the extensive journeys, by which 
 he had familiarized himself with the civilized ancient 
 world. The cosmopolitan spirit manifested in his writ- 
 ings, and the comprehensive manner in which he set about 
 propagating, over wide regions extending from Arabia to 
 Spain, if not to Britain, the faith he had formerly perse- 
 cuted, show that he had learned the world, not only from 
 books, but from actual contact with its different races and 
 religions. If Paul had been then living at Jerusalem, the 
 same fanaticism, of which he makes confession, would 
 have attracted him to the judgment hall of Pilate and 
 have made his voice the loudest among those, who clam- 
 ored that Barabbas, the robber, should be released and 
 Jesus be crucified. If the apostle had on his conscience 
 the guilt of having been one of the murderers of the man, 
 for whom he came afterward to cherish such an exalted 
 opinion as his master and savior, that sensitiveness, which 
 made him recur so often to his persecution of the dis- 
 ciples, could not have been suppressed in his correspond- 
 ence. It is therefore to be believed, that Paul was not in 
 Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion ; and it is prob- 
 able — that being the only period when their two lives 
 could have touched each other — that he never saw Jesus 
 in his lifetime. 
 
 The early Christian records are quite full of a con- 
 troversy, which arose in the early Church over Paul's 
 pretension to be an apostle. The evangelical party 
 seemed to have insisted, that among disciples only twelve 
 were raised to the rank of apostleship. Only these twelve 
 were admitted to the confidences of the last supper." The 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 24I 
 
 number must be kept full, but must not be enlarged. So 
 when Judas- fell off into apostasy and suicide, the eleven 
 survivors met to fill the vacancy with solemn prayer and 
 deference to the intimations of the Holy Ghost. But they 
 are not at liberty to choose at random. The apostles were 
 the witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus, and the selec- 
 tion must be made from among those, who were his com- 
 panions from the time of the baptism of John till the 
 ascension, — a requirement which would most effectually 
 have made Paul ineligible. 11 Now then, when Paul with 
 some warmth sets forth his claim to apostleship, based 
 upon an oral commission from Jesus himself, if he had 
 been able to substantiate it by adding, that he too was a 
 witness at least of the death and resurrection of Jesus, 
 which events happened at his home in Jerusalem, — though 
 in his blindness and hatred he had refused to believe in 
 the resurrection until an apparition of Jesus had appealed 
 to his heart on the way to Damascus, — it would have 
 given him a plausible qualification for the apostolical office. 
 Still further, the stress he ever laid upon that ghostly 
 interview, and his insisting that he did not care to know 
 anything more about Jesus in the flesh, or as a living 
 person, b while showing how he had been taunted with his 
 ignorance of the person of Jesus, show also that, not hav- 
 ing aught to meet the reproach, it had a basis of truth 
 behind it. 
 
 Throughout Paul's letters there is a remarkable absence 
 of allusion to any communication received from Jesus 
 in his lifetime, or to any personal recollection of his acts 
 or words. When Paul anticipates the question : Upon 
 tuhat authority do you speak of Jesus ? Who tells you what 
 you report of him ? he invariably answers : The Spirit. 
 God has revealed it to me by the Spirit. The Spirit 
 searcheth the deep things of God. The things of God 
 knoweth no man, only the Spirit of God. I speak not 
 man's wisdom, but as the Holy Ghost teacheth. The 
 gospel I preach I received not from men, but from the 
 revelation of Jesus Christ, who called me by his grace to 
 preach him among the heathen ; so I went not up to Jeru- 
 salem to confer with the witnesses.' 1 
 
 "Acts i., 15-26. MI. Cor. v., 16. c I. Cor. ii., 10, n, 13. 
 <lGal. i., ix. 12, 17. 
 
24- OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 But Paul is absolutely silent on the subject of the mir- 
 acles, which came to be attributed to Jesus.. If Jesus, 
 living in Galilee, had done all his mighty works there, 
 and, coming to Jerusalem only to be arrested, convicted, 
 and put to death, had declined to show his miraculous 
 powers there, otherwise than by his resurrection, as the 
 Synoptic Gospels declare, Paul, whose absence from Jeru- 
 salem during the events connected with the crucifixion 
 may be reasonably conjectured, could not have had per- 
 sonal knowledge of the miracles so occurring. But how 
 can the fact be accounted for, that no rumor of these mar- 
 vellous deeds came to his ears ? How can we believe 
 that a distinct tradition of miracles had been received 
 among the more reputable disciples, as early as the time 
 of Paul's writing ? 
 
 It may be said, however, although Paul's writings con- 
 tain no hint that Jesus in his lifetime cured diseases, 
 cast out devils, of which many were possessed, walked 
 upon the sea, multiplied food, transfigured his form into 
 something angelic and divine, and in several instances 
 raised the dead, these writings everywhere attribute to 
 Jesus higher and even divine powers, which imply the 
 power to work miracles. It may be added in support of 
 this view that Paul believed in miracles, and claimed that 
 he himself had wrought them. He narrates in one of his 
 letters that he was caught up into Paradise, and heard 
 unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to 
 utter. a In vindicating his claim to be an apostle, he says 
 the signs of an apostle were wrought among his converts 
 in signs and wonders and mighty deeds. b Miracle-working 
 is on his theory indeed only one of the secondary gifts 
 of the Spirit, given to the believers in consequence of the 
 resurrection and return to heaven of the Head of the 
 Church. He even goes so far as to give a scale of valu- 
 ation of these gifts and powers in his first letter to the 
 converts at Corinth, thus : " And God hath set some in 
 the Church : first, apostles ; secondarily, prophets ; thirdly, 
 teachers ; after that miracles ; then gifts of healings, 
 helps in governments, diversities of tongues." * 
 
 all. Cor. xii., i-4. b II. Cor. xii., 12. c I. Cor. xii., 28. 
 • The writer is aware of the weighty argument which makes it nearly certain that when 
 Paul, in these and several other passages, uses the word that has been unwarrantably trans- 
 lated in our version miracles, he only refers to the charismata or gifts — rather spasmodic 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 243 
 
 The argument is that the silence of the apostle in at- 
 tributing miraculous agency to Jesus is not significant, 
 since he could not honor so dignified and sublime a per- 
 sonage as he believed Jesus to have been by imputing to 
 him powers, which Paul felt ashamed to speak of, easily 
 exercised by himself, and which among the new gifts of the 
 Church he classed as inferior to apostleship, prophecy, and 
 teaching. There is much force and pertinence in the 
 statement, when thus put. Bat let it be considered that 
 these gifts came to the world, as Paul everywhere declares, 
 under what he characterized as a new order and regime of 
 the Spirit, introduced after the vindication and glorifica- 
 tion of Jesus as Son of God ; and also that Paul, whenever 
 he speaks of the human life of Jesus, never places him 
 — as the evangel of John does — in the category of an 
 exalted and divine person signalizing his authority and 
 dignity by mighty works and miracles, but as submissive 
 to servile conditions and the shame and contempt which 
 he voluntarily assumed as a part of his service and sac- 
 rifice. In his letter to the converts at Philippi, he gives 
 this view of Jesus in his pre-existence and in his human 
 life : He being "in the form of God, thought it not robbery 
 to be equal with God ; but made himself of no reputation, 
 and took upon him the form of a servant, and became 
 obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." a This 
 role of servant and contemned person, which he says Jesus 
 assumed in being born as a man, is quite incompatible 
 with the character of a great magician commanding the 
 elements, ruling evil spirits, and suspending the processes 
 of nature. It was when God raised Jesus from the dead 
 by the working of his mighty power, that he set him at 
 his right hand in the heavens, far above all principalities 
 and power, and might and dominion, and every name in 
 this world and the world to come, and made him the head 
 of all things to the Church. 1 ' It was through his cruci- 
 fixion and resurrection that his glory came, that he ceased 
 to be the contemned servant, and became the head of the 
 regenerated world. 
 
 1 Phil, ii., 6-S. b Eph. i., 19-22. 
 
 than supernatural — of which, though he possessed them himself in an eminent degree, he 
 came to have a contemptuous estimate ; and that properly there is no claim by the apostle 
 himself that hu had uvcr wrought a miracle It is deemed proper to offer considerations inval- 
 idating the supernatural acts attributed to Jesus in his lifetime, that may fairly appeal to the 
 candor even of those who believe in apostolic miracles. 
 
244 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 In his letter to the Roman Christians, Paul declares 
 that Jesus, who by his human birth was of the family of 
 David, was declared to be the Son of God with power, 
 by the resurrection of the dead." And, in his second letter 
 to the Corinthians, Paul writes that his master suffered 
 crucifixion through weakness ; that is, the weakness inci- 
 dent to the servile condition to which he had voluntarily 
 submitted, but that he lived again by the power of God." 
 Hence, Paul everywhere and in all his writings always 
 asserts, that he preaches Christ the crucified, or rather 
 Christ the risen from the dead ; insisting not only that 
 the spiritual gifts, the rare powers, that came to the 
 Church, were the gifts of the glorified Saviour, but that 
 his own power, dignity, headship of the Church, and office 
 of judge, were obtained through the suffering of the cross ; 
 and that the abolition of death for them who believe was 
 wrought out by the death of Jesus, and confirmed by his 
 resurrection. Paul denies that he preaches Jesus the 
 moralist, or Jesus the miracle-worker, but Christ the 
 victim, submitting to crucifixion, raised above all princi- 
 palities and powers by the power of God through his 
 resurrection from the dead. It is easy to see that with 
 such a conception miracle-working — any display of divine 
 powers — breaks the harmony of the part, in which he ful- 
 fils in weakness and patience the humiliation of a chosen 
 lot of suffering and shame. 
 
 Of course it is impossible to reconcile this silence of 
 Paul with the account in the Fourth Gospel which gives 
 us a Jesus spending three years in Jerusalem and its vicin- 
 ity, and making excursions into Galilee ; holding long col- 
 loquies in the temple with the Pharisees, — the multitude 
 attending, and generally taking sides with Jesus; heal- 
 ing an impotent man ; and giving sight to one born blind, 
 in the most conspicuous way; and in the presence of the 
 assembled populace, and, srangest of all, raising Lazarus 
 from the dead before a company of respectable and influ- 
 ential Jews. Even if we believe Paul, by a prolonged 
 absence from the city, might have missed personal knowl- 
 edge of these memorable events, he could not have 
 returned without finding his adopted city full of the 
 rumor and excitement which such works would naturally 
 
 a Rom. i., 4. bn. Cor. xiii., 4. 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 245 
 
 occasion. He does know, and know vividly, of the cruci- 
 fixion, and comes enthusiastically to believe in the resur- 
 rection. Of both these events, his authentic writings are 
 full. He does not know of other resurrections, as re- 
 markable as that of Jesus, preceding his, and caused by 
 him, since his whole scheme of a resurrection gives 
 Jesus the precedence, or, as he expresses it, makes him 
 the first-fruits, makes resurrection impossible until Jesus 
 has, by dying, visited the realms of death, and brought 
 back with him from the king of death those whom he has 
 kept in the prison of the grave. a He knows nothing of 
 any miracle, or of any rank or condition of the human life 
 of Jesus, with which miracle-working would be compat- 
 ible ; and so, to such powers, he makes no allusion. 
 When Paul wrote, the biographies of Jesus were not 
 written ; what was believed concerning him was told, 
 from mouth to mouth, among his disciples. Paul insists 
 even, that the tradition of the last supper he received 
 directly from Jesus himself. b Paul, in his writings, fre- 
 quently betrays his unwillingness to acknowledge any 
 indebtedness, even to the brothers and intimate compan- 
 ions of Jesus, for knowledge of the incidents of his life 
 and principles of his doctrine, lest he should thereby de- 
 grade his apostleship by seeming to have had only a sec- 
 ond-hand and hearsay knowledge of Christ. It can hardly 
 be credited that Jesus in vision told him of the manner in 
 which the communion of bread and wine had been inaugu- 
 rated. It is, however, reasonably probable that there was 
 at the time of Paul's writing no record in any form of 
 Jesus' life and teaching, because every record, afterward 
 appearing, had recounted this ceremony of the supper. 
 
 The argument from Paul's silence concerning miracles 
 is negative, but it is significant. Here is a first-rate wit- 
 ness in the very presence of the most remarkable events 
 that history has ever recorded, and he has no word to 
 utter concerning them. Let us suppose that, ages hence, 
 a question should arise whether Napoleon had been in 
 fact a restless warrior, who had subverted governments, 
 obliterated frontiers, and filled Europe with terror and 
 bloodshed. Let us suppose, too, that of all the literature 
 of our age only the writings of Goethe should have sur- 
 
 " 1. Cor. xv., 20, 23 ; I. Thess. iv., 15-17. •> I. Cor. xi., 23. 
 
246 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 vived. How significant would be the silence of a writer, 
 who had lived in the very countries chiefly disturbed by 
 the ambitious projects of the French sovereign, or only 
 such mention of him as implied that he was a pacific 
 ruler, chiefly interested in reforming the laws and enlarg- 
 ing the liberties of his subjects ! 
 
 If the Epistles attributed respectively to Peter, James, 
 and John, were written by those Galilean companions of 
 Jesus, their omission of miracles is most remarkable. If 
 those Epistles were written by later disciples, using apos- 
 tolic names, then the first recognition of miracle-working 
 by Jesus must be carried to a period later than the apos- 
 tolic age. None of these writings speak of Jesus as a 
 worker of wonders. Peter, if the second letter attributed 
 to him be genuine, testifies to hearing the voice from 
 heaven on the mount of transfiguration. But this scene 
 was the manifestation of a power not attributed to Jesus, 
 and of which he was the subject rather than the agent. 3 
 On the whole, these writers mainly agree with Paul in 
 representing Jesus' human life as a career of humiliation, 
 and not one that was made splendid by marvellous 
 powers, and in asserting that his glory and honor came 
 to him after his resurrection. Peter, in the Epistle the 
 authenticity of which is generally admitted, speaks of 
 the glory of Christ as following his sufferings, of God 
 raising him from the dead and giving him glory, of his 
 being put to death in the flesh, but made alive by the 
 Spirit ; and asserts that, on his resurrection, he went into 
 the heavens on the right hand of God, angels and powers 
 being made subject to him. b 
 
 A reference having been made to the extant writings 
 of Paul, also to those of Peter, James, and John, compan- 
 ions and witnesses of Jesus, to learn whether he wrought 
 miracles, they give no' testimony on the subject. They 
 present a scheme of the life and office of Jesus incom- 
 patible with miracle-working. If the so-called Catholic 
 Epistles were not written by the persons to whom they 
 have been attributed, they are genuine literature of the 
 early Christian epoch ; they indicate what the earliest 
 writers considered the opinions of apostles. Who then 
 among the believers first asserted that Jesus did miracles ? 
 
 all. Pet. i., 15-18. b I. Pet. i., 11. 21; in., 18-22. 
 

 LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 247 
 
 What works so denoted did they attribute to him ? How- 
 do their statements agree with each other ? 
 
 The narratives of Matthew and Mark need not be 
 treated as distinct testimonies. Scholars differ as to 
 which was the earlier production. The most casual in- 
 spection shows that Mark's narrative is Matthew's, with 
 the discourses of Jesus left out or greatly abbreviated, or 
 that Matthew's narrative is Mark's, with the Sermon on 
 the Mount, the parables and conversations of Jesus super- 
 added, together with legends of his birth and childhood. 
 Whether Mark's story was first committed to writing, and 
 Matthew's afterward, to supply its deficiencies from a 
 more accurate memory, whether this order was reversed, 
 and Mark's Gospel was written to abbreviate the other 
 record, retaining only what was more surely and uni- 
 versally believed, or whether, as some assert, both his- 
 tories are reproductions of an earlier document that has 
 perished, are questions of secondary consequence. It is 
 enough to note that a similarity of diction and a gener- 
 ally similar order of events in the first two Gospels indi- 
 cate that both have adopted one version of the memora- 
 bilia of Jesus, widely credited among his followers at the 
 time of its publication, whenever that may have been. 
 
 In this connection, it ought to be observed that the 
 traditions of the propagandism of Paul and the chief 
 apostles, as preserved in the Acts of the Apostles and 
 the canonical Epistles, contain no allusions to any written 
 memorials of the life of Jesus. It is fairly inferrible 
 that the writing, or, at any rate, the publication of the 
 Gospels, must have been later than the time when any of 
 the canonical Epistles were written. In all modern mis- 
 sionary enterprises to propagate the gospel, even among 
 degraded and illiterate people, like the South Africans 
 and South Sea Islanders, the literary department is most 
 sedulously attended to. Years of painful study are first 
 devoted to learning the language of the barbarians, whom it 
 is proposed to convert. If they have no written language, 
 one is invented for them. The machinery of propagan- 
 dism is wrought with infinite industry, and against the 
 friction of an enormous expense, and by processes so 
 slow and painful, that only a sustained and systematized 
 enthusiasm could prosecute the task, to establish through 
 
248 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 culture an intellectual relation with the people to be 
 Christianized. The best genius of the most ardent and 
 scholarly men have found no shorter road than this to the 
 heart of the heathen. All through the long labor of over- 
 throwing a rude cultus and supplanting it with a higher 
 one, the Bible, translated into the speech of the pagan 
 people, the tract, the written and printed page, are relied 
 upon as the great agency of their conversion. 
 
 Now, there is every reason why the first disciples 
 should have taken the same mode of effort. Their task 
 was to carry the gospel of the kingdom of heaven not to 
 illiterate and heathen people, but to the enlightened 
 Greeks, who, in that period, were at the zenith of their 
 culture, and who had schools and libraries in Egypt, Syria, 
 Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. The gospel narratives 
 were written in Greek, then the language of the civilized 
 world. If the apostles possessed them, they would have 
 used them to confirm their testimony of Jesus. They 
 would have used them as the missionary and revivalist 
 use them now, as effective instruments to arouse and 
 impress the conscience of their auditors, to edify the 
 believers under their persecutions, and as the ritual of 
 their devotional services. We have their hortatory letters 
 to the churches ; we have in the Acts fragments of their 
 occasional discourses ; and in neither is there any men- 
 tion of the Gospels, though in both, the old scriptures are 
 used as frequently, as copiously, and for the same rhetori- 
 cal purposes as in modern preaching. We even find Paul, 
 the philosopher and scholar, when he writes to Christian 
 communities, in such regions as Rome, Galatia, and Cor- 
 inth, drawing all his doctrines and arguments from the 
 Bible of a religion which he believed Christianity had 
 supplanted, and keeping the minds of his heathen con- 
 verts occupied with the narrow discipline, in which Jeho- 
 vah had trained the Jews. It thus appears, that, if the 
 canonical Gospels or any of them were written in the 
 lifetime of Paul, he studiously withheld from them the 
 sanction of his name. 
 
 All this tends to discredit in advance the testimony of 
 the evangelists upon the matter of the miracles. We find 
 the great and responsible men in the Christian movement 
 silent, if not hostile, toward the claim; and we have to 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 249 
 
 deal with unknown writers, whom neither Jesus nor his 
 apostles are known to have commissioned. Long after 
 the events they record, on their own account, and under 
 none of the responsibility that accompanies publication 
 under a reputable name, these writers undertake to give 
 a statement, not of actual occurrences, but of what "is 
 surely believed''' among the adherents of a new faith. 
 Luke, in the introductory note to his Gospel, confesses 
 such motive and method of writing. The authority of 
 a history of the events of our own century would be 
 properly estimated upon a scale like this. First, an his- 
 torian of t world-wide celebrity, like Macaulay, Niebuhr, or 
 Prescott, wrote and published it thirty years ago ; it has 
 been republished, after being subjected to the criticism of 
 scholars for the intervening period. This would be called 
 historical evidence of prime character. Second, it was 
 written anonymously, as long ago, but published in a most 
 respectable and trustworthy review, is probable in itself, 
 and has never been contradicted. This would be called 
 secondary historical evidence. Third, it was written 
 anonymously, as a private letter ; it is full of statements 
 intrinsically improbable ; and its authorship has never 
 been ascertained. What would be the worth of the last- 
 named testimony ? 
 
 The story of the miracle-working begins with the 
 account of the opening of the public ministry of Jesus, 
 and Matthew tells that he went about all Galilee, healing 
 all manner of sickness, and all manner of disease among 
 the people ; and that they brought unto him all sick 
 people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, 
 and those which were possessed with devils, and those 
 who were lunatic, and those that had . the palsy, and 
 he healed them.' 1 Taken narrowly and literally, this 
 implies a healing of all the disorders and diseases of the 
 province of Galilee, then densely peopled. But the nar- 
 rative, written in an animated style, and with Oriental 
 exaggeration characteristic of the age and country, is not 
 to be so treated. It does, however, fairly imply that 
 Jesus visited all parts of Galilee, — not to say every house 
 or even every hamlet, — that, to all the principal centres 
 of its population, he came, not only as a preacher of 
 
250 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the kingdom of heaven, but as a healer of the sick, 
 that there were brought to him, if not literally, all sick 
 and disabled persons, yet some of all kinds of such ; and 
 that as many as were brought he healed. Less than 
 this cannot be fairly implied, if indeed the reader is 
 at liberty to find any definite statement in the language. 
 
 Later on, the same writer gives us the picture of 
 one day's life of Jesus in Galilee, in which by a word he 
 cleansed a leprous man, cast out an evil spirit from the 
 servant of a Roman centurion, cured Peter's wife's mother 
 of a fever by a touch of his hand, and restored to sanity 
 and healed many persons brought to him in the, evening. 
 Afterward, he stilled a dangerous tempest on the sea of 
 Galilee, and, landing upon the pagan side, relieved two 
 men tormented with fierce devils, that had made them 
 a terror to the neighborhoods The sequel of the last- 
 named miracle shows how national prejudices may some- 
 times intrude themselves into the most serious narrative. 
 We readily detect a popular origin — the opportunity of 
 some local humorist to make mirth for his countrymen, 
 at the unclean practices of the barbarians of the other 
 side — in the consignment of the expelled demons to the 
 herd of swine. 
 
 Returning among his own countrymen, Jesus by a 
 command made a palsied and bed-ridden man rise and 
 walk, cured with a touch of his garment a woman of a 
 disease of twelve years' standing, and, taking by the hand 
 a certain ruler's daughter, who was supposed to have just 
 died, brought her to life. Afterward, — the writer gives 
 no chronology, and very rarely a locality, — he is evidently 
 recounting traditions, of which no detail is preserved, — 
 Jesus causes two blind men to see, and a dumb man 
 to speak, or, as the writer describes it, the man being pos- 
 sessed with the devil of dumbness, Jesus casts out the 
 devil, when the man, no longer obstructed, speaks like 
 other men. Then there follows a still more sweeping 
 assertion of miracles, done in the mass, in these words : 
 " Jesus went through all the cities and villages, healing 
 every sickness and every disease among the people." b 
 Still, it is not asserted that he healed every sick and 
 diseased man in all the cities and villages ; but it is fairly 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 25 1 
 
 implied that, going into all the cities and villages, he 
 healed every kind of sickness : there was no prevalent 
 sickness, of which he did not effect a cure. 
 
 After some time, — we are not told how long, — Jesus 
 went into their synagogue on the Sabbath, — we are not 
 told in what country or city, — and after some hesitation 
 on account of the Pharisees, who were watching him, 
 he restored to vigor the withered arm of a palsied man. 
 Alarmed at the hostility, which thereupon beset him, he 
 withdrew, — we are not told whither, — and healed all the 
 sick among the multitudes, that followed him. a It is then 
 related, that he cast out a devil, which had afflicted a 
 man with blindness and dumbness, so that he both spake 
 and saw. 1 ' 
 
 When certain scribes and Pharisees asked him to do a 
 miracle, he told them that the only miracle he should 
 show them was the miracle of rising from the grave after 
 being buried three days and three nights. But notwith- 
 standing this refusal, it is again told that, pitying the 
 multitudes who followed him to a desert place, he healed 
 the sick among them, and with but five loaves and two 
 fishes fed to repletion five thousand men with their 
 accompanying women and children/ His disciples re- 
 turned across the lake from this desert place, leaving 
 Jesus alone on a mountain ; and, in the middle of the 
 night, he, walking on the sea, came to them as they were 
 struggling with a storm, and at once it fell calm. 6 Then 
 he went into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and there 
 exorcised a devil possessing the daughter of a Canaanitish 
 woman, and healed those that were lame, blind, dumb, 
 maimed, and many others brought to.him by great multi- 
 tudes of people. There, too, he repeated for the benefit 
 of a crowd of four thousand — women and children not 
 counted — the miraculous multiplication of food. £ Again, 
 he refuses to exhibit his powers to scribes and Pharisees, 
 denounces them as a wicked and adulterous generation, 
 and says, no sign shall be given them but the sign of the 
 prophet Jonah, whose burial in the whale for a season, to 
 be returned alive, he will not long thereafter re-enact. B 
 The sequel tells of his transfiguration on the mountain 
 
 ; 'Matt xii., ^15. b Matt, xii., aa. c Matt, xii., 38-40. <l Matt, xiv., 14-21. 
 "Matt, xiv., 23-32. f Matt, xv., 21-39. gMatt. xvi., 4. 
 
252 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 and the apparition of the two greatest of the Hebrew- 
 prophets doing him homage;" and again of his casting out 
 a devil that had baffled the skill of the disciples, who 
 seem strangely to have lost the powers conferred on 
 them, when sent out to preach the kingdom of heaven/' 
 As the career of Jesus goes on, he seems to lose control 
 of the unseen powers. His works of healing and dispos- 
 session seem to grow less frequent ; and his teachings, 
 parables, exhortations, prognostications of the future, and 
 expositions of the polity of the kingdom of heaven fill a 
 larger place in his life. 
 
 Still upon the multitudes, who follow him out of Galilee 
 as far as the region opposite Judea beyond the Jordan, he 
 exercises his powers of healing, and gives sight to two 
 blind men, who sat by the road as he came out of Jericho, 
 followed by his Galilean disciples bound to Jerusalem. 11 
 
 Once arrived in the city, all miracle-working ceases. 
 The scribes and Pharisees are the rulers of Church and 
 State ; and before them, even in Galilee, he had resolutely, 
 and with contumelious language, refused to show a sign 
 from heaven. The only sign he will do among them is 
 the Jonas-sign of the resurrection. True, Matthew says, 
 the blind and lame came to him in the temple, and he 
 healed them. But Mark and Luke do not confirm the 
 statement. Such exhibitions of power by Jesus would 
 have been inconsistent with his avowed purpose not to 
 show any sign, and with his determination to bring about 
 his own arrest, condemnation, and death, which could only 
 be effected by abstaining from any exhibitions of power, 
 that might convince or overawe his enemies. 
 
 This is the combined testimony of Matthew and Mark 
 concerning the thaumaturgic powers of Jesus. It is to 
 be remarked, that the power is not universal or uni- 
 form. Jesus is made himself to say that he did not exer- 
 cise it arbitrarily, but in such places and upon such 
 subjects as God pleased. There was, he declared, the 
 same restriction of the wonderful power manifested of old 
 by the prophets Elijah and Elisha. He gave this as 
 a reason why he could not do in Nazareth 1 the mighty 
 works reported done in Capernaum. The narrator in 
 
 a Matt, xvii., i-S. bMatt. xvii., 14-21. cMatt. xix., i, 2. 
 
 <1 Matt, xx., 29-34. >■ Matt, xxi., 14. f Luke i v., 23-27. 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 253 
 
 each of the first two Gospels asserts that miracle-working 
 in Nazareth was obstructed by lack of faith on the part of 
 his fellow-townsmen. a But, on the other hand, for what 
 end, we are constrained to ask, were these marvellous 
 powers given ? Clearly, the writer answers that the 
 people to whom Jesus was sent should believe that he 
 was the commissioned messenger of God. And Jesus 
 himself is made to avow this object, when, in the hearing 
 of the messengers from John, he appealed to the cures 
 he had effected, to the diseased persons restored to health 
 and wholeness, and said : As to who I am, let works like 
 these declare. 1 ' Again, in reproaching Capernaum, Cho- 
 razin, and Bethsaida, wherein most of his mighty works 
 had been done, for not believing, he is made to admit that 
 such mighty works were done to produce belief. 
 
 This difficulty then confronts us. Here is a person- 
 age appearing in an obscure corner of an outlying prov- 
 ince of a subject and despised country, who, having 
 passed his youth in utter seclusion, conceives that he is 
 a prophet, a divine messenger, the heir of an everlasting 
 kingdom, the early establishment of which is to overthrow 
 all earthly kingdoms, and bring the physical universe 
 itself to an end; and he begins in his early manhood to 
 proclaim a new era, and to ask of men their allegiance, 
 the reward of which shall be their everlasting salvation, 
 the refusal of which shall be their speedy and miserable 
 destruction. He claims that he is accredited by super- 
 natural gifts of healing, and the power of suspending, by 
 his will and word, the ordinary courses of nature. Now, 
 to make men believe, it is clearly requisite, according to 
 conceptions imputed to him in these narratives, that he 
 should exhibit these powers. And yet the reverse condi- 
 tion is exacted. He is made to say that he will not ex- 
 hibit these powers, unless men will first believe that he 
 can.' 1 His biographer declares even, that he could not do 
 miracles in Nazareth because of the unbelief of his neigh- 
 bors. Clearly, this was the very people upon whom the 
 miracle-working should have been essayed, in order that 
 they might believe. A supernatural effort is superfluous, 
 where faith, the great purpose of supernatural demonstra- 
 tion, has already been produced. 
 
 "Matt, xiii., 58. '> Matt, xi., 4, 5. c Matt, xi., 20-23. 
 <1 Matt, via., 10, 13; ix., 28,29; xvii., 20. 
 
254 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Again, the message of Jesus was first to the Jewish 
 people, to the scribes and Pharisees, who, as he admitted, 
 sitting in Moses' seat, represented the will and thought of 
 the nation/ 1 I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of 
 Israel, he said. If Chorazin ought to have believed, 
 because mighty works were done in it, the converse is 
 true ; and mighty works, if they tend to produce belief, as 
 he told John's followers, ought to have been done in 
 every city where he desired men to believe. Only char- 
 latans and impostors ask for faith beforehand. The dis- 
 coverer of some occult law of nature, some striking result 
 of chemical experiment, says rather : I do not ask you to 
 believe this in advance. I ask you to disbelieve it, since 
 it is in itself ostensibly impossible and incredible ; but I 
 shall do it in the most open way before you, and I leave 
 it to you to say, whether or not you can accept it as a fact 
 and conform your preconceptions to it. Why, then, of all 
 classes, did he refuse to show a sign from heaven to the 
 scribes and Pharisees ? Are not the Jews first, through 
 their authorized guides and masters, to be proffered the 
 grace of the great salvation ? If they are unbelievers, 
 why should not their unbelief be assailed by the divine 
 power, given for that purpose ? Why, like John the Bap- 
 tist, proscribe them in advance, coming to the baptism of 
 repentance, and refuse to exhibit before them what is 
 so lavishly displayed before the multitudes, who throng 
 around the heavenly messenger in the desert, and not 
 withheld even from the dogs of heathen that feed on the 
 crumbs which the guests of Israel drop from the table ? 
 
 This insisting upon faith in Jesus as Messiah and 
 Saviour, everywhere injected into these gospel narratives, 
 carries us forward beyond the age of Jesus and his apos- 
 tles to the period of propagandism of the new religion, 
 to the long and ardent struggle which the enthusiasm 
 of a young faith maintained with the philosophy, culture, 
 conservatism, sordidness, and sensuality of the old world. 
 In this struggle, faith was everything. Give in your ad- 
 hesion to the new ideas, own Jesus as master, these 
 were the frantic appeals of the devotees to the frivolity 
 and indifference that abounded. " Every spirit," wrote 
 the pseudo-John, " that confesseth that Jesus Christ is 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 255 
 
 come in the flesh is of God " ; and again he asks, — the 
 coarseness of his language betraying the dogmatic fierce- 
 ness of his spirit, — " Who is a liar, but he that denieth 
 that Jesus is the Christ ? " Whoever believeth that Jesus 
 is the Christ is born of God. a Paul, too, wrote : No man 
 can say tJtat Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost ; and 
 Paul seems to have composed two of his Epistles to prove 
 that faith is a substitute for virtue, and that all virtue is 
 the fruit of faith. So great, in the struggle to inaugurate 
 a new creed, were the eagerness and enthusiasm of its 
 apostles. 
 
 How does Luke, the other witness, tell the story of 
 the miracle-working ? Luke says : Jesus returned in the 
 power of the Spirit into Galilee from the wilderness of 
 Jordan, and teaching in the synagogues was glorified of 
 all men, and a fame of him went through all the region. b 
 This indicates a fame and honor springing rather from 
 his preaching than from miracles. The utter chronologi- 
 cal confusion, in which the incidents of Jesus' career are 
 told by Luke, is indicated by the statement that, coming 
 to his own city Nazareth, he is importuned by his neigh- 
 bors to do in their midst the works they had heard of 
 as done in Capernaum, no such works having as yet 
 been recounted, as done anywhere in Galilee. Return- 
 ing afterward to Capernaum, he casts out an unclean 
 devil from one possessed ; and the people are amazed, 
 as they would not have been, if many such works had 
 been before done among them, so that the rumor of them 
 had spread to Nazareth. 11 He also cured Peter's wife's 
 mother ill of fever. u In the evening, all the families that 
 had sick brought them to him, and he healed them by a 
 touch. f Devils also came out of many invoking him as 
 the Son of God.' Afterwards, going into Peter's ship, he 
 directed where the net should be cast, and so many fish 
 were taken that they filled not only that, but a companion 
 ship nearly to sinking. This marvel so impressed Peter 
 and probably his brother Andrew, and the two sons of 
 Zebedee, James, and John that they left their calling to 
 become his disciples.' 1 In a certain city, he cleansed a 
 
 * I. John iv. ( 2 ; ii., 22 ; v., 1. b Luke iv., 14, 15. c Luke iv., 23. 
 
 <* Luke iv., 31, 33. c Luke i v., 38, 39. fLukeiv.,40. 
 
 V, Luke iv., 41. Ii Luke v., 3-9, 10, 11. 
 
256 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 leprous sufferer ; and then multitudes were brought to him 
 to be cured of their infirmities. On a certain other day, 
 he restored vigor to a palsied man brought to him on a 
 bed, and let down through the tiling of the roof." After- 
 ward, on the Sabbath, he healed a man with a withered 
 hand; 1 ' and, coming down from a mountain, whither he 
 had gone to pray, a great multitude of people out of all 
 Judea and Jerusalem, and from the sea-coast of Tyre and 
 Sidon, came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases, 
 and they, as well as all vexed with unclean spirits, were 
 healed. Virtue went out from him, and healed them all. 
 It was then — it is not told where — that he addressed, not 
 to the multitude, but to his disciples, that part of the 
 Sermon on the Mount that Luke has recorded. 
 
 Coming again to Capernaum, he cures the servant of a 
 Roman centurion by a word, without visiting him ; d and 
 the day after stops a burial procession, and restores alive 
 to his mother in the city of Nain her only son, who was 
 being borne to burial. The rumor of this great work 
 went through all Judea and the region round about. 6 It 
 is then told that, in crossing the lake in a ship, on which 
 were the disciples and Jesus, who had fallen asleep, a 
 great storm of wind arose ; the ship took in water and 
 was near foundering, when Jesus awoke, rebuked the 
 winds and a calm ensued. f Arrived at the country of the 
 Gadarenes, he commands the horde of devils to go into 
 the herd of swine, and they rushed to the lake and were 
 drowned. 8 He afterward returned to the Galilean side, 
 and called to life the young daughter of the ruler Jairus, who 
 was supposed to have died ; and healed a diseased woman 
 by the touch of his garment.' 1 Luke next tells of the 
 feeding of five thousand people upon five loaves and 
 two fishes, of the story of the transfiguration, and of 
 the casting out of a fierce devil from a child. 1 Then fol- 
 lows the casting out of a dumb devil in the presence of 
 the Pharisees, and their imputation to him of a league 
 with the chief of devils, with his crushing reply. j It is 
 afterwards told that the multitude pressed him to show a 
 sign, and that he told them they were an evil generation, 
 
 a Luke v., 12-15, 18-26. 1> Luke vi., 6-10. c Luke vi., 17-19. d Luke vii., 1-10. 
 
 c Luke vii., 11-18. f Luke viii., 22-25. S Luke viii., 26-33. 1> Luke viii., 40-56. 
 
 i Luke ix., 10-17, 28-36, 38-42. J Luke xi.,.14,26. 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 257 
 
 to whom no sign should be given, but the sign of the 
 prophet Jonas, raised to life from the belly of the whale, 
 as he himself would be from the bowels of the earth. a 
 After many chapters of teaching and parable, another 
 work of healing is ascribed to Jesus upon a woman bowed 
 together with a spirit of infirmity, so that she could in 
 no wise lift up herself. b More and more the marvellous 
 powers disappear, and the incidents that befall the great 
 Prophet fall into the sphere of probability. Still a drop- 
 sical patient is healed upon the Sabbath ; c on the way to 
 Jerusalem, in a certain city, it may have been in Galilee, 
 it may have been in Samaria, ten lepers are cleansed, but 
 one of whom had the grace to return to give thanks ; d 
 and a blind man, who begged by the wayside, as he 
 approached Jericho, is restored to sight. But with this 
 last effort the superhuman power is apparently suspended, 
 and, resuming the weakness of human nature, he yields 
 himself to the malice of his enemies. 
 
 How is this testimony of miracles to be treated ? If it 
 is the testimony of God, or of men inspired, informed, or 
 directed by Him, it is to be reverently believed. But it 
 must be so far subjected to rational criticism, as to deter- 
 mine whether it is to be so regarded. Both narrators 
 agree in these general statements, that all the mighty 
 works or miracles which they impute to Jesus, with the 
 exception of restoring sight to a beggar, or two beggars 
 in the environs of Jericho, were done by him in Galilee, 
 and in the countries adjoining that province, eastward 
 across the Jordan and Sea of Galilee, westward in the 
 coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and southward in the province 
 of Samaria. They both leave us to believe that the 
 miracle-working power either left Jesus or was restrained 
 by him, after he left his home in Galilee, and betook him- 
 self to Jerusalem, where, after his arrival, his arrest, trial, 
 and execution speedily followed each other. Both assert 
 that, while still in Galilee, he declined showing his mirac- 
 ulous power in the presence of scribes and Pharisees, and 
 again declined, after he had come to Jerusalem, in each 
 instance alleging that all the sign he would show to 
 them was the sign of his resurrection after being buried 
 
 a Luke xi., 2<j, 30. t> I.ukt: xiii., 10—13. ° Luke xiv., 2-4. 
 
 'I Luke xvii., 11-19. eLuke xviii., 35-43. 
 
258 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 three days and three nights. Both insist that prelimi- 
 nary faith was a favorable condition of successful miracle- 
 working : and that confirmed disbelief in his power would 
 in many cases even totally counteract, at least, his moral 
 power to accomplish a miracle. 
 
 Moreover the two narrators agree in the affirmation that 
 in his native province of Galilee, Jesus visited all the prin- 
 cipal centres of population, and — to take their language 
 literally — every city and village, and healed and relieved, 
 if not all sick, lame, maimed, and mentally deranged per- 
 sons, all that were brought to him in all the cities and 
 villages. As both writers assert that great multitudes 
 followed him, and that the fame of him filled all the prov- 
 ince and all Syria, they leave it to be inferred that all or 
 nearly all the persons suffering infirmities in Galilee, 
 were first or last brought to him, and were relieved ; 
 since all who believed in his power, and many who did 
 not, would not hesitate to avail themselves of it, when it 
 was so easy of access, and so uniformly efficacious. 
 
 When it comes to details there are discrepancies. Part 
 of these may be accounted for by the consideration that 
 each, besides special cases, gives a general, comprehen- 
 sive statement of cures and restorations, of which no de- 
 tails are given, while in selecting some to be more fully 
 described, Matthew chooses certain instances, and Luke 
 selects different ones. Thus Matthew tells of one leper 
 being cleansed, of whom Luke makes no mention, but 
 makes amends by telling of ten lepers cleansed, which 
 Matthew fails to report. Luke affirms that four chief 
 disciples were won by a marvellous draft of fishes, which 
 would seem to have given the successful fishers a new 
 zest for their calling ; while Matthew says, Jesus found 
 the eager disciples sitting listless on the shore mending 
 their nets, and that they gladly left a precarious business 
 to become fishers of men. Both tell of the healing of the 
 centurion's servant, with such agreeing details, that it is 
 an evident purpose to describe the same transaction ; but 
 Matthew says the centurion came himself with deferential 
 courtesy to solicit Jesus' aid, while Luke insists that, in 
 the first instance, the centurion sent elders of the Jews to 
 procure the attendance of Jesus, and, growing impatient, 
 sent friends to say it was not worth his trouble to visit 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 259 
 
 the patient, but that he might speak a word that would 
 heal the servant, giving as a reason for such suggestion 
 what is meaningless as told by Matthew, " I, too, am a 
 man of authority, and when I speak to my soldiers, 
 they do what I bid." Luke is silent concerning the mi- 
 raculous cures attributed to Jesus in the vicinity of Tyre 
 and Sidon, but there was a national feeling, and a theory 
 of the blessings of the gospel being offered only to Jews 
 at the first, which might account for the omission. 
 
 But there are variances not so easily explained as 
 these. Thus Matthew says in the country of the Gada- 
 renes, Jesus was met by two men possessed with devils 
 exceeding fierce, while Luke, evidently occupied with the 
 same tradition, says there was but one man so possessed. 
 Luke tells of the miracle of the five loaves and two fishes 
 feeding the five thousand people, but Matthew tells that 
 incident, and says that it was repeated as to four thousand 
 people not long afterward. Matthew says Jesus, having 
 absented himself for several hours from his disciples, 
 came to them at night, walking upon the sea, while Luke, 
 who gives with great detail the stilling of the storm, does 
 not mention this marvel. Both writers undertake to re- 
 count the last of the miracles, but Matthew says that it 
 was restoring sight to two blind beggars, after Jesus and 
 his company had left Jericho journeying to Jerusalem; 
 Luke says it was the cure of one blind beggar sitting by 
 the wayside before he entered Jericho. Finally, Mat- 
 thew, who tells — as both tell — with detail of place and 
 time the healing of the centurion's servant in Capernaum, 
 wholly ignores the stupendous work wrought by Jesus 
 the very next day in the neighboring city of Nain, in rais- 
 ing from his bier alive a young man, son of a widow, 
 whose corpse was being carried to burial, — a miracle which 
 Luke says brought fear upon all the people, who declared 
 that "a great prophet had arisen among them, and that 
 God had visited his people." When an event happens, it 
 draws with it its natural and usual concomitant circum- 
 stances. Accordingly, Luke goes on to say that the 
 rumor of this remarkable achievement went through all 
 Judea, and throughout all the region round about. It 
 could not have well been otherwise. In no age, among 
 no people, in no quarter of the world, could a dead man be 
 
200 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 raised from his bier and presented alive to his rejoicing 
 friends without creating a profound admiration for the 
 deed, and an awful reverence for its author. The biogra- 
 pher says also, that it was this crowning exhibition of su- 
 perhuman power by Jesus which arrested the attention 
 of John the Baptist, and suggested to him that the 
 Messiah, whom he believed to be near his coming, must 
 be this worker of wonders. Why does Matthew omit all 
 mention of a miracle in which the fame of Jesus culmi- 
 nated, which caused his countrymen to accept him as a 
 great prophet, and gained John's weighty adhesion to 
 him, as to him that was to come ; which led to his own 
 reluctant assumption of the Messiahship, and so precip- 
 itated the crisis of his fate ? The omission of such an 
 incident in the career of Jesus by a writer evidently un- 
 dertaking to tell the whole story, and bringing us indeed 
 to the very occasion and day, when this thing is said to 
 have occurred, throws the greatest doubt upon its 
 actuality. 
 
 Dr. Paley says : — 
 
 I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the under- 
 standing than to reject the substance of a story by means of some 
 diversity in the circumstances with which it is related. The usual 
 character of human testimony is substantial truth tinder circum- 
 stantial variety. This is what the daily experience of courts of 
 justice teaches. When accounts of a transaction come from the 
 mouths of different witnesses, it is seldom that it is not possible to 
 pick out apparent or real inconsistencies between them. 
 
 Conceding to its full extent the principle enunciated 
 by Paley, and by him appealed to, to support the credibil- 
 ity of the New Testament writers, it is obvious that it is 
 a rule that he applies only to human testimony. The 
 variance in circumstances accompanying a fact, which 
 different witnesses report substantially alike, is usually 
 due to the natural defects of the human understanding. 
 The rule cannot be pleaded to excuse the variance in two 
 different divine oracles. To the divine mind, however 
 manifested, we attribute entire integrity, complete knowl- 
 edge. We always speak of the infinite intelligence as 
 something not subject to the limitations and errors of the 
 finite intelligence. So that very rule, which Dr. Paley 
 lays down, concedes all that the sceptical critic can ask, 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 26 1 
 
 in conceding that Matthew and Luke are to be treated 
 like ordinary men giving their testimony upon knowledge 
 acquired by the defective and imperfect faculties of mere, 
 unaided human understanding. When it is asked upon 
 what authority are we to believe that Jesus of Nazareth 
 wrought miracles, we are only told that two persons of 
 common intelligence, unknown to us, have so declared in 
 writings to which they have put their respective names. 
 
 Conceding now, that whether two men among the Gad- 
 arenes were dispossessed of devils, or only one ; whether 
 two blind beggars in the vicinity of Jericho were restored 
 to sight, or only one, are mere circumstances, which dif- 
 ferent truthful witnesses might observe, remember, and 
 report differently, the divine mind, the spirit of truth, an 
 inspiration of God, could not and would not report such 
 circumstances incorrectly. But here is not a variance in 
 circumstances, but a variance in the substantial fact, that 
 we have to deal with. If one witness should declare in 
 court that Judas Iscariot in the vicinity of Jericho killed 
 and robbed a travelling Samaritan, and another witness, 
 being afterwards sworn, should testify that the accused 
 killed and robbed at the same time and place two Samari- 
 tans, it would be held, that there was such a variance in 
 the substance of the corpus delicti, that it could not be 
 considered as proved by such evidence. One of the 
 modes of protecting innocent persons against the malice 
 of false accusations is to seclude the witnesses, and draw 
 each in turn into a detail of circumstances, which it is 
 hardly possible for two different imaginations to fabri- 
 cate alike, and the rule applied in courts of justice is, that 
 where several witnesses bear testimony to the same 
 transaction, and concur in their statement of a series 
 of circumstances, and the order in which they occur, such 
 coincidences exclude all apprehension of mere chance or 
 accident, and can be accounted for only by one of two 
 suppositions : either the testimony is true, or the coinci- 
 dences are the result of concert and conspiracy. We 
 are but following the line of argument by which the 
 credibility of events connected with the life of Jesus is 
 supported by the most distinguished champion of the 
 Christian faith, when we decide that the evidence of the 
 delists is to be treated exactly like human evidence. 
 
262 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 The view already taken of the Fourth Gospel prevents 
 its being considered a third and independent testimony to 
 the miracles. If that work is, for the reasons heretofore 
 set forth, to be regarded as a legitimate literary fiction, 
 the purpose of which was not to give a history of the acts 
 and conversations of Jesus, but to develop in a vivid dra- 
 matic form the conceptions of his ideas and office to 
 which the more advanced and philosophical believers had 
 arrived in the age when it was written, then the writer 
 was not obliged by the rules of his art to confine himself 
 to the authentic facts of the life of Jesus. He could use 
 those facts, when he found them subservient to his didac- 
 tic purpose. He could imagine kindred and other facts 
 that would best harmonize with the symmetry of his sub- 
 ject, and make the life of Jesus realize the ideal concep- 
 tion he wished to present. Thus Shakspeare, in dealing 
 with Henry the Fourth, or Richard the Third, avails him- 
 self of the known prominent events, like the great battles, 
 the great trials and executions, and follows history 
 mainly in his dramatis personis ; but he puts a purpose 
 and a meaning into plots and projects, far more heroic 
 and poetic than the dull facts. He brings the sharp re- 
 trospect of a more critical later age to vivify and inform 
 the conduct of the past, and injects into the minds of 
 kings and courtiers the consciousness, which they did not 
 have, of the relation of their struggles and intrigues with 
 the development of English character and of English civ- 
 ilization. So the Johannic dramatist does not intend to 
 make any new demands upon the credulity of the Church. 
 It is already believed that Jesus rose himself from the 
 dead, and that, in one or two instances, he had restored 
 the dead to life. The author wishing to present the doc- 
 trine of the resurrection, as it had come to be held in 
 philosophic schools of the new faith, does it dramati- 
 cally, rather than metaphysically. There was a Mary and 
 Martha whom Jesus knew, whose names tradition had 
 preserved. They had lived at Bethany. Jesus had 
 lodged with them, when in daily peril of his enemies in 
 Jerusalem, during those last days of his life. The dram- 
 atist will have a brother in this family. He graphically 
 depicts their domestic life, homely, pleasant, but thor- 
 oughly respectable. He brings Jesus to them with their 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 263 
 
 other most eminent and reputable friends. It is the 
 pathos of fiction that death can be made to visit the 
 creations of our fancy. Wishing to unfold the mysteries 
 of the resurrection, he lets Jesus do it with touching elo- 
 quence over the grave whence Lazarus is summoned to 
 return to his dim and unreal life. 
 
 Jesus did no miracles in the temple or even in Jerusa- 
 lem, but he had elsewhere, and frequently restored sight 
 to the blind. Keeping up the great controversial debate, 
 of which all the apostolic writings are full, between the 
 hard and uncompromising Mosaic monotheism, and the 
 new claim that God had a son, that there are two, if not 
 three deities, and trying to find in the old theology some 
 implication or foreshadowing of the new, the writer enli- 
 vens the argument with marvels kindred to those already 
 believed. He has a blind man cured in the temple, and 
 makes it the occasion of a serious appeal to the Jews to 
 recognize in him, to whom God appoints such works, one 
 sent and commissioned by Jehovah. As the dramatic 
 English kings of Shakspeare have crowded out the his- 
 toric, and stand forever in the grand attitudes in which 
 his genius placed them, so the dramatic Jesus of John has 
 eclipsed the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, and is en- 
 shrined in the reverence and affection of Christian hearts. 
 
 Those, however, who accept John's story as history 
 have to reconcile, as they can, the entirely different 
 version of miracle-working which he gives. Not only is 
 no confirmation given by him of the general healing of all 
 sickness, and all disease among the people of every city 
 and village of Galilee, of the curing of all the diseased 
 among the multitudes that thronged around him from 
 that province, from Judea, and the region beyond Jordan, 
 of the great fame of such great works, that filled all 
 Syria, so that the people at least of Galilee believed him 
 to be a great prophet, but John asserts that Jesus did 
 but two miracles in all in Galilee. 11 John names in fact 
 two others; 1 ' but he asserts that the principal and great 
 miracles were done in Judea and Jerusalem. He dis- 
 closes that, comparatively late in the public career of 
 Jesus as a prophet, his own brothers did not believe on 
 him,' and that the people of Nazareth were only induced 
 
 n John ii., 1 1 ; iv., 54. b John vi., 5-14, 17-21. John vii. , 5 ; Markui.,21. 
 
264 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to accept him, after the report of the miracles had come to 
 them from people who came from Jerusalem and Judea. 1 
 
 In a work of purposed and avowed fiction, such depart- 
 ure from the historic tradition is of no significance. The 
 only historic weight to be given to the Johannic narrative 
 is that, at the time when the believers came generally 
 to accept its statements as authentic, whether that was 
 during the second century or still later, there was a tradi- 
 tion of the miracles entirely inconsistent with the earlier 
 tradition. If the so-called John declared that but four 
 comparatively insignificant miracles were done in any 
 other province than Judea, and no others ; and Matthew 
 and Luke, or writers so called, with equal positiveness 
 assert that no miracles were done in Judea, and that 
 Jesus refused, on being solicited, even to attempt them, 
 the testimony can only be reconciled by believing that 
 both were either mistaken in saying that miracles were 
 performed anywhere, or mistaken in denying that they 
 were not performed in both regions where Jesus is known 
 to have lived or visited. In such contradiction, it is obvi- 
 ous that we are obliged to take that alternative which is 
 most probable and most consonant with human experience. 
 
 Considering the testimony of the evangelists as mere 
 human testimony, we find both writers evidently groping 
 among popular beliefs vague and uncertain and burdened 
 with few details of time and place. It was, they say, in a 
 certain city, at a time after some other time, itself not 
 given, and their sequences of events by no means corre- 
 spond to each other. The believers had been taught and 
 they believed that Jesus had raised himself from the dead, 
 and ascended to heaven. They fully accepted him as a 
 superhuman person. One by one, the marvellous feats of 
 curing, of walking on the sea, of creating food, of raising 
 the dead began to be told and believed by obscure parti- 
 sans of the new faith, who already had all the elements of 
 faith in miracles, to wit : first, a belief that they had been 
 wrought for and by the great patriarchs and prophets of 
 their nation ; second, a belief that Jesus was of superior 
 rank to the greatest of the patriarchs and prophets. The 
 apostles, including the sagacious and cultivated Paul, had 
 all died, else they would have contradicted this prolific 
 
 > John iv., .(5. 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 265 
 
 gossip, — contradicted it as inconsistent with their own 
 evident conception of the subject and servile condition of 
 Jesus' human life. It grew and diverged with the telling, 
 so that, when, after the apostolic age, the annalists under- 
 took to write for purely personal reasons, as so-called 
 Luke did for the information of some candid pagan friend, 
 they wrote not as historians, not under the stress and re- 
 sponsibility which accompanies authorship, but to tell in 
 a vivid and striking manner what was believed at the time 
 among the Christians. 
 
 What two or three persons nearly simultaneously un- 
 dertook, many others copied. The age of action had 
 passed ; the novelty of faith had been lost ; the sharp 
 edge of persecution and public obloquy that confronted 
 discipleship had gone by. It was not disreputable, nor 
 greatly dangerous to be a follower of Jesus ; and, in the 
 quiet that succeeded the martyr age of the new religion, 
 a public sentiment had formed itself, that stimulated and 
 demanded literary expression. The poets, the story- 
 tellers, the pamphleteers, began to moralize upon the com- 
 pleted epoch, and to describe it, as they never do and 
 never can, while the agony of an epoch is just upon 
 them. So that not only these Gospels, which the Church 
 has cherished, were produced, but a whole swarm of 
 other Gospels, all more or less full of the picturesque and 
 the miraculous. Something like twelve Gospels are 
 alluded to among Christian writers of the first four cen- 
 turies of the Christian era, as held in more or less repute 
 among the Christians. These were imputed to each of 
 the twelve apostles, and to others, known or unknown, 
 in the canonical writings. Most of these Gospels have 
 perished ; but a Gospel of Nicodemus, two Gospels of the 
 infancy of Jesus, and the Protevangelium, attributed to 
 James, the brother of Jesus, are still preserved. 
 
 In the Protevangelium and books of the infancy of 
 Jesus, whole verses are copied, the one from the other ; 
 and his miraculous birth is told substantially as by Mat- 
 thew and Luke, but with more minute and gross details. 
 Nicodemus describes the trial and crucifixion, and recites 
 copiously the conversations between Pilate and the Jews, 
 and between the High Priest and elders, and a small 
 body of eminent men who favored Jesus. The conver- 
 
266 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 sations of Pilate with Jesus, and of the High Priests, are 
 so similar to that given in Matthew and John, that the 
 writers of those Gospels either copied from this narrative 
 called " of Nicodemus," or it is copied into that from 
 them. The earthquake and rising of the dead, which 
 Matthew declares attended the death of Jesus, appear 
 also in the same language in this apochryphal Gospel. 8 
 In the story of the infancy of Jesus, the journey to Egypt 
 is told with much detail, and many absurd, and some 
 indelicate miracles are recited as wrought by Jesus, while 
 an infant in the arms of his mother, by the touch of his 
 person, by contact with the clothes he wore, or with the 
 water in which he had been washed. It is evident that 
 the Nicene Council, or some other assembly of the bish- 
 ops and overseers of the Church in the earlier centuries, 
 were obliged, among a mass of writings, in which the 
 legends of the miracles had been collected, to select 
 those for approbation which seemed to be most creditable 
 to his memory. Their rule of selection and exclusion 
 seems to have been, not which of those stories are most 
 widely believed, and which stand upon the most credita- 
 ble testimony, but which are the most decent, and which 
 will be received by the reason and taste of a cultivated 
 and philosophical age with the readiest credence, and 
 which will best minister to the edification of the Church. 
 Perhaps a severer taste would have omitted, as Mark and 
 John omitted, Matthew and Luke's story of the unnat- 
 ural origin of Jesus, and left details of that kind to the 
 condemned apochryphal writers, who seemed to have 
 magnified it inordinately. Perhaps it would have left 
 untold the conjuring of the devils into the herd of swine, 
 as piquant only in that it amused a national prejudice of 
 diet. It might, too, have considered the changing of 
 water into wine at the wedding at Cana as not beneficial, 
 or a work of mercy. It was the task of this primitive 
 Christian criticism to select from the literary records of 
 several centuries — all written on purely personal impulses 
 by unauthorized persons, using without hesitation the 
 artifice of imputing what they wrote to some eminent 
 person — to reject what was trivial and indecorous, and 
 to indorse with their sanction what was of good report. 
 
 u Matt, jocvii., 51-53. 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 267 
 
 As a whole, their judgment will meet the approbation of 
 the cultivated modern mind. 
 
 The wholesale curing of disease and mental derange- 
 ment in Galilee, accompanied by two conspicuous in- 
 stances of feeding many thousand persons to repletion 
 with food scarce sufficient for ten persons, the walking 
 upon the sea, the restoring of strength to bed-ridden and 
 palsied men, of wholeness to those who were maimed, and 
 of life, in one or two cases, to persons who had died, 
 could not have happened during the reign of Tiberius 
 in any part of the Roman Empire and civilized world, 
 without producing greater effects than the New Testa- 
 ment literature records. Still more true is this, if, in 
 addition to these marvels done in Galilee, there had been 
 miracles of healing in Jerusalem, and a man raised from 
 the grave, after four days' burial, in the midst of a com- 
 pany of intelligent and reputable citizens of that city. 
 
 It was an age of comparative peace. Wealthy and edu- 
 cated Romans, following the armies, and employed in the 
 proconsular governments, in official service or in the pur- 
 suit of pleasure or the study of philosophy, passed the 
 whole length of the Mediterranean, and noted whatever 
 was remarkable in the countries they visited. The Jews 
 were not a barbarous people. To their own considerable 
 culture, they superadded that of the Greeks, in whose 
 language they spoke and wrote. They inhabited a region 
 lying between old Greece, on one side, shorn, indeed, of 
 its political, but still wielding its philosophical and artistic 
 sway over the world, and Egypt on the other side, in 
 which the culture of Greece had had a renaissance. The 
 cosmopolitan Greek was everywhere, whose sole passion 
 it was to hear and to tell some new thing." Why were 
 there not about the luxurious court of Herod, under 
 whose jurisdiction Jesus lived and taught, curious men, 
 Greeks and Romans, who would have taken the liveliest 
 interest in a man with the rumor of whose wonder-works 
 of beneficial magic, that so surpassed all that the sibyls 
 and soothsayers and magicians of the pagan world had 
 been able to achieve, all Syria was ringing, to carry to 
 Rome, to Athens and to Alexandria, some report of what 
 Jesus was doing in Galilee? In every city were philoso- 
 
 » Acts xvii., 31. 
 
268 OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 phers, dreamers, and schemers, who would have welcomed 
 such a prodigy as a new revelation. And yet pagan lit- 
 erature has not the slightest trace of Jesus, the wonder- 
 worker. 
 
 But, disregarding the so-called secular testimonies pre- 
 served in literature, let us look carefully into the very 
 records, upon which the actuality of the miracles stands, 
 to see if they are consistent in setting forth effects, 
 which should have naturally followed such wonderful man- 
 ifestations of power as are ascribed to Jesus. 
 
 Mankind are much more inclined to credulity than to 
 scepticism. In our own age, among such enlightened 
 peoples as the Americans, the English, the Germans, and 
 the French, the coarsest forms of superstition, the most 
 puerile and whimsical speculations, the most shallow 
 personal pretensions to sanctity or to inspiration, find 
 swarms of believers. And yet, in all those countries, an 
 enlightened public sentiment counteracts such tenden- 
 cies to delusion, and draws men back to the sphere of 
 reason and common sense. But if Jesus should come to 
 the most sceptical of modern cities, say to Paris, and 
 should there do the works of healing, dispossession, and 
 magic, including two instances of restoring the dead to 
 life, which tradition declares he did in Galilee, the igno- 
 rant and superstitious peasantry, the devout and fanatical 
 world would follow him with faith and wonder. More 
 than this, after some contempt, and a natural reluctance to 
 admit the actuality of what transcended ordinary human 
 experience, the philosophers would organize commissions 
 to watch and examine him; and they, together with the 
 scoffers and frivolous pleasure-seekers, would be coerced, 
 by the stupendous and repeated exhibition, to accept him 
 as a messenger of God. A palpable fact recurring so 
 many times as to preclude all deception, witnessed by so 
 many persons as to make defective observation impossi- 
 ble, is more potent than all a priori science. Ever since 
 it has been observed, the sun has risen in the east and 
 moved through the skies to the west. There is the 
 strongest ground for believing that this movement is a 
 permanent arrangement of nature. But if, for the morn- 
 ings to come, in the sight of all rational human beings 
 concurring in the observation, the sun should rise in the 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 269 
 
 west and travel toward the east, it would be legitimate 
 to conclude that, for that period at least, the arrangement 
 of nature had been changed. No prepossessions of sci- 
 ence could stand against such a palpable and evident fact. 
 
 But the first century was far more credulous than is 
 the nineteenth. There was no logic or science which in 
 the first century rendered miracles impossible. On the 
 contrary, all the systems of knowledge then extant ac- 
 commodated themselves to miracles, which men of all 
 nationalities and creeds held to have happened at some 
 time, if not in their clay and sight. The Jews were not 
 the least superstitious people of the first century, nor the 
 Galileans the least superstitious community among the 
 Jews. 
 
 Now, what do the gospel narratives themselves declare 
 as to the effect of the mighty works of Jesus, upon the 
 people in whose sight they were done ? After the death 
 of Jesus, and after it was believed among his adherents, 
 that they were commanded to assemble and remain in 
 Jerusalem to await some most momentous event to befall 
 them and all the world, the number of the believers in 
 Jesus was one hundred and twenty. a As even his chief, 
 chosen apostles had previously forsaken him, — Peter, his 
 confidential friend, denying, with oaths and anger, that he 
 had ever known him, — it is probable, that the most of 
 these were attracted, not so much by their recollections 
 of the miracles done in Galilee, as by the belief that 
 Jesus had risen from the dead and ascended into the 
 skies. 
 
 Let it be said, this was at Jerusalem, where the public 
 feeling was strongly hostile to Jesus.' There were one 
 hundred and twenty Galileans, who showed their devotion 
 to him by sharing his perilous mission to the sacred city, 
 besides the multitudes of believers that remained at home 
 in all the cities and villages of that province. It must 
 be acknowledged, that only a portion of his adherents — 
 generally poor people — could leave their homes and fol- 
 low Jesus to Jerusalem; and, if more than a hundred of 
 the more ardent disciples did so follow him, five hundred 
 or a thousand might have been left at home, who believed 
 in him as the Messiah. But what was to be expected 
 
2JO OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 was that all Galilee, all the people among whom he had 
 wrought cures, cast out evil spirits, fed multitudes with- 
 out any adequate provision of food, and raised the dead, 
 should have believed in him as a divine being, or as a 
 man specially favored and endowed by God. The records 
 quite contradict this view. He is made to reproach the 
 chief cities wherein his greatest miracles were done be- 
 cause they believed not. He said of the multitudes, 
 whom he miraculously fed, and whose sick he wholly 
 cured, that they followed him only to be fed by him. He 
 called his followers, those that accepted him as of God, 
 a little flock, alluding to the paucity of their numbers ; and 
 he said that he would not explain the parables to the 
 multitudes, before whom he is said to have wrought his 
 miracles, because they were not disciples, and had no 
 right to be initiated into the mysteries of the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 Of course, as has already been shown, the miracles at 
 Jerusalem, including the raising of Lazarus, could not have 
 been performed without placing Jesus in such an estima- 
 tion of admiration and awe in the minds of the citizens, 
 that it would have been utterly impossible for the rulers 
 to subject him to the ignominy of a public trial, and for 
 the people to have madly clamored for his death, when 
 Pilate made overtures to pardon him. They, who accept 
 the Johannic narrative as history, have also to reconcile 
 with the statement of the occurrence of the miracles in 
 Galilee the other statement, that, after the period when 
 they are declared to have been performed, the brothers of 
 Jesus did not believe on him. It is no slight confirmation 
 of the view here taken, that, even regarding John's Gospel 
 as a dogmatic fiction, a writer of the second or third cen- 
 tury should have represented the isolation of Jesus and 
 his repudiation by his countrymen in so vivid and touch- 
 ing a manner. 
 
 But did Jesus possess no remarkable powers out of 
 which the legend of the miracles naturally grew ? It has 
 been seen already upon how much less evidence this 
 claim for him stands than does his historical identity, his 
 teaching of a coming kingdom of heaven, and of an im- 
 pending end of the world, and his ethical doctrines, — 
 mainly of self-denial, mutual forgiveness, meekness, and 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 27 1 
 
 almsgiving. All these facts find confirmation in the 
 concurrent testimony of the whole literature of the age, 
 and have entered into a faith that survives to our own 
 time. But the miracles are told by unofficial and unau- 
 thorized reporters, whose accounts vary in substance as 
 well as in details, who are contradicted by facts, which 
 they themselves report, incompatible with such occur- 
 rences. Then, too, their testimony is disturbed by the 
 fact that after them came a writer of marked ability and 
 great celebrity, whose Gospel is either a literary fiction 
 or a palpable contradiction of all the substance of their 
 miraculous claims. If it be the former, it shows how 
 miracles were injected into the ordinary annals of Jesus' 
 career to exalt his character, and express the awe which 
 his name had come to inspire. We cannot say that Mat- 
 thew's and Luke's miracles may not have subserved the 
 same dogmatic and literary office as those of John. 
 
 But how, then, is the wonderful influence which Jesus 
 exerted upon his contemporaries, and which finds such 
 vivid expression in the Pauline and other early Christian 
 writings, accounted for ? It cannot be wholly accounted 
 /or as simply the effect of his personal purity, his blame- 
 less conduct, and the cogency and impressive eloquence 
 of his speech. These endowments would most affect 
 persons of abnormal intellectual and moral culture. In 
 our own times, and indeed in all times, men come to their 
 own order and class, and find appreciation. But Jesus 
 seems not to have powerfully affected the men of intel- 
 lectual culture of his own age. He said the things he 
 taught were hid from the wise and prudent, and accept- 
 able to babes. He appealed ever to the simple believers, 
 of easy and impulsive faith, and shunned those who were 
 critical and intellectually cautious. It is certain that his 
 earliest and most devoted followers were not men of 
 distinguished intellectual capacity ; nor do the glimpses 
 given of their speech and conduct imply that they were 
 gifted with fine moral susceptibilities, or had subjected 
 themselves to the discipline of much self-restraint. The 
 classes he principally affected were the very classes to be 
 attracted by a feat of walking upon the sea rather than by 
 the subtle persuasion of a doctrine of self-denial. How is 
 such effect upon such a class to be accounted for? 
 
272 OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 To assert that the miracles of Matthew and Luke were 
 actually performed to the extent and upon the subjects 
 they affirm is to find a cause quite too great for the 
 insignificant and petty effects that flowed from it. A 
 cause is wanted consonant and equivalent to the effect, 
 and no more ; and the cause, since it operated mainly and 
 most powerfully upon rude minds, must be something of 
 like kind, if less in degree, than that which tradition has 
 imputed. Miracles have been zealously affirmed in all 
 ages. There are certain modes by which certain pres- 
 ences can affect persons, which, not being as yet suffi- 
 ciently understood or capable of harmonious adjustment 
 with our accredited knowledge, are pronounced marvellous, 
 abnormal, or miraculous. There are in all communities 
 certain persons, having no superiority over ordinary men 
 in either physical, intellectual, or moral talent or culture, 
 who can, by touch or word or look, exert a power over the 
 wills or the nervous organization of other persons, which 
 in certain diseases results in a temporary or permanent 
 cure of such disease. It is foreign to the character of 
 the present discussion to consider the nature of any such 
 agency. Whatever it may be, real or imaginary, there 
 are few intelligent persons, upon whose observation some 
 occurrences have not been thrust, that have not been 
 explained by any of the ordinary laws of science. 
 
 It is altogether probable that Jesus, with his sensitive 
 and delicate organization, with a temperance and moral 
 strength of will, that put all his impulses and appetites 
 under the easy control of his reason and conscience, had 
 also in his habitual self-possession, and moral force that 
 came of a well-ordered life, a certain mastery of presence, 
 a magnetic influence, that powerfully affected sensitive 
 persons. His becoming aware of such power may have 
 been the beginning of the prepossession, that, not only 
 was the kingdom of heaven at hand, but that he was its 
 king. Most of the miracles are miracles of dispossession, 
 It seemed to be the belief of that age, shared by Jesus 
 himself, that all dementia attended by erratic and violent 
 conduct was the possession of demons, and, when the 
 delirious strength of the sufferer was very great, that 
 the force of many devils entered into his possession. 
 The New Testament writers seem also, in several in- 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 273 
 
 stances, to impute even deafness, dumbness, and blind- 
 ness to devilish obstruction. The caprices of the insane 
 are proverbial. Their intense antipathy to some per- 
 sons — perhaps their nearest relatives — is sometimes con- 
 trasted with the strange and soothing power of other 
 persons, who can allay by a word or a look their severest 
 paroxysms. Jesus might have possessed this power even 
 in an unusual degree. The fame, which his personal 
 sanctity established, would increase it. Its efficacious 
 exercise might have been, as it is now known generally 
 to be, only temporary ; for it is said of Mary Magdalene, 
 that seven devils had been cast out of her. a She was in- 
 sane ; Jesus had spoken, and soothed and relieved her, or, 
 in the thought of the time, that demon is cast out. But, 
 the cause of her malady not having been removed, she 
 lapses again into madness. Alas ! exclaim the friends, 
 another demon has come: where is the great prophet ? So 
 the cure is repeated, until seven seasons of mania have 
 been endured and relieved. It may have been a case, 
 wherein had happened, according to the remembered, 
 curious diagnosis of Jesus, that fatal relapse, when seven 
 demons have come back to a once cleansed soul. Even 
 this new peril is safely passed under his benign treat- 
 ment ; and the grateful woman had become famous as a 
 person relieved of a sevenfold possession. 
 
 It is curious to note that all this report of devilish 
 agency comes to us from the three earlier Gospels. When 
 we read them and take our minds back to the quaint 
 region and remote period which they describe, we think 
 of Galilee as a country where the torment of devils was 
 endemic. Some lands are plagued with fevers, some 
 with malaria, some with poisonous insects or reptiles : 
 this land would have been wholesome and salubrious but 
 for an incursion into it of evil spirits. Devilish possession 
 was one of the commonest casualties of human life — the 
 local peril that would stimulate the precaution of travel- 
 lers, and excite the solicitude of mothers. Even a consti- 
 tution, as well endowed as that of Jesus, was not exempt 
 from exposure to it, and escaped the baleful influence 
 only by the constancy of his faith. 
 
 Now, when we look through the Fourth Gospel, all this 
 ghostly visitation disappears. The writer attempts to 
 
274 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 describe the same country, the same age, the same people, 
 the career and activity among them of the same historic 
 personage, but he knows nothing of devils entering into 
 or being cast out of men. Seven different times the 
 writer uses the word "devil," but always in our modern 
 sense. He makes the Jews accuse and acquit Jesus of 
 having a devil. He makes Jesus retort vigorously upon 
 them that they are children of the devil. 8 But his idea 
 clearly is to impute to bad men and bad actions, as we 
 still do, a prompting and principle of evil, belonging per- 
 manently to such natures, and for which they are to be 
 held guilty. The idea of the Synoptic Gospels as clearly 
 is, that to have a devil is a misfortune, that may befall a 
 good man, and from which he may be relieved. 
 
 How forcibly the conclusion impresses itself upon our 
 minds, that in passing from the first three to the Fourth 
 Gospel we have arrived at the ideas of another time and of 
 another people ! How can the Fourth Gospel be the work 
 of an intimate companion of Jesus in all his career of exor- 
 cization in Galilee, who had witnessed the tortures of the 
 possessed and heard their imprecations and invocations ? 
 How could it have been written by that very one of all 
 the twelve apostles, whose thorough belief in demoniac 
 possession is disclosed so unmistakably in the Third 
 Gospel ? " 
 
 But there are other forms of disease mainly affecting 
 the nervous organization, of whose subtle law science has 
 as yet learned little, where what, for want of better intel- 
 ligence, is named personal magnetism, produces strange 
 and inexplicable curative or alleviative results. Why can- 
 not this paralyzed or palsied man walk or lift his arms ? 
 He is alive, his muscular structure is apparently unim- 
 paired, his circulation unobstructed. The nervous con- 
 nection between brain and muscle has been interrupted. 
 A shock and a strong impulse of the will, such as a 
 great joy, or a sudden peril, or a touch or word of certain 
 persons, will restore the connection, and the imbecile 
 patient will find himself able to walk. 
 
 It is even easy to find a basis of fact for the legend 
 of raising the dead. New-born infants, persons rescued 
 from drowning, have often no actual life, only the capacity 
 
 a John vi., 70; viii., 44, 48, 49; x , 20, 21 ; xiii., 2. b Luke ix., 49. 
 
LEGEND OF THE MIRACLES 275 
 
 of living. There is a perfect mechanism of vitality ; but 
 like a clock wound up, but not in motion, it requires an 
 impulse to set it going. There are lungs with which to 
 breathe, a strong heart ready to throb, a circulation ready 
 to flow to the remotest members of the body, but they are 
 all still and paralyzed. Without prompt external aid, that 
 feeble infant, that pallid, drowned man will die ; these 
 flexible muscles, valves, and veins will grow rigid and col- 
 lapse, and no power can reinstate the lost vitality. But a 
 gentle pressure of the chest, a warmth and stimulus min- 
 istered to the arteries, and the pulse of life begins to beat, 
 and strength and consciousness return to the very dead. 
 Doubtless, in many acute diseases, the strength of the 
 fever is abated, and the sufferer lies unconscious, apparently 
 dead of nervous prostration and exhaustion. He is just 
 in the situation where the slightest impulse, the gentlest 
 beneficial shock, such as the presence of some greatly be- 
 loved or greatly revered person might bring, would start 
 the feeble pulse and summon back the fading spirit from 
 the very portals of death. The ruler's daughter might 
 have been at this very crisis of her fever. Jesus himself, 
 in perfect good faith, as we must believe, said she was not 
 dead, but asleep, exhausted, in a state, that would become 
 death, if no change could be wrought. His presence, 
 longed for with the last consciousness, his touch, his 
 thrilling word is the needful change — the slight access 
 of nervous force, which turns back to joyful life the en- 
 feebled will from the death, into which a fatal sleep is fast 
 deepening. The rational result followed. Those that be- 
 lieved the girl was not dead, as Jesus said, rejoiced, but 
 were not astonished. Those that laughed him to scorn 
 insisted that she was dead, and told the story far and wide ; 
 and, after the power to raise the dead was once imputed to 
 him by the credulous, it was easy for rumor, growing for 
 centuries, to expand it into the raising of the widow's son 
 at Nain and of Lazarus at Bethany. 
 
 Just this extent of power and no more, while it gives a 
 probable foundation for the legend of miracles, harmonizes 
 completely with the effects, which the evangelists them- 
 selves confess the career of Jesus produced upon his 
 country and his age, — that is, a few persons, mostly 
 among the illiterate, believed that he was the Son of 
 God ; the community generally disavowed that preten- 
 
276 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 sion, and either aided or acquiesced in his judicial murder. 
 A solution, too, offers itself of the undoubted periodicity 
 of the curative power of Jesus. All but the romantic 
 John agree in the statement, that the miracle-working was 
 characteristic of the earlier part of Jesus' ministry, that it 
 abated, when he became more widely known in his own 
 province, and that it wholly ceased, when he emerged into 
 the broad light of history in coming into the publicity of 
 Jerusalem. This is excused by the writers by two pleas, 
 not quite consistent with each other. Jesus could not do 
 miracles anywhere, where there was a serious counterac- 
 tion of persons without faith. Powerful as he was, the 
 critical and self-possessed spirit was always hostile to his 
 energy, and rendered it inefficient. He would not do 
 miracles at Jerusalem, because his purpose was, not to 
 convince and convert the Jews, who would on their ac- 
 count have believed on him, but to deceive them and 
 harden their hearts, that, in killing him, they might pre- 
 pare the way for his return in the character of king of the 
 World, and ensure their own condemnation and reproba- 
 tion. But it is degrading the memory of a heroic martyr 
 to associate him with that unmistakable badge of charla- 
 tanism and imposition, which always begins an effort at 
 deception by some trick to juggle and put in bondage our 
 common sense. And, if the last was the deliberate pur- 
 pose of Jesus, it is hard to understand why the advent to 
 the world of such a malignant spirit should ever have been 
 considered an event over which mankind should con- 
 gratulate itself. 
 
 If Jesus had once the power that in this discussion has 
 been conjectured, it is not difficult to account for its sub- 
 sequent abatement. He lost the control of his own spirit, 
 in his later faith, that Heaven had appointed him to the 
 dazzling glory of kingship in a new-created world where 
 awaited him the homage of saints and angels. No longer 
 did he maintain that fine equipoise of soul, that harmony 
 with nature and with God springing out of the unselfish 
 nobility of his aspirations, and making him strong in self- 
 possession and a tower of strength to the weaker men 
 that attached themselves to him ; he could no longer 
 speak with the spiritual force his meekness and humility 
 had given him. "This kind," he once said, " goeth not 
 out but by prayer and fasting." a 
 
 a Matt, xvii., 21. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH. 
 
 "The Jesus, who appears to be depicted in the original tradition of the 
 disciples, is a Jew preaching to his countrymen the immediate coming of the 
 kingdom of heaven, for which they were waiting, and repentance and 
 amendment as the conditions of entrance to it ; protesting against the nar- 
 row technical morality, and the absorbing ritual observances of the religious 
 guides of the people, whose hostility he thus excites; winning at first an 
 amount of popular favor that awakens the fear of the government, to avoid 
 which and the hostility of the Pharisees he retires to Syro-Phoenicia; then 
 publicly entering Jerusalem in the avowed character of the King of the 
 Jews; renewing his conflicts with the Pharisees, and exciting the fears and 
 the enmity of the chief priests and elders; delivered by them to Pilate as 
 a rebel against the authority of Rome, and as such crucified. Thus viewed, 
 his own proceedings and those of his adversaries appear natural and con- 
 sistent, and his death to have been the inevitable consequence of his 
 assumption of the character of the Messiah." — Sir Richard Hanson's 
 "Jesus of History.'' 
 
 It has become necessary, pursuing a method purely 
 historic, next to consider more fully the causes of the 
 death of Jesus. If history be conceived of as evolved 
 according to a definite plan or by a vital growth, — one 
 event being the seed and parent of another, — the appar- 
 ently capricious actions of men seem to be parts of an 
 orderly social and political movement, as much under 
 the control of law as the succession of the seasons, the 
 courses of the heavenly bodies, or the propagation, 
 growth, and decay of living forms. 
 
 In trying to find the proximate causes of the death of 
 Jesus, it is not necessary to deny that there were provi- 
 dential purposes subserved by the event, or that it has 
 drawn after it consequences in the evolution of civilization 
 disproportioned to its apparent importance. From the 
 period of the Christian era, immediately succeeding the 
 death of Jesus, to the present age, there have been 
 devout minds that have not been able to consider the 
 crucifixion in the category of human events. To them, it 
 is more a conspicuous scene of divine administration, a 
 
2JS, OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 crisis in the divine economy, which in some way brought 
 men under the dominion of new laws and new duties, and 
 endowed them with higher hopes and larger destinies. 
 Paul explained to the philosophers at Athens that this 
 crisis had occurred in his own lifetime, previously to 
 which God had been comparatively indifferent to the 
 sins of men, but that from that time, taking fresh cog- 
 nizance of the conduct of his creatures, he had demanded 
 universal repentance. a This spectacular and typical as- 
 pect of the death of Jesus, its mysterious connection with 
 the enlarged vision, the enduring inheritance of life and 
 happiness, which it is believed to have procured,— if not 
 for all mankind, for all who strive to obtain the great 
 gift,— has had some effect to lessen the world's pity for 
 the sufferings of a heroic martyr, and its indignation 
 against his murderers. How severely can we inveigh 
 against the agents in a transaction so rich in the fruition 
 of blessing and salvation to the human soul ? Leaving to 
 minds capable of large generalizations and deep insfght 
 these profound speculations,— if indeed there remains an 
 aspect of the case that sincere faith and reverence have 
 not already perceived and disclosed,— let us essay a more 
 modest and less frequently attempted task. 
 
 How came such a man as Jesus, engaged in such an 
 enterprise as he is seen to have undertaken, pursuing it 
 by his methods and with his character, to have made him- 
 self so obnoxious to the leaders of public opinion in 
 Church and State, as to fall under the cognizance of the 
 civil law of his country ? Why did he so far lack popular 
 sympathy and support as to have been execrated by the 
 mob and forced by them to his fate, when a mild and 
 vacillating governor tendered his release ? It has already 
 appeared that Jesus lost his life because the chief priests 
 elders, scribes, and Pharisees, the ruling classes in the 
 ecclesiastical hierarchy which constituted the State, bit- 
 terly hated him ; because the highest civil magistrate, the 
 Roman proconsul, was induced by his love of popularity 
 or provoked by jealousy, to lend his soldiery for his execu- 
 tion ; and because the populace wildly clamored for his 
 crucifixion. He had no friends in either of these orders ; 
 and they embraced the whole public of Jerusalem upon 
 which Jesus had voluntarily ventured. 
 
 a Acts xvii., 30. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 279 
 
 What was there about Jesus and his methods and ideas 
 that gave offence to the people of his nationality and 
 religion ? His gifts of healing, if possessed in the degree 
 conjectured in these chapters, would have gained for him 
 consideration and gratitude. If these gifts had been exer- 
 cised, as the narratives of Matthew and Luke assert, in 
 a wholesale obliteration of every form of mental and 
 bodily disorder throughout all the cities and villages of 
 Galilee, they would have secured for Jesus universal ven- 
 eration and respect. The connection of his presence with 
 such wonderful works as the restoration of sight to the 
 blind, locomotion to the paralyzed, rational speech to the 
 insane, and life to the dead, even if the mysterious agency 
 by which he wrought was not understood, would have 
 insured him not only against all personal violence, but 
 also against all opprobrious or contemptuous epithets. 
 As a worker of beneficent miracles, Jesus could not have 
 been hated and persecuted. 
 
 As a teacher of a sublime system of ethics, Jesus could 
 not have excited the deadly hostility of his countrymen. 
 True, the prophets of Israel who had, along with their 
 exhortations to maintain the established forms of national 
 worship and the integrity of faith in Jehovah, sedulously 
 inculcated just dealing, mercy, and kindness to the poor, 
 and personal temperance and chastity, had been perse- 
 cuted by their countrymen, and some of them had been 
 slain. But the prophets were patriots as well as preach- 
 ers ; and they encountered hatred and persecution, either 
 because the idolatrous practices they denounced so vigor- 
 ously were favored by the kings or those men and women 
 of their courts who chiefly controlled the affairs of state, 
 or because the alliances with powerful heathen nations 
 that more or less controlled the affairs of the little king- 
 doms of Judah and Israel, which the prophets sometimes 
 favored and sometimes condemned, had more of a political 
 than of a religious character. The prophets had suffered 
 persecutions, as their successors have, as politicians not 
 on the winning side. The Sermon on the Mount, though 
 addressed to the disciples of Jesus, was listened to by the 
 people with some astonishment at the novelty of its doc- 
 trines and at the intuitive confidence with which its princi- 
 ples were affirmed, but not with anything like opposition/ 1 
 
 a Matt, v., 1, 2 ; vii., 28, 2.;. 
 
2So OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Yet, in that discourse, Jesus had indicated very significantly 
 his indisposition to maintain any fellowship with the 
 ruling classes of the Church, and had subjected to a free 
 handling the Mosaic ten words. But all the positive doc- 
 trines of that memorable discourse had nothing in them 
 to provoke opposition and hatred. They could provoke 
 no other feeling than the pique with which men, confi- 
 dent in their own rectitude and that their standard of 
 conduct is the highest possible, resent the implication 
 against themselves, when a man of deeper spiritual insight 
 and loftier virtue declares a rule of life, the comprehen- 
 siveness of which makes their own seem narrow and 
 incomplete. Doubtless, the scribes and Pharisees per- 
 ceived this implication, and returned the disparagement 
 of Jesus with both anger and disdain. But, being above 
 all things politic, and anxious to preserve their reputation 
 as men of virtue, moderation, and devoutness, they would 
 be more likely to conceal their chagrin and lay claim to 
 the possession even of the more interior goodness which 
 he portrayed, than to resent the establishment of a stand- 
 ard of rectitude too exalted for their emulation. Indeed, 
 the history of Jesus gives us several anecdotes which 
 show that the scribes and Pharisees never confessed them- 
 selves surprised by any of his more esoteric doctrines ; 
 but that, when he uttered any profound and ideal prin- 
 ciple, they even affected to be very familiar with it, and 
 claimed it as a well-known feature of their own doctrine/' 
 How could they then take offence when he pronounced 
 a blessing on the meek, the pure, the poor, the merciful, 
 the lovers of peace, the persecuted for righteousness, upon 
 the true successors of the prophets whom they revered ; 
 when he denounced causeless anger as murder, and a 
 lascivious look as adultery ; when he declared that it was 
 safe to make no defence against any violence, and wise to 
 forgive all injuries; when he said that men must give 
 freely to every asker, and must take no thought of how 
 the body was to be fed or clothed, asking freely of God 
 for every needed thing, in confidence that it would be 
 given ? These principles might be criticised as imprac- 
 ticable and visionary; but in no age of the world, where 
 they have been from time to time reproduced as the basis 
 
 1 Mark xii., 28, 32-34. 
 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 28 1 
 
 of an ideal system of life, have they excited derision and 
 satire, much less rage and hatred. 
 
 Did Jesus become obnoxious to the people of his time 
 by the claim which he made to be the Messiah of the 
 nation, and the king of a kingdom that was to supplant the 
 kingdoms of the world and reconstruct the order of soci- 
 ety and the constitution of the physical universe ? There 
 had been Messiahs before Jesus, and there were Messiahs 
 after him. It was a pretension, which in itself flattered 
 the national pride of Israel and fed the quenchless hope, 
 that has characterized that strange race through the long 
 history of its slavery and depression. Had the Messianic 
 idea of Jesus been more in accord with the prophetic fore- 
 shadowing, and with the popular expectation, his claim to 
 be the Messiah would have given him prestige and au- 
 thority, at least commensurate with the pretenders that 
 preceded and succeeded him, each of whom drew after 
 him a numerous following. 11 
 
 The kingship of Jesus, if it had anything ominous 
 about it, threatened the security of the Roman power. 
 The Jewish hierarchy, after they had come to hate Jesus, 
 did all they could to turn the eyes of the civil power to 
 the political dangers which his heresy portended. How 
 futile the effort was, how utterly indifferent the sceptical, 
 luxurious petty sovereigns, who held the vice-royalties of 
 Judea and Galilee, were to the danger, is apparent in the 
 Scriptural traditions. It is highly improbable that either 
 Herod or Pilate ever made the ministry of Jesus, and his 
 progress through their respective provinces, proclaiming 
 himself the king of a kingdom to be established during 
 his own generation in Jerusalem, the subject of a per- 
 sonal, still less of an official communication to Caesar at 
 Rome. If they had done this, perhaps some memoranda 
 of him might have crept into secular history. Matthew 
 tells, indeed, that Herod of Judea had so far interested 
 himself in the Hebrew prophetic literature that, learning, 
 by the exposition of the scribes, that the Messiah was 
 to be born in Bethlehem, and by a communication from 
 certain Magi, who came to Jerusalem from the far East, 
 that the Messiah had already been born, he took the pre- 
 caution to procure the slaughter of all the children of 
 
282 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Bethlehem under two years of age. a But as no other 
 Gospel contains this story, as the older copies of Mat- 
 thew's Gospel omit it, and as a full history of the crimes 
 and cruelties of Herod's reign, written by no friendly 
 hand, does not recount this massacre, it is not likely to 
 have occurred. 
 
 Herod of Galilee imprisoned, and afterward murdered 
 John the Baptist, but this was the result of the fury of a 
 wicked woman whom John had provoked by the plainness 
 of speech with which he had denounced her incestuous 
 connection with the king. 1 ' Jesus, though he was fearless 
 in bringing home his rule of rectitude to the life and 
 thought of the persons with whom he was in actual con- 
 ference, rarely made personal application of his doctrines 
 to particular individuals. As Herod had slain John, 
 whose teachings so closely resembled those of Jesus, the 
 Galilean Pharisees tried to alarm Jesus by telling him that 
 Herod was seeking his life. The slight apprehension 
 this, doubtless, false information caused in the mind of 
 Jesus, and the confident and contemptuous answer he sent 
 back show that Herod had taken no notice whatever of 
 Jesus' enterprise. It would have been apparently as 
 easy for the king to imprison and slay Jesus, as it was to 
 rid himself of his compatriot and master. The Roman of- 
 ficial evidently did not suspect that Jesus was of the least 
 political consequence. 
 
 How little the eager suspicions of the elders and chief 
 priests affected the more mild and philosophical Pilate, 
 the proconsul of Judea, is apparent in the Biblical record. 
 Jesus was delivered to him as a plotter against Csesar, a 
 pretender for the throne of Judea; and Pilate, as the 
 sequel will show, could not consider the empire of his 
 master seriously threatened by a hallucination that seemed 
 to him so absurd. 
 
 As Jesus never encountered any danger from the Ro- 
 man government either of Galilee, where he lived, or of 
 Judea, whither he betook himself, so it is to be said, that, 
 apparently, while he remained in Galilee, he was never in 
 any situation of formidable peril from any quarter. Luke 
 alone tells of a fierce and sudden tumult, which was caused 
 in Nazareth during the earliest days of his more public 
 
 nMatt. ii., 3-5, 16. b Matt, xiv., 3-12. c Luke xiii., 31-33. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 283 
 
 life, when a mob seized him and bore him toward a prec- 
 ipice to throw him down. The provocation given by 
 Jesus seems to be quite inadequate to cause such an ex- 
 hibition of animosity, unless words were spoken which 
 the record has not given us, though doubtless the inflam- 
 mable fanaticism of those provincial Jews exceeded the 
 limits of modern comprehension. Whatever the provo- 
 cation was, and however great the tumult, it was a mere 
 temporary excitement, only possible in an isolated Jewish 
 village. It was not preconcerted or connected with any 
 designs against Jesus formed among the scribes and 
 elders of the principal neighboring cities, and it sub- 
 sided as rapidly as it rose ; for it seems Jesus continued 
 to make Nazareth his home, and, so far from being ever 
 molested afterward, must have considerably gained in 
 public consideration, and secured in the end the good 
 opinion of his own quite numerous kinsmen. The 
 elders of the Nazarene synagogue were probably quite 
 as indignant at the unwonted presumption of a young 
 carpenter undertaking to read and interpret the Script- 
 ures, as they were at the disparaging imputations of his 
 comments." 
 
 How much the Galilean and Judean communities were 
 disturbed by the claim of Jesus to be the expected Mes- 
 siah may therefore be exactly determined by the effect it 
 had upon the jealous and suspicious Roman proconsu- 
 late whose business it was to watch and crush, at its first 
 outbreak, every effort at national independence. If Rome 
 did not care that Jesus was making a progress through 
 the land in some kind of royal state, as King of the Jews, 
 it may be certain that there was nobody to care. 
 
 As he was in no danger from Herod, an irresponsible 
 and capricious tyrant, so he was in no danger from the 
 elders, scribes, and Pharisees, during the time after his 
 baptism that he dwelt in Galilee, generally believed to be 
 about three years, but more probably only a few months. 
 The Pharisees, as a general thing, treated him with defer- 
 ence and respect. They addressed him as Rabbi, giving 
 full credit to his prophetic office. They extended to him 
 social courtesies and invited him to their feasts. They 
 referred to him questions of ritual practice, of the con- 
 
 »Luke iv., 16-30. 
 
284 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 struction of their written law, of general casuistry, and of 
 political expediency and duty; and we are not obliged to 
 adopt the evident prejudice of the evangelists, that these 
 questions were always put craftily and disingenuously for 
 the sake of embarrassing and discrediting him. a It was 
 not the practice of the bishops, canons, and curates of the 
 English Church to form a part of the promiscuous audi- 
 ences which listened in the fields and in barns to the 
 preaching of Bunyan, Naylor, and Fox. It was never 
 known that leading Presbyterian doctors of divinity or 
 Evangelical presidents of theological seminaries in the 
 United States condescended to hold newspaper contro- 
 versies with Joseph Smith, or with the itinerant Second 
 Adventist missionaries. Religious bigotry must have 
 been far more rife in Galilee in the first century than 
 it is in either Old or New England in the nineteenth 
 century; and the fact that the scribes and Pharisees 
 listened to Jesus, held colloquies with him, and frequently 
 approved and commended his doctrines, indicates on their 
 part a position toward him far more respectful than 
 modern Orthodoxy maintains toward modern dissent. 
 
 While this was the attitude of the religious classes 
 toward Jesus, what was his attitude toward them ? What 
 overtures did the Messenger and Son of Jehovah make to 
 the priesthood of Jehovah, to that body of men who, 
 whatever may be justly imputed against them, had been, 
 as far as can now be seen, exceedingly zealous for the 
 Lord of Hosts, and for the integrity of his worship. To 
 them, it was certainly due that the last traces of idolatry 
 had been eliminated from the cultus of their race, and 
 that the people had been thoroughly schooled into the 
 practice of a decorous and decent morality. When or 
 where was the grace of the Gospel offered to scribes and 
 Pharisees ? Why should Christianity have been left to 
 advance slowly through nineteen centuries with the em- 
 phatic protest, borne steadily against it, of the most de- 
 vout and religious race the world has ever known? 
 
 The antipathy of John the Baptist to both the popular 
 sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees, has already been spoken 
 of. It has never been known in the world, that a re- 
 former and teacher of a new faith did not seek to make 
 
 a Mark xii., 13, 14, 19, 28, 32-34; Luke vii., 36; x., 25; xi., 53, 54; xiv., 1. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 285 
 
 converts ; but, when this ascetic preacher saw multitudes 
 of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he 
 was disturbed and disgusted. He addressed them as a 
 generation of vipers, and told them that their damnation 
 was so assured, that it had not occurred to him to give 
 them any warning to avoid it. a This pre-judging of their 
 case, this shutting in their faces the door of hope, shows 
 how truculent and intolerant was the spirit of this ascetic 
 prophet. Perhaps Paul, then a zealous student of the law 
 at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel, going, with other Pharisees, 
 to hear what the preacher had to say, might have been 
 stunned and repelled, and had his orthodox faith con- 
 firmed, by this ungracious rebuff. From such a master 
 Jesus himself received baptism, and seemed ever after- 
 ward to have had his memory in reverence. He insisted 
 that he was the most enlightened of the prophets, and 
 that no greater man had been born of woman." 
 
 When John had been cast into prison, Jesus began him- 
 self to preach, c and, in his first discourse, indicated his ut- 
 ter hostility to the whole teaching and moral standard of 
 the Pharisees. He reviewed the ten words of the law 
 with the expositions and deductions the scribes had put 
 upon them, and declared them superficial and inadequate ; 
 and he said plainly : " Unless your righteousness exceeds 
 the pattern prescribed by the scribes and Pharisees, ye 
 shall in no wise enter the kingdom." d No more emphatic 
 announcement could be made that the grace of his gospel 
 was not for the scribes and Pharisees, or for any person 
 accepting their faith and conforming to their practices. 
 He evidently meant the scribes and Pharisees, when in 
 the same discourse he bade his disciples beware of false 
 prophets. They have, he said, the clothing of sheep, but 
 inwardly they are ravening wolves. 
 
 Early in his public career, he said, that people from all 
 corners of the earth should come into his kingdom, but 
 that the children of the kingdom — that is, the Jewish 
 Church — should be cast into the outer darkness.* That 
 the Jewish Church had a certain right of primogeniture, as 
 the first begotten of Jehovah, Jesus seemed at times fully 
 to recognize. Thus, when he sent out his twelve disciples 
 
 a Matt, iii., 7. b Matt, xi., 1 r. c Luke iii., 19, 20. 
 
 <1 Matt, v., 20. eMatt. vii., 15. f Matt, viii., 11, 12. 
 
286 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to proclaim the kingdom of heaven, he told them : " Go 
 not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the 
 Samaritans enter ye not ; but go rather to the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel." * The lost sheep were the poor, the 
 sinners, those that were oppressed and bowed under labor, 
 those whom the scribes despised, those whom the Phari- 
 sees in their self-righteous prayers thanked God they were 
 not like. b But, though Jesus sent out his disciples to make 
 converts among the people of his own nation, he evidently 
 had slight hopes of the success of their mission. For he 
 said : " Shake off the dust of your feet against the city 
 or house, that will not receive you ; it shall be more tol- 
 erable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, 
 than for that city ; c and ye shall be brought before gov- 
 ernors and kings, and scourged in the synagogues, and 
 hated of all men as representatives of me."' 1 For his own 
 part, Jesus said, almost with the emphasis and exclusive- 
 ness of John the Baptist, that he came not to call the 
 righteous, — meaning the religious and plausibly moral 
 Pharisees, — but sinners to repentance/' 
 
 The first actual contact between Jesus and the scribes 
 and Pharisees was, when certain of their numbers went 
 down from Jerusalem to Galilee, doubtless as a committee 
 of the body, to inquire into his teachings and practice. 
 With some evident awe of his known eloquence and dig- 
 nity of presence, they attribute the conduct, which they 
 wish to censure, not to him, or to his example, but to the 
 fault of his disciples. " Why do thy disciples" they ask, 
 "transgress the tradition of the elders in eating bread 
 without laving their hands?" Never was a reply more 
 crushing and personal, from a mind fully prepossessed with 
 a judgment adverse to their characters and doctrines, — 
 " Why do ye transgress the commandments of God with 
 your traditiojis ? " f Then he called them hypocrites and 
 said, they were those described by Isaiah as worshipping 
 Jehovah with their mouths, while their hearts were far 
 from him. So possessed was he with the resentment, 
 which their petty prying into the trivial table manners of 
 his household had justly excited in him, that, after the 
 committee had left him, he denounced the whole body of 
 
 a Matt, x., 5, 6. t>Matt. xi., 5, 28 ; Luke xviii., 1 1. c Matt, x., 14, 15. 
 "Matt, x., 18. t'Matt. ix., 13. 1' Matt, xv., 2, 3. 
 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 287 
 
 Pharisees to the multitude, as blind leaders of the blind, 
 to be let alone, and, unled and unwarned, to fall into the 
 ditch. 3 
 
 This attitude toward the leading religious sects cannot 
 certainly be considered as conciliatory ; but, during all the 
 life in Galilee, it did not appear to have subjected Jesus 
 to any personal danger. The invidious multitude, who 
 like to see men conspicuous for their social position and 
 repute, satirized and derided, and who doubtless listened 
 to the derogatory epithets with applause, probably liked 
 Jesus the better for the freedom of his censures ; and the 
 subjects of them, who were not left to hearsay to learn 
 the ill-repute they stood in with him, bore them with 
 remarkable good nature. On the whole, the record does 
 not impress us with the idea that the Pharisees were vin- 
 dictive ; and we acquire confidence in the statement of 
 Josephus, who says of them that "they follow the con- 
 duct of reason, and what that prescribes to them, as good 
 for. them they do." b 
 
 Why, then, did not Jesus remain in Galilee, where he 
 was certainly gaining in reputation and influence, and 
 where he was in no peril ? His own rule would have 
 justified such conduct, for he had told his disciples in 
 sending them out, " If they persecute you in one city, flee 
 to another."* They were not to resist, but to succumb to 
 and avoid danger. Peter, too, as we see, was quite alive 
 to the perils of the mission to Jerusalem ; and, though he 
 received a crushing rebuke for his advice, it was evidently 
 given with a most affectionate solicitude for his master's 
 safety. d 
 
 But Jerusalem was not to be avoided with any thought 
 even of saving life. So terrible had been the silent 
 struggles of Jesus with his own temperamental apprehen- 
 sion of death, as the natural result of the enmity he had 
 already excited among that class that were all-powerful in 
 Jerusalem, that when it arose again, albeit in the familiar 
 voice of his admired friend, it seemed the spirit of the 
 world — the insidious voice of Satan himself — and he set 
 himself to crush it. He had diligently counted the cost. 
 No king, he said, goes to war against another king until 
 
 » Matt, xv., 1-14. b Jos. Antiq. xviii., 1, 3. c Matt, x., 23. 
 dMatt. xvi., 22, 23. eMatt. xvi., 25. 
 
288 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 he first considers his own force and that of his enemy; no 
 man undertakes to build a house until he sits down first 
 and counts the cost." Counting the cost is the very thing 
 which kings and house-builders have ever been reproached 
 for not doing ; but Jesus was evidently putting into coun- 
 sels for others exhortations he was in fact addressing to 
 himself. He had diligently studied the prophecies, and 
 meditated much and long upon all that the Messiahship 
 involved. The king must go to Zion, and go, too, in the 
 days of his humiliation, in the meekness of his servitude. 
 But Messiah must be cut off. The Shepherd must be 
 smitten; the sheep must be scattered. He must make 
 his grave with the wicked. But afterward he will come 
 as a conqueror and a judge, with legions of holy angels 
 and the glory of his Father. So, to fulfil his destiny, he 
 must go to Jerusalem, — go sadly, treading alone the 
 wine-press of the wrath of God. He fears not the peril of 
 rulers, — of the wolves in sheep's clothing, — of the priest 
 and elders, and the powers of the Gentiles, who will 
 scourge and put him to death. He will go to defy them, 
 to provoke them to the very controversy, that shall 
 insure his deliverance to death. Jesus undertook the 
 journey to Jerusalem in order that he might die at the 
 hands of his countrymen. 
 
 He took with him his twelve disciples, and the friendly 
 Galilean women, who charged themselves with the ex- 
 pense of his support. b As it was the occasion of one of 
 the annual national festivals, a considerable part of his ad- 
 herents must have accompanied him with their families 
 out of the cities of Galilee. But, as the Jews were gener- 
 ally at the same season going up to the Passover, there 
 was nothing in his expedition to excite particular atten- 
 tion. Among the multitudes, that went up to Jerusalem, 
 only his confidential friends knew the sad errand that took 
 him thither. He went slowly and indirectly, crossing the 
 Jordan and avoiding Samaria, the direct route, and doubt- 
 less the thoroughfare of most of the pilgrims. A man 
 does not travel rapidly or cheerfully on his way to a vol- 
 untary death. No plots of the Pharisees annoyed him, 
 and no spies from Jerusalem watched his movements. 
 Probably the whole city was profoundly ignorant of his 
 
 a Luke xiv., 28, 33. b Luke viii., 2, 3. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 289 
 
 plans and unacquainted with his person. The citizens 
 knew as little that their long-expected king and deliverer 
 was actually approaching Zion, as that they themselves 
 would in a few days take upon their souls the guilt of the 
 blood of the chiefest of their prophets, and earn for them- 
 selves and their children to the remotest times the execra- 
 tions of mankind. 
 
 But, if there was hesitation, there was no pusillanimity 
 and no swerving from his high purpose on the part of 
 Jesus. Up through the wilderness of Jordan, where he 
 had visited John and received baptism, where, later, curi- 
 ous multitudes had followed him out of the towns and 
 villages of Galilee, and done honor to him as a prophet, 
 he travelled, more depressed than weary, strengthening 
 his spirit by the assurance that the Scriptures must be 
 fulfilled, and by the silent prayer, Not my will, but thine 
 be done. 
 
 In another connection, the triumphal entry into Jerusa- 
 lem has already been mentioned. It was not ostentation 
 on the part of Jesus, nor does it seem he derived any 
 augury of hope from the demonstration. He had already 
 made up his mind that he must be rejected of that wicked 
 generation, and be put to death ; but the Scriptures must 
 be fulfilled, and it was prophesied of Zion's King that he 
 should come meek and sitting upon the foal of an ass. b 
 It was but a meagre pageant. The Galileans, that were of 
 his company, cast palm-branches in the way, and the chil- 
 dren shouted: " Hosannah ! blessed is He that cometh in 
 the name of the Lord 7" c But the city itself made no re- 
 sponse, only it asked : Who is this ? as it would not have 
 asked had he been for months during two or three years 
 an habitue' of the temple, conducting famous arguments 
 with the Rabbis, the populace inclining to his side. Jeru- 
 salem does not know his person or his name. It is an- 
 swered by those of his party : " This is Jesus, the Prophet 
 from Nazareth of Galilee" ^ His name, which was a very 
 common one among the people at the time, does not iden- 
 tify him ; and he must be distinguished by the name of his 
 town. Even Nazareth is so little known that it must be 
 further told that Nazareth is a city of Galilee. Then it 
 
 a Matt, xxvii., 25. b Matt, xvi., 21 ; xxi., 5. 
 cMark xi., 8-10; Matt, xxi., 15, 16. d Matt, xxi., n, Revised N. T. 
 
29O OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 might have occurred to some of the more intelligent 
 scribes, — he is Jesus, of whose dealings with the pos- 
 sessed we heard a while ago, when we sent messengers to 
 observe his methods. He the Messiah ! Zion's King, 
 that was to come from Bethlehem of Judea, come out of 
 Galilee ! There is no warrant of Scripture for that. 
 
 Still considering the implications of such a procession 
 announcing itself with such cries, it must be said that the 
 Jews submitted to it with rather remarkable patience. 
 But the pageant proceeds directly to the temple itself, and 
 Jesus, dismounting at its portals, arms himself with a whip 
 of cords, and casts out all them that sold and bought, and 
 overthrew the tables of the money-changers and the seats 
 of them that sold doves. a The conduct is somewhat inex- 
 plicable, not only that it seems to be in quite another 
 spirit from the prophetic meekness, which he was attempt- 
 ing to illustrate, but because it seems to be foreign to all 
 the ideas of Jesus to undertake any reform whatever of 
 the temple service. He had not distinguished himself 
 by the assiduity or punctuality of his attendance upon the 
 temple services and sacrifices. Certainly all his influence 
 had been in the direction of a substitution of morality for 
 worship, and he had claimed the right in a matter, so fun- 
 damental as the Sabbath, to substitute his own authority 
 for the letter of the law. b There was much in the details 
 of such a mode of worship as the Jews had perpetuated to 
 disgust a sensitive disposition like that of Jesus. The 
 eager crowds of men, women and children, the jostling 
 of the multitudes of large and smaller beasts used in sac- 
 rifices and feasts, the ungentle hand of the slayers, the 
 terror and cries of the victims, the reek and horror of 
 wholesale slaughter — far less concealed and mitigated 
 than in well-regulated modern abattoirs — would seem to 
 have moved an innovator like Jesus to denounce the whole 
 service as superstitious and savage. But what Jesus did 
 was to break up an arrangement really in the interest 
 of decency, and an -arrangement not only convenient and 
 sensible in itself, but expressly permitted by the law. 
 For it is enacted in the second book of the law, that " If 
 the way be too long for thee, so that thou art not able 
 to carry the firstlings of thy flocks consecrate to Jehovah, 
 or the place be too far from thee, which the Lord thy God 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 29 1 
 
 shall choose to set his name there, then thou shalt turn 
 it into money and bind up the money in thy hand, and 
 shalt go unto the place, which the Lord shall choose, and 
 shall bestow that money for oxen, for sheep, and for 
 wine." a These sellers of doves very properly met that 
 want, and the money-changers were there to accommo- 
 date the sellers and buyers with coins of convenience 
 in their purchases. Doubtless there were extortionate 
 practices attending this traffic, which merited the punish- 
 ment inflicted ; but of these the record contains no hint, 
 nor does the extrusion seem to have been accomplished 
 upon any other ground than the abatement of a profana- 
 tion of the temple service. 
 
 The scribes and Pharisees might have overlooked the 
 triumphal entry, and the claim to be the King of Zion ; 
 but "Who is this," they asked, "that undertakes to control 
 the practices of the temple, and overthrows the statutes 
 of Moses?" They were seriously disturbed. b They still 
 refrain however from violence. They do not arrest Jesus. 
 They do not even interrupt him. Either moderation or 
 timidity seemed to have influenced the chief priests and 
 elders of the people, or this interference with the national 
 worship would have been promptly resented. Doubtless, 
 too, they deferred somewhat to the universal reverence, in 
 which the office of prophet was generally held. Whatever 
 may have been their motive, they contented themselves 
 with a decorous inquiry addressed to the Galilean Rabbi : 
 " Who gave thee authority to do these things ? " Jesus says 
 he will answer this question, if his interrogators will first 
 tell him, whether or not the mission of John the Baptist 
 was divine. The relevancy of John's authority to the 
 question of his own was apparently no more obvious to 
 the scribes than it is to us ; having consulted among 
 themselves, and over-cautious to avoid the logical dilemma 
 they might have been driven to by the keen intelligence 
 of Jesus, they decline to answer, and, overawed by his 
 courage and resources, forthwith abandon their inquisi- 
 tion into his proceedings. 
 
 But though his enemies retire dismayed from the con- 
 troversy, Jesus on his side continues it, and shifts the 
 accusation from his to their proceedings. He is evidently 
 in no mood to make explanations, or to proffer concilia- 
 
 " Dcut. xiv., 24-2^. !> Matt, xxi., 15. <= Matt, xxi., 23-27. 
 
292 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 tions. Indifferent to the effect his words may have to 
 exasperate the ecclesiastical rulers, he tells against them 
 two parables." The first was of two sons, one of whom 
 had promised obedience, but neglected to keep his prom- 
 ise ; the other was insolent at first, but repented and com- 
 plied with his father's will. This was the lesson of the 
 story : publicans and harlots believed John, and repented ; 
 you scribes and Pharisees, professors of righteousness, 
 repented not, when the preacher of righteousness came to 
 you. The other parable was of the householder, whose 
 servants, and finally whose son were slain by his wicked 
 tenants. But the owner will come and destroy those 
 wicked men, and will let his vineyard to those who will 
 render him the fruits in their season. And, said Jesus, 
 the kingdom of God, which John offered, and you rejected, 
 shall be taken from you, calling yourselves the chosen of 
 the Lord, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits 
 thereof.* This was a gratuitous taunt, if, when they had 
 in fact come to John seeking his baptism, he had driven 
 them away, saying they were children of vipers, who had 
 never been invited to repentance. b 
 
 If the priests and elders were angry when they came to 
 Jesus, they go away more angry ; and they are now ready 
 to lay hands upon him. But caution prevails. They do 
 not yet know how much support he has among the people. 
 The demonstration in the streets, in which the Galileans 
 were active, may have made friends everywhere among 
 the people. It seems prudent to wait a few days to see 
 how Jerusalem itself will receive her latest prophet. 
 Meantime, the hierarchy attempt to embroil him with 
 the Roman authorities or to prejudice him with the 
 people, by asking if it be lawful to pay tribute ; and Jesus 
 in his answer plainly commits himself against the patriotic 
 party.* 1 Then, the Sadducees put to him their case against 
 the resurrection, which Jesus evades. 6 The discomfiture 
 of the Sadducees pleases the Pharisees, who with great 
 show of deference ask him : " Which is the chief of the 
 commandments?" evidently referring to the decalogue. 
 
 a Matt, xxi., 2S-32. I> Matt, hi., 7. c Matt, xxii., 46; Luke xx., 19. 
 tlMatt. xxii., 16-22. e Matt, xxii., 23-32. 
 
 * If Jesus had himself during a period of three years preached the gospel of repentance 
 in Jerusalem, as the Fourth Gospel represents, why did he not reproach the priests and elders 
 (or the rejection of his own message, rather than for the rejection of the message of John? 
 These words of Jesus seem to carry a strong implication that all that Jerusalem had heard 
 of the doctrine of the kingdom of heaven it had heard from the lips of John the Baptist. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 293 
 
 Jesus indicates neither one of the commandments as 
 superior to the rest ; but declares that supreme love to 
 God and equal love to men — a sentiment wholly above 
 the grade of the ten words attributed to Moses, found 
 in a prophetic writing of a much later age than his — is 
 the basis of the whole law and prophets. a 
 
 When the Pharisees and Sadducees were withdrawn, 
 Jesus turned to the multitude and to his disciples and 
 proceeded to utter that invective against the scribes and 
 Pharisees which is the summary of his judgment against 
 them. He charged them with hypocrisy, deceit, oppres- 
 sion, ostentation, ambition, extortion, and blasphemy. He 
 called them fools, blind guides, children of hell, the pre- 
 destined to damnation. They were full of hypocrisy and 
 all uncleanness ; and there was no future for them, but to 
 fill up the measure of their iniquity ; for he declared them 
 guilty of all the blood of the good men, that had been 
 slain in the world, which God would require at their 
 hands. b 
 
 This ended his controversy with his enemies. He had 
 done and said whatever was possible to make them impla- 
 cable and unforgiving, and there is nothing before him 
 now, but to take leave of his followers and explain to 
 them more fully the nature of the new era that is about to 
 open upon the world in which he and they are to be 
 exalted to the right hand of power, while the glory and 
 pomp of kingdoms and churches is to fall in darkness 
 and condemnation. 
 
 The whole narrative indicates that these events fol- 
 lowed each other in rapid succession. Doubtless Jesus 
 seized on the occasion of so many Galileans going to the 
 Passover to go himself with his disciples. We can under- 
 stand something of the economy of the little sect. The 
 twelve had been required to leave all and follow him. 
 They had probably sold their possessions and paid the 
 proceeds over to Judas, one ot their number who was 
 their treasurer.' 1 The conjecture of the Johannic narra- 
 tive that Judas was an embezzler of the small treasure of 
 the company of Jesus is not approved by the more reliable 
 biographers ; but as it is quite probable that one of the 
 twelve was intrusted with their funds, it is fairly supposa- 
 
 ■ Matt, xxii., 34-40. '> Matt, xxiii. c Matt, xxiv., 3-51 ; xxv. d John jriii., 29; xii. , 6. 
 
294 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 ble that Judas was in fact the treasurer, as John declares. 
 The more wealthy converts supported the poorer, and 
 Jesus was the especial charge of certain devout women 
 who seemed to have some property. While the disciples 
 were on their missions of healing and preaching, they 
 lived upon the hospitality of the people who chose to re- 
 ceive them.' 1 Such an establishment might be supported 
 indefinitely in Galilee, where the habits of the people were 
 simple and the means of living abundant. But trans- 
 ported to a populous city in a mountainous district, where 
 everything was brought in from outlying fields and sold 
 to the citizens who were priests, teachers, public officers, 
 traders, artisans, and laborers, and where Jesus is not 
 known to have secured a single avowed adherent, even 
 the little band of believers could not have maintained 
 themselves upon their own means for very many days, 
 
 Jesus betakes himself at night-fall to Bethany. This 
 may have been his custom every night that he remained 
 at liberty. 1 ' He takes that much precaution for his safety ; 
 not that he does not even court death, but because he will 
 have his enemies proceed against him publicly, officially, 
 and by daylight, and not by secret assassination or abduc- 
 tion. Mary and Martha, friends and believers, had made 
 his acquaintance on his way to Jerusalem ; and they are 
 now honored in having him for a guest. At Bethany, and 
 just before his arrest, occurred an incident, of which men- 
 tion must be made. d A woman came into his presence, 
 and with a freedom, which seems to have excited the sus- 
 picion of the disciples, anointed either the head or the 
 feet of Jesus with a costly perfume. By what a cruel 
 disagreement of the annalists has she been robbed of 
 the fame, she was assured she should have throughout 
 the world for her delicate and sympathetic gift ! For 
 Matthew and Mark do not even give her name ; and 
 Luke casts against her the cruel imputation that she was 
 a sinner. Only the poet of the Fourth Gospel could see 
 in the touching incident, so contradictorily told down to 
 his day, something to be made more pathetic by his 
 artistic genius. So he makes the unnamed woman — the 
 sinner of the Third Gospel — no less a person, than the 
 
 "Matt, x., 9-1 1. b Matt, xxi., 17 ; Luke xxi., 37. c Matt, xxvi., 4 ; Luke xx., 20. 
 d Matt, xxvi., 6; Markxiv.,3; Lukevii.,37; John xii., 1-8. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 295 
 
 gentle and refined Mary, sister of him, that had been 
 raised from the dead, she whose saintly devotion Jesus 
 had, according to Luke's narrative, so pointedly con- 
 trasted with the sordid housekeeping carefulness of 
 Martha. All the evangelists evidently refer to the same 
 transaction, too eccentric and unique in the surprise it 
 occasioned, too well identified in the accompanying 
 words of Jesus, to have happened more than once. 
 
 Whether the disciples kept together, and lived upon 
 what Judas could buy with the not-exhausted fund of the 
 company, or whether they scattered and found friends 
 among the poor of the city or of the suburbs cannot be 
 known. They met Jesus every day, and must have been 
 exceedingly excited by the boldness, with which he con- 
 fronted the priests and the elders, and by the stupendous 
 disclosures he was making to them of the events of the 
 kingdom of heaven on the eve of being established. 
 
 When we read of those colloquies of Jesus with the Phar- 
 isees and Sadducees, we must not infer that the whole 
 body of Pharisees and Sadducees in Jerusalem, or even 
 the more prominent leaders and elders of the sects, took 
 part in the discussions. It has been seen that on his arri- 
 val at Jerusalem the person of Jesus was not known to 
 the citizens. a It is now to be noted, that the chief priests 
 and elders were in the same condition of ignorance. So 
 entirely aloof was Jesus and his company from the cogni- 
 zance of these high dignitaries of the Church, that, though 
 they had doubtless heard, that a rabble of men, led by one 
 Jesus from Galilee, had marched in fantastic procession 
 to the temple, where the same man had interfered with 
 violence in the practices of the worshippers, that he had 
 been quite too self-possessed for the wits of some of their 
 own number, and some Sadducees, who had ventured to 
 hold an argument with him, and had bitterly denounced 
 themselves to the multitude, they had not seen or heard 
 him. No description of his person had been given, 
 whereby he could be identified among the thousand 
 strangers from Galilee. So they were compelled to use 
 money to induce one of his own chosen disciples to accom- 
 pany the officers, and indicate him to be arrested. b This 
 circumstance shows most conclusively, how really isolated 
 
 "■ Matt, xxi., 10. '> Mark, xiv., 10, 11, 
 
296 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Jesus vas in Jerusalem, and how little impression his 
 teachings and demonstrations had made outside of the 
 little jircle of men and women, who had accompanied him 
 from his own country. 
 
 I: was clearly the preference of the priests, elders, and 
 scribes to put Jesus to death secretly.* But his precau- 
 tion in keeping himself surrounded with a company of his 
 followers by day, and withdrawing at night-fall, defeated 
 this purpose, and compelled them to resort to the legal 
 forms of procedure. Judas' treachery in the mean time 
 opens the way, and Jesus is at last identified, on the night 
 of the Passover, b — the only night, that he cannot retire 
 from the city, — in the garden of Gethsemane outside the 
 walls, where doubtless he knew that his enemies would be 
 sure to trace him. Late in the night-time, he is carried 
 before Caiaphas the High Priest, with whom the scribes 
 and elders are assembled in anticipation of the arrest. 
 Both parties had evidently mistaken the temper of the 
 Jewish mob. For days, the exasperation of the priest- 
 hood has been at its height, and they are ready to accom- 
 plish his assassination ; but they are afraid to subject 
 him to a public trial, lest the populace might interfere for 
 his rescue. So they have assembled secretly and unlaw- 
 fully in the night, and have sent a body, not of Roman ■ 
 soldiers, nor of regular police, but of hired ruffians, — an 
 improvised gang, armed with swords and staves, having 
 Judas for a guide — to find Jesus among the celebrants of 
 the Passover, and bring him before them. Their further 
 proceedings will be determined by the manifestations of 
 popular feeling. If the multitude incline to favor him, 
 they will make away with him secretly. If the multitude 
 take the side of the priesthood and scribes, then they 
 will proceed regularly, and obtain his condemnation and 
 execution under the forms of law. 
 
 Unexpectedly, the mob have got wind of what is going 
 on ; and they join the ruffians, and go to Gethsemane 
 with them to find Jesus. He is manifestly chagrined and 
 disheartened by their appearance.' 1 A brave and devoted 
 man may make up his mind to die, to accomplish some 
 lofty purpose, but he will welcome every obstacle thrown 
 in the way of his death ; and he will hope to the last that 
 
 , 1 ' M .in . -.xvi., 47. Matt, xxvi., 57. '1 Luke xxii., 47-53. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 297 
 
 some angel of mercy from heaven may intervene for his 
 rescue. Jesus had noted the multitude, who perhaps ap- 
 plauded, when, standing in the temple, he had pronounced 
 the scribes and Pharisees a generation of vipers, the 
 progeny of hell ; and he may have drawn some augury of 
 hope from their apparent favor. When the posse of the 
 priesthood came upon him in the garden, he seems to 
 have had no reproaches for the armed ruffians, none even 
 for his own trusted disciple, who had betrayed to them his 
 place of hiding ; but he turned to the multitude with 
 words like these : I sat daily with you teaching in the 
 temple, and hoped you were not enemies, as ye laid no 
 hands upon me ; and are ye now come out with swords 
 and staves as against a thief to take me ? a Yes, the 
 appearance was delusive : the mob were on the side of 
 his enemies ; and now even the courage of the twelve 
 failed, and all but Peter fled and hid themselves. 13 He 
 was bold enough to follow at a distance, hoping to pass 
 himself off as one of the mob by telling a lie. c His Gali- 
 lean dialect, however, betrayed him, — another evidence 
 that no Judaeans had believed on Jesus. Peter is in no 
 danger : there is on the part of the hierarchy no purpose 
 to molest any of the company but their chief and leader. 
 Now, for the first time, and only for a few hours, Jesus 
 comes out from the privacy of his provincial life into such 
 publicity as the official world of government and the courts 
 can give to illumine his conduct. Here, if anywhere, in 
 the evangelic narratives, we come upon veritable history. 
 Accordingly, we find a more substantial agreement in the 
 different traditions of his trial and execution than we find 
 in the traditions of his doctrines or of the incidents of 
 his preceding life. That there was a Jesus Christ, who 
 lived among the Jews of Palestine during the earlier years 
 of the Roman Empire, and that he was put to death by 
 crucifixion, are the best known facts in reference to him. 
 How uncertain all the data we have of his life, character, 
 and teaching are, may be inferred from the grave differ- 
 ences in the histories, that are extant, as to the proceed- 
 ings at his trial, as to how his conviction was reached, 
 and how sentence against him was executed. Tt could 
 not well have been otherwise. His trusted friends for- 
 
 "Matt. xxvi., 55. bMatt. xxvi., 56-58. c Matt, xxvi., 69-74. 
 
298 OPINIONS AXD CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 sook him in apprehension for their own safety. None 
 of the New Testament writers seem to have had access to 
 any record or official documents, in which the proceedings 
 against him, and the final judgment are set forth, if 
 indeed there were any such official documents. As to 
 what was formally charged against Jesus, by what, and 
 what kind of testimony, it was attempted to be substanti- 
 ated, and what, if any, defence was made, we can only 
 know from the unskilled persons, having themselves 
 apparently no knowledge of the classification of crimes, 
 of the nature of sufficient testimony or of the methods of 
 judicial proceedings, who have undertaken, years after the 
 event, to tell us. As tp the informal proceedings, — that 
 is, what was said to Jesus, and what he said, other than 
 in the indictment and pleadings, — we can know still less. 
 This much is certain : Jesus himself after his arrest had no 
 opportunity, during his life, to converse with his disciples 
 and to disclose to them the proceedings in reference to 
 himself before the Sanhedrim, and none of his disciples 
 were present as witnesses. What the public of Jerusalem 
 learned about those proceedings they must have learned 
 from members of the Council. Doubtless, many members 
 of the Council afterward embraced the faith of Jesus, and 
 described his language and bearing with all the partiality 
 of believers and admirers. Others, the majority, who 
 retained their animosity, told the story tinctured with 
 their own prejudices. But, between the two classes, a 
 substantial agreement as to the main facts ultimately 
 obtained, which formed the public opinion of the time. 
 From a public opinion thus informed, the disciples col- 
 lected their information ; and it was finally committed to 
 writing in what are called the Gospels. 
 
 It is doubtless correct as to its substance. What Jesus 
 said, if anything, at his trial and during the suffering of 
 his public execution, owing to the solemnity of the cir- 
 cumstances, and the number and character of the observ- 
 ers, would be likely to be better remembered and more 
 accurately reported than any of his words. Taking the 
 most trustworthy report of his words and of the course 
 and issue of his trial, let us try to understand how the pro- 
 ceedings against him which terminated in his death were 
 conducted. It will be necessary to consider the condition 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 299 
 
 of the civil government, and of the criminal code, to which 
 he was subject. 
 
 The political situation of Jerusalem and Palestine was 
 somewhat anomalous. The Romans did not until the year 
 70 of the Christian era conquer the country, and make it 
 a part of the empire. In extending their dominions, they 
 had subdued the Greek dynasties of the Seleucidae, and 
 Ptolemaias on either side of the Jews ; and the latter, 
 who had succumbed to the armies of Alexander, had no 
 means of resisting the armies of Pompey. In fact, Rome 
 got possession of Palestine as an ally of one of its native 
 princes, waging war against his kinsmen for the throne 
 of Jerusalem. 
 
 Ever since the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Jews 
 had maintained their independence. Their first revolt 
 from the Greeks was under Judas Maccabasus, 164 B.C. ; 
 and he and his brothers, and their descendants, had not 
 only delivered Judea, but had conquered Samaria, Galilee, 
 Trachonitis, and part of Idumea from the Syrio-Greek 
 kings, and had ruled over this territory as princes. In 
 the year B.C. 104, Aristobulus, one of those princes, took 
 the title of king. His brother Alexander succeeded him. 
 Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, sons of Alexander, strove to- 
 gether in arms for the succession, and the latter, being 
 defeated, called in the Romans as umpires ; and Pompey, 
 the general of the Senate, took Jerusalem and made Hyr- 
 canus king. Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, made war on 
 Jerusalem in the year 43 B.C., and tried to recover his 
 father's throne. Herod, the son of Antipater, who had 
 married the grand-daughter of Hyrcanus, attempted to de- 
 lend the city, but having been defeated fled to Rome. 
 The Senate declared him king, and sent him back with an 
 army. Antigonus in his turn was defeated and slain ; 
 and Herod became king of Palestine, reigning at Jerusa- 
 lem, until about the time of the birth of Jesus. On his 
 death, the kingdom was assigned to his sons, Judea to 
 Archelaus, Galilee to Herod Antipas, and Trachonitis to 
 Philip; but Judea in the sixth year of the Christian era 
 was added to the proconsulate of Syria, and governed for 
 the Emperor by Pontius Pilate. Afterward, for a brief 
 period, Herod Agrippa, grandson of the first Herod, ruled 
 for a few years over re-united Palestine ; but after 44 A.D. 
 it was ruled by governors as a Roman province 
 
300 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 As the revolt of Judas Maccabaeus was not only for 
 political, but for religious independence, and as it was 
 incited chiefly by an attempt by Antiochus to abolish 
 the Mosaic religion, it is to be concluded that all the 
 Asmonasan kings were devout Jews, and zealous for the 
 national worship and the faith of Jehovah. Hyrcanus 
 himself was originally the High Priest, and his powerful 
 family kept both the Church and the State well in their 
 hands. Indeed, the very last king of the line, Herod 
 Agrippa, seemed to have well merited the compliment 
 bestowed on his orthodoxy by Paul, when, in the presence 
 of his heathen compeers, he invoked him as a brother of 
 the faith : "King Agrippa, believest thoic the prophets ? I 
 knozu that thou believest." 
 
 Coming into possession of the country by policy rather 
 than by force, and ruling it for several years only by 
 accepting the fealty of its own native princes, the Romans 
 would be likely to interfere as little as possible with the 
 internal affairs of the people, and to leave the priesthood 
 in the complete exercise of all their ecclesiastical func- 
 tions. The Jews were not required to abjure their relig- 
 ion, to change their forms of worship, or to contribute 
 soldiers to the armies of the republic. They felt the loss 
 of their independence only in the payment of taxes, rigor- 
 ously exacted, and in the presence of Roman garrisons 
 in their strongholds. After the court of Archelaus was 
 broken up, and Pontius Pilate, a Roman knight, had been 
 established in the palace to represent the majesty of 
 Caesar, the High Priest was still absolute in all matters ot 
 religion, and perhaps the court of the Sanhedrim still 
 continued to administer justice in all civil affairs. The 
 probability is that ordinary offences against the person, 
 against property, as well as crimes of sacrilege and blas- 
 phemy, were judged and determined by the Council of 
 priests and elders ; while military offences, like rebellion 
 and riot, treason and crimes against the Roman sover- 
 eignty, were tried before the Procurator as the represen- 
 tative of Rome. Historical critics are not agreed as to 
 whether the power of executing sentence was allowed to 
 the Council of the Sanhedrim, or whether, in cases of cap- 
 ital offences, the sentence of punishment required, as it 
 does in England and in the United States, the warrant 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 3OI 
 
 of the Chief Executive, who had, besides, the prerogative 
 of pardoning. 
 
 So far as the data given in the Acts of the Apostles are 
 trustworthy, it would seem, that after the death of Jesus, 
 and while Judea was still under the control of Roman gov- 
 ernors, the Council of the chief priests and elders was 
 allowed, not only to initiate, but to complete capital trials, 
 to declare and execute sentence. Thus, Peter and John, 
 preaching the resurrection and faith of Jesus, after his 
 death, and while Pilate was still Governor, were arrested 
 and imprisoned, and brought before the Sanhedrim for 
 trial. Peter addressed the tribunal as : " Riders of the 
 people and elders of Israel." After listening to the 
 defence, the Council retired and consulted. It deter- 
 mined indeed to threaten and release the accused preach- 
 ers ; and the account says, the Sanhedrim refrained from 
 exercising their authority, not for fear of any interference 
 by the Roman military government, but for fear of the 
 people, who sided with the disciples. 11 The same apostles 
 were arrested a second time, committed for trial, and 
 were rescued from prison, but recaptured and brought 
 before the Council. Again the Council heard the de- 
 fence, again it deliberated apart, and then sentenced 
 the accused to be beaten. 1 ' 
 
 The proceedings against Stephen, though doubtless 
 somewhat irregular, were in their form judicial. Wit- 
 nesses appeared ; the charge of blasphemy was made; 
 the proofs were offered ; the defence was listened to, and 
 a sentence of condemnation was passed. Stephen was 
 executed by stoning, the witnesses attending and casting 
 the first stone, c as the law required. This was the legal 
 method of executing a capital sentence/ and although 
 there was manifested in the execution all the hatred and 
 vindictiveness, which characterized a mob, it is not lightly 
 to be believed, that an upright man, a scholar and a Phar- 
 isee, like Paul, would have participated in proceedings, 
 that were simply lawless and murderous. Later still, 
 after Agrippa had obtained the kingdom, Paul himself 
 was arrested in Jerusalem, and was carried by the Chief 
 Captain of the Roman garrison before the Jewish Council 
 
 *Actsiv., 1-23. b Acts v., 17-40 cActsvi., 11-15. 
 
 d hev. xxiv., 16. « Acts viii., 1. 
 
302 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to be tried. True he sent afterward a band of soldiers 
 and recovered his prisoner ; but that was because it had 
 become known that he was accused only of some ecclesi- 
 astical offence; and that he was a Roman citizen. As 
 military commandant, Claudius Lysias took the liberty to 
 change the jurisdiction, and to send the case of a man not 
 a native of the country, but a Roman citizen of the prov- 
 ince of Cilicia, to the judgment of the Roman governor. 
 This proceeding indicates, that, but for that interference, 
 the authority of the Sanhedrim to proceed to trial, sen- 
 tence, and execution, would not have been questioned. 11 
 The conclusion must be, therefore, that, in the political 
 status of Palestine at the time, it was within the province 
 of the Council of the elders and chief priests to try Jesus, 
 to pass judgment, and to execute sentence upon him after 
 conviction. 
 
 A writer in the Contemporary Review, in two papers 
 characterized by intelligence and judicial candor, has 
 undertaken to show that Jesus was subjected to two dis- 
 tinct trials under two widely different systems of jurispru- 
 dence, the Jewish and the Roman, both of them justly 
 celebrated for their elaborate and effective methods of 
 securing justice, and of preventing popular prejudice or 
 the influence of the government from obtaining convic- 
 tion in any other than clearly proved cases of guilt. The 
 writer undertakes to show that in both of these trials 
 the fundamental rules of the law were disregarded, and 
 that the delivery of the accused to execution was without 
 the requisites of a valid judicial conviction. The special 
 points stated to show that the proceedings before the 
 Jewish Council were in violation of the national criminal 
 code are, that the trial, being a capital one, was com- 
 menced in the night, the law requiring all trials in crimi- 
 nal and in civil cases to be commenced in the day-time, 
 though the latter only might be concluded in the night. 
 The law also required the Council in criminal cases, un- 
 less their judgment was for the acquittal of the accused, 
 to separate and consider their verdict of condemnation 
 twenty-four hours, or longer, if a Sabbath or holiday 
 intervened, before formally affirming it. It was not law- 
 ful for the Council, or any member of it, to procure the 
 
 « Acts xxi., 27-40; xxii., xxiii., xxiv., xxv. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 303 
 
 witnesses, who, under the Jewish system, were also the 
 prosecutors. The accusation and testimony of these wit- 
 nesses were the only indictment, — the only setting forth 
 of the offence that the proceedings required. The wit- 
 nesses also took the initiative in inflicting the punish- 
 ment. It was an outrage on all Jewish ideas of justice 
 for these persons, who assumed the responsibility of the 
 prosecution, to be either the magistrates who listened 
 to the evidence, or to be suborned or procured by them. 
 It is also maintained in the same papers, that, when the 
 testimony of the witnesses broke down, as it is declared 
 to have done, either because of its inadequacy to show an 
 offence, because of the lack of credibility of the persons 
 offering it, or on account of its contradictory character, 
 Jesus should have been at once acquitted. The subse- 
 quent adjuration of Jesus, and the finding by the Council 
 that his confession was blasphemous, were in direct viola- 
 tion of the letter and spirit of the Hebrew law, which 
 permitted no accused person to be interrogated, and pro- 
 tected him from self-crimination as effectually as does 
 the common law. 
 
 Instead of there being two triais, upon two distinct 
 charges, there was, according to the most credible tradi- 
 tion, but one. The writer, trying to account for the fact 
 that there was a reference to Pontius Pilate, a judgment 
 by him from the Pretorium, and a delivery of the prisoner 
 to the Roman soldiery, who led him away and consum- 
 mated the execution, assumes that there must have been 
 a trial, and methods of procedure something like what 
 were prescribed by the statutes and customs of the 
 Roman republic in criminal cases. But there is nothing 
 in the tradition to indicate that any second or Roman 
 trial was had. After reference to Pilate there was no 
 accusation, no fixing upon a day for trial, no testimony 
 offered under oath, no delatio, no argument of counsel, 
 no deliberation or balloting of jurors, all of which were 
 essential features of a trial conducted after the Roman 
 methods. It is true Syria, and Judea, after its annexa- 
 tion to Syria, were Imperial, and not Senatorial provinces, 
 and were ruled directly by Caesar and by his deputies, 
 responsible only to himself ; but in those cases, where 
 the emperor intervened directly in the trial of criminals 
 
3O4 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 at home, or in the provinces through his deputies — the 
 proconsuls — the forms of proceeding were substantially 
 the same, as when the trials were conducted before the 
 quasstors or the special judicial magistracy in Rome. 
 The emperor, the proconsul abroad, the quaestors at 
 home, presided in the court ; but the responsibility and 
 judgment were with the jurors, who gave their votes for 
 acquittal or condemnation, just like a modern jury, save 
 that a mere majority could convict, whereas from modern 
 juries unanimity is required. 
 
 The matter came to the judgment of Pilate because 
 he was the recognized chief-executive power, and because 
 the soldiers depended upon to accomplish the crucifixion 
 were under his orders. It seems probable, as has been 
 already shown, that this was not necessary ; that the 
 Council of Jews that had condemned Jesus had plenary 
 power to cause their sentence to be executed, and that 
 they might have ordered against him the same punish- 
 ment of lethal stoning, to which a short time afterwards 
 they subjected Stephen, with no more interference on the 
 part of the Roman governor or garrison, than happened 
 in Stephen's case. 
 
 There are two reasons wny probably the Sanhedrim 
 did not undertake, in the case of Jesus, to execute their 
 own sentence. The first was their great timidity, of 
 which the evangelical writers speak not only in their 
 account of the proceedings against Peter and John, but 
 also in the proceedings against Jesus. They had sup- 
 pressed their resentment and postponed summary meas- 
 ures, because Jesus had brought with him from Galilee 
 the reputation both of a prophet and a wonder-worker, 
 and, doubtless too, of an upright, pure, and blameless life. 
 The sect of the Pharisees, as Josephus says, never in- 
 clined to excessive punishments. 11 They dared not pro- 
 ceed against Jesus, until they had gained the support 
 and sympathy of the multitude. During those few days 
 that intervened between his arrival in Jerusalem and his 
 arrest, their emissaries had undoubtedly been busy with 
 false and exaggerated accusations against him in all quar- 
 ters of the city. After the multitude turned out at mid- 
 night to assist in the arrest of Jesus, the chief priests 
 
 "Jos. Antiq. xiii , ex. 6. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 305 
 
 first became sure, that the mob would stand by, and aid 
 in putting him to death. But now if, having thrown part 
 of the guilt of his plotted death upon the multitude, they 
 can throw a part too upon the Roman administration, 
 they believe that they can almost acquit themselves of 
 blame. So, in a spirit of new and feigned loyalty, they 
 carry their convicted prisoner to the deputy of Csesar, 
 and ask him to issue the necessary order to have him 
 executed. 
 
 The other reason why the chief priests and elders did 
 not insist upon a jurisdiction, about which they had gen- 
 erally been quite tenacious, was the fear of a military 
 interference with their proceedings. Jesus was not a 
 native of Jerusalem or of Judea. He was a Nazarene, and 
 a subject of King Herod, then reigning, an independent 
 ally of the Romans. When afterward the same Jewish 
 Council undertook to proceed with the trial and punish- 
 ment of Paul, the Captain of the garrison sent a body 
 of soldiers to rescue him, and transferred his case by 
 sheer military power to the Roman magistrate, on the 
 ground, as alleged in his letter, that he was a native of 
 Cilicia, a Roman province, and of Tarsus, whose citizens 
 had obtained from the Senate the privileges of Roman 
 citizenship." Doubtless, in repressing riots and in col- 
 lecting taxes, the officers and soldiers, partly through 
 ignorance, partly through contempt, had roughly violated 
 many of the local and ecclesiastical laws and customs of 
 the country, in which they were strangers, and so ren- 
 dered themselves amenable to arrest and punishment 
 before the local courts. It would ill comport with the 
 dignity of conquerors to permit their own functionaries to 
 be thus molested by the tribunals of a captured country, 
 and rescues of accused persons claiming Roman protec- 
 tion must have been already frequent. There were 
 strong reasons, therefore, why the Council at Jerusalem 
 should not arrogate against the Roman authority a crimi- 
 nal jurisdiction, which seemed by no means unquestion- 
 able, over the person of Jesus. 
 
 There having been but one really judicial proceeding, 
 it becomes necessary, following the footsteps of the 
 Review writer, to consider how far it was regular in its 
 
 "Acta xxii., 24-29; xxiii., 25-30. 
 
306 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 modes of proceeding, and whether its findings were sub- 
 stantially consistent with what we now know to have 
 been the facts in the case. It might be assumed, a priori^ 
 that, under the known circumstances of the case, the 
 safeguards of the law would have been violated, and all 
 the provisions which favored the accused would have 
 been, in spirit, if not in form, overridden. A body of 
 men so exasperated that they will, if they dare, arrest a 
 person and put him to death in secret, if they afterward, 
 to satisfy some of their more tender-hearted or more 
 scrupulous associates, decide to give him the benefit of a 
 trial, will be likely to make the trial as much as possible 
 the instrument of effecting their predetermined malice. 
 They will try him, not to see if he be guilty, but the 
 more safely to compass his death. In the same spirit, 
 in quite recent times, many famous State trials have been 
 conducted in England, where the judges and the juries, 
 in their judgments and sentences, have given savage 
 utterance to the resentment of the court, whose favor 
 they sought to win, by lending themselves to accomplish 
 its revenge, or to the prejudice and rage of the people, 
 from whose violence perhaps the prisoner had been res- 
 cued. During the madness of the Reign of Terror, — 
 although executions followed the sentence of legalized 
 tribunals, and after a summary hearing of testimony, — so 
 prevalent was the prejudice, so cruel and ferocious the 
 whole populace, and the government it had improvised, 
 that history properly characterizes such wholesale punish- 
 ment of innocent persons as massacres and murders. 
 
 Undoubtedly, the proceedings against Jesus were open 
 to the condemnation, that they were unlawfully initiated 
 in the night-time, and that a judgment of conviction was 
 rendered early in the morning after the arrest, and a few 
 hours before execution, which could not have been law- 
 fully rendered earlier than the third day afterward. It has 
 been seen that Jesus was arrested in the night, after the 
 Passover had been celebrated in the evening — that occa- 
 sion probably having been seized upon to find him in the 
 environs of the city. According to received tradition, this 
 was the day of the week corresponding to our Thursday. 
 The day following, the trial and condemnation took place ; 
 and, before three o'clock on the same afternoon, the agony 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 307 
 
 of his death was over. It was unlawful for the Council, 
 who were his judges, to procure the witnesses to prose- 
 cute him ; and, upon the failure of the suborned testimony 
 to justify his conviction, he was clearly entitled to an 
 acquittal. 
 
 The objection that, under the Hebrew law, the High 
 Priest had no right to adjure him to make confession, nor 
 the Council afterward to convict him upon a confession 
 thus illegally extracted, is not so well taken. a The interro- 
 gation of the High Priest was not a part of the judicial 
 proceedings. He addressed the prisoner as the public 
 prosecutor, the judge, or any casual person might have 
 done. He put a question he had no right to ask, the put- 
 ting of which was a gross official impropriety, if not an 
 illegality. But Jesus was not prejudiced by the question, 
 and was neither compelled nor even called upon to an- 
 swer it. It would have been the part of ordinary discre- 
 tion not to answer. Jesus was by no means destitute of 
 such discretion. His conduct in several difficult emer- 
 gencies, and the directions he gave his disciples, indicate 
 that he was a man of marked sagacity and self-possession, 
 was rarely at loss for a wise answer, was keenly alive to 
 what was due to his own dignity, and never betrayed 
 himself by any inadvertence of speech. As he did answer 
 the question of the High Priest, it must be concluded that 
 he did so in full view of the peril he was placing himself 
 in, and for the purpose of maintaining to the last that 
 claim to divine authority, which he knew would offend the 
 priesthood. 
 
 The Review writer assumes the proceeding to have been 
 the trial of an accused person upon a certain charge, and 
 the failure of the court to find legal evidence to substan- 
 tiate the charge. Thereupon, the presiding justice adjures 
 the prisoner to state whether or not he is guilty. The 
 prisoner, in replying, uses words which the court deems to 
 be tantamount to a confession of guilt, and it proceeds to 
 pass a judgment of conviction. This is not exactly what 
 the record imports, but rather, that the accusation break- 
 ing down through the infamy, incompetence, or disagree- 
 ment of the testimony, the accused repeats the crime in 
 open court, and is proceeded against de novo for the new 
 
 "Mall, xxvi., 63-66. 
 
308 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 offence. It was as if a person were under trial for an 
 assault with a dangerous weapon upon an officer. The 
 witnesses to the assault are so contradictory, and of such 
 bad repute, that the court refuse to consider the charge 
 proved. In that stage of the proceedings, the accused, it 
 may be with the very manacles, with which his hands are 
 a mfined, assaults the officer and dangerously wounds him. 
 The original indictment must fail ; there must be a new 
 arrest, a new indictment, and a new trial, at which it may 
 or may not be improper for the members of the court, 
 who were witnesses of the assault, to sit as judges. But 
 that the criminal can be tried by some tribunal, and can 
 be convicted upon the facts being shown, there can be 
 no doubt. Or it was as if the offence charged had been 
 an oral libel against a magistrate, and, midway of the trial, 
 the accused repeats the libel in open court. Is there any 
 doubt that, so far from being treated with impunity, the 
 repetition and publicity of the libel, and the contempt it 
 implies, will be considered an aggravation ? 
 
 We must try to understand the proceedings. Under 
 the Jewish law — and the Roman law was nearly the same 
 
 — there was no indictment, no formal written complaint. 
 The declaration of the two witnesses was the indictment. 
 The witnesses — doubtless in familiar, informal language 
 
 — made their declaration of what the accused did or said. 
 The Council determined what offence was implied in the 
 acts or words, and proceeded to try him for that offence. 
 
 In this case, Matthew narrates, that the delatio of the 
 witnesses was as follows : " This fellow said, I am able 
 to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days." a 
 Mark's version of it is this : " We heard him say, I will 
 destroy this temple, that is made with hands, and within 
 three days I will build another made without hands." b 
 Luke, very properly considering, that this charge, what- 
 ever it was, broke down, and the sentence was for the 
 offence in open court, omits all account of it, and proceeds 
 directly to the adjuration and the reply, deemed by the 
 court blasphemous. But let us revert a moment to the 
 trial as it began. The accusation, as given by Matthew, 
 involves only a single offence, a claim to supernatural or 
 divine power. As given by Mark, it involves that, and 
 
 a Matt, xxvi., 61. b Mark xi/., 58. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 309 
 
 also sacrilege, inasmuch as it not only asserts ability to 
 rebuild the temple miraculously, but the intention to 
 destroy it. Both of these offences were high crimes 
 under the extant Jewish law. 
 
 Now, we may either believe that the actual statement 
 of the witnesses was as Mark records, or that it was as 
 Matthew records, — for there is a substantial difference 
 between them, — or we may believe that both are correct, 
 and that this very discrepancy was the reason why the 
 Council determined that the disagreement was fatal, and 
 the offence not proved. But for which of the two 
 offences, blasphemy or sacrilege, implied in Mark's words, 
 was the court actually proceeding ? Clearly for the 
 former. Jesus had in fact never uttered any threats 
 against the temple ; and it is not probable, that he had 
 ever spoken the words put into the "mouth of the false 
 witnesses by Matthew. It was not a malicious purpose 
 of destroying the temple that the Council for the mo- 
 ment entertained, but the presumptuous implication of 
 the power to rebuild it in three days. He who could 
 do that must be greater than Solomon, greater than Ezra 
 or Nehemiah. Only the divine power could build such 
 a structure in three days. The author of the Fourth 
 Gospel, in the construction of the conversations ascribed 
 to Jesus in his lifetime, has skilfully used this charge 
 against him, and aptly indicated its significance in the 
 minds of his accusers. " Forty-six years," said the Jews, 
 "was the temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in 
 three days? But he spake of the temple of his body." a 
 It is probable,, too, that the author, who evidently be- 
 lieves Jesus had used the words alleged in the indict- 
 ment, wished to extenuate their apparent impiety by the 
 after-suggestion, that they were spoken in a figurative 
 sense. In the contradiction between the witnesses at 
 the trial, the Galilean evangelists, and the Fourth Gospel, 
 it is now impossible to determine what Jesus had said. 
 Was it something about coming back in three days, with 
 which the synoptic writers have confused the three days 
 of Jonah in the whale, and John a destroyed temple to be 
 raised in three days ? The real similitude indicated by 
 Jesus to Jonah must have been, that as Jonah was a sign 
 
 ajohn ii., 20, ax. 
 
3IO OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to the Ninevites, so was he himself to his generation ; • 
 and his actual allusion to the temple must have been, that 
 not a stone of it should be left upon another. b After the 
 disciples began to believe that their Master had come 
 back, after three days, from the grave, the swallowing 
 and casting-up of the old prophet, and the destroyed 
 temple to be restored, were thought to be parallels and 
 prophecies of the resurrection. What a fanciful believer 
 had appended as a marginal note to his copy of the 
 memorabilia of Jesus became adopted as the text of a 
 later transcription. What the High Priest said, with 
 the evident concurrence of the Council, indicates that 
 the inquisition of the court was toward blasphemy,^ and 
 not toward sacrilege. " Ye have heard the blasphemy" the 
 blasphemy about which we have been questioning the 
 witnesses ; what need of further testimony, that is, of 
 further like testimony, of testimony pertinent to the 
 matter under investigation? 
 
 It only remains to consider, Was the judgment itself 
 just? It has already appeared that the proceedings were 
 grossly irregular and illegal, both those of the court in 
 condemning, and those of the de facto executive power in 
 ordering to execution a person, whose sentence he had 
 the power, if not the right, to review, and whom after 
 examination he found to have done nothing worthy of 
 death/ 1 Such violent proceedings could only issue in 
 judicial murder, and the verdict of history has been just 
 that Jesus was put to death without having been lawfully 
 convicted, or regularly tried. But a murderer may be 
 unlawfully put to death by a mob, who are so indignant 
 at his crime, that they have broken into his prison, and 
 taken him thence, and hanged him. It is in the eye of 
 the law as much murder as if the victim were an inno- 
 cent man. And yet, in the case supposed, the murderer 
 would certainly have been convicted, and the mob have 
 only anticipated what would have been done ultimately 
 by the officers of the law. Did the acts and language 
 of Jesus, if they have been handed down to our times 
 correctly by the received traditions, constitute what a 
 conscientious and enlightened jurist of Jerusalem was 
 
 »Matl xii., 41 ; Luke xi., 29-32. b Matt, xxiv., :, 2 ; Luke xxi., 5, 6. 
 cMatt. xxvi., 63, 64. d Luke xxiii., 13-22- 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 3 1 1 
 
 required to consider blasphemy, or any other capital 
 offence ? 
 
 The words charged, the substance of which was that he, 
 Jesus, had power to rebuild the temple in three days, did 
 not seem to have been proved. We can account for the 
 tradition of the Fourth Gospel imputing them to him, by 
 the notoriety created by the trial, and the unsuccessful 
 effort of an apologist to extenuate their criminal signifi- 
 cance. For if Jesus meant by this temple this body of 
 his, — a meaning no hearer would infer, — it was equally a 
 claim to divine power. A temple is a human work, and 
 may be made even in three days, with a sufficient force 
 of perfectly organized laborers ; but a dead body cannot 
 be made alive by any power or skill of the deceased. The 
 explanation, if admissible, is an extenuation of the offence 
 of sacrilege. It is a confession of the offence for which 
 he was actually tried. And if Jesus had not said those 
 words, we know now that he had said other words, that 
 less equivocally asserted his divine sonship and Deity, 
 upon which the charge of blasphemy might have been as 
 well based. He had called himself Christ (meaning the 
 Messiah)," the Son of God, b Master, King/ King of Zion," 
 and the Lord — the usual designation among the Israelites 
 of Jehovah, their God. f ' He had declared himself the 
 Judge of mankind. 2 He had claimed authority to forgive 
 sins, 1 ' and to modify the law of the ten words. 1 He had 
 said that he was greater than Solomon, j greater than the 
 temple. k He had assured his followers that he would 
 soon come in the clouds of heaven in glory, with all the 
 holy angels as a retinue. 1 He had asserted that all things 
 were delivered to him by God, and no man could know 
 God except by him." 1 Within a few hours of his trial, he 
 had said, that he had only to ask God, who was his father, 
 and he would send twelve legions of angels to rescue him 
 from the soldiers, who had arrested him." 
 
 The old Hebrew law still in force in the time 'of Jesus 
 was, He that blaspJiemeth the name of the Lord shall surely 
 be fiut to death, and all the congregation of Israel shall 
 
 ■■ Matt, xxiii., S, 10; Mark ix., 41. c Luke xix., 38, 40. i Matt, v., 21-32 ; xii., 7, S. 
 
 Matt, xvi., 16, 17. f Matt, xii., 8 ; Luke xix., 31. j Matt, xii., 42. 
 
 c Matt, xxiii., 3. g Matt, xxv., 31, 32. k Matt, xii., 6. 
 
 d Matt. xxv. , 34. li Matt, ix., 6. ' I Matt, xxv., 31. 
 
 f" Matt, xi., 27. n Matt, xxvi., 53. 
 
312 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 certainly stone him* The oneness of God had been the 
 great idea, for which the whole cultus of the Jews stood. 
 All around them were peoples who believed in families 
 and associations of gods, in gods who were the husbands 
 of goddesses, and the husbands of mortal women, in gods 
 who were the fathers of other gods, and the fathers of 
 heroic men. All this was an unspeakable abomination to 
 the pure mind of the Jew. His God was neither begotten, 
 nor did he beget, but was from everlasting to everlasting 
 the same — never growing old, never sharing his power or 
 glory with a son or a successor. In their piety and ser- 
 vice of Jehovah, the Israelitish orators and poets had used 
 the figure of fatherhood to represent the tender love of 
 their deity for his chosen people ; they had used the figure 
 of husband to represent the peculiar and exclusive attach- 
 ment, which that relation implied from the chosen people 
 toward their deity, but always strictly as a figure of 
 speech. No Jewish mind was ever literal or gross enough 
 to connect anything genetic or sexual with the rela- 
 tion. All around them among the Greeks, the Romans, 
 the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the gods 
 were altogether like themselves : they married, they were 
 given in marriage, they broke over the exclusiveness of 
 the tie with the license allowed to great kings, and they 
 begot offspring like unto themselves, who shared their 
 power and immortality. One son of God had rebelled 
 against his father and conquered from him the sover- 
 eignty of the universe. But neither as fact, philosophy, nor 
 poetry did the. prophets of Israel receive these ideas, or 
 tolerate the least compromise with them, or with any 
 symbols or rites, that recognized them. Perhaps they 
 believed there were such gods, and that they lived in such 
 practices ; but their God, Jehovah, living in utter remote- 
 ness from all such compromising relations, in an awful 
 austerity of purity and holiness, was not tc be soiled by 
 any such imputations. How hard had the lesson of the 
 prophets been ! How easy it had been for the rude people 
 to forget their sublime faith, and to adopt gods that flat- 
 tered their instinctive and family affections ! And what 
 years of famine, war, pestilence, and slavery had they 
 suffered — as they came to believe — for their apostasies. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 313 
 
 But now at last they have grown up to the sublime idea 
 of their own religion ; and, after the revolt of Maccabaeus, 
 the nation may have been licentious, cruel, intolerant, and 
 turbulent, but it was no longer and never will be idola- 
 trous or capable of being turned from the great lesson of 
 its discipline, burned into its experience and heart, — 
 " Hear, O Israel ! the Lord our God is one Lord." a 
 
 Still, plain as was the prohibition of the law, strong as 
 was the national sentiment that sanctioned and enforced 
 it, and palpable as was the claim of Jesus to a genetic 
 relationship and substantial equality with God to be con- 
 sidered in the eyes of an intelligent Jew of his time a 
 breach of the letter and spirit of the law, it seems to be 
 fairly implied from all that we know, that Jesus would not 
 have been molested, notwithstanding his divine preten- 
 sions, had he remained in Galilee, or, coming to Jerusa- 
 lem, had he refrained from denouncing the ecclesiastical 
 authorities, and from violently interfering with the temple 
 service. He would have been safe in Galilee, which was 
 ruled over by Herod, nominally himself a Jew, but who 
 could never have been induced to molest a prophet that 
 abstained from denouncing his own licentiousness. The 
 hesitation of the Pharisees and elders, and their reluc- 
 tance to assume the guilt of his taking off, show that they, 
 too, would have overlooked the legal offence, but for envy 
 and malice, and the pretext it gave them to revenge them-* 
 selves on an enemy. 
 
 There is still a law against blasphemy in England and 
 in the United States, less severe in its penalty, but taking 
 cognizance of the same offence set forth in the Mosaic 
 code. There has been in this country and in England 
 much reverent and sincere, but bold and free, criticism on 
 matters of religious belief, which would seem to fall liter- 
 ally within the purview of this statute. An enlightened 
 public sentiment prevents the law — still wholesome and 
 salutary to punish ribald and profane libels upon the sincere 
 faith of the great mass of mankind — from being used to 
 punish honest and earnest inquiry, and the free expres- 
 sion of religious convictions, that differ from the popular 
 standard. Should a prosecution to enforce the statute 
 against blasphemy be undertaken in this country, it would 
 
314 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 be most desirable, that it should fall under the oversight 
 of a wise judge, who would know how to discriminate 
 between the conscientious inquirer, who had given expres- 
 sion to a reverent belief, and the flippant scoffer, who had 
 degraded a high ideal. Even as early as the first century 
 there was a liberal spirit, then due to the influence of 
 Greek philosophy and learning, and to the general scepti- 
 cism, that was beginning to make the whole scheme of 
 the pagan mythology slightly ridiculous, which modified 
 the rigor of positive law, and prevented it from being put 
 in execution, except in cases like that of Jesus, where 
 the ostensible charge was a mere pretext to cover a con- 
 cealed envy. 
 
 We are carefully considering the question from the 
 stand-point, not of the modern reverence for the name of 
 Jesus, but from the stand-point of Jewish law, as it stood 
 when Jesus came from his native Galilee to Jerusalem. 
 There is one consideration not to be overlooked. If 
 Jesus was the Son of God he claimed to be, how is the 
 justice of the judgment of condemnation pronounced 
 against him affected by the relation ? The le.°;al mind is 
 by no means unfamiliar with the privileges, which in 
 many instances modify and change the relation of persons 
 toward the laws. It was a maxim of the Roman State, 
 that the emperor was raised above all liability to the pen- 
 alties of the law. The English common law has always 
 maintained the principle, that the king can do no wrong. 
 The privilege of clergy, and of the peerage has been, and 
 to some extent still is, a bar to ordinary criminal proceed- 
 ings, and removes an accusation to some special tribunal 
 jurisdiction. So military authority, during the exigency 
 of a state of siege, takes away from the police and from 
 courts all inquisition of the violent and arbitrary acts of 
 commanders. But all cases of exemption from jurisdic- 
 tion, on account of the rank, dignity, or authority of the 
 person, must be apparent as a public fact, or must be not 
 only pleaded, but proved. It would be impious to pre- 
 tend, that the Deity, even if he should veil himself in 
 human form, or any divine being sharing his attributes, 
 could ever be the subject of human criminal law; and, if 
 Jesus obviously belonged to this grade of being, his cru- 
 cifixion was the most daring and blasphemous act that 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 315 
 
 ever oppressed the conscience of man. It would, how- 
 ever, ill comport with our ideas of justice to punish or 
 even to execrate a human tribunal that had ordered the 
 death of a divine being, who had effectually disguised his 
 deity in the form of a man, and had in that character com- 
 mitted an act, which would have been criminal in a man. 
 But were the Sanhedrim, according to the character in 
 which the person of Jesus became known to them, justi- 
 fied in regarding him as a man ? Could they indeed prop- 
 erly entertain any other opinion of him ? Whatever 
 demonstrations of superhuman power Jesus may have 
 made in Galilee, he had come to Jerusalem making only 
 such manifestations as a prophet and preacher might 
 make. He had declined, when importuned, to give any 
 sign to authenticate even that character and office. He 
 had allowed himself to be proclaimed in the street as the 
 King of Zion, and in the temple he had forcibly reproved 
 an old custom on the authority that the temple was the 
 house of his Father. But it was these very acts and dec- 
 larations, that had seemed to the Jews blasphemies, and 
 had led to his arrest and trial. But, as Jesus had come to 
 Jerusalem to die, he had refused to put forth any powers, 
 which might overawe his enemies, and prevent them from 
 consummating their malicious purposes. 11 He had in his 
 agony prayed to God, whose high purposes he believed 
 himself to be accomplishing, to spare him, if possible, the 
 bitterness of death. 1 ' He had in his mind vague hopes of 
 a rescue by legions of angels at the very last moment ; 
 but now he will not show any of those gifts of healing 
 or eloquence, by which he had won converts in Galilee, 
 to soften the hearts of the soldiers, and turn to his cause 
 tiic favor of his judges. He will confront his accusers 
 and receive and endure his sentence simply as a man. 
 He will not even allow his followers to defend him, 
 though this he at one time appears to have meditated. 
 This mob, he declared, these rulers, this Roman gov- 
 ernor with his soldiers, are all ministers of Jehovah ; 
 and they must work out, through my submission and 
 death, those divine purposes, which lead to my glory and 
 the salvation of my elect.' 1 Having doubtless in his mind 
 the prophetic emblem of the lamb dumb before his 
 
 ■ Matt, xxvi., 53, I'Mntt. xxvi., .12. c Luke xi., 29. '1 Matt, xxvi., 54. 
 
3l6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 shearers, he clearly intended to maintain entire silence, 
 and let his foes work their will. Before the Council of 
 the chief priests and elders, he is silent." The pre- 
 varication of the witnesses, who try to tell something he 
 had said, does not disturb him. The purely personal 
 sense of his language — the temple he would raise being 
 his own slain body, as explained by John — was open to 
 his explanation ; but he does not avail himself of it, — 
 partly, because it will not take from the language the 
 implication of blasphemy, but partly, because he will 
 not say anything, that might constitute a defence or 
 soften the hearts of his persecutors. 1 ' The Chief Priest 
 is astonished and indignant at his silence, and at length 
 adjures him, by the living God, to say whether he is or 
 is not the Christ, the Son of God. Now, Jesus will 
 speak ; because his speech will not lead to his deliver- 
 ance, but will, as it did, insure his condemnation ; and 
 because he has an opportunity to repeat the lofty claim, 
 upon which he has dared to stake his life. c We are 
 thus left to the conclusion, that whatever dignity or 
 privilege may have elevated such a person as Jesus from 
 capability of committing the crime, for which he was con- 
 demned, he studiously avoided showing that dignity and 
 privilege, in any way that would be likely to affect his 
 judges favorably toward himself, or take his acts and 
 words out of the category of human conduct, for which he 
 wished to remain absolutely responsible, in the character 
 of a man and a subject of the State. Inasmuch as the 
 judgment of the Council — in which there were probably 
 some men of candor and impartiality — was unanimous 
 for his conviction, it must be concluded that there were 
 no misgivings, even on the part of any of them, that Jesus 
 was other than a Galilean Jew, born into, and living 
 under allegiance to the Mosaic law, and to the ecclesias- 
 tical authority of the chief priests and elders, d to be judged 
 for his conduct in those relations precisely like an ordi- 
 nary person. 
 
 In examining the different accounts of the trial of 
 Jesus, new confirmation is found for the opinion ex- 
 pressed in these pages of the fictitious character of the 
 
 "Matt, xxvi., 63; xxvii., 14. b Matt, xxvi., 59-63. 
 
 \xvi., 64. '1 Mark jciv., 64. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 317 
 
 Fourth Gospel. Matthew, Mark, and Luke — these 
 names are only used to distinguish from each other the 
 unknown writers of the narratives bearing their names — 
 all assert that the occasion of Jesus being in Jeru- 
 salem the night he was arrested was to eat the Pass- 
 over with his twelve chosen disciples. The Passover 
 itself was a nocturnal feast. a In the company of the 
 believers, the occasion was prolonged by much conversa- 
 tion, by the institution, after the regular feast, of a memo- 
 rial service, and by many counsels and prophecies which 
 the presentiment of death forced upon the mind of 
 the Master. According to each of these writers, there 
 occurred at this time the prediction of Peter's treachery ; 
 and, according to Luke, it was accompanied by a serious 
 warning of Peter's imminent spiritual danger, and of an 
 assurance of intercessory prayers for his deliverance ; 
 also by the rebuke which Jesus gave to his friends about 
 striving for precedence and the promulgation of the law 
 of his kingdom, that he was greatest in it who served, 
 which Matthew and Mark attribute to an earlier occasion ; 
 and, finally, by the assignment to the twelve of their 
 splendid rank in the new order of things, in which they 
 should sit on thrones as princes of the twelve tribes, and 
 eat and drink at the table of the great king. 1 ' 
 
 Whichever account is to be taken as correct, it is evi- 
 dent that it must have been well into the night after the 
 feast of the Passover had been generally celebrated in 
 Jerusalem, before Jesus went out of the city to walk in 
 the garden of Gethsemane. It is late ; and the chosen 
 friends of Jesus, left to their sad thoughts, cannot refrain 
 from sleep. Before they had quitted the upper room in 
 the city, Jesus had said to Peter, " This night thou shalt 
 deny me" ; and again — indicating that it is still night, 
 and before dawn — " Before the cock crows, thou shalt 
 deny me." The writers of the Synoptics all assert that 
 Judas' overtures to the chief priests to betray Jesus 
 were made before the Passover feast, and leave it to be 
 inferred that they were made some interval before, 
 -luring which he sought opportunity to betray him. c 
 
 Turning now to the account of how Jesus was delivered 
 
 "Lev. xxtii. , 5. '>Matt. xxvi., 26-35; Mark xiv., 18-31; Luke xxii., 14-38. 
 e Matt, xxvi., 14-16; Mark xiv., 10, 11; Luke xxii., 3-6. 
 
318 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 into the hands of his enemies, given in the Fourth Gospel, 
 the only indication of time we find is that it was before the 
 feast of the Passover. Without indicating anything that 
 took place before the Passover, except the declaration so 
 characteristic of the writer's mind, " Jesus, having loved 
 his own, loved them to the end," the narrative goes on to 
 say : "Supper being ended, the devil having now put into the 
 heart of Judas Iseariot . . . to betray him," and other incon- 
 sequential considerations being named, "He riseth from 
 supper!' !l According to all other writers, this must have 
 been the Passover supper itself, an evening feast ; but 
 John does not say so. Indeed, so far as he could indicate 
 a time, it is before the feast of the Passover. He says 
 that when Jesus, at the supper, told Judas : That thou 
 doest, do quickly, some of them thought he meant, Buy 
 those things we have need of against the feast. b Later 
 on, he says that at twelve o'clock on the day that Jesus 
 was crucified, Friday, it was the preparation of the Pass- 
 over, which would then have occurred either the night 
 of the crucifixion, or the next night, the Sabbath. And 
 again, after the institution of the communion service, 
 after the admonition to Peter, after all the events that 
 Luke dates as occurring the same evening, and after the 
 formal discourse of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth 
 chapters, which no other writers have mentioned, after the 
 scenes in Gethsemane that all other writers describe, 
 after the trial before the High Priest which Matthew and 
 Mark say began at night and was continued by adjourn- 
 ment to the following morning, we come to the bringing 
 of Jesus after his condemnation to the judgment hall of 
 Pilate for sentence. "They," John says, which must 
 mean the priests and elders, cannot go into the judgment 
 hall lest they be defiled, and so be unfit to eat the Pass- 
 over.' 1 But the Passover was eaten the evening before. 
 If it is said the Passover lasted from the evening of the 
 14th to the evening of the 15th of the month Abib, there 
 is good law for the statement. The whole period from 
 the 10th to the 14th, or perhaps for seven days, was 
 sacred, and only unleavened bread could then be eaten ; 
 but the Passover itself must be eaten at even on the 
 14th. " /;/ the fourteenth day of this month at even, ye shall 
 
 & John xiii., 1-3. b John xiii., 27-29. cjohnxix, 14. A John xviii.. 28. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 319 
 
 keep it in his appointed season." a And yet John declares 
 that Satan entered into the heart of Judas with the sop 
 that Jesus gave him at the supper? John does not say 
 that all these proceedings were in the night, only we 
 may infer that they were, inasmuch as the captors of Jesus 
 are said to have borne torches and lanterns, and the 
 cock crows while Jesus is before the High Priest. d 
 
 According to John there was no trial before the Coun- 
 cil, no examination of witnesses^ no accusation of sacri- 
 lege or of blasphemy, no deliberation of judges, no judg- 
 ment of conviction, and no sentence. Jesus is arrested by 
 a band of men and officers from the chief priests and 
 Pharisees ; he is bound and led away, first to Annas, then 
 to Caiaphas, his son-in-law, the High Priest. 6 Apparently, 
 it is to the houses or palaces of these clerical dignitaries, 
 one after the other, that he is led. The elders and chief 
 priests are not assembled, and no formal proceedings 
 whatever are bad. It is not the case of a writer omitting 
 what previous writers have minutely told. It is a writer, 
 who ignores the statement of other writers, who brings 
 the narrative to the same point with them, and then gives 
 an entirely different account. For, instead of proceeding 
 to try him, or to institute any legal proceedings against 
 him, Caiaphas accosts him just as if the visit had been 
 one of ceremony or courtesy : he asks him concerning his 
 disciples, and his doctrine. 1 The captured prophet is 
 brought to Caiaphas, not to be tried by the Sanhedrim 
 under Jewish law, but that the High Priest might go 
 with his captors as accuser and prosecutor to lay the 
 case before the judgment-seat of the Roman procurator. 5 
 " Thine own nation" Pilate is made to say later, " and the 
 chief priest have delivered thee tmto me." h So here is an 
 account of the trial of Jesus as different from that of the 
 Synoptic Gospels, as is the whole accompanying story of 
 the life, the character, and the teachings of the man. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, the dogmatic and didactic purpose 
 of the author reveals itself. He will tell nothing that 
 comports not with his idea of the dignity of his hero. 
 He will tell only that part of his arrest, his trial, his cru- 
 cifixion, which accords with his divine ideal. But the 
 
 uLev. xxiii., 5-8. •> John xiii., 27. c John xviii., 3. <1 John xviii., 27. 
 « John xviii., 12, 13, 24, 28. f John xviii., iy. Ejohll xviii., 18. h John xviii., 35. 
 
320 OPINION'S AXD CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 invention of man is less simple, less dignified, less 
 worthy the historic fame of Jesus, than the truth as 
 told by the less ambitious contemporaries or predeces- 
 sors of the writer. Perhaps the writer of the Fourth 
 Gospel did not wish to acknowledge that he, who was 
 before Abraham," demeaned himself, like one of the chil- 
 dren of Israel, to celebrate the Passover, which could only 
 be kept at Jerusalem. He had carried him often to the 
 temple, but never as a .worshipper, always as a teacher 
 of a higher cultus, than that celebrated in the temple; 
 and had made him say the hour had come, when true 
 worshippers no longer worshipped in the high places or 
 in the temples." He gives an account of the arrest, but 
 he cannot tell it with the simplicity of the earlier dis- 
 ciples. He must have Jesus overawe by the glory of 
 his presence the very ruffians that captured him. As 
 soon as he said, "I am Jesus of Nazareth; 1 they stag- 
 gered backward, and fell to the ground. When Peter 
 valiantly drew his sword, so prostrate are his foes, that 
 their overthrow would have been easy. But Jesus ^ can 
 only be bound by his own sufferance. " The cup," he 
 says, "which my Father hath given me, shall I not 
 drink it?" d 
 
 The writer is always injecting, to the great derange- 
 ment of the sequence of his narrative, some explanation 
 of his own to prevent Jesus from being compromised. 
 When Jesus asks the posse who come to arrest him, 
 " Whom seek you?" the writer cannot bear to have his 
 reader think that Jesus did not know, and he explains 
 thus • " Jesus, therefore, knowing all things that should come 
 upon him, went forth," etc. He asks the question only 
 to reply, "If ye seek me, let these go their way."* When 
 the High Priest asks Jesus of his disciples and of his 
 doctrine, he is made to say : " Why askest thou me? Ask 
 them which heard me, what I have said unto them : behold, 
 they know what I have said." 1 The answer was consid- 
 ered disrespectful by the bailiff, who replies to it by a 
 brutal blow. 8 Such an answer would hardly be consid- 
 ered pertinent or decorous by any modern tribunal. It 
 was quite unlikely that Jesus would have trusted any 
 
 a John viii. , 58. <> John iv., 20-24- c John xviii., 4-6. d JohnxviiL, n. 
 ejohn xviii., 7. 8. f John xviii., 21. S John xviii., 22. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 32 1 
 
 casual hearer among those, who had heard him in the 
 temple, to explain to the official head of the old national 
 faith the sublime mysteries of his doctrine Happily, 
 although this record has stood as authentic for eighteen 
 centuries, there have been noble spirits tried for their 
 lives in both the ecclesiastical and political courts, who 
 have left to the world a better example than this of 
 patience, self-possession, and dignity. Better the noble 
 silence of Matthew and Mark, than to open the mouth 
 only to give expression to irritability and impatience. 
 
 Following along the Johannic fiction, we encounter 
 only accumulating improbabilities. Jesus is carried to 
 the judgment hall, but his accusers do not go in, for fear 
 of being defiled ; and Pilate so far accommodates himself 
 to their scruples as to come outside to learn what the 
 charge is against the prisoner. 11 There was no other trial, 
 according to the teller of the story ; and yet we recognize 
 neither the formalities of a Jewish, a Roman, or even of a 
 mere military court. It is the record of a trial conducted 
 under great difficulties, — the accused inside, in the hall 
 of judgment, the prosecutors and witnesses, if there were 
 any, outside, and neither confronted with the other. We 
 find in the mind of the writer no apparent familiarity with 
 judicial proceedings of any kind ; but what we do find is 
 the incessant dialogue of the whole book perpetuated 
 through the trial, and to the end of the life of Jesus, — 
 the dialogue couched in the aphoristic, antithetic, repeti- 
 tious, never-to-be-mistaken style of the first Johannic 
 Epistle — a style made up mainly of a series of verbal 
 catches and captious retorts upon the phrases used in 
 the interrogations. Thus, when Pilate asks very properly 
 and formally, "What is this man accused of '?" the chief 
 priests reply captiously and offensively, " If he were not 
 a malefactor, we woiild not have brought him at all." 
 "Well, then," says Pilate, irritated by the flippancy of 
 the answer, "take your malefactor and judge him accord- 
 ing to your law." 1 ' Everybody seems to be waiting for 
 everybody else to make some slip in his speech, and then 
 to pounce on him with a sarcastic reply. In this temper, 
 of course nothing can be done ; and the petulant Jews 
 have at last to tell whether the man is accused of robbery 
 
 a John xviii., 28, 29. bjohn xviii., 30-32. 
 
322 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 or theft, of a political or an ecclesiastical offence, before 
 any progress can be made. But the immediate reply of 
 the Jews is that it is not lawful for them to put any man 
 to death, though we find in the sequel that this, too, is 
 captious and untrue. They could never have truthfully 
 so said. All the other evangelists say they had already 
 condemned Jesus to death for blasphemy ; and the Jewish 
 law, then in full force, was that the blasphemer should 
 surely be put to death. The same writer, earlier in his 
 narrative, had declared that the law against adultery 
 required the guilty parties to be put to death ; ' and in 
 a following chapter he makes the same Jewish priests 
 tell Pilate, " We have a law, and by our law he ought to 
 die, because he made himself the Son of God." b The con- 
 tradiction is explained by imputing a divine direction to 
 the language of the priests who thus brought about the 
 fulfilment of Jesus' prediction, that his death would be 
 by crucifixion. They are made to say : It is not lawful 
 for us to put this man to death — certainly not during 
 these sacred festivals — but we are guiltless if he be 
 affixed to a cross, and his death ensue — as if any judge 
 could entertain the idea that a man dying lingeringly in 
 crucifixion was less slain by human hands than if he were 
 strangled, beheaded, or stoned. 
 
 When Pilate returns to the judgment hall, not having 
 elicited from the persons, who had arrested Jesus and 
 stood outside as his prosecutors, any information of what 
 the accusation was, the same cross-purposes, that had 
 irritated the disputants and prevented the trial from 
 having any progress begin again between Pilate and the 
 accused. Pilate asks Jesus, " Art thou king of the 
 yews?" and he replies captiously, " Did you say that of 
 yourself, or did others tell it of me ? " d Pilate loses his 
 self-possession at the impertinence, and flings back : "Am 
 T a yew? Thine own nation and the chief priests deliv- 
 ered thee unto me: what hast thou done?"* The prose- 
 cutor will not accuse him, will not even present himself 
 in court ; so the judge asks the criminal what offence he 
 has committed. Jesus is made to reply, "My kingdom is 
 not of this world, if it were: my servants would fight, that I 
 
 a Jolin viii., 5. t> John xix., 7. c John xviii., 32 ; iii., 14; xi.,51; xii. , 32, 33. 
 
 J John xviii., 34. c John xviii., 35. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 323 
 
 should not be delivered to the yews."* Every declaration 
 of this writer is so tautological that its substance can be 
 rendered by copious omissions. To this, Pilate : So you 
 are a king, then f The question is at last answered by 
 indirection. Jesus replies, " Yes, for that end was I born, 
 that I might witness the truth, and every one who is of the 
 truth heareikme."* " What is truth?" said Pilate ; and, 
 getting no answer, he went outside to the prosecutors and 
 said, I have tried the man you have delivered to me, and 
 find no fault in him. c Tried him for what ? For no ordi- 
 nary civil offence ; certainly not for sacrilege or blas- 
 phemy. The governor had asked him if he were king of 
 the Jews. Jesus had at last admitted that he was, but ex- 
 plained that his kingdom was not of this world, — that he 
 was a king only in that he had come into the world to 
 reveal the truth ; and, very justly, Pilate had determined 
 that there was nothing blamable in such a pretension. 
 How then, according to this writer, did Jesus suffer death ? 
 The curious story tells itself in the following chapter. 
 Pilate, instead of discharging a person whom he had 
 acquitted, after his only trial, forgetting, first, that he 
 had power to crucify or release him, d asks his accusers to 
 consent to his release ; then orders him to be scourged, — 
 this acquitted man — then tells the Jews to take him and 
 crucify him, for I find him innocent ; then delivers him to 
 his own soldiers to be crucified, upon an outcry of the Jews, 
 that, if he released him, he would not be a friend of Caesar. 6 
 It is easy to see that, if we had no other record of the 
 trial and condemnation of Jesus than is given in this 
 Gospel, it would be hard to understand how it came to 
 pass. 
 
 The whole Johannic story treats the ecclesiastical hie- 
 rarchy at Jerusalem with much more leniency than do the 
 Synoptic Gospels. Sharp colloquies are held with the 
 Rabbis in the temple, and Jesus once, in the irritation 
 of his spirit, pronounces them children of the devil/ 
 But, generally, they are deferred to, reasoned with, and 
 pressing overtures are repeatedly made to them to admit 
 the claims of Jesus to the place he claimed in the Jeho- 
 vistic dispensation. But the harsh speech of John the 
 
 o John xviii., 36. b John xviii., 37. c John xviii., 38. <1 John xix., 10. 
 • •Johnxix., 12, 15, 16. f John viii., 44. 
 
324 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Baptist is omitted, as well as the censure against them in 
 the Sermon on the Mount. They are not shut out of the 
 kingdom of heaven as proscriptively as in the several 
 parables and plain declarations of Jesus. The terrible 
 invective of the twenty-third of Matthew is suppressed ; 
 and, when it comes to the crucifixion, they are not the 
 judges and executioners of Jesus, but are made to cast 
 the responsibility of his death upon the Roman governor, 
 who crucifies him as a plotter against Caesar, rather than 
 as a person claiming a divine origin and destiny. 
 
 It ought here to be remarked that Matthew's narrative, 
 which is strictly confirmed by Mark, again vindicates its 
 character, as the most probable tradition of Jesus, by its 
 insisting on the silent acquiescence of the accused in all 
 the proceedings that culminated in his crucifixion. He 
 apprehends the result beforehand. Toward the mob, 
 toward the rulers and chief priests, toward Pilate and the 
 soldiery, he makes no demonstration, and allows no 
 defence." He insists that their acts are providential and 
 a part of the divine purpose. He will try only the effect 
 of prayer, to modify, if possible, that divine purpose ; but, 
 if God will not defend him, he will neither allow himself to 
 be defended nor rescued. 1 * Accordingly, he is more per- 
 sistently silent before Pilate, than he was before the San- 
 hedrim. " He answered him never a word, insomuch that 
 the governor marvelled greatly."* But both Matthew and 
 Mark mean to say that Jesus said one word to Pilate, 
 when he asked him if he was king of the Jews. d As he 
 had put his great pretension in the very form, in which 
 it was most offensive to the chief priests, when he admit- 
 ted to them he was the Christ, the Son of God, c so now 
 he will admit, in the most offensive form in which it can 
 appear to a Roman governor, that he is the king of the 
 Jews. To be a son of God was to the High Priest blas- 
 phemy, to be king of the Jews was treason to Caesar ; and 
 he will give such answer to each, as will insure his 
 destruction. 
 
 After this exhibition — so entirely consistent with both 
 the character and plan of Jesus — it is impossible for us to 
 give credence to the contradictory statement of Luke, who 
 
 a Matt xxvi., 62, 63. b Matt, xxvi., 51-54. c Matt, xxvii., 14. 
 '1 Matt, xxvii.. 11 ; Mark xv., 2. e Mark xiv,, 61. 62. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 325 
 
 says that, when Jesus was adjured by the High Priest, he 
 made the compromising and undignified reply, " If I tell 
 you, you will not believe ; and if I also ask you, you will 
 not answer me, nor let me go." a If he asked what, what 
 could Jesus ask the High Priest relevant to his case ? 
 Self-delivered, as he declares himself to have been, by his 
 own voluntary act, to accomplish a stupendous destiny for 
 himself and for the world, how could he have demeaned 
 himself by the pusillanimous consideration of being let 
 go ? But Luke, too, makes him nobly silent before 
 Pilate. 15 It is only in the Johannic drama that the whole 
 statement of these three writers is utterly falsified, and 
 the noble dignity of Jesus compromised. On the occa- 
 sion of the arrest, that peculiar chaffing, so prominent -a 
 blemish in the whole book — introduced so many times 
 in the story of the curing of the blind man, in colloquies 
 with the Jews, in the speech of Jesus with his followers, 
 and perpetuated even after the resurrection — reappears. 
 But brought before Pilate, Jesus, instead of the marvel- 
 lous silence, to which all his real biographers bear testi- 
 mony, is made, by the writer of this masterly, but most 
 presumptuous fiction, to offend his friendly intercessor, as 
 he does the taste of the modern reader, by the captious- 
 ness and verbose inconsequence of his replies. 
 
 Strange to say, the writer of the articles referred to in 
 the Contemporary Review evidently considers the Johan- 
 nic the authentic report of the trial of Jesus, and has 
 discovered a hidden meaning in those petulant remarks, 
 which were said to have been considered by the officer 
 a contempt of the High Priest. He cannot, however, 
 understand how — the principal trial being under Roman 
 forms — Jesus should have confessed that he was the 
 king of the Jews, and yet have been acquitted by Pilate 
 of any fault. He concludes that it was because Jesus 
 had satisfied Pilate, that his kingdom was not of this 
 world. If he had satisfied Pilate, that to be a king of 
 the Jews was no invasion of the authority of Caesar, be- 
 cause it was a heavenly and not an earthly kingdom that 
 was claimed, then Pilate must have seriously entertained 
 the idea that Jesus was a heavenly king. If it was an 
 insane vagary, a sensible governor would have been as 
 
 " Luke xxii., 67, 68. u Luke xxiii , 9. 
 
320 OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 liuie disturbed by a peasant's claiming the political sov- 
 ereignty of his own proconsulate, as he would by a claim 
 to the kingship of the Jews in heaven : either pretension 
 would only have amused him. The reviewer succumbs 
 to the evident purpose of the writer of Johannic fiction 
 to represent Jesus only in an imposing character, without 
 seeing that in so doing he has destroyed the probability 
 of the events he narrates, and compromised the character 
 of the hero. For how, if Pilate had been really affected 
 by the claim of Jesus to be a king of a heavenly king- 
 dom, and had judicially acquitted him of treason on that 
 ground, could he, while still finding him blameless, take 
 Jesus and scourge him, and have him mocked by his sol- 
 diers, and finally have this sentence — the most remark- 
 able in the annals of Roman jurisprudence — passed as 
 the judgment of the court, "Take ye him, and crucify him, 
 for I find no fault in him" ? a 
 
 The fact is, the writer is misled, as is the ordinary lay 
 and clerical mind, by coming to the study of this great 
 trial with prepossessions, not easily overborne, of the 
 exalted character of the person convicted. It is difficult 
 to measure the utter isolation and contempt in which 
 Jesus stood before the public of Jerusalem. Only the 
 scribes and Pharisees are angry enough to be in earnest 
 in their malice ; but they reveal their utter disrespect for 
 their victim, by the summary and hasty manner in which 
 they proceed to his trial. He is a Galilean fanatic, in 
 whose favor no one asks for deliberation or delay, or even 
 a seeming compliance with the forms of law. His follow- 
 ers have all forsaken him at the first sound of personal 
 danger ; and his most trusted servant, lately so demon- 
 strative in his devotion under the hope of being his vice- 
 roy and prime minister, has denied with oaths that he ever 
 knew him. 
 
 The High Priest does not deign to make any reply to 
 his assurance that he will come in the clouds of heaven, 
 on the right hand of power, but turns to the Council 
 to learn if they are not now satisfied that the blasphemy 
 is sufficiently proved. 1 ' The condemnation is immediate 
 and, as Mark reports, unanimous. There was no Gama- 
 liel or Nicodemus, or Joseph of Arimathea, or other candid 
 
 ixix.,6, '■ Matt, xxvi., 65. c Mark xiv., 64. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 327 
 
 person, to interpose any plea in mitigation or postpone- 
 ment of the sentence of death. It was not the custom of 
 Jewish courts to insult the capitally condemned. In all 
 human minds and in all ages, the doom of impending 
 death has invested the person of the criminal with a sort 
 of dignity and awe that has gained for him pity rather 
 than insult. How extreme must have been the contempt 
 of Jesus in the minds of these rulers of Israel and digni- 
 taries of the Church, so that even the sanctity of impend- 
 ing death did not restrain them from leaving their seats 
 to spit upon the face of the silently suffering man, and 
 from brutally buffeting him with their hands, after cover- 
 ing his face, while they derided his prophetic character 
 by challenging him to tell who had smitten him. a 
 
 When the chief priests and elders brought Jesus to 
 Pilate, it was, as has before been shown, with the evident 
 purpose of causing him to take the initiative in the execu- 
 tion of the sentence they themselves* had passed, or at 
 least to confirm it by an executive warrant. They knew 
 that no considerations of blasphemy, no questions of mere 
 ecclesiastical law would influence a Roman magistrate. 
 So they falsely represented Jesus as claiming to be king 
 of the Jews, and as forbidding to pay tribute to Caesar. 1 ' 
 It is possible that Pilate may never have heard of the 
 Galilean prophet, and of the kingdom of heaven that he 
 had preached. It may have been that some rumor of him 
 had even reached the ears of the governor. The chief 
 priests and elders, who utterly contemned the pretensions 
 of Jesus to be the Messiah, could not honestly excite an 
 apprehension in the mind of Caesar, which they themselves 
 believed to be groundless — though, if Jesus was the king 
 of such a kingdom of heaven, as he had preached, his 
 purpose threatened the supremacy of Caesar, and the sta- 
 bility of every human state and kingdom. But, whether 
 Pilate had ever heard of Jesus and his scheme of a king- 
 dom of heaven or not, it took only a brief colloquy with 
 him to convince Pilate that he need have no serious 
 apprehension for the authority of Caesar, and no resent 
 ment toward Jesus. "Are you the king of the Jews?" 
 he asks. Jesus answers in all simplicity and seriousness 
 that he is ; c and Pilate instantly concludes that he is 
 
 " Mark xiv., 65. •» Luke xxiii., 2. c Luke xxiii., 3. 
 
328 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 dealing with a harmless monomaniac. It ill accords with 
 his humane notions to put such a man to death. And 
 yet, with his pity, there is a contemptuous estimation of 
 a mind clouded, as it seemed to him, with such a fatal 
 hallucination ; and, after feeble attempts to get him re- 
 leased altogether as a harmless enthusiast, or to get him 
 adopted as the one forgiven criminal that an old custom 
 surrendered to the populace, he weakly passes the order 
 for his execution, lest — in the minds of the envious 
 Jews — he might seem to be wanting in loyalty to Caesar. 
 Still, when he proposed that he should be chastised before 
 his release, he showed that, in all this vacillation, Jesus 
 himself had made no favorable impression upon his mind. 
 And the fact that he sent him to the cross — an igno- 
 minious mode of punishment reserved among the Romans 
 for slaves and the disreputable — proved that there was 
 no deference to his rank as an artisan or free subject, 
 and still less to the sanctity, which he should have 
 obtained in the office of a prophet and healer of the 
 sick. 
 
 Neither do the soldiers nor their officers, upon whom 
 the next cruel office fell, indicate anything but contempt 
 for their victim. They cannot proceed in an orderly way 
 even to put him to death. They, too, are amused with the 
 idea of a Galilean peasant persisting that he is king. A 
 king, forsooth ! they said. Let him have a robe of scarlet ! 
 and one was found for him ; and a sceptre — a reed was 
 placed in his right hand — and, for a crown, thorns are 
 plaited and placed about his temples. Then, they bowed 
 the knee in mock homage, and hailed him as King of the 
 Jews. They, too, spat in his face, and smote him upon 
 the head with his own reed sceptre. a An inscription is 
 prepared — John attributes this malice to Pilate — ex- 
 pressing at once the official derision and the general 
 levity and mockery which scandalized all the pro- 
 ceedings. 1 * 
 
 Nor does the spectacle of his suffering touch the hard 
 hearts of his murderers. The very passers-by make gri- 
 maces, and shaking their heads at him, ask why one 
 that could destroy and build the temple could not save 
 himself. "Come down from the cross," they cried, " Son 
 
 ■Matt, xxvii. , 27-31. ''Matt, xxvii., 37; John xix., 19. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 329 
 
 of God : save, if thou canst, thyself ! " a The chief priests 
 and elders could not forego the malicious satisfaction of 
 looking upon his helplessness ; and they join in the horri- 
 ble ribaldry. " If he be the King of Israel," they sneer, 
 "let him now come down from the cross, and we will 
 believe him. He trusted in God : let him deliver him 
 now." b The very thieves so far forgot their tortures, 
 that they are swept away in the general ridicule, and 
 cast the same words in his teeth. c It is certain the 
 whole scene of the trial and the execution of Jesus, as 
 described with every indication of probability and in com- 
 plete historic harmony with itself, is not of a person of any 
 supernatural or unusual endowments, or majesty of bear- 
 ing, but of a person so ill-reputed that his judges lose 
 their decorum and dignity in trying him, the witnesses 
 and the officers of the court insult him with impunity, the 
 Roman governor, who sees at a glance the incompatibility 
 of what he deems a monstrous hallucination, with any 
 dangerous or criminal purpose, amuses himself and amuses 
 the multitude with his kingly pretensions ; while the 
 soldiers, the mob, the on-looking priests and elder's the 
 very wretches, companions of his torture, mingle mirth 
 and derision with a spectacle of fiendish cruelty, over 
 which the sympathetic heart of humanity has shed more 
 tears than over the great aggregate of misery which has 
 saddened the history of the world. 
 
 It was over at last. Sensitive to suffering as was Jesus, 
 by a nervous organization as fine-fibred and delicate as 
 a woman's, the darkness and the peace of death came to 
 end his tortures, long before the tough nerves of the two 
 coarse fellows, who hung at his side, had succumbed to 
 keen and accumulating pains. Pilate marvelled that he 
 was so soon dead, d — probably because the victims of that 
 terrible mode of capital punishment practised at Rome, 
 upon the person only of ignoble criminals, usually held 
 out longer. But, if the history is veracious, there were 
 other causes of death than the agony of the nails, and the 
 deadly torture that comes of quivering nerves and the 
 slowly ebbing forces of life. Only Luke tells that there 
 followed Jesus to his crucifixion a great company of 
 people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him, 
 
 ■ Matt, xxvii., 39, 40. b Matt, xxvii., 41-43. c Matt, xxvii., 44. <i Mark XV., 37, 44. 
 
330 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 and that, in forgetfulness of his fate, he turned to commis- 
 erate them ; that he besought God to forgive his tor- 
 mentors — for they knew not what they did; that one 
 of the thieves, awed by the majesty of his bearing, 
 prayed to him in penitence, and was assured of bliss 
 that day with him in paradise ; that he confidently com- 
 mended his spirit to God at the last ; that the centurion, 
 who commanded the executioners, openly acknowledged 
 him as a righteous man ; that all his acquaintances and 
 the Galilean women looked on from a distance ; and 
 that the people that looked on sadly smote their breasts 
 in sorrow at his fate." So Luke omits, as he must if 
 Jesus met his death in that spirit, the despairing appeal 
 to God, and the loud wail with which his spirit took leave 
 of his tortured body. But Mark and Matthew report 
 that, at the time of his arrest, all his disciples forsook 
 him and fled ; and neither of them assert that they 
 returned to witness the crucifixion, b or that his acquaint- 
 ance, or the women, whose sex might have given them 
 impunity, stood even within distant view of his last 
 agonies. According to both, the isolation of Jesus was 
 complete, the cruel mockery and hatred of all the par- 
 ticipants and spectators of his putting-to-death were uni- 
 versal ; and, in the desolation of soul which came over 
 the enfeebled sufferer at last, he declared, quoting the 
 language of one of the hymns of the temple worship, 
 that God, whom he had trusted as his father, had for- 
 saken him. Why did this sad refrain burst from his 
 lips, after he had seen in brave silence all the hideous 
 preparations for his cruel and lingering death, and, turn- 
 ing to the ribald crowd in vain for one pitying or sym- 
 pathetic look, had uttered no word of complaint or 
 reproach ? What expectation or hope, that till that 
 supreme moment had buoyed up his soul, of help from 
 the skies — interposition from the Father in heaven — 
 gave way, when that passionate and inexpressibly pit- 
 eous voice made itself heard above the mockery of the 
 soldiers and the mob, and has made its echoes heard 
 through all later time ? Can there be any doubt that this 
 older tradition as given in Matthew and Mark is the true 
 
 • Luke xxiiL, 27, 2.8, 34 42, 43, 46-49. *> Matt, xxvi., 56; Mark xiv., 50. 
 
 c 1'-. xxii., 1 ; Mark xv., 34; Matt, xxvii., 46. 
 
HIS ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH 33 1 
 
 history of the bearing of Jesus under the suffering to 
 which he was subjected, and that the purpose, evident in 
 the Fourth Gospel, is also apparent in the Third, to elimi- 
 nate from the narrative whatever is indicative of human 
 weakness ? How can we help regarding the suppression 
 of that irrepressible utterance of a great disappointment 
 which wrung his soul, and made him oblivious of physical 
 torture, as a concession to an ever-growing conception in 
 the minds of the early believers of a triumphing and all- 
 conquering deity, which more and more displaced the 
 recollection of a meek, suffering: and submissive man ? 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PERSONAL PRETENSIONS AND CHARACTER OF 
 
 JESUS. 
 
 " Invective may be a sharp weapon, but over-use blunts its edge. Even 
 when the denunciation is just and true, it is an error of art to indulge it too 
 long. We not only incur the risk of becoming too vapid, but of actually 
 inverting the force of reprobation which we seek to rouse, and of bringing 
 it back by recoil upon ourselves. At suitable intervals, separated from each 
 other by periods of dignified reserve, invective may become a real power of 
 the tongue or pen. But, indulged in constantly, it degenerates into scolding ; 
 and then, instead of being regarded as a proof of strength, it is accepted as 
 an evidence of weakness and lack of self-control." — John Tyndall, on Goethe's 
 "Fa/jenlehre." 
 
 " Science, as distinguished from philosophy, has always been republican. 
 Not that it refuses to reverence superior minds; not, perhaps, that it is 
 altogether incapable of yielding to the temptation of trusting a particular 
 authority for a while too much, or following a temporary fashion. But, as 
 a general rule, it rejects as a superstition the notion that a superior mind is 
 at all infallible ; it dissents without a scruple from those whom it reverences 
 most." — Natural Religion. 
 
 A complete summary of the elements that formed the 
 unique character of Jesus, a just estimate of the weight 
 and import of his life, will necessarily involve the recapitu- 
 lation of particulars of his history that have already been 
 considered under appropriate categories, and a renewed 
 reference to incidents of his career, and the implications of 
 his extant words, that have already been in this discussion 
 repeatedly cited. So little is known of what he said, so 
 brief and meagre is the record of what he did, that all his 
 words and all his acts, so far as their authenticity is rea- 
 sonably certified, must be considered on every side, till 
 their full significance has been exhausted. 
 
 It may be safest to limit the scope of our conjectures 
 by embodying them in tentative answers to the questions 
 that have been debated with assurance and acrimony for 
 nearly nineteen hundred years : What did he believe him- 
 self to be ? What did his age believe him to be ? What 
 was he ? These are substantially the questions he is 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 333 
 
 said himself once to have asked : " Whom do men say that 
 /, the Son of Man, am ? Whom say ye that I am ? " a 
 
 As has already been seen, Jesus through his whole 
 career most frequently spake of himself in the third 
 person, as the Son of Man. The epithet was not in itself 
 specially assuming ; for " Son of Man," as used poetically 
 in Hebrew literature, means Man generically, — the im- 
 personation of humanity. It is improbable that Jesus 
 used the designation in this unpretentious signification. 
 When he is heard affirming of this Man, or Son of Man, 
 that he has power on earth to forgive sins; b that all 
 things are given to him of God, who is his father ; ° that 
 he will come in the glory of his Father, with all the holy 
 angels with him ; (1 it is to be inferred that the Son of Man 
 is not a person of ordinary human rank, but that the term 
 was used in a special sense, and with reference to the man 
 whom Ezekiel saw in vision upon the throne above the 
 firmament, and to the Son of Man whom Daniel saw 
 coming to the Ancient of Days in the clouds of heaven. f 
 There would be none of the striking antithesis which 
 marked the style of Jesus in these words of his: "Foxes 
 have holes, and the birds of the air have nests ; but the 
 Son of Man hath not where to lay his head," g if, by Son 
 of Man, he meant only a human being. It is no un- 
 common lot for men to have no place of their own to 
 lodge in ; but what a humiliation for the exalted Son of 
 Man, companion of the Ancient of Days, to be less 
 securely sheltered than the birds and wild beasts ! 
 
 From the beginning of his public career, Jesus seems 
 to have claimed that he was aided by the divine power, 
 and impelled by the divine spirit, and to have assumed 
 a character and office above the grade of ordinary hu- 
 manity. If the question is concluded by the chronological 
 order of his conversations given by Matthew, it must be 
 allowed that the claim of supreme divine authority was 
 nearly simultaneous with his appearance among his coun- 
 trymen as a teacher. For, in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 he said that he himself would pronounce in the day of 
 judgment the sentence of banishment upon false disci- 
 ples. h Apparently in the midst of his mission in Galilee, 
 
 •Matt, xvl, 13-15. bMatt. ix.,6. c Matt, xi., 27. dMatt. xvi., 27. 
 * Ezek. i.,26. f Dan. vii., 13. SMatt. viii., 20. hMatt. vii. , 23. 
 
I 
 
 334 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 he is declared to have said, " All things are delivered unto 
 me of my Father " ; a and, about the same time, he claimed 
 authority to set aside the law of the Sabbath, promul- 
 gated in the ten sacred laws of Jehovah. 1 ' But the chro- 
 nology is not wholly trustworthy ; and Luke gives a later 
 date to one of these declarations. It would have been 
 very difficult for the evangelists, redacting the oral tradi- 
 tions of Jesus' words after his death, and after the Pau- 
 line ideas of his exalted character had become prevalent, 
 not to impute to his early consciousness the exaggerated 
 estimate of his later days. The verse found both in 
 Matthew and in Luke, " All things are delivered unto me 
 of my Father : neither knoweth any man the Father save 
 the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him," 
 is so evidently Johannic in style and thought, so unlike the 
 synoptic style of Jesus, that its source is to be looked for 
 in an adoption much later than the original tradition. 
 
 As has been seen, the distinct recognition of his Mes- 
 siahship, of his heirship to the throne of the kingdom of 
 heaven, did not originate with Jesus himself. It was first 
 imputed by John the Baptist.' 1 When the unclean spirits 
 invoked him as Son of God and as the Holy One, he 
 rebuked them; c and when, at last, he communicated to 
 his disciples the assurance to which he had come, that 
 he was the Christ, he charged them strictly not to make 
 it known to any man — so alien then to the modesty of 
 his nature seemed so lofty a self-estimation. 1 He began 
 his career as a prophet and healer of diseases ; and he 
 gained the adhesion of his first disciples as a person in 
 whom were the spirit and power of God, rather than as 
 the Messiah and hope of Israel. 
 
 In answering the question, what Jesus thought of him- 
 self, we must not disregard a crisis, that seemed to have 
 changed the project and purpose of his life. This crisis 
 occurred in the remote north of Palestine, whither Jesus 
 had withdrawn, perhaps to avoid the enmity of Herod, 
 perhaps to escape the inquisition and contradiction of the 
 Pharisees. Apparently, he has got beyond the rumor of 
 his gifts of healing — much narrower than the evangelists 
 define it — and, unvexed by the multitude, in the presence 
 
 a Matt, xi., 27. •' Matt, xii., 1-8. cLukex,22. J Matt, iii., 2-11. 
 < Mark i., 24, 25, 34, ' Mark viii., 30. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 335 
 
 of his twelve friends, he gives himself up to a survey of 
 what he has done, and of the enterprise that still lies 
 unattempted before him. a It was an opportune time for 
 confidence and confession. Let us consider what the gos- 
 pel tradition preserves of this memorable interview. 
 
 Though hitherto not unconscious of himself, nor indif- 
 ferent to public opinion, he now becomes morbidly sensi- 
 tive to the opinion of the world, and in his self-exaltation 
 he aspires to the highest grades of being. What do men 
 think of me ? in a moment of frank confidence he asks of 
 his disciples. The answer was one which should have 
 been grateful to a most aspiring spirit. Some, said his 
 devoted adherents, say that you are John the Baptist 
 come back from death. Some say you are Elijah, some 
 Jeremiah ; others, one of the great prophets. These sur- 
 mises of the credulous Galileans, who had followed him 
 out of their cities, and whose sick he had healed, seemed 
 but slightly to move him. Is that all ? " Whom say ye 
 that I am?" is his next appeal. When Peter, in the 
 fervor of his allegiance, replied, " Thou art the anointed 
 Messiah, Son of the Living God," Jesus was profoundly 
 affected, and with ardor exclaimed : Blessed art thou, 
 Simon, son of yonas ! Only the spirit of God could give 
 such true insight. Thou art the rock, upon which I will 
 build my church, and the gates of hell shall not be strong 
 against it; and I will give thee the key of heaven, and 
 power to bind and loose on earth as viceroy of the king 
 of heaven. b But the old modesty soon comes over his 
 spirit ; and, repressing his exultation, he charges his disci- 
 ples that his Messiahship is not to be divulged to any 
 human being. For the discovery of his high office and 
 dignity, which Peter, inspired with insight from the divine 
 mind itself, has just made, all honors are offered to him, 
 even to sovereign power upon the earth ; but tell no man, 
 he charges him, what God' hath revealed to you ; for, 
 before my glory in the acknowledgment of God, and the 
 plaudits and worship of all good spirits, must come my 
 humiliation, shame, and death. So all the prophets have 
 declared. Let the world, ignorant who I am, work its 
 evil will, till all eyes shall see and every tongue shall con- 
 fess the glory, which they have put to shame. The scene 
 
336 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 is most striking and impressive, and at the same time 
 quite human and natural. Surely never at any other 
 time did a human soul rise to a higher level of inspiration 
 or indulge in vaster dreams. But when Jesus, subduing 
 and repressing his gratification at such appreciation, as 
 had burst from the lips of his sanguine friend, with sad 
 thoughts of the dark and dreadful path, by which he must 
 walk to his glory, proceeds to tell how he will go to Jerusa- 
 lem, and surfer the scorn and persecution there of scribes, 
 elders, and chief priests, and even be killed, Peter, in 
 his turn elated at the sovereignty of the Church, so gener- 
 ously given to him, thinks the trusted viceroy may at 
 least advise, albeit in the affection and kindly solicitude 
 of a friend touched with human pity at the coming suffer- 
 ings of his Master. "That be far from thee, Lord," still 
 respectful, he ventures to interpose, "that shall not be 
 unto thee," — not so much evidently to dictate his Mas- 
 ter's well-considered course, as to express a motherly 
 anxiety, that a cruel death should not befall one beloved. 
 He had little comprehended the deep enthusiasm, to 
 which this mysterious man had been wrought up, nor 
 understood how that gentle spirit, when thwarted and 
 contradicted, could flash in the lightning of rebuke." For 
 Jesus, who had said : He that is angry with his brother, 
 without a cause, shall be in danger of the judgment, and 
 he that saith to his brother, Thou fool, shall be in danger of 
 hell-fire, 1 ' turned upon Peter, whom he had just declared 
 blessed, inspired of the Holy Ghost, the head of the Church 
 to be, — upon Peter, whose affectionate solicitude, apparent 
 even now to the reader of the narrative, he could not 
 have misunderstood — with these withering words : " Get 
 thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto vie ; for 
 thou savorest not of divine things, but of human things." 
 Then, with firm hand, he represses that rapturous de- 
 light of himself and his followers, which had culminated 
 in anger and cruel, contemptuous words, by calling their 
 attention to the sufferings, which all, who would share 
 his triumph, must first undergo. " If any man," he said, 
 "would be a follower of me, let him follow me to my 
 cross." * Do not think of saving your lives by desertion. 
 
 a Matt, xvi., 21-2S. b Matt, v., 22. 
 
 * It is scarcely questionable, that Jesus foreboded and foretold his own death by violence. 
 We ha<-e noted the successive steps he took to make such a result the catastrophe of his life. 
 
PEESONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 337 
 
 If by desertion you should not only save life, but gain the 
 whole world, what profit were it ? If you lose your lives, 
 you may thus gain the life of your souls. For, when I 
 come in the glory of my Father and with his angels, I will 
 reward every man according to his integrity. Nor is the 
 reward a remote one, for some of you shall not die, till 
 you see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. 
 
 Jesus comes from this conference with the twelve with 
 purposes either wholly changed or more definitely deter- 
 mined upon. Let the Galileans still debate which of the 
 great prophets has come back to enlighten his people. 
 Jesus knows ; and Peter, inspired of the Holy Spirit, has 
 learned that a greater than all the prophets is here — no 
 less a personage than the Messiah promised of old to 
 Israel. His work in Galilee is done. He need not ask 
 even three days of Herod to do cures and cast out devils. 
 That epoch has passed ; and he must go to Zion, as the 
 King of the new kingdom of heaven. The change in his 
 purpose, in the nature of his communications, in the 
 temper of his own spirit, even his dull adherents do not 
 fail to notice. All the synoptic evangelists, with more or 
 less distinctness, indicate it ; and they all assign its date to 
 the period of this Caesarean interview. In the First 
 Gospel, it is said : " From that time forth began Jesus to 
 show unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusa- 
 lem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests 
 and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third 
 day." ■ 
 
 The character and scope of a pure self-consciousness it 
 is always difficult to determine. Indeed, a man's estimate 
 of himself varies immensely with his moods. It rises at 
 words of commendation from other men, at honors and 
 rewards that are spontaneously offered and under the sat- 
 isfaction and exaltation which come from the accomplish- 
 ment of some great task. It sinks under reproaches of 
 those whom we esteem, under obloquy and neglect, and. 
 in the pain and mortification with which we charge our- 
 selves with the carelessness or the ignorance or the want 
 
 a Matt, xvi., 21. 
 It is less probable, that he anticipated that the mode of his taking-off would be a form of 
 punishment so little known among the Jews as crucifixion. After the crucifixion, the cross 
 naturally became in the minds of his followers the symbol of suffering; and those, who re- 
 COUnted from fading recollcclion liis conversations, could hardly avoid using a symbolism that 
 everywhere permeated the Christian speech and the Christian thought. 
 
338 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 of skill or courage, which produce our great defeats. So 
 with Jesus. His moods changed. He exulted over the 
 career of power that seemed opening before him. He 
 beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. a All things 
 seemed to be given into his hands by God, and himself 
 to be the only medium of knowledge of God open to the 
 human mind. b In his ardor and confidence, he is ready 
 to share his splendid glories with his humble friends. 
 They shall eat and drink at his table in his kingdom, and 
 have twelve thrones, and sit and reign one over each of 
 the tribes of Israel ; and whatever they loose or bind on 
 earth shall be loosed or bound in heaven. c Sometimes, 
 he even doubts if his enemies will be able to overcome 
 him. It was in the prophetic plan that Messiah should 
 be cut off, that his grave should be made with the wicked. 
 But Jehovah's judgments are not absolute. When he 
 had commanded Abraham to offer his precious son as a 
 sacrifice, did he not stay his hand, as it was stretched 
 forth to shy the already bound victim ? And was not 
 Nineveh spared upon its repentance, in spite of an uncon- 
 ditioned sentence against it ? So, in the garden of Geth- 
 semane, he goes three times to pray, " If it be possible, 
 let this cup pass from me." d For a little while, as the 
 danger thickens about him, he thinks he will arm his 
 friends. When only two swords can be found, however, 
 this man of peace, sickening at the thought of using 
 them, says, " It is enough." His better thoughts recur to 
 supernatural allies. "Thinkest thou now," he said, "that, 
 if I so prayed, the Father would not send me twelve 
 legions of angels ? " e When the children of Jerusalem, 
 who did not join the babes of Galilee in shouting Hosanna, 
 and whom he would fain have sheltered from fast-coming 
 calamities, as a hen shelters her chickens under her wings, 
 shall see him again, they shall say — so he felt assured — 
 " Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." t 
 
 His prevalent tone, however, as he went up to Jerusa- 
 lem, was one of manifest sadness. He speaks often of 
 what is to befall him, rather as his suffering than as his 
 glory. And, in his prayer for deliverance, he was in 
 agony, so that his sweat fell like drops of blood to the 
 
 aLukex.,18. b Matt, xi., 27. c Luke xxii., 2S-30. d Matt, xxvi., 37-45. 
 eMatt. xxvi., 53. I Matt, xxiii., 37~39- 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 339 
 
 ground. For a form so delicate and susceptible as his, 
 the sufferings of the Roman method of executing crimi- 
 nals must have been unspeakably terrible ; and the cry- 
 wrung from his soul, succumbing to the prolonged agony 
 of death, was by no means incompatible either with his 
 high courage or the grand sacrifice which he believed 
 himself to be accomplishing. The Messiah was to have 
 been oppressed and afflicted, and brought as a lamb to 
 the slaughter. He was to tread the wine-press of the 
 divine wrath alone — to be esteemed smitten of God. 
 
 It thus appears, that, up to the eve of his departure 
 from Galilee, Jesus had been reticent, perhaps uncertain, 
 about his own function and rank in the divine economy, 
 and that, simultaneously with that departure, he began to 
 assume the dignity and title of the anointed sovereign of 
 the heavenly kingdom ; and, while he lived, he continued 
 to assert it with more and more assurance. 
 
 What was the contemporary opinion of Jesus among 
 his countrymen ? All accounts agree that he was brought 
 up to manhood in the Galilean city of Nazareth. 
 
 It is with some distrust that we adopt the chronolog- 
 ical order of events as detailed in the first two Gospels, 
 differing as it does from that in the Third Gospel. 
 Adopting that order, it is found that, after the healing 
 of all manner of sickness and disease in every city of 
 Galilee, after the report of these miracles coming to the 
 ears of John the Baptist had excited in his mind the sur- 
 mise that Jesus was the Messiah, after Capernaum, Cho- 
 razin, and Bethsaida had been reproached for their dis- 
 regard of mighty works done in them, the people of his 
 own town, Nazareth, considered Jesus to be the son of 
 Joseph, the carpenter, and did not believe in him. a 
 
 The people who came to listen to Jesus, described in 
 the Synoptic Gospels as a great multitude from every 
 province of Palestine, must not be reckoned among his 
 adherents. b They were not of the flock — always a little 
 one — to whom he said it was the good pleasure of the 
 Father to give the kingdom of heaven. They were not 
 of the favored ones, to whom it was given to know its 
 mysteries.* 1 He was moved with compassion to give them 
 food in the wilderness from the supplies of his own com- 
 
 » Matt, xiii., 54-58. b Matt, iv., 25. c Luke xii., 32. d Luke viii., 10. 
 
340 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 pany ; but he never seems to have won their confidence, 
 nor did he gain even their inchoate discipleship." He 
 makes a distinction between the people and his disciples. 
 The former he dismisses, the latter he sends before him 
 on his return to Galilee. Even the disciples seemed to 
 have failed to see anything unusual in the feeding of the 
 multitude, for their hearts were hardened. b 
 
 To those who deem the Fourth Gospel historic, it is a 
 most significant declaration that, comparatively late in his 
 career, his own brothers did not believe in him. Indeed, 
 it is not apparent, that, with the exception of James, his 
 family had, up to the time of his arrest, given in their 
 adhesion to his Messianic pretensions. The mother and 
 brethren standing without, and desiring to speak with him, 
 instead of being within and listening to him, indicate a 
 somewhat hostile attitude, as does his reply : "I recognize 
 as my kindred those that do the will of my Father." d In 
 that view, we can understand the stress he laid upon the 
 sundering of all ties of kindred, as the necessary condi- 
 tions of discipleship ; and that, when he said, I am come 
 not to send peace, but a sword, to make discord and dis- 
 sension in families, and a man's foes shall be they of his 
 very household, he was speaking in the sadness, if not the 
 bitterness, of his own domestic experience. 6 
 
 After a prophetic career in his native province — it may 
 be only for a few months, though it may have extended 
 over several years — Jesus undertook the fatal demonstra- 
 tion upon Jerusalem. As his going thither, in the mind 
 of his followers, if not in his own, was to inaugurate the 
 kingdom of heaven, and begin the reign of righteous- 
 ness in the world, — a consummation which he seems to 
 understand must be preceded by his death, — it is likely 
 that nearly all who believed in him accompanied him 
 upon his journey. The company seemed to include 
 women/ and so many children, that those who applauded 
 him in the streets of Jerusalem were spoken of by him 
 as babes and sucklings. 8 While some real believers must 
 have been compelled by sickness or poverty to abide the 
 impending event at home, the faith and devotion of those 
 who attended upon him seemed of the most precarious 
 
 a Mark vi., 35-45. h Mark vi., 52. cjohnvii.,5. d Matt xii., 46-50. 
 eMatt. x., 34-38. f Luke xxiii., 55. 6 Matt, xxi , 15, if. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 34I 
 
 kind. When the city turned against him, and his arrest, 
 quickly followed by his trial, conviction, and execution, 
 was obstructed neither by supernatural nor popular inter- 
 position, all his disciples, according to the most authen- 
 tic tradition, forsook him; and even Peter denied with 
 scornful oaths that he had ever known him. a 
 
 On the day of Pentecost, however, one hundred and 
 twenty adherents rallied to his name, influenced by the 
 impassioned faith of the twelve disciples, that he had been 
 seen alive, and that, by a triumphant resurrection, he had 
 established his Messiahship. b All those one hundred and 
 twenty were Galileans, as the writer Luke narrates ; c and 
 noting how much more rapidly and numerously converts 
 were made to the faith by the reputation of the resurrec- 
 tion, than by his personal presence, with all the effect of 
 his teaching and miracles, it may be justly assumed, that 
 a considerable part of the company of believers were 
 attracted to the faith by the wonder of the resurrection, 
 which had proved efficacious enough, not only to bring 
 back Peter to his allegiance, but every one of his fellows, 
 whose desertion had only been less conspicuous, because 
 their original zeal and confidence had been less pro- 
 nounced than his. 
 
 This then was the impression Jesus made upon his age 
 and people. Something like a hundred persons out of 
 the cities of Galilee so far believed on him, as to follow 
 him, until it became evidently unsafe to be identified with 
 him. Then, they fled, and left him to the rage of the pop- 
 ulace, who hated him, not because they knew aught against 
 him, but because their fanaticism had been designedly 
 worked upon by his real enemies, the hierarchy of the 
 Jewish Church. 
 
 What the Galileans generally, including his unbeliev- 
 ing kinsfolk, thought of him cannot be certainly deter- 
 mined. In Nazareth, where he lived, his life was once 
 attempted. 11 Frequently, he betook himself to uninhabited 
 regions away from the cities and villages, either because 
 his person was not safe among the habitations of men, or 
 because he could not brook their indifference and scepti- 
 cism. Did the favor, with which the people at first 
 seemed to listen to him, change afterward to suspicion 
 
 "Matt, xxvi., 56, 74. b Acts i., 15. cActsii.,7. d Luke iv., 28, 29. 
 
342 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 or contempt ? Did they, who were first inclined to rec- 
 ognize him as a prophet and preacher of righteousness, 
 fall off from him, when he began to exact more rigorous 
 requirements of conduct, or to put forth claims to higher 
 personal dignity ? The written tradition clearly presents 
 two contrasted pictures, one of a reformer going forth 
 full of confidence and assurance upon a high and benefi- 
 cent mission, the other of a man of sorrow, sore-hearted 
 with disappointment, and not repressing keen complaints 
 of withheld appreciation. The Fourth Gospel has an 
 incident, probably historic, of the falling away from him 
 of a body of his disciples, perplexed by some new subtlety 
 of his doctrine, and of his mistrust of the fidelity even of 
 the twelve.* 
 
 In Jerusalem and Judea there were apparently no open 
 adherents to his faith. It seems as if there was not in 
 the sacred city a single believing family, with which he 
 could safely lodge. A secret friend placed his upper 
 chamber at the disposal of the disciples for the Passover 
 festival ; but he took such care to preserve his secret that 
 curious tradition has not been able to recover it, however 
 much it might now redound to his glory. 
 
 Difficulties are encountered in the effort justly to esti- 
 mate the character of Jesus, that cannot be met in study- 
 ing any other personage of history. We must gather 
 one by one his traits from eulogists, who will not suspend 
 their admiration long enough for us to see the man. The 
 Gospels, too, seem to have been written, when the contro- 
 versy with the ancient Church was at its height, and when 
 a disposition to find parallels in the fortunes of Jesus, and 
 the providential history of the peculiar people, induced the 
 writers to see fulfilment of prophecies in the most trivial 
 circumstances and the most dissimilar situations. 1 " How- 
 ever cogent as arguments these fancies may have been 
 at the time they were published, they only serve to con- 
 fuse the modern apprehension and obscure the vision of 
 a soul, perhaps more worthy of contemplation than any 
 that has enlarged our view of the capacities of human 
 nature. Certain it is, that in the minds of the biog- 
 raphers and friends of Jesus, the prophetic destiny he 
 was believed to fulfil quite eclipsed the most vivid impres- 
 
 » John vi., 66, 67. b Matt, i., 23; ii., 6, 15, 18, 23. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 343 
 
 sions of memory ; and their reminiscences too often give 
 us pictures of the trained actor going solemnly through 
 a prescribed part, when what we ask for is a majestic and 
 original man, speaking and acting spontaneously from the 
 resources of his intelligence and the inspirations of his 
 genius. 
 
 It is proper to look for the germ and primal force of 
 whatever is original and distinctive in the complex Chris- 
 tian cultus in Jesus himself. A careful study of his 
 intellectual, moral, and spiritual traits will reveal to the 
 candid inquirer with more or less clearness the secret of 
 his influence upon the world. In his age, the authority 
 and reputation of a wise man stood far less than it stands 
 now, upon stores of knowledge acquired from books and 
 study, and the capacity of communicating truth in writ- 
 ten words. He among the Greeks was esteemed a phi- 
 losopher, and among the Jews inspired of God, who 
 could wisely answer questions without quoting and from 
 his own insight. If he could cover an ethical lesson under 
 a vivid figure of speech or a picturesque allegory, or com- 
 press it into a pregnant and sententious aphorism, winged 
 with wit, he was sure of a hearing and of the adherence 
 of disciples. Jesus was largely endowed with this talent. 
 His parables have stood and will ever stand in the poetic 
 imagination as the permanent imagery and illustration of 
 most momentous moral judgments. So deeply engraven 
 on the human heart are his profoundly sagacious canons 
 of conduct, that they have become for generation after 
 generation the terms in which conscience and reason 
 express themselves. 
 
 Happily, we feel more assurance in tracing to the mind 
 of Jesus these intellectual creations, than we do in imput- 
 ing to him any thaumaturgic work, or the domination of 
 any controlling faith or enthusiasm. We know that the 
 annalists, who prepared for us the Synoptic Gospels, with 
 their easy credulity, and their limited comprehension on 
 the one hand, and with their simplicity and general good 
 faith on the other hand, could never have invented the 
 allegories and aphorisms, which disclose all that we know 
 of the mind of Jesus. The mere memory will retain 
 for ages the substance and even the form of a fable or 
 of a parable. Each part so depends upon another, each 
 
344 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 incident and detail so contributes to the moral or to the 
 denouement, that to forget and omit one would destroy 
 the symmetry of the whole. Just so, those sententious 
 maxims and popular by-words, which are handed down 
 without writing among illiterate races, and are not 
 indebted to the aid of writing among the most culti- 
 vated races, acquire in their repetition a certain rhythmic 
 melody, which fixes them in the memory from one age 
 to another. 
 
 Written, as our genuine Gospels in their first draft 
 are believed to have been, from thirty to sixty years 
 after the events which they describe, we find them 
 containing those very forms of speech, in which Jesus 
 was peculiarly gifted, and which the unaided human 
 memory is best able to retain. Doubtless, he said many 
 unremembered things well worth perpetuation ; but he 
 did say, and substantially as they have recorded it, what 
 the synoptic annalists impute to him. On the other 
 hand, it is morally certain, that the writer of the Fourth 
 Gospel — whether the Apostle John or a much later 
 disciple — could have found in his own recollections, or 
 in the collated recollections of all, who had known 
 Jesus, no data for a report of the conversations dramati- 
 cally ascribed to him in that work. The unaided human 
 memory could never have retained the form or substance 
 of prolonged metaphysical disquisitions, flowing feebly 
 and diffusely in vague and lifeless words, with their inad- 
 equate expressiveness eked out by repetitions, enlivened 
 by no imaginative illustrations, and charged with no 
 force or impetuosity of diction. The task of recalling 
 with all the precision of question and reply the conver- 
 sations with the Jews in the temple, or with the disciples 
 in the garden of Gethsemane, would be nearly as difficult 
 one week, as sixty years after they had occurred ; and 
 it is not pretended that the task was undertaken earlier 
 than after the last-named interval. 
 
 Many of the replies of Jesus to questions designed to 
 entangle him in an inconsistency, an impolicy or an 
 impiety, while they exhibit his shrewdness and the readi- 
 ness of his intellectual resources, disclose also the em- 
 phasis of his moral judgments. When the Pharisees 
 said he cast out devils by the power of the chief of 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 345 
 
 devils, Jesus rejoined: "How can a power antagonize 
 itself? How can Satan's kingdom be maintained, if he 
 is himself busy in seeking its destruction ? " How effect- 
 ive was his reply to the delegated scribes from Jerusalem, 
 who, coming to learn of his doctrines, had discovered 
 and remarked, that the disciples sat down to eat without 
 the ceremonial laving of their hands ! " Why do they 
 thus," they asked, "transgress the traditions of the 
 elders?" "Why do ye," retorted the Master, " trans- 
 gress with your traditions the commandments of God?" 
 Why do ye allow an empty form of words to cancel the 
 law of God, that requires a man to honor his father 
 and mother ? 
 
 There is philosophy, wisdom, and even wit in his 
 answer to the Pharisees, who asked, if for any cause of 
 dissatisfaction, a man might divorce his wife. The dis- 
 tinction of sex, he replied, is a distinction of nature. The 
 union of the sexes makes a relation so consequential, 
 that the married become one flesh, and that too by an 
 ordinance established by God. What God hath joined 
 together let not man put asunder/ 
 
 There was a conclusiveness about his solutions, that 
 left them sticking in minds like axioms, never to be either 
 questioned or forgotten. Of that character was his 
 settlement of the question of precedence, which his 
 disciples raised among themselves. It left a play for 
 a noble ambition, and a mode of gratifying it incapable 
 of provoking envy. He that would be the greatest among 
 you, let him be the servant of all, and let him understand 
 that, unlike the dominions of this world, this is to be the 
 law of the kingdom of heaven. b 
 
 The personal appeal, the argument to the man, was a 
 characteristic of his speech. The men who approached 
 him with a strong purpose of not committing or exposing 
 themselves, while they directed him to some purely doc- 
 trinal or speculative question, found the secrets of their 
 hearts suddenly exposed by the keenness of his criticism, 
 either in a direct reply, or by a palpable illustration. By 
 what authority does the Rabbi do these things, — march 
 in tumultuous processions through the city, disturb the 
 lawful trade in victims in the environs of the temple ? 
 
 * Matt, xix., 3-9. ^ Matt, xx., 26, 27 ; Markix., 33,35. 
 
346 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 The Rabbi says he will not answer, but asks another 
 question : John Baptist's Gospel, was it of heaven or of 
 men ? It is deemed discreet not to answer. Well, he 
 says, which is the obedient son, the one that promises to 
 obey, and breaks his promise, or he who, having refused, 
 afterward repents, and does the thing commanded? 
 The adulterers and extortioners repented, when John 
 preached righteousness. Why did not ye Pharisees, who 
 are the public professors of righteousness, repent ? 
 
 In some of his replies however, verbally complete, and 
 effectual answers to the questioner, a self-possessed intel- 
 ligence may detect some inconsequence, a virtual evasion 
 of the point, which perhaps the question itself did not 
 fully set forth. His solution of the difficulty of the 
 much-married woman in the resurrection, elsewhere con- 
 sidered, is of that character. 
 
 So, too, when he is called to meet the consequences 
 of some of his own manifest exaggerations of speech, as 
 when he said : " It is easier for a camel to go through the 
 eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the king- 
 dom of heaven." Who then — probably, what rich man — 
 can be saved ? It is impossible with men, not impossible 
 with God, explained Jesus, as if there were two kinds of 
 possibility in an agency in itself wholly of God. a 
 
 Like men of wit, he appreciated wit in others, and was 
 evidently gratified with an answer which manifested 
 shrewdness and self-possession. It was not more the rev- 
 erence, with which the Syro-Phcenician woman received 
 him, and her faith and humility, than her apt retort to his 
 brusque and unfriendly banter, that made him so gracious 
 to her. b It was his own facetiousness, we must believe, 
 rather than the expression of a coarse, national prejudice, 
 quite foreign to his character, that made him say : " It is 
 not proper to take children's bread and cast it to the 
 dogs." She, with woman's sagacity, saw the gentle nature 
 under the rough, repellent speech, but was too meek, too 
 set upon her purpose, to resent it. " Truth, Master, but 
 the dogs may eat the crumbs that fall from the table." 
 
 When the peculiar style of Jesus is once discovered in 
 the Gospels, it is impossible to mistake it. The terse, 
 piquant colloquies of the first three Gospels are as utterly 
 
 • Matt, xix., 24-26. bMatt. xv., 21-48. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 347 
 
 unlike the turgid, garrulous, and tautological discourses 
 of the Fourth Gospel, as two styles of men of the same 
 time could be. The ready resource, the pungent wit, and 
 the keen edge of Jesus do appear in that one line, wherein 
 he is made to say : u Let him zvho is without sin among you 
 cast the first stone." a Some flavor of the sententious acute- 
 ness of the great teacher — perhaps the situation, as told, 
 was real — had evidently come down to the writer to 
 show how incongruous were all his other imputations. 
 It is a singular corroboration of the view in these chapters 
 presented of the character of the Fourth Gospel, that 
 this very passage is deemed an interpolation. 
 
 There is traceable in his mind a fondness for intellect- 
 ual puzzles ; and he apparently enjoyed the confusion and 
 distraction into which the dull apprehensions of his friends 
 were often thrown by exaggerations, in directions, and 
 daring figures of speech. Thus, one day, he cautioned 
 his disciples to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and 
 the Sadducees. Something is at fault with the bread, 
 reasoned the disciples. Even the popular mode of pre- 
 paring it is tinctured with the general falsity and adulter- 
 ating character of the dispensation. " What can the Mas- 
 ter mean?" b The figure so explained has been plain 
 enough to the modern mind ; but what clew had those 
 matter-of-fact and unpoetic minds to its hidden meaning ? 
 
 They were more stupidly at a loss, when, in his pointed 
 antithetic epigram, he told the multitude, whom the Phar- 
 isees had perplexed by insisting upon some ceremonial 
 cleansing: "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth 
 a man, but what cometh out of the mouth." c 
 
 That too, lucid as it appears to us, was a parable to 
 them. This stupidity even annoyed him. Are ye too, 
 he asked, still without understanding ? a Not food going 
 into the mouth defiles, but those words and acts, which 
 flow out of a foul heart : they make the man unclean. 
 He had evidently overrated their perception, when a day 
 or two before he said to them, " Blessed are your eyes, for 
 they see ; and your ears, for they hear what prophets and 
 righteous men had in vain desired to see and hear." f 
 
 His whole scheme of a kingdom of heaven is pre- 
 sented in figures and pictures of common things. The 
 
 a John viii., 7. bMatt. xvi., 6-12. c Matt, xv., 11. '1 Matt, xv., 16. 
 «Matt. xv., 20. f Matt, xiii., 16, 17, 24. 
 
348 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 world is a field, its end a harvest. He himself is a sower, 
 a fisherman, a shepherd, a bridegroom, a master of a 
 feast, a landlord. The elect and non-elect are sheep and 
 goats, wheat and tares, good and bad fish, real pearls and 
 false pearls. When, at the instance of his friends, per- 
 plexed and exhausted by the tropical character of his 
 habitual discourse, and apparently thirsting for some 
 definite ideas, upon which their prosaic minds could rest 
 with some sense of reality, he undertakes to tell them 
 plainly of the signs of the kingdom of heaven, and of 
 the end of the world, he manifestly tries to impose some 
 curb upon his erratic fancy. a But that was impossible. 
 From beyond the world of experience, to him, as to the 
 most gifted men of genius, only vague and shadowy 
 images could come. He drops into unimportant details 
 made out of the life of his own time. It is still the local 
 Judea — all the world, to the narrow apprehension of his 
 hearers. A catastrophe which ought to embrace the 
 whole universe cramps itself to the limited geography of 
 Palestine. "Let him," he said, " who is in Judea flee 
 unto the mountains." 
 
 In estimating the character of Jesus upon its intel- 
 lectual side, his relation to the superstition of his age 
 must not be overlooked. It is not required of a tran- 
 scendent mind, that it shall emancipate itself from all 
 traditionary beliefs, and comprehend the laws of nature 
 as revealed in the perfected science of the world. All 
 knowledge has come into the world by a gradual process, 
 involving patient study, and a faculty of ascending from 
 facts to principles and laws. It is not expected of a 
 great philosopher or a great teacher, that he shall ignore 
 the prevalent science of his time, but, accepting it as his 
 stand-point, that he shall illuminate it with the light of 
 his own spirit. He must take the general tendencies of 
 his age as his data, and work out the problem of human 
 duty upon the theory they offer. Shakspeare and Dante 
 evidently accepted the theory of man's destiny, which 
 mediaeval Christianity taught ; and Socrates, though put 
 to death for his heresies, seemed not to have disturbed 
 by any of his philosophy the fundamental notions of his 
 age, that there were immortal gods, who were on the side 
 
 a Matt, xxiv., 3. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 349 
 
 of human virtue, and who were to be worshipped by 
 rites, as well as by righteousness. Admitting that Jesus 
 stood in the same relation as men of this order to his 
 age, and to its cardinal faiths, we may still place him in 
 the category of the world's greatest men. The Jews, 
 with the exception of the Sadducees, had come to believe 
 in angelic, immortal beings, who attended upon the Deity 
 to do him honor, and to be his messengers and the instru- 
 ments of his direct operations. Jesus shared this belief. 
 At the end of the world, he thought the actual separation 
 between good and bad men would be effected by the 
 angels, who would be sent forth in sufficient numbers and 
 with divine power to assign to each of the myriad crowd 
 of souls his proper place. a It was by a retinue of angels 
 that his coming again in his kingdom was to be heralded, 
 and honored, 5 and so precious was each believer that an 
 angel was assigned to stand constantly before the throne 
 of God, c to be his vindicator and patron. When meditat- 
 ing his arrest by the armed guards of the law, and when 
 he had even caused swords to be produced, as if to resist 
 them, he told his followers he had only to pray, and twelve 
 legions of angels would be sent to his rescue. It is not 
 apparent that these angels, which he believed peopled 
 heaven in such numbers, and, like the armies of Rome, 
 were organized in legions, to guard the divine throne, had 
 been men. d The belief of the Pharisees was that the 
 dead are still in the underworld ; and the early Christians 
 held that Jesus had spent the hours of his apparent death 
 in the tomb in a mission to them to make such as were 
 worthy the partakers of his resurrection. Jesus evi- 
 dently shared this belief ; for he said that they, that were 
 deemed worthy of the resurrection, should be in their 
 new estate like the angels, which he would not have said, 
 if he had not considered angels an order of beings dis- 
 tinct from men. 1 
 
 According to the narratives of Matthew, Mark, and 
 Luke, the beginning of Jesus' public ministry was sig- 
 nalized by a temptation of his integrity conducted by 
 Satan himself in the wilderness, after forty days' absti- 
 nence from food. How far is the intelligence of Jesus 
 
 aMatt. xxiv., 31. h Matt, xxv., 31. cMatt xviii., 10. 
 •IMatt. xxvi., S3, 5». c Acts ii., 27, 31-34 ; I. Peter iii., 19. fLukexx.,35. 
 
350 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 compromised by the recapitulation of this incident ? The 
 question is one, which the sincere minds who believe the 
 adventure actually befell him — for whom these chapters 
 are not written — need not to answer. Can the legend 
 be attributed to the creative imagination of the evan- 
 gelists, or of the originators of the oral tradition, out of 
 which the Gospels were woven ? There appears in their 
 narratives a strong tendency to exalt the life of Jesus, 
 whom they believed a supernatural being above the range 
 of ordinary human experience. The exclamations of the 
 devout prophets and prophetesses, who welcomed his 
 birth as of a sovereign prince, the jealousy of Herod 
 excited in his very infancy, the visit of the Magi that 
 travelled from the remote East guided by a star, to do 
 homage to him in his swaddling clothes, and the choirs 
 of angels singing paeans of congratulations to the world, 
 must be attributed to this tendency. The imputation to 
 evil spirits of an intelligence keener than that of men, 
 enabling them to perceive his divinity, sprung from the 
 same tendency. It might well comport with this sen- 
 timent to believe that the powers of hell were seriously 
 alarmed at the advent of Jesus to the world, and that to 
 counteract the beneficial agencies he came to establish, 
 by assaulting his integrity and destroying the power he 
 had with God, was a mission demanding the personal 
 intervention of their prince. 
 
 On the other hand, this legend of the temptation is too 
 dignified in tone, too complete and consistent in its inci- 
 dents, to be the work of any prosaic annalist. We recog- 
 nize in its masterly impersonation a genius kindred to 
 that which had inspired a similar conception in the an- 
 cient poem of Job. Great lives, like that of Jesus, are a 
 mingling of truth and poetry. The trial to which he was 
 subjected was the trial of timidity and doubt,- of the 
 allurement of pleasure and ambition, which assails every 
 heroic soul upon whom is laid the burden of a great 
 thought or of a great enterprise. Jesus had told, in his 
 vivid and poetic style, of purely internal conflicts, and 
 the literal minds of his unimaginative disciples received 
 his disclosure in the gross form of the canonical legend. 
 
 In a mind like his, in which the domains of the real 
 and that of the ideal so overlie each other, it is difficult 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 35 1 
 
 to detect his veritable faiths. It seems on the whole 
 a just conclusion from all our data, that, although he 
 imputed his own misgivings and hesitation on beginning 
 his career as a prophet — as he did Peter's prudence, 
 which later sought to avert the crisis of his career as the 
 Son of Man that was to come in glory — to the immedi- 
 ate suggestion of Satan, he nevertheless did believe in 
 the reality of devilish personalities, and in the existence 
 of a chief of devils. 
 
 Sometimes, when desired, Jesus himself made a com- 
 plete separation betwixt his ideal and poetic illustration 
 of things and his real cognition of things themselves. 
 Thus, when he explained the parable of the tares and 
 the wheat, for every figure of his mind he supplied the 
 corresponding reality in the nature of things, as they 
 appeared to him. The sower of the good seed is myself 
 — the Son of Man — the field, the world ; the wheat 
 typifies the children of the kingdom, or these little ones 
 that believe in me; the tares are the children of the 
 wicked, and the enemy that sowed them is the devil. In 
 such a literal and precise substitution of facts for rhetor- 
 ical figures, it would be most incongruous to find a figure 
 explained by a figure. a 
 
 It was in the midst of a most literal and bald setting 
 forth of the incidents of the judgment to come at the 
 end of the world, that he declares the place of punish- 
 ment for the accused was prepared for the devil and his 
 angels. There was already in the economy of the divine 
 government an everlasting fire, which would have had its 
 victims, though mankind had all repented, or had not 
 been born. Suspecting, doubtless, a fidelity that had 
 been too much boasted, he said to Peter, with all the 
 solicitude of friendship: "Simon, Simon, Satan hath de- 
 sired to have you, and sift you like wheat ; but I have 
 prayed that your faith may not fail." b 
 
 What domination over the mind and moral sense of 
 Jesus did the sacred writings of his nation exercise ? 
 How far did he accept, how far did he rise above, the 
 prevalent ideas of his time? With boldness he reviewed 
 the great moral code of his race, then and still consid- 
 ered to be so complete and perfect, as to be imputed to 
 
 ft Matt, xiii., 36-43 ; xxv., 41. bLuke xxii., 31, 32. 
 
352 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the legislation of God. The deeper spiritual insight, 
 that discovered its inadequacy and imperfection, reveals 
 the force and originality of Jesus. It is in his function 
 of seer, teacher, and reformer, that he has most perma- 
 nently and most beneficially affected the world. But 
 along with this strength and keenness of moral intuition, 
 that exalt and ennoble him, it is necessary not to overlook 
 a certain conformity to modes of thought, which even, 
 what may be called the Christian cultus, has repudiated, 
 and to an undoubting acquiescence in improbable and 
 impossible legends, which have become, on the whole, 
 offensive to Christian taste. 
 
 It is apparent that to Jesus, as well as to the scribes 
 and ordinary Jews, the Hebrew prophetic writings were 
 divine oracles, and all the patriotic denunciations and 
 vaticinations, which modern scholarship has determined 
 to have reference solely to political events, in the life- 
 time of the prophets, who wrote them, had a certain 
 cabalistic and universal significance, and that in them 
 one hears, not the local patriot uttering his thought, 
 sometimes wisely and eloquently, sometimes extrava- 
 gantly and even bombastically, but the divine word, 
 making these writers the medium of a communication 
 to all mankind. 
 
 There was a temple song in use among the Jews from 
 an early time, beginning : " The Lord said unto my lord, 
 Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies 
 thy footstool."" It appealed to the popular ambition, 
 exclusiveness and love of vengeance. It was the reac- 
 tion of the unquenchable national spirit against the suc- 
 cessive defeats and oppressions, which a proud but feeble 
 people had suffered for centuries from the powerful 
 nations that surrounded them. The Lord would say to 
 some Israelitish prince, through the mouth of the popu- 
 lar devout poet of his time : / will exalt thee, as it were, 
 to my right hand, while thy people 's enemies shall be trod- 
 den under their feet. There had been a period of na- 
 tional glory, which justified such a boast ; and the indomi- 
 table race-spirit assured them, that it must come again. 
 But this boastful song had for Jesus quite another mean- 
 ing. The Lord, who is to sit on Jehovah's right hand, 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 353 
 
 is Messiah ; and, since it was David, who first sang that 
 inspired song, how can he call him Lord who is his son? 
 That a father should thus honor his son was much more 
 incompatible with the old Jewish ideas of paternal dignity, 
 than with our ideas. The scribes cannot solve the riddle ; 
 but neither he who put it, nor they who were confounded 
 by it, seemed to have doubted that it was David who had 
 uttered the words, and that it was by the divine Spirit 
 that they were inspired. 1 
 
 Accepting this view of the Scriptures of his people, we 
 must not be surprised to find him believing in the legend 
 of the flood and of the sudden destruction of all the 
 inhabitants of the world, except Noah and his family. 
 The burning of Sodom and Gomorrah by a rain of fire 
 and brimstone and the escape of Lot were also to him 
 historical events as unquestionable as the slavery of his 
 ancestors in Egypt, or their conquest of Canaan. b We 
 have no data for denying that there was in prehistoric 
 times some wide-spread local flood, whose devastation is 
 perpetuated in the story of the deluge, or that in the 
 same period populous cities had been overwhelmed by 
 volcanic disturbances, like those known to have buried 
 Pompeii and Herculaneum. But the modern mind finds 
 purely physical causes for such calamities, and does not 
 charge God either with the cruelty of producing them or 
 the treachery of giving no warning when they impend. 
 Like other sentient creatures, man takes advantage of the 
 favorable conditions of life, which a cooling planet — 
 kerneled with fire, and turned loose among attracting 
 worlds — affords during certain stages of its evolution; 
 and, when some cosmic convulsion smashes his petty 
 housekeeping, he is not required to impute the catastro- 
 phe to his own sin, or to some spirit of vindictiveness on the 
 part of God. But when, as in the time of Jesus, the most 
 intelligent minds contemplated the sovereign will as pro- 
 ducing all phenomena arbitrarily, and so morally respon- 
 sible for them, it was necessary to find for floods and 
 earthquakes, storms and pestilences, a cause in the wrath 
 of God provoked by the abnormal sinfulness of men. 
 
 Turning to the moral and spiritual side of the nature 
 of Jesus, piety is found to be his predominant trait. 
 
354 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Toward God, as spiritual father of men, as the crea- 
 tive, vivifying power of nature, he maintained an un- 
 bounded reverence and submission, mingled, as in no 
 other person, with a certain affection and even familiarity 
 born of confidence in his own exalted dignity and destiny. 
 He was wont to go to God as to an ever-present friend 
 and father, in a communion of spirit which hardly seemed 
 to need the intervention of words. Though it is related 
 that he once betook himself to a mountain and spent the 
 night in prayer, it must be concluded that, as in Geth- 
 semane, this was a struggle with himself, an effort to 
 coerce a timid or reluctant will to steadfast conformity 
 to the high purpose to which he had consecrated himself. 
 The effectual, fervent prayer of the righteous man is often 
 a self-exhortation. 
 
 Next in prominence to his piety it is easy to recognize 
 his courage. The career he entered upon was full of 
 peril. The coldness and alienation of his family, the con- 
 tempt of the leaders of society in Church and State, left 
 him nearly isolated, supported among his friends by no 
 large or constant soul. With more than the delicacy of 
 woman, he shrank from the physical and mental suffering 
 to be endured, as the rejected and slain Messiah, on his 
 way through death to the glory of an everlasting throne. 
 His sensitive heart felt keenly the stings of reproach, 
 was soothed by words of high regard, and responded 
 warmly to the simplest acts of deference and courtesy. 
 His biographers, prepossessed with the prophetic idea 
 of an unresisting victim brought to the slaughter, who, 
 when he was reviled, reviled not again, have characterized 
 Jesus as meek. He once so characterized himself. 1 But 
 when we find Moses, who, in hot anger, slew an Egyp- 
 tian oppressor, and who, in uncontrollable fury, brake 
 the tablets of the divine law, and caused the summary 
 slaughter of three thousand of his people, called "very 
 meek, above all the men upon the face of the earth," b 
 we know that the Jews must have used the term in quite 
 other than the modern sense. This prophetic type, unless 
 in this peculiar sense, seems ill to comport with the lofty 
 courage of his convictions, which distinguished Jesus. 
 It rather appears that his constant self-possession, the 
 
 »MatU xi. f 29. bNum. xii., 3. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 355 
 
 superiority to other men he assumed, the authority with 
 which he criticised the oldest traditions and the most 
 fundamental laws ; his dignified bearing before the San- 
 hedrim, and the assertion before Pilate of his coming 
 glory, indicate that he wore his robe of kingship in a 
 lofty and royal way. Whatever he may have been, it 
 must be confessed that no man ever asserted or more 
 consistently maintained a diviner pretension. 
 
 No view of the character of Jesus will be complete, that 
 does not exhibit what may be called the thoroughness of 
 his ethical methods. All qualifications of a moral princi- 
 ple, all restrictions of its application, all abatements of its 
 integrity, seemed wicked and impious to his clear-sighted 
 and loyal soul. His methods with all evils and all falsi- 
 ties were summary. He could see no soul of good in 
 things evil. Reform it altogether and at once, was his 
 comprehensive requirement. What he meant by faith — 
 that faith, which could remove mountains, and to the 
 force of which nothing should be impossible — was this 
 spiritual integrity, this absolute confidence in and alliance 
 with that supreme righteousness, which was the order and 
 method of God, and the law of all vital progress, rather 
 than any intellectual belief in himself, or in any abstract 
 proposition. His strong will, his wholeness and clearness 
 of moral conviction, and his regard of nature as something 
 that was, or at least might be, completely subservient to 
 the beneficent will of God, were the secret of what he did, 
 that seemed to his contemporaries, perhaps to himself, to 
 be miraculous. The consciousness of his own power to 
 invoke the supreme source of all power was the first sug- 
 gestion of his Messiahship. He believed he knew that 
 a reign of righteousness was in the plan and promise of 
 God. What the popular faith, misinterpreting the oracles 
 of divine prophecy, had accepted as the glory of Israel, 
 he — admitted as a son to the confidence of Jehovah — 
 had come to understand as the kingdom of heaven. He 
 had never once estimated the grand aggregate of happi- 
 ness involved in its realization, nor distributed its satis- 
 factions to the capacities of the great mob of sentient 
 creatures. It was not to be a reign of happiness for the 
 subjects, but of righteousness and justice, and of glory 
 for the sovereign. What if its enormous compensations 
 
35^ OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 should inure only to a handful of elect souls ! What if 
 its stupendous results could be justified only in the in- 
 scrutable satisfactions of God himself ! It is no more the 
 thirst of virtue, that it shall find in heaven appreciation 
 and reward, than it is the lust of evil to fly deliriously into 
 the fascinating flames of hell and be consumed. 
 
 All great souls have looked upon the miseries, the 
 sins, the evils of the world, as the result of some great 
 mistake and mishap, some falling out of the perfect order 
 of paradise. Nothing can balance the awful catastrophes 
 which theology places at the end of human history on this 
 planet, but some wilful disobedience and rebellion of a 
 creature of angelic intelligence and unalloyed bliss at the 
 beginning of that history. What wonder that these great 
 souls have confidence that, by a word, they can summon 
 back these angelic intelligences to their primitive alle- 
 giance, and disenchant them from the spells in which 
 Satan has bound them ! 
 
 Either Jesus learned his radicalism from John the Bap- 
 tist, whose axe was at the root of every tree to cut down 
 and cast into the fire every corrupt and false growth, or 
 else this uncompromising spirit of the ascetic iconoclast 
 was the secret of the attraction he exercised upon the 
 enthusiastic soul of his convert, who so far surpassed him. 
 It requires the judicious aptitude of Paul — that ability to 
 see truth from other points of view, and good in worldly 
 and even evil men — to make Christianity a fit instru- 
 mentality of civilization, and give its heavenward expand- 
 ing branches a strong and lusty root in the soil of the 
 world enriched by decaying faiths. But alongside of the 
 politic and accommodating Pauls, there have always been 
 the imitators of Jesus cutting with sharp repentance and 
 reform the tangled knots of evil, which the former have 
 had the patience to untie. 
 
 Tradition has given us the character of Jesus adorned 
 with the lustre of personal virtues, due in him, as in most 
 good men, to a happy endowment of nature. The Jews 
 repudiated his lordship and crucified him, but they have 
 not maligned him. There is no imputation, even among 
 the enemies of his faith, that he was unjust, cruel, sensual, 
 or envious. In him culminated that type of character 
 — oftener found among women — strong in purity and 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 357 
 
 integrity ; that loves with passionless affection what is 
 brave and heroic, and is moved with a motherly pity for a 
 good man environed with peril or involved in excessive 
 toil or care. He easily and by instinctive impulse con- 
 formed to the severe rules of self-control he laid down 
 for others, so that his words, his manners, his very 
 presence, carried with them ministrations of chastened 
 thoughts to the profligate, and purposes of repentance to 
 the sinful. 
 
 In the true spirit of a practical reformer, Jesus had 
 set himself most strenuously to combat the corrupting 
 sensual tendencies of the Greek and Semitic races, with 
 whose vices he was conversant. With no premonitions, 
 that, after his time, the centre of civilization would move 
 westward; and that among chaster races the prevalent 
 form of sensuality — the active agent in deteriorating the 
 quality of the human race — would be alcoholic drunken- 
 ness, Jesus left no precepts against intemperance. His 
 own habits were social, if not convivial. He used wine 
 as a pledge of fidelity, and a symbol of the blood he was 
 himself to shed in passing from the subordination of a 
 despised servant to the glories of a heavenly kingdom. 
 Contrasting him with the ascetic John, his countrymen 
 had called him a glutton and a wine-bibber, and it did not 
 stir his sensitive spirit to resent the imputation ; for, he 
 said, wisdom is justified of her children. 
 
 It is certain that the sober second thought of, what 
 may be called the Christian sentiment of the world, has 
 opposed to the radical ideas of Jesus serious qualifications 
 and limitations. Out of the attraction of sex, which man 
 has brought up from the inferior orders of creation, which 
 lie behind him, have undoubtedly sprung all the domestic 
 affections, as well as those sentiments of kinship, which 
 dignify his nature and assert its superiority. That one- 
 ness of flesh, which the association of man with woman, 
 resulting under the ordinance of nature in offspring be- 
 comes, Jesus perceived with a philosophic insight. But, 
 while declaring a law for ordinary humanity he as plainly 
 declared, that it was not a rule for himself, nor for the 
 order of ideally perfect men, to which he belonged, and 
 which it was his effort to multiply in the world. In 
 the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in 
 
358 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 marriage." They who can undergo the ancient test prof- 
 fered to the most aspiring spirits will become celibates 
 for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. b By one of those 
 possibilities of God, the married may enter the kingdom 
 of heaven, but not its highest rank. The first impulse 
 of the genuine disciple is to forsake his family. What 
 is my mother, he asked, or what are my brothers to me ? 
 These disciples that do the will of God are my brothers, 
 my sisters, and my mother. The ties of sympathy in 
 a common enterprise and in a common faith have quite 
 outgrown the ties of natural affection, in him abnormally 
 weak. In one of his parables, he classes the cares of 
 avarice and the preoccupation of business along with the 
 strength of marital fondness, as hindrances to the grace 
 of the gospel, — " I have married a wife, and therefore T 
 cannot comc." d It was not only houses and lands, that 
 were impediments in the way to the kingdom of heaven, 
 and for the sacrifice of whiclf a man was to be rewarded 
 a hundred-fold, but father and mother, wife and children. 6 
 He once told the multitude following him : If any man 
 come to me, and hate not his father and mother, and wife 
 and children, and brothers and sisters, and his own life 
 also, he cannot be my disciple. f 
 
 Looking back over those spasmodic and abortive efforts,, 
 which individuals and masses of men have from time to 
 time made to introduce a better order into the world, and 
 to bring mankind up to some new control of the evil influ- 
 ences that environ them, frequent instances are found of 
 this hostility to marriage, this contempt of the domestic 
 relations, and repressal of the affections, that flow out 
 of them. Too often has the spectacle exhibited itself of 
 men forsaking wives and children for some vision of the 
 kingdom of heaven. Why, under the pressure of strong 
 religious enthusiasm, does it so often become apparent, 
 that there is some incompatibility of spirit between a 
 man and the woman, who has given him her affection, 
 and staked upon his trusted integrity the hope and fortune 
 of her life ? It is not, as it evidently was in Jesus, a vision 
 of a heaven of purity, that lures such a man away from his 
 fidelity and his duty, but some abnormal access of that 
 
 n Luke xx., 35. bMatt. xix., u, 12. c.Matt. xii., 4S, 50. 
 
 xiv., 20. e Matt, xix., 29. ' Luke xiv., 26. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 359 
 
 passion, which in man's nature is stored too near his 
 devout instincts not to share disastrously in their ex- 
 plosions. 
 
 We look in vain through the New Testament literature 
 for the high estimate of woman, and the chaste idea of 
 marriage, which finds its expression in modern poetry, 
 and in the thought and speech of well-bred men. To 
 Paul, marriage seemed a sanctioned compromise with a 
 natural instinct too powerful to be controlled. 21 There is 
 traceable in the disclosures of Jesus a conception only less 
 gross, in that it is less distinct. Shrinking from marriage 
 himself, he delicately hints, that it is a relation incompati- 
 ble with that perfection of character, which the select so- 
 ciety of the heavenly kingdom demands. 1 " Neither he nor 
 Paul had attained that idea of wedlock, in which the ani- 
 mal and instinctive is absorbed in the affectional; in 
 which two persons, preferring each other before all the 
 world, become, by a sympathy running through their 
 whole natures, not only one flesh, but one soul ; so that 
 what was earthly in its origin becomes spiritual in its 
 perfection, — the safeguard of all chastity, the spring of a 
 refined and refining love, flowing out to children and to 
 friends, to the race of men, and to the divine ideals of 
 the imagination. 
 
 Neither the Greek, the Jewish, nor the Christian culture 
 brought these influences into civilized society. They had 
 their origin in the Teutonic courtesy and honor, which 
 among the barbarous German tribes placed woman by the 
 side of man, equal in his confidence and respect, — that 
 Teutonic courtesy, of which mediaeval chivalry and 
 knighthood became the later expressions, and which, 
 especially among the English and German races, gives 
 to woman to-day that lofty homage and respect, under 
 the restraint of which, the rudest men grow ashamed of 
 their selfishness and brutality. 
 
 Passing from these sins, that spring from an ill-regulated 
 sense, let us consider those, that result from a feeble con- 
 trol of the reason and conscience over the thought and 
 word. Anger is the self-assertion of the soul against as- 
 saults by injurious actions or words ; and the precept of 
 Paul: "Be ye angry, and sin not ; let not the sun go down 
 
 a I. Cor. vii. bMatt. xix., io-ia. 
 
360 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 on your ivratJi" wisely recognizes the natural function of 
 anger, as well as the necessity for checking its exaggera- 
 tions." While anger, commensurate to the injury that it 
 repels, adds tenfold to the energy of a man, and some- 
 times raises him into the aspect of sublimity, excessive 
 anger, too long cherished, too cruelly expressed, degrades 
 a man's dignity before all that witness it, and leaves him, 
 in his swift remorse, weak, pitiful, and open to assaults 
 from without, and self-reproaches from within, under the 
 combined influence of which he is almost sure to inflict 
 some permanent injury and shame upon himself. 
 
 Nothing can be more excellent or complete than the 
 ethical rules inculcated by Jesus to restrain this danger- 
 ous impulse of the soul. Blessed are the meek, blessed 
 are the reviled. Anger without cause is an offence 
 kindred to murder. Be reconciled with your brother, 
 agree with your adversary, before performing any relig- 
 ious worship. Resent not injury, and give your cheek to 
 the smiter. Bless them that curse you, that ye may be 
 the children of the Highest, who does good to the unkind 
 and the unthankful. By these lofty principles, by which 
 he invited men to rule their spirits, it cannot be invidious 
 to judge his own.' 
 
 How can his antipathy to the scribes and Pharisees, 
 and the severe invectives he hurled against them, be made 
 consistent with this high standard ? A careful study of 
 the Jewish history and literature forces upon us the con- 
 viction, that there had been a steady intellectual and 
 moral progress of the people from their savage, sensual, 
 and idolatrous condition when rescued from Egyptian 
 slavery by Moses, down to the time of Jesus. Virtuous, 
 devout, and clear-sighted patriots and prophets had ap- 
 peared among them from time to time, who saw that the 
 uniform plan of nature indicated the unity of the deity, 
 and that the deity was on the side of rectitude and virtue; 
 but the mass of the people were ignorant, sensual, avari- 
 cious, and cruel. Their gods were altogether like them- 
 selves, and the decent rites, the severe virtue, the ab- 
 sence of images, the repression of appetite, which charac- 
 terized the cultuSy which the prophets extolled, seemed 
 empty and gloomy, when contrasted with the joyous 
 
 aEph. iv., 26. bMatt. v., 5, 11. 22, 24, 39, 44, 45. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 361 
 
 offerings, the lascivious dances, the gilded and decorated 
 images, by which their heathen neighbors appealed to 
 their grosser sense. It was told in the very glory of 
 one of the Israelitish kings, when, by reason of rest from 
 the oppression of powerful enemies, the nation was free 
 to follow the popular tendency in religion, that there were 
 only seven thousand worshippers of Jehovah in the whole 
 land. a Down through the prophetic dispensation, it is 
 evident that there is a divided sentiment — that the very 
 monotheistic idea is antagonized by a belief, sometimes 
 dominant even with the king and government, in the gods 
 of the nation ; and when, under such sovereigns as Josiah 
 and Hezekiah, the monotheistic faith gets the upper hand, 
 it is evidently only the court religion, the mass of the 
 people remaining idolaters. 
 
 The New Testament narratives introduce us to an 
 entirely different condition of society. Whether from 
 the influence of the prophetic literature, or the carefully 
 preserved and taught written law, that had taken the 
 place of the ancient traditions ; whether from the disci- 
 pline of its defeats, enslavement, and exile, or from some 
 access of new ideas from Persia, Egypt, or Greece, the 
 Jews, after their long training, after their stiff-neckedness, 
 — of which their great teachers complained, — had at 
 last become fairly converted to their own religion. The 
 cardinal evils of mankind still existed. There was lux- 
 ury and licentiousness, and the degraded classes that 
 ministered to them. There was the pride and oppres- 
 sion of the rich and powerful, and the envy and servility 
 of the poor. Men were scourged, as they are to-day, 
 by the natural punishments that follow hard upon their 
 vices ; and they were awed by the sad vicissitudes, that 
 lie in the path of the most prosperous lives, into at least 
 a slavish conformity to the decencies and plausible moral- 
 ities of conduct. But the mass of the people lived quiet 
 and orderly lives, true to their domestic obligations, 
 exercising charity and kindliness toward each other, 
 rendering obedience to the laws, and cherishing piety 
 t ward (j<h\. There are brief but graphic pictures of the 
 common life of common men introduced among the 
 questionable chronicles of the patriarchs of the race, 
 
 • I. Kings xix., 18. 
 
362 OPINION'S AXD CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the founders of the nation, and among the exploits and 
 conquests of its heroes and kings. We have similar pict- 
 ures of the Palestine of the Christian era ; and the moral 
 and intellectual contrast, to the great advantage of the 
 later period, is most striking. 
 
 At the head of this movement, and fairly entitled to 
 the honor of this renovation, stood the scribes and Phari- 
 sees. Doubtless there were among them formalists, 
 pretenders, and hypocrites, as there have been in all ages, 
 among the classes arrogating to themselves special sanc- 
 tity and consideration as the ministers of religion and 
 the exemplars of piety. But, as a class, they were sin- 
 cere, upright, and virtuous, and shaped their lives into 
 some reasonable conformity to the rules of the morality 
 which they inculcated. 
 
 The old Jewish scriptures had stories, doubtless sadly 
 true, of the debauchery of the priestly order, that minis- 
 tered at the altar, a and of lying prophets that sold their 
 oracles for gain or kingly favor. b But in all the traditions 
 of the career of Jesus, and of the acts of his apostles, no 
 story is told, no hint even given, that the scribes and 
 Pharisees, the accredited ministers of religion in the time 
 of Jesus, were either extortionate, oppressive, luxurious, 
 licentious, bigoted, or persecuting. On the other hand, 
 they are always introduced in such relations, and with such 
 estimation, as to command respect and confidence. Thus 
 the scribes and Pharisees are said to have followed John 
 the Baptist to the wilderness, and to have asked baptism 
 of him. c Before Jesus was personally known in Jerusa- 
 lem, they sent messengers to him to learn of his doctrine 
 and his works of healing. d As a general thing, they ac- 
 corded to him the title of Rabbi, listened to him with 
 attention and respect, and assented with hearty faith to 
 many of his expositions of the fundamental matters of the 
 law. 6 
 
 It was a chief Pharisee that invited Jesus on two differ- 
 ent occasions to dine with him, and whose hospitality he 
 accepted, as he would not that of a hypocrite and extor- 
 tioner/ John's narrative declares that Nicodemus, a chief 
 among the Pharisees, went to Jesus by night, and gave in 
 
 n. ii., 12. I'll. Chron. xviii., 5. c Matt, iii., 7. d Matt, xv., 1. 
 >• Mark. xii. , 32 ; Luke xx., 21. f Luke xiv., 1 ; vii., 36. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 363 
 
 his adhesion to some of the most subtle and mystic doc- 
 trines of the new faith." The statement is doubtless 
 a part of the general fiction of the Fourth Gospel ; but it 
 would hardly have been made a part of the plot, if there 
 were not instances well known of the friendly attitude of 
 enlightened Pharisees toward the scheme of doctrine, 
 which Jesus taught. Joseph of Arimathea, who braved 
 the terrorism following the crucifixion, that had scattered 
 even the twelve, to give honorable burial to the body of 
 Jesus, was a Pharisee. 13 
 
 But the most striking vindication of the good repute 
 of the Pharisees is found in one of their distinguished 
 fraternity, Paul, who became the founder of historic Chris- 
 tianity. The fact that Paul was not only a converted 
 Pharisee, but that, after his mind had been enlightened, 
 as he believed, by the divine spirit, he gloried in his Phar- 
 isaic faith, to which he still clung, as in no wise incom- 
 patible with his fidelity to Jesus, is one of the anomalies 
 of the New Testament tradition. He declares in one of 
 his epistles to a church — doubtless largely made up of 
 Jews, but in a heathen city — that he was a Pharisee of 
 the strictest sect. Evidently no ill repute of the Phari- 
 sees had reached that Greek city in the time of Paul. 
 They stood in his mind, and in the mind of his corre- 
 spondents, in the high regard, in which the world holds 
 now the Stoic philosophers and the primitive Christians. 
 If we would know what basis there was in Jerusalem it- 
 self for the imputations cast so indiscriminately against 
 this reputable sect, we may learn how slight it was from 
 the fact, that Paul, when on the point of being torn to 
 pieces by a mob in that city for teaching, as it was be- 
 lieved, doctrines incompatible with the laws of Moses, had 
 a sudden access of popularity by crying out, that he was 
 a Pharisee* Only the names of well-reputed men are 
 elements of strength in a popular commotion. 
 
 Last of all is the testimony of Josephus, certainly com- 
 petent to corroborate this testimony of Paul's, who says 
 of the Pharisees : — 
 
 They live meanly, and despise delicacies in diet; and they follow the con- 
 duct of reason, and what that prescribes to them as good for them they do, 
 
 " John iii., 1, 2. b Luke xxiii., 50, 51. e Phil, iii., 5 ; Acts xxvi., 5. 
 
 d Acts xxiii., 6. 
 
364 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 and they think they ought earnestly to strive to observe reason's dictates for 
 practice. They believe that souls have an immortal vigor in them, and that 
 under the earth there will be rewards and punishments, according as they 
 have lived virtuously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to be de- 
 tained in an everlasting prison, but the former shall have power to revive 
 and live again. On account of which doctrines, they are able greatly to per- 
 suade the body of the people; and whatever they do about divine worship, 
 prayers, and sacrifices, they perform them according to their direction, inso- 
 much that the cities give great attestation to them, on account of their en- 
 tire virtuous conduct, both in the actions of their lives and in their dis- 
 courses also. 
 
 This testimony of Josephus to the good character and 
 repute of the Pharisees is the more weighty, in that it has 
 been concluded that he did not himself belong to the sect, 
 but favored the doctrines and practices of the Essenes ; 
 and because he does not speak of the Pharisees in terms 
 of unmixed eulogy. For elsewhere he speaks of their 
 love of intrigue and of power, — traits of character, which 
 ecclesiastical bodies have exhibited in every age, — and 
 says that during the reign of Alexandra, who held the sov- 
 ereignty of Palestine nine years, under the Roman pro- 
 tectorate, the Pharisees were the real rulers, through the 
 influence they obtained over her. But as this influence 
 was obtained by their reputation for wisdom and virtue, 
 and was exercised in punishing those who had been guilty 
 of massacres and oppression under a former reign, this, 
 too, is rather a testimony in favor of the sect. 
 
 Toward this body of men, evidently the e'lite of their 
 nation, the attitude of Jesus was one of hostility and sus- 
 picion from the first. He, who had said so wisely : Judge 
 not, that ye be not judged ; for with what judgment you 
 judge, you shall be judged," had, when we are first intro- 
 duced to him, judged them with a severity, that knew 
 neither mercy nor moderation. When the wedding feast 
 of his kingdom of heaven was prepared, he recognized the 
 propriety of sending his invitation to the bidden guests. b 
 But the Pharisees were not bidden. There cannot be 
 found in the traditions of the gospel any overtures made 
 to the most religious men of the time to accept the new 
 religion. 
 
 One of the purposes of the writer of the Fourth Gospel 
 may have been to rescue Jesus from the imputation of 
 a too uncharitable and harsh attitude toward the religious 
 
 »Matt. vii., i, 2. bMatt. xxii., 3. c Matt. iii. , 7 ; v., 20; viii., 12. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 365 
 
 classes of his time, which the synoptic narratives seem to 
 have cast upon him. With some such view, that writer 
 brings Jesus prematurely and frequently to Jerusalem, 
 and makes his chief activity consist in doctrinal and casu- 
 istic discussions, publicly conducted in the temple with 
 representatives of the scribes and Pharisees, of which dis- 
 cussions the older tradition had taken no cognizance what- 
 ever. It may have been an instance of the great sagacity 
 of Jesus, that he concluded in advance, that an order of 
 men proud of their prestige of sanctity, complacent in 
 their intelligence of the will of God, were not likely to 
 submit to be taught by a Galilean carpenter how to at- 
 tain the divine favor and the everlasting life. But as Gar- 
 rison, when inspired with a new sense of the wrongs of 
 the slave, went first to the ministers of a religion that 
 taught the equal brotherhood of men ; as Columbus, pos- 
 sessed with the presentiment that India could be reached 
 by sailing across the Western ocean, betook himself first 
 to geographers and adventurous navigators ; so it would 
 seem that the first mission of a new religion should have 
 been to the reputable teachers and exponents of the old. 
 But this, Jesus evidently did not intend. As has been 
 already said, he shared the prejudice of John the Baptist, 
 who declared that the Pharisees and Sadducees were out- 
 side of the pale of mercy of his gospel, and had nothing 
 to expect but the wrathful fire, which should consume 
 every evil tree. a In a kindred discrimination, Jesus said 
 in his first discourse that the grade of integrity, to which 
 the scribes and Pharisees had attained, was not such as 
 would in any event prove a passport to his kingdom of 
 heaven. '' Later in his public ministry, when certain 
 scribes and Pharisees approached him with the deferen- 
 tial title of Rabbi, and would see one of his miracles, he 
 turned upon them with the rebuke, that they represented 
 to him the wicked and adulterous people of that time. 
 The times are evil, the plausible public virtue is hypocrit- 
 ical, the seeming pure are full of adulterous desires and 
 practices, and you, who lead the moral sentiment of the 
 age, are no better than the multitudes you lead. But 
 why is the generation evil and adulterous? Jesus gives 
 himself the reason. When Jonah went through Nineveh, 
 
 a Matt, iii., 9, 10. b Matt, v., 20. 
 
366 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 warning it of its destruction, the inhabitants believed and 
 repented : when he came, warning the world of its doom, 
 it neither believed nor repented. He believed some 
 evil spirit had taken possession of his countrymen. It 
 seemed to have been cast out, doubtless, when so many 
 flocked to listen to John's preaching repentance, and to be 
 baptized, and when great multitudes followed himself out 
 of all the Galilean cities, — as he hoped first, to listen to 
 his words, but, as he believed afterward, only to be fed by 
 his supplies. a But the wicked spirit was only temporarily 
 expelled. He had gone through dry places seeking rest, 
 and had returned with seven worse devils to possess the 
 victim, whose last state is worse than his first. So shall 
 it be with this wicked generation. b 
 
 When the Pharisees came again with the Sadducees, 
 asking for a sign, he rallied them with the well-known 
 red sunset, as a sign of a bright to-morrow, and of a 
 ruddy dawn as a sure herald of a dull day ; and called 
 them hypocrites, because they knew these signs, but 
 could not prognosticate the tokens of an impending judg- 
 ment. The very presence of these sects disturbed his 
 spirit ; and it was slowly, and after an effort, that he could 
 recover its serenity. After they had left him, he told his 
 disciples to beware of their insidious and noxious teach- 
 ings and influence. 11 He recognized the elders, chief 
 priests, and scribes as his enemies. He knew his people 
 would never believe in his Messiahship, while under their 
 influence ; and he warned his disciples that it was they 
 who would seek and accomplish his death. 
 
 When he came to Jerusalem, he pursued toward the 
 Pharisees the same uncompromising course. He con- 
 fronted them in the temple, and turned upon them per- 
 sonally their criticisms of his questionable expositions of 
 the law. He told them that the openly vicious, who 
 broke away from the divine commands with headlong 
 passion, but afterward repented, were more acceptable to 
 God than those who professed virtue and were not holy; 
 that publicans and harlots went into the kingdom before 
 them; and that their rejection of him — the sent Son of 
 God — would be followed by their own rejection and de- 
 
 "Matt. xii., j8, 39. ! ' Matt, xii., 43-45. c Matt, xvi., 1-3. 
 d Matt, xvi., 4-6. e Matt. xvi., 21. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 367 
 
 struction." He told them they were the bidden guests to 
 the marriage feast, but that not one of them should taste 
 of it, and that wayfarers from the hedges would be pre- 
 ferred to them. b Finally, in Jerusalem, apparently 
 within the precincts of the temple itself, he launches 
 against them in the hearing of his disciples the terrible 
 invective which is preserved for us in the twenty-third 
 chapter of Matthew. The retort of the scribes and Phar- 
 isees was the crucifixion. 
 
 The Christian world accepts this chapter as a correct 
 delineation of those classes in Judea, which in the first 
 century gave character to the Jewish people, and has jus- 
 tified itself by the high authority of Jesus for nearly 
 twenty centuries of hatred and persecution of the living 
 representatives of that people. The history of the 
 wrongs and sufferings of the Jewish race has been the 
 standing reproach of Christendom. They, who name 
 Jesus with reverence and even worship him as Deity 
 seem to have forgotten that he ever said : " Love your 
 enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that 
 curse you, and pray for them that persecute you." But 
 they have not forgotten the different spirit which breathes 
 through this pitiless chapter, contrasted with which, their 
 bitterest hatred seems brotherly forbearance. 
 
 It was enough for the disciples of Pythagoras, to give 
 unquestionable authority to any assertion, to say, Ipse 
 dixit. A more complete deference to the name of Jesus 
 will foreclose the candor of most minds, and except the 
 scribes and Pharisees from the scope and regard of his 
 own primary canon of personal judgments : He who zvould 
 not be himself judged must not judge. 
 
 When Jesus said of the Pharisees that they shut up 
 against men , the doors of the kingdom of heaven, the 
 reproach is just of them and of their descendants, if it be 
 thereby meant, that they did not accept, and have not 
 accepted, his claim to be the prophetic Messiah of their 
 race. A spirit of that liberal charity that believeth all 
 things, in the presence of the fact that these rejectors of 
 the Christ had been able to maintain a standard of moral- 
 ity and piety quite up to the level of the Christian stand- 
 ard, would be ashamed to impute this rejection to any- 
 
 & Matt, xxi., 23-32. *> Luke xiv., 17, 24. c Matt, xxiii., 13. 
 
368 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 thing but the stress of conscience and reason. When he 
 said that the Pharisees made long prayers to cover the 
 extortions they practised upon widows," we are surprised, 
 that neither the evangelical narratives, nor any other 
 contemporary history has given us any details of these 
 extortions. We stand appalled, as in the case of the an- 
 cient Canaanites, because history has told of their terrible 
 punishment, but strangely omitted to gratify our sense of 
 justice by telling of their sin. We wonder, too, how, if 
 such was, among the believers of the first century, the rep- 
 utation of this sect, so enthusiastic a disciple of Jesus as 
 Paul should have boasted that he was a Pharisee. When 
 Jesus said that the proselytes which the Pharisees were 
 so eager to make were, like themselves, children of hell ; b 
 that, in paying small tithes, they neglected justice, mercy, 
 and faith ; c that they were whited sepulchres, inwardly full 
 of all uncleanness ; that they were guilty of the blood of 
 the very prophets they quoted and reverenced ; and that 
 they were a brood of vipers, who could not escape the 
 damnation of hell, — the frightful vehemence of his re- 
 proaches do infinitely less honor to the anger that cannot 
 suppress them, than to the silent patience that endured 
 them. " Ye are the children of them which killed the 
 prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers* 
 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers ! how can ye escape 
 the damnation of hell?" If this was the first word of 
 the new dispensation to the representatives of the old, 
 it was not the latest nor the best. Let us turn from this 
 spirit that curses, to that which in the magnanimity of its 
 fraternal affection and pity tenderly asks to be accursed. 
 " For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ 
 for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh ; who 
 are Israelites ; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the 
 glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and 
 the service of God." u Let the Christian Church itself 
 declare, which of these contrasted spirits is the most 
 divine. 
 
 A casual reading of the first two Gospels discloses some 
 effect upon the mind of Jesus simultaneous with the 
 avowal of his purpose to go to Jerusalem in the ostensible 
 
 a Matt, xxiii., 14. b Matt, xxiii., 15. Matt, xxiii., 23. 
 '1 Matt, xxiii., 31-33. e Rom. ix., 3, 4. 
 

 PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 369 
 
 character of the Messiah. The observed change is in the 
 general character of his doctrines, and in his own tem- 
 per and spirit. Doctrinally, his teaching becomes less 
 distinctly ethical. With the exception of the lesson of 
 humility taught by the presence of the little child, there 
 is uttered after this crisis in his career scarcely a precept 
 that is purely moral. Carefully considered, even that 
 precept seems to be one of docility and discipleship. 
 " Whosoever," he said, " shall humble himself as this 
 little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of 
 heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child 
 in my name, receiveth me ; but whoso shall offend one 
 of these little ones which believe in me, it were better 
 for him if he were drowned in the sea." a It is not the 
 natural simplicity of childhood that Jesus is commend- 
 ing, but the disciple, who, with the docility of childhood, 
 has believed in him. Faith has taken, in his mind, the 
 place of righteousness. 
 
 There had been in the Sermon on the Mount an expo- 
 sition of the great judgment of mankind; and, although 
 Jesus was himself to be the judge, it was those who had 
 done the will of God who were to be approved and re- 
 warded. 6 Inasmuch, however, as in the same discourse 
 God is characterized as the benign giver of all good 
 things, as commending and blessing the upright and the 
 pure, and as perfect and unchangeable in his forgiving 
 love, the discrimination among the souls of men must 
 be considered a discrimination of character. Every 
 tree that brings not forth good fruit is hewn down and 
 cast into the fire. d Every life not fruitful in good deeds 
 is noxious or useless, and is to be cancelled from the sum 
 of life. This distinction between the intrinsically good 
 and the intrinsically evil harmonized with the funda- 
 mental ideas of older religions. 
 
 Just before his arrest, Jesus gave a fuller and more vivid 
 representation of the general judgment. "When the 
 Son of Man," he said, "shall come in his glory, and all 
 the holy angels with him, he shall sit upon the throne of 
 his glory; and before him shall be gathered all nations ; 
 and he shall separate them as the shepherd divideth his; 
 
 1 Matt, xviii. , 4-6. h Matt, vii., 11. 
 
 cMatt. v., 8, 45; vi., 32, 33. <1 Matt, vii., 19. 
 
370 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 sheep from the goats." a The sheep, who are accounted 
 righteous, and received into everlasting life, are those who 
 have rendered services of kindness to the Judge, that is, 
 as it is explained, to his disciples. The goats, who are 
 esteemed wicked, and sent away into an everlasting pun- 
 ishment, are those who have omitted to do services of 
 kindness to the Judge, that is, to the least of his disciples. h 
 Applying to these declarations of Jesus the conven- 
 tional methods of interpretation, — recasting them in the 
 larger mould of modern humanitarian sentiment, — we may 
 be able to find that the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned, 
 relieved or neglected by the elect and the non-elect, repre- 
 sent the suffering classes of the world. Thus explained, 
 the discrimination is not based on creeds or upon con- 
 formity to arbitrary conditions of salvation, but is between 
 men who do acts of charity spontaneously, and those who 
 take no heed of the great aggregate of suffering they 
 never think of relieving. Thus improved and enlarged, the 
 lesson becomes one of the noblest ever taught under the 
 authority of the great teacher. It is Jesus putting him- 
 self in the place of men — feeling that their sickness, im- 
 prisonment, poverty, and suffering are his own — reward- 
 ing those who had relieved, and disowning those who had 
 neglected them. But did he thus interpret himself ? Who 
 are "these my brethren," and "the least of these," whose 
 benefits and injuries are remembered in the final separa- 
 tion of the nations of mankind ? It is not difficult to 
 learn the sense in which characteristic expressions were 
 used by Jesus. It is nowhere found in the Synoptic Gos- 
 pels that he applied the term my brethren to ordinary men. 
 On the contrary, he expressly disclaimed the relationship 
 toward his own natural kindred. " They are my breth- 
 ren" he said, "who hear the word of God, and do it." c 
 " Call no man," he enjoined, "your father upon the earth ; 
 for one is your Father, which is in heaven." d The injunc- 
 tion applies by stronger reasons to subordinate relation- 
 ships. The whole stress of the later exhortations of 
 Jesus bears upon discipleship. All his precepts, the 
 moral of all his parables, seem designed to incite accept- 
 ance of his Messianic mission, and constancy and fidelity 
 of personal allegiance. The judgment of the great sepa- 
 
 » Matt, xxv., 31, 32. •> Matt, xxv., 34-46. c Luke viii., 21. dMatt. xxiii., 9. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 371 
 
 ration reaffirms what he had said before. It was not 
 whosoever shall give — be it only a cup of water — to the 
 thirsty, but " whosoever shall give a cup of water to you, 
 because ye belong to Christ, shall not lose his reward." a 
 Not he that shall injure a man, but he that "shall offend 
 one of these little ones which believe in me" had better be 
 cast into the sea with a millstone about his neck. b " All 
 the tribes of the earth," foreboding their impending 
 doom, "would mourn, when they should see the Son of 
 Man coming in the clouds of heaven. " c Only "the little 
 flock " to whom it was their " Father's good pleasure to 
 give the kingdom" were to be without fear at its coming. d 
 It seems scarcely capable of question that those char- 
 acteristic designations of Jesus, "my disciples," "my 
 brethren" "the little flock" "these little ones" "the least 
 of these," are terms of restricted application to those who 
 believed in him. 
 
 This tender regard for those who had given in their 
 adhesion to him is in striking contrast to his indifference 
 toward those who failed to recognize him and who 
 opposed him, — an indifference that strengthened in his 
 last days into alienation and reprobation. The reader 
 must pardon the repeated marshalling of the same texts 
 to illustrate the different traits of the character of Jesus. 
 It is made necessary by the meagre memoranda tradition 
 has given us of his words, and by the requirements of 
 presentation in detail of his opinions and sentiments. 
 Sending out his twelve disciples to do cures and proclaim 
 the kingdom of heaven, he said : " Behold, I send you 
 forth as sheep in the midst of wolves." "Beware," he 
 warned them, "of men." They will deliver you up unto 
 councils to be scourged in their synagogues ; but it shall 
 be a testimony against your countrymen and the Gen- 
 tiles. 6 Men, common men, what in modern phrase are 
 called the masses, were the enemies, whose hostility he 
 dreaded. The Son of Man, he once said, " is delivered into 
 the hands of men; and they shall kill him." f The people 
 were not the intelligent and virtuous constituency whom 
 it is the fashion of modern courtesy to flatter. They were 
 the wolves who would ravage his tender fold, and into 
 whose merciless claws he himself would fall at last. 
 
 "Mark ix., 4:. bMatt. xviii., 6. cMatt. xxiv., 30. <1 Luke xii., 33. 
 •Matt, x., 1, 16-25. fMarkix.,31. 
 
372 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESl\- 
 
 It has been seen that, when Jesus was pressed by the 
 multitudes, he avoided them and went up to a mountain ; 
 and that, sitting down there, his disciples came to him 
 and he taught them. It was his disciples that he pro- 
 nounced blessed and the heirs of the kingdom." It was 
 his little flock the hairs of whose heads were numbered. 1 " 
 It was his elect who could ask whatsoever they would of 
 his heavenly Father, and it would be given to them. c 
 But, when the multitudes came, he perplexed them with 
 parables that even his familiar friends could not under- 
 stand. And so they asked him why he did so, and he 
 frankly gave this answer : It is lawful for you to know 
 the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven ; it is not lawful 
 for them. I speak unto them in parables, because, with 
 eyes, they do not see, and with ears they do not hear; lest 
 they should see and hear, and so be converted and healed. d 
 In describing the calamities that should precede his 
 coming in his kingdom, he told his disciples that, for 
 his elect's sake — involved in the suffering — those evil 
 days should be shortened. 6 No consideration for the 
 mass of mankind was at all relevant. They were of no 
 account. Only the elect stand in the estimation of God. 
 
 Toward the people of the heathen nations, his attitude 
 was still more unsympathetic. I am sent to the lost 
 sheep of the house of Israel. It is not proper to take 
 the children's bread and cast it to dogs. f The heathen 
 represented those outside of the pale of his sympathy and 
 thought. For, he said, the offending disciple was to be 
 first privately admonished of his fault, then reproved by 
 two or three brethren, then solemnly warned by the whole 
 assembly of believers. But, if he remained obstinate in 
 his wickedness, he was to be like a heathen man and 
 a publican, which was for him a condition representative 
 of utter excommunication and separation/ Nothing could 
 so completely indicate how the people of the world lay out 
 of the scope of his regard, as what he once said to his dis- 
 ciples, — if ye love them, that love you, the heathen — or, as 
 Luke tells it, using what to him was a synonym, sinners — 
 also love those that love them. 1 ' The heathen sinners do 
 good to those that do good to them. It is a small thing 
 
 a Matt, v., 2, 3. b Matt, x., 30. c Matt, xxi., 22. d Matt, xiii., 10-16 
 eMatt. xxiv., 22. f Matt xv., 24, 26. B Matt, xviii., 15-18. h Luke vi., 32, 33. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 373 
 
 to equal the morality of the heathen : yours must surpass 
 that of scribes and Pharisees. All the ordinary employ- 
 ments of worldly men were to Jesus impious. As it was 
 in the days of Noah, they ate, they drank, they married 
 wives, until the flood came and destroyed them all ; as it 
 was in the days of Lot, they ate, they drank, they bought, 
 they sold, they planted, they builded, till the rain of fire 
 and brimstone destroyed them, — so, he said, will I come 
 bringing like destruction to worldly men, busied with their 
 worldly avocations." That broad humanitarian spirit which 
 has modified the severity of codes, and given gentleness to 
 manners ; which recognizes in alien faiths, for which men 
 would once have been crucified or burned, the product of 
 a religious sentiment as universal as conscience, — can only 
 be considered the fruitage of Christianity, as Christianity 
 has idealized Christ. . It has presumed to extend the char- 
 ity of Jesus to those to whom he was himself hostile or 
 indifferent. 
 
 In the Acts of the Apostles is found a fragment of 
 Peter's exhortation to the centurion Cornelius, in which 
 he thus speaks of Jesus: "God anointed Jesus of Naza- 
 reth with the Holy Ghost and with power ; who went 
 about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed 
 with the devil : for God was with him." b If this fragment 
 could be taken as the recollection of a personal friend, it 
 would be testimony of the greatest weight. The known 
 literary habits of Paul, the fact that disciples, used to 
 writing, accompanied his missions, who would gladly have 
 made notes of his speeches, gives us much confidence, that 
 the reports are the substance at least of his addresses. 
 What is imputed to Peter and the "unlearned" apostles 
 is more likely to be the dramatic form, in which the nar- 
 rator undertook to set forth arguments, generally known 
 to the receivers of the new faith. But, whether Peter's 
 or the author's, this language fairly represents the view, 
 which the early Church took of the character and work 
 of Jesus. The only miraculous power specified — that 
 good which Jesus, went about to do — was the relieving 
 of men from the infestation of malign spirits. 
 
 In the apostolic writings, of whose genuineness there 
 is a more reasonable assurance, the benevolence of Jesus 
 
 a Luke xvii., 26-30. b Acts x., 38. 
 
374 OPINION'S AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 is affirmed upon still more recondite and questionable 
 reasons. They speak not so much of the friend and 
 master, whose companionship they had enjoyed, or of 
 the Galilean teacher and prophet, whose acts and words 
 are told in the Synoptic Gospels, as of Jesus the Christ, a 
 typical and prophetic personage. Peter in his Epistle, 
 when he wishes to appeal to the example of his Master, 
 gives us no picture of his human life in Galilee or in Je- 
 rusalem, no anecdotes or personal traits, that an affection- 
 ate memory could not suppress, but — reverting to a 
 prophecy of Isaiah — thus describes him: "Who did no 
 sin, neither was guile found in his mouth ; who, when he 
 was reviled, reviled not again ; when he suffered, he 
 threatened not, but committed himself to Him that judgeth 
 righteously." Comparing this language with the ancient 
 prophecy, we find that, as it is inaccurate in substance as 
 well as form as a quotation, it is more manifestly inapt 
 as a personal description. When the scribes and Phari- 
 sees made vile accusations against him, he vigorously 
 retorted and called them hypocrites, blind leaders of the 
 blind, a wicked and adulterous generation ; and, when he 
 was about to suffer at the hands of the priesthood, he 
 pronounced against them a doom that should involve 
 their city and the whole generation. 
 
 But the view which the apostolic writings more fre- 
 quently present of the benevolence of Jesus is a view of 
 a divine being, equal with God, dwelling in the bliss of an 
 immortal life, who so loved the world that he consented 
 to put off this glory and become a man and a servant, and 
 be subject to death, that the world might be saved by 
 believing on him. This is the view invariably presented 
 in Paul's writings, and in those imputed to the other 
 apostles ; and, when they hold up the benevolence of 
 Jesus as an example, it is this grand and divine sacrifice 
 and condescension, rather than acts of human charity and 
 mercy, that his followers are exhorted to imitate. 
 
 A rational, not to say a reverent, criticism must turn 
 alike from such prophetic and providential contemplation 
 of Jesus to his human life as history has disclosed it. 
 We certainly cannot enter into or measure a purely 
 divine personality, nor admit among the beneficences of 
 any human life, however grandly endowed, its condescen- 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 375 
 
 sion in consenting to be born. Whatever Jesus was or 
 is, when he became a man, he took upon him the condi- 
 tions of humanity, and complete amenability to all legiti- 
 mate judgments of human conduct. 
 
 Leaving out of view, as we must, that office in the 
 divine economy, which may have brought Jesus from a 
 pre-existent glory to an exceptionally wretched human 
 lot, what estimate of his benevolence is justly due to what 
 is known of his life ? All the traditions represent him 
 as going through his native province healing cases of 
 chronic disease, mostly those disorders which disturb the 
 normal operations of the mind, and which in his time were 
 considered to be caused by demoniac possession. In a 
 character as nearly faultless as that of Jesus,' the senti- 
 ment of pity is quick and strong. But for what these 
 traditions assert, we should conclude that these curative 
 works were prompted by genuine and natural pity, and 
 gave the doer of them an eminent rank among the great 
 benefactors of the world. Of a person, who was endowed 
 with abnormal capacities to cure madness, blindness, pa- 
 ralysis, and other forms of painful and disabling maladies, 
 by a touch, by a word, by the mere virtue of his presence, 
 the world would require a large activity of service. If it 
 be lawful at all to interrupt the retributions appointed in 
 pain and death for all violations of natural laws, it is hard 
 in a world full of misery and disease to set any limit to 
 the responsibility of a person thus gifted less narrow than 
 the gauge of the aggregate of misery and disease. We 
 should hold one, who by a word could relieve the disorders 
 of mankind, and who failed to speak it, guilty of their 
 perpetuation. It does not either seem just to compare 
 efforts, to lessen the complicated wretchedness of the 
 world, that cost so little, with those long vigils, those 
 costly months and years of help and care, of nourishment 
 and sympathy, which — for the very reason that we cannot 
 by our words or prayers bring instant health to the sick — 
 we cheerfully render to mitigate their sufferings. We 
 cannot give the same value to these local and transient 
 exhibitions of thaumaturgic skill told in the annals of many 
 people, as to organized institutions of charity established 
 by the best governments, and under the most enlightened 
 social arrangements, supported by a regularity of giving, 
 
376 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 or by a munificence of endowment, that makes them as 
 permanent as the diseases they help to relieve. 
 
 Let us look again at the traditions of the career of 
 Jesus, and see what they assert in reference to his gifts 
 of healing. Whatever beneficent works he wrought 
 among his countrymen, he himself avows to have been 
 done somewhat capriciously, and not so much from pity 
 for the suffering, as to produce a certain opinion among 
 spectators favorable to himself. Thus he avowed that he 
 was not sent to cure insane persons who were Phoeni- 
 cians, though he consented to make an exception in be- 
 half of a woman, who accosted him with great courtesy 
 and tact. He declared not only that he would not, but 
 could not, do cures upon persons who had no faith, nor in 
 cities where the public sentiment was decidedly adverse 
 to him, nor in Judea and Jerusalem, where an obdurate 
 scepticism possessed the leading classes in society. 
 
 But Jesus as the loving heart of man has cherished 
 him, the fearless martyr braving the terrors of a' cruel 
 death, the patient sufferer silently bearing the scoffs of 
 wicked men, the pitying man quickly responsive to every 
 form of human suffering, more than all, the sublime 
 prophet proclaiming the glories of an everlasting life, has 
 been a minister of comfort, of consolation, of courage, 
 and of hope, and has become the spiritual benefactor 
 of all devout souls. Less distinct are the traces of his 
 beneficence in the real world of suffering and of sin than 
 in the ideal world of faith and aspiration. 
 
 As we have found the dominant idea of Jesus illus- 
 trating and rendering consistent much that was in itself 
 unintelligible in his ethical system, so will it be found to 
 throw some light upon the exposition of his character. 
 We have seen how gradually and reluctantly he surren- 
 dered himself to the loftiest ambition that ever inspired 
 the human mind. What wonder that, with its advent, 
 came the dawning of a self-consciousness which affected 
 disastrously the symmetry of a soul naturally modest and 
 self-contained. Human infirmity, expanding under the 
 influence of a great enthusiasm to divine capacities, be- 
 trays its mortal birth in hours of despair, oftener perhaps 
 in hours of exultation over success. When a man begins 
 to ask, What do men think of me ? his spiritual integrity 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 377 
 
 has not been maintained, and the staff of his achievement 
 is broken. That such a crisis came to Mohammed is 
 plain to us, who are not the captives of .his faith, though 
 after it came converts, conquests, and the empire of half 
 the world. We see how that crisis separates the devout- 
 ness, the gentleness, the fidelity, and the chastity of his 
 blameless youth from the arrogance, the ambition, the 
 ferocity, and the sensuality of his old age. Certain it is 
 that a line drawn midway in the career of Jesus — per- 
 haps at the memorable conference with his disciples at 
 Caesarea Philippi — leaves nearly all of his meekness, his 
 pitifulness, and his self-control, as well as his wisest and 
 most consolatory counsels to mankind, on one side, and 
 upon the other side his self-assertion, his petulance, 
 and his uncharitableness, along with those sombre vatici- 
 nations of impending doom by which ignorance and fanati- 
 cism have ever since harrowed the apprehensions of the 
 superstitious. 
 
 Not the scribes and Pharisees only became the subject 
 of his reproaches. Into the bosom of his own little flock, 
 upon the head of Peter, whom he had honored with a 
 burst of sublime confidence, and a largess of power 
 enough to disturb a cooler head, he hurled the cruel epi- 
 thet, Satan. When he came down from the mountain, 
 where he had seen a vision of Moses and Elias, he called 
 the multitude, who beset him with tearful prayers for his 
 intervention, a wicked and adulterous race, whose presence 
 he could scarcely endure, — unless, indeed, this reproach 
 was for the faithlessness of his own disciples. Travelling 
 to Jerusalem, he was hungry, and sought a fig-tree full of 
 leaves for fruit. Mark is ingenuous enough to explain 
 that it was not the season of figs ; and he must be correct, 
 since it was before the arrest and before the Passover, 
 which occurred in April ; and the fig in Palestine could 
 hardly ripen earlier than June. But it is told that Jesus 
 uttered an imprecation against the tree that had refused, 
 out of the season, to supply his wants. It was near the 
 same time that Jesus, in forgetfulness of his lessons of 
 peace, ordered his followers to arm themselves with 
 swords. These incidents are sufficient to show how he 
 could not quite assure the serenity of his own spirit, in 
 spite of the bravery with which he coerced his soul to 
 
378 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 endure the fate that befell his high mission, without 
 imputing to him the undignified and petulant demeanor 
 which the Fourth Gospel reports as characterizing his 
 bearing before Pilate. 
 
 Jesus did not come back, as he confidently expected, to 
 establish in the lifetime of his generation his kingdom of 
 heaven. The hope he cherished, like the hope his nation 
 cherished, has been indefinitely postponed. Magnificent 
 as was the scheme to accomplish which he gave his life, 
 the thoughts of God seem to have been larger and longer. 
 But yet, if not as the Jews longed for it, nor yet as Jesus 
 and Peter and Paul proclaimed it, there is for all believing 
 souls a kingdom of heaven ; and it is at hand. It comes 
 with every achievement of genius and art, with every in- 
 vention that enlarges man's dominion over his environ- 
 ment, with the disclosure of every new law that indicates 
 the unity, the vitality, and the divine order of the cosmos, 
 with every new moral power which man, by conforming 
 to the sentiment of duty, has been able to add to the 
 stock of his transmissible virtues. 
 
 Jesus did not come back to destroy the world. Hap- 
 pily, he had done not a little to make the world worth 
 perpetuation. The old lessons of virtue, already accred- 
 ited as the moral science of all civilized people, he reiter- 
 ated and emphasized. He cast them like seed into the 
 hearts of men, after they had been made tender and sus- 
 ceptible by the terrors of impending judgment and retri- 
 bution. The terrors have passed away, but not till, in the 
 warmth radiated from the fires of a freshly opened Ge- 
 henna, the good seed had germinated, and begun to grow 
 toward an abundant harvest. 
 
 Nor need the crown even of this kingdom be refused 
 to Jesus. Best of all who have yet lived in the world, he 
 is worthy to wear it. Spite of the insignificant blem- 
 ishes by which his relationship to us is confessed, he still 
 leads the van in the march of man from the plain of 
 bestial instincts to the high table-lands of spiritual dis- 
 cernment and power. By his purity, by the heroism of 
 his self-consecration to the noblest aims, by the dazzling 
 splendor of that standard of righteousness which he por- 
 trayed and exemplified, he is as yet enthroned King of 
 humanity. 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 379 
 
 It is rare that a great organizing mind affects the 
 world precisely as it intends, or does the precise work it 
 conceives and proposes. The secondary effects of great 
 lives become often more consequential than the primary 
 and immediate effects. Columbus did not find, as he all 
 his life believed, a new route to India ; but he found a new 
 world. Europe, united in arms, failed to establish a Chris- 
 tian kingdom in Judea ; but it did establish in Europe a 
 Christian civilization destined to conquer the whole world. 
 If Jesus did not establish his kingdom of heaven in Zion, 
 he became the inspirer of a new religion. 
 
 Man does not live by bread alone, — by that which min- 
 isters to his health, wealth, or power. He lives chiefly 
 by his ideals. Religion, with the awful solemnities of its 
 worship, with its stately pageantry of deathless gods, with 
 the invitations and repulsions of its heavens and of its 
 hells, is the verity and substance of the life of man's 
 spirit. So the world has honored and worshipped those 
 prophets and saviors who have enriched it with the 
 hopes, and reinforced it with the motives of a new religion. 
 A man's religion is a higher and better expression of him 
 than is his poetry, his science, or his art. 
 
 Nor is a religion always the best and the purest at its 
 inception. Of all the great religions, whose history we 
 know, the reverse is true. When a faith, that has been 
 the cultus of races and generations of men, ceases to 
 express the highest aspirations of the soul, when its 
 dogmas affront our reason, and its standards of righteous- 
 ness outrage our moral sense, when the tawdry vesture of 
 its mythology provokes more mirth than terror, it de- 
 mands and receives some worthier interpretation. Stated 
 in terms of a just and liberal thought, it revives and sur- 
 vives, and becomes the support and sustenance of genera- 
 tions. The time however comes at last, when the old 
 garment can no longer be patched with new cloth, when 
 the new wine bursts the old bottles. For the critical 
 faculty grows with the creative imagination ; and where the 
 continuity and identity between an idealized image and a 
 historical verity are at last broken, the time is ripe for a 
 new Messiah. 
 
 Contrasting Jesus with the founders of the other great 
 world-religions, \vc may be able to approximate toward 
 
380 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 his just place in human history. Moses, Confucius, 
 Sakya Muni, and Mohammed were all men of affairs. 
 They had experience in domestic life as husbands and 
 fathers ; in civil offices they had the responsibilities of 
 subjects and of rulers, in military service of leaders or 
 soldiers ; and they rounded to its completion a human life 
 rich in all the discipline and wisdom which comes with 
 manifold activity in conspicuous and responsible positions. 
 In Jesus, we have a long youth of utter obscurity in a 
 corner of the Old World, doubtless passed in those self- 
 musings which expose to egotistic enthusiasms ; a fastidi- 
 ous shrinking from those domestic relations out of which 
 grow so many of the human affections, and which furnish 
 the chief occasions for that self-sacrifice which is the 
 foundation of all virtues ; an utter distrust of all the 
 social and political experience of men, and an impatience 
 of those slow ameliorations of the evils of the world 
 which come from a better ordered state. Last of all, the 
 career of Jesus was too brief — perhaps less than a year 
 from the time he abandoned his artisan life in Nazareth 
 till the whole brilliant pageant was eclipsed in the dark- 
 ness and terror of Calvary — to be either a comprehen- 
 sive experience, out of which to instruct the teeming 
 races of men, or to be a fair test of his personal integrity 
 or a measure of his greatness. 
 
 Of the great world-religions, those of the Jews, of the 
 Greeks, and of the Chinese, have been specifically prac- 
 tical and secular. Moses originated a cultus, theistic in- 
 deed, but most completely outward, worldly, and adapted 
 to men, as men ; that took the fullest account of all the 
 human instincts, the love of life, the love of the sexes, 
 the love of offspring, the tribal sentiments, the thirst 
 for aggression and conquest, and the passion for pos- 
 sessions. Confucius gave a cultus as thoroughly human, 
 and adapted to the development of a great nation, — a 
 rule of life, whereby the most stable government and the 
 most permanent social order have been maintained for 
 more than a thousand years, — but atheistic in its basis, 
 and appealing as little as Judaism to the imagination. 
 Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism are essen- 
 tially other-worldly religions. They are all based more 
 or less upon a sacrifice of the earthly life in the interest 
 
PERSONAL PRETENSIONS OF JESUS 381 
 
 of a life to come after death. It shows how dominant 
 over the mind of man are the ideals of his imagination, 
 that these great religions, which more than others feed 
 the aspirations of his soul, have supplanted and outlasted 
 those religions that have taken solid hold of human life, 
 and most wisely adapted themselves to the social, polit- 
 ical, and industrial conditions of man's present existence. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 " To the mind of Jesus, his own resurrection after a short sojourn in the 
 grave was the victory of his cause after his death, and at the price of his 
 death. His disciples materialized his resurrection, and their version of this 
 matter falls to ruin day by day. But no ruin or contradiction befalls the 
 version of Jesus himself. He has risen ; his cause has conquered ; the 
 course of events continually attests his resurrection and victory." — Matthew 
 Arnold. 
 
 " If at first it sprang out of a local miracle, and may have been little 
 distinguished from other waves of feeling that were propagated by the 
 religious guilds of the ancient world, Christianity is not now identical with 
 belief in the resurrection of Jesus. It is now, and has for fifteen centuries 
 been, something wholly different ; namely, the great bond holding the 
 European races and their off-shoots together in that sort of union out of 
 which naturally springs a common polity. True it may be that the miracle 
 was the essential fact, without which the union would never have been 
 accomplished : there may have been a time when it was true that ' if Christ 
 be not risen, our faith is vain ' ; but when the union has taken place, has 
 endured for a thousand years, and though since weakened and endangered 
 yet subsists in the form of an indestructible common civilization and sense 
 of unity among nations, it is no longer true. The Christian Church is now 
 the visible expression of a true cosmopolitanism, which will be eternal ; and, 
 this being so, it avails nothing henceforth against it to argue that, after all, 
 Christ is not risen." — Natural Religion. 
 
 Of all the supernatural events which tradition has 
 imputed to the agency of Jesus, or to the divine power 
 which he was able to invoke, no one is so well vouched by 
 respectable testimony as the resurrection. The whole 
 Christian Church, and ultimately the whole Christian 
 world, with an insignificant amount of dissent, came to 
 believe and still believe, that, a day or two after his death 
 and burial, his sepulchred body disappeared ; and that on 
 several occasions, separated by intervals of a week's 
 duration, he showed himself alive to some of his disciples, 
 and fully established his identity by characteristic words 
 and actions, and by exhibiting in his hands and side the 
 fresh wounds left by the crucifixion. When we compare 
 the accumulation and general concurrence of the testi- 
 mony, upon which the belief in the actual occurrence of 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 383 
 
 this marvel rests, with the paucity and levity of evidence 
 which support the other evangelical miracles ; when we 
 consider the significant silence of the witnesses who 
 ignore and omit them, it seems just to conclude, that, if 
 the credibility of the resurrection was to be determined 
 by merely counting and weighing the supporting testi- 
 mony, we have tenfold more reason for believing it than 
 we have for believing that Jesus walked on the sea, made 
 of five loaves and two fishes an abundant feast for five thou- 
 sand people, raised from his bier the dead son of a widow 
 at Nain, or cured by a touch in the purlieus of the temple 
 at Jerusalem a man who had been born blind. One who 
 should reject as unproved the tradition of such miracles 
 might find his faith coerced by the accumulation of testi- 
 mony upon which the resurrection is asserted ; but one 
 who, on a critical examination, had come to reject the 
 dogma of the resurrection, could not give a very convinc- 
 ing reason for continued faith in any of the other events 
 outside of the range of the natural order, that are asserted 
 to have made the life of Jesus unique and abnormal. 
 
 The raising of the widow's son is told only in the narra- 
 tive of Luke, and the curing of the blind man in the tem- 
 ple is an incident introduced among the evident fictions of 
 the dogmatic drama of the Fourth Gospel. If real occur- 
 rences, they were too consequential and conspicuous to be 
 omitted in the tradition of Matthew. The wonderful en- 
 largement of the food — the recitation of which in all four 
 of the narratives makes it evident that the omission of 
 what other writers had told, and the telling of what they 
 had omitted, was not the controlling purpose that dictated 
 the composition of either of the Gospels — is not supported 
 by the confirmation of Paul or of either of the apostles. 
 The omission of all allusion to the miracles in the authen- 
 tic and imputed writings of Paul is not only pregnant as a 
 negation, but the theory that he carefully and always 
 insists upon, that Jesus' earthly life was not the triumphal 
 career of a god, or the awe-inspiring manifestation of a 
 hierophant, but the ignominious subjection of one submit- 
 ting to service and shame, for the glory that was to come 
 after his resurrection, — a r61e entirely incompatible with 
 miraculous powers, — made it illogical for him to believe 
 in the miracles imputed to Jesus. But the resurrection of 
 
384 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Jesus is, as to the substantial fact, asserted by all four of 
 the gospel writers. It is declared in the genuine Epistles 
 of Paul, nay, made the very basis of his whole scheme of 
 metaphysics and theology. The affirmation of it is im- 
 puted to Peter and James and John, as well as to Paul, in 
 their reported speeches, which the writer of the Book of 
 Acts undertakes to preserve, and in epistles believed to 
 have been written or dictated by them. It was the best 
 known dogma of the Christian creed, the novelty and 
 peculiarity, by which its scheme of doctrine was distin- 
 guished among the heathen from all contemporaneous and 
 antecedent faiths. 
 
 Before we institute an inquiry into the actuality of the 
 resurrection, let us consider precisely what the assertion 
 is, to which our assent is invited. A careful study of the 
 tradition, as preserved in the New Testament literature, 
 shows that the early believers were not in accord about 
 it. We discover two distinct explanations of the resur- 
 rection not reconcilable with each other. The opinion 
 held by the mass of the disciples was that set forth in the 
 four Gospels, and in the statement of which they substan- 
 tially agree. Let us endeavor to apprehend it. 
 
 The body of the crucified Jesus, which Joseph of Arima- 
 thea had procured to be delivered to him, he had carefully 
 entombed in a new sepulchre, the door of which was barri- 
 caded by a large stone. The corpse thus carefully depos- 
 ited and secured was also guarded, at least for two days, 
 by soldiers. After an interval of thirty-six hours at most, 
 a few devoted women — among them the mother of Jesus 
 — find the stone rolled back, the body gone, though 
 the cerements in which it had been wound are left in the 
 empty tomb. These women report to Peter and the 
 other apostles, not that Jesus is alive, — though even this 
 they begin to believe, — but that his body is not to be 
 found in the place where, under such safeguards, it had 
 been deposited. Peter and the disciples — as if that was 
 the surest test of the startling hope the words of the 
 women first awakened in their minds — proceed, actually 
 running in their excitement, to the tomb. If the body is 
 still there, the women have deceived them. But it is not 
 there, and immediately they abandon themselves to the 
 joyful assurance, that their Master has come back to life. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 385 
 
 It was the body the women went to see. It was the 
 absence of the body, that gave them their first vague 
 impression that he was alive. It was the body, that Peter 
 and John went to the tomb to identify ; and, not finding 
 it, they were ready to receive other evidence, that it has 
 again come to life. The words spoken all relate to the 
 corpse. " They have taken away my Lord'' that is, his 
 remains, "and I know not where they have laid him," 
 moaned the affectionate Mary of Magdala. a "He," that 
 is, his body, "is not here" said angelic voices. "He" 
 that is, the body of Jesus taking back its life, " is risen, 
 as he said. He goetlt before yon into Galilee : there shall 
 ye see Jrim."* 
 
 There were voices and angelic appearances, but as to 
 these the witnesses lamentably differ. It was one angel, 
 say some ; it was two angels, say others. They stood out- 
 side the tomb ; nay, they sat within the tomb. There were 
 no angels ; and Jesus, instead of being away in Galilee, and 
 first and only seen there, was all the time in Jerusalem — 
 never went to Galilee at all — and stood by the side of his 
 own tomb in the guise of a gardener, and spake to Mary, 
 who recognized and worshipped him. Communications 
 are reported to Mary, to Peter, to the assembled disciples ; 
 but the accounts differ in both form and substance as to 
 what these communications were, and by whom and to 
 whom they were delivered. Only as to one thing is 
 there entire accord, and that is that the corpse of the 
 crucified was not to be found in the place, whence it was 
 supposed only supernatural power could remove it. The 
 two disciples walking, on that Sunday afternoon after the 
 crucifixion, to Emmaus tell their unknown companion, 
 that before they left Jerusalem the same morning certain 
 women of their company made them astonished by report- 
 ing that, being early at the sepulchre, they found not the 
 body of Jesus, and that they had seen a vision of angels, 
 which said he was alive. 
 
 To a modern believer in the immortality of man, the 
 hope that his deceased friend still lives is in no way con- 
 tradicted or lessened by the discovery of his decaying 
 body just where it had been reverently deposited. The 
 belief in the continuous life of the soul takes no account 
 
 a fohn xx., 13. l>Matt. xxviii., 6, 7. 
 
$86 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 of the presence and decomposition of what was once its 
 physical organism. But to all the evangelists, and to the 
 disciples of Jesus, according to the evangelical records, 
 Jesus could not be alive in Jerusalem or in Galilee and at 
 the same time buried in a new tomb near the place of his 
 crucifixion. So, with pertinacity and unanimity, they 
 insist on what to us seems in no wise an essential cir- 
 cumstance, the absence of the body from the tomb, while 
 they are not careful to agree, and do not agree, as to any 
 of the substantial details of the resurrection itself. 
 
 What the resuscitated Jesus seems in all the narratives 
 to have insisted upon was, that he was not a ghost, but a 
 veritable body with bodily appetite more keen and gross 
 than even in his lifetime, and with the physical marks 
 left on his person by the cruelties of his putting-to-death. 
 The controversialists, to complete the discomfiture of Paul 
 and the rationalists of his school, put into the mouth of 
 the resurrected Christ himself this declaration: "Behold 
 my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle vie, and 
 see ; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me 
 have."* Even the author of the Johannic drama, from 
 whose generally exalted and spiritual conception of the 
 personality of Jesus a better opinion might have been 
 expected, gives the weight of his testimony to perpetuate 
 a gross superstition, which, chiefly on his authority, has 
 survived to the present day. For this author too por- 
 trays Jesus in a resurrection, whose chief glory seemed to 
 be in the consciousness of a restored physique, and in the 
 possession of an appetite demanding an anticipation of the 
 hour of dining. b Written, as this production is believed 
 to have been, about a century after Paul's letter to the 
 Corinthians, it shows conclusively how completely, even in 
 the minds of the more philosophic and mystic believers, 
 the theory of a physical resurrection had supplanted the 
 more just and credible conception of Paul. 
 
 What was this conception ? It is all disclosed in the 
 famous fifteenth chapter of the first letter of that apostle 
 to the Corinthians in these words : " For I delivered unto 
 you, first of all, that which I also received, how that 
 Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures ; and 
 that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day 
 
 a Luke xxiv., 39. >' John xx., 27 ; xxi., 4, 5, 10,12,13. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 387 
 
 according to the scriptures ; and that he was seen of 
 Peter, then of the twelve ; after that, he was seen of 
 above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater 
 part still survive. After that, he was seen of James, then 
 of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me 
 also." a Now, thus far we find nothing directly negativing 
 the theory of a physical resurrection, and the reanimation 
 of the crucified body of Jesus ; and, were this Paul's 
 whole testimony, it might be our duty to reconcile it with 
 the prevalent tradition of the early Church. For each of 
 these alleged appearances of Jesus may have been the 
 appearance of a body with flesh and bones, demonstrating 
 and asserting that it was no ghost. But of the last of 
 these appearances — all classed together as similar in 
 kind — we know somewhat, and that, too, upon the best 
 authority, — that of Paul himself; and we cannot regard 
 it as anything more than an apparition. 
 
 In Paul's letters, we come upon the questionable and 
 doubtful relation in which he lived and taught toward 
 those who, at Jerusalem, were considered the pillars of 
 the Church. We learn how sharply and passionately the 
 very fundamental ideas of his theology were gainsaid and 
 contradicted by apostles who, through their more intimate 
 connection with Jesus in his lifetime, were justly held in 
 higher repute than himself. b We know how his preten- 
 sion to be an apostle was scouted, and how his whole 
 story of an appointment by Jesus himself on the road to 
 Damascus was regarded as a fanatical delusion. It was 
 perhaps with a view of taking from under him the foun- 
 dation of his apostleship, that the tradition of the Gospels 
 was carefully fixed, limiting, by the authority of Jesus 
 himself, the number of the apostles to twelve, and filling, 
 under the sanction of the Holy Ghost, the vacancy made 
 by the falling off of Judas, not by Paul, but by Matthias. 
 
 A like disposition to check the presumption of a false 
 apostle is further manifested in the account the real 
 apostles seemed to have sanctioned of Jesus' ascension 
 to heaven. It is told in the Acts of the Apostles that, 
 after showing himself in bodily shape for a space of 
 forty days, Jesus went out into the suburbs of Jerusalem 
 
 M. Cor. xv., 3-8. MI. Cor. x., xi., xii. ; C.al. i., ii. 
 
 <^ Matt, x , 2-5 ; Actsi., 17, 21-26. 
 
388 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 with a concourse of his disciples, and there in a most con- 
 spicuous way was parted from them, and taken up to 
 heaven, and that two angels appeared, as they watched 
 his ascension. to the sky, that received him, and said: 
 " This same Jesus, who is taken up from yon into heaven, 
 shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into 
 heaven" a That is, forty days after the resurrection the 
 showing of Jesus to his friends definitively ceased; and 
 it was announced authoritatively from heaven that, when 
 he came again, it would be his final coming, as he 
 had foretold, to end the world. After this, no apostle, 
 no orthodox disciple, sees Jesus. They have visions, 
 they hear voices, the communication with the upper 
 world is frequent and intimate ; but Jesus is no longer 
 the medium. It is always the Holy Ghost or an angel 
 of God. The Johannic narrative — on this point plainly 
 anti-Pauline, and in the orthodox interest — brings its 
 emphatic disapproval of Paul's interviews with Jesus, 
 who, during the brief interval that was to separate the 
 ascension from the final coming, was not to be seen nor 
 to have his privacy with the Deity intruded upon. For 
 it puts into the mouth of Jesus himself the declaration : 
 " If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you. 
 But, if I depart, I will se?id him unto you" " A little 
 while, and ye shall not see me." h 
 
 The consideration is not here disregarded that an actual 
 absence of the glorified and resurrected body of Jesus in 
 the paradise of God was not inconsistent with an appar- 
 ition of Jesus to Paul. The common faith is, that appar- 
 itions are only of those who have departed from earth ; 
 and the sight of an apparition of an absent friend brings 
 terror to the common mind, because it is a token of his 
 death. But it is by no means probable that this distinc- 
 tion between a ghost — which in scientific parlance is a 
 strong subjective impression upon a highly sensitive 
 organization, not necessarily implying any objective real- 
 ity — and the actual presence of one who has died clothed 
 with an immortal though physical body was a distinction 
 that entered into the minds of the New Testament 
 writers, or into the mind of Paul himself. To them there 
 were two states in which human beings might exist — as 
 
 aActsi., II. b John xiv., 26; xvi., 7, 16. 
 

 LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 389 
 
 mortals before death, as immortals after death ; but, in 
 both states, they had material bodies with senses and ap- 
 petites. So that when the Church at Jerusalem estab- 
 lished as a canon of faith, that Jesus with a glorified 
 human body had passed into the heavens to remain there 
 till his final coming, they made it impossible for Paul on 
 his way to Damascus to have seen Jesus after his ascen- 
 sion and before his final coming, in any form in which 
 they could conceive it possible for him really to appear. 
 
 But Paul's testimony must be taken altogether; and, so 
 taking it, the conception of the resurrection of Jesus, 
 which he held, is still more irreconcilable with the tenet 
 of the primitive Church, and with the tradition preserved 
 in the canonical Gospels. The heat, not to say ill man- 
 ners, with which the apostle expresses himself, indi- 
 cates precisely where he treads upon controversial 
 ground. But some will say, How are the dead raised tip, 
 and with what body do they come ? Fool ! that which thou 
 sowest is not made alive, till it hath first died: tJtou sow- 
 est not the plant that is to be, but otily the seed of it, as of 
 wheat, or some other grain, and God givetJi it a body as 
 pleases him ; for there are kinds of bodies, as of men, beasts, 
 birds, and of fishes ; so earthly and heavenly bodies, natural 
 and spiritual bodies. And when you sow the natural body 
 corruptible, as a seed, it is in the power of God to raise from 
 it a spiritual body incorruptible." Paul had been evidently 
 provoked by the gross beliefs of his fellow-disciples. He 
 had heard, to the point of personal disgust, the stories, 
 that afterward embodied themselves in the gospel narra- 
 tives, of Jesus coming into the assemblies of his chosen 
 friends to exhibit the wounds on his person, to vindicate 
 his appetite, and to assert that he was something to be 
 handled, and no apparition ; and he cannot refrain from 
 flinging at the whole company, high and low, who were 
 retailing these stories, and getting them believed in spite 
 of his protest, the uncourteous epithet, fool. 
 
 Nor is it of consequence that the illustration of vege- 
 table growth breaks down wholly under a better knowl- 
 edge than Paul possessed of the process of reproduction. 
 He starts with the emphatic assertion, The old body, what 
 is that but the seed of quite a different kind of a body ? 
 
390 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 So far from the old body living again, the living again is 
 not possible "except it die." The reverse happens to be. 
 true. Reproduction is not possible in the case of " wheat 
 or of some other grain " except the seed is alive and keeps 
 alive; and, if it is dead when planted, or dies in the 
 ground, germination becomes impossible. But no matter. 
 It was a simile to help his thought ; and what his thought 
 was we are perfectly able to perceive, although the illus- 
 tration of it was unfortunately chosen. 
 
 Further on in his letter, Paul brings out more distinctly 
 his peculiar idea of the resurrection. " There is a spiritual 
 body" a he says, boldly yoking together these two incon- 
 gruities, which is tantamount to saying: there is a bodily 
 spirit ; there is a material soul. In the order of nature, we 
 derive the natural body by birth from the primitive man ; 
 but after Jesus, who was the first-fruit of the resurrection, 
 we shall put on the spiritual or heavenly body ; and, turn- 
 ing to the corpse-worshippers and manipulators of the 
 Master's flesh, who had made him say : "A spirit hath not 
 Jlcsh and bones as ye sec vie have" b he adds with warmth : 
 " This I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit 
 the kingdom of God, nor can corruption inherit incorrup- 
 tion. And this mystery some of us shall live to see ; for, 
 before the natural term of our lives, these bodies of ours, in 
 a moment, in the very twinkling of an eye, at the last 
 trump, which will certainly sound, shall be changed from 
 corruptible to incorruptible, and put on their immor- 
 tality." 
 
 Now, as the process of the human resurrection — for 
 which Paul finds a place in the economy of nature, along 
 with the order of vegetables, and the different races of 
 animals with their reproduction, growth, and death — was 
 also the process or mode of the resurrection of Jesus, we 
 can gather from these details his rationale of the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus.' 1 It was the death of his natural body, the 
 germination and uprising from it of his spiritual, heavenly, 
 and incorruptible body, in which he, and all who wear his 
 image, will be forever clothed. 
 
 He does not see how he confuses and contradicts him- 
 self ; how the word " body," which he still insists upon, 
 concedes the whole claim he is combating. What is this 
 
 " I. Cor. xv., 44-49. b Luke xxiv., 39. c I. Cor. xv., 50-57. d I. Cov. xv., n-20. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 39I 
 
 change, by which the corruptible becomes incorruptible, 
 the mortal immortal ? Do we find its analogy in the ger- 
 mination of wheat ? Very well ; the wheat germ, shoot, 
 stalk, perfect plant, though not the subject sowed, which 
 was a mere kernel of seed unlike them, is still a body, and 
 material, and as such capable of dissolution. Shall we 
 with him leave the correspondences of nature and soar 
 into the visions and speculations of the celestial world of 
 our aspirations and hopes, and assert : There is a natural 
 body, and there is a spiritual body ? A spiritual body, — 
 if such a thing were thinkable, — but still a body. Flesh 
 and blood may not inherit the kingdom of God, but by 
 some mysterious process these fleshly bodies shall at the 
 last trump acquire some qualities and powers, that will fit 
 them to pass over the confines of that kingdom, and — 
 bodies still — put on incorruption. 
 
 The speculation was too subtle to be popular. If Paul 
 had affirmed immortality of the soul, asserted its superi- 
 ority to and independence of the body, and resolutely 
 adhered to his own thesis, — that flesh and blood, which 
 is a synonym for the body, could not inherit immortality, 
 — he would have been more in accord with the enlightened 
 beliefs of the Jews, with the teachings of other religions 
 older than Christianity, with the educated opinion of his 
 time, and with the prevalent speculations of modern phi- 
 losophy. Taking neither the philosophic nor the popular 
 view, his ingenious surmises of the mode of the resurrec- 
 tion failed to impress themselves upon the creed of Chris- 
 tendom, which has read his equivocal words with great 
 eagerness, because they are the substance of all that has 
 been taught upon so fascinating a subject as human im- 
 mortality, interpreting them either in the philosophic or 
 in the gross form ; and, from want of clearness of expres- 
 sion, growing out, perhaps, of want of clearness of concep- 
 tion, they seem capable of either interpretation. 
 
 But the triumph of the evangelists and regular apostles 
 over Paul was more apparent than real. The whole 
 speculation of immortality belongs to the department of 
 philosophy. It is philosophy, rather than revelation, 
 which, gathering its data from Egypt and India, from 
 Zoroaster, Pythagoras, and Plato, as well as from Jesus 
 and Paul, carefully meditating upon the phenomena of 
 
392 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 psychology, and the manifestations of the moral sense, 
 has woven for mankind its thin and gorgeous hope of an 
 immortal life. So that, though his own age and many 
 succeeding ages rejected the metaphysical conceptions of 
 a resurrection entertained by the cultivated apostle, and 
 adhered to the vulgar traditions of the evangelists, the 
 modern world, whose faith has received the education of 
 science and philosophy, now cherishes its precious hope 
 in the forms and symbols of Paul. The apostle of the 
 Gentiles has become the apostle of the resurrection. It 
 is the fervid and confident, although still controversial 
 and inconsistent, language of Paul, that is read to-day over 
 every newly opened grave in Christendom ; and that 
 which he, with too much deference, said of his Master, 
 may, if we look at the Christian records for the report, 
 be more accurately said of himself : " He hath brought 
 life and immortality to light." a 
 
 It has been conceded that the tradition of a resur- 
 rection of Jesus, though the mode of that resurrection 
 seemed to have been the subject of dissent and contro- 
 versy among the early believers, is better vouched than 
 any of the New Testament traditions. If it stood upon 
 authority alone, it would actually stand stronger than it 
 does. If we should be told that Goethe and Humboldt 
 and John Stuart Mill and Emerson entertained a belief 
 in the manifestations of so-called Spiritualism, we should 
 be strongly prepossessed in favor of their truth ; for it 
 does not seem probable that such capacious, candid, and 
 cultivated minds could concur in upholding a delusion. 
 But if, besides, these clear-sighted men should give with 
 particularity and detail the facts and occurrences upon 
 which they base their belief, then we should feel required 
 to examine the facts and occurrences, and determine 
 whether they supported the belief. Just so, if we had 
 only the undoubted historical fact, that such men as 
 Peter, John, and Paul, and after them the enlightened 
 bishops, scholars, and philosophers of the Christian 
 Church, believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, it 
 would command the respect of all unbiassed minds. But 
 when these estimable men undertake to give with scrupu- 
 lous minuteness the actual occurrence of the resurrection 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 393 
 
 and tell how it happened, who were present, what was 
 said, and what was done, we are fairly invited, nay, chal- 
 lenged, to look into the details, to see if they form the 
 basis for us of a rational belief. 
 
 This is our precise attitude as candid students of his- 
 tory. The messengers of the resurrection seem to have 
 gone with their message, expecting that, as it was a wholly 
 exceptional event, it would be received with surprise, with 
 incredulity, with disbelief. This is just what the tradition 
 itself declares. It says, when the women told the apos- 
 tles, they disbelieved ; when the apostles told each other, 
 they disbelieved each other ; and, when Jesus himself 
 stood with them in Galilee, though some recognized and 
 worshipped him, some doubted* Just so when the same 
 story, preserved for us in the tradition, comes down to us, 
 we will be at least as candid as the disciples, and hesitate 
 and doubt and give our assent only to what seems con- 
 sistent and probable. Though ready to believe much on 
 the authority of such good and great men, we cannot 
 overlook the fact that they insist that we shall take 
 nothing upon their word, but take the testimony for our- 
 selves, upon which they have believed. 
 
 Let us now recur to what seems reasonably certain as 
 to the death of Jesus. It took place, according to Mat- 
 thew and Mark, at about three o'clock on the afternoon of 
 the fourteenth day of the month Nisan, on Friday. 15 Luke 
 does not indicate the hour, though he says that, from 
 twelve o'clock till three, there was darkness over all the 
 earth, and, after mentioning this circumstance, speaks of 
 Jesus as speaking and dying, c so that his account does 
 not contradict that of the two others. Some time during 
 the evening, Joseph of Arimathea obtained from Pilate 
 the custody of the body of Jesus, and, having swathed 
 it in linen cloth, laid it in a sepulchre, and rolled a stone 
 to barricade the entrance.' 1 All the narratives concur in 
 representing that the entombment was hurried by tKe 
 lateness of the hour and the necessity of completing 
 everything before sunset, when the Sabbath began, after 
 which even funeral rites became unlawful. 
 
 Luke says the women who came with him from Gali- 
 
 a Luke xxiv., 11 ; Mark xvi., ti, 13; Matt, xxviii., 17. 
 b Matt, xxvii., 46; Mark xv., 34, 37. c Luke xxiii., 44, 46. d Matt, xxvii., 57-60. 
 
394 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 lee followed after and beheld the sepulchre, and how the 
 body of Jesus was laid. Matthew and Mark, while de- 
 claring that the women from Galilee stood afar off, and 
 beheld the crucifixion, and naming Mary Magdalene and 
 the mother of Joses, who seemed also to have been Jesus' 
 own mother, and the mother of James, as among them, 
 assert that none but the two first-named women came 
 near and looked on at the entombment. a 
 
 The Sabbath began, the pious rites due to the beloved 
 remains not yet accomplished. To complete these rites, 
 to put spices and perfumes with the cerements, as Mark 
 and Luke assert, was the errand that brought the women, 
 as soon as the Sabbath was over, again to the sepulchre. b 
 There is no thought among them all that Jesus has not 
 remained dead, nor the faintest anticipation of any coming 
 up alive from the sepulchre. Sorrowfully, carefully, ex- 
 pensively, they make the preparations to take a final 
 leave of the lifeless form of him they had loved and be- 
 lieved in. Now begin the contradictions in the story. 
 To the interrogation, who first visited the tomb on Sunday 
 after the body of Jesus had been put there Friday even- 
 ing, Matthew says, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary ; 
 Mark, Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of James and 
 Salome, — a substantial agreement ; but Luke answers, 
 Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, the 
 women who came from Galilee with Jesus, and other 
 women that were with them, — quite a company of women, 
 at the least more than four. 
 
 Whom did the first visitors to the sepulchre see there ? 
 To this, Luke answers : they saw two men in shining 
 garments. Matthew affirms that they saw an angel of 
 the Lord from heaven, sitting upon the rolled-away stone, 
 whose countenance was like lightning, and his raiment 
 white as snow. Mark's account is, that they saw a young 
 man sitting within the sepulchre on the right side, clothed 
 in a long white garment, and were affrighted. 41 These are 
 details indeed, but they are important details ; and it is 
 only by a substantial agreement as to facts so important, 
 that an event, in itself incredible, is to be accepted as 
 
 "Mark xv. , 47; Luke xxiii., 55. h Mark xvi., 1 ; Luke xxiv., 1. 
 c Matt, xxviii., 1 ; Mark xvi., 1 ; Luke xxiii., 55 ; xxiv., 1, 10. 
 <1 Matt, xxviii., 2, 5 j Mark xvi., 5 ; Luke xxiv., 4. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 395 
 
 proved. There were two of these glittering men, says 
 one witness ; nay, there was but one, say the other two. 
 The two men stood beside the women, as they were per- 
 plexed at not finding the corpse, says the first deponent ; 
 nay, the one man sat within, on the right, deposes the 
 next ; not at all, declares the third, he sat outside, away 
 from the sepulchre, on the rolled-away stone. 
 
 What did these glittering men, believed by all to be 
 visitants from heaven, say to the women ? Whoever 
 they were, they had been placed in charge to communi- 
 cate to the world what transformation of the buried body 
 had taken place. Their communication is of prime im- 
 portance, and ought to have been preserved in its very 
 words. Here is the record of it: a — 
 
 " Fear not ye ; for I know that ye seek Jesus, who was 
 crucified. He is not here ; for he is risen, as he said. 
 Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, 
 and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead ; and, 
 behold, he goeth before you into Galilee ; there shall ye 
 see him : lo, I have told you." — Matthew. 
 
 " Be not affrighted. Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which 
 was crucified. He is risen ; he is not here : behold the 
 place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his dis- 
 ciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee : 
 there shall ye see him, as he said unto you." — Mark. 
 
 " Why seek ye the living among the dead ? He is not 
 here, but he is risen. Remember how he spake unto you 
 when he was yet in Galilee, saying, The Son of Man must 
 be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be cruci- 
 fied, and the third day rise again." — Luke. 
 
 In the first part of this message there is sufficient 
 accord. The last writer omits the words to reassure the 
 fears of the surprised women, and surmises the errand of 
 the women in a different way from the other two writers, 
 and omits a most important direction to go and give 
 information to the disciples ; but each statement affirms 
 that Jesus is no longer in the sepulchre — a dead body — 
 but is risen and living. When, however, we come to the 
 latter clauses of the communication, there is a fatal varia- 
 tion. All declare the message was that Jesus was not 
 dead in the tomb ; but they differ both as to where he is 
 
 ■ Matt, xxviii., 5-7 ; Mark xvi., 6, 7 ; Luke xxiv. , 5-7. 
 
396 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 and where he is to be found, and what the ante mortem 
 prediction of his had been concerning his reappearance. 
 We come here upon a point over which the New Testa- 
 ment records declare there had been a controversy among 
 the first believers in Jesus. 
 
 After the new faith had begun to gain converts in Jewry, 
 after Peter and James and John, its official representatives 
 from humble Galilean laborers, had grown to be pillars 
 of the Church, after they had abandoned their humble 
 avocation of fishermen, and, as the witnesses, trusted 
 friends, companions, and kinsfolk of the Messiah, had 
 come to be reverenced by the assembly as bishops and 
 hierarchs, there came into the minds of the disciples an 
 evident desire to disown as much as possible the disrepu- 
 table and provincial relation of the career of Jesus with 
 Galilee, and by giving him a closer connection with Jeru- 
 salem, the priests, and elders, the temple worship, the 
 national polity and its representatives, to make the active 
 propagandism of the faith more effectual among enlight- 
 ened and influential Jews. The first narratives, written 
 on the authority of the little band of provincials who had 
 come up with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, all indicate 
 Galilee as the theatre of Jesus' glory as a prophet. He 
 only came to Jerusalem, they say, to condemn it, and 
 foretell its doom, and to show how complete was his 
 estrangement from it. Accordingly, they tinge the story 
 of the resurrection with their local prejudices. He will 
 not show himself alive to proud and cruel Jerusalem. He 
 is not there. He will not even tarry to speak to his 
 mother, to Peter, or to John, whom he loved. He has 
 betaken himself to his beloved Galilee, which believed in 
 him. There, only there, shall ye see him. 
 
 As has been seen, the whole Johannic drama had for 
 one of its designs the presentation in its most imposing 
 light to Zion of her prophetic king, and to do away the 
 reproach, which seems the burden of the story : " Can 
 any good thing come out of Nazareth? Search, and look; 
 for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet."* Accordingly, the 
 phenomenon of the resurrection accommodates itself in 
 the writer's conception to this purpose. Jesus is not in 
 Galilee, nor will he show himself first there. In the 
 
 "John 1 , 46; vii., 52. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 397 
 
 guise of the keeper of the garden, he himself stands by 
 Mary of Magdala, and calls her by name ; and she recog- 
 nizes him as her crucified Master. 11 
 
 It seems to give a date to the composition of the Third 
 Gospel, that its version of the resurrection stands midway 
 between the Galilean and the Judaic traditions. The 
 Galilean tradition, as given by the first two evangelists, 
 is, that, though Jesus rose alive from his tomb in the en- 
 virons of Jerusalem, he first showed himself alive to the 
 twelve in Galilee. The Judaic tradition, affected by the 
 more conciliatory policy pursued by the followers of Jesus 
 after his death toward the Pharisees, asserts that the in- 
 terviews of the risen Master with his followers were in 
 Jerusalem, which he expressly forbade them to leave. For 
 Luke carefully eliminates from his affidavit all reference 
 to an appointment of Galilee as the place of reunion. 
 We find evident indication of a dispute that must have 
 quite divided the opinions of the little band of believers. 
 The older Galilean authorities, still clinging to their local 
 attachments, had insisted, that, as Jesus had honored 
 Galilee by doing in it all his great miracles, and preach- 
 ing all his fundamental doctrines, so had he recognized 
 it, by making it the place where he would show himself 
 first alive to his chosen witnesses after his passion. 
 They had gone so far as to put into the mouth of Jesus 
 a distinct and explicit prediction and direction that in 
 Galilee should be the place of meeting after the resurrec- 
 tion, as undoubtedly they had sought the sanction of 
 Jesus for many other points of belief, which, in the propa- 
 gandism of the faith, had become to their minds of prime 
 importance. Luke is no sceptic, but a man of easy faith, 
 full of innocent wonder at the miracles he has come fully 
 to believe in ; and it is not possible for him to deny any 
 tradition of Jesus, which honors his prophetic insight. 
 So he changes the story, or rather, perhaps, — for there is 
 no reason to question his good faith, — he reports a version 
 of it, which the Pharisaic Christians had come to believe. 
 Did not Jesus say himself, that he would appear alive in 
 Galilee ? eagerly asked the party of the primitive disci- 
 ples. 1 ' Not that he would appear in Galilee, say the later 
 Jewish proselytes, but lie said in Galilee that he would 
 
 a John xx., 14-17. "Matt, xxvi., 32; Mark xiv., 2S. 
 
39§ OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 appear. While the believers in the older story were too 
 numerous and too influential in the Church embracing, 
 doubtless, Peter, John, and James, and all the original 
 apostles, to allow their testimony to be overruled, and the 
 first tradition to be altered, it can be well understood how 
 a policy, which we find avowed among the early missiona- 
 ries of the faith, a would allow a contradictory tradition to 
 be told in those countries and among those people, where 
 it might help in winning souls to Christ. So the two 
 accounts, though impossible of reconciliation, find the 
 place in the Christian literature, and, ultimately, in the 
 canon of Scripture, which they have ever since main- 
 tained. 
 
 There is another illustration in the communication, by 
 which the resurrection was said to have been first an- 
 nounced to the world, of how such an occasion was seized 
 upon to get some sanction for cherished beliefs. Matthew, 
 writing first, says : " The angel said, Go quickly, and tell 
 his disciples that he is risen from the dead." Mark, writ- 
 ing later, reports the message : " Go your way, tell his 
 disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Gali- 
 lee." Was not Peter a disciple, and was he not included 
 in the direction to tell the disciples ? Can there be any 
 doubt that here was a writer, whom tradition declares to 
 have been the exponent and mouthpiece of Peter, endeav- 
 oring to get honor for his patron, and to get sanction for 
 the authority, which, according to the Acts of the Apostles, 
 Peter in his later life assumed over the faith of the Church, 
 — an authority culminating in the enormous pretensions 
 of the Papacy ? 
 
 Thus far, we have no statement from either witness of 
 any apparition of Jesus. Indeed, according to Matthew 
 and Mark and the more credible tradition, such appear- 
 ance at Jerusalem will be impossible ; for it will not only 
 contradict the angelic assurance, but the explicit predic- 
 tion of Jesus in his lifetime. The women, whether two 
 or many, find the tomb empty, the body they had come to 
 embalm gone, and angels, they do not agree how many, or 
 whether standing or sitting, within or without the tomb, 
 who declare that Jesus is not there. But it does not 
 appear that those angels pretended to be, nor are they by 
 
 a I. Cor. ix., 20-22. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 399 
 
 any of the visitants supposed to be, Jesus or impersona- 
 tions of Jesus. 
 
 Now is there any account that Jesus himself appeared 
 to any person other than the early visiting Galilean 
 women, at or near the tomb,- where he was buried ? All 
 the narratives agree in negativing this inquiry. Even the 
 Johannic drama is explicit in declaring that to no man 
 did the risen Master appear at or near his place of burial. 
 
 Did the Galilean women or either of them see Jesus 
 alive at or near the sepulchre ? Matthew says, the two 
 Marys ran from the sepulchre to tell the disciples what 
 they had seen and heard; and that Jesus himself met them, 
 as they went, and hailed them ; and that the women clasp- 
 ing his feet did homage to him, after which Jesus himself 
 renewed the angelic message, and commanded the women 
 to tell his brethren to go into Galilee, where they should 
 see him.* As yet there is nothing inconsistent in the 
 two statements. When the angel told the women : He is 
 not here, it was meant that he was not in the tomb. It 
 was not declared, that he had departed from Jerusalem to 
 Galilee, only that he was going to Galilee before his disci- 
 ples, and would show himself o them only there, though 
 he might show himself to his mother and his friend before 
 he left Jerusalem. Mark declares that Jesus showed him- 
 self first to Mary Magdalene, and the context requires us 
 to understand that this was at Jerusalem ; b but he does 
 not assert, that his mother Mary or any other woman was 
 present at the interview. It seems fairly to be implied, 
 that the other two appearances of Jesus after his death 
 mentioned by Mark were in the vicinity of Jerusalem, — 
 that is, to two 'disciples walking into the country, and to 
 the eleven as they sat at meat; and no meeting whatever 
 in Galilee is mentioned, though this writer declares else- 
 where the prediction of Jesus making an appointment of 
 Galilee for a showing after his resurrection, and also the 
 angelic message that the disciples and Peter should go to 
 Galilee to see Jesus.' 1 
 
 If we reject all of the last chapter of Mark after the 
 eighth verse, as funning, in the judgment of Tischendorf 
 and of other competent critics, no part of his original and 
 genuine gospel, the appearance of Jesus to any person in 
 
 11 Mitt, xxviii., 9, :o. '' Mark xvi., 9. c Mark xvi., 14, <1 Mark xiv. , 2S; xvi., 7. 
 
400 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Jerusalem stands upon still slighter testimony. The 
 statement of such appearance by Matthew is offset by the 
 denial of it by Luke, and remains unproved. As, how- 
 ever, these twelve suspected verses stand accredited in 
 our common version of the "New Testament, upon which 
 the whole structure of this argument is built ; as they 
 have not been omitted even in the lately revised Script- 
 ural translation, — it is deemed proper to consider them 
 as a part of the early, if not the earliest, tradition of the 
 resurrection. In an argument to show that all these 
 details of communications with Jesus, after his death, 
 must have been legendary accretions of his veritable 
 history, it would not be apposite to disregard a part of 
 them, because they are suspected of being later than 
 the rest. 
 
 But, when later, Luke undertook, in a letter to his friend 
 Theophilus, to set forth in order " a declaration of the 
 things that are most surely believed among us, as deliv- 
 ered by the eye-witness," the tradition of an appearance 
 of Jesus either to the two Marys or to Mary Magdalene 
 alone at Jerusalem had ceased to be told and believed. 
 For Luke gives, in two methods, the precise intelligence 
 which the Galilean women conveyed to the eleven disci- 
 ples ; and it is something quite different. There were 
 many women, he says, who had visited the sepulchre ; and 
 the report they brought back was, that the tomb was 
 empty, and that two angels declared Jesus to have risen 
 from the dead. Their story was wholly disbelieved : only 
 Peter ran to the sepulchre, and found no corpse therein, 
 and went away, perplexed with doubt and surprise. 15 The 
 account of the two disciples travelling into the country is 
 also given by Luke ; and, in their talk, they report pre- 
 cisely what the women had told on Sunday morning to 
 the assembled disciples. It is not that they had seen 
 Jesus, but that they had not found his body in the tomb, 
 and had also seen a vision of angels who said he was 
 alive. Him, they assert, they did not see. c 
 
 Comparing these documents with each other, and 
 applying to them the well-known rules of testing oral 
 testimony, it seems fairly inferrible, that the appearance 
 of Jesus alive to Mary Magdalene or to her and other Gali- 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 4OI 
 
 lean women in Jerusalem is not proved. Luke, one of the 
 witnesses, emphatically denies it ; and, while Matthew 
 and. Mark assert it, they assert with substantial circum- 
 stances inconsistent with each other, and the occurrence 
 itself was inconsistent with an appointment, which, they 
 say, was made by Jesus with his disciples, male and 
 female, to show himself to them in Galilee. 
 
 Were there no other proofs of a resurrection of Jesus 
 than these, we should not be justified in believing that 
 it had occurred. Credulous and enthusiastic as were the 
 disciples, upon this evidence alone it is admitted by all the 
 historians that the disciples refused to believe. On this 
 evidence, not reported, as it is to us, by unnamed writers, 
 without historic method or historic integrity, but told at 
 first hand by persons they confided in and respected, the 
 disciples believed not. a Luke asserts that they listened 
 contemptuously to the story. " Their words seemed to 
 them as idle tales, and they believed them not." b 
 
 The next appearance claimed to be of the risen Jesus 
 was to the two disciples travelling on Sunday to Emmaus. 
 One of these disciples was Cleopas, husband of the aunt 
 of Jesus. Of course, the person of Jesus was well known 
 to them. In the whole legend of the resurrection, Jesus 
 is made to authenticate his physical presence to his won- 
 dering friends by challenging an inspection and handling 
 of his body, with the marks of the crucifixion still upon 
 it. Having been suddenly put to death when in full 
 health, very little change could have affected his features 
 and expression. If the man overtaken on the road to 
 Emmaus had indeed been Jesus, there seems no good 
 reason why his intimate friends should not have recog- 
 nized him. The explanation ventured by the writer to 
 meet this obvious inference, that their eyes were holden 
 that they should not know him? is clumsy and unsatisfac- 
 tory. Why should their eyes be holden, when it was the 
 evident purpose of his appearance that they should know 
 him ? But he walked and talked with them for hours. 
 Of course, they would have known his looks, his tones, his 
 modes of speech ; and, as they did not, we should be com- 
 pelled to conclude the person who walked with them was 
 
 "Markxvi., ix. •» Luke xxiv., 11. <"• Luke xxiv , iS; John xix., 25. 
 
 J Luke xxiv., 13-33. 
 
402 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 not an acquaintance. The account says they recognized 
 him only when he blessed and brake the bread ; though 
 what distinguishing peculiarity there could have been in 
 this action, it is hard to understand. They think he 
 vanished out of their sight ; but, if he suddenly left them, 
 and they did not follow him, such disappearance need 
 not have been supernatural. 
 
 It was natural that in their excited minds, disturbed 
 and elated with what they had heard before leaving Jeru- 
 salem, about a vision of angels revealing to the women 
 that Jesus was alive, they should harbor the most welcome 
 surmise that the grave and courteous stranger, so con- 
 versant with the Messianic Scriptures, was Jesus ; but, 
 when they told the story while fresh in their memory, 
 with all its details, to the assembled disciples, there was 
 no one to give it credence'' 
 
 There must have been at Jerusalem many secret ad- 
 herents of Jesus, of the type of Nicodemus and Joseph 
 of Arimathea, who refrained under the prevalent terror 
 from avowing their sympathy. Doubtless, the unknown 
 man was a scribe, who joined the two travellers, and, 
 finding from the questions he asked that they were ad- 
 herents of the crucified, thought it safe to express his 
 secret conviction and avow the faith he held with them 
 in common. He withheld his name ; and, when he feared 
 that, in his enthusiasm, his disclosures might have ex- 
 ceeded the bounds of prudence, he might have left their 
 company to avoid the possibility of being betrayed to the 
 hostile influences that then controlled Jerusalem. 
 
 Thus far, then, nothing is shown to have happened indi- 
 cating that the dead Jesus has been restored to life, at 
 least nothing, that the accredited tradition, as told by the 
 three evangelists, concurrently maintains. Whatever man- 
 ifestation was made to Mary Magdalene, or to the two 
 travelling disciples, joyfully and confidently told by them, 
 met with no credence even from those who so much 
 wished to believe it. Of itself, it should not command 
 for a moment our faith, though, as the disciples came 
 afterward to recognize the resurrection as an accom- 
 plished fact, we, too, when we shall have found other 
 reasons for believing in it, may imitate them in revising 
 
 a Mark xvi., 13. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 4O3 
 
 our first judgment as to these equivocal and uncertain 
 appearances. Upon what other manifestations did the 
 disciples come to accept the resurrection as a veritable 
 event in the career of Jesus ? 
 
 Matthew says, the only manifestation of Jesus after- 
 ward was in a mountain in Galilee, where Jesus in his 
 lifetime had made an appointment to meet his followers. 
 He says : " The eleven disciples went away into a moun- 
 tain, where Jesus had appointed them. And when they 
 saw him, they worshipped him ; but some doubted. And 
 Jesus came and spake unto them, saying : All power is 
 given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, 
 and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the 
 Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; teach- 
 ing them to observe all things whatsoever I have com- 
 manded you : and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto 
 the end of the world." a Mark — if the whole passage 
 be not an interpolation — says : "Afterward he appeared 
 unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them 
 with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they 
 believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. 
 And he said unto them : Go ye into all the world, and 
 preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth 
 and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not 
 shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them 
 that believe. In my name shall they cast out devils ; 
 they shall speak with new tongues ; they shall take up 
 serpents ; and, if they drink any deadly thing, it shall 
 not hurt them ; they shall lay hands on the sick, and 
 they shall recover." b 
 
 Luke's account of the manifestation to the eleven is 
 in this wise. It was at Jerusalem, where the eleven and 
 their party were gathered together. " As they spake, Jesus 
 himself stood in the midst of them, and said : Peace be 
 unto you. Why are ye troubled ? and why do thoughts 
 arise in your hearts ? Behold my hands and my feet, that 
 it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not 
 flesh and bones, as ye see me have." Then, he showed 
 his hands and feet, and called for food and ate before 
 them, and, resuming his communication, said : " These 
 are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet 
 
 •'.Matt, xxviii., 16-20. l>Markxvi., 14-18. 
 
4O4 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were 
 written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets and 
 in the psalms concerning me. Thus it is written, and 
 thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the 
 dead the third day ; and that repentance and remission 
 of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, 
 beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these 
 things. And, behold, I send the promise of my Father 
 upon you : but tarry in the city of Jerusalem, until ye 
 be endued with power from on high." Then he led 
 them forth, as far as Bethany, and blessed them, and 
 was parted from them, and carried up to heaven. a 
 
 The last words of wise and great men, their grand sum- 
 ming up, at the last, of the experience and teachings of 
 life, have always been sacredly cherished among mankind, 
 who have hoped from the verge, that bounds the fascinat- 
 ing mystery beyond, to get some gleam of intelligence. 
 How much more precious is intelligence brought not from 
 this, but the other side of the gulf of death ! Here is one 
 of the wisest, the purest, the bravest souls, that ever lived, 
 returned from the grave ! He has deigned to stop in his 
 passage from corruption and the tomb, to incorruption 
 and a conscious eternal life in the spiritual world, to show 
 himself to his friends. He shrinks not from their ques- 
 tions ; and, unlike the thin company of ghosts, that appall 
 us with their austerity, he challenges their most familiar 
 handling of his person, and precedes them to feasts of 
 eating and conviviality. Was ever the aching curiosity 
 of man so lavishly satisfied ? Was ever such a transcend- 
 ent communication made to mankind ? How momentous 
 it is ! Could one man of the eleven ever in his lifetime 
 forget the substance or even the very form, body, expres- 
 sion, and tone of it, for it was only a few words ? Incapa- 
 ble of being forgotten, as it was said, in form as well as 
 spirit, in its very words and phraseology, what presump- 
 tion, what audacity of impiety to falsify it, to suppress 
 any of it, to add anything to it; to inject into it any 
 trivial detail, any incertitude ! And yet what perplexes 
 and astounds us in putting together these old documents, 
 the muniments of our title to an eternal life, is to find 
 them so contradictory, not only in form and expression, 
 but also in substance and subject-matter. 
 
 a Luke xxiv., 44, 46-49, 50-53. 
 

 LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 405 
 
 Where was this most consequential and momentous 
 interview between a divine being, who had come back 
 from death, to which in the form of man he had been 
 subjected, to throw light upon the darkness of the grave? 
 and who were allowed the supreme privilege of partici- 
 pating in it ? It was on a mountain in Galilee, says our 
 most trustworthy witness, upon whom we have chiefly 
 relied for the historic details of the life of Jesus. Nay, 
 reply two other witnesses, it was in a private room in 
 Jerusalem. Only eleven apostles were present, maintain 
 Matthew and Mark. The eleven apostles, and they of 
 their party, the body of Jesus' adherents, were present, 
 says Luke. 
 
 Let us suppose, instead of the vast stake depending 
 upon the actuality of this appearance of Jesus and upon 
 the communication he is believed to have made to the 
 world, it had been simply the title to an estate claimed 
 to have been devised by a nuncupative will. The judge 
 inquires of the three witnesses : Where were the words, 
 you claim to have the legal effect of a will, uttered by 
 the testator? Two of them testify, they were spoken in 
 a club-house in Boston ; and one, they were spoken on 
 a mountain in New Hampshire. The judge would not 
 permit them to testify as to the words, however accordant 
 the report might be ; for he would say : Until you can fix 
 the time and place of the comimtnication, I cannot permit 
 you to give its import. If it should be suggested that 
 the deceased just before his death was in the company 
 of the witnesses both in a club-house in Boston and on 
 a mountain in New Hampshire, and in both places he 
 talked about disposing of his estate, the explanation might 
 let in the testimony as to the language, because the wit- 
 nesses might honestly disagree as to the place where the 
 effective words were uttered. But let us suppose that 
 two of the witnesses persist in declaring : We know 
 nothing about any conversation of the deceased in New 
 Hampshire ; we never met him there. He assured us 
 that he had not been in New Hampshire for a month 
 before our last interview with him, and that he wished 
 to make his will in Boston, so that his estate could be 
 administered under the laws of Massachusetts ; while the 
 third witness should insist : His devisees, his counsel, his 
 
406 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 friends, all wished him to make his will in Boston ; but 
 he insisted that he would do nothing about it till he could 
 get back to New Hampshire, and he made an appointment 
 with them and us to meet him there for that purpose. 
 In such an aspect of the testimony, the disagreement as 
 to the attendant circumstances would make it impossible 
 that it all related to the same transaction, and the court 
 could never come to a consideration of the words of the 
 communication. 
 
 The proof of Jesus' appearance stands much in this 
 way. Matthew says it was in a mountain in Galilee by 
 express appointment of Jesus, made in his lifetime, re- 
 newed by angelic messengers stationed at his tomb.* 
 Mark and Luke say it was in a room in the city of Jerusa- 
 lem ; b and the latter adds, that Jesus expressly forbade 
 the disciples to leave Jerusalem and to go to Galilee, and 
 that they did not go thither. 
 
 But, to carry the illustration further, let it now be sup- 
 posed that, in the case of this nuncupative will, the scru- 
 ples of the judge about the irreconcilable attending cir- 
 cumstances had been overcome, and that he had defi- 
 nitely or provisionally permitted the witnesses to testify 
 as to the words of the testator, claimed to operate as a 
 devise. They recapitulate them. They are taken down, 
 and this is their purport. One witness says : the deceased 
 said he desired all to take notice that all his property, 
 real and personal, was to go to his deceased wife's 
 nephew. The next witness says : what I heard him say 
 was, that all he left was to be given to the town of Han- 
 over, as a fund for the support of its poor. The third 
 witness, on being put upon oath, testifies : he said he 
 wanted us to be witnesses that he was about to make a 
 verbal will, and then added : whatever I leave I desire 
 to go to Harvard College. Could either of the devisees 
 obtain an estate from such utterly contradictory testi- 
 mony ? 
 
 But, as to the substance and subject-matter of the post- 
 mortuary communication of Jesus, the testimony of the 
 written tradition is quite as conflicting. According to 
 Matthew, he said : that all power was given to him in 
 
 ■'Matt, xxviii., 7, 10, 16; xxvi., 32. t'Markxvi., 14, 19. 
 
 c Luke xxiv., 33, 36, 49, 50; Acts i., 4, 8, 12, 14. 
 

 LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 407 
 
 heaven and earth, and that he should always be with his 
 disciples till the end of the world. Accordingly, Matthew 
 makes no mention of his withdrawal to heaven ; nor can 
 he do so consistently with the assurance that he had 
 declared Jesus had given, that he had come back from 
 death to stay with them to the near end of the world. 
 The message he gave, according to Matthew, was, that 
 his disciples should teach all nations to observe the things 
 he had commanded, — that is, that they should keep his 
 moral precepts, — a declaration quite in harmony with Mat- 
 thew's view of the mission of Jesus. 
 
 Mark makes the communication consist of a reproach of 
 the disciples for not believing what Mary Magdalene and 
 the two disciples had told them, whereas their caution and 
 candor seem only commendable. The charge to the disci- 
 ples was not the inculcation of moral precepts at all, but 
 to go and tell every creature that the kingdom of heaven 
 was at hand, or preach the good news, and he that be- 
 lieved that, and accepted baptism, should be saved ; and 
 he that believed not should be damned. Then, he de- 
 clared that real believers should be known by their power 
 to cast out devils, to speak with tongues, to heal the sick 
 by touch, and to drink and handle poisonous things with- 
 out harm. He said nothing about a purpose to remain 
 with his disciples to the end; for the witness declares that, 
 after his message, he was received up into heaven, and sat 
 on the right hand of God. a 
 
 Luke's version of the last testament of Jesus is almost 
 wholly different with the exception of a statement of the 
 preaching among all nations of — not the moral precepts, 
 nor the kingdom of heaven — but of a remission of sins in 
 Jesus' name to succeed repentance. Thus, if we ask what 
 did the risen Master direct his witnesses and apostles to 
 preach, Matthew says, his doctrines of morality; Mark 
 says, the kingdom of heaven, and faith and baptism as the 
 conditions of salvation ; while Luke insists that it was the 
 forgiveness of sins for Jesus' sake to all who repented. 
 According to Luke, he did not chide his friends for their 
 doubt, or attribute it to perversity, but gently reassured 
 them with actual proofs, both of his identity and of his 
 physical presence, with all his members, functions, and 
 
40S OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 appetites, and afterwards took up the debate, which con- 
 stitutes so large a part of the controversial Epistles of 
 Paul, and is dramatically reproduced in the Fourth Gos- 
 pel, and labored to impress upon his hearers that his 
 career as a prophet, his crucifixion and his resurrection, 
 were all foreshadowed in the Hebrew scriptures. As in 
 Mark, everything Luke says implies a withdrawal and 
 leave-taking, and not a staying in the world till its end ; 
 and so Luke tells elsewhere of Jesus' formal withdrawing 
 in the sight of many witnesses to heaven." 
 
 It is probable that in the First Gospel we have the ear- 
 liest tradition of the resurrection ; but, as it did not get 
 committed to writing till after the writing of Paul's Epis- 
 tles, it contains also, what came to be believed among 
 a part of the disciples, the story of the meeting of Jesus 
 with Mary Magdalene, as she departed from the tomb. 
 This must be considered an interpolation, since any show- 
 ing of himself by Jesus to his disciples in Jerusalem was 
 inconsistent with Matthew's declaration, that both Jesus 
 and the angelic messenger had appointed Galilee as the 
 place for such showing. It is easy to perceive how the 
 story grew in the telling ; for, brief as Mark's general 
 biography is, it is fuller than Matthew's concerning the 
 resurrection. Jesus, according to Mark, shows himself 
 first to Mary Magdalene, after that to two disciples, and 
 then to the eleven apostles, sitting at meat, — all in 
 Jerusalem. Mark adds a distinct appearance not men- 
 tioned by Matthew, and places the interview with the 
 eleven in Jerusalem instead of Galilee. When Luke — 
 the date is not known, but certainly after many other 
 lives of Jesus had been written b — contributes his me- 
 morabilia, although he discountenances the story of any 
 appearance to the women, or to any disciple, previously 
 to the two travellers to Emmaus, he gives the last- 
 named appearance with vivid and picturesque details ; c 
 and the appearance to the eleven at Jerusalem, with a 
 much fuller communication from Jesus to his disciples. d 
 If we adopt Tischendorf's conclusion that the last twelve 
 verses of Mark's Gospel are additions by another hand to 
 the genuine writing, the three distinct appearances of 
 Jesus mentioned in our Second Gospel — which is prob- 
 
 ■* Acts i. ( 9-12. •> Luke i., :. c Luke xxiv., 13-33. lI Luke xxiv., 36-49. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 4O9 
 
 ably older than the Third, in which but two appearances 
 are mentioned — become intelligible. So far as they are 
 genuine, the first two evangels make mention of but one 
 appearance, and the third evangel of but two appearances 
 of the risen Jesus. 
 
 When later Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles, he 
 told of a tarrying of Jesus among his followers after his 
 death for a period of forty days, and of a showing of him- 
 self alive by many infallible proofs, and of much general 
 instruction given pertaining to the kingdom of heaven. 
 This statement does not necessarily imply a showing of 
 Jesus to his followers each one of the forty days ; but it 
 does imply that during six weeks Jesus was in the habit 
 of frequent intercourse with his disciples, and gave them 
 copious counsel and instruction. 11 
 
 Did not this writer think these " things pertaining to the 
 kingdom of God," which Jesus, returning from the realms 
 of death and about to ascend to the counsels and com- 
 panionship of the Father, had stopped to confide to his 
 disciples, worth telling ? Did he think the recitations of 
 Old Testament stories, which make up the speeches of 
 Stephen, of Peter, and of Paul, of so much more moment 
 than these awful last words of the king and judge of the 
 world ? If such things had been spoken, would they not 
 have burned themselves indelibly into each believer's 
 heart, who would have exclaimed : — 
 
 " Remember thee ? 
 Ay, thou great ghost, while memory holds a seat 
 In this distracted globe. Remember thee ? 
 Yea, from the table of my memory 
 I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, 
 All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, 
 That youth and observation copied there; 
 And thy commandment all alone shall live 
 Within the book and volume of my brain 
 Unmixed with baser matter: yes, yes, by heaven." 
 
 When Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, 
 about the year 59 — though this was probably earlier 
 than the writing of the Acts or either of the Synoptic 
 Gospels in their present form — the tradition, as learned 
 by him, seemed to be of five distinct appearances of 
 Jesus to his disciples, enumerated in this order : first to 
 
 "Acts i., 2-12. 
 
4IO OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Peter alone, then to the twelve, then to five hundred 
 disciples at once, then to James, then to all the apos- 
 tles." It is singular that the appearance first and solely 
 to Peter is nowhere else mentioned in the New Testa- 
 ment writings, not even by Mark, whose story a definite 
 tradition imputes to the dictation of Peter, and incredi- 
 ble that five hundred of the brethren should have been 
 assembled together, when the whole body of believers 
 numbered but one hundred and twenty, and when the 
 difficulty of assembling them all — scattered and alarmed 
 as they were — must have been very great. b 
 
 The Pauline version of the resurrection however, though 
 avowed hearsay, stands upon better authority than any- 
 thing in the Christian records, having for its sponsor so 
 respectable a writer as Paul. When we can perceive the 
 story growing thus in the very process of its telling, when 
 we find in what is believed to be its earliest oral promul- 
 gation not a trace of any separate appearings of Jesus to 
 Peter or to James, or of any assemblage of five hundred 
 brethren, who all attested it, some of them known and 
 living when Paul wrote, we are compelled to conclude that 
 the other details, less contradicted, are, like these, the 
 accretions of an enthusiastic faith, which had for its sup- 
 port but little, if any, basis of fact. It certainly is surpris- 
 ing that the primitive Christians should have gone out 
 among the sceptics and philosophers of the first century 
 with such a stupendous announcement as that Jesus had 
 appeared in bodily life after his burial, without having 
 been able to agree among themselves as to where the 
 manifestation took place, how many times it was repeated, 
 to whom it was made, or what was the substance or sub- 
 ject-matter of the communication which the resuscitated 
 Master made to his followers. 
 
 It will not be legitimate to cite the Fourth Gospel, with 
 the critical estimate of it adopted in this paper, as a fourth 
 distinct account of the resurrection, since it is not probable 
 that any historic purpose or historic responsibility con- 
 trolled the writer of that unique production. It is enough 
 to remark in this connection that the risen Jesus of John, 
 which is the prevalent Christian conception, that has con- 
 tinued till our time, no more resembles the risen Jesus 
 
 a I. Cor. xv., 3-8. bActs i. , 15. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 41 1 
 
 of the older traditions, than does the controversial Jesus, 
 holding metaphysical colloquies with the Pharisees, with 
 Nicodemus, with Pilate, and with his disciples, accord with 
 the Galilean prophet, announcing the kingdom of heaven 
 and preaching the ethics of poverty, of non-resistance, 
 and of universal almsgiving. 
 
 We have left then five testimonies to be weighed and 
 compared with each other. Paul's, the first committed to 
 writing, the most genuine, and, on the whole, the most 
 respectable, asserts that Jesus first showed himself alive 
 to Peter, that later James was favored with a private in- 
 terview, and that five hundred of his disciples saw him 
 simultaneously. But when we take up Mark's deposition, 
 we find it disclaiming that distinction for the apostle, who 
 is believed in the Church to have dictated the Second 
 Gospel. Mary Magdalene, it says, saw Jesus first. Peter 
 only saw him later with the other eleven. Matthew's 
 Gospel, believed to be the written form which the orig- 
 inal Galilean tradition of Jesus assumed some time during 
 the first or second century, of all others ought to know 
 about an appearance to James, who, in his Epistle most 
 nearly expresses the Galilean gospel of good works and 
 poverty ; but it does not make special mention of him 
 as present at any reported conversation of the resur- 
 rected Jesus. All the other deponents ignore the mani- 
 festation to the five hundred brethren, and Luke gives a 
 statement which makes such a manifestation impossible. 1 
 On the other hand, Paul ignores any manifestation to 
 Mary Magdalene or to the two travellers to Emmaus, and 
 by classing these appearances with that to him in vision 
 on the road to Damascus, and by his exposition of the 
 nature of the spiritual body, b most plainly indicates that 
 all these appearances were apparitional, and not actual. 
 
 Everything before the appearance to the eleven rests 
 upon the credit of Mary Magdalene, whose account, freshly 
 told, the apostles themselves disbelieved, and of the two 
 travelling disciples, whose conjecture that Jesus had walked 
 and talked with them seemed an idle tale to their fellow 
 disciples ; and, when we consider its details, we are forced 
 to adopt their suspicion. As to the appearance to the 
 eleven, besides the hopelessly irreconcilable statements 
 
 nActsi.,15. b I. Cor. xv., 50. 
 
412 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 as to where it occurred and what was the matter commu- 
 nicated, we have the naive avowal, that, of the eleven to 
 whom it was said to have been manifested, some doubted.* 
 The whole Church, including these disciples, came after- 
 ward to believe and persistently to maintain that Jesus 
 had come back to his earthly life. We ought at least to 
 maintain the candor of these ardent men, and conclude 
 that a personal manifestation that could not coerce their 
 faith cannot now secure ours in its contradictory and 
 confused telling by irresponsible annalists. 
 
 But an argument, that builds itself upon what may be 
 called a professional and cunning cross-examination, does 
 not press with the weight of assured conviction upon large 
 and liberal minds. For such minds, these considerations 
 are apposite. Why should Jesus have appeared alive 
 after his death on the cross ? Such an appearance was 
 wholly outside of his own anticipations and prognostica- 
 tions. His dominant idea was of a kingdom of heaven, of 
 which he came to have an assured faith, that he himself 
 was king. He believed that his human life was his send- 
 ing from the Deity to the chosen people, the Jews, to give 
 them their last dispensation of grace and salvation. First, 
 the Lord of the vineyard sent his servants, the prophets, 
 but, last of all, his son. But the wicked husbandmen, who 
 had stoned and disregarded the servants, will reject and 
 slay the son. b The son of God and king of heaven must 
 submit to shame and death. But, after death, he will come 
 again, not as before in weakness, still less in secrecy, but 
 in power and glory, with all the holy angels with him. 
 His coming will need no proclamation, nor will men say : 
 Lo here, or lo there is Christ ; for, as the lightning in the 
 east flashes through all the heavens, so shall the coming 
 of the Son of Man be. All the earth shall be astounded 
 at the brightness of his coming, and all the tribes of the 
 earth shall mourn because of him. c 
 
 After the legend of the resurrection, against some pro- 
 test, had established itself among the believers, Jesus him- 
 self is made to give sanction to it by precise predictions of 
 it in his lifetime. Thus, in Matthew's narrative, after the 
 famous conference with his disciples at Caesarea-Philippi, 
 
 a Matt, xxviii., 17. b Matt, xxi., 33-44. 
 
 cMatt. xxiv., 23-31 ; xxv., 31 ; xxvi., 64 ; Luke xxi., 25-36. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 413 
 
 Jesus is declared to have begun to show to his disciples, 
 that he must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things of 
 the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and be 
 raised again on the third day. a Coming down from the 
 mount of transfiguration, he charges his disciples not to tell 
 of the vision of Moses and Elias, till after he had risen from 
 the dead. b Again, before leaving Galilee, Jesus said to his 
 followers : " The Son of Man shall be betrayed into the 
 hands of men ; and they shall kill him, and the third day he 
 shall be raised again." While going up to Jerusalem, 
 Jesus took the twelve apart, and told them : "The Son of 
 Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto 
 the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and 
 shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, 
 and crucify him ; and the third day he shall rise again." d 
 Finally, in his last interview with them, before he was 
 betrayed, having told them his time was at hand, he said : 
 " It is written, I will smite the Shepherd, and the sheep 
 shall be scattered abroad. But after I am risen again, I 
 will go before you into Galilee." e Mark reports the same 
 communications, as made on the same occasions, with 
 such similarity of language that one account is evidently 
 copied from the other/ Luke reports the first three of 
 these communications in quite similar language.* 5 
 
 That Jesus foreboded his death at Jerusalem from 
 the malignity of his enemies, whose animosity he 
 had determined to provoke by severe denunciations, has 
 already been seen. He believed himself to be the Shep- 
 herd, who was to be smitten, the Messiah, whose grave 
 was to be made with the wicked, and that this suffering 
 and shame must needs precede his coming as Judge and 
 Conqueror and King. The manner of his death, by 
 whom and in what form it was to be inflicted, and the 
 minute details of his mockery and scourging, as he could 
 not have foreseen, must have been added to his actual 
 declarations after the event, as was akso the expectation 
 of a resurrection after the third day. That he did not 
 predict his resurrection the third day is evident from the 
 fact that the Old Scriptures, though certain of them in 
 
 
 Matt, xvi., 21. •> Matt, xvii., 9. c Matt, xvii., 22, 23. & Matt. XX., li 
 e Matt, xxvi., 18-32. ' Mark viiL, 3: ; ix., 31, 32 ; x., 32-34; xiv., 28. 
 g Luke ix., 22, 44, 4SJ xviii., 31-34. 
 
4H OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 the fanciful interpretations of the time, were believed to 
 indicate that Messiah could not be held by the powers of 
 evil forever in the under world, did not indicate three 
 days, as the period of his sojourn in those realms of 
 silence. The grotesque story of Jonah's living burial for 
 three days in the belly of a whale, which evidently came 
 to be credited as a veritable adventure befalling one of 
 their national prophets, might have been seized hold of 
 by the evangelists and disciples, as typical of the death 
 and resurrection of their Master. But we cannot impute 
 this whimsical fancy to Jesus without involving him in 
 self-contradiction.* The second coming of the Son of 
 Man was to usher in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus 
 could not have indicated three days after his death as 
 the opening of an epoch the day and hour of which he 
 declared he did not know. a 
 
 But the naivete of the evangelists' narration quite con- 
 futes them ; for all accounts of the resurrection — those 
 claimed to be historic and those avowedly or apparently 
 dramatic — represent the surprise of Jesus' disciples at 
 his resurrection to have been complete. The Marys and 
 the company of women, larger or smaller, went to the 
 sepulchre early on Sunday morning — Matthew and John 
 say only to see the sepulchre, the burial rites having 
 been completed Friday evening — Mark and Luke say to 
 complete the burial rites, by adding ointments and spices 
 to the cerements. But no reader of any of the deposi- 
 tions can fail to notice that the women went without the 
 slightest expectation or hope of finding yesns alive, though 
 
 *The opinion here arrived at in reference to Jesus having predicted in his lifetime a 
 rising again in three days after his death is the result of balancing conflicting testimony. It 
 is quite probable that Jesus did speak of himself as fulfilling some function or office of the 
 prophet Jonah. Was the similitude that of a temporary death and a resuscitation after three 
 days ? So the disciples and evangelists evidently came to believe. A rumor seemed to have 
 got abroad, that he had said if the temple were destroyed he would build it again in three days; 
 and for this saying, as blasphemy, he was actually tried. But we must remember that this 
 testimony broke down, and was discredited even by his enemies. What Jesus did say of 
 himself in connection with Jonah is probably just what Matthew and Luke agree in re- 
 porting : — 
 
 " This evil generation desir% a sign. No sign shall be given it but the sign of Jonas the 
 prophet ; for, as Jonas was a sign to the Ninevites, so shall the Son of Man be to this genera- 
 tion ; for the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonas, but this generation have not 
 repented though a greater than Jonas has preached to them." '• 
 
 But the very name of Jonah suggested to the ancient as it always does to the modem 
 mind the adventure with the whale, which effectually swallows up his fame as a prophet and 
 reformer; and when, after the death of Jesus, it came to be believed, that he had risen again 
 on the third day, a new and striking similitude was found between him and Jonah, to whom 
 in wholly other respects he had likened himself. 
 
 a Matt, xxiv., 36. b Matt, xii., 41, 42 ; Luke xi., 30-32. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 415 
 
 Sunday was the third day after the crucifixion. Neither 
 his mother, nor Mary Magdalene, nor the sympathetic 
 and affectionate women, who stood afar off at the cru- 
 cifixion, after Peter, James, and John had fled, appeared 
 to know anything about a resurrection. The two disciples 
 speak of his death, and say that they had hoped it was 
 he that would have redeemed Israel, but speak sadly, as 
 if that hope had perished on his cross. Though they had 
 even heard that his body was gone, and that angels, coming 
 in a vision, had said that he was alive, they have evidently 
 no such hope. When Peter and the other apostles are 
 told that the body is not in the grave, and the two disci- 
 ples are full of excitement in the belief that the gracious 
 and learned scribe whom they met on their journey was 
 Jesus himself, they are not helped toward belief by any 
 the slightest anticipation in their own minds of such a 
 happening as a rising of their Master from the dead. 
 
 How is this to be accounted for? Had Jesus on four 
 different occasions taken his followers aside, and with the 
 plainest and most literal speech he ever used told them 
 of his violent death, and of his coming again to life on the 
 third day, and yet are none of them — not Peter, nor 
 John, nor James, nor his own mother — found at the 
 sepulchre, waiting with beating hearts to welcome him 
 back to life? With a hope — and Jesus' plain words 
 ought to have been an assurance to his disciples — that on 
 the third day death would restore their leader and master 
 to them, would the disciples have fled at his arrest, would 
 Peter have denied him? And yet, strangest of all, while 
 the disciples and family of Jesus have most evidently not 
 the slightest expectation of his resurrection, though Jesus 
 had told them plainly of it at least four times, repeating 
 it the evening of his arrest, Matthew represents that the 
 chief priests, who had not been told, who could only have 
 heard of it from the lips of the disciples, seemed to be so 
 aware of the resurrection, or of something that might be 
 told to the credulous as such, that, with the assistance of 
 the procurator's government, they had provided an extra- 
 ordinary guard to watch over the sepultured body of 
 Jesus ! a 
 
 This utter faithlessness of the disciples in the resurrec- 
 
 "Matt. xxvii., 62-66; xxviii., 4, 13-15. 
 
4l6 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 tion as an event to be expected, the narratives of Mark 
 and Luke, in their attempt to account for it, confirm. 
 The thought evidently occurs to the writers or to some 
 transcriber or editor : If Jesus told beforehand all the 
 particulars of his resurrection, why did his friends, to 
 whom he made the communication, not look for his res- 
 urrection ? Why did they receive its first intelligence 
 with scornful unbelief? 
 
 Mark says, when Jesus told his disciples that he was 
 to be killed and rise the third clay, they understood not 
 that saying, and were afraid to ask him. Luke declares : 
 " The disciples understood none of these things, and this 
 saying was hid from them." a How could it be hid, when 
 so plainly told ? As Pharisees, they believed already 
 in the resurrection of the dead. They believed their 
 greatest prophets had gone to heaven in their bodily 
 forms. They believed that the bones of the revered 
 Elisha had given life to a dead man. Did they not be- 
 lieve that Jesus by a word had recalled from death the 
 ruler's young daughter in Galilee ? Can it be possible, if 
 these men had stood by at Bethany a few days before, 
 when Jesus had illustrated his ideas of the resurrection by 
 calling their friend Lazarus from the tomb, that they 
 could not understand how the man, who had shown such 
 power over death, could not remain subject to it? 
 
 If the estimate of the character of Jesus held by man- 
 kind were made to depend solely upon the words and 
 actions, which tradition imputes to him after his resurrec- 
 tion, it is easy to perceive that it would not be so high 
 as that now entertained. Fascinated and excited, as we 
 may have been, with the earnest assurances of many 
 apparently sincere people, that under difficult and capri- 
 cious conditions they could establish between us and cer- 
 tain celebrated persons, who have died, intelligible com- 
 munications of question and answer, the general impres- 
 sion made upon us by these communications has been of 
 disappointment and indifference. When the spirit of 
 Daniel Webster is presented to us by an impressible 
 medium, it has none of the characteristic eloquence and 
 simple cogency of statement, which characterized the 
 great orator in his lifetime. Franklin comes back to 
 
 o Mark ix., 31, 32 ; Luke ix., 45. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 417 
 
 us with none of his practical sagacity ; Humboldt, with 
 none of his comprehensive intelligence ; and Channing, 
 with none of his elevation and purity of spirit. All the 
 ghosts present themselves to us with their mental pecu- 
 liarities cancelled and their individuality suppressed, 
 steeped alike in the atmosphere of sentimentality and 
 cant, in which, as in a dreary limbo, they seem to have 
 lived. They assure us that they are happy ; but we 
 never can quite understand how they can be, in such a 
 sphere of wearisome vapidity and platitude. 
 
 If the intercourse of Jesus with his followers after his 
 death is an unverifiable tradition, then the undignified and 
 unheroic conduct imputed to him, the feeble language, 
 shorn of all the sententious pith and pungency of his 
 known style, the insisting upon trivialities, and the prom- 
 inence given to dogmas in which he had no credence are 
 easily explicable. The narrators compromise Jesus in 
 exactly the measure that they presume to report his 
 words, and every sensitive reader feels instinctively that 
 the majestic character suffers the least from him who 
 undertakes to tell the least. 
 
 Matthew, true to the confidence he has earned by the 
 general simplicity, probability, and orderly sequence of 
 his narrative, only puts into the mouth of Jesus these 
 words already quoted : " Be not afraid : tell my brethren 
 that they go to Galilee, and there shall they see me." In 
 Galilee, he only said : " All power is given me in heaven 
 and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, bap- 
 tizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of 
 the Holy Ghost ; teaching them to observe all things I 
 have commanded you : and, lo, I am with you always to 
 the end of the world." 11 
 
 When Mark's story, as we now have it, obtains publica- 
 tion, the communication of the risen Jesus has quite 
 changed its character, and becomes, first, a chiding of his 
 followers for their hardness of heart in not believing Mary 
 Magdalene, who claimed to have seen him, and the two 
 travellers to Emmaus, who had seen a person who did not 
 look or speak like him, and who could not have been he, 
 if he had truthfully declared that in Galilee his disciples 
 should see him ; second, an assurance that belief and 
 
 "Matt, xxviii., 10, 18-20. 
 
4l8 OPINIONS AXD CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 baptism are necessary to salvation, and that real believers 
 should be known by their power to cast out devils, to 
 speak with new tongues, to take up serpents, and drink 
 poison without harm, and to heal the sick by touching 
 them.* 
 
 Luke elaborates and extends every thing. The reas- 
 suring word, " Be not afraid," becomes : " Why are ye 
 troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?" and, 
 along with a showing of his wounded hands and feet, an 
 emphatic avowal that what the disciples see is no spirit, 
 but flesh and bones — a veritable corporeal presence. 
 While they believed not for joy, he calls for food, further 
 to assure them that he is no ghost, but has the appetite 
 of a living man. Then follows an exposition of ancient 
 scripture, and the repetition of the arguments he is said 
 to have elaborated before the travellers to Emmaus, with 
 the announcement that repentance and remission of sins 
 are to be preached in his name among all nations, begin- 
 ning at Jerusalem, and a distinct command that his dis- 
 ciples, instead of going to Galilee to meet him, must tarry 
 at Jerusalem, till they should be endued with power from 
 on high. b 
 
 Regarding all that is told of Jesus' acts and words after 
 his death as the fruit of the Christian imagination justify- 
 ing its excursions by a dogmatic purpose, it is legitimate 
 to allude to the Johannic narrative, even if it was origi- 
 nally produced as an avowed fiction. In that, the story 
 of Jesus still expands itself, gathering the accretions the 
 legend has received in more than a century's telling, and 
 growing still more grotesque. Still, the dramatic power 
 of the writer does not desert him. The narrative becomes 
 in his hand as vivid, as picturesque, as personal, as are the 
 conversations at Jacob's well with the Samaritan woman, 
 or the minute details of the talk, that accompanied the 
 restoration to sight of the man born blind. It is the man 
 of constructive genius reciting his vivid poem alongside of 
 the matter-of-fact annalist, and never losing his conscious- 
 ness of poetic effect. Mary Magdalene touchingly rec- 
 ognizes him as " Rabboni." Jesus looks at her with the 
 familiar, affectionate address of "Mary." Not all the dis- 
 ciples, only hard-hearted Thomas — if, after the gentle 
 
 a Mark xvi , 15-18. b Luke xxiv., 3S-49. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 419 
 
 reproaches before all the brethren, he is not ashamed to 
 do it — must handle the Master's feet and hands, to learn 
 that he is not a spirit. But Mary Magdalene must not 
 even touch him. It is the requirement of the Johannic 
 mind, that Jesus must give a reason for everything which 
 he does or says ; so this reason is given for the prohibi- 
 tion : "Because I have not yet ascended to my Father." 
 Of course, the writer cannot tell why that should be a 
 reason for not touching Jesus, and not a reason for touch- 
 ing him ; nor why, if it were a reason why one disciple 
 should not touch him, it was not a reason why the others 
 should not handle him. John further says that Jesus 
 breathed upon his disciples to impart to them the Holy 
 Ghost, which Luke declares was not to be given till after a 
 tarrying at Jerusalem after his ascension, and that he not 
 only commissioned his disciples to preach and to baptize 
 the repentant, but to remit or retain at their discretion all 
 the sins of the human race, — an enormous concession of 
 spiritual .authority. 11 
 
 The details of the twenty-first chapter — by many good 
 scholars believed to be a palpable corruption of the text 
 of the original writing — containing the marvellous story 
 of the great catch of fish through the divination of Jesus, 
 the gross demand for food, and the eager precedence of 
 Jesus in the passage to the prepared viands, the chaffing 
 of Peter as a piece of after-dinner divertisement, and the 
 gossiping fortune-telling of the fates of Peter and John, 
 are not to be laid to the discredit of a composition on 
 the whole so unique, consistent, and spiritual as the 
 Fourth Gospel. 
 
 In courts of law, forgeries so perfect as to deceive the 
 most cunning experts have been exposed by discovering 
 water-line impressions, which indicate that the paper upon 
 which they were written was manufactured after the date 
 they bear. In these imputed communications of Jesus, 
 are there any indications of a similar anachronism ? In 
 the three avowedly historic narratives there is one com- 
 mand of the risen Jesus, as to the terms of which there 
 is a tolerable accord among the writers ; that is, the com- 
 mand to offer the privileges of the gospel of Jesus to all 
 mankind. Matthew reports it: "Go teach all nations," 
 
420 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 baptizing them in the three divine names. Mark declares 
 the word to have been : " Go ye into all the world, and 
 preach the gospel to every creature" ; and Luke puts it 
 into the form of an acknowledgment of a divine preordi- 
 nation, that repentance and remission of sins should be 
 preached in the name of Jesus among all nations, the first 
 overture being to Jerusalem/ 
 
 It was taking a liberty with language not warranted 
 by the fidelity of history, to give this brief message of so 
 revered a person as Jesus even such varied expression 
 as this. But we are forced to recognize the perplexing 
 fact, that the reporters come nearer to agreement on this 
 than on any point. The founder of our faith appeared 
 alive after his death, and spake to his trusted followers. 
 What did he say f asks the eager world. We have not 
 been able to agree, say those who report the stupendous 
 event, except that in terms, about which the recollection 
 of the witnesses differ, he did direct that the benefits of his 
 gospel of a kingdom of heaven were to be offered ,to every 
 human being, to all nations and to every creature. The 
 words of Jesus, if all were said, were not too many for 
 the memories of ordinary men ; but is it to be supposed 
 that the only words, the substance of which all the wit- 
 nesses were able to remember, should have been within 
 half a dozen years after his death forgotten or disre- 
 garded ? And yet, if they had been uttered, we are 
 forced to that conclusion. 
 
 For it seems from a narrative of the beginnings of Chris- 
 tianity by Luke, one of the gospel writers, that a certain 
 Roman military officer, named Cornelius, who was a de- 
 vout Jewish proselyte, had heard of Peter preaching the 
 doctrine of the resurrection and repentance, and desired 
 to listen to him. Peter apparently knows nothing of a 
 command of his risen Master to " Go into all the world, and 
 preach the gospel to every creature." Peter does not think 
 it lawful for him, a Jew, to seem to keep company with 
 this devout proselyte of his own faith, or to visit a man 
 who is of another nation. He avows frankly that he 
 would not have presumed to do so, save that a voice of 
 God had come to him in a vivid day vision, and thrice 
 warned him that what God had cleansed was not to be 
 
 a Matt, icxviii., tgj Markxvi., 15; Luke xxiv., 47. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 42 1 
 
 deemed profane. Nor is he reassured that he has not 
 committed an audacious sacrilege, till he further observes 
 that the Gentile converts not only believed his Gospel, 
 but attested the genuineness of a their faith by exhibition 
 of the gift of tongues. 
 
 Peter's authority, immense as it is, will not sanction so 
 grave a departure from the rigid exclusiveness, which pre- 
 vailed among the body of the disciples. They contended 
 with and denounced him for a heretical practice. To 
 overcome their prejudices he must needs tell them of his 
 vision, and of the gift of tongues shared by Gentile be- 
 lievers. b At length, they open their charity to embrace 
 the alien brethren, their scrupulous minds reassured by 
 remembered words of Jesus : " yohn indeed baptized yon 
 with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost.' ' c 
 The language was scarcely sufficient to warrant the belief 
 that Jesus had ever cancelled his express declaration : 
 " Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city 
 of the Samaritans enter ye not." d If Jesus — a divine 
 and immortal being — standing before Peter, had said in 
 his hearing : " Go ye into all the world, and preach the 
 gospel to every creature"* would he have waited for a 
 vision to invite him to visit a devout and praying man ? 
 and if the Church at Jerusalem, within less than ten 
 years from the resurrection, had a tradition, that Jesus 
 had explicitly commanded his gospel to be preached to 
 every creature in all the world, would it have sought for 
 a precedent in words spoken by Jesus in his lifetime, and 
 only been able to find one in words in fact spoken not 
 by Jesus but by John the Baptist ? f 
 
 According to the same writer, when Paul began to 
 preach, he recognized fully the prior rights of the Jews 
 and their proselytes to the grace of the gospel. " Men 
 and brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, and 
 whosoever among you feareth God, to you is the word of 
 this salvation sent." B When the Jews contradicted him 
 and blasphemed, he with great boldness said to them : 
 "It was necessary that the word of God should first have 
 been spoken to you ; but seeing ye put it from you, and 
 judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn 
 
 »Actsx.,xi. t'Actsx..xi. cActsxi., 16. '1 Man. x., 5. 
 
 e Mark xvi., 15. f Matt, iii., 16. g Acts xiii., 26. 
 
422 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to the Gentiles."" And this bold step he justified on the 
 authority of the Lord, speaking through the lips of the 
 prophet Isaiah. b 
 
 But the whole Church was disturbed by this innova- 
 tion of Paul's, and came together to consult about it 
 amid sharp dissensions. In the end, both Peter and 
 James approved of the new departure — Peter appealing 
 to the mode by which his own repugnance to the Gentiles 
 had been overcome by his vision, and by the manifesta- 
 tion among Gentile converts of spiritual gifts, and James 
 finding a prophecy of Amos, that seemed to include the 
 heathen in the mercies of the latter-day restoration. 
 
 Now if there had been at this time, when the cruci- 
 fixion of Jesus was a recent event, a tradition among any 
 of the disciples, that the Lord, whom they expected soon 
 from heaven to establish his kingdom, had appeared alive 
 on his way to Paradise, expressly for the purpose of lay- 
 ing upon his followers the solemn charge of preaching 
 his gospel among all nations to every creature, and that 
 his coming again could not take place till this work was 
 done, would Paul or Peter or James have hesitated to 
 invite the willing heathen to the privileges of the great 
 salvation ? If they had presumed to give this invitation, 
 would they have justified the act by citing obscure, equiv- 
 ocal, and poetic passages from the Hebrew prophets, 
 when the imperative and implicit commands of him, 
 whose servants they claimed to be, were yet solemnly 
 ringing in their ears ? 
 
 It is true that Biblical critics have expressed grave mis- 
 givings as to the historical accuracy of the narrative of 
 the Acts, particularly of its earlier chapters. But that 
 the expansion of the gospel pale, so as to embrace the 
 faithful and penitent among the heathen, was resisted by 
 the exclusive spirit of the Jewish Christians, and yielded 
 to only after dissensions, that threatened the unity and 
 the very existence of the new Church, is everywhere 
 apparent in that part of the literature of the gospel, about 
 the genuineness of which no questions have ever been 
 raised. 
 
 When an honest and irrepressible distrust of the authen- 
 ticity of those communications imputed to the risen Jesus 
 
 a Acts xi:i., 46, 47. b Isa. xlii., 6. c Acts xv., 7-21. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 423 
 
 has, by considerations like this, been once fixed in our 
 minds, we find much more to confirm our suspicion. 
 
 We cannot understand why Jesus should have come 
 back from the realms of death with an exaggerated esti- 
 mate of the efficacy of mere baptism. Yet, so Matthew 
 and Mark have represented him. a We have the best 
 reason for believing that in his lifetime he thought lightly 
 of that rite, as he did of Sabbath-keeping. He claimed 
 that it was his distinction that he did not baptize, except 
 metaphorically, and with the spirit. John, he said, bap- 
 tizes with water, but my baptism is one of fire — of per- 
 secution and suffering, which my heroic followers shall 
 share. 6 Undoubtedly, the Fourth Gospel indicates a tra- 
 dition that survived till the period of its composition 
 when it declares that "Jesus himself baptized not, but his 
 disciples :" c 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity, which never had the sanc- 
 tion of Jesus' living testimony, gets an indorsement from 
 his apparition, — an indication that it belongs to a develop- 
 ment of the Christian scheme of mythology, later than 
 those revelations of his Father in heaven, which character- 
 ized the earliest preaching of the Galilean reformer. 
 
 Of course, there was an admirable opportunity to gain 
 for those doctrines, over which there had been vehement 
 controversies in the Church during the earlier centuries, 
 such sanction as could be derived from words imputed to 
 Jesus — words all the more awful and weighty in that 
 they were uttered after he had come back from death. 
 Accordingly, we find, that Jesus is made to pronounce 
 most emphatically against what was everywhere consid- 
 ered the heretical theory of Paul, that the resurrection was 
 not of the material body, that flesh and blood could not 
 inherit the kingdom of God. " Handle me, and see ; for 
 a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have," said 
 the risen Jesus. What are we to believe, that Paul delib- 
 erately set himself up to gainsay with his metaphysical 
 speculations the plain declarations of his revered Master, 
 or that, when Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians, 
 there was no generally held tradition among the believers, 
 that Jesus had uttered words like these ? 
 
 "Matt, xxviii., 19; Mark xvi., 16. h Matt, xx., 22; Luke xii., 50. 
 c John iv., 2. 
 
4-4 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 There was among the believers a more vital issue than 
 concerned the Trinity, or the process and mode of the 
 resurrection. The three evangelists have told us, that 
 the gospel of Jesus, at least in its earliest proclamation, 
 was an evangel of righteousness — that it related to con- 
 duct, not the outward act indeed, but to the whole of con- 
 duct, including the motive from which it proceeds ; that 
 its great word was : He that doeth the will of God shall 
 enter the kingdom of heaven. James, the brother of the 
 Lord, the pillar of the young Church in Jerusalem, had 
 insisted that, by good works, and not by faith, a man is 
 justified." 
 
 Paul had argued with great subtilty and warmth that 
 by works of righteousness no man is justified, but by 
 faith only ; that the good men had not lived by their 
 virtues, but by their faith ; that faith produces good works, 
 and, whether it does or not, its salutary influence can- 
 not be lost. b There was much in the later conversations 
 of Jesus himself to give sanction to the view of Paul. 
 Peter had dissembled, siding sometimes with Paul, some- 
 times with James. He too, like Paul, had had an expe- 
 rience as a missionary among the heathen, that modified 
 somewhat his Galilean orthodoxy. So there were schools 
 among the disciples sharply inculpating each other. 
 
 It is curious to see that Matthew, who gives most en- 
 tirely the primitive gospel of righteousness, or good living, 
 when he undertakes to summarize Jesus' last charge to 
 his disciples in sending them forth among all nations, 
 declares that it was to " teach them to observe all things 
 whatsoever I have commanded you.'" That is, they were 
 to preach a gospel of the observance of good works — 
 not outward good works indeed, but good acts, done 
 from sincere and pure motives — to do the will of God 
 in hearing and doing the sayings of Jesus, that is the 
 condition of salvation. 
 
 Luke, more completely than either of the evangelists, 
 wrote the Pauline Gospel; and, true to his school, he 
 maintains, that what Jesus charged his disciples on 
 taking leave of them was : " to preach in his name repent- 
 ance and remission of sin" or the doctrine of faith, as the 
 condition of salvation. While Mark, supposed to have 
 
 a James ii., 24. •> Rom. iii.-vii. J Gal. ii., 11, 12. c Acts x., 28; xi., 3. 
 
LEGEND OF THE RESURRECTION 425 
 
 written Peter's gospel, declares, or is made to declare, 
 that Jesus distinctly insisted that baptism, as well as 
 faith, is necessary to salvation, and that the genuineness 
 of faith will be attested by miraculous and spiritual gifts. 
 It shocks all ideas of historic fidelity to find each of 
 these schools putting into the mouth of Jesus what it 
 deems the essential article of its creed. 
 
 Some basis of fact undoubtedly lay under the rumor of 
 the resurrection. Paul, who was liable through physical 
 weakness to powerful impressions of the imagination/ un- 
 doubtedly saw an apparition of Jesus. b Manifestations to 
 both sight and hearing of the personality of dead and 
 absent individuals to certain peculiarly endowed nervous 
 organizations are too well authenticated in history to be 
 declared impossible. Such manifestations may be purely 
 subjective, and do not necessarily imply the actual pres- 
 ence of real persons. Spite of the constant correction by 
 our waking thoughts of the illusions of sleep, our dreams 
 have in them always the perfect sense of reality. 
 
 What Paul saw on his journey to Damascus, some one 
 or more of the disciples might have seen at Jerusalem, 
 within three days after the death of Jesus. It is not nec- 
 essary to conclude that any other than Mary Magdalene 
 had such a vision, and the reputation of having been pos- 
 sessed with seven devils indicates that she might have 
 been constitutionally the subject of hallucinations. The 
 rest of the story grew with the telling, and, since we see 
 in the literature of the new religion the exact rate of its 
 growth, it is legitimate to trace it back till it had only 
 this basis of hallucination ; and we may now eliminate 
 from it its improbable and conflicting adjuncts, till we 
 arrive at its substratum of truth in a feminine vision. 
 
 One theory is certain. Few men, that have ever lived, 
 could be so little affected by death as Jesus of Nazareth. 
 His life was a spiritual life : whatever he may himself 
 have anticipated, his real kingdom was not a kingdom 
 of this world ; the powers to which he appealed are 
 the permanent forces of this universe. Only sordid and 
 sensual men wholly die. The far-sighted poet, the saga- 
 cious moralist, the wise philosopher, the genuine good 
 man, when they die, do not cease to live. You might in 
 
 ■II. Cor. xti., 1-5. bActsxxvi., 13, 14. 
 
426 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 no corner of the universe find the identical form, within 
 which their continued individuality is comprehended. 
 When he lived, you might have found Shakspeare by 
 getting introduced to his house in Stratford, and you 
 would have been disappointed when you saw how common 
 he looked, and how trivial was his speech. After his 
 death — now two hundred years — he is more real. No 
 Stratford house contains or limits his enormous person- 
 ality, and no mind misses the complete effect of his 
 emancipated genius. 
 
 Jesus, when he lived, was a peasant of Galilee, laughed 
 at and tortured by the mob of Jerusalem. After he died, 
 his fame began to fill the world. No man ever lived, who 
 has so much affected the development of history. His 
 spirit pervades the world, and has been the companion, 
 the support, and the solace of all suffering and devout 
 souls. There is no sign that his spiritual influence 
 will ever wane. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 INFLUENCE UPON HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY OF 
 PAUL AND JOHN. 
 
 "The fervid imagination of the East constructed Christian theology. It 
 is not difficult to follow the gradual development of the creeds of the Church, 
 and it is certainly most instructive to observe the progressive boldness with 
 which its dogmas were expanded by pious enthusiasm. The New Testa- 
 ment alone represents several stages of dogmatic evolution. Before the first 
 followers of Jesus had passed away, intricate systems of dogma and m\sti- 
 cism began to prevail. His disciples, who had so often misunderstood his 
 teachings during his life, piously distorted them after his death. His simple 
 lessons of meekness and humility were soon forgotten. With lamentable 
 rapidity, the elaborate structure of ecclesiastical Christianity, following stere- 
 otyped lines of human superstition, and deeply colored by the Alexandrian 
 philosophy, displaced the simple morality of Jesus." — Supernatural Religion. 
 
 "No religion is born complete: the interpreter is as necessary to it as 
 the interpreted ; the society that realizes the ideal, as the ideal that is to be 
 realized. And the process of interpretation or realization, while it may 
 seem one of formal or even radical change, is yet one of real, though 
 variously conditioned, historical development." — Contemporary Review. 
 
 If Jesus were the sole factor in that complex problem 
 which we call Christianity, its solution would be compar- 
 atively simple ; but such is very far from being the case. 
 Not only have we to discover what were the ideas of 
 Jesus, but also how much that is taught and believed 
 under the authority of his name is the accretion of the 
 centuries since his age. Thought and speculation, mak- 
 ing use of the moral and spiritual experience of man- 
 kind, have ever busied themselves in the effort to find 
 how best to live, how to meet the demands which an 
 ever-expanding moral sense makes upon our wills, to 
 repress evil ways and evil thoughts, and to bring our 
 whole conduct, external and internal, under the law and 
 order of righteousness. Men of great spiritual insight, 
 enamoured of virtue, # devoted to the love of God and 
 the service of mankind, have risen from age to age, who 
 have been able to find fresh and deeper meanings in old 
 formulas of faith, and to burnish with an ideal lustre the 
 
428 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 rude and imperfect conceptions of sainted prophets and 
 teachers. The Christianity of to-day — it is said to its 
 glory, not to its reproach — is infinitely better, purer, 
 and more adapted to the wants of humanity, than was the 
 Christianity of Jesus, of Paul, and of John ; because it 
 has added to their discoveries the spiritual experiences 
 of good men for nearly two thousand years. To indi- 
 cate and unfold all these accretions, whereby the cultus 
 which names itself after Jesus, and of which he was the 
 prime source and spirit, has expanded to the capacities 
 of civilized and enlightened men, would be to undertake 
 a work that would task the research of a lifetime — to 
 write, what only in these last ages has commanded the 
 attention of scholars, the history of civilization, the evolu- 
 tion of the moral sense. 
 
 A more modest and restricted task has been proposed 
 in these chapters ; that is, to try from the most authentic 
 traditions to discover who Jesus of Nazareth was, what 
 was his character, and what enterprise he courage- 
 ously sacrificed his life to promote. But the tradition 
 having been long ago lapsed from the memory of men, 
 or being preserved in faiths and forms of uncertain 
 origin and authority, the world has been forced to 
 study primitive Christianity in its Scriptures, and par- 
 ticularly in those Scriptures, which contain its most 
 authentic traditions and its earliest expositions of doc- 
 trine. For us of this age, neither Jesus speaks nor any 
 of his confidential friends and disciples. If we would 
 know aught of him, we are driven to literature, — to the 
 records that survive ; and these indicate, not so much 
 what Jesus was in himself, as the impression that he 
 made upon the minds of the Galilean peasants among 
 whom he lived, and of a few magnanimous Jews, who 
 either witnessed or learned, after the event, the circum- 
 stances of his public trial and death at Jerusalem. This 
 literature embraces the free-hand and evidently exagger- 
 ated narratives called the Synoptic Gospels, and the Acts 
 of the Apostles, the controversial and hortatory Epistles 
 of the apostles and first preachers, and the dogmatic 
 drama called John's. 
 
 The first of this series has been the basis of the studies 
 and discussions embraced in these essays. Their struct- 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 429 
 
 ure is simple, their style direct. There is no attempt 
 in them at eloquence, pathos, or philosophy. They are 
 in their genuine substance authentic reports — unhappily, 
 too remotely connected with the events they record to be 
 accurate — of what was believed, not by scholars and per- 
 sons of responsibility, but by common men, who had 
 come to regard Jesus as a supernatural person, and his 
 career on earth as a new divine revelation. But what is 
 to be remarked in reference to these narratives is, that 
 they are pure reports. The authors neither put their 
 personality nor the weight of their opinions into their 
 writings. Authorship never so slightly magnified itself, 
 nor betrayed its consciousness. It is unknown who wrote 
 these narratives. It is not claimed that they are written 
 by any persons upon any commission to write, or that the 
 names of the writers, even if correctly imputed, give any 
 special weight of authority to their testimony. But their 
 very simplicity is their chief excellence ; and they hold 
 up to all ages the picture of Jesus, as it shone in the 
 minds of his enthusiastic adherents, without the shadow 
 of the personality of the writers to eclipse or obscure it. 
 
 But Christianity found greater instrumentalities to 
 propagate itself than these humble annalists, or it would 
 never have been heard of outside of Palestine. Two men 
 of greatest genius were embraced among its early con- 
 verts, who, for the influence they have exerted on the 
 development of the new religion, may rank as peers with 
 Jesus himself. These men were Paul, and the unknown 
 author of the Fourth Gospel. It is necessary, in order to 
 complete the sketch undertaken in these papers, briefly to 
 consider the character and work of each. 
 
 As soon as it became probable that the stupendous 
 cataclysm, the foreboding of which both saddened and 
 inspired the last days of Jesus, was not to occur, that 
 the course of history was to go on, mainly in the old 
 order, not seriously disturbed or accelerated by the ideas 
 that he had promulgated, then whoever could obtain a 
 prominent place in the literature of the new epoch was 
 sure of power and growing influence in all time. Jesus 
 was not a writer. His teachings were all oral, and he 
 had been utterly improvident in securing any trust- 
 worthy record 01 them. Besides, they had been largely 
 
430 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 provisional, and adapted to a transient period of waiting 
 for a revolution, that was to overthrow all the relations of 
 men to each other, and to the world in which they lived. 
 His feeling was that the time is at hand. Those few 
 whom he had warned of the catastrophe, that should 
 make all things new, need not write his warning." He 
 would come again. Every eye should see him ; and the 
 brightness of his appearing would be as the lightning 
 shining from the east to the west. 
 
 But the coming again was unwarrantably delayed. 
 Then, different accounts began to obtain currency of 
 what he had said about coming again. The witnesses 
 of his works, the auditors of his words, were beginning, 
 one after the other, to die ; and those, who told of him 
 at second-hand, began to mix extravagant and trivial 
 things with the accounts of his works of healing, and to 
 report his solemn counsels with admixtures of their own 
 prepossessions. Full late and inadequately, — perhaps 
 after the death of the twelve apostles, — obscure persons 
 — mere volunteers, like Luke — began to collect the 
 marvellous stories together in private letters to their 
 friends ; and they upon whom had fallen the oversight 
 of the faith selected from among the mass of volunteer 
 biographies of Jesus, those which seemed to them the 
 most decent and most edifying, and rejected the rest as 
 heretical. This work had evidently not been done while 
 Paul preached and wrote. So Jesus got into literature, 
 and got himself accredited to posterity, not by his own 
 genius, but by the admiring after-thought of a few un- 
 pretentious and unknown men, kindred to the first Gal- 
 ilean disciples, and heritors of their faith. 
 
 But Paul, who contributes more than any one mind to 
 the canon of the New Testament scriptures, is a man of 
 superior order. He is something of a scholar, and accom- 
 plished, according to the standard in vogue in his time, 
 in both rhetoric and logic. He is thoroughly devout and 
 orthodox, declaring himself to the last a Pharisee of the 
 Pharisees, and holding his faith in Jesus in strict subjec- 
 tion to his belief in Moses, and to a conception of the 
 universe that made the Hebrew Jehovah the Creator and 
 God of the world, — a conception that recognized the peo- 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 43 1 
 
 pie of his own race as the chosen favorites of heaven, and 
 their historic fortunes and destinies as, in a special sense, 
 a divine providence. Upon these rooted and inveterate 
 prepossessions he had engrafted, by a subtle and arbitrary 
 speculation, the economy of a Messiah, a kingdom of 
 heaven, a general proselytism of the heathen, a restora- 
 tion of Israel to its favor and primacy. But the glory of- 
 the chosen race, enlarged by the privileges of faith, was 
 to be shared with the favored of the Gentiles, and was to 
 be established in the New Jerusalem, whose coming king 
 he hoped in his own lifetime to welcome. 
 
 To these grand ideas and hopes he brought a devotion 
 and enthusiasm that persecution only kindled, a tireless 
 zeal, and an intense ambition, that drove him from one 
 end of the Mediterranean to the other, until at his death 
 the religion, which in the lifetime of Jesus was a despised 
 provincialism that could not command a respectful hear- 
 ing in Jerusalem, had established its churches in the cul- 
 tivated cities of Greece and Rome, and had the civilized 
 world waiting for its law. 
 
 Paul's right to be considered a man of transcendent 
 genius — one of the great intellectual forces that has 
 largely contributed to the culture of mankind — rests 
 upon the fragments that literature has preserved of his 
 letters and speeches. The Epistle to the Romans, be- 
 lieved by Renan to have been a circular letter prepared 
 for all the principal churches he had established, is a sum- 
 mary of the great apostle's theological conceptions, and 
 sets forth his theory of the divine economy and provi- 
 dence. It is dialectic rather than hortatory, — an argu- 
 ment rather than a revelation ; but its cogency and 
 eloquence fairly entitle it to an honorable place among 
 the sacred scriptures of the world. It is not the highest 
 order of composition. It can never touch the heart like 
 the old Hebrew Psalms, nor stimulate to noble self-denials 
 and daring efforts of virtue, like the Sermon on the 
 Mount. Controversial writings, of which this is a mas- 
 terly specimen, rarely survive the transient questions, 
 whose interest calls them forth. But there is compre- 
 hended in this great argument so many ideas of universal 
 and permanent import, that it has outlasted the local and 
 national conceptions which gave it its basis and reason 
 
432 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 of being. It has not failed of appreciation. Read in the 
 larger sense of a competent philosophy, with the copious 
 interlineations with which a subtle and trained criticism, 
 stimulated by superstitious reverence, has enlarged and 
 generalized its naked formulas, it has justly taken its' 
 place among the worthy contributions to the metaphysical 
 science of the world. 
 
 In his development of the method of the resurrection, 
 in his first letter to his Corinthian converts, Paul displays 
 the powers and resources of his speculative imagination, 
 so that nearly all the hopes of Christendom of a life after 
 death are built upon his assurances and reasonings. 
 Either Jesus had far less creative and suggestive fancy 
 than Paul, or — what is possible — he deemed the specu- 
 lations in which Paul seemed to delight of little value in 
 themselves, and, on the whole, enervating in their influ- 
 ence on conduct. 
 
 In the same letter, in the midst of much practical and 
 sensible advice, — on the whole depreciatory of those spir- 
 itual gifts of tongues and of prophecy, which seemed to 
 have marked the beginnings of a new faith, — he breaks 
 out into a glorification of charity, as greater than alms- 
 giving, more estimable than faith, and more to be desired 
 than gifts of tongues, power of miracles, or fidelity of 
 discipleship. This placing of charity, which is human in 
 origin and in object, before all correctness of doctrine, all 
 powers of the intellect, and all manifestations of inspira- 
 tion, is fairly in the spirit of Jesus, who declared that love 
 to God and man is the whole substance of the law, and 
 was level with the highest insight of the later prophets 
 of the Israelites, who had declared that God loved mercy 
 and justice more than worship and sacrifice. The substi- 
 tution in the late revision of love for charity may be a 
 more literal translation of the original word ; but it less 
 correctly expresses the thought of Paul. Love belongs 
 in its most concrete sense to the attractions of sex — to 
 those natural instincts that prefer offspring and kindred. 
 Wider than this, the word defines the preferences of 
 friendship ; and, highest of all, the devotion, adoration, 
 and awe which under all forms of religion a few exalted 
 spirits have felt toward their ideal of God or of the gods, 
 growing sometimes from a controlling sentiment to an 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 433 
 
 uncontrollable ecstasy. Charity, as Paul eulogizes it, is 
 not quite either of these. He defines it himself in the 
 familiar language, "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; 
 vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave 
 itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily pro- 
 voked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but in 
 the truth ; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth 
 all things." a It is a certain geniality of character, that 
 makes a man in the best sense, and to the best persons 
 agreeable, — tolerant of their conduct, tolerant of their 
 opinions — disposed to see the best side of men and 
 things. In fine, for want of a better word, it is the 
 quality of being a gentleman. 
 
 This chapter of charity sets forth Paul's ideal of a per- 
 fect manhood. It was the standard of excellence, which, 
 with the impediment of a fierce impetuosity of temper, 
 exasperated by the suspicions and accusations of men, 
 participators with him in a sacred enterprise, he tried to 
 attain, and toward which he more and more approximated. 
 It is less descriptive of the vehement and intense spirit 
 of Jesus, of the radical thoroughness of his methods of 
 dealing with the sins of men and of the world, and of 
 the intolerance and exclusiveness with which he regarded 
 all other reformers, and all systems of culture other than 
 his own. In certain features indeed, the contrast between 
 the two pictures is quite striking. Jesus had said, "If 
 you have faith, you might say to this mountain, be re- 
 moved to the sea, and nothing should be impossible for 
 you." Paul declares: "Though I have all faith, so that 
 I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am 
 nothing." " Strive to enter in at the strait gate," Jesus 
 exhorted. It is better to enter life with the loss of a 
 hand, of an eye, than to be cast whole into hell. But, 
 supplements Paul, though I give my whole body to be 
 burned, and have not charity, I have made a bootless sac- 
 rifice. " Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and 
 thou shalt have treasure in heaven," was the thorough 
 method of the Master. Nay, interposes the wiser disci- 
 ple, " If I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and have 
 not charity, it profit 'cth me nothing." 
 
 There are two fragments, which in the judgment of 
 
 » I. Cor. xiii., 4-7. 
 
434 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 many are better expositions of the genius and heart of 
 Paul, than even these, although their authenticity is 
 less well attested. These are the touching and eloquent 
 words he addressed to his converts at Ephesus, when, on 
 his way to Jerusalem, he became involved in the contro- 
 versy and accusations, that drew after them his -arrest and 
 imprisonment, and ultimately his death," and his sermon 
 at Athens. b Both of these were unwritten speeches ; and 
 as Luke, or the writer assuming that name, nowhere indi- 
 cates any literary capacity himself to originate such elo- 
 quence or comprehensiveness, there is no circumstance 
 to invalidate the genuineness of these reports, except the 
 difficulty necessarily attending the reproduction in their 
 identical language of the form or substance of the dis- 
 course either by a listener of good memory or by the 
 speaker himself. The probability, therefore, inclines 
 quite strongly to the substantial accuracy of the report. 
 
 The farewell address at Ephesus is chiefly noteworthy 
 for its pathetic tenderness and eloquence, and for its 
 self-conscious but pardonable assertion of the indomi- 
 table courage and devotion of the heroic apostle. The 
 apology spoken in the Areopagus is especially remarkable 
 as a manifestation of the liberality of Paul's culture and 
 the catholicity of his charity, and of that tact, which, as 
 a man of the world, he possessed in an eminent degree, to 
 adapt himself to the modes of thought of races and men 
 alien to his own lineage and training. Our admiration is 
 enhanced by the picturesque grandeur of the situation, — 
 the new religion with all the future before it, represented 
 by its most eloquent and cultivated convert, confronting, 
 amid the most splendid monuments of antiquity, the old 
 religion and the old philosophy, represented by the men 
 who had given them their best exposition and examplars. 
 This is Paul at his best. It must be confessed that he 
 discloses qualities both of mind and character less admi- 
 rable. He is contentious and passionate. His resent- 
 ments are sudden, and not well under his control ; and he 
 launches them hotly and hastily against men, whom he 
 loved and esteemed. He himself is the first to feel their 
 recoil, and his apologies are profuse and sincere. He 
 is self-conscious even to boasting, and, while believing 
 
 » Acts xx., 17-38. b Acts xvi., 22-31. ell. Cor. ii., 1-5; vii., 8; Gal. i., ii. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 435 
 
 that he is depreciating himself, always leaves the impres- 
 sion that he is fully aware of the value of his services 
 and the power of his intellect and presence. If he seems 
 ever to humble himself, it is almost with a piteous appeal 
 to others to vindicate and exalt him. He ever magnifies 
 his office, and insists, against all questionings, upon the 
 prestige of his apostleship. a 
 
 He liked to recall, what seemed to him the highest dis- 
 tinction, his training in the schools of Jerusalem. b Not- 
 withstanding the bigotry and nationality of its teaching, 
 " the feet of Gamaliel'" was, in the first century, the best 
 school in which an enthusiastic devotee of wisdom like 
 Paul could study the problems of philosophy and religion. 
 He is daring in his flights of speculative philosophy, and, 
 more ambitiously than Jesus himself, confronts and en- 
 deavors to solve the whole mystery of God and the crea- 
 tion. We catch in his illustrations oftener than elsewhere 
 intimations of his ideas about physical laws, and find 
 that they by no means agree — as none of the surmises 
 of his wisest contemporaries agreed — with the results 
 arrived at by the observations and experiments of sci- 
 ence. We are perplexed at his metaphysics, and find 
 that his philosophy of the faculties and processes of the 
 human mind are as foreign to the best teachings of our 
 times as is his philosophy of nature. Even where his 
 great strength lay, in his dialectics, we are unable to 
 surrender our judgments to his arguments, because some- 
 times we see no axiom or accredited fact at the bottom 
 of the enormous assumption of his premises, and a non 
 seqnitur where he attempts to overwhelm us with the 
 assurance of his conclusions. Often too, where the 
 premise is tenable, and the conclusion legitimate, the 
 intermediate ratiocination is either fallacious or sophis- 
 tical. 11 
 
 Comprehensive as was the survey which he took of 
 mind and matter, of things visible and things invisible, 
 of the past and the future — and it was much wider than 
 any of his fellow-laborers in the gospel were capable of — 
 it was still the comprehensiveness of a Jew fettered by 
 the prejudices of his race and sect ; and, doubtless, when 
 he tried to convert the philosophers of the Areopagus 
 
 »II. Cor. x.,xi. b Actsxxii, 3. c Rom. ii., iz; vii., 7-9; v., 13. dGal. iii., iv., v. 
 
43^ OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 by turning upon them a quotation from one of " their 
 own poets," he felt for Socrates and Plato and the sub- 
 limest speculations and purest precepts of the Stoics 
 and Epicureans all the contempt and pity which might 
 be expected to fill the breast of a Pharisee, skilled in the 
 traditions of his school, and imbued with the ideas of 
 Hillel and the most virtuous of the scribes. This Jewish 
 cultus was the basis of all his thought. The vision of 
 Jesus, which he scorned to authenticate — as he might 
 have done — by communion with the surviving kinsmen 
 and intimate friends of the Master who had frequented 
 the mountains and lake-sides of Galilee, did not so much 
 eclipse and supplant his hereditary Pharisaism, as adapt 
 itself to it by a certain complicated order and succession, 
 which the Jewish Christians of his time disowned, and 
 which the converts from alien religions could never quite 
 comprehend." When an overpowering vision, shining 
 with a brightness that darkened noonday, seemed to 
 announce in his astonished ears : " / am yesus whom 
 thou persecutest," these must have been the reflections of 
 that vehement, fierce, but tender and deeply repentant 
 heart of Paul : Jesus in heaven ! A vision, not of the 
 Jehovah of our fathers nor one of his angels, but of 
 this Galilean malefactor whom I have hated and 
 maligned, now exalted to companionship with God ! 
 Paul discloses to us how this vision modified all his 
 theologic ideas. Jehovah does not disappear, nor Moses, 
 nor the law, nor the old economy of a chosen race ; but 
 the purpose of Jehovah, cherished from the first, to exalt 
 his people, and through them to subdue and conciliate all 
 the nations of men, takes a new impulse and a new direc- 
 tion, and uses a new and more divine instrumentality. 
 For three years, in solitude, away from the haunts of 
 men, aloof from the fishermen, who are repeating to 
 admiring listeners the parables and the stories of the 
 exorcization of devils, Paul studies the scheme of divine 
 providence and world-ordering, until he can find in it a 
 place for the newly revealed divine being, who has 
 spoken to him from heaven. b At length, he perceives 
 the order and symmetry of the whole scheme of salvation, 
 and how Jesus was foretold by the prophets, and was the 
 
 a Rev. ii., iii. ; II. Pet. iii., 16; I. Cor. iii., 12, 13. &GaL i., 17-20. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 437 
 
 great antetype, toward whom the mysteries of the ancient 
 rites and sacrifices pointed, — the providential man, who 
 comprehended in himself the whole purpose of God, and 
 accomplished the fulfilment of all the promises to his 
 nation ; and how, besides, he was the seed of Abraham, 
 in whom all the nations df the earth should be blessed. 
 So Christianity clothed itself in a Hebrew costume, and 
 went out among the perplexed people of the heathen 
 world clothed with the ideas and giving its sanction to 
 the mythology of the older religion, which was foremost 
 in persecuting and opposing it. Its literary rather than 
 its traditional form was that in which it survived, and its 
 literary form was mainly shaped by the constructive 
 genius of Paul. 
 
 Paul had unbounded confidence in his dialectics. What 
 he had worked out as a syllogism for himself he believed 
 he could make every mind accept. His whole method of 
 propagandism was argumentation. He believed that, with 
 space to deploy his premises, his firstly and secondly, he 
 could force the most obdurate and sceptical reasoner to his 
 conclusions. Accordingly, he is nothing, if not logical. 
 On the largest and smallest occasion, he is always formi- 
 dable and ponderous with the weight of his polemic armor. 
 He seeks to conquer faith, not as Jesus did, by direct 
 appeals to the moral sense, intuitive of right and truth, 
 but by mining under the outworks of the understanding. 
 He is the father of all the schoolmen, the great prototype 
 of dogmatism ; and his influence and his school have been 
 in the world for eighteen centuries, often drowning with 
 the clamor of disputation the voice of him, that never gave 
 reason or logical basis for primal truths, but spoke never- 
 theless with authority, and not as the scribes. 0. 
 
 It is not surprising that Paul should have so completely 
 ignored the doctrines and the personality of his Master, 
 when it is considered that he knew Jesus only as a vision, 
 and that he drew all his rhetorical illustrations from the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, working out the details of the new 
 order of things, under what he called the dispensation of 
 grace, in distinction from the dispensation of law, that 
 had preceded it, and from manifestations of the divine 
 character and purposes, in the, to him, historical inci- 
 
 »Matt. vii., 28, 29. 
 
438 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 dents in the fortunes of the patriarchs, heroes, kings, 
 and prophets of Israel. For, though we find much con- 
 cerning Adam and Abraham, Sarah and Rachel, Moses 
 and Elijah, in his hortatory writings, addressed, in part 
 at least, to intelligent Greeks and Romans, in whose 
 mind such mythical and national names must have been 
 a contemptible reminiscence, we find very few allusions 
 to the sayings of Jesus or to the incidents of his life. 
 
 Paul is too great a man to leave any work of his incom- 
 plete. It was the necessity of his mind that he should 
 give the evangel he preached a balanced and symmetrical 
 form. So, while he seems to have ignored the ethical 
 system of Jesus, he gives a complete ethical system of 
 his own. If it be asked, what did Paul do to entitle him 
 to be ranked as the equal and collaborator of Jesus in 
 originating what is called Christianity, the answer must 
 be ; first, he constructed its theology ; second, he modi- 
 fied the rigor of the ethical precepts of Jesus, so as to 
 adapt them to the exigencies of this worW — to some 
 kind of relation to the existing and developing political 
 society. 
 
 Paul would have ' resented with eloquent indignation 
 any insinuation that he lacked deference to the name 
 and authority of the Master, whom he almost deified. 
 He placed Jesus in so exalted a sphere above all men, all 
 angels, all principalities and powers, a that it was an easy 
 and natural transition for the Church of a later age to 
 arrive at the dogma of his equality and co-essentiality 
 with God. But it is apparent now that, in the very 
 measure that Paul exalted Jesus to heaven, he banished 
 him from the world, and left it the more open to his own 
 constructive and innovating control. With a Christ whose 
 only memory was an apparitional interview on the road 
 to Damascus, whose activity was shut out from the world 
 by the beatific glories of the upper skies, he could work 
 harmoniously. But, when we remember the aloofness 
 which the great apostle ever maintained toward the con- 
 fidential companions and kinsmen of Jesus — the men 
 who kept the tradition of his words and works — the con- 
 jecture intrudes upon us, that he would have found the 
 world too narrow for himself and the prophet of Nazareth, 
 
 a Phil, ii., y-n; Eph. i., 20, 21; Col. i., 15-20. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 439 
 
 and that the latter would have encountered in him a more 
 intractable temper than Peter's, whose headstrong im- 
 petuosity alternated, as Paul's never did, with a childlike 
 and utter contrition and submission." 
 
 There is related in the Acts of the Apostles an inci- 
 dent of adventure befalling Paul on the travels he under- 
 took by land and sea to propagate the faith to which he 
 had devoted himself, which fitly illustrates both his char- 
 acter and work. b He was nearing Malta on his voyage to 
 Rome under arrest, taking an appeal to the emperor. 
 There had been three days ot tempest, and in the supreme 
 hour of peril a panic ensued. The soldiers, the active 
 men, whose aid was necessary to save the ship and pas- 
 sengers, are about to desert in the boats. Both the mari- 
 time and the military commanders appear to have lost 
 their authority. Just in this emergency, a hero appears 
 from an unexpected quarter. This scholar, this fanatical 
 preacher, this tiresome theological disputant, a prisoner 
 too, exhibit^ powers of command and of self-control, that 
 make him the sovereign of the occasion. His assurance 
 that safety is possible allays the fears of the terrified voy- 
 agers ; and, through his advice, order and discipline are 
 restored. The passengers, worn with sleeplessness and 
 fatigue, refresh themselves with food, and with instinctive 
 recognition of his superiority place themselves under his 
 control. Though the ship is wrecked, every life is saved. 
 
 Paul found the young Church in a like peril. Its 
 founder and leader had perished on the cross. The 
 special enterprise, upon which he had staked all, had thus 
 far palpably miscarried. His latest words had been of 
 his own speedy coming, and of catastrophe and doom for 
 the world. The coming of the Son of Man, he said, 
 shall be like the coming of the flood, sweeping away the 
 unforeboding children of men in the midst of their eating 
 and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. Your 
 Lord, he had said, will come in an hour when ye think 
 not, and will cut down the careless, drunken, and conten- 
 tious servants, and consign them to a place of weeping 
 and gnashing of teeth. The cruel spectacle of Jesus' 
 murder had enhanced the panic. What wonder that the 
 common people were ready to believe the world itself 
 
 • Gal. ii., 5. b Acts xxvii. c Matt, xxiv., 37-39, 44, 48-51. 
 
44-0 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 could not outlive so great a crime ; and, when Peter began 
 to exhort the multitude to save themselves from the doom 
 that awaited that " untoward generation" they were cut to 
 the heart, and cried out, " Men and brethren, what shall 
 we do f" a 
 
 Paul shared the alarm, and lived in the expectation that 
 the catastrophe, which was to overwhelm the world, 
 would befall in his own lifetime. 15 But Paul was heroic, 
 and never lost his presence of mind. Since the departure 
 of Jesus, the world had endured for twenty years. It may 
 still endure twenty years. First of all, he said, let us 
 have discipline, and perhaps it were as well to take some 
 refreshments. " Set thy house in order, for thou shalt surely 
 die " was the prophetic warning to an ancient Jewish king. 
 Paul was of those orderly souls who would set his house 
 in order, and, as far as he could, set the world in order, 
 and have it lie down covered with decency to await the 
 conflagration, in which it was soon to perish. 
 
 But, first of all, the tangled thread of providence must 
 be unravelled. The world is the creation of God, and 
 men are his creatures. What are God's plans ? What 
 fate has he appointed for men? To what consummation 
 is this mystery of human life and world-history tending? 
 To fit Jesus, his death, his resurrection, into the divine 
 plan, to find a place for him in a scheme of providence 
 that included Adam, Abraham, and Moses, that completed 
 and fulfilled the law, and left a superfluous grace for the 
 faithful among the Gentiles, — this was the intellectual 
 task, toward which the very nature of Paul's mind im- 
 pelled Mm. 
 
 Accordingly, we find in Paul's writings, not indeed the 
 connected scheme of salvation that fettered the Scottish 
 and New England mind of the last century, before hu- 
 manitarianism and science had assaulted it, broken its 
 sequences, and marred its integrity, but links of all that 
 concatenation of dogmas, — the masterpiece of scholas- 
 tic ratiocination, — at which, in their turn, Augustine, 
 Anselm, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards have wrought. 
 These links may be briefly indicated in these terms : 
 the eternity and self-existence of God ; the eternal rela- 
 tionship to him of a Son who was born into the world as 
 
 » Acts ii., 37, 40. b I. Thess. iv., 15 ; I. Cor. xv., 51. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 44I 
 
 the man Jesus ; the creation of the world, with the 
 heaven overarching it, for the use of man and the glory 
 of God ; and the creation in innocence of a primal pair, 
 whose speedy sin involved all their posterity, the whole 
 race of men, in guilt, condemnation, and death ; the sep- 
 aration from the general wicked of the descendants of 
 Abraham, and the attempt — on the whole, unsuccessful 
 — to rescue them by the teachings of a divinely enacted 
 law, and by a system of sacrifices in no value of them- 
 selves, but efficacious, in that they represented a sacrifice 
 of the Son of God, to be afterward made for the sins of 
 all that believe on him ; the coming into the world in the 
 fulness of time of this Son of God, to grow up a servant 
 and a man of sorrow, who, being killed, ostensibly by the 
 wickedness and malignity of men, was in reality self- 
 delivered to death by the eternal decrees of God to be a 
 propitiation for the sins, first of the chosen race, then of 
 all men who believe, whose faith is to be accepted in lieu 
 of obedience to the divine law — an obedience which, 
 from the innate wickedness of mankind, had been in 
 reality from the first impossible. 
 
 This comprehensive and elaborate system might have 
 been learned at the feet of Gamaliel. Such ambitious 
 speculations suited admirably the philosophic genius of 
 Pharisaism. We. only know that Paul could not have 
 learned it from Jesus : first, because he emphatically dis- 
 claims all knowledge of the philosophic, ethical, or theo- 
 logical ideas of Jesus, through the only source from 
 which they could have been learned, the twelve wit- 
 nesses ; tt and, second, because there is not a trace of this 
 system in the authentic tradition of the doctrines of 
 Jesus. Indeed, the surprise is that, considering how far 
 Paul's zeal had impregnated the new faith with ■ such 
 ideas, we find so few traces of them in the preserved dis- 
 courses of Jesus, memorized for us and committed to 
 writing, after Paul's time, by believers, some of whom 
 are believed to have been Paul's disciples. 
 
 The innovations introduced by Paul in the ethical sys- 
 tem of Jesus are quite obvious to all who read his pre- 
 served writings. As has been seen, the attitude of Jesus 
 toward the state was, on the whole, hostile. He seems 
 
442 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 to have hesitated whether he could so far recognize the 
 legality of the Roman power as to pay taxes to it. " Of 
 whom do the rulers of the earth," he asked his friends, 
 " exact tribute, of their own children or of strangers ? " 
 They said: "Of strangers." Then are children exempt 
 from tribute, he concluded." But to resist physical power 
 was contrary to his idea, that all exactions were to be sub- 
 mitted to. While asserting his right, he would not insist 
 upon it. He that had commanded that the blow of the 
 private ruffian was to be submitted to without retaliation, 
 and the depredation of the. private spoiler was to be borne 
 without reprisal, could not resent the claim of the public 
 tax-gatherer, backed, as it was, by the power of imprison- 
 ment. So he paid his tax under protest, and said : " If 
 you have recognized Caesar's sovereignty by using 
 Caesar's coin, you may use it also in paying for the gov- 
 ernment you have recognized." b But, to his view, the 
 rulers of this world did not belong to God's order. They 
 were the wolves. c Caesar's department is one thing, 
 God's is another. Paul taught quite otherwise : that the 
 powers that be are ordained of God, to which every soul 
 must be subject, and that to resist them was to resist the 
 ordinance of God, and to incur damnation. d 
 
 Jesus invited men away from worldly care and labor, 
 and told them that all anxiety for subsistence was faith- 
 less and useless. 6 Paul, on the other hand, was himself 
 thrifty and industrious, that he might not be a charge 
 upon his converts, and might have the means of joining 
 them in gifts to the saints. He exhorted men to industry 
 and diligence in business, and declared that the idle and 
 improvident should be left to starvation/ 
 
 Jesus excluded .rich men from the kingdom of heaven, 
 and imposed as the first condition of discipleship the 
 abandonment of all property. 5 Paul admitted rich be- 
 lievers to his churches, and only required that they be 
 liberal in charities out of the good gifts God had given 
 them to enjoy. h 
 
 Jesus, as he thought it a slight effort of virtue to ab- 
 stain from murder, because even causeless anger toward 
 
 a Matt, xvii , 24-27. b Matt, xxii., 20, 21. Matt, x., 16, 18. d Rom. xiii., 1, a. 
 
 eMatt. vi., 25-34. 'Rom. xii., n; II. Thess. iii., 7-12. 
 
 gMatt xix., 21, 23, 24. h I. Tim. vi., 17, 18. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 443 
 
 a brother was of itself the germ of murder, had said : " If 
 ye love them that love you, what merit is there in it? 
 The publicans do as much as that." a Paul, recognizing 
 the fact that many men find it easy to forgive their ene- 
 mies, and are torpid and patient under insults, who, in 
 daily intercourse with their families and friends, do not 
 always abstain from petty annoyances and affronts, nor 
 preserve themselves from that peevishness or censorious- 
 ness, that so much embitters social life, added this noble 
 precept : " Be kindly affectioned one to another, in honor 
 preferring one another." b Paul did not pretend to accept 
 Jesus' principle of non-resistance to wanton evil, but sub- 
 stituted for the precept to resist not evil the more prac- 
 tical one : " If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live 
 peaceably with all men." c Like Jesus, Paul exhorts to 
 patience in tribulation, constancy in prayer, the retaliation 
 of blessing for cursing, sympathy for those in sorrow, 
 humility of spirit, and the overcoming of enmity by per- 
 sistent and profuse well-doing,' 1 though his language seems 
 neither quoted from, nor suggested by Jesus ; and, where 
 he seeks to strengthen his authority by a quotation, it is 
 not the Sermon on the Mount, but the older Scripture, 
 that he cites. 
 
 Jesus was out of relation to all the political authorities, 
 the social customs, the merely conventional and civic 
 obligations of his time. Paul was politic, and in a cer- 
 tain sense conventional. He respected human laws as 
 divine ordinances. He vindicated his rights and privi- 
 leges as a Roman citizen, and his rank and birth as a 
 respectable and orthodox Pharisee of the lineage of Ben- 
 jamin. He treated with uniform courtesy and deference 
 the High Priest, the viceroy of Caesar, the military com- 
 manders, and the men and women, whose learning and 
 social position gained his respect. His comprehensive 
 direction was : " Render to all men their dues, whether of 
 tribute, custom, fear, or honor." c It was to have been ex- 
 pected that a man carefully and religiously reared, like 
 Paul, should represent in his conduct and in his prin- 
 ciples the highest virtue of his age. The cultus of the 
 Jewish people, under the tuition of the Pharisees, was one 
 
 »Mntt. v., 46. bRom. xii., 10. c Rom. xii., 18. 
 
 d Rom. xii., 6-21. c Rom. xiii., 7. 
 
444 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 that would favorably compare with the moral standard of 
 the most advanced people of modern times. 
 
 The New Testament traditions introduce us to an age 
 and people generally devout, chaste, and humane ; and 
 Jesus and Paul, themselves men of marked spiritual 
 strength, might be expected to be in advance of the stand- 
 ard of virtue of their time. Accordingly, we find in Paul's 
 writings, as in the preserved words of Jesus, a quite com- 
 prehensive summary of all that constitutes upright and 
 blameless conduct in our own age. Adultery and all 
 kindred disorders, murder, private vengeance, enmities, 
 hatreds, and retaliations are forbidden, just dealing is 
 insisted upon, extortion is censured, and piety and active 
 charity are enjoined. 
 
 Paul, like his Master, inherited an exemption from those 
 carnal instincts, the excesses of which have eclipsed the 
 spiritual vision of man, and dragged him down from the 
 angelic heights which he was approaching by his intellect 
 and genius to the gross animalism whence he may have 
 sprung. But Paul had too much sagacity and knowledge 
 of human nature to hold up absolute celibacy as the ideal 
 state, which all who would perfect themselves must at- 
 tain. 11 The only warning he gave against marriage, from 
 which he found it easy to abstain, was based upon the 
 cares — incompatible with the high duties of discipleship 
 — it would entail, and upon the incongruousness of a rela- 
 tion, which the new order of the regenerate world would 
 so soon interrupt. 1 * For those who were already wedded, 
 he prescribed fidelity and constancy ; and there were cer- 
 tain types of character, not deemed wholly incompatible 
 with a certain qualified form of godliness, for whom he not 
 only permitted, but enjoined marriage. But all that Paul 
 has written indicates that he had the same contempt for 
 woman in her maternal office that monks, Shakers, and 
 other conventional celibates have ever had ; that he failed 
 to see a pure affection in the marriage relation, and 
 looked upon the tie, out of which the domestic attach- 
 ments grow, as an unworthy compromise with instincts 
 which the wisest and best men deny and suppress. Out 
 of this contempt for woman, and the gross regard of her 
 as the servant and convenience of man, sprang the idea, 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 445 
 
 to which he gave frequent expression and emphasis, that 
 in the order of society woman was as far below man in 
 worth and attributes as man is below the Deity. This 
 conception, which he everywhere enforced with a feeling 
 alien to all modern courtesy and chivalry, and which indi- 
 cates that he was little touched by the tender deference 
 and confidence he himself inspired in the hearts of many 
 "honorable women," whose characters, conversation, and 
 faith so belied his hard theories, prompted several unrea- 
 sonable and absurd prescriptions and prohibitions. The 
 gifts of inspiration seem to have fallen upon women as 
 upon men ; and, in charity and hospitality, women were 
 specially distinguished. Paul, in his letter to the Corin- 
 thians, seems at first to have yielded to the power of the 
 spirit to express itself through the voice of woman, but 
 it was with ill grace ; and he will have his prophetess 
 veiled, and wearing some badge of her servitude to 
 man. 11 But, later in his letter, he declares that it is not 
 permissible for a woman to speak in the assembly, and 
 in his Epistle to Timothy that he "will not suffer a 
 woman to teach or usurp authority over men, but that she 
 must be silent." b 
 
 Thus, we see that Paul, besides constructing the creed 
 and faith of the Church, undertook its edification and in- 
 struction, as the minister and apostle indeed of Jesus, but 
 by no means confining himself to Jesus' doctrines, or, 
 when agreeing with him in his precepts, repeating them 
 upon his authority. As the letters of Paul were read as 
 circulars in all the churches, while the works and words 
 of Jesus were repeated from lip to ear as a fading and 
 already uncertain and disputed tradition, it is easy to un- 
 derstand why Paul, and not Jesus, became the supreme 
 authority in fixing both the creed and practice of the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 By his eloquence, zeal, and imperious temper, and above 
 all by a large-minded enterprise, which left the other mis- 
 sionaries of Christianity mainly to the narrow theatre of 
 Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, Paul was able to main- 
 tain the prestige of his authority and doctrines during his 
 lifetime. It is doubtful if Peter and the pillars of the 
 Church at Jerusalem would have had the courage to push 
 
 »I. Cor. xi., 5. b I. Cor. xiv., 34; I. Tim. ii., 12. 
 
446 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 this propagandism outside of the pale of Judaism, if they 
 had not been startled and provoked by the boldness and 
 success of Paul's proselytism in the Greek and Roman 
 provinces. It would even seem, as if they followed Paul, 
 more to counteract him and correct his heresies, than with 
 an assured confidence, that all the world was to be allowed 
 to share the promises of the gospel. But even Paul's 
 preaching, as has been seen, was a glorification of Moses 
 and of the Jewish policy. He maintained a relationship 
 with the see of Jerusalem, whose primacy was necessarily 
 recognized ; and for all the traditions of Jesus, of his char- 
 acter, his teaching, his works, his death, and his resurrec- 
 tion, he was obliged to give all inquisitive neophytes refer- 
 ences to the witnesses grouped about Peter and John. 
 While he was preaching and founding churches in 
 Greece, with large designs of pushing his operations to 
 Italy and Spain, emissaries from the twelve apostles se- 
 duced his converts in Galatia from the freedom that he 
 claimed to be in Christ into bondage to the Jewish law ; 
 and in a letter to his friend Timothy he complained pathet- 
 ically, that all Asia had fallen away from his faith. a 
 
 After his death, the apostasy widened; and the early 
 Church, so far as it was controlled by personal influence 
 and the voice of the preacher, inclined more to the creed 
 and domination of Peter, than to the counsels and theo- 
 ries of Paul. But Paul was able by his learning fully to 
 indemnify himself for this temporary eclipse of influence. 
 His place in literature had been assured ; and as the oral 
 traditions grew doubtful and obscure, and the reverend 
 apostles were succeeded by narrow-minded, illiterate, and 
 even irreverent priests, whose characters lent no sanction 
 to their teachings, the influence of Paul became again 
 superior; and finally, when Protestantism arose, appeal- 
 ing to interpretation and to the authority of the Chris- 
 tian literature, as against the distorted traditions and bor- 
 rowed forms preserved in the Church, the Pauline plan of 
 salvation became the creed of reformed Christianity, and 
 has remained its creed till our own time. 
 
 If Christianity, undoubtedly inspired by the doctrines 
 and enthusiasm of Jesus, had had no other literary ex- 
 pression than that given to it in the writings of Paul, it 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 447 
 
 would have been a barren dogma, or at the best a dogma 
 supplemented by an ethical code, having a standard of 
 virtue not materially higher than that which the Jewish 
 and the Greek cultus had, before the Christian era, estab- 
 lished among the most civilized races. Those rules of 
 conduct found in the traditions of Jesus, which his own 
 immediate followers did not at once modify or set aside, 
 had been largely anticipated by the teachings of the 
 wisest of the heathen philosophers, and of the most 
 eminent of the Jewish scribes. Then, as now, the world 
 did not live according to the rules of its best teachers ; 
 and it is probable that popular virtue, like popular intelli- 
 gence, was far less diffused among the community of 
 men in the first, than it is in the nineteenth century. 
 
 Something else was wanting ; some better reminiscence 
 of Jesus than Paul's highest conception of him, not so 
 much to teach as to inspire. The exigency was met by 
 the advent of a man of dramatic genius, of mystic in- 
 sight, capable of emotion and affection, who could not 
 contemplate such a character as that of Jesus from a 
 merely critical and dogmatic point of view. This was the 
 unknown author of the Fourth Gospel. When and where 
 he lived and wrote is not known,. though it seems to be 
 tolerably well ascertained, that he was of an age later 
 than Paul and the twelve apostles. He might have been 
 one of the Greek proselytes of the Alexandrian school, 
 who had found in Jewish monotheism and the Hebrew 
 conception of a pure God — author of the universe, and 
 patron of righteousness — so much in accord with the 
 teachings and implications of Plato. In his Gospel, he 
 always speaks of the Israelites and of their long estab- 
 lished national customs just as a native would not, and he 
 cannot mention the Passover without explaining that it 
 was a "feast of the Jews";" while Paul, borrowing the 
 Passover as an illustration, in one of his exhortations to 
 his Greek converts of Corinth, does not find it necessary 
 to make a similar explanation. 1 ' The evangelist avoids 
 mentioning, and sometimes makes palpable mistakes in 
 naming, places where incidents in the life of Jesus hap- 
 pened, just as a foreigner might do, who was groping 
 among localities of which he had no personal knowledge. 
 
 » John ii., 13; vi., 4. b I. Cor. v., 7. 
 
 cjohni.,28, 29, 35, 38, 43; iii-, 23; iv.,5. 45. 54 i vi., 3, 15. 
 
448 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 It does not seem necessary to suppose that, in writing 
 what is now known as the Fourth Gospel, this poet and 
 mystic of the new religion had a historic purpose. His 
 work is an exposition of Christian doctrine. But he did 
 not wish to unfold the Christian ideas in a controversial 
 or didactic form. That task had been already sufficiently 
 accomplished by Paul. Traces of the Pauline influence 
 are everywhere apparent in the production. Indeed, the 
 Johannic Gospel would not have been possible, until Paul 
 had systematized the Christian faith, and fixed the status 
 of Jesus in the divine economy of the universe. It required 
 a great man to take a comprehensive view of the work 
 and character of Jesus, and none of his personal associates 
 seem to have been capable of this. After Paul had done 
 it, the task of the writer of the Fourth Gospel became 
 comparatively easy. 
 
 The first certain recognition of the Fourth Gospel as 
 an extant work seems to have been toward the close of 
 the second century, though a portion of the critics have 
 zealously contended for a recognition some fifty years 
 earlier. It was early imputed to John, the son of Zebedee ; 
 and tradition asserted that he wrote it at Ephesus in his 
 extreme old age. This- tradition of authorship seems to 
 rest upon an indirect claim in the final chapter of the book 
 itself — now generally believed not to have formed a part of 
 the original work a — upon the evident similarity of style 
 between it and the Epistles of the canon, believed also to 
 have been written by the same John ; and upon the state- 
 ment in the Apocalypse, that the writer of the vision was, 
 at the time of its manifestation, John, "a companion in 
 tribulation, and in the kingdom and suffering of Jesus in 
 the isle of Patmos," b a small island off Ephesus, in the 
 vEgean Sea. 
 
 It is credible that the John, characterized in " Acts " 
 as "an unlearned and ignorant man," c who seems to 
 have always allowed Peter to be spokesman, when they 
 together propagated the Gospel, might have written or 
 dictated this unique production, called in our Script- 
 ures "The Revelation." Its lurid pictures, the monot- 
 onous horror of its plagues and torments well accord 
 with that truculent spirit, which imprecated fires from 
 
 ajohnxxi., 34. ''Rev. i., 9. c Acts iv., 13. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 449 
 
 heaven upon the unsympathizing Samaritans ; a while the 
 theologic hate, fertile in coarse maledictions that breathe 
 through its earlier chapters, — directed, as many compe- 
 tent critics have maintained, against our heroic Paul, — 
 shows that the seer could never learn, notwithstanding 
 the caution of his Master, not to forbid those who were 
 casting out devils in other fellowship than his own. b But 
 it is simply incredible that the person, who had thus 
 attested the inveterate traits of his character, could also 
 have written : "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, 
 for God is love ; " e The life of God is the light of man, 
 and this light illumines every man that is bom, d — senti- 
 ments which in spirituality and catholicity are kindred, if 
 not superior, to any the same writer has been able to 
 impute to Jesus himself. 
 
 There are reasons for allowing the tradition to stand, 
 that imputes to Ephesus the origin of the Fourth Gospel. 
 It was his beloved Ephesians who had fallen on Paul's 
 neck and kissed him, sorrowing most of all that they 
 should see his face no more. 6 He had preached among 
 them two years ; and they, if any among the people of 
 Asia, had entered into the large liberty of his faith. f It 
 was his beloved Ephesians whom Paul addressed in his 
 Epistle as the faithful in Jesus Christ, no more strangers 
 and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of 
 the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apos- 
 tles and prophets, and Jesus Christ the corner-stone, into a 
 habitation of God through the Spirit. * Now, it is j ust this 
 conception of Jesus and of his system, which this Epistle 
 of Paul foreshadows, that the author of the Fourth Gospel 
 afterward embodied. He sets forth a habitation of God, 
 in which the apostles take precedence of the prophets as 
 foundations, and of which Jesus, not Moses, is the corner- 
 stone. During Paul's lifetime such views of the exalta- 
 tion of Jesus may have been suspected as heretical by 
 the Pillar Apostles at Jerusalem ; and, after his death, the 
 general defection of Asia seems to have reached even 
 Ephesus — the triumphant tone of the Revelator indicat- 
 
 *Lukeix., 54. b Luke ix., 49. c I. John iv., 16. 
 d Prologue to Fourth Gospel. c Acts xx., 38. f Acts xviii., 10. 
 The Pauline authorship of this Kpistle has been most seriously questioned. It lessens 
 the authority of this characterization, if, instead of the work of the master, it is the tribute of 
 one of his admiring disciples; but, coming from the latter source, there is no reason to ques- 
 tion its truthfulness. 
 
450 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 ing how completely the seven churches had become entan- 
 gled again in the yoke of bondage. But years after the 
 death of Paul, after the intolerant seer of Patmos had 
 himself passed away, after the idea of the logos, derived 
 from the Greek philosophy, had made more comprehensive 
 the metaphysical concepts of Christianity, and after the 
 controversies, with which the New Testament canon is 
 rife, had been composed, at least among the body of 
 believers, the Johannic Gospel was demanded, and it came 
 forth. Was it the fruit, or was it the cause of the 
 reconciliation ? 
 
 In it, the high estimate of Jesus, to which we have seen 
 Paul constantly rising, is not abated. It is advanced. 
 He, who was to Paul exalted above all principalities and 
 powers, and who contained in himself the fulness of 
 Deity, shone on the Johannic page as the glory of the 
 only begotten of God, full of grace and truth. The call- 
 ing of Israel is not denied ; salvation is of the Jews, but 
 it is only their pre-emption. The rejection of the Jews 
 will not defeat the beneficence of God. The mission of 
 Jesus is no longer to save the lost sheep of the house of 
 Israel, but to take away the sin of the world. The com- 
 mand of Jesus is no longer : Whatever observances the 
 scribes and Pharisees, sitting in Moses' seat, prescribe, 
 those perform and do. All observances of the law — the 
 older national rite of circumcision itself included — are 
 become too trivial to mention. Faith has become the end 
 of the law for righteousness to the believer in Jesus. 
 But, on the other hand, the scribes and Pharisees are not 
 denounced as hypocrites doomed to the damnation of hell ; 
 nor is the standard of righteousness in the kingdom of 
 heaven placed above the capacities of their virtue. As for 
 the prestige of Jerusalem in the new order of the Spirit it 
 has entirely passed away in a cultus, that neither at Jeru- 
 salem nor on Mount Gerizim worships the Father in spirit 
 and in truth. 
 
 The eschatology of the Fourth Gospel is quite unlike 
 that disclosed in the Synoptics and in the Pauline 
 letters. It differs still more from that, which the true 
 John of Patmos seemed of all the primitive disciples most 
 to have emphasized. The second coming of Jesus was a 
 hope too universal, a tenet too fundamental in the Church, 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 45 1 
 
 to be denied at once ; but its whole character is changed. 
 It is no longer the Son of Man coming in the clouds, 
 with all the holy angels, in the lifetime of his own gen- 
 eration — every eye to see his presence gleaming as the 
 lightning from the 'east to the west, and all the tribes 
 of the earth to mourn because of him. The coming 
 again is asseverated, but with uncertain, even equivocal 
 meaning. The Spirit will come in my place, Jesus is 
 made to say ; and again : / am myself the Spirit. 11 In- 
 stead of a scenic showing to the world, he will manifest 
 himself to his own, and not to the world ; making his 
 abode in the hearts of those who love him. b In the 
 last chapter the writer does not contradict the current 
 saying, that Jesus had promised that John, already dead, 
 should tarry till his coming ; but he virtually says : The 
 only coming of Jesus is the advent of the Spirit, and 
 that John lived to see. c In the body of the work, what 
 that coming really imports is left quite uncertain. The 
 writer seems to be holding on to a fading faith. Some- 
 times, as in his first Epistle, when he talks about having 
 confidence and not being ashamed before him at his com- 
 ing, of seeing him as he is, and being like him when he 
 shall appear,' 1 and in his Gospel when he puts into Jesus' 
 mouth this explicit assurance : " / will see yon again, 
 and your heart shall rejoice" e he seems to be declaring 
 that the emphatic predictions of the Master must be ful- 
 filled. Again, when he talks of the chosen of Jesus being 
 indefinitely in the world, but kept from the evil of it 
 by the dwelling in them of the spirit of the Father, which 
 is the true manifestation of Jesus, we seem to see an 
 irrational expectation succumbing to a philosophy of the 
 permanent order of the cosmos, or yielding to a natural 
 impatience at a long-deferred hope. This uncertain 
 tenure of and preparation to surrender a prime article of 
 the primitive Christian creed points to a period later than 
 the lifetime of Paul, later than the later period of the 
 most modern of the Synoptic Gospels. 
 
 After the revered presence of the kinsmen and per- 
 sonal friends of Jesus had disappeared from the world, 
 the Pauline ideas, which their influence had rigorously 
 
 ■ John xiv., 16-18. I» John xiv., 22-24. c John xxi., 20-24. 
 d I. John ii. ( 38 ; hi., 2. v John xvi., 22. 
 
452 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 repressed throughout Asia, would naturally revive. Paul's 
 brilliant career was itself a fascinating memory among his 
 converts and their children ; and his letters survived, and 
 were everywhere read in the assemblies, — the only liter- 
 ature of the new era. In that very epoch, when the 
 Pauline theology, supported by the memory of his elo- 
 quence and the affection of his converts, and appealing to 
 the powerful persuasion of his letters, was contending 
 against the older creed, with — after the death of the 
 twelve — only a tradition to uphold it, the Synoptic 
 Gospels seem to have been produced. Their contradic- 
 tions are attributable to the circumstance, that they were 
 called out as testimonies in the pending controversies and 
 disputes of the believers. It was a perfectly legitimate 
 literary enterprise, according to the known standard of 
 intellectual integrity at the time, for a writer to give an 
 exposition of the doctrines of Jesus in the form of a ficti- 
 tious sketch of his life. Indeed, the primitive Gospels 
 with many of their kind, that have perished, were not at 
 all unlike our modern Lives of Jesus, that have abounded 
 in the present century, — mere points of view, theories of 
 his character and office, worked out with more or less of 
 detail. And we note how Paul himself came to charac- 
 terize his own summing up the functions of Jesus, as 
 " my gospel" and to speak of other views deemed by him 
 erroneous, as " another gospel." * 
 
 The early appreciation of the Fourth Gospel was doubt- 
 less due to the effect it had in composing controversies and 
 giving unity to the faith of the Church, and this effect 
 could not have been very much lessened by the knowl- 
 edge of its fictitious character. Converts had come into 
 the Church from the schools of Greece. With what liter- 
 ature shall they be edified ? Tradition had preserved the 
 " Sermon on the Mount " and the parables of Jesus, but 
 they were mixed up with predictions of the end of the 
 world ; and the whole career of the great teacher in Gali- 
 lee was compromised with the exorcization of devils. 
 Wise words, and not signs and portents, attracted the 
 Greek mind. When the sublime enthusiasm of Jesus, 
 outlined by the eloquence and philosophy of Paul, had 
 been illuminated by the poetic and mystic imagination of 
 
 a Rom. ii., 16; Gal. i., 5-8, 11 ; II. Cor. xi., 4. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 453 
 
 John, then first the new Christianity became conscious of 
 an ideal worthy of its most cultivated converts, and of 
 a record fit for a place among the older scriptures of man- 
 kind. 
 
 The Greek convert, — Greek in culture, if not in birth, — 
 who wrote the Johannic Gospel, evidently deferred to the 
 talents, learning, and metaphysics of Paul ; and his work 
 shows where he follows and where he supplements his 
 forerunner. Like Paul, he has a scheme of the divine 
 economy, in which Jesus, whose pre-existence is assumed, 
 has a most eminent place. Paul had believed that, in order 
 to give Jesus, who was the first-born of the creation, pre- 
 eminence, God had committed to him the creation of all 
 things visible and invisible; 11 and although this pre-emi- 
 nence was so great, that Jesus might without arrogance 
 claim equality with God, it was all derived, and, in the 
 end, would be restored to the Supreme, who would be all 
 in all. b Thus, to the complete divinity of Jesus, there were 
 in Paul's mind two important limitations. Though the 
 agent of the whole creation, he was himself created ; and 
 his honors and supremacy were to be held temporarily, 
 and were, in the end, to be surrendered to God. c We 
 can see in his own letters how Paul had been borne along 
 in the tendencies of his age from a lower to this high con- 
 ception; and the larger conception of John — by which 
 name we may, without misleading, designate the author of 
 the Fourth Gospel — fairly indicates the later age in which 
 he wrote. For the latter will not consent to consider Jesus 
 a created being, nor indicate any period, however remote, 
 when his authority and supremacy shall be surrendered. 
 He has adopted from the school of the Neo-Platonists and 
 from the Hebrew writer of the Proverbs the idea, that, as 
 the process of the creation was by a fiat or word, Jesus 
 was the word or wisdom of God, and thus too closely 
 allied with the divine essence ever to have been created 
 by it, and too essential to its perfection ever to be ab- 
 sorbed by it. He says : In the beginning, — that is, from 
 the first, — the word was with God, and was God. Being 
 essential life, it only could give life to men and all creat- 
 ures. In men, the divine life was light, and that light had 
 ever been in the world, though not recognized ; for the 
 
 »Col. i., 16. bphil. ii., 6. cl. Cor. xv., 28. 
 
454 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 world, though made by the word, which was the life of 
 men and the light of their spiritual intelligence, knew 
 Jiim not. Then this word, thus unrecognized and ineffi- 
 cient, because ignored and rejected of men, was incar- 
 nated in Jesus, in whom men beheld the glory of the only 
 begotten of God, who would give to all that believed on 
 his name power to become children of God, being born 
 into that relation directly by the will of God. a This au- 
 gust being, with God from the beginning, the agent of 
 all creation, the light of the world, the life in itself, needs 
 no conception, no birth, no infancy, no growing in wis- 
 dom and in stature, as the Galilean legend had declared. 
 He appears in the world, 
 
 " like the herald Mercury, 
 New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill." 
 
 John the Baptist, wisest of the prophets, alone of men 
 recognizes him as the Son of God, who baptizes with the 
 Holy Ghost. b He recognizes his disciples before they 
 come to him ; and they welcome him as Son of God and 
 king of Israel, and he announces that they shall see heaven 
 opened and angels descending to wait upon him. c 
 
 Like Paul, John is well disposed toward the Pharisees, — 
 perceives perhaps that they are a sect kindred to the 
 Stoics. Early in his story, he endeavors to bespeak a 
 favorable consideration for that class, who had so seriously 
 provoked the resentment of Jesus, by personating them 
 in a character introduced as Nicodemus, "a man of the 
 Pharisees, a ruler of the Jews." Nicodemus is timid and 
 cautious, as a man high in office and in the esteem of 
 fellow-citizens is apt to be ; but he is measurably enlight- 
 ened, candid, inquisitive of truth, and readily receptive of 
 the mystic ideas which Jesus is made to communicate to 
 him. The remonstrances which Jesus encountered from 
 the scribes and Pharisees, elders and chief priests, and 
 which drew down upon them the most offensive of the 
 parables, John puts into the mouth of " the Jews." In 
 the conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus is made 
 to affirm a most narrow view of the divine providence ; for 
 he tells her : The Samaritans worship they know not what, 
 for salvation comes from the Jews. The writer does not 
 
 a John i., 1-14. b John i., 33, 34. c John i., 50, 51. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 455 
 
 seem to be aware of Jesus' special antipathy to the Phari- 
 sees, nor of his standard of morality that left them outside 
 of the kingdom of heaven. The whole Church had evi- 
 dently, before the time of this writer, accepted the politic 
 ideas of Paul, that the Pharisees, who in their monotheism, 
 their exceptional morality, their belief in a divine revela- 
 tion, in the soul and its immortality, had a faith in com- 
 mon with the new religion, were to be conciliated rather 
 than antagonized. For it is perceived that the writer had 
 so far compromised his original conviction that salvation 
 was of the Jews, as to admit farther on in his work that 
 there were other sheep, not of this fold, which the Good 
 Shepherd must also bring with him. a 
 
 In vividness of description, in the dramatic naturalness 
 of his dialogues, in the consistent and orderly unfolding 
 of his great character, the author of the Fourth Gospel 
 may justly demand a very high rank among the writers 
 of the Christian Scriptures. The marvellous story-telling 
 genius of the East, whose earliest productions were the 
 idyls of the garden of Eden, of the migrations of the 
 patriarchs, and of the checkered fortunes of Joseph — 
 surviving even in the tales of the Arabian Nights — has 
 yielded nothing to surpass the wedding at Cana, the 
 colloquy at Jacob's well, and the raising of Lazarus from 
 the dead. 
 
 But, throughout the whole work, the art is less com- 
 plete. It is impossible to disenchant the solemn mono- 
 logue of the Johannic Jesus of the illusion of inspiration. 
 Strung in accord with the human heart, it has rung in 
 sympathy with it for seventeen centuries. If it could be 
 so disenchanted, it would be confessed that the human 
 infirmity betrays itself everywhere in the imperfect crea- 
 tion. The dramatic talent does not equal the descriptive 
 aptness, nor fulfil the didactic purpose of the writer. 
 For though the attempt is made to represent the career 
 of Jesus dramatically, to make John the Baptist, the lead- 
 ing disciples, Nicodemus, and the Jews speak each in his 
 or their own character, they all, as well as Jesus himself, 
 express themselves in the peculiar and unmistakable dialect 
 of the author of the First Epistle attributed to John, and 
 fall inevitably into his mannerisms and platitudes. Let us 
 
 "John x., 16. 
 
45^ OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 examine this style more closely, and note its peculiar- 
 ities. 
 
 An affirmation, sometimes an inconsequential one, is 
 repeated. Among very many instances let these be 
 noted in which the superfluous statement is indicated by 
 italics. "In the beginning was the word, and the word 
 was with God, and the word was God. The same was 
 in the beginning with God"" "All things were made by 
 him, and without Jiim was not any thing made that was 
 made!' b " The same came for a witness, to bear witness 
 of the light. He was not the light, but was sent to bear 
 witness of tlie light. And he confessed, and denied not, 
 but confessed: lam not the Christ." c " He that cometh 
 from above is above all ; he that is of the earth is earthly, 
 and speaketh of the earth ; he that cometh from heaven is 
 above all." d "The hour is coming, and now is, when 
 the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they 
 that hear shall live. The hour is coming when all that 
 are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come 
 forth." e "This is the Father's will that sent me, that of 
 all which he has given me I should lose nothing, but 
 should raise it up at the last day ; and this is the will of 
 him that sent me, that every one that seeth the Son and 
 believeth on him, may have everlasting life ; and I will raise 
 him up at the last day." f " Except ye eat the flesh of the 
 Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. 
 Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal 
 life. He that eateth me shall live by me. This is the 
 bread that came down from heaven; he that eateth this 
 bread shall live forever." s "I am the good shepherd ; the 
 good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. / am the 
 good shepherd, and I lay down my life for the sheep. " h " The 
 Father who sent me, he gave me a commandment what I 
 should say, and ivhat I should speak : whatsoever therefore 
 I speak, I speak even as the Father said unto me." 1 " That 
 which was from the beginning, which we have heard, 
 which we have seen with o?tr eyes, which we have looked 
 upon, which we have handled of the word of life (for the 
 life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, 
 and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the 
 
 "John i., 1,2. bjohni.,3,7. cjohni.,20. d John iii., 31. 
 
 e John v., 25-29. f John vi., 39, 40. gjohn vi., 53, 54, 58. 
 
 h John x., 11, 14, 15. i John xii., 49, 50. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 457 
 
 Father, and was manifested unto us) ; that which we have 
 seen and heard declare we unto you." a Here, the asser- 
 tion that the word of life, the meaning of the phrase being 
 set forth in the first chapter of the Johannic Gospel, was 
 seen by us, is made four times, besides the equivalent 
 assertion, thrice repeated, that it was manifested to us, 
 and that we have heard it, — all in the compass of a single 
 sentence. How ill-fitting a vehicle of any really elevated 
 sentiment is such clumsy verbiage! "I write no new 
 commandment, but the old commandment, which ye had 
 from the beginning. The old commandment is the word 
 which ye have heard from the beginning'" b " He that 
 hateth his brother is in darkness even until now. But 
 he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and knoweth 
 not whither he goeth, because that darkness has blinded his 
 eyes." c "I write unto you fathers, because ye have 
 known him that is from the beginning; I write unto you 
 young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one. 
 I have written unto you fathers, because ye have known Jam 
 that is from the beginning ; I have written unto you young 
 men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth 
 in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one." d 
 
 Feeble and undisciplined minds are apt to seek to 
 strengthen their asseverations by superfluous affirmations. 
 Such expletives as, " That is so" " There is no mistake 
 about it," and other even more reprehensible phrases, 
 betray a depraved taste, but are never used by good 
 writers, except with the obvious purpose of portraying 
 a vulgar character. The Johannic writer has not been 
 able to avoid literary faults even of this character. Thus, 
 having affirmed in his prologue that all things were made 
 by the Divine Word, he compromises the grand idea by 
 this feeble iteration, "and without him was not any thing 
 made that was made." e He makes his hero interject into 
 the delightful disclosures of mansions in the Father's 
 house, prepared for believers, this impertinence, which 
 we almost recognize as a coarse phrase of the street : 
 "If it were not so, I would have told you." l 
 
 There are the strongest reasons for believing that this 
 was not the style of Jesus. It is incompatible with the 
 
 a I. John i., 1-3. b I. John ii., 7. c I. John ii., 10, 11. 
 <1 1. John ii., 13, 14. ejohni.,3. ' John xiv., 2. 
 
45§ OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 dignity of his historic character. It is farthest removed 
 from that terse, epigrammatic, and sententious speech, 
 which none of the artless narrators of his life could have 
 invented. Lastly, we happen to know that such weak 
 tautology, such efforts to eke out an incomplete concep- 
 tion by the duplication and triplication of a meagre outfit 
 of epithets and figures, would have been specially offen- 
 sive to him; since he had classed simplicity and direct- 
 ness of speech among the cardinal virtues, and had 
 declared that whatever is superadded to a naked affirma- 
 tion or negation " comcth of evil!' a 
 
 It is another peculiarity of the author's mind to offer 
 irrelevant and inconsequential reasons for propositions 
 which seem to stand upon observation, intuition, argu- 
 ment, or authority. These instances will be remem- 
 bered : " He [the Father] will show him [the Son] 
 greater works than these." Why? " That ye may mar- 
 vel." b " He hath given him power to execute judgment 
 also, because he is the Son of Many" Why is judgment 
 a function of the Son of Man ? Though in the same 
 conversation, from which these words are reported, Jesus 
 says: "I receive not honor from man," d he is made to 
 give us a reason why the Father has committed all judg- 
 ment to him, — " that all men should honor the Son even 
 as they honor the Father."* "Greater works than these 
 [miracles] shall ye do, because I go to my Father." 1 Why 
 should his power to confer upon his disciples miraculous 
 gifts be greater away from them than with them ? When 
 the Son of Man shall come (the second time), he will, he 
 says, reprove the world of sin, because they disbelieved 
 in him; but why of judgment, because the prince of this 
 world is judged? Or how reprove the world of right- 
 eousness as well as of sin; and, if the g world is to be 
 reproved of righteousness, why so, because Jesus goes 
 to his Father and his disciples see him no more ? 
 
 Another peculiarity of the Johannic style is the fre- 
 quent recurrence in it of mixed metaphors. We have 
 seen how, in the philosophic prologue, the life becomes 
 light, and the light a man, and how both the word and 
 the light are successively credited with the work of crea- 
 
 •Matt. v.,37. bjohnv.,20. c John v., 27. d John v., 41. 
 
 ejohnv.,23. i John xiv., 12. S John xvi., 9-11. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 459 
 
 tion. It is not unlikely that the author so far deferred to 
 the traditional reputation of Jesus as an allegorist, as 
 to have attempted his manner in the so-called parable 
 of the Good Shepherd. It is certainly far from being 
 rhetorically a successful attempt. The writer is too in- 
 tent upon his didactic purpose, too much involved in his 
 own dominant and mystic modes of thought. He cannot 
 surrender himself to the illusions of his own fancy, or 
 rather the illusions of a feeble fancy have none of the 
 vitality and naturalness which characterize the creations 
 of Jesus. It is no parable at all. The Good Shepherd, 
 instead of maintaining his role, degenerates into the door 
 by which the sheep enter the fold, reversing the conduct 
 in "Midsummer-Night's Dream" of the wall that insists 
 upon taking a part in the dialogue. In developing the 
 dogma of the sole doctrinal authority of Jesus, the whole 
 story, without plot or catastrophe, sobers into a sermon. 
 In the parable of the vine and the branches, less was 
 attempted, a mere simile ; and, accordingly, the chapter is 
 worked out with less pretension and more skill. 
 
 A rudeness of style sometimes degenerates into rude- 
 ness of thought. Thrice, in the first Johannic Epistle, the 
 historic gentleness of the evangelist is compromised by 
 the direct imputation, that certain persons who pretend 
 to love God are liars* In the Gospel, this infelicity of 
 speech is put into the mouth of Jesus himself: " If I 
 should say I know him not, I should be a liar like unto 
 you," — the Jews to whom he was speaking. 6 
 
 Sometimes, contradictions break the consistency of the 
 revelations. Thus, Jesus is made to say : " If I bear wit- 
 ness of myself, my witness is not true " ; c and not long 
 afterwards to declare : " Though I bear record of myself, 
 my record is true"; d and again to return to his former 
 declaration : " If I honor myself, my honor is nothing." 
 So, too, he says: "For the Father judge th no man, but 
 hath committed all judgment to the Son," though he had 
 already announced: "I judge no man," f and afterwards 
 had repeated that statement, with the explanation that he 
 "came not into the world to judge the world, but to save 
 the world." g 
 
 » I. John ii., 4, 22 ; iv., 20. b John viii., 55. "John v., 31. <l John viii., 14. 
 e John viii., 54. f John viii., 15. Kjohn xii., 47. 
 
460 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 Besides these specific blemishes, we find in this compo- 
 sition and in the scriptures of the same author, a paucity 
 of ideas, with a wealth of sentiment, — much to excite and 
 soothe devout feeling, little to interest and employ the 
 critical understanding. A mystic, delicate, and exalted 
 sentiment, couched in epigrammatic terseness and simplic- 
 ity, as it sometimes is, is too often repeated and explained 
 until its beauty is marred and its impressive force abated. 
 The writer is always hopelessly illogical and diffuse ; and, 
 though some of his descriptions are so pathetic that the 
 very trivialities of detail intensify their naturalness, and 
 though some of his ideas are so grand that repetition 
 deepens their significance, it cannot be asserted that, in 
 the long controversies which Jesus is represented to have 
 held with the Jews, his own part is so well sustained, as 
 to merit what must be taken as a self-encomium, — " Never 
 man spake like this man." a In the more confidential dis- 
 courses to his friends attributed to Jesus, we find a very 
 few primal ideas, made the foundation of a mystic philos- 
 ophy and theology entertained by the author, strung upon 
 a thread of prolix talk, full of unintelligible transitions 
 and perplexing contradictions, in no logical connection or 
 recognizable order of thought. 
 
 Did Jesus utter these discourses of the Fourth Gospel, 
 and did his disciple and intimate friend become so pos- 
 sessed with admiration for his Master as to adopt his 
 peculiar philosophy, together with his mannerisms of style 
 and methods of ratiocination and expression ? To assert 
 this is to account in one way for the similarity in style, 
 philosophy, and modes of thought betwixt the discourses 
 of Jesus in the Johannic Gospel and the writer's own lan- 
 guage in the prologue and in the Epistles. Who, then, 
 was the Jesus of the parables, of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, and of the terse and striking conversations of the 
 Synoptics ? To impute to Matthew or to Peter or to 
 Luke the striking apothegms, pregnant with meaning, of 
 the first three Gospels, is to find in those men a grade 
 of genius, which their simple narratives indicate to be 
 quite beyond even their comprehension. No obscure dis- 
 ciple could have first uttered the " beatitudes," or such 
 germs of transcendent virtue as "Love your enemies" 
 
 »John vii., 46. 
 

 INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 461 
 
 " Do good to the evil and unthankful" "He that doeth the 
 will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother." 
 
 On the other hand, if it be asked, Could an obscure 
 disciple originate such thoughts as these : " God is a 
 spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in 
 spirit and in truth" ; " Except a man be born again, he 
 cannot enter the kingdom of God," we must remember 
 that the disciple was only obscure because he imputed to 
 another the work that would have made him more famous 
 than Paul. One who had read Paul's letters, who lived 
 after the sublime ethics of Jesus had been informed by 
 the theology of that great apostle, and harmonized with 
 the philosophic speculations of Plato, might have uttered 
 every sentiment imputed to Jesus in the Johannic Gospel. 
 Indeed, what the writer could himself do in the enuncia- 
 tion of pure and profound sentiments he has disclosed in 
 writings avowedly his own. In his prologue, he declares : 
 " There is a light that lighteth every man that cometh into 
 the world" ; and in his Epistle : " God is love, and he that 
 dwelleth i?i love dwelleth in God, and God in kim." The 
 writer has not been able to rise to a higher grade of think- 
 ing than this, in any revelation he has imputed to Jesus. 
 Having found, — as it were, in situ, — in the mind of this 
 mystic poet, specimen fragments like these of his intel- 
 lectual vein, why should not all the ore he exhibits — so 
 unmistakably homogeneous — be accredited to the same 
 quarry ? 
 
 Of this we can be assured, that the Sermon on the 
 Mount and the parables did not emanate from the same 
 mind that originated the illustrations of the vine and 
 branches, and of the Good Shepherd, and the discourse 
 beginning: "Let not your heart be troubled." For, if 
 these last are in the style of Jesus, some other hand has 
 improved the Sermon on the Mount. It is derogatory 
 to the memory of Jesus to suspect this. The probability 
 is much greater that the mind that produced the Epistles 
 and the Johannic prologue produced also the Johannic 
 discourses. It is impossible to trace any of the predomi- 
 nant intellectual traits of Jesus disclosed in his conversa- 
 tions in the Synoptic Gospels in the dogmatic disputant 
 of the Fourth Gospel, who is incapable of imaginative 
 creation, the arrangement of whose thoughts is as incoher- 
 
462 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 ent as the conclusions of his arguments are inconsequen- 
 tial, and whose meagre types and illustrations so inade- 
 quately serve the completeness of his expression, that he 
 seems compelled to repeat them, and enfeebles them in 
 the repetition. 
 
 Jesus' style is allegoric. He illustrates his ideas by 
 pleasant apologues. John's style is typical. Certain 
 terms of sense stand for him as representative of certain 
 spiritual states ; and, like Swedenborg's types, they shift 
 so suddenly and so arbitrarily, that it is not easy to follow 
 their metamorphoses. Thus, the word and the spirit be- 
 come impersonations and powers of creation and genera- 
 tion. Life abstracts itself from its accredited sense, as 
 the condition of living organisms, and becomes one of 
 the original uncreated essences. But it will not keep its 
 own estate, but is changed into light in the soul of man, 
 and, shining into the opposing darkness of the world, 
 becomes a person, the person who has created the world, 
 already made by the word. So that, unless there have 
 been two creations and two creators, light and the word 
 are one, and were made flesh in Jesus, whose office it is 
 to give to all that receive and believe in him the power 
 to become sons of God, and to inherit eternal life. But 
 no will of man determines who shall receive the incar- 
 nated light and word which give light. Only God's will 
 designates such, and gives them to Jesus to become the 
 recipients of his grace and salvation. In this scheme, 
 faith is everything. But faith is by no means a matter of 
 will or choosing on the part of the believer, since no man 
 can come to Jesus but by the Father's drawing ; and no 
 man can even say that Christ has come in the flesh but 
 by the power of God in him. The world is the kingdom 
 of evil and of darkness. History is nothing, nature 
 nothing. There is no history but the history of the 
 advent of Jesus to the world, to save those that believe. 
 All that is of consequence in the divine dealings with one 
 people are the intimations God had given them in prophe- 
 cies, in a typical worship, and in the providences of their 
 national history of the great salvation ; and, that salva- 
 tion having come, those things that signified it have 
 become as shadows. 
 
 This vision of all history and all providence through the 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 463 
 
 single medium of a spell-bound faith is the inspiration 
 of the Epistles ascribed to John, and the controlling influ- 
 ence, under which the prologue to the Fourth Gospel was 
 written. The controversy of the new religion with the 
 conservative Judaism, out of which it sprung, the record 
 of which is left to us in the canonical Epistles and in 
 fragments of the preaching of the apostles and first mis- 
 sionaries in the book of the "Acts," John puts into the 
 mouth of Jesus himself. Day after day, he is represented 
 as standing in the temple at Jerusalem and pleading with 
 the Jewish hierarchy — the official heads of the estab- 
 lished Church — for recognition as the counterpart and 
 fulfilment of their Biblical revelation. 
 
 Like the other evangelists, however, this one in no way 
 offends us by extraordinary pretensions. He does not 
 represent that the discourses which he imputes to Jesus 
 were particularly successful or even intelligible as efforts 
 of persuasive oratory. On the contrary, he declares that 
 for a considerable time his own brothers were quite averse 
 to the claims of Jesus to be a prophet ; a and that the effect 
 of one of his most spiritual and profound discourses was 
 to offend a large part of his adherents, so that they aban- 
 doned his faith. 1 ' He discloses that many of Jesus' expla- 
 nations, which seem quite comprehensible to us, were not 
 understood by the twelve, who repeated them and pressed 
 him to make them more intelligible. Finally, he declares 
 that, near the end, Jesus himself, speaking of these dis- 
 courses, admitted that they were proverbs which had not 
 been well understood, and promised that, in that day, — that 
 is, of his second coming, — he " will no longer speak to his 
 disciples in parables, but will show them plainly of the 
 Father." c 
 
 But what must be said of the marvellous success of this 
 production, and of the eager interest and satisfaction 
 with which its revelations have ever been cherished by all 
 devout minds in the Christian Church ? This success can- 
 not be denied. Toward the close of the second century, 
 the Gospel of John began to be noticed by writers of 
 the time ; and its publication could not long have ante- 
 dated that period. It was too striking and powerful a 
 work to remain long unnoticed ; and it soon took its fore- 
 
 " John vii., 5. I) John v., 44-66. cjohn xvi., 25. 
 
464 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 most place, as the authentic and complete life of Jesus. 
 Among scholars and the better informed Christians, its 
 fictitious character was doubtless at first well understood ; 
 but there were many circumstances which tended to estab- 
 lish for it an historic reputation. 
 
 The incidents of the life of Jesus up to his appearance 
 at Jerusalem were exceedingly obscure, and much disputed 
 about among his adherents. The wholesale miracle-work- 
 ing in Galilee attributed to him, as has been already shown, 
 did not seem to have been credited by Paul, nor by the 
 chief apostles. The account of these miracles, that ulti- 
 mately became written, seemed to have been kept in 
 abeyance till after the death of the companions and confi- 
 dential friends of Jesus. With Paul, perhaps with his 
 compatriots, Peter and James, the essential thing was 
 Jesus come in the flesh as the Messiah, crucified by the 
 malice of men, glorified through resurrection as the Son 
 of God, and as the saviour of the world through faith. 
 Dwelling on this grand scheme of his life as the exposition 
 of the wisdom and power of God unto salvation, the inci- 
 dents of his history and the traits of his human character 
 became insignificant, — a theme for the idle gossip of the 
 curious and the subtle fancies of the poetic imagination to 
 employ themselves upon at will. 
 
 The removal of the discussion over Jesus, who he was, 
 where he was born, where he lived, and what he had 
 done as a man, to a different public from that, that had 
 seen and heard him, — that is, to the communities of Asia 
 Minor, Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Rome, — favored the in- 
 troduction of marvellous legends on the one hand, and fan- 
 ciful speculations on the other hand, into the traditions of 
 his career. This process was all the easier, in that, during 
 the first century, great political changes were going on, 
 which finally obliterated the Jewish state, destroyed its 
 monuments, its temples, and its wealth, interrupted the 
 culture of its people, and arrested the production of its 
 literature ; so that, when enthusiastic disciples went about 
 Asia and Europe, telling of stupendous things, that had 
 been lately happening in Galilee and Jerusalem, there was 
 no body of intelligent people left in the scene of the won- 
 ders to confirm or to contradict the report. If now wholly 
 exceptional events should be alleged to have lately hap- 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 465 
 
 penecl in Belgium, in Scotland, or in Ohio, reference 
 would be had at once to the intelligent people of the 
 vicinage, to know if such events had occurred. The 
 legends of primitive Christianity obtained credence and 
 currency, in part, because political revolutions had ren- 
 dered a like reference impossible. There must have been 
 a period, not long after the crucifixion, when Christendom 
 knew less of the life of Jesus, than it knows now after 
 eighteen centuries. In that very conjuncture, a little 
 too late for any story to be either verified or contradicted, 
 ages too early for any historical responsibility to be felt, 
 or historical method or accuracy to be possible, this Fourth 
 Gospel appeared, and the world received, cherished, and 
 gave it credence. This is not surprising. The dramatic 
 Henry the Eighth of Shakspeare is a more real person 
 to the English race, than the little-known, much-disputed- 
 about, historic Henry. Very vivid, very authentic must 
 that history be, which will be able to efface the heroic 
 glamour which Shakspeare's genius has thrown around 
 the reign of nine English kings. Critical research and 
 the sober judgment of scholars have labored in vain to 
 obliterate in the gallery of fame the beautiful myths of 
 William Wallace and of William Tell. In many respects, 
 the fictitious Jesus of John is a more interesting charac- 
 ter than the real Jesus. 
 
 The place that the Johannic biographer obtained among 
 his collaborators at first he has retained to the present 
 age. The preacher, the theological writer of to-day, draws 
 his picture of the person of Jesus from the delineations 
 of John ; and, when he undertakes to set forth what Jesus 
 taught, he will take two passages from the Johannic idyl, 
 where he will take one from the synoptic narratives. 
 Even those preachers and theologians whose critical judg- 
 ment has succumbed to the arguments which recent 
 scholarship has accumulated against the historic charac- 
 ter of the Fourth Gospel continue thus to support its 
 authority. 
 
 Why, in spite of such faults of rhetorical execution, and 
 the fact that the dramatic design of the writer is so pal- 
 pably unfulfilled in the achievement of his work, has his 
 composition gained this high estimation ? It is because, 
 in this sketch, defective as it is in a literary point of 
 
466 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 view, he has given to faith what an eloquent and devout 
 preacher happily characterizes as "the heart of Jesus''' ; 
 because, like a man of genius, he has been able to con- 
 ceive of an ideal person, not bounded by the limitations 
 or marred by the defects, that robbed the historic per- 
 sonage of that supreme consideration and that complete 
 success which belong to nothing human. All large 
 human lives are capable of such treatment. As the 
 portrait of the great artist is a truer delineation of a 
 human countenance in its best capacities of expression, 
 than is the photograph of the mechanic, who has caught 
 the face in one of its aspects of pettiness or weakness, 
 so the ideal life is sometimes truer than the real one. 
 
 The Jesus of the Galilean tradition was born in poverty. 
 He grew in stature and in wisdom. He said wise words 
 and did great works, but he was despised, derided, rejected. 
 Few believed on him ; and, in an attempt to win the chief 
 city of his nation to his cause, he fell under suspicion, was 
 arrested, tried, condemned, and summarily executed by the 
 government, — the populace being incensed against him, 
 and his own disciples taking oaths that they had never 
 known him. 
 
 John's Jesus alights on the earth as one sent from 
 heaven. A dove, which is the Holy Ghost, descends upon 
 him. The greatest of the prophets and all good men rec- 
 ognize him as Son of God and King of men. He dies 
 indeed ; but he dies because he lays down his life, that he 
 may take it again, and, coming back glorified, may give 
 eternal life in heaven to those who have adhered to him. 
 John's Jesus talks much of himself, of his estate before he 
 lived in the world, of the glory that awaits him in the 
 after-life, when he shall return to the Father, who had 
 sent him, and when he will munificently share that glory 
 with his humble followers. How assuring and consoling 
 must have been such revelations of the heavenly state, 
 and of its compensations for all the toils, sufferings, mock- 
 eries, and persecutions of the primitive disciples ! How 
 precious in all ages to the believer's heart must have been 
 those soothing words he is believed to have uttered : 
 " Let not your heart be troubled., Ye believe in God ; 
 believe also in me. In my Father's house are many man- 
 sions. I go to prepare a place for you." In all the Syn- 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 467 
 
 optics, we cannot find anything more pathetic than these 
 words attributed to Jesus by Luke: "Fear not, little flock ; 
 for it is your Father s good pleasure to give you the king- 
 dom.'' a The Fourth Gospel is full of such tender assur- 
 ances. It is not eloquent. It is not rhetorically artistic. 
 It abounds in feeble platitudes. It is monotonous with 
 a phraseology, that were it less venerable would become 
 offensive. There is no wealth of illustration in its meagre 
 symbols, which so frequently change into other symbols 
 in defiance of all correct rules. But it is confidential, 
 familiar, and affectionate. We are ashamed to repeat 
 even to ourselves, much more to write, the incoherent 
 murmurings of our deepest sentiments, — the endearing 
 epithets we bestow on those we love. A scanty vocab- 
 ulary, the same old homely epithets, pregnant with the 
 heart's deepest experiences, serve well enough for 
 vehicles of the ever new affection, of which the critical 
 understanding takes no cognizance. 
 
 John's contribution to the new scriptures was like the 
 Psalmist's contribution to the older scriptures. Until the 
 tender sentiment to and from God found expression in 
 the temple songs, what was the Jehovah of the law and 
 the prophets but a stern judge or a jealous partisan? 
 Until John found and touched the heart of Jesus, what 
 was he to the world but an impractical moralist, or a 
 wrathful king taking vengeance on his enemies ? l) 
 
 John's work was a more complete idealization of Jesus 
 than Paul's. Paul would not go to the companions and 
 kinsmen of his deified Master to learn about his life and 
 sayings. The Jesus after the flesh, of whom they could 
 tell him, might eclipse the grand vision of him which he 
 believed the Holy Ghost had revealed to him. But Paul 
 was too much of a scholastic and metaphysician to be 
 capable of a really poetic idealization. That was the 
 great work of John. 
 
 John's free handling of the life of Jesus, though it was 
 bold, was for Christianity its greatest service. It was the 
 beginning of a treatment which made the new faith ca- 
 pable of universality and permanence. His life, says the 
 fervent evangelist, is the light of men! Behold the Lamb 
 of God, that taketh away the sin of the world ! We 
 
 Luke xii., 32. b Luke xix., 27. 
 
468 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 beheld his glory as of the only begotten Son of God, full 
 of grace and truth ! John was the forerunner and inspirer 
 of all devout souls, — souls that have worn out enfeebled 
 bodies in the sublime ecstasies of their love and devotion. 
 Of his order are Fenelon and Madame Guyon, Tauler and 
 Baxter. 
 
 If we had only the matter-of-fact annalists of Galilee to 
 tell us of Jesus, Christianity, instead of being an inspiring 
 and vital faith that puts man in relation with an ideal and 
 invisible world, would have been a superstitious Millerism, 
 ever distraught with the coming end of the world, and 
 employing the interval of waiting for a tediously delayed 
 catastrophe in vain efforts to make practical ethical rules 
 repugnant alike to natural instincts and social laws. 
 
 If we had only the metaphysical conceptions of Jesus, to 
 which Paul attained, — a Jesus playing his rigid role in a 
 prescribed and fatal plan of salvation, leaning backward 
 into the remote ages to clasp the hand of Moses, and to 
 adjust himself to the caprices and jealousies of Israel's 
 national God, — the fruition would have been a dogmatic 
 Protestantism, quoting and splitting texts, the dreary 
 predestinarianism of Jonathan Edwards, the jejune moral- 
 ities and casuistries of the Jansenists. In the freedom of 
 the spirit, out of which all serious doubt and all the 
 breadth of modern thinking upon matters pertaining to 
 God and the soul have grown, John has put to flight all 
 the quoters, the literalists, the dogmatists, and the formal- 
 ists, and initiated a handling of the facts of the origin and 
 development of the Christian ideas, under which they are 
 able to adapt themselves to the widening intelligence and 
 expanding civilization of the world. 
 
 If Jesus may be likened to the fountain of that new 
 element in civilization called Christianity, — the mountain 
 lake into which it poured as rain from heaven, and 
 welled up from springs deep in the earth, — Paul and 
 John are the twin rivers flowing side by side like the 
 Tigris and Euphrates, that have poured the accumulating 
 volume of its waters to the sea. Paul has interpreted the 
 ideas of Jesus in terms of thought, John in terms of feel- 
 ing. The constructive genius of Paul has taken the wild 
 cry, — the fire-alarm of John the Baptist in the wilderness : 
 "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," echoed 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 469 
 
 after him through the cities of- Galilee by Jesus and his 
 twelve messengers, — the whole burden of the primitive 
 gospel, — and elaborated from it a complicated plan of 
 salvation, a metaphysical scheme that harmonizes in a 
 certain way the aspects of history, and gives a certain 
 consistency to our conceptions of God and his providence. 
 The ethical rules of Jesus, which his auditors could not 
 receive, which seemed to them like the cutting off a right 
 foot, the plucking out a right eye, John has made a de- 
 light, by kindling a devout enthusiasm, and by inspiring 
 the ardor of a human love, responsive to the divine love. 
 But what these highly endowed minds have achieved in 
 the development of the Christian c?iltus is less valuable 
 for us in the results than in the methods. They best 
 learn of Paul and John, who, not accepting as finalities 
 their inferences and conclusions, in their free spirit and 
 with their broad sense enlarge and interpret the narrow 
 facts. The value and permanence of Christianity as a 
 religion is that it is capable of this idealization. It can 
 only endure, if its creed does not cramp and imprison its 
 spirit. 
 
 But as the Sadducees quoted the authority of Moses to 
 deny the hope of immortality, as the Pharisees adhered 
 to a worship of sacrifices against Jesus' idea of a worship 
 of righteousness, as the Ebionite Christians and the "pillar 
 apostles" set their narrow salvation of the Jews against 
 Paul's calling of the Gentiles, so do the literalists of the 
 Papal and Protestant schools to-day protest against all 
 new interpretations of old formulas of faith made neces- 
 sary both by the expanded intelligence and deeper piety 
 of the age. Paul called the Church the body of Christ. a 
 But a body lives only by the death of the living cells of 
 which it is built. Not the gross mass alone, but the 
 most delicate and vital organs — lungs, heart, brain, and 
 nervous fluids — are involved in the decay and reconstruc- 
 tion. When the organism has lost the power to vitalize 
 and assimilate to its structure and functions new aliments, 
 it has ceased to be alive. So the Church, — Christianity 
 as represented in the minds and spirit of its votaries, — 
 when it can no longer assimilate into its faith the most 
 comprehensive thoughts and deepest insight of capacious 
 
 • I. Cor. xii., 20, 27; Eph. iii., 6; iv., 12; Col. i., 18. 
 
4/0 OPINIONS AND CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 minds, or into its charity -and modes of activity the most 
 daring and revolutionary projects of reform, has ceased 
 not only to lead, but to live. 
 
 Primitive Christianity, when interrogated by the inquisi- 
 tive spirit of man, had an answer uttered from the lips of 
 Jesus and of Paul, which seemed to solve, both on its prac- 
 tical and philosophic side, the riddle of human existence. 
 At least, the answer served well enough for a petty and 
 passing world lying in terrible proximity to the dim vaults 
 of the underworld beneath it, and the near throne of an 
 anthropomorphic God just above it. It serves less well 
 for an infinitely expanded cosmos and a Supreme Ordainer, 
 whose large plans and vast purposes, hinted at in a more 
 closely studied nature, have become past finding out. But 
 the inquisitive spirit of man, like the ancient Sphinx, still 
 propounds its question ; and Christianity must answer it, 
 or confess that it is not sent of God, and so die out of 
 the reverence and obedience of the world. What is this 
 overture of Religion to divide with Science the domain of 
 knowledge but a confession that the prevalent form of 
 religion cannot answer the Sphinx's question. Neither 
 Religion nor Science can surrender the universality of 
 empire without abdicating. If the facts of religion are 
 realities, if they are not falsehoods or illusions, they are 
 elements of knowledge, and capable of statement in the 
 terms of the science to which they belong. On the other 
 hand, Science cannot claim exemption from the dominion 
 of the moral sense ; and all knowledge is nugatory that 
 does not show men how best to live. Religion cannot 
 be divorced from Science ; nor will any decree, however 
 judicial or authoritative, ever compel them to live apart, 
 girding at and recriminating each other. 
 
 But it is on the side of morality, as well as on the 
 side of intelligence, that the failure of help and guidance 
 has been exhibited. When Jesus was on the mountain- 
 top, receiving the homage of the great shades of the 
 older prophets, there was brought to his disciples in the 
 valley below, a man possessed with a devil, and they 
 could not cast him out. a So, now, when the disciples 
 are occupied in paying divine honors to the author of 
 their faith, offering him the adoration of prophets, poets, 
 
 a Luke ix., 40. 
 
INFLUENCE OF PAUL AND JOHN 47 1 
 
 and sages, there are brought to them the devils of war, 
 of poverty, of intemperance, of lust, and of slavery, and 
 the disciples cannot cast them out. Heretics devise the 
 temperance pledge, and prick the conscience of legis- 
 lators with a vivid recital of the cruelties of slavery, 
 till they decree its abolition ; unchurched rationalists 
 build upon old despotisms free and popular governments, 
 while atheists and agnostics agitate to supplant the 
 oppression and competition of the social and industrial 
 order with the veritable kingdom of heaven preached 
 and practised by Jesus, but contemptuously discontinued 
 and denied by his official successors. Instead of a god- 
 speed for their beneficent work, these secular reformers 
 are rebuked by the modern Johns, because they follow not 
 with them. 
 
 It is told that messengers came once to Jesus, and 
 asked him : " Art thou he that should come, or do we look 
 for another?" to whom he replied : Behold the tilings I do. 
 The blind receive their sight, the lame zvalk, the lepers arc 
 cleansed, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the 
 gospel preached to them}" To the organized Christianity of 
 our day, the same question is propounded : Art thou the 
 last evangel of truth and good, or must we look for 
 another ? It must give place to another, unless it, too, can 
 point to its miraculous and beneficent works. It must be 
 able with truth to declare : I am bearing the light of intelli- 
 gence into the dark corners of delusion and superstition; 
 by my healing touch, the disabled in the struggle for life are 
 made to keep abreast of the strong and cunning ; by my 
 sanitary lessons, the moral and physical diseases, that spoil 
 the brief lives of men, have been cleansed ; dead enthusi- 
 asms, dead hopes, and dead heroisms have been raised to 
 life by my inspirations ; and the gospel of genuine peace 
 and good will has cheered the fainting hearts of the poor. 
 
 a Luke ix., 49. b Matt, xi., 2-6. 
 

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