LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 GIFT OF 
 MRS. BRUCE C. HOPPER
 
 The Carpenter Prophet
 
 The 
 
 Carpenter Prophet 
 
 A LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
 AND A DISCUSSION 
 
 OF HIS IDEALS 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM PEARSON 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE AND COMPANY 
 
 CHICAGO AND NEW YORK 
 
 MCMII
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY 
 CHARLES W. PEARSON
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Gospels i 
 
 II. The .Birth of Jesus . . . . 15 
 
 III. The Boyhood of Jesus .... 23 
 
 IV. The Early Manhood of Jesus . . 32 
 V. The Baptism and Temptation . . 41 
 
 VI. The Kingdom of Heaven ... 52 
 
 'VII. Christ as a Teacher 64 
 
 VIII. Miracles 73 
 
 IX. Prayer 96 
 
 X. The Visit to Nazareth 100 
 
 XI. The Calling of the Disciples . . . 104 
 
 XII. Attitude Towards Women and Children 114 
 
 XIII. Peter Declares Jesus to be the Son of God 122 
 
 XIV. The Transfiguration and Second Coming 130 
 XV. The Final Preparation of the Apostles 138 
 
 XVI. The Last Journey to Jerusalem . . 147 
 
 XVII. The Temple 154 
 
 XVIII. The Last Supper and Farewell . . 167 
 
 XIX. Judas Iscariot 172 
 
 XX. Gethsemane 177 
 
 XXI. The Trial 183 
 
 XXII. Pontius Pilate 195 
 
 XXIII. The Crucifixion 198 
 
 XXIV. The Descent Into Hell . . . .211 
 XXV. The Resurrection . . . . 218 
 
 XXVI. The Ascension 231 
 
 XXVII. Jesus as a Man 238 
 
 XXVIII. The Testimony of Scripture . . .258 
 
 XXIX. The Christian Centuries 266
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IT is to me a deep satisfaction that I have 
 been able to complete this work, which I 
 venture to affirm has been written with a sin- 
 cere desire to promote truth and righteous- 
 ness and with patient solicitude as to facts 
 and expression, although it is evident to me 
 that in the nature of the case it is but tentative 
 and initial. There are probably many errors 
 in detail and many instances of wrong empha- 
 sis and wrong shading, and, for the sake of 
 brevity, much has been omitted. Yet it is, I 
 hope, a step in the right direction, the begin- 
 ning of a line of investigation which others 
 may continue. 
 
 The argument of this book is that all the 
 superhuman powers attributed to Jesus, 
 whether by the enthusiasm of disciples, by 
 the imagination of poets, or by the self-inter- 
 est of priests, are untrue, and if they are un- 
 true it follows as a matter of course that they 
 are hurtful. God is the God of truth and man 
 becomes godlike in proportion as he knows 
 and obeys the truth. 
 
 Much that is true and helpful about Jesus
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 has not yet been said, or at least has not been 
 said simply and unprofessionally and in the 
 light of recent study and investigation. The 
 gospel lives can never lose their unique charm 
 and pre-eminence, yet they are written from a 
 point of view so different from our own as 
 often to be unintelligible and even mislead- 
 ing. The gospels were written in an age of 
 intense supernaturalism. Their authors lived in 
 a world as full of angels and devils as of human 
 beings, a world of imagination and miracle, 
 totally unlike the modern world of scientific 
 observation and psychological analysis. 
 
 My aim is to discard all purely Jewish 
 conceptions and all the traditions and con- 
 ventions of Christian theologians and rever- 
 ently but frankly to study "the man Christ 
 Jesus." My sympathy and fellowship are 
 with those by whatever name they are called, 
 who love and admire and try to imitate Jesus 
 Christ, and I have only pity and sorrow for 
 those who are hostile to his spirit, if any such 
 persons there are. There may be such, but it 
 has never been my ill-fortune to meet them. 
 Opponents of the corruptions and abuses of 
 the church, men who scorn it for its unbelief 
 and hypocrisy, men who deride the theolog- 
 ical caricatures of the historic Christ, are
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 numerous enough. But there are none who do 
 not admire him who taught and exemplified 
 the Golden Rule, who antagonized every wrong 
 and promoted every right, who did good to all 
 to the utmost of his power, who forgave his 
 enemies, and to crown all sealed the sincerity 
 of a noble life by a patient and heroic death. 
 The true Christ all men admire, but alas! the 
 true Christ is hidden from many by veils of 
 ritual and clouds of controversy. 
 
 Physical science has in a century revolution- 
 ized the world; and moral science, if it were 
 cultivated with the same fidelity and care, 
 could produce even greater results, for moral 
 are stronger than physical forces. If, instead 
 of the careless assumptions and vague rhetor- 
 ical declamations of the pulpit, we could have 
 accurate and thorough teaching in religion and 
 morals; if, like men of science, clergymen 
 should keep silence till they had something 
 definite to say, and should then, after careful 
 examination of every phase of the question, 
 present their conclusions with scientific caution 
 and thoroughness, the pulpit would again 
 command a serious hearing. At present, un- 
 pleasant as it is to say it, a clergyman's utter- 
 ances are very lightly regarded. We read in 
 the Acts of the Apostles that when Paul
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 preached at Ephesus, "Many of those who 
 used curious arts brought their books together, 
 and burned them before all men." If we could 
 have a similar bonfire of all the text-books of 
 systematic theology and all the sermons based 
 upon them, there would be as great a relative 
 gain to-day as when the work of God as preached 
 by Paul "mightily grew and prevailed." 
 
 But perhaps the preacher will say, "I don't 
 any longer preach the infallibility of the 
 Bible, or the Fall, or the historic truth of the 
 Book of Daniel, or demoniacal possession, or 
 other errors." On the contrary, silence gives 
 assent. You must take sides. He that is not 
 with a debated truth is against it. Every 
 time a preacher praises honesty and courage 
 and zeal in behalf of truth, he by implication 
 claims these qualities for himself, claims that 
 he is not evading or sophisticating, not "han- 
 dling the word of God deceitfully," but is striv- 
 ing to declare faithfully "the whole counsel of 
 God" as he understands it. You cannot evade 
 the issue. You must choose between a view 
 that harmonizes with every known truth and a 
 view that opposes every truth in every field of 
 knowledge. 
 
 My appeal to ministerial readers is this: 
 
 If you are so constituted or have been so
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 educated that these views seem to you abso- 
 lutely unreasonable and impossible, it is your 
 plain duty to reject them. But if you have a 
 suspicion that they are true, if the question 
 seems to you a fairly debatable one, is it not 
 most important to the integrity of your mind 
 and heart that you look into it? Can there be 
 a greater condemnation than to reject acces- 
 sible and offered light, to close your eyes and 
 to say, "No matter what the truth is, I will not 
 accept it"? 
 
 I wish to undermine no man's faith. If he 
 has no difficulties and desires no further knowl- 
 edge, I have nothing to say to him; but if he 
 feels perplexed and dissatisfied, if current ex- 
 planations seem superficial and evasive, this 
 book will perhaps help him to see more clearly. 
 Above all I wish to destroy no man's hope, 
 but to substitute a larger and happier view of 
 life for the narrow and gloomy one of "ortho- 
 dox" theology. 
 
 For the theological fiction of an omnipotent 
 God incarnate I wish to substitute the inspir- 
 ing truth of a heroic man pressing on to a great 
 end in spite of every weakness and temptation 
 that besets humanity.
 
 The Carpenter Prophet 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE GOSPELS 
 
 IT is necessary in basing a study of the genius 
 and character of Jesus upon the gospels to 
 establish some principle by which to select 
 what is trustworthy from the mass of incon- 
 sistent and incredible statements. Every 
 biographer or historian is compelled thus to 
 sift the body of contemporary opinion and 
 conjecture and the eulogies and invectives 
 based on these early traditions. A writer, 
 whether a biographer, novelist or poet, must 
 seize some principle of unity and make his 
 representation consistent with itself. Tenny- 
 son, for instance, has ignored all the traditions 
 derogatory to King Arthur, and has based his 
 portraiture on the words of Joseph of Exeter, 
 Flos regum Arthurus, Arthur, the flower of kings. 
 He could not make the same man an Arthur 
 and a Lancelot, for the types are contradictory 
 and exclude each other.
 
 2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 There is a dominant motive, a ruling tend- 
 ency, in every character by which alone it can 
 be interpreted. This does not mean that good 
 men do not fall into sin or that bad men have 
 no redeeming qualities, but it does mean that 
 there are limits to the fluctuation of character, 
 because "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is 
 he"; and, in spite of apparently capricious and 
 perplexing variations, the outward life must 
 be an expression of the inner spirit. "A good 
 tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a 
 corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." "By 
 their fruits ye shall know them." 
 
 In the case of Jesus the question for deter- 
 mination is whether he is to be considered as 
 living a human life "tempted in all points as 
 we are" and helped to resist temptation as we 
 are by the grace of God, or whether he was a 
 God in disguise consciously possessed of infi- 
 nite knowledge, power, and sovereignty. 
 Evangelical preachers waver very curiously 
 between these inconsistent opinions. They 
 point us to the unworldliness of Jesus as he 
 rejects the kingdoms of this world, but what 
 possible temptation could the empty and 
 transient rulership of this world be to the Lord 
 of heaven and earth and of all things visible 
 and invisible. To be a real temptation it must
 
 THE GOSPELS 3 
 
 be addressed to a real man. A millionaire 
 who has left his pocketbook at home and is for 
 the moment penniless in a large city, but can 
 go to the nearest telegraph or telephone office 
 and call for an abundant supply, cannot be 
 said to have known the pains and anxieties of 
 poverty, and, even if for any reason he chooses 
 to forego the immediate use of -his resources, 
 the knowledge that he has them is an incalcu- 
 lable support and removes him from the class 
 of really poor men. Hunger has no terrors 
 for one who can turn stones into bread and 
 miraculously multiply loaves and fishes. Fa- 
 tigue and homelessness are impossible to one 
 who ever carries about with him a conscious- 
 ness of almighty power and of universal 
 dominion. The desertion of his human 
 supporters would be no disaster or trial to one 
 who could at will summon legions of angels. 
 There is no possibility of walking by faith and 
 being an example of heroism, if the end is 
 known from the beginning and if mere finite 
 temptations are offered to an infinite God or 
 petty obstacles opposed to almighty powers. 
 If Jesus was God, he walked in invulnerable 
 armor and wielded irresistible weapons, and is 
 no example or comfort to such frail and suffer- 
 ing soldiers of conscience as we are. But that
 
 4 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 the professed Son of Man deceived men with 
 mere phantom sorrows and unreal wounds and 
 death is a heresy that the intellect and con- 
 science of Christendom rejected in the early 
 centuries and always rejects when it is nakedly 
 asserted; but this heresy is nevertheless inex- 
 tricably bound up with the belief in the su- 
 preme deity of Jesus, and his omniscience and 
 perfect command of all forces while on earth. 
 
 We must, then, make our election between 
 considering him God or man, for he cannot be 
 both. Poets indeed have feigned such dual 
 beings, but they do not exist, and a demi-god 
 is as unreal as a centaur or a mermaid. 
 
 Starting, then, with the fundamental concep- 
 tion that Jesus was a man, it follows that all 
 statements that attribute to him actions or 
 powers wholly superhuman must be either 
 mythical or legendary. In regard to all other 
 mythologies and legends most people act upon 
 this principle without the slightest hesitation 
 or momentary suspicion that they are wrong. 
 They dismiss all such tales from Greek or 
 Roman, from Hindu or Arabian mythology 
 with perfect confidence and serenity, simply 
 because they know them to be contrary to the 
 familiar laws of nature and facts of life. 
 Protestants also dismiss with equal nonchalance
 
 THE GOSPELS 5 
 
 all the apocryphal gospels and all the vast 
 body of legends of the Madonna, and of all 
 the countless saints and martyrs of the Roman 
 Catholic Church. Yet there is no essential dif- 
 ference between the miracles of the canonical 
 and the miracles of the apocryphal gospels. 
 The unerring popular judgment has selected in 
 the gospels the best specimens of this class of 
 tales as it selects the best of every class of 
 imaginative, historical, or scientific books, 
 but to the best as to the worst, to the most as 
 to the least artistic legend, the same tests must 
 be applied. How do we know that the 
 legends of the Madonna are not true? Do not 
 Protestants dismiss with indifference the 
 story of her assumption to heaven, even while 
 they are pained that those who carry Protes- 
 tant principles a step further should dismiss 
 the assumption of Jesus as a legend of the 
 same class and in no respect more authentic 
 than the story of the ascent of Romulus or of 
 the scores of others of whom such translations 
 have been fancied or feigned? 
 
 If thorough consistency in the application of 
 critical tests seems shocking to any persons, 
 would it not be well for such persons to aim at 
 consistency in deductions from their own 
 premises? If the gospel statements are all to
 
 6 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 be literally accepted the primacy of Peter and 
 the power of his successors to bind and loose 
 is not easily disproved, nor is the church 
 easily acquitted of sinful negligence in not 
 exercising its miraculous power to heal the 
 sick, to raise the dead, and to cast out devils. 
 The truth is that Protestants treat the Scrip- 
 tures capriciously, and waver oddly between 
 faith and rationalism. If reason is to be 
 thrown out of court and faith in the infallibility 
 of Scripture is to govern belief and conduct, 
 let faith have the full and rich development of 
 the Middle Ages, but if that experiment has 
 been sufficiently tried and found to issue in 
 intellectual and moral degradation, let us con- 
 sistently apply the principles of reason and 
 not, by halting between two opinions, obtain 
 the benefit of neither. 
 
 But the word faith is abused when it is 
 applied to the belief of things inherently in- 
 credible. True faith is always in accord with 
 the highest reason. It applies only to things 
 beyond our present knowledge, and it is 
 wholly rational to hope and believe many 
 things which we cannot yet prove. But while 
 we thus outrun knowledge and leave it far 
 behind in our hopes for the future of our race 
 in this world and in the world to come, we do
 
 THE GOSPELS 7 
 
 not ignore it in relation to matters under our 
 present observation. To all earthly history 
 and to all alleged facts we apply the simple 
 tests of common experience and common 
 knowledge, and if they cannot bear those tests 
 we reject them as fancies. 
 
 It is not impossible, it is not usually diffi- 
 cult, to distinguish truth from error. There is 
 practically no dispute among men as to the 
 qualities of things and the forces of nature. 
 There are no men who contend that water is 
 dry or that fire is cold. No persons dispute 
 the seasons or the law of gravitation, or the 
 general laws of cause and effect in relation to 
 present events. We all see wonderful recover- 
 ies from disease, and are prepared for very re- 
 markable manifestations of the recuperative 
 powers of the body and soul, but none of 
 us believe in any story of the resurrection of a 
 dead man or woman in modern times. It is 
 entirely reasonable, and it is the only course 
 that is reasonable, to reject any story in the 
 gospels that you would reject if it were found 
 elsewhere in reference to the same age and 
 country. What you would not believe in Ben 
 Hur on the authority of General Lew Wallace, 
 it is not reasonable to believe in the gospel on 
 the authority of Matthew or John, for they, too,
 
 8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 wrote with the story-teller's art and bias, and 
 liability to error The truth is, our imagina- 
 tion is misled by the remoteness of time and 
 place, for it is easy to believe almost anything 
 of unknown countries and ancient heroes. 
 Times [and countries do actually differ so 
 much that credulity in reference to the char- 
 acteristics of foreign countries and men is 
 quite natural, but while we are prepared for 
 very strange stories if told by reputable wit- 
 nesses, as to the diet or clothing, the height, or 
 the strength, or the skill, the cruelty or gentle- 
 ness, the treachery or the honor, of a newly 
 discovered race, we should require vastly 
 stronger testimony than that which supports 
 the account of the raising of Lazarus before we 
 should believe a similar narrative if it dealt 
 with a recent occurrence in any country what- 
 ever. There are some laws to which we all 
 think that there are no present exceptions, 
 and, but for the overpowering influence of 
 early teaching which often paralyzes the mind 
 and makes it absolutely incapable of free and 
 rational action in reference to some subjects, 
 we should at once pronounce many Biblical 
 narratives as false, which we now under the 
 mesmeric influence of special education re- 
 ceive as true.
 
 THE GOSPELS 9 
 
 Protestantism is happily rid of many of the 
 beliefs and superstitions of Roman Cathol- 
 icism. It has no holy relics, no miracle- 
 working bones of saints, no winking Madonnas, 
 no doctrine of transubstantiation, but it is still 
 bound to a book full of untenable legends. All 
 its efforts to exhort Christians to righteous- 
 ness, to educate young people to truth, to ex- 
 tend Christianity among the heathen, all its 
 useful activities of every kind are thwarted 
 and impeded by this load of past ignorance 
 and superstition, this mass of once believed 
 but now incredible stories about angels and 
 devils and prodigies. 
 
 Well may the church pray, as did Paul in 
 his agony, to be delivered from this dead 
 body. But true prayer must be supplemented 
 by faithful and intelligent work. The gospels 
 themselves contain the principles by which the 
 church must work out its redemption. They 
 assert the supremacy of the reason and con- 
 science over law and tradition. The true 
 believer in the gospel believes in the mutability 
 of its form as the true believer in the cloud 
 knows that it is forever changing and yet is in- 
 destructible. Our life is a vapor. The world 
 is a cloud. All our formulas of knowl- 
 edge shall vanish away. The gospels are a
 
 io THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 transient record of a sublime manifestation 
 of the exhaustless wisdom and goodness of 
 God. 
 
 The foundation for all the more extreme 
 theories about the person of Christ is the fourth 
 gospel. Rev. Joseph H. Crooker, a specialist 
 in this field of knowledge, in his work on The 
 New Bible and Its Uses says: "Of those who 
 have contributed important articles to the dis- 
 cussion from about 1880 to 1890, about two to 
 one reject the Johannine authorship of the gos- 
 pel in its present shape that is to say, while 
 forty years ago great scholars were four to one 
 in favor of, they are now two to one against, 
 the claim that the apostle John wrote this gos- 
 pel as we have it. Again one-half of those on 
 the conservative side to-day admit the exist- 
 ence of a dogmatic intent and an ideal element 
 in this gospel, so that we do not have the 
 thought of Jesus in his exact words, but only 
 in substance." 
 
 Some light is thrown upon these opinions in 
 regard to the work which goes under the name 
 of John by a general statement which is taken 
 from the article on the gospels in the ninth 
 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 
 writer says: "A work of this kind, notwith- 
 standing the presence of historical elements,
 
 THE GOSPELS n 
 
 seems rather to deserve to be called a poem, 
 or a drama, than a biography." 
 
 In all scientific investigations the necessary 
 basis is a belief in the uniformity of physical 
 law, and similarly in all historical research 
 the one trustworthy and indispensable clue is 
 the essential oneness of the human mind and 
 the similarity of its products to each other. 
 The so-called gospel of John is a poem of 
 the same nature, though of a higher order, 
 as Browning's A Death in the Desert. The gos- 
 pel does for Jesus what Browning attempts to 
 do for John, interprets his ideas and speaks 
 dramatically through his mouth. And re- 
 garded in this manner, what a sublime and 
 noble work it is! Its three chief ideas are ex- 
 pressed by the words, life, light and love. 
 Jesus is represented as the bread of life, the 
 water of life, as the resurrection and the life. 
 He is the light of the world. Above all he is 
 the revealer of the Father's love. The gospel 
 is condensed into three short words, "God is 
 love " The fourth gospel reaches its climax of 
 power and beauty in the chapter beginning, 
 "Let not your heart be troubled." That chapter 
 is the theodicy of Jesus. In every age men 
 have wondered how it is that a God of infinite 
 wisdom and power should permit such sin and
 
 12 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 suffering as we see in the world, and such an 
 awful tragedy as death to terminate human 
 life. Yet God vindicates himself in every 
 human heart. We all live in some measure of 
 faith and hope, and in almost every genera- 
 tion some devout seer tries to pierce the 
 clouds and darkness that are round about God 
 and give us a clearer vision of his goodness and 
 his glory. 
 
 Jesus had just told his disciples that his death 
 was very near. His heart had overflowed with 
 tenderness. He had called them his "little 
 children," or, as the diminutive might be ren- 
 dered, his dear children, and had told them 
 that if they wanted to be true to him and repre- 
 sent him rightly to the world they should love 
 one another. Don't be afraid of death, and 
 don't be troubled on my account. "In my 
 Father's house are many mansions. ... I go 
 to prepare a place for you." . . . Then said 
 Philip, "Lord, show us the Father and it 
 sufficeth us." His entreaty means, Show us 
 that God is really a Father and not a stern and 
 inexorable Ruler. 
 
 Jesus answered the question of Philip and of 
 us all by saying in effect: I have been a long 
 time with you, Philip, and don't you believe 
 yet that I love you as I love myself, and would
 
 THE GOSPELS 13 
 
 guard all your interests as I would my own? 
 Don't you know me well enough to believe 
 that I would never betray or deceive you? 
 Would you not have confidence in me in all 
 circumstances? If you could trust me, trust 
 your Father in heaven, for all human goodness 
 is but a reflection of divine goodness, and 
 if you believe that I have a compassionate 
 heart, believe that God has one also and 
 will love and care for you everywhere and 
 always. 
 
 The language of the fourth gospel is but a 
 more dramatic expression of what Matthew 
 records in the words: "What man is there of 
 you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give 
 him a stone? Or if he ask a fish will he give 
 him a serpent? 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?" It has been said that it is the purpose 
 of the fourth gospel not only to show us "a 
 God-like Christ but a Christ-like God." 
 
 The spirit of God lighteth every one that 
 cometh into the worlcj. All parents, at least 
 all mothers, are an earthly providence. God 
 has made of one blood all races of men, and 
 wherever a little head, white or brown or black,
 
 14 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 is pillowed upon a mother's breast, that child 
 has a glimpse of the Love that sits enthroned 
 above and directs all other forces for its own 
 beneficent ends.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BIRTH OF JESUS 
 
 THERE is a natural impulse to make a work of 
 art as perfect as possible. In a biography this 
 impulse leads the writer to heighten the vir- 
 tues, to conceal the defects and to magnify the 
 achievements of his subject. This tendency is 
 so marked as to have obtained the name of the 
 biographical frenzy. 
 
 The hero's birth is invested with portents, 
 his ancestry is made as illustrious as possible, 
 his future greatness is prophesied in infancy, 
 he has one or more miraculous escapes from 
 death, and he early displays superior wisdom. 
 Materials for such legends are abundant in 
 every life, for every child shows some "inti- 
 mations of immortality," and every one 
 brings to the hearts of its parents a new sense 
 of the mystery and divineness of human life. 
 No child is commonplace to its mother, and it 
 ought not to be to any one, for the growth of 
 a child in wisdom and stature is the most mar- 
 velous thing in all this world of marvels. 
 
 The story of the massacre of all the children 
 15
 
 16 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 in Bethlehem and the vicinity in order to 
 ensure the death of Jesus is not found in 
 secular history or in any gospel but that of 
 Matthew, and is in all probability due to the 
 myth-making impulse. It seems natural to 
 the biographers of Jesus that he, the Son of 
 Man, the typical Israelite, should in all things 
 "be like unto his brethren" and should repre- 
 sent in his own person the history of his race, 
 and therefore as the Israelites had suffered 
 captivity in Egypt and their male children 
 had been killed by their jealous rulers, Jesus 
 was made to flee thither for safety and remain 
 there a virtual prisoner till the death of Herod 
 in order, as Matthew himself asserts, that the 
 prophecy of Hosea regarding him might be 
 fulfilled. What Hosea says is not, however, a 
 prophecy but a statement of fact, and the 
 actual reason for the account in the gospel is 
 one of dramatic fitness. 
 
 The doctrine of the immaculate conception 
 of Jesus by the Holy Spirit is a figurative way 
 of expressing one of the most important of all 
 truths, viz, that a pure birth is needful to a 
 healthful life. The children of the diseased 
 are themselves diseased, the offspring of the 
 lustful are impure; to be ill-born is the greatest 
 of misfortunes, as to be well-born is the richest
 
 THE BIRTH OF JESUS 17 
 
 of blessings. In all the gospel story there is 
 nothing so intrinsically rational as that the 
 purest and noblest of men was the offspring of 
 pure and deep affection, and this I conceive to 
 be the meaning of the boldly figurative lan- 
 guage employed. 
 
 The belief that the fate of men is controlled 
 by the stars and may be read in them is very 
 ancient and very natural to a pastoral nation, 
 such as the Jews originally were. Shepherds 
 living under the open sky and constantly see- 
 ing and feeling the influence of sun and moon 
 could not but think that the countless lesser 
 but still glorious orbs that stud the heavens 
 had some power over the earth beneath them. 
 The movement of the two larger bodies pro- 
 duces great effects. It was natural to con- 
 clude that the more intricate movements of 
 the smaller bodies should produce correspond- 
 ingly intricate and minute results. The sun 
 and moon were universal lords, the planets 
 were believed to preside over the destinies of 
 single persons and to foretell particular events. 
 Language, the best history of a race, because 
 the one unconsciously written by the whole 
 people, still shows many traces of these primi- 
 tive beliefs. Men "bless their stars" for good 
 fortune and say that an enterprise that turns
 
 i8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 out badly was ill-starred. Mirthful men are 
 still called jovial, as if born when Jove was in 
 the ascendant; sad men, saturnine; fickle ones, 
 mercurial; and mad men, lunatics. Astrolo- 
 gers developed these beliefs into elaborate sys- 
 tems, and poets embellished them with many 
 graceful details. 
 
 It was inevitable that men should think that 
 the birth of so remarkable a prophet as Jesus 
 had been predicted. Accordingly wise men 
 from the east, the special home of astrology, 
 are represented as seeing his star and coming 
 to worship him. In the same spirit of poetic 
 adoration the church later changed "the star- 
 led wizards," the simple "wise men" of Mat- 
 thew into three kings of different nations and 
 ages, that youth in the person of one, man- 
 hood in that of another, and age in that of the 
 third, might do honor to the infant Redeemer. 
 
 The gospel of Matthew not only embellishes 
 the earlier and balder account of Mark with 
 this beautiful story of the devout astrologers 
 and the guiding star, but it also provides Jesus 
 with a line of noble ancestors. The ancestry 
 differs in many respects from the genealogy 
 given in Luke, but both Matthew and Luke 
 agree in tracing the descent of Jesus through 
 his father Joseph. This is evident testimony
 
 THE BIRTH OF JESUS 19 
 
 that in the earlier historic period there was no 
 doubt that Jesus was the son of Joseph, since 
 otherwise Joseph's descent would have been 
 altogether unimportant. The last eight verses 
 of the first chapter of Matthew are a later and 
 awkward addition, and in Luke there is a still 
 clumsier modification of the original narrative, 
 as the writer has contented himself with a~brief 
 interpolation, making verse 23 of chapter 3 
 read, "Jesus began to be about thirty years of 
 age, being (as was supposed) the son of 
 Joseph." 
 
 In other portions of his narrative of the 
 birth of Jesus, Luke goes as far beyond Mat- 
 thew as Matthew had exceeded Mark, for while 
 Matthew is content with signs in the sky and 
 warnings sent in dreams, Luke makes the 
 angel Gabriel descend and announce to Mary 
 that she should be the mother of the "Son of 
 God." Gabriel is also sent to make an an- 
 nouncement to Zacharias of the birth of his 
 son John. 
 
 Matthew, in his account of the preaching of 
 Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, says that 
 those who heard him "were astonished and 
 said, Whence hath this man this wisdom, and 
 these mighty works? Is not this the carpen- 
 ter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and
 
 20 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 his brethren James and Joses and Simon and 
 Judas? and his sisters are they not all with us?" 
 This account is clear enough as to the common 
 opinion of the people of Nazareth, but it may 
 be said that Mary kept her great secret from 
 strangers and "pondered it in her heart." 
 
 It appears, however, more probable from 
 Luke's narrative that she habitually spoke of 
 Joseph as the father of Jesus, for on the 
 memorable occasion when he had been lost 
 during the visit to Jerusalem at twelve years of 
 age, when a mother's joy at his recovery would 
 have surprised her out of merely conventional 
 language, she associates Joseph with herself 
 in the most absolute manner, saying, "Son, 
 why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold 
 thy father and I have sought thee sorrow- 
 ing." 
 
 The gospel of John, which was written much 
 later than the narratives of Matthew, Mark and 
 Luke, presents an entirely different phase of 
 Christian thought. The simple and more poetic 
 early legends are discarded and the language 
 of Gnostic philosophy is employed. There is 
 so much sin and suffering in the world that the 
 Gnostic philosophers thought that the world 
 could not have been made by a being of infi- 
 nite power and goodness, such as they con-
 
 21 
 
 ceived the supreme divinity to be, and so they 
 imagined that it had been made by one of the 
 many created spirits or JEons who surrounded 
 his throne. The name of some of the ^Eons 
 were Life, Light, and Reason or Wisdom, or the 
 Word; and John in the opening of his gospel, 
 ignoring all human genealogies and accessory 
 honors, identifies Jesus with the Word, the 
 Life and the Light. At the same time he 
 antagonizes the Gnostic philosophy and main- 
 tains the unity of the Godhead by declaring 
 that these names denote attributes of the 
 divine mind and have no existence apart from 
 it. In regard to the gospel of John it may be 
 said that it maintains throughout the same 
 height of mystical exaltation. It is written 
 with the express object of enforcing belief in 
 Jesus as the Son of God and accordingly the 
 manifestations of his power, though fewer, are 
 more remarkable. Matthew reports twenty, 
 Mark eighteen, Luke twenty-one, and John 
 only eight miracles. The first three gospels 
 report the cure of blind men, but it is only the 
 gospel of John that tells of the restoration of 
 sight to one who was born blind. Three gos- 
 pels tell of the raising of the daughter of Jairus 
 who had died just before Jesus reached the 
 house, but it is only John's gospel that narrates
 
 22 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 the resurrection of Lazarus after he had been 
 dead four days. 
 
 To recapitulate and conclude this chapter: 
 Mark gives no account of the birth of Jesus, 
 Matthew and Luke surround it with prodigies, 
 provide him with a royal pedigree and invent 
 a story by which he is born at Bethlehem, the 
 city of his alleged ancestor David. It is not 
 necessary to swell this narrative by any discus- 
 sion of the truth of the account of the journey 
 of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. As a state- 
 ment of fact it must stand or fall with the nar- 
 rative of miraculous events in which it is 
 embedded. But, whatever may be said of its 
 literal truth, the story is poetically both true 
 and beautiful. 
 
 At the Reformation, Protestantism cut down 
 the ranker growth of superstition, but it did 
 not destroy the roots. In leaving the legends 
 about the birth and miracles of Jesus it retains 
 the germs of every other wild exaggeration of 
 the Acta Sanctorum. The life of Jesus in the 
 gospels implies a similar life of the Blessed 
 Virgin Mary and that a legend of Mary's 
 mother, Saint Anne.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE BOYHOOD OF JESUS 
 
 JESUS must have been a pure, gentle, sym- 
 pathetic and thoughtful boy. As he grew in 
 stature he grew also "in wisdom and favor 
 with God and man." We know even less of 
 his boyhood than we do of that of Shake- 
 speare, for there is but one recorded incident 
 that is worth attention. The apocryphal gos- 
 pels, indeed, are full of pseudo miracles. 
 They say that he made clay sparrows and then 
 gave them power to fly; that Judas, his school- 
 mate, was even then jealous of him, called him 
 a sorcerer and struck him. Jesus then prophe- 
 sied that the side struck by Judas would be 
 pierced by a spear at his crucifixion. His 
 other playmates recognized his goodness and 
 greatness and foreshadowed the crown of 
 thorns by crowning him with flowers. He em- 
 barrassed the teacher of the village school by 
 deep questions, and when the perplexed and 
 angry pedagogue lifted his rod to strike the 
 precocious child, his arm was paralyzed. 
 
 The one recorded incident that bears the 
 23
 
 24 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 stamp of probability is that of the visit to the 
 temple at the age of twelve. 
 
 Some time or other Jesus must have con- 
 sciously surrendered his will to that of God. 
 I imagine it was very early in life, for at twelve 
 he was about his Father's business and was 
 growing in wisdom and in favor with God and 
 man. From the fact that nothing is said about 
 a struggle it seems reasonable to infer that 
 his self-dedication was without agony and 
 tumult. 
 
 That Jesus should early feel that he was a 
 "dedicated spirit," and that his was to be a 
 life of service to God and man was very nat- 
 ural. He was fed on the noble poetry of 
 Israel, rendered to him tenfold more sweet and 
 inspiring in that he first heard it from the lips 
 of a devoted mother. Mary was herself a 
 richly gifted poet, as is shown by her recorded 
 poem, the Magnificat. If the external evidence 
 that it is actually her composition is not in 
 itself sufficient, it is confirmed by the fact that 
 her son was so great a poet, and according to 
 the common law of heredity he derived his 
 mental character chiefly from his mother. 
 That one so imbued with the spirit of Old Tes- 
 tament poetry that approaching maternity led 
 her to express her joy in a lofty psalm should
 
 THE BOYHOOD OP JESUS 25 
 
 soothe her firstborn to slumber with all the ten- 
 der, all the beautiful, and all the sublime pas- 
 sages of the poetry of her people, is self-evi- 
 dent. The lullabies of the infant Jesus were of 
 the overshadowing wings and the everlasting 
 arms of the Lord God of Israel. The last 
 sound that fell upon his ears before the com- 
 ing of "the sweet dream softer than unbroken 
 rest" was sometimes perhaps a song without 
 words or the absurd little rhymes, the "baby 
 talk' 5 into which affection pours a wealth of 
 beauty and meaning, but oftener, I think, it 
 was some sublime utterance such as: "The 
 Lord is thy Keeper. Behold He that keepeth 
 Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. He 
 giveth his beloved sleep." 
 
 The faith in the inherent nobility of woman 
 which Jesus always exhibits is a very strong 
 though an indirect testimony to that gentle 
 and long-suffering mother, to whom the early 
 and mediaeval church accorded honor almost 
 equal to that which it gave her son. 
 
 Next to the influence of Mary was that of 
 Joseph. I imagine that he was a grave, God- 
 fearing man. Every morning before work 
 began and every evening when the day's labor 
 was done, the father gathered his family about 
 him and selected "with judicious care" some
 
 26 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 portion of Scripture for reading and comment. 
 Jesus shows so intimate an acquaintance with 
 every part of the Old Testament that it is most 
 probable that he learned it day by day at home 
 and was not merely dependent upon the 
 weekly readings at the synagogue. 
 
 When the Scripture had been read in this 
 household at Nazareth, they probably sang 
 a hymn together, for the habits formed in 
 childhood are persistent, and we read that Jesus 
 not only prayed but sang with his disciples on 
 the last night of his life, the night on which 
 he was betrayed. I cannot think that these 
 daily communings ended without prayer. 
 
 Jesus was the eldest child and therefore had 
 the opportunity of watching the infancy of his 
 four brothers and of his sisters. He loved 
 children. Their innocence and trustfulness 
 attracted him, and in his later teaching he 
 often held them up for imitation. The king- 
 dom of heaven, he declares, is only for those 
 who have the spirit of children. 
 
 Then there was the discipline of daily work. 
 He learned industry and economy so thor- 
 oughly in that well-ordered household that they 
 became instinctive and a second nature. "I 
 must work the work of him that sent me, while 
 it is day; for the night cometh when no man
 
 THE BOYHOOD OF JESUS 27 
 
 can work," is natural language for the son of 
 a faithful carpenter. 
 
 He learned from many a precept in the Book 
 of Proverbs and from the example of father 
 and mother that idleness is a sin and a re- 
 proach. Doubtless the lesson of thrift was 
 also impressed with all the thoroughness with 
 which it is learned in a poor and conscientious 
 Scotch or New England household. In order 
 that the income of a village carpenter might 
 suffice for the needs of a large family nothing 
 must be wasted. Whatever may be thought of 
 the miracle of the loaves and fishes, "Gather 
 up the fragments that nothing be lost," is not 
 only pious and sensible language but exceed- 
 ingly natural to one who in childhood had felt 
 poverty's sharp pinch and had acquired a 
 horror of waste as one of the great causes of 
 poverty and distress. 
 
 As the boy grew older and was kept more 
 steadily at work he learned to prize more and 
 more the blessed weekly rest of the Sabbath. 
 People who have all the leisure they want 
 every day do not know what a beneficent 
 provision the day of rest is to those who toil 
 steadily from sunrise to sunset for six days of 
 every week. I don't wonder that Jesus was 
 indignant at a ceremonialism that hedged the
 
 Sabbath about with vexatious restraints and 
 deprived it of half its value. "The Sabbath," 
 he declared, "was made for man." Yet he 
 was no Sabbath breaker. He did not waste 
 the precious day in frivolity, but gained from it 
 the richest refreshment of both body and spirit. 
 The Sabbath was the core of the Jewish, as it 
 is of the Christian, religion. In fact no reli- 
 gion can permeate the mind and heart of a 
 people without systematic instruction, and 
 systematic instruction is impossible without 
 days appointed for the purpose. 
 
 Jesus was doubtless as regularly in his place 
 in the synagogue as the elders or "the min- 
 ister," and the day was to him one of high 
 communion with his Heavenly Father. I 
 imagine him walking with father and mother 
 to the place of prayer and worship, repeating 
 in his heart, "I was glad when they said unto 
 me, Let us go unto the house of the Lord." I 
 have no doubt he had visions of the presence 
 of God more real and vivid than those of Jacob 
 at Bethel, and that to him the glory of the 
 Lord rilled the plain white walls more than to 
 others it filled the temple of Solomon. It is 
 not the place or the mode of worship that 
 brings the sense of God's presence but the 
 spirit of the worshiper. God is found
 
 THE BOYHOOD OF JESUS 29 
 
 by those who seek him in spirit and in 
 truth. 
 
 Perhaps they had no great orator to expound 
 the Law in the little synagogue at Nazareth. 
 Perhaps sometimes to an undevout and unsym- 
 pathetic attendant the service seemed dry and 
 formal, but to the heart hungering and thirst- 
 ing after righteousness, to the one who can 
 truly say that the words of God's mouth are 
 more to him than his necessary food, every 
 sincere service, however poor and inartistic, is 
 a benediction. 
 
 To worship God sincerely anywhere and in 
 any manner purifies and elevates the soul of 
 man, but I cannot help thinking that the Sab- 
 bath services at Nazareth were more than ordi- 
 narily spiritual and helpful. It is impossible 
 that a man like Joseph should not have an in- 
 fluence in the community. The Psalmist prays, 
 "Create in me a clean heart and renew a right 
 spirit within me. Then will I teach transgress- 
 ors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted 
 unto thee." There is no such thing as soli- 
 tary piety or solitary wickedness. Every man 
 is a source of good or evil to others, and no 
 doubt the pious Joseph and the devout Mary 
 had a circle of like-minded companions with 
 whom they took "sweet counsel." The office
 
 30 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 of Reader and Expounder in the synagogue 
 was not permanent, but was assigned from time 
 to time to any qualified layman, and it is proba- 
 ble that Joseph was among those who were 
 appointed to it, and that Jesus often heard his 
 father speak not only in the retirement of the 
 home but also with the greater emphasis and 
 solemnity which the presence of a congrega- 
 tion adds to words of prayer and exhortation. 
 Indeed, the editor of the Oxford Sunday 
 School Teacher's Bible, basing his view upon 
 Luke 4: 16 supposes that Jesus himself held the 
 office of Sheliach, or Reader, at Nazareth, and 
 this opinion seems the more reasonable from 
 the fact that even in the beginning of his 
 itinerant ministry he seems to have had the 
 readiness and self-possession in public speak- 
 ing which are commonly acquired only by long 
 practice. We are not told when Joseph died, 
 but we know that he was living when Jesus was 
 twelve, and even if the good man passed from 
 earth soon after this time there is no doubt 
 that his image would be deeply imprinted on 
 the mind of his susceptible and thoughtful son. 
 It is a mistake that the beautiful unity of the 
 Holy Family, as it at least partially appears in 
 Catholic art and devotion, should among 
 Protestants have been broken by the false
 
 exaltation of the son and the inconsistent and 
 ungenerous neglect of his godly parents. Jesus, 
 though his stage of action has been conspic- 
 uous beyond that of all other persons, was in 
 all essential elements of character akin to the 
 devout and faithful father and mother who 
 shaped his character in that humble home in 
 the little village among the hills of Galilee. 
 
 The records of the life of Jesus are so 
 meager that we know nothing of his boyish 
 friendships. We know that he who "loved 
 Mary and Martha and Lazarus," and who 
 showed such special marks of affection to John 
 that he was known as the "beloved disciple," 
 must have been of a tender and companionable 
 disposition and have sought to gain from 
 heaven "its choicest gift, a friend."
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE EARLY MANHOOD OF JESUS 
 
 THE reticence of his biographers has doubt- 
 less upon the whole contributed to the fame of 
 Jesus. The best part of the life of a writer and 
 teacher is to be found in the words and acts 
 connected with his calling and chief work. In 
 everything else he is on the same plane as 
 other men or even on a lower one, for there is 
 in Nature a stern law of limitation and com- 
 pensation by which the greater the power of 
 one sort possessed by any creature the less its 
 strength of other kinds. Bird and beast are 
 allotted swiftness or strength or cunning, but 
 no animal combines them all in a high degree. 
 Those birds that have developed the highest 
 power of flight by constant use of the wings, 
 when necessity brings them to earth are sud- 
 denly transformed into clumsy and ungainly 
 creatures that have all but lost their power to 
 walk. And every specialist among men, 
 whether devoted to one work by deliberate 
 choice and training or set apart by an im- 
 perious instinct, must pay the heavy penalty 
 32
 
 THE EARLY MANHOOD OF JESUS 33 
 
 of his peculiar greatness. The whole force of 
 the nature goes to feed the favored quality, 
 and everything else dwindles away. 
 
 In all probability, therefore, Jesus was not a 
 very good carpenter. Industrious, painstak- 
 ing, conscientious, he must have been in all his 
 -work, but great imaginative and emotional 
 powers are very rarely, if ever, associated with 
 a liking or an aptitude for mechanical details. 
 The pride and affections are not centered 
 there, and excellence in anything is never 
 gained except by single and perfect devotion. 
 
 But whatever the quality of his work the sig- 
 nificant fact remains that Jesus was a carpenter, 
 and perhaps no mechanical occupation is more 
 favorable to the development of the intellec- 
 tual and the moral faculties. 
 
 It was an essentially honest occupation, 
 one in which every penny he received was 
 earned by labor that benefited both himself 
 and his employer. The carpenter is one of the 
 earliest and most essential figures of civilized 
 society. His occupation is honorable and use- 
 ful. By his agency the dark cave in which 
 man crouched like a beast is transformed into 
 the house in which the moral virtues may de- 
 velop and the home be created. 
 
 I am glad that we do not know more of the
 
 34 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 routine portion of the life of Jesus than we do. 
 I am glad that we do not know more of 
 Shakespeare, for the unknown part of his life 
 has perished only because it was common- 
 place, and if the frivolous details of his phys- 
 ical life had been forced upon us they would 
 have obscured the picture of that sublime in- 
 tellectual activity which is alone important to 
 the world. 
 
 Indeed I think it providential and a great 
 benefit to the world that most of the details of 
 the life of Jesus have been lost. I do not 
 mean to insinuate, for I do not believe, that 
 there was anything discreditable and unworthy 
 in that great life. I only mean that the flesh, 
 even in its fairest form, is a veil which hides 
 and obscures the purity and greatness of the 
 spirit, and the spirit of Jesus was not only 
 superior to its earthly tabernacle but superior 
 to any conception of his greatness that any 
 other mind has been able to form. Only a 
 mind and heart in all respects like his own 
 could do him full justice. 
 
 No doubt Jesus was intensely susceptible to 
 all the beauties of the favored part of the world 
 in which he lived. The mountains of Galilee 
 were his friends. "He drank his fill from the 
 bare bosom of nature." It is very likely that
 
 THE EARLY MANHOOD OF JESUS 35 
 
 he roamed from place to place in the ordinary 
 course of his trade, as it is still the custom in 
 Syria for a carpenter to do, just as in earlier 
 days in New England the tailor and the shoe- 
 maker used to come round every year and work 
 for a household until its wants were supplied. 
 As Jesus wandered among these simple moun- 
 taineers he found a primitive and noble race 
 the recollection of whose sturdy and handsome 
 bodies, and of their simple, generous natures 
 was often a refreshment to him when he came 
 into contact in later years in Judea with men 
 of an inferior physical and moral type. 
 
 In after -years, when he was exhausted by the 
 pressure of throngs of people, by the impor- 
 tunities of the sick and needy, and chafed 
 by controversy, he gathered strength again by 
 prayer upon his beloved mountains and 
 beneath the solemn stars which spoke to him 
 of the vastness of his Father's domain. 
 
 It is not unlikely that his intense patriotism 
 led him also to make voluntary excursions to 
 the more accessible historic scenes. I think 
 he must have stood among the cedars of 
 Lebanon and trodden the grass of Hermon 
 fresh with its morning dew. Perhaps Jesus 
 never extended his travels to southern Arabia 
 and saw the frowning mass of granite from
 
 36 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 which amid thunderings and lightnings the 
 Law was given to Israel by the hand of Moses, 
 but Mount Carmel, the scene of the triumph of 
 Elijah, the next in order of might among his 
 forerunners, was little more than a day's walk 
 distant from Nazareth, and to it he must often 
 have gone, not drawn merely by the charms of 
 the mountain and its memories, but that from 
 its summit he might gaze upon the broad and 
 mysterious expanse of the Mediterranean Sea. 
 But however widely he may have traveled, 
 Nazareth was his home, and its picturesque 
 scenes were the most familiar and the dearest 
 to his heart. 
 
 Nazareth nestles in one of those vales 
 
 "Where deep and low the hamlets lie 
 Beneath their little patch of sky 
 And little lot of stars," 
 
 but in all probability Jesus walked almost 
 daily to "the brow of the hill whereon the city 
 was built" and drank in with ecstasy the wide 
 sweep of landscape commanded by it. 
 
 National ideas do much to form the char- 
 acter of an ambitious youth. No race however 
 timid and feeble is content with servitude, but 
 all men feel instinctively that freedom is their 
 right and long to obtain deliverance from a 
 foreign yoke.
 
 THE EARLY MANHOOD OF JESUS 37 
 
 In any examination of the life of Jesus it 
 must never be forgotten that he belonged to 
 one of the greatest races in human history. 
 No other highly developed race has main- 
 tained a well-defined national life for so many 
 centuries, or has produced such a constant and 
 brilliant succession of men of intellect and 
 moral distinction. Even the laurels of the 
 Greek fade when placed in comparison with 
 the aureole that plays about the head of the 
 Jew. Israel has had a line of prophets who in 
 imaginative power, in moral purity, in unselfish 
 devotion, and in tenacity of purpose far sur- 
 pass those of any other nation. It was there- 
 fore to be expected, in accordance with the 
 analogies everywhere to be observed in nature, 
 that the supreme spiritual leader of mankind 
 should spring from the race that has shown 
 pre-eminent genius for religion. 
 
 The largest and finest apples are in the most 
 highly cultivated orchard, the fairest and most 
 fragrant flowers are in the best kept garden, the 
 tallest tree stands in the mightiest forest, the 
 greenest valley is amid the most verdant land- 
 scape, the highest mountain peak is in the 
 highest mountain range, the greatest tidal wave 
 occurs in the broadest and deepest ocean, and 
 the brightest stars are clustered into the most
 
 38 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 splendid constellations. It is impossible that 
 a great man should spring from an inferior 
 race, for every man in order to be great needs 
 the momentum of example and sympathy. 
 
 As Jesus grew up to manhood he had a pas- 
 sionate and absorbing desire "to make some 
 useful plan or book or sing some song" for 
 Israel's sake, but alas! the ordinary official 
 pathway to influence was barred to him. There 
 was no profession but that of the Scribe, and 
 the hair-splitting casuistry of these Pharisaic 
 teachers, their elaborate ceremonialism, their 
 solicitude about every trifle and above all their 
 ineffectiveness in enforcing the "weightier 
 matters of the law, justice and judgment" were 
 utterly repugnant to him. Some of these doc- 
 tors of the law forbade a man to wear a newly- 
 finished garment on the Sabbath lest a needle 
 should be still sticking in it and he should 
 then bear a burden on the holy day. They 
 forbade him to walk in tall ripe grass on the 
 seventh day lest he should knock out the seeds 
 and thus thresh grain on the Sabbath. They 
 regarded it as of such importance that a man 
 should always wash his hands before eating 
 that they venerated as a martyr a man who 
 starved to death rather than violate the rule, 
 although no water were accessible.
 
 THE EARLY MANHOOD OF JESUS 39 
 
 The Jewish church in fact, though it had 
 reached its maximum of external activity and 
 splendor, was exhausted and decaying. It 
 was like an overgrown tree most of whose life 
 has gone to its extremities. Its trunk was 
 huge and majestic, its branches were numer- 
 ous, its leaves were green and full, and appar- 
 ently it was the pride of the forest, yet it was 
 hollow at the heart and the giant was in 
 reality ready to be uprooted by the first blast 
 of a storm. 
 
 Jesus could not take his credentials and be- 
 come a teacher in a church whose doctrines 
 were false, whose ceremonies were frivolous, 
 whose general activity was misdirected. He 
 shrank from a violent break with the existing 
 order of things, and yet he could find no place 
 for himself in it. One thing he had deter- 
 mined, he would either speak what he believed 
 to be true or be silent as a public teacher. He 
 chafed at the obscurity and inactivity of his 
 life, for "he was tempted in all points as we 
 are," yet he saw no opening for any more con- 
 spicuous and useful career. But he was true 
 to his ideals. 
 
 While he was thus "nourishing a youth sub- 
 lime" and silently preparing himself, Judea 
 was agitated by a movement whose influence
 
 40 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 soon spread to Galilee and other outlying prov- 
 inces. A new prophet had arisen of the spirit 
 and power of Elijah. The whole nation had 
 long been expecting deliverance from the 
 Roman yoke by some national hero anointed 
 and commissioned of God for that purpose 
 and when John the Baptist issued from the 
 seclusion in which his life had been spent and 
 began to preach, "Repent, for the kingdom of 
 heaven is at hand," he found crowds of eager 
 listeners and among them Jesus of Nazareth.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION 
 
 IT WAS no idle curiosity that led Jesus to 
 make the long and toilsome journey . from 
 Nazareth to the southern part of Judea. 
 John's preaching, as reported, accorded 
 closely with the hopes and half-formed pur- 
 poses that had long filled the mind of Jesus, 
 and so, doubtless feeling that the step was a 
 momentous one and that he might be breaking 
 with his old life forever, Jesus determined to 
 see and hear for himself and, if on a nearer 
 view he approved of John's methods, to attach 
 himself to the movement begun by the Baptist. 
 
 John was a simple-minded and unlearned 
 man who had spent most of his life as a her- 
 mit; and, though he was an intense patriot and 
 could not refrain from rebuking the wickedness 
 of the "generation of vipers" which had 
 caused God in his anger to subject his people 
 to the yoke of the Romans, yet he did not feel 
 that he was able, like another Gideon or Judas 
 Maccabaeus, to break that hated yoke and 
 become the deliverer of his nation. He was 
 41
 
 42 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 not a warrior or a man of action but a voice 
 only, and as a voice he cried, "Repent, for the 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand." He knew 
 that one far mightier than himself was needed 
 to purge away the elaborate and imposing, yet 
 essentially empty, ceremonialism into which 
 Judaism had degenerated, and especially that 
 a wisdom and strength far beyond his own 
 were needed to check the greed, luxury, and 
 ambition that were demoralizing the nation. 
 The inward voice which had commanded him 
 to preach had assured him that his efforts 
 should not be in vain, but that the work he was 
 not able to complete should be taken up by 
 some mightier successor and carried forward 
 in power. John had looked with eager expec- 
 tation at every man of all the multitudes of 
 those who presented themselves for his bap- 
 tism for one who seemed likely to be the 
 Messiah he was expecting, yet the inward voice 
 was silent until Jesus came. But when John 
 saw and talked with Jesus that strange voice 
 which had first told him to preach, spoke to 
 him again and said, "This is he that baptizeth 
 not with water only but with the spirit of holi- 
 ness." 
 
 No divine inspiration ever entirely over- 
 powers the freedom of the human will, and
 
 THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION 43 
 
 men will forever look upon the humility and 
 self-abnegation of John as one of the most 
 beautiful illustrations of wisdom and virtue in 
 all the records of humanity. The language 
 ascribed to him is perhaps not historical, yet 
 in substance and spirit at least he declared to 
 his followers: "Behold the Lamb of God that 
 taketh away the sins of the world." Here is 
 the man who is to do away with the empty and 
 barbarous, the worse than useless, the cruel, 
 degrading and outworn system of sacrifices 
 which so many earlier prophets have protested 
 against in vain. Here is God's messenger and 
 anointed one who will purify his people and 
 take away their sins by righteousness and 
 mercy and not by "the blood of bulls and 
 goats," which is not pleasing to God and can- 
 not atone for sin. 
 
 John was at first unwilling to baptize one 
 whom he felt to be greater than himself, but 
 Jesus urged it and John assented. The act of 
 Jesus was a very gracious one. He too was 
 free from all petty jealousy. He was not 
 angry because John had anticipated him in the 
 kind of work he had been longing for an op- 
 portunity to do; he was content to enroll 
 himself in the ranks of John's followers. But 
 the event was not to be so. When Jesus went
 
 44 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 down into the water and John poured the 
 emblem of purification upon his head, Jesus 
 distinctly heard a voice that said unto him, 
 "Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well 
 pleased." 
 
 There is here no occasion for doubt. "There 
 are more things in heaven and in earth than are 
 dreamed of in your philosophy." Socrates, 
 Mohammed, Peter the Hermit, Joan of Arc, 
 and many others have heard, or believed they 
 heard, voices which commanded, encouraged 
 or restrained them at critical periods in their 
 lives. 
 
 Whatever Jesus heard, it affected him most 
 profoundly. He was driven by his agitated 
 spirit into the wilderness, for he felt as all 
 really great men feel that a man's responsi- 
 bility for his conduct is personal, and cannot 
 be abdicated or even shared. Like Moses 
 before and Paul after him, he went into soli- 
 tude to fight out the great battle with his 
 doubts and fears and to determine his course of 
 action. 
 
 It was no light thing to announce himself a 
 prophet and to undertake to rebuke wicked- 
 ness in high places, to antagonize deep-seated 
 national customs and prejudices, and to oppose 
 his opinion, that of a young and unlearned
 
 THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION 45 
 
 mechanic, to the teaching of aged and vener- 
 ated doctors of the law. 
 
 Mind and body suffered and most men would 
 have collapsed under the strain. But the tem- 
 perament of Jesus was intense, and the occasion 
 of his excitement was great. It is not, there- 
 fore, surprising that he forgot all about his 
 need of food and wandered for many days with- 
 out the sense of hunger. 
 
 But at last even the strong vitality of the 
 young carpenter-prophet was exhausted. His 
 overtaxed physical nature asserted itself, and 
 he hungered. In broken snatches of sleep or 
 in the waking visions of exhaustion and deli- 
 rium he thought that he was tempted by the 
 devil to make bread out of stones, to throw 
 himself from a pinnacle of the temple, or to 
 make himself a king by worshiping his 
 Satanic tempter. 
 
 The temptation of Jesus obviously reflects in 
 exaggerated and grotesque forms the tenor of 
 his ordinary waking thoughts. The practical 
 question of subsistence is imperative. A man 
 must eat or starve, and if he wants to eat and 
 has no money he must either earn his daily 
 bread or beg it. Perhaps Jesus was not long 
 or greatly troubled by this primary aspect of 
 the question. Yet it required faith and
 
 46 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 courage to abandon his certain and comfortable 
 subsistence as a workman and to determine to 
 adopt the precarious life of a prophet. 
 
 In all probability Jesus had a much harder 
 struggle before he was perfectly willing to 
 renounce "all the kingdoms of this world." 
 It is easy enough to call the grapes that hang 
 too high for us sour. We are all ready to 
 renounce every thing that is quite out of 
 our reach, but to renounce the good things 
 we have or think we may secure is quite 
 another matter. Jesus loved beauty, and long 
 and hard toil had prepared him to relish 
 leisure. His mind, too, was eager for knowl- 
 edge, and the opportunity for study and travel 
 that money affords was enticing to him. 
 Every man who walks through the long series 
 of stately rooms of a palace full of paintings, 
 sculptures, mosaics, and draperies, and then 
 from its balconies and corridors views the ter- 
 raced gardens, fair as Paradise with its 
 "flowers of all hues and trees of noblest kind," 
 must feel the fascination there is in great 
 riches. 
 
 But whatever attractiveness these things had 
 for Jesus, he rejected the temptation to pur- 
 chase them in the usual way by selfishness, 
 hardness, and injustice. He would rather
 
 THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION 47 
 
 "keep a conscience than a carriage," or its 
 ancient equivalent. 
 
 Yet there is a far greater temptation than 
 mere riches. Men desire nothing so much as 
 power. 
 
 The young carpenter of Nazareth could no 
 more fail to know that he was greater in soul 
 than his fellows than a man seven feet high 
 can fail to see that he is taller in body. He 
 must often have heard of the doings of Herod 
 Antipas, the princeling who ruled Galilee, and 
 perhaps he had occasionally seen him and esti- 
 mated him then as contemptuously as he did 
 later when he called him a "fox." 
 
 "To the workman belong the tools," said 
 Napoleon, and fitness for rule has by many a 
 man besides Napoleon been considered a suffi- 
 cient title to a throne. The energetic mayor 
 of the palace thrusts aside the do-nothing king, 
 and from being the power behind the throne 
 changes himself into the ruler upon it. Jesus 
 was tempted to do the same thing. But when 
 he thought of the inevitable consequences of a 
 revolution and a change of dynasty, thought 
 of the wars and sieges that would ensue, 
 thought of men torn from their homes to die, 
 of moaning widows and helpless orphans, 
 thought of all the unutterable wickedness and
 
 48 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 misery of a war of ambition, thought of the 
 bloodstained Herod pompously called the 
 Great, yet so tortured by remorse for his 
 crimes that he was the most miserable man in 
 all his dominions, when Jesus thought of all 
 these things he refused 
 
 "To wade through slaughter to a throne 
 And shut the gates of mercy^on mankind." 
 
 But as Jesus shrank from the brutalities of 
 war, the temptation changed its form and the 
 idea of reaching the high places of power by 
 policy and intrigue suggested itself. 
 
 Do not be so harsh and peremptory as John 
 the Baptist or Elijah, said the tempter. Be 
 politic, "worship me," flatter men in power 
 and make yourself indispensable to them, and 
 they will promote you. Enter a Rabbinical 
 school, get a place in the Sanhedrin and in a 
 few years become High Priest, and then, who 
 knows but that the way will open for you to 
 drive out the Roman governor and become the 
 successor of David and the King of Israel. 
 The gospels go farther and say that the tempta- 
 tion of possessing "all the kingdoms of this 
 world" entered his mind. Perhaps he thought 
 it was possible for him to repeat the career of 
 Alexander the Great, who three centuries
 
 THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION 49 
 
 earlier, at about his own age, had entered upon 
 the conquest of the world. 
 
 The renunciation of the world by Jesus was 
 not like the weariness and satiety which led 
 Charles V., the most powerful monarch of his 
 time, to abdicate his throne and retire to a 
 monastery to spend his last years in rehearsing 
 his funeral and in other gloomy and austere 
 religious ceremonies. 
 
 No. The renunciation of wealth and of 
 worldly power by Jesus was the act of a young 
 man full of life and ambition, one who shrank 
 from no danger and responsibility and found 
 his supreme joy in audacious thought and 
 energetic action, but who subordinated every- 
 thing else to the will of God, to the voice of 
 conscience, to the rights and welfare of others, 
 one who was too generous and noble to make 
 himself great except by love and service, and 
 so never reigned as a vulgar conqueror by im- 
 posing laws upon cities and kingdoms and for a 
 little while regulating the external life of a 
 nation. He does not rule over men but in 
 them. He is the Friend of Humanity, the 
 affectionate elder Brother, the Man of Sor- 
 rows, who toiled and suffered and dared for 
 us. 
 
 Jesus "tried the spirit" which tempted him.
 
 So THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 He had considered the voice that greeted him 
 when he was baptized to be from God, but this 
 whisper of worldly ambition was to him the 
 voice of Satan, and his brief, firm answer, 
 unlike the inquisitive paltering which led to 
 the downfall of Macbeth, was, "Get thee 
 hence, Satan." 
 
 Other strange temptations passed through 
 his mind, but he was proof against them all. 
 He had conquered the fear of poverty, calumny 
 and death, he had conquered the love of ease, 
 wealth and power. He accepted the office of 
 a prophet of righteousness with all its dimly- 
 foreseen strife and sorrow, and of a herald of 
 that kingdom of heaven, the speedy coming of 
 which John had announced. 
 
 There is nothing in the life of Jesus so won- 
 derful and commanding as the swift complete- 
 ness of all his moral victories. He never 
 dallied with temptation or placated his con- 
 science with the specious arguments that come 
 thronging to the mind that is inclined to 
 evil. He saw the right by intuition, and his 
 conscience, fortified by long habit and by 
 devout prayer, commanded and obtained 
 instant obedience. The life-long practice of 
 humble duties prepared him for all great 
 emergencies.
 
 THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION 51 
 
 When his internal struggle was ended, 
 "angels came and ministered unto him." 
 Food and sleep, memory, hope, conscience, 
 sympathetic friends, and the felt presence of 
 God in his world restored his strength and 
 serenity.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 
 
 THE conception for the sake of which Jesus 
 rejected all worldly ambitions was the simplest 
 and yet the grandest that ever entered into the 
 heart of man. He would transform earth into 
 heaven. He would redress all wrongs, cure all 
 diseases, wipe away all tears, he would dry up 
 all the countless streams of sin and sorrow by 
 purifying the corrupt source of them all, the 
 human heart. He would establish a society of 
 men and women who should be perfect as their 
 Father in heaven is perfect. 
 
 He had at first announced that he was sent 
 only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, 
 but, as in the later case of Paul, the opposition 
 of the Jews and the tolerance of the Gentiles 
 changed his views and gradually led him into 
 the sublime conception of a universal religion, 
 a world-wide kingdom of God. 
 
 "And when the devil had ended all the 
 
 temptations, he departed from him for a 
 
 season. And Jesus returned in the power of 
 
 the spirit into Galilee: and there went out a 
 
 52
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 53 
 
 fame of him through all the region round 
 about. And he taught in their synagogues 
 being glorified of all." This is the account in 
 the gospel by Luke of the opening of the pub- 
 lic ministry of Jesus. Matthew says, "Jesus 
 began to preach and to say, Repent: for the 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand." 
 
 Jesus grew into manhood at a time when a 
 mighty hope filled Judea, a hope that, time, 
 the destroyer of whatever is destructible, has 
 not yet been able to quench. Even down to 
 our own day, when a Jewish family celebrates 
 the Passover the door is left ajar to admit the 
 prophet Elijah in case he should appear to 
 announce the coming of the Messiah. O, idle 
 waiting and pathetic unbelief! But how elo- 
 quent is this custom! If after nineteen hun- 
 dred years of exile, of poverty, of persecution, 
 and of hope deferred that maketh the heart 
 sick, Israel still clings with desperate tenacity 
 to this expectation, what must have been the 
 original intensity of this faith! No other 
 enthusiasm was ever so ardent and general as 
 the Jewish longing for a Messiah in the time 
 of Jesus, and we can see how events gradually 
 forced upon him the conviction that he was 
 
 "The pillar of the nation's hope, 
 The center of the world's desire,"
 
 54 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 the one appointed by the omnipotent and 
 eternal God to establish the kingdom of heaven 
 upon earth. 
 
 All Judea was in a ferment. The Jews, 
 proud of their ancient and illustrious descent, 
 mindful of their former political greatness, re- 
 minded constantly by impressive national festi- 
 vals of former deliverances from foreign 
 oppressors, and above all fired by the predic- 
 tions of ardent prophets and the sublime strains 
 of patriotic poets, hated the Roman yoke with 
 a frenzy of animosity compared to which Irish 
 or Dutch hostility to England is almost like 
 affection. The Jewish tax gatherer, the agent 
 of the Roman power, was looked upon with 
 loathing as a traitor and a renegade. He had 
 denied his nationality, he had become a 
 heathen. He was an outcast and associated in 
 the common mind with harlots and vile men. 
 "Publicans and sinners" are almost synonyms 
 in the gospels. 
 
 Such was the national discontent that if 
 Jesus had never been born or had never 
 preached the coming of the kingdom of 
 heaven, the course of events, so far as Judaism 
 is concerned, would have been nearly the 
 same. The Jews would, in any case, soon 
 have rebelled against the Roman yoke, and
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 55 
 
 their nationality would have been destroyed 
 and their religion changed in consequence. 
 In fact it seems to me most likely that the 
 attempt by Jesus to substitute a spiritual and 
 philanthropic revolution for a political one 
 such as was generally expected, actually pro- 
 longed the life of the Jewish national institu- 
 tions, in much the same way as the preaching 
 of John Wesley and his followers reinforced 
 the influences that prevented England from fol- 
 lowing the lead of France in the eighteenth 
 century, and made his countrymen reform 
 patiently by moral and constitutional methods. 
 
 Jesus, like his great modern disciple, Wesley, 
 believed that the really important thing was to 
 break the yoke of sin rather than that of king 
 or governor. He believed that if men were 
 inwardly free and right, outward freedom and 
 outward prosperity would inevitably quickly 
 follow. "Seek first the kingdom of God and 
 all these things shall be added," might have 
 been said, and is actually implied, of many 
 things beside food and raiment. 
 
 In comparing the schemes of most other 
 thinkers with the "kingdom of heaven" as it 
 existed in the mind of Jesus, we notice that 
 all other reformers attach more value to 
 changes in law and institutions, to the regula-
 
 56 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 tion of labor and the just distribution of wealth, 
 and in general to man's external condition, 
 than did Jesus. 
 
 His primary method for reforming society 
 was to reform the individual members of it. 
 The whole can never be greater than the sum 
 of all its parts. A community made up of 
 imperfect people must be an imperfect com- 
 munity. He wished, therefore, to found a 
 society of perfect people, the beauty and 
 blessedness of whose lives should gradually 
 win all other men to righteousness and peace. 
 "Blessed," said Jesus, "are the pure, the 
 humble, the peacemakers, the merciful, and all 
 who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
 they shall be filled." The conception that the 
 righteous man is blessed rests upon belief in a 
 righteous God, and the conception that a 
 merciful man is blessed upon belief in a merci- 
 ful God. Accordingly God was to Jesus a 
 Father in heaven, who desired the good of all 
 his children and would certainly give them his 
 holy spirit if they sincerely and earnestly 
 desired to have his spirit and be like him. 
 Then when the heart was pure the life would 
 of course be right, for a good tree cannot bring 
 forth corrupt fruit. 
 
 Jesus preached stern doctrines. Righteous-
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 57 
 
 ness must have an undivided and absolute 
 sovereignty. You cannot serve God and 
 Mammon. A house divided against itself can- 
 not stand. As Lincoln said of this nation that 
 it cannot exist half slave and half free, so 
 Jesus taught that a man must make his choice 
 between good and evil. He could not mix 
 them and be a little of each, for one principle 
 must be the more potent and eventually must 
 destroy the other. To bring about this result 
 might take a longer or a shorter time, but the 
 result was inevitable, and every one who 
 attempted to save his life by sin was sure to 
 lose it, and every one who was willing, if need 
 be, to lose his life for righteousness was sure 
 to save it. 
 
 God's care of the righteous was absolutely 
 perfect. Not a hair of their heads should 
 perish. They need not fear men, for men 
 could only kill the body, and the destruction 
 of the body did not in any degree injure or 
 jeopardize the soul. 
 
 Jesus saw very clearly that all men would 
 not at first accept these teachings. In many 
 parables he taught that the kingdom of heaven 
 was a test. It was like a net which caught 
 good and bad. It was like wheat and tares. 
 It was like seed on fertile and on stony soil.
 
 5 8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 It was like servants entrusted with their Lord's 
 money. It was like virgins invited to a wed- 
 ding. 
 
 It is thus that every great teacher is at times 
 deeply saddened at the thought that in spite 
 of all possible clearness of demonstration, in 
 spite of the most patient teaching and example 
 and the most earnest exhortation, some will 
 remain blind and deaf. Some will be too 
 prejudiced even to listen, some whose interest 
 is for a moment awakened will be too indolent 
 to examine and weigh all the facts and reach 
 an intelligent conclusion, and many will turn 
 away from the clearest light because it rebukes 
 their selfish lives. 
 
 Although Jesus attached supreme importance 
 to the purification and ennoblement of the indi- 
 vidual life, he did not undervalue changes in 
 external conditions. Jesus persistently advo- 
 cated justice'and mercy, and taught by precept 
 and example that all property is a stewardship. 
 The rich man was condemned for faring 
 sumptuously and neglecting his poorer neigh- 
 bor. It was not said that his money was not 
 legally and honestly acquired, but he was con- 
 demned for not using it better. To clothe the 
 naked, to feed the hungry, to visit the sick and 
 the prisoner are paramount duties, and, in the
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 59 
 
 vision of the last judgment, are the tests by 
 which Jesus will determine his true disciples. 
 
 Jesus preached the gospel to the poor. He 
 loved the poor. He showed that he loved 
 them by sharing their lot. By his splendid 
 abilities he might easily have lifted himself 
 into affluence, but he preferred to stay with the 
 class to which he belonged by birth. He 
 stayed poor because he jlid not want to be a 
 deserter and a shirk. He saw how insufficient 
 are the common charities of men; how unsatis- 
 factory it is to give alms, little driblets of 
 charity to tide men over special periods of dis- 
 tress while at the same time sharply maintain- 
 ing class distinctions and holding aloof from 
 any real human fellowship and sympathy. 
 Jesus knew that men do not live by bread 
 alone, but that they need food for the soul as 
 well as for the body, and that the one essen- 
 tial food for the soul is love, and that real love 
 always manifests itself in companionship and 
 service. 
 
 A poor man was to Jesus a child of God, an 
 heir of heaven, a being of infinite possibilities. 
 He did not look upon men in the mass as part 
 of the resources of a nation, like its sheep and 
 cattle. They were not slaves, serfs, "hands," 
 but thinking brains and throbbing hearts.
 
 60 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 They were not pieces on the chess-board to be 
 played hither and thither in the service of the 
 king. They were not food for the sword and 
 spear, "food for powder" in the modern 
 phrase, to be sacrificed in war to serve the am- 
 bition of sovereigns or statesmen. Jesus is 
 the greatest asserter of the doctrine that every 
 man has "an inalienable right to life, liberty, 
 and the pursuit of happiness." By every word 
 and deed Jesus preached the gospel to the 
 poor. There is a great difference between the 
 Christianity of most of us and the Christianity 
 of Jesus Christ. Hearing the cross" means 
 doing painful duties, and in our artificial 
 society the weak and spoiled children of for- 
 tune are little willing and little able to adopt 
 the ideas and imitate the life of him who for 
 our sakes endured the hardships of poverty. 
 
 Jesus himself went about doing good. He 
 said, "It is more blessed to give than to re- 
 ceive," and that- all true greatness is service 
 and helpfulness and not lordship and power. 
 
 His earliest followers so understood him and 
 had all things in common, and in the first cen- 
 tury practical philanthropy was one of the 
 church's greatest elements of power. "See," 
 said the wondering heathen, "how these Chris- 
 tians lovel" Ah! how soon the disbelief in
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 61 
 
 God's goodness of poor, burdened and dis- 
 couraged humanity melts away in the warm 
 sunshine of huma"n love! "Come unto me, all 
 ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will 
 give you rest," or, in an older version, "Come 
 unto me, all ye that are careful (full of care), 
 and I will refresh you." No wonder that the 
 common people heard gladly the gospel of Jesus. 
 
 It was a gospel of faith, hope and charity, 
 the three Christian graces, fairer than all the 
 nine Muses of poetry and philosophy. 
 
 Jesus was taunted by the Pharisees with being 
 the friend of publicans and sinners. His 
 answer was, The publicans and the harlots are 
 nearer the kingdom of God than you are. 
 Sinners who belonged to the neglected and un- 
 fortunate classes always had the especial help 
 of Jesus. Many of them doubtless heard from 
 his lips with glad surprise the first kindly and 
 encouraging words ever spoken to them, and 
 they responded without hesitation. He knew 
 that the sinner's lot was hard. Defeated in 
 the battle of life, down-trodden and despised, 
 they had little to lose and much to gain by 
 becoming followers of Jesus. Some of them 
 were attracted only by the "loaves and fishes," 
 and did not tarry long, but others were irre- 
 sistibly drawn by the beauty of Christ's teach-
 
 62 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 ing and life, and remained faithful disciples till 
 death. To the sons and daughters of misfor- 
 tune Jesus was always strangely tender. Quick 
 to discern the first sign of remorse for sin, 
 quick to speak words of pardon and hope to 
 the penitent, patient with the faults and 
 ignorance of the feeblest and dullest disciple, 
 he "broke no bruised reed and quenched no 
 smoking flax." 
 
 But his indignation was hot against hypo- 
 crites and cowards. Those who had the fullest 
 light and deliberately rejected it, those who 
 made holy things a mere stock in trade, those 
 who while daily parading their knowledge of 
 the sublime and searching words of the law and 
 the prophets, had hardened their hearts against 
 them, he denounced with unsparing vehe- 
 mence. 
 
 Jesus puts himself before men in two charac- 
 ters; first as a comforter and helper, and 
 second as an example, and these two charac- 
 ters should be exhibited as parts of one life. 
 But human nature feels itself weak and help- 
 less, and shrinks from the labor of imitating a 
 herojc example, and so, for its own consola- 
 tion, it exaggerates the strength of Jesus and 
 makes him the universal healer and burden 
 bearer. It emphasizes his declaration, "Come
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 63 
 
 unto me, all ye that labor, and I will give you 
 rest," while it overlooks, "He that taketh not 
 up his cross and followeth after me, cannot be 
 my disciple." 
 
 Yet progress is being made, and a hopeful 
 spirit is abroad, a belief that the conditions of 
 human life may be greatly bettered. It is the 
 glory of Christianity that it is the religion of 
 hope, and that it has taught men to look for- 
 ward and not back.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 CHRIST AS A TEACHER 
 
 SOME of the ancient rhetoricians taught very 
 truly that the first requisite of the orator is 
 that he should be a good man. Sincerity of 
 character is the great source of strength. A 
 great conviction in the heart gives power to 
 the tongue. Jesus was great as a teacher 
 because his life enforced his utterances. 
 
 He believed what he said, and so he taught 
 "as one having authority and not as the 
 scribes." He saw things for himself, and was 
 not bound by the authority of the learned or 
 the opinion of the multitude. He trusted his 
 intuitions. He looked within for truth. He 
 brushed away a body of tradition even more 
 extensive and minute than that which now en- 
 cumbers and chokes his own teachings. But 
 Jesus did not go to the extremes of the great 
 modern transcendentalists. He built more 
 solidly upon the common experience and 
 established institutions of men. He came not 
 to destroy the law, but to fulfill. Like all the 
 greatest men, he looked before and after. He 
 6 4
 
 CHRIST AS A TEACHER 65 
 
 valued memory as well as hope. He was a 
 conservative as well as a radical. He formed 
 his opinions slowly and carefully, and then 
 held them against all external authority, and 
 only modified them as new light, which he was 
 always ready to receive, shone in upon his own 
 mind. He read as did Bacon the passages in 
 Jeremiah upon the old ways: Stand in the old 
 ways till ye see where the good way is and 
 then walk therein. His description of a wise 
 teacher is that he brings out of his treasury 
 things new and old. What Jesus knew h'e 
 knew. He did not "nibble and quibble and 
 scribble," and get together a medley of 
 precedent and bind himself body and soul in 
 chains of tradition like the ordinary doctors 
 of the law, but he read the hearts of men, and 
 above all he trusted his own consciousness. 
 
 He came not to narrow life, but to elevate it 
 and make it more abundant. The traditions of 
 his race and the narrowness of his own educa- 
 tion prevented any full development of his 
 artistic nature, but it manifests itself in the 
 germ. Much as he admired John the Baptist's 
 heroism, and much as he adopted of his ideas 
 and methods, he turned away with dislike from 
 John's coarse clothing and scanty, unwholesome 
 food, and from his ascetic solitude. Jesus
 
 66 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 came eating and drinking. He attended wed- 
 ding feasts and drew illustrations from them. 
 He loved flowers and children and their 
 games. 
 
 But the circumstances of the time and the 
 bent of his own mind made oratory and poetry 
 the chief forms in which his love of artistic 
 effect displayed itself. He sang hymns with 
 his disciples. He punned and jested with 
 them. He knew how a feather wings an arrow 
 and how an epigram or skillfully-turned phrase 
 gives currency to a truth. His language is not 
 more remarkable for the truth, weight and 
 dignity of its substance than for the beauty, 
 the symmetry, the melody, the perfect choice 
 and arrangement of words and the abundance, 
 variety, force and appropriateness of the fig- 
 ures. Well might contemporaries say, "Never 
 man spake like this man." According to the 
 definition of a good style as "proper words in 
 proper places," Jesus is the greatest of all mas- 
 ters of style, and it is as natural as it is notice- 
 able that habitual readers of the Bible are 
 superior not only in morals but in grace and 
 power of speech to those who neglect that 
 supreme volume. 
 
 The form of Hebrew poetry is simple and 
 rarely degenerates into weakness or triviality.
 
 CHRIST AS A TEACHER 67 
 
 It maintains a happy medium between the ex- 
 treme conciseness which prevents either clear- 
 ness or emotion, and the diffuseness which 
 always causes weakness. To say a thing twice 
 in a somewhat different way is to give a double 
 sense of its beauty and value. It is like turn- 
 ing a coin over and seeing that the reverse side 
 is as rich as the obverse one. To make a state- 
 ment and then follow it with a brief and wise 
 explanation or proof is to give the sword of 
 truth not merely a sharp edge but a reinforcing 
 weight. The parables have the best literary 
 characteristics of the psalms and prophecies 
 with a clearness of outline and a continuity of 
 development far greater than theirs. 
 
 His teaching reaches its climax of beauty 
 and power in the beatitudes. Their value is 
 beyond our poor praise. 
 
 "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, 
 To add a perfume to the violet, 
 Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." 
 
 We can but bow in adoration before these, 
 the sublimest and most wonderful of all say- 
 ings, the shortest and the greatest of all poems. 
 
 Jesus not only delighted in rhythm, but he 
 enjoyed a pun and appreciated its value as a 
 means of fixing an idea in the mind and rous-
 
 68 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 ing the emotions. Beneath his surface gaiety 
 he was very serious when he called Simon and 
 Andrew in the playful words, "Follow me, 
 you fishermen, and I will make you fishers of 
 men," and it was at a great crisis in his history 
 that he said to Peter, what may be rendered, 
 Thy name means rock, and on this rock I will 
 build my church. 
 
 These and other plays on words appear more 
 plainly in the Greek than in the English revi- 
 sion, but many similar ones are lost in any 
 translation of the language of Jesus out of the 
 Aramaic in which he usually spoke. 
 
 I love to think of Jesus as having worked at 
 the poet's as well as at the carpenter's craft, as 
 having tested the value of words, and toiled to 
 attain mastery of all the arts of expression. 
 But, however perfect are his rhythm and dic- 
 tion, these rhetorical excellences are the 
 smallest part of his greatness. 
 
 There is no trace in the teaching of Jesus of 
 the influence of the drama as such, yet he is 
 akin to Shakespeare in'the natural qualities of 
 his mind, in the quickness and range of his 
 observation and sympathy, and in the ease with 
 which he interpreted the human heart. He 
 looked with genial interest upon all classes of 
 mankind. He talked of shepherds and fisher-
 
 CHRIST AS A TEACHER 69 
 
 men, of farmers and merchants, of slaves and 
 kings, of stewards and soldiers, of maidens 
 and housewives, of mothers and children, of 
 rich and poor, of sinners and saints, and knew 
 what was in them all. We have but a small 
 selection of his sayings, as we have but a frag- 
 ment of his life, but the small body of his teach- 
 ing that remains has furnished more stimulus to 
 thought and more material for profitable com- 
 ment and elaboration than the works of any 
 other author however voluminous. 
 
 Ancient literature is about gods rather than 
 men. Jesus was fed on an imaginative litera- 
 ture which dealt very boldly with the person of 
 God. In the Jewish drama of life, God was the 
 central figure, as he is in some of the medieval 
 miracle plays. If we read the older prophets 
 more closely and sympathetically the lan- 
 guage of Jesus would often be more intelligible 
 to us. For example it will assist us in inter- 
 preting the gospel accounts of Jesus upon the 
 throne of judgment with all nations before him, 
 if we read that Jeremiah throws his teach- 
 ing into the same boldly dramatic form 
 and makes a similar claim to universal lord- 
 ship. "The Lord said unto me, . . . See, I 
 have this day set thee over the nations and 
 over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull
 
 70 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 down and to destroy, and to throw down and to 
 build and to plant" (Jer. 1:9, 10). 
 
 In general, according to the habit of his 
 nation and his time, and of all great writings 
 in all times, the language of Jesus was boldly 
 figurative. A great figure rouses the sluggish 
 imagination and stirs the blood like the sound 
 of a trumpet, or it flashes light into the dark- 
 est understanding or fastens an idea in the 
 most volatile memory. Who that ever heard 
 them could forget the words, "Let the dead 
 bury their dead," or "If these should hold 
 their peace the stones would immediately cry 
 out," or "If ye have faith and doubt not ye 
 shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed 
 and be thou cast into the sea, and it shall be 
 done." 
 
 Jesus inherited figurative language from his 
 great predecessors. His favorite title for him- 
 self, Son of Man, he borrowed from Ezekiel. 
 He delighted in the powerful language and 
 sublime imagery of Amos and Hosea, of 
 Isaiah and Jeremiah. He bore aloft their 
 torch and replenished it with fragrant and ex- 
 haustless oil. He drew from books and nature. 
 He was a great self-educated poet, like Burns 
 and Bunyan, not spoiled by the super-refine- 
 ments of the schools.
 
 CHRIST AS A TEACHER 71 
 
 Jesus is the greatest of all prophets, not only 
 as a teacher of divine truth, but even in the 
 secondary and relatively unimportant character 
 of a prophet, that of a predicter of the course 
 of events. One of the most wonderful of the 
 prophecies is, "Blessed are the meek: for they 
 shall inherit the earth." The ravenous wolf 
 and the blood-thirsty tiger are almost extermi- 
 nated, while the sheep and the cow are pos- 
 sessing the former habitations of the wild 
 beasts. So violent and dishonest men are play- 
 ing an ever-dwindling part in human history, 
 while the upright, the kindly and the helpful 
 are constantly becoming stronger and more 
 numerous. The robber baron is extinct, the 
 bandit is a vanishing figure. The milder forms 
 of chicanery in business have taken the place 
 of brute violence, and even these are sure 
 eventually to be discarded as both wicked and 
 foolish, as men learn from Jesus that happiness 
 and greatness are attained only by service. 
 Jesus taught men to please God by doing good 
 to man. He softened the stern outlines in 
 which many previous prophets had pictured 
 Jehovah. He took away the anger and the 
 jealousy and the clouds and darkness. For the 
 impassive Creator and the inexorable Judge he 
 substituted the Father in heaven, pitying and
 
 72 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 loving all his human children. Some men 
 have impressed themselves upon the world by 
 sheer force of intellect, other men of little 
 intellectual power have swayed great masses 
 by the fervor of their enthusiasm, others have 
 charmed assemblies by a winning personality, 
 by beauty of form and face, by fascination of 
 voice and manner. 
 
 Jesus united all these elements of power. 
 His intellect astonished and his tenderness 
 attracted men. He began to preach in the 
 very prime of his vigor and grace when his 
 pure and healthful body, invigorated by regular 
 labor, was able to endure great exertion and 
 quickly to regain its elasticity after fatigue, 
 and when his face without having lost the 
 ineffable grace of youth had already begun to 
 wear the noblest impress of manly dignity. 
 
 I think that to his other attractions he added 
 the charm and potency of a flexible and melo- 
 dious voice. The voice is the outcome of the 
 whole personality, and is often the peculiar 
 organ of its power.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 WONDERFUL as was Jesus as a teacher, his con- 
 temporary fame was even more largely due to 
 his marvelous acts, especially his cures of the 
 sick. As has been the case with most success- 
 ful faith-healers, the first exercise of his power 
 was unsought and almost unconscious. Shortly 
 after he began to proclaim repentance, as he 
 was preaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, 
 "a man with an unclean spirit," a man, that is, 
 whose language and gestures were indecent 
 and shocking, interrupted the service by loud 
 outcries. Jesus recognized the man's infirmity 
 and double consciousness. He soothed and 
 commanded him as Alexander the Great 
 soothed and commanded a fiery horse, till the 
 man became calm and rational. "And they 
 were all amazed," as they well might be. 
 "And immediately his fame spread abroad 
 throughout all the region round about Galilee." 
 
 "And at even, when the sun did set, they 
 brought unto him all that were diseased, and 
 them that were possessed with devils. . . . 
 
 73
 
 74 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 And he healed many that were sick of divers 
 diseases, and cast out many devils." 
 
 These verses are from the gospel of Mark, 
 the first and least-embellished of the gospels, 
 and show the prevailing character of the so- 
 called miracles of Jesus. He undoubtedly ex- 
 erted a marvelous and very beneficial power 
 over the sick. Contact with a strong and 
 kindly personality is always exceedingly 
 stimulating and helpful to those whose nerves 
 are weak and unstrung. 
 
 Hysteria, melancholia, paralysis and many 
 kindred diseases have been cured or alleviated 
 by the touch of healers of all religious opin- 
 ions, and even by that of men without moral 
 earnestness, if their personal force, or rank, or 
 circumstances roused the faith and latent ener- 
 gies of the sufferers who came to them for 
 help. 
 
 It is not even necessary that the healer 
 should be present in person. Anything that 
 vividly suggests him and stimulates the imag- 
 ination of a chronic half-invalid will serve the 
 purpose. 
 
 There is no good reason, therefore, to doubt 
 that Jesus effected a great many wonderful 
 cures and that his usual method was to arouse 
 the sufferer's own faith and to stimulate his
 
 MIRACLES 75 
 
 dormant energies. He felt that he could not 
 succeed without this co-operation, for we read 
 on several occasions that he could do no 
 mighty works because of the unbelief either of 
 the sick or of their attendants and the sur- 
 rounding multitude. 
 
 Other cures seem to have been effected by 
 the use of simple remedies, such as the appli- 
 cation of moist clay or by repeated ablutions in 
 cool waters. 
 
 Jesus himself did not profess that his cures 
 were different in kind from those of other 
 healers. When he was accused of witchcraft, 
 and of working by Satanic agency, his simple 
 defense was, "If I cast out devils by Beelze- 
 bub, by whom do your children cast them out? 
 therefore they shall be your judges." The 
 cures of Jesus were doubtless more numerous 
 and more wonderful than those of any contem- 
 porary or subsequent rival; but, if attention 
 had not been held to them by his remarkable 
 teaching and sublime character, they would 
 soon have been lost in the oblivion that has 
 overtaken the other wonder-workers. 
 
 It must be borne in mind also that every 
 wonderful thing is exaggerated, and the more 
 wonderful it is the greater the distortion of the 
 actual fact. The shadow of every body is at
 
 76 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 sunrise taller than the body itself; and so, in 
 the morning of life or of knowledge, the rays 
 of fancy lengthen every fact about which they 
 play. Rumor also is a great artist, and as a 
 report passes from lip to lip it gathers new 
 positiveness and details. 
 
 Many of the so-called miracles are suscep- 
 tible of simple natural explanation. A good 
 example is the stilling of the tempest on the 
 Sea of Galilee. The disciples are terrified at 
 the violence of the storm, but Jesus is calm and 
 confident, and when the squall blows over as 
 quickly as it rose they think that he allayed 
 the winds and the waves and not merely the 
 agitation of their minds. 
 
 The miraculous draught of the fishes and the 
 multiplication of the loaves are probably 
 poetic expressions of man's wonder and grati- 
 tude at the way in which his wants are so often 
 and so strangely supplied. 
 
 The original form of the miracle of the 
 turning of water into wine recorded by John 
 may have been only such a figure of speech. 
 It may have meant only that the presence of 
 Jesus so heightened the joy of the occasion 
 that water tasted as good as wine. 
 
 Few commentators take with absolute literal- 
 ness the words of Deuteronomy 29: 5: "I have
 
 MIRACLES 77 
 
 led you forty years in the wilderness; your 
 clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy 
 shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot," or those 
 of Psalm 78: 23-25, "God had opened the doors 
 of heaven, and had rained down manna upon 
 them to eat, and had given them of the corn 
 of heaven. Man did eat angels' food." 
 
 The crude fancy of some illustrators of Scrip- 
 ture has led them to represent "the wall of 
 waters on the right and on the left" of the 
 Israelites as standing upright like two walls of 
 brick, though the verse preceding says that 
 "the Lord caused the sea to go back by a 
 strong east wind all that night"; and the 
 phenomenon of great tracts of shore being 
 now covered and now bare, according to the 
 force and direction of the wind, is a very 
 familiar one. In Exodus 19: 4, God, through 
 Moses, declares: "Ye have seen what I did 
 unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on 
 eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself"; 
 and, if this passage were interpreted with the 
 same slavish literalness as some others, it 
 would be the orthodox opinion that at one 
 stage of his journey every Israelite was carried 
 through the air on the back of an eagle, and it 
 would be quite as easy to accept this view as it 
 is to believe that Jonah was safely carried to
 
 78 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 shore in a whale, or that Elijah was fed with 
 bread and flesh by ravens. 
 
 Many of the accounts of miracles have been 
 colored by the very natural desire of the dis- 
 ciples of Jesus of the second or third genera- 
 tion to make his deeds as wonderful as those 
 of Moses or Elijah. Indeed, the writers of the 
 gospels very frequently avow their eagerness 
 to find in his acts the fulfillment of prophecies 
 concerning the Messiah, and a reference to the 
 passages will also show how little in many 
 cases the so-called fulfillment is like the orig- 
 inal prophecy. This is not imposture or wilful 
 deception. It is the enthusiasm of unquestion- 
 ing faith. At most, these stories only attribute 
 to him works which the writers believed that 
 he could have done and which they regarded as 
 suitable to his character. 
 
 Something analogous is found in the Miracle 
 Plays of the Middle Ages, in Bunyan's Pil- 
 grim's Progress and in Paradise Lost, in all 
 of which God and Jesus are represented as 
 saying and doing whatever writers thought 
 appropriate in the circumstances. 
 
 The gospel of John is the latest of the four 
 gospels and this dramatic tendency is even 
 more marked in it than in the narratives of the 
 preceding evangelists. In fact there is an
 
 MIRACLES 79 
 
 ascending scale of the marvelous in which 
 Matthew and Mark represent the lowest stage, 
 Luke, a higher one, and John the extreme 
 degree. The miracles recorded .in Matthew 
 and Mark are either works of healing or exag- 
 gerated accounts of natural occurrences. The 
 only account in Matthew and Mark of the 
 resurrection of the dead is that of the raising 
 of the daughter of Jairus, and, as Jesus was 
 called while the girl was still alive and went 
 immediately (see Mark 5), her recovery may 
 have been a natural resuscitation. 
 
 Luke, who writes later and with more 
 deliberate literary art, tells a story of the re- 
 calling to life of the son of the widow of Nain 
 as he was being carried to his burial; while 
 John caps the climax by telling of the resurrec- 
 tion of Lazarus after he had lain in the grave 
 four days. 
 
 Trances and catalepsies have lasted much 
 longer than four days, and it is possible that 
 the animation of Lazarus was merely suspended. 
 The article on death in Chambers' 's Encyclopedia 
 says that "a French author of the last century, 
 Bruhier, in a work, On the Danger of Pre- 
 mature Interment, collected fifty-four cases of 
 persons buried alive, four of persons dissected 
 while still living, fifty-three of persons who
 
 8o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 recovered without assistance after they were 
 laid in their coffins, and seventy-two falsely 
 considered dead." 
 
 But there is no probability that the case of 
 Lazarus was like any of these. John represents 
 the resurrection of Lazarus as the immediate 
 occasion of the arrest and condemnation of, 
 Jesus. He says that some of the Jews "went 
 their ways to the Pharisees and told them what 
 things Jesus had done. Then gathered the 
 chief priests and the Pharisees a council, 
 and said, What do we? for this man doeth 
 many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all 
 men will believe on him: and the Romans 
 shall come and take away both our place and 
 nation" (John 11:46-48). 
 
 Again in the next chapter this miracle is said 
 to have caused much of the enthusiasm with 
 which Jesus was received when he made 
 his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. John's 
 words are, "The people therefore that was with 
 him when he called Lazarus out of his grave, 
 and raised him from the dead, bore record. 
 For this cause the people also met him, for 
 that they heard that he had done this miracle. 
 The Pharisees therefore said among them- 
 selves, "Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? 
 behold the world is gone after him."
 
 MIRACLES 81 
 
 Now if this account is true, is it not very 
 singular that Matthew who relates twenty 
 miracles and Mark who gives an account of 
 eighteen, though they speak of curing men of 
 palsy, of leprosy, of blindness, and of the rais- 
 ing of the daughter of Jairus when she was 
 thought dead, is it not singular that, speaking 
 as they do of so many minor acts of power, 
 they should have omitted all reference to this 
 miracle, the most stupendous one of all? Is it 
 not much more likely that the unknown author 
 of the so-called gospel of John invented the 
 story of Lazarus, than that Matthew, the 
 apostle and companion of Jesus, who, if the 
 resurrection of Lazarus occurred, must have 
 witnessed it with the other apostles, forgot all 
 about it or thought it too unimportant to be 
 mentioned? 
 
 The gospel of John is so unlike the other 
 three gospels in its account of the language 
 and the acts of Jesus, and of the nature of his 
 person and claims, that it seems much more 
 probable that it is the effort of some writer of 
 the second century to oppose Gnosticism and 
 convince unbelievers than that it was really the 
 work of the apostle John. 
 
 But whoever may be their authors, all the 
 gospels show the same characteristics as the
 
 8a THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 later biographies and eulogies of Jesus. The 
 lives of Christ by Matthew, Mark, Luke and 
 John were written in the same way as this or 
 any other life of Christ. In each case the 
 writer took a preceding report which was 
 assumed to be true, and tried to make his tale 
 more clear and interesting by arranging the 
 incidents in the most effective order, by sup- 
 plying further details and by conjecturing the 
 motives and feelings of the various speakers. 
 Every preacher does the same thing in perfect 
 good faith, and those who do it most vividly 
 and effectively are the most popular. It is a 
 very noble and beautiful characteristic of man 
 that leads him to adorn and idealize whatever 
 he loves and venerates. 
 
 One of the commonest defenses of the myths 
 and legends that have grown up around the 
 life of Christ is that they could not have been 
 invented, and that they transcend the power of 
 the imagination. The argument is foolish and 
 tantamount to denying that there are any 
 myths and legends at all, whereas they are one 
 of the earliest, most abundant, and most per- 
 sistent forms of literature. 
 
 But even supposing for a moment that all the 
 accounts of miracles were literally true, they 
 would be no proof whatever of the deity of
 
 MIRACLES 83 
 
 Jesus. They are not more wonderful or better 
 authenticated than the works attributed to 
 Moses and to Elijah. Moses turns a rod into 
 a serpent, he smites the river with it and the 
 water becomes blood, he waves it in the air 
 and summons swarms of flies and locusts, he 
 stretches it forth and causes a storm of thunder 
 and hail, he lifts his hand toward heaven and 
 brings darkness at noon-day, he smites the 
 flinty rock and the refreshing waters gush 
 forth, he lifts up his rod and divides the sea, 
 and stretches it out again and the obedient 
 waters return to their place. Surely this is a 
 sovereignty over the elements far greater than 
 any that is attributed to Jesus in the gospels, 
 yet no one attempts to prove by it that Moses 
 was God. Wonderful power he possessed, and 
 gloriously have poetry and legend magnified it, 
 but it was human and delegated power like that 
 of Jesus, who said, "I can of mine own self do 
 nothing." 
 
 Elijah, we are told, was a man subject to 
 passions like our own, and he prayed earnestly 
 that it might not rain; and it rained not on the 
 earth by the space of three years and six 
 months. And he prayed again, and the heaven 
 gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit 
 (James 5: 17, 18. See also I Kings 17: i).
 
 84 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 According to another legend, Elijah took his 
 mantle and wrapped it together and smote the 
 waters of the Jordan, and they were divided 
 hither and thither, so that Elijah and Elisha 
 went over on dry ground. Elijah called down 
 fire from heaven, which burned up two captains 
 and two companies of fifty soldiers each, who 
 had been sent to arrest him. Elijah restored 
 a dead child to life (i Kings 17). 
 
 Elisha, the successor of Elijah, is also said to 
 have brought to life again the son of the 
 Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4). 
 
 It is narrated in the Acts of the Apostles 
 that Peter prayed and that the dead Tabitha 
 opened her eyes and sat up, and was presented 
 alive to the company of mourners. 
 
 These narratives have an important bearing 
 upon the credibility of the accounts of mir- 
 acles in the gospels. If the gospel miracles 
 stood alone, they would be discredited only by 
 the observations of men of science and by com- 
 mon experience of the laws of nature and the 
 powers of man. As it is, any one who accepts 
 the gospel miracles ought in consistency to 
 accept those of the Old Testament. If he does 
 so, he will find it impossible to draw any line 
 of division between the Old Testament 
 miracles and those of the Apocrypha, and
 
 MIRACLES 85 
 
 those attributed to many saints and martyrs of 
 the early, medieval and modern church. 
 
 If he can believe that Elisha made an iron 
 ax-head to swim (2 Kings 6), or that Shadrach, 
 Meshach and Abednego walked unhurt in a 
 burning fiery furnace, and came forth without 
 a smell of fire upon their garments (Daniel 3), 
 and that an iron gate opened of its own accord 
 to let Peter pass through (Acts 12), there is no 
 good reason why he should reject any alleged 
 miracles recorded anywhere. 
 
 Without professing to know all or perhaps a 
 thousandth part of the processes and possi- 
 bilities of nature, we ought to be able to make 
 up our minds that such stories are legends 
 pure and simple. The question in its simplest 
 form is, Are we and our children to accept the 
 teachings of modern science, are we to believe 
 our geographies, and books of chemistry and 
 physics as to the uniformity of natural laws, 
 or are we to follow legends and believe that 
 sometimes fire does not burn unprotected flesh, 
 that the law of gravitation does not always 
 act, and that the law of the inertia of inorganic 
 matter is intermittent? 
 
 It is as necessary to make this intellectual, as 
 to make any moral, choice. As no man can serve 
 God and Mammon, so no man can both serve
 
 86 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 and renounce reason. He must be loyal to his 
 reason as far as it can guide him, or else he 
 must drift helplessly upon the sea of supersti- 
 tion without chart or compass. 
 
 Sermons about miracles, like other marvel- 
 ous stories, are often very amusing, but when the 
 preacher gravely argues for their truthfulness 
 it makes the cynical laugh and the judicious 
 grieve. Mirum est quod non ride at haruspex. It 
 is a wonder that the preachers themselves do 
 not laugh when they repeat these absurdities. 
 Yet some good people cling to them with des- 
 perate tenacity. Miracles are to some the 
 very anchor of their hope. 
 
 If Jesus was not miraculously born, did not 
 work miracles and did not rise from the dead, 
 they are afraid that his teachings may not be 
 true. It is a needless fear. Indeed, the 
 ground of alarm is in the opposite direction. 
 In the present state of knowledge and opinion, 
 any dogma that is linked to the supernatural 
 (except as all God's works are supernatural) is 
 thereby weakened. It would breed suspicion 
 as to the truth of the plainest demonstrations 
 of geometry, if the text-books of the science 
 were to contain similar fables about the lives 
 of the great geometricians. 
 
 In this discussion God's power is not for one
 
 MIRACLES 87 
 
 moment in question. God can do whatsoever 
 he will. He can reverse or suspend every law 
 that he has impressed upon matter. It is to 
 my mind blasphemous and ridiculous to think 
 otherwise. The Creator of all things can of 
 course annihilate or change all things. The 
 question is not what he can do, but what he 
 actually does. In the great Ruler of the uni- 
 verse and Father of us all is "no variableness, 
 neither shadow of turning." 
 
 Very little reflection will, I think, show that 
 this view is more consistent with the power, 
 wisdom and goodness of God than any other. 
 The uniformity of nature enables man to dis- 
 cover her laws and forces and to make them 
 serve him. They daily load him with bene- 
 fits, and deceive him by no false promise, yet 
 they constantly check his presumption and 
 remind him of his dependence by the swift and 
 inexorable punishment of every violation. 
 They are adapted to stimulate man's intelli- 
 gence and to awaken his wonder gratitude and 
 adoration. So far as our knowledge goes the 
 same cause always produces the same effect, 
 and as a result of this principle the universe is 
 a majestic and stable edifice, truly a temple of 
 omnipotent wisdom and goodness. Suppose it 
 otherwise. Imagine that the same cause some-
 
 88 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 times produced a different effect, and imme- 
 diately the universe would become a flimsy 
 structure, with shifting foundations, with lean- 
 ing walls, swaying and tottering amid the 
 winds of chance. If there were no uniformity 
 in law, there could be no acquisition of knowl- 
 edge, no growth of wisdom, no development of 
 virtue. The physical world would become a 
 chaos and involve the moral world in its 
 ruin. 
 
 Suppose that, instead of this majestic and 
 beneficent uniformity which we have learned 
 to trust, God should exempt certain men from 
 the operation of his laws and should give them 
 special power over natural forces whenever 
 they desired it. What would be the result? 
 The inevitable deterioration of all such men. 
 While other men were developing their minds 
 by careful study and their bodies by strenuous 
 exertions, these men with a power greater than 
 that given by the purse of Fortunatus or the 
 lamp of Aladdin, though they could perform 
 prodigies, would remain ignorant children. 
 
 If every saint, prophet, missionary and 
 preacher could by prayer suspend or modify 
 the laws when he chose to do so to further the 
 gospel or secure his own safety, the world 
 would soon be in confusion. The desire to
 
 MIRACLES 89 
 
 usurp this control over natural forces was a 
 temptation which Jesus twice rejected. 
 
 The good luck of slave ships and the ill luck 
 of missionary ships are proverbs among sailors, 
 and their beliefs are, I think, easily and natu- 
 rally explained. God has no partiality for 
 slavers and no prejudice against missionaries. 
 He lets all ships float or sink according as 
 they are built and sailed. A slave dealer 
 never expects any favors from providence. 
 He knows that if he is to be safe he must watch 
 wind and sea, he must keep a sharp look-out 
 ahead and a good man at the helm. He 
 expects no friendly interposition to save him 
 if his ship is unseaworthy, undermanned, or 
 overloaded. 
 
 But in the minds of many people a mission- 
 ary ship is specially guarded. It has been 
 built by devotion and self-sacrifice, it is going 
 upon a good work, pious men on board daily 
 commit themselves and their associates to God 
 in prayer. All this, though right and laudable 
 in itself, has a tendency to lull vigilance and to 
 diffuse a false feeling of security which only 
 sharp lessons can dissipate. A missionary 
 ship is often too small for the work it has to 
 do because there was not money enough to 
 make it larger, repairs are delayed and
 
 90 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 neglected for the same reason, its officers and 
 crew are sometimes chosen for their piety 
 rather than their skill, and yet when disaster 
 comes some people wonder at the mysterious 
 providence. 
 
 It is evident that if God did not enforce his 
 laws by sharp and salutary punishment they 
 would be transgressed and neglected more and 
 more. If, for instance, a missionary ship were 
 always preserved from harm, no matter how it 
 was built, manned, and sailed, missionary 
 ships would certainly soon become a very 
 peculiar class of vessels. The apostle James 
 states the true principles when he says: "Who- 
 soever shall keep the whole law, yet offend in 
 one point, he is guilty of all." A man's good- 
 ness in one respect does not absolve him in any 
 other, and his badness in one respect does not 
 punish him in any other. 
 
 "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
 reap." A profane man, a thief and a liar, if he 
 is a skilled and industrious farmer, will have 
 better crops than his pious neighbor who prays 
 often and sincerely, but who is weak in body, 
 poor in judgment and procrastinating in habit. 
 Do not understand me to say that there is any 
 natural alliance between bad morals and good 
 farming or good anything else. On the con-
 
 MIRACLES 91 
 
 trary, virtues are generally found in clusters, 
 yet there are frequent and strange exceptions 
 to this rule, and few persons possess all the 
 virtues in equal development. 
 
 It is sacrilege to destroy a venerable ruin, it 
 is infamous to compel men to live in it. 
 Accounts of miracles cannot of course be elimi- 
 nated from the ancient literature, but they 
 should always be explained in the light of 
 modern knowledge. It may be said that chil- 
 dren could not understand the explanations, 
 but they could accept them on authority, as 
 they accept other truths which they do not 
 understand. They cannot understand astron- 
 omy, but they are not on that account now 
 taught that the sun revolves around the earth. 
 Nor, though they cannot understand how fairy 
 tales grow, are they now taught that they are 
 true. 
 
 Perhaps the most prominent reason for the 
 irrational persistence in untenable opinions by 
 all religious sects is the inherited belief that 
 the laws of nature are capricious and may be 
 modified by incantations and ceremonies. 
 Clergymen have now given up the belief that 
 they can themselves work miracles, but they 
 have not yet surrendered the equally untenable 
 belief that other men in earlier times could do
 
 92 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 so. The faith-healer is the legitimate suc- 
 cessor of the Indian medicine-man, the African 
 witch-doctor and the Jewish miracle worker. 
 In him creed and practice are consistent. In 
 the ordinary Christian who believes in the 
 miracles of a former day, but thinks miracles 
 impossible now, creed and daily life are illog- 
 ically separated. 
 
 Genesis, Deuteronomy, the stories of Elijah 
 and Daniel, the writings of Matthew, Mark, 
 Luke and John have bound men as in a spell 
 and rendered them insensible to science and 
 reason. Imagination has been stronger than 
 sight. Tales of miracles have prevailed over 
 daily observation of the immutability of law. 
 
 Paul, though he wrote so many letters and 
 speaks in such detail about his life, never says 
 that he raised any dead or cured any sick 
 people. He besought the Lord thrice for the 
 removal of his own "thorn in the flesh," and 
 got only the answer, "My grace is sufficient 
 for thee." He had no exemption from disease 
 and pain, nor could he heal his friends, as 
 appears from the letter to Timothy, in which 
 he says: "Trophimus have I left at Miletum 
 sick" (2 Tim. 4:20). His judgment not only 
 in regard to the stories in the Apocrypha of 
 Bel and the Dragon, of Tobit, and of Judith,
 
 MIRACLES 93 
 
 but of the legends both in the Old and in the 
 New Testament is expressed in his words to 
 Timothy: "Refuse profane and old wives' 
 fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godli- 
 ness." 
 
 The mere fact that there is no argument 
 drawn from miracles by any of the prophets or 
 apostles is enough to show that the accounts 
 of them elsewhere are mere folk-lore and 
 poetry which the great spiritual leaders of the 
 church regarded as crude embellishment more 
 likely to do harm than good, just as enlight- 
 ened Catholic bishops are now everywhere 
 abolishing many of the more childish cere- 
 monies of their church. Only in backward 
 countries are the images of saints now carried 
 from church to church to visit each other, and 
 that of Saint Peter taken to the sea to catch 
 the first fish and insure a good season by bless- 
 ing the nets and boats of a community. Dog- 
 matism is offensive. The verdict should not 
 be given till the facts are known and the evi- 
 dence clear. But extreme skepticism as to 
 the powers of the human mind to discover 
 truth, and extreme timidity and procrastination 
 in proclaiming the results of investigation are, 
 if less offensive, far more injurious to man- 
 kind. The properties of a triangle are not
 
 94 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 changed by mere enlargement of the scale, and 
 so an induction is often in no way strengthened 
 by the continued addition of new facts. It is 
 not necessary to count the names of all the 
 men and all the women on the registry of mar- 
 riage to determine that in a monogamous 
 country there are as many marriages of one sex 
 as of the other. The law courts are satisfied 
 with the testimony of a few reputable wit- 
 nesses, and do not require the evidence of hun- 
 dreds to support a probable and uncontroverted 
 statement. 
 
 A little of the same sort of practical sense 
 applied to theological criticism would be very 
 helpful. What need is there to pile up argu- 
 ments from remote sources against the credi- 
 bility of the miracles or to discuss them one by 
 one when they are flatly opposed to the most 
 elementary and common knowledge of our age 
 and country? 
 
 We read that King Hezekiah tried to raise 
 the people in his day from superstitious cere- 
 monies to higher and more spiritual forms of 
 worship, and that, "he removed the high 
 places and broke the images and cut down the 
 groves, and broke in pieces the brazen serpent 
 that Moses had made: for unto those days the 
 children of Israel did burn incense to it: and
 
 MIRACLES 95 
 
 he called it Nehushtan," that is, a piece of 
 brass. 
 
 Would that the modern rulers of the church 
 had the same courage, wisdom and piety, and 
 would say "Nehushtan" to every popular fable 
 which now opposes a front of brass to knowl- 
 edge, morality and religion! 
 
 After discussing miracles, or, as he calls 
 them, "powers," Paul says there is a more ex- 
 cellent way. Then follows in the thirteenth 
 chapter of First Corinthians his sublime vision 
 of the transient and permanent elements in 
 religion. "Knowledge shall vanish away." 
 Or, as we may paraphrase his statement, Our 
 imperfect science will be superseded by new 
 discoveries; but Christianity does not rest 
 upon our present scientific interpretations, nor 
 can it be destroyed by advances in knowledge, 
 for it is a spiritual religion, and after all intel- 
 lectual changes we are sure that faith, hope and 
 charity will still abide. It is the climax of 
 Paul's teaching, his wisest and deepest word.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PRAYER 
 
 THE foregoing view of miracles does not in 
 any way deny or antagonize the belief in the 
 efficacy and duty of prayer. All great works 
 are done in a prayerful spirit, and usually with 
 the accompaniment of conscious and formal 
 invocation. 
 
 Belief in prayer is inseparably connected 
 with belief in God; and belief in God is the 
 most rational, universal, and deeply-rooted of 
 all religious beliefs. "Ex nihilo niliil fit. " There 
 can be no creation without a Creator. 
 
 Nothing in the uniformity of natural law 
 prevents man from talking with his fellow man, 
 and influencing him for good or evil, and noth- 
 ing in nature even remotely suggests any im- 
 pediment to communication between God and 
 man. "Ye fools, when will ye be wise? He 
 that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that 
 formed the eye, shall he not see?" (Psalm 
 94: 9). 
 
 Charles H. Spurgeon, the great preacher, 
 96
 
 PRAYER 97 
 
 was once asked if he expected to recognize his 
 friends in heaven. His brief and sensible 
 answer was, "I recognize them now, and I ex- 
 pect to have as much sense in heaven as I have 
 at present." 
 
 It is impossible to believe that if God hears 
 the humble, believing prayers of man, he alto- 
 gether disregards them. Better have no belief 
 in God at all than an opinion of him so un- 
 worthy. God is truth, and does not deceive 
 us. God is love, and does not forget us for a 
 moment, or cease to sympathize with our every 
 trial. He is our Father, and is training us in 
 the way he knows is best, however mysterious 
 it may sometimes seem to us. He is as much 
 better than any earthly father as he is stronger 
 and wiser, and the question of Jesus can be 
 answered in only one way: "If ye then being 
 evil know how to give good gifts unto your 
 children; how much more shall your heavenly 
 Father give the holy spirit to them that ask 
 him?" 
 
 That God answers sincere prayer for help to 
 live righteously is one of the very few tenets 
 of the church that will bear the test of the "ad 
 omnibus, semper, et ubique" rule. That God 
 pardons the sins of the truly penitent, that he 
 gives power to resist temptation to those who
 
 98 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 sincerely seek it, that he gives inward joy and 
 peace to those who walk uprightly, is the uni- 
 versal testimony of Christians of every age and 
 country. There is no counter probability. 
 Many of the well-known phenomena of con- 
 version cannot be explained by mere reflex 
 action upon the mind of man. There is an 
 immediate and often an abounding joy arising 
 from the consciousness of pardon. It is in 
 many cases, I think, as strong, clear, and trust- 
 worthy as the consciousness of identity or any 
 other intuition. 
 
 Nor is it rational to doubt the efficacy of 
 prayer in assisting man to live a righteous life. 
 The cases in which men who before they began 
 to pray were impure, dishonest and quarrel- 
 some, and who by the habit of prayer have been 
 enabled to live pure, honest, peaceable and 
 benevolent lives are numerous and well- 
 attested, and cannot be denied, however they 
 may be accounted for. There was a time when 
 every Methodist church could show many 
 such cases. Such wonderfully-transformed 
 and wonderfully-sustained characters are now 
 common in the Salvation Army. Such power 
 still attends some evangelists, and will 
 always attend those who do not shun "to 
 declare the whole counsel of God," and
 
 PRAYER 99 
 
 whose own lives are consistent with their 
 teaching. 
 
 But omnipotent as sincere prayer is, the 
 mere service of the lips in which the heart is 
 not engaged is of little use to man and of little 
 merit in the sight of God. Real prayer and 
 sin, recognized as such by the conscience, can- 
 not long co-exist, for either prayer will kill the 
 sin or the sin will kill the prayer. 
 
 The necessity and the value of prayer are 
 not only facts of Christian consciousness, but 
 are supported by the convictions of our com- 
 mon humanity in every age and country.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE VISIT TO NAZARETH 
 
 NOT long after the opening of his public 
 ministry Jesus made a visit to his old home at 
 Nazareth. He had suddenly become great and 
 famous, but it was not an ostentatious desire 
 to dazzle his former associates that led him to 
 the little village in the mountains. It was the 
 strongest and purest of natural instincts, the 
 yearning for home. Doubtless he came 
 primarily to see his mother and his brothers 
 and sisters. He wanted also to see his old 
 friends and to look again upon the scenes in- 
 separably associated with the early hopes and 
 visions which had now in some measure become 
 realities. His heart had often burned within 
 him in the old workshop and upon the moun- 
 tain's brow, as he had mused upon the proph- 
 ets of old and hoped some day to tread in 
 their footsteps. 
 
 Doubtless, too, he wished to proclaim here 
 as elsewhere his great message, "The kingdom 
 of heaven is at hand." If he had not so 
 wished, it would nevertheless have been hard
 
 THE VISIT TO NAZARETH 101 
 
 for him to resist the importunities of his old 
 neighbors, who were curious to hear the an- 
 nouncement which had caused such excitement 
 elsewhere. When the Sabbath came and 
 Jesus, as he had been accustomed, went to the 
 synagogue, everybody in the village followed. 
 The preliminary services were little heeded, 
 but there was a great buzz of expectation when 
 Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah a descrip- 
 tion of the Messiah and his mission, and then 
 boldly affirmed that in himself that prophecy 
 was fulfilled. 
 
 For a little while astonishment at his daring 
 and admiration of his eloquence were the pre- 
 dominant feelings of his hearers, but these were 
 soon supplanted by unbelief and indignation. 
 Old opinions and modes of thought are not 
 easily changed. In the minds of men in middle 
 life those whom they first noticed as boys always 
 remain boyish and immature. It is only in the 
 rarest cases that older people can believe that 
 younger ones are wiser than themselves in any 
 really important matter. They always look 
 patronizingly on youngsters, concede their 
 bodily activity and strength, and, more rarely, 
 their intellectual promise, but they pity the 
 inexperience of youth and think complacently 
 of the treasures of knowledge that years have
 
 loa THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 brought to themselves. The old people in the 
 synagogue at Nazareth could not shake off 
 their preconceptions. Jesus was to them only 
 a forward youth. 
 
 Perhaps the young men were not much better 
 pleased. We all hear with more complacency 
 of the success of entire strangers than of our 
 own rivals. The success of a soldier wakens 
 the jealousy of a fellow soldier, but stirs up no 
 resentment in the breast of a civilian. The 
 lawyer is not stung by the reputation of a phy- 
 sician as he is by the brilliant success of a 
 brother lawyer whom he knew in poverty and 
 obscurity. If others move forward faster than 
 we do, we seem to ourselves to be going back, 
 and are chagrined and disappointed accord- 
 ingly. 
 
 The congregation at Nazareth soon took 
 offence at the presumption of Jesus. They 
 said in substance, What ridiculous claims he 
 makes! Is he not a common carpenter? Are 
 not his brothers and sisters very ordinary 
 people? How does he dare to proclaim him- 
 self a prophet and a wonder worker? 
 
 Matthew and Mark say only that the Naza- 
 renes were offended and that Jesus could effect 
 few cures there because of the unbelief of the 
 people. Luke says that the indignation of the
 
 THE VISIT TO NAZARETH 103 
 
 people was so great that they made an attempt 
 upon the life of Jesus. The mob took him to 
 the brow of the hill and was about to throw 
 him down headlong when some word or act or 
 look deterred them. 
 
 A merciful provision in the old Jewish law 
 forbade the seething of a lamb in its mother's 
 milk. It would have been sad indeed if this 
 Lamb of God had perished at Nazareth.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES 
 
 SOON after Jesus had begun to preach, John 
 the Baptist was cast into prison, and from his 
 lonely dungeon sent an almost despairing 
 inquiry. Hunger, cold, darkness, solitude and 
 inactivity soon shake the most resolute spirit, 
 and John, the bold prophet of the desert, had 
 wavered during his captivity. His solicitude 
 was not for his life but for his reputation and 
 his work. He wanted to know that he had 
 not lived in vain, that his message had been 
 true and that the kingdom of heaven was really 
 coming upon the earth. 
 
 John had been the predecessor of Jesus and 
 had been the first to recognize his call as a 
 prophet. John was his spiritual father and had 
 given him the only ordination as a preacher 
 that he ever received. For a while they had 
 both proclaimed the same message. Now John 
 was thrown into prison, and the most ordinary 
 human foresight must have made Jesus reflect 
 that he, too, would probably soon share the 
 same fate. 
 
 104
 
 THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES 105 
 
 It was another test of his resolution, and he 
 did not shrink. Instead of lowering his tone 
 and becoming more politic and conciliatory in 
 order not to attract attention or give offence, 
 he was obviously stimulated to new zeal, for 
 Mark makes the imprisonment of John the 
 date of the formal inauguration of the public 
 ministry of Jesus. 
 
 It marked another stage in the growth of his 
 conviction of his Messiahship. As long as 
 John was actively and successfully preaching 
 "the kingdom of God," Jesus could not feel 
 the same burden of responsibility as when he 
 was left quite alone. But John was now 
 silenced, and no other voice had taken up his 
 message. 
 
 One who can do a needed work naturally 
 feels that he ought to do it, and from that it 
 is but a short step to the belief that he is per- 
 sonally called of God to do it. So the im- 
 prisonment and inability of John made Jesus 
 feel that the progress of the work depended 
 upon him, and he accordingly took measures 
 to extend and perpetuate it. 
 
 A modern thinker who wishes to give effect 
 to a theory or bring about a reform has facilities 
 unknown in earlier times. He sends articles 
 to the newspapers and magazines, or he gives
 
 106 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 public lectures or he writes a book, and in this 
 way secures a full and accurate presentation of 
 his views. But in earlier times teaching was 
 chiefly oral, and in order to prevent the speedy 
 distortion of his sayings as they passed from 
 mouth to mouth it was necessary for a teacher 
 to train a body of disciples so that they should 
 understand him thoroughly and 1t>e able after 
 his death to expound and defend his doc- 
 trines. 
 
 Jesus, accordingly, from out the large num- 
 ber of his more constant auditors and followers 
 chose twelve as his special disciples, that he 
 might prepare them to be his apostles. 
 
 It is noteworthy that he selected a large 
 proportion of fishermen. The sea of Galilee 
 is relatively small, yet it is large enough to 
 justify the words of the Psalmist: "They that 
 go down to the sea in ships, that do business 
 in great waters; these see the works of the 
 Lord, and his wonders in the deep." There 
 are no atheists among sailors. Men who 
 habitually live in the presence of God's great 
 works are almost necessarily devout. Atheism 
 is born in great cities where men can control 
 heat and cold and light and darkness. A 
 Nebuchadnezzar walking in security and ease 
 in his capital may say proudly, "Is not this
 
 THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLESio; 
 
 great Babylon that I have built?" but a man in 
 a boat is in a humbler mood. To a sailor, 
 man's strength is but little compared with the 
 powers of wind and wave, and all his works 
 seem small when he stands beneath the stars. 
 Jesus chose fishermen because he found them 
 strong, courageous, straightforward, and 
 devout. 
 
 The apostles were not all fishermen, but 
 none of them were professional scholars. 
 Jesus had the distrust of the schools and the 
 technically educated, which was natural to a 
 self-taught artisan, and his instinct was cor- 
 rect. A long course of literary training makes 
 men timid and fastidious in action. They are 
 acquainted with so many precedents, they are 
 hampered by so many canons of criticism, 
 they are awed by their knowledge of the vast 
 ramifications of existing institutions, they re- 
 member past failures, they know too much, 
 and are "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of 
 thought." There is a touch of Hamlet in 
 almost every great scholar. 
 
 Some scribes of this sort, with the natural 
 curiosity of their class, were among his con- 
 stant attendants, but Jesus chose none of them, 
 and in the few cases in which they offered 
 themselves he rejected them. He was afraid
 
 io8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 not only of their timidity, but of their sophis- 
 tications. Their old opinions would leaven 
 their new doctrines. 
 
 The wise teacher did not wish the apostles 
 of a spiritual religion to be men whose minds 
 were full of ceremonial superstitions and whose 
 modes of thought and action were fixed by the 
 almost indestructible tyranny of habit. Ac- 
 cordingly he selected no scribes. He did not 
 accept any men who had even been strongly 
 under the influence of the ecclesiastical doc- 
 trines and routine. Sturdy republicans are not 
 b'red in the atmosphere of courts, or uncom- 
 promising moralists in the purlieus of temples'. 
 
 Jesus chose his disciples not from Judea but 
 from Galilee of the Gentiles, from men far re- 
 moved by race and place from the false tradi- 
 tions, the rigid formalism and the greed and 
 corruption he wished to overthrow. 
 
 The Jews considered that a Jew who con- 
 sented to become a tax-gatherer for the 
 Romans had denied his nationality and his 
 religion. A publican was no better than a 
 heathen. He was classed with the grossest 
 sinners. Yet Jesus chose "Matthew the pub- 
 lican" as one of his twelve apostles. 
 
 There was a class of fierce patriots zealots 
 they were called who advocated armed resist-
 
 THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES 109 
 
 ance to the Roman government. They would 
 pay no taxes and were consequently outlaws, 
 and whenever possible they emerged from 
 their mountain or desert fastnesses and raised 
 the standard of revolt. The power of Rome 
 crushed these rebellions with merciless 
 severity, but fanaticism is not easily subdued, 
 and new leaders soon arose and gathered new 
 bands. It is significant and interesting that 
 Jesus was not repelled by this type of mind. 
 He did not distrust the zealot as he did the 
 Scribe and the Pharisee. Zeal, however mis- 
 directed, is a good quality. Every virtue may 
 be grafted upon its vigorous stem, and so, 
 though Jesus saw how impracticable these 
 zealots were in their resistance to Rome, yet 
 he saw also their indomitable love of truth and 
 justice, and looked on them, I imagine, with 
 pitying admiration. 
 
 The fact that Jesus chose Simon the Zealot 
 as one of the twelve suggests that he saw in 
 him a spirit very much like his own at a more 
 immature period. Jesus was not only the 
 Lamb of God, he was also the Lion of the 
 tribe of Judah. That vehement indignation 
 against all wrong that led him to drive the 
 hucksters and money-changers out of the tem- 
 ple and to denounce the ruling Scribes and
 
 no THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 Pharisees as hypocrites and vipers, must some- 
 times have been stirred against the political 
 oppressors of his country. I cannot believe 
 that he was indifferent to political liberty or 
 that he approved of the Roman yoke. On the 
 contrary he was a more ardent patriot even 
 than Simon the Zealot, but he saw, as Simon 
 did not see till taught by Jesus, that moral 
 freedom must precede all genuine political 
 emancipation. Wordsworth and Tennyson in 
 their early years were both, as is well known, 
 in favor of forcible revolution, and, if the 
 inferences drawn from the choice of Simon as 
 a disciple are correct, Jesus passed through a 
 phase of experience not unlike theirs. 
 
 Beside the fishermen, one of the disciples 
 was a tax-collector, one had been a revolution- 
 ist, and it is probable that one at least was a 
 foreigner. Philip is a Greek name, and when 
 on one occasion some Greeks wished to see 
 Jesus they requested Philip, as a fellow-coun- 
 tryman, to introduce them and probably to act 
 as their interpreter. Jesus was in all probability 
 of purely Jewish descent, except for the re- 
 mote mixture of the Moabitish blood of the 
 noble Ruth, but he had been brought up in 
 Galilee of the Gentiles and accustomed to look 
 on men of different nationalities without preju-
 
 THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES m 
 
 dice. In fact in few things is the inherent 
 greatness of his mind more apparent than in 
 his attitude toward foreigners. He rose singu- 
 larly above the prejudices of his race. He 
 found his highest examples of faith in a 
 Roman centurion and a Phoenician woman, 
 and his supreme illustration of brotherhood in 
 a Samaritan, all of which is a distinct anticipa- 
 tion of the noblest work and thought of the 
 noblest minds of later times. That love which 
 Jesus bore to man as man without regard to 
 race or nationality has ever been the stimulus 
 of the liberator and the philanthropist. 
 
 Jesus was one of the few Jews who had taken 
 to heart the teaching of the Book of Jonah, 
 that wonderful satire in which some broad- 
 minded and warm-hearted man holds up to 
 deserved ridicule the narrow type of prophet 
 who did not want the Gentiles to be fellow- 
 heirs with Israel and who cared more for his 
 own reputation than for justice and mercy, and 
 would rather see a city destroyed than that his 
 prediction should be unfulfilled. 
 
 In his early modesty and caution Jesus had 
 tried to limit his work to Jews only, and said, 
 "I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the 
 house of Israel," and had commanded his dis- 
 ciples "not to go into the way of the Gentiles
 
 ii2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 or enter into any city of the Samaritans," but 
 his innate generosity and daring soon widened 
 his plan from one of national to one of univer- 
 sal regeneration. His love was one that "col- 
 lective man" could not fill and is expressed in 
 the belief of the disciples that they were to 
 "go into all of the world and preach the gos- 
 pel to every creature." His sympathies were 
 not only with all classes but with all nation- 
 alities. 
 
 The work of Jesus was nobly carried on after 
 his death by the apostles whom he himself 
 chose, yet a volunteer who never saw his face 
 in the flesh "labored more abundantly than 
 they all." How much smaller would have 
 been the influence of Socrates without the ex- 
 position of his doctrines by Plato and the 
 anecdotes of Xenophon, and of Jesus if Paul 
 had not "filled up what was lacking" not only 
 in the suffering but in the purpose of Jesus! 
 The world is infinitely in the debt of that fiery 
 enthusiast who threw away with noble con- 
 tempt his birthright, his learning and his 
 office, counting them but as dung and as dross, 
 that he might become a servant of Jesus Christ. 
 Sublime self-abnegation! Perfect illustration 
 of the truth of the Master's words, "He that 
 loseth his life for my sake [i. e., in my way]
 
 THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES 113 
 
 shall save it," for Paul, giving up all, has 
 gained all and stands forth forever at the right 
 hand of Jesus as his immortal associate and 
 second self.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CHRIST'S ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN AND 
 CHILDREN 
 
 JESUS loved children with a peculiar affection, 
 and looked upon them with wonder and rever- 
 ence. When some of his disciples showed a 
 selBsh, ambitious and quarrelsome spirit, and, 
 bringing their differences to Jesus, asked him, 
 Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? 
 Jesus called a child to him and said, "Verily I 
 say unto you, except ye be converted (i. e., 
 changed altogether in spirit and purpose) and 
 become as little children, ye shall not enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven." The disciples 
 did not readily apprehend the lesson, and, 
 though Jesus was in general patient with 
 their dulness and mistakes, their conduct on 
 another occasion greatly offended him. Some 
 fathers and mothers had brought young chil- 
 dren that he should touch them, but the dis- 
 ciples apparently thought other claims upon 
 the Master's attention more important and 
 "rebuked them." But when Jesus saw it, he 
 was much displeased and said unto them, 
 114
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN 115 
 
 "Suffer little children to come unto me and 
 forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of 
 God. . . . And he took them up in his arms, 
 put his hands upon them and blessed them." 
 
 Sensitiveness of temper and love of beauty 
 are characteristics of women and of poets. 
 Jesus understood and loved women, and women 
 understood and loved him in return. He had 
 none of the masculine disdain for the intellect 
 of woman that was and is common in Oriental 
 lands and not unknown in western ones. 
 
 The gospels contain many incidents that 
 show the marvelous delicacy, sympathy and 
 tact of Jesus in his association with women. 
 Jesus had his inner circle of friends, Peter, 
 James and John among men, but it is said also 
 that he loved Mary and Martha, and of these 
 he preferred Mary, who refreshed his spirit by 
 sympathy, to Martha, who cared more for his 
 bodily comfort and less for his spiritual ideals. 
 
 Nothing plSces the general attitude of Jesus 
 toward women in a stronger light than the 
 contrast between him and his greatest apos- 
 tle. Paul was a self-sacrificing and heroic 
 man, full of fire, eloquence and devotion, but 
 as compared with Jesus his nature was narrow 
 and one-sided, and his theology was warped 
 and dwarfed accordingly. Look at these
 
 n6 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 words of Paul: "A man ought not to have his 
 head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and 
 glory of God: but the woman is the glory of 
 the man. For the man is not of the woman; 
 but the woman of the man: for neither was the 
 man created for the woman; but the woman for 
 the man" (i Cor. 11:7-9, Revised Version). 
 Contrast this legend of the creation of woman 
 after and for man and its legitimate inference 
 of woman's essential inferiority with the words 
 of Jesus: "From the beginning of the creation 
 God made them male and female. For this 
 cause shall a man leave his father and mother, 
 and cleave to his wife; and they twain shall 
 be one flesh." Here the legend of Eve's later 
 creation is quietly thrust aside and instead of 
 man's headship Jesus teaches man and wife the 
 duty of mutual dependence, equality and love, 
 such as he remembered in the home at Naz- 
 areth. 
 
 The quick sympathies of Jesus went out 
 to the individual soul. What wonderful 
 accounts the gospels give of his power to 
 restore self-respect and revive hope in women 
 out of whom he had "cast seven devils." 
 One of the most interesting of these is 
 his conversation with the woman of Sa- 
 maria. Jesus was weary with his journey,
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN 117 
 
 and during the noon-day heat was resting him- 
 self by Jacob's well. A woman came to draw 
 water, and Jesus asked her for a drink. She 
 was surprised that a Jewish rabbi should con- 
 descend to speak to a Samaritan woman, and 
 her answer showed both gratification and curi- 
 osity. Her eagerness and kindness were very 
 refreshing to the tired prophet. She asked 
 questions; and every true teacher longs for 
 intelligent and sympathetic listeners. Jesus 
 would not so often have repeated the exhorta- 
 tion, "He that hath ears to hear let him hear," 
 if he had not often been grieved and dis- 
 couraged by seeing that many of his hearers 
 were inattentive and indifferent. Every true 
 teacher welcomes small opportunities and 
 single auditors. Jesus did not reserve his 
 efforts for great multitudes or the select com- 
 pany of his disciples, but wherever there was a 
 needy and receptive soul, no matter how ex- 
 hausted the Great Teacher might be, he exerted 
 himself to enlighten and to help. Such a 
 listener and such an opportunity he found 
 here. He had often been irritated by opposi- 
 tion, wearied by dulness and pained by in- 
 credulity, and the quick sympathy, the 
 intuitive apprehension and the tactful and 
 deferential questionings of this warm-hearted
 
 n8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 woman drew from him an explicit assertion 
 that he was the Messiah. Who does not know 
 this fascinating and sympathetic type of 
 woman to whom men reveal those daring plans 
 and visions that they hide from the smaller 
 faith and blunter frankness of their own sex? 
 
 The conversation is given in outline only, 
 but enough is said to enable us to understand 
 how such a woman, quick of apprehension, 
 warm-hearted, impulsive, prompt and ener- 
 getic in action, as capable of enthusiasm in 
 virtue as in wickedness, should at once become 
 not merely a believer and disciple, but a 
 busy and zealous missionary. 
 
 Still more wonderful is the story of the 
 woman taken in adultery. How many persons 
 there are who will privately show a sympathy 
 with the erring which they are ashamed of in 
 the presence of a hostile public opinion! It 
 is indeed no easy thing to brave the frown and 
 the reproach of the leaders of the church and 
 of society, but Jesus met this as he met the 
 other tests of a reformer, with tact and courage. 
 The Scribes and Pharisees declared that the 
 woman's guilt was undeniable, and, as Shylock 
 appealed for his pound of flesh by the danger 
 that would fall upon the charter of Venice if it 
 were refused, so these prototypes of Shylock
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN 119 
 
 dared Jesus to break the cruel Jewish law as 
 they hissed through their teeth, "Moses com- 
 manded that such should be stoned; but what 
 sayest thou?" He said nothing, but wrote 
 upon the ground. They continued asking 
 him, and at last they got their answer: "He 
 that is without sin among you, let him first cast 
 a stone." The accusers were convicted by 
 conscience and slipped away in shame one by 
 one till Jesus was left alone with the woman. 
 Then came the peace-restoring, hope-reviving 
 words, "Neither do I condemn thee: go and 
 sin no more." I should like to know that 
 woman's subsequent history. One thing I feel 
 assured of, she never forgot the command of 
 Jesus or betrayed the confidence he had placed 
 in her. 
 
 Then, as now, the Master's faith and courage 
 were greater than those of his disciples, and, 
 as Farrar's Life of Christ explains in detail, it 
 was long before the story received official and 
 popular sanction and was inserted in all copies 
 of John's gospel. 
 
 The family is the corner stone of all virtue 
 and progress. Greek civilization fell because 
 it did not place woman on an equality with 
 man. Mohammedanism has the same funda- 
 mental and fatal weakness, has reached its
 
 lao THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 limit of growth, and is slowly sinking into 
 decay. It cannot elevate men because it de- 
 grades women, and by God's law in nature, 
 husband and wife, mother and child, cling 
 together for good or for evil. 
 
 It is the glory of Jesus that he built his reli- 
 gion upon the home as truly as upon the indi- 
 vidual conscience and upon the church. He 
 loved and honored man, and he loved and 
 honored woman, and men and women have 
 vied with each other in returning him love and 
 honor, and not seldom in this loving emulation, 
 woman's intuitive and impassioned loyalty has 
 outdone, outdared and outsuffered man's 
 colder and more calculating devotion. 
 
 The gospels are the most condensed of all 
 records, and their meaning must be brought out 
 by meditation. But the full force of some 
 passages only women can understand. No 
 man can know all that lies hidden in the few 
 references to Mary Magdalen and Joanna and 
 Susanna, and the many other women who 
 ministered unto him by their substance and by 
 their service. The Master and his apostles were 
 fed, his seamless robe was woven and lovingly 
 embroidered by woman's hands, his feet were 
 washed, his head was anointed by woman. 
 Women wept as he was led to crucifixion, they
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN 121 
 
 stood beside his cross, they tenderly prepared 
 his bruised body for burial, they watched 
 beside his tomb, they first proclaimed his 
 resurrection. Men forsook, denied and be- 
 trayed him, but no woman ever faltered in her 
 love and loyalty.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 PETER DECLARES JESUS TO BE THE SON OF GOD 
 
 IN GATHERING disciples about him in order to 
 spread and perpetuate his doctrines, Jesus was 
 only following the common precedent of the 
 times. Every rabbi of note had his body of 
 disciples, some companies like those of Rabbi 
 Shammai and Rabbi Hillel being very numer- 
 ous. His manner of teaching, however, was 
 far bolder, more authoritative, and attractive 
 than theirs, and his success with the common 
 people much greater. The multitudes who 
 followed Jesus must in most cases have left 
 some other teacher in order to do so, and men, 
 even good men, do not usually see their influ- 
 ence lessened and their sources of income 
 diminished without jealousy and exasperation. 
 As a result of these feelings, these rabbis fre- 
 quently attempted to check the work of Jesus. 
 They acted in fact very much as the clergy of 
 the established Church in England acted 
 toward *the early Methodist preachers. They 
 were jealous of him. They were doubtless 
 largely sincere in their opposition. We all 
 
 122
 
 PETER'S DECLARATION 123 
 
 too easily believe ill of those who are working 
 us manifest and great injury, and it is not at all 
 surprising that as soon as the fame of Jesus^ 
 spread abroad and multitudes flocked from all 
 parts to hear him that the regular clergy 
 promptly began a vigorous opposition. And 
 to jealousy was soon added a dread of his 
 power which deterred those who might other- 
 wise have been well-disposed from any attempt 
 at patronage. If there was any such attempt 
 it was too insignificant for notice. The gospels 
 tell us only of opposition. They say that 
 priests demanded of Jesus by what authority 
 he taught, that they challenged the truth of his 
 doctrines, denounced him as a Sabbath- 
 breaker, a blasphemer, a wine-bibber, an im- 
 postor and son of Belial. 
 
 Jesus had many an encounter with the 
 various types of inquisitors, from the dullest 
 and most obstinate formalist to the keenest and 
 most unscrupulous lawyer, but, like Lincoln, 
 he was never worsted in debate. Yet contro- 
 versy, however successful, always chafes the 
 mind and exhausts the energies, and Jesus had 
 many an hour of weariness and dejection, as 
 opposition revealed to him the stupidity and 
 perverseness of the ruling classes. 
 
 Success brought another trial perhaps hardly
 
 i2 4 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 easier to bear. All sorts of ignorant and worth- 
 less quacks clumsily imitated his methods and 
 brought discredit upon them. The impatient 
 disciples forbade them, but Jesus, though he 
 doubtless sighed inwardly as he thought how 
 these people were distorting and caricaturing 
 his words and his acts, knew that these 
 grotesque shadows must precede the dawn, and 
 told his followers to cease from a useless oppo- 
 sition. "He that is not against me is for me." 
 A yet harder trial was the opposition of his 
 own family. His mother and his brothers 
 attempted to lay hold of him and put an end 
 to his career. The reports brought to them 
 that he had set up as a teacher and healer, was 
 constantly followed by an infatuated rabble, 
 and was everywhere denounced by the priests 
 and rulers as a false prophet and "son of 
 Belial," must have been very painful indeed to 
 that simple-minded, God-fearing household. 
 Loving and self-sacrificing as a mother is, it is 
 very hard for her to think of her son, whom 
 she remembers as a helpless baby and whom 
 she taught to lisp his first words, as a great and 
 wise man. If a nation proclaims him great 
 and does him honor, his mother acquiesces with 
 joyful humility in the popular verdict. And 
 the popular verdict, if adverse, is equally
 
 PETER'S DECLARATION 125 
 
 potent. When the rulers and the multitude 
 join in condemning a man as a crazy enthusi- 
 ast, how shall the mother of an imaginative 
 child who remembers all his wild dreams, all 
 his absurd fancies, all his foolish boastings, 
 free herself from the fear that he is still only 
 dreaming and boasting as he used to do before 
 the little curly head sank into the soft slumber 
 of childhood? The very depth of her affection 
 increases her solicitude. It must have been a 
 sad journey when Mary set out with her other 
 sons to lay hold on Jesus because he was 
 "beside himself." Better, far better, honor- 
 able death than shame or insanity. Perhaps 
 the sword that passed through Mary's heart at 
 the tidings that led her to leave Nazareth in 
 search of the son who was reported mad was 
 the sharpest that ever pierced that patient and 
 loving heart. But the church for obvious 
 reasons has not made it the crown of her sor- 
 rows. It has been passed over in the enumera- 
 tion of her distresses because it is quite 
 inconsistent with the legendary account of the 
 miraculous birth of Jesus. If Mary knew that 
 an angel had announced the birth of her son 
 and that he had had no human father, she would 
 have hailed with joy his entrance upon his 
 mission and no opposition of priests or people
 
 iz6 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 would have troubled her in the least, for 
 women are sure and steady in their intuitions 
 and affections. 
 
 The soul of Jesus was troubled. As in the 
 case of Paul, "without were fightings, within 
 were fears." Every sane man sometimes 
 doubts the correctness of his own opinions and 
 methods, if they are rejected by the majority 
 of men, and especially if they are opposed by 
 the recognized leaders and teachers of the time 
 and by those whom he loves and who love him. 
 
 Jesus was often tempted to stop, to distrust 
 his own opinions and to yield to the authority 
 of the learned and the voice of numbers. He 
 had long believed that he had a mission, and 
 at times his belief as to his duty seemed clear 
 beyond the slightest peradventure. Then 
 again the opposing opinion of others and fears 
 and discouragements growing out of weariness 
 and disappointment had obscured his faith and 
 driven him in trouble of soul to solitude and 
 prayer. It is significantly recorded that after 
 the great temptation following his baptism 
 "the devil departed from him for a season," 
 but as the ocean labors long after a storm and 
 as storm succeeds storm upon it, so the agita- 
 tions of the human heart subside slowly, and 
 the wild currents of thought may at any time
 
 PETER'S DECLARATION 127 
 
 again lash the emotions into new tumult. 
 These repeated agonies of doubt, the common 
 experience of all real martyrs, were a large 
 element in the suffering of the "Man of Sor- 
 rows." 
 
 His sanity had been questioned, his brothers 
 and his mother had attempted to restrain him, 
 the Scribes and Pharisees, the leaders of the 
 church, had denounced him, he was looked 
 upon as a dangerous agitator, a man who 
 "had a devil," by the respectable elements 
 of society; he was followed by crowds who 
 wanted to be fed or healed or to see him work 
 miracles, and who were disappointed because 
 he did not satisfy their love of the marvelous 
 or cater to their vulgar greed and ambition. 
 
 He said, "A wicked and adulterous genera- 
 tion seeketh after a sign; and there shall no 
 sign be given it, but the sign of the prophet 
 Jonah." He grew heart-sick and wondered 
 whether he had not been deluded by the voices 
 and whether the task he had undertaken was 
 not too great for him, whether his supposed 
 Messiahship was not a failure and a dream. 
 
 It was in an hour of deep despondency that 
 he asked his disciples what people were say- 
 ing about him and who the multitude thought 
 he was. The answer was, "Some say that thou
 
 128 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 art John the Baptist; some Elijah; and others 
 Jeremiah, or one of the prophets." These 
 answers all mean that the multitude had no 
 faith in his Messiahship. In the opinion of 
 all he was but a forerunner, and the heart of 
 Jesus sank still more. Scarcely daring to ask 
 the question for fear that an adverse answer 
 might be another and almost intolerable dis- 
 couragement, he yet pushed his inquiry further 
 and said, "But who say ye that I am?" And 
 Peter, divining in some way the doubt and fear 
 that troubled his Master's heart, replied impet- 
 uously, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
 living God." The word of encouragement was 
 sorely needed and gratefully received. It 
 soothed and refreshed the chafed and weary 
 spirit of Jesus. To be believed in even by this 
 little band was enough. The good seed had 
 taken root, and would multiply. His work 
 would be continued after his death, which 
 from the power and exasperation of his ene- 
 mies and from the fate of previous prophets he 
 saw could not be far off. He was conscious 
 that he was a king of men, and he saw but one 
 vacant throne. He obeyed the outward guid- 
 ance of events and the voice of God in his 
 soul, and, with sublime faith and dim yet 
 glorious prevision of the world-wide extent
 
 PETER'S DECLARATION 129 
 
 and age-long duration of his spiritual kingdom, 
 he accepted the heaviest burden of responsi- 
 bility, the lowest deeps of shame and suffering 
 and the highest exaltation of glory known 
 among men he was obedient to his heavenly 
 vision, he accepted the appointment of Son of 
 God and Son of Man.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION AND SECOND COMING 
 
 THE declaration of Peter marks an important 
 stage in the life of Jesus. It filled him with 
 new life and joy. As Columbus and Balboa 
 were thrilled with delight at their great dis- 
 coveries, so Jesus, now that the foundations of 
 his church were laid, saw in vision the great 
 and enduring edifice that was to be, and he 
 rejoiced. The joy of his soul changed even 
 the appearance of his body. His face was 
 illuminated and radiant. At least this is what 
 I take to be the simple fact upon which the 
 story of the transfiguration which immediately 
 follows is based. It does not explain the 
 story of the transfiguration to say with Strauss 
 that as it is reported that the face of Moses 
 shone after he had spoken with God, so the 
 disciples of Jesus would naturally invent a 
 similar story about him in order to make him 
 as great as his predecessor. Biographical 
 frenzy and poetic imagination account for infi- 
 nite embellishment and exaggeration, but they 
 130
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION 131 
 
 need some material upon which to work. The 
 mighty wings of the imagination must always 
 have some medium in which to exert them- 
 selves, some hints and analogies from actual 
 life. Pure fiction is very rare and very insipid. 
 As Dante's visions of hell darkened his face as 
 with the smoke of the pit, and lurid fires 
 seemed to smoulder in the depths of his 
 troubled eyes, so the glories of a redeemed 
 humanity, of a happy earth the inhabitants of 
 which should never say, I am sick; of a world 
 free from weariness and pain and sorrow and 
 sighing, the vision of the kingdom of God 
 upon earth, the vision of celestial glory, 
 lighted up the face of Jesus and made it beam 
 as the face of no other ever shone. 
 
 Whatever may be the exaggerations of fancy 
 the old painters would not have put a halo 
 around the head of every saint, if there were 
 no fact at all to be expressed by the symbol. 
 What is the veil of flesh that it should obstruct 
 the light of the soul? 
 
 Like circumstances produce like effects, 
 and there was a transfiguration of Jesus as 
 there was one of Moses caused by "the abund- 
 ance of revelation given unto him." 
 
 What might have been expected occurred. 
 Jesus enlarged his work. In addition to his
 
 i 3 2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 twelve apostles he appointed seventy other 
 persons and sent them out two by two to preach 
 and heal. As his own mind became more 
 clear his preaching became more urgent and 
 impressive. He warned men that the day of 
 grace would not last forever, but that a day of 
 judgment would surely come and might over- 
 take them at any time. Especially he mourned 
 over the cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida, in 
 which he had preached longest and where -most 
 of his great works had been performed. He 
 went again through the cities and villages 
 teaching. As Paul afterward warned every 
 one "night and day with tears," so Jesus, in 
 parable after parable and exhortation after 
 exhortation, sought to bring men into the 
 kingdom of God before it should be too late. 
 "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall 
 eat; neither for your body, what ye shall put 
 on. . . . Seek first the kingdom of God; and 
 all these things shall be added unto you." 
 Regard not the opposition of friends or kin- 
 dred. "He that loveth father or mother or 
 wife or child more than me is not worthy of 
 me. . . . He that taketh not up his cross and 
 followeth after me cannot be my disciple." 
 He was pressed in his own spirit, and said to 
 his disciples, "I came to send fire on the
 
 133 
 
 earth and it is already kindled." "I have a 
 baptism to be baptized with; and how am I 
 straitened till it be accomplished!" "Whoso- 
 ever denies me now before men, him will I 
 also deny before my Father in Heaven." He 
 declared that he would come again in glory to 
 judge the world and that all nations should be 
 gathered before him, and that he would sep- 
 arate the righteous from the wicked as a shep- 
 herd "divideth his sheep from the goats," 
 caring nothing for their professions, but re- 
 garding or punishing them according to their 
 deeds. Those who had fed the hungry, 
 clothed the naked and visited the sick and the 
 prisoners should be recognized as his disciples 
 and should enter with him into his glory. 
 Others, no matter how wonderful their works, 
 how loud their professions, or what their re- 
 spectability and standing, were not his and 
 would have no share in his triumph. 
 
 Here Christ assumes his kingship over men. 
 Here is his supreme statement of his authority, 
 but how significant are its limitations! When 
 he was asked by his disciples, "When shall 
 these things be and what shall be the sign of 
 thy coming and of the end of the world?" his 
 answer was, "Of that day and hour knoweth 
 no man, no, not the angels which are in
 
 134 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 heaven, neither the son, but the Father only." 
 (Matthew 24: 36 and Mark 13: 32.) And of the 
 limitations of his knowledge and his liability 
 to error the context furnishes us a marked 
 example, for Jesus repeatedly declared, 
 "Verily I say unto you, that this generation 
 shall not pass, till all these things be done." 
 The phraseology reported by Luke is even 
 more definite and emphatic and runs thus: 
 "Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of 
 my words, of him shall the Son of Man be 
 ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, 
 and in his Father's, and of the holy angels. 
 But I tell you of a truth, there be some stand- 
 ing here which shall not taste of death, till 
 they see the kingdom of God." In accordance 
 with these declarations Paul wrote to the 
 Thessalonians, "We say unto you by the word 
 of the Lord that we which are alive and remain 
 unto the coming of the Lord shall not precede 
 them that have fallen asleep. For the Lord 
 himself shall descend from heaven with a 
 shout, with the voice of the archangel and with 
 the trump of God." Almost every epistle in 
 the New Testament bears similar testimony to 
 the belief of the primitive church that Jesus 
 would return attended by angels to gather his 
 elect before all of the first generation of his
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION 135 
 
 disciples had passed from earth. Alas! is not 
 this the constant error of the finite mind that 
 it measures everything by its own little scale, 
 forgetting the sweep and the grandeur of the 
 designs of the omniscient and omnipotent God 
 to whom "one day is as a thousand years and a 
 thousand years are as one day?" Ought not 
 the divine Workman to take infinite time and 
 infinite labor, if need be, to make his work 
 perfect, rather than by some short and easy 
 process reach a less satisfying consummation? 
 Do we not require even a human artist, one 
 who paints a picture or carves a statue, to take 
 all the time needed to do his best, and shall 
 not the same rule, apply to the almighty Fash- 
 ioner of the souls of men? But every human 
 reformer, with pathetic weakness and impa- 
 tience, wishes for a quicker movement of events 
 and a clearer vision of their results than it 
 seems best to the infinite Wisdom and Good- 
 ness to afford. 
 
 Another declaration made at this time is also 
 important as throwing light on the conscious- 
 ness of Jesus. A certain ruler, alarmed, it may 
 well be, by the sermons on the coming judg- 
 ment and attracted by the bright visions of the 
 coming glory of Christ's kingdom, asked him, 
 "Good Master, what shall I do to inherit
 
 136 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 eternal life?" As Jesus had before disclaimed 
 perfect knowledge, he now disclaimed perfect 
 goodness. "Why," he said, "callest thou me 
 good? none is good save one, that is God." 
 Account for it as we may, the holiest minds 
 are ever the most abased at the sense of their 
 own unworthiness. When Paul was a proud, 
 persecuting Pharisee breathing out fire and 
 slaughter and making havoc of the church he 
 "verily thought he was doing God service." 
 Later he boasted of his apostleship. "Are 
 they ministers of Christ? I am more; in 
 labors more abundant, in stripes above meas- 
 ure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. 
 Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes 
 save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once 
 was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a 
 night and a day I have been in the deep. In 
 journeys often, in perils of robbers, in perils in 
 the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in 
 the sea; in weariness and painfulness, in 
 hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness." 
 Yes, here was heroism, and Paul's boast, "I 
 was not a whit behind the very chiefest apos- 
 tles," is just. Yet, though stung sometimes 
 by detraction and opposition into thus assert- 
 ing his claims, Paul's mood whenever he turns 
 from human to divine standards is more hum-
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION 137 
 
 ble, and he declares, "I am the least of the 
 apostles, and am not meet to be called an 
 apostle because I persecuted the church of 
 God." As the ordinary flame of a lamp or 
 candle when placed in front of a calcium light 
 appears like a black spot, so the holiest men 
 have always felt most painfully the contrast 
 between their actual thoughts and feelings and 
 the standard of purity and virtue of which 
 they conceive and for which they long. 
 
 I think we find the climax of Paul's religious 
 experience in the words to Timothy written 
 when he was Paul the aged, when his good 
 fight was almost fought out and his strenuous 
 race almost run. Then there was no self-satis- 
 faction, no boasting of manifold labors and 
 sufferings, no claim of apostleship, nothing 
 but a vision of God's wonderful and unmerited 
 grace through Christ to sinners, "of whom," 
 said he, "I am chief." I think that this was 
 the mood of the Master also when he said, 
 "Why callest thou me good? none is good save 
 one, that is God,"
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE FINAL PREPARATION OF THE APOSTLES 
 
 WHEN the nervous forces are exhausted by 
 labor and conflict or by too much introspec- 
 tion, God's sovereign remedies are the sea, the 
 field, the forest and the mountain. In the 
 presence of God's grandeur things are seen in 
 their true proportion, a disturbed and jaded 
 mind recovers its tone, and the strongest and 
 noblest minds are lifted above themselves. 
 
 Such solitary retirements to the desert or the 
 mountain for communion with God were fre- 
 quent with Jesus, but just before his last 
 journey to Jerusalem he withdrew from the 
 world rather for the sake of his apostles than 
 for his own necessity or enjoyment. 
 
 If the order of events in the gospel of John 
 may be relied upon, even after Jesus had uttered 
 his last discourses in Galilee and manifested 
 his power to the utmost, his own kinsmen still 
 remained incredulous. They said to him 
 tauntingly, "Depart hence and go into Judea 
 . . . for no man doeth anything in secret, and 
 himself seeketh to be known openly," for, as 
 138
 
 PREPARATION OF THE APOSTLES 139 
 
 John adds, "Neither did his brethren believe 
 in him." It was from his own painful expe- 
 rience that Jesus learned the truth that he so 
 often and variously declared that in spiritual, 
 as in other things "a man's foes" are some- 
 times "they of his own household." If there 
 was such distrust in his natural family, could 
 he be sure that the faith of his spiritual family 
 was fixed and would remain unshaken in the 
 hour of supreme trial? So, knowing the 
 human mind and its vacillations, and remem- 
 bering how long and severe had been his own 
 temptations before his course became clear to 
 him, Jesus prudently determined before declar- 
 ing himself the Messiah in the capital, and as 
 he foresaw suffering the prophet's martyrdom, 
 to retire once more to some secret place with 
 his disciples and teach and encourage them 
 alone as he could not when thronged by the 
 multitude. The disciples were doubtless much 
 agitated by what they had heard. They also 
 had had their share in the work of preaching 
 and healing, and were worn and jaded by the 
 long journeys and constant labors of the pre- 
 ceding weeks. Accordingly Jesus again, as so 
 often before, said to them in loving words, 
 "Come ye yourselves apart and rest awhile." 
 Jesus is not a jealous and inexorable tyrant
 
 i 4 o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 wringing the uttermost penny of tribute, the 
 most intense exertion of every power at every 
 moment in his service, but, like the Almighty 
 Father, he pitieth them that fear him, and his 
 "yoke is easy and his burden light." "Come 
 ye yourselves apart and rest awhile," he said, 
 and the weary disciples gladly responded. 
 Doubtless Jesus himself yearned also for sym- 
 pathy and companionship, for the kind looks, 
 the loving words, and the affectionate caresses 
 of his familiar friends to whom he could un- 
 bosom himself as he could not to "the world." 
 In this retirement before the last stern trial 
 there was a divine wisdom and prudence. 
 
 Prudence is a very ambiguous word. Some- 
 times it means a cold, calculating selfishness 
 that saps the strength of generous resolve and 
 heroic action. Of this sort of prudence Jesus 
 had none. "He that saveth his life shall lose 
 it," was the way in which he expressed his 
 deep conviction on a question he had doubt- 
 less often considered from every point of view. 
 But prudence is sometimes not cowardice but 
 foresight. It then has a place among the 
 intellectual and even among the moral virtues. 
 In this sense Jesus was prudent, and to the 
 taunts of his incredulous kinsmen he gave only 
 the significant answer, "Mine hour is not yet
 
 PREPARATION OF THE APOSTLES 141 
 
 come." Like a wise captain he drilled his 
 soldiers before he brought them under a sharp 
 fire. In these quiet days he doubtless gave 
 them much instruction, for his mind was full 
 and at last he had left much unsaid only 
 because they could not yet bear to hear it. 
 These last opportunities were very precious 
 because they must be few and short. To delay 
 long in retirement would cause the multitude 
 to forget him, would undo his work and in fact 
 be an abdication of his claim as Messiah. To 
 precipitate a fatal conflict with the authorities 
 before his disciples were prepared in mind and 
 heart would be to ruin everything at his own 
 death. 
 
 Like Lincoln's delay in issuing the emanci- 
 pation proclamation till he had the support of 
 the nation, it was judicious deliberation. As 
 it was, one disciple betrayed, another denied, 
 and all forsook him. Had he led them earlier 
 to the supreme ordeal Peter might not have 
 been alone in his denials or Judas in solitary 
 infamy in his treason. 
 
 The mind of Jesus was far-seeing and saga- 
 cious. He expected no ends without the use of 
 adequate means. The man who started to 
 build without counting the cost, or the king 
 who with an army of ten thousand ventured to
 
 i 4 2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 encounter one of twenty thousand, he called 
 fools. In a parable of Browning-like audacity 
 he even commended the one good quality of a 
 despicable thief and liar, the unjust steward, 
 who acted promptly and energetically and did 
 not waste time in regrets and dreams. It may 
 reasonably be asked why Jesus did not take the 
 time to write a book which should contain a 
 full and clear statement of all his doctrines. 
 Why did he not write a code of laws and a 
 concise interpretation and comment? Why 
 did he not at least gather and edit his dis- 
 courses, parables, beatitudes, proverbs and say- 
 ings? I do not think that his failure to do so 
 was the result of neglect, or procrastination or 
 due to unexpected and premature death. I 
 think that he clearly foresaw his death, and 
 that he made what seemed to him to be the 
 best arrangements for perpetuating and extend- 
 ing his work and those arrangements did not 
 include the writing of a book. His purpose 
 was to produce a higher type of life in the 
 individual and in society, and in order to do 
 that he preferred suggestive general statements 
 to a precise and formal code of laws. 
 . If Jesus had written a formal code or system 
 it would have shared the fate of all other codes 
 and systems and been gradually superseded
 
 PREPARATION OF THE APOSTLES 143 
 
 and disintegrated. And this is in fact what 
 has happened to those of Christ's teachings 
 which his disciples have formulated most pre- 
 cisely. Christians have largely explained 
 away the gospel statements about non-resist- 
 ance, usury, poverty, divorce, the sacraments, 
 the Sabbath and the taking of oaths. The 
 Master's principle is good, but the hard and 
 narrow laws supposed to be based on them 
 have been found intolerable. 
 
 When people of a certain type of mind make 
 laws which result in intolerable hardships or 
 absurdities, they do not" honestly retreat from 
 their untenable theories, but try to save their 
 credit by some ingenious and casuistical 
 evasion. It was this indirect and dishonest 
 dealing which pervaded the whole Pharisaic 
 system that above all things else provoked the 
 indignation of Jesus. There is nothing else 
 that he says with such repeated and such ter- 
 rific emphasis as, "Beware of the Scribes, 
 beware of the Scribes, beware of the Scribes, 
 for their leaven, their spirit, is hypocrisy. 
 Woe unto you, woe unto you, woe unto you, 
 Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" 
 
 With such examples before him of the result 
 of regarding a written law as infallible and 
 unalterable, it is no wonder that Jesus never
 
 144 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 formulated his teachings or prepared a code of 
 laws. He wanted to purify and gladden the 
 hearts of men and not merely to control their 
 outward acts, to upbuild human character by 
 filling it with faith, hope and love, and not to 
 undermine it by making change and progress 
 difficult or tortuous. Wise and elastic legisla- 
 tion has its place, but Jesus did not think the 
 legislator's methods adapted to his purpose. 
 
 What is perhaps more surprising is that he 
 did not select and arrange his poems, parables 
 and discourses for exact preservation. The 
 work of the great poet is far more enduring, 
 powerful and pervasive than that of the legis- 
 lator, but all the great poets have felt as Jesus 
 did, that writing was only a means to an end, 
 and that life only is truly great. 
 
 Jesus could never have been satisfied to be a 
 mere speaker of the truth any more than a 
 mere hearer of it. He taught men, "If ye 
 know these things happy are ye if ye do 
 them." He wanted his sayings remembered. 
 No phrase of his is more frequent or significant 
 than, "He that hath ears to hear, let him 
 hear." He told his disciples that he wanted 
 his words to "sink down into their hearts," 
 and he secured just the perpetuation of his say- 
 ings that he desired, the preservation of their
 
 PREPARATION OF THE APOSTLES 145 
 
 substance and vitality and beauty as seed 
 thoughts and not as rigid and obstructive 
 dogmas. In spite of all his precautions and in 
 spite of all the providential variations in the 
 reports of his sayings, we see how "the letter 
 that killeth" has been exalted by many above 
 "the spirit that giveth life." What opposi- 
 tion has been made to astronomy, geology, 
 philology and biology, to ethics and religion, 
 by those who have perverted a body of liter- 
 ature and history into an ultimate and infallible 
 code of law! What royal and ecclesiastical 
 tyrannies, what defence of human slavery, 
 what absurd sacramentarianism, what supersti- 
 tious rites, have been based upon the supposed 
 finality and inerrancy of Scripture! Men have 
 thought that their eternal welfare depended 
 upon a drop of baptismal water, a morsel of 
 eucharistic bread, a few words of priestly abso- 
 lution, or the utterance of a set confession of 
 faith. All this is remote from the spirit of 
 Jesus. He attached no importance to forms 
 and ceremonies, and above all he did not 
 attempt to shut all truth in a book, but left the 
 course of progress and discovery open, giving 
 men as their only rule, loyalty to reason and 
 conscience which he believed would "guide 
 them into all truth." This is inductive philos-
 
 i 4 6 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 ophy on a higher plane than Bacon put it, 
 and ready to yield far greater results. If all 
 men could be persuaded to be wholly loyal to 
 truth in thought, and to justice, and to love in 
 action, how rapidly the conquest of natural 
 forces would proceed and how soon poverty, 
 disease and pain would disappear from the 
 earth and the kingdom of God be established 
 in all lands!
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM 
 
 IF JESUS could have been content to preach 
 the kingdom of God in general terms, without 
 attacking particular abuses or setting up any 
 personal claims, he might in all probability 
 have continued to preach till he died of old 
 age without any more serious molestation 
 from the authorities than he had already met 
 with. Governing bodies dislike trouble and 
 conflict. This was the usual temper of the 
 Sanhedrin. After the death of Jesus it was 
 reluctant to proceed with severity against the 
 apostles and gladly acquiesced in the advice 
 of Gamaliel to let them alone till the results 
 of their work were seen. The Scribes and 
 Pharisees were just as unwilling to bring a 
 popular prophet to formal trial as the Presby- 
 terian General Assembly or the Methodist Gen- 
 eral Conference to try a heretical professor. 
 Trouble and odium were certain and advantage 
 very doubtful. 
 
 But this timidity and temporizing, natural to 
 a council of elderly men, was quite alien to 
 i47
 
 i 4 8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 the temper of Jesus. He was courageous and 
 sincere. He could not evade or postpone 
 what he deemed a duty. He was "straitened," 
 pressed, and burdened in soul, until his work 
 was accomplished. His command to others 
 was, "Let your light shine" and he could not 
 hide his own under a bushel. It was from 
 Jesus that James learned that most searching 
 of all statements in the Bible, "To him that 
 knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it 
 is sin." It would have been easier for 
 Wycliffe to have been silent about transub- 
 stantiation arid to have left the Bible un- 
 translated, it would have been easier for 
 Luther to have expressed his opinions only in 
 an academic way in the classroom instead of 
 nailing them on the church door as a challenge 
 to the world, it would have been easier for 
 John Brown to have hung his rifle on the wall 
 and gone to hoeing corn or shooting rabbits, 
 than it would have been for Jesus to assert his 
 Messiahship only to a circle of his friends or 
 to susceptible inquirers like Mary of Bethany 
 and the woman of Samaria. 
 
 And so when Jesus judged that his disciples 
 were sufficiently trained, and that to delay 
 longer would impair their faith and that of the 
 multitude, he felt that his hour was come,
 
 LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM 149 
 
 and he set himself to go up to Jerusalem. No 
 strong, young man with the blood of life 
 coursing healthily through every vein can go 
 deliberately to death without some shrinking 
 and reluctance. It was not an easy thing for 
 Jesus to make up his mind to go to Jerusalem 
 and there challenge the authorities to a com- 
 bat to the death, yet that was what he felt he 
 must do or else renounce his claim to be the 
 Messiah. There was no middle course. He 
 was sent by God with a message to the nation 
 or he had no message to anybody. And so, 
 though he shrank from the martyrdom of his 
 body at Jerusalem, he shrank still more from 
 the martyrdom of his spirit by a failure to 
 accomplish the work to which he felt himself 
 called. The agony of his soul showed itself 
 in his face and manner. When at last he 
 called his disciples to follow him to Jerusalem 
 he had such a look and strode forward with 
 such determination that they were amazed and 
 afraid. (Mark 10: 32.) 
 
 "And it came to pass, when the time was 
 come that he should be received up, he stead- 
 fastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent 
 messengers before his face: and they went and 
 entered into a village of the Samaritans, to 
 make ready for him. And they did not re-
 
 ISO THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 ceive him, because his face was as though he 
 would go to Jerusalem. And when his dis- 
 ciples James and John saw this they said, 
 'Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come 
 down from heaven, and consume them even as 
 Elijah did?' But he turned and rebuked them, 
 and said, 'Ye know not what manner of spirit 
 ye are of. For the Son of Man is not come 
 to destroy men's lives, but to save them.' And 
 they went to another village." Surely "he 
 that ruleth his own spirit is greater than he 
 that taketh a city." But Jesus did not direct 
 his disciples to record this incident. He who 
 never forgot an act of kindness, who appre- 
 ciated even the gift of a cup of cold water, and 
 who, touched by a woman's impulsive devotion, 
 commanded that "wherever his gospel should 
 be preached what this woman had done should 
 be told for a memorial of her," never desired 
 to perpetuate the memory of an insult or a 
 wrong. 
 
 These poor, besotted Samaritans did not 
 know that in repulsing this tired and hungry 
 wayfarer they were rejecting a friend and 
 benefactor, rejecting the man who has lifted 
 the name Samaritan from reproach to honor, 
 and made it synonymous with human kind- 
 ness. Their petty little race prejudice shut
 
 LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM I5I 
 
 everything else from their view. They knew 
 only that he was a Jew and was on his way to 
 Jerusalem, and that was enough to condemn 
 him in their eyes. So here as at Bethlehem 
 and Nazareth he was "despised and rejected 
 of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with 
 grief." He turned sadly away and went to 
 another village. 
 
 The rejection of Jesus by this Samaritan vil- 
 lage was but a prophecy of his ultimate rejec- 
 tion by Jerusalem, as the palms and hosannas 
 which greeted him upon his entry are a pre- 
 lude to a coming world-wide triumph. 
 
 The dramatists and poets who hold the mir- 
 ror up to nature, and present the great types 
 of human character in their ideal strength and 
 fulness, generally exhibit the leading traits of 
 a hero in minor examples before delineating 
 his crowning achievement. This is obviously 
 wise and truthful, for in the nature of the case 
 no one leaps into excellence of any kind at 
 one bound. Skill comes by practice, strength 
 by exertion, self-mastery by the discipline of 
 habit. It was the common, the daily, habit of 
 Jesus to look with compassion on the mistakes 
 and sins of men, and only because of this 
 habitual and practiced compassion was he able 
 to say even amid the agonies of the cross,
 
 iS2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 "Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
 they do." 
 
 Hitherto Jesus had avoided public recogni- 
 tion as much as possible. He had said sternly 
 to many whom he had healed, "See thou tell 
 no man." Even when Peter made his famous 
 declaration, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of 
 the living God," and Jesus blessed him for it, 
 he immediately afterward charged his disciples 
 that they should tell no man that he was the 
 Christ. But now as he drew near to Jerusalem 
 his hour was come and his plan was changed. 
 Fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah, he entered 
 Jerusalem in modest yet royal state. He 
 encouraged the people to shout hosannas to 
 him. Children especially, in their loving 
 enthusiasm, proclaimed him the son of David, 
 and when the angry priests asked him, "Hear- 
 est thou what these say?" Jesus answered them, 
 "Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth 
 of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected 
 praise? . . . And the whole multitude of the 
 disciples began to rejoice and praise God with 
 a loud voice, saying, Blessed be the. king that 
 cometh in the name of the Lord. And some of 
 the Pharisees said unto him, Master, rebuke 
 thy disciples. And he answered and said 
 unto them, I tell you that if these should hold
 
 LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM 153 
 
 their peace, the stones would immediately cry 
 out." 
 
 He had taken the decisive step. He had 
 crossed the Rubicon. He had burned all 
 bridges behind him. He had proclaimed him- 
 self the expected Son of David, the king who 
 came in the name of the Lord. No middle 
 course remained. He must enforce his claim 
 or sink into contempt.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE TEMPLE 
 
 Jesus had formed his plan and was deter- 
 mined to attack Jewish formalism and iniquity 
 in the temple itself, their central stronghold, 
 and thus bring the question to a decisive issue. 
 When Martin Luther went to Rome and there 
 saw every ecclesiastical vice full-blown, his 
 faith was undermined, and he became a Protes- 
 tant at heart and ready for resistance when the 
 occasion permitted. Every previous visit of 
 Jesus to Jerusalem seems to have had a like 
 effect upon him. Beautiful as was the archi- 
 tecture of the temple, its beauty aroused in 
 him no enthusiasm. He told the woman of 
 Samaria that it had no special privilege as a 
 place of worship; and, though he wept over 
 the city of Jerusalem, he spoke without a sigh 
 of the destruction of the temple. Perhaps he 
 looked with horror upon it because it was a 
 monument of Herod's crimes and remorse. 
 Herod, the murderer of rivals, of priests, of 
 children and of wife, tortured by the ghosts of 
 the slain, had lavished money on this splendid 
 154
 
 THE TEMPLE J55 
 
 edifice in the hope that he might thus atone 
 for sin and find peace of mind. But if no 
 taint of murder and infamy had clung around 
 it, the regular routine of temple services would 
 have repelled Jesus. He sought a house of 
 prayer and found a den of thieves. Keen 
 money-changers and no.sy sellers of sheep and 
 oxen filled those cloisters which he would like 
 to have seen occupied by wise teachers and 
 devout worshipers. Worse than all, the tem- 
 ple was defiled with a never-ceasing stream of 
 blood. Though hundreds of years before, 
 David, Isaiah and Micah had declared that 
 God did not desire sacrifices of sheep and oxen 
 but only an obedient and contrite heart, still 
 the repeated declarations of the prophets had 
 not availed to abolish the hideous system, and 
 the greatest prophet of all was forced to look 
 upon bloody and pagan rites which, with the 
 strange tenacity of religious usages, had come 
 down from primeval savagery and, as a horrid 
 survival, defaced a cultivated age. 
 
 Jesus'must have felt as keenly as any preced- 
 ing prophet the folly and hurtfulness of sacri- 
 fice, must have felt as did his apostles that the 
 blood of bulls and goats could not take away 
 sin, and that the whole system, like all other 
 forms of ceremonial righteousness and priestly
 
 i 5 6 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 absolution, deadened the conscience, prevented 
 repentance and encouraged men to continue in 
 sin. Yet he did not press his way to the great 
 altar at the hour of morning or evening sacri- 
 fice and seek to arrest the arm of the officiating 
 priest as he was in the act of slaying the lamb 
 without blemish. Perhaps he thought that an 
 attempt to do so would fail or would cause a 
 riot in which he might die by some obscure 
 hand in a misunderstood and undignified strug- 
 gle. At any rate, instead of attacking the cen- 
 tral evil, the atoning sacrifice itself out of 
 which many smaller evils had naturally 
 developed, he began his assertion of authority 
 by assailing the more unseemly accessories of 
 the system of sacrifices rather than the offering 
 itself. There was a great and constant demand 
 for animals for sacrifice, and dealers in sheep 
 and oxen and doves had been allowed by the 
 authorities to bring these beasts and birds into 
 the outer courts. These crowded cattle pens, 
 offensive to eye and ear and nose, must have 
 been a great scandal, not only to those who 
 disbelieved in sacrifices altogether, but to all 
 devout worshipers. But the traffic was lucra- 
 tive, and the authorities, while doubtless shar- 
 ing in the profits, professed that they permitted 
 the cattle to be there only for the convenience
 
 THE TEMPLE 157 
 
 of those who desired animals for sacrifice. 
 Every Jew was required to pay annually into 
 the treasury of the temple a half shekel of 
 Jewish money, and many made large voluntary 
 gifts, and as great numbers of the Passover 
 visitors were of the "dispersed among the Gen- 
 tiles," and brought with them only the profane 
 and unlawful money of the heathen, there was 
 a very brisk and very unspiritual business of 
 money-changing always in progresss. 
 
 All this cattle dealing and money-changing 
 rightly seemed to Jesus utterly alien to the 
 true spirit of worship. "He made a scourge 
 of small cords, and drove all the traffickers and 
 the sheep and the oxen out of the temple; and 
 poured out the changers' money and overthrew 
 the tables; and said unto them that sold doves, 
 "Take these things hence." It was a strange 
 scene. the vehement young prophet with his 
 uplifted scourge, used perhaps on the backs of 
 sluggish oxen but not needed against men, for 
 the most callous butcher and the most heart- 
 less Shylock were startled for a moment into 
 shame and fear by the indignant look and the 
 clarion voice of the lion of Judah, and fled in 
 all haste. But they soon rallied and demanded 
 protection in the privileges for which they had 
 paid. The priests and elders promptly re-
 
 i 5 8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 sponded to the call, and sent a strong deputa- 
 tion to inquire into the matter. Conscious of 
 their own participation in the guilt of the 
 traffic, they did not like to encounter Jesus on 
 this issue, yet they were not willing to surren- 
 der their illicit gains and to submit to an em- 
 phatic public rebuke without a struggle. 
 
 So the chief priests and the elders, venerable 
 in their robes of office and attended by an im- 
 posing retinue, came to Jesus as he was talking 
 to the great crowd that the excitement had 
 gathered, and with magisterial formality de- 
 manded by what authority he had acted and 
 who gave him that authority. To face this 
 august body, reinforced doubtless by an angry 
 crowd of the expelled cattle-dealers and 
 money-changers, was a sharp test of the 
 sovereignty Jesus had just permitted his dis- 
 ciples to proclaim, yet he met it with skill and 
 courage. But circumstances were now very 
 different. Enemies and not friends formed the 
 majority of the crowd, and many sympathizers 
 and friends were doubtless overawed or per- 
 plexed at the sight of the priests and the elders. 
 When a private man opposes a large body of 
 officials there is a strong presumption against 
 him. Jesus felt this and so, instead of 
 nakedly asserting that he was the Messiah and
 
 THE TEMPLE 159 
 
 had been sent by God to set up a kingdom, an 
 assertion which might have given the authori- 
 ties an opportunity to arrest him for blasphemy, 
 he asked them a question about his predeces- 
 sor John. Was John sent by God? They were 
 thrown into confusion by the question. They 
 dared not say Yes, for John had testified of 
 Jesus. They dared not say, No, for the multi- 
 tude considered John a true prophet. There 
 was an awkward delay while they reasoned 
 among themselves, and the multitude began to 
 wonder and the more irreverent to laugh at 
 their confusion. When at last the answer 
 came, "We cannot tell," their discomfiture 
 was complete, and even the very tipstaves and 
 bailiffs who attended these dignitaries must 
 have laughed at their ludicrous helplessness as 
 Jesus said in turn, "Neither tell I you by what 
 authority I do these things." They were so 
 confused and crestfallen that they had not even 
 the sense to beat an immediate retreat, and 
 Jesus in searching and terrible parables showed 
 them that they were worse than the publicans 
 and the harlots, and that the opportunities 
 which they had abused would soon be taken 
 from them. 
 
 They withdrew at last in fright and anger 
 with the words ringing in their ears, "The
 
 160 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and 
 given to a nation bringing forth the fruits 
 thereof." But their rage was for the time 
 impotent, for "when they sought to lay hands 
 on him, they feared the multitude, because 
 they took him for a prophet." It was neces- 
 sary and it was congenial to use policy. Could 
 they not beat this audacious orator at his own 
 game? Among all their veteran casuists was 
 there no one who could outwit this inexperi- 
 enced and unlearned young man? "They took 
 counsel how they might entangle him in his 
 talk." 
 
 They framed a shrewd plot. Every patriotic 
 Jew longed for the deliverance of his native 
 land from the Roman yoke. It was warmly 
 debated whether to pay tribute to Caesar was 
 not apostasy from Judaism. The extreme 
 zealots refused to pay the hateful Roman taxes, 
 and others did so with misgiving and under 
 compulsion. Some wily lawyer, experienced 
 in all the arts of cross-examination, suggested 
 to his associates that they ask Jesus whether 
 such tribute was lawful or not. If he says, No, 
 the Romans will arrest him for sedition. If he 
 says, Yes, he will destroy all his claim to be 
 regarded as a patriot and leader. His popu- 
 larity will cease and his pretensions to be the
 
 THE TEMPLE 161 
 
 Messiah collapse. To throw Jesus off his 
 guard the priests and elders did not go them- 
 selves, but entrusted the execution of the plot 
 to disciples whose youth and apparent ingenu- 
 ousness might lead Jesus to give a full and 
 circumstantial answer. And so these apt 
 young learners in the school of hypocrisy came 
 up to him with the appearance of the deepest 
 concern and as though the question weighed 
 heavily upon their consciences and they had 
 vainly sought relief elsewhere, and said, "Mas- 
 ter, we know that thou teachest the way of God 
 in truth and carest not for any man. Tell us, 
 therefore, Is it lawful to give tribute unto 
 Caesar, or not?" Quick as a flash Jesus saw 
 who had sent them and what their purpose 
 was, and he said sternly, "Why tempt ye me, 
 ye hypocrites? Show me the tribute money. 
 And they brought unto him a penny. And he 
 said unto them, Whose is this image and super- 
 scription?" They did not like the turn things 
 had taken and began to forebode disaster, but 
 they could not refuse to answer so plain a ques- 
 tion, and they said unto him, "Caesar's." 
 And then came the simple and crushing state- 
 ment of Jesus, "Render therefore unto Caesar 
 the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the 
 things that are God's." Then the young men
 
 i6 2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 had their answer, and, crestfallen, they left 
 Jesus and went their way and reported the mat- 
 ter to the elders. 
 
 Countless millions have read with delight of 
 the baffling of these old intriguers. It is in- 
 deed a beautiful and wonderful thing to see 
 how native purity and sense are often more 
 than a match for the most crafty and experi- 
 enced villainy. Thus the painters make the 
 youthful archangel triumph over the grim and 
 gray arch-fiend. 
 
 The next attempt to discredit Jesus as a 
 teacher came from another quarter. The very 
 same day the Sadducees, who denied that man 
 had a soul or would live after death, on the 
 ground that nothing to this effect is revealed 
 in the law of Moses, came to him and tried to 
 reduce the doctrine of the resurrection to 
 absurdity by putting the case of a woman who 
 had had seven husbands. Whose wife was she 
 to be in heaven? He told them that "in the 
 resurrection they neither marry, nor are given 
 in marriage, but are as the angels of God in 
 heaven." Having answered the direct ques- 
 tion of the Sadducees, Jesus next replied to 
 their concealed innuendo that there was no 
 resurrection, and easily showed that if there is 
 no formal statement in the Old Testament of
 
 THE TEMPLE 163 
 
 the doctrine of a future life, it is frequently 
 implied. He took for illustration the familiar 
 phrase, "I am the God of Abraham, the God 
 of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," and added, 
 "God is not the God of the dead, but of the 
 living." 
 
 Thrice had Jesus signally and conspicuously 
 defeated and silenced his opponents in debate, 
 "and after that they durst not ask him any 
 question at all." More than this, some of the 
 younger and nobler spirits among the Scribes 
 accorded him a generous admiration, and 
 added, "Master, thou hast well said." 
 
 It was perhaps this evidence of susceptibility 
 to nobler feeling among the disciples of the 
 Scribes and Pharisees that led Jesus to utter his 
 tremendous denunciations of those "blind 
 guides," those "hypocrites," who "were shut- 
 ting up the kingdom of heaven against men, 
 neither going in themselves nor suffering those 
 who would go in to enter." In the most ter- 
 rible stream of invective in literature, beside 
 which the Philippics of Demosthenes, the ora- 
 tions of Cicero against Catiline, the impeach- 
 ment of Hastings by Burke seem tame and 
 colorless, Jesus, rising in a steady and awful 
 climax, called down woe after woe upon those 
 "whited sepulchres" fair without but within
 
 164 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 full of "all uncleanness." Eight times, 
 almost as if he intended to make a formal con- 
 trast between these maledictions against the 
 sinner with which he closed his public ministry 
 and the beatitudes upon the righteous with 
 which he had opened it, eight times Jesus re- 
 peated with ever-increasing emphasis, Woe 
 unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! 
 Disciples and descendants of the murderers of 
 preceding prophets, "fill up the measure of your 
 fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, 
 how can ye escape the damnation of hell!" 
 
 It was strange language to address to a body 
 of doctors of divinity and ruling elders in the 
 church. Is there not something startling and ap- 
 palling in the fact that the gentle and merciful 
 Jesus who so readily pardoned the thief and 
 the adulteress, and who never uttered a harsh 
 word against those whom we are accustomed to 
 think of as the vicious and criminal classes, but 
 was so pitiful toward their failings that he was 
 called the friend of sinners, that the patient 
 and hopeful Jesus should think the state of 
 these Scribes and Pharisees so hopeless? Does 
 it not suggest that as love is the supreme and 
 central virtue, so cold, calculating, respectable 
 selfishness is the cardinal and damning sin? It 
 is at any rate matter for deep thought that all
 
 THE TEMPLE 165 
 
 Christ's severe denunciations were visited upon 
 priests, teachers of the law and elders in the 
 church, upon professedly religious and out- 
 wardly respectable people. And indeed it is 
 clear that such people, being above others in 
 knowledge, opportunity and privilege, ought 
 to be much better than others or they are much 
 worse. 
 
 How these priests and lawyers in their robes 
 of office, these teachers accustomed to the 
 meek interrogatories of their pupils, to the 
 submissive obedience of their servants, to the 
 awe of the common people for their "broad 
 phylacteries" and reverend aspect, how these 
 men, blown up with pride by the breath of pros- 
 perity and applause, must have been startled 
 at the first words of public rebuke they had 
 ever listened to! In their own opinion they 
 were not very bad. Some of them doubtless 
 thought themselves good. Others who had 
 qualms of conscience now and then as they 
 "devoured widows' houses" and then "for a 
 pretense made long prayers" had grown into 
 their hypocrisies so gradually and had become 
 so hardened in them by habit, that they were 
 quite comfortable. 
 
 As Jesus turned their corrupt hearts inside 
 out, some of these men as they winced and
 
 166 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 cowered saw for a moment all their foul de- 
 formities, and saw, too, in swift, bright vision, 
 the long-forgotten aspirations of innocent boy- 
 hood, but in most cases the moral fibres had 
 been too long unstrung for any strong and sin- 
 cere response to a call to repentance. Pride is 
 a stubborn and pugnacious devil, and it soon 
 rallied every other evil spirit in human nature 
 to its support. The breach between them and 
 Jesus was irreparable. Their authority had 
 been shaken to its foundations. Another such 
 assault might overthrow it. Jesus must be 
 silenced at any cost, and so "the chief priests 
 and the scribes and the elders assembled at the 
 palace of Caiaphas, the high priest, and con- 
 sulted that they might take Jesus by subtilty 
 and kill him." "The righteous is an abomina- 
 tion to the wicked." Yet these warnings and 
 denunciations were not without good effect. 
 They not only strengthened the faith of the 
 older disciples, and fixed that of newer ones, 
 but they were seed sown for a future harvest, 
 for we read in the Acts that "a great company 
 of the priests" became obedient to the faith.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE LAST SUPPER AND FAREWELL 
 
 When, in humiliation and anger, the Phari- 
 sees left him, Jesus saw very clearly that they 
 had exhausted their verbal strategy and that 
 their next attempt would be a violent one, and 
 tha{ it would result in his death. He could 
 not be consistent with his claims and character 
 and either fly or resist. To save his life by flight 
 would be to lose what was dearer to him than 
 life, the accomplishment of his appointed task. 
 To fight would be a still more fatal error. 
 Force, "the last argument" of earthly kings, 
 proves nothing. If Jesus had called his fol- 
 lowers to arms, he would in all probability 
 have been defeated, but, if by any possibility 
 he had won victories in war, they would have 
 done nothing to prove the truth of his doctrine. 
 He would have established a fatal precedent, 
 and, instead of the unique and sublime moral 
 eminence he now has, he would have had only 
 the lurid and ever-dimming fame of the Ara- 
 bian fanatic whose angry appeal to the sword 
 has drenched so many lands in blood. 
 167
 
 168 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 There was no course open to Jesus but to 
 stay where he was and prepare the minds of 
 his disciples for the worst. His own convic- 
 tion that he was the Messiah was now com- 
 plete. It had acquired the strength of habit, 
 it was supported by the recognition of dis- 
 ciples, above all it had been fused and hard- 
 ened in the fierce fires of opposition. The 
 ordinary accretions of thought are like the 
 gentle deposits of the aqueous rocks; and, 
 like the friable sandstone, yield to influences 
 as gentle as those which created them. But 
 those convictions that have been formed in the 
 furnace of suffering and persecution are like 
 the igneous rocks hardened by volcanic fires 
 and the pressure of mountain weights. 
 
 Jesus had greatly longed to complete another 
 Jewish year. The passover season was en- 
 deared by the memories of childhood and 
 associated with every feeling of patriotism and 
 religion. He felt sure that the Jewish ritual- 
 ism against which he had preached was soon to 
 fall, and that the daily and yearly sacrifices 
 would cease. He knew that his death would 
 form a new epoch in the national life, and he 
 desired to link the future to the past as closely 
 and tenderly as possible in the minds of his 
 disciples and their successors.
 
 LAST SUPPER AND FAREWELL 169 
 
 Accordingly, as they were eating the paschal 
 supper, "Jesus took bread and blessed it and 
 broke it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, 
 Take, eat, this is my body. And he took the 
 cup and gave thanks, and gave it to them, say- 
 ing, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of 
 the new testament, which is shed for many for 
 the remission of sins." 
 
 In two respects this figurative language has 
 been perverted. The words, "This is my 
 body," have been understood literally, and the 
 doctrine of transubstantiation has been built 
 upon them. It would be just as sensible to 
 take literally and materially the words, "I am 
 the door, " "I am the good shepherd, ' "I am the 
 true vine," "lam the way!" When we consider 
 how boldly figurative the language of Jesus 
 habitually was, how he told men that faith, 
 like a grain of mustard seed, could remove 
 mountains, when we reflect upon his frequent 
 use of such paradoxes as, "Let the dead bury 
 their dead," it seems strange that the figure, 
 "This is my body," naturally suggested by the 
 occasion, should have been made the warrant 
 for the monstrous doctrine that every time a 
 priest utters a certain formula of consecration 
 over a bit of bread it is traasformed into the 
 body of Jesus. This seems to me mere fetichism
 
 i 7 o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 and magical incantation, and infinitely removed 
 from the spirit of the religion of Jesus. 
 
 But the Protestant can throw no stone at the 
 Catholic in this matter, for he perverts just as 
 grossly the clause, "shed for many for the re- 
 mission of sins." It was inevitable that after 
 the death of Jesus those who sought to abolish 
 the Mosaic sacrifices should declare that Christ 
 was the Lamb of God and that now that he had 
 been offered there was no need of further sacri- 
 fice for sin. The figurative language is beauti- 
 ful and appropriate, but it is a strange 
 distortion of its meaning to get out of it the 
 doctrines of vicarious atonement and imputed 
 righteousness. 
 
 The life and death of Jesus have awakened 
 many to righteousness and turned many from 
 sin. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of 
 the church"; and the blood of the central 
 figure in human history has, more than that of 
 any earlier prophet or later apostle, roused 
 men from the living death of sensuality, greed 
 and worldliness, and brought them into the life 
 of righteousness. It -has produced that peni- 
 tence, faith and effort which have, by God's 
 grace, loosed the yoke and remitted the guilt 
 of sin, but it is for no one a substitute for his 
 personal righteousness.
 
 LAST SUPPER AND FAREWELL 171 
 
 On this farewell occasion Jesus performed an- 
 other beautiful symbolic act. After the supper 
 he "laid aside his garments, and took a towel 
 and girded himself, and poured water into a 
 basin and washed the feet of his disciples." It 
 was fitting that he who "came not to be minis- 
 tered unto but to minister" should make his 
 last act one of humble service. On their way 
 to Jerusalem the apostles had contended among 
 themselves as to who should be the greatest in 
 the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus had said to 
 them, "Whosoever will be great among you, 
 let him be your servant." On another oc- 
 casion, as we learn from Paul, who had received 
 by tradition the precious saying not recorded 
 in any of the gospels, Jesus had declared, "It 
 is more blessed to give than to receive." To 
 give is a paternal, a kingly, a godlike act; to 
 receive is a childlike, a subject, a human act. 
 The recipient can but show gratitude, while 
 the benefactor shows mercy. So Jesus, the 
 king among men, made himself as the 
 humblest servant and girded himself to wash 
 the feet of his disciples.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 JUDAS ISCARIOT 
 
 It does not appear that Jesus made any ex- 
 ception, but washed the feet of Judas in his 
 turn. Perhaps he hoped that it was not even 
 yet too lafe by an act of love to calm the per- 
 turbed spirit and win back the lost affection of 
 the wretched man who betrayed him. 
 
 But Judas had determined upon his course, 
 and the touching incidents of the last supper 
 only increased his anger and alienation. The 
 same flower-juices that the bee transforms into 
 honey the spider distils into venom. The gos- 
 pel of the kingdom that was to lift the other 
 disciples to righteousness was to sink Judas 
 into deeper sin. As far as Judas was con- 
 cerned, Jesus had preached in vain that "a 
 man's life consisteth not in the abundance of 
 the things that he possesseth" but in the state 
 of his heart and mind; that men's lasting 
 treasures were in heaven, and that those who 
 172
 
 JUDAS ISCARIOT 173 
 
 hunger and thirst after righteousness are 
 blessed. To Judas "the kingdom" had seemed 
 to be the real and great thing. The beatitudes 
 and spiritual ideals were to this worldly man 
 amiable extravagances to be tolerated only 
 because they might be useful in winning men 
 into the kingdom. He was the treasurer and 
 carried the bag, and as long as there were 
 great crowds of enthusiastic disciples and as 
 the contributions of the wealthy men and 
 women who ministered unto Jesus flowed in 
 freely, Judas was well satisfied. But when it 
 became more and more evident that Jesus 
 really meant to sacrifice himself to these im- 
 practicable ideals and expected his followers 
 to do the same, Judas rebelled. He was a dis- 
 ciple for office and power and wealth, and 
 events had gradually opened even his eyes to 
 the fact that he could not obtain them as a dis- 
 ciple of Jesus. Then he was one of those men 
 who are thrown into an agony by the smallest 
 word of censure. A little while before, Mary 
 had broken a box of precious ointment on the 
 head of Jesus, and Judas had murmured about 
 it as a waste and with hypocritical compassion 
 had said that it might have been sold for the 
 benefit of the poor. Jesus had gently and 
 sadly replied, in effect, I shall not be long with
 
 174 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 you, Judas, you need not grudge me this 
 tribute of love; but the rebuke, mild as it was, 
 had rankled in the vain man's breast. He 
 was a thief, too, and his guilty conscience per- 
 haps saw suspicion in these words. 
 
 Moreover, he was the kind of man who liked 
 to stand well with the authorities, and the 
 recent breach of Jesus with the rulers had 
 greatly shocked him. It became his convic- 
 tion that Jesus was embarked in a foolish and 
 desperate venture, and that all who stayed 
 with him would share his destruction, and he 
 determined to save what he could from the 
 wreck. So he went to the chief priests and 
 bargained with them to betray Jesus into their 
 hands. "And they covenanted with him for 
 thirty pieces of silver." 
 
 It is at once the most shameful and the most 
 niggardly bargain in history. For once the 
 greed and cunning of Judas were overmatched, 
 and it was when he met the greed and cunning 
 of corporate wealth. 
 
 Judas had pledged his word, and if he had a 
 passing pang of remorse he quenched it by the 
 thought of this obligation. Jesus had watched 
 him during the supper. He saw that he was 
 unrepentant and joined to his idolized money. 
 It was useless to strive longer, and Jesus drove
 
 JUDAS ISCARIOT 175 
 
 him forth with the words, "What thou doest, 
 do quickly"; and Judas, in a tempest of inward 
 rage but with a simulated calm that deceived 
 the other disciples, left to complete his in- 
 famous agreement. He fled, as did Satan from 
 Paradise, to return no more. 
 
 His name is the most execrable in human 
 history, for he violated the most sacred obliga- 
 tions to the noblest of masters, apostatized 
 from the lowest motives and in the meanest 
 and most detestable manner. 
 
 The withdrawal of Judas was a relief to all 
 the company. Sorrow had seized the hearts 
 of the disciples as Jesus had declared that one 
 of them would betray him, and now that the 
 traitor was gone, Jesus comforted them with 
 tender words. "Let not your heart be 
 troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in 
 me. In my Father's house are many man- 
 sions." Continuing his farewell, he said in 
 substance, I am only going before to prepare 
 a place for you. *I shall watch you, I shall be 
 with you; whatever you shall ask me, I will 
 give you. The work I have begun is of God, 
 and "he that believeth on me, the works that I 
 do shall he do also; and greater works than 
 these shall he do; because I go unto the 
 Father." . . . "My Father is greater than
 
 i;6 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 I . . . ; and as the Father gave me command- 
 ment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence." 
 . . . "And when they had sung a hymn, they 
 went out into the mount of Olives."
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 GETHSEMANE 
 
 JESUS had thought through every problem 
 of man's life. He saw very clearly from thou- 
 sands of examples that goodness and truth do 
 not secure a prophet against opposition and 
 persecution; but that, on the contrary, the 
 greater and more active a good man's virtue is, 
 the more likely he is to arouse the hatred of all 
 bad men whose gains and influence are threat- 
 ened. The righteous are an abomination to 
 the wicked, and the wicked will do their 
 utmost to rid themselves of what they hate. 
 An actively good man must expect to be 
 assailed by bad men in property, person and 
 reputation. Jesus has warned his followers of 
 all this, and one of his most comprehensive 
 precepts is, "Fear not them that kill the body 
 and after that have no more that they can do." 
 To kill the body. is after all a small thing. 
 Epictetus said to the tyrant who threatened 
 him with death, "You may kill me but you 
 cannot hurt me." The immortal mind is un- 
 177
 
 i 7 8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 impaired by death, nay, its knowledge and 
 power are enlarged when it is "from its prison 
 released and freed from its bodily chain." 
 Jesus not only says that the soul cannot be 
 hurt, he says that the body cannot. "There 
 shall not a hair of your heads perish." The 
 mortal body itself, in that spiritual revivifica- 
 tion of which the new birth of trees and flowers 
 is but a faint foreshadowing, will live again in 
 richer glory, for after its sowing in corruption 
 it will be raised in incorruption. "Wherefore 
 comfort ye one another with these words." 
 The belief in immortality is necessary to man's 
 happiness and progress. There can be no solid 
 virtue unless men fear dishonor more than 
 death; but life with all its drawbacks is so 
 sweet that if death should be believed to be 
 extinction, the desire to cling to the present 
 life would be injuriously strengthened by that 
 erroneous belief. A man whose faith it is that 
 time is but a part of eternity, and that this life 
 is a probation, has immeasurably stronger 
 motives to virtue than a materialist who has 
 the gloomy and despairing opinion that death 
 ends all. 
 
 It may seem strange that after Jesus had 
 comforted his disciples there should have been 
 any further wavering or fear on their part, and
 
 GETHSEMANE 179- 
 
 still stranger that after he had said, "Let not 
 your hearts be troubled," he should himself 
 have passed almost immediately to the supreme 
 agony of Gethsemane. But these revulsions of 
 feeling will seem strange only to those who are 
 superficial observers of the human heart. Ob- 
 jects change their appearance as we draw nearer 
 to them. That which at a distance we contem- 
 plate with philosophic calm rouses very lively 
 feeling when we are face to face with it. 
 
 The apostles had seemed firm in their faith 
 and courage in the light and cheerful upper 
 room, but as they came out from the friendly 
 shelter into the chill air to take what they 
 had been forewarned was their last journey 
 with Jesus, their courage began to ooze 
 away. Jesus marked the change in face and 
 manner and said to them, "All ye shall be 
 offended because of me this night." It was 
 not said in reproach, but to warn and 
 strengthen them, and led by the impulsive 
 Peter each one said, "Though I should die with 
 thee, yet will I not deny thee." "Then cometh 
 Jesus with them into a place called Gethsem- 
 ane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, 
 while I go and pray yonder. And he took 
 with him Peter and James and John and began 
 to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith
 
 i8o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 he unto them, "My soul is exceeding sorrow- 
 ful even unto death. . . . And he went a little 
 further, and fell on his face and prayed, say- 
 ing, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup 
 pass from me- Nevertheless not as I will, but 
 as thou wilt." 
 
 There has been much discussion as to the 
 meaning of the expression "this cup." I 
 think, however, that its meaning is made clear 
 by comparing it with similar expressions used 
 elsewhere. There is a legend in the Talmud 
 to the effect that the angel of death at first 
 slew men with a sword, but that in compassion 
 a cup was substituted. In the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews we read that Jesus "tasted death for 
 every man." From these passages it seems 
 clear that the cup from which Jesus shrank was 
 the bitter cup of death. If his spirit had not 
 thus shrunk from "leaving the warm precincts" 
 of this house of clay, Jesus would not have 
 been the highest type of man. He loved 
 humanity and the work he wished to do for it. 
 Could that work not be accomplished equally 
 well in some other and less painful way than 
 by his premature and violent death? That, I 
 take it, was the burden of his agony. But the 
 greatness of his shrinking from death is the 
 measure of the greatness of his faith and obedi-
 
 GETHSEMANE 181 
 
 ence. The spirit triumphed over every bodily 
 weakness. If Jesus had not wished to escape 
 from suffering and death, there would have 
 been no merit in his obedience to conscience. 
 It is this sensitive heroism that appeals to us. 
 If he had been without hopes and fears, he 
 would have been insipid as a character and 
 useless as an example. 
 
 For wise purposes, the law of suffering seems 
 to be as universal and inexorable as the law of 
 gravitation. The very Captain of our Salvation 
 was made perfect by it; and each soul on its 
 way to strength and joy must pass through its 
 Gethsemane. 
 
 Whatever may have been the pangs of con- 
 science or of fear in the mind of Judas as he 
 took his solitary way through the shadows to 
 keep his wicked covenant, the evil elements in 
 his nature still had the mastery, and as Jesus, 
 strengthened by prayer, returned to his weary 
 disciples, Judas appeared with a company of 
 armed officers sent by the chief priests and 
 elders. Coward as he was in everything good, 
 he was bold in his baseness. He came for- 
 ward with an impudent pretense of loyalty and 
 said, "Hail, master!" and kissed him. The 
 officers approached and Peter drew a sword 
 and made a momentary effort at resistance.
 
 i8 2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 But Jesus told him to put his sword into its 
 sheath. He surrendered himself, "the dis- 
 ciples all forsook him and fled," and the 
 officers led him away to a travesty of a trial.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE TRIAL 
 
 WHEN a single man opposes society, when 
 with a new idea he attempts to set aside long- 
 established usage, it is by most men taken for 
 granted that the single man is wrong. This 
 judgment, natural to all men, is doubly potent 
 and binding in the case of the officers who are 
 charged with the duty of maintaining the ex- 
 isting system. Some charity is due even to 
 the chief priests and elders who made the 
 greatest blunder and committed the greatest 
 crime in history. 
 
 Even if the chief priests and elders had not 
 been "stirred up with hatred and revenge" 
 because they had a few days before been 
 publicly rebuked as hypocrites, as whited 
 sepulchres and as vipers, it would have been 
 impossible for such a body of men to have 
 given Jesus a fair trial. Only a few earnest 
 men keep their minds constantly open to new 
 truths. The great majority settle into grooves 
 of opinion along which they run smoothly and 
 out of which they can scarcely move at all. 
 183
 
 184 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 There were in that assembly half-blind, 
 mumbling, toothless old men, with decayed 
 intellect and dulled sensibilities, mere drift- 
 wood upon the stream of time. There were 
 bold, adroit, unscrupulous men, resolved to 
 maintain power and privilege at any cost and 
 ready unhesitatingly to sacrifice any one who 
 threatened to cross their path and thwart their 
 plans. There were narrow-minded bigots, 
 sternly orthodox, and utterly unable to see 
 even the possibility of error in the established 
 creed or to imagine a higher type of faith. To 
 dare to question tradition, usage, and the wis- 
 dom of local majorities is always shocking to 
 some minds. Those persons who decide by 
 reason and evidence are few. Men, like 
 sheep, mostly follow leaders. Those who to- 
 day are shocked at a denial of Christ's supreme 
 deity would have been just as much shocked 
 at the first assertion of it. The other name for 
 orthodoxy is conservatism; and conservatism, 
 like the centripetal motion of the earth, repre- 
 sents only half the force fhat directs the true 
 course of events. 
 
 As for any real examination of the merits of 
 the case, Jesus might almost as well have been 
 tried by a tribunal of foxes, wolves, and bears, 
 so swayed were the members of that assembly
 
 THE TRIAL 185 
 
 by low cunning, by greed, and by hate. What 
 a ghastly farce that trial was! A wise, pure, 
 benevolent man before that crowd of extortion- 
 ers, drunkards, adulterers, scheming politicians 
 and blind devotees. Most of them doubtless 
 sincerely thought that they were putting down 
 a dangerous agitator and bold blasphemer, and 
 regarded their own lapses from morality as 
 venial peccadilloes in comparison with his 
 dreadful and subversive impiety. A small 
 number, perhaps, regarded him with pity as a 
 poor, deluded fanatic whom they would gladly 
 have spared, if he could have been induced to 
 take advice and abandon his preposterous 
 claims. If Joseph of Arimathaea, "a counsel- 
 lor," and Nicodemus, "a ruler," just and good 
 men, and if the prudent and merciful Gamaliel 
 who later prevailed upon the Sanhedrin to let 
 the apostles alone, if these or others like them 
 were in the assembly that condemned Jesus, it 
 does not appear that they uttered a word in 
 his behalf. 
 
 The governing spirits of the assembly had 
 convened it on purpose to put Jesus to death. 
 They had taken counsel together as to how 
 they should do it. They had bribed Judas to 
 betray him and they had suborned false wit- 
 nesses to testify against him. It was a pre-
 
 i86 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 meditated judicial murder with a cut and dried 
 program. But, while justice and mercy were 
 trampled upon, the forms of law were scru- 
 pulously respected. It was necessary to the 
 comfort of that body of lawyers that the pro- 
 ceedings and the record should be regular. 
 They might murder a man, but must not omit 
 a technicality. So the perjured witnesses were 
 called; but they had been badly coached or 
 were dismayed by their surroundings, so that 
 their testimony was contradictory and ineffec- 
 tive. It seemed almost as if after all they 
 might have to let Jesus go with some light 
 punishment, for want of a definite and serious 
 charge against him. 
 
 It is one of the clearest of proofs that Jesus 
 had never claimed to be God that his enemies 
 in the extremity of their embarrassment and 
 anger never made any such charge against him. 
 That charge had indeed once been made in the 
 heat of debate, but Jesus had shown so un- 
 equivocally that he only claimed to be the 
 Son of God, and that similar titles had been 
 borne by others, that his accusers on this 
 occasion did not think it worth while to repeat 
 a charge that he would surely again disavow. 
 They took hold of his rhetorical expression, 
 "Destroy this temple and I will build it again in
 
 THE TRIAL 187 
 
 three days," but apart from the uncertainty of 
 its meaning, if the worst and most literal con- 
 struction were given to it, the offense of speak- 
 ing thus was not capital. 
 
 To prevent the breaking-down of the prose- 
 cution, the high priest said to him, "I adjure 
 thee by the living God, that thou tell us 
 whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God." 
 To this direct appeal an answer as direct was 
 given. Translating the words of Jesus into 
 a modern equivalent, they are, You have 
 spoken truly, and hereafter you shall yourself 
 see me sitting on the right hand of power, and 
 coming in the clouds of heaven. The high 
 priest dramatically rent his clothes and said to 
 his associates, He has spoken blasphemy; 
 what further need have we of witnesses? Ye 
 have heard his blasphemy. What is your 
 verdict? They answered, He is guilty of 
 death. 
 
 The court doubtless heard the confession of 
 Jesus with a great sigh of relief. From the 
 confusion of the witnesses and the indefinite- 
 ness of their testimony, the priests and elders 
 had begun to fear a long and tedious trial and 
 the possible final escape of the prisoner. 
 
 Jesus never surrendered his convictions 
 either to mobs or to governors and stands as
 
 i88 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 much for independence of thought as for 
 righteousness of act. The court held that his 
 confession brought him under that terrible law 
 against heresy found in the thirteenth chapter 
 of Deuteronomy. "If there arise among you a 
 prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth 
 thee a sign or a wonder, even if the sign or the 
 wonder come to pass whereof he spake unto 
 thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which 
 thou hast not known, and let us serve them; 
 thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that 
 prophet, or that dreamer of dreams. . . . That 
 prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put 
 to death." 
 
 Deuteronomy is not a Mosaic book, but was 
 written in the time of Josiah to aid in the 
 extirpation of idolatry and the establishment 
 of the national church. It accomplished the 
 desired ends. Like the Spanish Inquisition, it 
 stopped the growth of many mischievous 
 errors, but at the terrible price of preventing 
 the development of new truths. Wheat and 
 tares alike were cut down by the same remorse- 
 less scythe of bigotry. When, at the instiga- 
 tion of the Westminster Assembly, Parliament 
 passed the dreadful statute by which any one 
 who denied the inspiration of the Scriptures or 
 the doctrine of the Trinity was to be put to
 
 THE TRIAL 189 
 
 death, the wise Cromwell uttered the far- 
 sighted protest, "I beseech you, brethren, by 
 the mercies of God, that you think it possible 
 that you may be mistaken." 
 
 But no such spirit as that of Cromwell and 
 his fellow Independents tempered the furious 
 fanaticism of Judea. What would it have 
 availed for Jesus to have given them a sign 
 when the law expressly said that they were 
 to disregard all signs? They were proof 
 against conviction, like the juryman who 
 naively said, "I had made up my mind and the 
 evidence could not shake me." 
 
 The fact is that the preaching of the king- 
 dom of God by this audacious mechanic threat- 
 ened all the sources of wealth and power that 
 the chief priests and elders possessed, and it is 
 not in ordinary human nature to give up its 
 privileges and means of livelihood without 
 protest and struggle. Jerusalem was a sacer- 
 dotal city. Probably twenty thousand people 
 were dependent directly or indirectly for their 
 honors and income upon the existing cere- 
 monies and interpretations. A radical change 
 might mean "a clean sweep," and the mob 
 that howled, "Crucify him, crucify him," 
 when Jesus was brought before Pilate, was just 
 such a mob as Demetrius the silversmith gath-
 
 i 9 o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 ered at Ephesus with the watchword, "Our 
 trade is in danger." The Christianity of Jesus 
 was not mere singing and praying, was not 
 dreams and ecstasies, was not a long, elaborate 
 and speculative creed, was not quiescent opin- 
 ion, but was hard, constant, practical work in 
 clothing the naked, in feeding the hungry, in 
 teaching the ignorant and prejudiced, in heal- 
 ing the sick, in doing good in all possible 
 ways, and in opposing evil in high and low 
 places at all times and at all hazards. It was 
 not a theory of agriculture. It was ploughing 
 in the cold, it was reaping in the heat, it was 
 weeding and pruning and grafting and manur- 
 ing. It was the hard, plain, disagreeable but 
 necessary work of life. 
 
 Jesus was not crucified for uttering beatitudes 
 or for healing the sick, but for assailing the 
 abuses connected with the Sabbath, the Tem- 
 ple, the sacrifices and the Law, abuses by 
 which large numbers of influential men 
 obtained their wealth and honors. The 
 priests and scribes who condemned him were 
 fighting for their position and interests just as 
 a modern political ring fights civil service re- 
 formers, or as the southern planters who owned 
 slaves and the northern merchants who sold 
 them supplies, fought Lovejoy, Garrison and
 
 THE TRIAL 191 
 
 Sumner. It is the old sad story of human 
 folly, selfishness, and wickedness. As those 
 eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell 
 were not sinners above all other Galileans, so 
 the men who condemned Jesus acted only as 
 others of their class have acted under similar 
 tremendous temptation. It is easy for us all 
 to condemn the sins of other people, but the 
 just law of Jesus is, "Judge not that ye be not 
 judged." 
 
 Looking back upon the crucifixion, now that 
 Jesus is seen to be the foremost man of the 
 race and his precepts the greatest source of 
 happiness and progress in human history, the 
 folly and wickedness of those who condemned 
 him to death seem inconceivable. Yet who 
 can see the oak in the acorn? Who in the 
 sight of the overpowering present has any 
 vivid sense of the distant future? Men who are 
 amazed at the stupidity and wickedness of the 
 Pharisees and Sadducees who rejected and con- 
 demned Jesus, will themselves reject without a 
 moment's hesitation and, as they profess, with- 
 out the slightest misgiving, the present natural 
 development and practical application of the 
 principles of Jesus, will in fact reject him as 
 completely as did their predecessors in office. 
 A House of Lords and a board of bishops are
 
 i 9 2 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 still very conservative bodies, and have little 
 patience with radical reformers. 
 
 That a man is antagonized by society is of 
 course not in itself any proof that he is a re- 
 former or a righteous man. The way of trans- 
 gressors is hard, and most men who are put to 
 death by human law perish because they dis- 
 obey divine laws and run against "the thick 
 bosses of the Almighty's buckler." Most men 
 who stand alone against the world are fighting 
 vainly against "the stars in their courses." 
 But though criminals far outnumber martyrs, 
 society is not excusable for its mistakes, nor is 
 the disciple of Jesus at liberty to surrender his 
 convictions to the authority of the leaders of 
 opinion or to the multitude. Jesus, foreseeing 
 that he would be crucified if he persisted in 
 declaring and acting upon his conviction, snot 
 only continued his preaching and work and 
 gave men an example of loyalty to con- 
 science, but said in express and emphatic 
 words, "He that taketh not up his cross and 
 followeth after me cannot be my disciple." 
 His test of the human spirit is very searching. 
 Man is called to battle to the death not for a 
 positive knowledge of absolute truth but for 
 his own deliberate judgment, though he knows 
 that it is incomplete and liable to error. Not
 
 THE TRIAL 193 
 
 a single soldier in all "the noble army of 
 martyrs" who pre-eminently praise God and 
 exalt man, died for the whole and exact truth. 
 Each one died for the little glimpse and frag- 
 ment of truth that his soul had received, died 
 for the love of a small and imperfect vision of 
 good, died hungering and thirsting after a 
 righteousness to which he had not fully 
 attained, died to receive the blessing of the 
 great chief Martyr of the race and Captain of 
 our Salvation. 
 
 If the modicum of truth for which he suffers 
 and dies is too small and too much alloyed to 
 be recognized by the busy world, the would-be 
 martyr changes into the poor, scorned heretic. 
 Yet these younger and less fortunate brothers 
 of the apostles, less happily tempered and 
 less favored by circumstances, are doubtless 
 as sincere as their wiser fellows and though 
 they bring no fruit to perfection will be rec- 
 ognized by the righteous Judge as having 
 labored in the vineyard. Though they seem 
 not to have "beaten their music out," but only 
 to have made discord amid the harmonies of 
 faith, yet if they have but "endeavored with 
 sincere intent" they will have the rich reward 
 of those who do what they can, for by the just 
 Judge it is required of a man according to what
 
 i 9 4 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 he hath and not according to what he hath not. 
 The best and noblest man that ever lived was 
 put to death because stupid men could not 
 learn, because proud men would not stoop, 
 because rich men would not disgorge ill-gotten 
 gains, because revengeful men could not for- 
 give.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 THE Jewish Sanhedrin voted that Jesus was 
 guilty of heresy and blasphemy and ought to 
 die, but, as Judea was a Roman province, the 
 council had no power to carry its sentence into 
 execution. It therefore took Jesus before the 
 Roman governor and requested him to put 
 Jesus to death. Pilate was at first disposed to 
 refuse their request and, indeed, to think very 
 lightly of their accusations. Like other edu- 
 cated Romans, he was accustomed to great 
 latitude in philosophical speculations and was 
 tolerant toward all religions. As a Roman 
 governor he maintained toward the religious 
 beliefs of the conquered Jews a neutrality very 
 much like that of an English governor of India 
 to-day toward the views of Hindoos and 
 Mohammedans. Pilate was quite indifferent 
 to the opinions and ceremonies of the Jews. 
 Like Gallic, he "cared for none of those 
 things." But if indifferent in matters of 
 mere opinion, he was watchful in regard to all
 
 196 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 treasonable or seditious acts, and when the 
 rulers accused Jesus of claiming to be a king 
 he was at once aroused. He questioned Jesus 
 and was relieved to learn that the kingdom in 
 question was purely spiritual. His Roman 
 sense of justice again asserted itself, and he 
 declared to the accusers, "I find no fault in 
 this man"; but they were urgent in declaring 
 that the pretensions of Jesus to kingship were 
 dangerous to Roman sovereignty. "If thou 
 let this man go thou art not Caesar's friend." 
 Pilate trembled at these words. The cruel and 
 suspicious Tiberius was upon the throne and 
 Pilate knew that if he seemed in any way to 
 countenance or wink at the claim to sover- 
 eignty of any rival, his imprudence and negli- 
 gence would be quickly punished by deposition 
 or death. Moreover, the attitude of the Jew- 
 ish priests and of the rabble influenced by them 
 was so threatening that Pilate feared a revolt. 
 He tried to placate them by a nominal con- 
 demnation to be followed by the release of the 
 prisoner as an act of grace. He sought to 
 appease their hate by scourging Jesus, but all 
 in vain. They were implacable and cried out 
 continually, "Crucify him, crucify him." It 
 was much against Pilate's sense of justice to 
 accede, and he vainly tried to rid himself of
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 197 
 
 responsibility by washing his hands before the 
 multitude and declaring, "I am innocent of 
 the blood of this just person." Though all the 
 people answered, "His blood be on us and on 
 our children," yet Pilate did not transfer his 
 guilt to them, but must be joined with them in 
 condemnation. He doubtless also said to 
 himself in palliation of this judicial murder, 
 It is better that one man should be unjustly 
 condemned than that an insurrection should be 
 provoked in which many persons would be 
 killed. It is thus that men tamper with con- 
 science and find specious excuses for their sins, 
 abusing their reason by compelling it to find 
 reasons for their inclinations. Every judge is 
 ultimately judged. Pilate, like Belshazzar, 
 has been weighed in the balances and found 
 wanting. His baseness sprang from weakness 
 and fear. Christian legend says that he was 
 ever afterward haunted by remorse, and that, 
 like Judas, he ended his days by suicide. 
 However this may be, it would have been well 
 both for his peace and his fame, if he had not 
 been called to face a crisis to which he was 
 not equal.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 
 
 WHEN the sentence of crucifixion had at last 
 been wrung from the reluctant Pilate, Jesus was 
 delivered to the soldiers. Before executing 
 the sentence, these brutal men, with the con- 
 nivance if not at the instigation of their supe- 
 riors, mocked and tortured their patient and 
 unresisting prisoner. "They stripped him and 
 put on him a scarlet robe. And when they 
 had plaited a crown of thorns they put it upon 
 his head, and a reed in his right hand; and 
 they bowed the knee before him, saying, Hail, 
 King of the Jews! And they spat upon him 
 and took the reed and smote him on the head." 
 
 Human nature is capable of strange ex- 
 tremes. At its best it is little lower than the 
 angels, at its worst it is little better than the 
 beasts. Soldiers sometimes become indifferent 
 to the sight of blood and agony; nay, there are 
 cases in which men- have learned to delight in 
 the spectacle of human suffering. "Say not 
 thou, What is the cause that the former days 
 were better than these? for thou dost not 
 198
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 199 
 
 inquire wisely concerning this." Nothing bet- 
 ter measures the moral progress of nineteen 
 Christian centuries than the increased sensi- 
 bility and compassion of man. There are still 
 dreadful isolated cases in which prisoners 
 accused of peculiarly revolting crimes have 
 been tortured by mobs, but the whole official 
 and popular sentiment is different. Prisoners 
 of war and professional gladiators are no 
 longer "butchered to make a holiday." Mod- 
 ern compassion barely tolerates capital punish- 
 ment of any kind, and where the death 
 sentence is still permitted society requires that 
 it should be as painless as possible; but the 
 hard heart of antiquity sought to inflict the 
 utmost measure of pain and degradation upon 
 the wretch whom its harsh laws condemned. 
 Under the teaching and example of Jesus, man 
 has done much to "work out the beast" and 
 "let the ape and tiger die." 
 
 The brutality of the soldiers toward Jesus did 
 not, however, spring altogether from mere 
 wanton cruelty and love of boisterous sport. 
 Jesus suffered from their ignorance and race 
 prejudice. Jewish rebels and pretenders to 
 sovereignty had caused the Romans much 
 trouble and loss of life and kept the army in a 
 constant state of exasperation; and it was in
 
 200 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 part to avenge fallen comrades and to humil- 
 iate a hated class that Jesus was reviled and 
 beaten. The ignorance and stupidity of men 
 cause them to class together under the same 
 name persons whose character and purposes 
 are utterly diverse. Hard and cruel as these 
 poor soldiers were, if they could have looked 
 into the heart of the Son of Man and seen that 
 he was indeed the friend of sinners, there was 
 not a man of them who would not have shown 
 him kindness instead of insult. But alas! the 
 vices and mistakes of the great are as con- 
 tagious as their virtues and wisdom; and these 
 rude soldiers, though they must have been per- 
 plexed at the mild and benignant aspect of 
 their prisoner, took It for granted that in spite 
 of his gentle looks he was the troublesome and 
 dangerous rebel he had been condemned by 
 the authorities as being. Looks are deceptive. 
 There is many a mild-mannered cut-throat, and 
 the mistake in regard to Jesus is of the same 
 character as the subsequent one in which Paul 
 was supposed by a Roman captain to be the 
 Egyptian chief of an army of four thousand 
 murderers. (Acts 21: 38.) 
 
 After the soldiers had mocked Jesus they led 
 him away to crucifixion. 
 
 The faith and fortitude of Jesus had remained
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 201 
 
 unshaken during these dreadful indignities and 
 tortures. His physical strength even was not 
 altogether exhausted, for when at last the 
 soldiers, tiring of their cruel sport, led him 
 away he was able for a time to carry alone 
 the heavy cross on which he was to suffer. 
 A great company of people followed him, 
 and many of the women, with the natural 
 tenderness of the sex, wept and lamented. 
 When one has suffered pain and wrong, a sud- 
 den and unexpected manifestation of sympathy 
 often causes a revulsion of feeling that com- 
 pletely destroys self-command. The disciples 
 of Jesus had forsaken him, the priests had con- 
 demned and reviled him, the soldiers had 
 mocked and scourged him. After many hours 
 of neglect by friends and jeering and beating 
 by enemies, there came, like sunshine after 
 storm, looks of pity and words of kindness. 
 The tradition that Veronica, one of these com- 
 passionate women, wiped the sweat and blood 
 from the face of Jesus is in all probability true, 
 for the act is womanlike. Jesus was deeply 
 moved, but he was not unmanned. 
 
 On his way to the cross Jesus spoke to the 
 sorrowing women in the lofty poetic language 
 habitual to him, in sentences not less balanced 
 and figurative than those he had been wont to
 
 202 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 use in the days when he "rejoiced in spirit." 
 Deeper and more beautiful than the retention 
 to the last of his wonted manner of speech was 
 the persistence of his life-long habit of care 
 for the welfare of others. Almost the last 
 words of him who came "not to be ministered 
 unto but to minister" were a lamentation over 
 a doomed city and a warning to his hearers to 
 escape from it. "Daughters of Jerusalem, 
 weep not for me but for yourselves, and for 
 your children," is but an iteration of the com- 
 passionate cry, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how 
 often would I have gathered thy children 
 together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under 
 her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your 
 house is left unto you desolate." 
 
 The sad procession at last reached the bald 
 summit of Calvary, and there Jesus was 
 stripped of his garments and nailed to the 
 cross. 
 
 Crucifixion inflicts unnecessary and wanton 
 pain. It leaves the vital organs unimpaired 
 and usually produces death by sheer force of 
 protracted suffering. The blood oozes away 
 drop by drop from the pierced hands and feet, 
 every nerve shoots and tingles with pain, the 
 throat is parched, the veins are swollen till 
 they seem about to burst.
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 203 
 
 The mysterious law connecting mind and 
 body, by which at times each overpowers the 
 other, was not broken in the case of Jesus. 
 There is a limit to human power. There is an 
 extremity of physical suffering which the mind 
 cannot resist. 
 
 Jesus had believed that if he prayed to the 
 Father his prayer would bring legions of angels 
 to his assistance. But he had refused to ask 
 for them and had prayed only, "If it be pos- 
 sible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless 
 not as I will but as thou wilt." Still it is evi- 
 dent that he had not ceased to think some 
 interposition possible, and when the hours 
 dragged on and at last it broke upon him that 
 he was to be allowed to die in agony and 
 shame with no sign that heaven in any way 
 regarded him, his faith and courage were 
 shaken and he broke forth into a bitter cry of 
 doubt and fear. The tragedy of life is not the 
 death of the body but the anguish of the soul 
 when it loses faith in God and hope for man. 
 Jesus had lived for many months in a state of 
 spiritual exaltation. He had heard himself 
 called the beloved Son in whom the Father 
 was well pleased, he had had ecstatic visions 
 and an ineffable peace and joy in communing 
 with God and in praying and in teaching his
 
 20 4 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 disciples to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy 
 will be done on earth as it is in heaven." 
 And now came the rude shock. Instead of 
 these delightful meditations and hopes, instead 
 of applauding multitudes and docile disciples, 
 he was in the power of cruel enemies, he had 
 been derided and scourged, and was hanging 
 in torture upon the cross. 
 
 Intolerable agony wrung from Jesus the 
 despairing words, "My God, my God, why 
 hast thou forsaken me?" The eclipse was but 
 for a moment. Jesus had pierced more deeply 
 into the heart of the great mystery of pain 
 than any other. He knew even better than 
 Paul that in some way he was to be "made 
 perfect through suffering." Even in that 
 dreadful hour he saw "the joy that was set 
 before him and endured the cross, despising 
 the shame." Serenity and faith returned. 
 He cheered a humbler fellow sufferer, a 
 common thief, by assuring him of God's mercy 
 and of future life; he prayed for the pardon 
 of his murderers, and then, as was most 
 fitting, his last earthly thoughts turned to 
 the subject of his first consciousness. As 
 the great soul of Jesus sank beneath the 
 earthly horizon, it turned again to the 
 gentle and beautiful being whose loving face,
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 205 
 
 whose low, sweet voice, whose tender caresses 
 and unwearied ministrations formed the first 
 impressions upon his infant mind. The pain 
 was forgotten, the multitude before him faded 
 from view. In imagination he was once more 
 in Nazareth, in the quiet home in the green 
 valley, surrounded by the white hills. He was 
 a child again with his mother's hand upon his 
 head. Then the obliterated years rushed 
 back. Consciousness of his present situation 
 returned, but recollection had performed its 
 kindly ministry. The promised light had 
 shone at eventide, and the last moments were 
 peaceful. He commended his mother to the 
 care of his youngest and best-beloved disciple. 
 With deep joy he received the inward assurance 
 that his work was finished and permanent, 
 and, like Paul, no longer counting his life 
 dear unto himself, he passed peacefully away 
 with the words, "Father, into thy hands I 
 commend my spirit." The noblest human 
 life was crowned by the most patiently heroic 
 death. 
 
 Imagination has been busy with the death as 
 well as with the birth of Christ. An early legend 
 incorporated into the gospels of Matthew, 
 Mark, and Luke says that there was darkness 
 at midday for three hours. The tradition is
 
 206 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 akin to Milton's fancy, that when Adam ate 
 the forbidden fruit, 
 
 "Earth trembled .... and Nature gave a groan, 
 Sky lower' d, and muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 Wept at completing of the mortal sin 
 Original." 
 
 Other early legends say that many of the 
 dead arose, and that the veil of the temple was 
 rent in twain, God thus signifying that the 
 Holy of Holies, into which only the High 
 Priest had been allowed to enter, was now open 
 to all, and that Judaism having fulfilled its 
 mission was now abolished, being merged into 
 Christianity as the glory of the morning star 
 fades at the rising of the sun. 
 
 Another Christian legend relates that all the 
 gods of the heathen fled from earth vanquished 
 and terror-stricken at the moment that Jesus 
 exultingly said, "It is finished." 
 
 But to the ordinary observer everything re- 
 mained as it had been before. Nature con- 
 tinued her majestic course without a tremor or 
 a shadow of change. Even the political and 
 ecclesiastical worlds went on without the 
 slightest apparent modification. The smoke 
 of the morning and evening sacrifices still 
 ascended. The pomp of the temple service 
 was undiminished. The golden bells still
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 207 
 
 tinkled and the pomegranates of blue and pur- 
 ple and scarlet still gave "glory and beauty" 
 to the robe of the High Priest as he walked in 
 full-blown pride, just as though he had in no 
 way sullied the motto, "Holiness to the Lord," 
 which he wore engraven in gold upon his 
 breast. 
 
 The great choir of Levites sang as before, 
 Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or 
 who shall stand in his holy place? In glo- 
 rious response the antiphony rang out, He that 
 hath clean hands and a pure heart, and few 
 noted that it was but empty sound and fewer 
 still foreboded that those mighty chants were 
 soon to cease and that the great temple itself 
 ere a generation had passed would be thrown 
 down, and that no long time thereafter the 
 ground on which it had stood would be fur- 
 rowed by the plowshare. 
 
 The scepter of Rome was not broken. The 
 rule of Pilate was not disturbed. All was as 
 though nothing of importance had happened. 
 The incident was ended and everything would 
 soon settle down into the old routine. In spite 
 of the impotent efforts of a few foolish dis- 
 ciples who still revered his memory, the cruci- 
 fied blasphemer would soon be forgotten. So 
 fancied Scribe and Pharisee, Roman governor
 
 2 o8 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 and Jewish High Priest. O shortsightedness 
 of men! So sceptics and worldlings mistook 
 then, so sceptics and worldlings mistake now. 
 "The kingdom of God cometh not with obser- 
 vation," but nevertheless it comes with resist- 
 less power. Jesus triumphed in defeat. He 
 lives by his death. 
 
 That death did all that the poets have de- 
 clared. It abolished the sacrifices of Judaism. 
 It overthrew, the philosophies of Greece. It 
 conquered the armies of Rome. It dethroned 
 and banished the gods of Olympus. Not by 
 any magic but by the omnipotence of faith, 
 love and truth. The death of Jesus confirmed 
 and sealed the sincerity of his life and teach- 
 ings. One who will not sacrifice wealth or 
 popularity to his view of truth and right has 
 an opinion but not a conviction, one who will 
 not sacrifice life itself rather than apostatize 
 has an inclination but not love, a conjecture but 
 not faith. Beautiful as are the beatitudes and 
 parables, wonderful as was the eloquence, and 
 winning and strong as was the personality of 
 Jesus, if to save his life he had abjured his 
 teachings or consented to remain silent about 
 them, instead of becoming the founder of a 
 religion obviously destined, in its ethical 
 essence, to become world-wide, he would have
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION 209 
 
 had a place only among the poets and proph- 
 ets, the men who hope and dream and long, 
 and not among the more commanding gen- 
 iuses who act and cause. We are saved by his 
 death. It was a holy and wise spirit that 
 guided the church to preach "Christ crucified" 
 as "the power of God unto salvation." 
 
 As a straw shows which way the wind blows, 
 so an external change brought about by the 
 death of Christ will show something of the 
 nature and force of the inward revolution 
 caused by it. Crucifixion had for generations 
 been looked upon as the most ignominious of 
 deaths. It was reserved for the vilest crim- 
 inals and slaves. Roman law protected even 
 the humblest Roman citizen against it. Jewish 
 law accounted ; the man that was hanged or 
 crucified as accursed of God. The cross was 
 once a symbol as repulsive in all its associa- 
 tions as the gallows now is. But Jesus has 
 ennobled it, so that now it is the endeared 
 emblem of every thing most sacred, humane 
 and beautiful. It crowns the spires of the 
 cathedrals and churches that are the miracles 
 of medieval and modern architecture. It is 
 woven in silk, it is stamped on iron, it is 
 carved in stone, it is set in costly gems. It is 
 broadened or tapered, it is rounded or pointed
 
 2io THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 into every conceivable modification of its orig- 
 inal form. It blazes in diamonds upon the 
 breast of beauty, it streams upon the banners 
 of illustrious nations; above all in the red 
 color with which the cross of Christ was stained 
 by his precious blood, it is the sign of a lov- 
 ing kindness in war that makes no distinction 
 of friend and enemy but seeks only to lessen 
 human suffering; and in the nature of the case 
 the red cross and the spirit which it represents 
 will eventually put an end to war altogether, 
 for no nation, no man, no brute even, can long 
 resist the force of genuine kindness. Science, 
 logic and wit have effectually and forever dis- 
 credited a great mass of Jewish and Christian 
 legends and fancies, but there is no weapon of 
 science, of argument, or of ridicule that has 
 any power against justice and mercy. Theol- 
 ogies, symbols and ceremonies, products of 
 temporary needs and imperfect knowledge, 
 come in and go out, but faith, hope and charity 
 abide forever, and will at last win the loyalty 
 of every human heart.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 THE DESCENT INTO HELL 
 
 WE LIVE almost as much in our memories and 
 our hopes as in our actual experiences. The 
 fear of hell is a dread shadow upon the lives of 
 many persons; the hope of heaven is a radiant 
 glory, an abounding joy in the lives of many 
 others. Yet we have no definite knowledge 
 in regard to the future life. There are, how- 
 ever, some suggestive texts in the Bible, there 
 are phrases, pictures, and parables, that have 
 most powerfully affected the imagination of 
 men, and on a slender basis of figurative lan- 
 guage awful doctrines of eternal punishment in 
 a hell of fire have been constructed. In what 
 is called the Apostles' Creed, it is said of 
 Jesus, "He descended into Hell," and in the 
 Middle Ages when every event in the life of our 
 Lord was embellished to the utmost alike by 
 the theologians, the poets, and the painters, a 
 favorite theme for sermon, poem, and picture 
 was Christ's descent into the pit and his 
 triumph over Satan even in the very seat and 
 center of the Evil One's power. All words
 
 212 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 are defined by their connection, and in all 
 probability the meaning of the word "hell" in 
 the phrase in the creed is the grave; but Chris- 
 tian love and enthusiasm were not satisfied 
 with this tame rendering. It seems unfitting 
 that the great Conqueror of Death and Satan 
 should lie helpless in the grave for three days, 
 and instead of so doing legend represents him 
 as using these three days to proclaim the gos- 
 pel to all souls who had died before his com- 
 ing to earth in the flesh. In aid of this 
 interpretation we are referred to a passage in 
 the first epistle of Peter, which says that Jesus 
 by the spirit preached to the spirits in prison, 
 which some time were disobedient (i Pet. 
 3: 18, 19, 20). The connection shows pretty 
 clearly that the meaning is that Noah himself 
 preached to his contemporaries in much the 
 same way as Jesus had warned the inhabitants 
 of Jerusalem, but mysticism dislikes simple 
 explanations. In Ephesians it is said that 
 Jesus, "when he ascended up on high, led 
 captivity captive" (Eph. 4: 8). And so from 
 these and other vague expressions it is inferred 
 that Jesus forced an entrance into the strong- 
 hold of Satan, and that he inflicted new and 
 terrible punishments upon the arch-enemy and 
 his rebellious followers. He then proclaimed
 
 THE DESCENT INTO HELL 213 
 
 a general amnesty to all penitent men and 
 women, and ascended into heaven attended by 
 thousands and tens of thousands of those who 
 accepted his mercy. 
 
 By those who press the doctrine of the divine 
 sovereignty to an unwarrantable limit, God has 
 been represented as freely electing some to 
 everlasting happiness in heaven and irrevocably 
 reprobating some to everlasting misery in hell. 
 This doctrine of election received for English 
 people its most formal and authoritative ex- 
 pression in the Westminster Confession, framed 
 in 1646. A few years afterwards a New Eng- 
 land clergyman, Michael Wigglesworth, wrote 
 a long poem called "The Day of Doom.'' The 
 book, it may be remarked, was approved by 
 the churches, children were required to com- 
 mit it to memory, and it had a very wide circu- 
 lation. It represents Christ as passing 
 judgment upon several classes of persons. 
 When "reprobate infants" are reached the 
 poet says: 
 
 "Then to the bar, all they drew near 
 
 Who died in infancy, 
 And never had, or good or bad, 
 Effected personally. ' ' 
 
 In vain they plead that they were not respon- 
 sible for Adam's sin. They are told that Adam
 
 2i 4 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 was their representative, and that if he had 
 stood they would gladly have profited by his 
 virtue, and that therefore, as he fell, they are 
 justly punished for his sin. They are then 
 consigned to hell with the words: 
 
 1 'You sinners are ; and such a share 
 
 As sinners may expect, 
 Such you shall have, for I do save 
 None but mine own elect." 
 
 Surely this is blasphemy against God, against 
 the compassionate Son of Man, against 
 humanity and against every principle of jus- 
 tice and mercy. Such vengeance upon the 
 worst of sinners would be worse than inhuman, 
 worse than devilish. Strange that good men 
 should ever have thought that they were doing 
 God service in ascribing such an atrocious 
 character to him, and strange indeed that 
 Jesus, who said, "Suffer little children to come 
 unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is 
 the kingdom of God," and who taught men to 
 love their enemies and to forgive the trespasses 
 of a brother seventy times seven, should by 
 any possible process have been transformed 
 into a Ruler so stern and pitiless. 
 
 When King Lear was turned from the inhos- 
 pitable door by two unnatural daughters and 
 exposed to the fury of the storm, the filial
 
 THE DESCENT INTO HELL 215 
 
 Cordelia, fondling her rescued father, protested 
 against the outrage done to the aged man in 
 the words: 
 
 "Had you not been their father, these white flakes 
 Had challenged pity of them. Was this a face 
 To be opposed against the warring winds? 
 To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder? 
 . . . Mine enemy's dog 
 
 Though he had bit me, should have stood that night 
 Against my fire." 
 
 The absolute sovereignty of God is a rational 
 and, I think, a true conception. To create is 
 a greater work than to control, and it is in the 
 highest degree absurd to imagine that the uni- 
 verse or any being in it can in any way resist 
 or evade the power of its omniscient and 
 omnipotent Creator. Who can "run upon the 
 thick bosses of his buckler"? The sovereignty 
 of God is absolute. But the justice and mercy 
 of God are absolute also. It is impossible by 
 his very nature for God to sin. When God 
 arbitrarily appoints one man to honor and one 
 to dishonor, he simply gives one more and the 
 other less of his bounty for the time being, and 
 no one can know that when the cycle of life is 
 complete the good of each will not be the 
 same. Even now, it is very hard for us to be 
 sure whose lot in life is the most desirable.
 
 216 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 Happiness is as often found in the cottage as 
 in the palace. God's bounties are pretty 
 evenly distributed through his world. 
 
 But if it be not so if now and through all 
 eternity, God gives some of his creatures 
 greater power and greater gifts than he gives 
 to other created beings, who shall say that he 
 is unjust? Shall he not do what he will with 
 his own? What each receives is a free and 
 good gift for which the Giver should be 
 thanked. "The Lord is good to all, and his 
 tender mercies are over all his works." 
 
 The most detailed picture of hell in the gos- 
 pels is in the story of Dives and Lazarus, but 
 that account is not original with Jesus. He 
 simply used a familiar Talmudic story in sup- 
 port of his favorite doctrine that men are 
 brothers and responsible for each other's wel- 
 fare and especially that the rich have a duty 
 toward the poor. In the presence of cruelty, 
 hypocrisy, or heartless indifference, Jesus was 
 always vehement. 
 
 Lust, gluttony, avarice, anger, and envy 
 create hells in both body and mind. There is 
 a hell of corrupted blood, of palsied limbs, of 
 trembling nerves, a hell of pain and weariness 
 and self-contempt, a hell of remorse and mad- 
 ness unto which sin brings its victims. Against
 
 THE DESCENT INTO HELL 217 
 
 this the pulpit should warn men with earnest, 
 tender, painstaking, and persistent solicitude. 
 Let the chart of life be true. Warn men 
 against real dangers and hoist no false signals 
 against metaphorical and imaginary perils. 
 
 There is a hell, the hell of an evil conscience, 
 but Jesus, though he has delivered many from 
 it, never descended into it. His body de- 
 scended into the tomb and returned to the 
 dust from which it was created, and his im- 
 mortal spirit entered into his everlasting life 
 and has uplifted, and will continue to uplift, 
 countless others to sit with him in eternal joy 
 and glory at the right hand of God.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE RESURRECTION 
 
 THE belief in life after death is primitive and 
 universal. It is asserted by consciousness and 
 is corroborated by many phenomena. The 
 savage Indian had his happy hunting grounds, 
 and the polished Greek his Elysium, the Jew, 
 with his Asiatic love of pomp, had his celestial 
 city with gates of pearl and streets of gold. 
 All these are pictures of the imagination as it 
 plays around the deep and ineradicable intui- 
 tion that man is a spirit and that his spirit sur- 
 vives the destruction of his body. 
 
 Modern science teaches us that matter, how- 
 ever its form may be changed, is indestructible, 
 and that heat may be converted into motion or 
 into light, but that amid all its transformations 
 its energy remains constant. The laws of the 
 conservation of energy and the indestructi- 
 bility of matter have been more carefully 
 formulated and more absolutely demonstrated 
 in recent years, but the essential facts have 
 been known and poetically expressed by all 
 nations from the earliest times. The succes- 
 218
 
 THE 'RESURRECTION 219 
 
 sive changes of water to cloud, cloud to snow, 
 and snow back to water, the growth, decay, 
 and renewed growth of vegetation, teach man 
 by analogy that all death is only external and 
 apparent The spring, when the apparently- 
 dead earth wakes to new life, when the ap- 
 parently-dead root and trunk and branch send 
 forth new shoots and buds and blossoms, is the 
 great teacher of the doctrine of a resurrection. 
 But, it may be urged, the longest-lived tree at 
 last dies and returns its elements to the soil, 
 and therefore nature teaches no individual 
 resurrection but only the continuance of the 
 whole and an endless succession of new com- 
 binations. Why should God develop in man 
 an individuality made of memory, faith, hope 
 and love, and then destroy it? Man is made in 
 God's image, and man does not wantonly 
 destroy his most costly and wonderful crea- 
 tions. It is inconceivable that God should de- 
 velop through youth, manhood and age the 
 brain and heart of a Moses or a Paul, and then 
 blot them utterly out of existence! 
 
 The facts and analogies hitherto spoken of 
 appeal strongly to almost every one, but there 
 is another class of less common facts which 
 have also been influential in forming the belief 
 of men in the resurrection. Seeing is believ-
 
 220 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 ing, and undoubtedly many persons have seen 
 the spirits of departed relatives and friends. 
 Ballads and folk-lore are full of these ghost 
 stories. The wife sees the dead husband; the 
 husband, the dead wife; the parent, the child; 
 and the child, the parent. The perjured lover 
 is haunted by the ghost of the injured maid, 
 and the grave yawns to give back the body of 
 the murdered man to the terrified gaze of his 
 assassin. 
 
 The fact is that whenever the imagination 
 and emotions are very strongly excited, they 
 supersede or overpower the senses. When a 
 bright light is suddenly extinguished its ap- 
 pearance lingers for a moment on the retina, 
 and when a figure that has strongly impressed 
 the mind is withdrawn it still seems present. 
 The gospel account of the resurrection is not 
 an isolated or fictitious tale, however its details 
 may have been distorted or embellished, but 
 agrees with all the analogies of nature as 
 recorded in the literature of every nation and 
 every age. 
 
 The resurrection of Jesus is a great subjective 
 fact. It would have been a miracle of miracles 
 if so strong and wonderful a personality had 
 vanished at once from the minds of men. 
 Pilate's wife had in all probability seen him
 
 THE RESURRECTION *ai 
 
 but once, yet a single glance at that pure and 
 majestic face haunted her dreams and made 
 her warn her husband not to do him wrong. ; If 
 Jesus appeared in vision to Pilate's wife, to 
 whom he had never done a deed, or even 
 spoken a word, of kindness, how should he not 
 appear to Mary Magdalen, whom he had re- 
 stored to womanhood and to whom he had 
 spoken words of grace and sympathy such as 
 no woman ever forgets? If the sorrowing face 
 of Jesus haunted the dreams of Pilate's wife, 
 an utter stranger, on whom Jesus had not cast 
 a glance of even passing interest, how should 
 not the image of that face haunt Peter, on 
 whom the Lord had turned a reproachful look 
 that made him weep bitterly? Many a time 
 that paroxysm of grief was renewed, and many 
 a time the face of Jesus stood out with a phys- 
 ical distinctness as events recalled to Peter the 
 hour of his apostasy. The whole scene was 
 ineffaceably burned into his memory. If Jesus 
 appeared in mental vision to a woman who had 
 seen him but once, would he not appear to 
 disciples who had accompanied him for months 
 and years, and to whom he had spoken such 
 words as no other man ever spoke, and in whom 
 he had raised hopes more sublime and wonder- 
 ful than ever before filled the heart of man?
 
 aaa THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 The belief in the resurrection of Jesus inevi- 
 tably follows his life. If there had been no 
 story of the resurrection, the whole gospel 
 narrative would seem incredible, dispropor- 
 tioned and incomplete, like a building without 
 its roof and capstone. 
 
 That the resurrection was in the hearts and 
 not in the eyes of his disciples does not make 
 it less real or important but more so. The 
 spirit is more real than the body, and a resur- 
 rection of Jesus in the souls of his disciples 
 gives a far stronger attestation to his character 
 than any merely physical resurrection could 
 have done. That it was subjective and not 
 objective is proved by the general fact that 
 spirit is invisible and that all other stories of 
 the appearance of the spirits of the dead have 
 been psychologically explained. The partic- 
 ulars given in the gospels sufficiently show that 
 the resurrection was mental and not physical. 
 The appearance of angels, like that of ghosts, 
 always corresponds to the preconceptions of 
 the observer, and an apparition of an angel 
 "with a countenance like lightning and raiment 
 white as snow" is obviously a vision of the 
 mind and not of the eye. The two disciples 
 who thought that Jesus had talked with them 
 on the way to Emmaus did not know him for a
 
 THE RESURRECTION 223 
 
 long time, which was impossible if the figure 
 had really been that of Jesus in flesh and 
 blood. Perhaps they talked with a stranger, 
 and as they and he dwelt upon the life of Jesus 
 their hearts burned within them, and when 
 they sat down to their disconsolate evening 
 meal they involuntarily contrasted it with the 
 supper three days before, when the Master was 
 alive and the twelve disciples, now a broken 
 band, were apparently united in loyalty and 
 love. Three short days only had passed, and 
 of that band whose feet Jesus had washed, and 
 to whom in affectionate and solemn words he 
 had committed the perpetuation of his work, 
 one had proved a traitor and was perhaps 
 already known as a suicide, another was a con- 
 science-stricken penitent, because although 
 forewarned, he had denied with blasphemies 
 the Lord he had promised to follow to the 
 death, and all the rest were suffering pangs of 
 remorse only less keen, because they too, had 
 all forsaken him and fled. As they heard 
 again the familiar formula which a pious Jew 
 uttered before beginning his evening meal, the 
 vision of Jesus passed before them, but as their 
 eyes opened it vanished, like a weary soldier's 
 dream of home and peace. 
 
 The account of the appearance of Jesus to
 
 224 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 two disciples on the way to Emmaus at evening 
 on the third day after his crucifixion is found 
 in the gospel of Luke, but the gospel of John 
 narrates that on the same third day, at the 
 same evening hour, Jesus appeared to the dis- 
 ciples, except Thomas, at Jerusalem. That 
 this vision also was mental is evident from the 
 fact that a body could not be present in two 
 places at the same time, and could not, as the ' 
 account declares, pass through a closed door. 
 A week later the disciples were again assembled 
 and Thomas with them. Again it is expressly 
 said that "the doors being shut, Jesus came 
 and stood in the midst," and convinced even 
 the unimaginative and despondent Thomas that 
 he had risen. Thomas declared that unless he 
 should put his fingers into the print of the nails 
 and thrust his hands into the wounded side of 
 Jesus he would not believe, yet Thomas never 
 made the attempt, but was caught away in the 
 enthusiasm of the others, saw with their eyes, 
 heard with their ears, and believed with their 
 belief. How could he have put his fingers into 
 the print of nails in the hands of an immaterial 
 body that had just passed through a closed 
 door? 
 
 The gospel of Matthew says nothing about 
 the appearance to the two disciples at Em-
 
 THE RESURRECTION 225 
 
 maus, or to Peter, or to Thomas, but says that 
 "the eleven disciples went into Galilee to a 
 mountain where Jesus had appointed them. 
 And when they saw him they worshiped him; 
 but," the report significantly adds, "some 
 doubted." The plain appearance of a man in 
 the body convinces the credulous and incredu- 
 lous alike, and the doubt of some of the eleven 
 disciples can only be explained as the struggle 
 we all have, to maintain faith in the immor- 
 tality of the spirit in hours of bereavement and 
 sorrow. 
 
 Though in visions of the risen Jesus the 
 senses were superseded, or, if one chooses to 
 call it so, deceived, the heart was not deceived. 
 Faith and hope are more real and trustworthy 
 than flesh and blood or earth and sea. The 
 body and the earth shall perish, they are but 
 the Vesture of the spirit, and shall wax old and 
 be changed, but the spirit of man, like the 
 spirit of God, is eternal. The disciples saw 
 Jesus rise from the dead in spirit and in truth, 
 and the church sees, and will forever see, that 
 his spirit lives and reigns, and that death had 
 no power over him. 
 
 It is perhaps a sufficient comment upon the 
 last two chapters of John to say that, like the 
 story of the resurrection of Lazarus, they seem
 
 326 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 to illustrate the late and legendary character 
 of many of the incidents recorded in the fourth 
 gospel. If the story of the resurrection of 
 Lazarus were true, it is difficult to conceive 
 how it should have been omitted from the 
 earlier-written gospels of Matthew, Mark, and 
 Luke, and be found only in John. In the same 
 way, if the miraculous draught of fishes and 
 the conversation with Peter reported in the 
 twenty-first chapter of John, took place, as is 
 there asserted, in the presence of seven dis- 
 ciples, it is incredible that Matthew, Mark and 
 Luke should never have heard of it, or, having 
 heard of it, should have omitted it, especially 
 as the accounts of the resurrection in Matthew 
 and Mark are so brief. 
 
 There is one other late report, that in Paul's 
 first epistle to the Corinthians. Paul there 
 enumerates the appearances of Jesus, and in- 
 cludes with them, as of the same class, the 
 vision of Jesus which he himself had seen while 
 on the way to Damascus, when "a light from 
 heaven shined round about him," and a voice 
 from heaven said unto him, "I am Jesus whom 
 thou persecutest; it is hard for thee to kick 
 against the pricks." All violence provokes 
 reaction. Paul had been making "havoc of the 
 Church, entering into every house, and haling
 
 THE RESURRECTION 227 
 
 men and women and committing them to 
 prison." Paul was naturally an intelligent and 
 humane man, but he was also a Hebrew of the 
 Hebrews, and it was zeal for the religion of his 
 fathers which led him to attempt to suppress a 
 band of fanatics who seemed to him to be 
 assailing everything sacred and precious to 
 Israel. He had for them a vehement abhorrence 
 like that of modern society against the anarch- 
 ists and nihilists. But a humane and intelli- 
 gent man cannot long be engaged in imprison- 
 ing and putting to death even the most vicious 
 without much pain to himself and without 
 being stirred to wonder whether there is not 
 some great wrong or error against which these 
 people in their blind and blundering way are 
 contending. 
 
 Doubtless many of the early Christians were 
 drawn from the vicious classes, the "publicans 
 and sinners"; and the Pharisaic Paul may have 
 been confirmed in his suspicions and dislikes 
 by the conduct and appearance of some of his 
 victims, but he must often have seen with sur- 
 prise that the persons whom he was dragging to 
 prison or death seemed to be more than ordi- 
 narily intelligent and virtuous people, and, 
 above all, so acute and thoughtful a mind as 
 Paul's must have wondered what was the secret
 
 228 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 of the peace and joy these people possessed, 
 to which his own proud and passionate 
 heart was a stranger. He was present at the 
 execution of Stephen, and he never forgot the 
 words and the look of that heroic young 
 martyr. Ever afterward, in the forefront of his 
 remorse for sin, was his participation in the 
 "blood of thy martyr Stephen." He was con- 
 victed as he looked at Stephen and heard him 
 speak, but pride held him fast. Could he, a 
 scholar and an officer, a man specially trained 
 for, and long identified with, the profession of 
 the canon law, acknowledge that his learning 
 was worthless and his whole course of life mis- 
 taken? It is a hard thing to do, and few men 
 in Paul's position ever do it. Paul did not at 
 first. He stifled his convictions and redoubled 
 the energy of his persecutions, but the sight of 
 every other patient and cheerful Christian 
 sufferer recalled the face of the young saint 
 who as he was being examined said, "I see the 
 heavens opened and the Son of Man standing 
 on the right hand of God," and whose last 
 prayer before he "fell asleep" was, "Lord 
 Jesus, receive my spirit." 
 
 As Paul in the enforced leisure of the long 
 journey to Damascus brooded over the testi- 
 mony of Christian after Christian, their frag-
 
 THE RESURRECTION 229 
 
 mentary words and acts grew into' unity and 
 coherence, the multiplied instances of faith 
 piled up into a mountain of evidence, and Paul 
 felt himself at last obliged to confess that he 
 was fighting against a conviction clearer and 
 stronger than his own. His belief was school- 
 taught and complex, theirs was a fresh revela- 
 tion from God, accepted by simple faith. His 
 cold and intellectual belief left the heart still 
 weary and unsatisfied, their faith had given 
 them the "peace of God which passeth all 
 understanding." Paul's agony increased from 
 day to day till the ever-rising tide of his emo- 
 tions at last swept away the barriers of educa- 
 tion and led him to accept the new facts. He 
 heard the voice of Jesus saying to him, "Saul, 
 Saul, why persecutest thou me?" He saw 
 Jesus, as Stephen had seen him, standing at 
 God's right hand. With God all things are 
 possible. God may have aqtually stationed 
 himself in human form, and with Jesus at his 
 side within the range of the vision first of 
 Stephen and subsequently of Paul; but surely 
 to the devout and studious mind it seems more 
 consistent with the divine majesty and the 
 usual methods of communicating truth to men 
 to say that the visions of Stephen and Paul 
 were purely mental.
 
 2 3 o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 In the case of Paul this is further confirmed 
 by the fact that on another occasion he "was 
 caught up into the third heaven and heard 
 words which it was not lawful for him to 
 repeat," but could not tell whether he was in 
 the body or not. In every great crisis of his 
 life, at Troas before going into Macedonia, on 
 shipboard, and in the prisoner's dock, Paul had 
 a vision; and as Paul says of Jesus after his 
 crucifixion, "last of all he was seen of me 
 also," it seems reasonable to believe that in 
 his opinion all other manifestations of Jesus 
 after death were of the same visionary kind as 
 his own. 
 
 Moreover, in Paul's view the various visions 
 of Jesus after death were not the main support 
 of the doctrine of the resurrection. His con- 
 clusion is, '"'It the dead rise not, then is Christ 
 not risen." The general law supports the par- 
 ticular case, and the particular case in its turn 
 strengthens the general law. We believe in 
 the life of the spirit after death, not on the 
 slight and insufficient testimony of the senses, 
 but on the strongest grounds of reason and the 
 deepest and truest intuitions of consciousness. 
 Visions are effects and not causes of faith, as 
 certainly as shadow is the effect and not the 
 cause of substance.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 THE ASCENSION 
 
 ACCOUNTS of the ascension are found in Mark, 
 Luke and the Acts. That in Mark says simply, 
 "He was received up into heaven." Luke 
 more dramatically says, "He led them out as 
 far as Bethany, and he lifted up his hands and 
 blessed them. And it came to pass while he 
 blessed them, he was parted from them and 
 carried up into heaven." The account in the 
 Acts is much longer, and illustrates very well 
 the natural tendency to embellish a bald narra- 
 tion with suitable details. He is now received 
 by a cloud, and his disciples are told that he 
 will come again in like manner. These ac- 
 counts grow out of the necessities of the case. 
 When it had become the faith of the church 
 that Jesus had appeared in the body to his dis- 
 ciples after death there were only two courses 
 open, either to say that he was still upon the 
 earth in the flesh, or that he had left it at a 
 certain time and in a certain way. As he soon 
 ceased to appear to the disciples, and had 
 231
 
 232 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 never been seen by the multitude, the natural 
 inference was drawn that he was no longer 
 upon earth. The question then arose as to the 
 length of his stay, and the period was naturally 
 fixed at the traditional forty days. Moses was 
 forty days in the mount, Elijah forty days in 
 the wilderness, Jesus himself was tempted 
 forty days in the desert, and legend runs in the 
 groove of precedent. 
 
 Popular opinion having settled it that Jesus 
 stayed upon earth after death only forty days, 
 the imagination craved some picture of the 
 manner of his departure. There was the vague 
 precedent of Enoch. There was the myste- 
 rious burial of Moses, there was the fiery 
 chariot of Elijah. But none of these quite 
 satisfied the conceptions of the church. 
 Affection and reverence longed for something 
 more than a mere vanishing, and to be carried 
 away by storm and lightning like Elijah, con- 
 sonant as such an ending was with the career 
 of the fiery prophet of the desert, was quite 
 inconsistent with the life and character of 
 Jesus. He was not a "son of Thunder," but 
 one whose doctrine "distilled as the dew and 
 as the rain upon the mown grass." A summer 
 cloud, emblem of purity, beauty, and blessing, 
 was the appropriate chariot for the Prince of
 
 THE ASCENSION 233 
 
 Peace who came with gentle ministrations to 
 the poor and meek. 
 
 The conception that God dwells in the sky is 
 derived from the fact that the sun is the source 
 of light and heat, and gives life and beauty to 
 the earth. As the sun is always hidden or 
 attended by clouds, so God is represented as 
 dwelling in the clouds or as descending to 
 earth in them. "He hath established his 
 throne in the heavens." "Clouds and dark- 
 ness are round about him." In connection 
 with the giving of the commandments to Moses 
 it is said, "The Lord descended in the cloud 
 and stood with him." At the transfiguration 
 it is said that "a bright cloud overshadowed 
 them: and behold a voice out of the cloud 
 which said, This is my beloved son, in whom I 
 am well pleased." In like manner the writer 
 of the book of Revelation says, "I saw a 
 mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed 
 with a cloud." Greek and Roman mythologies 
 have many similar instances. Heroes are thus 
 invested with grace or conveyed from danger. 
 
 In the course of time the glory of the Son 
 was reflected on the mother, and in conse- 
 quence the death of Mary was idealized in the 
 same manner as his. During the reign of 
 Constantine the Great, under whom, in 313,
 
 234 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 Christianity became the official religion, the 
 feast of the Assumption of Mary was cele- 
 brated with great pomp in the East, and in the 
 next century the festival was adopted by the 
 western church. In 451 Marcian, the relic- 
 gathering emperor, asked Bishop Juvenalis 
 whether the body of Mary was still in the grave 
 at Jerusalem and was told in reply that in 
 Palestine the universal tradition was that the 
 body as well as the soul of the Blessed Mother 
 of God had been translated by angels into 
 heaven. Special prayers were composed in 
 honor of the event, it was later formally incor- 
 porated into the creed of the church of Arme- 
 nia, and it was supported in controversy by 
 many ingenious arguments. As, according to 
 Jewish legend, Elijah, the prophetic forerun- 
 ner of Jesus, had been carried to heaven in the 
 body, it was thought fitting to award similar 
 honor to the legislative predecessor of Christ, 
 and there is still extant an elaborate Latin 
 work upon the Assumption of Moses. 
 
 In the account of the departure of Jesus 
 from the earth, as in that of his birth, imagina- 
 tion has played a large part, but this does not 
 derogate from, but adds to, his true glory, for 
 imagination loves especially to employ itself 
 about the noblest men and the greatest truths,
 
 THE ASCENSION 235 
 
 as the artists delight to work in ivory and mar- 
 ble and to encircle pearls and diamonds with 
 gold. 
 
 When Mark, borrowing the language of the 
 uoth Psalm, says that Jesus sits "at the right 
 hand of God," the words are obviously a mere 
 figure expressing power and exaltation, just as 
 the language, "He shall cover thee with his 
 feathers and under his wings shalt thou trust" 
 expresses only the perfect security of the 
 righteous. God is not a corporeal being with 
 hands and feet like a man, but "God is a 
 spirit." Interpreting the language in its nat- 
 ural signification that Jesus is to us next to the 
 Father in power and glory, it is strictly true. 
 We have ceased to believe in Ceres, the goddess 
 of earth, in Neptune, the god of the seas, in 
 Apollo, the god of the sun, and in Minerva, 
 the goddess of the air. Fire, water, earth and 
 air are now only physical forces under the con- 
 trol of one omnipotent God. Angels are rep- 
 resented as singing and harping around the 
 throne, as mighty warriors victorious over all 
 rebels against God's power, and as God's min- 
 isters in all his communications with man. 
 They heal the sick, they strengthen the faint, 
 they deliver the prisoner, they guard the saint. 
 But the Christian imagination, even in the
 
 236 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 earliest ages, exalted the Son far above all the 
 hierarchy of heaven, above all the ranks of 
 angels, archangels, princedoms, powers, vir- 
 tues, dominions, thrones, cherubs, and seraphs, 
 into which, in imitation of the gradations of 
 earthly aristocracy, theologians have classified 
 the attendants of the Lord Almighty. But as 
 the conception of the unity and spirituality of 
 God has grown, belief in mighty angelic 
 agents of his will has declined. With every 
 advance of scientific knowledge it becomes 
 harder to believe the story of herald angels 
 singing to listening shepherds, to believe that 
 winged messengers from heaven communicate 
 medicinal powers to pools of water, or open 
 prison doors, or walk unseen at man's side to 
 protect him from danger. Our imagination is 
 turned into newer and nobler channels. Angels 
 are disappearing from the earth as elves and 
 fairies have disappeared, and instead of their 
 graceful and capricious activities we have the 
 immediate, ever-active, invariable and benefi- 
 cent power of the Almighty. Even the most 
 imaginative Protestant Christians rarely invoke 
 or expect the assistance of angels. So far as 
 earth is concerned, they belong to a decaying 
 and almost extinct mythology. 
 
 Before the rising sun of knowledge the clouds
 
 THE ASCENSION 237 
 
 of fancy have melted away, and with wiser and 
 deeper love for men, our visions of angels have 
 ceased, yet the ascension of Jesus is more real 
 to-day than ever before. At death he entered 
 into his kingdom and into fullness of joy; he 
 rose into a higher life and to a more perfect 
 knowledge of God. Language is at bottom 
 only a body of metaphors, and no metaphor 
 better expresses the truth than the words of the 
 creed: "He sitteth at the right hand of God in 
 glory everlasting." He reigns in heaven over 
 countless "spirits of just men made perfect." 
 He reigns upon earth over a humanity that 
 under the influence of his teaching and ex- 
 ample is achieving its great destiny.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 
 
 MEN'S views of Jesus, like their views of the 
 phenomena of nature, have passed through 
 various stages. To his contemporaries he was 
 a remarkable man. To some of them he was 
 a supremely good man, a prophet sent from 
 God and aided by God in all his works; to 
 others he was a mistaken enthusiast; to others 
 still, a base deceiver and blasphemer, but to all 
 contemporaries alike he was a man. 
 
 Scarcely had contemporaries passed from 
 the scene before the creative, idealizing imag- 
 ination of man began to transform the actual 
 Jesus into a demi-god. He was represented as 
 of supernatural birth, as possessing power over 
 all the elements, all creatures, all diseases, and 
 over death itself, as the divinely appointed 
 teacher, ruler and judge of men. This, the 
 gospel delineation, is essentially the work of 
 poetic minds. It is a concrete and beautiful 
 creation of character and work, such a trans- 
 formation as the historic King Arthur has 
 undergone at the hands of various myth-mak- 
 238
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 239 
 
 ers, until at last, in Tennyson's Idylls of the 
 King he is a thoroughly idealized man and 
 ruler, and an allegorical conception of the war 
 between Sense and Soul. 
 
 The evangelists did not do Jesus justice. 
 They embellished his actual life with mythical 
 incidents which they supposed suited to his 
 character and even necessary to the establish- 
 ment of his right to be the Messiah. They 
 intended to exalt, but they actually degraded 
 him. Stories of turning "water into wine," of 
 the miraculous multiplication of loaves and 
 fishes, of walking upon the sea, are tawdry and 
 melodramatic marvels. They chill and 
 alienate us, and greatly mar the simple beauty 
 of the delineation of the soul of Jesus. 
 
 So every prodigy that Jesus is represented as 
 performing pushes him a little farther away 
 from us, and makes us less able to appreciate 
 the realities of his suffering yet heroic human 
 life. 
 
 We shall yet have in literature a revolution 
 like that which has begun in painting in refer- 
 ence to Jesus. The halos, the floating clouds, 
 the winged angels, the rosy cherubs, and the 
 gaudy vestments of the Italian school are giv- 
 ing way to simpler and truer pictures of the 
 waiting and sympathetic human Jesus.
 
 2 4 o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 But if the poets have toiled in vain to repre- 
 sent the real Jesus, how much more complete 
 and disastrous has been the failure of the 
 systematizing philosophers, the creed-makers 
 and professed theologians. At their hands 
 Jesus has fared worse than the man who "went 
 down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among 
 thieves who stripped him of his raiment, beat 
 and wounded him, and left him half dead." 
 
 But the people have been wiser than the 
 priests and theologians. Unable to untwist 
 the iron links of the logician's chain they have 
 simply laid it aside and ignored it. The heart 
 is wiser than the head, and so the instinct of 
 humanity has cleaved to the sorrowing, suffer- 
 ing Son of Man and has rejected the theolog- 
 ical substitute of an easily offended Mediator 
 and a relentless Judge. Strange indeed that 
 what was intended for the highest adoration 
 should have resulted in the deepest abasement. 
 With every added title and external honor the 
 intrinsic worth of Jesus has been lessened. 
 Jesus the man is inexpressibly beautiful and 
 attractive; Jesus the demi-god is still a fasci- 
 nating creation of art; but the Jesus of Athan- 
 asius and Calvin and their followers, the angry 
 and pitiless deity, is a revolting conception, 
 essentially and basely pagan.
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 241 
 
 Let us reverently and earnestly study the 
 supreme Son of Man, praising God that he 
 has given such power unto men and finding 
 new encouragement and hope for even the 
 lowest human life because it is potentially one 
 with the highest example of manhood. This 
 was the original faith of the Christian church, 
 but it was speedily crushed by pagan philoso- 
 phies, and then lay in abeyance during the 
 ages of ignorance, but has steadily grown since 
 the Reformation, controls now the higher 
 intellect and scholarship of the civilized 
 nations, and will eventually supplant the re- 
 ceived Christian mythology as completely as 
 science and ethics have effaced the "bleating 
 gods" of Egypt and the anthropomorphic 
 deities of Mount Olympus. 
 
 The doctrine of the unity of God is among 
 the most rational and firmly established of 
 truths. It rests on an induction so strong and 
 simple as to be like a primary truth. It is sup- 
 ported by the most powerful scientific analogies 
 and harmonizes the phenomena of the moral 
 universe in the same manner as gravitation and 
 the indestructibility of matter harmonize the 
 phenomena of the physical world. It was the 
 faith of the greatest line of prophets and the 
 most religious nation of antiquity, and in
 
 242 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 ancient as in modern times of the wisest and 
 most virtuous philosophers. It has always 
 been the nominal creed of Christendom and is 
 now both the nominal and actual creed of 
 every educated man. It is of course believed 
 by some in conjunction with the doctrine of 
 the Trinity, but the acceptance of two incom- 
 patible opinions when it is not due to pure 
 ignorance and thoughtlessness, is either pious 
 faith in a mystery with which reason should 
 not presume to deal, or indolent acquiescence 
 in a tradition which it has been assumed it 
 v/ould injure religion and morality to disturb. 
 As soon as the mass of Christians fairly face the 
 question and make their choice between three 
 gods and one God, there cannot be any doubt 
 as to their decision. The Trinity was an im- 
 measurable advance upon polytheism, but a 
 still nobler conception is that of Paul, "Then 
 shall the Son also himself be subject . . . that 
 God may be all in all" (i Cor. 15: 28). 
 
 Creation as a whole is a manifestation of the 
 power and wisdom and goodness of God, and 
 each part of it, every plant, bird and beast, and 
 especially every man, is to some extent a 
 manifestation of the greatness of the skill, of 
 the unfathomable variety of the mind of the 
 Creator. But it is the wildest of man's dreams
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 243 
 
 to identify any one man absolutely with the 
 Creator of all. There is no only-begotten 
 Son, for God is the Creator and Father of 
 all men. To make Jesus God not only robs 
 humanity of its greatest example of virtue and 
 power, not only deprives Jesus himself of all 
 merit as a sufferer and worker in our behalf, 
 but it must offend the Almighty God. It is 
 excusable in the ignorant, but surely intelligent 
 people, while rising above the primitive fear of 
 a jealous and revengeful God to Christ's con- 
 ception of a patient and loving Father, will see 
 that it cannot be pleasing to the Most High to 
 have his glory given to another. 
 
 The essence of modern orthodoxy is that 
 men are saved by a vicarious atonement, a bap- 
 tism, and faith that Jesus was God incarnate. 
 The teaching of John the Baptist and of Jesus 
 is that righteousness is personal, that men are 
 saved by truth and purity, by justice and 
 mercy. The idea that men can be saved 
 by a ceremony or a creed or by substituted 
 righteousness is only a more refined idolatry 
 and does not differ in principle from belief 
 in the efficacy of the blood of bulls and 
 goats. 
 
 The measure in which any one feels the 
 nobility of the life of Jesus is the measure of
 
 244 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 his own nobility of soul and of his own intel- 
 ligence and virtue. 
 
 Very early in the history of the Christian 
 church the prediction was put into his mouth, 
 "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
 all men unto me." From the day of the 
 crucifixion to the present time his power, con- 
 trary to all human probability and expectation, 
 has continually increased. The work of Jesus 
 seemed to be utterly lost. He died in 
 ignominy and left no written record, no code 
 of laws, no defined ceremonies, no property, 
 no buildings, nothing but a few disciples and 
 the memory of his life and words. He was 
 denied, betrayed, crowned with thorns, 
 scourged, and crucified. His last utterance on 
 earth was a groan as in agony his great soul 
 left its earthly tenement, yet not a throb of 
 his heart or brain has been without effect. 
 His life is the most successful life that was 
 ever lived. Every great idea that he cherished 
 has struck deep root in the hearts of men, and 
 is continually conquering new fields of thought 
 and new areas of population. 
 
 "The love of Christ constrains" men as 
 nothing else does. For many years I have 
 watched the windows of a dormitory for theo- 
 logical students, and have seen that in some
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 245 
 
 rooms lamps were burning till past midnight, 
 and in others that they were lighted before the 
 dawn. Through almost the entire night those 
 stars of student industry shine. No other 
 motive power known to me is so strong and 
 steady a quickener of intellectual and spiritual 
 life as "the love of Christ." 
 
 The life of Jesus was noble and complete. 
 His ideals were lofty, and he maintained them 
 against all obstacles and allurements, and, 
 what is most important of all, he expressed 
 them in imperishable words and acts. He 
 finished the work that was given him to do. 
 Seven great qualities seem to me especially 
 prominent in the character of Jesus: faith, 
 spirituality, benevolence, intellect, courage, 
 energy, and, as the result of them all, power. 
 He had the rare and wonderful quality of per- 
 sonal faith in God. He seemed to see God 
 work and hear him speak. Most believers 
 believe on the testimony of others; Jesus 
 differs from them in that he believes primarily 
 because of his own intuitions. 
 
 The great fundamental question of religion 
 is the character of God. The practical con- 
 flict of opinion is between those who love and 
 trust God and those who do not, between those 
 who believe that God is positively and ener-
 
 246 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 getically good, that he is exerting infinite 
 power and infinite wisdom to benefit man, and 
 those who disbelieve, or at least doubt, that 
 God really cares much for man's welfare. 
 Now Jesus is the Captain of our Salvation 
 because he is the pre-eminent asserterof God's 
 goodness. God, as Jesus portrays him, is 
 "our Father in heaven." It was from Jesus 
 that John learned that God is love. It was 
 from Jesus that Paul learned that it is "more 
 blessed to give than to receive." 
 
 This faith in God is the basis of every 
 other great quality in the character of Jesus. 
 Believing in the goodness of God, it was 
 easy to believe that "the pure in heart are 
 blessed" and that "the meek shall inherit the 
 earth." 
 
 Yet his faith was voluntary and meritorious, 
 and not necessitated and absolute. "He was 
 tempted in all points as we are." His faith 
 was nourished as ours must be by obedience 
 and prayer. 
 
 The test of common men is to be true to con- 
 viction even in small matters. If a man could 
 know that his fidelity to principle would bene- 
 fit many nations for thousands of years, he 
 would be greatly strengthened to sacrifice his 
 comfort and life and glory. But if he fears
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 247 
 
 that his sacrifice of comfort and even of life 
 will influence very few people and for a very 
 short time and be an insignificant and soon- 
 forgotten event, his sacrifice rises immeasurably 
 in the moral scale, for it is made to duty and 
 not to the love of glory. 
 
 Jesus met this test, and for a long time did 
 his duty in obscurity and uncertainty. But, as 
 he taught the world, "If any man seeks to do 
 God's will, he shall know what that will is," 
 so the trust of Jesus grew continually stronger, 
 yet, as we see by his agonies and temptations 
 even to the close of his life, he still walked as 
 a Son of Man by true faith, and not as God to 
 whose vision the future is as clear as the past 
 and present. 
 
 He may have dreamed and hoped "about uni- 
 versal fame and power, but he had no assur- 
 ance of it. His biographers have attributed 
 beliefs and motives to him. He has been 
 made to see the extent of his future power as 
 Columbus has been represented as foreseeing 
 all the glories of the western continent, but it 
 is not true that Jesus was thus paid in advance. 
 His greatness is infinitely higher. It is the 
 greatness of faith, not in the seen but in the 
 unseen. He was a true son of Abraham, who 
 obeyed God not knowing whither he went; he
 
 *48 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 is the Captain of our Salvation because he, 
 like us, is saved by faith and hope. 
 
 Not his genius but his love, his courage, and 
 his fidelity are the most admirable and extraor- 
 dinary elements in the character of Jesus. 
 Who is so base and selfish that he does not 
 even wish well to his fellow men? Every man 
 dreams of doing good, but few have the faith 
 and courage to accomplish or even to under- 
 take any great work for the good of man- 
 kind. 
 
 It is because Jesus "endured to the end" 
 that he is saved, because he drank the cup of 
 obedience and suffering to the dregs, that he 
 wears his matchless crown. If he had flinched 
 at last, if he had "disgraced beauty of senti- 
 ment by deformity of conduct," he would 
 have been a mere "dreamer of the Ghetto," and 
 his discouraged disciples would never have 
 rallied, and there would never have been a 
 Christian church. If, after all his beatitudes, 
 his parables, his words of eloquence and his 
 deeds of mercy, if at the last he had made 
 peace with the Scribes and Pharisees and 
 agreed to be "prudent and practical" and 
 "make changes only as fast as the church was 
 ready to accept them," if, in short, he had 
 compromised with his convictions in the man-
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 249 
 
 ner of so many other reformers ancient and 
 modern, he would now have only the same 
 petty academic fame that belongs to other men 
 whose lives have been less noble than their 
 words. "If ye know these things, happy are 
 ye if ye do them." 
 
 To faith, courage, benevolence, and intel- 
 lect, Jesus added the homely but essential 
 virtue of industry. He did not think of the 
 world as made in six days and God as since 
 then sitting in idle pomp. No, he saw that 
 God's love and power are ever active. He saw 
 God as the keeper of Israel, who neither slum- 
 bers nor sleeps, as him in whom we live and 
 move and have our being, as him who sustains 
 all things by the exercise of his power, as him 
 who opens his hand and satisfies the desires of 
 every living thing. Jesus saw God not only as 
 a Ruler and Judge, but as a Father whose 
 greatness consists in laboring for the good of 
 all his children. God was to him the Supreme 
 Worker. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I 
 work." Work was his joy. He was straitened 
 until his mission was accomplished. 
 
 The claims put forth by Jesus himself and by 
 others in his behalf are so exalted that it is 
 surprising to hear him say of himself, "I am 
 meek and lowly," yet there is nothing in all
 
 2 5 o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 the gospel more touching than this confession 
 and the appeal based upon it. 
 
 All the great claims of Jesus were represent- 
 ative and official. In his personal character 
 he, like all truly great men, was humble. It 
 was from a fountain of humility, joy and peace 
 in his soul that he said, "Take my yoke upon 
 you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly 
 in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your 
 souls." 
 
 He was not only humble but patient and 
 "slow to anger." He did not resent mere 
 personal insults. When rejected by the 
 Samaritans, he went uncomplainingly to an- 
 other village. Yet "beware the fury of a 
 patient man." No one was ever so vehement 
 in his scorn of hypocrisy and greed, because no 
 one was so free from any complicity in them, 
 and to no one else was their hideousness so 
 apparent. 
 
 Jesus was the champion of the common 
 people whom God loves and whom proud and 
 cruel men have called the proletariat. He was 
 the poet of hope, the teacher of morality, the 
 martyr of truth and justice, the friend of man, 
 the obedient Son of God. 
 
 I hold with the man who loves and admires 
 Jesus Christ, whatever may be that man's
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 251 
 
 errors, rather than with the man who does not 
 love and admire Jesus, whatever may be that 
 man's truths. I consider that the lover of 
 Jesus is, on the whole, the wiser and the better 
 man of the two, even if he tells his beads on a 
 rosary because he cannot read, and even if the 
 other man be a polished scholar. 
 
 Greater than the tiller of the soil who feeds, 
 or the artisan who clothes the body, greater 
 than the thinker who informs the mind, is the 
 prophet who purifies and elevates the soul. 
 The chief danger to the supremacy of Jesus in 
 this regard is from those exaggerated claims 
 which provoke dissent and lead to an equally 
 exaggerated rejection of them. To exalt one 
 into a deity is to obliterate his characteristics 
 as a man, and to cast doubt upon all his actual 
 virtues and achievements. Countless good 
 men have suffered by this process. Canonize 
 a man and remove him from criticism, and 
 while he is placed on a pedestal he is rendered 
 motionless, lifeless, and uninteresting. The 
 least interesting biographies are those in which 
 adoration has most completely obliterated the 
 natural features of character. The educated, 
 even the ignorant, world can no longer read the 
 legends of the saints, and in the same way the 
 world is tiring of the orthodox sermon on the
 
 252 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 miracles of Jesus, and is concentrating atten- 
 tion more and more upon his genius, aims and 
 virtues. 
 
 He remains greatest of the good and best of 
 the great. Some men and women may have 
 been as innocent, gentle, patient, compassion- 
 ate and loving, may have been like him in his 
 lamblike aspect, but how immeasurably differ- 
 ent they are from him when he becomes the 
 lion of the tribe of Judah, how different 
 in originality of intellect, in force of will, 
 in power to do and to rule. What a pal- 
 try thing is mere innocence, merely doing 
 no harm, beside positive and high achieve- 
 ment! How Jesus himself condemns a merely 
 negative character, one whose talent is buried 
 in the earth! Almost every strong, active, 
 positive character in doing his work will make 
 some mistakes. The wheels will creak, the 
 dust will rise, the coach will jolt, if it is to 
 move onward. The deep, fertilizing river will 
 sometimes overflow its banks, but better the 
 great volume of water, enriching vast areas and 
 bearing commerce on its bosom, even though 
 it now and then rises too high and devastates 
 the surrounding country, than the tiny rivulet 
 powerless alike for good or evil. The marvel 
 of marvels is that a character of such tremen-
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 253 
 
 dous force and of such mighty genius as that 
 of Jesus remained at all times and under every 
 stress of temptation submissive to the moral 
 law and obedient to the voice of conscience. 
 
 He conquered all the weaknesses of human- 
 ity. The love of money, of social rank, of 
 ease, of "the bubble reputation," did not move 
 him. He went about doing good. He gave 
 himself for others. Trained though he was 
 among forms and traditions, he taught men 
 that religion was a thing of the spirit, and that 
 sin was in the motive as well as in the act. 
 He lifted himself above the prejudices of race 
 and was the first to give the world a religion of 
 humanity, one which was not only to be world- 
 wide in its extent, but all-inclusive in its em- 
 brace, for it was to do good even to the 
 unthankful and to the evil, and to remove 
 hatred from the world by putting an end to 
 retaliation. Compared with the establishment 
 of a religion adapted to become, and apparently 
 destined to be, universal, a religion of abso- 
 lute purity and of boundless benevolence, how 
 small is the achievement of any inventor or 
 man of science, of any artist, dramatist, legis- 
 lator or conqueror! The instinct of humanity 
 is right in placing Jesus high above Archi- 
 medes and Newton, above Raphael, Beethoven,
 
 254 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 and Shakespeare, high above Alfred and 
 Washington. He must be compared only with 
 Moses, Zoroaster, Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, 
 and Mohammed, and though the suffrage of 
 the world has not yet been given, though the 
 world at large has not even attempted a full 
 and impartial comparison of these founders 
 and their systems, it seems probable that the 
 comparison that will inevitably be made in the 
 future, while it will raise the great prophets of 
 other nations, who are now among us unduly 
 depressed by our ignorance and prejudice, will 
 also serve to bring out more clearly the superi- 
 ority of Jesus as the pre-eminent Son of Man. 
 
 The character of Jesus is so colossal that it 
 is unintelligible to us, accustomed as we are 
 to a different type of humanity. We under- 
 stand great inventors, great statesmen, great 
 manufacturers and merchants, but in this age 
 and country we rarely see and little understand 
 the prophet and the poet. There is a reserve 
 power in nature beyond our comprehension. 
 Travelers in the tropics are astonished to find 
 that many plants and animals attain there 
 twenty times the size that they have in the 
 temperate zone. Our delicate hot-house 
 plants are there hardy and luxuriant trees. 
 Our weak and timid domestic animals are
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 255 
 
 proud and beautiful lords of forest and plain. 
 Geraniums are trees, and cats are tigers. 
 
 Something analogous to this is seen in the 
 difference between the modern man, cramped 
 and pressed down by a life of routine, by a 
 mass of unassimilated knowledge, by multi- 
 plied legal restraints and by exacting toil, and 
 the greater men who lived in earlier times and 
 simpler conditions. 
 
 This stern discipline is doubtless improving 
 the race in important respects, and on the 
 whole working out good results, yet in one 
 great field at least we seem to have lost the 
 grandeur that human character once exhibited. 
 As compared with those of the ancient 
 prophets, the imaginations of our modern reli- 
 gious teachers are dull, their emotions cold, 
 their wills feeble, their courage small. They 
 and we stand abased and amazed at the char- 
 acter of Jesus, as the northern barbarians 
 accustomed to log huts were abased and 
 amazed when they saw the Coliseum and the 
 palaces of the Caesars. The character of Jesus 
 would be better understood among us if we 
 were better acquainted with the saints and 
 martyrs and prophets, if we familiarized our- 
 selves with the lives of Mohammed, of Joan of 
 Arc, of Saint Theresa, of Saint Francis, of
 
 256 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 George Fox, of Emanuel Swedenborg and 
 others, who have had heavenly visions and in 
 the strength of these have accomplished mar- 
 velous works. 
 
 Jesus transcends the limits of nationality as 
 no other man has done. He is not, like 
 Alfred or Washington, the ideal of a single 
 people or type. His mind was broader, his 
 nature more sympathetic than theirs. Jesus is 
 the ideal man, the hero of humanity. He was 
 so pure, so benevolent, so wise and so cour- 
 ageous, that his character fascinates and domi- 
 nates all who fix their attention closely upon 
 it. It is no wonder that in the effort to ex- 
 press their love and admiration men have 
 employed all the resources of language and 
 called him by every endearing and by every 
 honorable name. 
 
 He died in the prime of the strength of body 
 and mind. He was spared "the indignities of 
 decline and the cold gradations of decay." 
 More beautiful than Apollo is this daring 
 young prophet. Trusting his intuitions and 
 braving reproach and persecution, he threw 
 himself against formalism, hypocrisy, greed, 
 and cruelty, and taught men to love and help 
 One another. He is not only the culmination of 
 Jewish heroism, but the most romantic and
 
 JESUS AS A MAN 257 
 
 noble figure in the history of humanity, the 
 man of sorrows, the friend of sinners. He 
 died that we might live. He sacrificed him- 
 self to deliver men from a yoke and open to 
 them a larger life.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 THE Trinity never commended itself to any 
 one's reasoning as an abstract proposition. 
 When accepted it has always been as a compro- 
 mise, an escape from the difficulties and the 
 contradictions in the Bible. Divest the doc- 
 trine of its biblical support, and every mind 
 would reject it. 
 
 There are some persons to whom no confir- 
 mation is so strong as a "text of holy writ." 
 As a means of helping such people to the 
 truth, let us examine what the Scriptures say 
 in regard to the unity of God. In the first 
 place it must be remarked that the word god is 
 often used in a derivative sense, as for instance 
 in the first commandment, "Thou shalt have no 
 other gods before me" (Ex. 20: 3). It is some- 
 times thought that this text shows that the 
 Jews at this time believed in polytheism and 
 regarded Jehovah as their national god only, 
 and not as the God of the whole earth. By 
 others it is regarded only as a warning against 
 idols, which are mere creations of superstition, 
 258
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE 259 
 
 "nothing in the world." The Psalmist makes 
 a glorious distinction between the omnipotent 
 Jehovah and the false gods of the heathen. 
 "All the gods of the nations are idols: but the 
 Lord made the heavens." The books of the 
 Old Testament are one continued protest 
 against idolatry and polytheism. Jesus him- 
 self in summing up the Law and the Prophets 
 quotes from Deut. 4: 5, 6, and says the first and 
 greatest commandment is, "Hear, O Israel, 
 The Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
 with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and 
 with all thy strength: this is the first com- 
 mandment" (Mark 12:29, 30). All the other 
 utterances of Jesus are consistent with this. He 
 always represented himself as one appointed 
 and sent to do the will of the Father in heaven 
 and possessing only a delegated power. "I 
 can of mine own self do nothing; as I hear, I 
 judge: and my judgment is just: because I seek 
 not mine own will, but the will of the Father 
 which sent me" (John 5:3). He has no power 
 to protect himself in danger, but says to Peter: 
 "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my 
 Father, and he shall presently give me more 
 than twelve legions of angels?" (Matt. 27: 53). 
 When he sits upon his throne in his highest
 
 2 6o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 exaltation, it is an honor received from the 
 Father, and he tells his disciples: "To sit on 
 my right hand and on my left is not mine to 
 give, but it shall be given to them for whom it 
 is prepared of my Father" (Matt. 20: 23). He 
 does not even know the future. Of the time 
 of the coming judgment he says: "Of that day 
 and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the 
 angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, 
 but the Father" (Mark 13: 32). The writer of 
 the book of Job says of God: "He put no trust 
 in his servants; and his angels he charged with 
 folly; . . . yea the stars are not pure in his 
 sight" (Job. 15:15 and 25: 5). With the same 
 sense of the infinite disparity between the 
 original and perfect holiness of the Creator and 
 the reflected and imperfect goodness of the 
 creature, Jesus refused to be called "good," 
 saying to one who addressed him as Good 
 Master: "Why callest thou me good? there is 
 none good but one, that is Go'd" (Matt. 19: 17). 
 The apostles understood and preached the 
 subordination of Jesus. Paul, writing to the 
 Corinthians, declared: "All things are yours; 
 and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's" 
 (i Cor. 3:22, 23). Again he says: "I would 
 have you know that the head of every man is 
 Christ; . . . and the head of Christ is God"
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE 261 
 
 (i Cor. 11:3). Looking forward to the final 
 triumph of Christ, Paul says: "When all things 
 shall be subdued under him, then shall the Son 
 also himself be subject unto him that put all 
 things under him, that God may be all in all" 
 (i Cor. 15: 28). 
 
 Peter's testimony agrees with Paul's. 
 Preaching at Pentecost Peter says: "Jesus of 
 Nazareth, a man approved of God among you 
 by miracles and wonders and signs which God 
 did by him in the midst of you" (Acts 2:22). 
 When questioned by the council as to his 
 preaching, Peter declared: "The God of our 
 fathers raised up Jesus whom ye slew" (Acts 
 5: 30). On another occasion Peter declared in 
 a sermon: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth 
 with the Holy Ghost and with power: who 
 went about doing good, and healing all that 
 were oppressed of the devil; for God was with 
 him" (Acts 10: 38). 
 
 "In the mouth of two or three witnesses 
 shall every word be established." Here is 
 abundant testimony from Jesus himself and 
 from the evangelists and apostles as to the 
 primitive faith of the church. Language could 
 not be more clear and emphatic, and if all 
 references in the New Testament had been 
 similar no dogma of the Trinity could have
 
 262 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 arisen. It is not to be denied, however, that 
 there are very many passages, which ascribe to 
 Jesus unique and superhuman powers and dig- 
 nities, and from these in course of time a sys- 
 tem of doctrine was developed which represents 
 Jesus as the. firstborn of every creature, created 
 before all angels and all worlds, and therefore, 
 in a sense, the only-begotten Son of God. 
 This theology, known as Arianism, after a time 
 gave way to the full Trinitarianism of Athana- 
 sius. By selecting the poetic and mystical 
 titles of Jesus from the gospel of John and 
 from Paul's epistles, and ignoring the declara- 
 tions of Jesus himself and the explicit lan- 
 guage of the synoptic gospels and the Acts, the 
 Arians can fully establish their view. 
 
 But no one has any right to ignore those 
 early and definite declarations, or to attach 
 equal importance to the later and less intel- 
 ligible statements. Arianism satisfies neither 
 those who believe in the unity of God nor 
 those who consider that there is a divine 
 Trinity. It is a compromise. Though it is a 
 much more plausible and more scriptural doc- 
 trine than Trinitarianism, it does not appeal 
 strongly either to cool reason or to fervid 
 devotion. Imagination and reason alike push 
 on to full development.
 
 THE .TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE 263 
 
 Tract No. 2, published by the American 
 Unitarian Association, asserts: "Of 1300 pas- 
 sages in the New Testament wherein the word 
 God is mentioned, not one necessarily implies 
 the existence of more than one person in the 
 Godhead, or that this one is any other than the 
 Father." 
 
 "There are 320 passages in which the Father 
 is absolutely and by way of eminence called 
 God; while there is not one in which the Son 
 is so styled." "The terms which are neces- 
 sary to the very statement of the doctrine [of 
 the Trinity] are not found in Scripture. The 
 words Trinity triune God-man are not in the 
 Scriptures. We nowhere find the expression 
 God the Son, but always the Son of God; no- 
 where God the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit of 
 God. The expressions, first person, second 
 person, third person, three persons, are not 
 found." 
 
 In its literary aspect the Revised Version of 
 the English Bible is a great disappointment. 
 It seems to me a mistake to substitute for the 
 alliterative and euphonious "clear as crystal," 
 the unmusical and not essentially more accurate 
 expression "bright as crystal," and to alter 
 "Eliezer of Damascus" into the unintelligible 
 "Dammesek Eliezer," and it is literalism run
 
 264 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 mad to change the expression "the earth is his 
 footstool" from its sublime simplicity and 
 strength into the clumsy tautology "the earth 
 is the footstool of his feet." 
 
 But whatever may be the faults of style in 
 their version, the last revisers set a noble ex- 
 ample of fidelity to the facts in their dealing 
 with the corruptions of the text. On the 
 authority of the earliest manuscripts they have 
 altered or omitted some of the most famous of 
 the Trinitarian proof texts. They have omitted 
 altogether, "There are three that bear record 
 in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy 
 Ghost: and these three are one." They 
 append to the sixteenth chapter of the gospel 
 of Mark the significant note: "The two oldest 
 Greek manuscripts and some other authorities 
 omit from verse 9 to the end of the chapter." 
 In I Tim. 3: 16, they change "God was mani- 
 fest in the flesh" into "He who was manifested 
 in the flesh," and they change Luke 2: 33 from 
 "Joseph and his mother" to "his father and his 
 mother." 
 
 The earlier the manuscript the less Trini- 
 tarian it is. Yet the oldest extant manuscripts 
 of the New Testament are none of them earlier 
 than the fourth century, and, as they vary very 
 much from each other, it is a moral certainty
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE 265 
 
 that the text of no one of them is throughout 
 identical with the original gospels and epistles. 
 Growth and decay are universal laws, and, 
 though we talk lightly of three centuries, it is 
 a long period, and affords time for great modi- 
 fications in ancient popular writings, multiplied 
 not as now in great stereotyped editions, but 
 one by one, and thus subject to all the errors 
 and caprices of each transcriber.
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 
 
 THE personality of Jesus is so striking that in 
 regard to it the minds of men have vacillated 
 between irrational unbelief and irrational 
 credulity. There were once many, and there 
 are still a few, persons who think that there 
 never was such a man, and that the whole story 
 about him is a pure fiction, as much so as that 
 of Prometheus or Hercules, and that like other 
 wonderful creations its only original is the love 
 of the marvelous and the longing for the ideal, 
 inherent in human nature. 
 
 At the other extreme are those who regard 
 every detail in each of the four biblical biog- 
 raphies as absolutely true, who think that each 
 writer was supernaturally preserved from error 
 and that no subsequent copyist has altered, or 
 commentator amplified, the story in the least. 
 
 Between these extremists there is a growing 
 body of investigators who believe first that the 
 historic Jesus was a man of most remarkable 
 character, and secondly that his wonderful per- 
 sonality, having won the love and admiration of 
 266
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 267 
 
 men, has been idealized with all the artistic 
 skill that affection delights to lavish upon the 
 object of its regard. Men admire the strength 
 and courage of the warrior and they exag- 
 gerate his feats, but no Samson ever actually 
 killed a thousand men with his own hand in 
 one battle. Men admire woman's beauty and 
 idealize it in song, but no Annie Laurie ever 
 had a brow whiter than the snowdrift, and no 
 Juliet eyes that could shine in the sky in the 
 place of stars. We have everywhere to reckon 
 with the poetry and hyperbole of affection. 
 
 Jesus was considered to be God by the 
 majority of Christians from very early times, 
 but the majority have also believed a thousand 
 other now discarded superstitions. Truth is 
 not to be decided by majorities; and if it were, 
 would not that method of determination be 
 fatal to every Protestant church, nay, to Chris- 
 tianity itself, for it is certain Buddhists, Con- 
 fucianists, Mohammedans and pagans of vari- 
 ous sorts still far outnumber Christians. 
 
 So far as I have been able to learn, the strict 
 doctrine of the unity of God was universally 
 held in the Christian church throughout the 
 first century. 
 
 The New Testament, at least, which speaks 
 of so many controversies on other subjects, has
 
 268 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 not a word to say about any division of opinion 
 upon this one. In the New Testament there is 
 no mention of any God the Son or God the 
 Holy Spirit, but only of the Son of God and 
 the Spirit of God. In the first century there 
 were those who held that Jesus was only a 
 prophet like Moses or Elijah, and there were 
 those who believed that he Was an inferior 
 deity sent down from heaven; but no one at 
 that time, so far as the records show, believed 
 that he was equal with the Father. The gos- 
 pel of John was in all probability not then in 
 existence, but even the gospel of John makes 
 Jesus say expressly, "My Father is greater 
 than I" (John 14:28). "I am come in my 
 Father's name" (John 5: 43). "The works which 
 the Father hath given me to finish . . . bear 
 witness of me that the Father hath sent me" 
 (John 5:36). 
 
 Deification is barbaric ignorance, transcend- 
 ent wonder at an uncomprehended genius. 
 There is nothing singular in the deification of 
 Jesus. He is the evening star of the old twi- 
 light in which thousands of heroes and rulers 
 were thus honored, and the morning star of the 
 new dawn in which all men are sons of God. 
 
 It was not Jews but Greeks who fashioned 
 the doctrine of the Trinity. Some few Jews
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 269 
 
 may indeed have apostatized from the sublime 
 monotheism of their ancient faith, but it is to 
 the eternal honor of the Jewish people as a 
 whole that through the long twilight, deepen- 
 ing at last into blackest midnight of idolatry 
 and superstition, they have patiently waited 
 for that dawning, the early streaks of which 
 are now everywhere visible. 
 
 The testimony of the Jews, the countrymen 
 of Jesus, the nation most familiar with great 
 prophets and best able to understand their lan- 
 guage and aims, is of itself sufficient to prove 
 that Jesus was a man. And it is reasonable to 
 believe that if Gentiles had not distorted Chris- 
 tianity, the Jews would soon have included 
 Jesus among the roll of their authoritative 
 prophets, as after a time they included so many 
 others whose teachings they at first rejected 
 and scorned. 
 
 The world owes the Jew an immense debt of 
 gratitude for his continual protest against the 
 false and heathen doctrines that have been 
 associated with the person and teaching of 
 Jesus. In rejecting Jesus as a prophet alto- 
 gether the Jews made a great mistake, but a 
 large share of the blame of that error must be 
 charged to those who made Jesus the center of 
 an absurd and idolatrous system. The Jews,
 
 270 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 taught by the prophets and the psalmists, did 
 well to reject the doctrines of the Trinity, the 
 incarnation, the efficacy of sacraments, the 
 apostolic succession, and salvation by imputed 
 righteousness. Those ideas are corruptions of 
 the teachings of Jesus, and to reject them is 
 one mode of accepting Jesus himself. The 
 medieval Jew was perhaps as true a Christian 
 as the medieval churchman. 
 
 The earliest testimony of the Christian 
 church, the consistent testimony of the Jewish 
 nation, and the present judgment of intelligent 
 Asiatics are all against the irrational doctrine 
 of the Trinity. How, then, did such a concep- 
 tion ever fasten itself upon the creed of Chris- 
 tendom? It was part of that paganization of 
 the early church by which the apostles were 
 substituted for the greater, and the saints of 
 the church for the smaller, heathen deities, and 
 by which angels took the place of nymphs, 
 fauns and dryads. 
 
 The earlier admixture took place in the 
 East, but in the East and West alike the church 
 was soon saturated with pagan ideas. Jesus 
 was more and more closely identified with God 
 the Father, until at last the differences of 
 opinion in the church became so marked that 
 it was necessary to attempt to define belief on
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 271 
 
 the subject. A general council held at Anti- 
 och in 269 refused to declare the Son equal to 
 the Father, and expressly condemned the ex- 
 pression homo-ousioS) which means of the same 
 substance. The controversy, however, con- 
 tinued, and the great council of Nicaea in 325 
 singularly enough adopted as the test of ortho- 
 doxy the very word, homo-ousios, which had 
 been condemned by the earlier assembly. The 
 pendulum now swung to the other side. As 
 Jesus had been authoritatively declared by a 
 great council representing the whole church to 
 be of the same substance with the Father, 
 many enthusiasts began to teach that he was in 
 all respects one with the Father, or, in other 
 words, that it was God himself who had come 
 down to earth; and, as reverence for God for- 
 bade the supposition that he could need food 
 and drink, could grow weary and suffer, these 
 Docetae, Apparitionists as we may call them, 
 asserted that the body of Jesus was a mere 
 phantom, and all his apparent acts mere illu- 
 sions. This doctrine was too extreme even 
 for the credulous multitude, yet it lingered in 
 an attenuated form for many centuries; but we 
 shall not follow it further than to say that 
 Eutyches was condemned in 451 at the council 
 of Chalcedon for the so-called monophysite, or
 
 272 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 "one nature," heresy. That assembly, wearied 
 of the controversy which had now vexed the 
 church for three hundred years, and seeing 
 that it was impossible to make a clear state- 
 ment that would harmonize all the diverging 
 opinions, prudently took refuge in an ambigu- 
 ous and mystical phraseology. It was affirmed 
 that Jesus was truly God and truly man, and 
 that his two natures were perfectly united and 
 yet remained entirely distinct. 
 
 The question was soon set at rest for a time, 
 not by the long, ingenious and meaningless 
 statement of the council, summarized above, 
 but by the stern logic of events. It was no 
 time for Christendom to waste its strength 
 upon barren and metaphysical disputes. The 
 barbarians were at the frontiers of the Roman 
 empire. The first great invasion of the Huns 
 occurred in 451, the very year of this council, 
 and only twenty-five years later Rome itself, 
 the eternal city, was captured by the Goths, 
 and the Christian church, dismayed and almost 
 submerged by the torrent of barbarism, laying 
 aside all speculative questions, set itself to 
 work to civilize and educate its conquerors. 
 The practical Roman genius refused to waste 
 its strength on these Greek subtleties. It 
 aimed at power, and it won it by practical
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 273 
 
 means, by moral teaching, by useful labors, by 
 careful legislation, and by an impressive cere- 
 monial. The rise to power of the Roman 
 church, as told in Milman's Latin Christianity, is 
 a most wonderful and fascinating story, but it 
 must not detain us. Suffice it to say that the 
 principle of authority grew and the exercise of 
 private judgment declined. The Bishop of 
 Rome claimed to be the Vicar of Jesus Christ, 
 the successor of St. Peter, the chief of the 
 apostles, and the king of all the kings of 
 earth. Monarchs held the bridle or kissed the 
 foot of the supreme Pontiff. The great power 
 of the Popes had been won not by mere argu- 
 ment but by promoting peace among rulers, 
 and above all by protecting the poor against 
 the cruelty and extortion of the rich. Many 
 abuses there doubtless were, but on the whole 
 for many centuries the influence of the church 
 was in the interest of learning, good govern- 
 ment and religion. The rule of Rome made 
 Europe a federation, and by maintaining a 
 sense of union among the scholars of all coun- 
 tries by the common use of the Latin language, 
 it preserved amid the confusion of countless 
 harsh and unstable barbaric tongues a large 
 part of the noble literature and philosophy of 
 antiquity.
 
 274 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 But the universal and absolute sway of the 
 Popes, while it was favorable to the diffusion 
 of the doctrines of the church and such other 
 learning as the church approved, made it 
 almost impossible to disseminate any opposing 
 opinions. 
 
 Printing, that is to say, real printing by 
 movable metal types, was not invented till the 
 year 1450. Very few persons except the 
 clergy possessed t any manuscript books or 
 could have read them if they had done so. 
 Few of the clergy had a copy even of the Latin 
 Bible, and it was not till 1382 that a complete 
 translation of the Bible was made into English 
 by Wycliffe, "the morning star" of the Refor- 
 mation. 
 
 All through the Middle Ages the extent of 
 the sway, the magnificence of the pomp, the 
 majesty of the claims of Rome, overawed the 
 imaginations of men. It seemed like blas- 
 phemy to doubt and madness to assail any of 
 the fundamental doctrines of the Papacy. 
 There were scholars equal to any that ever 
 lived in industry and acuteness, but they were 
 exclusively occupied in harmonizing, develop- 
 ing and systematizing the doctrines of the 
 church. Aquinas and Duns Scotus and their 
 fellows from a few texts spun immense cob-
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 275 
 
 webs of learning, exquisitely ingenious and 
 fine, but, like all other metaphysics drawn from 
 false premises, of no practical value what- 
 ever. 
 
 If a doubt as to the deity of Christ arose in 
 the mind of some daring thinker, he was over- 
 awed as he thought of his presumption in dis- 
 senting from the universal creed of Christendom 
 from the teaching of the church and the 
 schools, and the implicit faith of the multi- 
 tude. Those were the ages of faith, and to 
 breast the current of opinion then was like try- 
 ing to swim against Niagara. 
 
 The circumstances were such as to produce a 
 contagion of credulity, and probably few per- 
 sons ever seriously doubted the fundamental 
 tenets of the church. If now and then a 
 scholar of unusual independence of mind did 
 so, he was likely for practical reasons to sup- 
 press his doubtings. By acquiescing in pre- 
 vailing opinions he was sure of a livelihood, 
 and had a line of promotion before him, but to 
 become a heretic was danger and disgrace and 
 in all probability death. America was not yet 
 discovered, and travel was still travail. There 
 was no foreign country to which he might emi- 
 grate unless after a long and painful pilgrimage 
 on foot he was willing to be a wretched exile,
 
 276 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 to live a lonely and precarious life in some 
 Mohammedan or pagan land. 
 
 The heretic who stayed at home was excom- 
 municated. All persons were forbidden to 
 speak to him or to provide him with food or 
 shelter, to buy from or sell to him, to employ 
 him or accept employment from him. Nowa- 
 days excommunication is easily braved, but in 
 the height of the power of the church it was a 
 fearful punishment. The excommunicated 
 man was a moral leper, a social outcast. His 
 life, if he managed to live at all, was a burden 
 to him. Of course, even then, there were 
 courageous men who defied excommunication. 
 Men who had physical force on their side 
 sometimes braved spiritual and social terrors. 
 Powerful nobles and great kings could fight on 
 something like equal terms against bishops 
 and popes, though the story of Henry's stand- 
 ing three winter days clad only in his shirt at 
 the gates of Canossa begging for an audience 
 in which he might prostrate himself at the 
 Pope's feet and ask forgiveness is an impres- 
 sive reminder of what an excommunication 
 from the church once meant. 
 
 Kings were sometimes victors by force of 
 arms, but what could a private scholar do 
 against the power of the church? The church
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 277 
 
 had its own courts and police, and could 
 arrest, imprison and sentence a refractory 
 ecclesiastic without the aid of the secular 
 authorities. The contumacious critic of the 
 church was immured in a cloister cell, fed on 
 bread and water and allowed the use of no 
 books except manuals of devotion. Even an 
 indiscreet defender of the church, who, like 
 Bishop Pecock in his Represser, a book written 
 against the Lollards, made concessions to 
 reason against authority, was likely to be con- 
 demned as was Pecock to such an imprison- 
 ment. 
 
 If a heretic had publicly promulgated his 
 opinions and would not publicly recant them, 
 the offender was sometimes excommunicated 
 with bell, book and candle, a ceremony that 
 tried the victim's own nerves and filled the 
 public assembly with dread and horror. The 
 church was at first brilliantly lighted with many 
 candles, which were extinguished one by one 
 as the service of condemnation proceeded. At 
 last, when but one candle remained, the officiat- 
 ing priest pronounced the awful words : "Cursed 
 be he from the crown of the head to the sole of 
 the foot. Out be he taken from the book of 
 life, and as this candle is cast from the sight 
 of men, so be his soul cast from the sight of
 
 378 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 God into the deepest pit of hell. Amen." 
 When the Bible had been shut as a sign that 
 the poor heretic had no part in it, and the can- 
 dle quenched as a sign that he was cast into 
 outer darkness, the church bell was tolled as 
 for a departed soul to indicate the sinner's 
 eternal death. 
 
 When the condition of Europe during the 
 Dark Ages is considered, it is no wonder that 
 there was little organized opposition to the 
 doctrine of the Trinity until the great revolt of 
 the northern nations from Rome, known as the 
 Reformation. The Reformation itself was not 
 primarily caused by speculative or doctrinal 
 questions. It was a revolt against the oppres- 
 sion, the greed and the corruption of the 
 clergy, and the weapon of the reformers was 
 the Bible recently translated into the various 
 tongues of the North and made accessible to 
 the multitude by the art of printing. Against 
 the claim of the Popes to divine authority and 
 infallible wisdom the reformers appealed to the 
 Scriptures as the only infallible guide, and 
 thus, in throwing off one yoke, they fixed an- 
 other with almost equal firmness upon the 
 necks of men. They got rid of many ecclesias- 
 tical errors and abuses, but in setting up the 
 Bible as infallible they gave a new lease of life
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 279 
 
 to every error in the book and opposed new 
 obstacles to scientific investigation. 
 
 In the tumultuous and terrible sixteenth cen- 
 tury Catholics and Protestants vied with each 
 other in sending heretics to the dungeon and 
 the stake. Hundreds were burned to death 
 before the battle for free thought was won. 
 Even as late as 1611, the year the authorized 
 version of the Bible was made and only nine 
 years before the Mayflower took the Pilgrim 
 Fathers to Plymouth, Bartholomew Leggatt and 
 Edward Wightman were burned in England for 
 denying the doctrine of the Trinity. Still, in 
 spite of all opposition, Unitarian churches 
 arose in Poland and Hungary, and many illus- 
 trious men, among whom are Milton, Locke 
 and Newton, professed Arian opinions. But 
 the authority of the Bible held the clergy and 
 people of the English churches to the dual 
 theory of the nature of Jesus which is legiti- 
 mately deduced from its pages. There could 
 be, and there can be, no thorough and con- 
 sistent belief in the humanity of Jesus until the 
 opinions of the writers of the New Testament 
 are tested like those of other men by reason 
 and observation, and one or the other of the 
 two inconsistent biblical theories is rejected. 
 
 Through most of the seventeenth century the
 
 2 8o THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 law continued to deny religious liberty. 
 When the arbitrary rule of Charles I. roused 
 the Puritans to revolt, as the war proceeded 
 sects multiplied. Though parliament was 
 fighting against the king for its own liberty, it 
 had no thought of granting liberty of con- 
 science to the people. By a great majority it 
 passed a statute against blasphemies and 
 heresies which declares "any man denying the 
 doctrine of the Trinity or that the books of 
 Scripture are the Word of God . . . and refus- 
 ing on trial to abjure his heresy shall suffer the 
 pain of death." 
 
 In America the Cambridge Platform, made 
 very soon after the Westminster Confession 
 had been adopted by the English parliament, 
 also declared that blasphemies and heresies 
 were to be restrained and punished by the civil 
 authorities. 
 
 In vain had been Cromwell's declaration, 
 "In things of the mind we look for no compul- 
 sion but that of right and reason," even when 
 he enforced it by the appeal, "I beseech you, 
 brethren, by the mercies of God to think it 
 possible that you may be mistaken." 
 
 The death of Cromwell and the downfall of 
 Puritanism increased the rigor of persecution. 
 By stringent acts of uniformity dissenters were
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 281 
 
 harried and crushed, and thousands of them 
 were thrown into prison. Tyranny, however, 
 perished of its own folly and excess. A 
 second revolution took place, and, in 1689, the 
 Act of Toleration was passed, by which a large 
 measure of religious "toleration," if not of 
 equal justice, was secured. 
 
 Since that date the chief hindrances to the 
 advance of a recognition of the true nature of 
 Jesus and of his gospel have been those ancient 
 and inveterate foes of every spiritual religion, 
 viz., the sinfulness, the worldliness, the preju- 
 dice and the ignorance of men. To be saved 
 by faith in the atonement of Christ is easier 
 than to be saved by obeying his commands and 
 imitating his example. 
 
 However, in spite of all obstacles, the truth 
 is gradually winning its way. The doctrine of 
 the humanity of Jesus is keeping pace step by 
 step with every advance in public intelligence 
 and virtue. In this country we are now a long 
 way from the grossness of medieval supersti- 
 tion. Men no longer speak of God as dying 
 on the cross, or swear by "God's wounds." It 
 is only in the most ignorant and bigoted 
 countries that regiments are called "The 
 Division of the Mother of God," or "The 
 Division of the Son of God," as was the case
 
 2 8a THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 with the army of Ecuador until 1875. No 
 Protestant church would now condemn any 
 one for refusing to call Mary the Mother of 
 God, as Nestorius was condemned for doing by 
 the council of Ephesus in 431. 
 
 The Roman theology, built on the ruin of an 
 empire, venerable by its antiquity, sanctified by 
 the blood of martyrs and adorned by the great- 
 est masters of architecture, sculpture, painting 
 and music is now rapidly decaying. It took a 
 thousand years to build up the mighty edifice; 
 and its massive walls, like the ruins of the 
 Coliseum, may long defy the forces of time. 
 The slighter systems of Luther and Calvin 
 were built up more quickly and their collapse 
 will be more rapid and complete. In the very 
 church at Geneva in which Calvin once 
 preached his narrow dogmas and cruel decrees, 
 Unitarian congregations have now for fifty 
 years listened to rational expositions of Scrip- 
 ture and to a gospel of good will. All the 
 Protestant churches have softened and attenu- 
 ated their theology. Of the doctrine of the 
 Trinity, the crowning folly of orthodoxy, a 
 twin absurdity with transubstantiation, there is 
 now very rarely any attempted exposition or 
 defense. 
 
 The deification of Jesus is the heart of the
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 283 
 
 church of Rome. One who accepts that pro- 
 tests illogically and vainly against the Papacy, 
 Mariolatry and saint worship, for these are all 
 legitimate outgrowths of the belief that Jesus 
 is God. 
 
 The struggle for a genuine Christianity free 
 from false philosophy and pagan error has been 
 long and bitter, but the victory of truth and 
 righteousness is drawing near. If it be asked 
 why the advance of thought has been so slow 
 and so painful, the only answer is that in the 
 inscrutable, though, as faith believes, the 
 beneficent, providence of God, man's intel- 
 lectual and moral, as well as his physical, 
 progress must be made "inch by painful 
 inch." Every reformer in making every step 
 in advance has done so in spite of "fears within 
 and fightings without." The ignorant have 
 opposed the dead weight of their stupidity, the 
 selfish the active ingenuity of their ambition, 
 the bigoted the fierce cruelty of their fanati- 
 cism against every social, political and moral 
 reform; yet, in spite of all, knowledge and free- 
 dom have increased. 
 
 It is surprising how many facts that now 
 seem obvious were unnoticed or unheeded 
 for thousands of years. Countless genera- 
 tions of men have gazed at the stars, yet till
 
 284 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 the sixteenth century not one man in a mil- 
 lion had any true conception of astronomy, and 
 when Galileo tried to expound the truth dis- 
 covered by Copernicus he was forced by 
 clerical persecutors to recant what an infal- 
 lible Pontiff declared to be his errors. Since 
 the beginning of the human race men have 
 roamed over the earth's surface, yet geology is 
 a nineteenth century science. Having eyes 
 men saw not. They shivered and sighed for 
 fuel while dwelling upon beds of anthracite 
 coal. They sat in darkness or by rush lights 
 when wells of illuminating oil were bubbling 
 around them. 
 
 Ever since man learned to use fire, steam has 
 wreathed itself before his stupid eyes, yet the 
 force that now, guided by genius, does more 
 work than all human muscles and all draught 
 animals put together,"was not utilized until the 
 last century. 
 
 If they do these things in a green tree, what 
 shall be done in the dry? If in these cases 
 men have failed to understand facts of the most 
 practical concern which were continually forced 
 upon their attention by their senses, is it sur- 
 prising that they have been slow to learn 
 abstract religious truths? 
 
 It took the ancestors of the more enlightened
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 285 
 
 nations of the world thousands of years to get 
 rid of gross forms of idolatry. Even the Jews, 
 the chosen people, the prophet nation, relapsed 
 again and again into polytheism, offered sacri- 
 fices to Baal and worshiped images of a calf. 
 "Every man is a quotation from all his ances- 
 tors." We are all descendants of hundreds of 
 generations of pagans. The blood of the 
 cave-dwellers who thought the thunderbolt the 
 dart of an angry god is in our veins. Our 
 nerves still tremble with the superstitions 
 which made altars reek with blood to propiti- 
 ate the vengeful deities who scourged men with 
 famine and pestilence. And so we still have a 
 fading theology that makes Christ a mediator 
 between an angry God and a suffering race of 
 men and his death an atoning sacrifice. But 
 all this is passing away, and we are coming to 
 understand the simple gospel of Jesus, the 
 plain gospel of purity, love, and service. A 
 righteous and useful life is the only condition 
 of discipleship or of salvation ever imposed by 
 Jesus, and the only one the modern Christian 
 world cares much about. 
 
 Counting as we in our ignorance and impa- 
 tience are accustomed to count, progress has 
 been slow and difficult, and every one who 
 struggles against ignorance, error and cruelty
 
 '286 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 echoes the pathetic wail of the ancient Psalm- 
 ist, "How long, Lord, wilt thou hide thyself? 
 . . . How long shall the wicked triumph?" But 
 now "we know only in part." The time that 
 seems to us so long is but an insignificant frag- 
 ment of eternity, and the short struggle for 
 truth and righteousness now will enrich and 
 ennoble our lives through all the millenniums 
 of the future. 
 
 We need to revise the scale of our thinking 
 and take the measuring rod with which in the 
 Apocalypse the temple of God was measured. 
 We need to take the sublime chronology of the 
 ancient poet who declared that "one day is 
 with the Lord as a thousand years." Chris- 
 tianity is yet in its early morning. The shad- 
 ows of paganism still linger about it and 
 obscure its brightness, the clouds of mythology 
 still invest it in gaudy, unsubstantial splen- 
 dors. But the shadows will fly and the scarlet 
 tints will fade and the white and holy light of 
 truth will fill the noon-day sky. 
 
 A mere caricature of Christianity, a medley 
 of pagan superstitions, of worldly ambitions, 
 of idle ceremonies, and of ascetic follies, has 
 ruled a quarter of the world for a little while. 
 Instead of it we expect that sooner or later a 
 true Christianity will prevail, and that in all
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES 287 
 
 lands wars and oppression will cease, all the 
 resources of the earth will be developed to the 
 utmost for the common good, and all men 
 will live in ever-increasing wisdom, virtue and 
 happiness. Such at least, as I understand it, 
 is the vision that was in the mind of Jesus when 
 he established the kingdom of God among 
 men. 
 
 The ascription of divine powers and honors 
 to Jesus was sincere and impressive in an early 
 day when great men were commonly deified, 
 but in our age of larger knowledge and of less 
 vivid and riotous imagination Jesus is by these 
 extravagant claims wounded almost unto the 
 death in the house of his friends. The ex- 
 pression, "the only-begotten Son of God," robs 
 Jesus of all real personality and power, just as 
 the high-sounding titles of the Emperor of 
 China, the Son of Heaven and Elder Brother 
 of the sun and moon, exclude that unfortunate 
 monarch from any active participation in gov- 
 ernment and make him a roi faineant, an idle 
 figurehead, hardly better than a prisoner of 
 state. So the exaggerated theological honors 
 of Jesus take him away from the working 
 brotherhood of men and surround him with 
 frigid and remote grandeur. The doctrine of 
 the Trinity is purely for show. It rouses no
 
 288 THE CARPENTER PROPHET 
 
 enthusiasm, it makes no converts at home or 
 abroad. It is an incubus upon the human 
 Christ whom the world loves as the noblest son 
 of our common Father. It is a tree that bears 
 nothing but leaves. It gives barren eulogy for 
 practical obedience. The decline of this 
 spurious glory will be the beginning of a new 
 epoch in the real power of the life of Jesus in 
 the world. We are not, as some timid persons 
 seem to think, looking upon the sunset of 
 faith, but are witnessing the sunrise of an im- 
 measurably more glorious day, a millennium 
 in which religion will not be an affair of one 
 day in seven in the church, but of every day 
 and every place; in which men will not serve 
 with lip and knee only, not say Lord, Lord, 
 and neglect justice and mercy, but one in 
 which the spirit of Christ will be carried into 
 the every-day life, into all the industries, all 
 the business and all the governments of the 
 world. 
 
 THE END.
 
 PRINTED BY R. R. DONNELLEY 
 AND SONS COMPANY, AT THE 
 LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL.
 
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