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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

GIFT OF
The Reverend Frank R. Lackey

THE SHORT COURSE SERIES

THE EMOTIONS OF JESUS

Volumes Already Published
A Cry for Justice: A Study in Amos.
By Prof. John E. McFadyen, D.D.
The Beatitudes. By Rev. Robert H. Fisher, D.D.
The Lenten Psalms.
By the Editor.
The Psalm of Psalms.
By Prof. James Stalker, D.D.
The Song and the Soil.
By Prof. W. G. Jordan, D.D.
The Higher Powers of the Soul.
By Rev. George M'Hardv, D.D.
Jehovah-Jesus. By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, D.D.
The Sevenfold I Am
By Rev. Thomas Maejoribanks, B.D.
The Man Among the Myrtles.
By the Editor.
The Story of Joseph.
By Rev. Adam C. Welch, B.D., Th.D.
The Divine Drama of Job.
By Rev. Charles F. Aked, D.D.
A Mirror of the Soul: Studies in the Psalter.
By Rev. Canon Vaughan, M.A.
In the Upper Room.
By Rev. D. J. Burrill, D.D., LL.D.
The Son of Man.
By Andrew C. Zenos, D.D., LL.D.
Ths Joy of Finding.
By Rev. Alfred E. Garvie.
The Prayers of St. Paul.
By Rev. W. H. Griffith Thomas, D.D.
The Emotions of Jesus.
By Prof. Robert Law, D.D.

Price 60 cents net per Volume

Xlbe Sbort Course Series
EDITED BY
Rev. JOHN ADAMS, B.D.

THE EMOTIONS OF
JESUS BY
Professor ROBERT LAW, D.D.
TORONTO

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
19*5

L.4-13

TO
MY MOTHER

PREFACE

Nothing needs to be said by way of preface
to this latest addition to the " Short Course
Series," except that it does not aim at being
a treatise on the emotional life of Jesus,
and that even the field indicated by its title
is covered only in part. Other attractive and
fruitful topics — such as our Lord's delight
in nature, the emotions arising out of His
more intimate personal relations, His emo
tion in the presence of death, His shame,
and the rich emotional content of the
Passion -narrative — readily suggest them
selves, but have had to be altogether
omitted, or else are touched upon in a
merely incidental way. Whether it may be
possible to me at some future time to
remedy this, I know not. Meantime, this
v

Preface
short series of studies is published with the
hope that it will be welcome to members of
my former congregations and to my many
friends, both old and new, as a memento of
one who always thinks of them with affection
and gratitude, as well as acceptable and profit
able to a wider circle of readers.
ROBERT LAW.
Toronto,
December 1914.

CONTENTS

I.

THE JOY OF JESUS .

PAGB I

II.

THE GENIALITY OF JESUS

• 23

III.

THE COMPASSION OF JESUS
(FOR THE SUFFERING)

• 43

IV.

THE COMPASSION OF JESUS
(FOR THE SINFUL)

• 65

V.

THE ANGER OF JESUS

• 87

VI.

THE WONDER OF JESUS .

. 107

VII.

STRAITENED ! .

• I31

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• I51

INDEX ....

• *55

"Jesus is God lived by man." — Godet.
"The face of Jesus is like all men's faces.''
Russian Proverb.
" We find in Emotion a function so highly beneficial, so
indispensable for full vitality, that we confidently include in
our ideal of human character a permanent and immeasurable
richness of emotional sensibility." — Sully.

THE JOY OF JESUS

"Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.
1 met a preacher there I knew, and said :
' 111 and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene ? '
¦ Bravely,' said he, ' for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.*
O human soull As long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil, thou labourest through the night,
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home."
Matthew Arnold.

THE JOY OF JESUS
" These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy
might remain in you, and that your joy might be full."
— St. John xv. ii.
Jesus is the Man of Sorrows ; the title is
for ever His, like His Crown of Thorns.
It expresses Him truly as the One who^has
borne the whole immense burden of sinning,
suffering humanity. But it does not fully,
nor even fundamentally, express Him.
Instinctively we would shrink from describ
ing Jesus as an unhappy person, as one
who at any moment, or in any circumstance,
existed miserably. Instinctively we feel that
the ground-tone of His life, latent in its
harshest discords, is joy. And as we think
of what His mission was, of what He pur
posed and claimed to effect, we see that it
3

The Emotions of Jesus
could not be otherwise. No pessimist could
be a saviour. "Such as we have give we
unto thee." Unhappiness can never beget
happiness, nor sickness health. Only he
can " strengthen the wavering line," in
whom joy is a force infectious and con
quering, ringing in his voice, gleaming in
his eyes. So was it that Jesus came. He
came with glad tidings, came as the Divine
Physician into the world's vast hospital.
His words are beatitudes. He lifts up His
hands in benediction. The blessings of the
Divine Kingdom He was bringing to men
He could compare to nothing so much as to
the festive joys of marriage (St. Mark ii. 19).
Himself and His disciples were like a wed
ding-party. He was the bridegroom whose
joy overflows into the hearts of his friends,
and turns fasting into , feasting. Even at
the last, on the verge of Gethsemane and
in sight of Calvary, He speaks not of His
sorrows, but still of His joy. He is the
Lord of joy, and His crowning desire for His
servants is that they may enter into the joy
of their Lord and have it fulfilled in them.

The Joy of Jesus
Yet Jesus is the Man of Sorrows ; and it
is because He is the Man of Sorrows that
His joy is so precious a legacy, so strong an
anchor to our souls. He is no " sky-blue "
optimist. This Man of Joy has dwelt in
the heart of blackest night. He has seen
hell, here on earth, in men's hearts, flaming
in their eyes, triumphing in their deeds.
Yet His joy is unconquered. No one has
ever sounded the depths of reality, has ever
penetrated to the ultimate core of life, as
Jesus did ; and what He finds there is not
an abyss of evil, but an infinite of good.
I desire then to speak of the joy of Jesus —
of His joy rather than of His joys. There
are joys which are transfigured sorrows, like
the rainbow, which shines in the very sub
stance of the lowering cloud. But the rain
bow is the child of the sun. And I want to
speak of that unfailing cause of joy which
for Jesus transcended all causes of sorrow,
which made the sunshine of His life, and
which alone can make the sunshine of
ours.

The Emotions of Jesus
i. The Joy of Trust.
Now all deep, lasting joy must be rooted
in faith, in our conviction regarding reality
— the eternal reality that lies within and
beyond the outward show that passes before
our eyes moment by moment. What does
life mean ? What lies at the heart of it ?
Stevenson used to say in his half-humorous
way that he had a tremendous belief in
the "ultimate decency of things." And a
biographer, speaking of the gaiety of John
Wesley, says that it was such as could be
seen only in one " who felt his religion to
rest upon the whole nature of things, and
who was at rest in his religion." And of
this joyous faith, this firm confidence in an
ultimate Tightness and goodness in the whole
nature of things, Jesus Christ is for ever the
Author and Perfecter. In better words,
He had absolute, invincible faith in God ;
and this was the root of His joy. " This is
life eternal," "He said, " to know Thee, the
only true God." We seldom realize, and
never adequately, what a stupendous thing
6

The Joy of Jesus
it is just to believe in God, in a God who
is really God, whose presence, thought, and
power permeate all existence, whose eternal
purpose disposes all events, overrules all
wills, shapes all destinies. Such belief, if
sincere and vital, must colour all life. God
must be its strength and joy, or its terror and
despair. And Jesus Christ believed in such
a God as no other has believed. To no other
has God been a reality at once so universal
and so immediately near. He believed in
God, not occasionally as we do, but all the
time ; not in the last resort, but as the first
and last and supreme factor in every situa
tion ; not in the hours of crisis alone, on the
mountain-top, but on the homely plain, in
the daily, hourly process of events. God
was the light in which He saw, the atmo
sphere He breathed.
And to Jesus this was joy, perfect and
ineffable ; because God was to Him not only
the Supreme Potentate — the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, Omnipresent ; He was all this,
but He was the Father, who is Love and has
bound Himself to us in our weakness, our
7

The Emotions of Jesus
ignorance, and even in our sinfulness, by ties
that cannot be broken ; who, because He is
what He is, must care, must provide, must
pardon, guide, deliver from evil, and carry
us safely to the goal of eternal life. To
conceive the joy of Jesus, we should have to
know the Father as Jesus knew Him, to feel
the emotion with which He lifted up His eyes
to heaven and said "Father," to have His
entrancing vision of the Father's infinite
goodness, His adoring vision of His glory,
His glowing trust in His work of redeeming
love, that responsiveness to all the Father is
and wills of which all we can say is that it is
to God what perfect sonship is to perfect
fatherhood. That joy is reflected in the
Gospels exactly as it must have been ordi
narily present in His life. He does not
pause in His work to speak of His joy.
It does not so much appear in bursts of
sudden splendour as it is the light that
shines in the face of common day and
colours all the landscape. Yet what it must
have been to hear Jesus say, " Have faith
in God," to see His face glow with an inner

The Joy of Jesus
joy, and to hear the ring of gladness in His
voice, when He spoke of doing the Father's
will and finishing His work ! Joy in the
absolute, all-embracing goodness, wisdom,
and sovereign power of the Father, joy in
imparting this joy to others — this was the
joy of Jesus.
And it cannot be gainsaid that such trust
in God is the only basis for joy that can
sustain the burden of rational, thinking men.
We are dependent beings. Our life is brief,
and against the force of circumstances com
paratively powerless — in the end wholly so.
Only this pin-point of a present on which
we stand is ours. To-morrow we cannot
see ; we know only that every to-morrow
is a step nearer to the end of all things of
which we seem to be a part. There is a
Power, conceive it as we may, which holds
us in the" hollow of its hand, by which We
are carried along "like flakes of foam upon
a swollen river." Can we trust that Power,
or can we not ? Get to the centre of things,
and there is no question to ask and to
answer, if we can, but this — Can we trus^t,
9

The Emotions of Jesus
joyfully trust, that Power ? And when men
to-day urge strong and plausible reasons why
we cannot, and tell us that the world of facts
is soulless and conscienceless, a world of blind,
relentless forces bearing no trace of Divine
origin or purpose ; and when we can see for
ourselves so much that seems to bear this
out, when we face the inexplicable inequalities
of life, the long misery and degradation of
the world, the gaping wounds of nature and
humanity, let us remember that Jesus Christ
saw all we see, and more ; that for none has
this world ever worn so godless a look as for
Him who died by the unparalleled iniquity
of the Cross, with the hideous taunt in His
ears, " He trusted in God that He would de
liver Him." He knew the absolute worst,
and for a moment even He was almost over
whelmed. The world, with all its. mustered
forces of evil, was on one side ; the solitary
faith of the crucified Man on the other ;
but in that decisive conflict Faith won the
day. It was decisive. Though the fight goes
on still and will never cease while the world
stands, the battle has been won. Jesus
io

The Joy of Jesus
calls men, and not in vain, to repeat His
victory. To this He calls not alone by His example,
but by the revelation of God which He has
brought, or, to speak more truly, which He
is. You and I are not Jesus Christ. There
is a sense in which we cannot have His
faith, His vision of God. His original,
direct, sure gaze into the heart of the Divine
Fatherhood. But He not only tells us what
He has seen there, — nay, He could not do
that ; the vision was not given in words and
cannot be communicated in words, — He
holds Himself up as the living mirror in
which we too may gaze upon it. " He that
hath seen Me hath seen the Father." The
character of Jesus is the character of Almighty
God, the holiness of Jesus the holiness of
God, the wrath of Jesus the wrath of God,
the compaasion of Jesus the compassion of
God, the Cross of Jesus the revelation of
the sorrow and self-sacrificing love with which
the sin of man fills the heart of the Eternal.
This is the Christian faith. And is it
not a joyous faith ? Is it not joy deeper
ii

The Emotions of Jesus
than all sorrow to know that He who holds
the helm of my life, who holds the helm of
the great universe, is One whose character
is the character of Jesus ? This includes
everything. Such a God claims from us
absolute trust. We cannot trust Him at
one point and not trust Him at every other
point. We cannot trust Him for ourselves
and not for every other being ; for to-morrow
and not for all eternity. Jesus is the Image
of the Invisible God, the Son of His Love.
God is what Jesus is. That excludes all fear
that ultimate victory can anywhere rest with
evil, forbids all acquiescence in imperfection,
assures us that every purpose of righteous
ness and love shall reach its goal. If this faith
is ours, our religion is a religion that rests
upon the whole nature of things, one in
which we can rest ; and it ought to fill our
lives with joy, much more than it does.
Though clouds and darkness may trouble
the circumference of life, at the centre is that
Eternal Light the radiance of which beheld
is joy and strength.

12

The Joy of Jesus
2. The Joy of Obedience.
In bringing to men a new conception of
God, Jesus revealed also a new obedience,
new not in its perfection only, but a new
type, free, reasonable, spiritual, springing
from community of spirit and purpose,
responding to the will of God as a son's to
a father's ; and therefore joyful.
Obedience is not in itself a joy. It is not
to the drudge, to the slave under the task
master's whip. It was not in the hard,
legalized Judaism of our Lord's time. The
Pharisees were scrupulous in their obedi
ence ; it might even be said that their delight
was in the Law of the Lord. But to them
the Law did not represent a really moral
ideal to be embraced with all one's heart and
soul and strength ; it was not the expression
of the character and will of God as intrinsi
cally loving and righteous. God was very
much a supreme dictator issuing arbitrary
decrees to test the obedience of His subjects ;
His Law a statutory requirement, the chief
use of which was to enable men to pile up
13

The Emotions of Jesus
merit in the eyes of the Divine Potentate.
One of the deep joys of Jesus was to be
Himself free, and to emancipate others, from
this merely external, mechanical, servile
relation to the Will of God. He toiled at
the Father's work as no Pharisee of the
Pharisees ever did. But the idea of merit
has no place in the spirit of Jesus ; it be
longs to a quite other plane. He obeys be
cause He loves the things the Father loves,
and hates those the Father hates, and wills
all the Father wills, as most holy, wise, and
good ; and unites Himself in spirit and
truth with the Father's purpose. This,
Jesus Himself declares, was His joy. Daily,
hourly, to respond to every intimation of the
Father's will, to take up and finish another
portion of the Father's work, to make Himself
the channel of the Father's pitying, patient,
mighty love to men — this was in life and
death His ruling passion, His " meat " that
so satisfied and regaled His whole nature as
to make Him forget weariness, hunger, and
thirst. For this He went to the wilderness, to
the crowded city, to the cross and the grave.

The Joy of Jesus
It is true that this is a joy which is won
only through the birth-pangs of pain. There
must be a saying " no " to self, that we may
say " yes " to God. And it was so for our
Lord Himself. He was tempted in all
points like as we are — tempted, really
tempted, to take the short way and the easy
way rather than God's long and toilsome
way. Once at least, as we read, there
was a "but" between His will and the
Father's ; once it was not " Thy will and
Mine," it was " Not My will, but Thine be
done." And that "but" was crimsoned
with the blood of Christ's soul. It marks
the uttermost triumph over self, the point
beyond which self-surrender absolutely can
not go — only so could He exhaust the possi
bilities of obedience, and His victory become
potential victory for every man. Yet even
here, not to mark the prevalence of joy would
be to misconceive entirely the spirit of Jesus.
Could we have heard that "Thy will be
done," we should have heard no groan of
reluctant submission, no sob of acquiescence
wrung from an exhausted will ; no, nor any
r5

The Emotions of Jesus
robustious shout of triumph. It was the
low yet glad and loving "yes" which in
that last struggle Jesus whispered into the
Father's ear, not the nay-saying but the final
yea-saying of life, its attainment to the
supreme joy in self- surrender to the Divine
purpose of life through death.
All the masters of the spiritual life declare
with one consent that only in such union
with the Will of God is the perfect joy.
My revered teacher, Principal Cairns, from
his death-bed sent the message to his
students : " Tell them that the chief thing is
to forget self utterly in the service of .the
great cause." The secret of life, says another,
is "freedom from pride, prejudice, and self;
absolute simplicity of truth ; resignation to
the order of the world and to the Divine
Will, and not resignation only, but active
co-operation with them, according to our
means and strength, in bringing good out of
evil and truth out of falsehood. He whose
mind is absorbed in these thoughts has
already found life eternal. He may be a
cripple or blind or deaf. His home may be
1 6

The Joy of Jesus
a straw-built hovel ; but he has learned to
see and hear with another sense, and is
already living in the house not made with
hands." Herein lies the true joy of life.
Without this a man may be various things.
He may be a drudge, a hewer of wood and
drawer of water, an animated tool to be
thrown on the scrap-heap when it is broken
or blunted. He may be an egotist, who
sets himself on a pedestal and wonders why
men do not see his greatness : " a selfish,
feverish little clod of ailments and grievances,
complaining that the world does not devote
itself to making him happy." But the
only way to joy is to rise above self; and
the only real way to rise above self is by
getting to God, uniting ourselves to the
Infinite Good, for which we are made. This
is the joy of Jesus ; and it is a joy — the one
joy — we may all possess. It is a joy which
may shine for us in the humblest details ' of
daily duty. You can unite yourself with the
Infinite, live the Eternal Life, by doing the
most transient task in the spirit of Christ. At
one time I knew an old labourer, a member
17

The Emotions of Jesus
of my congregation, whose task, year in year
out, was to trundle a wheelbarrow. After
his death, some of his fellow-workmen told
that when at his work he had a habit of talk
ing to himself ; and when they listened they
would sometimes hear this — " The chief end
of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy him
for ever." Was it not sublime ? — a man
thinking of the chief end of man and the glory
of God between the shafts of a wheelbarrow.
He found the Infinite, found Life Eternal, in
his poor daily employment. So may you.
Yet none of us is limited to "the trivial
round, the common task." We have all a
larger part to take in the building up of the
Kingdom of God. We are solicited and
called in many directions to lay our lives
alongside of God's great work in this world,
in the work of the Church, in its missionary
enterprises at home and abroad, in all that
makes for social, civic, political, and industrial
progress. We have to create a community
without slums for the poor and unnecessary
perils for the weak, without conditions that
make virtue gratuitously difficult, vice easy
18

The Joy of Jesus
and certain ; a community of truth and holi
ness and love, a city of God. We have to
labour on to bring in the " Christ that is to
be." And this is joy — the service of duty in
the spirit of love, the service of God and of
man in the spirit of Jesus. This is life, this
alone satisfies. And of this we may have as
much as we please ; it is the only thing of
which we may have as much as we please. Be
sure that if we are not getting what we want
out of life, it is because we do not want the
best. The best is unlimited. " These words
have I spoken unto you, that My joy may be
in you, and that your joy may be filled full."

3. The Joy of Hope.
The third and completing element in the
joy of Jesus was that of Hope. As to Jesus
God was that present reality which embraces
and transcends all else, and the will of God
the Infinite Good, so the one glorious vision
the future held for Him was the Kingdom of
God. Already He beheld Satan hurled from
his throne. God would arise ; righteousness,
19

The Emotions of Jesus
peace, and joy would triumph. He foresaw
all difficulties, discounted all disappointments ;
but, despite all obstacles, God's fatherly rule
would find its way into men's hearts. Not
even in the darkest hour of His and the
world's history, when injustice, hypocrisy,
and hate were at the height of their power,
did He doubt that " clouds would break," or
fear that though " right were worsted, wrong
would triumph." He Himself was the
seed of the Kingdom, that must fall into the
ground and die. His life was the price of
victory, the ransom for many. For this joy
set before Him, He endured the Cross.
And this joy of hope should fill our lives
too. We cannot hope too greatly if our
hope is based upon God, upon God's character
and purpose. Nothing can be too good to
be true ; the only possibility is that what we
think good, and very good, may not be good
enough for God. We cannot take too bright
a view of the future, our own future, our
country's future, the Church's and the world's
future, if in the centre of that view we set
Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and enthroned.
20

The Joy of Jesus
Such was the joy of our Master. It may
be ours in ever-growing measure ; and it will,
if we have but the courage to venture our
selves upon His God and our God, to sur
render ourselves loyally to live for God's
ends, and still to trust in Him when we can
not see, and hope in Him when all seems
doubtful. Lift up your hearts. Go into
the New Year 1 without fear. Go not seeking
joy, but with a fresh resolve to live for the
highest ; and the joy of Jesus will be more
and more fulfilled in you. For joy is given
never to them that seek joy, but always to
them that seek first the Kingdom of God.
1 This discourse was delivered on the first Sunday of
the year.

21

II
THE GENIALITY OF JESUS

"Wherefore did I contrive for thee that ear
Hungry for music, and direct thine eye
To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument,
Unless I meant thee to beseech me play ? "
Browning.

II
THE GENIALITY OF JESUS
" John came neither eating nor drinking . . . The Son
of Man came eating and drinking." — St. Matt. xi. 18,
19.
We have seen what was the basal joy of
Jesus. The being, the character, the uni
versal presence, activity, and sovereignty of
the Father in heaven — these were the
everlasting arms underneath all existence,
the widest, but also the most immediate
environment of His own life and of all life ;
and within this infinite joy all joys and
sorrows that arise from the lesser environ
ments were ensphered. And, to follow the
logical order, we ought to consider in the
first place the emotions awakened in Jesus
by the widest and most external of these,
Nature. But leaving this subject for
25

The Emotions of Jesus
another occasion, let us endeavour to study
the emotions excited by His human environ
ment ; and first by those things in it that are
naturally gladsome.
It so happens that the contrast be
tween Him and John the Baptist regarding
this very matter was one of the things that
arrested the attention of their contemporaries.
John impressed the popular imagination by
his rigid asceticism. His abode, his food
and raiment were those of the desert, telling
of one by whom the world and its delights, and
all the joys of common life, had been for
sworn. But Jesus, they said, came " eating
and drinking." He was no weird prophet
coming forth from the wilderness in hermit's
garb, but a homely man, affable, approach
able, sociable in His manner of life, kindly
with His kind. He had all John's scorch
ing indignation against the evils of society
and the hypocrisies of conventional religion,
but He had what John had not, geniality.
There is a type of piety in which we do not
expect to find this ; as, for example, St.
Teresa naively discloses when she writes of
26

The Geniality of Jesus
Peter of Alcantara,1 a saint and ecclesiastic
famous in her day, that "with all his sanctity
he was kind." She had not expected to find
so much genial humanity in so eminently
pious a person. And plainly it would have
been equally unexpected in John the
Baptist ; and to those who took their idea
of religious intensity from John it was a
surprise to find it in Jesus. He comes
eating and drinking, looking with lively
unaffected sympathy upon the pursuits and
joys of common life, and Himself partici
pating in them so far as His unique calling
allowed. We may say, indeed, that among
the great religious teachers and leaders a
marked feature in the uniqueness of Jesus
is His geniality. He wept with them that
wept ; no less did He rejoice with them that
rejoiced.
i. The Gospel Portrait.
Where upon the whole can be found a
fairer, more genial view of our natural
1 I owe the reference to (I think) one of Professor
Glover's writings. 27

The Emotions of Jesus
human life than in the Gospels ? Take
Christ's pictures of family life. How lofty
is His valuation of everyday human father
hood, which, imperfect as it is, seeks for its
children the best it knows, and gives the
best it can ! How He finds His whole
Gospel in that single figure — the father
whose joy at the recovery of his ungrateful,
self-willed boy sweeps utterly away, like an
obliterating flood, all resentful feelings and
painful memories ! How He bids men look
first into their own hearts, that they may
find God !
And how sympathetic Jesus is with the
joys of wedded love ! It is indeed start
ling to find that the scene on which He
first "manifested forth His glory" was a
rustic wedding ; and that His first miracle
was wrought to remedy no grave disaster,
healed no broken heart nor met any tragic
extremity at all, but was an act of simple
kindness, done merely to secure that the
humble marriage-feast of two villagers should
go brightly on with no shadow of poverty or
embarrassment falling upon it.
28

The Geniality of Jesus
Think of the joy of Jesus in children —
how He watched the little folk at their play
(you cannot imagine John the Baptist doing
that) in the open spaces of the market-place,
and how He enjoyed the humours of it, with
gentle smile marking the changing moods,
the very human perversities and little fits of
sulks, with which they conducted the affairs
of their mimic world, as real to them as the
anxious buying and selling of their elders.
Or look at that scene, where Jesus lifted the
child upon His knees, and fondling it in
His arms, sat with it thus in the midst of
twelve pretentious self-important men who
had been wrangling as to which of them should
be greatest in the kingdom of their dreams.
Or that other, where a band of fathers and
mothers bring their babes to Him for His
blessing, and the disciples, as if their
Master were some stiff, austere, pompous
Rabbi, bid them and their brats begone, and,
before they can turn away, His voice is raised
in mingled displeasure and tenderness to
plead the cause of the little ones and claim
them as His own. How the sunshine of
29

The Emotions of Jesus
Christ's tender, large-hearted humanity falls
upon this lovely scene ! How love beams
and smiles upon the visage of the Son of
Man !
Then, think of the delight of Jesus in
social intercourse. It was this that excited
the comment of contemporaries ; and it is
still one of the surprises of the Gospels to
count how often in the very brief course of
His recorded ministry we read of His
presence at some kind of festivity, or taking
part in the friendly intercourse of a social
meal. And no feast was ever graced by His
presence but the conversation was all the
brighter and the enjoyment all the heartier
for it. In His eyes this world of human
society was no unhallowed domain ; His
vision of God blended sweetly and naturally
with social fellowship and homely joys.
Everywhere Jesus appears in the Gospels
as a close and keenly interested observer of
the human scene. Nothing seemed to
escape His eyes. The labourers standing
around in the market-place waiting for a job,
the virgins of the wedding party waiting for
3°

The Geniality of Jesus
the bridegroom, the pertinacious litigant
and the conscienceless judge, the shepherd
sending for his neighbour to celebrate with
him the recovery of his sheep that was lost,
the scapegrace in the far country — think of
the multitude of such pictures in the Gospels,
pictures that will stand when all the philo
sophies of the world are dust. And Jesus is
not merely an interested, or even a kindly
and sympathetic spectator of life's busy and
various scene. He takes His place in it,
and takes His place in it not with an air of
condescending superiority or patient toler
ance, but with perfect spontaneity and
naturalness ; not as one who is brought
into accidental contact with it, like a visitor
from another world, but as one moving in
his proper sphere.

2. Its Meaning for Us.
What does this geniality of Jesus mean
for us ? What does it teach us ? First, it
rules out asceticism as a Christian ideal. It
is impossible to say with certainty on what
31

The Emotions of Jesus
ground the asceticism of John the Baptist
rested ; but we do know why Jesus could not
be an ascetic. The ascetic ideal may have
its origin in despair of the world, as it had
in the apocalypticism which was current
in our Lord's time. This world was a mere
devil's world, an " evil age " which could not
be mended, but must be ended to make
way for the Kingdom of Heaven. But this
pessimistic view was far from being that of
Jesus. To Him this world was an imperfect
world, on which the powers of evil had a
terrible grasp, of which the Evil One might
even be said to be the ruler ; yet not so that
it was not throughout God's world, with God's
hand everywhere upon it,1 God's presence
everywhere in it. Jesus could not be an
ascetic from despair of the world. Sometimes,
again, asceticism is based on despair of man.
Man is so weak and evil that the world
1 However far we may go in asserting fundamental
points of agreement between our Lord's outlook on life
and that of Apocalyptic, we must not fail to observe the
equally fundamental points of difference ; and this is one
of them.
32

The Geniality of Jesus
becomes to him merely an apparatus of
temptations with which he is utterly unable
to cope. But while no one has spoken so
sternly as Jesus of the necessity that may be
laid upon us to be content with less than
the full natural enjoyment of the world, and
for the sake of ultimate salvation accept a life
that is temporarily curtailed and maimed, He
never holds this up as the ideal. Neither in
the life nor the teaching of Jesus is there a
trace of the ascetic principle that the physical
is the necessary, lifelong foe of the spiritual.
The world is God's world ; and men are
God's children for whom this world is made.
Jesus, because He was the Perfect Man,
the Son of God, could not be an ascetic.
Nor could He hold up an ascetic ideal to
others ; for He came to lift up men to His
own plane, to give them that loving con
sciousness of God which makes all things
sacred, that purity to which all things are
pure, that potency of spiritual life which
converts all things to its own uses.
Further, the geniality of Jesus rules out
all cynicism. It signifies that Jesus _saw in
33

The Emotions of Jesus
the natural life of human society nothing
merely trivial and transient, not a Vanity
Fair, a moving picture-show, a tragi-comedy
of alternate laughter and tears. Many spec
tators have seen nothing more ; but Jesus
saw deeper. He saw in all this changing
panorama, this procession of work and play,
rejoicing and sorrowing, that passes hour by
hour across the stage, something great, some
thing* that in its coming and passing away
leaves eternal traces on men's souls. Yes,
and something that not only means intensely,
but means well. He "came eating and drink
ing," enjoying this human life in all its
relationships, because in its nature and
purpose it is good.
What then, let us ask, makes this natural
life so really great and good that it was
worthy even of Christ's living it, and taking
a genial delight in it ? Let us try to get to
the bottom of the matter. Why is it we do
not exist as isolated units ? Why is our life
set in a social framework, so that we have to
work and play, eat and drink, sorrow and
rejoice, together ? What is the meaning,
34

The Geniality of Jesus
God's meaning, in all that complexity of
physical and social relationship which forms
the organism of our life here on earth ? It
means just this : that God is Love, and
that we are God's children made in His
Image, and that only in this social state of
existence can we live the Divine life of love.
That is the meaning of it : our human world,
with all its endless ramifications, has only this
one great Divine purpose, the increase, the
development, and education of love. There
never was a more egregious error than that
which identifies the " religious " life with a
state of solitary devotion. Only think, if we
lived like Robinson Crusoe on his island,
there would be no place for justice, integrity,
or honour, none for trust, loyalty, generosity,
patience, forgiveness, self-sacrifice. Almost
all the qualities and dispositions that make
the moral image of God in man would remain
dead or dormant, like seeds frozen in ice or
buried in desert sands. Yes, our human
world is made for the increase of love. You
may say that it has very often lent itself to
the increase of selfishness, antagonism, and
35

The Emotions of Jesus
hate. That is true, just as one's arterial
system may circulate bad blood. But it is
made for the circulation of good blood ; and
even so all the relationships by which we are
made members one of another — the ties ot
kindred, th^ duties of citizenship, the work
of the world, aye and its play too, its more
superficial associations — are the natural
channels, the veins and arteries through which
the Divine life must flow and circulate among
men on earth.
And observe that this is exactly how Jesus
saw human life. Wherever He looked on
it, whether it was at the labourers in the
vineyard, or the servants with their talents,
or the creditor and his debtors, or the prodigal
and his father, He found a parable of the
Divine. And the parables of Jesus are
parables not of ingenious fancy but of insight.
He saw the Divine analogy there, because, it
is there, because man is the image of God,
and the natural human life with all its busy
activity arhori*g transient things is meant to
be filled with the Divine, all meant for the
growth and discipline of love, and of all the
3*

The Geniality of Jesus
graces of character that spring from love as
their root.
As we grasp this truth, we see in the next
place that, as St. Paul says, there is nothing
unclean of itself. There is really no " devil's
ground." The earth is the Lord's. Not a
single thing in it is the devil's, not a power
or appetite of body or mind, no kind of
work, no form of healthful pastime. But
I am wrong : there is " devil's ground."
Wherever love, the Spirit of God, is not,
wherever instead of it there is self-seeking,
self-indulgence, pride, jealousy or hypocrisy,
greed, overreaching, impurity, irreverence,
there is "devil's ground." A meeting of
Presbytery where any of these are is for the
moment devil's ground ; a base-ball match
without them were angels' ground.
It is strange how in this matter people
like to deceive and hoodwink themselves,
how even religious people like to palm off
deception and humbug upon themselves. It
is a saddening thing to any thoughtfid man
to see how in every age Christian morality
tends to become not a thing of spirit and of
37 '

, The Emotions of Jesus
truth, but of conventions and shibboleths.
Certain places and companies, certain forms
of amusement, are laid under taboo by godly
people, and originally, perhaps, with good
reason — they are associated with so much that
is evil. But then the avoidance of these
comes to be made a badge of religion and
Christian morality. They come to represent
the deadly sins ; and a man may neglect the
weightier matters, he may have a proud,
rancorous heart, may be unjust, censorious,
unkind^ a tale-bearer and backbiter, slippery
in business, untrustworthy in private, or
public life, yet if he can pronounce the
shibboleth aright, he takes himself, and other
like-minded persons take him, for a godly
man. How is it that there is in human
nature this ineradicable tendency to Pharisa
ism, to put outward things for inward things,
unreal things for real, to live by a morality
of badges and labels ? Because, I suppose,
it is the easiest and cheapest kind of morality
there is. Unfortunately, it is also the most
worthless. It is alien to the mind of Christ.
He set it entirely aside. He rejected all the
38

The Geniality of Jesus
shibboleths of the good, strict people of His
age. He offended their prejudices right and
left. He came eating and drinking, with
publicans and sinners one day, with a Pharisee
the next. He labelled nothing as bad, nothing
as good ; but told men that all the goodness
or badness they found in outward things
came from themselves. It was not that
which goes into a man, but what comes out
of him, from his evil heart, that defiles. He
told men to trust in God and seek first His
Kingdom and righteousness, to love God and
their neighbour everywhere and always, and
all would be well with them. He tells us
the same thing to-day.
3. The Need of Discrimination.
But on the other side also, there is the
constant danger of falsehood masquerading
under the guise of truth. People may turn
from a narrower to what they think the
broader view of the Christian life under a
profound mistake.1 They certainly do so
1 V. Stopford Brooke's Fight of Faith, p. 28.
39

The Emotions of Jesus
when they think that Christ is an easier
master to serve than John the Baptist. It
is no less possible to make mere shibboleths
of the assertions of Christian freedom than
of the negations of narrowness. When men
say in their hearts — I need deny myself
nothing and yet be a good Christian, for
Christ came eating and drinking ; I may go
anywhere I please, for every place is holy
ground ; I may live in and for my business,
and be absorbed in money-making all the
time, yet make it all "holiness unto the
Lord " ; I may devote my life to pleasure
and spend all my spare time in the round of
amusements and entertainments, for there is
nothing wrong in them, and God wishes me
to enjoy myself- — such a travesty of the
geniality of Jesus is only a ghastlier self-
deception than the other. Every place is
holy, yes, if we take a holy spirit to it ; but
do we ? All business is holy, if we do it in
faithfulness to God and love to our fellow-
men ; but, then, do we ? And pleasure too
is holy, if it does not degenerate into self-
indulgence, but is used for the holy purpose
40

The Geniality of Jesus
of refreshing body or mind for the serious
duties of life ; but, then, is it so used ? Who
cannot see that the geniality of Jesus is a far
more exacting ideal than the austerity of John ?
Far easier to eat locusts and wild honey like
John than to eat and drink with Jesus Christ.
What is it to have the geniality of Jesus ?
It is to carry on our worldly business, and
to give our time and our energies heartily to
its duties, but to do them in love, as the
work God has appointed us for the service
of our generation. It is to enjoy thankfully
all that God gives us to enjoy, but to enjoy
lovingly and never to let our enjoyment be
purchased at the cost, direct or indirect, of
pain or harm to others ; never to forget that
to stain enjoyment with self-indulgence, idle
ness, or impurity, is to make it devilish and
not divine. It is, above all and in short, to
have so much love in us, so much of Christ,
that we shall be freed from all external and
mechanical demands to give up this or that
for our own good or the good of others,
because such surrender is the very impulse
of love. To this we may not immediately
41

The Emotions of Jesus
attain ; to this we need to be helped by the
way of self-restriction and self-discipline.
And in truth we dare not face Christ's ideal
of life at all — nothing else than the austerity
of John the Baptist would offer us any hope
— were it not that Christ is Christ, our
Strength and our Redeemer, who when He
sets the ideal before us gives also the inward
power it demands, who quickens our nature
at its spiritual centre and creates in us a clean
heart. Let us seek, then, to be so deeply
Christian that we shall be Christian in all
things ; and to be so Christian in all things
that we shall be more fully Christian at the
deep heart of life. Let us seek to make all
our relationships and associations of earth, in
the home, in business, in the circle of friend
ship and social intercourse, in work and
pastime, in Church and State, the channels of
love ; and we shall be of those for whom
Christ's prayer prevails : not that they may
be taken out of the world, but that they
may be kept from the evil, and not only
kept from the evil, but be a leaven leavening
the world for the Kingdom of God.
42

Ill

THE COMPASSION OF JESUS
(FOR THE SUFFERING)

"Christianity raised the feeling of humanity from being
a feeble restraining power to be an inspiring passion. The
Christian moral reformation may indeed be summed up in this
— humanity changed from a restraint to a motive. " Ecce Homo.

Ill
THE COMPASSION OF JESUS
(FOR THE SUFFERING)
"Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses."
— St. Matt. viii. 17.
If asked to say what most characterizes the
moral development of civilized man since
the Christian era, we should answer without
hesitation that it is the growth of compassion,
of that sympathetic sensibility by which we
identify ourselves with other selves, feel
ourselves into other lives, and make their
situation and interests, their well-being or
ill-being, our own. Despite all that at the
present moment seems to give the lie to
such a statement, it is true that with ever-
widening range the power of fellow-feeling is
drawing mankind into one great brotherhood
— the rich and the poor, the strong and the
45

The Emotions of Jesus
weak, the wronged and the wrong-doer. By it
hostile tribes, classes, and nations are gradu
ally won from enmity to friendliness. Every
hospital, asylum, and philanthropic institu
tion, every effort by Church and State to
protect the helpless, enlighten the ignorant,
and raise the fallen is a tribute to the power
of compassion. And, however marvellous
it be, it is simple fact of history that this
enthusiasm of compassion has had its origin
mainly in the ministry of Jesus Christ, that
the life lived by the Man of Galilee among
the obscure folk of that obscure province
was the handful of leaven whose contagion
has done so much, and will yet do vastly
more, to transform the world.
To think of Jesus is to think of compas
sion. In the Gospels no emotion is so often
ascribed to Him, no other is so vividly ex
pressed in His words and deeds. One of
His disciples, a few weeks after His death,
portrayed His Master in a single matchless
phrase, "He went about doing good."
This alone was His occupation ; this He
made His sole business. But we need the
46

The Compassion of Jesus
fuller picture of the Gospels to reveal the
emotion which was inseparably intertwined
with action. A cold-hearted person may be
unselfish and may in his dry, unemotional
way do a great deal of good ; but he finds
comparatively little joy in it, and therefore
gives comparatively little joy by it. It is
fellow-feeling that makes it blessed to give
and blessed to receive. And in Jesus the
" doing good " was always accompanied by
the irrepressible tokens of a compassion which
doubled its value. " Jesus, thou art all com
passion " : this is what men felt regarding
Him in the days of His flesh ; it was this
that caused Him to be sought out by the
broken-hearted and heavy-laden, that with
mysterious, magnetic power drew to Him,
as it draws to Him still, the children of need.
I. Its Leading Features.
Let us think first of the range, the
universality, of Christ's compassion. In His
earthly life this had its necessary limitations.
Jesus was "God lived by man." His
47

The Emotions of Jesus
emotions were real human emotions, and as
such subject to the laws of human nature.
For example, we are always most keenly
touched with fellow-feeling for those to whom
we are bound by some special affinity or
affection. Human compassion is never
impartial. The misfortune, even the slight
misfortune, of a dear friend stirs us much
more powerfully than the greater calamity of
one with whom we have no special tie. So
it was with Jesus. Twice only is it recorded
that He actually wept : once at the grave of
Lazarus, His friend ; once for His own city,
and the fate He saw silently hovering over
it. Another condition of vivid emotion is
actual proximity. A devastating earthquake
in Japan touches our feelings less than a
small disaster in our own street. The grief,
the pain, the danger we see may awaken a
feeling so acute as to be unendurable — we
involuntarily avert our eyes from the sight ;
a far milder emotion is stirred by suffering
of which we only hear by report and can
realize only by an effort of imagination.
And so was it with our Lord. It was at the
48

The Compassion of Jesus
sight of the leper's misery that His whole
heart was dissolved in compassion ; it was
when He beheld the doomed city that He
wept over it ; when " He saw Mary weeping,
and the Jews also that came with her weep
ing," that His tears also overflowed. These
tears of Jesus are the outpouring of a Divine
compassion, a revelation of the very Heart of
God ; but therefore most human tears, the
swift spontaneous outburst of the warmest
tenderness of human emotion.
But within the limits imposed by flesh
and blood, the compassion of Jesus is uni
versal in its range ; within that horizon, it
is like the sun shining in the broad vault
of heaven. Jew and Samaritan, Roman,
Greek, and Phoenician, courtier and peasant,
ruler of the synagogue and outcast from
the synagogue, dignity and disguise, virtue
and vice, the trivial embarrassment of
the wedding-feast and the overwhelming
sorrow of the new-made grave, the spiritual
destitution of the multitude, ihe hunger,
poverty, and sufferings of the physical life
— all varieties of human characteristic and
49

The Emotions of Jesus
condition cross His path, and His compassion
meets them all at their point of need. The
compassion of Jesus was potentially — morally
— universal. It radiated in all directions,
and the extent of its radiation was circum
scribed only by the mode of existence which
belonged to His life on earth.
But in the words of my text, it is the
depth, the intensity j of our Lord's compassion
that is emphasized. It was a strange and
thrilling spectacle that was seen on that
Sabbath evening in Capernaum : men and
women spent with long sickness carried
upon their pallets, gibbering lunatics and
demoniacs raving and struggling against the
friendly hands that were laid upon them,
the maimed, the halt, the blind, all wending
their way in the fast-failing light towards
Peter's house ; the stream of suffering, excited
humanity ever growing in volume until, as
St. Mark says in his graphic way, "the
whole city was gathered together at the
door." The patients were there, and the
Physician was there, laying His hands upon
them, from which a healing virtue flowed
5°

The Compassion of Jesus
until light came back to languid eyes and
the sensations of long-forgotten health flowed
through wasted frames, and not one was left
unblessed. But more important even than the descrip
tion of the scene is the comment which St.
Matthew's Gospel makes upon it, quoting
from the great Passion-chapter of Isaiah the
words : " Himself took our infirmities, and
carried our sicknesses." This is, to my mind,
the most illuminating thing said in the New
Testament regarding the miracle-working of
Jesus. We might have thought of it as like
the easy profusion with which a millionaire be
stows a largesse that really costs him nothing ;
but here the Gospel guards against so un
worthy a conception. It tells us that for
every miracle He had to pay — full price —
not out of His pocket, nor out of scientific
knowledge and skill, but out of His own
soul. Those who had eyes to see could
read, in the convulsion of His features and
the mute sorrow of His eyes, how com
pletely He bowed Himself beneath the
burden He lifted from others. It seemed
5i

The Emotions of Jesus
as if literally He took their infirmities
and carried the load of their sickness, as if
He must Himself become the sufferer and
feel the disease and the distress, must project
His own soul into the leper's corruption
and the paralytic's deadness, before He could
communicate life and health. We should
be venturing into depths beyond our fathom
ing, were we to inquire how these miracles
were wrought — how, on the one hand, the
faith by which Jesus continued always in
perfect union with the will of God, and, on
the other hand, the perfect sympathy which
united Him to suffering humanity, were the
channels through which power went forth to
heal and save. But let us grasp the fact that so
it was. Men not only received actual physical
help at His hands, but were conscious of an
ineffable compassion which enfolded them and
drew them into His inmost heart. Here was
One who knew and felt all. " Himself took
our infirmities, and carried our sicknesses."
And, finally, we notice that this intense
compassion of Jesus was always actively
helpful ; the sympathetic emotion invariably
52

The Compassion of Jesus
bore fruit in self-sacrificing deed. And this
was its crowning perfection ; it is in this
that the test of character lies. For, like all
instinctive emotions, compassion has of
itself no moral quality. A wealth of
sympathetic sensibility, a tender heart, is
no more a guarantee of real goodness than
is a delicate ear for music. Good men and
bad men may alike possess it, and possess it
in a high degree. It may, indeed, only dis
guise a peculiarly subtle selfishness. For
we enjoy feeling simply as such. The
popularity of the novel, the drama, of all
emotional oratory, literature, and art, the
eagerness with which people throng to the
scene of any melodramatic happening or
follow its details as unfolded in the news
papers, show how we like to have our
emotions stirred, and to identify ourselves
for the moment with the most poignant
experiences of other lives. Thus compassion
is apt to terminate in mere barren commiser
ation, or, worse, in the luxury of self-con
scious feeling which we call sentimentalism.
In the complex working ot our nature,
S3

The Emotions of Jesus
emotion has but one purpose, to move the
will to action. Good feelings are given us
not that we may enjoy feeling them, but that
we may do good actions, do with a warm
heart what we could not do, or could not so
effectually do, with a cold heart. They are
the tide which floats the ship over the
harbour bar on which otherwise it would be
stranded. And in this we see our perfect
example in the compassion of Jesus.
Always as the needs of men entered into
Him by the gateway of feeling, a costly
virtue went forth from Him in words of
comfort and deeds of power. When hindered
from doing what He wished for sinful, suffer
ing humanity, He did what He could. He
gave His life, not a fragment but the whole,
all its days and years, all its gifts and powers,
all He might have used and all He might
have won for His own pleasure and glory,
— He laid it all down with a compassion
that never failed and a stedfastness that
never faltered. And when there was nothing
else He could do for men than die, in
infinite compassion He died.
54

The Compassion of Jesus
2. An Eternal Truth.
Such, so far as my inadequate words can
describe — and what words could be ade
quate ? — was the compassion of Jesus for
suffering men in its breadth, its depth, its
practical power. What does it mean to us
now ? What is the value of these miracles
of Jesus for us to-day ? Did they really
happen ? is the question many are asking.
But there is a prior question, it seems to me
— What does it signify whether they happened
or not ? What is it that makes them more
than a charming embroidery upon the Gospel
narrative, naive anecdotes that have come
down to us from a dim past and from which
we may, perhaps, learn some edifying lessons ?
What light do they bring for the spiritual
interpretation of life to-day ; how do they enter
into its meaning and its hope ? Our answer,
in the first place, is, that our faith finds in
Jesus of Nazareth not a transient pheno
menon but the Eternal Reality, and in His
miracles a vivid revelation of the com
passion and power that watch over us and
55

The Emotions of Jesus
rule our lives yesterday, and to-day, and
for ever.
Do I speak to some who feel their need of
such a friend and physician as Jesus was, one
who can pluck from the heart a rooted
sorrow, who can make us feel in all our
troubles that God is near, and that underneath
are the everlasting arms of His compassion
and help ? I proclaim to you the Christ of
Capernaum as the Christ of this place and
hour. He who took men's infirmities and
carried their sicknesses then is carrying
yours to-day. He beholds you in your
trouble as He beheld them, and He is as
sorry for you as He was for them.
Think how the tears of a little child would
touch Jesus as He passed along the street of
Nazareth ; they touch Him no less now.
Wherever there are men and women in the
crowd of this world fighting their solitary
battle with temptation and care, alone with
their poverty and grief, their burden of
weakness and suffering, they are not alone.
He is with them, feeling as if with the fibres
of their own souls the troubles that beset
56

The Compassion of Jesus
them, and how these troubles become temp
tations to discontent, despondency, and dis
trust of God. Why should not all confide
in this great-hearted Divine Friend ? Why
do we not all confide in Him more com
pletely than we do ?
For still that same compassion is putting
the same power in operation for our deliver
ance. Ah ! you say a statement like that
makes too large a draft upon our powers
of belief. The age of miracles is past. No
longer does that Presence come to the sick
bed and lay His hands upon the sufferers
and raise them up. No ! Who then does
it ? Whom do we praise and thank for it,
when it is done ? Is health, restored by
use of the means His Providence supplies,
less His work, than when it flowed immedi
ately from His hands ; daily bread less His
bounty when it comes to us through the
wonted channels of supply, than when He
fed the multitude in the wilderness ; sight
less His gift when a surgeon performs a
successful operation for cataract, than when
He bestowed it by a touch ? Yet there is
57

The Emotions of Jesus
a diviner way than this in which the com
passion of Christ works for our deliverance.
It is true that we no longer look for miracles,
if we confine the thought of miracle to the
physical side of things. But there is a
triumph of spirit over material conditions
which is in the highest sense more miraculous,
intrinsically more divine, than any physical
triumph. That is where I join issue with
the Christian Scientists, who make the
miracles of Christ, not His Cross, the centre
of their gospel. But Christ's miracles were
not His mightiest works. You need but ask
yourselves, where was the grander manifesta
tion of the power of God — in the brief respite
from disease and death granted to the sick
folk of Capernaum, or in the sufferings and
self-sacrifice of Jesus Himself — in a blind
man's receiving his sight, or in the victorious
submission which said, " The cup which My
Father giveth, shall I not drink it ? " — in the
resurrection of Lazarus, or in Christ's obedi
ence unto death ? Whether is it a diviner
work to lift the burden from a man's weak
shoulders, or to strengthen his soul to endure,
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The Compassion of Jesus
and win a victory of courage and fortitude
otherwise unattainable ? Only to ask such a
question is to make plain how the com
passion of Jesus puts a mightier power in
operation than even that of Capernaum. If
He does not bestow the good thing He gave
to the sick folk of that city — and. we know
that there are times when He will not — it is
because He would bestow that better thing
He won for Himself, not to be exempt from
suffering but to be made perfect through
suffering. These miracles were but flashes
of the Divine compassion, breaking the
darkness which through a long night of sin
and suffering had hid from men the face of
God. They were needed. Without them,
I cannot conceive how Jesus could in that
age have effectively brought His revelation
of God to the world. But now the Sun is
risen. Far more than any occasional miracle
is it to know Jesus Christ, and the Father in
Him ; to know that He is with us alway,
who once " took our infirmities and carried
our sicknesses," who still in some most real
way has the touch of all we suffer upon the
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The Emotions of Jesus
nerve of His infinite sympathy, and is with
held from making an end of all sorrow and
pain only by the nobler purpose, that we may
drink of His own cup and be baptized with
His own baptism, and overcome, and sit
down with Him on His throne.

3. An Example to Us.
Then, finally, let us remember that the
compassion of Jesus is for our example. It
is the plainest of its consequences that the
Christian — he in whom Christ lives — must
be a more than ordinarily compassionate
man. In him compassion will not act merely
in a negative way, to restrain from cruel
words and deeds, to put a curb upon wrath
and greed, and prevent the seeking pleasure
or gain at the cost of others ; it will be, as
in Jesus, a mainspring of life, limited in
its action only by opportunity and means.
The man who can witness human want or
suffering and pass by on the other side may
be very religious in some way — but it is
not Christ's way ; he may understand all
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The Compassion of Jesus
mysteries and all knowledge, may be devout,
sincerely and solicitously careful of religious
observances and customs — but he is not a
Christian. " Himself took our infirmities, and carried
our sicknesses." There was no other way of
helping men for Him ; there is no other way
for us. You cannot effectually help any
man unless by taking in some way his
burden upon you. You must pay the price ;
and while for mere pecuniary help the pocket
may suffice to pay, and for physical help the
body, at the basis of all real help is soul-help,
and for it you must pay with your soul.
Remember that sympathy — soul-help — is
itself real help. We are tempted to ask
sometimes, especially those of us who are of
an impatiently practical bent, why burden our
selves emotionally with troubles to which we
can bring no tangible, material relief? But
men do not live by tangible, material things
alone, bread and coal and blankets. If we
cannot touch another's burden with the
hand of actual help, we may do a greater
thing if we touch the man under the burden
6 1

The Emotions of Jesus
with the hand of brotherly sympathy and
encouragement. To go down into the Valley
of the Shadow with the mourner, to place
ourselves beside the struggling and the
fallen with a sympathetic understanding of,
their temptation and appreciation of their
struggle — this is verily a ministry of grace.
There is nothing more precious to have and
to give than a heart tender with the love and
compassion it has learned df Jesus Christ.
Sympathy itself is helpful ; it is moreover
the condition of all effective help. We can
not bless men unless in some way we put
ourselves in their place. That is the principle
of the Incarnation itself. When God would
give His greatest help to man, He had to
become man to do it. That is the prin
ciple of Christ's ministry on earth. Wher
ever He went He was seeking to get into
closest sympathetic touch with men and
women, so that, taking their infirmities and
carrying their sicknesses, He might impart
to them, whether in body or soul, the
contagious strength of His own life. There
is no other way. We desire — we all really
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The Compassion of Jesus
do desire — to help the miserable and raise
the fallen ; but we are unwilling to pay this
price. We want to do it from a distance, by
money, by legislation, by institutions and
agencies — all most necessary and laudable,
no doubt, but all tending to become mech
anical and inhuman, all largely futile when
they are made a substitute for the living
contact of helper and helped, hand to hand
and heart to heart. Here lies, in part
at least, the cause of the Church's failure
with regard to a large and, it is to be
feared, increasing section of our population.
The Church — the Body Christ now has
for making Himself visible, tangible, and
effective on earth — is out of personal contact
with it. And this personal contact can be
achieved — well, only by personal contact.
The gulf can be bridged only by making
Christ's ministry the law and pattern of our
own. He preached to the multitude ; but
His compassion also touched the individual.
Are not we trusting too exclusively to organ
ization and large collective effort ? Are not
too many of us wishful to perform all our
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The Emotions of Jesus
Christian service by proxy, to be tax-payers
furnishing the sinews of war but never our
selves serving even as " Territorials " ? Is
there no one of all the tempted, struggling,
poverty-stricken, sin-stricken around you, to
whom you can show the compassion of Christ,
and who might say of you, "He took my
infirmities, and carried my sicknesses " ? The
only justification of the Church's claim to be
the Body of Christ is that in it He is still
incarnate, that it is to Him eyes to behold,
and heart to feel, and hand to succour the
sore needs of humanity. You and I are
members of that Body. Let us ask ourselves
what that involves. Let us ask, " Lord, what
wilt Thou have me to do ? "

64

IV
THE COMPASSION OF JESUS
(FOR THE SINFUL)

" Man, indeed, is the most noble by creation of all creatures
in the visible world ; but by sin he has made himself the most
ignoble. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condi
tion, for they had not a sinful nature. By reason of that, I was
more loathsome in mine own eyes than a toad, and I thought I
was so in God's eyes too. ... I thought now that every one
had a better heart than I had ; I could have changed heart with
anybody." — John Bunyan.

IV
THE COMPASSION OF JESUS
(FOR THE SINFUL)
St. Luke xv., xxiii. 34, xiii. 34, xix. 41.
The next subject of our study is the
emotions awakened in Jesus by sin, and
towards men as sinners. And at the outset
it is to be said that the Gospels directly
reveal little of what these must have been.
There are flashes of emotion, keen and
passionate ; but these, we feel, are only
outbreaks from a hidden fire. The more
we think of what sin is and does, and of
His unique experience of what it is and does,
the more marvellous does the self-restraint
of Jesus in the face of the sin of the world
become. He seldom betrays astonishment
at sin ; He is never exclamatory, horrified,
67

The Emotions of Jesus
hysterical. His emotion in the presence of
sin is that of strength, not of weakness. His
attitude is never that of mere disgust,
because it is always that of practical effort.
He spends no emotion or eloquence upon
sin in the abstract.1 It is sinning men and
women that draw His very heart, and deed,
much more than word, that proclaims the
passion of His soul.
In the Gospels we see two emotions in
chief, awakened in Jesus toward sinful men.
Their conduct excited in various degrees His
indignation ; their condition as sinners His
compassion. We are dealing now with the
compassion ; and what at once impresses the
reader of the Gospels is the extraordinarily
compassionate view Jesus takes of human sin
and sinners. But we are so familiar with the
fact that we do not readily realize how
extraordinary it is.
1 The abstract conception of sin does not occur in the
Synoptic Gospels, a/iapria in the singular is found only
in Matt. xii. 31, and there in the concrete sense.

68

The Compassion of Jesus
i. The Marvel of It.
To feel the wonder of it, you must think
of our Lord's unparalleled experience of sin ;
He lived in the actual world, and knew at
first hand its ugliest facts. The pages of
the Gospels are written all over with the sins
of men. Jesus touches sin on every hand.
In the children of passion He sees it trample
upon reason, defy conscience, and laugh at
laws. In His own chosen disciples He sees
it prevailing against loyalty and breaking
down resolve. He sees its baneful influence
upon religion in the tortuous casuistry by
which men seek to serve at the same time
God and Mammon, the blind self-righteous
pride they feel in the sanctimonious formalism
they take for godliness. Above all, He Him
self is the exciting cause of sin's worst mani
festations, the magnet that draws out all that
is worst, as well as all that is best, in men.
Ever since Cain slew Abel because his own
works were evil and his brother's righteous,
it has been the fate of those who choose the
higher plane to arouse the enmity of those
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The Emotions of Jesus
who choose the lower. Stung by the inex
pugnable sense of the superiority of good
ness, wounded self-love turns instinctively
to hate, and
" Envy sets the strongest seal upon desert."
In the life of Jesus this saddening
experience rose to a climax. This was
His lifelong crown of thorns. Think
only of the story of His Passion. There
is sin's awful masterpiece ; there it displays
its deepest character. If we ask what sin,
human sin, is, human history gives its
answer there. Sin is that which repudiated
Jesus Christ, hated Him without a cause,
spat contempt and mockery upon Him, and,
only because it could do nothing more,
crucified Him. Those who have felt only sin's
velvet glove, and never its iron hand, may
judge leniently of it ; but is it not extra
ordinary that He who drank the bottom-
dregs of sin's malignity has in His heart the
one fount of unfailing compassion for the
chief of sinners ?
Again, think of the purity of Jesus. Men
often take a lenient view of sin in others,
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The Compassion of Jesus
because their moral sensibilities are blunted
by their own. In youth we are apt to be
censorious because we do not know ourselves,
in age to be cynically tolerant because we do.
Sin "hardens a' within, and petrifies the
feeling." It is only as men have kept the
purity of their own souls that the greed, the
impurity, the inhumanity of men, their
estrangement from God and goodness, are
felt as a heart-breaking burden. But how can
we conceive the emotions stirred by sin in
One whose whole nature was the stainless
dwelling-place of the Spirit of all purity ?
We may conceive what it were for a person
of fastidious tastes to be associated with a
horde of filthy savages, or for a pure-minded
youth or maiden to be suddenly immersed
in the life of a slum, reeking with all moral
disgusts. We may understand the feeling of
a pure soul like Henry Drummond, when
after hours spent in that Protestant con
fessional, the inquiry-room, he writes : " Oh !
I am sick, sick of the sins of men. When I
went home, I had to change my very clothes."
But to be acquainted with the sins of men
71

The Emotions of Jesus
as only the Sinless One could be, to live in
daily contact with it and feel all its loath
someness as only He could — we vainly try to
imagine what this must have been to Jesus
Christ. Is it not extraordinary that His
soul of glowing purity, aflame with abhorrence
of evil, should melt with the compassion
that drew the harlot to kiss His feet and
made Him known as the Friend of sinners ?
And again, the compassion of Jesus is
extraordinary because united with a full
condemnation of sin. Among men we often
find condemnation without compassion —
the hard legal view which simply identifies
the man with his wrongdoing, sees him
and sums him up in the light of his sin.
To most people (save a mother, a wife, a
friend) the thief on the cross was just
the thief Jesus saw that, but infinitely
more. He saw the criminal, who had lived
a selfish and cruel life, the human beast
of prey ; but He saw too the man, in
whom still lay untold capacities of higher
life. At the opposite extreme, we often find
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The Compassion of Jesus
compassion without condemnation. Many
to-day would see in the thief nothing really
criminal, but merely a product of circum
stances. Men, no doubt, do wrong and
abominable things ; but " to understand all
is to forgive all." They are the creatures,
not the authors, of evil — victims of a bad
heredity, bad education and example, bad
social conditions. After all due deductions
are made, nothing is left that is really sin,
nothing that a man must lay at his own door,
and say "the guilt is mine." And once
more, Christ's attitude is not that. To Him
sin is sin, and sinners are sinners. The truly
extraordinary thing about the compassion of
Jesus is that it is not founded on excuses,
apologies, or extenuations, but upon the fact
of sin itself. He pities and He condemns ;
yes, He pities because He condemns. His
supreme compassion is given to men because
they are sinners.
This is contrary to our usual way of
thinking. When one is involved in wrong
doing by circumstances for which he is not
greatly to blame, we pity him ; if he is
73

The Emotions of Jesus
entirely to blame, we say that he deserves no
pity. But how superficial is such a judg
ment ! The man who is put in the position
of a culprit while comparatively free from
blame is certainly to be pitied — he suffers a
grave misfortune ; but how little to be pitied,
how small a misfortune is his, compared with
the man who is inexcusably guilty, who has
done the evil thing, and has done it because
he is what he is ! It comes to this, that the
supreme misery of our human state is
that we are sinners. All other misfor
tunes and miseries are the small dust of
the balance compared with this. We may
not so judge ; but unless we so judge, we
cannot even get Christ's point of view. We
cannot understand Him at all ; His teaching,
His life, His death, all are a sealed book to
us, till we feel something of the unequalled
calamity and misery of sin.
2. The Gospel Picture.
Let us now turn for a little to the brightest
page in the Gospels, the fifteenth chapter of
74

The Compassion of Jesus
St. Luke, and look at His compassion as it
is there portrayed by Jesus Himself in that
series of exquisite parables, and specially in
the phrase which runs through them all,
" That which is lost." 1 Thus Jesus describes
the actual condition into which men are
brought by sin ; they have broken bounds
and are gone astray. Like the sheep that has
wandered from the fold, they have lost their
bearings. They know neither where they are
nor whither they are going, and are ignorant
of the deadly peril in which they stand.
1 In English the word " lost " is used in a double
sense : an article of property _ which has disappeared is
" lost " to its owner, and a person who has gone astray
and is ignorant of his whereabouts is also " lost." The
same two meanings belong to the various parts of the
Greek verb AiroAAwai. In St. Luke xv. the idea
directly conveyed is deprivation or interruption of actual
ownership ; but in St. Matthew's version of the Parable
of the Lost Sheep irXavaxrOat is used, bringing out the
fact that it is because the sheep has strayed and lost itself
that it is lost to the shepherd ; and the same Gospel has
to irpofiaTa ra cwroAaiXoVa oikov 'lapa-qK, where airo\u>\oTa.
seems to refer immediately to the " lost " condition of the
sheep. In this connection, indeed, the two ideas are
inseparable.
75

The Emotions of Jesus
In the story of the Lost Son, Jesus depicts
this tragedy from human life itself. He sets
before us in the raw ignorance, the egotism,
and blind self-sufficiency of a vain and selfish
lad, the world's great picture of the psychology
of sin. The story is an ugly one. The
conduct of the wayward youth is wholly un-
filial, heartless, presumptuous. He knew
that he was behaving badly in leaving his
home ; nor did it need the teaching of hunger
and misery to inform him that in throwing
away his money, his character, his very life,
among wine-bibbers and harlots he was
sinning against his own soul. And yet he
is so pitiably ignorant, so blind to the full
reality of what he is committing himself to.
Worse still, he is so ignorant of his ignorance.
Tell this self-confident youth as he stands on
the threshold of the far country, at last free
to make his own terms with life, untrammelled
by his father's antiquated prejudices, with
money in his pocket and the blood of youth
coursing in his veins, with all the world before
him, a virgin territory tempting the ardent
foot of the explorer — tell him that he knows
76

The Compassion of Jesus
neither the nature of the thing he would
have nor how to obtain it ; and, if he listen,
it will be with the smile of superiority, with
pity for your ignorance, not his own. In
quest: of reality, he knows not that he is
chasing phantoms. " A deceived heart hath
turned him aside." He is "lost," he has
drifted out upon uncharted seas. How
wonderfully compassionate is the view our
Lord here takes of human sin, and how pro
foundly true ! What leads men away from
God is no diabolical love of evil for evil's
sake, but the desire for happiness, for self-
expansion, the desire to realize the fullest
life. Happiness ! — it is the thing we are
born to seek, and from the cradle to the
grave do seek. And the sins of men are
just their efforts, their misguided, infatuated
efforts after happiness. This is the inner
most meaning of all human sin ; this is how
"the devil spends
A fire God gave for other ends."
And the deepest compassion of Jesus goes
forth to men thus self-deceived and self-
betrayed.
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The Emotions of Jesus
Look at another picture from the Gospels.
Men are doing the wickedest thing in the
long history of human wickedness ; and
Jesus, the victim of their wicked hate and
cruelty, only pities them for doing it, and cries,
" Father, forgive them ; they know not what
they do."1 Passing by all they did know
and all they were guiltily ignorant of, He
pleads for them that they have no real, no
adequate conception of what it is they are
doing. And that compassion avails for all.
Men know, and yet they do not know.
They know so well what they db that they
are responsible, yet so little do they know
that they are not beyond repentance and
forgiveness. We may be led by temper, or
appetite, or vanity, by fear or faithlessness, to
do what we know full well to be wrong ; yet
we know not what we do. We do not
know what sin is. We have very little idea
what sin is. " Father, forgive them," He
pleads ; " they know not what they do."
It is because men know not what they do
1 Regarding the genuineness of this verse, vide Expositor,
Jan. 1914, p. 92 ; also Expositor, April 1914, pp. 324 ft'.
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The Compassion of Jesus
that men are lost, but, being lost, may be
found again.
Yet recovery is not the necessary sequel.
This word "lost" denotes a condition of
deadly peril, a condition which therefore
excites the deepest compassion of Jesus.
The prodigal goes merrily on his way to the
far country — will he ever come back ? It is
only a voyage of discovery he is making ;
he wants only to see the sights and taste the
wine of the far country — but, will he ever
come back ? God only knows. Meanwhile,
he is lost, his feet are on the deadly slope
that ends on the brink of the precipice ; and
he is the gayest of the gay. How it must
have wrung the heart of Jesus Christ to
see men with the shadow of spiritual death
hovering over them, given up wholly to
the enjoyments or cares of the trivial
moment ! It is the shepherd, not the sheep,
that is tortured with anxiety about its fate.
The unheeding animal contentedly nibbles
the grass on the mountain-side, without a
thought of the night that is coming down,
the storm that is brewing, the rocks and
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The Emotions of Jesus
precipices among which it will be driven, the
beasts of prey that will seek its life. But
of all this the shepherd thinks — pictures its
helplessness, its loneliness, its sure destruc
tion in the midst of these perils, until a
great tide of pity carries him away and sends
him forth on his painful and hazardous quest.
It was thus Jesus saw men in their sins.
He must fly to the rescue. The lost would
not come to Him ; He must both seek and
save. On Him must the burden fall ; His
it must be to pay the whole price, the
chastisement of our peace. It was this
heart-breaking compassion for lost men
that inspired the ministry of Jesus Christ,
and still inspires it.
And, lastly, this word " lost " tells us that
Christ's compassion for sinners is in a sense
compassion for Himself — nay, we may go
further and say, for that Father-God whose
representative He is. The sinner's loss is,
first of all and most of all, Christ's loss,
God's loss. That, indeed, is directly the
theme of these parables. The shepherd's
compassion is not merely pity for a sheep,
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The Compassion of Jesus
any man's sheep ; it is for his own sheep
which he has cared for since it was a little
lamb, which has become like a part of him
self. The father clasps the penitent scape
grace in his arms as he would not another
man's son. "This my son," he says, "my
son," dearer to me than my own life, "was
dead, and is alive again ; was lost, and is
found." It is the climax of all Divine joy,
the joy of recovery, of love redeeming and
victorious. And not far from that picture of the
Rejoicing Shepherd and Father, we find
another — the picture of the Weeping
Saviour, of love baffled and defeated. " O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . how often would I
have gathered thy children together, as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her wings, and
ye would not." The soul of all compassion
— compassion defeated but only more poig
nant from defeat — all grief, the grief of love
unprized and trampled upon but only the
more tenacious for every rebuff, breathes in
that lament of Jesus over Jerusalem. This
heart-breaking compassion over the lost that
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The Emotions of Jesus
are not found because they will not, is the
climax of all Divine sadness. It contains
depths into which I shrink from looking.
Must Jesiis always bear this cross? This
Divine grief — is it irremediable, unending,
eternal as the joy of love triumphant?
This, only this, let us be sure of, this let us
fix iri our hearts, that something we must be
to Christ — to God — we cannot be nothing —
something, joy or grief, gain or loss, for
which we have no measure except God's
own, the uttermost sacrifice of the Cross.
This is the innermost meaning of the Gospel
of Christ : the love of God is love that, wants
us, not a mere benevolence that pours down
its gifts upon us from an infinite altitude,
but love that seeks us with patient, un-
forgetting desire, love that lives in our lives,
the love of God that can never be satisfied
until it find us in our finding Him.
3. The Christian Obligation.
Such was the character of Christ's com
passion on lost men, that inspired His
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The Compassion of Jesus
ministry ; and His ministry is ours, and
for its fulfilment, how we need His com
passion ! Now, I believe there never was
so much compassion in the world as at
present. Christ has taught us compassion
for the physical ills of life, the weariness,
the drudgery, the maladies and suffer
ings of men. That noble compassion
touches us with something like enthusi
asm. It inspires legislation, draws muni
ficent gifts from the rich, spreads over
the land a network of beneficent agency,
has its focus in the Christian Church and
its deep source and sustainment in the Spirit
of Christ. But, I fear there is not in the
Church to-day an equal growth of the deeper
compassion of Christ, for the spiritual dis
abilities of men, for men as lost to them
selves and lost to God. We do need a
great quickening there, in the conviction
that the root of all our human problem is
just Sin, in our compassion for those who
are wandering' in the ignorance of their
darkened minds, led astray by temptation,
far from the possibility of all really happy
83

The Emotions of Jesus
and fruitful life, who need help at the centre,
the help and salvation of God in Christ.
Does the heart of the Church, your heart
and mine, throb like His with a vast pity
for those who are scattered abroad as sheep
not having a shepherd, who have lost faith
in God and righteousness, whose soul's light
is quenched or has never been kindled, and
who are drifting into even deeper darkness,
and, worst of all, who are quite content or,
if not, think it is only more money, more
success, or more pleasure they need ? Do
we need to be goaded and whipped up to
something like zeal for the Church's miss
ionary enterprises at home and abroad, and
for its work of social service ? If we had
Christ's compassion for men, we would be
unable to restrain ourselves in effort and
sacrifice. We have the ideas, but ideas are
pale ghosts until they are suffused with
feeling and are embodied in action ; and it
is easier to preach the Cross of Christ, or
to demand to have it preached, than to bear
the burden of Christ's compassion. We are
called to take up the ministry of Christ, and
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The Compassion of Jesus
there was one only way by which He could
fulfil that ministry. In the fulness of His
love He entered into humanity, took the
sins and woes of men upon His own soul,
became one with them, entered so completely
into their lives as to make them His. At
a great distance, but in the same path, we are
called to follow. We cannot do it without
His compassion ; and we cannot know that
deep compassion of Christ except by first
realizing it toward ourselves. God com-
mendeth His love toward us in that, while
we were yet sinners, and because we were
sinners, Christ died for us. May He give
us to know and feel something of that Divine
wonder, and we shall know and feel this too,
that God makes known His love toward
us in imparting it to us, and calling us to
make it known by word and deed, character
and influence, and with all our heart and
power enter into His redeeming purpose of
bringing back to the fold of His love the
sheep for whom the Shepherd died I

85

V
THE ANGER OF JESUS

"The expression, the 'wrath of God,' simply embodies this
truth, that the relations of God's love to the world are un
satisfied, unfulfilled. The expression is not merely anthro-
popathic, it is an appropriate description of the Divine pathos
necessarily involved in the conception of a revelation of love
restrained, hindered, and stayed through unrighteousness. For
this wrath is holy love itself, feeling itself so far hindered,
because they whom it would have received into its fellowship
have turned away from its blessed influence. This restrained
manifestation of love, which in one aspect of it may be desig
nated wrath, in another aspect is called 'grief in the Holy
Spirit of love ; — wrath is thus turned into compassion.'' Martensen.

THE ANGER OF JESUS
" And when He had looked round about on them with
anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts,
He saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand." —
St. Mark iii. 5.
The anger of Jesus ! It seems foreign to
His character. One of the. hymns of our
childhood taught that " no one marked an
angry word who ever heard Him speak."
And it is one of the surprises of the Gospels
to find that He not only could be angry,
but on several recorded occasions both dis
played anger and acted upon it. It behoves
us, therefore, to consider what anger properly
is, what function it is intended to fulfil in
our moral life, why Jesus Christ as the
Perfect Man was capable, and why we as
Christians ought to be capable, of anger.
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The Emotions of Jesus
i. The Natural Emotion.
Anger, to speak broadly, is the combative
emotion. While compassion springs from
the love by which we identify ourselves with
others, anger is naturally aroused by our
antagonisms, of whatsoever sort. And as
the purpose of compassion is to enable us to
do, and to do spontaneously or graciously,
kind and self-sacrificing actions which other
wise we might not do, or might do coldly
and ineffectively, so the natural use of anger
is to enable us to perform actions which inflict
pain on others, and which without its stimulus
we might be prevented from doing by fear,
or by the sympathetic sensibility which
makes the infliction of pain on others painful
to ourselves ; or which, again, we might do
only in a half-hearted and unimpressive
fashion. Whether anger is in itself a
pleasure or a pain we may leave psycholo
gists to debate : it is at any rate a force, an
explosive liberation of psychical force, which
for the moment raises a man above his
normal self. It gives physical courage,
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The Anger of Jesus
overcoming the paralysing effects of fear, so
that with blood boiling and swollen muscles
a man in anger will hurl himself furiously
upon an antagonist whom in cold blood he
scarcely durst encounter. It reinforces moral
courage too. It gives outspokenness and
telling force to rebukes which otherwise
would remain unspoken, or would fall
timidly and haltingly from the lips. It
wings the orator to lofty heights in the
denunciation of wrong, and emboldens the
satirist to tear the mask from hypocrisy, to
lash the popular vices of society or the
venerable follies of superstition. Every
movement of righteous reform, every crusade
against evil, has throbbing in its heart not
only compassion for the victims of social
injustice, but a holy anger against the state of
things, and against those who stubbornly
uphold the state of things, which inflicts
the wrong.
But, like all natural emotions, anger is in
itself neither good nor bad. It is merely a
force, a gunpowder of the soul which, accord
ing as it is directed, may blast away the
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The Emotions of Jesus
obstructions of evil, or defend us from
temptation as with a wall of fire, or which
again may work devastating injury in our
own and in other lives. For our imperfect
and ill-balanced moral natures the capacity
for anger is a peculiarly dangerous posses
sion. And since our self-love, rather than
love to God or our neighbour, is apt to be
our most sensitive part, anger so generally has
the character of mere personal resentment that
this in fact is what we commonly understand
by the word. Enabling men to inflict pain
upon others with a minimum of pain, or
with actual pleasure, to themselves, it
readily allies itself with the worst dispositions
and passions of human nature. It paralyses
humane feeling. Under its influence mal
evolent men become ferocious fiends, and
men who are not malevolent say and do what,
when the tumult of the soul is past, fills them
with regret and shame. It confuses the judg
ment. Seldom do we see largely or clearly
in anger : seldom is it we have not reason to
repent of decisions formed or courses of action
entered upon under the influence of anger.
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The Anger of Jesus
2. The Gospel Incidents.
And yet Jesus could be angry, and again
and again displays anger. Anger flashed out
of Him against temptation. Never, I think,
was Jesus so hotly angry as at that moment
when He heard the voice of carnal unbelief
and worldly wisdom speaking to Him
through the lips of the chief of His disciples
to turn Him aside from the way of the
Cross, and when He met the ignoble sugges
tion with the scathing rebuke, "Get thee
behind me, Satan ! " In many of the parables
there is an undertone of wrath ; but its full
thunder breaks out in His denunciation of
the sanctimonious formalism into which
Jewish religion had so largely degenerated.
If one would know with what passion of
invective human language may be charged,
how words may be made to play like forked
lightnings around the heads of self-satisfied
dissemblers and evil-doers, let him read, in
the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew, the
"woes" of Jesus against "scribes andPharisees,
hypocrites." And we not only hear anger
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The Emotions of Jesus
in His words, but see it in His actions.^ In
the Fourth Gospel there is a sequence of
events which, whether it is chronologically
accurate or not, is singularly suggestive.
In one paragraph we see Jesus at the wedding
feast ; the next shows Him in the Temple
courts. There He is the genial, sympathetic
guest, adding brightness to the social gather
ing by His presence, showing forth His
glory in a miracle of simple kindness. Here,
with uplifted scourge, with indignation
flaming in His eyes and vibrating in His
voice, He drives the profane rabble of men
and beasts from the precincts of God's house.
He who was all friendliness, all benignity,
is now all fire, fierce, rigorous, unsparing,
consumed and carried away by passionate
intolerance of whatever violated the honour
of God and the sanctity of His worship.
But most instructive of all is the reminis
cence which has been preserved in the
Gospel of St. Mark. Already our Lord had
come into collision with the Pharisees at
several points, but especially with regard to
the principle of Sabbath observance. In the
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The Anger of Jesus
controversy He had clearly marked out their
respective positions : His, that the Sabbath
was made for man, instituted solely for
man's good, and that the interests of the
institution, as such, must not be exalted
above the end it is designed to serve ;
theirs, that man is made for the Sabbath, and
that human suffering and loss are a lesser
evil than any infringement of the rules
which guard the sanctity of the institution.
It was possibly on the next Sabbath that our
Lord and His disciples again went into the
synagogue at Capernaum ; and there, faithful
to their self-appointed task of espionage, were
His watchful critics, their expectation whetted
by the presence in the congregation of one
suffering from a grievous disablement, a man
whose right arm was withered and powerless.
"And they watched Him,'whether He would
heal him on the Sabbath day " ; nor does
He, to disappoint their malice, depart a jot
from His intended course. But He takes
the first word. He appeals to whatever
honesty of mind and humanity of feeling
might be in them. He calls the afflicted
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The Emotions of Jesus
man forth into the midst and challenges
them to say what ought to be done. " Is it
lawful to do good on the Sabbath day," He
asks, " or to do evil ? to save life, or to kill ? "
Will God's day of freedom for burden-
bearing humanity be more truly honoured
by making it a day of deliverance to this
suffering mortal, or by making it a pretext
for prolonging his bondage ? To the ques
tion so put there could be but one answer.
But the Pharisees gave none. They held
their peace. They could not answer our
Lord's arguments, but they could do what
every one can do ; they could harden their
hearts ; they could lock their lips in stubborn
silence when candour demanded of them to
speak. They could not answer our Lord,
did I say ? They could, and they did.
"They went out straightway and took
counsel with the Herodians, how they might
destroy Him." That was their answer to
all His appeals. All His reasoning with
them only made their hearts harder, their
hatred more virulent.
And what was the effect produced upon
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The Anger of Jesus
our Lord by their obduracy ? It angered
Him. " He looked round about on them
with anger." Not one of those sullen counte
nances escaped the search-light of that gaze,
and it was a gaze of indignant wrath.

3. A Flame of Holiness.
Such anger, we instinctively feel, is a holy
thing, one of the purest, loftiest emotions of
which the human spirit is capable, the fiery
spark which is struck by wrong-doing out of
a soul that loves the right. When a man is
destitute of such emotion, when there is
nothing in him that flames up at the sight of
injustice, cruelty, and oppression, nothing that
flashes out indignation against the liar, the
hypocrite, the "grafter," the betrayer of
sacred trusts, there is much awanting to the
strength and completeness of moral manhood.
But the anger of Jesus is worthy of closer
inspection. It is our duty to try to under
stand it thoroughly, to trace it, if we can, to
its roots, to see what it is in the character of
Jesus from which His anger springs, in order
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The Emotions of Jesus
that in the first place we may never draw it
down upon ourselves, and then that we may
sympathize with it and possess it, that we
may clearly know what are its true objects
and occasions, and how it is to be used and
governed. And, first of all, let us observe how
different the anger of Jesus is from that with
which we are most familiar in ourselves and
others. We call that anger, which is merely
bad temper, an ebullition of irritated wilful
ness, an irrational kicking against the obstacles
which lie in our way. Jesus never resented
circumstances, but trustfully accepted them
as the Father's will. We are angry when
persons with whom we have to do are in
competent or careless, when they do not
show that zeal in our service and regard for
our interests which we conceive to be their
duty. So was not Jesus. He was never
thus angry with His stupid, blundering, dis
appointing disciples. He took them severely
to task ; His displeasure was sometimes hot
against them ; but in it there was no tinge
of personal annoyance, no desire to retaliate
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The Anger of Jesus
upon them the pain they inflicted on Him.
We are angry when others put a slight upon
us. When, perhaps without wishing or in
tending it, they treat us as persons of little
consequence, whose rights and feelings need
not be too punctiliously considered, this hurts
sorely, and in our own judgment we do well
to be angry. But in Jesus this resentment
of wounded dignity had no place. His
meekness and lowliness of heart was armour
of proof against all careless discourtesy and
all studied insult. We are yet more angry
if any one has sought to blacken our character,
or has shown toward us a wanton and causeless
malice. All this Jesus suffered ; but when
men called Him a glutton and a wine-bibber,
a Sabbath-breaker, and, deadliest of insults,
an ally and legate of Beelzebub, He still
met them with unruffled calm and dispassion
ate appeal to reason. And when, because
they could not answer Him otherwise, they
drove Him tolthe Cross with bitter execration
and unpitying mockery, His only reply is to
interpose between them and the hand of
an avenging God the one possible extenua-
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The Emotions of Jesus
tion of their guilt, that word of eternal signi
ficance, still heard in heaven and on earth,
" Father, forgive them ; they know not
what they do." In all the manifestations of
His anger, there is no trace of personal re
sentment. Men might say or do what they
would against the Son of Man, and it would
be forgiven them. It was when they sinned
against the Holy Ghost, the very Spirit of
truth and right, that they were in danger of
sinning unforgivably. It was only evil, evil
as evil, and chiefly hypocritical, self-satisfied
and deliberate evil, hardening itself against
light and love, that awoke the anger of
Jesus.
4. The Reflex of Love.
Still we may ask, why should anger be dis
played ? What is it in the character of Jesus,
and in every character like His, from which
anger springs ? The answer to that question
is evident. God is love ; Jesus is love ; the
anger of Jesus and all holy anger is the anger
of love. For love is not wholly sympathy
and sweetness ; love is full of indignation
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The Anger of Jesus
and wrath. When you see some one mal
treating a child, what happens ? Your
sympathy with the child instantly becomes
wrath against his persecutor and rises up in
arms against him. You love your own
child, you fervently desire his highest good,
and what would your love be worth if it did
not inspire you with wrath against any one
seeking to undermine his purity and teach
him the pleasures of sin ? Nay, if you truly
love your child, is it not just your love that
causes you not only to grieve over his faults
of character, but compels you to set yourself
against them, and to meet them, if persisted
in, with the full force of your displeasure ?
Anger is the emotion produced by antag
onism ; and love by its very nature is an
tagonism to everything that works injury
to lite.
Look at the anger of Jesus. In every
case it is the anger of love. His love to
God and zeal for God's worship makes Him
indignant at whatever dishonours God, and
impels him to cleanse the Temple courts of a
profane and polluting traffic. He loves men,
IOI

The Emotions of Jesus
and, aflame with wrath against all inhumanity,
He speaks the Parable of the Rich Man and
Lazarus. And these men in the synagogue,
self-hardened against the truth — they were
doing Jesus no injury by their stubbornness,
they were harming only themselves. Nay,
not so. By harming themselves, they were
hurting Jesus, wounding His love. Because
He so yearned over them and so longed for
thcvictory of truth and sincerity in their
souls, therefore as He gazed upon them in
their suicidal obduracy, His eye flashed with
the instinctive wrath of love. He was angry
as one might be angry at a sick man who in
sheer perversity refuses the remedy in which
lies his only hope.
So we can understand the strange thing
which is further said : " He looked round
about upon them with anger, being grieved
for the hardness of their hearts." Did ever
such anger and such sorrow perfectly meet
except in the wonderful Christ ? Their
conduct excites His indignation ; and because
their conduct excites His indignation, their
condition excites His deepest compassion.
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The Anger of Jesus
He blamed them ; His heart was on fire
with displeasure against them. Therefore
He also pitied them ; yes, just because their
hearts were so hard, because they were so
much to be blamed, were so stubbornly
wrong and were so surely sealing their own
doom, His soul was wrung with compassion
for them. So should pity ever go hand in
hand with anger.
And now, what are the practical con
clusions for you and me from this study of
the anger of Jesus ? First, the need to set
a watch upon our anger. A man's anger is
a manifestation of himself. Pay heed to the
character of your anger, to its occasions and
incitements, and you will learn much about
your real self. Think of the two kinds of
anger : the anger of Jesus, which is the
anger of love ; the anger of the world, which
is the anger of selfishness. They are the
same, yet as far apart as heaven and hell.
They are the same, because anger is always
aroused by what hurts and antagonizes us ;
. they are opposite, because what hurts a selfish
spirit and what hurts a loving spirit are
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The Emotions of Jesus
different as night and day. How great is
our need to be watchful of that slumbering
fire in our bosoms, which may flame up in a
feeling that is Christlike and Godlike or into
a feeling that is worthy only of the devil !
We must be on our guard. There is
nothing our Master so vehemently forbids
and denounces as selfish anger — vindictive
anger that makes it a pleasure to retaliate
upon those who cause us injury or annoy
ance. Such resentment Jesus absolutely
repudiates. So far as our own feeling is
concerned we must be ready always to
turn the other cheek. I do not say, that it
is not possible to feel a pure and righteous
anger against a wrong done to ourselves,
just as if it were done to another. But there
we have a duty and a prerogative superior
even to just resentment, the power and the
duty of forgiveness. There we can set our
selves beside Christ on the Cross, and say,
" Father, forgive."
But when wrong is done against others,
especially against the weak and helpless, then
as Christians we are called upon to show the
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The Anger of Jesus
anger of love, the anger that makes men
bold and outspoken in defence of the right.
Let it be said again with distinctness that
love like that of Jesus Christ is full of anger.
" It looks on the rich man, and then it looks
on Lazarus rotting at his gate ; on the poory
struggling for bread, then on the monopolists
who keep food prices artificially high ; on
the abandoned girl of the streets, then on
the man who betrayed her and on the men
who seek their pleasure at the cost of her
shame. A feeble and negative benignity can
observe these wrongs and be unstirred ; but
a man might better call on the mountains and
hills to cover him than stand naked and
defenceless against the indignation they
excite in the Lamb of God." We need such
anger.^ There is a high sphere for anger in
the Christian life. Whatever injures men in
body or soul, in the individual or in the
community, we are to be its enemy. Christ
is the gentle Shepherd of the sheep ; but
because He is the Good Shepherd He is the
relentless foe of the wolves and robbers.
And if we forget His hatred of wrong and
x°5

The Emotions of Jesus
anger against it, we become ineffective
Christians, incapable of a great indignation,
tongue-tied in the presence of corruption,
the sugar possibly, but not ' the salt of the
earth. Yet once more let us fix it in our minds
that the anger of Jesus is the anger of love.
Because His love is so vast, His anger is so
terrible. May -He who has left us His
example and promised us His Spirit that we
may walk in His steps, make us partakers of
His whole nature, and fit us for all the work
He seeks at our hands I

106

VI
THE WONDER OF JESUS

" The tokens of man's highest nature lie not in his being able
to comprehend, but in his ability to feel that there are things
which he cannot comprehend, and which he yet feels to be true
and real, before which he is compelled to fall down in reverent
awe." — John Ker.

VI
THE WONDER OF JESUS
"When Jesus heard these things, He marvelled at him,
and turned Him about, and said unto the people that
followed Him, I say unto you, I have not found so great
faith, no, not in Israel." — St. Luke vii. 9.
" And He marvelled because of their unbelief." — St.
Mark vi. 6. r
Wonder is the emotion awakened by any
object or event, trivial or sublime, which we
do not fully comprehend ; and it ranges
from the merely transient feeling of surprise
at an unexpected occurrence, to the feeling of
adoration and religious awe with which we
contemplate the being, attributes, and works
of God. In its lower forms wonder is a
merely transient feeling, due to ignorance
or the sense of novelty, as when a child is
lost in amazement at a conjurer's tricks, or a
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The Emotions of Jesus
savage at the report of firearms. As soon as
the operation is understood or the novelty
becomes familiar, wonder ceases. Yet even
this rudimentary kind of wonder is of vast
importance in human life. It stimulates
curiosity, the healthy inquisitiveness of the
child, the explorer, the scientist ; the eager
desire to know the world in which we live,
and the nature and causes of the things it
contains. Such wonder, as Bacon said, is the
seed of knowledge.
Wonder in its higher kinds is the tribute
our souls pay to that in which we see some
thing of an ideal .greatness, beauty, nobility,
or strength,1 the admiration which rises at its
highest to worship. Such wonder is the
emotional source of man's loftiest aspirations,
the mother and nurse of the highest poetry
and art, the highest philosophy and the highest
religion. Wonder, admiration, reverence is
one of the few things by which the soul
really grows. And it is a part of our nature
1 The opposites of these also call forth wonder.
Wickedness has its marvels as well as goodness 5 unbelief
as well as faith.
IIO

The Wonder of Jesus
which is miserably neglected by many of us.
We live in a world of petty, commonplace
things, because our own thinking is so super
ficial and our interests so petty. And we
seek, vainly seek, escape from this dull and
commonplace world by rushing hither and
thither after novelties, while we are blind to
the beauty and grandeur before our eyes —
nature with its glory of sunset and evening
star, its miracle of flower and tree, the
pictures of heaven and earth ; human life
with its daily miracles of love and faith and
self-sacrifice. The mountain is full of horses
and chariots of fire if only we have eyes to
see and souls to feel.

i. The Astonishment of Jesus.
Though little is directly reported of it
in the Gospels, this also belonged to the
perfection of our Lord Jesus. No one has
ever lived in such a marvellous world as He,
to whom "the glory in the grass and
splendour in the flower " continually revealed
the diviner miracle of a Heavenly Father's
in

The Emotions of Jesus
munificent love and care. No one ever felt
as He did the wonder of God — the infinite
majesty and the infinite tenderness, the
infinite purity and infinite forgivingness of
God. No one has ever felt as He did the
wonder of man, of the human soul with its
heights and depths, its heroisms of love and
loyalty, virtue and self-sacrifice, its marvels
too of baseness and ingratitude — the amazing-
ness of sin.
Yet it was not the virtues or the vices of
men that most excited the wonder of Jesus.
What ,He is expressly said to have shown
Himself astonished at was their faith arid
unbelief. When He came to His own and
His own received Him not, He was stirred
out of His habitual calm. He was not taken
by surprise. He recognized that His was
the common experience of God's messengers :
"A prophet is not without honour, save in
his own country and among his own kin."
Still, He marvelled at it. Such blindness,
such perversity is really amazing, nor does it
become less so by repetition. And when
He came to those to whom He was a
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The Wonder of Jesus
stranger, like a Roman centurion or a woman
of Canaan, and they showed a penetrating
insight into His character, and received Him
with prompt welcome and vigorous faith,
again He marvelled. It was wonderful that
they whose faith had such distances to travel
and such obstacles to surmount should unerr
ingly find their way to Him — a thing to think
upon with wondering thankfulness.
The instance of faith which specially
excited His wonder and admiration was that
of a Roman officer, who, when he sought
from Jesus the healing of a favourite slave,
expressed his conviction that Jesus could
bring this about from the spot where He
was standing as easily as by His actual
presence at the sick-bed. " For I myself,"
he says, " am a man of subordinate rank,
owing obedience to my superiors ; and I
again have under me soldiers, and when I
say to one, Go, he goeth ; and to another,
Come, he cometh ; and to my servant, Do
this, he doeth it" And he is sure that Jesus
in the region of His activity is vested with an
authority no less efficacious and far-reaching.
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The Emotions of Jesus
If at the word of a centurion the well-drilled
cohort moved like a piece of perfect
mechanism, at the word of Jesus the legions
of heaven, the angels of healing, will
instantly obey. It was at this Jesus mar
velled. He had never before found faith
like this, so swift yet so sure, flying like an
arrow to the heart of truth. He had not
found it in His own disciples ; He had not
found it in all Israel, not in a single repre
sentative of a nation whose history was shot
through with religious ideas and hopes. It
was reserved for this Gentile, this mere
hanger-on to the skirts of the Chosen People,
to form this original and daring conception
of Christ's power, to see under the humble
exterior of the Prophet of Nazareth the great
Commander of the invisible powers of the
Kingdom of God, and to set on His head
the Messiah's crown.
It is evident that the element of unex
pectedness entered into this wonder of Jesus.
To find such faith in such a quarter was to
come upon an Elim in an arid wilderness.
The centurion was a pioneer soul, who
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The Wonder of Jesus
followed no man's lead, but made a path in
which others should follow. The story of
every mission field has to tell of such pioneer
souls ; everywhere, indeed, they are the
makers of history in the Kingdom of God.
Yet our Lord's wonder is not merely the
wonder of surprise ; it is the deeper wonder
of admiration. Such faith as the centurion's
is wonderful in itself, not merely because
of its exceptional circumstances. There is
something marvellous in all religious faith.
So marvellous is it that to Jesus it once
seemed a question worth asking, whether at
His coming He should find faith in the
earth. We think it wonderful if any man is
an infidel, whereas really it is much more
marvellous that any man is a believer. Just
as we esteem it strange if any one is dumb,
or lacks any of his senses, or is an idiot,
whereas the true marvel is not dumbness but
speech, not idiocy but intelligence ; so, I say,
the most wonderful thing about the human
soul is not its worldliness, its atheism, but is
its persistent and unconquerable faith in God
and the spiritual world.
H5

The Emotions of Jesus
2. The Wonder of Faith.
Faith ! We cannot even express what faith
is except in the language of paradox. It is
to see Him that is invisible ; to look not at
the things that are seen, but at things that
are not seen. It is to be assured of the
reality of what we cannot prove. It is to
possess a certainty which we cannot com
municate, and which to those who do not
share it is quite irrational or, indeed, unin
telligible. How wonderful it is,1 if we only
think of it, to see a congregation of people
joining in the worship of God ; rising in
praise and bowing down in prayer — to
whom ? To a Being they have never seen
or heard or felt. There is nothing palpable
around them but the sounds and sights
of earth. Yet they offer praise and prayer,
because they believe that such a Being is
present in their midst — the King eternal,
immortal, invisible. This, I say, is wonder
ful. No man from the beginning of the
world has ever seen God, has ever heard His
1 I am indebted to Newman for this illustration.
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The Wonder of Jesus
voice, or touched His hand in its working,
or traced His footprints. Men have longed
in vain for the vision of God : " Oh that I
knew where I might find Him ! that I might
come even to His seat ! . . . Behold, I go
forward, but He is not there ; and backward,
but I cannot find Him." And yet in so speak
ing they have but testified their faith. In
the same moment that they have said, " He
hideth Himself, that I cannot see Him,"
they have said also, "Whither shall I go
from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee
from Thy spirit ? " Surely, one may marvel
at this.
There are so many things, moreover, that
are fitted to shake man's faith in God. The
world has often a godless look. It does not
inevitably appeal to one as a world that a
God of infinite benevolence, wisdom, and
power has made and presides over. The
contention between materialism and a
spiritual faith, the question whether there is
in the universe that confronts us a conscience
corresponding to that within us, whether the
world of facts is obedient to a law of right,
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The Emotions of Jesus
or whether might is the only ultimate right
— this is a debate which runs through
the whole history of human thought, and
is tugging at us to-day as hard as ever. And
sometimes it does seem as if unbelief has
the best of the argument, as if " all things
happen alike to all," and life is all a chance
lottery rather than the careful plan of a wise
and loving Father. Yet men believe.
Faith in the Divine order is rooted in the
deepest instincts of our souls, and persist
ently reasserts itself, the stronger for each
rebuff. Then also, there are so many things in
ourselves that are obstacles to faith. Our
natural passions and cravings ally us to the
present world and make it hard for us to live
above it. The world has so much to offer
us that we want, home, business, literature,
society, politics, work, recreation, pleasures
and pains so various and so potent — it lays
upon us so many hands to which we readily
respond, that it is difficult to feel that God is
the supreme reality, and His service our
portion for ever. And when in spite of all
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The Wonder of Jesus
this you believe in God with a lively faith, is
not this wonderful ? When you resist the
temptations of pleasure or gain, and patiently
hold to the path of duty and self-denial
because you believe in the righteous and
faithful God ; when you are content amid
poverty because God is yours, at rest under
the stress of responsibility and care because
you believe in a God who is caring for you ;
when your life is cut from its familiar
moorings and you are out upon strange,
uncharted waters, and yet have an anchor to
your souls because you believe in God ; and
when you have peace in your soul and an
everlasting hope because you believe in a God
whose love bears the whole burden of your
sin — then, I think, Christ Himself must
marvel and rejoice at your faith. For a
weak human being in a world like this to
have such faith is wonderful. It is a mystery.
You cannot explain it. " Can you explain
how the flowers turn to the sunlight ; the
needle to the pole ? It is because they are
made for it." So our souls are made for
God. 119

The Emotions of Jesus
If we consider any of the great religious
truths which spring as corollaries from belief
in God through Jesus Christ, the creative
power which made all things, the Providence
without which not a sparrow falleth to the
ground, Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrec
tion, it may be said of all that they are
staggering. While they are merely articles
of a traditional creed, they do not disturb
our mental equilibrium ; but no one has
known the power of any great religious
truth until, in one way or another, he
has come to feel how ineffably wonderful
it is. Take, for example, faith in the life to
come. How strange a faith that is for
men, whose days are as grass ; how marvel
lous that men should cling so tenaciously to
that conviction ! Death does seem to be the
end of all. Change ending in decay and
dissolution is written on the face of every
thing around us. Man, too, dies and returns
to his dust ; graves are heaped up from age
to age, and lie silent and undisturbed.
These things we know ; these things we see.
1 20

The Wonder of Jesus
The " baffling, sad enigma " is before us day
after day ; and "To our graves we walk
In the thick footprints of departed men."
And no mortal eye has once seen a ray of
light from any land beyond. No one has
ever returned to tell us of it. No voice, no
whisper has reached as out of that silence.
The curtain has never been lifted. Sunset
and evening star, and after that — the dark !
And yet, marvellously, in the face of all this
the human soul has clung to the conviction
that the grave is not its goal, and has thrust
the daring hand of faith through the screen
of mystery, to grasp a larger life beyond.
Men have not seen that other world ; they
cannot by any demonstration prove its exist
ence ; still they firmly believe in it, and
multitudes live for it and press eagerly
toward the mark for the prize. This, I say,
is wonderful. I say that there is nothing in
man, no gift of genius, no force of will so
marvellous as this faith in God and the
Life Eternal, which Christ inspires. When
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The Emotions of Jesus
we think what men and women of common
clay like ourselves have done and suffered
for the sake of a God they have never seen
and a heaven beyond the clouds, — how they
have patiently suffered the loss of all things,
and have mounted the fiery pile with joy,
clasping their faith to their hearts, as a king
the crown which is his glory, or a miser the
gold which is his treasure, — this surely is the
most marvellous spectacle earth has to show.
We do not half feel the wonderfulness of
it. We are conscious chiefly of the flaws
and imperfections of our faith. We feel how
weak and struggling and ineffective it is.
We do not see the glory, nor feel the
grandeur of it. But one day we shall.
What looks mean and meagre under the grey
skies of earth will shine out in its proper
splendour in the sunshine of Christ's mani
fested presence. To have such faith in
God, in the eternal life of righteousness
and love, is the highest of which the human
soul is capable. It is the triumph of the
Divine in man. Christ Himself marvels
at it. 122

The Wonder of Jesus
And there is no question so central to our
life as this : Have we this faith ? There
the one broad issue for us all — this faith in
God and eternity, in Jesus Christ as the
Revealer of God and Saviour of men, is true
or it is false. We may have our different
interpretations of this faith ; but, broadly, it
is true or it is false. And it makes all the
difference there can be, whether it is eternal
fact, or all dream and delusion. Have we
unequivocally settled with ourselves the
question : If this faith is true, what does it
signify for me ? What course ought I to
follow ? What must I do to be saved, and
to save others ? Let us meet Christ with a
mind as frank and sincere and simple as the
centurion's. Christianity may present many
difficulties, intellectual and, still more,
practical difficulties ; but to those who look
plainly at plain issues, and give honest
answers to honest questions, Christ always
says " Follow me " ; and in Him, more and
more as they follow Him, they find the Way,
the Truth, the Life. 123

The Emotions of Jesus
3. The Marvel of Unbelief.
Let us consider, for a moment, one other
astonishment of Jesus. He marvelled joy
fully, thankfully, at the centurion's faith.
No less did He marvel, sorrowfully, as if it
were almost too bad to be true, at the un
belief of the men of Nazareth. Never as
yet had He suffered so bitter an experience of
blind unreasonableness and moral perversity
as now, among the people of His own native
town. For they were profoundly impressed by
Him. The facility and felicity of His speech,
the arresting and powerful thoughts which
flowed from His lips in an uninterrupted
stream of graceful and eloquent utterance,
moved them to astonishment. But ;t moved
what was worst in them. They resented it.
His marvellous superiority to themselves
was a thing they could neither understand
nor tolerate. From whence hath this man
these things ? they muttered in their chagrin.
Is He not one of ourselves ? Jesus the village
carpenter ? By what right has He become
a star to shine above us all ? So the little
124

The Wonder of Jesus
men of Nazareth were offended in the Great
Man of Nazareth. They could not account
for His originality, His wisdom, His mighty
works ; but with a really wonderful perver
sity they made the very reasons for believing
on Him, reasons for being offended in Him.
Well might Jesus marvel at their unbelief.
There is the same cause, or rather far
greater cause, for marvel in the unbelief of men
to-day. This inexplicable person, Jesus of
Nazareth, is with us still, and is more in
explicable than ever. This Jesus, this poor
Jew, this carpenter of Nazareth, has become
the Christ, the revolutionizer of men's spirit
ual life and of the world's history, whose
mighty works are in every quarter of the
globe, in whom coundess millions have found
the inspiration of their lives, whom even un
belief shrinks from putting on a level with
the noblest and best of men. He is still the
unaccountable man, more unaccountable now
than He was to the men of Nazareth. And
if Jesus marvelled at the unbelief of His
compatriots and contemporaries, much more
may He marvel at the unbelief of men to-
125

The Emotions of Jesus
day. The flimsiness of many of its pretexts ;
the paltry considerations for which men some
times say, " I am done with Christianity ; no
more religion for me ! " the blindness of
men to the highest and best when it is
set before them ; yes, and the sheer vanity
which sometimes prompts the profession of
unbelief, the intellectual pride which scorns
the " little children " of faith, and declines
to be set on the same level as the humble
believer — all this gives a view of human
nature which, in a melancholy sense, is
marvellous. But if Christ marvels at the unbelief of
unbelievers, still more does He marvel at
that of believers. It was so of old. How
often He expressed a sad surprise at the un
belief of His own chosen friends and disciples !
Where is your faith ? How is it ye have so
little faith ? He says to the disciples in the
storm. We do not wonder at their panic.
When the deep hurls its billows upon men,
making them the playthings of its awful sport,
gaping upon them with the jaws of death, we
do not wonder at men being seized with that
126

The Wonder of Jesus
blind overmastering fear which sweeps away
all reason, reverence, and self-control. It is
human nature, the last infirmity even of the
brave. But Jesus wondered at it in His
disciples ; He wondered at it, because these
men actually had faith. The faith they failed
to display was the faith they not only pro
fessed but possessed. Where was their
faith ? the Master asked. They had lost
grip of it when they had most need of it,
like the raw recruit who in action loses his
head, drops his rifle, or in his nervousness
forgets to fire it at the critical moment.
What is faith for but to make a man some
thing else than a bundle of unstrung nerves in
the hour of trial ; the conqueror, not the
demoralized victim, of circumstances ? And
if Jesus marvelled at their unbelief, how often
has He reason to marvel at ours ! We believe
in the Christ who died for sin ; strange that
men who so believe should sometimes act as
if wrong-doing were of less consequence than
some loss of money or deprivation of enjoy
ment. We believe in a God who cares for us
and guides us through all the intricacies and
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The Emotions of Jesus
dangers of this changeful life ; strange that
we so often succumb to the fret and fever of
anxiety and the tremors of fear ! We believe
that only in the service of God's will can we
find true freedom, only in the love of God
and our fellow-men true joy and strength ;
is it not strange that we do not seek to enter
more completely into this greater life, that
we do not launch out upon the deep, but
still hug the shore of lower aims, anxieties,
and ambitions ? We know that if we firmly
believed in and acted upon what we do believe,
the real things, the eternal things, love, truth,
faithfulness, kindness, the life of service,
Christ as a living presence with us and in us,
all things would be possible to us, and we
should be blessed above all that the world can
give. We know that if the whole Church fully
and firmly believed and felt and acted upon
what it does believe, the world would soon be
absolutely transformed. Sin and shame would
flee away, the Kingdom of God would be
here. And we know that, weak as we are, it is
in God's power and will to work this in us ;
and knowing this, and knowing how wonder-
128

The Wonder of Jesus
fui and divine a thing is a true and living
faith, let us prize and seek it above all else.
There are three great ways God has of in
creasing our faith, if we will. First, Duty —
doing His Will. Nothing makes more real to
ourselves all that we believe than prompdy
to do it ; especially when it goes against our
own will and inclination. And then, Suffering.
It is to enlarge and educate our faith that all
our trials and temptations are appointed.
And then, in all and through all, Worship,
the Word of God, and Prayer, looking in all
things unto Jesus, who is both the Author
and Perfecter of Faith.

129

VII
STRAITENED !

" And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not : behold,
the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed
to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof And I
beheld and, lo, . . a Lamb as it had been slain. " — Revelation
or St. John.

VII
STRAITENED !
" And it came to pass, when the time was come that He
should be received up, He stedfastly set His face to go
to Jerusalem." — St. Luke ix. 51.
" I have a baptism to be baptized with ; and how am I
straitened till it be accomplished ! " — St. Luke xii. 50.
It is no slight alleviation of the grievous
things in human life that they are for the
most part unforeseen, or at least are not
clearly and circumstantially foreseen. There
are places of pain and sorrow through which
we know our path must some day lead, but
a merciful obscurity veils them from our
eyes ; and thus the very weakness of our
nature becomes in some sort a shelter from
its troubles. But when Jesus set His face
to go to Jerusalem it was with a clear view
of what should befall Him there — we may
133

The Emotions of Jesus
even say that it was because He had in a
sense decided to die. From the beginning
the life of Jesus had been a going up to
Jerusalem, like a stream which with all its
windings is always making for the ocean.
At first unconsciously, then more and more
consciously as the Father's will unfolded
itself to Him, and at last with deliberate
intention, He takes the predestined way.
The cross, no longer looming vague in the
distance, has become a vivid and imminent
reality. " Behold," He says to the disciples,
"we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of
Man shall be delivered unto the chief priests,
and unto the scribes ; and they shall condemn
Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the
Gentiles : and they shall mock Him, and
shall scourge Him, and shall spit upon Him,
and shall kill Him."
The genuineness of these predictions has,
as might be expected, been denied by many
critics, but is substantially confirmed by the
narrative with which they are incorporated,
revealing, as it does, by many subtle and
uncalculated touches the extraordinary tension
«34

Straitened !
of feeling under which our Lord made that
last journey to Jerusalem. We hear it in
the Master's words, which are more than
usually abrupt, solemn, and peremptory, de
manding of men that concentrated, white-
hot enthusiasm which regards all secondary
interests, however precious, almost as enemies.1
We see it even in His bodily appearance.
As He went down into the Valley of the
Shadow there was that in His bearing and in
the expression of His countenance that struck
awe to the hearts of His followers. The
disciples, as St. Mark tells, "were amazed,
and as they followed were afraid " (x. 32).
St. Luke's phrase is more definitely descriptive.
"He stedfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem,"
literally rendered, He " stiffened " His face,
hardened it, set His face like a flint 2 to go
to Jerusalem. That Face of Jesus, lips
clenched, eyes fixed and gleaming, every
1 e.g. Luke ix. 59-62, xiv. 26. Jesus felt as never
before what the Kingdom of God required of men,
because He felt as never before what it required of
Himself. 2 The word is taken from the Greek version of Isa. 1. 7.
135

The Emotions of Jesus
feature tense with the emotion of resolute,
unyielding purpose, is one of the great
pictures of the Gospels. It bids us look and
marvel, sympathize and imitate.

I. Strength perfected in Weakness.
It bids us think once more, what it was to
which Jesus was setting His face — Jerusalem.
Sometimes it is given to God's soldier-saints
to lay down their lives at God's feet in a
blaze of unpremeditated sacrifice. The call
comes, and they are ready. A leap into the
dark, and " the black minute's at end," and
"sudden the worst turns the best to the
brave." Oftener they go forward like St.
Paul on the path of duty and danger, not
knowing certainly what things shall befall
them. How different was the ordeal through
which the stedfastness of Jesus had to pass.
He had a baptism to be baptized with, and
no warm wave of impulse must carry Him
through ; in no paroxysm of exalted passion
must He reach His goal and snatch the
crown of victory. Deliberately — knowing,
136

Straitened !
feeling, choosing all — He must foretaste the
cup prepared for Him. Jesus may have seen
crucifixions : He knew at least what cruci
fixion was ; what it meant for Himself, for
the followers who had placed their trust in
Him, for the miserable men who should db
the deed, for the nation He loved. And this
was the thing He had to confront ; into this
black shadow He walked, stedfasdy setting
His face to go to Jerusalem. That Face of
Jesus — what a mirror it is of grim resolve,
of deadly determination, of a will that is
braced to a supreme effort, putting forth all
its force in resistance to a mighty antagonism !
This is a side of our Lord's character
that is not often made prominent. We
think of Him, and delight to think of Him,
as the embodiment of all gentle, passive
virtues. " He is led as a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb,
so He openeth not His mouth." Yes, but
how are we taught here that the submissive-
ness of Jesus was the yielding, not of weak
ness but of strength ; that all this passive
side of His nature was balanced and com-
137

The Emotions of Jesus
pleted by His uniting with it, in equal per
fection, all those qualities and dispositions
that form the heroic type of character —
intrepid courage, unwavering resolution, the
fortitude which shrinks from no ordeal, bends
to no opposition, but braves and overcomes all
that stands between it and its purpose ? And
yet there are to-day critics of Christ who scoff
at His meekness as weakness ; who tell us
that Christianity breeds a servile and effemin
ate character ; who speak of the " pale and
bloodless Nazarene," and bid men throw off
His yoke, and live a virile, full-blooded life.
Surely they have no understanding, and the
light that is in them is darkness. We
think of a Paul saying, " None of these things
move me, neither count I my life dear unto
myself, that I might finish my course with
joy " ; of a Luther, when they tell him that
he must not go to Leipzig because the
Duke will lay hands upon him, replying,
" Though it should rain Dukes for three
days, yet will I go to Leipzig " ; of Living
stone on his last terrible journey, with death
knocking at the door, vowing and praying
138

Straitened !
day by day, " Nothing will make me give
up my task. May the good Lord help me
to show myself one of His stout-hearted
servants " ; of the men who yesterday and
to-day are doing battle with falsehood and
wrong, "Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Yet their stedfastness is but a faint reflec
tion of their Master's. When we see Jesus
setting His face to go to Jerusalem, striding
on to the cross as men march to the con
summation of their dearest hopes or struggle
upward to the summit of their most cherished
ambitions, we feel and know that here courage,
fortitude, strength of will have reached the
absolute limit of possibility, that such words
need an expanded meaning to cover the case.
If we would be men indeed, we must learn
of Christ.
But if we get a glimpse here of invincible
strength, we get a glimpse too of the weak
ness in which that strength is perfected.
That Face of Jesus Christ — what does it tell
139

The Emotions of Jesus
us ? It tells of victory, but victory at the
cost of inward conflict — victory which is first
of all victory over self. It tells of effort,
supreme effort ; and effort always means
strength, but always it means weakness too.
It means strength that is taxed, strength
triumphing over weakness and made perfect
in weakness. Do we derogate from the
perfection of Jesus in so speaking ? Nay,
we but enhance it. All human virtues
depend for their very possibility upon the
presence of their natural opposites. Were
there no such thing as fear, there could be
no moral grandeur in courage; no natural
shrinking from pain, then no such virtue as
fortitude, which is not insensibility to pain,
but triumph over it ; no natural tendency
to succumb to difficulties, then no such
virtue as perseverance. Strength always
needs weakness as the background for the
display of its loftiest perfection. So,
when we see that set face of Jesus Christ,
those rigid features, those sternly fixed eyes,
how it reveals to us one steeling Himself
against Himself, moving on through the
140

Straitened !
scene of His tribulation, not with the impas
sive gait and unmoved countenance of a
God, but with the effort, the tears, the
tremblings, and heart struggles of a man,
every step a victory over flesh and blood !
And we ourselves know what human
weakness is, what human fears and tremblings
are ; and from this side of experience we
may try to conceive, very faintly to conceive,
what our redemption cost our Redeemer —
how He had to overcome Himself and fight
down every weakness of the flesh ; how
He stands before us as conqueror in a real
conflict ; how He yielded Himself up by a
most real submission under the awful hand
of God, and not only at the last, but at
many a step up to that last, endured the
cross and despised the shame.
The significance of this exalted example
for our own lives is plainly written. There
are features in the spirit of Jesus which it is
possible to behold and even to admire without
immediately desiring them for oneself, such,
for example, as His meekness and lowliness
of heart ; but one does not need to be a
141

The Emotions of Jesus
Christian to desire to be strong of will. It
is only as men are resolute that they are to
be reckoned upon. He who is firm in will
moulds the world to himself : in every
region of life the chief cause of failure to
rise to the height of one's possibilities is the
lack of coherent and tenacious purpose ; and
though firmness of will is in itself neither
Christian nor moral, it is indispensable to
all moral and all Christian attainment. Un
less religion can help us here, can not only
direct the energies of the will upon the
noblest objects, but in doing so bring to it
Divine reinforcements to raise it above the
ordinary human level, it offers no sufficing
message of hope for mankind.
2. The Source of Strength.
Perhaps the first thing we need to take
into account is that strength of will is
not self-created or self-evoked. I can no
more make myself strong by saying, " I will
be strong," than I can fill my lungs in
a vacuum. The human will cannot set itself
142

Straitened !
in motion nor keep itself in motion ; it can
act at all only in response to some influence
acting upon it. The will is moved by the
emotions, and our emotions are fed by our
thoughts, our visions and ideals. Strong and
persistent effort of will is only the active
outcome of prolonged and repeated concen
tration of the mind upon the end we have
in view, until we are, as it were, obsessed by
it and held in its grasp.
So was it with our Lord Himself. Look at
those stedfast forward-gazing eyes of Jesus.
What is it they are fixed upon ? Before
Him is the blinding smoke and dust of
battle ; but beyond it all He sees His joy,
the crowning awful task accomplished, the
eternal victory won. So He Himself inter
prets for us that Face stedfastly set to go
to Jerusalem. "I have a baptism to be
baptized with ; and how am I straitened till
it be accomplished ! " Already He had passed
through one baptism. In the waters of
Jordan He had once for all responded to the
Divine call. Every power of His sinless
manhood, and every Divine heightening
143

The Emotions of Jesus
of that power, had been devoted to the
single aim of bringing Israel to repentance,
and preparing a people in whom the Kingdom
of God's fatherly will should be realized.
And He had failed. Now He saw that He
had another baptism to be baptized with.
He had come by water, as St. John says ;
but there was that in the need of men, and
there was that in the love of God which not
water but blood only could satisfy. ' His life,
with all its fulness of spiritual power, must go
down beneath the chill wave of death that it
might rise to become the new life of the
world. " And how am I straitened," He says,
" till it be accomplished ! " This Divine
necessity has laid its hand upon Him ; it
holds Him with constraining grasp ; He is
its prisoner. In days of brooding thought
and nights of prayer He has filled His soul
with it ; and it has kindled in Him a flame
of unquenchable resolve. " How am I
straitened ! " 'He says. He has no liberty,
no power to turn to the right hand or to the
left, until it is accomplished. His whole
soul is bound up in it, as it were compressed
144

Straitened !
into a single wedge of purpose, cleaving its
way to the moment when He shall say of
this awful baptism, " It is finished."
We see in our Lord's own stedfastness
the attraction of a supreme, compelling
motive. That word " attraction " holds the
secret alike of firmness and weakness of
will. The Epistle of James, you remember,
compares the double-minded, unstable man
to the surge of the sea, " driven of the wind
and tossed." Yet so unstable a thing as
water is rendered stable by the power of
attraction. There is nothing unstable about
the tide ; no clock made by man was ever
so punctual in its movements ; for the tide
follows the moon, and the unstable element
appropriates the stability of the heavenly
body it obeys. So is it with ourselves.
My strength of will is no independent
strength ; it is a derived strength, the
strength of the attraction that draws me. It
is ours to choose between the attractions,
good and bad, primary and secondary, which
our vision of life reveals, and to confirm our
choice by keeping the vision fresh before us.
H5

The Emotions of Jesus
But always strength and pertinacity of pur
pose are in proportion to the power with
which some object, be it truth or illusion,
has laid hold upon us. If you would will
strongly, think deeply, see clearly, keep look
ing straight onward. Where your gaze
penetrates, your face will be stedfastly set
to go.
But as we look at that Face, we see a
second element in the stedfastness of Jesus.
If He fixes His eyes upon the victory lying
beyond, this does not blind Him to the
batde lying in front. Nothing in this last
period of our Lord's ministry is more re
markable than the deliberate persistence with
which He dwells upon the horrors through
which He has to go. We might have
thought that He would spare Himself such
anticipations — some might account it wisdom
to do so ; but He who was always so urgent
on others to count the cost Himself felt the
need. He gazes unshrinkingly into the
tremendous cloud which must soon envelop
Him. He thinks of the cross, talks of it,
gazes upon the face of His agony until it
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Straitened !
becomes familiar. Thus He arms Him
for the fight ; for obstacles only strengthen
His resolution, and the stedfast Face is set
only the more stedfasdy to go to Jerusalem.1
Let us take a lesson from the Master. A
principal cause of that infirmity of purpose
which more or less we all confess to, is that
we do not adequately reckon with the diffi
culties to be overcome. We see some
object, some amendment of our own life, as
greatly to be desired ; and straightway we
resolve upon it. Cheerfully we promise it
to ourselves, and feel as if it were already as
good as done. We do not lay our account
with the desperate difficulty of really lifting
our life out of any deep rut it has worn for
itself, the stubborn opposition which the
world of facts offers to any attempt to make
the ideal real. And so time after time we
fail. Our ship is too lightly ballasted, too
weakly engined for the voyage, and when
the storm descends it is driven out of its
course, or is overturned and sunk. A re-
1 This thought is admirably expanded by Phillips
Brooks. 147

The Emotions of Jesus
solve lightly made is always a resolve easily
broken. If there is a threatening obstacle in your
way, a heavy task, a bitter struggle, a cross
grievous to be borne, learn from the Master
to look it full in the face. Do not bandage
your eyes. That is in every way fatal.
Not only does the trial when it comes find
you unprepared, with " unlit lamp and ungirt
loin " ; you lose the stimulus which opposi
tion gives. Look once more on that resolute
Face. What does it tell us but this : that
the most heroic energies of the will are
aroused only by antagonism, that courage
thrives on difficulties, that for the true soul
deterrents are incitements, enemies are
helpers, the task grappled with brings the
power, and hindrances pave the way to victory.
And yet I have not mentioned the sov
ereign element in the stedfastness of Jesus,
and in all stedfastness like His — the power
of God. I have said that the stedfastness of
the will is that of the object which attracts it.
I have compared it to the influence of the
moon upon the tide. Upon the tide, yes I
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Straitened !
But it is the attraction of the sun that keeps
the whole earth in its orbit. There is a
moon which draws in its train the tide of
your life — your profession, your fortune,
your home, your political interests, your
philanthropic or religious work. But like
the moon, all such objects wax and wane,
and they attract and give firmness only to a
portion of your life. It is the Sun we need.
God who alone is the eternal, unchangeable
reality, God who is the moral Omnipotent,
from whom our souls can derive sovereign
strength. What is it that finally we see in
that Face set to go to Jerusalem ? Power,
yes, the power that alone is absolute and
invincible, the power of God, the strength of
the Eternal Spirit, the omnipotence of love
and truth and righteousness. No other
power can explain that journey to Jerusalem.
We know the vast power of sin and the
world over men. Everywhere we see its
deadly work. But no sinner ever went
deliberately to crucifixion for the sake of
his indulgence ; no hater for the sake of his
hatred ; no slave of avarice for the sake of
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The Emotions of Jesus
his gain ; no ambitious man for his kingdom.
But in the power of His Divine love for
sinful men, in the assurance that thus He
would open to them new fountains of life,
Jesus stedfastly set His face even to the
cross, once for all showing how our humanity
can be filled with the moral omnipotence of
the Divine. And millions, looking upon the
face of the Captain of their salvation, have in
their weakness laid hold upon His strength.
Those who have followed the Christ, who
have lived to do the will of God, who have
seen the work given them to do or cross to
bear, and, trusting in their Leader, have set
their face to go to their Jerusalem, have
never failed.
There is the strength that endures and
conquers all — " Be strong in the Lord, and in
the power of His might." If at the last you
would be found, though with many a stumble
and many a fall, in the way everlasting, your
faces set heavenward, seek the Lord Jesus
and His strength.

150

BIBLIOGRAPHY

On the general subject of the emotions, The
Human Mind, by James Sully (Longmans),
but especially The Emotions and the Will, by
Alexander Bain (Longmans), are useful.
The Foundations of Character, by Alexander
F. Shand (Macmillan & Co. ; 19 14) was
issued too late to be of service for the
present volume, but from the portions of it
\ have read, I judge that the preacher will
find in it much that is to his advantage.
Of literature explicitly on the emotions of
Jesus I know none except Professor War-
field's scholarly essay in the Princeton
Biblical and Theological Studies (Scribner's
Sons ; 1 9 1 2) and the helpful articles in
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible and
Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels. Among
151

Bibliography
books dealing with the life of Christ as a
whole, Stalker's Imago Christi (Hodder &
Stoughton), Bousset's Jesus (Williams &
Norgate), and Stopford A. Brooke's The
Early Life of Jesus (David Stott, London^;
1888) may be mentioned; among books
on the Gospels, commentaries and expo
sitions, Chadwick's St. yMark ("Exposi
tor's Bible Series"), W. M. Macgregor's
Jesus Christ the Son of God (Scribners).
As a matter of fact, however, the liter
ature dealing with the emotions of Jesus
consists chiefly of individual expositions
and sermons. The subjoined references
to some of these are given according to
the order of topics followed in this volume.
I. A. B. Bruce, D.D., The Galilean
Gospel (Hodder & Stoughton),
pp. 197 ff.; John Clifford, D.D.,
The Gospel of Gladness (Scrib
ners), pp. 1 ff.
2. Stopford A. Brooke, M.A., The
Fight of Faith (Kegan Paul),
pp. 19 ff.; Alexander Maclaren,
152

Bibliography
D.D., Christ's Musts (Alexander
& Shepheard), pp. 33 ff.
A. B. Bruce, D.D., The Galilean
Gospel (Hodder & Stoughton),
pp. 128 ff.; Alexander Maclaren,
D.D., Christ in the Heart (Hod
der & Stoughton), pp. 65 ff.;
James Rutherford, B.D., The
Seer's House (Scribners), pp.
99 ff . ; Ecce Homo (Macmillan
& Co.), pp. 147 ff., 170 ff.
A. B. Bruce, D.D., The Galilean
Gospel (Hodder & Stoughton),
pp. 73 ff.; Alexander Maclaren,
D.D., Christ's Musts (Alexander
& Shepheard), pp. 228 ff.; John
Clifford, D.D., The Gospel of
Gladness (Scribners), pp. 158 ff.;
J. Oswald Dykes, D.D., Ser
mons (James Nisbet & Co.),
pp. 356 ff.; F. W. Robertson,
M. A., Sermons, First Series (Ke-
gan Paul), pp. 99 ff.
John, Clifford, D.D., The Gos
pel of Gladness (Scribners), pp.
153

Bibliography
145 ff.; W. Robertson Nicoll,
D.D., The Lamb of God (Hodder
& Stoughton) ; pp. 107 ff.
6. A. B. Bruce, D.D., The Galilean
Gospel (Hodder & Stoughton), pp.
146 ff. ; John Ker, D.D., Sermons,
Second Series (David Douglas),
pp. 83 ff. ; Samuel Cox, D.D.,
Expositions (Fisher Unwin ; 1885),
pp. 199 ff.
7. Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons
(Macmillan & Co.), pp. 316 ff;
Alexander Maclaren, D.D., Sermons
preached in Manchester, Third
Series (Macmillan & Co.), pp.
179 ff.

154

INDEX

A. TOPICS.

Anger, 89.
Asceticism, 26, 31.
Baptism, Christ's twofold,
143 ff-
Charity, false, 73.
Children, Christ's joy in, 29.
Church, work of the, 18.
Compassion, 45, 60, 83.
Cynicism, 33, 71.
Envy, 70, 124.
Faith, 6, 11, 113, 116.
Fatherhood, divine, 8, 28.
Hope, 19.
Humanity of Christ, 30, 49, 85.
Ignorance, 76, 78.
Immortality, 120.
Joy. 3-
Legalism, 13s 38, 72, 93, 95.

"Lost," 75, 79 f-
Love, 82, iooff.
Miracles of healing, 51, 55.
Obedience, 13.
Pessimism, 4, 32.
" Prodigal Son," 76.
Purity, moral, 71, 97.
Science, Christian, 58.
Self-scrutiny, 40, 103, 128.
Self-surrender, 15.
Sin,67ff.Social duty, 35, 84.
Sorrow of Christ, 3, 81, 102
Stedfastness, 137 ff.
Strength, moral, 142.
Sympathy, 63.
Unbelief, io, 96, 118, 124.
Wonder, 109 ff.

B. QUOTATIONS.

Arnold, Matthew, 2.
Bacon, no.
Brooke, Stopford, 39.
Brooks, Phillips, 147.
Browning, 24.
Bunyan, 66.
Cairns, Principal, 16.
Drummond, Henry, 71,
Ecce Homo, 44.
Godet, viii.

Ker, John, 108.
Livingstone, 138.
Luther, 138.
Martensen, 88.
Newman, 116.
Stevenson, R. L., 6.
St. Teresa, 26.
Sully, viii.
Wesley, John, 6.

iS5

THE
SHORT COURSE SERIES
EDITED BY
Rev. JOHN ADAMS, B.D.

This Series is designed to encourage a healthy reaction in
the direction of expository preaching. Leading expositors in
all the Churches have kindly promised assistance; and the
Series, to be issued at the uniform price of 60 cents net per
volume, will furnish a sufficiently large variety for individual
selection.

NOW READY

A CRY FOR JUSTICE: A Study in Amos.
By Prof. J. E. McFadyen, D.D., U. F. C. College,
Glasgow.
THE BEATITUDES. By Rev. Robert H. Fisher, D.D., Edinburgh.
THE LENTEN PSALMS.
By the Editor.
THE PSALM OF PSALMS.
By Prof. James Stalker, D.D., Aberdeen.
THE SONG AND THE SOIL.
By Prof. W. G. Jordan, D.D., Kingston, Ontario.
THE HIGHER POWERS OF THE SOUL.
By Rev. George M'Hardy, D.D., Kirkcaldy.
JEHOVAH-JESUS. By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, D.D., Kilmarnock.
THE SEVENFOLD I AM.
By Rev. Thomas Marjoribanks, B.D., Edinburgh.
THE MAN AMONG THE MYRTLES: A Study in
Zechariah's Visions.
By the Editor.

NOW READY
THE STORY OF JOSEPH.
By Rev. Adam C. Welch, B.D., Th.D., Glasgow.
THE DIVINE DRAMA OF JOB.
By Rev. Charles F. Aked, D.D., San Francisco.-
A MIRROR OF THE SOUL : Studies in the Psalter.
By Rev. Canon Vaughan, M.A., Winchester.
IN THE UPPER ROOM.
By Rev. D. J. Burrill, D.D., LL.D., New York.
THE PRAYERS OF ST. PAUL.
By Prof. W. G. Griffith Thomas, D.D., Toronto.
THE EMOTIONS OF JESUS.
By Prof. Robert Law, D.D., Toronto.
THE SON OF MAN.
By Prof. Andrew C Zenos, D.D., Chicago.
THE JOY OF FINDING: An Exposition of Luke
xv. 11-32.
By Principal A. E. Garvie, D.D., New College, London.
The Following Other Volumes are in
Preparation.

THE SEVEN WORDS FROM THE CROSS.
By Rev. A. B. Macaulay, M.A., Stirling.
READINGS IN THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE.
By Prof. W. Emery Barnes, D.D., Cambridge.
THE PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON.
By Principal A. E. Garvie, D.D., New College, London.
SOCIAL STUDIES.
By Rev. Canon Simpson, M.A., D.D., St. Paul's.
London.

BELIEF AND LIFE: Expositions in the Fourth
Gospel.By Principal W. B. Selbie, D.D., Mansfield College,
Oxford.
THE OVERTURES OF JESUS.
By Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D., Brooklyn.
SCENES FROM THE UFE OF DAVID.
By Prof. H. R. Mackintosh, D.D., Edinburgh.
THE PROPHECY OF MICAH.
By Principal A. J. Tait, M.A., Ridley Hall, Cambridge.
THE EXPOSITORY VALUE OF THE REVISED
VERSION. By Prof. G. Milligan, D.D., University of Glasgow.
A PREFACE TO THE GOSPEL: An Exposition of
Isaiah 55.
By Rev. A. Smellie, D.D., Carluke.
THE METAPHORS OF ST. PAUL.
By Rev. A. Boyd Scott, B.D., Glasgow.
THE HOLY SPIRIT.
By Rev. F. Stuart-Gardiner, B.D., Kingstown,
Ireland.
THE REDEMPTION OF GOD.
By Prof. T. B. Kilpatrick, D.D., Toronto.
STUDIES IN THE APOCALYPSE.
By Prof. W. T. Davison, D.D., Richmond.
EXPOSITORY STUDIES.
By Prof. Arthur S. Peake, D.D., Manchester.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
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