The
CHARACTER CHRIST
FACTEFICTION

William J. Lhamon

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE
COLLEGE OF MISSIONS LIBRARY
atthe
YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL

THE CHARACTER CHRIST

COLLEGE OF MISSIONS
LECTURESHIP

I. EPOCH MAKERS OF MODERN
MISSIONS. By Archibald McLean. Illus
trated. i2mo, cloth  net $1.00
" The author of ' Where the Book Speaks '
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tures ' a series of sketches of modern mis
sionary leaders which for clearness, brevity,
directness of style and inspirational value,
have rarely been surpassed." — New York
Observer.
2. THE HORIZON OF AMERICAN
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pel the life to rise to a higher place in
patriotism and to larger power in the great
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Call attention to it. Keep it in circulation
by all means."— Loo kout.

3. THE CHARACTER CHRIST, By
William J. Lhamon, D.D., Dean of Bible
School, Drury College, Springfield, Mo.
i2mo, cloth  net $i.oo
A study of the Christian Gospels, prepared
and presented with a view to enforcing the
claims of the historical Christ. Attention is
directed to the literary presentation of the
character Christ, and the contention made
that such a representation from Galilean
sources, apart from the historical reality of
Jesus, would have required a greater miracle
than such a presentation founded on the
actual appearance and teaching of Christ.

College of Missions Lectureship, Series III
The Character Christ
Fact or Fiction

By
WILLIAM JEFFERSON LHAMON
Dean of the Bible School of Drury College,
Springfield, Mo.

WITH INTRODUCTION BY
President CHARLES T. PAUL, M.A.

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1914, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

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FOREWORD
The argument of this volume was presented
in a course of addresses at the College of Mis
sions in Indianapolis during the session of 1913-
1914. It constitutes, in its published form, the
third annual series in the College of Missions
Lectureship. The author's utterances were received by an
earnest company of students, professors, minis
ters, mission board officials, foreign missionaries,
and candidates preparing for Christian service in
various parts of the world, all of whom felt them
selves to be under the spell of a master in the
exposition of " the immortal theme." The lec
tures are now offered for wider circulation in
the belief that to readers generally they will
bear fresh and stimulating witness to the reality
and supremacy of Jesus as the world's Saviour.
Dean Lhamon's qualifications for his task are
ample. He has the mind and learning of the
scholar, the practical experience of the minister
and professor, the literary style of one who has
drunk deeply from " the well of English unde-
filed." A life-long student and teacher of the
Gospels, he does not hesitate to subject them and
the character they enshrine to the most search-
5

6 FOREWORD
ing inductive analysis. And what does he find
at the end of the process ? The historical Jesus,
"No dead fact stranded on the shore
Of the oblivious years,
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet — "
And he finds this real Jesus not by a blind
act of credence reaching back into the dark, but
by following a clear path on which the mingled
light bf faith and reason shines.
His method is a challenge to intellectual fair
ness. To those who argue that, because the char
acter of Christ is presented as perfect and miracu
lous, it is therefore untrue, Dean Lhamon replies
that the marvel of its perfection is the veriest
pledge of its truth. For, who could fabricate a
Jesus? It is easier to accept the historicity of
the Evangelists' portraiture than the modern
speculative theory of literary idealization. Only
the fact of Christ can account for his character
as we have it in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
That is the main thesis of the lectures.
To the vast literature, both critical and inter
pretative, which has grown up about the Gospels,
and with which Dean Lhamon is quite conversant,
he makes almost no reference. Even recent
writers who might have brought strong support
to his argument, though they have wrought on
different lines, as for example, Professors David
Smith, Forrest, Mackintosh, and Weinel, are not
mentioned. This author with his own insight and

FOREWORD 7i"
elan proceeds in his own bold way. His argu
ment is indeed not new, but the elaboration of
it is. Indeed, he has given it new life and form
and trenchancy for our day. He has put into it
something of the verve that glows in the pages of
" Ecce Homo." As a piece of inductive apolo
getic in the field of Christology — drawn wholly
from the Gospel narratives — it is doubtful
whether anything fresher or finer has been done
since Horace Bushnell's classic on " The Charac
ter of Jesus " was issued more than half a cen
tury ago.
This book is timely, in view of the recently
published negations and mystifications of our
modern symbolists and mythicists like Mr. J. M.
Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Professor W. B.
Smith, whose rock of offence seems to be the real
Jesus of the Gospels. These writers have ven
tured to stake their sanity and learning on .the
astounding theory that the Jesus whose hand has
turned nearly two millenniums of history, and
who is the highest motive power in our civiliza
tion to-day, was only a first-century survival of
a Palestinian sun-god, Joshua, centre of a pagan
cult of Jewish " Christists." And as for the
records of the Evangelists : " You rake together
a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology,
picked up at random from every age, race, and
clime ; you get a ' Christist ' to throw them into
a sack and shake them up. You open it, and
out come the Gospels." * Dean Lhamon has no
*Dr. F. C. Conybeare.

8 FOREWORD
formal dealing with these assumptive vagaries
of pseudo-scholarship. He does not even name
this mythic hypothesis, except in a single para
graph in his introductory chapter. For that
reason his constructive argument against it is
all the more effective. When bread is given,
the stone may be ignored.
Twelve of the young men and women who
heard these lectures have since gone to three con
tinents to witness to the Jesus who called them,
and who stood before them in such warm reality
on those memorable days and evenings in Graham
Chapel. May the blessing which came to these mis
sionaries flow to the hearts of many readers as
they see anew in these pages " the image of the
Son of Man." Charles T. Paul, President.
College op Missions,
Indianapolis.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Argument . . . . ii
II Universality, a Characteristic
of Christ  31
III Masterliness, a Characteristic
of Christ  45
IV Authority, a Characteristic of
Christ  57
V Love, a Characteristic of Christ 71
VI Severity, a Characteristic of
Christ  85
VII Forgiveness, a Characteristic of
Christ  97
VIII Serenity, a Characteristic of
Christ  109
IX Consistency, a Characteristic of
Christ  123
X Harmonies in the Character
Christ  134
XI Finality in the Character and
Teachings of Christ . . . 148
Excursus I. Christ and Other Founders 161
Excursus II. Prevailing Ideals of the
Times of Jesus .... 183
9

I
THE ARGUMENT
" Deep strike thy roots, O Heavenly Vine,
Within our earthly sod;
Most human, and yet most divine,
The flower of Man and God."
IF Jesus lived he is the transcendent man
of history. If he did not live the charac
ter Christ is the transcendent one of liter
ature. In either case we are confronted with
a phenomenon thus far inexplicable on any
naturalistic hypothesis. The argument of the
following pages is an essay in relativity. Is
it easier finally to accept the Christ as the
transcendent figure of our human history or
as the transcendent character in our human
literature ?
As to his transcendency — that is indispu
table. Though some of the following valua
tions have grown familiar by frequent use they
still bear repetition, and especially here as
related to our theme. They are but a few of
the panegyrics that the foremost writers,
scholars, and historians of many lands and
11

12 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
languages have united in conferring on Jesus.
These writers have with unanimity taxed the
resources of their various languages in seek
ing superlatives suitable to the expression of
their reverence for him. With unanimity
they have discarded moderation, and the won
der is that no one thinks them extravagant.
" Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of
prophets," says Emerson; "he saw with open
eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its
severe harmony, ravished by its beauty, he
lived in it and had his being there. Alone in
all history he estimated the greatness of man.
One man was true to what is in you and me.
He saw that God incarnated himself in man,
and evermore goes forth anew to take posses
sion of his world."
Goethe, in his " Conversations with Ecker-
mann," is quoted as saying : " If I am asked
whether it is in my nature to pay Jesus de
vout reverence, I say, certainly. I bow before
him as the divine manifestation of the highest
principles of morality. Let mental culture go
on advancing, let the natural sciences go on
gaining in depth and breadth, and the human
mind expand as it may, it will never go be
yond the elevation and moral culture of Chris
tianity, as it glistens and shines forth in the
Gospel."

THE ARGUMENT 13
Guizot, in his " Meditations on the Essence
of Christianity," says : " The supernatural
power and being of Jesus may be disputed; but
the perfection, the sublimity of his acts and
precepts, of his life and his moral law, are in
contestable." " I think Jesus Christ's system of morals
and religion as he left them to us, the best the
world ever saw, or is likely to see," said Ben
jamin Franklin.
Lecky, in his " History of European
Morals," says : " It may be truly said that the
simple record of three short years of active
life has done more to regenerate and soften
mankind than all the disquisitions of philoso
phers and all the exhortations of moralists.
This has, indeed, been the well-spring of what
ever is best and purest in Christian life. Amid
all the sins and failings, amid all the priest
craft and persecution and fanaticism, that
have defaced the church, it has preserved, in
the character and example of its Founder, an
enduring principle of regeneration."
Gladstone, in his " Review of Ecce Homo,"
says : " Through the fair gloss of his manhood,
we perceive the rich bloom of his divinity.
If he is not now without an assailant, at
least he is without a rival. If he be not the Sun
of Righteousness, the Friend that gives his

14 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
life for his friends and that sticketh closer
than a brother, the unfailing Consoler, the con
stant Guide, the everlasting Priest, and King,
at least, as all must confess, there is no other
to come into his room."
In his " Sartor Resartus " Carlyle speaks
almost passionately as follows: " If thou ask
to what length man has carried it in this man
ner, look on our divinest symbol, Jesus of
Nazareth, in his life and his biography, and
what followed therefrom. Higher has the
human thought not yet reached ; this Christian
ity and Christendom — a symbol of quite peren
nial infinite character, whose significance will
ever demand to be anew inquired into, and
anew made manifest."
Renan, in his " Life of Jesus," speaks of
him in the most eloquent and unreserved forms
of the superlative; he says: " He founded the
pure worship — of no age, of no clime — which
shall be that of all lofty souls to the end of
time. Not only was his religion that day
(John 4 : 24) the benign religion of humanity,
but it was the absolute religion; and if other
planets have inhabitants endowed with reason
and morality their religion cannot be different
from that which Jesus proclaimed at Jacob's
well. Whatever may be the surprises of the
future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His

THE ARGUMENT 15
worship will grow young without ceasing; his
legend will call forth tears without end; his
sufferings will melt the noblest hearts ; all ages
will proclaim that among the sons of men there
is none born greater than Jesus."
Because of its special pertinency to the theme
in hand one more well-known paragraph must
be permitted here. It is from Jean Jacques
Rousseau. " I will confess to you," he says,
" that the majesty of the Scriptures strikes me
with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel
has its influence on my heart. Peruse the
works of our philosophers, with all their pomp
of diction; how mean, how contemptible are
they, compared with the Scriptures! Is it
possible that the sacred personage whose his
tory they contain should be himself a mere
man? Where is the man, where the philos
opher, who could so live and die, without
weakness, and without ostentation? When
Plato described his imaginary righteous
man, loaded with all the punishments of guilt,
yet meriting the highest rewards of virtue, he
described exactly the character of Jesus Christ.
The resemblance is so striking that all the
church fathers perceived it."
Because of its source in the very bosom of
present-day Israel the following has a special
claim on our attention. Max Nordau, Jew,

16 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
critic, and philosopher, says : " Jesus is soul of
our soul, as he is flesh of our flesh. Who then
could think of excluding him from the people
of Israel ? St. Peter will remain the only Jew
who said of the Son of David, ' I know not the
man.' If the Jews up to the present time have
not publicly rendered homage to the sublime
moral beauty of the figure of Jesus, it is be
cause their tormentors have always persecuted,
tortured, assassinated them in his name. . . .
Every time that a Jew mounted to the sources
and contemplated Christ alone, without his
pretended faithful, he cried, with tenderness
and admiration : ' Putting aside the Messianic
mission, this man is ours. He honours our
race and we claim him as we claim the
Gospels — flowers of literature and only
Jewish . . .'"
Our argument seeks to build simply on
facts. It desires to beg not a single question.
We have the four gospels. As related to our
course of study no matter when they were
written or by whom, or whether they are in
spired, or whether they are historically reli
able. Questions of date, authorship, inspira
tion, and historicity belong to other lines of
study, the results of which are highly reassur
ing to such as hold an evangelical faith. But
for the purposes of our study Matthew, Mark,

THE ARGUMENT 17
Luke, and John are simply facts. They be
long to the realities of our objective world.
Their influence is such to-day, and has for
centuries been such, that we cannot class them
as negligible. They challenge us, so simple
and searching are they, so commanding and
abiding. They have long since taken their
place as world literature, the best and most
dynamic that the world has produced.
These writings present to us the character
called Christ. Whether Christ was or not,
the character Christ is. It is a fact enshrined
in other facts, creative of them, affected by
them, and immensely affecting them. Speak
ing in literary fashion, Christ is the hero of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Other char
acters are there in abundance, humble disciples,
leaders of Jewish sects and parties, Roman
officials, but they are secondary to this one
and contributory to it. It is impossible to
mistake the central, outstanding, leading char
acter in these writings. Never was there such
a wide gap lying between the hero of a work
of literary art and the complementary persons
of the drama.
Broadly speaking, this Christ of the gospels
is either real or fictitious; a historical posses
sion and heritage, or a literary presentation
merely. Quite explicitly, by a literary or fie-

18 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
titious character is meant such a one as the
Wandering Jew, or Jean Valjean, or Ben Hur,
or Hamlet. Is the Christ of the gospels such
a character? The hypothesis is possible, just
as any hypothesis is possible in mathematics
or logic. Is it workable, or does it reduce
itself to an absurdity?
If we assume that this transcendent charac
ter is a fiction we are at once confronted with
the problem of its creation as a mere matter
of literary achievement. Who created such a
character? Who attained to the ideal and
clothed it with such realities of literary sim
plicity and power? Fishermen? Brawny
boys of the Galilean lake? Hated publicans?
Shepherds? Vine-dressers? Peasants of the
Judsean hillsides? Or did it originate among
the self-sufficient Pharisees? Purse-proud
Sadducees? Fiercely rigid rabbis? To them
all the ideal was utterly foreign, and to most
of them hatefully repugnant. Even the
saintly souls of that last Jewish and first Chris
tian century, such as Simeon and Anna, were
looking for "the consolation of Israel," and
not for any such reality as corresponds to this
literary ideal. Or if the ideal did not origi
nate among the Jews of any class, or if not in
the first century, but among unknown writers
in an uncertain age, how has the history of

THE ARGUMENT 19
such an unparallelled piece of work" been so
effectually lost?
The question of creation becomes many
times more difficult in view of the fact that
our greatest writers, with the ideal before
them, and the gospels in hand, have not pre
sented us with a single character comparable
to Christ. The greatest writers of our nine
teen centuries are, let us say, Dante, Milton,
Shakespeare, Goethe, and, cautiously one may
add, Victor Hugo. They lived in Chris
tian lands. They breathed a Christian atmos
phere. They wrought with materials fur
nished by Christian civilization. Yet not one
of them presents us with a character that can
for a moment compare with the Christ of the
gospels. One cannot put Shakespeare's Ham
let in the same category with the Jesus of
Matthew. Poor, great, crazed Hamlet — how
he falls down in that sane presence ! Ben Hur
and Jean Valjean, already mentioned, are
among the great characters in literature, and
the most Christian. It is held by some that
Jean Valjean is the greatest character ever
drawn in fiction. As to " Ben Hur," probably
no book produced in the nineteenth century
has been more widely read and highly appre
ciated by the more intelligent and Christian
classes. In the presentation of both characters

20 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
there are situations that would degrade Christ.
The chariot race, for instance, fits Ben Hur
and helps to make him. One cannot think of
Jesus in such a situation. He is entirely too
great for that. It would belittle him infinitely.
Jean Valjean climbs a wall in a blind alley to
elude the police; finds himself in a convent
garden; to escape detection allows himself to
be carried out in a coffin and put, in a grave;
warned against coughing or sneezing, he an
swers, " A man who is escaping does not do
such things." Such situations are factors used
by a great writer in building one of the great
est characters of all times. A hundred such sit
uations might be chosen from " Les Mise-
rables," any one of which would be ruinous to
the Christ of the gospels.
It has been suggested that our great writers
have not tried to present us with a character
comparable to Christ, implying that if they
should try they might succeed. But why have
they not tried ? And why did these four try ?
And how came they to succeed, to rise so in
finitely in their creation above all predeces
sors and successors? They had no model.
Later writers have theirs, and, therefore,
should find the creation of such a character
vastly easier of achievement. Besides, the
wonder is a fourfold one. It is a commonlyj

THE ARGUMENT 21
received conclusion of New Testament schol
ars that Mark's gospel is the first of the four.
His Christ is an unmatched masterpiece ex
cept as matched by his compeers. Who dares
to touch a masterpiece must be himself a mas
ter and even he may mar it. But Matthew
follows Mark with large sections of new ma
terial, and the masterpiece still holds; if pos
sible, it is heightened. Luke follows Matthew
and Mark with still other sections of new ma
terial, and the masterpiece still holds; if pos
sible, still further heightened. Last comes
John, strikingly different from the three, al
most wholly new in material, distinctly doc
trinal, profoundly meditative, gloriously aglow
with spiritual fervour, confessedly evidential,
and still the masterpiece is unmarred; if pos
sible, it is heightened. On the hypothesis that
this is fiction we are confronted with a liter
ary phenomenon so utterly apart from all else
in that line, so foreign from its fellows, so
quite unique and absolutely unaccountable as
to call for a new category in literature — the
category of miraculous fiction. It would re
quire more than human genius to forge this
fourfold, unmatched, literary wonder. " The
inventor would be a more astonishing charac
ter than the hero."*
* Rousseau.

22 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
If, on the other hand, we assume that Christ
really lived, and wrought, and taught, and
died, and arose from the dead, as these writ
ings say he did, the literary problem vanishes
at once. Quite unassuming, commonplace peo
ple, raised to the level of discipleship under
such a master, could easily tell just such un
adorned tales of what they had seen and
heard as are here told. History here is easier
than fiction, and not so strange as fiction would
be. The presence of the real Christ among the
disciples explains why they wrote, and what
they wrote, and how they achieved as writers
what none besides them has achieved. They
do not create a character, they present a per
son. Pilate led Jesus forth officially, saying,
" Behold the man." They have led him forth
in their simple sentences, saying, " Behold the
man." With the vanishing of the literary
problem there comes the problem of the per
son of Christ, and that has its solution not in
literature, but in God. He is, in Tennyson's
worshipful terms,
" Strong Son of God, immortal Love."
The above presents the alternative, fiction
or fact. There is a third possible hypothesis,
namely, that Christ is partly real, and partly
fictitious. There was, the theory assumes,

THE ARGUMENT 23
such a young man as Jesus living in the first
years of the first century. He was wholly
beautiful, strong, and regnant. He is fit to
be ranked with the foremost representatives of
our race. Moses was not more reverent;
Caesar not more imperial; Socrates not more
profound; Buddha not more compassionate.
But that Jesus was other than they; that he
was in a unique sense the son of God; that he
wrought miracles, healing the blind, the lame,
the lepers; that he raised the dead, and was
himself raised from the dead — all this be
longs to the glorious garments of legend or
myth woven about the real Christ by the
devout imaginations of his disciples during the
generation or two or three that succeeded him.
The theory balks at the miraculous. It is at
tractive to an age trained in scientific ways of
thinking. But miracles are not so much a
stumbling-block now as formerly, for science
herself is becoming reverent in the presence of
her own limitations. She is discovering that
there is something beyond her working hypoth
eses and her hypothetical electrons. Micro
scope and crucible are telling not half the
story after all. The laboratory has its mir
acles of mystery quite as much as the pulpit.
The final miracle that both the laboratory and
the pulpit must face is not the incidental one,

24 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
such as the healing of the leper or the raising
of the dead, but this miracle of manhood and
character whom we name Christ. He is " the
moral miracle of history." He is the funda
mental miracle, and our study reaches back
to him. It asks, could the fond imaginations
of his lowly disciples, narrowed by tradition,
cramped by environment, hardened by hatred
of other peoples, could the imaginations of
such disciples have clothed the memory of a
mere man in mythical garments divine?
Such a miracle of character creation on the
part of the longshoremen of Galilee would
be more unaccountable than Jesus Christ the
real, the man divine, the brother supreme, the
gift of God.
There is a fourth possible hypothesis, if it
may be dignified by the term possible, namely
that Jesus is altogether a myth ; that the exist
ence and personality of such a man is not a
necessary precedent to primitive Christianity.
This is known as the " Christ-myth " theory
of the " History-of-religions " school of
thought. The school is evolutionary in the
extreme and thoroughly materialistic. It has
no room for any of the categories of a spir
itual faith, or of a theistic world-view. Being
materialistic it is by consequence pessimistic,
and being without God it is without ethical

THE ARGUMENT 25
and spiritual realities. Christianity, accord
ingly, must be construed together with all
other religions as a <levelopment, a " syncre
tism," a compound of Jewish Messianism, Neo-
Platonism, Roman dogmatism, and whatever
else it could pick up in Alexandria, Babylon,
Athens, or Rome.
Our line of study replies by asking, was the
character Christ picked up thus ? Who among
the non-moral and immoral Greek gods and
heroes is in a single feature comparable to
Christ? Or where in the pantheon of Rome
with its twenty thousand gods shall we find a
single altar inviting us to kneel and adore such
love, forgiveness, masterliness, universality,
and heroism divested of militarism as we find
in the Christ of the gospels? As little do the
Jewish heroes suggest Jesus. He is not like
Samson or David or Judas the Maccabee.
Croly's Salathiel is the ideal hero of the days
of Jesus, and the tragedy of the story rises
out of the impassable gulf between the two.
As to the Messianic hopes and plans of the
times of Jesus — it is the very secret of the
cross that Jesus was compelled to antagonize
them. Claiming to be the long-looked-for
Messiah of his people Jesus persisted in being
such a Messiah as they did not expect ; such as
they hated ; and such as they would not receive.

26 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
To the political and military Messianism of
his day he opposed his irenic and spiritual
propaganda. The issue was quite sharply
drawn, and Golgotha was the sequel. Such is
the presentation of the gospels. If the Jesus
of the gospels is a syncretism of the elements
and times at the disposal of the writers, how
comes it that he is so different from those ele
ments and times ; so winnowed ; so strange and
unique; so antipodal; so transcendent? Abso
lutely he is " a root out of a dry ground." On
the hypothesis, let it be repeated, that he is a
fiction or a myth, we are confronted by a
literary problem of such novelty and unique
ness as to place it in the category of the
humanly impossible, that is, of the strictly
miraculous. Stated still further, and more explicitly, our
scheme of thought shifts the point of difficulty
from the physically miraculous to the ideally
miraculous in moral and spiritual traits of
character. If it should be granted that the
writers of our gospels, with the help of tra
dition in a myth-loving age, did invent the sto
ries of the miracles in a mistaken attempt to
glorify their hero, it would still remain inex
plicable how they invented a moral and spir
itual hero great enough to fit the miracles, and
how they succeeded in attributing to him many

THE ARGUMENT 27
and varied characteristics in their perfection,
characteristics harmonious one with another,
but out of keeping with, and contrary to, the
deepest desires and most cherished ideals of
the age; and finally, how they — the writers of
our gospels — succeeded in making this tour de
force of literary creation and idealism appear
to the men of their own and succeeding times
the most attractive, and commanding, and
dynamic piece of realism the world has ever
known. We are beginning to see that the
character itself which we find resident within
the unassuming pages of the gospels is the
real miracle with which we have to deal, and
that these unassuming pages, glorified by this
character, rise immeasurably above the highest
level of all other literary achievements. The
major miracle is not the healing of the blind,
and lame, and deaf, and diseased. The major
miracle is either this literary creation of a
character more than humanly sweet and
strong, unapproached and unapproachable,
great and gracious, sinless, timeless, the won
der, the delight, the aspiration of humanity;
or, it is the man Jesus himself, living, teach
ing, praying, healing, dying, rising — just as
the gospels present him — the gift of God, the
saviour of men. In the latter case this major
miracle of reality has its solution in that

28 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
phrase just used, " the gift of God." In the
former case, this major miracle of literary
idealism has no explanation.
In a limited way the following pages pre
sent an inductive study of the character Christ
as it appears in the gospels. Since it is the
presentation with which we deal as author and
audience, no critical valuation of the writings
is needed or offered. The presentation at least
is a fact. What can we get from it ?
The suggestion of the literary problem of
the possible creation of such a character as
Christ is not new, but the elaboration of it
here presented has not heretofore been at
tempted so far as the author is aware.
The essays comprising the book have been
the growth of many years. The substance of
them in the form of lectures has been pre
sented in many a class-room to gatherings of
college and university students, before a num
ber of ministerial associations in various
states, frequently in churches as features of
evangelistic campaigns, and frequently from
the Chautauqua platform. In December,
19 12, the theme was treated by the author in
a series of lectures on the T. H. Bondurant
Foundation in the University of Illinois, and
in February, 19 14, in a series of lectures in the
College of Missions in Indianapolis, Indiana.

THE ARGUMENT 29
Many times the request has arisen both from
individual auditors and from assemblies for
a book embracing the theme as a whole. This
has emboldened the author to add another vol
ume to the vast library that has gathered
around that glorious young man who never
wrote a sermon nor penned a parable.
The chapter on the theme " Christ and Other
Founders " is appended in response to a sug
gestion on the part of President Charles T.
Paul, of the College of Missions in Indianapo
lis, his thought being that the work as a whole
will be rendered by this addition more effect
ive in its appeal for aggressive Christian ac
tivities, especially in missionary ways. The
matter of the chapter, while not directly ger
mane to the argument of the book, is surely
germane to the spirit of it.
It is the conviction of the author that our
age needs not so much a new apologetic as a
deepening sense of reality relative to Jesus
and the message of Jesus. We need convic
tions that we cannot escape of the spiritual
actualities lying back of the person and the
consciousness of Jesus. His transcendent ver
ities must be ours, and they must become the
controlling forces within our souls and
throughout the realm of our social relations.
This is what the prologue of John's gospel

30 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
should mean to us in its strong and simple
phrasing of the fact of the incarnation. In
his " In Memoriam," over the grave of his
friend Tennyson cried,
" And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds,
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought,
Which he may read that builds the house,
Or binds the sheaf, or digs the grave."

II
UNIVERSALITY
"Not thine the bigot's partial plea,
Nor thine the zealot's ban;
Thou well canst spare a love of thee
Which ends in hate of man."
JESUS lived, or the character Christ was
produced, in a narrow age. The times to
which the records relate him were in
tensely provincial, Pharisaical, rabbinical, ex
clusive, and unsympathetic. Politics and re
ligion united to repel the outside world.
Learning was subsidized in the interest of an
exclusive caste. The temple cult forbade on
pain of death the participation or presence of
a gentile. Jehovah himself was localized that
he might be monopolized. No one could live
in Palestine and escape an environment of con-
temptuousness, superciliousness, exclusiveness,
and hatred.
These are severe sentences. They are not
made as an arraignment, but simply as a his
torical statement. It is our province not to
judge the people of the times of which we
31

33 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
speak, but to present them. The presentation
is essential to our study. We cannot know
Christ, or if the character be but a character,
we cannot appreciate it except by way of com
parison and contrast. We must know the
times to know the man. It is thought that
environment makes or mars. Have we here,
on the pages of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John, a character that springs out of environ
ment, or one that rises above it, struggles
against it, contradicts it, and corrects it?
Though the statements are severe they are
not too strong. Some paragraphs are needed
to justify them.
From the dark days of the Babylonian cap
tivity the Jews had been taught to esteem
themselves as the chosen people of God, and
to look upon all not Jews as rejected by
Jehovah. All not Jews were Gentiles, and the
Gentiles were dogs. It was commonly said
that one Jew was of more worth in the sight
of God than all the Gentiles on the earth.
Gentiles were likened to the spittle cast from
the mouth of a Jew. A Jewish midwife was
not allowed to help a Gentile mother in her
hour of need lest she assist in bringing into
the world an unclean worshipper of unclean
idols. The Jews esteemed themselves the chil
dren of Abraham. That in itself was enough

UNIVERSALITY 33
to distinguish them. Their genealogical tables,
the ordinances of their religion, and the expe
riences of their past had united in making them
a peculiar people, and in fostering pride in
their peculiarities. By the time of Jesus they
had learned perfectly the lesson of that ex
treme exclusiveness, which once had been to
them a necessity as a shield against idolatry
and which had now become their preference.
To the orthodox Jew, says Edersheim, " the
mental and spiritual horizon was bounded by
Palestine. It was the land. All the rest of
the world except Babylonia was outside of it.
All in it bore the impress of sanctity. God
created the world on account of Israel and
for their merit, making preparation for them
long before their appearance, just as a king
foresees the birth of a son. Nay, Israel had
been in God's thoughts not only before any
thing had been created, but even before every
other creative thought."
Many laws had been framed by the Rabbis the
purpose of which was to separate like a wall be
tween their own people and the gentiles. A gentile
child as soon as it was born was esteemed unclean.
It was unlawful for a Jew in any way to aid in
gentile worship, or to give pleasure to the wor
shippers. No other single sentence, perhaps,
could more fully express the feeling of the Jew

34 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
toward the gentile than the following : " The
best among gentiles, kill; the best among ser
pents, crush its head." " Those who worshipped
mountains, hills, bushes, etc. — in short, gross
idolaters — should be cut down with the sword."
" Heretics, traitors, and those who had left the
Jewish faith should be thrown into actual dan
ger and all means of their escape removed. No
intercourse of any kind was to be had with such,
not even to invoke their medical aid in case of
danger to life, since it was deemed that he who
had to do with heretics was in peril of becom
ing one himself." " If a heretic returned to the
true faith he should die at once — partly, prob
ably, to expiate his guilt, and partly from fear of
relapse. Terrible as all this sounds, it was prob
ably not worse than the fanaticism displayed in
what are called more enlightened times. Im
partial history must chronicle it, however pain
ful, to show the circumstances in which teaching
so far different was propounded by Christ." It is
necessary to transport oneself into this atmos
phere, as Edersheim has well said, " to under
stand the views entertained in the time of Jesus,
or to form any conception of their infinite con-;
trast in spirit to his new doctrine. The abhor
rence, not unmingled with contempt, of all gen
tile ways; the worship of the letter of the law;
the self-righteousness and pride of descent,
and still more of knowledge, become thus in
telligible to us, and equally so the absolute an-

UNIVERSALITY 35
tagonism to the claims of a Messiah so unlike
themselves and their own ideal." *
The Pharisees constituted the most religious
sect among the Jews, and as they sought to
practise what the rabbis taught the two may
be taken together. The rabbis were the learned
class. They were students of the law it is
true, but more especially and emphatically, of
the traditions of the fathers. They held these
traditions of more weight than the law. They
committed to memory vast masses of tradi
tional trifles, technicalities, quiddities, hypoth
eses, and cases of which they made a hedge
about the law, their theory being that the law
could not be transgressed till this hedge had
been broken down. They lived by rule, walk
ing with their heads bent as though heavy with
knowledge. They loved " greetings in the
market," and were disappointed if people did
not bow low to them and hail them as " doc
tors." They measured their Sabbath with a
tape line and weighed it in a scales. So many
furlongs one might walk — no further. The
weight of a dried fig one might carry. But if
he tossed it up and caught it falling, had he
carried twice the burden by carrying the bur-
* Quotations from " The Life and Times of Jesus the
Messiah," by Alfred Edersheim, Vol. I, Bk. I, Ch. VII.

36 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
'den twice? If he caught it in the same hand?
If he caught it in the other hand? If he
caught it in his mouth? All these were tech
nical questions, debated seriously!
" The standard as to what constituted a
burden was whether the thing could be
turned to any practical use, however tri
fling. Thus, two horse's hairs might be
made into a bird-trap; a scrap of clean
paper into a custom-house notice; a
small piece of paper written upon might be
converted into a wrapper for a small flagon.
In these cases, therefore, transport would in
volve sin. Similarly, ink sufficient to write
two letters, wax enough to fill up a small hole,
even a pebble which you might aim at a bird,
would be burdens." It was seriously debated
whether if a shoestring came loose on the Sab
bath it was lawful to stoop down and tie it. On
that day one must not heal either man or
beast. One must not sow, or reap, or winnow,
or take a stitch with a needle, or scrape the
ground with his foot, or climb a tree, or ride,
or swim, or clap his hands, or strike his side,
or dance, or cut his nails, or trim his hair. A
woman must not look in a mirror lest she spy
a gray hair and be tempted to pluck it out.
To scatter two seeds was construed as sowing
grain, and was unlawful. To pluck one blade

UNIVERSALITY 37
of grass was reaping, and was unlawful.
These are but a few of the numberless pro
hibitions and casuistries which ran through
sixty-four and a half folio columns in the
Jerusalem Talmud. By such rules the Phari
sees sought to regulate their Sabbaths. The
result was that they made the day a burden,
and themselves its slaves; or if by legal fic
tions they escaped from this, they in that case
deceived themselves by a mere pretence of
legal holiness.
On ceremonial handwashing before and
after meals, and when they returned from the
street or the market, the Pharisees placed a
superlative emphasis. To omit such wash
ings, they said, was as bad as murder, or
adultery. Tithings of his garden herbs, fast
ings, sacrifices, and formal prayer, belonged
to the weighty matters of the Pharisee's re
ligious life. By his overvaluation of forms,
ceremonies, rituals, technicalities, fictions,
trifles ; by his undervaluation of social, ethical,
and spiritual entities, the Pharisee, the rabbi,
became a cold, heartless, loveless, meritorious
legalist, quick to hurl a stone at any who
ignored his trifling traditions. Such were the
leading churchmen and schoolmen of the time
of Jesus.
The Sadducees were purse-proud agnostics,

38 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
priests and high-priests, sanctimonious men of
the altar, holding an annual monopoly on sac
rificial beasts, and pushing high the price at
every Passover, Pentecost, and Harvest-home.
No modern man ever had a more complete
corner on any necessity than they on sacri
ficial oxen, rams, and lambs. With this special
interest in hand they wrested fortunes from
the religious necessities of their pilgrim
brothers at the altar. They made the temple
" a den of thieves."
Out of this environment the character
Christ springs. In spite of this whole ad
verse ensemble this character Christ is repre
sented as universal in his sympathies, precepts,
and plans.
His universal sympathy is shown in his
invariable attitude toward man as man regard
less of the accidents of poverty and riches,
learning and illiteracy, race and nationality.
He shows no preference for the poor man be
cause of his poverty or for the rich because of
his riches; for the Jew because of his Abra-
hamic blood or the Roman because of his
highly prized citizenship. The social bonds
that he recognized were in no sense narrowly
partisan : they were broadly human. The only
lines that he drew between man and man were
those that cut deeply into character. In this

UNIVERSALITY 39
he stood apart from his people as a whole, and
distinctly from their learned men of the rab
binical schools. The rabbis despised the
" common herd," saying, " this people who
know not the law are cursed." Jesus, early
in his Galilean ministry, affirmed that he had
a message for the poor. He even made it
one of the proofs of his Messianic claims. To
the poor and to the despised and " accursed "
common people he showed the utmost kind
ness. He healed their diseases, fed them when
hungry and fainting, praised their pitiful sac
rificial gifts, comforted them in sorrow, and
raised their dead.
He is represented as the poor man's friend.
Is he the rich man's enemy ? Has he antipathy
for the rich because they are rich? If
so his sympathies are partisan, not universal.
The representation is not so. He forgives
Zacchseus, preaches faithfully to Nicodemus,
enjoys the hospitality of Mary, Martha, and
Lazarus, and loves while he warns the rich
young man.
The Roman tax-gatherers, called publicans
and invidiously classed with sinners, were
hated and despised. No Pharisee would allow
the hem of his garment to touch them. Jesus
put himself on terms of intimacy with them,
dined with them, and bravely called one of them

40 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
into the circle of his special disciples and
private friends. It was heroic to choose
Matthew. What an affront to custom and
clannishness ! How broad and brotherly!
The Jews hated likewise the Samaritans, and
would have no dealings with them. Jesus
talked familiarly to the Samaritan woman at
the well-side, roused her and her people, and
saw the souls of Samaria as fields white unto
the harvest. His sympathy knew no bounds
of party, race, or nation.
His precepts are universal. Like the multi
plication table, they are applicable everywhere
and always. One cannot think of a time or a
place where the Golden Rule is not advisable.
Centuries pass; thousand-fold intricacies come
to our society, commerce, and politics, but that
rule holds. Not one of the parables of Jesus
is yet threadbare. The Sermon on the Mount
is as remarkable for what is not in it as for
what is there. Not a word about Jewish
altar-forms, priests, rams, lambs, golden
candle-sticks, shew-bread, scapegoats, clean
meats, new moons, sabbaths, and shekinahs.
All that was temporal, merely national,' evan
escent, passing, outworn, falls away from that
strangely elevated, daring, revolutionary col
lection of simple sayings which we call a ser
mon. In reality it is the platform of an endur-

UNIVERSALITY 411
ing kingdom, all the planks in it for all men,
and their children's children to a thousand
generations. Jesus refuses to be limited. He strikes the
note of the universal..? Rabbinism cannot
stifle him. Phariseeism cannot terrify him.
Ritualism cannot misguide him. Nationalism
cannot dwarf him. In the midst of hatred he
loves. Surrounded by trifles and triflers he
lifts up a code of eternal principles. In an
age that revered the past he turned to the
future and planned its progress. Out from a
labyrinth of smothering traditionalism he
traced the way to light and liberty. In the
midst of fierce and warring sects he stood
aloof, and lifted high the banner of catholicity.
Such is the presentation of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John.
His plans are universal. His programme is
imperial. It includes all nations. It is fraternal,
educational, developmental, vital. In an age of
warfare he cried, " Put up the sword." While
militarism ruled the wor,ld his captaincy
voiced itself in the single command, " Go
teach." His people longed for release from
Rome, and the rebuilding of the nation in its
ancient pride and power. Even his disciples
looked no higher, knew no better, and hoped
for nothing further. A kingdom of Israel,

42 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
centred in Jerusalem, with throne and crown
and army and pomp and pride and power, was
in their minds. They would drive out the
Romans or make them slaves. They would
turn the tide of history. They would bring
their Messiah to a throne in Jerusalem. They
would build an empire to rival Csesar's or
Solomon's. That was their program. It was
backed by an intense patriotism, and a not in
glorious nationalism. " The people were
drunk with the vision of outward felicity and
political greatness under their expected world-
conquering Messiah." " How beautiful,"
says the Jerusalem Targum, " is the King
Messiah, who springs from the house of
Judah! He girds his loins, and orders the
battle against his enemies, and slays their
kings, and their chief captains; there is no one
so mighty as to stand before him. He makes
the mountains red with the blood of his
slaughtered foes. His robes, dyed in their
blood, are like the skins of purple grapes." To
the Jews the anticipated Messianic kingdom
was one of unspeakable glory and wealth and
luxury. The city of Jerusalem was to reach
to Damascus. In it there were to be houses
three miles long. The country within and
around was to be full of pearls and precious
stones. Grains of wheat would grow as large

UNIVERSALITY 43
as the kidneys of an ox. A single grape would
load a wagon or a ship, and men would draw
wine from it as from a cask.
Out of their intense, mistaken nationalism;
their glorious, mournful patriotism, the Jews
of the days of Jesus built such castles, and
dreamed such dreams. Such visions quickened
the hearts of their best people, and whetted the
daggers of their worst ones.
But with it all Jesus would have nothing to
do. His greater soul was fixed on an age
long, world-wide kingdom, and one that should
be built in the lives of men rather than on the
hills of, Judsea. He planned indeed that his
robes should be " like the skins of purple
grapes," but not with the blood-stains of Jew
ish-Roman battlefields. He planned a king
dom of the teacher, the brother, the friend, the
Good Samaritan, the returning prodigal, the
forgiving Father, the redeeming brother. He
cried, " Go teach all nations, baptizing them in
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Spirit." The method of this king
dom, the magnitude of it, the beneficence, the
universality of it, are foreign to all peoples
and times save those that are dominated by
the ideal presented in the four gospels. The
creation in such an age, or in any age, of such
ideals, and such a character as fictions merely

44 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
would be more wonderful than the God-given
reality. Could such an ideal of truth and
truth-teaching, and of golden-rule potency as
basal to a world-kingdom, could such an ideal
have grown out of that hard old Jewish soil?
Did Phariseeism invent this ideal of universal
ity? Did Sadduceeism? Did Rabbinism? The
shepherds of the hill-sides ? The fishermen of
the lake-sides? Ah, the dreams of prince and
peasant, of religious sectarian and political
zealot, were far other than this. Can the nar
row and national produce suddenly the cos
mopolitan and universal? The laws of
environment and evolution and literary pro
duction do not work that way.

Ill
MASTERLINESS
" Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord,
What may thy service be?
Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word,
But simply following thee."
TO be always manly and a master; correct
in judgment, incisive in action, iner-
rant in speech and daring in reform; to
utter immortal precepts, sermons, parables, and
prayers; to be enthusiastic yet dispassionate;
never to experiment, but always to do; to be
morally faultless and in conduct admirable ; to
suffer without resentment, and bless the lips
that curse ; to mold men, reforming and trans
forming them ; to live and die in perfect keep
ing with one's own highest ideals, yielding
neither to the threatening of foes nor the
pleading of friends — these are marks of mas
terliness. These and similar ones are at
tributed to Christ in the presentation of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
There is a .persistent high level in the con
duct of Jesus. Nothing is rarer than this.
45

46 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
All but invariably strong men have their weak
nesses, and men that are good have their
undesirable traits. Jesus is never presented
as a weakling, and responding to a limit
less variety of circumstances he is never
taken off guard. If we assume the char
acter to be a fiction, this perfect poise
is wonderful indeed. Where is there another
character so invariably excellent? Where is
there one who does not now and again disap
point us by falling below the expectation which
he himself has created? Where is there one
whose continuity of excellence finds its climax
in a style of dying comparable to his way of
living, and whose resurrection deeds are a
fitting sequel both to his life and to his death ?
Jesus is represented as masterly in speech.
We have reports of his sermons, parables,
prayers, and (in John) a kind of Socratic
dialectic. In estimating him as a speaker, one
must remember that he was a young man un
trained in the great schools of the time and
unpractised before the public. Does he give
the impression of a tyro? Does he practise
long and ardently, and even then blunder and
stammer and fail and apologize? Such is
the rule with young speakers. What impres
sion from the first did Jesus make? In his
home in Nazareth they "wondered at the

MASTERLINESS 47
words of grace that proceeded from his lips,"
an indication that he was a beautiful and ac
complished speaker. At the close of the Ser
mon on the Mount it was said, " The multi
tudes were astonished at his teaching, for he
taught them as one having authority and not
as the scribes." When he taught in the syna
gogues of Galilee they said, " Whence hath this
man this wisdom and these mighty works ? "
When the priests and Pharisees sent officers to
take him they returned empty-handed, saying,
" Never man spake like this man."
How daring he was ! How original ! How
revolutionary! How he cast himself in abso
lute abandonment up against the hard and old
and outworn legalism, traditionalism, Pharisee-
ism, Sadduceeism, and every love-killing con
ventionalism of his day ! " You have heard,"
he cried in his mountain sermon, " that it
was said by them of old time — Moses and the
rabbis — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth. But I say unto you that ye resist not
evil ; but whosoever shall smite you on the one
cheek turn to him the other also." He dared
thus to set himseH against that ancient tribal
law of rude revenge, though sanctioned by
Moses and all the schools of Judsea's learned
fathers. He dared in the interests of his new
kingdom to repeal that law, and replace it with

48 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
his new law of the other cheek. That is
masterly, and it is but one example. His ser
mons are aflame with many like it.
The impression made immediately by the
young preacher on his hearers lingers through
the centuries. His readers still feel that he
spoke " with authority, and not as the scribes."
The sermon reported in the fifth, sixth, and
seventh chapters of Matthew, and less fully
in the sixth of Luke, bears every mark of a
strong, clear-seeing soul. There is no hesi
tancy here, no apology for plain and incisive
speech, no shrinking from the utterance of
great and transforming truth, no fear of
originality. There is maintained a brave,
high-level of ethical and spiritual thought and
revelation, a decided break with the body of
rabbinical teaching of the time, and an undis
guised departure from the legalism of former
times. " In all history there is no parallel to
it," says Mr. Hughes, in his " Manliness of
Christ ;" " it stands there, a miracle or sign
of God's reign in this world, far more wonder
ful than any of Christ's miracles of healing.
Unbelievers have been sneering at it and ridi
culing it, and Christian doctors paring and
explaining it away, ever since. But there it
stands, as strong and fresh as ever, the calm
declaration and witness of what mankind is

MASTERLINESS 49
intended by God to become on this earth of
his." In the gospels one cannot go1 amiss for
masterly speaking. It appears wherever Jesus
is quoted, in his most public utterances, in the
privacy of the inner circle of his disciples, in
dealing individually with troubled souls, in
uncovering the plots of his enemies, and in
great and heart-breaking lamentation over the
doomed city of Jerusalem. Having spoken
he never apologized, or expressed a regret, or
recalled a single word. His yea was yea, and
his nay, nay.
Masterliness discloses itself in the forms of
speech as well as in the substance of it. It is
not usual with us, perhaps, to think of Jesus
as a literary artist. But a second reading of
the parables may convince us of that also.
The parable is one of the most difficult forms
of literature. It is all the more remarkable,
therefore, that the parables of Jesus are so
many and so finished. He is, above all other
artists, the master of the parable. In all their
beauty parables sprang from his radiant soul
in an impromptu way whenever occasion called
for them. Take as an instance the fifteenth
chapter of Luke. The situation that called
forth the group of parables in it was this.
Jesus was dining with publicans and sinners, a

50 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
very daring transgression of the social conven
tionalism of the time. Leading religious aris
tocrats, Pharisees and Rabbis, were present
murmuring, and saying with fine scorn, arch
ing of brows, curling of lips, " this man re
ceiveth sinners, and eateth with them." Un
disturbed, unresentful, Jesus answered, first
with the parable of the lost sheep, as much as
to say, " these are my lost ones, these at whom
you sneer; this is my way of seeking them till
I find them; thus I carry them back to my
Father's fold; the angels rejoice over one that
returns more than over the ninety and nine
that went not astray." As though this com
passionate and artistic reply were not enough,
he proceeds in a manner perfectly unruffled
and self-contained, presenting the parable of
the lost coin, the housewife sweeping till she
finds it, the rejoicing when it is found; as
much as to say, " these are my lost jewels,
these at whom you sneer. I am seeking thus
till I find them, and though you may not, yet
the angels rejoice when they are found." Still
he proceeds in the same vein, delicately re
buking, kindly explaining, graciously pleading,
presenting at last the pearl of all parables, that
of Fatherly Love, misnamed " The Prodigal
Son." Instead of being crushed by the mur
muring of his proud critics their censorship

MASTERLINESS 51
had given him the opportunity of presenting
the gospel in miniature, a portraiture of divine
grace, a literary masterpiece, an imperishable
parable. This group of parables presents a
climax of beautiful, self-contained, artistic
repartee. In this light there is nothing like
them. The prayers of Jesus are models of devo
tion, brevity, and directness. As to his answers
— they are unanswerable. No one came to
him carping, but he went away pained for
having " put his hand on that burning moun
tain." He was the prince of conversational
ists as shown by his talk with the woman at
the well in Sychar, with the two on their way
to Emmaus, and with his disciples on the night
of the last supper.
In his works also Jesus is represented as
being altogether masterly. What he does is
done at once and effectually. He is never
presented as an experimentalist. He never tries
this way and that to see whether he can heal
the blind or deaf or lame, or whether he can
raise the dead, and how. He does not try at
all, he simply achieves. A word, a touch,
a command, an obedience — it is done. " If
thou wilt, thou canst make me clean," cries
the leper. " I will ; be thou clean," answers
the Master. This is the more noteworthy

52 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
when we reflect that through all ages medicine
has been an experimental science, or if not it
has been mingled with magic. But the presen
tation of Christ makes him as free from magic
on the one hand as he is from experimentation
on the other.
Take for example his dealing with death.
Nothing could be more staggering to fiction
writers than to create a character great enough
to cope with death; to be the master there,
rather than be mastered. Yet the presentation
of the gospels in this capital matter is as un
strained and simple as in the general tenor of
their recital. Jesus is represented as calling
death sleep, and at once treating it just as
though it were sleep. To the little maiden
he said in charming simplicity, " Talitha cumi ;"
she arose as if answering a mother's morning
call. To the young man at the gate of the
city of Nain he said, " Young man, I say unto
thee, arise." He arose, and was restored to
his mother. To the brother of Mary and
Martha he cried, " Lazarus, come forth."
"And he that was dead came forth, bound
hand and foot with grave clothes." Of his
own approaching death he gave many intima
tions to his disciples, and passed calmly on to
meet it, saying, " I have power to' lay down
my life, and I have power to take it again."

MASTERLINESS 53
On the moming of the third day he arose,
leaving the empty tomb as his last and mighti
est miracle. The presentation of this majestic
dealing with death is very wonderful. The
story has all the touches of genuineness and
reality, while its idealism is the most unique
and enrapturing that the world has known.
The writers of our gospels had no model for
such achievements, unless indeed they were
writing h'istory, in which case their model was
the man himself.
Was his cleansing of the temple a miracle?
If not, all the more wonderful is the master
liness displayed by it. Twenty-five acres of
marble-paved courts ! A million Jews there to
worship! Thousands of rams and lambs and
oxen there for sacrificial purposes ! The people
with a necessity, the priests with a monopoly !
Extortionate prices! Bulling and bearing!
Haggling and hurrying! Oxen lowing and
tradesmen screaming ! A corner on sacrificial
beasts made the more hideous by a pretence of
worship — all this is what Jesus found in his
Father's house. Was there anything effemi
nate in his character, any overplus of the
" meek and lowly " when he gathered up a
handful of ropes witrl which they had littered
their marble pavements, twisted them into a
lash, drove out the herds, overthrew the money

54 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
tables, and cried, " You have made my Father's
house of prayer a den of thieves " ? To-day we
hold in high esteem the manliness of the man
who has a lash for " special interests," a Wen
dell Phillips, a Lincoln, or a Luther. Let
us not forget that lone-handed young man
who threw himself in absolute reformatory
abandonment against the whole bad mass of
mechanical worship, systematic extortion, and
stand-pat Phariseeism there in the heart of
his nation. His was a tremendous protest.
There is no severer test of masterliness than
a man's success in dealing with men. The
slightest touch of effeminacy kills the man who
aspires to be a leader of men. Weakness and
inefficiency are no less fatal. From the school
boy to the statesman the born leader must be
a born man, virile, positive, effective, com
manding. Now Jesus took a dozen whole-
bodied men from the lake and marts of Gali
lee, brave, hardy, storm-tried fellows, patriotic,
restless, ready for a fight. He bound them
to him with the cords of a man; he taught
them and trained them; he inspired and re
buked them ; he moulded them to his mind ; he
crushed them into denial and despair. There
after he revived their faith and love ; he com
mitted to them a mighty mission ; within three
years and a half he made those fishermen, just

MASTERLINESS 55
as he had promised, fishers of men, and set
them amidst the thronging thousands of Mount
Moriah's temple courts, there to challenge and
preach, to witness and to convict, to baptize be
lievers by thousands, and to create a new
movement of spiritual might within the heart
of decadent Judaism. All in all he made them
the world's foremost preachers and prophets,
heralds and reformers, the new-born spiritual
giants of the world's new spiritual era. He
who can thus hold men, and mould them, and
crush them, and recreate them, and give them
a living mission in a dying age, must be himself
a master among men.
If the presentation of this wonderful char
acteristic on the pages of our gospels is fiction
merely, then it is not only a miracle of literary
creation, but it is a miracle of literary realism
to the point of deception. The literary crea
tion of such sermons and parables and prayers ;
of such abandonment in heroism; of such effi
ciency in healing; of such leadership among
men; of such reformatory zeal; of such ideal
ism and of such power to crush the old and
build the new, would be an achievement un
paralleled by our masters of fiction. That men
" untrained in art " should " weave such agree
ing truths " would be more wonderful than Je
sus himself, the Man of men, the Gift of God.

56 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
For a moment one is constrained to drop the
argument and turn the heart to this wonderful
man. Sitting long at his feet love and admira
tion grow into adoration, and arising at last
we follow him, as the disciples of old, first
to the place of prayer : thence to the beckoning
duties of our day. If in the Gethsemanes of this
world we shall be found ever wakeful with
him, then also in the rough ways of the world
we shall not be found wanting to him.

IV
AUTHORITY
"O Lord and Master of us all!
Whate'er our name or sign,
We own thy sway, we hear thy call,
We test our lives by thine."
WE are accustomed to think of author
ity as an official attribute rather than
an inherent one. The creator of
fiction finds no characteristic more difficult to
bestow on his heroes than that of inherent
authority. It is not so with the accidental
authority of the autocrat, or the delegated
authority of the military or civil officer, or
the achieved authority of the expert student.
The Czar of Russia has a tremendous author
ity by reason of the accident of birth. The
President of the United States has a delegated
authority. The authority of expert opinion
comes by way of life-long study and distin
guished achievement.
Higher still is the authority that springs
from wisdom, knowledge, conviction, iner
rancy, immeasurable greatness of soul. There
57

58 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
are few indeed whose actions are such as to call
for no repentance, and whose words are such
as never to need an apology or a cor
rection. The presentation of Christ in the
four gospels is that of a character who, under
the most varied and trying circumstances, lived
a life of absolute rectitude, and whose speech
was inerrant. To this character there is at
tributed the authority of a transcendent vision
and a commanding personality. This is what
we term the attribute of inherent authority,
and the difficulty of bestowing it is the difficulty
of creating a' character sufficient for it. Our
wealth of fiction has not even remotely ap
proached, amidst the wonderful variety of its
characters, anything comparable to the Christ
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in this
matter of an authoritative norm for humanity.
This inherent authority is attributed to Jesus
in his ethical and spiritual teaching as voiced
in the Sermon on the Mount. His attitude
toward the laws, precepts, and customs of his
people and of the past is not that of a learner
like the rabbis all around him, or that of one
indiscriminatingly loyal ; but that of a free and
discriminating and criticising and even repeal
ing King and Lord.
Use was made in a previous essay of Matthew
5 : 38-42, and it was said quite tersely, " He

AUTHORITY 59
dared in the interests of his new kingdom to
repeal that law and replace it with his new law
of the other cheek." That law, namely, " an
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," is
not a rabbinical one; it is a Mosaic one; it
is embedded in the book of Deuteronomy, one
of the most spiritual books of the Old Testa
ment. It. is a relic of the ancient tribal law
of blood revenge. " Eye for eye, tooth for
tooth, burning for burning, smiting for smit
ing," cried all the tribes of the pre-Mosaic
world. Moses did not rise above that terrible
tribal law of rude and ready justice and re
venge. He checked its more frightful work
ings by the institution of the cities of refuge
to which the " unwitting slayer " might flee.
But there it is, and there Jesus found it in the
most sacred and authoritative legislation and
literature of his people. Does he bow rever
ently to it, and gladly, like any conventional
Pharisee or rabbi ? Does he obey it ? Had he
done so Judaea would have been drenched in
blood at his hand. Unhesitatingly, boldly, he
sets it aside. He lifts the first personal pro
noun up against it. Authoritatively he cries,
" But I say unto you that you resist not evil ;
but whosoever shall smite thee on the right
cheek, turn to him the other also." Nothing
could be plainer than this kingly repeal of the

60 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
old, this royal enactment of the new. And
this is the tone from first to last of the moun
tain sermon.
That sermon is the new king's platform of
his new kingdom, and to make room for it he
had to clear away much. Authoritatively he
pruned and cut and digged and discarded, and
when he was done, and his plan stood complete,
the ethnic and tribal features of Judaism were
totally eliminated. The Jews placed vital
values on the Sabbath, circumcision, the priest
hood, the altar, the sacrifices, the day of Atone
ment, and their various cycles of feasts. Jesus
does not so much as mention any of these.
He expresses no interest in them. Every
merely transient, out-worn feature of Judaism
falls away from his teaching, and the young
King stands out on a platform as universal
as the multiplication table or the Golden Rule.
With the ancient, wondering people we still
exclaim, " He speaks as one that has authority
and not as the scribes."
In the Sermon on the Mount there is an
authoritative assumption of the Fatherhood
of God. The thought of God's fatherhood
had been poetically and cautiously suggested
in the literature of the Jews. But fundamen
tally and constructively to the Jews God was
a monarch, and their government was a theoc-

AUTHORITY 61
racy. This thought about God conditions Old
Testament history and prophecy. Jesus passes
beyond it. To him God is more than mon
arch; he is Father. Nothing short of this
prime term of endearment and kinship could
satisfy the brave and tender heart of Christ.
With him it was not a passing figure of speech
merely; it was a constructive concept. His
teaching was dominated by it. If he exhorted
to good works it was that the Father might
be glorified. If to the love of enemies, it was
that his disciples might be " sons of the Father
in heaven." If to' prayer, it was that the
Father might hear and recompense. If to
fasting, it was that the Father might see and
approve. If he taught his disciples to
pray for a kingdom, it was for the Father's
kingdom. If for forgiveness, it was the
Father's forgiveness. Jesus announces that
God is Father, and then proceeds boldly, au
thoritatively to construe his teachings and con
struct his kingdom in accordance with that
fundamental premise.
In the Johannine account of the cleansing
of the temple there is the striking phrase,
" my Father's house." " Take these things
hence; make not my Father's house a house of
merchandise." In these words Jesus asserted
his authority for his daring and reformatory

62 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
act. Therein lay his right of protest. As
the Father's representative he made the pro
test effective. The rights resident in the
Father are resident also in the Son, and the
Son's expression of them is the Father's ex
pression. " Here at Jerusalem, in the very
central place of the nation's religious life,
amidst surroundings which would surely have
given pause to any reformer not quite assured
of his mission or of himself, Jesus throws
down his challenge to the world and announces
himself as One to whom the established order
of things counts for nothing at all, as One who
dares to lay his hand in reproof and correction
upon anything he held unworthy, however
consecrated by usage it might be."
This assertion of authority coupled with the
claim of a unique relationship to God carries
us very far into the secret of all the claims
and deeds of Jesus. Conscious of kinship
with God he asserted what otherwise he could
not have asserted, planned what otherwise he
could not have planned, commanded what
otherwise he could not have commanded, and
did what otherwise he could not have done.
His assertion of authority in word and deed
is the natural outflowing of his divine relation
ship. If he is the Son of God he must speak
authoritatively, as God would speak, and act

AUTHORITY 63
authoritatively, as God would act. In other
words, correlative with the tremendous claim
of conscious and unique kinship with God
there must be a tremendous use of the first
personal pronoun. From a purely literary
standpoint a feeble use of personality follow
ing such a claim would be quite incongruous,
while, on the other hand, to create a character
assuming such a kinship and to create situa
tions and teachings becoming to such assump
tion would be an unprecedented literary
achievement. Take again the mountain sermon. Five
times the form is used or its equivalent, " Ye
have heard that it hath been said by them of
old time, . . . but I say unto you." In
Luke's more abbreviated report of this sermon
there is an intimation of the same authorita
tive style of speech. It must therefore have
been a frequent and characteristic formula with
Jesus thus to cite the ancients that he might
supplement their legal ethic with a spiritual
one, or that he might quite set aside their un
ethical teaching for a highly ethical one. Now
the ancients whom he thus cited, and freely
supplemented or corrected, were not the hope
less traditionalists of his own day, the rabbis,
who never dared to say an original thing; they
were the law-givers of the Old Testament.

64 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
In the eyes of the contemporaries of Jesus they
" of the old time " had attained to such sanctity
and authority that to criticise them was heresy;
to touch them was sacrilege. In their eyes
Jesus suffered accordingly, and paved his way
to the cross by every authoritative pronounce
ment in which he transcended or repealed the
laws, of their far-away fathers.
In the light of the whole field of gospel pres
entation it is not too much to say that Jesus
assumed a judicial and official attitude toward
the decadent theocracy of his people, toward
the ethical and social questions propounded to
him, and toward the founding and furthering
of his new kingdom.
Jesus is represented as speaking with author
ity upon the profoundest of spiritual experi
ences and conditions. To the paralytic let down
through the broken roof he said, " Son, be
of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven." This
was an assumption of such authority in the
spiritual realm as to bring him under the
charge of blasphemy at the hands of the
scribes. He met the issue squarely. He as
serted that " the Son of Man has authority
(exousian) on earth to forgive sins." In proof
he at once placed the visible miracle of physi
cal healing by the side of the invisible miracle
of spiritual healing. At his word the helpless

AUTHORITY 65
invalid arose, folded his couch, and went out
through the surrounding throng. The simple
comment of the narrator following the recital
of this incident is highly significant. " Seeing
it the multitudes feared, and glorified God who
had given such authority to men." " To
men ", for to them he seemed a man, no more,
the type of men. And to them there was re
vealed in him a new deposit of spiritual author
ity; a dynamic of almost dreadful significance.
The incident recorded in the first part of the
eighth chapter of John has not good manu
script authority, but that does not invalidate
it for present purposes. It is a presentation
truly characteristic, and fits precisely into our
plan. The case was well worked up by the
enemies of Jesus. The Pharisees, legally pre
cise, religiously heartless, determined to en
trap the young and daring and free construc
tionist, and revolutionary reconstructionist of
law and life. They brought to him a woman
taken in adultery, " in the very act," they said
unblushingly. They reminded him that Moses,
in the law, commanded that such should be
stoned. And they added in tones of anticipated
triumph, " What sayest thou ? " It was a chal
lenge. It was a dilemma. The young teacher
must hang on this horn or that. Strangely,
unexpectedly, calmly he stooped; he wrote on

66 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
the ground, perhaps for their eyes what he
did not want the woman to see. They pressed
their case. " They continued asking him."
He arose with such lightning in his face and
such words on his lips as probed even their
law-hardened consciences. They too were
stained as the woman was; Jesus knew it, and
they knew it. They had not been caught ; the
woman had, and there was the difference. He
met their challenge with a challenge. He chal
lenged those stained men to throw stones at
that stained woman. They, law-hardened
though they were, dared not meet his chal
lenge, or stay longer in his withering presence.
Out they went, slinking, one by one. Then
lifting himself up in the presence of the
woman and in the face of an ancient law,
which neither called her to repentance nor al
lowed her to reform, he said graciously,
"neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no
more." Here Jesus assumed the authority of
setting aside the law of Moses, and of forgiv
ing and paroling " the prisoner at the bar."
Never was the native authority of Jesus dis
played to better advantage, and never did it
appear more threatening to the schools and
the cult of the Jews, than when he appeared
in the temple courts, and especially during those
last days preceding his death. After the sec-

AUTHORITY 67
ond cleansing of the temple he continued with
in its marble courts, teaching the thronging
worshippers there, and healing the sick. He
became a disturbing centre of influence, like
a new planet throwing old orders out of
orbit. When the temple authorities could stand
it no longer they came to him as he was teach
ing, and said, " By what authority doest thou
these things, and who gave thee this author
ity?" No Hillel or Gamaliel had ordained
him to the rank of a rabbi. He had asked
for no license from their schools, yet he was
intruding upon their prerogatives. Contrary
to rule he was teaching by the rule of his own
clear-seeing soul. Jesus taught as inevitably as
the sun shines. This the men of the schools
could not understand. Ground out duly, and
duly labelled, they taught as they were told.
The school, the party, the sect had authorized
them, and their teaching had, according to their
own claims, been stereotyped for two thousand
years. How could they understand Jesus?
The distance of the poles was between him
and them. Had he answered them directly they
would have trodden his answer like a jewel
in the mire, and they would have turned again
to rend him.
The record in John of Christ's last night
with his disciples mingles strangely words of

68 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
kindliness and kingliness. The " Lord and
Master " washes his disciples' feet, and in a
single simple sentence immortalizes the act as
an emblem of service in his new realm, the
realm of the king who is brother first and king
thereafter. Over against many a time-honored
commandment he places one new one, making
it central, imperative, and of more weight than
ali the rest ; " As I have loved you, love ye
also one another." For the perplexed and
troubled souls of his disciples there is the con
solation of his equality with God ; " Ye believe
in God, believe also in me." Have they felt
lost in their quest of the Father? Jesus says,
"I am the way, the truth, and the life." Is
the Father likened to a husbandman? Then
Jesus is the true vine, and his disciples are the
branches. Fruitfulness is conditioned on resi
dence in him as the branch in the vine. The
disciples should not be lonely and lost; they
should have the Holy Spirit as their Com
forter and Guide, Vice-regent of the Master
himself. These chapters, the fourteenth, fif
teenth, and sixteenth of John, rise to a climax
in their mystical sweetness, and in their
rugged, authoritative commandments and as
surances. The hearts of the disciples, doubt
ful and disturbed that night, were to be broken
and disconsolate before another night. And

AUTHORITY 69
Christ their Master, who speaks to them in
kingly style, who legislates by right of love
divine, transmutes his lordship into friendship,
becomes their suffering Servant and their
redeeming Brother.
The presentation of the risen Christ is in
the same vein as regards this characteristic
of authority. There is the same style of high-
souled speech, dominating all within its com
pass, yet tender and compassionate, concerned
with such things as haunt the secret chambers
of the heart, and such as make for peace with
God. Concerned also with an empire, a world-
kingdom, a majestic, age-long reign, not of
the club or the sword, the rack or the fagot,
the army or the navy, but of the teacher, the
brother, and the friend. With the emphasis
of pierced hands, with yonder the empty tomb,
around him once more the disciples of his
former teaching days, he cries, " All authority
is given to me in heaven and in earth. Go
teach all nations, baptizing them in the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit."
Can this be fiction? If so, who dreamed it?
Who planned it? Who created the situations?
Who contrived this mingled manward grace
and Godward glory? Who enshrined such
royal ways of working in such peasant ways

70 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
of speaking? Who ever conceived of authority
divorcing itself from force and wedding itself
to love ? Do the kings of fiction wash the feet
of plebeians? Do the heroes of romance win
their battles by praying, suffering, dying, ris
ing? Do the plots of Homer and Hugo and
Shakespeare in their unravelling disclose risen
Saviours, Pentecosts, apostles, martyrs, a whole
new era with twenty growing centuries in its
bosom ?
" Behold the Man," said Pilate, pointing.
There stood forth Christ, robed in purple,
thorn-crowned, bruised, bleeding. Men looked,
and gazed. And still they gaze, beholding still
the Man, forgetting Pilate, Csesar, Moses;
Athens, Rome, Jerusalem ; priests, altars, sacri
fices ; — beholding still the Man.

V
LOVE
"Immortal Love, forever full,
Forever flowing free,
Forever shared, forever whole,
A never-ebbing sea !
"Our outward lips confess the name
All other names above;
Love only knoweth whence it came,
And comprehendeth love."
WE habitually think of love as a senti
ment or an emotion or even a passion
. more or less transient. Almost never
have we thought of it as a factor in charac
ter. Perhaps we are right in our estimate as
it pertains to the average man. With him it is
too easily transmuted into indifference or even
into hatred. Were it something fundamental
to him it would be otherwise, for what is
fundamental abides and controls.
The love attributed to Christ is characteristic
of him. It, like universality and masterliness
and authority, is a factor wrought essentially
into that which goes to make the character.
71

72 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
The character could not be what it is if love
were not there.
There are circles of love. Self-love, how
ever refined and laudable, is yet narrow in the
extreme. Domestic love enlarges the circle to
all who gather in close kinship, and is nobler
by far. Beyond this there is patriotism, the
love of one's fatherland, larger and nobler
still. And beyond this, philanthropy, the love
of man as man, regardless of race, colour, and
condition. This is the highest, holiest human
love, unknown to politicians, scarcely guessed
by statesmen, preached rather than practised
by Christians, and attained only by the rarest
leaders of our race. It is this broad human
love, inclusive of the narrower circles, that
is attributed to Christ by Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John.
Sympathy and compassion are other names
for it, and all that is comprehended under the
term altruism is the fruit of it. Sympathy and
compassion are exact synonyms and they
mean en rapport, in touch with, suffering with,
rejoicing with, one with. That is love. When
it is said that Jesus had compassion on the
hungry multitudes, it is meant that he actually
felt their hunger. The pain was a physical
pain to him, so admirably was he constituted
spiritually and bodily. So of the sin-sick and

LOVE 73
physically infirm people all around him. Their
sorrows were his sorrows, and when they re
joiced in his healing and help their joy was
his joy. It was thus that he did " bear our
burdens," and " was beaten with our stripes."
We must recover from the thought that the
love attributed to Jesus was an assumed some
thing, extraneous, a sort of other seamless
robe that he could put on and take off at will.
Let it be repeated, the love attributed to Jesus
is fundamental to his very being. It abides
with him and is a controlling factor in his
teaching and the building of his kingdom.
For our purposes it may be defined as a
persistently right attitude toward God as
Father, and toward man as brother. To be
persistently right toward God as Father, that
is persistent sonship. To be persistently right
toward man as brother, that is persistent
brotherliness. Such Godward, manward per
sistence, is love — a radically different matter
from sentiment or emotion merely.
Though love is thus fundamental to Jesus
it has with him its emotional side, just as all
love has. In him also love " seeks possession
of its object, and lives for its object." It
craves and it gives. On the lower levels its
craving may take the form of selfishness. On
the higher levels its giving grows divine.

74 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
There " unselfish giving is its life." " When
it is said that God is love it is meant that
love is the characteristic and abiding quality in
God, by which his relations to other beings are
determined." * If Christ's love is a disclosure
of the Father's love it must crave, and give,
and abide. It must crave the possession of its
object. It must give itself in devotional ways
to its object. It must be as a fountain that
never fails, and as a branch abiding in the
vine. As thus defined love is attributed to Jesus
in his teachings. The beatitudes have in them
a tone of compassion from first to last. Their
introductory word is a benediction and a pro
test. Jesus delighted to place his hands in
blessing on the heads of the humble, neglected,
ignored, and outclassed; the meek, the merci
ful, and the brave. He delighted in protests
against the proud, the self-sufficient, the lux
urious, and the unheeding. The traits that he
blessed were despised in his day, and those
against which he protested were valued and
sought. In a pleasure-mad age he brought
comfort to the mourning, and assured them
that they were fortunate. In an age of war
fare he brought the good fortune of the divine
* William Newton Clarke, D.D., "Outline of Chris
tian Theology," p. 98.

LOVE 75
Fatherhood to the makers of peace. In an age
of cruelty he brought the assurance of grace
to the merciful. In an age of blurred moral
distinctions he blessed those who were hunger
ing and thirsting for righteousness, and
promised them satisfaction. This pronounce
ment of good fortune on the great masses of
the very common people who were honest and
humble and merciful and peaceable and anxious
to be right and do right is indicative of his
kindly attitude toward them. He loved them.
He loved their simple, honest, kindly hearts
and ways.
In rebuking a wrong attitude toward
brothers Jesus puts anger where the ancient
law of his land put murder, Mat. 5 : 22. In
this he was simply consistent. If love was
fundamental to the soul of Jesus it was funda
mental to his kingdom; to such a kingdom
anger and hatred are ruinous, and their fruit
age is death.
The rightfulness and even the duty of hat
ing one's enemies was the orthodox teaching
of the times of Jesus and the centuries pre
ceding him. The Old Testament teems with
texts, legislative and lyric, in which such
hatred is inculcated. Rabbi, Pharisee, and
political zealot, all united in shouting a
lusty " Amen " to this teaching, and in whet-

76 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
ting their daggers for the Romans, since they
were the special enemies to be hated at that
time. Against this ancient orthodox teaching,
the young, ardent, reforming Christ is repre
sented as lifting up his voice in unreserved dis
approval, saying, " Ye have heard that it hath
been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and
hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love
your enemies, bless them that curse you, do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them
that despitefully use you and persecute you."
This daring defiance of custom and orthodoxy ;
this brave repeal of the old law of the hatred
of enemies; this equally brave enactment of
the new law of the love of enemies, is at bot
tom, simply, logically, the setting aside of
what was inimical to the soul and the king
dom of one whose love was fundamental.
In recreating the simple situation in Matthew
22 : 35 f. one must know the lawyer. He is
a rabbi, and he is a type of the school. He is
a rigid traditionalist. His soul is full of the
finest spun cobwebbery of legalism. He has
been taught to " count and classify and weigh
and measure all the separate commandments
of the ceremonial and moral law." His teach
ers have told him that there were 248 positive
precepts, being as many as the members of the
human body. That there were 365 negative

LOVE 77
precepts, being as many as the days of the
year. That there were thus together 613,
being as many as the letters in the Decalogue,
Some of these were heavy and some were
light; some were very heavy, and some were
very light. The laws regulating the Sabbath,
circumcision, and hand-washing were very
heavy. To omit one's ablutions was as bad as
homicide. But the heaviest of all precepts,
so certain of the masters said, were those re
lating to their phylacteries and fringes. Each
tsitsith or. tassel or fringe must have eight
threads and five knots and be bound with a
thread of blue. To observe this law of the
tsitsith rigidly was the same as if one kept
the whole law. Filled with such absurdities,
trifles clothed in legal majesty, mountains of
nonsense made tremendous by tradition, this
lawyer, this blind leader of the blind, comes
to Jesus, asking, " Which is the great com
mandment of the law?" Jesus answered
promptly, " Thou shalt love." Not a word
about a single one of the 613 affirm
ative and negative precepts! Not a word
about ablution, or the Sabbath, or the
tsitsith! Sweeping the whole heaven of duty
clear of such legislative puerilities, Jesus
said, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with

78 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
all thy might. This is the first and great com
mandment. And the second is like unto it;
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
Love only is great as Jesus sees legislative
greatness. The " new commandment " given to the dis
ciples under the most memorable and sacred
sanctions of the last supper and the night of
the betrayal is just this same old command
ment of love made new by the master's new
emphasis of it in his approaching passion of
bloodshed and prayer. " A new command
ment give I unto you, that ye love one an
other." Not a word on that sacred night about
a single sacred day, or doctrine, vestment, sac
rament, or ritual! But a pleading, heartfelt
holy emphasis on that which to him was vital.
This new commandment thus emphasized and
vitalized means more to the world a thousand
times than all the Mosaic ten, and the priestly
hundreds, and the rabbinical thousands, and
the Romish and Protestant myriads. It is the
sum of what is good in them all, and the
absence of what is cold and hard and rigid
and devitalizing in all mere legalism.
Many of the parables of Jesus are parables
of love. The parable of the Good Samaritan
is the presentation of a new neighbourliness
based on love. " Who is my neighbour? "

LOVE 79
The conventional answer is, the man whom
you need. Christ's answer is, the man who
needs you. Go, bind his wounds, and lift him
up, and bring him in. See that he is sane and
well and well started. Such is the new neigh
bourliness of the new kingdom of this strange
character Christ. In sharp contrast with the
Samaritan, a man despised by the Jew, and of
a hated race, the priest and the Levite, typical
members of the family of Israel, proud of
their lineage, officially high, legally correct, go
by on. the other side of the blood-stained road
way. What interest have they in a man pre
viously robbed? He has no tithes for them.
He cannot bring them an ox, or a ram, or a
lamb, or even a poor little dove or pigeon.
Their glorious, blazing altar yonder on Mt.
Zion awaits them. They hurry on while
their brother by the wayside rolls in blood,
with gaping wounds. Good, mechanically cor
rect religionists they are, no doubt ; devoted to
the marble and gold of the temple, and the
shew-bread, and the candle-stick, and the in
cense, and the smoke of the altar, and the
tithes in the treasury, and their own pretty,
white robes. But in all that there is no love.
The parable of the Prodigal Son should be
renamed. It is the parable of Fatherly Love.
The whole context shows that the Father's

80 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
part in the drama is foremost in the mind of
Jesus. The elaboration of this pearl of para
bles in reference to the Father is noteworthy.
He sees the son " a long way off " ; runs to
meet him; throws his arms about him; kisses
him; clothes him anew with robe and ring of
fatherly forgiveness and acceptance; orders a
feast; exhorts every one to be glad, and cries
out, "My son was lost, he is found; he was
dead, he is alive." This is love. This is at-
one-ment. This is atonement.
The parable of the Good Shepherd is a pic
ture of devotion. Love lives between the shep
herd and the sheep. They know his voice.
He leads them out. They follow him. He
gives his life for them. The hireling flees
because he is a hireling, and cares not for the
sheep. The parable of the late labourers in the vine
yard pictures the love of the Lord of the vine
yard for all willing workers, giving " unto the
last even as unto the first," because they were
just as willing to work as the first, and " no
man had hired them." This tender touch of
pity for the workingmen who want work and
are " turned down," cuts close to one of the
deepest problems of the present day.
The miracles of Jesus were miracles of love.
It is significant that he never wrought a mira-

LOVE 81
cle on demand. " Show us a miracle," cried
the scornful scribes. From Jesus no miracle
came in response. But a way-side leper stands
crying, " Lord, if thou wilt thou canst make
me clean." At once there was the ready re
sponse, " I will ; be thou clean." It was a
miracle of love. Of the four thousand fed
with the few little loaves and fishes it is said,
" Jesus had compassion on them." Back of
the loaves was love. Into this category of
love may be brought all the miracles of heal
ing and of resurrection. At the gate of the
city of Nain, at the tomb of Lazarus, at the
master's own empty tomb, there was love.
While wondering at the minor miracles we
have missed the major one, the real one, whose
name is love.
The death of Jesus is the climactic love of
Jesus. Taking the last twenty-four hours of
his life as one dramatic movement, it is the
drama of love. The supper with the disciples
was a love feast with them. The prayer was
a plea for their continued unity in love.
Gethsemane was the agony of love struggling
against repulsive wickedness. The disarma
ment of Peter, and the healing of the wound
made in his Master's behalf, was a work of
love. The command, " put up the sword," is
but another phrasing of the new law of love.

82 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
The submission to the Roman soldiers was the
submission of love. The forgiveness of the
repentant thief was an act of redeeming love.
The prayer, " Father, forgive them ; they know
not what they do," is the prayer of interces
sory love. And the last words, " Father, into
thy hands I commit my spirit," is the commit
ment of love. It is wonderful, this love, up
lifted thus, and drawing all men unto it !
Our literary problem again appears, al
though in this connection it seems almost ir
reverent. Was this ideal of more than human
love realized in the actual Christ, or did that
spiritually blinded, hatred-nursing age fabri
cate it ? The term is not too strong. It was a
hatred-nursing age. Antipathy grew rank
between Jew and Gentile. Narrowness and
dislike reigned between sect and sect among
the Jews themselves. The hatred of enemies
was taught as a religious and political virtue.
The deadly fruit .of the upas tree poisoned all
Palestine, and Palestine does not account for
Christ. " God so loved the world that he
gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish, but have
eternal life."
A practical reflection seeks expression here.
In the light of the love that was fundamental
to the soul and the kingdom of Christ our

LOVE 83
differences dwindle into trifles. Love is funda
mental to the kingdom of Christ. But Cal
vinism is not; Arminianism is not; Socinian
ism is not ; credal formulas are not ; vestments,
rituals, sacraments are not. We quarrel over
creeds, sinning in our quarrels against the law
of love. We magnify trifles, contending for
and against them, falling out, and cleaving
asunder the body of Christ, all the while trans
gressing his " great commandment," his " new
commandment," wounding afresh his very
spirit. The deepest need of our hearts and our
centuries is not answered by Westminster or
Augsburg; by the Vatican or the Holy Synod;
by the seven councils or the Nicene Creed;
it is answered by the love of Jesus, revealing
the Father's love, and culminating on Cal
vary. Love was the handmaiden of Truth as the
two went forth in the name of Christ to con
quer the Roman empire. Anciently it was
said, "behold how these Christians love one
another." To-day the world does not so much
observe that. Whittier's lament still has oc
casion to be heard ; we
" Melt in our acid sects
The Christian pearl of charity."

84 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
" Holiness is central in God, but love is cen
tral in holiness." Without faith it is impos
sible to please God, and without love. His
proffered Fatherhood must have its response
in our gladly given childhood. Straight as
a* mathematical corollary from our childhood
Godward comes our brotherhood manward.
Without love it is impossible to serve men.
Paul and John saw this, and Whittier and
Longfellow and Lowell and Tennyson have
celebrated it, each in his own style of lyric
beauty. Only our theologians, logic-hardened,
have seemed to miss it.
"Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the
chords with might;
Smote the chord of self, that trembling passed in
music out of sight."

VI
SEVERITY
" Thou judgest us ; thy purity
Doth all our lusts condemn ;
The love that draws us nearer thee,
Is hot with wrath to them."
THE kindliness and gentleness of Jesus
cannot be overemphasized, but they
may be so presented as to obscure his
sterner and less attractive characteristics. To
know the character Christ we must know its
manysidedness. Severity is a characteristic
that contrasts sharply with love, or at least
on the surface seems to do so. The contrast
heightens the interest in our study, while it
lends to the character an unexpected com
pleteness and strength.
Many of the reported sayings of Jesus are
sharp and unrelenting. He rebuked certain
classes of people in words that were plain and
fearless. He sat in judgment on his age. He
denounced externalism, injustice, and self-
sufficiency. He used the most religious peo
ple of his time as warnings to his disciples
85

86 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
against hypocrisy, formalism, and soulless cer
emonialism. He foretold the destruction of
Jerusalem and the doom of the nation. He
sternly corrected his own disciples, and his
warnings against future punishment are
terrible. More explicitly and as examples of his
" hard sayings " the following may be cited :
In his earliest ministry he takes up John the
Baptist's stern call to repentance. The call to
a national repentance is a national accusation.
John's voice had been almost fierce in its de
nunciation of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
The axe for the tree of evil fruit and the
winnowing fan for the chaff were his favourite
figures. He saw around him a " generation of
vipers." He rebuked the national pride in
Abrahamic blood, and threatened the people
with a baptism of fire. While the same threat
ening figures are not found in the preaching of
Jesus, yet there is the same lofty demand for
reformation, the same uncompromising atti
tude toward sin, and figures scarcely less ter
ror-striking. The use of the scribes and Pharisees as
warnings to his disciples against a certain kind
of religious life is a noteworthy example of
Christ's severity. To get the full force of it
one must remember that the scribes were the

SEVERITY 87
most learned class of the time, and that their
learning was of the most approved and legal
kind. They were the honoured " doctors " of
the day. The Pharisees made a business of
being religious. They were perfectly punctil
ious about a thousand religious trifles, such as
hand-washing, tithing, fasting, praying, sacri
ficing, counting even the threads and knots in
the fringes of their religious gowns. They
were extreme legalists, ritualists, formalists,
ceremonialists. They were cold, hard, inhu
man, loveless. They prided themselves on
being agreeable to God seemingly in propor
tion as they were disagreeable to men. Now
this learned class and this leading religious
sect of his day were especially chosen by Jesus
as examples to be avoided by his humble band
of Galilean followers. To his group of peas
ant preachers he said, " Except your righteous
ness shall exceed that of the scribes and Phari
sees ye shall by no means enter into the king
dom of heaven."
The rebuke of ostentatious hypocrites has a
very keen edge. " They have their reward,"
he said, they who fast, or give, or pray " to be
seen of men." "They have their reward,"
he said again and again, the plain intimation
being that with such vain-glory their reward
forever ended.

88 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
When the occasion called for it Jesus was
severe on his own disciples. This moment
Peter is a " rock," praised for his confes
sional foundation of the new church. Next
moment, opposing the redeeming plans of the
Master, he is denominated " Satan," rebuked
as an adversary, and plainly told that he is a
stumbling-block. James and John, led by their mistaken
mother, foolishly desired to sit the one on his
right hand and the other on his left when he
came to the throne of their poor, worldly,
Messianic kingdom of dreams. His answer
to their request has a mingled tone of sorrow
and severity. " Ye know not what ye ask.
Are ye able to drink the cup that I am about
to drink ? " In childlike simplicity and abso
lute lack of forecast they replied, " We can."
He said, " Ye shall. But to sit on my right
hand and on my left is not mine to give. It
is for them [the multitudinous democracy of
the redeemed] for whom it has been prepared
of my Father."
The disciples of Jesus naturally participated
in the religious fervour and national pride of
their people. These emotions were mightily
stirred by the glory of their temple, the rich
ness of their worship and the stateliness of
their ritual. To them the temple and the tem-

SEVERITY 89
pie alone was " the house of the Lord." It
was because Jerusalem was the sacred city of
the temple that they sang at the end of their
weary pilgrimages,
" Our feet are standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem ;
Jerusalem, that art builded as a city that is compact
together ;
Whither the tribes go up, even the tribes of the Lord,
For a testimony to Israel, to give thanks unto the
name of the Lord."
The temple itself was a mountain of snowy
marble and glittering gold. Terrace upon ter
race it arose from the Court of the Gentiles
to the Holy of Holies. Its tessellated, marble-
paved courts comprised above twenty acres,
and these. courts were adorned with marble
colonnades nearly a thousand feet in length.
Hundreds of marble, monolithic columns, Co
rinthian in style, thirty-seven and a half to fifty
feet in height, supported the marble roofs of
the Royal Porch, and Solomon's Porch, and
the others to the north and west. Stones
sixty-seven and a half feet in length and nine
feet thick, Josephus tells us, were built into
the walls of the temple proper, and these were
covered with gold. The Holy of Holies was
roofed with marble and studded with golden
spikes so that no unclean bird might rest there.

90 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
The " Gate Beautiful " was an arched portal,
made of vari-coloured marble, eighty feet
high, and adorned with a vine of gold, emblem
of Israel, from which there hung clusters as
large as a man's body of golden grapes. The
altar of burnt offerings was forty-eight feet
square and fifteen feet high. Beneath that
wonderful acreage of courts and colonnades
and altars and portals there were hidden cis
terns that could contain ten millions of gallons
of water. " Not Antioch in Asia," says Eders
heim, " not even imperial Rome herself, ex
celled Jerusalem in architectural splendour.
Nor has there been, either in ancient or mod^
era times, a sacred building equal to the tem
ple, whether for situation or magnificence.
Nor yet have there been festive throngs like
those joyous hundreds of thousands who, with
their hymns of praise, crowded toward the city
on the eve of the Passover." If ever an over
plus of pride was pardonable it was the pride
of the Jews in this dazzling holy place,
thronged by a people who in number were " as
the sands by the seashore."
But Jesus, looking with other eyes than
those of his people, had not praised this tem
ple. To his disciples it seemed an oversight.
They sought to draw him out. They dreamed
that this mass of architectural grandeur might

SEVERITY 91
be a beginning of the glory of the Messianic
kingdom. Fond dreamers they were, and they
said to the Master one evening as he turned
sadly away from a hard day there, " Behold,
what manner of stones and what buildings are
here ! " It seems severe indeed that he should
have dampened their ardour, destroyed their
pride, and turned their anticipations into a
great dread. His answer was fitted to do
just that. " Verily I say unto you, there shall
not be left here one stone on another that shall
not be thrown down." When later in the
evening they asked him his meaning he pro
ceeded at once to forecast the destruction of
the city and temple, and the scattering of
the people, a doom entirely different from their
Messianic dream-castles. Their pride was his
dread, and he gave to it a strange, sad, un
reserved disclosure.
The warning to sign-seekers, Matt. 12:38-
45, is, on the one hand, an absolute refusal to
yield to the morbid demand of unreasoning
men for a spectacular show of divine power,
and, on the other, it is a lofty and terrible
warning against a disposition more deadening
than that of the Ninevites in the days of
Jonah, or that of the Gentile queen of Ethi
opia in the days of Solomon ; a disposition like
that of the house swept and garnished indeed

92 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
but empty, and inviting a sevenfold spirit of
evil. Ah, that hard, cynical, self-sufficient
heart of the typical Pharisee ! Jesus saw it as
the inviting home of many devils, and he
spoke out plainly just what he saw.
Religion, like all else that pertains to life,
has its fearful side, and Jesus met it squarely.
Thus there was introduced an element of doc
trinal severity into his sermons and parables.
The hatred of brothers he likened to murder.
To a certain class of Jews he said, " Ye are of
your father the devil." Those who* were hard
and inhuman he located on the left of the
throne in the parable, likened them to goats,
and declared that they " should go away into
everlasting punishment." The fruitless branch
must be cut away. The bad fish in the net
are cast out. From the " wicked and slothful
servant " the one talent is taken. The tares
in the field are gathered and burned. The way
of the prodigal leads to the swine's husks.
Among the thorns the wheat is choked. On
stony ground it is withered and scorched.
For the foolish virgins, unready at the bride
groom's coming, there is a fast closed door.
Against the merely negative life there are con
stant and fearful warnings in the reported
teachings of Jesus. Such is the presenta
tion.

SEVERITY 93
The twenty-third chapter of Matthew is
considered by literary judges more terrible
than the Philippics of Demosthenes. It is a
tremendous denunciation of hypocrisy. It is
a fearless, and yet fearful, arraignment of
hypocrites. The " woes " fall here like the
blows of a great hammer. They descend with
crushing weight on the proud and vaunting,
self-deceived and self-sufficient scribes and
Pharisees. Those misleaders were accustomed
to make distinctions where there were no dif
ferences. They are called " fools and blind."
They enter not into the kingdom of heaven
and they shut the door against them that are
entering. They are " blind guides, straining
out gnats and swallowing camels." They are
" whitewashed sepulchres ;" fair without, but
full of " dead men's bones." A climax of
awful import coupled with an imprecation is
reached in these words : " Woe unto> you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! Because ye
build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish
the sepulchres of the righteous, and say if we
had been in the days of our fathers we would
not have been partakers with them in the blood
of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses
unto yourselves that ye be the children of
them that killed the prophets. Fill ye up then
the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye

94 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
generation of vipers; how shall ye escape the
judgment of Gehenna ? "
How shall we understand this calmly reit
erated and awful severity? Did these hard
words fall from lips of love? Did Jesus say
these things? Did he find joy in denuncia
tion? Is there a tone of vindictiveness here?
Much depends on the manner of one's
speech. William Ellery Channing could read
this twenty-third chapter of Matthew, this
cycle of woes and cumulative denunciations, in
such a way that his auditors were melted to
tears. The last verses of this terror-stirring
chapter give us the clue to its spirit. They
save it from any touch of vindictiveness.
They are a great sob. The whole chapter is
a heart-break. " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem !
How often would I have gathered thy chil
dren together as a hen gathers her brood under
her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your
house is left unto you desolate."
And this is the clue to all the severity of
Jesus. As a judge he tempers his decisions
with sorrow. As a surgeon amputates to save
life, so Jesus corrects that he may redeem.
Seen aright his severity is but the other side of
his love. " Whom a father loveth he chasten-
eth, and scourgeth every son whom he re
ceiveth." Somehow we feel the love that

SEVERITY 95
throbs and groans beneath the hard sayings
of this character Christ.
But who in that age could have invented
such a characteristic? And who could have
made it thus the corollary of love ? And who,
having invented it, would have directed it
against the most religious sect and- the most
learned class of the time? All the ideals of
the day, even of the writers themselves, were
against such fictions. It is easier to believe
that Jesus actually lived and spoke thus than
to believe that undisciplined Galileans invented
such sayings, such situations, and such a
character. There is a deeply devotional element in the
severity of Jesus. In his plans love and loy
alty are wedded. " If ye love me keep my
commandments." Personal love and loyalty
stand related in his mind as motive and
action. The severity of the commandment is
not relaxed, it is simply transmuted into the
joy of personal service. Mathematics has its
severe lines and its rigid axiomatic truths;
they are the basis of an attractive science.
Music has her laws of harmony; inflexibly
followed they lead to delight. Art has her
harmony of colours, and she will not yield
them; she must have them in her ministry of
beauty. Just so, salvation has her cry of

96 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
warning, her rebuke of sin, her rules of
righteousness, and her call to repentance.
Love and prayer cannot ignore the distinctions
between sin and holiness, condemnation and
salvation, shame and glory. The gulf is there,
with a point where it becomes impassable ; and
as the danger is dreadful so the salvation is
gracious and attractive. Jesus saw clearly
and affirmed positively a circle of tremendous
verities. These verities heightened his love —
may one say it reverently; they deepened his
devotion; they led him by the way of loyalty
to the cross. And there he died for these veri
ties, and for us, that we also might be loyal
to them, not coldly, slavishly so, but warmly,
earnestly, lovingly so, through the love of him
" Whose kingly eyes looked throneward
While his priestly blood dropped downward."

vn
FORGIVENESS
"Through all depths of sin and loss
Drops the plummet of thy cross ;
Never yet abyss was found
Deeper than that Cross could sound."
THE ancient Jew was quick to resent and
slow to forgive. He fed his sense of
nationality and honour on the histories
of Moses and Samson and Gideon and David,
all of whom were military heroes. Once a
year he read the book of Esther and kept the
feast of Purim, thus kindling anew within him
the fires of vengeance which otherwise might
have burned low. In the denouement of that
stirring Old Testament story Esther, the
saviour of her people, becomes Esther the de
stroyer of her enemies, and in her vindictive
ness she demands a second day's slaughter
throughout the provinces of Ahasuerus. This
made her the ideal heroine of the Jews, and
anciently her example of retaliation was not
lost on them. If that feast of Purim was not
quite literally a dagger-whetting one it was
87

98 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
quite literally a temper-whetting one, and thou
sands of those who kept it were ready, if oppor
tunity presented, to wreak their vengeance on
their Roman rulers. This type of dreadful
patriotism was still further fostered by the
later history of the Jewish people. They could
never forget, and they sought to emulate, the
holy zeal and fierce fighting of the Maccabees.
They knew and loved the story of the aged,
heroic father, and of his equally heroic sons,
Judas and Jonathan. There is in ancient his
tory no presentation of a patriotism more
lofty, and a vindictiveness more terrible than
that of the Jews of the Maccabsean period.
In his inherited poetry and legislation the
Jew was taught to hate his enemies. Numer
ous quotations are at hand from which are
selected the following. In the 139th Psalm,
attributed to David, the poet is made to say, as
though it were pleasing to God :
" Do I not hate them, O Jehovah, that hate thee?
And am I not grieved with them that rise up against
thee?
I hate them with a perfect hatred.
They are become mine enemies."
The purely lyric celebration of patriotism
has surely reached its climax of pathos and
passionate appeal in the 137th Psalm. But

FORGIVENESS 99
that noble lyric, marred for the Christian by
its last vindictive lines, was by those same ter
rible lines heightened for the Jew ;
"O Daughter of Babylon that art to be destroyed,
Happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast
served us.
Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little
ones
Against a rock."
As to the legislation bearing on our theme,
the following selections may suffice. The book
of Deuteronomy is remarkable for its beauty
and spiritual power. Nevertheless, two an
cient tribal laws are embedded in it whose ef
fect was great in the long run of Hebrew his
tory. These were the law of the ban, and the
law of blood revenge. Under the former
whole tribes were destroyed — men, women
and children, and their cattle. In the 7th chap
ter of Deuteronomy seven Canaanite tribes are
listed under this law, and in anticipation of
victory the children of Israel were commanded
as follows : " When Jehovah thy God shall
deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt
smite them; then shalt thou utterly destroy
them ; thou shalt make no covenant with them,
nor show mercy unto them." The intention
here is not to criticise the law, or the terrible
obedience rendered to it . but simply to state it,

100 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
and to estimate its effect upon the development
and history of the people. Anciently it may
have been expedient, and even necessary. It
may have been related in the way of a quaran
tine to the very life and ethics and pure worship
of the Hebrew people. But in the New Testa
ment times such expediency or necessity had
passed away, while the fierce spirit of the law
remained, and by the law was justified. The
other law, the tribal law of blood revenge, is
also found in the book of Deuteronomy, not
to speak of Exodus and Leviticus : " Thine
eye shall not pity; life shall go for life, eye
for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot
for foot." So fully recognized was this law
and its workings that the six cities of refuge
were instituted in favour of the accidental, or
" unwitting," slayer of his fellow, " lest the
avenger of blood pursue the man-slayer while
his heart was hot." One does not look far to
see what a quick and ready use the Jews of
Jesus' day would make of these laws in favour
of their own spirit of hatred and thirst for
revenge. The Romans were the rulers of the Jews in
the days of Jesus, as the Greeks had been in
the days of the Maccabees, the Persians in
the days of Esther, and the Babylonians in the
days of Ezekiel. They hated them with a

FORGIVENESS 101
hatred inveterate and inexpressible, and with
all the sanctions of the patriotic hymns and
laws of their far-away fathers. They hated
the Romans politically, religiously, consci
entiously, and with all the instincts of an as
sured racial superiority. If hatred, by reason
of its perfection, could be admirable, theirs
was an admirable hatred.
Coupled with such hatred there is not the
spirit of forgiveness, but of retaliation. Ha
tred seeks the destruction, not the reforma
tion of its victims. It lifts not the golden
sceptre, but the iron dagger. In proportion
as it is deep and abiding and conscientious it
is the more implacable and deadly. One has
but to contemplate this hatred on the part of
a people as a whole, centering as it did in the
party known as the Zealots, or Nationalists, or
Sicarii, growing more and more exasperating
to the Roman rulers, leading on to the inter
necine horrors of the years of 67 and 68 and
69, and to the dreadful siege and destruction
of Jerusalem in the year 70 — one has but to
think of this to realize the awful fires of re
venge that consumed the hearts of Judaea's
sons. But to the character Christ, as presented in
our gospels, there is no taint or touch of this
terrible hatred. In a former study love was

102 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
presented as a characteristic of Jesus. It was
said that love was fundamental tp his very
being and a constructive principle in his new
kingdom. As revenge is coordinate with ha
tred so forgiveness is coordinate with love, and
the character in which love is an essential
factor must include forgiveness also.
Jesus is. presented as throwing himself unre
servedly against the above trait of his times,
and as teaching the unwelcome doctrine of
forgiveness to a people bent on retaliation and
revenge. The presentation is to the effect that
forgiveness is with him not a casual act, but
a customary one, and invariable as conditioned
on repentance. And furthermore, his teach
ing of it is as incisive and persistent as his
teaching of love.
His daring repeal of that lingering relic of
the tribal law of blood revenge, " eye for eye,
tooth for tooth," was used in an earlier essay
as exemplifying another theme. He quoted
it to disapprove it, though it had the sanction
of Moses and the fathers. Against it he put
the law of " the other cheek," and of " the
second mile." And he meant it. Jesus meant
that in his kingdom there should be no place
for revenge, no sanction of retaliation.
In the model prayer Jesus included a peti
tion for forgiveness based on the spirit and the

FORGIVENESS 103
practice of forgiveness. " Forgive us our debts
as we forgive our debtors." According to the
record in Matthew this is the only petition in
the prayer on which the Master paused to pass
an emphatic comment, namely, " For if ye for
give not men their trespasses neither will your
Heavenly Father forgive your trespasses."
It seems that Jesus' teaching on the subject
was so frequent and emphatic that the Apostle
Peter became impressed and perplexed by it.
At last he said, " Lord, how often shall my
brother sin against me and I forgive him?
Till seven times ? " Putting it up to seven was
high indeed for a Jew. It is too high for many
a twentieth century Christian, too high by six
— or seven. But seven did not satisfy Jesus.
One shudders to think what might happen had
he allowed revenge to come back after seven.
There love would end, and hatred with all her
horrors would come back, and the new king
dom with its new law would be scarcely better
than the old with its out-worn relics of the
tribe and the jungle. But with Jesus limitless
forgiveness keeps pace with limitless love, and
his answer, with a cheery play on the word
seven, came quickly : " I say not unto thee
until seven times, but until seventy times
seven." That was his playful, pleading way
of making the law a limitless one.

104 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
In his office as Saviour Jesus is represented
as frequently forgiving sinful ones. They
brought the paralytic for the healing of his
body. The first act of Jesus was to heal his
soul, saying, " Child, thy sins be forgiven
thee." He dined with Zacchseus the publican,
and upon his promise of generosity to the poor
and restoration of wrongfully gathered goods
forgave him, saying, " To-day is salvation
come to this house." He forgave the sinful
but repentant woman in Pharisee Simon's
house because " she loved much." To the re
pentant thief on the cross beside him he said,
" To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
The superlative incident in the presentation
of this characteristic is the one on the cross.
General Lew Wallace has shown his appre
ciation of it by its use as follows in one of
the closing chapters of " Ben Hur " : " Which
way wilt thou have him faced?" asked a
soldier, bluntly.
" Toward the Temple," the pontiff replied.
" In dying I would have him see the holy house
hath not suffered by him."
The workmen put their hands to the cross,
and carried it, burden and all, to the place of
planting. At a word they dropped the tree into
the hole; and the body of the Nazarene also
dropped heavily, and hung by the bleeding

FORGIVENESS 105
hands. Still no cry of pain — only the excla
mation, divinest of all recorded exclamations,
" Father, forgive them, they know not what
they do."
It is scarcely a descent from this supreme
act of forgiveness to that of the forgiveness of
the Apostle Peter after he had denied his Mas
ter in the darkest hour of his suffering and
need. What can be more distressing to a
friendly and companionable soul than such de
sertion and doubt and denial as Jesus met at
the hands of his foremost disciple ? What can
be more irksome than to teach and train and
direct and rebuke and inspire through long
months, and at last to see one's pains and
patience bearing fruit in deliberate denial even
of personal acquaintance? It is not hard for
us to see that there were extenuating circum
stances, looking as we do through the quiet
presentation on the gospel pages. But it was
not so easy for Jesus as chief sufferer in the
midst of the affray. The presentation is that
some days after the resurrection Jesus made
but the most delicate and indirect reference to
the threefold denial by the requirement of a
threefold confession of love, and by a three
fold exhortation to service. Three times,
pleadingly, rather than commandingly, Jesus
said, " Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me ? "

106 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
And when he was assured of the disciple's
love, he said three times, still pleadingly,
" Feed my sheep." In such a tone, in such a
mood there is no resentment, but a great heart-
hunger for fellowship in holy and compas
sionate service.
This official forgiveness is thus represented
as having been customary with Jesus, and per
sistent, though on the first occasion of its ex
ercise it subjected him to the charge of blas
phemy. " There were certain of the scribes
sitting, there and reasoning in their hearts,
Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies?
Who can forgive sins but God only ? " Under
the Levitical law blasphemy was a capital
crime, punishable by stoning. That sentence,
" Child, thy sins be forgiven thee," was a dar
ing one therefore, and would have been used
by no ordinary person in fact, nor would it
have been allowed by any writer of fiction to
any of his characters. On the lips of the real
Christ " it was at once a proclamation of his
own sinlessness, and of his kingly dignity as
the Messiah, in whose hands had been placed
the rule over the new theocracy."
There is a further feature of this official
claim of Jesus. In the whole body of laws
of the Hebrew people there was no form of
absolution, nor any enactment authorizing the

FORGIVENESS 107
pronouncement of forgiveness by prophet,
priest, or king. It was this that the scribes had
in mind when they said, " Who can forgive
sins but God alone? " The presentation there
fore is that Christ was transcending the law,
virtually that he was violating it, a presenta
tion that would have been impossible to any
fiction writer of that age, unless to such — if
there were such — as were utterly rebellious
against the institutions of the time, and that
is not the spirit of the gospel writers. For
giveness was a prerogative of God. No cre
ative writer of the day would have thrown
his hero up against that prerogative.
Many incidents of an unpleasant nature,
such as that of the inhospitable Samaritans,
the treason of Judas, the general defection of
his disciples on the night of the arrest, and the
reiterated, biting mockeries of his enemies
through the long hours on the cross, were
treated by Jesus in the spirit of a redeemer
of men rather than a destroyer of them. His
own rule of limitlessj forgiveness coordinate
with limitless love has translation into life by
his death on the cross.
And all this, according to the presentation,
was under the protest of his own disciples.
James and John, finding an Old Testament
precedent for retaliation, wanted to command

108 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
fire to come down as Elijah did and destroy
the churlish Samaritans when they refused to
receive the Master. Peter protested against
the announcement even of the betrayal and
trial and death of Jesus, and in the crucial
hour drew his sword in his behalf. But Jesus,
true to his ideal, rebuked now and again his
over-zealous disciples, stood against them, dis
appointed and bewildered them, and sought
by self-sacrifice and non-retaliation to lift
them up into his own new realm.
Again we face our literary problem. Was
this characteristic, so' new and unique, so ut
terly foreign to the times, so contrary to cus
tom and law, SO' incomprehensible to the
leaders of the land, so consistent with love, so
perfected by death — was it a literary creation,
or a gift of God in flesh and blood? Did Gali
lean fishermen, unimaginative hill-side peas
ants, shepherds, vine-dressers, temple-trained
priests, perfunctory Pharisees, invent it all?
Or did Jesus really live and teach it and prac
tise it? Was it not Christ the real who dis
covered that love and forgiveness are —
"Creation's final law,
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With raven shrieked against the creed?"

VIII
SERENITY
"Hush every lip, close every book,
The strife of tongues forbear;
Why forward reach, or backward look,
For love that clasps like air?"
WE have in the gospels the presentation
of a life that refused to be ruffled.
In Jesus there is an imperial com
mand over his own strong emotions. The
peace into which the winds and the waves fell
at his word is an emblem of his own tran
quillity. Storms of passion on the part of
others, stubborn and terrible, he encountered
and quelled, while his own composure of spirit
he all but invariably maintained. Once and
again furious souls, more terrible than angry
winds, raged round him, while through their
storms he held his peace. Unelated by popu
larity on the one hand he was not cast down
by adversity on the other. Dispassionately he
foresaw tragedy, and he met it bravely. He
kept a high pathway, and went straight to his
goal. To his disciples he breathed out sweet-
109

1,10 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
est comfort in times of deepest distress. He
faced the forces of organized hatred with
equipoise and dignity. He bore malediction
without resentment and injustice without re
venge. His death was in keeping with his life.
Silently he stood in the presence of Pilate;
calmly he heard his sentence pronounced;
patiently he bore the agonies of the cross;
prayerfully he remembered his mocking mur
derers; resignedly he committed his spirit to
God. He could have achieved such an " em
pire over his passions " only by a serenity
complete and incomparable.
Serenity may be disturbed by success or dis
appointment, and that in proportion as the
success is phenomenal and the disappointment
grievous. According to the presentation in
our gospels Jesus was subject to both. In
his early ministry he met with ovation; in
his later, with execration. At first his popu
larity was unusual and inspiring; at last his
opposition was organized and deadly. To
study his character under these conditions is
to discover another of those wonderful traits
which, quite incidentally presented, and per
haps unnoticed by the writers themselves, add
so much to the charm of their pages and the
force of our argument.
Very early in the ministry of Jesus, accord-

SERENITY 111
ing to the presentation of John, " When he
was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the
feast many believed on his name, beholding
the signs which he did. But," adds the writer,
" Jesus did not trust himself to them, for he
knew all men, and needed not that any should
bear witness concerning man; for he knew
what was in man." He " knew men." He
knew how fickle they were, how suddenly en
thusiastic, how far from conviction, how easily
caught by the spectacular, how slow to re
ceive the stable truth. He was not deceived by
the hope of a quick triumph, nor was he, as a
young man, carried off his feet by the sudden
enthusiasm of a people agape at his miracles.
Matthew tells us that " great multitudes fol
lowed him from Galilee and Decapolis and
Jerusalem and Judsea and from beyond Jor
dan." Luke, that the multitudes sought him
even in a desert place, " and came unto him,
and would have stayed him that he should not
go from them. But he said unto them, I
must preach the good news of the kingdom
of God to other cities also : for therefore was
I sent." Again, Luke tells us that having
healed the man who "was full of leprosy,"
Jesus charged him that he should tell no man
but go and shew himself to the priest and
make the offering that Moses commanded.

112 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
" But so much the more," adds the writer,
" went abroad the report concerning him, and
great multitudes came together to hear, and
to be healed of their infirmities. But he with
drew himself into the deserts and prayed." In
the sixth chapter of John there is a very sig
nificant incident presented showing the en
thusiasm of the people for Jesus and his
refusal to be influenced by it. He had fed
the multitudes with the loaves and fishes,
whereupon the people began to cry, " This
is of a truth that prophet that should
come into the world." Seized with political
enthusiasm the people became impassioned
in their Messianic hopes. They believed that
their long-looked-for theocratic and military
leader was at hand. They were ready and
waiting for a king of the line and spirit of
David, and for an insurrection against Rome
under his leadership. They planned to " take
him by force to make him king." By the
" sign "of the loaves they had been inspired
thus suddenly with theocratic hopes and kingly
plans. And back of their kingly plans there
were military ones. The daily sustenance of
the army is one of the most difficult of mili
tary problems. But here was a young man
who had solved that problem. Five loaves
among five thousand, and whole baskets- full

SERENITY 113,
of fragments ! What a commissariat he alone
would be for an army marching against
Rome ! At once they sought " by force " to
make him king! But he, the record tells us,
" withdrew again into the mountain himself,
alone." Fairly construed there was perhaps never
in the history of the Jewish people a fairer
opportunity and a more promising future for
a kingly and military career. Historic prec
edent and military glory reaching back
through many centuries, the intense patriot
ism of the whole nation, the glowing hopes
of the myriads of Israel, their unbounded de
votion to the theocracy for which their fathers
suffered, their own present sufferings under
Roman rule — all united to make a most in
viting opportunity for Jesus to accept the
crown, to seize Jerusalem, to rouse the nation,
and to lift the standard of rebellion against
Rome. Surely, as the people saw it, he must
succeed, since he was their divinely commis
sioned one and God-sent deliverer. The times
were ripe ; the people were ready ; the Messiah
was at hand; why should they wait? Had
Jesus lost himself in the fervour of the crowd;
had he yielded to the plans of that Galilean
multitude; had he permitted his vision of a
spiritual kingdom among all men to fade away

114 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
in the heated national enthusiasm for the an
cient theocracy; in short, had he as a young
man yielded to these tremendous popular and
national forces, history would have found in
him not the Redeemer of men, but another
David, or Judas Maccabseus, or Theudas, or
Bar-cochba. A rebel against Rome, with bat
tle-fields and bloodshed and devastation and
hope of victory, and a throne in Jerusalem and
an iron sceptre there — it was into this role that
they would have driven him when " they came
to take him by force and make him king."
Let us be just to the Jews. There was not in
all the ancient world an ideal of government
comparable to that of the Hebrew people.
Their king was king under God. Their gov
ernment was the government of God. Their
God was the highest, holiest, best, and truest
that the ancient world possessed. To restore
the theocracy as the friends and disciples of
Jesus understood it was, from their stand
point, the most laudable undertaking, and the
only official one, that could engage a God-
commissioned man. Christ's action in that
crucial hour is told in the simple words above
quoted : " He withdrew again into the moun
tain himself, alone." Serenely he maintained
his own lofty world-view, and his higher
plans. He refused the throne that he might

SERENITY 115
go steadily toward the cross. In the loneli
ness of the mountain he kept tryst with God
the Father of men rather than with God the
Monarch of Israel, and before the dawn of
day he was calming the fears of his band of
Galilean disciples on their stormy little lake.
When on the next day the multitudes came
thronging to him again he at once cut off their
expected supply of loaves and fishes: put up
to them the choice between spiritual loyalty to
him or abandonment of him, and calmly saw
them turn away, complaining about his " hard
sayings." It was a crisis sufficient to try the
soul of any but the serenest of men. From
that day the popularity of Jesus among the
Galilean multitudes was at an end, except for
a spasmodic demonstration when he entered
Jerusalem amidst their mistaken " hosan-
nahs " within a week of his final tragedy. As
he saw the multitudes melting away from him
his only comment, so far as the record goes,
was a quiet question to his twelve : " Will ye
also go away ? " The most popular young
man of the day has suddenly become the most
deserted, and to him all is well. He has
spoken out unreservedly his new thought about
God and man and spiritual things, and it at
least shall stand. Henceforth he will take
long walks with the twelve into lonely Gentile

1,16 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
regions ; he will spend long months with Peter
and James and John and the rest of them,
patiently preparing them to be the heralds at
last of his new thought, after he has sealed
and signed it with his death and resurrec
tion. Scarcely had the days of his popularity
passed when the active opposition of his foes
began. For the forgiveness of sins he was
accused of blasphemy. For the cleansing of
the temple he was hated by an army of priests
and tradesmen. For his free construction of
the ancient laws he was plied with questions
and tried with cases. For the neglect of cere
monial hand-washing he was censured by the
most religious sect of the land. For healing
on the Sabbath he was pronounced a sinner.
In various ways they sought to entrap him,
with the question of tribute to Csesar, with the
question of divorce, with the question of
stoning an unfortunate woman to death, with
the question of authority for teaching, with
the question of the future life. Various ones
of these questions have been used in other con
nections belonging to our argument, and are
here suggested simply for their cumulative
value. In the midst of such a running fire of
opposition the Christ is represented as having
borne himself both in word and act as only

SERENITY 117
one could do who lived in an atmosphere of
tranquillity. The presentation of Jesus on the occasion
of the last supper as it stands in John is the
masterpiece of a serenity that is sublime. His
hour has come and he knows it. He has en
tered Jerusalem to be " lifted up." His care
is for his disciples, not for himself. " Having
loved his own who were in the world, he loved
them unto the end." He washed their feet,
cleansing them by his own lowly service from
unholy ambitions. He warned them of their
coming trial and weakness : " It is written, I
will smite the shepherd and the sheep shall be
scattered. All ye shall stumble because of me
this night." Once it is said of him that he
was " troubled in spirit." It was in that mo
ment when he was compelled to say in the
presence of the traitor himself, " Verily,
verily, I say unto you that one of you shall
betray me." The record indicates that that
announcement sent a pang to his soul. Hav
ing designated the treasonable one with a
strange and kindly indirectness, he recovered
his composure with the reflection, " Now is
the Son of Man glorified, and God is glori
fied in him." The rest of the occasion was
devoted by him to the breathing out of bene
dictions of peace on his disciples, and in prom-

118 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
ising them the Holy Spirit as Comforter, and
in the institution of the supper. He, the Mas
ter, the doomed one, betrayed, rejected,
mocked, maligned, with only a few quick
hours between himself and the cross, poured
forth spiritual blessings on his disciples as
though his soul were an unfailing fountain.
What sweet, calm words they are ! " Let not
your hearts be troubled ; ye believe in God, be
lieve also in me. In my Father's house are
many mansions; if it were not so I would have
told you. I go to prepare a place for you, and
if I go and prepare a place for you I will
come again and receive you unto myself, that
where I am there ye may be also." And again :
" Peace I leave with you ; my peace I give
unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto
you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither
let it be afraid." There are mountain heights
above the storms, and depths of the sea below
them. Such was the soul of Jesus relative to
the profoundest things of life and the abiding
things of God — such at least is the presenta
tion of the character on the night of the last
supper. The passing of the Passover on the night
of Christ's betrayal and the institution of a
memorial supper in his name, and for the
furtherance of his kingdom, is an indication

SERENITY 119
of his unfaltering faith in the great future as
he faced the hour which to his disciples was
the end of all their hopes. In the bread and
the wine of remembrance there is a calm fore
cast of a glorious continuance of his name and
influence. The serenity of Jesus is not the Buddhistic
repose that springs from pessimism. It is not
resignation to fate, retirement from the world
and its evils, the desire to quench desire, med
itation with a view to annihilation. The quiet
ism that is attained by the utter abandonment
of purpose is wholly foreign to Jesus. The
tranquillity of Jesus is not a negation, and
his peace is not the peace of a burial ground
or a vacuum. His is the peace of victory, the
tranquillity of triumph, the serenity that
springs from security in God. His soul grew
strong and quiet in a great optimism. To his
disciples he said, " Be of good cheer; I have
overcome the world." So confident were the
Romans of victory that they were accustomed
to sell at auction before the battle the land on
which their enemies' tents were pitched. So
Jesus in assurance of ultimate good found
peace. Nor is the serenity of Jesus the fruit of
Stoical indifference to the things that should
engage real men. He did not " treat persons

120 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
as pawns in the game which reason plays,"
and thereupon cancel his concern for them, or
hold himself in cold aloofness because he
looked upon human beings as " frozen to
gether through their common relation to uni
versal law." Jesus discovered in the world
something beyond " an eternal somewhat that
makes for righteousness;" something better
than a " survival of the fittest;" and something
higher than " fate's eternal decrees." He dis
covered a supreme purpose to be attained, a
supreme will calling for loyalty, and a su
preme soul to be loved and adored. He found
in the universe a some One rather than a
somewhat, and honouring that One he by conse
quence honoured all whom that One honoured.
He loved men. He had compassion on the
hungering and unshepherded thousands. He of
fered hope to the weary and heavy-laden. He
mourned over Jerusalem, forecasting her
doom. He prayed for his disciples that their
faith might not fail. There is nothing of the
Stoic in the Jesus of the gospels. The seren
ity of an icicle could never have won the heart
of the world and the praises of humanity. His
calmness was attained by a strange and unique
union of the hand that heals with the heart
that breaks.
Christ's mental sufferings in the garden of

SERENITY 121
Gethsemane constitute the outstanding excep
tion to his usual serenity. We may not fathom
the incident all in all. Fiction could never
have created such a situation with its sharp
contrasts of agony and victory. There is a
crisis in sorrow and a triumph in prayer.
" Yea once," as Elizabeth Barrett Browning
has it, " Yea once our human sin hath rolled
Between the righteous Son and Father,"
but it was for an hour only. Then the storm
was over and the calm returned. Then he
could say placidly to the drowsy disciples,
" Sleep on now and take your rest. . . .
Behold, he is at hand that betrayeth me."
Having committed himself in a final act of
consecration to the will of God, he could then
without disturbance face the traitor and re
ceive the kiss ; meet the soldiers and submit to
them though they came with swords and staves
as if against a desperado; heal the wound that
his mistaken disciple had made; accept the
robe of purple and the crown of thorns; pass
patiently through trials that were the hol-
lowest mockeries; hear from the same lips
the verdict of his innocency and of his death ;
go uncomplainingly to the cross and be num
bered there with transgressors; and die at

122 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
last, praying for his enemies, and committing
his spirit in peace to God.
One who has seen Munkacsy's picture,
" Christ before Pilate," must feel that the
artist has presented the mastery of peace and
the picture of serenity in the figure of Christ.
He, the Christ, is the only tranquil one in the
whole group. Pilate sits troubled; over
against him, supercilious Pharisees, vexed;
the mob in the foreground, hooting with open
mouths and up-thrown hands. Amidst them
all, the figure of Jesus, pale, placid ; the Lord
of Life, perfectly poised in the presence of
death. He has conquered and is at peace. It
is thus that he made his heavenly life an
irenicon for the troubles of earth.
" Peace on earth and good-will !
Souls that are gentle and still
Hear the first music of this
Far-off, infinite bliss."

IX
CONSISTENCY
"He cometh not a king to reign:
The world's long hope is dim:
The weary centuries watch in vain
The clouds of heaven for him."
JESUS is presented on the pages of our
gospels as having a method and a pur
pose and as never turning from them.
He never wavered. He withstood the oppo
sition of foes and the pleading of friends. He
stood alone against his age. Inherited tradi
tions and time-worn customs were against him.
His life and teachings were in antagonism to
the fond, but false, ideals of his people. Hav
ing come with new cloth, he refused to make
his mission a compromise and a patchwork on
the old Jewish garments. New wine — new
wine-skins! That was his brave cry. Yet
he reflected sadly, " No man when he hath
drunk old wine straightway desireth new, for
he saith, the old is better." He knew the cost
of a live propaganda against a decadent age,
yet he yielded not one iota to the Pharisees
who murmured, the rabbis who raged, and the
123

124 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
priests who plotted. As a reformer he suf
fered, but he did not complain. As a herald
he died, sealing his message with his blood.
As a Saviour he arose, commanding an age
long, world-wide advocacy of the teaching pre
cisely for which he had suffered. Such is the
presentation. There is a difference between stubbornness
and continuity of purpose. One might indeed
die out of sheer stubbornness, and in the eyes
of a dwindling circle of disciples have a mar
tyr's halo. Stubbornness is unreasoning and
is mixed with bad temper. In the presenta
tion of Jesus there is nothing to' suggest
either the unreason or the temper. On the
contrary, there is everywhere the suggestion
of a wonderfully sweet-tempered being, com
plaisant to the last within the limits of his
code of conduct, and compassionate to1 the
point now and again of sobs and tears. A
soul under the compulsion of a high purpose,
yet maintaining every possible bond of sym
pathy with those who are unsympathetic and
unappreciative, is not obstinate, but simply
brave and praiseworthy.
The presentation of Christ's continuity of
will and purpose is of the indirect and quite
incidental kind that we have found in other
studies.

CONSISTENCY 125
It appears on the occasion of the induc
tion of Jesus into his public ministry at the
hands of John the Baptist. When Jesus pre
sented himself to the rugged and impassioned
prophet, asking to be baptized at his hands,
John attempted to dissuade him, saying, " I
have need to be baptized of thee, and comest
thou to me?" The answer came promptly
and effectually, " Suffer it to be so now, for
thus it is becoming to us to do whatever is
right." Half commandingly, half pleadingly,
the Baptist opposed him. In the original there
is a strong word which the revisers have trans
lated, " Would have hindered." However,
" as John surveyed that serene form and that
holy face radiant with the peace of God, his
soul bowed in reverence and awe," and the
positive young prophet yielded to the resolute
will of one who was more than his compeer.
In the story of the temptation we have the
presentation of a high purpose and of unfal
tering loyalty to it. First, there is the temp
tation that life should be lowered to the bread
level. Jesus held it up to the divine level.
Though he should die, yet would he live " not
by bread alone," but by every word of God.
Secondly, there is the temptation to the quick
and easy and spectacular way of winning. By
casting himself down without hurt three or

126 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
four hundred feet from a turret of the temple
over its immense retaining wall into the val
ley below, within sight of five hundred thou
sand or a million people, Jesus would have
won to himself the immediate adherence of a
spectacle-loving nation. Unhesitatingly he put
the impulse aside in favour of the slow and
obscure and painful methods of the unwel
come teacher and the rejected sufferer. Three
strenuous years to' win a dozen disciples ! That
was the Father's will and Jesus made it his
programme. Thirdly, there is the military
way of winning. Jesus had imperial ambi
tions, and on the " high mountain " of the
temptation the crowns and thrones of earth
appeared within his reach. " Fall down and
worship me," cried Satan, " and all shall be
thine." Had Jesus yielded, had he worshipped
Satan in Csesar's way, sword in hand, the
world would have had — not the one who
conquers sin and sorrow and wayward souls
by suffering, but one more military monster of
the Csesar type. He turned from proffered
crowns and thrones to take the hard and lonely
way of the cross, saying, " Thou shalt worship
the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou
serve." There is a sublimity of purpose in
the story of the temptation that rises above
the demands of the flesh and the ways of the

CONSISTENCY 127
world. God and the worship of God are
set over against bread and stage-plays and
crowns, and the choice of Jesus is firmly fixed.
The inflexible purpose of Jesus is seen in
his persistent opposition to the ruling classes
and the religious sects of his time. It appears
in various incidental ways, such as his treat
ment of the rabbinical Sabbath, neglect of
hand-washings, dining with publicans and
sinners, rebuking the Pharisees for their hy
pocrisy, convicting the Sadducees of errone
ous teaching, and interfering with the temple
trade. It was contrary to the social code of the
time to dine with publicans. Yet Jesus did it
again and again. When censured for it he
made no apology, but calmly told his elite crit
ics that that was his way of seeking his lost
sheep, and of calling sinners to repentance.
There was no more crucial test of orthodoxy
than the proper observance of the rabbinical
Sabbath. Jesus treated both the Mosaic and
the rabbinical Sabbath with remarkable free
dom. On that day as on all others he did
what his hand found to do, utterly regardless
of the hard legalism with which his people had
mistakenly attempted to hallow it. On that
day it was unlawful to heal, but Jesus healed
and justified himself by putting the demands

128 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
of mercy above such laws as came from farr
away tribal times. In a quite disturbing way
he said, " My Father worketh hitherto and
I work." In this he claimed equality with
God, and also asserted that there is a sense
in which the Father never rests, his days being
altogether working days. Nothing could have
enraged the Jews more than this. Esteeming
it right to so do and teach in the face of their
terrible zeal, Jesus unfalteringly did it.
The Apostle John, in the ninth chapter of
his gospel, has taken pains to present the sharp
contravention between the teaching of the
Pharisees and the conduct of Jesus relative
to the Sabbath. Jesus had healed a blind man
on the Sabbath. Face to face with that miracle
of beneficence the Pharisees said, " This man
is not from God, because he keepeth not the
Sabbath." On the other hand, the man who
was healed reasoned that a sinner could not
do such wonderful works. The dispute was
prolonged, and the man, fairly browbeaten by
those hard legalists, was at last cast out of the
synagogue by them. Having thus disgraced
and disowned the unfortunate one they cried,
" Give God the glory; we know that this man
is a sinner." In disgracing the man they were
striking at Jesus. The blow was the direst
they could inflict at that time and it was a

CONSISTENCY 129
warning to him of an impending penalty.
Jesus, however, interested himself not in their
ravings and threatenings, but in comforting
the outcast whom he had healed and in win
ning his faith. He spoke not a syllable of
regret, but falling into a judicial mood, gave
utterance to the startling paradox, " I am
come that they who see not may see and that
they who see may become blind."
Reference has been made in a previous chap
ter to the Messianic expectancy and ideals of
the Jews of the first century. Here it will be
sufficient to say that for generations the Jews
had been looking for the one promised from
God, anointed as their king, and " mightier
than Moses." In imagination they clothed
him with kingliness, placed him upon the
throne of David, and made him their victorious
military hero. They foresaw in him a career
more glorious than that of Judas Maccabseus,
or Cyrus, or Caesar. He was to make Jeru
salem the centre of an empire outrivalling
Rome. He was to have " Nations for his in
heritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth
for his possession." He was to " break them
with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces
like a potter's vessel." Psalm 2.
But Christ's view of the Messianic kingdom
was antipodal to all this. He refused the

130 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
crown and the sword. In a critical hour he
disarmed the would-be captain of his little
company. He sought to quell that impotent
rage against Rome which he might have in
flamed with a word. He said, " I am not come
to destroy men's lives, but to save them." He
chose for his companions and disciples a few
small captains of industry. He went about
teaching and healing, befriending the poor,
warning the rich, manifesting a heart of cath
olic love and condemning the holy hatred in
spired by the rabbi and cultivated by the
Pharisee. Against the fond fancy of a king
dom of the sword he put the sweet, stern ideal
of the kingdom of the mustard seed; of the
leaven; of the hidden treasure; of the long
sought jewel; of the sower; of the fish-net; of
the wise virgins, and the Good Samaritan. He
told Pilate that he was king of the truth, and
the haughty Roman answered with an inter
rogatory sneer, while furious Jews were de
manding his death. Never were two ideals set
more directly the one against the other, and
never was the opposition more deadly. It was
a nation and a nation's thought against one
man and his thought. The strong-willed young
man answered with his life, and with a wail of
sorrow for the city and the people that re
jected him. He died in self -consistency rather

CONSISTENCY 131
than yield his convictions, forego his plans, or
abate a syllable of his teaching.
The presentation carries us beyond his death
to his resurrection and commission. Death
made in him no difference. His commission is
in perfect keeping with all that goes before.
He cried to his disciples, " Go teach all na
tions ! " That was the great Teacher's teach
ing plan for the world's help. No kingdom
of the sword would he have, but a kingdom of
truth and love and loyalty; of the teacher, the
brother, and the friend. Such a Messianic pro
gramme was to the Jews entirely new and un
welcome and revolutionary. And Jesus knew
this quite as well as they, and in Gethsemane,
and on Golgotha he paid the price. Such is
the presentation in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John. Can such lofty and original ideals, such
unyielding maintenance of them, such consis
tency of purpose — can such a lone-handed
moral and spiritual battle against a dying age
have been conceived as a fiction and thrown
into literary form by that same dying age?
This characteristic in Christ has a rich de
votional value for us. We must not think of
it as hard and cold and distant. We are not
confronted here by a frosty form, or an
icy regularity. Rather it is ardent devotion
to a divine ideal. Though the will of Jesus was

132 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
unbending, it was warm and sweet and ten
derly human. It was touched by sympathy;
it was made ardent by devotion; it was
wrapped in consecration.
The will of Jesus sought to express itself
in forms of prayer rather than in forms of
law. The crown of loyalty to truth was never
more devoutly worn than in the garden of
Gethsemane. " O my Father, if it be possible
let this cup pass from me ; nevertheless not as
I will, but as thou wilt." And again : " O my
Father, if this cup may not pass away from me
except I drink it, thy will be done." And
again, turning in sorrow from his sleeping dis
ciples, he " prayed the third time, saying the
same words." Then he was strong, and could
say, " Rise, let us be going; behold, the hand
that doth betray me." Thus his purpose was
braced by prayer, made tender by tears, and
kept quite to our human needs, yet raised aloft
and rendered one with the will of God.
In a style of regnancy all his own, Jesus
stood before Pilate and confessed that he was
King ; that he was King in the realm of truth.
Accused, beaten, bleeding, thorn-crowned, yet
calm, consistent, brave, unyielding, the world
sees him reigning in its realm of truth. We
see him thus. In his reign we see redemp
tion, and possessing him we possess the re-

CONSISTENCY 133
demption that is in him. His cross is the final
expression of his kingliness, while his life
breathed out in prayer is the final expression
of his kindliness. His blood is the symbol of
the whole blessed, terrible tragedy of the
truth, and we are washed therein by entering
into the tragedy of truth with him, and walk
ing there in our small way, yet arm in arm
with him.
"He hath made us kings and priests unto God and
his Father; To him be glory and dominion for ever
and ever. Amen."

T

X
HARMONIES
" O Love, O Life ! Our faith and sight
Thy presence maketh one;
As through transfigured clouds of white
We trace the noon-day sun."
*' 1" N Jesus Christ all contradictions are
harmonized." This is one of the sug
gestive sayings of Pascal. It is a
startling paradox. Can contradictions be
harmonized? Pascal is speaking of contradictions in the
Scriptures, or what he calls contradictions,
and his meaning is that they find their unities
in Christ, the Old Testament anticipating him,
the New Testament presenting him. Quite
boldly the paradox may be used of the conflict
ing features in the presentation of the charac
ter Christ. In Christ the Psalmist's ideal has
been realized:

" Mercy and truth are met together ;
Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.'
134

HARMONIES 135
Such " meeting together " and " kissing
each other," of divergent, and even of conflict
ing, characteristics, is found in perfection only
in the highest and best balanced characters.
The man of small character is ever in danger
of being, or of becoming, an ill-balanced ex
tremist. His small house affords no room for
the residence together of many great traits.
On the contrary, the great and well-balanced
soul acts as an umpire over the most distinctive
and opposing properties that weave themselves
into character. In white light all lights unite.
Well-balanced characters are rare. Perfect
balance is more than human. Enthusiasm
easily runs to extremes. The orator insists
on his hyperboles, the poet on his metaphors,
and the artist on his " riot of colours." The
apostle, the reformer, the advocate, is prone to
overreach. The ruler too easily becomes a
despot, and the man of wealth an oppressor
of the poor. The philanthropist, leaning to
mercy, forgets justice, while the judge of rigid
constructions is merciless. On every hand ex
tremes invite, and on every hand society im
poses restraints. One feels that the aged
Bishop Myriel in Victor Hugo's " Les Mise-
rables," is too forgiving, if such a thing can
be. But one is sure that Javert is too good a
policeman. He is the law incarnate, cold,

136 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
heartless, fearless, persistent, such a terror to
criminals as to be repugnant to good men, a
human bloodhound. Victor Hugo has sketched
for us the extremes and has made them irrec
oncilable. But in Christ love resides with justice — love
the highest, justice the truest. The character
istic of love in Christ has been treated in a
previous chapter. There it was claimed that
love is fundamental to the character Christ
and to the kingdom established in his name.
No one can read the gospels without feeling
the presence and the predominance of this
feature in their presentation. So pronounced
is it that we are prone to present it with an
overplus of emphasis, obscuring thus other
features of the character. Popularly under
stood, such terms as gentleness, meekness,
kindliness, and forgiveness are other names for
it. This over-emphasis has reduced the char
acter in the minds of many to a seemingly
quite feminine one.
But there, side by side with love, is justice,
virile and rugged and commanding. Love in
Jesus never degenerates into a weak senti
mentality in favour of the wilfully wicked and
unrepentant. Justice holds her own in hand as
he faces the narrow nationalism of his time,
the hard sectarianism, and the wide-spread

HARMONIES 137
spirit of revenge. Out of his sense of justice
there came his warnings to the unrepentant,
his woes upon such unheeding cities as Beth
saida and Chorazin, and the doom he foresaw
and pronounced on Jerusalem and the nation.
But justice does not exhaust itself in pro
nouncements of woe and doom. It changes its
expression with changing conditions. The cry
from the cross, " Father, forgive them ; they
know not what they do," is a cry that springs
quite as much from the sense of justice as
from the heart of love, since it is not just to
mete out the same doom to the ignorant and
the knowing. One may not be able to say
how much of a consideration the ignorant de
serves for his ignorance, but however that may
be, Jesus in his dying moments recognized the
justice of such consideration. While there
fore the intercession on the cross is the cry
of a pitying heart, it is also a protest against
putting the knowing and the unknowing in
the same category of blameworthiness.
Again, Jesus is represented as having em
phasized the exceeding sinfulness of sin while
loving the sinner. We, on the contrary, are
inclined to hate the sinner in proportion as
we hate the sin, and to condone the sin if we
like the sinner. No one has ever made sin
appear so hideous as Jesus, both by his radi-

138 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
ant life and his rigid precepts; nor has any
one ever held the sinner in such high regard
and dealt so compassionately with him in the
moment of his repentance.
Unfortunately distance grows between cul
ture and crudity, and quite as much on the
part of the cultured one as the crude one.
This is true of holiness and sin, and of the
holy one and the sinful one. But in Jesus
sinlessness and sympathy coincide. Somehow
this sinless one still loves and seeks the sinner,
and the sinner who would shun the ordinary
saint draws near to him and finds in him a
friend. This is the more noteworthy in view
of the fact that the sinner received such cold
consideration among the people of Palestine
in the days of the story of Jesus. Sinners
were at once and contemptuously classed as
outcasts. No systematic effort was made for
their reformation. The courts were penal
courts, and not reformatory ones. The rabbi
and the Pharisee judged ceremonial trifles with
amazing harshness, and held themselves quite
aloof from those who were less righteous than
they. The lines were rigidly drawn between
the clean and the unclean, and the hem of the
Pharisee's robe must not touch that of the
sinner. Pharisee Simon expressed the whole
spirit of the age when he censured Christ, say-

HARMONIES 139
ing, " This man, if he were a prophet, would
have known who and what manner of woman
this is, for she is a sinner." He and his age
took it as a cold matter of course that a
prophet would detect the sinner and have noth
ing to do with her. But this was not the
spirit of Jesus. He saw the sin, blacker and
more dreadful than Pharisee Simon could see
it, but he saw also what Simon did not see at
all ; he saw the woman's crushed life, in which
there was still room for faith, and love, and
repentance ; her sins washed by her own tears ;
her new life, radiant with a new light; and he
said to her, " Woman, thy faith hath saved
thee; go in peace."
Again, Jesus is presented as holy, yet in his
holiness there is no impracticable asceticism
or mysticism. His is no mere holiness cult
with assumed superiority, boastful blessedness,
mystical fervour, and spiritual elevation above
all sin levels! He is no hermit, but a man
among men. No monk of the wilderness, but
a resident of thronging Galilee, with various
groups of friends, boon companions, devoted
disciples, a physician to the sick, a teacher of
the simple, a lover of lilies and birds and
mountains and seasides.
The presentation of the miraculous in the
character Christ furnishes an incisive test of

140 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
the argument in hand. In a matter-of-fact
way miracles are reported of him as though
they were matters of fact with him. In the
records there is perfect verisimilitude. There
is no elaboration, no heightening, no straining
after effect. The miracle worker is as free
from ostentation on the one hand as he is
from tragic effort on the other. His miracles
are wrought on the call of beneficence, and
never for display. On the contrary, he refused
to " show a sign " on demand, and took occa
sion to rebuke those who were the merest of
shallow sign-seekers. He, the miracle worker,
never wrought a miracle simply to show that
he could work a miracle. He was entirely too
genuine for that. He rather sought to sup
press the undue notoriety that the reports of
his miracles were creating, and seemed in
stinctively to shrink from being known as a
wonder worker. The presentation is that his
own emphasis was placed not on the miracles
but on his teaching and his life. This appears
in his sharp reply to the Pharisees who de
manded a sign of him. He called them " an
evil generation," and declared that no sign
should be given them but the sign of Jonah
the prophet, at whose preaching the Ninevites
repented. The almost perfect winnowedness
of the recorded miracles in their character of

HARMONIES 141
beneficence, or of didactic value; their free
dom from magic and pomp; the very parsi
mony of them relative to the sum total of
recorded activities — all this is the presentation
to us of power as admirably balanced by
sanity and restraint as it is great and wonder
ful. One other feature of the presentation of the
miraculous relative to Jesus deserves mention.
The gospel miracles are miracles ; they are not
freaks. The noted scientist who declared that
no amount of evidence could convince him that
" a minotaur had been seen trotting down the
Strand in London " failed to distinguish be
tween a miracle and a freak. That is an un
fortunate blunder for a man of science to
make. The miracle has its due occasion, its
beneficent or didactic value, its close kinship
with psychical and ethical forces, and its
rational place in the economy of theistic
thought. None of these categories apply to
the changing of a pen into a pen-wiper, or the
hypothetical minotaur trotting down the
Strand in London. Such freaks, or signs, or
others quite like them, might have pleased the
ancient sign-seekers more by far than the
beneficent works that sprang as naturally
from the kindly soul of Luke's and John's and
Matthew's hero as water from a fountain. It

142 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
is highly significant that with such signs that
hero would have nothing to do.
Not in the miracles alone, but in other ways
divine power and authority are attributed to
Jesus. In the exercise of these gifts there is
no coercion of individual freedom, no sub
merging of the individual conscience, no
blocking of our human initiative, no scotching
of our humble human achievements. Jesus
alone of the world's great leaders harmonized
his kingly claims with the rightful liberty of
his subjects. Authority and slavery were the
governmental correlatives of the ancient
world; the authority of the monarch presup
posed the slavery of his subjects. It was so in
Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Democra
cies were shortlived. They were the fitful ex
pressions of the freedom and equality that are
native to humanity, but which were soon lost
under the sceptre of the monarch and the
sword of the conqueror. On the contrary, the
authority claimed by Jesus is greater than that
of any earthly monarch, while his method of
wielding it assured the freedom and goodwill
of his subjects. He seeks to develop rather
than to suppress personality, and constantly
to transmute his lordship into friendship. The
adjustment of claim and command in Matt.
28: 18 and 19, is very significant; "All au-

HARMONIES 143
thority in heaven and on earth is given to me.
Go teach all nations ! " With Jesus teaching is
the correlative of authority, and its method.
Thus his kingdom becomes the kingdom of the
church, the school, the college, the university;
of enlightenment, neighbourliness, and brother
liness. To create a sinless character under the most
strenuous and trying conditions of life would
have been in itself a marvel of marvels for
the period in which the gospels were produced.
To create in such an age a character that com
mends itself to after ages as sinless is wonder
ful indeed. Now that is precisely what ap
pears on the pages of the gospels. The char
acter Christ is presented as free from the
cramping legalism of the day and from many
a distinctive but merely ethnic feature of
Judaism. To our age it is astonishing to see
how splendidly the Christ rises above the cere
monial trifling of his time, the hand-washings,
and Sabbaths, and fastings, and tithings, and
rabbinical distinctions, and priestly preten
sions, and even the temple cult, with its holo
causts of animals and rivers of blood. What a
tour de force of fiction it would be to create
such a character in such an age, at once mak
ing it a protest and giving it ascendency, and
by very virtue of its break with the times com-

144 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
mending it to after times! Here, however, is
the fact ; here is the character, pronounced sin
less by the centuries, and yet free from the
precise legalism and traditionalism which in
that age constituted sinlessness.
A further presentation is that in Christ's
person God-like ideals have their home in
human perfections, and that thus the seem
ingly irreconcilable human and divine are made
one. " The Word was made flesh," says John,
in his profoundly meditative statement of the
incarnation. And the glory that he had ob
served in Christ as a man he could liken to
nothing less than " the glory as of the only-
begotten of the Father, full of grace and
truth." And thus in the mind of the aged
apostle there was wrought out in Christ the
long sought reconciliation between flesh and
spirit, God and man.
In Christ the contradictions between life and
death meet and are harmonized in the resur
rection, and the fear of death gives place to the
hope of life. His resurrection is the fond as
sertion that
" Life is ever Lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own."
In his life and its measureless activities; in
his death and its abysses of sorrow and love

HARMONIES 145
and forgiveness; in his resurrection and its
triumphs over death and despair; in his plans
for an empire of the teacher, the brother, the
friend, and the redeemer, there are such ideals
matched by such realities as have compelled the
world to make a new category. The God, the
man, in him, are one and unique. Our
Brother is our Deity, and we worship him in
close, familiar love.
Let it be repeated, the writer of fiction who
can create thus must be greater than Milton or
Dante, Victor Hugo or Shakespeare, Goethe
or Schiller, or Tennyson or Browning. These
are geniuses in the world of creative literature.
Their amazing capabilities were devoted to lit
erature. They were the sons of a Christian
civilization. They breathed an atmosphere of
Christian idealism. The pages of Luke and
John were in their hands, and the form of
Jesus passed before them. But withal they
have created no character comparable to
Christ ; they have realized for us no ideal even
remotely approaching that of Matthew and
Mark. Are we then to believe that men un
trained in literature, without creative genius
as their pages plainly show, humble Jews of
the Galilean lake, tax-gatherers, peasants, pro
vincial men, children of that cramped and
Pharisaical first century, ... are we to be-

146 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
lieve that they created this character, threw it
up in mighty, God-like protest against their
own times, and projected it as a tremendous
reality, a transforming dynamic, into waiting
centuries? Did they deceive their own times
and the centuries that followed with the
hypothesis of a reality that never existed?
And by such a hypothesis merely of idealized
but unrealized glory, power, and protest, have
they reformed abuses, transformed the cen
turies, and created civilizations? Causes must
be, even in literature and history, adequate to
their effects. The character Christ and the
Christian dynamic of our Anno Domini cen
turies must be accounted for. Our heads and
our hearts at their best refuse to consent that
the peasants of Galilee are a sufficient explana
tion for this measureless effect. In the name
of literature and history reason cries out for
Christ, for the real Christ, the Son of the liv
ing God, the gift of the Father's love.
Evidently the choicest souls that gath
ered around Jesus in the days when he
taught and loved and wrought in universal
ways, felt that there was a strange and poten
tial difference between him and their other
great ones. They struggled to know him.
They could not at once comprehend him. In
their perplexity they loved him. Before his

HARMONIES 147
day was half done they had travelled so far
with him that they could not turn back. The
thought of it was terrible. " Lord, to whom
shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal
life." When his day was done they revered
his memory; they received his spirit; they
obeyed his commandment; they bowed their
knees to him; they lifted up their hearts, and
went forth to live and die telling his story, the
story of
"The far Father in the close, sweet Son."

XI
FINALITY
"We faintly hear, we dimly see;
In differing phrase we pray ;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee,
The Light, the Truth, the Way."

H

" BT ST is thought after two thousand years
needs no revision." It is to Dr.
George A. Gordon that we owe
this observation. It suggests much. Ordina
rily we esteem him the greatest teacher who
constantly revises his matter and his presenta
tion. Such revision is a condition of progress.
" We rise on stepping stones
Of our dead selves to higher things."
Jesus, however, was able to speak the final
word, and yet leave room for growth on the
part of his disciples. We are far removed
from the Galilean fishermen, but the message
to them is still the message to us.
" No fable old, no mythic lore ;
No dream of bards and seers;
No dead fact stranded on the shore
Of the oblivious years;
148

FINALITY 149
" But warm, sweet, tender — even yet
A present help is he;
And faith has still its Olivet,
And love its Galilee."
As the character Christ is unrivalled, so his
revelation is ultimate. The stamp of finality
is everywhere on the sayings and doings of
this wonderful One. In rapture it was writ
ten of him that he was " The Alpha and the
Omega, the first and the last, the beginning
and the end." In our critical age, looking
through much cold light, we still speak of him
in the same rapturous terms. He did not
simply speak God's last, best, word to men;
he is that word. The prologue to the fourth
gospel so presents him. " The Word was
made flesh and dwelt among us, and we be
held his glory, the glory as of the only-be
gotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."
In substance the synoptic gospels say the same.
Not one of them leaves room for an expec
tancy higher than is realized in its pages.
Such is the presentation.
In the sciences and arts there are funda
mental facts and principles upon which we
build, which we cannot change, and beyond the
application of which we cannot go. In mathe
matics the axioms are fundamental. In music
there are harmonies that must be honoured.

150 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
Chemistry has her reagents, botany her science
of numbers, the stars their orbits, and geology
her vast and impenetrable periods. In religion
the world waited long for one who should
find what is fundamental, and who should
winnow it out from the mass of the accidental,
and give to it expression in simple words and
immortal deeds.
That finality should be found in religion and
ethics, or even an approach to it, is the more
wonderful when we remember the numerous,
world-old and age-long attempts and failures.
Religions are as numerous as the races of men.
They change with changing times. There are
fashions in forms of worship that are mis
taken for essentials of the spiritual life.
Creeds and cults come and go carrying bane
or blessing to countless thousands of their dev
otees. "Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O God, art more than they."
But to find this God, and his final, fundamental
will and way, this has been the mocking quest
of countless centuries. "Who by searching
can find out God?" "What is truth? said
jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an
answer."

FINALITY 151
To Christ is attributed final, fundamental
thought about God, not in philosophic ways
maybe, but in ethical and spiritual and dynamic
ones. Building on the best type of monotheism
of the ancient world, that of the Hebrew
prophets, he passes beyond it and presents us
with a better monotheism. The monarchical
monotheism of the Old Testament gives place
to the paternal monotheism of the words and
the spirit of Jesus. God as Jesus reveals him
is not a ruler merely, a monarch, a supreme
judge, and autocrat, whose will, however
righteous, is yet so cold and inflexible as to
reduce his people to subjects rather than de
velop them into citizens. Nor is he " a Man of
war," nor does he command the destruction of
tribes or peoples, nor does he rejoice in the
overthrow of the enemies of his chosen ones.
There is much of the Old Testament thought
about God that is never repeated by Jesus.
To him God is personal Spirit, and he is
Father. This Father who is Spirit cannot be localized
or monopolized. The answer to the woman
at the well in Samaria is marvellous both in
its spiritual insight and in its constructive
daring. " Our fathers worshipped God in
this mountain," said the woman ; " ye say
that in Jerusalem is the place where men

152 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
ought to worship." A local God with a local
shrine was in her thoughts, and in the thoughts
of her people, and of his. But Jesus in his
answer rose immeasurably above all the thought
of the time. He said, " the hour cometh when
ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet in
Jerusalem worship the Father. The hour com
eth and now is when the true worshippers shall
worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for
the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is
Spirit, and they that worship him must worship
him in spirit and in truth." In this one
saying Jesus forever delocalized and univer
salized the worship of the God who is Spirit
and who is Father. It was a saying that in
volved great danger, first to the one who ut
tered it, then to the local altars. It involved
also tremendous changes, for the worship of
the whole world through all time. Can our
thought rise higher than this? Can we con
ceive of any one better or beyond the Personal
Spirit who dwells in his world, making every
foot of soil a place of prayer? Who also is
Father with all that this term of endearment
implies of love and providence and chastise*-
ment and forgiveness ?
Christ's thought about God is discoverable in
his acts quite as distinctly as in his words.
He went to the temple not to sacrifice an ox or

FINALITY 153
a lamb, but to drive out the extortionate trad
ers. There was more true worship of the
Father-God in his lash for thieves than in
the river of blood that flowed from the altar
to the valley below. He would not allow that
his Father's house should be a house of hard
bargains, extortionate prices, and ill-gotten
gains. The attitude of Jesus toward the sects of
his time sprang from his thought about God.
Phariseeism, Sadduceeism, Rabbinism were out
of keeping with a Father's kingdom in which
men should be brothers.
His view of God made it incumbent on
Jesus to be " the Prince of Peace." In the
Father's kingdom there should be no war.
Consistently therefore Jesus refused to take
the sword or allow his disciples to do so. Can
there be a more beneficent or dynamic thought
about God than that which issues in a kingdom
of human fraternity, justice, helpfulness, and
peace ? For practical, efficient, social goodness
is not Christ's disclosure of God the final one ?
The term " Father " as used by Jesus stands
for personality and love and providence. It
conditions our kinship with the object of our
worship, calling for sonship, childhood, and
loyalty based on love. In the matter of per
sonal relations we cannot go beyond it, and

154 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
we have learned that we dare not fall below
it. Now and then a prophet of the ancient
times thought of God as Father, but in a
far-off, poetic way. With Jesus the term is
central to his disclosure of God. It is final
and fundamental. It is constructive. It is
foundation and turret and dome to his spiritual
temple. Does he speak of a kingdom? It is
the Father's kingdom. Of love? It is the
Father's love. Of justice? It is the Father's
justice? Of providence? It h the Father's
providence. And so of all his teaching, while
his practice is such that in his unfailing
brotherliness he manifests the Father's father-
liness. " No man hath seen God at any time.
The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom
of the Father, he hath declared him." The
fatherhood of God is the full secret of Christ's
presence in the world as Son. By his own
wise, brave, and unfaltering brotherliness to
ward men he has revealed to us the highest,
kindliest, and most vital relationship that can
prevail between the Creator and his created
ones. With Jesus the term Father as applied
to God is the final theological term, the final
ethical one, and the final sacramental one.
That is to say, this term was meant by Jesus
to condition our thought about God, our rela
tionship to him, and our worship of him.

FINALITY 155
Christ's thought about man is a direct corol
lary of his thought about God. If God is
the Father man is the child. If one man is the
child of God so is another; so are all. The
broadly human family becomes the humanly
divine one. There springs from this the con
ception of a universal brotherhood, a world
wide neighbourhood, an all-embracing man
hood. To this conception the Golden Rule be
comes the logical code of conduct, since it is
simply the way of fraternal relations, while
the law of the other cheek is simply the way of
a real brother with a real brother. The act of
the compassionate Samaritan is the way of a
•brother who is up with the one who is down.
In a word, this final, fundamental kinship is
the source of the ethics of the mountain ser
mon, of the precepts, the parables, and the
prayers of Jesus.
In this Jesus is not only consistent, but he
has the advantage also of reverting to the
noble thought about man presented in the first
pages of the Old Testament. There is this
difference, however, in favour of Jesus. He
makes the thought central and constructive
for all men, whereas the Old Testament
writers and lawgivers failed to apply it broad
ly to their own people, not to speak of
other peoples, which, in the long run, they

156 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
learned to despise. With Jesus the thought
works itself out into the broadest groupings
of men, schools, churches, federations, parlia
ments, arbitrations, democracies, republics,
and international relations fraternally condi
tioned. Can we in thought go deeper than
this? Is it not final? Is not our only diffi
culty found in its limitless applications to the
affairs of life, and its multitudinous bearings
on conduct? Is it not this that makes secta
rianism illogical, and repugnant, and uneth
ical? And is it not this that is urging us to
seek the higher ethics of Christian union, the
ethics of a united family under the one
Fatherhood? Can there be a higher thought
about man than that which makes him a child
of the eternal Father, and a brother to his un
dying brother, and that inspires every possible
beneficence on the one hand, coupled with
every possible insurgency against evil on the
other? If a panegyric of humankind had been in
tended, nothing higher could have been offered
than the capabilities and possibilities that
Jesus imputes to man. But it is not eulogy
with which Jesus is dealing ; it is stern, and in
tense, and almost dreadful reality. He invests
man with possibilities of victory over sin, of
the attainment of holiness, and of eternal life.

FINALITY 157
The seriousness, the greatness, the sweetness,
the possible tragedy of life that is like God,
and that is related to him in filial ways — it
was all this that impressed Jesus, and regard
ing it all he has spoken words that cannot be
surpassed or forgotten.
In his thought about life and duty Jesus
reaches finality in his valuation of the motive
rather than the form. With him the inner,
not the outer, is paramount. Right intention
Godward issuing in reverence; right intention
manward issuing in beneficence, these are the
poles about which he would have the life re
volve. Of legislation there is from Jesus al
most nothing; of inspiration there is almost
all. Forms, ceremonies, legalities, techni
calities, he left to those who trifle in religion
and ethics. To those who are serious he pre
sented ideals, motives, purposes, and affec
tions. He discarded the thousand burden
some rules of the rabbis, the deadening forms
of the Pharisees, and the laborious cult of
the Old Testament times. For these he sub
stituted the simplest, quickest, easiest, every
where usable ways of worshipping. He made
worship to consist not of motions but of emo
tions. In his presence rituals and sacraments,
forms and formalities recede; reverence and
love, benevolence and beneficence gain access.

158 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
He sought to make worship a joy and life a
delight. Who that knows him as the gospels
present him can think of pleasing him by
flagellation, or sleeping on spikes, or making
pilgrimages, or imprisoning himself in a mon
astery, or by nice distinctions in the cut of a
chasuble, or by the presence or absence of
leaven in a loaf? It was never his thought
that his disciples should be miserable and legal
istic and small and cynical here in order to
be happy and free and great and gracious
hereafter. In a most sacred hour he gave a
final, all but blood-sealed, passionate, exhorta
tion to his disciples; a new commandment in
clusive of all the old ones that were worth
keeping; "that ye love one another." That
was his summary of religion in manward ways
just as the love of the Father in heaven was
his summary of it in Godward ways.
This that is final in Christ, and the source
of finality in his teaching, is the secret of the
satisfaction he has bestowed on unnumbered
myriads of men. His invitation, " Come unto
me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest," is at once the kind
liest call and the fullest assurance that have
ever been given to the souls of men. It is
the ultimate door thrown wide to men by the
Son of Man.

FINALITY 159
If we do not find finality in Christ where
shall we find it? Who can suggest a step
beyond the pathway he has trodden? Who
can put a better, sweeter thought about
God into any heart that is human, or devise
a more brotherly relationship between trav
ellers on life's rough road, or inspire men
with a holier hope for this world of time and
the timeless world? " O Saul, it shall be
A face like my face that receives thee; a Man like
to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by forever; a Hand like
this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee.
See the Christ stand."
Is it necessary still to raise the now fa
miliar question as to fact or fiction? What
kind of illumination fell at once on Luke the
Greek physician, Matthew the publican, John
the mystic, and Mark the unimaginative prag-
matist, that they four should unite in pre
senting to the world's fondest faith such a
conquering picture of their combined fancy?
Or if these four names are but symbols for
the four little books, the question is the same.
Galilean peasants and a Greek doctor — they
four or any other unknown four, the problem
is the same; how came they to strike these

160 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
notes of finality? To present a body of spir
itual and ethical teaching that can be revised
only by being marred? To present such
thoughts about God and man as were wholly
repugnant to1 their own age while increasingly
attractive to all future ones? To incarnate
these thoughts in a character supreme, make
them vital in the picture of a person morally
miraculous, seal them to succeeding centuries
by a most vivid tragedy of crucifixion and
resurrection? How came these four by this
miracle of literary creation, for such it must
be if Christ himself be not the reality that is
claimed for him by these same humble or un
known four? Surely this miracle of presen
tation springs more easily and rationally from
the fountain of reality in One, and that One
the gift of God, than from the divergent and
untrained fancies of the average sons of an
unimaginative and crabbed age. The easier
faith is that the " Strong Son of God " by a
painful process during many months tore these
average sons of their times away from their
times, and made them by his pre-eminence over
:'them both competent and glad to tell in their
simple ways his story sublime.

EXCURSUS I
CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS*
"To Him, from wanderings long and wild,
I come, an over-wearied child,
In cool and shade His peace to find,
Like dew-fall settling on my mind.
I turn from Fancy's cloud-built scheme,
Dark creed and mournful eastern dream
Of power, impersonal and cold,
Controlling all, itself controlled,
Maker and slave of iron laws,
Alike the subject and the cause;
From vain philosophies that try
The seven-fold gates of mystery,
And, baffled ever, babble still,
Word-prodigal of fate and will;
From Nature, and her mockery Art,
And book and speech of men apart,
To the still witness in my heart;
With reverence waiting to behold
His Avatar of love untold,
The Eternal Beauty new and old." —Whittier.
CHRIST stands alone. He is a fact
apart, a phenomenon unequalled, a
manifestation without a second. He
is man and super-man. He touches all, yet he
*For the introduction of this theme see Chapter I,
p. 29.

162 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
is above all. Through perfect manhood he
rises into Godhood. Religion at its best re
fuses to be satisfied with exclusively human
categories relative to him. His character, his
claims, and his effects are unique. Literature,
art, civilization, and centuries rise up to do
him reverence. Schools find their inspiration
in him, laws their equity, parliaments their
permanence, and souls their rest. Through
him God speaks; in him man hopes.
In a lonely hour, on the slopes of Mount
Hermon, not far from Csesarea Philippi, he
called for the confession of his school of
young men. Reverently the foremost of them
said, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God." Benediction followed confes
sion. "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah;
for flesh and blood have not revealed it to
thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And
I also say unto thee that thou art Petros, and
upon this petra I will build my church." With
this happy play on the name of his ardent dis
ciple he declared himself a future builder.
The great founders of religions aside from
Jesus are Moses, Buddha, Confucius, and Mo
hammed. Not one of them has presented to
the world such claims either God-ward or
man-ward as those of Christ. Confucius did
not so much as claim a religious message.

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 163
Buddha presented a pantheistically condi
tioned one. Neither made any prophetic
claims as messengers for or from God.
Moses and Mohammed presented themselves
as prophets from God speaking the messages
of God. Christ presents himself in vital re
lationship with God, a relationship which he
describes in terms of sonship and fatherhood.
He makes this vital kinship with God the
medium of his full and final revelation of
God. Christ is Deity expressed in terms of
humanity. Such claims were never made for Moses,
and had he made them for himself he would
have been held guilty of blasphemy by both
the earlier and later prophets of the religion
that he founded. He is represented as con
scious of his own limitations, and as having
had a forecast of one greater than himself
whom " the Lord would raise up," and whom
the people should hear " in all things what
soever he should say unto them." Moham
med, misguided by the cold and harsh and
speculative forms of Christianity with which
he came into contact, revolted from the
thought of such vital relationship between
God and Christ, and to this day Moham
medans teach that the claim of such kinship
is the most heinous of sins, the sin of " Shirk."

164 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
Christ's man-ward claims are precisely in
keeping with his God-ward ones. More fre
quently than by any other term he calls him
self " the Son of Man." He heals and helps,
invites and warns and forgives, reconciles and
commands and judges. He is at once Brother
and Redeemer. He is slain Lamb and risen
Lord. He is the revelation of God to man
and of man to himself. He is " holy, harm
less, undefiled, separate from sinners,, and
made higher than the heavens." Neither
Moses nor Mohammed bears any such rela
tionship to mankind. Jesus was a man among
men and a man above men; they are merely
men among men. Neither is wholly ex
emplary; neither is typal; both are far from
it. Both were legislators according to the
primitive needs of their respective periods and
peoples. From neither did there come an
evangelical message, a call to repentance or
a promise of forgiveness. On the contrary,
both imposed severe penalties for the trans
gression of their hard codes. Moses and Mo
hammed were soldiers, fierce and terrible.
Jesus refused the sword, disarmed his dis
ciples, and stands as the Prince of Peace to
all the earth. They slaughtered : Christ saves.
They legislated : he loves. They built in ethnic
and limited ways: he, in catholic and unlim-

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 165
ited ones. Pascal exclaimed, " Moses for a
people ; Christ for the world." The exclama
tion fits Mohammed also, for his work is char
acterized by limitations similar to those of
Moses. One feels a glowing admiration for Con
fucius. Serious and serene, wise for his
times and beyond his times, towering above
his fellows, a marvel, and a teacher to a hun
dred generations of his own teeming millions,
he commands reverence — almost. In com
parison with Jesus, however, his limitations
are at once apparent. He did not claim to be
a religious teacher at all; rather, he distinctly
disclaimed it. He preferred not to talk about
the gods. His theory was that we cannot as
yet perform our duties toward men, and until
we can we should not trouble ourselves about
spirits. He was intensely practical and the
whole emphasis of his teaching rests on tem
poral things. Like the people to whom he
ministered he was " singularly devoid of im
agination and indisposed to philosophy." He
claimed no message from above and was not
conscious of any merit beyond that of the
human level. Propriety was his watchword,
and the superior man his ideal. All our
Christian categories relative to conversion and
the new life were foreign to him. It is no

166 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
injustice to call him the Solomon, or the Ben
jamin Franklin, of China. He called himself
a transmitter, and his mission was to gather
up the wisdom of the ancients and pass it on
to others. He was a traditionalist. He set
the face of China toward the past, and blocked
whatever wheels of progress she may have
had. Christ, on the contrary, was the world's
mightiest prophet of progress. He gauged
his age as one of transition; he boldly an
nounced the approaching end of the dead or
dying past, and resolutely set the face of his
disciples toward a boundless future. Con
fucius stereotyped China; Jesus emancipated
the world.
Confucius misgauged man. He assumed
that man is naturally good, and that if unob
structed he will surely reach, like a river, his
goal. From this it followed that what man
needed was simply the open way of just laws,
righteous rulers, good government, and in a
word, proper environment. He had no vision
of sin. He could not see that the heart needed
to be made right, or that men can possibly be
evil by choice. His theory was that the bucket
conditioned the water that it held. If the
bucket were clean the water would be whole
some. If the bucket were foul the water
would be bad. This is why he cared nothing

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 167
for religion and everything for law and poli
tics and government. He was a thoroughgo
ing externalist. The more spiritually-minded
Lao Tze discovered this and made light of it,
bidding him observe that the crow does not
paint himself all day in order to be black or
the pigeon to be white. Confucius saw the
body and its needs, the family and its needs,
the community and its needs, the state and its
needs, but not the soul and its needs. That,
on the contrary, is precisely what Jesus saw
first, and upon that he placed his first empha
sis. Jesus had a perfectly clear vision of sin
and holiness and of their radical differences.
He knew the values of the inner states of
man, of right- and wrong-mindedness, of
struggle and abandonment, of repentance and
forgiveness, of churlishness and neighbourli
ness, of profanity and prayer. Jesus, there
fore, directed his life and teaching to the cor
rection and perfection of these inner states
of man, leaving the corrected man to frame
his own laws, build his own constitutions, and
direct his own governments. The contrast is
sharp between Christ's method of inwardness
and the Confucian method of outwardness.
The beautiful story and attractive life of
Buddha must not blind us to his limitations
and his misdirections. One cannot say of him

168 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
as Renan says of Jesus that " his legend will
grow young with years," but one can say that
it has charmed the thoughts of many genera
tions. Buddha the compassionate is revered
by millions to-day though he came and went
two millenniums and a half ago. Buddha
loved, or at least he pitied, and therefore he
lives in the memories of men. He did not
claim a revelation, but a struggle and a tri
umph. Having made his well-known " great
renunciation " he went forth clothed in a yel
low robe with a beggar's rice bowl in his hand,
seeking the light. As a begging monk he
sought. He starved his body that his soul
might see. He reduced his food to three
grains of rice a day. Failing, he abandoned
that hard way, and was reviled by the monks
from whom he parted. Still he sought. After
long meditation amidst the silent shades of a
sacred Bo-tree the light dawned on him, and
at once he became a Buddha, that is an en
lightened one. Undecided at first as to
whether he should preach or not, he at last
determined " to beat the drum of the eternal
in the darkness of this world." Thus he be
came a preacher, gathered a school of monks,
and founded a religion.
The light that Buddha saw is darkness in
deed in comparison with the light that Jesus

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 169
revealed. He saw not sin, but sorrow; not
holiness and hope, but death and despair; not
repentance and forgiveness and restoration,
but the extinction of desire and the pathway
of nescience ; not a positive heaven, but a neg
ative nirvana; not God and goodness, but
atheism and pessimism.
Gautama, for that was Buddha's family
name, was the most compassionate of men.
What appealed to him were the wrinkles of
age, the plaints of childhood, the deficiencies
of the lame and deaf and blind, the sufferings
of the sick, the wretchedness of beggars, and
in a word the appalling aggregate of human
sorrow. He was oppressed by it. He brooded
over it. In view of it he was smitten with
" the divine unrest of noble souls." Out of
the travail of his soul there came the light —
his light. He saw that desire was the source
of all unrest, and that if desire could be over
come sorrow would cease. From that mo
ment he was " Buddha," the enlightened one,
and tradition has placed these words of that
first hour of his enlightenment in his mouth:
" Looking for the maker of this tabernacle I
have to run through a course of many births
so long as I do not find him; and painful is
birth again and again. But now, Maker of
this tabernacle, thou hast been seen ; thou shalt

170 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
not make up this tabernacle again. All thy
rafters are broken; thy ridge-pole is sun
dered ; the mind, approaching the eternal, has
attained the extinction of all desire."
This experience of Buddha, all too briefly
told, is a miniature of his system, embracing
what he termed the " Four Noble Truths."
The following statement of these " noble
truths " is that of Dr. Allen Menzies, in his
" History of Religion," page 365.
1. " The Noble Truth of Suffering. Birth
is suffering, decay is suffering, illness is suf
fering, death is suffering. Presence of objects
we hate is suffering, separation from objects
we love is suffering, not to obtain what we
desire is suffering. Briefly, the fivefold cling
ing to existence is suffering.
2. " The Noble Truth of the Cause of Suffer
ing. Thirst that leads to rebirth, accompanied
by pleasure and lust, finding its delight here
and there. This thirst is threefold, namely,
thirst for pleasure, thirst for existence, thirst
for prosperity.
3. " The Noble Truth of the Cessation of
Suffering. It ceases with the complete cessa
tion of thirst, a cessation which consists in the
absence of every passion, with the abandon
ing of this thirst, with the deliverance from it,
with the destruction of desire.

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 171
4. " The Noble Truth of the Path that leads
to the Cessation of Suffering — The Holy
Eightfold Path. That is to say, Right Be
lief, Right Aspiration, Right Speech, Right
Conduct, Right Means of Livelihood, Right En
deavour, Right Memory, Right Meditation."
These last terms, belief, aspiration, etc., are
not Christian; they are Buddhistic, and are
filled each with a Buddhistic content. Right
belief, for instance, is not Christian belief, but
Buddhistic belief. It is belief in pain and
sorrow as the great evil, and in desire as the
source of that evil; in the desirability of get
ting rid of desire; in transmigration; in
karma; in the possibility of ending both karma
and the round of transmigration; and finally
in Nirvana or nescience.
Buddha's doctrine of sorrow is conditioned
by the Hindu doctrine of transmigration. If
birth and life and death are painful, how ter
rible must be the prospect of eight million four
hundred thousand births and deaths ! " The
essential doctrine of Buddha," says Professor
Menzies, " is determined by the belief in trans
migration. His cry of triumph at the time
of his enlightenment is to the effect that the
long series of suffering existences through
which he has passed has now come to an end,
and that he will not be born again."

172 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
Buddha's doctrine of the last things is antip
odal to that of Jesus. Nirvana, whatever else
it may mean, is certainly the exhaustion of
the karma, the end of sequence, the quenching
of desire, the sweet relapse at last into nes
cience. Buddhism does not teach the per
manence of the ego, for the soul is " but a
chance collation of elements," to be dissolved
by fate or chance or conscious effort. There
is no prettier presentation of this " finis and
total liquidation " of the individual than
Edwin Arnold frames for us in various
quatrains of his fine epic, " The Light of
Asia." Take this:
" The dew is on the lotus ! Rise, Great Sun !
And lift ray leaf, and mix me with the wave.
Om, Mani, Padme Hum ! The sunrise comes !
The dewdrop slips into the shining sea."
Christ, on the other hand, allures his fol
lowers with the hope of that " Life which is
ever Lord of Death," and of that " Love
which can never lose his own." Wonderful
were his words on the night of the last sup
per with his disciples : " Let not your hearts
be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in
me. I go to prepare a place for you, and if
I go and prepare a place for you I will come
again and receive you to myself, that where
I am there ye may be also."

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 173
By way of further emphasis on the Hindu
doctrine of transmigration, inherited by
Buddha and accepted by him, the following
paragraph from Dr. John Henry Barrows is
offered : " The birth stories of Ceylon rep
resent him as having been born five hundred
and thirty times after he became a predestined
Buddha. We read that he was born eighty-
three times as an ascetic, forty-eight times as
a monarch, forty-three times as a deva,
twenty- four times as a Brahman, eighteen
times as an ape ; as a deer, ten ; as an elephant,
six; as a lion, ten; at least once each as a
thief, a gambler, a frog, a hare, and a snipe.
He was also embodied in a tree. But as a
predestined Buddha he could not be born
in hell, nor as vermin, nor as a woman.
. . . He could descend no lower than a
snipe." " Many," says Dr. Barrows, " have been
impressed with St. Hilaire's eulogy of Prince
Siddartha ; ' His life had no taint ; his con
stant heroism equals his convictions, and, if
the theory which he preconceived was false,
the personal example which he gave was ir
reproachable.' " " And yet," continues Dr.
Barrows, " since through the early years of
his life he lived in what, according to his own
teaching, was heinous sin, we have no historic

174 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
right to say that he takes rank with Jesus in
the perfection of his holiness. Gautama, after
his enlightenment, was at first undecided
whether he should keep his new faith to him
self or proclaim it to others. Not so Jesus.
Buddha made discoveries : the Christ revealed
what was from within. Buddha taught the
vileness of the human body; Christ its sacred
ness. We can explain Buddha without the
miracles which later legends ascribe to him.
We cannot explain Christ, either his person or
his influence, without granting the truth of
his own claim that he did the supernatural
works of his Father. Only his resurrection ac
counts for the rise and continued existence of
his church. We must go to Palestine and not
to India to find a perfect Man, a perfect
Teacher, and the only Savior."
Thought about God ultimately conditions
all thought in religion. There is, therefore,
no more crucial test of religious leaders than
their presentation of God. Deficiency or mis
direction can be sustained at any other point
better than at this. Every deficiency, every
misdirection in the founder's thought about
God works itself out inevitably into doctrine
and worship, and life, and history. But if the
founder's thought about God is great and en
compassing, whole and wholesome, the reu

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 175
ligion that flows from it seeks constantly the
same high level.
Judged by this standard, Buddha and Con
fucius are fatally defective. Neither felt the
need of any god or gods. Buddha did not
need God because the struggle upon w;hich he
insisted was a purely inward and personal
one, a fight in a realm where, as he thought,
no god could help and for salvation of a kind
that no god could give. Buddhism " is the
most autosoteric of all religions," says Pro
fessor Menzies. " It declares more uncom
promisingly than any other that man must
save himself by his own efforts, and that no
one can possibly stand in his place or relieve
him of any part of the great task." Buddha's
last words to a favourite disciple as presented
by Dr. George F. Moore, in his recent work
entitled, " History of Religions," are these ;
" Therefore, Ananda, with yourselves for
islands (of safe retreat from the overwhelm
ing floods of desires and lusts), live ye, with
yourselves for refuges : with the Teachings for
an island, with the Teachings for a refuge,
with naught else for a refuge." Even the
pantheistic Brahma of his fathers seems to
have faded away from the self-sufficient soul
of Buddha, and we have from him the anom
aly of a. God-less religion. Being God-less,

176 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
it is, of course, devoid of all the categories of
relationship between God and man that be
long to theistic religions, such as love and fear,
repentance and forgiveness, regeneration, jus
tification, and reconciliation.
" He breathes," says Dr. Justin Hartly
Moore, " no revenge for disobedience, no for
giveness for the penitent. No higher power
ever whispered into his ear the secrets of eter
nity nor pointed out the secret place of truth.
Buddha never claimed to be the messenger of
any Power who dwells above this world. And
if he spoke as having authority, it was the
authority of experience merely, and in no1 wise
due to inspiration or personal divinity."
Very similarly, but from a different motive,
Confucius dispensed with the gods. He did
not deny them; he simply did not need them
and was not interested in them. His life and
teachings were an essay in practical politics,
and he could not see how the spirits of stones
and trees, and mountains, and rivers, and of
dead ancestors, plus an impersonal national
deity popularly known as Shang-ti, could be
of any assistance to him or his people. He
left the religion of China as he found it, with
this exception, namely, that he taught the fun
damental ethics and morals of that religion,
and contributed, therefore, indirectly to its

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 177
furtherance. What was said above of the
Buddhism of Buddha must, therefore, be said
also of the system of Confucius: it is devoid
of all distinctly Theistic and Christian cate
gories. " To him as to other thinkers of this
type," says Professor Moore, " God was es
sentially the moral order of the world, an
order energizing in the phenomena of nature
as well as in the course of history and the
destiny of individual lives." This issues in
fatalism, and prayer is futile. When person
ality is lost from the God idea, nothing is left
but the hard and relentless grind of law and
order. Confucius felt this, as the following
story shows: Once when he was sick his
disciple, Tsze-lu, asked leave to pray for him.
He said, " Is that proper ? " Tsze-lu replied,
" Yes, that is proper, for it is said, prayer has
been made to the spirits of the upper and
lower worlds." Confucius answered, " It must
be a long time since I prayed."
Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus are mono
theistic, but each in his own way. The mono
theism of Moses is ethical and monarchical.
God is the one rightful ruler of his people,
and he is holy. Being holy he calls for holi
ness on the part of his subjects and worship
pers. Hence the Decalogue with its negative
ethics, and hence also other more positive

178 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
codes of flhe later Hebrews. Out of this
thought about God sprang the age-long strug
gle of the prophets against polytheism and
its degrading idolatries. And side by side
with that heroic struggle, there sprang also the
most ethically and religiously dynamic body of
literature in the world aside from the New
Testament. Furthermore, since God was the
rightful Ruler of the people of Israel, he must
reign after the fashion of the times. He must
legislate, and execute ; he must be " a Man of
war," and lead his armies to victory; he must
be present at the place and time of the central
ized national worship; and as King he must
have a glorious habitation, a temple that
should be a palace, and a palace that should
be a temple. All this we find in the Old Tes
tament with here and there noble prophetic
protests against various of its more primitive
and distinctly national traits. The result
was a decidedly ethnic religion with many
limiting and perishable features. This lonely,
noble, ancient monotheism of Moses gave at
last all that was best of itself as a heritage to
Christ, and much of the worst of itself as a
heritage to Mohammed.
James Freeman Clarke says of the mono
theism of Mohammed that it is the worst in
the world. It is monarchical, legalistic, rigid,

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 179
and relentless. It is cold, distant, and deis-
tical. The God of Mohammed is an inflexible
autocrat. He is not a Father; he does not
love; he cannot be called gracious, or long-
suffering, or tender in mercy. He has no
mercy except toward believers. To unbeliev
ers he is brutally unmerciful, commanding
their slaughter wherever they are found. Mo
hammedanism is a relapse from the higher
teaching both of Moses and of Jesus. It de
mands slavish obedience on the part of its
votaries, and makes them fanatical enemies
of all whom they deem hateful to their God.
Mohammed's God is a reflection of his own
great and furious and warlike soul. Moham
med's God has drenched the earth in blood.
He has retarded civilization. He has built
harems and enslaved womanhood. He has
conquered that he might degrade. He has
blocked progress and choked life.
A treatment of the monotheism of Jesus
has been presented in the chapter on " Final
ity." To that the reader is referred in closing
this discussion, the enforced brevity of which
no one can feel more than the writer. This
much must be said, however, at the risk of
repetition. Jesus passes beyond the legalistic
and monarchical monotheism of Moses and
presents us with the great and encompassing

180 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
and comforting fact of the Fatherhood of
God.
It was a new day in the history of religion
when Jesus made that concept fundamental
and constructive. Others had dreamed of it,
but the dreams had passed with their waking,
warlike hours. Jesus held to it and built upon
it. He taught his disciples to pray for the
Father's kingdom, not for a monarch's. He
inspired them to live as children, not as sub
jects; and as brothers, not as patricians or
plebeians. When Jesus spoke it was as repre^
senting the Father; when he wrought he did
the Father's works; when he suffered it was
for the Father's glory; and when he died, it
was to the Father he prayed in behalf of his
enemies, and into the Father's hand that he
committed his spirit. In all the teaching of
Jesus there is not a hint of monarchical mono
theism. It was because Jesus saw God as a
Father that he refused to wear a crown and
wield a scepter, and be such a king as David or
Solomon had been. As Jesus perceived it, God
preferred to love and forgive and heal and save
rather than to fight and kill after the far-away
tribal fashion; so Jesus himself refused the
sword and accepted the cross. He insisted
on being the Prince of Peace because he was
the Son of the Father of all mankind. For

CHRIST AND OTHER FOUNDERS 181
the same reason he pursued the method of
inspiration rather than legislation, and of the
educator rather than the executive. In the
true family, as between father and children,
law reduces itself to a minimum, and love
reaches its maximum. So Jesus simply said,
" A new commandment give I unto you, that
you love one another."
The heaviest burden that historical Christi
anity has had to bear through all its centuries
has been reversion, under the misguidance
of Augustine and Calvin and Charlemagne
and Hildebrand and Leo, to the monarchi
cal monotheism of Moses and Moham
med. But we are returning now to the
Father of Jesus and out of the return there are
coming federations, democracies, peace prop
agandas, fraternal feelings, unity movements,
rosy dawns of better days, and the blessed
graves of many a heartless and unbrotherly
dogma. " Jesus Christ is in his own order," says Dr.
Fairbairn, " namely, the order of the founders
or creators of religions, the transcendent per
son of history; and to be transcendent here
is to be transcendent everywhere, for religion
is the supreme factor in the organizing and
regulating of our personal and collective life."
Dr. Fairbairn pushes this matter of the

182 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
transcendency of Jesus some steps further.
He even affirms that Christ created monothe
ism. No weightier sentences than his could
be quoted in concluding this chapter. He says
of Jesus, " He is the real Creator of Monothe
ism. Before and apart from him we have
Naturalisms, Polytheisms, Pantheisms, and a
Henotheism, which is the term most charac
teristic of Judaism as it was and is. But it
is only through him, and within Christendom
that Monotheism has come to be and has been
incorporated in a real and a realized religion.
" He created a religion in its own order as
transcendent as his person, and its order is the
universal and ethical. The one God has his
correlative and counterpart in the one religion,
and in its character the religion could not but
be as was the God; and as were the God and
the religion, so did they design man to be.
By making God a new being to man, man was
made a new being for the service of God."

EXCURSUS II
PREVAILING IDEALS OF THE TIMES
OF JESUS
"What precisely did Christ, by his ideas and the
condition of their realization, accomplish for religion?
It is a small thing to say, He made a universal re
ligion possible; it is a greater thing to add, The religion
he made possible is one that ought to be universal, for
its ideal is the humanest, and the most beneficent that
has ever come to man." — Fairbairn.
THE Messianic ideals of the Jews of the
first century have been referred to more
than once in the preceding pages. In a
broad way it has been shown that the Christ
ideal of the gospels is in striking contrast with
the thoughts and ideals of the time, and radi
cally antagonistic to the fondest anticipations
of the time. A further study of this feature
of the work seems advisable, especially in be
half of those who have not the opportunity to
read widely on the subject.
There are four especially valuable indices of
the spirit of the times, namely the Apocryphal
books of the Old Testament, the pre-Chris
tian Apocalyptic writings, the character and
teaching of the Rabbis, and the Apocryphal
Gospels. 183

184 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
The Apocryphal books of the Old Testa
ment comprise a body of literature belonging
in the main to the two centuries preceding
Christ. They fill a gap between the Old Tes
tament and the New, and tell us much of what
the people were thinking about during that
time. They help us to recreate for ourselves
the situation out of which, and above which,
the Christ arose and our gospels grew.
First Maccabees is the foremost book of
the group in historical value. It was written
not far from ioo B.C. It deals with the
dreadful and glorious wars of the Maccabsean
period, and its interests are exclusively na
tional and patriotic. It maintains the theo
cratic viewpoint throughout, and does not
rise above the trials and the hopes of the peo
ple of Israel. Its point of pride is in the mil
itary achievements of Judas Maccabseus and
his heroic brothers. The situation with which
the book deals and the key to its spirit cannot
be presented better than by the following quo
tations. " Now Jerusalem lay void as a wil
derness; there was none of her children that
went in or out. The sanctuary also was trod
den down, and aliens kept the stronghold; the
heathen had their habitation in that place; and
joy was taken from Jacob, and the pipe with
the harp ceased." "And Judas said, 'Arm

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 185
yourselves, and be valiant men, and see that ye
be in readiness against the morning, and that
ye may fight with those nations that are as
sembled together against us to destroy us
and our sanctuary; for it is better for us to
die in battle, than to behold the calamities of
our people and our sanctuary.' "
The book of Tobit, written, it is thought,
about a century before Christ, is a story of
captivity in Nineveh. It is a mediocre piece
of writing intended to inculcate honesty and
alms-giving. " Its marvels and angelology are
of a debased kind. Asmodeus, the evil spirit, is
represented as capable of lust for women."
Magic plays a goodly part in the story. The
smoke arising from the heart and liver of a fish
is used to drive away an evil spirit, and the
gall of a fish, to cure blindness. The poem
in which Tobit expresses his thanksgiving is
quite fit to rank with the devotional psalms,
but its viewpoint respecting Jerusalem and the
nation is still the old theocratic one. Curses
are pronounced on all that hate Jerusalem, and
blessings forever on all that love her. The
psalm ends with the cry,
"Let my soul bless God, the great King.
For Jerusalem shall be built up with sapphires, and
emeralds and precious stones,
Thy walls and towers and battlements with pure gold.

186 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
And the streets of Jerusalem shall be paved with
beryl,
And with carbuncle, and stones of Ophir.
And all her streets shall say, Alleluiah;
And they shall praise him, saying,
Blessed be God, who hath extolled it forever."
The book of Judith is a fiction celebrating
the heroine for whom it is named. Judith is a
second Esther, greatly praised and admired,
though the role that she plays is far less noble
than that of Esther. The scene is laid in the
times of Nebuchadnezzar, but the story was
written after the time of the Maccabees.
Holofernes, a captain of Nebuchadnezzar,
sets out to take vengeance on all the earth. On
his road to Jerusalem, he lays siege to Beth-
ulia. Judith, a beautiful widow, pretends to
desert her people, gains access to his court on
the plea of desiring to assist him in his con
quest of the land, leads him after some days
by means of her beauty and attractions into
a season of feasting and revelry, seizes him by
the hair and cuts off his head while he
is in a drunken stupor, conceals the head in a
bag, and on the pretext of going out of the
camp to pray carries it to Bethulia, delivers it
to her people, and instructs them how to raise
the siege. Her speech to her people as she
delivers to them the head of Holofernes
brings out the climax to the story.

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 187
" Then said Judith unto them, Hear me now,
my brethren, and take this head, and hang it
on the highest place of your walls. And so
soon as the morning shall appear and the sun
shall come forth, take every one his weapons,
and go forth, every valiant man out of the
city, and set ye a captain over them as though
ye would go down into the field toward the
watch of the Assyrians; but go not down.
Then shall they take their armor and shall go
into their camp, and raise up the captains of
the army of Assur, and they shall run to the
tent of Holofernes, and shall not find him.
Then fear shall fall upon them and they shall
flee before your face. So ye, and all that in
habit the coast of Israel, shall pursue them,
and overthrow them as they go." The As
syrians were defeated, and Judith was praised
in a triumphal song, celebrating her brave in
delicate deeds.

" She put off the garment of her widowhood
For the exaltation of those that were oppressed in
Israel,
And anointed her face with ointment,
And bound her hair in a mitre,
And took a linen garment to deceive him.
Her sandals ravished his eyes,
Her beauty took his mind prisoner,
And the fauchon passed through his neck."

188 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
Ecclesiasticus, or The Wisdom of Jesus the
Son of Sirach, is a voluminous work of
homely, practical, worldly wisdom, quite com
parable to the book of Proverbs. It belongs
to the large body of wisdom literature pecu
liar to the Hebrew people. Though written
at a late date as compared with the main body
of such writings, its spirit and atmosphere are
unchanged from theirs.
Portions of the book of Baruch are sup
posed to have been written after the destruc
tion of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year
70 a.d. It probably belongs to the late years
of the Maccabsean period. It looks to the
past rather than the future. Its situation is in
Babylon, and it is professedly written in part
by Baruch while he was a captive there. In
part it professes to be a message from Jere
miah to the exiles in Babylon. The whole sit
uation is distinctly Jewish, and it is anti-sym
pathetic with alien peoples. Even the few
lines that are supposed to forecast the coming
of Christ cannot fairly, in view of their con
text, be made to bear suoh an interpretation.
As to the story of Susanna, it is a pity that
it survived. It is intended to teach a moral
lesson, but it is crude in the extreme.
The story of Bel and the Dragon is another
myth of the Babylonian times, in which Dan-

- IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 189
iel outwits the priests of the god Bel, gains
favor with the king, and destroys both Bel and
the Dragon.
The Song of the Three Children is a late
legend, another Babylonian romance. It puts
a prayer and a song into the mouths of the
three who, according to the book of Daniel,
were cast into the furnace. It tells us that
" the angel of the Lord came down into the
oven together with Azarias and his fellows,
and smote the flame of fire out of the oven,
and made the midst of the furnace as it had
been a moist whistling wind, so that the fire
touched them not at all, neither hurt them.
Then the three, as. out of one mouth, praised,
and glorified, and blessed God in the furnace,
saying, " Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers ;
And to be praised and exalted above all forever.
And blessed is thy glorious and holy name
And to be praised and exalted above all forever."
This is the beginning of the song. It is a
nature hymn, running on through forty coup
lets, each repeating the refrain above, and
altogether reminding one of the 103rd Psalm,
though inferior to it. Further description of
these books would be both wearisome and un
necessary. Enough has been said to show

190 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
the student that the gulf between the gospels
and these books is a very wide one. Then-
field lies wholly within the past. It is ethnic
rather than catholic, theocratic rather than
democratic, governmental rather than inspira
tional, and militant rather than pacific.
As compared with the nobler books of the Old
Testament canon these Apocryphal books pre
sent to us the literature of decadence. To
gether they weave a literary shroud for the
dying theocracy. There is no breath of life in
them. They do not prepare for the new age
except as death prepares by the removal of the
old for the coming of the new. There is noth
ing in them out of which to make a Matthew,
a Mark, a Luke, or a John. The Christ ideal
is not there.
Of the Apocalyptic writings preceding the
days of Jesus the Book of Enoch and the Sib
ylline Oracles may be named as most charac
teristic and as bearing directly on our theme.
The former is a library rather than a volume,
and has been divided by modern scholars into
five books. It belongs to the last two centuries
of the pre-Christian era, much of it was prob
ably suggested by the book of Daniel, it sprang
(like other apocalypses) from periods of per
secution and distress, and it has a varied and
unknown authorship. It is quoted in the four-

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 191
teenth and fifteenth verses of the book of
Jude. Edersheim says of it, " It professes to
be a vision vouchsafed to the patriarch
(Enoch), and tells of the fall of the angels
and its consequences, and of what he saw and
heard in his rapt journeys through heaven and
earth. Of deepest, though often of sad inter
est is what it says of the kingdom of Heaven,
of the Advent of the Messiah and his kingdom,
and of the last things." Its forecast of the
Messianic age is presented in terms that are
decidedly materialistic, and that of the Millen
nium in terms of sensuous enjoyment. To the
kingdom of the Messiah Israel is to be gath
ered, its people coming from the four quarters
of heaven riding in carriages and borne as on
the wings of the wind. The Messiah is her
alded in glowing terms, such as " The Son of
Man," "The Elect," "The Just One," and
" The Son of God," but the content of these
terms in the mind of the time is indicated by
the fact that he is heralded also as " the first
of the white bulls," " the great Animal among
them, having great and black horns on his
head, whom all the beasts of the field and all
the fowls of heaven dread, and to whom they
cry at all times."
Of the Sibylline Oracles a word must suf
fice. They comprise a varied body of apoca-

192 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
lyptic writings extending over a long period,
some of them pre-Christian, some post-Chris
tian. Of the third book Edersheim says:
" Dating from a century and a half before
Christ it presents a picture of Messianic times,
generally admitted to have formed the basis of
Virgil's description of the Golden Age, and of
similar heathen expectations. In these Ora
cles the Messiah is ' the King sent from hea
ven ' who would judge every man in blood and
splendour of fire. The vision of Messianic
times opens with a reference to ' the King
whom God will send from the sun.' " This
book enumerates a number of world, powers
similar to, but not coordinate with, those of
Daniel and foretells a period of woe preced
ing the advent of the Messiah. The work of
the Messiah was to destroy the enemies of
God, to deliver the people of Israel, and to
restore the throne of Israel to a son of
Judah. Schooled in such writings as these the Jews
naturally found fault with the simple, prac
tical, teaching life of Jesus. " If he were the
true Messiah was he not," says Dean Farrar,
" according to all the legends of their nation
to enrich and crown them, and to banquet them
on pomegranates from Eden, and ' a vineyard
of red wine,' and upon the flesh of Behe-

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 193
moth and Leviathan, and the great bird Bar
Juchne?" The Messianic ideals of the Jews in the
times of Jesus were distinctly national and
theocratic and conservative as against the uni
versal and democratic and progressive reality
which we find in the gospels. This appears on
the pages of the gospels themselves wherever
they reflect, as they frequently do, the current
Jewish expectancy. Even the songs of the in
fancy as treasured by Luke are not free from
a distinctly national cast and limitation. The
song of Zacharias, Luke i : 67 f., is especially
noteworthy in this respect. Its viewpoint is
purely a Jewish one. It is only by a strained
interpretation that it can be made to serve as
a Christian hymn. It was this national view
of the Messianic king and kingdom that
troubled Herod when he heard that there was
born " a King of the Jews." It was this that
caused John the Baptist to stumble and doubt
at last, and to send two of his disciples to say
to Jesus, " Art thou he that should come, or do
we look for another? " John could not see in
the peasant teacher and healer with his band of
fisherman followers the glorious king and mil
itary hero that even he expected. It was this
that the people had in view when, after Jesus
had fed the five thousand, they came to " take

194 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
him by force and make him a king." The two
on their way to Emmaus said sadly, " We
hoped it had been he who should have re
deemed Israel." After his resurrection, and
as he was about to return to the Father, his
disciples said to him, " Wilt thou at this time
restore again the kingdom to Israel? " Noth
ing could be more pathetic than this. Spite of
all Christ's teaching, his death, his resurrec
tion, his catholic commission, his insistence '
upon the ethical and the spiritual, these Jew-
fettered disciples could not dream of anything
higher for him to do than restore the the
ocracy, and bring back to Israel the times of
David and Solomon and Hezekiah. They
hated Rome. Their horizon was no broader
than Israel. For Israel alone their sun of sal
vation had arisen, and in Israel it must set,
unless the Master could through his resurrec
tion, and commission, and gift of the Holy
Spirit, force them into larger thought.
The same view of the Messianic kingdom as
limited to Israel appears in the best writings
of contemporary times outside of the New
Testament. The Psalter of Solomon was
written about 50 b.c. It consists of eighteen
hymns attributed to Solomon. Edersheim
says, " The seventeenth Psalm bursts into this
strain : ' Blessed are they who shall live in

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 195
those days, in the reunion of the tribes which
God brings about. And no wonder, since they
are the days when the King, the Son of David,
having purged Jerusalem, and destroyed the
heathen by the word of his mouth, would
gather together a holy people which he would
rule with justice, and judge the tribes of his
people, dividing them over the land according
to tribes; when no stranger would any longer
dwell among them."
Even Philo, most philosophic, most cultured
of the Jews, most influenced by the outside
world, especially the Hellenic, embraced this
fond and futile hope of the restoration of his
people to Palestine, and the centralization of
their theocratic cult and reign in Jerusalem.
" However low the condition of Israel might
be," he said, " or however scattered to the ends
of the earth, the banished would on a given
sign be set free in one day. Gathering as by
one impulse, the dispersed would return from
Hellas, from the lands of the barbarians, from
the isles, and from the continents, led by a di
vine, superhuman apparition, invisible to
others, and visible only to themselves. On
their arrival in Palestine the waste places and
the wilderness would be inhabited, and the
barren land transformed into fruitfulness."
Such was the wild, sad, patriotic dream of

196 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
the Jews. It passed over into rabbinism, and
became more and more fantastic by the accre
tion of a thousand extravagances. In its crude
materialism, its harsh hatred of the gentile
world, its glorious but misguided patriotism,
its deathless devotion to the things of the past,
its fanatical and furious adherence to an im
possible programme, it confronted Jesus. He
alone saw its folly, dared to oppose it, sought
to correct it, mourned over it, and died under
its ban. In sharp antagonism to it he presented
his spiritual programme, defended it with his
life, sealed it with his blood, arose from the
dead in its vindication, and sent his disciples
out to herald it through all the earth. Mean
while the Holy City went down in blackness
and ashes; the land was devastated; and the
devoted people were driven out more than ever
among the gentiles whom they hated. And
there that programme would have ended had it
not been for the strange fact that a skeleton
hand of the same impossible hope reaches still
through the centuries, and points to-day to the
dream of Zionism.
Another of the prevailing ideals of the Jews
in the days of Jesus is indicated by the word
rabbinism. But to understand that word re
quires the help of many pages. Its method
and its material are wholly foreign to us. It

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 197
is hard to put ourselves into touch with it, and
to attain to an appreciation of it. Yet without
this it is impossible to value aright the spirit
and teachings of Jesus, his attitude toward the
scholasticism of his day, and the emancipation
from it wrought out in his life and character.
Barely enough of the spirit and teachings of
rabbinism have been used in the above essays
to frame effectively the argument, and to en
liven the theme. A further study of the sub
ject by way of the presentation of Hillel, " the
loftiest figure which Rabbinism has produced,"
seems advisable. For this presentation we are
indebted for the most part to the pages of
Dean Farrar, Excursus III, in the Appendix
to his Life of Christ. Of this Rabbi he says,
" He seems to have been really learned, hum
ble, peaceful, and enlightened; but the distance
between him and Jesus is a distance absolutely
immeasurable, and the resemblance of his
teaching to that of Jesus is the resemblance
of the glowworm to the sun. Their whole
scope and method are utterly different. Hillel
rested on precedent, Jesus spoke with author
ity. Hillel spoke in the schools to students and
separatists; Jesus in the streets and by the
roadsides to publicans and sinners. Hillel con
fined his teaching to Jerusalem ; Jesus travelled
the length and breadth of Palestine. Hillel

198 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
mainly occupied himself with the Levitical law
and modified its regulations to render them
more easy and more palatable; Jesus taught
only the moral law, and extended its applica
tion from external actions to the very thoughts
of the heart. Would Jesus ever have uttered
a sentiment so deeply dyed in Phariseeism as
this ? . . . ' No uneducated man easily
avoids sin; no common person is pious.' Is
not this the very echo of the haughty, exclu
sive insolence which said, ' Have any of the
rulers believed on him, or of the Pharisees?
But this mob that knoweth not the law are
cursed.' Is it not the very spirit which Christ's
whole life and practice combated, and which
his whole teaching most utterly condemned ? "
To an inquirer who desired to be taught
the whole law while standing on one leg Hillel
said, " What is unpleasing to thee do not to
thy neighbour." This is his wisest saying, and
it is at best but a negative form of the golden
rule. It falls far below the positive teaching
of Jesus.
Among the stories told to illustrate the high
character and self-command of Hillel is the
following, greatly abbreviated. A rude fellow
on a bet of 400 zouzim tried to make him
angry. After disturbing him with three foolish
and impertinent questions, which the Rabbi

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 199
graciously answered, commending them as
"important questions, my son," the matter
was given up with a petulant explanation.
Whereupon the Rabbi said, " Calm thyself,
my son; better that thou shouldst lose for
Hillel's sake 400, aye, and 400 more zouzim,
than that Hillel should lose patience." This
may be judged as a fair enough bit of legend
ary matter, but it is not comparable to the
situations and answers, dignified and elevated,
so frequent in the gospel presentation of
Christ. Hillel was not above a grain of double-
dealing for occasional convenience. " In op
position to Shammai he directed that in the
bridal song the beauty of the bride should be
praised, no matter how ugly she were ; and on
one occasion to avoid any question or dispute
with the school of Shammai he passed off an
ox, which was to be sacrificed for him, as a
cow." " The Rabbis praise these proceedings,"
adds Dr. Farrar, " yet we feel instinctively
what a shock they would have given us, how
injurious they would have been to the world's
morality, had they occurred in the life of
Christ. He alone of all who ever lived in the
world could say, ' Which of you convinceth
me of sin ? ' Little as we know by comparison
of Socrates, of Confucius, of Sakya Mouni,

200 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
of Hillel, of Mahomet, and much as we know
of Jesus, yet in the scanty records of their
lives we find much to disapprove. But there is
nothing which is not divine and sinless in the
four-fold record of the life of Christ."
" One of Hillel's most celebrated and elabo
rate decisons was on the trumpery series of
questions as to whether one might or might
not eat an egg which a hen had laid on a feast
day, when the feast day came in connection
with the Sabbath. This precious inquiry gives
its name Bitsa [egg] to an entire Talmudic
treatise. Is it possible to imagine that Jesus
would have treated it otherwise than with
withering irony ? "
" Owing to a vague expression in Deut.
24: i' Hillel ruled that a man might put
away his wife even if she cooked his dinner
badly." A wide gap lies between this and
Christ's ruling on the subject of divorce. It
would seem that with the rival schools of the
Rabbis, namely of Hillel and of Shammai,
divorce was esteemed as a much more trivial
question than a myriad of trifling forms per
taining to the temple cult, the Sabbath, and
ceremonial washings. Edersheim, speaking of
the differences between these schools, says,
" Many, very many of them are so utterly

IDEALS OP JESUS' TIMES 201
trivial and absurd, that only the hairsplitting
ingenuity of theologians can account for them;
others so profane that it is difficult to under
stand how any religon could coexist with
them. Conceive for example two schools in
controversy whether it was lawful to kill a
louse on the Sabbath ! "
Renan, with more ingenuity than acumen,
has suggested that Hillel was the real master
of Jesus. To this Farrar replies as follows:
" He and his school and Shammai and his
school spent a century of unprofitable and
groundless jangling on the exegesis of two
short words of the law [ervath dabhar, Deut.
24 : i ] without approaching a single sound
principle, which would have rendered their
quarrel needless ; but Jesus furnished that prin
ciple, and solved the question forever the
moment it was brought before him [Matt.
I9:3"9]- Let any candid reader consult
the translation of the Talmudic treatise
Beracoth, by M. Schwab, and see the kind of
miserably minute questions of infinitely little
matters of formalism which occupied the mind
and life of Hillel, and calmly consider the
mixture of scorn and pity with which Jesus
would have treated the notion that there was
in such questions any intrinsic importance.
He will then be able to judge for himself of

202 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
the folly and untenability of the statement that
Hillel was the true master of Jesus ! "
The almost unbroken silence of our canon
ical gospels respecting the childhood and young
manhood of Jesus is a remarkable evidence
of their historical character. Had our four
gospels been mythical in character they cer
tainly would not have missed the opportunity
of weaving round the wonderful child any
number of marvellous fictions. To fiction
writers the temptation would have been great,
and could not have been resisted. On the
contrary, but one simple, natural story breaks
the silence of those thirty years. At twelve
years of age the grave and thoughtful boy
lingered in the temple, and was found by his
parents, " sitting in the midst of the teachers,
both hearing them and asking them questions."
They might well have been " amazed at his
understanding and his answers." There is
nothing at all miraculous about it; nothing
overwrought, or fabulous or fantastic. It is
just such an incident as fits naturally into the
experience of such a child. " But how differ
ent," says Farrar, " is the boy Christ of the
New Testament apocrypha! He is mischie
vous, petulant, forward, revengeful. Some of
the marvels told of him are simply aimless and
puerile, as when he pulls a short board to the

IDEALS OF JESUS' TIMES 203
requisite length; or moulds sparrows of clay,
and then claps his hands to make them fly; or
throws all the clothes into the dyer's vat, and
then draws them out, eaoh stained the requisite
colour. But some are on the contrary simply
distasteful and inconsiderate, as when he vexes
and shames and silences those who wish to
teach him; or rebukes Joseph; or turns his
playmates into kids. And others are simply
cruel and blasphemous, as when he strikes dead
with a curse the boys who offend or run
against him, until at last there is a storm of
popular indignation, and Mary is afraid to let
him leave the house."
These Apocryphal Gospels of the infancy
and childhood of Jesus belong to the second
century. They sprang from a craving on the
part of certain classes for something abnormal
and more sensational than the sober, simple
history. They were rejected by the church in
those strenuous middle years of the second
century, during which she, under stress of
persecution and false teaching, selected her
list of authoritative writings. She sifted
finely; she rejected much chaff; she kept our
gospels because they were found by her worthy
to be kept. But the inferior, post-apostolic
works continued to circulate among the less
enlightened classes, spite of the disapproval of

204 THE CHARACTER CHRIST
the church and its great leaders. Their value
to us, as intimated above, is in the striking con
trast they present between their own legendary
and puerile matter and the genuinely frank, un
strained, unadorned, matter-of-fact recital of
our canonical gospels. Soberly trodden, every
pathway of induction open to us relative to
these writings leads to reliability.
" Shall we suppose the evangelic history to
be a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend,"
answers Rousseau, " it does not bear the marks
of fiction. On the contrary, the history of
Socrates, which nobody presumes to doubt, is
not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ.
Such a supposition in fact only shifts the diffi
culty without obviating it. It is more incon
ceivable that a number of persons should agree
to write such a history than that one should
furnish the subject of it."

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