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THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
THE FOUNDER OF 
 CHRISTENDOM 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 UNITARIAN CLUB OF TORONTO 
 
 BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH 
 
 ' 1 * ' - ° ' 
 
 TORONTO 
 GEORGE N. MORANG & COMPANY, LIMITED 
 
 1903 
 
^' 
 
 3-: 
 
 
 • •• • Z-. - 
 
 • • • . . 
 
PREFACE TO SECOXD EDITIOX 
 
 The demand for a second edition of this 
 address, delivered to the Unitarian Club of 
 Toronto and published at their instance, 
 seems to show that the address has attracted 
 the attention of some who s}Tnpathize with 
 its general views. That traditional belief in 
 supernatural Christianity has been overthrown 
 or shaken in many minds by the advance of 
 criticism and science is evident. Criticism 
 applied to the historical character of the 
 Gospels, as well as to the e^ddence of the 
 miraculous generally, has caused many to 
 doubt, many to reject, the Christian miracles. 
 The creeds repose on the Atonement; the 
 Atonement assumes the Fall; and the Fall 
 seems to have been disproved by science, 
 which has demonstrated that man, instead 
 of falling, was raised by evolution from a 
 lower order of being. 
 
 Yet spiritual Christianity may live, even 
 
 253691 
 
VI PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 though supernatural Christianity dies. If 
 the miracles must be set aside as mythical, 
 and the dogma must be resigned, still the 
 spiritual Teacher, his character and his words, 
 remain. If we have lost the Jesus of Bethle- 
 hem, we have not lost the Jesus of Nazareth, 
 or the testimony of his life to the existence 
 of a spiritual world. 
 
 That man is made up of a body and a 
 spirit, the spirit being a separate entity 
 infused into him by a distinct act of the 
 Creator, pent in the body but parted from 
 it at death, and itself imperishable, is a belief 
 which many of us, perhaps most of those who 
 are educated and have any tincture of science, 
 have resigned. We see that what has been 
 called the soul is, in fact, our conscious per- 
 sonality, the outcome, mental and moral, of 
 our general frame. Still, there appears to 
 be in man that which may be rightly called 
 spiritual, as distinct from physical, life. Free 
 will or, as perhaps it had better be called, our 
 power of choice, perception of moral good and 
 evil, moral aspirations, notably such as lead 
 to self-sacrifice, the faculty and habit of 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION Vll 
 
 idealization, are apparently real phenomena 
 of our nature, hitherto not explained by physi- 
 cal causation or brought within the domain of 
 physical science. To what these phenomena 
 may point, who can say ? Yet, if they have 
 no meaning, man, while he is higher than the 
 other animals, is more unhappy than they are, 
 inasmuch as he has always going on in him a 
 conflict between good and evil, with the sense 
 of failure to reach an ideal and a conscious- 
 ness of a power of development beyond his 
 present condition which is doomed to frus- 
 tration by death. We cannot see beyond the 
 grave. On the other hand, it is by no means 
 certain, or even likely, that, aided as we may 
 be by the telescope, the microscope, and the 
 spectroscope, we see the universe as it really 
 is. There is, apparently, no reason for assum- 
 ing that the evidence of our physical senses 
 is exhaustive and that all intimations of any- 
 thing beyond given us by our spiritual nature 
 are delusive. This may be said without any 
 disloyalty to science, which bids us recognize 
 all phenomena, whether at present explained 
 or not. 
 
VIU PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 On the solution of the question, so much 
 -debated, about the origin of life, however 
 interesting it may be to physical science, 
 nothing regarding man's spiritual nature and 
 destiny seems to depend. Certain it is that 
 man, with all his faculties and aspirations, 
 is developed out of a senseless embryo. It 
 is at the same time certain that the embryo 
 is not the man, and that an active power, 
 apart from rudimentary elements, is revealed 
 in the development. 
 
 There are many Lives of Christ, some of 
 them pietist, others rationalist, others inter- 
 mediate not excluding but minimizing the 
 miraculous element. The popular Life by 
 the late Dean Farrar shows a tendency to 
 rationalize the miraculous. His treatment of 
 the miracle of the Gadarene swine is a notable 
 instance of this mode of manipulation, which 
 no doubt meets a popular demand and keeps 
 doubt at bay, but is not likely to be found 
 satisfactory in the end. 
 
 Strauss' s second Life is the extreme of scep- 
 ticism. We rise from perusing it, thinking 
 that we know little or nothing^ of the Founder 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION IX 
 
 of Christendom. Yet, imperfect as our mate- 
 rials are, the character and the doctrine are 
 distinct. The character is clearly mirrored 
 in the writings of Paul. The character and 
 the words together have embodied themselves 
 in the creation of Christendom. 
 
 Kenan's Life of Christ, like everything else 
 that came from his pen, combines, in the 
 highest degree, literary grace with erudition. 
 But his is the work of a great artist, hardly 
 in touch with simple Galilee. His author- 
 ities are fully set forth, but his principle 
 in making use of them is not always clear. 
 For the quintessence and climax of Christ's 
 teaching, he goes to the Fourth, and least 
 historical. Gospel. From the miracles he 
 arbitrarily picks out the raising of Lazarus 
 as a real occurrence, insinuating that it was 
 a pious fraud contrived by the enthusiasm 
 of the family. 
 
 From deity, the character of Jesus has 
 sunk so much among violent enemies of his 
 faith and of the Christian order of society as 
 to be the mark of the most revolting^ carica- 
 ture. His extreme precepts, such as those 
 
X PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 about passive submission to injury and renun- 
 ciation of worldly wealth, in minds over Avhich 
 they have lost their theological hold, are 
 apt to make way for free indulgence of natu- 
 ral and worldly passions. It is time that 
 the character should be j)resented in its dis- 
 tinctly human excellence and that the pre- 
 cepts should be presented with due allowance 
 for the circumstances, intellectual and social, 
 of the peasant preacher of Galilee. 
 
 Recoo^nizino; Jesus as Jesus of Nazareth in 
 Galilee, and Galilee as Galilee of the Gentiles, 
 we are more completely set free from thral- 
 dom to Judaism and from enforced belief in 
 the inspiration of the sacred books of the 
 Jews, with all those primitive passages in 
 them which divines of a certain school are 
 now striving to reconcile with divine author- 
 ship by supposing that God, in revealing him- 
 self to man, conforms to the law of evolution. 
 
 Jerusalem is the scene of the atoning sac- 
 rifice ; Galilee is the real scene of the mission, 
 and the Holy Land of the moral and spiritual, 
 while Judea is that of the doctrinal. Christian. 
 
 My intention w^as, while I excluded the 
 
/ 
 
 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xi 
 
 supernatural from view to avoid traversing 
 it. Nor do I think that it is traversed by 
 any admission of human infirmities or limita- 
 tions in Jesus. Cardinal Newman concluded 
 a narration of the indignities inflicted upon 
 Jesus in the Passion by bidding his hearers 
 remember that all this was done to Almighty 
 ,God. If Deity could stoop to the endurance 
 of pain and insult, if it could stoop to all the 
 incidents of lowly birth and life, to the 
 infirmities of infancy and childhood, to all 
 the physical wants and liabilities of human 
 nature, why should it not have stooped to 
 the mental liabilities and limitations of a 
 peasant preacher? 
 
 When the miracles of the Gospel narratives 
 are put out of sight, we are more than ever 
 impressed with the miracle of a world trans- 
 formed by the character and teaching of the 
 son of the carpenter of Nazareth. 
 
 Reluctantly we resign the creed of our 
 childhood, but we cannot bar out truth. 
 
 a s. 
 

 THE 
 FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 3>»i« 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth is held by Trinitarians 
 to have been God and Man, by Unitarians to 
 have been man, though in his spiritual gifts 
 and teachings near, above all men, to God. 
 Among those w^ho believe him to have been 
 God, there are divisions about his relation to 
 the other persons of the Trinity. Whether 
 the third person of the Trinity proceeds from 
 him as well as from the first person is a 
 question which separates the Eastern from 
 the Western Church. But all Churches agree 
 that he was man. " Perfect God and per- 
 fect man, of a reasonable soul and human 
 flesh subsisting," he is called in the Athana- 
 sian Creed. Perfect man he could not be 
 without the conditions, affections, liabilities. 
 
»' «.' »> « 
 
 .V^ - /' .' tji;^ :E0MDEII: of CHRISTENDOM 
 
 and limitations of humanity. The Super- 
 natural is here not impugned, but simply 
 put out of sight; as it may be without ab- 
 juring the Spiritual or anything to which the 
 Spiritual really points. It is only to be said 
 that if there is a God and He manifests Him- 
 self to us, it is through the highest human 
 character that He is manifested, and most 
 through the highest of all. 
 
 As to the miracles by which the divinity 
 of Jesus is held to be attested, it may be said 
 that the halo round this head is brighter, 
 purer, more moral, and, if rationality is com- 
 patible with miracle, more rational, than the 
 halo round the head of any other prophet or 
 saint in history. Two only of the Gospel 
 miracles seem in this sense to repel us ; that 
 of the banishment of the devils into the 
 Gadarene swine, and that of the barren fig 
 tree. Compare with this the miracles of the 
 Old Testament; the destruction of the first- 
 born of Egypt, the stopping of the sun to 
 prolong carnage, the slaying of forty-two 
 children by bears to avenge an affront to 
 the prophet ; you have the difference between 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 3 
 
 the spirit of the Old and that of the New 
 Testament. 
 
 Our materials for the life of this man, who, 
 of all his race, has exerted the greatest 
 influence, are unhappily poor and precari- 
 ous. His personality of course cannot be 
 questioned. It is attested by Roman histo- 
 rians, Tacitus and Suetonius, who mention his 
 religious leadership and his crucifixion. Paul 
 had not seen him, but had conversed with 
 those who had seen him, and was profoundly 
 impressed with his character. Devotion to 
 him is Paul's religion. No imagination could 
 have created such a character, with a reli- 
 gious and ethical sj^stem to correspond, and 
 given it an influence so wide and so enduring. 
 Nor could anybody have invented so won- 
 derful and striking a mode of teaching by 
 apophthegm and parable as that which, 
 adapted at first to peasant audiences, has 
 kept its hold upon the mind of the world. 
 But for the Life, we have to rely on the first 
 three, or Synoptic, Gospels ; all of which are 
 anonymous, and of date unknown ; without 
 claim to being the work of eye-witnesses ; 
 
4 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 evolved by a process which we cannot trace 
 from pre-existing materials, written or oral, 
 now lost ; not seldom at variance with each 
 other ; full of miracle ; and, after all, not 
 biographies properly speaking, since they tell 
 us next to nothing of the first thirty years, 
 but collections of memorable sayings and 
 doings of Jesus in a loosely biographical 
 or anecdotic form. The Fourth Gospel is 
 unavailable as historical evidence. It is 
 plainly Alexandrian theology, with its charac- 
 teristic Logos, in a biographical frame. It is 
 not the work of a Palestinian Jew. It makes 
 Judea the scene, whereas the real scene of 
 the ministry was, and the real holy land of 
 the Christian is, not Judea but Galilee ; Judea 
 is the scene of the close. Though the actual 
 date of the Gospels cannot be fixed, we may 
 be pretty sure that the epoch of their compo- 
 sition was that at which the memory of the 
 founder's sayings transmitted by oral tradition 
 was beginning to fade, and the desire of pre- 
 serving them was felt. 
 
 That there was time between the events 
 and the records for myth to grow, is manifest 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 5 
 
 on the face of the records themselves. Mem- 
 ory, however, was strong in the days when 
 writing was scarce, and the sayings of Jesus 
 may have been well preserved. 
 
 We who wish simply to hear the word, do 
 not take our stand in Jerusalem, with its 
 grim environs, its sumptuous temple, its altar 
 reeking with bloody sacrifice, its narrow 
 Judaism, its haughty Sanhedrim, its self-right- 
 eous Pharisees, its worldly Sadducees, and the 
 ceremonialism and casuistry which are pres- 
 ently to assume ^ portentous form in the 
 Talmud. We take our stand on a hillside by 
 the lake of Gennesaret, with the snowy moun- 
 tains in view and the sea not far away, amid 
 the hamlets, the corn-fields, the sheep-folds, 
 the vineyards, the olive grounds, the lilies 
 and oleanders of Galilee, all that supplies the 
 rural imagery of the parables. Around us is 
 a crowd of peasants and fishermen, many of 
 whom have been drawn by the fame of the 
 miracles, some perhaps by the hope of miracu- 
 lous cure. We for our part have come only 
 to hear the word. 
 
 Opposite to us on the hillside is a group of 
 
b THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 twelve men, peasants and fishermen, round 
 one central figure. That central figure comes 
 forward to speak to us. He is Jesus of 
 Nazareth, the Founder of Christendom. The 
 name of Cassar is said to be the greatest in 
 history. In the history of empire and con- 
 quest it is. But what is it to the name of 
 this man, which forms the dividing landmark 
 of the centuries ? So much may be said, and 
 we may rejoice in the superiority of the word 
 to the sword, without allowing ourselves to be 
 swept away by the tide of pious eloquence 
 and ascribing the progress of humanity during 
 nineteen centuries to a sing^le life. 
 
 To the personal influence exerted by Jesus 
 nineteen centuries after his death, and the de- 
 votion of which he is still the object, there is 
 absolutely no parallel in history; before them 
 the glory of Sakyamouni and of Mahomet 
 pales. This is no doubt to be ascribed 
 largely to deification. But it is also due in 
 no small measure to spiritual impression. In 
 the Unitarian it has no other source. A 
 figure less divine could hardly have been 
 deified, much less have continued to be del- 
 
i'HE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 7 
 
 fied and be the object of adoring love, not 
 only to pious hearts, but to high intellects 
 down even to the present day. 
 
 What is Jesus like ? What would we not 
 give to know ? There is no authentic portrait 
 or tradition. The Byzantine portraits are 
 plainly works of the crude Byzantine fancy. 
 Of the impression on Veronica's kerchief or 
 on the fabulous winding sheet nothing need 
 be said. They are like a number of other 
 spurious relics, millstones round the neck of 
 the Roman Catholic Church in this her hour 
 of trial. Kenan's idea of the peculiarly 
 Jewish beauty of Jesus, as well as the senti- 
 mental incidents which he connects with it, 
 are the offspring of his somewhat Parisian 
 imagination. We are apt to think of the face 
 rather as that of the Man of Sorrows. But 
 in this we antedate the Agony in the Garden. 
 Art at its highest has striven in later times to 
 produce something which would satisfy our 
 conceptions, but it has striven in vain. To 
 paint a union of the human and divine 
 natures was beyond its power. Raphael in 
 his Madonna di San Sisto has perhaps sue- 
 
8 THE FOUNDER OF CHKISTENDOM 
 
 ceeded in producing a supernatural child by 
 putting mature expression into a baby's face. 
 Of this we may be sure, that in the features 
 of the Great Teacher, whatever their form, 
 shone the spiritual light which was to lighten 
 the world. 
 
 Dogmatic religion and the creeds have 
 filled our imaginations with the harrowing 
 scenes of the passion, which from the dogmatic 
 point of view are overwhelming in their 
 interest as the consummation of the Atone- 
 ment. Any religion, to fit humanity, must to 
 a certain extent be a religion of sorrow. But 
 we have no reason to assume that the 
 preaching of the kingdom of heaven amid 
 smiling scenery, in buoyant air, beside the 
 blue and sail-studded lake, by a youthful 
 enthusiast full of hope to a simple audience of 
 believers, was melancholy, or that the counte- 
 nance of the preacher was not bright. 
 
 The garb, it seems, being that of the un- 
 changing East, we know. It was a long and 
 closely fitting undergarment of wool, with a 
 mantle loosely thrown over it, a girdle, a sort 
 of caftan on the head, and sandals on the feet. 
 
'the founder of CHRISTENDOM 9 
 
 The language of Jesus is Aramaic, a Se- 
 mitic dialect, and a rude cousin of the Hebrew. 
 Greek is spoken in those parts by the cultured, 
 but not by the Carpenter's Son, or by the 
 peasants to whom he preaches. The Greek 
 version of Jesus's words, therefore, which 
 alone we have, is a translation, a fact to be 
 borne in mind. He is a native of Nazareth, in 
 a dell twelve miles from the lake. His home, 
 if he can be said to have a home, is now the 
 neighbouring town of Capernaum, where there 
 is a Roman garrison and customs station . 
 The people of Nazareth had failed to recognize 
 their spiritual master in the Carpenter's Son. 
 
 Jesus is a Galilean by birth, and no doubt 
 of Jewish race, though few will now maintain 
 the genuineness of either of the two diver- 
 gent genealogies framed to prove that he was 
 a descendant of David. But the population 
 of Galilee was very mixed, and was despised 
 by the pure blood of Abraham at Jerusalem. 
 Its speech had the provincial accent which 
 betrayed the nativity of Peter. Consequently 
 it was less tribal than the population of Jerusa- 
 lem and more human ; fitted therefore to be 
 
10 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 the birthplace of the Jew who was destined to 
 break dowq the wall of Judaism from within, 
 and to enlarge the religion of a race into the 
 religion of humanity. 
 
 Jesus is about thirty years old, ripe for 
 action, yet with his enthusiasm not yet 
 chilled by age. He is the son of a carpenter, 
 and though we are told nothing about his 
 youth, he may be taken to have plied his 
 father's trade ; often, however, as we may 
 surmise, laying down his tools to plunge in 
 thought. His education must have been sim- 
 ple. He can read and no doubt write. He 
 has been tauscht the Law and is familiar with 
 the sacred books of his nation. His knowl- 
 edge of the books is uncritical. He takes the 
 book of Jonah for history. He believes in 
 the genuineness of the apocalyptic book of 
 Daniel, and its mystical " Son of Man " has 
 taken hold upon his mind. So have the 
 prophets who, like Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and 
 Micah, set mercy above sacrifice. He shares 
 with his nation the hope of a Messiah. Of 
 science or scientific conceptions of the uni- 
 verse or man, he, like all around him, is 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 11 
 
 I 
 
 totally devoid. He has made trips to Jeru- 
 salem for the festivals, otherwise his knowl- 
 edge of the world and its doings has probably 
 been almost bounded by his little hill-town 
 and its neighbourhood. He is perfectly open 
 to belief in miracle and to such popular ideas 
 as that of demoniacal possession. To philoso- 
 phy, literature, and art he is a stranger. So 
 is he to politics and to commerce. He must 
 have been a lonely and original thinker, little 
 aided or tempered by intercourse with other 
 minds. He is unmarried. He is a wander- 
 ing preacher, and, though he has a mother and 
 brothers, he has no domestic ties. 
 
 One day, as Jesus was musing, the spiritual 
 impulse prevailed ; he threw down his tools 
 and went forth to ^Droclaim the kingdom of 
 God. Whence did the impulse come ? There 
 was around him a general ferment of rebel- 
 lion, political and religious, against the pagan 
 dominion of Rome and its satraps, the house 
 of Herod. But to this Jesus is a stranger, 
 saving that he may be stirred by the general 
 unrest. Reaction from prevailing evils, social 
 and moral, had given birth to the ascetic and 
 
12 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 Utopian sect of the Essenes, but there is no 
 trace of anything distinctly Essenist in the 
 histories of Jesus. The preaching of John the 
 Baptist is another sign of the spiritual fer- 
 ment. Jesus was evidently stirred by the 
 appearance of John, at whose hands he sought 
 baptism as his consecration to his mission and 
 whom he continued to revere. But John the 
 Baptist was an anchorite ; Jesus was none ; 
 and it is implied that Jesus had felt his 
 prophetic calling when he came to receive 
 confirmation of his mission at John's hands. 
 We can only suppose that Jesus, like Sakya- 
 mouni, was moved by pity for the general lot 
 of humanity. It seems that in the further 
 East at least, men are easily moved to don 
 the garb and go forth on the errand of the 
 preacher. Opposition to the formalism of 
 the Pharisee, though afterwards intensely 
 developed, can hardly have been the original 
 motive, since the centre of Pharisaism was 
 far away. Nor can we suppose that wealth 
 in Galilee was strikingly oppressive ; we 
 should rather suppose that an equality of 
 rude plenty was the rule. 
 
THE FOUNDER OP CHRISTENDOM 13 
 
 Now Jesus speaks. What has he to tell 
 us? Does he bring authentic tidings from 
 the other world ? The answer must be that 
 he does not. He does not undertake to unfold 
 to us the mystery of our being. He does not 
 undertake to tell us the origin of evil, of 
 which his only explanation is the existence 
 of a spirit of evil, Satan, dividing the world 
 with the spirit of good, as, in the Zendavest, 
 Ahriman divides the world with Ormazd. He 
 embraces the belief in a resurrection which 
 was current among the Pharisees, and makes 
 a thrilling use in hortatory discourses of the 
 awful imagery of the judgment-day. But of 
 the truth of that doctrine, though the doctrine 
 is fundamental, he does not give us positive 
 proof or even such distinct and explicit assur- 
 ance as one charged with revelation might 
 have been expected to give. He solves none 
 of the difficulties connected with the restora- 
 tion of the bodies the particles of which have 
 been dispersed; with the cases of infants, 
 heathen, and savages ; or with the arbitrary 
 division of the human race into those deserv- 
 ing of paradise and those deserving of hell, 
 
14 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 characters being so mixed and variable as 
 they are. The apologue of Dives and Laza- 
 rus, plainly fictitious, almost fantastic, could 
 not have been uttered by one who knew and 
 was sent to unfold the awful secret of the 
 spirit world. The same might be said of the 
 argument that because God is called the God 
 of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob those patriarchs 
 must be still alive. Religious philosophers 
 without number have ever since been labour- 
 ing to solve the mystery of our being, to 
 account for the existence of evil, to prove 
 the immortality of the soul. This they would 
 not have had to do if the Gospel had revealed 
 it all. 
 
 On the other hand, Jesus did preach doc- 
 trines so new and so momentous, doctrines 
 which took such hold, and have had so im- 
 mense an effect, that they almost deserve the 
 name of revelations. He preached not only 
 the unity, but the universal fatherhood of God. 
 The God of the Jew was one ; but even if he 
 was sole, and there were not other gods for 
 other nations, he was not the father of all. 
 He was the father only of the Chosen People. 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 15 
 
 He was not the father even of the Samaritan. 
 Sacrifice could be offered to him acceptably 
 only in the holy city. He was far more 
 moral than the tribal deities of the nations, 
 as well as the sole God of his tribe ; in both 
 respects more capable of being exalted and 
 liberalized into a universal God. But he was 
 tribal after all, and tribal he would still have 
 been when, as the Jew expected, all the idols 
 of the Gentiles had fallen prostrate before 
 him, and his dominion, with that of his 
 chosen people, had been extended over the 
 whole earth. 
 
 Socrates, Plato, and the Roman Stoics 
 Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, were 
 in their way theists. In a way only. They 
 used sometimes the singular word "god," 
 sometimes the plural "gods"; and they con- 
 tinued to pay their offerings to the State 
 divinities. The dying request of Socrates was 
 the payment of an offering to -^sculapius. 
 The Antonines, the best of Stoics, even per- 
 secuted for nonconformity to the State reli- 
 gion. Moreover, the philosophers' deity was 
 not, like that of Jesus, a father, the object of 
 
16 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 love, communion, and prayer, but merely a 
 governor of the universe and a supreme sup- 
 port of virtue ; hardly personal ; a conception 
 confined to members of an exalted sect, not 
 preached by them to the common herd of men. 
 No church or religious community of any 
 kind was the result. 
 
 True, Jesus does not undertake to explain 
 fully the relations of God to man. How can 
 the father of all allow so many of his children 
 to be lost ? How can he have made the gate 
 of salvation narrow, that of destruction wide ? 
 How can mankind, with their infinitely graded 
 characters, be justly divided into sheep and 
 goats ? How can the potter condemn the pots 
 which himself has made? These are ques- 
 tions which Jesus does not attempt to solve. 
 But he does preach the universal fatherhood 
 of God. We are listening to Jesus, the man 
 with profound spiritual insight, not with super- 
 natural knowledge of the ways of Deity. 
 
 With the universal fatherhood of God, 
 Jesus proclaims the universal brotherhood of 
 man. This is the end of tribalism, the in- 
 auguration of humanity. God, it is said in 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 17 
 
 the Acts, has made all nations of one blood 
 to dwell together on the face of the earth. 
 Here is a revolution greater than any polit- 
 ical or social revolution in history. In the 
 Greek or Latin writers you may find faint 
 breathings of a common humanity; you will 
 find no recognition of universal brotherhood. 
 To the polished Greek other races were bar- 
 barians, fitted by nature to be slaves. The 
 Jew could not see a brother in the uncircum- 
 cised. In the early period of the Koman 
 Empire there were uncircumcised conformists 
 to Judaism ; but they were outside the pale. 
 Circumcision remained an insurmountable bar. 
 By an effort which we can now hardly measure 
 Jesus threw down that bar, making the Gen- 
 tile the brother of the Jew. He may have 
 wavered, he may at times have said that he 
 was come not to destroy the law but to fulfil 
 it, that he was sent only to the lost sheep of 
 the House of Israel, that it was not meet to 
 take the children's bread, and to cast it to 
 dogs ; though the record is doubtful and these 
 passages may express the qualms, not of the 
 teacher, but of Judaizing reporters of his 
 
18 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 words. WKat the ultimate effect of his teach- 
 ings was is plain, nor can we doubt that his 
 true interpreter in this respect was Paul. 
 
 The world, it is said, was united by the 
 Roman Empire. That world was only the 
 circle of nations round the Mediterranean. 
 The plunder of all those nations made up the 
 bloated opulence of Rome. The blood of 
 gladiators from all those nations was mingled 
 in the Roman amphitheatre. Slaves from 
 them all pined in the horrible slave quarters 
 of the Roman lord. Over them all ruled 
 Roman Governors, some, no doubt, like Pliny, 
 but some like Pilate. The inspiration of 
 Jesus sent forth missionaries to found an 
 empire not of the sword but of the word, 
 which should know no limits but humanity, 
 which should give and not take away, 
 and which, when the Roman Empire had died 
 of its own vices, would fill the void with the 
 new life of Christendom. 
 
 Let the creed, the liturgy, the fane, the 
 ecclesiastical order be what they may, the uni- 
 versal fatherhood of God, which implies God's 
 paternal care for us now and forever, and the 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 19 
 
 universal brotherhood of man, are the essence 
 and the sum of all religion. If we have 
 ceased to believe in them, the end of religion 
 has come. We cannot go back to the 
 Pantheon ; and the religion of humanity with- 
 out a God, to which we are invited to go for- 
 ward, though it may be an enthusiasm, is 
 not a religion at all. Science must take the 
 world in hand and do what is in its power to 
 do for mankind. That we are losing our 
 belief in the universal brotherhood of man, if 
 not so consciously or avowedly our belief in 
 the universal fatherhood of God, is shown by 
 this outburst of Imperialism with its tribal 
 theories of dominion and its contempt for 
 ^ human right. 
 
 Another revolution, momentous in its way, 
 is the treatment of poverty by Jesus. Pov- 
 erty theretofore had been the general object 
 of contempt, though it might be affected by 
 the Cynic, not from humility but from phil- 
 osophic pride. " Hapless poverty," says a 
 Roman satirist and moralist, " is in nothing 
 more pitiable than in the ridicule which it 
 brings on men." Hebrew prophets had nobly 
 
20 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 denounced oppression of the poor and rebuked 
 the insolence of the rich. Jesus not only de- 
 fends the cause of the poor, but regards 
 poverty as the state most favourable to the 
 reception of the Gospel and to the spiritual 
 frame of mind. Wealth he treats as an 
 obstacle to spiritual life. If a rich man 
 would find entrance into the Kingdom of God, 
 he must sell all that he has and give to the 
 poor. Not that Jesus says that wealth in 
 itself is sin. The moral of the apologue of 
 Dives and Lazarus may fairly be taken to be 
 that there will be a change of lots in the next 
 world, not that wealth as wealth is as a matter 
 of course doomed to hell. Nor is Jesus, as 
 some have called him, a socialist or a leveller. 
 He preaches no social revolution. It is with 
 the Kingdom of God that he deals throughout, 
 not in any sense with the kingdom of this 
 world. He recognizes the right of property 
 while he enjoins unbounded almsgiving. So 
 after him did his church at Jerusalem, in which, 
 though it is called communist, the gifts were 
 free. '' Whiles it remained, was it not thine 
 own ? and after it was sold, was it not in 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 21 
 
 thine own power ? " says Peter to Ananias. 
 Nor, whatever might be the practical effect of 
 unbounded almsgiving, does Jesus say any- 
 thing to sanction mendicancy. There is 
 nothing to show that he would have looked 
 with complacency on a begging Friar. His 
 own bread, though he did not labour with 
 his hands, was earned by giving the bread of 
 life to the world. So in its degree was the 
 bread of those whom he sent forth to preach 
 the Gospel, though they were to live upon the 
 charity of their hearers. Poverty is not in 
 itself a merit, nor when it is abject or when 
 it is caused by idleness and accompanied by 
 mendicancy, as we see it hanging about the 
 door of the church or the monastery in super- 
 stitious countries, has it any relation to spir- 
 itual life. Yet riches are deceitful, and it is 
 aways hard for a rich man to keep his heart 
 above them and thus to enter into the King- 
 dom of God. 
 
 Apart altogether from asceticism or even 
 from almsgiving, there has run through 
 Christendom a vein of sympathetic interest 
 in the character and lives of the poor to 
 
22 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 which a parallel will hardly be found outside 
 the Christian pale. The sentiment finds ex- 
 pression in our fiction and our poetry ; in the 
 novels of Scott and George Eliot ; in Dickens's 
 " Christmas Carol " ; in the poetry of Gray, 
 Crabbe, and Wordsworth. The toiling masses 
 have been redeemed, if not from suffering, at 
 least from contempt. Their special virtues 
 and merits are appreciated. We still speak 
 respectfully of the widow's mite. 
 
 It must be confessed at the same time that 
 the doctrine is extreme, such as we should 
 expect from a peasant reformer, solitary, 
 unchecked in his aspirations by experience 
 of a mixed and commercial world. Without 
 wealth, without the accumulation of wealth, 
 neither material civilization, nor anything 
 intellectual or moral that depends on mate- 
 rial civilization, could advance. Christendom 
 has had practically to qualify the teachings of 
 its founder and treat them at most as correc- 
 tives of inordinate devotion to gold. 
 
 As Jesus is no communist when he exhorts 
 the rich to give away their wealth, so when 
 he prohibits the exercise of dominion and bids 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 23 
 
 his disciples be servants of each other, when 
 he rebukes their rivalry for rank by lifting a 
 child in their midst, he is not, as some have 
 fancied, playing the part of a political level- 
 ler. He is not the hon sansculotte of Camille 
 Desmoulins. He took no part in the political 
 movements of his time, nor does he show any 
 interest in them beyond one or two hostile 
 allusions to Herod. The equality which he 
 enjoins is spiritual only. His words, never- 
 theless, have taken effect in the political and 
 social as well as in the religious sphere. They 
 have instilled a feeling for equality, though 
 they have not kindled revolution. The wearer 
 of the Triple Crown, with his scarlet train 
 of Cardinals, was far from being an em- 
 bodiment of the ideal of Jesus. Yet his 
 title of the Servant of the Servants of God, 
 amidst all the titles which proclaimed the 
 lordship of man over his fellows, was a re- 
 minder of the Christian ideal. 
 
 " Take no thought for your life what ye 
 shall eat, neither for the body what ye shall 
 put on. The life is more than meat, and the 
 body is more than raiment. Consider the 
 
24 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 ravens : for they neither sow nor reap ; which 
 neither have storehouse nor barn ; and God 
 feedeth them : how much better are ye than 
 the fowls ! " " Consider the liHes, how they 
 grow. They toil not, they spin not. And 
 yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his 
 glory was not arrayed like one of these. If 
 then God so clothe the grass which is to-day 
 in the field and to-morrow is cast in the oven, 
 how much more will he clothe you, ye of 
 little faith ! " " Take, therefore, no thought 
 for the morrow : for the morrow shall take 
 thought for the things of itself. Sufficient 
 unto the day is the evil thereof." This 
 preaching of carelessness for to-morrow would 
 kill industry and prevent a man from earning 
 his own bread and that of his family, though 
 it might seem less extravagant in a land like 
 Galilee where boon Nature almost of herself 
 supplied simple wants. Nor, whatever may 
 have been done in wild ecstasy by Francis of 
 Assisi, has Christendom ever attempted to 
 give practical effect to such doctrines. At 
 best they have served as alteratives, miti- 
 gating the intense and wearing lust of gain 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 25 
 
 which seems in our own days to be corroding 
 the hearts of men and threatens to deliver the 
 world over to the despotism of the purse. 
 
 " Ye have heard that it hath been said, 
 An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth : 
 but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil : 
 but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right 
 cheek, turn to him the other also. And if 
 any man will sue thee at the law, and take 
 away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. 
 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, 
 go with him twain." Such a renunciation of 
 private right and of legitimate redress for 
 wrong as this teaching, taken literally, im- 
 plies would manifestly put an end to law and 
 give up the world to the wrong-doer. Again 
 Christendom has practically qualified the pre- 
 cept of its founder and reduced it to a warning 
 against over-litigiousness. Throughout it must 
 be borne in mind that the reformer's actual 
 sphere was Galilee with its population of peas- 
 ants, which he might, without great stretch 
 of imagination, hope to turn into a world of 
 brotherly equality, spontaneous justice, and 
 self-sacrificing love. 
 
26 THE FOUNDER OP CHRISTENDOM 
 
 It must, perhaps, be admitted that an im- 
 practicable standard of self-abnegation, it 
 might almost be said of self-annihilation, has 
 proved rather a snare to Christendom by pre- 
 venting the formation of a more practicable 
 rule. Men sit in church listening heedlessly 
 to the words of Jesus against care for the 
 morrow or against litigation as words that con- 
 cern them not, and go out of church to heap 
 up wealth by manipulation of stocks and to 
 press all their advantages in courts of law. 
 
 Jesus was not an ascetic or a father of 
 monkery. He came eating and drinking. 
 He was social ; it might almost be said con- 
 vivial. His enemies called him a glutton and 
 a wine-bibber. His first miracle is said to 
 have been wrought at a feast. At fasting he 
 glances as a recognized practice, less to enjoin 
 it than to warn against ostentation. Asceti- 
 cism and eremitism came to the Thebaid and 
 thence to Catholic Europe rather from the 
 Ganges than from the Lake of Gennesaret. 
 Of what use the monastic orders may have 
 been in the Middle Ages as a counterbalance 
 to the ascendancy of grossness and force, and 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 27 
 
 whether their service in that way exceeded the 
 disservice done by their fanaticism, their in- 
 trigue, and the vices into which they presently 
 fell, are, therefore, questions which need not 
 be raised here. Jesus would not have seen 
 himself reflected in a monk. 
 
 The ethical philosophy of Jesus, if we may 
 use the term, seems to rest on the importance 
 of character and motive above formal action. 
 He who looks on a woman lustfully is an 
 adulterer. " From within out of the heart of 
 men proceed evil thoughts ; " and in the enter- 
 tainment of such thoughts, even without for- 
 mal action, the essence of wickedness consists. 
 
 The Golden Rule of doing to others as you 
 would they should do unto you was not taught 
 by Jesus alone. It had been taught by Hillel. 
 It may probably be extracted from any system 
 of moral philosophy, even from a system so 
 little altruistic as that of Aristotle's Ethics. 
 It might have been read on the walls of sacred 
 buildings in China by the soldiery of the 
 Christian powers, which was filling that hap- 
 less land with massacre and rapine for the 
 advancement of Christian civilization. But 
 
28 THE POUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 the difference lies in the motive. Are you 
 doing good to others only that they may in 
 return do good to you ? Or are you doing it 
 from love of your kind ? A Pharisee makes 
 a market of his virtue. 
 
 Self-renunciation is carried almost to the 
 pitch of self-annihilation, and, like the ex- 
 treme precepts of meek submission to wrong 
 and carelessness for the morrow, transcends 
 the possibilities of moral aspiration in the 
 world as it is. In Jesus throughout, as he 
 is presented to us in the Gospels, we meet 
 with a being as near as humanity can come 
 to a disembodied spirit, one possible only in 
 such circumstances as those of his life and 
 mission in Galilee. 
 
 Closely allied with hatred of formalism and 
 legalism is the leaning of Jesus to the con- 
 verted sinner, the returned prodigal, the 
 sheep restored to the fold, the penitent, rather 
 than to those who had never needed the phy- 
 sician. Not that he anywhere dallies with 
 sin. There is nothing antinomian in his teach- 
 ings. It is to a licentious interpretation of the 
 teachings of St. Paul, if to anything in the 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 29 
 
 New Testament, that antinomianism is to be 
 traced. 
 
 The word ecclesia, translated in our version 
 " church," is twice found in the Gospels, where 
 it has rather a strange look ; one of the two 
 places being that upon which the claim of the 
 Papacy is founded. We cannot help doubt- 
 ing whether it came from the lips of Jesus. 
 But if it did, he cannot have meant general 
 councils, consistories, S3mods, and courts of 
 ecclesiastical law ; for he says that where two 
 or three are gathered together in his name, 
 there will he be in the midst of them. We 
 can imagine nothing more alien to his mind 
 than the form which, in later ages, the church 
 assumed. But if Christianity was not to be 
 only a school of thought, like Stoicism or 
 Platonism, but a spiritual society formed for 
 mutual aid in godly living and the formation 
 of a religious character, organization was 
 indispensable. Organization necessarily im- 
 plied authority. By a process easily divined 
 if not historically recorded, authority, origi- 
 nally vested in the congregation, gradually 
 centred in the bishops, to consecrate whose 
 
30 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 exaltation Apostical Succession was devised. 
 Ultimately, by a process not less natural, it 
 was engrossed by the Bishop of Rome round 
 whom the imperilled and distracted members 
 of Christendom rallied as their head and pro- 
 tector amidst the dissolution of the ancient 
 world. The office of the Twelve and that of 
 the Seventy was clearly not ecclesiastical but 
 missionary. 
 
 Formalism of all kinds Jesus abhors. Ap- 
 parently he would have disliked ritual, litur- 
 gical prayer-books, formal worship of all kinds. 
 He seems to exclude them by enjoining the 
 ever memorable prayer which we may trust 
 oral tradition to have faithfully handed down. 
 Expansion, in this respect, liturgical and aes- 
 thetic, when worship came to be a regular and 
 collective function, could not be avoided, though 
 it might have stopped short of the prayer-mill. 
 
 Mercy, not sacrifice, was the rule of the 
 Founder of Christendom as it was of the evan- 
 gelical prophets. Mercy he prefers even to 
 the Sabbath, the ceremonial idol of the Jew. 
 The Sabbath he says was made for man. 
 He admits moral grounds for relaxation. 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 81 
 
 No dogmatism is put into the mouth of 
 Jesus by the Gospels. Dogmatism could 
 hardly exist before his deification. It seems 
 to have had three principal sources; the 
 theology of Paul, who, however, is perhaps 
 rather ecstatic than dogmatic, and would 
 hardly have treated dogmatic dissent as sin ; 
 the Alexandrian theosophy embodied in the 
 Fourth Gospel; and the speculations of the 
 Gnostics and other metaphysical or heretical 
 sects which evoked counter-definitions from 
 the Church. Those definitions became ortho- 
 doxy and conditions of church-membership. 
 When the Church unhappily, though perhaps 
 inevitably, had been united to the Empire, 
 orthodoxy became law, and heresy, alas, be- 
 came treason. Desperate were the shifts to 
 which the Church in her darker days was 
 put in her effort to extract from the sayings 
 of Jesus anything like warrants for perse- 
 cution and mandates for the Inquisition. 
 What is meant by those awful words about 
 the sin against the Holy Ghost has never 
 been made clear. It can hardly be imagined 
 that sin against the Holy Ghost means de- 
 
32 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 parture from the dogmatic ruling of an eccle- 
 siastical Council. 
 
 Hatred of formalism and legalism, as deadly 
 enemies of genuine godliness, brought the 
 Founder of Christendom into collision with the 
 Pharisees, whom he denounces as hypocrites, 
 whited sepulchres, destroyers of souls, with a 
 vehemence startling in one so full of loving- 
 kindness. The spirit of the Gospel at its birth 
 was confronted by the spirit of the Talmud, 
 and the issue proved that the struggle between 
 them was unto death. Talmudic Judaism, 
 with its tithing of mint and cummin and its 
 neglect of the spiritual law, recognized its 
 mortal enemy in Jesus. It sought to discredit 
 him before he, invading its citadel, enabled it 
 to take his life. Jesus admits that the Phari- 
 sees sat in Moses' seat, and exhorts his disci- 
 ples to do what the Pharisees bid, but in a 
 spirit unlike theirs. It is strange to find him 
 entering the house of a Pharisee and sitting 
 down to meat, unless his object was to rebuke 
 in a friendly way the formalism which there 
 prevailed. Mortal conflict with the Pharisees 
 probably belongs to the close of the his- 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 33 
 
 tory. Pharisaism in force could hardly have 
 been encountered in Galilee. While we con- 
 demn the Pharisee for his formalism and his 
 hypocrisy, allowance is to be made for his 
 natural opposition to claims which to him 
 would appear impious. 
 
 Jesus was himself unmarried. From the ob- 
 scure words ascribed to him about those who 
 made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom 
 of God, he would appear to have regarded 
 celibacy as the superior state. It must always 
 be borne in mind in estimating his sense of 
 the value of human relations that he believed 
 the end of the world to be at hand. Papal 
 policy which saw its advantage in a militia 
 of priests detached from family ties, conspir- 
 ing with false notions of purity imported from 
 the East, might find support for ecclesiastical 
 celibacy in his words. But he bade husband 
 and wife be one flesh and asserted the sanc- 
 tity of marriage by forbidding divorce, too 
 easy even under the Hebrew law and in 
 other nations licentiously common, saving for 
 the cause of fornication. He parries a casuis- 
 tical question by saying that in heaven they 
 
34 THE FOUNDEE OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 neither marry nor are given in marriage. 
 Nothing else have we from Jesus on the mo- 
 mentous subject of marriage and love. What 
 is superior in the Christian idea of marriage 
 and in the Christian treatment of women must 
 be ascribed, not to any precepts of Jesus on 
 those particular questions, but to the general 
 influence of his teaching in favour of purity, 
 loving-kindness, and consideration for the 
 weak. 
 
 To the worship of the Virgin has been 
 ascribed the chivalrous feeling of devotion 
 to woman. But that feeling was displayed 
 almost solely toward women of quality, and 
 was really sexual, not in any sensible degree 
 religious. To the mediaeval mind the Virgin 
 was not a woman but a deity. 
 
 St. Paul improves to some extent upon his 
 master, bidding husbands love their wives; 
 though he, too, in dealing with social and 
 domestic relations, is under the impression 
 that the world is passing away. 
 
 The wandering preacher has evidently been 
 estranged by his mission from his family. 
 Rather perhaps his family had been estranged 
 
THE FOUNDER OP CHRISTENDOM 35 
 
 from him. There is even a harshness in his 
 reputed language about his mother and his 
 brethren, when they stand without desiring 
 to speak with him. He seems, if not to 
 repudiate the domestic bond, completely to 
 merge it in religious brotherhood. It is diffi- 
 cult to see how the worship of the Virgin and 
 the belief in the Immaculate Conception can 
 survive the record of the son's treatment of 
 the mother, or of her evident ignorance that 
 the son's mission was divine. We expect 
 nothing directly from Jesus on the subject 
 of domestic affection. Yet the reputed day 
 of his birth is the festival of the home ; and 
 so it may fitly be, considering the impulse 
 given by the Founder of Christendom to all 
 pure and gentle affection, apart from any 
 belief in his divinity or in his coming to 
 atone for sin and to redeem the world. 
 
 There were, of course, wide fields of human 
 action to which the peasant prophet of Naza- 
 reth was a total stranger, and to which only 
 the most general principles of his teachings 
 could apply. He was a total stranger to 
 politics y a political quietist, wilHng to render 
 
36 THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 unto Caesar, a foreign power of conquest, the 
 things which were Cassar's, provided Caesar 
 would allow him to render unto God the 
 things that were God's; willing to pay the 
 tribute, abhorred as impious by the Jew ; not 
 shrinking from social intercourse with the 
 detested tax-gatherer. As it turned out, his 
 quietism, transmitted to his Church, ulti- 
 mately proved a key to political power. An 
 emperor found in the Christians not only a 
 predominant sect but the most submissive and 
 obedient of subjects. Political considerations, 
 probably more than his conversion to Chris- 
 tianity or any miracle of the Labarum, led Con- 
 stantine to make Christianity the religion of 
 his Empire. Those words, however, " Render 
 unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and 
 unto God the things that are God's," together 
 with the declaration that the kingdom was not 
 of this world, were profound in their signifi- 
 cance. Had they only been observed, it 
 would have been happy indeed for Christen- 
 dom, and many of the darkest pages would 
 be torn from the book of history. 
 
 Of commerce again, now so mighty an ele- 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 37 
 
 ment of civilization and life, Jesus could see 
 nothing, saving a little transit trade at Caper- 
 naum ; or see only what was revolting to his 
 mind, the traffic of the sellers of cattle and the 
 money changers in the purlieus of the Tem- 
 ple. Whether he saw Tyre and Sidon is 
 doubtful. If he did, it was with the eyes 
 of a Hebrew prophet looking upon them as 
 doomed cities of ungodly wealth. In regard 
 to commerce, as in regard to politics and pub- 
 lic life, we have nothing from him but the 
 most general principles, which are those of a 
 wandering preacher, maintained by the hospi- 
 tality of his hearers, and regarding wealth as 
 a bar against entrance to the kingdom of 
 Heaven. 
 
 Everything that was established the Founder 
 of Christendom took as he found it. His mis- 
 sion was to the spirit, not to the frame of 
 humanity. Not only did he, odious as Phari- 
 saism was to him, recognize the Pharisee as 
 the occupant of Moses' seat, but he enjoined 
 upon his disciples conformity to the Pharisaic 
 observances, while he forbade them to do mor- 
 ally what the Pharisee did. 
 
38 THE FOUKDER OP CHRISTENDOM 
 
 Like John, who bade soldiers be content 
 with their wages and refrain from extortion, 
 Jesus recognized the soldier's trade in the 
 person of the centurion, and in his discourses 
 he uses the imagery of war. It does not fol- 
 low that he approved war or that he did not 
 detest it. Can the clergy of a State Church, 
 when they bless the battle-flag or chant their 
 Te Deum for a victory, perhaps of some power 
 of iniquity, hear the voice of the Founder of 
 Christendom mingling with their choir ? 
 
 Science was but in its germ, even in Greece. 
 Not the slightest breath, even of its spirit, can 
 have reached Jesus. Of the laws of nature 
 he had evidently no conception. What science 
 regards and explains as nature's order, he 
 took for the direct action of a personal God, 
 who numbered the hairs on our heads, pro- 
 vided our bread, anticipated our prayers, and 
 without whose decree no sparrow fell. 
 
 Parables, such as that of the Prodigal 
 Son, that of the sheep strayed and brought 
 back to the fold, that of the good Samaritan, 
 that of the wise and foolish virgins, that of 
 the Pharisee and the Publican, are gems of lit- 
 
THE J'OUNDER OF CHRISTENDOM 39 
 
 erature, and the influence of some of them 
 has been undying. But of the literary world 
 Jesus could see nothing beyond the sacred 
 books of his nation. His saying about the 
 glorious vesture of the lily shows that he had 
 an eye and a heart for beauty. But he can 
 never have seen a statue or a picture, since 
 Jewish iconoclasm prohibited painting and 
 sculpture, at least of the human form. 
 
 Whatever by his love of truth Jesus may 
 have done for science, whatever by his moral 
 purity he may have done for art, the entire 
 field both of science and art was beyond his 
 ken. 
 
 The ideal of Jesus is the kingdom of God 
 or of heaven, on the transcendent blessedness 
 of which, as well as on the conditions and the 
 inestimable value of admission, he constantly 
 dilates, illustrating them by a variety of 
 figures. What was this kingdom ? The 
 ground of the conception, so far as it was 
 terrestrial, probably was a peasant Galilee 
 purged of all social inequalities, of all selfish- 
 ness, of everything but childlike simplicity of 
 heart, pure self-sacrifice, and brotherly love. 
 
40 THE FOUNDER OP CHRISTENDOM 
 
 "Suffer the little children to come unto me, 
 and forbid them not : for of such is the king- 
 dom of God. Yerily I say unto you, Whoso- 
 ever shall not receive the kingdom of God as 
 a little child, he shall not enter therein/' It 
 is not likely that the seer of such a spiritual 
 Paradise had distinctly present to his mental 
 vision the Roman Empire and the great 
 world at large. 
 
 This terrestrial kingdom was to be the 
 believer's portal to everlasting happiness here- 
 after. But apart from the hereafter the 
 preacher may have been opening a kingdom 
 of spiritual happiness here into which all enter 
 who prefer spiritual excellence, the love and 
 service of their kind, to worldly goods, pleas- 
 ures, and advancement. The veil of death he 
 failed to raise. We may not be able to look 
 behind it. But so long as we are his true dis- 
 ciples, we are in the kingdom of God. 
 
 On the mind of Jesus the idea of a kingdom 
 of Heaven gathering into it all good men 
 took such hold that at last he saw its advent 
 and the consummation of all things as near at 
 hand, so near that they would be witnessed 
 
•••::• 
 
 THE FOUNDER OP' CH^lSTEi^tt'ok ';'/' ; . ;41; . 
 
 by some of those who were then listening to 
 his words. This belief in his advent he trans- 
 mitted to his disciples ; it prevailed during the 
 first ages of the Church, affected all relations 
 of life among Christians, sustained martyr- 
 dom, was reluctantly resigned, has from 
 time to time been revived, and is scarcely 
 extinct even now. 
 
 Apart from miracles and such events as the 
 Temptation in the Wilderness or the Trans- 
 figuration, it is impossible to say what concep- 
 tion Jesus may ultimately have formed of his 
 own character and relation to God ; whether 
 he identified himself with the Messiah or 
 even with Deity. Always we must remem- 
 ber that he was a peasant prophet with- 
 out any critical or intellectual environment 
 to temper his aspirations or limit his concep- 
 tions ; while his followers, mingling perhaps 
 with their spiritual hopes that of sitting on 
 twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of 
 Israel, may have been pressing him to show 
 himself the Messiah, reveal his divinity, and 
 put forth his power. Nor can we tell 
 precisely what was the impulse which sent 
 
t r r ' 
 
 42 ,; , j£fi^\ iFOcrKPEfe of Christendom 
 
 him at last to confront the hostile forces of 
 Jewish orthodoxy in their stronghold at Jeru- 
 salem, to declare his character and claims in 
 face of them, and thus to court inevitable 
 death at their hands. 
 
 After the last departure from Galilee to 
 Jerusalem, it would seem almost in quest of 
 martyrdom, there are in the life of Jesus two 
 events of importance, which have not only 
 their theological or ecclesiastical but their 
 historical aspect. One is the Last Supper, 
 an authentic account of which, apart from 
 the narrative in the Gospels, was no doubt 
 received and transmitted by St. Paul. The 
 whole mass of doctrine about the Real Pres- 
 ence and Transubstantiation is in the eye of 
 history excrescence on the sacrament of reli- 
 gious brotherhood and devotion to the Foun- 
 der's ideal which, through all the ages, under 
 many different forms, and in spite of the most 
 miserable perversion, has kept its hold and 
 done its work. 
 
 The other event is the Crucifixion; re- 
 garded by theology as the atoning sacrifice for 
 the sins of the world, by history as the great 
 
THE FOUNDER OF CHillSTEiK:j>Oi*, 43 
 
 martyrdom. The life of the Founder of . 
 Christendom was the first of many lives of- 
 fered up by his disciples, and not by his 
 disciples alone, as sacrifices to freedom of 
 opinion. Unhappily the temper of Annas 
 and Caiaphas or of Pilate was not confined to 
 the murderers of Jesus. His own creed of 
 liberty and mercy was perverted into a war- 
 rant for murders on the other side. Annas, 
 Caiaphas, and Pilate, considering their posi- 
 tion and their environments, must be said to 
 have been eclipsed in guilt, though not in 
 infamy, by men who murdered in the name 
 of Jesus, by Spanish and Roman Inquisitors, 
 by the authors of the massacre of St. Bartholo- 
 mew, by Philip II and Louis XIV. There is 
 nothing more deplorable in history. Religious 
 bigotry, however, has had too great a load of 
 odium to bear. It has comparatively seldom 
 been murderous, except when the priest or the 
 priest-ridden king has been alarmed, not only 
 for his creed, but the priest for his worldly 
 wealth, and the king for his despotic power. 
 The house of Annas and Caiaphas held rich 
 offices, and Pilate represented an Empire. 
 
44 /c i". ;*;apfc rFOCCJjfiDi^ of Christendom 
 
 Now the sun is low on the lake and on the 
 hillside. The peasant hearers break up, pon- 
 dering on what they have heard, and dis- 
 perse to their homes ; while he, the Founder 
 of Christendom, having no home of his own 
 wherein to lay his head, goes to find shelter 
 for the night beneath some disciple's lowly 
 roof. Little did the owner of that roof dream 
 that it was receiving as a guest the genius 
 of nineteen coming centuries ; perhaps of the 
 whole future of humanity, unless the Spiritual 
 as well as the Supernatiu-al is doomed and 
 science is henceforth to reign alone. 
 
ID ^O^dbO 
 
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