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SAMUEL R. BETTS

1930

JESUS CHRIST AND THE
CHRISTIAN CHARACTER

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JESUS CHRIST AND THE
CHRISTIAN CHARACTER

AN EXAMINATION OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS IN
ITS RELATION TO SOME OF THE MORAL
PROBLEMS OF PERSONAL LIFE

BY

FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY
PLUMMER PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN MORALS
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES
AT YALE UNIVERSITY
1904.

Neto got*
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
I9°5
All rights reserved

v-°l ,

Copyright, 1905,
Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1905.

V

NortoaoB jprces
J. 8. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

MY DARLING BOY, SO EARLY SNATCHED AWAY
FROM ARMS STILL SEEKING THEE IN EMPTY AIR,
THAT THOU SHOULDST COME TO ME I DO NOT PRAY,
LEST, BY THY COMING, HEAVEN SHOULD BE LESS FAIR.
STAY, RATHER, IN PERENNIAL FLOWER OF YOUTH,
SUCH AS THE MASTER, LOOKING ON, MUST LOVE;
AND SEND TO ME THE SPIRIT OF THE TRUTH,
TO TEACH ME OF THE WISDOM FROM ABOVE.
BECKON TO GUIDE MY THOUGHTS, AS STUMBLINGLY
THEY SEEK THE KINGDOM OF THE UNDEFILED;
AND MEET ME AT ITS GATEWAY WITH THY KEY, —
THE UNSTAINED SPIRIT OF A LITTLE CHILD.

CONTENTS CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Modern World and the Christian Character . i
CHAPTER II
The Character of Jesus Christ  39
CHAPTER III
The Roots of the Christian Character . . . .71
CHAPTER IV
The Growth of the Christian Character . . .112
CHAPTER V
The Personal Consequences of the Christian Char
acter  154
CHAPTER VI
The Social Consequences of the Christian Character 196
CHAPTER VII
The Ascent of Ethics  234
CHAPTER VIII
The Descent of Faith  265
vii

iESUS CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN
CHARACTER

CHAPTER I
THE MODERN WORLD AND THE CHRISTIAN
CHARACTER
In another volume1 the teaching of Jesus has
been considered in its relation to some of the
problems of modern social life. It is an inquiry
which, in one form or another, forces itself upon
every mind which has, on the one hand, any rev
erence for the teaching of Jesus, and, on the other,
any understanding of the present age. This is the
age of the Social Question. Never before were
so many people concerned with problems of social
amelioration and programmes of social transfor
mation ; never before were social solutions so
freely proposed or social panaceas so confidently
prescribed. Social institutions which for centuries
have been assumed to be rooted in human nature
or ordained of God are frankly discussed as social
expedients or experiments, to be reformed, trans
formed, or abolished. Is the institution of the
family to survive the present movement toward
1 " Jesus Christ and the Social Question," Macmillan, 1900.

2 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
disruption ? Is the institution of private property
to be maintained among the economic changes of
the future ? Is the new social order to arrive by
peaceful processes of evolution, or must the pain
and travail of social revolution attend the birth
of a better world ? — such are the questions which
confront all thoughtful persons who observe the
signs of the times.
A similar change in the centre of gravity is
to be observed within the Christian Church.
Where the mind of the Church was once absorbed
by questions of doctrine, it is now devoted to
questions of practice ; and instead of a sur
vival of controversies concerning God, there is a
revival of devotion to the service of man. Chris
tian convocations which were once preoccupied
with definitions of orthodoxy and refutations of
heresy are now discussing the relation of the
Church to the family, the duty of the Church to
the hand-workers, the application of the Church
to philanthropy, the missionary opportunity of the
Church. A distinguished preacher of the last
generation, being asked whether Christianity was
outgrown, answered that, on the contrary, it had
never been tried. The present age is making this
trial of Christianity. The mighty wind of the
Social Question has swept through the Church, as
through the world, with cleansing and refreshing
force, and has swept away the barriers which once
divided worship from work, the single life from
the social order, the love of God from the love of

THE MODERN WORLD 3
man, the salvation of the soul from the salvation of
the world. It is the age of the Social Question.1
At such a time one is inevitably led to examine
afresh the teaching of Jesus, and to consider the
applicability of that teaching to modern social Ufe.
Has a teacher so remote from the circumstances of
the modern world any message to give which that
world should hear ? Is there in the Gospels, be
sides their personal and religious inspiration, a
social teaching which is still timely and significant ?
Many a modern mind which had almost abandoned
interest in the Christian religion is drawn back to
it by such questions as these. The theology of
Christianity has lost its grasp on great numbers of
such lives ; the ecclesiastical claims of the various
sects have become simply uninteresting ; the piety
of the Christian mystic has retreated before the
demands of the busy world ; but the world itself,
with its unredeemed masses, its unsolved problems,
its cry for help, is of unprecedented and dramatic
concern ; and those who stand, as it were, on the
shore of the present age and watch the social life
of the time, drifting like a rudderless vessel with
out course or helmsman, turn with a pathetic eager-
1 So, Kidd, "Social Evolution," 1894, pp. 13, 14: "We are
beginning to hear from many quarters that the social question is
at bottom a religious question, and that to its solution it behoves
the Churches in the interests of society to address themselves. . . .
We have the note sounded in various keys, that, after all, Chris
tianity was intended to save not only men but man, and that its
mission should be to teach us not only how to die as individuals
but how to live as members of society."

4 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ness to Jesus Christ, as to a pilot who is at home
in this uncharted and perilous sea.
When one turns with this new problem to the
Gospels, he discovers with fresh surprise the ex
traordinary richness and variety of the teaching
of Jesus. Each period in history goes with its
question to the simple record, and finds an an
swer which seems written to meet the special
problem of the time. In an age of theology the
Gospels were a source of theological doctrine ; in
an age of ecclesiasticism they fortified the Church ;
in an age of emotionalism they kindled the flame
of piety. The same adaptability is now discovered
once more by the age of the Social Question. As
others have found in the teaching of Jesus the key
of doctrine or organization or religious experience,
so there is now delivered by the same teaching to
the mind of the present age a key of the Social
Question. Remote from the condition of the
modern world as was the life of Jesus, and pri
marily directed as was his teaching, not to social
but to spiritual ends, he has much to say of social
duty. His ethics are not individualist, atomic, a
doctrine of the single soul ; but organic, social, a
doctrine of the common life.
This characteristic gives, indeed, to the whole
Bible its freshness, contemporaneousness, and
applicability. The Bible is not only a book of
life, but a book of life in common. "The
Bible," said John Wesley, "knows nothing of a
solitary religion." The stream of the Bible story

THE MODERN WORLD 5
flows not only through quiet places of personal
experience, but also through a world of social
relationships, as a great river runs through chang
ing scenes of town and country, society and
solitude, light and shade. One who embarks on
its current finds himself floating down through
political changes, national problems, social reforms,
the sins and repentances of Israel, the needs and
hopes of the Gentile world, until at last this social
teaching issues into the broad, calm current of the
message of Jesus Christ. It was not an accident,
therefore, that when Jesus announced the purpose
of his mission, he defined it in the language of the
ancient but still effective Law;1 still less was it
an accident that this law was social as well as
religious, the love of one's neighbor as well as the
love of God ; least of all was it an accident that
Jesus said of these two laws, one religious, and one
social, that the second was like the first. The so
cial teaching of Jesus was the corollary from his
religious faith. The love of God involved the love
of one's neighbor as one's self.
In one of the most striking of his parables
Jesus commits himself unreservedly to this social
mission. Standing among the grain fields of
Palestine, which had often seemed to him the
symbol of his work, he speaks not only of the
grain, the soil, and the sower, but of the scope
and horizon of his hope. The field, he says,
is not restricted, fenced in, local, national; the
1 Deut vi. 5; and Lev. xix. 18.

6 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
field is the world.1 His message is not personal
only, as in the parable of the soil and the seed,
but comprehensive, expansive, universal. Beyond
the Palestinian valleys, beyond the mountains that
shut in the North, and the strip of sea touched
with the Western light, stretched the field of his
social dream. " Neither pray I for these alone,"
says the fourth Gospel in the same spirit, "but
for them also which shall believe on me through
their word. For their sakes I sanctify myself."2 It
was the comprehensive, generous dream of a conse
crated society. The field is the world.3
It may be not unreasonably urged that, in this
transfer of interest, there is grave danger of mis
interpreting the teaching of Jesus. He was, we
are reminded, not a social agitator, but a religious
teacher ; not a reformer, but a Revealer ; not pri
marily concerned with social conditions, but with the
life of God in the soul of man. His social ideal was
not of an industrial order, but of a Kingdom of
God. Whatever his social teaching may have been,
it was but a by-product of his religious mission.
All this is obviously true; and no misinterpreta
tion of the Gospels is more superficial than that
which describes the work of Jesus as essentially that
of a labor leader, an anarchist, or a social revolu
tionist.4 It must be remembered, however, that a
1 Matt. xiii. 38. 2 John xvii. 19, 20.
8 Compare also Homiletic Review, May, 1904, pp. 330 ff. F. G.
Peabody, " The Social Teaching of Jesus Christ."
4 Renan, " Marc-Aurele," 1882, p. 598: " Le christianisme

THE MODERN WORLD 7
by-product, though in itself subordinate, may have
peculiar adaptability to certain conditions and
needs; and even though the social teaching of
Jesus be not his supreme concern, it may be an
aspect of his message which for the moment claims
attention. There are many paths which lead to
the understanding of Jesus; but the path of his
social teaching is, for the present age, the path
which is most open. Here is where the thought
of the time happens to be. The foreground of
human interest is for the present occupied by
social problems, and the way to any contemporary
interpretation of the Christian religion is not to
be found by going round the Social Question, but
by going through it. It is, therefore, quite super
fluous to consider whether there may not be other
ways which might lead more directly to the truth
of the Gospels. What must be frankly recog
nized is the fact that a new way of approach is
fut, avant tout, une immense revolution economique." "Vie
de Jesus," 13th edition, 1867, p. 133: "Une immense revo
lution sociale, ou les rangs seront intervertis, . . . voila son r§ve."
So, Nitti, " Catholic Socialism," 1895, PP- 5^ & : " Poverty was an
indispensable condition for gaining admission to the kingdom of
heaven." Rade, " Die sittlich-religiose Gedankenwelt unsrer In-
dustrie-Arbeiter," 9th Evang. Soz. Kongress, 1898, ss. 103 ff. -.
" Christ was a revolutionist, like thousands now living." " A true
friend of working people, not with lips alone, like his followers,
but with deeds." " He was persecuted as the Social Democrats
are persecuted now." " To-day he would have been the greatest
of socialists." Compare H. Kohler, " Sozialistische Irrlehren von
der Entstehung des Christentums," 1899, ss. 9-16; and F. G. Pea-
body, "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," p. 26, note; p. 65.

8 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
prescribed by the conditions of the time. Other
paths open before the thought of other generations ;
but straight before the age of the Social Question
lies the social teaching of Jesus Christ. The
modern mind must start from the point where it is,
and must proceed by its own path to its own form
of Christian loyalty and service.
When, however, one frankly commits himself to
this recognition of social redemption as the im
mediate problem, both of the world and of the
Church, a further question presents itself to which
the age of the Social Question is now called to
reply. Though it be true, as the title of a book,
which is itself a sign of the times, affirms, that
the world is the subject of redemption,1 it is still
left to inquire what shall be the means of that re
demption, and what instrument of social service
can be permanently effective. Here is a question
which must be answered before a campaign of
social service can be wisely undertaken. It is in
vain to enter upon a modern war until one is
equipped with modern weapons. It is impossible
to redeem the world without a well-considered
plan of redemption. What, then, is the weapon of
social amelioration which must be antecedently
provided before the age of the Social Question
can fulfil its task ?
No sooner does one ask this question than he
is confronted by two theories of social progress,
1 Fremantle, " The World as the Subject of Redemption,"
2d edition, 1895.

THE MODERN WORLD 9
which are often regarded as irreconcilable com
petitors. Social amelioration may be sought, on
the one hand, through external, mechanical, and
economic change ; or, on the other hand, through
spiritual, ethical, personal renewal. It is the
perennial issue between environment and person
ality, the world and the individual. Does the
world make the person, or does the person make
his world ? Is personality the product of circum
stances or are circumstances the instrument of
personality? Is the secret of social progress to
be found in better social conditions, or are such
conditions unredemptive unless met by better
men ?
The first answer now offered to this question
is the answer of externalism. The Social Ques
tion has been interpreted as a consequence of
external maladjustments, and relief has been sought
by revolutionizing the conditions which are de
humanizing and unjust. How can people, it is
asked, become better in character, if they are not
better fed and housed and clad ? How can the soul
be saved if the body is starved ? The Social Ques
tion, it is urged, is a " Stomach Question." " Man
ist was er isst." Conditions create character.
Change the conditions of industrial life, establish a
living wage, supplant the rule of the capitalist by
the rule of the hand-worker, create circumstances
fit for a human life, and the better human life will
spring out of the better soil.
This answer of externalism was soon fortified

IO JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
by the philosophy of socialism. The spiritual
condition of any civilization, it was taught, is
the corollary of its economic system. Given the
industrial order of a land or time, and one may
prophesy what shall be its ethics or art or
domestic life or religion. Character is the product
of circumstances. Social revolution must precede
ethical progress. " Religion is a mirror in which
is reflected the prevailing social condition. As
society develops religion is transformed. . . .
Both religious and moral conceptions spring from
the contemporary circumstances of human life." ]
"The bourgeois moralist . . . holds fast to the
old fallacious standpoint, according to which in
dividual good men make healthy social condi
tions, rather than acknowledge the truth that it is
healthy social conditions which make good men." 2
Abolish, therefore, the institution of private prop
erty, transform the machinery of society, emanci
pate women from domestic bondage ; and from
the new circumstances thus created will emerge
new moral capacity, as surely as the moral degra
dation and social discontent of the present time
have been the consequences of the competitive
system.3 1 Bebel, "Die Frau und der Sozialismus," 1891, ss. 314, 315.
' Bax, " The Religion of Socialism," 1 886, p. x : " Socialism breaks
through these shams in protesting that no amount of determination
on the part of the individual to regenerate himself . . . will of
itself affect in aught the welfare of Society."
8 Marx, "Zur Kritik der polit. Oekonomie," 1859, Vorwort,
s. xi : " The form of material production is the general cause of

THE MODERN WORLD II
There is unquestionably much in the modern
world which appears to justify this application to
society of the philosophy of materialism. Many
conditions of modern life are almost prohibitive of
morality. Precepts of chastity are mocking words
to dwellers in one-room tenements; exhortations
to patience find few listeners when children are
hungry and work is slack. Many processes of
modern industry convert the worker into a de
humanized fragment of the machine at which he
works. The moralization of industry is an essen
tial part of the Social Question. It does not, how
ever, follow from these solemn facts that the only
key of social progress must be found in external
changes, or that favoring conditions are sure to
make good men. On the contrary, most great
transitions in social welfare have occurred, not
through mechanical, external, or economic changes,
social, political, and spiritual processes. It is not consciousness
which determines conditions, but, on the contrary, social condi
tions which determine consciousness." Compare Bernstein, " Die
Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus," 1899, s. 5; and Masaryk, "Die
phil. und sociol. Grundlagen des Marxismus," 1899, s. 93. So also
J. A. Hobson, "The Social Problem," 1901, p. 140 : "To preach
that each individual can, by his own private conduct, contribute to
the solution of a social problem is a barren gospel." C. H. Kerr,
"The Central Thing in Socialism," p. I : "Tell me fttrw you get what
you eat and I will tell you what you are. In other words, the laws
and customs of a people in any stage whatever, . . . grow out of
the way in which the people get their food, clothing, and shelter."
The issue is clearly described by Arndt, " Die Religion der Sozialde-
mokratie," 1892, ss. 9 ff., with many references. See also "Jesus
Christ and the Social Question," p. 18, with references.

12 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
but through personal initiative, moral or intellec
tual leadership, mastery of circumstances by force
of character. The story of Christianity, of Protes
tantism, of Greece, of Germany, of New England,
is not one of favoring conditions accepted, but of
hostile, conditions conquered, the victory of the
mind or will or conscience over the flesh or the
world. If this be true of history, it is still more
obviously true of the social movement which char
acterizes the present age. The social ferment of
the time is most inadequately described when it is
regarded as the sheer consequence of evil condi
tions, or as proceeding altogether from material
desires ; and it is one of the most unfortunate acci
dents of history that a philosophy derived from
Neo-Hegelian materialism should have filtered
down into the popular creed and have obscured
the real nature of the working-class movement.1
What gives pathos and power to the modern Social
Question is not the economic programme which it
proposes, but the human note which it utters, of
sympathy, pity, justice, brotherhood, unity. The
sense of discontent is most conspicuous, not where
1 F. Engels, " Ludwig Feuerbach u. der Ausgang der deutschen
klassischen Philosophic," 1888, s. 68: "The German workingmen's
movement is the heir of the German classic philosophy." Schaffle,
" The Impossibility of Social Democracy," tr. 1892, pp. 32, 33 : " Its
philosophy is in reality the offspring of the subjective speculation
of Hegel. Three important Socialists were followers of this
philosopher's school, Marx, Lassalle, and Proudhon. . . . But the
grass has long grown upon the grave of Hegelianism."

THE MODERN WORLD 1 3
social conditions are at their worst, but where they
are at their best ; not in Turkey and Egypt, but in
Western Europe and the United States. It is not
an evidence that people have less, but an evidence
that they think and feel more. It proceeds, not
from the decrease of possessions, but from the in
crease of desires. The Social Question is the
demand of human beings for a more humanized
life, a " Menschenwiirdiges Dasein." It is the
protest of character against conditions, rather than
the pressure of conditions on character. Within
the Social Question, that is to say, mechanical and
material though it may seem to be, lie ethical
questions of duty, compassion, humanity, service,
which are the signs, not of a degenerating social
order, but of a regenerated social conscience. The
truth of history is precisely reversed when it is
affirmed that economic changes must invariably
precede moral progress. Ethical education, per
sonal character, and intellectual initiative are much
more likely to create the demand for social change.
The Social Question meets civilization, not on its
way down but on its way up.
There is a further aspect of the modern situation
which is equally significant. The special attention
which has been for two generations devoted to
external and mechanical progress, whether in
industry or politics, philanthropy or religion, has
had as its result a disproportionate development
of machinery and of men. " This faith in mech
anism," said Carlyle, in 1829, "has now struck

14 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
its roots deep into men's most intimate, primary
sources of conviction. ... By arguing on the
force of circumstances we have argued all force
from ourselves and stand leashed together, uniform
in dress and movement, like the rowers of some
boundless galley." J Organizations, consolidations,
combinations, federations, we have in prodigal
abundance, and the wheels of the social world
revolve with a speed and smoothness never before
attained; but the age of machinery has brought
with it a new demand for persons competent to
control the intricate mechanism of a new world.
Civilization has had the skill to harness social
forces which it has not had the time to tame ; and
it is by no means certain whether the present age
can control the runaway steeds which it is com
pelled to drive. The pace of modern life demands
at every point new alertness, new sobriety, new
integrity, in those who administer its affairs ; and
the need of the time is not so much for better
social machinery as for competent social engineers.
A science of poor-relief has been devised, but where
are the persons equipped with the sagacity and
sympathy to utilize that science ? Vast aggrega
tions of capital are created, but where are the dis
interestedness and integrity to convert new forms
of industry into new instruments of social peace ?
An army of hand-workers is organized for war, but
where is the incorruptible leadership without which
an army becomes a mob ?
1 "Signs ofthe Times," Miscellaneous Essays, II, 162, 168.

THE MODERN WORLD 1 5
In Plato's famous parable1 of spiritual experi
ence, two horses, one " noble and of noble origin,"
the other " ignoble and of ignoble origin," draw
the chariot of the soul. One steed is ever eager
to mount, the other wishes to descend, and the
charioteer who guides these divergent passions
keeps his course by fixing his eye on the " color
less, formless, and intangible essence . . . which
is the only lord of the soul." Looking up to
his ideal, the driver controls his errant steeds ;
and "feeding on the sight of truth is replen
ished." It is a picture of the conflicting forces
which threaten disaster to the hurrying Ufe of the
modern world, if the soul of the time shall fail to
master the forces which it is called upon to drive.
The Social Question is not one of alternative
theories of progress, as though one must choose
between horses without reins or a driver without
steeds. It is a question of controlUng the mechan
ism of the age by strength of the spirit. In its
form it is an economic question, a question of
chariots and harness; but in its essence it is
ethical, a question of personal capacity and ideal
ism. Circumstances wait on character. Machinery
is the instrument of power. Social progress has
for its charioteer the conscience of the age.
Better methods may simpUfy the Social Ques
tion, it can be solved by nothing less than better
men. "We are idealists," wrote Schiller to von
Humboldt, "and should be ashamed to have it
1 " Phaedrus," tr. Jowett, 1871, 1, 580 ff.

l6 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
said of us that we did not form things, but that
things formed us." x The whole creation of
modern society, as the Apostle Paul said of the
world of nature, groaneth and travaileth in pain,
waiting for the revealing of the sons of God.
At this point, where the Social Question opens
into the question of character, we meet, once more,
the teaching of Jesus Christ. Concerning the
machinery of the world he has little instruction to
give. His teaching is misapplied when utilized as
a manual of social mechanics. Even his own social
ideal of the Kingdom of God, is not for him, in
form or method, to define. " Of that day and
hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven,
but my Father only." 2 When, however, we inquire
for the instrument of social redemption, the teach
ing of Jesus becomes explicit and undisguised.
His care is for the person. He has what has been
called a passion for personality. He is concerned,
not with devising ways of social redemption, but
with creating people applicable to social redemp
tion. The Kingdom is the end of his desire, but
the person is a means to that end. First character,
then usefulness ; first persons fit for the Kingdom,
then the better world, — that is the method of Jesus.
The field of his purpose, according to his parable,
is the world ; but the good seed which is to possess
and fertilize that world, are the children of the
Kingdom. These are they who shall take com-
1 Sime, " Schiller," 1882, p. 212.
2 Matt. xxiv. 36; Mark xiii. 32.

THE MODERN WORLD \J
mand of circumstances and, like strong, produc
tive seed, crowd down the tares by their superior
vitality. The teaching of Jesus, therefore, even when its
form is social, is fundamentally personal. Out
from behind the Social Question emerges the ante
cedent problem of the Christian character. It is
for others to plough and harrow the field of the
world, to arrange its schemes of work and wages,
of poUtics and reform ; the mission of Jesus is to
create a type of character which shaU be sown like
good seed in the waiting field and possess it as
children of the Kingdom. The more commanding
the Social Question grows, the more essential be
comes this demand for people fit to meet that
question. The more intricate is the machinery
of the world, the more competent must be its
engineers. At every point the Social Question
drives one back to the antecedent question of
character; from the acquisition of goods to the
need of goodness; from the problem of cheapen
ing the product of labor to the problem of raising
the standard of men ; from things to life ; from
the thought of the world as a factory to the
thought of the world as a field, where the good
seed are the children of the Kingdom. The prob
lem of other centuries was that of saving people
from the world ; the problem of the present century
is that of making people fit to save the world.1
1 E. Grimm, " Die Ethik Jesu," 1903, ss. I, 2, 3 : " Out of the
Social Question rises more and more distinctly a new and ethical
c

1 8 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
If, then, the study of the Social Question opens
as by an inner door into the interior problem
of the Christian character, it becomes of peculiar
interest to follow the teaching of Jesus as it thus
enters the region of personal morality. What are
the traits which he is most concerned to inculcate ?
By what kind of persons is the service of the world
to be effectively undertaken ? What is the way of
growth, and what are the consequences of the
Christian character? Is the character trained in
the way of Jesus Christ fit to meet the demands of
the present age ?
Such an inquiry would seem to be peculiarly
free from difficulty. It appears to lie on the very
surface of history and to require no venture into
the depths of criticism or speculation. Nothing
would seem to be more easily determined than the
kind of character which is inspired and exemplified
by Jesus Christ. The type is derived directly
from the Master's principles and practice, and
these are reported to us with vivid and uncon
scious picturesqueness in the plain narratives of
the first three Gospels. Whatever other material
offers itself for such an inquiry must be regarded
as of subordinate importance. The fourth Gospel

question . . . What did Jesus desire and what did he teach? "
George Harris, "Moral Evolution," 1896, p. 244: "Another
characteristic of the personal ideal of Christian ethics remains to
be noticed. It proceeds from the individual to society rather than
from society to the individual. . . . Christianity deals directly with
individuals rather than with institutions and tendencies."

THE MODERN WORLD 19
moves in a region of exalted speculation which
Ues for the most part quite above the zone of
ethics, and the reader, as he enters it, feels a
cUmatic change of environment and intention.
One may beheve that he hears at certain points
the echo of an independent tradition, but this
impression is trustworthy only as it is confirmed
by the Synoptic record.1 The Book of Acts is
primarily concerned with the expansion of the
new faith, and the ethical enthusiasms and sacri
fices of the little company of beUevers are but
incidents along the way. In the Epistles of Paul,
it is true, a series of precepts concerning practical
morality appear as corollaries of his speculative
theology. " Therefore," he says, " Wherefore,"
as though the logic of his dialectics brought him
to the maxims of his ethics ; yet here also the
1 O. Holtzmann, " Leben Jesu," 1901, ss. 34, 35 : " So remote an
interpretation and working over of tradition should, preferably, not
be used as a historical source. . . . Yet the stream of Apostolic
report might bring with it much which the Synoptists had not
appreciated." Stevens, "Teaching of Jesus," 1901, p. 30: "Unlike
the Synoptic tradition, it is not so much a report of Jesus' words
and deeds, as a reproduction of the meaning which his person and
work had assumed for one who had long lived in the mystic con
templation ... of his saving power." " Encyclopaedia Britannica,"
E. A. Abbott, Art., Gospels : " Independently, therefore, of its intrin
sic value, John is important as being in effect the earliest commentary
on the Synoptics." Warschauer, " The Problem of the Fourth Gos
pel," 1903 : " The Jesus of the Synoptics is chiefly a great teacher
of applied religion, the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is a theological
figure, expanding himself under a variety of thought-allegories, as
bread, the door, the vine, etc., all of which are without parallel
in the first three Gospels."

20 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ethical teaching is subordinated to the main inten
tion of clarifying and universalizing the revelation
of God in Christ. When we turn back to the first
three Gospels the scene changes. The atmosphere
is ethical. Instead of the mystic heights of the
fourth Gospel, or the obscure depths of Pauline
theology, one enters, as it were, a region of homes
and fields, of natural and familiar experiences, and
through this rolling country, with its varied voca
tions, its joys and pains, its happiness and tempta
tions, among old and young, rich and poor, good
and bad, walks the Teacher of the higher righteous
ness, showing by words of blessing and deeds of
mercy the way that men should go. The Synoptic
Gospels are in their primary intention not the ex
position of a doctrine, but the narrative of a life.
Whatever further disclosures they may make of
the relation of that life to God are inferences from
the narrative rather than its conscious aim. What
ever else may be in debate concerning the life of
Jesus, the character which he illustrates and com
mends seems to be beyond dispute. Profounder
problems may be left to the learned to explore,
but the Beatitudes, the Parables, the grave, com
pelling, gracious Master, bidding men of imperfect
faith and halting decision follow him — these
aspects of the record are for the unlearned to
appreciate and obey. It seems a simple task to
detach from other questions of interpretation the
ethical teaching of Jesus, and to contemplate the
Master as he unfolds the principles of the Christian

THE MODERN WORLD 21
character. The first three Gospels are Uke a sea-
beach, where one may note the ebb and flow of the
tides of the spirit and the many fragmentary
reminiscences which are thrown up by the uncon
scious waves ; but where, along the shore, runs
a high-water mark, indicating by its indisputable
evidence how far into the continent of truth the
flood-tide has at least once made its way.1
This plain inquiry into the ethics of the Gospels
is, however, met by unexpected obstacles. The
approach to the message of Jesus by way of his
ethical teaching is not, as might be anticipated,
the path habitually followed by the most competent
guides ; but is, on the contrary, a comparatively
untravelled way. Instead of finding one's self on
the main road of BibUcal study, one is surprised

1 So, W. Knight, "The Christian Ethic," 1893, p. ix: "There
can be no doubt that the teaching of the Founder of Christianity
was primarily moral teaching." Bruce, " With Open Face," 1896,
p. 184: "Note the first general thesis: ethics before religion.
This was fundamentally in our Lord's teaching enforced with much
emphasis and due reiteration." A. Thoma, " Gesch. der christl.
Sittenlehre," 1879, ss. 134, 136: "The teaching of Jesus is specifi
cally ethics, not religion, ... yet the ethics of Jesus are penetrated
by his religion." Wernle, "Die Anfange unserer Rehgion," 1901,
a. 58 : " In the first three Gospels we hear nothing of great words
like redemption, atonement, justification, regeneration; yet every
reader realizes that the companions of Jesus were lifted into a life
of supreme, spiritual joy." Fairbaim, " Philosophy of the Christian
Rehgion," 1902, p. 565 : " Would it not have been to the infinite
advantage of the religion if these Councils had concerned them
selves as much with the ethics as with the metaphysics of the person
of Christ?"

22 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
to observe that he has left the path pursued by
the great majority of New Testament scholars,
and must proceed in large part alone. This
meagre travel along the road of ethics is not diffi
cult to explain. It is a striking evidence of the
overmastering interest which through all the cen
turies of Christian thought has been felt in the
theology of' the New Testament. Practical moral
ity, the conduct of life, the traits of the Christian
character, have seemed too elementary and ob
vious subjects of inquiry to command the atten
tion of scholars. What they have sought is a
background for morality, a metaphysics of reh
gion, the satisfaction of the thirst of the mind for
the living God. To define the place of Jesus in
God's plan for humanity, and the place of human:
ity in God's plan for eternity, has been the absorb
ing passion of the theological habit of mind. From
this habit of mind has issued what may be called a
dramatic rather than an ethical conception of the
Christian religion. A vast world-drama appears
to unfold its plan, from the first act of creation to
the climax of redemption, and when the spectator
of this scheme of universal love is called to con
sider the details of personal character, it may well
seem a trifling, if not a sacrilegious interruption.
It is that sense of deprivation and regret which
the disciples felt when they were bidden to go
down from the mount of transfiguration; a de
scent to the valley of commonplace, when one has
seen the vision on the heights. The theology of

THE MODERN WORLD 23
the New Testament invites us to the large horizon
of God ; the ethics of the New Testament calls us
down to the common people and the demoniac
boy. Even the science of Christian ethics, which
by its very name would appear to be a study of
the Christian character, has been generally re
garded, not as a plain, inductive inquiry concern
ing the ethics of Jesus Christ, but as a chapter in
the history of dogma. Christian ethics, it has
been remarked, was treated by the earUer theology
as the step-child of Christian dogma ; a Cinderella
whom the proud sisters, theology and philosophy,
might patronize or neglect.1 It would be more
just to say that Christian ethics has itself under
taken the part of a proud sister and has sought
the gay company of the speculative theologians,
instead of remaining contentedly at the fireside of
fact. Nothing could be more remote from the
form of teaching which prevails in the first three
Gospels than the erudite discussions of many a
1 A. Thoma, " Geschichte der christl. Sittenlehre," 1879, s. 1 :
" Die christliche Sittenlehre wurde von den alten Theologen
in Verbindung mit der Glaubenslehre als deren Gefolge be-
handelt; und begreiflicherweise sehr stiefmutterlich; aber dies
nachgeborene und vernachlassigte Stief kind, das Aschenbrodel der
christlichen Lehrwissenschaft, wurde nachgerade auch miindig, und
erweist sich wohl als das dankbarste fur eine aufmerksame Pflege.
Ja, es ware kein Schade wenn es die Stelle der vorgezogenen
Schwester einnahme und das Lieblingskind der Mutter Theologie
wurde, ist es doch das echteste Geisteskind des Christentums, wie
dessen Urgeschichte nachweist."

24 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
treatise on Christian ethics. Instead of concrete
problems of experience, we are confronted by
elaborate discussions of the being of God, the
nature of evil, and the doctrine of the Highest
Good, which approach the facts of conduct from
so distant a point, and with such leisureliness of
movement, that the modern world cannot wait for
their tardy arrival. A revival of simplicity, a
discarding of the fine attire of theology, and a
return to the teaching of Jesus, seem essential
if Christian ethics is to have a hearing from the
present age. Meantime, the monumental works
which were the pride of one generation are for the
most part consigned by the following generation
to those upper shelves where, like the early Chris
tians in the catacombs, repose the honored remains
of our dead literature.1
1 It is instructive to observe the various relations which have
been proposed between Christian ethics and Christian theology.
I. Ethics a corollary of dogmatics. Dorner, " System of Christian
Ethics," tr. Mead, 1887, begins with Creation. Division 1: "The
order of the world as fixed by God at creation, antecedent to the
moral process." So, p. 5 : " Ethics cannot be called the foundation
of dogmatics, but stands to dogmatics in a relation of dependence."
So, Martensen, "Christian Ethics," tr. Spence, 1873, of which Gass
(Geschichte d. Ch. Ethik, 1887, III, 304) remarks: "Martensen's
method is like a three-arched hall approached through a row of
columns." (" Martensen konnte daher nicht ohne Propylaen in den
dreifach gewolbten Saal seiner Wissenschaft eintreten.") Section I :
" Postulates of Christian Ethics, theological, anthropological, cos-
mopological, eschatological," pp. 61-140 : " Dogmatics is the first
born and thus enjoys the higher dignity." So, Wuttke, " Christian
Ethics," tr. Lacroix, 1873, p. 21 : "Ethics forms a part of system
atic theology, . . . and has dogmatics as its immediate presupposi-

THE MODERN WORLD 2 J
It should not be hastily concluded that this
absorbing interest in the theology of Christianity
tion." Newman Smyth, " Christian Ethics," 1892, p. 13 : " Christian
ethics naturally follows Christian theology."
2. A second alternative is proposed by approaching Christian
ethics, not through dogmatic theology, but through ethical phi
losophy. Hermann Weiss, " Einleitung in die christl. Ethik,"
1889, § 6, I, "Of ideas in general"; II, "Of the idea of good
ness," § 7, I, "Goodness and the good in general"; n, "The
relation of goodness to the world of man and nature." (EarUer
literature of various tendencies is indicated, s. 40, note.)
3. A third adjustment is made by fusing ethics with theology,
in a " System of Christian Doctrine," as in Rothe, " Theologische
Ethik," 1845, § 5 : "It ^1 always be an impracticable venture
to discriminate theological ethics from theology."
4. All these academic undertakings overlook the modest path
which begins in an inductive inquiry concerning the moral type com
mended and illustrated in the New Testament Such an examina
tion presupposes no preliminary speculation concerning the nature
of God, or the Highest Good, but begins with the obvious facts of
duty-doing, and proceeds to the implications which these facts sug
gest. A foreshadowing of such a method is made in the " Moral
Proof" of Kant ("Critique of Practical Reason," tr. Abbott, 1883,
p. 360 : " We may divide all religions into two classes — favour-seek
ing rehgion (mere worship), and moral rehgion, that is, the reh
gion of a good life ") ; in the " Theology of experience " of Schleier-
macher, " Die Christliche Sitte," 1843, ss. 12, 13 : "To expound the
idea of the Kingdom of God is to expound the law of Christian con
duct, and this is nothing else than Christian ethics. " s. 17: " If we as
sume that the original characteristic of Christianity is a way of life, we
must present the doctrine of Christianity as a unit, of which ethics
is the foundation and dogma is the corollary "; and again in Ritschl's
" Theology without metaphysics " (" Lehre der Rechtfertigung und
Versohnung," 1888, III, 415) : " A scientific understanding of the
relations of Jesus as expressed in his religious conception appears
attainable only by assuming that we have understood his historical
and human manifestations ; that is, have perceived its ethical con-

26 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
has been misdirected or superfluous. On the con
trary, it may be more justly described as inevitable.
sistency and law." So also, Kaftan, " Wahrheit der christl. Religion,"
1888, s. 383 : " The question is whether the will or the intellect natu
rally takes the lead (von Haus aus das Regiment fiihrt). It is no
difficult question. The primacy of the will is so obvious that it can
hardly be proved." So, Pfieiderer, " Moral und Religion," 1872,
s. 214 : " Ethics, in its manifestations in a moral world, is independent
of religion and antecedent to the religious expressions of the
Church." Baur, " Christenthum der ersten drei Jahrhunderte,"
i860, ». 35 : " This ethical note which is heard in the simple phrases
of the Sermon on the Mount is the purest and most unmistakable
element in the teaching of Jesus and the essential core of Chris
tendom." Ehrhardt, "Der Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu," 1895,
s. 106: "The essence of the character of Jesus is not in his vision
of the Eternal, but the loving sacrifice of his devotion to the hum
blest human needs."
The systematic acceptance of this inductive procedure is, how
ever, a modern incident in the history of Christian ethics. Thus
Jacoby (" Neutestamentliche Ethik," 1899) remarks (s. VI), that
but one book, that of Thoma (cited above), is known to him as
anticipating his treatment. "The present work may claim to be
the first to present the ethics of the New Testament in scientific
form." So, A. Thoma, s. 3 : "A specific treatment of the history of
Christian morality in its original expression does not, to my knowl
edge, exist." Of special significance is the address at the 14th
Evang.-soz. Kong., 1903, W. Herrmann, " Die sittlichen Gedanken
Jesu in ihrem Verhaltnis zu der sittlich-sozialen Lebensbewegung
der Gegenwart" (reprinted and expanded in "Die sittlichen
Weisungen Jesu," 1904), s. 12: "We can continue to be Chris
tians only by recognizing in our contemporary and inevitable con
dition of morals and manners the fulfilment of the purpose of
Jesus Christ." s. 29 : " The ethical ideas of Jesus are incontestably
the essential element of the spiritual experiences of the modern
world." The discussion was continued in 1904 (i5ter Evang.-soz.
Kong., 1904) byTroeltsch, "Die christl. Ethik und die heutige Ge-
sellschaft" (supplementing, as Rade points out (s. 51), the Paper

THE MODERN WORLD 2"J
Nothing, after all, is of such permanent worth as a
rational interpretation of the universe. The mind
of Herrmann). To the same effect, E. Grimm, " Die Ethik Jesu,"
1903, s. 4: "There was a time when ethics was almost devoured
by dogmatics. . . . All this has radically changed. . . . The
more the dogmatic element recedes in interest the more the ethi
cal element is emphasized." Gallwitz, " Das Problem der Ethik,"
1891, s. 272, "The moral significance and uniqueness of the per
son of Christ is discerned in his illuminating the dark problems of
morality which confront the present and the future, and which
find their solution only in the hght proceeding from his person."
Wellhausen, "Israel, und Jud. Gesch.," 5te Ausg., 1904, s. 386:
" Christianity has a wholly different root from Judaism. The con
trast of Jew and Gentile withers and the moral contrast takes its
place. . . . Good and evil are two distinct worlds. . . . Moral
responsibihty gets the chief emphasis." See also, O. Holtzmann,
" Leben Jesu," 1901, Kap. IX, X; Bonhoff, " Christentum und sittl.-
soz. Lebensfragen," 1900, Kap. IV, "Die Rehgion Jesu Christi als
Kraftquelle der Sitthchkeit "; Feddersen, " Jesus und die sozialen
Dinge," 1902 (a protest against excessive emphasis on the social
teaching, ss. 107 ff.) ; Otto, " Leben und Wirken Jesu," 1902, ss. 47 ff.
Of hterature to the same purpose in English may be mentioned :
" Ecce Homo," 1866, Ch. IX, " Reflections on the Nature of Christ's
Society," p. 100 : " The object ofthe Divine Society is that God's will
may be done on earth as it is done inheaven. In the language of our
own day, its object was the improvement of morality." Phillips
Brooks, "The Influence of Jesus," 1879, Lect. I, "The Influence of
Jesus on the Moral Life of Man," p. 14: "To tell men that they
were, and to make them actually be, the sons of God, — that was
the purpose of the coming of Jesus, and the shaping power of His
life." Martineau, "A Study of Religion," 1888, I, 16 ff.: "Why
Ethics before Religion." See also his " Faith and Self-Surrender,"
1897. W. S. Bruce, " The Formation of Christian Character," 1902,
p. ix : " The chief contribution of Jesus Christ to the Social Prob
lem is the production of spiritual personality. In the Christian
Character He provides that element of social progress of which the
world stands most in need." Harris, " Moral Evolution," 1896,

28 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of man is unsatisfied until it contemplates the
thought of God. " Thou hast formed us for Thy
self," said Augustine, "and our hearts are restless
till they find rest in Thee."1 The criticism which
the present age has to make on the ages of
theology is not that they have gone too far, but
that they have gone too fast. They have scaled
p. 392 : " In the order of time Christian doctrine followed Christian
ethics. Jesus was a moral teacher." G. B. Stevens, " The Teach
ing of Jesus," 1901, Ch. XI, p. 130: "The religion which Jesus
taught . . . was moral to the core, that is, was wholly concerned
with righteousness of life." Harnack, " What is Christianity? "
tr. Saunders, 1901, pp. 153 ff. : "The Gospel is no theoretical system
of doctrine or philosophy of the universe. ... It is a glad mes
sage assuring us of life eternal. ... By treating of life eternal it
teaches us how to lead our lives aright. . . . How great a depar
ture from what he thought and enjoined is involved in putting a
Christological creed in the forefront of the Gospel. . . . He
takes the publican in the temple, the widow and her mite, the lost
son, as his examples; none of them know anything about 'Chris
tology.' " So also, F. P. Cobbe, " Studies New and Old," 1865, p. 1 :
"Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Christ"; George Matheson,
"Landmarks of New Testament Morality," 1889; G. H. Gilbert,
"The Revelation of Jesus," 1899; C. A. Briggs, "The Ethical Teach
ing of Jesus," 1904, Pref., p. x: "Jesus' principle of voluntary
love is the great transforming principle of Christianity." W. deW.
Hyde, "Jesus' Way," 1902; R. F. Horton, "The Teaching of
Jesus," 1895, Part I, The Synoptics; Broadus, "Jesus of Naza
reth," 1890, Lect. I, "His Personal Character"; Lect. II, "His
Ethical Teachings"; A. L. Bruce, "With Open Face," 1896,
Ch. X, "The Moral Ideal" ; J. Drummond, "Via, Veritas, Vita,"
Hibbert Lectures, 1894; Lect. VI, VII, "Ethics"; VIII.
"The Motive Power of Christianity"; G. Jackson, "The Teach
ing of Jesus," 1903, IX ; " Concerning Righteousness."
1 " Confessions," I, 1 : " Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor
nostrum, donee requiescat in te."

THE MODERN WORLD 29
the heights of heaven without providing them
selves with the necessities of earth. "Give me
the luxuries of existence," said a distinguished
historian, when describing his personal tastes, " and
I can dispense with the necessities." That is what
one is tempted to say of a theology which substitutes
a dramatic redemption for an ethical revival. A
theology which does not begin by estabUshing the
foundations of morals may be subtle and lofty as the
clouds, but to the modern mind appears, Uke
the clouds, remote and intangible. Whatever else
the City of God may have, it must have a founda
tion. Whatever else theology may be, it must be
first of all a moral theology. Whatever other attri
butes may be ascribed to God, the first must be his
goodness. The theologians are obeying the call of
the highest when they press upward to the heights
of the knowledge of God, but it is by no means
certain that they have chosen the only practicable
way. It is not always the straightest line, said
Lessing, which is the shortest.1 The steep ascent
of theological reasoning seems reserved for the
few, while for the many the modest footpath
of ethics is less arduous and obstructed. Vistas
into reaUty may open along the way of simple
duty-doing, which are hid from the highway of
theological learning; and though one may not
ascend by this path to the summit of vision, he
may see clearly the lower landscape instead of
being lost in the fog.
1 " Education of the Human Race," § 91 : " Es ist nicht wahr
dass die kurzeste Linie immer die grade ist."

30 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
In a lecture of Cardinal Newman's, concern
ing the nature of Christian faith, he describes,
with astonishing candor, the effect of a theology
which begins in something else than ethics.1
" A feeble old woman," he says, " first genu
flects before the Blessed Sacrament and then
steals her neighbor's handkerchief. She kneels
because she believes, she steals because she does
not love. ... How merciful a Providence it has
been that faith and love are separable, as the
Catholic creed teaches." It is not too much to say
that this divorce of faith from love, of religion from
ethics, of prayer from pocket-picking, appears to
the modern mind unthinkable. It seems to propose
a religion with an end but without a beginning,
with a top but with no bottom, in the air but not
on the ground, a separation not alone of faith from
works, but of religion from common sense, of the
character of God from the character of man ; and
one turns with a sigh of reUef from a system of
theology which is consistent with larceny, to a
code of ethics which begins with honesty.
1 " Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans on sub
mitting to the Catholic Faith," 1857, pp. 225-229. Compare Lecky,
"History of European Morals," 1869, I, 359: "That the greatest
religious change in the history of mankind should have taken place
under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and historians
. . . that, during the space of three centuries, they should have
treated as simply contemptible an agency which all men must now
admit to have been . . . the most powerful moral lever that has
ever been applied to the affairs of man, are facts well worthy of
meditation. . . . The explanation is to be found in that broad
separation between the spheres of morals and of positive religion."

THE MODERN WORLD 3 1
Such considerations restore in some degree the
self-respect of those who turn from the steep way
of theology and enter the Gospels by the wicket-
gate of ethics. It is a modest way of approach,
unfrequented by the learned, but the gate swings
easily open and the path is plain. One may per
haps not hear the highest message of the Gospel,
but he is not likely to miss its most obvious lessons.
His contemplation of a cosmic drama will not hide
from him the elementary demands of duty. His
theology, such as it is, will at least be inconsistent
with moral delinquency; his God will at least
be good; his creed will not encourage the suspi
cion that loose business ethics are compatible with
firm Christian discipleship. It must be frankly
admitted that theology is viewed by many modern
minds with scepticism, if not with complete in
difference. Theological speculation seems to many
persons to deal with much that Ues quite beyond
the horizon of knowledge, and with Uttle that
concerns the ordinary life of man. Even if such
scepticism be unjustified, the lesson for theology
is plain. It must estabhsh connection with the
world of conduct; it must reconsider the ethical
basis of theology; it must restate the doctrine
of the Christian character. If there is to be a
restoration of confidence in theology, it must be
secured, not by annexing new fields of speculation,
but by exploring more thoroughly the f amiUar field
of moraUty. If theology is to remain the queen
of the sciences, righteousness and judgment must
be the foundations of her throne.

32 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
For the moment, therefore, it is of no great im
portance to consider whether ethics or metaphysics
offers the most direct road to truth. It is only
necessary to observe that one of these roads lies
straight before our feet, and that to reach the other
we must transfer ourselves to the mind of another
age. To pass from the temper of the present time
to the method of dogmatic theology is to go a long
way round. The ideals of the modern world ex
press themselves in the desire for practical effec
tiveness; the intellectual speculations of other ages
are supplanted by the passion for usefulness, leader
ship, and service. Does such a transfer of interest
dry up the sources of idealism ? On the contrary,
it simply creates a new channel for idealism, and
directs its refreshing stream to social instead of to
speculative ends. Does it, on the other hand,
detach the modern mind from the influence of
Jesus? On the contrary, it calls attention to an
aspect of that influence which theology has often
overlooked. Never was there a time when plain
people were less concerned with the metaphysics
or ecclesiasticism of Christianity. The construc
tions of systems and the contentions of creeds,
which once appeared the central themes of human
interest, are now regarded by milUons of busy men
and women as mere echoes of ancient controver
sies, if not mere mockeries of the problems of the
present age. Even the convocations of the Churches
manifest little appetite for discussions which were
once the bread of their life and the wine of their

THE MODERN WORLD 33
exhilaration, and one of the leaders of a great Chris
tian communion has been led of late to say : " I do
not know what conclusions they arrived at, nor do
I think that it is of any particular consequence
that they arrived at any conclusion. The most
desirable thing was that they should come to an
end."1 Under these very conditions of theological sa
tiety, however, the mind of the age returns with
fresh interest to the contemplation of the char
acter of Jesus Christ. " Back to Jesus ; " " In
his Name;" "What would Jesus do?" "Jesus'
Way " — phrases Uke these, caught up by multi
tudes of unsophisticated readers, indicate the force
and scope of the modern imitation of Christ.
To follow Jesus even though one does not fully
understand him; to do the will even if one has
not learned the doctrine; to perceive through
much darkness that the Life is the Ught of men ;
— these are the marks of the new obedience.
The character of Jesus Christ speaks with its
own convincing authority to the mind of the
present age.
A striking example of this new discipleship may
be observed in the prevaiUng temper of the
modern labor-movement. To the great mass of
hand-workers nothing could seem more unreal or
uninteresting than the ordinary methods and con
cerns of the Christian Church. Priests and par-
1 Henry van Dyke," Straight Sermons," 1893, X, "The Horizon,"
p. 229. D

34 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
sons, formal worship and conflicting creeds, appear
to deal with matters that have no vital relation
with the work of the world. On the day when
Christians meet for prayer, trade-unionists and
socialists meet to consider what they believe the
not less sacred themes of human fraternity and
industrial peace ; and by great numbers of hand
workers the Christian Church is frankly regarded
as a mere club of the prosperous, if not a mere
symbol of the capitalistic system. Yet hostile or
contemptuous as may be their attitude toward in
stitutional Christianity, at one point their sense of
alienation is supplanted by sympathy. It is when
they recall the character of Jesus Christ. Nothing,
indeed, is left of a supernatural halo round his per
son. " He would have accomplished more," it is
urged, "if he had worked for economics and
science rather than religion."1 He was a plain
working-man, a friend of the poor, a social reformer,
" who if he were now Uving would give him
self to the labor-movement." " The ancient forms
and symbols in which Christian faith has been
hitherto expressed are," says an observant inquirer
among German working-people, "for the great
majority of hand-workers irretrievably shattered.
. . . One thing alone is left to them all, — respect
and reverence for Jesus Christ." 2 Imperfect and
1 Rade, 9te Evang.-soz. Kong., 1898, s. 104: "Die sittlichrel.
Gedankenwelt unsrer Industriearbeiter."
2 P. Gohre, " Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter," 1891, s. 190; compare
"Jesus Christ and the Social Question," 1900, p. 71 ; American

THE MODERN WORLD 35
superficial as this judgment of Jesus may be, it at
least makes a point of contact between the Chris
tian faith and the modern working-man. The
Church, it was once said, hears none but Christ.
The labor-movement, it may now be said, hears
not the Church of Christ, but gladly Ustens to the
voice which says : " Come unto me, all ye that
labor ; " "I will give unto this last even as unto
thee." At this point — and probably at this point
only — it is possible to bridge the chasm which
divides the ideals of Christianity from the ideals of
the hand-workers. From a common reverence it
may be possible to cross to a common understand
ing; and the times are waiting for the great teacher,
the Pontifex Maximus of his generation, who shall
build this bridge from the daily concerns of the
working masses to the teaching of Jesus Christ.
Nor is this ethical susceptibility a mark of the
present age alone. It is quite as conspicuously a
mark of the age of Jesus himself. The same sense
of unreaUty and remoteness then affected many
minds as they surveyed the formaUsm of Hebrew
worship. They were ready for an ethical revival ;
they looked for a teacher who should say, " Seek
Journal of Sociology, March, 1899, pp. 621 ff.; H. F. Perry, "The
Working-man's Alienation from the Church " (evidence of Ameri
can hand-workers, collected), p. 622: "Working-men understand
that Christianity is only another name for justice, love, and truth,
and that ' Churchianity ' is only another name for wrong, injustice,
oppression, misery, and want. Then they take the two apart and
cheer the name of Jesus Christ and hiss the Church . . . honoring
the one, scouting the other."

36 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness."
Jesus met his age where it was. He did not begin
with a philosophy like that of the fourth Gospel,
or a theology like that of Paul, but with the per
sonal problems of fisherfolk and publicans, of the
doubting and sinning, the good and bad. His
first blessings were offered to the humble, the
merciful, the peace-makers; his first discriminations
were between conformity, externalism, legalism,
and brotherhood, chastity, moderation, sincerity,
love.- His first rebukes were pronounced against
worldliness, anxiety, and hypocrisy ; his first tests
of discipleship were those of practical ethics. "By
their fruits ye shall know them."
In short, the teaching of Jesus was primarily
a teaching of character. Further intimacy with
him might give to his followers deeper insight into
his purposes and hopes ; but the way to this com
prehension lay through the path of personal loyalty
and obedience. Seeking first the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness, other things would be added
unto them. Character was the gate of conviction.
Purity in heart would have as its consequence
the capacity to see God. Obedience, as Robert
son said, was to be the organ of spiritual knowl
edge. If any man willeth to do the will, says
the fourth Gospel, he shall know the doctrine.1
1 Wernle, "Die Anfange unserer Religion," 1901, s. 47: "The
central desire of Jesus is to awaken the conscience and set before
it the thought of Eternity. . . . One can understand Jesus only
when one recognizes this desire in him." So also, s. 54: "The

THE MODERN WORLD 37
The ethical teaching of Jesus is, therefore, not only
the way which leads most directly from the mind
of the present age to the interpretation of the
Gospels, but it is also the way by which the men
of the Gospels actually approached their Master.
It presents the sequence of experiences, the chro
nology of conviction, which — though it be by no
means universal — is none the less that which the
first three Gospels, as a rule, present.
If, then, it be the truth of history that the first
disciples were led on from moral attachment to
spiritual insight, from reverence for the character
of Jesus to confession of the faith of Jesus, it may
be reasonably beheved that the same path of
spiritual development may be followed to the same
demands of Jesus are so thoroughly simple and positive, that they
may be completely set forth without involving them in questions
of the Law, the Pharisees, or Jewish ethics." So, von Dobschutz,
"Die ur-christlichen Gemeinden," 1902, VI: "It is an ancient and
approved method of apologetics, to begin with the moral proofs
of Christianity. HpSfis iiripairis Beaplas, says Gregory of Nazian-
zen; and a preacher of the Primitive Church teaches: 'Neither
life without knowledge, nor safe knowledge without true hfe;'"
Epist. ad Diogn., XII, 4. Harnack, " What is Christianity ? " tr.
Saunders, 1901, p. 76 : "To represent the Gospel as an ethical
message is no depreciation of its value. . . . There is a sphere of
ethical thought which is peculiarly expressive of Jesus' Gospel."
R. Otto, "Leben und Wirken Jesu," 1902, ». 52: "The first work
of Jesus is to set free the moral life." George Harris, "Moral
Evolution," 1896, p. 404: "Theology starts now with the historical
human person." So, Channing : " The sense of duty is the greatest
gift of God ; the idea of right is the primary and highest revelation
of God to the human mind ; and all outward revelations are
founded on and addressed to it."

38 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
end by the mind of the present age. Other times
have first been taught of the nature of God and
then have turned to the service of man. It may
be the distinction of the present age to reverse this
order of religious experience and to rediscover the
knowledge of God through the doing of duty. It
may be that beyond the ethical renaissance of the
• present time there is waiting a revival of religion.
As philanthropy reconsiders its foundations, it may
find that the word which it obeys : " Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself," prepares the mind
to receive that other command which is like to
it : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Chris
tian ethics may come to be recognized, not as a
step-child of the faith of the past, but as a parent
of the faith of the future. An ethical revival may
be the prophecy of a new theology, in which the
goodness of God will be supreme. The call to
social service may be a new utterance of the voice
of God. Perhaps the very life of Christianity is
being borne through the troubled waters of the
present time by the faithful servants of its human
needs, as the giant Christopher found that it was
the Christ-child whom he had carried stumblingly to
the shore. It may happen again, as with the first
disciples, that those who are at first drawn by the
character of Jesus to ethical obedience, will be
finally led by him toward the Source of his ethical
authority. The Christian theology of the future
may be a corollary from the character of Jesus
Christ.

CHAPTER II
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST
The conditions of the modern world give new sig
nificance to the problem of the Christian character.
The Christian character is, however, a consequence
of the imitation of Christ ; the reproduction, under
the varying conditions of different ages, of the
characteristic aspects of the conduct of Jesus. A
study of the Christian character must, therefore,
begin by contemplating the moral type which
the Teacher himself illustrates.
The imitation of Christ may be misdirected in
many ways. He may be imitated Uterally, frag-
mentarily, capriciously, as though each act or say
ing expressed his total purpose and had no relation
to time, place, race, or occasion. He may be imi
tated, on the other hand, overconfidently or arro
gantly, as though the saying: "Greater things than
these shall ye do," emancipated his disciples from
the hmitations of science or civilization or common
sense. A rational imitation of Christ is not the
conduct of a mimic or a puppet. It means what
the imitation of other characters means, — an influ
ence of leadership, power, authority, example, ap
plied to the conditions of one's own life. The traits
in him which command appreciation are applied.
39

40 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
not to suppress one's own character, but to enrich
and ennoble it. Jesus comes not to destroy, but to
fulfil. If any man will come after me, he says, let
him take up his own cross, his own burden, his
own experience, and follow.
What, then, was the character of Jesus Christ ?
What kind of person is this from whom so rich
and persuasive a teaching proceeds ? Detaching
ourselves, so far as practicable, from the traditions
and presuppositions which thrust themselves be
tween the Gospels and their readers ; setting our
selves in imagination, if we may, on a hillside in
Galilee or in a street in Jerusalem in the days of
Jesus, what, we ask ourselves, is the impression we
receive from this new teacher who arrests our
attention and compels our obedience?
It would be of extraordinary interest if we might,
in the first place, picture to ourselves the exter
nal appearance and physical traits of Jesus. The
simple record, however, offers practically no mate
rial for the reproduction of his face or form. It
is indeed reported, not without great suggestive-
ness, that the first impression of his teaching was
for the moment created, not so much by its con
tents, striking as these were, as by the demeanor
and personaUty of the Teacher. " He taught as
one having authority," is the first comment of the
narrator. There was a calmness and mastery, a
force and restraint, an originality and reverence,
which dominated the scene. As Jesus proceeded
in his ministry, this effect of his personal bearing

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 4 1
is often evident. To a soldier he seemed Uke a
commander who was born to be obeyed ; to many
a hearer he had but to say, " Follow me," and ^
busy men left aU and followed ; to minds possessed
by devils he had but to speak and they grew self-
controlled and calm ; to those who would seize him
at the last his very presence seemed to strike a
blow, so that, as the fourth Gospel says, "they
went backward, and fell to the ground." 1 Little
children, on the other hand, came when he called,
and nestled in his arms ; women followed him and
ministered unto him gladly. Command and sym
pathy, power and charm, must have been singu
larly blended in a person who drew to himself
these varied types of loyalty. Authority and
affection, playfulness and gravity, the light of
love and the shadow of rebuke, must have
touched in quick succession the face of Jesus.
He smiles at the sport of children; he perceives
with sympathetic imagination the symbolism of the
woman's costly gift; he stands before the repre
sentative of Caesar and asserts himself a king;
and all these moods, childUke, poetic, kingly, are
genuine and consistent expressions of his many-
sided character.
These suggestions of external demeanor are,
however, far from establishing any trustworthy
tradition of the physical appearance of Jesus.
Pious imagination soon pictured him as fuifilUng
in form and face what had been prophesied of the
1 John xviii. 6.

42 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Messiah, and later history has perpetuated in the
portraiture of Jesus the various ideals of physical
manhood which have prevailed in successive ages
of the Church. The Gospels, on the other hand,
preserve to us no portrait of the Teacher. They
were not written to satisfy the curiosity of future
ages; they were the artless and incidental sum
mary of an oral tradition, designed to perpetuate
the record of the Master's deeds and words. The
same unconsciousness and spontaneity appear in
Jesus himself. He is not posing before the glass of
the future. He is indifferent to great occasions or
striking effects. He lavishes his care on single,
obscure and unresponsive lives. He is marked by
what has been called accessibility,1 the unassuming
candor of the unconstrained and unaffected life.
He is occupied in doing not his own will, but the
will of the Father who sends him, and in accom-
pUshing the work which is given him to do. Thus
it happens that we are more familiar with the
spiritual traits of Jesus than with his outward
form. His profoundest utterances and even his
private thoughts are preserved to us by the reten-
tiveness of love, while his physical appearance can
be at the best only inferred from the impression
created by his acts and words. His face was once
1 Fairbairn, "Philosophy of the Christian Religion," 1902,
p. 361 : " There are multitudes of the saintly less accessible than He,
... so remote from all weakness and so severe to self-indulgence
that we dare not confess our sins in their presence. . . . But we
can do this before Him."

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 43
a key to his character; his character must now
suggest his face.1
What, then, one asks again, were the special
traits of the character of Jesus Christ ? Dismiss
ing for the moment the inquiries which con
cern themselves with the interior nature of the
person of Jesus, and approaching him as one
might have done when he taught the people by
the lake, or faced the Governor in his palace,
what is the main impression which his character
creates ? The question seems as simple and un
embarrassed as any historical question can be. It
demands neither theological subtlety nor critical
erudition. On every page of the first three Gos
pels stands this character of singular positiveness
and consistency, whose most conspicuous traits it
would appear difficult to mistake.2

1 The history of the portraiture of Jesus is told with abundant
learning by von Dobschiitz, " Christusbilder," 1899, p. viii ("Texte
und Untersuchungen," Gebhardt und Harnack, Bd. XVIII) : " In its
legends a people often registers the best of its religious feeling."
See also, Keim, "Jesus of Nazara," tr. Ransom, 1876, II, 190 ff.;
Wiinsche, " Der lebensfreudige Jesus," 1876, ss. 65 ff., with the
descriptive summaries of Strauss, Konig, Renan, and Keim ; H.
Schell (R. C. Professor in Wflrzburg), "Christus," 1903 (89 illus
trations) ; Farrar, " Life of Christ as represented in Art," 1894
(with many illustrations); Sir W. Bayliss, " Rex Regum, a Painter's
Study of the Likeness of Christ," 1898 (a somewhat emotional
defence of the catacomb frescoes, but with many illustrations from
the masters); H. D. M. Spence (Dean of Gloucester), "Early
Christianity and Paganism," 1902 (with interesting illustrations,
pp. 284 ff.).
2 W. Boyd Carpenter (Lord Bishop of Ripon), " Introduction to

44 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
The impressions made by the character of Jesus
have been, however, as various as the temperaments
and needs of different times and men. Jesus has
been called the light of the world, but this light has
been broken as though passing through a prism,
and each color of its spectrum has seemed to some
minds the complete radiation. He had, it has been
variously urged, the character of a fanatic, an an
archist, a socialist, a dreamer, a mystic, an Essene.
It is one of the evidences of the moral greatness
of Jesus that each period in Christian history, each
social or political change, has brought to view some
new aspect of his character and given him a new
claim to reverence.1 From these various concep
tions there have emerged two, of exceptional per
manence, each of which represents to many minds
the special traits of his moral personality. One
view interprets his character in terms of asceticism,
the other in terms of sestheticism. One contem-
the Study of the Scriptures," 1903, pp. 131, 132: "It is this char
acter, apart from any miraculous or supernatural accessories, which
has profoundly impressed mankind : it is this character which still
holds up, as it were, its own ideal to humanity. . . . Our behef in
Jesus Christ must be based upon moral conviction : not upon physical
wonder. ... In other words, we must invert the process. . . .
You can never compel moral admiration by physical power, but you
can understand that the lower ranges of life may be subservient to
one whose greatness lies in the higher, i.e. in the moral order of
life." 1 The most noteworthy of modern interpretations of the charac
ter of Jesus, from Strauss to Naumann, are analyzed in the interest
ing volume of Weinel, " Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert," 6te
Aufl., 1904.

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 45
plates the suffering of Jesus, the other his joy.
One is the view of ecclesiasticism, the other is
the view of humanism. Tradition perpetuates the
first, imagination welcomes the second.
On the one hand is the prevailing tradition which
associates Jesus with the Messianic prophecies.
When the Second Isaiah writes of the servant of
God : " He is despised and rejected of men, a man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief ; he hath no
form or comeUness, we did esteem him smitten of
God and afflicted " ; whom, it is asked, could these
passages prefigure if it was not him who expressly
claimed to fulfil the Messianic promise ? Thus
the character of Jesus becomes a historical neces
sity. The Teacher of the New Testament is the
answer to the hope of the Old Testament. He
was the Lamb of God, the patient victim, the will
ing sacrifice. The ethical type, therefore, which
shall reproduce his character can be none other
than a resigned, self-mortifying, ascetic type. The
Hellenic character of harmony, symmetry, viriUty,
is supplanted by the Hebraic type of patience,
pathos, pain. The Christian character, un-Hellenic
and other-worldly, utters the poignant note of suf
fering Israel.
This tradition of the character of Jesus was
early accepted by the Church. The Christian life,
it was taught, could be indeed attained in a cer
tain degree under the conditions of the secular
world ; but the Vita Religiosa was a product of the
asceticism of the monastic cell. It was intended,

46 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
as Strauss has said, " to depict as strikingly as pos
sible the contrast between the popcj>r) 6eov and the
fj,opcj>r) SovXov." x Here, also, is the dominant ideal
of mediaeval Christian art. With but few exceptions
the Christ of the masters is the Man of Sorrows,
whom it hath pleased the Lord to bruise, and who
is stricken for the transgressions of his people.
One of the most eminent of German philosophers2
has set forth in detail this conception of the char
acter of Jesus. The Christian character, says
Professor Paulsen, is marked by abnegation ( Welt-
verleugnung), the Greek character by appreciation
( Weltbej'akung) ; the one represents the scorn of
the natural, the other the development of the
natural. The Greeks prized intellectual develop
ment, the Christians distrusted it. To the Greeks
courage was a cardinal virtue ; the Christians were
taught to resist not evil. All Greek virtues were,
therefore, in the Ught of Christianity "splendid
vices." All that was of worth in Greece was
worthless in Christianity. For a Greek to become
a Christian it was necessary that the old man should
die and a new man be born. Thus the Christian
character, self-effacing, ascetic, contrary to nature,
admirable though it may have once appeared, be-
1"Life of Jesus," tr. Marian Evans, 1856, p. 202.
2 Friedrich Paulsen, "System der Ethik," 1889, ss. 50 ff., "Die
Lebensanschauung des Christentums." Rejoinders to Paulsen are
made, among others, by Jacoby, "Neutest. Ethik," 1899, ss. 464 ff.;
Gallwitz, "Das Problem der Ethik," 1891, ss. 271 ff. ; E. Grimm, " Die
Ethik Jesu," 1903, Kap. 18, " Lebensbejahung und Lebensver-
neinung."

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 47
comes impracticable for a healthy-minded man in
the modern world.1
On the other hand is the interpretation of the
character of Jesus in terms of aestheticism, as the
type of gladness, graciousness, spiritual peace, and
joy. According to Renan, a young Galilean
peasant, " sprung from the ranks of the people," of
parents " of humble station Uving by their toil," is
entranced by the vision of the Divine Ufe, and
gives himself with delight to its expression. "An
exquisite perception of nature furnished him with
expressive images." "A remarkable penetration,
which we call genius, set off his aphorisms."
" Tenderness of heart was in him transformed into
infinite sweetness, vague poetry, universal charm."
" His lovely character, and doubtless one of those
transporting countenances which sometimes appear
in the Hebrew race, created round him a circle of
fascination." In the same spirit Strauss remarked :
"Jesus appears as a naturally lovely character
(eine schbne Natur' von Hause aus), which needed
but to unfold and to become conscious of itself." 2
1 The same conclusion was reached by Augustine (L. Stein,
" Die sociale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie," 1897, s- 244) :
" His doctrine . . . has a dark and monastic quahty (etwas mon-
chisch Finsteres) which is hostile to social and philosophical in
quiries based on confidence in human nature." So many modern
philosophers ; e.g. F. H. Bradley (International Journal of Ethics,
October, 1894, p. 25) : "We have lived a long time now the pro
fessors of a creed which no one consistently can practise, and
which, if practised, would be as immoral as it is unreal."
2 Renan, "Vie de Jesus," I3me ed., 1867, pp. 746?.; Strauss,

48 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
It is interesting to recall the many incidents in
the life of Jesus which tend to confirm each of these
impressions of his character. On the one hand,
there is a quality of self-sacrifice in his experience
" Das Leben Jesu, fur das deutsche Volk bearbeitet," 2te Aufl., 1864,
a. 208. So, Hase, "Geschichte Jesu," 1876, § 53: "Jesus defends
human life from the asceticism which so often allies itself with reli
gious earnestness. . . . He shares freely in the good things of this
life. . . . He is as a bridegroom among his companions. Never
did a religious hero shun so little the joys of life." So also, though
in less unmeasured words, Keim, "Geschichte Jesu von Nazara,"
1867, I, 458: "Is not the primitive description of him as being
gentle and joyous (seine Herzlichkeit und die milde Heiterkeit)
— the character which Strauss assigns to him — justified by the
record ? " One of the most curious illustrations of scholarly can
dor is the somersault of conviction performed by A. Wiinsche in
his "Der lebensfreudige Jesu," 1876. In 1870 he published
his "Leiden des Messias," describing with much erudition the
Messianic ideal of lowly suffering in its fulfilment through Christ.
Six years later Jesus appears to him in a wholly opposite char
acter, joyous, triumphant, with a delight in life in which the
Talmudic teachers could find no satisfaction, s. 24 : " My problem
is to deliver the figure of Jesus from the unhistorical shadows in
which it has laid, and set it in the sunshine where it belongs."
See also the essay of I. Zangwill, "Dreamers ofthe Ghetto," 1899,
pp. 491, 492: "I give the Jews a Christjthey can now accept, the
Christians a Christ they have forgotten . . . Christ, not the tortured
God, but the joyous comrade, the friend of all simple souls . . .
not the theologian spinning barren subtleties, but the man of genius
protesting against all forms and dogmas that would replace the
direct vision and the living ecstasy, ... the lover of warm life,
and warm sunlight, and all that is fresh and simple and pure and
beautiful." So in many popular studies of the Gospels, e.g. the
fresh and thoughtful narrative by W. J. Dawson, "The Life of
Christ," 1901, pp. 87 ff. : " He became the incarnation of the spirit
of joy, the symbol of the bliss of life. . . . Christ's gracious gayety
of heart proved contagious,"

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 49
which removes him from aU positive relation with
Hellenism.1 A whole series of virtues — humility,
self-forgetfulness, the bearing of burdens not one's
own — appear in Jesus, for which no room is found
in the Greek ideals of cro^pocrvvT] and fieydKo^v^ia.
Such a saying as " He that will be chiefest among
you shall be the servant of aU," would have seemed,
as St. Paul said of the crucified Christ, " unto the
Greeks fooUshness." 2 On the other hand, there is
heard throughout the ministry of Jesus an under
lying note of tranquil and lofty joy. He is quick to
note the beautiful in nature and in character. He
detects quaUties worthy of love even in unlovely
Uves. In his teaching the instinct for spiritual prin
ciples is met by the instinct for artistic expression.
The universe is picturesque and eloquent to his
sensitive mind, and at the end of a short career,
abounding in misinterpretations and disappoint
ments, there still lingers the happy tradition of his
spiritual joy.3 " These things have I spoken unto
1 A. Harnack, " What is Christianity ? " tr. Saunders, 1901, p. 37 :
" The picture of Jesus' hfe and his discourses stand in no relation
with the Greek spirit. . . . That he was ever in touch with the
thoughts of Plato or the Porch ... it is absolutely impossible to
maintain." 2 I Cor. i. 23.
8 Ehrhardt, "Der Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu," 1895, s. no:
" In Jesus the Messianic idea is rather a means than an end (mehr
ein instrumentaler Begriff als ein Zweckbegriff) . He used its form
for the expression of his ideal. The ascetic element in the ethics of
Jesus is its transient, the service of God its permanent, element."
See also, Strauss, " Leben Jesu," 2te Aufl., 1 864, s. 34 : " This joyous,
continuous conduct of a lovely soul . . . may be described as the
Hellenic quality in Jesus."
E

50 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
you," says the fourth Gospel, " that my joy might
remain in you, and that your joy might be full."1
1 John xv. n. In a voluminous work (H. S. Chamberlain, " Die
Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts," 2 Bd., 5te Aufl.,
1904, I, ss. 219 ff.) which, though written by an Englishman,
has attracted attention chiefly in Germany, the author raises the
question whether this fusion of the Hellenic and Hebraic spirit
in Jesus may not be referred to the conditions of his birth. Gali
lee, he remarks, lay on the main track of Greek migration toward
the East, and its population must have been one of mixed blood
and descent. It may well have happened, he concludes, that
Jesus was thus a child of two races, and that the Hellenic traits
which are so marked in him were his, not by supernatural gift, but
by inherited right. " One who asserts that Jesus was a Jew is
either ignorant or insincere." The probability "that Jesus was
not a Jew and had not a drop of pure Jewish blood in his veins is
so great that it approaches nearly to certainty." " By religion and
education he was unquestionably a Jew, but in race in all proba
bility not." " I have felt obliged to enter in some detail into this
question, because I do not find in any other work that the facts in
the case are clearly brought together."
This venturesome hypothesis of mixed descent, though it is not
without plausibility, is not only unsupported by positive tradition,
but is altogether in conflict with the earliest tradition of Jesus. If
among the first disciples there had been the least intimation of extra-
Jewish descent in him, — and the facts of his birth must have been
familiarly reported by the companions of his childhood, — it could
but have happened that as the new religion expanded into the
Hellenic world, its claim to authority through an origin partially
Greek must have been repeatedly emphasized. The Epistle to the
Romans is in large part devoted to commending the Gospel of Christ
to the extra-Jewish world, and its second chapter, devoted to the
distinction between Jew and Gentile, must have called attention
to the fact that Jesus represented in himself both Gentile and
Jew. The fourth Gospel, deliberately appropriating Greek phi
losophy as the witness to Christ, must have recalled the natural
right of Jesus to a place in Greek philosophy. The hypothesis of

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 5 1
Striking, however, as are both these traits of the
character of Jesus, it is far from probable that they
touch its deepest note. The asceticism of Jesus,
however un-Hellenic it may be, and his delight in
Ufe, however un-Messianic it may be, are obviously
not ends in his teaching, but incidents along his
way. They are the by-products thrown off in the
development of his career. The problem of the
character of Jesus first comes into view when be
hind his sufferings and his joy there is observed
a quality of spiritual life which makes these various
experiences so subordinate and contributory that
they become the mere rhythm of his step as he
moves steadily toward his supreme desire.1 The
Chamberlain, though ingenious and at its first statement striking,
is in reality a superfluous and unverified interpretation of a char
acter which is simply larger than the limits of national traits, and
in which Hebraism and Hellenism are but formal names for piety
and joy.
1 So Keim, "Geschichte Jesu von Nazara," 1867, 1, 445 : " . . .
a Galilean in the freshness and susceptibility of his sense of nature
in all her forms, a Hebrew in his contemplative seriousness and the
depth of power of his life with God. . . . Let us at the same time
confess that humanity can elsewhere hardly exhibit the even balance
of centrifugal and centripetal forces." O. Holtzmann, " War Jesus
Ekstatiker?" 1903, a. 139: "It is the quality of paradox and
contradiction of traits which often makes a person attractive.
The contrasts of tranquillity and enthusiasm in Jesus attached his
followers to him, and the union of these opposite qualities was
not the least part of the secret of his first results." The contrast
and union of types is admirably stated by Hugh Black, "Culture
and Restraint," 1901, p. 349: "He preserves the Hellenic spirit
from degradation and selfishness. . . . He saves the Hebraic
spirit from formalism."

52 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
explorer in a rugged country does not seek for
hardships. He expects them as the cost of success.
He accepts the solitude, the fatigue, the perils, as
incidents along his way. He is no more an ascetic
than he is a Sybarite; he is bent on his errand
and takes the risk of his road. Something like
this is the attitude of Jesus toward asceticism. He
neither courts nor shuns suffering. He is not con
sciously imitating the sorrows foretold of the Mes
siah ; but he is doing the Messiah's work, and, as
the Prophet had anticipated, he is despised and
rejected of men. His asceticism is real, but it is
incidental. The pains and pleasures of the body
and the soul are the rough places and fair pros
pects which meet him as he goes. He is neither
a mediaeval saint nor a Galilean dreamer, but a
Teacher whose pains and pleasures are but the
scenery and environment of the soul.
What, then, was the first impression of this
Teacher, which seized upon his hearers with such
extraordinary compulsion, that when he said, " Fol
low me," men left all to follow ? The answer to this
question concerning the original and general im
pression of the teaching of Jesus seems beyond dis
pute. The immediate effect of the teaching of Jesus
was an effect of power, of authority and mastery,
the commanding impressiveness of a leader of men.
It is striking to notice how often this word " power"
is applied in the New Testament to the influence
of Jesus. "The multitude glorified God," says
Matthew, " who had given such power unto men."

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 53
"The Kingdom of God comes with power," says
Mark. " His word was with power," says Luke.
" Thou hast given him power over all flesh," says
John. "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with
power," says the Book of Acts. " The power of
our Lord Jesus Christ," says Paul. His ministry,
that is to say, was, first of all, dynamic, commanding,
authoritative. When he announced the principles
of his teaching, he did not prove or argue or
threaten Uke the Scribes ; he swayed the multitude
by personal power. It was the same throughout his
ministry. He called men from their boats, their
tax-booths, their homes ; and they looked up into
his face and obeyed. He commends the instinct
of the soldier who gives orders to those below him
because he has received orders from above.
What is the note of character which is touched in
such incidents as these ? It is the note of strength.
This is no ascetic, abandoning the world ; no
"joyous comrade," deUghting in the world; here
is the quiet consciousness of mastery, the author
ity of the leader, the confidence which makes him
able to declare that a life built on his sayings is
built on a rock. Jesus is no gentle visionary, no
contemplative saint, no Lamb of God, except in the
experience of suffering; he is a Person whose
dominating trait is force, the scourger of the
traders, the defier of the Pharisees, the command
ing Personality whose words are with the authority
of power. Women, it is true, were drawn with
pecuUar loyalty to the service of Jesus, and it has

54 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
been inferred from such feminine devotion that the
character of Jesus must have had in it more of the
womanly than the mascuUne. Quite the contrary
inference would be indicated by the ordinary re
lationships between women and men. It is not
feminine traits in men which attract women, but
mascuUne quaUties of force, initiative, and leader
ship. Gracious consideration for women marked
indeed the thought of Jesus, from the time when
he went down to Nazareth and was subject to his
mother, to the day when he commended his mother
to the disciple whom he loved; but for softness
and sentimentality, such as characterizes the femi
nine man, there was no room in his rugged,
nomadic, homeless life.
From whatever side we approach the life of
Jesus this impression of mastery confronts us. On
the one hand is the ethical aspect of strength,
to which our later inquiries must repeatedly return.
Solemn exaltations of mood, experiences of pro
longed temptation, moments of mystic rapture,
occur, indeed, in his career ; but when we consider
what a part these emotional agitations have played
in the history of religion, one is profoundly im
pressed by the sanity, reserve, composure, and
steadiness of the character of Jesus. He is no
example of the " twice-born " conception of piety,
which has been of late presented to us with such
vigor and charm. His "Religion of Healthy-
mindedness" is not a psychopathic emotionalism,
but a normal, rational, ethical growth. His method

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 55
is not that of ecstasy, vision, nervous agitation,
issuing in neurological saintUness ; it is educative,
sane, consistent with wise service of the world,
capable of being likened in an infinite variety of
ways to the decisions and obUgations which every
honest man must meet.1

1 The captivating lectures of my distinguished and beloved col
league, William James ("The Varieties of Religious Experience,"
1902), abound, it is needless to say, in illuminating suggestions con
cerning the expansion of life through religious emotion ; and, in
spite of his starthng pluralistic theism, the conclusion that "the
conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which
saving experiences come " makes an epoch in psychology. The
sweep and charm of the discussion cannot, however, obscure the
fact that among the varieties of religious experience which come
under consideration, no place is found for a character like that of
Jesus Christ. The " once-born " are dismissed as an imperfect type,
in whom " optimism may be quasi-pathological," — a type which
culminates in Walt Whitman, and in which the great names of con
structive and rational religion hardly appear. St. Theresa is, to
Professor James, an important " document," and St. John of the
cross, and Mr. Ratisbonne, and Mr. Dresser ; but Luther is inter
esting only when he is recalling his spiritual tortures while a monk ;
and Schleiermacher's " Discourses on Religion " are unaccounted
for ; and while the coldness of Channing's bedroom gets atten
tion, the warmth of his religious hfe is unexplained. One of the
most curious of the copious footnotes in this monumental study of
human documents is the allusion to an evangelical estimate of
Charming (p. 488). He was.it is reported, " excluded from the
highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his
character." No wonder that Professor James remarks, in comment,
that " the twice-born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness
of life ... as not properly religion." A religion rendered imper
fect by perfectness of character seems to present a paradox which
American slang would describe as " the limit." This sense of lack
reaches its climax when we observe the almost complete absence

56 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
On the other hand is the intellectual aspect of
the same quality of power, — a strength of reason
ing, a sagacity, insight, and alertness of mind, which
give him authority over the mind not less than the
will. It has often been assumed that Jesus was an
untutored peasant, an inspired working-man, whose
intuitions were his only guide ; and it is undoubt
edly true that his intellectual gifts had not been
trained in Rabbinical schools of academic legalism.
" How knoweth this man letters," asked the Phari
sees, "having never learned?" — learned, as they
probably meant to say, as a student from the
of reference to the character of Jesus Christ. Among the "varie
ties of religious experience-," here, it would seem, was one which
deserved consideration ; yet it is noticed in a single footnote, where
Harnack is cited as suggesting that " Jesus felt about evil and dis
ease much as our mind-curers do." It is open to some question
whether Harnack would regard this as a just inference from a pas
sage where he says : "He [Jesus] calls sickness sickness, and
health health," — which is precisely what many mind-curers do not
admit. However this may be, it is evident that the character of
Jesus is not a document to Professor James's immediate purpose.
What Strauss (" Leben Jesu fur das deutsche Volk bearbeitet,"
1864, s. 208) has said is too obviously true to give Jesus a place
among the " twice-born " saints. " In all those natures which have
been purified through struggle and violent revolution of nature, —
as in Paul, Augustine, Luther, — there remains something hard and
bitter throughout life ; but of this quality there is in Jesus not a
trace. . . . He does not have to be converted and to begin a new
and different life." Many a cordial admirer of Professor James's
genius is eagerly hoping that his promise " to return to the same
subject in another book" may be happily fulfilled, and that he
may be led from this fascinating discussion of the pathology of
religion to the interpretation of its normal, heroic, rational,
dynamic types.

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 57
masters of the law.1 Yet, on almost every page
of the Gospels there are indications that the
new master was neither unlettered nor untrained,
but equipped with intellectual as weU as spiritual
authority. When, at the beginning of his work, Jesus
is soUcited by the temptations of a misused min
istry, he meets them aU with the weapons of the
scholar ; confronting his adversary with the testi
mony of the Scriptures, and quoting to him, " It is
written; it is written." When the time arrives to
set forth the principles of his teaching, he expounds
them through their contrast with the teachings of
the past: "Ye have heard that it hath been said,
but I say unto you." When he returns to Naza
reth, where he had been brought up, there is
delivered unto him the Book to read. He is habitu
ally addressed as Teacher or Master. When his
enemies would entangle him, they assume his
famiUarity with the hterature which they cite, and
he in his turn does not hesitate to use against
them their own weapons of dialectic, so that they
dare ask him no more questions.
Yet, sufficiently equipped as Jesus was to adapt
his teaching to the learning of his age, it was
not his scholastic wisdom which most impressed
his hearers. There was perceived in him a
1 Weinel (op. cit.), s. 59: "To see how far Jesus stood from
Pharisaism, not only in his public teaching but before it, we need
only compare his figures of speech with those of Paul." Compare
H. Holtzmann (op. cit.), I, ss. 119, 120.

58 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
quality of insight which, instead of being akin to
the learning of scholars, was distinct from it, and
was seen to be an original endowment, a spiritual
gift. When the boy Jesus met the wise men of Jeru
salem, it was this untaught wisdom which startled
them. He lingered among the doctors, eager
to hear and to ask them questions ; and when his
parents sought their child, he turned to them with
one of those deep, strange sayings with which
other children sometimes perplex their parents, as
though they were listening to another voice and
heard a command their parents had not given.
From that time on, as it is written, Jesus increased,
not in stature only and in charm, but in wisdom. He
was a Teacher, but the authority of his teaching
was not that of the scribes. His wisdom was not
erudition. It left, not an impression of academic
acquisition, but of penetration, discernment, grasp.
It was one aspect of his central quality of power.
It has been said that the distinction between
the best modern practitioners of the law and
men of the second order lies in the capacity
to discriminate between the essential point on
which the issue should be determined, and the
multitude of interesting but subordinate issues
which the case may suggest ; and a Justice of the
Supreme Court of the United States has remarked,
concerning a leader of the bar, that the point urged
by him had never failed to be the point which
finally determined the mind of the court. A simi
lar statement might be made of the teaching of

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 59
Jesus. It proceeds directly to the fundamental
issue. Many aspects of Ufe which might appear
to others of importance are touched by him with
surprising Ughtness, but without preamble or am
plification he touches the dominant note of each
situation and discerns the permanent principle
which it involves.
His principle of selection from the earUer tradi
tion is marked both by reverence and by audacity.
It was written : " Do that to no man which thou
hatest."1 Jesus rests on this authority, but the
saying gets new significance when he restates it
in the positive form of the Golden Rule : " What
soever ye would that men should do to you, do ye
even so to them."2 He confirms the law of the
Sabbath, but chooses as his authority the ethics
of Hosea : " I will have mercy, and not sacrifice," 3
rather than the theology of Exodus : " In six days
the Lord made heaven and earth." i He does not
hesitate to discriminate between the law of Moses
and the law of God,5 with something of that dis
tinction between form and spirit, the accidental and
the essential, which is now described as the critical
spirit. Jesus, however, was not a critic, but a seer.
He did not balance and weigh the various tradi
tions ; he saw the truth which these traditions, with
different degrees of completeness, had desired to
express. 1 Tobit iv. 15. * Ex. xx. 11.
2 Matt. vii. 12. 6 Matt. xix. 8 ff.
8 Hos. vi. 6 ; Matt. xii. 7.

60 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
An interesting witness of this untaught wisdom
is to be found in the attitude of Jesus to the world
of nature. It would be misleading to speak of his
mind as scientific, for there is in him no trace of
the special discipUne in which students of science
are trained. His attitude toward nature, however,
is the prerequisite of the scientific mind. Nature
in every phase and form is his instructor, his com
panion, his consolation, and each incident of nature
is observed by him with sympathetic insight and
keen delight. He is a poet rather than a natural
ist; but with him, as with all great interpreters
of nature, poetic insight gives significance to the
simplest facts. The hen and her chickens, the
gnat in the cup, the camel in the narrow street,
the fig-tree and its fruit, the fishermen sorting
their catch, — all these and many other of the
slightest incidents which meet his observant eye
become eloquent with the great message of the
Kingdom. The contrast at this point between the mind of
Jesus and the mind of Paul is striking. In the
Epistles of Paul one finds hardly an allusion to the
familiar and homely aspects of the world of nature.
We hear the distant sound of cosmic tragedies,
the groaning and travailing of creation ; but of the
birds and lilies, the seed and harvest, the lake and
the fish, the vines and the cattle, Paul takes no
account. He is a man of the city. His figures of
speech are of the market-place, the athletic con
tests, the military career. The mind of Jesus, on

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 6l
the other hand, is most at home in the country.
When he seeks the companionship of God in
prayer, he goes, not into his closet, but into the
comforting and quickening solitude of the hills.
Each process of nature, the growth of the grain,
the working of the leaven, the blossoming of the
trees, the flight of the birds, is observed by him with
an accuracy which never falters and is reported
with a precision which gives us, as has been said,
" a compact, coherent, Uving world, which we can
rearticulate, revivify, and visualize." 1 From the
day when Jesus pointed to the UUes and the crops,
the mountain and the lake, as symbols of the King
dom, the messages of nature have been, for mill
ions of minds, spoken in his words and interpreted
in his spirit. As SheUey wrote of Keats : —
" He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her names. . . .
He is a presence to be felt and known,
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone."
1 Fairbairn, " Philosophy of the Christian Religion," 1902, pp.
383 ff. The whole paragraph, concerning the responsiveness of the
mind of Jesus to the suggestions of nature, is singularly beautiful.
So also, H. Holtzmann, " Lehrbuch der Neutest. Theol.," 1897,
s. 112: " One could not thus have spoken whose soul had first awak
ened in the narrow alleys of Jerusalem and been brought too soon
into contact with the spirit of the Schools." H. Weinel, in the
"Festgruss fur Bernhard Stade," 1900 (" Die Bildersprache Jesu in
ihrer Bedeutung fur die Erforschung seines inneren Lebens"),
s. 57 : " This use of figures is the best evidence for the genuineness
of the tradition concerning Jesus. For since the Christian reli
gion through its great apostle became a faith of the lower classes

62 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
A further and still more striking evidence of
this intellectual mastery was a certain lightness
of touch which Jesus often employed in contro
versy, and which sometimes approaches the play
of humor, and sometimes the thrust of irony. His
enemies attack him with bludgeons, and he de
fends himself with a rapier. No test of mastery is
more complete than this capacity to make of play
fulness a weapon of reasoning. The method of
Jesus pierces through the subtlety and obscurity of
his opponents with such refinement and dexterity
that the assailant sometimes hardly knows that he
is hit.1 Instead of a direct reply, the immediate
question is parried and turned aside, and the mo
tive which lies behind it is laid bare. People come
to him with an inquiry about the division of prop-
in Greek cities, and since — on the other hand — it was soon
touched in Palestine with Pharisaism, these figures and parables,
in their original freshness and homeliness, could not have been a
later invention." So, W. M. Ramsay, " The Education of Christ,"
1902, Ch. I, "On a Mountain Top"; Renan, tr. Allen, 1896, pp. 122
ff. : "The region round about Jerusalem's perhaps the dreari
est country in the world; Galilee, on the contrary, was extremely
verdant, well shaded, smiling. ... In no country in the world do
the mountains spread themselves out with more harmony or inspire
loftier thoughts. . . . The entire history of infant Christianity has
in this way become a delightful pastoral."
1 So, Renan, "Life of Jesus," tr. Allen, 1896, p. 143: "Some
times a wonderful keenness, like what we call wit, put his aphorisms
in sharp relief. ... ' Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye;
and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye.' " So, Jacoby, " Neutest.
Ethik," s. 138. The trait has been traced with perhaps excessive
ingenuity by G. W. Buckley, " The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus,"
1901.

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 63
erty, and Jesus at first seems to decline jurisdic
tion in the matter. " Who made me," he says, " a
judge or a divider over you ? " Then, however,
looking round at the faces of the crowd who are
seeking his guarantee for their greed, he pene
trates to the thought which the economic problem
has disguised, and answers, not their inquiry, but
their hearts : " I say unto you all, keep yourselves
from covetousness." His disciples ask for the re
ward of their loyalty : " Lo, we have left all and
have followed thee " ; and Jesus answers : " Ye
shall receive an hundredfold, houses and brethren,
sisters and mothers, and children and lands " ; and
then, as if with a playful sense of the little that all
this tells them of that which is to happen, he
goes on : " Yes, houses and lands indeed, with per
secutions." He opens the Book in the synagogue,
and with the familiarity of one versed in the
Scriptures, selects that passage which is fulfilled
by him : " He hath anointed me to preach the
acceptable year of the Lord"; but while the minds
of his hearers run on into the next phrase of the
Prophet's saying, Jesus abruptly closes the Book
in the middle of a sentence, and gives it back to
the attendant, leaving it for the congregation to
perceive that he declines to appropriate the an
cient threat : " And the day of vengeance of our
God." 1
Here is intellectual insight matching spiritual
1 This incident is noted by S. M. Crothers in a " Sermon on the
Simplification of Life," 1901.

64 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
authority. This is no recluse or peasant or pas
sive saint, but an intellectual as well as moral
leader, who may be rejected indeed, but who
cannot be despised. The picture of the his
toric Jesus which would reproduce this type of
character, and which is still left for Christian art
to paint, is not of the pallid sufferer, stricken by
the sins of the world, but of the wise, grave Mas
ter, whom to meet was to reverence, if not to obey.
Tempted he may be, but his are the temptations
which come to power. Confronted by learning he
must be, but the weapons of scholarship are his
also. Thwarted by the kingdoms of this world he
will be, but he remains a king in the empire of the
truth. Suffer he must, but it is the suffering of
the strong. He dies as if defeated, but his power
asserts itself commandingly even when he is gone ;
and the very memory of it brings to his cause men
who could resist his teaching. Nicodemus, the
scholar, returns to care for the body of Jesus ; and
Judas, the betrayer, hangs himself for shame.
This central quality of moral and intellectual
power becomes still more impressive when one
proceeds to notice the habit of life and way of
conduct which are its natural expressions. There
are two ways in which the conduct of Jesus dis
closes a character whose dominant note is strength,
and both of these habits of life increase the pathos
and impressiveness of his character. The first is
the prodigality of his sympathy ; the second is his
solitude of soul.

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 65
The first mark of power is its self-impartation.
It gives itself lavishly because there is so much
to give. It feels no need of thrift. This is what
impresses one in the conduct of Jesus. He is ex
travagant and unthrifty in his teaching. On one
occasion only does he seem to gather an audience
about him and address to them any formal an
nouncement of his mission. For the most part he
lavishes his teaching on a few, and sometimes
charges even these to tell no man what he has
taught. He takes three friends apart from their
companions and shows them his glory. His para
bles are flung out into the world with Uttle care
for their interpretation. Those who have ears to
hear may hear them ; but many shall hear and not
understand. His favorite symboUsm is that of the
sower's work, with its broad, free sweep of arm and
its widely scattered seed. What matter was it if
much seed be wasted, if that which faUs on good
ground has such reproductive power ? There is
the same prodigaUty in his relation with the diverse
types of people who came to him. It is often asked
whether Jesus should be classified with reformers
or with working-men, with the proletariat or the
poor. The fact is, however, that the ordinary
social classifications are inappUcable to him. He
is equally at home with the most varied types. He
moves with the same sense of famiUarity among
rich and poor, learned and ignorant, the happy and
the sad.
What does this range of sympathy, this prodi-

66 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
gality of distribution, mean ? It has been some
times regarded as the sheer manifestation of an
appreciative and responsive mind. This is the
trait which has encouraged the aesthetic interpre
tation of the character of Jesus. This lavish offer
ing is, it is said, a mark of his delight in life. But
delight in life is robbed of its significance when it
has no background of rational justification. Sym
pathy to be effective must be the expression of
power. To give, one must have. To give one's
life a ransom for many is of no avail if the ransom
be insufficient. To say that the Son of Man comes
not to be ministered unto, but to minister, is to
utter no great truth, unless the Son of Man has the
capacity for ministering. To dig a channel for the
water-power of one's mill is no wise investment if
the stream has run low. The sympathy of Jesus
is the channel through which his power flows, and
the abundance of the stream testifies to the reserve
of power at the source.
The second mark of the conduct of Jesus is his
spiritual solitude. Give himself as he may to
others in lavish word and deed, there remains
within the circle of these relationships a sphere
of isolation and reserve. Eager as he is to com
municate his message, there are aspects of it which,
he is forced to see, are incommunicable, so that his
language has at times a note of helplessness. Men
see, but they do not perceive ; they hear, but they
do not understand. " No man knoweth the Son, but
the Father ; neither knoweth any man the Father,

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 6j
save the Son."1 In the fourth Gospel this sense
of soUtude is expressed with solemn reiteration.
" I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye
cannot bear them now."2 "It is expedient for
you that I go away : for if I go not away, the Com
forter will not come unto you." 3 Behind the re
gion of communication, Jesus recognizes in the Ufe
of the spirit a realm of reticence, where the heart
knows its own secret and the life must make its
way alone. Instead of intruding, as many a teacher
has done, into the solitude of personality, Jesus
says : " Let not your heart be troubled. ... If it
were not so, I would have told you."4 He
respects the reserve of others, as he maintains
his own. It is the confident silence which is the
assurance of love.
" I count that friendship little worth,"
says a Christian poet,
" Which has not many things untold,
Sweet longings, that no words can hold,
And passion-secrets, waiting birth." 5
The reserve of Jesus is the background and the
support of his sympathy. The throng that presses
about him seems to drain his strength, and he
seeks the soUtude of the hills or of the lake to
recover poise and peace. Here is the meaning of
those passive virtues which appear to give the note
1 Matt. xi. 27. * John xiv. 1, 2.
2 John xvi. 12. 6 Henry van Dyke, "The Builders."
3 John xvi. 7.

68 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of asceticism to the Gospels. Meekness, patience,
forbearance, silence, — these are not the signs of
mere self-mortification, they are the signs of power
in reserve. They are the marks of one who can
afford to wait, who expects to suffer, who need not
contend ; and all this, not because he is simply meek
and lowly, but because he is also strong and calm.
A touching evidence of this sense of solitude
is offered by the relation of Jesus to his family.
Christian art has here again misled the sentiment
of the devout, and has pictured the mother of
Jesus as continuously aware of his profoundest
hopes, from the time of his boyhood, when she
" pondered these things in her heart," to the time
of the Cross, when she stood near by, leaning on
the disciple whom Jesus loved. The fact is, how
ever, that in many glimpses of the domestic relations
of Jesus we see him separated from an undiscern-
ing, if not an alienated, home. When his parents
find their boy in the Temple, they keep his sayings
indeed in their hearts, but they do not open their
minds to those sayings. On the contrary, it is
written that "they understood not the saying
which he spake unto them." Even when his teach
ing had gained many other followers, his own kin
had no ears for his message. What infinite pathos
is in that scene at Capernaum, when the people
crowd upon him so that he and his friends cannot
find time to eat, and his mother and his brethren
cannot " come at him for the press " ! They come,
it is plain, to take him from the dangers which be-

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST 69
set him. Perhaps they see the political peril that
threatens him ; perhaps they lament his break with
the sacred law ; perhaps they even doubt his san
ity. At any rate, they come, not to listen, but to
deter, and Jesus is smitten with the poignant reaU-
zation that a man's foes are of his own household.
If he is to go on, it is to be alone. Those who
should know him best are the last to comprehend
him. With a look of profound sorrow, yet of un
deterred resolution, he turns from those who are
dearest to him and gives himself to that larger sym
pathy, which is at the same time personal solitude.
" And he looked round on them which sat about
him and said : ' Behold my mother and my brother ;
for whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is
my mother and my brother and my sister.' "
Here, indeed, is the pathos of the character of
Jesus ; yet here also we approach the source of his
strength. It was in this detachment of nature, this
isolation of the inner Ufe, that Jesus found his com
munion with the Ufe of God. At this point his
ethics melt into his religion. The crowd press
round him and he serves them gladly, and then it
seems as if his nature demanded solitude for the re
freshment of his faith. The tide of the spirit ebbs
from him in the throng, and when he goes apart
he is least alone, because the Father is with him.
Thus, from utterance to silence, from giving to
receiving, from society to solitude, the rhythm of his
nature moves; and the power which is spent in
service is renewed in isolation. He is able to bear

70 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
the crosses of others because he bears his own.
He can be of use to men because he can do
without men. He is ethically effective because he
is spiritually free. He is able to save because he
is strong to suffer. His sympathy and his solitude
are both alike the instruments of his strength.
How, then, shall one approach the type of char
acter which is derived from him? It must be
approached, not as a survival of monastic or senti
mental ideals, inapplicable to the conditions of
the modern world, but as a form of power, express
ing itself in sympathy and fortifying itself in soli
tude. Its evidence is its effectiveness. It is able
to serve the world, as an unstinted river flows
down among the utilities of life because it is re
plenished from the eternal hills. It has its abun
dance and its reserves, its stream of service and its
peace in solitude ; and the power which moves the
busy wheels of the life of man is fed from the
high places of the life of God.

CHAPTER III
THE ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
We turn from the Teacher to the teaching. If
the character of Jesus Christ was, in any degree,
such as has been indicated, it must have stamped
itself upon his message, and have prescribed the
moral type which should reproduce the spirit of his
life. The creation of such a type was his funda
mental desire. The Christian character was his
chosen instrument for the establishing of the King
dom of God.
What, then, is the nature of the character which
thus proceeds from the teaching of Jesus Christ ?
From what roots does its growth begin, and into
what f oUage does its growth expand ? What were
the moral traits which Jesus most immediately wel
comed, and the moral defects which he most un
qualifiedly condemned? What was his hierarchy
of ethical judgments, his classification of the su
preme virtues and of the nethermost sins? By
what steps of growth, according to his teaching,
does the good Ufe expand, from root to flower
and from flower to fruit ? What are the enemies
without and the weaknesses within which threaten
its vitaUty? Is the moral type which represents
71

72 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
his influence fit to survive among the conditions of
the modern world ?
These questions appear to lead one directly to the
most obvious aspect of the Gospels. Jesus was a
teacher. More than forty times in the New Testa
ment he is thus addressed. The immediate subject
of his teaching is equally unmistakable. It is con
duct, life, practical morality, character. Other
aspects of his message, indeed, lead one beyond
the sphere of ethics ; but his first teaching is of
duty, conscience, humanity, love, the conduct of
life. "Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine,
and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man,
which built his house upon a rock."1 "Come, ye
blessed of my Father; . . . inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me."2 If, therefore, Jesus,
the Teacher, is primarily a teacher of character, it
would seem as if nothing could be simpler than to
determine what that character is which he desires,
and how it comes to be.
When, however, one turns to this elementary
inquiry, he is at once confronted by two uses of the
New Testament which gravely obscure this ethi
cal teaching. They are the two chief heresies of
Biblical interpretation. The first is the heresy of
the casuist ; the second is the heresy of the dog
matist. The casuist turns to the Gospels to find ethical
prescriptions applicable to specific ills. He looks
1 Matt. vii. 24. 2 Matt. xxv. 34, 40.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 73
for a code of maxims. Conduct presents itself to
him as a piecemeal, incidental, fragmentary series
of decisions. God says, Thou shalt, and, Thou shalt
not, as each problem of duty stands in the way.
The Gospels, however, when thus approached, are
among the most baffling of documents. They deal,
it is true, with cases of conduct, and record specific
moral judgments ; but these detached instructions
give, in themselves, no consistent law of life. On
the contrary, they are often perplexing and some
times contradictory in their teaching, and the casu
ist, having determined his conduct by one precept,
is surprised to find himself reproved by another
teaching from the same lips. "Resist not evil,"
says Jesus, and the casuist erects this precept into
the essence of the Gospels,1 only to find the teach
ing of non-resistance refuted by Jesus himself as
he scourges the traders from the Temple or says to
his friends : " I came not to send peace, but a
sword " ; " He that hath no sword, let him sell his
garment, and buy one." 2 " Swear not at all," says
Jesus again, and the casuist proceeds to prohibit
1 Tolstoi, " My Confession," tr. 1887, p. 190 : "Whoever shall
not utterly renounce all the cares and advantages of the life of the
body, cannot fulfil the will of the Father." " My Religion," tr.
1887, p. 94: "This simple, clear, and practical fourth command
ment (Matt. i. 33-37), ' Never resent evil by force, never return
violence for violence ; if any one beat you, bear it ; if any one
would deprive you of anything, yield to his wishes ; if any one would
force you to labor, labor ; if any one would take any of your prop
erty, abandon it at his demand.' "
2 Matt. x. 34; Luke xxii. 36.

74 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
judicial oaths as an offence to Christ, only to find
Jesus himself, when "adjured by the living God,"
ready to make solemn reply.1 " I will give unto
this last, even as unto thee," 2 says Jesus, and the
casuist justifies by this teaching a doctrine of social
equality ; but no sooner does he turn a few more
pages of the Gospels than he hears Jesus say :
" For he that hath to him shall be given : and he
that hath not, from him shall be taken even that
which he hath," as though nothing were more
obvious than the truth of essential inequality.3
These paradoxes in which Christian casuistry
finds itself involved indicate that the Gospels should
be approached in quite another frame of mind.
They are not collections of maxims, or utterances
of oracles, or text-books of rules to be learned by
rote. They are, on the contrary, the simple record
of unstudied discourse as it was applied to varied
incidents and needs. It is the occasionalism of the
teaching which gives it the appearance of para
dox. Jesus is not weighing his utterances as though
the world were listening; he is dealing with the
immediate problem of the individual soul. " What
he taught," said Robert Louis Stevenson, " was not
a code of rules, but a loving spirit ; not truths, but a
spirit of truth ; not views, but a view." The task of
the modern student is not to detach his aphorisms
from their circumstances and give to each a uni
versal validity, but to discern through these occa-
1 Matt. xxvi. 63. 2 Matt. xx. 14.
8 Mark iv. 25.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 75
sional utterances the principles which control the
Master's mind. It is easy enough, as has been
wittily said, to die for an idea, if you have but
one idea. It is easy enough, one might add, to
define the Christian character, if you reduce that
character to a single virtue. The casuist's trouble
begins when he is confronted by the richness and
many-sidedness of the teaching of Jesus. Idolatry
of a single saying may be as misdirected as indiffer
ence to it. The nature of the Christian character
is not comprehended by an incident or an aphorism,
though the incident or aphorism may disclose some
aspect of the teacher's comprehensive plan. The
prescription of a physician in a given case may not
be a remedy which is universally appUcable, but
the physician's dealing with the single case may
disclose the prevailing habit of his mind. Here
is the difference between the teaching of Jesus and
that of the Pharisees. They were expounding pre
cepts of casuistry; Jesus was teaching principles
of moraUty. Instead of washings and tithings, he
set forth the comprehensive commandments upon
which the whole law and prophets hung. Christian
casuistry tabulates the precepts of the Gospels;
Christian ethics seeks the mind of Christ.1
1 Herrmann, "Die sittl. Weisungen Jesu," 1904, ss. 48, 65 : "The
most common and most pernicious misconception of the interpre
tation of these sayings is their acceptance as invariable laws. . . .
Such an interpretation is possible for those only who care more
for his words than for himself. . . . The teachings of Jesus are to
be accepted, not as exhibitions of an arbitrary power, or flashes of
inspiration, but as rays of light from his consciousness. They are
not cords to bind us, but signs to point out the way to liberty."

J6 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
On the other hand is the heresy — or more accu
rately, perhaps, the orthodoxy — of the dogmatist.
To this habit of mind the Gospels offer, first of all,
a body of doctrine, and the Christian character is a
consequence of the Christian creed. "Give me,"
a distinguished theologian has remarked, " the In
carnation and Resurrection of Christ, then Sin,
the Atonement and Justification follow. ... In
the defence of Supernatural Christianity every
thing is at stake. . . . The great battle of the
twentieth century ... is a struggle between a
Dogmatic Christianity, on the one hand, and an
out-and-out naturalistic philosophy, on the other."1
Much there certainly is, both in the New Testa
ment and in religious experience, which justifies
this view of the Christian religion. Righteousness,
says Paul, " shall be imputed, if we believe on him
that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead." 2
Is it not rash, however, to maintain that in the
defence of Dogmatic Christianity "everything is
at stake " ? Much, no doubt, that is precious is
involved; but is there no path leading to the
Christian life except through consent to Chris
tian dogma ? Does not this demand for doctrinal
assurance as antecedent to the sense of sin re
verse the natural order of Christian experience,
and bar the door of discipleship to many who
are trying to find their way to Jesus Christ?
A different spiritual chronology meets one in
1 F. L. Patton, " Princeton Theological Review," January, 1904,
pp. 135, 136. 2 Rom. iv. 24.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER TJ
the first three Gospels. To the Apostle Paul,
as in the prevailing tradition of the later Church,
intellectual apprehension of Christ was antece
dent to obedience; in the teaching of Jesus
himself, obedience is, as a rule, the path to intel
lectual apprehension. Jesus accepts as a disciple
many a hearer whose confession of faith would
satisfy few modern churches; he commends the
centurion's faith as greater than that of Israel ; he
says to responsive and receptive lives : " Great is
thy faith " ; " Thy faith hath saved thee " ; even
though these lives are uninstructed in dogma and
untried in loyalty. In short, his teaching is not of
a logic of doctrine, but of a way of Ufe. " Follow
me," he says, " Take up thy cross, and follow me " ;
and along the way of the Christian character may
be discovered the articles of the Christian creed.
The dogmatist overloads the teaching of Jesus with
theology, while the casuist strips that teaching
of its comprehensiveness and wealth. Casuistry
obscures the Gospels with legalism ; dogmatism
complicates the Gospels with intellectuaUsm. One
reduces Christian ethics to a meagre conformity;
the other involves Christian ethics in a superfluous
complexity. Between the two stands the teaching of
Jesus, — not casuistical or theological, but vital, per
sonal, creative, — the recognition and development
of the capacity to follow him, the creation of the
Christian character.
How does he approach this ethical enterprise ?
What was the process of moral growth which he

78 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
desired to quicken ? From what root of spiritual
vitality does it proceed ? What is to be its issue
for oneself and for the world? These are ques
tions, not of Christian casuistry or of Christian
dogmatics, but of what a distinguished scholar has
called "psychological hermeneutics," 1 — the dis
covery of the spiritual intention of the Teacher
through the varied expressions of his word and
work. It is as though one were permitted to pass
through the antechambers of an artist's home,
where his finished products are set, and to enter
an inner room, where he may watch the master
busy with his creative task. With a peculiar sense
of reverent intimacy one passes by many other
aspects of the life of Jesus which have detained the
attention of the world, and enters that closet of the
spirit where the Master may be seen in the very
act of moulding men into the character which he
desires. What then, we ask once more, are the elements
and principles of the Christian character? The
answer to this question may perhaps be best ap
proached if one begins with the opposite inquiry.
What was the kind of character which received
from Jesus special condemnation and rebuke, as
though he felt it to be peculiarly impervious to his
1 " Psychologisch orientierte Hermeneutik," Julicher, " Gleich-
nisreden Jesu," I, 73, cited by Weinel (op. cit.), ss. 53, 54: The
succeeding pages are an admirable instance of the method of
" discovering, through the ideas behind the words, the spiritual
experiences behind both."

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 79
teaching and almost incapable of being moulded
into his plan ? Here at once we meet one of the
most surprising traits of the teaching of Jesus, and
find ourselves called to reconsider our common
classification of virtues and sins. Jesus regards
with extraordinary leniency some of the faults
which the world most unqualifiedly condemns, and
on the other hand judges with surprising severity
much which the world lightly forgives or mistakes
for exceUence. He is infinitely patient with the
precipitate Peter ; he cannot bring himself to
despair of the treacherous Judas; he is a friend
of those whom the world calls sinners ; he accepts
those whom the world calls lost.
What is it, then, in the hierarchy of morals which
seems to him more disheartening and irremediable
than either cowardice or treachery or passionate
sin ? Strangely enough, it is the sin of self-suffi
ciency, the disease of self-importance, the spiritual
satiety of the Pharisaic mind. This is what stirs
Jesus to unmeasured and pitiless rebuke. "Thy sins (
are forgiven thee," he says to a sinning woman ; /
"Woe unto you, hypocrites," he says, on the J
other hand, to the bewildered representatives of
orthodox behef. What does this reversal of judg
ment mean ? It means that, to Jesus, character
is not an attainment, but a growth. Under any
test of attainment it was monstrous to condemn
a Pharisee and pardon a PubUcan. It is not sur
prising that to many Usteners the teaching of
Jesus seemed to reverse all reasonable standards

80 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of respectability and sin. Jesus, however, is con
templating a higher righteousness, a new ideal,
a perfected character; and he observes that the
obstruction of his purpose which is most insur
mountable is not experience of sin, but incapacity
for growth. The Pharisees had been attacked by
ethical atrophy. They were unteachable, unsus
ceptible, impenetrable, self-satisfied. The German
agitator Lassalle said of the working-men whom
he desired to inflame with a sense of wrong, that
the chief cause of his exasperation with them was
their inability to appreciate how much they lacked,
their " Bedurfnisslosigkeit," the absence of the
sense of need. Something of this same sense
of helplessness seems to have fallen upon the
mind of Jesus as he saw how much the Pharisees
needed and how unconscious of need they were.
They did not want to learn ; their minds were
closed ; their self-sufficiency was an absolute bar
rier to the message of Jesus. " There is no cure,"
said Frederick Robertson, " for ossification of the
heart." " Publicans and harlots," said Jesus, " shall
enter into the kingdom before you."
This point of departure in the ethics of Jesus
may be further indicated by observing the estimate
which his teaching sets on childhood. The Chris
tian world has become so familiar with the scene
where Jesus sets a child in the midst and says,
" Except ye turn and become as little children, ye
shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of heaven," 1
1 Matt, xviii. 3, xix. 14; Mark x. 15; Luke xviii. 17; compare
Ps. cxxxi. 2.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 8 1
that it hardly considers how unprecedented a teach
ing is here given. It is in reaUty a new note in the
history of ethics. Greek philosophy takes no seri
ous account of chUdren except to train them for
maturity. Children did not nestle in the arms of
Plato or Aristotle as they held their grave dis
course. Such a saying as " Whosoever therefore
shaU humble himself as this Uttle child, the same
is greatest," 1 would have seemed in Athens or
Rome sheer fanaticism. It might even now be
questioned whether it is a reasonable doctrine
which makes the child the teacher of the man.
Is a child, even though guileless, nearer to the
Kingdom of God than a ripened and discipUned
character ? Would not Jesus have been more of a
philosopher and less of a sentimentahst if he had
set among his disciples some clear-eyed youth
or some wise, calm man, and said : " Except
ye become as one of these, ye cannot enter the
Kingdom " ?
The real nature of the teaching of Jesus, it
must be answered, is precisely indicated by the
phrase which he employs. He does not say that
the childlike spirit is inherently better than the
spirit of the man. He does not promise that it
shall possess or govern the Kingdom. He affirms
only that it is the condition of entering the King
dom. It is not that the child is better than the
man, but that the child stands at the gate of the
ideal and takes the first step toward the Christian
1 Matt, xviii. 4.

82 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
character. Docility, receptivity, open-mindedness,
the eager, listening spirit of the little child — this
is the polar opposite of the unteachable, satiated,
closed heart of the Pharisee, and as the latter
blocks the way to the kingdom, so the former
opens its door. The teaching of Jesus does not
end with the praise of childhood, or confound
childlikeness with childishness. Better things
than childhood has to offer are to be gained
through the discipline and stress of Ufe, yet
entrance to the Kingdom is attained by no other
door than the unspoiled, natural, spontaneous
spirit of the child, and many a sophisticated and
unteachable life will find with a shock of surprise
that it has lost the key.1
Other aspects of the teaching of Jesus may ap
pear to some minds antiquated or temporary or pro
vincial, but this preliminary demand has pecuUar
significance for the conditions of the modern world.
Pharisaism in its grosser forms of hypocrisy and
affectation is certainly not a characteristic sin of the
present age. Candor and contempt of disguise are
prevailing virtues. Yet the underlying state of
1 The same attitude of mind commends itself to scientific ob
servers. See the noble letter of Huxley to Charles Kingsley,
" Life and Letters," 1900, I, p. 219 : " Science seems to me to
teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which
is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to
the will of God. Sit down before the fact as a little child, be
prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly
wherever and to whatever end nature leads, or you shall learn
nothing. ... I have only begun to learn content and peace of
mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this."

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 83
mind in which Jesus found the first obstruction to
his purpose is still conspicuous in great numbers
of prosperous and respectable lives. It is the
condition of spiritual satiety. Circumstances have
been so propitious, social traditions so sufficient,
and moral inheritances so ample, that many per
sons are now Uving on a kind of left-over morality,
as they are Uving on bequeathed estates, and arrive
at ethical decisions through transmitted momentum
rather than through personal initiative. These
persons cannot be classified with sinners. Their
instincts make for refinement, self-culture, and
physical vigor. They maintain, as a rule, a pas
sive conformity to conventional ethics; but they
have lost the capacity for moral enthusiasm, for
vigorous decision, for spiritual vision, for social
hope. What is this epidemic disease of modern civiU-
zation which fastens so easUy on many of the
most favored Uves ? It is what the Germans call
" Verfettung" — the overnourished and satiated
condition created by lack of moral exercise. It
is what athletes describe as staleness, the disease
of high condition, the loss of moral freshness, the
incapacity to respond to strain. Precisely this
inertia and unresponsiveness Jesus observed in
the respectable Pharisees and contrasted with the
teachableness and eagerness of the Uttle child. A
large part of what is called modern society has
forfeited the taste for simpUcity and the appetite
for righteousness, which are conditions of moral

84 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
health. It is often fancied that some great tran
sition in science or philosophy is responsible for
this neutraUty and lassitude of mind. The fact
is, however, that spiritual insensibiUty is not an
intellectual but a moral defect ; not a philosophical
development but an ethical reversion ; the sheer
indolence and satiety of a loose and ungirt habit
of life.
Such, then, is the first condition of the Christian
character. Its primary quality is teachableness.
It is unattainable except by the open mind and
the receptive heart. Two men go up to the Temple
to pray, and of the two the Pharisee is in attain
ment the better man. He fasts, gives tithes, and
scorns the sins of the Publican. He is, however,
satisfied and unteachable, and his prayer is un
availing. The other is a self-confessed but peni
tent sinner, and there is to Jesus more hope in
self-reproach than in self-complacency. Two sons
"go their different ways, — the one to evil, the other
to self-regarding virtue, — and Jesus does not teach
that the prodigal is better than his brother. The
contrast is between satiated virtue and the conscious
emptiness of sin. Far as the prodigal has wandered,
he has not lost his hunger for love; near to the
father as the elder brother has remained, he has
remained self-seeking ; and to the father's ear there
is more hope in the penitent cry : "lam not worthy
to be called thy son," than in the unfilial complaint:
"These many years have I served thee and thou
never gavest me a kid."

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 85
Character, in other words, is marked, not by its
achievements, but by its desires. It is an unfold
ing process, a way of education, a moral evolution,
thwarted by self-sufficiency, and beginning in docil
ity and love. A child may be immature in morals
as he is in form, but Jesus looks upon the child
with the love which he felt for all budding and
ripening things. He sees the far-off Divine event
toward which this moral creation moves. The im
perfect is significant as a prophesy of the possible.
The ethics of Jesus are not static, but dynamic.
He was what the modern world would call an
ethical evolutionist. Life to him is not a condition,
but a mode of motion. His God is a Uving God ;
his discipleship is a Uving process. " I am come
that they may have Ufe, and may have it abun
dantly."1 If this is the starting-point of the ethics of Jesus,
then even in the primary demand for teachableness
there are involved two other principles which
characterize and illuminate all his message. One
principle considers the persons to be made into
Christians, the other principle considers the way
they are to go. One represents the ethical faith of
Jesus, the other his ethical method. The first is
his teaching concerning moral growth, the second
1 So, Wellhausen, " Israel, und Jud. Gesch.," 5te Aufl., 1904,
s. 384: "Religion ceases to be the property of experts (eine Do-
mane der Virtuosen) . No art is essential, no refinement of erudi
tion as of Rabbis, but a simple and open mind." (The whole
chapter abounds in insight and eloquence.)

86 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
is his teaching concerning moral decision. On the
one hand his acceptance of the tentative beginnings
of character indicates his confidence in moral
growth. He does not expect the Christian charac
ter to bloom in a day. Having found a receptive
soul, he gives it time to grow. His loving observa
tion of the ways of nature teaches him the analogy
of the growth of the spirit. " First the blade," he
says, " then the ear, after that the full corn in the
ear." a Let the sower find good ground and he may
wait for a harvest. Human nature, like the wheat-
fields of Palestine, is a soil where the good naturally
grows. It has potential capacity. The forces of
the universe conspire in its germination. Even
lives which seem sterile or blighted have in them
the latent good. Precisely as the law of growth
gives significance to each season, however harsh,
and to each storm, however violent, so the law of
growth in the Christian character sanctifies child
hood, dignifies experience, and forbids despair.
Where there is growth there is life, and where
there is life there is hope. What Jesus has in
mind is not primarily the condition of a life, but
its direction. It was no accident which gave to
the Gospel its original title of "the Way." Saul's
persecution was directed against those who were
" of this Way " ; 2 and Paul, the convert, disputed
with those " who spake evil of that Way," so that
there "arose no small stir concerning the Way."3
1 Mark iv. 28. * Acts ix. 2.
8 Acts xix. 9, 23. So, "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," tr.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 87
The Christian reUgion is a movement, an organism,
a faith, a hope, a door, a way. Let a Ufe be but
moving along the way of Jesus, and, Uke a river,
the very motion is a cleansing process, and instead
of the malaria of the stagnant pool there is the
self-purification of the flowing stream.
Here we meet a characteristic of the moral judg
ments of Jesus which to many minds has seemed
unjustified and extreme. It is his unconquerable
faith in moral capacity, even when such faith
seemed mistaken or misplaced. The third Gospel
narrates that when the infant Jesus was brought
by his parents into the Temple, a devout old man
took the child in his arms and prophesied that
through this child the thoughts of many hearts
should be revealed. That is precisely what has
happened to multitudes of lives through the teach
ing of Jesus. He has revealed to them the thoughts
of their own hearts, and taught them that their best
self was their true self. When the prodigal is
stirred to repentance, he " comes to himself." He
had been dead and is alive again. He had lost
himself and now it is himself whom he finds. The
faith of Jesus in men produced faith in themselves,
and they discovered within themselves thoughts
and motives of which they themselves had not
dreamed. It was faith in growth which justified
this faith in man. People who seemed to them-
Hitchcock and Brown, 1884, p. 3: "Two ways there are, one of
life and one of death, but there is a great difference between the
two ways."

88 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
selves fixed in some condition of unworthiness or
dulness or sin appeared, to Jesus, as children in
the spiritual Ufe, material for education, seed of the
Kingdom ; and his communication to them of the
capacity for growth made them that which they
desired to be.
Two dramatic examples illustrate this quality in
Jesus. In one his faith was justified, in the other
it was disappointed, but in both ahke the princi
ple is clear. On the one hand is his apparently
unjustified faith in Peter. What could be less de
scriptive of that unstable character than to say
that it should be a rock on which the Church might
be built? Was ever a man less Uke a rock and
more like shifting sand than Peter ? May not the
group of disciples have fancied that the saying was
but the playful irony of the Master ? Yet Jesus
discerns in the man a capacity for leadership, be-
Ueves in Peter even when Peter does not beUeve in
himself, steadies his impetuous moods of devotion
and denial, until at last the sand of his character is
hardened by the friction of experience into sand
stone, and Peter becomes the rock which his
Master prophesied that he should be.
On the other hand is the still more perplexing
relation of Jesus with Judas. How was it possible,
one asks himself, that the plot of betrayal should
ripen without detection or loss of faith ? We seem
placed between two difficult alternatives. Either
Jesus, it may be said, was not discerning enough to
discover the purpose of Judas, or else, knowing the

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 89
end, he still permitted a traitor to sit among the
disciples and break with them the paschal bread.
In the one case he seems to be an unobservant
leader ; in the other case he seems to be playing a
merely dramatic part. When, however, one recalls
the faith which Jesus had in potential morality,
neither his insight nor his sincerity seems at fault.
The truth appears to be that Jesus could not bring
himself to surrender Judas, and hoped to the last
that faith in him as a disciple might save him from
the fate of a betrayer. The incidents of the last
days when thus interpreted are unspeakably touch
ing. Jesus is trying by force of confidence to hold
the disciple from his shame. This faith is doomed
to disappointment, yet the better nature in which
the Master trusted overtakes the traitor when it is
too late, and Judas hangs himself in self-reproach.
It is startling to think how Uttle was needed to re
duce the character of Peter to that of Judas, or to
lift the character of Judas to that of Peter. Both
were traitors, yet in neither did Jesus find it possi
ble to abandon hope. Both, he felt sure, still pos
sessed the capacity for moral growth ; both he trusted
with a limitless patience and desire. One friend
he saved, and history has almost forgotten the sin
of Peter in the tradition of his leadership. The
other friend Jesus seemed to lose, but even the
story of the betrayal is illuminated by the inextin
guishable faith of Jesus in potential repentance, and
by the fact of that repentance when alas ! it was
too late.

90 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Moral education, in other words, begins, accord
ing to Jesus, not only with teachableness in the
scholar, but with the Teacher's faith in the person
taught. Jesus expects much of men. There is
little evidence that his chosen friends were men
of extraordinary capacities or opinions. They were
plain people, with simple fears and hopes, won
ders and alarms, yet Jesus, through his faith in
them, makes of them heroes and martyrs.1 "Ye
are the light of the world," he says, "ye are
the salt of the earth " ; " Be ye therefore per
fect " ; and their natures, easily tempted to doubt
or self-seeking or denial, respond at last to his
great faith.
A Christian preacher, addressing young men,
said not long ago that, just as children were at
tacked by so many infantile diseases that it was sur
prising to see them grow up, so youth was attacked
by so many sins that it was surprising to see young
men grow up good. Precisely the opposite of this
teaching is that of Jesus. It is natural, he would
say, for young men to be good, just as it is natural
for a child to grow up. Hindrances they may have,
and crises, and reversals, and some seed will faU
on stony and thin soil ; but in ethics as in nature

1 Wernle (op. cit.), s. 65 : " He [Jesus] enlarges the sphere of
moral possibilities as a scientific discoverer enlarges the sphere
of the scientifically possible. . . . The disciples of Jesus were
originally no heroes ; the whole relation of Jesus with them, up
to the denial by Peter, proves this. Yet Jesus made of them a
force strong enough to defy the world."

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 9 1
the law of life is not of unproductiveness and
decay, but of growth and fruition. The teacher
is to expect character, as the sower is to expect a
crop. This is the first lesson of Jesus, the Teacher,
to all who profess to teach. Education in any
form demands, first, the pupil's teachableness,
and, secondly, the teacher's faith. No teacher
can penetrate the closed and satiated mind; but
the most open mind will shrink from the faithless
teacher. To draw out the latent gift, to discover
the unexpected capacity, to beUeve in the pupil
even when he does not beUeve in himself — this
is the test of the teacher ; and to have this faith
justified by the ripening mind and wUl — this is the
teacher's great reward. Nor is this test to be ap-
pUed to the education of the mind alone. The
first condition of all effective leadership is faith in
those who are to be led. Many a parent forfeits,
by the habit of distrust, his right to guide his
child; many a leader finds his foUowers fail him
because they are driven, not led. The good shep
herd goes before, and need not turn his head to
see if the sheep are following. They know his
voice, and foUow because he is sure they wUl.
His faith in them kindles their loyalty to him.
When Washington at VaUey Forge was reviewing
his tattered troops, he paused before one feeble
regiment and said, " Gentlemen, I have great con
fidence in the men of Connecticut," and the nar
rator says, " When I heard that, I clasped my

92 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
musket to my breast and said, 'Let them come
on. x
Such, then, are the two great assumptions of the
teaching of Jesus. The Christian character begins
in moral teachableness and is developed by moral
faith. It assumes first, humility, and secondly, self-
respect. Here is a union of traits which at first
sight seems difficult to maintain. If a character
is blessed with docility and child-likeness, is it not
likely to forfeit initiative and self-confidence ? If,
on the contrary, it conceives of itself as infinitely
precious, is it not likely to be tainted by self-impor
tance and conceit ? This antinomy, however, Ues on
the surface only of morality. Cheap morality may
discourage effort ; vulgar piety may despise teach
ableness ; but in the deeper experiences of the
spirit, receptivity and activity are not conflicting
elements, but reciprocal and cooperative. The
more one perceives how little he has done, the
more the unattained persuades him. The more
sincerely one cries, " God be merciful to me a
sinner," the more justified in hope he goes down to
his house. It is not the sense of ineffectiveness that
is impenetrable ; it is the sense of sufficiency. The
1 So, John Watson, " The Mind of the Master," 1897, PP- 23^>
239 : " He [Jesus] moved among the people with a sanguine ex
pectation ; ever demanding achievements of the most unlikely,
never knowing when He might be gladdened by a response. An
unwavering and unbounded faith in humanity sustained His heart
and transformed its subjects. . . . With everything against Him,
Jesus treated men as sons of God, and His optimism has had its
vindication."

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 93
child, sorry that he knows Uttle, is eager to know
more. The poor in spirit inherit the earth. Self-
effacement is the beginning of self-respect. There
is a sorrow, as the Apostle Paul said, which is unto
death ; but there is also a sorrow which is unto Ufe.
Here is the root of that quality in the teach
ing of Jesus which has often been described as
positiveness. The ethics of the Old Testament
are in large degree negative and prohibitory ;
Jesus translates their " Thou shalt not " into the
" Thou shalt " of the Gospels. His judgments con
cern themselves, not so much with things done
which should not have been done, as with things
left undone which should have been done. Among
the sins which he especially condemns are unpro
ductiveness, unfruitfulness, ineffectiveness, indeci
sion. The servant is rebuked, not because he has
lost his talent, but because he has not used it. It
seems to him a sufficient defence to say : " Lo,
there thou hast that is thine," but because he has
not put his money to interest he is cast into dark
ness. The Priest and the Levite do no positive
harm to the man by the wayside, but their sin of
omission is their self-condemnation. This quality
of positiveness of the ethics of Jesus is the corol
lary of his doctrine of growth. The prohibitions
wbich leave life where it now is, are supplanted
by the summons to action and the demand for
progress. " Take up thy cross," says Jesus, not to
lean on it, but to follow, with the cross on the
shoulder. " Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit

94 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
the Kingdom prepared," not for the resigned, the
patient, the passive, but for the giver of food to
the hungry and the opener of eyes to the blind.
The chief contention of Jesus was not with sinners,
but with the negatively good. Pharisaic ethics,
the code of prohibition, seemed to him the chief
obstruction of moral growth. One might obey all
these precepts of abstinence and remain an un
profitable servant. His demand is not merely for a
good life, but for a life that is good for something ;
teachable that at last it may itself teach ; growing
that at last it may be fruitful. First the grain, he
teaches, then the ear ; but both for the sake of the
corn which shall feed the hungry. It is not the virtue
one has attained or the things one does not do which
makes one a Christian. One may be saved by
temperament from many faults which degrade, or
saved by prudence from the mistakes of the pre
cipitate; and this illusion of sufficiency may lead
him with all sincerity to pray : " I thank thee that
I am not as other men are " ; but the judgment of
Jesus probes this illusory judgment with its positive
test. What hast thou done ? it asks. What gain
has God from his investment in thy soul; what
fruit from thy sowing; what added strength or
peace or courage, through the loan of life com
mitted to thy care ; what fidelity as of the faithful
steward ; what watchfulness as of the trusted
porter; what integrity as of the righteous judge?
When Mazzini heard a man described as good,
he asked, " Whom then has he saved ? " It is

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 95
the question of Jesus. The Christian character is
not free from blunders or failures; but it grows,
through its blunders and failures, toward effective
ness, serviceableness, merciful judgment of others,
humble judgment of itself. Its end is not re
straint, but generosity. It asks not, " What shall
I leave undone?" but "What shall I do?" It
mounts on stepping-stones of the dead self to higher
things. It finds itself by losing itself ; and finaUy
it wiU be judged, not by its accompUshments, but
by its growth ; not by its achievements, but by its
ideals." And this one thought of hope and trust comes with its
healing balm,
As here I lay my brow in dust and breathe my lowly psalm ;
That not for heights of victory won, but those I tried to gain,
Will come my gracious Lord's ' Well done,' and sweet effac
ing rain."
If, however, the roots of the Christian character
begirt in teachableness and are persuaded to their
growth by faith, what is the form which this growth
assumes as it emerges into the air and Ught ? What
is the first expression of the Christian character,
the point where, as it were, it breaks through the
soil of consciousness and rises into the stalk of the
conduct of Ufe? What is the specific organ of
moral growth, the significant factor of moral expe
rience ? At this point we are confronted by the
various psychologies of religion, enumerating the
possible forms which the spiritual life may assume.
Is religious experience primarily expressed through

96 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
the reason or the emotions or the will? Is char
acter determined chiefly by thought or feeling or
volition ?
The attention of scholars has been chiefly di
rected to the place of the first two elements of
experience. Either the reason or the emotions has
seemed the dominant spiritual force. On the one
hand, the distinction of human life is discovered
in its rational nature. The truth makes men free.
" To place the essence of religion in feeling is self-
contradictory, for a religion of mere feeUng would
not even know itself to be religion." " The spirit
ual life of man . . . rests on the fact that reason
or self-consciousness is the form of an infinite con
tent." x On the other hand, it has been urged that
a spiritual experience which is universal and com
manding cannot be reserved for the elect few who
may approach it by the way of reason. "The
measure of knowledge is not the measure of piety."
At one point only does the spirit of the individual
have free access to the spirit of the Eternal, as an
unobstructed stream empties itself into the sea.
It is in the high exaltation of the emotional life.
" Your feeling, in so far as it expresses the uni
versal life you share, is your religion." 2 Here is
the only way of revelation open to all comers.
There is no aristocracy of the spirit. If the life
of God is to reach the life of man without discrimi
nation of privilege or condition, it must be in those
1 John Caird, " Philosophy of Religion," 1880, pp. 170, 291.
2 Schleiermacher, " Reden fiber die Religion," 1843, ss. 180 ff.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 97
emotional experiences which all can share. " The
spirit searcheth aU things, yea, the deep things of
God." In this perennial issue of philosophy between
the rationaUsts and the mystics, there is much
on either side which finds itself verified by the
teaching of Jesus. It was his knowledge of God
which gave him tranquilhty and power. " No man,"
he said, " knoweth the Father save the Son, and
he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him."1 It
was, again, his high accessions of spiritual emo
tion which lifted him above intellectual doubt.
" I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and
earth, because thou hast hid these things from the
wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes." 2 Yet, however rational may be the phi
losophy of Jesus, and however exalted his moods
of mystic insight, it was neither to the reason
nor to the emotions that he turned for the initial
dynamic of the spiritual Ufe. His appeal is prima
rily to the third function of spiritual expression,
the will. He expects from men a moral initia
tive. " Follow me," he says. " SeU aU that thou
hast, and foUow me. Take up thy cross and
foUow me. Whosoever shall do the will of God,
the same is my brother and sister and mother.
Be it unto thee even as thou wilt." In other
words, his teaching is primarily ethical. What he
first demands is not verified truth or exalted emo
tions, but moral decision. He deals with many
1 Matt. xi. 27; Luke x. 22. 2 Matt. xi. 25.
11

98 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
persons whose opinions are far from fixed and
whose feelings are far from purified ; but Jesus
takes these lives just as they are, and welcomes
the determination of the will as the test of dis
cipleship. The moral decision may be accom
panied by a clarifying thought or by an emotional
surprise, or by both. It is as if one had lost his
path in the dark, but, summoning his will to try the
way that seemed most straight, should find it lead
ing quickly to a well-known road and the lights
of home. The first step toward safety is in the
decision to proceed. The will takes up the march,
and the mind and heart follow. Among the ob
stacles to the spiritual life on which Jesus prima
rily dwells is the sin of indecision : " He that is
not with me, is against me. He that gathereth
not with me, scattereth. No man can serve two
masters." Neutrality is iniquity. Pilate, though
he finds no fault with Jesus, is responsible for his
fate. On which side? asks Jesus. What is the
direction of desire ? " Seek first the Kingdom of
God and His righteousness, and all these things
shall be added unto you." The Christian charac
ter has not, indeed, through this initial decision
reached the port toward which it moves; but it
is, as it were, launched for its voyage, when the
blocks that held it are struck away by one sharp
impulse of the will.1
1 So, Wernle (op. cit.), ss. 50, 65 : " Jesus, simply because he is a
Jew, is far removed from speculation concerning God. . . . But it
is equally true that Jesus is no mystic, and demands of no one a

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 99
No aspect of the teaching of Jesus is more sig
nificant than this appeal to the will. It is not
a question of origins. Psychology may stiU with
justice urge that the beginnings of the rehgious
life must be sought, either in the primitive specula
tions of the reason or in the primitive agitations of
mystic self-absorption in God. . . . The teaching of Jesus is a
summons to the will, the faculty of free decision. . . . He doubts
not that one can ; his question is whether one wills." Modern
psychology has arrived at a similar recognition ofthe priority of the
will in spiritual growth. Percy Gardner, " A Historic View of the
New Testament," 1901, p. 37: "In the nature of man the supreme
element is will, which dominates alike feeling and thought " ;
p. 86 : " According to the teaching of the Founder of Christianity,
the will of God is revealed to men in two ways — in the external
and visible world as law, in the moral world as ideal. . . . The
rehgious view of the will is set forth in the Gospels as it is taught
nowhere else." Still more striking is the evidence of spiritual auto
biography. "I resolved," wrote John Wesley in 1725, "to devote
all my life to God, all my thoughts, words, and actions, being
thoroughly conscious that there was no medium, but that every
part of my life, not some only, must be a sacrifice either to God or
to myself, that is, in effect, the devil." " I have been for the last
hour on the seashore," wrote Charles Kingsley on his twenty-
second birthday, " not dreaming, but thinking deeply and strongly,
and forming determinations which are to affect my destiny through
time and eternity. Before the sleeping earth and the sleeping sea
and stars, I have devoted myself to God, — a vow never (if he
gives me the faith I pray for) to be recalled." So, Bushnell (cited
by W. Gladden, "Pioneers of Religious Liberty in America," 1903,
p. 231) : '"Have I ever consented to be, and am I really now, in
the right ... to live for it, to make any sacrifice it will cost me, —
in a word, to be in wholly right intent, and have no mind but this
forever? ' This was Horace Bushnell's conversion. He has found
God. . . . The ethical test will be applied, then, unflinchingly to
theology."

100 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
the emotions. The supremacy of the will marks,
no doubt, a later stage in social evolution, a late
arrival in the history of the soul. Moral decision
obviously assumes some knowledge of the objects
of choice, and some feeling of attraction or repul
sion concerning them. This confession, however,
is precisely what gives its exceptional character to
the teaching of Jesus. Its primary emphasis is
given to a factor of experience of which primitive
religion takes scarcely any account. He is not
concerned with defining a philosophy of religion,
but with communicating a practical religion. He
is dealing, not with primitive man, but with devel
oped man, and touching motives of the spiritual
life which are not effective in less evolved religions.
The origins of faith may be discovered in imagina
tion and wonder, in crude cosmologies, in the sense
of dependence, in emotions of hope or fear ; but a
new step is taken by the teaching of Jesus in his
summons to the will. The Christian religion, as
Kant taught, is primarily a moral religion. It
creates, like other religions, a theology ; it feels,
like other religions, an emotion; but neither the
theologians nor the mystics touch the characteristic
note of the teaching of Jesus. What he desires
first of all to communicate is not a system of
doctrine or a rush of feeling, but an ethical de
cision. Before his public ministry begins he with
draws from human companionship and faces the
special temptations of conscious power, of self-
display, and of worldly glory, which threaten him.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER IOI
Once and for all he fortifies his will against them,
and from that time to the day when he gives back
his life to God, saying, "Not my wiU, but thine,
be done," 1 the dominating factor, both in his expe
rience and his teaching, is not inteUectual achieve
ment or emotional exaltation, but ethical decision.
" My meat," says the fourth Gospel, " is to do the
will of him that sent me." " I seek not mine own
wUl, but the will of him that sent me."2 The
Sermon on the Mount concludes with the accept
ance, not of those who confess " Lord, Lord,"
but of those who "do the will of my Father."3
"Whosoever shall do the wUl of God," says Jesus,
again, " the same is my brother, and my sister, and
mother." * First obedience, then insight ; first de
cision, then precision ; first the following of Jesus,
and later the understanding of him, — such is the
sequence of Christian experience. When modern
psychology announces that "The wilUng depart
ment of our nature . . . dominates both the con
ceiving department and the feeUng department,"5
what is this but a reiteration of the teaching of the
fourth Gospel, " He that willeth to do the will shall
know of the doctrine " ? Among the baffling truths
which invite and defy the reason, and the tides of
feeling which rise only to faU, the beginnings of
1 Luke xxii. 42. s Matt. vii. 21.
2 John iv. 34, v. 30. * Mark iii. 35.
5 William James, " The Will to Beheve," 1897, p. 114. So also,
p. 141 : " To the end of time our power of moral and volitional
response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ of com
munication therewith we shall ever possess."

102 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Christian experience are, according to the teaching
of Jesus, in the conversion of the will.
" Our wills are ours, we know not how,
Our wills are ours to make them thine."
What is there more disheartening in the history
of Christian thought than the meagre recognition
of this appeal of Jesus to the will ? Systems of
theology have been devised in which every virtue
is ascribed to God except that of simple goodness,
and every hope offered to men except that of
moral choice. Creeds have been confidently pro
mulgated by millions as expressing the essence of
the Christian faith, which one might utter in entire
sincerity without committing himself to personal
holiness or ethical decision. It is not surprising
that the vulgar estimate of the Christian character
should gladly seize on this defect, and fancy that,
to the follower of Jesus, dogma is more than obedi
ence and feeling more than righteousness. No
single cause, perhaps, has done so much to alienate
plain minds from the Christian religion as this di
vorce of faith from morals. Elsewhere the issues
of life are chiefly determined by the will ; the best
law in other affairs is the law of conscience; the
highest occupation to which most men attain is the
simple effort to do their duty ; and if the teaching
of Jesus gives another principle of conduct, derived
either from speculative opinion or from emotional
excitement, it becomes an unreal and ineffective
teaching among the ordinary problems of unsophis
ticated men.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER IO3
The fact is, however, that Christian disciple
ship begins, where aU excellence begins, in the
dedication of the will to goodness. The first
demand of Jesus is not for orthodoxy or ecstasy,
but for moraUty. Seek first God's Kingdom and
His righteousness, — this is not the whole of the
Christian faith, but it is its first article. The first
step to take in the foUowing of Jesus is the resolu
tion to be good. The IsraeUte without gufle is fit
to be a disciple. Further disclosures of truth and
further accessions of feeUng Ue along the way of
the Christian character; but the direction of its
growth is determined by the wiU. The reason is
Uke the sails of a ship, which give momentum and
lift ; the feelings are the waves, thrown off tumult-
uously on either side ; but the rudder, which gives
direction and control to Ufe, is the will.
At this point, however, where the Christian life
hears the summons to the will, there enters a
further experience which gives a new quality of
poignancy and pathos to the story of the Christian
character. It is that experience which the theolo
gians have described as the sense of sin. The will,
invited to this definite decision, becomes aware of
habits and tendencies whose significance has been
unrecognized and whose mastery has been un
checked. It is as though the landscape of life
were blurred in outline because seen through an
iU-adjusted glass, and as though the action of the
wiU threw the picture of life into focus, so that
one saw the perspective cf conduct with a new

IO4 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
sense of vividness and precision. As the horizon
pf incUnation thus takes shape, there comes to the
beholder a shock of surprise and shame. Gross
and startling shapes, at once repelling and irre
sistible, grow distinct and recognizable. The
action of the will discloses an area of conduct in
which are seen volcanic craters, threatening an
outpouring of evil, from which one recoils with
horror and alarm. Life, which had appeared a
tranquil and orderly growth, seems disordered,
divided, undermined.
Such, for example, was the first effect of Chris
tian discipleship in the experience of so intelli
gent and controlled a man as the Apostle Paul.
He had learned his lesson in the Law, and had
conformed to its ethical demands. " I had not
known sin," he says, " but by the law. ... Where
fore the law is holy, and the commandment holy,
and just, and good." x Then came the new sum
mons to the Christian character, and that decision
of the will disclosed to Paul a chasm, into which
he had not before looked, and which separated
his Hebrew legalism from his Christian ideal.
"Sin, taking occasion by the commandment,
wrought in me all manner of concupiscence." He
becomes aware of a divided, unreconciled, volcanic
life. Conduct comes into focus before him, and
the foreground of this scene is a battle-ground
where two forces struggle for control. " The good
that I would, I do not, but the evil that I would
1 Rom. vii. 7-12.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 105
not, that I do. . . . Oh, wretched man that I am,
who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? "
What shall be the end of this spiritual struggle? It
cannot be ignored or pacified or arbitrated. It must
be fought through. The antinomy of character must
be overcome, the strength of sin subdued, until
Paul is able at last to say : " The law of the spirit of
life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law
of sin and death. . . . Thanks be to God, which
giveth us the victory through our Lord, Jesus
Christ." x It was a victory well won, yet through
aU his later life the apostle bore the scars of the
battle, and through all his teaching funs this sense
of internecine conflict between flesh and spirit,
the old man and the new.2
When one turns from this tragedy of the con
science which the Epistles of Paul describe, to the
story of moral experience told in the first three
Gospels, the climatic change which has already
been observed is again immediately felt. The
landscape of ethics is not volcanic and appalUng,
but sunny and inviting, as of a home country of
the wilL " Jesus," a distinguished German Evan-
geUcal has remarked, " as the preacher of his
Gospel should take note, has spoken Uttle of sin
in general, and has proposed no doctrine of it, least
of aU a doctrine of its origin."3 If it were true
1 Rom. viii. 2 ; I Cor. xv. 57.
2 Compare Jacoby, "Neutest. Ethik," 1899,5s. 266 ff., and Stevens,
"Theology ofthe New Testament," 1899, pp. 338 ff., with notes.
8 Beyschlag, "Neutest. Theol.," tr. Buchanan, 1895, I» 9°'

106 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
that the outlook upon life of the " twice-born " is
" the wider and completer," or that " the ' heroic '
or ' solemn ' way in which life comes to them is
a 'higher synthesis,'"1 then the character, not
of Jesus, but of Paul, would represent the moral
ideal of Christians, as indeed it has dominated
much of Christian teaching. The moral ex
perience of Jesus is not a revolution, but an
evolution. He meets his own temptations, but he
meets them with preparedness and tranquillity,
and repels them with authority and contempt.
" Get thee hence, Satan : for it is written, Thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only
shalt thou serve." 2 The reUgion of Jesus is
not that of the "twice-born," but that of the
" healthy-minded." A Christian priest who holds
an infant in his arms and says : " Forasmuch as
all men are conceived and born in sin, ... we be
seech Thee . . . that this child, being delivered
from Thy wrath, may be received into the ark of
Christ's Church," has learned his lesson from the
Psalmist 3 or from the Apostle Paul 4 rather than
from him who said : " Suffer Uttle children to
come unto me. . . . Whosoever shall not receive
the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not
enter therein." 5 Paul, the man of cities, feels a
1 William James, "Varieties of Religious Experience," 1902,
p. 488. 2 Matt. iv. 1-11.
8 Ps. li. 5 : " I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother
conceive me." * Rom. v. 9-12. 6 Mark x. 15.

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 107
kindred turbulence within himself ; Jesus, the in
terpreter of nature, feels the steady persuasiveness
of the sunshine of God, and grows from childhood,
in wisdom and stature and favor with God and
man. Beneath these differences, however, there is a
deeper sense in which the recognition of sin is as
characteristic of Jesus as of Paul. The decision
of the will which Jesus asks, while it may not be a
dramatic catastrophe, is none the less a dehberate
turning or conversion of the nature toward teach
ableness and childUkeness. " Except ye turn,"
he says, "and become as Uttle children, ye shall
in no wise enter into the kingdom of Heaven." J
The first caU of Jesus is the call to repentance.
" From that time forth Jesus began to preach and
to say, Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at
hand " ; 2 and his disciples, taught by him, " went
out and preached that men should repent." 3
Jesus is not concerned with Sin, as an abstraction.
The word, as used not less than forty times in the
Epistle to the Romans, is used but once in the
Synoptic Gospels. Of sins, on the contrary, and
sinning, and sinful men, Jesus has much to say.
He traces acts to their source in the will. " From
within, out of the heart of men, proceed evU
thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts,
covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an
1 Matt, xviii. 3.
2 Matt. iv. 17, xL 21; Mark i. 15, vi. 12; Luke xv. 7, 10 ;
xxiv. 47. 8 Mark vi. 12.

108 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness." J Jesus, not
less imperatively than Paul, sets at the gates of the
Kingdom the plain demand for a will turned toward
righteousness, and a conscience sorry for its specific
sins. By what road one shall have come to this
gate, and through what storms of the spirit he
shall enter it, does not seem to Jesus essential to
say. The fourth Gospel, in sharp contrast with
the reticence of the Synoptics, reports him as pre
scribing a process of spiritual agony like that of
physical child-birth : " Ye must be born again,"
says Jesus to Nicodemus ; and Christian teaching
has often found in this travail of the conscience
the only sign that the Christian character was
born. To Jesus, however, the form is less than
the fact. Whenever and however the decision is
reached and the will is turned, there the same victory
which Paul describes, of the spirit over the flesh,
the new man over the old, is won. Compromise is
as far from the calm confidence of Jesus as from
the brave wrestlings of Paul. " If thy right hand
offend thee, cut it off ; if thine eye offend thee,
pluck it out." To Jesus as to Paul the sense of a
divided will is the essence of the sense of sin.2
1 Mark vii. 20-23.
2 Compare, Jacoby (op. cit.), ss. 56 ff. : " It is noticeable that the
judgment of Jesus concerning sin is without severity. It is a sick
ness (Matt. ix. 12, xv. 14 ; Mark ii. 17 ; Luke v. 31), a folly (Matt.
v. 26 ; Luke vi. 49 ; Matt. xxv. 1-13). . . . Three sins are empha
sized by Jesus, — hypocrisy (Matt, xxiii. 13-31), hardheartedness
(Matt. vi. 15; xviii. 23-35), and worldliness (Matt. vi. 24;
Luke xvi. 13, xii. 15-21, xvi. 19-26). Wernle, "Die Anfange

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER IO9
At what point in experience, it may be asked,
does this consciousness of conflict, this cry of the
life rent by two forces, occur ? Is it the beginning
of reUgious experience or is it the corollary of an
antecedent act of wiU ? Is it a sign of the fall of
man or of the rise of man ? Is it a witness of
death or of birth ? It has often been regarded as
evidence of the remoteness of human Ufe from
holiness, the mark of incapacity for moral growth,
the witness of aUenation from God. To Jesus, on
the contrary, and indeed to Paul, this poignant
appreciation of unworthiness is a step, not toward
the darkness, but toward the light ; a mark, not
of alienation from goodness, but of the emer
gence of character from impenetrabiUty to dociUty,
from the self-satisfaction of the Pharisee to the
spirit of the Uttle chUd. The sense of shame, the
confession of sin, the cry for forgiveness, are expe
riences which meet one, not on his way down, but
on his way up. The consciousness of sin is the
prophecy of redemption. The publican crying,
"God be merciful to me a sinner," is already less
a sinner. The prodigal saying, " I am not worthy
unserer Religion," 1901, ss. 658.: "The Hebrew sense of sin . . .
had grown to a form of disease. . . . Paul is its great interpreter.
. . . Jesus banishes this morbid sense of sin. It disappears before
him hke the mist before the sun. . . . One would forfeit his right
relation to God if he refused to claim God's pardon. . . . Before
this faith in the pardon of a fatherly God vanish the beautifully con
structed theories of sacrifice and substitution. The one parable of
the prodigal son disposes of them. The theology of sin, with sin
itself, is left behind by the disciple of Jesus."

110 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
to be called thy son," is in fact claiming his sonship.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
The confession of sin softens the soil where the
seed of the Kingdom grows. Jesus is the friend
of sinners, not because he is indifferent to sin or
because he confuses evil with good, but because the
character he desires to establish grows out of self-
humiliation and regret. " I am not come," he says
in lofty satire, " to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance." " Come unto me all ye that labor and
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." x
Such, then, are the roots of the Christian char
acter. A teachable life is stirred to faith in poten
tial goodness and responds with a decision of the
will. Conscious of its faults, confessing its follies,
chastened by its new ideals, it yet feels a new sense
of power, and turns to the way of Jesus, as roots
reach up into the light ; and as it thus rises above
the ground of consciousness, it is surprised to find
its imperfect beginnings and undeveloped traits
welcomed by the Master who has bidden it turn
that way. It is the surprise which the first blades
of spring might feel as they ventured forth into
the cold and found the sunshine waiting for them.
These, says Jesus, are his disciples, — plain people,
1 So, Stevens, "Theology of the New Testament," 1899, p. 99 :
" He [Jesus] saw men as they were. ... In all their unfilial in
difference and disobedience they were still, in his view, Sons of God,
susceptible to the appeal of a Father's love, and capable both of
coming to themselves — their true, normal selves — and of return
ing to their Father."

ROOTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER III
with half-formed purposes and half-grown charac
ters, likely to blunder, quick to misinterpret, still
tempted to be ambitious, contentious, hesitating,
even unfaithful ; still crying : " Lord, we believe,
help thou our unbeUef " ; yet welcomed because
turned toward the Ught, teachable in temper, able
to grow, converted in will, finding the Way. The
roots of the Christian life, fixed in the soil of
moral loyalty and unhindered by the weeds of
hypocrisy, unteachableness, or love of Mammon,
normally grow toward the new moral type ; and the
patient Sower, walking his furrow, awaits the har
vest, when, from these germinating beginnings,
under the sunshine of God, will some day issue the
ripened fruit of the Christian character.

CHAPTER IV
THE GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
The beginnings of the Christian character are
in the childlike temper, the teachable nature, the
responsive will. Repentance enters where self-
sufficiency may not tread. Imperfections, mistakes,
blunders, are not, to Jesus, insuperable obstacles.
What he welcomes is capacity for growth, open-
mindedness, the turning of the will ; and finding
these, he trusts himself and his cause to persons
who have little else to offer him except the will
to believe. Up through the consciousness of sin
grows the Christian experience, until from the ini
tial decision of the will there issues at last a fair
and expanding flower of character.
What, then, is the form which this growth of the
Christian character assumes; the perfect fruit of
this ethical process ? The answer to this question
may be approached by recalling three great words
in the teaching of Jesus which together express the
moral ideal of the Christian character. Of these
three words the first represents especially the pre
vailing tone of ethical teaching in the first three
Gospels ; the second recalls to us the more intimate
utterances of Jesus himself ; while the third, though
appearing throughout the record, is peculiarly

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 113
characteristic of the fourth Gospel. The words
seem to represent distinct moral types. One sug
gests a character which is upright but severe;
another a character which is gentle but soft ; the
third a character which is large but vague ; yet
taken together these three words form a logical
sequence of ethical definition, and each in turn
contributes to the growth and is essential to the
completeness of the Christian character.
The first of these three great words is Righteous
ness. It was no new word to Hebrew tradition,
but among the most familiar attributes ascribed to
God, and the most essential virtues demanded of
man. "If we observe to do all these command
ments," says the Book of Deuteronomy, "it shall
be our righteousness " ; x " He shaU judge the world
with righteousness," says the Book of Psalms.2
" God that is holy shall be sanctified in righteous
ness," says Isaiah.3 When, therefore, those who
listened to the teaching of Jesus heard him repeat
the ancient word and demand of his followers that

1 Deut. vi. 25.
2 Ps. xcvi. 13 ; So, lxxii. 2 ; Is, ix. 7, xi. 2, 4, xxxii. I.
8 Is. v. 16. Compare Wendt, "Teaching of Jesus," tr. Wilson,
1897, I, 257: "We must bear in mind that, in the Old Testament
phraseology, which governed the religious language of the Jews in
the time of Jesus, and which he himself adopted, the word ' righteous
ness ' had a wider signification than that of the Greek word ' Sinaio-
<riv-t\ '. . . . Righteousness in this sense is the most general
designation for the pious God-pleasing disposition or conduct of
men which is opposed to sin."
1

114 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
they should seek first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, it may well have seemed to them that
his message was a simple reiteration of the Law
and the Prophets whose teachings they knew so well.
Jesus is, however, in fact utilizing this large and
sacred word of Hebrew tradition to open the way
along a path which was familiar to his hearers
toward an end which they had failed to see. His
preaching was, indeed, the well-known summons
to righteousness : " Blessed are they that hunger
and thirst after righteousness." x " Then shall the
righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom
of their Father." 2 Is this righteousness, however,
that same trait of rectitude and conformity of
which the Law took account ? Yes, Jesus answers,
it is essentially that which they of old time have
preached. His message reproduces the original
intention of the Law. "Go ye and learn what
that meaneth," he cites from Hosea ; " I desired
mercy and not sacrifice."3 "I am not come to
etesttQX, DUt to fuml'" Yet Righteousness, as the
word is used- by Jesus, though it may legitimately
claim the ancient title, is immediately distinguished
by him from the common usage. "Except your
righteousness," he says, "shall exceed the right
eousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall
in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." i
Righteousness had become the word which gave
its authority to the external, legal, ceremonial
1 Matt. v. 6. 8 Hosea vi. 6 ; Matt. ix. 13, xii. 17.
2 Matt. xiii. 43. 4 Matt. v. 20.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER II5
conformity, whose yoke lay with oppressive weight
upon the spirit of Israel. "Being ignorant of
God's righteousness," wrote Paul, "and seeking
to estabhsh their own righteousness, they did not
subject themselves to the righteousness of God." x
To dehver his people from this yoke, to recall
them from the righteousness of conformity to the
righteousness of the heart, to revive the spirit of
righteousness within the forms of rectitude — that,
indeed, was to restore the original definition of
righteousness, yet it involved such revolutionary
demands as to be a practically new command.2
Thus, the first task of Jesus is to legitimatize the
word which he has spiritualized. He is not come
to destroy, yet the righteousness which the Law
appeared to teach becomes the first object of his
attack. His first controversy is with conformity,
1 Rom. x. 3. Compare the suggestive view of J. H. Ropes
(Journal of Bibl. Lit. 1903, p. 211), "'Righteousness' and 'The
Righteousness of God' in the Old Testament and in St. Paul,"
p. 227 : " We have here a significant and instructive illustration of
the fact that Paul the Pharisee, like his Master, turned back from
the problems and dreams of his contemporaries to the words of the
Prophets of Israel, and that he found in them with right the heralds
of the Gospel of Christ."
2 H. Holtzmann, "Neutest. Theologie," 1897, s. I78: "The Ser
mon on the Mount, in its announcement of the ethical programme
of Jesus, discriminates between ' justitia ' and ' jus.' Its theme is that
' higher righteousness,' which is the ideal of Jesus. Righteousness
is conduct regulated by the standard of the perfection of God. . . .
When Jesus commends those who hunger and thirst for such right
eousness, the profoundest desire of Israel, its thirst for the Living
God (Ps. xiii. 2), gets its highest ethical expression."

Il6 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
conventionalism, externalism, legalism. Righteous
ness had become, as a distinguished scholar has
said, " not so much a moral quality as a legal sta
tus."1 Rectitude by statute had supplanted right
eousness of the heart. Was, then, the teaching of
Jesus conservative, in reviving the earlier law, or
radical, in rejecting the popular faith ? It was
both. Throughout the Old Testament had been
heard from time to time the same note of spiritual
righteousness. " Man looketh on the outward
appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart,"2
says the Book of Samuel. " Search me, O God,
and know my heart" ; " Create in me a clean heart,
O God," 3 repeat the Psalms. " I, the Lord, search
the heart," i teach the Prophets. To this thread of
spiritual tradition Jesus attaches himself. Not a
jot or tittle of the Law is to be disturbed by him.
In great detail and by a series of instances he
illustrates his interpretation of the ancient word,
the righteousness which- was not that of the
Pharisees, but which was the heart of the Law
and Prophets. " Ye have heard that it was said by
them of old time . . . but I say unto you." 5
The earlier righteousness had concerned itself
with overt acts : " Thou shalt not kill " ; the new
1 Robertson Smith, "The Prophets of Israel," 1882, p. 71:
" The ideas of right and wrong among the Hebrews are forensic
ideas ; that is, the Hebrew always thinks of the right and the wrong
as if they were to be settled before a judge."
2 I Sam. xvi. 7. * Jer. xvii. 10.
8 Ps. cxxxix. 23, li. 10. 5 Matt_ v. 21-28.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 117
righteousness searched the heart: "If thou . . .
rememberest that thy brother hath aught against
thee." The former righteousness took account
of unchaste conduct: "Thou shalt not commit
adultery"; the new righteousness judged the
desire behind the act : " Whosoever looketh on a
woman to lust after her hath committed adultery
with her already in his heart." The old righteous
ness taught consistency between promise and per
formance : " Thou shalt not forswear thyself " ;
the new righteousness supplanted protestation by
moderation : " Swear not at all." It was the
teaching which inspired Newman to say : —
" Prune thou thy words, thy thoughts control
That o'er thee swell and throng ;
They will condense within thy soul,
And turn to purpose strong."
Those of old time had commended justice,
reciprocity, an eye for an eye, love for neighbors
and hate for enemies ; the new righteousness sup
planted this equation of rights by generosity, for
giveness, the sacrifice of rights, the recognition
of the unrequited beneficence of God : " Love your
enemies, ... do good to them that hate you " ;
" If ye love them which love you, what reward
have ye ? Be ye therefore perfect as your Father
in heaven is perfect." First restraint, then sacri
fice, is the law of the Christian character. Force is
reserved that it may be freely spent. " We Flor
entines," said the old scholar in " Romola," " Uve
scrupulously, that we may spend splendidly."

Il8 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Here is no new code of social laws. Jesus is
not falling in his turn into the legalism against
which he had protested, or defining righteousness
once more in terms of conformity. He does not leg
islate concerning non-resistance or judicial oaths or
self -mutilation ; he substitutes ethical principles for
ethical maxims, and displaces the righteousness
which is hypocrisy or the acting of a part, by the
righteousness which is reaUty or the expression of
a life. Instead of superimposed, external, legal
morality, tied to a life as a flower is wired to its
stalk, the growth of the Christian character is like
the answer of a seed to the sunshine; and this
straight normal growth puts forth, as its first
shoots, the righteousness of self-judgment, self-
control, and self-sacrifice.1
Such is the first word of the ethics of Jesus.
He sets over against each other the conscience
regulated from without and the conscience ap
proved from within, ceremonial conformity and
spiritual morality, rectitude and righteousness, an
ethical code and an ethical ideal. When one frees
this teaching from its Oriental phrases, how modern
1 So, Herrmann, I4ter Evang.-soz. Kong., s. 20 : " How does
Jesus discriminate his ethics from the prevailing teaching? Is it
enough to say that righteousness to him concerns not outward
acts alone, but the inner disposition? . . . This was no new dis
tinction. The word of the Prophets was familiar : ' This people
honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.' . . .
The original element in the ethics of Jesus was the completely prac
tical application of ethical ideas which had already been theoreti
cally developed."

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER Iig
it is ! What is there which so much obstructs a
teacher of righteousness at the present time as the
conventionalism and externalism of modern moral
ity ? The permissible without disgrace, the limit
of the law, the demands of the social code — are
not these the ethical standards which prevail in
pohtical, industrial, and even in domestic Ufe?
Who shall censure a nation for oppression if the
forms of law are maintained; or an industrial
movement for injustice if it escape indictment; or
a home for divorce if the courts permit; or a
church for loss of its soul if it gain the world ?
Conform, consent, avoid excess, march with the
procession, follow the crowd, keep to the middle
of the road — such are the moral exhortations
which the modern Scribes and Pharisees offer, in
many a legislature and home and church, as the
secret of social security and worldly wisdom. At
such a time it is worth recalling that the first pro
test of the teaching of Jesus was against the mo
raUty of conventionaUsm. Ethical judgments, he
affirms, are not to be determined by majorities, but
by principles; not by pubhc opinion, but by univer
sal laws. " The sentiment of virtue," says Emer
son, "is a reverence and deUght in the presence
of certain divine laws." x Such was righteousness
to Jesus. His teaching is not of ethical pruden-
tiaUsm, but of ethical ideaUsm. Conventional duty-
doing is still confronted by that saying which
has always perplexed the prudentialist : "When
1 " Miscellanies," 1875, p. 66.

120 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ye shall have done all those things which are com
manded you, say, We are unprofitable servants :
we have done that which was our duty to do." That
nation follows Jesus which dismisses compromise
and pays the price of justice; that industrial order
commends itself to him which substitutes coopera
tion for competition and peace for force ; that home
is fit for him to enter where domestic unity is not
of the lips or courts or church, but of the heart
and will ; that worship is in his name where form
is less than spirit, and orthodoxy is less than truth.
Righteousness, however, is but the first word of
Christian morals, an ancient word which seemed
to Jesus capable of restoration to its spiritual sig
nificance. As his teaching deepens and broadens, a
second word begins to displace the first, and enters
like a new motif into the music of his Ufe. Right
eousness as it rises from its roots in the will opens
by degrees into a fairer trait, and character blooms
into the flower which Jesus calls Love. This also
was to his hearers no new word. " Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself," said Leviticus.1
" Love ye therefore the stranger," said Deuter
onomy.2 " What doth the Lord require of thee,"
said the Prophets, " but to do justly, and to love
mercy " ; 3 " Love the truth and peace." * It is
the word which Jesus selects from scattered pas
sages of the ancient law, when he is challenged to
1 Lev. xix. 18, 34. 8 Micah vi. 8.
2 Deut. x. 19. * Zech. viii. 19.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 121
name its great commandments.1 It is his answer
to the question : " What shall I do to inherit
eternal life ? " 2 Love then, like righteousness, is
a word which Jesus draws from the tradition of the
past and uses to enrich his ethical vocabulary.
As his teaching proceeds, however, he seems, in
this case, less concerned with establishing the legiti
macy of his definition, or with the contrast between
the old and new ideals of love. Righteousness, in
his teaching, seems to grow unconsciously toward
a fairer bloom, and one can hardly say where the
stalk ends and the flower begins. Love is the
flower of righteousness. The severer word which
suggests self-scrutiny and self-discipline bears,
Uke a stiff stem, the fragrant blossom of self-for-
getfulness.3 To this expression of his desire the
mind of Jesus turns with increasing emphasis as
his ministry proceeds. Not righteousness, but
love, becomes the supreme word of Christian
ethics. The note thus struck in the first three
1 Deut. vi. 5 ; Lev. xix. 18 ; Luke x. 27. 2 Luke x. 25.
8 Stevens, " The Teaching of Jesus," 1901, p. 132 : " Love, then, is
righteousness " ; and, more precisely, " Theology of the New Testa
ment," 1899, p. 104 : " A very slight attention to the words of Christ
serves to show that love and righteousness are for him practically
synonymous, or at any rate that righteousness is included in love."
So, Wendt, "Teaching of Jesus," tr. Wilson, 1897, J» 35°. 358, 363 :
" When we glance over all the various directions given by Jesus
... we are filled with wonder at the elevation and consistency of
His conception of love." So, Harnack, " What is Christianity ? "
tr. Saunders, 1901, pp. 76 ff. : "The higher righteousness and the
commandment of love. . . . This is the third head, and the
whole of the Gospel is embraced under it."

122 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Gospels goes sounding on through the New Testa
ment. It reverberates in Paul's great summary
of the things which abide: "and the greatest of
these is Love." It is heard again like a lingering
echo in the reiterated phrases of John : " Beloved,
let us love one another : for love is of God ; and
every one that loveth is born of God." 1
How strange it seems that this word should have
sunk to the soft and sentimental usage so common
in Christian teaching; that a love which is the flower
of righteousness could be interpreted as a parasitic,
clinging, not to say sensual affection, supported by
no stalk of duty or root of will ! 2 A great part of the
literature of Christian love is a tale of sickly senti
ment rather than a record of maturing righteous
ness. " Jesus," it sings,
"... the very thought is sweet,
In Thy dear name all heart-joys meet ;
But sweeter than sweet honey far,
The glimpses of Thy presence are."
The love which the Gospels describe is as far as
possible from this saccharine sentimentalism. It
is virile, authoritative, rational; not neurological,
but ethical. Love is the corollary of righteousness.
Follow the line of duty and it issues into love.
Seek first God's righteousness and you shall find
1 I John iv. 7.
2 Repelling illustrations in abundance are reported with a devo
tion worthy of a better theme, by W. James, " Varieties of Religious
Experience," 1902, esp. Ch. I, "Religion and Neurology"; Ch,
XI-XIII, " Saintliness " ; Ch. XVI, XVII, " Mysticism."

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 123
the love of Christ. The obligations of morality
are not detached from the privileges of love. The
ancient commandment held both in one law. Love
is not only a dehght, but a duty. " Thou shalt love,"
say the verses cited by Jesus, "the Lord thy God,"
and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
These things, says Jesus in the fourth Gospel, " I
command you, that ye love one another." Love to
man, like love to God, is not an effervescent, pie-
tistic, indiscriminate affection, but the joy of good
ness, the passion of sacrifice, the beauty of hohness.
" O how love I thy law," says the Psalmist ; " Thy
law is my delight." x
This recognition by Jesus of the organic relation
of righteousness and love becomes the more impres
sive when his teaching is contrasted with certain
modern doctrines of moral growth. Mr. Spencer,
for example, teaches that "the feeUng of moral
obligation" is to be ascribed "to the effects of
punishments inflicted by law and pubUc opinion."
By these "is generated the sense of compulsion
which the consciousness of duty includes, and which
the word 'obUgation' indicates, . . . but which has a
merely ' iUusive independence.' " 2 " This remark,"
Mr. Spencer proceeds, "implies the tacit conclu
sion; which will be to most very startling, that the
sense cf duty or moral obligation is transitory
and will diminish as fast as moralization increases.
Startling though it is, this conclusion may be satis-
1 Ps. cxix. 97, 77.
2 "Principles of Ethics," Am. ed., 1893, 1, 126 ff.

124 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
factorily defended. . . . With complete adapta
tion to the social state, that element in the moral
consciousness which is expressed by the word 'obli
gation ' will disappear."
It is not to the present purpose to observe the
consequences of this candid hedonism. In identi
fying the good with the pleasant, it inevitably
confuses acts which are unmoral with acts which
are morally sublime. When Mr. Spencer, for
example, concludes1 that "among the best ex
amples of absolutely right actions" may be named
"fhe relation of a healthy mother to a healthy
infant," because "between the two there exists a
mutual dependence which is a source of pleasure
to both," it is justly replied that the same absolute
goodness might be affirmed of " free lunches . . .
flattery, bribery, concubinage ... all of which
likewise combine advantage to one's self with the
pleasure of the other party concerned." 2 Animal
ism, sensuaUsm, and naturalism become " absolute
morality" when love is detached from obligation;
and the dictum of Mill that "it is better to be
a dissatisfied man than a satisfied pig " becomes
indefensible. Precisely the reverse of this doctrine of emanci
pated and unrestrained morality is the teaching of
Jesus. Obligation is to him not a limitation, but a
foundation. External coercion is indeed outgrown,
as the righteousness of externalism is supplanted
1 p. 261.
2 J. T. Bixby, "The Crisis in Morals," 1891, p. 74.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 125
by the righteousness of God ; but there remains the
more imperative coerciveness of ethical ideaUsm,
the obligation of sacrifice, the imperative of love.
The artist, though he seem free from the laws of
art, is in fact free through his mastery, and behind
his apparent spontaneity are his disciphne and
obedience. It is the same with character. Chris
tian love rests on Christian righteousness. Love
does not outgrow duty ; it grows out of duty, as a
flower grows out of its supporting stalk. " Strong
Son of God, immortal Love," says Tennyson, with
philosophical accuracy as well as poetic insight.
Love to be immortal must be strong. Many a
home has been built on a love which was emotional,
passionate, physical, and has found that, without
an underlying sense of obUgation, it was built upon
the sand. The foundation of a stable love is the
recognition of a common duty. Affection cannot
endure without respect. Love is not created by
law, yet love is not lawless. It is the rational joy
which emerges from right relations. " Love is the
fulfilling of the Law." x As Tennyson finds in
Love a strong Son of God, so Wordsworth finds
in Righteousness the root of Beauty.
" Stern daughter of the voice of God,
O Duty ! . . .
Stern Lawgiver ! Yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face.
1 Rom. xiii. io.

126 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Flowers laugh before thee in their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads,
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and
strong." :
What, then, is the form assumed by this love
which is thus the flower of righteousness ? What
way of expression and what kind of fragrance are
characteristics of Christian love ? Love, answer
the Gospels, is to be known, not by its protesta
tion or adoration, but by its utterance in service.
Love is righteousness appUed to happiness. It is
not mystical rapture ; it is not passive acceptance ;
it is duty done with joy. To love God is not an
act of the heart and soul only, but of the mind and
strength; a rational and effective affection. To
love man is to serve one's neighbor. And who is
one's neighbor ? It is he, Jesus teaches, to whom
one may show mercy.2 Love is mercy, consider-
ateness, sympathy, self-forgetfulness, service.
The teaching of Jesus becomes at this point, as
at so many others, inseparable from the person
of Jesus. If the Christian religion were prima
rily doctrinal, it might have been taught by a
book instead of a person, and have offered a
system instead of a saviour; if it were primarily
emotional, it might have been taught by nature or
experience, in wonder or fear, in joy or pain, by
miracle or sign. A religion which begins in right
eousness and is fulfilled in love must, on the other
1 " Ode to Duty." 2 Luke x. 29, 37.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 1 27
hand, be communicated by a person to a person.
Will is moved by will. Character answers to
character. Love is not felt for a doctrine or a
miracle, but for a person. Christian love is not
vague ecstasy or Ump dependence, but service
based on reverence. " The love of Christ," writes
his apostle, " constraineth us." It is not a vague,
generalized, diffusive affection, but specific, per
sonal, individualized, the direction of desire in the
way of Jesus.1 Christianity, being a way of life,
must have its source in a Life; being directed
toward conduct, must proceed from a Person.
The beginnings of Christian discipleship are not
in knowledge about Christ, or in feelings concern
ing Christ, but in obedience, loyalty, the dedication
of the will, the following of Christ.
Many a preacher of the love of Christ has failed
to take account of the personal relation which is its
essential element. A vast deal of sentiment in
culcated as Christian love has dispersed itself in
atmospheric forms, such as the comprehensive love
of the heathen or the poor or the negro or the
human race, instead of being " constrained " or
compressed into a relation of a person to a person.
The teaching of Jesus deals in no abstract affections.
It addresses itself to individuals through individuals.
The love it commends is the righteousness of one
person applied to the need of another person. One
man is going up the Jericho road and helps another
1 2 Cor. v. 14. Compare the note in Alford's " Greek Testa
ment," 1883, II, 663, with references.

128 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
man by the roadside.1 One woman pours out her
symbolic offering for the sake of One who has
pitied her, and he says : " Her sins which are
many are forgiven; for she loved much."2 The
ancient commandment, "Thou shalt love," is ap
plied, not to general principles or to classes of
persons, but as a law between thy neighbor and
thyself. Thy neighbor and thyself stand for the
moment detached from wholesale programmes of
Christian love, and one is called to discern another
self in another person, and to love even the un
lovely for the sake of the better self one sees.3
Many an impulse of Christian love finds its per
sonal application much more difficult than its
emotional expression. Missionary zeal is easily
stirred by love of a heathen world, but finds an
individual heathen, cast up at one's door, a per
plexing and objectionable problem. Philanthropists
bid us love the poor, but a specific poor person is
often unpicturesque and sometimes repelling. Re
formers would have us love the human race, but
this general principle becomes much obscured
when individuals of a race, black, brown, or
yellow, are brought into objectionable proximity.
Christian love becomes, under such conditions, no
1 Luke x. 30 ff. 2 Luke vii. 47.
8 So H. Holtzmann, " Neutest. Theol.," 1897, 1. =• 176 : "To love
another as oneself is to have the rest of human society with its
external and accidental relations retreat into the background, and
to be confronted by the moral problem of discovering in the single
life of another the life which is thine own. (' Dass in jedem Du
das eigene Ich gefunden und anerkannt werde.')"

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 1 29
easy surrender to general good-nature, but a specific
victory of the will. It stands before the complex
mystery of another personality, and sees reflected
in that neighbor a similar mingling of the desirable
and repelling which it discovers in itself, and, by
applying reflection to affection, is taught tolerance,
justice, patience, and hope. When Paul said, " If
any man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spirit
ual restore such a one in the spirit of meekness ;
considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted,"1
he was but paraphrasing the earUer command :
" Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
No sooner was the Christian rehgion communi
cated to the Uttle company of the first disciples than
it expressed itself in this individualized love ; and
with this awakening of personal responsibihty a new
chapter in the history of phUanthropy began. The
care of the destitute had played a great part in the
Roman world, but it was a wholesale care, a legis
lative and governmental charity, the virtue of "Pro-
digalitas." The "Caritas" of the Christians was
personal, continuous, "constrained," definite, the
love of the Samaritan for "a certain man," the sin
gling out of the individual from the mass.2 " Love
your enemies," says the teaching of Jesus ; but one
cannot love his enemies by the wholesale, when
gathered in a hostile army, a threatening nation, a
corrupt party, a despotic Church. He can, how-
1 Gal. vi. 1.
2 Compare, however, the limitations of this contrast, noted in
"Jesus Christ and the Social Question," pp. 226 ff., and notes.
K

130 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ever, detach the individual whom he must love
from the movement which he must oppose, and be
merciful to the wounded soldier or generous to the
hostile politician or tolerant to the believer in an
irrational creed. The more confident is one's faith
in the righteousness of his own cause, the more
aware he becomes that the same honorable motives
may govern his enemies. Christian liberality is
not a blurring of the truth for love, but a " speak
ing the truth in love." x Christian tolerance is the
outcome, not of loose sympathies, but of firm con
victions. The Christian loves another because he
knows himself. Christian charity is not reckless
almsgiving or mechanical schemes, but the patient
and painstaking gift of a life to a life ; not alms,
but a friend ; not schemes, but a saviour ; the " con
straining " consequence of the love of Christ.
It would seem as if these two words were a suf
ficient summary of the Christian character; and
they are, indeed, the words which the first three
Gospels habitually use to express the ethical teach
ing of Jesus. When, however, he is led to reflect
upon character in its wholeness, and, as it were, to
watch its growth, from the first stirring of the will
through the erect stalk of righteousness to the
flower of love, a third word comes to his lips
which covers the entire moral process, and holds
within itself both righteousness and love. It is the
word Life. The ethical growth which we have
traced appears to Jesus to be a growth toward life,
1 Eph. iv. 15.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER I3I
or an attainment of life, and the end of this process
is described by him as the only condition where
one can be reasonably called alive.
To speak of life as the end of conduct was, again,
no unprecedented use of language. The Old Testa
ment in many noble passages teaches that the issue
and reward of righteousness are life. " In the way
of righteousness is life," says the Book of Prov
erbs ; x " The fear of the Lord is a fountain of
life " ; 2 " He is in the way of life that keepeth in
struction." 3 "The just," says Habakkuk, "shall
live by his faith." 4 " He is just, he shall surely
Uve," says Ezekiel.5 Life, however, as thus affirmed
by the Old Testament to be the reward of con
duct, is, for the most part, Ufe in its ordinary and
physical interpretation. " He asked Ufe of thee,
and thou gavest it him, even length of days " ; 6
" With long life will I satisfy him " ; 7 " In length
of days is understanding." 8 Jesus deals with this
word as he had already dealt with the word Right
eousness. He accepts it as the word which serves
his purpose, but gives it a kind of definition
which to the prevaiUng tradition seemed strange
and new. Parallel with the physical thought of Ufe
and death Jesus discerns, in the earlier teaching, a
spiritual interpretation. "The way of Ufe," says the
1 Prov. xii. 28. 5 Ezek. xviii. 9.
2 Prov. xiv. 27. 6 Ps. xxi. 4.
3 Prov. x. 17 ; see also viii. 35, xv. 24.
* Hab. ii. 4. 7 Ps. xci. 16.
8 Job xii. 12.

132 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Book of Proverbs, "is above to the wise";1
"Whoso findeth Me [Wisdom] findeth life";2
"He that f olloweth after mercy, findeth life." 3 " In
his favor is life," sang the Psalms ; * " With thee
is the fountain of life." 5 " Wisdom giveth life to
them that have it," adds the Book of Ecclesiastes.6
To this golden thread of spiritual meaning Jesus
boldly attaches his teaching, as though the physi
cal appUcation of the word had been incidental,
and its ethical significance were self-evident and
essential. With no sense of strain or novelty he
quietly carries over the whole conception of life
into the world of the spirit, in language which if it
were not so familiar would still surprise and be
wilder.7 When the lawyer cites to Jesus the great
words of the law concerning love to God and men,8
Jesus replies : " Thou hast answered right ; this
do and thou shalt live." Is it of a prolongation
of physical existence that the promise speaks ?
On the contrary, Jesus is recalling the attention of
the inquirer to those sayings in the earlier tradition
which confirm his spiritual teaching : " Ye shall
therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments,
1 Prov. xv. 24. * Ps. xxx. 5.
2 Prov. viii. 35. 6 Ps. xxxvi. 9.
8 Prov. xxi. 21. 6 Eccl. vii. 12.
7 So, Jacoby, " Neutest. Ethik," 1899, s. 12 : " While the concep
tion of life in the Old Testament is not yet detached from its physical
sense, or, at the most, is but striving to be free, life, to Jesus, is a
spiritual possession, which, though already ours in the present world,
will be completely developed only in the world of the spirit."
8 Deut. vi. 5 ; Lev. xix. 18 ; Luke x. 25, 28.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 1 33
which if a man do, he shall live in them." x For
tified by such testimony Jesus does not hesitate to
teach that love to God and love to man are not
merely rewarded by life, but are in fact life itself,
and that until one thus obeys the ancient com
mandment he does not truly live.
The transfer of meaning is most obvious in the
story of the Prodigal. When the penitent boy
returns, his father says of him : " This, my son,
was dead, and is alive again."2 Is this a merely
rhetorical embellishment of the father's welcome ?
On the contrary, it is a statement of fact, of which
physical changes are the imperfect symbol. This
boy had been actually dead and had risen from the
dead. Life and death are incidents of the soul.
A man may be physically alive, and yet may ex
perience the whole process of dying and coming to
life again. At the very beginning of his ministry
Jesus adopts this use of language. He cites to the
Tempter the ancient saying concerning the manna
in the wilderness;3 but he translates this special
saying concerning physical food into a general law
of spiritual Ufe : " Man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God." i Is this a figurative or hyperboUc
use of words ? On the contrary, as Jesus re
peatedly insists, this Ufe, which is not nourished
by bread, and into which one enters when he loves
God and men, is the real life of man. Life and
1 Lev. xviii. 5 ; Neh. ix. 9 ; Ezek. xx. 11 ; and cited, Rom. x. 5.
2 Luke xv. 24. 3 Deut. viii. 2. 4 Matt. iv. 4.

134 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
death are ethical processes. A man may believe
himself to be alive when in fact he is dead. He
may set himself, as he says, "to see life," when it
is but death that he sees. Another man may be
dying in the body, yet thoroughly alive. A man's
life, Jesus teaches, consisteth not in the abundance
of the things which he possesseth ; x it is more than
meat ; 2 the way that leads to it is narrow ; 3 he that
loses it, finds it.4 " If thou wilt enter into life,"
he categorically concludes, "keep the command
ments."8 Such is the word which Jesus borrows from
the earlier tradition and appropriates to his own
purpose. The Apostle Paul inherits from his
Master the same use of language. " To be car
nally minded is death," he says ; " to be spiritually
minded is life." 6 " The law of the Spirit of life in
Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of
sin and death";7 "That we also should walk in
newness of Ufe." 8 More specifically, however, and
with more sustained reiteration, the new word for
the Christian character dominates the fourth Gos
pel. In this philosophical reflection on the mis
sion of Jesus nothing further is heard of the word
Righteousness,9 and the word Love is expanded
1 Luke xii. 15. 4 Matt. xvi. 25. 7 Rom. viii. 2.
2 Luke xii. 23. 6 Matt. xix. 17. 8 Rom. vi. 4.
8 Matt. vii. 14. 6 Rom. viii. 6.
9 The word appears only in the reproof of the Comforter, John
xvi. 8, 10. Compare Wendt, " Teaching of Jesus," tr. Wilson, 1897,
I, 254.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER I35
in significance until it comprehends, not only hu
man affection, but the mystical communion of the
Father, the Son, and the brethren.1 When, how
ever, the purpose of Jesus is to be completely ex
pressed, no definition seems to the author of the
fourth Gospel capacious enough to hold it but the
great word Life. " In him," the prologue begins,
"was Ufe; and the Ufe was the Ught of men."2
" I am the bread of Ufe," 3 goes on the lofty teach
ing, as though explicitly denying that bread for
the body was the staff of real life. " The bread
of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and
giveth life unto the world." 4 " Except ye eat the
flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood," it
proceeds with still bolder spiritualizing, "ye have no
Ufe in you " ; 5 " The words that I speak unto you,
they are spirit, and they are life " ; 6 " That beUev-
ing ye might have Ufe." 7 Thus from its beginning
to its close the fourth Gospel is a psalm of life. The
Ufe which is created and sustained by communion
with Jesus is the only true life. The philosophy of
Christian experience is summed up in that great
utterance which has in it the ring of oral tradition :
" I am come that they might have life, and that
they might have it more abundantly." 8
Nor does this psalm of life cease with its spiritual
interpretation of the present world. It rises to a
stiU higher strain in passages, not exclusively the
1 John xiv. 23 ff., xv. 12 ff. B John vi. 63.
2 John i. 4. 4 John vi. 33. ' John xx. 31.
8 John vi. 35. B John vi. 53. 8 John x. 10.

136 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
possession of the fourth Gospel, where Jesus iden
tifies life with eternal life. When the young
man asks : " What good thing shall I do, that I
may have eternal life?"1 Jesus direct* him to the
immediate duties and sacrifices which confront him,
assuring him that this is the gate, not only of
discipleship, but of all which can be called Ufe.
" If thou wilt enter into life, keep the command
ments. . . . Come and follow me." Eternal life
is not separable from the life that now is. " This
is Ufe eternal," the fourth Gospel more definitely
announces, " that they might know thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." 2
"Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood,
hath eternal life." 3 Life, in its New Testament
usage, has in it what a distinguished preacher has
called a quality of timelessness.4 It is immediately
accessible and it is eternal. One may enter Ufe
here; and once having.entered life, has eternal life.
On through the New Testament echoes the great
word Life, until it dies away in the song of the
New Jerusalem, whose river is a river of life, whose
1 Matt. xix. 16 ff. ; so Mark x. 17 ; Luke xviii. 18.
2 John xvii. 3. So, Jacoby, "Neutest. Ethik," 1899, ss. 18, 23:
" We hear [in the fourth Gospel] neither the demand for neramia
nor the command of Bimuxrivq, nor is there a picture of the
development of righteousness through hunger and thirst. . . . The
Christian life is presented rather as completed unity (' ein in sich
vollendetes Ganzes')."
* John vi. 54.
* J. B. Mozley, "University Sermons," 1876, pp.46ff., "Eternal
Life."

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 1 37
food is from the tree of life, whose crown for
him that is faithful unto death is a crown of Ufe,
and whose final blessing is that whosoever will
shall drink of the water of Ufe freely.1
Here is the largest name for the Christian char
acter. The root of Christian ethics is in the com
mand: Seek first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness ; the flower of this righteousness is a
rational and serviceable love ; but when this growth
from root to flower is surveyed as a whole, the moral
process is found to be nothing else than the process
of life itself. Life to the Christian is the Ufe of
growing character. All else that may be described
as Ufe is but a symbol of Ufe. A man's life con-
sisteth not in the abundance of the things which
he possesseth, whether these things be physical
strength or negotiable securities or titles of respect.
His life consists in the capacity to use his posses
sions, in the discipUne of the body as the instru
ment of the wiU, in wealth of righteousness and
love. " Wealth," taught Mr. Ruskin, " is the pos-

1 Rev. xxi. 6, ii. 7, 10, xxii. 17. So, Wendt, "Teaching of
Jesus," tr. Wilson, 1897, I, 243, 248: "Eternal life ... in the
Johannine discourses, it is spoken of as something already possessed
in the present. . . . Jesus . . . not only exhibits a pecuhar use of
language, but also a peculiar thought, not occurring in the sayings
recorded in the Logia and in Mark." Jacoby (op. cit.), s. 11:
" Jesus defines salvation as life, or eternal life. Life, however, in
its limited sense, is an ethical possession, a disposition, a determina
tion of the will. Righteousness is thus a constituent of life. This
relation had already been indicated in the Old Testament, where
life is described as the fruit of righteous men.:'

I38 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
session of the valuable by the valiant, ... To be
' valuable ' is, therefore, to ' avail towards life.' " J
The teaching of Jesus gives a similar definition of
life. As a man may seem rich and be in fact poor,
so he may seem alive and be in fact dying or dead.
When a man considers the problem of his life, his
first inquiry should be, not whether he is Uving well
or living ill, but whether he is living at all. As he
gives his will to righteousness, and as his righteous
ness grows toward loving service, he is beginning
to live; and as he proceeds in that way of life, he
finds it dissociated from the changes of the body
and a part of the eternal life. " He that hath the
Son," says the Epistle in which love and life seem
most at one, " hath life. . . . These things have
I written unto you . . . that ye may know that ye
have eternal life."2
To this height of utterance rises the ethical
teaching of Jesus. The Christian character is
not a fragmentary collection of detached virtues,
or an occasional spasm of excellence, or a pass
ing vision of perfection. It is a normal, healthy,
gradual growth, like that growth of nature on which
the eye of Jesus was wont to dwell with peculiar
joy; a growth not beyond the power of a plain,
imperfect, hesitating life, if only its will be firmly
rooted in the great decision, which first seeks
righteousness and then devotes that righteousness
to love. " First the blade," teaches Jesus, " then
1 "Unto This Last," Am. ed., 1870, pp. 99 ff.
z I John v. 12, 13.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 1 39
the ear, after that the full corn in the ear " ; x and
the Apostle Paul, though he turns not to nature but
to human Ufe for his figures of speech, describes the
Christian character in the same terms of growth.
The " perfecting of the saints " is like the develop
ment of the body. We are "henceforth no more
chUdren," but come unto a " perfect man," unto
"the measure of the stature of the fulness of
Christ," and " grow up into him in aU things, which
is the head."2
If, however, this series of experiences represents
the normal growth of the Christian character, if
this dedication of the will to service constituted to
Jesus the only life which was rational and secure,
what, one finally asks, is to be the fruit of this way
of life ? What may the Christian character do for
one, or rather what may one do with it ? What is
the practical issue of this kind of life, and what
place may it hold among the circumstances and
needs of modern men ? Such questions are neither
trivial nor contrary to the spirit of Jesus. One of
the most striking evidences of the sanity of his
teaching is the candor with which he points out the
rewards of the Christian character. He does not
exhort his disciples to act without regard to con
sequences or to let goodness be its own reward.
He says, on the contrary: "Your reward is
great"; "Great is your reward"; "Whosoever
shall give to drink unto one of these little ones
1 Mark iv. 28. 2 Eph. iv. 12, 13, 14.

140 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
. . . shall in no wise lose his reward." x Conduct
has fruits which it is reasonable to recognize. As
one sows, so shall he reap. " By their fruits ye
shall know them " ; " For the tree is known by
its fruit." 2 Even of the hypocrites Jesus says :
"Verily I say unto you, They have their re
ward." 3 What, then, is the reward of the Chris
tian character ? Into what condition of conscious
gain does one enter when he has discovered that
righteousness and service make the true life of
man ?
The answers which have been given to this
question have been, as a rule, of two opposite
kinds. On the one hand, the fruit of Christian
discipleship has been found in a condition of joy
and peace, the rapture and exaltation of the saints ;
on the other hand, this culmination of Christian
experience has been found in the sense of escape
from the penalty of sin, the salvation of one's soul.
The first view sees in the Christian character a
way of blessedness ; the second sees in it a way of
deliverance. To the first, the purpose of Jesus
is sanctification ; to the second, it is redemption.
Two widely different moral types thus come to
represent the Christian character. On the one
hand are the calm and holy lives of fair, sweet
saints, tranquil in their desires, radiant in their
faith, inheriting the Master's promise: "Be ye
therefore perfect, even as your Father which is
1 Matt. v. 12, x. 42 ; Luke vi. 23.
2 Matt. vii. 20, xii. 33. 8 Matt. vi. 16.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 141
in heaven is perfect." x On the other hand are the
heroic experiences of victory over stubborn desires
and persistent sins, the bearing of heavy burdens,
the discipUne of sorrow, the way of the cross.
Which of these is the natural fruit of the Christian
character? Is it to be known by its capacity for
joy or by its capacity for pain ? Does it grow most
luxuriantly in the light or in the dark ? If a life
commit itself to the way of the Christian character,
wiU it find that way easy or hard, a way of peace
or a way of strife ? Seeking first the Kingdom of
God and His righteousness, what are the things
which wfll be added ?
There is much in the Gospels which may serve
to fortify each of these views of the fruits of the
Christian character. As one listens to the first
announcement of the message of Jesus, he hears
the Teacher dweUing with fond reiteration on the
sense of blessedness, the assurance of reward, the
substantial peace, which his disciples will attain.
" Blessed," he says in his strain of jubilant con
fidence, "are the poor in spirit, the merciful, the
pure in heart " ; " Blessed is that servant, whom his
lord when he cometh shall find so doing " ; " Come,
ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom
prepared for you." 2 This note with which the
Gospels begin is sustained until their close. The
last gift of Jesus to his disciples, according to the
fourth Gospel, is this sense of an abiding happi
ness which the vicissitudes of life cannot destroy.
1 Matt. v. 48. 2 Matt. v. 3-8, xxiv. 46, xxv. 34.

142 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
" Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto
you. That my joy might remain in you, and that
your joy might be full." x Through all these teach
ings we seem to see the Master trying to communi
cate to his friends the joyous satisfaction and lofty
content which are to issue from the confident ac
ceptance of the Christian character.
No sooner, however, does one listen attentively
to this note of tranquil confidence than he hears
another and, apparently, a dissonant chord, which
seems to be struck in quite another mood. It is
the chord of conflict, the warning of pain, the assur
ance of hardness, the motif oi the cross. " He that
taketh not his cross and followeth after me, is not
worthy of me " ; 2 " Ye shall be hated of all men for
my name's sake " ; 3 " Behold, I send you forth as
lambs among wolves" ;4 "Think not that I am come
to send peace on earth : I came not to send peace,
but a sword." 6 The minor note of suffering breaks
in with recurring cadence upon the simpler har
monies of blessedness, until at last it seems to
dominate the Teacher's mind, and he cries out in
his own great agony : " My soul is exceeding
sorrowful,, even unto death : . . . O my Father, if
it be possible, let this cup pass from me."6
Must one, then, conclude that the character of
Jesus, Uke the character which he commends, is
fundamentally a moral discord ? On the contrary,
it is precisely at this point that we seem to see, be-
1 John xiv. 27, xv. 11. 8 Matt. x. 22. 6 Matt. x. 34.
2 Matt. x. 38. 4 Luke x. 3. 8 Matt. xxvi. 38, 39.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 1 43
neath the unharmonized and fragmentary record,
the expanding experience of Jesus himself, enrich
ing his teaching with more comprehensive elements,
as though with new and subtler harmonies. At the
beginning of his work, with the gracious promises
of his message possessing his mind and pressing to
his Ups, no cloud overshadows his assurance that
what he has to teach is to bring blessedness and
joy. " Rejoice," he says, " and be exceeding glad.
Ye are the salt of the earth, the Ught of the world !
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and per
secute you, and shall say all manner of evU against
you falsely, for my sake."1 Throughout the GaU-
lean ministry runs this buoyant strain of tranquil
confidence, and the voice of the young Teacher has
in it the thrill of delight and the ring of command.
Soon, however, — and the point of transition seems
clearly indicated, — there is heard a sterner note.
"And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the
towns of Caesarea Philippi, . . . and he began to
teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many
things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the
chief priests, and scribes, and be kiUed, and after
three days rise again."2 From the time of this
1 Matt. v. II, 12, 13, 14.
2 Mark viii. 27, 31 ; Matt. xvi. 13 ; Luke ix. 22. So, Fairbairn,
" Philosophy of the Christian Religion," 1902, p. 395 : " At this
point there comes a most extraordinary and unexpected develop
ment in the teaching. Coincident with the new emphasis in
His person is the new thought of His passion. No one could be
less fitly described as the ' Man of Sorrows ' than the Jesus of the
' Galilean springtime.' The idea embodied in Holman Hunt's

144 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
withdrawal the words of Jesus become touched with
a new pathos, and the Beatitudes give way to more
poignant utterances. It is as though a calm and
sunny dawn were succeeded by a sombre and
threatening day. As Jesus " goes up to Jerusalem,"
the shadow of the cross falls across his road. His
way is leading, not through unclouded blessedness,
but through conflict and pain. "From that time
forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how
that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many
things." x " And Jesus going up to Jerusalem took
the twelve disciples apart in the way, and said unto
them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son
of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and
unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to
death, and shall deliver him unto the Gentiles to
mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him." 2
His teaching becomes colored by this assurance
of his destiny. Instead of promises of reward,
there are warnings of conflict and calls to vigilance.
' The Shadow of ihe Cross ' is false to nature and to history. . . .
The morning of His ministry was a golden dawn. . . . The new
development in His teaching occurs, then, at the moment when the
disciples had come to conceive Him as the Christ." So, Wernle,
" Anfange unserer Religion," 1901, s. 53 : " It is a sublime fact that
Jesus first calls for this confession at Csesarea Philippi, where he and
the disciples are threatened by danger. A faith without danger and
suffering had never been commended by him ; . . . but now the
confession is necessary because the suffering is near. . . . Jesus
does not hesitate to make the readiness to suffer a part of disciple
ship." Compare also O. Holtzmann, " Leben Jesu," 1901, Kap. XI,
" Auf heidnischem Boden."
1 Matt. xvi. 21. 2 Matt. xx. 17-19.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER I45
" Whosoever will save his Ufe shall lose it ; he that
shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
Many are called, but few are chosen. If any man
would come after me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross, and follow me." x As the great
word of the Sermon on the Mount is blessedness,
so the word which now springs to the lips of Jesus
is watchfulness. Characters are tested by their
readiness or unreadiness. The wise servant is ready
for the reckoning ; the foolish virgins stand before
the fast-shut door ; the faithful porter watches for
his Lord's coming. " What I say unto you I say
unto all, Watch."2 Thus, the teaching of Jesus
deepens and broadens Uke a river which receives
new tributaries along its course as it proceeds. His
mind had at first turned with delight to the rewards
of discipleship, and he had perceived that the only
rational and permanent happiness was to be found in
the life he had to teach. This doctrine of the end is
now amphfied by a doctrine of the way. The path
to blessedness, though it will reach that end, runs
through a region of misinterpretation, solitude, and
discipline. Jesus does not retract the Beatitudes.
The supreme satisfaction in life is to be gained by
none other than the poor in spirit and the pure in
heart. Blessedness is, however, not separable from
suffering ; and among the things which are added
1 Matt. xvi. 25, xxiv. 13, xxii. 14, xvi. 24 ; Mark viii. 34 ; Luke
ix. 23, xiv. 27.
2 Matt. xxv. I, 13, 19, xxiv. 42 ; Mark xiii. 34, 37 ; Luke
xxi. 36. L

146 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
to one who seeks God's Kingdom is the bearing of
one's own cross.
Such is the paradox of the Christian character.
It is to be blessed, but it is not to be sheltered.
It hears the word : " My peace I give unto you,"
but it hears also that other word : " Not as the
world giveth " ; it is the saving of the soul, but the
saving is through losing ; it is the house built upon
a rock, yet the porter of that house must watch.1
The teaching of Jesus evades neither the prob
lem of pleasure nor that of pain. The Chris
tian character takes account of both. It leads
to blessedness, but it anticipates hardness. Its
end is reached, not by escape from trouble, but
by victory over trouble. The peacemakers are
to be blessed ; but the peacemakers are not so
much those who avoid war, as those who contend
for equity. They are not seekers of peace ; they
are makers of peace. What they are seeking is the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness ; and the
blessedness of peacemaking is thus added to them.
The outcome of righteousness is blessedness ; but
the process of righteousness is sacrifice.
Frankly, however, as Jesus recognizes this para
dox of ethics, which has divided the hedonists from

1 Mark xiii. 34. The contrast of types and the Christian solu
tion of the antinomy are admirably stated by Hugh Black, " Cul
ture and Restraint," 1901, pp. 329 ff. : " In all Christ's teaching on
self-denial it must never be forgotten that it always meant to Him
some larger good. . . . The surrender of self to the will of God
makes all necessary self-denial not worthy to be mentioned."

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER I47
the ascetics, there remains in his teaching a further
quahty which separates him from both these moral
types. Clearly as he notes these incidents of
pleasure and of pain, he is strangely indifferent to
them. The experiences, both of blessedness and
of cross-bearing, are to happen along the way that
he is going, but they are plainly not the end which
he is most concerned to reach. Jesus is neither
hedonist nor ascetic. Pleasure and pain are not
the motives of his conduct, but the corollaries of
his conduct — the environment, as it were, through
which conduct has to go. It is as though one,
whUe walking his chosen path to his predetermined
end, had time to note the scenery along his road
and to take account both of the sunny heights and
sunless valleys through which his pathway led.
The Christian character goes its way with a pur
pose which Ues quite beyond the changeful light
and shadow of its path ; and while it marches
along looks about it on either hand.1
And what is this end toward which the Christian
character proceeds, and in which its growth is f ul-
1 Tolstoi, among many excesses of interpretation, notes this
moral detachment in Jesus (Vol. XXII, " The Christian Teaching,"
tr. Wiener, 1905, p. 458) : "A man who hves a Christian life does
not ascribe any great meaning to his joys . . . but looks on them
as accidental phenomena which meet him on the path of Ufe ;
. . . and does not look upon his sufferings as something that ought
not to be, but looks on them as an indispensable phenomenon of
life, like friction at work." So, Jacoby, "Neutest. Ethik," 1899,
s. 103 : " Jesus applies the motive of reward, but at the same time is
free from it. . . . The essence of reward is eternal life."

148 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
filled? The answer to this question becomes ob
vious when one recalls the total impression which
was made by the character of Jesus himself. The
first effect of his personality upon his hearers was,
as has been said, an effect of power. His word
was with power ; he taught with authority. Behind
his tenderness, his sympathy, his patience, utter
ing itself in his insight, leadership, and tranquillity,
was this quality of force and mastery, the effect of
a commanding personality, the power of character.
Such power may manifest itself both in action and
in repose. There is a power to lead and a power
to calm ; a strength of expression and a strength
of reserve. Both these forms of power were
illustrated by Jesus. His word had power both to
stir and to calm. He was strong to defy and
strong to suffer. He was equally powerful when
he drove the traders from the Temple, and when
again he was accused of Herod and "answered
him nothing." x Nor is the secret of this power
obscure. It lay in singleness of desire. Jesus had
committed himself without reservation to the work
which had been given him to do. His horizon was
clear from obstructing aims. His business was to
preach the Kingdom of God, and this singleness
of desire clarified his mind and gave simplicity and
consistency to his duty. He was sure of himself
because he was not concerned about himself. His
detachment from the world gave him power over
the world. Being lifted up from the world, he
1 Matt, xxvii. 12 ; Mark xiv. 61 ; Luke xxiii. 9.

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER I49
drew men unto him. The secret of his poise of
character was the completeness of his idealism.
He made himself the instrument of his Father's
will, and the blessedness or pain of his experience
was, as it were, the shifting landscape through
which he walked his way.
This quahty of power is the perfect fruit of
the Christian character. In many a vivid phrase
Jesus describes the power which his disciples re
ceive. " Behold," he says, " I give unto you power
to tread on serpents and scorpions." x " And he
caUed unto him the twelve and gave them power
against unclean spirits." " And to them," adds the
fourth Gospel, " gave he power to become the sons
of God." 2 The Apostle Paul reiterates the same
thought: "According to the power which the
Lord hath given me,"3 he says, "that the power
of Christ may rest upon me."4 The Christian
character, that is to say, as it grows through right
eousness to love, is discovered to be not only life
itself, but life at its full power. Character means
effectiveness, force, capacity, serviceableness, an
instrument with which things may be done, a
power by which things may be moved, or resisted,
or overcome. " Character," said Emerson, " is cen-
traUty, the impossibiUty of being displaced or over
set. . . . The natural measure of this power is the
resistance of circumstances. " 5 The purpose of
1 Luke x. 19. 8 2 Cor. xiii. 10.
2 Matt. x. 1 ; Luke x. 19 ; John i. 12. 4 2 Cor. xii. 9.
5 " Essays," 2d series, 1869, pp. 96 ff.

150 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Jesus is not accomplished when character has
become meek, enduring, long-suffering, calm. Be
neath these evidences of self-control there is a
certain volcanic quality in the Christian character,
capable of sudden expression in indignation, pas
sion, or rebuke. The same Jesus who recalled the
prophecy of a Man of sorrows acquainted with
grief, turned upon the traders in the Temple with
righteous wrath and lashed the Pharisees with pas
sionate irony. The same Paul who was an instru
ment of persecution became through the very
passion of his nature the most serviceable instru
ment of the new faith. Leadership, mastery of
oneself and of the world, mark the character
derived from the influence of Jesus Christ. The
teaching of Jesus ends as it began, by rejecting the
self-satisfied, the self-important, the consequential,
and accepting the poor in spirit, the childlike, the
burden-bearing; but his teaching does not end
without imparting to those whom it accepts a new
gift — the gift of power. It promises to the self-
distrustful a new sense of capacity ; to the crushed
a new strength of resistance ; to the insignificant
a place in the world ; to plain people a spiritual
democracy; to the mourners the comfort of self-
forgetting service; to the solitary the sense of
companionship ; to the poor in spirit the Kingdom
of Heaven within. What all these, and many
more ineffective, effaced, and hesitating Uves, most
need is an assurance of significance, a sense of
power; and their response to the ethics of Jesus

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 151
is that of Paul: "When I am weak, then am I
strong." x
Whence does such moral power proceed ? It
issues, as in Jesus himself, from single-mindedness
of desire, and from subordination both of pleasure
and of pain. So long as a character hovers be
tween competing ends, computing the consequences
of pleasure and of pain, balancing the expediency
of self-interest and of self-sacrifice, its spiritual
momentum slackens. It is like a vessel that hangs
in the wind until her steerageway is lost. Move
ment involves decision, as a vessel obeys its wheel.
To seek righteousness first is to have other things
added ; to seek other things first is to find that the
more they are gained, the more of life they sub
tract. The divided life is without moral power.
Control of circumstances is gained by detachment
from circumstances. The only mastery of the
world is for those to whom its apparent issues are
indifferent, and to whom its service is essential.
Only those who are lifted up from the earth draw
men unto them. The world is possessed by those
who are not possessed by it. The momentum of
love is the source of power.
Has such a character a place among the special
conditions of the modern world ? What is it, in
deed, for which such a world is waiting but an
accession of spiritual power ? What are the traits
demanded by the perplexing circumstances of social
and industrial life? They are efficiency, service-
1 2 Cor. xii. 10.

152 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ableness, moral force, strength of character. Insti
tutions, governments, industrial machinery, political
schemes, are elaborately prepared to accompUsh
their ends if they can but be supplied with the
motive power of idealism. How to take command
of circumstances instead of being their slave ; how
to own one's wealth and not be owned by it;
how to rule one's spirit as well as to take a city ;
how to be among the leaders and not among the
led ; how to labor together with God instead of be
coming a cog in some great machine ; how to main
tain peace of mind amid the disasters, illusions, and
tragedies of experience, — this is the cry for power
which goes up from many a Ufe, ensnared — as
whose is not ? — in the mechanism and materialism
of the world.
To this cry for moral power among unprecedented
conditions there comes with new force the answer
of Jesus Christ. One cannot be, he says, both the
servant of circumstances and their master, the slave
of the world and its freeman. What hinders char
acters from efficiency is their divided aim. They
want blessedness, but they want things inconsistent
with blessedness. They seek the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness, but they seek other things at
the same time. They want pure politics, but they
want also political success ; honesty in business,
but profit in business ; simplicity for their children,
but luxury for themselves ; happiness, but not
suffering ; humility, but not humiliation ; leader
ship, but not the leadership of love. The teaching

GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 1 53
of Jesus tolerates no such ethical bimetallism.
The source of power is discovered by him in the
undivided dedication of the will to righteousness
and service. The incorruptible statesman, the
just employer, the seU-effacing mother, the wise
giver, not of alms alone, but of the mind and the
strength, — these are not only characters to be
commended, but they are instruments of power
through which the world's redemption is to come.
The only effective utiUtarians are the ideahsts.
The heart of the world turns with its final loyalty
to Uves untainted by self-seeking and greed. He
that would be the greatest must be the servant of
all. The modern world is a vast mechanism which
waits for power to do its work, and the form of
power most apphcable to the mechanism of the
modern world is the Christian character.

CHAPTER V
THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE CHRISTIAN
CHARACTER
We have set before ourselves the Teacher and
the teaching. The Teacher is not impracticable
and visionary, but convincing and sane. The
teaching is not emotional and extravagant, but
natural and consistent, a doctrine of moral growth,
a call to the Christian character. We turn from
the past to the present; from the character pre
sented to us in the Gospels to the character de
manded by the conditions of modern life. What
relation does the one bear to the other? Is the
teaching of Jesus applicable to the circumstances
of the modern world? Has the Christian charac
ter a place in an environment so remote from that
in which the teaching of Jesus was delivered ?
Are we still Christians ? Is it possible to adjust
the Christian character to the needs of the present
age? It is frequently urged, both by critics of the
present age and by critics of the Gospels, that the
perpetuation of the Christian character under
the conditions of modern life is possible only
through a pious self-deception, which is soon
'54

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 55
proved to be untimely and impracticable. " If
Christianity," it is categorically laid down, " is to
mean the taking of the Gospels as our rule of life,
then we none of us are Christians, and, no matter
what we say, we aU know we ought not to be." x
The circumstances under which the teaching of
Jesus was deUvered, were, we are reminded, even
in that distant age, exceptional. " It was," said
Strauss, " as though a preacher, during a Russian
occupation of Poland, should address the native
population on their immediate duties." 2 Under
such conditions many problems which might con
cern the rest of the world would be overlooked,
and many sayings, apphcable to the special needs
of an oppressed and despairing people, would be
colored by the pecuhar and pathetic traits of the
time and place. "The life of the famUy," said
Strauss again, "falls into the background of the
teaching of this man without a family; he is at
least neutral toward the State ; property is not only
rejected by him because of his vocation, but ob
viously opposed ; and practicaUy everything which
concerns art or the aesthetic interests of Ufe Ue
beyond the horizon of his mind."3 "Jesus," said
Schopenhauer, " transformed the optimism of Israel
1 F. H. Bradley, International Journal of Ethics, October,
1894, p. 25.
2 " Der Alte und der neue Glaube," 6te Aufl., 1873, s. 25, cited
by H. Holtzmann, " Neutest. Theologie," 1897, 1, 177, note.
8 "Leben Jesu fur das deutsche Volk bearbeitet," 1864, s. 626,
cited by Luthardt, " Gesch. d. christl. Ethik," 1888, ». 73.

156 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
into the pessimism of India. . . . The New Testa
ment must be in some way of Indian descent. Its
ethics are thoroughly Oriental, and issue into the
morals of asceticism, its pessimism and its Avatar." l
To the same effect is the comparison of Strauss :
"Sakya Muni was a nihilist; Jesus, a dualist. . . .
Nothing which contemplates human activity as an
end or object has for him any worth." 2 All these
historical judgments lead to the same conclusion.
We are not Christians. The Christian type of
character was local, Hebraic, Palestinian, and has
been inevitably outgrown. A new world must con
struct a new moral code and create a character fit
for its new needs.
This conclusion of critics concerning the unfitness
of Christianity for modern life has been greatly
fortified by two literary influences which have had a
profound effect on many minds. Tolstoi, the John
the Baptist of the nineteenth century, preaching
in his Russian wilderness a message of repentance,
simplicity, and universal love, identifies this teach
ing with the Gospel of Jesus. The future of soci
ety depends, he affirms, on a revival of religion, an
emancipation from "personal life," a discovery
of essential Christianity, a return to the Gospel.
The Gospel, however, demands the complete
abandonment of the complexity of the modern
world, and a reversion to simplicity, non-resist-

1 Werke VI, Kap. XV, "Ueber Religion," ss. 407 ff.
2 "Der Alte und der neue Glaube," 6te Aufl., 1873, ss. 61 ff.

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 157
ance, perfect flexibihty of social relationship and
superiority to the claims of family, friendship,
or State.1
What is the effect on the modern mind of this
interpretation of Christianity ? The sins of civiliza
tion, it may be confessed, deserve grave indictment,
but is the conversion of civilization to this social
creed either conceivable or desirable ? Is it possible
to detach the personal conscience from the world of
other people and to determine conduct as though the
social order were unreal and social duties were in-
!"My Religion," tr. Smith, 1887, pp. 3, 16, 94, 153: "My
faith was chiefly shattered by the indifference of the Church to
what seemed to me essential in the teaching of Jesus. . . . The
command ' Resist not evil ' is the central point of Jesus' doctrine.
... It is verily the key to the whole mystery. . . . The entire
doctrine of Jesus inculcates renunciation of the personal, imaginary
life." "Never resist evil by force; never return violence for vio
lence; if any one beats you, bear it; if any one would deprive you
of anything, yield to his wishes; if any one would force you to
labor, labor; if any one would take away your property, abandon
it at his demand." With more appearance of system and with great
nobility of utterance the ethics of Tolstoi is summed up in " The
Christian Teaching," 1897, tr. Wiener, 1905, Vol. XXII of Works,
where the " personal life " and the " true Ufe " are contrasted (p.
375), and the five offences enumerated which ruin men : the per
sonal offence, the family offence, the offence of work, the offence
of companionship, and the offence of the common good (pp. 397 ff .) .
The first offence justifies one's conduct by its being "useful to
men "; the second by its being good for one's children; the third
by the desire to finish one's work; the fourth by its usefulness to
friends; the fifth by its being for the " good of the State, of the
nation, of humanity." "To live according to Christ's teaching a
man must destroy the obstacles which interfere with the true Ufe "
(P- 413)-

158 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
significant ? Ought one to divorce his own business
from God's business, and " be at all times prepared
to throw up any business as soon as the execution
of God's work calls him " ? Ought one to " do the
same for any stranger that he wishes to do for his
family " ? Ought one, " under no condition, to
prefer the people of his own nation or country to
the people of another nation or country " ? x If this
is the Christian religion, if the teaching of Jesus
is inconsistent with devotion to one's business,
one's home, and one's country, then these teach
ings are plainly not adapted to the modern world.
Here and there some noble protestant against the
lusts and strife of civiUzation may retreat to primi
tive solitude, but the great multitude must stay
where the work of the world is done, and meet
their moral problems within the circle of their
commercial, domestic, and poUtical life. What the
monastic system was to the mediaeval world, — a
retreat for the elect whom the unsanctified must
maintain, — that is the Christian anarchism of
Tolstoi amid the prosaic trade and toil which turn
the wheels of the world. If on no other terms we
can be Christians, then Christians we are not and
cannot be, and must be content with what has

1 Compare Hugh Black, " Culture and Restraint," 1901, pp. 334 ff. :
" ' Entangle not thy heart with any creature,' says a Kempis, but
it is part of the divine education of life that we should he so en
tangled. The sweetest and noblest qualities of human nature . . .
are alone developed through the ties that bind us to our fellows,
in the family, the Church, the state."

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 59
been called an interim ethics, adapted to life as it
must be Uved.1
On the other hand, there is heard at the same
point the more defiant prophecy of Nietzsche. The
Christian ideal, gentle, compassionate, ascetic, is to
be frankly regarded, not only as antiquated, but
as repulsive to the modern mind. Social stabihty
rests on a more virile doctrine of the survival of
the fit and the victory of the strong. Christianity
is "a reUgion of decadence." "Every instinct
which is beneficent or contributory to life or es-
tabUshing the future is mistrusted." " To live so
that one shall not care to live, becomes the problem
1 Paulsen (Deutsche Monatsschrift fur das gesamte Leben der
Gegenwart, October, 1903, ss. 1 19 ff., " Die Ethik Jesu in ihrem Ver-
haltniss zur Gegenwart ") confirms the interpretation of Tolstoi, and
concludes that " the ethics of heaven cannot be at the same time the
ethics of earth. We need an interim ethics for this life." Compare
Herrmann, "Die sittUchen Weisungen Jesu," 1904, s. 3off. : "Tolstoi
bears the stamp of . . . Russian culture and the Russian Church. The
best in the Russian Church is devoted to tradition. In this Tolstoi
is its true son. He submits to the sayings of Jesus even when he
cannot convert them to reality. He finds it essential to foUow as
universal the principle of Jesus that one resist not evil ; but he
cares nothing for the responsibihty for discord which would ensue.
Such responsibihty does not concern the Russian Church ; it is
buried in the happy sense of reverence for tradition. . . . The
energy of a man is applied to reduce human Ufe to the condition of
a child." So A. Harnack, " What is Christianity ? " tr. Saunders,
1901, p. 86 : "To him [Tolstoi], too, the shunning of the world is
the leading characteristic of Christianity. There are thousands of
our ' educated ' readers . . - who at the bottom of their hearts are
pleased and reUeved to know that Christianity means the denial of
the world; for then they know very weU that it does not concern
them."

l60 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of life." " Christianity is the one great curse, the
one great spiritual corruption, the one great instinct
of revenge, for which no means are too poisonous,
secret, subterranean, or mean."1 Virtue must be
freed from " moralic acid." Ethics has been hith
erto tedious and soporific, and morality a weariness
(eine Langweiligkeii)? "When one has learned
the symptoms of decadence, he understands morality
and what is concealed under its sacred names and
formulas, — the impoverished Ufe, the desire to end
it, the weariness of it. Morality is the negation of
life." 3 " How a conscientious theologian can re
main a Christian is more than I can understand.
... It is a matter of honor ... to hold one's
faith pure from belief in God. . . . We are not
Christians. We have outgrown Christianity, not
because our lives have been too far from it, but
because they have been too near. ... It is our
more strenuous and instinctive piety which forbids
us to continue Christians."4 "Would that he
[Jesus] had remained in the desert, far from the
good and righteous. Then perhaps he would have
learned to live and to love the earth — even to smile.
. . . He died too soon. Had he lived to my age
[38] he would have renounced his teaching."5
1 F. Nietzsche, Sammtl. Werke, Leipzig, 1895 &» VIII, 270,
272, 313, "Der Antichrist."
2 VII, 78, 183, " Jenseits von Gut und Bose."
3 VIII, 88 ff., " Gotzen-Dammerung."
* XIII, 313, 317, 318, "Die Befreiung vom Christentum."
6 VI, 107, "Also sprach Zarathustra." Citations might be multi
plied, as in XIII, 120, 130, " Zur Kritik der Moral " : "As Optics is

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES l6l
To such a philosophy of life the Christian char
acter with its sympathy, compassion, social re-
sponsiMlity, and love of the unlovely appears an
anaemic survival.1 The "Superman," as one of
the most audacious of Nietzsche's disciples calls
him, " wUl snap his superfingers at all Man's pres
ent trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice,
religion, even decency. ' ' 2 Christian sentim entaUsm
must be supplanted by virile aggressiveness. The
Christian character has no place among the prob
lems and programmes of the present age.
Here are two teachings which seem as remote
from each other as Ught from darkness, or peace
from war. One is a gospel of non-resistance, the
other of force; one is a programme of reversion,
the other a war-cry of revolution ; one is a doctrine
of the spirit, the other a doctrine of the flesh. Both
teachings, however, are expressions of social pessi
mism. Behind both is the shadow of the philosophy
of Schopenhauer.3 Both coincide in the conclusion
forgotten in seeing, so is Ethics in moraUty." " One no longer eats
his food for duty's sake, he will soon do nothing for duty's sake."
"Der Fall Wagner," VIII, 85: " The praxis of the Church is hostile
to vitality." The language of abuse finaUy becomes untranslatable,
VIII, 272 : " AUes Missratene, aufstandisch Gesinnte, schlecht Weg-
gekommene, der ganze Auswurf und Abhub der Menschheit."
1 Compare C. F. G. Heinrici, " Durfen wir noch Christen blei-
ben?" 1903; "Ist die Lebenslehre Jesu zeitgemass ?" 1904.
2 G. Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman," 1904, "The Revo
lutionist's Hand-book," p. 194.
8 The relation is traced in the case of Nietzsche by Rittelmeyer,
" Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion," 1904, s. 12 : " Nietzsche
became an atheist on the day when, as a student in Leipzig, he

1 62 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
that the Christian type is inapplicable to the world
as it is. Tolstoi proposes a new world, Nietzsche
proposes a new man ; but the inference concerning
the adaptation of the Christian type to the present
world is in both cases the same. Either the world
is not fit for the Christian character, or the Chris
tian character is unfit for the world. We are not
Christians. Either a new man is needed to cope
with things as they are, or a new world must be
created to fit the Christian character.
These strictures and prophecies appear, however,
to involve two misconceptions. They misappre
hend, on the one hand, the nature of the teaching
of Jesus, and on the other hand, the nature of the
present age. The teaching of Jesus is, it is true,
not to be violently detached from the circumstances
and problems of his own time. He was a GaUlean,
teaching other Galileans. He was a Hebrew, apply
ing and fulfilling the Hebrew law. In form and
manner his teaching was applied to conditions
remote from our own, and the adjustment of its
precepts to modern life is quite impracticable. This
admission, however, instead of reducing the teach
ing to insignificance, indicates precisely where its
significance is to be found. The method of Jesus
was, it is true, occasional, incidental, contem
porary. He was not posing before the future;
he was dealing with people as they met him, with
discovered at a bookseller's the works of Schopenhauer " ; and in
both cases by M. Adams, International Journal of Ethics, October,
1900, " The Ethics of Tolstoi and Nietzsche."

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 63
the temptations, prejudices, and possibilities of
their Palestinian Uves. He speaks to them, not to
us. Yet, occasional though the teaching be, its
fundamental intention was to Uft those Uves of
his own time into the sense of the timeless and
eternal, and to disclose to them, through the inter
pretation of their own experience, the permanent
principles of the Kingdom of God.
Is not this problem, which thus lay before the
mind of Jesus, precisely the problem which presents
itself to each succeeding generation as it interprets
the message of Jesus ? The form of Christian
teaching is occasional, but the intention of Chris
tian teaching is universal. The modern student of
the Gospels is called, as Jesus was called, to see the
timeless through the medium of the temporal, and to
interpret, through the occasionahsm of the present
age, that which was expressed by Jesus through the
occasionahsm of his own age. To revert, with Tol
stoi, to the Uteral reproduction of the circumstances
of the Gospels, is thus not only impracticable, but
contrary to the intention of the Gospel. To dismiss
from consideration, with Nietzsche, the teaching of
Jesus, because it was addressed to another civiliza
tion and another age, is to mistake the temporary
for the permanent, and instead of solving the prob
lem of Christian ethics to leave that problem unap-
proached. The relation of Jesus to his own age is
the subject of Christian archaeology ; the discovery
of the principles which underlie the relation of
Jesus to his own age is the subject of Christian

I64 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ethics. The circumstances of Palestine in the time
of Jesus were, it is true, Uke the condition of the
Poles under Russia ; yet it is possible to infer from
the conduct of the Czar of Russia, in his dealing
with the specific problem of the Poles, what gen
eral principles of governmental control would be
appUed by him in a widely different case. The
occasionalism of the Gospels is the frame in which
the principles of the Gospels are set. Through the
incidental looks out the picture of the permanent.
Christian ethics is not a reiteration of the maxims
of the Gospels; it is the rational inference con
cerning conduct to be derived from the facts of the
Gospels. On the other hand, these critics of the Christian
character misapprehend the nature of the present
age. On the face of things it may seem to be a
time of brutal competition and material success, a
commercial, militant age, a time when it is as im
practicable to follow Tolstoi in his heroic repro
duction of the circumstances of the Gospels, as it
is to urge against Nietzsche that the principles of
the Gospels are still applicable to society. When,
however, one listens more attentively to the tumult
of the time, does he not hear beneath these harsh
noises of the present age an undertone of serious
desire, quite distinct from its obtrusive discords ?
Is there not, at the heart of the time, a deep sense
of dissatisfaction with material gains, with luxury
and ostentation, with political aggrandizement and
commercial power ? Riches increase, but are not

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 65
great numbers of the rich seriously considering the
peril and the use of riches ? Commerce expands,
but does not commercial success leave many a Ufe
with a confession of emptiness and failure ? Wars
still scourge the nations, but is not the hope of in
ternational peace being converted from a Utopian
dream into a practical programme ? " 111 fares the
land," said Goldsmith,
"To hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay,''
and many a modern prophet is repeating the warn
ing of the "Deserted Village." Do not these
deeper aspects of the time suggest that it is a
preparatory, preliminary age, to which the Christian
character may be for the moment ill adjusted, but
which is prophetic of a new world in which the
Christian character may be an effective force ?
Nothing could be more contrary to the facts of
social evolution than to assume, with Nietzsche,
that the movement of civilization is proceeding
from moraUty to naturalism, from good and evil to
passion and force. On the contrary, the process
of social evolution moves, though with many halts
and reversions, toward a more humanized world, and
registers not only the descent, but also the ascent
of man. Beneath the scum and eddies which are
conspicuous on the surface of the time, a deeper
current of thought and feeUng sets toward a revival
of idealism, and the stream of tendency is purified
of its uncleanness by the very swiftness with which
it flows.

1 66 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
If, then, it may be not unreasonably believed that
the Christian character is appUcable to the modern
world, we are led to consider in some detail the
special qualities of this ethical type. What kind
of person is naturally created by the influence of
Jesus Christ? How does such a person lead his
own life, and how does he conduct himself among
his fellow-men? What are the personal conse
quences, and what are the social consequences of
the Christian character? It is, of course, impos
sible to fence off from each other these two fields
of ethics, as though one might have, first, a char
acter of his , own and then might carry over that
character into the world of social good. All mo
rality is social morality. Ethics is a sociological
science. The moral life is a life in common.
The sense of obligation is a sense of being tied
to other people. Personal character does not grow
in a vacuum, but in the soil of the common life
and the atmosphere of the social world. For
convenience, however, it is possible to consider
character, first in its own inherent traits, and later
in its uses as an instrument of social good — to
think of a person first as a moral being, and then
as a moral force. What sort of person, then, is
the natural product of the Christian character ?
How does the teaching which we have traced
affect and mould the various functions of person
ality ? How does the Christian determine his duty,
first, in the concerns of his body, secondly, in the
interests of his mind, and finally, in the affections
and desires of his emotional life ?

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 67
The ethics of the body has seemed to many
sincere followers of Jesus Christ to present one
of the most perplexing of moral problems. They
have heard in the teaching of Jesus an unmistak
able note of asceticism, summoning them to physi
cal repression and sacrifice. What, they ask, are
the concerns and conveniences of the body com
pared with the welfare of the soul ? What shall
it profit us to gain all else and lose our souls ?
Does not Jesus command us to cut off the offend
ing hand, to pluck out the sensual eye ? Is it not
better to enter the Kingdom halt and lame than
with a sound body to be cast into hell ? Each new
wave of reUgious exaltation which has been set in
motion by Christian faith has borne on its crest
the foam of this ascetic discipline. The call to
self-denial came to a world dominated by a Greek
philosophy of self -culture and a Roman tradition
of worldUness ; and classic morals seem palUd and
unsatisfying to those who were touched by the
passion of the Cross. The tide of monasticism
swept over Europe and bore away from the temp
tations of the flesh the choicest of those who heard
the call of the spirit.
" She heard it, the victorious West,
In crown and sword arrayed !
She felt the void which mined her breast,
She shivered and obeyed.
* * ******
She broke her flutes, she stopp'd her sports,
Her artists could not please ;

1 68 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
She tore her books, she shut her courts,
She fled her palaces ;
Lust of the eye and pride of life
They left it all behind,
And hurried, torn with inward strife,
The wilderness to find.
Tears wash'd the trouble from her face !
She changed into a child !
'Mid weeds and wrecks she stood — a place
Of ruin — but she smiled ! " 1
No one can review this history of the soul in its
struggle against the body without a sense of ad
miration. The supremacy of the religious senti
ment was never more manifest than in its power to
dictate bodily sacrifices and rejoice in bodily suffer
ings. Yet the final judgment of history can but
conclude that Christian asceticism, with all its hero
ism, was one of religion's glorious mistakes. At
the very time when the world most needed the
Christian character, thousands of those whose mis
sion was to relieve the world fled from the world,
and in the caves of the desert and the cells of the
monasteries forgot what was written of their Mas
ter : " He saveth others ; himself he cannot save."
Asceticism was not a solution, but an evasion, of the
ethics of the body. It did not fight the battle of
Ufe ; it fled from that battle. The battle had to go
on, and the great working, productive, tempted
multitude had to fight it through ; while those best
equipped to win the battle were heroic runaways.
1 Matthew Arnold, " Poems," 1889. "Obermann, once more,"
P- 237-

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES I 69
Nor was even the soul deUvered from the body
by this flight. The more rigidly the body was
repressed, the more violently it turned upon its
oppressor, and tortured him with imaginary sins.
They pursued the hermit to the desert, and hid
beneath the cowl of the monk. " When me they
fly," they said, with Emerson, " I am the wings."
Self-denial was no escape from self-consciousness ;
and behind the forms of sacrifice lurked the spirit
of self -consideration and pride. The ethics of the
body, in a word, offered a problem which must be
answered, not by change of place, but by change
of heart, and which must be finaUy answered no
where else than in that place where the body
found its natural duties and desires.
This is precisely the view of the body which
meets us when we pass from the spirit of monasti-
cism to the teaching of Jesus. It is Uke passing
from an anchorite's cell, sohtary in a sterile desert,
to some happy scene of fields and homes, and the
natural vocations of the common Ufe. Jesus does
not counsel deUverance from the body by retreat
from the world. He finds no antinomy between
the Ufe of the body and the life of the soul. He
does not, Uke John the Baptist, call his followers
to the coarse food and raiment of life in the wilder
ness. On the contrary, he meets human Uves just
where they are, among their natural incidents of
pleasure and pain, temptation and joy, social re
sources and private needs. Among all these varied
Uves, rich and poor, saints and sinners, he goes

170 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
his way, not demanding of them change of condi
tion, but discerning in each condition its significance
and service.
One of the most striking facts of the ministry
of Jesus is the fact that, for the most part, he
left people in the same vocation where he found
them. He bids them forsake all and follow him ;
but this loyalty involves no abandonment of their
habitual tasks. His first disciples were fishermen
washing their nets, at the beginning of the Gospel
of Matthew ; and they were fishermen, still washing
their nets, at the end of the Gospel of John. Obe
dience to their Master did not drive them to the
wilderness, but held them to their work. They
forsook all and followed him, yet the circumstances
of their lives remained just what they were before.
Thus it happens that the discipline of the body,
which has played so great a part in Christian his
tory, holds no important place in the ethics of
Jesus. The temptations which he regards as most
alarming are of a more subtle kind. He has more
to say of worldliness, hypocrisy and care, than
of the sins of the flesh. When the tempter
approached his own life, he was, it is written, " an
hungered " ; yet the temptation to make stones
into bread was a temptation, not of hunger, but of
power and self-display. When physical asceticism
is demanded by him, it is always for a purpose
behind itself. When the body has become an im
pediment to the soul, then the hand is to be cut off
and the eye plucked out. It is not an act of merit,

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 171
but a penal discipUne applied to a member which
offends. When the young man is withheld from
entering life by his "great possessions," Jesus does
not hesitate to say : " Sell whatsoever thou hast . . .
come, and follow me." x The teaching of Jesus
is not that of bodily mortification, but of bodily
sanctification. The body is an instrument of the
soul. At this point meets us once more the word
whicb made its mark on the record as expressing
the moral aim of Jesus. The Christian character
is a form of power. As righteousness rises into
love, and love discovers itself to be life, there issues
a new quaUty of effectiveness, vitality, capacity for
service, spiritual force. The Christian comes to
regard himself, not as a detached problem to be
solved, or an isolated creation with its own laws of
conduct, but as a means, a member, an agent ; or,
to use the more human language of the Gospels,
as a servant trusted by his master, a porter bidden
to watch, a steward to whom much is committed,
a son to whom the father confides his affairs.
From this point of view the ethics of the body
gets a wholly new significance. It deals, not
with an enemy of character to be subdued, but
with an instrument of character to be used. As
ceticism, as the New Testament commends it, is
not a negative term of denial or abandonment
or renunciation ; but a form of exercise, a way
of discipUne, a kind of spiritual athletics, which
1 Matt. xix. 21; Mark x. 21; Luke xii. 33.

172 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
trains the soul for effective living. "Herein," says
Paul, " do I exercise myself " ; " Exercise thyself
rather unto godliness " ; x and Ignatius Loyola ac
curately describes his self-discipline under the title
of " Spiritual Exercises." 2 As the Christian
character is itself a form of power, so the various
organs of life are agents of this power. Whatever
condition or action of the body sustains, steadies,
and amplifies moral power, is right. Whatever
reduces moral effectiveness, self-control, poise of
judgment, and ethical confidence, is wrong. If a
conflict of interests arises between the body and the
character, if the flesh instead of serving the spirit
dominates and degrades it, then there must be im
mediate moral surgery. Cut off the offending mem
ber; pluck it out. Surgery, however, is not for
normal, but for pathological, conditions. The body
is not made to be amputated, but to be educated.
There is a mortifying of the flesh, but there is also
a dignifying of the flesh. "I am not come to
destroy, but to fulfil," might have been said by
Jesus of the body. The body which is conformed
to his ethics is not a despised and distrusted mem
ber, but full of serviceable life. Character, to be
power, must have its machinery in full command ;
and the alertness, responsiveness, and endurance
of the body are the mechanism which conveys
1 Acts xxiv. 1 6 ; I Tim. iv. 7.
2 So, Dorner, "Christian Ethics," tr. Mead, 1887, p. 405:
"Ascetics is the doctrine of the purification, preservation, and
strengthening of the spiritual life."

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 73
moral power. It is possible to be good and to do
good with a weak and shattered body; but it is
much easier to be good if one's body be sound,
and much easier to do good if one's body be the
ready instrument of one's will.
This teaching of Jesus may be more specifically
illustrated in the case of two virtues which concern
themselves directly with the ethics of the body.
The passion of sex has been controlled by chastity ;
the passion of drink has been subdued by temper
ance; and both these forms of bodily discipUne
have profoundly affected the history of Christian
ity. Chastity seemed the most obvious evidence
that the spirit had gained its victory over the flesh.
Saintliness, therefore, knew no sex; and cehbacy
was the first mark of the higher life. Temperance,
in its special appUcation to intoxicating drink, is
the modern expression of the same asceticism. As
chastity came to be identified with celibacy, so
temperance has come to signify abstinence. Both
cehbacy and abstinence assume that the physical
Ufe is essentiaUy hostile to the spirit, and must be
rigidly repressed and subdued.
There are, no doubt, many circumstances where
this ethical antinomy is real. The sensuahty of
Rome under Tiberius and CaUgula forced the
chastity of Christians to take the form of ceU-
bacy; the circumstances of many a modern life
and of many a modern country permit no tem
perance which is not abstinence. A celibate
clergy may have been the best protest which

174 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
the Christian ministry could make against the
corruptions of the mediaeval Church ; as a pledge
of abstinence is beyond doubt, for many persons
to-day, the best safeguard of self-control. There.
are those, says Jesus, with unflinching sternness,
"which have made themselves eunuchs for the
kingdom of heaven's sake." x " If meat make
my brother to offend," says Paul, "I will eat no
flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my
brother to offend." 2 Yet to identify chastity with
celibacy, or temperance with abstinence, is to for
get that in the teaching of Jesus the body is not
an end in itself, but a means to character. Chas
tity is not a virtue pertaining to one condition of
life. There may be unchastity within the marriage
bond, and even in the condition of ceUbacy.
There is, on the other hand, no purer chastity than
in the union of chaste lives. Chastity is such
maintenance of the body that it shall be the will
ing and effective servant of the Christian char
acter; and unchastity is the domination by lust
and appetite of a life which should be an instru
ment of the Kingdom of God. Celibacy takes
account of the immediate virtue of the single Ufe.
Chastity contemplates the future and presents to
another life, for whom it would gladly sacrifice
itself, an unstained body, fit to be an offering of
love. It takes account of one who is as yet un
loved, and of others who are as yet unborn. The
same enlargement of definition must be given to
1 Matt. xix. 12. 2 I Cor. viii. 13.

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 75
temperance. Under many conditions of Ufe tem
perance can be best assured through abstinence ;
yet temperance is more than abstinence. To be
temperate is not to escape temptation, but to hold
the physical life to its maximum of service. Tem
perance tempers the body as the artisan tempers
a sword, so that it resists and reacts without
breaking. Abstinence may contribute to temper
ance; but temperance is, as the word is rightly
rendered in the Revised Version of the New
Testament, the capacity for self-control.1
Who, then, is the Christian in the concerns of
his body? He is not to be found in any single
condition of life. The celibate may be unchaste
in desire; the abstinent may be intemperate in
speech. The Christian use of the body is its main
tenance as the mechanism of the spirit. Chastity
and temperance are not forms of contempt of the
body, but forms of control of the body. The body
is not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Its
health, composure, restraint, self-mastery, are con
ditions of power. Even its ills may contribute to
patience, humiUty, and peace. Bodily passions
which obstruct ease of moral movement are to be
unhesitatingly repressed. The Christian does not
shrink from moral surgery. The healthy body is,
however, an agent of the healthy soul, and is nor
mally utiUzed, not when it is amputated, but when
it is dedicated to the Christian character.
1 iyKpireia, 2 Peter i. 6 : " Add to your knowledge . . . self-
control." So Acts xxiv. 25 ; Gal. v. 23.

I76 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
When we turn from the ethics of the body to the
ethics of the mind, we meet in Christian history a
different situation. While the body has been for
the most part regarded as a hostile force threat
ening the Christian character, the mind, on the
contrary, has often been accepted as the special
organ of Christian discipleship. From this point
of view the acceptance of Christian dogma is the
first of Christian duties, and intellectual doubt
the most deadly of sins. At times the ethics of the
mind has appeared to prescribe as Christian duty
a restriction of thought ; at other times an adjust
ment of thought to the standards of the Church ;
at still other times an attack on one form of thought
called science, by another form of thought called
religion. All these limitations and controversies
have proceeded from the assumption that religion
is a way of thinking, a conclusion of the reason,
a state of opinion, a consent to proof.
The first important heresy in Christian history
was a consequence of this intellectual interpretation
of Christianity. Gnosticism regarded Christian
faith as a form of knowledge, a chapter in the
history of philosophy, an esoteric doctrine to be in
terpreted by adepts alone. What was at first heresy
has often become orthodoxy ; and many a definition
and persecution, when not directed against Gnos
tics, has itself expressed the spirit of Gnosticism.
To regard knowledge as the essence of faith, to
affirm with Hegel, the prince of Gnostics, that
"religion is a knowledge reached by finite spirit

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 77
of its real nature as infinite spirit," is to close the
door of the inner kingdom on aU who do not hold
its key of speculative truth. "For much of the
Agnosticism of the age," a great teacher has re
marked, " the Gnosticism of theologians is undeni
ably responsible." x
These heresies and orthodoxies of Christian
history are, it must be recognized, encouraged by
one aspect of the Gospels which is often over
looked. Whatever else may be found in the teach
ing of Jesus, it certainly exhibits an extraordinary
quahty of intellectual elevation and insight, which
easUy tempt the speculative mind to believe that
they are the supreme elements of the Gospel ; and
it is not surprising that the phUosophers have
found material for elaboration in the deep sayings
of Jesus concerning both God and man. His in
teUectual mastery would have given him a place
among the great idealists, even if he had failed to
establish his authority in the ways of duty and
faith. When, however, one examines the teaching of
Jesus in its appUcation to the mind, it becomes ob
vious that nothing could be more remote from the
spirit of his ethics than the spirit of Gnosticism.
Jesus is neither a philosopher unfolding his sys
tem nor a theologian enforcing his creed. Re-
Ugion is to him, not a form of thought, but a way
of Ufe. He approaches the ethics of the mind at
a much earUer and a much more critical point than
l Martineau, " Study of Rehgion," 1888, 1, xi.

I78 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
that of intellectual conformity. He considers not
so much the morality of opinions as the morality
which creates opinions, the motives of reasoning,
the moral perspective in which the mind is set,
the attitude of the thinker toward truth. The
intellectual sins which appear to Jesus most alarm
ing are not those of imperfect faith or hesitating
doubt. He does not reject Thomas because of his
scepticism, or rebuke the disciples who confess
their unbelief. Intellectual immoraUty, to him,
begins, not in incorrect opinions, but in irreverence,
unteachableness, satiety of mind ; and intellectual
morality gets entrance to a mind when it is open
to the truth, childlike and unperverted, unafnicted
by formal philosophy or Gnostic self-sufficiency.
There are, in short, antecedent ethical conditions
which direct the mind toward truth. Behind Chris
tian truth lies the Christian character. The bless
ing of the pure in heart is not in their purity alone,
but in the fact that their purity permits them to
see God. They are blessed, not only with moral
simplicity, but with intellectual discernment.
Here is an order of procedure precisely the
reverse of that which the Gnostic proposes. He
that knoweth the doctrine, says ^an intellectual
Christianity, will do the will. The fourth Gospel,
on the other hand, finds in obedience the path to
knowledge : " If any man will do his will, he shall
know of the doctrine." Sound knowledge and
straight thinking issue from moral loyalty; the
flippant or reckless mind lacks the ethical condi-

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 79
tions of intellectual achievement. " Let knowledge
grow from more to more," says Tennyson, " but
more of reverence in us dwell." Jesus goes farther,
and affirms that the higher knowledge wfll not grow
from more to more, unless an antecedent reverence
in us dwelL It is not an accident that in the great
summary of the fourth Gospel Jesus sets the truth
between the way and the life. The way of Jesus
leads to his truth, and the truth becomes thus, not a
doctrine merely, but a life.
Who, then, is the Christian thinker ? He is not
to be recognized by his opinions alone. There
may be immoraUty in conformity as weU as in
heresy, and more faith in honest doubt than in
half the creeds. Nor is the Christian thinker en
dowed with a special kind of knowledge, which may
be contrasted with the scientific habit of mind.
All paths to truth are sacred to the Christian
thinker. Good science is good theology. The only
issue between science and faith is between faithless
science and unscientific faith. What distinguishes
the Christian thinker is the ethical background of
his reasoning. He is reverent, teachable, self-
controUed, pure in heart. " God desireth," says
the Psalmist, " truth in the inward parts ; " and it is
in the inward parts that a Christian thinker equips
himself with the desire for truth. " Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God," quotes Jesus from the earUer
law, not with thy heart alone, but " with thy mind."
The Christian thinker makes his mind an organ
of sympathy, appreciativeness, love. His wfll to

l80 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
do the will enriches his knowledge. His purity of
heart makes him see. His Christian character has
its consequence in his Christian creed.
To the ethics of the body and the mind there is
added in the Christian character the ethics of the
emotional life ; and here the contrasts of opinion
are much more confusing. To many minds the
emotions appear to give to life all its richness,
color, and charm; to many other minds feeling
seems an intrusive and perilous element of experi
ence, which is likely to mislead the reason and
to enervate the will. The aesthetic temperament
finds in emotional expression an ultimate satisfac
tion. Art for art's sake is its maxim. Beauty is
its own excuse for being. Morality is an inter
loper when it invades the sphere of the beautiful.
To the ethical temperament, on the other hand, this
delight in the sensuous, the harmonious, the artistic,
appears to weaken moral fibre, and to threaten the
world with a new wave of heathenism.
The same conflict of opinion is met in Christian
teaching. To great numbers of devout believers,
the only adequate expression of the religious senti
ment seems offered by the feelings. " The measure
of knowledge," they repeat, with Schleiermacher,
" is not the measure of piety. . . . Your feeling, in
so far as it expresses the being and life common to
you and to the universe, is your religion. . . .
There is no feeling which is not devout, unless it
indicates some diseased and impaired condition." x
1 Sammtl. Werke, " Zur Theologie," I, 1843, ss. 184 ff.

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES l8l
This faith of the mystic Ufts him above reasoning,
even above action, into the higher region of passive
or ecstatic communication with the Divine. It is
the rehgion of the revivaUst, with its emotional
expressions and ejaculatory faith ; it is the religion
of music, of color, of processions, of art. In all
such forms of piety feeUng becomes the main chan
nel of revelation. " To seek Ufe and to find it in
immediate feeUng — that is rehgion."
Nothing, on the other hand, is more repelling to
many thoughtful minds than this religion of feel
ing. It appears unbalanced, vague, delusive, ex
travagant. The mystic mistakes sensual raptures
for Divine communion. The revivaUst excites to
a remorse or joy which satisfy themselves in utter
ance and make no mark on character. The wor
shipper is stirred to vague emotions by beauty of
sound or sight, but this aesthetic deUght is often
an unmoral and sometimes a demoralizing joy.
There is, as a distinguished theologian has said,
"an enormous monotony" in mysticism. Its ex
periences " have no history," but are immediate
and return upon themselves ; and their differences
are only those of intensity of feeUng.1
What is it which gives this impression of insta
bility to the emotional Ufe? Why is it that the
feeUngs may become either the organ of the high
est good, or the source of the most insidious evfl ?
How may one trust himself to his emotions without
1 W. Herrmann, " Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott," 1886,
ss. 12 ff.

1 82 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
falling a victim to their treachery or deceit ? The
answer to these questions is plain when one con
siders the genesis of emotions. Feeling is not a
self-originated or isolated function. It refers itself
to some antecedent suggestion, either of the body
or the mind. An e-motion is a motion from. It
is a pleasure or a pain emerging from an act or
thought. In itself it is spontaneous, unreflecting,
immediate; but it assumes an intention to be
achieved, a desire to be satisfied, an adjustment of
body to environment or of mind to fact. Feeling,
therefore, has in itself no moral value. Strictly
speaking, there is no ethics of the emotions.
The emotions are corollaries to be drawn, rather
than problems to be solved. They are the wave
which leaps up in light and color on the crest of
the heaving ocean. If the sea is deeply stirred,
its crest will inevitably carry the foam of feeling ;
if the sea is sluggish and flat, the white-caps of
emotion cannot be induced to break. The ethics
of emotion, then, is to be sought, not in the emo
tion itself, but in the source from which it pro
ceeds. Feelings which are apparently akin may
be, ethically, strangers to each other. The sense
of the beautiful may be either a spiritualizing and
refining grace, or a degrading and sensual self-
indulgence. Religious mysticism may express it
self either in exalted vision or in fleshly ecstasies.
Even the supreme emotion of love, whether to God
or to man, may represent loyalty, sacrifice, and
service, or may exhaust itself in ineffective senti-

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 83
mentaUsm and pious rapture.1 The ethics of the
emotions is concerned, therefore, not so much
with their form or intensity, as with their origin
and background. Is the feeling of the beautiful
detached from this moral background, or does it
stand out against this background as the beauty
of holiness ? Does the mystic's vision of God lift
him so high above the plains of duty that he loses
sight of its prosaic detaUs, or does this vision give
him a clearer and broader view of duty, and verify
the promise that the pure in heart shaU see God ?
Is Christian love an isolated passion, which may
utter itself without committing conduct to a moral
pledge ; or does love presuppose righteousness, as
a flower involves its stalk ?
No aspect of the teaching of Jesus is more in
structive for the present age than his declaration
1 One of the most instructive transitions in the history of philos
ophy is that of Schleiermacher, from his original confidence in feel
ing as altogether sacred, to the more restrained teaching of his
maturer years, where the religious feeUng becomes specific, contem
plative, and humbling. " Reden fiber die Religion," 1843, s. 264 :
" The true nature of rehgion is not one or another form of thought,
but immediate consciousness of Deity. ... In the midst of time to
be one with the Infinite and in every instant to be eternal, that is
the immortaUty of religion." "Christliche Glaube," 1861, I, 15,
167 : " In all expressions of religion the common element, which
distinguishes reUgion from other feeUngs and make the essence
of piety is this — that we are conscious of an absolute dependence, or
in other words, of relation with God. . . . This consciousness of
absolute dependence [is] the only way in which the finite being and
the infinite God can be consciously one." (Compare Unitarian
Review, August and September, 1880, F. G. Peabody, " The History
of the Psychology of Religion.")

184 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
that Christian emotion has worth only as a con
sequence of the Christian character. The detach
ment of feeling from obligation, the satisfaction of
the religious sentiment with aesthetic expression,
even the scorn of rigid ethics among the circum
stances of the modern world — all these perversions
of Christian faith stUl afflict the Christian church.
When a negro convert in a Southern prayer-meet
ing shouts, " I'se done broke all de commandments,
but praise de Lord, I'se got my reUgion," it seems
a grotesque separation of faith from morals ; but it
is, in fact, not more ludicrous, and it is much less
shameless, than the practices which, to many cul
tivated people, appear consistent with Christian
discipleship and Christian worship. How does it
happen that ostentatious prodigality, habitual gam
bling, and looseness in marriage occur, not only
among those who have abandoned religious obliga
tions, but among those to whom reUgious conformity
is a part of good manners and good taste ? It is be
cause religion is regarded, not as a moral law, but
as a comforting emotion. The commandments
may be broken, while the solace of religion is re
tained. Such is the travesty of religion, when it
becomes aesthetic instead of ethical. It is well to be
stirred by religious feeUng, but, as Phillips Brooks
once remarked, " you must ask of its parentage and
its offspring." x
The same lesson concerning the ethics of emotion
i«The Influence of Jesus," 1879, Lect. Ill, "The Influence
of Jesus on the Emotional Life of Man."

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES I 85
is taught on a larger scale, and in a more positive
form, by a great historical transition, of which this
looseness of contemporary morals is one expression.
Among the creative forces of reUgion in America,
the most important was the spirit of Puritanism.
It subdued a wilderness, estabhshed popular gov
ernment, bred a learned ministry, and set reUgion
at the centre of the State. Its morals, however,
were severe ; its judgments harsh ; its recoil from
the laxity of English customs made it hostile to
mirth and play. It is not surprising, therefore,
that a reaction has come, and that one hears much
ridicule of the spirit of Puritanism. Instead of
the earUer rigidity we have the new tolerance;
instead of unlovely morals, a new appreciation of
the beautiful ; instead of self -discipline, self -culture
and dehght in Ufe. Is this transition a moral gain
or a moral loss ? That must depend on the rela
tion between the new aestheticism and the earlier
Puritanism. If what we are witnessing means
simply a reaction from sternness to license, from
hardness to softness, as Puritanism was itself a
reaction from the laxity of its own age, then it is
simply one more swing of the pendulum of opinion
which merely registers the course of time. To be
a moral gain, these generous instincts of a kindher
world must be, not an outgrowing of Puritanism,
but a growth out of Puritanism ; not a revolution,
but an evolution ; not the swing of a pendulum, but
the blooming of a flower ; not the withering of the
Puritan conscience, but the unfolding of it under

1 86 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
a more genial sun. First the sternness of duty-
doing, then, and then only, the fairer traits of
attractiveness and charm ; first the Puritan self-
discipline, and then an age of sweetness and light,
— this is the only order of a sound moral growth.
Puritanism was like a bulb, brought — as Puritan
ism was brought — from Holland, of rough ex
terior and without apparent beauty or grace, but
which, set in a Southern window, unfolds into a
flower which a Puritan might have thought too
fair. " Seek first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness," said Jesus, " and all these things
shall be added unto you." To seek righteousness
first is to find in other things the natural flower
of the expansion of righteousness; to seek other
things first is to attempt the impossible task of
developing a moral creed from the seeds of sen-
suaUsm, self-indulgence, and scorn.
Who, then, is the Christian in his emotional
life ? He is not to be recognized by his ecstatic
utterances or turbulent repentances or demonstra
tions of passionate affection for a visualized Christ.
These states of feeUng may be the best expression
of the Christian character, or may, on the other
hand, have no moral significance. Christian emo
tion is an instrument of Christian consecration.
The Christian has his exalted moments of emotional
communion with God, like those in which Jesus
said, " All things have been delivered unto me by
my Father " ; but these mounts of vision rise out
of valleys of common duty-doing, as when Jesus,

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 87
in the same passage, said to the weary and heavy-
laden, " I will give you rest." The Christian, Uke
his Master, has his mount of transfigured feel
ing; but at its foot waits the life of service, as
Jesus went down to heal the demoniac boy. The
Christian feels the passion of indignation, as when
Jesus drove the traders from the Temple ; but
his indignation is impersonal, unselfish, "a zeal
for the Father's house." The Christian is touched
by the feeUng of compassion; but it is a con
scientious and continuous compassion, as when the
Samaritan set the sufferer on his own beast and
took care of him. Behind Christian feeling stands
Christian thoughtf ulness ; behind Christian passion,
power in reserve. The emotions are not super
ficial agitations of nervous excitement, like Uttle
waves tossed up by a passing steamer with its
churning wheels; they are the crests that lift
themselves when the depths of nature are stirred,
and the whole character is lifted, Uke a heaving
roller, to the surface of life.
If, then, the Christian character has these per
sonal consequences in the affairs of the body, the
mind, and the emotions, what is the total effect
which is thus produced ? What is the moral type
which naturally issues as the product of the Chris
tian character? What kind of person normally
represents the influence of Jesus Christ? What
are the distinctive marks by which we recognize
the Christian, in his moral bearing, attitude, and
influence ?

1 88 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
The first of these distinguishing traits of char
acter may be described as Poise. The body, the
mind, and the emotions, being the instruments of
moral intention, are held in balance, and perform
their functions without excess. It is this trait
which makes it so difficult to define or classify the
character of Jesus himself. He is in his physical
life neither ascetic nor self-indulgent ; in his intel
lectual life neither scholar nor peasant ; in his emo
tional life neither prosaic nor visionary. The
inclinations which distinguish temperaments are
held in poise by him. He meets the scholars with
the learning of their law, but he welcomes the
spontaneity of the little child; he is stirred by
deep emotions, yet he is calm when others are
most moved. It is the same with the Christian
character. Many a devoted enthusiast has com
mitted himself to the imitation of Christ, and has
seemed to find ample support in the teaching of
Jesus for some moral protest or exhortation, but has
precisely missed that poise of character which
made it possible for Jesus to be a revolutionary
innovator without eccentricity, extravagance, or bit
terness. The Christian character is neither excited
nor temporizing; it is balanced and sound. The
duties of body, mind, and feeling, being determined
by their contribution to moral power, get steadi
ness and poise.
From this trait follows the second mark of the
Christian character, which is known in the New
Testament as Simplicity. " In simplicity," says

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 89
Paul, " we have had our conversation." x "I fear
lest . . . your minds should be corrupted from the
simpUcity that is in Christ." 2 Simplicity, however,
is not so simple a quahty as the word may seem to
imply. It is not attained by eUmination of desire.
Life is not simplified by becoming barren. Sim
pUcity means, not meagreness, but singleness; the
simplifying, not of the content of life, but of the
direction of Ufe. It is better known as single-
mindedness, the uncomplicated directness of a life
which moves toward a thoroughly determined end.
In the Revised Version the saying of Paul reads,
not " The simplicity that is in Christ," but " The
simpUcity that is toward Christ." The movement
of a life toward Christ simplifies character by giv
ing it a way to go. The Christian character has
poise, yet it is not the poise of rest, but the poise of
motion ; as a bird, which seems to Ue inactive on
the air, is borne straight to its aim by the perfect
balance of its wings. " If therefore thine eye be
single," says Jesus, "thy whole body shall be full of
Ught." 3 Single-mindedness throws its Ught on the
path of life, and the crooked problems of experience
become illuminated and simpUfied. What compli
cates life is its divided aim, its double standard, its
uncertainty of direction. When it turns with un-
deviating directness toward Christ, then simplicity
meets it on the way.
To the poise and single-mindedness which mark
the Christian character, there is added a third trait,
1 2 Cor. i. 12. 2 2 Cor. xi. 3. 3 Matt. vi. 22.

190 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
which, as exhibited by Jesus himself, deeply im
pressed his disciples. It is what the Gospels, with
constant reiteration, describe as Peace. " To guide
our feet into the way of peace," x prophesied Zacha
rias of John the Baptist ; the angels sang at Beth
lehem : " Glory to God . . . and on earth peace ;" 2
and Jesus himself at the beginning of his ministry
promises to the weary and heavy-laden the gift of
rest. It was a strange prophecy, strangely ful
filled ; for the life of Jesus was as unrestf ul as a
career could be, and those who came to him for
peace were confronted by his other words, " Sup
pose ye that I am come to give peace on earth ? I
tell you, Nay ; but rather division " ; 3 "I came not
to send peace, but a sword." 4 Yet it remained true
that the final impression left by the influence of
Jesus upon his friends was that of peacefulness ;
and his last promise, as enshrined in the fourth
Gospel, was that this gift should be their perma
nent possession. " Peace I leave with you, my
peace I give unto you"; "These things have I
spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace."5
When the Apostle Paul recounted the blessings of
his new faith, none was more constantly in his mind
than the gift of peace, "from God our Father, and
the Lord Jesus Christ." 6 " The fruit of the spirit,"
1 Luke i. 79. * Matt. x. 34.
2 Luke ii. 14. 6 John xiv. 27, xvi. 33.
8 Luke xii. 51.
6 Rom. i. 7 ; 1 Cor. i. 3 ; 2 Cor. i. 2 ; Gal. i. 3 ; Eph. i. 2 ;
Phil. i. 2.

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES I9I
he says, "is love, joy, peace";1 "Christ came
and preached peace to you which were afar off,
and to them that were nigh"; 2 "Now the Lord
of peace himself give you peace always by aU
means." 3
What was this peace of Jesus, this restfulness of
spirit, which so impressed those who had been
with him that Peter, in commending the new faith,
describes it as " preaching peace by Jesus Christ " ?4
Certainly it was not a peace to be attained through
escape from conflict or retreat from trouble or
freedom from misapprehension. Never was a life
more continuously involved than that of Jesus in
incidents which would seem destructive of peace.
The peace of Jesus Christ is, however, not created
by external events. It is a freedom from inward
conflict, the peace of single-mindedness and poise,
the tranquiUity of a character at one with itsetf.
Jesus knew what it was that was given him to do ;
and his meat and drink were to accomplish it. " I
do not mine own will," he says, " but the will of
the Father that sent me." Here was the secret
of peace. He was not primarily concerned with
the praise or blame that met him on the way.
These were the scenery of Ught and shadow which
he passed. His task was to finish the work which
was given him to do, and this distinctness of desire
gave peace of mind. Misunderstanding might
environ him, friends might doubt him, enemies
1 Gal. v. 22. 2 Eph. ii. 17. 8 2 Thess. iii. 16.
4 Acts x. 36; so Eph. U. 14, 17; Col. i. 20.

192 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
might threaten him; but in the midst of these
storms he is at peace. When he was gone, his
friends remembered what he said : " In the world
ye must have tribulation;" but they also remem
bered that he said : "Peace I leave with you." " I
have overcome the world. " x
It is the same with those rare characters which
represent most perfectly the influence of Jesus
Christ. They are not the most sheltered of lives,
retreating from the world into the peace of inactiv
ity or stagnation. Peacefulness is not inconsistent
with activity. The opposite of rest is not work,
but restlessness ; and the source of peace is not
inaction, but single-mindedness. This is the life of
undistracted service, which Matthew Arnold has
described as one of " toil, unsevered from tranquil
lity." Poise of character gives simplicity, and
simplicity gives peace. Such persons trudge along
the highway of life, not looking here and there for
a peaceful spot by the wayside, but travelling tow
ard home, and going, though wearily, yet peace
fully, with a song upon their lips. They steer their
course across the ocean of life, not as those who
are lost in the vastness of the Universe, and know
not whither they are bound, but as those whose
compass points true, and who can steady their
course with peaceful hearts because they are sure
of their course and their port.
Poise, simplicity, peace — all these mark the
character which issues from the teaching of Jesus ;
1 John xiv. 27, xvi. 33.

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 93
but when his followers wished to sum up in a single
phrase the most dominant aspect of this moral
creation, and the special blessing which it received
from him, they turned to one further word, which
soon became the accepted form of benediction in
his name. It was the word Grace. " Full of
grace and truth," said the fourth Gospel of him.
"They wondered at the gracious words," wrote
Luke of his first teaching. "The grace of our
Lord Jesus Christ be with you all," x conclude
most of the Epistles. What is this grace of Jesus
Christ, which thus lingered Uke an aroma where
he had been, and for which Christians in their
worship still unite to pray ? It is the issue of
poise, simplicity, and peace, the total impression
of a harmonious, unruffled, and disciphned charac
ter. Grace is not so much a virtue as an acquired
instinct, not so much a duty done as a way of do
ing duty. External manners may be cultivated to
become what is known as gracefulness ; but gra-
ciousness is the unconstrained expression of the
kindly, self-forgetting, and tranquil mind. Some
times one sees a child blessed with this sweet
reasonableness, this natural winsomeness. Such
is — " The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day."
1 John i. 14, 17; Luke iv. 22; Rom. xvi. 20; 1 Cor. xvi. 23;
Phil. iv. 23; 1 Thess. v. 28; etc
o

194 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Sometimes a man or woman is endowed with this
same gift, — a beautiful way of doing things, an in
stinctive generosity, considerateness, and tranquil
lity. This is the gracious man, the gracious woman ;
and when the disciples recalled their Master it was
this elevation of nature and compelUng grace which
dwelt in their' memories so vividly that their letters
and their worship could not end without this final
prayer, that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
might be with them all.
Here is the final consequence of the Christian
character. Much goodness, though it compels
respect, repels affection. It is severe, restless,
strained, uncomfortable. We admire, but we do
not love. We wish there were more persons so
excellent, but we do not wish them near to our
selves. Much which has been mistaken for the
Christian character has had this repelling and ex
asperating quaUty. The saints have not been the
pleasantest of neighbors. Precisely the reverse of
such saintliness is the type which reproduces the
character of Jesus. Beyond the poise, simplicity,
and peace of these rare Uves, there is the abiding
sense of their charm. They are not incapable of
severity, of indignation, of rebuke ; but their char
acteristic quaUty is graciousness, considerateness,
patience with defects, insight for the excellent in
uninteresting lives. They do not strive or cry for
leadership ; they go their way and speak their
word, and men are drawn to them by the natural
law of attraction, which draws small bodies to

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES 1 95
greater. The sheep hear their voice and follow.
They do not drive, they draw. When one thinks
of them, he recalls not so much their greatness as
their grace. They have received the final benedic
tion of the Christian character, the grace of the
Lord Jesus Christ

CHAPTER VI
THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE CHRISTIAN
CHARACTER
The social consequences of the Christian charac
ter are not to be approached as though they were
independent of its personal consequences. Life is
not like a ship with water-tight compartments, one
of which may be submerged while another floats.
Among the most familiar of moral failures is the
attempt to do good without the antecedent resolu
tion to be good. Social morality is a corollary of
personal morality. If simplicity and tranquillity in
social conditions are to be attained, it must be by
increasing the number of lives whose characteris
tics are poise, simplicity, peace, and grace. The
Christian character is the key of the Christian
world. Here we meet a distinguishing characteristic of
the Bible. Its ethics are, as a rule, personal ; yet
the consequences of its ethics are, as a rule, social.
The Old Testament habitually addresses the indi
vidual as though he were alone with his duty and
his God. " Thou shalt not sin ; Thou shalt love."
" The word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth
and in thy heart." Yet the individual is at the
196

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 1 97
same time the member of a chosen people whose
hohness and redemption are the pecuhar task of
Jehovah. The secret of national welfare is in
personal morality. The nation may be saved by
a remnant of the righteous. Economic prosperity
is the social consequence of personal righteous
ness; pohtical prosperity is the corollary of indi
vidual holiness.
Even more exphcit is the teaching of Jesus. He
concerns himself scarcely at aU with the organiza
tion of society or the adjustment of social con
ditions. The New Testament is not a text-book
of pohtical economy or of social science. Jesus
gives himself to the inspiration of individuals,
leaving the form and order of the Kingdom in the
hands of individuals. "Ye are the Ught of the
world," he says to his handful of followers : " Ye
are the salt of the earth." The Christian character
is to iUuminate the darkness of the world with its
Ught, and savor the flatness of the world with its
salt. The field of the purpose of Jesus was the
world; but the good seed which was to fructify
the field was the children of the Kingdom. To
plant in the sofl of the world the strong seed of the
Christian character was to be certain of an abun
dant harvest of social consequences.
It is interesting to remember that precisely this
sequence of events immediately succeeded the
teaching of Jesus. Though he had so little to say
of the social perils and problems which confronted
his own age, his followers were at once thrown

I98 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
among these perils and problems; and the new
faith, planted in a few responsive lives, gave an
early harvest of social change. Jesus was not an
organizer of charity ; yet the immediate effect of
his teaching was a bloom of charity more luxuriant
than the world had ever seen. He was not a labor
agitator ; yet his teaching undermined the Roman
system of society, gave new hope to the slave,
and new self-respect to woman. So dramatic
were these social consequences of the teaching of
Jesus that it has been frequently described as
essentially a doctrine of social transformation, as
though industrial and political rather than moral
and spiritual changes were his primary aim.1 Far
from the truth as this conclusion may be, it indi
cates the ethical scope of the Gospels. They may
be searched almost in vain for social regulations,
yet they have become an unparalleled source of
social inspiration. Their social principles have
transformed the moral code of the world ; yet
these principles are not prescriptions of the Chris
tian teaching, but social consequences of the
Christian character.
1 So, Nitti, " Catholic Socialism," 1895, PP- 64 ff. : " We are bound
to admit that Christianity was a vast economic revolution more than
anything else. . . . Most of the great schisms and conflicts by
which the Catholic Church has been torn, were simply economic
conflicts." So, Herron, "The New Redemption," 1893, pp. 30 ff. :
" The Sermon on the Mount ... is a treatise on political econ
omy. . . . An industrial democracy would be the social actualiza
tion of Christianity." Compare " Jesus Christ and the Social
Question," pp. 26 ff.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES I99
What, then, are these social principles, which are
thus involved in the teaching of Jesus, and which,
even in their incomplete application, have created
a new order of social duties, ideals, and hopes ?
There are three such principles explicitly stated in
the Gospels, interdependent in their effects, but
distinguishable in their form. Each of the three
has appeared to many minds not only impracticable
and visionary, but even destructive of social stabU-
ity, and has been opposed by important tenden
cies of philosophy and theology. Each principle
presents itself in the form of a paradox, whose very
statement repels many minds ; yet by these para
doxes the Christian character, as a social force,
must stand or fall, and through these paradoxes
Jesus most distinctly announces the social conse
quences of the Christian character.
The first of these principles is the paradox of
sacrifice, the principle of self-realization through
self -surrender, or — in the less academic language
of Jesus — the finding of life through the losing of
it.1 This principle makes a line of cleavage not
only between ethical systems, but between personal
types of character. Self-development, self-culture,
self-realization, — the Greek ideal of a harmonious
and symmetrical nature, — is an end of conduct
which cannot be Ughtly dismissed as discreditable.
Self-realization is the primary law of life. It is
not selfish to cultivate one's faculties or to utilize
1 Matt. x. 39, xvi 25 ; Mark viii. 35 ; Luke ix. 24.

200 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
one's opportunities. Faculties and opportunities
are possessed only as they are developed and used,
and without cultivation shrivel and disappear.
Jesus himself teaches this truth, with unusual
elaboration, in his parable of the talents. The
gifts of life, according to this impressive picture,
increase in the using and shrink through disuse.
To cultivate one's powers is to multiply them, and
from him who fails to increase his stock is taken
away that which seemed his own. This note of
sanity and reasonableness is heard throughout the
literature of self -culture. We seem to stand on safe
moral ground. We are not beguiled into the mis
leading paths of self-sacrifice, but find before us a
plain way of conduct. Realize thyself ! Invest thy
talents ! Know thyself ! To thine own self be true !
— what can be more rational and convincing than
these familiar maxims of prudential philosophy ?
The difficulty of conforming to these maxims,
however, begins when one discovers that this self
which is to be thus realized is itself not a fixed
self, with a definite signification, but a variable
and developing self, so that one self is reached
only to be passed in the search for a better self.
There is, as Professor James has remarked, a
physical Me, a social Me, and a spiritual Me.1
Self-realization, in other words, may mean any
thing, from the realization of animal instincts or
the most undisguised ethical egoism, all the way
to the highest visions of ethical idealism. Self-
1 Compare "Principles of Psychology," 1890, I, 292.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 201
culture may mean either the surrender to the lower
self or the emergence of the higher self. The
moral process is thus not so much the outgrowing
of self, as the detachment of one self from another
self, and the discovery of the true self in the
" spiritual Me." How to develop the existing self
into the better self; how to —
" Move upward, working out the beast
And let the ape and tiger die ; "
how to give to the potential self control over the
actual self — that is the problem of self-realization
which has given to the philosophy of self-culture
its spiritual power.
Yet even with these qualifications, self-realization
has always appeared to many minds an unsatisfy
ing ideal. What is this little Ufe of the individual,
they ask, that it should be taken so seriously ? Is
it not rather an instrument than an end of duty ?
So long as it remains in the region of self-interest,
where it computes its own advantage and bal
ances its own insignificant pleasures and pains,
can it be fairly said to have entered the region of
moral obUgation at all, or to have reached the
knowledge of duty as a universal law ? It is not
until one transcends the personal and surrenders
himself to the universal that he passes from ex
pediency to morality, from the calculations of
prudence to the categorical imperative of ethics.
These reflections, more or less consciously ex
pressed, displace, in many Uves, the ethics of self-
realization by the ethics of self-sacrifice. Instead

202 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of sagacious maxims of self-interest there is heard
the call to the heroic, the self -forgetting, the larger
good. " He that taketh not his cross, and follow-
eth after me," said Jesus, " is not worthy of me." J
" What is the reason," said Thomas a Kempis,
" why some of the saints were so perfect and con
templative? Because they labored to mortify
themselves wholly to all earthly desires; and
therefore they could with their whole heart fix
themselves on God." 2 Self-abnegation, self-efface
ment, even the scorn of self, becomes the mark
of positive morality; and the self -considering,
computing, prudential spirit is a sign that posi
tive morality has not yet begun. This conflict of
moral creeds may occur even within the bounds
of a single human life. It cultivates itself, by
education and opportunity, only to find in some
high moment of moral purpose that all these gains
of self-realization must be abandoned for some ad
venture of self-sacrifice. What, then, is my duty,
cries out, in grave perplexity, this life which finds
itself rent by opposing motives — to develop myself,
or to deny myself ; to hear the command of Jesus
bidding me invest my talents prudently, or to hear
his other command bidding me sell all I have, take
up my cross, and follow ?
"What is the answer of Jesus to this antinomy of
ethics, which makes the daily, and often the tragic,
problem of many a self-scrutinizing life? Jesus
1 Matt. a. 38 ; so xvi. 24 ; Mark viii. 34 ; Luke ix. 23, xiv. 27.
2 " Imitation of Christ," Bk. I, Ch. XI.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 203
meets the issue with his paradox of sacrifice.
There is, he teaches, no such schism in life be
tween gain and loss, self-cultivation and self-abne
gation, the finding of life and the losing of it. The
field of duty-doing is not a battle-field, where duties
to oneself contend against duties to others ; it is a
field, where human life, Uke other living things, is
growing; and growth, by its very nature, means
transmission, expansion, the giving of the root to
the stalk, and of the stalk to the flower, — a loss
which is gain, and a death which is hfe. In short,
when Jesus announces the paradox that to save
life is to lose it, and that to lose it is to save it, he
is transferring to conduct the general law which
the processes of Nature had disclosed to his
observant eye. The life, aUke of the corn and of
the conscience, was, as Jesus saw it, a process of
development through service, of self-reaUzation
through self-sacrifice. The Ufe that withheld itself
was checked and dwarfed; the life that yielded
itself was enriched and confirmed. AssimUation
and elimination, receiving to give, dying to live —
such was the rhythm of nature which Jesus dis
cerned, alike in the fields of Gahlee and in the
life of man.
The modern world has verified this law of
rhythm. The same paradox is observed in bio
logical organisms, in physiological tissues, in in
teUectual achievements, even in economic progress.
Physical health, which seems to depend on that
which the body receives, depends in fact quite

204 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
as much on what is exhaled and excreted. In
tellectual growth seems a matter of accumulated
learning; but an undigested mass of erudition leaves
one a bookworm rather than a scholar, and produc
tive expression alone clarifies and sifts the scholar's
mind. The movement of trade is on its surface a
mere scramble of self-seeking ; but in its total action
economic life is a vast tidal process of production
and distribution, of multiplying by investing, of
increase through use. To hoard one's possessions
is to lose their increment. " Thou oughtest there
fore to have put my money to the exchangers," says
the capitalist of the parable, " and then at my com
ing I should have received mine own with usury." x
Nothing could be more remote from the spirit
of the Gospels than to conceive of Jesus as con
sciously arguing from such analogies, or deducing
from them, by a process of logic, his philosophy
of life. His mind was that of a poet rather than
that of a logician ; he saw rather than reasoned ;
he overleaped logic rather than trudged through
it ; yet there are many indications that the paradox
in which he states his ethics was confirmed by his
observation of a general law. " Except a corn of
wheat fall into the ground and die," he says of the
world of nature, " it abideth alone : but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit."2 "Not that which
goeth into the mouth," he says of the body, " de-
fileth a man; but that which cometh out of the
mouth, this defileth a man."8 "Take therefore
1 Matt. xxv. 27. 2 John xii. 24. 8 Matt. xV. II.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 205
the talent from him," he says of the unused gifts
of God, " and cast ye the unprofitable servant into
outer darkness." x The same principle is formulated
in his paradox of sacrifice. He does not ask that
life be thrown away; on the contrary, he points
out how life is to be saved. He does not compare
personal duty and social duty, self -development and
self -surrender, as alternatives from which conscience
must choose. On the contrary, the only complete
self-realization is, according to his teaching, to be
reached through self-sacrifice. A hoarded life, like
hoarded money, fails of increase. Throughout the
Gospels runs this assurance, that the law of rhythm
binds together both development and sacrifice.
" Blessed are the merciful,"2 says Jesus, not only
in the mercy they show, but also in the mercy
they receive. Judge not, for in the judgments
made on others thou thyself art judged. The re
actions of mercy and the recoils of judgment bind
together duty to another and duty to oneself. The
other is, in fact, another self; and the self which
forgets itself in another rediscovers itself in the
other whom it serves. This is the truth summed up
in the Golden Rule, — golden, not only because it is
a rule of self-effacement, but because it is also a law
of self-realization. In the other self thou seest
thine own self. What, therefore, ye would that the
other should do to you, that do ye also unto him.3
l Matt. xxv. 28, 30. 2 Matt. v. 7.
3 So, Paulsen, " System der Ethik," 1889, ss. 298 ff., " Egoism and
Altruism": "All conduct which promotes or disturbs the healthy

206 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Such is the first social consequence of the Chris
tian character. Many followers of Jesus and
many critics of his teaching have conceived that
the character derived from him is a stunted and
truncated type, which flings itself away in self-
abandoning and self-scorning altruism. The fact
is, on the contrary, that the paradox of sacrifice
indicates the only way of deUverance from the
stunted and truncated life. Nothing shuts in a
life and shuts out satisfaction and joy like the self-
considering temper and the self-centred aim. Such
a life, though it may seem to itself self-developing,
is in fact self-deceived. Instead of growing richer
in its resources, it finds itself growing poorer. The
more it cultivates itself, the more sterile it grows ;
the more it accumulates, the less it has ; the more
it saves, the more it is lost. The paradox of Jesus
is the picture of a character which is enriched by
spending, developed by serving, happier itself be
cause it makes a happier world, finding itself in
losing itself, discovering the unity of the moral
world, where sacrifice is growth and service is
freedom. It would be ungracious to illustrate this con
trast of types by any personal reference had not a
striking instance been of late forced upon public
development of the individual has at the same time the tendency
to promote or disturb the common life. But the converse is also
true : The fulfilling of duties to others, and the possession of social
virtues, have the tendency to promote personal welfare, and the
lack of these virtues . . . works injury to one's own life,"

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 207
attention by the self-confession of a remarkable
man. Mr. Herbert Spencer had hardly crowned
his colossal system with the theory of ethics which
he regarded as its crucial test, when failing health
forbade further ventures in phUosophy, and he
gave himself to the study of his own character and
mind. His autobiography is singularly lacking in
incident, but almost without parallel as the scientific
analysis of a human type, and as an unconscious
illustration of the writer's ethical creed. He had
already expounded, in theoretical terms, the dis
tinction between absolute moraUty and relative
morality, the hopelessness of attaining ideal right,
and the duty of adjusting oneself to expediency
with the least friction of desire ; and he has now
reported the experience of a life consistently
directed by a creed of relative ethics. What was
the moral product of such a creed ? What type of
character, according to the philosopher's own con
fession, issued from the habitual balancing of
competing ends ? Was this balance of desires pos
sible to maintain, or did it involve an experience of
meagre satisfactions, scanty resources, and trivial
decisions ? In substituting for the paradox of
sacrifice the pursuit of a judicious self-interest, did
the happiness and scope of life increase, or did that
which seemed the gain of Ufe become its loss ?
These interesting questions are answered with
fulness in the curious story of high thinking and
meagre Uving which Mr. Spencer himself has told.
It is sufficient to recall a single chapter, which

208 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
bears the startling title, "A Grievous Mistake."
It recounts what Mr. Spencer describes as "the
most unfortunate incident" of his career. What
was this great disaster? It was the mishap of
yielding to an instinct of indignant sympathy.
The tendency of English politics toward aggres
sion over weaker races stirred his sense of justice,
and he permitted himself to attend a meeting and
to make a speech. This interruption of his regu
lar routine, however, brought temporary harm to
his health and a consequent delay in the comple
tion of his philosophical system. He was smitten
with a sense of self-reproach, and proceeds at con
siderable length to speculate whether the effort to
do good does not generally bring more harm than
benefit. His one attempt at public service re
mained in his memory as "a grievous mistake."
For the rest of his life every circumstance is tested
by its bearing on his own productive power and
his own peace of mind. Even the love of children
is a cultivated resource ; and he sends for them to
play in his room because he finds that they quiet
his nerves and restore his power of work.1 Never,
1 "An Autobiography," by Herbert Spencer, 1904, II, 443 ff. ;
" The actions I have narrated above were prompted exclusively by
the desire to further human welfare. . . . But right though I
thought it, my course brought severe penalty and no compensations
whatever." II, 523 : " During early years, and throughout mature
years, there was no sign of marked liking for children. . . . When
at Brighton in 1887, suffering the ennui of an invalid life, I one
day, while thinking over modes of killing time, bethought me that
the society of children might be a desirable distraction. . . . Mrs.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 209
perhaps, was there so candid a disclosure of a
wholly self-considering career, or a more expUcit
contrast with the Christian paradox of sacrifice.
From this point of view the career of Jesus, ending
at the age of thirty, with its task, as it seemed,
half done, its disciples despairing, and its teach
ing not even preserved in literary form, would have
certainly seemed "a grievous mistake." Would
not the world have been richer if Jesus, Uke the
EngUsh philosopher, had Uved to a ripe old age,
and left behind him, not a few beatitudes and
parables, but a complete system of religion and
ethics such as his later years might have produced ?
The answer to this criticism is sufficiently given
by the unconscious evidence of Mr. Spencer himself.
He had set himself to write a universal philosophy;
but, with a candor which no critic would have
dared to use, he points out how meagre was the
material for such a phUosophy which could be
drawn from his own emotions and desires. He
did not permit himself to enter the region of Ufe
where Jesus found not only the joy of Uving, but
all that he understood under the name of Life.
Mr. Spencer's narrow range of experience dis-
quaUfied him from interpreting experience. The
severest indictment of his ethics is his autobiog
raphy. Love and pity, service and sacrifice, are
W. Cripps let me have two of her little ones for a fortnight. The
result was ... to awaken in a quite unanticipated way the philo
progenitive instinct . . . and the two afforded me a great deal of
positive gratification." p

2IO JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
subordinated by him to the task of explaining
human life ; but the subject which was his theme
was precisely the subject he had left unexplored,
and when his Ethics was set, as a capstone, on the
great structure he had built, the writer regarded
it with a sigh of disappointment, as though aware
that his system was soon to be a historical monu
ment, marking a point where the procession of
thought had for a few years paused.1 The frag
mentary ethics of Jesus remains the interpreter of
the modern conscience, while Mr. Spencer's Sys
tem, in comparison with which a generous impulse
seemed a grievous mistake, has, hke many another
system, had its day and ceased to be. The whole
story is told in a conversation with Professor Hux
ley. As they walked together one day Mr. Spencer
said : " I suppose that all one can do with his life
is to make his mark and die." " It is not necessary
to make one's mark," replied Huxley ; " all one
need do is to give a push."
To the paradox of sacrifice in the teaching of
Jesus is added, as a second principle, the paradox
of service. It is the answer of the Gospels to the
inevitable desire of healthy-minded human beings
for success, achievement, power, mastery. Jesus
1 See Preface to "Principles of Ethics," Vol. II, 1893: "Now
that ... I have succeeded in completing the second volume of
The Principles of Ethics, ... my satisfaction is somewhat
dashed by the thought that these new parts fall short of expecta
tion. The Doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the
extent I had hoped."

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 211
takes life as it is, with its ambitions, its hope of
reward, its desire to control. He does not counsel
the abandonment of these normal desires, but on
the contrary says to many an inquirer : " Your
reward shall be great." He does not depreciate
success or greatness; he teaches what it is to
be successful and what is the mark of greatness.
When, however, he announces his paradox, how
irrational and impracticable it seems! "Whoso
ever," he says, " will be great among you, let him
be your minister; and whosoever will be chief
among you, let him be your servant."1
When such a teaching is confronted by the facts
of the world, does it not sound like sheer rhetorical
extravagance? Is not greatness more concerned
with ruling than with ministering ? Is there to be
no distinction between master and servant ? Is not
success, under the conditions of the real world,
reserved for self-assertion, aggression, leadership,
rather than for the desire to minister and the pas
sion for service ? Is not the law of natural selec
tion verified in social life as in the physical world ?
Do not the few that are fit to survive succeed in
the social struggle, and the many that are unfit to
be great become ministers and servants ? Is it not
better to accept this inevitable law and to adjust
life to its compulsion than to substitute a senti
mental for a scientific world ? Though the ways
of nature are merciless, do they not in the end
prove more merciful than the ways of sentiment ?
1 Matt xx. 26, 27.

212 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Let the fit survive, let the strong rule, let the weak
slip down by the easiest path, unobstructed by
mistaken philanthropy, toward degeneration, steril
ity, and extinction ; until at last, through much
pain perhaps, yet by an unhindered process of
social evolution, the better world arrives, when those
who are great shall rule through their greatness,
and those who are fit to be first are the masters
of all ! Such is the new animalism, so cleverly
disguised as scientific wisdom and worldly com
mon sense, which finds in superior force and un
bridled license the most effective instruments of
social peace.
It would not be difficult to oppose these doctrines
by a saner view, even of the physical processes on
which this new naturaUsm rests. Is it true, one
might ask, that social evolution invariably advances
through the same internecine conflict which in the
physical world has eliminated inferior types, or is
it rather true that as progress becomes human it
proceeds under a new law of ministry and service ?
The inventor of a new industry, the explorer of
a new continent, the discoverer of a new law of
nature, the advocate of a new cause — have these,
whose names make epochs in human history,
become great at the cost of others or rather
through service to others? Behind the competi
tions of the industrial world is there not disclosed
a system of social service, where, in spite of many
evasions of its laws, he that would be greatest min
isters to some general need and becomes the ser-

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 213
vant of aU ? Do not the poet and the artist become
great by ministering to an ideal which others recog
nize but cannot utter ? Is there not a temporariness
in success through mastery, and a permanence in
success through service ? Does not the world
finaUy withhold its honor from those who compel
admiration and give it to those who deserve
gratitude ?
Such considerations, even though they may not
cover the whole area of social life, at least Umit
the range of the brutaUty and mercUessness which
it at times exhibits. It would be, however, a most
inadequate statement of the teaching of Jesus to
find in it merely this observation of the kindUer
aspects of civilization and progress. His paradox
of service goes quite beyond the statement of laws
which govern the world as it is, and proposes a
new law for the world as it might be. He is rais
ing an issue with the ordinary principles of social
life, rather than stating an analogy which they
confirm. It is not the correspondence of his
thought with accepted truth, but the originality and
improbability of his paradox which give it a place
in history. Jesus is himself the discoverer of a
new moral process, the explorer of a new moral
continent; and the paradox which he announces
must always appear incredible to those who use
the ordinary moral processes or hve in the f amihar
continents of conduct. His teaching, as he ex-
pUcitly says, is not one which can commend itself
to worldly wisdom, but one which must be verified

214 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
by personal experience. He prefaces his paradox
by saying : " Ye know that the princes of the
Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they
that are great exercise authority upon them. But
it shall not be so among you." x
What, then, is this moral process which he dis
covers, this moral continent which he explores ?
It is a process which reverses the ordinary classifi
cations of goodness, a continent in which recogni
tion and primacy are given to a kind of conduct
which is elsewhere lightly regarded or doubtfully
praised. In the history of ethics character has
been generally described as a personal possession,
to be cultivated and maintained as an endowment
of the individual. Its ideal expression is in what
is called integrity, — the clean, straight, honorable
way of Ufe. It is an ethical attitude like that
physical attitude which the body assumes when at
its best, a condition of uprightness, a moral posture
of steadiness, erectness, and poise. Nothing in the
teaching of Jesus discredits this self-respecting
integrity. The literature of his nation abounded
in the praise of uprightness. Noah, it is written,
was an upright man ; Job was an upright man ;
David walked in integrity. "Mark the perfect
man," says the Psalmist, "and behold the up
right " ; " The just man walketh in his integrity." 2
This is the unbending and unflinching habit of life
to which Jesus appUes the word righteousness.
Uprightness is the external expression of righteous-
1 Matt. xx. 25, 26. 2 Ps. xxxvii. 37 ; Prov. xx. 7.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 215
ness ; righteousness is the spiritual principle of
uprightness. It is at this point that the ethics of
Jesus begin. " Seek first the Kingdom of God and
His righteousness"; "Blessed are they that hun
ger and thirst after righteousness." The Christian
character is, first of all, upright, erect, integral,
righteous. When, however, Jesus passes from the element
ary beginnings of morality to its finer expressions,
and considers the marks which distinguish moral
greatness, he enters into a new region of conduct,
as though he were ascending the heights of life
and had come to a new zone of vegetation and a new
horizon of outlook. " Whosoever would be great
among you," he says, " shall be your minister, and
whosoever would be first shall be your servant."
This is not only uprightness, but uprightness which
bows itself ; not only erectness, but the capacity of
erectness to stoop and serve. Integrity, to Jesus,
is not merely a possession, but an instrument ; not
an attitude which is unbending, but a strength
which can bow itself to minister. His whole
teaching gives an extraordinary dignity to the
humblest forms of service. " Come, ye blessed
of my Father," he says, in language of the loftiest
commendation, " inherit the kingdom prepared for
you from the foundation of the world." x What
makes these blessed ones the heirs of the Kingdom ?
It is that they have fed the hungry, received the
stranger, clothed the naked, befriended those in
1 Matt. xxv. 34.

2l6 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
prison. The servants of those which are least are
the heirs of that which is most. They are chief
because they are ministers.
The most touching illustration of this teaching is
that in which the fourth Gospel adds to the sayings
at the Last Supper an act of the most impressive
and suggestive symbolism. Jesus, after the Sup
per, says the passage, knows that the Father
has given all things into his hands, and that he is
come from God and goes to God.1 It is his last
opportunity to confirm his leadership and to demon
strate to his friends his great commission. How
does he teach this lesson of spiritual primacy ? He
rises from the table and, laying aside his garments,
washes the disciples' feet, saying unto them : " For
I have given you an example, that ye should do as
I have done to you."2 The evidence that he had
come from God and was going to God was in his
taking on himself the form of a servant. His right
to lead was in his desire to minister. His mastery
of men was in his service of men. The disciple of
Jesus was to prove his discipleship by the capacity
to stoop and serve.
When the Apostle Paul desires to reiterate his
Master's principle of service, he also is led to
express it in the same language of paradox. " Bear
ye one another's burdens," he says, " and so fulfil
the law of Christ."3 The law of Christ is the
law of service. To say : " Bear ye one another's
burdens," is but to repeat the saying of Jesus,
1 John xiii. 3. 2 John xiii, 15. 8 Gal. vi. 2.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 217
"As I have washed your feet, ye ought also to
wash one another's feet." Yet in almost the same
breath Paul goes on to announce an opposite and
apparently contradictory law. " Every man," he
says, " shall bear his own burden; " as though now
repeating that other word of Jesus : " If any man
would come after me, let him take up his own cross
and follow me." Is this transition sheer inconsist
ency in the apostle's thought, or does the essence
of his teaching Ue in its paradox ? Who are they,
he seems to ask himself, who can fulfil the law of
Christ and bear the burdens of others ? It is not
every one who wishes to be a burden-bearer who
is able to carry the load. Not every tender heart
can be effectively sympathetic. They only can
bear others' burdens who quietly and firmly bear
their own. The principle of service involves the
possession of strength. To stoop in pity one
must first stand erect. Each one who bears his
own burden has added to him the further bless
ing that he may bear others' burdens too. The
paradox of service states not only the duty, but
the condition of usefulness. He that is strong
to bear his own burdens is able to be the servant
of all.
This aspect of the teaching of Jesus immediately
impressed his followers and gave a pecuhar qual
ity to primitive Christian life. Among the earliest
traditions concerning the death of Jesus was that
" being put to death in the flesh ... he went and
preached " to the spirits in prison before he as-

2l8 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
cended "to the right hand of God."1 "He de
scended into hell," says the so-called Apostles'
Creed,2 " he ascended into heaven." The first act
of his ascension was a descent. His freedom from
the flesh made him the servant of those in bonds.
His first step toward heaven was not up, but down.
This new ethics at once characterized the new faith.
A new responsibility for the weak, the sick, the
outcast, the prisoner, the slave, for women and
children, became the primary evidence of disciple
ship. The earliest records of Christian worship
report as an essential part of ritual the deposit of
alms for the relief of the needy. The earliest
expressions of Christian prayer gather up into the
petition of the congregation, the help of the helpless
and the cry of the poor.3 The Christian religion
1 I Peter iii. 19, 22.
2 So, XXXIX Articles, No. VIII : " That which is commonly
called the Apostles' Creed."
a Justin, " Apology," Ch. LXVII : " At the close of the prayer, as
we have before described, bread and wine with water are brought.
The President offers prayer and thanks for them, according to the
power given him, and the congregation responds the Amen. Then
the consecrated elements are distributed to each one, and partaken,
and are carried by the deacons to the houses of the absent. The
wealthy and the willing then give contributions according to their free
will, and this collection is deposited with the President, who therewith
supplies orphans and widows, poor and needy, prisoners and strang
ers, and takes care of all who are in want." So, " Teaching of the
Twelve Apostles," tr. Hitchcock and Brown, 1884, Ch. XII, XIII :
" Let every one that cometh in the Lord's name be received, but
afterward ye shall test and know him ; for ye shall have under
standing, right and left. If he who comes is a traveller, help him
as much as ye can ; but he shall not remain with you, unless for

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 219
became a vast movement of phUanthropy. Com
passion, sympathy, charity, brotherhood — these
words were superimposed in the structure of the
Christian character on rectitude, uprightness, right
eousness. Christian discipleship was not complete
until the disciple, Uke his Master, rose from the
table of abundance and bent as a servant to minister
to human needs.
Here was a new classification of virtues. The
primacy of compassion, the dignity of sympathy,
the lordship of service, made a teaching strange to
Roman ears and stiU presents a perplexing para
dox to many a modern mind. However noble the
teaching appears to be, is it — one may stiU ask —
a teaching which should be unhesitatingly obeyed ?
Has it been to the advantage of the world that
these softer sentiments should have such pre
cedence? Has not Christian compassion pro
longed many superfluous Uves; has not Christian
charity supported in idleness those who should
two or three days, if there be necessity. But if he will take up his
abode among you, being an artisan, let him work and so eat ; but
if he have no trade, provide, according to your understanding, that
no idler live with you as a Christian." . . . "Every firstfruit,
then, of the products of wine-press and threshing-floor, of oxen and
of sheep, thou shalt take and give to the prophets ; for they are
your high-priests. But if ye have no prophet, give it to the poor."
So, " Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians," tr. Lightfoot, 1877,
Appendix, p. 376 : " We beseech Thee, Lord and Master, to be our
help and succour. Save those among us who are in tribulation ;
have mercy on the lowly ; lift up the fallen ; show Thyself unto the
needy ; heal the ungodly ; convert the wanderers of Thy people ;
. . . raise up the weak ; comfort the faint-hearted."

220 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
have learned the hard lessons of thrift? Is one's
life best employed in ministering to the weak ; or
will one in the end accomplish more for the world,
as well as for himself, by finding for himself a place
among the strong ? Might not Jesus have occupied
the last hours of his life with some task more useful
than the washing of his disciples' feet ?
The answer to such questions must finally de
pend on the antecedent conclusion which one may
reach concerning the nature of human society. Is
the social order essentially a fratricidal or a fraternal
world ? Is it a chaos or a cosmos ? Is it a scramble
or a family ? Must those who rise chmb over the
bodies of those who fall ; or is there, on the con
trary, no permanent security for those at the top
unless there be a corresponding lift of those at the
bottom ? Can there be a survival of the fit unless
there be also a corresponding revival of the unfit ?
Is civilization most secure where a ruling class
represses an illiterate peasantry, or where a democ
racy insures civil rights to all? Is a community
rich which spends nothing on its paupers, its blind,
its insane ; or is it true, as a historian of the Eng
lish Poor Law has remarked, that " the moral life
of the community is incompatible with the spectacle
of unrelieved indigence " ? x
The teaching of Jesus presupposes what the an
swer to such questions must be. If it were true
iFowle, "The Poor Law," 1881, p. 10 : "This law or fact we
may express in the following terms : That every society upon arriv
ing at a certain stage of civilization finds it positively necessary

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 221
that society is merely the organization of selfishness,
that the elevation of the few involves the degrada
tion of the many, that progress and poverty must
increase together, that mastery must rest on servi
tude ; — then the teacher who should propose that
the great should be servants and the first should be
ministers, is too ignorant or too defiant of social
laws to be a trustworthy moral guide. If, on the
other hand, human society is an organism, where
the strength of the whole is dependent on the health
of each part, and where the neglect or atrophy of
any part threatens the vitaUty of the whole; if
the chief peril of the social order is created by the
isolation and hostihty of social classes ; if the first
conditions of social security are mutual understand
ing, fraternahsm, cooperation, the spirit of indus
trial and pohtical democracy ; if there is a law of
the equiUbration of characters, as of the equiUbra-
tion of forces, by which power is transferred from
the strong to the weak, and the balance of life re
stored ; — then no teaching could be more sane and
rational than that which exalts the work of minis
tering and affirms the dignity of service.
It is interesting to observe how many modern
tendencies of thought tend to confirm this view of
social progress. Sociology and economics, poUtics
for its own sake, — that is to say, for the satisfaction of its own
humanity, and for the due performance of the purposes for which
societies exist, — to provide that no person, no matter what has
been his Ufe, or what may be the consequences, shall perish for want
of the bare necessaries of existence."

222 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
and philanthropy, have been led to appreciate, in
an unprecedented degree, the unity and interdepen
dence of human society. It has become plain that
a condition of prosperity for the few and a condi
tion of degradation for the many creates, not a
stable society, but a social volcano, which is threat
ened every day by eruption from beneath. We have
learned through the tragedies of war in the East
that political autocracy is the seed of political
weakness and revolution. We have become aware,
through tragedies near at hand, that the life of the
garment-wearer in a luxurious home is at the mercy
of the health or disease of the garment-worker in
the tenement. We have become convinced that
the defective classes must be protected if the State
is to be secure ; that the social order, though it be
built by self-interest, must be cemented by com
passion. In spite of all the greed and self-seeking
of the modern world, it is already recognized that
those are first in honor who heal social divisions,
establish democracy, free the slave, help the help
less, deliver the oppressed. The heart of the time
responds to the dictum of Emerson : " Every step
so downward, is a step upward. The man who
renounces himself, comes to himself."1 Human
society, in short, is not a fixed condition, where a
single law is adequate for its interpretation ; it is
a living, moving organism, a process of growth,
from the animalism and brutality which still threaten
its advance, to the humanity and altruism which
1 " Divinity School Address," p. 67.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 223
are already real possessions. The teaching of
Jesus addresses itself to the ideal society, the com
ing social order, the superman. To the lower
instincts of human beings his law is an absurdity
but to their higher moments it is demonstrable
truth. Here is the issue between Christian civili
zation and social reversion. The whole structure
of modern philanthropy and social responsibUity —
our hospitals, our charities, our science of reUef , our
industrial schemes of mutual welfare — rest on the
paradox of Jesus. The passion for service, which
is so conspicuous a mark of modern life, is nothing
else than a social consequence of the Christian
character. There remains a third paradox in the teaching
of Jesus, less expUcitly announced and less directly
related to the conduct of life, but involved in all
his teaching, and of the utmost social consequence.
It is the paradox of idealism. As one reviews the
intellectual, hterary, and social tendencies of the
present time, he observes, among much that is
reckless and superficial, an extraordinary revival
of the sense of reaUty. Instead of conventionalism
in Uterature, formalism in art, and artificiaUty in
manners, there is a new respect for facts, a new
confidence in candor, a renaissance of realism. It
is a phase of civflization which is full of promise.
Honesty is better than affectation ; facts are more
romantic than fiction ; sincerity is more convincing
than conventionaUsm, and realism than unreality.

224 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
What is it, however, which to modern reaUsm
seems most real ? What are these facts which are
thus substituted for unreality ? To what end is
this new passion for sincerity and unaffectedness
devoted ? Is it not true that realism, instead of
offering a satisfying creed, often presents a patheti
cally meagre and colorless picture of life ? In its
reaction from the fictitious and the metaphysical,
is it not inclined to content itself with facts which
are insignificant, and in its respect for truth to take
for its material truths which are not even respect
able? Realism at its worst has become merely
another name for the art of the flesh and the litera
ture of the sty ; and, even at its best, realism, in the
effort to be real, runs grave risk of missing the
very touch which gives to art or literature perma
nent reality. It is steadying to have one's feet on
the ground, but it is not unreasonable to look up
to the stars. It is honest to recognize the scum
on the surface of the stream of life, but it is not
dishonest to remember the clear current below.
It is a dramatic surprise to discover — as reahsm
has discovered — that poetry may be wrought out
of steam-engines and barrack-rooms and light
houses; but Mr. Kipling's writings would be no
more than a passing literary fashion unless at times
he touched the note of the heroic, the spiritual, the
sublime. In short, the revival of realism renews
the question of the nature of reality. Is human
life real when it is at its worst or when it is at its
best ? To be sincere must one be brutal, fleshly,

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 225
cynical ? Is the scum of life real and not its deeper
waters? Is the mud real and not the star? Is
there, in a word, any fundamental issue between
the real and the ideal, or is the ideal the most real
of human possessions, and are the best interpreters
of reaUty the ideaUsts ?
To such questions the greatest of the world's
sages, prophets, philosophers, artists, and seers
give but one reply. Human Ufe does not come to
its own until it comes to its ideals. The thirst for
reaUty is unslaked by the temporary, the accidental,
the fleshly ; and is satisfied by nothing less than
the permanent, the spiritual, the ideal. "The
things which are seen are temporal ; but the things
which are not seen are eternal," says St. Paul.1 " Our
heart can find no rest until it rests in Thee," 2 says
St. Augustine. "We seek the better because we
conceive a Best," says modern philosophy.3 " Man
is an ideal-forming animal," says modern ethics.4
" 'Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man
would do,"
says modern poetry.5
1 2 Cor. iv. 1 8. 2 " Confessions," I, I.
3T. H. Green, "Prolegomena to Ethics," 1883, p. 325: "No
one doubts that a man who improves the current morality of his
time must be something of an Idealist. . . . That idea cannot
represent any experienced reaUty. If it did, the reformer's labour
would be superfluous."
1 John Grote, " A Treatise on the Moral Ideals," 1876, p. 392 :
"Whatever else we consider about man, we must add to this —
what constitutes indeed the practical significance of our caUing
him a rational animal — that he is an ideal-forming animal."
6 Browning's " Saul."
Q

226 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
" What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me." x
" Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im weiten,
Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten." 2
In this serene company of witnesses of the spirit
the teaching of Jesus finds its place. He is the
greatest of idealists, not as a philosopher ex
pounding a system, but as a character consciously
sustained by an ideal aim which to him is the
supreme reality. At the beginning of his minis
try he repeats to the tempter the words of Deu
teronomy : " Man doth not live by bread only,
but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of the Lord ; " 3 and this conviction that the
real life is fed by the sense of the ideal colors his
teaching and conduct to the end. "The life," he
says, " is more than meat." 4 "A man's life con-
sisteth not in the abundance of the things which
he possesseth." "Thou fool," says the parable, of
him that " layeth up treasure for himself, and is not
rich toward God." 5 " My meat," says the fourth
Gospel, "is to do the will of him that sent me."6
Thus by word and deed Jesus testifies that the real
Ufe is life directed toward its ideal. His teaching
is not a theory of reaUty, but a discovery of reality.
He does not evade material facts; he translates
1 Browning's " Rabbi Ben Ezra."
2 Goethe, Faust, ite Theil, " Zueignung."
3 Deut. viii. 3. 8 Luke xii. 15, 20, 21.
1 Luke xii. 23. 6 John iv. 34.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 227
material facts into his ideahsm. Nature, business,
the play of children, the work of Ufe, all speak to
him the truth of the spirit in the language of the
real. The subjects of his parables are the com
monplace and trivial incidents of life, but the
purpose of his parables is the idealization of the
commonplace and trivial. The way of his dis
cipleship is through prosaic deeds, Uke feeding
the hungry, clothing the naked, or caring for the
stranger ;- but the prose becomes poetry and the
real becomes ideal when Jesus says, " Inasmuch
as ye have done it unto one of these least ye have
done it unto me."
Thus, behind the paradox of sacrifice and the
paradox of service in the teaching of Jesus stands
always this paradox of ideahsm. The reason one
is sure that to lose Ufe is to find it, and that to
serve is to command, is because he is antecedently
sure that the world is not what it seems to be, — a
world of material gains and glory ; but that the
real is the ideal, and that the unseen things are
eternal. Here is the explanation of the curious
mingUng of conservatism and radicaUsm in the
teaching of Jesus which has perplexed many an
observer. He comes, not to destroy the Law, but
to fulfil it; yet his teaching proves a radical de
parture from the Law and an offence to the legal
ists. How can he be at once a destroyer and a
fulfiUer, a radical and a conservative ? It is because
he finds the reahty of the Law in the ideals of
the Law ; and in destroying the formal law he is

228 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
fulfilling the ideal law, as the ripening of a seed
involves the bursting of its shell.
Such, for instance, is the attitude of Jesus toward
the law of the Sabbath. He is conservative in con
formity, yet radical in interpretation. He shares
the common worship, and takes his part in its
ritual ; yet his conduct on the Sabbath day appears
to many blasphemous. "The sabbath," he says,
"was made for man, and not man for the sab
bath." 1 The reality of the Sabbath was to be
sought in the ideal of the Sabbath. Its authority
is not formal, conventional, repressive ; it is human,
enriching, spirituahzing. What makes a man more
a man is a Christian use of the Sabbath ; but a man
is not more a man when he is undevout, ungirt, or
torpid. Jesus does not lower the level of the day
of rest; he lifts it, and it becomes a real day of
the Lord through its revival of the ideal life of man.
These details, however, are but illustrations of
one comprehensive conception in which the ideal
ism of Jesus is fully expressed. " He came into
Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of
God." 2 It was a social ideal which still seems to
many minds the Utopian dream of a visionary en
thusiast ; yet to Jesus this unattained ideal was the
supreme reaUty which gave direction to his entire
work. The Kingdom of God, as described by Jesus,
has many aspects. It is, at one time, remote, exter
nal, millennial ; again it is near, accessible, spiritual.
In its fulfilment it was to be a divine harvest of the
1 Mark ii. 27. 2 Mark i. 14.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 229
world ; but the seed of that harvest already lay in
the faith, love, and prayers of the Uttle company
of beUevers. "Fear not," he says, "Uttle flock;
for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you
the kingdom." " I wiU give unto thee the keys
of the kingdom of heaven."1
Was ever ideahsm so audacious as this ? What
seemed the real world, with its Roman power, its
Hebrew prejudices, its human neutrahty and timid
ity, shrank into insignificance before the mind of
Jesus, as the ideal of his faith, the better world,
the brotherhood of man, the Fatherhood of God,
became to him the great reaUty for which he might
Uve and die. The paradox of ideahsm made his
teaching extravagant and unintelUgible to many
hearers, as it stiU remains an offence to the wis
dom of the world. Why should we be guided, one
asks, by illusory dreams, when the realities of life
bluntly contradict this vision ? Why should Chris
tian congregations still pray that God's kingdom
may come on earth, when after nineteen centuries
it is as far away as ever ? Is it not better to take
the world as it is than to imagine it as it cannot be ;
to content oneself with the real rather than to
dream of the ideal ? The Christian character, on
the other hand, inherits from Jesus his inexpug
nable ideaUsm. The world as it is, prosaic, hard,
commercial, is the raw material of the world as it
1 Luke xii. 32 ; Matt. xvi. 19. Compare the various views of the
nature of the Kingdom as contrasted in "Jesus Christ and the
Social Question," pp. 91 ff., with notes.

23O JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
is to be. The Christian is an optimist, not with
the reckless assurance which calls evil good, but
with the rational faith that good is to overcome
evil, and that : —
" Step by step, since time began,
We see the steady gain of man."
When one surveys the history of moral prog
ress, what does it teach but the justification of
this idealism ? What is it that has created a better
world but the antecedent faith of the ideahsts?
Each reform in industrial conditions, in the pro
tection of the unprotected, in the abolition of slav
ery, — whether it be chattel slavery or commercial
slavery, — in the treatment of the criminal and the
prisoner, has been first dreamed and then accom
plished. The idealist endures " as seeing him
who is invisible."1 God chooses "the things which
are not, to bring to nought things that are."2
First comes the idealist with his impracticable hope,
and then follow the legislatures and the nations
with their practicable measures. First comes the
prayer for God's kingdom, and then the realization
of that kingdom in some corner of the world. The
idealist does not argue with the world as it is ; he
simply creates the world which has been proved to
be impossible. The sagacious Pilate smiles at the
zeal of Jesus for a kingdom of truth and withdraws
from this hopeless idealism to the realities of the
kingdom of the Caesars ; but the realist is soon
1 Heb. xi. 27. 2 I Cor. i. 28.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 23 1
remembered only because he once ridiculed the
ideaUst, and the kingdom of the Caesars surrenders
to the kingdom of the truth.
Such are the paradoxes of the teaching of Jesus
and their social consequences. The Christian
character, with its sacrifice, its service, its ideaUsm,
must always appear perplexing to the selfish, the
grasping or the worldly. Why is it, then, one is
led finally to ask, that, in spite of these paradoxes
of character, the heart of the world has turned
toward such a teaching, and that worldly sagacity
has been unable to arrest the progress of this ideal
ism, even when it seems so easily disproved ? It
is because life itself is so complex, many-sided, and
contradictory that nothing short of the paradoxical
is its adequate interpretation. One of the most
instructive of intellectual experiences is to watch a
system-maker as he follows his passion for the
simpUfication of truth. He sets at the head of his
task some clew or formula, and the facts which
present themselves faU in like a procession behind.
It may be the origin of religion which he is ex
amining, or the nature of society or the history of
ethics, and in each the complexity of truth is re
duced to the Umits of one astonishingly simple law.
We are on the brink of consenting to the theory
proposed, — a worship of ancestors, it may be, or a
law of imitation or a doctrine of utility. Truth,
which had hitherto baffled us with its complexity,
is opened by a single key. Then, of a sudden,

232 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
another truth looks, as it were, over the shoulder
of the principle thus presented and mocks our
simple faith. Instead of presenting to us one
calm face, truth is like a throng of faces, vary
ing in expression and confusing in their complex
ity. The simple formula was ingenious, but it was
not ample enough to hold the many-sidedness of
truth. There is the same story to tell of the simpUfy-
ing of conduct. Do what the phUosophers may
to reduce life to a formula, it remains a para
dox. Shall we define life as pleasure or pain, as
gain or loss, as rich or poor, as long or short ? It
is all of these, a series of mingled and bewildering
experiences, a quick shifting of light and shadow,
of sunshine and storm, of achievement and regret,
of living and dying. To find life simple is not to
have lived; to miss the complexity of experience
is to miss the meaning of life. Each life holds
many lives. There are truths which are false on
one level of experience and which become true
only as one ascends. There are experiences which
are fictitious to one age or condition, but which
are the supreme sources of joy or peace as one
grows fit to use them. The same truth, Jesus
taught, may be convincing to some minds and
quite inaccessible to others. He that has ears to
hear, alone can hear. " Unto you," he said to his
friends, " it is given to know the mysteries of the
kingdom of God ; but to them it is not given." 1
1 Luke viii. io ; Matt. xiii. 1 1.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES 233
There were things which he desired to teach which
did not come into view until one went up with him
to the height of his teaching; where that which
seemed to those below a paradox became the most
obvious of reahties.
How is it, then, that the paradoxes of Jesus may
be appUed to the paradox of life? They cannot be
accepted as theories ; they can be verified by ex
perience alone. The appeal of Jesus is always to
experience. " Follow me," he says. " Sell all that
thou hast and follow me." " Come unto me." " I
am the way." The paradox of sacrifice must seem
to those who do not go the way of sacrifice, a foohsh
teaching which leads to loss of life ; but those who
follow this way to its end, discover that it is Ufe
which they have found. The paradox of service is
for the poor in spirit alone to verify, yet through
their self-effacing service the poor in spirit reach
the kingdom of heaven. The paradox of idealism
is to the realist the most illusory of dreams, yet the
idealist creates the reaUty in which he alone has
beUeved. Not one of these paradoxes is a truth
open to demonstration. They are apparent con
tradictions, precisely as life itself appears to be
a contradiction; but the apparent contradictions
of truth are among the most impressive evidences
of the many-sidedness of Ufe. The social para
doxes of Jesus are not propositions of the Christian
reason ; they are consequences of the Christian
character.

CHAPTER VII
THE ASCENT OF ETHICS
In all that has been thus far said there is a
manifest sense of incompleteness. The ethical
teaching of Jesus, though it may interpret many of
his words and works, brings us repeatedly to a
point where the Teacher seems to pass beyond the
province of ethics and to use a language which
ethics does not comprehend. His summons to
righteousness, his command of love, his conception
of life, all move in the sphere of ethics ; but when
at any point he indicates the sources of his moral
authority, the motives which direct his will, the
grounds of his ethical confidence, he crosses the
boundary of ethics, and, while still discoursing of
character, enters a region where character is con
sciously controlled by communion with God. Jesus,
in short, is fundamentally not a teacher of morals,
but a witness of religion. The supreme motive of
his conduct is his relation to the Father. " Wist
ye not," he says in youth, " that I must be about
my Father's business ? " x " All things are delivered
unto me," he says of his commission, "of my
Father."2 The interpretation of the teaching of
1 Luke ii. 49. 2 Matt. xi. 27; Luke x. 22.
234

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 235
Jesus in terms of ethics leads, as it were, to a
threshold, which the Teacher crosses to enter a
room of which ethics has no key, and of which he
says : " I am the door."
This impression which one receives from the
teaching of Jesus, that, though ethical in its con
tent and aim, its motives and sources are super-
ethical, meets one again as he examines the modern
hterature of systematic ethics. These analyses of
conduct proceed with their classifications of virtues,
appetites, and desires, where the student feels at
each step that there is sohd ground under his feet ;
yet he cannot escape the suspicion that these
ethical distinctions, though substantial so far as
they go, do not touch the bottom of the material
with which they deal. It is as though one's way
led over a series of stepping-stones, each of which
was firm, but beneath which ran an unexplored and
mysterious stream. Beneath the questions of ethics,
even when these are answered, run deeper ques
tions of religion, issuing from sources which lie
back of ethics, and flowing to an end which is be
yond ethics. The footpath of ethics follows the
course of this current of reUgion, and one looks
down from the stepping-stones of morals and
wonders whither this unexplored river would bear
him if he gave himself to its control.
In the preface of Dr. Martineau's " Study of
Rehgion" he quotes "an eminent English posi-
tivist " as commenting on John Fiske's treatise on
the "Destiny of Man." "It only proves," said

236 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
this advocate of naturalistic ethics, " what I have
always maintained, that you cannot make the
slightest concession to metaphysics, without ending
in a theology ! " The criticism was to be antici
pated ; but, as Dr. Martineau proceeds to remark,
it was a naive confession that " If once you allow
yourself to think about the origin and end of things,
you will have to believe in a God and immortaUty." x
That was precisely what had happened to John
Fiske. He had permitted himself to think about
the evolution of morality, and the implications of
ethics had led him across the threshold of religion.2
Ethics, in short, while it has a certain stability and
coherence of its own, has the marks of a prelimi
nary, suggestive, propaedeutic science. A theory
of morals is like a house by the wayside, where
one may rest securely for a night, but which is not
the journey's end. Ethics is a sign-post on the
way to religion.
This lack of finality has a striking illustration in
an Association which has made important contri
butions to contemporary morals in the name of
" Ethical Culture." Here is a movement which,
superficially regarded, is neutral or hostile to the
1 " Study of Religion," 1888, pp. vii ff.
2 " The Destiny of Man, viewed in the Light of his Origin,"
1884, pp. 104 ff. : "Now what is this message of the modern
prophet but pure Christianity? . . . When have we ever before
held such a clew to the meaning of Christ in the Sermon on
the Mount? . . . Our new knowledge enlarges tenfold the sig
nificance of human life, and makes it seem more than ever the
chief object of Divine care."

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 237
formal teaching of reUgion, and deUberately re
stricts its programme to moral education. The
metaphysics of Christianity are dismissed from con
sideration as superfluous and obstructive, and atten
tion is recalled to the obvious and immediate truths
of ethical responsibiUty and human service. It is
an indictment which the churches should take to
heart, an appeal from feehng to conduct, from
theology to Ufe. When, however, one observes
more closely the Uterature of Ethical Culture, he
is surprised to observe that, though its title seems
repressive, its intention is comprehensive. Its
"culture" represents not merely the practice of
moraUty, but the philosophy of idealism. Its hope
is not to reduce reUgion to morals, but to expand
morals into reUgion. Its language is that of ethics,
but its motives are those of faith. Ethical ideaUsm
may shun the phrases of rehgion ; but its emotions,
its impulses, its spiritual attitude, are identical with
those of rational piety. Faith in the moral order
of the Universe, in the categorical imperative of
duty, in the fitness of man for ethical culture, may
not express the whole of reUgion, but it is certainly
the point at which the teaching of Jesus began.
Lives which are trained to recognize the universal
authority, of the moral law may not name the name
of God, but they are doing the will of the Father.
Ethical culture is suppressed Theism.1
i Compare eg. " Ethics and Religion," edited by the Society of
Ethical Propagandists, 1900, Lect. I, J. R. Seeley, "Ethics and
Religion," p. 26 : " My advice is that instead of waging war, open

238 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
If, then, it be true that ethics, whether in its
modern forms or in the teaching of Jesus, bears
this mark of preparatoriness, as though preliminary
to an end beyond itself, what is the principle which
distinguishes these two ways of conduct ? Can
religion exist without morality ? Can morality ex
ist without religion ? Is religion merely morality
touched with emotion ? Is morality merely religion
freed from superstition ? Theologians have spoken
slightingly of mere morality or mere works ; moral
ists have regarded with equal indifference mere
theology or faith without works. Religion often
appears unmoral or even immoral, whether in cruel'
rites of barbaric tribes or in limp emotions of
modern sentimentalists. Morality often acts with
out consciousness of religious sanctions, whether in
Stoic philosophers or in modern Agnostics. How,
then, shall one discriminate ethics from religion ?
What is it in these two sentiments, which have
or covert, you enter once for all into the heartiest and most reserved
alliance with Christianity"; Lect. II, Felix Adler, "The Freedom
of Ethical Fellowship," pp. 50 ff. : " The teachings of Jesus . . . are
that it is necessary to live the spiritual life in order to understand
the spiritual truths. . . . The symbols of religion are ciphers of
which the key is to be found in moral experience. . . . The new
religious synthesis which many longed for, will not be a fabrication,
but a growth. It will . . . come in time as a result of the grad
ual moral evolution of modern society." Lect. IV, W. M. Salter,
" Ethical Religion," pp. 88 ff. ; " Ethics realized in its meaning is
religion. . . . Aspiration, reverence, awe, . . . are but uncompleted
morality; and when the moral act is done, ecstasy is its sign, —
ecstasy, which is the grace heaven sets upon the moment in which
the soul weds itself to the perfect good."

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 239
directed so great a part of human history, — the
sense of duty, and the sense of God, — which at
the same time demonstrates their affinity and denies
their identity ? How is it that ethics comes to have
this preUminary and unconclusive aspect, as though
it were a threshold across which one passed to
faith ?
The answer to these questions is suggested when
one observes the different circles of relationship in
which the two sentiments habituaUy move. Ethics
is sociological, human, contemporary. It considers
the adjustment of each individual within the circle
of his social relations. The elementary truth which
makes the starting-point of ethics is the truth that
the individual is not alone, but is a part of the
social order. Through the performance of its
function by each part, the social organism, like
physical organisms, survives and thrives ; the dis
covery by the individual of his part in the social
whole is his problem of ethics ; and the perform
ance of that part is the doing of his duty. Indi
viduals are not wandering atoms which at times
colUde and then rebound into isolation ; they are
inevitably associated in the organic life of the
social body. Thy neighbor and thyself are inter
dependent atoms ; and the moral law, " Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself," is imperative, be
cause it describes the fact that thy neighbor and
thyself are members one of another.1
1 Compare Royce, "The World and the Individual," 1901, Lect
VIII, " The Moral Order," p. 349 : " The essence of this consciousness

24O JESUS .CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
If this is the field of ethics, what is that of reli
gion ? Here also the individual finds himself part
of an organic life, in which he is to find and fulfil
his function ;¦ but the circle of relationship in which
he is now set is no longer limited by the human,
social, contemporary world. Association with the
Eternal, loyalty to the Ideal, communion with
God, — the characteristic attitudes of the religious
life, — assume that the individual is set within a
universal order, whose total movement, whether of
man or nature, of pain or pleasure, of personal or
national experience, is the movement of a spiritual
intention, the evolution of a Divine plan. To con
form to that plan and cooperate with it becomes the
supreme desire. Discernment of that plan is the
end of theology; cooperation with it is the end
of religion. To fulfil one's function in the uni
versal organism ; to recognize in one's own experi
ence not an unmeaning accident, but an essential
incident in the vast design ; to do not one's own
will, but the will of Him who sends us, — that is
the habit of mind which expresses the peace, cour
age, and consecration of a religious faith.1
[of Ought] is that the Self is to accomplish the object of its search
through obedience to an order which is not of its own momentary crea
tion "; Seth, " Ethical Principles," 1902, Ch. XI, "The Social Life ";
Wundt, "Ethik," 1886, ss. 386 ff., "Das Verhaltniss des Einzelnen
zur Gesammtheit " ; Mackenzie, "Introduction to Social Philoso
phy," 1890, Ch. Ill, "The Social Organism."
1 So, Sabatier, " Religions of Authority and the Religion of the
Spirit," tr. Houghton, 1904, pp. 350 ff. : " If the law of duty is the
immanent law of the life of the spirit ; . . - if humanity makes no

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 24 1
Here, then, are two circles of conduct which in
one aspect are identical, but in another are dis
tinct. The problem of conduct is in each case the
same. Morality and reUgion are aUke concerned
with the adjustment of the part to the whole, the
atom to the organism, the person to the world ; but
the areas of conduct within which adjustment is to
be found are of different dimensions. What ethics
proposes within the circle of social life religion
accomplishes in the larger circle of the universal
order. The two circles are concentric. At the
centre of each stands the personal life, with its
own problems and needs ; but while the radius of
one circle runs out to the circumference of human
companionship, the radius of the environing circle
is protracted as far as thought and feeling have
the strength to go. It is not surprising, then, that
ethics, though having a certain completeness of its
own, betrays the sense of a greater environment.
The outer edge of ethical inquiry is the inner
margin of larger problems. Prolong the radius of
duty-doing, and one enters the territory of faith.
Ethics goes its own way toward its own end ; but
the end of ethics is no sooner approached than
there appears beyond it a further ideal, as one
progress . . . except by obedience ; . . . if this law commands uni
versal evolution . . . does it not become evident that . . . the law
of duty shares in the objectivity of cosmic laws themselves ? " So,
G. H. Palmer, "The Field of Ethics," 1901, p. 201 . "Ethics is
. . . occupied with earthly conditions. The finite is its field;
but . . . the moral man is ever seeking to manifest the connection
of the finite with the infinite."

242 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
reaches what seems the summit of a mountain
only to discover a higher peak beyond.
May ethics, then, exist without religion ? Such
independence, it must be answered, may unques
tionably be maintained; but it is maintained by
restricting the radius and scope of duty. Small
ethics, conventional conduct, decent conformity,
may be comfortably fortified within a very limited
circle of principles and sanctions; but no sooner
does conduct reach out toward heroism, initiative,
leadership, idealism, than the circle of ethics ex
pands into that of faith, and instead of conformity
to conventional maxims feels the compulsion of
categorical commands. May religion, on the other
hand, exist without morality ? This detachment,
also, it must be admitted, appears practicable.
Religion has an outer circle of emotion and expres
sion in which one may dwell without retiring to
the inner circle of practical morality. The con
templation of God may become so absorbing that
it may induce sheer inactivity, meditation or ec
stasy.1 The manifestation of religion may be mis
taken for reUgion itself, and religion may be defined
as though it occupied an outer circle of ritual,
ceremonial or theology. Yet this rupture of the
outer circle of experience from the inner is Uke the
breaking of a living growth, where the part cut off
withers and the part abandoned shows the scar.
Religion, as a way of life, is a flower of the whole
of life. It does not outgrow morality, it grows out
1 So, Palmer, " Field of Ethics," 1901, pp. 180 ff.

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 243
of moraUty. It is no more to be defined by the
form it assumes than a person can be defined by
the clothes he wears. Ritual, ceremony, theology,
are the clothes of reUgion, and religion itself is
the life within. Normal religion is an extension of
the radius of morality. It is conduct persuaded
by the call of God, life set in the circumference of
the Eternal, participation in the universal order,
enlargement of experience by contact with the
permanent. "Wouldst thou find thy way to the
Infinite ? " said Goethe, " Push on into the finite
as far as thou canst go." x Even the immoralities
which have often characterized the history of reU
gion confirm the principle that religion is an exten
sion of morality ; for it is the sense of obhgation,
perverted but compelhng, which has given to these
immoraUties their authority. The imperfect ethics
has penetrated the developing faith, as a waver
ing radius vitiates a circle. Pure religion, what
ever else it may contain, is a circle of experience
at whose centre are those who are unspotted from
the world.
What, then, is the relation of moraUty to reU
gion ? It is the relation of the part to the whole,
of the smaller to the larger world, of the ante
chamber to the presence-chamber, of companion
ship with humanity to companionship with God.
The second commandment, " Thou shalt love thy
1 " Gott, Gemuth, und Welt " : —
" Willst du in's UnendUche schreiten,
Geh' nur in's Endliche nach aUen Seiten."

244 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
neighbor," is not only like the first, " Thou shalt
love the Lord, thy God" ; it is in reality the same
commandment in a preliminary form. Love of
one's neighbor, the problem of ethics, is the same
task of self -adjustment within the social organism
which makes the problem of religion in the uni
versal order. Ethics is thus, in its form, identical
with religion, but in its content distinct from reli
gion. The interior circle of conduct is in itself
complete, but it is environed by the larger circle.
In one of the noblest passages of ethical litera
ture, Dr. Martineau, applying the analogy suggested
by Kant, describes the relation of duty to faith as
that of an island to an environing ocean.1 The
islander has firm ground under his feet, he may
live and work in the thickets of the interior and
may " remain quite unaware of any relations beyond
this circle, and work within it as a complete and
rounded whole." If, however, he goes up some day
to the heights of his conduct, there, on every side,
he finds the unexplored and mysterious circle of
the sea. " Ethics, therefore, on their outer margin,
bring us face to face with the momentous question,
whether their supreme intimations are verifiable,
and their relations eternal. . . . Conscience may
act as human, before it is discovered to be divine.
. . . Ethics must either perfect themselves in re
ligion, or disintegrate themselves into Hedonism." 2
" Sometimes," said Lowell, translating into one of
1 "A Study of Religion," 1888, I, 20 ff.
2 Ibid. pp. 16 ff., " Why Ethics before Religion ? "

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 245
the highest utterances of modern poetry this phi
losophy of life,
"Sometimes at waking, on the street sometimes,
Or on the hillside, always unforewamed,
A grace of being, finer than himself,
That beckons and is gone, — a larger life
Upon his own impinging, . . .
To which the ethereal substance of his own
Seems but gross cloud to make that visible,
Touched to a sudden glory round the edge." 1
One of the most impressive of modern preachers
has developed the same thought in still more spa
cious language under the title of "The circular
and the onward movement." 2 In the solar system
where we dwell, he points out, there are two forms
of motion, first the rotation of the planets round
the sun, and secondly a vast onward movement,
sweeping both sun and planets in infinitely greater
orbits round some infinitely distant centre. How
is it, he asks, that this second motion, whose scope
is beyond all observation, can be proved ? The
onward movement, he answers, is discovered through
the patient observation of the orbits which can be
seen. Perturbations in the solar system are inter-
pretable only by conceiving this mighty sweep of all
which can be observed in a movement which is in
visible. So, says this inspiring teacher, the system
of duty Ues within the system of faith, and the in-
1 "The Cathedral," 1870, p. 34.
2 Mark Hopkins, " Strength and Beauty," 1874, Sermon XVI,
p. 311.

246 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
visible truths of the universal order are disclosed by
the patient observation of the smaller system where
one's duty, in its orbit of daily tasks, revolves.1
When one turns from these discussions of mod
ern scholars to the teaching of Jesus, he finds
himself, it must be admitted, in quite another
chmate of experience and expression. Jesus does
not speculate concerning the relation of ethics to
religion in philosophical language or by astronom
ical analogies. Without apparent consciousness
of logical processes, his discourse moves freely
among the problems of duty and faith; yet the
ascent of ethics to religion, which these modern
masters describe, is the way which he summons
men to go. Jesus is, first of all, a teacher of
morals. The Sermon on the Mount is an ethical
discourse. The Beatitudes are ethical promises.
Conduct is the test of discipleship. "Whosoever
heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I
will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house
upon a rock." 2 The commendations bf Jesus are
for moral fidelity, conscientiousness, watchfulness,
unselfishness. The faithful servant, the diligent
woman, the watchman at the gate, the maidens
with their lamps burning, represent the moral type
which he desires to create. When, however, these
ethical judgments and instructions are traced by
1 See also, G. H. Palmer, "The Field of Ethics," 1901, p. 187:
" Morality precedes religion, but morality fulfils itself in religion."
2 Matt. vii. 24.

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 247
Jesus to their causes or their consequences, or
are explained by him in their full significance,
they are taken up into his religious consciousness,
and are illuminated by his sense of God. Thus at
many points it is not easy to say whether Jesus
is a teacher of ethics or of rehgion. He speaks
of conduct, but he looks past conduct. Phrases
which begin in one key end in another. The
radius of his thought prolongs itseff from the
circle of duty to the comprehensiveness of God.
One can hardly open the Gospels without coming
on an Ulustration of this transition in his thought.
The Beatitudes, for example, are for the duty-doers,
the meek, the peacemakers, the pure in heart ; but
the consequences of this duty-doing are super-
ethical, the inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven,
the title of the children of God, the capacity to see
God. Character is the object of the teaching, but
character is discovered to be a part of the Divine
plan. The parables of Jesus follow the same path
of ascent, and though their way runs through the
vaUey of duty, it mounts to the heights of faith.
It is as though the Teacher Ufted his eyes while he
spoke, and saw, as those who listened did not see,
the distant view beyond. He speaks of servants
and their talents ; but he sees, beyond the problem
of their duty, the Lord of those servants who will
come and make a reckoning with them. He
speaks of the sower and his seed ; but beyond the
sower's task he sees the harvest which is the end
of the world and the reapers who are the angels.

248 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
He commends the porter watching at the gate, but
translates his fidelity into a universal law : " What
I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch ! " He
speaks, with infinite pathos, of the prodigal's re
pentance, and it seems a purely ethical transition.
The boy " comes to himself," as though it were the
recovery by himself of his real character ; but as
Jesus traces farther this moral regeneration, he sees
in it another factor of reform, and beyond the self-
discovery of the prodigal hears the call of the waiting
Father. Thus, the near and the far, the con
temporary and the universal, the immediate duty
and the consummate revelation, are so intimately
blended in the teaching of Jesus, that as it ascends
from the less to the greater, from the plains of
duty to the summits of faith, it is one path which
he follows, unbroken in its continuity and familiar
to his feet. The point of departure is from the
obvious facts of duty ; but the path of duty leads
to a view beyond duty ; the corollaries of conduct
give significance to the problem of conduct; to
him that is faithful in that which is least there is
added the capacity for faithfulness in that which is
much, and for him who learns the lesson of the
Mammon of unrighteousness there are reserved
the true riches. To the follower of Jesus the
ascent of ethics is like the ascent of a mountain
with a trustworthy guide. Through the level facts
of duty one may trudge a well-trodden way ; but
as the slope grows more precipitous, and the plains
of commonplace recede, and what seems the

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 249
summit is reached only to disclose a higher peak
beyond, the cUmber is sustained by the assurance
that the guide knows the path, and has the right
to say, as one having authority : " Follow me."
One may begin this ascent at any point where
one strikes the path of duty. Even a single virtue
or repentance or resolution gives a point of depar
ture. The Canaanite woman says in self-abase
ment : " Lord, help me " ; " The dogs eat of the
crumbs which fall from their master's table," and
Jesus welcomes this humble teachableness and
says : " O woman, great is thy faith." x The
father of the sick child cries : " Help thou mine
unbelief " ; and Jesus accepts the half -belief
as the hesitating beginnings of a faith to which
" aU things are possible." 2 The woman " which
was a sinner " has Uttle to offer to Jesus but the
lavishness of her love ; but Jesus accepts this
also and says : " Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven ; for she loved much." 3 It is the story of
the growth of character told once more, but ascend
ing from character to faith. Not conscious attain
ment, not the theological satiety of the Pharisee,
but each genuine impulse of humiUty or loyalty
or regret has in it the potential development
of Christian faith. "A Christian," said a great
German theologian, JuUus Miiller, " is never made,
but always making. He therefore that is aUeady
a Christian is as yet not a Christian." The ethical
method of Jesus is prophetic, preUminary, a doctrine
1 Matt. xv. 27, 28. 2 Mark ix. 23, 24. 8 Luke vii. 47.

250 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of the way, with an assurance of the end, the
method which, as Wordsworth says,
" hath among least things
An under-sense of greatest, sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole." x
Even in the ministry of Jesus himself it is, per
haps, possible to trace a deepening of his message,
as though the channel of his teaching were broad
ened by the increasing abundance of his thought.
In the Sermon on the Mount the Kingdom of
Heaven is described in the language of ethical
prophecy. "Whosoever therefore shall break
one of these least commandments . . . shall be
called the least in the kingdom of heaven."2 In
the later teaching, however, this Kingdom takes
the form of a day of the Lord or of a coming of
the Son of Man in his glory. The calm, grave
Teacher of righteousness becomes more distinctly
the spiritual Messiah, whose mission is the fulfil
ment of the Father's will ; and instead of summa
rizing his teaching in a law of ethics, " Therefore
all things whatsoever ye would that men should
do to you, do ye even so to them," 3 he expresses
the heart of it in a prayer of faith : " Not as I
will, but as thou wilt." 4
Nor does this influence of the teaching of Jesus
cease at the Master's death. Jesus seems aware
that a teacher may so dominate the minds of his
1 " The Prelude," Book VII. 8 Matt. vii. 12.
2 Matt. v. 19. * Matt. xxvi. 39.

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 25 1
foUowers that, as the fourth Gospel says, it is
expedient for him to go away if the Spirit of
truth is to come to them. That is what the
later experience of the disciples seems to prove.
" FoUow me," he teaches, and they foUow, though
with hesitating steps ; but the Master's death,
which seemed the end of their hope, becomes
in fact the beginning of their ascent from obedi
ence to faith. Their eyes were opened, and they
knew him, says the third Gospel, as he vanished
from their sight. Not till they tarried in the
city after he was gone were they "endued with
power from on high." x This is the tradition
which is ampUfied in the fourth Gospel, where
Jesus repeatedly points beyond his own teaching
for its interpretation. "These things have I
spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But
the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom
the Father wiU send in my name, he shall teach
you aU tnings, and bring aU things to your remem
brance, whatsoever I have said unto you." 2 The
ascent of discipleship was to be continuous and
Ufe-long, a progressive revelation, from loyalty to
insight, from the plains of duty-doing to the heights
of communion, from things to God, from obedience
to vision, from the teaching of Jesus to the teach
ing of the Comforter, from the righteousness of
the Kingdom of God to the truth of aU that had
been said unto them.3
1 Luke xxiv. 49. 2 John xiv. 25, 26.
3 Compare the striking treatment of E. M. Chapman, " The

252 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
When one turns from contemplating these char
acteristics of the teaching of Jesus and recalls the
teachings which have been offered in his name, is he
not met at many points by a most disheartening con
trast? Have the expositors of Christian duty and
Christian faith consistently recognized that in the
mind of Jesus these two elements of experience were
parts of a continuous process which has its natural
growth and fruit ? Have the elementary facts of mo
rality been " seen as facts," yet with " a feeling of the
whole " ? On the contrary, much well-intentioned
teaching, both of ethics and of religion, has become,
at this point, self-defeating. Morality and faith
have been often presented as fixed alternatives,
subjects of statical sciences, cases where one must,
so to speak, take all or none ; when, in fact, mo
rality is, according to the teaching of Jesus, not a
fixed fact but a way of ascent, a growth from less
to more, a movement toward religion.
One of the most curious of literary experiences is
the sense of unreality which seems to pervade a
considerable part of the hterature of ethics. No
subject, it would seem, could be more Uving than
life, and ethics is the study of life; yet many a
student of ethics will testify that its text-books have

Dynamic of Christianity," 1904, p. 142: "An intelligent man who
should come to the reading of the Gospels for the first time and
without theological predisposition would doubtless be impressed
with Christ's sense of the partial nature of His own work in the
flesh." p. 21 : " Christianity is not a completed system . . . but
an organism . . . with the power of an endless life."

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 253
appeared to him singularly desiccated and juiceless.
" Never before," as has been said of these formal
systems, " had human nature been so neatly dis
sected, so handily sorted or so ornamentally packed
up. The virtues and vices, the appetites, emotions,
affections, and sentiments, stored each in their
appointed corner, and with their appropriate label,
to wait in neat expectation for the season of the
professional lecturer, and the literary world only
delayed their acquiescence in a uniform creed of
moral philosophy, till they should have arranged to
their satisfaction whether the appetites should be
secreted in the cupboard or paraded on the mantel
piece, or whether some of the less creditable pack
ets .. . ought to be ticketed ' Poison.' " x
What is it which reduces the study of hfe to such
lifelessness, and makes the language of life a dead
language? It is the assumption that ethical dis
tinctions are fixtures, when, in fact, the Ufe of con
duct grows, withers, and takes heart again, as the
flowers of the field struggle for their existence
among the weeds. The schools of ethical philoso
phy with their historic titles, Egoism, Prudentialism,
IdeaUsm, are not final choices, as though one must
commit himself to a single and consistent view of life.
One's moral experience must be, on the contrary, very
meagre if it does not recognize in itself all three of
these competing creeds, and inchne in turn to differ-
1 Cited by J. C. Shairp, *' Studies in Poetry and Philosophy,"
1872, "The Moral Motive-power," p. 272: "'Never before,' as
one has smartly said." Who was it ?

254 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ent masters. At one moment one is a disciple of
Hobbes, and all that masks itself as duty seems to
show the mocking face of self-interest ; again, one
joins himself to Mill or Bentham and computes the
consequences of pleasures and pains; still again,
in some high moment of joy or sorrow or love, one
goes up where selfishness and prudence shrink
into insignificance, as the details of a flat country
recede when one looks down on it from a height.
The great peaks of idealism come into view and
call one to their exploration and possession, and
one calls back to them, —
" Wait there, wait and invite me while I climb,
For see I come ! but slow, but slow,
Yet ever, as your chime
Soft and sublime
Lifts at my feet, they move, they go
Up the great stair of time." 1
Ethics, in other words, if it would describe life as
it is, must take account of its quality of surprise,
must welcome the broader horizon which unfolds
as one ascends, the influx of new power as one
breathes the higher air, the increasing sense of
reaUty and authority in the moral ideal. One may
be very selfish, but he is never safe from inroads
of generous desire ; he may be habitually pruden
tial, as one who sits on the shores of emotion and
does not trust himself to its depths ; but in some un
foreseen moment of self-f orgetfulness a great wave
of emotion sweeps up upon him and snatches him
from his security into the ocean of self-sacrifice.
1 David A. Wasson, "Poems," ed. Mrs. E. D. Cheney, 1888,
"Ideals."

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 255
" Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides, —
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again." 1
. The same truth has an opposite and more solemn
aspect. IdeaUsm may ebb as it has risen; the
vision splendid may fade into the Ught of common
day ; and instead of an ascent of ethics there may
ensue the real fall of man, the shortening of the
radius of duty, the narrowing of the circle of obU-
gation. Capacity for moral growth means risk of
moral decay. It is this appreciation of the remoter
consequences of conduct which, in the teaching of
Jesus, gives such significance to each lapse from
integrity and each petty sin. Moral experience is
seen, not as a series of disconnected incidents, but
as a continuous process, in which each stumble
retards the ascent and each blunder misses the
way. " Every idle word that men shall speak,"
says Jesus, " they shall give account thereof in the
day of judgment."2 The reckless speech hangs
round the climber's neck, and though he may still
ascend, he must carry his burden to the top and
give account of his delay. Ethics, in short, is not
a piecing together of the fragments of life, but a
description of the whole of hfe, the story of the
1 Browning, " Bishop Blougram's Apology."
2 Matt xii. 36.

256 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
retarded yet persistent ascent of man, its gains and
its pains, its advances and its pauses, its higher
levels and its breathlessness, its detaining selfish
ness and its inviting ideals. It is all one life, be
ginning in the valley of commonplace duties and
idle words, and proceeding to the vision of truth
and the day of judgment. The will to do the will
takes up the march, and the knowledge of the
doctrine broadens as one climbs.
This sense of continuity is the first principle of
a sound education in morals. Why is it that chil
dren so often find goodness uninteresting and repel
ling, and wrong-doing persuasive and exhilarating ?
Why does the routine of duty so often become, to
grown people, monotonous or trivial ? It is because
goodness is looked at as a fixed condition, a dead
weight, a pile of duties to carry one by one to their
proper places, and then perhaps to carry back
again. The woman in her household, the man with
the hoe, the boy at his lessons, the worker at his
work, — what are they but slaves and drudges,
with the duty done to-day confronting them again
with its inert mass to-morrow ? What is their life
but a treadmill, in which they seem to move ; but in
reaUty, like the horse in a treadmill, only move the
wheels of the world from the pen in which they
are tied fast ? " Sir," said an employee in a vast
government bureau as he looked up from his
death-bed to a friend who spoke of death, " why
talk of death ? I have been dead and buried here
for twenty years."

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 257
Nor is it alone the workers of the world who
find duty on these terms a dehumanizing slavery.
Many who seem most free from the burden of
routine — the idlers, the pleasure-seekers, the in
creasing army of the prosperous unemployed —
are not less oppressed by a sense of the insignifi
cance, the triviaUty, the meaninglessness of Ufe,
and when they attach themselves to any philosophy
of duty become docile converts to a creed of de
spair. Restlessness, despondency, ennui, are not
so much products of work as of leisure ; cynicism,
pessimism, and self -contempt afflict the hves which
seem most blessed. Why take this paltry human
Ufe, they ask, so seriously ? What is it but a mo
mentary bubble on the surface of an unknown deep ?
Why strive and sweat to build a straight highway
of conduct with the stones of duty, when the
wandering path of pleasure is unobstructed and
fair? What is one's Ufe but a descent into the
dark, the flight of a bird, as the Saxon warrior said
to the Venerable Bede, out of the darkness into
the banquet hall, and out again into the night ?
" A moment's halt — a momentary taste
Of Being from the well amid the waste —
Andlo ! — the phantom Caravan has reach'd
The Nothing it set out from — oh, make haste ! " x
What is it which redeems life from this sense of
flatness and impotence, and restores to duty its
significance and scope? It is the truth of the
1 Fitzgerald's " Omar Khayyam," 54.

258 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
ascent of ethics; the emergence of idealism; the
translation of duty-doing into faith. To find in
the routine of life, not a series of disconnected ac
cidents, but the participation in an Infinite design ;
to follow the way of duty until it mounts to insight,
composure, courage ; to discover that the inter
pretation of life must be reached, not by going
round one's duties, but by going through them;
that to him only who is faithful in the least that
which is much is revealed — this is what rescues
life from fragmentariness and fixedness, and gives
one, even among laborious and monotonous duties,
a sense of unity, movement, and hope. "The senti
ment of virtue," says Emerson, " is the essence of
all religion. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is
strong by the whole strength of nature. . . . When
he says, ' I ought '. . . then he can worship, and be
enlarged by his worship. ... In the subhmest
flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted." x
This is the view of life which meets us both in
the teaching and in the character of Jesus Christ.
His ethics speak, not of stones to be moved, but
of seeds to be planted. The routine of life is
to Jesus the background on which he paints his
picture of God's thought for man. The disciple
of Jesus is like a soldier at the front, involved in
much routine of marching and counter-marching;
solitary, it may be, as he paces up and down a
sentry's beat; but through all the monotony and
solitude sustained by the sense that he is under
1 " Miscellanies," 1868, Divinity School Address, pp. 66 ff.

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 259
orders, and that the Commander whose wiU has
sent him is at his back. The follower of Jesus is
a laborer, but he is a laborer together with God.
He is the man with a hoe, but he has his part in
the harvest whose reapers are the angels. He
is a cog in the great machine of industry, but the
whole great machine depends on the strength of
each shghtest cog, and each failure of the humblest
part mars the fabric which issues from the whole.
The Christian Ufe trudges through the valleys,
but its face is set to the hills. It moves, as a
modern teacher has said, " from small moral mat
ters up to large reUgious ones. The road up is
man's natural path. It may see in the httle the
large, and may look through the finite Umited duty
into the friendly face of the eternal.
' Who sweeps a room as to Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine.' " x
What is the effect of this view of hfe on the
problems of practical conduct which perplex so
many minds in the modern world? When one
observes the way in which practical morality con
ducts itself under the conditions of the present age,
its dealing with new duties, its experiments in
philanthropy, its schemes for industrial or pohti
cal justice, he is struck by the tentative, wavering,
undetermined hne which marks the movement of
ethics. No directing principle or manifest end
seems to give confidence to contemporary morals.
i Palmer, " Field of Ethics," 1901, 183 ff.

260 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
To many modern minds religion has become a
remote, if not an unreal, support; and they must
determine their duty by ephemeral, empirical,
hand-to-mouth choices between the worse and the
better. To many devoted Uves, concerned with
problems of philanthropy, no issue of their enter
prise seems clear, and they are smitten with a
sense of helplessness, a paralysis of enthusiasm,
as those who have undertaken more than can be
performed. To many who have pledged them
selves to industrial or political reform, the signs of
the times seem ominous, the prevailing philosophy
of the working-classes seems blighted by materi
alism, and instead of national ethics we seem to be
offered mere statistics of products or ships or guns.
What is it under such conditions which can
restore to duty-doing its confidence, and to philan
thropy its patience, and to industrial and political
morals their ideaUsm? It is the appreciation of
the ascent of ethics, the discovery of the continu
ity of conduct, the recognition of the cumulative
movement, which proceeds through the temporal
toward the Eternal. How shall one act who finds
duty real, but faith a receding vision? There is
but one path to the rediscovery of faith, and it runs
straight through the duty which is real. " It is an
awful moment," said Frederick Robertson, "when
the soul begins to find that the props on which it
has blindly rested so long are, many of them, rot
ten, and begins to suspect them all. ... In that
fearful loneliness of spirit ... I know but one way

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 26 1
in which a man may come forth from his agony
scatheless; it is by holding fast to those things
which are certain still — the grand, simple land
marks of moraUty. ... If there be no God and no
future state, yet even then it is better to be gener
ous than selfish, better to be chaste than Ucentious,
better to be true than false, better to be brave than
to be a coward. . . . Thrice blessed is he who —
when all is drear and cheerless — has obstinately
clung to moral good. Thrice blessed, because his
night shall pass into clear, bright day." x This, if
there be any way to a revival of religion, is the way
now open ; — not by the assent to opinions, but by
the ascent of ethics. There are not two ways of
Ufe running paraUel through experience, — a way
of duty and a way of faith. The way to God is up
the steep path of duty, and the vision and peace of
God are for those who cUmb. This is the con
viction which gives persistency and fidelity to duty-
doing. Life may not be aU at once understood,
but the horizon of life broadens as the path of
duty ascends, and one may bear with many ob
scurities and hindrances along the path if he
knows that he. has not missed his way. To one
who sees what is right, and wants to find what is
true, the best rule is the simple maxim : " Turn to
the Right and keep straight on." 2
The same discovery is made by modern phi-
lMLife and Letters," 1882, p. 86, from a Lecture to the
Workingmen of Brighton.
2 " Both Catholics and Protestants have taught (Spectator,

262 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
lanthropy. How to maintain faith in one's own
usefulness, how to be patient with its incomplete
ness and yet believe in its significance — this is the
harassing sense of discouragement and scepticism
which attacks many a servant of others' needs.
There is but one way to the restoration of social
courage. It is by the practical following of the
path of social duty and the discovery that it is an
ascending path, with constantly broader outlooks
and clearer views. What seems a fragmentary and
ineffective task is taken up into the total movement
of social responsibility, and one is lifted and sus
tained by a faith which his works may not seem
to justify, but to which none the less they point
the way. The modern charity-worker, tempted by
many failures to loss of hope and courage, takes
heart again from the reviving words : —
" Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith !
She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro' the winter bud,
She finds the fountain where they wail'd ' Mirage ! ' " 1
November 12, 1904, quoting Daily Telegraph of November I and
J. F. de Bruno's " Catholic Belief,") that there is a ' Body of the
Church ' and a * Soul of the Church,' and that to the latter belong
hundreds and thousands of men and women who could not, not
anyhow at present, make explicitly even a short confession of faith.
The Catholic teaching ' holds that these Christians belong to and
are united to the Soul of the Catholic Church.' "
1 Tennyson, " The Ancient Sage."

THE ASCENT OF ETHICS 263
Many a helper of the poor is led by his patient
service among them not only to freedom from
himself, but also to the renewal of his faith in
the moral order of the world. Seeking the King
dom of God other things are added. To love one's
neighbor as oneself has as its corollary a new
appreciation of the Love which rules the world.
The work of philanthropy turns out to be not a
series of incidental skirmishes, but a great cam
paign of compassion; and courage returns when
one becomes aware that he is not of " an ignorant
army clashing in the dark," but that the ascent of
duty discloses the plan of the campaign.
Finally, the affairs of modern industry and poli
tics are to be redeemed by the same recognition of
the ascent of ethics. Commercialism, materialism,
and militarism have become so dominant and auda
cious that many lives are repelled from pubUc
affairs and many more are subdued to that they
work in, like the dyer's hand. It seems a long
way from industrial contentions and political am
bitions to the Christian vision of a Kingdom of God,
and ethical idealists are easily tempted to become
social pessimists. Yet through precisely this re
gion of life, where the keenest interests of the
modern world are concentrated, through the treach
erous ways of business where one must pick his
steps or fall, through the mire of political corrup
tion where many sink, goes the path of modern
duty ; and in this low ground, where the life of the
time for the moment halts, the ascent of ethics must

264 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
begin. It is in vain to set the higher life of the time
over against its lower life, as though they looked at
each other across the way. It is one world, with
one way of progress, which begins in the malarial
valleys and ascends to the purer heights. " If any
man among you seem to be religious," says the
apostle, "and bridleth not his tongue, . . . this
man's religion is vain." x It is the same with any
nation which thinketh itself to be religious, but
finds some other starting-point for national reiigion
than in industrial justice and political integrity.
Here is the ground of confidence for those who
in these muddy places of public life make firm the
road which social morality must go. They may
not themselves accomplish the complete ascent of
ethics, but they are at least preparing the way.
The ladder of social progress may some day reach
to heaven, but it must be none the less set up on
earth ; and those who set it firmly on the ground
make it safer for the angels to ascend.2
1 James i. 26.
2 Precisely the opposite course of argument is illustrated by M.
Guyau in his two volumes : " Esquisse d'une Morale sans Obligation
ni Sanction," 1903 ; and " L'Irreligion de PAvenir," 1904. "The
Moralist," he warns us, " is tempted to invoke a law superior to
life itself, a law intelligible, eternal, supernatural." Ethics must be
withheld from this vain idealism and reconstructed from the mate
rial of physical instincts and social hopes. Instead of the sense of
obligation disclosing opportunity, it is the sense of opportunity
which creates obligations. Duty will step more firmly if it ceases
to look up.

CHAPTER VIII
THE DESCENT OF FAITH
The ascent of ethics is a cardinal doctrine of the
teaching of Jesus. The normal development of
the Christian character, the straight path of Chris
tian discipleship, leads from duty-doing to faith,
from obligation to revelation, from fideUty in that
which is least to possession of the true riches, from
the plain of ethics to the heights of religion. It
cannot escape notice, however, that this logic of
discipleship, though it be expUcitly taught by
Jesus, does not seem to represent the logic of his
own mind. As one surveys the Gospels he does
not see Jesus pressing his way upward along the
path of duty until the horizon of God's purpose
expands before his thought. On the contrary,
Jesus seems most at home when on the heights,
and his habitual path leads rather downward, from
the consciousness of God to the service of men,
than upward, from human duties to Divine com
panionship. His view of Ufe is a view from above.
From the beginning of the record he is seen to be
about his Father's business, as if in his Father's
house. AU things are delivered unto him of his
Father.1 One is his Father which is in heaven.2
1 Matt. xi. 27. 2 Matt, xxiii. 9.
265

266 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
The sources of spiritual strength and peace for
Jesus are not in his human affections and associa
tions, however precious these may be, but in his
communion with the Father. He pauses in his
busy life of teaching and healing, and seeks a soli
tude which is to him companionship, to return with
a fresh accession of confidence and authority. He
withdraws in a boat to a desert place apart ; x he
goes up into a mountain apart to pray, and when
the even is come he is there alone ; 2 he brings his
chosen friends into a high mountain apart, and
is transfigured before them.3 " Come ye your
selves apart," he says to his friends, ..." and rest
a while, for there were many coming and going."4
The horizon of his faith seems shut in by the press
ure of work and care, and he goes up for his re
freshing to some place of larger outlook where he
may see life as it really is. He is like a man whose
native air is in the mountains, and who brings the
strength of the hills down to the weary world be
low. All this is but to say once more, that Jesus
is primarily not an ethical, but a religious, Teacher.
He finds his duty through his consciousness of God
instead of finding God through his consciousness
of duty. His doctrine of character is the corollary
rather than the cause of his reUgious faith.
Does not this essentially religious quality in the
ministry of Jesus appear to nullify all that has been
said of the ascent of ethics ? Is it true that he
1 Matt. xiv. 13. 8 Matt. xvii. 1, 2.
2 Matt. xiv. 23. 4 Mark vi. 31.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 267
teaches the slow growth of character from duty to
insight, or, if he does so teach, does not the testi
mony of his own experience contradict the teach
ing ? Does he not, first of all, demand one supreme
act of faith, and in that change of the heart's de
sire change aU the motives of character ? Is he
not rather a Revealer than a Redeemer, Son of
God rather than Son of Man ? Should not his
teaching read, " He that knoweth the doctrine will
do the wUl," rather than, " He that doeth the will
shall know of the doctrine " ?
This is the impression which has been made by
the Gospels on many minds. The theological and
dramatic element in the record, its disclosure of the
purpose of God and the place of Jesus in that pur
pose, — what has been called the " self-assertion "
of Jesus, — has appeared to be so dominating and
significant, that it has seemed to be trifling, if not
irreverent, to give serious consideration to Jesus
as a teacher of character.1 His ministry has ap
peared to move on quite another level, and to be
primarily concerned not with conduct, but with
faith. His teaching is of life with God rather
1 This view is maintained with unusual power and candor by
D. S. Cairns, Contemporary Review, November, 1903, January, 1904,
"Christianity in the Modem World"; September, 1904, "The
Self-Assertion of Jesus," p. 522: "The Gospel is not simply a new
interpretation of the standing facts and laws of the world, but a
great cosmic event, the coming of God to his world after a new
fashion"; p. 532: " The great movement of Christological thought
... is directly due to the deliberate and conscious action of the
Founder of Christianity."

268 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
than of duties to men. The ascent of ethics, with
its laborious advance, finds, according to such
minds, no confirmation in the confident and con
tinuous faith of Jesus, which descends from the
heights of Divine communion to make God known
to men. " No man knoweth the Father save the
Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal
him." x
This sense of contradiction between the ethics
of Jesus and his religion fails, however, to take
account of the chronology of his experience. The
Gospels, it must be remembered, do not undertake
to narrate the entire life of Jesus, but, with a few
fragmentary additions, only the story of its last
years. We see the Teacher at the height of his
power, speaking with authority, saying to the
weary and heavy-laden : " Come unto me " ; but
we do not see the path of spiritual education and
self-discipline by which he has reached this height.
Unless the life of Jesus be regarded as wholly
detached from human processes of development,
and therefore wholly valueless as a human exam
ple, it must have had its years of moral growth
and patient ripening of character before the ful
ness of its time was come. The glimpses given
by the record of the childhood of Jesus indicate
this development of obedience, thoughtfulness, and
charm. The boy goes down with his parents to
Nazareth and is "subject unto them"; he "grew
and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom";
1 Matt. xi. 27; Luke x. 22.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 269
he " increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor
with God and man." x Between these gUmpses of
the boy and the work of the man Ue unrecorded
years of spiritual growth, from which Jesus is
summoned by the preaching of the Baptist, and
which have armed him to meet the triple tempta
tion of conscious power. It cannot, therefore, be
inferred from the height of religious insight which
Jesus has gained when his ministry begins that he
has not reached that height by the path of duty.
When he speaks of character as the way of faith,
he is describing a way on which, indeed, he now
looks down, but by which he himself has come.
He too knows the ascent of duty, and through
obedience and restraint has come at last to the
spacious horizon which his rehgious consciousness
surveys. What is of more concern, however, than the
chronology of experience in Jesus is the law of
conduct which governs him when he has thus
reached the heights. The way by which he may
have ascended is less important than the way by
which he is now called to go. His character, we
may surmise, has " grown and waxed strong," Uke
other characters ; and when he teaches that obedi
ence is the path to knowledge, and that the pure
in heart see God, he is but reporting that which he
has learned through twenty silent years. When,
however, he has reached the height of the con
sciousness of God, it would seem as if the end of
1 Luke ii. 40, 51, 52.

270 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
duty-doing were attained, and that he had but to
point to the wide horizon which he sees. His
mission would seem to culminate in some such
testimony of high experience as is contained in the
closing discourses of the fourth Gospel : " O right
eous Father, the world hath not known thee : but
I have known thee " ; " Glorify thy Son, that thy
Son also may glorify thee." x
Such, however, is not the final expression of his
religious faith. Having ascended to this intimate
communion with the Father, there is set before
Jesus a new compulsion, — the obligation to de
scend with these resources of power and peace to
the world of duty which he had just left below. No
sooner is the ascent of ethics accomplished than it
is succeeded by the descent of faith ; and the second
law of conduct is, in imperativeness and persuasive
ness, like the first. It is impressive to observe how
often Jesus departs from human companionship to
renew his strength in communion with God ; but
more impressive than this departure is his quick
return to the patient fulfilment of his human task.
At evening he is on the mountain alone, but " in the
fourth watch " of the same night he is helping his
friends in their boat.2 He departs " by ship into
a desert place apart," 3 but is " moved with compas
sion " for the multitude and comes forth and heals
their sick. He is in a high mountain apart trans
figured, and his companions find it good to stay ;
1 John xvii. 25, I. 2 Matt. xiv. 25; Mark vi. 48.
3 Matt. xiv. 13; Mark vi. 32; Luke iv. 42.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 27I
but Jesus hears the cry of the epfleptic at the
mountain's foot and descends quickly from the
company of the Prophets to heal the boy.1 The
reUgion of Jesus is thus at every point an appUed re
Ugion. He teaches no ascent of ethics which leaves
one on the Mount. His source of power is above,
but his use of power is]below. "He that descended,"
says the Epistle to the Ephesians, "is the same
also that ascended." 2 Whatever effort it may have
cost to find the upward path makes it easier for
him to follow the same path downward. A slow
ascent of duty to the horizon of God, a quick
glance, a long breath, a far-away look, and then
the descent of faith to the plains of human need —
such is the picture of the life of Jesus.
Here, perhaps, is the secret of those contrasts of
traits which have so often perplexed and divided
the students of his character. He is, at one moment,
on the height of conscious power and authority ;
and at another among the meek and lowly of heart;
now claiming the high mission of the Messiah,
now making himself the servant of all. Which,
it is asked, is his real character ? Is he Revealer
or Consoler, Divinely commissioned or humanly
compassionate, ascending in spirit until lost as
example or descending in service until lost as
Messiah ? He is both of these ; not because two
competing characters are in him miraculously
joined, but because the movement of his harmo
nious character feels the rhythm of the spirit. The
1 Matt. xvii. 1-21; Mark ix. 1-30. 2 Eph. iv. 10.

272 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
tidal life of his nature, its ascent of duty and its
descent of faith, are not opposing, divisive, alter
native forces, but part of the total swing of char
acter, which unites action and pause, inspiration
and dedication, the consciousness of God and the
service of man. " Now that he ascended, what is
it but that he also descended . . . into the lower
parts of the earth." x
At the conclusion of one of Bishop Berkeley's
Dialogues, the two friends stand by a fountain, and
Philonous says : " You see, Hylas, the water of
yonder fountain, how it is forced upwards, ... to
a certain height ; at which it breaks and falls back
into the basin from whence it rose : its ascent as
well as descent, proceeding from the same uniform
law. . . . Just so, the same principles which at
first view lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain
point, bring men back to Common Sense." 2 The
same picture may represent the movement of the
Christian character. It has its impulse to rise and
its attraction to descend ; its ascent in beauty and
its descent in service ; and both ascent and descent
proceed from the same general law. The teaching
of Jesus, in other words, whether it be of ethics or
of faith, is a teaching of the unity and continuity of
experience. It recognizes no divided Ufe, either of
morality which does not ascend to God or of religion
which does not descend to man. Duty-doing, fol
lowing its own law, leads to the Eternal ; but the
sense of the Eternal with equal compulsion leads
1 Eph. iv. 9. 2 Works, 1837, I, 82.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 273
back to duty. It is the river by its own nature
seeking the sea, only to find the tide of the sea
sweeping back into the river. Ethics remains
tentative and preUminary until it fulfils itseff in
faith; reUgion remains empty and abstract until
it dedicates itself to service. The test of reUgion
is neither the height it gains nor the view it sur
veys, but the strength with which it descends.
The Christian rehgion, Uke the Christian charac
ter, is not a detached, isolated, self-sufficient pos
session, but a form of power, an appUcation of
strength to weakness, of sight to blindness, of the
soul that has found the heights to the soul of the
world below. There is no Christian reUgion which
is not an apphed reUgion. The sanctified life is the
serviceable life, and in that service finds its free
dom. " For their sakes," says the fourth Gospel,
" I sanctify myself." x The stream of the reh
gious life rises in the quiet places of personal com
munion with God, but the law of attraction leads it
down to the great places of the busy multitude and
their unsanctified tofl; and as it flows it sings to
itself the Master's message : " I am come that these
may have my life, and may have it abundantly."
" Not always on the mount may we
Rapt in the heavenly vision be ;
******The mount for vision, — but below
The paths of daily duty go." 2
1 John xvii. 19.
2 F. L. Hosmer, " The Thought of God," 1890, p. 45 : " On the
Mount."

274 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
Such is the law of the descent of faith, the
utilization of power, the application of religion,
the unity of the spiritual life. The same spirit
which leads Jesus to God sends him back to
man. " And Jesus was led by the Spirit into the
wilderness, . . . and Jesus returned in the power
of the Spirit into Galilee . . . and taught in their
synagogues." x What is the record of Christian
history and of contemporary religion concerning
this application of faith to duty ? Has there been
a consistent acceptance of this test of pure religion ?
Has the ascent of ethics been supplemented by the
descent of faith ? Is religion doing the work it
was meant to do, as though working with what
the political economists call the maximum of pro
duction ?
No one can survey the history of modern prog
ress — its philanthropy, its reforms, its industrial
responsibility, its political democracy — without
recognizing that the chief accession of moral force
which these movements have received has come
from the Christian religion. On the other hand,
however, it must be frankly admitted that no misin
terpretation of the purpose of Jesus is so persistent
as the belief that religion is an end in itself, a
detached region of experience, to be explored and
administered as a distinct province of life. When
one has reached, by any path he may have followed,
the knowledge of God, the life with Christ, the wit
ness of the spirit, then, according to much reUgious
1 Luke iv. I, 14, 15.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 275
teaching, the end of the soul's progress is attained,
and there is left only contemplation, obedience, de-
Ught, and peace. It is as though one threw himself
down at the summit he had gained and surrendered
himself to the tranquil joy of the unclouded view.
What is the whole duty of man ? It is to glorify
God and enjoy Him forever. What is the Chris
tian Church ? It is the refuge of the saints. What
is the Christian life ? It is a way of retreat from
the vicissitudes of Ufe, —
"From every stormy wind that blows,
From every swelling tide of woes,
There is a safe and sure retreat,
Tis found beneath the Mercy-seat."
What is the evidence of Christian discipleship?
It is worship, praise, prayer, behef, conformity,
confession, a creed, a state of the heart, a submis
sion of the will, a consent of the mind to Christian
truth. Are not, then, these expressions and pledges
of faith of the essence of reUgion? Undoubt
edly they are the sublime heights toward which
the ascent of ethics leads. The satisfactions
of rehgion are reached on the heights of faith
as a varied landscape unroUs itself when one
reaches the summit. Yet neither one nor aU of
these rehgious satisfactions represent, according
to the teaching of Jesus, the end of the journey
of the spirit, the abiding-place of Christian faith.
The whole duty of man is not to enjoy God for
ever, but to descend with the grace of God to the

276 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
help of man. The Christian Church is not a place
of refuge from the world, but a place of training
for the world. The Christian life is not a retreat
from stormy winds and tides of woe, but an advance
through them ; not a hiding beneath the Mercy-seat,
but a rising from one's seat for the sake of mercy.
The evidence of Christian discipleship is not ec
clesiastical or doctrinal, but ethical, social, political,
industrial, human. In short, the Christian religion
does not occupy a separated, even though it be
an elevated, plateau of life, but descends like a
fertilizing stream to the world below. " When he
ascended up on high," quotes again the Epistle
to the Ephesians from the 68th Psalm, " he led
captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men." x The
strength to release the captives, and the grace to
give unto men the gifts they need, are for those
who, having ascended up on high, are ready to
descend into the lower parts of the earth.
Are not many tendencies and movements of
the Christian Church brought to judgment by this
teaching of Jesus? They have concerned them
selves with the defence of faith rather than with
the descent of faith ; they have guarded religion on
its heights, while the world, which reUgion should
redeem, has trudged by, without looking up, along
its dusty way. They represent in reUgion what is
known in social affairs as provincialism. A per
son of wide experience finds himself some day in a
secluded viUage, and listens to the talk of its people,
1 Eph. iv. 8 ; Ps. Ixviii. 18.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 277
as they discuss the weather and the crops, the
price of hay and the gossip of the churches. What
impresses this observer is the provinciaUsm of this
rustic life. These subjects of commanding interest
are not fictitious or discreditable, but they are local,
specialized, provincial. The great concerns of civ
ilization — the wars of nations and of industries, the
achievements of science and art — excite less real
emotion in these viUagers than the condition of the
roads and the talk of the town-meeting; and it is
not surprising that the alert and venturesome of
the vUlage youth escape from this provincial life
and betake themselves to a world which is more
diversified, comprehensive, and real.
Suppose, however, that it is not some modest
vUlage which is thus visited, but some dignified
convocation of Christian behevers; may one not
stiU hear in its hot debates the same note of
provinciaUsm ? It is a province of high altitude,
indeed, which he has entered; yet these solemn
deUberations seem not less detached from the
interests of the real world. What is this organi
zation, one asks himself, which is here adminis
tered ? Is it a piece of machinery which is being
wound up and repaired ? Is it a court, assigning
its penalties ? Is it an army, with its officers and
driUs ? These discussions which appear so absorb
ing to the participants seem to the looker-on, not
indeed Ulegitimate, but simply uninteresting. They
magnify the local until it shuts out the universal ;
they exaggerate the unimportant ; they use a dead

278 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
language ; their deliberations run on a side-track of
thought which does not connect with the main line
of the modern world ; they are provincial. In the
preface to the sixth edition of Professor Paulsen's
"Ethics" he cites Professor Sidgwick as applying
to many controversies in philosophy a student's
reply to an examiner's question concerning the oc
cupations of the people of the Hebrides. "The
people of the Hebrides," answered this youth,
" obtain a meagre subsistence by washing one an
other's clothes." x A similar comment might occur
to this observer as he watches the proceedings of
some ecclesiastical convocations. The Christians,
he might say, obtain a meagre subsistence by wash
ing or soiling or criticising each other's clothes.
This separatism of religion, this provinciaUsm of
the saints, is not peculiar to contemporary Chris
tianity or indeed characteristic of it. The same
heresy has appeared in much more formidable
shapes in earlier periods of Christian history.
Gnosticism, with its interpretation of religion as an
esoteric mystery; Mysticism, with its detachment
of the believer from the ordinary channels of re
ligious expression ; even the familiar Prudentialism
of self-interested religion, with its overwhelming
concern for personal salvation ; — all have in them
a quality of provincialism, as though the security
of the single soul were separable from the fate of
x" System der Ethik," 1903, I, x: "Sidgwick macht Anwen-
dung von der Geschichte auf die Metaphysiker. Sie scheint mir
auch auf manche Moralphilosophen zu passen."

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 279
the world, Uke a single Ufe which saves itseff from
a sinking ship. These forms which rehgion assumes
are not so much misrepresentations of religion as
fragments of religion. They miss the uniting bond
and harmonizing principle of the descent of faith.
They delay on the heights when they should be
at work in the valleys. There is but one subject
which is appropriate as the centre of debate in a
Christian assembly. It is the question how to util
ize the power of faith for the good of men. There
is one Bible passage without which no convocation
of Christians should end its deUberations. It is the
last verses of the Sermon on the Mount: "Not
every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, but he
that doeth the will of my Father. . . . He that
heareth my sayings and doeth them, buflds upon
a rock." The heresy in Gnosticism is not its con
clusion that knowledge illuminates religion, but its
assumption that illuminated knowledge may be a
substitute for religion. The defect of Mysticism is
not its emotional exaltation, but its emotional isola
tion. The inadequacy of Prudentialism is not its
beUef that to save one's own soul is of supreme
concern, but its behef that one's soul can be saved
alone. The hfe that escapes from the wreck may
seem to be saved, but in deserting the wreck the
soul may be lost. The problem of salvation is that
of saving the ship; and a perfect statement of sal
vation was made of a life that seemed to be lost :
" He saved others ; himself he cannot save." x
1 Matt, xxvii. 42 ; Mark xv. 31.

280 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
How is it, then, that the descent of faith may
be accomplished under the special conditions of
the modern world ? Here, on the one hand, is a
source of power ; and here, on the other hand, is
the world, waiting for a supply of power. What
are the channels which are prepared by the cir
cumstances of modern Ufe for this movement of
spiritual irrigation? What are the signs of the
times which invite the descent of faith?
It is interesting to recall that this, which is the
most pressing question of reUgion, has already met
us in another form, as the question with which the
civilized world is confronted as a new century
begins.1 The nineteenth century was a period of
extraordinary development in the external, physical,
mechanical arrangement of the world's work. It
was the age of science, of invention, of machin
ery, of political consolidation, of industrial organi
zation, — the period which made of human society
in an unprecedented degree a fighting, producing,
governing, administering machine. Religion also
had its share in this movement toward mechanical
perfection. It was the period of institutional
churches, parish houses, denominational organi
zations, of conventions, conferences, delegations,
committees. Never before did the machinery of
the Christian Church work so well. It is the natu
ral order of progress, — first that which is natural,
afterward that which is spiritual. The develop
ment of natural science, the acceptance of natural
1 Compare Ch. I, pp. 13 ff.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 28 1
law, the interpretation of human society in terms
of biology, the conception of the social organism
with its many members — aU these characteristics
of the nineteenth century had their inevitable in
fluence on rehgious methods, as though they also
were physical, biological, material, with a mechani
cal and external work to do.
Such a period, however, though it be essential in
the history of reUgion, bears on its very face the
mark of preparatoriness, as though confessedly pre
Uminary to a new movement of a new time. The
mechanism of nature, which has been so impres
sively demonstrated during the nineteenth century,
is already seen to disclose within itself a spiritual
movement, of which natural law is the instrument
and expression ; and the key of the modern philoso
phy of nature is found in the dictum of Lotze, —
that mechanism is everywhere essential, yet every
where subordinate.1 The vast organizations of
pontics and industry which have been devised by
one generation now present to the next generation
a new problem of converting this gigantic machin
ery into forms of moral power. The conception
of society as a biological organism, which was con
fidently announced a generation ago, has proved in
sufficient, and social evolution turns to psychology
for its interpretation. These aspects of the world
1 " Mikrokosmus," 2te AufL, 1869, s. xv: "The Ufe of science
consists ... in proving how absolutely universal is the extent, and
at the same time how absolutely subordinate is the part, which
mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world."

282 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
and its affairs — a spiritual significance within the
machinery of nature, a demand for the spiritualiza-
tion of material life, a renaissance of ethical ideal
ism — find unprecedented recognition as a new
century begins. The nineteenth century had for
its subject of inquiry the social body ; the twentieth
century has for its subject the social soul.
The same enlargement of its task is now offered
to religion. If the churches remain primarily
concerned with questions of their mechanism; if
they continue to live in the era of organization
while philosophy and sociology have advanced to
the era of spiritualization ; if religion is fenced in
by separatism and provincialism, while the rest
of the world is taking down its fences and dis
covering the unity of human hfe — then, even
though religion concerns itself with the loftiest of
themes and contemplates the broadest horizon of
human thought, it must forfeit the right to primacy
among the creative influences of the new world,
and must become simply the refuge of the gnostic,
the mystic, and the prudential.
In one of the most brilUant, though not perhaps
most cautious, of modern treatises on early Christian
history, Professor Wernle remarks that Jesus came
" to save his followers from the theologians." x The
statement has a certain historical justification in
the attitude of Jesus toward the theologians of his
own day; but it most imperfectly represents his
1 "Anfange unserer Religion," 1901, s. 60 : "Die Gabe dieser
Gelehrten war Scharfsinn und gutes Gedachtniss, weiter nichts,"

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 283
attitude toward theology. His purpose was not to
save men from the theologians, but to save the
theologians themselves. Theology must always re
main the supreme interest of thoughtful minds,
the height of loftiest contemplation and broadest
horizon ; but the theology of the separatist, the
gnostic, the mystic, the priest, the Pharisee, has
no more part in the Christian religion to-day than
it had in the days of Jesus. The defence of faith
must be made by the descent of faith. The the
ology appropriate to a rehgion of power is a
theology which supphes power. The communion
of the soul with God remains, as it has always
been, the mount of vision to which theology may
ascend ; but the proof of reUgion which theology
must give is to be found nowhere else than in the
descent of theology to Ufe, and the application to
service of the heavenly vision. The modern world
needs, indeed, new adjustments of its machinery
to steady employment, to diminish the tragic waste
of human Ufe and the stih more tragic idleness of
the unappUed and inappUcable; but what the
modern world much more needs is the power to
set this halting machinery in steady and effective
motion; and this spiritual power is from above,
descending as by the law of gravitation from the
sources of faith to move the wheels of work.
How is it, then, that the descent of faith may
proceed ? The first and most obvious application
of religion to Ufe was immediately made by the
primitive Church in its extraordinary movement

284 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of compassion. The descent of Christian faith
expressed itself from the beginning in Christian
charity ; the descent of pity was the corollary of
the ascent of prayer. Even in this great move
ment of Christian charity, however, it has been by
no means always recognized that the application
of faith to service is an integral part of the religious
process itself, as essential to Christian discipleship
as worship or belief. Philanthropy has often ap
peared an accessory enterprise, which may be
becoming for Christians to undertake, but which
lies beyond the distinctive sphere and essential
task of the Church. At a meeting in a Women's
Settlement House — the most unimpeachable form
of self-effacing service which modern philanthropy
has devised — a minister of the Christian religion,
looking about him for some technical expression
of ecclesiastical loyalty, remarked : " This is very
touching, but I wish there were more of Christ
in it." How could there be more of Christ, one
asked himself, than in such a work, just as it was,
without technical confession or provincial limita
tion ? Might not the Master, were he to walk those
streets, pass with indifference many a temple built
in his name, and laying his hands of blessing on
these ministering women say : " Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto these least, ye have done it unto
me"? Modern charity, in other words, is not an enter
prise into which persons, being already religious,
may venture, as into a foreign land of new cus-

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 285
toms and new languages, but Ues within the
natural boundaries of reUgion, a home-country
whose language is the language of faith, and which
needs no apology or symbol or flag to bring it
within the Kingdom of God. " The poor," it was
held in the early Church, as though charity were
itself an act of worship, "shah be esteemed an
altar unto God." x The workers in modern charity
need, it is true, more knowledge of their science,
better training, new schools of philanthropy ; but
if they should utter their deepest need, it would be
a prayer for faith, the assurance that they were
working with God, the grace to see their work from
above and to descend to it with power. Rehgion
is provincial if it does not annex this territory of
pity. Undefiled rehgion is to be recognized not
less by the wisdom with which one visits the
widows and fatherless than by the grace to keep
oneself unspotted from the world.
The same quahfied appreciation must be ex
pressed in a second instance where Christian faith
has been appUed to modern Ufe. Nothing has of
late so gravely impressed the Christian world as
the significance to civilization of the institution of
the fanuly. The social peril of domestic instabiUty
which confronts modern life is a challenge to reU
gion, and faith has descended into this scene of
disruption and infeUcity with its counsels and ex
hortations. Better laws, better comity between
churches, more scrupulous obedience to ecclesias-
1 " ApostoUc Constitutions," Bk. TV, m.

286 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
tical canons, are urged in the name of Christ.
Through all this consciousness of social peril,
however, there still persists in many minds the
provincial impression that in this extension of
responsibility reUgion is proceeding beyond its own
special sphere, as into foreign territory, adjacent,
but not its own. Is not the home, it is asked, a
product of law and custom, which must be safe
guarded by the legislatures and courts, rather than
a part of the field of religion, for which religious
organizations have the chief responsibility ?
The answer to this question must depend on
one's conception of religion and its boundaries.
Is the relation of religion to the home that of
one institution patronizing another institution, or is
the home itself a religious institution, historically
created by moral sacrifices and restraints, and per
petuated by the ideals of faith and love ? Behind
all legislative questions which concern the family
lies the religious question of recognizing in the
family the social type selected by Jesus Christ to
represent his religion. The stabihty of modern
marriage is not to be attained by mechanical
devices of law, but by a spiritual revival, which it is
for religion to secure; a return from ostentation
to simplicity, and from laxity to loyalty, which is
for religion to preach ; a restoration of faith in the
home, not as a commercial venture, but as a spirit
ual opportunity and discipUne. The problem of
religion in the twentieth century begins in the
descent of faith into the family, the recognition of

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 287
the family as the type of God's Kingdom, the an
nexation of the province of the f amUy as belonging
to the Kingdom of God ; and the order of procedure
in this expansion of reUgion is to be, — not, first,
the enactment of ritual and canons to be apphed
to the family, but first, the plain understanding that
domestic integrity is an essential part of Christian
discipleship. It may be gladly admitted, however, that in
these concerns of charity and of family integrity
the descent of faith has been in large degree rec
ognized as an essential part of a Christian civiliza
tion. It is otherwise with other great areas of the
modern world, where the most commanding inter
ests of the present age are to be found. Within a
single generation new forms of industry and new
movements of politics have created a practically
new world, and the Christian Church stiU stands
on the quiet shore of its secluded and specialized
Ufe and watches the life of the present age as it
drifts among these tumultuous waves and conflict
ing currents, Uke a vessel driven toward the rocks.
Something, the Church knows, ought to be done
by religion, to save, not single Uves alone, but the
ship itself; yet how shaU faith venture into so
dangerous a sea ? What means of help, what
skiU in salvage has it, what training to take com
mand of so perilous a venture ?
Precisely at this point, however, where the new
risk is seen, is the new opportunity offered to re
Ugion to justify its claim to leadership, wisdom, and

288 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
power. Who shall rescue industry from merciless-
ness and rapacity, or politics from unscrupulousness
and sectionalism, if it be not those who have learned
that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of
the things that he possesseth, and that righteousness
alone exalteth a people ? A church is like a life-
saving station, set in a protected bay; but what
shall we say of life-savers who make no venture
toward a drifting vessel, but stand on the beach
and wave ? What wonder is it that the industrial
movement of the present age believes itself beyond
the province of the Church, when the Church still
believes itself to be provincial? When Jesus
stood one day with his little company by the Lake
of Galilee, it was the meagre use of their great
opportunity which seems to have impressed his
mind, and he used the language of their vocation
as a parable of the work they had to do. " Launch
out," he bade them, "into the deep, and let down
your nets for a draught." x They had been fishing
along the shores of their opportunity, and he called
them to do business in great waters. They had
been as those who caught minnows, when he meant
that they should catch men. It is the call of the
present age to a timid Church : " Launch out
into the deep." The place of religion in the
modern world is not along its shores, but among
its waves and storms. The industrial agitations of
the time are a challenge to the courage of the
Church. 1 Luke v. 4.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 289
What is the fundamental provocation of our in
dustrial discontent ? It is the obvious fact that
neither party to the industrial conflict manifests
the shghtest intention of applying the principles of
religion to the affairs of business. The two prov
inces of Ufe are regarded as having distinct boun
daries, as though in one continent of the spirit there
might be a state of war, while in another peace
and prosperity might endure. There is, however,
no such division of Orient and Occident on the
map of reUgion. Either the whole of life is ruled
by reUgion, or reUgion becomes formal, technical,
fictitious, and substitutes for reUgion must be found
which shall control the whole of Ufe. One of the
most instructive aspects of modern industry is
the passionate devotion which thousands of plain
people offer to the cause of industrial revolution.
What is there in the creed of sociaUsm which gives
it this emotional quaUty ? On its face it appears
to be a mere change of ownership, a new distribu
tion of production, an economic proposition. Why
is it that men sacrifice themselves so eagerly and
passionately for such a cause ? It is because it is
the nearest substitute they have discovered for a
reUgion. A reUgion of materiaUsm it may be that
they have reached, a pathetic substitute for Chris
tian faith; yet so long as the Christian Church
regards the world of industry as foreign territory,
so long those who are inextricably involved in the
industrial order wiU create a new reUgion for them
selves. The growth of sociaUsm is an indictment

29O JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
of the Christian religion. It is the working-man's
answer to religious provincialism. The descent of
religion into the problems of industrial Ufe is the
crucial problem of the Church in the twentieth
century. Finally, the same problem presents itself in
the political conditions of the present time. In
the most unanticipated and dramatic manner the
movement toward organization, concentration, and
efficiency which has dominated industry has re
appeared in national affairs. The nations are con
fronted by questions of world-politics. National
expansion has become, not so much a pohcy to
debate, as a condition from which it is impossible
to retreat. But what does political expansion indi
cate as the new task of religion ? It is often
affirmed that it opens the way for religion to
follow, as though, when other agencies had done
their work, religion might reap the harvest. What
is this view of religion as a technical, specialized
undertaking, which may follow on the track of
politics, but sheer provincialism ? Religion can
not be exported to a foreign nation, like one
more home-manufacture, after the politicians and
the traders have opened the way. It is in and
through the spirit of conquest, in and through
the conduct of commercial Ufe, that religion must
be conveyed. Its missions will be regarded as
mere hypocrisy and formalism unless its rulers, its
soldiers, and its traders are themselves missionaries.
It is not after the statesmen have finished that the

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 29 1
Church begins, but it is in that which the states
men do that the religion they represent is weighed.
Politics is not extraneous to reUgion, a foreign
invasion to be followed by international peace ; it
is itseff a part of reUgion. The detachment of
pohtical expediency from religious ideals is the
gravest indictment which can be made, not only
against the politics, but also against the religion of
a land. In beginning the biography of Gladstone, Mr.
Morley calls attention to the essentiaUy religious
character of that great poUtical career. " Not
for two centuries," says his biographer, " had our
island produced a ruler in whom the rehgious
motive was paramount in the hke degree. He
was not only a pohtical force, but a moral force.
. . . Well was it said of him, ' You have so hved
and wrought that you have kept the soul alive in
England ' " ; and in another place Mr. Gladstone
himself makes his own confession of faith : " I
am desirous that the standard of our material
strength shall be highly estimated . . ., but I be
lieve it of stiU more vital consequence that we
should stand high ... as the lovers of truth, of
honor, and of openness in our proceedings. . . .
I value our insular position, but I dread the day
when we shall be reduced to a moral insularity." 1
That is the descent of faith into the pohtical world.
The Christian statesman keeps the soul of his nation
1 "The Life of WilUam Ewart Gladstone," 1903, I, 3, 5, and
II, S7«-

292 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
alive and defends her from moral insularity. The
Christian State, like the heavenly Jerusalem, is not
built up from beneath, on material foundations,
but descends, in the ideals of her statesmen, out
of heaven from God.
Such, in imperfect illustrations, is the scope of
the ethics of Jesus. In a heated pohtical cam
paign, a distinguished American politician is said
to have given as instructions to his adherents :
" Claim everything." Such, with a different in
tention, is the message of Jesus to the Christian
character. Nothing lies beyond its province. The
chief peril of Christian conduct is in dealing with
a great matter as though it were a small one ; in
mistaking a universal claim for a limited, fenced-
in area, staked out Uke a miner's claim within
which treasure must be found. "All things are
yours," x says the Apostle Paul, reiterating the
comprehensiveness of Jesus, — whether it be the
divisions within the Church, of Paul or Apollos or
Cephas ; or the world outside the Church, with its
philanthropy, its industry, its politics ; or life, with
its problems; or death, with its mystery; or the
present, with its cares; or the future, with its
hopes ; — all is yours, if you are Christ's, as Christ
is God's.
There are many subjects concerning which Jesus
has Uttle to teach the modern world. The circum
stances of his life were primitive in their simplicity
1 I Cor. iii. 21-23.

THE DESCENT OF FAITH 293
when compared with the storm and stress of the
present time. He knew nothing of the industrial
complexity which has brought with it such indus
trial perplexity ; he heard but from afar the rumors
of imperial pohtics; he was not concerned with
the mechanics of theology or ecclesiasticism. One
truth concerning human Ufe, however, he taught,
which is the secret, in any age or place, of peace in
industry, of wisdom in politics, of tolerance in re
ligion. It was the truth that life is not divisible,
departmental, provincial ; but organic, interdepend
ent, one. He saw life in motion, as a process of
growth, a sowing and harvest ; a progress, not on a
level, but through a land of hiUs and valleys, ascend
ing to descend, obeying to know, and knowing to
obey. There is, according to the teaching of Jesus,
no duty-doing which does not lead one up its steep
path toward religious faith; there is no rehgious
faith which does not lead one down its slope to duty.
These are not two ways of life but one, moving with
the rhythm of the spirit, which is akin to the rhythm
of nature, with its nights and days, its seasons and
tides, its society and solitude, its activity and recep
tivity, its Ufe and death and renewing life. One
beat of the spiritual rhythm is character ; another
is reUgion. Ethics fulfils itself in its ascent; re
Ugion is perfected in its descent; and life keeps
time to this rhythmic movement, from tasks to
visions, and from visions back to tasks.
In the Book of Genesis it is written that a ladder
was set up on earth and reached to heaven, and

294 JESUS CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN CHARACTER
that the angels of God both ascended and de
scended on it ; and in the fourth Gospel it is said
of Jesus that the angels of God both ascended
and descended upon the Son of Man.1 These two
processions of celestial influences still attend the
ascending life of duty and the descending hfe of
faith. The duty-doer as he goes up into the pres
ence of the Most High joins the ascending angels;
but even in that presence they do not pause with
folded wings. Downward they go once more, and
he is their companion who leaves the vision to
descend into the lower parts of the earth. Up the
ladder of life mounts duty, until the pure in heart
see God, and down its stairs descends the wisdom
from above to interpret the life below ; and along
both ascent and descent stand the angels of God
to guard and cheer the sons of men.
1 Gen. xxviii. 12; John i. 51,

INDEX

Abbott, E. A., 19 note.
Adams, M., 162 note.
Adler, Felix, 238 note.
Alford, 127 note.
Apollos, 292.
" Apostolic Constitutions," 285 note.
Aristotle, 81.
Arndt, n note.
Arnold, Matthew, 168 note, 192.
Art, Christian, 43 note.
Asceticism, Christian, 167 ft ; Jesus
opposed to, 169.
Articles XXXIX, No. VIII, 217
note.
Baur, 26 note.
Bax, 10 note.
Bayliss, Sir W., 43 note.
Beatitudes, 246, 247.
Bebel, 10 note.
Bentham, 254.
Berkeley, 272.
Bernstein, n note.
Beyschlag, 105 note.
Bible, social quality of, 4, 196 ft
Bixby, J. T., 124 note.
Black, Hugh, 51 note, 146 note,
158 note.
Body, ethics of, 167; source of
power, 171, 175.
Bonhoff, 27 note.
Bradley, F. H., 47 note, 155 note.
Briggs, C. A., 28 note.
Broadus, 28 note.
Brooks, Phillip*;, 27 note, 184 note.
Browning, R., 225 note, 255.
Bruce, A. L., 2r note, 28 note.
Bruce, W. S., 27 note.
Bruno, J. F. de, 262 note.

Buckley, G. W., 62 note.
Bushnell, H., 99 note.
Caird, J., 96 note.
Cairns, D. S., 267 note.
Caligula, 173.
Carlyle, T., 13, 14 note.
Carpenter, W. Boyd, 43 note.
Casuist misinterpretation of New
Testament, 72 ft
Celibacy, 173 ff.
Cephas, 292.
Chamberlain, H. S., 50 note.
Channing, W. E., 37 note, 55
note.
Chapman, E. M., 251 note.
Charity, Christian, 129, 130, 284 ff. ;
in primitive church, 218 note.
Chastity, 173.
Childhood.artitude of Jesus toward,
80 ff
Christian character, present de
mand for, 13 ff., 151 ff. ; not
attainment but growth, 79, 86 ;
receptiveness of, 84 ff. ; elements
of, 112 ff. ; paradox of, 146 ; fruits
of, 139 ft ; fitness for modern life,
134 ff. ; personal consequences of,
154 ff. ; social consequences of,
196 ft; relation to knowledge,
179; to emotional life, i8r ff. ;
poise, 188; simplicity, 188 ff. ;
peace, 190 ft ; grace, 193 ft ; ex
pressed in sacrifice, 199 ft ; ser
vice, 210 ft ; idealism of, 223 ft ;
ascent to faith and return to
duty, 272 ft ; universality of, 292.
Christian Ethics, see Ethics, Chris
tian.

295

296

INDEX

Christian thought, characteristics
of, 179.
Christopher, 38.
Church, opportunity of, 287 ff.
Clement, 218 note.
Cobbe, F. P., 28 note.
Consequences, of Christian char
acter, 154 ff.
Conversion, Jesus' doctrine of,
107 ft
Crothers, S. M., 63 note.
" Daily Telegraph," 262 note.
Dawson, W. J., 48 note.
Dobschiitz, von, 37 note, 43 note.
Dogmatic misinterpretation of New
Testament, 76 ff.
Dorner, 24 note, 172 note.
Dresser, 53 note.
Drummond, J., 28 note.
Duty, conception of Jesus, 123 ft,
257 ft; hedonistic theory of,
123-124 ; false isolation of, 256.
" Ecce Homo," 27 note.
Education, moral, 90, 91.
Ehrhardt, 26 note, 49 note.
Emerson, R. W., 119 note, 149, 169,
222 note, 258 note.
Emotion and reason, 96 ; Christian
doctrine of, 180 ff. ; true place of,
186 ff.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 19 note.
Engels, F., 12 note.
Eternal life, real nature of, 135 ff.
Ethical Culture Association, 236 ff.
Ethics, neglect of, in New Testa
ment study, 22 ff. ; leads to reli
gion, 234 ff. ; field of, 239;
incomplete in itself, 244 ff. ; of
Jesus, 258 ff.
Ethics, Christian, relation to the
ology, 23 ff. ; supremacy, 29 ff.
Ethics, formal, unreality of, 252 ff.
External righteousness, opposed by
Jesus, 115 '• modern form of, 119.
Externalism, as social remedy, 9.

Fairbairn, 21 note, 42 note, 61 note,
143 note.
Faith, of Jesus in humanity, 87 ff. ;
maintenance of, 262 ff.
Family, relation of Jesus to his, 68 ;
relation of Christianity to, 285 ff.
Farrar, 43 note.
Feddersen, 27 note.
Feeling, place of, in religion, 96;
also see Emotion.
Fiske, John, 233, 236 note.
Fitzgerald, 257.
Fowle, 220 note.
Fremantle, 8 note.
Fruits of Christian character, 139 ff.
Gallwitz, 27 note, 46 note.
Gardner, Percy, 99 note.
Gass, 24 note.
Gebhardt and Harnack, 43 note.
Gilbert, G. H., 28 note.
Gladden, W., 99 note.
Gladstone, W. E., 291 note.
Gladstone, religious nature of, 291.
Gnosticism, 176 ff., 278, 279.
Gohre, P., 34 note.
Goethe, 225 note, 243 note.
Golden Rule, 205.
Goldsmith, O., 165.
Gospels, fourth less ethical, 18 ff. ;
ethical teaching of, 21 ff. ; ethical
approach to, 31.
Grace, in Christian character,
193 ff.
Green, T. H., 223 note.
Gregory of Nazianzen, 37 note.
Grimm, E., 17 note, 27 note, 46
note.
Grote, J., 225 note.
Growth, of Christian character, 86,
112 ff. ; elements of, 113 ff.
Guyau, M., 264 note.
Harnack, A., 28 note, 37 note,
43 note, 49 note, 56 note, 121 note,
159 note.
Harris, G., 18 note, 27 note, 37 note.

INDEX

297

Hase, 48 note.
Hebrew, conception of righteous
ness, 113 ft ; conception of char
acter, 214.
Hedonism, 123 ft, 147.
Hegel, 176.
Heinrici, C. F. G., 161 note.
Hellenism, in Jesus, 50 Tiote.
Herod, 148.
Herrmann, W., 26 note, 75 note,
118 note, 159 note, 181 note.
Herron, 198 note.
Hitchcock and Brown, 87 note,
218 note.
Hobbes, 234.
Hobson, J. A., 11 note.
Holtzmann, H., 57 note, 61 note,
115 n°te, 128 note, 155 note.
Holtzmann, O., 19 note, 27 note,
51 note, 144 note,
Hopkins, Mark, 245 note.
Horton, R. F., 28 note.
Hosmer, F. L, 273 note.
Human nature, faith of Jesus in, 87ft
Hunt, Holman, 143 note.
Huxley, T., 82 note, 210.
Hyde, W. de W., 28 note.
Idealism, of present age, 164 ft ; in
Christian character, 223 ; in char
acter of Jesus, 226 ft
Industrial system, redemption of,
263, 288 ff.
Isaiah, 43.
Jackson, G., 28 note.
Jacoby, 26 note, 46 note, 612. note,
105 Tiote, 108 note, 132 note, 136
note, 137 note, 147 note.
James, W., 55 note, 56 note, 101
note, 106 note, 122 note, 200.
Jesus Christ, imitation of, 33, 39;
and laboring men, 33; external
appearance of, 40 ; traits of char
acter, 43 ft; asceticism, 45,
31 ff. ; strength, 32 ; insight, 56 ;
aesthetic conception of, 47; atti

tude toward nature, 60-61; in
controversy, 62 ff. ; prodigality of
sympathy, 65 ff. ; solitude of soul,
66 ff. ; relation to own family,
68 ; attitude toward childhood,
80 ff. ; faith in humanity, 87 ff. ;
criticisms of,i54 ft; peacefulness,
190 ft; idealism, 223, 226 ft;
essentially rehgious, 265 ff. ; spir
itual development of, 143, 268;
devotion to.practical duty, 270 ft
Jesus Christ, teaching of, its per
sonal quality, 17, 126 ft; ethi
cal, 36, 113; not rules but spirit,
74 ft, 78 ; positive character, 93 ;
appeals to will, 101 ft ; compared
with Paul, see Paul; elements
of, 112 ft ; relation to Old Testa
ment, 113, 120, 131; condemned
as unfitted for present age, 154 ft ;
timeless character of, 163; non-
ascetic, 169 ft ; social conse
quences of, 197 ft ; through
ethics to religion, 246 ff. ; mes
sage to present age, 292 ft
Jowett, 15 note.
Joy of Christian character, 140 t
Judas, feith of Jesus in, 88.
Jiilicher, 78 note.
Justin, 218 note.
Kaftan, 26 note.
Kant, 25 note, 100^244.
Keats, 61.
Keim, 43 note, 48 note, 31 note.
Kempis, Thomas a, 202 Tiote.
Kerr, C. H., 11 note.
Kidd, 3 note.
Kingdom of God, summary of the
teachings of Jesus, 228 ff.
Kingsley, Charles, 82 note, 99 note.
Kipling, R., 224.
Knight, W., 21 note.
Knowledge, in teaching of Jesus,
177.
Kohler, H., 7 note.
Konig, 43 note.

298

INDEX

Labor movement, relation to Chris
tianity, 32 ff.
Lassalle, F., 80.
Lecky, 30 note,
Lessing, 29 note.
Life, in teaching of Jesus, 130 ft;
not mere existence, 132 ff. ; eter
nal, 135 ff.
Lightfoot, 218 note.
Lotze, 281 note.
Love, in teaching of Jesus, 120 ; ex
pressed by service, 126 ; personal
nature of, 126 ff.
Lowell, J. R., 245.
Loyola, Ignatius, 172.
Luthardt, 155 note.
Luther, Martin, 55 note, 56 note.
Mackenzie, 240 note.
Martensen, 24 note.
Martineau, J., 27 note, 177 note, 235,
236 note, 244 note.
Marx, 10 note.
Masaryk, 11 note.
Materialism, of Socialists, 9 ft
Matheson, G., 28 note.
Mazzini, 94.
Mechanism, social, 14; in religious
work, 280.
Messianic conception of character
of Jesus, 45 ff.
Mill, J. S., 124, 254.
Monasticism, 167 ff.
Morality, see Ethics.
Morley, 291.
Mozley, J. B., 136 note.
Muller, Julius, 249.
Mysticism, 181 ff, 278, 279.
Nature, sympathy of Jesus for, 60 ff.
Newman, J. H., 30 note, 117.
New Testament, casuist misinter
pretation of, 72 ff. ; dogmatic
misinterpretation of, 76 ff.
Nicodemus, 64, 108.
Nietzsche, F., 159, 160 note, 161
note, 162, 163, 164, 165.

Nietzsche's condemnation of Chris
tianity, 159 ff.
Nitti, 7 note, 198 note.
" Omar Khayyam," 257 note.
Otto, 27 note, 37 note.
Palmer, G. H., 241 note, 242 note,
046 note, 259 note.
Paradoxes, of Christian character,
146 ; in teaching of Jesus, 199 ;
ground of, 230 ff.
Patton, 76 note.
Paul, conversion of, 104 ; teaching
of, compared with that of Jesus,
60, 105, 134, 149, 216.
Paulsen, F., 46 note, 159 note, 205
note, 278.
Peabody, F. G., 1 note, 6 note, 7
note, II note, 129 note, 183 note,
198 note, 229 note.
Peacefulness, of Jesus, 190 ff. ; in
Christian character, 189 ff.
Perry, H. F., 35 note.
Personal consequences of Chris
tian character, 154 ff.
Personal nature of love, 126 ff.
Pessimism, 161 ff.
Peter, faith of Jesus in, 88.
Pfleiderer, 26 note.
Pharisaism, modern form of, 82 ff.,
119; opposed by Jesus, 79, 94,
US ff
Pilate, 98, 230.
Plato, 15, 49 note, 81.
Poise, in Christian character, 188.
Politics, redemption of, 263, 288,
290.
Positiveness of teaching of Jesus, 93.
Power, in character of Jesus, 52 ff. ;
as fruit of Christian character,
147 ff
Present age, of Social Question,
1 ; making trial of Christianity,
2; demand for Christian char
acter, 13 ft, 151 ff. ; ethical tem
per of, 32 ; fitness of Christianity

INDEX

299

for, 154 ft, 280 ff.; underlying
ideahsm of, 164 ff. ; conception of
social progress, 221 ; new oppor
tunities for religion in, 287 ft;
message of Jesus to, 292 ft
Provincialism, in religion, 276 ff.
Psychology of rehgion, 55 note, 95,
99-
Puritanism, 185 ft
Rade, 7 note, 26 note, 34 note.
Ramsay, W. M., 62 note.
Ratisbonne, 55 note.
Realism, modem, 223.
Reason and emotion, 96.
Receptiveness, of Christian char
acter, 84.
Religion, and ethics, 234 ft, 241 ff. ;
outgrowth of morality, 241 ft;
field of, 240 ; incomplete in itself,
274 ff. ; provinciaUsm in, 276 ff.
Renan, E., 6 note, 47 note, 62
note.
Righteousness, in teaching of Jesus,
113 ft; Hebrew conception of,
113 ft, 116 ft
Ritschl, 25 note.
Rittelmeyer, 161 note.
Robertson, F., 36, 80, 260, 261 note.
Ropes, J. H., 115 note.
Rothe, 25 note.
Royce, J., 239 note.
Ruskin, J., 137, 138.
Sabatier, 240 note.
Sabbath, teaching of Jesus as to,
227 ff.
Sacrifice, in Christian teaching,
199 ff. ; paradox of, 203 ff.
Salter, W. M., 238 note.
SchafHe, 12 note.
Schell, H., 43 note.
Schiller, F. von, 15.
Schleiermacher, 23 note, SS Tiote,
96 note, 180 note, 183 note.
Schopenhauer, 155, 156 note, 161.
Seeley, J. R., 237 note.

Self-realization and sacrifice, 199 ff.
Sentimentalism, in Christian teach
ing, 122.
Service, expression of love, 126;
paradox of, 210.
Seth, 240 note.
Shairp, J. C, 253 note.
Shaw, G. B., 161 note.
Shelley, P. B., 61.
Sidgwick, 278 note.
Sime, 16 note.
Simplicity, in Christian character,
188 ff.
Sin, sense of, 103 ff. ; function of
this sense, 109; Jesus gives no
doctrine of, 105.
Smith, Robertson, 116 note.
Smyth, Newman, 25 note.
Social consequences of Christian
character, 196 ff.
Social order, true nature of, 220 ff.
Social progress, modern concep
tion of, 221.
Social Question, present interest in,
I ff. ; modem form of, 12 ; leads
to Christian character, 17.
Social struggle for existence, 211 ff.
Socialism, materialistic fallacy of,
9 ff. ; as religion, 289.
" Spectator," 261 note, 262 note.
Spence, H. D. M., 43 note.
Spencer, H., 123 note, 124, 207, 208
note, 2/y}, 210.
Spencer, Herbert, life as illustrating
his own ethics, 207 ff.
St. Augustine, 28 note, 56 note,
225.
Stein, L., 47 note.
Stevens, G. B., 19 note, 28 note, 105
note, no note, 121 note.
Stevenson, R. L., 74.
St. John of the cross, 55 note.
Strauss, 43 note, 46 note, 47 note, 48
note, 49 note, 56 note, 155, 156
note.
St. Theresa, SS note-
Suffering in Christian life, 142 ff.

300

INDEX

Sympathy, of Jesus, 65 ff.
Synoptic gospels, ethical value of,
I. 18 ff.
"Teaching of the Twelve Apos
tles," 87 note, 218 note.
Temperance, 174.
Tennyson, A., 125, 179, 263 note.
Theology, must be ethical, 29 ; true
conception of, 282-283.
Thoma, A., 21 note, 23 note, 26
note.
Tiberius, 173.
Tolstoi, L., 73 note, 147 note, 156,
157 note, 158, 159, 162, 163,
164.
Tolstoi's interpretation of Chris
tianity, 157 ff.
Troeltsch, 26 note.
Van Dyke, H., 33 note, 67 note.
Virtues, Christian, 219.

Warschauer, 19 note.
Washington, George, 91.
Wasson, D. A., 254 note.
Watson, J., 92 note.
Weinel, 44 note, 57 note, 61 note,
78 note.
Weiss, Hermann, 25 note.
Wellhausen, 27 note, 85 note.
Wendt, 113 note, 121 note, 134 note,
137 note.
Wernle, 21 note, 36 note, 90 note,
98 note, 108 note, 144 note, 282
note.
Wesley, John, 4, 99 note.
Whitman, Walt, 55 note.
Will, appeal of Jesus to, 101 ff.
Wordsworth, 125, 126, 250.
Wiinsche, A., 43 note, 48 note.
Wundt, 240 note.
Wuttke, 24 note.
I Zangwill, I., 48 note.

INDEX OF BIBLE PASSAGES

Acts ix. 2 . . . .
x.36 . . .
xix. 9, 23 . .
xxiv. 16 . .
xxiv. 25 . .
Colossians i. 20 .
1 Corinthians i. 3

2 Corinthians

1-23 i.28
iii. 21-23
viii. 13
xv. 57
xvi. 23
i. 2 .
i. 12 .

iv. 18 .
v. 14 .
xi. 3 .
xii. 9 .
xii. 10
xiii. 10
Deuteronomy vi. 5
vi.25 viii. 2
viii. 3
x. 19
Ecclesiastes vii. 12
Ephesians i. 2 . .
ii. 14, 17
ii. 17 .
iv. 8 .
iv. 9
iv. 10 .
iv. 12, 13,
iv. 15 .
Exodus xx. n . .
Ezekiel xviii. 9 . .
xx. 11 . .

PAGE
. 86
• 191
. 86
. 172
• 175
. 191
. 190
¦ 49
. 230
. 292
¦ 174
. 105
¦ 193
. 190
. 189
¦ 225
¦ 127
. 189
¦ 149
• ISI
¦ 149
ii, 132
• "3
¦ 133
. 226
. 121
. 132
. 190
• 191
• 191
. 276
. 272
. 271
¦ 139
. 130
• 59
• 131
• 133

Galatians i. 3

•23.i. 1 .

PAGE I90 191I7SI29
vi. 2  216
Genesis xxviii. 12  294
Habakkuk ii. 4  131
Hebrews v. 1  262
v. 14  262
xi. 27  230
Hosea vi. 6  59, 114
Isaiah v. 16 .
ix.7 .
xi. 2, 4
xxxii. 1
James i. 26

... 113
.... 113
.... 113
.... 113
. . . 264
Jeremiah xvii. 10  116

Job xii. 12
John i. 4 .
i. 12
i. 14,
i-Si

17

. . 131
• • I3S
.... 149
• • 193
.... 294
iv. 34  101, 226
v. 30  101
vi.33  135
vi.35  135
vi. 53  135
vi.54  I36
vi.63  135
x. 10  135
xii. 24 .  204
xiii. 3  216
xiii. 15 . • • • 216
xiv. 1, 2  67
xiv. 23 ff.  13S
xiv. 25, 26  251
xiv. 27 ... . 142, 190, 192
xv. 11  50, 142

301

302

INDEX OF BIBLE PASSAGES

PAGE
John xv. 12  135
xvi. 7  6j
xvi. 8, 10  134
xvi. 12  67
xvi. 33  190, 192
xvii. 3  136
xvii. 19  273
xvii. 19, 20  6
xvii. 21, 1  270
xviii. 6  41
xx. 31  135
1 John iv. 7  122
v. 12, 13  138
Leviticus xviii. 5  133
xix. 18 . . . 5,121,132
xix. 18, 34 . . . . 121
Luke i. 79  190
ii. 14  190
ii. 40, 51, 52  269
h-49  234
iv. 1, 14, 15  274
iv. 22  193
iv. 42  270
v. 4  288
vi. 23  140
vii. 47  128, 249
viii. 10  232
ix. 22  143
ix. 23  145, 202
ix. 24  199
x. 3  142
a. 19  149
x. 22 . ... 97, 234, 268
x. 25  121
x. 25, 28  132
a. 27  121
x. 29, 37  126
x. 30 ff.  128
xii. 15  134
xii. 15, 20, 21 ... . 226
xii. 23  134, 226
xii. 32  227
xii. 33  171
xii. 51  190
xiv. 27 ... . 145, 199, 202
xv. 7, 10  107

PAGE
Luke xv. 11  204
xv. 24 .
• 133
xvui. 17
. 80
xviii. 18
. 136
xxi. 36 .
• 145
xxii. 36
• 73
xxii. 42
. 101
xxm. 9
. 148
xxiv. 49
• 231
xxiv. 47
. 107
Mark i. 14 .
. 228
1. IS ¦
. 107
11.27 •
. 226
hi. 3S •
•a .
iv. 25 .
. IOI
¦ 74
iv. 28 .
86, 139
VI. 12 .
. 107
vi. 31 .
. 266
vi. 32 .
. 270
vi. 48 .
. 270
vn. 20-23 •
. 108
vin. 27, 31
• 143
vin. 34
145, 202
vm. 35
• 199
ix. 1-30
. 271
ix. 23, 24
• 249
A. 14 .
. 106
x. 15 .
80, 106
x. 17 .
. 136
X. 21 .
• 171
xiii. 32
. 16
xui. 34
. 146
xui. 34, 3
7
¦ I4S
xiv. 6 .
. 148
xv. 31 .
• 279
Matthew iv. 1-1
I
. 106
iv. 4
• 133
iv. 17
. 107
v. 3-i<
1
. 141
v. 6
. 114
v-7
. 205
V. II,
12,
13
I.
1
• 143
V. 12
. 140
v. 19
. 250
v. 20
. 114
V. 2I-.
!8
. 116
INDEX OF BIBLE PASSAGES

303

PAGE
Matthew v. 48  141
vi. 16  140
vi. 22  189
vii. 12 .... 59, 250
vii. 14  134
vii. 20  140
vii. 21  101
vii. 24 .... 72, 246
viii. 27, 31 .... 143
ix. 13  114
x. 1  149
x. 22  142
x- 34 • • • 73. 142, 190
x. 38 . . . . 142, 202
x-39  199
x. 42  140
xi. 21  107
xi.25  97
xi. 27 . 67,97,234,265,268
xii- 7  59
xii. 17  114
xii. 33  140
xii. 36  255
xiii. 11  232
xiii. 38  6
xiii. 43  114
xiv. 13 . . . 266, 270
xiv. 23  266
xiv. 25 . ... 270
xv. n  204
xv. 27, 28 ... . 249
xvi. 13  143
xvi. 19  228
xvi. 21  144
xvi. 24 . . . 145, 202
xvi. 25 . . 134, 145, 199
xvii. 1-21 .... 271
xvii. 1, *  266
xviii. 3 .... 80, 107
xviii. 4  81
xix. 8 ft  59
xix. 12  174
xix. 14  80
xix. 16 ff. .... 136
xix. 17  134
xix. 21  171

PAGE
Matthew xx. 14  74
xx. 17-19 .... 144
xx- 25  213
xx. 26  213
XX. 26, 27 .... 211
xxii. 14  145
xxiii. 9  265
xxiv. 13  145
xxiv. 36  16
xxiv. 42  145
xxiv. 46  141
xxv. 1, 13, 19 ... 145
xxv. 27  204
xxv. 28, 30 . . . . 205
xxv. 34 . . . 141, 215
xxv. 34, 40 ... . 72
xxvi. 38, 39 . . . 142
xxvi. 39  250
xxvi. 63  74
xxvii. 12  148
xxvii. 42  279
Micah vi. 8  120
Nehemiah ix. 9  133
1 Peter hi. 19, 22  217
2 Peter i. 6  175
Philippians i. *  190
iv. 23  193
Proverbs viii. 35 . . . 131, 132
x. 17  131
xii. 28  131
xiv. 27  131
xv. 24 . . . 131, 132
xx. 7  214
xxi. 21  132
Psalms xxi. 4  131
xxx. 5  132
xxxvi. 9  132
xxxvii. 37  214
li. 5  106
li. 10  116
lxviii. 18  276
Ixxii. 2  113
xci. 16  131
xcvi. 13  113
cxix. 77, 97 • ¦ • • I23
CXXXl. 2  80

3°4

INDEX OF BIBLE PASSAGES

PAGE
Psalms cxxxix. 23 .... 116
Revelation ii. 7  137
xxi. 6  137
xxii. 17 .... 137
Romans i. 7  190
iv. 24  76
v. 9-12  106
vi-4  134
vii. 7-12  104
viii. 2 . . . . 105, 134
viii. 6  134

PAGE
Romans x. 3  114
X-S  133
xiii. 10  125
xvi. 20  193
1 Samuel xvi. 7  n6
1 Thessalonians v. 28 . . . 193
2 Thessalonians iii. 16 . . . igi
1 Timothy iv. 7  172
Tobit iv. 15  59
Zechariah viii. 19  120

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