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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY Gift of

YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL

THE FACT OF CHRIST

THE

FACT OF CHRIST
A Series of Lectures

BY

P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON, M.A.
MINISTER OF RENFIELD CHURCH. GLASGOW

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
Publishers of Evangelical Literature

Co mij Wife

PREFATORY NOTE
These lectures were given in Renfield Church
during last winter to a public class which met
on Sunday evenings after service; they are now
published without further elaboration either of
matter or style. ¦ A few sentences and two or
three notes have been added.
The subject has been treated strictly within
certain limits, and many aspects of it have been
purposely left untouched. In particular, the
inquiry has been carried on as an individual
question, and little or no account has been taken
of the way in which religion comes to us
through the Christian society and tradition, or
of the way in which it must express itself in the
social life of the world. The whole range of
topics that are suggested by the ideas of
' Church ' and ' Kingdom of God,' which are
certainly parts of the meaning of Christ, are
not included in the scope of this volume. An-

2 PREFATORY NOTE
other occasion may be found for their discus
sion. In passing the lectures through the press, I
have tried to acknowledge and verify all quota
tions and references, and ask indulgence if any
thing in this respect has been omitted.
P. C. S.
Glasgow,
October igoo.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND
EDITION
The publishers having asked for another edi
tion of this book in England and America, an
opportunity is afforded of referring to one or
two matters to which one's attention has been
drawn since the first edition was issued and
which are of immediate interest for the subject.
i. The articles recently published by Dr.
Schmiedel of Zurich and the late Professor
Bruce of Glasgow in the Encyclopaedia Biblica
cannot but suggest to many that the very start
ing-point of the argument in these lectures is
made impossible by modern criticism. Dr.
Schmiedel leaves us with an historical fact of
Christ that is no more than ' a thing of shreds
and patches ' ; Dr. Bruce gives us little or no
ground for regarding Jesus as being historically
more than a lofty teacher and notable healer —
the child, in many things, of his times, but with
3

4 PREFACE TO THE
spiritual intuitions truly and happily conceived.
I have neither the qualifications nor, at present,
the space to enter into a detailed discussion of
these views; but one remark I should like to
make. It seems to me that you must make up
your mind along which of two ways you are
going to look for the explanation of the whole
affair of Christianity. Are you going to say
that the Christian faith made Christ or that
Christ made the Christian faith? I mean, are
you going to take, on the one hand, the view
that historically Jesus was of not more than
humanly comprehensible stature, but that his
early disciples and apologists raised his figure to
a height of heroism, idealism, supernaturalism,
Divinity, till they created the picture of the
evangelic tradition and the Church's faith; or,
on the other hand, the view that there really and
historically was and must have been in Jesus as
He actually existed what originated and neces
sitated all this for those who thought out and
did justice to the fact of Christ ? I cannot here
enter into an argument, and I content myself
with saying that I never could see why the
former of these alternative views should be

SECOND EDITION 5
regarded as the more ' critical ' or one free from
historical difficulties. It seems to me to involve
an historical paradox amounting to an impos
sibility that, if, as a matter of fact, Jesus was
but a man among men — the child of His time
with happy religious inspirations — His primi
tive apologists could ever have made Him into
the Man for all time. They could never have
done it except with the concurrence of the his
torical facts, — unless, that is, Jesus really was
what they represented Him to be.1 I submit,
therefore, that the alternative which would ex
plain Christian faith by what Jesus historically
was (and, one must add, is) remains an emi
nently reasonable one, and that the fact of
Christ still is the true starting-point for a con
sideration of what is Christianity.
2. Since these lectures were given to the pub
lic, I have received a large number of communi-
1 This is particularly the case as regards one matter —
the sinlessness of Jesus. His sinlessness is by far the
most interesting and important historical tradition re
garding Jesus: to write His life and not refer to it seems
to me an extraordinary thing in so penetrating an author
as Dr. Bruce. (Cf. his own Apologetics, Bk. in, ch. v.)

6 PREFACE TO THE
cations from correspondents, always courteous
and often far too generous, suggesting various
criticisms and queries. It is quite impossible
for me here to deal with these, but one I wish to
refer to because it has been mentioned to me
by so many different persons. The argument in
the section on ' the Problem of Forgiveness '
seems to many to lead to the conclusion that in
the end sin is not and cannot be forgiven (in
our sense of the word) by God at all. And yet,
ask more than one or two, are we not enjoined
to forgive one another 'even as God, for Christ's
sake, hath forgiven ' us ? As regards these
words, one need only say that one is not dis
posed to form or alter one's theology upon the
turn of a text, and that surely the ' even as '
may cover our forgiving in God's spirit, readily
and wholly and heartily and so on, without
involving a precise parallel between what for
giveness involves on our part and His; and a
similar remark applies to the like petition in the
Lord's Prayer. But as to the question whether
God, being the Source and Sustainer of the
ethical order, can really forgive sin — is it not
an unreal question because, unconsciously, it in-

SECOND EDITION 7
volves an unreal abstraction ? Sin is an unreal
abstraction apart from the person who sins.
The question whether God really forgives sin
is meaningless unless it means whether He for
gives the sinner. The answer to this question
is clear. As Principal Rainy — my theological
master, if he will permit me to call him so —
once said to me in answer to this very diffi
culty : ' Well, we are forgiven at least.' Ex
actly; and to forgive us — sinners — is the only
thing that can be meant by forgiving sin. A
great many of our difficulties arise, not from
facts, but from our abstract view of these facts.
All that is said above is entirely consistent with
what I have said in the lectures, to the effect
that to forgive sinners involves quite peculiar
implications on the part of God, Who is the
ethical order of things.
I should also refer to the subject of the
Divinity of Jesus, about which, it is plain,- many
really Christian minds have great difficulty or
disinclination to accept a precise position; but
this could only be done at some length. I can
only repeat that the Christian man, living his
religious life, does not, and cannot, differen-

8 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
tiate between ' knowing God ' and knowing
' Him whom He hath sent.' This is the essen
tial fact for theology to construe, and it seems
to leave no alternative.
3. One more personal word I wish to add,
since the pen is in one's hand. A valued critic
surprises me by the charge of lack of reverence
to Dr. M'Leod Campbell, whom he very justly
eulogises, and from whom, he says with entire
truth, I have yet much to learn. May I then
say here that The Nature of the Atonement
seems to me the only modern English book on
the subject that can justly be designated
great? As to Dr. M'Leod Campbell himself,
it is not for me even to praise his great origi
nality of mind, his profoundly religious spirit,
above all, his gracious and Christ-like character.
I cannot admit the charge I refer to, but I am
glad of an occasion to pay a very humble
tribute to the work and memory of a most illu
minating teacher and one of the holiest of men.
P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON.
March 1901.

CONTENTS

i PAGE
The Data of Christianity  13

II
What is the Fact of Christ? .... 39

III
The First Meaning of the Fact ... 65
1. The Christian Character .... 71
11. The Moral Motive-Power ... 81

IV
The Further Meaning of the Fact ... 103
1. The Foundation of Faith .... 106
H. ' And the Word was God ' 126

10 THE FACT OF CHRIST
V page
The Final Meaning of the Fact ... 141
1. The Reality of Sin . ., . . . 146
n. The Problem of Forgiveness . . . 157
Addendum: The Principles of the Atone
ment  174
VI
What is a Christian ? . . , , * 191

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY

' Christus ist nicht der Lehrer wie man zu sagen pflegt,
Christus nicht der Stifter ; er ist der Inhalt des Christen-
thunu..' Schelling.

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY
When the greatest religious Master whom the
world has ever known put one day to His first
disciples a certain question, and, on receiving
an answer to it, declared that on the strength
of this He could build His Church, it is evi
dent that here is to be found what He regarded
as the critical issue for religion and its proper
point of departure. To state the religious
problem as Jesus stated it is surely the most
hopeful way of approaching the subject not
only of Christianity, but also of religion gen
erally, on which He is the indisputably supreme
authority. It surprises us, however, when we look at
what this question was. The occasion referred
to is, of course, the scene near Csesarea Phil-
ippi, when Jesus asked His disciples, ' Whom
say ye that I am ? ' The question is a notable

14 THE FACT OF CHRIST
one, but it astonishes us that it should be
treated as a fundamental one. The inherent
truth of a teacher's message would always ap
pear to be a more important matter than any
thing, however interesting, about the teacher
himself. We should therefore expect that the
question which Jesus would regard as of deci
sive importance for religion would be about
some cardinal theological belief — such as: Do
you believe in the Father in heaven? — or some
primary ethical principle, such as: Do you
accept the law of the Sermon on the Mount?
This is what we should expect. But the
question was not of this kind. It was not
about God nor about morals. It was a ques
tion simply about Jesus Himself. It was
neither theological nor ethical, but personal.
And this was the question upon an answer to
which Jesus declared, with energy and enthu
siasm, that His Church would be built. The
fact is a very remarkable one, and we cannot
too carefully impress its significance upon our
minds. This greatest of religious teachers
forms His religion — for the building of His
Church cannot be less than that — frorn His

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 15
followers' convictions regarding Himself.
What appears to be an irrelevancy to religion —
the personality of the preacher — He makes its
very root. It is to put the same thing in other
words to say that Jesus directed men to find the
data for Christianity primarily and essentially
in the phenomenon of Himself.
If such a statement seem to need further evi
dence than a single incident, that evidence is
not far to seek. It is found in the whole of
the didactic method of Jesus, which was such
as no other religious teacher has ever adopted.
That, according to the records, the strikingly
distinctive thing about the way Jesus taught
and trained His followers is that He so per
sistently and energetically presented Himself to
them is a thesis that is now almost a common
place in any trustworthy discussion of the sub
ject. It strikes even the casual reader of the
Gospels; all the more will it do so if he com
pares with the manner and method of Jesus
as a teacher, the manner and method of Moses
or Isaiah or John the Baptist, or if he opens
his Plato or the Koran. All other great teach
ers are profoundly conscious that they are but

16 THE FACT OF CHRIST
pointing to a realm of truth, and — all the more
if they are truly great teachers — they efface
themselves before its eternal principles. Alone,
absolutely alone, among leaders of the soul,
Jesus absorbs the highest principles into His
own personality. To the seeker after eternal
life He said, ' Follow Me ' ; of one who would
see the Father, He asked, ' Hast thou not
known Me ? ' No other teacher has ever dared
thus. Who else has said of truth, not that he
teaches it, but that it is he ; of the vision of God,
not that he has found it, but that it is in the
sight of himself; of that which supplies all
man's need of rest, of spiritual food, of
strength, of pardon, not that he can point to it,
but that it is all in him? Not Moses so spake
nor the prophets ; not Plato nor the Buddha nor
Mahomet. But Jesus spoke thus. He did so
habitually, deliberately pronouncedly. There
is no doubt about this, and it differentiates Him
as a teacher from all other teachers. Others
know they are but messengers of truth; He is
also the message. They are but torchbearers ;
He called Himself 'the Light of the world.'
They point to truth ; He said, ' Come unto Me.'

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 17
All this is the unique note of Jesus' teaching.
In His training of His disciples we see it car
ried on systematically and step by step so dis
tinctly that an intelligent reader perceives that
the conversation at Cassarea Philippi was not
incidental, but a carefully planned climax, and
therefore its result so gladly welcomed a con
summation. So Jesus, who came to preach religion, delib
erately and distinctly did so by making men
' think of ' Himself. As a German author of
insight says, ' He knew no more sacred task
than to point men to His own person.'1 He
came not to elaborate a system of theology or
ethics, but to introduce Himself to men's minds
and hearts, and left men with the question, not,
' What think ye of this doctrine or that prin
ciple? ' but, ' What think ye of Christ? ' And
this means that, as has been said, Jesus directs
us to find the data for Christianity primarily
and essentially in the phenomenon of Himself,
not in His ideas, His teaching, His example
merely, but in the fact of Christ. To quote an-
1 Herrmann's Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott,
Eng. trans., p. 76.

1 8 THE FACT OF CHRIST
other eminent German authority — one of the
most careful of examiners and a critic unbiased
towards orthodoxy — Keim, after saying that
' the religion of Christ goes mysteriously back
to His person,' adds, 'this fundamental fact
alone enables us to understand the religion
which sprang from it.'1 To understand Chris
tianity then is, in at least the first place, to
' think of ' Christ — to say how our mind and
heart and conscience regard Him. The philo
sophical mind, especially in the period known
as the Aufklarung, discusses Christianity,
Jesus apart, as the manifestation of eternal
truths of the reason; and that, no doubt, it is.
The modern, practical mind discusses it mainly
as a moral motive and ideal; and these, too,
doubtless, it is. But these were not the ways
in which Jesus bade men approach the subject.
His direction to any one who would consider
the problem of religion was, in effect if not al
ways literally, the question of Caesarea Philippi.
And, be it remembered, He is the greatest
Master of religion that the world has known.
Now here is nothing less than a revolution
lJesu von Nazara, i. 448.

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 19
in the whole study of the problem of religion.
That problem, which bewilders and baffles the
quest of the human spirit that is ever athirst for
God, is here restated in terms which we can
hardly believe to be sufficient because they are
so simple. This restatement has never been
sufficiently regarded, considering the authority
of its source; certainly it never more needed
to be regarded than to-day.
There are two notable and significant fea
tures in the condition of the question of religion
at present, one on either side of the question.
On the one side, unbelief has very markedly
settled down into agnosticism. On the other
side, Christendom, more perhaps than ever, is
confused and contradictory as to what Chris
tianity most simply and essentially is. A
slight survey of these features will, I think,
show that both of them have, at least in part,
arisen because we have not approached the dis
cussion of Christianity as its Author directed
us to do.
Unbelief has, in our day, settled down into
agnosticism. We are no longer in the days of
Voltaire. We are no longer in the days even

ao THE FACT OF CHRIST
of the Deists, and hardly any one reads now
Shaftesbury or Toland or Bolingbroke. Nor,
if we are to have a religion at all, is there at
present any serious rival to Christianity. Va
garies such as Neo-Buddhism make conversa
tion rather than converts. But these facts do
not mean that the age is agreeing to Christian
faith. They mean rather a more settled refusal
of it. An opposition that contended, however
fiercely, that Christianity was false might al
ways possibly be overcome; but an unbelief
which submits, however courteously, that
Christianity is futile, because the whole topic
of religion is beyond human ken, is a far
subtler foe. It is the latter which is the men
tal mood of very many in our time. They do
not virulently deny ; in many cases they long to
believe. But they are agnostic; that is, they
do not know. No one surely knows. Relig
ious faith is no more than it was in Socrates'
days — a thing of ' fair hopes.' It all seems
far away, uncertain, unknown and probably un
knowable. I am referring not so much to any
philosophical statement of agnosticism, but
rather to the general uncertain attitude towards

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 21
religion of many a thinking man and woman.
Among such, a mental attitude of this kind is
very often to be found, and one serious thing
about it is that with the generality of people,
and despite not a few notable examples to the
contrary, where religious faith becomes a mere
perhaps, moral strenuousness is in danger of
becoming a counsel of perfection.
But what is the reason of this uncertainty,
this agnosticism ? The reason is just that men
more than ever feel the difficulty, the impos
sibility of answering at all the great questions
of God and the soul. The origin and meaning
of the universe are something so far and vast,
and life is something so complex, that we can
not say much about them on the religious side.
Nature we can know, but, though Nature
stretches out to the Infinite, we cannot see what
meets her there. The battle of faith and un
belief — Bishop Butler or Paley notwithstand
ing — was always an inconclusive one, and now
less than ever are men able to take as decided
in the affirmative the problems of God, of reve
lation, of freedom, of immortality. These
questions are beyond us. Who knows? And

22 THE FACT OF CHRIST
the more serious read their Herbert Spencer
and make their agnosticism a philosophy, the
more shallow their Omar Khayyam and make
it a pleasure, and many, many a seeking soul is
left unsatisfied.
Now to every such an one — be his agnosti
cism intellectually self-satisfied, sensually self-
indulgent, or neither of these, but only sad —
comes the great Master of the soul with His
revolutionary restatement of the problem of re
ligion. What He says, in effect, is this. You
say you cannot answer the great question of
God : it is beyond your ken. Well, here is the
way in which to approach this question ; what is
your attitude towards Me? Now, whatever
else this question may be, it is at least this —
it is answerable. Your agnosticism cannot
apply here. If the being of God is beyond your
ken, the fact of Christ is not. He is a fact of
history, cognizable as any other phenomenon.
And your mental and moral conclusions on this
answerable question are the true beginnings of
an answer to the apparently inscrutable problem
of religion.
Thus does Jesus so restate the religious prob-

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 23
lem as to make it at least answerable. He
calls it from the region of the inscrutable to
that of the positive. This is the practical
answer of Christianity, as Jesus presented it,
to agnosticism. The late G. H. Lewes in his
History of Philosophy dismisses religion from
the realm of verifiable knowledge because ' it
confesses its inability to furnish knowledge
with any available data.'1 With the Chris
tian religion, according to the method of Jesus,
the reverse is the case. He furnished His fol
lowers with the most patent and accessible of
data — the person standing before them. The
data of His religion were and are in a positive
fact. What are the data? Unverifiable sen
timents or ideas in the inscrutable region of
faith ? Not so. ' Whom say ye that I am ? '
' What think ye of Christ? ' ' I am the truth.'
' Come unto Me.' Here are the data of Chris
tianity. They are in an historical person, a
fact as available as any other fact. Jesus
drove agnosticism into the open when He de
clared that the data of religion are in the fact
of Christ. •'Vol. i. p. 17.

24 THE FACT OF CHRIST
Of course it does not necessarily or immedi
ately follow that by driving it into the open He
has defeated it. Even a fair and honest facing
of the fact of Christ may not be sufficient to
take us to a religious faith. That, of course,
remains to be seen. But one may just now
ask this: how many of those who assume an
agnostic attitude about religion have tested this
method? I mean how many of them have
honestly brought their minds and hearts and
consciences face to face with the fact of Christ,
and candidly considered if it means anything
to them for religion? It is impossible to say
that no one has the right to be an agnostic.
But no one has the right to be an agnostic till he
has thus dealt with the question — the certainly
answerable question — which Jesus regarded as
the critical issue and the true starting point
in the matter of religion. Let us not give up —
if we are in earnest we shall not give up — the
great question of religion without being quite
sure that there is no help to be got from the.
•method of the great Master of religion. If
;an agnostic would be honest, he must spend

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 25
some serious days at Csesarea Philippi; after
that, he may be an agnostic — if he can.
If the method of Jesus in stating the prob
lem of religion has thus a direct bearing on
the agnostic tendency which is one marked fea
ture of the mind of the day, not less direct is its
bearing on the other. To believe it is not the
only difficulty about Christianity to a present
day inquirer ; the other and almost greater diffi
culty is to discover it. For Christendom is full
of Christianities, and to say what simply and
essentially is the Christian religion is one of
the problems of the nineteenth Christian cen
tury. The evidence of this is manifold ; it ap
pears alike within and without the pale of the
Church. Looking without that pale, we cannot fail to
be struck with this feature in the most serious
and influential modern criticism of Christian
ity — that it is, or at least professes to be, not
destructive but reconstructive. It desires not
the ruin of Christianity, but its rescue. It
comes not to destroy, but to deliver. It would
give us the true and simple and pure Christian

26 THE FACT OF CHRIST
religion in place of the beclouded and corrupt
tradition of the centuries. Christianity, it de
clares, has yet to be born, or at least must be
born again; criticism comes not to follow its
obsequies but to attend its rebirth, for at its first
birth it was strangled in its cradle. In this
spirit and with this aim, so their authors assure
us, are written — to name two popular examples
— Literature and 'Dogma and Robert Elsmere.
I hope it may be said without offense that to
one with any grave historical sense there is
something about this that savors a little of
what might be described as intellectual nouvelle
richesse. To propose to take down the struc
ture of a Christianity that has stood for centu
ries, and to rebuild it largely anew, to allege that
the main idea of the thing has been radically
misconstrued, and needs to be stated afresh, to
say that the lines laid down and followed by St.
John and St. Paul, by Athanasius, Augustine,
Lather, are largely misleading and a new di
rection must at this hour of the day be taken —
one cannot help feeling that all this, like the
philosophy of a man who has struck oil, lacks
historic background. Under what a melan-

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 27
choly mistake have these nineteen centuries been
laboring ! On what a false scent those apostles
put us! We are all derailles — we are off the
rails ! What a pity that St. John, ' who was
so much more metaphysical than his Master,'
was ever allowed to write about Him, or that
St. Paul, whom the older rationalism held to be
the ' real creator of Christianity,' appeared just
at the critical formative moment he did in
Christian history! And how thankful we
should be that now, at last, such a clever and
still ingenuous man as the author of Literature
and Dogma has come to put them and us right,
and that such a gifted — and one must add, most
earnest — lady as the writer of Robert Elsmere
has shown us, in so unquestionably interesting
and also eminently convenient a way, how the
old construction of Christianity is (in fiction)
so helpless after half an hour of squire-archical
talk, and the new is (in fiction) so regenerating
a power in East London. These reconstruc
tions have many aspects of value, for the
Church is constantly in danger of being a slave
to its past and of thinking that a quotation
from a Father or a confession is the final word

28 THE FACT OF CHRIST
of truth. But it does not do to put a fool's cap
on the history of the Christian religion.
Nevertheless, the popularity which attends
reconstructions of Christianity that thus pro
fess to give us the simple and true reading of
it, is very significant. It is significant of an
uncertainty as to what Christianity is and how
far the traditional version of it is to be trusted
as genuine. This is a marked feature of the
mind of our time, which, in many quarters, is
much disposed to echo the well-known dictum
that the Christian religion has now been tried
for eighteen centuries but the religion of Christ
remains to be tried. Much of the most popular
religious criticism of the day is just the attempt
to give us, in its simplest and purest form, an
answer to the question: What is the religion
of Christ?
The difficulty of answering this question does
not appear to be lessened — it appears rather to
be increased — when we pass from without to
within the ecclesiastical pale. The inquirer is
now bewildered by variant voices. That the
world has been divided into two camps on the
indubitably difficult question of whether Chris-

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 29
tianity be true is not wonderful ; what is won
derful is that the professed Christian authori
ties have been divided into sects and schools
upon the apparently simple question of what
Christianity is. It is bound up, in one view
of it, with an ecclesiastical rite, in another with
a dogmatic belief, in a third with the morality
of a man's conduct, and in yet a fourth with
his inward experiences of faith and a ' new
birth.' One director will ask you about your
baptism, another about your conversion; this
one will speak exclusively of the death of Jesus,
that one of your own life. Nor do these vari
ous guides of the soul agree to regard their
views as all different aspects of one truth. On
the contrary, of active purpose and in express
terms, will they exclude each other. ' He
that believeth not shall be condemned ' — the
anathema, though usually in less direct lan
guage, is as familiar as its application is varied.
Believeth not what? The authority of the
Church, the necessity of the sacraments, the as
sertions of the creeds, the doctrine of the Atone
ment, the need of regeneration by the Spirit,
the all-importance of moral life? In the house-

30 THE FACT OF CHRIST
hold of Christians and about the simplest es
sentials of Christianity arises a strife of
tongues to not only the confusion of truth, but
also, not seldom, the extinction of charity.
And nowhere does this appear more signifi
cantly than in the great and enduring conflict
between faith and unbelief. Here in the face
of the common foe, one might expect that
Christians could agree upon a method of attack
and concentrate upon the really vital points
of defense. It is far from being so. One sec
tion is ever accusing the other of imperiling
the kernel with the husk, and, in turn, is ac
cused by the other of sacrificing everything by
surrendering the shell. Does Christianity go
if the infallibility of the Church goes, or the
inerrancy of the Bible; if the dogmas of the
creed go, or miracles, or the ' doctrines of
grace ' ?¦ Christendom answers ' Yes ' and ans
wers also ' No.' It is all very perplexing to
plain-minded men who, in the din of battle,
never are sure whether they need to tremble
for the ark of God or not; and it is not less
exasperating to zealous opponents of Christian
belief to be so often told that some point which

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 31
they have assailed with all their energies is not
even within the real field of battle. The result
is 'Confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.' *
False issues, vain victories and defeats — what
examples of these are to be found in the records
of the Christian controversy! Sometimes it
may have been, intellectually or otherwise,
magnificent; often it has been miserable. But
it is not war. It is not the war between truth
and error, light and darkness, faith and un
belief. In all this confusion, the voice of Jesus, as
He asks the question of Caesarea Philippi, falls
on our ears with peculiar significance. Amid
all your reconstructions and all your versions,
He seems to say, here is the question. What
do you say of Me? What is your attitude to
Me ? Criticism must not banish nor the Church
bury these issues. If you would find Christian
ity, find it in Me — in what I am and mean to
your mind and heart and conscience. So
Jesus seems to speak to us. The direction is
'Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach.

32 THE FACT OF CHRIST
surely, for every reason, to be followed. It
is from the ultimate authority, for I do not im
agine that any one proposes to reconstruct the
Christianity of Jesus : it appeals to us distinctly
and directly : it is full of intellectual and moral
interest. And thus the Master whose restate
ment of the problem of religion makes it to the
agnostic answerable, makes it also, by the same
means, to the inquirer clear — clear, that is to
say, not indeed in the sense of easily fathom
able, but in that of being neither misconceived
nor confused. The inquirer knows at least his
data and can begin. He knows where Chris
tianity is, if not yet what it is; or, to put it at
the least, he knows where was its spring. Un
satisfied, perplexed, perhaps even repelled by
the many Christianities he finds around him, he
can ' lift up his eyes unto the hills ' where
Christianity took its rise. It took its rise not
in a philosophic school, theological or ethical,
not in an ecclesiastical system, not in a social
or political proposal. It took its rise in men
being brought face to face with a certain phe
nomenon — the fact of the person of Jesus
Christ. There, indubitably, are the original

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY

33

data of Christianity. Whatever may be said
of the building, there is the authentic site.
The first business in any inquiry is to de
termine your data. It appears, then that ac
cording to Jesus, the data of Christianity are to
be sought for in the fact of Himself. If we
would follow His method, we must begin there.
We must not start from theological ideas or
ethical precepts, but from a fact — the fact of
Christ. We must examine what that fact is,
and what it means. This is the way of rightly,
clearly and simply learning Christianity and
the way, at the same time, of attacking the
problem of religion itself. The data of Chris
tianity are in the fact of Christ.
In words, this may appear to be satisfac
tory enough. But an obvious reflection occurs
to our minds and seems to invalidate its whole
religious value. Is not this fact of Christ a
fact of nineteen hundred years ago ? Possibly
to those who stood before Him, Jesus presented
Himself in the way that has been indicated and
thereby was of immediate religious significance
to them. But how can it be identically so with
us to-day? What truly and properly religious

34 THE FACT OF CHRIST
value for us is there in a figure, however won
derful, of centuries past? It is present, living
truths of the spirit that religion demands.
Such truths may be in the teaching of Jesus,
and there therefore may be data for religion.
But is this insistence on the fact of Jesus Him
self really religious ? How can religion, which
is other than historical and theological or ethi
cal opinion, find its data there ? It may be our
misfortune, but is it not an inevitable misfor
tune, *hat we cannot — even if the first disciples
could and did — base our religion thus? To
examine this fact of Christ may lead us to his
torical and other conclusions ; but to religion —
how? The data of religion can be only the
eternal truths of spiritual life present and liv
ing in the soul.
The question thus raised — which finds its
most authoritative expression in the opinion so
frequently insisted upon by Hegel, that the
content of Christianity is to be manifested by
philosophy and not by history — is one we can
not and need not here discuss at length. At
present we are concerned with it only as re
gards this point : does the fact of Christ being

THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 35
(as of course it is) one of past history prevent
it from containing to the mind and heart and
conscience that examine it, real data for relig
ion? Well, let us see. Let us not prejudge
this. We know the original site; let us ex
amine for ourselves whether or not for us it
is still available. The original site of Chris
tianity is the fact of Christ. What is this fact
of Christ?
To some, even this question may seem .value
less — so intricately is it involved in philosophi
cal presuppositions and party prejudice. The
mists of controversy may appear to have set
tled too densely on the Galilean hills. Let us
not be deterred easily by these difficulties. Let
us not so despair of what a plain intelligence
and an honest will can still find about this great
fact. We shall at least try this. ' The ques
tion whether anything can be known,' says a
master among those that know, ' is to be set
tled not by arguing but by trying.'1
'Bacon's Nov. Org., prmfatio.

II
WHAT IS THE FACT OF CHRIST?

' Auctor nominis ejus Christus Tiberio imperitante per
procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat.'
Tacitus.

II
WHAT IS THE FACT OF CHRIST?
Jesus Christ is, beyond all reasonable ques
tion, the greatest man who ever lived. The
greatness of a man is to be estimated by two
things : first, by the extent of his influence upon
mankind; and, secondly, — for no one is alto
gether great who is not also good — by the pu
rity and dignity of his character. Tried by both
these tests, Jesus is supreme among men. He
is at once the most influential and the best of
mankind. We are concerned at present with the fact
of Jesus Himself, with therefore the latter
rather than the former of the two qualities just
named. We are concerned with His character
rather than what He has done. As to the un
paralleled impression that He has made on
human life and history, I shall content myself
by quoting a weighty sentence from Mr,
39

40 THE FACT OF CHRIST
Lecky's History of European Morals. The
' three short years ' of the active life of Jesus
have, says Mr. Lecky, ' done more to regen
erate and to soften mankind than all the dis
quisitions of philosophers and all the exhorta
tions of moralists.' x If this statement be true
— and who will dispute it? — then the secular,
historical greatness is unparalleled of the man
whom a Roman historian dismissed in a sen
tence and a Greek satirist with a sneer.2
Not less emphatically was He the supreme
man in the realm of moral character. It were
an easy task to compare Him in this respect
with any other saint or hero of history and
show He was morally better. To do this
would be, however, but to say the least part of
the truth about the character of Jesus. Let us
state the complete truth at once. He had not
simply less sin and more virtue than others.
His supremacy is not comparative. It is ab
solute. Jesus is the stainless man, the one sin
less human being.
1 Vol. ii. p. 9.
1 Vide the quotation from Tacitus (Annates, i. 15, 44)
prefixed to this lecture. Lucian (De Morte Peregrini,
xi.) calls Jesus fitiyai ironically.

WHAT IS THE FACT ? 41
To prove a negative is always difficult; to
prove it absolutely often an impossibility. It
is obviously an impossibility absolutely to dem
onstrate that the life and character of any man
are entirely stainless. But in the case of Jesus
the witness is as strong as the very nature of
the thing to be proved can possibly admit. His
enemies are witnesses to it. With all their
ingenuity of hate and malice, never once did
they dare to prefer against Him any moral
charge, and insinuations such as that ' this man
receiveth sinners and eateth with them ' fell
harmless upon Him. His friends are witnesses.
They described Him as ' separate from sin
ners.' They were orthodox Jews, steeped in
the doctrine that ' there is none righteous, no,
not one.' But they were compelled to contra
dict themselves. ' Yes, one,' they said against
their scriptures ; ' He did no sin.' And we too
are witnesses of the stainless perfection of the
character of Jesus. For His friends have given
us about Him far more than a vague eulogy.
They have given us accounts, short indeed but
particularized, of His life. They do not merely
affirm His stainlessness, which were easy.

42 THE FACT OF CHRIST
They exhibit it, which it were simply impossi
ble to do except from the life. We have there
what Jesus said and did in all kinds of circum
stances and on all manner of occasions — in
public and private, in the sunshine of success
and the gloom of failure, in the houses of His
friends and in face of His foes, in life and in
the last great trial of death. It is the detailed
picture of a man who never made a false step,
never said the word that ought not to have been
said, never, in short, fell below perfection.
Such a portrait is of necessity a true portrait.
It simply cannot be an idealized picture. That
which is so above human criticism is not less
above our conception. ' It is no use,' says the
sane and acute J. S. Mill, ' to say that Christ
as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical, and
that we know not how much of what is admir
able has been superadded by the traditions of
His followers.' -1 It is no use because, as Mill
goes on to ask, who among His disciples or
their proselytes — who, he might have asked,
among the poets and dramatists of the world ?
— is ' capable of inventing the sayings ascribed
1 Three Essays on Religion, p. 353.

WHAT IS THE FACT? 43
to Jesus or of imagining the life and character
revealed in the Gospels ? ' 1 Artistic inspiration
is a fine thing ; but it is simply nonsense — ' it is
no use ' — to say that it reached such an un
heard-of height in four Jewish writers of the
first century as to enable them, and all of them
harmoniously, to draw from their imaginations
the lines and colors, the lights and shades of
the life of the perfect man. But they did it.
Only one thing accounts for their being able to
do it. That is simply veracity. They had a
model and they copied it faithfully. And
because, first, the model was faultless, the re
production, being faithful, was perfect too.
Our inquiry, then, as to what Jesus was re
ceives its first emphatic and astounding answer
in an assertion of something that He was not.
He was not a sinner. And this at once intro
duces and explains to us that mysterious alone-
ness in Jesus by which He who was the friend
and brother of the humblest is, nevertheless,
in another category from the best and
greatest. The difficulty of realizing the true
place of Jesus among men is that of bringing
1 Three Essays on Religion, p. 353-

44 THE FACT OF CHRIST
Him into actual comparison with them, for
He has impressed the imagination, not only to
a degree, but also in a way that no other man
has done. Instinctively we do not class Him
with others. When one reads His name in a
list beginning with Confucius and ending with
Goethe we feel it is an offense less against
orthodoxy than against decency. Jesus is not
one of the group of the world's great. Talk
about Alexander the Great and Charles the
Great and Napoleon the Great if you will.
Jesus was — as has been said, from even the
secular point of view — incomparably greater
than any of these; yet, who would speak of
Jesus the Great? Jesus is apart. He is not
the Great : He is the Only. He is simply Jesus.
Nothing could add to that.
This aloneness of Jesus appears in two ways,
or, rather, has two degrees. First, His whole
manner betrays that His moral experience and
that of other men were not parallel. He who
so searchingly told others of the evil within
their hearts made no confession for Himself.
He who gave the despairing sinner every other
token of brotherhood, never spoke as if He

WHAT IS THE FACT? 45
Himself had been in the same case. He who
was so morally sensitive that He has become
the supreme conscience of mankind, yet chal
lenged men to convict Him of sin. All this
reveals a singularness by which He is not only
' separate from sinners,' but is also distinct
from the saints. The saints among men all
tell us how they reached sanctity, if at all, only
from below, having toiled with tears and pray
ers up the bitter path of repentance to a new
ness of life. The Psalms tell us that, and the
Confessions, and the De Imitatione; the whole
company of holy and humble men of heart tell
us that. But Jesus never tells us that.
And this is not all. There is a second thing
about this strange moral aloneness of Jesus —
something, not negative, but positive. Not
only did Jesus never betray a sense of any
moral imperfection or moral need, but, further,
He regarded Himself as the sufficer of all
others' need. This was referred to in the last
lecture; it needs no elaboration, for it can
hardly be denied, and the most labored exposi
tion of it cannot be more expressive than the
simplest statement. Listen to this voice : ' If

46 THE FACT OF CHRIST
any man thirst, let him come unto Me and
drink ' ; ' Come unto Me, all ye that labor and
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' The
quotations suffice. They reveal one who not
only is Himself without moral distress, but can
aid all distress. Others are lost sheep; He is
not only not lost, but is the shepherd. Others
are sick ; He is not only in health, but is the phy
sician. Others' lives are forfeit; His is not
only His own, but is the ransom. Others —
all others — are sinners; He not only is not a
sinner, but is a Saviour.
These are things that cannot but impress
profoundly every candid and earnest mind.
There is nothing else like them in the whole
range of human nature. And they are not
exaggerated dogmas of orthodoxy; they are
conclusions of the most modern criticism. The
most remarkable feature of religious scholar
ship in recent times is the study of the Jesus of
nineteen hundred years ago. In the Christian
centuries His personal figure had been largely
lost sight of and His human face hid behind
the clouds of mystic devotion or the drapings
of dogma. In the Romish church Jesus was

WHAT IS THE FACT? 47
the vision of a fair face whose painful beauty
won the wistful adoration of the rapt relig
ious, but whose living form, as He was in
Galilee, was hardly seen in the daylight of
thought and life ; to the Protestant He was too
easily an official personage, the executor of
certain functions, rather than the Son of Man.
From both of these have men in our day turned
to ask, with a new earnestness, in the name, not
only, nor perhaps even mainly, of religion,
but of history, the old demand : ' We would
see Jesus.' The demand has had a remarkable
response. The historical spirit, which during
the past half century has profoundly influenced
almost every department of knowledge, has
affected none more markedly than the study of
Christianity, and, in particular, of the life and
character and person of Jesus. Biographies of
Jesus have appeared in great numbers, written
from all points of view; critical research has
been lavished on every historical aspect of the
question; His teaching, work, career, and per
sonality have been studied and appreciated as
never before. The result, it is not too much
to say, is that Jesus who lived in Palestine is

48 THE FACT OF CHRIST
better — that is, more distinctly and more crit
ically — known to our age than He has been
known to any age since His own. And what
has been the effect of all this? The effect has
been that never was the wonderful, strange,
and mysterious loneliness of Jesus more ad
mitted. To modern criticism Jesus is indu
bitably and emphatically a phenomenon unique.
As an illustration of this one may name the
great work of Keim,1 where his irresistible
sense of the transcendence of his subject is ever
straining to the utmost and even bursting the
limits of naturalistic presuppositions. There is
found about Jesus what there is about no other,
and the more accurately and critically we know
Him the more profoundly we feel it. He is
beyond our analyses. He confounds our can
ons of human nature. He compels our criti
cism to overleap itself. He awes our spirits.
There is a saying of Charles Lamb, which is
responded to by a very deep feeling within the
heart of every really serious student of the per
son of Jesus, that ' if Shakespere was to come
1Geschichte Jesu von Nazara. (English translation.)

WHAT IS THE FACT ? 49
into this room we should all rise up to meet
him, but if that person was to come into it, we
should all fall down and try to kiss the hem
of His garment.' *
Yet, despite all that has been said — which it
would be easy to elaborate along the same lines,
but that is unnecessary — have we found in it
any real answer to the question we wish to
determine? The character of Jesus may have
been stainless, and His personality may be
mysteriously alone among the phenomena of
human nature. He may have been apparently
above the otherwise universal moral needs of
men, and even able to supply the needs of those
around Him. Still the old objection remains.
All this is long ago. However wonderful it
may all be, what properly religious data are
there in it for us to-day? The data of relig
ion are essentially present and living within the
soul. All that has been said about Jesus is
historical; that does not make it religious.
This fact of Christ is a fact of history ; it has
'Quoted in Hazlitt's essay on 'Persons one would
wish to have seen.'

So THE FACT OF CHRIST
still to be shown how — as in the opening lecture
was insisted — it contains the data of personal
and spiritual religion.
The answer to this is still to ' think of '
Jesus, to pursue to their issues these historical
impressions. We shall find that to consider
the fact of Christ has issues and that these
are religious issues. We discover on the cold
page of history this stainless one ; and in a very
wonderful and arresting way do thereupon our
consciences discover, as never before, what
kind of persons morally we are. We read an
historic evangel — a proclamation made long
ago by Jesus to all in moral need to listen to
Him and to come to Him — and, as we read it,
we growingly feel that this demands a decision
on our part. All this is really religion, yet it is
out of this fact of Christ that it has directly
risen. Let us try to understand how we find
our thoughts of Jesus thus turning into moral
and religious channels.
What we find is this. We find that this fact
of Christ, at all candidly considered in the
conscience and the will, raises great moral is
sues within us. It is not merely that some-

WHAT IS THE FACT? 51
thing in the example of Jesus or in His teach
ing has suggested a duty or made evident a
defect. It is far more than that. It is that
the problem of our whole moral life and char
acter has been raised. The fact of Christ is
not just a fact of history; it has become also a
fact of conscience. It has arrested and ar
raigned our moral being; it has interrogated
it; it has asserted itself as an authoritative re
viewer of our life in the very fastnesses of our
thoughts, our affections, and our will. It does
so with a strange inevitableness and with a
remarkable right to do it. The more we can
didly keep our hearts and minds and con
sciences open to the impression that even an his
torical appreciation of the fact of Christ makes
upon them, the more does that impression
turn to moral issues within us. We had
thought intellectually to examine Him ; we find
He is spirtually examining us. The roles are
reversed between us. Not that historical and
intellectual questions on our part about Jesus
end, but far more serious and pressing and
immediate are these moral questions about our
selves that have arisen out of them. All this

52 THE FACT OF CHRIST
is found true by many and many an one who
simply reads the Gospels. It is a very singu
lar phenomenon. We study Aristotle and are
intellectually edified thereby; we study Jesus
and are, in the profoundest way, spiritually dis
turbed. The question — apparently so inno
cently historical and morally non-committal —
of ' What think ye of Christ ? ' passes into the
most morally practical and personal of ques
tions : ' What shall I then do with Him ? ' And
this presses for an answer.
For it comes to this. It comes to it that we
are driven to do what it is a strange thing to do
towards a figure of history. We are constrained
to take up some inward moral attitude of heart
and will in relation to this Jesus ! or, to be more
precise, we find we actually are doing so. We
cannot escape it. A man may study Jesus with
intellectual impartiality; he cannot do it with
moral neutrality. If the words, the character,
the person of Jesus at all awaken within us
such issues as these, we cannot go on, nor can
we even leave off, as if they never had been
raised. Such questions, once asked, do have
their answer; to try to ignore them is an an-

WHAT IS THE FACT? 53
swer as real as any other. And thus it is that,
as I say, we are compelled to take up some at
titude towards this fact of Christ. Whether we
are going to have it that the inspiration and
authority associated with Jesus are to be wel
comed and cherished and obeyed, or whether
we are going to evade them and resist them —
this alternative becomes an inevitable question
for us. Disguise it as we will to ourselves, we
know we are answering it. What the answer
is becomes the serious issue for our moral state
and moral future. Indeed, here the great mat
ter of our choice of a side in the perennial
opposition between the good and the evil
comes to a head. Ah ! here is the war we spoke
of. Here are no longer, merely, the ' confused
alarms ' of ' ignorant armies.' Here is the
great conflict, near, real, personal ; and we must
declare our colors. To this has our unevasive
contact with Jesus brought us. We began
it in the calm of the study; we are called out
to the field of moral decision, where, with
some of us at least, are forces that will not
yield without desperate struggle. We opened
with the question of Jesus : now the question is

54 THE FACT OF CHRIST
about ourselves. And its answer depends on,
or rather is, the attitude we take towards Him.
Th'is may seem vague ; this '' attitude ' —
what is it? The most practical thing in the
world. If we put aside the stereotyped terms
of religious usage — not necessarily as false
but as easily lending themselves to unreality —
and face a few obvious facts of life, then the
matter becomes not only clear but even rather
clearer than at times we care that it should be.
The alternative directions in life — in thought
and in act — that lead, the one towards, the
other away from, the inspiration and influence
of Jesus, are not obscure. We know when
we are honestly pressing towards Him and
when we are keeping Him out of sight. In
every man's life there are, both in little things
and great, these alternative paths, and, at every
serious moral choice, they diverge plainly be
fore us. A man, seeing that the fact of Christ
is becoming within him a fact of conscience
with grave moral issues, may deliberately re
fuse to let it lead him further, and may, when
any matter upon which it bears comes before
him, take the path that does not lead to where

WHAT IS THE FACT ? 55
the voice of Jesus would be more clear or His
influence more authoritative. If so, it is no
wonder that the primary fact of Christianity
remains to him a merely historical externality,
and that he does not find in it the data of re
ligion. But a man may take the other course.
There is much in the words of Jesus that calls
him to this, and much in his own heart to
admonish him to it. He may choose to fol
low the other way with strenuousness and sim
plicity, and if he does so, — and does so sincerely
and with no arriere-pensee of adhering to evil
things — then this fact of Christ becomes for
him really a fact for religion. Christianity
takes from it a meaning and a shape. The
Jesus that was first the Jesus of history and
criticism, and then the Jesus of conscience and
of moral inspiration and decision, becomes now
the Jesus of an inward experience of spiritual
promise and wellbeing. The name of Jesus
becomes in a remarkable way identical with the
man's best self and his true life. Jesus is the
man's true life, who with a hesitating aston
ishment finds himself putting a real, even if a
small and variable, meaning into words he had

56 THE FACT OF CHRIST
always regarded as mere hyperbole — ' I live
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'
Now this — which I only indicate here and
which we shall have occasion to pursue further
and more carefully later — is religion. It is
living, spiritual truths. It is not dead history.
But it sprang out of history. It sprang out of
the historical fact of Christ. It is all traceable
back not to abstract ideas and principles but
to that real phenomenon. ' Thinking of ' Him
has given us not only historical opinions but
also the data of a faith. This fact, which
begins in history, develops in the conscience
and ends in religious experience, is indeed a
fact on which religion can be built, and we find
the ancient site of Christianity is still available
for religion to-day.
This, then, is the fact of Christ — a fact of
history, of conscience, and of spiritual experi
ence. What we have to be careful about in
stating the fact of Christ is that we state it
completely. We do not state completely what
Jesus is if we confine ourselves to an account
of what He said and did and was in Palestine
nineteen hundred years ago. Jesus is more

WHAT IS THE FACT? 57
than that. He is more than a fact of ancient
history. He is also an ever-living fact of
present or personal experience. You really do
not do justice to the fact of Christ unless you
*¦' thus treat it is, first indeed, an historical phe
nomenon, but also a phenomenon re-emerging
and asserting itself in an unique way as a fact
of consciousness — an inward arraignment, call,
promise, renewal. You have not said what,
as a matter of fact, He is unless you recognize
both these elements. Neither is complete with
out the other. ' A perverted picture,' says a
modern writer, ' is always the result when we
take account of either the spiritual or the his
torical Christ to the exclusion of the other.' 1
If, then, we are to build our Christianity upon
the fact of Christ, it must not be upon a ' per
verted picture,' upon a one-sided presentation
of what the fact is. The fact is a dual fact.
It is upon Christ as a fact alike of history and
of experience that Christianity is based. We
must hold to both of these aspects. If we con-
'Jess, Uber den Christi. Glauben Vortrage, p. 68
(quoted in Dr. Somerville's St. Paul's Conception of
Christ).

58 THE FACT OF CHRIST
fine ourselves merely to ' the Christ of history '
in the sense of discussing a long dead teacher
and his teaching, or if, on the other hand, we
consider only ' the Christ of experience ' with
out reference to what historically Jesus was,
we shall fail to build on the wide and sure foun
dation. The foundation of Christianity is
Christ. There are not two Christs on one or
other of which we may build. There is but
one Christ. But He is found alike in outward
history and in inward experience. And our
Christianity must be built upon the complete
fact of Christ. ' The Christian religion,' as
Professor Denney says, ' depends not only
upon what He was, but upon what He is.' x —
depends, in other words, upon a Christ who is
a fact alike of history and of experience.
Our inquiry seems thus to be opening up as
we proceed. We saw to begin with — very
briefly, for it is a point which has often been
established — that the original Christianity was
based, not on theological or ethical ideas, but
on the fact of the person of Jesus Himself.
When we went on, as we have just been doing,
1 Studies in Theology, p. 24.

WHAT IS THE FACT ? 59
to inquire if our Christianity could be built on
this same site, we have found that it can,
for this fact, while an historical event of nine
teen hundred years ago, is also a fact of con
science and of moral life and experience in us
to-day, and can thus be to us a source of
present living truth, that is, a source of religion.
We have thus not only found the authentic
site; we find also that we can build upon it.
With this building we must now proceed. That
is to say, we now go on to examine and ar
range and explicate what, for religion, is in this
fact ; in other words, we inquire into the mean
ing of the fact of Christ.
In beginning this, there is one thing which
we must make very clear to ourselves. The
whole success of our inquiry depends on our
recognition of it.
It has been insisted upon that we must state
and examine the complete fact of Christ. That
complete fact is one not only of outward his
tory, but also of inward experience. It is,
therefore, obvious that there is needed for an
inquiry into the meaning of such a fact more
than simply the rational intelligence. That

60 THE FACT OF CHRIST
will discuss one aspect of it — the historical;
and in its discussion of that, all the powers of
the intelligence, aided by all the resources of
scholarship, are welcome. But what is thus
studied is not the whole fact of Christ, not
the complete data of Christianity. That fact is
also a fact of conscience; these data include a
moral arraignment and choice and promise
and experience. All this must be received as
candidly as the other. If the fact of Christ,
in one aspect of it, calls, like every other his
torical question, for the banishment of intellec
tual prejudice, in another aspect of it, the same
fact calls for an honest conscience and an hon
est will. From the very nature of the case,
from the dual character of the fact to be ex
amined, you must, if you would really and
thoroughly study Christianity, study it, with a
critical intelligence indeed, for Jesus is a fact
of history, but also with more than a critical
intelligence — with a conscience and will that
are open to moral impression and direction, for
He is also a fact of inward moral experience.
If you would know what Christianity is you
must be open and honest in both directions. If

WHAT IS THE FACT ? 6 1
your investigation of the fact of Christ dis
closes some historical point, you must have a
candid mind for that. So much every one will
admit. But if your investigation brings you
face to face — as it will do, for this is a fact of
conscience as well as of history — with some
moral choice and moral call, then, not less, you
must have a candid will to receive that. This
is apparent from the very nature of the subject
that is investigated, from its dual nature as
alike outward and inward. Let us make this
matter clear to ourselves. Let us distinctly
perceive that we shall never understand what
Christianity is if we have a morally evasive
or dishonest will. Let us perceive there is a
reason for this — namely, because the fact of
Christ, in which are the data of Christianity,
is a fact of conscience as well as of history.
We must then meet that fact with moral as
well as mental candor, with not only a mind
open to historical facts but also a will honest
with moral issues. Otherwise is it not obvious
that our whole discussion is doomed from the
outset? In insisting on this, we are still only
following the method of the great Master of

62 THE FACT OF CHRIST
Religion, for it was particularly to the man
' that willeth to do His will,' even more than
to the man of intellectual superiority or his
torical erudition, that Jesus promised that he
' shall know of the doctrine.'

HI
THE FIRST MEANING OF THE FACT

Tovroov tiSij XpoStifw6fidv<av, kicoiisvov av e.l'.rj tov
itaiSayooybvr)fi6bv'Ir)6ovv tov fiiov rifiiv tov akrfiivbv
¦vitorvTt<b6a6f)ca> Kal tov iv XotdrcS iccaSayaoyfj6ai
avQpwitov.
Clement of Alexandria.

Ill
THE FIRST MEANING OF THE FACT
The meaning of Christ is a large word. Such
a pivotal fact — pivotal in the realms alike of
universal history and of individual experience
— is surely not, as Aristotle would say, a mere
episode in a badly composed play. If human
history have a meaning, and if spiritual ex
perience have a meaning, then the fact of Christ
has a meaning. So great a fact must indeed
have great meanings, and it should not surprise
us if, in the end, we find these stretching out
beyond what we are able fully to explain or
even to express.
But however the question of the meaning of
the fact of Christ may develop, there is no diffi
culty about making a beginning in the answer
ing of it. Christ has at least some meanings
that are immediate and plain and simple., I
think I shall express the mind of perhaps most
6s

66 THE FACT OF CHRIST
of us if I say that the first of these is a mean
ing for moral life and character.1
This has indeed (already appeared in the
mere statement of the fact of Christ. Histori
cally we have found Him to be an ideal, su
preme and stainless ; in the inner realm of con
science we find Him to be a moral authority,
personal and pressing. No man can really
open his mind and conscience to the fact of
Christ without feeling that he ought to be a
better man, and that, if he and Christ are to
continue near each other, he must be a better
man. His faults are named to him and his
duties as never before. Whatever else the fact
of Christ means, it means this ; and a man well
knows that any attempt to lose sight of this
meaning by a professed earnestness about any
other is a palpable evasion. Christ indubitably
means this much — that you revise your life and
conduct and character by a new standard, that
'The "way in which the fact of Christ approaches the
mind and becomes meaningful of course varies. The
meanings here discussed last are often the first and im
mediate. But some order or other must be chosen, and
that I have adopted seems, on general grounds, natural
and logical, and is intelligible even to those whose per
sonal experience may not have followed it.

THE FIRST MEANING 67
you set before yourself new ideas of what you
will be and do, and that you set out to realize
these. Where this is not felt, it were far bet
ter for a man to admit that he is not facing and
will not face the fact of Christ. The example
of Jesus in history and the authority of Jesus
in experience alike mean this. And thus the
question of our character at once arises in
Christianity as a part of the meaning of Christ.
Whatever else it does, Christianity proposes
to us a new character, and it also — for with
out this the other would be futile — declares
the way of its achievement. Both of these
things we must examine a little.
One may observe, before going on to these
points, how notable and also how effective is
this element in the religion of Jesus. That a
religion should concern itself with character is
to us a matter of course ; but this was far from
being the case in the great world into which
the young Christian gospel made its way. In
the civilization of the Roman empire — a civil
ization, in some respects, more elaborate than
ours — religion was something absolutely apart
from morality. The priests and augurs oS

68 THE FACT OF CHRIST
ancient Greece and Rome never for one mo
ment regarded it as any part of their duty to
exhort or help men to a purer life. Alike public
life and private were steeped in a heartlessness
of cruelty and an abandonment of vice such as
we can hardly realize ; but pagan religion made
no protest, for, on the contrary, its mysteries
often screened and its ministers sanctioned the
grossest iniquities. It is this entire divorce be
tween religion and morality in the ancient world
which supplies the explanation, as Mr. Lecky
has pointed out,1 of the apparently strange cir
cumstance that the classical philosophic moral
ists pay so little attention to the appearance of
Christianity. One would suppose that that
religion, as a mere system of ethics, apart from
any theological beliefs would have commanded
the notice of all serious men. But — so we can
imagine the philosophers who were in earnest
about moral things, saying — is this not a re
ligion? and what has a religion to do with the
matter of moral life ? Thus argued, and most
naturally, such men as Plutarch, or Seneca, or
1 History of European Morals, i. 336 et sqq.

THE FIRST MEANING 69
Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, and thus before
the eyes of these great moralists emerged what
was to be the supreme moral phenomenon of
history, and they gave it hardly a glance. How
were they to know that this religion was to
belie all their natural anticipation of the scope
and purpose of religion, was going to unite
itself so emphatically and essentially with mor
als, and was going to mean, almost before any
thing else, a new moral character for men. If
such thoughts had been even for a moment
conceivable, surely a Seneca would have had
a word about that Christianity with some of
the tenets of which his own writings supply so
interesting a parallel,1 and surely history might
have been spared what has justly been called
one of its ' most tragical facts,' 2 that a Marcus
Aurelius should have persecuted the followers
of Jesus Christ.
But, not to dwell on this, what is the char
acter which Christianity has brought into the
world ?
1 Vide Lightfoot's Dissertation on Seneca and St. Paul
in his Commentary on Philippians.
' J. S. Mill's Essay on Liberty, ii.

70 THE FACT OF CHRIST
i. The Christian Character
The norm of the Christian character is of
course the character of Jesus Himself. He is
its ' living law,' **¦ as an early apologist terms it.
We must, therefore, in the first place, form
some definite impression of what were the dis
tinctive features of the character of Jesus. I
say distinctive, for, of course, there were in
Him many qualities — such as courage or truth
or fidelity — which are not peculiarly Christian,
and these we do not need to dwell on here,
Our aim at present is not to discuss all the
aspects of the character that Jesus exhibited on
earth, but to recognize those that are distinct
ively and specially what we call Christian. It
is these we wish to observe.
There were, I think, four such elements in
the character of Jesus.
The first of these were purity or holiness. I
call this distinctive because Jesus was not only,
as has been said, a perfectly unstained man, but
the only man to whom such a word as purity
or holiness can be applied without any reserva-
1 Lactantius, Divin. Instit. iv. 25.

THE FIRST MEANING 71
tion whatever. Among the moral teachers and
heroes of the extra-Christian world are many
who admired and practiced virtue to an emi
nent degree; but there is not one of whom we
should say that to him the very thought of
impurity of any kind was abhorrent and with
whom the imagination shrinks from asso
ciating the bare suggestion of evil. It is
Jesus who has introduced into virtue a passion
before which vice is not condemned but con
sumed as by fire. It is He who has charged the
ethical nature with an intolerable radiance and
raised it to a white heat. And thus what we
call purity — the virtue that is intense and vivid
and sensitive to the very suggestion of sin —
has, through Him, entered into the moral ideal
of human character. He has made virtue a
wholly new thing — an inward, refining pas
sion in the soul. He has taught His people
to pray : ' O God, make clean our hearts
within us.' Clean, transparent, pellucid as a
hillside spring in which all that is turbid and
foul has sunk, and which reflects in all its
depths only the sweet, glad light of heaven!
^Vho has suggested to the sin-befouled soul of

72 THE FACT OF CHRIST
man such a thought of virtue as this? Who
has shown the way to its realization ? He has
who out of His own experience said, ' Blessed
are the pure in heart for they shall see God.'
The second distinctive feature in the char
acter of Jesus was love. This, too, in its true
and Christian sense He created. The appre
hension of what love really is and of the place
it should have in human life came into the
world with Jesus and had never been under
stood before. This is not to say that human
nature, apart from Jesus, had no idea of what
love is; but He so enlarged, so intensified, and
so exalted that idea as to produce a practically
new creation. He enlarged it. He made it
a universal thing. It had been at best a limited
thing, and even so elevated a teacher as Plato
applauded an ' unadulterated hate ' 1 of a for
eigner. The very name for foreigner was to
the Greek the same as that for barbarian, to
the Roman the same as that for enemy. If the
ancients knew love at all, they did not know its
universal realm. Jesus has showed us that love
15 of humanity; that had never been thought
1 Menaxenus, 245.

THE FIRST MEANING ^
of in the Porch or the Academy. And He not
only thus enlarged the idea of love, but He also
intensified it. If it be said that the Stoic phil
osophers, at least, approached the idea of uni
versal brotherhood, be it admitted. Yet what
a new thing to a Stoic was the love of His
brother-men that was in Jesus. The former's
view of the relation of man to man was, at best,
a tepid, theoretical affair; even when a Stoic
was humane — and he was far from always be
ing that — he was studiously temperate and re
strained in his humanity. The love of Jesus
for men was an enthusiasm. It was a heart's
love He gave them and its activities were puls
ing with His heart's blood. In His love to men
He yearned over them, and prayed for them,
and labored for them, and, in the end, He died
for them. This was indeed a new love, that
amid the cold of the first Christmas came upon
the world like the heat of a midsummer sun
and its warmth has never died since out of the
heart of man. And again, Jesus who made
love universal and ardent, made it also the first
and supreme law of life. There have been in
history many noble deeds of self-sacrificing de-

74 THE FACT OF CHRIST
votion. But He made love the law — the guid
ing principle of life and of all life. It was His
life to love, and He had no other life than love.
He was love. In all these ways, then, Jesus
so renewed the idea of love — so enlarged it,
intensified it, and exalted it — as really to cre
ate it. The world had never seen love after this
sort. And if love after this sort — love that
is towards all, that will do anything and that
is recognized as life's first law — has a place in
the ideal of human character, that dates from
Him, who, even literally,1 has re-created the
name of love in the world.
The third distinctive feature in the character
of Jesus was forgiveness. This, of course,
springs out of the last, and yet it must be men
tioned by itself, for it is, while not the greatest,
perhaps the most distinct innovation that Jesus
made in morality. The general feeling on the
1 The word ' love,' to us one of the most elevated in
the language, had in ancient classical use a very different
reputation, and even in the fourth century, Jerome,
writing the Vulgate (in Latin) could not use the
ordinary word amor to express the Christian grace of
love, and had recourse to the unusual caritas. Hence
the use of the word ' charity ' in our A. V,

THE FIRST MEANING 75
subject in the pre-Christian world is well ex
hibited in the famous inscription which Plu
tarch tells us was written on the monument
to Sulla in the Campus Martius at Rome : ' No
friend ever did me so much good or enemy
so much harm but I repaid him with interest.'
Forgiveness was a thing not unknown to the
ancient mind as an idea, but it was not really
expected of any one in practice. Jesus made
it operative. He treasured no resentments,
kept no wrongs green, harbored no implacabil
ity, had never a moment's thought of revenge;
and, not this only, but He acted daily in the
spirit of that prayer on the Cross, which, more
than anything, must have made the Roman
centurion wonder and watch till he wor
shipped : ' Father, forgive them, for they know
not what they do.' What an innovation was
here ! This law of forgiveness ' has produced,'
says the author of Ecce Homo, ' so much im
pression upon mankind that it is commonly re
garded as the whole or at least the fundamental
part of the Christian moral system,' and ' when
a Christian spirit is spoken of it may be re-

76 THE FACT OF CHRIST
marked that a forgiving spirit is usually
meant.' 1
There is, however, yet a fourth feature in the
moral character of Jesus which was original
and distinctive as much as any other, and that
was humility. That this is peculiarly Chris
tian hardly needs to be said. In the pagan
world, anything approaching to it was de
spised, and the very virtues of the best ethical
schools were founded on a self-pride. The
humility of Jesus may appear to be a feature of
hardly such importance that it should be ranked
with the others that have been mentioned, but
to think this is to fail to appreciate what a
place it had in His life. Of course humility is
not conspicuous; just because it is humility it
is always the flower
' Half-hidden from the eye.'
And in this, humility is always to be distin
guished from self-humiliation, with which
mediaeval religion tended to identify it, and
which may be, and often is, obvious and osten
tatious. Humility must be looked for if we
1 Ecce Homo, ch. xxii, from which one or two thoughts
in this paragraph are taken.

THE FIRST MEANING 77
would discover it, like eidelweiss upon the Alps.
But when we find it in perfection, as we do in
Jesus, how beautiful it is ! It was not only that
He was utterly free from vulgar vanity and
restless self-seeking, that he never even list
ened for applause nor looked towards the place
of the popular hero. It was far more than
that. If ever there was a master among men
it was He ; yet He was among them as one that
serveth. If ever there was a teacher of genius
it was He; yet He counted an afternoon not
wasted that was spent with the Samaritan
woman, nor a life lost that was lived, for the
most part, with the poor, the unlearned, the
uninteresting — as men often judge — of 'tihe
land. He who was the supreme person in his
tory is best described as the friend of publicans
and sinners. This was the humility of Jesus.
It is a revelation of the true greatness. There
is at times something impressive and fasci
nating about the lordly egotism of a Caesar or
a Napoleon — men who seem almost of right
to regard themselves as of another than the
common clay, and the rest of men as made but
to swell thp train of their {riumpb- Yet w§

78 THE FACT OF CHRIST
see in Jesus, who incomparably more than these
world-conquerors was one above His fellows,
and who, moreover, knew His power over
them — ' Ye call Me,' He said, ' Master and
Lord, and ye say well, for so I am ' — some
thing that impresses us far more than a proud
' bestriding of the narrow world like a co
lossus,' and which stirs us to a deeper reverence
than we ever give to them. Jesus had power,
but He baptized His power with the spirit of
humble service. He was a world-lord, but He
was the lowly among His inferiors. He was
the Master, yet He ministered. Thus has He
taught us a new and the true grandeur of life.
It was one of the supreme moral triumphs of
His career, and, with forgiveness, its most or
iginal feature. And there is in men to-day
perhaps no feature which more distinctly tells
that a new influence has come to operate on
human character than a spirit that has learned
of Him who was ' meek and lowly of heart,'
and that ' has let this mind be in it ' which was
also in the humble spirit of Jesus ; for there is
so much in the natural man that dislikes and
disputes this that it is a peculiar sign of the

THE FIRST MEANING 79
character which is Christian. ' Wellnigh the
whole substance of the Christian discipline,'
says Augustine, ' is humility.' x
Purity, love, forgiveness, humility — these
are four distinctive features of the character
of Jesus. No one can have to do with the fact
of Christ — either historically in the record of
His life and teaching, or inwardly in the moral
issues which He raises — without having these
things set before him. Whatever else Chris
tianity has in it, surely and urgently to be a
Christian means to be pure, to be loving, to be
forgiving, and to be humble. This moral
meaning of Jesus for life and character we can
not deny and cannot honestly evade.
But if we cannot deny it and cannot honestly
evade it, how shall we really achieve it? It is
easy to speak of purity, but how shall I, with
any sincerity, cleanse my heart ? It is pleasant
to write of love, but how almost irresistibly
difficult to be wholly unselfish? It is a fine
thing to laud forgiveness, but, when I am hurt
and wronged, it is not in human nature easily
to forget it. It is not hard to affect to be hum-
1Ser. de Panit, i. 4.

80 THE FACT OF CHRIST
ble, but it is very hard to be humble. A very
slight practical observation and experiment in
these things will soon discover to us that they
do not evolve themselves within us, and that
they are ideals we like to praise but are un
ready too strictly to practice. We lie on the
plains of life and look and talk of the heights
of purity and love and forgiveness and humil
ity; but when it comes to climbing them, how
human nature is laggard, is impotent, is posi
tively unwilling and opposed to it! No man
who knows himself will deny that.
And yet these heights have by many been
scaled. No one can survey the Christian cen
turies without admitting that Jesus has not
only meant this kind of character, but, despite
this practical opposition to it in human nature,
has, to a very marked degree, meant it effect
ively. Men have learned of Jesus not only
what this character is, but that it may be theirs.
The Christian character — the character that is
pure, loving, forgiving, humble — has, to an un
deniable extent, been achieved in many lives.
Most of us, I imagine, have seen it — seen it
perhaps in lives that have passed from our

THE FIRST MEANING 81
sight, leaving us as their sacred legacy, an im
pression of the reality and beauty of what is
Christian that nothing can efface. The char
acter that is Christian is not a natural evolu
tion, but it is a fact.
It is then a fact that calls for some explana
tion. What has made men pure, loving, for
giving, humble ? What will make me all this ?
The ideal of the Christian character is not
enough; where and what is the moral dynamic
that will realize it in human nature? Can we
find in the fact of Christ this, too ?
ii. The Moral Motive-Power
The loved late Henry Drummond — whose
own character was a singularly clear example
of those who, as I have just been saying, show
to us that the Christian character can be
achieved in human nature — begins his little
brochure entitled The Changed Life by quoting
the following well-known words of Huxley:
' I protest that if some great power would agree
to make me always think what is true and do
what is right on condition of being turned into
a sort of clock and wound up every morning,

82 THE FACT OF CHRIST
I should instantly close with the offer,' 1 and
then he proceeds : ' I propose to make that offer
now : in all seriousness, without being " turned
.into a sort of clock," the end can be attained.' 2
It is a bold reply. Is there anything which the
fact of Christ means which can make it good?
In answering this question the things to be
carefully watched and avoided are unreality and
exaggeration. When one is speaking of his
torical facts, it is easy to detect these faults,
but when one is speaking of such a topic as in
ward moral power, they are faults into which
it is very easy to fall. There is a conscience in
all teaching, especially about experimental
things; and I do not know any way in which
that conscience is more prostituted than when,
on this very topic, a man speaks loosely, and in
dulges in assertions that have not facts behind
them. The first question for us to ask is plainly
this: What kind of a motive-power is it that
expresses itself in what we call a character?
To this question, answers seem apparent and
"Essay on Descartes' (Selected Essays, p. 139).
' Addresses, p. 179. (' The Changed Life,' init);

THE FIRST MEANING 83
simple. We may say it is our choice or our
will; or we may say that it is the force of an
inspiring example or a strong command. Such
answers may be sufficient when we are consid
ering character on its ordinary levels, but they
are not sufficient when the springs of char
acter in its loftiest or deepest levels are sought.
They are not then sufficient when we ask the
motive-power of the Christian character. They
are not a sufficient motive-power to produce
purity, love, forgiveness, humility. Choice and
will are not, for we must often admit with the
Apostle that ' the good which I would, I do
not, and the evil which I would not that I do ' ;
example is not, for we must admit with the
Roman poet,
' Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor ' ; '
while a bare command to such moral excel
lences as those of the Christian ideal is obvi
ously non-effective. The motive-power we
seek must be something more than any of
these. What more is it? If not merely choice or
'Ovid, Met. iii. 19 (' I see and approve the better; I
follow the worse').

84 THE FACT OF CHRIST
will or an example or a command suffices to
achieve character in its highest and deepest
forms, therefore not in the Christian form,
what does? Well, what really makes your
character is the kind of spirit that is in you.
It is of course difficult to define this, and per
haps I shall make my meaning most clear by
an example. Take the example of patriotism.
What makes the patriotic character ? Not just
the choice of it as a fine and noble ideal; not
just the assiduous imitation of the habits and
deeds of a Nelson or a Washington; not just
the command of a government. Something,
including, perhaps, all these, but also deeper
and subtler. There must be stirred up what
we call the patriotic spirit. Create that in men
and cherish it, and the patriotic character is
already there and will express itself in life
spontaneously and inevitably. So is it with
any other high or deep form of character. It
is not manufactured, it is not a studied process ;
it is ' born of the spirit,' and being so born can
do almost anything that that spirit requires.
Now if this is to be said of a type of char
acter such as the patriotic, it is to be said with

THE FIRST MEANING 85
tenfold emphasis of such a type as the Chris
tian. The patriotic spirit is indeed a fine and
admirable thing, but yet not a thing so lofty
as to be unattainable by various human means.
But the spirit, the very spirit, of purity, of love,
of forgiveness, of humility — how that is too
high for us! The externalities of these are
hardly reached by us, and who shall bring down
their very inspiration ? If the white flowers of
the Christian moral ideal grow almost too far
up the mountain for our hands and feet to get
to them, how hopelessly inaccessible is the sun
in whose streaming light the flowers have
grown ! If we do not even attain to the acts of
Christian character, how shall we attain to the
spirit of it? And yet, if what has been said
in the foregoing paragraph be true, the only
motive-power that will achieve that character
is the creating and cherishing in us of the spirit
of Jesus. We seem to have made for ourselves
an impasse.
Let us remember what was said about the
importance, in discussing these things, of a
conscientious regard to facts, and let us try to
base our way out, not — as is so easily done — on

86 THE FACT OF CHRIST
moral rhetoric, but on certain recorded facts of
history. In the first place let us note that Jesus Him
self regarded the imparting to men of a new
spirit as the one thing that would make them
right. ' Except a man be born again,' He said
to one of His most interesting inquirers, ' he
cannot see the kingdom of God,' and this He
explained to mean a being re-born spiritu
ally or ' of the spirit.' Jesus regarded this as
axiomatic, and therefore His moral aim and
mission on earth were not simply to teach
morals, or even simply exemplify them, but —
it is His own phrase — ' baptize with the spirit.'
And that He succeeded in this, His transforma
tion of a John and a Peter, a Mary Magdalene
and countless others shows. Most literally
and obviously He put into them a new spirit, —
His own spirit of purity, love, forgiveness, and
humility — and thus made them new characters.
We can understand this so long as Jesus act
ually was living on earth. The spirit of a
great personality enters into those who come
into actual contact with him. A brave man in
spires the spirit of bravery in others by his

THE FIRST MEANING 87
presence; a pure soul purifies us when we are
with him. And when one thinks of what a
marvellous personality that of Jesus was, one
can believe that those who met Him, and heard
His voice, and felt His glance, not only were
impressed by His words, but were really
changed in their whole nature, and yielded
themselves to His spirit. ' If Napoleon could
have this influence on his army, certainly Jesus
could have it on His friends. But this has
limits. This kind of influence on men's spirits
demands one thing — that the author of it be
himself present. It is essentially personal, and
where the personal element is wanting, the
spiritual inspiration fades. And therefore, ob
viously, when a great man dies, the influence
of his personality passes. It remains for a
while in the hearts of those who knew him,
and it may remain for future ages as a great
memory and example. But all this is but a
phantom of the man's personal inspiration. He
is no longer there. We must seek new inspira
tions. It would thus appear that, while we can un
derstand that Jesus, so long as He was living on

88 THE FACT OF CHRIST
this earth, was able literally to put a new spirit
into the minds and hearts and wills of those He
met (and therefore enable them to realize even
the Christian character), all this was only while
and only because He was personally alive and
present with them; and when He passed from
this earth, we should expect it to pass, too. It
does not appear therefore that there is any
thing in all this to put a new spirit in us to-day,
who have never seen His face nor heard His
voice. But it is here that we meet with by far the
most remarkable phenomenon both of the New
Testament and of all moral history.
In the utterances of Jesus recorded in the
Gospel narratives — which are here regarded
simply as historical records — we find a very
singular point of view emerging on this sub
ject. Jesus, as has been said, exerted a marvel
lous spiritual influence by His personality dur
ing His life ; but, as that earthly life was draw
ing to its close, we do not find Him contem
plating the withdrawal or diminution of that
influence. The very contrary. He promised
jts persistence and even its augmentation. That

THE FIRST MEANING 89
very spirit with which He had baptized men,
and which it only too inevitably seemed must
pass with His earthly presence, is the very thing
which, most impressively, He declared would
be given more than ever. By this spirit, He
clearly meant certainly nothing less than all that
His present personality had been; and indeed
His meaning He often simply expressed by say
ing that He — all that the personal contact with
Himself had meant — would not pass. It is
this note which is the most remarkable charac
teristic of the latter phases of the utterances of
Jesus. There is nothing like it in the later
teaching of any other man. He sums it up in
His last recorded words : ' I am with you al
ways, even unto the end of the world.' Consider
these words. Imagine that they were the last
words to us of some loved friend or some
trusted leader. How infinitely sad and pa
thetic would they be ! And why ? Simply be
cause they were not and could not be really,
fully, literally true. They might have a cer
tain amount of poetic truth. Something re
mains with us — a dear memory, a great ex
ample. Something remains, but, ah, not he}

90 THE FACT OF CHRIST
Not the loved presence, not the potent personal
inspiration : there remains not he! We will not
say he is extinct, and that which was a soul is
clay; but only too clearly, he is not here as
once he was. And we are lonelier, and sadder,
and poorer because he is not with us. If,
therefore, I say, some loved friend of ours or
leader left us saying, ' I am with you always,'
how pathetic it would be. These were the last
words of Jesus.
Let us turn now to the other writings of the
New Testament — not, I repeat, as inspired au
thorities, but as records. What do we find?
This pathetic sense of irreparable personal loss,
the constant sigh that He were here to guide
and strengthen and inspire, the sad refrain —
' Now He is dead ' ? This is the note we
should expect in the New Testament, a kind of
' In Memoriam ' strain. But we find that ev
ery page is simply throbbing with the utter op
posite. Every book is filled with the witness
to it that the last words of Jesus are found
fully, literally true. His great idea had been
towards the end of His earthly life that all
that spiritually He had been to men — all that

THE FIRST MEANING 91
He w.as for men, above mere precept and ex
ample, in His personality — would continue a
living spirit within them. The New Testa
ment writers' chief thesis — I say it deliberately
— is that this is so. The spirit of Jesus moving
them, moulding them, transforming them as
really, as directly, as powerfully, as personally
as when He walked on earth and spoke to them
— that is unquestionably the great feature of
New Testament literature. There is nothing
like it in any other literature in the world. All
the writers are agreed about it. St. John finds
that Jesus is not a fading ideal, but ' has given
us of His spirit.' St. Peter, who knew Jesus
so well in history, finds Him still present in
inward life in His spirit ' which is in thee.'
St. James, in almost parallel words, speaks of
it ' dwelling in us.' St. Paul finds Jesus to be
just as much a victorious moral dynamic
against evil as ever His personal presence on
earth was, and declares that ' the spirit of life
in Jesus Christ has made us free from the law
of sin.' I have given four quotations ; but any
one who reads the New Testament knows that
the number can be made unlimited. I repeat

92 THE FACT OF CHRIST
that the most notable and unmistakable thing in
the New Testament is this assertion that all that
Jesus had been He still was found to be, that
He was not a dead memory, but a living spirit.
His last words were no pathetic fiction ; He was
with them, in them a spirit, a power, a presence,
a personality as much as ever in the days of
His flesh.
Now what does all this mean? It is an im
pressive witness — the combination of the dis
tinct forecast of Jesus that it would be so and
the unwavering assertion of the early Christian
writers that it had proved to be so. Does it all
mean no more than that a great and good
man's influence is a powerful legacy to the
moral force of the world, or that the New
Testament writers, when they speak of ' Christ
living in them ' by His spirit, mean only that
His ideas profoundly influenced them still?
Those who say the former think by a platitude
to account for what is the most remarkable
phenomenon in history — the triumphant rise
of the Christian church immediately after the
death of its Founder; those who say the latter
make the New Testament the most inflated and

THE FIRST MEANING S3
exaggerated religious book in the world and
therefore one of the worst, for what is worse
than a spirituality that is not sane and a relig
iousness that has no conscience about facts?
And yet what does it mean to us — the spirit of
Jesus still living about us and within us ?
A previous lecture has been enough to show
us that it is not all utterly meaningless. We
found the fact of Christ to be more than a bare
fact of ancient history; we found it to be also
an inward authority and appeal and persuasion.
And what is this but at least the beginning of
finding that Jesus is spirit and life within us?
Alike the man who resists it and the man who
yields to it and obeys it confess this.
There is such a thing as resisting the appeal
and authority and influence of Jesus. Have
not many of us — if we really ask ourselves —
done this distinctly, persistently, emphatically?
Have we not at times said a ' No ' to something
in His words or example with a loudness that
almost startled ourselves? But why this ex
penditure of energy? Why call up our reso
lution to take arms against a precept or an ex
ample of nineteen hundred years ago? We

94 THE FACT OF CHRIST ,
do not so resist Aristotle even when he speaks
to us of ethical things; we can decline to obey
him without that expenditure. But when we
really let Jesus speak to us by His words and
examples, if we are going not to obey, we must
and do definitely and often determinedly say
' No.' Again, I ask, why this expenditure of
energy? Let us learn from the active reality
of our resistance the active reality of what we
are resisting. It is not simply an old ethical
precept nor a far ethical example. It is some
thing more active, more living. It is ' spirit
and life.' It is Jesus appealing to us to-day
with just the same spiritual, personal presence
with which, as we can well understand, He did
to the rich young ruler or the woman of Sam
aria. There are times when our very refusal
of something in Christianity, by its very heat,
discloses itself to be a refusal of far more than
an idea or precept, like the ideas or precepts
of, say, Epictetus. A spirit touched and
moved and almost persuaded us in it all ; there
fore was our ' No ' so peculiarly distinct a
thing. It is an unwilling witness that Jesus
is not a dead tradition of precept or example,

THE FIRST MEANING 95
but is still all that living spiritual personality
can be.
If this be forced upon us by our refusals of
Him, how shall we say that it is clear to us by
our yieldings to Him ? Let us avoid all vague
ness and unreality. Let us start from what
is plain and practical. When Jesus was speak
ing of this spiritual realization of Himself He
reached to lofty mystical heights, but He con
nected it with things quite near. In particular
He connected it with His words — that is, alike
His commands and promises. Let a man
really face these, and meditate on them, and
apply them to his life, and realize their mean
ing. What then? He finds he is doing far
more than merely reading ' words, words,
words.' He is opening unseen forces upon his
mind and conscience and heart and will — forces
that enlighten and quicken and purify and en
able him in a way that is a surprise to himself.
A day thus lived is lived in a new spirit — in
the spirit of Jesus. And have we created that
in ourselves? Have mere ethical precepts,
however elevated, done it? Surely the apos
tle's account of it is the only just one. ' We

96 THE FACT OF CHRIST
are changed ... by the Spirit which is
the Lord.' Only Jesus Himself, only His liv
ing personality, gives us the spirit of Jesus.
The most remarkable phenomenon of spiritual
literature finds its echo in the fact of our moral
history, and what account of it can we give but
this — that whereas the personalities, with all
contained therein, of all other moral and spir
itual leaders must pass away with the passing
of their earthly career, ' there is one grand ex
ception to this rule?'1 The spirit — as some
thing more than example and precept — which
Jesus, when on earth was able, as we can un
derstand, to inspire into the spirits of those He
met, He still gives to us to-day. In short, He
is ' with us.' His personal presence — with all
the inspiration that is in personal presence —
has changed its form; it is no longer in the
flesh. But it abides in essence and in reality.
It is spirit, and
' Spirit with spirit can meet' *
It can — I should rather say He can, for spirit
is essentially a man's personality — inform our
1 Principal Caird's Fundamental Ideas of Christianity,
ii. 337. * Tennyson's Higher Pantheism.

THE FIRST MEANING 97
spirits, and if our spirits are informed by the
spirit of Jesus, then our lives will assuredly
exhibit the otherwise unattainable ideal of the
Christian character. ' The Lord ' — the Law
giver of the new ideal morality — ' is the Spirit '
— the inspiration of it.
This, then, is the meaning of the fact of
Christ for character — its twofold meaning.
Jesus is at once its ideal and the power that in
spires men to its achievement. This meaning
that Jesus has in the realm of character is with
out even an approach to a parallel in the whole
ethical world. The world's masters of morals
have simply trifled with the question of charac
ter in comparison with Jesus. What as a real
solution of the problem of human character —
what it is for man to be good, and how man
actually is to be made good — are the discus
sions of Aristotle, the aphorisms of Bacon,
even the virtues of Socrates or the example of
Gautama, in comparison with what Jesus has
done first by His example and teaching, and
then, even more wonderfully, by His enduring
personal spiritual presence and power giving to
men that very spirit by which alone a character

98 THE FACT OF CHRIST
can be realized? In this domain His name
holds the field.
And is not this a great thing for each one
of us personally, as well as a great thing for the
world at large? In our truest moments we
know that, after all, the question of our lives
is the question of our character. Our most
profound and significant success or failure is
not in the secondary issues on which the world
judges us, but is there. Indeed, it looks as if
this strange life of ours were made only for
character. Not only the world of conscience
within suggests this, but also the world of cir
cumstance without. For all other purposes —
the making of fortune, the enjoyment of pleas
ure, the securing of worldly wealth or position
or fame — this is a life ill-adapted. The flux of
things, the uncertainties of fate, the varied un
foreseen combinations of circumstances adverse
to or destructive of health or wealth or happi
ness — all these make life a place obviously
not formed primarily for these ends, the at
tempt to gain which is so easily and often
thwarted, and which, even when gained, are
held on so uncertain a tenure. This is really

THE FIRST MEANING 99
not the world for worldliness. But observe
that all these conditions — this flux, this risk,
this uncertainty — are the very conditions that
help to form character. They make just the
discipline by which a man may become tender
and spiritual, patient and humble, unselfish and
loving. The circumstances of life may defeat
all other ends, but they cannot defeat, and they
even must contribute towards, this end. And
so I say that it looks as if life were made for
character. And if thiii be so, then surely life
can never be properly or prosperously lived
without Him who is the only person who has
dealt with the problem of human character fully
and effectively. To this extent, therefore, and
at least so far as this first meaning of the fact
of Christ goes, should not every one of us seek
to be a Christian?

IV
THE FURTHER MEANING OF
THE FACT

' Du den wir suchen auf so finstern Wegen
Mit forschenden Gedanken nicht erfassen,
Du hast dein heilig Dunkel einst erlassen
Und tratest sichtbar deinem Volk entgegen.'
— Uhland.

IV
THE FURTHER MEANING OF
THE FACT
About the meaning of the fact of Christ which
we have just discussed one thing is plain — that
it is not the full meaning of that fact. It
clearly raises questions that call for further in
vestigation. If it be the first meaning of the
fact it is only the first. This meaning must
itself have a meaning. We have already said
about Jesus more — incomparably more — than
can be said of any other man, but just because
we have said so much we must say more still.
With no mental satisfaction can we halt at the
present stage. To say that Jesus Himself ex
hibited an absolutely stainless and ideal char
acter, and that moreover, He is able, though
His form left this earth centuries ago, still to
be an inspiration of the most personal kind in
men's hearts, by which they, too, are, at least
to some degree, enabled to realize that other-
103

104 THE FACT OF CHRIST
wise impossible ideal — to say all this and then
lay down the pen is utterly inconclusive. If it
be ethically and spiritually impossible to say
less, then it is intellectually incumbent to say
more. The finding of this first meaning of the
fact of Christ is the setting before us of new
questions that need a further answer.
The questions thus raised are of the follow
ing kind. Is a phenomenon in history and ex
perience, such as has been described, not one
of quite peculiar and commanding significance
for our philosophy of life and nature? Can it
be accounted for along with, and in the same
way as, other phenomena? May we not, and
must we not, ' amid the darkness of the world,'
accept it ' as throwing a vivid and particular
light on the nature of the force that is guiding
the destinies of man and of the soul ? ' -1 May
we not through it find some foundation for a
faith — for some real assurance concerning a
God such as our spirits seek and often seek in
vain? Ever since Jesus was in this world, men have
'Mrs. Humphry Ward in the Times, September 5,
1899.

THE FURTHER MEANING 105
never been able to rid themselves of the feeling
that in Him, if at all, is the quest of faith most
likely to find its answer. The fact of this is
indisputable and it is of extraordinary signifi
cance. His very first associates felt it when
their spokesman said : ' Lord, to whom shall
we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.'
His very last and latest students feel it, and the
authoress of Robert Elsmere writes in the year
of grace 1899 to the Times (in the earnest and
interesting letter quoted above) that the school
she represents still ' say as Peter said of old,'
not indeed from Peter's standpoint, but with
Peter's persuasion that there is the light to be
sought. Think of that far fisherman in Galilee
and of this writer of to-day in England, and of
the inconceivable difference of their whole in
tellectual atmosphere and surrounding and
point of view ; and yet both, in the soul's search
for God, unable to turn away from that figure.
Think of the unceasing and innumerable in
quirers who, during the intervening centuries,
have confessed the same. And is not already
a prima facie case made out that in the fact of

106 THE FACT OF CHRIST
Christ is something of entirely unique signifi
cance for the great problem of faith ?
There is thus ample reason, alike from the
meaning we have already found in the fact of
Christ, and from the feeling of earnest minds
in all the Christian ages towards that fact, to
go on to ask the questions that have been in
dicated. In doing so let us not think that we
are leaving the simple data of Christianity and
are plunging into the dogmas of theology. It
is still the fact of Christ we are investigating,
still that living fact of history and experience;
it is not theological theory. In passing, then,
from questions of character to questions of
faith, our inquiry need not, to use Goethe's
metaphor, assume the ' greyness ' of ' all
theory,' but should preserve the glow and ver
dure of life.1
i. The Foundation of Faith
The quest of faith is not simply an intellec
tual exercise in dialectic as to whether there be
a God — a first principle of which all things are
the manifestation and the result. It is far
' ' Grau, theurer freund, is alle Theorie,
Und griin des Lebens goldner baum.' — Faust.

THE FURTHER MEANING 107
more than that. It is essentially a personal
quest, undertaken not by the speculative side of
man's nature, but by the whole of his nature,
and therefore what it seeks is not a mere cate
gory of thought, but what will meet and satisfy
personal needs. Whether or not this be a
hopeless quest, certainly not less than this is
what the human spirit — something much more
profound, complex, and passionate than a
merely intellectually speculative spirit — has ever
sought and ever will seek. It never found
simpler, yet truer and more pathetic utterance
than in the old words of the exiled Hebrew
psalmist : ' My soul is athirst for God, even the
living God.'
There is a tendency in certain philosophical
quarters to regard a prayer such as this almost
with contempt. We are sometimes exhorted
that we should be above this fond yearning
after a personal Friend and Father of our spir
its, and should be able to stand, sad a little, per
haps, but strong, in our philosophy; and that
even such a desire as that for immortality is in
reality a selfishness which it is the nobler part
to renounce. There is not a little of this sug-

108 THE FACT OF CHRIST
gested to us in modern philosophy and litera
ture. Goethe suggested it to us, and Hegel,
George Eliot, and Matthew Arnold. I believe
this to be an utterly false resignation, an en
tirely spurious heroism, ' which prides itself on
being able to renounce what never ought to be
renounced.' 1 Man never ought to renounce
these yearnings after a personal God and a per
sonal immortality, for in these are his true self
and his true dignity. His true self is his per
sonal individuality, and ' over-against its I, it
seeks a Thou, and will rest satisfied with noth
ing less.' 2 It is not treating man as man to
bid him be satisfied with less. It is an act of
spiritual suicide which, with whatever philo
sophical glory it may disguise itself, is still dis
honorable ; ' such honor rooted in dishonor
stands.' The true dignity of man is in these
very personal needs which sometimes we would
be too intellectually dignified to confess. These
prayers may be in vain. We may seek the
Father — the living, personal Father — of our
1 Professor Seth's Scottish Philosophy, vi.
'Professor Orr's Christian View of God and the
World, p. 135-

THE FURTHER MEANING 109
spirits and not find; we may knock at the gates
of everlasting life and they may not be opened.
But the seeking, the knocking — it is these by
which man declares, not his littleness, but his
greatness, not the smallness of selfishness but
the infinity that is in and that is himself. That
is indeed a poor honor which man pays himself
in bidding himself attain to be satisfied to be
but a part of finite nature.
Whether or not this search for the Father of
our spirits will find its answer in the fact of
Christ, it is clear that it is not satisfied by the
facts of outward nature, of history, or of even
the moral realm within. I shall speak of this
only briefly. Nature tells us of great forces,
impersonal and unconscious, indifferent to, and
apparently ever antagonistic to, the hap and
hopes of man. There is an aspect of Nature
that is benign and beautiful, but there is also an
aspect that is bloody and brutal; there is one
view in which she seems full of marvellous
thought for even the smallest thing, but in
another view how little she seems to feel for
even her noblest works, flinging them aside
to perish in utter heartlessfiess, There is n°

no THE FACT OF CHRIST
¦inswer here to faith; there are indeed but ' evil
dreams.' Nature does not meet but only mocks
our quest with her baffling and often brutal
Enigma — ' I bring to life, I bring to death . . .
I know no more.' '
We turn to history. In that realm in which,
more than in physical nature, human activity
and intelligence have had play, shall we not
find something of the supreme plan and pur
pose which shall assure or encourage our faith ?
History — what a disappointing and dubious
murmur of voices that is! Even if the ages
have ' an increasing purpose,' how shall we find
in it a purpose that has any real meaning for
us? History may be a great drama; the
author of it is unknown to the actors and never
cares to know them. ' All the world's a stage,'
and we, its tragic comedians, play perforce our
little parts and pass. But we turn, from nature
and history, to the world within us. Here
surely, and especially in the realm of conscience,
may we find some evidence of the ' living God '
who shall be our God. But hardly ! The law
'Tennyson's In Memoriam, lvi.

THE FURTHER MEANING in
of conscience within us is a remarkable com
mand and constraint which, as it asserts itself,
does indeed suggest a law-giver that is a moral
personality; and yet, by itself, I doubt if it
takes us incontrovertibly and assuredly beyond
a fact and principle of human life — the fact
and principle, namely, that what we call moral
ity is, for us, a good and satisfaction and
strength, and the opposite is an evil, a source
of unquiet, and a weakness. It indeed, as I
say, suggests more; but it hardly says more,
or, at least, hardly says it in such a way as to
be able to maintain itself as a foundation for a
sure faith.1
Not in nature, then, nor in history, nor even
in conscience does the quest of faith find its
satisfaction. It has not been said that these
disprove the hopes and yearning of faith; that
is by no means true. But they do not fulfil
them. The wisest of men are agreed about
this. I suppose that among ' the masters of
those that know,' a higher place as regards
these matters — for Shakspere does not deal
' Cf. Dr. Rainy's Delivery and Development of Chris-
Han Doctrine, pp. 37, 38.

112 THE FACT OF CHRIST
with these questions — can hardly be given to
any than is to be given to Plato of the ancients,
to Dante of the middle ages, to Bacon of the
moderns. There is nothing upon which all
three are more distinctly agreed than the fruit-
lessness, or at least the frailty, of the attempt
of reason to satisfy the desires of faith from
nature and human life. It is, says Bacon, ' in
my judgment, not safe.' -1 It is, says Dante,
(more than once), ' desiring fruitlessly.' 2 And
one of the most pathetic passages in Plato3
speaks of our having to sail the seas of darkness
and doubt on ' the raft ' of our understanding,
' not without risk,' he adds, ' as I admit, if a
man cannot find some word of God which will
more surely and safely carry him.' 4
1 Advancement of learning, p. 128.
2 Purgatorio, iii. 38. Cf. Inferno, iv. 39.
'Phado, 85.
*The topics referred to in this and the preceding para
graphs have been discussed very briefly from considera
tions of time. I hope that what has been said will not
be taken to mean that one regards nature, history, and
moral life as ' godless.' What is said is that they do not
enable us to reach a ' living God,' who is the Father of
our spirits and recognizes and treats us as His children.
If even nature be moral and history progressive, still
they, at the most, tell us only of laws, and ' law,' as
the ablest of recent Bampton lecturers has said, ' is

THE FURTHER MEANING 113
This utterance of Plato is not only pathetic,
but is, to our minds, also suggestive. ' Some
word of God that will more surely and safely
carry him ' — we cannot but associate with such
an expression that of the evangelist that 'the
word was made flesh and dwelt among us.'
Does, then, the fact of Christ mean such a
word of God as the quest of faith seeks in vain
elsewhere? 'Lord, to whom shall we go?' —
that part of the apostle's cry we can under
stand; but may we go on with him and say,
' Thou hast the words of eternal life ' ?
We are encouraged to ask this question not
merely by apostolic witness, which could not
have finally decisive weight with us to-day, but
also and much more by the fact that Jesus
Himself so often said that the satisfaction of
universal in its action; it does not individualize; it has
no equity, no mercy ; it does not treat us as persons '
(lllingworth's Personality, Human and Divine, v.).
Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, regards conscience
as able to carry us further, but, as stated in the lecture,
while it suggests more and is a kind of circumstantial
evidence for more, it hardly itself really gives us more
than a law of life that ' makes for righteousness.' Be
hind all these declarations of impersonal principles and
forces, our individual spirits still seek the Father of our
spirits.

H4 THE FACT OF CHRIST
the soul's search for God was met in Him. I
shall not refer to passages such as, ' He that
hath seen Me hath seen the Father,' which
might raise exegetical and critical discussion.
There is at least one saying in the Synoptics
which serves our purpose, and in the view of
Beyschlag it 'possesses the highest guarantee
of genuineness as belonging to the original
collection of Logia.' 1 When Jesus said that
all things were given Him of the Father, and
that ' No man knoweth the Father except the
Son ' (that is Jesus Himself), or ' he to whom
the Son will reveal Him,' 2 He virtually said
three things. He recognized that the object of
the quest of faith was the Father — the living,
loving God. He declared, as we have seen
that Plato and Dante and Bacon declared, that
man could not reach it. But, lastly, He af
firmed that He had satisfied this quest,
and that others could through, but only
through, Him be satisfied also. He, who
was the greatest Master of religion the world
has ever known, at once thus appreciated
' Neutestamentliche Theologie, i. iii.
" S. Matt. xi. 27 ; S. Luke x. 22.

THE FURTHER MEANING 115
man's position in the quest of faith and
also regarded it as met in and by Himself.
Here is no waiting, like Plato, for a surer
word; here is the assurance of the truth itself.
And surely we already have found enough in
Jesus to make us ready to listen to Him when
He speaks thus.
When we consider what there is in the fact
of Christ that has a meaning of assurance for
faith, the essential thing we find is this— that
Jesus is supernatural. I use the word, as law-*
yers say, without prejudice, and in its strictly
grammatical sense. What I mean is that He
is not to be accounted for by the forces that
make human nature as we know it. It is really
impossible reasonably to deny this. I shall not
raise here the question of what are called the
miracles, not from any desire to shirk the ques
tion — the purely historical evidence that Jesus
rose from the dead seems to me really quite
unanswerable — but because it is rather a ques-'
tion of presuppositions about God and Nature,
to discuss which would lead us too far afield.
But if His miraculous works are made subject
of debate, His character attests ever more em-

116 THE FACT OF CHRIST
phatically that Jesus was a supernatural person.
It is, as Tennyson once said, ' more wonderful
than the greatest miracle.'1 The one fact of
His sinlessness suffices. That His sinlessness
is historically a fact and cannot be an imagining
we have already found reason to be assured.
It is admitted to be a fact by a great many per
sons who are above suspicion of a dogmatic
bias which prejudices their judgment. Pro
fessor Orr, who delights in appealing to the
Germans, names 2 among those who are con
strained to admit it adherents of the Hegelian
school like Daub, Marheineke, Rosencranz,
Vatke; mediating theologians of all types like
Schleiermacher, Beyschlag, Rothe, and
Ritschl; liberal theologians like Hase and
Schenkel; and so decided an opponent of the
miraculous even as Lipsius. Lists of authori
ties are a weariness to the flesh rather than illu
minative to the spirit, but these names are not
without impressiveness when one realizes what
is the subject-matter of their common admis
sion. For, disguise it as you may, sinlessness is
1 Memoir, p. 273.
¦ Christian View of God and the World, p. 268.

THE FURTHER MEANING 117
supernatural. Sin is in human nature as we
know it, and where there is no sin there is
what is — if not infra-human, as in the case
of the beasts — supernatural. But let us sup
pose that even this sinlessness is disputed. That
Jesus is a supernatural person is still brought
home as a personal conviction and impression,
a thing of which he is sure, to any man to
whom the living spirit of Jesus is such a power
as has been already described in life and charac
ter. Such a man needs to read neither the
claims of Jesus nor the concessions of German
critics; he has the witness in himself. As he
finds Jesus the principle and potency of a new
life that is stronger than all the old forces
within him, he argues immediately and unhesi
tatingly, as was argued long ago, that ' if
this man were not of God, He could do noth
ing.' What the expression ' of God ' precisely
means we are hardly yet in a position to say.
But it means at least this — that there is mani
fested in Jesus a power greater than the natural
forces in human life. Here is a unique fact and
which justly we call supernatural. Here is a
fact of unique significance for the quest of

118 THE FACT OF CHRIST
faith: this supernatural fact will tell us some
thing over and above all other phenomena
about, the great question to which we seek an
answer. The answer of Nature we have read ;
here is a fact supernatural which we have still
to read.
This, then, is the position we have reached —
that among the facts of the world, whose voice
in answer to the question of faith is so insuf
ficient, has appeared this fact of Christ which
has a quite peculiar significance just because
it cannot be classified with the other facts of
history, but is over and above them — a fact by
itself and transcendent. Its meaning, then, is
a final word, and is not to be qualified or can
celed by the apparent meaning of subordinate
facts. All facts are subordinate to the fact of
Christ who has shown Himself to be greater
than such tremendous facts as sin and
death.1 Therefore to this fact the human spirit
turns in its quest of faith for its final answer,
1 1 refer here primarily to that spiritual life after His
departure from earth which has already been described;
but, if this be admitted, the recorded physical victory
over the tomb obtains a certain congruousness, and, with
its strong historical support, can hardly be dismissed as
a preposterous incredibility.

THE FURTHER MEANING 119
and it asks what is the character of the power
that is in and with the transcendent fact of
Christ ?
To begin with, it is clearly a spiritual Power.
It is not a brutal, meaningless physical compul
sion to which, even if we had to yield to it, we
as rational spirits would be really superior. It
is spirit: it is the highest within our spirits.
Its compulsion is ever reason, and to obey it is
our freedom. Then, secondly, this Power that
is with Jesus is ethical. It is the very Power
of holiness and truth and love in our hearts,
and all that we know of these things we know
through it alone. Lastly," it is personal. By
this I mean not so much that it is a personal
agent — though of course that is meant too, and
it is really implied in a power that is spirit — but
rather that it treats us as persons. It does
not deal with us en masse. It individualizes
us and is almost as if made for each of us
alone. Whereas in the laws of nature and pro
cesses of history we perceive their general
meaning but can hardly find in them a mean
ing for ourselves, in the fact of Christ our dif
ficulty is to express it in general terms, but we

120 THE FACT OF CHRIST
are quite sure of what it has meant for our
souls. We describe, then, the Power that is in the
fact of Christ as spiritual, ethical, and one that
personally takes to do with us. Is not this to
name the God we seek? Is not this, most
simply and really, to find the ' living God ' ?
What is this ' living God ' that our souls de
sire but a Power precisely such as has been de
scribed: a God who, at last we know, is not
merely a part of the machine of nature, but the
Orderer of it and is spirit as we are spirit who
seek the Father of spirits; who is ethically
holy, for we cannot call that God which is not
good ; who is, finally, one who deals with us as
persons and not, as Nature seems to do, but as
items in her eternal process? The Power that
is with Jesus is surely and really at least the be
ginning of the faith that there is indeed a ' liv
ing God ' who is the Friend and Father of our
spirits, and our quest for Him, if haply we
might find Him, finds its rest in the ' surer
word ' of the fact of Christ.
And so the fact of Christ is the foundation

THE FURTHER MEANING 121
of faith in the ' living God.' It is, be it ob
served, not the teaching or doctrine of Jesus
that is this, but the fact of what Jesus Him
self is and means.. This distinction is of im
portance. Faith is based not on the ideas of
even the noblest of teachers, but on a fact
which declares itself to mean the supreme
Word of God. It is not that Jesus has spoken
and His words are in the Gospels; it is that
God has spoken and His word is in history
and experience. The importance of this lies
here, that what faith needs is not new ideas,
but new facts. As ideas, the central po.ints of
Christian faith — such as a trust in the Divine
Fatherhood and a hope beyond the grave —
are hardly wholly new. Many earnest and
noble souls have stretched out their minds to
wards them. What, then, was lacking for
faith ? Just that, after all, there were but ideas,
speculations, yearnings; and our thoughts on
these matters are not the sure measure of what
really is. Before the stern, unyielding facts of
life and especially before life's final fact of
death, how easily such thoughts falter and fail.

122 THE FACT OF CHRIST
' Eternal hopes are man's
Which, when they should maintain themselves aloft,
Want due consistence : like a pillar of smoke
That with majestic energy from earth
Rises, but, having reached the thinner air,
Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen.' '
Who will assure us, in face of ' the thinner air '
that is the breath of death, that these hopes
and speculations are the sure ' pillar of cloud '
leading us truly to a promised land and are not
but a ' pillar of smoke ' from the fires of human
fancy? A faith thus founded will always be
cherishable by certain temperaments — and it is
largely a matter of temperament — but it will
never really grip the mass of men simply be
cause it is a mere edifice of conceptions insecure
ly founded on the bed-rock of fact. But it is just
this that Christian faith possesses. Its basis,
I repeat, is not the ideas of Jesus but the fact.
It brings not a new doctrine merely, but new
data. It comes not with the theory of a
fatherly God, but with a phenomenon, in his
tory and experience, which means that. Now all
this is precisely what faith needs. Faith — as
'Wordsworth's Excursion, iv,

THE FURTHER MEANING 123
indeed may be said of all truth — is like Antaeus
in Greek legend, who was invincible when
touching mother-earth; and the mother-earth
of faith is fact — the fact of Christ.
Perhaps it is well for us to recall here, in
thus basing faith on the fact of Christ, that, as
we saw, that is a dual fact — one at once of out
ward history and inward experience. It is on
this dual fact that our faith is to be based; in
other words, faith has an historical as well as
a spiritual witness. There is an influential
tendency in our day to receive the latter but
discard the former. Teachers such as the late
T. H. Green or Dr. Martineau would have
faith find its sole authority in the religious con
sciousness within and not lean on any outward
historical revelation.1 Now it is indeed true —
and it had become obscured under apologists
like Paley — that no external authority can
demonstrate faith. Only within are we really
made sure that this is of God. But it does not
follow that the inward experience is to be iso
lated, and that in accepting it we do well to
xVide Green's address on Faith (Works iii.) and
Martineau's Seat of Authority in Religion.

124 THE FACT OF CHRIST
discard the other. As a matter of fact the in
ward experience, as has already been said, can
not always, when isolated, maintain itself. It
really is not an assured, established witness.
Now the Christian assertion here is that God
has spoken to men in two corroborating ways
— the witness of the historical Christ confirm
ing and thus assuring (not, as Green implies,
superseding) the witness within. This was
certainly the method of Jesus Himself; as
Canon Gore says, He ' undoubtedly intended
religious belief to rest on a double basis.' J It
is precisely this historical corroboration which
is needed not to create — for that it cannot do —
but confirm faith within us and to assure us we
are not mistaken. The outward and inward wit
ness about Christ interlock. The historical
seals the spiritual; the spiritual signs the his
torical. On the complete fact of Christ — the
fact that is alike in history and in experience
inexplicable except as meaning the living God
— faith stands.
It is not necessary that we should discuss
' The Incarnation of the Son of God (Bampton Lec
ture, 1891), p. 57.

THE FURTHER MEANING 125
the varied contents of faith, for obviously if
Jesus be the word of God to man, that includes
everything. If God have spoken and have so
spoken that ' sufficeth us.' It does not indeed
show us everything, but it shows us the one
thing we need to know — the character of God.
God is the God who sent Jesus. Given that as
an axiom, faith can work out anything. Take,
for example, immortality. Christian faith has
no demonstration that death does not end all.
But, assured about the character of God, it
knows who is the keeper of the keys of the.
grave, and it can trust its dear ones to Him
with calm hope. How far Is that better than
trying, as spiritualism does, to pick the lock!
The character of God is the question in all
questions of faith, and when that has been
answered faith is at rest about everything.
May we then, now, lay down the pen and say
we have stated comprehensively, however
slightly, the meaning of the fact of Christ for
faith? It is an impossibility. Again we have
raised questions that impel us further. We
have found that Jesus cannot be truly described
or accounted for in the terms of merely mun-

126 THE FACT OF CHRIST
dane phenomena. We say He is, in some
unique sense, ' of God.' He was more than a
man as we know men. All this must be ex
plicated. Sooner or later we must say what it
means. It is obvious that, despite all that has
been said, we have still to say with definiteness
and finality what this growingly profound fact
of Christ is.
n. 'And the Word was God/
The question that is now before us stands
out like the Matterhorn seen from the valley
below. It towers above us to dizziness; but
at the first glance you see the summit. The
question before us is this: If Jesus be more
than a man — in His own consciousness, His
sinlessness, His immortal personal presence
and power, His mighty works, His significance
— what then shall we say of Him? There is
only one answer to this question. It is an
answer which is not incredible — utterly, wildly
incredible — only because it is simply inevitable
alike to logic and to religion.
The rational or logical side of the argument
can be stated very briefly. If Jesus was more

THE FURTHER MEANING 127
than a man, as we know me^ shall we then
say that He was a prodigy — superhuman and
demi-divine ? To state such a position is to ex
pose it. It is true to the data about Christ
neither in history nor in experience, and at the
same time it raises insuperable objections to
itself. In Jesus are to be found things charac
teristic of a man, and also things — such as His
claim to forgive sins or His power to create a
new moral self — characteristic of God; but
there is nothing about Him characteristic of a
being neither man nor God. And the objec
tions to admitting into our thought such a be
ing are too obvious to need emphasis. Demi-
divinity is simply a relapse into heathenism.
This Arian, or quasi-Arian, view of Jesus has
absolutely nothing to say for itself historically
or experimentally, and has everything against
it philosophically. It is a Christ which no
reader of the Gospels would recognize, and
in which, as T. H. Green — whom, having
named lately to differ from him, I wish to name
now with regard and gratitude — says, ' no
philosopher who had outgrown the demonism
of ancient systems could for a moment acqui-

il8 THE FACT OF CHRIST
esce.' 1 This should be fairly and fully faced.
I think there is just ground of complaint when,
for example, Keim describes Jesus as ' super
human miracle,' 2 or Channing says he ' be
lieves Jesus Christ to be more than a human
being,3 and there they leave the matter. One
complains of this not in the orthodox but in a
purely intellectual interest. These are meant
to be serious and exact expressions, or they are
not. If they are not seriously and exactly
meant, they are intellectually unworthy eva
sions of the great problem of Christ. If they
are serious and exact, they involve — let this
be clearly understood — a position for which
history has not the smallest support and phil
osophy has only utter repudiation.
If this be so, what then? There is only a
dernier ressort. It was reached at a very early
stage of Christian thought by a writer of in
spired insight who seized his pen and, without
argument or explanation, wrote : the Word was
God. The critical penetrativeness of that writer
' Works, iii. 172.
2 Geschichte von lesu von Nazara, Eng. trans., iii.
662. ' Works, iv. 160.

THE FURTHER MEANING 129
is too little recognized. He overleapt centuries
of controversy. He saw at the first glance,
what all history has abundantly demonstrated,
that all intermediate compromises, such as the
Arian, were neither historically nor logically
tenable, and that, therefore, the issue Was clean
and clear between mere humanity and very
Deity. With that issue direct before him, he
wrote, not so much the best or highest, but the
only description of Jesus that he could write.
As a Christian, he could not describe Christ as
mere man; nor can we. As a thinker he could
not describe Him as an intermediate divinity;
nor can we. If then he was to write at all he
could write but one thing, and if we are to say
at all what Christ is, we can say but that one
thing too. It is, I repeat, saved from being
quite incredible only by being quite inevitable.
I have indicated this logical argument
briefly, and therefore, doubtless, very insuf
ficiently, but I do not propose to dwell on it
further because, after all, this is driving faith
at the point of the bayonet, and spiritual truth
is not so reached with reality and certainty.
But the Divinity of Jesus is not only a logical

130 THE FACT OF CHRIST
conclusion to which we are forced, but is in
the very woof of Christian experience. The
Christian as a Christian is profoundly involved
in it and committed to it.
That by which the Divinity of Jesus is seen
to be not a mere logical addendum to Christian
ity but an integral part of Christianity itself is
simply these meanings of the fact of Christ
which we have been discussing. What the
Christian man finds he receives from Jesus is
not simply teaching about God, but is a life and
power that are of God Himself. He finds in
the fact of Christ all he looks to find in God.
As he reads the definition of eternal life as ' to
know Thee (that is, God) and Jesus Christ
whom Thou hast sent,' he is quite unable
religiously to maintain the distinction between
the two. He finds God not beyond Christ, but
in Him. In the very human life and person
of Jesus we find not only a human life and per
son that direct us to a higher source of power ;
we find already there the presence and power of
what declares itself to be not less than God
Himself. When Jesus deals with us and works
within us, He does what only God can do. All

THE FURTHER MEANING 131
Christian experience is nothing if it is not this.
And if this be so, then, again, we can only in
one way say what Jesus is. As Herrmann
aptly puts it, ' when we confess His Deity, we
simply give Him His right name.' 1 What
other name can we give to one who is for us
and in us what assuredly only God can be?
This is the really Christian meaning of the Di
vinity of Christ. The dogmatic definitions of
the symbols are quite secondary to this. There
is no reality in your assertion of the dogma
of the Divinity of Jesus unless you mean that
for you Jesus is that which only God Himself
can be. If He is not this, the orthodox formu
laries are mere verbiage. If He is this, you
cannot but give Him ' His right name,' and
though possibly with considerable stumbling at
Athanasian or other expressions — rightly to
judge of which requires an adequate recollec
tion of their historical conditions — you surely
may in words call Him that which in fact He is.
Moreover, all deep and honest Christian life
lDer Verkehr des Christens mit Gott, Eng. trans., p.
112. Some of the expressions in this paragraph are sug
gested by Herrmann.

132 THE FACT OF CHRIST
goes on upon this foundation. It goes on if we
take Jesus to be not only a Friend, or Teacher,
or Leader, but, in the most strict and inward
sense, our Lord. That Lordship of Jesus ob
tains over the very prerogatives of personal
life. Our hearts, our wills are to be His; our
consciences reserve no rights before Him whose
authority is our last moral appeal. In actual
life, indeed, this completeness of surrender is
far from being realized, but it is, in idea, in
separable from Christianity. Now, all this is a
relationship utterly intolerable to be given to
any save One. It 4^ the surrender of all
self-respect and manhood, intellectually or
morally, to render it to any man. It is, how
ever, a relationship entirely proper to render
towards God, — towards Him alone. If, then,
this be the relationship towards Jesus which is
the very constituent of Christian life, it surely
again appears that to confess His Divinity is
only to give its ' proper name ' to that of which
all Christian life is a practical confession. It
comes — to put it more briefly — to this. We
cannot be Christians unless we will say to
Jesus, most literally and unreservedly, ' My

THE FURTHER MEANING 133
Lord.' But we simply ought not and must not
say that to any creature. If we say ' My Lord '
we should be able to add with the honest
Apostle, ' My God.' The Christian who will
not maintain his Lord's Godhead must find it
hard to maintain his own self-respecting man
hood. This, then, is the all but incredible but wholly
inevitable conclusion to which we are brought
— that Jesus means God. * As reason cannot
receive Jesus as a demi-god, and as religion
cannot regard Him as merely an intermediary
revelation, we, who say unalterably that He is
more than a man, must go on to say : ' and the
Word was God.'
The idea is so utterly staggering and over
whelming — that is, if one in the least thinks
of it — that it is difficult to know what it means
to believe it. Even when one admits its logi
cal sequence from the historical facts, and its
essential admission in all Christian life and ex-
1 Of course I do not intend this expression in merely
the Ritschlian sense that Christ, having for us in re
ligion the value of God, may be estimated by us as God.
The historical-logical argument is to be combined with
the religious, and corroborates the latter' s judgment as a
fact.

134 THE FACT OF CHRIST
perience, still one feels that such knowledge is
too high for us, and we cannot attain to it. Some
of the difficulties that are presented to us about
it are indeed to be boldly resisted, and even re
sented. For example, we are sometimes re
minded in this connection that we no longer
live in pre-Copernican days. This planet,
which men used to believe was the center of the
universe, and its inhabitants, therefore, at least
possibly, the apple of its Creator's eye, we now
know to be but a speck amid infinite systems of
worlds ; and we are, therefore, scornfully asked
if it be not but an insanity to imagine that the
Infinite Cause whose universe is in endless
space has taken the likeness of the creatures of
one of the most infinitesimal of His worlds, and
has ' dwelt among us.' Now, this is simply
an attempt to terrorize the imagination, and is
not to be yielded to. We know little or nothing
of the rest of the universe, and it may very
well be that in no other planet but this is there
intelligent and moral life; and, if that be so,
then this world, despite its material insignifi
cance, would remain the real summit of crea
tion. But even if this be not so, still man re-

THE FURTHER MEANING 135
mains man — a spiritual being, capable of
knowing, loving, and glorifying God. Man is
that, be there what myriads of worlds there
may ; and is not less than that, though in other
worlds were also beings like him. There is
therefore a spiritual interest at stake in this
small world, and it is therefore not a small
world to a God who knows the true propor
tionate value of the material and the moral. ' Is
then,' asks Tertullian, ' the Incarnation un
worthy of God ? ' and he justly replies that ' it
is in the highest worthy of God, for nothing is
so worthy of God as our salvation.' x When
Mr. Spencer asks us if we can believe
that ' the Cause to which we can put no limits
in space or time, and of which our entire solaf
system is a relatively infinitesimal product, took
the disguise of a man,' 2 he may think he is
giving us an imposing conception of God; but
no conception of God is less imposing than that
which represents Him as a kind of millionaire in
worlds, so materialized by the immensity of
His possessions as to have lost the sense of the
1 Adv. Marcion, ii. 17.
* Ecclesiastical Institutions, 704.

136 THE FACT OF CHRIST
incalculably greater worth of the spiritual in
terests of even the smallest part of them.
And yet, though we may repel objections of
this kind, the essential difficulty of, with reality,
believing in the Incarnation remains. Even a
successful argument for it hardly establishes it
in our minds as a fact. There is but one thing
that will meet this, only one thing that enables
us to say not merely ' I cannot deny it,' or ' I
admit it,' but — what is a great deal more — ' I
believe it.' That one thing is to perceive the
need for it. So much is this the case, that I
will say you cannot with reality apprehend the
Incarnation as a fact unless you see, to some
degree, a raison d'etre for that fact. It appeals
to us as a truth only when it appeals to us as a
divinely necessary truth. And thus if we are
to receive with reality this stupendous meaning
of the fact of Christ we must ask the meaning
of that meaning. We must ask Cur Deus
homo?
The answer to this question is the final mean
ing of the fact of Christ, and must be treated
by itself in the next lecture. But, introductory
to that and in closing this lecture, one thing

THE FURTHER MEANING 137
may be said of the bearing of the idea of the
Incarnation on the meaning of Christ we have
just been considering, that, namely, for faith
and as a revelation of the Divine character. It
is the Incarnation and the Incarnation alone
that gives faith its supreme word about God's
character — that God is love.
What is love? It is more than a kind inter
est or generous regard. Love has its essential
qualities, and these are sacrifice, unselfishness,
the giving of one's own and of oneself. If then
we are to call God love, we must be able to say
that He is sacrificing and unselfish, generous
of His own and unsparing of Himself. Now
if the word or messenger or revealer of God be
not one with Him, then there is indeed an ex
pression of the Divine interest and regard and
care, but not, in the deepest sense, an expres
sion necessarily or clearly of love. It does not
show really and essentially a ^//-giving on
God's part. But love is just a self-giving. I
do not say that in that case God would not be
love, but only that His love, as love, has not
been really exercised or exhibited towards us.
But if Jesus be a Divine Incarnate word, then

138 THE FACT OF CHRIST
' in this was the love of God manifested.' Here
is God giving Himself. Here is not the send
ing of another, but the sacrifice of Himself.
Here, then, is a great word for faith. God is
not merely good, gracious, recognizing us and
helping us; in the most real and essential and
literal sense He loves us. How great a word
that is — ' God loved the world ! ' ' How many
hearts have understood it who have never yet
understood what " God created the world " or
" God will judge the world " means? ' 1 It is
now the superb commonplace of Christianity.
But nothing enables Christianity to say it quite
truly except the Incarnation, for nothing else
shows us the real self-giving, the personal un
selfishness, the literal love of Almighty God.
' From Thoughts from the Writings of R. W. Bar
bour (privately printed).

V
THE FINAL MEANING OF THE FACT

' La foi chrdtienne ne va principalement qu'a Etablir ces
deux choses : la corruption de la nature et la redemption
de J6sus Christ' Pascal

V
THE FINAL MEANING OF THE FACT
If we are now going to ask the meaning of
that meaning which we have found in the
fact of Christ, it is of some importance that
we should once more put before our minds
what that fact precisely was. The meaning we
have found in Christ is that He is an incarna
tion of the Divine life and power. If we feel
we cannot with reality embrace this in our
minds unless we also perceive something of the
reason and ground of it, then it is, I say, im
portant here to remember what historically that
Incarnation was. Let us again, as everywhere,
study the fact of Christ.
Why this is important is that there is a way
of thinking about this question which, treating
it philosophically and not historically, gives us
a solution which is no solution. We are told
that the idea of the Incarnation is really in-
141

142 THE FACT OF CHRIST
volved in the very Being of God and His re
lations to man. If God be spirit and love, He
must ever seek to reveal Himself to beings
whom He has made capable of receiving such a
revelation, and this consummates itself in the
taking of manhood into God. The Incarnation
is thus part of the process of the Divine life,
and the ground and reason of it are to be found
there. This line of thought is very character
istic of Hegel and of all philosophers who seek
to construe Christianity in terms of an abso
lute dialectic. The same tendency appears in
theology, and the idea of the ' Gospel of Crea
tion,' as Dr. Westcott calls it x — that is ' the
promise of the Incarnation which was included
in the Creation of man ' — has received encour
agement from considerable, if not from the
greatest theologians.2 It is a speculative nicety
which has much about it that is very attractive
at first sight; but its attraction fades when we
turn to history. For philosophy is interesting
' Vide Essay at the close of his The Epistles of St.
lohn. ' Vide a just conclusion in Thomas Aquinas, Sum.
Theol, pars in. quest, i. art. 3. (Thomas is a theologian
who should be more read than he is in the Protestant
Church.)

THE FINAL MEANING 143
and valuable only as it deals with the facts of
the world, and this way of thinking hardly
seriously deals with the historical facts of the
case. It is admitted that this Divine self-mani
festation reaches its highest in Christ. And
what was Christ? Ecce Homo! There is a
coming of God not simply to man, but to sor
row and shame and suffering, to tears and
prayers and a sweat. There is an entering into
not only human trouble, but an agony unparal
leled and unfathomed. This is the Divine self-
manifestation, this the Incarnation we have to
ponder. It is not Bethlehem only nor Naza
reth, but Gethsemane and Calvary. It is not a
philosophical idea of an Incarnation, but the
historical fact of the Incarnation. You have
said nothing by saying that self-revelation by
becoming man is involved in the idea of God as
loving spirit; do you mean that there is in
volved in God's life that self-manifestation
which you see in the ' man of sorrows ' ? The
question is to be faced. Our philosophy must
be a theory of the facts of the case. An hon
ored writer on Christianity says that ' the very
idea of God may be seen to contain that rela-

144 THE FACr OF CHRIST
tion to humanity which is expressed in the per
son of Christ' 1 What is that relation? Be
coming man? That is but a shallow way to
state the facts. It was becoming that man —
that ' man of sorrows,' that ' thorn-crowned
man.' I look at that man. I see His infinite
sadness in the upper-room. His agony and
sweat in the garden ; I hear His ' Father, if it
be possible,' His ' My God, My God! ' And I
ask, is this relation to humanity in ' the very
idea of God ' ? Surely, whatever philosophical
reflections may be made about an Incarnation
idea, we shall not pretend that these explain
the facts of the Incarnation. Face the history
and there is more to be said. The reason and
ground of that so sweet and beautiful, but, in
the end and essentially, so awful and myste
rious Incarnation are still to seek.
Whether or not we shall ever find the more
that is to be said and be able to say it, the line
along which we must seek it is made clear for
us by Jesus Himself. At the impending of the
' Principal Caird's Fundamental Ideas of Christianity,
ii. 102.

THE FINAL MEANING 145
very crisis of the dark side of His life, He said
— and I do not suppose that the authenticity of
the words of institution at the Last Supper are
seriously questioned — that His blood was shed
' for the remission of sins.' The word is a key
and suffices. It would be only perversity of
mind not to use it. The meaning of the Incar
nation — I say of the Incarnation — is to be
found in the fact of sin. Jesus said so and that
is enough. Ah ! what a problem this is we have set our
selves if for light upon it we have to turn to
what is itself of all problems, the darkest, most
difficult, most despairing! And, moreover,
this to which we are directed is of all topics,
that which our whole nature most dislikes to
face; we shall dispute its facts, discount their
significance, and, above all, deny their personal
application. Let us therefore again say to our
selves that it is Jesus Himself who forces those
who would understand Him to follow this line ;
let us recognize from Him that we cannot fully
state the meaning of Christ if we will not
frankly study this matter of sin.

146 THE FACT OF CHRIST
i. The Reality of Sin
The study of sin is, if it is to be really serious
and effective, a study of oneself. Nothing is
more easy than to bring in a charge of uni
versal sinfulness against humanity in general,
and to substantiate that alike by facts and by
the witness of even non-Christian authorities.
' Sin is common to all men,' says one of the
Greek tragedians.1 ' We have all sinned,' says
a Roman moralist.2 And modern literature —
not least, modern fiction — is full of the same
confession, and indeed has often to defend it
self from the charge of being repulsive and im
moral by saying that it is only depicting what
life is. But such a general impeachment of hu
manity as sinful makes hardly any impression
on the conscience. It is like the ' all men are
mortal ' of our logic-books, which we all ad
mitted as a major premise but which never
made us in the least realize that we should die.
Sin is, like death, not seriously realized except
as a personal fact. We really know it only
when we know it about ourselves. The word
' Sophocles' Antigone.
' Seneca's De Clementia.

THE FINAL MEANING 147
' sin ' has really no serious meaning to a man
except when it means that he is a sinful man.
If then a general impeachment of humanity
is not enough to show an individual man his
personal sinfulness, what is it that will do this ?
The answer is that Jesus Christ does it.
When a man by his self-indulgence in wicked
ness has got his life into misery, that may make
him realize that evil is a real thing and that he
has played the fool; but even this is hardly a
conviction of sin. And while in a man's con
science there is what might formulate the
charge to him, still even that often fails because
it easily becomes deadened and sered and appar
ently incapable of bringing home its charges
against us. It is Jesus Christ who gives a spir
itual edge to life's judgments and revives the
voice of conscience within us. He Himself
says His own spirit is that which convinces
men of sin. Let us not think that in studying
what sin is we are wandering away from the
bright and beneficent fact of Christ. It is in
and by facing this fact that we have to confess
that we have sinned.
For when a man lets the meaning of Christ

148 THE FACT OF CHRIST
really fully and fairly shine upon his life then
it says to him three things about sin.
The first is this : that one has seen and known
the better and has chosen and done the worse.
The charge, if only we will face it, cannot but
go home. We have seen and known the better.
Not only the fact of Christ — which, as we saw
in an earlier lecture, is a fact of more than bare
history — but also life and nature, have again
and again brought the issues before us, and we
cannot say that, like the brutes, we have had no
knowledge of the better way of life. But we
have chosen and done the worse in thoughts
and words and acts. We know this not in a
general sense but concretely and particularly,
and not as an occasional or exceptional thing,
but as a characteristic of our lives. We recall
last year or last week or yesterday, and we
name that evil habit or unkind word or selfish
act or base thought. We take one form of sin
— some besetting sin. We begin to count how
often we have yielded to it. We find the num
ber is more than that of the hairs of our head.
Our whole past life seems to have been lived
for that sin; our whole character to have been

THE FINAL MEANING 149
a companionship with it; our whole nature to
have made itself its home. I am not speaking
of a notoriously wicked man nor, necessarily,
of what are called grosser vices. Let the aver
age man, who has never let Jesus Christ deal
with his conscience about the facts of his life,
review the last year of it with a mind and heart
quite open to all that we have been finding in
that fact, and will he not find that his dominant
and deepest note, his daily habit of thought or
life, his thousand-times repeated characteristic
has been, not a noble loving and choosing of
the highest when he saw it, but some worldly
' lust of the eyes ' or sensual ' lust of the flesh '
or — perhaps the most common of all — petty
' pride of life ' which he did not blush to yield
to even daily, but which it is a shame to him to
discover now and to confess even to himself?
This develops into something more — the
second thing that the spirit of Jesus brings
home to us about sin. It is a thing so indi
vidual and personal that it is best stated in the
first person. He makes me feel that at least
in me all this is without excuse ; in other words,
that I am not only sinful, as all men probably

150 THE FACT OF CHRIST
are, but also culpable and guilty with many and
special aggravations. This I cannot say in the
same way of others; indeed, I often feel there
may be and are a hundred excuses for them. I
therefore cannot out and out condemn others
without Pharisaism. But there is no arrogance
in my judging myself. No doubt I have had my
temptations too, in circumstances without and
temperament within, but I cannot find in these
any escape from the charge of being a culpably
guilty man. For two reasons I cannot. In the
first place, whatever circumstances or tempera
ment may have brought, I have not only done
evil but liked to do it. This love of it, which
often created the desired circumstances and
cherished the suitable temperament, is a fact
which I know about my own heart but which I
cannot in the same way know of any other
man's heart, and it makes me condemn myself
in a way in which I can condemn no other.
And, in the second place, I know another thing
about myself that I know about no one else. I
v know the chances I had of the better choice and
the better way. I knew the special reasons and
arguments, arising out of just my experience

THE FINAL MEANING 151
in life, which should have made me a good
man. I recall this mercy and that other in my
upbringing, this warning and that in my life's
discipline, this call to thought, that appeal to
everything worthy in me and so on. I begin
to count up these things which are things I
know nothing about in my neighbor. And
thus I find myself, apart from any general im
peachment of humanity or any charge against
any other man — I find that at least I have been,
in a peculiarly inexcusable and shameful way,
a sinful man. And so is it that the very prin
ciple on which I cannot judge others is one on
which I must judge myself. What that prin
ciple is was never better stated than by Burns —
' What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.' '
It is true; and I will not judge, say, the sad life
of Burns himself. But the plea cuts both ways.
In myself I know ' what's resisted.' I know
the grace I have resisted. And therein I judge
myself, and feel, as Bunyan says, that ' every
one has a better heart than I have.' 2 Thus, to
1 Address to the Unco Guid.
' Grace Abounding, 84. Readers of this book will re-

152 THE FACT OF CHRIST
quote another great English writer who often
deals with this subject, ' God has given no one
any power of knowing the true greatness of any
sin but his own, and therefore the greatest sin
ner that every one knows is himself.' 1 This is
strictly true; and this is how every man who
has learned from the spirit of Jesus Christ that
his has been a sinful life, calls himself with the
Apostle, for the clearest reasons, ' The chief of
sinners.' All this leads to a third thing. We con
demn ourselves because we know ourselves.
But Jesus, of whom the woman of Samaria said
that ' He has- told us all things that ever we
did,' makes us realize with a new seriousness
that Another knows us too. That other
is no mere human judge.
'But what will God say?"
— the living, holy, personal God of whom just
Jesus has made us so sure. Is His judgment
member how Bunyan feels what is said above when he
begins to compare himself with other sinners — David,
Peter, and even Judas.
1 Law's Serious Call, chap, xxiii.
"Browning's Worst of it,

THE FINAL MEANING 153
laxer and less serious than our judgment of
ourselves ? He is indeed good, but ' He shows
His love of good by His hate of sin.' What
will He say? God cannot regard us as other
than we really are. And what is it that we
really are? We have just been discovering
that. We are persons who knew the better and
did the worse, and that without excuse, with
the deepest aggravations and despite a thou
sand reasons and restraints that should have
kept us. If God be God, if God be morally
worthy to be God, what is and must be His
relation towards such ? Our religion comes to
an unhappy pause. Our search for God, if
haply we might find him, is clouded with a dark
apprehension lest we should too really and
nearly find Him or He find us. Our cry of
' My soul is athirst for the living God ; when
shall I appear before the presence of God ? ' be
comes the other cry of ' Whither shall I flee
from His presence? ' We dislike the thought
of God. We avoid the thought of the future.
Our desire and effort become to forget God,
1 Tertullian's adv. Marcion, iv. 26,

154 THE FACT OF CHRIST
and to evade such things, as death, that remind
us of Him. ' Thus conscience doth make cow
ards of us all.'
Are these unworthy and degrading thoughts,
akin to the gloomy terrors of the heathen on
whom the beneficent light of Christ has not
dawned? It is easy to call them such, but they
are not. The meaning of the fact of Christ for
faith indeed dispels all fears about God that
arise from the thought of Him as wicked and
unjust and unholy. But these solemn appre
hensions which arise in the mind of the man
who perceives that he is a sinful man come not
from the thought of God as wicked and unjust
and unholy, but on the very contrary, from the
thought of Him as righteous and just and
holy — in other words, from a true, not an un
true, thought of what God is. From these ap
prehensions many things would deliver us, but
these things are the spirit of unbelief, the nar
cotics of pleasure, the optare non esse Deum.1
The fact of Christ does not treat these appre
hensions as morbid and foolish dreams. He
awakens them and deepens them and makes
1 ' "The wish that God did not exist,'

THE FINAL MEANING 155
our consciences feel them to be eternal moral
truths. He convinces us not only ' of sin,'
but also ' of judgment.' And — without the
smallest morbidness or superstition, but only
with moral sanity and seriousness may it be
asked — wherewithal shall we, who cannot
stand before our own consciences, stand before
the Searcher of hearts and not be over
whelmed? Nur das Vollkommne vor Gott
vorstehen kann.1 The question may be evaded.
It may be evaded by a refusal seriously to
think what on the one hand God is, and on the
other we are. It may be evaded. But it re
mains. It thus would appear that the problem of
sin is deepening and darkening. It is some
thing far more than the moral problem of char
acter. As we have already seen, there is a
problem of character. Evil has its results in
bad habits, sinful disposition, and bears fruit in
many moral and even physical consequences in
this life. But it appears this is not all the
meaning of evil in man. For it bears other
1 Schleiermacher's Der Christliche Glaube, ii. ('Only
the perfect can stand before God.')

156 THE FACT OF CHRIST
than these temporal fruits, and has eternal con
sequences towards God. Here is a matter call
ing for more than we found in the fact of
Christ when we were discussing the first mean
ing of that fact. The problem of immorality
— that is, man's character viewed only by itself
— is a small thing compared to the problem of
sin — that is, man's character viewed sub specie
ceternitatis and under the condemnation of God.
What a sad confusion seems to have over
taken us in our investigations! The fact of
Christ that had opened to us such happy and
hopeful prospects in the spheres of character
and of faith, has now darkened the day of its
own heralding and has developed meanings that
seemingly destroy both hope and happiness.
For think what is meant by God's condemna
tion of sin — of us who are sinners. To say
it means punishment is only to say the same
thing in another word, but what is punishment
but simply displeasure in operation? It means
far more than punishment. There is no good
of which it does not mean the loss ; there is no
hope of good of which it does not mean the
abandonment. Is it to this that after all Jesus

THE FINAL MEANING 157
has brought us ? Is the fact of Christ like one
of Heine's poems that begin with thoughts of
beauty and of peace which, in the last verse,
they shatter by some word of bitterness and
despair ?
But this is not the last word of Jesus Christ
about our sin and about God's view of it. We
must read on.
11. The Problem of Forgiveness
The further word that is to be found in the
fact of Christ concerning sin and God's view of
it can be stated very shortly. It does not admit
of dispute. The light and liberty that Jesus
brings with Him wherever He is received hon
estly and cordially mean — despite all that has
just been said — that we are being treated by
God not with displeasure and condemnation but
with favor and approval. The word of the
Gospel and the experience of the Christian man
are a delusion if this be not so. In the fact of
Christ we are assuredly called to a glad confi
dence towards God and a happy expectancy not
of evil but of good, and we have the sure con
viction that He is not against us, but is and

158 THE FACT OF CHRIST
eternally will be for us. Jesus has simply mis
led our hearts if the Christian, finding all this
in the fact of Christ, may not rest upon it as
final and true about God.
It is obvious that only one word solves the
paradox thus created, and reconciles this grace
and assurance on God's part towards us with
that displeasure and condemnation which the
same fact of Christ made us feel must also be
in God towards sinners. Observe that these
two apparent contradictions are to be recon
ciled. We are not to admit one into our minds
by simply ousting or forgetting the other. In
saying that God receives us and welcomes us,
we must also and at the same moment remem
ber that we are full of sin and God's face is
set against sin. These contraries must be fairly
reconciled, and, I say, there is obviously only
one word that reconciles them. That word
is forgiveness. In forgiveness is contained the
reality of sin, else there were nothing to for
give; in it is contained also the reality of God's
free favor to us, else we were not forgiven.
We are really sinful men ; we are really received
and welcomed by God. These two facts put

THE FINAL MEANING 159
together can mean only that God has forgiven
our sins.
The conclusion may seem a very simple one.
It is not a simple conclusion. Here we have
reached the very crux of the fact of sin —
namely, the problem of the forgiveness of sin.
That God forgives is something we are apt to
take as almost axiomatic. Let us think a little
carefully and exactly what it means for God
to forgive sins.
We naturally assume that it means for Him
just what it means for us, and that there is in
volved in the Divine forgiveness of our sins
just what is involved in one man forgiving an
injury done to him by another. Thus, Priest
ley — a most honest, truth-seeking man — says
that ' it is required of us that if our brother
only repent we should forgive him even though
he should repeat his offence seven times a day ;
on the same generous maxim, therefore, we
cannot but conclude that the Divine Being acts
towards us.' 1 The conclusion appears at first
sight, undeniable, unless, as Socinus says —
from whom the argument is taken — ' we wish
1 Corruptions of Christianity, i. 151.

160 THE FACT OF CHRIST
to concede less to God than is conceded to men
themselves'1 But a more careful reflection
will, I think, show us that it is a conclusion
containing an utterly inadequate conception of
God, and that the question is one of conceding
not less to God than to men, but infinitely more.
One is inclined to reply to Socinus and Priest
ley in the words which Luther once used to
Erasmus in their discussion on free-will : ' Your
thoughts concerning God are too human.' 2
Consider the essential difference in the re
lations of God and of man to the fabric of
morality. We are merely private individuals,
and our passing over of our injuries, which are
but personal wrongs, does not in the least de
gree involve that that law by which, in an eth
ical world, evil and its due reward are, as Plato
says, ' riveted together '3 is abrogated or com
promised. The moral fabric of the universe
does not depend on us, nor is it altered by what
we do. Indeed, it is only as private individuals
that, in general, we can forgive, and if our
1Pralect. Theol., xvi. The objection is of course
much older still; it is mentioned by Anselm.
* Luther's De Servo Arbitrio, sect. xv.
'Phado, ix.

THE FINAL MEANING 161
forgiveness would have social or public effects
endangering moral order in the community,
then it may be impossible. Now, Almighty God
is not a magnified private individual. He is
the very source and center of the ethical order
of the universe, and it does depend on Him.
Thus the just and ethically true connection be
tween evil and its due judgment is abrogated if
He abrogate it ; and that means ethical disorder
and ethical chaos and the world no longer a
morally constituted world. Such forgiveness
would be on God's part, what it is not on ours,
an act involving moral anarchy. It is of real
importance that this essential difference be
tween God and ourselves in this matter be rec
ognized. A modern American theological
writer insists repeatedly that this matter of for
giveness is ' not a matter of relation to law or
to government; it is primarily and essentially
a matter of the relations between persons, God
and man,' and that ' it is the personal relation
that needs to be set right, and it is through be
ing right with God that men are to be made
right with the government of God.' 1 The dis-
* Outline of Christian Theology, by W. N. Clarke,
D.D., New York, p. 322.

162 THE FACT OF CHRIST
tinction seems to me of no essential value— =-
it may have a use as a check to abstractly foren
sic forms of speech — for the law and the person
of God are one. God is the ethical order. In
Him, as Dr. Dale says, ' the law is alive.' -1 It
¦is, therefore, of no essential meaning to speak
of a ' personal relation to God ' in forgiveness
as if that were ' not a matter of relation to
law.' I repeat that God is the moral law.
And because He is and we are not that,
there is no just comparison between forgiveness
in us and in Him. With us, indeed, what we
call forgiveness is rather a forgetting of our
injuries; but there can be no mere forgetful-
ness in God's forgiveness. If the just and
eternal ethical order that is the very founda
tion of a moral universe rivets together sin
and its due reward, how can He who is that
very order, separate them and yet be its God?
Forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties;
to God it is the profoundest of problems.
Is it not, indeed, as Dr. Chalmers used to
say, ' a problem fit for a God ? ' It is no petty
question of personal unwillingness to forgive,
lThe Atonement, Lect. ix.

THE FINAL MEANING 163
or of personal vindictiveness. It is a question
of the ethical order of the universe — an order
that is of the very being of God. What is the
problem? It is to declare in one breath that
the wages of sin is death, and also that we
who are sinners are heirs of eternal life. It is
to save men, who, by the ethical order of a
moral universe, are condemned and yet at the
same time save the ethical order that condemns
them. It is to be eternally just and also the
eternal justifier of the unjust. There is the
problem. No man has any such problem pre
sented to him in forgiving another man. But
when God would forgive us, He has to face it.
It is a problem for God, and ' a problem fit for
a God.' All this means that in the end the question of
the forgiveness of sins is not simply a
' whether ' — one of inclination merely — but is
a ' how.' The problem falling to God and ' fit
for a God ' is to find the way of forgiveness.
There can be little doubt as to where that is to
be sought. We turn again to Him who called
Himself 'the Way' — to the fact of Christ.
All through our discussion, I have sought that

164 THE FACT OF CHRIST
we should never for long be out of sight of
history. The compass of reasoning has its
great uses, but it easily gets out of gear; facts
are the infallible stars by which the voyager
seeking truth must ever regulate his course.
The facts about Jesus on the matter that now is
before us are plainly — as I have said He Him
self connected them — the facts about His
death ; and by that is meant, as Professor Den-
ney describes it, ' the experience which the Son
of God anticipated in Gethsemane and under
went to Calvary.' 1 To this, then, we turn.
It is to turn to the most profoundly perturb
ing spectacle in history. We look at Him
whom we have raised in our faith to a very
Deity, whose every feature we have come to
regard with an adoration, whom we have found
among men not so much first as incomparable
and only — we look at Him in what a great
man 2 touchingly and truly called ' the last
trial,' and we find Him, at the prospect of His
death, in an agony. That sweat of blood, that
broken prayer, that falling on His face again
1 Studies in Theology, p. 103.
2 Mr. Gladstone.

THE FINAL MEANING 165
and yet again ; that overmastering sorrow and
depression, that utter dread and horror, that in
expressible disquietude and anxiety, and terri
ble consternation of spirit x — what does all this
mean ? We scorn indeed the baser sort of un
believers who, with all disregard of the decency
which any martyr has a right to expect in his
hours of suffering, have pointed a taunting
finger to that figure. In the name of decency,
it is not to be mocked; but how can it, in the
name of truth, be adored? Is Jesus here the
incomparable, the only, even the supreme?
We recall the wonderful scene in the prison-cell
at Athens when Socrates met his ' last trial '
with such calm and such good cheer. We read
again the closing pages of the Phado; how
beautiful they are! And then we look again
at that agonizing figure, and our adoration of
Jesus receives a shock. Our minds — dislike
it as they may, and resist it as they will — seem
forced to admit to themselves that in one thing
Jesus is not our perfect example and inspira-
1 The expression translated in the A.V. ' sorrowful,'
' sore amazed,' and ' very heavy,' are immensely stronger
in the original. Vide the somewhat full note in Pearson,
On the Creed, Art. iv. (' Suffered.')

166 THE FACT OF CHRIST
tion. And that single thought has enough in it
to alter our whole Christianity.
There is only one thing that saves us from
this conclusion, and that is that the compari
son out of which it arose be an impossible one.
If ' the cup ' which Socrates took ' quite readily
and cheerfully,' 1 and ' the cup ' from which
Jesus prayed in an agony to be delivered were
alike but death, then (even though the latter's
was a more painful and shameful death) the
conclusion is inevitable. It is good to say these
things plainly to our minds; and if the death
of Jesus was just death, we have not given Him
His entirely right name when we say He is
Divine, nor even His entirely right place when
we regard Him as our perfect and complete
ideal. But was it just death? Jesus Himself
suggests otherwise.
We recall again His saying that His death
was ' for the remission of sins.' And we recall
what we have been thinking about the meaning
of the remission or forgiveness of sins. We
saw that forgiveness — that is, God's forgive
ness, who alone really ultimately forgives —
1Ph(edo, 117.

THE FINAL MEANING 167
must include in its meaning a dealing with the
whole ethical order by which sin and its due
desert are, to use Plato's phrase again, ' riveted
together.' It must in no way subvert or com
promise this, but on the contrary must respect
it, and do all that is right by it.1 Now Jesus
said that His death was ' for the remission of
sins.' Then in His death is the doing right
by that ethical order which binds together sin
and its due desert; then it was that bond (the
terribleness of which, we, just because we are
forgiven, can only faintly and indeed hardly at
all imagine) which tightened at His heart and
pressed His brain — the heart that had known
no other bond to God but love, the brain that
had never thought of Him but with joy. One
says these things simply, and the words in
which they are said are cold and colorless.
But when one really thinks of the realities
which the words cover, the mind is over
whelmed. Strange and startling thoughts in
vade it. That agony of Jesus, as we look on
it, ' harrows us with fear and wonder.' Does
'This last expression is Principal Rainy's. (Cf. Ger
man genugthun.)

1 68 THE FACT OF CHRIST
it find its meaning, not in a human weakness,
which though we should never mock it, we
could not adore, but in the unprecedented strain
of the meeting of human sin and that moral
order which condemns sin — that appallingly-
real and absolutely uncompromising meeting
which had to take place somewhere, somehow,
if a Divine, an ethically true and ultimate for
giveness was to be? It has not taken place in
our lives; that we know. Did it take place
there? How, then, would all comparisons be
tween the cup of hemlock and that cup be
hushed and shamed and awed !
These seem wild, and may seem even mon
strous, thoughts, but it is Jesus Himself who
suggests them. And the Christian mind — the
mind led by that Spirit which was to ' take the
things of Christ and show them unto us ' —
does not recoil from them appalled, but it is
sure that they are true. It has no doubt, that
is to say, that the meaning of the death of Jesus
is His bearing the responsibility for sin in face
of the law of God that condemns sin. The
Christian man is sure of it not simply because
the alternative is, as I have indicated, the affect-

THE FINAL MEANING 169
ing of all his Christianity. He is sure of it for
another reason. In that death — and let us
again remember that that means the whole ex
perience from Gethsemane to the end — the
Christian man can recognize something that
should be his own but has not been, and, in the
evangel come in Jesus, is not to be his own.
It brings home what would be his case if he,
with all his sins upon his head, ' unhousel'd,
disappointed, unaneled,' were brought to face
God's law. A dark and dreadful mystery
hangs over the Garden and the Cross, but one
thing in it all presses home clear — there I
might have been and should have been. This
is why the Christian heart in all ages — with
doubtless varied interpretation, yet with a com
mon experience deeper than its differences —
has said, ' He was wounded for our transgres
sions,' or, ' Who died for us,' or, ' Who loved
me and gave Himself for me.' There is noth
ing or little gained by multiplying words about
this. It cannot be said much better or very
differently in the end than at the beginning,
or by the most learned than by the simplest. It
is the ' our,' the ' us,' the ' me ' that say it all.

170 THE FACT OF CHRIST
You cannot state this great meaning of the
death of Jesus without personal pronouns.
When you can use these thus you have said
everything. You have found the final mean
ing of the fact of Christ.
The final meaning of the fact of Christ, then,
is that He has opened up ' the way of forgive
ness ' for us by, on our account, doing right by
the ethical order which connects sin and its due
desert, and without respect to which a true, ul
timate, and Divine forgiveness could not be.
Thus He ' reconciles us to God,' who is that
ethical order, and on the strength of this, relig
ion as a fellowship and friendship between
God and us can begin and go on. Let us note
the two pillars on which all this view rests.
One is ethical principle, the other historical
fact. The principle is that forgiveness in God
must not compromise or subvert the order of a
moral universe; the fact is the death of Jesus
as interpreted by His own words, by the gen
eral impression of His life and character and
person, and by the consciousness of the Chris
tian man. On these pillars rests the stupen-

THE FINAL MEANING 171
dous phenomenon of what, in theological lan
guage, is called the Atonement.
There are many persons who, at this point,
stop; that is to say, as it is usually put, they
accept ' the fact of the Atonement,' but profess
no sort of explanation of it. They say with
Coleridge, ' factum est; and, beyond the infor
mation contained in the enunciation of the fact,
it can be characterized only by its conse
quences ' ; 1 or with Butler, in more guarded
terms, that ' if the Scripture has, as surely it
has, left this matter of the satisfaction of Christ
mysterious,' then ' it is our wisdom thankfully
to accept the benefit by performing the con
ditions upon which it is offered on our part,
without disputing how it was procured on
His.' * Now, if what is meant by such lan
guage is that we cannot reduce to a final and
complete statement the principles involved in
the forgiveness of sins through the work of
Jesus, then it is all admitted. For to under-
1 Aids to Reflection. There does not seem to be much
aid to reflection in the bare enunciation of an impene
trable factum est.
* Analogy, pt. n. ch. v.

172 THE FACT OF CHRIST
stand fully the Atonement were to understand
these three things and their ultimate relation
to each other — the greatest thing in God, which
is His love ; the strongest thing in the universe,
which is law; and the darkest thing in man,
which is sin. These are matters which cer
tainly stretch beyond our comprehension. But
if what Coleridge and Butler mean is that we
cannot even expect to discern any moral or
rational principles in this great fact, that is
quite another thing. In this case the Atone
ment could be in no proper sense a fact for
religion. For religious truth is truth that has
it in it to be a motive and persuasion and
appeal to the life of thinking beings. Its facts,
then, cannot be facts impenetrable to thought.
They must be luminous, not opaque. To deny
this of the Atonement is really to dislodge it
from religion and make it a merely algebraical
fact. It will indeed ever stretch beyond us
into mystery — and it is good for us thereby to
be reminded that God's thoughts are ' greater
than the measure of our minds ' — but it cannot
be merely a mystery. Its principles, however

THE FINAL MEANING 173
inexhaustible, must be approachable. To
Christian thought and experience they must
suggest not the dumb darkness of mystery but
the light of rational and moral truth.
It is perhaps reasonable that, having said
this, one should add a few words in elucidation
of these principles. These lectures are not
theological, and it did not seem necessary in
connection with either of the other meanings of
the fact of Christ to discuss the doctrine, in
the one case, of the Holy Spirit, or, in the
other, of the Christology. In these cases the
religious facts had their own sufficient meaning
and value. But for various reasons the subject
of the Atonement is in a somewhat different
position. It cannot have even its purely re
ligious value for us if we are in the dark or in
error as to any understanding of it. And,
therefore, one may add to what has been said
an addendum with some remarks on the spir
itual principles that seem to underlie the for
giveness of our sins through the Atonement of
Jesus Christ. It must be understood that only
the briefest outline is attempted here.

174 THE FACT OF CHRIST
Addendum : The Principles of the
Atonement
The work of Jesus Christ in atoning for the
sins of men is not a new departure in His life.
It is but the carrying out to its bitter end that
saving of men which was His aim all through.
What, therefore, we should seek in it is not
new principles but rather new implications and
applications of the ruling principles already dis
cernible in other and less mysterious aspects of
His work. And so I begin by asking what is
the ruling principle in all Christ's relations to
man in His coming to save us?
What that is it is not difficult to discover.
It has presented itself all through our investi
gations of the fact of Christ. Let us recall the
first and simplest of the meanings we have
found in this fact. When we discussed the
meaning of Christ for ethical life and character
we discovered that to be more and other than
His bequeathing to us a lofty teaching and a
supreme example. We found that He gave
us of His spirit, which means that, in a won
derful but real way, He Himself entered into
and became part of our thoughts and affections

THE FINAL MEANING 175
and will — part of, in short, ourselves. ' I live,
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' He is the
real name of our better and true self. Some
thing of this is all through characteristic of
Christianity, and is distinctive — something that
has no pretence to a parallel in Buddhism or
Mohammedanism. This is a clear and dis
tinctive element in Christ's saving relation to
men, and the principle of it is simply enough
stated. It is that of a oneness, an inward
unitedness between Christ and humanity. This
is the idea expressed by Christ Himself under
such a figure as ' I am the vine, ye are the
branches,' and St. Paul carries on the same idea
by such a figure as that of the head and the
members. This spiritual oneness with Christ,
who not only comes before us in history but
becomes one within us and identical with us —
Christ is in a wonderful way identical with a
man's best self — is the principle in all His
saving relations to men, and Christianity can
not be stated apart from it. And the principle
that is at the root of forgiveness is not, I re
peat, a new departure, but is a further applica
tion of the same idea.

176 THE FACT OF CHRIST
The problem of forgiveness we have seen to
be this. God is the source and sustainer of the
ethical order of the universe — rather, indeed,
is that order — and an ethical order that is truly
ethical must condemn sin and ' rivet together '
(as Plato said) sin and doom; how then can
God forgive a humanity that is sinful? The
principle of a oneness between Christ and hu
manity suggests, in answer to this question, a
counter-question, namely: How can God con-
I demn that which has Christ in it? If Christ
be one with us, so that God cannot look at us
apart from Him, how shall condemnation be
God's verdict on us? This is the principle of
the Atonement. It is the essential principle in
any aspect of Christianity, but it has, in con
nection with this aspect of forgiveness, new and
profound implications and consequences.
Two quotations from two eminent teachers
will illustrate the directions in which these lie.
There is a famous passage in Luther's Com
mentary on the Epistle to the Galatians in
which he applies this idea in one direction with
characteristic vividness and force. He repre
sents God as saying to Christ : ' Be thou Peter

THE FINAL MEANING 177
the denier, Paul the persecutor ....
briefly, be Thou the person that hath committed
the sins of all men.' Then, Luther goes on:
' The law cometh and saith, I find Him a sin
ner .. . therefore let Him die.' 1 The
quotation needs no exposition; there can be no
dubiety about Luther's meaning. But another
eminent writer on the subject applies the same
idea in precisely the opposite way. M'Leod
Campbell — whose work on the Atonement,
however criticizable in parts, is one of the few
books of its kind that command and repay care
ful study — says in a strain very similar to
Luther : ' Let us suppose that all the sin of
humanity has been committed by one human
spirit . . . and let us suppose this spirit,
loaded with all this guilt, to pass out of sin
into holiness . . . becoming perfectly
righteous, with God's own righteousness.' In
such a case, which is ' the actual case of Christ,
the holy one of God, bearing the sins of all
men,' this righteousness would be, Dr. Camp
bell thinks, a ' true and proper satisfaction.' '
1 In loc. iii. 13.
3 Nature of the Atonement, ch. vi.

178 THE FACT OF CHRIST
In other words, and to contrast this view with
Luther's, when ' the law comes ' it finds not so
much Him — that is, Christ — a sinner and so
says He must die, as rather that the sinner is
become Christ and so it is satisfied.
All views of the Atonement may be roughly
classified according to which of these two di
rections they take. One class emphasizes
Christ's union with us and our sin : ' Him that
knew no sin God made sin on our behalf.' The
other emphasizes humanity's oneness with
what He is : 'by the obedience of one many
were made righteous.' Now the most intel
lectually irritating thing in the world is a false
alternative. There is a false alternative when
we are invited to pit these views against one
another, and choose one of them or the other.
Both views must be held; both directions fol
lowed. And for this clear reason. The prin
ciple is a oneness, a union, between the sinner
and Christ. Well, a union just because it is a
union, has two complementary aspects and in
volves two sets of consequences. If Christ and
His people are one, that has implications for us
in view of what He is, and also implications

THE FINAL MEANING 179
for Him in view of what we are. The one re
sult follows as much as the other. We must
look along the lines suggested by the German
doctor and also those suggested by the Scot
tish. The Atonement, because its principle is
a union, has two sides, and non uno itinere po
test pervenire ad tarn grande secretum.1
It is the implications in that aspect of this
union which Luther emphasized in the quota
tion given above which are the more unwel
come to many. But to become man surely
must include some relation on Christ's part to
the position in which man stood. For human
ity was in a certain position — the position,
namely, of being condemned by the ethical
order which connects sin and doom. If Christ
became man with a reservation on this point,
then He evaded the very point of man's need.
But there is no justification for the suggestion
of any such reservation. He took upon Him
to deliver man. To do so, He became man
under the condition that created the need of
deliverance, and that is the condition of con-
1 " Not by one way only can we reach to so great a
secret."

180 THE FACT OF CHRIST
demnation. By no word or act did Christ dis
regard that condition or minimize it. On the
contrary He accepted it as His condition be
cause it was the condition of the humanity
with which He identified Himself. And He
then dealt with it. He dealt with it in a great
and serious and real way; not seeking to shirk
it or subvert it, but doing all that is right by it.
And He did right by it by letting all that such
a condition had to say be said to Himself. In
saying this we must take care not to say more
than this. How it works out, and what it
precisely meant for Him are not to be unguard
edly stated. Expressions such as that God
punished Christ or that God was angry with
Him are inappropriate, and the latter is — as
even Calvin admits 1 — an impossibility. But
the things that are clearly to be asserted are
two : that the ethical law connecting sin and
doom was in no wise suppressed, but was given
effect to really and adequately; and that this
full and adequate expression of it came upon
Him. It has not come upon us; it is part of
the evangel that it will not come upon us. But
lInstitutio, n. xvi. ii.

THE FINAL MEANING 181
i. has not therefore been canceled. It has had
right done by it. If you ask, Where? the an
swer is to be found in the fact that when Christ
became man He accepted the condition in which
man stood and its consequences, and He ex
hausted them on our behalf. Whatever diffi
culty or mystery is about this, it and it alone up
holds an absolutely essential principle in any for
giveness that can be of God — namely, that the
ethical order of a moral universe is not thereby
compromised. The reality of this identifica
tion with us of Him who ' was numbered with
the transgressors ' that He might make answer
on their behalf must be held to, though in this
— as indeed in all His relations to us — Christ
is more and undertakes more than we can ex
plain. This is one side of that oneness between
Christ and us which is the principle of forgive
ness. But it is only one side. All this is funda
mental, but not final. It is only one-half of an
Atonement. The need of the other side sug
gests itself immediately. For even granting to
the full the facts of Christ making Himself an
swerable to the ethical order connecting sin and

1 82 THE FACT OF CHRIST
doom, after all, how does that affect me? I
am not Christ. He may have made an answer,
but that does not make it my answer. If I
were He, it were all well ; but I am not He. I
am still a sinner, and I am answerable still. It
is here that the principle of the Christian relig
ion — that of union between Christ and man —
approaches us again, and, with its complement
ary application, completes its evangel of for
giveness. It comes saying this. Here is Christ who is
' the righteous,' who has done right by all the
claims of ethical order that connect sin and
doom, and He would now be your true self.
As He has identified Himself with man as far
as man's general relation to God's laws was
concerned, so now He calls men — individual
hearts and wills — to admit Him to a personal
union with themselves. This is the call of the
evangel of forgiveness, not to believe any
mere fact or doctrine such as Christ died for
sins; but to receive, to become one with, in
mind, heart and will, the Person who has thus
answered for sin. Then, in a real and spir-

THE FINAL MEANING 183
itual sense, is not His answer yours, if you in
a real and spiritual sense are He ? ' There is
therefore no condemnation to them that are in
Christ Jesus.' They are identified with the
perfect answer to the law connecting sin and
doom, because in inward reality they are iden
tified with the Answerer.
Thus our union to Christ — an inward union
of mind, heart, will, and life — completes what
He did in identifying Himself with our con
dition, and the result is the gospel of forgive
ness. Observe how ethical this gospel is. A
spurious evangel of forgiveness that merely
rings the changes on what Christ has done till
we ' only believe it ' may well be open to the
charge of not at least necessarily securing for
forgiveness an adequate and immediate ethical
content. And in evangelical Protestantism,
the forgiveness of sins is too often represented
as one thing, and Christian morality as an
other — the latter to be expected to follow the
former from, generally, the sense of gratitude.
This is a very defective and erroneous manner
of stating it. The true way of it is this. For-

1 84 THE FACT OF CHRIST
giveness is not only because of Christ but in
Him.1 There is no such thing in the gospel
as mere forgiveness. There is nothing in the
gospel that is separable from Christ. You
cannot have forgiveness without having the
Forgiver, without admitting Him to an inward
union with your mind and heart and life. Only
thus is His answer yours. But you cannot
thus admit Christ to mind and heart and life
without admitting the whole business of the
moral life. And so morality is no mere adden
dum to forgiveness. It comes as an imperative
and indisputable part of Christ, of whom also
forgiveness is an indissociable part. You can
not have this which we are calling the final
meaning of the fact of Christ, without having
also the first meaning of the same fact, — with
out finding that He means for you a new life.
Christ is not divided.
But while this is to be said, there is some
thing else also to be said. I have tried to say
that forgiveness is inseparable from the moral
ideal that rises before us, and that it is only by
our being inwardly one with the great An-
' This is a point greatly insisted upon by Luther-

THE FINAL MEANING 185
swerer of the law's claims that His answer is
ours. Now our realization of the moral ideal
and our union in mind and heart and life with
Christ are really but begun. It might there
fore seem that our forgiveness is in a merely
embryo stage, a state of probation rather than
of assured achievement. But this is not the
note of the evangel. Whenever we are really
united in sincerity of heart and will to Christ,
even though it be, as it will be, imperfectly,
then, already, His answer to the law of con
demnation is ours and that is a finished and
complete answer. With our point of contact
with Him we find something on which we can
take a stand. He has redeemed us from the
curse of the law. And thus arises, in all true
evangelical Christianity, its note of immortal
assurance towards God. It is not the dawn of
the faint hope of forgiveness in the end. It is
a confidence stablished and firm and sure. In
our contact with Christ we find also a call, as I
have said, to begin and go on with a holy life.
But it is a great thing when the Christian man
goes forth to that conflict animated with the
sense of what his Lord has done for him

186 THE FACT OF CHRIST
against his foes, and so fights with the inspira
tion of a redemption achieved and secure.1
These few paragraphs, however fragmentary
they may be, must suffice here as a statement of
the principles of the Atonement for sin through
Jesus Christ. It is not to be expected that any
statement, even the most elaborate, can be an
exposition of the matter finally or shall answer
all difficulties about it. It must be remembered
that the whole event is essentially and abso
lutely unparalleled, and that therefore it cannot
be brought under general principles. It is un
paralleled simply and clearly because its pri
mary condition is unique. That is a oneness
between Christ and His people. This is a thing
unparalleled in human experience and cannot
be reduced under any general categories of
friendship or the solidarity of the race or any
' I venture to think that what this paragraph asserts is
at the heart of the evangel, the ' great truth ' of which
is rather here than, as Canon Gore states, in that ' God
deals with us by anticipation.' (Incarnation of Son of
God, p. 225.) Canon Gore quotes Augustine's well-
known expression, that God regards us 'non quales
sumus, sed quales futuri sumus,' which is true, but not
so true as its converse. It is a suggestive rather than a
scriptural expression.

THE FINAL MEANING 187
other. Of no other do we speak as we do of
Christ, who is, says a Father, ' our inseparable
life ' -,1 of no other leader or teacher do we
say that he and his are, as a great saint and
doctor describes Christ and Christians, ' quasi
una persona mystica' 2 Here is the root prin
ciple of the whole matter, and because it is
something absolutely unique, the Atonement
itself cannot be brought under any final gen
eral explanation. And if this unique root prin
ciple were remembered, many of the difficulties
and objections that are raised on this subject
would disappear. The chief and central ob
jection to the whole idea is that there is injus
tice in it ; it is unjust that one should thus bear
the sins of another. But are these words
' one ' and ' another ' quite applicable ? Here
is really no ' other ' ; as it is put in an old
Scottish catechism — ' Christ is not another per
son from His people properly." This, if you
will, is mystical, and I cannot explain in terms
' Ignatius, Ad Ephes., in.
' Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars m. quaest. xliii. art.
11. ' Craig's Catechism. A thought also in Thomas
Aquinas and Bernard.

1 88 THE FACT OF CHRIST
any point where God touches man. But the
mystery is fact and in that fact is the answer
to many an irrelevant and inappropriate charge
against the Atonement. Often these arise from
the ' illustrations ' of persons with unscriptural
and inexact imaginations. There can be no
illustrations of the Atonement. The Cross is
its own interpreter. And if this be so, and is
so because of its unique central principle of the
oneness of Christ and the Christian, then we
shall perceive that the reality of it all is seen
best, not from the disputings of the divines,
but in the school of the spirit's communion with
God. St. Paul deals most deeply with it in his
prayers. It is when a man confesses his moral
bankruptcy before God and realizes it, that it
comes home to his need how the Holy and
Harmless One so loved him as to identify
Himself with even his condemnation, and has
answered on his behalf. To mock at this
evangel is the jest of him who never felt the
wound. It is a sinner's only religion.

VI
WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

'E/MH yhp to fg»Xptor^ koX to airoOavew K€/

KcpSoS.
Paul.

VI
WHAT IS A' CHRISTIAN?
We have now reached a stage at which we may
pause and gather up some practical results from
the ground over which we have traveled.
In the first place we sought the original data
of Christianity, and these we saw to have been,
not in a philosophical or ethical system, but in
Jesus Christ Himself. We went on to ask
how far our religion of to-day could be based
on such data, and found that Christ is a fact
not only of history but also of present spiritual
life and experience — a fact, that is, within the
proper sphere of religion. Therefore we went
further and inquired what meanings this fact
contains for religion, and we found it to hold
meanings of the profoundest kind for character,
for faith, and for conscience — a new moral life,
a real revelation of the living God and an
evangel of assured forgiveness. All this is re-
191

192 THE FACT OF CHRIST
ligion, and this religion is Christianity, which
we cannot better define than as the meaning of
the fact of Christ. Indeed, that in that fact
are the data of the Christian religion has for
its correlate that Christianity is the content of
these data — the meaning of Christ.
But after all, to have done all this is not to
have done the main thing. After all, the main
thing is not to understand Christianity but to
be a Christian. The Light must be the life.
As Dr. Chalmers — always a great teacher on
the moral bearings of any truth — said, our
chief business with Christianity is ' to proceed
upon it.' x We have described this religion ;
we must not close without considering what
is to be done with it. We have been asking
what Christianity is; but what is a Christian?
This question must be answered clearly and
simply, for to be a Christian is certainly not
something abstruse and difficult to understand.
On the other hand it must be answered with a
just and adequate relation to Christianity as a
whole, and not merely in respect to some one
point in it. We shall guard ourselves in both
* Lectures on the Romans, lxxi.

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 193
of these directions by remembering what we
have found Christianity to be. It is the mean
ing of Christ. Well, a Christian would then ;
naturally be described as one who is responding
to that meaning. I shall explain the word ' re
sponding' more fully presently, but I use it
here in preference to any such more usual word
as ' believing,' because the latter has come to
be associated with merely matters of creed,
while, as we have seen, Christ has meanings for
life and character as well as, and perhaps even
prior to, faculties of intellect. Apart, how
ever, from such explanation, to speak of re
sponding to the meaning of the fact of Christ
at once raises a question. It will be said that
we have been stating the most stupendous
meanings in the fact and meanings that are, to
many, surrounded with the utmost intellectual
difficulty. Is it to be said that a Christian
must be a man who responds to all these? A
moment's reflection will clear this up. Have
we not found in Christ meanings for moral life
and character that are, not to many only, but
to all of us, surrounded with the utmost prac
tical difficulty? If it is difficult for some to

194 THE FACT OF CHRIST
respond to that intellectual meaning of Christ
for faith which, for example, declares He is a
God-man, it is also difficult for all to respond
to that moral meaning of Christ for character
which, for example, calls us to purity or love
in life. Our responding to Christ, then, is an
ideal. A perfect Christian would certainly re
spond to the complete meaning for thought and
for life of the fact of Christ. Where is the
perfect Christian? St. Paul counted not him
self to have apprehended. Luther described
himself as ' almost a Christian.' 1 A response
may be real though not perfect. And here we
must resist and even resent the strong but quite
unjustified tendency to treat on different prin
ciples our moral and our intellectual response
to Christ, and to mark a certain stage in spe
cially the latter, to which a man who can be
called a Christian must have advanced. There
are those who will call a man Christian even
though his practical response to the meanings
of Christ for life be very meager, but will deny
him the name if his intellectual response to the
meanings of Christ for doctrinal belief be not
l<De Servo Arbitrio, sect, cljcviii.

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 195
very adequate. This is untenable. The amount
of response to the meaning of Christ that is
requisite to make a man a Christian is to be de
termined in the same way alike in matters of
creed and matters of conduct. And if it be
asked, then, how it is determined, the answer is
clear. Men's mental and moral constitution
and circumstances are so individual and so vari
ous, that no man can draw the line in this mat
ter in either of its respects for another, nor can
it be drawn for all men at once; but each man's
responsibility, moral and intellectual, can be de
termined only in the region of the conscience,
and therefore only by the Searcher of the con
science. ' The Lord knoweth them that are
His.' And now from all this we may come to a
definition. If one were asked to state in terms
what a Christian is, I should say something like
this: a Christian is one who is responding to
whatever meanings of Christ are, through
God's Spirit, being brought home to his intellec
tual or moral conscience. This is a definition
at once exhaustive of the profoundest Chris
tianity and admissive of the simplest. The

196 THE FACT OF CHRIST
meanings of Christ, either for thought or life,
that one man may be able to respond to with
intellectual assent or practical obedience, will
be many and advanced ; another man may, with
equal earnestness and effort, be able, from his
constitution, upbringing or circumstances, to
respond to but the most elementary. Yet both
are Christians if both are responding with a
faithful conscience. One is a more mature
Christian than the other, not, necessarily, a
more real. Do not misunderstand me. I have
not said, nor do I mean, that a man may re
spond to just that in Christ which he chooses; I
spoke of what God's spirit brings home to the
conscience, and that is quite another thing from
the selection of our own inclination. Nor do I
imply that it does not seriously matter how
much meaning you put into Christ. It matters
immensely. The Christian who has not some
thing of the richness of the Christian faith as
well as the victory of the Christian life is a
great loser. But he is not ' lost.' He is to be
encouraged, not excommunicated. It is not
the amount of our achievement in either belief
or conduct that Christ first looks at, but the

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 197
honesty of our purpose. It is not the embar
rassed following of Himself He blames, but
the unfaithful. Where is the master more
ready than He to take the will for the deed ?
But we must spell this out a little more par
ticularly. I have been speaking of a man's
' responding ' to the meanings of Christ, and
this expression requires some explanation.
Well, to respond to the meanings of Christ is
to be what one should and must be if these are
really true. Let us recall the meanings of the
fact of Christ we have been discussing — mean
ings for character, for faith, and for conscience
— and then ask, ' What manner of persons
ought we to be ? ' What love and trust and
gratitude and obedience and service should ring
and rule in our being? This is not anything
vague or far away from life. It is life. Your
being is just your life. The scenery, the sur
roundings, the furniture of your life are those
of your being. All the affairs, interests, rela
tions of your life contribute to make you what
you are — to your being. Then it is in all these
that you are to respond to Christ — to find out
what bearings and directions the fact of Christ

198 THE FACT OF CHRIST
has for this fact of life and that, and to be true
to them. In short, to be a Christian or — to
use Dr. Chalmers's phrase — ' to proceed ' upon
Christianity is, day by day, in all the varied
circumstances of experience within and with
out, to bring together and honestly relate to
each other two great facts or sets of facts
which, when so brought together, wonderfully
elucidate and interpret one another — the fact of
Christ and the facts of life.
Thus is Christianity concerned, not with
merely a section of life — with the ' affairs of
the soul ' — but with all of it. No life — as I
think Luther has said somewhere — is more
worldly than a Christian's. It embraces every
thing that makes us what we are — all that,
lived in a certain light and treated from a cer
tain point of view. One of the great wrongs
that ecclesiastical Christianity has done religion
is to disparage or deny this, to give us the im
pression that a Christian life lived in the clois
ter is higher and holier than one lived in the
family, the market, the secular arena of the
world, and to bid us look to types of the former

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 199
rather than the latter for saintship.1 I cannot
find any meaning such as this in the fact of
Christ. The carpenter of Nazareth, who was
among men ' eating and drinking ' — He is ' our
only Saint.' We must secularize saintship by
sanctifying the secular life. ' What you do
now even after the flesh,' says an early Father,
' that is spiritual, for in Christ Jesus you do
everything.' 2 In that Christ Jesus, for it was
by Him that all things were made, the Chris
tian man can ' do everything ' — except sin.
The exception, we all feel, is crucial. What
ever other meanings of Christ may be difficult
to accept or disputable, this much is clear and
cardinal — that the invitation and persuasion to
be one with Him mean a war with sin. We
know as an axiom that sin is something incon-
' While saying this, one must, too, recognize the value
and even necessity of the ascetic ideal for certain periods
of Christian history. As has been justly said (by, I
suppose, the finest mind that Anglicanism has pos
sessed since it lost the devout, subtle Newman) ' it
must be looked upon as a great war, the only one that
could have made any impression on the world of that
day' (Dean Church's Occasional Papers, ii. 224).
Christian morality, when fighting for its very life against
the violent, savage grossness of the times, fought with a
corresponding violence.
'Ignatius, Ad Ephes., viii.

200 THE FACT OF CHRIST
sistent with Christ in its whole aim and princi
ple and activity. Now we shall most assuredly
not live life — this varied secular life — and yet
avoid or overcome sin unless in addition to and,
in a sense, over against all that has been said of
the breadth and secularity of the religious life,
we honestly admit another side of the question
and observe, simply but really, two things.
One of these is prayer. Our Christianity is
in constant danger of becoming merely a sys
tem — a doctrine or a praxis to which more or
less faithfully we adhere. If it be but this,
it certainly will not carry us victorious through
the ceaseless, subtle and varied temptations to
sin which meet us in life. There must be be
hind and in and through all this something per
sonal. We must realize that Christ means that
God is really and nearly taking to do with us,
very authoritatively, very graciously, very won
derfully. Our religion must be less merely a
doctrine to be studied and a duty to be done,
than a call, a touch, an intercourse. Then is
it a religion of a listening conscience, a wonder
ing spirit, an awed soul, a loving and a contrite
heart; and it is to these that sin is impotent.
Now, all this ' mutual speaking and hearing be-

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 201
tween God and the soul ' 1 finds its most real
and most definite expression in that most sim
ple and necessary thing, prayer. By it, as by
hardly anything else, ' we come into God's
presence and assure ourselves again of what
He is in Himself and of what He is to us.' a
No one, without that, is sin-proof. Of, on the
other hand, the practical potency of prayer
against sin little need be said. Take any known
besetting sin in your life ; pray against it. What
is the result? The result is that they cannot
live together. Your prayer will kill your sin,
or your sin will kill your prayer. There is
therefore no surer and clearer test of how a
man is dealing with this crucial matter of sin
in life than which, in especially his secret life,
is the survivor — sin or prayer ?
The other thing we must observe and admit
is self-discipline or self-denial. I have asserted
the breadth and worldliness of the Christian
life — the life that responds to Christ. But a
man will not go through the range of this
rich and engrossing life saying ' Yes ' to the
meanings for it all of Christ without saying a
1 Professor Candlish's Christian Salvation, p. 104.
"Professor Denney's Gospel Questions and Answers,
.P- Si.

202 THE FACT OF CHRIST
' No ' to many things. And this ' No ' he must
say, not only to what is plainly of sin, but also
to much, at times at least, which cannot be so
definitely characterized. The reason lies here.
We have to work out our Christianity in the
world with an imperfect and unreliable instru
ment. Theologians call it ' our fallen nature.'
Well, whatever name you give to human na
ture, this, at least, is true of it — that it is very
readily seduced by even morally legitimate
things to another view and construction of life
than Christ's. A man is simply either uncan-
did or unintelligent who does not admit this to
be a real fact in the situation. This world is
the place where men are to be Christians, but
it is a place certainly where very easily they be
come not Christians ; here is our true religious
opportunity, but it is a perilous one. This is
not a reason for fleeing from life. Such perils
as come to a man in the path of his duty, he is
meant to be ennobled by overcoming. But it
is a reason for self-discipline and self-denial,
What will imperil or deaden an honest and full
response to Christ must be ' cut off.' This or
that must be denied, and — what is perhaps
more important — all things must be re-con-

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 203
sidered, re-valued, re-arranged in life. Some
of us, for our own sakes or our neighbors',
may have to do that more than others. Some
may have, as Christ Himself plainly put it, to
cut off their right hand or pluck out their right
eye. It is not, as the mediaeval church taught,
the higher, more saintly ideal. It is, as Christ
said, to ' enter the kingdom of Heaven
maimed.' But in some way — and often the
most real ways have, to others than a man him
self, least appearance of being a self-denial at
all — it must be done by all who would really
mean to respond fully and faithfully to Christ
in this complicated, compromising life. There
is something singularly ennobling about the
uncowled, unproclaimed self-discipline of a rich
and passionate nature that loves life not the less
but Christ the more. It can be done gladly if
it be done for His sake, and some day He may
very literally recompense it. That is the mean
ing of the lines : —
' Make me a cottage in the vale, she said,
Where I may mourn and pray;
Yet pull not down my palace towers that are
So lightly, beautifully built;
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt' '
'Tennyson's Palace of Art.

204 THE FACT OF CHRIST
The last couplet suggests another aspect of
the meaning of Christ in life, and on it I add a
word. The poet's lines suggest a larger future.
Now, I have spoken of this life as the real
sphere in the circumstances and conditions of
which we must be Christians, and yet as a place
in which our response to Christ is incomplete,
imperiled, and to be maintained only by a war
fare and with prayer and self-denial. At the
end of life is the fact of death. That is a very
great and real fact, so great and real a fact that
any true or satisfying view of life must take ac
count of death and have something to say about
it. The fact of Christ does so. The ultimate
meaning of Christ is a future meaning. He is
He who not only ' was ' in history and ' is ' in
experience, but ' is to come ' in the beyond. Of
that we know very little; it is one of those
places where even the true religion hardly takes
us out of agnosticism. But if Christ's mean
ings here for character, for faith, and for con
science are true promises, that meaning of
Christ who is to come will be, than anything in
this life, a ' far better.' It will be that if it lead
from a good that is embarrassed, menaced, in
complete, to that good made safe, victorious,

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 205
abundant, and yet not less but more real, per
sonal and living. And so St. Paul, who said
' To me life is Christ ' added 'and death gain.'
This may seem unnatural and strained, and
yet I will say that there is nothing about Chris
tianity that more convinces of its Divine de
vising than this, its suitability for both life here
and life hereafter. It is thus that it declares it
self to be the religion that men need. Christ is
for life in the most real and secular sense. And
we are for life in the most real and secular
sense — we men to whom this life calls so stir
ringly and strongly and sweetly. But the more
deeply and worthily we answer that call, is it
not a call to something else ? This life is richly,
really good ; but just in its very good — in truth
or love or character or the service of man — are
strange and subtle suggestions of a better than
itself. ' I have found life,' said the subject of
a modern biography,1 ' sweet, bright, beauti
ful; I should dearly like to live it again.' Is
this wish the true and deepest corollary to this
experience? Is not the true and deepest thing
in this life's sweetness, brightness, beauty, an
intimation, a glimpse, an earnest of something
1 Life of Fitzjames Stephen.

206 THE FACT OF CHRIST
sweeter, brighter, yet more beautiful? Is it
not this which gives to our actions their tender-
est tints, to our affections their purest pathos,
and informs even nature with that subtle sig
nificance which makes us say that
' the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' ' ?
The sea of the Infinite laps upon the shore of
the finite where we now live. When we sigh
for satisfaction here, we do not realize that in
this world satisfaction is for us a form of sui
cide. We are made for this life, yet not for
this life only, but, after this, for a ' far better.'
And so is our Christianity. The Christ who
disclosed such fit meanings for us in the discip
line of our life here, discloses a like fittedness
for our nature when the last chapter of that
discipline comes and we look out to the future.
Thus a Christian man blesses God every day of
his life, and, on the greatest day of a man's life,
which is the day of his death, blesses Him still
and not fearfully or repiningly enters into the
untold meanings of the endless fact of Christ.
I must close, but would at least mention one
question out of many that remain. We have
'Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 207
been speaking of what it is to be a Christian.
But why be a Christian ?
There are two voices neither of which is ever
long silent in the heart of any serious and hon
est-thinking man. One is a voice within that
speaks to a man of himself. It shuts the door
on the throng of the world, in which so easily
we forget our personal responsibilities and even
our own moral identity, and confers with us
solus cum solo about our individual character
and destiny. It is a small voice, never over
heard in another, easily drowned even in one
self. But whenever there is a stillness in our
life — especially if the great silence has hushed
our spirits by its nearness — it speaks out clear
and makes us listen. The other is not a small
voice. It is the multitudinous murmur of hu
manity in its labor and sorrow — now an un
couth roar as of the breaking sea, now a moan
as of the homeless wind. This, too, can be
drowned by a selfishness, even a religious
selfishness, that dulls the ears and deadens the
heart, but again and again it disturbs men and
awakens within them thoughts of a worthier
life than that lived but for themselves. These

208 THE FACT OF CHRIST
are the two great voices that are ever speaking
to the human heart. They are two voices, yet
they bear but one message. They are both a
call to look to and to learn of Jesus Christ. We
need Him for our own sakes if we are going
to live rightly and die restfully; we need Him
for others' sakes if in any deep and real way
we would serve them. Alike by every reason
of regard towards our true selves and every
call of love towards our brother, we are bound
to be Christians. And ah ! there is this too, if
only we will think of it and can read it as it is
written over our lives and in the fact of Christ
— the unmeasured and unmerited goodness and
grace that God has shown to you and me.
These are reasons for being a Christian.
They sum themselves up in this. Jesus said of
Himself, ' I am the Truth.' In these lectures I
have not argued from the authority of Church
or Bible; I have tried to state Christ, who, if
He be the Truth, is His own authority. Does-
He not mean to heart or mind or conscience
some things that are deeply and really truth?
Then, to be a Christian is the first principle of
a true life.

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