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JESUS,THE CHRIST,
INTHE
LIGHT OF PSTCHOLOGY
.. . G. STAN LEY HALU , 3.

for the founding ef a. College in ;

JESUS, THE CHRIST, IN THE LIGHT
OF PSYCHOLOGY VOL. II

Books by the Same Author
Adolescence Aspects of Child Life and Education
Aspects of German Culture
Educational Problems
Founders of Modern Psychology
Youth, Its Education, Regimen and
Hygtene

JESUS, THE CHRIST,

IN THE LIGHT OF

PSYCHOLOGY

BY

G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D.

Professor of Psychology,

President of Clark University

VOLUME II

Garden City New York

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1917

Copyright, igif, by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian

CONTENTS VOLUME II
chapter page
VI. Messianity, Sonship, and the Kingdom  326
VII. Jesus' Eschatology, His Inner Character, Purpose,
and Work  t . . 392
VIII. Jesus' Ethics and Prayer  471
IX. The Parables or Jesus  517
X. THEMntACLES  592
XI. Death and Resurrection of Jesus  677

JESUS, THE CHRIST, IN THE LIGHT
OF PSYCHOLOGY VOL. II

CHAPTER SIX
messianity, sonship, and the kingdom
I. Messianism among primitive people — Different views among
the Hebrews — How Jesus came to believe himself the Messiah, and his
original interpretation of the idea as he grew into the r6le — II. His
achievement in coming to regard himself as the Son of God — The
development of Yahveh and the kind of Deity he had grown to be in
Jesus' day — The unique time and circumstance for the development
of the theanthropic consciousness — Deity as ontological — Outcrops of
this idea among children, primitive races, and its relation to Mana
theories, and the development of a sense of fatherhood — In what re
spect sonship was involved in Messianity — How it transcended it —
God as the race-soul — III. The Kingdom as the third great achieve
ment of Jesus — Views of Kalthoff, Weisse, and others — Contradictions
in Jesus' characterizations of the Kingdom and their explanation —
In what sense it was of this earth and how far transcendent — The
myths of primitive paradises — The Kingdom as inward — Stages by
which Jesus came to realize that he must die — The value and proof of
the idea of genetic stages — What it means psychologically to find God —
Jesus' sociological ideas— Psychologic effects of the conviction that
the end was at hand — The "second coming" — Kenosis.
I Messianity. W. D.WallisMnaveryinterestingstudy of theMessiahs
of primitive people, shows us that in times of hardship from any
* source a great deliverer is expected. The claimant to this function
must have qualities sometimes pretty carefully defined, and by fasting,
vision, the interpretation of omens and oracles, he must demonstrate
excessive spirituality. He must and does often heal the sick. If once
accepted by the tribe, his soul becomes the embodiment of their col
lective soul, and he may acquire almost supreme authority. He can
cause the tribe to migrate, to dispose of its goods, to perform very
exceptional ceremonies, take great risks, undergo great sufferings; but
if he fails he is at once discredited and often slain. In about every
great crisis of history of the North American Indians some medicine
•"Individual Initiative and Social Compulsion." Amtr. Antkropol., Oct. -Dec, 1915. He has also allowed me to
we a much fuller manuscript study of Messiahs. 326

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 327
man, and occasionally more than one, comes forward to rally his people
to save themselves, to better the present customs or restore the old
ones, to expel the oppressor, etc. The Messiahs interpret the old
traditions as Jesus did prophecy. They point to an ideal state of
restoration, and it is they that have caused nearly all the outbreaks so
justly dreaded by their neighbours. Such Messiahs were Pope" among
the Tewas in 1675 and Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee warrior in 1805, who
began his Messianic career in a trance and was thought to have brought
his people a new revelation from the Master of hfe. He denounced
the witchcraft and medicine of his tribe, the firewater of the whites,
demanded more respect of parents and ancestors. Smohalla among
the Nez Perce found the higher power and brought his tribe the sacred
message that they should have strong and sudden help. Kanakuk
among the Kickapoos was another mouthpiece of the Great Spirit to
rescue his tribe. Flourishing tribes that do not feel the outside pressure
of civilization have little need of redemption. The Navajos, e. g.,
rejected such gospel messengers. The Apaches, Delawares, Ojibways,
Kiowas, have responded in some cases with intense vigour to such
Messianic appeals. The first record we have in this country is in the
seventeenth century when the Pueblos expelled the Spaniards. The
Sioux were infected by the same fervour in the form of a ghost-dance.
Among the aborigines of this country there are far more failures than
successes, and the latter have greatly solidified the tribe. Similar
phenomena have been found among the South American Indians, in
South Africa, and among the Kalmucks. China so well knows these
phenomena that it requires all incarnate gods in the empire to register,
and "forbids the gods on the register to be reborn anywhere but in
Tibet," fearing warlike results very much as Herod did. Among the
Jews there have been various Messianic uprisings, not only against the
foreign yoke but against the upper classes, and there are many features
in the career of Jeanne d' Arc that illustrate the same principle. Some
compare the relation between the Messianic religion and the national
life with that between the brain and heart. The prophet very often
cajoles his people with promises of an ideal state of things after a period
of hardship and tribulation; buffalo will come back; game of all kinds
will abound. The cry is generally to restore the old ways and customs,
but perhaps in an idealized form. Some convince their followers that
they perform mighty nature miracles. Occasionally a time is set for

328 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the sudden and divine inauguration of a new state of things, generally
to the disaster of the tribe when the prophet's direction is implicitly fol
lowed. In 1889-90 a wave of intense Messianic excitement swept
through several Southern States among the negroes, and a number of
self-announced Christs arose and wrought miracles. They received
many gifts, predicted the day of the end, appointed a place to which
many came on that date to await the great transformation. Such
phenomena have a generic identity with the Messianism represented
by Jesus, Mohammed, the Mahdi, and many others.
These phenomena raise the question which was first elevated to
importance by the school of Durkheim, viz., as to whether in such
phenomena the individual or the group leads. Very many phenomena
connected with the various Mana theories now seem to indicate that the
most primitive phenomenon is a sense of one great unifying principle
which springs out of the collective soul when tribes celebrate together,
in which case the soul of the individual is completely submerged in
that of his community. Messianic phenomena, however, would seem
to indicate that it is the individual that influences the group. He
strives to take into himself the social mind of his community, and
mould and guide it, for without him the group would be blind and
dumb. The group makes the Messiah possible, but in him scattered
rays, too dim to be otherwise effective, are focussed, and although his
power is wholly psychic, it may become hardly less complete than that
of the soul over the body. In Messianity we have, then, the most per
fect of all paradigms of the relation between leader and led. Each
creates and depends upon the other. In no psychologically essential
aspect did Scriptural Messianity differ from that of a more primitive
type. In the former, however, the phenomena are far more clearly
wrought out and more adequately recorded, and especially the efforts
of the Messiah are given a higher spiritual interpretation, which rises
far above the material or political sphere in which the cruder forms of
Messianism find their field of interpretation. Wallis sums up by
saying, "The social seems merely a polarity or a dimension in which
personality finds meaning and by which it is conditioned in its expres
sion." Social influences are responsible for the ability of the leader to
grasp their meaning, and each is equally creative of the other.
In addition to 456 passages in the Old Testament, Edersheim
collected 558 in the Talmud and Targums referring to the Messiah.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 329
Stanton collects 400 references in the New Testament to as many
passages in the Old, which together he thinks define the entire career
of the Messiah from his preexistence in heaven to his resumption of a
place in the Trinity at God's right hand after the Resurrection. Some
of these are very explicit in detail. If the Old Testament passages are
prescriptions they leave little room for freedom. His Hfe had been
written beforehand, and Jesus in assuming Messianity had simply to
assemble the specifications from their many places and contexts and
order his hfe with fidelity to these old oracles. From this point of view
we should have to regard him as a studious compiler, diligently seeking
cues and conscientiously following them as his rule of hfe. We might
conceive that at some stage he realized how many circumstances in
his past conformed to these rubrics, and from that point he took his
life in hand to make the rest of it conform more perfectly. Thus
many a savage ruler is moulded by prescriptions that define all his
Tun and Haben, his licet and non licet, and later accepts for himself
these taboos and exacting customs that may make a king's life a burden
with constant fear of transgression. Some of these requirements
happily are very generic, but they range from the most trivial points of
etiquette to fundamentals.
On the other hand, we may conceive that all these correspondences
between the new and the old dispensation hardly entered Jesus' mind.
He may have lived out his hfe with little thought of what was or was
not proper for a Messiah, and most of this texture of cross-references
between his career and the. sacred books of the Jews may have been
woven later by dull dogmatic or Judaizing followers. Neither Paul
nor the synoptists entirely ceased being Jews in becoming Christians,
and they at least sought to keep every way open from the old to the
new dispensation, as the patristic and even scholastic authors later
sought to harmonize the classics with new Christian ideals. So the
New Testament writers felt it necessary to amalgamate Jesus' apercus
with the prophets, psalmists, and historians. Thus we may conceive
what occurred somewhat as follows: The original reporters of the
New Testament story had been profoundly inspired by Jesus' reverence
for the prophets and his luminous interpretation, which made them
glow with novel meanings. They were loyal to him and to them, but
realized how he sublimated their lessons till they almost transcended
their own narrow ken. He had thus legitimized himself to them as a

330 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
re-revealer and transvaluator of the old writings. He was the Theseus
who had drawn the sword of the spirit from the old sacred tree of
knowledge, the Ulysses who had demonstrated his legitimacy by bend
ing the bow of Hercules. So one of the chief impressions he made
upon them was as the master of prophecy. He could bring out its
ravishing music. It spoke to him as it spoke to no other. Its books
had been more or less sealed but he became their great opener, as if he
were the one to whom they had really been addressed across the cen
turies. As their latent content now shone forth, his hearers had been
spellbound, overwhelmed with a deep sense that all the prophetic
idealism would be realized and transferred from the realm of poetry
to that of fact. They were thrilled by anticipating the early fruition
of the old dreams of a long-deferred hope. The day had dawned,
and expectation was on tiptoe as he talked.
But high meanings tend to fade, especially from minds on a lower
level. To a mental vision that could see only dimly, these glorious
insights were hazy and deformed, and as the years passed his followers
became more incompetent to do full justice to them, so that a process of
transvaluation downward into psychic equivalents of a lower order
began. When at last the New Testament writers sought to set it all
down we have the transformations characteristic under such circum
stances, that are only now coming to be understood. Some phrases
persisted and others were obliterated. Thoughts of Jesus lost their
precision, for they had always been more felt than understood, and so
the Evangelists had to strive to meet their task by a cy pres modifica
tion, if all unconsciously, of what Jesus exactly had said into the nearest
psychokinetic equivalents possible to their minds. These took the
form of general and specific, often very crass, correlations between the
incidents of Jesus' life and teaching and prophecy, but on the lower
plane of place and incident. The true interpretation of prophecy as
here and now fulfilled, then came to expression in their representation
of compulsion to conform to the vaticinations of old "that Scripture
might be fulfilled." The tendency to find or make conformity was
strong. It might be limited to trivialities like entering Jerusalem on
an ass or dividing the garments by lot, or to larger matters like the
virgin birth, Davidic pedigree, flight to Egypt, slaughter of the Inno
cents, appearance in the temple; but it warped the real historicity of
all that pertained to Jesus. This apperception mass or complex in

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 331
the minds of the Evangelists would tend to make them more or less
alert to all in their memories or in the traditions that conformed to this
function, but neghgent of all that diverged from it. This process
began in the years immediately following Jesus' death, during which the
rapprochement between the Messiah of the Old and the Jesus of the
New Testament was growing toward a more complete identification.
It is significant that the logia and also the primitive Mark and John
show far less effort to unify the two than do the synoptists. If this
be true, our problem is one of restoration, and is difficult.
The problem of Jesus' Messianity, although one of the most
unique and difficult, is not unsolvable. Since Wellhausen's "History
of Israel" (1878) it has been realized, as never before, that the most
remarkable product of the Hebrew mind is found in the sixteen Books
of the Prophets. The future was the stronghold of Jewish patriotism,
the asylum of all its thwarted or delayed hopes, the ark of Israefitic
expectation. The interpretation of the future was the chief field of
whatever hterature and social philosophy then existed. Poetry sang
of it, history pointed to it, belief in a just God depended on it. It
eclipsed not only the past but the present in interest. It was the
refuge of defeated souls. Other races had beheved in a golden age, and
even placed it in the future, as Pfleiderer has shown. The Egyptians
thought the great phoenix was to appear and change all. The Greeks
realized that Pan was dead and a new world-power about to take the
helm. The Roman augurs believed the present period drawing to a
close. But it was the speciality of the Jews to establish a great na
tional bank of the future and to make very heavy drafts upon it.
From Amos to Obadiah they had expected another dispensation with
such fervour that the present was made more or less provisional. It
was, of course, variously interpreted ; perhaps merely the present wrongs
would be righted, or it was a poetic revelling in a land flowing with
milk and honey where there was no war, sin, or sickness, and perennial
spring, a new paradise, no labour or mourning. Again, it was ex
pressed in measured denunciations and threats of a dies irae, as awful as
human depravity had become hopeless, or yet again in mere penitential
moods of humihation. Some emphasized the judgment motive, and
thought the new reign would be inaugurated by a great assize, meting
out rewards and punishments. Some thought physical nature was to
be remade. Others thought it would be heralded by worse tribulations

332 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
than any ever before known. Elijah would appear; the nations of the
earth would war upon the chosen ones, who would only after unutter
able suffering conquer, gather the dispersed, and rebuild Jerusalem
under a greater ruler than David. Slowly, as Schiirer has shown, some
of these different interpretations were more or less curricuhzed in the
popular consciousness and in sequent order, but the Hebrew mind
grew protensive and from Abraham on lived more and more on prom
ises, as they had done in Egypt and the wilderness, because they were
Children of the Covenant. The idea of the new order of things was so
inebriating that many feeble minds had become insane, and excitable
ones expected a speedy catastrophe. Some wondered why it was so
long delayed, but all who were dissatisfied looked for a restoration.
There can be no doubt that the Messianic ideals of the people were
very different from those of the prophets. But rehgious consciousness
in this race was proleptic. Despite all the learning lavished upon this
subject we do not know the extent of this faith among the Jews at the
time of Christ, how many held it, with what intensity, when it was to
come, how long it was to last, how it was to be ushered in, its ethnic or
geographic extent. However this be, there are a few psychodynamic
laws that apply to it, as follows:
i. It followed the law of inverse relation between the immanent
and transcendent. When the kingdom of David and Solomon was at
the height of its splendour, the faith in the spiritual Jerusalem grew
dim. But when the national hearth became cold or when the people
fell into captivity or under the Roman rule, it became more real as a
refuge of irrepressible Semitic optimism. The Messianic belief was
the form which national faith in God's justice and omnipotence took.
It was an insurance policy, which if clung to would make up for all
loss and deficit. This whiprow relation of reciprocity between the
real and the ideal, which appears in a more adumbrated way in the
history of other nations as well as in individuals, was also seen in the
proclivity of the Jews to fall into idolatry in the days of prosperity,
but when adversity came to turn to the living God. By this same
principle sickness weans from earth and raises man's thoughts to
heaven. 2. Ideas of historic continuity, developed in some directions, were
in others strangely lacking among the Jews. Creation was epochal.
A new period began with the Flood, another with Abraham, another

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 333
with the captivity, another with the exodus, another with the estab
lishment in the promised land. Miracles like the destruction of Sodom
and of the armies of Sennacherib and Pharaoh gave new turns to
events, so the status quo was tentative like the short tenures of the
year of jubilee. Thus the idea of dispensations, perhaps separated
by transforming events, gave a catastrophic trait to the Hebrew con
sciousness, although some continued to believe that the reign of the
Messiah would steal over the world unobserved, perhaps from some
obscure quarter, and very gradually leaven the heart and transform life.
3. Characterological differences predisposed to different ideas of
the Messianic rule; for the gross it would be sensual; for the refined
spiritual; for the poor it would abound in gold and silver; for those
hungry for God, knowledge of him would fill the earth; for those op
pressed, compensation and retribution would be most prominent.
Those of a spurty diathesis might interpret it as coming suddenly,
while for others it would be a natural evolution. For visionaries it
would stand forth with every detail with which the imagination can
invest ideals, while for prosaic minds it remained a beautiful cloud-
dream. 4. It might be very far or near. The competition with other
national deities with whom Yahveh was brought into comparison by
their conquerors tended to make him afar, because piety exalted him
above them all. God had withdrawn, hid his face, his very name was
secret. And although the Jews never gasped up into the inane by the
Greek method of ecstasy, the Semitic fancy had long before peopled
the hungry void between God and man with a series of intermediate
beings, principalities, powers, angelic orders, and these also tended to
keep God at a distance by themselves doing his work in the world.
All the apocalyptic and eschatological conceptions were expressions of
a consuming desire to bring God back to man, and such ethnic tension
is a prayer which always answers itself.
5. The chief feature in the Messianic realm was ethical. God's
justice was to be vindicated. The culmination of human affairs was
not to be despair, nor was it formulated according to any program of
pessimism save for the wicked. Nothing but good awaited the
righteous. Thus optimism and pessimism were both true, one for the
good and the other for the bad. The worse things were, the more
radical would be the Messianic metamorphosis.

334 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Precious concepts like these lay very close about the hearts of
those Hebrews who were truest to the national ideal. Faith in some
form of them was the essence of the highest rehgious life. They may
have been held with peculiar intensity by a little circle of receptive
waiting souls closest to Jesus. Perhaps the new realm might break
out with dazzling brilliancy at the next Passover in Jerusalem. Any
unusual event might be its signal to those conventicle brooders who
kept themselves in a state of ideahty. There can be httle doubt that
this was the chief culture atmosphere in which Jesus grew, and it is no
wonder that it has suggested the most fruitful of all recent interpreta
tions of Christology.
The most enhghtened common sense now inclines to the view that
Jesus lived out his early hfe completely under the influence of his en
vironment, that his first conception of his Father's business was car
pentering, that he had a completely natural development, and had
known the Messianic ideals objectively long before he felt any special
personal relation to them. We cannot agree with Lagarde that Jesus
never thought himself the Messiah, nor with Holtzmann that it was
merely a matter of ideahty. But whenever he first conceived it with
reference to himself it must have given him great pause. The modesty
of one who does not yet know his genius would prompt him to hold
back. Practical sagacity might suggest that the times were not ripe,
or the difficulties were too great. It was not merely editing an old
traditional story, as Goethe sought to embody the Faust legends or
Sue those of the Wandering Jew. It was not assuming a title by per
forming some predetermined feat like that of Theseus or Siegfried.
Norms it merely playing a role to meet the popular expectations of the
return of some great hero, nor a new sense of being an agent of fate or
destiny. It was not working out a national task of reconstruction
like those which Stein, Jahn, and Scharnhorst undertook for Germany
after the Napoleonic wars, nor obeying the call of patriotism by hark
ing back to ancient prophecy, as of a virgin deliverer in the days of
Jeanne d'Arc. Neither was it the emergence of some great Mahatma
from his obscurity, nor interpreting the mad ravings of the Pythian
prophetess, or the whispering of the leaves of the Dodona oak. It has
some analogues to all of these, but was vaster. It was impossible to
fulfil any single interpretation of Messianity without disappointing
others; and so lacking in coherence were even the canonical foregleams

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 335
of it that any detailed interpretation was sure to make more enemies
than it could make friends. The great hope was not a prepared mould,
like a Cinderella shpper, which the right individual would completely
fit or fill. To realize it required the greatest perspicacity into the
things of the soul, a genial creativeness, marking the advent of the
successful artist or poet of poets in this domain, that should move in
the midst of all this plastic material, like the spirit of God upon the
pristine waters.
Of course we never shall exactly know how Jesus felt when he fully
realized that the glorious nimbus of Messianity was within his reach.
He was not intoxicated with it as many had been before, for it seems to
have been a favourite form of paretic delusions of greatness. He did
not put aside this thrice kingly crown because he saw dangers, for his
pneumatic self perhaps urged him on by making him feel called to it.
Perhaps he rather felt that he must justify not the assumption but the
refusal of Messianity. Did he use it as a means for accomplishing
other ends? Had he already grown so exactly into it that he would
have been what he was apart from this conception, and merely found
that it coincided with what he already was? Did it simply give him a
higher form of self-knowledge because of the coincidence of objective
ideal with subjective spontaneity? Was he more or less free, or was
there a higher consciousness experienced or reflectively realized? In
deed, was there any distinct act of choice, resolve, decision, weighing
results, or did the sense of Messianity grow in him unconsciously, even
though the realization was sudden? Did all that was in him go up
and out into Messianity and was his psychic legitimacy complete?
Was this consciousness in its final form the exact expression of just
what and all that he was by birth or heredity? Under the influence of
this general expectancy did his nature expand further beyond the
dimensions of mere prophethood than it would have done in another
psychic environment, or was there any degree of accommodation?
All we can answer is that he did for the Old Testament Christology
what, and more than, the higher criticism now seeks to do for Scripture,
delivering its spirit from the bondage of its letter, not by scholarship
but by a more vital psychological re-realization and revelation of its
inner content. Perhaps Kahler is right, that what we really worship
is not entirely the Jesus of the Gospels but the larger Christ of the whole
Bible, of which Jesus gave us the germinal principle. Perhaps we

336 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
shall have to discuss with Nosgen whether the whole of Messianity
found expression in Jesus so that the real kenosis is that this great ideal
was in a sense self-pauperizing. If this be true, all those who advance
the cause of Jesus are developing the hope of ancient Judea. Neither
Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, nor any other great rehgious creator
had any such wealth of preformations or anticipations, and therefore
no such culture momentum behind him. This prelusive ethnic
hunger drew out the noblest aspirations, for it was a great ideal await
ing reahzation and beckoning to the heights of humanity. In this race,
small, with limited notions of the great cosmos, and within a few years,
a process of intensive greatness occurred which is the world's classic
illustration of the power of the religio pectoris to supplement all defects
of time, place, circumstance, and person by vision and idealism.
Jesus might have sought to realize Messianity in the high priest
hood with its splendour and mediatorial function, with its great appeal
to the imagination, but the priesthood was for Levites, and he was not
of their tribe nor even a Pharisee but a layman. He was neither
scholar nor theologian, and the atmosphere of legality repelled him.
He might have chosen the prophetic r61e, usually at enmity with the
hierarchy. The majestic figures of the prophets emerging from the
desert, charged with spiritual messages like Zarathustra, especially at
great crises, must have made a powerful appeal. Again, the role of the
wonderworker was one of the most popular of all the attributes as
cribed to the Messiah. The Jews never forgot what Yahveh did at
Sinai, how Elijah drew down fire, and the sun obeyed Joshua. Nature
was not yet tamed by laws, and all clamoured for a sign. This role
was partly accepted by Jesus so far as he overcame man's greatest
enemies, death and disease, although medicine was then exorcism and
all nervous ailments were possession. Thus he fulfilled this type of
expectation more than any of the others. The most insistent and
common idea was that the Messiah should be a warrior king like Saul,
and thus he had to be a son of David, so that his advent could be a roy
alist restoration. The dream of Jesus' age, as Holtzmann perhaps
best puts it, was deliverance from an ahen yoke and taxation, as Moses
had delivered Israel from Pharaoh. This idea was most of all thwarted
by Jesus, for his kingship was entirely inward.
What, then, was his interpretation? In a single word it was in
wardness. The glorious triumphs of the Messiah must be realized in

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 337
the human soul. The new Jerusalem is the city of Mansoul. The
law is all in the heart. This involution or subjectivization constituted
the great work of Jesus in this domain. Never was anything done that
assumed such depth, breadth, and capacity of the soul, or that was so cal
culated to magnify our timid narrow psychology. All the Messianic
ideas have ample space for reahzation in the immanent domain of the
human spirit. More than this, all history is worthless or valuable
just in proportion as it is resolved into a typology of the processes
that take place in that world which Kant taught us to caU intelligible
rather than empirical. Each man is prophet, priest, king, healer of
himself. Compared to this inwardization Berkeley's subjectivization
of the outer world is only a parody, as the magicians aped the miracles
of Moses. As subject knows object only as a system of meanings, so
Jewish history is transmuted into ethical and rehgious experience.
Nothing ever implied such a high valuation of man's psychic power,
and this greatly reinforced by transference the belief in immortality.
Its echo is still heard in the ideals of the Church invisible, not made
with hands, although all this an age like our own, so utterly absorbed
in externals, is perhaps less able to comprehend than any other age.
This involved great transvaluation of values. Of this great
reversal Buddha's renunciation is only the darker, sadder form. It is
not easy to see how the poor are rich, or the rich poor, why the meek
are proud, and the proud humble; how pain brings joy, the conquered
conquer; how the vilest sinner may be purer than the perfect con
ventionalist . Only when we understand these things can we understand
the sense in which Jesus reahzed Messianic hopes. This thesis of Jesus
should appeal with peculiar force, but does not, to those psychologists
who think meanly of the soul or deem it a mere epiphenomenon or
mainly noetic, or nothing but a mirror or record of outer facts. Again,
the great founder of the inner kingdom of faith gives us a culminating
example of what every race should do for its history and ideals. He
answers the question how races and ethnic stocks can remain peren
nially vital and growing, and escape the decay and death which have
seemed to be the destiny of all the great nations of the past. Racial
and national immortality are assured only by inwardly assimilating
and interpreting on ever higher planes the earlier achievements and
ideals of the race, by perpetually sublimating fact into meaning, using
it as a symbol of higher future truths, ever trying to reproduce the his-

338 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tory of the past but in a transfigured way, so that all that went before
seems prophecy, and all that follows its fulfilment. Human records
must have this incessant re-interpretation and re-revelation, just as
human hfe is made more effective by it as we see, e. g., in Goethe.
Either for lack of great minds or of incentives thereto this development
has been arrested or there have been retrogression or so many dead
and stagnant periods and so many dead nations. We have here a re
cipe of ever progressive growth and development for races.
Thus in realizing Messianity within, Jesus transcended individual
ity, and his soul became totemic of his race, the palladium of its ideals.
In gathering this into himself he also diffused his self into the larger self
of the gens and became its generahzed type, so that his identity was
expanded and merged into that of his people. AU its good predicates
became his. All that was significant in its history must be explained,
at least symbolically, in his own hfe. But all this vastation of soul
involved the beginning of a reversal of ah the processes of incarnation.
It was the doom of the body as the principle of individuation. As
Plato conceived philosophy as love of death, so as Jesus' soul ceased to
be individual and became racial, his body, which could not incorporate
the race, must die, and the larger body, viz., the community — that is,
the disciples, the elect, the Church — must take its place. The soul
such as his had become needed a new and larger incarnation, not in one
person but in a group. This reincarnation of soul he described figur
atively as the Holy Spirit that could only come after his death, which
was necessary to set it free, for the Spirit is only his soul freed from the
body. Perhaps a better modern trope or simile of this process would
be to call it a higher procreation which having borne and transmitted
the immortal germ plasm, leaves the specialized soma to die because
as an instrument it has done its work and so must be sloughed off like a
husk which is of no further use and may become an encumbrance.
Compared with the new, higher life his soul had kindled, his corpo
reity had become senescent and moribund. His psyche had outgrown
his soma, and could not become a diffusive power in the disciples and
their followers and successors while it was imprisoned in its sarcous
tenement, so that in becoming the Messiah the thanatic processional
had already begun. As others struggled to five, the struggle to die
had now begun in the depths of his soul. Unique as this was, in him it
is intelhgible and not without analogies in human experience. The

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 339
sense of Messianity he described, not by calling himself the generic or
ideal Jew or type-man, but by means of the more tropical and less
exact phrase, Son of Man. He might have called himself the Father
of Man, of a new type truest to the idea of humanity, or the best repre
sentative of the genus.
As Jesus grew into the Messianic idea his individual consciousness
gradually passed into the larger consciousness of the group or race,
and he eventuaUy came to identify himself with it. He came to
think, feel, and act in super-individual or genetic terms. He inter
preted this supervening race-consciousness in himself ambiguously,
partly as Godhead and partly as the Kingdom. Following the inveter
ate projective hypostatizing habit, he interpreted it on the one hand as
his heavenly Father with whom he grew into unique oneness. This
experience was the knell of his own personality, as distinct from and
independent of the Father. Even his individuality, however perfect,
could not express God, who as humanity itself transcends all limita
tions inherent in any single personality. On the other hand, the Jo
hannin phrases expressing his relation to the Father, as we shall see,
can be so arranged as to show every stage of progress from utter
subordination to equahty and identity until his individual ego, now
entirely evacuated, marches on to death in order that the undiminished
fulness of God may take its place. Thus he illustrates psychic euthan
asia. God is Mansoul transcendentalized.1
II. The Sonship. A second great achievement was that Jesus
grew to regard himself as Son of God. This was another experience
not unique in kind but far transcending any other approximation to it
in degree. This we must now consider.
Perhaps the most distinctive trait of Jesus' personahty, the one
that has always overtopped his teachings, is the fact that he beheved
himself to be and was thought by his foUowers to stand nearer than any
other to God. This conviction was probably the most basal and deep
est thing in his soul, and constituted his divine sonship. Harnack2
declares that no psychology can ever tell us how Jesus attained this
insight. Here, he says, research ceases, and this must forever remain a
! K>1 the voluminous literature on the subject see as convenient in English: V. H. Stanton: "The Jewish and Chris
tian Messiah." 1886,399 p. S. Mathews: "The Messianic Hope in the New Testament." New York, 100s, 338 p. E.
Fiehm: "Messianic Prophecy." 1900, 356 p. C. H. Briggs: "Messianic Prophecy." 1805, 5iop. C. H. Cornill: "The
Prophets of Israel." 1895, 103 p. J. M. P. Smith: "The Prophet and His Problem." 1916, 344 p. See also V. VSlter: "Jesus
der Menschensohn." 1914, 113 p. D. Carl Stange: "Das FrSmmigkeitsideal der modernen Theologie." 1907, 3a p.
F. Moerchen: "Die Psychologie der Heiligkeit." 1908, 47 p. See also his "Zur psychiatrischen Betrachtung des uber-
lieferten Christusbildes," in MonatssckriflfUr die kirchliche Praxis. Oct., 1906.
v'Das Wesen des Christentums." 1901, 189 p.

34© JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
mystery. This we cannot admit or beheve. Were it so, the loss or
absence of this knowledge would not only be unutterably sad but it
would leave Christianity with a hiatus between itself and God, and
also between itself and man, as a thing apart and dissociated, and there
fore forever uninteUigible and incredible. In fact, the sense of sonship
was attained through a normal development of the vita religiosa, and
although it occurred in the greatest psychic altitude, it was as natural
as spring. True, Jesus kept no journal intime, and we cannot teU how
much of this process was spontaneous unfoldment, impeUed only
by the nisus back of all development, and how much was the result
of struggle, search, and victory. We find many of the same uncer
tainties as to the precise way in which he reached the sense of sonship,
that we have seen exist concerning how he attained Messianity.
Much, however, as we long for a fuUer record of the hidden processes
of his soul, it is not difficult to understand and even to indicate the
psychogenetic stages that led him to conscious deity. To do this we
must, however, first recaU one of the considerations above that bore
on the problem of Messianity, viz., that a race that does not produce
great representative men and leaders at each stage of its development
always suffers arrest and, in the end, degeneration. A race has been
defined as a device of nature to produce one or more men of a high or
der. As its culture becomes richer, ever-increasing ability is needed
for its guides. Because the demands for increasing superiority in fit
leaders were not met in season, the great ethnic stocks of the past
dechned, like exotic plants that sprouted but could not bear fruit
or even come to blossom. Again, outer forms, conventions, too much
legality, external rites, encrusting internal meanings — these are like
specialized somatic tissue which loses germinal power until the corpse
is evolved. To such a condition Jesus as Messiah brought regenera
tion by subordinating form to content and becoming the unipersonal
entelechy of his race, its higher monad or microcosm, entitled to speak
with the voice of all the prophets at once, so that what had been phylo-
genetic processes now took in his person an ontogenetic form.
But what was the Hebrew deity whose son Jesus thought he be
came? Yahveh, at first the God of the Kenite tribe near Sinai, was as
unique as were the Hebrews who adopted him, who chose him, or, as
they always ascribed the initiative to the Divine, whom he had chosen.
Each could say to the other in the phrase of the worshipper as in-

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 341
scribed on the Orphic tablets, "I am of thy race." He was essentially
the God of the gens, and to each member of it he was his great clans
man and kinsman, his personified ideal, destiny, genius. OriginaUy
regarded as hardly less awe-inspiring than the Akkadian Maskim from
which some elements of his nature were derived, the mystic tetragram
that stood for a name too sacred to be spoken suggested etymolog-
icaUy the lofty, strong, eternal one, and he was always associated in
the Hebrew mind with the sublime and to them novel mountain
phenomena at Sinai. Although the God of the ancestors, Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, though not in a way that suggests, as some have
thought, traces of the Spencer-Lange ancestor-worship theory of the
origin of rehgion, and although long worshipped with offerings, there is
httle evidence that he ever sat at the table as the guest of his devotees
or that sacrifices were ever made to him under either of the formulae,
do ut abias or do ut das, phrases now sometimes used to distinguish
between the earlier, e. g., pre-Dionysian, and the later Olympic re
ligions in Greece. Yahveh was also both a battle-cry and a God of
war. Once he had accepted human sacrifices. He had adopted many
of the rites of the Canaanitic Baal, and had thus become also God of
the soil and its fruits, and husband of the land, being always psychically
consanguineous with his people. His worship was never domestic,
and his sacrifices never on the hearths and altars of homes; but his
culture was always a social rather than an individual, or even a family
matter. Rehgion was not yet personal, but merely "the tie that
binds." From these very humble, not to say barbaric, beginnings, Yahveh
grew in complexity and exaltation of character with the growth of the
race, reflecting its most effective subjectivity, which came to be en
dowed not only with aU the supreme ethical values but with indepen
dent objectivity. For primitive man and the folk-soul particularly, to
know means to posit objectively, a tendency arising particularly from
the irresistible ejective habit of sense perception. Races especially
must project outward their most intimate nature to reaUy know it, for
what is man without an object? In rehgion differences between sub
ject and object are most constantly changing. Kalthoff urges that the
deeper we penetrate into this domain the more the subjective predom
inates over the objective. Yahveh became more than tribal, more
than the embodiment of the moral ideas of the Hebrew stock. He

342 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
was the "essential truth of Jewish man." Hence, by the law of
fission or bifurcation, the transcendent, which is always secondary, had
emanated from the soul of the race. What the chosen people re
nounced for themselves in power, wisdom, and holiness, they not only
ascribed to but enjoyed in their deity. He was one, because they
were the pure, unmixed race; supreme, because they held themselves
to be the best stirp in the world; just, because he embodied their con
viction that good and evU would both be recompensed in this hfe. He
was the celestial party to the great covenant; vindictive, yet judicious;
jealous, but kindly; stern in discipline, but with a parental heart.
To this personation of the higher life Abraham was caUed to devote
himself with abandon. Some of the prophets gave Yahveh almost
cosmic dimensions, and the Psalms made him not only Lord but Creator
of nature. Yet he was a particularist, exacting in aU matters of sacri
fice and rites, and enforcing nice distinctions between what was kodish
and taboo. His personahty later became so multiplex that it was hard
to define, and if he did not become merely a vinculum to include a
larger number of attributes these were so distinct as to suggest heno
theism among the qualities enshrined within his nature. He had not
only chosen but trained his people by successes and calamities, fears
and hopes. He had watched over them, and had always been on hand
in emergencies with special deliverances. Thus the worship of Yahveh
meant respect for the very highest ethnic conceptions and convictions.
We can see that the assumption of sonship to such a being, instead
of being involved with and inseparable from the problem of Messianity,
as Baldensperger, e. g., thinks it to be, would mark a distinct advance,
although it would be a natural if not inevitable next step, if advance
there was to be. As the Jews were children of Yahveh's choice, so
Jesus as their type-man was his Son in a pecuhar sense. As such, aU
the lavish care bestowed upon them by their Lord would converge
and concentrate upon him as its focus. Jesus was the apical blossom
for the sake of which the Divine Creator had so long watered, pruned,
transplanted, and dug about the parent stem. He was chosen from
among his race just as it had been chosen of old, so that he now stood
in a position related to his kinsmen somewhat like theirs toward the
gentiles. He was sacrosanct, or doubly set apart, as weU as beloved,
and this relation was most exactly conceived as filial. Thus no object
ive event (such as Peter's confession, the transfiguration, or the yoke

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 343
from heaven) nor any pathological subjective experience led Jesus on
to this momentous next step, but an ineluctable inner necessity which
was genetic because it was an advanced stage of development along the
hne of his previous psychic growth. It was at the same time a logical
conclusion from two premises. Yahveh is the Father of the Jews,
and Jesus is their Messiah. Thus only one aheady consciously the
Messiah could have become Son of God with any plenary conviction.
This of course involved the utmost expansion and elevation of soul,
and many new lines of spiritual development. Natural as it aU was,
and true to aU we know of the higher psychology and anthropology,
it was unique, as much so, indeed, as was the development of man on
the monophyletic theory, which assumes that at only one particular
point in time and place did the primitive man evolve out of the higher
anthropoids. So this process could never have taken place in the
world before, and we can hardly conceive it possible again.
For instance, the conviction of sonship could not have broken
forth toward any deity that was not in many respects tribal. Again,
no individual could normaUy grow into the sense of sonship, unique
like that of Jesus, who had not already in a sense embodied his race in
himself. That race, too, must be pure, its stock eugenic, persistent,
ascendent. The conceptions of the cosmos had to be more or less
narrow to make the process possible and also to give it depth and
intensity. Just this deity, individual, race, moment, stage, had to
concur. Thus the problem of sonship was reduced to its simplest
and most favourable terms. If we delocalize or detemporize the
process, or dissociate the solution from its historic environment, the
understanding of it aU wiU escape us. True, myth tells us of sons
of God galore, that have sprung from the immortal descendants of
heaven who consorted with the daughters of men, but the sonship of
Jesus has nothing reaUy in common with this, nor is his sonship pro-
creative save in the above sense; so that the Immaculate Conception is
only a symbol but of a distinctly different order, a figure of speech
taken hteraUy. Jesus' relations to his Father were purely spiritual
and not spermatic. From every pragmatic point of view sonship did
involve some reduction of Yahveh. We find in the New Testament
no such magnificats of God as abound in the prophets, as a being
infinite in time, space, and perfection, omnipresent, omnipotent, creat
ing aU things, awful and infinitely transcending human concepts.

344 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Indeed, there is httle left of the numen tremendum of Sinai, with aU his
plenitude of superhuman and supernatural predicates. Deity for
Jesus is the still small voice of man. He brought the twihght of the
Semite Yahveh, as God the Father passed over into the Son by whose
generation his own being is diminished. Not that Jesus deliberately
reduced the God-idea to make it coincide with his own personal con
sciousness; but he only felt that aU possible revelation of him must
henceforth be in human terms, and so he wished to make it as complete
in his own person as possible.
The theanthropic consciousness, too, was attained under circum
stances unprecedentedly favourable to the human race. Yahveh had
become an essentiaUy ethical being whose greatest love was for holiness,
and whose deepest hate was for iniquity. This marked a complete
accession of man to his Kingdom, for virtue is the most divine thing in
the world. Man, indeed, cannot think too highly of this, his essential,
truest ethical self. No other deity than that of the prophets could be
incarnated in human form with more gain and less loss of attributes.
This once attained, immense impulsion of soul would foUow from an
experience so new and so near the apex of the goal of human develop
ment. So pregnant a mystery would impel aU who could feel it to
strive to utter it by every crude trope avaUable; to preserve as precious
and to reiterate as rubrical; to elaborate into dogmatic, mystic, specu
lative form every phrase, image, or parable descriptive of the filial
relationship. The sense of its intense significance would give the
crassest of these experiences a certain degree of sacred inviolability.
Thus it is no longer possible to befieve that Jesus brought the thean
thropic consciousness ready-made with him into the world or that it
arose suddenly and completely at a particular stage like the baptism.
Why the synoptists quietly assume but say so little about sonship,
and why the great Johannin passages so indelibly stamped on the heart
of Christendom are so incondite, confusing, and contradictory, are
themselves facts that need explanation. It was of course far easier
in an age of fable and miracle to substitute material for spiritual truth
than to describe supreme new stages of psychic development. The
Nativity and especiaUy the Resurrection were dramatic sarcous scenes
that seemed to give tangible demonstration of deity, and such crass
literalisms are of course far more inteUigible. The psychic fact that
these symbols stood for was so lofty and difficult of comprehension

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 345
that the terms of man's previous experience were inadequate to express
it, and therefore many clung to the stupendous physical miracle as one
of the most available vehicles of expressing Jesus' mediatorial function.
Masterpieces of ethnic pedagogic art as they were in their day, they stiU
linger because their crudity of form and matter is so over-compensated
by the sublimity of their content. Their very amorphousness and
monstrosity, if taken literally, constitute a standing incitement to trans
late them up and back into the spiritual truth they stand for.
In view of this, it is not without psychological interest and signifi
cance to try to indicate the very scattered and confused references to
Jesus' relations to his heavenly parent. Gathering them aU together
thus, and by the simple method of transferring the order of passages
bearing on the subject so as to give them a certain possible historic
sequence, we may arrange them to show stages as foUows:
(1) First come the texts that suggest great subordination to the
Father, akin to the first stages of childhood. Jesus is little, the Father
aU; the Father is greater than he; he does nothing of himself; he speaks
as the Father taught; he is but a voice; even his words are not his,
but his Father's; he tells what he has heard; he does as the Father
commands, and can do nothing he does not see the Father do; his doc
trine is not his; places in heaven are not his to give; he comes not of
himself, but is sent; no man comes to him except the Father draw him;
he is astonished that his hearers should not know that the doctrine is of
God, and that he does not speak merely by himself; he finds satisfaction
that he always does the things that please the Father; he has made
known aU the things he heard from him; he has declared and will con
tinue to proclaim his name. In such expressions Jesus seems to be
commissioned as a factor, agent, or envoy, and is far from being pleni
potentiary. He has little personal power or discretion, but acts on
pretty complete instructions. Thus any prophet might have spoken
who had seen the Lord as the world had not. Such texts have been the
arsenal of both the mystics and the heretics, who regard Jesus as dis
tinctly inferior to the Father.
(2) At a somewhat more advanced stage of his sonship Jesus is
given some authority, e. g., to execute judgment. He is not alone,
but the Father is with him, or will give him what is asked in his name.
Some are given him to keep, and he reports that none save one has
been lost. In his valedictory prayer he says that he has finished the

346 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
work assigned to him, and recommits those given him to the Father.
He prays not for the world, but only for those given him. Power has
been delegated him over aU flesh to confer eternal hfe upon those given
him. Here he appears to have a sense of delegated power, sharply
defined and limited, although it shows that the sense of sonship is
developing toward maturity.
(3) To a perhaps next higher or more closely related stage belong the
phrases in which the relation of the disciples to Jesus is compared to
or identified with his to the Father. He loves them as the Father loves
him. They are to keep his commandments and abide in his love, as he
keeps the Father's commandments and abides in his love. He sends
them into the world as he is sent. The glory given him he gives them.
The love of the Father to him is to be in him and he in them. Those
who confess, deny, receive, hate, or persecute his disciples, do the same
to him, with the frequent intimation that those who do so to him do
it to the Father also. The Father is to love them as he loves him.
He is in the Father, and they in him. They that love him shaU be
beloved of the Father, and he wiU love them. "As I hve by the
Father so he that liveth in me, even he shaU hve by me. " Without him
they can do nothing, etc. Here his mediatorial function of middleman
between God and his foUowers is attained and expressed. His rela
tions to God are paraUel to their relations to him. Although in the
vine parables and other aUusions there are differences, the nascent
sonship-idea is so far throughout entirely psychic or adoptive with
nothing about it involving natural paternity.
(4) Higher, and we may conceive later, comes a stage of parity,
consubstantiality, equipoUence, if not identity with the Father. AU
things that the Father hath are the Son's (Matt. ii:27) delivered to
him of the Father, given into his hands. "AU thine are mine, all
mine are thine, I in thee and thou in me." When Philip would be
shown the Father he is asked, "Have I been so long with you and you
have not known me?" Those who keep his word the Father will love
and "we wiU come and abide with him." Both wiU love those who
love the Son. To know him is to know the Father. "All things that
the Father hath are his," and, as if their functions were now reversed,
"he shaU take of mine and show it to you." Now he readUy assigns
to the disciples the places in heaven which he had before said in answer
to the same request were not his to give (Matt. xix:28). Not only

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 347
does no man know who the Son is but the Father, and who the Father
is but the Son, hut the Son knows the Father even as the Father knows
the Son. The Father is in him and he is in the Father. Before he had
said that aU that was asked in his name the Father would give, but now
he says, "If you ask anything in my name I wiU do it." "Whoever
loves me shaU be loved by the Father and" (as if a climax) "I wiU
love him." "Also these things they will do because they know not
the Father nor me." Now to hate, love, receive, see, know the Father
and the Son are one and the same act and state. In aU this there is no
trace of subordination, but, indeed, a few phrases in which the Son
almost seems to take precedence.
(5) An implication, and perhaps also a last stage, is that of the
transcendence of his own nature. These expressions seem prompted
when the shadow of the cross first appears. He is to go hence and the
disciples cannot teU whither. Soon they wfil see him no more. None
asks him, " Whither goest thou? " Later, perhaps, he announces again
and again that he goes to the Father. This should cause them to
rejoice if they love him. Sometimes he promises to come again.
Again, he goes to prepare them a place and will receive them unto
himself but they cannot foUow him now. When he next drinks the
fruit of the vine it will be in the Father's kingdom. Thence he wiU
send them the Comforter from the Father who wiU testify of him.
Because he goes to the Father the world wiU be convinced of righteous
ness and, a causal sequence of the same event, the disciples shaU do
greater works than he. Even the dead shaU hear his voice. As to his
origin, the disciples are from beneath; he is from above. Then, at
their entreaty, speaking more plainly than before he announces that
he has proceeded forth from God. He loves them because they be
fieve that he came out from God. He is to receive the glory that he
had before the foundation of the world. He came forth from the
Father into the world, and returns to God; he is himself the bread that
came down from heaven. Here and in the preceding phase he germs
of the supernal birth, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, which seek
to body forth in tangible form these exalted states of mind which
historically not only preceded, but gave the initial psychic motivation
to the parousia and aU the post-mortem records, as well as later to even
the Nativity. Of course these stages must not be regarded as too sharply de-

348 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
marcated in time. They are rather degrees of nascency, the last more
or less implicit in the first. Jesus' theanthropic consciousness, Gottes-
bewusstsein, lived, as it were, on a slope; and mood, recognition by
others, favouring or adverse currents of outer events or inner states,
impelled his soul now up, now down, this scale. At the Crucifixion
the ebb of conviction sank to zero, as he felt forsaken of God as he was
discredited and deserted by his friends. On the other hand, hostile
critics have raised the question whether, had he lived to a good old age
and achieved vast other successes, this sense of oneness with God
might have grown to a dogmatic oraculism or megalomania. To
such vain speculations it can only be answered that his faith seems to
have had just the degree of intensity and elevation to give it maximal
psychological efficiency as the punctum saliens of the new and epochal
historical movement which it inaugurated. The very phrase, Son of
God, is an artistic, anthropomorphic masterpiece, because it expresses
correctly and in terms of the closest personal relation the best attitude
of man toward God, and indeed by no means loses its appositeness
even if the Father be conceived as impersonal. It means that the
claimant of this title feels himself a child of the universe out of which
he sprang, and has a filial attitude toward it. To attain and maintain
this attitude it is not necessary to regard the cosmos animisticaUy.
What lies behind this, perhaps the most pregnant phrase in aU the
culture history of mankind?
Evolutionism did not begin with Darwin, but with the very early
cosmogonies. Man has always been interested, not only in his human
but in his cosmic pedigree. He has yearned to know in the language of
one of the oldest Vedic hymns, "Whence, oh whence did this great
creation spring?" Was it made or did it grow? In any case what
was first or in the beginning, and how is man related to this? AU
ontologies from Parmenides to Hegel have grappled with the problem
of man's ultimate derivation. Spinoza was " God-intoxicated,"
although his God was substance, knowable in only two of his perhaps
numberless attributes. Mystics of all kinds, from Proclus and Plo
tinus to Boehme and Eckhart, have striven to come into contact with
or immersed themselves in pure predicateless being. What was in the
beginning has always been one of the most haunting of all questions
that the world has addressed to thinking man, and it has had as many
answers as there are mythic cycles, creeds, or systems. It has been

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 349
conceived as undifferentiated being, so highly generahzed that no posi
tive affirmation can be made without limiting it, so that it is little else
but the substantive verb standing alone, without either subject or
predicate, and tantamount to nothing. It is existence without quality.
In this old ontological mould have been cast such conceptions as cosmic
gas, the undifferentiated and unknowable. Or more anthropomor-
phicaUy it has been caUed nous, logos, a reason, force, or energy con
ceived as wiU, with a developmental nisus behind it, or love has been
the spring of aU things. This great recessionary Hang or trend has of
late been studied in two new fields, which show how its primordial and
instinctive nature antedates the dawn of reason.
(i) The first is its prevalence among children,1 who often lose
themselves in cosmic emotion in the contemplation of infinities of time
and space. This may become a dizzying obsession or neurosis. The
soul is drawn heavenward in sky- and star-gazing, and may become
almost agoraphobiac toward the blue vault above. The psychogenet-
icist sees in this phenomenon the germs of such cults as those of
Varuna or Urania or Nirvana, and perhaps of the Yogi disciphne. It
is the pantheistic "impulse to return," the first effort to think sub
specie eternitatis. It is the first naive orientation toward the beginning
and end of aU things, a dim instinctive sense of a menstruum into
which even personality wiU be resolved.
(2) Students of the mind of primitive races have within the last
two decades found, especially in all our Indian tribes, who are best
known, and among other primitive people, especiaUy the Melanesians,
cumulative traces of a stage of culture that preceded the animism
which Tylor thought primitive. Although concerning these primitive
conceptions scholars are by no means accordant, there is an ajfreement
that we have here the undiscovered but very general stage through
which the souls of perhaps aU savages pass. On this view aU men
very early in the history of mankind had a deep, overmastering sense
of some aU-pervading power, variously caUed Mana, Orenda, Wakanda,
etc., which is not the great spirit and which has probably no trace of
personahty in it. This power was before and back of aU things, per
vades them, and gives unity to the most diverse things in nature, for
it is continuous and so cannot be broken. It brings aU things to pass.
It is an ancient, sacred, mysterious energy, that is supersensual and
•See my "Adolescence," Vol. 3, p. 159 et *«?•

35° JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
metaphysical. It is a subtle bond that gives aU things a common life
and makes them akin. It is also a bond of souls. Mana is felt chiefly
in times of great social excitement and group activities which bring
individuals into the closest touch with one another, as if the individual
soul expanded into that of the entire tribe, and this expansion is pro
longed until it feels itself to be continuous with the principle of hfe,
and even with that of being itself. Some think Mana the source
of magic power. Lovejoy thinks it is the first phUosophy. Harri
son1 finds it pervading the rehgion of ancient Greece before Zeus, and
compares it to Bergson's duree reelle. Durkheim2 seems to conceive
it as a kind of totem of the universe, and so does Marett.3 It is a sense
of oneness that seems to enter from without, and most agree that it is
superpersonal.4 Hocking6 thinks it an ontological reminder of man's
sense of dependence. It is only experienced in states of excitement
and social solidarity. It has been defined as a sense of exceedingness
or excessivity, or a kind of ecstasy, involving some surrender of the
normal self. It brings with it a feeling of a larger, higher hfe, of ela
tion and freedom as against personal limitation. A greater perfection
is felt, etc. At first students of Mana thought that the conception
of it was quite distinct both from the ontology of philosophy and from
the haunting infinity psychosis of children, and yet deeper study shows
the very close psychic analogies and equivalences of aU three.
Moreover, every noetic quest, such as that for categories or innate
ideas or forces, is motivated by the same propensity of the soul to get
back to an abstract background of the universe. It was this deep
trend in the human soul that made man so prone to accept modern
evolutionism perhaps prematurely, and to presuppose its operation at
points of the upward scale where it is as yet by no means established.
In aU these ways man has sought to strengthen the feeling of his own
legitimacy as a true son of the cosmos, and this title makes him feel
more at home in it. He yearns back toward the roots of things in
order to feel that he is the heir of all the ages. His wiU loves to posit
itself as a direct derivative of creative energy. He loves to think his
sense of duty a categorical imperative, and also and especiaUy that the

•Jane E. Harrison: "The Religion of Ancient Greece." London, 1006, 66 p.
'Emile Durkheim: "Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse, le Systeme Tot&nique en Australie." Paris,
Mean, 1012, 647 p. See also V Annie Sociologique.
*R. R. Marett: "The Threshold of Religion." London, Methuen, 1909, 173 p.
'Lucien Levy-Bruhl: "Les fonctions mentales dans socie'tes intericures." Paris, Alcan, 1910, 461 p.
5W. E. Hocking: "The Meaning of God in Human Experience." New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 191a, 586 p.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 351
absolute lives and moves in his own heart and that his feehngs, whether
of dependence in Schleiermacher's sense, or of absolute freedom, as
Hegel prefers, incorporate his inteUect and his heart into the ultimate
scheme of things. In aU these ways the soul strives to feel itself one
with the inmost nature of the world, and to realize that to be either the
abject slave or the Supreme Lord of the universe are only ambivalent
expressions of the same instinct of unity and solidarity with self, others,
or the world.
Thus to personate aU the sources of nature and mind, and to salute
them all in one as "Our Father in heaven," as both the goal and end of
aU things, was a sublime achievement of pedagogic, pragmatic, human
istic genius. Each is the child of nature and of man, and therefore of
God. Pure reason may soar to the absolute, but practical reason
regards even being itself animisticaUy, as parental, just as theology
ascribes ontology as an attribute to God not inconsistent with his
fatherhood. Our love to it seems reflected in its love of us. Man
seems caUed to do its wiU because he made it according to his own.
To know it is the highest self-knowledge, and therefore man anthropo
morphizes the coUective fundaments of things into a unity that seems
personal, and in this world he is more at home as in a father's house
made for him.
Thus, by identifying himself with God, Jesus went beyond Messi
anity by just so far as the God of the prophets transcended the Hebrew
Messiah, and he also took another step toward death because deity
as mankind in its totality is greater than any single individual can ever
become. God was in him to an exceptional degree, but God cannot
come to adequate and complete consciousness in any individual; and
so, since God could not come to Jesus in aU the plenitude of his attri
butes, Jesus had to go to God. In plainer and more modern terms,
this means that if Jesus' reahzation had been complete that God was
simply and only ideal humanity rather than a transcendent celestial
person, and that man's universe were all of his own making, and if
this conviction had also pervaded the minds of his foUowers, he need
not have died, risen, and ascended, to document his sonship. These
latter were a dramatization, necessary because of man's inability to
accept Jesus' thesis of sonship unless his soul was thought to actuaUy
go up to the traditional abode of God. The fact which they symbolize
is that he found, went to, and became the divine in his own soul.

35» JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
He had to die, because men in the bhndness of their hearts and minds
could not believe that he had really found or become God unless he
was thought to have divested himself of his body and gone up through
space in ghostly and levitated form. Thus Jesus had to UteraUy die
and ascend to give a modulus or aUegory of a successful quest for God.
This was clung to as sacred because of the meaning it was dimly felt
to embody. Committed as Jesus was to the objective, hypostatized interpreta
tion of God, and creative as was his designation of this concept as
Father, many of the above Johannin passages show that he also revered
the God within his own breast as a kind of coUective term for the racial
instincts, most of which slumber unrevealed in us aU, throughout our
entire hves. Hence we find a strange duality of interpretation in his
mind. The Holy Spirit that was set free by his death and was in fact
his soul, goes up to God in heaven, but it is also commissioned to dweU
on earth in the souls of Jesus' foUowers, where it reaUy belongs, al
though he bequeathed it to both them and God. Thus Jesus long
hoped that his friends would understand the inwardness of his God-
quest, and perhaps the beloved disciple was weU on the way to do so.
Therefore Jesus was reticent about it aU, and shrank from promulga
tion, because he saw that crassly minded as most of the disciples were
he could not make them realize that he had found God within, and that
there was reaUy no other way of doing so. To them the only success
ful quest of God would be to go to him above as one can do only after
death. This he had to do, therefore, as a last resort, because worst
came to worst, since the only God they knew was to be found at home
only in the sky. Perhaps had there been time for a longer apprentice
ship on the part of his foUowers, they might have understood without
the tragic object-lesson which Jesus chose to give them at last, rather
than that they should hopelessly faU to understand his divinity. Thus
he gave an objective idolization of it which the Church has cherished
as so central. But for this only mystic consciousness of the deep inner
things of the soul, of which the death and Resurrection are only sym
bols, would his successors ever have confessed his divinity?
If the great sayings of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel as to his rela
tions to the Father have any coherent and intelligible meaning, it
is that the way to God is that which opens within the depths of the
human soul. The true son of God reaches, communes, and unites

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 353
with him by mystic inner experience. Of this the laying aside of the
body and the rising through space to a place are only symbols, even if
the best and only ones. The star of the wise men, the opening heavens
at the baptism, the reversal of gravity at the Ascension, the cloud that
"received him out of their sight," suggesting absorption or melting into
the empyrean, and aU other astral references, as Voigt's careful study,
"Die Geschichte Jesu und die Astrologie" (191 1, 225 p.), suggested, are
aU to be taken tropically. God is not reached by a voice through
space at any definite place, nor can we conceive Jesus returning to him
by the same way by which he came down to earth to be born. This is
aU myth and symbol, although in the highest Platonic sense of these
words, and haUowed as is aU this imagery of the highest of aU psychic
processes. To rise to God is to enter the soul of the human race as a
beneficent, discarnate, disembodied, superpersonal, diffusive power.
This was the true assumption; for Uranotropism is reaUy spiritual
involution, and communion with God is the acme of communion with
the larger racial soul within us. The absorption of Jesus' risen spirit
into the cloud did not mean that he had left the world and man, but
that he had completely entered them. It marked the consummation
of his wiU to die in order to attain a more than personal immortality
in the human race.1 In the apocryphal Gospel of Peter (Chapter 5),
Jesus is made to ascend directly from the cross, whUe in Chapter 9
the resurrected Jesus is of supernatural stature. If Jesus died as Mes
siah, his Resurrection and Ascension show him forth as Son of God.
Here the two functions are perhaps most differentiated. If the former
was historic, the latter is more Docetic, spiritual, plastic, poetic. Mere
personality had ended, and with the Resurrection the soul of Jesus
became henceforth incarnated in the community he founded.
The Jesus that arose and ascended was not a reanimated cadaver;
so that the emptiness or tenancy of the tomb, so much discussed of
late, is irrelevant. His body mouldered like ours. The post-mortem
Jesus had no vestige of historicity, but was the most consummate of all
the creations of humanity's wishes, hopes, and aspirations, the embodi
ment of his ad astra per aspera impulsions, the symbol of what we trust
our future history is to be on to the end of time. Befief in it is the
artistic interpretation of the yet-unspent momentum of human evolu-
»See my "Thanatophobia and Immortality," Am. Jour. Psychol., Oct., 1915, p. 581 «l mj. Also Lake: "The
Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ." 1907, Chapter 7. Also N. Gill: "On the IntennediaU
State," Chapter 7.

354 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tion, which in that day had to be conceived as apotheosis and divini-
tization; for man wiU become divine when he realizes not merely theo-
reticaUy but in all his life the sense in which the Son of God is the son of
man and wfil return to his father, man. Thus Jesus not only brought
the twilight of the Yahveh of the prophets in reducing him to human
dimensions, but made the beginning of those long processes the goal
of which is the resumption of transcendent deity into immanent hu
manity. Thus the son of man wiU become father of the true God, and
aU things be given into his hands. This is now being accomplished in
the Kingdom of the Son.
III. The Kingdom. And now how shaU we conceive the Kingdom,
the third great achievement of Jesus? Roughly we may say that it
was a community in which his own Holy Spirit was reincarnated after
his death, his heir, to which he bequeathed his soul. In it he began
again a new (this time pluripersonal) life on earth. It was first the
invisible and then became the visible Church. As the child is more
generic and a better representative of the race than the adult, and so
nearer God (as Jesus saw and said long before Wordsworth), so his own
unique God-consciousness which was a growing, aU-pervading sense of
the genetic soul within him, came more and more to subtend the differ
ences which separate individuals and to be not only genetic but generic.
His divinity consisted in his ideal and eternal childhood, or in doing
away with the threshold which separates the individual from the species
in us. The child is father of the man he is to be, first because his traits
are phyleticaUy older than adulthood, which is a later addition or
superstructure, and secondly, because he is a more generalized type
from which the adult departs by the specialization and limitation
involved in growth. More than the adult he is "human, and nothing
human is foreign to him." Psychoanalysts never tire of insisting
that the childlike is the unconscious, and vice versa (das Kindliche ist
das Unbewusste und das Unbewusste ist das Kindliche). Thus Jesus
is the eternaUy chfidlike (das ewige Kindliche) in us. In this consists
his filial nature. He is God's own Son, for deity is intrinsic man's
autistic nature. Jesus' personality differed from that of others by its
plenitude of racial traits and in his ready access to this source of power.
The ego must be minimized because over-individuation alienates from
this divine weU-spring of power. Jesus was not a philosopher of the
subconscious, but its pragmatist, who first taught the use of and right

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 355
attitude to it. This made him a man of destiny, and gave unique
momentum to his deeds and words. The high degree of affectivity
often developed where injective and ejective tendencies of thought
osciUate, as in the Johannin mysticism, is highly characteristic of the
vita religiosa in which subject and object often become indistinguishable.
It is hard to find an Aristotelian mean between medium Sludge and
Nirvana or between oraculism and Vedanta.
This mean Jesus thought and found, not in any single personality,
even in his own, but in a select group of persons which after his death
grew in numbers and reached an unprecedented closeness of union one
with another, surpassing even the friendship so lauded in classical
antiquity, for the ties that bound his foUowers were closer even than
any ties of famUy or blood. Each member sought, wiUed, loved, feared
nothing for himself, but aU things for the brethren. They were in
Jesus. They were his body, and he was their soul. Community of
goods was only one and not the chief expression of this new unison of
soul. With such new ardour of feUowship it would be strange indeed
if there were not occasionally agapistic perversions between the mem
bers one of another, and also of Christ. It is no wonder that the dis
ciples lingered together and were loath to separate after the effusion
of the Spirit. Kalthoff and his pupils think1 that the figure of Jesus
himself was created out of the heat and light of the new brotherly love.
They deem primitive Christianity a gradual synthesis of Messianism,
Stoicism, and various proletarian societies, and think that Jesus is only
the personification of the ideas and experiences of the earliest groups of
believers. His suffering and Resurrection are the martyrdom and
revival of the early Church, and he never really lived. He was a fictive
patron and founder of the Christian as some think .ZEsculapius was of
the medical gufids. Every great movement of the folk-soul, according
to Kalthoff, demands a personal ideal; and even if Jesus was an optical
iUusion, he was a necessary presupposition of the growing Church.
Jesus embodied the psychic content of a movement that had to evolve
a leader, and his figure, projected backward by the Evangelists, repre
sents the aspirations and ideals of the infant community incarnated
in its flesh. Each item in his hfe and teachings is meant to mirror

•A. Kalthoff: "Dat Christusproblem; GrundHnien m e. Soaaltheologie," 190*. "Die Entstehung des Christentums,"
1004. "Was wissen wir von Jesus?" replying to Bousset, 1904. See also M. Maurenbrecher: "Von Nazareth naca
Golgotha," 1009. Lublinski: "Die Entstehung des Christentums aus der antiken Kultur," 1910. Also "Falsche
Beweise fur die E.tistena des Menscben Jesus," 1010. W. Schultz: "Dokumente der Gnosis, "19:0.

356 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
some event in the nascent stages of the development of the Church,
as similarly, post-exilic Judaism put back later ordinances as com
mandments given to Moses. Thus the commitment of the keys to
Peter was put back from the later emergency in which it arose. We
seem to get very close to a real individual heart in the Gospels, and this
shows that it was a product of genuine literary ability natural enough
after once the personal traits began to be given to the Christ-image.
The freedom, idealism, and intense new enthusiasm of a group very
sympatheticaUy fused into a community could give an Ulusion of
reality more compelling than history itself.1 When we consider the
psychological principle that fervid assent to a traditio recepta is only a
lesser degree of the wfil to befieve, which, if intensified, could create
the tradition, we must construe Kalthoff 's theory as iUustrating only an
exaggerated appreciation of the vitality of the new group-consciousness
in which that of Jesus became incorporated and which took up and
carried on his work of organizing the Kingdom on earth.
Besides being the perpetual repository of Jesus' soul two other
facts were implicit in this, which made for the very highest ideality in
the new community. The first was the immeasurable reinforcement
of the befief in immortality, and the second was the conviction of a
speedy end of aU things. Both of these made for spirituality and in
wardness. To live in dafiy expectation of judgment often made for
purity, whUe the aU-dominance of the next world over this and of the
soul over the body exalted each above aU material aims and aU proxi
mate ends and methods. The righteousness of the new Kingdom must
be diffused to the farthest extent and in the least time, for the only
real business of every one was to save his soul and that of others. In
danger the herding instincts of aU gregarious creatures culminate; and
so the cofraternization of individuals who stood in unprecedentedly
close relations to one another gave a unique sohdarity not only between
the individuals but between the different groups, however widely
separated in race or rank. Solidarity of aU the persons and aU the
groups one with another meant the unity of Christ's body in which
his soul went marching on. They ate his body and drank his blood
commensaUy as a symbol of oneness both with him and with one
another. Thus with the conviction, first, that he was indeed the Jewish
»J. Weiss: "Jesus von Nazareth, Mythus oder Geschichte." 1910, 171 p.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 357
Messiah caUed to both reinterpret and realize that ideal, and second,
that he was the son of Yahveh, in a very unique sense was also involved
the third supreme affirmation, viz., of the Kingdom of God or of heaven.
This was a community in which the new and higher hfe which he iUus-
trated and taught was to be lived out. It appears, as we have seen,
that the attainment of the Messianic consciousness dawned very early
in Jesus' public career, and appears as a fixed assumption later; also
that the sense of sonship which was involved in and yet distinct from
it arose not long after, and was weU established. Both these in some
sense mvolved the Kingdom; but only after the shadow of death had
faUen across Jesus' path did the details of it chiefly occupy his con
sciousness, so that only toward the last of his career were his concep
tions of the Kingdom in a state of rapid evolution.
If we turn for a moment from Jesus' personal life and character,
with the study of which the new Christology began, and consider him
as a teacher, foUowing in so doing the impulsion that prompted his dis
ciples first of aU to coUect the logia, sayings, or words, which he had
declared would survive heaven and earth and make each who kept them
a rock, our first problem is to ask what was the central theme of his
teaching; that is, how can it be most comprehensively characterized?
In past decades we have had many opinions upon this subject. Fair-
bairn thought the divine fatherhood his focal concern; Titius con
ceived blessedness to be the root of it aU; Julius Muller said it was sin;
Rothe caUed it righteousness; Dorner held that the chief stress was
laid on justification. But I think aU those who carefuUy scrutinize
the utterances at first hand must incline to the view, of late so strongly
advocated by men of such diverse standards as Ritschl, Wendt, Lutgert
and many others, that the most comprehensive characterization of his
teaching is that it proclaims a new Kingdom of God or heaven or a new
social state which is referred to in no less than 106 Gospel passages,
only two of which are peculiar to John.1
Dissatisfied and confused by the voluminous recent literature on

'Confining ourselves first to the more explicit statements of Matthew in order concerning the Kingdom, we are told
that the poor in spirit, also those persecuted for righteousness' sake, will possess it. Those who break the command
ments are least, and those who do them greatest, in it. If our righteousness does not exceed that of the scribes we shall
not enter. We must pray that it come, must seek it first, and all else will be added. Not all that call on the Lord can
enter. It must be proclaimed. Some would now take it by violence. It is given to the disciples to know it. It is
like a man sowing good seed, not tares. It is like a grain of mustard seed, like leaven, a hidden treasure, a precious
pearl, a net. Some will not die until they see the Son coming in it. Those like children are greatest in it, and or such is
the Kingdom. The rich cannot enter. It will be taken from the Jews. The scribes shut it up. Its Gospel must be
preached. The disciples must drink in it with the Father. The angels will sort out of it those that offend. We should
be instructed in it. The parables of the unjust steward, the eleventh hour workman, the king's marriage, the ten virgins,
tbe one, five, and ten talents, are all called parables of the Kingdom, etc.

358 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the subject of Jesus' social teachings, I made a tabular list of all the
passages with their contexts in the first three Gospels, where the
Kingdom is specificaUy mentioned, in order to see if any general char-
terization of them was possible. Assuming these to be the prime data,
to them I later added another larger tabular list of passages generaUy
believed to refer to the Kingdom but not mentioning it by name. From
a careful scrutiny of these data the most obvious fact about them is
their inconsistency and the diametrical contradictions between them
which are both many and baffling. Now it is said that few find it;
and again it is described as drawing aU men and filling the world. It is
very hard yet very easy to gain admittance. The perfect scribe or the
most exemplary rabbi who would stand up and be slain rather than
defend himself on the Sabbath, who has avoided every spot of Levitical
uncleanness, and the ingenuous child of fortune, who from his youth
has kept aU the precepts of the law, both lack the one thing needful,
while even the prodigal who has broken every commandment and
wasted his substance may find ready access. Sometimes it is described
with a wealth of biological analogies, as coming slowly by the method
of natural evolution, the blade, then the ear; or it grows like a mustard
seed, and while we sleep; and elsewhere it is ushered in with a cataclysm
of changes as great as those that mark the advent of one of Plato's new
aeons when every process of nature is reversed and the gods turn aU
things backward. Sometimes it seems very material, and those ambi
tious for prestige in it are promised thrones and judgeships, or refused
them; elsewhere it seems purely spiritual. Now it seems to centre at
Jerusalem and to irradiate thence, whfie John interprets it as eternal
life in a transcendental sense, or as truth. Now it seems immediately
impending, aU the prophecies are to be realized now before the
present generation has passed, and we should await daily, if not hourly,
some eschatological denouement; whUe, on the other hand, its coming
may be indefinitely postponed for centuries and mifiennia, and perhaps
the counter kingdom of the great adversary wfil preponderate for a
time to test faith. Thus even more than ancient prophecies the utter
ances concerning the Kingdom are strangely timeless and lack the
perspective that distinguishes between things near and far, even in
time and space, and it is often impossible to tell whether we are reading
of the faU of Jerusalem or the beginning of the Kingdom, or the end of
the world.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 359
Before considering Jesus' ideas of the Kingdom in detaU, it should
be noted again that the more we study the Gospels the clearer does it
become that everything in them is in a state of rapid change and de
velopment. They are not static, as has commonly been thought, but
dynamic. Much that seems discrepant is due to the fact that different
_ stages of development are represented, and aU growth is from a
severely logical standpoint per se inconsistent. If Jesus said aU that is
ascribed to him about the Kingdom, those who seek to know his mature
views concerning it are in the position of one given every saying of a
great man on a great theme from childhood on and told that they are
aU put forth at the same time, stage, or level of his development. On
this theme his consciousness was most metamorphic, and we can make
no progress tfil we have some scale on which to measure his develop
ment. Probably, too, he was most fluctuating and uncertain, con
stantly passing from cruder to finer conceptions of it and vice versa.
How fittle sense of historic and still less of genetic sequence the Evange
lists had is seen in the vast diversity of order of those events and of
the sayings about the Kingdom which they all record in common.
They were not in a position to realize the development of Jesus' own
soul, and the conceptions of his divine nature in the Church since have
made this interpretation inapplicable because of Jesus' complete dei
fication. So long as his consciousness was deemed perfect and infalli
ble from the start the problem of apologetics had to be merely to mosaic
everything into one picture, whereas the conception of stages of greater
or less maturity gives us a vital moving picture, simplifies Christology,
puts everything in better perspective, and thus makes the mind and
hfe of Jesus more accessible. To arrange aU the data in order along
the various lines of development is the problem of genetic psychology.
It is neither so very great nor hard, and although it cannot be finished,
it can be roughly sketched.
The earher and lower stages of Jesus' development are of course
hopelessly lost, although this loss is perhaps less serious than has been
thought because it was largely within the ranges of the normal growth
of higher human nature. The Gospels are precious because they are
devoted, not to the early stages which are more common to aU men,
but to the later stages of the rapid evolution of Jesus' higher nature
wherein other stories were added that constituted his supremacy.
We see him first when he had passed through the steps of unfoldment

360 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
common to the best type of men and had entered upon a series of post-
adolescent steps of psychic evolution that were peculiar to himself. Tja
this there is only the one great exception of his naive and almost un
conscious attainment of a unique sense of oneness with God before his
baptism, to be described below. We can never forget, unfortunately,
that these are described by writers who, whfie they profoundly appre
ciated all they could in any degree understand, and wrote in a spirit of
utter fidelity to what they could not fathom, were quite inadequate to
their task in general and lacked aU sense of the temporal order of
events, believing this of no consequence. For them everything was on
one plane. Moreover, time itself was soon to end and hence was a
discredited category. Thus sequences are as difficult to make out
between the facts contained in the Gospel record as in the order of
events Jesus had in mind for the final ushering in of his Kingdom.
Thanks to recent criticism we can, however, now discern stages in
the development of the record of Jesus' life. Wendt has marked a
distinct advance along this hne in massing what seems conclusive proof
that the Fourth Gospel represents a later redaction of one very early
and authentic but independent apostolic tradition, which was wrought
into its present form without knowledge of the synoptists although
using some of the original sources they knew, and hence in essential
accord with them. This view is confirmed by the fact that the subse
quent development of Christian doctrine in the early Church was not
along the lines of the Fourth Gospel, which looked mainly to the past
and was little coloured by the future, nor even by the contemporaneous
developments in the larger environment of Christendom. John rather
consists largely of the discourses of Jesus, longer and shorter, which
according to this view belong to the latter part of his public career, but
many of which we regard as referring to conceptions .which arose in
Jesus' mind before his public career began. These so often only am
plify the more concise statements of the other Evangelists that our
verdict concerning the chief teachings of Jesus, and even their essential
authenticity, need not wait for the further work that critical scholar
ship has yet to do in detail, large as that work is. If Jesus reaUy
taught one coherent doctrine the main perspective of its parts is not
hkely to change.
Again, it is plain that Jesus did not attain any such definiteness
of conviction in his own soul concerning either the detailed constitution

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 361
of the Kingdom or the program of its inauguration, as he did con
cerning his Messianity and sonship. Perhaps he wisely forbore to^
go into details, either because he felt limitations in himself or beheved
it better to give general hints, aperqus, and suggestions fit to stimulate
and capable of diverse types of realization. He must, however, have
seen that to interpret the Kingdom in detail when there were no less
conflicting conceptions of it than of Messianity itself, would be a matter
of great dehcacy, and no matter how it was done would increase antago
nisms. Perhaps he only dimly felt or intuited certain main features
of it which might have grown more coherent and explicit had he lived
longer. Indeed, some have thought that he had a program in which
sole attention to the Kingdom was placed later. On such assumptions
we must regard aU his statements and imphcations concerning the
Kingdom as material for such psychoanalysis as we can make, and
here more than anywhere else we must seek to get beneath the con
sciousness of Jesus (which for many recent writers is the cardinal ques
tion) to the deeper strata of his unconscious soul. We must indeed
boldly attempt nothing less than interpreting to a certain extent what
he said into what he meant, and strive to penetrate from the patent
to the latent content of his ideas of the Kingdom, a task not only deli
cate but so cfifficult that it can be completed only when we know far
more than we do at present concerning the nature of the submerged
factors of the human soul.
In pursuit of this purpose we must first of all realize the nature
of the unique theanthropic self-consciousness of Jesus, which is
commonly interpreted as having two sides. (1) On the one hand,
so far as he had come to be dominated by the supernormal complex
of his Messianity his Kingdom must be of this earth. He would be
influenced in forming it by the conception of the type of hfe represented
by the patriarchal sheik, Abraham, with whom the old covenant was
made, which was naturaUy compared with the new covenant which
Jesus established. StiU more, perhaps, would he be influenced by the
ideals of the theocracy, and perhaps more yet by the glory of the Davidic
kingdom to which he was the legitimate heir, and most of aU
doubtless by the Zion of the prophets. How much each of these four
determinants or factors entered into his conception of the Kingdom
can never be known, but aU were present and contributed features.
The Messiah must be the great restorer and realizer of ancient purpose

362 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
and longings, and it must be in this world, probably centring in
Jerusalem. (2) But Jesus was also dominated by the deep and sublime convic
tion that he was the Son of God and as such his Kingdom was not of
this earth but heavenly. The new Jerusalem was a celestial city of
God, established in the empyrean beyond the clouds. It was an apoc
alyptic vision of the home of the great and good dead, under the im
mediate rule of God on his throne and the glorified Son sitting at his
right hand. In proportion as Jesus saw his work on earth threatened
and nearing its end, it was this transcendental Kingdom that became
dominant in his mind; thus the sonship consteUation or personafity
impeUed to a supernal, just as the Messianic complex did to a terres
trial, realm. Again, the Jenseits stood over against and was in some
sense antithetical to the Diesseits, and as either one grew near or
seemed real the other tended to fade. Were either lost the other
would be a resource or consolation. There must have been at
some stage a schizophrenic tension in Jesus' own soul as he envisaged
these two disparate ideals, and some of his utterances concerning
the one realm are quite irreconcilable with those concerning the
other. (3) How and how far the immanent and transcendent conceptions
of the Kingdom came to be harmonized, is a problem which perhaps
we can best approach by coUecting and grouping aU the characteriza
tions of the Kingdom, without reference to where they stand in the
Gospels, into an inteUigible genetic order. From such a table we may
opine that the oldest and the germ of aU was the conception that the
Kingdom was entirely within the individual. The regenerate soul
found itself in a new realm. The passion to love and serve God made
all else seem unattractive and uninteresting, and the world underwent
a radical transvaluation. There was a new joy, peace, health, vigour,
love in the soul, that nothing could surpass. Nothing could express
the inner sense of beatitude and the invincible certitude of having
found the chief end of life. The first promise of the Kingdom in the
Gospels is to the poor in spirit, or to those who make the least demands
upon life for themselves, and also to those persecuted for righteousness'
sake, that is, to those who have abandoned the ambitions of this world
or been unjustly outlawed by it. The Kingdom at first consisted of
Jesus and his disciples, and they had foUowed the Baptist's proclama-

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 363
tion, " Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." To repent in
deed was to be born into it. To confess and forsake, that is, to evict
evil, is self-initiation into it. It does not come by outer observation
but is within each. This is the Kingdom we must first seek, and to
it aU else wiU be added. To those who do this it is given to know its
mysteries. Thus it is a hidden treasure, a pearl of great price. In
fine, it is found in Christian experience.
(4) But man is gregarious, a socius, and no man lives to himself.
The new life is not only intensely inward and solitary, but must have
vent and companionship, and the outer Kingdom begins in collectivity,
sharing aU things. Each must confess and exhort the others. The
newborn must assemble and pray with and for and impart aU to aU
in a new community. The lofty classic traditions of amicitia, or
friendship as represented by Aristotle and Cicero, must be developed
into the yet higher brotherly love and mutual service, which must be
with abandon. Not only must the Golden Rule be foUowed, but each
must prefer the other to himself. Thus a new and higher solidarity,
typified by the sacred symposium of the Lord's Supper and by the
agapce or love-feasts, with their perilous embrace and kiss, is symbolic
of the very closest of all ties of affection, above those even of husband
and wife, parent and child. Perhaps never was mutual service such a
passion. In such union there is strength indeed, and wherever so
few gathered in the spirit the Lord was present with them. No such
communion of soul was ever possible before. Men never got so near
together as did these early Christians, heartening one another to endure
hardship and even the most cruel martyrdom. "How the Christians
love one another!" was the comment. In aU the hundreds of types of
organization, secret and open, before and since, for cultural, convivial,
reformatory, reciprocal, health, business and financial enterprises,
and aU the rest, there was never such merging of individual ends in the
common weal, such a degree of utter loyalty to a common cause, or
such unreserved sinking of personal into group consciousness. This
little Kingdom (big with promise and potency of a vaster one) was
founded with a sense that it and its members were the light, the salt,
leaven, seed, of a new world-order. Other Eldorados have been largely
external, and consisted chiefly in ideal environments, working inward.
This was a new inward life with a special organ of its own working
outward. Others have been political or aimed at civic or industrial

364 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
ends, but this was primarily and purely ethical, based solely upon the
ideals of virtue, morality, justice, and mercy.
Myth at its best is larger than philosophy or literature, for no
individual can compass all the dimensions of a great my thopceic theme.
It underlies rites, beliefs, customs, and cults, and is ahnost as com
prehensive as the psychology of races. Even religions may be almost
said to live, move, and have their being in it. The greatest of these
ethnic themes is that of an ideal social state or a realm where aU that is
coincides with aU that ought to be. Sometimes this ideal is very crass
and sensuous. It is often described with great poetic license and aban
don; e. g., the north pole blossoms, dolphins carry men, the seas are
lemonade or wine, the earth yields exuberant fruits without toil, the
land flows with milk and honey. It is a realm of the magic Tamkappe,
wand, bowl, sword, ring, boat. Perhaps there are fairies, diamond
pavements, no deserts, disease, or pain. The gods are friendly and
familiar. Old age is curable in a Fountain of Youth. The world is
young, man pure and unfallen. The earth is full of beauty; and war,
fear, anger, and hate are unknown. These paradises of old are often
placed in the past, and the idylls or sagas about them are cradle-songs
of primitive and perhaps autochthonic men.1 Perhaps Warren2 is
right that this cunabulum gentium was near the north pole, while for
very different reasons WaUace thinks it may have been Siberian.
Haeckel identifies it with his sunken Lemuria, in the Indian Ocean.
Others suggest a sunken Atlantis between Africa and South America,
of which modern theosophists have given us such a detailed story.
Columbus thought it up the Orinoco, which he deemed one of the four
streams flowing down from paradise where heaven and earth joined
and where he would perhaps find a sacred omphalos where earth's navel
string with heaven had been cut. For Dante it was on the summit of
the purgatorial mountain. Philology has suggested the Northern
Himalayas or Eastern Persia. One anthropologist puts it in Scandi
navia, and thinks Adam spoke Swedish. Perhaps the Flood wiped out
traces of it. Nor was it all a fata morgana or real Eldorado, but it
made a convenient point of departure for the history of many people
for which it furnished so pregnant a prologue. In classic days its
outlines were fancied as the age of Saturn, or when Kronos ruled before

¦Edmund Pfleiderer: "Die Idee eines goldenen Zeitalters." Berlin, Reimer, 1877, 17a p.
*Wm. Fairfield Warren: "Paradise Found." Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1886, 505 p.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 365
the Olympian dynasty. The Roman saturnalia were kept as a memor
ial of it, and there were presents and games. Slaves were served by
their masters until it degenerated to Bacchanalian license. For the
Jews one day in seven was kept in memory of it as sacred to paradise,
and the year of jubilee to prevent gravitation of capital into a few hands
was commemorative of it. It was the point where eternity touched
time. Indeed it is so purely mythic that the very conditions of its
existence have never been realized, but probably as Pfleiderer says it
is true to the law, "Das Schone bliiht nur im Gesang" and these writers
postulate everywhere what exists nowhere.
Great things have been done in the past. Not only has language
evolved but along with it, in even its primitive forms, the most mar-
veUous grammatical construction. Instinct has developed perhaps as
lapsed intelligence. Early social institutions often seem to be the
work of unfathomable intelligence. Utopia may be located in the
country for the city child, and indeed it was for Rousseau. Vergil's
"Bucolics" were written and had great charm because Greek and
Roman civilization were decaying, and often Hyperboreans, Getas,
Thracians, were used as symbols of regenerative energies as were the
ancient Germans by Tacitus. So in the French Revolution the cry was
"Back to nature," and there were abundant dreams and romances of a
new dispensation when man rollicked and frolicked in Arcadia and
realized the importance at least of not losing barbaric virtues in develop
ing those of culture. But the wisest men long ago began to see that if
any such apotheosis of social man really occurred it would be in the
future, was not in the past; for man has evolved from an animal state and
the twilight of the gods is the dusk not of evening but of dawn. Hence
the passion for progress, and hence so many men and races, like the
ancient alchemists, have died from drinking their own elixir of cultural,
social, pofitical reform. All the scores of early constitutions that Aris
totle collected had fatal flaws, and our star of paradise is a morning and
not an evening star.
The working power of these popular ideals has been incomparable.
In contrast with them those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Prudhomme,
Rodbertus, La SaUe, Comte, and aU modern social reformers since
Bellamy and George and professional sociologists, are partial, fragmen
tary, and superficial. Indeed, not only society but even business is
far too complex to be grasped by any individual mind. And yet true

366 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
statesmanship requires mastery in just this field; and many a writer,
from Aristotle down to the anonymous author of "Rembrandt als
Erzieher " have agreed that the supreme artist is he who deals with the
material of human nature. He wfil be a doer, and so far beyond the
professor who merely knows. But society is a monster obeying its
own laws, which we are just beginning to understand and may construe
mathematicaUy according to Jevons or Walras, or biologicaUy hke
Lifienfeld, Schaeffle, or Worms, with its own anatomy, physiology,
pathology. But we had better more modestly begin with Tarde, who
studied single laws, or with Letourneau, and start with beginnings of
single institutions if not with animal societies like Espinas and Perrier,
or with small country communities like the school of Du Prey.
Much as the cult of Jesus owed to the cults of dying and rising gods
aU about it, his conceptions of the Kingdom owed nothing to these
pagan ideals of a golden age, but from first to last stood in sharpest
contrast to them in two fundamental points. It began within, and it
was purely ethical. If we put the burden of Jesus' teaching into mod
ern psychological terms, it is that if the individual utterly subordinates
himself to love and serve his fellow-man, which is the quintessence of
morality, and to love and serve God, who represents the aU-embracing
universe, which is the quintessence of religion, he comes into a new and
hitherto undiscovered or at least unexplored continent of human ex
perience. It is of a higher order, and brings new insights into the world,
which takes on a unitary, ethical, spiritual character, and brings a
new reinforcement of the will and a new depth and range of emotion
not only humanistic but cosmic. This experience is so sui generis
that it seems to come ab extra like a revelation or a gift. It not only
subordinates volition to its purpose but impels it with the momentum
of the main current of history and evolution. So new is it that it must
have miracles as tropes of this humanization of the world's dynamism.
It also suffuses the soul with a love not only of man but of aU being
which far transcends the best that sex love has to offer. Just because
such experience is unique and exalted and becomes possible only long
after the means of expression had been developed, it cannot be ade
quately described but always seems a mystery, a state superinduced
as from on high. Individuation develops to its uttermost, and having
attained its goal it becomes completely subordinated to the race. It
is so blessed that if the best and richest of men, most widely known

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 367
and praised, were to make himself an obscure pauper, deliberately
destroy his good name and become an object of hate and contempt,
suffer aU pain, and leave his family, like Buddha, aU these would seem
as dross if he thereby gained this peculiar experience, which is related
to ordinary life somewhat as the deathless germ plasm is to the mori
bund soma. This can never be fuUy believed on testimony. It must
be tried and experimentaUy proven. It is not meant, perhaps, that
aU should go so far, but only a few; but aU must go far enough to have
faith in the fact of this higher potentiahzation of life by realizing that
much of it can be attained with less than supreme renunciation. This
subjection to the species is only the law of life in the plant- and animal-
world, where every detail of form and function is never for the individ
ual but always in the interests of the species. To break away from
this law and to set up for self violates nature and constitutes the bottom
sin or disease in the world.
Although graduaUy attained by him, this experience was the heart
of the heart of Jesus' life. It gave it a unique organic unity that doc
trinal systems can only faintly mirror or typify. This experience was
the apperception organ by which he knew and interpreted everything
in his ken. It gave harmony and consistency to the most contradic
tory things that he said concerning the Kingdom, such as whether it
was inner or outer, of this world or another. He knew that this con
ception would grow and transform the world, and that it represented a
higher plane of life which would never be entirely lost. This was the
first theme of his teaching before he had developed a sense of his own
relation to it as Messiah or Son of God, which so transformed it, and
he began by describing its inner charm to those who could enter it.
As opposition grew and the available time seemed short, he developed
a steadily increasing sense of the calamity of missing it and of the
doom of those who did so. In doing this he borrowed his imagery
from the great prophets of the captivity, especially Daniel, with whom
there began a unique apocalyptic style which affected not only canon
ical but apocryphal writings.1 This had its own vocabulary of char
acteristic Hebrew words which Harper has compiled, and which is so
marked in Enoch. It is a unique literary phenomenon, and requires
some special interpretation. It is more commonly used in treating

>H P Nichols- "The Temporary and Permanent in the New Testament Revelation." New York, 1905. Lecture 6.
See, too. Harper: "The Prophetic Element in the Old Testament." Chicago, 1905, p. 118 et siq.

368 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
such topics as death, resurrection, judgment, miUennium, heaven and
heU, and is most marked in Jesus' eschatological utterances. Its fig
ures are intense, sometimes gross, a trifle fantastic, artificial, enigmatic,
and even contradictory. It is commonly applied to mysteries that
were chaUenging, and it makes Daniel seem arrogant and better in
formed concerning the next world than this. Its conjuring phrases
are often repeated. Its religion is catastrophic, so that it has always
been a favourite of Montanists, chfiiasts, and Adventists. It is not
the style of history, fact, or prose, but of poetry and vision, and its
theology might be described as sung. Weiss thinks that Jesus' use
of this resource, especially after the shadow of the cross feU upon his
hfe, was often exaggerated, but these phrases gave him courage and
strength in desperate state. The synoptists remembered, loved, and
best recorded these utterances which are often devotional and have ever
since frequently recurred in liturgies and lectionaries. It was the
style of the Sabbath rather than the week-day. We cannot entirely
agree with Muirhead1 that their key has been found; for they have
always given rise to the greatest diversity of interpretation, so that just
what they mean is the most chaUenging of aU the problems in the
New Testament. What ought to be is, shaU be, and always was, every
where. The coming of the Kingdom is entirely conditioned by man's
responses to it. It gave elasticity to apostolic institutions and ordi
nances, and is weU fitted to the use of those who wish to apply all the
resources at their command to the need of the present moment, so
that despite its hazy mysticism it is intensely practical.
Unlike aU pagan conceptions of the last things or the social
summum bonum, the moral dualism of the Kingdom is intense. AU bene
fited in the gentile conceptions of an ideal state; but in Jesus' concep
tion there was to be a great sifting, and all the bad were to be swept
away. As his obsession of impending judgment grew, he believed
and used to the uttermost the tremendous stimulus of his conviction
that it was not only certain but very near. He had no presentiment
of the nfillennia that were to intervene. The barren fig-tree was given
only the briefest respite. His foUowers were to pray for it, and watch
every sign of its approach. When it came it would be a catastrophe
of inconceivable magnitude. Nature would be convulsed, trans
formed, the powers of evfi let loose. All the vengeance since Abel
>" Eschatology of Jesus." New York, 1904.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 369
would be poured out. The doom of the world would be like that of
Sodom and Gomorrah, and Wendt thinks that some of the phrases
descriptive of it were interpolated, being reflected back from the fall of
Jerusalem. Hence his foUowers must be ever ready, for the end might
come at any moment. It was not necessary to organize even the
apostolate, or weed tares from the wheat. Although the disciples were
sent like sheep among wolves, they must do their work with aU dis
patch like those who warn sleeping -villages of a breaking dam and a
great inundation. They must shout their message from the housetop,
and take aU risks and dangers.
Besides the scores of specific mentions in the synoptists of the
Kingdom it was the chief theme of Jesus' teachings and it was to pre
serve his sayings about it that the logia were gathered. Not only are
his utterances as they stand, however, hopelessly discordant and con
tradictory, but, from Holtzmann's coUection of definitions of it as inter
preted by scholars, their ideas of what Jesus meant by it are no less
irreconcfiable. From this the only sane inference is that if the sayings
represent one fixed or final stage, then his mind was in utter confusion
about it, if, indeed, he did not have delusions respecting it that were
not even systematized. In the social Christian movement of the last
two decades, which has made the Kingdom the theme of most active
and voluminous discussion, almost every phrase of Jesus touching it
has been made central for the interpretation of the rest, and about
every reform — personal, social, business, political, religious, moral, wise,
or otherwise — has been given his sanction, although there is generaUy
a transcendental residuum of utterances which has been treated with a
very different theological and mystic Einstellung.
The chief directive lines (Richtlinien) along which aU his sayings
can be arranged are the foUowing: (a) the Kingdom is inner or outer.
(b) It is on earth or in heaven, that is, in this life or the next, (c) It
is present or future, (d) It is of slow growth or comes with cata
strophic suddenness, (e) It is attained by struggle, or is a free gift
to be received passively, (f) It has a benign aspect for the good and a
malign one for the bad; i. e., it comes as a boon to the former and a doom
to the latter, (g) It comes more or less independently of Jesus, or he is
the central agent in bringing it in, and its head. Everything said of it
has its place on one or aU of these seven lines of antithesis. Arranging
them on such a scale, the only possible conclusion is that each group of

370 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
them thus deployed represents a genetic stage in the development
of Our Lord's views about it or that these fines are developmental.
Thus from first to last his conceptions of it were in a state of rapid
evolutionary flux and transformation, and the inconsistencies and
contradictions are those that are always involved in growth. Can any
reordering of these give us a clue to thrid the maze and escape the chaos
of present interpretations? As a perhaps overbold and professedly"
tentative psychoanalytic first step the foUowing is suggested:
i. Jesus' first teaching of the Kingdom was that it was all in
ward and personal rather than social. It was righteousness, joy,
peace, purity, first sanctifying self. It was in the invisible realm of the
individual heart. It was the goal of aU the good tendencies of history,
and more specifically of prophecy. It meant enthusiastic moral re
form, a new zest toward or aspiration forperfection. There was fittle or
nothing of the Baptist's awful imprecations or threats, no new dis
pensation coming to sweep away the old order of things and bring in a
new one. Jesus had profited by the fate of John and kept aloof from
him, and his doctrine of repentance was far less drastic. He had him
self grown into the new higher life naively and naturally without
convulsive reconstruction, and assumed in others the possibility of do
ing as he had done. He did not even baptize, but regarded this rite
as simply washing away uncleanness and not as a baptism of fire. His
relation to those he taught was simply that of one who had found the
way of truth, rest, peace, and the higher hfe, and who.wished others to
follow in the steps he had taken before his baptism. He was fuU of a
great new joy as weU as of the all-transforming insights which followed
his own baptism, and sought companions and disciples in this fresh
and glowing experience. His beatitudes were upon a simple, single,
humble, clean fife of service and self-abnegation, harmlessness, non-
resistance, childlikeness. Neither Herod nor the rabbis could fear or
object to this. The supreme realm of what ought to be was in the
heart. To discover and make landfaU on this new world within was
his great achievement and should be the supreme quest of life, com
pared to which the loss of eye or hand, or the sacredest of family ties,
was of minor account. To acquire such a treasure all else might be
sacrificed. It was meat and drink for the very soul that others knew
not of. Thus, having lately come to the full realization of his own
Messianity, his first chief task was to interpret the Messianic Kingdom,

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 371
and thus his first conception of it was sweet, nuld, subjective, as the
one thing of supreme worth. It was so hidden and inoffensive that no
member of the hierarchy or representative of the state could object or
suspect, for he seemed only a preacher of a more perfect individual
hohness. Thus there was no danger of any such calamity to him or his
cause as had befaUen the Baptist. At this stage Jesus made no ene
mies. To it would probably belong the parables of the prodigal son,
the lost sheep and penny, perhaps the sower, forgiveness seventy
times seven, no fasting when the bridegroom is present, the eleventh-
hour labourer, the budding fig-tree as a herald of spring, the city on a
hiU, the scribe instructed in the Kingdom, etc. This stage of Jesus'
teaching was fllustrated by the first invitation of the guests to a feast.
In this initial stage Jesus' tone was most exuberant. Hope was at its
highest, and there were almost no antagonisms or oppositions. AU
was positive, optimistic. The people listened gladly. The disciples
whom he chose, perhaps with less critical scrutiny because of the gen
eral spirit of buoyancy, left aU and foUowed on the instant, and this
presaged an easy, triumphant, and unresisted progress. Thus Jesus
began at the positive end of each of the above lines from (a) to (f) in
clusive, although the chief progress was along (g), for his sense of his
own leadership was greatly augmented.
2. But his fame and the charm and magnetism of his personality
proved very effective therapeuticaUy in Galilee, which abounded with
neurotics, and in an age when cure was exorcism. Thus, besides being
a physician of the soul, Jesus found himself more and more revered as a
physician of the body. This was not within the scope of his first pur
pose, and gave him pause, as weU it might. His human sympathies
made it hard to refuse the importunity of the sick and their friends,
but there was an ominous danger of diversion from his prime intention
and of distracting the attention of his hearers from his doctrine. Now
came the first clear note of conflict which was with the demons whom
he expeUed, who represented the hostUe kingdom of Satan. It was
they who first recognized his Messianity and his lordship over them,
if somewhat to his dismay. Healing was a victorious sally into the
territory of the Great Enemy whom after his death he was to despoil in
his stronghold. This therapeutic work brought new acclaim and gave
his mission its first clear note of militancy. He must oppose the
counter-kingdom of the great adversary at every step. The world is

372 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
dual, and good and evfi are so opposed that every gain of either means
loss to the other. The realization that he had power over Satan's
realm greatly augmented his own secret sense of his dignity, for it
showed that his work had a supernatural significance. He and his
Kingdom stood over against Satan and his hosts. It was from his
minions, too, that he heard the first and ardently longed for recogni
tion of the office he had assumed when as yet no one else knew him for
what he was, and hence there was a great advance along the line (g),
for his person and work now had a supernal sanction. Along (f) there
were now objects of abhorrence and imprecation while along (e) the
element of struggle was emphasized, and on line (f) this earth was more
or less transcended. If he could withstand the devil he must be sent
by God. Cosmic powers were involved in the battle now on, and he
was heaven's chosen champion. The realization of aU this was an
epoch indeed. Now he first began to draw upon the imagery of
Daniel. Moreover, as the enemy was transcendent, so must the
Kingdom be not merely of earth but of heaven. It could no longer
remain immanent only. Henceforth what he said of it might always
have a double meaning. Still, the individual soul was the theatre of
all the warfare, while the conception of attaining the Kingdom now
underwent much modification. It was not easy, but hard, to win; for
there was resistance by the powers of evil at every step. It was no
longer conceived as a state to be born in or grow into, but to be won
by conflict. Sin, too, now was devils' sickness and needed more drastic
treatment. The new life was less spontaneous, for there was always
a root of evil to be plucked out. Fornication, hypocrisy, lies, greed,
sensuousness, must be extirpated and not charmed away by the
lure of beatitudes.
3. The hierarchy took note of his cures as it had not of his doc
trine, and accused him of evicting devils as Beelzebub their prince,
the most truculent and blasphemous of charges. Not only this, but he
had dared to take the rash and perhaps iU-considered step of pardoning
the sins of some he healed. This seemed a most flagrant usurpation of
divine power. Thus, to his surprise and grief, Jesus found not only
that the Kingdom did not draw aU, but that those in the highest places
of authority, whom he had been taught to revere, were arrayed against
both it and him. We can understand what he meant when in removing
the physical consequences of sin he pronounced the sins of his patients

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 373
forgiven, fatal as was the strategic mistake he made in doing so, if
he wished to avoid or delay the rupture with Jewish orthodoxy, for
now it was at as implacable enmity with his cause as were the leagued
demons. The prophets of old had defied and rebuked not only kings
but priests; but there had never been so open and bitter a warfare,
and now the gentle Jesus was roused to the utmost rage and fury
against the conservatives in the very faith in which he had been reared,
and had to fight them with no less abandon, if by different methods,
than he had assaUed Satan's agents. His Kingdom could not be set
up in the temple or even at Jerusalem so long as it was unoverturned.
If it came there not one stone would remain upon another, but aU must
be rebufit from the foundation. Its rulers were blind leaders of the
blind, unfaithful tenants, vipers, whited sepulchres, and their cult is' a
barren fig-tree to be cut down and burned. Thus now the cata
strophic conception of the advent of the Kingdom, if it did not begin,
had here its chief augmentation, for it could not come among the
gentiles, but must be a new Jerusalem, and hence the new ictus of the
apocalyptic motif. It might come down from heaven, but at the very
least it implied a radical transformation. Jesus could compel demons
but not the souls of the Pharisees, and so God as the only recourse
must intervene. Thus, in the face of rabbinical opposition Jesus'
unconquerable soul appealed to transcendental divine powers to effect
the great metamorphosis necessary to inaugurate the new Kingdom.
What he could not do himself God would accomplish, and would
perfect outwardly what he had begun inwardly. The goal of fife which
he had attained was so blessed, so certainly God's final purpose in
creating man, that he would and must give it a worthy outer installa
tion, and that, too, among his own chosen people in the land of the
promises, very soon, very gloriously. He would just as surely do so as
Jesus was the Messiah. The disciples did not yet know whom he claimed
to be, for he had not proclaimed it; but the more perspicacious priest
hood had clearly divined it, for indeed he had himself betrayed it in
forgiving sins if only incidentaUy to healing. At this stage it was,
therefore, that the great appeal was taken to Yahveh. He would
overturn in the Holy Land until aU was fit, and then usher in the King
dom, subduing Satan, binding the beast of political domination, de
stroying the wicked, and creating a new earth worthy of the new in
stallation of man into his true Kingdom.

374 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
4. FinaUy, as Jesus realized that he must die, and that soon, hi«
conceptions of the Kingdom became more celestial and post-mortem.
Admission to it would depend upon a verdict at a great judgment day
for which the dead would be resurrected. Earth faded somewhat in
his thought and would be destroyed by fire; and the good go to dweU
with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the wicked be consigned to heU-
fire forever. The Son would come in glory ; the elect would be gathered
and transported to heaven. The Kingdom was spiritual in the skies.
The day of probation, grace, and mercy would have ceased, and no
importunity would avafi in the great day of fate and finality, for the
last hour of history would have struck. A gulf which none could cross
would yawn between even members of families. Danielitic imagery
was more often resorted to, and there was more abandon on the part
of Jesus to a state of ideality. There was a note of ecstasy about the
future state as death became his muse and his mind became increas
ingly thanatotropic, while the Kingdom grew transcendental and more
detached from this world.
Although he had fuUy accepted death as his fate, and perhaps as
wfiled by the Father, he would not have been human had he not felt
toward the wickedness that had brought it about the same wrath that
in the Old Testament so often flamed up in Yahveh against sin and
iniquity. He would have been a Docetic phantom or dummy of heaven
not to have felt his death an outrage upon justice. Indignation was
the natural and inevitable reaction of a just and innocent soul against
those who had made the best in him the worst. His very consciousness
of innocence would give him no less unique realization of the evil which
was arrayed against him, and which fiUed him with increasing surprise
and dismay as he came to know it. The ban of excommunication
of the Church later pronounced against Spinoza was no more scathing
and sublime and almost blood-curdling than his imprecation and in
vectives against the scribes and Pharisees in the third stage. But here
in the fourth he no longer spoke in propria persona, but hurled the awful
curse of God upon the wicked, chanting the old prophetic litany
against them. In three of the five judgment-day scenes the Son reigns
in heaven, and in those in which he returns he does so for judgment.
There are signs and wonders in heaven, and on earth pestilences, wars,
false Christs. The sun and moon darken; the stars faU; heaven and
earth quake. AU nations are to be gathered and parted as sheep and

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 375
goats, and the sentence upon both (Matt, xxiv: 41-46) is based upon
their treatment of Jesus. But his greatness of soul is seen here in the
fact that even the whirlwind of his indignation is directed not against
the immediate agents of his suffering and death but against the general
depravity that was the ultimate cause of all, and it is made yet more
sublime in that the items of the condemnation are so systematically
balanced by the benedictions and rewards upon the faithful.
Thus the conception of genetic stages alone can bring order out
of the otherwise unharmonizable utterances relating to the Kingdom.
Without this temporal perspective they must remain as they have al
ways been, sibyUine leaves arrangeable in any order or blown about
by the winds of doctrine. On this view everything has its place and
also its perfect natural explanation. Jesus began to teach it as a
blessed mystic inner state easUy accessible to aU, just as he himself had
attained it, by intuitive insight and self-consecration by counsels of
perfection. This state was the supreme end of fife, the highest of aU
worths and values. He proclaimed it with great and defiberate
sagacity, amply safeguarded against aU pofitical opposition. There
was no antagonism such as John's announcement of it had aroused.
Thus the first interpretation of the Kingdom was the loftiest, purest,
best, and sanest. When he came to conceive it later as a campaign
against Satan's kingdom, as he did when he yielded to the demand to
become a healer and caster-out of devils who acclaimed him as Mes
siah, his theanthropic consciousness underwent a great and sudden
augmentation and a new note of conflict was struck; but it was with
supernal powers and the issues suddenly assumed superterrestrial
dimensions. He became a champion and leader of supermundane
spiritual energies against other opposing but also invisible forces, and
this evoked in Jesus' soul new subconscious energies from their latent
depths and gave him a new sense of solitariness, and also a no less
unique one of greatness. He became yet more an agent of destiny
and of God. An unforeseen war was precipitated which could be
crowned with victory only when Satan and his crew had been driven
out, his innocent victims set free, and he bound and sealed up in a pit.
Thus Jesus assumed in some sense a Michael-luce function as a leader
of the hosts of God against those of the great enemy. Had he not
healed or thought himself recognized as heaven's vicegerent by the
demons he evicted, these first motives of transcendentafizing the King-

376 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
dom would have been lacking and its enemies would have been for the
time aU of this world. But the drama would have been incomplete
and less thrilling, and deep unconscious motivations less involved.
If this would have given the Kingdom a fuUer and richer ethical de
velopment, it would also have had less power to enhst the deeper
energies of the soul which are always objectified as supernatural
powers. But when the opposition of the Jews developed its strength in the
third stage, Jesus was brought face to face with one of the most sig
nificant alternatives in aU his career. When it became plain that the
Kingdom could not be established at Jerusalem, he might have taken
the great appeal to the gentile world, as Paul did later. This, how
ever, his intense Judaism made him unable to do, and so his invincible
pertinacity took refuge in the future and in a superior world-order.
The conviction attained in the second stage, that supernal powers were
enlisted and embattled, also predisposed him to develop the old
prophetic idea of a new dispensation sweeping away the present
Hebrew cult, as construed by the scribes and Pharisees, and establish
ing a new heavenly Jerusalem and temple, and aU this miraculously
and convulsively. His very diathesis was perfervid and even fulmi
nating. For him aU that ought to be was certain, and what was certain
must be soon.
In fact, it was the Church of the gentfies, and not a divine visi
tation, that was destined to leave the Jewish dispensation desolate.
Sublunary and slow developments were to work aU the destruction
his perspectiveless mind saw as immediate. Paul in a sense only
translated the changes which Jesus expected from divine intervention
into their earthly vicariates and surrogates. The Jews were rejected,
and not swept away. The diaspora is not yet ended, and in his day was
only begun. Not a spectacular assize but the verdict of the Church
composed of then heathen races sat in judgment upon them, and the
verdict was the long-delayed one of history. The drama was to be
played to the end of the fifth act here, and not transferred at the end
of the fourth to a transcendent realm at the death of Jesus, which was
only the beginning and did not mark or prelude the end of the earthly
kingdom. Paul interpreted much of Jesus' incoherent and troubled
nightmare dreams into a practical program, set it in scene on earth, and
not in cloudland, although he did not reduce it all to immanence.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 377
The later forms of Jesus' eschatology were, in psychoanalytic terms,
the products of a protective mechanism enshrining his great hope
when it had become desperate and seemed to him incapable of realiza
tion by even the best normal human endeavours, so that he had com
mitted its accomphshment back into God's hands. Paul's appeal was
to God, too, but also to the gentile world. He would bring in the
Kingdom through its means and not by the destruction of Judaism, a
remnant of which at least would also be brought into it. His goal and
method were a psychodynamic equivalent of Jesus' vision, although
human was to do more and divine agency less. Or, rather, God would
make more use of man's efforts in bringing it about, and work was a
larger supplement of prayer.
The Kingdom is so many-sided that we must go deep to explain or
understand it, and also we must go back of the baptism and of the be
ginning of the public ministry to do so. The psychogenetic root of
it aU was that, unknown to others and with no realization of what was
involved in it, Jesus had naively and more or less unconsciously (as
great genius works), already found through a pure, simple, guileless
life, and by self-communion and meditation, an inner way to the high
est or the divine. In the language of the piety of his day rather than
in that of psychology, he had found God. He had yearned to attain
the maximum of perfection, or, in Scripture language, he had hungered
for righteousness with aU his heart. As other ingenuous youth seek
for love, fame, greatness, wealth, or power, so aU the energies of his soul
were directed to holiness. In this quest he had put aU other things
aside. It seemed to him the summum bonum, the supreme goal of fife
and of aU endeavour, something so precious that it must be sought even
though aU ties of blood and famUy affection had to be sundered in the
quest. Not only had he striven, but he had made the great Eureka
discovery and attained the goal he sought. He had reahzed that hfe is
service. His own individuahty had been caught up, inundated, merged
in the vaster life of the race of which he became a biophore. This ex
perience had unlocked new energies within; had brought great inner
exaltation and a new access of vitality so great that even death could
not be conceived as able to daunt or queU it, and if it came resurrection
was inevitable. This put him in the centre of the current of creative
evolutionary processes. Instinct, reason, conscience, wfil, could no
longer collide, but must reinforce and summate each other. So

378 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
positive was this experience that before it all negations and limitations
fell away, and in place of repressions there was a great expansion of the
soul which was now fed by the inner mystic bread of hfe that others
knew not of. It brought a sense of ecstasy and raised fife above the
ordinary familiar ranges of humanity. Of this experience aU miracles
are symbols, and become true in a higher than hteral sense if they
remain symbols. It brought a new Sabbath of rest in the brooding
peace of God, made pure oughtness no longer merely an imperative
but a passion, and removed every trace of heteronomy. One had only
to awake, arise, hear, see, do. It may be described as dying to sin or
passing from death to fife, or as becoming true sons of God with his wfil
as the only law. It is also to be free.
It was with some such inner personal experience as this glowing
in his heart but not yet explicit or realized that Jesus, doubtless with
hesitation, came to John, although he felt his standpoint so much
beyond that of the Baptist that he declared that the least in the King
dom was greater than he. He had even then fittle sympathy with
John's denunciatory methods. He had made as yet no resolution to
proclaim his experiences or to seek, save in a private personal way, to
guide others along the way he had found, nor had he planned to organ
ize any movement or to abandon his occupation. He did not yet dream
that he was the Messiah, or that the sonship he had achieved was
more than other zealous seekers might attain of themselves. But the
new Kingdom was already founded in his own soul, although in an
embryonic stage, with parturition just impending, while John was
destined, although unwittingly to both, to be its midwife. Thus this
interior way to God opened in the quest for perfection was the deepest
and most central thing in Jesus' experience and in his teaching. This
is the key to unlock aU; to understand it is at once the hardest, most
chaUenging, and yet the most imperative problem of Christianity, and
to realize it is salvation. Although for Jesus it was virtuaUy a fait
complet at the baptism, its progressive realization in the world was a
futuristic problem, and hence what foUowed gave the Kingdom a pre
dominantly eschatological character.
Now, since the way to the goal of life opens from within the soul,
its attainment would seem naturaUy to be sought by solitude and
meditation. Jesus himself often retired to be alone and pray, and
anchoritic cults arose in which by introversion, visions, vigils, fasting,

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 379
and self-castigation of soul and even body, man sought his God. Hence
we now face the great but never yet adequately explained problem
why Christianity became a social religion instead of sending its devotees
in isolation into ceUs or the wilderness to save each his own soul. This
would have been the result had Jesus' development of the Kingdom
been completed or arrested at the first stage, as in fact Buddha's cult
was. Jesus had found his way out to the open sea of eternal peace and
joy more inwardly and with less dramatic incidents of renunciation,
so that from the Baptism on he transcended Buddha. How, then, was
the Kingdom given its so pronounced social character, especiaUy as
organization was not imperative in view of the nearness of the end?
It was not enough to define it successively over against Satan's king
dom, the Jewish hierarchy and a world of sin. Why must and
did those who entered Jesus' Kingdom get and keep so close to
gether? Why should those divinely ruled be a company or brother
hood? How came it that the charm of amicitia or classic friendship so
praised by ancient moralists before the development of romantic love,
who taught that the good and only they could and should become true
friends, was not only realized but so far transcended in the early
Christian community? Whence came the brotherly love that made
each prefer the other, the community of goods, the symbiosis in which
the rules of the higher life became the canticles of love? The answer
to this problem can only be found in the psychological realm of inward
intimate experience genetically evolved. As Jesus advanced in his
conceptions and convictions of his own Messianity and sonship, he
came to realize that his own seeking and finding had been unique and
above and beyond what was attainable by others, for he had at first
naively assumed that aU could reach it as naturaUy as he had done.
Then he tried to teach that it was achieved, to develop the word that
should guide to and in the way. But it could not aU be set forth in
precept, for there were deep subjective factors in it that could not be
adequately objectified. He caUed disciples whom he thought apt,
instructed them, and sent them forth on the first mission to teach
others, and thus to know and establish themselves the more firmly.
But the parables and miracles symbolizing it, effective as they were,
did not convey it aU. Having appealed to the inteUect, the intuitions,
and then to the wiU of his adherents, he realized that he must now go
deeper and reach the lower stratum of sentiment and feeling by an

380 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
appeal such as had never before been made to the instincts of personal
loyalty, love, and intuitive identification with his own person. His
followers must feel the very breathings and pulsations of his own soul,
and be made one with him in the subconscious depths of hfe by a subtle
induction of personahty. Thus he strove to develop every trope and
symbol of consubstantiality between him and them. In this endeavour
he naturaUy had recourse to the rich but very portative thought-forms
of the totemistic cycle of the ancient folk-soul1 which even to-day and
in that age stiU more pervaded hfe, although the origin of these an
tique moduli of the psyche was unrecognized. He also avafied him
self of the yet more faded but effective and recognizable traces of the
primitive concepts of blood covenant2 of which there were abundant
remnants. His disciples were to eat his flesh and drink his blood;
they were members of his body; he was the vine and they the branches;
and as he was one with God, they were one with him. He was the
way through whom they could reach God. He was in them and they
in him. He was the middleman or mediator through whom God
reached man and was reached by him. AU his relations to God they
must establish to him. No other religious founder had ever sought to
thus bind his disciples to his own person. Ritschl has caUed the
Kingdom not only bibliopaidic and pistobasic but essentiaUy Christo-
centric. Thus Jesus became a more tangible proxy and surrogate of
God. It was thus easier for his foUowers to find God than it had been
for him, and this was as he wished.
From this it foUowed that the relations of the disciples to one
another became unprecedentedly close. They were members one of
another because members of him. When he was gone he survived as
the tie that bound them together, and the degree of this love of each
for the others was also the degree of his persistence as a living reality.
To love and serve a brother was to love and serve him; and this they
must do to each other, even as to him. He lived in, and indeed was,
their mutual devotion. A union thus cemented had a unique strength,
and he was this strength. Jesus never dreamed that the first feUow-
ship meal would become a permanent sacrament or stereotyped insti
tution, or that his prayer, which was intended only as an iUustration of
the spirit of prayer, would become a standard, to be repeated through
»S. Freud: "Totem und Tabu." Leipzig, 1913, 149 p.
'Henry Clay Trumbull: "Blood Covenant." New York, Scribner's.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 381
ages ipsissimis verbis as the one best and official model of appeal
to the Divine, any more than he thought that Peter would become pri
mate of the Church. As Bousset1 weU says, he drew very few of the
logical consequences of his teaching, for his perspective of the future
was very short. He did not realize the implications of his doctrine,
which Sabatier2 is so fond of insisting are even yet, in large part, un
realized practicaUy or even theoretically by his foUowers. He never
dreamed of what F. G. Peabody caUs the "calisthenics of religious
rites," or the "cold storage of orthodox opinion," or a coUection of
specifics or panaceas for reform, or the mechanisms of legislation that
would foUow. He was simply full of the great and undefined hope of
the world which, as Pott3 has shown, later grew into the Pauline doc
trine of faith. The forces he knew and dealt with were those that
worked from within outward and not those which began externally
and worked inward. It can thus be only obtuseness to this potent
inner psychic factor that has sought to explain the fraternal bond that
bound the primitive Christians by the common dangers involved in
the nine persecutions, or as the cadenced step of common zeal for
missionary propaganda, nor can it be explained as social cooperation
in quest of the great treasure, for aU of these influences had dispersive as
weU as fraternizing tendencies. The root of the solidarity was the
magnetism and charm of Jesus' own personality, the magic of his
words, the purity and ingenuousness of his character, and especiaUy
the naturally thriUing, melting effect of the unutterable pathos of his
death and the transcendent glory of the Resurrection. These together
made him the focus and cynosure of all who believed on him. The
Pauline conception of a sacrificial ransom or a hero invoking God's
wrath upon his own head to divert it from others was only a half
figurative objectivization, effective as it was through its long day, of
the instinctive Einfuhlung into the sublimity of Jesus' virtue which
overtopped that of aU others and that fused hearts, minds, and wfils into
a common devotion. Thus he reached the acme of leadership, as those
in his train did of hero-worship. Death usuaUy dampens the authority
of leaders, but it immeasurably exalted his. There had never been such
a soul-compeller, such an authority, such a master of those who strive
to know, do, and feel the best life has to offer. No life had been so
¦Bousset: "Teachings of Jesus." London, 1906. Chapter 6, "The Kingdom."
'Louis Auguste Sabatier: "Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution." London, 1004, ia8 p.
»A. Pott: "Das Hoffen im neuen Testament." I9i5( *<>3 p.

382 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
ravishingly beautiful, and no one had even been thought so powerful,
wise, or good. And so he drew all who revered him closer together
than men had ever stood before, and made them indifferent to aU else
save their captain's good will. To become one of his favourites was to
gain aU, and aU man's gregarious herding instincts reached in his wake
their highest culmination in and through him. This was a union that
aU outer ties can only typify or vicariate for.
Recent anthropological studies teach us that the primitive self
was not the individual but the group, and that the former emerged very
gradually out of the latter. Primitives knew no barriers between one
another, or even between themselves and nature. The ego could change
into the alter. There was not only contagion of qualities but meta
morphosis of character. This was peculiarly the case among members
of the same totem clan. Within these self may be acquired, lost, or
changed with increased facility. In the closest social groups members
were so knit the one to the other that if one suffered aU did. If one
sinned all did, and any other member might be punished as in blood
revenge. Possession and regeneration involved acquiring another soul.
Virtue could be transferred by a touch or magicaUy. AU this con
course, exchange, fusion, or circulation of soul or self was mediated by
some Mana-like principle which underlay aU conditions and was the
medium of such changes. Now the Kingdom was a spiritual and re
stricted totem group in which each was, had, did nothing for himself
alone, but lived, moved, thought, felt, acted, and had his being in the
whole. Those who came into the Kingdom thereby changed their
souls. Peter and Paul even changed their names. The exalted Christ
was thus their totem head. He was born or formed anew in each, and
each was reborn into him. Thus the primitive Kingdom was founded.
It was invisible and not made with hands, long before it grew into the
visible Church. Out of this fusion of individual souls all the institu
tions, doctrines, ordinances, offices, buildings, rites of the Church, later
evolved. All these, however, belong to a third stage of the develop
ment of the Kingdom which Jesus never knew or presaged. He had
experienced in his own person the first stage in the genesis of the King
dom before bis ministry began. It embraced the second stage of
organizing those who had found salvation by knitting their souls up
indiscerptibly with his own person and through it with one another.
The third stage, begun by Peter and Paul after Jesus' death, is not yet

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 383
ended. We must not disparage totemism as a principle for aU that
rises high strikes its roots deep into the past. As a system it has long
since ceased to exist in the consciousness of cultured races, and there -
were some but faint ostensive traces of it among the Jews in Jesus' day.
But it is stiU potent beneath the threshold of the human soul in its
instinctive autistic nature and depths, and when we feel the closest of
all human ties we turn not merely in poetry but in prose to its terms,
for it was the mediator of the most intimate fraternization through
countless ages. Indeed it so long represented the closest of aU rela
tions between men, and was so long the hieroglyph of the culmination
of man's gregarious instincts, that although now obsolete and absurd
as a system, it still fives deep in the heart, and its vestiges and scattered
phrases in the Fourth Gospel are stiU valid and work their magic in us.
Could we see more clearly into the subconscious psyche, we should
realize that the old metamorphoses of personahty and reidentification
with a sovereign Lord of the higher hfe and mind of man are stiU very
active processes within us.
AU Jesus' moral and social teachings foUowed naturaUy from two
major premises: first, the end is at hand, and second, there must be a
general merger of the individual in the whole in which the partnership
is unlimited and without reservation. From these data it is plain how
httle respect there could be for differences of station, and how Jesus
must have abhorred over-individuation and aU that favoured it, such
as power, fame, pleasure, and wealth. Let us select the latter as typical
and see how severely conditioned his views were upon the two above
premises, and therefore how fatuous it is to attempt to apply this typi
cal line of his social teachings to modern conditions. To do so we
should have to revert to a totemic community and be convinced that
mundane affairs were about to end. Hence Jesus' teaching here as
elsewhere was ad interim.1 In this very close and temporary fraternity
no man must caU anything his own. There must be a communistic
sharing of aU with aU. No one was worthy who loved anything or
anybody more than him. The rich young man was a paragon of every
virtue, but his wealth barred him from the Kingdom, which was as hard
to enter as a needle's eye. The land was rich, the people industrious,
but most were in bitter poverty by reason of extortion. Jesus was
¦See G. D. Huever: "The Teachings of Jesus Concerning Wealth." Chicago, 1903. C Rugge: "Der erdischer
Besitz im neuen Testament." Also Edersheim: " Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ." London, 1876,
342 p. Marquand: "Staatsverwaltung." Here Peabody is beat.

384 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
reared in poverty, his disciples were poor, and aU were below the middle
class, which Aristotle thought the most favourable. On entering his
ministry Jesus and his followers had left behind their means of suste
nance, and they seem to have known hunger, cold, scantiness of attire,
and homelessness. When the disciples were sent forth to preach, they
were forbidden to take any provision for their own maintenance, but
must trust solely to spontaneous hospitahty and must withdraw if this
was not offered. Thus it is not strange that poverty became almost a
muse to be wooed, that it was a test of admission to the Kingdom.
Against the heU of want their only safeguard was faith in a heavenly
provider, and they must make this the psychic equivalent of a modest
life endowment. Their wants, too, must be reduced to a minimum, nor
was this thought treason to the agencies of industrial production. No
one can serve God and Mammon. From the parable of Dives and
Lazarus we are left to infer that the former went to heU solely because
he was rich, and the latter to heaven merely because he was poor.
The Gospel was first proclaimed to the poor, and they seem to have
been saved first and easiest. Nitti thinks poverty was an explicit and
inexorable condition of membership in the Kingdom, and Leslie
Stephens thinks the early Christians were almost nihilists in their
rancour against property. Luke, whom Rugge caUs the socialistic
Evangelist, teaches that none who did not renounce all could become
disciples. He alone records of the woes upon the rich, the parable of the
rich man who boasted and was condemned for it; the lost penny; the
unjust steward; the good Samaritan. He says the blessing is for the
hungry, which Matthew records for those hungry for righteousness
rather than for the poor in spirit. Luke makes Jesus say, " Give to
every one," instead of " to him that asketh. " He records the marriage
feast to which the poor and defective were bidden. The Gospel in
junction is if one asks a coat to give a cloak also. " SeU what thou hast
and give alms." AU must give, even the widow her mite. Those who
give to the poor give or loan to the Lord, lay up treasure in heaven, etc.
Renan regards the Gospels as essentiaUy Ebionistic and pervaded by
the view that none but the poor could be saved. Many if not most
of the commands to give could not have been addressed to the esoteric
circle, for those who had abandoned aU would have nothing left to give,
but were themselves the fittest to receive charity. Jesus' own main
tenance and that of his disciples and his cause depended on the virtue

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 385
of benevolence which was so stressed, although we need not infer, as has
often been done by critics, that he had a subtle and selfish though un
conscious motive in magnifying this virtue to the uttermost. Paul
said the Lord loved a cheerful giver, and believed in giving as freely
as we have received. Pity, compassion, almsgiving, are perhaps best
developed in Buddhistic lands like Burma, but Christianity sublimates
charitas into generosity of thinking and feeling, which is something far
above benevolence as a business, a virtue, or a science, aU of which it
now is. This involves the wise direction of sympathy, prefers a personal
touch to the anonymity of a subscription paper, accepts datours and
doles, even of fil-gotten wealth.1 It seems as if Jesus' rancour toward
the rich grew during his ministry. In the Old Testament property is
a sign of Jehovah's favour, but in the New Testament woe is pronounced
upon the rich as such. As Ruskin says, wealth is now filth. Fine
raiment, sumptuous fare, houses, land, property, barns bursting with
the harvest, aU are deceitful, snares. Holtzmann says Jesus thought
them perfious, Luke that he deemed them disgraceful. They choke
the word. Love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. James caUs
on the rich to "weep and howl." Naumann caUs Jesus an enemy of
wealth and capital. Laveleye2 says that if Christianity was taught
according to Jesus' spirit, "the existing social order could not last a
day." Herron says, "Jesus regarded industrial wealth as a moral faU
and a social violence."
In view of the above it is disheartening to contemplate the vast
body of literature which has accumulated since the great advance in
industrialism and the coincident efforts of the Semitic writers, Marx
and Lasalle, to make a radical speculative socialism a substitute for
Christianity. Bebel, Bax, and Liebknecht teach revolt from the
Church, which they hold has come to stand for private wealth, the
worst of all monopolies. Hence God and "the semi-mythical Syrian
of the first century" must be abolished, and the world reorganized
without religion in a social democracy. Against this alienation of

iW. Rauschenbusch: "Christianizing the Social Order." New York, 1912, 493 p. Also his "Christianity and the
Social (Mei. » w».iw Vnrt TnoR ,4n n. V. (V PeahnHv: "Te&us Christ and the Social Oiiestinn." New York. lata.
374 P-.
ships 1
London, ties from the Christian Point of View." Chicago, 1009, 332 I
ion, 247 p. J. H. Holmes: "The Revolutionary Function of the Modem Church." New York, 1912, 264 p. G.
Harris: A Century of Change in Religion." Boston, 1914, 266 p. F..R. M. Hitchcock: "St. Augustine's Treatise on
the City of God." Trans., London, 1900, 115 p. P. A. Kropotkm: "Mutual Aid as a Factor of Evolution." London
1902, 348 p.
8" Primitive Property." Introd. Trans. London, 1878.

386 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
industry from the Church arose a long series of efforts from Wichern
and his " inner mission " in 1849 to Von Ketteler, De Mun, and Du Prey
in the Catholic Church and Maurice and Kingsley in England, who
sought to humanize economic principles and methods and to put co
operation in place of competition. Thus we have two sociahsms, one
Christian and the other anti-Christian. Meanwhile a great effort has
been spent in minimizing and explaining away Jesus' sayings concern
ing wealth, as if it were necessary to apologize to him for the wealth
both of and in the Church. We are reminded that he was a friend of
the rich publican Zaccheus; that he taught the increase of each man's
talent; said that to him that hath will be given. We are told that a
Christian may be rich if he masters and is not mastered by wealth;
that Jesus said nothing against trusts; that property begins in the
animal world, etc. Why not frankly admit that it is as preposterous
to go to Jesus for economic as it would be for scientific wisdom?
Everything indicates that his views of property and industry were
hardly less crude and negligible than those he held concerning astron
omy. In this domain he was more ignorant than the crudest
modern tyro and most of his sayings should be left to the ob
livion they deserve. What he said and his foUowers practised was
due to conditions hardly less exceptional and transient than the en
forced rules laid down on a doomed ship. What could he know of the
new worths and values wealth creates, absorbed as he was with the
idea of merging the individual in the group, and in eradicating selfish
ness in all its forms during the brief time that remained? Of course he
would have abominated modern predatory wealth; but he was no
socialistic communist or anarchist in any modern sense. In wise
discrimination, present-day teachings and even the best of the ancient
moralists are better guides than Jesus. Were we to take his precepts
in this field literaUy and apply them, modern society would be reduced
to the level of the totemic clan, living for the day, improvident and
absorbed in dreams of a new paradise supernaturaUy inaugurated.
Jesus foresaw neither the Church, science, modern industrialism, law,
courts, nor medicine, and had no conception of statecraft. But he did
see, as no one before or since has seen, the principle of service and
mutuality, which is the psychogenetic basis of true success in aU
these domains. Although we must forget and often negate his
specific teachings, we can and must find for ourselves ways and

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 387
means of applying his spirit in aU these fields; and thus only can
we make all of them truly Christian. To him we owe simply the
crude but inspiring ideal and impulsion. The work must be aU our
own. The early Church groped its way to two expressions of the ultimate
relations of the ideal man to the race and to the cosmos back of it,
which are expressed respectively in the doctrine of incarnation and
that of the parousia. The first means in modern terms that not merely
in Hegelian sense does God come to consciousness in the ideal man; for
the theanthropic state of the soul must forever transcend the conscious
ness of any individual, and personafity itself necessarfiy involves
limitations. It means, rather, that the type-man whose fife is impelled
by the maximum momentum at the centre of the evolutionary stream,
feels, thinks, and acts as normaUy, and especiaUy as genericaUy, as
is possible for a single human individual. In so doing he incarnates
what Hegel caUed the pure idea, Fichte the absolute ego, Schopenhauer
the wfil to hve, Spencer the developmental nisus, Bergson the creative
elan vital, Freud and Jung the primordial libido, Janet the impulse to
perfection, or wholeness (which is holiness), Adler the horror of medioc
rity or inferiority in the impulse to attain Geltung, etc. This is the
prime impulse of hfe and heredity, which pleasure normaUy advances
and pain and disease tend to inhibit, the arrests of which make what
we caU consciousness, which is always remedial, causes aU neuroses
and psychoses, and brings death sooner or later to all. This great
impulse toward more intense larger human life the soul responds to
even in its aberrations. Most that constitutes hfe slumbers in us
from birth to death because the vaster hfe of the race hes so largely
below the threshold of consciousness and rarely breaks through the
barriers that bar the phyletic from the ontogenetic fife. This means
heredity, which is well caUed from God, for every formulation of the
background of existence, whether it stops at the human stage or goes
back to the ulterior source of hfe in general or stfil further back to the
great autos we caU the cosmos or to the pantheistic mother lye, being,
cosmic gas, protyle, or whatever its name — these are what man has
always caUed divine. Recession or reversion toward this, whether it
be back to a prime principle underlying the universe or to some proxi
mate stage of development, is recession, or religion in the best ety
mological sense of that word, because it revives or releases genetic

388 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
impulsions. Of this the old word, "incarnation," is a stiU adequate
and pregnant symbol.
The "second coming" is less psychogenetic than moral for it
expresses the ineluctable conviction that sometime, somewhere, virtue
and happiness on the one hand and sin and misery on the other wiU get
together, as they should, as justice demands. This conviction Kant
thought created and kept alive the befief in a transcendent world.
Thus every drama and novel which in the end metes out desert justly
is a petty parousia and keeps alive the selfsame instinct which found
expression in this doctrine. It is one of the chief glories of Jesus that
this eschatological denouement was believed in so fervently by him that
he felt impelled to find relief for the inner tension of his soul about
it by having recourse to even the wild weird tropes and metaphors of
Daniel and the apocryphal imagery, and that to him it seemed as real
as it did to the author of the Book of Enoch. The awful apparition
of justice in a final day of judgment haunted this most fervently
ethical of all the souls in history. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum et terra.
Then only can the Kingdom come. Jesus' soul was so surcharged with
the flush of creative evolution that it was like a battery with such a
voltage of electric tension that discharge was inevitable, defective as
were the conductors, so that its heat and light can stiU be felt in the
fantastic dreameries about the catastrophic advent of heaven to reward
the good and of heU to punish the bad. To the passionate moralist
earth needs nothing so much or so immediately as a judge who is wise
enough to perceive desert, and powerful enough to mete out to aU
according to their merits. The agonizing cry of his soul is, "Why
does the day of justice not come!" Belief that it impends effects the
most thorough of all purgations of soul. AU who deem this a moral
universe hold that biological laws or the perhaps yet slower course of
history wfil sometime vindicate justice, even though it require ages of
natural selection acting on individuals, families, and nations to do it.
But in Jesus' temperament the processes of this conviction found a
short-circuit, and the detonation was sudden, here, and now. AU fu
ture history lost perspective as temporal remoteness was foreshortened
into the present. Thus the parousia is anticipation by the same psychic
mechanism that evolution is revelation. As in the Incarnation we
command the resources of the past of the race and the world, so in the
parousia Jesus strove to teach us to command the resources of the

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 389
future by vividly presentifying the far-off results and issues of human
destiny.1 Thus the parousia-idea, is to us a kind of parable made, not like
other parables, consciously, but by Jesus' autistic nature. To fuUy
understand it we must get back of what he said about it to what he
meant by this highly symbolic complex. We err if we try to accept
it literaUy, even though he probably meant to be thus understood.
Here we have a motif which we must interpret. Theology has piously
conserved but failed to understand it. Romance, as we saw in Chapter
2, has often, although very feebly, tried to bring Jesus or some figure
representing him into modern life in a way to make his moral power
felt by those who came in contact with him. The range of this prin
ciple far transcends these puny efforts, but it should be a most inspiring
incentive to the creative imagination.
Kenosis is another pregnant theme for religious psychology. AU
the Yahveh of Isaiah and the major prophets did not find embodiment
in Jesus, for the former was too vast for aU the plenitude of his attri
butes, infinity in time and space, creativeness, omnipotence, to be
manifested in any single son of man. Nor is it aU a matter of logical
extension versus intention; nor is it the case of a generalized type-form
of animal like the patrofelis, with more generic and less specific types
than any of the species that sprang from it; nor is it exactly iUustrated
by the processional of growth of an adult out of Wordsworthian child
hood, who, as he develops, loses many of the traits of the genus in
acquiring those of the individual. These are only analogues of ken
osis. The great achievement wrought by Christianity of casting man's
ideas of the divine into a specific, unipersonal, human form did, but
should not, make us forget the greater God of all nature, animate and
inanimate. It is excessive anthropomorphization of rehgion that has
caused its tragic age-long warfare with science. The substance of the
Godhood that did not and could not aU go over into Jesus the Christ
is still worthy of adoration and service. This overplus was the Deity
'In his very ingenious and stimulating "The Master of Modem Evolution " (ipii, 13s p.) G.H. MacNish represents
heredity and adaptation as the two chief factors of life, illustrating how now one and now the other dominates in history
and in individuals. One is racial, and the other individual. Thefirst makes for conservatism, is favoured by aristocracies
and pride of birth, is cultivated by meditation, by which the individual may break through the "screen" of William
James, and is illustrated in the conservatism of the Catholic Church and in stable states and societies generally. The
other is marked by an overplus of the individual element that innovates reforms, brings in the new, etc. Jesus he con
ceives as marking the climax of evolution, bringing in not only a new but a higher degree of life; conserving yet revising
the old in the light of the new; controlling nature and man, yet no less a paragon of adjustment. He desired all to
become children in the sense of going back to the old unity with self and kind, chose for his cabinet disciples of the most
opposite traits, and harmonized them. He kept the "screen" open so that he could command all the latent resources
of his soul and that of the race and the world to which he ever harked back, and which he could summon at will. He
was a master at adjusting antagonistic forces. Because it was inner, the union that he brought into the world was
wider, closer, and more lasting than the empires of force set up by Caesar and Alexander.

39° JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
that Jesus himself adored. Indeed, it is only the pathetic Enge des
Bewusstseins on our part that makes us think that to be truly Christian
we should know and serve Jesus only. It needs no very profound psy
choanalysis to show that the most devout of aU Jesus' disciples from
the beginning to our day make him the chief but never the only divin
ity that they worship. The germs of aU the old faiths stiU live in us
aU, and alas for Christianity if they were not there! We might as weU
try to extirpate the scores of rudimentary organs in our body as to
eliminate these. We must not only revere the Most High of the
Psalms and Prophets, but what large and true Christian heart does not
warm to the pantheistic sentiment of the great poets and phfiosophers
and feel the lure of the best that is in aU the great ethnic Bibles? Other
wise why do or can we study comparative religions? Children in their
plays and toys, and adults in the charms and ornaments they wear,
are fetish-worshippers, and under stress of feeling we aU become primi
tive animists. Thus there has never been a complete kenosis of any
of the antique or transcended faiths and cults into Christianity. The
aesthetic feelings still worship the blue vault above, the heavenly
bodies, clouds, rain, lightning, wind, water, fire, trees, flowers, and
animals. Each of these has at some time or place long been the very
highest object of the rehgious instincts, and alas for us if these vestiges
are rooted out from our souls! We have thought too meanly of Man
soul. It has many mansions, and it is enough if we keep the best of
these sacred to the God of our Scriptures. Only in the cruder past did
the new God evict, diabofize, or slay his predecessor. No man can
be Christian in the sense too usuaUy required with more than a safe
working majority of his faculties. In his attitude of filial piety toward
Yahveh and the Hebrew cult Jesus gave the world the truest and
loftiest paradigm of how a new should succeed an old religion; and this
suggests that the true missionary should be chiefly intent upon reveal
ing the new that lies concealed in the old religion, but which he is to
minister to just as Jesus did, and as only a very few of the great Catholic
missionaries have ever attempted.1 Perhaps no one now fiving wor
ships Zeus, once supreme father of gods and men, yet the study of this
cult enriches the religious life of every classicist. Thus no kenosis ever
was or can be complete. Modern pragmatism has not rightly observed
the principle of kenosis with reference to the older metaphysics and the
'See "Missionary Pedagogy" in my "Educational Problems." ign, vol. 2, chapter lo.

MESSIANITY, SONSHIP, AND THE KINGDOM 391
phUosophy of the absolute which it would supersede. Every teacher
of the history of philosophy may have his own preferences, and even
his own system; but if the latter interferes with his sympathy with any
one of aU the serious efforts from Thales to Bergson that men have
made to comprehend the universe, he ceases to be a worthy or even
efficient representative of his own standpoint. Indeed, Christianity
from the very first has been a masterpiece of syncretism, and owes its
marveUous spread largely to the fact that it has given back to aU men
a revised and enriched version of what they aU had. No old religion
that went over to it did so whoUy. Converts who ostentatiously and
enthusiasticaUy burned their idols in so doing stiU continued to invest
the new faith with the old rehgious feehngs transferred to new objects,
for nothing is so transferable as affectivity.1

'I have found help in this chapter by following among others, Robert Law: "The Emotions of Jesus." T. & T.
Clark, 28s p. A. Schlatter: "Die christliche Ethik.'T Calw. u. Stuttgart, 1914, 386 p. G. S. Painter: "The Philosophy
of Christ s Temptation." Boston, 1914, 333 p. Dn. Volter: "Jesus der Menschensohn oder Das Berufsbewusstsein
Jesu." Strassburg, 1914, 1 13 p. Konst. Gutberlet: "Der Gottmensch Jesus Christus; eine Begrlindung und Apologie
der kirchlichen Christologie. Regensburg, 1013, 325 p. E. D. La Touche: "The Person of Christ in Modern
Thought." London, 1912, 416 p. E. H. Merrill: "Person of Christ." Bibliotheca Sacra Co., 1910. J. W. Berg:
" Das Leben und Leiden Jesu Christi." Caspar, 1915. S. C. Tapp:"Why Jesus Was a Man and Not a Woman." 1914.
Sidney C. Tapp, 406 Reliance Bldg., Kansas City, Mo. W. J. Lhamon: Character Christ." Revell, 1914. E. W.
Serl: Laughter 01 Jesus." Neale, 1911. E. D. Wright: "Psychology of Christ." Cochrane Pub., 1909. A. Whyte:
"Our Lord's Character." Revell. C. H. Barrows: "Personafity of Jesus." Houghton, 1906. J. Smith: "Magnetism
of Christ." Doran. C. E. Jefferson: "Character of Jesus." Crowell, 1908. T. Hughes: "Manliness of Christ."
Altemus. H. Bushnell: "Character of Jesus." Scribner. P. Schaff: "Person of Christ." Am. Tract, 1013. Fried-
rich Daab: "Jesus von Nazaret." Diisseldorf, Langewiesche, 1007, 224 p. Karl Weidel: "Jesu Personlichkeit; eine
psychologische Studie." Halle, Marhold, 1908, 47 p. Johannes Ninck: "Jesus als Charakter; eine Untersuchung."
2d rev. ed. Leipzig, Hinrichs, 1910, 396 p.

CHAPTER SEVEN
JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY, HIS INNER CHARACTER, PURPOSE AND WORK
The founders of the eschatological view— Relations of psychology
to Christology — Jesus' diathesis, which was essentiaUy ecstatic — Jesus'
great change of plan and the causes of the "quest for death" — Contact
with the great ethnic religions of death and resurrection of divine
personages based on seasonal changes — Jesus' "passion for secrecy" —
The pathos of his death found in the fact that he believed this second
plan a failure and that there was to be no sequel — In what sense did
Jesus rise and return? — His futurism— The reinforcements of the moral
sense by the expectation of an end of the world: — The psychology of
death — In what sense was Jesus great? — (A) The standard of being
discussed — (B) That of experiencing both extremes of pleasure and
pain — (C) Alternations between the subjective and objective hfe or
between solitude and society — (D) Belief of being influenced by some
power above self — (E) That they are generic type or totemic men —
(F) Combining pairs of opposites hke conservative and progressive,
calmness and enthusiasm, imagination and common sense — Necessity
of new and higher conceptions of Jesus if his power is to be maintained
in the world — (i) He felt superior to others and closer than any one
else had been to God — (2) He concealed this dominant sense of inner
deity — (3) This brought the higher tension of opposites in his soul —
Such a being must necessarily move far up and down the algedonic
scale, and love and hate more than others — The psychology of inspira
tion — Jesus' death brought foUowers at first no glimmer of insight into
what he was — The supreme miracle is how befief in Jesus' Resurrection
arose and this psychology enables us now at least in part to understand
and trace the development stages of this great affirmation — What is the
Holy Ghost? — The psychology of the conversion of Paul and his dual
nature — He knew fittle of Jesus save that he died and rose — Did he
know the pagan cults of death and resurrection? — The psychology of
Pentecost, the Ascension, and the apocalypse.
JESUS' eschatological conceptions have in recent decades come
to be almost as important as the mythic problem itself, and
views concerning them are no less opposite. Jesus' utterances
on the subject were thought to be his own until the authenticity of the
392

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 393
apocalyptic documents was established. They showed that eschatology
was a very prominent feature of his age, so that his own views, what
ever they were, came to seem less new and original. The prophets
thought the Messianic Kingdom belonged to the present world-order,
whfie the apocalyptic representations in Jesus' own time made the
Kingdom not only a future but a new order of things. T. Colani1 held
that Jesus at first sought only complete communion with God and
nothing else, but as he proceeded in teaching the Kingdom his con
sciousness grew Messianic, and he expected it to come slowly by organic
development and not by the way of a catastrophic denouement. As
his views on the Kingdom grew inward he came to accept the title
of Messiah, which he could not do so Jong as he thought it material
and Davidic. In accepting this view he also accepted the role of suf
fering which was integral to the very idea of Messianity, and he trusted
that the effects of the Passion would establish the Kingdom. If it
was spiritual the idea of a glorious second coming must be dropped.
Hence the Jewish eschatology would have to be discarded save certain
natural symbolic aUusions to it. We must therefore eliminate passages
which teach the speedy spread of the Kingdom among the gentiles,
and also the idea of a preliminary judgment because of men's lack of
receptivity. Most of Matthew xxiv and Mark xiii, as well as much of
Luke xxi must thus be regarded as unauthentic interpolations. Jesus
never expected to return from heaven to finish his work. That was
finished by his death. We can never, however, entirely explain Jesus'
preaching on these points from the history of his time. Thus Colani
completely rejects eschatology, although he would do so only by textual
analysis and criticism.
Later G. Volkmar2 took up the problem, resting aU authentic
knowledge on Mark, which he dated 73 a. d., five years after the Book
of Revelations was written. Matthew for him is a tertiary compfiation
and so Volkmar's effort to eliminate eschatology was made easy, for he
had only Mark to deal with. The contemporary ideas of Messianity
were such that Jesus could not possibly have claimed it. The concept
of a spiritual Kingdom came later. In Jesus' time only the pofitical
ideas of the Kingdom were known, and any one who awakened hopes
of this kind would certainly share the fate of the Baptist. Jesus thus

'"Jesus-Christ et les croyances messianiques de son temps." Strassburg, 1864, 255 P.
!"Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit mit den beiden ersten Erzahlero." Zurich, 1882, 403 p.

394 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
had to be a pofitical Messiah, or none at aU. Thus not only escha
tology but Messianity is eliminated. Only after his death did Jesus
become Christ. Peter's acclamation of him as the Messiah was only
near the end of his career and anticipative of the effects of the Passion.
Thus, after the excision of a few other passages, it appears that Mark,
like Paul, thought that Jesus became Messiah only as a result of the
Resurrection. Jesus' ethics were not confused by eschatological mo
tives. In some places, nevertheless, the expectation of the parousia
reached such a high pitch that marriage was thought useless. This, of
course, would have shocked Jesus. The discourses about the end of
the world and the second coming are later and for edification. Jesus'
own view is found in the parables of sowing, the mustard seed, and of the
permanence of his sayings. He never expected to come in the clouds.
Ideas of the second coming Volkmar complains have been hitherto
slighted or regarded as too delicate for discussion.
Weiffenbach1 seeks to mediate between those who think that the
parousia or the second coming formed an integral part of Jesus' teach
ing, and those, more in number, who hold that he was misunderstood
by his disciples so far as they ascribed to him. belief in any literal or
sensuous form of it. He found a deadlock between these two views,
and the way out that he sought was in the relation between the parousia
and the Passion. He dissents from the view that Jesus' eschatological
sayings acquired this character from the way in which they are com
bined, the component passages themselves having no trace of it. Nor
does he hold that the little apocalypse (Matthew xxiv and Mark xiii)
was broken up by irrelevancies in order to tone down expectation,
since predictions of a second coming had not been fulfilled even after
Jerusalem feU. Weiffenbach thinks Jesus did express the thought of
his own near return, but did so moderately, and that Jewish-Christian
eschatology amplified these sayings. The belief is waxing, not waning,
in these chapters, and the disciples' hopes were too strong to be ac
counted for solely by current Jewish expectations; otherwise Jesus'
teachings and the faith of primitive Christians are unexplained. If we
eliminate aU other predictments, Jesus' admonition at the Mount of
Olives to watch though the hour was unknown, is the key to unlock
and the standard by which to measure every other passage touching
this subject. Proceeding, then, to test aU other New Testament
'"Der Wiederkunftsgedanke Jesu." Leipzig, 1873, 414 p.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 395
passages by this, we have as a result only a colourless and rather con-
tentless thought of an early personal return. All that does not square
with this authentic form can be rather ruthlessly efiminated. Jesus
never thought of judging the world, and this function was never as
cribed to the Messiah until later. He did not foresee the destruction
of Jerusalem. His charge to the Twelve, so far as it imphed a second
coming, was an anachronism. The charge at the Last Supper is
simply chiliastic. As his fife drew toward its close, Jesus did express
the hope of coming back, but, as the parousia was deferred, this became
more and more embellished, and missionaries to the gentiles grew
cautious about caUing it near. He did not offer even to save Jerusalem
from its fate, and so his return was put further and further into the
future. This contentless expectation may prove the identity of the
prediction of the parousia and of the Resurrection. The conduct of
the disciples after the Resurrection shows that it had not been very
clearly predicted. Both were connected with Jesus' death and both
were expected about the same time; hence they were at first thought to
be one and the same. Only after his death were the two differentiated.
The Resurrection did not bring what the parousia had promised, but
the eschatology he had dampened during his life now flourished very
rankly. Baldensperger1 assumes that Jesus' conception of the Kingdom was
dual. The spiritual and eschatological elements were equaUy strong
and were also mutually conditioned. Thus Jesus began with the pur
pose of founding an invisible Kingdom, but expected that it would be
realized miraculously. Hence Jesus' consciousness was in some sense
double. His Messianic consciousness was a special form of the sense
of unique relation to God. This had power to transform the Jewish
Messianic self-consciousness, although perhaps the latter was itself
religious in Jesus as was his unique sense of union. Thus for him the
term " Son of Man " would have both an apocalyptic and also an ethical
and religious sense. This dual self-consciousness of Jesus Balden
sperger explains geneticaUy and historicaUy. At the start eschatology
affected Jesus' expectation of the Kingdom and his Messianic conscious
ness. After the latter arose at the baptism, he rejected the ideal of a
Davidic or warring king, and began to found a Kingdom by preaching.
Thus for a time a spiritual Kingdom was his ideal and the Messianic
>"Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der messianischen Hoffnungen seiner Zeit." Strassburg, 1888, 193 p.

396 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
eschatology faded, or he was sUent about it, perhaps for pedagogic
reasons, fearing a pofitical movement by his foUowers, which the Ro
man rule would crush. His" other reasons for not revealing his Mes
sianity vanished when he had dehberately decided to die and return
in the clouds. Until then he knew not when or how the Kingdom would
come. Until Peter's confession the disciples had only the haziest
ideas of his Messianity. This was the preparatory period of waiting
and watching. For him it was a period of acute struggle between his
religious conviction of his Messianity and the old national ideals of
this office. In the second period he became clear and harmonious.
By accepting suffering his inner peace became ineluctable, great and
deep, for now he knew when and how God would fulfil his promises.
It would be with the second coming of the Messiah. Now he was Son
of Man and judge of the world. Would the people accept him as Mes
siah? To determine this he went to Jerusalem, and at first they ac
claimed him with great heartiness; but later when they saw that
he did not and could not fulfil their ideas, the reaction came and was
so great that in it he lost his life. The sensation that Baldensperger's
book caused was due to the fact that it so diametricaUy opposed
preceding opinions on the subject, by assuming that Jesus had a well-
developed eschatology instead of none.
J. Weiss'1 solution of the problem is strongly pro-eschatological.
The Kingdom, which is the key to the problem, has no likeness to any
other, in that it is entirely futuristic and so in a sense supermundane.
The best index of its advance is the waning of Satan's kingdom, and
hence Jesus cast out devils. Jesus merely proclaimed it just as the
Baptist had done, except that Jesus knew that he was the Messiah;
but he exercised none of the functions of the office, but simply waited
for God to bring in the Kingdom supernaturally. He sent out the
disciples to preach its nearness, but he did not know its date although
he believed it near. But as obstacles accumulated, he realized that
it must be more remote than he had thought, and at length saw he
must die before it came, and as a conditio sine qua non to its advent.
He reahzed that he must die not merely for his own httle group but
for many. This depressive foresight of his demise was, however, more
or less compensated for by a conviction that he would return glorified in
the sense that, since Daniel, men had expected the Messiah to come.
'"Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes." GBttingen, 1900, 2d ed., 214 p.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 397
These great ideals not only consoled him for, but enabled him to tri
umph over, death. He was to come thus gloriously, and very soon,
and justify to his friends before they died his predictions of the King
dom. The judgment day was to precede. The Kingdom was trans
cendental enough not to arouse pohtical fears, yet it was by no means
merely within the soul. Its ethics was of a kind to make men free
from this world, and hence it is mainly negative and penitential.
The sense of Messianity to which he awoke at the baptism was not a
present affair, but a future though assured potentiality. Here and
now Jesus is only a man and a prophet. Son of Man is a purely
eschatological term, although it is not clear whether his disciples thought
it referred to his present state or his future rank, or thought it desig
nated another person. Thus the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus
as expressed in the title, Son of Man, shares in the transcendental
apocalyptic character of Jesus' idea of the Kingdom of God and can
not be separated from it. Jesus' eschatology was thus quite primitive
and constitutive. By accepting suffering he " emerged from passivity."
The most extreme eschatologist is A. Schweitzer.1 He holds that
Jesus and most of the other New Testament writers were possessed if
not obsessed by the idea that the world was to end before their death.
In this we have the key to explain the epistles and especially the
Gospels in a way which must profoundly modify our conceptions of
Jesus' views, and which has been caUed "the last word" in the higher
criticism. Condemning aU current liberal and orthodox views alike,
Schweitzer tries to show that about all that Jesus said and did was
prompted by a dominant and ever-present conviction that the world-
order was to come to an early and sudden end. The impending
change was to be by a miraculous intervention of God. When Jesus
sent out the Twelve he fully expected the parousia to occur before they
returned. The persecutions and tribulations foretold were immediate
and for them, and had no reference to later troubles, for the very ex
istence of a Church was never dreamed of by Jesus. All the calamities
he foretold were to befaU them on this trip, and they were exhorted
to endure to its end. Before they came back the Son of Man would
have come. To Jesus' consternation they came back safe and sound.

»"Das Messianitats- und Leidens-Geheimnis; eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu." Leipzig, iooi, 109 p. His view is
revised in his "Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung." 2. AuB., 1913. See Kap. 15, 16 and especially 21. See also
Tyrrell's "The Church at the Cross-Roads," for a fairly good English presentation of Schweitzer's views, and C. W.
Emmet's "The Eschatological Question in the Gospels." London, 1912, 237 p.

398 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Hence, after a little new orientation, he abandoned his promising
work of heralding the Kingdom in Gafilee, and fled to the north "in
order to escape his foUowers who dogged his footsteps" to be with him
when the Kingdom should break forth upon the world. From this
crisis on we hear no more of the suffering of the elect, but only of Jesus
himself. The Jewish apocalyptists of whom Jesus became the chief
exponent aU expected tribulation as "birthpangs" of the Messiah, but
conceived him as above and aloof from it. It was with this heavenly
being that Jesus had in his first period come to identify himself, but
now he reafized not only that he must suffer but that he must suffer
and die alone. He must enter upon a " quest of death " for the benefit
of others as a conditio sine qua non of the advent of the Kingdom. Now
he came to regard himself as the future Messiah. In his present
earthly life, however, he was merely a proclaimer and preparer, and it
was an anxiously guarded secret that he was the future King and judge
of the world. He was displeased when Peter revealed the secret of
his Messianity to the rest of the Twelve. It leaked out again, how
ever, involuntarily in the ecstasy described as the Transfiguration.
Jesus went to Jerusalem solely in order to die there. If he taught there
it was only to provoke the rulers to slay him. Clearing the temple and
denouncing the Pharisees, in which his Messianic consciousness again
broke through, were reaUy to the same end. The entry to and aU that
he did in Jerusalem were Messianic for him, but were not so for the
people, who only thought him a prophet. The synoptists here and
often elsewhere represent Jesus as playing with his great secret. The
question of the high priest, however, showed, to Jesus' surprise, that
he had in some way come into possession of this secret. In fact, Judas
had told him, and this constituted the act of betrayal which the story
of the kiss merely masks. Thus Jesus died because two of his disciples
had betrayed his secret, first Peter to the rest, and later Judas to the
high priest. Jesus, too, admitted it, so that there should be the two
witnesses required for his condemnation. The people, who had been
subtly informed of his claim, no longer held him to be a great prophet,
as they did when he entered the city, but now deemed him a fanatic.
The end of aU we know about Jesus was that he was crucified, and the
last we ever shaU hear of him was his cry of despair at being forsaken.
In developing the above conclusions Schweitzer has no use for
John or even for Luke, and condemns Mark for knowing nothing of any

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 399
struggle or any development in Jesus' soul; for being without intelh
gence as to the meaning of his entry to Jerusalem; for being unable to
distinguish between the early period of success and the later one of
fafiure. He otherwise discredits the Second Gospel, but on the whole
thinks himself a justifier of Gospel tradition because he both puts out
of and puts into the Scriptures far less than his predecessors on the
eschatological hne had done. According to his view, Jesus was reared
in an atmosphere charged to the saturation point with eschatological
ideas, and in his ministry he "sealed" those to whom entrance to
the Kingdom could be guaranteed. Baptism thus came to predestine
the elect to salvation. Feeding, too, was an eschatological sacrament.
Those who shared Jesus' table in obscurity would do so in glory.
This sacrament was really unique, for it worked quite independently of
the understanding of the communicants. The phrases about binding
and loosing are thus authentic and pregnant. Schweitzer interprets
the apocalyptic language of Jesus, not as imagery or symbol but as aU
of it crude, fiteral, and material. The ethics of Jesus was aU of it
ad interim morals. As the old world is just about to end people may
give away coat and cloak, take no thought for the morrow, and there
is no need of loving parents, etc. Jesus is no great moral teacher, be
cause salvation and damnation are aU predestined; but he was so pre
occupied with impending other-worldness, on which he wished aU to
fix their souls, that his ethical teaching was quite incidental. Thus
the whole history of Christianity is based on the delay of the parousia
and its progress is measured by the degree of de-eschatofization.
Schweitzer thus eliminates what was basal in the founder's mind. He
died in the despair of disillusion and with a sense of absolute failure.
But in his death eschatology bore to the world a marveUous chfid, viz.,
the early Christian doctrine of literal, not to say physical, immortality.
This new religion of immortality took the place of the old decaying
civilizations. The problem of just how this narrow and extreme apoc
alyptic consciousness motivated the supreme world religion now opens
before us, but it is yet unsolved. The Jesus this view gives us is not a
figure to whom we can ascribe our own ideals, nor is he one from whom
the early Church can fairly be said to have fallen away, but he is rather
a person we cannot understand. Indeed "perhaps the best knowledge
of the personahty and hfe of Jesus wfil not be a help but rather an
offence to rehgion" (p. 633). StiU, great energy sprang from this

4©o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
unprecedented consciousness with its great osculation between life-
affirmation and life-negation. Jesus was the great renouncer, passing
from the greatest hope to the nadir of despair. Schweitzer's Jesus,
however, is far less "reduced" than the Jesus of Harnack and of the
many liberal critics, of most of whom he is the conspicuous opponent.
The Christ of this eschatology, though never until now understood or
even dreamed of, looms up far above the highest ranges of humanity
as thus far known. The Jewish apocalyptists felt that God had failed,
and the world as it was was lost, and so he must intervene and make it
over. With the Jewish history and temper this was a natural, if. not
inevitable, result of centuries of thwarted hopes. It was obsession
with this idea that drove Jesus to his death and despair. The problem
how Christianity evolved from this, which, despite Schweitzer's protest,
is a purely psychological one, he does very little to solve, so that it stiU
challenges us. Until this is explained his whole conception, original and
stimulating as it is, must remain in suspense with doubt predominant.
In response to these eschatological views we feel justified in the
following: (a) It is grossly false to exclude psychological interpreta
tions from this field, as some critics so vehemently do. On the con
trary, the whole progress of recent critical studies of Christianity has
consisted largely in emancipating it from merely textual criticism and
historical research. The certain data are so meagre, gappy, and con
tradictory, that psychology must, even more than it has of late, become
henceforth our chief guide. Most other sources are exhausted, and
whether we wish or know it, we are now confronted by problems that
only better knowledge of the laws of the human soul and better appli
cation of those already known can hold out any valid hope of solving.
In fact, the Jesus problems have already become, some solely and all
increasingly, those of psychology or of the higher anthropology, and
we can distrust either the sincerity or the knowledge of all experts in
the field who deny this. That it has been so long ignored or excluded
here has been the great calamity, and that it is now in order is the
brightest hope, of the Christianity of the present and the future.
Jesus' mission was to save souls, and he was the world's master prag
matic psychologist, all intuitively and for the most part unconsciously,
none the less but rather more so because he was so unintrospective
and acted and spoke so predominantly from out of the depths of his
uniquely rich and deep autistic nature, as we shall point out later.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 401
Henceforth our motto must become bonus psychologus, bonus Christo-
logus, for if there are next steps impending and inevitable, the psychol
ogy of the large, genetic, and analytic-synthetic type will be the
necessary prerequisite for taking them. Already those who have done
most and best in this field have used psychological data, methods, or
principles, though often unaware of it, and without technical training
in this discipline.
(b) The first step in the psychological evaluation of the eschato
logical movement as above outlined is plain enough. The history and
diathesis of the Jewish mind being what they were, the eschatological
movement was inevitable. Revering a deity whose chief attribute
was that he loved justice and hated iniquity, and whose interventions
in human affairs had always been in behalf of justice, to see that the
good were rewarded and the bad punished — a God who both in exter
nal affairs and in the souls of men was always struggling with Satan
although vastly more powerful than his adversary, so that if he chose
he could at any moment put forth his might for disciplinary or any
other unknown purpose — it was inevitable that the devotees of such a
God should befieve that in his own good time he would arise in his
might, sweep away aU evil, and establish an order of things after his
own will. He could do it, for only a few score generations ago he
had created aU things out of nothing and pronounced them good. Why
he who brought his favourites out of Egypt and gave aU the riches of
Palestine into their hands, who had guided the patriarchs, had never
theless permitted the captivities and the other calamities that had
befaUen his chosen, was hard to explain. For centuries, whenever
disaster came, his worshippers had been inchned to take the blame upon
themselves, and at every misfortune had foUowed the lead of the
prophets and examined their own hearts and hves to find out the hidden
sin there. They had a fixed idea, older than the days of Job, that
tribulation was sent and was meant as punishment, so that they must
either confess sin and do penance for it or else accuse God of injustice,
rob him of his cardinal attribute, and make him a being to be cursed
instead of trusted. If, on the other hand, and in so far as, they felt
their sufferings undeserved, there was but one alternative — to renounce
Yahveh or to trust that he would right things in the future. Because
they did the latter the future became a palladium ever fuUer of hopes
deferred, and they became more and more uniquely the people of the

402 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
promises. They hved on expectations, and made ever heavier drafts
upon the bank of futurity. This went on for generations. Yahveh
was the embodiment of their own strong racial soul which would not be
overwhelmed by any series of disasters. A weaker or less persistent
stirp would have given up and renounced their aUegiance, but this
they could not do, and so the tension between a sense of their own
merits and their fate grew ever greater. The world about them be
came worse. The wicked flourished and the good suffered, yet God
was still on his throne, and inscrutable as was his delay he surely
could not long put off coming for recompense. Thus the prophetic
mood acuminated and graduaUy passed over in certain eager nervous
souls into the apocalyptic consciousness. The state of mind of Daniel
and Ezekiel was revived in the wild welter of words and images of
Enoch, and the conceptions of III Esdras and Baruch were revived.
The date of the culmination thus came ever nearer. The awful dies
irae and the new dispensation, the conquest and binding of Satan, were
just at hand. The wicked would meet their doom, the righteous shine
forth in a great and terrible compensation, and beatitudes would be
realized for the worthy, in whose souls joy would reign in a new world
purged of iniquity and aU defilement. A new paradise of wish-fulfilment
would take the place of the present sin-sodden world, in contem
plating the imagery of which some minds grew ecstatic. Every prom
ise and prophecy was on the very point of fulfilment. The lowly
would be exalted and the high brought down. We deem the modern
Adventist unbalanced or insincere, or both, but under the conditions of
that era no conviction could have been more sincere. Rather it was a
struggle between the soundest and most vigorous moral sense on the
one hand, and wonted thought processes on the other, in which the
former triumphed. Never was there such utter abandonment to the
ethical instincts. Eschatology was a saturnalia of justice, the apo
theosis of reformatory zeal, although men had simply to wait and look
on while the power that makes for righteousness does its prophesied
work in a new and higher creation, completing that of genesis. Thus
by a process in the race-soul psychologically analogous to that in the
victim of delusions of persecution who at last turns and instead of being
persecuted becomes the persecutor, running amuck and wreaking
terrible vengeance on those he fancies had wronged him,1 so Yahveh at
'See V. Magnan: "P6ychiatrische Vorlesungen." 1891-1894.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 403
length wfil arouse himself and reestablish justice in the world at dread
ful cost to those who have so long and ever increasingly outraged it.
Eschatology was thus the form which trust in divine goodness, when
put under long and severe strain, had to take sooner or later.
If Weiss and Schweitzer are right, Jesus' consciousness during
the first period of his ministry made him the consummate unipersonal
expression of this inevitable attitude. If the existing order is just
about to end in this way by God's intervention, nothing matters save
righteousness. Wealth, station, social and pohtical institutions and
most human relations are neghgible, and nothing is of worth that does
not ensure entrance to the new Kingdom. AU is suddenly seen sub
specie eternitatis and there is radical transvaluation of all values, so
that never was there such a basis of appeal to a new orientation and
right perspective, to motives to do and be, and at short notice, the
very best possible. No one ever had such a moral leverage upon the
soul or the world, and nothing could have such transforming power
over the minds and hearts of aU who shared this conception, the dis
covery and reinstatement of which marks a great epoch in this field.
It was a situation and an attitude impossible before or since. The
world was a ship suddenly found to be fast sinking to perdition, with
only a few who grasped the awful situation or observed implicitly the
orders of the captain who had completely thought out the only condi
tions that could ever make a happy landfall on blissful shores.
(c) Granting that aU this is normal psychodynamics, why should
a few weeks' or even months' delay cause the whole long-incubated
conception of Jesus to collapse? Why this sudden disillusion or bank
ruptcy of a faith on which so recently aU had been staked? When or
before the Twelve returned, Jesus, according to Schweitzer, had seen
aU this to be a dreadful mistake. The Lord would not presently come
to rejuvenate the world. Jesus' whole scheme of things and his entire
program had aborted. Was the motivation sufficient? Was the
new idea that he must take upon his own person the tribulation that he
had predicted for others a psychokinetic equivalent of the old idea?
Was it germane for the prospect of dire disaster to others to pass so
readUy to the conception that he himself must bear it all and alone?
Did he accept the r61e of suffering in any degree as a self-imposed
penance for his mistake?
After the "quest for death" began why should there be any

404 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
secrecy about bis Messianity? If we grant the great change in Jesus'
plans as Schweitzer conceives it, its most probable objective cause was
one to which he does not aUude, viz., during or before the absence of the
Twelve Jesus had learned something concerning the pagan conceptions
of a dying god in the sense of Frazer, etc., and had passed in some sense
and degree from the Jewish to the gentile conception of the way of
salvation. He, hke Paul, saw a great and new light, although a very
different one. If a king, quasi-king, or god, like Osiris, Attis, Demeter,
or Mithra, died originally in the fall to return in the spring, that was
indeed better than that all or many should suffer. This may have
suggested the new or greatly modified role. The Jewish ideas of vica
rious offerings for ransom and atonement were now supplemented in
Jesus' mind by those of the immolation of a royal or divine being.
The ancient Jews were far beyond the old custom of human sacrifices,
and Yahveh had long accepted buUs, rams, and even turtle-doves;
but they knew nothing of offering up men of low or high degree, still
less royalty, and least of all deities. But by the new turn of Jesus'
thoughts his sense of self-divinity must have been greatly augmented
along with his conception of his own worth and dignity. Such a being
as he now deemed himself could die for many and they go free. The
suffering servant of Yahveh is not offered up for others. He is only
the personified soul of the race itself, and endures to the end, no matter
how afflicted. Not so the old cult quests of the mystery religions of
the lands bounding the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt around to
Thrace. Jesus on this view found himself, we know not how, driven
by a new culture current, more conformable to Paul's idea of vicarious
atonement than to his own previous conception. His present new
view, then, conforms not only to the Jewish but at many points even
more closely to the old gentile religions which originated in nature
worship; or rather it was a new synthesis, and hence of incalculably
greater scope and efficiency.
The inner cause for Jesus' conversion from his first to his second
plan, assuming this to have occurred, must have been that something
had increased his certainty that he was the Messiah, and given a
greatly enhanced sense of the dignity of this office. The greater he
felt this and himself to be, the more effective would be his self-immola
tion. Perhaps this would account for his change to a " quest of death,"
without assuming discouragement over the results of the initial propa-

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 405
ganda of his foUowers. To consent to die is far more than to accept
tribulation, and he may have felt that his psychalgia in doing the former
was equal to the sum of that of many others who underwent affliction.
Also, the more superman he felt himself to be, the greater the quantum
of affliction necessary to quench his soul. Thus, with every addition
to the sum total of affirmation of fife and its negation, ..the larger the
number of others his experience would exempt from the need of suffer
ing. If he really deliberately provoked his enemies to kill him, one
motive might have been thereby to enhance their guilt. Feeling him
self divine, so that it would be a sacrilege to lay violent hands on him,
every offence committed against his person would be vastly more hein
ous than if against a mere man who had none of this inviolability.
Hence their punishment would be both greater and surer. It would
provoke the Father to hurry the intervention of justice. To get him
self abused and slain must arouse Yahveh to make an end of his delay
and to come quickly to wreak vengeance on those who dared to do
violence to his only Son. Perhaps Jesus felt that his extremity would
afford the Lord not only an opportunity but an irresistible incentive
to come quickly. Every new adversity on the way to death would be a
new call to God to appear and stop the tragedy before the final scene.
This is psychologicaUy natural. But it was not done in a paroxysm of
hate, suffering himself in order that his enemies might suffer more.
It was rather a drastic and desperate appeal to the Father to delay no
longer, but to arouse himself from his apathy and to bring in the King
dom by giving to both good and bad their meet reward. But even this
last desperate and pathetic appeal failed, and the awful tragedy pro
ceeded to its fatal and pathetic end. Even if Jesus' course was not
without a suggestion of patheticism, it was based on an invincible belief
that the cosmos and its Lord were moral to the core. Perhaps the
pathos of it was that he never dreamed, when he set his face toward
Jerusalem and death, that he would be called on reaUy to go on to the
tragic end. On this view he must have died in the agony of utter de
spair, feefing that his sense of Messianity was a delusion. Still,
although he felt forsaken he never renounced or denounced the
Father so that there is no intimation that his faith in the ultimate
coming of the Kingdom was weakened. It was only stiU further
procrastination. So far, then, this interpretation conforms to
psychological laws. All this might normally have happened, and it

406 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
is for textual criticism and history to determine whether or not it did
actuaUy occur here.
(d) Was there sufficient motivation for the passion for secrecy
on the part of Jesus as to his conviction that he was the Messiah?
Incomplete certainty would have been one motive, but his conviction,
according to the eschatologists, was no less than plenary at the begin
ning of the second period, and then it was that he came nearest to
betraying it. Before this it may not have been complete, and later he
may have had moments of waning faith in himself. But why, during
the time he felt surest of it, should he have hesitated to teU his inti
mates? Megalomaniacs often persistently tend to conceal their de
lusions of greatness from others, and it is only when they become
pretty weU fixed in their conviction of them that they speak of them
openly. A king's son, reared among peasants, having just found out
his royal parentage, might hesitate before reveahng his newfound dig
nity to his humble companions. To do so might mean weakness and
vanity, and might alienate his closest friends by inciting jealousy.
It is impossible to explain Jesus' reticence on the subject without be
heving that he felt his disciples incapable of comprehending or sym
pathizing with his claims. He felt them to be vessels unfit for being
repositories of his sacredly cherished secret. He could not take them
into his confidence, much as he yearned to do so, because he felt them
incompetent, untrustworthy, or perhaps both. He could tell them of
a new and higher order of things, but not that he was the destined,
though incognito, head of that Kingdom. They could help him pre
pare the way for it; but he whom they knew in daily intercourse —
walking, talking, eating, and perhaps sleeping with them — dared not
teU them that he was indeed the Christ. Paul, who knew him not in
the flesh, could conceive him thus; but the disciples were too much
like his parents and townspeople, and knew him too familiarly. This
imphed no flaws in his hfe, but only that he did not conform to their
ideas of Messianity. They did not conceive it as so humble and simple.
The disparity between his conception of it and theirs, though perhaps
aU the whfie slowly diminishing, was too great to be spanned by an
open avowal without a shock involving obvious risks which he hesi
tated to take, although he was always striving to prepare them for it;
not "playing" with it as Schweitzer says, but seeking to lead them
toward it, step by step, without revealing to them his purpose to do so.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 407
If they rejected it, their intimate relationships would be severed, while
if they accepted it, the impetuous zeal or indiscretion of some of them
might jeopardize aU. They would be sure both to misconceive it and
to blazon it abroad with no discretion as to fit time, seasons, or persons.
Therefore it must remain double-locked in his own breast, somewhat as
certain adult secrets are withheld from children both because they
cannot really grasp their truth and because they would have no reserves
in betraying them where they should not. When his secret led him to
enter upon the road toward death, he was still less able to explain to
them his new Messianic motives, for these were now much harder for
them to understand. Jesus himself had just attained these new in
sights, and this step in advance greatly increased the distance between
his point of view and theirs. They knew nothing of the gentile cults of
dying and rising gods or culture heroes. This involved the entrance of
a new and alien strain of cult and tradition. Moreover, they clung to
him as their leader into the Kingdom, and the possibifity of his death
would fill them all with consternation, and so he had to remain un
known to them to the end. The transfiguration was a wish-dream
symbolizing how different he would appear to his friends if they really
had known him as he felt himself to be. The disparity between what
they thought of him and what he thought of himself was great and
growing, and he may have brooded much over it as a haunting and
painful theme. It was also a sense of just this disparity, that came
home to his followers after they thought him arisen, which constituted
the psychological basis for the avidity with which the theological
representations of his two states of humility and exaltation were ac
cepted. "How familiar we were, yet how little we knew him," they
must often afterward have mused. How this would reinforce their
sense of the pathos of his end, how strongly such afterthoughts would
tend to bring him back and prompt his friends to rehve every item of
memory or association with him, and how inevitably it would predis
pose them to react to the faintest hint or suggestion that he had sur
vived or returned, and to cherish the shghtest pretext for any such
behef that could be found!
(e) Jesus died, on this view, thinking his second plan a more utter
failure than the first had been, the most pitiable and unconsolable of
all deaths in history. He had striven for the highest and sacrificed
everything for nothing, as if he were God's fool and lunatic. His death

408 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
was not a dehberate suicide to save others, such as many heroes,
known and unknown to fame, have committed. His motivation was
purely soteriological, but his theory of forcing Yahveh's hand was in
sane and his method had proven absurd, and when he expired super
natural intervention seemed not nearer but further off, and more hope
less than ever. His attempt to take the Kingdom by force had failed,
and very likely aU hope that he would return in glory and judge the
world was entirely extinct in his own soul, even though this was the
last and most fondly cherished of his delusions. How, then, and in
what way, did his grave become the cradle of the new Kingdom and of
the Church that bears his name? It is just here that we find the most
critical point of the eschatological scheme. Was it necessary that
every scintilla of hope in Jesus' breast should die out in order to make
his self-immolation complete? To have gone through the act of death
knowing that he was merely sloughing off mortal habiliments to emerge
at once in glory, would have involved no sacrifice but might have even
been prompted by the crassest selfishness. This would be in the fine
of even animal instincts as old as impupation. Were this all he could
have laughed death in the face and defied him to do his worst. Thou
sands of martyrs did this later, sustained only by the hope of personal
resurgence into the heavenly Kingdom. We have long been taught
by the Church that his death was the more bitter and tragic because
he was divine; but with a plenary sense of his divinity and assurance of
Resurrection his death was only a role and its pain at worst only a
birth-pang. If, however, his sense of sonship itself was extinguished,
he might have feared, if not extinction, the very torments of heU, for
what else can the old and persistent belief that he went among the
damned mean if not that he felt himself one of them? This sense must
have been primal, and the interpretation of his supreme psychalgia on
the cross as a visit to Hades, in order to preach to or rescue its inmates,
was due to a later ambivalent swing of the pendulum over toward an
optimistic interpretation of the most pessimistic of facts, all effected
under the impulsion of the subsequent faith in the Resurrection. On
this view Jesus, between the beginning of his second period and the
moment of his death, passed all the way from full assurances of his
Messianity down to the extreme "negative eudaimonism" of believing
himself the one of all others most accursed of God. All the great
affirmations that made him regarded as the resurrected Redeemer and

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 409
reinstated him so gloriously in the faith of the world as Ml that he
ever thought himself to be when at the acme of his own belief in his
Messianism came later. These were due to the reaction that took place
in the souls of his chosen companions, headed by Peter, who was perhaps
for a crucial moment the only believer in the Resurrection, but were
reinforced later by a rapidly widening consensus that as early as Pente
cost had developed to an almost cataleptic certainty.
The psychological root of the whole eschatological theory is
whether the pathos of such a situation can be conceived of as so in
tense, so appealing to the individual and to the folk-soul as to compel
both to react to it by affirming in the face of fact that (a) Jesus did
overcome death and come back a victor over and not defeated by the
Great Enemy, and that (b) Jesus' life-career had been planned before
hand and carried out with no change of purpose; that there was never
a moment or a sign of doubt of his own divinity, and never a thought
of any possible alteration of purpose.
Both these beliefs are the diametrical opposite of the truth in the
case. In answer to the problem here presented we must remember
how the fondest human wishes often tend to find or make modes of
their realization almost in direct proportion as they are thwarted, and
that even dreams that express the will to befieve tend to be accepted
as facts. WiU and wish have thus often denied the most palpable
facts and given the utmost reahty to the most baseless fictions. But
such tendencies could never have created ex nihilo all the great affirma
tions of Resurrection, Judgment, the Kingdom, etc., without a norm
or modulus to give them current form and content. This must have
been found in Jesus' own idea of himself and his work when his work
was at its highest and best. The chief dynamic agent in this post
humous reaffirmation of the best that had been in him was pathos.
This contributed, perhaps more than anything else, to make the first
faint suggestion of his return pass so soon and rapidly up the scale
of certainty to complete and triumphant assertion. The rest fol
lowed naturally, and made this conviction of Jesus that he was to re
turn, but which he abandoned at the end, accepted along with his own
highest valuation of himself. Thus, suppose that the stupendous
miracle of the Resurrection actually occurred; the other no less stu
pendous psychological miracle would yet remain to be accounted for,
viz., how men first came to befieve in such a monstrous and absurd

410 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
thing, so contradictory to all human experience, and why behef in
such a surd has been held to ever since with such pertinacity. Never
had fate been so cruel to one so pure and innocent, perhaps beautiful,
deep-souled, intuitive, sincere, who in his prime was foredoomed to
the cruelest death. Each of these attributes, even when alone, has
been wont to arouse apotheosizing tendencies. The modern world
tends to forget the power of pathos of which Jesus' death was the
world's supreme masterpiece, which no tragedy, antique or modern,
has ever approached. The ancient Hebrews had pitied themselves
uniquely and cumulatively, and now in the survivors of Jesus' circle
aU these tendencies were brought to a sharp focus in one man and his
supreme act that typified all the age-long sufferings of the race, of
which he thought himself the totemic representative or type-man.
Thus Jewish persistence of hope concentrated itself upon a unipersonal
object. Also, and what was far more to the point, his fate was sym
bolic of that of his people. If his hfe had reaUy gone out in despair,
it prefigured the extinction of hope for his race. It, too, would end as
he had ended. Acceptance of the main features of Jesus' eschatology
was thus both pre- and over-determined by the conscious and uncon
scious analogies involved in it. To accept his despair as final and pro
phetic would be ominous that God had forsaken his race, while con
versely his Resurrection and rehabilitation would only express the
persistent hope of the Jews that they would be reestablished in the
world along the lines of their faith in the promises. If Jesus survived
the extreme calamity, and came back to judge and rule, so the chosen
people could not be overwhelmed, but would come to rule the earth.
Thus the choicest treasure of the Hebrew soul, transferred and trans-
valuated, went over into the new Christian consciousness that arose
from Jesus' tomb. All this had reaUy occurred before the vision that
came to Paul on his way to Damascus, so that in preaching Jesus he
was in a sense only continuing to advance the cause that he had
striven to promote as a persecutor, only now it is Judaism sublimated
and freed from its literalism and exclusiveness. Thus primitive
Christianity was Judaism resurrected and transformed, re-asserting
its old faith in the Covenant, but extending its benefits to the elect
among the gentiles, as indeed had to be done because so few within
the old pale had penetration enough to see the old in its transfigured
new form. Thus the heart and soul of the old Hebrew dispensation

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 411
went over into the new, leaving the remainder to lapse to still lower
stages of formalism, literalism, and religious materialism, until it
became fittle more than a cast or husk from which hfe had departed.
Thus Jesus did come back, and speedily, before the Gospels were
written, not as he expected but more effectively. The lurid imagery
of his eschatology faded. Wherever it has had recrudescence in fanatic
texts later, it has been rank and lush for a season, but has soon proven
to be only a deciduous foliage. It left as its far more precious and
perennial result a futuristic attitude of soul inspired by hope for both
the individual and the race. It loosened and enriched the soil for all
conceptions of progress, created ideals of evolution, filled men with the
buoyant sense that the best things have not happened yet, gave am
bition, made the old narrow prophetism a diffusive power, and gave a
courage and hope that enabled the human race to endure the tragedy
of the fall of the old states, cultures, and civilizations. Much of this
general new courageousness, perhaps too much of it, went over into the
specific form of a befief in personal immortality. If this befief often
tended to be a fetishistic form of the great new wave of futurism, so
that the impulses to reform this world were weakened, it nevertheless
conserved a precious thing through ages so troubled that had it been
only socially conceived it would have been utterly lost. The Church
was the external form which the new futurism took on in its immanent
mundane sphere, always correlated with the thought-forms of a trans
cendental heavenly future. The hope and the treasure of faUing
States went over to it. But for it the world might have despaired.
The Kingdom it conceived could only have its symbol or preparatory
school on this earth; but this helped men to look away from and beyond
the present at times and places, or in circumstances when they needed
to do so, if they were not to lose hope. On the eschatological theory
everything Jesus and his foUowers taught focussed on some mood and
tense of the single word — hope. Everything the Christian says is a
variation on this theme, and aU he does is to sustain and increase it.
If this view has at last reaUy found the true Jesus unknown even to the
Evangelists his message to us is that, instead of being too absorbed in
the past or even in the here and now, our chief endeavour must be to
construe the future. It follows, of course, since this is so uncertain
as to admit of countless constructions, that we shall make mistakes as
Jesus did in his plan, and so change to a second; nor is this any ground

412 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
of disparagement, because the future must ever be recast. It is
rather to his glory that he could change and readjust to new insights,
for all interested in the future must ever do this. It is less to his credit,
however, that he died in despair because he realized that his second
plan had miscarried. A third, fourth, or series of other programs
would surely have included among them that of waiting, but this his
impetuous soul could not do. Perhaps if he had not followed the issue
to a fatal termination, but had lived on to a good old age, he would
have come to accept some other and more deliberate program for the
advent of the Kingdom, and have realized that the essential thing was
that it would and must come at some dateless and perhaps very remote
time, whether suddenly or gradually, and that constant expectant
tension with variable direction of orientation to it was the main thing.
The eschatological view certainly also makes Jesus seem far more
historic, because the issues involved are so vital and the psychic
processes which concern us here are so true, to the nature of the soul,
although nearly aU the phenomena are those of unusual altitude. Al
though the whole is entirely without precedent, the items of which it
is composed have, some of them, innumerable analogies and paraUels
in human history and experience. Here they are aU summated and
synthetized, and to re-realize the whole Gospel story from this new
standpoint exalts the soul, augments its energies, gives new immunity
against being ensnared in narrow and partial views, tends to purge
many imperfections, makes the central figure of the New Testament
nearer, more attractive, imposing, and, in a word, more sublime and
Godlike in its solitary effort to find and open a new and true way of
salvation for man.
Thus in Jesus the futurism of aU the prophets culminated. The
protensive diathesis of youth, of ascendent races; the mood of dawn
and springtide, of abounding vitality and health or wholeness, aggres
sive energy, self-affirmation; the excelsior spirit of ambition; the zeal
that would reform society and convert the world; the feeling that man
as he is is but the embryo of what he is to become as superman; the
impulse that would intensify the present because it is parturient of a
far greater and better age, that beheves in a golden age but conceives
it as future rather than as past; the religion of eugenics, which holds
that the present generation should live solely in the interests of the
countless generations to be born from it, and to which the duty of all

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 413
duties is to transmit the torch of life undimmed and burning ever
brighter; the mania for progress and the phobia of stagnation or con
servatism; the supreme will to serve and live for a long fine of posterity
rather than to revere ancestors; the feeling that great destinies depend
upon present decisions — all these are distinctively Christian in their
psychogenesis. Their organ is faith; their Einstellung or attitude is
something which Jesus, if he did not bring it into the world, supremely
illustrates. It calls to the world to think more in the future tense,
and it is this that reanimates and starts on the upward track all races
and individuals that have adopted the Christian viewpoint. If Jesus
lost the true temporal perspective of the Kingdom and thought the
righteous would inherit the new earth at once, that only intensified
this Stellungsnahme toward the hereafter. It is precisely this that
gives us the new key by which psychology is now able to unlock the very
secret soul of Jesus himself, which has never been understood before,
and which but one Christologist, 0. Holtzmann, has ever glimpsed,
although Schweitzer, who one would think would be the first to see,
refuses to admit it. Living as Jesus did in this highly wrought state
of expectancy, his powers were subjected to the greatest stimulus and
strain which could be put upon them, and therefore, though not an
ecstatic in the sense Holtzmann urges, he was more or less erethic, more
habitually in a state of exaltation or second breath, illustrating what
we now term "the higher powers of man." This tiptoe or superlative
state is not ecstasy in the clinical sense, but is inebriation with great
ideas in Plato's sense. In this temperament inhibition and restraint
have less power to fetter the soul, and so it is more unreserved to let
itself go with abandon in response to the incitations of each occasion.
In such a disposition anger can blaze forth without stint, and love
and, devotion are no less unrepressed. Fasting, hardship, heroism
in the face of danger, living completely for one's ideal, moods of de
pression and of elevation, may all go to the limit. Now the soul is the
victim of hope, now of despair, and each in turn fills the whole field of
consciousness and evicts its opposite. Only such hves can exhaust
the possibifities of individual, and in a sense of racial, experience.
Every passing movement of such souls is prone to be superlative.
The ordinary repressions that cramp and warp most are cast to the
winds. If in such a disposition the psychic structure is sound and the
hfe pure, with no dangerous secrets hable to be betrayed because there

414 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
is nothing to conceal, there is no thought of consistency, the fetish
of souls that feel themselves lacking in organic unity and in danger of
fission or dissolution into multiple personahties, for there is no peril in
escaping the conventions, whether of behef or conduct. If we are right
in claiming for Jesus this kind of character we can understand why he
seemed so many different sorts of persons at different times, and also
why those who try to delineate him now differ so widely. The har
mony of his powers was too deep to be disturbed by his reactions to
different solicitations. Such characters seem very polymorphic to
others, but they exist and constitute a true ethological species. They
are not multipersonal in a pathological sense, and the point of our con
tention is that while they do bear a very close resemblance to fictive
personalities that are the product of syncretism, they are not so, but
are in a sense more real than any other type. In fact, only in free
energetic souls keyed to a constant high pitch, as Jesus was by his
eschatological concepts of the world and his view of his own functions,
can we have the generic type of individual. In such the race finds
fullest expression in the life of the individual. This type of person
can best represent in his own life that of the race, which should find
ample expression in each. Thus the eschatological concepts and an
erethic disposition would seem almost inseparable, each as cause and
effect of the other. To the amplification and the proof of this position
we shaU return later.
Consciousness also gave an unprecedented reinforcement to the
moral sense. In the impending world-assize not only outer but inner
iniquity meets an awful doom, and goodness wfil have its glorious re
ward. Friends wfil be separated and consigned to the most opposite
fates. The age of concealment and procrastination is finished. Con
version, not merely of the intellect in the sense of Plato's myth of the
cave, but of heart, will, and the conduct of life, is imperative. There
is no escape from the purgation of fire save by repentance. All not
found fit to enter the heavenly Kingdom wfil go to the counter-kingdom
of Satan. Man is at the cross-roads and must choose, for there is
no middle course. If a great pestilence were to come and men had to
reconstruct their diet and regimen, the principles of personal and pub-
he hygiene would be reinforced by all the instincts of self-preservation.
Thus Jesus' eschatology reinforced moral hygiene, and thus his fu
turism made the world more keenly conscious of sin than ever before.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 415
This construed the world as through and through moral, with ethical
laws supreme, established a new and stronger association between
evil-doing and fear, which had thus a new deterrent if not preventive
power. The age-long sin scare which eschatology threw into the souls
of men was a drastic moral pedagogy, and has left some scars, as seen in
the ethically disequfiibrated, but on the whole it was the most benef
icent and efficient autotherapy Mansoul has ever brought upon itself,
and saved the race from being submerged in the flood of putrid cor
ruption which foUowed the coUapse of the old civilizations under the
successive waves of barbaric invasion. Hell,1 the psychology of which
we are just beginning to understand aright, became very real and near,
culminating in Dante, and death became a veritable muse and a sym
bol of the yet more dreadful second death. Thanatophobia2 and
gennaphobia were harnessed up with harmatophobia. It is the puny
fashion of our age to distrust fear cures, and, indeed, they are always
dangerous to weakfings, but we forget that fear is the beginning of
wisdom, and that those who have feared wisely and well have inherited
the earth; for fear is only the anticipation of pain. We forget that
fear of disease created medicine and hygiene; that fear of death has
been the chief factor in the evolution of the doctrine of immortality
as compensation for mortality; that social and pofitical institutions
evolve from fear of anarchy; that the Church, insurance, and even
science, that is making man the master instead of the slave of nature,
are in no small degree products of fear; and that one of the chief spurs
of ambition to make the most and best of our individual lives springs
from the fear of inferiority or mediocrity. To this emotion eschatology
made the strongest of all possible appeals, and Christian virtue owes
it a debt it can never estimate.
Was the real historic Jesus, as the psychologist may now conceive
him in the new light of modern liberal studies, a truly great man?
And if so how great was he, and wherein consisted his superiority?
Paidologists are now learning how hard it is to grade intelligence even
in children and to establish norms and standards by which to distin
guish the normal from the subnormal. Halls of fame, learned academies,
"Who's Who," industrial corporations, efficiency experts, anthro
pologists, psychologists, characterologists, eugenists, and the psychol-
>C F. Sparkman: "Satan and His Ancestors." Jour. Relig. Psychol., 1912, vol. s, PP- 52-85, and 163-194. F. T.
Hall: "The Pedigree of the Devil." Also Tompson, i883^p. 256.
2G. Stanley Hall: "Thanatophobia and Immortality." Am. Jour. Psychol., 1915, vol. 26, pp. 550-613.

416 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
ogists of genius and talent and the analyzers of the biographies of great
men, are all seeking to assort and grade the human qualities that make
up the few personalities that tower highest above the rank and file
of mankind. We have already from several sources attempts to fore
cast the overman of the future, from Aristotle's magnanimous man, the
true aristocrat, and the Stoic sage, down to Zarathustra.
What is the place of Jesus amidst aU these modern criteria and
evaluations of men? The old diploma of greatness was divinitization,
and of no one has this been more persistently urged. This old pedestal
or supreme encomium, despite the unanimity of the consensus of the
past, no longer suffices, at least for many. Hegel said in substance
that the great were those who forced mankind to discuss and explain
them until different groups of interpreters arose and contended with
one another. This process began for Jesus with the authors of the epis
tles and Gospels, or before, and for two miUennia he has been more
studied, written, and thought of than any other person in history.
But fame alone is not a test of true inner greatness. Carlyle said great
men are those who change the current of history. Jesus certainly
marked the dawn of our new era. Emerson stressed the opening of
new culture fields and trends, and measured on this scale Jesus cer
tainly towers above all others. But the question stiU remains how
much of the movement that bears his name was his own personal work,
and whether but for his successors any such institution as the Church
would have arisen, for we are stiU unable to enucleate with confidence
just what Jesus was, did, and said. Since Galton,1 heredity has been
stressed, and we have voluminous if inconclusive discussions of the
relative value of inheritance and environment. Reibmayer2 thinks
that talent and genius are more commonly products of settled but sim
ple life with agriculture and trade, but that talent is more prone to
spring from inbreeding where parents differ fittle, while genius is more
often a product of cross-breeding between parents of different families,
stations, or even races. How alert the earliest followers of Jesus were
to the necessity of giving him the best of pedigrees by making him at
once the son of David and of God, and by beatifying his mother, we
saw in Chapter 4. Whatever our interpretation of the earliest records,
there is not only no indication of any handicap but much that was

•Galton: "Hereditary Genius." 1892, 379 P-
2"Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talents und Genies." 2 Bande, 1908. See especially Bd. 1, S. 513 el seq.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 417
favourable for subsequent greatness in both his ancestry and his early
environment. The same may be said of the latter if we agree with
Freudians, who deem greatness largely due to infantile experiences. Joly /
Tiirck,2 and especially Fischer,3 as well as H. Ellis4 and many others, have
attempted to define both the conditions and the very many and com
plex characteristics of greatness, which Lombroso,5 Nordau6 and their
numerous followers always think tainted with insanity, while Hirsch7
seeks to trace the genesis of fame.
(A) Amidst all the wide diversity of opinion in hterature one
point of unanimity that stands out, perhaps before all others, and one
very significant for the characterization of Jesus, is that greatness in
volves the union of the most opposite quahties. The great man must
be at once very receptive and very active. He must be passive and
docile and accept facts as they are, even if it has to be with stoicism
and resignation. He must yield to present reality with utter acquies
cence until he grasps it completely, not fly from or ignore it because it
is disagreeable to face if it goes counter to all his wishes and prejudices.
He must understand the misunderstandings of his enemies, and antici
pate the worst that they can say or do. He must appreciate obstacles
and difficulties at their full value. He must be able to see and even
take the other side temporarily and with Einfuhlung. He must take
pleasure in the range of his sympathies and, if need be, "accept the
inevitable with joy " in the sense of Seneca. But on the other hand, this
consummation of the noetic must not check but rather excite a counter-
conative reaction if he is sure he is right. Knowing what he is up
against, he must not he down or quit, but cling to his purpose tena
ciously with the utmost courage and perseverance. He must glory in
conflict, love danger, enjoy the maximum of effort and suffering, and if
things are not according to his will must make them so. He must
enlist for this purpose every resource he can summon, within or without,
be ready constantly to modify, if necessary, not only methods but his
initial impulsion, and must continue to do so indefinitely until his goal
is attained. The energy of his aggressiveness must bend other wfils,

'"Psychologie des grandes hommes." Paris, 1883, 280 p.
'"The Man of Genius." Schwerin, 1914, 483 P-
»"Der Grossgeist des hSchste menschliche Ideal." 1008, 280 p.
«"A Study of British Genius," 1904, 300 p.
5"L'homme de genie." Paris, 1889, 499 P-
6"Degeneration." 7th ed. London, 1893, 560 p.
'"Die Genesis des Ruhmes." 1914, 285 p.

418 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
beat down or evade all opposition; and he must often seem relentless if
not pitiless in this work. Most of the world's ilite are great either in
insight or in action, but very few indeed combine the two in due pro
portion. Tiirck and the Freudians best describe this amphibole, and
religionists, e. g., Cromwell and his followers so far as they were ab
jectly passive toward God and imperative and domineering toward the
world, best illustrate it. In this respect of course Jesus is supreme.
He, however, found it hard to accept the god of things as they are,
although he went to the limit of voluntarily meeting death. So intent
was he upon his own supreme affirmation of will in establishing the
Kingdom, that he perhaps fell short of appreciating the strength of the
opposition, unless, of course, he really meant to die as he did, and trust
all to the reaction thus provoked. In that case he measures up to the
criterion more than any other. Knowing Satan and all the mundane
powers arrayed against him for all they were and could do, he never
theless challenged and overcame them. Jesus was not one whose
intellect paralyzed his will, like Hamlet, or perverted it, like Faust.
Nor was he a great executive of ill-laid plans, or a hero of a mistaken
cause or of a good one foolishly served. He was an expert in both the
depth and truth of his religious insights. The work he organized,
considering the human material he had to deal with and the short time
he believed was left before the consummation of the existing order of
things, could hardly have been improved upon. If, however, he planned
by his death to spur others to carry on his work as they did, his mas
tery of means to this end was above our full comprehension even yet,
for not only was his will power Stoic and even Promethean, but his
sagacity and foresight remain in a class by themselves. H. Bushnell1
thought him "a great social and religious architect with a plan em
bracing ages," and that his work of establishing the Kingdom, humanly
impossible, was the chief proof that he was more than a man. Of the
two primitive documents which so many critics now believe to have
been the precursors of our Gospels, the Ur-Markus and the logia,
the former was'mainly concerned with what Jesus did and the latter with
what he taught, thought, or said, as if the first two groups of his fol
lowers and the first two lines of tradition, one stressing his practice and
the other his theory of life, were for a time rival parties, perhaps, which
our Gospels strove to synthetize. So, in the history of theology, we
'"The Character of Jesus." New York, 1895.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 419
find interest now in Christ's work and now in his words paramount.
Are we not thus justified in inferring a high and a uniquely well-
balanced development of both will and intellect in Jesus?
(B) Another trait always prominent in the characterization of
great men, and illustrated in the hundreds of biographies that have
lately been so carefully rummaged in quest of the secret of eminence, is
that they have exceptional experience with both the extremes of plea
sure and pain. They both suffer and enjoy keenly, and fate often leads
them to the superlative degree of both. The power to respond to one
does not destroy, but heightens, the power of response to the other.
Such men can be afflicted and even long depressed without settling
into melanchoha, and can exult with euphoria and enjoy all the real
pleasures of hfe without abnormal exaltation. Pleasure and pain are
the two poles of experience, the sovereign motives and masters of life,
which is made up of efforts to enlarge the field of the former and to reduce
that of the latter. Too much as weU as too fittle of either dwarfs,
arrests, or perverts, just as children need both to laugh and to cry.
This power of response to either, together with rebound and resilience
between the optimistic and the pessimistic experiences and interpreta
tions of fife, exploring each to its limit without becoming its captive,
gives the soul range, richness, variety; and not only greatness but
sanity depends upon this elasticity, for most forms of alienation begin
in psychalgia or hypereuphoria. Every novel or drama is an exercise
in alternations between the tension of imminent danger and the re
laxation of the happy ending, and this is a very potent preventive and
psychotherapy in securing to the mind unity and safeguarding it
against danger of fission. All life is cadenced between work and play,
striving and recreation, failure and success, defeats and victories, and
the great soul hungers for both, loves risks and hardships as well as
enjoyments. Small men gravitate predominantly toward the one or
the other, and make but short, infrequent, and timid excursions over
into the domain of the other.
How does Jesus as we now understand him measure up on this
standard? Renan, Haase, and Keim long ago pointed out his aversion
to asceticism, his love of the joys of life, and even Strauss spoke of his
gentle Heiterkeit. In 1876 A. Wunsche pubhshed his " Der lebensfreu-
dige Jesu," representing him as exultant, triumphant, and prone to
indulge in all innocent joys of life, and thrilled with success. He sought

420 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
to "deliver the figure of Jesus from the unhistorical shadows in which it
has lain, and set it in the sunshine where it belongs." Six years earlier,
however, in 1870, Wiinsche had published his "Die Leiden des
Messias" which represents Jesus as the man of sorrows and the suffer
ing servant of Yahveh, as dark a picture as the former was a bright one,
leaving us a little uncertain how much of the difference between these
two books was due to a deep change of conviction on the author's part
or to a mere change of attitude and theme. Zangwfil describes Jesus
not as a "tortured God" but as a "joyous comrade." Dawson says of
Christ, "He became the incarnation of the spirit of joy, the symbol of
the bliss of life," and " Christ's gracious gaiety of heart proved conta
gious," etc.1 Recent works still more popular show the same tendency
to react from the Puritan rancour against happiness. R. Law2 has a
chapter each upon his joy and his geniality. A. Whyte,3 in describing
the thirty-three dramatis personae in the New Testament, gives a some
what humorous turn to the accounts of the enemy who sowed tares by
night, the man who sowed a grain of mustard seed, the one who found
a great treasure in the field, the wedding guest in unfitting costume,
and the children dancing in the market place. G. W. Buckley4 goes
still further in his attempt to "resurrect Jesus from theology and
humanize him." He urges that Jesus had a keen sense of the comedy
of life; that he admired the brilliant repartee of the Canaanite woman to
his saying that it was not meet to give the children's bread to the dogs,
to which she retorted that the dogs might eat the crumbs. It was
reaUy not her faith but her wit and humour which made him yield.
The new piece in the old garment describes a comic thing. So does
the story of the man waking his neighbour because he has a hungry
guest; of the judge who yielded because he feared the woman's con
tinual coming; the saying that no one can serve two masters; the asking
bread and giving a stone; the woman who rejoiced over the finding of a
penny. These to Buckley are "realistic, palpable hits." He sees
humour, too, in the story of the foolish virgins. This sense of humour
made the common people hear him gladly. The stupidity and faux pas
of the disciples, who understood him as little as Goethe's Wagner under
stood Faust; the address to the soul, "Thou hast much goods laid up,"
'See Peabody's "Jesus and the Christian Character." 190J, 48 p.
«"The Emotions of Jesus." 1915, 154 p.
'"Bible Characters; Our Lord's Character." Chicago, 311 p.
'"The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus." Boston, 1901, 213 p.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 421
which suggests Holbein's " Dance of Death"; the admonition not to sit
in the chief seat at a feast, or ask to dinner only those who will ask you
to dine in turn; these and the many pithy epigrammatic sayings that
the world knows by heart show that Jesus was a great conversationalist,
as witty as he was wise; that he was as ready with pleasantry, satire,
ridicule, and irony as he was with invectives. Perhaps no one goes
quite so far as Bousset1 in making the joy of life the chief trait of Jesus.
Most now think the first part of Jesus' career more joyous and the
last part more sad. If we are told that he wept, but not that he
laughed, as if, like Chesterfield, he was one of Sully's2 misogelasts
or laughter-haters or phobiacs (and no artist ever yet dared to make
him smile), he must nevertheless have had sources and times of ecstatic
joy in communion with God, made Eureka discoveries of new insights,
felt the satisfaction of attaining ineluctable certainties where others
wandered in doubt.
But whatever was the case with Jesus' own experiences, his imme
diate foUowers, between the time he died the most disgraceful of deaths
and his body was sealed in the tomb or lost and their full conviction
that he had risen and ascended, passed from the nadir of despair to
the zenith of exaltation at Pentecost. Their spirits, at least meta
phorically, passed through heU and up to heaven. The story of the
cross and its sequel is the world's masterpiece of pathos and of triumph;
and this great algedonic ebb and flow constitute the world's chief
autotherapy, its immunity-bath against being finally overwhelmed
by pain and disaster on the one hand, or on the other, by intoxication
with inebriating joy because the king of terrors has been overcome.
Thus they could look death in the face and defy him to do his worst,
as countless martyrs did in the nine persecutions that followed. (See
the chapter on the Death and Resurrection.) In fact, the very core of
Christianity consists in a discipline in meeting pleasure and pain,
without going through which adolescence, the golden period of life, is
incomplete and suffers arrest, so that the novitiate to life is unprepared
to meet it, and his poise and equilibrium between the two chief dangers
and opportunities remain unsafeguarded. (See my "Adolescence,"
Vol. 2, chapter 14, "Adolescent Psychology of Conversion. ")
(C) AU characterizations of greatness specify alternations between

'"Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum." 1892, 130 p.
"See his "Essay on Laughter." 1902, 44' P-

422 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
solitude and society, or between subjective and objective life. The
Cathohc Church has always found a soul-cure in the "retreat."
Modern morafists, especially the French ethical writers for young
people, emphasize a silent hour for meditation or introspection.1 The
psychology of solitude shows its high ethical value for those who are
great enough to avoid its dangers.2 As MacNish shows, solitude
reinforces heredity; society and the objective hfe make for individual
adaptation to the environment. The desert, says Renan in substance,
perhaps even more than the mountain, has always been the stronghold
of great Semitic spirits and the cradle of great ideas. Aloneness
teaches self-knowledge, self-control, and reverence for inner oracles.
With social restraints and distractions removed, we are free to be and
to face ourselves. We get close to nature and to God. Hermits, ere
mites, cloistered monks, entertain and reinforce their own personalities
and incubate the supreme problems of hfe and death, good, evil, des
tiny, and providence. Tiirck and Fischer point out how often the very
greatest men even outside the Church remain cehbate, because their
affections are fixed on larger interests than those of the family, although
perhaps maintaining ideal relations to the other sex, as Wunsche
thinks Jesus did,3 pointing out the immense service women rendered
to the Church in apostolic and patristic times. Solitude, too, gives
true perspective, and inclines religious minds to prayer. Jesus knew
and used this resource to an unusual extent during all his career, from
the flight into the wilderness in order to muse on the staggering sug
gestions that came to him at the baptism, to Gethsemane. He often
took refuge from the multitude, escaped to northern Galilee when the
disciples were absent on their first missionary journey, and his habit
was not to fly from but to prepare for difficult emergencies. Some
writers make much of the secret hfe of Jesus, and OUivier4 believes that
in his infancy and youth he was much alone, partly on account of the
Herodian slaughter of so many near his own age. Although he was so
above those in his entourage that he must have felt isolated in their pres
ence, he nevertheless loved their companionship, had his favourites and
intimates, and has even been described as a "brilliant dialectician."
As one who loved to sharpen wits by dialogue and discussion in the

'See my "Educational Problems," Vol. i, chap. 5, on "Moral Education," passim.
JSmall: "On Some Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude." Fed. Sem., Apr., Jooo. vol, 7, pp. 13-69.
'"Jesu in seiner Stellung an die Frauen." 1872, 146 p.
'"La vie cachee de Jesu." Paris, 1904. 4°5 p.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 423
sense in which Plato commends this method of investigation, and took
pleasure in discourse with strangers, both men and women, although he
preferred as a teacher to communicate his own and God's truth, he still
took a true and pedagogic pleasure in answering questions and meeting
objections. His preparation was not that of a reader, as Plato re
proached Aristotle with being, but, as Plato claimed for himself, he
sought inner insights and was a true autodidact. Perhaps he did feel
the inspiration of attentive crowds, even though he never gave the set
sermon on the mount. He certainly was a master opportunist in seiz
ing on every occasion, as it arose, to impart his precepts, and was in vital
rapport with both the individuals and the groups he met, and his King
dom required every member of it to be an ideal socius, as Christian
socialism in both its narrower and larger sense is now abundantly tell
ing us. Both the agapce and the institution of the supper cement the
closest of all bonds between men, as the Fourth Gospel shows us, closer
than love between the sexes. Nothing is more contagious than reli
gious emotion.
(D) Great men often believe themselves inwardly influenced by
some power above themselves. This power has been very diversely
interpreted and has been assigned the most diverse functions. Muses,
guardian angels, individual guiding spirits, good and bad, fates, destiny,
fortune, luck, gorus, familiar spirits, etc., are all different names for it,
and it is thought sometimes to enter and control individuals until they
seem possessed as by alien personalities. Many feel themselves caught
up or borne along by a momentum not at their own command. If
these phenomena are predominantly inteUectual they are often con
ceived as inspiration or revelation; if mainly emotional, as ecstasy. If
the synergy of the afflatus is chiefly conative it may be thought a
categorical reinforcement of duty or a specifically decreed commission,
command, or calling from on high which, like Luther, they cannot re
sist. It may only gently dissuade, like Socrates' daimon, or issue
peremptory positive commands in an hallucinated voice. Its language
may be vision or the word of the Lord as it came to the prophets.
Sometimes it causes rapt trancoidal states, or it may hyperenergize the
active, efferent tracts. From shamanism and witchcraft to the
Convulsionnaires of St. Medard; from the mantic maenads to Shakers,
Jumpers, and speakers with tongues, we now know that it is only some
higher potentialization of the powers of the individual. Plato de-

424 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
scribed two kinds of delirium, one the furor poeticus that inspired great
creative works, especially in the domain of rehgion, art, and hterature,
while the other was insanity. Between the latter and genius, especially
since Lelut, Moreau, and Lombroso, a considerable and growing litera
ture1 has pointed out a relation. Whether we interpret these pheno
mena in the old ways as visitations from without or on high, or, as we
now know them to be, as incursions into consciousness from the sub
liminal realm, they are as real as second breath, and some degree of
these states is by no means uncommon, especially in vital and naive
souls. In its lesser degrees the subject feels free but with augmented
power, while in the higher degrees of it he feels himself a passive agent
and knows no more than do onlookers what he is going to say, see, hear,
or do next. His autistically active self becomes objective. At their
best these erethic states are simply the superfluity of vitality, and super
vene when the evolutionary nisus of the growth impulse is at its high
est tide; for evolution is the only true revelation. They represent
life at high pressure with aU its resources rung up, mobilized, and in
action. Instead of doing our work ourselves and with effort, we stand
off, look on, and see it done for us by some unusual, latent power.
Perhaps we accomplish prodigies, surprise ourselves, feel that we
are being used and swept along. What we deemed hard is easy, and
what was obscure clears up, for we feel clairvoyant, clairaudient, ob
sessed by our task, and borne along whether we will or not. We feel
informed by a higher wisdom than our own, and when we come back
to ourselves we review these experiences as if they pertained to another,
and they seem new to us. Of course experiences that foUow these
formulae occur also in neurotics and psycho tics, and the alien power may
be complex and develop into what seems another personality. Fanat
icism, too, might be characterized in some of the same terms, so that
all spirits have to be proved and tested. Again, the ardour of the
impulsion may be so great or long continued that the psychophysic
system of its victim may suffer lesions or impairments; but to be able
to summon such reserves in emergencies is wondrous gain, and it is no
whit more difficult to distinguish between right and wrong uses or re
sults of these experiences than between any problems of morals or of

•To cite a few, e. g., see P. Radestock: "Genie und Wahnsinn," 1S84. E. Murisier: "Les maladies du sentiment
religieux," 1901. j. F. Nisbet: "The Insanity of Genius," 6th ed., 1912. j. Morse: "Pathological Aspects of Religion "
1906. W. James: "Varieties of Religious Experience," especially p. 77 el seq. Sec also, for two specific aberrations
ideally analyzed, Pfister on "Glossalalie und Kryptographie," in Jakrb.f. Psychoanalyse, 1912. Vol. 3, p. 427 and 71a
et seq.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 425
hygiene. There is no practical, but only theoretic, difficulty of defini
tion. The acts of genius itself can never be insane, although their
sequelae or concomitants as found in pathological natures may often be
so. From this viewpoint Jesus seems the Supreme Master of all who
have ever known or utilized consummately the higher powers of man.
Most that he did and said that is significant was with some degree of
such afflatus. God and the Holy Spirit were his muse. He followed
inner oracles that he thought came from on high as no one else had ever
done, and it is small matter that after the fashion of his day and as the
masses always have done and will do, he objectified these impulsions. In
deed, epistemologically speaking, no one can know what he does not
objectify. He projected the power he lived by into heaven, identified
it with the Hebrew Yahveh, and whatever may be said in this case of
the processes of the intellect, which is an individual and relatively acci
dental product, the heart of every one who is truly religious can as yet
make or poetize no better imagery than this, for feeling must always
have symbols aU its own. The psychology of Jesus remains to-day by
far the best and most classic field in which to study all such processes,
for here best of aU these problems are iUustrated. Here we find a key
to the understanding of his character, further study of which will no
doubt long continue, as it has already so well begun to do, to make his
life seem more real, his traits more intelligible, and his biographies more
engaging. (E) Comparative studies of biographies, and especially of autobiog
raphies of great men, show as another attribute, closely allied to the
above, a sense that they are not merely themselves but generic or
type-men, or that in them the species is especially expressed in the
individual. They feel themselves in a sense the embodiment of the
soul of their tribe, race, nation, or other group; the bearer of its ideals,
its leader or representative; the voice through which the wishes, will,
needs of the larger social group are expressed. Some think the roots of
this trait must be traced to totemism. Its perversions tend to hyper
trophied egoism, but its ideal is to subordinate, if not evacuate, the
individual, so that he who best illustrates it has a passion to renounce
rather than to acquire, to serve rather than to rule, the group he repre
sents. His own personal proprium shrivels rather than expands; he
becomes least, not greatest; his personal fortunes, or even his life or

426 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
death, are inconsequential compared with the weal or woe of the group
interests of which he is the surrogate. If he comes to supreme power
he uses it humbly as a charge or cause to which he is entirely subject.
He is a delegate or a corporate folk-soul, and to hve to himself would be
treason to it. If he is utterly devoted to the common welfare, he may
legitimately feel himself a man of destiny because he is bound up with
it to the point of identification, so that its weU- or fil-being is his own.
This gives enlargement of view, purity of purpose, a sense of responsi
bility that may become oppressive, perhaps temptations at times
either to use it for self-aggrandizement or on the other hand to re
nounce it all and fall back to the easier, simpler fife, and five for individ
ual ends, perhaps according to Nietzsche's ideal of the superman,
who is a powerful and relentless monster of selfishness, incapable of
pity or regret. The altruistic struggle for the survival of others in
the supremely great is the diametrical opposite of this. It is born of
a spirit of sympathy, benevolence, cooperation, and love of mankind.
It is phylogeny exceptionally dominant over ontogeny, the race con
trolling the individual. It is rooted in man's highly gregarious instinct,
and thus makes for social solidarity and against disruption.
Now, whoever illustrated all this as Jesus did? He did it by
drawing on the unconscious reserve energies as described above (in 4),
because men differ most in their most conscious activities and are most
alike in the nine tenths of their nature which is usually submerged, so
that in calling it up man appeals to the common element in which all,
even the most diverse, are, at bottom, one. Here we reach nearest of aU
to the secret springs of Jesus' character and the simple motivation of his
hfe and works; from this point of view we can best understand the
mystery of his Kingdom and the "way " into it. It is das ewige Mensch-
liche das zieht uns hinan, an ideal yet far from attainment but that
lures, charms, and inspires perennial visions of its ultimate fulfilment,
gives us the norms of all social ethics, a standard by which to measure
aU real progress, which at bottom and at its best is always and only
moral, and that would minimize hate and aU its dreadful progeny, and
establish harmony and confraternity over the world. It is still largely
a sentiment; but sentiment dominates the human heart, and has already
given the Christian world most of the best things in it and promises
far more in the future. No message to man is so authentic as that
which comes from his own phylum, and the only validification of its

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 427
authority is that it rings true in each individual soul it reaches. This
is the supreme criterion of every truth and value in the humanistic
realm as distinct from that of physical science. To incarnate the best
that is in the race is to incarnate God, for he only is its highest anthro-
pomorph. (F) Other attributes of greatness, less often specified, are combi
nations of pairs of opposites that are rarely found in the same person,
such as analytic and synthetic, or critical and creative powers; traits
which he chiefly in the sphere of intellect or balance between the con
servative and progressive temper; the union of Olympian calmness and
enthusiasm; of quick and slow temperaments; vivid imagination along
with practical common sense; open-mindedness and absence of preju
dice; readiness, if need be, to subordinate personal friendship and all
social, even family, ties to a cause greater than they; indifference to
fame or all personal ends; keen aesthetic sense; an alert and inerrant
conscience; power of concentration; great strength of affection; the
group of qualities we caU personal magnetism; a disposition to be
always working over and improving oneself; ability to systematize
and make or apply efficient methods; a gift for keeping always in the
top of one's condition, physically, mentally, morally; the instinct to
strive and exert oneself to the utmost of his powers rather than to
hve in the realm of inertia and half efforts — these and other qualities
are designated in this hterature on great men and have great though
perhaps not prime significance. In Jesus the strength of his affections
was certainly unbounded, although they were less concentrated upon
individuals than diffused over the race, or at least those fit for the King
dom. He was weU anchored in Jewish conservatism, and yet ultra-
progressive. He did not seek fame, and must have had rare magne
tism and charm (see Chapter 1). He gave himself to his task with an
energy that was unreserved and unflagging. On the other hand, he
was probably not emancipated from racial prejudice and was inefficient
in methods of social and pofitical improvement as measured by the
modern standard. He cared little or nothing for system, either in
his thinking or in the conduct of his fife, and knew no science of any
kind. The rest of these standards either test qualities not known in
his day, and so are more specific and less genericaUy human, or else
we are too uninformed concerning Jesus' life and character to apply
them to him.

428 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
To the present writer it seems hardly less than axiomatic that if
Jesus' personality is to continue to have worth and reality in the world
and not fade into myth, symbol, or a projection of the community
consciousness in the sense of Kalthoff, or if his character is not to be
come as formless and unknown as his physical traits are to art, he
must be definitized and we must have at least certain fundamental
ideas of what psychological components entered into the ensemble of
qualities which we call character and personality. We need to escape
from the mystic nebulosity that now surrounds it. A union of all the
superlative traits ascribed to him, a harmonious synthesis of the par
tial components that appear from different aspects of his fife, work,
and words, which shall combine all the different views of him, is im
possible, for they could not be synthetized in any individual, normal,
abnormal, or supernormal. In place of a living person we should have
in him rather a table of ethological categories theoretically and log
ically unhomogeneous and the correlation of which into a single human
being is a psychological impossibility. This would give us at best
only a classified fist of traits with certain tentative groupings but lack
ing dynamic force because without any real organic unity. If we cull
these traits from the scores of lives of Jesus during the last few score
years, every possible synthesis of them thus far suggested gives at
best only the conception of a personality unprecedentedly multiple
or schizophrenic, as if tenanted by a congeries of souls of which now one,
now another, comes to the fore. Now he seems divine, now very human.
In the wilderness he struggles with temptation, yet is impeccable.
Here he is above earthly joy and sorrow, yet in the transfiguration
he seems to be in a transport of euphoria, while in Gethsemane
he is in agony. Now his belief is ineluctable, and he is autodi-
dactic, and again he feels forsaken, if not accursed, of God. He is
called infallible and inerrant, and yet repeatedly changes his purpose
upon intercession; endowed with prescient prophetic insight into the
future, yet dies in anguish and despair because his hopes aborted and
his plans miscarried. From this viewpoint one could almost fancy
that we have before us a product of a series of efforts to synthetize
into one the typical traits and experiences of many different real or
mythic personages of which primitive culture gives us many examples,
and that here the hazy name, "Jesus," is simply their point de repere.
He needs to be made a more natural, real, and dynamic personality.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 429
Can this be done? Is there a type of personality that is more com
posite and yet more unified than those we know, in which all the
essential attributes that history assigns and religious psychology needs
can be combined? Is there any one such ensemble of qualities more
probable than any other, and which, in the hght of the New Testa
ment data and also of the preceding principles, we can best conceive
Jesus to have been? To this our answer must be affirmative and is as
follows: (1) Jesus had an invincible sense of his own vast superiority over
other men, and felt that he stood closer to the source of aU wisdom
and power than any other man had ever stood. He interpreted this
sense according to the highest and fittest thought-forms of his day and
race, as the Church has since done, as Divine Sonship or Messianity.
He came to do this gradually, but as an inevitable result of many
experiences with many men, which showed him, as they must, that his
insights were deeper, his personal influence over those about him greater,
his therapeutic efficiency which he thought showed unique control of
demons, was equal to or superior to that of the greatest of prophets
of old. The complicated sophistries of the subtlest of the Pharisees
were no match for him, and although, unlike the rabbis, self-taught, he
found he could easily confute them. Those who crowded about him
and foUowed him to be healed and taught regarded him as a man of a
higher order. In rapt states to which great souls, especially among
Orientals, are sometimes subject, his visions, as in the baptism and
the temptation, favoured those fond ideas of greatness which are
secretly cherished by every ardent aspiring young genius. Thus it was
as inevitable as that Socrates should find from converse with many
men who thought themselves wise that he was wiser than they all in
that he knew that he knew nothing, that Jesus should, with his unusual
gifts of body and psychic powers, become convinced that he was the
Messiah. Since the expectations of such a being and to some extent
his r61e had various types of preformation, nothing was more natural
than that such a person in such a culture milieu and with such experi
ences should come to feel caUed to give this great hope a personal em
bodiment in himself and an original interpretation of his own. Thus
he felt himself Heaven's aristocrat, too exalted to care for earthly
dignities, and so he mingled with the masses, was friendly to the
despised publicans, and even conversed with harlots, as Socrates was

430 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
reproached for doing. In his assumption of supremacy there is no
trace of delusions of greatness. If he placed the crown of sonship
upon his own head, it was because it belonged to him by intrinsic
merit. Jesus' sense of celestial royalty under such circumstances and
in his race and age was as normal as the behef of poets that they were
the favourites of and visited by the muses, or of potentates that deity
spoke in their deeds or of prophets that he did so through their words.
It may not be our interpretation of him now, but no other was within
his reach. If his description of these phenomena in his own soul has
become obsolete and ahen, its strangeness is because we are provin
cials of our own times and lack historic sense, knowledge, or Ein
fuhlung for human nature when it is remote from us chronologicaUy
and ethnologicaUy, and when it is subjected to far greater strains and
tensions than are common in our civilization. The point is that any
other sanest of men, with gifts, aspirations, and experiences like his,
would then and there have come to the same estimation of himself;
but there never was another thus circumstanced. This once fully
realized, much else foUows naturaUy enough. Of course, with such
conceptions of himself, he would speak with authority and autodictic
certainty, for Yahveh spoke through him more directly than he had
ever done through the prophets. Those who did not understand felt
his power, and no one ever disobeyed his command. The sick, told to
arise, take up their beds and walk; the fisher-folk told to leave all and
follow him, obeyed on the instant, wondering, doubtless, why they did
so. This inborn sense of superiority gave him confidence in all he did
and said because the spontaneous inner compulsion which he felt he
deemed infallible, and the oracle that spoke through his soul seemed
inerrant. Perhaps it was too implicit confidence in its deliverances
that led him to trouble and finaUy to death. Had he not been fully
persuaded that he was divine he would never have died, and had others
not at last come to think him so, befief in his Resurrection could never
have been established. Thus our first characterization of him is as
one who above all others thought himself divine and has no less
uniquely been thought to be so by innumerable others ever since his
death. He believed himself a type, a superman or man as he was meant
to be, realizing aU the high legitimate ideals of old ascribed either to
great men or to Yahveh.
(2) The trait that has now come to seem second only to this is

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 431
that he concealed this fondest and most dominant sense of inner divin
ity. As Socrates hid his knowledge by the mask of irony, in order to
draw out others and then to convict them of ignorance, so Jesus hved,
an incognito deity among his friends, because premature avowal of
himself would spoil aU. Keim, far more than any other biographer of
Jesus, represents him, especiaUy during the second part of the Galilean
ministry, as often flying or retreating in order to escape his enemies.
He did so, we are told, "in order to preserve himself for God and man,"
until he could carry his cause to Jerusalem. Eschatologists, especiaUy
Schweitzer, make him hardly less a victim of fear lest his Messianity
should be prematurely disclosed. This might imperil his relations with
even the Twelve. His eschatological secret must therefore be kept
closely, and for the most part within his own breast, to the very end.
Thus he taught with reservations, and often, especially in some of the
parables, with intentional obscurity. His identity and his full pro
gram were thus undivulged and unsuspected. This reticence, whether
from instinct or deliberate conviction, was a natural and inevitable
consequence which developed concerning his own nature and function.
It was not impossible that his disciples with their limited intelligence
would deem him a victim of insane delusions, and at least his enemies
would be sure to make the most of so commonplace an inference, and
it would be very contagious, and thus, because of the very best that was
in him, he would be thought mad. Greater yet was the danger that
the Jews would regard a pretender to the sacred office of Messiah as
guilty of sacrilege, while the Roman rulers would be only too prone to
see in his claims a perpetual menace to their supremacy because they
would think them prelusive of revolt. These several motivations for
repression were together very strong, and could not fail to induce a
state of psychic tension unprecedentedly great as well as constant.
The result would be more or less vacillation, and that this is repre
sented as great is very true to human nature. Feeling himself the re
pository of such a treasure, so fraught with ultimate good to others
and so precious to himself, yet so beset by dangers that all might be
easily lost before the day of fruition came, it would be strange indeed
if he should not be anxious, tense, and ready at least to be a fugitive
for his treasure's sake when he thought perils threatened, and at other
securer moments should seem almost at the point of giving away his
secret, as a kind of sacred trust committed to his favourites among

432 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
his esoteric circle, with whom he must have longed to share it. With
out doing so he doubtless felt that their mutual confidence would be
impaired should they ever know his secret. In this struggle, however,
caution prevailed, and he went to death alone, without revealing the
secret that lay closest and warmest about his heart. This itself was a
unique and pathetic struggle with a heroic denouement. It was not
egoism or the lust of receiving homage that pleaded for avowal, or
cowardice that made him flee. On the one hand, he may have felt it
disloyal to Yahveh to hide it, and on the other he may have been ready
to seem a skulking fugitive for its greater security. How frequent
these alternations were, or how far they went each way, we do not know;
nor is this so very essential. The point is that we have here a situation
of tragic intensity with an attendant strain sustained we know not how
long, but with no pathological traces either concomitant or in the
sequel, and carried to the final issue in a way that has made it aU the
most psychodynamogenic in history. It is a story of supreme great
ness surrendering self, disguised, humiliated, and yet in the end coming
to its own. This is the truth that underlies and informs every romance
and drama, and is the epitome of every great life that struggles, suf
fers, and achieves. It gives an ethical which is even greater than the
hedonic narcosis, because it makes us feel that the world, whether
beautiful or not, is moraUy good to its very core. Jesus was thus like
a prince of royal blood who found himself alone in a hostile land with
out means or credentials which any one could be trusted to accept,
and so thrown upon his own personal resources, but charged with the
commission of organizing a counter-kingdom at short notice that would
last until the invincible forces of his Father should arrive and sweep
away aU but the remnant that raUied about his Son, and estabhsh
them in the seats of power and honour forever. Everything thus
depended upon his own initiative, sagacity, caution, and fidelity to
his trust. This and the old and strong, though vague and polymorphic,
hope-dream of a deliverer from within and of intervention from above —
these two were his only resources.
(3) Under such strain and with such a high tension of opposite
impulsions we have to think of the diagnosis of anxiety, the mother of
all fears, and realize how many morbid psychoses might have arisen.
He might have fled from such a reality and taken refuge in the old
dreameries and vaticinations of the new Kingdom and its Lord, or

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 433
faUen into the old habit of watchful waiting. Instead of presentifying
aU the past and future in the here and now, one of the most aU-
comprehending traits of greatness, he might have evacuated them and
lapsed to mere memories and hopes; or conversely he might have pre
cipitated the issue by rushing prematurely toward his goal with the
blind frantic zeal of a reformer whose motto is, "All or nothing and
that now." Jesus did neither, but chose the hardest middle course.
Now, what was the inevitable psychological effect of this strain? It
was to keep him unusually alert, keen, augmenting to the utmost, and
instead of paralyzing aU his powers, to raise and keep them at their
highest potential. Reserve energies would be mobilized, deeper un
conscious strata would be tapped and drawn on, a higher efficiency
equilibrium would be established, a state of psychic erethism would
tend to become habitual, while the usual barriers of fatigue and all
personal and social inhibitions would be transcended and new ranges of
power attained. Mentation would be accelerated, wiU-power aug
mented, feelings intensified. The entire personality would be charged
to its saturation point with available but latent energy, provided only
that the incitement was in the direction of the all-dominant protension.
What was this, and what did Jesus supremely want?
It was to prepare for the Kingdom which was just at hand, and
the only means to this end was to make people believe in it and in him
as its promised head; but instead of open avowal, he had to lay the
foundations on which it could and would be surely built when all
preparations were complete. The only possible course thus open to
him was to impress himself, that is, his own personality, so intensely
and favourably upon all with whom he came in contact, that they
would sooner or later inevitably come to feel that he was himself no
other than the true Messiah. This, then, was his task. Those he
met, healed, taught, counselled, reproved or lived with, must be made
to so love, admire, obey, depend on, feel in awe of him, that they
would sometime inevitably come to realize that their feelings of affec
tion, reverence, gratitude, dependence, and so forth, were the selfsame
that were due to the Messiah, and that therefore he must himself be
indeed nothing less or other than the Promised One. It was indeed a
stupendous task with people so sluggish of soul. It must mean a re
education of so radical a sort that it might in some cases be weU com
pared to arousal from the dead. But upon just this task aU Jesus'

434 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
superior and very highly wrought powers were bent. In everything
he did and said, from the choice of disciples to the final visit to Jerusa
lem, he was striving simply and solely to win full and spontaneous
recognition for what he was. He put himself in the place of him
whom the Baptist had announced as a successor greater than he; he
healed, cast out demons, explained and fulfilled Scripture by turning
the prophecies upon himself. He spoke with superhuman authority
as Yahveh gave the law at Sinai, but was greater than Moses or the
prophets; and he must, by his frequent withdrawals and prayer, have
seemed to aU about him in the closest rapport with Yahveh. AU
this, however, graduaUy seemed to him in vain so far as this supreme
end of securing the unforced acclimation of himself as the one who was
to come was concerned. When he thought he saw signs of this recog
nition in the converse or conduct of his disciples or foUowers or in the
multitude, he was elated with hope, for the good seed seemed to have
struck root and sprouted. But when they seemed cold or dense, his
spirits sank. It sometimes seemed as if the very stones would shout
his true function. But all the people who knew him remained dumb,
blind, spirituafiy unfiluminated. He had cast his pearls before swine,
and so as a last resort he turned to the program of the pagan gods who
had to be immolated before they were recognized and worshipped.
During all this period he was most assiduously at work in the
only ways open to him in his desperate quest for identification, throw
ing himself with abandon into every opportunity, in convers
ing with individuals, flashing all the light that was in him into the
dark recesses of the souls of either inquirers or critics, in such a way
that each of these encounters must have seemed memorable to each
of his interlocutors, inventing that most luminous and portative
pedagogic instrument known as the parable, teaching his little school
or circle, while wandering about, always ready to confer with individ
uals or talk to larger groups, healing aU he could among those he met,
organizing and launching his propaganda by proxies, helping the needy,
defining his relations to the State, and, what was still more difficult, to
the hierarchy and its hopes, altogether involving prodigious activity,
while in it aU he remained true to the functions of Messianity as he
had come to conceive it. He was always eager and responsive toward
every indication of any attitude by any one toward himself and his
Kingdom, but all the while never quite came to the point of trusting

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 435
open avowal, though never ceasing to trust himself. It was an educa
tional campaign unprecedented in the momentous issues at stake, in
the brevity of time during which it must aU be accomplished, and in
the array of supernatural powers appealing to both hope and fear.
The more we understand it, the more we marvel at the amount of
inner and outer work Jesus put into it, the variety of resources devised
and employed, the boldness and originality of it aU, and the invincible
pertinacity with which the supreme end was clung to and pursued
through aU the many and devious ways that were brought to converge
upon it. The whole of life had to be reconstructed and brought under
the light of new apperceptive centres in order to bring fitness to enter
his Kingdom. Then, when aU seemed doomed to failure, Jesus' unconquerable
soul refused to yield to despair but accepted his own death as the only
means to the end of establishing the Kingdom, and this inevitably
enhanced still more his psychic tension. His life must be offered up as
a last resource, not only in order to make a still stronger appeal to the
Father to intervene and bring the consummation, but as a final appeal
for recognition. Death, especially in its most cruel and degrading form,
if voluntary and as an act of devotion, beatifies the memory of the
victim, and in the new light and warmth thus generated he hoped to be
seen as what he was, for such a death would surely reveal him. But he
must die aright with the issues clearly drawn and manifest to aU. It
must come in no obscure way, but openly, facing aU the hierarchical
and pofitical powers that opposed the Kingdom. Thus, when the
will to hve ebbed over into the counter-will to die, the latter came not
as outer fate, to be stoically resigned to, but as a freely accepted inner
destiny. Moreover, every step downward to the tomb must be fuUy
explored. Every counter-trend of the affirmation of life must be felt
for aU it could mean, for only thus could death be complete. This
involved the stfil higher potentialization and the arousal of still deeper
strata of latent energy. Because he was type-, race-, and also super
man he had vastly more to sacrifice; death would mean more to him,
and in a sense it would take more lethal energies to queU such a being.
Even his soul had to die in despair. Hence, the tension always caused
by impending death was not merely that caused in the soul of other
heroes condemned and approaching the great shadow, but bis soul must
have experienced the greatest tension of any the world has seen. In his

436 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
public life, and especially in his closing scenes, more human trends were
focussed into and thence irradiated from his own psychophysical system
than any one else has yet attained before or since, and this makes
him so dynamogenic. In his conscious and unconscious nature the
best and highest moral forces before him converged, and from him they
have since diverged. We have lately said and heard much of the
higher powers of man, but here we have phenomena of an altitude
which, though many have approached, none has ever yet attained, so
that the psychology of Jesus remains the unique psychology of human
ity at the acme of its insights and in the supreme actus purus of moral
efficiency.1 Given such a being, charged with such functions and thus circum
stanced, it follows necessarily that he would possess certain traits.
(a) The algedonic scale in which his life was lived out would be
a very long one, running between the maximal degrees of pleasure and
pain, or from the dignity of a God coming in aU the Father's power
and glory, to cruel and shameful death on the cross, abandoned by
both God and men. This would involve a wide gamut of moods with
out implying any duality of nature in the sense represented above by
Wiinsche, and it would develop unusual capacity to both suffer and
enjoy, as the nisus that impelled him was now blocked and now facili
tated. Thus Jesus could pass all the way from the transfiguration
to the garden without scathe or loss of psychic unity for he could
endure, with no peril to complete normality and sanity, both the
heights and depths of human experience. Extreme vicissitudes of
fortune thus brought no dissociations, for keenly as he felt them he
surrendered to neither fate, both living by and concealing his secret
with perfect integrity of soul. He was inebriated by neither the cup
of joy nor that of sorrow, deeply as he drank of both. Neither the
exhilaration of hope nor, save at the last moments, the flaccidity of
despair, could possess or sweep his soul from its moorings. Thus he
could enter into the joy and sorrow of others, enjoy the good things of
fife, and not be enervated or lose the power to face any difficulty or
endure any hardship. This temper and environment inclined him to
gravitate not toward the indifference point, midway between pleasure

'K. Weidel: "Jesu Personlichkeit; eine psychologische Studie." Halle, 1008, 47 p. Erich Haupt: "Die eschato-
logischen Aussagen Jesu in den synoptischen Evangelien." Berlin, 1805, 167 p. August Pott: "Das Hoffen im neuen
Testament in seiner Beziehung zum Glauben." Leipzig, 1915, 203 p. 0. Holtzmann: "Christus." Leipzig, 1907, 148 p.
Johannes Weiss: "Jesus von Nazareth, Mythus oder Geschichte?" Tubingen, 1910, 171 p.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 437
and pain, like a Buddhist saint approaching Nirvana, or the Stoic
sage who strives to be above emotion, nor was he in danger of being
caught at either extreme. Rather, he oscillated between both, so that
now hope and now fear absorbed him. This both gave and presup
posed that rare temper of spirit that could bend very far either way
without either breaking or losing any of the elasticity of rebound. He
also took both his pleasure and his pain in the things that he and man
ought, because his primary orientation was moral. Hence the heaven
and hell between which his fife reaUy moved were both in aU their
substance and reality within his own breast, so that both are eternal
because in some sense they are essential to every moral consciousness
that is complete. In the story of Jesus' preexistence with God in
heaven and of his descent into Sheol, we have only the crude patent
imagery which strove to express this latent sense of the free ranging
of his soul between the ultimate terms of euphoria and disphoria to
which the sublime Semitic genius gave a moral interpretation, con
ceiving the longest dimension of man's universe as that which stretches
between the two poles of good and evil. Thus Jesus did not live on a
plain interspersed with hiUs or dark vaUeys, hke most of us, but on a
ladder the top of which was at the summit of hedonic goodness while
the bottom went to the depths of sin and torture. Thus happiness and
goodness on the one hand, and pain and sin on the other, are to such a
consciousness one and inseparable.
(b) AU men love and hate, but none as he did. Some foUow the
craven maxim, "Make no enemies," a coward adage of smaU shop
keepers or selfish politics, instead of choosing carefully some evil, in a
world so abounding in it, and fighting it with might and main. No
invectives were ever so charged with scorn, hate, and loathing as those
he hurled against men who obstructed the way of the kingdom of
righteousness. He pictured an assize of aU the world, pronounced the
sentence of doom upon the damned, saw God's wrath sweep away most
of the inhabitants of the earth into the fiery realm of Satan, and our
earth melting with fervent heat. Jesus' rage against iniquity and
religious stupidity knew no bounds. Nor was there any reason why he
should set bounds to it, for no anger can be too great against it. On
the other hand, he was the world's greatest lover, for to love and serve
God and man epitomized all his teaching, whether by precept or ex
ample. Love that is usually directed to parents, wife, or children, in

438 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
him was sublimated to the heavenly Father and to mankind. He
longed to love his enemies, sinners, the outcasts, if they would only
accept his love. AU this the world knows by heart, but it does not
realize how far any high degree of love or hate involves its opposite.
We say he died as a love-sacrifice, but it is equally true that he died
because of his irrepressible hate of the enemies of the Kingdom. Be
cause of his stern suppression of his great secret as to who he was, the
tension broke through in other directions where there was no such
censorship, and here the vents were ecstasies of love and transports of
hate to a degree that would not have occurred had there been no inner
or outer check upon the open avowal of his Messianity, just as the same
inhibition increased the ranges of his experience with pleasure and pain
as we saw above. His love and hate were over-determined and hyper-
accentuated by this hidden cause. The point is that his great repres
sion must find vicarious or surrogate expression to reheve the inner
conflict. We are but just learning the power of a suppressed wish and
how it may dominate life, normal and abnormal, and also something
of the mechanisms by which the energy generated by one group of
either impulses or ideas may be transferred to others that seem remote
from them. Hegel taught us that ideas, and psychoanalysis has
shown that both feelings and impulses to action, go in pairs of polar
opposites. This shows us that the ego or self is not the simple unitary
thing it was thought but a group composed of the most varied elements,
both conscious and unconscious, and very liable under strain to be
broken up into its simpler components. Thus some rupture of con
tinuity at whatever be the weakest point is especially liable to occur
under great and prolonged stress and strain. Where this danger im
pels, the instinctive autotherapy is an intensified and especially varied
play over all the gamut of affectivity, as we see in its pathological
manifestations in the hypermotivity of hysteria. Manifest as these
tendencies are in what we know of Jesus, they are, nevertheless, even
when he seems to let himself go with abandon, always under the strong
control of the higher moral purpose. Whatever his temperament,
which may very likely have been that of a man liable to very strong
passion, his cause was always supreme, so that to the most violent
tempests that raged within he could always say, "Peace, be still" and
be obeyed. We still need larger conceptions of his fuU humanity.
We must insist upon putting posse non peccare in the place of non posse

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 439
peccare in conceiving him, and realize that to be tempted yet without
sin is a harmatological as weU as a psychological impossibility, and that
to know sin is to feel it from within though not necessarily to have such
acquaintance with it as Paul, Augustine, and others filustrate. To live
under the power of a supreme wish supremely repressed would itself
give a unique moral strength and also a sense of immunity, whfie it
would at the same time impel one to explore aU the possibifities of the
tragicomedy of life. It would tend to maximize every response to
every experience because of the principle, as true iii psychology as in
physics, that repression generates tension, and tension must seek every
vent. (c) The chief content of Jesus' consciousness was the Kingdom,
and his chief purpose was to bring it in. His will, that impelled him to
do any deeds that would advance it and resist any obstacles it encoun
tered, was the entelechy of his hfe. To this not only feeling but in
tellect was subordinated. The latter was of a type hard for us to
understand, not only because it was so Oriental in its florid pictographic
imagery, but because it was of a type of mentation that has been more
or less transcended. His was not only a prescientific but largely a
prelogical age. Poetry was in the place now occupied by philosophy,
and the day of systems of ordered thought had not dawned in his
environment, so that the repressive influences of consistency were
relatively unknown. Men thought by flashes, as spontaneous up-
gushes of impulsion dictated, and on the spur of occasion. Mental
freedom was unharnessed by a knowledge of the laws of either nature
or mind. The criterion of truth was the strength of the sentiment of
conviction and certainty behind it. The modern taste for rationality
was undeveloped. The eschatological writings and vaticinations of this
age were the classic outcrop of this stage of mentation. That was true
that was supremely willed or felt under the present stress. In a great
genius under the pressure of desperate straits, fighting a hand-to-
hand conflict with despair, we have the best paradigm of the struggle to
survive and to validate its great affirmations. Nothing is so versatile,
polymorphic, prolific in resources, so strenuous in all its various striv
ings, seems so many different sorts of man in turn, as now one, now
another, side of his psychic microcosm appears. Under no other
conditions has the individual such power to caU upon the larger racial
soul within him and to tap its almost limitless reserve energies; to

440 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
break through aU the pannicules that separate men; to respond to the
exigencies of a cause that transcends aU such limitations; to be con
servative or radical, old in wisdom or young in enthusiasm and vigour
of action ; to love now peace, now war ; now to be meek, patient, and hum
ble, and now aggressive and proud to a degree, able to run through all
the diapason of temperament and even the greater one of moods, dis
playing traits usually conceived as predominant in the different races
of men and even sects; to seem now naive, now sophisticated, and self-
conscious; to show the burgeoning of the different psychic diatheses
that when fully flowered make optimists or pessimists, realists or ideal
ists, pragmatists or devotees of the theoretical, contemplative, or even
mystic life, and the rest; in a word, to show forth the basal humanity
that makes geniuses, as it were, spectators of and participants in aU
events. We may thus now conceive such a being as Jesus, not as an
unhistoric, syncretic artifact, but more, rather than less, real than
others, because better representing the human genus and made natural
by the fact that his cause embodied the supreme interests of the race.
(d) The newest psychology enables us now to understand, by no
means fully but far better than before, a large group of phenomena
most commonly found in religions, whether Christian, ethnic, or even
most primitive, always more or less mysterious and very diversely
interpreted. Most of them now have to be conceived as the efforts of
the individual to come into his larger racial inheritance, or of conscious
ness to avail itself of its vaster unconscious resources.
A glance at the psychology of inspiration will help us here. R.
Hennig,1 who gives a bibliography of sixty-four titles on the subject,
reported the testimony of some scores of prominent writers, living and
dead, as to how their best work was done. Uhland said his poems
wrote themselves. George Sand described herself as another being
when she wrote. Mrs. Stowe did not know Uncle Tom was dead till
she read it afterward. Hardy was often almost unconscious, and felt
as if he were a medium. Some write as if suffering a seizure, and are
curious afterward to know what they have done. Mozart did nothing,
and could not remember, add to, or subtract from what was given him.
Some do their best work when thinking of something else. Hehnholtz
wondered where his best thoughts came from. Goethe said that aU
the highest productivity and deepest apercus are in no man's power.
'"Das Wesen der Inspiration." Schriflen d. Gesell.f. psychologische Forschung, 1912. Sammlung IV, Heft 17.

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 441
Some describe themselves as above mundane influences, and others say
their ideas seem to be presented to them. Something else uses them as
a tool. Others describe themselves as looking on and having no part
in it all. Stevenson described this as the work of the "brownies of the
brain. ' ' Regnault spoke of this power as a " benevolent stranger' ' ; and
testimonies of this sort might be indefinitely multiplied. Once this
elevation was thought to be caused by one of the choir of muses, by
Urania or some other celestial patroness that had to be invoked or
wooed. Such experiences are commonest in religion, where they occur not
only in the intellectual but in all spheres of hfe. For the Buddhist
it was absorption; for the neo-Platonist, ecstasy; for Swedenborg,
iUumination and revelation; for Mohammed, the angel Gabriel; for the
Shakers and Quakers, "the power"; for Fox, possession by the Spirit;
for the modern Spiritualist, occupation of the place of his own soul by
that of some departed great one or friend; for Christian Science, un
conscious mind; for James, the higher powers of man; for Arnold, a
power, not self, making for righteousness; for Socrates, his familiar
spirit; for St. Paul, the Holy Ghost.
Under the influence of transmigration cults and theories, the
adept, perhaps from some deja-vu experience, thinks he has made con
tact with one or more of his own past lives. Karma teaches that every
new birth is higher or lower according to the net sum of merit or de
merit in the series of previous existences, as traducianists thought the
results of Adam's transgressions were inherited. Plato thought to
iUustrate his doctrine of preexistence and reminiscence by evoking a
demonstration of the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid from the
mind of the ignorant slave boy, Meno. The quest of ideas he thought
was the quest for immortality. The philosopher loves and woos
death in his passion to pass from the concrete and individual to the
general and abstract. He seeks the transcendent, metaphysical,
noumenal, and turns from the immanent and phenomenal; and once
securely anchored to these deathless ideas, the soul shares their per-
durability. New noetic experiences are often interpreted as a kind
of letting out imprisoned powers into a larger freedom.
All these experiences or cults geneticism conceives as so many ways
by which the individual gets into rapport with the genus, and is in
formed, facilitated, reinforced, or checked by its larger life and its all-

442 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
dominant interests, and the species in us is largely represented by
the unconscious as the individual is by our conscious life. In prayer
we hold converse with it, either as Christ, the embodiment of Mansoul,
or the Son of Man, or else with the yet larger cosmic soul we are wont
to caU God. The story of Jesus represents the typical individual be
ing subjected to the soul of the human phylum, and ah the above phe
nomena are phases of the same process. An indefinitely long series of
biographies would be needed to record the complete pedigree of each
soul. This present personal fife is only a day, or a single flitting mood
or fancy representing one aspect of a larger, truer life which runs
through the whole series, as the sense of a discourse pervades each of
its single words and sentences, in which birth and death are only punctu
ation points. The fact that the soul has been immortal through such a
succession of fives, is the best of all indications that it will live on with
increasing momentum. Thus, in each individual but very little of
the whole can be expressed; and the instinct to attain all-sided utter
ance in thought and deed, here and now, the stronger it is, is only a
partial expression of the selfsame impulse that constitutes the promise
and potency that will go over to other hves that spring from our own,
till all the possibilities are exhausted, and till after having lived out all
the orders of fife, and having ascended through every stage of psychic
metamorphosis, we rest in the end in the infinite from which we came
in the beginning, and the cycle of evolution is complete.
The soul thus in seeking to expand itself, strives to draw on the
larger hfe of the race within us. If the individual had been created
de novo with no race history, with no psychic or other vestiges of his
long pedigree, and no germs of future generations in him, it is hard
to conceive how he could ever have sought general ideas or cared for
any consensus semper ubique et ad omnibus, or sought for categories
valid for all orders of existence, or how such a being could have felt
any form of afflatus. This and even the speculative passion as Aris
totle describes it in the contemplative hfe, charm and draw us because
we inherit in an adumbrated way aU the experience of our forbears,
and remember them across thousands of birth and death nodes, and
find them so much better, vaster, and stronger than we are. To draw
upon this reservoir is the purpose of every ascetic cult, rehgious exer
cise or attitude, dance, or even drug. How to arouse these human
energies, usuaUy dormant in the individual, in a way to augment life

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 443
here and hereafter, and how to apply them in a practice of personal and
social life in a way to conserve the best that has come to us from the
past and to ensure perpetual progress, it is a great achievement of
Christianity to have set forth, because in its study and practice we
find the deeper unconscious racial soul of man incarnate as nowhere
else. When tempted to escape his sentence, Socrates dreamed that
the spirit of the laws appeared to him and reminded him that it was the
citizen's duty to the state to remain loyal to it to the end. So, too,
the beatitudes and about aU of the sermon on the mount consist of
injunctions to live for and in the community, almost as much as the
individual ant or bee, which is often caUed the ideal citizen socius, does,
and which Lifienfeld says in substance lives more in accordance with
the precepts of the Lord's Prayer than do the members of any other
gregarious species, not excepting the primitive Christian communities.
Self must be developed to the uttermost degree that can make the
individual a more efficient instrument of social service. It is only
because and so far as self sets up as an end to itself that it sins and
needs conversion. Reason must not obscure the light within. Wealth
and power are trusts for the common weal. To love and serve man is
to love and serve God, because God is the embodiment of man's ideal
knowledge of his best self, personified and projected into the celestial
regions. He is the source and end, the alpha and omega of man, and
also of his earthly home. Every duty to God is a duty to the race and
vice versa because of this identity. Every gift or aid within God's
power to bestow reaUy comes from the generic soul of the race within
us, be it guidance, inspiration, help, wisdom, or energy. Converse
with it is converse with God, and alienation from it is separation from
him. In fine, our rehgion has only three themes. The first is Jesus,
the ideal yet historic individual who goes through the typical stages
of adjustment to the deeper racial soul within him. The incidents of
his fife are paradigms, and the teachings directions how to hve for
and in the race. His end illustrates the extremest sacrifice the in
dividual can be called upon to make for it. The soul of the race spoke
through him more and more as his life unfolded, and when it had used
aU that was in him, flung him aside in a way the story of which makes
it the quintessence of aU great tragedy.
Second, Christ the Messiah is the soul of the ancient Hebrew race

444 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
as they conceived it. Great souls among them hoped for a unipersonal
embodiment of it, and that the hovering ideal of it might actuaUy en
ter history in flesh and blood. The more Jesus sought to incarnate
this ideal of his stirp, the more under his influence and that of Paul and
his other successors the conception of the totemic race-man broadened
into that of a type-man of the entire human race, the concept necessa
rily becoming that of a true Son of Man. Jesus' fife is to prepare his
foUowers to make their own personal fives and character conform to
the larger dimensions of humanity itself.
Third and back of man, is the cosmos. The Semitic Yahveh,
originally the deity of a Kenite tribe, grew in the minds of the prophets
till he took on more or less cosmic dimensions. He became the anthro
pomorphized and personified universe, its Creator and the embodiment
of all that was good in it. His golden age, which culminated. with the
later prophets, began to wane toward a twilight or Gbtterddmmerung
under two influences, first because the above Jesus-Christ cult, to
which the New Testament and the early Church were devoted, stressed
man and neglected nature; and second, because the spirituafization of
ideas of God and the vastation of his nature in expanding from Yahveh
to the God of all the worlds, the conception of which grew with the
centuries, and especially since the men of science, made him too
vast, vague, and afar to be grasped by any powers of man, so
that now he is only dimly felt as a kind of "cosmic emotion" or an
aU-pervading power perhaps inspiring love of nature. The intellect
does sorry work in seeking to make him apprehensible, whether in the
form of theology or in conceptions of a controlling and perhaps inter
fering Providence, and for the rest faUs back on poetry and antique
mythology for its symbols and imagery.
(e) Even Jesus' death brought to his followers at first no glimmer
of insight into who he or what his Kingdom was. They not only made
no effort to save him (unless the story of Peter's impulsive and foolish
act be authentic), but deserted him with no sign of either courage or
fidelity. There is no record of any lamentation or mourning on their
part. Peter denied aU acquaintance with him to others, and if he
wept afterward with remorse, he did it in secret. Socrates' friends
stood by him to the end, and so did those of many a Christian martyr
afterward, but the disciples of Jesus hardly seem to have shown com
mon human sympathy with him even in Gethsemane. None offered

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 445
to come forward and testify in his behalf, or even attended him at the
trial, or came to help him bear the cross or tried to comfort him as he
hung upon it or even helped to bury him decently. Indeed, the very
baldness of the narrative of his death with no attempt to improve the
rare opportunities of pathos, which in the death story of so many other
gods and heroes have been utilized with such moving power, is itself
a cogent voucher of its historicity. His last cry might have been,
"Why have my friends forsaken me?" If, as is often assumed, the
motivation of the representation that he died alone was to enhance
the pathos of his own anguish, this end was accomplished at the ex
pense of the loyalty of his disciples. There is no indication that they
would not all have been aUowed to be present to the last, or that any
of them sought to be. None of them ever interceded with him not to
die, nor did any of them dream he would arise. Hence the only infer
ence is that they thought his death the end of aU, and therefore they
must have felt that they had faUen victims to his delusions and must
skulk back to their own environments and occupations, sadder but
wiser men. Instead of remembering him with pride and joy it would
be with mortification. If Jesus had hoped his death would bring the
insights he had so longed for or that he would be rehabilitated in their
souls for what they knew he was, he was doomed to bitter disappoint
ment; for even in this forlorn hope all the Christianity there was in the
world seemed dead forever and submerged in obloquy. The acme of
the pathos of it all is not Gethsemane, the indignity of the trial, the
nailing on the cross, or even the death in despair, but the simple record
that his disciples having heard the rumours of his Resurrection re
garded them as "idle tales and believed them not." This signified
that all the efforts of Jesus to have himself and his Kingdom recog
nized by them had finally aborted, and that in this last crucial moment
he was found to be dead indeed, buried in a rock he himself had hewn
out in their own stony hearts, and sealed up there forever. This was
the nadir of the diaspora of the Christian story. The disciples
merely played a r61e not unlike that sometimes assigned to the chorus
in Greek tragedy, serving as a foil to deepen the pathos of the hero's
suffering by contrast. If the Jews and Romans slew Jesus' body,
the stolidity and obtuseness of his disciples slew his soul. Their
inner apathy withstood even Jesus' final appeal to awake, open their
eyes, realize, befieve. All the many reproaches uttered by Jesus con-

446 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
cerning hardness of heart, incapacity of soul or of senses, although di
rected to others, were meant for and merited by them. He hoped they
would be the light of the world, but they extinguished his light in dark
ness. His tomb was their adamantine hearts, in which aU his work
and words, and even his memory, were sealed and guarded, to perish
in oblivion. This is the true story of Jesus to the end. It is all natural and
normal, and what seems supernatural is in fact only our common
humanity raised to a higher power, ideaUy developed and circumstanced
to evolve its noblest possibilities. Its seemingly miraculous factors
are aU those of degree and not of kind, for there are no specifically
heteronomous elements, and hence aU are within the ranges of human
experience and also of apperception, if only our powers of sympathetic
imagination and moral Einfuhlung, once given the technical name of
faith and in which true humanity culminates, are kept ahve and active.
The new marvel and reality of it aU is that it is so true to the psychol
ogy of human nature at its very best; for it depicts the highest achieve
ment of which it is capable, and by the degree of approximation to
which every other great achievement of man is to be measured and
graded. We now come, however, to the true marvel and miracle which
psychology is not able fuUy to explain or even to understand, viz.,
how the belief in Jesus' Resurrection arose. Renan makes Christian
ity begin in the imagination of a single woman, that she had seen his
wraith. Others think Peter first saw an apparition of him and that
his experience became contagious, while others suggest that Paul's
vision on the way to Damascus may have been the most important
factor in the development of this great befief. Of course some assume
a veritable ghost. Discrediting this last view, however, along with
the crass conception of ancient orthodoxy of a reanimated corpse, and
even discarding the theory of recovery from suspended animation, the
problem of psychology is how without, or even granting, the last
three views, the earliest Christians came to believe, and withal so
passionately, in such an irrational and inconceivable thing. Would it
have been possible for any kind or degree of human testimony to con
vince one who had not seen it of its truth, even had it occurred as a
physical event? Or could one who had actuaUy seen a dead man come
back to life fully accept the evidence of his own senses? Would not

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 447
such an experience, in fact, be like a foreign body in his consciousness,
unassimfiated by it? If this would not have been the case then and
there, in minds that had accepted belief in other restorations to life so
that it would not be without precedent, nevertheless the modern mind
would balk at such a surd, however attested. Granted the fact, the
acceptance of it would itself be another psychological miracle. There
fore there is no alternative save to seek what explanation we can of
what took place in the minds of Peter and Paul that made them be
lieve; for if we ever find a key to it all, it must be here. Despite
Peter's impetuous attestation at Csesarea Philippi, the objective envis-
agement of the risen Jesus must have marked a crisis in his soul second
in significance only to that of Paul's vision. Are there any known
psychic laws by which to explain this experience, or any modern analo
gies that shed hght upon any factors of it? Or is the mystery of it
still entirely and hopelessly beyond our ken?
From the unharmonizable records of the Resurrection, the point
on which there is most agreement is the resistance in the minds of the
disciples to accepting it. Luke names three women "and other wo
men" who told " these things " to the apostles, " and their words seemed
to them as idle tales and they beheved them not," although the Fourth
Gospel says John and Peter had seen the empty tomb. Even these
two, we are told, "knew not the Scriptures that he must rise again
from the dead." Mark says Jesus first appeared to the Magdalene,
a neurotic out of whom Jesus had cast seven devils. John says she
knew him not at first but mistook him for the gardener. When upon
his reproof she did recognize him, he forbade her to touch him, al
though he later made Thomas do so. Jesus told her, as the angel had
done before, to tell the disciples. Mark says, "And they, when they
had heard that he was alive and had been seen of her, believed not."
StiU they seem to have gone to Galilee as he directed, either to resume
their old life or to accept the rendezvous he there appointed. Of the
two disciples he met on the way to Emmaus, Mark says he was "in
another form"; Luke says "their eyes were holden that they should
not know him." He calmed their fears, explained the prophets, and
only later as they sat at table did the disciples know him, and then he
vanished. Mark says he "upbraided them with their unbelief and
hardness of heart because they beheved not them which had seen him
after he was arisen," and says "they went and told it to the residue;

448 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
neither beheved they them." When he appeared in the midst of
them and said, "Peace be unto you," Luke says that "they were terri
fied and afrighted and supposed that they had seen a spirit." He
showed his hands and feet, and told them to "handle" him, and re
minded them that "a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me
have." "They yet beheved not for joy, and wondered." Then he
ate before them, as if to still further prove his physical reahty, and re
peated his old teachings, partly as if for further identification, again
explaining how he had to suffer, die, and rise. Thomas later had to
be given a special private tactile demonstration of Jesus' corporeity
and identity. Matthew tells of another appearance on an appointed
mountain, and adds, "and when they saw him they worshipped him;
but some doubted." Finally John says, "none of the disciples durst
ask him ' Who art thou?' knowing that it was the Lord."
It is hard to understand how a being who could talk and eat,
whose body bore wounds of the Crucifixion, and also who could be
touched and who discoursed on wonted themes with his friends, should
have such difficulty in convincing his followers, to whom the Resur
rection from the dead was no new theme, either of his reality or of
his identity as really risen. This shows how completely they had
accepted his death. According to the records he did not regard himself
as a ghost, or wish them to do so. Were he merely this, the tomb need
not have been empty, for he could have passed through its walls with
no need of having the stone rolled away just as he passed through
closed doors, and gravity would not have to be reversed for him to
ascend. Two causes worked toward facilitating their behef in his
Resurrection, first a strong wish and will to believe it, for when it was
fuUy accepted joy abounded in their hearts, as we see later at Pentecost,
and secondly, they had not actuaUy seen him die or seen him buried.
These experiences, as psychic research statistics show, strongly tend
to prevent survivors from thinking or dreaming that they see the ghosts
of their just-dead friends. Personal experience with these last sad
scenes tends thus to lay ghosts, because it brings home to even the un
conscious regions of the soul, whence ghosts chiefly arise, a reahzation
that friends are finally and completely dead. Had the disciples actu
ally seen him crucified, expire, and sealed up in a tomb, and had they
helped in these last rites, they might never have been able to accept
the full belief that he lived again. As it was, this belief hung for critical

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 449
moments, hours or days, in suspense. This hesitation can only mean
one thing, viz., that the sum total of aU their impressions of Jesus as a
companion had to undergo a great transformation before they could
accept their friend and teacher as the Messiah, as he must be if he had
reaUy returned from the grave. The discrepancy between what they
had formerly thought of him and the way in which he must now be
regarded, in the light of this great achievement, was too wide to be
bridged suddenly. Either there had been less in his deeds, traits,
and teachings that was calculated to make them befieve him super-
mortal than the record tells us, or else they were dense and unimpressed
to this effect by intercourse with him, or perhaps both. Before they
had only day-dreamed of his dignity, and now it was hard to awaken to
it as a reahty; for to accept it meant radically to revise aU their mem
ories and estimates of him. This involved very much inner work or
travail of soul; and it would in a sense put him farther away from be
cause so much above them, for their whilom friend would thus be
transformed into a deity. Recognition of him as the latter would
involve, too, a painful realization of their own stupidity when he was
in full flesh and blood with them. Moreover, to rest everything upon
something so incredible, "to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the
Greeks foolishness," would be a salto mortale that would most flaunt-
ingly chaUenge doubt and draw ridicule upon their work, for they
would be thought credulous, superstitious, ignorant, and fanatical,
if not victims of insane delusions. Such an avowal would mean to
enlist in a most arduous world campaign of propagating a cult to accept
which would involve a reversal of all current values, to call men to
hate what they had loved and burn what they had worshipped, and
persecution must have at least vaguely and half unconsciously been
forefelt. The issue was indeed staggering.
But if it was hard to befieve and cast aU resistances to the wind,
it was harder yet not to do so. Whatever the nature of the sense-
presentiments they may have had of his post-mortem return, however
faint they may have been, these could not fail to arouse a mass of
affective tendencies in their favour. Presentiments of his greatness,
which they had felt before but which had been so effectively suppressed,
now burst through or at least strained every leash that held them from
complete realization. What his death may have made them think
had been the result of his foUy, now was triumphantly vindicated as

450 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
transcendent wisdom. The wishes and hopes they had hardly dared
to indulge now made their hearts bound and burn within them because
they might become true. The optative passed into the indicative
mood. The teachings they had warmed to were not false but true.
If there was even mortal danger it would reck little, because the king
of terrors had himself been slain, for death was gain and not the loss of
aU. Item after item of their reminiscences of him began instinctively
to be illuminated by higher meanings. Belated and arrested responses
to his insistent incitements began to find voice within them. More
over, such extreme depression as they had lately experienced had to
react toward the opposite of euthymia. The skeptical consciousness
could not maintain itself against the affirmations that arose from the
submerged momentum of the cumulative impressions he had left upon
their deeper and better nature. So at last all breakwaters of reserve
and doubt were swept away by a rising tide of belief, and in this meagre
account we have the story of how the current of history began to flow
in new channels. It was as if the world waited in breathless suspense
for a moment to see whether these Galilean peasants would come to be
fieve or not to believe that their dead master had come back to fife.
The full conviction that Jesus had risen, slow, hard and revolu
tionary as it was, dawned apace. Many came to befieve that they had
seen and recognized him on various but always brief occasions. It
was a fulfilment of an intense, deep, and more or less unconscious wish,
which, if strong enough, always finds or makes its own realization.
These were days of expectant tension among the faithful. Perhaps
some hoped or longed in vain for sight of him, while to others he
manifested himself to several senses. Some, doubtless, had a sensus
numenis, or a feeling of personal presence or reveniance that was not
defined. Indeed, when not seen he might be among them, and some
might expect a visitation at any place and any moment. Some believed
on testimony, while others doubted or remained in suspense. He
certainly showed no disposition to resume his old relations with his
comrades. That and his psychophysical nature doubtless seemed to
them to have undergone some great change as a result of what he had
experienced. He could not remain with them permanently on the
same basis as before, not even if he were a mere Doppelgdnger of the
new social consciousness of this group of his whilom companions. All
these experiences might be a dream, while the more sarcous he was, the

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 451
more difficult it would be for him to maintain consistently and con
stantly such a falsetto existence as was now ascribed to him. There
fore the folk-soul, since it could not make him more crass, had no alter
native but to subhmate him stiU more, and therefore he was made to
ascend beyond a cloud with an angehc promise that he would sooner or
later return from thence. Thus he also vanished from the present into
the future tense, and this is interpreted as return to his former home,
from which he watches and guides until he comes back in power and
glory. Thus the cycle is complete, and his followers must turn from
gazing up into heaven, realize and assimilate their experiences, and
orient themselves and agree upon some practical program as the
entire apostolic college straightway began to do under Peter's guidance.1
And now the full meaning of aU their experiences as a whole, from
their caU in Galilee to the cloud that shut Jesus from their view, came
over them. All seem suddenly and at once to have realized what Jesus
took himself to be and really was while he was with them. All that he
had striven, even to the tragic end, to make them realize concerning
himself, but hitherto in vain, burst upon them. Jesus' great secret
stood forth revealed to them in all its significance. Were he among
them at this moment, there would be no longer any reason or cause for
his long painful reticences, reserves, inhibitions, and fears to avow
himself. His own sense of divinity could be indulged in without limit
in this httle new circle. At last he was discovered and understood for
what he reaUy was. His death, supplemented by experiences that
indicated his reveniance from it, had consummated in their souls his
work while with them, and his supreme wish and desire for them were
now realized. The crude symbolism and imagery of Pentecost and the
account of the gift of the Paraclete mark the arrival of Jesus' followers
at the goal of Jesus' chief endeavour for them. The supreme act
of the Holy Spirit is in its very essence establishing belief in the Resur
rection and all that it imphes, and this is described as the gift of the
Holy Ghost. Christian faith was invented as the special organ of this
function, and it has no other content. The Spirit designates a high
degree of the energy by which that organ does its work.
If this httle band had merely dreamed or hallucinated their late
companion back from death and up to the Father, and if such a com
plex had once become firmly established in their minds, even as a
»K. Lake: "The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ." New York, 1907, 291 p,

452 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
foreign body forced upon their credence from without by the insistence
of false sensations, then a process of assimilation and intussusception
would have at once begun about such an apperception mass, or else
mental unity and integrity would be lost. Rapid as this process of
unification was, and far as it went, it has never yet been completed,
so that the Christian consciousness has always remained more or less
•dual, and flesh and spirit, sight and faith, this world and the next,
have always stood more or less over against each other. Jesus from
this point on, too, in a peculiar sense has had two lives, one in humilia
tion and the other in exaltation, and in these two states the old antith
esis between the real and the ideal took a new and most pragmatic
form. Now the pneumatic took great and sudden precedence over the
sarcous. Now the unseen and transcendent dominated the seen and
immanent world as never before. The body and present life waned
before the soul and the next life. This momentous change was wrought
out, not by eschatology alone, but was chiefly caused by, and, indeed,
consisted in, accepting the Resurrection, which is the fons et origo of
Christian ideahsm. The old Greek unity and harmony between soul
and body were gone, and henceforth man was predominantly soul,
and body only in a secondary sense. The leader of this little band had
documented himself beyond all cavil as a celestial being for whom
death was only an emancipator, and they were not only of his race but
his intimates, and therefore, like him, celestial and deathless. In
discovering what he really was they discovered what they were and
also what others could become. Never before had humble or even
exalted men thought so highly of themselves. What matters it to us,
now that the old theology of a vicarious atonement has lost its power,
just how much of the Resurrection was material fact, and how much
was product of a highly wrought imagination? Behef in it has done
and will long continue to do its work, and so it is most real by every
pragmatic sanction. Henceforth soul cults were not only detached
from but made far superior to body cults.
Thus the Holy Spirit, which was the soul of the dead Jesus, passed
into his successors. Thus at last on the day of Pentecost they caught
his inspiration and came for the first time into vital rapport with him,
and their lesser minds were frenzied by the muse from heaven which
he had sent them. In the aura of their ecstasy their over-wrought eyes,
which had lately seemed to see the spectral form of their Lord, now saw

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 453
red flickering flames over one another's heads as symbols of their new
enlightenment, and perhaps of fiery tongues to proclaim it. Their
ears rang as the wind pipes, as if a new spirit of the air were abroad.
Instead of listening to the risen Master's words they heard one another
in an access of glossolafia, speaking strange tongues, as if of the races
they were about to preach the Gospel to. They raved like frantic
sybils when the mantic spirit enters them, and these all seem to have
been phenomena which Jesus had never anticipated. They were
indeed drunk, not with new wine, but with the new mystery of the
Resurrection and what it implied, and with the burden which they felt
was now laid upon their souls to rescue others from their own long
ignorance and density. Through all these pregnant days before the
apostles dispersed, Peter stands forth as the great leader and compeller
of souls. He tempered their crude and wild enthusiasm and gave it
practical directions, informed their zeal with wisdom, rehearsed the
outline of Jewish history as it must henceforth seem in this new hght,
established community of goods, gave object lessons in healing as weU
as teaching, in confuting enemies and unmasking pretenders, making
with their novice aid thousands of converts, steeling their courage by
bis own heroism to meet persecution, in his vision of the sheet trans
cending the narrow limits of Judaism and insisting that the great
message was for aU the gentile world, and by this and many other
means developing step by step the primitive apostolic constitution.
The second and only other great miracle in the New Testament,
also psychological, is the conversion of Paul, who experienced his
Pentecost on the way to Damascus, which made him another Neander
or new man with a new name, as Peter was renamed. His change also
is not entirely inexplicable or supernatural. About Jesus' own age,
he was born in Tarsus, a cosmopolitan trade and also an academic city,
so that he may have " drunk from the springs of Helicon as weU as from
those of Zion," although it was also the seat of Baal worship with its
rank orgies. About the age and time when Jesus first visited the
temple, Paul went to Jerusalem and studied the Scriptures with Gama
liel, a Pharisee of great learning and breadth of mind, who was said
to have counselled the Jews not to persecute the Christians because if
their cause was of man it would come to naught, and if of God they
could not exterminate it. He had consented to and seen the death of
Stephen calling upon God to forgive those who slew him. He inherited

454 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Roman citizenship from a prominent father, and was a man of rare
vigour of mind and body. His rabbinical training and temperament
made him a zealous proselyter, and he may have secretly hoped to see
Judaism pervade the Roman world, at least in the East. The rapidly
growing Christian community, however, endangered this ideal, and so
he became the most active antagonist that we know of this new sect. He
persecuted its members from place to place with relentless cruelty and
fanaticism, commissioned by the rulers and, as he thought, by God, to
crush out their pestiferous cause. Had he persevered in this work, the
very apostles might have f aUen and Christianity have died in its infancy.
Many fled to distant parts for fear of him, perhaps sowing the good seed
afar which Paul was destined later to help them cultivate.
But now occurred an event of which it is impossible to harmonize
the various accounts. According to the more objective versions of it
made by others, Paul was on a six days' journey of some one hundred
and sixty miles, across a desert, a condition favourable for orientation,
when in the oppressive heat of noontide he seemed to see a great fight
more dazzling than that of the sun, and to hear a voice which he ascribed
to the risen Jesus saying, "Why .persecutest thou me?" He fell
blinded and perhaps unconscious, was led to a retreat, fasted
three days, then recovered his sight, and we hear nothing of him for
some years. Commentators have conjectured sunstroke, a very
heavy and near thunderbolt, somnolence, a startling, painful dream
with nightmare symptoms, or an access of epilepsy. There is much
diversity in the record, nor do we know just what, if anything, his
companions saw or heard. Paul's own allusions to this experience are
less dramatic and objective, but make it no less epochal, for he there
met the risen Jesus and was transformed in doing so. The subject of
such experiences can never give any very lucid account of what befell
him, but has to be content with somewhat futile tropes and symbols.
Whatever the spectral and phonic features here are, it is certain that
we can never get very far away from the sphere of subjectivity.
Hence, the all-important thing is not what occurred but how Paul
interpreted this crisis, which was that he had actually envisaged in the
spiritual and risen form the very Jesus whose followers he was perse
cuting, and had experienced a kind of transporting ethical narcosis in
his presence, which left him both fascinated and dismayed. The
Christophany vouchsafed him had inebriated him with an ideal of

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 455
transcendent and triumphant virtue, far above that which he had long
striven to attain in himself but in vain. He had seen the second spirit
ual Adam, the Christ than whom he thenceforth resolved to know
nothing else, but he must take up his abode in him and also unite him
with God. But such interpretations did not come on the instant,
but later, as a product of years of meditation which were necessary to
assimilate such a new and anomalous experience. He had to recon
struct in a new form aU his shattered views of life, and to recover
complete sanity after a shock that seemed to have destroyed his
old personality and to have established a new one within him, viz.,
that of Christ that had exorcised the truculent demon of persecution in
him and taken its place.
Was this experience, or the volte-face it caused, a miracle, or only
a challenging but not insoluble psychic enigma? In the years of
retreat and incubation, perhaps solitary and possibly convalescent,
Paul could not help recalling his mingled feehngs as he had seen
Stephen's death, and also as he remembered the mild and tolerant
teachings of his old preceptor. The "pricks" which he found it hard
to kick against were those of his own conscience. It was very doubtful
whether either the Sanhedrin or the best elements in the Judaism of Paul's
day wouldhavesanctionedhistruculence,orwhether the groupof believers
in Christ was large or formidable enough to be a source of great danger;
and certainly the spirit of the great prophets would have condemned
such persecution. It may have been prompted by slanderous reports
about the new sect, which, however, their bearing under his cruelties
was doubtless tending to discredit. The above facts constitute an
ensemble of influences that before the expedition to Damascus were
undermining and repressing his antagonism, and so preparing the way
for a revolt in his soul against the course he was pursuing. The ma
jority of his impulses was warring against a silent but growing minority
of them which was soon to come to power.
(a) But other more personal preformations of the impending
change we find in the extreme moral dualism that characterized his life.
His whole soul longed and strove for righteousness under the law, but
he found great resistance in the "flesh." His spirit craved and strove
for God and purity, but the lust of his members always stood in the way
till he prayed to be delivered from the "body of death." The strength
of his ethical nature made him aspire to nothing less than moral per-

456 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
fection, but the requirements of the Hebrew law were complicated and
impossible of literal fulfilment, while the impetuous passions of the
physical man, in which concupiscence may and may not have played a
prominent part, made his ideals seem unattainable. The good that he
longed to do he did not, and the evfi that he hated, that he did. Thus
he interpreted the war within him of the flesh with the spirit, although
how much of this conflict was due to exceptionally high ideals of virtue
and how much to exceptional strength of baser propensities in him we
do not know, but both may have been extreme. It was doubtless in
no smaU part to relieve this inner strain that he became a ravening
wolf to the Christians, being exceedingly mad against them, breathing
out slaughter, forcing them to blaspheme, thus wreaking upon them the
wrath he reaUy felt against his own better nature, as anger is so
prone to vent itself upon another object than that which excites it,
by the law of transference. He doubtless hoped also thus to atone by
supererogatory zeal for his own sins.
In the midst of this desperate struggle with himself, which he
always conceived as between body and soul, or spirit, came the appari
tion of a real discarnate spirit that in sloughing off the body had
escaped the source of aU sin and was thus above the temptations that
racked his own soul. In this he saw actualized before him something
like that which his own better self had long striven to become, and if
relieved of mortal errant flesh might approximate. Identifying as he
did this visible immortality with the Great Teacher whose cause he in
his folly and madness had sought to bring to naught, he came to the
great realization that what he had persecuted was in fact in very deed
and truth his own better self, beatified and idealized. This reproved
him and called him to awake and turn. It also gave him assurance of
victory in his moral battles, brought great peace as that after a long
storm, and inundated his soul with hope and faith. Paul conceived it
as an ecstatic experience which exalted him above bis old life and filled
his soul with new and unique joy, loyalty, and devotion. He had
found his ideal, or rather, himself idealized.
Another predisposing cause of his conversion was doubtless con
siderable knowledge of the Christian story of the cross, and probably,
because they were all about him, of some of the cults of dying and
rising gods, or of the pagan Christs with soteriological functions, while
beneath all, like a tidal wave (that bears many lesser systems of waves

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 457
down to the tiniest ripples from a breeze), was the pendular nature of
his affective hfe reinforced by the sequence of autumn and spring,
which makes it prone to swing over from every extreme state into its
opposite. Thus there were in his own soul disapprovals of his course
as persecutor arising from human sympathy with his victims, whom he
found to be not wolves but lambs, while the violence he was doing to
the more poised minds like that of Gamaliel would reinforce the re
action. All these inclinations he had doubtless felt, fought down, or
sought to evict from his consciousness, and keep out by setting a
censor over them, but they persisted in coming back now in great force.
(b) His personal struggles against sin and toward perfection, and
his high standards, which gave him a horror of moral inferiority or
mediocrity, had brought him to conceive his body as the source of all
iniquity and his spirit as the quintessence of all that was good. Thus
an ocular object-lesson demonstration of a most real and perfect soul
set free from its sarcous prison, was an inspiring vision.
(c) Death and rebirth in all the ethnic cults went together and
were eternal complements of each other. In them what dies rises
again. The formula of every tragedy is first pain and last victory.
The first flash of synthesis between these hitherto more or less isolated
psychic constellations, the life and death of Jesus and that of the pagan
Christs, would cause a psycholeptic crisis sure to moult the old con
sciousness and reveal the new and better one that was growing beneath
it. Paul's experience is thus the classic paradigm in the normal re
ligious realm of which there are very many analogies but none upon the
same high plane, e. g., the crises of Constantine, Augustine, Bunyan,
and many others described in the current psychologies of conversion.
In mid-adolescence, e. g., the larger fife of the race often seems to burst
upon the youthful soul that has hitherto lived only in and for itself,
leading it captive to the larger life of the race which demands service
and altruism. Again, love often has a period of unconscious latency or
incubation, during which it may be silently growing in the depths of
the soul even toward the very persons the subject of the passion believes
that he only fears, fights, and hates. So, too, those in whom rage has
done its worst and burned out, may turn to pity and even love their
victims. Once more, it is a pregnant psychogenetic law that the
indulgence of some base propensity or a fall into sin may arouse the
next higher power that inhibits and sublimates it, and so advance the

458 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
wrong-doer to a more highly evolved evolutionary plane where, but
for sin, its normal corrective would never have come into function.
Or again, as toxins stimulate the development of antibodies in the
blood, which act as their antidote, so Paul's struggles with sin aroused
the countervalent lust for holiness which could not only give immunity
from wickedness but cast it out.
As a result of this crisis Paul's life was shattered and lay in ruins,
and the new and larger personality that was forming beneath merged
into his consciousness; but it was callow, inchoate, fragmentary, or like
early infancy when it most needs protection. A larger synthesis of
all the above elements was necessary if integrity of soul could be
attained. New theories, new directions of will, new feehngs, must
be syncretized into a far more complex unity and a higher sanity at
tained, or else hopeless disintegration would ensue. All these prob
lems of autopsychotherapy which Paul faced had, however, a remark
able solution in the working out of which he became the world's great
est psychologist of the regenerative processes. All the many latencies
within him were heard from, and in place of the old shattered self
another one that seemed to him so much larger and better that it
could not be his own, arose. He thus achieved a new and far
more complete wholeness or holiness above all the old disharmonies so
that he was twice saved, once from these and again from the effects
of the shock of his disruptive crisis. The self-reeducative and regener
ative powers of a new ideal and a new affection were thus supremely
illustrated in the change which turned Saul the inquisitor into Paul the
apostle, which changed the slave of the letter of the law into the ex
ponent of a perfect, because not antinomian, freedom. Whfie we have
no systematic confessional of the travail of Paul's soul during his silent
years, such as psychoanalysis would desire for a Tatbestandsdiagnostik,
or even of the kind represented by other types of extreme changes, e. g.,
Rousseau, Faust, Hamann, we do have many precious glimpses in the
Pauline epistles of the process of "fides quaerens intellectum" or of pistis
seeking gnosis like capital seeking investment. The problem he now
faced was, how can the spirit of the Jesus whom he had seen, enter the hfe
of man? By what tropes, analogies, allegories, symbols, rites, insti
tutions, can this new experience be expressed and inundate thought,
feeling, and will? How can the precious bullion be minted into cur
rent coin of the realm? It was hard enough for Paul to come to a fuU

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 459
realization of what had happened to himself, but much harder to find
ways and means of giving others, even gentiles, the benefit of the
heavenly treasure he had found.
(1) Two chief means, however, were at hand. The first was
gnosticism. The point of contact of the new sense of Divine Sonship
with gentfie thought was first made in the domain of Greek fife through
the medium of its philosophy, which had long since demonstrated
its efficiency and economy as a means of grasping the universe as a
whole and to which Hellenic thought, from Anaxagoras down, had
contributed its riches. In Paul's day it was most popularly known in the
form of the logos doctrine. The Divine Word was conceived not only
as the reason and wisdom inherent in nature, but as active in and crea
tive of it. It bore to the thought of that day a relation very like that
of thought in the logic of Hegel, only that it was essentially trans
cendent rather than immanent. The Word was the rationality by
which things were made, with at once the archetypal or constitutive
value of Plato's ideas and the normative or regulative force of Aris
totle's categories. This gnosticism was the last word of generations
of Greek thought, and gave to it most of the unity that it possessed.
No formula ever perhaps had more epoch-making historic significance
than the simple equation, "Jesus is the Logos." This pass-word ad
mitted Christianity to the whole system of Greek thought, and irri
gated it with fertilizing streams. It was the basis of a network of
theory and demonstration which widened and irradiated for centuries.
It opened all the field prepared by the conquest of Alexander and gave
a personal positive moral content which almost made the previous
culture of Greece appear to be another propadeutic Old Testament
to the new Gospel. Greece, however, lacked ; and could not under
stand Messianism, while the Semitic mind could not conceive the iden
tification of an historic individual with a metaphysical principle, so
that the above equation was as strange to the Jews as it would be to
us now to equate him with, e. g., science. This conception of him as
the Logos later tended to make enthusiasm evaporate into doctrine and
to put creed in the place of faith and theology in that of religion. Had
Christ been equated with will, which makes conduct, or with the nisus
of evolution or the biologos, how different all would have been!
But happily because it was related to the idea of sonship the logos
was also conceived as spermatic, and this conserved vital roots even

460 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
though they were subordinated. Harnack may be right in his view that
it was necessary to rigidify orthodoxy in order to make headway against
polytheism, idolatry, and the various heresies, and to establish a sofid
basis for Church organization, but this did not keep out the theocrasias
or prevent saint worship from taking the place of polytheism or canon
ization of the apotheosis of heroes. Still the psychologist who puts
an ever higher valuation upon subjective processes and believes in their
ultimate triumph cannot help raising the question whether the noetic
element in Paul's exposition of the new religion was not over-emphasized,
as would be natural in a religion that was propagated so intensely
and so largely by preaching, and whether his intellectuafization of his
own experience was not better calculated to make than to hold con
verts. Hard and long as he strove to do so, Paul never explained either
himself or Christ. He was not a philosopher or clear thinker but a
mystic, more articulate, to be sure, than minds like Boehme or Eck-
hart, but his mind was essentially ejaculatory, teeming with brilliant
phrases, seeing new apercus, rich in metaphors and even in epigrams.
He was a prose poet, often a rhapsodist, and far greater as an organizer
than as a thinker. It is idle to seek in his writings for evidence that
he had ever grasped the doctrines of the great Greek thinkers, or even
the essential principles of Stoicism, of which he seems to have known as
little as he did of the life and teachings of Jesus. Even his gnosticism
was only that of a novice and amateur, and the best that can be said of
it is that it was sufficient for the immediate purposes he had in hand,
like a mariner's knowledge of astronomy.
(2) The other great influence Paul represented is seen in the most
significant fact that he knew Jesus almost solely as crucified and risen,
and seems to have known or cared fittle else about him. From his
writings alone we should know almost nothing else of Jesus. Now,
death and revival were central themes of most of the religions of near
Asia and ancient Egypt and Greece. The idea of dying and reviving
deities was the root of about all the ancient mysteries. Back of all
were the countless rites commemorating the death of vegetation in
the faU to ensure its return in the spring, in which autumn sadness
ebbs into vernal joy. Winter is driven out by May queens.
But as culture advanced, the desire to secure vernal resurrection
in plant life merged over into that to secure the revival of human life
after death. Osiris, originally the god of vegetation, was slain by the

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 461
demon of summer heat, personified as his brother Set. The day of his
death was celebrated by mourning, which two days later passed over
into joy unbounded at the recovery of his body by Isis. So the death
of Adonis was mourned one day, and the next his resurrection and
translation into heaven were commemorated. In some versions he,
like Persephone, spends half a year in the underworld, and the other
half in the upper. So Attis, the lover of Cybele, the great mother,
mutilated himself to death, and this was celebrated symboficaUy by
the priest, who wounded his arm as if to follow in the footsteps of the
god. The fourth day came the feast of joy, celebrating his resurrection.
The history of Demeter and the recovery of her daughter were the
theme of the Eleusinian mysteries, which are traced back to spring and
fall myths, but later attained the significance of a pledge of blissful life
after death. Dionysus, like Osiris, with whom some identify him, was
commemorated by tearing a bull to pieces by the teeth of the worship
pers who in devouring the bleeding flesh partook of the immortal fife
of the god incarnated in the bull. Allied to the violent deaths of the
gods are the legends of the voluntary descent of a god or hero to the
underworld and his fortunate return. The Babylonian Ishtar did this
to restore her lover Thammuz, and again to fetch back the waters of
life. She was admitted only after threatening to break down the doors
of hell and on condition that she must leave one garment at each of the
heavenly gates, so that she entered the nether world quite naked.
She was imprisoned here and inflicted with sixty diseases. This re
moval of the goddess of fertility threatened to end human and animal
life until a hero was sent to ensure her return, which she effected, re
gaining a garment at each gate. Thammuz was washed in the water
of life and anointed with ofi, and then in place of the death dirge came
merrymaking with pipes. The gates of the underworld were finaUy
broken down and the dead dehvered from their prison. In a weU-
known gnostic hymn we are told how the soul wanders in the laby
rinth of life with no escape. Christ implored the Father to send him to
its relief. So he wandered through the aeons, disclosing all secrets,
delivering souls from Hades, protecting them from demons by mystic
names and formulae. In the Gospel of Peter, Christ declares that he
had preached to those that slept, meaning that between his death and
Resurrection he had descended to hell and revealed himself as the Lord
of its inmates. Thus the hard yoke of death was broken, and hence

462 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the shouts, "Death, where is thy sting?" The heavenly watchmen
see the booty won and cry, Lift up ye gates that the King of Glory
may come in! — gates which were OriginaUy the ice and snow of winter.
So Odysseus, Hercules, Theseus, and Pythagoras descended to the
realms of Orcus.
The ancients quite commonly deemed death a result of super
natural causes, and for the Semites it was a penalty, deliverance from
which must be either propitiatory or by vicarious sacrifice, in which the
cleansing power of sacred blood played a great role. Death must be
defeated in his stronghold. Christ imparts life either by faith in his
name, by baptism, or by the Lord's Supper. The belief that the inno
cent sufferings of the good have great vicarious power first appeared
in Isaiah liii, and again in the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, and it
dominated the Jewish custom of animal sacrifice. Among the Greeks
the placation of the anger of the gods was the motif of many purifica
tion rites in which sometimes human beings were sacrificed, first
commonly, then annually, later at great public calamities. The transi
tion from human to animal sacrifice is seen in Abraham's offering, and
also in Iphigenia. Human sacrifices were very common among the
Canaanites; and everywhere the greater the worth or rank of the fife
offered, the more effective was the sacrifice.1 In great danger the ruler or
his son might be the victim. The Carthaginians thought their defeat,
b. c. 308, due to Baal's wrath because they had sacrificed slaves instead
of children of noble family and so cast into the furnace one hundred
children, and three hundred more offered themselves. The efficacy of
royal children was due to the belief that deity was incarnate in the king.
Ascension myths have many forms. A hero becomes a favourite
of the gods, and therefore they take him to themselves. Leaders may
be caught up in ecstasy, so that we have here the motive of eschatolog
ical stories of voyages of pious souls after death. The Hebrews knew
of only two cases, that of Enoch, who was translated, and of Elijah,
who went up in a fiery chariot. These were more common among the
Greeks where the hero may be taken to the Elysian fields or islands
of the dead, caves, or the depths of the sea, or Olympus. Originally
the man was transferred, body and soul, without death, as in the case
of Hercules and Romulus. The former was the son of Zeus and a hu
man mother, and so continued to battle with fate and with Hera, but
¦See here Pfleiderer: "Early Christian Conceptions of Christ." London, 1905, 170 p.

JESUS* ESCHATOLOGY 463
overcame death in this and in the lower world, conquering Cerberus,
delivering Prometheus, and at last voluntarily ascending from his
funeral pyre. Many mythic heroes of heavenly birth return heaven
ward. Caesar was raised to the rank of a god by official decree, and
the soul of Augustus after his death was seen in a comet. A praetor
swore that he had seen the emperor's soul fly up from the funeral pyre
to heaven. After Peregrinus had thrown himself into the pyre at
Olympia, a man declared that an eagle flew up from the flames into
heaven. So, too, the fact of the apotheosis of ApoUonius was said
to be proven because his grave could nowhere be found on earth.
So the apocalyptic Jesus is exalted as Lord of Lords, head of
the Church and universe, etc. So the disciples of Buddha hailed him
as God of Gods, Saviour, Father, joy, light of the world, jewel of the uni
verse, King of physicians, holy, before whose glory sun, moon, and fire
shine no more, the miracle of three thousand worlds. He is addressed
as "My beloved, my riches, greatness, hfe," as omniscient, as yet
accessible to prayer although he has entered Nirvana, because he is
the eternal Spirit of salvation. Marduk of Babylon was also adored
as king of kings, finisher of creation, and such, superlative terms have
also been applied to Ammon-Ra in Egypt, Ahura-Mazda in Persia,
etc., aU illustrating the same need of the soul that was expressed in the
apotheosis of the historic Jesus who, however, alone had the unique
power of renewing humanity. Pfleiderer says that the chief rival of
Jesus in early centuries was not Mithra, as is commonly said, but the
Roman emperor. Of Augustus it is said that aU things would have
sunk to ruin if this son of universal joy had not arisen and brought
regeneration. He came as a saviour. "In his appearance the hopes
of our forefathers are fulfiUed. He has not only surpassed aU former
benefactors of mankind, but it is even impossible that a greater than he
should ever appear. A new era must begin from his birth." Thus
emperors were thought incarnations of deity.
But the point here is that the Christian idea of an eternal son of
God who became man, died, descended to heU, conquered death and
Satan, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand
of God, wfil come to judge the quick and the dead — aU these articles
are found in rehgious cults of the East, not once but many times.
What these lack, however, is a single subject for the synthesis of aU
these predicates, a nucleus around which this seething mass of religious

464 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
concepts can crystallize into a new world of hope and faith for the
present life and for that which is to come. It was precisely this that
the Pauline risen Jesus gave. Thus the best in the old heathen myster
ies was incorporated into Christianity, so that in it members of these
old faiths saw each their own cult completed and glorified. The prog
ress of the primitive Church thus did not consist so much in trans
planting the religion from one ethnic soil to another, nor is it
adequately described as cross-fertilization of religious cults, but Paul was
enough Jew, Roman, and Greek to inaugurate a new blending of strains.
In the new fight now shed on Paul he stands revealed more as the
apostle of than to the gentiles. His movement took the pagan cults of
dying, rising, and glorified deities and heroes, Semitized and synthetized
and in general edited, and took them back in a sublimated form to the
people about the Mediterranean who had long known them in their
own cruder and more imperfect forms. What he preached to them was
their own cult-categories made over and attached to a Hebrew hero
whom he and Peter had apotheosized in a way even better calculated
to meet gentile than Hebrew modes of thought and feeling. This
goes far toward explaining the marvel of the rapid spread of early
Christianity. It was a revival of the old ethnic cults which were
restored, their lacunae filled out, their themes of befief and rite given
new names, the deeper human needs they had met embodied in a new
legend, so that Mithra, Osiris, and the other dying and rising deities
could be worshipped again and in unison under the common name of
the risen Christ. Hence the great power ascribed to "his name," for
the conversion of the gentiles was largely to a new name, the only
name whereby they were told they could be saved. This was a great
achievement of the Semitic genius, a possibifity, which, however, as
we have seen, Jesus anticipated when at the close of the first period of
his career he turned his face toward death. All the ingenuity that Paul
and most Christian writers have since shown in tracing the origin of
the dying-rising concept to the prophets is somewhat misleading, for
no fact is now more sun-clear to every unprejudiced student who can
rightly evaluate culture forces than that this was distinctively gentile.
The new faith did not destroy but fulfilled the preexisting religions
with which it came in contact, even more than it did the Old Testa
ment. Psalms and prophets could be retained, much of the rest of
the old canon allegorized, while what was left became ineffective, and

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 465
under the influence of rabbinism lapsed and desiccated like husk from
which the corn had been taken. These heathen cults were lapsing
and had developed fungoid abominations which had to be removed,
but the stock was stiU so vital that with discretion new grafts could
be inserted that would grow and, to use a favourite figure of Harnack's,
serve as capillary tubes in which the sap of the new religious life could
rise high, quickly, and copiously. On the whole there was probably
more continuity than rupture or contrast, so that the new faith seemed
to be the natural goal of the evolution of old ones. Thus, in the Chris
tian prayers, meditation, rites, and struggles for salvation, the best of
the old heathenism still fives. The view which underlay aU its forms
was that atonement comes by the vicarious sacrifice of the god of the
gens, and Paul's self-immolating Christ is no mere effigy or unwilling
captive or criminal, nor an intangible phantom, nor a metaphysical
Platonic idea, but a symbol of the human race, and so his death and
Resurrection are not so much an historical story as an eternal allegory.
Wrede even suggests that had Paul had personal knowledge of Jesus
this would have been something of an obstacle to his apotheosis of him,
and that had the Pauline epistles come first in the New Testament,
as they were first in time, perhaps we could hardly have regarded Jesus
as a real man but rather as an ideal bearer of all the great attributes
or a composite portrait of all the great functions with which previous
religions had invested their supreme ideals. There were other prefor
mations, e. g., dreams of a golden age, expectations of a great deliverer,
deep longing for post-mortem personal life. Some or most of these
were common throughout the realm conquered by Alexander and later
by Rome, and wherever they occurred the spread of Christianity was
facilitated, while where they were unknown or dim it found barriers
hard to pass, as, e. g., into the domain of Brahminism, Confucianism,
and even in the Teutonic domain.
FinaUy, looking back, let us ask ourselves what reaUy happened
during the first forty days, few months, or very first few years, after
Jesus' death, that made this point the greatest era in the world's history.
We can answer comprehensively that it was an unprecedented exalta
tion and fusion of the best ideals of humanity. The phylon "took up
the harp of life and smote on aU the chords with might; smote the chord
of self, which, trembhng, passed in music out of sight," so that the
race and its interests came nearer than ever before or since to incar-

466 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
nation in the individual. The future dominated the present, and inner
states were so intensified that outer states sank to relative insignifi
cance and moral purity became a passion. This, in rough terms, was
what was happening, and there was nothing else save what is connoted
and denoted in these phrases. It was all natural and aU explicable
by the unique conjunction of events, and there were no unknown psy
chological laws. It was the sudden advent of man's adolescence
with its characteristic outburst of accelerated growth, its penetrating
insights, foregleams of all the soul will ever know, its realizations, its
waves of altruism when the race takes possession of the individual,
endowing him with aU his rich heritage of enthusiasm, energy, and
intuition Which it is henceforth his whole duty to conserve, refine, and
apply. So now Gospels had soon to be written, and myths, miracles,
epistles, rites, institutions, grew, born of the effort to preserve, object
ify, organize, and put to work the wealth of new powers so lavishly
poured out. The new psychic energies set free were given by an in
veterate instinct a Uranian or astral direction. A filial relation was
evolved between the new consciousness and the source of all things,
personified as a celestial All-Father. Closer social bonds even than
those of classic friendship were developed, and had to be provided for.
Some of the new apergus found fit embodiment in a common and very
portative muthos tiU later, born of the needs of controversy and com
bined as it had to be with the cumulative wealth of religious experi
ences, a credo arose which is the germ of theology. Methods of attaining
and retaining higher inner states had to be wrought out, as did
modes of demarcating those who had from those who had not attained,
or who opposed it. Access to this higher life must be opened to all men,
etc. The prime trait of early Christianity was thus a great tide of new
joy in hfe that lifted everything within its pale to a higher level. New
words, even, or old ones charged with new meanings came into vogue —
grace, charity, love, hope, faith, the Holy Spirit and its fruits, repent
ance, forgiveness, turning from death to life, putting on Christ and also
having him born within; for new experiences had to have new phrases.
But it was impossible to objectify or realize aU that had occurred
and been dimly sensed, and hence aU who had experienced the great
augmentation of efficiency and the transformations it involved believed
that behind and above all they knew were countless higher unseen spir
itual agencies, so that another of the chief characteristics of this age

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 467
was its intense pneumaticism.1 This meant that every inner calenture
was inspired and regarded as the work of some invisible power or spirit,
and inspiration was possession. Strong and inexplicable impulses
were interpreted, riot as an exaltation of the natural powers of man, as
we know them to be, but as supernatural, and thus divine or mysteries,
gifts of the Holy Spirit received by faith. Weinel says that what might
be called inspirational seances were held tfil weU on into the second
century, strange as they seem to outsiders. The Holy Ghost was com
municated to neophytes by laying on of hands, and prayer, and wrought
signs and wonders. The apostolate was its chief gift, and it might be
continuous, as with its members, or intermittent, and had many degrees.
Instead of being one spirit, it was often conceived as differentiated into
many. It gave visions, wisdom, sleep, heroism. Philo said: "When
the divine insanity or prophetic impulse comes over man the sun of
consciousness must set and the human must vanish in the divine light."
Ecstasy for him was the essential form of prophecy; but every wise and
virtuous man could speak not his own mind, but utter what was given
to him as wfil-lessly as the strings of an instrument. Indeed, for dec
ades, most great thoughts or strong feelings that came suddenly were
thought to be given by some of these muses. These pneumatophores
soon had to distinguish between good and bad spirits, for unclean
demons might possess the soul. The Spirit seized, bound, cried out,
drove into the desert, inspired means to overthrow Satan's work; and
the unpardonable sin was to mistake the work of a true spirit for that
of a demon. The former worked miracles, was comparable to the wind,
its visitations were like those of angels, made of fire and light. In
this immaterial world dwell the souls of the dead, and this made the
whole of the latter part of the first and second centuries eschatological.
The old aeon was dead, and another had come. Had spiritism been too
intensely cultivated, historicity would have been lost; but this in time
was duly subordinated. Paul's anthropology made his pneumaticism
unique. His conversion, his claim to speak with tongues more than
they all, his type of preaching, his calling as an extra apostle, his groan
ing, sighing, crying "Abba, Father," witnessed to his possession of this
heavenly treasure. It weUed up from within, bestowing charismata
'See Weinel: "Die Wirkungen des Geistes und der Geister im nachapostolischen Zeitalter, bis auf Irenaus." Leip
zig, 1899, 234 p. H. Gunkel: "Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes." 2d ed. Gdttingen 1890, 109 p. Karl Holl:
"Enthusiasmus und Bussgewalt beim griechischen Mdnchtum; eine Studie zu Symeon dem neuen Theologen." XS98,
532D. Wendt: "Teaching of Jesus." 1901,2vol. Harnack: "Monasticism: its Ideals and History," and ^"Con
fessions of St. Augustine." London, 1901, 171 p.

468 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
of many kinds and degrees. Sometimes it interpreted senseless utter
ances. It inspired every virtue. Power and spirit were for Paul
synonymous. It was God's strength and wiU, and also the procreative
power of the heavenly Father, to beget earthly children. It made man
not only a new being, but dead to the world with which he must make
a break. Although supernatural and sporadic, it had its own laws, and
its possession marked an advance over the prophets. It was not based
on speculation, like the wisdom literature of the Hebrews, but was
more theosophic. Paul's life was a riddle to him which he sought to
explain by his pneuma, which was the ideal possession of eternal life.
For him there was at least partial identity between it and Christ,
although the efficiency of the latter was greater. One of its attributes
was that it was whole, or holy, as opposed to sin or disease, and its
freedom was autonomous, and no power on earth could constrain it.
His experience is a fresh well-spring of the inner life, and its psychological
content should be the basis of theology, which like religious institu
tions, is one of its deposits. These newer studies of religious enthusi
asm made the attitude toward spirits, in Weinel's phrase, "the most
essential possession of the innermost personal hfe of primitive Chris
tendom." Here we must include apparitions, demons, angels, for the
multifarious spiritism was widespread and intense. The invisible
world of powers, principalities, heathen gods, was long a dominant
influence, and is a new key to the history of this period. Evil spirits
were arrayed under the leadership of Satan, and caused countless here
sies and the desolating effects of the persecutions were ascribed to
them. They manifested themselves in hysterical, epileptic symptoms,
heathen magic, spurious miracles; and not only men, but even animals,
were inspired by them to war on mankind. Pagan rites were sacrifices
to devils whose purpose it was to seduce to polytheism and idolatry,
and there was great joy when one Christian was led astray. Dread
of these influences became a superstitious awe that darkened life and
gave it a sombre background. War, murder, adultery, sacrilege, were
inspirations of Satan and his ministers. He sent doubt, pain, hate,
that made the Christian life a desperate battle and made asceticism
necessary. These mighty invisible personal powers behind the world
were well organized, and Olympian Jove, the Roman emperor, and all
false gods were their representatives. Christ, on the other hand, in
spired faith that none of these principalities or any other creature could

JESUS' ESCHATOLOGY 469
separate the believer from his Master. Thus, good and evil powers
were leagued and graded, with the Holy Spirit supreme among the
powers of good, pouring out love and giving assurance that the legions
of Satan would be driven back to the pit. This exuberance of enthusi
asm, which was interpreted as a pouring out of the Spirit, had at first
to be checked for the work of organization. But it gave the inner
witness; transformed hfe; marked the beginning of life in heaven. Its
effects were not only speaking in unknown tongues which were often
interpreted, poetizing, narrating words heard in trancoidal states or
autosuggestions that came in meditation, but inspiring authorship
sometimes without comprehension, by direct impartation. Cures
were wrought; demons confessed its power. In the field of will it
brought both tonic and clonic cramps, and involuntary and sometimes
uncoordinated movements. The behest of the Spirit prompted
symbolic acts, heroic renunciation of possessions, fasting, continence,
obedience, service, all supernaturally motivated. Thus, back of the
phenomenal world were two camps of hostile spirit forces arrayed
against each other. Virtue was the work of the one, and vice that of
the other. Things were heard without understanding. There were
floods of light. Some had clairvoyance and what might now seem
telepathy. The senses were affected, and in apocalyptic moments
the dramatic state brought what seemed oblivion to the outer world.
Never has there been such richness and variety of pneumatic life as
in this age, which Zeller thinks in the West was more superstitious than
any other before or since. All this showed that, for generations, the
souls of men were in a state of high tension; and the marvel is that these
states of supercharged mental energy often went with the greatest
practical sagacity.
The great inaugural work of the Holy Ghost was to create belief-
in the risen Jesus; but more than this, the risen Jesus was himself its
creation. In giving realization to this deep unconscious wish-suggestion
in the soul of his foUowers it not only worthily inaugurated but virtually
completed its work. AU the above rank growths of spiritism that
foUowed were involved in this prime act of faith and were the Vor-
frucht of the rich virgin soil in the first stages of reclamation from the
miasmatic marsh of superstition, from which the long succession of
crops of idealisms has since grown. Now the pneuma was related to
the psyche, much as Platonism thought the psyche was to the soma.

47© JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
The charismata that flowed from the new dispensation of the Spirit
which was the pleroma of them aU were only coroUaries of fuU behef
in the Resurrection. When it was once accepted, aU the rest foUowed.
This gave a new futuristic trend, for the centre of aU human interests
was henceforth less on what was or is than on what was about to be,
and the wild eschatology of that day was only a rude attempt to ex
press in figurate imagery this new trend. With his soul reaUy back in
the world, identified, believed in, and marching on, as captain of the
souls of all his foUowers, the goal of all Jesus' endeavour was attained,
his work was finished, his legitimate successor installed, and he and his
career were henceforth only a memory, sacred and enshrined. Like
other great leaders, all that was human of him sleeps forever, and only
his spirit henceforth wakes and lives. It does so only in those souls
that experience supernormal reinforcement or are inspired by the larger
soul of the race, impelling them to new and upward steps in the evolu
tion of an ever-higher manhood in an ever-better .kingdom of man.
What Seelye called "the enthusiasm of humanity," Giddings, "the
sense of kind," analysis dubs "ethical erethism" and, in general, the
higher potentialization in the individual, and in communities, of the
power that makes for righteousness, that toward the future gives aug
mented optimism for the good and a deeper pessimism for the bad,
reinforced now by new eugenic insights — these together constitute
the legacy of Jesus and indicate the most generic gifts of the Spirit.
Such phrases indicate the rough shadow plan of the higher story which
Jesus built in the mansion of Mansoul.1

¦jw i*. Aunaun. ,.iu aim uu iumiucKia, ujuuwi, iy.i, iiuo y. u. rucmtici. jl^lluic^ uu Lilt imiutui-t
of the Apostle Paul on the Development of Christianity." Trans, by J. F. Smith. 3d ed.,, London, 1897, 292 p. For a
handy but uncritical sketch, see E. D. Wood: "The Life and Ministry of Paul the Apostle." Boston, 1912, 261 p.

New York, 1908. Paul Cams: "The Pleroma. Chicago, 1909, 163 p.; B. Weiss: "Paulus und seine Gemeinde."
1914, 296 p.; C. Clemen: "Religionsgeschichtliche Erklarung des neuen Testaments." Giessen, 1009, 301 p.; S. G.
Ayres: Jesus Christ Our Lord:" an English bibliography of Christology comprising over five thousand titles annotated
and classified. New York, 1006, 302 p.; W. Hanna: ''The Forty Days After Our Lord's Resurrection." 1866. 163 p.
See also Segaloff: "Die biologische Bedeutung der Ekstase, Zeits. f. Psychotherapie u. medizinische Psychologie. See
also my "Human Efficiency," address at Clark College, 1009; G. E. Partridge: "Psychology of Second Breath," Ped.
" '' " ' * ' "™ '' ' ¦- v '¦ " — — ¦ • U. lip " 

Hauptmann, H. A. "Kennedy: "St. Paul's Conceotion' of the Last Thin?'!." 1904, "390 p.; L." A. Muirhead"~The
Eschatology of Jesus." 1004, 224 p.; G. B. Stevens: "The Pauline Theology." 1908, 383 p.; W. D. Hyde-
"From Epicurus to Christ." 1905, 285 p.

I have been also indebted to J. H. Holtzmann: "Das messianische Bewusstsein Jesu." Tubingen, 1907 100 p
A. Pott: "Das Hoflen im Neuen Testament." Leipzig, 1915, 203 p.; T>. E. Haupt: "Die eschatologischen Aussage:

J.; C F. Kent: "The Work and Teaching of the Apostles." 1015, 3«3 P-i G. H. Gilbert: "The First Interpreters of
esus." 1901, 729 p.; 0. Pfleiderer: "Primitive Christianity." a vols, 1011; W. H. Thurton: "The Truth of the
Gospels." 1913, 639 p.; F. Andres: "Die Engellehre."i9i4, 183 p.; G. Denny: "Jesus and the Gospels." 1908, 418 p

CHAPTER EIGHT
JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER
I. Gist of the moral teachings of the sermon on the mount —
Subordination of the individual to the whole among unicellular or
ganisms, also the bee and the ant — Animal herds — Primitive totemic
society — Altruism and mutual help — The ethics of self -subordination —
Interpretations of totemism, its influence in shaping the doctrines and
life of early Christendom — The contrast between the hyperindividual
or superman and the opposite of social subordination and effacement —
Jesus' attitude to science and its explanation — II. The evolution of
prayer among primitive people — Its types, forms, and meanings —Its
place in the world of science — Its incalculable psychological and peda
gogical influence — Its specific functions, especially that of confession
in the new light which psychology has shed upon it — An exposition of
the Lord's Prayer in the fight of modern thought.
THE so-caUed sermon on the mount embodies the most essential
teachings of Jesus. The first and strongest impression it makes
upon every candid mind is that it chaUenges in the most
flagrant way most of the principles on which modern Occidental
man conducts his life. The beatitudes are upon the poor in spirit,
the meek, the mourners, those who are persecuted and reviled. They
are to inherit heaven and earth along with the pure in heart, those who
hunger for righteousness, the merciful, and the peacemakers. These
are the salt and light of the world.
Then come the great inwardizations. To feel anger is murder;
to feel lust, adultery. If any member or function offend, get rid of it,
even if that involve mutilation. Sacrifice is giving up rancour. Simple
assent and dissent are sufficient, with no oaths or protestations. Hard
est of aU is the precept, "resist not evil; turn the other cheek to the
smiter; if you are robbed, give the robber more; love your enemies;
bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate and persecute
you." Give alms, pray and fast, not in public but secretly. Seek no
other but heavenly treasure; serve God whoUy; take no more thought
471

472 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
concerning food than do the birds, or concerning clothes than do the
lilies; think not of the morrow. Ask and you will receive aU that is
good for you. Pronounce no judgments upon others. Do to others
as you wish them to do to you. Those who practise these precepts
build not upon the shifting sands but upon the Rock of Ages.
Surely, even to attempt seriously to live according to such pre
scriptions, one must become an ascetic or a monk and devote his whole
life to self-regimentation. In a world of such individuals there would
be little industrial wealth, ambition, enterprise, feasting, amusement,
fashion, rivalry, or competition. There would be no wars, or even
conflicts, no personal foresight, no penalties, no pride of station, and
no knowledge or lust of power. Evil would remain unresisted, and
there would be no toil or worry for a livelihood. Even Oriental com
munities that have taken these precepts in earnest and tried to live
up to them have almost always come to grief. No wonder that such
ideals have been sometimes derided as a fool's paradise by enemies,
on the one hand, or on the other have been characterized in every
kind of mitigating, accommodating, and euphemistic way by friends.
Still, if we are honest, we cannot escape the bald fact that it is exactly
in these precepts that we have the core of Jesus' teaching, and that he
meant them to be taken literally. Moreover, the more we study the
above items, the more we realize that they are not isolated, so that we
can pick and choose, accepting some and rejecting others; but they
form a pretty complete psychological and ethical whole, so that if we
abate the rigour of one, that of the others suffers. The injunction to
resist not evil, e. g., was the only thing in the sermon on the mount
which Wu Ting Fang seriously challenged, but Tolstoi made it the
key to everything in Christianity.
Are these ideals good, true, or even beautiful? Are they practical?
The best point of view from which to answer these questions we shall
find by a glance at the early evolutionary stages of social development.
Once unicellular organisms were the highest forms of life. Each
individual performed all the fundamental vital functions of self-
preservation, food-getting, and reproduction. When multicellular
organisms arose, each cell surrendered progressively some of its func
tions, and developed and specialized others in the interests of the whole
and with great gain. The higher organisms thus evolved proved to
have many advantages in the struggle for existence. The integration

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 473
and differentiation of the constituent units which thus occurred in
volved more or less limitation and subordination of each part to the
whole. Even where colonies of protozoa arose, the same advance
occurred in greater or less degree as Espinas was the first to show in a
broad way. Indeed, every metazoan body is a colony of cells. A
swarm of bees or a nest of ants might be caUed a body in which each
unit while acting within the plan of the whole, is detached enough to
have its own freedom of movement. The worker bee1 often works
itself to death in two or three months for the sake of the hive. In
the ant state the individual is no less subordinated to the welfare of the
community. Each class and each individual has its own functions in
conserving and developing the community, which lives on for genera
tions with a kind of terrestrial immortality, whfie countless generations
of individuals wear themselves out in serving it. Thus to each cell in
a body, and to each member of such an insect community, the precepts
of Jesus concerning abandonment of personal ends for the good of the
whole would hold; for each individual is only a means to an end vaster
than itself.
In the social organization of higher forms of animal life gregarious-
ness has immense advantages over solitary habits, as we see in the
familiar comparisons between the cat and the dog, which are vastly
to the advantage of the latter because it is far more completely domesti
cated, more intelligent, docile, etc. Man is probably the most gre
garious of aU mammals, and to this fact he owes, in no small part,
not only his survival but his dominion over the animal world. Thus
his social nature means that even his primary egoistic impulsions
for food and sex, and also his fear, anger, lust for power and possessions,
etc., are constantly restrained in the interests of the clan, tribe, or
group to which he belongs, which always demands altruism. The re
pressions thus arising from his social milieu have operated from the very
first, and probably even before he became man, and their influence is
powerful. They are also aU-pervading and their ramifications are met
in every department of life. The herd instinct is far more dominant
than one would infer from the psychology of crowds, or even that of
suggestion. It may be mainly offensive as is illustrated by the wolf-
pack, or chiefly defensive, as in a flock of sheep. Group influences

'See Maeterlinck: "The Life of the Bee"; also especially W. Trotter: "The Instinct of the Herd in Peace and War.1
tgis. 212 p.

474 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
incessantly check, facilitate, transform, man's every impulse. They
make society, from the clan up, more or less homogeneous. It is due to
them that each unit is so extremely sensitive to the conduct and senti
ment of each other member of his group, as weU as of the whole, as we
see aU the way from the first symbiosis up to the development of the
higher form of sympathy. To break from group control, custom, ac
tion, or opinion, involves a painful conflict. Suggestion and even
speech itself are media of the union of each with all. Much that we
call reason is only an attempt to justify our instinctive acquiescence
in the mandates of society; and a large part of human conduct, and
most of what we caU morals, and even rehgion, consists essentially of
group prescriptions, so that about all sin is defiance of social control,
and insistence upon our personal uninhibited individual wishes and
desires. Whenever we do thus break away from what the general
consensus of our social milieu requires we have a painful sense of un
worthiness, ill-desert, imperfection, insufficiency; in a word, of sin or
guilt. The Pauline war within our members began with the very first
inclination to violate tribal taboo.
As human society has grown complex, and family, clan, community,
and man's social rapport have irradiated, and have also broken up
into industrial, cultural, and other groups within groups, the adjust
ment between egocentric inclinations and social requirements has
become very complex and very difficult. Conflicts are innumerable.
They are incessant and painful, and men often break away from the
law of service to the whole. Thus, man is not so adjusted to his human
as the bee is to its community. That he should become no less so is the
postulate of Jesus. Only when this adjustment is made wfil man be
an ideal socius in an ideal kingdom. To effect a complete adaptation
between them both, society and the individual must change. But the
change can and must begin with the individual. The bee and ant
state began to evolve countless ages before man appeared, so that
besides being simpler themselves and living in a simpler state, they
have had a vastly longer time to develop their communities. Both
the human individual and his society are vastly more complex. More
over, man has been very seriously aberrant and has suffered loss or
arrest. Storms of passion and many departures from his norm have
left their scars upon his nature. It may weU be doubted, too, whether
modern institutions control the individuals within them to-day as

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 475
completely as was the case in the ancient tribe. From the point of
view of the sermon on the mount, man seems to have just begun to
effectively socialize himself, old as are his efforts and deep as is his in
stinct to do so. In some respects conventions are too rigid, and pre
vent what Walt Whitman and Carpenter caU "free exfoliation" of
the individual without danger of disruption of the social bond, and
thus, too, great resistance to progress and free differentiation arises.
Here social pressure is too great, there too weak, or man is too insensi
tive to it. Jesus had little place for great men or hero-worship in the
Kingdom as he conceived it. But his blessings are upon the simple
life, and his praises are for simple duties in a simple environment.
History is essentially the story of man's efforts to find his place in
nature, and especially his true relations to his fellow men; and both
endeavours, especially the latter, are now in their rudimentary stages.
When this work is finished, we may perhaps then realize the ethics of
Jesus, and the hyperindividuation of to-day may be reduced to the
dimensions most favourable for the interests of the race, to serve which
is the whole of both duty and piety.
Not only Jesus' person as Messiah, the atonement achieved by bis
death, his mystic union with the Father and his foUowers, according
to Pauline and Johannin doctrines (as characterized in other chapters
of this book), but the ethics of self -subordination taught in his "Ser
mon" are all standing forth in a new light by reason of the manifold
studies of what it is now apparent was the chief culture system of un
counted prehistoric millennia, to which we give the inadequate name of
totemism. Robertson Smith first showed how totemism was the key
to the secrets of the entire sacrificial cult of the Old Testament. Other
studies show how it permeated the cults of ancient Egypt, Assyria,
Persia, Greece, Phoenicia, Mexico, and Peru, to say nothing of the
entire social organism of many primitive peoples. When we ask what
it was, and especially how it arose, expert opinions are hopelessly
divergent. \
Frazer, after long and perplexing investigations, thought he had
found a solution among the Arunta.1 Mothers at first did not know,
and later feigned ignorance of, the cause of conception. When a
mother felt the first movements of a child in her body attention may

'"Totemism and Exogamy." Edinburgh, 1887. Especially p. 90. See also "The Beginnings of Religion and
Totemism Among the Australian Aborigines," Fortnightly Review, Sept., 1903.

476 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
have been strongly drawn to something near her, for instance, an emu
or a kangaroo, which acquired thus a peculiar significance, tfil she
fancied its soul had " struck root in her." Thus the child, when born,
although it will look human wfil be an emu or a kangaroo in essence.
The child, when later told of this paternity, loved and cultivated the
species. Thus many other totems would be found by others. In this
"conception theory" Frazer said, "our plummet has at last touched
bottom," although he has later abandoned this view in despair.
Totemism often, as here, included the idea of ancestral spirits, perhaps
connected with amulets archaically marked, and so discarnate spirits of
older days may be reborn. On the other hand, of 201 totems in
Central Australia, 169 are of edible animals. Ten years later F. Max
MuUer1 sought to discredit totemism by caUing it an infantile epidemic
of thought, refusing to credit the totemic origin even of Egyptian thier-
olatry, totemism being inconsistent with his theory of a more primitive
and direct worship of natural objects, and holding that animals and
other fetishes of savages were eponymous ancestors.
W. Robertson Smith2 reduces the most essential part of the Old
Testament cult of Yahveh to totemism, which was also the core of the
ceremony of the feast of the dead. An offering on an altar or a sacri
ficium was the essential rite in about all refigions, and was " an act of
social feUowship between the deity and his worshippers," or a com
munion of the faithful with their god. The oldest offerings were ani
mals, and others came later and were progressively demateriafized —
flesh, blood, then smoke or incense. The significance of common eating
was always to strengthen the social bond; for the god was commensal
with his worshippers, and eating the same food meant the same material
of their body. In this act the worshipper says to his god, " You are my
blood and flesh. ' ' As men are consubstantial with their mother through
her milk, so food is a family bond. There was no communion without
the sacrifice of an animal, and this must always be public; for no one
could slay even a domestic animal for his own use. The common blood
of the tribe is sacred, and the sacrificial animal was treated like a
relative, so that the god, the animal, and the tribe were one, not unlike
the persons of the Trinity. Thus the animal offered up became a
totem. The sacrificial animal was holy to the god, and OriginaUy

'" Contributions to the Science of Mythology." London, 1897. Especially pp. 7, 158, and 443.
'"The Religion of the Semites." New York, 1889, 48S p.

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 477
identical with the god. All animals were once sacred, and no flesh
could be eaten unless the whole tribe participated in so doing, for to
slaughter an animal was to pour out tribal blood. On this basis de
veloped in many lands the idea that atonement was necessary for the
slaughterer in this sacrifice, which was the tie that binds the members
of the race each to each, and each to his god, and each to the totemic
animal, the life of which must not be touched unless the entire tribe
was guilty. Thus the totem animal was the primitive god, slaying
and eating of which brought the closest communion. The Aztec
human offerings, the bear offerings of the bear tribe, also the Ianos,
the tortoise offerings among the Zunis, illustrate this "killing the divine
animal and eating the god."
Durkheim1 regards the totem as almost a god, dwelling in each
member of the group and all of them in it. It is not only the con
dition of the existence of the group, but soul of its soul and hfe of its
life. It is also the clan ancestor immanent in it, and incarnate in
each individual, perhaps his very blood itself. It is the chief object
of the cult of a tribe, and the focus of its religion. Each totem, there
fore, is in a sense divine, and if its blood is shed its very being is poured
out. Thus the totem is consanguineous and consubstantial in each
in whom it dwells, and is the central part of his personahty. It can
no more be changed than can his soul. It is a principle of filiation.
So intussuscepted are the members of a totem tribe or phratry that it
becomes incestuous for them to marry; hence, exogamy. Animals of
the same species as the totem are usually tabooed, for to eat them
would be cannibalism. If half of a horde chose a separate animal
deity, the horde would then split into two clans which might become
hostile, but members of the one clan can now intermarry with those of
the other by capture or purchase. Back of this strange biological meta
physics of totemism Durkheim assumes an aboriginal religiosity or a
feefing of something potent, dreadful, supernal (as Mana principle),
which in process of time became attached more to certain animals or
persons than to others, perhaps originally more often to women,
whose motherhood is mysticaUy regarded. This divine principle,
therefore, was a diffusive power that came to concentrate itself in the
emu, bear, etc., which then became a sacred shrine of the divinity and
gave the name of the animal to the tribe. He assumes that the sexual
'Various articles in L'AnnU Sociolosique since 1898.

478 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
relation was first more or less promiscuous, and that thus arose the
first attempts to regulate it. The totemic animal is neither exactly
the species nor the Platonic idea of it. It is an individual but mythical
being from whom aU members of the group evolved, so that once
within it existed potentiaUy both the human clan and the animal
species, both being thus close blood relations. Totemism is thus
usuaUy closely connected with the segregation of tribes into primitive
matrimonial classes. Durkheim does not attempt to suggest the time
which it took totemism to evolve, but J. F. Hewitt1 in discussing the
development of the mythology of India, which he thinks was made by
projecting more or less important events rather than individuals in
very highly symbolic form upon the heavens, wherein if we only had
the cipher we could read in the ancient astrological creatures there the
history of man, believes we must go back definitely to about 21,000
years b. c. and that this period continued down to, and indeed well
into, the historic period. As perpetuated guide-marks of the progress
of tribes, with events apotheosized in the very names of the constella
tions (at first animal), these official transmitters gave us in pictorial
language the story of their achievements laid off in superposed layers,
which added greatly to man's interest in the heavens and still rever
berates with the momentum of millennia in the soul. Thus heavenly
things acquired a new interest tiU they were superseded by a later race
that took a more economic view of steUar phenomena. Many beheve
that, at least in these fields, we have sketchy outlines or remnants of
the history of man long before there is any other record, that here lies
the philosophy of the paleo- and neo-lithic ages before domestication
of animals, and that we glimpse here old methods of thought labori
ously wrought out which already gave man mental unity and a basis
of association, brought economy in thinking, together with communal
solidarity, and, especially, laid the foundations for religion.
Lang2 takes a very different view. Agreeing with Darwin that
primitive man must have lived in very small and highly gregarious
communal groups, so smaU, indeed, that male jealousy on the part of
the head of the clan would be a constant repeUant force (especiaUy
since man is amatory at aU seasons), he thinks that these early groups
of men came to assume the names of certain animals and other objects
'"History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age." London, igoi. Also "The Ruling Races of Prehistoric
Times in India," etc. London, Z894.
'"The Secret of the Totem." London, 1005, ir J p.

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 479
and thus to feel themselves in closer rapport with them, and to develop
a general magic for the species thus constituted of which they were a
part. Hewitt had thought that the animal name began the entire
process, and would be thought to imply a mystic connection. The
name was thus the soul-bearer or box. Hence, the totem became the
group-soul designating the most vital part, and all individuals bearing
that name were psychically one. Pikler and Somto1 thought that one
of the first needs of man was settled names for his communities, which
could be expressed in pictographs, tattoos, on grave-posts, etc., as a
clan mark, and the advantage of animal names was that they could be
better expressed in picture language. On this view, therefore, the
name is the germ of totemism. Once the relation between all objects
and their names was everywhere deemed vital. On this view totemism
took its rise rather in the practical needs of man than in his religious
instincts. To utter names, or even to know them, gave enemies or
lovers power over those who bore them. Hence, true names were
often secret, and perhaps in proportion as the generic name became
recognized and accepted by those bearing it, it could be used to harm
or help an entire group. Later, when the connection between the
totem name and what it designated was settled, man's active specula
tive mind began to evolve myths as to the connection between itself
and its name-giving totem, and this solidarity often became quite as
great as that between mother and child. The bond of union was
blood. Later, but on this basis, came the various taboos pertaining to
the particular animal, and also to marriage. Sometimes even contact
with the totem means disrespect for its palladial quality. Savages
never know the origin of these transcendentaUy binding names, be
cause it is always obscured by traditions of later origin. Lang thinks
they may have arisen as sobriquets or nicknames given by one group
to another, sometimes perhaps opprobrious at first, even though later
adopted. Thus, to receive the name of an animal in the savage mind
came to mean "to be endowed with the essence or spirit of the object
or to be under its protection, to become one with it in a very special
and unique sense." The epithet may have been suggested by some
resemblance of feature or trait, although Hewitt thinks that dreams
of seers or medicine men may have given a sense of relationship to some
specific animal. The totem name became the centre of a religious
'"Der Ursprung des Totemismus." Berlin, igoo, 36 p.

480 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
system involving praying to, feeding, or burying the totem, best seen in
Samoa where the totem was regarded as the shrine of an ancestral
spirit. In Egypt the animal gods were once totems, and some of them
were even creators. Menzies1 says roundly, "there is no animal that
has not once been worshipped," and he thinks that in Babylonia we have
the earliest clear records of the transition from zoolatry to anthropol-
atry in its winged buUs and eagle-headed men. OccasionaUy we find an
"over-all deity" having a totemic name for every part of his body, and
some deities create man out of a certain animal or a primal creature
rising out of the ground or sea, or he comes from the sky, or is trans
formed perhaps after death into the first man. Frazer collects very
many reincarnation myths of this kind. In one case the name is
ascribed to the fact that the gens had hved so long on the flesh of a
particular animal which had become its totem that its qualities had
passed into the eaters. Haddon2 found that in the Torres Straits the
disposition of the clan members was supposed to reflect the character
of the totem; that the animal was often extinct, even where it was
revered and protected, indicating the very great age of the institution.
He described elaborate initiation rites, and found other indications
here of the advance along the hne which the race must have taken from
the worship of a great animal to that of a great man. Among the
Malays, who were highly totemic, he often found personal totems
cultivated, which had been suggested either by dreams or by some
exceptional experience.
The totemic theories of American anthropologists, based largely
upon the Indians of the North-west who are less primitive than Austra
lians, show that the very word totem has many (PoweU says from
ten to fourteen) different meanings. Hfil-Tout thinks it may mean
either a sacred animal, a tribe, the name of a religious or magic society
or object, an hereditary designation of kin, or even an individual.
The protective animal, guardian spirit, or patron, PoweU thinks, always
comes from the Manitou or from some person to whom the animal or
object was revealed by an inspired dream or vision, or else is the re
sult of a long fast, or of hypnotic suggestion during initiation to adoles
cence. If the totem kins become exogamous, he thinks it is later and
by treaty. The essence of totemism here is the spiritual entity.
'"History of Religion." London, 1895, p. 30.
s"Head-hunters." London, 190Z. Especially Chapter 9.

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 481
Boas thdnks that crests or totem marks perhaps once designated a
tutelary spirit or genius. There is certainly vast difference between
the American Indians and the Pacific Islanders in this respect. In
stead of being hereditary, the American totem is often acquired in
pubescent trance. OccasionaUy there are myths of metamorphosis
into totemic animals or approximation of each to the habits of the
other, with some suggestion of metempsychosis.
Some believe that in the old animal epos we have some vestiges
of totemism. For instance the story of Reynard the Fox,1 the most
famous of the best cycles or epics, gives characteristic names as well as
traits which were recognized all over Europe, as Noble, the lion; Bel-
fin, the lamb; Bruin, the bear; Baldwin, the ass; Eisengrim, the wolf;
Chanticleer, the cock, etc., where each animal represents a human trait
personified. The origin of the story of Reynard is still a mystery.
No one knows whether it was Oriental or possibly astrological. It
certainly represents a different psychic attitude toward animals from
that represented by ^Esop, and stiU more by Uncle Remus. Zabism,
too, or serpent worship and the art of snake charmers are of undoubted
totemic origin.2
Freud3 finds the key to totemism in the child's relation to animals.
Children often have an Angsttier or an animal which has come to be
especiaUy dreaded and in which they therefore have a special interest.
OccasionaUy they imitate and almost personate, as weU as dread, this
animal. Accidents of the individual's experience usuaUy determine
what animal it is, but Freud holds that this attitude was first developed
toward the child's father and later transferred from him to the animal,
which may be loved as weU as hated at the same time, or alternately.
The animal may appear in a recurrent dream, as in pavor nocturnus, as
savages sometimes find their totem. A boy of five very carefully
analyzed had such a phobia for a horse, which was found to be part of
an " Oedipus complex" carried over from the father to the horse, which
thereby became the boy's totem. Wulff found the same transfer
from the father to a dog in a boy of nine, and Ferenczi describes an
other to aU kinds of waterfowl. Toward such animals children very
often feel a strong ambivalent hate and love. Hence Freud infers

•See Carton: "History of Reynard the Fox." 1481. Also Jacobs: "The Most Delectable History of Reynard
the Fox." London, 1895. Also Goethe's poetical version in Dale's edition. Vol. a.
•See W. H. D. Adams: "Curiosities of Superstition." London, 1882. Chapter 2.
•"Totem und Tabu." 1913, 149 P-

482 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
that the totemic animal is really the father, particularly the father of
the clan, who was a severe discipfinarian, enforced exogamy, etc. The
two commands of the totem are that the animal representing it must
not be kiUed, and that no woman inside the clan can be married. Both
these commands Oedipus broke. After the totem is slain the attitude
toward him is reversed and he is revered as is the father in primitive
parricide. Thus totemism developed from the father-surrogate and
from a sense of filial guilt, and every totem and every god were fashioned
on the pattern of the father.
In our day of hypertrophied individuation, egoism, and perhaps
Teutonic ideas of the superman, it is not strange that Reinach thinks
totemism a hypertrophy of its opposite, viz., the social instinct. But
the more we understand this central problem of prehistoric culture, the
more we realize that in primitive communities the individual was hardly
less subordinated to the group than in the hive or the formicary. Its
members were one by closer bonds than those of classic friendship as
characterized by Aristotle and Cicero before romantic love for the
other sex, as Finck describes it, arose. It bound feUow tribesmen
into a unity no whit less deep and mystic, and in some respects more so,
than that described in modern amatory literature. Members of a
totem were one in having the name often sacredly secret, at a time, too,
when the name was no mere nominalistic flatus vocis but almost an
entity, giving those who used it conjuring power over those to whom it
was applied. They were one by partaking of a common meal, eating
commensally the same divine animal, and becoming thereby "milk
brethren," as if born from the same mother. All who ate the flesh or
drank the blood of the same god became thereby one in him as he is
and remains one in them, a symbol of the sacramental tie that binds.
They were one so closely and literally that to marry any clan member
was incest, for she was a true sister. They were one so sacrosanctly
that members could exchange their very souls, so that we have here
one key to explain metamorphosis, and transmigration or metem
psychosis. They were one in having a common ancestor, and the
totem was often a father-surrogate; the same feelings and attitudes
developed toward the father or perhaps toward the head of the clan,
being transferred to the totem. They were sometimes one, too, in a
special sense on great festivals and corroborees, where in states of
social exaltation they partly projected their ecstatic sense of unity,

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 483
and universalized it in a sense of one pre-animistic and aU-including
ontological principle caUed variously Mana, wakanda, etc. Thus
the psychic foundation was laid deep and early for man's passion both
for pantheistic absorption and fusion with the universe, and also for
the no-less-passionate affirmation of monotheism, and even monism;
for aU have here the same psychogenic root, viz., the feefing of one soul
in different bodies, which every great exaltation of the social instinct
brings. Thus in some small, close, and primitive communities an
e pluribus unum feeling developed in man, the gregariousness of which
is without precedent, for it was so strong that it explained all other
social and, perhaps, intellectual unities, which are best understood
anthropomorphically as symbols of this social union.
On this view, the cardinal attitudes, Einstellungen, and deter
mining tendencies of the New Testament conserve for us the best
achievements of many thousand years of prehistoric culture. In this
era of smaU communities, the members of which were indiscerptibly
bound together, each to each, and which felt, acted, and thought in
common, between the individuals of which altruism and mutual help
had their golden age; in these social groups which were in the closest
rapport also with animals, plants, celestial phenomena, seasonal
changes, and nature generaUy, were laid the foundations of aU rehgions.
In the maxims of subordination of self to the service of the group
Christianity thus conserves and refines for us the most precious legacy
of the most unrecorded past, the vestiges of which are like those of a
lost Atlantis. If in such a close community one individual broke the
bonds and smote or robbed a tribal kinsman, to invite him to smite
again or to rob more would bring the automatic social reaction that
would correct the aggression, while to resent evil or aggravate enmity
would tend to the disruption and ruin of the group. This was only a
far greater degree of the results of such action to-day in the family, where
harmony is the first law and where almost any price is not too great to
pay for peace. The history and psychology of Quakerism aptly illus
trate the practical efficiency of these precepts, and in Jesus' day aU this
was intensely reinforced by the expectation of a speedy end of the world,
in view of which aU personal ends sank to insignificance. We might
approximate this ethical standpoint if we could consider all who wrong
us as diseased, and therefore irresponsible, and to be pitied as if insane
or moraUy defective. Moreover, yielding to those not irreclaimably

484 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
violent tends to bring about in them the countervalent sentiments of
sympathy toward their victim, and thus has a palliative, if not pre
ventive, effect. A community actuated by the self-effacing morafity
of Jesus would need no laws, courts, nor penalties, and is found only
in primitive societies such as in some respects, as has often been pointed
out, Homer describes. Again, ideal motherhood, and the less often
sacred ideal, fatherhood, also commended by Aristotle, ethical culture
of the Desjardins type, some text-books of morals, and some of the
types of Christian socialism as it has been so voluminously and vari
ously described of late, have kept alive at least a pale afterglow of the
ethics of Jesus. We are aheady beginning to suspect that the sick, the
defective, and dependent, and the disinherited generaUy, who from
the eugenic point of view alone considered ought to be eliminated,
reaUy perform a great function in keeping ahve the spirit of sympathy
and charity, which would shrivel without them, and that not only they,
but criminals, are necessary for the greatest good of the community as
a whole. Now, of course, social ties are weakened by being expanded
centrifugaUy from the small family group to ever wider and often al
most cosmic dimensions, and egoism, self-assertion, and aggrandize
ment are the chief traits of most of the historic ages, and especiaUy of
our own. The last very few thousand years of man's existence, which we
caU the historic period, are but a few minutes of the day since he began;
and during much of this era we must admit that man has been pretty
selfish. But it was not so of old, as we have seen; and it will not be so
when he reaches his normal maturity. Psychoanalysis describes as
Narcissism cases in which all the love of a child is focussed upon his own
person, before affection has found its proper object in others. In some
neurotics we find arrest at this stage. The patient indulges a silly
vanity, seems to faU in love with his own body, which he admires,
pampers, and often vents aU his eroticism upon. Selfishness is moral
Narcissism, and induces self-magnification and indulgence, or in a
word it is a kind of moral self-abuse. Mankind is in this pubescent
stage, and is afflicted with its most characteristic epidemic. Whether
the race wfil reach ethical maturity or suffer permanent arrest, per
version, or regression, as if smitten with phyletic moral dementia
praxox, is the supreme question of culture and progress. The Chris
tian life is above aU things else a life so utterly devoted to goods and

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 485
worths, and that so transcends self, that self would be freely sacrificed
at any time and in any way if the interests of the whole could thus be
best advanced. No man has reached his ethical majority who would
not die if the real interests of the community could thus be fur
thered. If complete, each man is always at least a potential hero or
even martyr. What would the world be without the values that have
been bought at the price of death? Now even religion rarely demands
this supreme test, but it does demand loyalty to truth, right, and the
common weal. These often require the sacrifice of means, of comfort.
They necessitate the repression of every rancour and hate; they refine
fear for self into fear for others, and make us fear evil for them more
than we fear it for ourselves. As I write, thousands of men are vastly
increasing the risk of death or mayhem for causes they deem worth the
risk. A militancy that brings hfe as a sacrifice ready to be offered up,
if called for, caUs out again a new and larger perspective and rouses
deeper and more generic forces in the soul. To his own superiors the
soldier must filustrate meekness and submission, and to his mates a
confraternity of the sermon on the mount. But all this intensified
esprit de corps makes him more terrible to his enemies. Among those
who stay at home, too, all barriers of rank, station, wealth, party, and
often blood are broken, and a new solidarity supervenes, while toward
the enemy racial hates are augmented and new ones developed. Thus
there is regression as between the larger units and toward ancient tribal
relations of hostility. Within the national units, the Kingdom of Christ ;
without, that of Antichrist, is advanced. Within, all aversions are
reduced; without, they are intensified. There is more benevolence
at home, and more malevolence abroad. At home there are more
Christian forbearance, toleration, and closer bonds; and without, there
are relapse toward the barbaric rules of the jungle and its hate and
aggression. Meanwhile, we can only hope and pray that the good
within may prove greater and more lasting than the relapse of outer
relations. If only external dangers prove to confirm and advance inner
harmonization, the aggregate good may exceed that of evil, and the
psychic and material havoc of the conflict may be offset by gains.
That we may hope for this issue we have seen many indications in the
latter part of Chapter 2.
Can we infer anything concerning Jesus' attitude to culture in our
sense, especiaUy to science, the greatest achievement of modern man?

486 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Here (and perhaps we should ask the same question concerning modern
industrialism and society) we touch the greatest and sorest of aU issues
between Jesus' view of the world and our own. His conceptions of the
cosmos were infantile and in no respect in advance of his age. Of
nearly everything taught in modern universities he knew nothing,
while of literature, even that of classic Greece and Rome, and of fac
tories and modern institutions generaUy he does not seem to have had
the slightest anticipation. Neither did he have even an inkling of
the satisfaction Socrates found in response to the Delphic Oracle,
which caUed him the wisest of men because he knew that he knew
nothing. Is there any sense in which Browning was right in saying, "Mind
is nothing but disease, and natural health is ignorance?" Has man
to-day so run to brain that this organ has outgrown its correlation
with others, as Keridon1 says? Has the vast luggage of knowledge
that has accumulated, and that we have had to develop all the vast
and complicated machinery of education to transmit, made man forget
the oracles within his soul in the sense in which Plato reproached
Aristotle with being a "reader" or dealer in other people's ideas instead
of a creator of them at first hand? Surely Jesus looked within for his
truth even more than did Plato, just as his Kingdom involved a closer
ccenaesthesis between its members than did the Republic. Indeed,
fides quaerens intellectum might be caUed the noetic formula of Jesus'
psychic development. Moreover, in him conscience was coextensive
with consciousness. Knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil,
if, as Lecky and Buckle thought, the slowest, is also the most precious
of aU kinds of knowledge, for it is a union of knowing and doing, of
Kennen and Konnen. The leaves on the tree of hfe are not, like those
on the tree of knowledge, deciduous. To be completely Christian
must we not assume that aU knowledge that is not for the sake, not
merely of action but more specifically of moral action, is sophism, and
is not this indeed the trend of modern pragmatism? For Kant science
was a solid island that had arisen in the midst of a vast stormy, foggy
sea of nescience. Perhaps, after all, we have magnified both the extent
and the importance of its domain, so that through pride we have lost
the true perspective of values and needed "the Gahlean peasant to

'"Man: the Prodigy and Freak of Nature, or, an Animal Run to Brain." The Samurai Press, Cnnlelgb, Surrey,
X007, 62 p.

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 487
set us right," somewhat as Tolstoi found his lost cue in the simple
life of a humble worker. Must we, as Hauptmann assumed, be foolish
to be Christian to-day? Has Jesus become an anachronism, a person
age of now only historic importance, whom we have transcended, and
can approach again only by reverting to a lower stage of development?
How could he who knew so little which we deem of prime importance
be caUed the Truth and the Light? These are the questions that have
seethed in cultivated souls throughout Christendom for centuries, and
still agitate the minds, especially of young students. The answer given
to them by the Church without or by individual conviction within
has resulted in the fact that the learned world to-day is either indif
ferent or hostile, or else under the obsession that some accommodation
must be wrought out, however tortuous and unnatural; or, finally,
in the sad fact that souls have been spht into two compartments or
registers, one confirming and the other forgetting or denying the au
thority of the Great Teacher.
One thing is certain, viz., no answer can be admitted that is based
on any disparagement of science. If the alternative is science or
Jesus, the latter will be sure eventually to go; but there is and can be
no such alternative. Our answer is, in brief, as foUows: Science began
in general with inanimate, and then slowly proceeded to animate
nature; and last of aU, in every land where it has had a history, as,
e. g., in ancient Greece, it found its consummation in the study of
man. To-day sociology, anthropology, and psychology are in their
infancy. The soul of man, individual and coUective, is the highest,
last, and most difficult of aU themes (as self-knowledge is the noblest
kind of knowledge), the solution of which both depends on and ex
plains aU that precedes, assigns correct values, and reveals relative
importance and perspective. To this field Jesus almost solely directed
his endeavours. In his conception of the Kingdom we have the
results of his insights into human society; in his ideas of sin and salva
tion, we have his general doctrine of man; and in his character, life-
work, precepts, and fate, we have the key to aU the chief themes
involving the moral activity of the individual. In the ways in which
the soul of the race prepared for him before his advent in the older ethnic
religions about the eastern Mediterranean, and in the ways in which it
has reacted to it since, we have aU the essentials of folk psychology.
There is, of course in addition, a psychology of the senses, memory,

488 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
association, attention, etc., and there are many studies in the mechan
ism of psychic processes; and such work has a very significant past and
will have a yet greater future development. To critical and exegetical
New Testament scholarship Christology owes an inestimable debt
and may possibly come to owe yet more (although many think its great
work is accomphshed). But the psychology that is at once dynamic,
genetic, and pragmatic, and can penetrate below the shallow surface
of consciousness to the unconscious depths below, finds in the great
Galilean both the master craftsman in psychodynamics, and in the
collective records of him the richest of aU the fields for further explora
tion. Here he is not below but far ahead of present-day science. Here
das ewige Christliche zieht uns hinan. He knew and compeUed the
individual and coUective soul as no one else ever began to do. He is
the centre of the greatest psychic synthesis ever yet made, and from
this viewpoint as from most others, it makes vastly less difference than
was till very lately thought how much of his majestic figure is historic
and how much a "focus of projection of the optimal ideals of the race."
Thus, if he did not know the sciences of nature he knew that of man,
their maker. His psychology was not that of the schools any more
than is the botany of Burbank or the physics of Edison, but like them
he controUed natural agencies and brought out beneficent practical
results. We can hardly assume that Jesus would not welcome aU
sciences that bring forth fruits or, indeed, any and every kind of
knowledge that means service. In Chapter 2 we saw how many
novelists and playwrights have described Jesus in various callings and
situations in modern hfe, but no one has ever attempted yet to present
him in the modern laboratory, seminary, library, or even clinic, and
we rarely see his picture or image in any of these places. But this will
doubtless yet come. As we have seen as a result of the war so many
new conceptions of Jesus as a soldier, so a vital growing Christianity
will take him wherever good men go with heart and purpose.
The evolution of prayer began probably with that of man himself.
It is perhaps the only common trait of all refigions, their very heart,
and the most universal expression of piety. It is always optative or
expressive of some wish, either to obtain some good or avoid some
evil. It is often accompanied by rites and ceremonies, or reinforced
by magic speUs, or perhaps by the mimetic acts suggestive or symbolic
of the desire, while the speech forms are often stereotyped, and potent

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 489
phrases or incantations.1 "The roots of prayer are older than aU
creeds and cannot be deduced or derived from them." Fielding HaU
thinks it inconsistent that the Buddhist women of Burma pray pas
sionately at the shrines of their deity, because he has entered Nirvana
and can neither hear nor answer. But prayer does not need to be
addressed to any one, so aboriginal and primordial is "the soul's
sincere desire uttered or unexpressed." Its answer, too, is subjective,
its issue often being simply acquiescence, power to accept the inevit
able with joy, so that if prayer is a true cause, it is so only by setting
free energy within. So one can pray to malign powers or to nothing.
Some think that prayer developed the gods themselves, and that their
continued existence depends upon it. Among most lower races it is
regarded as a kind of projection of wiU-power to influence a supernal
being, somewhat as one influences his friends.
It is very different to-day with our vastly enlarged conceptions
of the universe and of law. Compared with some of the thousands
of millions of stars our sun itself is of insignificant size, and the in
dividual on our tiny planet shrivels to a microbe, so that ideas of
special providential answers can be no longer held. The child and the
savage have more or less definite conceptions of whom they are ad
dressing, but this is no longer possible, for many pray to nothing more
definite than a vast diffusive power. Again, whoever or whatever
is addressed is now regarded as less objective and more immanent.
As Coe2 weU says, we do not conceive that the God of prayer and the
God of nature are opposed or even distinct, so that the more law there
is, the less God, nor do we think of a supernatural over against a natural
realm. Nor are prayer and a life of piety so much split off or set apart
for set hours or places, nor is the soul partitioned. Prayer is etymologi-
caUy a request so that we should expect those that have most wants to
be most in need of it. But the Church is more prosperous and com
fortable to-day than ever before; and if these blessings are answers
to prayer, then the latter tends to its own elimination, because men
are more and more able to help themselves. The rich certainly do not
feel the need of praying for food, shelter, clothing, as do those in
adversity. In prayer man wants something done for or given him,

'L. R. Famell: "The Evolution of Religion." London, 1905. R. Marett: "From Spell to Prayer." Folklore,
1904, Vol. is, p. 132. D. G. Brinton: "The Religions of Primitive Peoples." New York, 1897- H. .Fielding HaU: "The
Hearts of Men." New York, 1901.
,_ »"The Religion of a Mature Mind." New York, 190a.

49© JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
and we wrestle and argue with God in many ways. We remind
him (a) that he is so rich that giving does not impoverish him; (b)
he is so powerful that he could help with no effort, but would
need only to speak and it would be done, and he could aid us
with no fatigue; (c) of the great help he has rendered others in
ancient times, Abraham, Isaac, the manna and quails, etc.; (d)
how wretched and mean and weak we are, prone to evil. As if
we had a phobia of provoking the envy of our gods such as the
Greeks feared, we indulge in patheticism, as if to excite his pity, pos
sibly under the momentum of the old instinct of sacrifice of self; or
perhaps this prayer motive, if psychoanalyzed, would be an attempt
to praise God by the subtle method of contrast, or to point out to him
what an opportunity our extremity is. (e) We plead promises of
receiving for asking, recalling aU the pledges of the old covenant, as
if he might forget or not hve up to his contract, or as if he had aroused
great expectations which we often identify with faith, (f) We seek
further to insinuate ourselves into divine favour by assurances of joy
and gratitude if the largess we seek is given, so that we can feel our
selves the favourites of heaven; and our most vociferous thanksgivings
are of course often subtly tinged with a lively sense of benefits to come.
(g) We plead that we are loved, for he is love; that his bounty is
universal for saints and sinners alike; and that he often delights to do
the most for the worst, (h) We realize that a just God must be angry ;
that a trivial sin against infinite justice becomes itself infinite, and
perhaps deserving an infinite punishment; but here we plead the ahen
merits of the great victim. We magnify the agony of the cross as our
only plea. Its pains were sufficient to compensate for the sins of the
world, and poor debtors though we are, we seek indemnity and the
cancellation of penalty as beneficiaries of the great atonement fund.
We argue with the Divine that instead of holding us personaUy respon
sible he set us free, and draw on the supererogatory virtue which the
Great Patron has placed to our account, as if his pains could coerce
mercy, and there could be no danger of overdraft. By aU these catego
ries we pray, plead, beg, urge, for health, success, prosperity, for ourselves
and our friends, often with a selfishness so narrow that if our petitions
were granted others would be incalculably injured. We make a virtue
of an importunity that cannot be denied or put off. We would weary
God out. Our hearts pant with the fervour of desire, as if heaven

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 491
hesitated and needed to be coaxed and teased. There is thus often
an inordinate greed in prayer. Some prayers, of course, could not be
answered, for they are contradictory or violate the order of things;
and if aU were answered, prayer itself would be obsolete because there
would be nothing left to pray for unless for the power to conceive stiU
greater gifts.
The Christian consciousness has rightly shrunk from any attempt
to make any of the scientific tests which skeptics have proposed, es
peciaUy since the day of TyndaU's prayer gauge. It properly resents
any form of experimentum crucis to see whether of two like things under
like conditions the one prayed for would have a little advantage.
Perhaps the whole world as a battery of prayer with its very exis
tence staked upon the outcome, could not make a filliped coin faU
differently. Probably very few indeed of aU man's prayers have in
any sense been answered, because he lacks the genius to pray aright
save in the most general terms. No faith can be strong enough to
accomplish what is not in the nature of things, for true faith is only
anticipated history. Prayer should only direct and put an edge on
work, and be in the hne of tendencies that are conformable to the laws
of nature and of the human heart. One writer suggests that in a
universe made up of spiritual beings a strong desire of any one of them
would slightly influence aU the others, as the earth rises to meet a
falling feather; but this exiguous and infinitesimal possibility rests on a
special hypothesis of the universe which will appeal to but few.
Tylor shows that prayer is almost coextensive with animism, and
that perhaps aU, even the lowest savages, lead lives abounding in
prayer. A. J. Nutt, in "Ossian and the Ossianic Literature" (1899),
says: "A nail driven into a wooden idol is a prayer, and so is a pin
dropped into a sacred weU." These are often selfish invocations,
perhaps of their fetishes, for success in head-hunting. When we realize
how man is always prone in great undertakings, in panics or in grief, to
cry out for help, as if prayer were almost an automatism, even though
it be a monologue or love chant, we realize how, up and down the
whole scale of culture, man has always been a praying animal. Indeed,
prayer has its pathology, may become a monomania or delirium, as
weU as worked by a machine. Criminals pray for success in crime,
gamblers for lucky numbers. Prayer may be hardly more than a sob,
or may lead to syncope. It may be a periodic impulse without any

492 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
muezzin or angelus. Some think its canticles based on a specific emo
tion or a distinct faculty. Most hymns are simply prayers. The
New Caledonian kindles a fire to increase the heat of the sun which he
addresses, saying, "I do this that you may be hotter." The Karens
in thrashing rice caU to the corn-mother to shake herself that the paddy-
hill may grow as large as a mountain. Some Sioux formulae involve
endearing phrases of kinship, and the wish is uttered with the sacrifice.
Countless ceremonies attend prayers. Quaint forms of words are
often used, e. g., in dispatching the ghost of the dead to its home. A
Vedic hymn says, "Thou, O Agni, art our father, and we thy kinsmen."
A Babylonian prayer begins: "I have no mother; thou art my mother.
I have no father; thou art my father." Some prayers are spell narra
tives on the idea that talking of a thing causes it to happen. Much
medicine magic aims at purification. The African witch doctor holds
his fetish up over the patient and prays, "Father heaven, bless this
medicine." The Klonds conclude all their prayers for special favours
with the phrase, "We are ignorant of what is good for us; you know;
give it to us." Giesbrecht in, "Die alttestamentfiche Schatzung des
Gottesnamens, " shows the wondrous power ascribed to the divine name.
The Latin pontifices concealed it lest it be wrongly used, and Euripides
speaks of the wise man "who knows the silent names of the gods."
The Greek liturgies sometimes enumerate several epithets, or caU on
the God of many names. A chorus in Aesculapius says, "Zeus, who
ever the god is, if this name of Zeus is dear to him, by this name I
appeal." So, in India, Agni is immortal and of many names, and the
Egyptian Ra has manifold names unknown even to the gbds. So the
name Yahveh was sacred, if not potent, and the Christian is baptized
into the name of Christ. Not only does knowing the name of the
deity give power over him, but to know his origin works as a charm.
The Veda says, "O sleep, we know thy breath; thou art the ender,
death; protect us from evil dreams," etc. The ancient Germans
thought the rune the rival if not the parent of prayer, and in the
Middle Ages the Holy Ghost was a name thought to make blood, skin,
and bone grow again after injury.
Even in ancient England the prayer charm was used against
sterility of the land, much as in ancient Greece agricultural petitions
were uttered. The devotee glancing into the sky simply said, "Rain
and conceive." Similar speUs were used for human fertility. The

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 493
Romans were prone to invoke the spirits of ancestors, held that there
was great power in repetition, dancing and in uttering the words, "lo
triumphe." The famous Roman address to Jupiter in the days of
Hannibal's War was a legal document shrewdly drawn to bind both
the god and the state. Greece had an official liturgy containing curses
on certain offences against the state, and both Jews and Christians
have curse formulae consecrating their victim to the lower world and
constraining the very gods. A savage oath says, " May this fetish slay
me if I do not fulfil this contract." Socrates commended the Spartans
for not praying for particular gifts, but only for what was beautiful
and good. Very lofty is Pindar's prayer: " May I walk, 0 God, in the
guileless paths of life and leave behind me a fair name for my children,"
and "0 God that bringest aU things to pass, grant me the spirit of
reverence for noble things." Euripides prays: "May the spirit of
chastity, the fairest gift of God, abide with me," and in a much-used
banquet song the Greeks prayed, "O PaUas, born of waters, Queen
Athene, may thou and thy father keep this city and its citizens in
prosperity, free from sorrow, civic discord, and untimely death."
Xenophon prays, for " Good fife, bodily strength, good feeling among
friends, safety in war, and wealth." Socrates prays: " Grant me to be
come noble of heart"; Apollonius, "O gods, grant me that which I
deserve" ; Plato, " King Zeus, grant us the good, whether we pray for it
or not, but keep the evil from us, though we pray for it." Epictetus
prayed: "Do with me what thou wilt. Thy will is my wfil." And
the early Stoics prayed: "Lead me, 0 God, and I wfil foUow willingly,
if I am wise, but if not willingly stfil I will f oUow. ' ' Some philosophical
Christians early raised the question whether special prayers were
justified, and it was on this view that the Pythagoreans at one time
forbade prayer because the gods know better what to give than men
do what to ask. They also held that all prayer should be aloud, so
that no one would pray for anything he would be ashamed for others to
hear. Neo-Platonism stressed the idea of communion with God.
The only prayer of Apuleius was, "that thou wouldst be willing to
keep us aU our fives in the love of knowledge." The Vedic thought
was that the gods uphold the sky and do aU their work by prayer.
A very ancient prayer is, "With my mind do I seize your mind," and
again, to Agni, "May we be weU-doers before the gods," and again,
"Give us not up, 0 Agni, to want of thought; make us sinless before

494 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Aditi; put far away the sins of the mind; enter into smoke, 0 sin, go
into the vapours, and into the fog." With such prayers often went
potent symbols of purification. Among the Iranians a real speU could
accompany only a real prayer, the text of which was very potent in the
hands of the "sacerdotal physician." He prays, "Give us, Ahura,
that powerful sovereignty by the strength of which we may smite
down the sickness demon," and then, turning to it, he says, "To thee,
O sickness, I say avaunt; to thee, O death, I say avaunt." The holy
word is of such a nature that if aU the corporeal and living world should
learn it and, learning, hold fast to it, they would be redeemed from
their mortality. The Persian prayers are even higher than the Vedic
in their conception of righteousness. Before rising the pious Persian
prays, "AU good thoughts, aU good words, aU good deeds, I do will
ingly. AU evil thoughts, aU evil words, aU evfi deeds, I do unwillingly.
May we help bring on the good government of Ahura." "How may
man become most like unto thee? I implore through the good mind a
kingdom for myself, through whose increase I may conquer the lie."
In Babylon Marduk is often invoked as the arch magician and there
were experts and spells in purification, and yet lofty types of faith that
"prayer absolves from sin." One of the greatest of aU prayers is
that of Nebuchadnezzar to Marduk on his ascension: "0 eternal
ruler, Lord of aU . . . lead the king by the right way . . .
I am the work of thy hand. Father, the great mercy which thou
showest to aU, grant that thy high majesty, 0 Lord, may now show
compassion on me. Set in my heart the fear of thy Godhead. Grant
me what thou deemest best, for thou it is that hast created my hfe."
Another king prays for his first-born that he may commit no sin, and
another that he may reign "according to thy wish. Let me not in my
pride lose true knowledge of thee." Another prays: "Set righteous
ness on my lips, and grace in my heart." "Marduk is the God full of
mercy who lives to quicken what is dead," and Ishtar is "the helper
of the oppressed, endowed with majesty, who raisest the fallen and
exaltest the trodden underfoot." Some of these prayers to Marduk
rise to an almost prophetic loftiness and suggest the best of the proph
ets. In Egypt the idea of spells oppressed the soul, and both gods
and worshippers used them toward each other, the latter sometimes
with such confident faith that the prayer seems nothing less than a
command. This is especiaUy seen in the "Book of the Dead," over

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 495
whom entrancing words were used that their souls might become divine.
Prayer amulets and symbols were very prominent at every stage of this
most elaborate of aU the cults of death. In one case the soul addresses
Ammon: "I am a perfect spirit among the companions of Ra, and I
have gone in and come forth among the perfect souls; grant unto me
the things which my body needeth and heaven for my soul and a hidden
space for my mummy." Everywhere here we find magic prayer,
intense conviction, trust in pictures, words of power, and sacred texts.
In Christianity Clement developed the first theory of prayer.
The true gnostic, he says, "works himself with God in his prayer so as
to attain perfection. ' ' Thus prayer is not merely petitionary, but a self
projection. So Origen thought prayer was chiefly communion. Still
the gnostics used the old magic often suggesting the mimetic acts of
lower faiths in their ritual under new names, such as prayer, blessing
the baptismal water on the eve of Epiphany, with thrice dipping of the
crucifix into it, symbolic of the sweetening of the bitter water with
wood, in Exodus. Some of the formulae of the Church are masterpieces
of synthesis of intoned chant with the subtle value of suggestion and a
typical act with prayer. But we must not forget that it was the befief
in demons, possession, and exorcism that sustained the spell theory of
prayer in the early Christian ages. Indeed, it has so strong a hold that
I know of no suggested reforms of liturgy that would entirely eliminate
it. We now often regard prayer as an end in itself rather than as a
means. It is a function of adjustment to fate or fortune, often seeking
to make the best out of the worst. The extreme expression of this
attitude is that, although the Lord slay and doom him to hell, the saint
will acquiesce, justify the divine way, and strive to accept even fhis
fate with consolation if not with joy. This of course assumes that
aU evil is partial good, and involves a struggle up to an absolute stand
point. Renunciation has its own inspiration, and is the ambivalent
opposite of the Titanism that when brought to bay defies heaven and
dies with malediction. Indeed destiny is a divine wfil to which ours
must give way, and this element of prayer is aU acquiescence and seeks
to regard evfi as purification, which is more complete the hotter the
furnace of tribulation. One function of philosophy is to bring us to
abandon freely even the fife that fate wfil one day require of us. This
involves, not merely facing death with equanimity and dignity, but a

496 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
sense that nothing happens without sufficient reason, and that our
extinction would be tolerable if it advanced the glory of God. The
race is of course the end to which the individual is utterly subordinated,
and so the race itself may be a means to be subordinated to a higher
end, and that to a still higher one in indefinite perspective. Thus
there is not only a joy but a passion in utter self-sacrifice and immola
tion. Prayer psychologically considered does not presuppose invocation
or any special concept of any being to whom the prayer is addressed,
so that an agnostic or atheist can truly pray. "0 God, if there is a
God, save my soul, if I have a soul," is a real prayer. True prayer, too,
may be addressed to stalks, stones, trees, and idols, sun, moon, stars,
ether; and it would be easy to quote genuine cases of it to about every
false deity the world has ever known. The savage who conceives
things below man and prays downward, as we think, never does so
according to his own idea. Anything, indeed, may be a medium
through which man reaches the great heart of the world, and while the
new convert may see God alike in aU things, the soul generaUy makes
a very distinct Objekt-Wahl, and through this seeks confidential con
verse, dialogue, or to make incursions into a higher realm, or to receive
visitations from it. Thus the culmination of prayer is psychologicaUy
very analogous in the moral sphere to the hedonic narcosis that Scho
penhauer ascribes to the moment of most intense aesthetic contempla
tion with surcease of aU pain. This is why mystic prayer is sometimes
so regenerating. " He prays best who loves best," and the acme of the
communion of love is a transport which usuaUy leaves the soul perma
nently changed because it has been caught up by the oversold and
received a higher potentiahzation. The soul has reopened the original
weU-spring of fife and perhaps glimpsed its own final destiny, augmented
every higher motivation. This makes prayer in a sense the opener of
new and higher ways, the purest psychic expression of the evolutionary
push-up in us. Moozumdar once told me how he insisted on a cupola
on his Bombay CoUege, in which, Christian though he was, he encour
aged his students to develop the old Buddhistic cult of sitting cross-
legged alone, high above the earth, in quiet, turning the soul inward,
trying to escape from the great fatigue, watching the greater stars
come out in the inner fife as the garish httle sun of consciousness set.
His idea was not so much to evacuate the mind in the contemplation

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 497
of Nirvana as to reinforce it by attaining perfect nervous poise and
repose as a kind of higher rest cure. Or rather the goal was to hear the
still, smaU voice of man's truest nature, to develop some consciousness
of our higher, more perfect and generic self, which he deemed the true
vocation of man, which consisted in communing with and drawing out
his own genius, and feeling its incubation. Western thought has
often recognized, though in a far fainter way, this higher autodidactic
element in the soul. Indeed, in a sense, not only the mystic contempla
tion striving to reach the superessential, but even the scientific bot
toming on some absolute space, ether, energy; Kant's autonomous
oughtness, supreme over every heteronomous motive; Schleiermacher's
feeling of absolute dependence, which wfil always be correlated with
Hegel's idea of absolute freedom; the passionate Edwardsian love of
being; the love which for Jesus and Paul is the fulfilling of the law —
these, and indeed aU the higher impulsions of the soul, down through
the whole history of the categories, testify that man has experienced
something in his own nature that is authoritative, unfaUen, capable of
being normative in his fife. Man cannot work out these themes in the
form of personal vital experience without being devout. They are the
permanent and essential parts of his higher nature, and the act of
bringing them out is, in its most generic aspect, prayer. They are the
best things in us, and perhaps the very hardest to get at because they
are elements of our very personality. They give aU the worth there
is to every proof of immortahty, and we might weU abase ourselves
before them, as if they were not parts of us but of God incarnate in us.
Here it is that we hve in him and he in us. Indeed, if man does not
become one with the eternal in this realm of inner unity of intuitions,
feelings and desires, he remains forever separated from it in aU the
derived unities of consciousness.
One function of prayer is praise, which may lapse to adulation
and flattery, with which the Orient particularly exalts the amour
propre of potentates. We enumerate the physical, metaphysical, moral
attributes of the great Autos with abandon and superlativeness, eulo
gizing him with endless panegyrics for his great achievements in the
past. We invoke him as over aU lords, kings, rulers, with a kind of
poetic license not unmixed with a consciousness that praise is the best
exordium for requests. True praise involves a profound sense of
sublimity, which is perhaps the best expander of the soul, even inspiring

498 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
creation in the sense of Ruskin, who insists that "aU art is praise."
In this direction, at least, lie some of the loftiest human thoughts and
feelings. The vast modern enlargement of the universe greatly en
hances this attitude toward the divine, so that of him who best knows
philosophy and science it can be said, as it was long ago of the
astronomer, that if undevout he is mad. The vastation of knowledge
broadened with progress of the suns is a growing incitement to this de
votional attitude and tends to bring man metaphoricaUy to his knees.
At an age when the spirit of criticism tends to paralyze the higher
powers of appreciation, when men are prone to take greater pleasure
in looking down than in looking up, and the instinct of reverence lan
guishes, this element of praise ought to be a theme of careful psycho-
pedagogic study and ought to be developed, for its cult is capable of a
far greater function and value than it has ever had in giving man the
new orientation he stiU lacks to the new world of science.
The most important element in prayer psychologicaUy considered
is confession. The instinct to teU instead of to conceal our faults
is sometimes very strong, so that relatives and lawyers may have to
contend against this impulse in clients they are defending, and suicide
is sometimes a form of confession. So social is man that both his sins
and troubles seem halved by sharing them with a confidant. In some
temperaments the impulse to confess even sins that may bring legal
penalties and ostracism or that excite feelings of repulsion, aU of which
silence might escape, is so sudden that it might be caUed spasmodic.
It may be prompted by a sense of danger so intolerable that even the
worst social penalty is voluntarily incurred in order to relieve the
psychic tension, just as men often have such horror of altitudes that
they throw themselves down from heights. I have often been tempted
to coin a word, poinetropia (poine= penalty), to express the fascination
that punishments for real faults may sometimes have. Plato thought
that bad men in their hearts hungered for the retribution due their
evil deeds; and in the annals of crime, and sometimes in common life, we
certainly meet this impulsion, rare and overlaid as it usually is by the
selfish instincts of escaping pain generaUy, and also by the Christian
habit of regarding the atonement as superseding the reign of justice in
the world. If in error, admit; if in fault, teU it frankly, whether to the
person injured, physician, priest, friend, or God, for this is the true
way of honour, chivalry, manhood, and brings great and instant ease-

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 499
ment. Confession shows good intentions to be deeper than our faults,
and as in some sense sloughing off the latter as an ahen and not our
true self. Moreover, confession lets in the light of another's knowledge
upon propensities that can flourish only in the darkness of concealment.
It is reparation and balm for wounds that we inflict. We must chiefly
remember, moreover, that the lie came into the world to cloak sin, and
this is stiU its chief motive. No one lies to conceal virtue, but the
first and worst fies are to veil wrongdoing.1 Heinroth, the Berfin
alienist, conceived all disease, insanity and sin included, as lies,
because perversion of nature's intent in us; and Nordau and many
others (for this topic has now a copious literature) have shown how
deep-seated mendacity is in the conventions of modern society. Thus
when an individual or a civilization gives up the fie and falls back upon
the real self by robustly speaking, thinking, acting the truth and wish
ing to be accepted for what it reaUy is by nature and heredity, a joy
and peace so great that it is often weU called regeneration supervenes.
Thus sins and fies have the same root; or, in theological phrase, the
same Diabolus, as their father. The worst result is when men come to
believe their own hes, as they always tend to do, and when fies work
themselves into the soul and remain unassimfiated like surds or foreign
bodies, vitiating the roots of character. To some morbid souls there
comes a strange exhilaration in the blankest kind of lying, insisting
that white is black when gazing upon it. This gives a sense of emanci
pation from reality, asserts the sovereignty of arbitrariness, and makes
conscience conscious. To say the thing that is not, and deny the
thing that is, seem inspiration for some moral inverts. This pseudo-
mania to lie where the truth would better serve one's purpose, as great
souls sacrifice for the truth, brings out a kind of self-consciousness that
might be caUed mental masturbation. Of course, too, men have
prayed to and devoted their fives to the powers of evil, and there have
been those who strove deliberately to commit every known sin, as the
history of Antichrist and Satanism shows. But we should not forget
that practicaUy aU devUs are ex, faUen, or emeritus gods that have
been dethroned, and conversely that the best gods are devils many
times refined and reformed and the highest in a series of many sub
stitutions, and that it is a psychic trait of man, as his elimination of
the missing link has shown, to abhor the second best more than he does
. 'See my " Children's Lies," Fed. Sem., Vol. I, p. ai l. Also Delbriick: " Die psychologische Luge." Stuttgart, i8gi.

Soo JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the fifth or tenth best. If prayer is real truth in word and deed, it
always involves contrition (or fiteraUy trituration) of self and of pride,
which are the roots of sin and lies. For if they are not expurgated the
soul is dualized. If confession to one halves, confession to many, which
is harder, stfil more diminishes guilt, especiaUy if voluntary. Auricular
confession in the Catholic Church meets a great need for which Prot
estantism has no adequate substitute. Priestly confidence is inviolate
and respected even by Courts in cases of the greatest crimes. It may,
of course, be abused or become mechanical, perfunctory, or too insti
tutionalized. But if genuine and contrite it is its own absolution.
In Dostoyefsky's "Crime and Punishment" the detective long had
proof enough to convict the criminal, but worked to bring about his
fuU confession, feefing that this should be the goal of every detective.
The ancient Jews and Teutons were too proud to confess to any but
God, but the more social Southern races have long found peace in
confessing to accredited men. Disclosures to God are secret, the
difficulty of avowal is lessened, and there is fittle virtue in being honest
to the omniscient Searcher of hearts. But if we consider confession
for what it truly is, viz., deepening self-knowledge, it may be in itself
the best autotherapy. Round terms or mere enumerations are not
enough, but poignancy of regret and improvement can come only with
specification. Of course the devotee who babbles to God that he is a
vile wretch, polluted with sin, if taken literally would be expeUed from
Church, placed under a social ban, boycotted or outlawed. This kind
of confession is a mere parody of the real thing, but even this seems to
have for some its charm, because many have confessed to sins they
never committed and had almost a mania for magnifying those they
had. This, however, is easily explainable. Hystericals gratify their
instinct to be interesting by inventing heinous offences with a prodi
gality of fancy and detail that misleads adepts. Feeling that they have
done wrong beyond the possibifity of complete and exhaustive acknowl
edgment, they magnify the errors they recaU, so that the sum of sin
may be sure to be offset by the equivalent amount of confession. In
other words, they make the bad they remember worse than it is to
cancel forgotten and unconfessed faults, the former in technical terms
being overcharged with affectivity. Of course brooding distorts true
proportions, while sometimes the sin is felt to be so deep-seated that
convulsive efforts are necessary to exteriorize it. Some, too, become

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 501
habitual inebriates of the sense of relief that teUing brings, so tnat they
appropriate and disgorge every sin they hear of. In Jeremy Taylor's
"Ductor Dubitantium," in the records of the old Fulton Street daily
prayer meeting, which I once perused, and in all the literature of
casuistry and autobiographies of great saints and great sinners, one
finds copious illustrations of all these abnormalities, every one of which
now has its close analogue in the hterature of personal hygiene and
autotherapy. Remarkable new light, which has shown confession to be one of the
central themes of humanistic impulse, has lately been thrown on it
in the recent development of abnormal psychology, especially in the
line begun by Breuer and Freud,1 the pith of which is as foUows:
When a nervous system is a fittle loosened in its texture, as in puberty,
or by reason of hereditary defect, exhaustion, or some sudden or un
usual experience, death, accident, or sin, the tension thus caused often
becomes too great to be worked off by the laws of associative thinking,
the function of which is to adjust to and assimilate the new fact, pain
ful though it is. It cannot be expressed by normal actions, reflexes,
gestures, or words. In such a case the generated excitement over
flows, diffuses, and tends to find or break out new paths. It now be
comes a question of fines of least resistance, as in the nasal irritation
that normally issues in a sneeze, when, if the latter is delayed the
excitement irradiates to eyes, brain, glands, respiration, etc., or as a
riddle may excite great tension until the answer is found. Goethe
felt psychic pain after very strong feefing till he had expressed it in
poetry. In weakened subjects this vent for psychic excitement may
be found in digestive or circulatory pains or convulsions, in tonic or
clonic cramps, etc., tfil one or more of these, although abnormal,
become habitual. When thus these exciting causes become real
psychic traumata, when they break out in these unnatural fines, when
ideogenic causes thus issue in somatic symptoms, the latter physical
phenomena take the place of consciousness, which may be quite lost
with hardly any accessible trace. Perhaps, e. g., a series of cramps or
digestive disturbances, started by a painful psychic experience, draws
off the energy so completely that the experience itself is entirely for
gotten. Now, when in such cases the memory of the cause and all its
attendant circumstances can be brought point by point and vividly into
'"Studien Qber Hysteric" Leipzig, 1895.

502 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
consciousness, whether by question, suggestion, or hypnotism, and
everything can be vividly reproduced with the attendant feelings and
movements, and thus the psychic reaction be dramaticaUy restored,
then the abnormal symptom vanishes because its surrogate has been
restored in consciousness. This "auricular confession," as these
authors term it, plucks out the cause of the disorder which had acted as
a foreign body in the soul, so that its functions are "converted" back
to normality. Such patients suffer from "forgotten reminiscence,"
which is exorcised by this process. So in the larger racial field Mansoul
has been scarred by the long and bitter struggle of survival. Not only
is the soul warped but the system has experienced washouts of
passion that have broken through dams of restraint and gullied the
psychophysic organism with many a lesion. Sense, appetite, sex,
disease, have left their marks upon him. Storms of anger have howled
through his nature, so that both his conscious and unconscious life
have been perverted. Psychic pestilence and contagion, like greed,
drink, war, witchcraft, fetishism, fanaticism, have left some of his
nervous functions more or less insane, so that his organism is a reso
nance chamber of the long historic travail to escape the ape and tiger
in him, to get loose of Plato's dark steed harnessed to the white one, or
of the body of death predisposed to leipothumia. At various points
we have reacted wrongly to our environment. Not only our world
but our experience has grown vastly too large for our intelligence to
respond to it aright.
But deep as is the depravity, it is not total, or man's case would be
hopeless. There is always a saving remnant of good. Fortunately
not only the worst individuals but the worst elements of man's nature
have been eliminated, and the best carefully preserved. Bad as man
is to-day, he has unquestionably been vastly worse in the past, so that
the sense of personal and ancestral sin that has always been so strong
has never been without hope of restoration. Thus the rehgious con
ception of Jesus' suffering is more or less reflected in the depths of the
soul where slumber the almost effaced and deeply overlaid traces of the
goodness of man's first " intention." The first stage of cure and rescue,
then, is the Aristotelian katharsis that comes by inner rehearsal of the
faU, the re-experience in weakened, imaginary form of the pride, anger,
lust, that seem to have done their worst for us in order to arouse the
higher powers that control and correct them. Nelson long ago showed

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 503
how habitual forms of bad dreams and nightmares might be prevented
by rehearsing them in thought faintly just before going to sleep. So the
soul may acquire a certain immunity from temptation by reenacting
its drama on the mimic shadow stage of consciousness and thus robbing
it of its sting of actual sin. How deep this realization of the perversity
of our conduct and nature can go is an individual matter. Some can
feel guilty only for a few overt acts in their fives, and very few can
realize the ravages of our remote inheritance. To do this we need to
have some conception of ideally perfect human nature, and only the
embodiment of this could adequately feel the full weight of sin or realize
the degree of man's alienation from his norm. Of course, conviction of
unworthiness and admission of it even to self means that schism has
begun and that purgation may follow. The bad is set clearly over
against the good, and resonances of "vague snatches of Uranian anti-
phone" begin to be felt. A tribunal is erected; the soul is judging with
aU its might and main. The law written in the heart is revived, for
man is confessing to himself and the moult of his baser nature is be
ginning. This is the most inner and intimate of aU the functions of
prayer, the most saving of aU works, the greatest of aU rescues. It
implies the highest vitality and momentum of further development.
Indeed, it suggests to us that the chief function of self-consciousness is
remedial because its very existence is due to our deviation from the
true law of our own being. Thus the fall of man was from instinct and
intuition to self-consciousness, which is like a wart made on a tree by
the sting of an insect, except that when the end of perfection is at
tained it may be eliminated.1 Recent writers have urged in a very
sentimental way that man learned to speak in order to pray, and that
as his language is the cry of the body, his prayer is that of his soul.
It is inner speech "exciting our emotions." Strange as this is, we
know that often abnormal functions tend to come to the front, and
that as long as functions are undisturbed we are not conscious of them,
so that to sense them is a danger signal which not only calls attention
to where help is needed, but on the principle ubi effluxus ibi affluxus
is itself of real therapeutic value. The conscious intellect, therefore,
may have its prime function in making distinctions between right and
wrong ways of thinking and acting, so that it is at bottom therapeutic

'Guimaraens: "Le Besoin de Prier et ses Conditions Psychologies." Rev Philos., Oct. 190a.
A Strindberg: "La Psychologie de la Priere." Rev. Blanche, Apr. is and May 1, 1895.

S04 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
and curative. This gives us our deepest view of the confessional ele
ment in prayer. To tell the Great Companion, or an idle spectator,
or a human confidant, is itself a way of salvation. To acknowledge
is not only to objectify but to heterize. Confession is thus truly
apotropaic, and this was the goal of all primitive, if not of every other
kind of sacrifice. What is thus alienated ceases to be part of us, is
already partitioned off from us, and this is the psychic root of pardon.
Only the sin that is thus exteriorized or doomed to exclusion is forgotten
because only this reveals the higher self which is foreign to it. It must
still be punished in the body, or even in the mind, of the individual;
but something higher now stands forth that had no participation in
its commital, and is therefore itself exempt from either guilt or penalty.
The exuviae may stiU cling to us, and we suffer pain; but the other purer,
more interior part of us, remains pure. Thus confession becomes, as
Hegel in his "Phenomenology" says, the act of sovereignty of the soul
by which it forgives itself because it has no longer any part or lot in
the punishment that may supervene.
Prayer, in the modern psychological sense of meditation and self-
communion in quiet hours, when we inventory our interests, powers
and ideals, and commune with the deeper racial self within us, is a cult
that greatly needs and, indeed, is now to some extent having a revival.
In the prayer books of the Church, and lately in many new prayers
composed for those in various caUings and for those facing special
exigencies or choices, and more specificaUy in the prayers composed for
soldiers in the field, we realize again the pregnant sense in which man is
a praying animal. Prayer should keep alive the aspirations of youth,
so many of which are prone to fade as we advance in life. It should
refine but never destroy them, for it is one of the chief strongholds of
ideality, and rightly used gives the truest and most practical self-
knowledge and self-control. When collective, it makes a unique
synthesis between members of a social whole, and when solitary, as it
should also always be at times, it brings and keeps us in touch with the
submerged self within us and taps its measureless resources. Of aU
autodidactic agencies it is perhaps thus the most synthetic and unifying,
bringing together feefing, wfil, and inteUect, the conscious and the
unconscious, the individual and his social environment. Nature
lovers, artists, and also quite notably children, have evolved special
formal prayers in both prose and poetry to express for them what are

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 505
ideal attitudes, toward the aspects of nature, society, duty, temptations,
studies, vocations, etc. Sometimes individuals develop a personal
mark, sign, or symbol, book-plate, bit of art or diagram, incorporating
into it often the inmost secrets of their lives, which they would not
impart to their most intimate friends. This is reaUy a prayer, for it
expresses their most ardent wishes. At the opposite extreme of gen
erality stands, of course, the immortal petition of Our Lord, which is
so perfect that in aU its history I find but few improvements have even
been suggested as possible. The chief of these has been repeatedly
expressed in the wish that to the petition "Deliver us from evil" he
might have added "and ignorance," so that the advance in knowledge
and science should have had recognition, for this might have mitigated
the long conflict between piety and reason.
(1) There is no such quintessential synopsis of the Christian con
sciousness in brief form as is attained in the Lord's Prayer, which is
an outline of its chief attitudes toward the world and is on the whole
the high-water mark of the moral developmental instincts of the human
soul. To address as ' 'Father' ' the background of the universe, its source,
principle, the unknown reservoir out of which all things sprang, be
it ether, energy, or something forever above aU name or thought,
marked a flash of creative genius or an inspiration richer in anticipa
tions and more transforming in its beneficent influences than perhaps
any other single conception of the religious soul. If man's pedigree
is now conceived to go back through the amoeba to some matrix,
mother-lye or cosmic gas, it is, nevertheless, to a father, and the stages
of our evolution are aU procreative. Creation is an act of generation
by which the great One and All transmits his own inmost essence to
the world. He is here personated, and we are connected not only with
his somatic but with his yet more fundamental spermatic elements.
Just so far as we are true and legitimate children, therefore, we, too,
are divine in the same sense that he is, and if nature in its most compre
hensive sense is the total product of all his creativeness, it is no less
divine than he. Otherwise, generative stages are degenerate and
decadent. The offspring is not equal to the parent, or all Godhood
is not expressed in creation or revealed in mind and its products.
Indeed, this mode of address seems at first a product of Titanic over-
weaning, heaven-storming pride, which to the Greek would rouse divine
jealousy and invite wrath. The emphasis here, however, is more upon

506 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
beneficence, present guidance, and parental care, so that our attitude
in thus addressing the Source of aU things is that of a child in frank
relations to an all-powerful parent, abounding in love and inclined to
answer aU reasonable petitions. Pindar devoted his great genius in
part to tracing back the pedigree of the successful athletes at Olympia
to the heroes of an older day, ApoUo, Hercules, and other deities of the
Greek Pantheon. But by the appeUation "father" the Christian de
clares that the heavenly ichor of the only living and true God flows
in his own veins by direct, fiteral, linear heredity, and this conscious
ness therefore fortifies and emboldens aU his petitions. Indeed, this
is the greatest altitude which the soul reaches in its animistic, an
thropomorphizing impulse to construe the universe into congruence
with man's highest possible conception of himself. Evolution cannot
be conceived or represented in a more artistic or personal way, and far
as science has now removed us from the beginnings of creation, the
fact that creative evolution is here represented, not as a fiat or an
act of mechanical construction but as the most intimate projection
of self, should make man feel henceforth forever at home in his world.
It is only anaemic sentiment that interprets fatherhood according to
the degenerate ways often seen in contemporary addresses to God,
which often show traces of sentimentality, querulousness, over-intimacy,
the familiarity born of imperfect respect, or the assumption that love
means indulgence of whims until our attitude suggests that of spoiled
children. Even if, as we are now told, the father complex in this higher
application is fashioned on the human parent, this conception keeps
fatherhood dignified and worthy, and suggests to each earthly father
an added motive so to five and discharge his whole duty and function
as head of his household that his children shall form the largest and
highest possible ideas of him, so that when they are transferred to the
heavenly All-Father they shaU not be too faulty.
(2) The Father addressed is ours and not mine. This implies the
solidarity of the human race, and might easily be extended to imply that
of all animate and, perhaps, inanimate existence. Even though we
pray alone, it is not selfish but with initial recognition that it is to a
God upon whom aU other creatures have the same claim as we. Man
kind, especiaUy, is a confraternity. We are aU of one family, and every
ideal of Catholicism and universality lurks under this pronoun. Its
connotations are in fact wide or narrow just in proportion to the span

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 507
of the horizon of our own consciousness. He is the Father of even our
enemy, who would imprecate us; for he sends rain upon the evil as weU
as upon the good. In fine, not only mutuality and brotherhood, but
consubstantiahty with the entire world upon the ground of genetic
relationship to a common source, are involved.
(3) He is in heaven. Toward it, rather than toward the rising sun,
toward Mecca, Jerusalem, Benares, or any altar, crucifix, or shrine, we
should direct our prayers. Man is by the etymology of his Greek
name the upward-looking being. The erect position was acquired
after long experience of anthropoid ancestors whose arboreal habits
freed the forelimbs from the necessity of the work of locomotion, so
that they could be instruments for more intellectual tasks. Like our
Aryan ancestors or the classic statue of the Greek youth, we extend
our hands supine upward. We pray up into the void of space, we
look away from the earth toward the nebulae, ether, and sky, on the
same principle that the raja-yoga gazes at his navel in passing into the
rapt state of contemplation, because it is our origin, and because, like
all the other worlds and all that is in them, we are in some mysterious
way secreted out of the heavens from which stiU comes our help.
Indeed, to have a sense of reality above us (which we owe in no small
measure to clouds and the fancies spun about them, and to thunder)
acquires and implies a certain spirituafization of soul. For primitives,
belief in and reverence of powers above, so vividly felt in storms, are
akin to what Renan has shown to be the effect of such phenomena at
Sinai upon the plain-dwelling Hebrews, viz., to make God more actu
aUy present, near, fearful, etc. The Aryan mind, too, has developed
more richly than any other the mythology which personifies celestial
objects and phenomena. More effective yet is perhaps the over
whelming sense of our own littleness and insignificance, most of aU
intensified in contemplating the infinities of time and space which
an upward glance suggests. Man is profoundly uranotropic. De-
voutness, reverence, humility, which are the distinctive features of the
religious mind, culminate when our thoughts take this direction, and
find their homeward orientation to be also heavenward. Even more
than Kant's undevout astronomer, those who contemplate infinite
space without devout sentiments may be caUed mad.
(4) His name is to be hallowed. God is thus above all name, and
greater than anything that can be called thought, even in this scien-

508 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tific age. Our minds cannot apprehend, and stiU less comprehend,
this vastest of aU possible objects, too great, indeed, to be objectified.
He is the one and all; the great Pan himself personified. But worship
requires some form, concept, or at least a term with some appellative
significance in it. God's name may be the whole body of science, a
system of philosophy, an evolutionary cosmogenic scheme of things.
He, of whom aU nouns are but partial names, aU verbs designations
of his acts, aU adjectives of his qualities, should have for each of us
some symbol or thought-form, or should be brought home by some
special type of experience connected with some time or space, or at
least some word above all others to connote some and denote aU others
of his attributes. AU high art, aU science and religion, which strive
to formulate ultimates, are wrestling, as Jacob did with the angel, for
the revelation of a new name, and names have always had magic power.
Atoms, vortexes, monads, reals, ether, vitality, force, mind, reason,
beauty, virtue, truth, entelechy, cause, infinity, and all the categories
of philosophy which Trendelenburg coUected, as weU as the fundamen
tal concepts of science, are part names of our polynomous Father in
Heaven. The prayer here is that aU these be respected and recognized
as more or less holy. The Christian as weU as the Jewish consciousness
has been haunted by fears of blasphemy as the one unpardonable sin,
and its awful prohibition is against every degree of such an offence.
Of course the divine name is not haUowed when men become indifferent
to or contemptuous of these higher strivings to close in with ultimate
reality, the efforts of which we must not allow even pragmatism to
interfere with. Not so much the agnostic who insists that none of
these are names of reality, and that aU noumenal existence eludes and
is forever beyond our ken and reach, nor the pessimist who declares
that what we know of it indicates that it is bad, malign, disruptive, or
diseased, is here contemplated — but rather he who has lost the power
to respect those products of human endeavour which are most worthy
of reverence because seeking best to embody the divine, even if it be
only an idol, an elaborate ceremonial rite, a theology, or a fruitful
scientific hypothesis. The deities of other and even savage faiths,
too, should be haUowed just so far as they mark stages in this incessant
and weary quest of man to understand, grasp, and achieve some kind
of unity of what to lower creatures seems the booming, incoherent,
chaotic, snarl of things that we dare caU a universe. The soul has

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 509
always sought God, and aU its attempts to proximate him are not with
out sacredness. (5) " Thy wfil be done " is not merely the invocation of a theocratic
rule, but the expression of an earnest wish that pure oughtness recon
struct and flow through every sphere of hfe and mind. Our wflls are
full of picae, whims, perversity. They are uninstructed and, above all,
prone to be selfish. The divine wfil, of which the really educated
conscience is so commonly thought to be the best oracle, is here invoked
to irrigate human conduct and mind in aU details both of the higher and
the lower vocation of man.
We should not be absorbed by selfishness or inclination, but aU
our acts should have not only a supreme sanction but a supreme moti
vation. This is not adequately formulated, even in Kant's lofty pre
cept of so acting that aU we do could be made a principle of universal
lawgiving. But it rather means acting as we should wish to act if we
saw aU things in their largest possible relations, and apprehended aU
the subtle conflicts of duties which casuistry has so tediously sought to
rubricize. Nor does this imply only an ethical rigorism that requires
us to act against desire, nor an exiguous prying Puritan conscience,
but it recognizes a diaphoria or No Man's Land of neutral deeds, inter
mediate between right and wrong. It allows us to conceive that the
Great Author of nature so organized it that pleasure is in very many
things the best of aU guides, although, because sin has entered this f aUen
world that has its cause, effect, or both, pleasure now has its limitations
fixed by adamantine laws. Thus, if we ever have a complete evalua
tion of pleasures by which they can be weighed, measured, or graded
as high and low, and the absolute value of each determined with
reference to the chief end of man, this conflict will be efiminated and a
higher hedonism become the surest guide in all issues.
God's wfil is benign if evolution is his work, because in the bitter
struggle for existence the fittest and best have survived, while others
have perished, and hence in human affairs it is best expressed in those
acts and institutions that tend to bring man to the very fullest matur
ity of which he is capable. If man's nature is on the whole good and
true, then those tendencies that are deepest and most universal are
modes of executing this wfil, and the true nature of man as distinct
from everything factitious is here desiderated.
(6) The prayer for the Kingdom expresses an idea that has

5io JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
prompted philanthropy, fired missionary zeal, and inspired many an ef
fort by deeds and books to reconstruct society. The visible Church is
supposed to be its representative, and the ideal Church or the heavenly
New Jerusalem is its realization. Heaven is attractive because it is
conceived as a community of moral, elite souls existing in relations to
one another which realize every noble human aspiration. Man is a
social being, or, in Aristotle's phrase, a pofitical animal, and although
his attempts to organize society, the records of which almost constitute
history, have failed at many periods and in many respects, the dream
of ideality was perhaps never more vivid and in some aspects of it
more detailed than now. From Plato to Comte, Bellamy, George,
in many a philanstery and social and religious community, secret
societies, sodalities, clubs, profit-sharing and cooperative schemes, to
say nothing of reform movements in city, state, national government
or Church, we see tentatives toward the realization of this item in the
great petition. How can men best live together in such a way that the
worst shall be most effectively repressed and the best most favoured,
is a problem never more pressing and never more studied than now.
Just in proportion as sociologists, economists, and publicists can so
adjust business and society until they make a perfect placentum in
which man can be brought to his greatest perfection, they are helping
to"usher in the Kingdom. It will not come suddenly; and probably,
as the world is more and more united and in rapport, each part with aU
others, no one place or land wfil take great precedence. The millennial
state, if social evolution ever realizes it, •will not be primeval paradise,
or any clannish organization of gregarious instincts, but it will be world
wide. We may sometime approximate it by gently and wisely con
straining lower races to take up the white man's ways; but most truly
and surely will it be realized where the instincts of each ethnic stock
are developed naturally upon their own foundations. We are already
beginning to see that the secret of colonization and missionary work
is to allow native races the largest freedom to do their own thing in
their own way, if it does not involve grave and irreparable loss. The
statesman of the future, moreover, wfil deliberately take for his prob
lem, not the grafting of a more highly domesticated scion into wild
stock, but the legitimate development of what is everywhere, even in
the lowest aboriginal tribes, found to be already begun. In plainer
words, the ideal is this: when by careful and aU-sided anthropological

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 511
study it has been found out just what the family, tribal, and other
organizations of primitive races really are, what their myths, customs,
rites, and beliefs truly mean, it wfil then have to be very carefuUy con
sidered, on the basis of this knowledge, how most effectively, with
least loss either of energy or of what has already been accomphshed,
the next and then the next higher step can be taken. Then we shaU
recognize the fact that what we now call civilization is not the only
one; but that radically different civilizations that contravene perhaps
many of our fundamental pofitical, social, and even economic axioms
are possible, and that there are perhaps as many undeveloped cultures
and religions as there are languages capable of further development,
some of which may indeed ultimately become far higher than any now
known, but which are now simply arrested at some lower stage of evo
lution or made retrogressive, not so much from any inherent defect of
the idea or system but from some accident of hygiene, location, food,
or some error of misconception of crucial factors, or, alas, sometimes
by suppression or perversion of good things by a stronger alien race.
Real colonial statesmanship, if it ever becomes broad enough to realize
this possibifity, will be bringing in the Father's Kingdom in ways far
more effective than cataclysmal reconstruction upon a single model,
which often means the alienation of the best indigenous men, methods,
and ideals. To attain the end here sought we must have a psychology
broad enough to be truly called human. Indeed, every believer in
evolution must realize that our present civilization, like older ones that
have perished, may be sloughed off like the cast of a worm when the
butterfly emerges from it. Nothing prompts the old man's visions
and the young man's dream like these optimal possibilities of develop
ment of the superman in the superstate. The swan song of senescence
sometimes cadences the highest aspirations of the soul, while the ideals
of young men are the best material for prophecy, so that in them we
find often what wfil be written as history half a century later. Such
ideals supplement the limitations of what has already happened,
by the larger complement of what wfil be when history reaUy begins.
The increasing purposes of God's will, which faith sees running through
the ages, are often balked by popular frenzy, bigotry, corruption, and
there have been stationary and retrograde centuries; but man to-day
perhaps has more vital befief in the future of progress than ever before,
whether on this earth or in a heavenly Kingdom, for both locations are

512 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
effective in the same direction. The conception of the primitive
gnostic sect was of the preexisting soul descending into the body of a
new-born babe. Jesus, too, was said to have divested himself of
ideahty to become real on earth. Lotze dreamed of a state wherein his
soul would some time hold high converse with Buddha, Plato, Mary,
and above all, Jesus. Even if the earlier concepts of the Church are un
satisfying or even unattractive, we all look forward to a state of attain
ment, fulfilment, completion, where aU things and persons will wear
the aureole of the ideal. Dreams of Elysian conditions or of the
Kingdom have sustained man in his hours of greatest pain and fear,
because he has felt that aU his sufferings would be accounted as in
vestments in a heavenly bank. These antithetical and compensatory
conceptions have thus had the greatest supportive power. As pre-
Columbian navigators thought they could sail off on the sea, and, by
direct continuity if they went far enough, reach the sun, moon, and
stars, so the heavenly Kingdom as now interpreted is something that
will be entered by imperceptible gradations, and there will be no break
and no great commencement day as the earth slowly graduates into
the Kingdom. (7) The prayer for daily bread is for growth and nutrition, which
is basal. Trophic prophecies underlie fife, which has in the past been
largely a struggle for food. In general, species have become extinct
either because they failed to find it or became themselves food for
other species. Hunger is the first and, with love, the strongest instinct.
The bonds of commensality are the closest. Breaking bread together
is more than a symbol of the closest brotherhood, and sometimes
constitutes the act of marriage; while in many primitive tribes, as
TrumbuU has shown, the blood covenant, effected by mutual transfu
sion of blood, is the strongest of aU ties. Famine and thirst bring out
the most bestial qualities, and may cause one of the most dreadful
forms of death. To feed the hungry is the most imperative charity,
even before that of clothing the naked, and is the first duty of hospital
ity. Food colonies are the lowest social organizations in the animal
world. There is a sense, too, brought home to us by the remarkable
studies of the Pawlow school, supplemented by the work of Truro,
Sternberg, and Dejerine from their very different standpoints, in which
every psychic activity is due to the hunger of brain or other ceUs;
these are fed by the satisfaction of curiosity, which abounds in anal-

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 513
ogies with appetite, whfie even the gastropathies and psychic anorexias
are rich in spiritual analogies. All that hves, whether community or
molecule, is on the way up if anabofism can do its work, or, if katabofism
is excessive, begins to degenerate. Every disease, whatever its cause,
involves partial starvation of some organ or tissue, which is shut off
from its due irrigation by the blood, the all-feeding fluid. Food
monopolies are the worst of aU, and food adulteration is one of the
most inimical of crimes. This petition, therefore, is not only the best
of aU table prayers as it stands, but is fuU of endless analogies in the
psychic and moral realm.
(8) The forgiveness of debts is more remote from modern thought.
Incurring debts is not unknown in primitive communities, where lib
erty and even life may be pledged to cancel obligations. The hope or
promise to repay, however, enables poverty to maintain its self-
respect. As property and its rites were developed, the laws against
debtors were often very severe. They have been branded, labelled,
pfiloried, imprisoned, tortured, and even their families, relatives, and
friends have suffered with them. They have been transported as
convicts; and society regards improvidence, which the ants are a
constant parable to avoid, with fittle leniency, although modern bank
ruptcy acts show an interesting evolution of sentiment in the direction
of answering this item of the prayer of ages. Nevertheless, to forgive
just debts is only one step easier than to love enemies. The evolution
of property1 shows that it arose as an extension of the ego. The rich
man feels the pulsations of his own fife in all he owns, somewhat as
Lotze's clothes philosophy thinks one of their uses was to extend the
sense of the wearer's physical ego. The millionaire feels himself al
most identified with all his interests. Relinquishment therefore means
restriction of the contours of his affective and effective personality,
and is directly in the teeth of aU instincts of self-aggrandizement. On
the other hand, we are here reminded that we are aU poor debtors
before God's high assize. On the strict scale of debit and credit we
owe our parents for food, clothing, protection, and care; we owe
school or coUege, the city and state, for our protection; but above aU,
we owe to the heavenly Father not only aU we have but all we are.
There is no standard by which to measure this debt; but it is infinite
and inextinguishable, so that aU we have we should hold as his stewards
'See L. W. Dine and C. J. Fiance: "Psychology of Ownership." Pel. Sm., 1899.

514 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
with full accountabifity, for should he foreclose we should have nothing,
and should lose fife itself. The Stoics, even before the early Church,
gfimpsed this conception in challenging private ownership in anything
essential for support of hfe and the common weal. Thus God owns us,
body and soul, with absolute power so to dispose of us as he sees fit,
for he made not only us but our world, and we are all his servants,
either good or bad. This debt is only forgiven, therefore, when we
become true sons, make his wfil ours, and hold all that we have and are
as his factors. But it needs only insight and not mere Calvinistic
blood to show that the race has drifted from this norm; that much has
been overdone and much underdone; that substance has been wasted,
effort misdirected; that the race has blundered along, so that real his
tory is very different from what it should have been. We should treat
others, therefore, as we would have God treat us. If our friends injure
or owe us, we should be mindful of the great remissions we have en
joyed, and practise divine magnanimity. When impelled to exact
even just claims upon those unable to meet them, we should simply
think of our own faults and the penalties due us which we have es
caped. (9) As to temptation, it always ideaUy involves some moral waste;
for fife is easily conceived of as so pure that it can have no hold upon
us, so that impeccability is more perfect if temptation has never been
known. It usually involves deliberation, and always a moral conflict,
suggesting the familiar proverb that the woman who deliberates is lost.
Whfie this sets forth the dangers of temptation, it is a glorification of
her deeper intuitive natural instincts and automatic organization, but
a libel on her intelligence and consciousness, because it implies their
untrustworthiness, as if consideration, convention, the artifacts of
education or environment, were less organized and therefore less to be
trusted than intuition. If human nature had been radicaUy bad, and
the good superposed upon it by precept and training, the reverse would
be true, and the woman who did not deliberate would be lost. Jesus
thus expresses naively his befief in the fundamental goodness of human
nature, and that it is not wise to commit virtue to the keeping of a
deliberative moral consciousness where the pros and cons of right and
wrong are weighed, debates with passion encouraged, and choices made
as a result of careful consideration.
(10) "Deliver us from evil," has been, as we saw elsewhere, the

JESUS' ETHICS AND PRAYER 515
greatest of aU solicitudes of the human soul, from the first apotropaic
prayer and sacrifice to unknown powers down to our own day. All burnt
offerings, all superstitious fears, especiaUy those with a moral root,
are bred of phobias of impending evil, which always threatens within
and without. Not. only did man struggle for ages with nature, with
the great beasts of the prime, disease, and death; but his fate was
jeopardized by rapacious passion, ignorance, and superstition. To
escape evil prompts every -effort, brings foresight, makes for survival
and the accomplishment of our vocation as men. This item of the
prayer expresses the perfervour of the desire not only for continuance and
complete well-being, but for development. The answer to this prayer
involves escape from post-mortem evil and the exemption of the soul
from anxiety, the mother of aU fears. It may involve, too, some deep
Buddhistic insight into the ills inherent in aU existence, and express the
optative sentiment that we may pass safely through this vale of tears
inoffensively, and immaculately innocent of every stain of finitude or
even individuation. Fear of evil has been the spur that has created
medicine and even science as prevision, as weU as every protective
immunizing or insuring agency, so that as in the former items we are
touching another of the fundamentals of human life.
(n) In the ascription of the Kingdom, glory and power to God,
some have fancied pantheism, although the Kingdom implies a personal
ruler, and power and glory are certainly consistent with theism.
But what if an all-pervading God-consciousness like that of Spinoza
toward a being too great to submit to the limitations involved in per
sonafity, but in whom we hve, move, and have our being, does work
in the background? We ought to understand by this time that no
deeply rehgious soul can possibly escape the undertow of this great
current. God is all. Everything in the world is in a sense a mode,
form, speaking-tube, or persona of him, and the ultimate reason of all
the foregoing desiderata is found in the grand old Oriental refrain that
God is all and in aU, and that apocatastasis is the final cause of crea
tion. At any rate, it helps us to know that if experience, philosophy,
science, or the right attitude to poetry, force us to choose between per
sonafity and something higher than it rather than lower, we can faU
back on assents as old as the Mana doctrine, and feel that we rest in
everlasting arms, and that if our bark of system sinks it is to a vaster
sea. All modern studies of the ego show that it is not simple, but

516 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
infinitely complex, at best a kind of vinculum containing various quan
tities, both known and unknown, carried on together through the whole
equation of life for convenience, till each element receives its final
evaluation. The elements of human selfhood are loosely wrought
together and easily break up as in the phenomena of dual or multiple
personality, whfie our truest self is below the threshold of conscious
ness, and therefore of unknown value, so that consciousness can never
serve as a pattern of absolute existence. Indeed, all recent studies of
prayer seem to show that the basal motivation of it is unification with
the deeper unconscious elements of the soul, and back of these, with the
orientation to the background of the universe itself.1

• A. L. Strong: "Relation of the Subconscious to Prayer," Am. J. Relig. Psychol., 1906-07, vol. 2, p. roo-187. J.B
Pratt: "An Empirical Study of Prayer." Ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 48-67, 1911. Stephen W. Ransom: "Studies in the Psy
chology of Prayer." Ibid., 1904. Vol. 1, pp. 120-142. F. O. Beck: Prayer, a Study in Ito History and Psychology.'*
Ibid., 1906, Vol. 2, pp. 107-121.

CHAPTER NINE
THE PARABLES OF JESUS
The following is the classification of Jiilicher, the chief contempo
rary authority on the parables, whose rubrics are followed in this
chapter: A. Comparison parables: i. The budding fig-tree as a herald of
spring. 2. Constant slaves to duty without thanks. 3. Piping and
dancing children. 4. A son asking a fish and getting a scorpion.
5. The disciple and pupil not above the teacher. 6. The blind leader
of the blind. 7. What goes out of and not what enters the body de
files. 8. The salt of the earth. 9. The fight on a candlestick. 10.
The city on a hill. n. The reveafing of the concealed. 12. The eye
as the light of the body. 13. Serving two masters impossible. 14. The
tree known by its fruits. 15. A scribe instructed in the Kingdom.
16. The carcass-gathering eagles. 17. The watch set if we know when
the thief is coming. 18. The faithful and unfaithful servant. 19. Re
ceiving the head of the household late. 20. " Physician, heal thyself. "
21. The sick and not the weU need a physician. 22. No fasting when
the bridegroom is present. 23. No new patch on an old garment, or
new wine in old bottles. 24. Counting the cost of war or a tower.
25. Satan's kingdom divided against itself. 26. Agree with an enemy
quickly for fear of judge and prison. 27. Take the lowest seat. 28.
Children and dogs eat crumbs.
B. True parables: 29. The house on the rock or sand. 30. The
neighbour importuned arises and gives food. 31. The widow and the
unjust judge. 32. The usurer and the two debtors. $3- The pitiless
servant. 34. The lost sheep and penny. 35. The prodigal son.
36. The brother who promised, and the brother who went. 37. The
defiant tenant of the vineyard. 38. The declining guests to a feast.
39. The barren fig-tree. 40. The ten virgins. 41. Equal pay for the
eleventh-hour man. 42. The loaned-out talents. 43. The unjust
householder. 44. The sower on different kinds of ground. 45. Seed
growing independently. 46. Tares and wheat. 47. The fish-net.
48. The mustard seed and leaven. 49. The treasure and the pearl
of great price.
C. Illustrative narratives: 50. The good Samaritan. 51. The
Pharisee and the publican. 52. The foolish rich man. 53. The rich
man and poor Lazarus. 517

518 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
THE parables are probably the best transmitted and most au
thentic of all the teachings of Jesus, of which in Mark they con
stitute about one fourth, and in Matthew and Luke stiU more.
Some of them are masterpieces of effective popular impartation.
Jiilicher,1 who has given the most detailed study yet made, distin
guishes three historic types of their hermeneutics. In the first period
everything was allegorized. In the parable, e. g., of the prodigal son,
the father's property squandered by the son stands for heathendom,
the swine are demons, the robe is the state of Adam which was lost at
the faU, the fatted calf is the body of the Lord broken at the eucharist,
etc. Every item and idea is interpreted by itself with no reference
whatever to unity, and there is no aUusion to the customs of Jesus' age
and land, as if these could contribute nothing to the eternal verities
here dealt with, just as sometimes in a charade or a riddle every word
and phrase precisely as it stands is significant. In the second period,
from Origen (a. d. 254) to Luther, only essentials were aUegorized.
Each parable was taken as a whole and taught its own distinct lesson,
and to this the occasion on which it was uttered is often the key.
They illustrated Jesus' condescension to the level of folk-thought. In
the third period, extending to the present, nothing is aUegorized. Weiss
goes so far as to say that Jesus was not striving for heuristic clearness,
but was promulgating laws of the Kingdom of heaven. Their higher
meaning must be intuited. They are the acme of self-luminosity,
and to explain is to obscure them. Each is best conceived as a com
mand. AU belong together as more or less distinct specifications
concerning the central theme of the Kingdom. While old and new
methods of interpretation are still found, the old allegorization is on
the wane. Parables fall readily into four groups.2 (1) Simple comparisons
whereby one statement is made more objective by another: as, e. g.,
the budding fig-tree as a sign of summer, or whereas a servant who is
ordered to do as he is told, receives no thanks (Luke xvii: 7-10), so
every man must serve the Lord. Jesus had a genius for such illustra
tions. (2) Narratives or storiettes not unlike fables. These are
numerous, e. g., the sower, the woman and the unjust judge, the usurer
and his debtor, the lost penny, the lost sheep, the prodigal son, the

'"Die Gleichnisreden Jesu:" Leipzig, 1899. Bd. 1, 328 p.; Bd. 2, 643 p.
¦P. Staude: "Die Bedeutung der Gleichnisreden Jesu in unserer Zeit." Langensalza, 1903, 18 p.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 519
unfruitful vineyard, the barren fig-tree, the ten virgins, the unwfihng
guests, equal reward for unequal work, the talents, the unjust house
holder. (3) A third class contains neither comparisons nor parables
in the strict sense. Here belong the rich man and Lazarus, the piti
ful Samaritan, the foolish rich man, the Pharisee and the publican.
These are not strictly parables, because the story does not run in an
other domain, but the incident is rather an example illustrating a gen
eral principle. (4) The fourth class is peculiar to John, and is best
filustrated in the pericope of the good shepherd. Such a complex
of analogous statements is an allegory, always hovering in a half light
in which we do not compare but substitute terms, without which the
meaning is not clearly seen.
Jesus taught in parables, not, as the synoptists seem to have thought,
in order to obscure, but rather to clarify his meaning. They tell us
not only much incidentally about the local and temporal conditions
of Jesus' life, but suggest that during his prepublic years in his solitary
musings he had come to symbolize much in his physical and social en
vironment by investing their items with higher meanings so that the
parables give us glimpses of how in his own marvellous, if primitive,
method of growth all things had come to speak to him of something
above themselves. They give us perhaps the best of all examples of
how the human soul works its way on to truth in a prelogical stage, when
imagination and intuition are everything and logical concatenation
has not begun its work of coordinating and harmonizing insights in
different directions. If Jesus was, however, no mere poet or mystic
on the one hand, nor on the other a man, with his intuitive insights
utterly unconstellated, they did nevertheless converge toward one
practical goal — the Kingdom, of which both the incidents of his experi
ence and his intuitions had become so eloquent in his own soul. Apt,
too, and weU motivated as the parables generaUy are to the occasion
on which they were enunciated, they could hardly have been ad hoc
extemporizations. They have also been grouped into chronological cycles according
to topics, fulness of details, lucidity or obscurity, etc. Some have such
verisimilitude that they have been thought to be actual events utilized
for iUustrative purposes, and most are so natural that they might have
occurred at almost any time or place. As the chief theme of the mir
acles is the new life, so that of the parables is the Kingdom, what it is,

530 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
how it comes, who enters, how, etc. They are of various degrees of
homiletic value, and the meaning of some is so obvious as to be almost
commonplace, while others are cryptic and very diversely understood.
They often overlap or teach almost identical lessons, or show only
slight differences of aspect or relation in their themes; while it is baf
fling if not impossible to harmonize others, either with one another or
with other utterances of Jesus on the same topic. They are the best-
known and most portable of aU bis teachings, and some have furnished
favourite themes to art.
Although a few occur in ancient Hebrew literature, canonical and
other, parables are in a large measure Jesus' unique creation. His
method was not that of the dialogue or of dialectic, for he rarely dis
cussed or reasoned, nor did he ever show Socratic irony by evoking
callow opinions on the part of his hearers and then gradually leading
them on toward his own view by showing contradictions in theirs.
He was not a midwife but an impregnator, handing down truth to be
accepted intuitively and lived out, not argued about or debated. The
parables show how to his mind the facts of nature and the events of
human life were not merely what they seem but were transfigured,
transparent, translucent, supercharged by meanings behind and above
them. "A primrose by a river's brim" was not to him, as it was to
Peter Bell, nothing but a yellow primrose; but rather like the "flower
in the crannied wall," which really to know was to know what God and
man are. If it can be said at all that the phenomenal world was to
Jesus only an appearance, it is not in the metaphysical sense of re
vealing the transcendent noumenal entity, but as being essentiaUy
only types and symbols of moral values, and so ancfilary to these that
they would shortly be sloughed off and pass away to give place to a
new heaven and earth when the day of righteousness came. On the
other hand, the fact that the Great Parable-maker could find so much
in the moral and social order of his day and time that spoke so clearly
of the Kingdom suggests that though many would change or pass,
many, and perhaps more, would abide when it came.
Most Protestant literature on the parables in English (Trench,
Bruce, Dodds, Lang, Kirk, Taylor, Thompson, Maturin, Hubbard,
Arnot, and many more) is chiefly for edification. Unless we except
Trench, it is on the low level of scholarship that is content to compare
paraUel passages and versions in the New Testament, less often ex-

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 521
tending to the Old; very rarely attempting to extract meanings from
the original language, and almost never with aUusions to passages in
the texts of other refigions. Save in Trench we rarely find allusions
to patristic interpretation, which is a rich and suggestive, if often
picturesque, field. Thus Jiilicher, with his vaster learning, rarely
finds in English anything he deems worthy of citation. Yet from it
aU we can best realize how deeply embedded in the imaginal thought,
and still more in the sentiment, of popular Christian experience are
the personages and incidents. Like a magnet each of the leading
parables has drawn about itself all the mass of meanings within the
sphere of its attraction tfil it might be compared to a special complex
or consteUation, so that a large part of the moral life is interpreted in
its terms. In this sense the art of the parables has become more real
than history. The habit of extracting manifold meanings from them
has also done much to predispose Christian scholarship and thought to
interpret the record of historic events in the same symbohc way, as
Farrar's "History of Interpretation" abundantly shows. While insisting
on their historicity, events are regarded as also carrying one or perhaps
a whole sheaf of higher messages, and facts are endlessly allegorized.
In the vast body of comments on the parables, of which the above are
illustrations, we find a surprising rarity of their application to daily
secular duty; they are far more often brought home to vaguer hovering
religious experiences. There is not so much withdrawal from pressing
business and social reality as failure to reach it with the directness and
force with which the inculcations of parables might be driven home
to the very core of modern individual life; which raises the question
whether the pulpit has actuaUy used them without reservation, be
cause they reaUy touch the most vital matters of life and mind.
The new Tubingen school, culminating, so far as the parables are
concerned, in Volkmar and Loman, think that everything, not only in
the Apostolic Age but later, was coloured or motivated by three rival
tendencies or parties — Paulinism, Judaism, and Petrinism. The last,
whfie more or less mediating between these extreme views, is strongly
anti-Pauline. In this school, from Baur down, the first thing to be
determined of any New Testament writer is his attitude to Paul, the
Johannin current only being more or less independent. Even Renan,
who to some degree escapes this tendency, thinks that the seven chief
parables of the Kingdom reflect later ideas. The parable, e. g., of the

522 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
eleventh-hour workman who received the same pay as those who
had wrought aU day, refers to Paul, and therefore underwent a redac
tion, and so did aU the sayings to the effect that the last shah be first.
These jealousies, especially between Paul and the disciples, represented
by Peter, are thought to have strongly motivated all early writings
till, later, in the interests of the Church, the traces of this old antago
nism were carefuUy scored away.1 Volkmar seems to think that we
owe to partisan and controversial motives the very impulse to write
Gospels and epistles and that the first effort of the critic now should
be to know each author's tendency or bias, so that to some degree we
can predict what he would select from the floating body of tradition,
what he would omit, what he would bring into the foreground, what he
would keep in the background, and even what he would be likely to invent
or poetize. But the many variations of details in the different writers,
together with the essential identity of content, can only mean genuine
ness and a common source, which must go back to Jesus. ^Esop's fables
were not recorded for centuries after his death, and in very different
renderings; but they, too, show amid petty variations identity of
content. The word "parable" occurs fifty times in the New Testament,
aU times in the synoptists; although, subtracting parallels, it occurs but
thirty. All represent Jesus as having a predilection for using this rhetori
cal form. Mark uses the word thirteen times for six different narratives ;
Matthew, seventeen times for twelve; Luke, eighteen times, seventeen
of which are for the same parables as are recorded by Matthew and
Mark. This "comparison" or "example" way of teaching may ob
scure or enlighten. The one train of thought or description is obvious,
but the other is in more or less need of rebus-wise interpretation. Par
ables challenge the hearer to find the higher parallel meaning. They
are thus in a sense Binet tests of spiritual insight, as to see a joke is a
test of humour. To see only their literal meaning suggests the naivete"
of childhood, even more than does the tendency to take miracles liter
ally. Thus for genetic religious psychology they serve as moron-
finders. A parable is a patent, postulating a latent meaning, always
requiring some psychoanalysis, as does a dream. It does not merely
involve a parallelism of happenings in two domains, as Juhcher thinks
(Op. cit. Bd. i, S. 80), but the lower is given to find the higher, as a
'See an account of this movement in my "Founders ot Modern Psychology." 1912, p. 6-to.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 523
fable is a story the framework of which supports a higher significance.
Both in a sense particularize some general truths, and in both, as well
as in constructing aUegory, analogy, symbol, simile, etc., there must be
much Rilcksicht auf Darstellbarkeit. The synoptists caUed them
"dark sayings" because, and when, they did not understand them.
Perhaps some of them showed Jesus' own tentative efforts to bring the
truth he sought more clearly to his mind, or to grasp it better, so that
they might not have been all primarily pedagogic. Some of them
seem to have been the results of sudden intuition. It has been said
that, effective as they were, the masses were not convinced, or else
they would never have cried " Crucify him." In Mark the parables
constitute a quarter or more of aU Jesus' words, and in Luke nearly
half of aU he said from his first public appearance to his arrest, but we
can hardly say that this tendency grew. At least, John records not
one true parable.
In the parables we see farthest into Jesus' own heart. The chief
of them pertain to the Kingdom, and without them we should have
comparatively little knowledge of how he regarded it. For the first
thousand years the Church looked on them as essentially for edification
and explanation, and refused to admit their teachings into the body of
theology. This idea of parable hermeneutics which forbade their use
in argument conceived their appeal to be to the heart and will rather
than to the reason. Now, however, we have a parabolic theology, very
much debated to be sure, but which has come in with the recognition
that the parables are the most genuine and the best transmitted of aU
the teachings of Jesus. In them many think we have his personality
and his higher theanthropic consciousness; but we must not go too far
in this direction, for in the parables Jesus speaks far more of the
Father than of himself. There is little Paulinism and no aUusion to
the vicarious atonement. Here Jesus' sense of his Divine Sonship is
not developed into a sense of his divinity. The salvation that he
teaches is entirely independent of his death. The Kingdom is already
at hand and open, not because Jesus is trusted by the Father as about
to offer himself as a ransom for sin on the cross, but because the dear
Father cannot refuse to answer prayer. In other words, Jesus is here
teaching not a saviour but salvation; not he himself but history later
made him a saviour. (See Jiilicher, Bd. 1, S. 152 et seq.) Thus he was
a redeemer before he died, and indeed we may add he would have

534 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
been so in a sense had he not died. His self-feehng in the parables,
to be sure, gives him a place in the Kingdom. He evolved laws of the
Kingdom, one after another, from his own self-consciousness, and while
he felt himself stronger than Satan and conceived himself as a Messiah,
his concern is almost entirely with his work and not with himself.
If we knew their chronological order it might shed fight upon the
evolution of his ideas, but the synoptists differ very widely in this
respect, and as they present the parables in so many degrees of fulness,
it is doubtful whether we can ever find their genetic sequence. The
common Christian conception is that they represent the same level of
consciousness, without traces of developmental stages. All of them
together are not in themselves sufficient to serve as a basis for an entire
system of theology, important as they are for Jesus' pedagogy and
psychology. Most, even critics, panegyrize them as models, although
they can hardly be caUed works of art. His was a rather dark age of
Hebrew hterature; at least it was far below the prophetic age, and the
parables by no means equal the prophecies in form. Moreover, Jesus
had higher than aesthetic ends in view. In respect to form it is absurd
to compare them, as many have done, with Homer, Sophocles, Isaiah,
Habakkuk, Dante, or Shakespeare, or to caU them the "greatest
poetry in the world." They he rather more in the domain of oratory
than in that of poetry. Compared to the above classic authors Jesus
is as JEsop to the ornate La Fontaine. Jesus' thought is of the highly
imaginal type, as Goethe said his own was. This instinct to compare
similia similibus was for him an expression of idealism. The very
homeliness of the parables constitutes much of their charm, and per
haps still more of their effectiveness. If there are traces of exaggera
tion, yet there is no caricature. The size of the tree that grew from a
grain of mustard seed, the ten thousand talents, the extreme unwilling
ness of the invited guests, the one hour which the belated labourers
served instead of two hours in a somewhat similar Buddhistic legend,
the extreme joy at finding the lost penny, the severity of some penalties
— these may perhaps be a fittle Oriental but are hardly intemperate.
The treachery of the householder, the conscienceless judge, the busi
ness shrewdness of the man who found the pearl of great price, were
not censured, and this Renan has thought significant, but Jesus' gallery
of characters and the repertory of acts had to contain both good and
bad.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 525
The chief attack on the parables has been that they were not
original with Jesus. The early Church regarded most of the Old Testa
ment as parable and subordinated its historicity to its meaning. Some
of Jesus' parables, like the "good shepherd" and the vineyard, seem
amplified from Old Testament metaphors. If we look to the apoc
rypha or pseudepigraphy, and especially to the Talmud, midrash, and
cabalistic writings, as has often been done since Lightfoot (d. 1675),
we learn that many Christian and Jewish writers have unearthed from
these sources not a few more-or-less remote analogues to the parables
of Jesus, and extremists have almost derived the New Testament from
rabbinical literature. Wetstein (1751 f.), Noack (1839), Van Koets-
veld (1858), Muscoviter (1882), A. Wunsche, Havet, and others have
stressed the haggadah as the nurse of Jesus' mind and teaching. It has
always been a problem to ascertain how much of this voluminous ht
erature Jesus knew. Scholars find a few rabbinical storiettes with a
moral that suggest some of the parables of Jesus. To illustrate:
A king singled out one of his many labourers who was weU-favoured
and who distinguished himself by industry and skfll, and he walked
and talked with him openly. AU the employees were paid the same
wage at the end of the day, and the rest murmured that this new fa
vourite who had wrought but two hours was given the same wage as
those who had worked aU day. But they were told by the king that
the favoured one had done as much in two hours as they had done aU
day. So in another tale a genius died young, and it was said that,
because he had accomplished as much in the few years he had lived as
most did by the end of a long hfe, God caUed him to his reward. But
in general the spirit, frame, theme, and lesson of Jesus' parables are very
different. If the Talmudic tales were commonly known, of course
Jesus without being taught them might have caught suggestions from
them. Just how far his parables were a de novo creation perhaps we
shaU never know, but that his merit is impaired by these rival claims
there is little reason to befieve. He surely drew less from such extra-
canonical sources than he did from the Old Testament, and whatever
came from the former or from current tradition was probably no less
transformed and transfigured.
Renan, Havet, Seydel, and many others who have since followed
in their wake, think that Jesus' parables were influenced by Buddhistic
literature by some mysterious way of infiltration. Buddha's life and

526 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
that of Christ are very often paraUeled and their teachings compared.
Oldenberg thinks that these two lives are variants of the great epos of
religious founders. There is some similarity, e. g., between John's
tale of the cure of the man born blind and a Buddhistic story, although
in John the incident is reported as a miracle, not as a parable. The
Buddhistic canon was practically closed before Jesus' day, but there
was very much apocryphal elaboration afterward. Max Muller finds
what he calls a striking coincidence between a pre-Christian Indie
tale and that of the prodigal son, and there are many other items that
suggest some relation, although the student of comparative religion
knows how often legendary matter may be cast in similar moulds by
different races independently of one another. The Evangelists er-
tainly show no traces of Buddhistic influence, and the problem as to
Jesus is not unlike that as to whether Pythagoras profited by the cul
ture of Egypt. The Buddhist tales vacillate between thought and
imagery, fable and allegory. They are far more rank in fancy, ^nd
so much longer that their prolixity sometimes makes them almost
unreadable by Occidentals. They often abound in extreme exaggera
tion. The phrenologist GaU postulated a special parable faculty
which he thought located in the brain just back of the upper frontal
skull, near the middle of the forehead. This absurdity might be com
pared with that of certain apologists who assert for Jesus an entirely
unique faculty which created and alone could use true parables, and
who resent aU rival claims as if they were infringements of patent.
Jesus' parables are at least a species if not a genus by themselves, whfie
if he drew from Indie sources, this not only does not lessen his inven
tiveness but gives a most useful hint to missionary pedagogy in
India. Buddha lived five centuries B. c, and his cult was well estab
lished and widespread when Jesus was born; but despite the oft-traced
analogies between the two men and their cults, the differences between
both their fives and their doctrines are so great as to make them largely
incommensurate. Moreover, the Hebrew mind was especially imper
vious to such influences. We can but wish that Jesus knew and freely
drew from all the above sources; and if either accident or jealous design
has robbed us of the evidence that he really knew in a broad compara
tive way and borrowed freely where it served his purpose, it would in
deed be a great misfortune. If the author of Shakespeare had the
knowledge of Bacon would it not reaUy enhance his originality that,

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 527
with aU the impedimenta of knowledge, his mind selected from the
wide field the richest material and used it so freely and creatively?
Certainly Shakespeare's lustre is not dimmed by the fact that he drew
much of the material of his plays from the various older Quellen that
Simrock has so convincingly shown to be his point of departure.
Let us turn now to the parables themselves.
A. COMPARISON PARABLES
1. After Jesus had vividly described the dreadful events attending
the second coming of the Son, his disciples asked him privately by what
sign they could foreknow these events. The answer, Matt, xxiv 3 2;
Mark xifi:24-8; Luke xxi:29-3i, called a parable, was that as when a
fig-tree puts forth tender shoots we know summer is nigh, so when
these calamities begin to occur, the Kingdom is at hand. As buds
presage spring, calamities presage the millennium.
This equation of relations halts; for while the Kingdom is like
spring, how can we call calamities its buds, when one is evolution and
the other revolution? Though a thrice-recorded riddle it is as if Jesus,
when asked to expound it, turned away from his awful picture of judg
ment to a milder mood, or else meant to say reassuringly to the disci
ples, "For you these calamities are not meant, but the new era wfil
steal over you like gentle spring"; or else he meant to fortify them
against disaster by saying that to them these horrors would have no
terror, but only be signs of joy.
2. Luke (xvii:7-io) makes Jesus ask: Who wfil say to his servant
coming in from ploughing, "Go and eat?" He will rather say, "Pre
pare and serve me, and when I have eaten and drunk, then you may do
so." Is a servant thanked for thus doing? I trow not. So when you
have done aU that you are told to do, say: "We are unprofitable ser
vants and have only done that which it was our duty to do."
Thus Jiilicher thinks the disciples are told that they must be the
slaves of God, not serving under a contract and unable not only to
accumulate a store of desert but even to merit thanks. Supererogation
therefore would be impossible. Subordination must be complete.
This illustrates what Nietzsche calls the Sklavenmorale taught by Jesus
and dear to slave-holders from whom not even thanks are ever due.
The surrender of wfil must be complete. Some think this a Pauline

528 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
interpolation (because it is so much out of touch with its context),
expressing the doctrine so stressed by Paul that our own righteousness
is as filthy rags, an idea dear to Luther and to Calvin, while the self-
righteousness of the Pharisees brings out the opposite standpoint by
contrast. The teaching of this passage is absolute subjection and sub
mission. It suggests Schleiermacher's feefing of absolute dependence
and self-evacuation. We must be not merely the Lord's henchmen
but his fags and factotums.
3. This generation (Matt. xi:i6-i9; Luke vii:3i-35) is like children
in the market calling to their mates, " We piped and ye did not dance,
we mourned and ye did not weep"; for John ate no bread and drank no
wine but was called a devil, while I do both and am called a glutton,
wine-bibber, and friend of publican and sinner. Wisdom is justified of
her children. In both accounts the previous talk is of John, but the after-context
differs so that the historic place of the incident is disputed. Exegetes
of this illustration of Jesus have differed extremely. Cyril opines that
the children were playing alternately wedding and funeral games, ex
pressed by dancing and mourning, to two kinds of music, and this he
infers rather from archaeological and antiquarian studies than from the
fact that such games are favourite plays to-day. Part of the children,
he assumes, at a certain stage of the game refused to play and were
chided by the rest, which would be a very typical incident in plays and
games to-day. John is funereal with a pessimistic message, says Holtz
mann in substance, while Jesus represents an optimistic, marriage-like
r61e. Both games werebalked by the powers that be, so that the leader
of one game was called a devil and that of the other a glutton. Jiilicher
says the moral is against Kritikasterthum, and the piping and mourning
are the still small voice of the Spirit to which men are unresponsive.
Thus wisdom is scorned. On the other hand, Jesus and John are made
to accuse their hearers of not dancing to their music, playing then-
game, or justifying their wisdom. The moral implication is that no
one can please those predisposed to censure, who will always find some
pretext to pervert or find fault, and that no course of hfe or conduct
can suit constitutional recalcitrants or those predisposed to negativism,
who set their noluntas against the voluntas of others in a way which is
in some sense the opposite of the servile submission taught in the pre
ceding parable. As for Aristotle temperance was the golden mean
between the two excesses of mortification of the body and Epicurean
license, so the Christian life must justify itself by a wisdom equally
distinct from excesses on either side. So, too, in social intercourse the

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 529
true way to fulness of life is not to hold entirely aloof from outcast
classes like publicans or harlots, nor to consort with them as if we were
of them. Use but not abuse all the goods of life, eschew alike intem
perate temperance and abandoned license, and ignore the demands
and fashions of a generation that has lost the true middle way. Look
with appreciation sympathetic enough to be inteUigent on all the rich
comedie humaine. Taste every joy of life that can be felt with inno
cence. B e in thought, word, and deed just as f uU-blown and humanized
as possible. Exploit and experience the whole life of man in all its
modes, tenses, lights and shadows, forms and fashions, as far as individ
ual limitations permit, regardless of the childish theories that would
regulate and prescribe our conduct, using only the all-saving wisdom
that is justified of her children. See the world, feel all its fulness, enter
into all its moods, and expand personality as nearly as possible to the
utmost limits of the race, provided we keep well within the orbit our
nature marks out, equally mindful of the two poles of excess and defect.
Do not dance to the infantile piping of those who prescribe a regimen
in which either pleasure or pain unduly predominates. Be neither
optimist nor pessimist, but rather both. Between the truth in all
creeds do not conform to one to the exclusion of others and leave out
the sound precepts of all faiths, parties, classes, practices. FoUow aU
religions that have any core of righteousness, and avoid a life of pre
scription, for life is green, and theory old and gray. This parable
seems a very crude exhortation to common sense in the conduct of life.
There is often more philosophy in regulating health and moods than in
many-volumed systems.
4. Again (Matt. vfi:9-n; Luke xi:n-i3), What father, if his son
ask bread, will give him a stone, or if he ask for a fish will give him a
serpent; or, Luke adds, if he ask an egg wfil he give him a scorpion?
Thus, if you being evil know how to give fit gifts to your children, how
much better does the heavenly Father know how to give fit gifts (Luke
says give the Holy Spirit) to those that ask him? Just before, Jesus
had been saying, " Ask and it will be given, knock and it will be opened,
seek and ye shall find." Matthew adds next, "AU things therefore
whatsoever you would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to
them, for this is the law and the prophets."
Bread loaves, we are told, then looked like stones, and hence the
two became favourite terms of contrast; while fish, which became the
type symbol of Christianity, is the diametrical opposite of the serpent,
tlie symbol of the devil; and the egg, too, means fecundity, while the

S30 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
scorpion stands for destruction. Thus it is predicating little of a
father's love to say that he will not answer a request by giving the very
opposite of what is asked for. This injunction to ask, knock, seek, has
been perhaps more faithfully foUowed than any other scriptural behest.
"O Lord, give me something: wealth, health, safety, success, victory,
food, raiment, salvation," is the core of nearly aU petitional prayer.
Every wish of the human soul has taken the form of a request to heaven.
The degree to which Christianity here has taken Jesus at his word and
accepted his invitation to ask favours has often become nothing less
than spiritual begging for what men should get for themselves. In
deed, this mendicant chapter constitutes one of the saddest in religious
pathology. "You shaU have whatever you ask" suggests the carte-
blanche promise of a friendly despot to a favourite, or a gift of a magic
wishing-cap. Indeed, it has been even condemned as a charlatan's bid
for adherents. It contains, however, the saving implication that
petitions may not be answered in kind, and that those who pray will
not be given things bad for them. Luke safeguards the unconditioned
promise by intimating that those who pray wfil receive the Holy Ghost,
or what they ask for in its spiritual symbolic form. Thus the promised
satisfaction of the uttered desire is qualified by God's fatherly discre
tion. Every wish breathed heavenward will bring some response from
on high, or at least is reinforced by being expressed, so that its utterance
marks a step toward its fulfilment. If we know what we want, if we
try to get it, and if it is good for us, we shall get it.
5. "The disciple is not above his master nor the servant above his
lord" (Matt. x:24 f.; Luke vi: 40). It is enough that the former be
as the latter. Luke adds that every man that is perfect shaU be as
his master. If the master be caUed Beelzebub, aU the more will the
disciples have to bear this opprobrious epithet. The pupil does not
stand higher than his teacher. It is enough if he equals him. AU
who are perfect should be teachers.
This parable bears on the jealousy of the disciples for precedence,
but it teUs us clearly in its gnomic way and in a spirit later filustrated
in the "Imitatio Christi" and earlier in the instinct of subordination
taught by the Stoic Epictetus, how domineering Jesus was both by
nature and by necessity, and how authoritative he regarded his office
as teacher. When enemies insult, the master must bear most, but
his followers wfil have to endure their share of abuse.
The possible aUusions or "improvements" in this pedagogic com
plex are so many that one wonders, as so often, whether Jesus himself
saw all that was involved or was led to it by his genius, which was wiser

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 531
than he knew. It teaches at the same time docility, obedience, the need
of perfection in the teacher, the duty of all who have attained it to
teach and to rule. It warns against conceit, prepares the soul of his
foUowers for opprobrium, inculcates the duty of every subordinate to
equal if possible whoever is over him, but not to excite his enmity
and indignation by surpassing him. At least aU these meanings have
been extracted out of or read into the passage. Did Jesus intend aU
this multum in parvo; and was it meant to teach aU these lessons, or to
stress some one or more of them?
6. "If the blind lead the blind, both shaU fall into the ditch"
(Matt. xv:i4; Luke vi:39). Cicero, Plutarch, Philo, and many in
modern times, have used this concise and expressive phrase. Matthew
premises, "Every plant which my heavenly father hath not planted
shaU be rooted up. Let them alone : they be blind leaders of the blind. "
In both Gospels this sentence is more or less isolated and out of place.
It is also anti-Pharisaic.
Leadership in thought and in action must be competent, or leader
and led wfil come to grief. This is a sound common-sense precept
filustrated in every sphere of fife, but it is here given a very realistic
and almost comic metaphor and shows Jesus' talent for graphic figura
tive phrase-making. 7. Calling all the people, he said, "Hear and understand (Matt.
xv:io-2o; Mark vii:i4-23); not that which goeth into the mouth de-
fileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a
man." And then he adds impressively (Mark), "If any man have ears
to hear, let him hear." When asked by Peter or the disciples to ex
plain, he said, Do you not see that what enters into the mouth does not
go to the heart but to the beUy and is cast out at the draught? But
out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, theft, covetous
ness, blasphemy, the evil eye, pride, foUy, and false witness, etc. These
defile, and not what we eat; nor, he adds (alluding to the Pharisees
who were displeased at this saying), does, it defile to eat with un
washed hands.
A unique setting is given this saying by the fact that Jesus appears
almost to convoke his audience like a town crier, enjoins them to make
their very best effort at comprehension, as if something very cryptic
and significant were coming, and then lays down a general principle

532 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
in a single sentence and is done. It suggests some new discovery.
It is a kind of challenge to the understanding, a fittle as if it were a
riddle or dream which each must work out the meaning of as best he
can for himself. It implies, too, a glint of physiological knowledge,
always so significant for any kind of psychology, here of the digestive
tract and the phenomena of defecation, and also a deep insight into
the psychology of the feelings and impulses. It is a thrust at the
distinction so sacred to the Jews between clean and unclean or tabooed
viands, and it causes the resentment of the Pharisees, because it im
plies that anything nutritive may be eaten without pollution. The
really impure things are sins, all of which, like virtue, spring from the
heart, the fons et origo of all that is really bad or good because it is the
centre of the life of the soul. Thus the mouth is the excremental
organ of thought, feelings, will, and desires, which spring from the
heart. To make the contrast complete only the evil that escapes
through the higher function of the mouth in speech, which is super
posed upon its primal function of eating, should be included. Yet
deeds proceed from the heart no less reaUy than do words. To adduce
our modern conception of food that is full of toxic products or morbific
germs which do defile would be to go beyond the scope of the parable,
although the Levitical sumptuary prescriptions here abrogated are
thought to ha/e been originally based on hygiene. Neither sacra
mental nor common food makes clean or unclean, but language, which
reveals the soul's purity or vileness. Evil speech is worse than food
ceremonially unclean. The contagion of crime is mostly oral. The
utterances of a vile soul in speech are a veritable sewer against the
defilement of which every safeguard is inadequate. The foul mouth
corrupts and the effect of its utterance is true pollution. Moral
hygiene demands the repression of aU utterance of evil; for repression
is to vice as oxygen to smouldering fire, which dies if it is withheld.
Elsewhere bad thoughts are condemned, but here giving them language.
We have two voluminous collections of popular obscenities published
by groups of anthropologists respectively in Germany and France,
and their precept is that, if sin were robbed of its rank vocabulary, its
sting if not drawn would be at least blunted. This is sound psycholog
ical ethics and emphasizes an important item in the regimen of
virtue. The esoteric explanation of this parable, or fragment of a parable,
as some think it, is plain enough. Assuming the soul to be clean,
nothing external working inward can pollute it. What reaUy degrades
is efferent and has its chief seat in ejective tracts. This chimes very
well with the theory of the efferent nature of aU psychic activity, and
here for the ethics of the present and the future is opened a rich quarry
not yet adequately worked. We have a new criterion of value that

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 533
pragmatic morality should amplify, an apperception centre, a vital
node of contemporary pragmatism.
8. Salt is good (Matt. v:i3; Mark ix:49; Luke xiv:34), but if the
salt becomes stale with what can it be seasoned? It is not fit for land
or the dunghill; it is good only to be trodden under foot. Matthew
makes Jesus call the disciples the salt of the earth. He tells them to
have salt in themselves, and says they shall be salted with fire as the
sacrifice is with salt.
Salt here is a conservative factor rather than an appetizer, and so
is in fact in little danger of losing its savour as is implied. E. Jones1
has taken great pains to prove that salt in folk-lore has a predominant
sexual significance, but we think vainly, and there is certainly no such
meaning here. Nor does this metaphor contemplate the destructive
action of too much salt upon animal and vegetable life. It is a chemi
cal which the systems of animals and men need and which they so
crave that they accept many substitutes and often migrate far to get it.
A small, quite constant percentage of it is as essential for the health
of fiving, as it is preservative of dead, bodies. To be called "the salt
of the earth" is one of the highest proverbial commendations, and this
is in Jesus' sense. Salt keeps the sea fresh, and this trope implies that
but for Christianity the world would putrefy. But we must not forget
that a parable or simile pushed too far loses its savour. The context
suggests that if the disciples lose their power of renunciation, they are
degraded from a noble, precious, preservative element to dirt and mud
underfoot. Christianity gives life a new zest as salt appetizes food.
9. A candle (Matt. v:i4 f.; Mark iv:2i f.; Luke vfii:i7, and xi:33)
is not put under a bushel or a bed, or in a secret place, but on a candle
stick, that aU may see; so your light must shine that men may see your
good works and glorify the Father. You are the light of the world.
Thus the disciples are told that they practically cure from blind
ness aU who see by their fight. To a world lying in darkness they re
peat the marvel of the creation of light. The admonition is against the
luxury of mere self-illumination. There must be no secret cults of
truth. No repression of it must be suffered, but it must be given
promulgation and insights must be imparted. Preaching and teaching
of the very best that is in them must be with abandon, utterly without
reservations from prudential or any other motives. Christianity must

> "Die Bedeutung des Salz in Sitte und Brauch der Volker." Imago, 191a. Bd. 1, S. 361-85; 454-1

534 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
mean Aufkldrung, iclaircissement, as indeed it always has brought
enlightenment, and kindled the torch of culture and science, and
banished spiritual darkness. Who put their fight under a bushel?
Those who have intuitions or convictions which they conceal; those
who kindle and feed the flame of truth in esoteric circles; those who
refuse to promulgate their best and deepest thought, whether from some
fear of odium theologicum or current orthodoxy, or diffidence of their
own powers, or sluggishness; or those who seek to monopolize like a
trade secret, and to use as if it were a burglar's dark lantern, the knowl
edge that others have a right to.
Those who refuse to patent, but give freely to the public their
inventions and discoveries and refuse all monopolies of information are
observing this precept.
10. "A city set on a hiU cannot be hid" (Matt. v:i4).
According to the early aUegorizing interpretation, the city is the
celestial city of the saints; the mountain upon the solid rocky basis of
which it rests is Christ; the citizens are Church members; the towers,
prophets; the doors, the apostles; the walls, the priests and teachers.
Pure air, solidity, elevation above all that is mundane, and all manner
of symbolisms which have been woven about mountain and city, have
been spun about this passage. Some think that we have here an
apocryphal prophecy of Zion's rule of the world; others, that it means
that the light of truth in Christianity cannot be hidden but will in
evitably be preached; but most commentators think it refers to the
way in which good deeds shine far in a naughty world. Jesus teUs his
foUowers that they are conspicuous and observed, as weU as that they
live on the altitudes of human experience. The Kingdom is a moun
tain city, such as in a figurative sense was the heavenly Jerusalem,
and such as the Roman Church was thought to be on earth. Certain
it is that this parable, simple as it is, need not and should not always
have one unitary and consistent explanation, but was meant to be a
centre from which irradiate many lessons not necessarily consistent
with one another.
u. There is nothing hidden which shaU not be revealed and
nothing secret that shaU not be manifest. Then foUows, What I teU
you in darkness or privately, that speak in the light or from the house
top (Matt, x: 26 f.; Mark iv: 22; Luke viii: it, and xi: 35 f.).
This is a Hebrew gnome. The esoteric shall be made exoteric.
Some think it has an anti-gnostic purport. All riddles and parables
wfil be explained. There must be no cloistered or concealed knowl-

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 535
edge. Some think it means that faith wfil attain sight. The heart
will bear its fruit. Things secretly guarded in the breast wfil come out.
Bushels will be taken off all candles, not to satisfy prying curiosity
but by a law of diffusion and popularization of true science. Here
once rested the dogma of the perspicacity of the Scriptures, on which
so much exegesis is an unconscious satire. But this passage is futur
istic and prophetic, suggesting the indefinite progress of knowledge.
Perhaps here Jesus withdraws or cancels aU his injunctions to teU no
man. Whatever opposition it encounters the glad Gospel tidings must
be proclaimed with no reservations and no vestige of timidity. Not
only God sees, but aU the world will and must.
12. The light of the body is the eye (Matt, vi: 22 f.; Luke xi:
34, and xxxfi: 6). If the eye is right, the body is full of light, but if it
is bad, of darkness. No part of the body must be dark. The light in
us must not be darkness, which is great if it is a darkness made out of
light. This is one of the most difficult of all Jesus' sayings, and volumi
nous and divergent have been the interpretations of it. Liberal com
mentators think it shows a muddled knowledge of optics and repre
sents views that are utterly antiquated. Jiilicher, after epitomizing
many other views, concludes that it is "an admonition to care faith
fully for that which is as indispensable for the spiritual as the eye is for
the corporeal fife," and thinks its purport akin to that of the parable
of the salt of the earth which had lost its savour. He seems to think
that Jesus regarded the eye for the purpose of illuminating the whole
body, so that any defect involved obscurity in some part of the body —
a view nowhere found in antiquity, and as false as the very widespread
and persistent view, till Harvey, that air entered the lungs and through
them the arteries (air passages), and thence pervaded the whole body.
Even if Jesus anticipated the modern experiments which show that ret
inal stimuli tone up aU the bodily functions and accelerate every
physiological process, while binding or extirpating the eyes puts many
animals to sleep, this might help. Was he groping toward something
he did not fully comprehend? Does it suggest, like many other of his
sayings, a proclivity toward physiological psychology on Jesus' part,
crude and ignorant but rightly oriented in the very direction in which
that important science has recently developed? May we psycho
analyze some of the parables, and throwing history and criticism to the
winds, read modern meanings into them? If so, possibly we have here
a prelusive adumbration of Wundt's chief contribution to psychology,
viz., that optical perception is the key to apperception, and that in the

'536 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
distinction between Blickpunkt and Blickfeld we find an open door to
the comprehension of the direct and indirect field of consciousness,
so that the mind is in a sense made largely on the pattern of the eye,
and this sense is the best analogue of its mode of action. We must not
forget that in many passages Jesus used seeing symbolically, and that
the new insights he brought into the world were conveyed to us under
the analogy of restoring sight to the blind. At least he means that
ignorance leaves the soul in darkness as optical opacity leaves the body
inert and without the power of self-direction. The symbolization of
light through all the ages has been too complex to be exhaustively
treated. Until this is done this passage wfil have to remain one of the
"dark sayings."
13. No one, or no servant, can serve two masters (Matt, vi: 24 f.,
Luke xvi: 13). One will be loved and cleaved to and the other hated
and despised. Thus no one can serve God and Mammon, the god of
ill-gotten wealth.
This reminds us, of course, of the treasure laid up in heaven and the
camel in the needle's eye. It seems a popular proverb utilized for Jesus'
present purpose. Some expositors assume that the two masters are hos
tile, which would make the task of serving them both more difficult.
The slave cannot possibly be indifferent and so far as he is inclined to
prefer one master he will grow averse to the other. But there should be
no duplicity, no vacillating policy, no hypocrisy or reservations. Ser
vice should be complete and single. The claims of the two masters are
not only divergent but contradictory. There might conceivably be al
ternation, serving of now one and now the other master, like doing the
wfil of God on Sunday and serving Mammon the other days of the week.
We must have one supreme goal in life, and not two or more, which
would be worse yet. If one master were served in a way and at a time
displeasing to the other, the neglected master would, of course, be in
censed. Thus fife, as in the preceding verse we are told the eye, must
be single. 14. Men, like trees, are known by their fruits. Good men bear
good, bad men bear evil fruit (Matt, vii: 16-20; Luke vi: 43-6). A
good tree cannot bear bad, nor a corrupt tree good, fruit.
This is connected with the warning against false prophets in
sheep's clothing who are inwardly ravening wolves. Luke adds that
men do not gather figs of thorns or grapes of thistles. A good man
out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth that which is good,

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 537
an evil man that which is evil; for the mouth speaks out of the abun
dance of the heart. Unfruitfulness is a sure sign of false piety and
doctrine, and this is valid of false prophets.
^ This seems like modern pragmatism. Good works are the best
indications of sound doctrine, and every error produces bad conduct.
A wolf clothed with a sheep's skin is like thistles bearing figs, and both
are impostors or hypocrites. A really good heart cannot produce bad
deeds. Acts speak louder than words. As each plant breeds true to
its species, so the good or the bad man lives out his life according to
his inmost nature. Fruit there must be, yet the warning against false
prophets implies that men may seem but not be good, although to true
discernment each is sure to betray himself. A morbid complex, evil
or good desires, inevitably find a vent, and aU disguise and pretense
are ineffective to prevent it. Only in a double fife, which is against
nature, is it possible for thorns to bear grapes.
15. Every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven (Matt.
xiii: 52) is like a householder bringing forth from his treasure things
new and old.
This comes at the close of a long pericope of parables, and after
Jesus had asked the disciples if they had understood and they had an
swered. This seems to say that a Jew who understands Jesus' teaching
of the Kingdom, and, as did the disciples, combines a knowledge of the
Old Testament and the new message of Jesus, is like one who brings
forth from a richly furnished family store-room what is most needful
for each member of the household. There is always the implication
that the old must not be forgotten for the new, as neologists are prone
to do. Kostlin thinks Jesus here is recommending to the disciples his
own mode of teaching by parables, which combines the recondite and
the familiar. Would that we could think he meant to commend the
genetic method that understands the new only in the fight of the
old and vice versa in the sense of modern evolution! This would
be putting new wine into old bottles, which he is reported on authority
that some have chaUenged to have said elsewhere no man does. Yet
in the limited sense that stands for the most striking of all religious
evolutions, viz., that of the New Testament developing out of the Old,
in which it lay concealed, Jesus was facile princeps of cultural evolution
ism. If we can only be progressive and at the same time conservative,
or even as a member of either party recognize the necessary function
of the other, we shall be strong. To be devotees of the past or of the
future is, like all extreme positions, easiest but least effective. Paul
perhaps was the best of all filustrations of this parablette, being well
trained in the learning of the scribes and also a Christian.

538 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
1 6. Where the carcass is there the eagles gather (Matt, xxiv:
38; Luke xvii: 37).
In Luke this is said in answer to the question apropos of Jesus'
statement that two will be in one bed, two grinding together, two in the
field, and one wfil be taken and the other left. In Matthew it ap
pears in the midst of a description of the advent of the last day. It is
one of the most current proverbial, if somewhat repulsive and difficult,
of the parables, brief as it is. The terrible side of the parousia will ap
pear wherever there is an object of judgment, Jewish or heathen. Sin
draws a penalty as carrion does birds of prey. It can hardly mean, as
has been said, that the Messiah wfil as surely find his own as vultures
find a carcass, or that retribution will overtake those dead and rotten
with sin, or that Satan is the eagle preying upon his victim. Why not
take it in the double sense, viz., that virtue will as surely find its reward
and sin its penalty as a mouldering dead body will draw to it aU those
creatures that naturaUy feed upon it? Iniquity draws social and
physical convulsions. Vengeance is waiting hke birds of prey. The
Hebrew mind was peculiarly prone, if disaster came, to interpret it as
a punishment for sin and to search its own heart for the real cause.
Jesus here says: "Given these calamities that I have described, and
you can be as certain that there is a commensurate sin as you are
when you see a flock of carrion birds gathering that there is a carcass
somewhere attracting them."
17. If a good householder knows when a thief is coming he will
watch and prevent the burglary (Matt, xxiv: 43; Luke xii: 39). The
context both before and after in both Gospels is: Be ready for the
coming of the Son of Man, who wfil arrive stealthily as a housebreaker.
Here the time, as in the preceding parable the place, is stressed.
The injunction is: Watch, for you know not the day or the hour, so
that this is another semper paratus warning. The parousia will come
when it is least expected.
Many expositors make the householder deaf, some refer to Hol
bein's stealthy dance of approach, while others think the thief is the
devil, always striving to outwit and pilfer away souls. But if we
watch we prevent the theft. Believers welcome the coming of the
Son who gives rather than takes away from them. The advent, too,
will be soon, although it is undatable, and no one must be caught nap
ping. Not only is the time short, but it will probably secretly be set
at just that time when most wfil be off their guard. Thus the disciples
have the double advantage of knowing this and also knowing that

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 539
it wfil come soon. He who takes your soul wfil seek to surprise you,
and you must strive to prevent him from taking you unawares. Me
mento semper mori. Never for an instant forget that you must die,
and may die at any time. Always have preparations complete.
Thanatophobia, which has inspired medicine, hygiene, and even the
conceptions of another fife, has indeed been a great muse, and here we
are enjoined to hve as if every day, hour, and minute would be our
last. Or does it aU concern the coming of another order of things in
this world without death? With the indeterminate characterization
of other parables is it meant to have multifarious suggestiveness?
18. Blessed is the faithful and wise servant whom his lord made
ruler over his household (Matt, xxiv: 45-51 ; Luke xii: 41-48), and who
gives to aU their meat in due season, and is found so doing when the lord
comes. He wfil be made ruler of all. But if because the lord delays
his coming he smites his feUows and becomes drunken and gluttonous,
to him the lord wfil come when least expected, will, cut him asunder
and send him among hypocrites where there will be weeping and gnash
ing of teeth. Luke adds that the servant that knows his lord's wfil
and does it not shall be beaten with many stripes, but he who knows
it not shall receive but few stripes, for to whom much is given of him
will much be required.
Here the admonition is to the virtue of loyalty in the large sense
of Royce and the Japanese. Personal fealty and at the same time
fidelity to a trust are commended, and also by implication fiduciary
responsibility and duty done independently of supervision. There is
a saving gradation of demerit because those who do not know are
beaten less than those who violate their trust after being duly instructed
in it. All are servants, representatives, with only delegated power,
or at best vicegerents holding and administering what is committed
to them in trust for a feudal lord. Heavy indeed will be the penalty
for those found false. As time goes by those who are not true will
begin to act, not as vicariates or attendants, but as owners, and wfil
abuse their power, as other parables show; but that is just the moment
the absentee landlord will select to arrive. Good stewardship with
few specific instructions, tenancy with an indeterminate lease, and
utter loyalty to the employer, though he be an absentee, are required
on pain of cruel and barbaric torture.
Had, then, Jesus no trust in his followers or in human nature,
that he felt it needful so often to hold out rewards and utter threats
of direst punishment? Had he so little faith in men that he could

540 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
not depend upon their fidelity to him and had to make the strongest
appeal he could possibly devise to fear and hope? The Stoic made
virtue its own reward and vice its own penalty, but in Jesus' sayings
there are very few traces of this. Even in the beatitudes each trait
commended is given a prize. All are paid or penalized in natural
or spiritual coin. Save only in Parable Two, there is no glint of a
service of love alone; but rather that of servile duty is enjoined. Is it
not as if virtue and happiness, sin and misery, did not intrinsicaUy
belong together, but must be brought together by an extraneous sov
ereign will, without whose intervention they would rarely and only
fortuitously find each other? There is much in Jesus' sayings that
almost seems to anticipate the modern doctrine of temibfiity, or the
principle that a certain degree of pain, measurable for each individual
and for each sin, would be an adequate deterrent.
19. Keep your loins girded and your lights burning (Mark xiii:
33"37; Luke xii: 35-38). Wait like servants, ready to open on the
instant when the master, coming home from a wedding, knocks. Such
servants he will make sit down at his table, and will gird himself and
serve them. Blessed are they who are found thus waiting, at whatever
watch of the night the lord comes. In Mark the lord had gone on a
journey, having assigned to each servant his duty and having charged
the porter to watch his return. He will come suddenly, and must not
find any one sleeping. AU must watch. He must not be kept waiting,
or knock a second time.
Godet says that the lord is supposed to have come home so sated
from a wedding feast that he cared not himself to partake of the meal
the servants had ready for him, and as a reward for their promptness
and punctuality divided it among and served it to them, in the same
spirit of humility as Jesus washed his disciples' feet. Thus in the
Roman saturnalia the master became servant and the servant master.
Thus Jesus served the viands at his Last Supper. The coming of the
Lord, some think, refers to the parousia, others to the hour of death
as it comes to the individual. Some see in it an exhortation to die
fully conscious and thus to receive the Lord. If the parousia is
meant, it is also implied that it may be delayed longer than was
expected. But the Lord will surely come again, and it will be in judg
ment, and of this great assize aU the faithful must be ever mindful.
No one knows the hour, not even the Son, but it wfil be by night when
most sleep. Hence the old charge to be always ready, expectant, at
tentive, with lamps lighted and with sufficient oil in them, to observe

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 541
keenly the signs of the great advent, listen for the knock at the door,
and open immediately; be ever alert, watchful, waiting all through
the night for the great home-coming.
20. Jesus quotes the proverb, "Physician, heal thyself" (Luke iv:
23), after he had charmed the attendance at the synagogue at Nazareth,
had been identified as Joseph's son, and had been asked but was
declining to do miracles here as he was said to have done in Capernaum,
because no prophet is accepted in his own country.
"Physician, heal thyself" is the shortest of the parables, but it is
set in an illuminating pericope. If he did no miracles here he would
be like a physician that could not heal himself. His repute at his
boyhood home waned when he was recognized, and he was invited
to heal his reputation by a miracle done on the spot. Otherwise he
would be like a doctor smitten by the disease he had made it his
specialty to prevent and cure. The call to show what he could do here
has suggested to some the taunt on the cross, Thou that doest mighty
things, save thyself and come down from the cross. Plato thought a
physician must have experience with illness in his own person to be
sympathetic and efficient with his patients; but we are not told that
Jesus was ever ill, not even amidst his greatest trials. Those about to
be executed must sometimes be carried, but he carried his own cross.
If we look at his life as a whole, he did perhaps save his repute as a
healer of souls by doing what were thought to be miracles of bodily
healing. Luke's form of statement suggests imperfect comprehension
on his part.
21. They that are whole (Matt, ix: 12; Mark ii: 17; Luke v: 21 f.)
need not a physician, but they that are sick. Jesus says that he was
come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. Matthew
adds an injunction to learn the meaning of the phrase, "I will have
mercy and not sacrifice." Luke gives this saying in answer to the
question why (at Levi's feast) Jesus and his disciples ate with publicans
and sinners. Here Jesus appears as a moral psychiatrist associating with those
whom rigorists thought depraved and so held aloof from. His attitude
is not that of modern social workers who say they are studying condi
tions to devise ethical and hygienic reform, although he could hardly
help doing this; but he is rather comparing himself to a doctor visiting
quarantine quarters to help his patients. Missionary work has only

542 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
lately taken on again a largely medicinal and hygienic character. The
early Church gradually abandoned its healing function when the old
psychotherapy with which it began was discredited. Thus this parable
proverb has new significance to-day. This, however, is not the core of
meaning. It is more akin to that of the lost sheep and the prodigal.
Those whom his questioners thought righteous he felt were in peculiar
need of salvation, so this saying is rather a retort or confutation in
justification of his latitudinarianism. Perhaps it shows how he re
garded the power of conversion as later exemplified in Paul and August
ine, and in the case of the devotion of Mary Magdalene, so often before
him. Thus he doubtless realized that those who had gone wrong and
been set right were the most active elements in the new fife; for there
is a point of view from which it is better to have sinned and been
rescued than never to have sinned at aU, as Kierkegaard has shown.
At any rate, this sketch brings out the contrast between the native,
naive Parsifal innocence and impeccable virtue, filustrated by Jesus
himself, and those snatched like brands from the burning, and implies
that he, unlike his interrogators, did not need to be so careful of the
company he kept, because he was in less danger of being infected or
tempted than they. His work of mercy was more pleasing to God
than were sacrifices. His attitude is corrective compassion to those
whom narrow legalism had outlawed. Sinners like those of this feast
to whom exception was taken were interesting "cases," patients he
yearned to save, and he would not be kept or called away from them.
22. The disciples of John and the Pharisees were wont to fast
(Mark ii: 18-20; Matt, ix: 14 f.; Luke v: 23-25). When Jesus is asked
why his disciples do not do so he replies that they have the bridegroom
with them, but that the time for them to fast wfil be when he is taken
away. In this debate Pharisaic purism adduces the Baptist's example
against Jesus' more liberal views of the conduct of life. He sees the
device that might involve an issue between himself and John's fol
lowers but avoids it, urging that those within are celebrating high
festival so long as he is with them, and that this is no time for legalism,
funereal mourning, or ascetism. Fasting is out of place in the presence
of the Lord of life. Stern Ebionitic pietism would be an anachronism
now. A temperate euphoric abandon is in order. A bridegroom
ought to be the happiest of men, and should irradiate joy. Here
again we have the ecstatic motive. The soul just wedded to Jesus
is transcendentafly joyful, as the objective studies of those newly wedded
to Jesus in Starbuck, James, Leuba, and others show. Fasting has its

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 543
important place and function in medicine, religion, physiology, and
hygiene; but very likely had the Baptist himself been present and
fully understood that Jesus was in very deed the Messiah whom he
heralded, he would have cast off his abstemiousness and realized the
double joy that folklore and custom have always assigned to banquets
and to weddings. Exhilaration, elation, elevation, and euphoria of
soul, anticipating the moods of the heavenly marriage-supper with
the Lamb, are here sanctioned.
23. No one sews new cloth on an old garment, for this makes the
rent worse (Matt, ix: 16 f.; Mark ii: 21 f.; Luke v: 36-39). Luke adds
that the new piece does not match the old. No one puts new wine
into old bottles lest the bottles break and the wine be spilled and the
bottles spoiled, but new wine must go into new bottles and then both
are preserved. This parable has had a very checkered history. The old bottles
and old garment have been interpreted as the Pharisees' cleaving to
the old, as all under the old covenant, as the disciples of the Baptist,
as Jesus' weak and callow disciples, and as old institutions, views and
customs generally, whfie the new cloth and wine have been thought
to mean the new joy and freedom Jesus brought, the new covenant and
doctrine, the ecstatic state of mind brought by the Gospels, aggressive
policies, new institutions, discoveries, etc. Many writers think both
comparisons relate fundamentally to the relations between the New
and the Old Testament, or the new life of Christ and the old one of sin
while some think all relations between the old and the new in every
domain of fife are here alluded to. Many find here an admonition to
break with the old, and come out. Reformers should not consort with
but cut away from the old, as Paul did, and as he would abrogate the
law. The passage is generally thought to be out of place in Mark,
and some regard it as a fragment of a larger but lost discourse of Jesus.
This impression that we are dealing with older fragments patch-worked
together without regard for matching, which Luke alone refers to, is
often felt. But the gravamen here is in the contrast between the old
and the new, and it shows Jesus as a catastrophist rather than as a
uniformitarian. He was temperamentally disposed toward breaks,
crises, epochs. He would have had more sympathy, if we can judge
by this passage alone, with the French revolution, that swept aU that
was old away and organized everything anew, than with the English
way of making history, where everything widens on from precedent to
precedent, and so much of the old is conserved in the new and so much
of the new is cast into the forms of the old. The parable is so anti-

544 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
evolutionary, too, that some have hoped it was not authentic. The
Catholic Church in absorbing the barbarians of early Europe achieved
its greatest successes by putting new meanings into old forms, and
changing and adapting, rather than throwing away, most that it found
at hand. The same principle applies to the successful Protestant
minister, to the pedagogue, and to reformers generally. Do not aU
leaders do just what Jesus here says no one does? How many are now
engaged in putting new wine and meaning into the old bottles of
Christianity, and thus conserving both at the same time? Even con
version may come as graduaUy as growth, and be dateless.
24. Who, intending to build a house, does not sit down and count
the cost to see if he has enough to finish it, lest having laid the founda
tion, observers mock and say, "Here was one who began to build but
was not able to finish" (Luke xiv: 28-33)? Or what king, going to
war, does not first sit down and consider whether with ten thousand
he will meet an enemy with twenty thousand troops, and then have
to beg terms of peace? Whoso does not forsake all cannot be my
disciple. This is a paradigm of ordinary economic world wisdom applied to
the Kingdom which it costs so much to enter. Do not join the Church,
take any vow, as of a monk or nun, swear any fraternity or sodality
oath that you have not fully reafized the obligations of and estimated
your moral ability to keep, etc. The motive for the prudence here
adduced is fear of ridicule. It has a pregnant sense for promoters of
enterprises, and its need is seen in failures in business (more than ten
thousand a year in this country), in organizations, societies, etc., for all
varieties of good purposes. Confucius repeatedly gave the same ad
monition in other terms. Jesus felt it, for he had counted the cost of
his own perilous career, perhaps was doing so throughout the tempta
tions of the desert. His modern enemies, and, indeed, some of his
friends, like Renan, think he made a fatal error in his calculations of
what he could and could not carry through, and lost his life because
he attempted too much. This is also one theme in the modern effi
ciency movement. Every dictionary of proverbs, too, shows that all
people have popular sayings to this effect, and not only is prudence
in this respect rated high, but failure to count the cost brings mis
fortunes that are the chief theme of satire and ridicule. To begin
only what we can finish is a kind of everyday, Ben Franklin-, Tupper-
like, proverbial philosophy, desperate though the enterprise here
typified is. It means abandonment to a love so intense that family
love is hate beside it, just as ice itself is hot compared to the lowest

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 545
artificial temperature of thousands of degrees that physics is now able
to produce. Few inteUects can compute in advance aU the cost involved in
choosing such a course, and this characteristic utterance of Jesus is
weU calculated to warn aU men of ordinary mettle from attempting
to lead his life. Its intrinsic difficulty makes it seem superhuman;
for the context in the fight of which this parable is to be interpreted is
that no man can become a fuU disciple who does not forsake all, hate
father, mother, wife, children, brethren, and even his own life, and bear
the cross. We had better not try if we are not confident of the power
to finish. If the head is weak, or the eye, or the heart fails, miscarriage
is inevitable, sooner or later. The natural affections must actually
be martyred. Thus Jesus certainly cannot be said to cajole, wheedle,
or seduce. The hardihood of accepting his call would seem to require
less intellect than what the world calls fanaticism. Nor does the
context comport with a moral injunction to love all men, even our
enemies; but here again we must recognize Jesus' tropical and per-
fervid nature, which scorns qualification, comparison, or balancing
modulated statements. For these his heart was too hot, his mind too
sharply focussed on the single point in hand, and so he often fails to
consider the relations of what he says to other truths, trusting the
deeper unity of his own soul rather than relying on the superficial unity
of doctrine or logic.
25. When the scribes said he had Beelzebub and cast out devils
by the prince of devils (Mark iii: 22-27; Matt, xii: 24-30; Luke xi:
14-26), Jesus answered by a parable, viz., how can Satan cast out
Satan? A kingdom or a house divided against itself cannot stand.
If Satan rise up against Satan he is divided and hath an end, and he
adds that in order to spoil a strong man he must first be found. All
sin wfil be forgiven save only blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, but
such a sin can never be, but he who commits it is in jeopardy of eternal
damnation. (This because they accused him of having an unclean
spirit.) Luke makes Jesus ask his accusers the counter-question:
"By whom do your offspring cast out devils?" and say: "If I with
the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the Kingdom of God is
come upon you." In Luke he had just cast out a devil, and adds that
a strong keeper of a palace can be overcome only by one stronger yet,
who wfil then take away his armour, and divide his spoil, closing the
incident in Matthew with, "Who is not with me is against me, and who
gathereth not with me scattereth."

546 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Here we are in a dualistic, Manichean world, conceived with
Dantesque or Miltonic vividness. The good and the bad, fight and
dark, are represented by highly developed hierarchies, each with its
supreme leader and a series of subordinates graded by ranks. Most,
if not all, that happens in both the physical and the moral world are
incidents of their incessant and relentless warfare. One of these inci
dents is that evfi spirits often take possession of the souls of certain
people. Many of these Jesus had ordered out, and they had obeyed
him and fled away. Here the insidious and damning charge is that
they obey his behest because he is their superior in command. He is
the leader of their side, viz., very Satan himself, and they do not obey
because they are evicted by a conquering leader of the hosts of good
ness. Or, according to many primitive concepts, Jesus is here accused
of using black and not white magic. If this is true, he is a demon of
high degree, and not divine. He is Diabolus masquerading as a son of
God, and is now detected. The issue is momentous, crucial, perhaps
sudden, and the alternative perhaps the most extreme that could be
conceived according to the ideas of the cosmos that then prevailed.
Jesus' answer is that Satan would not order the withdrawal of his own
forces. He wishes to possess, not to dispossess, men. To order him
out of tenements his minions have conquered and occupied, and cling
to so pertinaciously, would mean revolt, weakness, and eventual ruin.
Satan would never order a retreat; for this would sow the seeds of dis
sension among his own subordinates, and thus his house would fall.
The only explanation, therefore, of these cases of exorcism, is that
Satan's emissaries are forced by a stronger hostile power to give up
the ground they have won, although it jeopardizes the unity and integ
rity of his kingdom. Thus Jesus constrains Satan and is more potent
than he, and the power of God comes very near whenever he does these
acts. He asks his accusers by which of these two powers they cast
out devils, suggesting that the same charge they had brought against
him might be levelled against them with equal force. No half-way
ground is possible, therefore. AU must be for or against. It must be
Yahveh or Satan, for here are the polar opposites of the moral world.
Therefore, to reverse all things, to attribute the works of God to the
devfi, or vice versa to put him in God's place, is the greatest, most hope
less inversion of aU values. It is the one and only unpardonable sin
against the Holy Ghost. It is, in short, blasphemy. Frank diabolism,
it may be mentioned, has had many disciples and cults with sacri
legious rites such as the Witches' Sabbath in which the mysteries of
Christianity have been parodied under the motto, "Evil, be thou my
good." Satanism has had its own decade and school of literature in
France (e. g.? Huysmans' "Des Esseintes" and Baudelaire's "Les
Fleurs du Mai," Stendhal's work, and some of the writings of the very

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 547
clever Paul Bourget, who says, "We do not want to be saved and de
prived of the voluptuous pleasure of going to perdition." See also J.
H. Leuba (Am. Jour. Psychol., Vol. 5, pp. 496-539). Here, too, we might
cite the pathetic history of the conceptions of the unpardonable sin
and its effects on those who are thought to have committed it. But all
this would take us too far afield. The very scholarly but finicking and
jejune Jiilicher laboriously extracts from this parable the lesson that
"the expulsion of demons presupposes the advent of God's Kingdom."
To us the lesson is eternal orientation as the condition of virtue in this
world of moral dualism.
26. Agree with thine adversary promptly whiles thou art in the
way with him (Matt, v: 25 f.; Luke xii: 58-59). Luke says, Give dili
gence to this matter lest your enemy bring you to the judge and he de
liver you to the officers, and then you will be cast into prison. From"
this there will be no hope of escape till you have paid the uttermost
mite or farthing.
This seems a precept of very ordinary but sound common sense,
which is uncommon enough in fact. Appease all enemies promptly
for the prudential reason that otherwise you may have to go to law
and be caused greater trouble . Not only the nature but the history
of this parable makes it a good illustration of what is often called the
elasticity of the parables, and it might be stretched into a commenda
tion of arbitration to prevent war, a utilitarian removal of all possible
causes for quarrels in their bud in the interests of peaceableness, as a
precept never to make enemies when it is possible to avoid doing so,
because vengeance is an infection that rankles and tends to grow
rapidly to dangerous proportions. "Agree" may mean any kind of
appeasement, from apology and pardon-begging to placation by the
extremest self-abasement. The implication is that those addressed
are either weaker or less resentful or more conciliatory than their
adversary, nor is it entirely inconsistent with Bacon's injunction to
avoid entrance into a quarrel but being in, to comport oneself so
that the enemy wfil beware of one. Here only one specific aspect of a
very complex situation is singled out of how the true aristocrat of the
Kingdom will act. Jesus' allusion to lawyers who tend to magnify
disagreements is often suggested and perhaps also his distrust of Courts
and of humanly administered justice.
27. Noting how they chose the chief rooms, Jesus said (Luke xiv:
7-14), When bidden to a wedding, do not sit in the highest place lest a

548 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
more honourable man come and be given your seat and you have to sit
lower down. Rather choose the lowest place, and then the host may
say to you, " Go up higher." Then the other guests will respect you
for the honour they see done you. For whoso exalteth himself shaU
be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
Weddings greatly impressed the celibate Jesus, and he evolved
from them many of his highest and most sublimated insights and im-
partations, and the same was true, perhaps, in even a higher degree, of
eating and feasts. This parable is a part of the table-talk with a lead
ing Pharisee. Jesus announced it as a parable, perhaps in a spirit
of pleasant banter. Possibly he himself occupied the lowest place at
table, and if so this would have made his utterance more impressive.
It has been suggested that he had insisted on taking it, perhaps not so
much with design in order to give point to an admonition which he
planned to give, as to explain his humble place. Perhaps, too, the host
had given an object lesson by changing the position of some of the
guests, raising some and degrading others; for in ancient symposia,
as we see in Plato, this was often an important though very delicate
matter. If so, it was all stingingly apposite and personal, but the
opportunity sharply to point and bring home a moral was too good to
be lost, and this applies, even though it was Jesus' seat that was re
garded as the head of the table.
This has a close parallel in one of the adages of Mencius, suggesting
on its face merely the conduct proper for a true gentleman, so that it
might stand in any book of good manners or etiquette. It would be
foolish to take a seat on the platform if there was a chance of being
asked to come down and make room for others there. There seems
no superhuman wisdom here, but as if by some Swedenborgian corre
spondence between things earthly and things heavenly, it is made an
apperceptive formula of insight into the next world. The merit that
takes the lowest place is just that which deserves the highest. The
immanent and the transcendental are complemental each to the other.
The Diesseits and the Jenseits are not copies but counterparts, if not
antitheses. Jesus humbled himself in his earthly fife, and was later
exalted. So the beatitudes are upon the weak, lowly, humble, poor
in spirit. Heaven pays weU, and abnegation here brings blessing
beyond. Investment in the momentary obscurity of this hfe buys an
eternity of glory. Mundane relations are only negatives of those found
in the fairyland beyond. What we have there is measured by what we
forego here. This may be a parable of asceticism to which the dis
guises of meanness became the chosen incognitos of good sense. This
at least underlies the parable, and is a meaning that finds fuller out
crops in other teachings of Our Lord.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 549
28. To a Greek woman who asked Jesus to cast out a devil from
her daughter Jesus said (Mark vii: 27; Matt, xv: 26 f.): "Let the
children first be filled for it is not meet to take the children's bread
and to cast it unto the dogs." She replied: "Yes, Lord, yet the dogs
under the table eat of the children's crumbs." Pleased at this, Jesus
cast out the devil from her daughter (a cure at a distance). Matthew
adds that at first Jesus answered her not tfil the disciples wanted to
send her away, and then said that he was sent only to the lost sheep,
especially to Israel.
Here Jesus is made to seem persuaded to make an exception to
the rule of helping Hebrews, first by a deft, repartee-like plea of a
gentfie mother who bested him by turning his semiparable on her side
and against him. Matthew adds that he commended her faith in
believing that not a whole ration but only a crumb was sufficient for
the cure. Let us hope, too, that although realizing as he must that
he was outwitted and his own simile fairly turned against him, and that
by a despised alien and woman, he capitulated gracefully and as a
gentleman rather than, as some urge, because he was susceptible to
the other sex, although there are elsewhere suggestions of this, as in
Renan and several of the apocryphal writings.
The interpretation commonly stressed is that this marks a step
toward universalism in the later Pauline sense, and that crumbs under
the table are among the first suggestions of missionary work. It also
contributed something to the miraculous efficiency afterward ascribed
in Church legends to the crumbs of the sacrament, which as the body
of Our Lord came to be cared for with such superstitious anxiety.
Some think that it marks not only an early but the first stage in Jesus'
mind of a realization that non-Israelites were to profit by his mission,
and that the parable of outcasts taking the place of those first invited
stands for a later and more developed conception by Jesus of the scope
of his work. In the later parables, on this theory the dogs under
come to be seated at the table, and the chief priests and the Jews of
high degree are not present even as dogs under it. Jesus' race feeling
was intense, and he was more or less caste-bound to the end. The
"children" whom he wished to sit at the table were true orthodox Jews;
but of his ideal of reaching them he was soon disillusioned, and so
came to put his trust in and direct his effort toward the people or
masses, who were chiefly represented on his board of disciples. In
the above parable he perhaps first grasped the next step, viz., of direct
ing efforts to the still wider circle of gentiles who later, in fact, came
to constitute practically aU of his followers, for Christianity offers
the most complete case of an ethnically transplanted religion. If so,

550 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
then this nimble-minded unknown Greek mother marked an epoch
in the psychogenesis of Christianity, and she would have been fitter
than Thekla to be the heroine of the spurious Acts of Paul.
B. TRUE PARABLES
29. He who hears and does Jesus' precepts is like a man who builds
a house on a rock, even if he has to dig down to it (Matt, vii: 24-7;
Luke vi: 41-9). Then, when wind and storm beat on it, it stands firm.
He who hears and does not, builds his house on earth and sand, and
then, when flood and storm come, it falls and is a wreck.
This duplex parable is in Luke the epilogue or peroration 01 the
sermon on the mount, and might well end every sermon. Its appli
cation is plain as day. Gnosis is good, for it builds, but the structure
lacks durability. Willed action carried on to the point of habituation
is the rock. This is the solid basis of human nature to which the mind
trusts that builds for aye. It is character, not nativistic, but made as
a result of precept. It is knowledge put into the form of will and
deeds, which are the language of complete men and become trans
missible by heredity as merely noetic attainments are not. Wind,
flood, and rain are trials; and storm, and stress, and sand are good
impulses and resolutions, not petrified into character. Jesus had a
penchant for symbols of steadfastness and perdurabihty. Simon was
surnamed Peter the Rock, or cornerstone of the Church. Heaven and
earth will fail, but no item of his word. His followers must be stead
fast and immovable. As a mason as well as a carpenter Jesus felt the
force of such similitudes. The discourse of which this is the end con
sisted of precepts to live by, which were not intended to be mere en-
lighteners of the intellect. They were a philosophy to be embodied
in life. To five by and according to these directions is to build on
the solid Rock of Ages. The same might be said of industrial, and
especially of engineering, activities. These must be based on sound
scientific principles or come to naught, as thousands of them in this
country do for this reason. Also, so far as we are artificers of our
own fortunes, sound moral principles are the rock to build on, not
merely to be known and assented to. Re-education cannot be se
curely accomplished without adding perspiration to aspiration. To
respond to good inculcations only by the phosphorescent glow of an
swering good purposes or wishes is nothing but leaves, not fruit. H
this parable was intended to be restricted to the sermon on the mount,
it shows how fundamental Jesus considered that discourse. Few com
mentators think the storm or flood has any eschatological reference,
although it harmonizes with the doctrine of the perseverance of the

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 551
saints. The world longs for certainty ineluctable, for some aliquod
inconcussum which cannot be moved and on which the soul can stand
securely. Kant compared truth to a rocky island set amidst tempes
tuous and foggy seas of doubt. Men have sought it in religion, phi
losophy, science. Here, says Jesus, it is, so far as needed as the basis
for the moral conduct of life.
30. A man goes to his neighbour at midnight and asks for three
loaves to set before a friend who has just unexpectedly arrived from a
journey. The neighbour aroused from his slumber cries out from
within, Trouble me not. The door is shut and I am abed with my
children and cannot rise and serve you. Now although he would not
rise because asked by a friend, he will arise and give him all he wants if
sufficiently importuned. Therefore ask, seek, knock, and you wfil
prevail (Luke xi: 5-10).
This anecdote is a genre picture of lowly life. A poor man has an
unexpected, tired, and hungry guest at midnight, when, as Wendt and
Weiss explain, bread shops are closed. His own larder is bare, so that
he cannot perform the duties of hospitality, so imperative that Tiersch
explains these gave the host's request a much stronger appeal than if
he had asked for his own needs. Waking the friendly neighbour in
the weary traveller's behalf, the former, inert with sleep, voices his
reluctance to arise and disturb his children. The disturber of sleep,
however, is not in the least rebuffed, discouraged, or fearful of arousing
the resentment of his somnolent friend, and so persists in his request
till his well-disposed but torpid friend rises and gives him all he asks.
The moral is perseveration in proffering requests.
But is the good Lord the sleepy neighbour who must be awakened
as the prophet of old exhorted the priests of Baal to cry louder and
again lest their unresponsive god be sleeping or travelling? If so, he
certainly does not here seem more anxious to give than his petitioners
are to receive; nor is he in the r61e of one who never slumbers or sleeps.
This reference seems to fall in the blind spot of Jesus' purpose here,
whfie in the fovea is the injunction that the Lord will not feel that we
are imposing on him or presuming too much upon his good will if we
break in upon his slumbers and arouse him and his celestial household
to give us for a needy guest. The host is, perhaps, less ashamed of his
imprudence in being caught unprovided in the presence of his neigh
bour than he is before his guest. But hospitable instincts are also
probably outside the scope of the parable. The crucial point is that
believers should not in their prayers simply ask and, if they do not
receive, withdraw with dignity or discouragement, nor should they do

552 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
so out of deference to the Lord's state or convenience, but should keep
on urging their needs, and persevere in so doing tfil they are gratified.
To pray and not receive is always a great and crucial trial to faith,
especially that of young converts, and it is against the discouragement
and possible unbelief of those whose requests are deferred or unan
swered that Jesus here provides a safeguard for those who foUow him,
even though to do so he represents the All-Father in an aU too human
role. Elsewhere importunity is represented as overcoming indiffer
ence or disinclination on the Lord's part, but here he is first asleep,
and then shows the inertness that follows sudden waking. Here in
clination is not absent, but only torpid. Jesus seems inconsiderate
of the way in which the Lord appears. He permits him to do so in a
very undivine fight, excessively anthropomorphized, because in so
doing he can make pertinacity in intercession seem more necessary,
and more hopeful. Better the heavenly Father be thought somnolent
and lazy than have believers lose confidence in the answer to their
prayer. Consider the Lord as human, only too human, but do not
doubt that he is at heart well disposed to answer prayer. Thus Jesus,
true pragmatist that he is, meets the great danger that men may fall
away and grow faint-hearted by an astonishing sacrifice of the dignity
and sublimity of the Lord. The interests of men are after all his great
concern. Thus we have a profound and most iUuminating glance into
Jesus' true mind and will. His relation is primarily with man, and
not, as older theology made out, with God.
31. In a parable which Luke says is to teach men always to pray
without ceasing (xviii: 1-8), Jesus teUs, as if it were a true incident,
of a judge who feared neither God nor man, to whom a widow prayed
to be avenged of her adversary. At first he turned a deaf ear, but
later decided to avenge her lest by her continued importunity she
weary him. If an unjust judge was thus spurred to do his duty, how
much more will God avenge his own elect who cry to him day and
night? Though he bear long, he will avenge them speedily. Shall the
Son find faith on earth when he comes? The widow was deserted,
in sorrow and need, and exposed to we know not what trials, persecu
tions, or temptations, from which a just judge would desire to free her.
This judge had no love of justice and no sympathy with the victim of
injustice, but granted her request at last, solely to be rid of her.
In the previous parable (30) of the sleeping householder aroused
from slumber to give bread to a neighbour for a guest, previous ac
quaintance and good wiU are assumed, but here these are apparently

., THE PARABLES OF JESUS 553
absent so that this parable intensifies still more the efficiency of im
portunity. A strong and reiterated wish tends to realize itself if the
object to which it is addressed is in fact not an objective deity but our
own deeper, larger, and more potent unconscious nature. This in
junction thus seems good modern psychology. We have constantly to
spur and incite our submerged self to wake it (as in 30), or as here to
worry it into activity; for the conscious mind needs its help. We ob
jectify our racial and unconscious nature from an inveterate habit of
projective or ejective thought imposed upon us by sense experience.
Hartmann's philosophy calls the unconscious not only omniscient and
omnipotent but beneficent; and in these Freudian days we realize
what a power it is in making us well or ill, strong or weak, happy or
miserable. If it were permissible to interpret these two parables in
this sense they would teach rather the relative impotence of conscious
ness which is a product of individual experience as compared with the
vaster racial soul in each of us, and suggest that when invoking a
mighty alien power to vouchsafe to us what we want, it is best done by
fixation upon the object of our desire. The question, however, is best
discussed in the general psychology of prayer.
Jesus in his healing works seems almost powerless to resist per
sistency. If our efforts to obtain the things we need are feeble, they
ought to be unintermittent; for as trickling water wears away a rock,
so unremitting effort will overcome every obstacle. When the sum
of many little efforts reaches a constant total, the lever tips, and anon
the powers that rule the depths of nature and the soul are found on our
side, and they assuredly make for righteousness in the end and at
bottom. The deepest and oldest things in us are the best organized, san
est and most normal, and so an appeal to them is often most efficacious.
32. A certain creditor (Luke only viii: 36-50) had two debtors, one
who owed him five hundred and another who owed him fifty pence;
and as neither could pay, he forgave the debt to both of them. Which,
asked Jesus, would love that creditor most? They answered, He to
whom most was forgiven; and this answer Jesus approved.
This parable is inseparable from its setting. Jesus was dining
with a Pharisee when a sinful woman entered, who wept, washed his
feet and wiped them with her hair, and anointed him from an alabaster
box. The host thought that had he been a great prophet, he would
have known that this woman was a great sinner, and therefore resented
her attention. Jesus answering his thought responded that he had
something to say, and when told to speak, gave this parable. Then
pointing to the woman he said to the host, You gave me no water with

554 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
which to wash my feet, but she washed them with her tears and dried
them with her hair. You gave me no kiss but she has continued to kiss
my feet. You did not anoint my head, but she anointed my feet.
Therefore her sins which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.
Those to whom httle is forgiven love little. To the woman he said,
Thy sins are forgiven. Thy faith hath saved thee. Go in peace;
while the guests murmured, Who is this who forgives sins?
Altogether, this prose idyll in which the parable is set as an apt
and illustrative anecdote has always been one of the most cherished
incidents of Jesus' life, on which the Christian consciousness dwells with
great fondness. Grace is most abounding to the greatest sinners.
Those plucked as brands from the burning naturaUy love most. The
pathos of forgiveness and gratitude is the dominant motive, and art
has loved to give the whole a scenic setting. Nothing could be more
lucid and unambiguous than the lesson it teaches. A fallen woman is
not beyond the reach of salvation. To the Lord her sin is like a debt
forgiven; and no wonder that the easy, spontaneous assumption of the
power to forgive sin as a creditor might forgive a debt gives his fellow
diners pause. Some think the woman is Mary Magdalene who there
after followed Jesus with such touching fidelity and devotion. Her
act is voluntary, abject, and self-humiliating, and an act not only of
pathetic but of costly devotion.
This story contributes to one trait of vulgar converts, viz., osten
tatiously magnifying the depth of the iniquity of their previous fives
in order to impress others with a sense that they had had forgiveness to
an exceptional degree, as if they had been objects of peculiar, divine
favouritism, and therefore could love with greater fervour; so that it
has often been asked whether it is not better to have sinned much, if
only one is surely forgiven, than to have sinned fittle or not at all.
This is a peculiar trait of the revival psychosis. But a debt, even if
forgiven, is still in a sense due, and no power can truly forgive it.
Pardon, too, is always relative and personal. An avenger may refuse
to retaliate, but this is not all of forgiveness. Would a man of Stoic
pride or of true honour consent to be rehabilitated or relieved from
paying a price by an act of insolvency or taking a poor debtor's oath, or
even having another pay a debt that he had incurred? The Nietzsche
superman says, If I have deserved hell by my own life, it is hell
that I want, for I could never be happy in heaven if I did not merit it
in my own person. To think I can sin and evade its consequence by
hiding behind the skirts of Jesus is not an invitation to sin, but to
accept it is to abandon manliness, and only a craven soul can accept a
salvation that is not his due. By this doctrine a man is sold not so
much to sin as to priestcraft, and the sale of indulgences is inevitable.
The only true redemption is to pay the penalty in full, and that also is

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 555
in fact what every sinner always did and must always do. In nature
or psychology there is no such thing as a vicarious atonement. The
soul that sins dies, and it was Paul, not Jesus, who taught anything
at variance with this. Let us rather follow those who hold that in
forgiving the sinful woman Jesus only meant that he would not con
demn her, but saw saving goodness in her penitence. He sympathized
with, trusted, and pardoned her, but had no thought of unlocking the
door of heaven to her. Again, if Jesus is loved ten times as much by
those he has forgiven ten times as much, then one great sinner's love is
equal to that of ten who are forgiven little; while those who need no
forgiveness, if such exist, would experience no love. But here comes in
the law of compensation. If after leading a sinful life we are converted,
we instinctively strive to atone for the past by doing supererogatory
good enough to compensate for the badness of our previous life. What
is this deep instinct but an impulse to work out our own salvation,
to which we are impelled even though we have confessed and received
absolution? In the Catholic confessional an ever larger part of the
help which the penitent receives comes from the human sympathy
and encouragement extended by the priest, and less can be ascribed to
the sense that post-mortem penalties are removed, indefinitely helpful
though this sense is to those who can still whole-heartedly believe it.
Sin is unsocial, and its very act tends to isolation, which for gregarious
man is always painful. Thus, to have a true friend take us by the
hand, express confidence and good will, and act toward us as if we had
never gone astray — this is the only forgiveness, and this alone may res
cue. But of this elsewhere.
33. A king (Matt. xvifi:2i-35) took account of his servants. One
owed him ten thousand talents, and as he had nothing to pay, it was
ordered that he and his wife and children be sold to make good the debt.
But the servant feU down, implored pardon, and promised to pay all,
and thus he aroused the king's compassion so that he was forgiven aU.
This same servant went out and found a fellow servant who owed him
one hundred pence, and seized him by the throat and demanded pay
ment. His victim feU down, implored patience, and promised to pay
aU; but he was not heard, but cast into prison tfil aU was paid. The
king hearing of this summoned the servant, rebuked him, and asked
why he had not exercised to his debtor the same pity that had been
shown to him, and in anger gave him over to be tormented till the ten
thousand talents were made good. Thus will the Lord do to you if you
do not aU from your very hearts forgive every one who trespasses
against you. Forgive as you have been forgiven is the obvious moral.

556 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
We are again, as in the preceding parable, in the realm of debt and
credit. Creditors in that day had almost unlimited power over their
debtors and often used it flagrantly, requiring their full pound of flesh.
Creditors were often also extortionate and usurers; hence this parable
must have gone home. In a sense there is nothing specifically Chris
tian here, and various parallels are found in the teachings of the Old
Testament. In the context Peter had just asked how often if a brother
sinned, he should be forgiven, and had been told seventy times seven,
and then follows this parable. It is doubtful, however, if we have the
true context here. At least the cruel servant is only forgiven once and
then condemned beyond redemption, as if Jesus would place those
guilty of such iniquity as this in as low a circle of the inferno as Dante
did. The heinousness of the offence of the pitiless servant appears here
set off by the damning fact that he had just been forgiven a vastly
greater debt, so that his inhumanity to his own debtor immediately
afterward is so incredible that it has been variously explained. The
reason we must forgive debts to the poor is not because they deserve
it, or because it is good for us to do so, but because the dear Lord has
forgiven us all a far greater debt. The servant was not forcibly col
lecting debts owed to him in order to pay what he owed the king, be
cause this obligation had been cancelled. As he who gives to the poor
lends to the Lord, so to forgive a debt to one unable to pay it is to pay
our own debt to the Lord, and the natural impulse to remit a debt to
others after a larger obligation which we have been ourselves under
has been remitted shows the conduct of the servant in a very dark
light by contrast. Modern society recognizes the principle here
taught in its statutes of limitation of debts, and also in its bankruptcy
laws. Behind the debt and credit terms of the parable, however, lies a
larger lesson of forgiving all kinds of trespasses as we have been forgiven
them. Some commentators waste much ingenuity in discussing the
significance of this largest sum of money, ten thousand talents, men
tioned by Jesus, and think he uses it perhaps as a chfid uses millions
as the highest number it knows, and thus it stands in Jesus' mind for
the immeasurable debt aU sinners owe. Others discuss the " tormen
tors," usuaUy opining that they refer to the powers of heU. Others
discuss the cause of the change of mood of the servant, who must have
at first been greatly exalted and happy when he was forgiven, so that
some special experience must be assumed to account for his apparently
sudden change to cruelty. Some postulate that the remission he had
experienced was given publicly, and that he was taunted by his co-
servants with accepting a gratuity, or that he excited their envy by
being an object of favouritism, and that this angered him. Still
others think that after having laboured so long under a debt that

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 557
seemed to him hopeless, he was suddenly rid of it, and developed a
new or revived an old but abandoned ambition, perhaps a strong child
ish wish, to become rich himself, which now became possible; and so he
took this cruel way to attain his end. StiU others think his black
moral perversity only a fit image of man's treatment of the Lord, and
imply that if he was moraUy insane so are aU unregenerate men. It
shows also the two personahties of the Lord, the loving and forgiving
on the one hand, and the punitive and vengeful on the other, and how
readily the one attitude passes over into the other.
Over against aU such subtleties we must not forget that this,
like most of the other parables, is a humble effort to teach homely,
practical truths to the populace, and thus most scholastic efforts to
explain it are nothing but sophistic pedantry that detracts rather
than adds to its force. Mercy and compassion, tenderness and pity,
could stand out in no stronger contrast than over against poverty and
debt, so common and so pathetic in this age of Roman exaction, which
had reduced to direst need so large a part of the population even in this
very fertile land. All are debtors, and if under the law of justice God
should foreclose, the best of us would be bankrupt and sold for debt;
but heremits freely as he would have us do. Hegel's "Phenomenology"
makes forgiveness the very essence of religion, marking its emergence
from within as the soul's act of sovereign majesty, making the done as
though it were undone. To repent is to alienate and estrange our
selves from our past — to cast it off as a nullity. Such is the vigour of
our nature and the power of God that man can eject his baser self,
as the cell extrudes the polar globules that it does not need. Thus we
moult sin, even when it is well entrenched. Forgiveness, therefore, is
a good measure of the stages of moral and religious life. Freedom to
become bad involves the power to become good again. Penalty for
ejected sin retards the magnificent stages of its expulsion from the soul,
while pardon, if hearty and reiterated, accelerates them.1 Perhaps con
fession as now understood by alienists has this strange therapeutic power.
If the debt cancelled is great, the joy of its remission is also great.
34. Despise not these little ones (Matt. xvifi:io-i4) for their
angels (or souls) always behold the Father's face. The Son came to
save the lost. If a man have one hundred sheep and one go astray,
he leaves the ninety and nine, seeking the lost one, and if he find it,
he rejoices more in that one than in the ninety and nine that went not
astray. The Lord does not wish one of these little ones to perish.
Luke (xv:i-io) gives this parable a different setting. To publicans
and sinners who drew near, and to the scribes and Pharisees who
'See my translation of Rosenkranx'g "Hegel as the National Philosopher of Germany," p. 146.

558 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
murmured that Jesus received and ate with sinners, he gives this parable
of the lost sheep. Here the shepherd returns with the sheep on his
shoulder and calls his neighbours to rejoice with him because the lost
is found. Matthew adds that there is more joy in heaven over one
sinner that repents than over ninety and nine just men who need no
repentance. Luke also adds the story of the woman losing one of her
ten silver coins. She then lights a, candle, sweeps and seeks till it is
found, and then calls her friends to rejoice with her. So the angels
rejoice most over sinners who repent. How much more is a man worth
than a sheep or a piece of silver? The parent or teacher having a sick
or even imbecile child cares more for it than for all the others who are
normal, for need and helplessness increase love.
If this doctrine applies to degenerate man, it is anti-eugenic, for
care is most worthily and most profitably for mankind bestowed on
those who are best. But pity drew the Christian God from heaven to
earth, and human as pity is, it tends to make the Church a hospital or
asylum. Matthew's prelude concerning the little ones always behold
ing the Father's face suggests that the errant was loved more because,
by repenting, he became again as a new-born chfid. To be lost cannot
mean that the Divine One does not know where we are, but that we
have escaped saving influences. Here the spirit that has made mission
aries and slum workers is inculcated. The sinner is still God's prop
erty, and is loved as an individual. Reproached by his critics as he
so often was for it, Jesus really loved sinners and publicans, whom the
Pharisees held aloof from. Luke, the sympathetic physician, as we
might expect gives this parable a somewhat higher colour. Cyril called
the owner of the flock the Saviour. The lost sheep is Adam with all his
posterity; the ninety and nine that stayed in the fold are the hosts of
unfallen angels, vastly outnumbering man; the incarnation is the start
in quest of the lost; the lost penny had God's image on it, although it
was obscured by rust and dirt.
Would it not, in fact, be better shepherd-craft if one sheep were
lost out of a flock of a hundred, for the shepherd to spend the time and
energy here given to finding the strayed one to caring the better for the
ninety and nine that remained, instead of leaving them uncared for
while seeking the lost one, that might be found to have impaired value
or to be dead in the wilderness? Yes, but for the infinite worth of each
soul which is here implied. Could not the woman earn several pence
with the same effort spent in finding the lost one? Yes; but there
would have been one less coin in the realm to circulate. These and the
next are parables of pity, and not of prudence.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 559
35. The younger of two sons (Luke xv:n-32) asked his father to
give him his part of the inheritance. He received it, journeyed afar,
spent it aU in rioting, and when a famine f eU, had to herd swine and
became so hungry that he longed for their food. And he reflected that
even his father's servants had bread while he starved, and resolved
within himself that he would go home to his father, to whom and to
heaven he would confess his sin and plead that he was not worthy to
be called his son, and beg for a servant's place. As he approached
home, his father saw him afar, pitied, ran to meet, and kissed him,
whereupon he confessed his sins and his unfitness to be called a son.
But the father ordered the best robe, a ring, and shoes to be brought
for him; kified a fatted calf, and held a feast because, as he said, "This
my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." But as
the elder son, who had been working in the field, drew near and heard
of the festivities and was told what it all meant, he was wroth; and
when the father invited him to enter and take part he would not, but
said, I have served and obeyed you these many years, and you made no
festival for me as you have done for your younger son who devoured
his living with harlots. To him his father answered, Son, thou art
always with me, and all that I have is thine, but it is fit that we
should make merry; for thy brother who was dead is alive, was lost, is
found.

This is the most comprehensive of aU the parables, and was once
caUed evangelium in evangelio; while Luther with his Pauline doctrine
of justification by faith neglected, and many, indeed, have objected to,
it as almost rewarding dissipation and vice. To most Christian
teachers this has been one of the very dearest of aU the parables. It
has also been deemed theocratic. The older son has been caUed the
Jews, the younger, the heathen. At one time the older represented
angels, and the younger, men. There are two sides, if not indeed a
real dualism, in aU refigions. This grievous sinner was freely forgiven
without and before any atonement had been provided by Jesus' death.
For this reason the parable is a stumbling block to those who make
justification rest solely upon faith in Jesus' death and Resurrection.
The prodigal in a sense saves himself. His spontaneous and internal
regeneration is purely subjective, and is accepted by the father.
Beyschlag says that his salvation, however, was unevangefical and
unapostolic. In another sense we may say that not the Holy Spirit, but
hunger and poverty, converted this lost son. We seem to have here a

560 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
contradiction of the motto, extra ecclesiam nulla solus. There was
perhaps some Oedipus-like, if unconscious, father-hatred which prompted
the son's departure with his patrimony, and. his home-coming may have
been a compensating revulsion of feefing. But it all seems on his part a
matter of calculation. He was "down and out," and preferred even a
servant's place at home to the dire extremity in which he found him
self. The father's forgiveness before any confession or expression of
regret and his extreme joy at regaining his rakish son have seemed to
some to smack of senility and infatuation. The older son's wrath,
too, was perhaps not due to a natural sense of justice alone, for with
this feeling we can aU sympathize. Another mainspring of his con
duct may have been a desire, perhaps unconscious, to be himself the
object of such manifestations of love from his father as were lavished
upon the renegade younger brother. Only infatuated wives welcome
back their erring husbands so precipitately and unquestioningly.
Does this parable in some sense place a premium upon sin, and dis
courage steadfast devotion to duty? Thus in this parable we have,
as many have thought, the same dangerous lesson as in the preceding
one of the lost sheep and the penny. On this doctrine a faUen angel,
weary of heU and returning, would cause more rapture in heaven than
a large company of unfaUen saints. This parable has long been one
of the favourite themes of art, of hymnology, and revivalism, and has
been made the theme of romances and dramas galore because man pities
his own estate. Of all the Evangelists Luke records most of these
teachings, and tradition has said that he illustrated them in his life as a
physician. It has often been hinted, but without good ground, that
perhaps he had experienced salvation from great sin himself. He
alone, too, records the parable of the good Samaritan to illustrate the
love of neighbour as of self. The priest and the Levite passed by the
stripped, robbed, and wounded man, but the Samaritan bound his
wounds, after washing them with oil and wine, took him to an inn, and
on leaving left money for his further care and promised to return. In
all these cases there is special love of the disinherited, the sinful, the
victims of wrong, those who have suffered social wreckage from their
own or others' passion. To the chief of sinners grace most abounds.
The graver the disease, the greater the cure, and the more affection
would both physician and patient bear each other. Nothing better
shows the power of Christianity than its rescue of desperate cases,
and perhaps nothing so enlists Christian enthusiasm as this work.
Christianity, above all other refigions, is thus one of hope in the very
teeth of despair. This is the true resurrection from death, and of this
every other resurrection is only a symbol, or a parable crassified, it
may be, into literal reality by the very weight of meaning it has to bear.
The grave and heU yield up their prey to Jesus; but just as it is easier

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 561
and more truly divine to forgive sin than to heal the body, so to revive
those dead in trespasses and sin is a mightier miracle than to reanimate
a corpse. How does this consteUation of instances comport with the lesson of
the parable of the sower? The down-trodden, the despised, whom
Jesus would make special efforts to find and whom it gives peculiar
rapture to save — are not those most apt to receive his teaching? If
they were so, then, at least, it would seem that some of the disciples
would have come from this class, and there is fittle indication that this
was in fact the case with any one of them or of any other of his near and
constant foUowers. None of them had been prodigals, lost sheep, or
objects of any special work of rescue. It was not any of the special
quahties engendered by such experience, such as Paul or Augustine had,
that Jesus primarily sought for in his chosen apostolate. Quick as
such cases are to learn, and eager as they may be to atone by zealous
propaganda for their own past, they are not the best human material
for laying the foundations of the Kingdom, serviceable though they
may be in the later work of building or decorating, and Jesus knew or
felt a very real difference between relatively unfallen and specially
restored human nature. Reformed drunkards may conduct whirlwind
campaigns for teetotafism; but they are not likely to be wise leaders of
their great cause, and still less so to expound the philosophic doctrines
of true temperance.
Perhaps a fitter title for this parable would be "A father's love."
Some think this, and more think the parable of the unjust judge, may
have referred to some real and notorious contemporary incident. But
we are not told of the future of the prodigal, whether he became re
spected and powerful or soon died from the natural results of his de
bauchery, despite the parental forgiveness. On the other hand, we
must not conceive the father as fatuously and senilely blinded by love
to his son's sins. If we are here taught that the vilest sinner may
return, and that the Father will not disown or disinherit, but welcome
and lavish openly affection upon the penitent, we have surely a doc
trine that may easily be abused. Nature's penalties are inevitable.
36. A man (Matt. xxi:28-32) had two sons, and he said to the first,
"Son, go work to-day in my vineyard"; and the son replied, "I wfil
not," but afterward repented and went. The second son given the
same command, said "I go, sir," but went not. Which of these two
sons, asks Jesus, did the father's will? His auditors replied with ap
parent urianimity, The first. And Jesus said, publicans and harlots
wfil go into the Kingdom before you (for they are like the first son).
They believed John and you did not. Luke (vii:29-3o) adds that the

562 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
people and publicans heard John, but the Pharisees and lawyers re
jected him.
Expositors have always treated this parable with the greatest
reserve, because they have found it very embarrassing. There was,
of course, but one answer to Jesus' question concerning childish obedi
ence. The lesson is clear. Actions speak louder than words. To
obey is of more consequence than to promise, resolve, or contract to do
so. Those who make a pledge and then fail to keep it are worse than
those who oraUy refuse to obey and then, on second thought, do so.
True service is in deeds, and not by word of mouth. There is less harm
in breaking a bad promise than a good one, although to promise and
also to do is better yet.
37. A man (Mark xii:i-i2) planted a vineyard, hedged it, provided
storage for the wine, built a tower, let it out, and travelled to a far
country. In due time a servant was sent to the husbandmen for rent,
but he was beaten and sent away with nothing. Another servant was
sent, who was stoned and wounded. A third sent on the same errand
was killed, and later many others were sent who were either beaten
or killed. At last the owner sent his favourite son, feeling that the
tenants would surely respect him. They, however, conferred, reason
ing that, as this was the heir, if they kified him the vineyard would be
theirs. This they did and cast him out. What, therefore, will the
lord and owner of the vineyard do? He wfil destroy these tenants and
give the vineyard into other hands. Thus the stone rejected by the
builders becomes the chief stone, for such are the marvellous things of
the Lord. Those who heard this parable, knowing it was against them,
sought to seize Jesus but feared the people and so left him. Matthew
(XXK33-36) adds to this narrative, God's kingdom will be taken from
you and given to the nation bringing forth fruits. Whosoever falls
on this stone will be broken, but he on whom it faUs wfil be ground to
powder. Luke (xx:9-i9) also repeats the same parable with only
slight differences of detail, this unique conformity indicating a common
older source, adding only that when they were told that the vineyard
would be given to others the people cried out, " God forbid."
The commonest and most frequent interpretation makes the
vineyard God's Kingdom on earth. He himself is the absent owner;
the Jewish hierarchy are the tenants; the servant-messengers, prophets;

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 5<*3
the beloved son, Jesus; the new tenants, the gentile nations. On this
view Jesus foretells his own death, the rejection of the Jews, and the
conversion of the gentiles. It is God who, having established his
own plantation, departs. The revolting, Messiah-murdering hierarchy
who fear the people is here definitely rejected after a manifestation
of extreme patience on the Lord's part and after repeated and cumula
tive provocations. The so-called theocracy, the chosen people, has
proved a usurper. The promised land is not to be Jerusalem, and the
people of the covenant have forfeited it. Israel, which thought itself
the elite among nations, is proscribed, condemned, and executed. The
antithesis some think a double one, viz., between the hierarchy and
the common people, and also between the Jews and the heathen.
This proclamation is a mene tekel upharsin for those who have
betrayed a sacred trust. The rejected stone (the Son) is reinstated
and given the chief place as the Rock of Ages. The Son's murderer
seems a vaticinium ex eventu, and so the authenticity of the parable
has been challenged as a product of the theological thinking of the
primitive Church instead of the definite proclamation of Jesus himself.
Certainly the Jews never did or would say that Jesus was the heir,
for this would be an acknowledgment of his Sonship, which they never
made. He was not slain as God's heir. Liberal scholars, therefore,
usuaUy conceive that Jesus gave some parable concerning a vineyard,
but that it was radicaUy reconstructed later; and the very unanimity
of the synoptists is thought suspicious, indicating an agreement on
the part of the survivors of Jesus to give the fragment of tradition
which is at the core of this parable a Pauline cast. It surely could not
have come from Jesus in its present form.
Some think that instead of a direct conscious reference to Jesus'
death we have here only an accidental coincidence with no designed
allusion, and that the abuse and murder of the servants refer to the
treatment meted out to prophets or to the Baptist. Of course, as in
all the parables, its very nature is only supposititious, not factual, and
we find fittle aid from legalistic or archaeological scholarship, or indeed,
from the context. On its face it seems minatory to a priesthood which
had arrogated divine authority and usurped proprietorship, where it
was only vicegerent, and which had crushed by force reformers, those
sent of heaven to exact tribute due to the Supreme Ruler whom they
should loyally serve. It very likely epitomizes the stories of prophets
sent to kings to remind them that the state was still a theocracy and
Yahveh their liege lord. It is perhaps spiritual rather than temporal
power that would usurp divine right and dominion, and so it iUustrates
in Semitic wise the same fatal hubris or pride that in HeUenic story
always brought down Jove's thunderbolts or invoked the avenging
fates or furies. This parable is a lighthouse erected where the sirens

564 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
of ambition lure to the breakers of pontifical assumption. The heavenly
Father whom Jesus revealed, although the God of Love, is also the
jealous Deity of the old covenant, exquisitely sensitive to slight and
insult, and quite capable of laying aside his clemency and wreaking
vengeance. Although afar, he is not oblivious, but wfil have his due
and depose and crush all faithless deputies.
38. A king (Matt, xxii: 1-14; Luke xiv: 15-24) sent a servant to
call the bidden guests to come to the wedding of his son, but they
refused. Another servant was sent to say that the oxen and failings
were killed and all things ready; but some of those bidden scornfuUy
went their way to their farms and their merchandise, while others
abused, and even slew the messengers. Then the king was wroth, and
sent his armies, and destroyed the murderers and burned their city.
Servants were sent out again to find more worthy guests, and gathered
from the highways the good and the bad. When the king came, he
found one with no wedding garment, who was speechless when asked
why he came thus. Him the king ordered bound and cast into outer
darkness where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth; for many are
caUed but few chosen.
The invitation declined by aU on account of other occupations
was repeated at the last moment by the embarrassed host; but this
second time his messengers were insulted and slain, and he, angered,
wreaked vengeance upon the recusants. Then, as the feast was
already prepared, aU without distinction were invited to fill the table.
The refusers have been identified with the hierarchy, the Jewish race,
the rich or those reared with Christian opportunities, whfie those who
actually partook represent conversely the non-official Jewry, the gen
tiles, or those outside the Church respectively. On the first two supposi
tions the destruction of the temple and the fall of Jerusalem or the disper
sion have been thought to be prophesied in the king's act of vengeance.
This is, however, both less certain and, if meant, less important, than
the fact that Jesus was rejected by the rulers of the synagogue. In
view of this he is alternately indignant and pathetic. Disappointment
and incomplete foreknowledge seem involved in the very essence of this
parable. The invitation of those who came is an afterthought as if
they were heaven's second choice. If it worked weU, then the course
of events was wiser than the king's original purpose. This tone of
disappointment, indeed, pervades much of Jesus' career, and there are
many expressions of baffling defeat which were genuine and not af
fected. They seem to make the theological theory that he had a clear,

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 5^5
higher foreknowledge doubtful; or, at least those views of his divinity
which interfere with his humanity and render the incarnation incom
plete. His primary intention was not to be a saviour of the gentiles;
and we here see in the destruction of his rejectors his fury and unas-
suaged indignation. It was an ominous threat by a man of war and
retaliation, not, however, without sufficient cause. He came to his
own with a doctrine of hfe that was the needed food for their very souls,
but was summarily rejected. To prepare it had cost him long and hard
travail of soul, and he had felt assured it would be welcomed as Gospel
indeed; but it was met not only with indifference but with scorn, and
so, as if piqued, his gift was offered to and accepted by those in whom
he had less interest. This was also a prominent feature in the ex
perience of Confucius, Buddha, and to some extent Mohammed and
is of most foreign missionaries to-day. Their disciples were not those
they most desired to reach. All great reforms are marked by similar
discontinuity. Those who are caUed are not those who come. New
races and classes take up the burden of progress, and the old are
ploughed under. This extension of the scope of his principle of new
bottles for new wine Jesus does not here appear to see. It is this that
makes every great step in advance more or less paroxysmal. A fuUy
developed cult resists transpeciation, and every appeal back to first
principles must be to those not preoccupied but open and candid.
The highly specialized social soma must die, and new germ plasma
must develop new organisms. In choosing as his disciples plain men
of the people, and in appealing to the masses, Jesus recognized this
law. It is not flattering to those who accepted his call that they seem
to be an afterthought. But in this parable it is not they whom he
has primarily in mind. He is addressing those in high places in Israel.
Thus here, as always, we must remember that each utterance of Jesus
is aimed at a specific end, and often he has an individual or a small
group only in mind. This method is to be evaluated by its efficacy
for the special purpose for which it was used. Thus Socrates felt to
the prytany and Luther to the Church of his day.
The treatment of the man without a wedding garment may have
been aggravated by the king's indignation against the absentees and
suggests that one in the new circle lacked appreciation of the honour
he received. The incident is not easy to interpret conformably to
Jesus' love of the poor and his lack of respect for forms. Some have
thought it showed that he was not himself entirely emancipated from
formality. Others have symbolized it as a reproof to those who think
faith can suffice without works, or, again, as referring to those who
would accept the privileges of religion covertly without being known to
others by any outward badge. Ritualists have even seen here com
mendations of vestments in worship, the importance of which is

566 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
measured by the severity of the penalty for not having them on. The
more obvious lesson, however, seems to be that piety demands some
outward token by which it can be known, some external conformity
that distinguishes the guests of heaven from those in the common
world. The extreme punishment suggests that the meaning may fie
in a still deeper stratum of life, and teaches that piety should always be
clad in conduct and cannot be a matter of mere sentiment; that true
worship cannot dispense with outward forms; or that religion must
transform life. If, however, it is the gentiles that are here invited,
the allusion gains a new and interesting pertinence, for their pagan
forms of worship would be very likely to offend. On the whole, how
ever, we incline to this latter view that Jesus here reprimands a pagan
novice in whom the new faith had not yet found a better expression,
but who would adore the true God under the form of worship belonging
to Jove, Ishtar, Semiramis, or some other heathen deity. If this is the
pith of the parable, the mediaeval Church was lax in conforming to it,
and indeed it is doubtful if the Church ever went as far in tolerating
the man without the wedding garment as modern religious pedagogy
and psychology would warrant.
The unusual diversities both in the settings and the items of the
two synoptists have suggested to some that Jesus repeated this parable
on different occasions with variations, although there is no reason to
think that he did this in any case. More think that it illustrates
the freedom of treatment of a single clear parable under the influence
of strong, allegorizing propensities, and perhaps that Luke's version
of it is most elaborate as weU as, of course, more Pauline-Calvinistic.
A man without a wedding garment some, e. g., Weiss, think a dis
placed reference to the guests first invited, while others, e. g., Ewald,
think it a fragment of a different but lost parable. It shows Jesus'
high initial hope for his race undergoing progressive disillusionment.
39. A farmer had a fig-tree (Luke xiii : 6-9) and sought fruit thereon,
but found none and told the dresser to cut it down, as this was the
third year he had come and found it barren; but the dresser pleaded for
one more year in which he would dig about and dung it, and only then,
if it was still barren, cut it down. The implication is that this in
tercession prevailed.
Thus Jesus, the dresser, pruner, gardener, might plead with the
Yahveh of the Old Testament prophets of impending judgment to
suspend it a little longer. The tree might be old and decayed, yet it
might bloom again. It may typify an individual, a family, a Church,
a race, or all mankind, for in this little silhouette is the multiplicity of

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 567
aUusion that characterizes most of the parables that Jesus did not
himself explain. Men, like trees, are known by their fruits, which are
good works, and in the divine economy if a person or institution is
sterile it has no longer any raison d'etre. But as barren wombs have
sometimes been made to bear, and patient mulching may fructify a
tree that has for years borne nothing but leaves, so to a religious com
munity that has been unfruitful there may come a good and prolific
year again. The barren tree has certainly borne so rich a fruitage of
song and homily that the very vocabulary of Christian experience
would be impoverished without it. It teaches that the end of life,
indeed, the only things that justify its continued existence, are moral
deeds and the graces of religious character. God has no other measure
or standard of values. The luscious leaves of the fig-tree, the old
pulpiteers have told us, are mental culture, accomplishments, knowl
edge; but all these are not even worthy of mention, and are no justifi
cation for prolonging fife.
40. Ten virgins (Matt, xxv: 13; Luke xiii: 25-30) awaited sum
mons to a wedding by night. Five forgot to put oil in their lamps.
At midnight when the bridegroom was announced and this omission
discovered, the wise maidens refused to share their oil lest there be
not enough for both, while the foolish maids who had to go back for it
found on their return that not only was the door shut, but they were
refused admission and were told that they were unknown. They were
not prepared for the untimed but impending arrival of the Son of Man,
the heavenly Bridegroom, and the exhortation is to watch with all
preparations made in advance.
r In its form this is a simple admonition as to schoolgirls to be fore
handed and provident on penalty of missing a festivity dear to every
maiden heart. But its content and mission are a significant warning
to be ready always for death or for the coming of the bridegroom of
the Church to his own. The eschatological motive is dominant and
loud. Be ever ready, though the hour steal on one unawares like a
thief in the night. Had the householder known at what hour the burglar
would enter he would not have suffered house-break, and the evfi ser
vant finding that his lord's return was delayed would not have beaten
his fellow servants and rioted until, at the unannounced return, he was
cut asunder, and sent among hypocrites where there is weeping and
gnashing of teeth. The Lord may come suddenly at cock-crow or
later and find us sleeping, as the flood found men eating, drinking, and
merrying. The coming of the Kingdom will find two men in a field,

568 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
two women at a mill; one wfil be taken and the other left. We must
use every safeguard against surprise. This is a drastic, nerve-tensing,
anxious moral. Even the sects that have fived under a sense of the
impending end of all things, like a Damocles sword above their heads,
have found easement in setting the day, if not the hour, when the crack
of doom was to come. To live each day and hour as if it were the last
has always been a Christian rule of fife. From the Baptist, Jesus had
learned the potency of interpreting aU in terms of here and now,
instead of putting everything important afar in time and space.
Thus present realization was one of the secrets of Jesus' power as well
as a measure of it, as we elsewhere see. The very essence of greatness
is to presentify it, to see everything actualized here and now and in me.
This is in a sense the quintessence of religion, and in another way also
of psychology. It is not only hard to enter the Kingdom, but (Luke xiii: 24-30) it
may be too late before we know it. When the master has once shut
the door the tardy seeker wfil knock and plead that it may be opened,
but the master of the house wfil say, I know you not. They will urge
that they have eaten and drunk in his presence and heard him teach in
the street, and again he will say, I know you not. Depart, aU ye
workers of iniquity. They shall weep and gnash their teeth when they
see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets and people from aU the
points of the compass, in the Kingdom and they themselves be thrust
out. Many that are last shall be first and the first last.
Open as the entrance to the Kingdom now is, there will come a
time when it will be forever too late to gain entrance. Those who
knock after this hour has once struck will be ignored, condemned, and
sent away. They shaU see the great men of old and many strangers
from afar that seem to them interlopers, with the Great Companion
whom they knew in daily intercourse, but he will no longer have
compassion or hear their cry, and they will be eternaUy banished from
his presence to woe. Though they thought themselves the elect,
they shall find that they are castaways.
This haUowed fable Jesus devised, like others of his pedagogic
masterpieces, to warn against procrastination. Again we hear the
tocsin, now — and he paints in a few strong strokes the consequences
of delay. It is hard to believe that so sympathetic, indulgent, and
inviting a friend, who begged and pleaded with and would accept all,
will soon turn to heartless adamant against the entreaties of old as
sociates; but they are forewarned and so wfil have no excuse and must
not be astonished. This hardly seems to comport with post-mortem
probation, and it must be a rather exiguous exegesis that finds it here.
Moral reforms seem to all easy, at least for a time; but habits grow
entrenched and freedom fades from reality to an illusion till, at some

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 569
awful but unknown moment, as we proceed along the way of life on
which no return is possible, we pass the last fork of the road all unwit
tingly. Every one has his own moral dead-fine, one perhaps for each
besetting sin, after passing which there are only might-have-beens,
regrets, and vengeance. This ethicodynamic principle, drawn here as
Jesus loved to do in eschatological colours, is as true as thepsychophysic
law, though not yet expressed in terms of calculus. The law of pro
gressive habituation, already among the most interesting and practical
of the chapters in modern psychology, is outlined negatively and given
a moral point of ultimate reprobation. This, too, is one of the supports
of the familiar doctrine of grieving the Spirit till it takes its final de
parture. To be almost persuaded; to be chronically on the brink of
the great choice but never taking the decisive step, slowly creates
hovering indecision as a habitus, well personified by Bunyan in Mr.
Facing-Both-Ways. The process goes on without knowledge or
realization, and there slowly supervenes the gradual abatement of
even desire for good, so that Jesus here, with true artistic instinct,
represents the seekers as realizing their position just at the critical
moment after it is too late, so as to heighten the pathos of it all. He
chooses the psychological moment of inception into the hopeless state
when hope and desire have not yet faded.
41. A parable of the Kingdom (Matt, xx: 1-16) is that of the em
ployer of labour who engaged men at six in the morning for a twelve-
hour day, at the stipulated price of a penny. At nine, twelve, three,
and five o'clock he engaged others. Those employed at the eleventh
hour, who had wrought but one hour, were both paid first and given
the wage of an entire day. When, last of all, those who began earliest
and had borne the labour and heat of the day received only what was
promised, they murmured, not that those who had worked less time
were overpaid but that they had themselves received no more com
pensation than the contract price. The employer answered that he
had kept his word; they must be satisfied; he had a right to do what he
would with his own. "The last shall be first and the first last: for
many be caUed, but few chosen."
The moral here has some connection with that of the prodigal,
the lost sheep, and the penny. Those who enter the Kingdom late
have the same usufruct of it and are even preferred, at least in the
order of payment, over those who began early in the morning. The
interpretation is often made that a death-bed repentance is as profit
able as a life of service. Salvation is all God's gift that he may bestow

570 *JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
.4
according to his sovereign pleasure, and frafi man must not cavil or
repine. To modern sensibilities this lacks something of sweet reasonable
ness, but so do many of the hardships that seem bound up with man's
relation to the laws of nature. As a matter of poficy such practice
would soon bring confusion into any modern industrial group. The
warmer welcome for the tardy penitent than for one who has never
fallen is a hard doctrine. This Galilean fisher of men was perhaps
baiting his hook weU to cast it far over toward Satan's dominions,
exulting especially over every catch drawn out of the slowly closing
net of the great enemy over whom these were trophies of victory. A
premium upon eleven hours of sloth would soon reduce the length of
the working-day to one hour: but perhaps this is further than the scope
of the parable goes, for the day here represents the entire life of man.
42. A man (Matt, xxv: 14-30; Luke xix: 11-27) on travel bent
gave five, two, and one talents to his servants according to their abil
ity. Those who had five and two respectively doubled their capital,
but he who had but one hid it in the earth. The master on returning
listens to each and rewards the first two alike. They have proven
faithful in a few, and so are made rulers over many things and intro
duced to the Lord's joy. The man with one talent pleads in his
excuse that he was afraid of the master, as he was a hard man. He is
told that if the master is exacting, all the more should he at least have
put out the money to interest. As a punishment his talent is taken
away and given to the man who has ten; for to those who have shaU
be given, and from those with fittle even that shall be taken. The
profitless servant is then cast into darkness and torment.
Talents are the power of doing good that increase by use, and it is
implied here that as the man of two was rewarded in the same way as
was he of five talents, so the man of one, had he doubled bis gift, would
also have had the same reward, proportionately, as the others would
have had the same penalty had they followed his course. Throughout
Christian history perhaps the most pervasive lesson of this parable
is that there are differences of ability among men — that they are not
equal. Second to this, although probably the chief meaning Jesus
intended it to convey, was that he of one gift should strive as hard, and
by so doing have equal merit, as he of five. According to the purport
of other parables, perhaps he would meet even greater reward than the
others, like the eleventh-hour labourer. Certainly the temptation
to inactivity is greater for him. He is, to be sure, poor in spirit, and

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 571
comes under a special beatitude which he has not realized, but it is
censorious apathy like his from which social discontent and even an
archy sometimes spring. Common average ability, and even subnor-
mality, thus carry no exemption from common duty.
In this, as in the other mundane parables of Jesus, there is no mys
tery, and we feel in the study of them no sense of superhuman wisdom.
All is simple, human, homely, clear, central; and nothing in the whole
sphere of morals is easier to comprehend or, we might add, harder to
fashion daily life and thought upon. In our age of the lust for power,
which Nietzsche thinks man's supreme passion, to feel weak is supreme
misery and brings peculiar temptation to balk. It has never been so
discouraging to be smaU or average, to renounce aU distinction and
pubfic applause, to live obscurely with content and fidelity, as in our
democratic days, when all seems open to all who can attain. Jesus
was no equalist, but he lashes the recusant and recreant who will do
nothing because they cannot do much. Those of this type who are
faithful indeed deserve special praise; for even if they have not over
come special temptations it is hard to rise to their full opportunity to
five, which really is found in the possibility of living more unselfishly,
tranquilly, and with purer motives than others. We wish Jesus had
given us also a parable rewarding a man of one talent who had used
it to the uttermost, for his reward would doubtless have been greater
than that of aU the others.
43. In the parable of the unjust steward (Luke only, xvi: 1-13) a
rich man's agent is charged with wastefulness and summoned . to
account. Fearful of losing his position, and being unable to dig and
unwilling to beg, he makes friends of his master's creditors by summon
ing each and accepting from one his note for half and from another for
four-fifths of his indebtedness. This he does so that, if he is deposed,
he may find favour with those whose debt he has dishonestly reduced
and who are thus made parties to his crime, and will also be bound to
him by ties of gratitude. This deed, which modern law has punished as
fraud for centuries, the master, who is also a loser, commends, ignoring
its injustice to him, because it iUustrates sagacity and fidelity to un
righteous Mammon in details which would be commendable if the cause
were great and just. A steward thus circumstanced must choose between
faithfulness to the master or to his debtors, for he cannot serve both.
This has never been a favourite parable for the pulpit, and often
seems the despair of exegetes and ethical apologists. Some have even
thought it misunderstood or misreported. The latter part of the

572 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
narrative appears either to have covert connotation or to reflect a
confused state of mind on Luke's part. A few negative critics have not
only chaUenged Jesus' soundness here, but have charged him with
commending flagrant and palpable chicanery, and have hinted that
in his Oriental environment Jesus' conceptions of equity and business
integrity had remained undeveloped. Others more favourably dis
posed interpret the owner as God and the steward as Jesus, the great
remitter of man's debts of sin; but this has difficulties, for Jesus' stew
ardship is not imperilled nor is he obliged to choose between fidelity
to sinful man and to his Lord. Neither is there any reason to think that
he would commend such methods of equalizing wealth. Instead of
collecting debts that creditors acknowledge to be just, the steward
conspires with them to defraud, thus corrupting them, and whfie he
himself does not directly share the spoils of the rebates, he expects to
receive the full value in good wfil and favours, should he need them.
If we assume the rich lord to be Satan himself as the prince of this
world, and the creditors those sold under sin whose obligations to him
Jesus reduces, then we have a meaning which comports well with the
mediaeval conception, which long abounded in many a monkish tale of
duping and outwitting the devfi. But on such a view we cannot ex
plain the lord's commendation of the act. The moral context welters
with confusion. Again, Jesus, it has been said, was an unpractical
idealist who felt strongly the need of more of the same worldly sagacity
in the administration of the affairs of the Kingdom that controls
mundane affairs, and if this be so the parable is a crude expression
crudely reported of this conviction. Still others have thought that
Jesus here and elsewhere implies that property is robbery, and so pitied
poor creditors that he commends even questionable means toward the
more equitable distribution of wealth. Wendt1 says this prudent
agent is commended for providing by present needs for his future
welfare. We must so use the goods God entrusts to us to secure heav
enly reward. The Lord owns aU; we are only his trustees, and instead
of wasting the fiduciary resources in our hands we should use them in
conciliating the claims of those who owe us. By these means if we are
reduced to beggary we shall have deposits in the bank of their gratitude.
Thus we have here counsel to spendthrifts foreseeing utter bank
ruptcy and providing for it by liberality to their friends while they yet
have the means. But at best the parable is tortuous and confused,
inconsistent with the teaching of the other parables of husbandmen and
their agents, and either belonging to the decadent stage of Jesus'
parable method of teaching or, probably, an imperfect record not
understood by Luke; and, at any rate, as it now stands, of but the
slightest significance to us.
i"The, Teaching of Jesus." I, p. 235, H, p. 377.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 573
44. Of aU the parables, the number of which is estimated- accord
ing to different criteria all the way from thirty-two by Briggs to fifty-
three by Jiilicher, the one most classic in form, clearest in meaning,
possibly the first, and at any rate the one which Jesus himself explained
most fuUy, is that of the sower (Matt, xiii: 3-32; Luke viii: 5-15). As
he sowed, some seed fell by the roadside and was trodden down or de
voured by fowls. The word is heard, but Satan snatches it away lest
it be understood and believed unto salvation.
The beaten path is the heart waxed gross, the eye that sees not,
and the ear that hears not. Spiritual dullards are utterly unimpres
sionable and hopeless, and perhaps this refers to the scribes and Phar
isees, whose souls the devfi had seared. Wasted and unappreciated
truths are like pearls before swine, and great teachers like Plato have
shrunk from proclaiming their best truths to those utterly unfit to re
ceive them. Souls smitten with the mildew of nil admirari and indif
ference, who abhor aU that is new, have always been the terror of great
teachers and reformers. Dread of them has caused aU the differentia
tions that have been made between exoteric and esoteric teachings,
and had something to do in leading Jesus to devise his own invention
of a new type of parable which, like a cathedral window, looks dull and
dingy to those without, but to those within is beautiful with fight.
Of all the conservatives, reactionaries, and obscurantists, moral and
religious cynics are the worst; and who that is smitten with the love
of the ideal does not shrink from their presence as from profanation?
They chill, blight, disenchant, are precipitate to criticise before they
understand. The preachers of the simple fife in "Vanity Fair"; of
exiguous honesty to the promoters of frenzied finance; of exquisite
chastity, even in thought, in the gilded halls of licensed prostitution;
of philosophic temperance in a saloon; of the conclusions of science con
cerning the ultimate constitution of the universe to the superstitious
and ignorant, are sowing by the wayside and wasting both effort and
seed, for those whom they address are, at the best, hearers only and not
doers. Perhaps Plato might have given them some credit because he
held that theory goes part way toward practice; but for Jesus even a
httle knowing without doing only adds condemnation. The seed does
not even sprout, but feeds the enemies of the crops.
Second, there are stony places with poor and shallow soil where
the word is heard and received with joy; but when the sun of tribula
tion, persecution, or temptation is hot, the tender shoot withers to the
root. The impregnation of souls thus symbolized is foUowed by early
miscarriage. Offence and abortion are easy. The superficial who pave
heU with good intentions; the neologists, or culturists ever seeking

574 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
some new thing; people with quick perceptions, easy apprehension,
ready expression, with a veritable lust for the easy first stages of knowl
edge and with as veritable an aversion for thoroughness; those with
only the dry light of intelligence, in whose souls there is no irrigation
or even seepage from deep perdurable enthusiasm which is the water of
fife; the neuroticism that always loves to begin and never can finish —
these constitute a true psychic type which is alternately the hope and
exasperation of the true teacher. The rehgious smatterers and back
sliders who put their hands to the plow and turn back; who begin to
build without counting the cost; who take lamps with no oil in them;
who say "I go," but go not; who are almost but not quite persuaded;
who in youth give precocious promise which is never fulfilled — these,
no doubt, were often the despair of Jesus, and it was such followers
who discouraged Buddha and angered Mohammed. This class illus
trates dementia prsecox in religion. Their piety is a kind of air-plant,
perhaps an annual rather than a perennial growth. It was those of
this diathesis who balked at martyrdom in the early Church, and have
made up the great body of recanters. Here the mediaeval dogmatists
found the true sin against the Holy Ghost.1 This is often, too, the
tragedy of great truth for httle minds, of all-sided culture for cheap
souls or those with a single facet. The Gospel seed Gan never ripen on
thin soil which cannot improve itself. Thus, back of this parable
there perhaps lurks a fatalism that makes the redemption of such acre
age impossible. To raise such a question, however, is to press the par
able beyond its legitimate scope.
The third class of hearers is parabled as thorny ground where
weeds and tares representing the care, riches, and lust of worldly
things spring up and choke the wheat. These, another parable teaches,
cannot be removed without uprooting the crop. Here the soil is rich
and deep, but rank with other growths sown perhaps at night by the
devil, the god of weeds. The guilt of this class is clearer, for not talent
but will is lacking. In place of the summum bonum they have chosen
secunda bona or at best moral allotria. There is no conscious noluntas
for good, but only voluntas for other things — perhaps the will to power,
fame, wealth. Their high idealism has faded into the light of common
day, and in its place have come sordid greed, tuft-hunting and pelf-
hunting. They have apostatized to other gods, or their piety is smoth
ered in some isolated compartment of the soul where it is dormant save
on Sundays or in stereotyped ways. Business has supplanted Bethel.
Religion, which should be supreme, is subordinate. They have de
clined the Bridegroom's invitation with many an excuse, and have be
come servitors of practical utilities, worshippers of Mammon, and so
the way to heaven has narrowed down for them to the dimensions of a
'See one of the most desperate and pathetic illustrations in the account of Franceses Spiera by Philip Schaff, "Die
Sunde wieder den Heiligen Geist." Halle, 1841, p. 173-210

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 575
needle's eye. One world at a time, and now this, is perhaps their
maxim. To-day in academic life it is this class who ask the money
value of studies and courses, and disregard culture values. A life of
high living and plain thinking has no charm for such. They build
barns, lay up store of goods, eat and drink, and forget that their souls
may at any moment be required of them.
Lastly, fertile soil stands for those who hear, understand, and do;
those who have waited, longed, and are ripe and ready for the word;
the wise to whom a hint is sufficient, for whom even parables are hardly
needed, and who intuit at once their meaning and are fittest for esoteric
impartations by the rich and condensed language of hints and chapter
heads. Tribulation only increases their faith, and conviction is
prompt, complete, and lasting. All that sprouts comes to full fruit
age. The law was originaUy written on their hearts, and needs only
a touch to bring it out in consciousness.1
This brilliant parable is the key to several others, and supple
ments much other teaching. There is nothing enigmatical about it,
and perhaps it least needed Jesus' exposition. Dull indeed must have
been the disciples who required this detailed explanation of it. These
four kinds of ground stand for four pedagogic temperaments as char
acteristic and distinct as any of the types of modern genetic psychology
or ethology. Every teacher of new and higher truths could supply a
generous anthology of illustrations of each one of the four from his own
experience. Indeed, these supplement our present knowledge of the
psychology of the learning process somewhat as Plato's myths do his
philosophy. These are ways in which education does or fails to do its
proper work of supplementing heredity. These are the four great
reactions of the soul to truth. Here aU the Herbartian interests
may be subsumed. Pedagometric scales might best be established
along these lines. This is Jesus' confession of his educational poficy,
and it probably gives us a key to the principles on which he chose
his disciples and the Seventy, focussing his best endeavours on the
inner group of the fourth class, for the mostly lost and unrecorded
instruction of whom the world must forever mourn. Had this been
accessible, how different the conceptions of Christendom concerning
his fife and work might have been, and what labour of painfully recon
structing from popular utterances his inmost creed might have been
saved! The wealth of pedagogic experience and insight in these few
apothegmatic phrases is nothing less than amazing. In this confessional
revelation we get nearest to the heart of the Great Teacher and can
realize how deeply he must have pondered the ways and means of
impressing his doctrine, as he had to do, without the aid of writing,
' Tradition would have us infer that Jesus' teaching b illustrated by the definition of a college as Mark Hopkins on
one end of a log teaching Garfield on the other.

576 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tests, or organizing a mere school in the classic sense. How apt for
his and for all subsequent time was his choice of the agricultural simile
of grain-growing! One wonders whether Jesus felt that all these types
were illustrated among his own disciples. In this parable no censure
of any of these four classes is implied for it is all a question of native
quality, of unfertilized soil. The seed always and everywhere grows
as best it can, and it is only inherited ability typified by the soil that
differs. Elsewhere, but not here, are manuring, digging about the
roots, and pulling up tares considered. Here Jesus seems almost
fatalistically resigned as to the nature of the soil, and this was doubt
less his attitude as to the very diverse endowments of his immediate
followers. From the nature of the records of his life, and from his
frequent rebukes of dullness of apprehension on the part of his fol
lowers, must we not infer that he had most of all at heart yet another
or fifth kind of companions who could not be classified by a figure of
speech drawn from the domain of vegetable life, viz., those who dimly
felt the power of the truth he taught and strove to their uttermost to
comprehend but constantly fell short, and, owing to their inherent
limitations, incessantly misconceived him? With Boswellian devo
tion, but with a pragmatic shortage of understanding sometimes sug
gesting even the typical pedant of Faust, these biographers could be
only fags of the Holy Ghost while striving to their uttermost to be
its oracles, understanding even the parables only when an explanation
was vouchsafed them. Would that Jesus had left us his own luminous
explanation of other of his parables instead of trusting them or us to
supply it! Indeed, it seems strange, incompetent as their comments
upon his teachings often show them to be to give such interpretation,
that if he had any forefeefing that his inculcations were to be trans
mitted to future generations, he did not more often explain himself.
45. The Kingdom (Mark iv: 26-9) is as when a man casts seed
into the ground, goes to sleep, and rises day after day, while the seed
springs up and grows, he knows not how, whether he wakes or sleeps.
The earth bringeth forth fruit of itself, the blade, the ear, and the
full corn; but when the fruit is ripe, man puts in his sickle to the
harvest. The growth impulse of nature supplements the work of man.
The seed seems buried in the dark, cold earth till the springtide when
nature rises again, and it sprouts and grows all summer. Man sleeps,
but nature does not. We know not how the great spirit of fife works.
It is thus, however, that the Kingdom grows by the profound laws of
evolution far below consciousness, if we only plant good seed betimes.

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 577
The Kingdom, then, here is like a crop. Nothing is said of the nature
of the soil, of fertilizing, watering, or weeding; but the stress is on the
growth impulse of which man avails himself, and this growth is here
and not hereafter. The Kingdom will grow and ripen inevitably with
out attention on man's part, as if it were in the inmost nature of things
to do so. Man must do his part, and God and nature wfil do the rest.
Man does not even need to watch. Growth proceeds very slowly and
surely, stage by stage. Such has been the law ever since cibiculture
and the domestication of plants began.
This parable is often thought to symbolize the part that good
impressions play if made upon the soul very early in life — which, even
though they seem to be lost, are reaUy germinant. Although those in
whose hearts they are growing know it not, they wiU bring harvest of
good deeds in time. From this point of view we are dealing with the
under or unconscious soul in man, which once fructified does the rest
of itself. This parable, therefore, seems to be strongly anti-Pauline,
for it means that the inborn nature of man is pure and good in itself,
and not depraved or corrupt. Thus, not only our vegetative and
autonomous but also our instinctive and intuitive nature, receives
seed like good ground, and stimulates it to grow and ripen. This is
quite in accord with the later psychogenetic and psychoanalytic view
of the prepotency of infantile impressions; for the unconscious in us
is the childlike, and the childlike is the unconscious. No good in this
plastic age is lost.
46. Another parable which Jesus himself explained is that of the
tares (Matt, xiii: 24-30 and 36-43). The Kingdom is like a man who
sowed good grain, but while his workmen slept an enemy sowed tares,
so that both sprang up together. The servants came to the owner and
asked, Did you not sow good seeds; whence, then, these tares? He
replied that an enemy had done it. When asked whether they should
pluck up the tares he said, No, lest the wheat also be uprooted. Both
must grow until the harvest, and then the reapers will be ordered first
to gather the tares, bundle, and burn them, and then bring the wheat
to the barn.
When he had sent the multitude away and the disciples were alone,
they asked him to explain, which he did by saying that the sower is the
Son of man; the field is the world; the good seeds are the children of
the Kingdom; the tares, of the wicked one; the enemy that sowed them,
the devil; the harvest, the end of the world; the reapers, the angels, sent

578 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
forth to gather sinners, who would be cast into a furnace with wailing
and gnashing of teeth, while the righteous should shine as the sun in
the Kingdom. Here again Jesus is the sower, and the seed is growing according
to its soil; but by a scurvy trick the god of weeds steals in by night and
inseminates the ground with his undomesticated, outlawed crop; and,
contrary to the mediaeval legends, wherein he is always worsted, he
here outwits the Lord, so much so that before the latter knows it,
the weeds have taken such root that to pull them will uproot the crop,
the more as the more abundant and rank are the weeds. Thus, as
the mischief is done, nothing remains but to await and harvest what
of the crop is unchoked, and burn the Unkraut, as in John's preaching
the winnowed out chaff is burned; or, as elsewhere from a full net the
good fish are saved and the bad thrown away. Here forbearance
and the awful fate of the wicked are set forth. It is not here taught
that good needs evfi to bring it to full maturity, but God's tolerance
of sin is ascribed to his tenderness for the good. Against the faith
of ancient Israel it is here frankly assumed that sin is not punished
in the present life; though here the parable, if taken too literally,
halts a fittle, for many weeds may be uprooted to the advantage of
many a crop without serious jeopardy, as society often promptly pun
ishes evil, not only without injury to the good but to its great advan
tage. If the tares and weeds are not persons, as we are told they are,
but qualities in each individual, the meaning becomes in some sense
clearer. It is vain, however, to speculate what would happen if all
the human tares were weeded out by Divine Providence. A fatalism,
too, is implied, because the tares cannot be transmuted into grain,
but from each seed only its like can grow. Hence, the implication
would make Jesus' mission to save the lost nugatory. The purport,
however, is consoling because of the certainty of the future penalty
of the wicked after their lush and unpunished life here. Even where
sin abounds we must not doubt the ultimate justice or doom of evil.
This is another form of the draft Jesus so often loved to draw on the
great bank of the future, fafiure of which would have left him and his
cause bankrupt indeed. Its credit is called faith, and his system of
doing business with it is what we call eschatology. The key-word of
this parable is, Wait; possess your souls in patience. The evil are but
laying up wrath, and the longer the delay the more terrible it will be
when it comes. Heavenly laws work slowly but surely. Sin will
end, not by the gradual selective process of elimination of the unfit,
and the natural survival of the fittest; but at a certain point there will
be a supernal intervention of divine agents with fearful and swift
execution of judgment. Here again, despite the injunction to patience,

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 579
we see Jesus' convulsive or catastrophic diathesis. At a certain point
the powers of righteousness wfil break loose and sweep away all that
offend, with the besom of destruction. Over and over again he tells
of weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, fire, sword, thunder, lightning,
earthquake; so that nothing in all earth's sad litany of woes and horrors
is in his view too terrible for the foes of the Kingdom, and the world
fives in the aura of a great convulsion from which a new earth is to
emerge hke a butterfly from the ugly chrysalis. The great metamor
phosis doubtless seemed to him now near, now farther away, but rarely
beyond the life of some then fiving, and he eagerly scanned earth,
heaven, and the souls of men for signs and foregleams of its coming.
Despite its terrors it was a consummation to be devoutly wished and
prayed for. This tension between the real world and that of his ideals
grew painful at times. Such polar opposition would at some point
become insupportable; and then, when the crisis came, all who offended
would be destroyed in dreadful but rapid stages and the chosen
would shine forth, for the glorified world could produce no tares or
weeds. So far this article in the program of Jesus is unfulfilled, and many
a crop of tares and wheat in varying proportions has grown together
for two millennia. The Christian world has everywhere practically
ceased to expect a harvest of fire. The conception of it has become
impotent, and if it is anywhere held to it is relegated to the post
mortem world. The method of evolution has discredited that of revo
lution, although if the best only survive, the result is even more
certain though longer deferred. The essentials of Jesus' faith are
confirmed, and the minor matters of means and method changed.
Impetuous souls like his, with perf ervid ethical passion, still occasionally
lose their temporal perspective and see all that they hope and strive
for near at hand. But the more we study this psychosis, the more
clearly we see that Jesus' befief was no distemper, but only a con
science inflamed with true zeal, putting our own faith in the form
which perhaps at his age was both most artistic and morally effective.
Thus optimists have still but to foUow the council of this parable,
wait without doubting, and never cease to sow good seed for fear of
the weeds of diabolus.
47. The Kingdom (Matt, xiii: 47-50) is like a net cast into the
sea, gathering all; and when it was full they drew it ashore, and sat
down and gathered the good into vessels and threw the bad away.
So, at the end of the world, the angels shaU sever the wicked from the
just, and cast them into a furnace where there shaU be Weeping and
gnashing of teeth.

58o • JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Selection is the theme here. Sorting weeds from grain, chaff from
wheat, leaves from fruit, symbolizes what might as well be filustrated
by parting small, rotten, pest-injured specimens of any kind of crop,
wild or cultivated, from those that are perfect, or dross from good
metal, or inferior or diseased animals of every kind from those best
fitted to survive; and the same principle of sortage might be applied
to human families and races. Evolution is always doing this. We
might now interpret the Church as the net gathering fish from the
world, and some have suggested a proportion between the relatively
few fish caught in a net compared to the vast numbers in the sea, and
those really Christian compared to the population of the world. Some
think the Church the vessel in which the good are put. So, too, opin
ions differ as to what the catch itself is. It may be death, and the
sorting may be the judgment. At any rate, it is now too late to
convert bad works into good; for the fish are already dead, and have
only to be separated. Perhaps there are as many standards of selec
tion as there are species of fish. Bad fish are very bad and very dan
gerous, and this fact may have been an unconscious determinant and
contributed its quota of reinforcement.
48. The Kingdom of heaven (Matt, xiii: 31-32; Luke xiii: 18-19)
is like a grain of mustard seed, the least of all seeds, sown in the earth.
But when it is grown up it is the greatest of all herbs, and the fowls of
the air can lodge in its branches. Again, it is like leaven (Matt, xiii:
33; Luke xiii: 20-21) which a woman hid in three measures of meal till
aU was leavened.
This optimism takes no heed of any adverse influences. The tiny
seed becomes a very great tree, and the leaven pervades the whole
mass. Scholars have found out that in Palestine mustard never
grows more than twelve feet high and that birds never nest in it, and
so other authorities have believed that another larger tree-like plant
(Salvadora persica) was here suggested, which has some similar quali
ties, and which often grows twenty-five feet high, bearing berries which
birds love. If the tree is the Church this is somewhat more fit, but
hyperbole is still involved. A mustard seed was in current Hebrew
proverbs a symbol of smaUness; yet many think Jesus' botanical
knowledge was here at fault. Other exegetes have dwelt on the taste,
colour, form, medical effects, of mustard seed in a very irrelevant if
ingenious way, but the meaning that from smaU beginnings great
things arise is the central thought. Some say the tree is the Messiah,
others that it is the very few true believers; the ground is the earth
or its people; the birds of the air are the population of aU climes that

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 581
enter the Kingdom, etc. Some think that the tree is Paul, and others,
the Gospel. The leaven is a more culinary parable, the ephah being
the largest of the then-current standards of measurement. It suggests
a departure from the unleavened bread sacred to the Hebrews. Hea
thenism, too, is about to be leavened. It signifies fermentation.
Both of these parables mean only that Jesus' ideal will be completely
accomplished, and we are here simply given a convenient and portative
expression for the current growth and universal prevalence of the
new dispensation, so humble in its beginnings. Its development is
to be quiet, without convulsion and unobserved. It should be re
membered that Jesus here is not philosophical but prophetic.
49. The Kingdom of heaven (Matt, xiii: 44-47) is like a treasure
hid in a field, having found which, a man keeps secret but sells all he
has and buys the field. Or again, it is like a man seeking precious
pearls, who having found one of the greatest value sells all he has to
buy it.As one sacrifices all minor treasures for one very great one, so aU
else should be gladly given up for the Kingdom. For its sake every
thing ought to be renounced. Such a procedure is only business
shrewdness. Perhaps the secrecy concerning the field containing the
treasure is aimed at the exclusiveness of the Jews, while some think that
this refers to the inwardness of the higher life. Both find the prize
and set its true high worth upon it. There is here no tedious seeking,
but having found, there is the greatest effort to possess the prize.
Discipleship costs much. Here, too, salvation is bought by those who
attain it, and is not a gift. Catholic theologians find here a similitude
of the monkish fife with its three vows of renunciation, viz., property,
family, and will. Everything should be offered up gladly for the
Kingdom. It is spoken of as if it were a possible private possession,
and so perhaps it means the Kingdom within rather than that without.
Something priceless becomes my very own property. I am not a
collector, but am impeUed to own one only thing of transcendent
worth. H. Unser,1 describing the parable of the pearl, teUs us that in the
liturgy of the early Church Christ was made the "pearl born of Maria."
The ancient folk-soul conceived the pearl as born of lightning striving
the sea, and it was thus always conceived in a mussel shell. It is
thus a precious stone made out of flesh, and was thought to symbolize
God born of the body of his mother and not, like others, a product of
carnal intercourse. As the bivalve opens to let in the "moon dew,"
'"Vortrage und Aufsetze." 1907, p. 219 f.

582 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
as other folklore has it, the pearl is born, and the lightning only loosens
it from its attachment to the sheU when it is ripe. This is a wide
spread Syrian myth, going back to the time of Jesus. Thus, too,
Aphrodite was born with the sea for her father, and rose to the surface
in a sheU, as she is so often represented in art. She was known as
goddess both of the sea and of pearls. The pearl was Aphrodite's
Doppelgiinger, and there are many symbolic relations that have evolved
and that Unser traces to sea-foam and amber. This conception of
Christ was motivated by anti-Docetism. This putative origin of the
pearl made it a symbol of the annunciation and the virgin birth of
Jesus. So, too, the spark of the Holy Ghost in the pure water of
baptism generated the new man in Christ.
C. ILLUSTRATIVE NARRATIVES
50. A lawyer (Luke x: 25-37) asked, tempting Jesus, what he
should do to inherit hfe eternal, to which Jesus replied by the counter-
question as to how he read the law. He replied that he found in it
the behest to love the Lord with all the heart, strength, mind, and
to love thy neighbour as thyself. To which Jesus retorted, Do this
and thou shalt five. But, inquired the lawyer, who is my neighbour?
To this Jesus replied by a parable. A man going from Jerusalem to
Jericho fell among thieves, who stripped and wounded him, and left
him half dead. Soon a priest chanced to come by and, when he saw,
passed by on the other side. A Levite did the same. Then came a
Samaritan who, when he saw him, had compassion, bound his wounds,
poured oil and wine in them, set him on his beast, brought him to an
inn, cared for him overnight, and on leaving in the morning gave the
host two pennies to care for him, promising to pay when he came again
whatever more was spent. Which of these, asked Jesus, was the true
neighbour? The lawyer answered, He who showed mercy. Then,
said Jesus, Go thou and do likewise.
This illustrative narrative ends without telling us whether the
victim of the assault recovered, or whether the Samaritan performed
his pledge to return and pay, but the point is made. Love God and
thy neighbour, and thou hast life eternal. To this Jewish theologian
"neighbour" is made a distinguished title, and the Samaritan, though
a heretic and half heathen, is commended, with implied disparagement
of the priest and the Levite. If it were, as some think, a true incident,
who would or could have told it? Surely not the half-dead victim.
Neighbours thus extend beyond racial or creedal circles. Although, as

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 583
Jiilicher thinks, Luke's setting was wrong, the meaning is clear. The
self-sacrificing expression of love has in the sight of God and man
supreme value, transcending all claims of birth and office. Pity more
deserves salvation than all the merits of high officials who are selfish.
Money, time, and effort were lavished upon the stranger by the alien.
Harms finds in this parable only common kindness and no specifically
Christian meaning, whfie others say Christ is himself the Samaritan,
the victim is man as the assaults of sin have left him, and the kindness
extended to him symbolizes salvation. Some make Paul the Samari
tan, others think it chiefly a satire directed against the Jewish hierarchy.
Few parables have been so completely incorporated into the Christian
consciousness, or are more beloved. It exemplifies one of the best
traits of human nature, viz., the sympathy with suffering that makes
the whole world kin, or the "feeling of kind" that motivates human
solidarity, or the fraternity of truly gregarious man. It is the instinct
that has built hospitals, established free clinics, out-patient wards,
.nursing agencies of all kinds, the Red Cross work, relief for victims of
plague, famine, floods, fires, and earthquakes, and as I write, aid for
the suffering Belgians. The very name "Good Samaritan" has not
only redeemed this discredited race, but connotes all shades and
varieties of acts of kindness to the unfortunate. Theologians and
poets tell us that this was the very motive that drew Jesus from heaven
to earth. All in need are neighbours, and should be cared for as we
would wish to be cared for in their place. Make such service a part
of self-love as against the vicious precept and practice of ruthless self-
maximization. It means mutuality and social service, so that the
roots of this apologue go deep down into the animal world, as many
records, aU the way from Espinas to Sutherland, have shown. Even
to keep those socially unfit alive helps to bring out the highest qualities
of human nature, and without dependents and defectives normal man
would have been far lower down than he is in the scale of altruism.

51. Apropos of those who boasted that they were righteous and
despised others, Jesus tells (Luke xviii: 9-14) the apologue of two men
who went to pray in the temple. The Pharisee stood and thanked God
that he was not like other men, extortionate, unjust, adulterous, or
even as this publican. He fasted twice a week and gave tithes of all he
possessed. But the publican stood afar and would not even lift his
eyes to heaven, but smote his breast and cried, "God, be merciful to
me, a sinner." He and not the Pharisee went home justified, for whoso
exalteth himself shall be brought low and he that humbleth himself
shaU be exalted.

584 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
By confession of sin, and not vaunting our self-righteousness,
should we approach God. The prayer state of mind is not that of self-
laudation, but a cry of mercy from moral humility, and not with pride.
This state is the beginning of holiness, as the Socratic conviction of
ignorance is of wisdom. In both cases discontent with self augurs
growth, as complacency does arrest. A conviction of sin and demerit
is one of the striking traits of Christianity, and exists in no such degree
in any other religion. Few things Jesus said probably so shocked the
complacency of his Jewish contemporaries as that these hated agents
of a rapacious and extortionate conqueror, of whose depravity the Jews
had the hveliest sense, should by the mere inarticulate expression of
his unworthiness be justified of God before the representatives of their
own orthodoxy. The publican's prayer meant self-abandonment to
divine mercy, and just this extremity makes the Christian God's op
portunity. No such self-abasement is involved in any phrase of the
model prayer of our Lord. But in the self-conviction of our own right
eousness the psychology of conversion has already seen the crucial
moment when the soul becomes filled and suffused with a righteousness
not its own. The old consciousness is sloughed off, and a new and
better one emerges from within. Our dead self is a stepping-stone to
our higher life. Indeed, self-consciousness itself is at bottom a witness
to and a measure of the degree of man's departure from the true norm
of his nature. This acknowledgment of aberrancy and aberration is the
culmination. The fruit of the tree of knowledge reveals good and evil,
and the only function of true wisdom is to bring sin to light, shed it,
and leave us better. There is no true knowledge that is ethically
indifferent. This is the psychic quarry where Paul wrought best and
deepest, and few of Jesus' precepts suggest so much beyond and above
the range of our present knowledge of the soul. If in some respects we
seem abreast of Jesus in our insights, here in the psychology of sin we
have a vast deal yet to learn, and the best of us can only dimly feel
that in this direction Jesus far transcends our ken.

52. A man (Luke xii:i3-2i) asked Jesus to tell his brother to divide
his inheritance with him, but Jesus refused, saying, Who made me a
judge and divider for you? Beware of covetousness, for a man's fife
does not consist in an abundance of the things he hath. A rich man's
ground yielded bountifully and he thought, What shall I do to provide
room to store my harvests? I wfil tear down my barns and build
greater, and when these are full I will say to my soul, Soul, you have
much goods laid up for many years. Eat, drink and be merry. But
God said to him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shaU be required of thee,

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 585
and then whose shall these goods be? Such a man lays up treasure
for himself, and is not rich toward God.

The fate of the foolish rich is here set forth. His foUy consists in
planning selfish enjoyment when death is unwittingly at hand. In his
castle-building revery he forgets the need of God's constant grace.
In planning to secure and enlarge his possessions for his personal en
joyment he forgets the Lord of life and death. This warning against
greed is not specifically Christian. This large owner had no thought of
others, for he was a hard-hearted egoist and thought not of laying up
treasure in heaven. The gem of this otherwise aesthetically homely
parable is the soliloquy. In fact there is nothing to indicate that rich
men just planning to secure their future enjoyment are prone to die;
and yet retiring from active affairs to a hfe of idle self-indulgence is
always hygienicafly a very critical step. To say, "I will henceforth
impupate myself and live for personal pleasure," is moral death. Per
haps aU who do this deliberately ought, in the interests of the general
social well-being, to die at that point, for mere luxury makes men para
sites. A sybarite is a drone in the social hive, and in the social
economic order is ripe for death. Such a resolution is unintentional
suicide. Otherwise God might have demanded not his soul but his
property that night. In the sense of this parable all who hoard for
selfish enjoyment are fools compassing their own destruction, for true
life is love and service to others.

53. There was a rich man, Dives (Luke xvi: 19-31), clothed in
purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously, and there was a beggar,
Lazarus, full of sores, which a dog licked as he lay at the gate, desiring
only the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table. Both died, and the
plutocrat in hell saw Lazarus in heaven, cried for mercy, and implored
Father Abraham for a drop of water on his finger-tip to cool his
parched tongue, for he was tormented in the flames. But the patriarch
replied, You had in your life good things and Lazarus evfi, and now a
great gulf which no man can cross is fixed between us. Then, at least,
said Dives, Send some one to warn my five brethren lest they come to
this place of torment. No, replied Abraham. They have Moses and
the prophets and should hear them. But, said Dives, If one goes to
them from the dead they will surely repent. Not so, said Abraham.
If they hear not Moses and the prophets they would not be persuaded
by one from the dead.

586 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
The awful imagery of this parable is branded on the very soul of
Christendom. This world wfil be turned topsyturvy in the next, its
pleasure will become agony, and its glory shame. The lowest shall be
supremely exalted, and the last become first. Rewards of this earth
bring penalty in the next, and the very lowest is there supreme. AU is
fatally fixed beyond all hope of further change. There is no intimation
that Dives had any guilt save that of being rich, or that Lazarus had
any merit save poverty, unless Dives ought to have known and relieved
the suffering of Lazarus; but the next world is represented as simply one
of complemental reversal. Wealth here is repaid with hell there, and
pauperism with heaven. There is not the slightest mitigation, and
all probation has passed. Literature abounds in descriptions of an
au rebours world where plebeians become princes, kitchen drudges have
all the wealth of fairyland, diamonds are stones and stones diamonds.
But these are usually thought mere dreams or fancies. Nietzsche
describes not only a transvaluation but a retrovaluation of worths,
and Plato sketched a counter-world where aU laws are reversed and
time goes backward, or where men worship what they have burned
and burn what they erstwhile worshipped, where truth becomes a lie
and a lie truth, the hated are loved and the loved hated, the devfi is
God's ape, the witches' sabbath parodies the sacraments, and hell is a
reflex of heaven. Contrasts and antitheses are tonics and stimulants.
Here all this counterparting or dualism in both philosophy and the
imagination is focussed down to a single scene setting this world over
against the next. No one can doubt that the general view here illus
trated has had the greatest social efficacy, and has not only made the
hardest lots tolerable, but has provoked asceticism and every form cf
self-stupration. Hardship and pain have been wooed as muses, that
by paralleling the state of Lazarus his fortune also might be ensured.
Misery otherwise utterly unendurable has been borne, and instead of
arousing reactions that nothing could resist has found vent in visions of
compensating joy and glory. Crafty oppressors, temporal and spirit
ual, have used this reciprocity formula to cajole their victims. When a
future of compensation has been doubted, and men have even begun to
think this life perhaps the be-all and death the end-all, society has
undergone its most radical revolution as a result, and priests and piety
have fared hardest of all because felt to be arch-deluders. If death
were the close, or the next world only a prolongation of this under
similar circumstances or something yet more pallid like that of the
Homeric shades, how different would have been the history of Chris
tianity, how weakened the sense that justice rules the universe ! With
out heaven and heU the morafity of aU those ages when the chief motive
of virtue was to escape punishment would have suffered, though per
haps such rewards and punishments have made men purblind to the

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 587
inner oracle and to the old Stoic ethics that virtue is its own reward
and should be foUowed if it lead to the inferno. We should have had
no Dante or Milton. Jesus far more than any other developed and
gave the world a moral heaven and heU. He made them definite, real,
longer, more durable, and more important than anything mundane,
and if he had done nothing else than organize all the fragmentary
superstitions of a life beyond the grave so as to utilize their combined
power most effectively for good, what incalculable service to the race
so long as and wherever this superstition exists ! This sublime frescoing
of the hereafter had most to do with bringing the barbarians into the
Church. By itself alone it is perhaps the most stupendous work ever
achieved by an ethico-refigious genius. It has quickened sluggish
consciences that nothing else could touch. No one who knows the
human heart can have patience with those who, because there are a
few pure and lofty souls that can live out the best within them without
the aid of hope or fear for the future, argue that more harm than good
was done by using these immense powers to stimulate righteousness
and repress evfi. Even a fear of fire scorching and crackling the flesh
is needed for moral degenerates and perverts, and in aU men the power
of the boundless future and the long-ranged view of life, the standpoint
of the hereafter, are aU the better developed for this drastic pedagogy
and aU the traditions and theosophemes that are grouped about it.
With all our boasted science the best of us are still more or less in the
nursery-tale stage as to ethical values, and if these were only the black
man and the goblins of childhood both their deterrent and stimulating
influences would be in the right direction. What the world most needs
is a fixed and indissoluble association in our very neurons between
sin and shuddering horror, so that the nerves shall tingle and crepitate
when we do or contemplate wrong. This is to fear aright. It is to
have the strongest of all human impulsions, the dread of pain and dis
ease, directed toward its chief cause. For the ethical psychologist the
place or state of future weal or woe based on rewards and penalties is
not a question of objective reality but of subjective need, and because
he cannot doubt the latter he holds with regard to these beliefs a Kan
tian view that they do truly exist, since the practical reason is higher
than the theoretical. If the latter doubts, the former, which is a
higher tribunal, affirms, their unassailable reality for the will, and in
this form they should be preached from the pulpit in new and stronger
terms.1 Of these fifty-three parables, three seem marked by ignorance or
error, viz., (7) what enters the body does not defile; (11) the eye filling
'See also C. G. Griffenhoofe: "The Unwritten Sayings of Christ." Cambridge, 1903, 128 p.; and especially L. E.
Browne: "The Parables of the Gospels in the Light of Modern Criticism." Cambridge, 1913, p. 91.

588 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the body with light; (48) the mustard seed becoming the greatest of
trees; but still the meaning is clear and the moral remains unaffected.
Some are obvious, if not ahnost commonplace, admonitions of ordinary
worldly wisdom; like (6) the bfind cannot lead the blind; (14) a tree
is known by its fruit; (24) counting the cost before building; (26) agree
ing with an enemy betimes; (27) taking the lowest place. Dearest of
all adown the centuries are perhaps (35) the prodigal; (50) the good
Samaritan. The danger of being too late is especiaUy stressed in (40)
the ten virgins, in (53) the rich man and Lazarus, and in several others.
The efficacy of importunity stands out in (30) the friendly neighbour
roused from bed; (31) the woman and the unjust judge. The largest
number, however, are based on or connected with the rights and duties of
tenants and landlord, e. g., (2) duty of unthanked servants; (13) serving
two masters; (18) the loyal and the disloyal tenant; (19) sitting
up late for the master of the house; (32) the usurer and the two
debtors; (33) the pitiless servant; (37) the defiant tenant; (43) the
unjust householder; while still others refer more or less to this re
lation. This group of parables suggests from its closely related themes that
Jesus' ideal in youth and in early manhood may have been that of
being the lord of a manor; perhaps inviting guests to a feast; loaning
out talents according to ability, with a definite theory concerning pay
and the eleventh-hour labourers; abhorring usurers; counting the cost
beforehand; demanding an undivided and also an absolute service;
wise enough to build on a rock, and not on the sand; shrewd enough to be
reticent in purchasing a treasure found in a field; interested in tares and
wheat; an owner of sheep; pleasingly conscious that seed once sown
grew while he slept; also with knowledge of the different kinds of
ground; pleased when the fig-tree budded as a herald of spring, and
condemnatory if it was barren; piqued if his dinner invitations were
refused; issuing orders to brothers, one of whom obeyed and one of
whom did not; welcoming a vagabond son back; yielding like Aris
totle's magnanimous man to wise importunity; heafing up quarrels
quickly before lawyers and courts magnified them; using precautions
against thieves; loaning money wisely; leading a life open as day, and
with nothing in it to conceal, etc.
On this view the parables, which are so authentic and reveal to
us so much of the soul of Jesus, suggest that his youthful dream was

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 589
to command servants, stewards, tenants; to be a master thrifty yet
kind, wise in building, just yet sympathetic — in short, a noble country
gentleman, a position Bismarck later called the finest on earth for the
development of all-sided qualities of manhood, and the fuUest of op
portunity for the highest culture, the choicest virtues, and the greatest
usefulness. Something like this was very likely the role Jesus came to
fill in his own youthful reveries, and he hved sympathetically into this
adolescent imagination far more fully than into any other. On this
view, in the parables we see how he had idealized the opportunities and
duties of some such position in fife. This is borne out not only by the
theme but by the lesson and meaning of the parables. Now as the
"visions splendid" by which the youth had been attended were de
layed in their realization and finally recognized as impossible of at
tainment, two diametricaUy opposite tendencies gradually supervened
in Jesus' soul as a natural and inevitable consequence of his unconquer
able and aggressive spirit. On the one hand he came to hate the rich
who could have realized such ideals but whose interests had grown sor
did; who failed even to see these opportunities, and who seemed to him
both culpable and despicable because instead of making the very best,
they made the worst use of their means. On the other hand, he came
to aggrandize his dreams of living as a great country lord into being
the head of a far greater Kingdom extending over all Israel, in which
ideal conditions should prevail — a conception which the events of his
life caused him to vastate and to sublimate until it began to take the
features of a terrestrial if not a cosmic and heavenly Kingdom, partly
realized on earth under his leadership. Thus, in a word, we find in the
parables a psychoanalytic key to the secret of the evolution of Jesus'
idea of the Kingdom, which was later developed as the Church visible
and invisible. All this the world would have lost had he achieved in
fact the day-dream of his youth. This processional of genius, doubtless
more or less unrealized by him, he has unconsciously revealed in the
parables, the theme of which thus constitutes an unwitting confession
on his part as well as a series of admonitions. As prophets found their
inspiration in days of calamity for which they over-compensated by
portraying the glories of the future Zion, so the thwarted and repressed
ambitions of Jesus' youth and manhood surged back and up into the
inward realization of a new theocracy, and even a new paradise, in
which his reign would be as benign as it was sovereign, and where

59© JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
justice and mercy would be supreme. To this Kingdom nearly all the
parables directly or indirectly relate.
It was a kingdom and not a democracy that Jesus would found,
and most modern Christian sociahsts of the Rauschenbusch type
seem quite to forget this. The pofitical, industrial, social, and eccle
siastical institutions, as Jesus conceived them, were hierarchies strat
ified into ranks or classes from the prophet, priest, or king, down to the
meanest and most menial servant whose sole obligation it is to obey
and who has no claim even for thanks. Men could take, or were
assigned, places high or low. Jesus never entirely outgrew the patri
archal idea. The head of his Kingdom was no constitutional monarch,
but more like Plato's wise and good tyrant, or a father to all his sub
jects. AU its citizens must love and serve one another, and be more
than just, that is, merciful, to one another. Democracy existed before
Christianity, and so did socialism and even communism. The King
dom of the parables is no republic, though the fraternal bond of sym
pathy must exist not only between equals of the same station or caste
but between all, high and low alike. If Christianity made each in
dividual of transcendent value there remains, nevertheless, an uncal-
culated difference between the value of individuals even where degrees
of merit are the same. Of course, if it is hard to harmonize the three
synoptic Gospels, it is indefinitely harder to harmonize the teachings
of the fifty-three parables. But their general drift and trend is un
mistakable. If in some the Kingdom comes like a convulsion sweeping
all away, in others it comes as gradually and naturaUy as the seed ger
minates. To some institutions it is like dynamite; to others it comes
as rain or fertilizer. So, in our infinitely more complex civilization
there are charitable, philanthropic, reform, and other efforts better
and vaster, and there are also worse tendencies and institutions, than
it ever entered into the heart of Jesus to conceive; but here and now, as
there and then, there are, and should be, both catastrophes and benign
evolution. There are still rank tares fit only for fire, growing with the
wheat, ignorance, and superstition along with science and true culture,
animality beside spontaneous spirituality. But although the perfect
Kingdom as Jesus conceived it is still far from realized, there has been
progress toward it since his day, and therefore the objurgations and
condign sentences he pronounced upon the state of things he knew, it
is only fanaticism or pessimism to apply without qualification to our

THE PARABLES OF JESUS 59*
civilization to-day. Thus Jesus' youthful reveries of an ideal manor
and its feudal lordship and its manifold orders of service, vast as it
came to be in his mind as the months and years of his life went by, and
far vaster yet as the conception of it has since become, have aU attained
reality enough to give the world its most precious hope as it continues
to grow from age to age, although perhaps aeons yet must pass before
it fiUs the earth.

CHAPTER TEN
TEE MIRACLES
The higher criticism and miracles — Why Jesus became a miracle
worker — (A) The healing miracles — Their technique and conditions —
Their results — The first heafing — Blindness and its symbolism — Deaf
mutes — The lame — The withered hand — Dropsy — The epileptic at
the synagogue — The pool of Bethesda — Possession — The demoniac
in Gadara — Allegorization — Leprosy — Malchus's ear — (B) Resurrec
tions — (a) Jairus's daughter and the youth of Nain as adolescent —
(b) Lazarus — (c) Jesus' own resurrection — (C) Cures at a distance —
(D) Nature miracles — (a) Cana and the symbofism of water made
wine — (b) The miraculous draught of fishes — (c) The feeding — (d)
Stilling the tempest — The psychology and pedagogy of the miracles
from the standpoint of geneticism — The laminated soul — The miracles
as sarcophagi.AS TO the documentary evidence of miracles, the oldest Christian
/-% writings are the only undisputed epistles of the chief missionary,
"*• Paul, to the churches he founded at Corinth and Galilee and to
the Petrine Church at Rome. These four seem to have been written from
twenty-one to twenty-seven years after Jesus' death. Second comes
Mark, thirty-five to forty years after the Crucifixion, which was
compiled from earlier, chiefly Petrine, traditions. Third, and at
about the same date, come the logia, lost but partially reconstructed,
and containing chiefly Jesus' sayings. Fourth comes Matthew, 70 to
100 a. d., based on Mark and on the logia, but adding some new ma
terial. Fifth come two treatises written between 70 and 75 a. d., by a
Greek disciple of Paul. The first is the Gospel of Luke, which sets out
to be more complete, exhaustive, and scientific than those that had pre
ceded, and the other is Acts, containing events from the narrow circle
as Jesus left it up to the climax in the establishment of the Church at
Rome, which utilized at least one older source. Sixth came a " mystical
and devotional treatise on the Incarnation thrown into biographic
form," which we know as the Gospel of Saint John, written probably
SQ2

THE MIRACLES 593
soon after the end of the first Christian century, or some seventy years
after Jesus' death. All the Gospels were thus derived and edited
compilations written from an older source (which can be traced back to
probably from twenty-one to thirty-two years after Jesus' death),
while our first three Gospels took form fifteen or eighteen years later,
except John, which came about a quarter of a century later still.
As to the oldest source, Paul does not even allude to any miracles
done by Jesus. The then-unwritten Gospel, as he knew it, consisted
almost entirely of the story of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus.
He knew fittle else concerning Jesus' life or teaching, nearly all of
which was developed later. His detachment from this source was due
to his absorption in the events of the last week of Jesus' career. The
Gospels, giving Jesus' previous fife, were from his point of view an
afterthought. The supernatural elements Paul believed in were the
gifts of the Holy Spirit, wisdom, knowledge, faith, heafing, prophecy,
and tongues, more or less correlated with the ecclesiastical offices.
Thus the authority that goes back nearest to Jesus' own day contains
nothing more miraculous than faith healing, exorcism, etc.
As to Mark, whfie it gives more growth and unity, the chronology
and selection of incidents are both somewhat perverse. The Church
preceded the Gospels, and hence even Mark is more apologetic and
theological than historic. Before he wrote, the word "gospel" meant
a message to faith. Mark consists largely of Petrine traditions. Its
author was probably John Mark, who came into contact with Jesus
only during Passion Week, and whose house was afterward a meeting-
place for the disciples. He also accompanied Paul on his first mission
ary tour, and he very likely came under Peter's influence later. Under
the latter's influence he extended the life of Jesus backward beyond
Paul's ken, and most of these additions could have been and probably
were supplied by Peter. Thus we have in Mark two parts, first the
events of the last week, which John Mark very probably saw at first
hand and from which Paul started, and secondly the rival Petrine
reminiscences of the previous career of Jesus. The miracle stories
belong to the latter, and centre about Jesus' early period in Galilee,
which is more obscure.
While some still dispute the existence of the above lost source,
called "Q" (Quelle) or the logia, the Oxford students have sanctioned
it, and Harnack has even attempted to reconstruct it in a document of

594 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
nearly two hundred verses, chiefly made up of Jesus' teachings. Be
sides these it contains only six incidents of which two are miracles,
viz., the heafing of the centurion's servant and the casting out of the
dumb devil. Thus it is about as free from miracles as is the latter
part of Mark; and both the above miracles are those of healing al
though one seems to be by a most mysterious action at a distance,
which anti-supernaturalists think a coincidence and cite paraUels.
Matthew used our Mark and "Q," and also added other material.
Here detailed criticism shows that the only evidence of most of Mat
thew's miracles is Mark, and there are some traces, though very slight,
of a tendency to exaggerate these. What he adds is least trustworthy.
Luke claims to have been written by an educated gentile compan
ion of Paul, and marks a new stage of tradition. He assumes a new
method, for he was not an eyewitness, and refers to the failure of
other attempts by those who did not know Jesus at first hand. To this
physician-evangelist Jesus is less Messiah than saviour and healer of
the body and soul, and thus to the miraculous tales he brings no new
evidence but various new motives. He does not omit any previous
records on grounds of incredulity or lack of evidence, but amplifies
and strongly emphasizes nearly all the supernatural events, and most
of those which he adds are extremely marvellous and rest on hearsay
and tradition as they had been developing for about twenty-five years.
John cares less for the facts than for their meaning. If the
Gospel that bears his name was not written by him in his old age, re
viving and embellishing old memories, it was doubtless composed by
one or more authors who reached the facts through their faith rather
than vice versa as with the synoptists. The farther we go back from
the Passion Week, which has no miracles, the more miracles we find.
In John, Jesus himself is miraculous. His story is of the Incarnation
of a preexistent divine person who as God's vicegerent had created
the world that he now visits. He could supernaturally read the
thoughts of all; he vanishes or passes mysteriously through crowds;
he is a stranger to and quite aloof from the Jews. The divinity of the
Johannin Jesus did not depend on supernatural birth, and so this is not
mentioned. The judgment, too, is not impending, but came with the
advent of the Paraclete. Of historic crises or developmental stages,
such as the baptism, temptation, transfiguration, etc., which are marked
in the synoptists, there is no trace; but Jesus is quite divine from the

THE MIRACLES 595
begirming, and is thus independent of time and space. John's seven
miracles are saturated with symbolism.1
The above represents in the barest and most summary outline the
results of the higher criticism in their chief bearings upon the problem
of miracles. It is precisely here, where these studies end, that the
problem of geneticism begins, which is how and by what motivation
did these few actual cures which Jesus performed come to be magnified
into the prodigies recorded by the Evangelists, why are they so clung
to, and what is their positive value and meaning to us? The higher
criticism only informs, but does not edify. The religious instincts
and needs can never be satisfied with negations. We accept all the
real results of criticism, but charge it with blindness to deeper meanings.
Thus religious psychology comes to the defense of miracles. They
made the fortune of Christianity and are still precious to believers.
Despite their historic falsity they have a high significance for piety
and also for psychology, for they are made, warp and woof, out of
soul-stuff and are thus in a sense both more valid and valuable than if
they had been actuaUy performed. What seemed their negation thus
reaUy rescues them to higher purposes, and from this standpoint they
are invested with a new and hitherto undreamed-of truth. AU re
figions have miracles, which are the dearest children of faith. Even
the wildest of those in Brewer's "Comprehensive Dictionary"2 are
psychologically explicable and constitute valuable data for our science.
But those that evolved in the early decades of Christianity are unique
and in a class by themselves, because, from the psychogenetic view
point, false as they are, they are by no means mere creatures of imag
ination, nor products of superstition. They take us to the shrine of
the inner life of Jesus, on which every one of them sheds light, and
without which the world would never have realized much of the best
that he was, did, and said. Let us, then, approach our problem by a
few general considerations.
It was a peculiarity of the Jews that any great leader to be ac
cepted must accredit himself by working miracles. Thus the great
men of old had done. Thus only, too, could Jesus ever meet the popu
lar ideals of a Messiah, or fit the specifications of prophecy as his
biographers had a veritable passion for making him seem to do, often
'London, igor, 582 p.
This is well epitomized for our purposes in J. M. Thompson: "The Miracle* of the New Testament." London,
igir, 236 P.

596 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
in very trivial details. Not only the multitude but the disciples again
and again "desired mighty works" as a sign; but if they had not be
lieved that he did miracles, it is very doubtful whether they would have
recognized him as sent from God. In the first two so-caUed tempta
tions he seems to have considered and definitely rejected this function;
but the Pharisees chaUenged him to do them, the populace awaited
them, and even the disciples assumed that he would do them. There
were no hospitals or asylums, and the sick were aU about, while the
troublesome times preceding had produced, we learn, an exceptional
number of neurotics and psychotics, so that every characteristic type
of mental aberration was constantly met with. Every one assumed
that a rehgious teacher must also exercise the functions of a healer.
To this end the patients and their friends constantly importuned
Jesus, while his closer followers were intensely prone to ascribe the
natural stimulus of his presence, touch, or handclasp, or even the cases
where the betterment was slight or temporary, to supernatural healing
power. This Jesus deprecated, and obviously sought to avoid the reputa
tion of being a mere curer of the body. He often refused to attempt
marvels, sometimes with evident resentment, and rebuked the spirit
that demanded it. He told those who thought themselves cured to tell
no man, commanded the evil spirits that would proclaim him to hold
their peace, escaped when pressed by the crowd who sought cures, said
to them who thought he had healed them, with equal truth and mod
esty, " Thy faith hath made thee whole." But he could not escape the
superstition of his day. He must either accept the reputation of the-
urgic power or else abandon his divine mission. This seems the alter
native, although we do not know how clearly and sharply it was
present to Jesus' soul. How far the r61e of miracle-doer was forced on
him by the pedagogic necessity of his day, and how far his intimates
and biographers misrepresented him, we can never know. Perhaps
the latter was true of the physical and more utterly unbelievable
miracles, and the former of the more credible therapeutic marvels.
To do the latter he was of course strongly impelled by sympathy with
suffering and distress, and he also very clearly saw that these were the
best symbols of just the spiritual work he sought to do, viz., to open the
eves of the spiritually blind and the ears of the deaf, make the lame
walk, and bring health to the sick, if not life to the dead. Perhaps

THE MIRACLES 597
he even learned to use some of the most fabulous nature marvels as
cribed to him as parables, set in scene object-lesson-wise, of higher
truths. But if the repute of a wonder-worker made his success in his day
and through the earlier centuries of Christianity, now we have to see
and realize that the religion of Jesus is losing its hold upon the cul
tured world precisely because of the deeds imputed to him that made
his early foUowers accept him. This crass literal interpretation is to
day the chief handicap that prevents the acceptance of his teaching
or the admiration of his life. Our modern mind cannot worship with
out subtle psychological, even if unconscious, reservations, not to say
stultification, a being whose claim rests upon multiplying loaves of
bread, changing water to wine, walking on the water, raising the dead
to life, healing instantly a group of lepers at a distance by a word, etc.,
for such things belong to the shadow-land of fiction and not to that
of historic fact. The future of Christianity demands the emphatic
and authoritative repudiation of such encumbering infantilism, neces
sary and inevitable as this was at the beginning of our era. Miracles
wfil perhaps always have a high value as illustrations of the state and
disposition of the mind of those nearest to Jesus and their successors.
They are also serviceable as types of higher psychic meaning. But
even the latter cannot be seen and felt until every vestige of the credu
lity that accepts them in any sense or degree, as literal, physical events,
is purgated from the soul and our faith thereby made purer and clearer.
Nothing would sweep away so many modern repugnances to Chris
tianity as this complete katharsis of theurgy. None sin so grievously
against the true spirit of the person and doctrine of Jesus as those who
champion the effete orthodoxy that thus materializes the spiritual.
(A) The Healing Miracles. — P. Dearmer enumerates forty mir
acles of healing by Jesus in the Gospels. Of these twenty-one were
recorded by one Evangelist, eight by two, eleven by three, and none by
all. Matthew reports twenty-one, six of which are peculiar to him;
Mark records eighteen, three of which are his only; Luke twenty-four,
eight of which are peculiar to him; and the only four by John are
mentioned by him alone. Keim's enumeration does not differ very
much from this. As to the genetic order of the miracles it would be
sad if we must indeed abandon all knowledge. The Gospels differ
very widely in their sequences, and some writers now, according to

598 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the fashion of certain ages in the past, have selected one or another
Evangelist as the norm. Some group them by an artificial system that
either ignores or disaUows the historic process. Miracle cycles, too, are
sometimes centred about the Galfiean or Jerusalemic periods. We can
distinguish by various attendant circumstances some four of them as
early, and some six or eight as late in Jesus' public career ; and on the cycle
theory perhaps the greatest of them centre about the second of the per
iods, perhaps near its end. The Cana and Capernaum miracles, which the
three synoptists placed first, many regard asparts of an artificial program.
The records in those Gospels supposed to have been written last
do not suggest a gleaning of miracles hitherto unrecorded, but give
abundant evidence that the miraculous element was on the increase.
The same event is elaborated later, as if during the period between
the first and the last even of the synoptists, the taste for the super
natural was growing. Thus, as we pass from Matthew or Mark to
Luke and John, the demands on our faith are augmented. The
diseases are of longer duration, and graver, the cure is wrought on more
persons, and sometimes the point of death seems to have become death
itself. The healing methods are more circumstantially recorded and
thus often made more mysterious. Haupt gives an exquisite case of
the growth of a Mohammedan miracle four times recorded. In the
first the prophet at a certain point in. his story rests under a leafy tree.
In the second record, years later, he stands under it as if expectant of
something supernatural. In the third AUah led him to the tree, whfie
in the fourth he caused it to grow for the purpose. The many discrep
ancies in the parallel records respecting detail in the Gospels are very
suggestive of growth, and yet the unanimity that is dominant furnishes
now one of the chief arguments for a common source older than any of
our Gospels. There is repeated allusion to a large number of un
recorded miracles, but if the source were unlimited there is reason to
believe that those recorded would not so often be the same. Recent
criticism holds that the actual authors of our Gospels were themselves
in no case witnesses to the mighty works they describe. Some of them,
at least, wrote after this source had for some time been dry. The double
and triple narratives show how very fluctuating was the tradition, so
that in several cases we are left in doubt whether the record is of the
same or of different events. A few miracles are perhaps figures of
speech, or parables taken literally, like the draft of fishes, or the threat

THE MIRACLES 599
against the barren fig-tree which lata: appears as the stupendous mir
acle of its being withered at a distance by a curse. Some moral pre
cepts may have been developed into a visible description, as if Isaiah's
prophecy of the healing of the blind, deaf, lame, lepers, were factual-
ized. Symbolic picture-stories undoubtedly exist, but not to an
extent to justify Herder's belief that all the marvels were pictures of
ideas. We have (i) sometimes a material event as a starting point,
core, or minimum of truth at its lowest potence. Je~us often depre
cates the lust for sensuous marvels because he wishes his truth to attain
a higher power, and the difference of the spiritual meaning in the dif
ferent synoptists accounts for some of their discrepancies. Thus we
have (2) the meanings which are to be embodied, the stilling of the
storm, e. g., by the captain who will bring the ship of the Church into a
safe port, the blindness which is really of the heart, not of the eyes.
(3) Another germ from which some of the miracles were developed is
plainly traceable to the Old Testament, while others sprang from the
psychic life of Jesus himself, who healed from sheer compassion. (4)
Heafing was one of the chief functions of the traditional Messiah and
one of the signs by which he was to be known.
One centre of intellectual interest is how Jesus effects his healings.
He often touches or lays hands upon the sick, lifts them up, anoints,
uses saliva, puts his finger in the ear of the deaf mute, prescribes wash
ing or bathing, takes his place at the side of or has him stand forth,
inquires as if making a diagnosis, prescribes rest and diet. Paulus
thinks he had all the medical skfil of the Essenes and used their rem
edies. Others hold conversely that his reluctance to heal was due
to his conscious lack of knowledge of the art and still others have urged
that he yielded to pressure and acquired later some hasty knowledge
of it. Venturini assumed that the disciples carried about a portable
medicine chest. Some of Jesus' patients or their friends deemed man
ual contact especiaUy efficacious, and it is the later records that amplify
methods. Besides using the rationalists' herbs and tinctures Weiss
thinks that Jesus was charged to an unusual extent not merely with
animal but a higher personal magnetism of a peculiar kind, and de
velops the theory that the progressive loss of this by his cures, his men
tal activities, and his anxieties, caused his death. Gutsmuths thinks
Jesus had a power of voluntarily transferring nervous force in some
kind. Renan thinks some of the miracles deliberate jugglery justified

600 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
by their moral or pedagogic end, while Rothe postulated some as yet
unknown but nevertheless natural force.
More potent than all these physical therapeutic agencies, unless
it be touch alone, was the power of the spoken word: "Be thou
clean"; "as thou hast believed"; "arise and walk"; "come forth";
"thou art loosed"; "stretch forth thy hand"; "take up thy bed and
walk"; "thou art made whole"; "go in peace"; "sin no more";
"thy faith hath saved thee"; to the filthy spirit, "come out of him."
Thus there was no set formula, but aU these phrases show intense
confidence and authority on Jesus' part, and this naturaUy inspired
assurance or faith on the part of the patients. Sometimes it seems
as if the whole energy of his soul went forth in such words, motivated
by his indomitable faith in himself and his mission. This is more
apparent in the later writings, indicating growth in the belief of some
specific magical power. The word alone without physical manipula
tion is more common in Jesus' heafing miracles than in those of the
ancient prophets.
Again, cure presupposes not only a strong desire for it on the pa-
\ tient's part, but an intense belief that it will be attained. The sick
* crowd about Jesus or are brought by friends. They beg, cry out, faU
down, or their relatives entreat for them. The centurion asked for
only a word in absentia. Faith is shown in the many forms that this
desire takes and is measured by the obstacles that are overcome. One
is let down through the roof. The blind will not be silenced, but cry
out yet louder. The woman for whom physicians could do nothing
is certain Jesus can heal her. So great became bis repute and fame
that assurance in advance may have preformed or initiated the restora-
ftive work. On his part the chief demand was just this intense faith.
["Do ye believe that I can do this? " "Be it according to thy faith. "
Where it is faint he encourages it in the germ by promises, and where
it is absent he reproves. In faith on the patient's part he often sees
the complete and sufficient cause of the cure, and without it he some
times can or will do nothing. Like the physical agencies, it is, of
course, possible that where not mentioned it is implied or presup
posed. In one remarkable case he heals by forgiving sins. If the
omission to mention faith is more frequent in the later Gospels, this
may imply a growing belief in Jesus' own initiative, as if the human
cooperation were increasingly felt to be subordinate, or as if to heal

THE MIRACLES 601
without it meant more glory to the physician. This is the trend most
marked in John. Faith of friends is often effective. The demoniacs
felt instant alarm as if dimly conscious from afar of Jesus' power, and
were both attracted and aroused to a high pitch of excitement by his
very presence. They not only leave aU activity to him but abjure
him to depart, so that instead of cooperation of faith there is here
intense resistance to be overcome, and yet there are traces of schizo
phrenia, for while the evil spirit that possessed them objected to the
cure, the remnant of sanity that remained in them not only believed
but desired it.
The result of Jesus' healing activity is instantaneous as weU as
sometimes telepathic. Cures were usuaUy signalized by immediate
and sometimes intense physical activity, and also by praising and proc
lamation. This of course intensified the impressiveness of the miracle;
and if what we know of the effect of psychic trauma and shock detracts
from the credibility of some of the cures, it certainly adds greatly to
that of others. AU the Evangelists imply that such events had never
been known before, although they do not, Keim urges, intimate that
they were in any case opposed to the unknown laws of man's higher
nature. They were not investigators; and if they were credulous,
this quality was the outcrop of just that befief that worked the cure.
Thus the defects and exaggerations of the record permit our doubt as
well as our faith. These writers used their reason upon their second
hand, but to their mind well-authenticated, data on which their con
clusions were based. While Jesus certainly preferred to heal the soul
rather than the body, he perhaps accommodated to the demands of
those about him to be healed of diseases, because of a growing insight |
on his part into the closeness of the bond between the psyche and the!
soma, growing thus more completely into the sphere of interest of
those about him. There has been much but vain discussion whether
or not the records of his words and doctrines are more or less distorted
than those of his deeds. Some have urged that these great works made
the Incarnation more complete than if he had preached more and done
less; but surely biographers are less liable to go astray in reporting
the things done by those of whom they write than in setting forth their
undocumented opinions, because in the latter the subjective factor
would inevitably have more scope.
Padolean gathered many instances to show that a pure and

6o2 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
devoted life of sanctity not only has always been thought to have great
therapeutic power, but in his opinion reaUy has it, and to prove that a
moraUy perfect life heals by infection quite apart from the natural
influence of a magisterial wfil upon an oppressed one, and independently
of any theory such as that the psyche is so bound up with the soma that
to cure spiritual distempers the body must be first made whole. If
faith meant to Jesus a summons that he could not resist, and if he had
to heal by an inner necessity of his nature, as we are often told, then
why is he represented as healing now with an almost Buddhistic calm
and imperturbability, at another time as if with an outbreak of rage
against Satan and his morbific agencies, and yet again as heafing with
sighs and groans as if beside himself, or in a nervous paroxysm, or
making an intense agonistic effort? It is entirely impossible to cor
relate these differences of his attitude with differences in the nature of
the disease or with the degree of illness of his patients. Moreover,
now he represents his cures as God's work, and again as so genuinely
human that his followers could even surpass him. He was as far as
possible from any consistent theory or method, and we do not need to
adduce Hume's theory that a miracle from its very nature is incapable
of being proved because the best possible human testimony is less
infallible than nature's laws. The evidence of the Gospel records of
some of the miracles is not only impugnable but suspicious from every
point of view. So flimsy, indeed, is it that it offers only a very poor
pretext for the wish to befieve to gratify itself, and yet this desire is
often so strong, especiaUy toward healing miracles, that even a hint
suffices. Furthermore, the accounts of Jesus' healing activities are
given a somewhat higher degree of plausibility in recent decades by
psychotherapeutic studies, so that it is safer to assume in some of
these instances a nucleus of fact than it is in the nature miracles.
We now pass to the discussion of the chief individual miracles grouped
into classes.1 The First Healing. — With four of his disciples then chosen, Jesus
proceeded, directly after the temptation, to the home of Peter and
Andrew, where the mother-in-law of the former lay fil of a fever, which
most exegetes who have ventured any conjecture think probably, owing
to the nature of the country and the modern health conditions there,
•C. W. Waddle: "Miracles of Healing." Am. Jour. Psychol., rgog, pp. 110-268 (with an excellent bibliography to
date). As a typical modern cure see Flournoy: "line Mystique Moderne (Documents pour la Psychologie Reugieuse)."
Arch, it Psychol., 1915, T.IJ, 224 P.

THE MIRACLES 603
was malarial. Matthew says that Jesus went in and touched or took
her hand in greeting, and she arose and ministered as housewife to her
guests. Matthew's narrative is simple, human, and natural, the
"cure" unintentional, and the result perhaps a little surprising to
Jesus himself. The bystanders thought it marvellous, and the impres
sion it made on them reflected into his own mind may have given him
his first sense of power as a healer. The credulity of the town folk
grew to a most embarrassing degree that day. Even the other Gospels
show the beginnings of mythic accretion and elaboration. Luke and
Mark add various items, e. g., of the guests. Jesus was told about the
invalid, his aid was besought, the fever was said to be great, he rebuked
the disease, lifted her up; the cure is said to be immediate. The later
recorders evidently thought, as the Church has since done, that this
was a miracle, and so very likely did the four companions of Jesus;
but it is only honest candour and not carping to remember how many
persons, and especially housekeepers, have responded to sudden calls
made upon them as hostesses, to entertain distinguished people, and
that whfie so doing they have forgotten aU sense of filness. This
woman knew, perhaps, that this was the master her son-in-law and his
brother were to follow, and she naturaUy wished to send them off from
this parting visit with pleasant memories, for there would be time
enough to rest and recuperate when they were gone. Moreover, the
very presence of the hero of the hour, as Jesus certainly was that day,
and especiaUy the impressiveness of his magnetic presence in itself —
such things are often the best medicine. And, again, there was the
added stimulus of an approaching throng.
As the sun was setting there were brought to Jesus at this humble
home all the possessed and those with diverse other filnesses, and aU
the town gathered; and Mark says he healed many of diverse diseases
and cast out many devils. Matthew says he healed aU with his word,
while Luke says he laid on his hands and healed every one, and many
from whom devils were cast out acknowledged that their healer was
Christ the Son of God. None remained fil in that region that night.
Matthew even adds that thus a prophecy might be fulfilled to the
effect that he took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses. This idea
of prophecy-fiilfilment is, of course, always suspicious because Jesus'
feeling that he was fulfilling ancient predictions or decrees, imparted
to his chroniclers, made them, however unconsciously, tend to fit their

604 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
records to these old vaticinations. In this thrice-attested twilight
clinic we seem to have real healing power, of the genuine effectiveness
of which, in view of so many modern instances, we need not be in
credulous, although, as so often, the impression of it increases with the
successive Gospelographers, Mark, as usual, being most temperate
and Luke most prone to amplify without critical restraint. Mental
healers of many types and theories, Emmanuefists and still better of
late, men like Dejerine, Dubois, Marcinowski, and Rosenbach, have
accredited the power of the soul to cure many of the ailments not
organic or bacteriological, that it can make. Jesus' methods were more
JUke those of a consummate medicine man, being chiefly without set
method, but direct and immediate, and this had been an epoch-
making day in his career which, had we its date, the Church would
perhaps still celebrate. We have probably as yet by no means sounded
all the powers and wonders that the imagination when strongly
appealed to can work in casting off or defying disease, and we have stiU
to lay to heart the lesson that even savage medicine, which this was
far above, though in the same spirit, has yet to teach modern therapy.
FinaUy, of no single day of Jesus' career, save only the second preceding
the Crucifixion, have we so fuU a record, sketchy as it is.
Blindness. — Isaiah represents that the joy of being permitted to
return from the Captivity was so great as to heal diseases. But as
the prophetic program of a return and a re-establishment of the old
glory of Jerusalem was not carried out, such expectation of cures of the
blind, deaf, and lame, as he specifies, was extended on to the day of the
Messiah. Hence, when Jesus was recognized as the Messiah, there
was an accumulated store of expectation which constituted a large
fund of popular faith for him to draw upon. The healing of prophecy
was always and purely symbolically meant, but in the above process
of postponement the conceptions of such cures were more and more
grossly materialized. Hence such structures as the evangelical legends
of healing were ready in a moment by a touch of suggestion to take on a
literal form. Making the bfind see in prophecy always meant spirit
ually, but the Evangelists interpret each miracle of this kind which
they make Jesus perform as fiteral and sensuous. They not only often
lack aU spiritual insight themselves, even where this meaning is obvious,
but sometimes take the very greatest pains that all be made to appear
historical and physical only. In the story of the cure of the blind

THE MIRACLES 605
man of Jericho, Luke, and still more Mark, add picturesque details
which contribute to give it an almost Defoe-like verisimilitude.
Mark, who began this materialization of psychic miracles, saw nothing
else in them; but John, in whom this tendency culminated, sees also
along with the natural a spiritual and ideal meaning. And it was the
force of his conviction of the latter which impelled him to amplify
and historicize the former. Jesus' life is the light of men. To the stiU
incorrigible unbelief of the Jews, Jesus was come that " they which see
not might see, and that they which see might be made blind," thus
equating the two processes although he did not literally put out eyes,
that is, he did no penal miracles of this kind. In the literature of
modern psychoanalysis we do, however, have cases in which mental
blindness is the result of the wfil or wish of the unconscious part of
our nature converted downward into diseases of the eyesight, into which
we take flight. John made his stories as real as testimony knew how
to make anything in his day, because he dimly saw at the same time
that the incidents were supercharged with symbolic meaning.
Thus, that the blind should be made to see is not only one of the^
traits of Isaiah's Messianic age, but it is the very life of the Logos- ,
Christ who was the fight of the world shining into a darkness that com-/
prehended it not. Moreover, from the gnostics to Wundt's paraUel-
ism of perception and apperception, vision is the closest analogue of
knowing. Visual imagery is one of the most inseparable elements of
the higher thought processes, and blind-mindedness involves the grav
est kind of mental imperfection. Thus it was nothing less than a fore
gone conclusion that Jesus, the great and good Lucifer or light-bringer,
would have to be thought a healer of blindness. Indeed, from the
imputation of this power he could not escape, however much he might
desire to do so.
In the first or Bethesda cure of this kind (Mark only) a blind man
was brought to (not sought by) Jesus, imploring him to touch him, in
accordance with the widespread view that healing influences emanated
from famous men. Jesus led him by the hand out of town, whether to
make a better private diagnosis, or to make an unobserved experiment,
or to keep the case a secret one, and spat in his eyes safiva, then thought,
in folklore to have great therapeutic power, instead of being deemed as /
now a prolific source of infection. Even yet safiva is a popular remedy
in many lands for eye troubles. Jesus also laid his hands upon him

606 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
and asked him if he could see. He replied he could only see men as
trees walking. After a second imposition of hands, however, we are
told "he saw every man clearly," and was told to go home and say
nothing of it in town. Rationalists have often objected that a second
imposition of hands meant a limitation of the infinite divine healing
power, and it is a fact that one element in the aggrandized cures which
Jesus is reported to have wrought is that they were immediate and not
like this in stages, as if in order for more effective demonstration.
But the implication was that there were no spectators and that even
knowledge of how the cure was wrought must have come from either
Jesus or his patient. Perhaps, said Paulus, Jesus somehow manipu
lated out of his eyes some very aggravating dust or possibly some mor
bid growth that had rendered vision imperfect; or, says Venturini,
he may possibly have removed a cataract with his fingernail, and per
haps he made two steps in the operation because, as we know now, to
heal too suddenly would have been dangerous.
In the Jericho restoration from blindness recorded by the three
synoptists, Matthew and Mark say there were two, while Luke says
only one blind man, Bartimaeus. Mark says it was on the way to, and
Matthew and Luke say it was on the way from, the city. Mark makes
his blind man arise and come to Jesus at his call, casting off his gar
ments, and there are other discrepancies, although the weight of opinion
is that we have here different versions of the same incident and not
different cures. The blind men cried out to Jesus as son of David, and
continued to do so all the more when told to hold their peace. Jesus
asked what they wanted him to do. They replied, to restore their
sight. Matthew says he pitied them and touched their eyes, while
Mark and Luke say he pronounced them cured by virtue of their faith.
Their sight was immediately restored, and they foUowed Jesus, and the
people glorified God. Here nothing is implied of the nature or cause
of the blindness, or how complete the cure was. This surpasses
Elisha's removal of the penal blindness inflicted on his enemies as a
result of his prayer. These patients not only wanted to be cured but
had faith, neither of which is intimated in the Bethesda case. Ven
turini makes the gratuitous assumption that Jesus healed their eyes
with a tonic lotion he carried to purge away the irritating dust which in
those regions was so detrimental to vision. In both the above cases
there is no hint of symbolic significance. The healing is a purely

THE MIRACLES 607
physical restoration to sight, as marveUous as in the very few modern
instances of restoration from congenital cataract by a surgical opera
tion, although Jesus acts with none of the delicate apparatus or complex
methods of procedure of modern ophthalmology.
As in the series of three resurrection narratives, as we shaU see, so
here John caps the climax by a third which is far more wonderful and
better attested than any other, as if to make aU others superfluous.
This patient is blind from birth. As if referring to an even-then-current
belief that the blindness of the newly born was due to parental infec
tion, Jesus was asked whether in this case the affliction was due to the
sin of his parents or to himself (as if congenital disease could be due
to any sin of its unfortunate victim). Jesus replied that neither had
sinned, but that this patient was born thus in order that in his cure***
the divine power might be shown forth. For this reason the blind j
man was not brought to but discovered by Jesus, who, stating that he «
was the light of the world, made a mixture of clay and spittle and
applied it, telling the man to go wash in the pool of Siloam, which
meant "sent," as he was sent. This he did and came seeing. Here we
are told of no petition to be cured either by the patient or his friends,
but the restitution to sight seems to have been made on Jesus' own
initiative. The scene of this miracle is placed in Jerusalem also on
the Sabbath and as if to make this only case of healing blindness which
John records a perfect and unimpugnable bit of testimony, the restored
patient is made the subject of a formal and rather elaborate hearing.
First came the question of identity. Some said it was the blind beggar
that they had often seen, and others were not sure of anything more
than a resemblance; but he declared, "I am he." Interrogated as to
how he was cured, he replied by telling just what "the man caUed
Jesus" had done, and how he washed and saw. He was asked where
Jesus then was, but did not know. Next he was taken to the Pharisees,
who asked the same and received the same response. They wrangled,
some thinking that the healer could not be of God or he would not have
violated the law by heafing on the Sabbath, while others maintained
that no sinner could perform such a cure. The patient was again asked
what he had to say of his curer, and he replied that he was a prophet.
Doubting whether he had reaUy been born bfind, his parents were
summoned, and they testified first that he was their son and second
that he was born blind. But in this affidavit they averred that they

608 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
did not know who opened his eyes, and advised that the son be asked
for he was of age, because, knowing that any one who confessed Christ
would be excommunicated, they were afraid. They were thus made
unwilling witnesses, and hence all the more credible. Again the pa
tient was called and told to praise God though he had been cured by a
sinner, to which he stoutly replied that whether his healer had been a
sinner or not mattered not to him. He only knew that whereas he was
blind he now saw. Told again to describe his cure, he refused, asking
tauntingly if they intended to become Jesus' disciples. They replied
that they were disciples of Moses, but that he was a disciple of Jesus,
adding that they knew not whence this fellow Jesus was. The patient,
however, averred that Jesus must be the Son of God for since the world
began no one ever heard before of a cure of congenital blindness. For
his temerity in thus taunting them the patient was caUed a sinner and
expeUed. Then Jesus sought him, asking if he believed him to be the
Son of God. " Who is that?" the man asked; and when Jesus replied,
" I am he," the man believed and worshipped. Jesus declared that he
came " that those who see not might see and those which see might be
made blind." "Are we then blind?" asked the Pharisees, and they
were told that if they were blind they would have no sin, but because
they see their sin remains. Then after a Johannin discourse the Jews
are left, still disputing, some saying that he was a devil and mad, and
others saying that a devil could neither discourse as he had just done
nor cure the blind.
These three are the chief and only circumstantiaUy described ac
counts of healing blindness, although Jesus is elsewhere represented as
healing many other cases. The case John reports is the chef-d'oeuvre.
He attests the literalness of the cure far more effectively than the sy
noptists do theirs, but he, unlike them, also sees its symbolic significance.
To any oculist or ophthalmologist any and every such cure is too pre
posterous to be for a moment considered. Neither atrophied centres,
optic tracts, the retina, nor diseases of the anterior media in the bulbus,
can be made normal without long treatment or very delicate operations.
Hysterical or functional blindness like Paul's of course may be overcome
perhaps spontaneously, but this is contra-indicated here and would
be no miracle. We have the rationalistic explanation that Jesus
knew the secret of spectacles and carried in his medicine chest, that
Paulus thinks was always present, an assortment of glasses; and he

THE MIRACLES 609
holds that the stories we have are only an exaggerated account of thus
remedying myopia, which is now exceptionaUy common among the
Jews, and perhaps was then. This, indeed, is hardly more absurd
than to say, as one commentator does, that as glasses are made of silica,
the account of mixing saliva and clay was the best account John knew
how to give of what Jesus reaUy did, viz., making glass and fashioning
it into lenses on the spot.
True miracles are things which are absolutely false. They never
happen. There are of course phenomena of a higher order than what
is yet known; but they are not these, for these are only fabrications,
and that of a low order. Forever grateful as the world must be to the
authors of the four Gospels (for they constitute by far the best part of
the New Testament), their merit does not consist in themselves, for
they did not write infallibly and had no inspiration save that which
came from the exalted and inspired character who was their central
theme. They give us well-meant and painstaking reports of the most
impressive fife that the world has contained. Compared to their
theme and task, their intelligence and performance are wretchedly in
adequate and often misleading. If their blindness had been removed
how much more precious their records, for to see Jesus through them
is to see through a glass darkly.
Why, then, the persistent credulity of so many who should know
better concerning this class of marvels? The answer is, because these
records are so overdetermined by the higher meanings which they
embody. The teachings of Jesus are so filuminating that once to
understand them is like fight banishing darkness. One who has really
accepted the rule of service in place of the rule of self is like a being
restored to sight. The ethical and altruistic viewpoint is so hke a
new morn that there is no possible symbol so pat and apposite to ex
press it as the restoration of the master sense. Jesus is the great
opener of the inner eyes to the loftier power of spiritual truth, and the
believer materializes this unique and only fit metaphor of the new life.
He takes it fiteraUy just so far as he has not yet grasped the meaning
of the higher iUumination it stands for. These miracles are crypto
grams which most of us cannot yet fuUy decipher, but which, when
once they have delivered up their message, wfil be of no further value.
The only definition of light is the excitation of the optic nerve. Now
suppose there were no eyes in the world, and that at a certain stage

610 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
of evolution eyes suddenly came into existence; with them would of
course be born aU the phenomena of the visible universe, its colours,
shades, contours, perspectives, etc. These miracles thus would be
the best illustration and fittest for general currency of the new psychic
world which Jesus' doctrine revealed. Such cures, therefore, are only
parables misunderstood as history. They are degraded, and as it
were fossilized, because their significance has been lost or dimmed.
Thus it is the literal believer who is blind and in need of this cure.
They are vessels of vulgar clay, precious only because of their content
and useless when it has been appropriated. Their perennial lesson to
us is that there is a higher life, more intense, efficient, and ecstatic, viz.,
that of self-sacrifice and of serving instead of ruling, loving instead of
hating or fearing; a life that is to our present one as wine to water; as
crawling about near the bottom of this dark and dirty sea of air is to
Plato's empyrean ether above in which the gods lived; as health is to
disease; as strength is to weakness; as winter to summer; as death to
resurrection; or here, in a word, as darkness is to fight. These are the
meanings that have kept alive the bizarre fantasy of this type of cure,
and the very power of persistence of so preposterous a tale in this civil
ized age is a witness which only the psychoanalyst can rightly evaluate
of the high potential current of meaning that flows through it.
As a lofty and intricate building needs a more sofid foundation
than a cheaper one, so the miracles became in the folk-mind more crassi-
fied than the parables, simply because they have more to support and
because their meaning is more fundamental and generic and more
focussed on the one central theme, whfie the parables are more specific
and detailed in their meaning. Every miracle stands for a more
cardinal truth than any parable. The one and the same general truth
to which every miracle points is a higher, more evolved superman state,
a more socialized condition farther on in the developmental scale,
while the parables are devoted to specifications concerning attitudes
and conduct or doctrine ancillary to the supreme lesson of the Kingdom.
Deaf mutes. — In the Gospel Greek the same word means deaf and
dumb, but only Mark connects them: Matthew and Luke represent
Jesus as speaking in his answer to the emissaries of the Baptist only of
cases of deafness, while in their own accounts they speak only of dumb
ness restored to utterance. Matthew (only) teUs the tale of a man
brought to Jesus with a dumb devil, which was cast out and he spoke.

THE MIRACLES 611
The multitude wondered, for "it was never so seen in Israel," while
the Pharisees said he cast out devils by their prince, Beelzebub. Then
Jesus went "to aU cities and viUages" preaching and "healing every
sickness and every disease among the people."
In another, or some think a different, version of the same case,
Matthew tells of a man blind and dumb who was restored, and the
people asked if this did not show that Jesus was the son of David. In
Luke's amplified account Jesus replies at length to the charge of casting
out devils by Beelzebub, by saying that if he did so Satan's house
would be divided against itself and would faU; also, if he can do so he
must be mightier than Satan to spoil this strong man's house. He teUs
of an unclean spirit evicted and restlessly roving till it finds its old
habitation purified and then it returns, taking with it seven other vile
spirits. To those who do not desire to multiply miracles more than is
necessary, as the scholastics before Occam did entities, it may be noted
that the fact and nature of the illness, the association with sin, the
controversy with the Jews, the presence of the crowd, the approximate
stage of Jesus' ministry in which the event occurred — aU these are the
same in both. If the two are different cases their similarity suggests
stereotyped forms of apperception and description, while if they are
different versions of the same cure, very great liberty in the treatment
of fact and fallibility of human testimony is indicated. Woolstan and
Paulus crudely interpret the Johannin account as of a slothful impostor
or malingerer whom Jesus detected and sent away. The disease was
evidently not grave enough to have affected the invalid's mind, and
functional paralysis of hypochondriacal and hysterical origin is often
overcome by stimulus or excitement strong enough to arouse dormant
volition, as the crutches for centuries hung up at many a shrine bear
witness. Another patient whom Matthew calls a lunatic and also possessed,
as Luke, too, does, Mark calls also deaf and dumb. Here the disciples
fail, and Jesus goes to their aid and calls the deaf and dumb spirit out
of the man, a cure mentioned elsewhere among those of the possessed.
Mark (only) teUs of a deaf man with an impediment in his speech
whom Jesus took aside, put his fingers in his ears, spat, touched the
tongue, looked up, sighed (as he did elsewhere only in raising Lazarus),
and said a talismanic Aramaic word, Ephphatha, be opened, and
straightway the string of his tongue was loosed, his ears were opened,

612 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
and he spake plainly. Charged not to teU, he told aU the more, and
the people said of his healer that he "hath done all things weU; he
maketh the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak," just as prophecy
expected of the Messiah.
Here again it seems almost remissness and also somewhat out of
character that the Johannin Jesus, who was the living word or divine
Logos, does no miracle of this kind. Perhaps John, whose Christ did
so completely all that symbolism required, thought that curing the
defect or loss of audition was so obvious and elemental an act and so
charged with symbolism concerning mental deafness to spiritual truth,
that it was quite superfluous and that such cures could be assumed.
Others have said that perhaps John on the other hand underestimated
the value of volubility, preferring a laconic yea and nay. To Jesus,
hearing the word meant doing it; and for him, unlike Plato who thought
knowing half way to doing and therefore good in itself, hearing without
doing augmented guilt. To more insightful miracle-makers the re
moval of deafness would mean augmented power of understanding,
such as faith gives, while the removal of dumbness would mean power
to proclaim the new salvation. Their first act was to disobey the
injunction of silence by an uncontrollable impulsion to use their newly
acquired power of speech, the use of which on any other theme would
betray the fact that they were restored to the world of sound and
phonation. Of the phenomena foUowing complete restoration from
utter and congenital deafness we know nothing, for there is no such
case on record; but this would be a no less eloquent simile of the birth
of a new and higher mental function of comprehension than restoration
from total blindness. Had these patients been long quite deaf they
would of course have lost in a corresponding degree the power of speech,
so that the parabolic scope of these cases is limited. On the whole,
there is somewhat more probability of a germ of material happening
here than in the blindness cures, although there is an uncritical ex
aggeration, and no gleam of suspicion on the part of the narrators of
any higher meaning.
The Lame. — Isaiah said that in that day "the lame man shall leap
as a hart," and cures of palsy, paralysis, and cripples were to be
expected in the process of validifying the new dispensation. The mus
cles are the organs of the will and have done everything man has accom
plished in the world. Loss of the power of free, voluntary movement

THE MIRACLES 613
hampers the passion for power and brings in its place a sense of weak
ness, which is proverbiaUy miserable and has its own type of pathos
and its own copious higher symbolism for whatever of the many types
of lameness clinical diagnosis distinguishes. Thus, artistic and
pedagogic as weU as pragmatic tendencies could not fail to work
unconsciously if not purposively to give us specific cures by the great
physician of these very numerous, but, of course, in the Gospels not
well differentiated, classes of cases.
AU three synoptists, in ways the discrepancies of which as usual
clearly show developmental stages, teU of Jesus preaching to a crowd
that flocked from far and near. It was so dense that the four bearers
who had brought the palsied man to him had to mount the flat roof
and break it open so that they could let down the patient on his bed.
This show of faith pleased Jesus. Strangely enough, as if recognizing
a case of luetic tabes, and anticipating modern medicine, he thought
the disease due to infection from a sex disease and so first of aU pro
nounced the patient's sins forgiven. Accused by his enemies of blas
phemy in arrogating to himself the power of forgiveness of sin, which
belonged to God alone, he gave them to understand that this first
phase of the miracle was harder than to cure the disease, and we are
almost given the impression that the latter was the extemporized
result of an afterthought to silence those who objected to bis act of
pardon. So the patient is told to arise and go home. This he did,
carrying his bed, and glorifying God as did the crowd, which we are
left to imagine parted to let the erstwhile bedridden victim of sin pass.
Here Jesus not merely prevented but removed the slowly developing
pathological results of a sin as if he were remitting a penalty, thus
interfering with the normal moral order of life. If the disease was of
syphilitic origin he created a fiat immunity as lord of bacteria, thus
outdoing Beelzebub, the god of flies. Jesus, all agree, came to redeem
the world from sin and provide a way of remission, ransom, and atone
ment, so that having sinned, a man may again be restored to righteous
ness and purity and escape the otherwise inevitable punishment. The
world, it was assumed, was under a curse, which Jesus makes void by
providing a way of escape. This is the chief theme of Paul, but the
effects of this salvation, although inwardly so transforming, become
chiefly apparent in the next fife. This metamorphosis of regeneration
needed to be figured and objectively demonstrated ad oculos by a

614 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
salient and ostensive instance, and also to be made more manifest by
appearing instantaneously. How could even a modern symbolist
devise a more apt, striking, and portable fable of the new fife? for we
are now very near the focus of the Christian consciousness. If it was
progressive paralysis or paresis, an incurable germ disease of which
only a fatal termination can be prognosticated, Jesus here not only
suspended but reversed the law of cause and effect and wrought the
only cure of this disease in the New Testament. The implication that,
if he can forgive sinful acts that bring disease, he can far more easily
and on the instant efface the bodily ravages of the infectious bacilli
and toxins, is obvious, for are not all the hundreds of diseases now fisted
the results of sin, either personal or ancestral? His Kingdom is that of
Hygeia, morally and therefore physiologically perfect. He is thus doc
umented as the Divine Biologos, in whose presence lethal agencies are
obviated. The very word "health" means wholeness or holiness, and
all morbific agencies must flee if his attention is once focussed on them.
In the Kingdom all sickness is driven away, and the fond dream-
wish of the folk-soul to be completely and superlatively weU is realized
in a way beyond the wildest dreams of modern Christian Science.
The Withered Hand. — The three witnesses again tell of the man
with the withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath. Knowing
that he was watched to see whether he would heal him on the holy day,
Jesus made the patient stand forth and asked the people whether one
should not lift a sheep out of a pit and save life rather than kill, do
good rather than evil, on that day. There was no answer. Then at
his command the man stretched forth his hand and it was whole like
the other. The Pharisees then took counsel how to destroy him, not
for heafing but for doing so on the Sabbath, so strict were their laws
and customs on this point.
This miracle is less striking than its Old Testament precedent.
Jeroboam stretched out his hand against Efijah, and it stiffened so he
could not draw it back till, at the prophet's prayer, this penal miracle
was set aside by a second miracle of grace. We are not told whether
the cure meant power to move the hand, or whether instantaneous
restoration of the atrophy was involved. The latter would mean
that the shriveUed member grew suddenly in size, weight, and fulness,
as weU as came under the power of the wfil. Such growth would
involve regeneration of tissues and might make this in a certain sense

THE MIRACLES 615
analogous to the miracle of the multiplication of loaves. If the afflic
tion was merely hysteroid, the cure has abundant paraUels and was
no miracle but an unusual restoration misinterpreted. But, if instead
of being sprain, rheumatism, or inflammation, aU of which have been
suggested, it was unilateral wasting with atony or contractures involv
ing both cerebral and trophic nerves and gradually bones, after a long
train of symptoms according to modern pathology,1 then this instan
taneous reversal of a long train of degenerate and necrotic processes
was a fittle like resuscitation, not of the whole body but of the limb only.
The more we know of the nature of this disease the more impossible is
it to conceive any such cure.
Dropsy. — Again, in the house of a chief Pharisee was a man with
dropsy; and again Jesus, knowing he was watched, asked if it was lawful
to heal on the Sabbath, and repeated the query, if an ox or ass fall into a
pit should he not be rescued on the Sabbath? But there was no answer.
So Jesus healed his patient and let him go. This trouble was in some
sense the reverse of atrophy. There are, however, practicaUy the
same objections and the same defense, and the difficulties and possi
bilities of the two cases are analogous.
The Epileptic at the Synagogue. — In another Sabbath healing (like
the above, in Luke only), a woman who had been bowed (some think
a hunchback) for eighteen years was healed by imposition of hands and
pronouncing her cured, and she became at once straight and glorified
God. The ruler of the synagogue protested that there were six other
days in the week, in any of which cures should be done rather than on
this day. Jesus replied calling him a hypocrite because he who would
water his own staUed cattle on the Sabbath was less kind to his feUow-
man. Much more should a daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan, be
loosed. At this Jesus' enemies were ashamed, while the people rejoiced.
The Pool of Bethesda. — John (v:i-i6) caps the climax in this series
of miracles. The scene is brilliant, at the pool of Bethesda (to the exist
ence of which scholars find no other contemporary allusion, and which
may be a purely imaginary place) . Here it was not only on the Sabbath
but in Jerusalem and at a feast. It seems to have been a kind of hospital-
theatre with five halls (which some think analogous to the five Books of
Moses), fuU of patients with diverse diseases. An angel occasionally
troubled the waters (as geysers spout and bubbles often arise periodicaUy
•Osier: "Principles and Practice of Medicine." 5th ed., p. 928 ef seq.

616 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
from mineral and aerified springs), and whoever stepped into the water
first, after one of these visitations, was healed, whatever his disease. It
was, therefore, a very popular curatorium in which the healing seemed
to come directly from heaven. Here Jesus found a man infirm, not for
eighteen but for thirty-eight years (the same number of years in which
the children of Israel wandered in the desert). As he lay there Jesus
asked him the superfluous question "Wilt thou be made whole?" and
was answered that when the waters moved there was no one to put
him in, and others stepped down before him. Jesus commanded him
to arise, take up his bed, and walk, which he straightway did, when
Jesus quietly left the multitude. The Jews told the patient that he
had violated the Sabbath law in carrying his bed, and he defended
himself by saying that the healer commanded it. Asked who had cured
him, the deponent replied that he knew not. But Jesus met him later
in the temple and commanded him to sin no more lest a worse thing
befaU him. Then he knew it was Jesus, and so informed the Jews,
who sought to slay him because he had healed on the Sabbath, although
the angel who troubled the waters was doing so.
Working on the Sabbath to John seems to symbolize the never-
resting activity of his Logos-Christ. The defense for so doing in his
miracle is drawn from the bucolic exigencies of pastoral life. Even a
citation of David eating the shewbread of the temple, which was set
apart for the priests, is not quite in point, but what is shown forth
is the incessant creative, regenerative, divine power. Thus John's
story of the cure of a bedridden man is, like his narrative of the blind
man and the raising of Lazarus, the superlative instance of the series,
but this has the most gorgeous scene-setting of any miracle of Jesus.
The latter now and here triumphantly demonstrated his ability to give
strength to the weak.
If the therapy of the agitated water be interpreted as a natural
tonic bath, Jesus here shows his vis creatrix to be vastly superior to
that of nature, and, if it was the work of an angel, superior to his.
By dramaticaUy selecting one patient from the large number and
signalizing his case by an immediate and complete cure, he must have
excited jealousy and envy in the other visitors at this spa. If he had
merely enabled him to enter the pool he would have in a sense seemed
ancfilary to a superior healing power, and we should have had here two
miracles instead of one.

THE MIRACLES 617
The meaning which this crude fable embodies, and which is the
soul that has kept its body with aU its grotesqueness and deformity
alive, is the precious symboHzation of the truth that with God we are
strong, and without or against him we are impotent. Iniquity saps
strength, weakens wfil, while righteousness breaks the bands of sin, rein
forces volition, and gives a strength not our own. With the divine powers
we can become energumens so potent that by comparison our
former strength, though normal, would seem weakness. Free wfil is
hobbled by inhibitions and repressions like an athlete threatened with
abulia. Here Jesus is made the emancipator of the shackled wfil,
and puts "I can" in place of "I cannot," closes the chasm between
desiring and accomplishing wherein so many lives are wrecked, re
stores lost control over the voluntary muscles and body movements;
for, as Pindar says, only strong muscles can make men and nations
great and free. Strong himself from his vocation, Jesus wanted his
followers to be so, but they must be athletes of the new and higher life,
capable of forming, holding, and executing the great purposes of the
Kingdom. Strength always had and always will have its votaries, its
heroes, its thrilling incidents, and its religion, and cannot be fitly
served by weakfings, for only the power of the normal will makes us
complete men. These cures thus are only ancient fossils of what we
now caU the gospel of efficiency, and therefore they wfil long remain
precious things in the reliquary of orthodoxy because there wiU always
be those who have suffered arrest on the lowest rungs of the ladder
that leadc from sense up to spiritual comprehension. Thus men may
be endowed with power from on high that makes the weak mighty, the
feeble strong. Every lesson emanating from Jesus teaches man's
higher power, now of insight, as in the blindness cures; now of vitality,
as in the Resurrection narratives; here of ability to do. We are aU as
thenic, or living far below our maximum output of energy. The moral
here is of works, not of knowledge. Ethically we are aU lame, crippled,
paralytic, bound by Satan. We would be more chaste in thought and
life, more temperate, enterprising, industrious and less idle or lazy,
more altruistic and less selfish, more mindful of the supreme ends of life
unless distracted by irrelevancies and details. Such are the sermons in
these fossil stones.
Possession. — Possession was to a great extent a new idea among the
Jews in Jesus' day, and there are relatively few traces of it in the Old

618 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Testament. It had, however, developed rapidly under the influence
of Babylon and the Parsee dualism, as Azel, Ahriman, Asmodeus, and
demons that bring disease, pain, terrify, and enter living men and
animals. Exorcism, however, though a recent importation into Judea
from the East, was preformed and rooted in the old pre-Semitic Akka
dian consciousness. Beelzebub 's minions especially seize, tear, strangle
men, make them cry out, roll, foam; and seven, or even a legion, may
take up their abode in the same person, although, Hausrath thinks, only
successively. If expelled they must wander to and fro, enter into
unclean beasts, haunt tombs or deserts, or else return to their gloomy
abode in the nether world. Although they cling with great tenacity
to their human abode, they do not spare, but strain and wrench, and
may destroy it. It is they who make men bfind, deaf, dumb, deformed,
or may indwell with no external manifestations save bad conduct.
Jesus doubtless held this view, and did not merely accommodate to it,
as Schenkel said.1 Jesus undoubtedly believed himself in such cases
to be face to face with Satan's house, and that the spoliation of it
meant so much more ground won for the Kingdom of God, and held
that every such cure advanced the day when Satan would himself be
bound. Yahveh and Satan were fighting face to face with the human
soul as their battle-ground. Jesus' cures in general differed from those
of his disciples and of the Church later in that he discarded washing,
fasting, fumigation, ceremonial methods of dispossession. He needed
no consecrated oil nor water, no incantation, music, magic stones,
formulae, binding, nor any other of the methods of the Jewish exorcists
which Josephus enumerates. Some of the healing miracles of this
class we can now accept, while others once thought marvellous can
hardly seem so to us. The evil spirits regarded Jesus' very proximity
as the harbinger of their expulsion. They often knew him from afar
'Even in our own day exorcism seems to be sometimes effective as a psychotherapeutic method. See, e. g., "The
Treatment of Insanity by Exorcism," by Dr. G. Williams, London, 1908; also "Body and Soul," by P. Dearmer, New
York, 1000, 426 p. Here also one might consult the records of Emmanuelism in this country, as briefly stated in Weaver's
book, "Mind and Health," New York, 1913, 500 p. For the much further developed scientific applications of psycho
therapy there is not only the literature of the Freud school, but see more specifically J. J. Dejenne and E. Gauckler's
"Les manifestations fonctionnelles des psychonevroses; leur traitement par la psychotheiapie," Paris, Masson 1911
561 p.; Paul Dubois, "The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders," Trans, and ed. by S. E. Jelliffe and W. A.'White!
New York, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1905, 466 p.; and J. Marcinowski, "Der Mut zu sich Selbst; das Seelenleben des
NervSsen und seine Heilung," Berlin, Salle, 1912, 400 p. See also Rosenbach's Works. These methods are now multi
form, and besides the records of them in the memorabilia of the synoptists there are twenty more records of marvellous
healings in Acts, and a long list of them in the early Church from Justin the Martyr (d. 163 A. n.) to Sosomonus (d. 450
A. D.). Dearmer traces the record from St. John of Beverley, 781, to Father John of Kronstadt, 1008, and has much
to tell us of places like Lourdes, Holywell, etc., urging that stigraatism is natural, etc. The method has fallen into disuse
because it was thought to be miraculous, although in fact it is in no sense so, but many of the cures are genuine, natural,
permanent. A number of regular physicians who do not themselves believe In prayer advise it to their religious patients,
e. g., as a soothing and sleep-bringing agency, and a building has even been recommended where'methods of exorcism
could be made Impressive, to which certain patients would be likely to respond. Should some such scheme prove even
more effective than its advocates hope, it would hardly surprise the psychogenetlciit who realizes how strongly man's
past still grips his unconscious life. If a patient thinks he has a devil, perhaps the physician might with profit humour
bis illusion and call to the devil as if he were real, to come out of him.

THE MIRACLES 619
and entreated him not to molest them. He suffered them not to speak,
and his procedure was probably more effective because it was simple.
The fame he early acquired, his magnetism, poise, confidence, author
ity, manner, broke mental fetters, stimulated dormant selfhood, aroused
healthful reaction, gave new and supplanting thoughts, freed the
enslaved imagination, broke the power of fixed ideas, changed the
current of diseased wfils, and made him a master in this field of moral
psychotherapy from whom, with our conceptions of the fatalistic domi
nance of somatic and also hereditary influences, we have still much to
learn. Despite aU the diversities and credulity of the recorders, Jesus'
achievements in this domain are one of his chief trophies and most
potent suggestions to the world, and there is something here which the
most inexorable criticism must leave essentially intact. These mys
terious cures in his day excited more wonder and awe than anything
else he did or said, and were one of the chief causes of the envy of the
Pharisees. It was this class of which the early Church boasted, which
had much to do with its spread, and which involved a kind of intensity
of soul emitted by the energumens of the Church. They would also
give him immense repute and authority over the world of souls in
general, and would inconceivably reinforce all his nterpretations of all
things of the soul. They documented him, too, as one to whom the
devils did homage, so that thus he has a message perhaps not yet en
tirely appropriated by the Church or by modern medicine. He stands
for the salvation of the body as for that of the soul, and would doubtless
have understood something of our own theories of the undersold and of
the efficiency of relics, pilgrimages, and shrines.
First on this list comes the doubly recorded and very characteristic
second miracle of healing, with a most dramatic setting. Jesus taught
or preached with great power one Sabbath in the synagogue. The
congregation marveUed both at his doctrine and at his original auto-
didactic way of setting it forth. Although we have no intimation of
the theme of his discourse, he evidently did not give a mere exegesis of
even the greatest of the prophets but, though he may have cited them,
spoke on his own authority as if independently commissioned by
Yahveh, and even went distinctively beyond the greatest of his prede
cessors. Perhaps this was his very first setting forth of his new-found
insights and attitude to the universe, and the first fresh, condensed,
germinal expression of his new conviction which was set forth more.

62o JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
fuUy in his later words and deeds. Would that the world had some
record of this utterance! The authoritativeness with which he seems
to have spoken may have been a little intemperate or brash, like the
extravagant zeal of a new convert. " It hath been said by this or that
prophet, priest, or king of high degree of old, but I say unto you thus
and so," as if very obviously he felt himself to be greatest of aU; and
yet the worshippers seem to have been speUbound, awed, and delighted.
When he had finished, or perhaps in the very midst of his sermon, an
excitable epileptic became unable longer to contain himself. Accept
ing the belief that his own attacks were the invasion of a Satanic
personafity, as aU others, Jesus included, did, he cried out in propria
persona diaboli and as representing aU his f eUow evil spirits from the pit,
"Let us alone, do not destroy us, we know thou art the Christ, the holy
one of God." This made a thrilling, significant, and utterly unex
pected situation. The devfi had erstwhile sought in vain to tempt
Jesus. Now his minions openly recognized and acknowledged him,
and still more significantly, they were the very first to do so. It was
now open war between the Divine and the powers of darkness. The
two supreme potencies that in the Persian-tinged dualism of that day
and land were always arrayed in strife, one against the other, were now
face to face, each knowing its adversary. In the cry of the demoniac
there was also a note of fear and dismay, even more than of defiance,
as if the demons were reminiscent of the long-ago expulsion from
heaven of the cohorts of Satan, and as if now they feared eviction from
the domain of earth, which had hitherto been freely aUowed to them.
Jesus and all his friends and acquaintances doubtless believed that at
this crucial moment he stood face to face with a representative of the
great enemy. Here and now the war between the two kingdoms was
joined, a warfare stfil hotly waged and unconcluded. This type of
insanity is very generaUy thought to be the devil's inspiration, the
diametrical opposite and counterpart of that brought by the Holy
Ghost. The theopneustic man stands over against the diabolo-
pneustic Convulsionnaire, a little as if the contestants represented, one
aU the celestial and the other all the infernal agencies in the world.
The type of the victim's attack seems to have been ideaUy fitted for the
kind of clinical demonstration dramatically needed. There was first a
coherent and purposive exclamation involving full recognition of the
Divine Physician, as if the Christhood of Jesus had been convincingly

THE MIRACLES 621
demonstrated to an insightful mind in which, at the onset of the aura,
the attack took the form of extreme if not clairvoyant lucidity. Per
haps in his normal state the patient had been instructed and possibly
expectant, and the sudden impulse to cry out even in such an environ
ment, when it became overmastering, was recognized as a warning
that the convulsion was coming. Jesus showed no trace of the pro
found inner satisfaction which later was so apparent when Peter recog
nized his Christhood, but commanded that the unclean spirit hold his
peace, as if he shrank from being recognized publicly and proclaimed
for what he was and for what he had come to know himself to be.
Then he ordered the demon to come out of the man, which it did only
after he had cried out and fallen in convulsions. The fit had spent its
force, and the patient doubtless lay quiet, limp, and comatose in the
characteristic post-epileptic state. The awe and fame of this power to
command devils shows that those present thought this a miraculous
cure. The record itself, however, as it stands, asserts no psychotherapy
of any kind. While Jesus' preaching may have precipitated the attack
by its incitement and tension, the latter would normaUy have ended
as it did if Jesus had said nothing or even been absent. Jesus seems to
have thought his intervention cured a veritable case, and thereby ac
quired faith and courage to try to heal other cases. But the only real
cure would have been the prevention of other attacks of the same type,
and whether this occurred we are not told. Hence it is all very un
satisfactory. When we remember that the insane were not sequestered
in those days, the incident was natural, and the form as it is narrated
is quite consonant with what we know both of the prevalent ideas of
madness as possession and of the course of Jacksonian epilepsy, which
begins in the higher and proceeds downward to lower level centres.
It is evident that Mark and Luke thought this cure a miraculous
one, but accepting all they say there is no indication that any cure
occurred. The Demoniac. — The healing of the demoniac in far-off heathen
Gadara gives us a lurid glimpse of the demonology of that day, and is wild
and weird to a degree that suggests Walpurgis-night or the Witches' Sab
bath. It has been called the master- or show-piece of aU mind-cure tales.
Nevertheless it is recorded in aU three of the synoptics and with fewer
discrepancies than in some of the other thrice-told tales. On landing
uDon these unknown shores Jesus was met by a wild man (we wfil

622 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
assume one with Mark and Luke, and not two men as with Matthew)
coming out of the tombs, naked and so untamable that he broke all
fetters, and even chains, wandering day and night, crying out in the
mountainous desert and caves, mutilating himself with stones. Seeing
Jesus from afar he ran toward and fell down before him in adoration
and shrieked, "What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God,
most high? I adjure thee by God not to torment me. Send me
not away out of the country." When asked his name, he answered
"Legion" (the name of a corps of the army of the hated Romans,
numbering from four thousand five hundred to six thousand men be
sides cavalry), so many devils were in him. Thus Jesus alone now
faced the cohorts of heU, which recognized him on the instant and from
afar for aU that he thought himself to be, and begged abjectly for
mercy at his hands. Strong as the demons in him had made this man,
he groveUed at Jesus' feet and implored him not to inflict torture or to
banish him; and Jesus granted the patient's prayer. On the desolate
highlands skirting the lake was a herd of swine which some estimate
at not less than two thousand in number, animals abhorred by the
Jews and suggestive of all gentile abominations; and so, instead of
sending the demons directly to the abyss, Jesus transferred them into
the swine, whereupon the latter, as if seized by a sudden and uncon
trollable panic, such as more gregarious animals are more prone to,
stampeded and tore wildly down the precipitate bank and perished in
the sea, beneath which the Hebrew traditions thought lay the way to
Sheol or the inferno. By this therapeutic prodigy the possessed man
was cured, clothed himself, and desired to follow Jesus, but was told
instead to proclaim his cure to the people of his own race who had
known him. The swine-herds had spread the news of what was done
and how, and the people gathered among them, probably the owners of
the swine, which Woolston estimates worth at least four thousand
dollars. But so alarmed were all that, instead of demanding recom
pense they besought Jesus to depart, and he did so.
Mitigators of the miraculous have outdone themselves in suggest
ing modifications of the record as it stands. We have been told that
the swine were semiferal and were probably frightened by the cries and
gestures of the lunatic, and that the latter was shocked into sanity by
realizing the calamity that he had caused. Others have puzzled to
make the number of devils in the patient equal to the number of swine.

THE MIRACLES 623
Others have thought the souls of Jesus' companions, tense in this new
unknown country of ill repute, probably interpreted the incoherent
and perhaps inarticulate cries of a madman as the acknowledgment of
Jesus' divinity, or that the presence of these strangers brought on an
epileptic fit which caused the man to faU with a cry and to recover
normaUy. Some said that had it ever entered into the heart of Jesus
while fiving to suspect such an interpretation as the synoptists here
made of some natural event, he would have protested and despaired
of them. Our narrative as it stands is perhaps an interesting iUustra-
tion of the way in which excited minds saturated with the folklore of
that day might react to a series of perfectly natural, if to them unusual,
events. Pierquin in "Traite" de folie des animaux," and many others
since have shown how liable half-wild flocks of various animals are to
sudden alarms. Others, accepting this weird welter of wonders, so
strangely felted together, at its face value, praise Jesus' noblesse oblige
by which he seemed in a truly gentlemanly way to grant the wish of
the troop of demons, and then after strategically impounding them in
these porcine bodies, stampeding them back to the Hades whence they
came. It was thus in miracle plays that God, Christ, angels, and even
saints always outwitted the devil and all his imps. Lange and Krabbe
think that in this coup Jesus did have the aid of angels who influence
certain animals, and add that here Jesus penetrated farthest into
heathendom and overcame a whole pantheon of demons preparatory
to assailing Satan in his own stronghold later. Neander thinks that
if Jesus ventured among the rude Gadarenes this narrative was coloured
to cover a report from it after some unknown bucolic or pastoral
incident, or else that he unwittingly destroyed property and was
forced to retire, or that the story as we have it may be a satire made by
the owners of the swine to retaliate by sarcasm for their loss. Keim
says it should teach moderation to those who are shocked at any scruple
about any miracle, and that it should be a kind of memento mori
against extreme credulity, for it cannot possibly be accepted by a sound
mind, at least without involving a belief in demonology far cruder than
any form of modern spiritism. The superstitious believer must hold
that demons can indweU in animals as weU as in man, and that these
fool demons destroyed the very bodies that they had just prayed to
enter, and went straight to the place from which they had wished to
be saved. It seems to involve a belief in mafign disembodied spirits

624 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
that may wander in waste places, and in psychic personalities that can be
transferred, as ancient savage diseases could be conjured, from human
to animal or even inanimate bodies. Souls must be interchangeable,
therefore, to a high degree. These old soul extractors and exchangers
were wont to convince their patients and bystanders that the princi
ple extracted had really left them and gone into something else by mak
ing it seem to spill water, upset furniture, shake a tree or flower, make
an animal cry out, as a sign that the evicted soul had entered it and left
its former host. Thus it is said that we have only to invert the order
of events to see that the panic of the swine gave Jesus an opportunity
which he used by a flash of inspiration to convince his patient that the
devils had really left him, and that the epileptic accepted the sugges
tion. It was a clever and impromptu therapeutic device which proved
to have the pragmatic sanction of working weU. To accept this view
we need only to change the order of two events, and this we may do on
the doctrine of the "timelessness of supernatural events" or by as
suming that the inspiration of the Holy Ghost in the writers was so
plenary and coercive that they lost all sense of time and sequence, being
swaUowed up in Bergson's duree reelle, the modern euphemism for the
old theological eternity, and so became mere "human pens" writing
automaticaUy as autistic or planchette writers do now without knowing
what they say.
Allegorization. — The allegorists have not been very successful with
the Gadara incident. The theory that the demons are heathen gods,
who are here expelled by being aUowed to f oUow their own elective affinity
and thus reveal their true character, by going to the most unclean of aU
beasts, is one favourite interpretation of this kind. The rejection of the
cured patient who desired to enter the circle of Jesus, and the demand to
state and proclaim his cure among his own people, prefigures the esta
blishment of an apostolate among the heathen races. The chains he broke
were those of Hebrew legation, custom, form. His pre-prompt recognition
of Jesus as the Son of God foreshadows the fact that gentiles led in the
acceptance and promulgation of Christianity. We have here, too, the
most striking of all conversions from the complete dominion under
Satan's kingdom to the Kingdom of God, compared to which that of
Paul himself was less sudden or transforming. Thus, too, aU swine
who cannot appreciate Gospel pearls, and would rend those who present
them, are to be offered up as a hecatomb to Satan. Thus this first

THE MIRACLES 625
promulgation of Jesus to the gentile world is marked by a terrific
slaughter of the agents of uncleanness.
John says nothing of casting out devils, as if this odious super
stition were already on the wane; and this is one argument to show that
John wrote late. Such events, too, do not comport with the logos
nature of Jesus as held by John. Still, exorcism had become so com
mon in the second century that it was of no value as a proof of super
natural power in those who practised it. Paul does not enumerate
this power among the gifts of the Spirit, and in the Johannin circle this
practice had probably fallen into ill repute. Strauss even sees here
the beginning of a healthful skepticism directed toward the grosser
forms of miracle working, and infers that this kind of higher criticism
had begun before the completion of our New Testament canon.
Leprosy. — This disease was so malignant and incurable, and also
so dreadful from the seclusion that became necessary to prevent infec
tion, that it was commonly thought to be a specific divine punishment.
A leper colony even to-day is too horrible for uncensored description.
The disease was perhaps more common than we know in ancient Israel.
It appeared in Job, and Moses was taught both to cause and to cure
it in his own land, to accredit himself with the people as if by a kind
of trick in coUusion with Yahveh. His sister Miriam was smitten
with it as a punishment for her contumacy. Elisha cured the Syrian
captain Naaman by prescribing seven immersions in the Jordan. It
seems generally to have been placed under a hygienic ban as especiaUy
unclean. One of the earliest miracles ascribed to Jesus and thrice told is
the miracle of healing a leper who came, knelt, besought, and expressed
faith. Jesus had compassion, touched him, and commanded him to be
clean, and he was so. He was then charged to tell no one, but to go to
the priests, as the hygienic laws required, and have his cure certified
and promulgated so that the restrictions upon his life could be removed.
Whether he did so and was duly inspected we are not told, but he
violated the behest of silence, and blazoned his cure abroad to such
an extent that Jesus had to withdraw to the desert to pray.
This cure staggers faith. Of course the correctness of the diag
nosis has often been called in question. Some opined that a sudden
upgush of faith in the patient made him feel cured, so that he fancied
he detected in himself signs of sudden convalescence, although official

626 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
attestation that his condition was improved is lacking. Perhaps, al
though this is not mentioned, he bathed like Naaman, and was and
appeared cleaner. Others think Jesus and his disciples were so sure
he could heal that they assumed without scrutmy that the cure had
actually occurred, when in fact it had taken place only in their imagina
tions. Others have suggested a case of what is now known as anaes
thetic or nervous leprosy with its alternating train of symptoms.
Luke (only) tells the story of ten lepers just outside a village,
who stood at the distance prescribed by law and cried out for mercy.
Without touching, Jesus commanded them to go and show themselves
to the priests, and on the way they were cleansed of this disease. A
few critics have thought this a variation of the former case despite the
fact that here ten instead of one are cured, but the sequel gives it
an individual character, for nine who were cleansed proceeded on their
way, while only one, a Samaritan, returned and effusively thanked his
curer. Remarking unfavourably upon the nine who had not glorified
God, Jesus dismissed the grateful one, declaring that faith had made him
whole. Thus Naaman, also a stranger, had been cured. Jesus said
that in Elisha's day there were many lepers in Israel, but only this
one had been cured. This instance has to many suggested the parable
of the good Samaritan stranger who was the only one of three to be a
"neighbour" to the man who fell among thieves. To credit the com
plete, fiteral, instant, and wholesale cure of this dread disease is im
possible save for those whose minds are leprous with ignorance and
superstition. Perhaps one of its lessons is that if such are cleansed it
is their duty without ostentatious proclamation to show themselves
to their spiritual advisers, who should then publicly proclaim them
clean. Leprosy was thought to be a filth disease, and was common from
the earliest times not only in Egypt but in India, China, and most
parts of Asia. So it was the fittest of all symbols of the corruption of
sin which could be washed away by the cleansing water of baptism.
Some think it especially typifies secret personal vice. Its slow but sure
progress, and its repulsiveness which makes it a body of fiving death,
best showed what Yahveh thought of iniquity. John, instead of giving
us the last and greatest wonder as he does in other series, says nothing
of cures from this disease, some think because he was preoccupied
in his Semitic way with what Plato caUed the beautiful and good, and

THE MIRACLES 627
was averse to facing the harmatological aspects of life in their ugliness
and deformity. The synoptic stories are the merest sketches, vulner
able on every side to criticism, so that there was abundant room for a
characteristicaUy Johannin culminating cure. But John seems to
have felt the leprous nature of sin far less than Paul; for the former
seems to have been born good and to have had less knowledge of sin
in his own experience, approaching, as is often remarked, the impec
cability of Jesus himself. He had rare power of intuition, while Paul
became good by a great conversion and laboriously reasoned out his
insights. Modern medicine would probably select another disease as
best illustrating the effects of individual and hereditary sin, and several
such have been suggested, but even yet leprosy has more currency and
popular efficacy. The idea of those exegetes was that Jesus was him
self an antitoxin or specific against, or panacea to cure, all illnesses,
inaugurating a new psychic life so intense that it sloughed off all in
firmities, even the most deep-seated and offensive. Had man been
sinless he would never have been fil, we are told, and we never hear of
sickness among his foUowers, as if they were immunized by his faith.
The cases of leprosy originated in sin and have established the usage of
the most expressive of aU the metaphors of sin, under the curse of
which the unregenerate world is a leper colony to which Christianity
comes with a miraculous sudden and complete specific which not merely
checks the progress of the disease but restores the degeneration of tissue
that it has caused. Thus we are here in the field of rhetoric or heur
istics in the large Aristotelian sense, rather than in the domain of his
torical fact.
Malchus 's Ear. — Luke only tells of the healing of Malchus, the
servant of the high priest whose right ear was "cut off" when Jesus
was arrested. He teUs us that he "touched his ear and healed him."
We are not told whether the entire external ear or a portion of it was
smitten off, nor do we know whether we are to infer that Jesus merely
staunched the blood or replaced a severed member which grew back by
intussusception, or caused a new ear to grow. The incident is not men
tioned elsewhere. It shows how ready Luke was to draw on the faith
and credulity of his readers without detail or circumstance, and also
has a certain significance as an index of his own state of mind. That
Jesus paused to remedy this injury at a critical moment in his career
seems at the same time a rebuke to Peter, who, we are elsewhere told,

628 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
inflicted the blow and whom he also verbally reprimanded. It may
have been an act of sympathy evoked by the mutilation, or done by
way of placation to avoid precipitating a more serious conflict between
his foUowers and those who came to take him into custody. But the
casual way in which the incident is tossed off suggests a power of faith
on Luke's part that was capable of believing that on some more serious
occasion Jesus would not have been unable to restore Malchus's head
had it been severed and had restoration been necessary for his pur
poses. It was a wild, somewhat comical, and half cowardly act on
Peter's part, and a really and wisely valorous man would have attacked
not a servant but the leader of the troop, or especially Iscariot himself,
against whom vindictive retaliation might have been more fitly di
rected. It is a strange anticlimax, too, that this should have been rep
resented as the last of all Jesus' miracles. This is the only cure of
trauma, and while it might conceivably be invested with symbolic
significance, there is no indication that it ever had the slightest.
(B) Resurrections. — (a) The raising of the twelve-year-old daughter
of the archon Jairus is attested by the three synoptists. As she lay at the
point of death the father came and requested healing, but on returning
to the house they were told she was dead. Jesus insisted that she was
not dead but sleeping, and with three disciples and perhaps the parents
went in where she lay, took her by the hand, and called upon her to
arise. This she straightway did and walked, when Jesus commanded
that food be given her, and charged secrecy which was, of course, im
possible. The funeral piping suggests that the friends believed her
dead. Only children such as she are often feeble, and her age, to say
nothing of the woman healed on the way of the twelve years' issue of
blood, suggests first menstruation. Modern literature abounds with
death-like trances and swoons at this epoch. One need not be credu
lous toward modern mind-cures in order to see that this narrative
might be a veracious account of a rare but by no means supernatural
event. It seems, however, to be attracted into a striking parallelism
with the story of Efijah raising the son of the widow of Sarepta. In the
one case it is a son, in the other a daughter; here the father, there the
mother intercedes; in the one case a staff is laid upon the body, and
in the other, hands. In both cases the saver came from a journey and
strangers are excluded. The prophet laboured longer, and the resus
citation he effected was more gradual, for we are told that the lad first

THE MIRACLES 629
sneezed and then opened his eyes. Both are only children, and the
parents of both come with faith.1 By these paraUelisms Jesus is made
to legitimate himself as a prophet and challenge comparison with the
greatest one of old.
Luke alone reports the resurrection of the youth of Nain. Here the
body was met on the way to burial, which among the Jews was very
soon after fife went out. This account is but fittle amplified. Jesus
touched the bier, called the young man to arise, which he did and began
to speak. As the narrative stands, death in this case is more probable
although revival from a swoon is not entirely excluded. The stages of
restoration were passed immediately. But why was such an event
unknown or unmentioned by the other Evangelists? Here, too, is an
Old Testament parallel. The widow's son dies in the presence of Eli
jah, who carries him to an upper room, stretches himself upon the
body, and prays that the youth's soul may return. This famous an
cient miracle was performed only half a league from Nain, and the
geographical and circumstantial nearness is at least suggestive. The
Jewish belief that the soul hovered about the body for some time, and
the absence of tests of the complete extinction of life, should also be
given due weight. The balance of probabilities in every mind that is at
once candid and intelligent cannot long remain in doubt, without in
voking the cheap assumption of Paulus, that in this case and that of
Jairus's daughter Jesus by his medical experience was able to perceive
signs of life unnoticed by others. The candid psychologist cannot fail
to admit that we do not yet know very definitely how far the gradual
processes of natural death may go and yet be reversed by the intense
faith and love of a circle of friends using extreme methods of recall.
Very many well-attested cases might be cited of suspended animation
and of those who have lived after being snatched from the jaws of
death. AUowing only human fallibility of judgment on the part of
both bystanders and writers, the stfil-unexplored limits of nature may
not have been transcended in either of the above cases. Jesus may
have acquired exceptional insight into the stages by which life passes
over into death, and in certain cases he may have achieved resuscita
tion at a degree of ex-animation still unreached by our methods.
At any rate, the tendencies of modern psychological progress suggest
some impending advance in both knowledge and practice in this
'Keim, "History of Jesus of Natara." Vol 4, p. 173.

630 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
direction, and medical science may by natural means ere long accom
plish somewhat more than is even yet generally thought possible.
In these two cases of resuscitation of adolescents it may seem at
first sight symbofism run wild to suggest an allusion to the well-under
stood fact that this age is itself one of regeneration, the salient traits
of which are the outburst of physical growth, the beginning of love,
by which life normally passes over from egoism to altruism, the awak
ening of the intellect, the new orientation to adulthood, and the fact
that this everywhere is the age of conversion, confirmation, or initiation
into the tribe, and also the period of new liabilities to arrest or retarda
tion of the subsequent stages of development, which are so precious yet
so precarious.1 The tout ensemble of these changes, the new tempta
tions and the new dangers, and the successful overcoming of them aU
might weU be typified here; but this would be too cryptic and recondite.
The discrepancies in the first narrative are so great that some think
there were two girls healed at different times. Again, aU three ac-
covnts strangely insert very near the middle of the narrative, as Jesus
was on the way to heal the twelve-year-old girl, the case of the woman
with the twelve-year issue of blood. The placing of this latter event
on the way to the bedside of the dead or dying girl is hardly sufficient
excuse for injecting it into the narrative in the way in which aU the
synoptists do it. Indeed, the question is inevitable whether the
association of death or the deativ-like swoon at the age of first menstrua
tion showing phenomena that suggest aborted molimena, with a case
of menorrhagia or excess, does not imply a more inner relation between
the two. It at least suggests the question whether the first cure may
have consisted in the inauguration of the first monthly period. If so,
we have a veiled intimation that here Jesus is made to control the lunar
phenomena of womankind and thus to appear in a new way as Lord
of the very gates of life. As Yahveh of old made wombs barren or
fertile, so here Jesus stands forth as the normalizer of the function
by which was fulfilled the old covenant with Abraham, whereby if he
kept the Lord's law and word his seed should be multiplied like the
uncounted stars. On this eugenic view Jesus is made Lord of the un
born as well as of children and youth. He controls the entrance to as
weU as the exit from life. In this so evidently belaboured and dispar-
ately told story, and the baffling and unparaUeled incorporation of a
'See my "Adolescence." New York, 1904, 1 vols.

THE MIRACLES 631
healing into the midst of a resurrection story, we may thus have before
us an attempt to establish Jesus as the controller of excessive or defective
functioning of sex in women. The feeling that virtue had gone out of
him in staunching the bloody flux has often been caUed suggestive, but
no commentator that I can find has ever attempted to tell of what.
It probably refers to the mysterious healing power that emanated from
Jesus' body working independently of his wfil, and perhaps coming
directly from the Father. Few, if any, miracles make so strong an
impression that there is behind something untold and utterly inaccessi
ble, however much it may chaUenge conjecture. The writers seem de
sirous of expressing something which they could not express, either
from lack of insight into a tradition which had already taken a certain
form and to which they felt loyal and could not omit, or else because
they saw in it some meaning that needed to be veiled for a larger and
less esoteric public, on a tabooed topic on which they were liable to
speak too plainly. So they adopted this method of inserting one ac
count into another, hoping that to the wise, at least, the hidden mean
ings would seep through while they imposed upon themselves a strict
censorship. A large body of new knowledge to-day shows the recip
rocal control each by the other of all psychoneural phenomena and the
vita sexualis. The son of the widow of Nain was also an only child,
like the daughter of Jairus. Thus Luke's mother-son narrative
exactly complements that of the father-daughter pair in the synoptists.
The latter, too, is dead by added tokens; which suggests either subse
quent accommodation or else that there was a number of such cases
from the abundance of which the writer could select one that was ex
traordinarily fitted for this purpose.
(b) The raising of Lazarus (John only) is as it stands the most
stupendous and confounding of all miracles, more so in some respects
than even the Resurrection of Jesus himself; for in the latter case there
was no putrefaction, and there were also no witnesses and no details
of just how it occurred. Sincerely as Jesus loved Lazarus and his sis
ters, when the latter sent him word of their brother's illness, he quietly
remained where he was two days, with no intimation of any special
duties, but remarked to those about him that the sickness was not
unto death, although the sequel shows that it was, and although he
later told his disciples that Lazarus was not asleep but reaUy dead.
Only when Thomas, overwhelmed with pathos, exhorted the disciples

632 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
to go to Bethany and die with the friend they all seemed to love so ar
dently, did Jesus consent to start for the afflicted home. Why did the
Johannin or Logos-Christ delay? He explained this later by saying that
he was glad he was not present at the death, in order that they might
have occasion to believe that it had aU occurred for the glory of God
and his Son. The object of the delay thus seems to have been to give
an object-lesson of God's power to raise the dead. The soul was
supposed in that day to leave a corpse on the end of the third day,
and then the body was given over to corruption. So Jesus waited four
days, until as Martha said the body stank, a delay that from the human
standpoint seemed inhuman, all the more so if Jesus had the slightest
doubt of his success in raising him from the dead, although the implica
tion is obvious that his confidence in his power to do this was absolute.
The mourning friends were thus compelled to endure their grief for the
sake of the great demonstration that was to follow. On the other hand,
Jesus did not at first expect a fatal issue of the illness, although he knew
later, apparently telepathicafly, that Lazarus was dead, and then was
intent upon showing that what seemed so conclusively to mortals to
be death was really only sleep, from which he knew how to awaken those
he loved. Thus, while he lingered in Perea his higher nature knew all
the while what was to occur, and he stayed just long enough to ma!:e
the miracle most impressive and dramaticaUy effective. The sisters
upbraided Jesus for his delay, saying that had he been there their
brother would not have died. They seem to have had no intimation
that his assertion that their brother would be awakened could mean
anything but at the resurrection of the last day. When Jesus told
Martha that he was the resurrection and the -life, and whoever believed
in him, though he were dead, would live, and added that whosoever
believed on him would never die, she does not seem to have drawn the
inference that because truly dead her brother had not believed. When
asked if she accepted all this, her hope seems to have been revived but
to be yet held in abeyance, so that she only answered that she believed
he was Christ, the Son of God, and then hastened off to call her sister
Mary to be present, as if to witness some great impending event which
at least might be possible. When Mary came with a large group of
sympathizing Jews, like a Greek chorus or like the mourners and
musicians when Jairus's daughter was raised, unlike the synoptic Jesus,
who is sympathetic with grief, the Logos-Christ seems vexed that

THE MIRACLES 633
any one should weep while he, the very principle of life, is present, and
also because he had been reproached for not being present and thus
permitting the death. But if he felt anger it turned at once to grief,
and we are told that he wept as he is never said elsewhere to have done,
save in view of Jerusalem when bemoaning the troubles that awaited
her. The sepulchre before which aU now stood was very like that of
Jesus later, hewn out of a rock and closed with a stone, while the grave
clothes also were similar, prefiguring thus Jesus' own Resurrection.
At his command the stone was removed despite Martha's protest
that after four days the corpse would be offensive. Then Jesus prayed,
thanking God that he was heard as always, not asking power to do this
miracle, but as if feeling that he already had virtually done it, and
apologizing to Yahveh for praying at aU, on the ground that he did so
that bystanders might know that he was the Son of God, and perhaps
to lift their thoughts to him. Critics have impugned the motivation
of this prayer as mockery, as acting, or at least as accommodation.
The synoptic Christ might pray for power as Efijah had done before
restoring the dead, but the Johannin Christ is above the need of asking
or thanking, because his whole life is an effusion of God. The prayer
is thus pedagogical, to show his oneness with the Father. As Hilgen-
feld well said, we have in this record traces of the dualization or in
complete fusion of the divine and human nature. After this Jesus " cried
with a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come forth.' And he that was dead came
forth, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes; and his face was bound
about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, 'Loose him and let him
go. ' " With this dumbfounding denouement the narrative stops short.
The natural curiosity to know Lazarus' state of mind and his sub
sequent experiences after his reanimation, whether all traces of the
disease that caused his death had been eliminated, whether he was
restored at once to his maximum of health and strength, and how
much truth there is in the persistent tradition that the family suffered
at the hands of the Pharisees — aU this is not gratified, although litera
ture has repeatedly sought to fill the void in our knowledge by fantasy.
It used to be said that Lazarus had not confessed Christ, and so his
soul had to be caUed back not from paradise but from Hades, and that
thus he had the only opportunity vouchsafed to any mortal to accept
Christ after some experience with post-mortem existence. If this is

634 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
so, it is regrettable that we are not told explicitly whether he really
was saved at last.
This is, of course, the miracle of miracles and the most staggering
of aU to faith, even to that of orthodoxy. The first question which
naturaUy arises is why the other three Evangelists say and apparently
know nothing of it. They wrote earlier, and there was every reason
why they should have chronicled it and none why they should not;
and those reasons that have been brought forward why they should not
are of fittle or no weight. It has been conjectured, e. g., that owing to
this incident persecution had caused Lazarus' family and friends to
move to parts unknown, and that this miracle had dropped out of the
memory of the circle in which the synoptists moved tiU John unearthed
it. But surely it was unique and too famous not to have been heard
of by aU Jesus' foUowers. Others have said that the synoptists were
not apostles, and that this was reserved to John who was. But there
were no other reservations; on the contrary, what was known of Jesus
seems to have been used by each writer with no restrictions save those
he imposed upon himself. Some agreement has been fancied among
the apostles by which this feU to John, but the other dozen miracles
which two or more of the Gospels have in common make this improb
able. Some have had recourse to the view that it was not reaUy
Lazarus' body but his ghost in ghostly grave-clothes that appeared.
But this would severely tax the credulity of all who doubt the existence
of ghosts, and it distinctly contravenes the spirit of the narrative.
The much-overworked hypothesis of suspended animation has been
adduced despite its exclusion by the statement that putrefaction had
begun. Some have conjectured that the first Gospels did not mention
this incident because it might injure the feelings, or imperil even the
safety, of Mary and Martha, and interfere with their effort to escape
the notoriety it had brought to the family while they were at Bethany;
or again it has been urged that the first synoptists desired to magnify
the Galilean career of Jesus, and were jealous of deeds done, as this
was, in Judea. In the more liberal camp, too, we find a great variety
of theories. Renan, e. g., conjectures that Lazarus had been ill,
but was better. His sisters, who were intensely sympathetic with
Jesus, knew that the latter was near the most depressing period of his
career, since his role of Messiah was making increasing claims upon
him which he was more and more unable to meet, until the distress

THE MIRACLES 635
from this cause finally drove him to accept death as a welcome relief,
because the part of Messiah had become intolerable. Fearing some
tragic result from this extreme depression in which Jesus now was,
these well-meaning sisters hit upon a ruse in fulfilment of which
Lazarus, now recovered but still pale and weak from his illness, allowed
himself just before Jesus' arrival to be wrapped in a winding sheet and
shut up in the family tomb, to which Martha conducted Jesus im
mediately upon his arrival because he desired to see him. She, who
represents the Petrine executive as her sister Mary does the Johannin
contemplative type, had gathered a crowd, and Jesus then caUed upon
Lazarus, upon which he came forth. Thus not only the people, but
very probably Jesus, thought this was a miracle, and Jesus, if he sus
pected any deception about it, did not betray his friends, either because
he was so sad and weary that he had grown a fittle indifferent for the
moment, or because he may have sought to console himself with the
forlorn hope that possibly he had raised the dead without intending to
do so. Others, also, such as Saints Bernard and Francis d'Assisi, were
unable to check the passion for miracles among their friends, and so
they were almost coerced into the r61e of miracle-workers, perhaps
despite ineffective protests. This view of course compels us to
sacrifice either the truth of John's account or else the sagacity and
common sense, if not the honour, of Jesus.
Many exegetes think to mitigate some one or other single feature
of the record, making concessions of detail to save the rest; and others,
assuming some unknown incident as a nucleus, admit some degree
of distortion or exaggeration. Protestants have from Luther down
found this the most troublesome of all things in the story of Jesus'
life, unconsciously assuming, perhaps, that, as Spinoza said in sub
stance of himself, if they once accepted this marvel literally they would
be compeUed to accept Jesus as superman, even if they knew nothing
else about him. Every other claim of Christianity would be easy if
this were once accepted. Some have advised that here reason be held
in abeyance to a credo quia absurdum or abandonment to faith, and
would make this the cardinal shibboleth or orthodoxy. In this they
are right, for a credulity that can accept this wfil stick at nothing.
The rationalistic school reminds us that the only evidence that
decomposition had set in was Martha's opinion, and that she was prob
ably mistaken. Paulus thought that Lazarus was in a comatose state,

636 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
or lethargy, from which he was awakened by the opening of the tomb,
which let in fight and warm air, and calls attention to the fact that
Jesus merely commanded him to come forth and not to awake from the
dead. It has also been suggested that Jesus' keen sight perceived slight
movements in the corpse that others did not notice. Gabler, assuming
Lazarus had really died, says Jesus had very good reason for saying he
was glad he was not present, because if he allowed any one, especially
a friend of his, to die in his presence, he would lose Messianic prestige.
If we were to grant either of the above suppositions, Jesus is made an
actor, and his moral character is sacrificed. The excision of difficult
passages as interpolations has also been attempted by various critics,
notably Deffenbach. Luke conjectures that Jesus' delays were
excused by the fact that he was having a great revivalistic success in
his ministry in Perea and therefore, especially as he was instinctively
averse to miracle-working, felt himself bound to remain where he was.
Jesus was also predominantly a teacher in that he deliberately pro
posed to let Lazarus die and then resuscitate him rather than to heal
him before his death, because this would have a better pedagogic
object-lesson effect on Lazarus' friends and others, although in no
other case does he try to increase his miracles.
But surely the time has long since come when it can and must be
said that befief in this miracle taken literally is a psychological impos
sibility for any intelligent modern soul. This is a case where the wfil
to believe cannot compel belief itself. The Kalif Omar, the dearest
friend of the great prophet of Mohammedanism, after he had just
seen his master die, stepped to the door of the tent with drawn sword,
affirming that the prophet still lived and threatening death to any one
who dared to deny it, because he felt the pragmatic sanction that it was
expedient for the people to think him yet alive. Thus Jove was said
to have recourse to his thunderbolts when he knew he was in the
wrong. Thus too, psychoanalysis explains how men can vociferate
most those things they wish to make themselves believe but cannot,
and may even persecute those who confess the doubts which they them
selves more or less unconsciously feel. Thus one active and vital
Church to-day sends out as missionaries those young men who have just
begun to doubt its creed, and finds that by a few years of trying to
convince others they have stifled their own doubts. Thus, and in
many other ways, reason may be silenced and depressed where it can-

THE MIRACLES 637
not be immolated. To avow faith in such a miracle as this is a con
fession of ignorance of what true sincerity and conviction are.
Not only has this narrative become an offense to the modern
Christian consciousness which causes rejection of the whole Christian
scheme by ingenuous youth who have been taught that it is integral
and that aU the rest falls if this does, but returns which we have col
lected from many orthodox Christians show that this miracle has either
quietly lapsed into insignificance and has come to be ignored as if it
were encapsulated like a foreign body in the soul, or else it fies heavily
on the conscience as a positive handicap to both faith and works.
Assemblages of Protestant clergymen confess that they rarely preach
about it, save incidentally as a symbol, and Schleiermacher said it was
reaUy of little significance, even for spiritual edification. Those who
think they believe it, or try to, do so with reservations of which they
may not be aware. The very soreness and touchiness of orthodoxy con
cerning it, and its readiness to turn loose the awful odium theologicum
upon those who openly question it, is of itself a conclusive proof of the
official and precarious tenure with which it is still clung to in the
ultra-conservative camp. This state of mind is not unlike that of
neurotics. A young woman, e. g., worn out by the petulance of an
incurably morbid mother, half realized one day that she perhaps reaUy
wished her parent were dead. She was so horrified by the recognition
of this motive submerged in herself that it led her to redouble. aU her
careful assiduities and protestations of love for her mother, while she
became morbidly timid lest others should suspect her awful death-
thought, which she was trying to strangle down by over-compensation.
An upright man was surprised by a temptation which in an unguarded
and relaxed moment suddenly sprang upon and nearly overcame him,
and thereafter he made himself a paragon of the countervailing virtues.
Kant's theory that belief in God, soul, and immortality work weU, and
although unprovable to the pure theoretical are true to the practical
reason, led to modern pragmatism that makes the effects on conduct
the criterion of truth, as James, Schfiler, and better yet, Vaihinger
(in his " Philosophie des Als Ob ") have explained in great detail. But
even granting that faith in Lazarus' miracle worked pedagogicaUy
weU in the early stages of Christianity, by this very test to-day this
miracle must be utterly discredited. It has become a stone of stum
bling and a rock of offense and should be sloughed off as a caput mortuum

638 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
or death's head at every symposium of Christian experience. Nor is it
enough to aUow it to lapse into innocuous desuetude. As every en
lightened man has seen who has had any experience in meeting the
doubts of earnest, honest, truth-seeking young men over this, once
this handicap is dispeUed there is a regeneration of loyalty to Jesus'
person and a reinforced zest to penetrate to the inner meaning of his
positive teaching to our age; but mere negations like the above will not
suffice to accomplish this emancipation. We must understand the
motivation of the fabrication, and at least indicate, though we cannot
here do so in great detail, why it has come to occupy its present though
false position in the conservative Christian consciousness. This may
be roughly stated as foUows, premising only that in doing so we enter
a field of both individual and folk-psychology that is still more or less
strange, if not yet finally explored by expert students.
The first and strongest impression which Jesus left on his foUowers
after his departure from the world consisted in their conviction that he
had arisen from the dead and thereby conquered the king of terrors.
For the early Christians, fear of death was changed into exaltation, if
not often into longing. His Resurrection was Paul's cardinal theme,
without which he said aU faith was vain. Inebriation with this con
viction and all it implied was the chief cause of the ecstatic phenomena
of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was given, the chief mission of
which was to give faith in the Resurrection. The great death-killer
had brought fife and immortality to light, and it was because he had
arisen that all the lingering doubts of the disciples as to his nature and
mission were finally dispelled. Belief in the Resurrection was the
chief test in the acceptance of new converts. Jesus' teachings as well
as aU the incidents of his life paled relatively to this submission to and
subsequent conquest of death. This tremendous transforming con
viction in both its form and degree was a new thing in the world, and
for decades and even generations, it brought into and kept the early
promulgators and their converts in a state somewhat predisposed to
ecstasy. This was augmented by the tribulations and persecutions
to which the early Church was subjected. What was more natural,
therefore, than that the immediate successors of Jesus should develop
apperception centres keenly attuned to everything in Jesus' life and
work that pertained to his death-quelling function and power? This,
too, was the chief focus of doubt, and by far the most vulnerable point

THE MIRACLES 639
of attack by those who rejected or questioned the message of the Gospel.
There was in believers a strong determining tendency to lay stress
on aU that made for and to ignore aU that made against this prime
article of faith, and to require a Stellungsnahme to it from all prose
lytes. Even the synoptic Gospels did not escape this tendency to
stress and exaggerate the details of the two resurrections which they
ascribe to Jesus; but in the considerable interval between their com
position and that of the Fourth Gospel the need of and the wish for
stronger attestation grew apace. John and his circle would inevitably
have felt this most, and that for two reasons: first, John was the only
apostle to whom a Gospel is ascribed; and second, he was the beloved
disciple who stood closest to Jesus and from whom most would be
expected,, whfie he and his disciples would also most desire to help out
the nascent Church at this its weakest point.
(c) Jesus' Own Resurrection. — The accepted miracles of Jesus
readily fall into two classes, the least, like those of healing slight ailments,
on to the cures of chronic and constitutional disorders, and thus up the
ladder to the two earlier resurrections, which the synoptists report that
Jesus effected, viz., that of Jairus's daughter and the young man. Neither
of these two cases of resurrection was unimpeachable by carpers. From
them to Jesus' own Resurrection was a very long step, not only in time
(for the above two resurrection miracles came relatively early in Jesus'
ministry) , but in convincing power and in fulness of attestation. Here,
then, was a chasm, a veritable missing link which, if it could be supplied,
would make the series complete and rather uniformly graded, so as
to show a progressive succession of tolerably equal steps in the develop
ment of Jesus' power and also in the development of the power of faith
in his followers. Then Jesus would stand forth in a new fight as being
able and willing to vitalize with new life all who needed it, aU the way
from those transiently indisposed, in whom the energy of the great
biologos was temporarily abated, on to those in whom it was entirely
extinct. Here, then, was a void that could only be fiUed by a miracle
of recuperation more marked and more circumstantiaUy attested than
anything in the three then-existing Gospels or in the Old Testament.
There must be no room for any doubt that the death was itself real.
It must be of some definite and more or less known person (although
he must not be too well known; John the Baptist, e. g., much as the
disciples might have wished Jesus to raise him, would not do, because

640 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
all persons raised from the dead have to vanish so that we have no
subsequent knowledge of their fives), and there must also be witnesses,
both friendly and hostfie. The tomb must have been closed securely,
just as that of Jesus had been, but the stone must be removed and the
corpse go forth in broad daylight, in sight of all, and with the winding-
sheet still about him. These were items the lack of which in the
already more or less fixed traditions of Jesus' own Resurrection had
been found painfully lacking in effectiveness, and the new miracle must
supply these defects. Moreover, the needed miracle must be placed
at what has often been called the dark hour of Jesus' ministry, when
he was most depressed and felt most keenly the meshes of destiny
closing about him. This period of his ministry, too, was relatively
miracleless and somewhat uneventful, Jesus' great deeds and great
doctrines having been aheady promulgated, while the closing scenes
of his life were not yet begun. There was a rather waste place that
needed a great event to give better proportion and more orderly pro
gression to the processional of his story on earth. Here, too, the
fame of such an event was necessary to explain the otherwise not fuUy
motivated acclaim that the synoptics had said Jesus was met with
on entering Jersusalem. FinaUy, it would help also to explain and
intensify the rancour and jealousy of the envious scribes and Pharisees
in Jerusalem. Therefore the miracle should be placed near and not
long before Jesus' entry into this city. Thus the psychological hour,
place, and act were predetermined. Something adapted to meet all
these specifications ought by every token to occur; and, therefore, if it
was believed, it would be truer than historic fact because it would have
the supreme pragmatic sanction of faith that is above sight.
This miracle, as we read it, was therefore no individual fabrication,
like Plato's myths, but something that inevitably would graduaUy
develop in the fructifying psychic soil of the Johannin group. The
soul-stuff of which it was whoUy made was not fantasy alone, but had a
very large ingredient of practical wfil as weU. It was long especiaUy
dear to faith because made warp and woof of faith. To us to-day it is
only a rare and fascinating fossil from a past age of an extinct species,
which teUs us only what religious culture history used to be. Its
rejection to-day is not because our faith is less, but because faith now
needs new and higher forms, and, like the chambered nautilus, the
Christian soul must build for itself ever larger mansions.

THE MIRACLES 641
In the early Christian centuries it became very much the fashion
to develop miracles for edification purposes, as is copiously filustrated
aU the way from the apocryphal Gospels to the "Acta Sanctorum."
Pious wishes were given a license in construing nature because the
power of the transcendent was prepotent over the material world as
never before. The Jenseits controlled the Diesseits to an unparaUeled
degree; for this world was nothing, while the new supernal Kingdom
of the future was aU. Earth was translucent and was thus also tran
scended. It was very soon to pass away, while the other world was
eternal. Hence the cosmos as we know it was only a symbol of the
other world, and faith was the new-born organ and sanctioned befief
in what man fondly longed to believe, uncensored by criticism. Science
was unknown, and its earliest votaries when they arose were thought
in league with the devil. The miracle of Lazarus was the most con
spicuous and perhaps the first fruit of this type of fabrication. It was
the masterpiece of all its kind, and both set the pattern and opened
the door of license for hosts of inferior creations evolved for the same
purpose, the pious end of which was felt abundantly to justify their
construction. This justification was something as foUows:
Something like this could happen, or else God's omnipotence was
limited. Moreover, Jesus had arisen, and as he raised himself he must
be able to raise others; and he had promised to raise aU the dead ere
long. A paradigm of his power to do this was greatly needed as an
ante-past and guarantee of the final resurrection, to demonstrate that
he could reverse the normal processes of decay. An ocular demon
stration of the possibility of the future resurrection of all men was
necessary, or else it might be and was said that "he raised himself,
others he could not raise." A great companion-piece to his own self-
resuscitation was needed wherein he revived a common, average man.
It was meet to show that the Father could raise others just as truly as
he had raised his only begotten Son. Hence, both the similarities and
the contrast between these two events were especiaUy wrought out.
Like Lazarus, aU men would soon be raised, and the good would foUow
Christ to heaven.
It was also so certain that Jesus could have done it, and it was
so urgent that he should have done it, that what ought to be must be
more truly than what reaUy is. He could not possibly have left his
earthly work with so obvious a lacuna, and therefore he must have

642 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
given a type instance of his power to raise the dead that would be no
less convincing in its way than was his own Resurrection. It was a case
that the patristic writers described as fides quaerens objectum, for faith
is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not
seen. The wfil to believe must have an object on which to wreak itself,
and if it did not find it, had to make one. This would not be so diffi
cult because the three then-existing Gospels were very scrappy and
imperfect jottings, and left so much of his life unwritten that all the
books in the world, we are told, could not contain it. Hence there was
a free field for this non-Bergsonian kind of creative evolution, for the
imagination, as Froscheimer has shown us, is in its inmost essence a
totalizing faculty, complementing the imperfections of the individual
with the perfections of the whole. This, we are told, is its chief func
tion. Thus we can see that this miracle was no extemporized produc
tion, but the unique and classic structure of its type, most of aU
independent of Old Testament analogies and allusions.
StiU, as others have pointed out, its poets or artificers took sug
gestions from diverse sources. Many have shown, from Strauss to
Jiilicher, who has devoted his life to the study of the parables, how they
sometimes shade over into, overlap, and interpenetrate miracles in a
few cases. Thus it has been urged that the Lazarus here was bor
rowed from the blind beggar of the parable whom Luke represents
as sitting covered with sores at Dives's gate, and after death as trans
ferred to Abraham's bosom. Both are sick, both die and are buried.
The one did return from the grave, and the other desired to do so,
but was not allowed because the brethren he wished to warn would not
believe, just as the Jews did not believe the Johannin Lazarus really
did return. Thus the thought of reveniance, the name of the hero of
it, and that of his sisters, given by Luke, serve perhaps as points de
repere for the Fourth Evangelist, so that Lazarus was resurrected,
in another sense, by being transferred from an allegorical existence
in a parable to a flesh-and-blood personality. The rest of the nar
rative was framed to fit the various exigencies of the situation as we
have seen them. Very probably this entire narrative of forty-five
verses grew gradually into its final form from many repetitions, inter
polations, and excisions, till a slowly evolving consensus made it fit
the psychological exigencies to a degree that merely historical hap
penings rarely, if ever, do.

THE MIRACLES 643
It should be distinctly understood that the word "fabrication"
is taken here in its literal sense of makmg, as a poet is a maker, and not
at aU in its derived sense, which implies some degree of falsification.
So anchored were these "makers" in truth that they could freely with
poetic license "play with gracious lies." Like their master, yet more
often, the Johannin group of foUowers was prone to exaltation, not
only owing to their theme and also the tensity of the times, but because
in them these tendencies were reinforced by a mildly erethic diathesis
of soul which predisposed them to visions and revelations. They were
poets under the inspiration of a new muse which they revered under
the name of the Holy Ghost. So multifarious were these impulsions
that they were exhorted to test aU spirits to see if they were good, and
to discard others. Thus such a formation as this truly nascitur
non fit, and it was accepted with an enthusiasm that was psychologicaUy
identical, being less only in degree, with that which evolved it. For
it must not be forgotten that we are always here in the realm of James's
"higher powers of man," where the phenomena are aU normal but
of unusual altitude, like the exhilaration that both myth and experience
ascribe to mountain-tops.
Now precisely this strong fecund tendency to make edification-
value the supreme test of truth, a tendency so vital that it persisted
long after it had degenerated to fatuousness, was very largely the
natural result of Jesus' own chronicaUy transcendent state of mind,
and also of his notable pedagogic invention of the parable, which con
sisted of incidents only spirituaUy true. Not only to art but to Chris
tian experience the prodigal son is as real as, if not more so than, the
Lazarus of the resurrection. The disciples must often have wondered
whether Jesus was telling an apt anecdote of some one who really lived
and whom he knew, recounting things that actually happened, or
hypothecating both persons and events to meet a practical exigency
or a didactic end for which only verisimilitude was needed. With
Jesus there was no confusing of the parables he told and the miracles
he did. The substance of the former is always a natural, if not com
mon, event from daily fife, and so the very opposite of a marvel. But
if common occurrences could be fabricated for heuristic ends, sooner
or later it would inevitably be asked why uncommon events could not
be thus used, especiaUy since the latter had now become an integral
part of the new order of things and in excited minds prone to supersti-

644 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tion were common enough. Again, Jesus regarded his healings as
mainly symbols of healing the soul from the ravages of sin. Thus it
was not strange if the real truth of all things came to consist in their
higher meanings, and the value of historicity as such inevitably suf
fered relative decline. The parabling of Jesus thus proved to be the
innocent and unsuspected beginning of a new test of objective truth
and reality. Hence, in another sense, the story of Lazarus is a precious
missing link, for it fies half way between the parabling propensity of
the Great Teacher and the miracle-mongering of, e. g., the Bolandist
fathers in whom credulity stopped at nothing, however preposterous,
if they thought it contained spiritual edification. Absurd to reason
and abominable to science as the tale of a reanimated corpse is, it
nevertheless glows deep down in the soul below consciousness in aU,
however rational or scientific, when the lust for personal survival
beyond this life is strong. Unconjugated as it is by any mood or tense
of the grammar of assent as Newman construed it, under the severest
ban of logic, bewusstseinsunfdhig to the cultured modern mind, out
lawed by the higher and often even the lower criticism, surd and
anachronism as it now is, nevertheless, when in revery childish wish-
dreams recur in those souls in whom the supreme question they put to
fife is to know whether when a man die he shall five again, this pre
posterous tale grows warm and phosphoresces deep down in the heart,
the oldest part of our psychic organism. Thus, as at last spring re
animates nature; thus, too, as the immortal germ plasm is resurrected
out of the moribund soma in each generation by love; so the often
idiotic prose of superstition may be rescued to the highest uses by
poetic genius. It was reserved to geneticism to teach us that things
utterly false on the lowest may be Bible truths in the highest psychic
levels. (C) Cures at a Distance. — Of cures at a distance there are several
narratives. The centurion was of gentile birth, but a lover of the
Jews, and had built them a synagogue. His son was paralyzed, tor
mented, and, Luke says, about to die. Matthew's less artificial ac
count says the centurion came himself; Luke, that he sent messengers
twice. He would invite Jesus, but was unworthy to receive him. He
had faith in his power to command spirits, which he thought analogous
to his own to command his soldiers. He believed Jesus could heal with
a word at a distance. Remarking (in a phrase sometimes chaUenged

THE MIRACLES 645
as rupturing the spirit both of the narrative and the general purpose of
the Evangelist who records it) that this faith was greater than he had
found in Israel, Jesus said that it would be to him according to his
belief. John's edition of this miracle is so different that some have
thought it another event. It is now the son of a nobleman, perhaps a
Jew, at the point of death with a fever. Jesus said, " thy son liveth,"
and it was later found that he began to mend the same hour. Then
the father and his house believed.
With this double narrative we can hardly identify, as some do, the
other case of healing at a distance, the daughter of the Greek woman
vexed with a devfi. She is far more gentile than the centurion, and
Jesus was reluctant because he declared that he was sent to save only
in Israel, and that the children's bread should not be cast to dogs.
But she importuned that dogs might eat the crumbs that fell from the
table. Commending her faith, he granted her wish, and her daughter
was made whole, for the devil left her. Mark omits the account of the
centurion, although its attendant lessons would harmonize with his
spirit, but records that of the Greek girl. This is said to indicate
identity and to support the hypothesis of the greatest freedom of treat
ment of the same material. But, on the other hand, Matthew contains
both, which shows that he regarded them as two, as, indeed, most have
held. Each raises the question of Jesus' service to those who are not
Jews, although the centurion may have been a proselyte as well as a
benefactor, and this may account for Jesus' friendly spirit toward the
one appeal and his reluctance toward the other. The difficulty with
John's nobleman is that he travels so slowly a distance of only five
leagues homeward to reach his dying son, although this loitering has
on the other hand been regarded as an indication of his certainty that
the cure had been effected and that his presence at home was not
needed. These cures at a distance exclude not only contact but prob
ably faith on the patient's part. Strauss regards the first incident as a
fictitious imitation of Elisha's cure of the leper Naaman at a distance,
and thinks each may typify and foreshow the penetration of Jesus'
influence into far-off gentfie lands. Paulus assumes a messenger sent
to communicate the cure. If the son and daughter knew their parents'
mission, faith and expectation may not have been absent; and some
have chaUenged only the coincidence of the telepathic word and the
curing, assuming that the joyful confidence of the parent or messenger

646 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
upon his return gave the curative stimulus. Magnetism and a " direct
mental path" have also been assumed.
The healing miracles are often graded as, first, those with material
means, saliva, clay, washing; second, touching; third, by words alonej
when the patient was present ; fourth, by a word efficacious at a distance,
and, lastly, with no will, intent, or even knowledge on Jesus' part,
curative power being, as it were, surreptitiously drawn from him when
he had no purpose to heal. It is a moot point whether a cure thus
stolen by touching his garment ever became efficacious if he did not
know it at once afterward, while some imply that even an accidental
contact with his garments unbeknown to him, and also with no intent
or knowledge on the patient's part, was really curative.
In these cases, as elsewhere, the discrepancies in the various
accounts can best be explained as showing " an increasing materializa
tion of the idea of a miracle," while the above series from the applica
tion of remedies to accidental contact and action at a distance show a
growing abandon to belief in some magical agency with which Jesus'
body was charged, but the loss of which left him depleted for a time
of healing virtue, even without knowing whose touch drew upon it.
A further growth of the same tendency later made handkerchiefs,
aprons, and even the shadow of Peter efficacious, as we find in the
Acts, and thence led to the belief in the therapeutic power of tombs
like that of the Abbe" of Paris, and in relics, and bones provided they
were believed to be those of saints; for here faith is essential. To ex
plain Jesus' power to project his will at a distance apologists often
remind us of the phenomenal nature of space, which is only for cor
poreal nature and not for spiritual things. Spiritual powers are not
bound down to our common space of three dimensions.
These tendencies show to psychoanalysis a strong but blind im
pulse in the early Christian consciousness toward sublimation, a ten
dency, however, mistaken in kind and direction. When the Gospels
were composed Jesus had long since ascended and the salvatory power
of his personality had to act at a distance or not at all, and so an in
stance of his telepathy while on earth was sorely needed. If he could
heal a few leagues away, he might stiU exert his heafing power from
his heavenly home. His person here had been uniquely magnetic, his
spirit contagious, his wfil compelling; and his Resurrection body might
be conceived as vastly more so to faith. Every vestige and relic

THE MIRACLES 647
of him thus become an Archimedean fulcrum of leverage for the faith
that could remove mountains of guilt from man's sin-sick soul. Jesus
was an embodied panacea for all human iUs, sarcous and psychic. He
was life and health, which latter word means wholeness or holiness.
The Great Physician had been supercharged with therapeutic, ortho
paedic, euthenic power, and where he had gone there could be no sick
ness or sorrow. How could this great inspiring conviction be imparted
with the culture resources then at his disciples' disposal? It was too
great for any of the devices of rhetoric. No figurative language could
compass it. History afforded no adequate precedents, examples, or
illustrations of it, and so there was no possible recourse save to couch
the message of this new muse in a new language, and thus and for this
purpose the healing miracle was created.
In referring to the vindictive miracle of cursing the fig-tree at a
distance, Mark makes it cursed one day and withered the next, as one
blind man was cured in stages. It is added that the time of fruit was
not yet, which was true in Judea the week before Easter. Why,
therefore, was it cursed for not bearing fruit out of its season? The
only answer is that this tree was a symbol of unfruitful Israel, at the
root of which the axe was laid. In the parable of the fig-tree, barren
for two years and condemned to be cut down, the gardener pleaded
that he be aUowed to give it special attention for another season, and
if it then remained barren it might be felled without further grace.
But there is no respite or parley, but a curse that blights at once.
Thus the divine wrath, like love, is telepathic, and thus even from high
heaven the wicked may be smitten. Thus Jesus is invested with the
power of black, as of white, magic.
(D) Nature Miracles: (a) The Water Made Wine. — Perhaps the
first of all Jesus' miracles, marking his debut as a wonder-worker, and
certainly the first nature miracle (recorded only by John), was at Cana.
Here and at this time in Galilee experts tell us wedding festivities lasted
a week. AU the guests were exalted, and the wine was exhausted.
Jesus' mother called his attention to the fact, as if she expected he could
and would relieve the situation. He protested with some apparent
resentment, because his hour was not yet come; but acquiesced,
though under protest, either as if to humour her, or in response to so
open a challenge to help on the revels, and with no modern temper
ance scruples. By his order six stone jars, holding, according to

648 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
research into the antiquities of that age, from one hundred and eight
to one hundred and sixty-two gallons, were filled to the brim with
water, and it was found, apparently almost on the instant and without
word, prayer, sign, or effort on his part, that all this water was tran-
speciated into wine, and that of the very best quality, suggesting further
jollity and inebriation.
It is both pathetic and ludicrous to see how the Christian con
sciousness has so crassly and persistently attempted to make bread
out of this stone of stumbling and offence. If it were a miracle of
transpeciation, Jesus was here doing something very akin to what he
had a few days before refused to do at Satan's behest. Now he would
be doing it only to further luxury and the delectation of a merry mar
riage party, when he would not do it to save himself from death by
thirst and starvation. Regarded as a factual miracle, it is both
clumsy and unmotivated, the product of an idle whim or caprice, and
as senseless as animating mud birds and making them fly away, as an
apocryphal Gospel said Jesus did as a lad.
It would be hard to say whether the orthodox fiteralists or the
early rationalists have been most absurd. Paulus thought it all a
sportive wedding jest in which wine was secretly smuggled in by some
collusive trick or conjuring. Ammon suggested some unrecorded use
of "spirits of wine," and Langerdorf says it was done by some unknown
use of "extracts of herbs." Others have thought it might be a case
of making bitter water sweet, hard water soft, or impure water pure.
A long list of mystic intermediate substances has been proposed, while
some have suggested that the miracle consisted in tinging the water
with blood, perhaps that of Jesus, as a symbol of his coming death and
of its atoning power. The learned, pious, and voluminous expositor
and commentator Lange, naively intimated that it might have been
Seltzer water or a magnetized water, while others have suggested that
it was perhaps from an effervescing or mineral spring near by which
only Jesus knew, by revelation, or perhaps naturally. Many have had
recourse to the very hard-worked hypothesis of accelerated natural
processes by which water poured on the roots of vines in the spring
would become wine after the grapes were trodden and fermented in
vats in the faU; while here the same process in aU its stages was rushed
through as if time had been dissolved into a Bergsonian eternal dura
tion. Unlike most miracles, this has no analogue in the Old Testament,

THE MIRACLES 649
and just what event, if any, underlies the narrative we can probably
never know.
Somewhat more insightful apologists have taken refuge in the
hypothesis of mental exaltation, a state to which the guests toward
the end of a hilarious week, where they had exceeded the expectations
of entertainers in consuming wine, might be predisposed. Their
condition would make water taste like wine, and so their imaginations
would give the effects of its imbibition increased potency. For
Beyschlag the incident showed Jesus' power over minds. The fluid
was itself unchanged, but those who drank it were entranced and per
haps half hypnotized, and so were made to think it wine and excellent.
Thus Jesus was really bringing the guests out of their state of semi-
inebriation by working a most commendable filusion. The more con
servative Weiss says in substance that Jesus only ordered the jars
filled, and then stood aside while God the omnipotent did the great
work of transformation.
Besides its inherent and utter incredibility as a fact, the richness
and appositeness of it as a symbol of many things must convince every
candid and insightful mind that we have here a group of ideas and
feelings clothing themselves in the form of a physical process. As an
aUegory rather than as a fact it is aU most pregnant and pertinent.
Keim suggests that it means that Judaism had no more wine, but must
be supplemented by the Christian water of purification and baptism,
made here still more effective as a type of spiritual wine. Again
Jesus was no fasting ascetic, but a bringer of joy ineffable, such as the
marriage of the faithful to the heavenly Bridegroom brings. Thus we
have here the keynote to his ministry as he steps into publicity out
from the shadow of the Baptist. Again, it has been conceived as an
intermediate step between ceremonial washing and the complete
cleansing with Jesus' blood, while the festive wine is prelusive of the
joy of the Holy Ghost. Jesus' nature had just undergone a trans
formation from humanity to conscious divinity, well typified by chang
ing water to wine. To his new theanthropic consciousness aU nature
and life were also thus and thereby sublimated, as if from aqueous to
vinous. Wine exalts, and his own experience had brought bis soul into
a more or less ecstatic state illustrative of the higher powers of man or
a kind of second breath reinforcement. It was prelusive of the sacra
ment of communion to be later established. The magic metamor-

650 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
phosis has a wedding as its background, because the miracle of love
typified how Jesus' soul had just been wedded to God, and so it is a
symbol of the soul's union with the All-Father. This wine was the
culminating and the best, and especiaUy satisfying after other poorer
wines, just as the thirst of Jesus' soul had been completely slaked by
the water of eternal life after partaking of which no one ever thirsts
again. If we thus conceive the material as swaUowed up in a new
dispensation of higher spiritual truths the incident is not only saved
from scoffers but may be used for those whose souls suffer from Silber-
er's1 apperceptive insufficiency and who must take hold of great and
high truths by some symbolic handle. Every item fits this kind of
interpretation, and people are more prone to cling to factual events
just so far as they fail to see and feel the power of their higher and
transcendent significance, so that literal belief often involves loss of the
power of higher spiritual insight. Whether the Cana incident was a
moving pictograph, dream, or revery in Jesus' soul, or evolved coUec-
tively in the Johannin group of his foUowers after his death, it certainly
has very many determinants, so that its interpretation is obvious and
its form easily explicable. Because it was so surcharged with meaning,
its crassification into a banal fact was to have been expected by those
who realize how tropes thus charged with multifarious significance
are inevitably literafized, because the mind vaguely feels vastly more
than it can understand. This we now can see pretty well by the
suggestions that have come to myth-study from a psychoanalysis of
the psychological laws that govern such formations. The precise point
at which this is placed, viz., just after Jesus' caU to Divine Sonship
and his acceptance of it, was admirably chosen. At the same time,
this makes it suspicious as a narrative of an objective happening, but
luminous and bientrouve as an effective, dramatic, rhetorical, pedagogic
device. It is not entirely satisfactory to regard this record as the manifest
content of a coUective dream of the inner Johannin circle of Jesus'
foUowers, possibly based on some trivial incident, or perhaps a de novo
creation of the seer of that circle which came to be adopted by it. As
alchemy sought to change baser metal into gold, and was itself moti
vated by every deep aspiration of aU its devotees and enmeshed in
countless aUegorical meanings, so this fluid alchemy of water into wine
'"Probleme der Mysrik und ihrer Symbolik." Wien, 1914, 283 p.

THE MIRACLES 651
was not a parable or vision, but an apologue of spiritual transformation
converted downward until it seemed anchored to fact. It was set
forth with due Riitksicht auf Darstellbarkeit so that it might conceivably
be made into a miracle play showing Jesus as the most conspicuous
exemplifier of the higher powers of man and of the now ecstatic state
on which he had entered after the baptism, and to which his former
life was as moonlight to sunlight, or as water to wine. For such a mir
acle we have no name. Neither ideo-, mytho-, or thumo-gram is quite
fit. It is in fact a parable fossilized, a purely psychic structure with
not the slightest element of objective or historic truthfulness in the
world of fact. It is thus twice a miracle, first in that it was a new and
original pedagogic masterpiece in embodying a momentous new, mean
ingful insight, viz., that of the new and higher life about to be revealed
by Jesus' words and deeds. The necessity of expressing a new psychic
content is sometimes so great that the crassest terms of its utterances
give relief and come to be believed because they are absurd, for only
absurdity can adequately utter novelty. Secondly, such a structure
as this is an almost ideal test and measure of psychic and religious
insight. The moron type of comprehension regards it as a kind of fact
fetish, while to the higher type of comprehension it reveals itself
as what it really is — a splendid trope of a profoundly characteristic
religious experience. The religious fetishist, however, we must not
forget, has an important function, viz., that of conserving the form in
which many precious meanings are wrapped up unchanged from age to
age; while, on the other hand, if aU saw only the content the form would
be slowly dissipated and thus that precious content lost. Thus we
have here a congeries of normal complexes standardized and conserved
by what we caU orthodoxy, embodying a new and transforming point
of view, desiccated and mummified but resurrectable in any soul vital
enough to transmute baser, sarcous into higher, pneumatic elements.
The early Church must have felt this impulse to enshrine spiritual
meanings in marvellous tales, because the lives of the saints, thousands
of whom the Bolandists have recorded during the last four centuries,
are a welter of so-called miracles of edification which are psychic con
structions once of great heuristic value but now rendered ineffective by
science. Such writers took liberties with nature's uniformity, as
poetic license does with syntax and grammar, and felt justified in so
doing in order to convey higher meanings; for new wine must be put

652 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
into new bottles. The Cana marvel, however, was no product of
caprice or wanton individual fancy, but an almost inevitable construc
tion of zeal in its first intention for propagating Gospel truth. As
great situations bring forth great men, so these products of expositorial
energumens struck out as by a spark of genius an incident that pre
cisely filled and fitted aU things, because, while couched in terms of
sense, they really say things only to the subconscious intuition. Such a
happening becomes in a sense a new technical term weU adapted for
general currency. Whfie, if considered as a mere factual event, it
serves admirably as a religious fool-finder, it makes its own deeper
appeal to the affectivity and autistic nature of aU in whom this deeper
stratum of psychic life exists.
(b) The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. — According to Matthew and
Mark, Jesus saw Simon Peter and Andrew fishing and said, Follow me
and I will make you fishers of men. Farther on he saw James and
John mending nets, called them, and they left their father and followed
him. Luke, however, has a fuller and very different account. Pressed
by the crowd, Jesus came upon two empty fishing boats and had the
owner of one take him aboard and push out a little from the shore be
cause of the crowd, and taught, sitting in it. When he had finished he
told the obliging owner of the boat to put out and cast his net, indi
cating the place. Doubtless because he had caught nothing aU night,
Peter remonstrated, and then yielded, catching so many fish that the
nets broke and they caUed the second pair of fishermen brothers to
their aid. Both boats were filled with fish to the sinking point.
All were astonished, and Simon with characteristic impulsiveness feU
at Jesus' feet, saying, Depart from me, Master, for I am a sinner.
Jesus replied, Fear not but have faith; thou shalt catch men. Having
landed, they forsook all and foUowed him.
Thus the miraculous draft of fishes is in Luke only and he teUs
it apparently to explain what seemed to him a greater marvel, viz.,
why according to the earlier reports, four hard-working fishermen should
on the instant leave aU to foUow a stranger. According to Luke, they
had felt the speU of Jesus' discourse, which might weU have been on the
symbolism or higher parable-like meaning of the vocation his lakeside
audience knew best. They had also had a demonstration of his strange
and uncanny power to locate fish, and by the use of it had certainly
acquired a tiny fortune. In Matthew and Mark the call and the obe-

THE MIRACLES 653
dience to it by this quaternion of fishermen seems a psychological mir
acle of almost hypnotic will-compelling power, while Luke finds a
natural motivation in a physical miracle, a distinct step downward
showing both Jesus and these disciples in a weird light. Jesus' per
sonal power over the wfil of others is lessened, whfie the alacrity of
obedience with which the caU is obeyed suggests an element of sordid-
ness. It has been asked why, when convinced of Jesus' power to locate
fish as they could not, they did not urge him to enter their caUing
instead of leaving it themselves on the moment of their greatest success.
Some have assumed a bargain by which Jesus promised to return and
repeat the miracle from time to time, so that they would reaUy catch
more fish if they spent the interim with him, on which view of course
their aUegiance was bought, or they were freed for a time by the great
haul to foUow their inclinations. Carpers have objected that whatever
may be true of shad, herring, and mackerel in the sea, fish never as
semble so densely in a lake of this size as to make such catches as are
here described possible, and also that the fish now in this lake do not
do so. It has even been argued that aU of the species of fish which had
this peculiar instinct of flocking together were here caught and their
race made extinct. At any rate, we are told that fish in this lake now
show no such habits. Another view is that Jesus noticed the shoal of
fish when he was speaking, and when he was through naturally caUed
Simon's attention to it; while stfll another commentator urges that the
multitude had drawn the fish together in great numbers by throwing
crumbs from their lunch into the water. StiU another says that if it
was a true miracle Jesus must have had not merely the power to per
ceive but to gather fish as Orpheus did beasts; that such was Jesus'
magnetic charm that even aquatic forms of life were attracted, indi
cating a sympathy of nature with supreme virtue, although it has been
objected that this was inconsistent with other intimations that Jesus
felt kindly toward birds and flowers while he lured the poor fish to
their destruction.
All this materialization of metaphors and aUegories, so character
istic of infantilism, is at the same time pathetic and fuU of the charm
of naivet£, and so at the other extreme is the pedantic skepticism as
to whether the first disciples were reaUy ever fishermen at all, but
that the typological force of the analogy between fish and making

654 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
converts transformed their vocation as weU as invented the miracle.
The Kingdom is a net, gathering good and bad, to be sorted later.
Max MiiUer, Coxe, Kiihn, and many others have abundantly shown
how metaphors do often tend to be taken fiteraUy and so become the
germ of mythology, and how spiritual meanings tend, as by a law of
psychic gravity, to lower fiteral and material levels. Of this law we
must conclude that we have here another illustration, and that the
power of Jesus' discourse in the boat and the enthusiasm of a newly
awakened consciousness of a great redemptive work in these four men
who now perhaps come over from John's mission, now put vividly
into terms of their own caUing, rather than a command to foUow
reinforced by a miracle, made them devote themselves to Jesus'
Messianism. In this view aU becomes natural and in fuU accordance
with the higher laws of psychodynamics.
What a better rhetorician or even historian than the Evangelists
would have said is that Jesus in calling the first four disciples man
aged to impress them with the idea that he could teach them object-
lesson-wise to draw crowds as he had done, as if (in the sense of Vaihing-
er's philosophy des als ob) he were to teach them where always to find
shoals of fish awaiting them. That they had caught nothing all the
night before was a doubly determined symbol, first of the night pre
ceding contrasted with the day in which they now were, symbolized by
Jesus' new life and his presence; secondly, their utter failure to catch
anything typified their previous inability to impress themselves upon
men. But this was offset, thirdly, by the implication that under his
guidance they should draw crowds as they had filled their boats with
fish. Thus we have some insight as to the inner motivation that im-
peUed them on the instant at his behest to foUow Jesus, which the more
laconic First and Second Gospels do not give, and we are able to obviate
the vulgarity and increase the power for edification of the incident if
taken fiteraUy and crassly. In this Jesus was more than a clairvoyant
fish-finder. If this had been all, he might have been a god of fishermen,
or thought to be a god of fishes themselves. We can perhaps better
understand, if not entirely sympathize with, the marveUous power
which the fish symbol 1% #/*?, as an anagram for Jesous Christos Theou
Uios Soter has. The symbol has been overloaded with meanings
hitherto not understood or explained. Here again it needed but a
slight insight into the psychological laws that govern the workings of

THE MIRACLES 655
the soul to save the Church from ages of gross materialism of faith
and of taking purely natural psychic process for a physical and sensuous
prodigy. If Jesus' phrase, fishers of men, was aptly pedagogic and
effective with these followers, it is easily carried too far as the Church
has often done. To fish for converts is in no sense the best trope for
bringing men to Christianity. It not only suggests Jesuitism and
artifice where utter sincerity and candour should be, but, pushed a step
too far, breaks down as a simile, for fish are not benefited but destroyed
by being caught, while men are caught for their everlasting betterment.
(c) The Feeding. — Famine during the Exodus had been relieved
miraculously by manna and quails. In the great drouth under Ahab,
Elijah prevented the meal of his widowed hostess from wasting or her
oil from failing. So when Elisha's hundred disciples suffered famine,
twenty barley loaves and a little crude corn were made sufficient by a
miracle. The supper, too, that Jesus instituted the last evening of his
life, consisted in the breaking and distribution of bread, and the arisen
Jesus was first recognized as he broke bread with his disciples in the
same characteristic way as he had done at the sacrament when insti
tuting the supper, which was itself a counterpart of the feeding with
manna and quails. The latter is told twice, too, in the Old Testament
and so there is a second somewhat diverse miracle of marvellous feeding
reported by Matthew and by Mark. In the first the Twelve had just
returned from their first mission, and Jesus wished to retire with them;
but crowds foUowed, and Jesus taught and healed. But toward the
evening the disciples suggested that the multitude be sent away out
of the wilderness to buy food in the viUages. Jesus commanded to
feed them, and was asked if the disciples should buy two hundred pence
worth of bread. Asking what provisions they had, he was told five
barley loaves and two small fishes. He then commanded that the
people be made to sit on the grass in an orderly way, took the bread,
blessed it, looked up to heaven and passed it to the disciples to give
to the multitude. AU ate and were filled, and they gathered twelve
baskets full of fragments. This marvel is told by all four of the Evan
gelists, aU of whom agree on the above figures and also in the estimate
that there were some five thousand people present.
In the second miraculous feeding (Matthew and Mark only) the
multitude numbered four thousand, and had been with Jesus for three
days. He had compassion upon them because in the wilderness they

656 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
had nothing to eat. Seven loaves and a few smaU fishes were aU that
could be found in the larder of the disciples. Taking these viands and
giving thanks, Jesus handed them to the disciples to be distributed.
AU were filled, and seven baskets fuU were gathered up. Luke omits
this second miracle, and John seems to compound the two. In the
wilderness Jesus had been tempted by hunger, and John makes Jesus
ask Philip, "Whence shaU we buy bread that these can eat?" to test him.
The people after eating said, This is of truth that prophet that should
come into the world. In the second miracle, too, Jesus had just
preached and healed. John is always ready to modulate from the
literal to the spiritual aspect and vice versa. As for Hegel the real is
the rational and the rational is the real, so to John aU things symbolic
of higher meanings are real and vice versa. Barley, too, was the cheap
est bread, and fish the commonest food in that region.
Many have asked when the actual miracle of increase took place —
in the hands of Jesus during his prayer or in the hands of the disciples as
they distributed the food, or in the hands or mouths of the multitude.
Assuming the first as most in the spirit of the narrative, Strauss asks
whether the loaves and fishes were multiplied in number as they came
one after another from Jesus' hand, or whether each loaf grew to satisfy
one fifth of the multitude and to supply two and four tenths of the
twelve baskets of fragments. Here expositors vie with one another in
shifts and evasions to rid themselves of so embarrassing a miracle or
to make it more palatable to faith. Did the people follow Jesus, not
to hear him or even to be healed, but rather to be fed in a bread-line?
Did they know of the miracle, or think Jesus a generous almoner of
food that he had provided himself? Only John suggests that they
knew; and would it not have been wiser on Jesus' part to let them
know? Perhaps he gave a hospitable lunch which was afterward
conceived as supernatural.
Finally, the fact that the fragments are gathered with care that
nothing be left suggests more than economy, for the early Church
held that the loss of the smaUest fragment of the eucharistic body of
Our Lord was almost sacrilege. Twelve baskets would be one for
each disciple, and the seven baskets in the second feeding may have
been suggested by the number of loaves which were on hand, or of the
seven deacons that served the sacred elements in the early agapce.
This miracle involves nothing less than the creation of food. The

THE MIRACLES 657
supply is increased about a thousandfold. The grain, and perhaps
fish, came into existence on the spot and at a moment, ready cooked.
The conventional exegetes have long had recourse to their favourite
phrase of accelerated processes by the Lord, to whom a thousand years
are as one day. But he also established seed-time and harvest. He
might create a new world, but to abrogate bis own laws implies that
they were inadequate to support the higher spiritual development in
the new order of things. Moreover, Jesus had refused to make stone
into bread for himself, and why should he do it for others? This
miracle is plainly a rough-hewn aUegory of heavenly bread or treasure
that grows by being spent, and we must not substitute the letter for
the spirit. Jesus would lift men above the sense of hunger or ap
petite generaUy. Some have suggested that in the crowd were those
who had a surplus of food, and that they were moved by hospitality
or brotherly love to forget social barriers and share their store with
others. FeUowship may not satisfy hunger, but it may make men
forget it. Very common is the suggestion that Jesus fed the souls
of his hearers so fuU of heavenly bread by his teaching that physical
hunger was forgotten, and his slender stores of food were not eaten
but merely broken. Keim figures that Jesus' achievement here was
two hundred times greater than that of Elisha, who fed one hundred
sons of the prophets on twenty barley loaves, for here five thousand
were fed with five.
(d) Tempest. — In one thrice-told tale it was decided to cross the
Lake of Galilee, and after they had put out there was a great storm that
seemed about to swamp the ship, while Jesus lay in the stern asleep
on a pfilow. The disciples awoke him, asking him whether he cared not
if they perished, and caUed upon him to save them. He ascribed their
fear to lack of faith, and then rebuked the winds and raging waves
saying, Peace, be stfil, and there was a great calm. The people feared
and marveUed, asking one another what manner of man he was that
winds and waves obeyed him.
In what is apparently another incident, told by aU four of the
Evangelists, Jesus sent the disciples across the same Lake of Galilee
while he remained behind to send the multitude away, and then
retired to pray, John says to escape being made a king by force. By
evening the ship was in the midst of the lake and tossed by angry bil
lows, and in the fourth watch of the night when, John says, they were

658 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
twenty-five or thirty leagues off shore, they saw Jesus walking toward
them on the water, and Mark says they thought he was a ghost.
To calm their new terror he caUed out, It is I, be not afraid; although
one report says he made at first as though he would go by. Peter said,
If it is thou, caU me to come to thee, and he was called to come; but
after starting he became afraid and began to sink, crying, Lord, save
me. Then Jesus caught him by the hand, rebuked his doubt, and both
entered the ship, and the wind ceased although John says, "Im
mediately the ship was at the land whither they went" as if it were
miraculously transported over the twenty-five or thirty leagues, and
that the people glorified him as the Son of God. Mark says: "They
considered not the miracle of the loaves; for their hearts were hard
ened." When they had landed, all the sick in the viUages and coun
try and the cities round about were brought, and as many as touched
even the hem of his garment were made whole.
In the first incident Jesus' sleep after a hard day's work brings into
effective contrast divine repose and the distress of earth. When caUed
in panic and extremity, both wind and wave sank to peace as if bowed
by his presence and rebuke. He did not pray, but commanded as God
did of old the waters of the Red Sea. He had a control no less than
magical over both raging elements and perturbed souls. In the other
lake tale Mark makes Jesus about to pass by as a stranger, as if he had
not seen or thought of the ship; but he responded to a caU to come
aboard, whereupon the wind ceased of itself without command, as if in
obedience to his unspoken wish, although he had apparently not
smoothed his own path over the rough waves, upon which his footing
must have been most precarious. Here Jesus is not asleep, but absent,
and the implication is that had he been awake or present the elements
would not have broken forth from their bounds. As to Peter's venture,
some think it a later and spurious interpolation. Lange curiously
accommodates by saying that Peter "was perhaps a high- water
treader," but that the waves were so high they compeUed him to swim
and finaUy threatened to submerge him. Oelshausen thinks Jesus'
water walking was a case of levitation or rarefaction of the body,
and that the incident favours Docetism, or that his corporeal nature
had already begun to undergo progressive etherization. Paulus says
that probably the disciples falsely thought they saw him. Venturini
suggests that Jesus was reaUy on shore, and in the dawn or

THE MIRACLES 659
mist and fog which enwrapped him he seemed to be out at sea. This
is favoured by John's account of the speedy landing, and so we are
told Jesus reaUy drew Peter out of the shaUow water in which he was
floundering and wading very near the shore.
These scenic miracles have many paraUels, ancient and modern,
like the Philopedes who ran over the green yEgean Sea with cork-shod
feet, escorting ships far out to sea. There are also many Old Testa
ment parallels. In Psalm 107 the restoration from captivity is de
scribed as a sailor brought to land from a tempest. Yahveh raised a
strong wind, and they cried to the Lord, and he saved them. So Jesus
is made to factualize this symbolic imagery. Hengstenberg thinks
that thus insights suggested by ancient writers were often realized,
rather than that this realization was never effected at aU by Jesus but
fictitiously ascribed to him later. The figure of the tempest soon came
to refer predominantly not to ancient days but to the tribulations of
the early Church, and even if there were no nuclear incident, some such
tale was likely to be told of Jesus because of its tropical value. "The
Lord makes a way on the sea, a path in the mighty waters," and Job
said, " he walks upon the sea as on a floor." He calms perturbed minds,
comes to his friends in their hour of need. In a sharper and more
acuminated way he helps on the instant the failing faith of one who
with characteristic sudden impulsiveness essayed more than he could
accomplish, and this is a sweet assurance that comes home to the heart.
Socrates had taught that no real evil could befall the good man, fiving or
dead; but Jesus here shows himself a very present personal help in. time
of trouble. If the embodiment of this fond hope and wish were couched
in even more impossible terms it would have been too precious to be
sloughed off or thrown into the rubbish heap of vulgar superstition.
The heuristic meat most often found here is in Peter's venture,
his failure and rescue, which Goethe thought a beautiful filustration
of the fact that man succeeds in desperate undertakings if only he
has faith and courage, while if he lacks confidence he fails. Again, it
teaches that man's extremity is God's opportunity. Something like
this is the only moral haec fabula docet. We also see how inferior
Jesus is to Yahveh in controlling nature, as he is superior to him in
dealing with human affairs. Jesus does not bring storm and rain,
stop the sun, control thunder, cleave the sea, shake the earth, bring
floods, but his domain is the body and soul of man.

660 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Davies1 makes forty-six miracles, but fourteen of these are aUusions
found in one or more of the Gospels where various cures are asserted,
but which he thinks refer to at least fourteen groups of more or less
misceUaneous healing, and there are many phrases indicating that very
large numbers had been cured. " He healed all that were sick." " He
healed many that were sick of divers diseases." They brought the
sick to him and "he laid his hands on every one of them and healed
them." "Devils also came out of many, crying out." He went
through all Galilee, preaching and casting out devils. "Healing
all manner of disease." "The whole multitude sought to touch him:
for there went virtue out of him and healed them aU. " " They brought
unto him aU sick people that were taken with divers diseases and
torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which
were lunatic and those that had the palsy; and he healed them." He
cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and
unto many that were blind he gave sight. "And Jesus went about aU
Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching the Gospel of the
Kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of dis
ease." "Healed them that had need of healing." "They brought
unto him all that were diseased, and besought him that they might
only touch the hem of his garment: and as many as touched were
made perfectly whole." "And great multitudes came unto him hav
ing with them those that were lame, bfind, dumb, maimed, and many
others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet; and he healed them."
These general statements concerning many miracles are aU of
heafing and none of nature wonders, and the query arises why if Jesus
cured so many on what principle it was that those above more circum-
stantiaUy described were singled out from the others.
The impression made by Jesus' miracles on those who were eye
witnesses to them was very diverse. As to the disciples, at the draught
of fishes Peter was profoundly awed, crying, " Depart from me for I am
a sinful man," and to him and the other three disciples then chosen,
who seemed to have accepted their call because of the impression this
wonder made on them, Jesus said, "Fear not." John said that the
disciples believed in him at and after the Cana miracle. They seem
soon to expect healing miracles and to accept them almost as a matter
of course, and were more inclined to bring Jesus and his patients
'"The Miracles of Jesus." London, 1913, 240 p.

THE MIRACLES 661
together than to protect him from their importunity. In healing
they seem to have regarded themselves as in a sense apprentices to
the art, and Jesus as their master. In stilling the tempest they were
rebuked for faithlessness, and when he came to them walking on
the water they feared again, and, Matthew said, confessed him to be
the Son of God; and Mark, that their hearts were hardened and that
they had not considered the miracle of the loaves. This suggests
that the disciples were not inclined to believe but rather to doubt the
nature miracles, or at least that they were not wonted to them. They
had no intimation beforehand that he could or would raise Lazarus,
and when told of the reports of Jesus' own Resurrection thought them
idle tales. On the whole, it appears that the disciples, while expecting
him to perform certain cures, emulated his power to do so. By the
nature and resuscitation miracles they were amazed, but far from
being convinced that he was divine because of them. Nor did they
ever attempt to emulate him in performing these except in the case
of Peter's walking on the water. Thus the Evangelists have not made
the disciples react to these greater marvels as normal human nature
should and must, and this constitutes another source of doubt whether
they ever occurred or were reaUy seen by the disciples. They were
later completely convinced, though graduaUy and in stages, that Jesus
had arisen; but the raising of Lazarus and the nature wonders left no
trace on their lives such as they must have done had they really oc
curred. They never expected them beforehand, and never believed
in them later, because they never saw them.
As to the patients, those healed at a distance seem not to have
known that Jesus had anything to do with their cure. Those resur
rected seemed dazed, but we are told almost nothing of them after their
resuscitation. Some of those healed went their way without even giving
thanks, whfie others overwhelmed him with gratitude and some desired
to become bis followers. It was the demoniac who first of aU and un
reservedly confessed and proclaimed him divine. John's congenital
blind man courageously protested Jesus' power, braving even the
Pharisees to do so. Some of the sick had most earnestly entreated him
to cure them, while the demoniacs most violently resisted cure. Some
had indomitable faith, and some none. The friends and relatives of
those cured were most uniformly true to human nature in their conduct.
It would seem that Jesus would have the warmest of aU places in

662 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the hearts of those he healed. To their cure his fame among the popu
lace was chiefly due. But even the friends of those to whom he gratu
itously dispensed physical salvation have left no very tangible token of
gratitude, and seem to have made no offerings, although some seem to
have spent their substance on other healers, and none of the latter
appeared desirous of learning the potent secret of the Great Physician.
These patients restored to health must, according to the Gospel impli
cation, have been very many. They and their relatives were among
the first and most ardent believers, but fittle influence seems ever
to have emanated from them in Jesus' behalf even in his hours of trial.
Had they numbered hundreds or thousands, it would seem that they
and the multitude of those who had seen and known of the cures must
have constituted an element of more influence upon Jesus' life than we
are told they had. Mary Magdalene, out of whom seven devils were
cast, seems to have yielded with abandon to the sentiment of gratitude
and love to a degree that illustrates the Freudian "transfer." But
many of those, like, e. g., the nine lepers, seem to have gone their way
as if desiring to have their disease and its cure forgotten. No others
who had convalesced under his influence were in his train of foUowers.
Nor did he choose those who had been rescued from a sinful life by a
great salvation. In Paul's life and teaching healing played little more
than a metaphorical r61e, nor in the patristic writers does it loom up as
in the Evangelists. All these considerations indicate again that it was
exaggerated. As for the scribes and Pharisees, who were often present or told
afterward (as in the case of Lazarus and elsewhere), they were never
convinced but jealous and enraged, and the more manifest the miracu
lous power the more they sought to destroy Jesus. From the accom
plishment of this their chief end they were restrained by fear because
the people favoured Jesus while they censured him, not because he had
healed, but because he had healed on the Sabbath day, and again be
cause he had arrogated to himself divine power by forgiving sins. The
scribes, Pharisees, priests, and elders, these were his implacable enemies
seeking to entangle him in his words, to incite the people against him,
and to take him by craft. Their attitude was that he was an impostor
and pretender. Renan thinks it was their machinations that reaUy
checked Jesus' career prematurely. They bargained with Iscariot,
accused him, sent officers to arrest him, suborned false witnesses,

THE MIRACLES 663
testified him to Pilate, taunted him on the cross, bribed the soldiers to
say that his body had been stolen. He was foUowed by their implac
able hate from first to last, and while accepting some of his cures they
explained them by assuming him to be in league with the devil. Thus
they, at least, were convinced of no other miracles than these which by
implication they did admit in certain cases, and which they, too, had
some power to do.
Apologists for the Jewish hierarchy urge that its rancour has been
exaggerated, especially in the early part of Jesus' career, and that he
was comparatively unknown at Jerusalem, entering that city only near
the close of his ministry; that his fame was chiefly Galilean, and that it
was the gentile propaganda of Paul that intensified opposition and
made an atmosphere in which every divergence that arose later was
put back into Jesus' lifetime and exaggerated. According to this view,
the Gospels do injustice to the representatives of Jewish orthodoxy
by seeking to magnify Jesus' influence and make it far more formidable
than it became during his life. We are told that the acclaim of his
entrance into Jerusalem and the attention he received there were exag
gerated, and also that there were real grounds in his teaching and deeds
for accusing him of sedition; while his caustic and unpolitic vitupera
tions made him seem not only a heretic but a fanatic to impartial
minds in the holy city, who knew him only from without, and saw
chiefly his unique genius for making enemies, which Pilate quite failed
to understand. Jesus' torrid outbursts of indignation, the impreca
tions expressed in the woes he launched, awful as the curse of Rome by
Richelieu or the excommunication formula of the synagogue hurled
later against Spinoza — these it was not in human nature to endure.
Hence his death was even more inevitable than that of Socrates, and
the misrepresentation of him by bis enemies was more exaggerated
than that of Socrates by the sophists, whom the later historians of
Greek philosophy have done much to reinstate without thereby dim
ming the lustre of the great hebamic artist of ancient Athens. Jesus,
although he made no such apology as Socrates did, claiming that in
stead of death he should be supported by a pension, nevertheless
deemed himself as good a citizen as Socrates did. Surely, Jesus, black
as he is made to have painted these vfilains in the drama of his life,
would never have sanctioned the way or degree in which his persecutors
and their descendants have become the persecuted during the Christian

664 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
centuries. How could a Jewish Messiah, the proclaimer of the gospel
of love, have foreseen, much less have left behind him, this legacy of
hate instead?
FinaUy, the multitude generaUy present, like the chorus of the
old Greek tragedy, performed a not very dissimilar function. They
were amazed, murmured, believed, praised God, acknowledged Jesus
to be bis Son, and were generaUy favourable and prone to believe,
though sometimes divided in opinion and also eager to profit by being
fed or having their friends cured.
They are not only less often present, but are less responsive, and
their reactions were less natural perhaps, or merely conventional, even
in the presence of the most stupendous wonders, to which the recorded
responses are not unlike those evoked by marvels within the range of
possible psychotherapy. In general, the more inexplicable the prodigy,
the less the number of those who saw it or the less they said about it,
suggesting that they were impressionable sensation seekers to whom the
Great Healer was only a transient object of fickle curiosity, without
dreaming of the higher spiritual meanings of which the miracles were
symbols. Else why were these regions where Jesus did most of his
mightiest works and where the new Gospel was preached, of which he
was the centre, not those most favourable for his doctrine to take
quickest and deepest root? Why was this not the ground chosen for
the first and most effective preaching after Pentecost? Common sense
would surely indicate that this would be the richest soil, for here per
sonal reminiscences of Jesus and the best things he said and did were
freshest. This would certainly seem to have constituted a unique
field for a propaganda, but it seems to a great extent to have been
unutilized and left to go to waste. The seed Jesus planted here was
unharvested. This again suggests that there may have been an exag
geration of marvels.
In the cure of the blind man, the leper, the raising of Jairus's
daughter, the Transfiguration, etc., secrecy is enjoined, but usuaUy
in vain, while some patients are taken apart as if to prevent publicity.
But the injunction to secrecy is never said to have been observed, and
in the case of some of the lesser, and even the greater, miracles like
walking on the water and raising Lazarus, no such injunction is re
corded. Many miracles are done before the multitude, as aU should
have been if they were chiefly credentials of Messianity; and there is no

THE MDXACLES 665
more reason or consistency among the different wonders in Jesus'
seeking or avoiding publicity than in his now wishing and now being
reluctant to do miracles. Many motives for enjoining silence have
been conjectured, viz., Jesus' mortification at having to vafidate
himself, his word, and his work in this way when he desired to do so by
his doctrine chiefly or alone. Again, he may have objected because
he saw that his wonders were being used as advertisements and drew
crowds excessively large which made too great drafts upon his time
and energy. Again, it may have been due to a wish on his part to
reserve some miracles to the narrower and more esoteric circle of his
disciples and friends, and that he thus made a distinction between the
mass of spectators and the acolytes closest to him. Again, it has been
ascribed to a desire not to offend the Pharisees too greatly or prema
turely, since these seemed especially to exasperate them. Again, we
might assume that they were reaUy natural though striking deeds of a
kind which, he feared, if told and retold generaUy, would grow into
supernatural events, and that he had a penetrating intuition that in his
social environment he was in grave danger of what he abhorred, viz.,
being regarded as a breaker or suspender of natural laws, thus antici
pating and seeking to prevent just the fate that he suffered. On this
latter view, Jesus forbade gossip when he thought it would lead to an
exaggeration which would become eventuaUy untruth. Again, to-day
it is often the patient who wishes the doctor to be silent about his
trouble and its cure, but there is no intimation that Jesus desired his
cures concealed in the interests of the patient. Nor was it that he had
private methods or remedies, as Paulus suggested, such as would to-day
be patentable, and which he desired to keep to himself and to his disci
ples. If the Evangelists had a subconscious sense that they were mis
representing what their master reaUy did, then their dim compunction
might weU express and also ease itself by representing Jesus as forbid
ding that it be told at aU, knowing in their own hearts that he would
not have sanctioned their mode of telling it. Thus they tended to
atone for the injustice their inmost conscience felt they were doing him
while telling what, to them, was an improvement on the exact historic
truth. Moreover, by assigning this dread of publicity to Jesus more
colour was given to their intimation that there were many other
unreported miracles concerning which his injunction of silence had

666 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
been observed. If knowledge of some of these leaked out despite his
wish, surely the latter would be effective in the case of other of his
marveUous doings. In fact, though he did nothing to merit the fame of
the thaumaturgist and was both unable and unwilling to do anything
to bring this fame upon himself, he knew his clientele, and that the
proclivities of his age were in this direction. He had a haunting dread
that he would be misconceived and misrepresented just here, and this
feeling on his part is reflected to us in the Evangelists under the dis
guised form of representing him as trying to keep real miracles secret.
From this new angle of approach, therefore, indications seem to
converge to the conclusion that Jesus did heal certain neuropaths and
psychopaths who abounded about him, and also that his rarely im
pressive personality, backed by great local fame, caused at least tem
porary betterment in some cases of other kinds. We see modern con
firmations of this in vulgar contemporary healers like Slater, Dowie,
and even in the occasional successes of the most arrant and knavish
medical quacks and charlatans, in which scientific psychology is finding
rich new material, while the higher forms of faith- and mind-cure also
tend to bring such cases within the range of natural law and to save
them from wholesale rejection as superstitious. On the other hand,
these selfsame modern instances teach us how very slight and transient
betterments of this kind tend almost inevitably to grow in the mind
of the patient, and also by being told and retold, to grow into marvels
that are preposterous and absurd, and how readily a mole-hfil may be
come a mountain and credulity make a grain of mustard seed into a
great tree. Not only were there, in fact, no other mighty works save
these healings done by Jesus, but, as we saw above, the surfaces of
cleavage between them and aU the other spurious wonder tales are stiU
traceable. The disciples could heal in modo magistri, but were directed,
were able, and wished, to do no other miracle. The physical marvels
of the Old Testament order died out with Jesus. The fact that the
disciples cured, marvellously invalidated these cures of Jesus as proofs
of his Messianity, and therefore the Evangelists had to stress those
of other kinds, or else Jesus could no longer be thought divine be
cause of his supernatural power. Unless he outdid his disciples,
they were as divine as he so far as the range of this kind of attestation
went. Had the disciples not developed some of his power to heal,
therefore, one motive of representing Jesus as outdoing them and pass-

• THE MIRACLES 667
ing beyond the realm of what is possible to man would have been ab
sent. Again, as we saw above, the really supernatural doings of Jesus
either left no traces on the minds and hearts of his disciples or else
caused fear and aversion, the diametrical opposite of the effect the
normal cures made upon them; and only in the age of the Evangelists,
and by them, was the attitude of the disciples toward the superhuman
achievements of Jesus reversed. The stone the disciples rejected
became to the Evangelists the chief stone of the corner.1
Thus, to summarize, geneticism gives us a new interpretation of
the miracles of Jesus which, while accepting all the negative results
of antisupernatural criticism, at the same time gives them a novel
and precious significance, and invests them with a value even greater
than they held before. As objective facts capable of cinematographic
reproduction they are one and aU (save only certain cases of curing or
bettering certain types of disease, to which we have modern paraUels)
as false to both nature and history as hippogriffs, centaurs, phoenixes,
or the most fantastic exploits of the denizens of Olympus or WaUialla.
In the literal sense in which the synoptists record and orthodoxy ac
cepts them, they are as untrue as dreams or haUucinations, and would
have been no less abhorrent to Jesus than was the formal sanctimoni
ousness or the hypocritical piety against which he launched his most
impassioned invectives. How he shrank from the reputation of a
thaumaturgist even the Gospel writers who invested him with it did
not have the wit to disguise, but involuntarily betray it to us in their
recitals, as we have seen.
Again, miracles have never been entirely assimilated by the
Christian consciousness, but have remained as foreign bodies in it,
perhaps more or less encysted in its system of doctrine. They have
always necessitated a double housekeeping and more or less dualization
of mind. Over against a world of reason and science based on the
senses, they require as a postulate another order of things with its
own organ, faith, which is created for their special conservation.
Where natural and supernatural impinge or collide, the latter is su
preme. We have to pass from the cosmos to an epicosmic world, and
between the two we must evolve a watertight compartment, building
a coffer-dam, as it were, about certain articles of faith which the
' See J. R. Ulingworth: "The Gospel Miracles," r9rs, 213 p.; H. Huelster: "Miracles in the Light of Science and
History," 1913, 164 p.; D. M. Rade: "Das Religiose Wunder. 1899, 87, p.; J. M.Thompson: "Miracles in the New
Testament/' 191 1, 236 p. Also A. Harnack: "Die Apostclgeschichte," 1908, p. 298.

668 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
mediaeval Church expficitly, and we implicitly, reserve as taboo to
reason. A large part of the entire history of Christian thought has
consisted of reciprocal claims, concessions, accommodations, as be
tween these two views of the world, and the rivalry, hate, persecution,
and mutual outlawry of their partisans still subsist. Yet even more
tragic, perhaps, is the schizophrenia caused by these two trends that
exists in so many indiv dual souls. The very bitterness of the cham
pions of ultra-conservatism in religion is due to the fact that they
themselves feel heretical promptings in the depths of their souls. In
letting loose the odium theologicum against skeptics they are really
seeking to suppress by force nascent doubts in themselves. The
apostles of science, on the other hand, in pouring out the vials of their
scorn upon believers have also done violence to their own souls and
have come to falsely think themselves irreligious when, in fact, an
undevout scientist, who spends his life in thinking God's thoughts
after him in the world of nature and mind, would be, as the proverb
has it, mad if he were really undevout.
To this tragic schism or bifurcation of the soul geneticism comes
as a mediator and unifier, accepting all real affirmations of both parties
and ignoring only their negations. Both are right, and each is a con
servator of the truth, but in different ways. The error of both is lack
of insight into the nature of the human soul. Genetic analytic psy
chology comes forward as a reconciler, doing justice to both sides and
violence to neither, and asserting even for miracles and before the
tribunal of science, a new and higher value, while at the same time
denying to them every vestige of objective reality. On what ground
do we base this great and paradoxical claim?
The answer to this question is found in a transforming conception
of the nature and functioning of the soul itself. As long as it was
conceived as synonymous with consciousness no light could come from
this source. On this view reason is built up on the basis of sense per
ception, and every mental construction is formed in the focus of apper
ception and takes the predominant form of objectivity. Psychology,
to be sure, had a class of objects peculiar to itself; but its method was •
that of the physical sciences, and to these it looked for its logical norms.
The reign of law was so universal that no testimony conceivable could
ever prove a miracle. Seeing then would not be believing, but would
be merely delusions or haUucinations.

THE MIRACLES 669
According to the new view of the soul, however, consciousness is
only one partial expression of psychic life. It is narrow and limited,
if not at bottom corrective and remedial. It is intense only where
adjustment is needed or something is liable to go wrong, while most
of its activities go on beneath the threshold of consciousness. Much
that strives to come into its focus fails to do so, and therefore can find
expression, if at aU, only in movements or tendencies to move or act,
or else in the vast domain of feeling, sentiment, and emotion with their
somatic reverberations. There are strivings, trends, wishes, anxieties
galore that are perpetuaUy repressed and submerged, and that often
express themselves in abnormal ways as symptoms of the many grouped
and tabulated kinds that pathology rubricizes. Sometimes these
multifarious tendencies, incapable of taking conscious forms, evade
the checks that hold them in leash, and appear, perhaps, as over-
accentuations of insignificant experiences or objects. In the folk-soul,
where the phenomena of individual experience are often rewritten,
only in larger and more legible characters, we have a good filustration
of this class of happenings in fetishism. Here some insignificant and
often chance object is lifted out of its class, made sacred, supercharged
with affectivity, and exalted to a significance for life and death itself
because overdetermined by becoming a focus of multiform and often
submerged associations. These processes and products often seem
causeless and senseless, but if the data are accessible so that they can
be analyzed, they can always be shown as subject to the severest
laws of cause and effect. There is reaUy no such thing as chance in
the whole psychic world, sane or insane. The same is true of amatory
fetishism. One person, usuaUy in dawning pubesence, is drawn to
another of the opposite sex by the deep laws of compensation — which
we caU love. The elements of the attraction are deep and many, and
too intricately complicated for consciousness to grasp, so that before
it is recognized as love it may aheady be far along in its development.
To immature minds thus some one trait or feature, hair or ears, gait,
voice, or even attire and gesture are focussed on to the exclusion of all
the other factors, which remain unconscious whfie this one completely
fills the little stage of apperception itself alone, yet excites every symp
tom, sensuous and psychic, of love. So, too, totemism iUustrates e
similar hypertrophy of some special plant, animal, or lifeless object
about which it evolves a system of taboos. Again, certain attitudes

670 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
or acts are singled out and rituafized, spun about, almost impupated
in a felted mesh of symbolic meanings, and made sacrosanct by emo
tivity, until they become representatives or surrogates of a psychic
constituency that is often too multifarious to be individuaUy counted.
Stresses and trends of this order give miracles their unique importance.
They are made and clung to by psychic processes of the same order as
the above, so that the explanation of either throws light upon the others.
Miracles are aU these together, but more, so that the above only gives
us a very general orientation for our quest.
Again, the soul is as laminated as the geological strata which
now give us more or less coherent series of fossil remains showing the
ascending orders of life, as they evolve, one after another, from lowest
to highest, in which we find that many types have become extinct,
whfie many other ancient ones have been conserved to our own day.
Just as man arose at a relatively late stage, so consciousness evolved
late and slowly out of a long series of preconscious stages of blind im
pulses and instincts. Man's conscious life to-day is a very recent
product, and to be understood must be seen in its indefinite perspective
which stretches back to the remotest past. Heredity conserves in our
souls as well as in our bodies innumerable vestiges of all our phyletic
pedigree, many of which the infant recapitulates in its psychophysic
growth. Thus our conscious apperception and rational activities rep
resent the topmost twigs of a vast but buried tree. Now this new
psychic mode of rational life is still only partiaUy evolved, and is
therefore insecure and unstable. We have no such established equilib
rium with our environment as animals have acquired. Hence, our
fife is not on one level but rather on a steeply inclined plane, and we
are incessantly alternating between intense adjustment to the present,
in which we are aggressive, alert, apperceptive, pressing on to new
knowledge, overcoming obstacles, advancing the kingdom of man,
pushing ahead to the unknown goal of fife with the whole momentum
of the evolutionary nisus behind us, maximizing our strenuosity and
efficiency and reinforcing our endeavour; or else, on the other hand, we
relax, become passive or backsliders, and revert to older and more
autistic types of thought, feefing, and will. Even when most poten-
tialized, man does not dream how atavistic he is and how he is shot
through with old veins which outbreak in all he does, says, and feels:
how childish, not to say how animal, in his secret heart, and, indeed,

THE MIRACLES 671
in most of his tun, sollen, und haben. To modern psychoanalysis we
owe much of the demonstration of this new aspect of life and mind.
This is not expressed with entire adequacy by saying that our psychic
life is laminated, or that we five on an evolutionary ladder up and down
the rungs of which we are constantly moving. It is better to conceive
aU our conduct and mentation as complexly motivated by features
new and old, adult and childish, rational and irrational, conscious and
unconscious, so that everything that we do is coloured if not shaped
by manifold factors from the immemorial past. Rest, recreation,
dreams, and even sleep itself, as well as neuroses and psychoses, are all
either whoUy or largely reversionary, and therefore often restorative.
Now, during the first few decades after Jesus' death and under the
influence of the conviction that he had arisen, the chief impression
left by his life and words was that he had brought anew and higher
type of living, a sounder, broader view of the world, a unique standard
of purity, and that those who foUowed him would survive death. But
aU this was as hard to characterize as is the superman for us. Every
memory of him, and aU he said and did, had not only to be reviewed
but radicaUy revised in the light of the Resurrection, which gave the
disciples the first plenary conviction of his divinity. Had he remained
in the tomb the memorabilia of him, had they been written, would
have been revised downward. The expectations of his followers would
have seemed to be too great, and he would have been regarded only
as an earnest, intuitive soul preaching an idealism too good to be
practicaUy true, and with some power of heafing by his pure and im
pressive personality. But now that he was certainly a god, aU was
transformed. Many of his parables dealing with special precepts of
the new life, as weU as much else that he said, could be recaUed, al
though a good deal was lost owing to the fallibility of memory and the
inadequate appreciation of his significance while he was with them.
Many things not forgotten could only be inaccurately reproduced.
What was, then, the net resultant or the whole burden, the composite
photograph, of what he meant to the world?
It was, as we have said, a higher, more devoted, and intense fife;
but nothing is so hard to characterize or describe. This life involved
new ideals, motives, goals, a higher potentialization, and a complete
ness unmarred by sin. It meant relief from the oppressive sense of
inferiority that we all feel when we compare what we are with what

672 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
we might have been. It meant a heightening of every power of man,
a new dominion of the soul over nature, such as science has actually
achieved since: in short, a new and loftier kingdom of man. This
was the real core, heart, root and soul of the new Gospel, which must
be intensively proclaimed to a careless, inattentive, sordid world; and
this must be done at once, for the end of things was near. Never was
such a great and pressing heuristic pedagogic problem presented to the
mind of man, and those upon whose souls it pressed were by no means
ideaUy fit to solve it. Paul had not known Jesus, and he attempted
to reason the matter out according to his fights. But the Evangelists
must utilize their memories and traditions of him as he was in life,
and had no recourse save to find or make symbols of his message to the
world which should, if possible, be connected with his life and made
central and integral to it. To this end they utilized the only possible
symbols within their reach. The new revelation dispensed to them
could all be summed up in the most portative and striking way by say
ing that the Gospel is like bringing sight to the blind, hearing and
speech to deaf mutes, voluntary movement to those who are lame and
paralytic, the curing of all specific diseases, feeding the hungry with
bread marveUously supplied, changing the water of life to wine, speak
ing peace to tempest-tossed souls torn by fears and distress and by
anxiety, the mother not only of aU phobias but, as we now know, of
about every psychosis and neurosis, expeUing the devils of temptation,
bringing perfect sanity, and even raising the moribund or the dead.
Such are the best possible tropes and symbols of the vita nuova he had
brought into the world.
But the Evangelists were no rhetoricians, and figures of speech
could not satisfy them. They recaUed that Jesus had wrought cures
that seemed to them marvels, and that they had imitated him, not
without success. Moses and the prophets, too, had done even greater
marvels; but Jesus was now proven superior to them aU, and doubtless
could have done countless greater things than they. His Messianic
office, too, required such deeds. He had in very truth done for souls
precisely what the miracles they came to ascribe to him typified. Dur
ing all the years between his death and the composition of our Gospels
there was a strong, if unconscious, determining tendency to make him
do what it was so desirable that he should have done, and perhaps it
was felt that he could hardly have left his foUowers without so effec-

THE MIRACLES 673
tive and easily provided means of promulgation, and perhaps would
have suffered them had he lived. Under these influences the wonders
that he really performed grew inevitably, and perhaps imperceptibly,
into what he was finaUy reported to have done; for the historic sense
was undeveloped, and the impulsion to teach, preach, convince, and
convert was aU dominant. Thus these miracles were no products of
fantasy, and are quite unlike aU others, whether those done by his
successors or ascribed to the founders of other religions, in that they
were so multifariously motivated, viz. : (a) by the cures he really did;
(b) by the necessities of the Messianic r61e; (c) by Old Testament
precedents; (d) by the cataleptic conviction that to a self -resurrected
God they would have been easy and natural; (e) by the sense that they
were necessary to round out the imperfect records of his life, and there
fore, probably, (f) they were pressing necessities of the now absorbing
work of making converts; while (g) there was no critical censorship for
their unschooled minds, or in their land and age, to prevent this process.
Thus these miracles are classics of their kind, and like the Kantian pos
tulates worked weU for the early Church, which would have been very
different, if it could have even existed at aU, without them.
To the synoptists, however, the miracles had become far more than
postulates, Indeed, they grew to be the most actual and literal of
events. They petrified, embalmed, buried the very spirit of Jesus in
these crass materializations, and here for complacent orthodoxy their
spirit still lies entombed. Having so supremely satisfied subjective
needs, these scenic achievements must conform to such crude criteria
of objectivity as were then accessible. These figurate receptacles or
imaginal embodiments of precious treasure thus became sacrosanct
and inviolable. Like Plato's preexisting souls imprisoned in bodies,
so their soul of meaning was shut up and almost hidden within them.
By becoming thus incarnated, if the light went out the heat remained
and can stfil be felt and communicated in the deeper strata of our psy
chic life. Although conscious reason cannot accept them, they stfil
have a subterranean existence, and still have something to say to
Ahnung and the deeper intuitions, although outlawed by science.
Criticism cannot entirely eject their influences from any soul that has
ever been fairly exposed to their infection, and that feels strongly the
evolutionary impulsion to a fuller, deeper, better fife. Religion in its
very nature is reversionary, and so it is conserving and curative by

674 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
bringing us back to the older, better organized layers of our psychic
life. The best thing about Jesus is that he was the most grown-up of
aU children, and the most childlike of aU men, in the new sense in which
we are now understanding the child to be the father of the man. He is
the exemplar of the best type of adolescence, most constantly yet
temperately inebriated with ideality, and of this supernormal but not
superhuman life the so-caUed miracles are the best symbols.
Thus the synoptists were in a sense undertakers, and the miracles
are holy sarcophagi in which the most vital of aU truths have been laid
away. But, happily, they are only in a state of suspended animation,
and the reverence we give them is both because they are mementoes
of the past and augurs of the future, when their cerements shaU be
burst and they shall come forth, as so many of the great dead are
thought by the folk to be sleeping tfil at the appointed moment they
awaken to wield again the destinies of man. But if the Gospel writers
interred, they also and thereby preserved, these cadavers of truth
against the time when their soul should return to them. When they
do arise and speak to us, their message is that there was once and wfil
again be a type of human life vastly purer, clearer-minded, stronger-
wfiled, as ready to die as to live as best serves the race, more com
pletely one with the great spirit of life; a new life that seems marvellous
only because it is farther on and higher up the evolutionary scale,
and compared to which we are like the blind, deaf, crippled, deformed,
like those who hunger and thirst, and perhaps even like the dead.
Nevertheless, hope and regeneration are possible. They are symbols
of Jesus' ecstatic and abounding life, and thus they contain the very
heart and soul of the Gospel, and teU us in different aUegories only
one thing, viz., that a far better, richer, more potent, free, joyous
human life has actuaUy existed and can again be in and for us. Although
their voice is raucous with long disuse, they caU to us again just as
Jesus did to his companions, to awake, arise, unlimber the dormant
powers in us; to really see, hear, be clean and moraUy hygienic;
to truly speak and say something; to feed our souls with the highest
culture and not with gossip of local and personal ephemerafities; to do
great deeds, think great thoughts, feel the larger emotions, and thus enter
into the kingdom of man's soul, in which we can all do aU these miracles
upon ourselves. The lesson and moral of the miracles, therefore, is the
higher powers of man. They teach that, as Jesus raised himself by his

THE MIRACLES 675
own pure inner impulsions from a mason-carpenter to Messianity and
Divine Sonship and made himself the focus of history, to which so
many lines before him converge, and from which they since diverge,
thus becoming the greatest leader and light in the world— precisely
so all who realize what he was and did can do in and for themselves.
They show that there is nothing in his real life not possible to us, ac
cording, of course, to our gifts of insight, feefing, and endeavour;
for all his powers differ from ours only in degree and not in kind. He
was the man in and upon whom all these miracles were truly done.
He overcame his own blindness, deafness, immobility of soul, and fed,
reanimated, cleansed, and potentialized it. Thus in their spiritual,
sublimated sense, the miracles are the rude hieroglyphs of all that he
was, did, and said.
Their one and only theme is human dynamogenesis, of which then-
very oppugnance to law and their impossibility are a flaring advertise
ment. For centuries before Christ the secret mysteries of the great
cults of Thrace, Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, the scope and impres-
siveness of which scholarship is now unearthing, celebrated by their
inaugurations the death of winter and the revival of spring as realised
in the life of man. As cold arrested aU the processes of nature and as
spring broke the speU and made the world live again, so they thought
sin, ignorance, and routine brooded over man's soul, chified and ar
rested, while insight, purpose, and enthusiasm were light, heat, wine,
and inspiration, intensified to an almost inarticulate extreme in the
Pentecostal outpourings, which in the Attic rites degenerated into
maenadic frenzy, and here and often elsewhere into amatory calentures.
At the heart of aU these ancient ceremonies we find regenerative impul
sions more or less ritualized and sublimated. Jesus' miracles teach the
same thing, only more openly and specifically, and in more constel
lated yet diversified and portable ways. They are rough emblems of
psychic springtide, ugly chrysalids full of the possibilities of new life,
if and when vernal influences came; while, after life had burst forth
from them, they were but casts or empty shells. Thus, neither the old
theology nor the higher criticism can explain Christian regeneration,
but are themselves beginning to be explained by geneticism, which
sees in this new life a symphony of many parts, the oldest of which is
the awakening of nature by spring, the bottom tidal wave beneath aU.
Upon this are superposed the suggestions that come from dawn

676 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
banishing night, and the sun conquering clouds and answering the
prayer of the plant and animal world for light. Another factor is
food satisfying hunger, with aU the higher symbolism which it has
suggested to Truro. Then come sex and its spiritualization, love, the
greatest thing in the world, with aU its wealth of symbols for religion;
release or convalescence from the handicap of disease and the cure of
traumata; also, self-conquest and control, freed from lameness or
paralysis in the new city of psychic hygeia, and so on up to the modern
forms of maximal cultural efficiency, anticipating the ideal reconstruc
tion of the material and social world. It is, of course, impossible to
teU how much aU this excelsior impulsion comes from any one of the
series of meristic levels, although the basal factor is older than man.
But the conclusion is that the Jesus-cult, if we can only free and utilize
it aright, contains the chief promise and potency by which man, stfil
embryonic and always held back by repressive and arrestive influences,
can and will some day attain his full maturity.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS
I. The story of the cross the world's masterpiece of pathos — The
cross the widest-known symbol — How its story, if vividly told, affects
children, neurotics, and others, like Zinzendorf — Pity fetishes, or the
psychology of sympathy — The closing of the tomb upon Jesus, the
nadir of dysphoria — The similarities between psychology of love and
of death — II. The meaning of the great flood toward euphoria and the
stages by which the Resurrection was believed, beginning with the
incredulity which regarded the reports of it as idle tales, on to the
passionate and ecstatic affirmations of Pentecost — The gift of the Holy
Ghost — The psychology of death and the various immortalities — Why
death is hard to conceive — Immortality as a support of morafity —
III. Forms of befief in Resurrection — (a) The old view of restoration
of a putrefying corpse — (b) the theory that it was a revival from a
trance state — (c) The theory that it was due to a more subtle form of
corporeity or a ghost — (d) The vision theory — (e) The psychological
theory of a great resurgence from the extreme of depression, to that of
exaltation — The value of dying and rising with Jesus as an immunity
bath against schizophrenia — The great cults of antiquity pre- and
post-Christian which centre in death and resurrection — The psychology
of projection and of purification or purgation — Guilt taboo — All
enemies overcome as symbols of progressive riddance of the obsession
of sin and guilt which in early days oppressed the human soul — The
meaning of the eucharist — What the great redemption wrought by
Jesus reaUy means in modern terms.

JESUS is most widely known as the man of the cross. In hun
dreds of the more ignorant and backward communities of
Christendom, as Mr. Fielding HaU has shown with some detail,
where very little is known of his teachings, his character, or the events
of his life, the crucifix is found and revered. Men, women, and chil
dren who cannot read regard it with reverence and often ascribe to it
supernal properties and magical efficacy. In Catholic lands frag
ments of the true cross are more widely disseminated than any other
677

678 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
refic. In aU Christian centuries the story of the cross has been the
chief theme of preaching, the centre of sacred ceremonies, and the
most effective propaedeutic in aU the repertory of mission methods
among pagans. It is the deepest and most widespread of aU the
impressions that Christendom has made upon the human heart. In
no other religion has the death of the founder had such prominence
and efficacy. The natural, objective, sensuous impressions which
each of the events of Passion Week was calculated to make upon the
mind and heart of the observer have been wrought out with great
detail in descriptive preaching, in narrative, tradition, and art. Every
incident has been amplified and fifled out so that the story of the last
stages of Jesus' life constitutes the world's great masterpiece of pathos.
It would be hard even for creative genius to add new elements to the
story that could materially increase the mordant effects of this train
of events, which have so burned and eaten into the very soul of believers.
Many causes have lately made us negligent or forgetful of this fact.
Critical studies which enlist the inteUect; philosophy which neglects
sensuous facts for metaphysical meanings and interprets events as
symbols; perhaps, especially, theology, which has always tended to
volatilize the full humanity of Jesus and thus make the Incarnation
of none effect; the refinement of modern nerves that shrink from the
contemplation of physical anguish; the perfervid zeal that can never
wait to let his humanity have its natural effects before insisting that
the man Jesus is also Very God of Very God, thus giving the biog
raphy of Jesus an inexpugnable, Docetic innervation — aU these have
conspired to rob the story of his death of its pristine hold upon the
heart and make it seem hollow and falsetto. These influences tend to
take away his Lord from the average Christian, and especiaUy from
the young, and to abate the original power of the plain story of the
cross. It was the simple narrative of death and resurrection in physical
terms, as first told to fresh, receptive minds, that reaUy made the
fortunes of the nascent Church.
Neither Greek tragedy nor modern history or romance can paraUel
the "descending incongruity" of the decline of Jesus' fortunes from
the three great achievements of his soul (the triple conviction that he
was the Jewish Messiah, the Son of God, and the Founder of a new
Kingdom), to the anguish in his own and the utter despair in the
hearts of his friends at his death and burial. The faltering, but finaUy

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 679
resolute, determination to go to Jerusalem, the necessity of which may
have loomed up in his soul like an apparition of fate; the prospect of
death thrice foretold; the entrance into Jerusalem, perhaps more
ostentatiously than even his courageous heart really sanctioned; the
conspiracy of the rulers; the supper at Bethany; the Passover; the
treachery of Judas; the prayers in Gethsemane whfie thrice the disciples
slept; the advent of the soldiers; the kiss of betrayal; the hearing before
Caiaphas; Peter's denial thrice; Christ's muteness while he was
buffeted, mocked, smitten and spat upon; his silence before Herod;
Pilate's more judicial attitude of mind; the gorgeous scarlet robe and
crown of thorns with the reed, ironicaUy suggesting a kingship neither
of this world nor any other; the release of Barabbas; the scourging;
the invocation of his blood upon his accusers' heads; the death of
Judas; the cowardly flight of every disciple; the cross-bearing with
Simon; the woe of the daughters of Jerusalem; the vinegar and gaU;
the parting of the garments; the mocking inscriptions and taunts to
come down and rule; the penitent thief; the mother, aunt, and the two
Marys, alone faithful to the end, which has so often suggested a
pathetic romance; the agonizing cry of being forsaken as his supreme
conviction of Sonship seemed to be shaken; the earthquake, the spear,
and finaUy the tomb, sealed and guarded — aU these events copiously
amplified in detail, set in scene by the most realistic imagination, every
item made a theme of meditation until it stood out with an almost
scarifying and sometimes actuaUy stigmatic effect in the psychophysic
organism of the believer, appeal as nothing else before or since has
ever done to the sentiments of sympathy and pity, which strike to the
very roots of man's gregarious nature.
It would be an interesting, although perhaps too great to be a
practical, task to mosaic together the history of the effects which these
events, regarded as purely historical and pragmatic, .have wrought in
the soul. Every station of the cross, and many apocryphal instances
as well as everything told in the Gospels, have been focussed on as a
special theme of meditation, a basis of exhortation as typical of larger
and back-lying meaning. Believers have sought closer unity with
their Saviour by reiterated, prolonged, agonizing efforts intensified by
fasting, vigils, and solitude remote from the haunts of men, etc., to
actually visualize the facts as if they had been eye-witnesses to it aU.
They have sought to put themselves in Jesus' place at every stage and

680 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
to realize how the stripes, thorns, nails, and spear would feel. Pious
exercises have been developed and assigned peculiar saving efficacy,
and fanatics have sought to subject themselves to some of these
tortures, even the cross itself, or to make single items in this train of
suffering five again in their own person. Those who have felt them
selves failures, who have been deserted, or suffered from cumulative
disasters and insults, or known the pangs of injustice, have brought
their own experiences to bear to aid them in realizing the anguish
of Jesus. Cults and sects have arisen to bring out in full relief special
elements in this the world's most pathetogenetic train of events.
Perhaps only those who have made special studies in this field real
ize how effective every item of this galaxy of incitations to pathos still
is in the young, in whom it often becomes a highly specialized pity
fetish. Some illustrate this propensity of sympathy to focus by re
garding the betrayal by a kiss as the acme of the tragedy. Others feel
a lump in the throat or sob at the prayer, "Father, forgive them."
Others have physical symptoms at the thought of the flesh torn and
bruised by the scourge. And so the commendation of his mother to
the care of the beloved disciple, his meeting with her on the way to
Calvary, the stripping of the garments, the three falls under the cross,
the Veronica handkerchief, the silence and passivity of Jesus before
Herod, the scarlet robe, the awful invocation by the Jews of his blood
upon themselves and their posterity — each of these and many more,
may be, have been, and still are almost maddening or may bring tears,
heartache, limpness, clenching of the hands, breaking of the voice,
constriction in the chest, weakness of knees, involuntary groaning or
sighing, or even shrieking, the haunting and persistent sense of help
lessness and depression, waves of flushing or chill, and other vasomotor
effects. I have coUected many instances of this potent contagion of
emotion which may seem to some almost incredible,1 but the number
and character of which place them beyond aU doubt. A man now
forty, from the age of about fifteen used to find the place exactly in the
centre of the palm of his own hand where the nails went in. He was
later wounded very near this spot and this experience in his quaint
language, "brought him to Jesus." Others press nails against then-
own hands, though rarely deeply enough to bring blood, in order to
realize more acutely the pangs of the cross. Many develop very exact
'See article on "Pity," Am Jour. Psychol., July, 1900, Vol. n, pp. 334-59'.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 681
ideas of the kind of nails. They are, for instance, tenpenny nails,
blunt at the point, square, sharp, or rusty. For some the very sound
of the word "nafis" seems cruel and causes a nervous shudder. A few
cannot help thinking upon them so intently that they have subjective
sensations in the hands. A few on seeing nafis that look antique feel
pains in the hands from the strength of their imagination and are on the
way to stigmatization. Others muse on how the nails were driven in,
the heads, for instance, hammered down a fittle into the flesh causing
needless pain, and how the last blow broke the skin as it roUed over be
tween the hammer and the nail and spattered the blood drops that
oozed out. Nervous children shudder in thinking how the first blows
would "squeech and creak" before the nafis would go through the
flesh, or reflect on whether the larger nails that went into the feet
would come out in front of the heel to help support the weight. Of
all the items in my collection the nails lead in this kind of efficacy.
The scourging, thorns, spear, and other tactile or haptic sensations
come next. The spear, for instance, is often vividly imaged as duU or
blunt, with the haft a fittle larger than the head, or barbed so that the
pain of withdrawal was greater than that of thrust. One, in church,
presses her hand against the lower rib, sometimes tfil it hurts, to feel
more vividly the spot pierced by the spear. Some conceive it thrust
with such malice that it penetrated the body and went weU into the
wood of the cross. In the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play the most
pathetic moment is usuaUy when the spear seems to enter the side of
Jesus. A tinseUed point is reaUy pushed back by a spring into the
haft causing the red ink used for blood to spurt out. I have seen this
four times and inspected the apparatus, but loved to feel the sob rising
and to wipe my eyes. We must reserve for publication elsewhere
fuUer details of this propensity of the youthful soul to sensualize the
physical suffering of the Passion and to make it not merely a graphic
or dramatic presentation but a personal experience. All this shows us
again how nothing in any of the old dramatic unities is so calculated to
bring out every strong and deep tone in all the shades and degrees of pity
that can wring the heart. Were the whole story the creation of some
sublime artistic genius, master in all the resources of aesthetics, or were
it the slow evolution of the race soul, it would incite amazement and
reverence for the faculties that could create such a masterpiece.
Pity fetishes seem to be as real as the love fetishes, now so weU

682 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
recognized, but their causation is quite different. The very young can
not pity intensely because they have not had sufficient experience in
suffering or in fear. Defectives are lacking in sympathy partly, at
least, because they are insensitive, analgesic, and more or less disvul-
nerable. In general the average man pities only for pains he has felt
himself or, in a secondary way, for those he fears. Thus, we come to
pity in others evils which we have experienced, or to which we feel our
selves liable. It is, therefore, because we have suffered or feared in
spots, as it were, that sympathy is not properly distributed but, like
phobias, tends to focalization. Plato held that a good physician must
have had experience with disease in his own person to know how it
feels and to take his patient's point of view. Hence, the young, whose
lives have been so sheltered, and the rich reared in luxury, who can so
imperfectly pity the poor, cannot rightly distribute their sympathy.
Hence, too, where it is felt it is prone to be over-intense. Only genius,
in which the highest powers of imagination are developed, is able, with
little or no experience with woe, to feel what a recent writer makes its
chief characteristic — the pathos of resonance.
In a unique study, "Die Frommigkeit des Grafen Ludwig von Zin
zendorf" (Leipzig, 1910, 118 p.), O. Pfister has given us a striking analy
sis of religious sublimation directed chiefly toward the wounds of Jesus.
As a child, Zinzendorf had no outlet for his affection, which slowly
came to focus in a unique way upon the physical personality of Jesus;
and so as a boy he wrote letters to Jesus which he threw out of the
window at night. He prayed, was entranced, practised asceticism,
but the unique fact in his whole religious career was that it was the
blood and wounds of Jesus which exerted a supreme fascination for
him. In the community he founded there were agapistic elements,
and the most passionate affection was expressed for Jesus, the bride
groom and lover. Parts of his body and special wounds, particularly
that in the side, were apostrophized in sermons, and their drawing
power characterized in hymns. Believers wished to hide themselves
in these wounds, and their very festering had a charm. "They lived
in the wounds, were born from them, and envied the worms that dwelt
in them, their home." They even developed a litany expressive of
this cult that had a jargon of its own, and in scores of their hymn3
Christ's corpse is kissed and eaten, in an orgy of traumatolatry which
was strangely bound up with their doctrine of redemption. It was

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 683
not all a Sadistic gloating over Jesus' sufferings, but there were mas
ochistic elements in it; the wounds were erogenic zones. Indeed,
the author tells us that even Luther's eucharistic ideas were somewhat
nekrophagic. Sympathy, too, begins at home with a few friends or loved ones,
and irradiates to those remote in time, place, or associations slowly and,
in a sense, inversely as the square of the distance. It is intensified by
physical beauty, by every personal charm and grace of disposition, and
every gift that provokes admiration. Perhaps, as we have seen, this
element was a part of the magnetism that drew the friends of Jesus to
him. Instead of emaciation and ugliness, which art has sometimes
assumed for him and which the friends of Socrates doubtless magnified
to bring out in stronger relief the beauties of his soul, his nature may
have been at once so commanding and attractive as to give him that
rare prestige which often comes from this source. Again, spring sug
gests life as autumn does death. With this the cults of Balder,
Apollo, and many others have always been very intimately merged.
The heart expands and feels far more keenly. Again, Jesus was young
and cut off in the height of his promise with a work of incalculable
magnitude but just begun, so that we have here the keen pathos of un
realized hope. For the old, who have lived out a fully rounded life to
the end; who have finished their work; who fortify themselves by
thoughts of their good deeds, perhaps now even by Weismannism,
which has sources of consolation not yet utilized; who have risen to
the largest ideas and in so doing are de-individualizing themselves
and dying the death of Platonic philosophers in whom the great bio
logos has accomplished its work of involution; who have beaten the mas
terly retreat that can make old age glorious; who are surrounded by
friends — even under these circumstances death, with its horrid ac
companiments of pallor, weakness, perhaps unconsciousness; the sweat,
agony, rattle, and final cessation of breath; the rigidity, coldness and
decomposition, is the king of terrors for all who witness it. But for
those cut off prematurely, with the gifts and possibilities of rich lives
undeveloped, it is incalculably more ghastly and horrid. Again, inno
cence and non-resistance intensify the pathos of it. I have myself in
my study of pity witnessed two hangings of criminals, both of whom
had committed crimes so namelessly horrible that the indignation of
communities was aroused to a high pitch. One managed to meet death

684 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
with some repose and the other struggled insanely, but here even strong
men fainted or grew sick and withdrew. Resentment, for the moment
at least, seemed swallowed up in pity for those suffering what has
always been for man his supreme dread. But for one with no fault or
crime to die with every mental and physical torture which he might
have escaped, and to accept it aU with equanimity, especiaUy when
his great sacrifice was for the weal of others, must have aroused in the
faithful few that witnessed it emotions of a kind and intensity very
rarely felt in the human soul and which art and literature are powerless
adequately to describe. Justice seemed dethroned, and the resent
ment against even the race that caused this tragedy has ever since been
deep, persistent, and widespread, blind and unreasoning as it is. AU
these considerations have been developed and dwelt upon in Christian
cults, which have in every way sought to magnify their great natural
impressiveness on the theory that every man had sin enough in his
own soul to merit aU this agony himself and that, by vicariously fol
lowing the way of the cross as far as imagination and tender-heartedness,
goaded on by every provocative, could go, the heart could be cleansed
of sin, and experience a saving virtue in feeling anew aU these wounds
of Jesus. In the story of the Passion, as interpreted in Christendom, Jesus is
often placed in the attitude of craving sympathy. He made no sub
lime Promethean resistance against the will of heaven, attempted no
heroics or even a Socratic apology, but bowed to the divine will, fate,
or kismet with utter submission, with a passivity that was more femi
nine than masculine. He seems to many to have desired to excite
compassion, and would have his foUowers die with him and rehearse
aU his litany of woe to make their self-abandonment complete. Hart-
mann has given us a new and deeper, if also somewhat grotesque, glori
fication of pity in his theory that the Absolute, before aU the worlds
were, was suffering intolerable pain, and that their creation was like
an eruption that "ameliorated his negative eudemonism," and insists
that the highest of all motives to virtue is to pity divinity, and thus to
hasten on by a new motivation to morals and good works God's ulti
mate relief from transcendental pain and redemption.
On the other hand, familiarity always tends to blunt the effects of
this sentiment. Our returns abound in expressions of regret and self-
reproach that the whole story of Jesus' sufferings is now heard with in-

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 685
difference. Many think they are growing hardened, grieving the Spirit,
fear they are losing befief, or backsliding, growing stagnant; find they
pity saints, contemporaries, characters in romance or even suffering
animals, more than they can Jesus; or perhaps think this is aU because
their sympathy has been overdone, forced, or premature.
Moreover, there is much in modern fife to discourage pity, the
pleasure field has widened so rapidly with growing civilization and com
fort and immunity to want. Aristotle had what seems to us a strange
dread of the overmastering power of pity, for which he thought it
necessary to find in the drama or in art a method of purgation by his
well-known theory of katharsis or psychic vaccination, or setting a
back fire. Spinoza thought it an unworthy sentiment wherever it
did not prompt action for relief. Story readers who are so inebriated
by woe that it becomes an obsession, who in serials implore romancers
not to let their heroes die or suffer, are, if this be true, marked with the
stigmata of degeneration. Darwinism comforts us by the doctrine
that, although the majority of known species and animals perish in
pain, it is on the whole the best that survive. Nietzsche excoriates
those who pity, and his Zarathustra denounces aU who either crave or
indulge in this sentiment as hysterical. For him, as for the Stoics, the
sage would blush to be pitied or to pity, and he finds here a pathogenic
element in Christianity and calls Jesus an amiable and neurotic degen
erate. Profoundly as we dissent from this view, this is not the place to
discuss the normality of the sentiment of pity, but only its power and
wide prevalence. For Christendom it was a unique moment when the
body of Jesus was wrapped in clean, fine linen with Nicodemus's "mix
ture of myrrh and aloes about a hundred pounds' weight," placed in a
new sepulchre hewn in a rock, sealed up with a stone, and guarded by
a watch. As to the state of mind of the friends and disciples during
these three days, and especially on the Jewish Sabbath which inter
vened, we know nothing whatever, for the record is an utter blank.
Peter, the rock, had shown himself a vociferous, triple perjurer, and
the disciples seem to have been skulking fugitives seeking their per
sonal safety. Many must have felt their hero to be of clay, either an
impostor or a foolish dreamer. That they thought this the end of
him on this earth is plain; for when told that he was risen these "words
seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not." "As

686 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
yet they knew not of the Scripture that he must rise again from the
dead." "And they, when they had heard that he was alive and been
seen of her, believed not." The Jewish belief that righteousness was
rewarded and evil punished here, which was so persistent in the minds
of the disciples, must have wrought great disenchantment. When
Rome, the hope of the world, was falling, we read that at the death of
Otho the Good many slew themselves from sheer pity. The logic of
pessimism or Stoicism must have made suicide the theme of every
philosophic mind under those circumstances, for the last spark of hope
had gone out in utter darkness. The grief, humiliation, sleeplessness,
must have made this the nadir of despair for them all. Only the lust
of fife in youth (Keim thinks the average age of the disciples was but
little over twenty) must have sustained them. What if he had lain
in the grave a month, year, decade, century, and then arisen gloriously,
or perhaps, when aU who knew him were dead? It is, of course, impos
sible to conjecture what would have occurred had there been no sequel.
His followers had no possible source of hope or consolation in their
anguish. Everything that had begun to germinate in their souls dur
ing the years of intercourse with their master must be left to die or be
actively exterminated. The powers of darkness seemed to be at the
helm. The world was a " City of Dreadful Night," and with the Great
Companion's shameful and miserable death a paU shrouded the earth
and left his friends a prey to nameless fears. Grief at his loss, the
pathos of his suffering, mortification at their own misguidance, strug
gled together in their souls, or perhaps left them stunned so that when
they found their bearings they had to strike out a new plan of fife.
It might be wisest to five for the day and hour, and worship the blind
power of wrong or fate on the throne of an antimoral universe. Thus,
in their agony they, too, in a figurative sense, descended into hell,
tasted aU the spiritual torments it could inflict, and touched the pro-
foundest depths of dysphoria. Moreover, aU their personal and racial
ideas and beliefs in a transcendent world of rewards and punishments
lay in ruins. If there had been anything in man reaUy worth while
that could survive death, he who was so solemnly pledged to do so
must come back, or, at least, give some sign of post-mortem survival.
This he failed to do, and nothing remained of him but a corpse that
was doomed to moulder, and the aching recollections that clutched
their hearts. This fife must be the beraU and death the end-aU, and

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 687
every man only awaits like the brutes the inevitable hour of total en-
gulfment in the grave. Man is a fleeting pillar of dust thrown up by a
rude whirlwind. Even their bitter-sweet memories of him would soon
be swaUowed up in oblivion. Perhaps the thoughts of different in
dividuals drifted in aU these different ways. Some may have lapsed
to resentment and indignation that their hopes and endeavours had
been thus bankrupted. Such, at least, is the psychological apprecia
tion of such an historic situation. There was no comfort from the
psychic law that the healthy soul by its very nature cannot remain long
in a state of extreme depression, but must react toward some more
exalted state, so that the entire moral, social, religious world which was
wrecked and reduced back to chaos for them, must be bufit up again
in some form, or else they must succumb to the grim logic of miser-
abilism. The psychology of death and of love agree in each having an un-
envisageable fact at its core, the one a putrefying corpse, the sight of
which started Buddha on his career, the other the sex act and organs.
The psychalgia of the one and the shame and modesty that veil the
other have used the same mechanisms, such as repression, fetishism,
diversion, over-determination and sublimation, and each from its
respective core has evolved a most elaborate superstructure that
has played a tremendous role in human culture. There is a sense in
which all fears and phobias are at bottom fears of death or of the
arrest of the momentum of life, and there is also a sense in which
gratification of every desire and wish is that of love. The one is the
supreme affirmation of the wfil to five, the other the great negation.
The real meaning of death is not understood until puberty. Just
as art and religion are largely made up of sublimated sex feelings,
so out of the fear of death have grown the medical sciences, hygiene,
and what is far more important, the desire for and belief in immor
tality. Both death and the act of love transcend individuality, and
neither is entirely bewusstseinsfahig. The "death-thought" and the
"love-thought" sometimes spring up suddenly and spontaneously,
and make us realize that they are the voice of the race in the individual,
and that our consciousness about the matter is only an epiphenomenon.
In both the genetic impulse shields the child by diverting attention
from the central fact to countless irrelevancies and accessories. Just
as racial instinct has striven to prevent sex precocity, so religion

688 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
strives to mitigate the old horror of the fact that we must aU die and
cease to be, body and soul. The Pentecostal conviction that the
great incubus of ages, the greatest of aU repressions, had been removed,
was the culminating moment of history.
Every mode of disposing of the dead is motivated largely by the
impulse to repress or divert us from thoughts of the putrefying corpse,
and belief in reanimation and another life serves the same purpose.
The survivors must be prevented from dwelling on the natural proc
esses of decay, and so these diverting and defensive mechanisms have
been evolved. Their worth is not all in what they give but in what
they save us from, viz., obsessive thoughts of the body's decay. They
are therapeutic measures against thanatophobia. The impulse to
embalm, to deck out corpses, is a diversion mechanism as much as
the fig-leaf, breech-cloth, or wedding-dress. Of course the four
immortalities, nominal, influential, plasmal, and orthodox, have other
motivations, but they sustain and support each other in ways which
only this key reveals. II
But now from this direst of extremities came the great reaction,
the pivot of history for Christendom, which made the grave of the old
world the cradle of a new one. Although there may have been watches
and vigils, there is no recorded eye-witness of the Resurrection. The
first news of the empty tomb was brought by Mary the Mother, Mary
the Magdalene, who, it is often conjectured, had faUen in love with
Jesus, or both of them, so that, as Renan says, the first promulgator,
announcer, preacher of the Gospel of glad tidings was woman who, in
this office, followed the directions of an angel with fear and trembling.
The news, according to the record, was received with every indication
of incredulity and skepticism as "idle tales." The sight of the vacant
tomb and even the first parousia were unconvincing. If it was not a
hallucination or a theft of the body, a dream or a fiction, conviction,
at any rate, began at a faint suggestive stage and we have few details
of how it passed up the long scale of probabilities tfil it reached a
cataleptic certainty. The epochful fact, however, is that the cer
tainty of it soon became so intense and peculiar that it needed, if it
did not create, faith as a new faculty, whose chief function was to cher
ish it. Thus the Resurrection soon became the chief affirmation and

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 689
source of power of Christendom, the key to the right understanding of
the entire apostolic and even patristic period. "If Christ be not risen
our faith is vain." Many other faiths had held to a future life, but
all with far fainter certainty. It was better, thought Homer, to live
the fife of a common man than reign in the kingdom of the dead, where
all is pallid and unreal. Henceforth the belief in another life, of which
the Resurrection is the object lesson and proof, became the main
spring of activity. As faith became absolute Jesus was chiefly known
as the death-kfiler, the first fruits of them that slept, the one who had
removed the sting of death and caused it to be swallowed up in victory.
Although he came back weak and exhausted, it was as a conqueror.
"Death-exterminator" was his chief epithet. Not only this, but he
had raised others, and more yet, had gone to Hades and vanquished
the ruler of death and sin. The power of the Resurrection was the
chief theme of the first preaching. Christ had bearded the king of
terrors and burst the bars of the tomb. TertuUian compares him to a
phoenix rising from his own ashes. Thomas had actuaUy felt the body
and its wounds, and five hundred at once had seen it; and after the
Ascension the abode of the dead was upward. The present world is
mean, life is short and squalid, and earth made perhaps by a vicious
demiurge, as the Marcion heresy later taught. Thus it was not strange
that the first book of the New Testament to be written was a revelation
or apocalypse of a higher world order, describing a new Jerusalem in
which are all the treasures which the heart holds dear. Its architecture
is elaborate and gorgeous, and slowly not only its details but those of
Tartarus and purgatory grow to Dantesque vividness. This world
is eclipsed by the other. It will burn, but aU things worth saving are
in the great Beyond. Just as Alaric destroyed Rome and the hope of
the world for man as a political animal, Augustine described the City
of God, and the Church inherited the forms and ambitions of the
Roman State.
The world had been ruled by fear, and the greatest of aU the fears
is that of death. To be relieved of this and aU so suddenly (for it was
barely fifty days from Calvary to Pentecost), caused, as was most
natural, an outburst of unbounded enthusiasm that in some tempera
ments amounted almost to delirium. Men chanted, raved, spoke in
unknown tongues, prophesied, gazed up into heaven all day, longed
for vision, with a real parousia-raama,, straining to grasp the momen-

690 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tous fact that death was swaUowed up in victory, that its incubus and
awful inhibition were removed. Every human faculty let itself go
with abandon to excesses often riotous. Men babbled as if drunk with
new wine, were erethic and beside themselves. There were new ideas
of inspiration, and befief in possession. So widespread and intense
was this tendency that it was necessary to make strenuous efforts and
adopt stern measures to come back to sanity and reality and prove aU
spirits. The normative form of this outburst of enthusiasm was the
doctrine of the Holy Ghost selectively evolved. Thus to save the
nascent Church from inebriation from its great joy, it was necessary
to turn attention to practical efforts; hence, preaching, proclaiming the
good news, and making propaganda was the first mundane direction
of the new life.1
The attitude toward spirits Weinel calls "the most essential pos
session of the innermost personal life of primitive Christendom," and
shows how the ideas of the Holy Spirit developed out of the intense mul
tifarious spiritism that long ruled. Powers of evil had made themselves
felt even in the temptation of Jesus. They inspired aU evil and gave
doubt. Thus, behind the world were mighty, invisible, personal influ
ences weU organized, leagued, and graded, and Jesus had conquered the
ministers of evil and brought the Holy Ghost which conquered hate,
consoled, guided into truth, gave certainty, and could make aU believ
ers truly pneumatic as weU as denizens of the higher and only real
world. Glossolafia, singing, praying, poetizing, convulsions, narrating
words heard in ecstasy, inspiring authorship that noted the experiences
of trancelike states, sometimes even cramps, symbols, acts, aU super-
naUy motivated, were slowly subjected to a criticism which, if it limited
the richness and variety of pneumatic fife, slowly came to an increas
ingly normal direction and bestowed gifts essentially good. Pneu-
>On this interesting development see the admirable work of Weinel, "Die Wirkungen des Geistes und der Geister
im Nachapostolischen Zeitalter bis auf Irenaus." Leipzig, i8g9. Upon speaking with tongues there is already an
interesting if limited literature. Godet thought it a hybrid between song and language, a kind of recitatif, and found it
somewhat diffused among the prophets. It was developed in the cult of the Delphic Oracle of Apollo, among the Thra-
dan orgiasts and ecstatics. Paul characterized and named it as one of the charismata. It was common among the
Quakers, and Edward Irving called it the gift of the Holy Ghost. See, too, Schmiedel's "AusfUhrungen," II, i, Frei
burg, 1913, which is best from the philological point of view; also Lombard's "De la Glossolalie," 1910; and Mossiman's
"Zungenreden," Tubingen, 1911. Especially see Pfister's study, "Die psychologische Entratselung der relig. Gloss
olalie und der automatischen Kryptographie," in Jahrb.f. Psychoanalyse u. psychopath. Forsch., Bd. 3, 1912, in which
he censures theologians for having done so little here, which began with a young man of twenty-four who, at seventeen
years, on Pentecost felt inspired to make brief utterances that no one could understand. Pfister was able to take down
a large part of his very limited vocabulary and explain each word in it, showing the source and meaning of it all. His
exhortations expressed his own desire to study and get religious clearness, and how he ardently wished to be a preacher
and to many a certain girl. It was a distortion of language made in order so to disguise the utterances of the most sec
ret things of his soul that nobody could understand, and yet he could vent all that was in him. His glossolalia proved
infectious and he later developed a cryptographic unknown language, and finally there came to be some liturgicalstere-
otypy. His sister's unknown tongue played a good deal upon English, and his mother's upon Italian, but both were very
infantile. Pfister thinks this the same as the xenoglossolalia that appeared among the rabbins or the phenomena of
Pentecost, or that it was related to the unknown tongue in which Isaiah spoke to the Jews. Sec also Flournoy, "Des
Indesa la planete Mars," Paris, 1900, 420 p. This gives both specimens and theories.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 691
matophores were inspired to prophecy and virtue by spirits that came
from God by baptism, laying on of hands, etc.1
Thus the reality of a psychic far transcending that of a sarcous
body in importance was slowly estabfished, and aU mainly by the
Resurrection. Faith was the organ of things unseen; virtue was other-
world conduct. This life was mean and transitory. The other world
had conquered this. All interests here paled in comparison with those
of the next fife. Thus it came to pass that at first believers in the new
faith not only defied and challenged but often courted and prayed for
death. They feared they were not worthy of martyrdom, and the ten
persecutions from A. d. 64 to 303 gave them abundant opportunity to
bear witness in the supreme way. The testimony of Tacitus, Pliny,
Suetonius, and Caecifius shows that the Christians early made them
selves detested as infected with a new malefic superstition aggravated
by obstinacy and contumacy. They were hated not so much because
they injured the business of astrologers, shrine-makers, gladiators, and
the rest, as because their faith was not to them one of many, but so
exclusive and supreme that they would gladly die to advance it. Thus,
Jesus' followers soon came to defy, taunt, and even woo death. They
gloated over the details of the charnel-house and worms. They lived
in tombs, and developed the catacombs, those of Rome having hun
dreds of miles of passages. TertuUian. said aU Christians should die
the death of martyrs at the end. Those who died with Christ would
rise with him. Martyrdom was a prize, a great treasure, an honour,
a kind of diploma summa cum laude. Death was despised, fled to;
it was the muse that inspired to great deeds. Its worst forms were no
longer hated but preferred. It was no mere thanatopsis or dreamy
contemplation of euthanasia, but to achieve a glorious death was the
goal which many attained of whom we know nothing else. Often
men and tender women agonized as to whether they were worthy of
the honour of the most horrid forms of death. Thus the newly discov
ered continent seemed infinitely fairer, more lasting, more charming,
than the old hated world of sense, and the great enemy was met no
longer with Stoic apathy but was coveted and craved. It was the es
sential part of man that survived, the only thing of moment, when the
veil of the body was sloughed off. The soul was no longer regarded
as a mere harmony, a vapour liable to be blown away if one died on a
'H. Gunkel: "Die Wirkungen des heilujen Geistes." and ed., Gflttingen, 1899.

692 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
windy day, but as the very man himself. Besides the mortal part
there was the spiritual body which went to the home of souls. Thus
the psychology of the early Christians was not without a soul. It was
no mere parallelism but was instinct with futurity, and so protensive
withal that agnosticism had no place. Never before nor since has the
soul seemed so supremely important.
The lust for another life, or the horror of extinction, is so old and so
all-pervading that it has greatly perverted man's desire to know him
self. When, however, we study this lust for immortality dispassion
ately, we have reason to befieve that the dread and pathos of it aU
is that man still dies so young. If we lived to an old age, not of
Methusalemic or even Metschnikoffian span; and died symmetricaUy,
not by the premature fafiure of some one organ or function; if thus
we knew senescence as fully as we do adolescence, we should find that
the lust for life would be slowly supplanted by an equally strong
counter-wfil to die. Indeed, we might seek death actively as we now
do life, and regard it as the greatest blessing. In that case there would
be no immortality mania, for we should be satisfied with life here,
without wanting a sequel to it, and dreams of post-mortem existence
would become a nightmare. True macrobiotism means not only
more years and completeness of experience but especiaUy absence of
repression. Had we lived through the whole comedie humaine and
drunk aU the drafts of bitter and sweet that were ever brewed for man,
we should never want to repeat any part of such experience. The
fact is, man is now cut off in his prime with most of the best things
in him repressed and unrealized. He is a pathetic creature doomed to
a kind of Herodian slaughter. He has felt this dimly, and so has
always cried to the gods and to nature to have mercy. He has fancied
answers to the heartrending appeals which he shouted into the void,
and on their warrant has supplemented this life by another. When
we psychoanalyze this conviction, we find that at bottom it is a sense
that the human race is unfinished and that the best is yet to come.
Man's future on this earth is the only real, glorious, and sufficient
fulfilment of this hope in the prolonged and rich life of posterity here.
The man of the future will live himself out so that nothing essentiaUy
human wfil be foreign to his own experience. The desire for immortal
ity, therefore, is at bottom the best possible indication that man as he
exists to-day is only the beginning of what he is to be, the pigmoid

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS $93
or embryo of bis true self. When he has completed and finished aU
that is now only begun in him, many transcendental structures wfil
become useless. Thus doctrines of another life, whatever else they
are, we may stfil regard as symbols or tropes in mythic terms of the
true superman as he wfil be and the great hope that so many have
lived and died in wfil be fulfilled, every jot and tittle of it. The
deathbed visions of those who died hungering for more life wfil come
true. Another point of the greatest importance is that the old lust for
personal immortality has now made man much more anxious to pro
long and enlarge his mundane life. The great and good things he
expected beyond he now strives to attain here. He wants more, not
less, as of old in this life, because he expected so much in the other,
so that the old belief in immortality is one of the analytic roots of
hygiene and orthobiosis.
Just as sense is the organ of the physical world so faith is the inner
sensory of the true soul world. It was indeed the very substance of
tilings hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. The Holy Ghost,
which was its supreme manifestation, was a new muse and organ of
communication with the next world, and superior to the lower faculties
of sense and reason, which were despised as filthy rags, just as the moral
ity of this world was regarded from the standpoint of supermundane
morals. Thus ideals became more real than facts; the visible Church
was plastic to, and moulded by, the invisible Church. The laws of this
world differed from those of the new and higher one now revealed.
The two world orders collided, and what seemed miraculous here was
natural there because the lower must give way to the higher. This
earth was given over to evil and to destruction. Worship was the
purest, other-world conduct, the avocation of heaven. No real evil
could, indeed, befall a good man, living or dead, if he were good in this
sense. No wonder, therefore, that this evangel of a new impending king
dom and dispensation was heralded by a kind of hurrah preaching.
The Church was the best image of heaven and suggestive of it; was the
ante-room through which all must pass to arrive there. Individuality
was given an intensification immeasurable, unprecedented, and of tran
scendent value. In this new dualism the Jenseits was so superior to
the Diesseits that all the scales of value were reversed, and aU the

694 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
troubles, disorders, and ruinations of the period impeUed the soul to
fly to and live by anticipation in its home above. Cyprian had some
almost fulsome encomiums upon martyrdom which CruttweU1 bfindly
caUs "a strange symptom of that unhappy age." It was reaUy the
most natural and inevitable result of a fixed and literal belief in the
Resurrection and all that it implied. The passionate thirst for martyr
dom made it thought by many the very best gift they could render to
God, and they went far out of their way to provoke it. Men rushed to
death with a cheer, which to the Romans seemed a blind fanaticism
because they could not understand it to be anything but sheer obstinacy
that men would refuse to cry " Lord Caesar," or burn a grain of frankin
cense on the altar. TertuUian praised martyrdom as a second baptism
in blood with very peculiar power to wash away post-baptismal guilt
otherwise very hard to remove. He even laid down what might ahnost
be called rules of etiquette for martyrs, who must not shriek when wild
beasts come upon them, etc. He exhorted men to be witnesses, thus
praising those blessed ones who, crouching in gloomy prisons, awaited
the martyr's crown. Even to Clement, who was a little more unsym
pathetic with this passion or mania, a martyr was a confessor.
Thus within the space of three days, or at most some fifty days
from Calvary to Pentecost, we have a great tide from the ebb of
depression to the flood of euphoria. The katabasis of humiliation,
shame, and suffering was followed by the anabasis of exaltation, glory,
and Resurrection. Never was there such a flood from the depths to
the heights of human experience in its fluctuations between its two
great poles of pleasure and pain. Even Jesus' earthly life had two
sides, well illustrated by the two works of Wiinsche,2 as we have seen,
in one of which he is described as suffering, solitary, misunderstood by
his mother ever after his first visit to the temple, by his contemporaries
and even his chosen disciples, and in the other as jubilant and trium
phant. The soul is normally poised between these extremes, and when
the balance is lost in either direction tends to react toward the other.
The high hopes of years in the breasts of the disciples could not be
permanently crushed by one series of calamities, however appalling,
and any objective intimation of resurgence would be reinforced by this
psychodynamic principle. Ever since Magnan's important studies in

'"Literary History of Early Christianity." 1893. a vols.
¦See "Die Leiden des Messias." 1870. Compare it with" Der lebentreudlge Jesus." 1870-

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 695
psychiatry, alienists are increasingly prone to lay stress upon depressive
or melancholiac as contrasted with exalted states of consciousness, as
succeeding each other in the so-caUed cyclic forms of insanity, into
either one of which the patient, after losing the power of reacting to the
other, may settle with relative permanence. Even moods of joy and
sorrow have different mental horizons and may take the form of some
thing almost like dual personality. The healthy soul, however, is
marked by the power of resilience. To explore the possibilities of
human experience each way, both up and down, gives breadth, range,
and, in a word, humanism. The plastic soul of adolescence is peculiarly
prone to osciUate from the pain field to the pleasure field, and thereby
strengthens and tempers itself, insures sanity and poise, and makes
recovery from the vicissitudes of fortune a habit or diathesis. No
experience of the ordinary individual sounds such extremes of misery
and rapture as is presented at this epoch. To have fully realized the
possibility of this great experience cadences the soul; gives it immunity
against the danger of being overwhelmed by woe or enervated by joy.
Having been thus seasoned, man is initiated into life and inoculated
with saving heart-power against all the ills that may befall. For those
with vitality to react, the greater the depression below the algedonic in
difference point, the higher and the easier the ascent above it. To
be helped by an external norm to this reaction gives temper to the soul,
and to have suffered and rejoiced vicariously up to the fuU measure of its
possibilities is the best initiation into life and the best safeguard against
arrest at either extreme point of the pendulum. It is thus that the
soul expatiates over the widest ranges of human experience. The
psychologist marvels at and applauds alike the affirmative vigour that
kept Jesus' disciples from being so overwhelmed at his death that
they could not accept and exult in his Resurrection, and the tem
perance that restrained the exuberant and almost frenzied enthusiasm
of Pentecost from the sibylline, msenadic madness that threatened it,
formulated this exuberance into the doctrines of inspiration and the
Holy Ghost, checked the impetuous zeal to bear witness by death, and
diverted aU this spring flood of energy to the practical work of preach
ing and organizing. Both ways lay danger.
Again, death is always hard to conceive of or even to accept as a
fact. The personafity of our friends is a very persistent force and,
moreover, it is peculiarly difficult to conceive a negation. The reality

696 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
of dead friends is a persistent presence, a momentum which if we close
our eyes to their vacant places will bring them back. The best ex
planation we have of all kinds of funeral ceremonials is that they origi
nated at least in large part as modes of bringing home to mourners the
fact that their friends were reaUy dead and would never be seen more.
Ghosts haunt relatives if they have not been properly buried, so that
the last sad rites are to lay spirits by acting upon the survivors' minds
so strongly that neither waking nor asleep shaU they fail to realize that
they are no more. Presence at a deathbed also impresses the same
sad fact. The apostles were far away from the cross and the tomb.
None of them knew probably by sense, but only by testimony, of their
Master's death and burial, so that it is less strange if he appeared
to them on the ground of his power and triumph in Galilee and amid
the familiar scenes with which they were wont to associate him. They
had not seen him dead or dying, and so lacked this corrective of old
memories, this rectification of old associations.
Again, strong personalities, especially, die hard to their friends.
They have filled so large a space in heart, head, and wfil, and the soul so
abhors this kind of vacuum made by death that it is almost a part of the
vis medicatrix naturae to restore the wounded psychic tissue and rein
state the loved ones again to life. Those who polarize and give new
directions to lives, who sustain hope, inspire courage, open vast mental
vistas, have an inextinguishable post-mortem existence for those about
them, which, in these democratic days when impulse, knowledge, feel
ing are stirred by so many persons and are so rarely focussed upon one
life, we hear little of. Hegel and Baur have both insisted that the
Resurrection of Jesus consisted essentiaUy in this kind of faith and love
of the members of his immediate circle.
Moreover, love always predisposes the soul to doubt death. It is
excited in almost direct proportion to the worth and perdurable reality
of its object. Affection naturaUy chooses not the transient and ephem
eral, but the abiding; and conversely when it is chosen it generates
toward its object a sense of permanence and stability. Thus love con
quers death.
Once more, mythopeic forces preform and predetermine the direc
tion of psychic activities in great crises. Myth abounds in rescues
of the souls of the dead from their abodes, and this general restitution
motive is itself preformed by the change of seasons. As the Aryan

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 697
races penetrated the colder regions, these myths became more real, and
in Balder's death and attempted rescue we have the same ground
motive with many identical psychic elements and effects. Balder was
the god of summer, who dies in the fall and comes back in the spring,
and not only the Easter season itself but many of the popular and even
Church ceremonies commemorative of Jesus' return are borrowed from
pagan folklore and custom. If not in the narrative itself, still in the
hold which this event has upon the heart of Christendom and in many
of our reactions to it, there are abundant reverberations of psychoses
that long antedate Christianity. The psychologist, too, must never
forget that the human soul in its unconscious ranges, which are so
much vaster than all that appears in the field of consciousness, often
treasures uncomely beliefs as blindly as insects cherish their sometimes
ugly larvae, dimly feeling their future racial utility. One of the marvels
of Christianity is that some of its possessions, now understood and
glowing with light, were so tenaciously clung to when they seem to us
to have been only a mouthful of empty phrases, or senseless or absurd
rites. Classical legends and ceremonials are far more comely. But the
soul is far wiser and truer than it knows, and clung to what concealed
worth for itself through dark ages and persecutions in a way which our
philosophy is too smaU to explain and which should forever make us
treat even superstition and the blindest and narrowest orthodoxies
with sympathy and, if possible, with the hebamic art which Socrates
praised. Psychology does not pronounce on the historicity of the Resurrec
tion as an objective fact, but it magnifies the unquestioned belief in it
which became ineluctable and the chief source of power in the early
Church. Of aU the possible issues noted above, while Jesus lay in the
tomb, only one was inevitable, and that was that the normal soul
would react from despair, and if it did not find, would invent, sources of
consolation. Had the evidence of the Resurrection been still less or a
mere suggestion, there fies in the depths of human nature a power of
affirmation that would have found some relief and might have given the
body of faith to even a suggestion. The power of belief without sight
or any evidence that would satisfy logical criteria was truly and wisely
praised. This is not quite saying that the soul would have affirmed
the Resurrection had it not occurred in fact, but it is asserting that the
nature of both the individual and the folk-soul would strongly tend to

698 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
reinforce any degree of befief in that direction, would find judicial
impartiality difficult, and would make every hint and hope a little more
tangible or emphatic. This view at least gives added dignity to the
soul, gives it some share in the great crisis of Christendom, endows it
with greater powers of appreciation of what occurred, and makes his
toric events more cognate with its own mythopeic powers, however
wide the interval between the ability to sympathize with and to create.
From this point of view, some new light is shed upon the way of salva
tion. Our age has forgotten the power of pathos and of fear. Comfort
makes us selfish, and individualism disintegrates the old solidarity of
earlier primitive communities. In becoming cosmic our sympathy is
diluted and volatilized and our scholarship has failed to lay due stress
upon the fact that in early days both Christians and pagans shuddered,
groaned, and fainted, were convulsed and torn with an inner anguish
racking the frame with intense physical symptoms as the story of the
cross and all that led up to it were vividly depicted for the first time or
rehearsed in solitary meditation. So, too, learning has been so occupied
with the spade, with ancient codices and attempts to reproduce ob
jective facts, that it has forgotten those that were inward and tempera
mental. It is increasingly hard for us to put ourselves in the place of
simple minds before the dawn of science, minds capable of believing
literally and with such utter abandon that Jesus had arisen, that they
could cast off aU fear of death, had to be restrained with difficulty from
rushing precipitately into its arms with joy, and truly and practicaUy
felt as even the believer to-day does not and cannot, that the next life
was infinitely vaster, more real and sure than this. But the inner
history of Christianity will continue to have a great and aching void
until some work of psychic reconstruction can be effected here.
The effects of the belief in the Resurrection must at once have
given a new lustre to Jesus' fife. Every word and incident must have
been reinterpreted in the fight of the new fame with which he was thus
invested. It illuminated and transfigured all. Had he been a common,
average man, everything about his personality would have glowed with
new and hidden meanings and been invested with mystery and awe.
Paul had one incalculable advantage over the disciples. His first
impressions of Jesus were as one who had already arisen and even
ascended, and from the apperception point of his glory he studied his

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 699
life and sayings. His own faith and teaching were conditioned upon
the Resurrection, without which aU would have been vain. The
disciples, however, knew him in the plain, prosaic, everyday life of
humanity. They had talked, walked, and eaten with him, and had
been his companions by day and night. The text shows the difficulty
of readjustment of their own personal experiences with him to the
conceptions of the risen and glorified one. To bring unity into their
minds they must tend to more or less level down the post-mortem to
the ante-mortem fife, while in Paul the converse process of leveUing up
would occur. In him, faith was all; in them, sight dominated. Briggs1
even says, illustrating a haunting tendency of modern conservatism to
make the post- and ante-mortem life intussuscept with each other, and
on evidence that must forever be more or less conjectural, "We are
justified, therefore, in the conclusion that we must assign no incon
siderable portion of the teaching of Jesus to his appearances after his
Resurrection. It is upon the experiences of these forty days, as much
as upon the year and a half of the previous ministry of Jesus, that the
faith and life of the apostolic Church was grounded." We must believe
it to be in the highest interests of Christianity to admit that the sequel
to Jesus' life stands in some very different relation to the religious con
sciousness from his career before death. It appeals to psychic registers,
the difference between which is somewhat symbolized by those between
the ideal and the real or between the soul and the body. Supremely
precious as is the former, and indispensable as it is to the soul of the
Christian, it is more exalted, remote, aloof, superhuman, unincarnate,
a middle term between his humanity and the pleroma of his fuUy diplo-
mated divinity. To Paul it was aU a vision, and his own legitimacy
was bound up in the differences between prosaic, common, sensuous
experience and the ecstatic state. Both he and the disciples were very
conscious of the differences between his soul facts and experiences and
their sense memories. The risen Jesus is a hovering, iridescent reality,
to be regarded a little more as we ought to regard the supremest and
most inspired of aU creations of art, and is not exalted but in danger of
being a little besmirched by too much peering criticism as to times and
places, which sometimes only vulgarizes the purely ideal. This the
Resurrection ever was to Paul, because it came to him as a transcen
dental experience, and it must ever be to us a predominantly psycholog-
'"New Light on the Life of Jesus." New York, 1904, 1 24 pp.

700 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
ical fact, truer to the nature and needs of the soul than to the canons
of historical research. Humanity has never dreamed of imitating or
sympathizing with its risen Jesus as it has so intensely done with the
Jesus of the Passion. Tradition has done little to amplify the very
scanty record between the Resurrection and the Ascension by apocry
pha and myth, and it has never been a favourite theme of art. The
risen Jesus did not attract even the disciples, and has always been
a little uncanny, and repellent, and heartless, as if he were coldly dis
charging a formal theological function, or were but a mere dogma gal
vanized into only the pallid tenuous fife of which a dogma is capable.
Thus there is a new sense in which we may now say no one is com
plete or has attained fuU moral maturity who has not passed through
an experience which of old was designated as dying and rising with
Jesus. The selfish ego must die and the higher social self of service
must arise from its tomb. The pre-Christian mysteries knew this,
and their sacredly secret rites which their initiates went through
symbolized death and rebirth, and contemporary psychopathologists
are weU on the way to the revival of the equivalent of this cult in their
therapy. It is only the next step beyond what Dejerine, Dubois, and
Marcinowski have aheady taken to lead patients obsessed with
personal anxieties to see their own worries pale by sympathetic reali
zation that their tribulations are not the worst possible, and that
beyond these there is always a great hope and resanification by re-
traversing with deep and sympathetic Einfuhlung to the point of
abandon the successive steps by which Jesus passed through the worst
of all conceivable fates and yet found at the end the best and highest
of aU goals, finding in this an immunity bath, ensuring them against
being upset by either extreme of pleasure or pain, evil or good, that
can befall man. This is the consummate lesson of life and all who
have not learned it are incomplete, inferior, arrested, not sociaUy sane.
The immemorial past, back to the old cadence of autumn and spring
time, amplified and enriched by the recensions of millennia, conserves
for us here its most precious heritage. The cults of many pagan deities
whose shrines excavators are now unearthing were groping toward
the same goal, and who knows but that we have here not only a heal
ing formula for sin-sick souls, but even for neurotics and psychotics, so
that Jesus is to be revealed in a new sense as the Great Physician to the
obsessed in a way which his healing miracles only inadequately typify ?

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 701
One thing, however, is certain, viz., that every degree, even the
slightest, of increased faith in a future eternal life of rewards and pun
ishments for the soul gives inestimable support to morality. It gives
hedonism a wider range and makes selfishness transcendent and in some
sense intensified. The sage who is supremely bent upon saving his
own soul, who is assured that this life is only a portal to the next, who
is not merely indifferent to wealth, fame, comfort, and a merely worldly
prudence, but who regards death as only disrobing, finds it far easier to
die than to swerve from his convictions of right. The Resurrection
estabfished the befief in the soul as infinitely more real than the body,
not only surviving it but relieved and glorified by emancipation from it.
Thus convinced, the motive of action to save life is reduced to its
minimum, the supreme fear of death vanishes, and man can live out
the impulsions of his inner vocation for their own sake. Of course the
lust for individual survival in the next world is not the highest motive
of virtue. It is a utilitarian making the best of two worlds instead of
one. There is a sublime autonomous sense of oughtness in the soul
that points, like a magnet to the pole, to the destiny of the human race
and that differs widely from even the highest form of transcendental
selfishness. This Paul glimpsed when he said that under certain con
ditions he might almost wish himself accursed. But by bringing im
mortality to light, the soul stood forth revealed, and a utilitarianism for
its larger life after death was an incalculable gain, the full benefit of
which, ineffably as it has advanced all good causes in the Christian
world, is yet far above the level of life which the race has yet attained.
It gave the greatest transvaluation of all worths and reinforced every
ethical motive. Ill
What is befief in the Resurrection or what does it involve and
mean to psychology? The answer is, as questionnaire returns plainly
show, that it means very different things to different believers whose
lives seem equaUy devoted to the Master and who have long used the
same formula or symbol. It is a very complex belief involving often
elements that are so flagrantly contradictory the one with the other
that the least examination of it brings immediate reconstruction with
the mingled pain and gain so peculiar to religious progress. There are
archaic but stfil persistent factors of this belief which popular Christi-

702 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
anity often assumes but which no disciple of Jesus, ancient or modern,
no martyr, no candid professor of theology, or reaUy religious soul ever
did or can attain, and there are vulgar standards of orthodoxy so crassly
material and self-contradictory that no one, I will not say with mere
learning or scholarship or with only emotional or rhetorical power, but
no one who has power of thought or real psychological insight or the
instinct to organize his own soul coherently or logically, or who keeps
an intellectual conscience, can possibly hold and be a truly honest man.
The data of our returns may be roughly grouped as foUows:
(a) Many think they believe in it as a literal fact because they have
never candidly examined the nature of their affirmation of it. This
few can do, and still fewer do. Some fear disiUusion or dread the la
bour of reconstruction. As Albertus Magnus and Aquinas carefully
reserved certain dogmas from the sphere of philosophic thought, so
this psychic process is set apart as too sacred for investigation, (b)
Many have some degree of faith in too crude a form of it even to be
able to attain the fuU conviction they crave, and so are unhappy, halt
ing and praying for more faith when they ought to reinterpret it into a
form the mature modern mind demands, (c) Others think they find
aid to their own faith by vociferous and dogmatic affirmation of some
form of it, or find their own befief reinforced by censuring what they
deem shortages or errors in the belief of others, on psychic laws akin
to those which make young Mormons suspected of doubt reclaimed
to faith by being sent on missions to preach their doctrines among here
tics, and who by becoming advocates instead of judges convert them
selves if no others, (d) Yet others with, and surprisingly often with
out, any knowledge of Kant's critique of the practical reason and its
postulates, hold to the conventional form of belief because they think
its effects on the conduct of thought, fife, or both, are a higher criterion
or sanction than any which reason can supply. The highest truth is
that which works supremely well, (e) Many hold to it aesthetically.
Art has embodied it in many forms that edify and give a true hedonic
narcosis and so they have grown indifferent to historical validity. It
is venerable, hallowed by association and by a consensus so wide as to
be itself sublime. Moreover, poetry is often truer than fact, (f)
Many think it essential for the young, and while they feel that it is
outgrown in their own experience deem it vital, saving truth for chil
dren and youth, to the needs of which they subordinate not only their

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 703
own lives but their convictions, and find a pedagogic virtue in so doing
that they reconcile with personal standards by often elaborate accom
modation theories, (g) Finally, a few devout souls whose private
lives are consecrated to the imitation of Jesus' life, and who live for
good works, distinctly and consciously reject all forms of resurrection.
Of these, some, chiefly women, were shocked to first realize their un
belief and are more assiduous in practising the Christian graces as if to
atone for a defect, while others, more often men, have found great satis
faction in their tclaircissement, but believe they can do most good by
conforming and working in the harness of conventionality, or perhaps
think this an article of faith best left to lapse from the Christian con
sciousness quietly, as they believe it will do.
These are facts based, to be sure, as yet on only a few score of hon
est cases, most of them academic students and all of them more or less
active church members who desire to lead Christian lives. More data
are, of course, needed, and would no doubt show many new varie
ties and different statistical proportions. That they are typical of the
present state of mind of thoughtful youth in the Church, who are pro
verbiaUy the best material for prophecy, there can be no doubt. But
few, if indeed any, held to a belief in the Resurrection that would satisfy
the conventional standards of orthodoxy in the denomination to which
they belonged. This shows a wide chasm between the latter and the
true facts of inner religious life. To make new, fresh, close, and vital
contact with the latter is, I befieve, the most crying need of Christian
thought to-day. A psychologist must be pardoned if he finds one chief
cause of this ominous and widening chasm in the astonishing neglect to
provide for any study of the soul in institutions the business of which is
to train men for the work of saving it, and in the abstract, speculative
and antiquated ways of teaching philosophic subjects in institutions for
higher education generally. Reserving fuller exposition for later arti
cles let us finally glance in a preliminary way at the present status of
opinion on the subject.
The passages in the New Testament touching the Resurrection are,
individuaUy and coUectively, extremely unsatisfactory and contain
many discrepancies and contradictions. First of aU there were, as
every one knows, as mentioned above, no recorded eye-witnesses of the
process itself, as there were in the case of Lazarus. We have no
account of how it occurred. The guards slept, the disciples fled even

704 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
before the crucifixion, and the proofs which appear chronologicaUy
first differ in detafis, such as whether the angel sat, stood, was inside or
outside the tomb, etc. The number of parousias, the persons to whom,
and the places in which, he appeared, have always been difficult to
harmonize. The quasi-materiality of the risen body, the unforetold
and unexpected event of his bodily presence, the tardiness of recogni
tion — all show us that we are now in a very different position with re
gard to historic reality from that afforded us by the record of the public
ministry. Everything is hazy, falsetto, and at every point profoundly
different from the kind of evidence that modern coroners or medical
boards might furnish. For this reason alone, belief in the Resurrection
must forever remain a matter of faith or subjective conviction, and
involve more or less of a salto mortale for the modern and especially for
the scientific mind. In view of the stupendous nature of the fact
assumed it must always remain more or less incredible, and for every
one who accepts it there will forever be a real, though perhaps uncon
scious, handicap on the energy of conviction. That the disciples and
immediate friends of Jesus were convinced that they had seen his
resurrected personality in some form, and that this was a source of
great reassurance and one of the chief bases of their preaching, and
gave it its chief momentum, there can be no doubt. It is, however,
now quite competent to inquire upon what evidence this belief rested.
(a) Elemental as are the considerations involved, it will remove a
great burden and reproach from modern Christian belief for us to
recognize fully and honestly at the outset that the Resurrection can
not mean for us to-day the reversal of the processes of physical death.
It is a suicidal materialization of religious faith to hold to all that this
implies. Death means, according to various legal and physiological
tests and criteria, the cessation of respiration and therefore of oxygena
tion of the blood, and the complete arrest of the action of the heart.
The nervous system, it is now believed, dies first, the cerebral preced
ing the sympathetic. Soon the glands and other tissues follow in an
order determined by the nature of the morbific or lethal process. Prod
ucts of decomposition accumulate; the blood coagulates in from half an
hour to twelve hours, depending upon the degree of exhaustion ; the mus
cle plasm hardens to cadaveric rigidity; and with the gradual relaxation
of rigor mortis putrefaction sets in. Before the cooling of the body be
gins very subtle changes occur in its protoplasm, which is changed

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 705
from an active state with many elements of its composition unknown to
a dead state, the constitution of which is now pretty well made out.
Recent neurological studies indicate momentous changes in the brain
neurons. Reanimation of a grave corpse after three days would mean
inversion of all this sequence of processes after they had advanced so
far that death by every criterion must be pronounced complete. Mod
ern definitions and conceptions of death make the idea of revivification
indefinitely harder than it was before the development of modern physi
ology, especiaUy its chemical section. Moreover, the modern mind
must ask what was the condition of the wounds, whether they had
cicatrized, whether the spiUed blood had been restored or there was
still extreme anaemia. Was the weight the same? From the record it
appears that the risen body was no longer without spot or blemish,
but was at least scarred. It is no pedantic intrusion, but an irresistible
query of every judicial and especiaUy scientific mind, to dweU upon the
many detafis of this order, which are here suggested.
It is no revival of the Humean argument to urge that from the
nature of both testimony and of miracle such a one can never be reaUy
proven, that the befief in any such series of reversals of the order of
nature must forever and by every mind, no matter how devout or im
passioned the instinct of its befief, remain more or less superficially
forced or formal. Fervid affirmation of such a faith is an act of wfil
rather than of defiberate, deep, and poised inteUectual conviction.
Its satisfaction and even sublimity is psychologically akin to the
credo quia absurdum by which practical faith sometimes loves to stop
the mouth of reason. Plato's imagination was creative and vivid
enough to describe the reversal of the processes in nature's cycle when
the universe turned about with a shock and revolved the other way,
when old men rose out of the dust, gradually grew young, and entered
again their mother's wombs; but Pliny's philosophy made it a matter
of consolation to mourning friends that even the gods could never raise
the dead. That faith in the Resurrection has often taken this mon
strous form in crass and fiteral minds there can be no doubt, but a
large view of all the Pauline passages indicates that the sense in which
he made the Christian faith vain if Christ be not raised is not this.
Such a fact, so unique and out of relation with everything we know,
must forever be no less antagonistic to the higher activities of faith
than it is stultifying to science and common sense. Even if it has ever

706 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
had any value, this has ceased to exist for modern culture, and it is
not only no longer needed but is a grievous encumbrance to modern
apologetics. An inteUigent man who affirms that he holds this belief
can hardly know what intellectual honesty means.
(b) Another view not unknown in earlier times, and also favoured
by several of the most careful and conscientious modern Christologists,
is that Jesus was not entirely dead, but was revived from some form of
trance. Paulus suggested that the sponge applied to his lips may have
contained a narcotic, and intimates that when he bowed his head upon
the cross he fainted. Jung inclined to the same view. Schleierma
cher favoured the hypothesis of apparent death. Brehmke and others
(see Chapter 2) thought he revived, and lived and worked for a
quarter of a century later in obscurity. Pilate seemed astonished that
he died so soon. Hengst imagines that he may have revived and
prayed among the hiUs, where he led perhaps a kind of prolonged
Mahatma life. His own rare heafing powers, it has been said, may have
been exercised upon himself. He was vigorous, endowed with rare
vitality, and in the prime of life, so that he naturally would not suc
cumb easily to death. Moreover, the body was perfumed, perhaps
bandaged and possibly embalmed, and treated according to the surgical
arts of his day, else why the hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes
in John xix: 39? One tradition reports that his feet were not nailed,
that the spear wound was low in the thigh, and therefore not necessarily
fatal. Medical records, to say nothing of the traditions of Catholic
saints, report cases of actual crucifixion, where both hands and feet
were pierced, from which recovery has been made. Modern resuscita-
tive methods, particularly in the case of drowning, and the records of
the gallows, present authentic cases where fife has thus been snatched
from the very jaws of death in rare ways. The purity and sinlessness
of his fife, it has been said, gave augmented vitality, and perhaps the
earthquake shocked him back to life. (See Chapter 2, Sadin.)
The history of human hibernation is a strange chapter, but the
reality of its main facts may be said to be proven. Respiration and
heart action can be almost incredibly reduced beyond the reach of
the usual methods of detection, and subjects can be actually buried and
aroused again after days and perhaps weeks of a high degree of sus
pended animation. In these cases the processes of dissolution, of
course, do not supervene and there is no death, one factor in the very

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 707
conception of which is the impossibility of restoration to life. Those
familiar with the strange facts of modern hypnotism, which are ac
cepted by the most conservative psychologists, know how far death is
sometimes thus simulated by its brother sleep. Even the uncontrolled
sporadic cases, where hysterical subjects have in imagination passed
into and long remained in unconscious and perhaps cataleptic states,
must be weighed if this view is to be seriously dealt with. The soul
in this state may in vision have visited the abode of the dead and re
turned with strange and vivid dream pictures. AU these phenomena
are now more or less understood.
If this be the hypothesis we could partiaUy explain the changed
appearance of Jesus after this exhausting experience. We should ex
pect him to be feeble, anaemic, pallid, hungered, a trifle dazed and mys
terious to himself and others, instinctively seeking seclusion and rest
for restoration. He would naturally, exhausting though the effort
might be, endeavour to see his friends again, so that he must lapse back
again to death indeed. To intimate, as has been done, that death was
simulated in order to be escaped is an extreme hypothesis which has
little positive evidence to countenance it. It would, however, only be
conformable to the promptings of the instinct of love to appear as well
and strong as one's condition aUowed in the presence of one's friends.
If any such hypothesis as this be accepted, it must not be for
gotten that it is not resurrection in the sense which the Church held of
old. It would remain an illustration of marvellous vitality, but the
superstitions of death have always been such that those who were
believed thus to break away from its close embrace have always been
objects of wondering awe and curiosity rather more than of love, de
votion, and service. Such an event must be regarded as more or less
accidental, as suggesting at best a being endowed with supernormal
viability, able to resist causes of death which would effectively over
whelm most men. It would not add any sanction of divine authority,
would give no warrant of a general and real resurrection of others, but
would distinctly rob the death on the cross of much of its impressiveness
and power. It would be no real confirmation of any interpretation of
his own prophetic intimations, and could not be a factor in the r61e
of the Jewish Messiah. Whfie this view, therefore, is not impossible
and can never be absolutely disproven or proven, it has against it an
enormous improbability, and has little power of edification.

708 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY r
(c) From the early times of Celsus down to Weisse and even
Keim, many have held the parousia to be of some higher and more
subtle form of corporeity. Each of the Christophanies is held to imply
some degree of materialization. There was a real presence as the
objective cause and at the point de repere of the vision. From the
standpoint of this theory, which Venturini has elaborately exploited,
the physical body is not needed and the grave might have remained
either tenanted or empty. It is a heavenly or glorified body or form of
objectivity, a soul disembodied "stooping to visibility," or in plain
terms a ghost or spectre. This theory is not without consonance with
some facts of the record like the passing through closed doors, the
sudden appearance and vanishing, the appearances now in Jerusalem,
now in Galilee, the difficulty of recognition, etc. ; but it hardly comports
with eating, touching, speaking, as Jesus did. To many this view may
have a certain new interest from the recent studies of apparitions which
have convinced many cultivated minds that there may be phantasms
of the living or dead, which are invested with some form or degree of
objectivity and are not wholly subject to the laws of matter. This view
has b'een developed, especially in England, by a group of bold spirits
in the Society for Psychical Research, whose views are far more definite
than those of Seydel, Scholten, or Ewald, who also held it. They have
made a future life seem more real and true to minds that claim no so-
caUed "mediumistic" power, or indeed any supernormal faculty. A
laborious colligation of hundreds of dreams by Mr. Gurney has erected
what is thought to be a formidable presupposition in favour of a con
tinuance of individual existence, at least in an attenuated form. We
have been exhorted by Mr. Myers, the coryphaeus of this school, to
have more resolute credulity toward the accumulated and systemati-
caUy presented new evidence of a physical basis of immortality. Mr.
Robert Dale Owen long ago described the "feel" of ghost clothes,
which melted away in his grasp. We find, too, a few cases of sensa
tions of spirit breath upon the cheek. Appeal is also made to a super
normal faculty of receiving personafity suggestions, to some kind of
rare sensitiveness which Mr. Podmore says must be either a vestige of
some function of primordial organisms or else a bud of powers later to
be unfolded. This faculty, we are told, may in some way, difficult to
characterize because of the absence of mundane analogies, become ex
alted to a hallucinatory state, which, however, has a veridical and

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 709
objective cause. This latter is not a common ghost or an astral body,
and indeed no physical process at present known can adequately ex
plain its mode of action. Yet in some way the faltering soul of man
may be thus brought into rapport with forms of individual existence
which have survived death, in a way which gives faith in a future life
by actual communication with departed acquaintances, and which
affords some kind of answer to the long and agonizing cry of the soul —
" If a man die shaU he live again? " If the future life has a high degree
of reality and those dead retain any reminiscence of earthly experience,
the presumption that they may find some mode of revealing their
continued existence weights every die, and where the air is murky with
superstition and there are fabulists and those who strive and hunger
for this evidence, it seems strange that at the very least in a few unique
cases this passion should not be gratified. The fact that this theory
seems to modern science stupendous and revolutionary, that it is
hardly susceptible of physical expression but must be wrought but in
poetic metaphors and has never attained anything like true demon
stration, though those who have struggled to make it apprehensible
use the theories of ether, neuricity, and eccentric projection toward
some kind of objective correspondence, even the wild intemperance of
spiritualists of every age and clime, should not blind us to the possibifity
of some such truth in a world as yet but imperfectly realized, in which
science is still in its infancy and man himself only in an active develop
mental stage. For those whose minds are not encumbered by critical
methods some such hypothesis can readily be developed which affords
a satisfaction very great and tranquillizing, and for them it is indefi
nitely easier to explain the whole class of phenomena by it than to enter
tediously upon the indirect long-circuit methods of critical testing and
historic research which are now demanded in this field.
On the other hand, there are some things which it is a virtue to
doubt. Superstition has no ranker, grosser forms than those due to the
attempts long ago described by Kant to explain the dreams of vision
aries by those of metaphysicians. While it is impossible to enforce
temperance of thought upon this subject in the popular religious mind,
and while it would be the labours of Hercules over again to drive out
from their cover in the many and vast fields of hypotheses opened by
modern science all the traces and forms of these survivals, it is never
theless necessary to say in unequivocal terms that the probabilities

710 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
against a single isolated occurrence of this nature seem to the natural
mind almost overwhelming. It is not at aU impossible, from the fear
ascribed to those who saw the risen Jesus and from the characteristics
implied in these Christophanies, that some of the cited witnesses
honestly believed that they saw his ghost. Indeed, when we consider
the frequency of such experiences, especially in the cases of great and
beloved leaders, and the almost universal prevalence of a befief in
spectres as objectively real, brought out in so admirable and scholarly
a manner by H. Weinel, it is highly probable that this was one of the
important factors in the great and sudden change from extreme de
pression to extreme joy and confidence. Yet stiU more we must incline
to the view that this interpretation of real experiences is more plausible
for earlier appearances than the theory of subjective, even if revelatory,
vision. To the belief that the ghost of Jesus had actually reappeared
Christianity probably owes no small part of its initial momentum. A
credited apparition may have had something to do in giving to the
early Christians, and through them to the world, their God. But even
if we hold them to have been in error in this regard, we must hasten to
say somewhat as Fairbairn said of the vision theory, that at least it
worked supremely weU. Men may have once believed on superstitious
grounds on him, whom now the world is coming to adore as divine in a
higher sense than the early Christians could comprehend. We have
here only an extreme illustration of the fact that from age to age the
basis and emphasis of belief in Jesus have changed, but that he has
always occupied in the souls of his disciples the highest place which
every stage of culture could provide. That even superstition was thus
made to praise him is no derogation of his merit, no stigma upon his
character, and should cause no abatement of our own trust in him. It
was not only necessary but inevitable that he should impress those
about him with a sense of a reality and validity in his own teachings,
sentiments, and character that far transcended their narrow compre
hension. One form which the conceptions of great men then took was
that of the superiority, actuality, persistence, and power of survival
generaUy of their souls. The ideal thus became real, the transcendent
immanent. The plastic, receptive power of mind, sense, and feeling
passed over into the passionate enthusiasm of will. The very energy
of being which to-day makes a popular hero, a leader, and compeller of
souls, was then wont to be appreciated and interpreted as control of

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 7"
the powers beyond the grave. History cannot be written without
recognizing at some of the most important crises in human events the
power of belief in even the veridical nature of dreams.
While, therefore, for us the spectre theory has fittle of the power
which Paul ascribes to the Resurrection, it was by no means devoid
of it in ancient days. It is also well to reflect that for those who stiU
hold any form of the hypothesis of spiritualism, credence in the Resur
rection of Jesus is an easy matter, for it becomes only a highly special
ized and perhaps uniquely preeminent case under a general law.
Just as the same natural phenomena are interpreted according to
radicaUy different theories in different ages, so we have here an
filustration of the progressive reconstruction of the apperception
organs in man.
(d) Far more current now is the vision theory, represented in
different forms by Spinoza, Strauss, Renan, Seydel, RaviUe, Fichte,
Geiger, Noack, Gratz, and others. For some the Resurrection is a
speciaUy inspired vision sent by God. Some, like Fichte, distinguish
between visions that can and that cannot be explained; or attempt
psychological distinctions between imagination, abnormal ecstasy, and
faith; hint at the possibility of dreaming either by night or by day; dis
tinguish between visions self-generated or due to the contagion of
numbers; between visions vivid enough to cause complete belief in
their objective validity and those that bring only partial conviction.
They expatiate on Paul's diathesis and Peter's ecstatic experience, or
discuss the extent to which the visionary practices which Noack sug
gests even Jesus cultivated, and which the Montanists afterward
unfolded, prevailed in the apostolic circle before and after Jesus'
death. Renan calls Mary a visionary, and intimates that in her
person a woman became the first missionary. There is much con
sensus of opinion that Paul saw visions; and if he did not rest his
claims to the apostolate upon them, nevertheless he regarded them
as in some sense a commission directly from Jesus to preach the
Gospel. The discrepancy among different writers in their conception of the
psychology of vision and the imparity between the different Christoph
anies for Paul himself, and between his and those of others, has its
root, perhaps, in the wide variety of experiences which the term vision
is used to include. For those who are visually minded, a clear belief

712 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
readily takes the form of an image with contours and even colours.
In many perfectly sane persons there are entoptic experiences of visual
ization that may be so entirely independent of the stream of thought as
to seem objective, while in other cases they give a concreteness to the
processes of ideation, almost as vivid as pictorial illustration. Life at
twilight and during the night is very different from that of the clear
day in this respect. In darkness thoughts create and project objects
that often attain a high degree of objective clearness. Fechner has
well characterized the influence of the night side of life upon human
conduct, and modern psychology abounds in cases where illusions and
dream experiences have become definitely incorporated into the mem
ory continuum as actually experienced.
Moreover, intense experiences involving great emotional stress
always tend to shift the boundaries between the inner and the outer.
The sensorium may be anaemic or congested, and the perturbation of the
souls of the disciples in those days has not inaptly been compared to
the resolution of the world back to some primitive cosmic state from
which it slowly cooled again. Even more frequent than visual is audi
tory haUucination, and both may be entirely consonant with mental san
ity and normality in other respects. Seeing visions has in many persons
and in many ages been a passion and evolved a very definite cult.
Many theories of inspiration have had recourse to vision theories. In
primitive ages there is no such distinction between illusion and percep
tion as we often find in the early stages of neuro-psychic disease. Yet
the old proverb that seeing is believing has a deep psychological truth.
Helmholtz has well said that any filusion of sense persistently repeated
is certain in the end to force itself upon the acceptance of the mind
with fuU and inexpugnable conviction. To have actuaUy seen the
risen Jesus made belief in his power over death and aU that it impfied
irresistible, and when reinforced by all the hopes, desires, and love of
his friends would give this faith a momentum not inferior to the su
preme cataleptic certainty of the Stoics and would give their preach
ing the impetus of tons instead of pounds.
Mary's enthusiastic annunciation of the Resurrection must have
been the gladdest of all Gospel good tidings. It was news that must be
spread. Tongues grew aflame like Jove's chariot wheels under the
impulse to spread the greatest and best news ever proclaimed. It was
simply tidings of a momentous and unique message from the future

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 713
home of aU men, far higher and farther above all news-mongering than
preaching is above gossip. Paul underwent a radical reconstruction
of standpoint and fife-purpose under its influence, and the supreme
duty of aU who had been clairvoyant and clairaudient to the great
parousia was to promulgate the great fact, to proclaim it from the
housetop, to organize a world propaganda of it. The Resurrection was
the central event in aU the universe, to which every important preceding
event led up, in which it focussed, and from which aU agencies for good in
the world must henceforth irradiate. The man Jesus became the Divine
Christ. All his teachings obtained a sanction direct from God. The
Resurrection was not only the great attest and credential, authorizing
aU his words and giving the most sublime possible climax to the tragedy
of his life, but it marked a new era in the relations of this world to the
Supreme Author of all being. Thus I opine it did not need, as Keim
holds, any definite closing of the period of vision or any authorization
to cease gazing into heaven, to recover self-possession, and go to work.
There was a spontaneous and inevitable passage from a state of con
vincing vision and passionate belief to enthusiastic wfil, a great psycho
sis under the influence of an unprecedented train of experiences and in
an age dominated by psychic forces, which never and nowhere else,
before or since, was aroused in any such kind and degree. The dis
ciples, at least the dominant members of their group, had seen. That
was enough to henceforth make them all missionaries, preaching that
which had been actuaUy seen and heard.
In fact, Paul's conception of Christ had very fittle to do with the
earthly life of Jesus. So far as modern Christianity is Pauline, it is
essentially unhistoric so far as both the words and the deeds of Jesus
are concerned, and indeed, has little connection with the Jesus of the
synoptic writers or even with the Johannin Jesus. Paul's mind was
chiefly fixed upon the voluntary humiliation of the preexistent Jesus
in coming down to earth, taking on the form of man and submitting to
crucifixion. By this supreme act of renunciation, obedience, and love
he merited and received the reward of Resurrection and Ascension and
stfil greater exaltation at the Father's right hand than he had before.
His daily life, walk, and example constituted an otherwise relatively
insignificant episode in the transcendent being of a preexistent and
still more lofty post-existent state. Paul praises in many and diverse
paradoxes the virtue of his self -emptying of celestial glory and takmg

714 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
on the humiliation of flesh. In this sacrifice and self-offering his
consenting to death was involved.1
(e) Perhaps the world has mistaken a group of psychological ex
periences, profound and of supreme historic significance, for plain, bald
historic fact, but the mistake is of far less practical significance either
way than has been thought. Textual criticism, laborious compilation of
contemporaneous aUusions, the possible discovery of new manuscripts or
archaeological inscriptions, can never make the apologists of the his
torical school the chief authorities for the post-mortem appearances of
Jesus, and their verdicts wfil always remain of limited effect upon the
souls of believers. But if we insist that this is all at bottom psychology,
we must also candidly admit that we are here in the presence of soul-
events which have features that it is hard to paraUel in aU the records
of the individual or the coUective mind. Psychology with its special
sections on iUusions of perception, on the hfe of feeling and will, on the
individual and the movements of groups and races of men, has yet much
to learn and is stfil in its infancy, but it is aheady big with the promise
and potency of larger and more cogent explanations here, which far
from weakening faith will give it both a higher sanction and a larger
scope with strict conformity to science.
How much of it all was due to vision and how much to other factors,
whether some disciples dreamed while others thought of ghosts, espe
ciaUy how many parts of objective reality different individuals ascribed
to their experiences, and just how Paul himself understood his own,
we can never with certainty know. New books and theories in indefi
nite perspective will continue to trim the Christian ship by rolling the
weight of one or aU of these four baUast boxes to starboard or larboard,
but if anywhere the frank confession of ignoramus, if not of ignorabimus
is proper, it is here.
While, then, some forms of belief in the Resurrection must be
definitely abandoned as obstacles to faith, others, not one but several,
'See "Die Entstehung der Paulinschen Christologie," by Dr. M. Bruckner, Strassburg, 1903, 237 pp., which ex
presses essentially the thought of the above paragraph and urges that Paul had from his youth a very definite idea of a
supernatural Jewish Messiah, and that his conversion consisted chiefly in the visual apparition of his ideal in a form so
like the Resurrection Jesus that the two concepts were instantly fused. At the same time his ideal was supplemented
and enlarged by the kenotic idea of the episode of Incarnation and higher post -ascensional glory. Thus the risen and
ascended Jesus of Christendom is the highest idealization of the Jewish Messiah of Paul's time, which included conflict
with, and victory over, demons and all the supernal powers of evil, but now universalized and freed from Mosaic laws
and Jewish limitations and given cosmic significance. Bruckner does not state, but very clearly leaves us to infer, that
had Paul known the historic Jesus it is doubtful if this identification with his earlier Messianic ideal would ever have
occurred. Thus Paul sought to convert gentiles to the most exalted of Jewish ideals, but the nature and work, which
was essentially transcendental and connected with the historic Jesus only by a vision of identification, was later confirmed
by Jewish metaphysical speculation. This noble ideal not only became an apparition, but took the form of flesh and
died to provide a Jewish atonement for Jewish law. This identification is the chief masterpiece of religious genius in the
world, and has in many if not most respects worked supremely well, although there is as little intussusception between
the historic Jesus and the racial ideal as between the parts of the image of Ezekiel '3 vision.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 715
far higher are not only possible but inevitable for every large and posi
tive mind, instructed in the nature of the individual and racial soul.
They neither can nor should yet be formulated with definiteness or
finality enough to satisfy those who demand rigid dogma or apodeictic
demonstration. The character and teaching of Jesus have a supreme
and independent value of their own, and his death will ever work its
miracles of pathos. These, at least, will remain historic even if the
Resurrection be all dogma. If all the precious worths that have been
made in the course of Christian centuries to depend upon the cruder
statements of the latter as an assumed major premise for innumerable
deductions be a fittle imperilled for a time, psychology has within itself
possibifities hitherto undreamed, of both restatement of the premise
and revalidification of all the values and of thus re-Christianizing
Christianity. While the Jesus of what we may call the Resurrection dispensation
is undergoing reconstruction, the historic Jesus remains as, at least, the
true superman, prophetic of what the members of our race may attain
if it ever come to its fuU maturity, the first fruits not of those that die,
but the first and ideal representation of those who are to five in the
larger and more glorious future that, if evolution is true, awaits it.
If the Resurrection Jesus is made so material and historic as to eclipse
the spiritual Jesus, if he is made so local and temporal as to be a mere
idol of the ever-living and ever-present Emmanuel, there is religious
decadence and not progress. If he whom Paul saw as a vision the
psychologist of the near future shall find to be more a creation than a
mere object of faith, most sacred because the first, highest, and purest
production of the Paraclete in the soul of man; if the risen Jesus was
projected by this supreme muse solely to be, as well as to make, the
pledge of its abiding presence guiding into all truth, then he would be
revealed to our distracted age as the Comforter indeed. For then not
only the growing strain which the parousia put upon the Christian
thought of our day would be wondrously eased and harmony in the
record estabfished, but the work of the Holy Spirit would be worthily
inaugurated in the world as the great spiritualizer of fife, and the Jesus
of the Resurrection as completely and entirely its first fruits would
shine forth with a new light and with infinite promise and potency for
all who strive to attain true sonship with the Father.
This imperfect and sketchy conflation of psychological viewpoints

716 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
at least suggests something above textual or historical criticism and
shows that these cannot be finalities. The latter have clearly shown
that even the authors of our four Gospels, especially the unknown
writer of John, conflated and compiled and reverently sought to ex
plain in the light of all the available sources, traditional and written,
what Jesus meant quite as much if not more than what he literally said
and did. Psychological criticism accepts all the records, somewhat
as geology bases upon aU outcrops, cuts, mines, etc., and evolves from a
compilation of aU data the sequence of strata and the development of
living forms by collating all the fossils with their most cognate fiving
forms. So psychology demands a wider purview than the New Testa
ment and the local and temporal events associated with it, and seeks to
lay the foundations of a larger faith that shaU rest on aU that we know
to-day of the facts and laws of nature and stfil more of the soul of man.
The Passion and Resurrection must to-day be discussed in view of
a vaster background than the Old Testament affords, for they are the
culminating redaction of the central theme of many cults far older than
they, all about the eastern Mediterranean, each of which contributed
its best elements. How the folk-soul came to make this most impos
ing and precious synthesis is at once the most stimulating and lofty
of aU culture problems, and the new vistas that we can already glimpse
give us the vastest and most imposing perspective into the past of
man's psychic evolution. Most superstitions were found in Rome
before Christianity, which, unable to suppress them, purged them of
their grosser features and syncretized them. In several localities in
Italy, and best of aU in Sicily, Easter is still very dramaticaUy cele
brated on the older pattern of Adonis worship. For instance, a wax
effigy of the dead Christ is exposed all through Good Friday in the
middle of a Greek church, and is covered with fervent kisses, while the
church echoes with dirges. At nightfall it is carried, covered with
flowers, in slow, solemn procession through the crowded streets. Every
man carries a taper and wails, while women from every house fumigate
the image with censers. Thus the community celebrates the funeral
of Christ as if he were just dead, and all fast tiU midnight Saturday.
As this hour strikes the bishop appears and announces that Christ has
risen, and the crowd responds, "He is risen indeed." Then the
church and soon the city burst into an uproar of joy with mad shouts
and shrieks. There are volleys of cannon and musketry and fireworks,

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 717
and the erstwhile fasters fill themselves with meat and wine. Thus
Catholicism brings before the susceptible Southern races with aU possi
ble pomp and pageantry the representation of the death and Resurrec
tion of man's redeemer from sin by the very rites once used to redeem
the earth from the death of winter. Both the spade and psycho
analysis of the folk-soul are now unearthing old, submerged symbolic
strata which show us that Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, though dead in
name, still five wherever Christianity lives. This ethnic background
so long faUow stfil fertilizes and enriches our own lives, and enables us
to understand why Christianity spread so rapidly among the gentiles.
We can even correlate these phenomena with the predominance of
suicides in the fall and revivals and procreations in the spring.
Ever since the glacial age the soul of man has been impressed with
the processional of the seasons. In the spring the world is clothed
in green, everything reawakens or grows, food is abundant, and the
spirit of life is resurrected from the death of winter. Conversely in
autumn vegetation dies, the sun recedes, there are cold and ice, the
conditions of life grow hard, and nature seems dying. Primitive man
must have been awed by these cosmic tides and, especially with his
close rapport with nature, must have watched for the ebb of the ther
mal wave. Thus it is not strange that in monuments, myths, myth
ologies, rites, we are rapidly finding everywhere more and more traces
of these changes and of the magic by which man of old sought to con
trol them. Scholarship in this field is exhuming more and more the
vestiges of these cults. Man early felt that this birth and death of
nature were connected with the waxing and waning figures of divine
beings who controlled them, and that their energy might be increased
by dramatic representations of the processes he wished to facilitate.
The universal theme of these dramas was thus death and rebirth, at
first chiefly the latter in the field of vegetation. Control came from
symbolizing it, and vegetation is often presentified as a god who annu
ally died and arose. Of this theme there are endless local variations,
beginning with Adonis, the Asiatic Tammuz, the Old Testament
Adoni, My Lord. Following Frazer, in ancient Babylon he was the
young spouse of Ishtar, the great mother-goddess of reproduction.
Every year he died and went to the sad, dark regions below, where his
divine mistress foUowed him. During her absence love died, repro
duction ceased, and life threatened to go out. Hymns lamented

7i8 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
the departure of the pair, liturgies were chanted to the effigy of the
dead god, which was washed in water, anointed with oil, clothed in
red, fumigated with incense designed to effect his resurrection. Finally
the great god Ea himself sent a messenger to the grim queen of the in
ferno, who at last very reluctantly sprinkled the waters of life upon the
pair, and they were aUowed to return, and then aU nature revived with
springtide energy. In Greece Adonis was a transcendent beauty, be
loved by Aphrodite, who in his infancy gave him to Persephone, queen
of Hades. She, seeing his beauty, refused to give him back. So
Zeus decreed that he should spend half of the year with the one goddess
below and the other half in the upper world. When he was slain
Aphrodite bemoaned him as if anticipating the mater dolorosa. Of this
species of celebration we have many sub- varieties. In Phoenicia these
rites were very solemn and the kings of Biblus assumed the god's
name, as was done in very ancient times in Jerusalem. David himself
showed vestiges of this cult by being held more or less responsible for
drouth, famine, and certain diseases. Earth was the great mother of
plants and animals, to whom first-fruits were offered and sons and
daughters devoted, so that trees, crops, and beasts were aU children of
Baal and Astarte. Once a temple of Adonis stood on Mount Lebanon,
amid one of the most impressive of aU landscapes, where the whole
region has long been haunted by traditions of the mangled body of
Adonis here buried. Here he was worshipped by Assyrian damsels
when the river was incarnadine, and the sea fringed with anemones,
which dyed them with the blood of the god untimely slain. At Cy
press the cult degenerated to sanctified harlotry, once, Frazer says,
thought to be as much a religious duty as is now the nun's vow of vir
ginity. Here the worship was a symbol of fertility, and the variations
of this cult and the anonymity of such unions caused the offspring often
to be called children of God. Sometimes, as at the temple of Epidau-
rus, souls of the dead were reincarnated, while ploughing and sowing
the earth are given the same significance. Widespread was the cere
mony of burning Melcarth, centred in Tyre. In Sophocles' drama,
Hercules burned himself on a vast pyre on the top of Mount GLta;
this was afterward annuaUy repeated with his effigy, and the next day
came the drama of the awakening of Hercules. Still farther back the
kings of Tyre personated Melcarth and were burned in effigy at an an
nual festival, later toned down to a fire-walk. So the Punic general,

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 719
Hamilcar, burned himself in the old heroic way pro bono publico as he
saw his army giving way, for this was the old method of apotheosis.
The burning of the Sicilian Sandan was foUowed by a ceremony of
resurrection. Among the Semites under this or other names Adonis
was often personified by priestly kings, perhaps originally put to death
in their divine capacity, although later there are mitigating stages
and makebelieves. In Alexandria images of Aphrodite and Adonis
celebrated their nuptials on two couches with manifold flowers and
fruits. The next day their death was bemoaned with streaming hair
and bare breasts, and their images were burned by the sea; but they
always returned in another ceremony in the spring. Even when the
Emperor Jufian entered Antioch, this great capital was splendid with
grief for the mimic death of the annual Adonis. With the rise of agri
culture, the Adonis cult centred upon domesticated plants and animals,
but stfil the fear of hunger animated the entire vast cycle of Adonis
worship all the way from the first edible wild fruits to the day of corn,
spirits, and herdsmen. Sometimes the dead were feigned to revive
with life in the spring. At Athens they were commemorated in March
with the earliest flowers, when they were thought to rise from then-
tombs and go about everywhere seeking entrance, for the festivals of
the dead are always those of flowers. Sometimes potted grains and
flowers were fostered in every way to accelerate their growth, to make all
herbs grow by homoeopathic magic, and these were called gardens of
Adonis. Personifiers of this revival were always bathed or washed in
water or blood to ensure against drouth.
So, too, Attis was of virgin birth, lover of Cybele, mother of gods
and goddess of fertility, and his cult was celebrated by eunuch priests
who commemorated his tragic death and resurrection. In 204 b. c,
Cybele and her cult were brought from Phrygia to Rome and solemnly
inaugurated on the Palatine Hill in April. The next year the crops
were abundant, so that henceforth this festival took a very strong hold
upon the Romans. Before the effigy of Attis's corpse the priest shed
some of his own blood with barbaric music and frenzied dances. The
image of Attis was taken from the sacred tree to which it was swathed,
and reverently buried, and there were mourning and fasting. But
suddenly at night a light was struck, the tomb opened, and the god
was found to have arisen. The priest touched the lips of the mourners
with balm and whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation.

720 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
His resurrection was a promise to his disciples that they should rise
from the grave. The next day the resurrection of the god was cele
brated with carnival, license, masquerades. The following day was
for repose, and the next and last was marked by processions of barefoot
nobles to the banks of the Arno, where the image was bathed and the
wounds and blood were forgotten. A bull was butchered on a high
grating, and the devotees with wreathed fillets stood below to be
drenched in the hot blood, and thus sins were washed away. The fic
tion of a new birth, too, was kept up for a time by requiring of the
initiate a diet of milk like a babe. For a long time thus the remission
of sins by the blood of a bull was dramatically represented on the
Vatican HiU, on the very spot where now stands the Basilica of Saint
Peter. Attis was originally a tree spirit, then a corn a'nd grain god,
tied to or burned on a Maypole, which stood for a holy tree. Castra
tion and the burial or burning of various parts were to impregnate the
earth, and the same is true of all kinds of bloodletting in religious ser
vice. Slowly, however, the ceremonies that symbolized fertility of
soil were given another meaning, viz., a new and higher birth of the
soul, so that these ancient cults preformed the way for Christianity.
No Oriental worship at Rome was so popular as that of Attis and Cy
bele, or did so much to undermine the older Greek and Roman cult by
teaching the salvation of the individual soul as the supreme end of fife.
Of course there are many missing links in this reconstruction, but
there are also glimpses of connection with things so diverse as the story
of Marsyas bound to a tree and flayed alive, probably a double of Attis.
So Odin's victims, and once he himself, were hanged on a s'acred tree
and wounded with a spear, as Artemis was hanged in her own sacred
grove. Later the Persian worship of Mithra became immensely popu
lar at Rome, and it resembled Christianity even more, perhaps, than
it did the cult of Attis, so much so that Christian scholars caUed it a
trick of the devfi to seduce people from the true fold by a close imita
tion of it. Its solemn ritual, too, was full of aspiration for moral
purity and eternal life, and it universally fell on Christmastide instead
of Easter. The Church of course accommodated, adapted, adopted,
and this was at once its strength and its weakness.
Osiris was perhaps the most popular of all the deities of ancient
Egypt, and his death and resurrection were annually celebrated with
sorrow succeeded by joy, although this was originally only a dramatiza-

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 721
tion of seedtime and harvest. He was the son of an earth-god and a
sky-goddess. He became king and gave the previously savage and
cannibal Egyptians law and worship. Isis, his wife-sister, introduced
the culture of wheat and barley, and made the people vegetarians,
while Osiris domesticated the vine. Then both went over the world
civilizing everywhere. Osiris's brother proved a usurper, and made a
precious coffin for him; and on their return, when all were merry,
he proposed that each should try it, which they did in turn. When
Osiris lay in it, it fitted exactly, and the usurper slammed down the
lid, soldered it, and flung it into the Nile. Isis wandered far, weeping
and seeking the body, which had floated to Syria, where a tree shot
up that entombed the coffin in its trunk, which a king cut and made a
piUar in his house. Isis foUowed it and mourned by its side; she was
accepted as a nurse in the house, and finally was given the coffin,
took it home, opened it, kissed the body, mourned, and was about to
revive it, but Typhon found it and tore it into fourteen parts, so that
there are fourteen shrines of Osiris to-day in Egypt. Orthodox Egyp
tian tradition says that the grief of this dolorous mother induced the
sun-god Ra to send down Anubis who gathered and swathed the
scattered parts of the body, observed aU the rites over them, and fanned
the clayey remains with wings till at last Osiris revived and returned
as king both of the upper earth and among the dead. He became Lord
of Eternity, ruler of the lower regions, where he judges and rewards aU
so*uls after death according to their merits. The morality of the
Egyptian Book of the Dead is very like that of Jesus, and those who
are acquitted five in a land of indescribable fertility and beauty where
men and animals are young and fair, and there is eternal verdure. In
Osiris's resurrection the Egyptians see a pledge of their own immortal
ity: "As surely as Osiris lives I shaU live." Befief in resurrection
is suggested by the custom of embalming, which was physicaUy very
like that of Osiris. Mourning for him began when the Nile began to
rise. Then the dams were ceremonially cut and the soil became the
bride of the Nile. Seed-sowing was in autumn, and was sad; for
planting, as among primitive people to-day, suggests the burial, and
is often connected with the festival of the dead. Thus representatives
of potentates are often kfiled, dismembered, or burned to increase the
fertility of the soil, so that in Egypt special precautions were taken that
bodies be not cut up and their fragments used as talismans for this

722 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
purpose. Osiris was originaUy a tree spirit, and pfilars solemnly
erected to him were symbols of resurrection. Even from this so bald
sketch we can glimpse the culture atmosphere which pervades so much
of Christianity, and can see that not only in the regions which
Jesus knew but perhaps still more in those which Paul knew and
where the Church first had its development, these cults were de
veloped in both their higher and lowest forms, and their influence was
very pervasive.
Now the above death and resurrection motifs which have had
such polymorphic expression, and the partial impulsions of which are
so effectively syncretized into the story of the cross, express in symbolic
form the most essential philosophy of human life. To understand it
takes us nearest to the noetic core of the supreme problem of the na
ture, meaning, and purpose of human life, and to feel it with correct
orientation gives the right Einstellung to duty and the practical con
duct of fife. It is just here that we are having most helpful genetic
insights which may be roughly indicated somewhat as follows:
First, we must postulate that something happened very early in
man's career to disturb his harmony with nature such as animals still
have, and to make his life more or less anxious, conscious, and uncer
tain. He had to leave paradise and apply himself to the work of
restoration. As himself the apex of evolution and thus the chief
bearer of its highest momentum, he must transcend the animal plane
and forge his way on and up with constant effort and danger both of
error and arrest. On the one hand he had not only aU the animal in
stincts, some of them perverted or hypertrophied, but he also felt the
nisus of development beyond them and a desire for perfecting himself
along with a corresponding horror of inferiority, while the strength and
often the gratification of his baser propensities gave him a now vague
and now acute sense of unworthiness and sin. The impulse to improve
and ascend is, despite aU, the most constant and deepest thing in the
human soul, and out of this has grown every beneficent human insti
tution, family, society, state, culture, and religion. Moral autonomy
has been both the efficient and the final cause of aU these, and to this
end Mansoul has through the ages slowly evolved language, art, science,
gods, demons, mythologies, rites, cults, and even consciousness itself,
by the slow and costly method of trial and error, for aU these are at
bottom pragmatic.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 723
In such a being every step of advance involves some sacrifice of
a lower to a higher good. As birth itself brings harder conditions, so
every stage of growth means renunciation of more infantile conditions.
As the child is weaned, gets out of the nursery, and then the home,
parental influences wane, and the time comes when he must leave all
this and set up for himself. So, too, he must constantly sacrifice not
only childish wishes but allurements to linger on lower stages of develop
ment and to indulge propensities which should be sublimated. Ad
vancement is hard, but both sin and psychic disorders or arrest ensue
if advance is not constantly made, for there are countless forms of
arrest, which is impossible without regression. All this is on the anal
ogy of rudimentary organs and functions which must be developed in
their nascent period only to be reduced or made over into higher organs
and functions later. Thus biologicaUy, psychogeneticaUy , and morally,
men can only "rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves," and
growth is always moulting the tissues and processes that illustrate
this metamorphosis. One of the prime traits of savage life is that it is
pervaded in every department by taboos or " Thou shalt nots." These
prohibitions abound concerning food, sex, rulers, aU relations of co-
members of the tribe to one another, war, industry, etc., and they
altogether show not only the manifold restraints but the tremendous
energy with which man enforces them upon himself. Thus human life
has always tended to hedge itself in by restrictions upon its freedom,
which instead of facilitating have often hindered its further normal
development because there were so many things in themselves proper
and perhaps needful that were not permitted or were disallowed; for
customs, stronger and before law, are always enforcing every such
licet aut non licet. Psychoanalysis holds against Wundt that these rude
and often disastrously perverted impulses preceded the development of
deities or demons that could reward or punish, and that such beings
were only projections into the objective sphere of agencies that were
primarily subjective to enforce man's primal sense of what he ought or
ought not to do. From the very first man felt that he should not
murder, commit incest, injure the dead, chiefs, priests, or medicine
men, etc., all of which are hedged in by countless taboos; and so slowly
and unconsciously his creative soul evolved supernal agencies to en
force these prohibitions, and this man did because he had first of aU
developed an abhorrence of violating the unwritten codex or taboo

724 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
that originaUy worked automatically and executed itself. Thus rever
ence and aversion combined to restrict very many natural inclinations.
But all the conflicts that thus arose were at first endopsychic, and they
were given external embodiments for the sake of better Einstellung and
because of the persistent habit of extradition of consciousness which
man owes to the functioning of his senses. In neurotics every phase
of these conflicts can be seen writ large. Thus there is a striking simi
larity in their fundamental operations between primitive men, most
forms of mental alienation, children, etc., and about every mechanism
found in the one is also operative in the others.
Now, whenever a strong taboo is violated, the primitive sense of
guilt arises and the need of atonement is felt, so that sacrifice and
offering must be made or penance done to make good the wrong act,
thought, or even inclination. It is hard for us to realize the intensity
of this experience in the early history of mankind, which so pervaded
and dominated all his activities, his myths, rites, and primitive culture
generally, aU of which we are just now beginning to see were full of it.
Indeed, this interpretation of the pristine sense of guilt affords us a
new key to explain most of the fundamental elements of antique culture
as weU as many of the chief forms of modern psychosis. The savage
warrior does penance to the ghosts of those he has slain, undergoes long
and painful ceremonies of purification for the violation of countless
and often absurd prescriptions, mutilates his body, offers his fruits,
treasures, kine, and even human beings, to appease the higher powers
whom he thinks he has offended. Holocausts are offered, or the peni
tent denies himself food, renounces the vita sexualis, makes over his
possessions, abandons his fondest inclinations, all in order to escape a
bad conscience and the intolerable anxiety it causes. Ancient legends
and superstitions abound in depictions, often in very symbolic language,
of this sense that the right way has been lost and of the desire to find it
that the soul may rest again. Christianity has so tended to weaken
this old dread of sin and its penalty that even those who have not
adopted it in the technical sense that the Church demands filustrate
how the long and bitter struggle to be justified by the supreme powers
has so lapsed that it is hard for us to believe or realize its pristine in
tensity. We might even roughly say that the atoning work of Jesus
has been so effective or so deeply brought home to the world during aU
these centuries since his death that under its influence men have even

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 725
lost sight of the pathetic state of mind of their forbears from which it
has rescued them.
All dragons, serpents, vampires, and other monsters slain by
heroes, and also aU flagellations and self-mutilations by frenzied
priests are at root symbolic expressions of the effort of man or of the
gods he has made in his own image as his totemic Doppelgdnger to
sacrifice their lower animal nature or their infantile personafity in the
interests of their higher development, which must be done unless, as in
dementia praecox, there is regression to the old subjectivity. But what
is offered up always comes back in higher form, and this is resurrection.
Gross love, if repressed, returns in the form of love and service of God
and man. Coarse appetite for food, if restrained, revives in spiritual
or mental hunger. Each lower impulse has a higher psychokinetic
equivalent, the development of which is the inner meaning and moral
of every planting or seed burial, and subsequent sprouting, which
despite its first economic meaning which began with the very domesti
cation of plants, soon came to be pressed into the higher service of
expressing man's need of mortifying his crude lower desires that they
may spring up and bear fruits in due season in the loftier psychic realm.
Every expropriation of possession to the gods or their priests, every
lustration or ceremonial washing, every libation of wine or of blood and
flesh-burning upon altars, every offering of doves, lambs, bulls, or
human victims, is in order that man may square himself or set himself
right with the higher powers which are always and everywhere projec
tions of his own conscience. Many of even his worst phobias are ex
pressions of conscience-made cowardice. From the old Akkadian
dread of the awful Maskim, the Semitic conscience slowly evolved all
the rituals of purgation to propitiate conscience and expiate sin. The
mysterium Mythraicum centred upon the same theme and approached
nearest to the Christian sacraments. The Dionysian and Orphic cults
and the Eleusinian mysteries were those of the death of the lower and
birth into the higher fife. The dying of vegetation in the faU and its
revival in the spring, and even the daily setting and rising of the sun
were also pressed into service as symbols of redemption from sin.
AU are paradigms of renunciation of a lower for the attainment of a
higher end. The purpose of the old chthonian rituals (the dacia, antis-
theria, and the thargelia) was apotropic or to effect riddance, exorcism,
or avoidance of evil. The novitiate who had once carried the sacred

726 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
liknon cried out, "Death is life, life is death," or, "Bad have I fled,
better have I found." Where Buddhistic elements enter man con
ceives himself as evolving by his own merits in choosing the good and
avoiding the bad through aU the orders of transmigration from the lowest
to the highest. Even inebriation is often a symbol of spiritual ecstasy
due to the sense of having transcended the range of lower temptations.
Jesus' stupendous problem was to rid man of this awful obsession
of sin, and to devise and make effective a practical psychotherapy of
release and salvation. First of aU there must be a new orientation as
to what was reaUy right and wrong, and this he could give only by a
teaching which showed duties in their true perspective, gave a correct
table of values, and replaced formal by real moral distinctions. But
in addition to this there must be a removal of the sense of long-accumu
lated hereditary guilt and apprehensiveness. How could the paU of
depressive gloom be removed so that man could feel justified and freed
from the enmity of the higher powers? It was just there that Jesus,
on the basis of the widespread atonement ideas and cults, found the
way that it is the glory of Christianity to have opened. He would
personate aU the victims ever offered to propitiate the gods; would be
the totemic embodiment of aU the first-fruits, gifts, animals, captives
or kings, real or fictive, ever slain for remission; would take upon
himself aU the wounds, stuprations, and tortures of body or soul ever
inflicted upon men by themselves or others, in order to placate wrath
or even the scales of justice. He would be not a reluctant but a glad
and voluntary victim, surrendering, as few of even human victims had
done, the very will to live itself, choosing freely the most painful and
disgraceful death, renouncing even the hope of a future fife, and feeling
forsaken and accursed of God and man, in a word, dying a death more
pathetic than any had ever died before, dooming himself, if need be, to
utter extinction or to eternal torment as heaven wiUed, by an act of
supreme self-immolation. Moreover, his perfect innocence and abound
ing virtue made this supreme sacrifice still more complete and ideaUy
perfect. Thus he underwent every possible punishment and suffered
every penalty at once, as if he were the incarnation of every possible
vice, crime, or sin. The best suffered the worst in the acme of injustice.
All the accumulated wrath of the higher powers was concentrated and
vented upon the paragon of human virtue and perfection. Only by
the conception and the objective and dramatic representation of a

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 727'
perfect and also a totemic paragon of humanity, invested with the
supreme aura of divinity, honoris causa, brought from the heights of
heaven to the depths of heU, could man be made to feel that the accu
mulated wrath augmented by sin ever since the fall was at last com
pletely discharged, and that the higher powers could henceforth be
conceived as innocuous and man as immune from the curse of guilt un
der which he had cowered. The long tragedy that began in the council
of heaven when the Son determined to go down to earth to take on the
form of man, and which culminated at Golgotha and in the tomb,
showed in the most appaUing way, once and for all, what God thought
and felt about sin, because he both required such a victim and had so
completely accepted and overwhelmed it. The age-long complex of
guilt and fear was here fuUy brought up into consciousness, and by
being objectified was thereby made evictable, so that the cure of the
obsession was brought within man's reach. The sense of sin and
atonement are like all-pervasive chemical elements which because of
their intense affinities are hard to isolate, but which are here for a mo
ment seen in their free, pure, nascent state, as moral elements that
pervade all human experience.
What now remains for man to do is to realize that the whole proc
ess is endopsychic; that it is at root an autosoteriological process;
that the great tragedy is not an outer spectacle, but a symbolization of
an inner process of self -katharsis which Mansoul has achieved; that
pity for Jesus' agonies is reaUy self-pity; and that "the suffering ser
vant" of Yahveh is in very fact and truth man himself, whose release is
reaUy achieved only when he repeats the act of self -purgation in himself.
Only because of man's persistent ejective habit of thought is it hard to
realize that it is aU only a projection into the field of history of an internal
process, and that the precious symbols of ransom and vicarious atone
ment are necessary, and that man has been so persistently prone to think
himself saved from without by the imputation of an alien righteousness.
Again, the psychology of anger shows that when it has flamed forth
with abandon, and especially toward an innocent and lovable being, it
is followed by an ambivalent wave of pity and perhaps love. The
tragedy of Calvary makes man impute the same process to the soul of
God, so that a new dispensation of benignity succeeds that of wrath
and punishment, as if the mind of the divine being had been converted
to a new attitude toward man. This means that sympathetic par-

728 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
ticipation in the story of the cross brings a new attitude of man toward
himself. He has evicted the old dread, and in so doing his own soul
is resurrected. The real Resurrection thus is not an achievement of
Jesus. But what man has done for his ideal self, symbolized ob
jectively by the Resurrection, he has ascribed to Jesus, now inwardly
seen to be his own alter ego and the ideal renouncer of all regressive
tendencies. Eucharistic bread and wine, the baptism, aU survivals of
the old and world-wide blood covenants and haoma cults, and aU the
copious imagery of Paul and of the Fourth Gospel touching incorpora
tion and identification with Jesus, are precious rituals, symbols, and
types of the psychologic fact that Jesus is in very truth the incarnation
of man's better self, purified of sin, and that Jesus' Resurrection is not
a fait accompli but a perennial duty of all believers. AU these rites
thus are so many invocations to resubjectify the processes of salvation.1
AU that is of value in human life strikes its roots deep into our
instinctive nature, and what rises highest has the deepest and oldest
roots. This shows the need of constant transformation of aU that
is best in us into ever-higher and more sublimated forms. There must
be incessant new adjustments and finer adaptations. Sin is failure to
hold to new insights and ideas, and this causes uncertainty and failure
of the power to put them to work. Failure to make these most-needed
readjustments brings a sense of anxiety closely allied to guilt, into which
it easily passes over, and misfortune often arouses or deepens a sense
of guilt. In this tense state the soul sometimes yields to and carries
out some base impulsion, and this arouses into action the next higher
power that controls the impulse, so that such lapses may issue in the
renunciation of the base tendency. This is, however, a dangerous
way of making sin abound that grace may the more abound, and we
think of the great sinners who have been saved by a great salvation.
In the struggle to be released from the body of death, the soul for whom
these processes are objectified projects into God his own wish to punish,
and expects him to avenge what he would, but cannot. It is just the
sins we are inclined to that we are most anxious for him to punish. The
vindictive God thus expresses man's sometimes almost Sadistic rage
against his own faults. In his reprobation of sin we mirror our own
abhorrence of it. Thus we are both punisher and victim. Again, we
'See J. C. Goeti
man Schultze: "Zur
Ullmann's "The Sinlessness
pharmazeutischer Vorzeit." 1886.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 729
may wreak vengeance upon innocent objects by transfer, when we are
really wroth only at ourselves. Thus the guilty conscience makes
scapegoats or vicariates for its own fll deserts. AU offerings to the
gods are not only self-penalizations, because they involve sacrifice of
personal or communal goods, which are expropriated, but we feel and
express our resentment in the obloquy and cruelty we mete out to the
proxy of our sins. Thus Mansoul is bifrontic. Man punishes himself,
and Paul was logical in inferring that if, as the whole Hebrew scheme of
sacrifice implied, guilt and punishment could be transferred, merit
could also be transferred. So, too, the sinlessness of Jesus meant that
man felt that there was a bottom core of goodness in his own nature
beneath aU the guilt, and that when all its guilt and sin had been purged
away and atoned, this would shine forth as if resurrected from the dead.
Thus Paul's theory of vicariousness was after all a concession to the
hardness of men's hearts and the blindness of their minds, because
Jesus is at bottom not a substitute. He is in very deed ipsissimal man
himself, and aU that happened or was done for the one was also done
for the other. Thus Jesus' fate was only an aUegory of what reaUy
transpires in every soul that becomes regenerate and finds again the
lost trail. The sarcous man dies, and the pneumatic man arises in his
place, reformed, reoriented, and reconstellated.
For long evolutionary ages, probably since the troglodytes, the
chief fact in the psychic history of man was his uncertainty and fear
concerning his own place in the universe. Long and hard had been
his struggle for survival with the formidable animal forms that would
not recognize him as lord of creation. Nature visited him also with
storm, flood, drouth, famine, disease; the fruits of the earth were un
certain; enemies lurked about; and instead of being in a lawful cosmos
his ignorance made his world full of mysterious and capricious forces
which were really of his own creation, so that his mind was saturated
with superstitious dreads. He must be incessantly circumspect, and
every calamity that befeU him, even death, was due to his own fault,
and very likely was the retributive act of invisible personalities. Per
haps he felt that his predecessors had offended; but certainly he felt
that he had, and that he was constantly liable to offend the powers that
shaped his fate. We probably have in the analyses of neuroses with
compulsive ideas a very good survival of this old savage conception of
sin and its dangers, and ways to avoid it. Now nothing is so provoca-

730 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
tive of projection as this sense of guilt. Evfi must be extradited, and
so, as Wundt shows, bad demons were projected before the benign gods,
and it needed but little secondary working over of these outward
expressions of this conflict in his own soul to develop and establish
the conception of a dual world ruled by two groups of powers, one
friendly and the other hostile. When this was done the unconscious
processes in man's soul became more accessible, and instead of impera
tive psychoses there were commands or prohibitions from without to
check, and some to facilitate, the expression of man's impulses. Sym
bols and dreams although these powers were, they were very efficient
for control. That man did not, however, entirely resign the con
trol of himself to his gods is seen by the belief in the omnipotence of
his own thought or wish, traces of which we can still see in infancy,
but which have their chief filustration in magic, by which man directs
the action of gods. If he had forgotten that the supernal powers were
made, warp and woof, out of his own soul-stuff, and had never begun
to realize how solipsistic he had been, and never consciously said "AU
this transcendental universe, it is I," he nevertheless drew the prag
matic moral of this fact in the befief that by manifold and fit spells,
incantations, and later by rites, ceremonies, and prayers, he could con
strain the high powers.
Very slowly, particularly in the Hebrew consciousness and in the
patriarchal age, the concepts of good as over against bad powers had
been fused together in one unitary, monotheistic idea, fashioned on the
pattern of the father and headsman of the pastoral tribe, who was both
loved and dreaded with the same feelings which psychoanalysis shows
younger children stfil have toward their father. AU sin was against
the God-father, and when the flesh-and-blood head of the clan died or
was slain (his slaughter being perhaps the primal sin in the world),
whatever of this God-idea remained was attached to the father surro
gate, totemism began, and religion began to consist in identification
with the totem by blood covenants, by commensal eating, and in
sublimation by fire, in burnt offerings and incense, with increasing
refinement as the God-idea grew and withdrew.1
'To which we might apply the language of Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest;
"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade.
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich, and strange."

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 731
Thus, when Jesus, the perfect totemic man, offered himself up
voluntarily as a sacrifice and was accepted and aUowed to die as a
victim, the old kingdom of law became bankrupt. It had utterly and
hopelessly failed. The Yahveh of the priests and Levites was dead.
Like the Titans, he had devoured his own offspring, and the tragedy
of Golgotha was his funeral. He was slain by the rigorous execution
of his own law. He had long been an obsession from which man was
now at last released. Jesus' death had also been the death of the
Ur-Father. He would no longer exact to the uttermost farthing of the
letter or take his pound of flesh. His whole disposition had suffered a
reductio ad absurdum,1 and there was no further raison d'etre for him,
although we see only the ambivalent side of Jesus' reverence and filial
devotion to him, for this apparently was all that came into Jesus' own
consciousness. It was this tendency to cover up the slaughter of the
old God which was seized upon and greatly exaggerated, especially by
Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel, who could never conceive
Jesus as a noble parricide who with super-Promethean defiance had
challenged and slain the Deity of the temple and the law. As Theseus
slew the Minotaur, Siegfried and Saint George the dragon, so Jesus
had overcome the antiquated and cruel guardian and executor of the
law, and thereby released man from his age-long sense of accumulated
guilt and the haunting dread of unworthiness that it had become the
chief function of Yahveh as well as of aU his psychogenetic predecessors
in other races, back to the first malign demons, to inculcate. It was a
supreme act of genius to detect his vulnerable point, of strategy to
find how to reach it, and of devotion to inflict the coup de grdce.
Originally a combination, as we saw, of the good and bad powers that
ruled human life into a unipersonal form, Yahveh thus had degenerated
from his golden age into a predominantly malign being, fully ripe for
execution. Jesus' method of accomplishing this result by drawing aU
the venom out of Yahveh upon his own innocent self, so that both died
together, was perhaps the supreme achievement of the human soul,
so that Jesus' Resurrection and exaltation to Supreme Deity after
ward is a monument that humanity had to rear to this great act
of deliverance. Thus the concurrent Einfuhlung, which is in

>F. Riklin: "Bstraehtung nir krltlschen Passionsgeschichte," in "Wissen und Leben," Zurich, rgi3. C G. Jong:
"The Psychology of the Unconscious," ipifi, 566 pp. J. E. Harrison: "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion?*
1003 680 pp, J. G. Frazer: "The Golden Bough," London, 1907-13, 12 vol. S. Freud: "Totem una Tabu," I9t3, t49 pp.
Wm.' Ramsay Smith: "Lectures on the Religion of the Semites," New York, 1889, 488 pp.

732 JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY
fact the supreme test of the real actual existence of any person,
vouches even more strongly for the factuality of the risen Jesus
than it does for the Jesus of Galfiee and Gethsemane, and all
the admirable and scholarly argumentation of men like Lake,
that bases belief in the risen Jesus upon the evidence of the empty
tomb, must tend to divert us from the chief psychodynamic evidence
on which we must mainly depend for the affirmation of that with
out which "our faith is vain." Indeed, at this distance and hence
forth increasingly and forever, the chief basis of our belief in the
superhistorical reality of Jesus is that the folk-soul being what it is, he
had to rise.
On the one hand, although Yahveh had degenerated far toward
ethical dotage, as compared with the conceptions of him held in the
classic age of prophecy, and had become vindictive and petty, with
much of the ceremonial punctilio of senescence, it could never be for
gotten that although he was ripe for death, because there was more
harm than good left in him, he was still, although defunct, the Lord of
the old covenant and of precious memories. Hence, as if dimly realiz
ing the patricidal attitude and act to which fate had destined him with
respect to the God of the Jewish orthodoxy of his day, Jesus had no
disposition to degrade Yahveh to the position of an ex-God or to
diabofize him, for Jesus was no usurping aspirer for Godhood by dis
placing a predecessor, as all new gods had done before. But by the
laws of ambivalence and compensation the better elements of Yahveh's
nature were not only conserved but, now that he was gone, given a
loftier and far more attractive interpretation than ever before. Thus,
along with the accession of Jesus to plenary Deity, not only had the
better side of the God-father idea been conserved but Yahveh might
in a sense be said to have been converted to a new benignity. He
was again humanized, refined, and exalted. Thus God and man were
each atoned, and the God-idea as well as Jesus was resurrected from
the dead in transfigured form. This was the great reconciliation.
Thus the inmost soul of the race was revealed and spoke as never
before or since. The last dreary and ominous word of the Old Testa
ment with which the old dispensation closed was a threat which Mal-
achi puts into Yahveh's mouth "to come and smite the earth with
a curse." But this empire of fear was over, and God in Christ had
reconciled man to himself in the new liberty of the sons of God. To aU

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS 733
who wfil love and serve God and God in man, the old era, therefore,
of dread, and the incessant and interminable sacrifice which began,
perhaps, with the very first and lowest man and was world-wide, was
over. Thus in raising Jesus from the dead Mansoul raised both God
and itself, and entered a new world as a new creature.

THE END

THE COtTNTBT LIFE PBESS
GARDEN CITT, N. T.