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THE KINSLEY SERIES
Complete in Three Volumes
MAN'S TOMORROW $1.20 net
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 1.00 net
WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 1.00 net

The arguments and illustrations
in the three volumes making up
this series are intimately inter
woven, and together give in its
entirety the author's thought
in a wide and supremely im
portant field of inquiry. Each
volume will, however, be found
complete in itself, — an interest
ing and instructive work. Full
description sent upon request.

SHERMAN, FRENCH fcf COMPANY
PUBLISHERS BOSTON

WAS CHRIST DIVINE?

BY
WILLIAM W. KINSLEY
Author of " Man's Tomorrow," " Does Prayer Avail ? "
" Views on Vexed Questions," " Old Faiths
and New Facts," etc.

BOSTON
SHERMAN, FRENCH y COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912
Sherman, French & Company

PREFACE
The arguments and illustrations, used in an
swering the questions of "Man's To-morrow" and
"Does Prayer Avail?" in the first two volumes of
this recent series already issued from the press,
are intimately interwoven with those employed in
this the third, "Was Christ Divine?" While,
however, the three, both in their nature and mode
of treatment, constitute together a single unified
threefold theme, giving the author's thought in
its entirety in a wide and supremely important
field of inquiry, yet each will be found complete in
itself.
( A multitude of most interesting and illuminat
ing facts, facts full of suggestion and inspiration,
have been discovered through the researches of the
physical sciences and of the science of psychology,
bearing directly upon this the third most per
plexing of the World's problems, the true nature
of the personality of Christ.)
With each inflooding of new light there arises
a new necessity for a reinvestigation of this baf
fling mystery. Can our passionate questionings
be satisfied? Can the secret be solved?
r In place of the half-blinding reverential awe
with which the enigma of Christ's personality has
been approached thus far there has come in this
critical scientific age a spirit of keen scrutiny, a

PREFACE
cool determination to obtain, if possible, some so
lution that will stand the test of modern thought.
Is there any possible common meeting ground
for the hitherto supposed irreconcilable Trinita
rian and Unitarian schools of belief? The author
would like to have his readers keep this query in
mind as they acquaint themselves with the facts
and arguments which he has written down with
candor and with care.
It has been his fixed determination in institut
ing this inquiry to champion none but his own in
dependent conclusions reached after a most pains
taking study. He has endeavored during his in
vestigations to hold in strict abeyance all his pre
conceived opinions, his inherited beliefs, and to
follow fearlessly the light as far as he has been
able to see the light. He does not hold a brief
for any established school of thought, for any sect
of faith ; on the contrary it has long been his fixed
determination not to advocate any opinion, how
ever authoritatively affirmed, which he cannot
himself fully endorse and defend after mature
reflection, as appearing to him reasonable and
just. Whether he has arrived at the truth,
whether he has been able to shed any new light on
this most intricate of themes he is willing to leave
to the thoughtful consideration of all who have
honest doubts to solve, and who are sincerely seek
ing to solve them.
W. W. K.
Washington, D. C.

WAS CHRIST DIVINE ?

WAS CHRIST DIVINE?

/ Skeptics of to-day take issue with Christian
thinkers, not as to the fact of a historic Christ,
but as to his nature, contending that he is noth
ing more than one of the world's great original
geniuses who attained eminence in the department
of religious thought, and whose fortune it was to
flourish in an age naturally superstitious because
antedating scientific inquiry, — an age in which
popular reverence enveloped the heads of its he
roes in a halo of divine light and taxed the cre
dulity of after-centuries by myths and traditions
of their marvelous miracle-working.)
They do not hesitate to concede that he was a
man of excellent spirit, profound wisdom, excep
tionally pure life, that his discourses abound in
most praiseworthy sentiment. Neither do they
hesitate to affirm that to account him Divine even
in any qualified sense is a notion excusable, it may
be, in some confiding child-age of the world, awed
by mystery and ridden by priests, but ill beseem
ing the bold, investigating spirit of the twentieth
century. As this opinion widely prevails in learned and
especially scientific circles, and is gaining ground
so rapidly that we meet it everywhere in books, in
the columns of the press, on the platform, and

2 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
in the thoughtful social circle, every earnest
truth-seeker feels impelled thoroughly to re-exam
ine this most vital and vexed of all the questions
that have come up for settlement, "What think ye
of Christ? whose son is he?" and to decide whether
the answer given by infidel or Christian best bears
the crucial test of modern thought.
We find on reflection that this question natur
ally resolves itself into these three :
1. Is the human race of sufficient worth to war
rant such condescension and sacrifice on God's
part as were displayed in Christ?
9,. Is such earthly mission absolutely necessary
to free man from the guilt of sin and the power
of it?
3. Are there in the characteristics and career
of Christ convincing evidences that he was that
Divine Visitant engaged in this most astounding
mission of mercy?
1. Is the human race of such transcendent
worth that the great God of the universe, in order
to reclaim it from sin, would enter into any excep
tionally intimate relationship with a single frail
human spirit, identify himself in closest sympathy
with its sacrificial life of extremest poverty and
humiliation in which it will consent to be scoffed
at, traduced, forsaken by friends, and finally put
to a cruel and shameful death by the hands of
hate? When we view the vast world-peopled heavens

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 3
through the tubes of our telescopes, and reflect
that our little earth is but a single grain of sand
on the measureless shores of immensity, that the
solar system, of which our globe is but a very
inconspicuous member, is only one of millions
of similar systems that compose the Galaxy or
Milky Way whose luminous band encircles the
heavens; and that this mighty nebula is but one
out of thousands of sun-clusters already un
covered by the searching eye of science, we are
overwhelmed with the vastness of God's plans
and cares, and instinctively feel that it would be
the height of presumption to suppose that he
has given any special attention to the welfare
of this single race of beings that inhabit this
little satellite, much more that he has entered
into close sympathetic union with a member of an
obscure peasant family of Jews, who permitted
himself to be despised, afflicted, and smitten of
men. If we confine our minds to these lines of
thought solely, the upas tree of unbelief will
soon cast its baleful shadow over us. But,
happily, science has carried the torch of knowl
edge far down the corridors of forgotten time
and disclosed a well-nigh infinite patience and
painstaking on the part of the Almighty in in
carnating right here, by successive acts of crea
tion, his conception of life. The earth is small
indeed, being twelve hundred thousand times less
in bulk than the sun it circles. But the micro-

4 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
scope tells us that God does not need vast stel
lar spaces and ponderous masses of matter in
which to work his wonders ; that he can embody
his choicest thoughts, as readily within the in
finitesimal boundaries of atoms as within the wide
circumferences of suns ; that with him bulk or
avoirdupois is not the unit of worth; that the
germ-force lodged inside every minute sphere
of fish-spawn exhibits in its work the same Divine
depths of wisdom and perfection of skill that
characterize the operations of those mighty
organizing forces that convert amorphic vapor-
banks into million-sphered sun-clusters. The
spectroscope tells us that other worlds are con
stituted like our own, that processes of planet-
making are still going on, and that marks of in
completeness and evidences of continued evolu
tion are clearly traceable ; and the idea naturally
suggests itself that it is by no means improbable
that many yet incomplete and uninhabited worlds
are to be peopled from this very globe of ours.
Certain it is, through the gates of death have
passed out somewhere, age after age, countless
multitudes of disembodied spirits ; and who can
tell when this mysterious procession of throng
ing souls shall cease to come and go across this
narrow stage of being? For aught we know,
earth is the nursery of the universe, the great
training-school of the stars.
The very scientists who decry Christianity
have by their researches unwittingly so exalted

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 5
our conceptions of man's place in Nature as to
silence all questioning whether, in order to effect
his salvation, God would consent to such a sacri
fice as that claimed, provided this end could in no
other way be secured. Most abundant and con
vincing evidences have been unearthed of the fact
that God, after hundreds of thousands of years
of patient progressive work, reached in man the
full and final expression, the ultima Thule, of
creative thought on this planet.
Would that somehow we might be lifted in con
templation to some far height, where with sweep
ing glance we could note as mapped out beneath
us over the populous periods of the past those
majestic outlines of Divine purpose which found
in man, in his gifts and destiny, its long-awaited
consummation !
In our geological researches we find that God
revealed almost at the outset his full ground-
plan of vital organization, the fossil records of
the rocks declaring that mollusks, radiates,
articulates, and vertebrates — the four cardinal
characteristics, the set patterns after which all
bodily forms have since been built — appeared on
the earth nearly at the same epoch ; and the fact
that around these primal conceptions all other
creative thoughts have clustered and have served
simply to unfold their well-nigh inexhaustible
possibilities of adaptation to the demands of an
ever-varying environment; and the further fact
that not one of them has fallen into disuse, but

6 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
is as distinct and dominant to-day as at their first
appearing, that they have survived all changes,
withstood climates and cataclysms, have neither
increased nor diminished, were clearly marked at
the first, are clearly marked now — may be taken
as a sure token that God's ultimate purpose as
to the framework of living organisms has been
reached. After the highest, most complex of these four
types — the vertebrates — the human body has
been fashioned, and in this sub-kingdom it ranks
among the Mammalia, the highest of the five
classes, and in this class among the Primates,
the highest of the twelve orders, being considered
by scientists the last term of an organic series.
And it not only far surpasses all other organisms
as a physical instrument of the mind, but bears
upon it such marks of Divine completeness, such
absolute competency to perform the most com
plicated and the most exalted tasks to which
pieces of mechanism can possibly be assigned,
that we may safely affirm that in it the full Di
vine ideal has been attained.
Let us consider this a little in detail. Hugh
Miller has called attention to the fact that in
man alone the body assumes an ideal position.
No other vertebrate stands erect. Between the
horizontal fish and the partially stooping ape
spinal columns may be found at every degree of
the quadrant.
In organs of sense-perception and in powers

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 7
of manipulation man's body furnishes to his in
tellect an equipment so admirable in its com
pleteness that nothing further can reasonably be
desired or can be used to advantage, and in the
well-nigh universal range of its capacities is im
measurably superior to that of any other animal.
It is true that a dog's scent, a gorilla's hand, an
eagle's eye, a horse's neck, in some points sur
pass our own. Many animals have been better
clad by Nature for warmth and beauty than we,
have more impenetrable armor, sharper claws
and teeth, easier and swifter locomotion, greater
powers of endurance. Many have their limbs
terminated in most cunningly fashioned tools,
which from the first they know precisely how to
use most effectively. But though we can point
to this one or that which in some respects has an
organ more perfect, or more perfectly under
control, yet through the sovereignty of our in
tellects, through their power of inventive and
adaptive thought, we are able to bring our
bodies into such' development and training, and
to fashion and place in our hands such tools, and
so to supplement our organs by those of the
animals below us, which we domesticate, and also
so to utilize Nature's forces, that our minds have
at last at their disposal the acutest senses and
the strongest muscles in the world. We make
our own the scent of the dog, the wing power
of the bird, the strength of the horse, the sight
of the cat, the instinct of the bee.

8 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
The camel, that living ship of the desert, with
its great store of fat on its back, thick sole on
its foot, long lash of its eye, its self-closing nos
tril, capacious honeycombed water-bags, won-
drously acute sight and smell, its almost exhaust
less endurance of muscular fiber, is especially
fitted to withstand the privations and the blind
ing, suffocating siroccos of the desert. Man has
long since so thoroughly domesticated the only
two known species of this animal that not a single
individual now exists in a wild state. It has be
come so emphatically the servant of man that the
earth's widest sand-wastes have been turned into
highways of commerce, across which richly laden
caravans are constantly threading their way.
We not only develop our own organs into
marvelous capacity by patient training and sup
plement them by appropriating those of the
brutes, but we vastly multiply their original re
sources by ingenious seizure of Nature's ele
mental forces, so that we speak with telephones,
look through the tubes of great refractors, add
to our detective sense of taste and touch and
smell by chemical tests, multiply our muscular
powers by applying steam, wind, electric energies,
until we can lift mountains, walk over seas or
under them, send our voices across continents,
transport our bodies to the clouds or burrow
them thousands of feet under ground, brave the
suns of tropics and the frozen breath of arctic
zones. From the shorn lamb's fleece and the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 9
worm's spun shroud we weave our woolen and
silken fabrics. The furry skins of the seal and
the otter and the mink protect our hairless backs,
the brilliant feathers of birds grace our persons,
the skilled industries of all the instinct-guided
creatures below us contribute to the cheer and
beauty of our homes. Were our bodies more
fully equipped, our minds would have less
stimulus for development. Just enough of bodily
endowment has been granted to show us what we
lack and how to get it, to create in us a desire
and a purpose to add to our store, the effect
being not to discourage, but to awaken and in
cite. No animal has any natural bodily advan
tage that is not in our reach to acquire or use
so that all the marvelous gifts of all the species
of sentient life we have a right to regard as parts
of our own fleshly furnishings, and we have rea
son to believe that for the housing of the human
mind all Nature has been commissioned by the
Almighty to pay bountiful tribute. In this ele
ment of universality lie the insignia of royalty.
The bee steps out from its cradle most admirably
equipped with tools for a specified work and with
all the unerring skill of an expert, but its sphere
is an extremely narrow one. It has no reaching
out of desire or of power, except for the smallest
part of this broad heritage. To drink from the
nectar cup of flowers, to fill its pollen baskets and
wax pouches, to build its cells and store them
with honey or eggs — these are to it the sum total

10 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
of life, its utmost longing, its unchangeable
destiny. So with every other one of God's crea
tures. In marked contrast to man, most cir
cumscribed spheres and subordinate positions are
assigned them.
Furthermore, man's bodily organs, even when
taken apart by themselves, un supplemented, are,
if considered each in the entirety of its powers,
in its flexibility and range, immeasurably supe
rior to those of all other animals, even the most
gifted. Man's hand, which is far in the lead of all his
other organs as a serviceable implement of the
mind, though in general structure and charac
teristics resembling that of the ape or of the
lemuroid, is vastly superior as to both the
variety, delicacy, precision, and swiftness of its
movements. Only man's hand is fully and per
manently lifted from the ground, and relieved
from the task of assisting in locomotion and sup
port — tasks which greatly tend to lessen its sup
pleness and to blunt its finer sensibilities. It
alone can with readiness oppose the thumb to
the fingers for the purposes of seizure, or is cap
able of pronation and supination — that is, of so
rolling itself that the back or the palm shall at
will lie uppermost. The gorilla's hand has
greater grasping power, but in this its supe
riority ceases ; for, being designed only for coarse
and menial offices, as the servant of a sluggish,
shallow, and wholly brutish mind, every finer

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 11
quality either was at the first denied it, or has
through neglect been long since withdrawn.
It is in the hand that our sense of touch is
most acute. We feel by means of papillas, — rod
like bodies about one-hundreth of an inch long,
coming up out of the lowest part of the cuticle,
and composed of nerves, blood-vessels, and
fibrous tissue — and it is right at the tips of our
fingers that these are the most abundant, though
they may be found scattered everywhere over the
surface of the body, and the extent to which the
revealing power of the fingers through this sense
has been carried by careful culture may well fill
us with most profound amazement. Experts
among the world's workers sometimes seem gifted
with magical insight. The silk throwsters of
Bengal, for instance, can by touch alone dis
tinguish twenty different degrees of fineness in
cocoons, even before they are unwound. The
achievements of the blind, who have been forced
to make their fingers supply in part their loss
of sight, show us how limitless are our possibili
ties in this direction, for they have gone so far
as to determine even differences of color, so we
are informed by Dr. Kitto in his work on The
Lost Senses. This expertness is attained by con
stantly recalling former experiences, instituting
comparisons, and completely absorbing the at
tention. Dr. William B. Carpenter assures us
that we can by persistently willing it increase
the flow of the nourishing blood to any point in

12 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
the body, and thereby perceptibly increase the
vigor and activity, and promote the growth, of
any organ or sense. Even minute papilla can
thus be reached and rendered more effective. In
deed, no limit has yet been found to their attain
ment when the capacious, aspiring, dominant
mind insists upon increased facilities of outlook.
The body is under the plastic power of the mind
far more than we are apt to think. How the
musician adds by patient drill to the strength,
celerity, and precision of his finger touch! His
hands at last fly over the keyboard of the piano
like fairy sprites, executing with lightning speed
and delicate nicety the most difficult commands
of their master. He has, it is true, found one
impediment in the way of the perfection of his
art, but he has also found that that impediment
can be removed by the skill of the surgeon.
There is a certain cord, a relic from our brute
ancestry, so scientists tell us, that partially binds
the third finger. The lancet sets it free.
It is deeply interesting to note the various
partial embodiments of the Divine ideal in this
portion of the body's furnishing, to see in how
many ways the hand may be modified to suit the
different needs of different modes of life, an
swering as a paddle to the whale, its digits with
out claws or nails being so connected and covered
with integument as to have their individuality
well-nigh obscured; serving as a wing to the bat,
its elongated fingers glued fast to broad pieces

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 13
of skin to be spread or furled at the pleasure of
this little flying mouse; or serving as a grasp
ing hook to the sloth, with which to hang in mid
air hour after hour from some branch in its
forest home, its slender fingers, lying side by
side, always curved and ending in curved claws;
or, still further, being used as a nut-pick by the
aye-aye, with its single bony finger stretched out
to a seemingly abnormal length.
But, while we note how each brute's hand is
admirably fitted for some specific work, we note
also how specific that work is, how extremely
limited the sphere of action, how forever pre
cluded, by the peculiarity of its structure and the
hopelessly menial character of its tasks, from
any further enlargement or refinement of power.
As we study the achievements of the human hand,
and observe how the human mind can, seemingly
without limit, multiply and exalt its powers, we
feel warranted in regarding this most wonder
ful combination of bone and horny plate, muscle
and tendon and cartilage, ligament, cuticle,
blood-vessel, and nerve fiber, as the final and full
embodiment of God's ideal, as in this direction
the ultima Thule of his thought.
This is equally true of the mind's other fleshly
furnishings. Anatomists astonish us with the
statement that, in providing a window through
which man may look out on earth and sky, there
has been effected a combination of eight hun
dred different complemental contrivances. The

14 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
structure of the eye is essentially the same in all
the mammalian genera. There are, it is true,
some animals of peculiar needs which have had
their eyes correspondingly modified. Amphibi
ous mammals, as the whale and seal, have eyes
built, like the fish, without tear glands, with
spherical lenses, and with thickened rear walls
for pushing forward the retinae, and thus secur
ing great refractive and microscopic power, in
order that they may thus more readily find their
way and procure their food in the dense salt seas.
In some genera the shape of the pupil is varied,
and in some the eye's interior chamber, instead
of being painted black, fitted for absorbing light,
is covered with a pigment of brilliant metallic
luster, fitted for reflecting it on the retina, and
thus rendering it possible for the animal to see
and seize its prey in the darkest hours of night.
The birds, a lower order of creation, have eyes
which, to suit the demands of swifter locomotion,
can adjust the focus for different distances more
rapidly than mammals. They also have a third
eyelid, which, when not in use, lies folded at the
inner corner, ready to be spread by two little
muscles which have it in charge, like a thin gauze
veil, to temper the sun's glare, which otherwise
would blind them. Insects' eyes are made sta
tionary; and to enable these Lilliputians to see
in every direction, each one has been furnished
with two clusters, each cluster numbering, in some
cases, as of the beetles, as high as twenty thou-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 15
sand, each eye set in different directions, and
having a separate optic nerve, lens, iris, and
pupil. But these variations are simply offsets
to disadvantages belonging to the habitat, or
ways of making good some defect inherent in the
eye itself. Man's eye, with its power to roll in
the socket, lubricate the parts, enlarge the pupil,
adjust the focus, and avoid spherical aberration,
seems to lack in nothing essential to perfect
vision. It has power to see a particle measuring
but one five-hundreth of an inch on a side, and
a thread but one forty-nine hundreth of an inch
in thickness. Whatever its limitations and de
fects, the mind has found it quite possible to
fully make them good, not only by artificial aids,
the results of its ingenious contriving, but by
sheer force of will, compelling the blood to
strengthen it and enlarge its varied parts, as
already alluded to. But, more especially, it can,
by rigidly fixing the attention, constantly striv
ing after closer observation, cultivating its
aesthetic tastes, contrasting and comparing,
finally, in a most marked degree, increase the
sensitiveness of the retina so that the most deli
cate lines in the sunbeam-painted pictures shall
stand out distinctly without blur or defacement,
and the impression in all its fullness shall be
carried over the optic nerve to the brain. Just
here lies the eye's chief capacity for improve
ment and enlargement of power, and, as in the
case of the hand, there has yet been found no

16 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
limit to the mind's plastic influence over it. The
experiences of artisans and artists and star-
gazers, and all trained observers, abundantly
corroborate this statement.
Very few of the objects that come within the
brute's range of vision ever make an impression
on the brute's brain. No cognizance is taken.
Sunbeams may paint their pictures never so
deftly, they fade unnoticed from the canvas.
Here has been provided an apparatus whose pos
sibilities of achievement lay all undiscovered until
the advent of man, and that too of the most
gifted and cultured man, — possibilities which are
still unexhausted and even undetermined, not
withstanding so many centuries of civilization.
There is certainly every indication that God here
contemplates no improvement which use can not
develop, that he has given to this organ its stamp
of Divine completeness.
The human ear is a marvel and a mystery —
a marvel in the scope and perfection of its in
terpretative power, a mystery in the modes of its
working. Scientists with all their tireless re
search confess that in many very important par
ticulars it still baffles their efforts to unlock its
secrets. The anatomist, with his dissecting
knife, his microscope, his chemical tests, his
delicate scales, and his minute measuring lines,
has been enabled to present to us a passably
clear conception of the different parts of this
piece of matchless mechanism. With his help we

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 17
note first the auricle, or outer ear, with its
peculiarly grooved frame-work of cartilage to
serve as a sounding board. The pulses of the
air, we find, are gathered and guided by this into
a narrow, winding passage, called the auditory
canal, along which they beat until they strike
the membrane of the tympanum. Behind this
lies a little chamber, known as the middle ear,
across which is hung an irregular chain of bones
— the first link shaped like a mallet, the second
like an anvil, the third as round and small as
the head of a pin, the fourth bearing the familiar
form of a stirrup. These are supposed, though
not known, to carry along their line the vibratory
movements of the tympanic membrane to the
inner ear, in which lie peripheral end-organs of
the minutely subdivided auditory nerve. Here,
in this so-called labyrinth, are the vestibule, the
semicircular canals, and the cochlea. Here the
outer world's messages of sound are in some
mysterious way sent flashing over the wires until
they end in molecular changes of the brain.
There are three characteristics of musical
sounds which by this instrument we are able to
distinguish — the pitch, the intensity, and the
timbre of the tone. In what this last consists,
in the determining of which the other two play
no part, or in what way it is communicated, are
matters of still grave dispute. But what puzzles
scientists most, and piques their curiosity, is the
ear's achievement of taking in and communicat-

18 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
ing not only melody, but harmony of sound, and
at the same time keeping separate the individual
notes which are used in each combination.
Whether the fibers which are stretched across the
central coat of the membrane of the tympanum,
and radiate from the attached handle of the
mallet bone, can, by means of their difference in
length, size, and tension, sympathetically re
spond to the different waves of sound, or whether
the three thousand rods of the organs of Corti
to be found floating in the fluid that fills the wind
ing chambers of the cochlea constitute a key
board to answer the air wave's finger touch; or
whether the end is attained through some yet
undiscovered process, — is a matter still to be de
termined. We have by our training brought this wonder
ful instrument to such a degree of perfection that
we have succeeded in taking cognizance of sounds
so low as to be formed from as few as thirty
vibrations per second, and so high as to come
from as many as thirty thousand, so flexible is
it, so capable of enlargement of capacity, so re
sponsive to the behests of the aggressive human
will behind it. Practical musicians have at last
reached such keen discrimination that they per
ceive a difference of pitch amounting to no more
than one sixty-fourth of a semitone. Does it
not seem that in this bodily sense also, as in the
others considered, the Creator's grand ideal has
been fully realized?

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 19
Our olfactory nerves, though in some cases
less acute than those of brutes, are evidently of
far wider range and suited to and designed for
nobler service, being something more than grimly
utilitarian, to be employed as aids in procuring
and selecting food, and in sounding alarm when
dangers impend. These sets of nerves in man
not only subserve these lower ends, but are also
sources of exquisite pleasure and aesthetic refine
ment, and enter in as most important factors in
the great scheme of the world's intellectual de
velopment. The arts and sciences, with rarely an
exception, place them under tribute. We gain
some conception of the well-nigh preternatural
sensitiveness of the ends of these minute nerve-
fibers, as well as of the almost infinite divisibility
of matter, when we reflect that one one-thou
sandth of a milligramme of mercaptan when
mixed with two hundred and thirty cubic metres
of air give out an odor clearly perceptible to us.
The scientists, who recently demonstrated this
fact by experiment, estimate that it is only one
fourteen hundred and sixty millionth part of a
milligramme of this substance that comes in con
tact with the nerves of the nose at any one time,
yet they can detect its presence. But the fact that
it lies within reach of the human will to indefinitely
increase the range and power of this interpreta
tive organ should be especially noted, for in it lies
the revelation that upon this subtile sense also has
been affixed the seal of Divine completeness.

20 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
Had we space we might cite analogous facts
pertaining to our powers of taste.
That which has been found true with reference
to those gifts of body that disclose what lies with
out, that unlock the doors opening into Nature's
vast arcana, may be equally affirmed of those
that reveal what lies within, such as articulate
speech, facial expression, gestures and pose of
body, and peculiarities of gait and intonations
of voice. Our bodies have here very marked
original versatility of utterance, far transcend
ing the bodies of brutes. Indeed, they have been
utterly denied articulate speech, and laughter
and tears and the tell-tale blush that mantles
brow and cheek. For proofs of the almost limit
less plastic power of the will over these thought-
transmitting capacities of the body we have the
confessions of noted conversationalists and ora
tors and actors and rapture-thrilling vocalists,
disclosing to us how, through persistent, pains
taking drill, they have finally attained this their
most wonderfully complete mastery.
Wallace, speaking of the power, range, flexi
bility, and sweetness of the musical sounds pro
ducible by the human larynx, adds that the habits
of savages give no indication of how this faculty
could have been developed, as the singing of
savages is a more or less monotonous howling,
and the females seldom sing at all. It seems as
if the organ had been prepared in anticipation
of the future progress of man, since it contains

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 21
latent capacities which are useless to him in his
earlier condition.
Actors, to render more certain and telling their
triumphs by kindling the imaginations of their
audiences, surround themselves with the acces
sories of stage scenery; and for the voice of the
singer the sounding pipes of the organ, and the
notes of all manner of metal and reed and
stringed instruments, are called in as accom
paniments, though that voice soars over all in
the grand crescendo passages of the hallelujah
chorus. And then, too, what charm of form, grace of
motion, delicate tint and rapturous glow of
beauty are reached at times by these gifted
organized bodies of living dust! To add still
further to the inherent powers of fascination of
the body, the restless spirit that dwells within
it, and seeks through it aesthetic expression, decks
it with flowers and plumes, gems and gold, and
dyed garments of gracefully flowing folds, and,
when possible, places it within a marble palace
where electrically lighted apartments are ren
dered rich with works of decorative art!
But the foremost of all the organs of the
human body — that which lifts man, as to all
other orders of creation, into unapproachable
pre-eminence — is the brain, whose massive lobes
of convoluted gray matter constitute, as is sup
posed, the seat of the soul. It certainly is the
central office from which radiates that com-

22 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
plicated system of nerve lines over which are ever
flashing night and day, waking and sleeping,
telegrams of conscious and unconscious thought.
The brain of the fish bears an average propor
tion to its spine of not more than two to one;
of the reptile, two and a half to one ; of the bird,
three to one; of the mammal, four to one; while
that of man bears an average of twenty-three to
one. What a leap! How significant! Here
surely is a great gulf fixed. Man is thus at a
single bound placed at an almost infinite remove
from all sentient life about him in point of
thought capacity; and in the already completed
centuries of his history he has shown that while
there are some resemblances, there are not only
vastly increased mental acumen and breadth,
but also absolutely radical differences of mental
structure; for while with the lower animals in
stinct is at the front ; with man, reason, the insect
and the brute following blindly a course marked
out by another, man deliberately determining on
a course for himself. While one is confined to a
narrow sphere and to temporary dominion, hav
ing no desire for or prospect of progress, the
other, ever restless and dissatisfied at his present
status, is driven on by an insatiable longing from
conquest to conquest until to every thoughtful
student of individual and national history comes
the grand conception that man has been created
for universal dominion and for endless growth;
that he was the long-expected guest toward whom

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 23
all the prophecies in Nature have been pointing
through the long geologic ages, that into his
hands have been intrusted all the wonder-work
ing forces with which Nature abounds, the keys
that unlock all the secret storehouses of material
wealth, the art galleries, the conservatories of
music, all the treasuries of suggestive thought.
Surely it was for him, who has shown himself
capable of utilizing her riches, developing her
possibilities, perfecting her incompleteness, train
ing her forces, interpreting her hieroglyphs writ
ten on rock and sky, on sea and land, this wide
world of wonders was being molded by the Crea
tive Hand. It was for man the crystalline forces
in some long ago gathered the sediment of the
primal seas into rock quarries and salt beds, the
vegetative forces produced the dense conifer
growths of the carboniferous era and volcanic
fires buried and baked them into beds of coal.
For him the waters swarmed with fish, the fields
were white with cotton, the long-fibered fleece
grew on the back of the sheep, even the lowly
worm spun and wove its silken shroud, the forest
oak buried its great roots in the soil, threw out
its banners of leaves, and with its mighty arms
grappled with the fierce storms of centuries in
order that he might from its tough and sinewy
stem fashion ribs for his ships and build a
sheltering home for his little ones.
The fact that the earth had for ages been a
vast reservoir of minerals lying idle till man's

24 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
advent, and that those qualities which render
them fusible, malleable, ductile, soluble, sealed
secrets to all but him, have rendered them
through his inventions conducive to his comfort
and culture, is proof positive that it was for these
very ends of use and for this very being of
marvelous gifts that God fashioned them at the
first. The fact that electricity — which for ages
simply hung across the northern skies its myste
rious banners of light and now and then crashed
down from the clouds in death-dealing thunder
bolts — now, man's tamed Titan, lights the streets
of his cities, his workshops and his marble
halls, drives his machinery, draws his carriages,
and flashes his thought over the everywhere in
terlacing telegraphic highways of modern life, is
proof positive that it was for these very ends of
use and for this wondrous being that God fash
ioned at the first this most astonishing of all the
forms of elemental force.
The fact that man has shown himself capable,
by following out the suggestions of Nature, of
becoming a sort of sub-creator, a finisher of
God's work, developing new and improved varie
ties of fruit and vegetables and exercising a plas
tic power even in the charmed circle of animal
life, reclaiming the desert and morass, adding
new tints to the rose, new lines of symmetry to
the tree, new grace of curve to the river, new and
fuller combination of charms to the landscape

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 25
beauties with which earth abounds, is proof posi
tive that it was in anticipation of man's coming
that God left his work thus incomplete, and that
it is to man's hand God at the first determined
to entrust the finishing.
The fact that man has proved himself able to
thrive in all climes, on all foods, to build for him
self homes out of all materials, to make the whole
world his habitat, all animal species, all kinds of
force, his docile household servants, his winged
messengers, clothiers, purveyors^ architects, even
artists, and, when occasion fits, his grand orches
tral choir, is proof positive that it was pre
eminently for man that God thus exercised his
almost infinitely provident thought on this
planet. The fact that man is thus a microcosm, all
types of living organisms centering in him and
becoming perfected; that he is fast reaching uni
versal sovereignty through his ever-widening
knowledge, stretching out his scepter over the
three great kingdoms of the world — the mineral,
the vegetable, and the animal — and leaving the
imprint of his personality everywhere ; that he is
the great, the only cosmopolite at home on sand
wastes or on tossing seas, in sheltered nooks or
wind-swept mountain summits, under blazing
equatorial skies or amid the brooding stillness
and desolation of the land of the iceberg and the
creeping glacier ; that he can by a plastic,
an almost creative touch round out the

26 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
partially finished designs of Nature into full
completeness; that he can hold converse through
Nature with Nature's God, interpreting the
thoughts embodied in earth's phenomena, deci
phering the handwriting on the leaves of the rock
records of vast geologic periods, and thus trac
ing the ongoing and noting the trend of the
Divine purposes as from age to age they have
found embodiment, and discovering in this his
tory of earth's evolution evidences of the sound
ness of his own scientific classifications and there
by the striking likeness of his own thought to
that of the Divine, threading his way through
the labyrinthine mazes of the star-peopled
heavens, determining the mechanism of the uni
verse, calculating eclipses, weighing and analyz
ing suns; the fact that he can thus, through his
susceptibilities, his faculties of memory, of per
ception, of reasoning, of conceptive imagination,
transmute into a populous world of thought with
in, this populous world of fact without, furnishes
proof positive that it was for this very end of
use, the surrounding of man's spirit with a fitting
environment, this planet has under the creative
and directive power of God been undergoing proc
esses of evolution that extend back over a period
so vastly remote that it completely transcends
our utmost reach of thought.
When we contemplate how inconceivably many
have been the centuries consumed by God in his
patient painstaking preparation for man's com-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 27
ing, what astounding riches of invention he has
lavished upon it, what mighty and subtile second
ary causes have been commissioned to forward the
work, when with the help of science we trace the
mighty evolution of the ages and learn at last
that man is the grand goal of creative purpose,
the supreme consummation, the ultima Thule of
Divine thought on this planet, how strikingly
inadequate seem to us all the current esti
mates placed upon human life and human des
tiny! And yet I have directed attention only to the
less important of God's preparations for man's
coming and to the less valuable of his bestow
ments upon this most favored child of his choice.
To this complicate world-environment, to this
subtile, organized body, to this interpretative and
scepter-winning faculty of deliberative thought,
were added what far transcend them all and to
which they were evidently designed but as acces
sories — the gifts of moral discernment and of re
sponsible free choice. From their exercise, char
acter — that which lifts us from brute being into
Divine likeness — is finally evolved. This, from
the very nature of the case, God could not
directly create, but that this was a consumma
tion which ever lay uppermost in all his thought
through all the ages, to which he made every
other consideration bend, there is now no shadow
of doubt. His entire endeavor was directed to
the making ready the conditions out of which

28 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
character might be the final fruitage. To this
end he not only bestowed upon man this gift of
sovereignty, of absolute freedom of choice, and
gave him capacity for moral motive and for
judicial insight, but he absolutely atmosphered
him with multiform disciplinary influences, and to
this end established as a universal law of life
growth from germs through struggle. As I have
elsewhere, in a paper entitled Satan Anticipated,*
described at length the operations of this law, I
will here only briefly outline the workings of this
perhaps the most marvelous and deeply laid of
all the plans of God.
We note that plant life has germinal begin
nings and a history of development, and the
vegetative force, in its efforts to embody in ma
terial organic form the ideal given it, finds itself
confronted at every step of the way by per
sistently opposing forces with which it has to
strenuously and successfully contend or be itself
defeated. It meets the force of gravity at the
very outset of its career and lifts its masses of
matter, in some instances amounting to several
tons, right against the steady antagonism of
that force. It wrestles with the winds again and
again, every contest resulting in tightening its
fibered stem. It is compelled to tear asunder
atoms which chemical forces are holding together
with all their might, to actually drag these forces
into its service and to fight unremittingly their
* In Views on Vexed Questions.

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 29
disintegrating tendencies, re-enforced as they
often are with the weakening depredations of
hungry parasites, until worn out with the
struggle it at last succumbs and disappears for
ever, leaving its palace of wonders to become
shapeless and drifting dust again.
Those mysteriously commissioned forces that
build up and maintain animal organisms have
closely corresponding battle histories ending at
last in corresponding fatal defeats. These his
tories are made up of like rendings asunder of
chemical compounds, impressment into service of
unwilling chemic forces, fierce fights with swarm
ing parasitic foes, and at last the like endless
leaden sleep of death.
This was God's established order long before
sin came. Man's moral fall has unquestionably
multiplied diseases and hastened death, but it
cannot be charged with having first introduced
them to this sorrow-burdened earth. Long be
fore Adam there were sand wastes and pitfalls
and cyclones and thunderbursts and poisonous
airs and ravenous beasts. Bodies were made of
perishable clay and environed with adverse in
fluences. Life would have been a fierce contest
even if sin had never come. Rare indeed are the
paradisiacal spots where fruits grow with luxur
iant spontaneity, where the air is soft and odor-
laden, where the rays of the sun are always tem
pered and golden and full of balm, where the life
of the flesh is a careless, cloudless holiday. Even

30 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
if sin had not come, disease would have paled the
cheeks of loved ones and home circles would not
have been without some vacant chairs. Anxie
ties, forebodings, care-burdens, disappointed
hopes, scalding tears would have been accom
paniments of human life even if that life had
been kept pure. This world as now constituted
was evidently designed as a means not an end,
as disciplinary and developing, as a great train
ing school for some higher form of existence.
If death ends all, this present order of Nature,
however full of matchless mechanism, of astound
ing achievement, however stamped with profound
est inventive thought, may be rightly counted a
most lamentable failure; but if God designed this
life and this world as means for developing vir
tue, the present order of things is not only a
marked success, but it takes on new and deeper
meanings, it displays on God's part an infinitely
greater care-taking than scientists have as yet
discovered in all their investigations.
Virtue being beyond the range of God's crea
tive power, being the result of the choices of a
responsibly free will, as we have already stated,
God was necessitated from the very nature of the
case to pass man through some probationary
period, make him amenable to systems of law,
place him inside a body easily deranged, full of
appetites and passions and desires, susceptible
of over-indulgence, place him amid opportunities
for gratification left open to abuse that thereby

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 31
he might learn self-mastery, amid dangers to
prove and develop his courage, amid trials and
disappointments to test his fortitude, and objects
of need to appeal to his better sympathies, amid
hindrances by the surmounting of which to
toughen the fiber of his spirit, to make him nobly,
grandly aggressive.
This preparation of untold centuries to ensure
a suitable habitat and housing for human souls,
this well-nigh infinite painstaking and deliberate
incurring of most fearful risks to school those
souls into virtue, give us some intimation of
God's high estimate of the possibilities of spirit
ual attainment concealed within these yet closely
folded buds of promise. When we contemplate
the great mass of mankind, study the dark his
tory of the ages, when we realize to our thought
how that myriads in every generation have come
and gone revealing only narrow, sluggish, brut
ish minds, the slaves of appetite, victims of
multiform tyrannizing forces, cowed by supersti
tious fears and consumed by greed, we are apt
in our haste despairingly to conclude that the
risks were too great and have proved fatal. But
a more thoughtful study will convince us that the
race is surely moving toward light and love. It
sometimes seems very strange to us that God saw
fit to wait through vast geologic periods for his
delegated mechanic and chemic forces to convert
a shapeless bank of cosmic vapor into a planet
fit for peopling, then to wait through other

32 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
periods still, whose lengthened lapse we have no
means of measuring, for earth in its physical fea
tures and in its lower sentient life to become a
place habitable to man. Had he so chosen he
could have called this globe into being in all the
perfection of its latest age by the instant flash
of his thought. All we can say is, he preferred
to wait, and to wait long. Think you his
patience tires as the slow centuries of human prog
ress wear away, that his courage fails, that his
hope is growing dim? He knows how long he
can afford to wait. A thousand years in his
sight are but as yesterday when it is past and
as a watch in the night.
But we anxiously ask what becomes of those
countless throngs of sin-distorted souls which
hear death's summons unprepared and pass with
in the shadow. This much I think we can safely
say : not until God has fully compassed the re
sources of his infinite love to win back the erring
and has finally lost all hope of their return will
his striving cease and his sustaining presence be
withdrawn. Yet when the last ray of hope is
quenched in the great yearning heart of God,
then, but not till then, will the hardened ingrate
rebel be forever banished from his presence.
That men, if they choose, can, despite all God's
striving, sink down to devils we must concede,
and also that at the last this appalling fate of
banishment so long impending, prophesied in the
immutable -laws of life as well as in God's written

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 33
revelation, may become at last the dreaded doom
of devils.
But again we tremblingly inquire what is to
be the future of those who before death have in
deed become repentant and believing and had as
pirations after better things and yet have been
summoned hence while passing through perhaps
the very first stages of moral development, or at
best before discipline has ripened their powers
or unfolded and confirmed their virtues. It can
not be that their growth is thus arrested and they
thus doomed to remain forever incomplete, yet
further development can be effected only under
disciplinary agencies similar to those now at work
in this world.
"Heaven is not reached at a single hound;
But we build the ladder on which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to its summit round by round."
Where they are to finish their training is not
revealed, and it is of little moment inasmuch as
the further atmosphering of these souls must re
main essentially the same. Every human spirit
comes gifted with a divine ideal to grow to and
germinal impulses for growing, and he who made
and gave will supply the environment of imple
ments and influences and afford the time requisite
for the full fashioning, even though centuries or
millenniums must be consumed in opening those
closely folded buds of promise into bloom. Not

34 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
those who through life have been fortune's ap
parent favorites, who have escaped the baptism
of fire, who never, or rarely, have had their man
hood tried, should be tendered our congratula
tions, but rather those battle-scarred heroes who
have come up through much tribulation, for
"whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth," as only
such can yet possibly be prepared to enter
through the gates into the city.
Have we been left to vague conjecture as to
the nature and extent of each spirit-germ's Divine
commission, as to what, if any, are the impassable
barriers to its capacities for growing, or has
there appeared in the centuries a Shining One in
the serene majesty of whose perfect consecration
we find brought out at last in its completeness the
grand ideal God has set and made possible for
each created soul to grow to under the uplifting
power of his presence? It is now universally
conceded that there has visited the earth a per
sonage called Christ, and that, whatever else he
was, he was a created human soul, housed in a
human body, hemmed in by all the ordinary
human limitations, and rising at the last to no
greater height of moral excellence than is possible
to be attained by any of his disciples. The
Sacred Record assures us that he was tempted in
all points as we are. The same sustaining grace
given him is offered us. To the same sublime
height of loving self-sacrifice which he reached
we may climb, for in the words of the command,

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 35
"Love one another as I have loved you," there is
the promise of the power. But to reach this full
ness of Christ's stature will doubtless require on
the part of most a longer schooling than this
short life can give. But the schooling will cer
tainly come. Full opportunity will be afforded.
We are the sons of God, joint heirs with Christ.
So far, then, as we can picture in our thought
this transcendent personage whose life and teach
ings have stood the test of the world's keenest
scrutiny for now nearly two thousand years, so
far we can conceive what we, if lovingly obedient,
are, under the molding power of the Divine
Presence, destined to become at some time during
that far-off by and by. The day may be dis
tant, but it is coming; the standard high, but
we may attain to it. The flesh is weak, is worn
with pain, is full of importunate pleadings, but
we may become its master. The world offers
glittering prizes, but we may overcome the world.
Perils impend, but leaping thunderbolts may
not swerve us from our purpose. Calumnies
darken the air, but with an all-conquering calm
we can wait the uncurtaining of God's Tomorrow.
When will the battle period end? To one
class, at the recall of the despised gift; to the
other, at the perfecting of the Divine image.
The final outcome of God's creative work on this
planet I believe will be a host, which no one can
number, of glorified spirits who through suffer
ing and struggle under the immutable laws of

36 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
spiritual growth have attained unto the stature
of the fullness of Christ. Not until we have our
selves entered into the "silent vastnesses of
eternity" can we form any adequate conception
of the glory yet to be revealed in this Creation's
Masterpiece.

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 37

II
I now call attention to the second and third
divisions of my theme; whether it was absolutely
necessary for a Divine Visitant to come, and
whether we have in the characteristics and career
of the historic Christ convincing evidences that
he was the Messiah foretold by Jewish prophets
and by the world's most pressing needs.
Every plant is an organic unit. Its parts are
complemental and are linked so intimately that
no one can be separated from the others without
fatal results. Root, stem, branch, and leaf are
vitally essential, each to each, must remain in
intimate union, and each play its part. There
is a life-current flowing from the tiniest rootlets
that weave their network in the dark and damp
of the underworld, to the veined leaves that hang,
wind-shaken and sun-kissed, from the outermost
branches that reach toward the sky. Sever the
connection and you stop the flow and end the
life. The very forces which, before the sever
ance, were invigorating and devoloping become
destructive. The sunlight now scorches and
withers, and the moisture in the air and soil rots
the plant into unorganized dust again.
There has been established a vital union be
tween not only the different parts of the organism

38 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
but also between the organism and its environment,
the ingredients of the soil, the air, the raindrop,
and the sunbeam, severance here being attended
with equally fatal results. The central germ-force
reaches with vitalizing influence to the remotest
corner of the organism, directing where every
particle of matter shall go and precisely what
office it shall perform in perfecting the embodi
ment of the Divine ideal intrusted to its keeping.
There is thus an interplay, an interdependence,
binding together not only the different parts of
an organism, but the clod of the valley with the
cloud of the sky, even reaching through space
the almost inconceivable distance of ninety-five
millions of miles.
A more perfect and complex organization may
be observed in the higher realm of animal life.
Not only is every body, whether of mote or
mammoth, an organized whole, a combination of
parts by whose joint action a certain predeter
mined purpose is carried out, but each organ
also in the combination is endowed and commis
sioned and has significance and efficiency only
when conjoined with the others into one harmo
nious whole. The human eye, for example, has
been found composed of hundreds of such com
plemental parts, some of the more noticeable
being a self-adjusting window, carefully curved
and accurately placed lenses, an elaborately pre
pared plate, susceptible of the slightest impres
sion, consisting of a closely woven network of

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 39
the frayed ends of the optic nerve, oil and tear
glands, sets of minute muscles to roll the balls
and lift the lids with their fringed edges, and
change the curvature of the crystalline lens.
These have evidently been built with reference
each to each, as only by a concert of action, can
they effect an outlook to the spirit housed within.
In this highly organized body of ours we find
the brain in such close telegraphic communication
with every fiber of flesh that nowhere, over the
wide area which the skin covers, can even the
fine point of a cambric needle find entrance with
out a message of warning being flashed over the
wires to the central office. Along the motor
nerves the will reaches, with its mandates, thou
sands of waiting muscles in that vast army that
lies encamped throughout its kingdom.
The vital organs are also most closely con
joined, and are constantly sending out, along
canals that ramify everywhere, rich cargoes of
vitalized atoms, that, under the supervision of
the all-dominant organizing central force, are
incorporated into muscle and bone, tendon and
nerve-fiber, cuticle, cord, cartilage, and brain
tissue. Here, too, break the union, and you end
the life. Any part of the body wrenched from
this quickening contact with the controlling germ-
power soon falls a prey to the ever-waiting,
hungry hordes of chemical forces which tear it in
pieces and despoil it of its glory.
And, also, between every animal organism and

40 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
its environment there must be maintained an
equally constant union, or life will cease. It
seems to be the special, if not sole, office of those
marvelous animal instincts, which are unques
tionably none other than a Divine informing, to
promote and regulate this union as God first
planned it.
This scheme of organization, which we find to
prevail thus universally in these lowest kingdoms
of vegetable and animal existences, has been dis
covered to be equally dominant in the higher
realms of self-conscious thought and of moral
choices. Careful grouping of parts, the widely
reaching centralization of purpose and of power,
is here as unmistakably present and as ineradi
cable. For example, our powers of reasoning and
reflection cannot be exercised without the aid of
the memory, for we must be able to recall and
retain former conceptions in order to pass our
thoughts in review, institute comparisons, draw
inferences, reach conclusions ; and for the ex
ercise of the memory the imagination is indispens
able, for we must picture whatever past incident
or idea we recover to consciousness. The
imagination must have, as its ready servitors,
the mind's powers of association and suggestion,
of comparison and contrast, and of memory, for
its office is not to create outright, but to fashion
new combinations, selecting its material from
former perceptions and experiences. Thus the
mind acts as a unit, thought being the result of

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 41
a combined operation of its faculties. As the
brain is the instrument used in all thought-
processes, and as all crude thought-material must
come through the five bodily senses, the union of
the intellectual world with the physical is also
close and constant, and the deeply laid plan of
organization in the one leaves its indelible im
press on the other, is fairly inwrought into its
very structure, so that the two may safely be
considered parts of a still wider organization,
all of whose vast multitude of members are in
vital union with each other and with some central
Over-Soul, its author and organizing spirit.
This union has been found to extend still
further, linking mind with mind, each individual
endowment of personality being essential to the
healthful and efficient exercise and unfolding of
the others, each having its peculiar fashioning
with reference to this world-wide relationship.
Here, too, the penalty of severance is death.
This was not known until revealed by quite recent
results of State-prison discipline. Solitary cell
confinement has so uniformly ended in hopeless
insanity or idiocy that the authorities have felt
compelled to abandon this mode of punishment.
While occasional solitude serves as a tonic and
regulator, as a positive medicine to the mind,
it will, if obstinately persisted in, turn into
deadly poison. We must maintain communica
tion with the ever-flowing thought-currents of
the world and of Nature, must never suffer to

42 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
wholly cease within us that beat of pulse which
is but God's beat of heart, by whose mighty
enginery the world's thought-arteries are fed with
a Divine vitality. This fact of a world-organism
is brought out still further, and with ever-increas
ing emphasis, in the unmistakable drift of modern
civilization toward a more intimate and organized
interplay of all individual forces in society as
may be noted in the increased facilities for travel
and for interchange of thought, the multiplica
tion of machinery, closer combinations of indus
tries, the formation of great trusts and co-opera
tive associations, the international federations
for reform and for the forwarding of the re
searches of science. The Duke of Argyll, in his
Reign of Law, but more recently in his work on
The Unity of Nature, has presented certain
phases of it with great learning and force.
Walter Bagehot has attempted to show the ex
tension of natural law to the political world;
Herbert Spencer, its application to the social;
and Prof. Henry Drummond, its reaching up
even into the spiritual life of the soul.
The fact that we are parts of one vast, closely
linked organism in our intellectual as well as our
physical nature is again made evident whenever
we attempt to develop any theme of thought.
We work most effectively when we place ourselves
as far as we can in a receptive frame, freeing our
minds from all trammels of passion and precon
ceived opinion, being resolved to know only the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 43
truth and fearlessly to state and stand by it,
then inform ourselves as to all discovered perti
nent facts, institute original investigations when
possible, search through Nature, among the
world's libraries, its customs, industries, its re
ligions, political and social institutions, its ex
hibits of art, all the multiform phenomena of its
ever-varying life, and after having thus thrown
open every avenue of approach, place ourselves
in closest vital union with the thought-movements
of the planet and through them with the God
of the planet, the great central thought-source,
and having thus become fairly alive with our
theme, quickened and filled, we hold our attention
unswervingly to the subject of our purposed con
templation, and suffer our mental faculties to
evolve their thought-products according to the
methods predetermined by their Creator. Our
minds are, we shall find, most consummately con
structed pieces of mechanism, with most com
plicated yet most nicely adjusted parts, working
with as perfect regularity as characterizes the
processes of vegetable or animal growths. All
we have to do, — all, in fact, we can do — , is to
provide them with this fitting environment, this
proper spiritual sustenance, and then hold fast
the attention. God does the rest, we know not
how. The mystery is as profound as that which
envelops the unfolding of an acorn into a thou
sand-armed, million-leafed oak, or of the ap
parently structureless white of an egg into a

44 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
plumed songster. The environment is instinct
with Divine life; the constructive mental germ-
force is the product of a Divine quickening; the
processes have been determined by a Divine or
der. To us is intrusted simply the choosing of
the departments of thought in which they shall
work their wonders. It is impossible for us to
stop the unfolding of thought or to change the
laws of the unfolding. We simply have directive
power, and power to throw wide open all mental
avenues, and keep up all necessary vital unions
with this vast world-organism, of which we form
part. We plant, we water, but God gives the
increase. Thoughts spring up into conscious
ness, and unfold finally into flower and fruit, in
strict conformity to methods and models devised
in the inscrutable councils of the Almighty. As
spiritual chemists we may exercise a choice as
to the ingredients of the solution, but along what
lines of symmetry the precipitated thoughts shall
arrange themselves will depend on pre-established
laws of crystallization, in determining which we
are permitted to take no part. Or as spiritual
gardeners, we may enrich and moisten the soil of
the mind, and select and sow the seed; but with
that our work ends, and God's begins.
Dr. Carpenter cites a fact that happily illus
trates the automatic, unconscious action of the
mind. An eminent mathematician one evening
toilfully attempted the solution of a long and
intricate problem, without success. He retired

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 45
and after a while fell asleep. In the middle of
the night his wife was awakened by his leaving
his bed. She watched, but said nothing. He
went to his study table and busied himself for a
time with his papers, and then returned. The
next morning, when about to resume his studies,
he found to his astonishment all the mysteries of
his vexed problem unraveled in plain figures on
the sheet before him, and to his greater astonish
ment he found, on inquiry, that he himself had,
in the unconscious hours of sleep, accomplished
what, while he was wide awake, had baffled his
utmost endeavors.
I have often availed myself of this most mar
velous property of the mind by presenting to it
whatever subject perplexed me and eluded my
grasp in as clear and forcible a light as lay in
my power, and then deliberately turning my at
tention elsewhere with the intent, after an in
terval had elapsed, of again calling up the ques
tion. I have almost invariably found that the
mind has, without any conscious effort on my
part, in some secret and silent way, with clarified
vision and unwonted concentrative energy, per
formed most difficult tasks without any discover
able fatigue or friction. There is rarely a per
son that has not had frequent and pleasant sur
prises of this sort. They are genuine surprises
to most, because the existence of these mental
laws is not generally known, and a deliberate at
tempt to thus turn them to account is a rare oc-

46 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
currence. People generally puzzle and study
until, in a fit of discouragement or pressed by
other cares, they toss the themes aside, only to
find afterward, upon some chance recurrence, the
much-coveted prizes fairly thrust upon them,
coming out of their hiding places like sudden
flashes of intuition, though unquestionably they
are the result of long processes of unconscious
ratiocination. On one occasion I had revealed to me with
what lightning speed the mind works when thus
left untrammeled in its organic action. I had
made quite laborious preparation to write a char
acter-analysis of a certain literary celebrity. I
had read what I could find on the subject and had
taken quite extensive notes of facts and
suggestions. I had also jotted down what
ever had come up in my own reflections,
from time to time, without regard to or
der, without any plan of treatment. After I
had thus gathered my material I set my
self to the task of evolving order out of this wild
chaos. After long study I could discover only
one line of treatment that to me seemed at all
possible, and still with that I was quite dissatis
fied. I finally shut my desk, heartily discouraged,
and began some vigorous manual exercise, leaving
my mind seemingly in a state of vacuity, of ab
solute rest. To my utter astonishment and de
light, while still swinging my axe, a hitherto en
tirely unthought-of plan flashed upon me. It

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 47
came wholly unbidden, for I had not then learned
of this unconscious automatic mental action.
The plan proved to be precisely what I needed.
I have had recourse frequently to the same
methods, when desirous of recalling any past
thing or thought.
The fact of our being parts of a wide-reach
ing organism again becomes manifest when per
sons of reflective, studious habits have taken a
careful review of their thought-history, for they
find that it possesses a very noticeable symmetry
and system, and that too without any conscious
purposing on their part. The mind when left
free to work naturally and healthily will fall into
methods which are the outgrowth of its peculiar
organic structure, its environment being as
similated and transformed into it.
An analysis of the works of great literary
geniuses will confirm this statement. The minds
that are the most gifted will be found to be those
of greatest intuitive power, in closest sympathetic
communication with Nature and the great throb
bing intellectual life of the world ; those that are
characterized most by this unconscious action,
and untrammeled by conventionalisms, and
unawed by public opinion; that stand loyal to
their own individuality, and independently assert
what they candidly believe to be true. Such are
pre-eminently Divinely led, because they im
plicitly trust in and follow the promptings of a
nature Divinely bestowed. They may not be de-

48 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
vout, may not design to be under Divine leader
ship or realize that they are. They are simply
healthily self-reliant and self-asserting, candid,
impressionable, assimilative. They are some
thing more than echoes of their age, for their
large susceptibility is accompanied with equally
large assimilative capacity, and their strong na
tures vitalize and transmute their intellectual
environment into finer forms of spiritual essence,
into their own unique personality. But this
transmutation is wholly an unconscious process,
under the conduct of Divine methods and in
strumentalities. They simply follow out the
promptings of their instinctive impulses, or, as
we are wont to phrase it, follow the bent of their
own genius.
Shakespeare is a notable illustration of this.
It is universally conceded that his was one of the
most original, creative minds ever placed on this
planet. Yet he so little realized his peerless pow
ers that he used them simply for purposes of live
lihood, and when a competence was secured he left
the London playhouses, retired to his estate at
Stratford-on-Avon, and was so unconcerned about
his fame, so careless of his manuscripts, that he
left them scattered about the theaters, and it was
not till some time after his death that two appre
ciative friends collected what of them they could
find and identify, and handed them over to liter
ary immortality, to be the delight and wonder of
all nations in all succeeding centuries. He was

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 49
not a product of the schools, yet he seems to have
been wonderfully conversant with literature and
with the living thought of his age, so great were
his absorbent powers. His conceptions took on
dramatic form, for that was the one then gener
ally prevailing. He was the glory, the consum
mate flower, of the Elizabethan era, his pages
glowing with the enthusiasm of its literary renas
cence, with its bright awakening from the dark
ness and thrall with which the bigotry of the
Romish Church had cursed the Middle Ages. The
Bible had under Henry VIII been unchained, and
the world's rich stores of classic learning broken
open and again made free to all. He drank in
the spirit of his time as naturally and freely as
his lungs filled with the air about him. This
quickened spiritual pulse of old England beat
strong and full in Shakespeare's veins. The
breadth of his knowledge, the depth of his in
sight, the intuitional quickness of his perceptions,
the exuberance of his fancy, were excelled only by
the outspoken, unstudied naturalness with which
his thoughts burst into bloom and filled the world
with their fragrance. He surely had no purpose
of building up a system of philosophy ; he never
dreamed that his dramas had any connection with
each other, yet a keen critic of to-day has shown
us that they are actually bound together in close
organic union, that Shakespeare "builded better
than he knew," was as profound a philosopher as
he was a gifted poet. I once expressed to this

50 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
commentator great incredulity as to the sound
ness of his interpretation, remarking that he had
seemingly injected into these writings his own
thought-life, had displayed his own fertility of in
vention, but he stoutly contended, and, I found
after more careful reflection, contended with
good reason, that Shakespeare did actually,
though unconsciously, construct and illustrate a
most profound system of philosophy; that his
dramas, so far from standing alone as utterances
of wholly disassociated moods, were complemental
parts of one grand organum.
This writer told me further that he believed he
had discovered a still wider generalization, and
had nearly ready for the press an extensive work,
reaching through seven or eight volumes, on "The
Four Literary Gospels," in which he maintains
that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, the
great apostles of the world's literature, have em
bodied in their productions the four great stages
of the world's intellectual evolution, and should
be considered together as component parts of one
vast world-system of thought — so vast that long
centuries of world history have been required for
its full unfolding and embodiment.
Do we not see here the stately steppings of Di
vinity? Is there not here all the consummate
regularity of organic action, all the oneness of
plan we note in the unfolding through time of an
amorphic bank of cosmic vapor into a peopled
planet?

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 51
If we extend our inquiries into the phenomena
of spiritual life, we shall also find evidences every
where of this same most thorough organization,
the different parts constructed with a view to con
cert of action, under the directive control of some
central organizing power with which they are all
vitally joined. The most cursory glance will re
veal that our spiritual experiences are but the
outgrowth of our multiform and intimate rela
tionships. Indeed, it seems that it was for just
such glorious consummation of moral character,
of healthful individuality, that all this marvelous
system within system was at the first devised.
On close inspection it will be found that all the
virtues are but the protean forms of a single at
titude of the soul, that of self-forgetting sym
pathy. It is this which, as I have shown else
where, knits together friends, endears home cir
cles, incites philanthropy, fires the breasts of pa
triots, and consecrates the Cross.
When this feeling prevails a unity of purpose
binds together the widest diversities of gifts.
Friends find themselves halves of one whole, and
become mutually helpful, supplying by their com
plemental parts each other's lack, inspiriting and
consecrating each other's efforts and aspirations.
Souls in an environment of unselfish love flow to
gether in obedience to laws of spiritual affinity as
exact and inexorable as those which control in the
chemical unions which are effected in Nature's
laboratory. The differently endowed and tern-

52 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
pered members of a household, being once imbued
with this spirit, find their place as readily and in
evitably as do the crystallizing particles of some
solution. Led by a central organizing force, they
follow lines of social and spiritual symmetry as
mathematically exact and as Divinely predeter
mined as those which fix the contours of crystals.
They soon discover that they are as vitally joined
to each other, and to some central directing
power, as are the parts of a plant or the mem
bers of an intricately constructed animal organ
ism. Families are combined into communities,
and communities into commonwealths, in unsus
pecting obedience to similar laws of Divine order.
Just so soon as this vital love-union ceases, the
several souls sink into spiritual disintegration and
death. As diseases of the body mark a partial
severance, so petty jealousies and heartburns and
pride, the changing of generous emulations into
covert, selfish ambitions, outcroppings of sharp
criticisms, a spirit of greed, a love of display — all
indicate a partial severance, a process of devitali
zation which, unless arrested, will end in death.
So many of earth's friendships, family circles,
and commonwealths have fallen prey to these dis
integrating forces of selfishness that we cannot
turn our eyes to any age or clime without finding
the plains strewn thick with their bleaching skele
tons. The truth that voluntary, unsympathetic
isolation, even under the most favorable circum
stances, will uniformly end in lamentable spiritual

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 53
disaster, has been proclaimed in burning words by
Tennyson in his "Palace of Art." To illustrate
and enforce it, this foremost poet of the age
placed under tribute his finest pictorial power.
He built for the hermit's soul a lordly pleasure-
house, looking out on a landscape full of most en
trancing beauty, looking in on open courts, where
fountains leaped and murmured, with walls hung
with speaking canvas fit for every mood and
change of thought, with marble-carved forms of
angels far overhead among its spanning arches,
with rich mosaics underfoot choicely planned into
suggestive pictures of the past, with apartments
redolent with rarest perfumes and echoing with
silver notes of self-swung bells. Here for three
years, with every bodily want, every aesthetic crav
ing, satisfied, away from the turmoils and troubles
of earthly human life, this seemingly highly fa
vored soul throve and prospered in her isolation.
But " .... on the fourth she fell,
Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears,
Struck thro' with pangs of hell.
"Lest she should fail and perish utterly,
God, before whom ever lie bare
The abysmal depths of Personality,
Plagued her with sore despair.
"When she would think, where'er she turned her sight,
The airy hand confusion wrought,
Wrote 'Mene, mene,' and divided quite
The Kingdom of her thought.

54 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
"Deep dread and loathing of her solitude
Fell on her."
From out dark corners in her palace-home
phantoms glared, nightmare shapes appeared, and
blackened corpses. She seemed to herself shut up
as in a crumbling tomb. At last
"She threw her royal robes away,
'Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said,
'Where I may mourn and pray.' "
With this vital, sympathetic touch with our fel
lows — without which we can do nothing, enjoy no
spiritual health, make no spiritual progress —
there at once becomes operative the law of spirit
ual assimilation, which has the same Divine ori
gin, and is as inexorable, as the laws that control
in chemical combinations of affinitive molecules.
Companions whose inner spiritual lives commin
gle, inevitably grow into each other's likeness, the
stronger nature producing the deeper, more last
ing spiritual impressment.
There is no influence in the world that will at
all compare in potency with this of personal
presence. Indeed, all others combined are out
weighed by it. Every soul which secures to it
self spiritual vigor and enlargement will be found
to be intimately linked with stronger and nobler
natures, out from which course currents of irre
sistible, vitalizing power. From our cradles, by
the very instincts of our being, we become hero-
worshippers, and our hearts' heroes are the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 55
molders and masters of our hearts. Some per
sonal presence, then, without and above humanity,
must be in vital contact with it, to insure to the
world permanent moral elevation. A chain of in
fluences must reach up to God's throne. Other
wise, by this very spiritual law we have an
nounced, the whole race would soon sink into a
state of spiritual equilibrium, the lowest and the
highest finally meeting on a common level.
Whatever of spiritual life the world possesses to
day must have come originally from this Divine
source, and human companionships have been but
channels of its dissemination. The fact that the
human race has made moral progress through the
centuries can be explained only on the ground
that it has been blessed with Divine companion
ship. That it has not made far greater progress
is clearly chargeable to a voluntary failure fully
to avail itself of this most inestimable privilege.
Spiritual deterioration in individual lives because
of this withdrawal from God's proffered presence
is, alas ! too frequent to require any confirmation.
Not a single instance can be cited, either in indi
vidual or national history, of the developing of
the supposed inherent promise and potency of
spiritual life without this Divine environment.
The Duke of Argyll has, in his "Primeval Man,"
challenged evolutionists to prove that any people
has ever risen out of savagery into civilization
without being incited and helped to it by influ
ences from without.

56 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
To develop the Godlikeness in human souls
through this very law of spiritualization, what
more effective way could be devised than to have
a man in a most intimate relationship with the Di
vine Spirit enter human history? To bring the
Divine Heart into closer sympathetic relation
with men, to present incontestable evidences of
God's loving estimate of man's infinite possibili
ties, of his longing to enter into closer intimacy
with these his cherished children, an Immanual
must come, and by thus transfusing his own spirit
he would transform theirs. As soon as they per
mit his tears and smiles to mingle with theirs,
clasp his hand of friendly greeting, open with glad
welcome the door of their hearts as he stands
waiting, look into his face radiant with a self-
forgetting love, listen to his voice as, in tones as
gentle and winning as a mother's, it asks, as it
speaks their name, "Lovest thou me?" — then, but
not till then, will their spirits begin to thrill with
that Divine vitality that has in it the power of
an endless life.
Thus we can see how firmly based on the deep
principles of this world-organism would be his
warning that without him we can do nothing, as
also his promise that with him we can do all
things, that he is the vine and we the branches,
and that we must abide in him if we would have
life and bear fruit. These utterances of the his
toric Christ were bold and startling. If he did not
regard his human spirit as intimately linked with

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 57
the Divine they were blasphemous ; if he did, then
profoundly true, for under this law of spiritual
assimilation no spiritual blessing within the range
of our asking lies without the reach of his giving.
Even the feeblest and least gifted rise, under the
influences of such a companionship, into the full
ness of his stature.
This statement is so astounding that it is diffi
cult, well-nigh impossible, for us to realize or
credit it; but we shall find ourselves wonderfully
reassured if we note the well-nigh limitless capac
ity for being uplifted possessed by everything God
has made, and the power to uplift bestowed upon
the various forces he has commissioned to bring
finally into full perfection the embodiment
of his creative thought. In an Oriental proverb
we find the conception of this Divine plan
crystallized into a gem worthy to be worn in the
crown of our rej oicing : "I was but common clay
till roses were planted in me." Into this sentence
is compressed the profoundest philosophy of all
the ages. We may use it as a Rosetta Stone to
decipher the many mysterious hieroglyphs written
on the world's walls by the finger of God. I still
watch with wonderment and awe the unfolding
phenomena of the vegetable world. These tiny
architectural artists of Nature are enveloped in
such unfathomable mystery. Their mantles of
invisibility are never unclasped. Their deft fin
gers move as noiselessly as sunbeams. Their lips
are as mute as the lips of the dead. Yet without

58 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
confusion, without hesitancy, without mistake,
they transform amorphic matter into symmetries
and tints and flavors and perfumes that become to
us speaking symbols of God's love. Out from the
foul stagnancy of the marsh a lily lifts its pure
white lips to receive the kisses of the sun. What
delicacy of fragrance, grace of form, charm of
color, fineness of texture, marvelous etherealiza-
tion of gross substances, evidencing the well-nigh
limitless uplifting power of this Divinely commis
sioned germ-fairy that has been sent into this
most unpromising part of God's kingdom ! Simi
lar miracle workings fill the earth ; indeed, as the
modern microscope discloses, the capacities of
matter for refinement are practically infinite.
Animal germs take these same gross elements
after they have been thus uplifted by the vege
table, and carry them still higher, even to the very
border-land of spirits, weaving them at last into
a veil of so ethereal a texture that sometimes, in
privileged moments, we catch glimpses through it,
we are well-nigh persuaded, of the spirits them
selves of our loved ones, for the human face at
times seems not only to reflect, in its mobile fea
tures, changing colors, flitting lights and shad
ows, the thought-life within, but to be suffused
with some strange preternatural radiance, that
suggests the outshining of the glory tints of the
soul, of the halo of its very essence.
So universally prevalent throughout Nature are
these displays of matter's capacity for being up-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 59
lifted that only those peculiarly gifted with po
etic perennial freshness of thought and reverent
interpretative insight are properly impressed with
the deep significance of promise and of prophecy
they possess for every one of us.
We are taught, not only thus by the marvelous
movements of life below us, but by the whole
course of life about us, forming the incidents of
the world's individual and national histories, that
if we come into vital union with spirits superior,
live in their personal presence, thrill to their talis-
manic touch, bask in the sunshine of their sym
pathy, we shall grow into spiritual exaltations of
purpose that will eventually ripen into permanent
traits of character of whose possibility of develop
ment we before had never dreamed. Let the seed
of Christ's Divine love be planted within us, and
the common clay of our natures, that would have
forever remained but common clay were it not for
this union, will under its magical power be uplifted
and transformed into roses whose graces of form,
of tint, and of perfume will win for us by and by
glad welcome into the Paradise of God.
Thus we see that the advent of just such a per
sonage as the Christ of the Gospels was absolutely
essential to consummate the plan of organization
Divinely purposed from the beginning; that just
such a spiritually vitalizing influence was needed
to be infused into individual experiences to pre
vent the whole fabric, so elaborately built through
the long centuries, from falling into wreck. This

60 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
unmistakable necessity for the coming of Christ,
living such a life of loving self-sacrifice, making
such a revelation of the yearning sympathy of
the Divine Heart, coming into such vital union
with waiting souls, contains in itself the sure
promise of his coming, and testifies that the his
toric Christ is the veritable Christ of prophecy.
The necessity which scientific inquiry has dis
closed of this quickening touch to thus complete
God's vast plan of world-organism reveals to us
Christ's place in Nature. It was not that his sac
rifice was essential to satisfy the demands of a
broken law, to pay its penalty so as to render
possible and safe God's forgiveness and man's re
instatement, — such a thought finding no warrant,
so far as I can see, either in science or sound phi
losophy, — but to work such change in human
hearts, exert over them such ennobling influences,
reach out with such tender, life-giving sympathies,
as to win men back to loving obedience, and thus
fit them for the forgiveness God is ever anxiously
waiting to bestow upon the repentant and believ
ing. Science in thus discovering the indispensable
need of such a work witnesses to the reasonable
ness of the Christian's faith in an exceptionally
intimate union of Christ's spirit with the Divine.
A half-century ago Doctor Horace Bushnell
with most elaborate and profound argument
sought thus to interpret Christ's mission and to
show how the whole trend of Scripture teaching,

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 61
once rightly understood, would be found to sus
tain such a view however widely it differed from
the accepted creed of Christendom. Though
strikingly correct as to his conclusions, however
imperfect and involved at times the course of rea
soning by which they were reached, and though
strikingly in consonance with sound judgment and
our innate sense of justice, the Doctor, instead of
winning wide sympathetic assent, raised such a
storm of denunciatory criticism for presuming to
attack the supposed citadel of Christian faith he
barely escaped being driven from the pulpit for
rank heresy, and nowhere to this late day among
the many promulgated articles of Christian doc
trine can any trace be found of the Bushnell in
novation. The Greek Church affirms that "Christ has
done and suffered in our stead all that was neces
sary for the remission of our sins" ; while the
Roman Catholic Church takes the same stand, an
nouncing that "it was a sacrifice most acceptable
unto God offered by his Son on the altar of the
Cross which entirely appeased the wrath and in
dignation of the Father"; and in the Westmin
ster Confession we find reiterated this identical
concept in the words, "The Lord Jesus by his per
fect obedience and sacrifice of himself hath fully
satisfied the justice of his Father and has pur
chased reconciliation and entrance into the King
dom of Heaven for all whom his Father hath given
him."

62 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
Doctor McConnell, an eminent Episcopalian
divine, in a very recent work, gives practically
the same interpretation of Christ's mission that
Doctor Bushnell did, though he arrives at his con
clusion by an entirely different method.
In remarking as to the common creed of the
churches he says, "The suggestion that the parent
would slay the child to regain his own peace and
to safeguard his own justice is one so wildly ir
rational that one can only stand amazed when he
confronts it in theologie guise."
Underlying all the variant views of the differ
ent Christian sects there is to be found "this fun
damental belief that Christ was a sacrifice offered
to appease an incensed Judge, and that it has been
so far efficacious that it has left God with no valid
claim against any man who takes the proper
steps to interpose this safeguard between the im
pending judgment and himself. Propitiation of
God by sacrifice and the transference of right
eousness from the innocent to the guilty are of
its very essence, and they are both but survivals
of an ancient blind paganism." The present
widespread decline and apathy of the churches,
the alarming defection among thoughtful inquir
ers, they either silently withdrawing or else keep
ing aloof from fellowship, he attributes to this
still holding fast on the part of the churches to
the old-time dogma of propitiatory sacrifice. He
thinks that the Church is now passing through a
most grave crisis, that the old creeds are no

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 63
longer binding and in many particulars have
been outgrown, that the educated and reflective
do not care to be compromised by appearing to
endorse what they no longer hold true. He
points out that the Mosaic and Levitical codes
were designed not so much to foster as to limit as
far as that rude age would permit, and eventually
to eliminate, the still prevailing pagan notion of
a necessary sacrificial offering to placate an an
gry God. He declares that "the Epistle to the
Hebrews construed Christ's mission in terms of
Hebrew sacrifice and that St. Paul's teachings
were in the mixed terms of Hebrew sacrifice and
Roman Law," that "the Light thus shining
through imperfect and stained windows was sadly
refracted and discolored," that "Christianity at
the bottom should be construed as a life-process
and not a commercial transaction," that the
"Higher Criticism" had set free the reason and
intuitive moral perception in the study of the
Bible for the determining of the extent and the na
ture of its inspiration, the precise meaning and
degree of inerrancy of its precepts and revela
tions, that this volume though wonderfully rich
and suggestive was henceforth to be regarded sim
ply as a collection of religious literature, a record
of life experiences and devout reflections of many
centuries, designed as a helpful stimulant, not as
an authoritative dictum and finality, but pro
gressive in its revelations and standards of motive
and conduct, that the New Testament was to a

64 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
large extent a revisal, and in many things a re
versal of the Old, modifying and enlarging its
conceptions, that as none of the reputed words of
Christ promulgate this doctrine of vicarious
atonement with the exception of two short
phrases to be found in the twentieth and twenty-
sixth chapters of Matthew, at the close of the
twenty-eighth verse in each, and as they are so
out of all accord with his other sayings and were
not committed to writing until at least thirty-
five years after his death, but handed down by
the uncertain word of mouth, we would not be
going beyond our privilege to regard them as
possibly the unauthorized interpolations of some
unknown scribe and in no way binding upon
Christian believers.
Doctor Bushnell, believing Paul's teachings
inspired and authoritative, yet being unable to ac
cept the current conception of vicarious sacrifice,
employed his remarkable gifts, amounting almost
to genius, in showing how Paul has been entirely
misunderstood and that Christ's mission was not
to reconcile God to man but man to God. The
whole misconception of Christendom, he conjec
tured, has grown out of a too wide separation of
the three persons in the Godhead, and that had
God been conceived of as possessing a unified and
indivisible self, that he was triune only in some
such sense as we are, the three persons being but
three phases of the self-same Divine Ego, the
stern sense of justice of the Father and the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 65
yearning self-abnegating love of the Son repre
senting but different attitudes of the one Divine
Spirit toward humanity, the theology of the ages
would not have gone so lamentably far astray.
Modern science in so far as it has been able to
penetrate the deep mysteries of personality has
by its disclosures confirmed with no uncertain
emphasis, though without design, this view of
Christ's nature and the purpose of his mission,
advanced by these two learned doctors of divinity.
It will be found, I am strongly persuaded, that
the doctrine that Christ in one very important
sense was Divine, when once rightly understood,
does not necessarily contain any confusion of
thought as to the true nature of personality, or
in any way antagonize the conclusions of science
on this the most perplexing of questions, but that
modern discoveries in mental phenomena will be
found here also to be Christianity's most helpful
allies. There are three widely different opinions
prevailing among evangelical theologians as to
Christ's nature; first, that he never possessed any
human soul, but that a human body simply was
animated for a season by the Divine Spirit; sec
ond, that while he indeed had a soul, this was so
completely and permanently blended with the
Divine Spirit that they together constituted a
single new and unique personality which will re
main intact through all the eternal ages ; third,
that Christ was of a dual nature, lived a dual
life, had two infinitely different spirits alternately

66 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
animating and controlling his body, sending elec
tric waves of thought and emotion over the brain,
that most delicate and mysterious of all its
organs, that at times only the human was mani
fest with its many weaknesses and limitations, its
longings and its griefs, and then again only the
Divine appeared, teaching with authority, for
giving sins, scanning the secret intents of the
heart, lifting the curtains of the future, healing
the sick, restoring the blind, even raising the dead.
I seriously question whether the first two opin
ions can bear the searching scrutiny of this
critical age, and as neither of them embodies my
own belief I will not now take time to state their
grounds of defense. The third, however, seeming
to be in perfect accord not only with the facts
of history but with the conclusions of science, is
worthy of at least a tentative acceptance.
Multitudinous instances are well authenticated of
one personality being for a time completely sub
merged by another through that marvelous power
denominated mesmeric influence. These show
that duality of nature is certainly possible, that
two spirits can alternately employ the same set
of bodily organs. We have seen the mesmerized
under this strange spell losing for a time his
identity, thinking the thoughts and thrilling with
the emotional life of another. I, of course, would
not attempt to designate or explain the precise
mode of this particular Divine informing in the
case of Christ, but simply to show that the facts

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 67
we have unearthed in our scientific researches
into the subtle power of mind over matter in the
realm of Nature as well as of mind over mind
serve to illustrate and confirm the third attempted
explanation of the mystery that shrouds this the
strangest visitant our earth has ever had. The
testimony of our own self-consciousness convinces
us that the ego is an indivisible unit, a wholly
separate entity in itself, from which nothing can
be taken, to which nothing can be added, with
which no other ego can be so blended that they
will permanently disappear and a new complex
third ego result from this union. But that one
ego can so dominate over another, so completely
capture the body that incases it and through
which alone it can operate as to cause a period
of oblivion to pass over it, is a fact that can be
witnessed almost any day. The vanished ego is,
however, not destroyed but simply repressed and
will promptly reassert itself the moment the
dominating power is removed. There is here no
blending of egos, no joint action of consciousness,
nor is there the incoming of some new self, but
simply the temporary domination of the stronger
over the weaker one. This, it seems to me, is a
possible explanation of the many apparent con
tradictions in Christ's allusions to himself and in
the facts of his life. In that forty days' combat
with the tempter at the opening of his career, in
that last all-night agony of prayer in the Gar
den at its close, in all the sufferings and strug-

68 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
glings and most glorious triumphings that filled
the years between, in all his sense of weakness
and weariness and most pressing need of help
which his frequent seasons of secret prayer be
tray, we see the brave battlings of simply a noble
human soul; but when we hear him call out in
tones of authority as he stands with mourning
friends at the door of a sepulchre "Lazarus,
come forth," when we hear him say to the help
less paralytic as he is laid at his feet "Thy sins
are forgiven thee," when we hear him assure the
penitent brigand who hangs beside him on the
cross, "This day thou shalt be with me in Para
dise," we hear the voiced mandates and blessed
assurances of a God.
Thus we see that Science cannot rightly urge
against the claim that Christ was both human
and Divine the objection that this is in direct con
flict with the testimony of self-consciousness as
to the essential unity and indivisibility of the ego.
Great confusion of thought has arisen among the
mass of Christian believers out of the dogma,
which they feel forced to accept, that while there
is but one God he is composed of three separate
independent personalities. They are seemingly
uninformed that the word "persons" can be used
in a restricted sense and indeed has been in the
polemical writings of some of our most eminent
theologians. It is unquestionably impossible for
us to conceive of three absolutely distinct egos
being combined into one, and that too during the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 69
very time they, each, maintain intact their own
individuality. This is simply a contradiction
and confusion of thought, or rather, we might
say, it is mere jugglery of words ; for to us, con
stituted as we are, with our clear consciousness of
a unified and indivisible self, such a proposition
is absolutely unthinkable. But there is a sense
in which we ourselves possess a triune nature, the
ego in us being made up of the intellect, the sens
ibility and the will. We are capable of self-com-
munings, of self-criticism, of self-conflict, of gen
eral introspective thought. In this sense and only
in this, can we form any adequate conception of
what has been styled a triune God, and \yithout
a conception, a picture in the mind, belief is im
possible. It is said that we are created in God's
image. Certain it is that the very utmost we can
conceive of God is as a spirit possessing in in
finite perfection faculties and attributes similar
to those which we ourselves possess in but par
tially developed germ, the difference being not in
kind but simply in degree and in healthfulness
of development. If he has any quality or at
tribute radically different from ours, of which
there is in us no likeness, we can have no knowl
edge of it whatever, it cannot possibly be re
vealed to us, we having no conceptual capacity
for such a thought. As well attempt to teach the
horse we drive a proposition in Euclid. There
fore all we know of God or can believe about him
must necessarily come through the medium of our

70 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
own self-knowledge, and through that alone.
The three persons in the Trinity can possibly
mean to us nothing more than different phases or
presentations of the same Divine Ego, and any
language of Scripture which seems to mean more
than this must be regarded simply as bold poetic
personification, a mode of thought peculiarly
fascinating to the quickly kindling fancy of the
Orient, and a marked feature of its literature.
"At morn I prayed, 'I fain would see
How Three are One and One is Three
Read the dark riddle unto me.'
"In vain I turned in weary quest
Old pages where (God give them rest)
The poor creed mongers dreamed and guessed.
"O ! blind of sight, of faith how small
Father and Son and Holy Call,
This day thou hast denied them all.
"Revealed in love and sacrifice
The Holiest passed before thine eyes
One and the same in three-fold guise.
"The equal Father in rain and sun,
His Christ in the good to evil done,
His Voice in thy soul; — and the three are one."
"And my heart answered 'Lord I see
How Three are One and One is Three
The riddle hath been read to me.' "

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 71
The more deeply I have reflected on the ab
solute necessity of Christ's mission, and the
equally absolute adequacy of it for the completion
of this vast plan of world-organism to which I
have directed attention, the more deeply I have
been impressed with Christ's unique universality
of nature, his perfect intellectual and spiritual
equipment, his majestic, incomparable world-
sympathy. There is a notable absence of any
racial aversion, of any narrow Jewish bigotry or
prejudice, of any limitation characteristic of
some single age, or class, or clime. His concep
tions and ethical principles are such as can never
be out-grown by advancing culture, by the widen
ing of the horizons of thought, by higher world-
standards. He still stands in the fore-front,
though nineteen centuries have come and gone
since his advent. He satisfies the needs of all
social grades, of all mental types. Self-effacing
love, life's quenchless, mightiest, foremost force,
is that which he has ever sought to evoke, which
he aims to make the main motive in every human
heart, the highest ideal in every human life. De
voted attachment to himself as an ever living
personality is the imperishable incentive in his re
ligion. By it he has brought the Divine Spirit
out of the inscrutable solitudes into the purview
of human thought, within the embrace of human
love. This supreme attachment is the quickening
force in all social ethical advancements. It has
prompted all the great beneficences for humanity,

72 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
kindled hatred of oppression, purified love of
liberty, awakened zeal for the truth, inspired hope
in the despondent, proved itself indispensable in
the manifold uplift of the race. Christ's high
ideals permeate all best literatures, all highest
art, have been paramount in all advancements in
social reform during past centuries.
Right here this most vital question forces itself
upon every thoughtful mind; has it been revealed
in the character and career of Christ that the
Divine and the human spirit can be inter-penetra
tive, that there is an affinity of nature between
the two, a close communion of life, and at the same
time a distinctiveness of personality, and that the
incarnation disclosed not only God to man but
also man to himself as God's ideal susceptible of
subsequent unfolding into complete likeness and
finally into joint heirship with Christ himself?
It was imperative that there should be revealed
a Divine Ideal for the human soul to aspire after
and grow to.
This subtle, magnetic transforming power of
personal intimacy and attachment has arrested
attention in these last days of tireless scientific
inquiry with an emphasis never before felt. Its
inexhaustible possibilities have filled us with
amazement. It was this influence of such
strange, measureless potency which Christ chose
with an infinite wisdom as his chief ally to dis
ciple mankind and win his kingdom.
Yet exactly how Christ was Divine, how the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 73
union of the two natures was effected and main
tained, and how it is that we with our finiteness
are assured that we will eventually become as
truly Divine with him if we through his influence
finally grow into his spirit of loving self-sacrifice,
has long been with me a very serious and most
perplexing question. How is it that he is our
elder brother, that we are to be joint heirs with
him, if he was really Divine? What did he mean
in that marvelous farewell prayer for his disciples
when he said "The glory which thou gavest me I
have given them," if that glory was essentially
a Divine effulgence? Is it possible that our
spirits will be privileged at the last to enter into
the self-same intimate union with the Divine that
Christ experienced and to undergo a like Divine
transfiguration ? Was it a man or a God or both
combined that suffered and died on the Cross?
or was the union and the suffering on God's part
simply sympathetic, each spirit maintaining in
tact through it all its own distinctive personality?
The discoveries of modern science have for me
gone far in solving this the deepest mystery of
the ages. The thought has already been incor
porated in preceding paragraphs but lest it has
not been duly emphasized or made clear I will
venture on a brief restatement of its salient
points. Confirmatory of our modern belief in the ex
istence of an intimately woven material world-
organism is the discovery of what is termed

74 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
luminiferous ether, the nature and universal prev
alence of which I have elsewhere attempted to
describe. Its apparent properties are so utterly
at variance with those of which we have always
supposed matter to consist we have been tempted
at first to dismiss all statements concerning it as
preposterous, as wholly chimerical, but as there is
no dissenting voice among scientists as to its
reality and its seemingly contradictory proper
ties we are simply forced to confess that there are
mysteries about matter we are not yet able to
fathom. As John Fiske puts it, "How curious
to think that we live and move in an ocean of
ether, in which the particles of all material things
are floating like islands. But how amazing to
learn that this ocean of ether is also an adaman
tine firmament. Is not this sheer nonsense, an
ocean-firmament of ether-adamant. Yet such
seems to be the fact and our philosophy must
make the best of it." Granite and steel are con-
spicious for their solidity, yet the particles of
which they are composed, instead of touching
each other are floating like separate islands in
this strange ether. Although its pressure is, ac
cording to Herschel, Jevons and other eminent
scientists equal to seventeen billion pounds to the
square inch, indicating an almost infinite com
pactness, we cannot feel it, we cannot see it, and
the swarming worlds that people space whirl
through it as unobstructedly as through a
vacuum. It is through this that waves of light

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 78
are propagated at a speed of from one hundred
and eighty-five to two hundred thousand miles per
second, electricity is flashed, radiant heat travels,
magnetic attractions and repulsions thrill and
startle with their mysteries, the universal force
of gravitation is supposed to maintain its sway.
With what incredulity we first heard of the
achievements of the telegraph with its long
stretches of metal highways over whose closed
circuits the mind's messages succeeded in wing
ing their way. Now by touching the keys of our
instruments we toss our thoughts out into wire
less space and instantly throughout all this cir
cumambient ether circling waves of agitation
widen out into immensity, following each other in
inconceivably rapid succession until at last,
leagues of distance away, they break on the shore
of some attuned receiver and tell their tale of joy
or sorrow to some listening ear, to some throbbing
heart. The fact that thus distance is practically
annihilated, that soul is thus brought into im
mediate touch with soul we would utterly refuse to
credit were it not demonstrated hour after hour
right in our very presence.
These astounding phenomena find their coun
terpart in the spiritual realm. Without strung
wires, without electric instruments of any kind,
our widely separated spirits are somehow, we do
not know how, brought into telepathic touch with
each other. We not only seem to hear each
other's voices, to look into each other's familiar

76 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
faces, but even to step across the threshold
of the flesh and enter within the veil. It took
many years of patient investigation to con
vince us that the phenomena of telepathy were
anything more than figments of a disordered
fancy. Now, however, they are accepted every
where as proven facts of science. We have not
yet discovered the laws under which these com
munications are carried on nor the exact nature
of that all pervasive transmitting medium whose
real existence we have long since ceased to ques
tion, and have not yet succeeded in bringing into
service these occult powers as we have those of
steam and electricity, but their actual existence
has become thoroughly established, and they, too,
will, no doubt, some day be brought under man's
control and answer to his needs. Closely allied
with them are hypnotic, clairvoyant, and other
partially hidden powers which also as yet manifest
themselves largely under abnormal conditions.
They seem in great part to be held in reserve,
whether for a later period in this life or for some
other sphere of existence we cannot now deter
mine. Until we have further light we would be
justified in regarding them as precursors, fore
shadowings of a life beyond.
The psychotherapeutic dominance of the sub
conscious self, of which we are now hearing so
much, which Christ doubtless employed as one of
the agencies in effecting cures during his earthly
ministry, and which he left as a legacy to his

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 77
disciples, is a part and a proof no doubt of this
intimate interplay of forces in the world-organism
of which I have hitherto been speaking. This
complicate organization established throughout
the physical and spiritual realms seems to have
been devised in the counsels of eternity as Christ's
instrument for winning souls into his Kingdom,
for it was with the magnetism of just such an
infinitely loving personality he came surcharged
and which he still retains in all its matchless,
living force, it was with this self-same personal
affection he sought to inspire his disciples. Up
on the entering thus into closest touch with all
human hearts he based his hopes of ultimately
winning and transforming all human lives. In
that last most tenderly pathetic prayer for his
little group of followers and their successors
how significant that he should repeat over and
over again this very conception we have been
trying to express, "Holy Father, keep through
thine own name those whom thou hast given me,
that they may be one as we are — neither pray
I for these alone but for them also which shall
believe on me through their word, that they all
may be one, as thou Father art in me and I in
thee, that they may be made perfect in one." An
intent yearning for an eternal love-union seemed
to have poured in like a flood on his sorrow-bur
dened soul in these last hours. Right here we
find the true touchstone of his ministry.
F. W. H. Myers, in his last and greatest work

78 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
entitled "Human Personality," has remarked, "It
was a great day when a previously unsuspected
capacity for electrical excitation demonstrated the
fact that we had long been acted upon by electri
city as well as by heat and light ; that we were liv
ing in an inconceivable and limitless environment,
— namely an ether charged with infinite energy,
overpassing and interpenetrating alike the last
gulf of darkness and the extremest star. May
we not suppose that there are yet other environ
ments, other interpenetrations which a further
awakening of faculty still subliminal is yet fated
by its own nascent response to discover. It was
a great day when a previously unsuspected ca
pacity of telepathic percipience revealed the fact
that we had long been acted upon by telepathic
as well as by sensory stimuli, and that we were
living in an inconceivable and limitless environ
ment, — a thought-world or spiritual universe
charged with infinite life, interpenetrating and
overpassing all human spirits — up to what some
have called World-Soul, and some God."
Eminent psychologists claim and fortify their
claim with most startling facts, that below the
region of consciousness there exists a secret
workshop of the mind in which are wrought no
one knows how, most marvelous products of
thought, products that border on the miraculous.
Here is the mysterious birthplace of intuitions,
of creative concepts, of deductive hypotheses
which eventuate in great discoveries. Here too

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 79
is the birthplace of poetic inspiration, of previ
sion, and out of here issue all those inimitable
dreams of genius that so enrich literature and
art and science and religious belief. In my re
search I have found well attested facts of a most
startling nature, a few of which I have recited
in my treatment of the efficacy of prayer, facts
which have filled me with wonderment, even with
reverence, at the seemingly inexhaustible pos
sibilities of the human spirit. The first concep
tions of works of genius, and often their full
perfected form have been marked in their genesis
by most surprising spontaneity, by strange ab
sence of conscious effort, they coming up uncalled
for, and unaccounted for, out of the depths of
the unknown.
In the presence of these facts and experiences
are we not entirely justified in the conviction that
it is out from this very region, as yet but little
explored, of the sub-conscious-self vast and, for
aught we know, infinite in extent, reaching down
into personality far beyond where human plum
met has ever yet sounded, that it is out from
this region of shadow there issue the great in
spirations of life, that it is through this most
mysterious region we come into answering touch
with the environing spirit world of the universe,
even with God himself. Do not these astounding
discoveries of the complete compactness and in
tense vitalization of the universe and of our own
vantage ground in it growing out of this sub-

80 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
conscious part of our being, of whose capacities
for spiritual outreach to both the living and the
dead, and of direct impressment, we are as yet
but very partially informed, afford us an inval
uable clue to the solution of the mystery of the
character and career of Christ. He was excep
tionally equipped to come into closest touch with
this sub-conscious self, to call into play its mira
cle-working powers, to bring their creations up to
the threshold of consciousness, and thus to make
them serviceable in the exigencies of his excep
tional life. Did he not discern also in us
potentially a like equipment, like abysmal depths
of personality, a like open door into this universal
spirit life, a key to unlock the exhaustless treas
ure-house of all sentient life, a possible widening
of our horizons of thought and feeling to the
very uttermost bounds of being, in short, power
intimately to touch and take in, as did he, the
very infinitude of the loving heart of God.
There are many facts in Christ's career that
very strongly indicate that he was pre-eminently,
as has been suggested, an ideal psychic healer.
In every human individual a certain psychic force
has been found lying latent ready to answer to
the call of a confident, masterful concentrated
will. Late discoveries as to the curative power
of suggestion, put forth by an outsider or arising
out of one's own consciousness, have been so star
tling as to well nigh stagger belief. Cults of
various sorts have sprung up along down the cen-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 81
turies, and greatly multiplied in these last days,
making use in one way or another of this mys
terious transcendency of the mind over the body.
The most startling and satisfactory results are
obtained when the healer's will is most dominant,
his faith in his own powers most supreme, his
concentration of thought most complete, and, in
conjunction with this, the patient's faith in the
healer most unquestioning, freest from adverse
auto-suggestions of every kind. As I have entered
quite extensively into a discussion of this question
in other parts of this volume I will here simply call
attention to the fact that Christ in the great
majority of his cures will be found to have fol
lowed closely the laws that most effectively set
free this force. In nearly every instance he de
manded an unquestioning faith on the part of
the afflicted. He confessed that in certain locali
ties he was nearly shorn of this one of his powers
because of a lamentable lack of faith among the
people. He spoke of healing virtue going out
from him when certain individuals surcharged with
this recipient faith contrived secretly to touch
him. His disciples when they came to him with
complaints of failure were told that the hamper
ing cause was their lack of faith. In almost all
instances of cure either by himself or by his dis
ciples physical contact was employed as a fac
tor, as a help to faith. A cold distrust oper
ated seemingly as a powerful deterrent. This
was doubtless true only in such cases as were

82 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
sought to be effected through this one channel
alone. Thus far Christ utilized simply a psycho
therapeutic force which is clearly within our own
purview, and within, at least, our partial control.
The nature of the other powers which he called
into play when more than functional and nerv
ous disorders, when even organic losses or lesions
were restored, when the dead were raised, and
when, supreme above all, the bands of his own
death were burst asunder by his all conquering
will, baffles as yet human investigation. Whether
these powers were exhibits of psychic control
which are only temporarily beyond human reach
or are to be forever beyond it, whether in some
far age our spirits are to be to that same extent
en rapport with the Divine as was that of Christ,
we can, as yet, only conjecture.
Christ's knowledge of psychic laws was un
questionably intuitive and complete. Doctor
Hudson in one of his books remarks, "Christ him
self was the most stupendous psychic phenomena
the world has ever seen. He is the one example
of a being in whom the synchronism of develop
ment, physical, intellectual, psychical and moral,
was absolutely perfect. In him the objective and
subjective faculties preserved at all times, under
all circumstances, an exquisitely harmonious bal
ance. His reason was always in the ascendency.
He never allowed himself to be placed in such a
mental condition as to render it possible for him
to be dominated by a false or vicious suggestion.

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 83
He never exercised his psychic power except for
the accomplishment of some good object."
To this we may add that Christ's super-phys
ical powers, his use of natural mental means, does
not detract from his claim to an exceptionally
intimate touch with the Divine. We would ex
pect him to employ as far as possible the already
established, Divinely-derived facilities for accom
plishing his desired results. His disciples were
instructed in the same methods, — were promised
like control over the forces in nature. The real
proof of Christ's union with Divinity rests upon
his own affirmation of it, fortified by his complete
knowledge of, and dominance over, physical and
mental, indeed all cosmic, forces, and his use of
this knowledge and power wholly for beneficent
ends. How forcibly, right here, is presented to
our thought the possibility, indeed the extreme
probability, that through this very open door of
the sub-conscious self of Christ came the inflood-
ing, in his matchless, love-lighted life, of the
Divine Presence, forming that mystic spirit union
which he claimed with the Father, and that we,
it may be, will be finally privileged to enter into
a like transforming companionship, by and by
in the far eternity of the soul. As I have already
remarked it was for this very same sympathetic
blending of spirits that Christ so passionately,
pathetically prayed the Father during that last
memorable reunion with his disciples, "that they
all may be one as thou art in me and I in thee";

84 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
it was that priceless privilege of finally becoming
joint heirs with him he so confidently pledged all
those who should unreservedly love him and love
him to the end.
Theologians in attempting to solve the problem
of Christ's personality and to account for the fact
that he alone of all the unnumbered millions of
spirits that have sojourned for a season on this
planet never sinned, never seemingly had any con
sciousness of the least short-coming or need of
forgiveness, — have affirmed of him a nature, a
combination of attributes absolutely beyond
human power to conceive. Why thus attempt the
impossible? Why enter upon lines of thought
that can end only in hopeless bewilderment? Dr.
D. W. Forrest, a most eminent divine in Edin
burgh, in his "Christ of History" has tried, and
I think tried in vain, to sound these depths. He
says "If Christ's personality represents a new
stage in man's consciousness of God it is a stage
which closes with himself. He has no more been
reproduced in Christendom than he was antici
pated in Judaism. There is a double break in the
continuity. Naturalistic evolution fails to ac
count for him alike in connection with what pre
cedes and with what follows him, and it is the lat
ter failure which is fatal." "We can see indeed
that in some respects he has realized the very ideal
of humanity which we cherish and long to reach,
but he has not reached it along our lines, and so
the inspiration of his life is enfeebled by a doubt."

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 85
"We talk too easily of Christ as our great ex
ample. The peculiarity of his attitude is that
it cannot be imitated. Here is a note we cannot
sound" — "The forms and conditions under which
Christ develops are truly human, yet the person
ality developed though human also, is of a type
of which other men do not possess the possibility,
and which they cannot even imaginably realize, a
union of characteristics which eludes definite con
ception." — "We may say, if we choose, that there
was but one consciousness in him as there was but
one personality, that of the Word made flesh."
The conclusion here reached by this most
learned and world-famed theologian absolutely
shuts Christ out of human conception, out of
human imitation, and out of human love.
It affirms that two egos can be indissolubly con
joined into a single new and incomprehensible one.
The testimony of our self-consciousness as I have
already remarked positively confutes such a com
bination and consequent new creation. That our
spirits are, each one of them, unique, indivisible
entities is the very basic belief of our being. If
Christ contrary to his professions, bore some of
the deceptive semblances of a perfect humanity,
the part he played of a loving and lovable leader
was all a heartless farce.
Doctor Henry P. Liddon in his famed Bompton
lectures affirms that "God incarnate in Christ,
willed each volition of Christ's human will," —
"that from the first Christ's human will was con-

86 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
trolled by the Divine to which it is indissolubly
joined," — that "Our Lord as God and man, had
two wills but the Divine originated and ruled his
action," that "the person of Christ is one and in
dissoluble." No wonder that this eminent expos
itor after these most astounding statements should
have felt impelled to confess that here he
"touched upon the line at which revealed truth
shades off into inaccessible mystery."
If Christ's human will was thus absolutely sub
merged, robbed from first to last of all individ
uality, of all freedom of choice, he on his human
side must have been none other than a mere au
tomaton without any capacity for loving self-
sacrifice, without any real capacity for virtue of
any sort, though the prime purpose of his mission
was to body it forth in its very completeness, vir
tue pre-supposing susceptibility to temptation
and triumph over it. Only in an environment of
liberty can love live, can it ever be manifested or
maintained. When the Doctor asserts finally the
indissoluble and submerging union of Christ's
personality with the Divine, he, it seems to me,
reaches the very climax of contradiction; he, for
us, shuts forever the door of hope.
C. F. Nalloth, of Oxford, in a very learned
treatise entitled "The Person of our Lord and
Recent Thought," concedes that Christ was a man
among men, that every essential element of true
human life was observable in him and has been
recorded in the New Testament, claiming this as

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 87
the bed rock on which Christianity rests. Yet
he adds that Christ was not a Divine Person who
became a human person, but a Divine Person who
took another nature in addition to his own, main
taining to the full his own original personality.
He seems content with the confession simply that,
"such a coalescence of two whole and perfect na
tures with their separate endowments into a single
new personality is an unexplained mystery," but
at the same time credible, failing to realize that
it is something more than a mystery, that it is a
downright, inconceivable contradiction, as I have
previously pointed out, a resultant absolutely un
thinkable by us intuitively conscious as we are of
possessing, each one, a separate selfhood from
which nothing can be taken and to which nothing
can be added. Not only can no new ego result
from the coalescence of other two, but neither of
those two can ever be destroyed if the well known
axiom of science is true, that a real entity, spirit
ual or otherwise, can never become a non-entity,
be absolutely blotted out of being even by Divine
fiat. This author in his two closing chapters in sum
ming up the results of his research assures us
that, while the Jews' conception of God was of
a solitary Personality, the Apostolic writers em
braced the belief, derived as they thought from
Christ's own teachings, that the Godhead had
united in itself from all eternity three separate
personalities, the Father, the Son, and the Holy

88 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
Spirit, that only the Son, who had been eternally
pre-existent, became incarnate, "laying aside the
glory which he had with the Father before the
world was," and became conjoined in some unex
plained way with a human soul, forming thereby
an absolutely new personality never afterward to
be dissolved ; that the Father and the Holy Spirit
thus temporarily separated from the Son, contin
ued above in the spirit-world in their original un
abated glory, while the Son, after his mission of
humiliation was ended returned again into the
bosom of the Father, taking with him, however, a
human soul with which he was conjoined and was
to be conjoined forever after. This entire scheme
of thought is considered by our author to be in per
fect accord with the Gospel narrative, and, to our
astonishment be it said, is claimed by him to be
within the pale of human conception and worthy of
human belief. To both of which counts we must,
it seems to me, in the interest of clear thinking, en
ter a most emphatic dissent. Either the words of
Scripture are susceptible of a widely different in
terpretation, or else they are but the blind grop-
ings of uninspired and unsafe guides in the fields
of faith. Such a personality as the one here de
picted could never disciple a sorrowing and sin
ful world, being not only inconceivable by finite
minds but hopelessly beyond the reach of human
aspiration and of hungering human love. It
would negative completely the peremptory com
mand, which is necessarily accompanied with the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 89
promise of the power for us to be like Christ,
and would turn into mockery the prophecy that
by and by we will reign as joint heirs with him
in the Kingdom that is to be.
We cannot suppose for a moment that these
among our great expounders of religious thought
set out with the deliberate purpose of reaching
such conclusions but have lamentably lost their
way in the labyrinthine mazes of their own
speculations. Better far for all of us to con
tent ourselves with answers to the following plain
questions : Is man of sufficient consequence to war
rant Christ's coming? Was there an imperative
necessity for him to come in order to rescue
man from the guilt of sin and from its destructive
consequences, to furnish an indispensable and at
tainable ideal to which to aspire? To reach this
height of spiritual perfection on Christ's part was
it imperative that the Divine Spirit should enter
into intimate relationship with the human and
were there convincing evidences in Christ's life
that some such union was effected? Were
Christ's concepts and conduct broad enough and
pure enough to warrant us in believing that in
him was actually fulfilled that type of spiritual
perfection striven after and prophesied in the
ceaseless processes of evolution carried on through
the ages? Were Christ's sympathies apparently
deep enough and wide enough to overleap every
barrier of race or class prejudice, to embrace in
its folds every sort and condition of men? Are

90 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
the means he adopted, that of a deeply sympa
thetic personality, the most effective, the only ef
fective force for winning back a lost world? What
other personage than Christ has ever appeared
in all history who has ever stood these essential
and searching tests?
Why set out on the bootless quest of precisely
how, or to what extent the Divine and the human
were conjoined in Christ. Why not rest satisfied
with simply some such tentative explanation, as I
have suggested of how a union was possible.
Why not accept trustingly and gratefully as a
fact of priceless promise that they were in some
way actually conjoined, and the long sought for
ideal life was somehow thus actually attained?
No one thinks of questioning the equally mys
terious fact, everywhere patent throughout na
ture, that in some way the life-forces have become
so conjoined with unorganized material masses,
and have attained such transforming power over
them that they have risen up into myriad forms of
vegetable and animal beauty to grace the land
scape, people the seas, and wing the air. No one
disputes the fact, at the same time no one pre
tends to be able to solve the mystery. The pon
derous works on theology with which the shelves
of the world's libraries are loaded, are most of
them but the recorded failures of the keenest in
tellects in this domain of thought. As I have
already remarked, we ought to rest content with
simply establishing, as we may, these fundamental

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 91
facts, that a certain unique personage nineteen
hundred years ago entered, in some way, through
life's portals; that his conduct and conversation
during the few troubled years of his sojourn
were, as far as has been discovered, absolutely
without flaw; that his system of ethics has never
been superseded, or even improved upon in any
essential feature; that his unparalleled altruistic
love, he loving with utter self-renunication and
loving to the end, has ever been, and still is, the
foremost uplifting power at work in the world;
that his incomparable creative personality, so per
fect in its purity, so deep and broad in its sym
pathies as to embrace the lowliest as well as the
most gifted, is fully fitted to satisfy the utmost
craving of the human heart ; that his coming was
absolutely demanded in order that through him
there might be revealed to our bewildered thought
the vision of a definite, thinkable, Heavenly
Father, and the blessed assurance of an endless
life. Further than this we cannot go; further
than this we need not. In a little volume, en
titled, "No Refuge but the Truth," containing
the last utterances of Goldwin Smith, one of the
most brilliant and illustrious free thinkers of
modern times, I find the refreshingly frank admis
sion that "of the New Testament there remains
the moral ideal of Christ, our faith in which no
uncertainty as to the authors of the narratives
or mistrust of them on account of the miraculous
embellishment common in biographies of saints,

92 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
need materially affect. The moral ideal of Christ
conquered the ancient world when the Roman,
mighty in character as well as in arms, was its
master. It has lived through all these centuries,
all their revolutions and convulsions, the usurpa
tion, tyranny and scandals of the Pap
acy. ... At its birth it encountered alien
and hostile influences, Alexandrian theosophy,
Oriental asceticism, Byzantine imperialism, the
theocracy engendered by the ambition of the
monk, Hilderbrand, resulting eventually in the
Norman raids upon England and Ireland, the civil
wars kindled by Papal intrigue in Germany, the
extermination of the Albigenses, the Inquisition,
Alva's tribunal of blood in the Netherlands, the
massacre of St. Bartholomew, the persecution of
the Huguenots, and the many evils which Jesuit
ism has wrought. Through all this, and in spite
of it all, Christian character has preserved itself,
and it is still the basis of the world's best civiliza
tion. . . . Whatever may become of our
creeds and of the dogma, so plainly human in
origin as are some of them, we have still the
Christian ideal of character, which has not yet
been seriously challenged, does not depend on the
miracle or dogma for its claim to acceptance and
may continue to unite Christendom. The type
of character set forth in the Gospel history is an
absolute embodiment of love, both in the way of
action and affection, crowned by the highest pos
sible exhibition of it in an act of the most trans-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 93
cendent self-devotion to the interest of the human
race. This being the case, it is difficult to see
how the Christian morality can ever be brought
into antagonism with the moral progress of man
kind; or how the Christian type of character can
ever be left behind by the course of human de
velopment, lose the allegiance of the moral world,
or give place to newly emerging and higher ideals.
This type, it would appear, being perfect will be
final. The moral efforts of all ages, to the con
summation of the world, will be efforts to realize
this character, and to make it actually, as it is
potentially, universal. . . . Humanity as it
passes through phase after phase of the historical
movement, may advance indefinitely in excellence,
but its advance will be an indefinite approxima
tion to the Christian type."

94 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?

Ill
By following out an entirely different line of
inquiry, I find that this selfsame necessity for the
coming of Christ becomes manifest, and that
science thus witnesses a second time, and with
added emphasis, to the reasonableness of the
Christian's creed.
There is no theme of such universal interest
about which there is so much confusion of thought
as that of the nature of real liberty and the con
ditions of its maintenance. There is a multitude
of forces of widely different orders at work in the
world. We can not see them, and we know ab
solutely nothing of their real nature, and are
made aware of their existence only by certain
effects produced on matter. Experiment has dis
closed that under certain conditions there follow
certain effects. Both are uniform and unchange
able. The forces lie inert and hidden until the
precise conditions are reached, and then work un
swervingly in accordance with certain pre-estab
lished laws of their being. To set a force free,
then, is simply to fulfill certain conditions, and
thus remove whatever hinders it from rendering
in its thus awakened energy an implicit obedience
to the laws established over it. We can not free
it from such laws, and it manifests neither power

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 95
nor disposition to free itself, to mold matter into
any different form or for any different purpose
than that prescribed in its Divine commission.
Between the particles of water, for example, we
can discover no cohesive attraction or but the
slightest ; yet remove a given amount of heat that
now holds this force bound and hidden, and it will
spring at once into full activity, and the water
will become a block of solid ice. Another force,
and a marvelous one, also makes its appearance.
Those particles not only cohere but are arranged
in set patterns along predetermined lines of
symmetry, forming geometrical figures of great
beauty and exactness. In the forms of snow-
flakes we recognize a Divine fineness of touch and
flawless finish. The crystalline architect just as
often as its delicate frost palaces are torn dowR
will build them again untiringly after precisely the
same models and under precisely the same con
ditions, so prompt is its obedience to law, so un
swerving its fidelity to the plans and specifications
intrusted to it by the Great Master Builder.
Pass that water as vapor through a heated
tube of platinum, and the water will be at once
resolved into its original hydrogen and oxygen
gases, and another force still — one of repulsion —
will bound into being, and so Titanic is it that
you will fail to crowd the infinitesimal atoms of
these gases together again though you apply
twenty tons' pressure to the square inch. But
touch them with fire, and they will fly back into

96 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
each other's chemical embrace instantly, and be
come water, as before.
We thus see that to free any of the lower forces
is not to release them from law, but simply from
what prevents them from acting in strictest
obedience to the laws which have been established
over them.
We shall find the same principles holding true
in the history of other and higher forms of force.
Inside the walls of a seed lies concealed a germ-
fairy which remains inert, a chained captive, un
til definitely prescribed conditions are complied
with. Place that seed in the proper environment,
surround it with dew, air, soil, and sunlight, and
those prison walls burst asunder, and out of the
crude material which Nature furnishes the
awakened and freed force constructs for itself,
with an architectural skill that is marvelous in our
eyes, a charming palace-home, — it may be the
pure white chalice of a lily, or the richly tinted
and perfumed petals of a rose, or the stalwart,
storm-defying form of a forest oak. There is
such perfection in its work, such profundity of
thought in it, that we recognize at once that it
is carrying out plans not of its own contriving,
but matured in the deep councils of Jehovah. To
set it free is simply to remove whatever hinders
it from energizing in ways predetermined for it,
from, strictly obeying the laws of organization
that pertain to its special sphere of work. It is
never restive under Divine command. We mortals

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 97
can never tempt it, nor can we drive it into dis
obedience. The germ-force inside an apple seed
will never fashion for us a grapevine or a sun
flower, but a tree rather of a species like that
which bore it. That tree will, through successive
growing seasons, throw out its banners of leaves
and add branch to branch, and then, when the
time is ripe, burst into bloom and at last bend its
boughs with fruit golden with the rich colorings
of autumnal sunset skies. Through just such
faithful re-embodiments by law-abiding forces
have God's creative thoughts been transmitted in
all their freshness down the long lapse of ages.
It will be further observed that this germinal
force, if it would accomplish its purpose, — be set
free and kept free — must not only be placed in
its proper environment, but be absolute master of
all the under forces that can in any way either
help or hinder it in its work. It lifts its material
right against the force of gravity, fifty, one hun
dred, two hundred feet into mid-air, and then
summons the force of cohesion' to hold it there,
in some instances for long centuries together. In
its laboratory, the leaf, it takes a sunbeam, and
with it tears in pieces carbonic dioxide, — the most
stable chemical compound known to science, — re
versing the process of combustion. When you
burn coal in your grate, the carbon of the coal
and the oxygen of the air unite and cling to
gether with so firm a grasp that to tear them
apart again the chemist must employ the most

98 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
powerful agents, carry on the processes in his
strongest vessels under most startling manifesta
tions of light and heat, and at the last bar and
bolt the refractory oxygen in a strong prison by
itself. That the vegetative force accomplishes
this in each one of the thousand diminutive and
delicate cells of a single leaf, taking the carbon
for its own use and restoring the oxygen to the
air, demonstrates to us how absolute is its
sovereignty over the under forces that enter into
the borders of its kingdom. Its freedom, indeed
its very life, is found to depend upon this
sovereignty, for the very moment it relaxes its
hold they rise in mad riot and, like communists,
proceed to tear down into shapeless heaps of dull
dust again the very glory-touched palace they
have been forced to construct and maintain.
If we extend our inquiry into the phenomena of
animal vitality, we shall find that liberty means
the same, is won and held in precisely the same
way. Within the shell of an egg, as within the
walls of a seed, a germ-force lies hidden. To
arouse it and set it free the egg must be kept at
a predetermined temperature and for a predeter
mined period. These conditions none but He who
prescribed them has power to change. When the
time is up, the shell cracks open, and out steps
a wondrously organized living creature fashioned
by the germ-force out of a mass of seemingly
structureless jelly.
There is such perfection in its work, such wealth

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 99
of contrivance, such profound knowledge of this
complicate world, such clear vision of prophecy,
we can but conclude that within its tiny window-
less workshop it has been strictly following out
the instructions of a Divine Master, that it has
been free simply to render implicit obedience to
Divine law. And in its subsequent history we
learn, also, that it remains free to follow out
further the Divine plan only on condition that it
maintains a mastery over the under forces; that
these forces are hostile to it, and will perform
their new strange tasks only so long as they are
held down by the strong arm of a master. There
must be no divided throne, no toleration of in
surgents. The vital force must reign through
out the body without a rival, or it will be tram
meled in its action and eventually pushed out of
being. So soon as food enters our bodies and is
set flowing through certain appointed channels,
it is made to undergo gradual vitalization. As it
passes through the mouth into the stomach, then
through the duodenum and down the smaller in
testines, different solvents are poured in upon it —
saliva, gastric juice, bile, pancreatic fluid, and
mucous secretions. Whatever stubbornly refuses
to dissolve under their influence is at once carried
further on and expelled from the system. The
remainder is taken up into hairlike tubes called
the lacteals, and by them emptied into the thoracic
duct, thence carried through the aorta to the
heart. This great force pump, after first send-

100 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
ing it to the lungs for oxidation, distributes it,
now thrilled with vital power, along the widely
branching arterial courses everywhere, far and
near, to replenish bone and muscle and cartilage
and tendon and nerve fiber; for every time we
move, every time we evolve a thought, we break
down some tissue, and its waste must be made
good from the nutritive principles in the blood.
Every atom that thus loses its vitality, that has
been wrested from the grasp of the organizing
force and has fallen under the sway of the under
chemical forces, must be driven out, or pyaemia
— blood poisoning — will ensue ; and if any local
insurrection is not promptly put down, it will
widen into revolution, and eventually end in death.
To effect this expulsion, the body is interlaced
with a network of canals, called lymphatics, form
ing an internal, decomposing, absorbent system,
some of which empty into the great veins ; but vast
multitudes open their discharging mouths at once
on the surface of the skin, three thousand to every
square inch, so essential is it to afford ready and
swift exit to whatever the organizing force can
no longer control.
If we pursue further our investigations, and
enter the region of animal instinct, so full of the
marvelous, we find the same general principles
prevailing. Liberty is secured and maintained in
precisely the same way. Animals are born
specialists. Their mental and bodily furnishings
are complemental and specific. The sphere of

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 101
each is a narrow one, but it knows precisely what
to do and how to do it, and has just the tools
to do it with. When a bee, for example, sallies
forth from its cradle, it is provided with a full
business outfit — wax pouch, pollen basket, honey
stomach, trowel-shaped mandibles, a tireless wing,
a discriminating and most powerful scent, and
complete working plans for those hexagonal stor
age cells that in point of capacity and economy
of wax and strength of wall bear the most search
ing test of the differential calculus. There is
not a creature that is not equipped either with
some peculiar organ or with some organ
peculiarly modified, accompanied with a corre
sponding peculiar instinctive impulse for using
it. The impulse and the organ are but comple
mental parts of a single plan, and that plan
Divine. The thinking has been done for the
creature, not by it. Should it step outside its
prescribed circle, fail to follow the lead of its
instinct, it would become a helpless prey to hostile
forces, its only strength and safety and real free
dom being found in strict obedience to the laws
of its organism. Should it not do what God has
appointed in God's prescribed way, in God's
chosen time, and with the tools God has himself
furnished, it would become the helpless slave of
circumstance and meet with certain and swift
destruction. Let us now direct our inquiry to our own com
plex spiritual life of meditations, sensibilities,

102 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
and moral choices, and see of what liberty con
sists, how it can be obtained, and how in these
highest known forms of force it can be made a
permanent possession.
When man stepped upon the scene I believe
there was a radically new departure in creation ;
that he came endowed with that of which before
there was only a semblance, a dim prophecy, on
the earth; that to him alone was vouchsafed self-
consciousness, the clear light of reason, perfect
freedom of choice, moral discernment, and a sense
of accountability. These, however, are but
superadded gifts, for man is closely linked with
all the lower forces, forms part of the same gen
eral plan we have been considering, indeed was
designed in the Divine councils to be its grand
culmination. Note the features of this plan,
first in the nature and history of the soul's
meditations. We find that certain predetermined
conditions must be fulfilled before the currents
of living thought are set free from their foun
tains, for, through one or more of the five senses,
communication must be opened with the outside
physical and mental worlds. This done, the mind
thus awakened and liberated, its subsequent
activity, is as we have already shown, as rigidly
regular as that of the chemical or crystalline or
germ-forces already considered, the processes
being carried on under a system of unchangeable
laws Divinely established, the prerogative of the
human will reaching solely to the choice of themes,

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 103
to the selection of the fields of labor. There is
no other liberty of choice than this, and even
this depends for its maintenance on the control
exercised over the under forces, upon the health
ful condition of the delicate tissues of the brain
and all the other bodily organs that are linked
with it, and upon the degree of moderation
secured among that eager throng of appetites,
passions, and propensities which, for far-reach
ing moral purposes, have been placed in our
keeping. We have found upon experiment that
we are wholly powerless to stop the flow of
thought once begun, that all we can do is to
change the course of the current. We have
power to direct and hold the attention, that is
all. Our thoughts of meditation and reflection
are generated under the laws of association and
suggestion wholly independent of any direct act
of the will. The bodily senses are, as I have
said, the mind's only avenues of communication
with the world outside. They become available
solely through strict obedience to physical law,
which we have no power either to abrogate or
modify, and what thus comes to the mind from
nature or art, social intercourse or literature, de
pends upon its natural receptive capacity as
modified by culture. The same landscape painted
on the retina of a poet's eye conveys a message
of widely different import from that conveyed
when it is painted on that of a plain, matter-
of-fact man of affairs. The laws of suggestion

104 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
and of association will determine what that im
port shall be. It is under these laws that the
vanished past of circumstance or of thought is
called back into consciousness ; it is under them
that the imagination, which can combine, but not
create, gathers its materials for its castles, de
termines how those materials shall be placed in
the walls and what styles of architecture those
walls shall assume. Processes of reasoning are
carried on in precisely the same way. Our con
trol over our mental operations reaches no
further, as I have said, than directing and hold
ing the attention. Here our power and our re
sponsibility both begin and end. The measure
of this power is the measure of mental liberty;
with its decline begins our mental enslavement.
If we concentrate our thoughts too intently and
too long on any one theme, we incur the risk of
losing our power of directing them into other
channels and dangerously verge on monomania.
On the other hand, if we indulge in inattention,
suffer our thoughts to wander aimlessly, we
weaken our concentrative power, and are in
danger of losing it altogether, and thus sinking
into mental imbecility. The golden mean of
healthful self-poise lies between these two ex
tremes. It is sadly true that this perfect in
tellectual liberty is rarely, if ever, reached on
this planet. Bodily diseases, business perplexi
ties, financial losses, family bereavements, pas
sionate longings, feelings of envy, jealousy, or

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 105
revenge, the many undue excitements to which
our lives are liable, have made every one of us at
times victims of morbid moods, certain thoughts
taking possession to the exclusion of everything
else, and ruling us as with a rod of iron. How
often, too, we suffer our minds to go wool-gather
ing, through sheer indolence or shiftlessness, un
til we find it well-nigh impossible to call our
thoughts in from their aimless wanderings and
give needful heed to the stern duties of the hour!
If what I have stated of our intellectual life
be true — and any one can readily verify it by
recalling his own experiences — thoughts are
evolved and grouped about any chosen theme with
as perfect regularity, as strict conformity to un
changeable law, as is observed when salt atomsi
crystallize, or the structureless contents of an
egg are changed into the organized body of a
bird. To set mental force free, then, and keep
it free, is not to release it from Divine law, but,
by fulfilling certain prescribed conditions and by
securing and maintaining sovereignty over the
under forces, to remove whatever hinders it from
energizing in those precise modes established at
the first by Him whose fiat brought it into being.
Within the soul lie dormant, also, wondrous
germinal affections and aspirations, purposes and
far-reaching hopes, waiting compliance with cer
tain fixed conditions before their fetters fall and
they begin to grow into the permanent moral
traits of the soul. There is required for this

106 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
quickening the gentle influences of sunbeams of
sympathy. To the joy-light of a mother's smile,
to the distilling tears of her quick pity or of her
overburdened solicitude, to the brooding acts of
her ever-watchful care, to the tender tones of her
affection, the spirit promptly responds. The
greater the confidence inspired in the child, the
deeper is the intimacy and the more free and fre
quent the interchange of thought and feeling;
and if this close spiritual union is continued, if
the mother holds the confidence and love of the
child through the years, she becomes to him a
heroine, a model, an inspiration, her influence
reaching down into his innermost desire, vitaliz
ing his whole spiritual being. He tells her every
thing, and in return receives the smile and tear
and counseling word. Under the law of spiritual
assimilation, which is dominant when soul is
linked to soul, he gradually grows into her moral
likeness. Here is no compulsion, no deadening
of nature. His whole being is roused rather into
intensest life, into the fullest freedom, her
sympathetic response calling out the deepest
emotion and motive. Reserve and indifference
are all gone. The charm of her personal pres
ence is farthest removed from a feverish fascina
tion. His soul is simply quickened and freed as
is the germ-force in the seed when planted in a
sun-kissed soil.
These promptings to hero-worship, this quick
response to sympathy, this molding of the char-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 107
acter by the subtile influences that go out from
intimately communing souls, this directive power
of the stronger spirit over the weaker and less
mature, this enlargement of liberty, this quicken
ing of impulses, this wondrous vitalization, thus
begun in the child through companionship with
the mother, is repeated over and over again in the
intimacies of after-life. The friendships and
love unions of the soul, the choosing of great
leaders in peace and war, in church and state,
the canonizing of the objects of affection, the
wonderful transforming power these chosen
heroes of hearts have displayed in the world, the
intense enthusiasm, the profound devotion they
have enkindled, the quickening they have caused
of the world's pulse, show beyond question that
it is a universal and deep-seated instinct of the
heart to idealize those who have won their way to
intimate companionship, or have become en
throned as loved leaders, and that, because of this
instinct, hero-worship has ever been, and will
ever be, under the law of spiritual assimilation,
the greatest plastic power at work in the world.
As in the intellectual life we can by the will
direct and fix the attention, but not stop the flow
of thought or change the modes of its genera
tion under laws of association and suggestion, so
in the spiritual life we can choose who shall be our
intimate companions, to whom we will uncurtain
our inner lives. But the choice once made, the
intimacy once begun, we shall inevitably grow

108 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
into each other's likeness, the stronger, more
mature spirit, the one of more pronounced posi
tive personality, having the greater plastic
power. Just so soon as the free interchange be
gins, the process of assimilation begins under
laws that are immutable.
As soon as the soul feels vitalizing power from
communion with a pure and benign spirit, it at
once sets about self-mastery, control over all the
under forces, the passions, appetites, propensi
ties, every form of selfishness whose tendency is
to enslave, and the growth is upward and outward
toward a likeness to the superior and freer spirit.
The converse is equally true. Intimate commun
ion with lower spirits, in whom ignoble thoughts
are cherished, will result through the same law
of assimilation, if continued, in increased enslave
ment and finally in moral death.
In view of these laws that thus control in the
development of character, is it not very significant
that the historic Christ asked to be received into
intimacy, to become the chosen hero of hearts?
As the affections cannot be enforced, freedom
being their vital air, he has ventured no further
than to stand at the door and knock, asking
simply to have us uncurtain to him our inner
lives. Is it not significant that he thus mani
festly craves our affections, assures us that he is
deeply interested in every worthy thing that in
terests us, offers in return his loving presence,
and desires all barriers to be forever torn away?

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 109
Is it not because he is profoundly aware that
when he is thus received into intimacy, soul touch
ing soul, the germinal spiritual forces will at once
begin to build up character, through processes
of assimilation, under the immutable laws of
growth? Does he not evidently desire this close
relationship, that he may transform us as soil is
transformed into rosebuds, and eggs Into plumed
songsters, knowing full well that, If we once let
him into our hearts and cherish his presence there,
the growth into his likeness will as inevitably
ensue as, when we drop the seed in rich, moist,
sun-warmed soil, or place the egg in a befitting
atmosphere, a plant or an animal is built up by
the constructive forces within? Is not such a
world-wide need a most sure prophecy of the com
ing of some one fitted and willing to supply that
need? What pilgrim spirit so worthy of a wel
come as the historic Christ has ever visited this
earth, and knocked, and waited at the door of the
human heart? What spirit so worthy of admis
sion to its most sacred inner sanctuary? What
one Into the charmed circle of whose presence it
has been so distinguished a privilege to enter,
who has come so admirably fitted in so many ways
to draw all men unto him? Who but he could
answer to this need, and thus fulfill the prophecy?
He has, in the first place, shown an interest in
us under such varied and trying circumstances
that we can never for a moment question its
genuineness, its depth, or its permanency. He

110 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
has given evidence that he is moved not merely
by some general feeling of friendliness for the
erring, suffering, longing multitudes that throng
this planet, but assures us that he knows each
one personally, and that, because he does, he
stands ready to brave danger, endure fatigue,
suffer privation, and actually desires to meet us
face to face, to look through our kindling or tear-
dimmed eyes in upon our very souls, to watch the
sunshine and shadow of our most secret thoughts.
He wants to be welcomed warmly, to have us feel
that everything that is of interest to us is of in
terest to him. We all know that no intimate
companionship can exist without an assurance of
this personal attachment; that just so soon as we
suspect that any of our earthly friends have lost
their relish for our society, listen listlessly and
grow wooden in their voices when they make re
ply, a deathlike chill, a spirit of reticence, comes
over us, the meetings grow less frequent, the con
versation drops Into empty, conventional common
place, the friendship cools into formal acquaint
ance and, it may be, terminates in bitter estrange
ment. Who has not had the iron thus enter his
soul? There is always more or less of prudent
reserve In earthly friendships, a questioning of
how far one may presume upon the affections of
another, so painfully mindful are we of our
limitations. No such barriers can ever exist be
tween us and Christ. He takes pains to assure
us that there is not one of such low degree as to

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? Ill
be unworthy of his personal regard. Our de
ficiencies, however great, in bodily attractions, or
social rank, or worldly possessions, in mental en
dowment or culture or conversational power, need
not in the least discourage us from aspiring to
intimacy with him, for he asks for our loving
trust and fellowship, not because of what we are
now, but of what we may become, ages hence,
under the marvelously transforming power of his
personal presence. Here is a vantage-ground no
earthly friend can have. Christ looks at us with
the piercing eye of a God in the white light of
eternity. The grand possibilities of the spiritual
germ-forces locked up within us are definitely
outlined in his far glance of prophecy, as if they
already were accomplished facts. He can see the
flashing diamond into which the loose dust of car
bon at his feet can be compressed. He can see
the delicately fashioned flower petal, with its
faultless lines of grace and exquisite coloring,
into which the rude elements in soil and air may
be molded at the talismanic touch of life. To us
it does not yet appear what we shall be. He,
however, not only sees, but assures us that he
sees, even In the humblest of those who truly love
him here, the coming heirs and joint heirs with
him to fadeless crowns. Under his plastic power,
through this law of spiritual assimilation, he is
confident that he can so develop our possibilities,
if we will seek his society, as eventually to render
our companionship with him both delightful and

112 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
lasting. What soul does not stand in pressing
need of such a friend? Through whom else can
such a need be met?
We are assured not only that Christ is thus
personally interested in us, but that he knows
us through and through. In his public ministry
he frequently demonstrated his power to discern
the most secret intents of the heart. How im
perfectly we know our friends, or they us! We
try to draw aside the hiding curtains, but can
not; and because of this unavoidable partial con
cealment, the interchange of sympathy is seldom,
if ever, full and free. This element of embarrass
ment never enters into our friendship with Christ.
Again he, by his self-sacrificing spirit, inspires
in us a degree of confidence our earthly compan
ions never can. We feel perfectly safe in trust
ing our most cherished secrets with him, fear of
coming estrangement or of any advantage ever
being taken of anything spoken in confidence
never once entering our thought. By his ab
solutely unselfish devotion he naturally awakens
in his true disciples a love transcending every
other. This explains his saying, "He that loveth
father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me." He felt that he had those special gifts
which brought him naturally into closer personal
relations with those worthy of him; that he had
by his sacrifices commended himself to their con
fiding love more fully than any other. He de
sired only his natural place in our hearts. His

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 113
purpose was not to supplant home affections, but
to so vitalize and sanctify them that they would
not only weather the storms of time, but outlast
the grave. This supreme affection, this com
plete self-surrender, in that it is cordial and ac
cording to nature, instead of enslaving, liberates
us. Do we curtail our freedom when we give our
hearts to our friends, our heroes, or our saints?
Are not our souls thus stirred as never before, all
their forces aroused into most pleasurable ac
tivity? Indeed, only a Christ can truly set us
free ; for in none other do we find so perfect an
ideal, a life without a flaw, a living revelation of
God's yearning love. With no other one can we
come into such close personal relations, whose
heartfelt interest in each one of us is so unmis
takable, whose insight into our inner selves is so
complete, to whom we feel that our intimate
friendship will be so welcome and so unselfishly
cherished. We are constitutionally social beings.
We cannot stand alone. Companionship and
hero-worship are the inborn demands of our na
ture. The purer and more unselfish the one
whom we admit to intimacy, the more complete
through his influence becomes our self-mastery;
the formative spiritual powers within us the more
sovereign over the under forces and the more
subject to the upper and Divine. How imminent
the danger to which we are exposed, how impera
tive the necessity for the power of a Christ's per
sonal presence!

114 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
We have seen how the under chemical forces
within our physical organisms are slaves, not will
ing servitors, and that they seem to be on the
watch for any weakening of the sovereign
vitality; for so soon as it in the least loses its
control, they break out into open rebellion, bent
on devastation and death. Hostile forces also
wait outside, ready to rush In at any unguarded
portal. The air is full of the eggs and seeds of
parasites, which find a rich nexus in any part not
thoroughly vitalized to hatch out, and multiply
by myriads, into miasmic fevers and contagious
diseases. Scientists have discovered sixty-six or
more different species of these parasitic foes that
prey on human flesh. Nothing but a most
vigorous vitality can repel and destroy these at
tacking armies.
In our intellectual life we have found ourselves
equally exposed, symptoms of disorder con
stantly appearing, — lack of power to hold or
direct the attention, thoughts crowding them
selves into undue prominence, loss of mental per
spective, a weakened memory, a confused reason,
a wild and wayward fancy. But especially in
our emotional and moral nature have we realized
the need of the watchful eye and the strong hand
of a master. This supremacy can be maintained
only by a willing obedience to the higher law of
the conscience and the revealed will of God
through the inspiriting, vitalizing power of
Christ's pure life and sympathetic presence.

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 115
Philosophy and history both affirm this.
Every individual from the first, as we have re
marked, needs outside assistance. Every mind
and heart must have kindred minds and hearts
of wider culture and higher virtues to instruct
and incite. A recluse from birth would be a
drooling idiot or a wild bushman. History has
no record of any tribe of savages ever lifting it
self unaided into civilization. Surely the moral
world is now too seriously diseased, and has been
as far back as we have any knowledge, to throw
off the incubus by the strength of its own vitality.
All are enslaved, and all may be freed, but only
through some life-touch with a Christ. Under
his benign influence the progress of the world is
toward this higher sovereignty. Sciences and
arts are discovering and conquering and utiliz
ing Nature's forces. Diseases are becoming
more thoroughly understood, and are being
checked by more efficient remedies, or guarded
against through wiser sanitary regulations.
Literatures and schools are throwing off the in
cubus of ignorance and superstition, governments
are advancing toward larger social and religious
liberty, and there is to-day among the leading
peoples of the earth a more free and healthful
development than ever before of that individuality
which is a Divine and priceless gift to every
man. It is to Christ's influence we can look, and
to that alone, for a final and full unfetter
ing of the human spirit from the enthralling

116 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
power of all the under and the outer forces.
What a proffer Christ has here made us — a
confidential companionship with himself, the up
lifting power of his personal presence, the nour
ishing sunshine of his sympathy, privilege to
grow into his likeness! We are at a loss to ex
plain this condescension, except on the ground
of our immortality and his far look into the
eternal years.
His Invitation is to every one. In this uni
versality of sympathy and power to help he stands
alone. He comes to those of sick and bruised
bodies, saying to them: "I too have passed
through like bitter experiences, have been racked
and torn with pain, and know how hard It is to
bear, but I also know what wholesome disciphne
there is in it, what power to purify. Keep good
cheer, for 'whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.' "
His invitation is to the neglected, whose hearts
have been saddened by lack of appreciation, who
feel themselves walled out from those whose love
and companionship they crave. Upon their
wounded spirits his words fall like balm. "I
came to my own, and my own received me not.
My good deeds were evil spoken of. Despite my
oft-repeated explanations, my miracles of power
and acts of love, I was lamentably misunderstood
and maligned until after my death. When my
dark trial hour came, those whom I had chosen
as my disciples and bosom friends forsook me and
fled. Wait patiently, for I can assure you there

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 117
will be a glorious uncurtaining by and by."
His invitation is to the poor, the unsuccessful,
the persecuted, those whose plans have failed
from causes which they could not control, those
who have struggled with a worthy purpose but
struggled against a resistless tide. His earthly
career had many things in common with theirs,
too, for he was by his contemporaries very
naturally pronounced a failure. He added noth
ing to his wordly stores, had not a roof to cover
him, gained no social position, was unpopular
with the powerful and rich. He endured priva
tion, won none of the world's reputed prizes.
His very faithfulness blocked his way to personal
preferment. His persistent determination to re
claim the fallen, rebuke sin, courageously to state
and stand by his convictions, finally cost him his
fair fame, brought down upon him the anathemas
of the very rulers of the synagogue, and at last
nailed him to the cross, to suffer and die between
convicted thieves.
His message is to the tempted. He had many
a desperate struggle with appetite and passion.
He fought no mock battles. His soul was
racked with many misgivings at thought of the
terrible ordeal through which he knew he was
destined to pass, and these misgivings never per
manently left him until the very morning of his
crucifixion, after an all-night agony in Geth
semane. He comes to those who mourn, with a heart

118 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
that has felt bereavement, with eyes that have
filled with tears for the dead. He comes to the
timid, the sick and dying, this time with reassur
ing power, for in his many miracles he proved
himself Lord over Nature. Her forces were
ready servitors of his sovereign will. By his
touch, fevers fled, the lame walked, lepers were
cleansed. At his word, disordered minds were
blessed with returning reason, and even the dead
heard his call and felt the thrill of life again.
From the grave he himself rose victor. He
proved that he indulged in no idle boast when he
said, "I have power to lay down my life, and I
have power to take it again." Christ is thus
not only a sympathizing but an all-powerful
friend. Whatever the nature of the need, he can
supply it. There is no pain or danger or dis
aster from which he cannot free us, and will when
it is best. Just as soon as we turn toward him
with loving confidence, and say, "Thy will be
done," whatever chills or cripples or enslaves our
spirits, clogs their powers, or hinders their de
velopment, melts away in the sunshine of his
sympathy. No exigency for help so pressing
that he is not able to meet it. He thus becomes
our great liberator, rock of defense, inspiration,
comforter. , He enables us to beat down the
restive under forces which lie in wait to enslave
and destroy. He does not free us from the pain,
but from its power to dull the sensibilities; not
from poverty and care, but from their tendency

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 119
to narrow and harden; not from calumny, but
from the maddening poison in its sting; not
from disappointment, but from the hopelessness
and bitterness of thought which it so often en
genders. We attain unto this perfect liberty when we
rise superior to untoward circumstances, triumph
over the pain and weakness of disease, over un
just criticism, the wreck of earthly hopes, over
promptings to envy, every sordid and selfish de
sire, every unhallowed longing, every doubt of
God's wisdom and love and kindly care, when we
rise into an atmosphere of undaunted moral
courage, of restful content, of child-like trust,
of holy, all-conquering calm. We should wel
come the discipline God sees fit to send. Christ
could not escape the cross and wear the crown.
It is enough for the servant that he be as his
master, the disciple as his Lord. We must fight,
at times fight desperately, and wear battle scars.
In that ever-memorable farewell, Christ said,
"My peace I give unto you, not as the world
giveth." This was the fruit of struggle, the
calm that comes only from the perfect obedience
of consecrated love.
How priceless that trustful serenity in the
midst of life's reverses and dangers and cares
and separations ! How does the freed soul rise
on widespread pinions till the clouds of time roll
their wind-driven billows beneath it, and it basks
in the bright smile of God's promise! Do you

120 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
ask, doubtingly, Who have attained to this
liberty? Many have: those early Christians, who,
driven by relentless persecution, dwelt in the
catacombs of Rome ; martyrs, who died with songs
on their lips ; the sainted Stephen, whose face
shone as the face of an angel; Paul, whose ring
ing words of cheer have for nineteen centuries
been heard round the world. All may. It is
offered to all. Life's storms have broken over
the souls of men, and will break again, but a
Christ has proffered an all-sheltering love.
A flood of light is here thrown on two most
remarkable sayings of this marvelous Being:
"If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye
shall be free indeed"; "He that loveth father or
mother, son or daughter, more than me is not
worthy of me." Only Christ then can give true
freedom, and he only to those who are worthy
of him; and those only are worthy who make to
him a complete self-surrender, according to him
a supremacy in heart and life over every affec
tion and aspiration known to earth. The revela
tions made by the science, not only of physics,
but of metaphysics, to which we have here called
attention, enables us to see now how self can be
set free by an absolute surrender of self to
another, provided that other Is not only perfect
man but man in closest touch with a loving God,
this apparent contradiction proving to be but
apparent, the assertions to be in complete accordk
betokening a most intimate acquaintance with the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 121
deep foundation principles on which this world
is built. In what perfect keeping with the exigencies
of this world-organism is the fact that he who
assumes to be its very central heart should de
mand that every soul be in this threefold attitude
toward him of implicit obedience, full consecra
tion, and devout trust ! ^He stands alone among
all the leaders of mankind in the sweeping nature
of his exactions. No radicalism of any religious
zealot ever equaled this. He accepts nothing less
than an unconditional surrender of the entire
being, with all its loves and longings. He
recognizes no limitations and no exemptions^
/His rewards are as unprecedented as his de
mands. They are embodied in that last strange
bequest to his disciples to which we have alluded,
"My peace I give unto you, not as the world
giveth." file makes no promise of any of earth's
prizes, its wealth, or ease, or power, or social
preferment, or trumpeted fame, but has the cour
age and candor to disclose to them that poverty
and contumely, scourgings and imprisonments,
tortures and death itself, await them ; that he
sends them forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.
Who that has not the outlook of one Divinely in
formed would hope thus to disciple a world;
would demand such devotion and in return offer
simply an inward peace? His call is as wide as
the race, and lasting as the soul's eternal years.
flf we believe Christ simply a man without

122 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
being in some unprecedented way intimately linked
with and transformed by the Divine Spirit we
can but regard with the profoundest amazement
his unparalleled assurance, but if thus conjoined,
then in the reveaUng light of the science of
physics and of metaphysics we can perceive how
he could consistently demand nothing less ; that
only when the soul is brought into such relation
ship with himself can the vast plan of providence,
which has been unfolding since the dawn of time,
reach final consummation. Do you ask why the
obedience, the consecration, and the trust must
be so absolute? It is, as I have attempted to
show, this very feature of the demand which
stamps it Divine. Christ has in his own history
exemplified the very spirit he enjoins, not only
in his human soul, but even in the Divine Spirit
that spoke through him as well — a view rarely
understood, still more rarely entertained^/ He
requires of us no more than he exacts even from
his higher self. It is a very common error, yet
a very grave one, to suppose that the great
foundation principles of moral obligation had no
existence until God created and established them,
that his acts are wholly arbitrary, that he is
amenable to no law, but is and always has been
a law unto himself. It seems to me that on care
ful reflection it must be perceived that there can
be no moral life unless there exists a moral law,
a fixed standard of right by which to gauge mo
tive and test character ; that as far back as there

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 123
was any moral quality in God's acts there must
have been this fixed standard to which he made
his acts conform ; that these principles, this
standard, must have been coexistent with his ever
living self; that the Bible in its moral code has
simply revealed and applied to the various
exigencies of the complicate inter-relationships
of human life these self-existent principles, that
these principles God could not only not originate,
but not even change in the slightest degree; that
by no pronunciamento of his can loving self-
sacrifice, chaste desire, dauntless fidelity to in
ward conviction, be degraded into revolting forms
of vice; nor, on the other hand, can cold, selfish
greed, falsehood, lust, or murderous hate be ex
alted and transformed into the nobilities and
manly virtues of the soul ; that when he brought
us into being he could do no more than endow us
with moral discernment and with perfect freedom
of choice, leaving us utterly characterless, and
necessarily so, when we came from his creative
hand; and that the responsibility of the nature
of our future moral development rests wholly
with our own sovereign selves, according as we
choose to place our lives in harmony or in dis
cord with these eternal principles of the true and
the good, in harmony or in discord with this all-
reaching, unchangeable law of order in the great
world-organism of which he has kindly purposed
that we shall form a part.
Availing ourselves thus of the light of modern

124 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
science in our attempted explanation of the
eternal destiny of souls, we can but conclude,
first, that whoever stubbornly rebels against
these Inexorable systems of law under which
every one is necessarily placed at the very birth
of being, and persists in that rebellion, which he
has the power to do ; whoever, in other words, re
fuses to hold in vitalizing subjection the under
forces of his most complicate nature, and to yield
lovingly to the vitalizing influence of the upper
and Divine, will under these very laws be finally
pushed out of his present state of self-conscious
being and lose forever his gift of sovereignty.
If the body, the intellect, and the spirit are, as
we have attempted to show, not only organisms
in themselves, but parts of the great world-organ
ism, dissonance, disorder in any particular, will,
unless arrested, spread confusion throughout the
whole, and end eventually in total wreck.
Science thus reveals the awful fact of an im
pending doom of utter annihilation of self-con
sciousness and sovereignty to every incorrigible
rebel in God's realm, for the very exigencies of
the case demand this, the very fact that we are
organized units, and as such are composed of
complemental parts, having an intimate interplay
and interdependence, and that we are parts of
still wider organisms, and they of wider still,
until the bounds of the human race are reached,
and it may be the very bounds of being, as the
planets and solar systems and sun clusters of the

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 125
universe circle at last orbit within orbit, in one
vast sweep, in grand majestic harmony around
God's central throne.
We witness every day the body as an organism
passing under the doom of annihilation through
the disintegrating power of the under forces
which have broken away from the control of the
upper. Faculty after faculty of the intellect we
have seen disappear through violation of the laws
of mind until finally all evidence of any continued
thought-life ceases. Science has furnished a
strong presumption at least, through the analo
gies of Nature, that the soul also is organic, and
must depend for continued self-conscious exist
ence on the harmonious interplay of its parts, on
the maintenance of its mastery over the under
forces, and its implicit and ready obedience to the
upper. There are, as we have seen, no other con
ditions of liberty, and without liberty there can
be no perpetuity of any organic life. It is now
a rapidly growing belief among Bible-students
that the final annihilation of conscious selfhood,
accompanied with sovereign self-control, of the
Incorrigibly wicked is revealed in God's Word
as well as in his works. Converts to this creed
are now numbered by tens of thousands in the
Christian churches. I was surprised to find,
when my attention was called to it, how all the
passages bearing on this subject were susceptible
of such an interpretation, and that the vast
majority of them fairly excluded any other.

126 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
The symbols used are symbols of destruction, and
not of eternal torment. It is said that the
wicked are cast out where the worm dieth not,
and the fire is not quenched. But the worm and
the fire are instruments of annihilation, and the
obvious meaning is that their work will go on un
interruptedly until it is complete, until the organ
isms on which they are delegated to feed have
been utterly consumed. While there is food for
the worm or fuel for the fire they will gnaw and
burn ; but, as the processes of destruction are
progressive, that on which they prey is constantly
diminishing, and unless there is being wrought a
perpetual miracle of creation, as in the liver of
the fabled-Prometheus on which the vulture fed,
an end must surely come. This figure, and in
deed all other figures in the Sacred Record illus
trating the final condition of those who persist
in their disobedience, are robbed of their rhetori
cal force, are carried wholly out of their natural
meaning unless this be their prophecy of
doom. I would not be understood as considering it
possible for a human spirit to be banished, even
by divine power, absolutely out of all being — be
reduced to nothingness, but only out of a state
of organized, sovereign, self-conscious being ; for
scientists, as indeed all careful thinkers, while
conceding that any particular form of existence
may be made to permanently pass away, regard
it as axiomatic that an entity can never come up

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 127
out of nonentity, nor ever be returned to it.
Many entertain the belief, born of hope it may
be, that God is too kind and sympathetic to suffer
any soul to be lost. Unquestionably he would
rescue every one had he the power. The disin
tegration of the body he can arrest by sheer force
of will, but the decay of the moral nature is the
sad consequence of the exercise of a will as
sovereign as his own. Without its consent he
cannot stop the process except by destroying the
life, for, as I have said, moral life is made up
of sovereign acts of will. Liberty is its vital
air. God can compel our obedience, but so soon
as compulsion begins responsibility ends. The
soul after that becomes a characterless machine.
Unless divine love can win back the rebel, his
moral life must gradually die out, in accordance
with spiritual laws which it Is not in the compass
of even God's power to alter or annul. Though
God cannot stay this destructive process against
our will, however his sympathetic heart may be
wrung with grief, as was Christ's when he wept
over favored yet fated Jerusalem, still, while there
survives the faintest spark of hope of the soul's
reclaim, his spirit will no doubt strive with all its
kindliest Influences. I cannot see why the mere
fact of physical death should be a signal to cease.
Not until the heart has grown stony in sin, not
until moral death has come, will God's hope
perish, and his pleading Spirit, with all its loving
patience, be finally grieved away. Until then he

128 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
will stand and knock at the door of the human
heart. Many profound scholars now affirm that it is
nowhere revealed in the Sacred Scriptures that
the body's death ends the soul's probation.
Surely sound philosophy does not teach it. But
that probation will certainly have an end some
time — before death it may be for some souls,
after death for others — the immutable laws of
spiritual growth and decay have most certainly
decreed. Thus, from the phenomena and principles
which the researches of science have brought to
light, we are irresistibly led to the conclusion
that in some far future all discords will cease
throughout God's universe; that all souls which
stoutly stand out against his overtures of love,
refuse to come into harmony with the great world-
organism of which they were purposed to form a
part, withstand the spirtual vitalizing forces
whose mission it is to organize all things into a
divine order, will, through this perverse persist
ence, be finally pushed out of self-conscious, moral
being; that the time is coming when that notable
prophecy will be fulfilled which declares that be
fore Christ, who became obedient unto death, who
is the perfect embodiment of the divine order and
of the divine love, the central heart, the myste
rious vitalizing power of this vast world-organism
— that before this Immanuel, the Mighty Coun
selor, the Prince of Peace, in that great day when

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 129
the Divine plans shall have reached their final
consummation, all knees shall bow and all tongues
confess.

Two thousand years ago there appeared in
Palestine a Jew artisan. He lived a life without
a flaw, a life free from the slightest taint of self
ishness, marked by no effort to secure wealth or
ease, political or social preferment. He came in
to the closest sympathetic touch with the poor,
the despised, the forsaken, and that touch was to
save. There was no interest of self he did not
sacrifice with noble gladness to free souls from
the guilt of sin and the power of it. The French
skeptic Renan testifies in his world-famed Life of
Jesus : "In him is condensed all that is lofty and
good in our nature. . . . Never has any
man made the interests of humanity predominate
in his life over the littleness of inordinate self-
love so much as he. Devoted without reserve to
his idea, he sub-ordinated everything to It to such
a degree that toward the end of his life the
universe no longer existed for him. Whatever
may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will
never be surpassed. His worship will grow
young without ceasing. His legend will call
forth tears without end; his sufferings will melt
the noblest hearts ; all ages will proclaim that
among the sons of men there is none born greater
than Jesus."
Though his youth was passed amid most con-

130 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
tracted surroundings in a despised country town,
and though he was of Jewish parentage, yet he
proved himself absolutely free from the prover
bial narrowness and the petty prejudices of his
race. His sympathies and his plans of reform
were as wide as the world. ( In the three short
years of his public ministry in a degenerate and
superstitious age this young mechanic taught a
system of ethics which has borne the test of the
keenest criticism of the world for nineteen cen^
turies, and to-day stands abreast of the world's
best thought, quickens it, leads it, uplifts it,
glorifies it still. The present advanced forms of
civilization are the outcome of the leavening in
fluences that went out from his life and lips. )
He spoke in bold, uncompromising denuncia
tion against all forms of sin, however intrenched
behind social custom or church sanction, or bol
stered up by wealth or power. He paid the for
feit for his fidelity with his agonies on the cross.
His utterances and his conduct were pervaded
with an unwonted, awe-inspiring spirit of com
mand. /He repeatedly claimed with unperturbed
assurance that he was Divine, and never once
weakened with a single word of retraction when
the powerful leaders of the synagogue confronted
him before the multitude with the charge of
blasphemy, but simply reasserted his claim and
calmly pointed to the proof. It is a remarkable
fact that Christ never confessed any imperfection
in himself. No prophet or teacher but has

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 131
frankly granted his own shortcomings. The
most holy are the most sensitive in this regard,
most self-accusing. Christ said positively that
he always did the will of the Father. He boldly
challenged his enemies to convince him of sin.
Either Christ believed himself to be morally per
fect, or was guilty of intolerable presumption^
He asserted of himself not only perfection, but
Divine intimacy, and promised that eventually
his true disciples should enter into as intimate re
lationship with the Father and be as completely
transformed by the power of love and be raised
at last to as high a spiritual level as himself.
(in his person, in his surroundings, in the in
cidents and spirit of his ministry, in the manner
of his death, he fulfilled with startling accuracy
those old Messianic prophecies that had been
handed down in the sacred books of his people.^
It is true that only a few of that race, which has
been marvelously preserved till this hour, notwith
standing it lies scattered and peeled among the
nations, have ever accepted him as their long-
looked-for deliverer, for it was a spiritual, and
not a temporal, kingdom he came to found; it
was from their personal sins, and not from the
heavy Roman yoke, he sought to free his people,
yet they have watched for some other one to come
while nineteen centuries have one by one crept
slowly by, and watched in vain.
In the facts which have been brought to light
through scientific investigations we have abun-

132 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
dant evidences, as I have attempted to show, that
the human race is of sufficient importance to war
rant just such a divine mission as Christ's, and
that through this alone can that vast scheme of
life succeed on whose unfolding through the un
told ages God has already lavished such wealth
of creative thought.
£~ Christ must have been either a myth, or an im
postor, or a lunatic, or else have been in some
intimate union with God himself. The theory
that Christ is a myth, the product of the thought-
accretions of some reverent, ignorantly worship
ing period of antiquity, a demigod like Hercules,
the product of dim, distorting tradition — a
theory put forth by the Bauer school of phi
losophy — has long since been abandoned by all
historical critics of any standing as utterly un
tenable. Weisacker of Tubingen and Harnack of
Berlin, though Bauer's modern successors, are
distinctively not his disciples. Listen to the de
liberate judgment of one of the most pronounced
and keenest skeptics of modern times, John
Stuart Mill: "Whatever else may be taken away
from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left:
a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors
than all his followers, even those who had the
direct benefit of his personal teaching. It is of
no use to say that Christ as exhibited in the
Gospels is not historical, and that we know not
how much of what is admirable has been super
added by the tradition of his followers. The

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 133
tradition of followers suffices to insert any num
ber of marvels and may have inserted all the
miracles which he is reputed to have wrought.
But who among his disciples, or among their
proselytes, was capable of inventing the sayings
ascribed to Jesus or of imagining the life and
character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly
not the fishermen of Galilee, as certainly not St.
Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of
a totally different sort; still less the early Chris
tian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than
that the good that was in them was all derived,
as they always professed that it was derived,
fran a higher source."
LNapoleon, imprisoned on the rock of St.
Helena, when conversing as was his habit, about
the great men of the ancient world, and compar
ing himself with them, turned, It is said, to Count
Montholon with the inquiry, "Can you tell me who
Jesus Christ was?" The question was declined,
and Napoleon proceeded, "Well, then I will tell
you. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I
myself have founded great empires, but upon
what did these great creations of genius depend?
Upon force. Jesus alone founded his empire
upon love, and to this very day millions would
die for him. I think I understand something of
human nature, and I tell you all these were men,
and I am a man. None else is like him. Jesus
Christ was more than man. Christ alone has suc
ceeded in so raising the mind of man towards

134 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
the unseen that it becomes insensible to the bar
riers of time and space. Across the chasm of
eighteen hundred years Jesus Christ makes a de
mand which is beyond all others difficult to sat
isfy; he asks for that which a philosopher may
often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or
a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse,
or a man of his brother. He asks for the human
heart. He will have it entirely to himself. He
demands it unconditionally, and forthwith his de
mand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of
time and space the soul of man, with all its powers
and faculties, becomes an annexation to the em
pire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in him
experience that remarkable supernatural love to
wards him. The phenomenon is unaccountable;
it is altogether beyond the scope of man's crea
tive powers. Time, the great destroyer, is power
less to extinguish this sacred flame; time can
neither exhaust its strength, nor put a limit to
its range. This is it which strikes me most. I
have often thought of it. This is it which proves
to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus
Christ." The late Goldwin Smith frankly acknowledged
that "Christ's personality cannot be questioned.
It is attested by the Roman historians Tacitus
and Suetonius (and by Pliny as well), who men
tion his religious leadership and crucifixion.
"No imagination could have created such a char
acter with a religious and ethical system to cor-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 135
respond. To his personal influence through
nineteen centuries, and devotion still, there is ab
solutely no parallel in history — Before them
pales the glory of Sakyanouni and of Mahomet."
f If the Gospel narrative Is a work of fiction
rather than a statement of plain fact it should be
regarded as the "literary miracle of the ages."
The Christ-character, if the product of an un
inspired imagination, stands an absolutely un
rivaled masterpiece of creation, clearly beyond
the scope even of the genius of a Shakespeare.!
Not in all the world's literatures, ancient or
modern, is there a record of such a sublime, con
ceptual triumph, a fact which unmistakably
evinces that it lies utterly beyond the reach of
human attainment, and yet we are indebted for
the record left us, out of a remote antiquity, of
the life and sayings of this so unique a person
age, chiefly to the pens of plain, common-place
peasants, of meager education, of ordinary
mental caliber, of no literary experience or apti
tude, of no exalted ideals of life and morals.
But, so convincing is the verisimilitude of the tale,
mankind has long since ceased to deny that Christ
actually lived the life, developed the character,
made the claims, taught the precepts, died the
death, and finally, as crown and finish, won the
signal victory over the very grave itself, as sub
stantially set forth in the Gospel records. What
other than just such a triumphal ending can we
possibly imagine would have been at all in con-

136 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
sonance with such a claim and such a career?
However, if we once but concede the actual fact
of his resurrection we are logically compelled to
believe that in some way, though undefinable and
Inconceivable by us, his human spirit was cer
tainly and most intimately linked with the Divine.
In his resurrection Christ manifested a power
not only to lay down his life, for love's sake, but
even to take it again, and if we feel forced by
seemingly irrefragable evidence to accept this
final crowning miracle, at what marvel in the
record need our faith falter? All other displays
of his transcendency, however astounding, for
which he is accredited, are but natural and neces
sary concomitants of such a triumph. None of
them, surely, are out of keeping with his mani
fested spirit of supreme beneficence, none detract
from his august dignity, none are out of har
mony with the purity and elevation of his
thought, while all are inextricably interwoven
with it.
So essential is it for us, now and here, to note
how irrefragable are the proofs of this crowning
act in Christ's career, evincing his supreme Lord
ship over life and death, I will venture to enumer
ate them as briefly as may be, as I have elsewhere
made mention of them in treatment of another
theme. Recording to the Gospel record Christ after
his passion convinced his disciples that he was
veritably alive by many infallible proofs, being

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 137
seen of them forty days and speaking of the
things of the Kingdom; one hundred and twenty
persons witnessing his final ascension. Among
the infallible proofs were their meeting him face
to face, and holding familiar intercourse. As
they had been on most intimate terms with him
for years and had become thoroughly familiarized
with the tones of his voice and his general appear
ance it could not have been a case of mistaken
identity. Having frequently and most unex
pectedly met him after his death and talked with
him under widely varying circumstances they
could not have been victims of any hallucination,
of mistaking for his presence some figment of an
inflamed fancy. The simple, even tenor of their
lives, and the calm, unadorned character of their
writings disprove any strain in them of wild
fanaticism. Their frankly confessed ignominious
desertion of him in his last most trying hours,
shows how utterly unexpected was his reappear
ance in their midstj
TNo possible inducement can be imagined for
them to steal his body and falsely proclaim him
risen and persist in such a fraud by a continued
public preaching based on its verity, for they
could not possibly reap any personal advantage
in thus linking themselves with a condemned
crucified criminal, but would be placing them
selves In perpetual peril. There is nothing to
show that they were bold, cunning adventurers
capable by natural endowment or education or

138 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
social (standing to successfully palm off such a
cheat on the world; but everything that they,
ordinary, plain people, stood ready to die, if
need be, in attestation of their beliefx
fSt. Paul, once their scoffing persecutor, wrote
in one of those four epistles, whose genuineness
no critics dispute and which together constitute
what is denominated the fifth gospel, twenty years
after Christ's death, that as many as five hundred
brethren at one time had seen Christ again alive,
the greater number of whom were, as he affirms,
still dwelling in the midst of the Corinthians to
whom the Epistles were addressed and who were
ready to vouch for the fact. How easily Paul
could have been confuted and put to open shame
had this not been true and notorious. These
early disciples imperiled not only their own lives
but those of innocently believing multitudes by
this their uncompromising advocacy of a risen
Christ. No hardships or perils, nothing but
death itself seemed capable of silencing them.
They endured to the end, cheerfully forfeiting
everything that the world holds dear, evidently
sustained solely by an inward consciousness of
truth. How otherwise are we to explain the
transformation afterward wrought in these fright
ened disciples, so deeply disappointed in their
hopes of the coming of a Messiah to break the
Roman yoke, from most ordinary, plodding peas
ants into strenuous advocates of a system of eth
ics and religious faith that is so marvelously free

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 139
from the narrow, shortsighted Jewish prejudices
of the times, of such broad catholicity, of such
sound philosophy that the peoples on this planet
in all their nineteen centuries of advancing en
lightenment have not yet outgrown it ; how other
wise are we to explain this marvelous transforma
tion except on the ground of these disciples hav
ing come into actual, constant touch throughout
their self-sacrificing ministry with the mind and
heart of their risen and ever-living Lord?j
No wonder that when the listening crowds, as
Luke writes, "saw the boldness of Peter and John,
and perceived that they were unlearned and ig
norant men they marveled and took knowledge of
them that they had been with Jesus.
The famous Dr. Arnold of Rugby testifies, "I
have been used for many years to study history
and examine and weigh evidence, and I know of
no fact which has been proved by better and fuller
evidence than that Christ died and rose again
from the dead."
There Is now a school of textual critics of un
questioned acumen, of profound learning, who,
after almost unprecedented painstaking research
have reached the conclusion that there is no sat
isfactory evidence in the Scriptures that Christ's
tomb was found empty on Easter morning and
that his crucified body was raised to life, but
rather that it was his spiritual body which at
sundry times had been seen by his disciples.
They contend that Paul, whose earliest epistles

140 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
date twenty-seven years after Christ died and
fifteen before the Book of Mark, the earliest of
the synoptical gospels, was written, testifies sim
ply to the fact of sundry apparitions. Tin his ar
gument on immortality he certainly does not pre
dict a resurrection of the body which we lay away
in the tomb. "Thou sowest not the body which
shall be." "There is sown a natural body; there
is raised a spiritual body." Out of the disinte
grating seed there springs the new vegetation.
The continuity lies not in the material enswarth-
ment but in the individualizing vital principle.
The fleshly body is not transformed, but out of it
there issues the original germinal life rehoused in
a wholly new and radically different body, built up
through the exercise of its inherent architectural
powersj Present psychologists affirm that such appari
tions as those of Christ are not isolated phenom
ena, and that they are not necessarily non-veridi
cal, mere hallucinations of subjective "origin,
neither that they are instances of distant tele
pathic control over the senses of the living by the
spirits of the dead, but that the dead in their new
spiritual bodies may be actually present and
actually seen, the veil of invisibility being tem
porarily drawn aside. The disciples evidently
were assured that they actually saw again their
living Lord. On this certitude the apostles
boldly preached the word and built the church.
There is no fact in personal experience more

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 141
universally conceded than that of Saul's conver
sion, and that it was based on his firm belief in the
actuality of his vision of Christ while on the road
to Damascus, yet he clearly implies that his ex
perience and that of the other former witnesses
were precisely alike, — they and he seeing pre
cisely the same sort of body. These critics af
firm that Mark's story of the empty tomb was
but a record of an oral tradition of very uncer
tain origin and of a quite improbable character,
that came down to him fifteen or twenty years
after Peter and Paul had passed away.
It is not my purpose to follow out the lines of
criticism of these authors in which they essay to
show the fragmentary character of Mark's ac
count, the interpolations of passages in the other
gospels, the discrepancy of texts, the strong im
probability of certain recitals, the conflict of tes
timony, the different stages of growth through
which what are apparent myths and legends
reached their final form. Suffice it to say that
while they discard the historical verity of the
resurrection of that identical body of Christ which
was once nailed to the cross and afterward laid
in the tomb, yet the essential fact of his spiritual
resurrection and actual reappearance to his disci
ples again and again, and their firm conviction
and attestation of that fact, these critics do not
deny. That Christ In some way, clothed In some sort
of a body, made his actual living presence known

142 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
to his followers and thus lifted them out of their
despair and inspired them with a courage and a
hope that afterward knew no defeat, they seem
willing to concede. Whichever interpretation of
the closing scenes in Christ's career may be true,
a belief that his spirit was in some way most inti
mately conjoined with the Divine, and that ever
since that day it has entered as a conquering force
for good into the world's life and will ultimately
and gloriously triumph, such a belief, certainly
a most priceless possession, is happily left us still.
No wonder infidels are still puzzled to explain
how unlearned Galilean fishermen nineteen hun
dred years ago, when superstitions and most con
tracted views were rife, could have conceived and
pictured with their pens an ideal God-man so
masterfully that his acts and sayings as recorded
in their pages should be found and universally
acknowledged, after the searching test of so many
centuries, to be in perfect accord with what would
be expected in such a strange and august person
age. To fashion such a hero, a hero who should
in every exigency maintain the decorum, mani
fest the spirit, and teach with the wisdom of a
God, is, as I have before remarked, an achieve
ment far transcending even the creative genius of
a Shakespeare. Christ's last discourse has no
parallel In all literature. Rosseau, the French
sentimental deist, unhesitatingly affirmed that the
original inventor of the gospel history would have
been as miraculous a being as its historical sub-

WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 143
ject. We can but admire the wise discretion of
the writer of "Ben-Hur" in rigidly adhering,
whenever he introduced Christ into his story, to
the severely simple outlines given in the Gospel
histories. He seems to have recognized with true
artist instinct that the least deviation from the
grand original would but mar his work, if not
ruin it.
As to Christ's being either an impostor or a
lunatic, there is no infidel who has proved so reck
less of his own reputation for insight or for can
dor as to venture on such a plea.
There is but one other answer left us to that
great question of the hour, "What think ye of
Christ? whose Son is he?" That answer has
fallen from the lips and been embodied in the lives
of millions of nobly trusting souls in every age
since Christ's coming. Faith in his intimate
union with the Divine Spirit is the foremost force
in the world to-day, quickening, uplifting, and
purifying the lives of its mighty multitudes as no
other force has done or ever can do. fThe spirit
of scientific inquiry is now abroad in the earth as
never before, uncurtaining the past, analyzing
and classifying the phenomena of inanimate and
animate nature, carrying its torch far into the
abysmal depths of personality, discovering the
laws that prevail in the departments both of
physics and of metaphysics, leaving no subject
untested, suffering no sacrifice to check its ar
dor. This spirit of inquiry, which owes its im-

144 WAS CHRIST DIVINE?
petus directly or indirectly to this same Christ of
history, will, as I confidently believe and have at
tempted to show, finally establish beyond all con
troversy that this Christ is indeed that Divine
Deliverer to whose advent Nature and Revelation
so long pointed with prophetic fingers, and of
whose reign of love we have the blessed assurance
there shall be no end. )