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THE CHRIST FROM 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
THE CHRIST FROM 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 A STUDY OF THE GOSPEL BY ST. JOHN 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Rev. henry W. CLARK 
 
 AUTHOR OF "meanings AND METHODS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE " 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 
 1908 
 
r 
 
 V 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 nr^HE object of this book is to show how the 
 A various impressions made by successive 
 sections of John's Gospel coalesce at last into 
 one unified impression — are, as it were, various 
 roads to a common centre for the traveller who 
 is willing to be led. 
 
 The tone passes often into one of persuasion 
 and appeal. There needs no apology for this ; 
 for John himself had a purpose of appeal in 
 every word he wrote. And an intellectual 
 examination of the Gospel — if properly carried 
 out — must lead to a spiritual decision either for 
 or against the spiritual claim it makes. 
 
 Woking, March 1904. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. The Purpose and Method of the Gospel . i 
 
 II. Christ seen as fulfilling the Eternal Inten- 
 tion : The Word made Flesh. (John i. 1-18.) 15 
 
 III. Christ Foreseen : John the Baptist. (John i. 
 
 19-34.) 36 
 
 IV. Christ seen in Contact with Differing 
 
 Human Types : The First Callings. (John i. 
 35-51.) 46 
 
 V, Christ seen as Supreme over Nature : The 
 
 Earliest Miracle. (John ii. i-ii.) . . 57 
 
 VI. Christ SEEN as Authoritative: The Cleansing 
 
 OF THE Temple. (John ii. 13-17.) . . 66 
 
 VII. Christ seen as Preacher of the New Birth : 
 
 Nicodemus. (John ii. 23-iii. 21.) . . . 75 
 
 VIII. Christ seen rousing Self-Knowledge : The 
 
 Samaritan Woman. (John iv. 1-38.) . . 99 
 
 IX. Christ seen calling for a Spiritual Trust: 
 The Nobleman and his Faith. (John iv. 
 43-54.) 109 
 
 X. The Voice of Christ's Consciousness: '*Life 
 
 in Himself." (John v.) . . . .118 
 
viii 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 XI. The Voice of Christ's Consciousness : " The 
 
 Bread of Life." (Johnvi.) . . .130 
 
 XII. The Voice of Christ's Consciousness: Liv- 
 ing Water." (Johnvii.) . . .143 
 
 XIII. The Voice of Christ's Consciousness: **The 
 
 Light of the World." (John viii., ix.) . 154 
 
 XIV. The Voice of Christ's Consciousness: "The 
 
 Good Shepherd." (John x. 1-18.) . . 172 
 
 XV. Christ seen under the Shadow of Death, 
 
 (John xi., xii.) ..... 182 
 
 XVI. Christ seen as Concealing and Revealing 
 Himself: The Beginning of the End. 
 (Johnxiii.) . . . . .196 
 
 XVII. Christ seen in the Upper Room. (John 
 
 xiv.-xvii.). ..... 205 
 
 XVIII. Christ seen at the End and at the New 
 
 Beginning. (John xviii.-xxi.) , . .215 
 
THE CHRIST FROM 
 WITHOUT AND WITHIN 
 
 — * — 
 I. 
 
 THE PURPOSE AND METHOD OF 
 THE GOSPEL. 
 
 IF John's Gospel is to be rightly understood, 
 and the success rightly estimated with 
 which it achieves the object behind the writing, 
 the reader must, so far as possible, set himself at 
 John's point of view, and must judge the Gospel 
 by the standard to which the evangelist himself 
 worked. How far the book goes in the direction 
 of proving its author's case can only be determined 
 by a student who, through all his attentive 
 reading, preserves within him a true memory of 
 the proposition which is to stand or fall. Exact 
 I 
 
2 THE PURPOSE AND METHOD 
 
 comprehension of, and close grasp upon, the 
 doctrine in John's mind, are indispensable to us if 
 we are going to test the degree in which John's 
 argument carries weight ; and the writer would be 
 entitled to complain of unfair dealing on our part, 
 did we either praise his work as sustaining a 
 theory he never meant it to prove, or condemn it 
 as insufficient to bear a conclusion he did not 
 intend it to support. The test we apply to the 
 Gospel's facts and suggestions must, if it is to 
 have value, be identical with John's own. 
 
 Towards the end of his Gospel John gives a 
 definite statement of the purpose which has been 
 his guiding star. " These are written, that ye 
 may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of 
 God ; and that believing ye may have life in 
 his name." Yet it is possible to read even an 
 announcement so clear as this without fully 
 appreciating its content, and without, therefore, 
 being able to put it to its right use as the touch- 
 stone of the whole book's success. It is not a fair 
 — or at any rate not an exhaustive — paraphrase of 
 the statement to say that John's Gospel is written 
 
OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 3 
 
 in defence of the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, 
 and in order that certain results may follow in our 
 experience upon an intellectual acceptance of it : 
 each outstanding point of the sentence carries a 
 significance beyond that which first appears ; and 
 we must interpret the words " believe," " Son of 
 God," " have life in his name," as John interpreted 
 them — or at least be receptive to the fact that John 
 employed these words with a meaning over and 
 above their first simplicity — before we can even 
 understand what the writer would be at. 
 
 Yet it is of course equally true to say that the 
 full significance of the declaration can only be 
 apprehended after the Gospel has been read ; and 
 the fact that the evangelist places this succinct 
 summary of the intentions which have swayed him 
 practically at the close, rather than at the be- 
 ginning, of his work seems to indicate that he 
 himself viewed the matter so. The Gospel needs 
 to be studied in the light of this declaration, and 
 yet the declaration can be fully apprehended only 
 in the Gospel's light — how are we to escape from 
 the circle to which we thus appear condemned ? 
 
 This much, it may be said in reply, we can 
 
4 THE PURPOSE AND METHOD 
 
 gather at once from John's brief concluding ex- 
 planation of what his aims have been, and this 
 much we may take back with us to the reading of 
 his book (leaving the complete understanding of 
 his final summary to dawn upon us when it will) as 
 a lamp which will go far to light us through page 
 after page. If we give due weight to the final 
 clause of the evangelist's summarising statement 
 — " and that believing ye may have life in his 
 name" — the inference emerges that in the 
 divineness of Jesus John held a new force (not 
 merely a new revelation^ but a new force^ in the 
 strict and scientifically limited meaning of the 
 term) to have thrown itself among the forces 
 acting upon the experience of men. On those 
 who believe — whatever the precise attitude of 
 mind and heart indicated by that word may be — 
 the divine life in Jesus works in such wise as to 
 communicate itself to them. Christ possessed a 
 life which was able to repeat itself — a life which 
 could generate life — in those who gave it oppor- 
 tunity and room ; and this creativeness, being the 
 prerogative of God, shows Christ to have been 
 God's Son. That is John's case. His aim is to 
 
OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 5 
 
 demonstrate that in this Jesus of whom he writes 
 there dwells an active, energising power such 
 as has never visited the world before : it is not 
 merely the appearance of a self-contained super- 
 natural phenomenon that he speaks of : he would 
 bring his readers, not only to acknowledge the 
 presence of something marvellous in this Jesus, 
 but the emergence of something marvellous from 
 Him, operating upon human experience to touch 
 it to issues not hitherto included in its range ; and 
 in his Gospel John advances no speculative theory 
 accompanied by reasonings which, it is hoped, will 
 tend to demonstrate its truth, but seeks, from 
 the manifestations of indwelling power which the 
 history of Jesus affords, to lead students of the 
 history to yield themselves to that power in their 
 turn. " Here is a new force revealed — will you 
 not open your hearts that it may do there the 
 work my pages show it as being able to do ? " 
 
 John, in brief, is not so much the philosopher 
 (despite the admitted fact that his Gospel is in 
 its fundamental idea philosophic above the rest) 
 as he is the discoverer and announcer of a new 
 force which in the earthly years of Jesus alighted 
 
6 THE PURPOSE AND METHOD 
 
 in the midst of men. He adopts, and wishes his 
 readers to adopt, the inductive method. Here is 
 a power operating in this way, and in this, and in 
 this — what is the doctrine about it which combines 
 the distinctive and essential features of all the 
 results it brings to pass ? By what name shall 
 this force be clearly marked off from all the other 
 forces we know ? Jesus, not simply as divine in 
 Himself, but as the divine life communicating 
 itself to the common life of man, the divine life 
 thrusting itself upon human experience and human 
 hearts to transform them — that is the conception 
 to which this writer desires his readers to attain 
 when their reading is done. And the question 
 which the student of to-day must propound to 
 himself as he passes into John's company is this, 
 What manner of force can that be which, 
 working upon the material presented to it by man 
 himself and by the world in which man lived, pro- 
 duced effects such as those here set down ? " For 
 that is the question to which John offers a reply. 
 
 The distinction between Jesus as divine in 
 Himself, and Jesus as divineness acting upon, 
 communicating itself to, human character till 
 
OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 7 
 
 human character is in measure tuned to divine 
 pitch, transfused with the divineness which acts 
 upon it, is a distinction entirely essential to a 
 comprehension of John's Gospel — entirely essen- 
 tial, indeed, it is not too much to say, to any 
 Christian experience that is to be in any wise 
 profound. Certainly it was not John's intention 
 simply to add to the sum of human knowledge 
 a knowledge of the fact that something surpass- 
 ingly wonderful had flashed across the horizon 
 of human view. And, in fact, it needs scarce 
 any consideration to perceive that if this were 
 all that is to be said about the divineness of 
 Christ, a recognition of it would leave the 
 essential problem of human character much 
 what it was before. This Jesus may have said 
 certain things and done certain things which 
 show Him to have had His origin outside our 
 earth : the sources whence spring the average 
 types of human life — even the sources whence 
 the grand and heroic types of human life emerge 
 — may be admittedly insufficient to produce such 
 a life as this ; but the mere appearance of a life 
 isolated, in its divine origination, from the ordinary 
 
8 THE PURPOSE AND METHOD 
 
 lives of men leaves those ordinary lives to climb 
 and raise themselves as they did before. A 
 supernatural revelation which is nothing more 
 would have the dynamic quality only in very 
 small degree. Men might be encouraged by the 
 spoken word, drawn by the revealed ideal ; but 
 the old problems would face them still. Not 
 until the divineness in Jesus is viewed as actually 
 creative — as entering into, reproducing itself 
 within, those who are willing to admit it, does 
 even a divine Jesus change for us the problem 
 of character and the method by which it is to be 
 solved. To employ and submit to a force is a 
 different thing from being stirred by a miracle or 
 kindled by new ideas. Christ as divine in Him- 
 self is but a miracle on which through the ages 
 human eyes look back with wonder : Christ as 
 a creative divine life, as a divine force which for 
 the first time sets itself at the disposal of men in 
 their spiritual strife, changes, wholly and hope- 
 fully, the spiritual programme and the spiritual 
 prospect of men. And it is to the point of con- 
 ceiving and receiving Him so that John would 
 have his readers be led. 
 
OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 9 
 
 We shall be prepared, if this be understood, to 
 find John's purpose influencing the character of 
 his argument, and giving a particular tone and 
 colour to all the process of his thought and word. 
 The presence of an active force is not proved 
 through logical syllogisms : it is nothing to the 
 point to say that this Gospel affords no reasoned 
 demonstration — starting from universally accepted 
 premises, and reaching at last to a conclusion 
 irresistible by the mind — of the divineness of 
 Jesus Christ : John's business is not the logical 
 unfolding of what certain admitted general 
 principles contain. The complaint that such 
 an unfolding is not provided is really what 
 lies behind many refusals, made confessedly on 
 philosophic grounds, to recognise Christ as " the 
 Son of God." But purely logical demonstration 
 can find no place in this field. It is not by pure 
 logic that men are brought to believe in the 
 presence and activity of force. A force proves 
 its presence by producing its appropriate effects ; 
 and the only exercise the mind can have to 
 perform in such matters as these is to reason 
 back from the character of the effects to the 
 
lo THE PURPOSE AND METHOD 
 
 character of the force behind them. We perceive 
 certain things, and conclude that electricity is at 
 work : we feel certain things, and they amply 
 demonstrate to us that heat is there : in some 
 fashion results announce themselves, and we 
 know what cause is passing by : we start, in fact, 
 not with a priori reasonings, but with that which 
 the eye can see and the hands can handle; and 
 the purely logical faculty, working as it does in 
 the abstract realms, could never establish the 
 actual existence of a concrete and energising 
 force. In this field, the effect is the premiss. 
 Of course, reason may go on to show how, within 
 a universe ordered in all things and sure, such a 
 power as that whose presence we have been led 
 to suspect may well find a home. How the 
 working of such a power is entirely in harmony 
 with a philosophically satisfactory and complete 
 scheme of things may be made clear, to the 
 further confirming of a new-born faith. But this 
 is not included in John's plan, although the 
 prologue to his Gospel gives sufficient token that 
 on this point, also, his conviction was firm. The 
 first and primary operation of the mind, as some 
 
OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 II 
 
 power strikes into its field of vision, is to gather 
 the nature of the power at work from the nature 
 of the seen results. To demonstrate that the 
 power is there, the demonstrator must bid his 
 hearers attend to what the power has wrought : 
 the hearers' minds, then, must take or refuse the 
 last step. John's whole dealing with his readers 
 is the definite recording of definite things ac- 
 complished by the force which dwelt in Jesus 
 Christ. His pages can only carry, not syllogisms 
 and arguments and logical proofs piled high until 
 the mind is compelled to say " Amen," but 
 concrete signs which indicate that out of this 
 Christ some power was reaching forth to touch 
 the world. And from the consideration of these 
 signs, from the uniform character which amid all 
 their variety they bore, from the unique impress 
 stamped upon every one, John hoped that those 
 who read would be brought to call this Christ- 
 force the very creative life of God. 
 
 It is in the same line of things to say that the 
 final certainty of Christ's divineness is attained 
 by the way of experience. If Christ's divineness 
 
12 THE PURPOSE AND METHOD 
 
 means, as we have seen that for John it did 
 mean, not only that Christ was from above, but 
 that the force of divine creativeness was in Him, 
 it cannot be otherwise than by experience that 
 the supreme demonstration of His divineness 
 comes home. With forces it is always so. The 
 material forces of the world are proved for us by 
 our experience of them in the particular sense 
 to which they make their appeal. This divine 
 creativeness of Christ is proved for us when 
 through the whole range of life (since the appeal 
 of such a force can have no narrower object than 
 that) it has done its creative work. There is 
 nothing to be ashamed of in the fact — though 
 by those who do not grasp the essentials of the 
 problem it be made a reproach — that we hold 
 Christ to be the Son of God because we have 
 experienced Him to be so. To base our con- 
 viction upon the foundation of experience is 
 in no wise to be carried away by a shallow 
 emotionalism, and is, in very deed, an indication 
 of the perfect sanity of our faith. Our belief in 
 the divineness of Jesus Christ ranks thus with 
 our belief in all other forces that sweep the world. 
 
OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 13 
 
 The sense that Christ's divine creativeness has 
 touched us is the last confirmation of the belief 
 that He is divine. And John's presentation of 
 effects which this force has wrought can only be 
 the preface to an experience wherein it repeats 
 all the wonders of old. He can but show us what 
 the power has performed in order that his doctrine 
 concerning its nature may have its greatest vindi- 
 cation for us when we submit to its sway. 
 
 It is for a cumulative process of thought and 
 suggestion that we must look. It is not from a 
 first manifestation of energising power, nor from 
 a second or a third — but from the combined 
 testimony of the three — that we arrive at 
 certainty as to the force which has produced 
 them all. What John undertakes is a survey of 
 a certain field of history — a field broad enough, 
 and on a scale amply large, to permit of a safe 
 generalisation as to what lay back of the recorded 
 events. And the mind must wait for the develop- 
 ment, patient while the separate threads weave 
 themselves into one firm strand, allowing time 
 for the impression to grow. It must be driven 
 
14 PURPOSE AND METHOD OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 to its definition of this power at last by the 
 impossibility of finding any other definition that 
 gives consistency to the manifested results. Here 
 is no sudden elevation to the summit of a firm 
 and convinced belief. Here is rather a long 
 climb up a gradual slope — the climber turning 
 at the end, to be surprised at the altitude he 
 has reached. And not only is it a cumulative 
 argument for which we are to be prepared — an 
 argument whose strength lies in the combination 
 of all its elements, and whose full strength, there- 
 fore, is not to be appreciated till all the elements are 
 given — but even for some records whose relevance 
 to the main purpose of the writer is not immediately 
 clear. These, too, will obtain and reveal their 
 significance when the process is complete. If some 
 of the incidents standing on the page seem to 
 strike notes that contribute little or nothing to the 
 music which this evangelist wants to make us hear, 
 we shall find at length that all is harmony after all. 
 
 So we turn to the things that are written, 
 that we may see what force has worked itself 
 into the effects these pages record. 
 
II. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING THE 
 ETERNAL INTENTION: THE WORD 
 MADE FLESH. 
 
 F the four Gospels, John's is the only one 
 
 which sets out with a theory to be sup- 
 ported by the narrative to come. The other 
 evangelists recapitulate the facts of Christ's life, 
 or a portion of them, simply — one might say — 
 from the historian's point of view : one by one 
 the incidents are detailed, the discourses reported, 
 each incident and each discourse being taken as 
 practically an isolated thing ; and while it is of 
 course impossible to tell the story of Christ 
 without suggesting certain doctrines and in- 
 ferences, the writers leave it at that, allowing 
 the doctrines to emerge out of the story as they 
 
 John i. 1-18. 
 
i6 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 may, not at all arranging the story to support the 
 doctrines. With John's Gospel the case stands 
 differently altogether. His doctrine, his theory, 
 is clear in his mind before his pen begins to 
 move. He possesses, indeed, more even than 
 what would be commonly understood by a 
 doctrine about Christ : he possesses what one 
 might term a whole system of philosophy whereof 
 Christ is the culminating point and wherein Christ 
 is the supreme figure ; and this prologue to his 
 Gospel, as contained in the first eighteen verses, 
 indicates what it is. In these verses he sets forth 
 the theory about Christ which his future writing 
 is to illustrate : they form the text, as it were, 
 of which the following Gospel is the expanded 
 discourse. Towards the end of the book, when 
 nearly all the tale has been told, John sums up 
 again, in briefer form, the thesis to which he has 
 devoted his labour ; and, as we have seen, this is 
 the summary he then constructs, " Many other 
 signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the 
 disciples, which are not written in this book : but 
 these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus 
 is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 17 
 
 ye may have life in his name." He has been 
 selecting, that is to say, those " signs " of word 
 and deed on the part of Jesus which went 
 specially to uphold the doctrine that " Jesus is the 
 Christ, the Son of God," and which would lead 
 men to submit themselves to the divine life in 
 Him ; and other signs, numerous and essentially 
 arresting as they might be, which did not so 
 directly tend to that, he has passed by. His 
 Gospel has been written with the set purpose 
 of throwing the divineness of Christ — in the full 
 sense our previous chapter set upon the phrase — 
 and His relation as Son to God the Father, into 
 bold relief before the reader's eye. With careful 
 discrimination John has chosen out the incidents 
 in the life of Jesus which, as the reader appre- 
 hends them, will repeatedly constrain him to say, 
 " Here is the divineness in this Jesus revealing 
 itself once more. This Jesus must be the Christ, 
 the Son of God." 
 
 This prologue contains in fuller — one might 
 say, in more philosophical — form, the doctrine 
 about Christ which John sets into briefer expres- 
 sion at his Gospel's close. " I am going to write " 
 2 
 
i8 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 (so we may paraphrase it) " of One who is the 
 Word of God." Word, speech, is of course the 
 most direct and immediate revelation of him who 
 employs it, springing straight out of what, at the 
 moment of the speaking, the speaker is : speech 
 is our quickest, readiest, surest method of ex- 
 pressing ourselves when the necessity for self 
 expression arises. There is nothing that can 
 come between us and the word whereby we re- 
 veal what we are. Outside circumstances, unless 
 of course superior physical force silences us 
 altogether, have no influence that can spoil or 
 interfere with the connection between that which 
 is in us and the utterance in which it is embodied. 
 It is in our word that the inmost nature of us 
 comes to its birth for the world beyond. So 
 Christ is the direct, immediate method by which 
 God utters Himself. God puts Himself into 
 Christ as we put ourselves into speech. What 
 is in Christ springs straight out of what is in 
 God, as the speaker's word springs straight out 
 of what the speaker is. He is the Word of 
 God. 
 
 But John has larger thoughts even than that — 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 
 
 if larger thoughts than that be possible — crowding 
 into his mind as he frames this philosophy of his, 
 previous to beginning the actual story he has 
 to tell. Christ is the Word ; and the intention 
 which dwelt in the mind of God from all eternity 
 was that this great Word should be spoken and 
 this expression of the divine life should be made ; 
 and all the activities of creation, all the processes 
 through which the world came to be what it is, 
 looked on to, were only the preface to, that 
 utterance of the Christ- Word : for " all things 
 were made through him " — made with a view 
 to His coming and His earthly day. That was 
 what God held ever-present : " the same was in 
 the beginning with God." And not only so, but 
 it was God's ordaining and God's will that man 
 should reach to his true and best life only through 
 union with the divine life as it expressed itself in 
 the Christ- Word : " in him was life ; and the life 
 was the light of men " : clearly revealed in Him 
 was that which man in his imperfection needed 
 if he was to be made complete. Christ was not 
 only the revelation of the divine life, the Word 
 which told the divine life, but He was the 
 
20 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 bestower of perfect life upon man, whose life was 
 imperfect still He is the life and light of man — 
 the light, because man discerns, beside the Christ, 
 how it is the Christ's fulness of life he needs must 
 have, sees flashed out upon him a revelation of 
 what life should be — the life, because from Christ 
 life passes to those who will take it at His offer. 
 And so, as we saw, John, at his Gospel's close, 
 declares his purpose to have been, not only to 
 make his readers believe that Jesus is the Son of 
 God, possessor of the divine life, but to bring 
 them, through their believing, to possess life 
 themselves. " These are written, that ye may 
 believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; 
 and that believing ye may have life in his 
 name." 
 
 It is upon a vast sea of thought that John 
 has thus launched himself and his readers before 
 the story of Christ's human life begins. Christ 
 is to be taken as the expression of the divine life, 
 as the coming of the divine life to birth visibly 
 before the eyes of men ; and this coming of the 
 divine life to the world in Christ was the thing 
 for which the world had been made and to which 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 21 
 
 history had been tending, and which man — quite 
 apart, it must be noted, from any question of sin 
 at all : John has not touched that matter yet — 
 which man needed if in the fullest sense of the 
 word he was to live indeed. It is not (and I 
 think that, if this be realised, our relationship to 
 Christ, sweet as in any case it is, becomes sweeter 
 still, and the whole Christian gospel, wondrous as 
 in any conception of it it must always be, takes 
 on a wondrousness more inexpressible yet) — it is 
 not only our sin that has made us require Christ : 
 had the human heart never turned itself to the 
 love of things which are unworthy of its love, had 
 the human will never taken wrong decisions to 
 the impairing of its power and to the perverting 
 of all the activities the will inspires — still, apart 
 from Christ, man could never have risen to his 
 best, could never have entered into possession of 
 that life of God which can alone fill his nature ; 
 and even if man had not fallen so low that only 
 a Christ can redeem him out of his lowness, he 
 would still have had dizzy heights of divine per- 
 fection above him to which only a Christ can 
 draw him up. In Him, in Christ, and only in 
 
22 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 Him, was and is life. The absoluteness of the 
 statement requires us to believe that without 
 Him — leaving the question of sin wholly out 
 of the reckoning — we could have possessed no 
 more than the beginnings of life, dim aspirings 
 after life which would have served but to torment 
 our helpless souls. From the beginning it was 
 ordained that with God's utterance of His Word 
 in Christ the day of perfect life for man should 
 dawn. So, I say, was it ordained to be, and so, 
 as we set ourselves close to Christ, do we re- 
 cognise that it is : He kindles the light wherein 
 we see ourselves and see Him ; and, as He 
 becomes to us the light, we understand how He 
 must become to us the life. In Him is life, and 
 the life is the light of men. 
 
 Objection is sometimes taken to the idea that, 
 even under a normal course of human develop- 
 ment — a course undisturbed by the intrusion of 
 sin — Christ would still have been the source out 
 of which that development would have obtained 
 its final completion, on the ground that by the 
 adoption of that idea some subtraction is made 
 from the honour due to the sacrifice of Christ's 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 23 
 
 Cross.-^ The Cross is no more the entirely 
 exceptional thing it was, and stands out less 
 prominently as a testimony to redemptive love, 
 if it be held that anything else than the sin of 
 man brought Christ to earth. If Christ's descent 
 to the level of man, and Christ's relating of 
 Himself to man and of man to Himself, be, so 
 to say, in the natural line of things, the wondrous 
 glow is dimmed on Calvary. I confess I can see 
 no force in the plea. Surely it is enough to say, 
 in reply, that belief in the inevitableness of Christ 
 — if the phrase may stand — leaves untouched and 
 undiminished all the wonder of that love which, 
 when the world's sin had made the Cross in- 
 evitable too, did not shrink. It is not a smaller 
 miracle of grace that God, having purposed to 
 send His Son for the perfecting of the life of 
 man, should still fulfil His first purpose although 
 man's transgression had thrust the Cross among 
 the burdens to be borne in its fulfilment, than 
 that God should frame a new purpose of sending 
 His Son because the appearance of man's trans- 
 
 ^ This appears to be the burden of Dr. Denney's objection. See 
 The Death of Chist, p. 209 sqq. 
 
24 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 gression so required. On the one view as on 
 the other, Calvary stands as the witness to God's 
 changeless love. Indeed, on the suggested view 
 that Christ would in any wise have been the 
 fulfilment of human life, the wonder of Calvary 
 looms larger rather than recedes. Since man has 
 sinned, man's redemption must be begun — is the 
 conception which lies beneath the opinion that sin 
 alone called Christ to earth. Though man has 
 sinned, man's purposed redemption into fulness 
 of life must nevertheless be consummated, even 
 if its consummation necessitates the giving of 
 the Son to death as well as to life — is the con- 
 ception which lies beneath the view suggested 
 here. And herein is certainly no dishonour 
 either to the tenderness of God or to the 
 marvellous wonder of the Cross whereon the 
 Saviour died. The Cross, interposed in the 
 Father's ordained design (although of course all 
 these phrases must be qualified by a due re- 
 cognition of a foreknowledge in God wherein 
 all human history was wrapped from the begin- 
 ning), may drive us to our knees in adoration 
 no less than a Cross which is the sign of a 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 25 
 
 new redemptive process supplanting the old. A 
 love which, spite of all the obstacles of sin, 
 clung to and carried through its first Will, is as 
 constraining as a love new-born. 
 
 If we may anticipate in part what will become 
 clearer as the study of John's pages passes on, 
 it may be said also that whenever the voice of 
 Christ's self-consciousness is heard, there rings 
 in it the sense that His mission to man was a 
 mission which, however sin may have changed 
 some of its accompaniments, would, according 
 to the first constitution of things, have been per- 
 formed. When, for instance, Christ speaks of 
 Himself as the bread of life, the very form of 
 the statement shuts away any idea of His self- 
 communication having been necessitated by sin 
 alone. The suggested relationship is too intimate 
 and fundamental — too much grounded in the 
 nature of things — to have been, so to say, lately 
 adopted. And through many other utterances 
 of Christ's the same conviction looks out upon 
 us, though at first its glance be not recognised or 
 felt. When Christ declared Himself to be the 
 Way, the Truth, and the Life, does not the second 
 
26 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 title of the three claimed send our thought along 
 the indicated line? Christ is the way to the 
 Father ; but He is more than that. He is the 
 truth of God, the changelessness of God, fulfilling 
 itself. There are " ways " which are not realised 
 as being the " truth " — ways of accomplishing 
 something which we adopt because the sudden 
 arising of special circumstances compels it, but 
 which are not in harmony, we know, with the 
 essential truth and order of things, and which, if 
 life had been perfectly ordered, would have found 
 no place. They serve our turn, but it would 
 have been better if there had been no call for 
 their use. This method of meeting the need of 
 the moment may be the " way " for the time 
 being ; but it is not the " truth " — a perfect 
 management of matters would have dispensed 
 with it. The second of Christ's asserted titles 
 closes the door against any such conception here. 
 He is no suddenly devised expedient to meet a 
 special need — an expedient for which, had the 
 world been what it ought to be, there would 
 have been no call. But " I am the truth " — in 
 finding their way to God through Me, men are 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 27 
 
 finding it as God always meant them to find it. 
 In His sending of Me the Father is true to 
 His own eternal thought. And to that idea 
 our thoughts about Christ need to cling. That 
 through the sinfulness of man Christ's ministry 
 in bringing man to God was different far from 
 what in a sinless world His ministry would have 
 been, is of course not denied : it was sin which 
 laid on Him His cross, sin which smote His heart 
 with pain, sin which surrounded His gracious 
 working with many a hindering prejudice and 
 many a cruel opposition, sin which round the 
 brow that should have worn a diadem wove thorns ; 
 but even a sinless humanity, if such a thing had 
 been, would have fulfilled its destiny in God the 
 Father only by means of God the Son ; and, the 
 question of sin wholly apart, it was the Father's 
 good pleasure that in the Son should all the 
 fulness dwell, and that through the Christ should 
 there be a gathering together of all. From the 
 beginning the Christ was, as it were, built into 
 the Father's scheme. Sin deepened, but did not 
 make, man's need of Him. And it is no idle 
 and profitless speculation, but a real intensifying 
 
28 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 of the sweetness of discipleship, to believe that 
 even if Christ had not needed to come as Jesus 
 to save His people from their sins, He would 
 still have made our world glorious as Emmanuel, 
 God with us. In Him God does what He always 
 intended to do. 
 
 So, coming back to our Gospel's present page, 
 we may take John as holding that from all 
 eternity this Christ of whom he is about to 
 tell was predestined to be the life and light of 
 men. As man relates himself to Christ, man's 
 life enters into the home prepared for it of old. 
 Viewing things almost from the standpoint of 
 the Eternal Himself (if one may say so) John 
 beholds God putting His own life into the Christ, 
 and through the Christ into man. 
 
 Suddenly now, as if on these heights the air 
 were becoming too keen and rare, John drops 
 down to speak of things as from the standpoint 
 of man. This Christ, bearing in Him the divine 
 life in which man was intended to find his life, 
 came down to earth : it is the story of His com- 
 ing the evangelist is going to tell. Well, what 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 29 
 
 actually happened when He came ? What sort 
 of a story will it be ? A story of conflict, certainly 
 — for " the light shineth in the darkness." " I 
 shall have to tell how the dark passions of the 
 human heart stirred themselves in resistance to 
 this light and this life — how man, who should 
 have taken life from this Christ, refused to live." 
 And yet, though it be a story of conflict, it will 
 be a story, too, leading to a triumphant end. 
 " And the light shineth in the darkness ; and 
 the darkness overcame it not." ^ It was the light 
 which triumphed after all, although it had to 
 struggle against the darkness of the world. There 
 will be opposition to tell of, and awful bitterness 
 of hatred which set up a cross at last ; but then 
 a Resurrection at the end. " The darkness over- 
 came it not." So, as he plunges into the story 
 which has the gloom of conflict upon it, does John 
 look through as it were to the tunnel's further 
 end, and feel sure that he will come out into 
 the blaze of day when his journey is done. Dark- 
 ness for a while ; but it was after all the light that 
 overcame. 
 
 ^ Ver. 5, margin. 
 
30 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 Still, the darkness fought hard against the 
 light, even though it fought in vain. And thus it 
 should not have been : this opposition of man to 
 the Christ should never have declared itself ; for 
 the world had reached just to that point at which 
 it ought to have recognised and leapt out to greet 
 the light and life in Christ. For there came a 
 man — sent from God, certainly, but still a man — 
 John the Baptist, who came to bear witness to 
 the One greater than he : thus far, at any rate, 
 under the divine guidance, manhood had attained 
 — to the power of recognising and bearing witness 
 to the presence with it of the life whereof it stood so 
 sorely in need ; and still, spite of the recognition 
 and the witness, manhood rejected the life. 
 
 It is not difficult, and it is moving, to grasp 
 the salient point of the evangelist's thought. In 
 this Christ was the life of men prepared and 
 waiting for them from all eternity : men had 
 reached to the point at which they were prepared 
 and waiting for the Christ ; and yet, though 
 Christ was waiting for man and man was waiting 
 for Christ, it is of conflict, and not of happy union, 
 between the two, whereof the evangelist's pen 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 31 
 
 must write. Christ ready for man, and man 
 ready for Christ, so that man might in very deed 
 and truth be called Christ's ozvn ; but " he came 
 unto his own, and they that were his own 
 received him not." Poor world — so John appears 
 to weep his heart out over it — ^poor world, to which 
 the Christ had come so near, which in its Baptist 
 had come so near to the Christ ! So near, and 
 yet you received Him not — what a pitiful tale 
 is this I have to set down ! The divine life 
 moved down to you, and you moved so near to 
 the divine life ; and then you did not choose to 
 live. All was ready. God had waited through 
 His eternities for this hour to strike : the world 
 had pressed on through its history toward the 
 dawning of this day: there needed now, at this 
 supreme moment, only the last touch of responsive- 
 ness from you to make all things blest and right ; 
 and that you withheld. Some there were who, 
 in better mood and with truer wisdom, realised 
 that here was their redemption come, and deter- 
 mined that not in vain should it be offered ; and 
 for these open-hearted ones life was crowned 
 indeed. " As many as received him, to them 
 
32 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 gave he the right to become children of God." 
 But, looking at the whole record which has now 
 to be set down, it can but be summarised in the 
 mournful wail that " he came unto his own, and 
 they that were his own received him not." 
 
 Excuse for the rejection of the Christ by those 
 that were His own, John is unable to find. One 
 seems to see how he has asked himself the 
 question, " Is there anything to be said for 
 them, any plea to be advanced on their behalf, 
 through which their offence grows less? In 
 arrest of judgment, what can they advance ? " 
 And he has seen how, so far from anything miti- 
 gating their fault, everything makes its black- 
 ness and its ugliness more pronounced. Was it 
 a profound mystery they were asked to explore, 
 wherein their minds might easily come to mis- 
 taken conclusions? Or was a call made upon 
 their imagination, their reasoning powers, upon 
 anything which some possess and others lack, and 
 for the non-possession of which no blame could 
 be theirs ? Nay. They had but to look and see. 
 For " the Word became flesh, and dwelt among 
 us." " We beheld his glory, glory as of the only 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 
 
 begotten from the Father." It was a thing about 
 which no sane man ought to have made any 
 mistake. The divineness in the Christ was so 
 clear that they who did not see it must have 
 blinded their eyes. John does not mean, of 
 course, that all who saw or learnt the facts of 
 Christ's human existence ought at once to have 
 sprung to a philosophic theory of His divine- 
 ness, or become able to reduce Him to formu- 
 lated doctrines and set terms ; but this much at 
 least should have won their flashing recognition 
 straightway, that here was a life and a power of 
 a quality this earth did not know. Whatever else 
 may have been unsettled about Him, as to this 
 at least no doubt could be, save for those who 
 refused to believe, that He was " full of grace and 
 truth." 
 
 To close his preface, John turns away from 
 that conflict which has saddened him so as he 
 has recalled it, and lays close to his mind and 
 heart once again the great theme to which he 
 is going to devote his work. The light had to 
 struggle against darkness : the Christ came, and 
 3 
 
34 CHRIST SEEN AS FULFILLING 
 
 they that were His own received Him not ; but 
 still, this great truth remains — let me forget (he 
 appears to say) all about man's oppositions for a 
 moment as I set down the great truth once more 
 — that " no man hath seen God at any time," but 
 that " the only begotten Son, which is in the 
 bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." 
 And I think that as John wrote the words, that 
 hope grew in him which at the end of his Gospel 
 he expresses again — the hope that by what he 
 wrote something of the opposition might be con- 
 quered, and some might be brought to see how in 
 this Son the Father had been declared indeed, 
 how in this Christ the divine life had indeed been 
 revealed to and bestowed upon man. 
 
 Across these introductory verses of the Gospel 
 the lesson is writ large for all time — that every 
 coming of the Christ to the individual soul is such a 
 coming as that coming to the world of which the 
 evangelist tells — the coming of One who is pre- 
 pared and waiting for our life, of One for whom 
 our life is prepared and waiting, of One whose life- 
 giving divineness is so clear that He must be 
 
THE ETERNAL INTENTION 
 
 recognised as God's revelation of Himself to the 
 world. In so far as we hold ourselves back from 
 a communion with Christ perfect and complete as 
 we can make it, something in us must die ; for He 
 in His fulness of life is ready for us, and we in our 
 need of life are so pathetically ready for Him. 
 Now and unceasingly, the hour strikes afresh for 
 our souls to achieve their destiny in Christ. It is 
 the supreme business of every soul to see that 
 at not a single striking of that hour shall it be 
 possible to say, in regard to its relationship with 
 the appealing Christ, that the Christ came unto 
 His own, and His own received Him not. 
 
III. 
 
 CHRIST FORESEEN: JOHN THE 
 BAPTIST. 
 
 John i. 19-34. 
 
 HAVING reached thus the close of the 
 introduction to his Gospel, John turns 
 himself, or is just on the point of turning himself, 
 to the actual history of the life-giving Christ, and 
 stands ready to launch his readers forth upon the 
 marvellous tale. He has stated his case, so to 
 say ; and his case is that this Christ, of whom he 
 is going to speak, is the Son of God, the Giver of 
 life to men ; and he is prepared, now, to marshal 
 the facts of this Christ's human life, and to show 
 how in those facts the case, as he has stated it, finds 
 its support and its proof. With his readers, the 
 evangelist stands looking clear ahead into the space 
 
 through which they are to take their long flight. 
 
 36 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST 
 
 37 
 
 Yet even now, something arrests him for a few 
 moments as he is eager to start off upon his re- 
 cital : a newly-remembered thought lays its hand 
 upon him and bids him pause. The Christ came 
 to bestow the true life ; but the hearts of men 
 were already filled with a life which was not the 
 true ; and they needed to be recalled from the life 
 they possessed, to be emptied of the life which 
 possessed them, before they could be receptive 
 toward the true life Christ brought. And there- 
 fore John lingers for a few verses upon the great 
 missionary who performed this preparatory work — 
 the missionary who, great as he was and great as 
 his enterprise may have been, was but the herald 
 of One greater than himself, of One destined to 
 a greater and more truly redemptive ministry to 
 the world. John the Evangelist sets, as with a 
 few bold strokes, the picture of John the Baptist 
 clear before our eyes. 
 
 John the Baptist is an arresting figure. The 
 outstanding characteristic in the man himself (as 
 distinguished from his message) was of course the 
 utter humility which enveloped him, his pervading 
 
38 
 
 CHRIST FORESEEN 
 
 consciousness that, although he was the first in 
 time, he was but the second in rank and place, 
 and his persistent resolve that no one should take 
 him for other than he was. Something pathetic 
 — I always think there is — in the figure of this 
 giant-man. Crowds flocking to him, obdurate 
 hearts melting at his word, multitudes looking up 
 to him as to the only divine messenger they had 
 ever acknowledged — and he holds them all at 
 arm's length. " I am the voice " (only the voice) 
 " of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight 
 the way of the Lord." " In the midst of you 
 standeth one whom ye know not, even he that 
 Cometh after me, the latchet of whose shoe I am 
 not worthy to unloose." It used to be a saying in 
 the Jewish schools that a scholar should be willing 
 to do his teacher any service, except the unloosing 
 of his sandaL That was an office so menial that 
 not even a master, honoured as he might be, had 
 a right to expect its rendering. But this man, 
 towering up as he did in his moral greatness 
 entitled, if any one could be entitled, to some- 
 thing of honour for the austere rectitude of his 
 living — this man felt himself so far beneath the 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST 
 
 39 
 
 One who should follow that he shrank from doing 
 Him that lowest service, not because he considered 
 it too mean for him, but because even for that 
 service he considered himself too mean. " The 
 latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to un- 
 loose." John cared only to bring the people up to 
 the point at which they should be ready for the 
 ministries of Christ, and then he would slip away : 
 all he did had worth and value in his own eyes 
 only as it opened the door for the Christ ; and 
 he was willing to stand unseen behind the door 
 he himself had opened, and to be forgotten as the 
 Christ passed in. His influence could truly live 
 only as it died away, and the influence of the 
 Christ held sway in its stead. 
 
 The lesson of it holds true for the Church in all 
 ages. Every religious agency that works on us 
 — every religious agency wherewith we seek to 
 work on others — has no worth except as it is 
 a means of introduction to the Christ. All the 
 engagements of the religious life, all exercises of 
 worship, all holy feelings which by one method or 
 by another may be produced in us, have, if we 
 take them rightly, only this one meaning — they 
 
40 
 
 CHRIST FORESEEN 
 
 are the preface to the coming of the Christ 
 Himself, and must so be read. They do their 
 true work only as they make us turn expectantly 
 towards Him as He comes. The one phrase 
 which sums up the true life is this — the union of 
 Christ with us ; and all spiritual influences find 
 their only aim in heralding that union, in making 
 it possible, in preparing the way for the advent of 
 the Christ Himself. To rest in the mere religious 
 exercises or the mere religious feelings themselves, 
 as if in themselves they possessed any value at 
 all, is the fallacy by which men are not seldom 
 ensnared. The test for the trial of all these things 
 is this — How far have they advanced us in recep- 
 tiveness toward Christ ? Have they been fore- 
 runners of Him ? By these things, was the way 
 made straight for His approach ? Nothing, how- 
 ever religious and spiritual it may appear, is of 
 benefit to the soul unless it has pointed us to 
 Him who is to come ; and every religious feeling 
 of ours, every religious exercise of ours, must 
 lead up to and terminate in, and be itself lost and 
 forgotten in, a more real relationship between us 
 and Christ. Religious feeling, religious exercise, 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST 
 
 41 
 
 cannot be the light or the Hfe : it can only be the 
 witness, the proclamation that the light and life 
 are at hand. By all spiritual agencies must we be 
 led — by all spiritual exercises must we lead others 
 — to One mightier than all else. Well to have 
 the way made straight and clear; but the pre- 
 paration of the way is not to be mistaken for 
 the end of all. Over the prepared way the 
 Christ must come. 
 
 The outstanding characteristic in the Baptist's 
 message (as distinguished from the man himself) 
 was that it was a preaching of repentance. This 
 evangelist, indeed, is in such haste to get on to 
 the preaching and the doing of the Christ, that he 
 tells us little about the preaching of the forerunner, 
 except that he proclaimed himself to be a fore- 
 runner and a forerunner only. But elsewhere the 
 Baptist's message stands out, " Repent ye ; for the 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand." And although it 
 be little that this Gospel records concerning John 
 the Baptist's word, it is not without purpose that 
 John the Apostle sets down here the mention of 
 his name and work. As the Baptist himself was 
 
42 
 
 CHRIST FORESEEN 
 
 the forerunner of the Christ in the history of the 
 world, so, in the history of every soul, must the 
 repentance which the Baptist preached be the fore- 
 runner of the life which Christ came to bestow. 
 The Baptist prepared for Christ, the Giver of the 
 life new and true, by preaching repentance, the 
 giving up of the spirit of the life old and false. 
 His hearers were to cut themselves loose from 
 their past, that they might be newly started upon 
 their future — to empty out what their hearts held, 
 that Christ might then fill their hearts with the 
 life of His own. " Repent ye " — that was the 
 forerunner's message. He gave the negative 
 inspiration, as it were, under which they might 
 realise the wrong of their past: then, unable to 
 give the positive inspiration under which their 
 future would be kept right, he passed them on to 
 Him in whom that inspiration of right had come. 
 " I can but make you realise how sinful you 
 have been — but behold the Lamb of God, which 
 taketh away the sin of the world ! " By their 
 repentance, by their realisation of the wrongness 
 of what had been, were they to make ready for 
 acceptance of what would be. There must be the 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST 
 
 43 
 
 deliberate casting away of the old, in order that 
 the new, as it drew near in Christ, might possess 
 them utterly. 
 
 The soul which would relate itself truly to Christ 
 must make its deliberate surrender of the spirit 
 whereby, without Christ, it has been possessed. 
 Not one of us can know Christ's baptism of the 
 Holy Ghost, Christ's baptism of the spirit of 
 holiness, until in the depths of our nature we have 
 gone through John's baptism of repentance. Is 
 repentance only for gross and open and palpable 
 transgression ? Has the word scarcely any mean- 
 ing for those whose hands and hearts have not 
 been deeply dyed with wrong? Is it claimed that, 
 at any rate, repentance cannot be the same thing 
 for the morally respectable as for those who have 
 slipped far into the pit and must have a long and 
 painful climb back ? It is essentially the same 
 thing for all. Repentance is not a sort of feeling, 
 proportioned in quantity to the quantity of sin the 
 repentant one has committed : it is the confession 
 that we have been living from the wrong source, 
 by the wrong spirit, that the spring of all things 
 in us, out of which all we have been and done has 
 
44 
 
 CHRIST FORESEEN 
 
 come, has not been the true spring of life. And 
 if Christ is to set the spring of true life within 
 us, to be Himself the spring of true life within 
 us, we must detach ourselves from those other 
 springs of life that have been pouring their life 
 into the channels of our nature. The Christ-life 
 can take hold only upon natures which have with 
 deliberate purpose and conscious will cleared 
 themselves free from all other hold. Although in 
 the Christ the kingdom of heaven is at hand, it 
 can only take up its rule in those who have 
 repented of and from the spirit of their past. It 
 is not a question as to how much right and how 
 much wrong we have performed. With the Christ 
 coming to us, we cannot experience the seizure 
 of His life upon us till we acknowledge that — 
 whether outwardly right or wrong — much of our 
 life must be cast aside and disowned because it is 
 not from Him that it has been lived ; and His 
 spirit makes us only when every other spirit has 
 been deliberately thrust away. At the beginning 
 of our discipleship the spirit which was not His is 
 to be renounced : through the continuance of our 
 discipleship, as spirits which are not His enter in 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST 
 
 45 
 
 again and usurp partial control, must the renuncia- 
 tion be repeatedly re-made ; and to one and all of 
 us, till we be perfect, the forerunner's cry must 
 come, " Repent ye ; for the kingdom of heaven is 
 at hand." 
 
 The history here set down must be the history 
 of the experience of the soul. First the Baptist, 
 then the Christ. If it be an ancient record, it is a 
 modern necessity too. Only within cleared and 
 receptive natures can the life of Christ take up an 
 uninterrupted reign. If it be indeed as life that 
 Christ comes. He must have the undivided field. 
 For life is all. 
 
IV. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN IN TOUCH WITH DIFFER- 
 ENT HUMAN TYPES: THE FIRST 
 CALLINGS. 
 
 HE earliest occasion, noted by John's Gospel, 
 
 A on which Jesus manifested before men the 
 divineness that was in Him, is the occasion of His 
 attachment of the earliest disciples to His cause. 
 The narrative of the Temptation finds no place in 
 this evangelist's account, for a reason which it is 
 perhaps not difficult to conjecture. He is writing, 
 one has carefully to bear in mind, with the object 
 of displaying the action of the divine Christ 
 among and upon men, so that men, as they 
 ponder over the story, may realise how divine He 
 was ; and the Temptation of Christ had been a 
 thing that took place in secluded quietude, unseen 
 
 John i. 35-51. 
 
CHRIST IN TOUCH WITH HUMAN TYPES 47 
 
 of any human eye. Had John recounted the 
 facts, the rejoinder might have sprung upon him, 
 " But this thing of which you speak has no points 
 of contact with human Hfe : it took place, if it 
 took place at all, away from any who could bear 
 witness to it : if you want to convince us, tell us 
 something which this divine Christ, as you hold 
 Him to be, w^orked openly before the face of man. 
 Speak to us, not of something which, like this 
 Temptation of His, took place only within Himself, 
 but of something which made others recognise 
 His power." And, as if anticipating such a 
 demand, John begins his cumulative testimony to 
 the wondrous life that was in Christ by showing 
 how men of different temperament, of opposite 
 make, found, as they came into contact with Him, 
 that He brought out of Himself just that for which 
 their nature and disposition and circumstance 
 called. Notice first " — he appears to say — " how, 
 as men of utterly diverse moods passed within His 
 range, this Jesus touched at once the heart of 
 each, had the one necessary word prepared, 
 established immediately an abiding connection 
 between Himself and them. Surely He who 
 
48 CHRIST SEEN IN TOUCH 
 
 mastered and satisfied many varieties of tempera- 
 ment thus must have had in Him something that 
 lifted Him above the race of common men ! " 
 
 First of all, John shows us Jesus in contact 
 with two men who were following Him under 
 the constraint of some mysterious spell which in 
 all probability they would have been unable to 
 explain, had explanation been asked. The 
 Baptist, seeing Christ pass by, had repeated 
 the exclamation which had once before been 
 forced from him as the sacred Presence drew 
 near — " Behold the Lamb of God ! " And two 
 of the Baptist's disciples — John the evangelist 
 himself being almost certainly one of them — 
 hearing their leader's utterance of adoration, 
 and turning to look upon the One of whom he 
 spoke, had been mysteriously magnetised, and 
 had left the old leader for the new. Under 
 vague impulses they followed, knowing not why. 
 Here was an atmosphere that gripped them. 
 Here was a strange music to which they were 
 compelled to adjust the movement and rhythm of 
 their steps. But Christ had the fitting word 
 
WITH DIFFERENT HUMAN TYPES 49 
 
 whereby their vague following might be changed 
 to a following of conscious and deliberate 
 purpose. " And Jesus turned, and beheld them 
 following, and saith unto them, What seek 
 ye ? " If they were going to follow, they must 
 look into their own minds and discover what, 
 by their following, they hoped to obtain : out of 
 this adherence of theirs, which was as yet little 
 else than a walking in their sleep, they must 
 rouse themselves to an adherence whose motive 
 they could express, an adherence which sprang 
 out of the awakened will : Christ must have a 
 deliberate, purposeful discipleship from them, if 
 disciples they would be. " What seek ye ? " 
 
 In that the first gleam of divine loftiness in 
 the Christ shines out. How many leaders have 
 there not been who, for the sake of a following, 
 would receive followers upon almost any terms ? 
 How many movements have there not been 
 whose devotees were swayed simply by some 
 spell which the movement wove round their 
 unthinking minds, and whose guiding spirits 
 were content that so it should be ? And indeed, 
 for some purposes and from some points of view, 
 4 
 
so CHRIST SEEN IN TOUCH 
 
 followers who are mastered by a magic power 
 they have not troubled to analyse or reason out 
 are among the best followers that the leader of 
 a great cause could have; for they will be un- 
 tormented by doubts, carried by mere force 
 of enthusiasm over many difficulties whereat 
 thinkers would be brought to sudden halt. But 
 not so would Christ have His w^ork be done. 
 They who followed must know what they 
 sought. And in this driving in upon themselves 
 of the spell-bound disciples, in this rigid examina- 
 tion of an offered homage, in this determination 
 that any devotion to Him must be able to give 
 an account of itself, the Christ grows great. 
 
 But will any reader of the Gospel say that 
 this was merely a just cautiousness — worth 
 noticing, perhaps, but nothing so very remarkable 
 after all ? " Show us something more than this, 
 if you want us to believe that your Christ was 
 as great as you say." Well then, John shows us 
 next how Jesus said the one right word to a 
 man of utterly contrasted type, the Simon Peter 
 who was afterwards to play a part which swung 
 
WITH DIFFERENT HUMAN TYPES 51 
 
 backward and forward so often between the 
 noble and the mean. Brought into the presence 
 of the new Teacher by Andrew his brother, we 
 can imagine how he would let himself be carried 
 there — with eager curiosity in him, swayed by 
 alternating moods of willingness and unwilling- 
 ness to believe that there was something in this 
 matter which his brother had taken up, all 
 tumultuous within as it was his nature to be. 
 " And Jesus looked upon him, and said, Thou 
 art Simon the son of John : thou shalt be called 
 Cephas (which is by interpretation, Peter)." 
 And Peter of course means rock. This man, 
 then, Jesus felt that He could transform. Rock 
 — about the last thing, everybody would have 
 said, with which this nature had any affinity ! 
 Like the torrent, rather, that leaps and careers 
 wildly down the face of the rock, impetuous, 
 beating itself madly against one obstacle after 
 another, no calmness in it, no stability like that 
 which belongs to the rock over which it takes 
 its headlong way ! But calmness, stedfastness, 
 immovable strength, like that whereof the great 
 rock is the symbol — that was what Christ meant 
 
 U. Or lit U3. 
 
52 CHRIST SEEN IN TOUCH 
 
 to produce in this undisciplined soul. Never 
 mind what he is now — the Christ saw past all 
 the vacillations and the follies, and discerned 
 how at length, through what He Himself would 
 do upon this headstrong, unreliable spirit, faith- 
 fulness and apostolic strength should be born 
 therein. Whatever he might be now, it was 
 Peter, the Rock, he should be at last. 
 
 And the greatness that spoke in that word — 
 who can measure it? Many leaders know how 
 to use men ; but what leader has ever possessed 
 this calm consciousness that he could so transform 
 a man — swing him right round, as it were, so 
 that he faces precisely the opposite way to that 
 he faced before? Now, one can almost hear 
 John triumphantly questioning, does not the 
 Christ grow before your eyes into a more 
 wondrous exaltation still? 
 
 Through the other two callings which John 
 records, the same readiness of the Christ — the 
 fitness of His spirit for all men and all circum- 
 stances — shows itself in other ways. This Jesus, 
 who was prepared with the one right word when 
 
WITH DIFFERENT HUMAN TYPES 53 
 
 men came to Him, possessed also the power to 
 win whom He would, to make whom He would 
 realise that they ought to be His. This perfect 
 Leader is fitted to all ; but He is able also to 
 compel an admission of His fitness. It is by 
 calm authority that Philip, the next disciple, is 
 secured. "Jesus saith unto him. Follow me." 
 This Leader, then, appeals to all : it is not only 
 souls which have by some special experience, or 
 through some particular element in their con- 
 stitution, been attracted to Him, whom He can 
 touch ; but all who hear His word recognise — 
 whether or no they choose to obey — that it is a 
 word they ought to receive. Greater still thereby 
 does the Christ become. Other teachers have 
 their schools, their parties, their special make 
 of scholar: it is within their own well-defined 
 limits that they are strong, and there alone: 
 you can draw the border-line and say that 
 beyond that their rule does not extend. But 
 this Jesus has in Himself an authority before 
 which all know that it becomes them to bow 
 down. And so He leaves all others yet further 
 behind. 
 
54 CHRIST SEEN IN TOUCH 
 
 The doubter, and Christ's method of dealing 
 with him, stands last. " Can any good thing 
 come out of Nazareth ? " Nathanael had asked. 
 But, since there had been no malice in his doubt, 
 and since he had been open-minded enough, 
 when invited to come and see, to act on the 
 advice and come, Jesus meets him, not with any 
 word of blame, but rather with a word of com- 
 mendation for the true enquiring spirit he had 
 shown. His questioning had been the question- 
 ing, not of obstinacy nor of superciliousness nor 
 of an idle mind : in his readiness to come and 
 see he had shown that, if there was doubt, there 
 was at least no guile ; and for him there was the 
 smile of welcome, with not the slightest utterance 
 of reproof to impair its charm. 
 
 Of the most scrutinising enquiry, of the deepest 
 probing man could bring to bear, Christ had no 
 fear. Great must a leader be if he is willing to 
 submit himself and his claims to the scrutiny 
 of all who, when they would know whether there 
 is any good thing in him, come and see. The 
 most will have their reserves, their secrets into 
 which they would prefer that none should pry, 
 
WITH DIFFERENT HUMAN TYPES 55 
 
 lest authority should be weakened by the things 
 revealed ; and not too closely must questioning 
 disciples make their examination : not too deeply 
 must they probe. The veil must not be raised 
 too far. There are shadows which must not 
 be searched through by a too brilliant light of 
 enquiry. Disciples must not walk over these 
 dark places bearing a flaming torch in their 
 hands. But this Christ, knowing that one 
 approaches intending to sift His evidences and 
 His claims, so far as may be, to the depths, 
 keeps him not off, but welcomes him, accepting 
 his very resolve to sift and search as a token of 
 the true heart he bears. 
 
 So does John set forth the Christ with these 
 men of many natures round Him : so does he 
 paint in the picture of His greatness with touch 
 after touch, showing how for one and all Christ 
 could bring forth from what His own life 
 contained just that whereof the life of one and 
 all stood in need. And indeed, it is still one of 
 the greatest miracles wrought in our world by 
 Christ's power, that, be the moods of men what 
 
56 CHRIST IN TOUCH WITH HUMAN TYPES 
 
 they may, that which comes forth from the Christ 
 IS sufficient for them all. There lies no strange- 
 ness between Christ and any type of human 
 soul — save the strangeness made by the soul's 
 refusal to be brought near and set at rest. Some 
 of us are like the spell-mastered disciples, some of 
 us like Peter, or Philip, or Nathanael : rather, each 
 of us is sometimes one and sometimes another, 
 passing from disposition to disposition, from mood 
 to mood : yet, the influence of the Christ upon us 
 is not a medicine which avails for one disease 
 and is powerless over the rest, but is the healing 
 and redemption for them all. What must the 
 life be that answers so completely to all phases 
 of life in man? Surely it must be the life for 
 which man is made, the authoritative revelation 
 and the free offering of the life which man was 
 destined to live ; and He who has brought it so 
 abundantly within our reach must be Himself 
 the light and the life of men. 
 
V. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN AS SUPREME OVER 
 NATURE: THE EARLIEST MIRACLE. 
 
 John ii. i-ii. 
 
 T TAVING thus shown how the divine life 
 in Christ had the power, as one would 
 expect it to have if it were indeed divine, of 
 adapting its ministries to the various natures of the 
 various men who approached it, John proceeds to 
 show how the divine life in Christ had power, 
 as one would also expect it to have if it were 
 indeed divine, over material nature too. Building 
 up the image of his great Christ before his readers' 
 eyes, the evangelist wants them to see now how 
 while His heart had in it that which mastered 
 and answered to the hearts of men, His hand also 
 was able to lay itself in quiet sovereignty upon the 
 forces of nature and compel them to do His will. 
 
 57 
 
58 CHRIST SEEN SUPREME OVER NATURE 
 
 Without, as within — in regions where Nature 
 seemed to keep herself secluded from intrusion of 
 any power man could bring to bear, as well as in 
 the more accessible regions of human disposition 
 and character — everywhere John intends his 
 readers to behold Christ^s influences ranging ; and 
 so "this beginning of his signs" which Jesus did 
 in Cana of Galilee occupies the next place in the 
 record of His life. 
 
 A miracle, then, is what John has now to record. 
 And yet, one misses one of the most striking 
 points about John's recording of it unless one 
 observes how careful he is that Christ shall not 
 be looked upon as a miracle-worker merely, as 
 one ready to provide a display of the marvellous 
 simply for the sake of doing it or in order to 
 smite the onlookers into wide-eyed and entranced 
 admiration of His skill. The purpose which John 
 had in view in the recital of this miracle may 
 indeed be said to have been twofold — to show 
 how Christ possessed, as a divine Christ would 
 possess, the power of working a miracle, and to 
 show also how Christ held the power under strict 
 
THE EARLIEST MIRACLE 
 
 59 
 
 restraint, affording thereby a still further proof of 
 the divineness which inspired all He did. 
 
 For " when the wine failed, the mother of Jesus 
 saith unto him. They have no wine." It was her 
 expectation, evidently, that Christ would seize the 
 opportunity of displaying to the assembled guests 
 the power which she must have known Him to 
 possess : His life had not gone on until now 
 without affording her, through a thousand ways, 
 some glimpses into the wondrous secrets at its 
 depths ; and here, at length, was the hour for the 
 manifesting of His glory — the hour for which she 
 had waited through thirty years. " They have no 
 wine " — " here is the door opened through which 
 the light that is in Thee may shine forth and 
 bring all these people to their knees ! " Surely 
 this chance was not to be missed. Perfectly 
 natural, of course. Who, so keenly as the mother 
 of Jesus, would long for men to know what He 
 was and what He could perform ? Here is the 
 true throbbing of the true mother-heart. 
 
 And yet it was not thus, not with any inten- 
 tion of forcing Himself upon those who saw, that 
 Jesus would set His power to its work. " And 
 
6o CHRIST SEEN SUPREME OVER NATURE 
 
 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do 
 with thee ? mine hour is not yet come." Perhaps 
 it is worth while to say — lest difficulty should be 
 felt upon the point — that the phrase really carries 
 no such sound of harshness as the English trans- 
 lation suggests ; and the sternness which one is 
 apt to read into it is not, as a matter of fact, 
 present in it at all. " Woman " was quite a usual 
 method of address, and carried not the faintest 
 trace of disrespect. " What have I to do with 
 thee ? " is perhaps not the best expression for 
 conveying the point of Christ's utterance. " What 
 is it to me and thee ? " would be a more exact 
 rendering ; and, adopting that, one perceives at 
 once what Christ's rebuke, so far as it was a 
 rebuke, meant. " This power that dwells in me 
 — what is it to me and what is it to you? 
 To me a different thing altogether from what 
 it is to you. To you it is the means through 
 which honour, fame, reverence, are to be won 
 from applauding crowds : to me it is a far more 
 restrained and holy thing." The Christ would not 
 employ for any such purpose of notoriety the 
 might He had at His command : indeed, one 
 
THE EARLIEST MIRACLE 61 
 
 knows how through the whole of His life He 
 stedfastly refused to do so : He never built up 
 a stage and arranged the figures and invited an 
 audience and then dazzled it by an exhibition 
 of miracle; but whenever miracle was wrought, 
 it was simply because divineness, with those 
 particular circumstances around it, could not do 
 otherwise than it did. The wonder is not that 
 Christ did so many mighty works, but that, being 
 what He was, the sum of them is so small. Yet 
 it is no wonder, after all ; for so, surely, would 
 divineness, in its calm consciousness of power, and 
 in its unfailing remembrance of the eternal ends 
 for which alone power must be employed — so, 
 surely, would divineness be severely restrained. 
 When Christ did miracles, it was because then 
 and there the miracles were the natural things for 
 divineness to do. Called on for signs, just in 
 order to prove that He could show signs. His 
 attitude towards the demand was always the 
 attitude He showed to His mother in her im- 
 portunity here, " Mine hour is not yet come." 
 
 With the acceptance of His rebuke by His 
 
62 CHRIST SEEN SUPREME OVER NATURE 
 
 mother, it became possible for the Christ to do 
 what, when she came with her eager and un- 
 disciplined desire, He had to refuse. Realising 
 that He was not so much her son as her Lord, 
 that His power could not be at her disposal but 
 must be directed as He Himself should ordain, she 
 turned in her new submissiveness to the servants, 
 saying to them, " Whatsoever he saith unto you, 
 do it." The dream of a son applauded by this 
 company, set on a pinnacle of fame, the country 
 ringing with that story of the miracle he had 
 worked — that dream had melted away. He was 
 Lord now ; and all, rather than dictate to Him, 
 must set themselves simply to do His will. And 
 with the dawning of that mood upon His mother's 
 heart, Christ's hour, which had not yet come 
 when she presented her somewhat imperious 
 claim, arrived ; and He could do what the divine- 
 ness in Him prompted Him to do for this 
 company in its need. His power, which would 
 not wake when it was called upon by His mother's 
 mere ambition for its display, wakened when she 
 had accepted the fact that the divine authority 
 in Him must be left free to work out its will. 
 
THE EARLIEST MIRACLE 
 
 63 
 
 One has to remember that the whole impression 
 of the miracle came upon the mother of Jesus 
 rather than upon any one else. There is no hint 
 even that the bulk of the company knew of the 
 miracle having been wrought : the servants, w^ho 
 filled and drew from the waterpots, of course were 
 aware ; and afterwards, doubtless, the thing would 
 be noised abroad ; but the lesson of the whole 
 incident, at the time of its happening, was a 
 lesson for Mary first of all. All power in the 
 Christ — she was wholly right as to that ; but that 
 her very appeal to Christ, made as it was in the 
 wrong spirit and with undisciplined eagerness, shut 
 up, rather than opened, the outflowing of His 
 power — that was the truth which, out of the 
 situation, her mind had to seize. The water was 
 turned into wine when she had realised that Christ 
 must be left to grapple with the case as to 
 Himself seemed best. 
 
 It is fitting that a divine Christ should so guard 
 the manifestation of His might, bestowing it only 
 upon those in whom the meet spirit is dwelling ; 
 and so with the divine Christ will it always be. 
 He turns all lifers water into wine, enriches with 
 
64 CHRIST SEEN SUPREME OVER NATURE 
 
 inspiring and quickening quality all the experiences 
 whereof we have to partake, when we come to 
 Him — not with that cry which seems to rise so 
 often to our lips, " If Thou art indeed the Christ, 
 this is surely the hour when Thou shouldest prove 
 Thyself by the revelation of Thy power " (for is 
 not that very often the spirit of our prayer to 
 Him ?) — but simply with the desire that somehow, 
 as He will, the divineness in Him may rule the 
 situation in which we find ourselves, make the 
 end of it to be what He shall choose. There will 
 be no stint in anything that makes life's feast, 
 so long as we are seeking, not that Christ should 
 every moment be doing some transcendent miracle 
 for us, but that He, because He is so great, shall 
 have His way. 
 
 To those who are of a spirit so submissive, 
 all things grow transformed. Our demand is so 
 often, " Because He is the Christ, this ought to 
 be different for me, and He should make life 
 larger here and richer there — it would be so easy 
 to believe then ! " To that there can be but one 
 reply — " Mine hour is not yet come." But when 
 we gather all our faculties together in face of our 
 
THE EARLIEST MIRACLE 
 
 65 
 
 life — our servants as they are — and say to them, 
 " This life by which you are faced Christ has to 
 deal with : whatever He saith unto you, do it 
 then He does the miracle, and then the wine of 
 life is abundant and rich. Christ's wonders are 
 done for those who prescribe no wonders to Him, 
 but care only that He, in His divineness, shall 
 somehow, through His rule over all things, make 
 all things to be divine. Keeping that spirit in us, 
 through richer and ever richer transformations life 
 must pass : whatever water of experience, so to say, 
 any hour or year brings us, we shall find, as we 
 draw off the results of it, that it has become wine 
 of the best ; and, so far from life's inspiration to 
 us growing feebler with the growing number of 
 our years, we shall be constrained to declare with 
 added emphasis, as each year is added to the sum, 
 that the best wine has been kept until now. 
 
 5 
 
VI. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN AS AUTHORITATIVE: 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 
 
 John ii. 13-17. 
 
 73 Y His cleansing of the Temple, as these 
 -L-' verses record it, Jesus stepped on at once 
 to an impressive and unequivocal assertion of 
 authority, and at the commencement of His 
 public ministry in Judsea made clear, without 
 any hesitancies or experiments, the line He was 
 going to take and keep. Here at Jerusalem, in 
 the very central place of the nation's religious life, 
 amid surroundings which would surely have given 
 pause to any reformer not quite assured of his 
 mission or of himself, Jesus throws down His 
 challenge to the world and announces Himself 
 as One to whom the established order of things 
 counts for nothing at all, as One who dares to lay 
 
 66 
 
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE 67 
 
 His hand in reproof and correction upon anything 
 He held unworthy, however consecrated by usage 
 it might be. His judgment as to the right of 
 things — that is what it comes to — was supreme 
 over the judgment of all others : the ecclesiastical 
 rulers might permit this desecration of the sacred 
 precincts, find excuse for it, justify it in one way 
 or another ; but that w^eighed not at all against 
 His own consciousness of what was fitting in His 
 Father's house ; and in this, as in all other things, 
 Jesus felt assured that His judgment was just. 
 Without temporising, without even a glance at 
 what might be said upon the other side of the 
 question. He suits His action to His own first 
 sense of what ought to be. 
 
 There was in Christ, then, nothing of the 
 reformer who, at the beginning of his work, cal- 
 culates the effect which will be produced by this 
 possible course or by the other possible course, 
 sets himself with something of uncertainty to 
 the task lying before him, wonders what, under 
 the circumstances, may be the best thing to do. 
 There is no consideration with the view of taking 
 
68 CHRIST SEEN AS AUTHORITATIVE 
 
 the line of least resistance. Who of human 
 workers ever feels so sure that the spirit of 
 Absolute Right is in him as to throw himself 
 without possibility of retreat upon the first course 
 the mind suggests ? There comes a time, it is 
 true, when enthusiasm for a great cause so 
 develops in and possesses the reformer's soul, that 
 he is raised above considerations of consequence 
 and commits himself for a final effort to that 
 which he thinks the best. But that is a different 
 thing. Christ, with no great cause, recognised 
 by others as a great cause, given into His 
 keeping, with no cause at all except the cause 
 which His own pure heart originated, feels within 
 Himself that He is going to do the one thing 
 Heaven must approve, that no consideration could 
 alter His judgment of the matter nor any voice 
 say to Him one word whereby the thing would 
 be set in different light It is not enthusiasm at 
 all, in the ordinary sense of the word, that impels 
 the Christ to His work : one feels immediately 
 how incongruously, as applied to Him, the word 
 rings. From the beginning His consciousness 
 was the consciousness of Absolute Right, quietly 
 
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE 69 
 
 and inexorably guiding will and lips and 
 hand. 
 
 To that one has to add — as still further 
 separating the Christ from all others who have set 
 themselves to grapple with abuses and to right 
 the wrong — that nothing of self-doubt as to His 
 own fitness for the work He had to do ever 
 touched His mind. The narrative, as John 
 recounts it, shows us the Christ standing in 
 untroubled consciousness of perfect harmony with 
 God : it is " my Father's house " He calls the 
 Temple He is purifying ; and the note of 
 personal aloofness from all wrong is unmistakable 
 and clear. " My Father's house." " I dwell in a 
 different world from yours. My heart and God's 
 be;at together." The reformers of earth perform 
 their tasks with the sense of unworthiness tor- 
 menting them, with the cry " Who am I that this 
 mission should be mine ? " ever breaking from 
 their lips : yea, we hold them worthier so far as 
 they hold themselves unworthy ; but Christ had 
 no part in self-reproach such as theirs. As One 
 who, through His own purity, had the right to do 
 it, He drives the profaners forth. From His own 
 
70 CHRIST SEEN AS AUTHORITATIVE 
 
 soul no cloud is flung upon the relations between 
 Him and the Father whose house He takes under 
 His charge. The assurance of unimpaired recti- 
 tude speaks and acts in Christ. 
 
 So John shows us how Jesus, at the com- 
 mencement of His ministry, took the decisive 
 stand, stretched His claim for Himself to its full 
 compass, entered upon no trials, no experiments, 
 but once for all decided upon His course, though 
 the taking of it involved a final challenge to 
 the world and a final break with the recognised 
 authorities before whom all bowed down. The 
 reason for thus setting into the forefront the 
 absoluteness of Christ's decision, the unwaver- 
 ing character of Christ's consciousness of Right 
 and Truth, is easily to be discerned. John's 
 readers are to see, as they pass on through the 
 story that has yet to be written, how it justifies 
 Jesus in the stand He takes. Divineness would of 
 a surety thus declare itself — would thus throw out 
 a claim which the future time would test ; and 
 the test of the future time would but prove the 
 validity of the claim. Let it be considered, then, 
 
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE 71 
 
 as the coming pages are scanned, whether One 
 who at the outset of His ministry felt so sure 
 that He perceived the only right course before 
 Him and so certain that He possessed unimpaired 
 Right within — and who ever lived up to the claim 
 He thus made — whether such an One must not 
 be indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God. 
 He knew the one thing that Absolute Right 
 dictated, and that in these early days : others 
 know it not till the education of time has made 
 them wise — their understanding comes to them 
 through the practice and the experience of years : 
 how could Christ have known it, and been so 
 reliant upon His knowledge, except through a 
 touch of God upon Him which has fallen upon 
 none else ? He claimed a communion with 
 God unspoilt by the slightest marring of sin : 
 others claim no such communion as that : if 
 they did, you would soon find them out : how 
 could Christ claim it, and be afterwards justi- 
 fied in His claim, unless it v/ere through a rich- 
 ness of divine life utterly unique ? It is as if 
 John held up Jesus before us daring all criticism 
 from the outset, offering His utter challenge to 
 
72 CHRIST SEEN AS AUTHORITATIVE 
 
 men, and then said to us, " Now read the rest, 
 and see whether you can find mistake in anything 
 He did, the faintest lapse from perfectness in 
 anything the records tell. Who must He be ? " 
 At the very start of His ministry among those 
 whom He knew to be hostile, Jesus dares and 
 ventures all. He gives them, as it were, every 
 advantage for their campaign — supplies them, in 
 the earliest revelation of His spirit, with a weapon 
 which, should any weak places be, they will be 
 able to use against Him by and by. 
 
 The claim of perfect harmony with goodness 
 and with God implied in Christ's stern expulsion 
 from the Temple of the intruding presences, is a 
 claim which every soul must somehow examine 
 and test, if it is to receive the fulness of Christ's 
 redemption. For it is only by a recognition of 
 the commanding authority in Christ, and by an 
 assent to it yielded from our heart of hearts, that 
 we can be at rest beneath His cleansing ministries 
 — so searching and so penetrating are they. In 
 one sense. He who professes to bring a great 
 redemption to men must be, not near to, but far 
 
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE 73 
 
 from them. Will the temple of the human heart 
 ever submit itself to be cleansed by any Christ 
 who is not recognised as being something very 
 different from and very far greater than the best 
 reformers who, for all their greatness, are still 
 of ourselves ? Not with such a cleansing as He 
 wants to impart. The purpose of performing it 
 would be an impertinence in any one of the family 
 of mankind who had just managed to climb a 
 little higher than the rest. It is only as Christ 
 proves Himself — by the claim to perfect inward 
 purity He makes and by the justification with which 
 the after-history seals His claim — as He proves 
 Himself to stand alone, that we shall be prepared 
 to submit ourselves to all He seeks to do. Before 
 we shall be willing to yield to Him, we must hold 
 Him unique, not in that He has mounted nearer 
 to God than any other has reached, but in that 
 His is the only life which has ever come straight 
 from God to man. Taking Him so. His insistent 
 demand to be the cleanser of our natures will 
 but stand as the natural expression of the divine 
 royalty that is His. This Christ, who cleansed 
 the Temple of builded walls as none other than 
 
74 CHRIST SEEN AS AUTHORITATIVE 
 
 the Son of God has the right to do, may, if He be 
 acknowledged as the Son of God indeed, work 
 upon the temple of our hearts what ministries 
 He will ; and we will not say to Him, " What 
 sign showest thou unto us, seeing that thou 
 doest these things?" Rather, knowing Him 
 to be the temple's holy Lord, will we let Him 
 order its cleansing as He shall choose. The 
 Christ who had the right, and vindicated it, to 
 rule in the Temple of earth, has the right 
 also to rule in the inner temple of our souls, 
 and to make it indeed what His Father's house 
 should be. 
 
VII, 
 
 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER OF THE 
 NEW BIRTH: NICODEMUS. 
 
 HE division between the second and third 
 
 chapters of the Gospel, coming, as chapter- 
 divisions not seldom do, in a somewhat inappropri- 
 ate place, may at first prevent us from perceiving 
 how the account of Christ's conversation with 
 Nicodemus follows on from and illustrates what 
 John says about Christ's understanding of " what 
 was in man." " Many believed on his name, be- 
 holding his signs which he did. But Jesus did not 
 trust himself unto them " — did not, that is, commit 
 Himself and His cause to these men, believers in 
 a sense though they might be, admitted them to 
 no confidential relationships with Himself — " for 
 that he knew all men, and because he needed 
 
 John ii. 23-iii. 21. 
 
 75 
 
76 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 not that any one should bear witness concerning 
 man ; for himself knew what was in man." They 
 might believe on Him because of the signs, and 
 yet their belief might be a thing not deep enough, 
 having not enough real understanding of Jesus 
 behind it, to secure their full admission to the 
 ranks of His chosen and closest ones. Christ saw 
 that much of the early faith was the result of only 
 a surface-stirring of the waters, and in no wise a 
 sign that the great deeps of personality were 
 broken up. And these who made their hasty 
 professions must be driven to take profounder 
 soundings both in Christ and in themselves, 
 before Christ would set upon them the final seal. 
 
 Now, to show how Jesus dealt with these people 
 — " there was a man of the Pharisees, named 
 Nicodemus " — who was one of those impressed by 
 the " signs," and who in consequence hovered 
 round Christ with a feeling mixed of admira- 
 tion and hesitancy — admiration for what Christ 
 had done, hesitancy in regard to what Christ was 
 going to do. Coming to Christ by night, his 
 first words reveal the mental attitude of the man, 
 " Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 77 
 
 from God : for no man can do these signs that 
 thou doest, except God be with him." " A teacher 
 come from God " — well, there is nothing very 
 startling about that : that much might be said 
 of a hundred others, of any one, indeed, who 
 taught anything worth listening to: this faint 
 praise was, in fact, only the careful opening of 
 conversation on the part of Nicodemus — the 
 flinging of the burden of the talk upon Christ 
 Himself, so that Nicodemus might judge, from 
 the reply he received, whither things were tending. 
 He says something because, having sought Christ 
 out, something must needs be said ; but he puts 
 as little as possible into the saying of it, so that 
 he shall not be committed to any definite and 
 decided course. The first words of the conversa- 
 tion proceed from the visitor : the first real idea 
 of the conversation proceeds, as Nicodemus 
 intended it to proceed, from Christ. The utter- 
 ance of Nicodemus is but the preluding note, 
 struck before the actual music begins. 
 
 Would not the new Teacher welcome a recruit 
 from the Pharisees' ranks, conciliate him somewhat, 
 
78 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 seek to overcome this wary caution he was show- 
 ing, try — by making things as attractive to him as 
 might be — to engage him in a deeper and warmer 
 adherence than he had reached as yet ? Would 
 he not go half-way to meet a possible disciple 
 such as this ? So would many have done. But 
 not so does Christ. As from towering heights 
 Nicodemus receives His reply, " Except a man be 
 born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." 
 If there was to be anything between Christ and 
 Nicodemus, there must be plain dealing between 
 them, at least : this ruler of the Jews must not 
 suppose that his cautious advances will be met 
 by responding cautious advances on the part of 
 Christ : let this man's notions about the kingdom 
 of God, or about any possible part he might play 
 in the bringing in of the kingdom of God, be what 
 they will, Christ will not tone down His majestic 
 conceptions in order to secure one single vote. 
 Nicodemus wanted to know how far Christ was 
 likely to be in harmony with him ; and Christ, 
 not trusting His cause to discipleship offered with 
 such reserves, delivers His ultimatum, as one 
 might say — " Never mind about how far I am 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 79 
 
 likely to be in harmony with you in your notions 
 concerning the kingdom. This is my doctrine, 
 * Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the 
 kingdom.' How far are you in harmony with 
 me ? " To such a guarded Hking, so unready 
 to commit itself, Christ would not commit Him- 
 self. He knew what was in man. 
 
 It has been rightly said that this is a point 
 which calls always for reflection — not only 
 whether we have faith in Christ, but whether 
 Christ has faith in us.^ Is our abandonment 
 to Him so complete that He can abandon 
 Himself to us and count us among those who 
 have really identified themselves with Him ? Or 
 has He always to be in a manner thrusting us 
 back, telling us that we have not yet understood 
 who and what He is, that the essence of His 
 teaching is hidden from us still ? It is possible 
 to take Christ in all sincerity, and yet to take 
 Him as something less than what He is; and to 
 such a taking Christ cannot yield Himself in all 
 His fulness. Might He not have to drive some 
 of us back upon the fundamentals of His ministry 
 ^ Dr. Marcus Dods, in loc. 
 
So CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 and His gospel, telling us that we have not 
 understood them yet, and that until they are 
 understood and accepted, admission to the 
 perfection of fellowship must be denied us ? 
 We may and do come to the Christ not seldom 
 with reserves and qualifications in our coming, 
 with a mood of mind towards Him which lacks 
 something of complete abandonment; and to 
 such a spirit Christ cannot fully give Himself. 
 Can He trust our trust ? Is our attitude towards 
 Him an attitude to which He can respond by 
 an attitude of perfect self-bestowal ? If not. 
 He can only drive us back to the beginning of 
 things once more, to the starting-point whence 
 all true discipleship must set forth; and only 
 when we accept His direction, and move to Him 
 from that starting-point, and with the spirit in us 
 which descends upon us there, are all the barriers 
 broken down. The movement of good out of 
 Christ to us is checked unless it be with a right 
 understanding and a true acceptance of the main 
 thing in Him that we move to a place at His side. 
 
 The decisiveness of Christ'3 teaching strikes 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 8i 
 
 one here as did the decisiveness of Christ's action 
 a Httle while before. As in His cleansing of the 
 Temple He showed Himself prepared to re- 
 cognise and to dash upon the one right course, 
 so now He shows Himself prepared with the one 
 absolute and final word. Before the problem of 
 human character and its redemption, Christ has 
 from the beginning but one thing to say, " Ye 
 must be born anew." Different again is the 
 Christ herein from all others — in this absolute- 
 ness of His, this readiness to prescribe immedi- 
 ately for the most malignant disease the world 
 has ever known. The world's prophets, the great 
 minds and souls which have addressed themselves 
 to the question of purifying the conduct and 
 the character of their fellow-men, have said 
 anxiously, " Let these methods be tried. Let 
 this effort pave the way for a more searching 
 and far-reaching effort to follow by and by." 
 To them the question has been a question in- 
 deed — a question which, as one asked it, set a 
 thousand answers ringing, among which it was 
 hardly possible to choose the best. For the 
 
 Christ there was but one answer, which from 
 6 
 
82 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 the first He knew : for the Christ there was in 
 one sense no question at all : He had once for 
 all diagnosed the disease and could Himself once 
 for all proclaim the cure, " Except a man be 
 born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." 
 There is no tentative experimenting about it. 
 " Ye must be born anew." 
 
 Human nature, on the moral side of it, calls 
 for some one who can say to it, " You mustr 
 And we, although we may sometimes be in- 
 clined to resent it, have to confess, in our wiser 
 moments, that in the matter of character and 
 heart and soul, we need some voice which has 
 the ring of authority in it, as greatly as we need 
 such a voice in any of the other departments of 
 life wherein we allow authority to have sway. 
 In physical disease, we want a physician who 
 can say to us, " You must " ; and of the value 
 of one who should only give hints and suggest 
 experiments we should justly have doubt. In 
 the diseases of the soul, complex and unsearch- 
 able as they are, it should be no hardship, but 
 rather a relief, to have One standing above the 
 soul in its helpless weakness, and saying to it, 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 83 
 
 "You must." The greatest of the world's 
 ministers of redemption — after a thousand 
 others have given their advice and made their 
 suggestions and, with furrowed brows, painfully 
 thought out a course which may accomplish 
 something not quite in vain — the greatest of 
 them will be the one who stands up, calm- 
 thoughted and clear - voiced, and declares, 
 " There is but one thing, and that one thing 
 must be done, would you be made whole." 
 And this, the Christ, is He. 
 
 What is to be said of this new birth which 
 Jesus pressed upon Nicodemus as the necessary 
 means of man's moral and spiritual cure ? Spite 
 of the startling sound of the phrase — so startling 
 that Nicodemus was thrown into bewilderment as 
 he heard it — the entire reasonableness of it, and 
 certainly the entire sufficiency of it, becomes 
 apparent with a moment's thought. Our birth 
 is of course the one thing in our experience in 
 which we make or do nothing for ourselves, but 
 only receive from another: the life which then 
 becomes ours is a thing wholly imposed upon 
 
84 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 us, set into us, without any co-operation of our 
 own : at birth, more absolutely even than at 
 death — the time and circumstances of which 
 may, to a certain limited extent, be determined 
 by our own doings — are we wholly passive, 
 simply accepting what is bestowed. How is the 
 moral life, the character, of man to be cleared of 
 its blemishes and kept within right bounds and 
 directed upon true ideals? In the last resort, 
 only thus — by finishing with all man has been 
 and done, and by man being so held beneath 
 the life and character of God that man's life and 
 character may be imposed upon him from God, 
 new-born in him out of God. A transformed 
 moral life becomes ours, not by altering this 
 thing or that in us, not by substituting a better 
 piece of machinery here or there within the 
 depths of character where the machinery hitherto 
 employed has failed to work or has worked out 
 wrong results, but by turning ourselves, receptive 
 and waiting, toward God, saying, " Let the life 
 in me be produced by and out of Thine, my 
 inward life and being be born from Thee." We 
 take with ourselves the course which Christ pro- 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 85 
 
 claimed as the only possible course of complete 
 redemption when we detach ourselves from 
 everything whence our life has been drawn till 
 now, cease all effort at manufacturing a moral 
 life for ourselves, and let ourselves be born. 
 
 Heightening of ideals of life and conduct will 
 not of itself make life a perfect thing ; for, dream 
 as you may of high ideals, you will find only 
 soiled and decayed materials within yourself 
 wherewith to build life according to your dreams ; 
 and out of imperfect elements a perfect product 
 cannot be made. Self-improvement will not lift 
 us to the highest : one wonders, indeed, that 
 any sane man, surveying the problem of human 
 character, should delude himself for even an 
 instant with the idea that he can train or 
 improve himself to the loftiest reaches of moral 
 living ; for the only implements we can use for 
 the purpose of improving ourselves are the 
 faculties and capabilities of our nature; and 
 these are themselves the very things that need 
 to be improved. Could we once get outside 
 ourselves, and obtain some leverage upon our 
 own moral nature from beyond our own moral 
 
86 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 nature, we might accomplish something; but 
 since that is a feat for ever impossible, self- 
 improvement, hampered by faultiness in the tools 
 it employs, can never achieve a result wherein 
 fault shall not be. Only one method can there 
 be by which the moral nature of man may be 
 preserved from taint and realise all possibilities 
 of worth — yet a method all-sufficient, if only it 
 be faithfully pursued ; and that is the attachment 
 of life to a new source, the clearing out of all we 
 are, the filling of our nature from new and holier 
 springs that rise in the Nature holiest of all, and 
 the receiving of all that goes to constitute the 
 inner life we live out of the life of God Himself. 
 Not to be made better, but to be new-born, is the 
 moral programme by whose fulfilment men will 
 be redeemed. " Except a man be born of water 
 and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom 
 of God." " Born of water " — water, the accepted 
 symbol of repentance : there must be the cutting 
 oneself loose from what has been, the drowning 
 of one's present moral accomplishment, as it were, 
 and the coming forth from the baptism of repent- 
 ance in which it has been swept away ready to 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 
 
 87 
 
 make a new beginning again. Then " born of 
 the Spirit " — the attaching of oneself to the 
 inspirations of God that all we are may be 
 derived from them and made by them, the open- 
 ness of one's nature to the nature of God so that 
 our nature comes in its degree to be but the 
 continuation, the reproduction, of His. And so 
 we enter into God's kingdom : so is that vast 
 range of regnant purities and towering ideals 
 and measureless holinesses thrown open to what 
 is in us now, since what is in us now is what was 
 in God and has come to us from Him. " Ye 
 must be born anew!' 
 
 The transformed life, the corrected life, is the 
 life which takes its rise in God. And once again 
 Christ re-asserts that truth in differing manner, 
 " The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou 
 hearest the voice thereof, but knowest not whence 
 it Cometh, and whither it goeth : so is every one 
 that is born of the Spirit." The verse is taken 
 almost universally — though I am sure it is 
 wrongly so taken — as if it were the Spirit which 
 comes one knows not whence and goes one knows 
 not whither. Yet so one misses what Christ is 
 
88 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 seeking to emphasise for His hearer's mind. " So 
 is every one that is born of the Spirit." It is not 
 the Spirit, but the transformed life, that is like 
 the wind in its mystery. We hear the wind's 
 voice, but there is nothing in all this wide world 
 on which we can lay our finger and say, " It is 
 from this it took its rise " " So is every one that 
 is born of the Spirit " — every one whose life is 
 transformed by being born out of the life of God. 
 There is no force known to man, no influence 
 counted among the influences this earth can bring 
 to bear, of which we can say, " This is what ac- 
 complished the miracle." For it was not within 
 the limits of this world that the miracle was 
 wrought: far out beyond this world and all its 
 circle of forces and influences lies the source of 
 this wonder worked upon this human soul : it has 
 been born of God. When you see a life trans- 
 formed indeed, you cannot point to the place 
 whence its transformation came, so long as you 
 search this world alone, although you search it 
 through and through, any more than you can 
 identify the touch which started the winds upon 
 their career. For the transformation came from 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 89 
 
 beyond this earth's utmost bound. It is the 
 introduction to earth of something that belongs 
 to heaven. 
 
 And nothing less than this must be under- 
 stood by " conversion " — that much misunderstood 
 word. It means the attaching of ourselves to 
 God, that all which constitutes the moral life in 
 us may be set within us straight from Him. 
 
 But still Nicodemus did not understand. " How 
 can these things be?" His failure is suggestive; 
 and his inability to understand what had been 
 said doomed him to remain without comprehension 
 of what was still to say. The need for such a 
 transformation as that of which Christ had been 
 speaking — that at least he ought to have under- 
 stood : it was a thing so patent that it might 
 even be called an " earthly thing " : any one who 
 surveyed life dispassionately should recognise that 
 man's moral condition demanded nothing less than 
 this absolute change, this being born anew. And 
 if Nicodemus, the teacher of Israel, had not 
 reached so far as that, how could Christ go on to 
 tell him the still greater wonder that in Him, the 
 
90 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 Christ Himself, the new life into which man 
 needed to be born had come down to earth? 
 " If I told you earthly things, and ye believe not, 
 how shall ye believe, if I tell you heavenly things ? " 
 And yet Christ goes on to speak, even though He 
 knew that Nicodemus would not comprehend, of 
 those same heavenly things. " And no man hath 
 ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of 
 heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven." 
 This birth into the life of God, of which Christ 
 has been speaking, was made possible to man, for 
 in Christ the life of God had come : man could 
 not ascend into heaven toward it, but in the Christ 
 it had descended out of heaven to man ; and the 
 Son of man — walking upon earth, yet most truly 
 in heaven still because He was immersed in and 
 possessed by the life of heaven — the Son of man 
 was offering this heavenly birth to those who 
 would link themselves with Him. But Nicodemus, 
 not having realised how greatly the change was 
 needed, would be still more unable to realise how 
 in Christ the change was brought near; and 
 Christ, feeling that the " heavenly things " pressed 
 for utterance within Him and must not, under- 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 
 
 stood or not understood, go unspoken, utters them, 
 through the rest of this interview, to Himself 
 rather than to the hearer, Nicodemus saying 
 no other word. To all this Nicodemus was 
 strange. It was a language whose interpretation 
 was beyond his power. 
 
 Christ's offer of Himself as the Giver of new 
 and redeemed life grows reasonable to us — the 
 word is advisedly employed — only as we realise 
 the moral condition of human nature, of our own 
 nature most of all. The required thing is that 
 we shall search our own souls, and see if it be not 
 a new life they need — if anything less than that 
 will in all reasonableness serve our turn. Then, 
 with the impression of it fresh upon us, are we 
 to behold the Christ. And then the ministry He 
 offers, His assurance that in Him the new life we 
 need has descended out of heaven, will appear to 
 us — most wondrous " heavenly thing " although it 
 be — a thing we can accept and in manner even 
 understand. What my soul needs, and what my 
 soul cannot obtain, is here in Him. If I must be 
 born anew (and how else can a moral life like 
 mine, such an abject failure as it is, be purified 
 
92 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 and redeemed?) I turn myself with gladness to 
 this Christ who bears upon Him the signs that 
 not from this world, but from other worlds, He 
 came — from worlds of goodness where I fain 
 would be. By the very depth of my need I am 
 made to see the greatness of His power : under- 
 standing what is the reality and the terror of sin, 
 I understand how in the programme of spiritual 
 ministry which He proclaims is its only reasonable 
 cure ; and as He tells me that by my coming to 
 Him and by my throwing myself upon Him I 
 shall be born into the high spiritual worlds, I ask 
 no more " How can these things be ? " For I 
 know that, made one with Him, I shall be born 
 of God. 
 
 Upon the other " heavenly things " of which 
 Christ went on to speak let us attempt to take 
 some hold. What are the main points in the 
 rest of Christ's speech to this ruler of the Jews ? 
 There is, indeed, practically only one point, though 
 from that one point some consequences follow 
 which Christ draws out. That one point, at any 
 rate, let us grasp. 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 
 
 In brief, it is this. It is out of a divine love 
 that this call to a newness of life has come : 
 stern and deep-reaching though this demand may 
 appear to be, it issues, not out of a relentless 
 authority, but out of a gracious tenderness which 
 longs to perfect the good and the happiness of 
 man. " Ye must be born anew," and the means 
 of this new birth is presented to you in the Son 
 of man who came down from heaven — well, but it 
 sounds very stern and absolute : what is behind it 
 all ? This is behind it all — a tenderness which 
 has put itself so entirely at the service of man 
 that it is going to stop short at nothing, not even 
 at a cross, in order that man may be blest. This 
 Son of man, who presses the new life upon you, 
 does it at the bidding of love which will even 
 suffer for your sake. " And as Moses lifted up 
 the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the 
 Son of man be lifted up : that whosoever believeth 
 may in him have eternal life.'* Just as conspicu- 
 ously as that sign of Israel's deliverance , was 
 displayed before the gaze of those who cared to 
 see, so conspicuously will this Son of man allow 
 Himself to be lifted up — will not even shrink 
 
94 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 from that — so that men may be drawn to Him. 
 Knowing that for the sake of men He was going 
 so far as that, Christ could say " For God so loved 
 the world " that this Son of man came to live 
 His life and perform His ministry and die His 
 death. Great and stern as this ideal of a new 
 birth and a new life may appear to be, still it is 
 by Love it is imposed ; and behind the ministries 
 of the Christ, who declared the ideal and sum- 
 moned men to Himself for its realisation, it was 
 Love that was at work. 
 
 Christ sought thus to make His great ideal 
 magnetic by showing how its realisation is 
 demanded by God alike for our sakes and for 
 His own. For Love behind the demands of God 
 means that God wants us, and can only have us 
 through our fulfilment of those demands — that 
 He knows we are made for and want Him, and 
 can only have Him through that same fulfilment. 
 God wanting us and knowing that we want Him, 
 and out of that Love presenting this loftiness of 
 ideal and this Son for the ideal's attainment — 
 with that consciousness in us, the height of the 
 ideal appals us no more and the terror of it 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 95 
 
 passes away : the command of the God who is 
 seated over us as Ruler is really the drawing of 
 the God who wants us in His love ; and He pro- 
 claims the command in order that He may have 
 those whom He wants, and that they, wanting 
 Him, may have Him too. All God's arrange- 
 ments in the spiritual world are what they are, 
 not simply because He has chosen to order them 
 so, but because only through them and through 
 their carrying out can His love be content. 
 " God so loved the world." That is the main 
 point in Christ's thought through these later 
 words of His talk with the enquirer — one of the 
 " heavenly things " which it was hopeless to ex- 
 pect Nicodemus to understand. Behind Christ's 
 proclamation " Ye must be born anew," and 
 behind His proclamation of Himself as the means 
 whereby that strange " must " could be carried 
 out, lay this — that God so loved the world as to 
 establish the " must " and to send the Christ, 
 
 But Christ's mind passed on then to this other 
 thing, which followed as the natural corollary 
 from the thing He has just uttered — that, since 
 
96 CHRIST SEEN AS PREACHER 
 
 the ideal is proclaimed hy Love, any condemna- 
 tion it brings upon man is in reality a con- 
 demnation passed by man upon himself. " For 
 God sent not the Son into the world to judge 
 the world " — that was no part of His mission : it 
 was out of Love He came. And yet, " he that 
 believeth not hath been judged already, because 
 he hath not believed on the name of the only 
 begotten Son of God." The Son comes not to 
 judge : He comes only to present life ; but whoso 
 rejects Him judges himself, condemns himself, 
 cuts himself off from life. How can it be other- 
 wise? By rejection we declare what manner of 
 men we are, pass sentence upon ourselves. " This 
 is the judgment, that the light is come into the 
 world, and men loved the darkness rather than the 
 light ; for their works were evil." Though Christ 
 here changes the metaphor, the meaning is still 
 clear enough. No need for Christ to judge us, 
 when our rejection of Him is pronounced : since 
 life — or light, to employ the other figure — comes 
 to us in Him, we show ourselves up, judge 
 ourselves, by the rejection, and prove ourselves 
 unworthy of the life, unloving of the light. We 
 
OF THE NEW BIRTH 97 
 
 declare concerning ourselves — and there is no 
 more need that God or Christ should declare it 
 concerning us — that we love darkness rather than 
 light, that from the life and light in the Son 
 we are, and have chosen to be, cut off. Christ's 
 coming is the offered gift of Love : if we receive 
 Him not, our loss is all the heavier because it is 
 the loss of something we might have possessed, 
 since Love offered it ; and the loss we suffer is a 
 loss to which we have voluntarily chosen to be 
 doomed. 
 
 So every rejection of Christ's ministries, though 
 it moves Him not to judge the rejecter, must 
 meet its judgment nevertheless. For our re- 
 jection of His ministries hands us over to the 
 dominion of those forces which His ministries 
 would have corrected or cast out, and allows 
 them to have their way. And it is with constant 
 remembrance of that solemn truth that such a 
 ministry as the ministry recorded in this Gospel 
 must be faced. Christ is always, not the Judge, 
 but the Life-giver whom Love has sent ; but by 
 want of abandonment to the Life and Love, we 
 pass our own sentence, hand ourselves over to the 
 7 
 
98 CHRIST AS PREACHER OF NEW BIRTH 
 
 forces of evil which will work their doom within 
 our souls. Rejecting the Christ's ministries we 
 are, in so far as we reject them, judged already. 
 
 Love behind the great ideal — judgment and 
 destiny waiting every moment upon our attitude 
 towards the Love — these are the great thoughts 
 which moved through Christ's mind with the 
 uncomprehending Nicodemus before Him. As 
 these phrases drop from the lips of the Christ 
 once more (and they are the phrases which He 
 uses unchanged, and will ever use unchanged, to 
 all who come to grasp His lesson and to learn 
 His secret) it needs that His hearers should so 
 write them upon mind and memory that they 
 may pass from their interview with Him with 
 hearts enlightened and faith made stronger, and 
 with all these things — things both " earthly " and 
 " heavenly " — holding them fast. 
 
VIII. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN ROUSING SELF-KNOW- 
 LEDGE: THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 
 
 HE woman of Samaria, it is needful to 
 
 J- observe in order to appreciate rightly any 
 points suggested by Christ's dealing with her, has 
 had set upon her an amount of blame which is 
 beyond her deserts. She is commonly taken as 
 an example of human nature fallen far towards its 
 worst. But it is noteworthy that throughout the 
 whole interview, Christ appears to look upon her, 
 not so much as one who needs reproof for flagrant 
 sin, as one who needs healing for the pain, and 
 satisfaction for the sense of brokenness and failure, 
 which life had flung upon her ; and yet Christ, we 
 know, would have been the last to attenuate or 
 belittle whatever measure of guilt might have been 
 
 ToHN iv. 1-38. 
 
 99 
 
loo CHRIST ROUSING SELF-KNOWLEDGE 
 
 hers. Had she been one who sought for and 
 revelled in evil, finding joy in her severance from 
 purity and uprightness, Christ's tone would have 
 been severer, His whole attitude more like that of 
 a judge. That the woman had drifted into sin is 
 of course clear ; but that she had, taking her past 
 as a whole, been more sinned against than sinning, 
 I think it is legitimate to conclude. When one 
 remembers that, in the laxity of practice which 
 had overtaken the Jewish nation in this matter, a 
 man could at any time divorce his wife if he con- 
 sidered that in the smallest matter cause of offence 
 had been given, the fact that this woman had 
 been cast off by five husbands may after all not 
 mean very much ; and it is small wonder that, 
 after an experience of hardship and cruelty, she 
 should at length have gone astray. And so, I 
 say, it is legitimate to conclude that she had 
 been more sinned against than sinning. She 
 stands before Christ as one with whom the 
 world had dealt harshly, who had found 
 the cup which the world had held to her lips 
 to be bitter indeed, who had been broken 
 down into wrong rather than sought for it 
 
THE SAMARITAN WOMAN loi 
 
 with eager desire, and who needed sorely to 
 be healed rather than to be reproved or 
 blamed. 
 
 Now, with this maimed, starved, hopeless soul 
 before Him, see how Christ sets Himself to its 
 relief. Before all else. He wants this woman to 
 realise the conditions of the problem, so to say — 
 to estimate what it is she needs, to rouse herself 
 out of mere vague yearning and set herself to a 
 definite quest. "If thou knewest the gift of God, 
 and who it is that saith to thee. Give me to drink ; 
 thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would 
 have given thee living water." He had it, and 
 could give it : the revelations and the ministries 
 which would have taken hold upon her broken 
 life and raised it into wholeness were ready in 
 Him ; and the Christ could have saved her all 
 thought about what it was she required, 
 revealed to her at once how in God, and 
 in Himself, God's messenger, all she required 
 was lying. But He wants her to realise the 
 problem of her own nature and her own 
 need : she must know the gift of God, think 
 
I02 CHRIST ROUSING SELF-KNOWLEDGE 
 
 about it, ask for it, do her part and seek for 
 it before the Christ would do His part and 
 give. 
 
 To appropriate the full benediction of a 
 ministry such as Christ's, the soul must know 
 itself, take its own measure, bring out into the 
 light of recognition its secret need and care. We 
 meet with Christ not seldom, in the weakness and 
 brokenness and disillusionment of life, and fancy 
 that in some vague fashion we could not define to 
 ourselves, all His restoring grace will be passed 
 over to us, and that, without any effort of ours at 
 forming a well-defined relationship with Him, He 
 will take us into His charge. All that is left in 
 us very often, when some hour of crisis has fallen 
 upon us and this or that part of our life is sunk in 
 ruin, is a vague sense that all is gone wrong, and 
 that somehow the magic of Christ must make 
 things right and whole. It is not to be said that 
 such a vague, undefined hope will be in vain : one 
 cannot turn, be it in ever such a haze of bewilder- 
 ment, to Christ without finding something from 
 Him returning upon us; but the best is not won 
 from Christ until we know what it is we seek. 
 
THE SAMARITAN WOMAN 103 
 
 He would have us know the gift of God in Him 
 and ask for it from Him. It is no useless thing, 
 but a thing useful beyond all telling, to search 
 through the deep places of our nature till we 
 come upon the weakest spot, to learn what there 
 has been in us that has made life break down so 
 sadly — and then, knowing something of the con- 
 ditions of our problem, to turn to Christ and say, 
 " The gift to answer to this lack in me, to repair 
 this flaw in me, to fill up this emptiness in me 
 which has cost me so dear, is the gift I need." 
 To know ourselves, to take the weak places in us 
 and connect them (if it may be so put) with the 
 corresponding strong places in Christ, to malke 
 faith and expectancy well defined and clear, is a 
 preliminary to receiving the absolute best into our 
 souls. And if we cannot understand ourselves, 
 let us realise that at least, make the very in- 
 definiteness of our necessities the definite thing 
 we show, and seek for light upon the dark 
 mysteries within. We must know the gift of 
 God which is to match the want in us, before 
 a perfect sacred ministry can be exercised on 
 our behalf. 
 
104 CHRIST ROUSING SELF-KNOWLEDGE 
 
 But then, as if declaring the correlative to that, 
 Christ, while driving this woman in upon herself 
 so that she might realise the definite thing she 
 wanted, the one gift for which her condition called, 
 proclaims also that, in satisfying one need. He 
 satisfies all. It would have been living water 
 He gave her, had she known the gift ; and " who- 
 soever drinketh of the water that I shall give him 
 shall never thirst," What, this one gift cover 
 everything? This one bestowal of water — even 
 though it be living water, life-bringing, in regard 
 to the immediate thirst — prevent thirst for ever? 
 Will there not be other thirsts for which some 
 different supply must be sought? No. The 
 ministry of Christ — although it be a suddenly- 
 awakened need in this or that part of our nature 
 that moves us to call it to our aid — is, in the full 
 exercise of it, sufficient not only for this or that 
 part of our nature, but for all. And the point, 
 the lesson of it, stands thus — although we 
 need to know ourselves, our immediate want, 
 our present requirement, the gift which at this 
 moment our nature lacks, still the Christ is never 
 to be taken simply as One who devises expedients 
 
THE SAMARITAN WOMAN 105 
 
 and meets new emergencies with their fitted 
 remedies, and who, in ministering to this weak- 
 ness, omits to touch that. His nature touches 
 and meets us at this special place of necessity to 
 whose existence we have just become alive, pre- 
 cisely because His nature is fitted to touch and 
 meet the whole of ours. Our conception is to rise 
 — as Christ Himself sought to make this woman's 
 rise — from the local and transient giving to the 
 universal giving that He performs. Behind every 
 presenting of this or that request which we make 
 to Christ, we are to carry the consciousness that 
 He holds in Himself, not only the possibility of 
 answering to the current request, but a life which, 
 if we could but hold ourselves altogether in con- 
 tact with it, would make us fully live, and allow 
 no single request ever to rise in anything of pain- 
 fulness again. For so will our trust in Him grow 
 a fuller thing, our appeal to Him broaden out, 
 till at last we may realise — or come near to 
 realising — the promise He made, and find the 
 water He bestows to have become in us indeed 
 a well of water springing up into everlasting 
 life. 
 
io6 CHRIST ROUSING SELF-KNOWLEDGE 
 
 It is on these two points that Christ, through- 
 out the conversation with the Samaritan woman, 
 lays the emphasis of His words. These are the 
 things He seeks to impress upon His hearer 
 with most of force ; for as the talk proceeds, He 
 does but recur to them, once more bidding the 
 woman realise her present and pressing need 
 when He tells her to call her husband and come 
 hither — once more declaring Himself as the all- 
 sufificient One when, in regard to the Messiah, He 
 proclaims, " I that speak unto thee am he." 
 And, to receive the perfect benediction of this 
 ministry, our hearts must take the lessons 
 home. In the shortcoming of life, in its dis- 
 illusionment, in its sin, realise the particular 
 need, and present it before Christ. But realise, 
 too, that, were our relationship to Christ com- 
 plete, all the particular needs of our nature 
 would be swallowed up and forgotten in the 
 all-sufificingness which would pass to us from 
 Him. 
 
 Before the story is left, it remains to note 
 (because the noting of it brings an added beauty 
 
THE SAMARITAN WOMAN 107 
 
 both upon the relationship of Christ to this 
 woman, and upon His relationship to us) how, 
 in refreshing the spirit of the Samaritan Christ 
 refreshed His own, how He found His own 
 delight in administering hope and comfort to 
 her bruised and wounded soul. His disciples 
 had gone away into the city to buy meat, 
 while Jesus, wearied with His journey, sat 
 thus on the well ; and they returned just as 
 the conversation was at its height, to find that 
 their Master had been refreshed with better 
 refreshment than the meat they brought could 
 give. He had had meat to eat that they 
 knew not of : His meat had been to do the 
 will of Him that sent Him, and He had done 
 that will upon this woman's heart. It is sweet 
 to think that with every draught of the water 
 of life He gives us, the Christ refreshes His 
 own spirit — that as He goes to and fro about this 
 world, waiting near the earthly wells at which 
 men and women try to slake their thirst. His joy 
 grows abundant when they say to Him, " Give 
 me this water, that I thirst not, neither come 
 hither to draw " — that our new life is the 
 
io8 CHRIST ROUSING SELF-KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Christ's new delight. For remembering that, 
 we shall watch for Him the more alertly, and 
 be the readier to give to Him what we can 
 by taking from Him what it is His joy to 
 give to us. 
 
IX. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN CALLING FOR A 
 SPIRITUAL TRUST: THE NOBLE- 
 MAN AND HIS FAITH. 
 
 John iv. 43-S4- 
 
 IT was in search of quietude that Christ had 
 left Judaea on that journey which had taken 
 Him through the Samaritan country, and which 
 He is now about to complete. In that fact lies 
 the explanation of a difficulty which the form of 
 statement in these forty-third and forty-fourth 
 verses may at first appear to raise. " And after 
 the two days he went forth from thence into 
 Galilee. For Jesus himself testified, that a 
 prophet hath no honour in his own country." 
 But if He would have no honour in His own 
 country, why go thither ? It would seem to be 
 
 rather a reason for keeping away. The journey 
 109 
 
no CHRIST SEEN CALLING 
 
 had been commenced, however, as at the outset 
 of this chapter John has told us, in order to 
 escape from the notoriety which was coming to 
 be attached to Jesus among the Pharisees as the 
 number of His disciples grew. The strain of 
 the situation was becoming too great : as more 
 frequent accessions to the ranks of His followers 
 were received, the enmity of those who hated Him 
 would develop into more marked and definite 
 form ; and Christ departs, therefore, for a period 
 of quietude and relief, seeking it in His own 
 region, where He was more likely to be left alone. 
 They who had known Him from His earliest 
 years would be the last — as a man's nearest 
 kindred usually are the last to recognise any- 
 greatness in him — to yield Him any honour or 
 to admit that aught extraordinary dwelt in Him ; 
 and in Galilee Christ might find the freedom from 
 publicity which for a while He desired. 
 
 It is of interest to note, in passing, how 
 absolutely honest John is as he compiles his 
 record : if there be any risk to his main purpose — 
 the purpose of winning from his readers faith in 
 Christ as the Son of God — in showing Christ thus 
 
FOR A SPIRITUAL TRUST 
 
 III 
 
 retreating for a time of rest from the hostilities 
 and notorieties of the world, John faces the risk : 
 his picture is to be complete, not securing men's 
 admiration for its chief figure by leaving out 
 any lines to which criticism could plausibly take 
 exception. He shows the Christ seeking even 
 to hide Himself for a while. And indeed, what- 
 ever the first impression of it may be — however 
 strange it may for an instant appear that One 
 who claims to be divine should shut Himself 
 away from human relations because they had 
 become too straining in their demands — yet on 
 second thoughts it does but draw us with all the 
 more confidence back to Christ again. For one 
 thing, it is only the really strong who can afford 
 to show what may be mistaken for weakness 
 by those who do not understand : the man who 
 leads when he ought more fittingly to be humbly 
 following, the man who has thrust himself into 
 a position of eminence for which he has no real 
 qualifications, can never afford to relax, even for 
 a moment, the process of making an impression 
 on his deluded adherents : let there be a second's 
 hesitancy, and the whole imposture is likely to be 
 
112 CHRIST SEEN CALLING 
 
 laid bare. It is in itself a testimony to the 
 greatness of Christ that He can in this fashion 
 lay His leadership down, and thereafter calmly 
 resume it once more — show what might have 
 been read as fear by the hostile Pharisees in 
 Judaea, and then return again to advance His 
 claims. But more than that, the very dependence 
 of Christ upon God, as He manifested it in these 
 retirements from the world's strain and stress, in 
 these periods when He sought for the refreshment 
 of His own soul (and there are more than this 
 one noted in the Gospel-story) may bring us to 
 trust Him the more. For as one notes how, in 
 giving to man what He had to give, Christ was 
 Himself receiving it first of all, and had to receive 
 it, in His own communion with the Father — how 
 He could do nothing except it were given Him 
 from above — one feels that in coming into touch 
 with Christ one comes into touch with the eternal 
 Source of all. He returned ceaselessly to the 
 everlasting and authoritative One, and lets us see 
 Him so returning : as we fasten ourselves to Him 
 we reach, therefore, to the ultimate ground of 
 things ; and the very fact that Christ sought 
 
FOR A SPIRITUAL THRUST 113 
 
 sometimes to pass into quietude that He might 
 the better hear His Father's voice should but 
 make us more alive to the strength and certainty 
 which thrill the utterances of His voice to us. 
 Since He could do nothing except as He was 
 bound to God, they who bind themselves to Him 
 are bound to God in Him. 
 
 In quest of retirement, then, Christ went to 
 His own country. As it chanced, however, re- 
 tirement He did not obtain ; for with His arrival 
 in Galilee came the request from the nobleman 
 for healing to be done upon his son. The request 
 was of course a natural one ; and yet Christ's 
 answer to it indicates how it was a different 
 sort of request He would have liked to hear. 
 " Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no 
 wise believe." Believe, that is, in the sense of 
 accepting Christ as He would be accepted, as the 
 supreme revelation of God and consequently the 
 supreme guide of life ; for the nobleman clearly 
 believed in some sense already, believed at any 
 rate in Christ's miraculous power, else his request 
 
 would not have been made. That was, in fact, 
 8 
 
114 CHRIST SEEN CALLING 
 
 the point of Christ's utterance: that is the ex- 
 planation of His tone of regret. As the wonder- 
 worker He could always get Himself accepted, so 
 long as men and women benefited by the wonders 
 He worked ; but the higher faith, which was in 
 His eyes the only sign of true surrender, was a 
 far more difficult thing to call forth. So few took 
 Christ because of what He was : so few saw the 
 regal dignity, the divine majesty, the commanding 
 holiness, in Him, or bowed down before these 
 things. It was only through signs and wonders 
 that the most could be brought to believe. And 
 Christ's sorrow over this second-rate faith was 
 made the more poignant by its contrast with the 
 faith He had just seen where it was less likely to 
 exist. The Samaritans had believed on Him, not 
 for His mighty works, but for the moral grandeur 
 they had discerned in Him — but ye, here in my 
 own country, " except ye see signs and wonders, ye 
 will in no wise believe." Their only attitude to the 
 Christ was an attitude of expectancy for whatever 
 might come from Him to minister to their selfish- 
 ness ; and to the believing which carried the whole 
 nature over to Christ, not for what could be got 
 
FOR A SPIRITUAL TRUST 115 
 
 out of Him, but for what He was in His goodness, 
 to that they could by no means attain. 
 
 Christ is never satisfied with us so long as it is 
 only the miracles He works for us — whether they 
 be miracles affecting our condition in this world 
 or in the next — that draw us to His side. In 
 Christ's own estimate of things, all He does for 
 us by way of making us happier is meant to be 
 subservient to what He does for us by way of 
 making us better. We are not to let the Christ 
 make us better because He evidently has the 
 power to make us happier — that is our frequent 
 reading of the matter; but we are to find the 
 greater happiness that He can give come to 
 us naturally, and without our thinking about it, 
 through receiving the greater goodness that He can 
 give. The signs and wonders of Christ's consola- 
 tions and Christ's healings are not to be the most 
 prominent matters in our relation to Him, with 
 His spiritual improvement of us added on as a 
 sort of supplementary affair : that is to turn the 
 whole of Christ's ministry upside down. He 
 would be taken by us as the One whose moral 
 greatness, when He stands before us, draws our 
 
ii6 CHRIST SEEN CALLING 
 
 love and faith upon itself. Amid the selfishness 
 of our prayers to Him, amid our readiness to 
 make Him the servant of our desires rather than 
 to be ourselves servants to His spiritual royalty, 
 He might well say to us, " Except ye see signs 
 and wonders, ye will in no wise believe." 
 
 But the nobleman, too distracted to analyse the 
 quality of his relationship to Christ, could not, at 
 the moment, consider the meaning of what Christ 
 said, and had only an added word of pleading. 
 " Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no 
 wise believe " — " Well, I do not know what that 
 means, but. Sir, come down ere my child die." 
 And Christ responded to his pleading, as He 
 will always respond to human pleading, be the 
 mood which prompts it imperfect or even mean 
 as it may. And then the nobleman, with his 
 pleading heard and his son restored, grafted the 
 higher faith on to the lower, and believed — in 
 the true sense, this time — and his whole house. 
 
 Better so, of course, than not at all. Better 
 reach to the highest faith somehow, even though 
 by a road below the best, than not reach it at all. 
 
FOR A SPIRITUAL TRUST 117 
 
 The lesson stands clear for us — that every miracle 
 Christ does for us should find its issue in our truer 
 spiritual surrender to Him. We have been mean 
 enough in that our faith has been so much a faith 
 of the " signs and wonders " type : it would be 
 meaner still if, when the signs and wonders are 
 wrought, we should not respond to the spiritual 
 greatness of the Christ who has responded to 
 our selfish prayers. Let all that Christ does for 
 us, in making us happier, be employed as an 
 impulse to consecration, so that He may make 
 us holier. And if the gratification of our selfish 
 desires be thus turned into a means of grace, the 
 hour will come at last — and better late than 
 never — when we shall believe in and surrender 
 to Him, not for what He bestows, but for what 
 He is. 
 
X. 
 
 THE VOICE OF CHRISTS CONSCIOUS- 
 NESS : "LIFE IN HIMSELF." 
 
 ITH the commencement of this fifth 
 
 his Gospel which may be called entirely new in 
 the method it adopts. Up till now he has been 
 looking at Christ from the spectator's point of 
 view, taking his stand with those whom he is 
 seeking to convince of Christ's divineness, bidding 
 them gaze now upon this incident and now upon 
 that, seeming to say, " Must not He who did 
 these things have been in very truth the Son 
 of God ? " At this stage he changes the line 
 of treatment. From the beginning of this fifth 
 chapter down to the end of the tenth John dwells, 
 not in the consciousness of the spectators of 
 
 John v. 
 
 chapter John enters upon a section of 
 
'*LIFE IN HIMSELF" 
 
 Christ, but within the consciousness of Christ 
 Himself. He has been speaking about Christ 
 before: now Christ speaks for Himself. The 
 foregoing chapters have been John impressing 
 upon his readers what men saw Christ do and 
 what men heard Christ say : these following 
 chapters are John projecting himself, as it were, 
 into the depths of Christ's mind and feeling, 
 and revealing what goes on there. The great- 
 ness of Christ's public work has up till now 
 been thrown upon the screen : the greatness 
 of Christ's own inner life, the greatness He 
 felt Himself to possess, is now called upon 
 to come forth from the secrecies of Christ's 
 heart. 
 
 Christ realising Himself to be the actual source 
 and Giver of life, is the burden of the whole 
 of the present chapter. In the discourse here 
 recorded Christ states literally what in the 
 subsequent discourses of the subsequent chapters 
 He states in figures of speech — that He came to 
 impart to men the actual life He held within 
 Himself. The source and Giver of life, He is 
 
I20 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 here; and through following utterances He 
 speaks of Himself as the Bread of life, the Giver 
 of living water, the Light of the world, and the 
 Shepherd of the sheep — all of the metaphors 
 tending to the same point, that He came to 
 establish an absolute union between Himself and 
 men, to instil Himself into men and to absorb 
 men into Himself, so that they might draw their 
 life from Him. 
 
 The source and Giver of life, Christ here 
 declares Himself to be. The whole discourse 
 arises out of the miracle which Christ had 
 wrought upon the man waiting by the Bethesda 
 pool, the miracle whose propriety was questioned 
 by the Jews because it was wrought upon the 
 sabbath day. Over the miracle itself we need 
 not linger, since the main interest of the chapter 
 lies, not in the miracle, but in the great sermon 
 which, in answer to the cavilling of His adver- 
 saries, Christ preached. It was at Jerusalem, of 
 course, that the sermon was delivered ; and it is 
 worthy of notice, in passing, that the greatest and 
 profoundest utterances which this Gospel, or in- 
 deed any of the four Gospels, record, were drawn 
 
<*LIFE IN HIMSELF" 121 
 
 from Christ by the pressures of hostile criticism 
 and amid the angers of His foes. The greater 
 their hostility, so much the greater became the 
 range of His thought and speech. He rose, one 
 might say, to His fullest height, just when the 
 hands of men were most fiercely set to drag 
 Him down. 
 
 In the twenty-sixth verse the key to the entire 
 chapter is found. " For as the Father hath life 
 in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to 
 have life in himself." That is how and why 
 Christ had wrought His miracle on the impotent 
 man : just as God has the power of creating other 
 life from His own, so the Christ has power to 
 create other life from His own ; and it was by 
 the exercise of that power that He created life, 
 new physical life, in the man whose life had 
 been so long spoilt and maimed. It is only by 
 implication that Christ notices the charge of 
 sabbath-breaking which the Jews had launched 
 at His head, and yet the implied answer is 
 complete. " I create as God created ; but so 
 long as God's work of creation went on, there 
 was no sabbath : the sabbath did not begin until 
 
122 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 the creative work was done. And so long as I 
 set the creative power that is in me to its work, 
 there is no sabbath for me to break : that comes 
 not till all my work is done." But leaving that, 
 Christ in this discourse raises the whole thing 
 above all questions of sabbath-breaking and even 
 above all questions of physical healing, and speaks 
 from the lofty level of One who would have man 
 derive life, in all its range, from the life in 
 Himself. " For as the Father hath life in him- 
 self, even so gave he to the Son also to have 
 life in himself." Just as surely as all came 
 from God, is all that is in us to come from the 
 Christ. In regard to all the moral content of 
 our natures, Christ would be repeating every 
 moment the creative work which God performed 
 when He made the world. The spiritual nature 
 of man is without form and void — certainly 
 without its fairest form and void of its best 
 contents — until Christ comes to take it in charge ; 
 and He takes it in charge, not by altering and 
 improving what is there, tuning up the notes 
 which have dropped out of tune, tightening the 
 fibres which have become relaxed, but by re- 
 
<^LIFE IN HIMSELF" 123 
 
 producing there what is in Himself. " Life in 
 himself" — enough life carried in the Christ to 
 spread itself through all men and women till 
 time shall end. He not only corrects human 
 action, but gives to us, out of Himself, that 
 whence action springs : our action is but the 
 revelation and outcome of what we are, of the 
 life behind the action ; and Christ wants to 
 create that life in us out of His own. He not 
 only purifies human thought : our thought, too, 
 springs out of the life in us ; and Christ wants 
 to create that life in us out of His own. Life 
 is not what we say or think or do : these are but 
 the signs of life : the life itself is the root from 
 which all saying and thinking and doing grow 
 up, the hidden reality which constitutes the / 
 beneath it all. And Christ wants to be to us in 
 such a relationship that what constitutes me shall 
 simply have been transferred out of what con- 
 stitutes Him, He has life in Himself — is ready 
 and willing to create other moral and spiritual 
 personalities out of His own. And we, would 
 we rightly take Him, must accept Him thus in 
 His creative power. 
 
124 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 If there seem to be any vagueness about the 
 idea, it is only because it is so great, and deals 
 with an experience out of the common run. It is 
 most assuredly an idea to the contemplation of 
 which — and to the experimental realisation of 
 which — men and women must return, if they are 
 to understand Christ as He would be understood. 
 Christ as in most literal truth the Giver of life — 
 we need to ponder it, till the strangeness which 
 hangs over it is dispelled. We need a frequent 
 course of John's Gospel, so that we may the better 
 realise how Christ conceived of His relation to 
 men. He does many things for us, the benefit 
 of which we are to seize : outside of us, so to say, 
 He carries on many a ministry — did so through 
 those earthly years of His, does so now through 
 many an influence He sends across the world to 
 draw men to Him ; but all He does, all He has 
 ever done,/t?r us is but the preliminary to what 
 He would do in us ; and glad as He is to draw 
 us to Him, He is not wholly satisfied until, having 
 drawn us to Him, He draws us into Him and sets 
 Himself into us. And the Christian Church will 
 not know the deepest Christian secret till that 
 
**LIFE IN HIMSELF*' 125 
 
 is learnt. Christ has life in Himself. Out of 
 the life He possesses He, creative like the God 
 from whom He came, would create life in us. 
 
 It is under the guardianship of this idea that 
 our relationship to Christ must be shaped and 
 maintained. We use rightly this Christ who has 
 life-creating power in Him, when we allow Him 
 to seize upon, absorb into Himself, all that we are. 
 To relate ourselves truly to a Christ who has life 
 in Himself can mean nothing else or less than this 
 — the flinging of our whole being into His, that 
 in that communion all the living forces in Him 
 may exert their power upon our submitted souls. 
 Any other relationship to Christ is insufficient — 
 is not a relationship in which His creative power 
 is known. Some even of the standard words in 
 which we attempt to describe what the heart and 
 mind and soul ought to do with Christ — although 
 correct enough, and adequate, when their full 
 significance is grasped — are, in our common 
 understanding of them, inadequate and incorrect ; 
 and our relation to Christ is not represented by 
 them in its completeness. This Christ has life 
 in Himself — how shall we, as it were, get the 
 
126 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 most out of Him, see to it that none of this strong, 
 living, creative force in Him is permitted to waste ? 
 Believe in Him — have faith in Him — will these 
 phrases do ? Not if they are interpreted as 
 meaning simply that we are to assent to the 
 truth of what He says, rest upon the sufficiency 
 of what He does, quiet ourselves by declaring 
 that He knows what we do not know and per- 
 forms what is beyond our power. We may have 
 that mood of entire faith towards Him, and still 
 not be submitting our nature and life to the grip 
 of the creative God-nature and God-life in Him. 
 Learn of Him — will that word do ? Not if it be 
 taken as meaning simply that we are to give fixed 
 attention to whatever proceeds from His lips, to 
 write indelibly upon heart and mind the truths 
 He dictates to us as we set ourselves as pupils at 
 His feet. These things we may do, and still not 
 be permitting the life in Him to enfold and be 
 substituted for the life in us. Love Him — will 
 that do ? Not if it signifies only that we are to 
 cherish His presence as the most precious treasure 
 of life, to cling round Him with an earnest 
 passion which does not even for an instant cool 
 
'^LIFE IN HIMSELF" 
 
 127 
 
 or forget. Even with that heat of affection we 
 may love Him, and still not have the nature in 
 Him absorbing the nature in us. But this Christ 
 who has life in Himself is rightly used when we 
 hand over our whole selves in order that the life 
 in Him may transform the self and re-create it, 
 when the personality in us drops into the person- 
 ality in Him, when the life in Him has us absolutely 
 in its power for working out its will. This life- 
 creating Christ must be One to whose life and 
 nature, in their wholeness, our life and nature, 
 in their wholeness, are given up. 
 
 Experience easily misses this — and fails, in 
 consequence, to provide us with testimony to the 
 truth of this voice which out of Christ's inmost 
 consciousness struck upon the ears of men. It is 
 not an easy thing to surrender the whole nature 
 to the play of another. To set our life under 
 the grip of another life, and then to abandon all 
 attempt at interfering with the influence of that 
 other life upon ours, is not such a simple thing : 
 we are too restless, too prone to put forth our 
 hands when they ought to be still and to speak 
 when we ought to be silent — too anxious to make 
 
128 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 ourselves instead of letting ourselves be made — 
 for that. And this life-creating Christ does not 
 do for us all He might, because we do not truly 
 adjust our lives to His. We easily bring our- 
 selves into some sort of relationship with Christ ; 
 and, because it is impossible to be in any sincere 
 relationship with Christ without being the better 
 for it, we rejoice over the grace which even our 
 imperfect relationship bestows, and forget the 
 grace which through the imperfection of our rela- 
 tionship we lose. All is not done on our part, 
 and all is not done on the Christ's part, until 
 we transcend all other relations, and rise into this 
 relation — or fall into this relation, should rather 
 be said — the relation of surrendering all we are 
 to the play and influence and re-creative power 
 of all He is. Many steps we may have climbed 
 up the ladder that brings us near to Christ — has 
 the last flight been taken, the flight which carries 
 our life to nestle in the deepest recesses of His 
 own ? 
 
 Of course any consciousness which could speak 
 like this, and with justice, must be the conscious- 
 
'*LIFE IN HIMSELF'' 
 
 ness of the Son of God. To create is God's own 
 prerogative: whoso truthfully claims to create 
 must be indeed divine. Man alters what already 
 exists, combines the present material into new 
 shapes, cuts and carves and uses what lies to his 
 hand ; but he has not done one single creative act 
 since the world's history began. Man cannot 
 truly make. But Christ's claim for Himself is 
 that He can create life in us. And if they 
 who let Him do His work upon them find that, 
 in proportion to their surrender, He does indeed 
 transform the basis of being in them into some- 
 thing new — gives them, not only new thoughts, 
 new ideals, new programmes of conduct, new 
 inspirations (all that is far short of creation, and 
 could be done by any human reformer possessed 
 of the necessary human knowledge and character 
 and skill), but a new life — they are entitled to 
 say that He who has wrought this work in them 
 must be from above. 
 
 9 
 
XI. 
 
 THE VOICE OF CHRISPS CONSCIOUS- 
 NESS: "THE BREAD OF LIFE." 
 
 E saw, as we looked at the previous 
 
 chapter Christ was giving definite proclamation 
 to the central fact that the life in Himself was 
 to be handed over to form the life in man. 
 As God exercised creative power, so was Christ 
 going to exercise creative power in those who 
 rightly surrendered themselves to His spell. 
 We noted also that in some of these subse- 
 quent chapters, and in the discourses they 
 contain, Christ repeats the same fact in more 
 figurative fashion, declaring Himself to be the 
 Bread of life, the Water of life, the Light of the 
 world, and the Shepherd of the sheep — all the 
 
 John vi. 
 
 chapter of the Gospel, that in that 
 
<*THE BREAD OF LIFE" 131 
 
 metaphors leading in the same direction and 
 tending to the same point, namely, that the 
 true relationship between man and Christ is a 
 relationship in which man does nothing less 
 than assimilate Christ into himself and live by 
 Him. In this sixth chapter it is as the bread 
 of life that Christ declares Himself, as the food 
 whereof man must partake if life in man is to be 
 sustained at its true level and in possession of 
 its true qualities ; and the fiftieth verse of the 
 chapter may be taken as supplying the key- 
 note of the whole, " This is the bread which 
 cometh down out of heaven, that a man may 
 eat thereof, and not die" The utterance finds 
 its starting-point, as did the preceding utterance, 
 in a miracle which Christ's power had wrought, 
 and which Christ takes for a text whereon to 
 base His words. He had fed the multitude, 
 not with bread that sustained the soul, but with 
 bread that could nourish the body only; and 
 as the crowd, remembering how easily He had 
 answered to their physical need, seek Him out 
 again, His thought passes away from the 
 physical life in them, to which He had given 
 
132 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 its needed bread, to that other life in them, for 
 which they were caring so little, to which He 
 would give its needed bread too — for which He 
 would be Himself the needed bread. " Ye seek 
 me . . . because ye ate of the loaves, and were 
 filled. Work not for the meat which perisheth, 
 but for the meat which abideth unto eternal life, 
 which the Son of man shall give unto you." 
 Could He but make them see how in Him they 
 might look for the sustenance, not alone of the 
 physical nature, but of the spiritual nature for 
 which they as yet felt no concern ! For the 
 inner life of the soul and spirit. He was the 
 bread which came down out of heaven, that a 
 man might eat thereof, and not die. 
 
 What suggestion emerges from the phrases, to 
 assist us in comprehending the relation in which 
 Christ desires to stand with the natures of men ? 
 He is the bread of life — thinks of Himself as 
 actually the nourishment whereby the life of the 
 soul and spirit is kept strong and undying. As 
 the physical frame receives into itself the bread 
 which repairs the lost strength and restores those 
 
'*THE BREAD OF LIFE" 133 
 
 elements in the physical frame which under the 
 demands of living have wasted away, so must the 
 spiritual frame — all the aggregate of moral im- 
 pulse and all that goes to make character and 
 all that constitutes the personality in us — receive 
 the Christ into itself, would we be sure that it 
 shall never fail. Christ's thought of Himself as 
 the bread of life goes far beyond any idea of His 
 teaching strengthening us to live rightly, or of 
 His influence guarding us against whatever would 
 destroy the best life in us, or of His inspiration 
 vivifying us so that far reaches of spiritual life, 
 which have been hitherto outside our attempting, 
 may be brought within our compass now : not 
 alone is the soul to take gifts from Him, but of 
 Himself must the soul partake, as truly as the 
 body partakes of the bread by which it wards off 
 the ever-threatening touch of decay and death. 
 " He that eateth me, he also shall live because of 
 me." " / am the bread of life." The life of true 
 relationship to Christ is made by the assimilation 
 of Christ. The phrase may need to be somewhat 
 qualified and guarded presently; but for the 
 moment let it stand. The moral and spiritual 
 
134 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 life in us is to feed on the Christ. All that 
 makes character in us must adopt Him for its 
 food, and, as our character works Him into itself, 
 unites Him with itself, feeds upon Him, our 
 character will truly live. Would we be related 
 to the Christ with the relationship round which 
 here His thought is ranging, there must be the 
 actual taking in of Christ ; for He is the bread of 
 life. 
 
 If it be said that this looks in the direction 
 of mysticism, it is to be replied that this mysti- 
 cism at any rate saves the responsibility of 
 the soul unimpaired, preserves its individuality 
 well defined, and not only leaves room for, but 
 requires, effort definite and direct. If Christ 
 be life's bread, then in order to secure for our- 
 selves whatever Christ has to bestow, and to 
 secure it permanently, there must be activity, 
 deliberate and earnest activity, on our side of 
 the relationship ; for bread does not give itself to 
 man in his need. He who will make no effort to 
 obtain, who keeps his hands hanging inactive at 
 his side, might starve with abundance all around. 
 
'<THE BREAD OF LIFE'' 135 
 
 Bread must be seized upon, or we die. And it 
 may be that Christ wanted to set up this idea 
 of Himself as bread which must be deliberately- 
 taken, for the complement — not by any means 
 the contradiction, but the complement — of the 
 idea of the preceding discourse, the idea of 
 Himself as the Creator of life. The Creator and 
 Giver of life in us, is He ? Oh ! then we have 
 only to let Him do His creative work in us, and 
 religion may become a sort of emotionalism. 
 This life of His to be transferred to, created in, 
 us — the idea might throw us into inactive mood 
 by the very beauty and poetry of it, and by its 
 suggestion of all-sufficient power in Christ ; and 
 we might content ourselves with simply waiting 
 in rapt expectancy for that new life to be born. 
 But take the other figure. He is the bread of 
 life ; and that must rouse us ; for bread does 
 nothing for man except as man goes forth for it 
 and seizes upon it and makes it his own. Christ 
 is to live in us ; but He will not do so through 
 any of our poetic imaginations about Him, or 
 through any of our entranced admirations of 
 Him, or through anything less than our de- 
 
136 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 liberate taking of Him into ourselves. The 
 needed thing is to set ourselves in presence of 
 the Christ, and then with conscious purpose to 
 adopt Him into us. " I call in Thy will to 
 envelop and supplant mine own. I take Thy 
 spirit and cover up mine own therewith. I draw 
 in, so far as the power to do so lies in me, I 
 draw in Thy heart to beat with mine. And all 
 that Thou art, I summon to come in and pervade 
 me through and through, till in me there shall be 
 nothing which does not live by the feeding of my 
 nature upon Thine." Christ is the bread of life, 
 and must therefore be deliberately seized upon by 
 those who would possess the life which in Him is 
 stored up. 
 
 In the fact that bread needs ever to be re- 
 taken lies yet another call to effort from the 
 Christ-fed soul. As bread for the sustenance of 
 the physical nature has to be constantly ob- 
 tained in fresh supplies, so our relationship with 
 Christ has to be constantly re-formed and re- 
 started, with a repetition of the act whereby it 
 was first made. The " finished work of Christ " 
 is one of the standard phrases of religious 
 
**THE BREAD OF LIFE" 137 
 
 speech — and a phrase which is, of course, in the 
 right understanding of it, entirely valid and true : 
 only one needs to set over against the truth of it 
 this other truth, that if Christ's work in regard 
 to us has been finished once for all, our work in 
 regard to Him is never finished, but must be 
 ever re-done. Once for all He has lived His 
 life for man and died His death for man and set 
 Himself in His resurrection life before the world 
 in order that He may be changelessly the 
 Saviour for man ; but we have to repeat the 
 acts of uniting faith and love and surrender by 
 which there pass into us the benefits of His 
 completed work. You cannot take bread to- 
 day, and expect the physical life in you to be 
 sustained to its end by to-day's partaking : you 
 cannot say with any truth or reason that in one 
 act of faith in Christ or of acceptance of Christ 
 your spiritual condition has been put beyond 
 all fear of weakness and failure for all time. If 
 Christ be, as He declares Himself to be, the 
 bread of life, then the spiritual nature in us — 
 however joyfully it may have once partaken of 
 the holy feast — cannot endure with its strength 
 
138 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 unabated unless moment by moment it reaches 
 out, with no diminution of its first energy, for new 
 supplies of the bread which is its staff and stay. 
 
 But as Christ's mind moves round this 
 relationship He wants to sustain to the souls of 
 men, His thought sounds a further depth. He 
 is the bread of life, but not only that. He is 
 the living bread. " I am the living bread which 
 came down from heaven." 
 
 It is an indication that the analogy of the 
 food by which the physical nature maintains 
 itself fails somewhat after all. The relations 
 between Christ and the soul become too profound 
 for the relations between earthly bread and the 
 physical frame to supply any complete likeness 
 to them ; for the physical life is sustained by that 
 which itself has no life, while the spiritual life, the 
 soul, is sustained by that which is itself living. 
 What it comes to is this — that at each taking in 
 of Christ we are not so much repairing and main- 
 taining the spiritual life that is already within 
 us, as adopting new spiritual life from Him : 
 receiving the Christ into ourselves, there follows, 
 
**THE BREAD OF LIFE" 139 
 
 not the transforming of His life into ours — as 
 the analogies of bodily sustenance would suggest 
 — but the transforming of our life into His. The 
 bread wherein the soul finds its nourishment is 
 itself living, and so it is the life in the bread 
 taking hold upon the soul, absorbing the soul's 
 life into itself, rather than the soul taking hold 
 upon the bread. It was said that the life 
 of true relationship to Christ is made by the 
 assimilation of Christ as the food of the inner 
 life : more accurate still is it to say that the life 
 of true relationship to Christ is made through 
 being assimilated by the Christ ; for He is the 
 living bread. The spiritual life within us must 
 reach out after the Christ who is its only sufficient 
 food, and must bring the Christ close upon itself. 
 But then the relation is perfected, not after all 
 by the soul taking the Christ into itself, but 
 by the soul allowing itself to be taken into the 
 Christ. Since the bread whereon the spirit lives 
 is itself most living, the spirit has not to win life 
 from it, but to be enfolded by the life in it ; and 
 our feeding upon Christ comes to be the passing 
 of all the elements and forces of character in us 
 
I40 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 into the life and character in Him, and losing 
 themselves there. 
 
 Immortality is implied in this conception of 
 the relations between Christ and the soul. " This 
 is the bread which cometh down out of heaven, 
 that a man may eat thereof, and not die." The 
 life which feeds upon an undying life must itself 
 be undying. The physical life must cease when 
 it can no longer renew and repair itself from 
 something beyond ; for all that earthly bread can 
 do is to maintain life that is already there — to 
 maintain it, not to give it. The whole thing 
 depends upon our power to make life for ourselves 
 out of the bread whereof we partake; and, with 
 that power lost, life cannot endure. But par- 
 taking of this living bread, deathless and im- 
 mortal the spirit must most surely be ; for from 
 the living bread new and inexhaustible supplies 
 of life are evermore to be won. It is no more 
 a question as to how long our power of obtain- 
 ing life for ourselves and maintaining life within 
 ourselves can persist : it is but a question as to 
 how long life will continue to pass into us from 
 
<'THE BREAD OF LIFE" 141 
 
 Him who is life's source ; and since He is the living 
 bread which came down from heaven, where is 
 the eternal source of all life, life for the soul that 
 feeds upon Him can never fail. Immortality is 
 the spirit's assured heritage, since it depends, 
 not primarily on what we are, but on what that 
 Christ is, from whom our spirits live. Immortal 
 with God's own immortality is He : the life 
 He possesses, wherewith He feeds His own, is 
 come down out of heaven ; and therefore, " If 
 any man eat of this bread, he shall live for 
 ever." 
 
 From the commonest, most ordinary act of our 
 daily living — the simple act by which we nourish 
 and keep healthful the physical frame — Christ 
 would thus have us learn something as to the 
 nourishing and keeping healthful of the spiritual 
 constitution wherein our true life lies. He is the 
 bread which came down out of heaven in order 
 that, by their partaking of it, the eternal life of 
 heaven may become the portion of dying men. 
 Yet He is the living bread, so that the accepting 
 soul transforms, not Him into itself, but itself into 
 
142 VOICE OF CHRISTS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 Him. Whoso realises his dependence upon the 
 Christ who is the spirit's true sustenance, and 
 whoso sets himself to partake of the Christ as 
 in His sacramental love He offers Himself, shall 
 hunger no more. 
 
XII. 
 
 THE VOICE OF CHRISTS CONSCIOUS- 
 NESS: "LIVING WATER." 
 
 S in the sixth chapter Jesus has proclaimed 
 
 ^ Himself to be the living bread, so in this 
 seventh chaper He proclaims Himself to be the 
 living water ; and therein the essential significance 
 of the chapter is to be sought and found. True, 
 it is not until the chapter reaches its thirty- 
 seventh verse that the record of the proclamation 
 appears ; but all that has gone before has been 
 designed to lead up to that ; and one sees how 
 Christ, through all the preceding incidents of the 
 chapter, has had in mind the intention of spring- 
 ing the proclamation of Himself as the water 
 of life upon those who might hear Him in the 
 Temple courts. His brethren — those brethren 
 
 John vii. 
 
144 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 who had not yet brought themselves to believe 
 in Him — wanted Him to give so signal a proof 
 of His Messiahship that their uncertainty about 
 Him might be swept away. So at the com- 
 mencement of the chapter we find them saying 
 to Him, " If thou doest these things, manifest 
 thyself to the world." If He were the Messiah 
 in truth, let Him give the signs of Messiahship 
 for which the people were waiting and expectant : 
 then the brethren and all the rest would find 
 themselves forced to believe. But " Jesus there- 
 fore said unto them. My time is not yet come." 
 This sort of manifestation — such a proof of His 
 claim as they would hold satisfactory — He would 
 not give : He would not take His way to 
 Jerusalem with any idea of setting up and 
 occupying such a Messianic throne as the mass 
 of the nation desired to see. For His purposes, 
 such a throne would be worthless : it was a 
 different Messiahship that constituted Christ's 
 ideal. Still, He meant to go up to this feast, 
 not to conform to their purposes, but to carry 
 out His own ; and " when his brethren were 
 gone up unto the feast, then went he up also, 
 
LIVING WATER 
 
 145 
 
 not publicly, but as it were in secret" Then, 
 through the days of the feast, He " went up into 
 the temple, and taught" — preparing the way, by 
 those teachings recorded in the body of the 
 chapter, for the supreme announcement which 
 at the end He meant to make. And as the 
 last day, the great day of the feast, dawned, the 
 opportunity for which He had been waiting was 
 reached, and " Jesus stood and cried, saying, If 
 any man thirst, let him come unto me, and 
 drink." It was in order to make that proclama- 
 tion that Christ had guided His way to Jerusalem, 
 and had mingled with the crowds which were 
 gathered in the city for the season of the 
 feast. 
 
 It must be recollected that all who heard 
 would at once attach a very definite meaning 
 to this call of Christ's : to none of them could 
 there be any obscurity about its metaphor : to 
 a Jewish mind the utterance must have been 
 perfectly clear, and must have rung out as an 
 explicit claim on Christ's part to be the Messiah 
 for whose advent the nation hoped. Christ did 
 
 lO 
 
146 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 after all go up to the feast to manifest Himself 
 as the Messiah, although not in the manner His 
 brethren wished Him to adopt. 
 
 This feast was a kind of symbolic repre- 
 sentation of a portion of Israel's past history, 
 commemorating the nation's sojourn in the 
 desert and its entrance into the promised land. 
 For seven days the people lived in tents or 
 booths, recalling thus the time when their 
 ancestors had dwelt homelessly in the desert : 
 at the end of the feast, on its last day, they 
 went, as the close of the chapter has it, " every 
 man unto his own house," recalling how, when 
 the desert homelessness was past, the nation 
 had taken possession of its own. Besides that 
 general symbolism, there was another rite con- 
 nected with the feast which led up with perfect 
 naturalness to Christ's declaration of Himself as 
 the living water. On each of the seven days, 
 water was drawn in a vessel of gold from the 
 pool of Siloam, and then borne in joyful pro- 
 cession to the Temple to be there poured forth, 
 as a remembrance of the mercy with which God 
 had caused water to be brought out of the rock 
 
LIVING WATER" 
 
 147 
 
 in the people's desert years. But on the last 
 day, since that day commemorated the entry 
 into Canaan, this rite was not observed : water 
 needed to be obtained from the rock no more, 
 since the land with freely-flowing streams had 
 been attained. More than that. It was an 
 article of Israel's Messianic hope that, just as the 
 waters of Canaan had been opened to them after 
 the droughts of the desert, so when the Messiah 
 came — when the dryness of the period of ex- 
 pectation was past — a fountain of water would 
 miraculously spring up within the Temple itself, 
 signifying that the time of perfect refreshing 
 had arrived. It is clear, therefore, what Christ's 
 words must have meant to the crowds. " We 
 are here, longing for the day when that fountain 
 shall break forth in this Temple of ours, because 
 we shall know then that our Messiah is come 
 indeed. And this man is calling us to find the 
 fountain in him ! We expect the water that 
 is the sign of our perfected life to well up here 
 in this Temple : he cries. If any man thirst, let 
 him come unto me, and drink ! That can only 
 mean that he claims to be the Messiah himself 1 " 
 
148 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 And of course they would rightly interpret 
 Christ's utterance in reasoning so. He claimed 
 to be the reality whereof that fountain for whose 
 birth they were looking would have been the 
 sign, had it sprung forth. He claimed to be 
 the One to whom their history had been point- 
 ing, the One in whom all their aspirations — if 
 only they interpreted their aspirations aright — 
 were fulfilled. 
 
 To conjure up the circumstances in this 
 manner before our eyes gives us added power 
 to understand more completely the significance 
 of Christ's proclamation of Himself as the living 
 water. And what that proclamation meant, or 
 should have meant, to these hearers of Christ's 
 own time it means, or should mean, to us, the 
 hearers of this present time, which is indeed 
 Christ's own time still. How does the relation- 
 ship between Christ and the soul of man present 
 itself to us in the light of the proclamation 
 which this chapter records ? 
 
 Christ's declaration that He would make the 
 living water to spring up emphasises the fact 
 
LIVING WATER" 
 
 149 
 
 that in His relationship to the individual soul 
 the soul finds an entirely new era to be begun. 
 It was the hope of Israel that when the fountain 
 for which they looked should flow, when there 
 should come the Messiah at whose advent the 
 looked-for fountain was to arise, their national 
 life would be, not merely improved, but trans- 
 formed, finding wholly new activities, being 
 directed upon wholly new ideals ; and Christ's 
 declaration of Himself as the true spring indi- 
 cated that He looked on Himself as bringing an 
 entire transformation of life for the nation to 
 receive. When Christ claims to have the living 
 water in Himself, He means that His gift of 
 Himself to us involves, not simply improve- 
 ment, but newness. With our relation to Him we 
 commence an absolutely fresh chapter. We are 
 to take Him with a larger hope in the taking 
 than the hope that He will make a few cor-, 
 rections here and there, or touch up for us this 
 point and that. His coming to us is the spring- 
 ing up of a quite new stream of life, on whose 
 bosom we must allow ourselves to be borne. 
 And if we realise that, it makes our relationship 
 
ISO VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 with Christ an altogether more hopeful thing. 
 If He came only to repair, to add on something 
 to what is in us already, our real life would not 
 be taken very far beyond the stage it has 
 reached. But if our relation to Christ marks a 
 fresh beginning, an attachment of us to a source 
 of life wholly new, then our possibilities stretch 
 further and our hopes of living indeed may 
 mount higher and our flow of life must become 
 as great and pure as the flow of life from that 
 source can be. Christ must be taken as the 
 beginning of a new chapter for us — or as the 
 beginning of a new book, perhaps it would be 
 better still to say. We must give ourselves to 
 Him, not to be improved, but in order that an 
 absolutely fresh spring of life may be opened for 
 us in Him. 
 
 It was, besides, a ceaseless and inexhaustible 
 fountain on whose up-springing the national hope 
 was set ; and in declaring that the true fountain 
 was in Him, Christ declared that the relationship 
 of human souls to Him was no temporary ex- 
 pedient, but a method of life which could not fail 
 
LIVING WATER 
 
 and which would suffice for all time. Our spiritual 
 nature needs to find some means of sustaining 
 itself to which it shall be able to cling fast : we 
 have tried experiments enough, found many ways 
 of bringing an apparent and temporary satisfaction 
 to the needs of the soul, and then discovered that 
 the seeming satisfaction was a delusion and a 
 snare : our relationship with Christ once formed 
 aright, we have taken the means of satisfaction 
 which will never play us false. He is the inex- 
 haustible spring of life. And it is not a useless 
 matter to remind ourselves of that, because there is 
 so much energy wasted — even by those who claim 
 to have surrendered to the Christ — on what can 
 only be called experiments in satisfying the soul. 
 We forsake too often the one pursuit on which we 
 ought to concentrate — the pursuit of consolidating 
 and establishing our attachment to the Christ- 
 source — and spend ourselves on a thousand 
 things which heighten the emotion and produce a 
 spurious sense of life, which is after all no life, 
 within us, as though the supply from Christ were 
 not inexhaustible and sufficient, and we needed 
 to have some other springs in reserve when the 
 
152 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 supply from the Christ-spring breaks down. The 
 life which flows into us from Christ is sufficient 
 for our to-day, and its tide will be no less high for 
 our to-morrow if we keep our attachment to the 
 source unimpaired, and through all our days no 
 failure of its streams can be. Christ is the inex- 
 haustible spring : it is our part, therefore, to do 
 but this one thing — to perfect our attachment 
 thereto. All other efforts of ours are but wasted 
 strength. 
 
 Christ the source of a life that is new — Christ 
 the source of a life that is inexhaustible the ages 
 long — so does His proclamation of Himself as the 
 living fountain set Him before our eyes. It is, of 
 course, only saying in changed manner what 
 He has said before. Life in Himself — the living 
 bread — the living water — it all leads to the same 
 conception of the relationship between Christ and 
 man, and indicates that only in absolute union 
 between man and Christ is the true relationship 
 found. It is but playing the same melody in 
 varying key. Let each lesson in its turn write its 
 impression upon the mind. As the water of life 
 
LIVING WATER" 
 
 153 
 
 — new and exhaustless — is He now to be received. 
 In our need of such a full and ceaselessly-flowing 
 life, in our hope of it (as vain apart from Him as 
 the Messianic hope of Israel apart from Him was 
 vain) He comes to us and, if we allow Him to do 
 so, will make the spring to leap up within our 
 hearts as He establishes Himself there. And thus 
 the soul's long drought passes ; and they who 
 have sought for water out of the rock, and some- 
 times sought it for nought, find the new age begun 
 as the streams flow full ; and the Christ leads 
 them unto the living fountains of water which in 
 Himself are rising, and so wipes away all tears 
 from their eyes. 
 
XIII. 
 
 THE VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUS- 
 NESS: "THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD." 
 
 E may pass over the paragraph with which 
 
 recording the story of the woman taken in her 
 sin — partly because it is doubtful whether the 
 paragraph ought to stand there, since most of the 
 manuscripts of the Gospel omit it, and partly 
 because it in any case marks only a parenthesis 
 in the steady revelation of Himself as life-giver 
 which Christ was carrying on. Of course to say 
 that the legitimacy of the paragraph is open to 
 question is not by any means to say that the 
 incident it records did not happen, but only that 
 it is uncertain whether in this particular Gospel 
 or at this particular place of the Gospel the 
 
 John viii., ix. 
 
 the eighth chapter begins — the paragraph 
 
**THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD'* 155 
 
 record should find a home. Be it as it may, the 
 thing which calls for notice, now that we have 
 heard Christ declare Himself as the Creator of 
 life, the Bread of life, and the Water of life, is 
 His declaration of Himself as the Light of life, 
 the declaration which sounds out to us from the 
 twelfth verse of the eighth chapter. Again there- 
 fore Jesus spake unto them, saying, I am the light 
 of the world : he that followeth me shall not walk 
 in the darkness, but shall have the light of life." 
 
 Just as Christ's previous announcement that they 
 who thirsted should come unto Him and drink 
 found its origin, as we saw, in one of the rites 
 of the feast of Tabernacles — the rite of bringing 
 water from the pool of Siloam and pouring it forth 
 within the Temple bounds — so is it with this 
 announcement that in Him the true and lasting 
 light is kindled. Lamps were set round about 
 the Temple during the time of the feast, in 
 commemoration of the Pillar of Fire which had 
 through the desert been the people's guide. And 
 as Christ had claimed that in Him the symbol of 
 the water had its antitype, its fulfilment, so He 
 
156 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 claims now that these symbolic lamps, while they 
 reminded the onlookers of the light by which their 
 wandering fathers had walked, had their symbolism 
 perfectly realised in the light which He, the Christ, 
 would shed abroad. As He was the world's living 
 and lasting water, so was He the world's living and 
 everlasting light. 
 
 Christ gives life, then, as light gives guidance 
 — simply by shining Himself, if one may say so, 
 into the natures of men. Precisely the same idea 
 in substance, let it be observed, as Christ has 
 enunciated in other methods before. We have 
 heard Him speak of Himself as the Creator of life 
 in man : man, therefore, has simply to open him- 
 self to and to receive the Christ and the creative 
 impulse with Him. We have heard Him speak 
 of Himself as the bread of life : man, therefore, 
 has simply to receive Him as the physical nature 
 receives its sustaining food. We have heard Him 
 speak of Himself as the water of life : man, there- 
 fore, has simply to receive Him and to let the 
 spring of life that is in Him leap up within. 
 Now He is the light of life : man, therefore, has 
 
**THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD'' 157 
 
 simply to receive Him as the world receives and 
 is bathed in the light of day. Precisely the same 
 idea — and yet, as is important to note, with a 
 new element added to its content. For you 
 cannot speak of light without at once suggesting 
 the darkness which is in contrast with light ; and 
 in calling Himself the light of the world Christ 
 addresses Himself directly to the problem of the 
 world's sin, and declares that even for that His 
 ministries are enough. The life-giver — the bread 
 of the soul — the living water — yes, that is all 
 very well, but what about this question of corrupt 
 hearts and tainted wills and natures warped from 
 their comeliness — this question with which all 
 who are going to minister effectually to men must 
 deal ? And Christ makes His answer, " It has 
 none of it any terror for me. Dark as it all is, I 
 am the light which can shine it all away." What 
 makes all other ministries powerless, or to a great 
 extent powerless, has no effect upon the ministry 
 of Christ : it is not with Him, as with many, that 
 under favourable conditions, with man va his 
 normal and healthy state, He can minister to 
 man, but finds His working checked when man 
 
158 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 has swerved out of the proper line of develop- 
 ment: this life which Christ has to give is food 
 for the nature which yearns to be fed with life, 
 and water for the nature which longs to have the 
 streams of life welling up within it; but it is also 
 light for the nature which feels itself, by reason of 
 its unworthiness, wrapped in impenetrable gloom. 
 Let the conditions of man's inner life be abnormal 
 and crossed and muddled as they may, thrown 
 into such utter confusion that darkness black as 
 night is the phrase which most accurately describes 
 their state, Christ's claim for Himself is, " Only let 
 me come near, and the thick banks of darkness 
 piled up and up within that heart must be dis- 
 sipated as I come." Others can only work in 
 natures already lit up : Christ is Himself the 
 light. 
 
 For the purpose which John had pre-eminently 
 in view in the writing of his Gospel, it is of value 
 to record this claim which Christ made on His 
 own behalf — this claim of entire competence to 
 deal with the conditions of life at their worst. 
 John writes to show that Jesus is indeed the 
 
''THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD'* 159 
 
 Christ, the Son of God. Well, how does this 
 Jesus bear Himself with all the darkness of the 
 world before Him ? The question is crucial. He 
 offers great gifts, holds up supreme ideals, catches 
 at the aspirations and yearnings of human hearts 
 and says that He can fasten them to that which 
 will make them abidingly content — yes, but sin, 
 this great shadow which enfolds man, this pall of 
 night which appears as if it could never lift again, 
 what has He to say to that? At the supreme 
 moment, does His promise fail. His ministry 
 draw back with nothing more that it can do? 
 Has He all the secrets except the one last secret 
 without which all other secrets might as well be 
 left untold ? Nay. " I am the light of the world ! " 
 His claim for Himself is that the worst darkness 
 is nothing to Him, that the sin which veils human 
 life with its heavy shadows daunts Him not, that 
 at His coming the darkness flees. Look at the 
 great Figure — John seems to call — listen to the 
 great claim ! " Sufficient to cope even with the 
 problem of sin itself" — that is its sum. No one 
 would be fool enough to make such a claim 
 untruly; and if by this Jesus the claim can be 
 
i6o VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 truly made, verily He must be the Son of the 
 living God. 
 
 In regard to our relationship with Christ, this 
 metaphor has the same message and suggestion 
 as all the rest — that the actual mingling of the 
 Christ with ourselves, the actual substitution of 
 His life for our own, is the indispensable condition 
 for the establishment of a relationship such as He 
 would have. If Christ be the light which scatters 
 the soul's darkness, we have but to set ourselves 
 beneath His shining and to let Him shine, would 
 we be touched with light. Christ's shining upon 
 us the simple remedy for our darkness — the im- 
 pinging of Christ's nature and Christ's life upon 
 ours the simple remedy for our sin — thus is the 
 secret to be read. ,Only to receive Him is the 
 gospel's changeless call. Not to make anything, 
 not to do anything — only to let Him shine ! The 
 sin in us is to be destroyed, not by direct conflict 
 against it, but by putting ourselves under the 
 personality of the sinless One. For He is light, 
 so that the very kindling of Him near us, within 
 us, must make it light near us and within. How 
 
*'THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD'' i6i 
 
 do we cause darkness to give way to light ? You 
 go into your darkened room, and you do not do 
 anything to the darkness : you do not (the very 
 idea is grotesque) take it out by handfuls or expel 
 it by any mechanical pressure. You do but 
 kindle the flame, and the darkness is gone. This 
 darkness of sin within us, this black fog of cor- 
 ruption which so pervades our souls — take not so 
 much thought to drive it out, but take more 
 thought to let the Christ-light in. The gloom 
 and fog will go. Our whole spiritual exercise 
 should be this — to keep the Christ-nature and the 
 Christ - life near us, and to keep ourselves near 
 to the Christ-nature and the Christ-life. What 
 transformation our natures need will be accom- 
 plished then, because where Christ is, un-Christli- 
 ness cannot be. What communion hath light 
 with darkness ? Only let enough light in — only 
 let the whole nature, not a part of it, be turned, 
 and only let it be always, not intermittently, 
 turned, to the Christ-sun — and the darkness must 
 be past. We have not to drive out the souFs 
 darkness. We have but to let Christ shine in. 
 
 To clear sin out of us, we have but to admit the 
 II 
 
i62 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 Christ. Our care should be fixed, not on the 
 door by which we hope to thrust sin forth, but on 
 the door by which we mean to let Christ in. For 
 if He come, sin must slink out ashamed. The 
 positive kindling of the Christ-life in us is the 
 thing for which we must seek, for so we shall 
 walk in darkness no more. 
 
 Yet the ninth chapter (which, closely related as 
 it is with the main idea of the eighth, needs to be 
 permitted to make its impression at once) supplies 
 us with a counterbalancing thought. In the ninth 
 chapter John passes on — clearly with perfect 
 comprehension of the connecting links, and with 
 deliberate intention that his readers shall com- 
 prehend them also — from Christ^s declaration of 
 Himself as the light of the world to a miracle of 
 Christ's which illustrates the spiritual truth in the 
 physical sphere. Christ brings light to man in 
 the spiritual sense : here He brings light to man 
 in the physical sense, and makes the blind to see. 
 And that Christ Himself wanted the physical 
 miracle to be taken as an illustration of the 
 spiritual ministry is evident from this — that in the 
 
'*THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD" 163 
 
 presence of this man He echoes His own words 
 from the previous chapter, and repeats the declara- 
 tion He formerly avowed. " When I am in the 
 world, I am the light of the world." The behold- 
 ing of this man, to whom He is going to restore 
 the lower light, stirs in Christ again a vivid con- 
 sciousness of His mission to bestow upon all men 
 the higher light; and as He has the power to 
 give to this man in his need the illumination 
 of his darkness, so has He the power to give 
 to men and women in the deeper darkness of 
 their inner life the illumination for which they 
 wait. The miracle presents itself to John after it 
 has been performed, just as it presented itself to 
 Christ even while He was performing it, as an 
 illustration in the lower sphere of Christ's ministries 
 in the higher. 
 
 But one of the first things which starts up and 
 forces itself into notice, as the account of the 
 miracle is read, is that Christ compelled this 
 blind man, notwithstanding his helplessness, to 
 take some part in the work of his own healing. 
 He had to go to the pool of Siloam and wash ; 
 and it was when he had done this that he " came 
 
i64 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 seeing." Christ was the light for him, and yet he 
 had to bestir himself and make an effort of his 
 own before the shining of the light was his. 
 
 To the declaration that spiritually Christ is 
 the light of man, we need always to add the 
 counterbalancing declaration, with its warning, 
 that not for us is the shining of the light until 
 we have done our part. We came previously 
 upon practically the same point, when we were 
 pondering Christ's proclamation of Himself under 
 the other metaphor as the bread of life : it was a 
 fair inference, we saw then, from His use of the 
 metaphor that upon ourselves something of the 
 burden lay ; for bread does nothing for us unless 
 we stretch forth the hand and seize it. It does 
 not of itself feed our hunger, but must be sought 
 for and grasped. But here we have something 
 more than an inference — here is an actual concrete 
 instance of Christ making His gift dependent in 
 part upon the effort of him who was to receive. 
 We need always to hold the balance true between 
 the idea that all for us is in Christ and the other 
 idea that a burden rests nevertheless upon our 
 own hearts : when one idea is exclusively held, 
 
''THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD'* 165 
 
 and the balancing idea forgotten, you get a con- 
 ception of the Christian life which can in no wise 
 lead to the highest results. In all the darkness 
 of our bewildered moral nature, in all the shadow 
 of our sinfulness, Christ is our light ; but He wants 
 us to do some work of preparation upon ourselves 
 before the light that is in Him can shine in. All 
 is to come from Him ; and still we have some- 
 thing to do in making it possible for all to come 
 from Him. Indeed, on this as on all subjects 
 which go down to the deeps of things, one has to 
 give utterance to what sound like partial contra- 
 dictions, but are really only different sides of the 
 same truth. Nothing is required of us but faith ; 
 and the apparent contradiction is that we have 
 to work out our own salvation with fear and 
 trembling. Every influence that can improve 
 and refine and sanctify our inner nature is in 
 Christ, and Christ alone ; and the apparent con- 
 tradiction is that Christ seems to demand from 
 those who would be His disciples so much which 
 discipleship might perhaps produce, but which 
 can hardly be present before discipleship begins. 
 The truth amid the seeming contradictions is of 
 
i66 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 course this — that before Christ's grace can come 
 forth upon us, there must be self-preparation, self- 
 discipline, a clearing of the inner life from pre- 
 judice and obstinacy and bondage to habit, a 
 whole programme of preliminary things whereby 
 the soul may be got ready for Christ to come in. 
 Not that the preliminaries have any particular 
 positive virtue in themselves : the positive grace 
 is to come from Christ ; but the way is to be 
 prepared for its coming by the self-discipline we 
 set ourselves to go through. The man had to 
 go to the pool of Siloam and wash before he 
 could see, although the light of the world stood 
 beside him ; and the fact is symbolic of the 
 preparation required of us would we have the 
 Christ shine in. He is the light of the world, 
 indeed — but the phrase must not lull us into 
 spiritual sloth, nor make us fancy that on un- 
 disciplined natures the light will shed its rays. 
 Before you can appreciate the light-giving power 
 of the sun, you must at least open the eyes which 
 have been closed : before you can appreciate the 
 light-giving power of the Christ, you must at 
 least open the eyes of the inner nature; and it is 
 
''THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD" 167 
 
 not such an easy thing there. For co-operation 
 with Himself does Christ call, if He is to perform 
 His miracles; and a burden of responsibility 
 rests upon us still, although all grace is in 
 Him. 
 
 Returning for a space to the eighth chapter, 
 which for a while we left, it is noteworthy how, 
 when Christ's declaration that in Him the 
 perfect light was shining roused into fiercer 
 hostility the irritated Pharisees who lay in wait 
 to catch Him in His words, Christ's tone rose 
 higher, and how He reiterated, in more pro- 
 nounced form than perhaps at any other time. 
 His claim to closest intimacy and most entire 
 harmony with His God. Or, if elsewhere asser- 
 tions of equal force are to be found, it is at any 
 rate here that they are most often repeated and 
 most strenuously insisted upon and most daringly 
 thrust upon hearers unwilling to receive them. 
 Christ seems to realise how bitterly hostile these 
 men round Him are, and to accept their hostility 
 as a necessary element in the situation — to think 
 within Himself, " If you will be opponents, at 
 
i68 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 least you shall have full opportunity of show- 
 ing how irreconcilable you are " ; and so He 
 presses home that claim of His which they could 
 not away with, His claim to be one with God. 
 Even when some of the Jews believed on Him 
 after a fashion, as the thirtieth verse informs us, 
 Christ returns to the same point, as if determined 
 that it shall not be through any imperfect under- 
 standing of what He demands for Himself that 
 their belief is rendered ; and we see, as the 
 chapter goes on, that under that insistence of 
 Christ's even those who had given Him some sort 
 of assent are roused into opposition again. All 
 through, " the Father " or " my Father " is the 
 word : God was in Him and He in God : He 
 knows God's secrets, reads God's mind : He is not 
 of this world : He is " the Son." Christ's conten- 
 tion was ever this — that He did not have, as 
 others had, to learn about God, to struggle up 
 to Him, to add item after item to His stock 
 of knowledge of God, to grow into a perfect 
 relationship with Him : with God He was 
 from the beginning entirely at home. He 
 had come straight out from the bosom of 
 
*^THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD" 169 
 
 the Father whereon He had rested : yea, 
 although the world saw Him as one of its 
 own citizens, He was really resting upon the 
 bosom of the Father still. He was part of 
 God. 
 
 We may say, in reference to John^s record of 
 this claim of Christ's and of Christ's persistence 
 in affirming and re-affirming it — as we said in 
 reference to the record of Christ's announcement 
 that He was the world's perfect light — that for 
 the evangelist's main purpose it was a thing of 
 value thus to set down the tale of the uncompro- 
 mising Christ — the Christ who was so sure of 
 Himself. The lowest type of character is always 
 apt to be sure of itself, to think that it has all 
 that can be possessed and is all that it can be — 
 because it is ignorant of how much there is above 
 it : the highest character of all would of course 
 be sure of itself — because the highest must know 
 that there is above it nothing higher still : it is 
 the intermediate types — those to which the most 
 of us belong, those who know themselves to be 
 struggling out of a lowness beneath them into a 
 greatness above them — whose accents will ever 
 
I70 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 be faltering and who will advance no claims on 
 their own behalf. An assertion that no effort 
 after anything higher remains to be gone through 
 — it might be made by the low man, who has 
 never awakened to the reality of things, and it 
 might be made by divineness itself. Which was 
 Christ ? This is the point to be dealt with — so 
 John's recording of Christ's calm, large claim 
 sets it before us — was this Christ so low that He 
 was unaware how far He was from God, and in 
 ignorance made His claim, or was He so high, so 
 divine, that it was with perfect justice He could 
 make it ? His assertion about Himself was not 
 one which the average good man could make. 
 One far enough below the average good man to 
 make it, or one far enough above the average 
 good man to make it — which was Christ ? And 
 because any claimant asserting unjustly a moral 
 and spiritual oneness with God would be found 
 out ere long, and because Christ was never found 
 to have falsely claimed — because all that He is 
 supports the claim He made — therefore does He 
 stand before us as one with the Father in very 
 deed and truth. Of this chapter — leading as it 
 
^'THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD' 171 
 
 does through the great announcement that the 
 world's light was shining up to the great and re- 
 emphasised declarations that God and Christ were 
 one — of this chapter, as of the rest of his Gospel, 
 John could say that these things " are written 
 that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the 
 Son of God/' The greatness of Christ's self- 
 assertion compels us to put Him either down to 
 the lowest or on the very throne of God. Who 
 can hesitate as to where His place shall be ? 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE VOICE OF CHRISTS CONSCIOUS- 
 NESS : '*THE GOOD SHEPHERD." 
 
 HIS chapter brings us to the last figure, the 
 
 A final metaphor, by which Christ seeks to 
 make clear the relationship which is to subsist 
 between Him and His own. As far back as the 
 fifth chapter, it will be remembered, Christ made 
 the definite statement concerning Himself and 
 His ministry, that " as the Father hath life in 
 himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have 
 life in himself" — indicating thereby that He, the 
 Christ, comes in order to create actual new life 
 out of Himself in the hearts of men. Men are 
 not simply to imitate Him, not simply to believe 
 in Him — in any shallow interpretation of the 
 word " believe " — but to be actually pervaded by 
 
 John x. i-i8. 
 
'*THE GOOD SHEPHERD" 173 
 
 the life He possesses. And we have followed the 
 subsequent declarations, in which Christ repeated 
 and expounded the same idea under various forms, 
 expressed in differing fashion the fundamental 
 thought that men are in truth to receive Him into 
 themselves and to be themselves lost in Him. 
 For a last method of impressing His persistent 
 idea, Christ employs the figure of the shepherd 
 and his flock, wishing His hearers to understand 
 that as the sheep depend absolutely upon him 
 who tends them for all they do and for all they 
 get, finding all in him who tends them, so the 
 followers of Christ stand to Him in a relation of 
 utter dependence, and in Him and from Him 
 are to find their all. To the Eastern mind the 
 metaphor would appeal more powerfully even 
 than to us, since the shepherd of Eastern lands 
 identifies himself most entirely with the sheep 
 under his care, and his interest in them suffers 
 nothing to diminish it, and he makes their safety 
 to be inseparably linked with his own. 
 
 Christ the Shepherd — we the sheep of His 
 flock. It is a tender relationship, sweet, idyllic. 
 
174 VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 beautiful ; and I think that after the other figures 
 under which Christ had described His relation to 
 His people and theirs to Him He was glad to 
 use this new figure, which had in it a winsome 
 graciousness absent from the rest. The Creator 
 of life in us, the Bread which is transformed 
 into life in us, the Water which springs up as 
 inexhaustible life in the soul, the Light of life 
 which diffuses itself through us — He is all these 
 things, and must be so apprehended ; but these 
 conceptions of Him are so great, with something 
 of austerity in them it may be, making the 
 Christly relation seem to have in it a touch of 
 the severe. And so Christ comes down to us — 
 " here is the same idea of absolute dependence on 
 me in a sweeter form : I am the Good Shepherd. 
 No austerity, but all tenderness, is in that." 
 Having hung these other great ideas before our 
 vision, like suns that dazzle us with their rays if 
 we look upon them too long, Christ swings this 
 quiet star into its place in the sky to shed its 
 softer light. All those great things He is to us 
 and will always be to us ; but also He is the Good 
 Shepherd. And yet, if we cast another glance 
 
**THE GOOD SHEPHERD" 175 
 
 upon it, we see immediately that, in the using 
 of this metaphor, Christ gives up nothing of His 
 claim to be the one authoritative source of all to 
 us. A shepherd — he is kind and patient and 
 gentle, if he be a shepherd worthy the name ; 
 but if he be a shepherd worthy the name, he is 
 also one of the most absolute rulers the world 
 contains. The sheep, I suppose, stands as the 
 type of most utter helplessness, making blunders 
 whenever there is the slightest chance of making 
 them, running into danger as if it loved it, about 
 the most pitifully incapable thing on God's earth. 
 The shepherd, though he rule kindly, must 
 preserve the strictness of his rule. And in 
 Christ's view we are the sheep who do not know 
 their way and have no life except what He, 
 the Shepherd, makes for them. He is the Good 
 Shepherd ; and that means that He will be 
 running over with graciousness, compassionate 
 with the wounded and the tired ones ; but if He 
 is the Shepherd, we are the sheep, and that means 
 that to take all from Him is the only thing we 
 can safely do. Round again are we brought to 
 the Christ's fundamental idea — that He must 
 
176 VOICE OF CHRISTS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 make life for us and in us. So when Christ 
 speaks of Himself as the Shepherd of the sheep, 
 He wants us to combine in our thought about 
 Him these two things — His absolute, authoritative 
 superiority, and His sweet, familiar, condescending 
 care. We have no complete understanding of 
 what Christ would be to us and of what we 
 should be to Him until in our conception of the 
 relationship the two ideas are inseparably linked. 
 When the greatness of the ministry Christ wants 
 to work in us makes us afraid, we may remind 
 ourselves that He does not merely stand above, 
 beyond us, flinging down, as it were. His great 
 ideas. His great suggestions. His great offers, 
 leaving us to get out of Him what we can, but 
 is the Shepherd who compasses His flock about 
 with active benevolence and care. When, on the 
 other hand, the wonder of His tenderness warms 
 and gladdens us, we are to remember still that all 
 those great ideas and great suggestions and great 
 offers of His keep their authority unimpaired ; 
 and, let the Shepherd be kind as He will, the 
 sheep on their side must at least obey. Christ's 
 metaphor, when He speaks of Himself as the 
 
<<THE GOOD SHEPHERD'' 177 
 
 leader of the flock, suggests alike and equally His 
 undiminished authority over us as the source ot 
 all our life, and His gracious, familiar condescen- 
 sion in bringing life to those who in themselves 
 have none. And we must allow both suggestions 
 to have their weight if we would fully apprehend 
 the figure Christ employs. 
 
 It may be said that Christ's divine greatness 
 shows itself in this — that He can bear to stoop, 
 that He can use language like this, so gentle as 
 it is, so unduly mild as it would be in any other 
 who should aspire to be a leader of men, and yet 
 keep all His majesty. Your ordinary man who 
 wants to hold a position of authority and leader- 
 ship is everlastingly afraid lest he should unbend 
 too far : he has to keep his distance and to keep 
 others at theirs : he must allow no soft accents 
 to slide into his speech : he compromises himself 
 so far as he makes familiar relations possible 
 between himself and those whom he seeks to lead. 
 But this Christ has so much greatness in reserve 
 that, let Him stoop as He may, men still feel 
 
 that His home is in heaven. Somehow all the 
 12 
 
178 VOICE OF CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 tenderness of His language and the grace of His 
 attitude to men does but suggest and emphasise 
 the measureless divineness behind it all, which 
 never can be veiled. Truly this man, who could 
 thus make Himself familiar to men as the 
 Shepherd whose sheep they were, and could yet 
 without any incongruity claim an absolute rule — 
 truly this was the Son of God ! 
 
 The figure suggests the constancy of man's 
 dependence upon Christ, its persistence, its 
 permanence. The sheep are never educated to a 
 point at which they can do without the sheperd's 
 care. Our attachment to Christ is not simply 
 a new beginning for us, a means by which we 
 obtain a fresh start. As dependent as we are 
 to-day, so dependent must we always remain : in 
 this matter of the true life there is no strengthen- 
 ing of faculty which will at last enable us to do 
 without shepherding and accomplish everything 
 for ourselves : Christ does not take us in charge 
 in order that He may train us to stand alone. 
 There are certain directions in which we are not 
 to look for progress : the only progress for which 
 
*'THE GOOD SHEPHERD'' 179 
 
 we are to look is progress in the power of obtain- 
 ing more from Christ, in letting His shepherding 
 of us have more complete effect. Christ is not 
 the schoolmaster in matters of the spiritual life, 
 keeping us under His hands for a while, and then 
 sending us forth with our education finished to 
 act out the principles He has instilled. He is 
 the Shepherd whose v/ork of care is never done. 
 To enter, not upon independence, but upon a 
 completer and more continuous dependence, is the 
 only progress that has worth. The perfected life 
 is not the life grown so strong that it needs no 
 shelter any more, but the life which never quits 
 the Shepherd's fold. 
 
 The metaphor offers also a suggestion, which 
 for every soul has sweetness, as to the separate, 
 individual character of Christ's ministries. " He 
 calleth his own sheep by name '' — as the Eastern 
 shepherd does know his sheep, distinguishing 
 them every one, remembering the particular 
 characteristics and necessities of each. So does 
 Christ know His sheep separately, as it were by 
 name. The Creator of life, the Bread of life, the 
 
i8o VOICE OF CHRISrS CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 Water of life, the Light of life — yes, but there is 
 something impersonal about all these things : I 
 may try to know something about them, but they 
 will not know anything about me. Then take 
 the final figure. The Shepherd knows. Christ 
 is all these things, but He sets them before us 
 with remembrance of and regard for the particular 
 elements of your life and mine which belong to 
 us alone. A Christ who can only work on men 
 and save men in one way, and yet a Christ who 
 works on and saves each man in the way adapted 
 to his own special need — so does the sweet 
 contradiction run ! And let me be what I may, 
 Christ, wanting to give Himself to me, to shep- 
 herd me, will make His approach to me in a 
 way that I shall understand ; and He will take 
 this sheep of His in His arms in a different 
 fashion from that other, and His voice to each 
 one will be the voice to which each one will most 
 readily respond. By many varieties of ministry will 
 this Shepherd bring all His sheep at last to receive 
 His one great ministry of eternal life. 
 
 So, not forgetting the other methods in which 
 
*'THE GOOD SHEPHERD" i8i 
 
 Christ had declared Himself, did John wish His 
 readers to add to them this last and tenderest 
 declaration, that they might be the more surely 
 won. As they heard Him calling Himself the 
 Good Shepherd, they were to accept Him so — 
 making in answer to His words their own psalm 
 of confidence and praise, testifying that the Lord 
 was their Shepherd indeed, and that therefore 
 they could not want. 
 
XV. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN UNDER THE SHADOW 
 OF DEATH. 
 
 John xi,, xii, 
 
 T N order to preserve unity of impression, our 
 study has to abstract itself from many of 
 the details contained in the subsequent chapters 
 of John's Gospel, and to concentrate upon the 
 spirit behind the recorded deeds and utterances 
 of Christ rather than upon the deeds and utter- 
 ances themselves. John lingers lovingly over 
 much whereon we, lest the general effect be 
 blurred by prominence of particulars, must not 
 linger long. Full as the remaining chapters are 
 of much which will ever be most precious to the 
 Christian mind and heart, for our present purpose 
 • — which is to gather the one impression whereto 
 
 every detail is subordinate — they must be 
 182 
 
CHRIST UNDER SHADOW OF DEATH 183 
 
 surveyed with swift, rather than with slow-moving, 
 eyes. 
 
 The end of the tenth chapter marks a clear 
 break in John's narrative; and he resumes now 
 the method of writing which after the fourth 
 chapter he laid down. Let us recall for an 
 instant what the run of the story has been — 
 always, of course, bearing in mind that John's 
 main object in compiling his Gospel has been to 
 build up a cumulative witness that this Jesus is in 
 truth the Son of God. John began by recounting 
 various incidents about Christ — the calling of the 
 first disciples, the miracle at Cana of Galilee, the 
 conversation with Nicodemus, and others — each 
 incident in its turn doing a little more to separate 
 Christ from the family of mere men, and bringing 
 into bolder relief something in Him for which 
 ordinary classifications provided no place. After 
 the fourth chapter, John did not so much speak 
 about Christ as allow Christ to speak for Himself: 
 the marvellous consciousness of Christ, His own 
 inner life, His own thought and feeling, have been 
 expressing themselves from the time the fifth 
 
i84 CHRIST SEEN UNDER 
 
 chapter commenced until now ; and it has not been 
 John pointing us to the divineness Christ mani- 
 fested, but the divineness in Christ coming forth 
 to draw our attention upon itself. In all these 
 discourses of His about life and bread and light 
 and water and shepherding, there has been the 
 implied question, " What save divineness could 
 utter itself like this ? " Now John begins to 
 speak about Christ once more ; and it is about 
 what a human estimate would term the sad 
 ending of His life that John is preparing to 
 speak ; and it is to the account of the last scenes 
 that these chapters — the eleventh and twelfth — 
 are designed to lead up. " You said at the be- 
 ginning," John's readers might remark, " that this 
 Christ came unto His own and that His own 
 received Him not. If He were in truth of God, 
 He ought to have been able to avert the doom 
 brought upon Him by the rejection of those that 
 were His own. How are you going to deal with 
 that matter? You have been building up an 
 impression of divine greatness in this Jesus — will 
 it survive the story of His death ? " And so John 
 faces the question. He will recount the tale of 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH 185 
 
 the last scenes, without fear that they who read it 
 open-mindedly will fancy the chief Figure in them 
 to be suffering any loss of greatness as the scenes 
 pass before their eyes, knowing rather that those 
 last scenes themselves will but accentuate His 
 greatness still more. Only something must be 
 set before the readers by way of preliminary, and 
 they must understand that, although Christ per- 
 mitted death to master Him, He really held the 
 mastery over death, and that He chose death 
 because by death He perfected the work He had 
 begun. 
 
 The eleventh chapter shows Christ mastering 
 death, in that He called back the dead Lazarus 
 from the tomb : Christ Himself, therefore, need 
 not have died. The twelfth chapter shows Christ 
 actually welcoming death, and giving the reason 
 for His welcoming of it — " And I, if I be lifted 
 up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself." 
 And we miss a great deal of what John intended 
 to convey unless we realise how the contents of 
 these chapters, in addition to the interest and 
 suggestion they possess in themselves, fit thus 
 into the evangelist's general scheme. He is going 
 
CHRIST SEEN UNDER 
 
 to recount how Christ, divine though He was, 
 died under the hands of men ; and he prepares 
 his readers for the recounting of it by showing 
 how in His divineness Christ was able to master 
 death when He would, and yet how in His divine- 
 ness He actually welcomed it as it threateningly 
 lifted up its head. 
 
 That there dwelt in Him the divineness, the 
 divine creative power, the divine life, against 
 which death was powerless. He showed when He 
 came to the cave where Lazarus lay buried, and 
 called in a voice which the dead was constrained 
 to obey, " Lazarus, come forth." If He could 
 do this, then all questioning of His divineness 
 based on the fact that He endured the Cross 
 becomes invalid : it can no more be said that 
 death conquered Him, but only that He, when 
 He might have done otherwise, submitted Himself 
 to death ; and it must be true, as He had asserted 
 before, that no man taketh His life from Him, 
 but that He layeth it down of Himself because 
 this is the commandment He has received from 
 His Father. The conqueror's power was His, 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH 187 
 
 had He chosen to put it forth. At once, there- 
 fore (so the inference irresistibly suggests itself), 
 He is carried away from the level of all others 
 who for the sake of great causes have died : He 
 was not, as others have been, a martyr who, with 
 all power and opportunity of resistance exhausted, 
 accepted a fate from which there was no escape : 
 the door was open to Him up to the end, had He 
 willed to flee. And so He grows divinely great 
 indeed. Can it be thought that any, even among 
 the noblest heroes of our race, would, if they 
 had been possessed of such power as this — and a 
 power, moreover, by the exercise of which they 
 could have covered themselves with renown and 
 brought at any rate a temporary success to their 
 cherished cause — have held it back ? To endure 
 what must be endured is one thing : to submit to 
 what may without loss of honour in man's eyes 
 be avoided is quite another. But Christ, who 
 Himself called the dead to life, said no word 
 to bid death hold aloof when it drew near. 
 Carry that remembrance with you, John would 
 say, as you read the story of the Cross, and^ 
 notwithstanding the Cross, you will be sure 
 
i88 CHRIST SEEN UNDER 
 
 that He who died upon it was the Son of 
 God. 
 
 But John wants his readers to see, not only 
 Christ submitting to death when He might have 
 been free, but Christ actually welcoming it, re- 
 joicing in it is not too strong a word, taking it 
 as being even a help to His influence upon the 
 hearts of men. And so, in the twelfth chapter, 
 he tells how certain Greeks, drawn to seek for 
 Christ by something they had heard concerning 
 Him, were among the worshippers at the feast. 
 In one sense it was an opportunity: here was 
 recognition accorded to Christ from beyond, 
 however His own might refuse to receive Him : 
 these few He had drawn by the magnetism of 
 whatever was strange and wonderful in Him. 
 But He would not be carried away, would find 
 no excuse in this success for avoiding what lay 
 before Him. " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
 will draw all men unto myself." He had drawn 
 but these few : His Cross would draw, not a 
 few, but all. To Christ, death. His submission to 
 death, was going to be, not a curtailing, but an 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH 189 
 
 enlargement, of His influence and His work. 
 Carry with you — so John would say to those who 
 read his words — carry with you, as you ponder 
 the story of the Cross, the remembrance that this 
 Christ welcomed it, rejoiced in it, prophesied that 
 it would be itself the very strength by which He 
 would win His way; and notwithstanding the 
 Cross, you will be sure that He who died upon 
 it was the Son of God. 
 
 There is a strengthening of the impression 
 made upon us by Christ's welcome of death 
 in remembering how the fact that He so wel- 
 comed it chimes in and harmonises with all that 
 He has previously said about the relationship 
 between Himself and man. That through His 
 dying that relationship would become a possible 
 experience for all men through all time, was an 
 idea at which He had ali;;eady hinted, however 
 little the hint may have been understood. When 
 He spoke of Himself as the bread of life — 
 indicating thereby that absolute union between 
 Himself and man was the conception of the 
 needed relationship He entertained — thoughts 
 of the approaching death were moving in His 
 
igo CHRIST SEEN UNDER 
 
 mind ; and it was through sacrifice that He would 
 become the bread of life to all. With gaze fixed 
 upon the decease He was to accomplish, He said 
 then, " Yea and the bread which I will give is my 
 flesh, for the life of the world." For the full 
 understanding of it, that utterance must be linked 
 with the other utterance following a little further 
 on. " The bread which I will give is my flesh," 
 — and yet it is not long before Christ goes on, 
 "It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh pro- 
 fiteth nothing." Christ looked upon the giving 
 of His body up to death as the means whereby 
 His spirit, the quickening bread of our spirits, 
 would be set free to offer itself far and wide to 
 men : through His sacrifice of Himself upon the 
 Cross, and through His rising when the Cross had 
 done its worst (for death and resurrection were 
 always inseparably linked in His thought). He 
 would become and would remain, in the con- 
 tinued, unseen ministry which was to begin when 
 the seen and earthly ministry closed, the bread of 
 life, not to a few, but to all the world. It was 
 a figure within a figure, a metaphor within a 
 metaphor. Christ was the bread for souls, and 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH 191 
 
 the bread which He would give was His flesh, 
 since the giving of Himself to death' would mark 
 the beginning of that spirit-ministry of His, 
 unchanged and real till now, which is the 
 quickening influence for the life of the world. 
 The Cross was standing in Christ's thought, not 
 as the end, but as the beginning of things ; and 
 sacrifice would but enlarge His power of offering 
 Himself to men as their spiritual food. 
 
 Here the same fundamental idea possesses 
 Him ; and it is as we remember how Christ 
 viewed the relationship between Himself and 
 man that we become able to enter in measure 
 into His thought of what may — though with 
 recognition of the inadequacy of the phrase — be 
 called the advantage of the Cross. He saw in the 
 Cross the means which would make Him for ever 
 accessible to man, able to be the source of life to 
 those who would unite themselves with Him. " I, 
 if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
 unto myself." The utterance is itself profound, 
 and corresponds with all the other profound 
 things which in this profoundest of all the Gospels 
 Christ is reported to have said about Himself, 
 
192 CHRIST SEEN UNDER 
 
 " Will draw all men unto myself — that is, will 
 so take men who are willing to surrender into the 
 deeps of My own life and so identify them with 
 Myself and Myself with them that all their life 
 shall be drawn from Mine. Since He was going 
 to do that — since He was going to carry on that 
 enfolding of man's spirit within His own through 
 all the coming centuries of the world — Christ 
 looked on to the Cross and to the resurrection 
 whereof the Cross was the pi-elude (for let it be 
 said again that death and rising always made 
 one whole in Christ's mind) as giving the needed 
 demonstration that in Him was life and that He 
 would ceaselessly have life to give. If He died 
 and rose again, He would be the living and the 
 life-giving Christ for evermore : the very Cross 
 which seemed to slay Him would itself supply the 
 proof that death had no dominion over Him ; and 
 men might let themselves, till time was done, be 
 drawn to the Christ who had life in Himself and 
 life to give. " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
 will draw all men unto myself." " That winning 
 of all men into oneness with Me, which is the 
 work the Father has given Me to do, will be 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH 193 
 
 performed year on year unfailingly when it is by 
 One who died and lives again that men are 
 sought and drawn." 
 
 Preacher of new and most wondrous truth, 
 exemplar of most perfect character, even supreme 
 revelation of God in a manner — all these Christ 
 could have been without the Cross. We could 
 have looked back nineteen, twenty, any number of 
 centuries, to recover all that, to hear the echoes 
 of His words, to discern the outline of what 
 He was. But we could not look back nineteen, 
 twenty centuries for life. To be the life-giver, 
 the one who constantly draws men unto, into 
 Himself — for that there must be something more, 
 if we may so say, than a local Christ; and for 
 that great ministry Christ's Cross and His rising 
 set Him free. Since He died and rose, the life 
 in Him can draw me to-day and can to-day, 
 through that union, be mine. This did Christ 
 see in the Cross on which He was to die — and 
 seeing this, welcomed the Cross with all its pain 
 — the beginning of that ministry whereby into 
 His own triumphant life He would draw the 
 souls of men, poor of life as they might be, to 
 13 
 
194 
 
 CHRIST SEEN UNDER 
 
 the end of time. The very Cross would speak 
 to men of the life-giver who had conquered the 
 Cross, and would give them for their worship 
 and their trust, not a Christ who had been and 
 passed away, but a Christ who, though He was 
 dead, was alive for evermore. 
 
 It is not suggested that this touches more than 
 the fringe of Calvary's meaning, or that Christ 
 read in His Cross no other significance than that 
 here drawn out. But, at Christ's side, we read 
 these things at least with Him upon the mys- 
 terious page which tells how He was to drink 
 death's bitter cup. " I, if I be lifted up from the 
 earth, will draw all men unto myself." By the 
 Cross He was going to win that power which He 
 uses still. Of all others who in the service of 
 humanity have given their lives one can say that, 
 had they been permitted to keep them, their 
 service to humanity would have been greater 
 still : of Christ one has to say that just because 
 He died does His empire grow on and on 
 towards universality among men. 
 
 But this thought of Christ's had a divine daring 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH 
 
 in it. Only divineness could entertain such an 
 expectation as this of His. What made Christ 
 so humbly submit and so wondrously rejoice 
 in that whereto He submitted ? Is there any 
 sufficient explanation but this — that this was the 
 Son of God ? 
 
XVL 
 
 CHRIST SEEN AS CONCEALING AND 
 REVEALING HIMSELF: THE BE- 
 GINNING OF THE END. 
 
 John xiii. 
 
 T T AVING furnished his readers, in the narra- 
 ^ ^ tive of the two preceding chapters, with 
 two fundamental ideas which they are to carry 
 with them through their glance over the closing 
 scenes, John now begins his account of the closing 
 scenes themselves. Christ had power over death, 
 for He had bidden the dead Lazarus live; and 
 His death was therefore no martyrdom in the 
 ordinary sense, no fate which He was unable to 
 escape, but a fate voluntarily embraced — that is 
 one thing to be remembered as the story goes 
 on. And death was something which Christ 
 took as an actual assistance to His ministry, not 
 
CHRIST SEEN AS CONCEALING HIMSELF 197 
 
 as a hindrance to it, for by means of it He would 
 gather power to draw all men unto Himself — ^ 
 that is the other. Now John proceeds to show 
 still more clearly how absolutely out of the 
 common order is Christ's bearing of Himself 
 throughout, how in all He did and in all He 
 said there is something only to be explained by 
 declaring that there was in Him a life entirely 
 different from the life of man. Even if it were 
 possible to imagine one of the ordinary family 
 of mankind in such a position as this of Christ's 
 — with a death before him which might be 
 escaped, with a death before him, moreover, 
 which was going to perfect his work — his action 
 and his speaking would be of a different order, 
 directed along quite different lines, from the 
 action and the speaking of Christ. These chapters 
 are to show how the promptings which moved 
 Christ are quite other than the promptings by 
 which, if one could picture a man set in Christ's 
 position and possessed of Christ's power, a man 
 would be moved. This present chapter shows it 
 in regard to what Christ did, as the following 
 chapters show it in regard to what Christ said. 
 
198 CHRIST SEEN AS CONCEALING 
 
 He humbles Himself before His most intimate 
 followers, making no attempt to impress even 
 them with any special sense of the power He 
 was restraining or of the greatness He kept 
 veiled. The greatest of men, accepting as they 
 may whatever may be involved in faithfulness to 
 their call, find strength in communicating the 
 inmost secrets of their minds to those who are 
 in truth their friends. Of course history has 
 many instances of great ones who have preserved 
 locked within their own breasts thoughts and 
 feelings which could not have been understood 
 had they uttered them ; and there have been 
 those who, because any telling of what was in 
 them would have been a vain thing, have kept 
 silence. But before those who are accessible to 
 impression, man opens his heart : in the com- 
 pany of his intimates, who are willing to hear 
 and who will appreciate whatever seems to in- 
 dicate his greatness, man's lips are unsealed. This 
 Christ, accepting a death He need not endure, 
 keeping restraint upon a power in Him by whose 
 exercise He might be delivered — what will He 
 do ? Will He not at least ensure that upon the 
 
AND REVEALING HIMSELF 199 
 
 minds of these disciples, gathered with Him just 
 before the end, an adequate impression shall be 
 left of the greatness with which He might have 
 dazzled the world? They would be ready to 
 listen to Him if He spoke of it, would gladly 
 cherish the recollection of any sign of it He might 
 give — will He not see to it that the impression 
 they are ready to receive is given ? They^ at 
 least, will surely be made to know how wonderful 
 their Master is ? 
 
 But instead of greatening Himself in their 
 eyes, the Christ brings Himself low, and washes 
 His disciples' feet. He cares nothing about 
 what impression His followers may have as to 
 His power to resist the advancing doom : He 
 cares a great deal more about the spirit that may 
 dwell in them after His departure; and in order 
 that the spirit dwelling in them may be right. He 
 gives them this example that they should do as 
 He is doing to them. It is in that direction that 
 Christ's thought is looking : having no desire that 
 this renunciation of power He is making in letting 
 death conquer Him should be impressed as a 
 wonderful thing upon the disciples* minds, He 
 
200 CHRIST SEEN AS CONCEALING 
 
 does not set their attention upon that : among 
 their last recollections of Him there is to stand 
 out the recollection of Him as He humbled Him- 
 self to this, so showing them what they themselves 
 should be. Quite away from all ordinary human 
 methods is Christ lifted in this, as in so many 
 other things we have seen Him to be. When 
 man would have striven that at least the intimate 
 ones in his fellowship should appreciate and un- 
 derstand, Christ cares, not for their understanding 
 of Him, but for their continuance in a right spirit 
 after He is gone. The greatness He is veiling is 
 a secret between Himself and God — not even to 
 these friendly eyes is it to be displayed. 
 
 But was the Christ, then, wholly removed from 
 what man would have felt at such a time? If 
 He was, His very distance from the common 
 plane of humanity might come to appear too 
 great. The sympathies for which man would 
 have yearned, the helpfulness which hearts near 
 by can render to a heart which has to endure — 
 was all this nothing to Christ? Nay, for "he 
 was troubled in the spirit, and testified, and said, 
 
AND REVEALING HIMSELF 201 
 
 Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you 
 shall betray me." It was pain to Him, and a 
 trouble to His spirit, that among His followers 
 should be one so base ; and His sorrow over it 
 He does not hide. Quite away, once more, from 
 the ordinary methods of men. What man would 
 have displayed — the greatness in Him — Christ 
 hides : what man would have hidden — the pain 
 caused by the unworthiness of one of the band — 
 Christ displays. Your great man would be afraid 
 that such a reference as this would be taken as 
 a sign of weakness, of failing heart, of relaxed 
 will : Christ takes the risk, and lets those with 
 Him see that the falling away of one makes Him 
 to be troubled and cast down. So John adds 
 stroke after stroke to his picture — shows Christ 
 hiding what man would have revealed — then 
 shows Christ revealing what man would have 
 hidden — and drives one thus nearer and nearer 
 to the conclusion that in this Christ there was a 
 life at work, prompting Him to this incalculable 
 unexpectedness of action, which must have been 
 a life different from the life of man. He had 
 no care to make detailed impression of His 
 
202 CHRIST SEEN AS CONCEALING 
 
 greatness even upon His most intimate ones: 
 yet their sympathy meant something to Him ; 
 and when the sympathy of any one of them was 
 withheld, He did not hide His grief. 
 
 Yet, to complete the picture, John sets in one 
 other stroke. Christ might be troubled in spirit 
 at the knowledge of the treachery with which 
 Judas was going to defile his soul ; but the 
 trouble meant no real weakening of life to Him. 
 For at the moment when the traitor goes forth 
 to do his treacherous work, Christ rises above all 
 emotion of trouble and regret, and, falling back 
 once more upon the promptings of the life within, 
 declares with victorious joy, " Now is the Son of 
 man glorified, and God is glorified in him." So, 
 although Christ was glad for all the sympathy 
 and love His disciples would yield, He had 
 elsewhere a suf?icient store of strength: He 
 does not make Himself really dependent upon 
 them, even though He will receive what they 
 give ; and in the depths of Him there is that 
 which upholds Him and imparts this ring of 
 triumph to His tone even as the traitor goes 
 
AND REVEALING HIMSELF 
 
 out to betray Him, and as the rest, under the 
 mysteriousness of the whole thing, are dumb. 
 It is not dependence upon those around, for 
 they are yielding no support : it is not stoicism, 
 for Christ is troubled because sympathy and 
 faithfulness fail : what can make or account for 
 the joy, then, but another life in Him fed from 
 divine sources, a life man has not known ? Not 
 like man in what He hides — not like man in 
 what He reveals — not like man in the joy which 
 rises within His heart at the very moment when 
 man could do no more than endure, if indeed 
 man could do even that — so, point by point, John 
 intensifies our conviction that here is One before 
 us who is not of us, who came from God. 
 
 One wonders what those who saw the Christ, 
 as He moved through these phases of His 
 activity before them, gathered from what they 
 saw. As to the most of it, what He did they 
 knew not then. We, at any rate, looking back, 
 can get but one impression — an ever-deepening 
 impression of greatness, of immeasurable divine- 
 ness, of the presence of another life, only to be 
 
204 CHRIST SEEN AS CONCEALING HIMSELF 
 
 called the life of God, in this Christ on whom we 
 look. And for the establishing of our faith in 
 Him, there is something to be gained in looking 
 upon Him as He goes through these last scenes 
 which, had He been less than divine, would 
 surely have shown Him to be so, but through 
 which He passes with such an inspiration of 
 sacred life possessing Him as no other has ever 
 known. In imagination, set the noblest man into 
 the situation of Christ as the end drew near, 
 and you will be surer than ever that the Christ 
 is born out of diviner forces than those which 
 make the common family of man, and descends 
 from God. 
 
XVII. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN IN THE UPPER 
 ROOM. 
 
 John xiv.-xvii. 
 
 /^^NE of the chief marvels in these four 
 marvellous chapters — from the beginning 
 of the fourteenth to the close of the seventeenth — 
 is that throughout the stretch of them Jesus lays 
 the whole stress of what He says upon His dis- 
 ciples rather than upon Himself. Of the four 
 chapters, the first three record Christ's utter- 
 ances to His companions in the upper room, 
 while the fourth contains His prayer to God ; 
 but everywhere the atmosphere is the same. 
 When He speaks, His speaking is concerned, 
 not with any consideration as to how what He 
 is about to go through will affect Him, but with 
 
 the effect it will have upon those whom He has 
 205 
 
2o6 
 
 CHRIST SEEN IN 
 
 loved and loves; and when He prays, it is still 
 with them and with their concerns that His 
 prayer is occupied. It is to cheer them that He 
 speaks : it is that they may be cheered and kept 
 that He prays. 
 
 Every verse is in itself a jewel that scintillates 
 with light, a wonder over which the rapt atten- 
 tion cannot help being detained ; and every 
 separate thing that Christ said has left to the 
 Christian mind a legacy of rich thought and 
 suggestion inexhaustible through all the years. 
 But just now, in this rapid survey of ours, I 
 want, not to linger over any particular saying, 
 but to notice the marvel which looks forth 
 through all the sayings alike ; for so will the 
 purpose of securing a unified impression from 
 the entire course of John's Gospel best be served. 
 And the constant marvel here is that Christ, with 
 the Cross so close upon Him that its shadow 
 must have been already felt upon His soul, 
 devotes Himself, not to thinking about what 
 will mitigate His own pain or gird His own 
 strength, but to the comforting of those from 
 whose sight He was about to pass. " Let not 
 
THE UPPER ROOM 207 
 
 your heart be troubled," so His communication 
 to the disciples begins : " these things 1 have 
 spoken unto you, that in me ye may have 
 peace. In the world ye have tribulation : but 
 be of good cheer ; I have overcome the world," 
 so His communication to the disciples ends. 
 And between the beginning and the ending the 
 same spirit persists ; and throughout the prayer 
 which we are permitted to overhear the same 
 spirit is revealed. How to them the Comforter 
 would be sent, although from them He Himself 
 in His visible presence would be withdrawn — 
 how they would not be left desolate, however 
 things might seem — how He was going to leave 
 peace with them — how they might have whatever 
 they asked in His name — how their sorrow 
 would be turned into joy — with what a long- 
 drawn list of promised blessings does He seek to 
 make their oppressed hearts grow light again ! 
 How does the picture of such self-efifacement as 
 this impress you ? — John seems to enquire. To 
 us, of course, there is no surprise in it, for it 
 is what we should expect from one higher and 
 diviner than ourselves ; but for John's purpose — 
 
208 
 
 CHRIST SEEN IN 
 
 the purpose of leading his readers to see that 
 here is one higher and diviner than themselves — 
 how the picture would tell, as stroke by stroke 
 and line by line he paints it ! This Christ, set 
 at what a man, great as he might be, would 
 have looked upon as the crisis of his fate, when he 
 would have had no thought to spare for anything 
 except for what would help him to face the crisis 
 unflinchingly and to pass through it unbelittled 
 and unashamed — this Christ devotes Himself to 
 binding up His disciples' wounded hearts ! What 
 reserves of life — reserves which no mere human 
 life could ever have accumulated — what reserves 
 of life there must have been in Him ! In a sense, 
 Christ took His impending fate to be more His 
 disciples' concern than His own : He appears to 
 watch it as though from outside and to note, 
 not what it brings to Him, but what it thrusts 
 upon them ; and while others would have been 
 occupied in suppressing the natural shudder of 
 apprehension and in girding themselves up to 
 maintain a brave front. He turns quietly to 
 those near by, with the word, " Let not your 
 heart be troubled." 
 
THE UPPER ROOM 
 
 It IS good for us sometimes thus to take 
 into account the general bearing of the Christ 
 rather than His detailed actions and words, for 
 so there gathers round about Him a greatness 
 vaster even than actions or words, taken alone, 
 produce. Wonderful are many of the things He 
 did, wonderful many of the things He said ; 
 but when, passing behind the actual sayings 
 and doings, we get a grip upon the spirit 
 and feeling out of which they come, there 
 descends upon us an impression of divineness 
 in the Christ which overmasters all re- 
 sistance. It may be said, in fact, that the 
 supreme proof of Christ's divineness lies not in 
 anything He said or did, or in any logical 
 inference drawn from what He said or did : one 
 can construct reasoned proofs, of course, and 
 they have their worth ; but in the last resort, 
 it is the atmosphere which hangs round about 
 Him, the indefinable spirit behind all the miracle 
 and all the preaching, that proclaim themselves 
 from heaven. One feels it as one feels the 
 breath of changed and purer air. This spirit, 
 one knows, as one gazes upon it, is coming 
 14 
 
2IO 
 
 CHRIST SEEN IN 
 
 down to earth, not being produced from earth. 
 In regard to many things Christ said, imagine, 
 if you can, a man wise enough to say them — 
 still you would not have a Christ; or in regard 
 to many things Christ did, imagine, if you can, 
 a man strong enough to do them, still you 
 would not have a Christ : there is something 
 more, something behind, in the general con- 
 stitution of the life and being, which separates 
 Him from all. And these chapters show a 
 fresh instance in point. This absence from the 
 Christ of any interest — for so it may be phrased 
 — in what lay before Him, this detachment of 
 His from any care about it for His own sake, 
 this concentration of Himself upon others through 
 the hours of crisis, which marks His whole bear- 
 ing — one realises that it is all flung out from 
 behind the gates of heaven. Earth never made 
 it : no forces at work in human nature are 
 sufficient for this : to this marvel of tempera- 
 ment (though the term is of course inadequate) 
 nothing else than divineness can have given birth 
 
 For the substance and burden of the message 
 
THE UPPER ROOM 
 
 211 
 
 with which Christ sought to console His dis- 
 ciples for His impending departure from their 
 side, it is a reaffirmation of His assurance that 
 death was not the end, but the beginning, of 
 His perfect ministry. Spite of the appearance 
 of departure, He will be with His own still — 
 not as a memory, not as one who has paid a 
 visit to their lives and communicated a new 
 impulse to them thereby — but He will be with 
 them as a living presence, still able to do for 
 them all that He has been doing and more 
 than He has been doing, able to repeat and 
 to enlarge all His ministries to them, even 
 although the channels of their coming should 
 be changed. He would not leave them deso- 
 late, but would come unto them. He, with 
 the Father, would make His abode with them. 
 He was the vine and they were the branches, 
 and they were to abide in Him. The world 
 might behold Him no more, but they would 
 behold Him, and because He lived they should 
 live also He would see them again, and their 
 heart should rejoice, and their joy no one 
 should take from them. And so, in various 
 
212 
 
 CHRIST SEEN IN 
 
 ways, through many forms of speech, Christ 
 seeks to bring His disciples to an apprehension 
 of the truth that, after He was gone, no less 
 than while He was in bodily presence near 
 them. He would be to them the very source 
 of life. As He had on previous occasions 
 declared Himself, to those who could not or 
 would not understand, to be life's bread, life's 
 light, the living water — possessing the source 
 of life in Himself — so now He impresses upon 
 the disciples, longing that they may understand, 
 that independent of physical presence or absence. 
 He will have in Himself for them life's inex- 
 haustible supply. And understanding and re- 
 membering that, they would leap past the 
 Cross with all its sadness, knowing, as Christ 
 knew, that it was not the close of a ministry, 
 but the beginning of a ministry that should 
 endure; and their hearts would be troubled 
 no more. 
 
 The secret of a strong Christian life is to 
 be learnt in that upper room; for its secret is 
 the conviction that Christ is still what He ever 
 was. He did not merely make history, as 
 
THE UPPER ROOM 
 
 213 
 
 other great ones have made history: He did not 
 inaugurate a new era, and then leave, to work 
 themselves out, the new forces He brought into 
 play. If He only did that, our hearts might 
 be troubled indeed at the thought that His 
 footsteps tread our earth no more. The very 
 greatness of the ideals He uplifted before us, 
 the very fact that no other can compare with 
 Him, would but make the present desolation a 
 desolation indeed if He only came and went 
 away. And when so much modern thinking is 
 devoted to a reconstruction of the earthly life 
 of Christ, when so many lights are flashed upon 
 it that it starts out into dazzling clearness, a 
 work is done for us whereof we may indeed 
 be glad, but a work with whose doing we may 
 not rest content. The greatness of what was 
 is only an oppression unless we are alive to 
 the greatness of what is now. It was to what 
 was coming after that Christ's earthly life 
 looked on : it is on what is come after that 
 our gaze must be fixed. Now He is what He 
 was and more than He was : now we are to 
 abide, not in the memory of Him, but in Him: 
 
214 CHRIST SEEN IN THE UPPER ROOM 
 
 He did not simply come and go and leave a 
 fragrance upon our earth, but He makes His 
 abode with us ; and, commonplace as all these 
 things are, it is as we remember them and re- 
 impress them upon our hearts and appreciate 
 the vivid reality of them that our discipleship 
 is delivered from aught of sadness and strain 
 and becomes a buoyant thing. For our con- 
 solation, as for the consolation of those who 
 companied with Him in the upper room, Christ 
 tells us that, though our eyes see Him not, 
 yet He is coming now to receive us unto Him- 
 self, that desolate He does not leave us, that 
 now and to the end He is for us the living 
 source of life. And so we need not let our 
 hearts be troubled, since from us no one can 
 take the living Christ who is Himself our joy. 
 
XVIII. 
 
 CHRIST SEEN AT THE END AND 
 AT THE NEW BEGINNING. 
 
 HROUGH the chapters with which his 
 
 Gospel closes John has only to indicate 
 how right up to the end Christ remains what 
 all the preceding narrative has shown Him to 
 be, so that the whole account may reach its 
 termination without revealing any trace of in- 
 consistency in His bearing or His words. The 
 last tests — whether it be the test of apparent 
 failure under the suffering of the Cross, or the 
 test of triumph when resurrection had come — 
 the last tests are endured by Christ without 
 any impairing of the impression He gives as 
 living from other sources than those whence 
 man's life is drawn. The picture forms one 
 
 John xviii.-xxi. 
 
2i6 CHRIST SEEN AT THE END 
 
 harmonious whole : we may go to the account 
 of this life and death, and if, impressed by the 
 wonder of the life and death, we ask what the 
 explanation can be, the only adequate reply is 
 that this Christ is from above; or we may 
 begin, as it were, at the other end and may 
 enquire whether, on the supposition that this 
 Christ is from above, there is in the account 
 any single thing which does not fit in with 
 the theory we bring — only to find that there 
 is not one. It is not merely that on the 
 whole, taking everything into consideration, Christ 
 was probably divine. Who can it be that has 
 said these things and done these things and 
 been these things? The Son of God. And 
 if the Son of God did come to earth — if such 
 a coming could be — what would the Son of 
 God naturally say and do and be? Just 
 these things. There are many great things in 
 this life which can only be explained by 
 saying that this is the Son of God ; and 
 there is nothing in this life which is not great 
 enough to be so explained. The saying that 
 Christ was from above covers all the life: the 
 
AND AT THE NEW BEGINNING 217 
 
 life was always up to the demands of the 
 saying. And John completes his story in 
 order that his readers may see how this is 
 so. The end matches the beginning. The 
 last scenes fit perfectly upon those that have 
 gone before. 
 
 Through the whole tragedy of the Crucifixion 
 something shows itself in this Sufferer which 
 marks Him out from all other sufferers of whom 
 history tells. One has but to ask oneself a 
 single question in order to see the truth of 
 the statement. What is the emotion stirred in 
 the human soul as detail is piled on detail 
 while the story of the Passion passes on ? Can 
 we pity Christ? That is the emotion we should 
 feel were it anybody else's fate of which we 
 read ; but pity, in the ordinary sense, has no 
 place here. Any pity of ours appears almost 
 an impertinence when offered to this Sufferer. 
 Not that to Christ pain was any less real 
 than to others — not that to Him, through His 
 divineness, one touch was spared of the bitter- 
 ness such a death as that must have held; 
 
2i8 CHRIST SEEN AT THE END 
 
 but it is awe, not pity, that moves us as we 
 behold Him drinking the cup of bitterness to 
 its last drop : He is not open to sympathy of 
 ours, we instinctively feel : our hearts are over- 
 whelmed before this Cross because it is so 
 holy, not because it is so sad. One dares not 
 pity Christ. Something dwells in Him, looking 
 forth upon us, which even in those awful 
 hours, when in one sense He comes nearest 
 to our suffering humanity, takes Him right away 
 from ordinary suffering humanity again — no 
 open - minded reader can go through John's 
 chapters without being conscious of the fact. 
 Here at the life's close is the same quality 
 which all the life's progress has shown — that 
 remoteness, that severance, from man's common 
 plane. And (if we may venture upon the 
 question) did we ask. How would a Son of 
 God take a death inflicted upon Him by the 
 hands of men? — we should have to answer. He 
 would have taken it thus. The whole thing 
 fits in. 
 
 Then John passes to the resurrection. " The 
 
AND AT THE NEW BEGINNING 219 
 
 light shineth in the darkness ; and the darkness 
 overcame it not " — so he had said at the Gospel's 
 beginning. Now he has to tell how, notwith- 
 standing the temporary overclouding, the light 
 emerged in brilliance again. And still the whole 
 thing fits in. This Christ whose whole life had 
 been a revelation of heavenly life, ought, if all He 
 said about Himself was true and if those who 
 received impressions of something heavenly from 
 Him were not deluded, to find nothing in death 
 He cannot overcome. The divine life that held 
 Him — if it did really hold Him — ought to be 
 able to hold Him still, whatever man might do. 
 There is nothing miraculous about the resurrec- 
 tion for those who have set themselves under the 
 impression of the life that went before : it is what 
 one would expect, if it had really been given to 
 Christ, as He declared it to have been given to 
 Him and as one cannot help believing it to have 
 been given to Him — if it had really been given to 
 Christ to have life in Himself: the miracle would 
 have been for a resurrection not to come. And 
 yet it is to be noticed that, although the resurrec- 
 tion was His vindication, Jesus did not use it so 
 
220 CHRIST SEEN AT THE END 
 
 in face of an unbelieving world : it was to His 
 disciples that He showed Himself, not to those 
 who during His life had scorned Him ; and He 
 would not now, any more than He would before, 
 employ the power of the divine life in Him 
 merely to provoke wonder or to excite an ad- 
 miration that had no moral quality or value. 
 Again, the whole thing fits in. The picture 
 makes an unbroken harmony throughout. It is 
 thus, we are moved to declare, that the Son 
 of God would have borne Himself It is thus 
 that a divine life would have manifested its 
 divineness. 
 
 With the resurrection and the self-manifesta- 
 tion of Christ to His disciples John had intended, 
 probably, to bring his Gospel to a close. At 
 any rate the verses at the end of the twentieth 
 chapter read like last words. But then, as if 
 suddenly recollecting something, John adds the 
 chapter which follows. I fancy that as his 
 mind travelled back from the end of his task 
 to the scenes he had recorded at the beginning, 
 John remembered how, at Peter's calling, Jesus 
 
AND AT THE NEW BEGINNING 221 
 
 had told him that he should be called Cephas — 
 a rock or stone, indicating that his nature should 
 be transformed from its instability and unruled 
 impulse to rock-like firmness and strength. And 
 the last thing John has had to record about 
 Peter has been the fact that he denied his Lord. 
 Was Christ's promise then to come to nought? 
 Not so. And to show how Jesus still meant this 
 impulsive Peter to be transformed, John records 
 the tender scene in which Christ, without reproach 
 or hardness, recommences His spiritual training 
 of the disciple who had failed, draws from him his 
 avowal — " Lord, thou knowest that I love thee " 
 — and bids him feed His sheep. Still it fits in. 
 The Christ who at the beginning was conscious 
 of the power to transform character and make 
 a man the exact contrary of what he was 
 before, is at the end conscious of it still, 
 and actually begins the transforming work 
 when Peter must have felt himself almost 
 beyond any redeeming power at all. Just what 
 the Son of God would do — our hearts dare 
 humbly to voice their assent. The wholeness of 
 the picture is made more vivid to us still by the 
 
222 CHRIST SEEN AT THE END 
 
 chapter which John adds after he had thought 
 his task was done. 
 
 So the profoundest book in all the world 
 reaches its climax and its close. This is the 
 book which speaks of Life — of man's need of it, 
 of the gift of it in Jesus Christ. There is no 
 book in the Bible — and of course, therefore, no 
 book in all the libraries of earth — that can so 
 give us a fused impression of strong, beating, 
 palpitating life as this Fourth Gospel, which we 
 have rapidly scanned, and no book that can so 
 make us realise that life, life in its fullest sense, 
 may be ours. And life is in truth our need. To 
 have had a great example is something, but not 
 all. To have had even a Saviour who, by some- 
 thing He did outside us, made possible to us a 
 passage to heaven, is not enough for those whose 
 souls are really wakened. It is life we need. 
 We feel, when the slumbering instincts are roused, 
 and the commonplace quietude which broods 
 generally over our inner being is broken up — we 
 feel then as if the life within us were flowing, 
 a poor, thin, trickling stream, between its banks, 
 
AND AT THE NEW BEGINNING 223 
 
 instead of rushing on like a rich, flooding torrent 
 that gathers strength and volume as it goes : 
 looking round the length and breadth and height 
 of our natures, we see vast empty spaces, silent 
 and desolate, waiting for a movement and a 
 beauty that have not come ; or, to change the 
 figure, our souls are like a great house with half 
 its rooms unfurnished, striking consciousness of 
 poverty and helplessness upon us as we see how 
 bare they are. Existence, of course, is always 
 ours, but life, in any large and rounded sense of 
 the word, is not. We only pant along our way, 
 instead of drawing full, deep breaths. We want 
 life. What we want is some ministry which will 
 change our lives within us to divine fulness, 
 which will work, not only for us, but in us, which 
 will convert the merely human in us into some- 
 thing that is of God. We want divine life to 
 overflow us as the sea-tides overflow the bare 
 sands which at the ebb lie waiting for the tides 
 to come. And in the Christ as John shows Him 
 the life-tide of God begins its flow upon our bare 
 and desolate hearts. Let us take that impression 
 of Christ from our study of His deep conscious- 
 
224 CHRIST AT END AND NEW BEGINNING 
 
 ness in this book — realise how, when our voices 
 make their pleading — 
 
 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, 
 Oh Ufe, not death, for which we pant; 
 More Ufe, and fuller, that I want 
 
 — this Christ has life indeed, and in His power of 
 self-communication to us can make us to have 
 life and to have it abundantly. And through 
 these things that once were written by the 
 evangelist of vanished centuries may something of 
 their intended work be wrought in us who read 
 the phrases formed by his dead hand — we 
 believing with more complete assurance that 
 Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and, as we 
 believe, finding life in His name. 
 
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