Ilil 'k.:k;k:: fit tu* found™? of aColUg* t tha Colcjy^_ 1 « OBBLftmr ° Bought with the income of the William C. Egleston Fund 19*? THE PILGRIM BY THE SAME. AUTHOR THE CONFLICT OF RELIGIONS IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE. THE JESUS OF HISTORY. JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN. THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND ITS VERIFICATION. THE PILGRIM ESSAYS ON RELIGION T. R. GLOVER FELLOW OF ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE AND PUBLIC ORATOR IN THE DNIVERIITY LONDON STUDENT CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT 3x RUSSELL SQUARE, W.C.I 1942 I First Published Oetabtr 1 921 Printed in Great Britain by TurnMl 6* Spears, Edinburgh R. G. QUIDQUID EX ILLO AMAVIMUS QUIDQUID MIRATI SUMUS MANET MANSURUMQUE EST Preface A VOLUME of collected papers must have some central idea, and perhaps that central idea is given clearly enough in the title and in the article that stands first. All the sections of the book turn upon the spiritual life, and on that interpretation of it which we find in the New Testament, in its pre cursors and in those who in art and life have developed and elucidated it. The study of Jeremiah appeared in the Expositor. "The Meaning of Christmas Day" was written at the request of the Y.M.C.A. for distribution in the British Army, and it was reprinted, I understand, by the wish of the American Y.M.C.A. for the American Expeditionary Force. Two other papers in a somewhat different form were in a small booklet, once pubhshed by the Student Christian Movement under the title of Vocation, and now out of print. Others rest on contributions to the Nation and other journals, but have been completely rewritten. Four at any rate have not been in my writing before. Contents The Pilgrim Page II The Making of a Prophet 19 An Ancient Hymn of Hate . 35 The Meaning of Christmas Day 45 The Training at Nazareth 54 The Talents 74 The Last Evening 92 The Writer to the Hebrews 104 The Holy Spirit . 125 The Statue of the Good Shepherd 152 The Rehgion of Martin Luther 175 A lost Article of Faith . 194 The Study of the Bible 214 The Pilgrim THE pilgrim seems to be dropping out of our rehgious conceptions. There are hymn-books which still keep a place for pilgrim hymns, but they are probably not often sung, except by children. And we are told often enough that the sentiment is false — if the hymn-writer insists that he is " but a stranger here," it is his own fault ; earth is not, as he asserts, " a desert drear " ; and the reference of all happiness to another world is unsound, and, perhaps, unchristian. On the contrary, R. L. Stevenson is a good deal nearer the mark : The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. So he wrote in the Child's Garden 0/ Verse, and the couplet stood for a poem in itself. The greater part of his work is to the same tune — the world is a good place, planned to be so by " our cheerful General on high," and, indeed, achieved, if you will only have the sense "to be up and doing," and take the gladness of it. If you grumble : Bleak without and bare within, Such is the place that I hve in, — he bids you look better at it ; why, if nothing else, the very frost of winter will " make the cart-ruts beautiful," and, in short, To make this earth our hermitage A cheerful and a changeful page, God's bright and intricate device Of days and seasons doth suffice. II THE PILGRIM So the pilgrim passes out of the picture with his medieval trappings, sandal shoon, and shell and staff. He is gone, and the excursionist has taken his place. I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. That the world is a good sort of place is not, after all, a very novel idea — it is in the first chapter of Genesis curiously enough, for in general it is credited with being Greek rather than Hebrew. The Greek, we all know, lived in the beauty and glory of the world, and, what is more, he interpreted it for all time. Take, for instance, Pindar's picture of the baby Iamos hidden among the flowers. The child of a god, he is a child of shame, some would say ; but look at him, as he hes wrapt in a cloth under the flowers, and mark the lavish richness of the colours. It is the ion, in whose rays his tender body is steeped (the phrase is the poet's), that gives him his name. Where is the shame ? A healthy child, half-god by birth, with a heroic story, a god-given inheritance, heaven lying about him in his infancy, and a house of heroes founded ere he dies. A beautiful world, and full of glory — who has limned it better than Pindar, or loved better the gleam of its life and colour ? And yet at the end Pindar strikes another note. rl &s rig • r) 8' ou rig ; exiag omp a,t9pw?rtg. " What are we ? What not ? Man is a shadow of a dream." Curious how Greek melancholy is bound up with Greek love of beauty ! And the same thing meets us elsewhere. Spenser stands in Enghsh litera- 12 THE PILGRIM ture as the poet of " the worlde's faire workemanship," and the poet haunted with the thought that Nothing is sure that grows on mortal ground ; for, when he weighs well the words of Mutabihtie, it causes him to loathe This state of life so tickle, And love of things so vain to cast away ; Whose flow'ring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. It seems that, if we are not exactly pilgrims, we are like the horses in the chariot-race at the theatre. We may not be progressing, but the stage slips away under our feet. In fact, as the Red Queen said to Ahce, it takes a great deal of running to stay in the same place. If we are not very careful, we shall find ourselves strangers in the most familiar scenes — old faces gone and new come, old ways and words for saken, and new habits and new language surging in. We are not pilgrims, but we live in a progression. The difference is that the pilgrim looks forward, and does it more and more eagerly, while we look back with growing wistfulness. " The world passes away," wrote the old writer ; " love not the world." Or, if you love it, pray to die young, when the evil days come not, when you are not yet solitary, when men do not yet count you some queer relic of the past, a curiosity from an older time, and a time they count inferior to their own. Now the pilgrims were ready for all this, for they were curiosities from the start. When they passed through this fine world and saw its houses, 13 THE PDLGRIM lands, trades, honours, preferments, titles, kingdoms, pleasures, and delights of all sort, they passed, as it seemed, through a lusty fair, with no mind to the merchandise, and without laying out so much as a farthing. And a great stir they made by this con duct ; and, as their chronicles tell us, there were reasons for this. First, the pilgrims were clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of any that traded in the fair. The people, therefore, made a great gazing upon them ; some said they were fools, some they were bedlams, and some that they were outlandish men. Secondly, and as they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise at their speech ; for few could understand what they said ; they naturally spoke the language of Canaan. Thirdly, the pilgrims set very light by all their wares, and when one chanced mockingly to say, " What wiU ye buy ? " they, looking gravely upon him, answered, " We buy the truth." On examination, they owned they were pilgrims, and strangers in the world, and that they were going to their own country, which was the heavenly Jerusalem. So wrote John Bunyan, with an old Greek writer's words at the back of his mind — " These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country." That Greek writer, as plainly, had studied one yet older, who had spoken of a place above the heavens, of an ideal city there laid up, and of man 14 THE PILGRIM as "no plant of earth but of heaven " — ovpaviov <£vtoV. And if Bunyan had read the Faerie Queene, or even the first book of it, as Giant Despair and some other features might tempt us to think, his heavenly city has yet another link with Plato — that goodly City, That earthly tong Cannot describe, nor wit of man can tell ; Too high a ditty for my simple song. The Citty of the greate King hight it well, Wherein eternall peace and happinesse doth dwell. Anyone who will read the Gorgias will see how the men of this world called Socrates, and, no doubt, his wonderful pupil too, fools and bedlams, how they wondered at their speech (for few could understand them), and how strange men thought their passion for Truth. How odd that a man should call this life a practice for death, that he should speak of a glorious vision beyond sense, and urge that our preparation should be " seeking the Truth " — and this in Athens, with Aristophanes living in the next street, and Cleon and his successors, as practical Empire-builders as ever turned a nation away from virtue and mercy, and such fine words ! Strange, too, that in that city, which stood unique in all Greece for the intensity of its culture, and its love of beauty, yes, which in itself was the actual " education of all Greece," men should "desire a better country, that is, an heavenly " ! The pilgrim, with his foreign air, the language of Canaan, and the strange gaze that will have Truth, above all with his conviction that there is a heavenly 15 THE PILGRIM reahty which is his home — he is an uncomfortable spectacle for us. God sends sometimes rain, and sometimes sunshine ; let us be content to take fair weather along with us. We hke that rehgion best that will stand with the security of God's good bless ings unto us ; for who can imagine, that is ruled by his reason, since God has bestowed upon us the good things of this life, but that He would have us keep them for His sake ? And the pilgrim, the ideahst, is for hazarding all at a clap. No, the world is not as bad as he thinks ; our city will not be destroyed with fire from heaven; we have learnt better. In stead of forsaking his city, why not do something for it ? There are many who would help. A Charity Organization Society would, at least, be something; Mr Legality would gladly aid, and the pretty young man his son, Mr Civility, would make the very ideal secretary. At all events, let us go quietly; let freedom slowly broaden down ; let us mend things cautiously, or we may upset more than ever we can put right. But he says No ; he will hazard all at a clap. He neither regards prince nor people, law nor custom, nor Sir Having Greedy, nor the rest of our nobility. And he means what he says, and goes armed — as strange a spectacle as Don Quixote — and his speech is the speech of a bedlam. His gaze is fixed on some thing far off, toward which he wul go ; but if you ask him what he sees, it seems the perspective glass shook in his hand, and he could not look steadily — he thinks he saw something hke a gate, and some of the glory of the place — so that, if you roundly tell him there is no such place, the best he can say is that he has 16 THE PILGRIM heard and beheves there is ; he does not know. This is indeed hazarding ah at a clap. And yet — And yet who ever cared for Truth, and was not a stranger in a strange land, a pilgrim through shams, delusions, vanities, and compromises — a bedlam in whom every child of convention could read absurdity writ large ? Who ever sought the good of his fellow-citizens, and did not pass, sooner or later, for a quack and an advertiser, or, at best, a dreamer who could only stammer that he thought he saw the gate, and some of the glory, and could not tell the way to it ? Who ever hved, as seeing the invisible, putting his faith in the existence of a God, hazarding all for Him, and never had to face mockery and shame, and the hideous doubt that, at the end of it all, the Great Perhaps might turn out to be nothing — vacuam sedem et inania arcana ? The bitter foUy of his quest, who knows hke the pilgrim himself ? He must own Rehgion in rags, as well as when in his silver slippers ; and stand by him, too, when bound in irons, as well as when he walketh the streets with applause — in short, he will be made the off-scouring of all things ; and the very sensitiveness of soul that has set him on this pilgrimage, leaves him doubly tender to pain, contempt and rejection, and to doubt and despair. The pilgrim is not gone. The moods of sentimen- talism, in their play upon lazy natures that will think nothing out, may have turned our fancies elsewhere ; but whether we dream, in our idle way, of him or of something else, he is treading our streets the same as ever, clad in a garb of his own, the strange speech on b 17 THE PILGRIM his lips, his gaze strained afar, and yet curiously keen in seeing through what is near. The real, the eternal, the spiritual — there is an appeal in them that Vanity Fair does not understand, nor Mr Worldly Wiseman and a great many more respectable citizens, nor again many of those Greeks of whom we talk so much, perhaps not Pindar himself at heart. But as Words worth tells us, " the immortal mind craves objects that endure " ; and it was made for them and finds no rest till it rest among them with their Author and its own. No, the pilgrim is not gone ; he is still seeking the Celestial City — that kingdom of Heaven which has cost the world so many good hves, the way to which is marked by a cross for every milestone, and which mankind will not have at any price, and yet knows in its heart it must have. 18 The Making of a Prophet x ONE of the most profitable studies is to know the man to whom a call to some high task has come, and to find out, if he lets us so far into his heart, how it came to him. Where the call of God is heard by a man with any measure of obedience, there can seldom be for long any great doubt as to the history of it. Sometimes he will tell it us himself, vividly, and directly, as Isaiah tells how he " saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple " (Isaiah vi.). But that is not the whole story, for if we ask who was this man to whom this vision came, and why should he have had it rather than any one else, we are involved in a good many questions. If we can find the answers to them, we shall be in a position better to understand how God deals with men — how, historically, He has dealt with men ; and when we understand that, we may find that He has had dealings with us ourselves, the significance of which we did not see. It is perhaps rather a risky thing to enter on such inquiries when one is dependent on translations and is not at home in the vernacular spoken by the man we study. But I begin to think that a foreign speech is never fully mastered, however long one reads it ; — do we know our own ? And again, when a thought reaches a certain elevation, it may lose something in translation — a great deal perhaps — and yet reveal a 1 1 have to thank Dr Theodore H. Robinson, Lecturer in Hebrew at University College, Cardiff, for reading this paper, and for his criticism. 19 THE PILGRIM great soul in awful simphcity. " And His will is our peace " — that is, even in a foreign prose, a thought of power and wonder, and it speaks, for those who will hear, of a spiritual experience of no common kind. Without Italian, we shall not know Dante to the full; but we can know something worth while of the greater sort of man from even a very httle of him. One of Shakespeare's most famous women speaks thirty hnes only in the course of the play. So, if we recognize that we are to lose something, we may also fairly claim that we do not lose all, when we read so living a man as Jeremiah in translation. He tells us a httle about himself and his ante cedents. He was " the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin " (i. i), a member by birth of a priestly caste, which does not always imply much rehgion but which some times explains reaction against a priestly view of rehgion and of God. The episode of his purchase of land (ch. xxxii.) seems to suggest that he was a man of some means. He further tells us (xvi. 2) that he did not marry. The rest of his story must be gathered from the things of which he speaks and the way in which he speaks of them. It has been remarked of our Lord and St Paul, that it is plain from their speech that the one was country- bred and the other a man of municipalities — " a citizen of no mean city," he says himself. The same contrast would appear to hold between Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Similes from nature are frequent in all literature, but there are differences in the way in which men use them. Our Lord always confined 30 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET himself to the real and the actual, and^so does Jeremiah ; and there is a certain hkeness in their use of country things and country ways, though Jeremiah does not employ the parable-form with anything approaching the supremacy we find in the Gospels. But contrast him with Ezekiel. The eagle, with great wings and long pinions, full of feathers, which comes to Lebanon and carries off the topmost of the young twigs of a cedar and sets it in a city of merchants in a land of traffic (Ezek. xvii. 2-8), — the other cedar, under whose shadow " dwelt all nations " (Ezek. xxxi. 6), — and the lioness with the wonderful whelps (Ezek. xix. 1-9), leave nature a long way behind ; and we are perhaps right in thinking that men who have lived close to nature take fewer hberties with her. Ezekiel draws his imagery less from nature than from Babylonian art. Jeremiah's references to country hfe, to the farm, the animals wild and tame, the daily round of labours and anxieties, and the wonder and beauty of nature, surely have something to tell us of a sentient spirit, for whom all these things were familiar and were dear. The examples of Virgil, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson, of Jesus himself, prompt the thought that Jeremiah's instinctive re currence to country scenes and doings whenever he wishes an illustration that will reach the heart and make the matter clear and hving, points to boyhood and its impressions. It is wonderful how many sides of country hfe he touches — perhaps he would have been surprised to be told it himself. There is the vineyard, with the " noble vine, wholly a right seed," and " the degene- 21 THE PILGRIM rate plant of a strange vine " (ii. 21), and the grape- gatherer (vi. 9).1 There is the olive ; and here we may pause to note a certain deliberate use of the adjective, not idle at all, which suggests feehng and gives a hint of the man's style — " a green ohve tree, fair with goodly fruit " (xi. 16) — and we may compare the question " where is the flock, that was given thee, thy beautiful flock ? " (xiii. 20). There is the cornfield of course. " What is the straw to the wheat? saith the Lord" (xxiii. 28). That is not quite the Lord's dialect when He speaks with the city-bred. One of his most haunting phrases turns on harvest — " The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved " (viii. 20). He thinks of a harvest much earher than ours in a more genial latitude. After harvest the preparations begin for next year and new cattle are broken in — Ephraim, he says, is " chastised, as a calf unaccustomed to the yoke " (xxxi. 18). As the boy grows, he ranges further afield — with the fowler after the birds — "they watch," he says of the wicked, " as fowlers lie in wait ; they set a trap, they catch men " (v. 26). He studies the birds — " the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times ; and the turtle and the swallow and the crane observe the time of their coming " (viii. 7) ; as to the partridge (xvu. 11) it is suggested that he depends here on a legend of the countryside, as White of 1 I omit other references in chapters xlix. to li., as the ascription of the chapters to Jeremiah is questioned, but they too contain interesting pictures — the vineyard (xlix. 9) ; the lion (xlix. 19 20 li. 38) ; the scattered sheep (1. 17) ; the eagle (xlix. 16). 22 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET Selborne foUowed the popular tale of the swallows lying congealed together under ponds in winter. Or perhaps he wandered with the shepherds — stretched the tent with them and set up the curtains (x. 20 ; vi. 3) ; and later on he looked back to the desert hfe and wished he could have it again (ix. 2). He told the flocks with them (xxxiii. 13), and grew into acquaintance with the wild beasts, notably the lion. The jackal, perhaps referred to in iv. 17 as the watcher of the fields, the leopard (xiii. 23) and the wild ass 1 (ii. 24) we can beheve,, had. all their interest, and the wildest and most dangerous of all the desert-dweUers no less — " by the ways hast thou sat for them, as an Arab in the wilderness " (iii. 2). But apart from the living creatures, The earth And common face of Nature spoke to him Rememberable things.2 There is the great drought — " because of the ground which is chapt, for that no rain hath been in the land, the plowmen are ashamed, they cover their heads. Yea, the hind also in the field calveth and forsaketh her young, because there is no grass. And the wild asses stand on the bare heights, they pant for air hke jackals ; their eyes fail, because there is no herb age " (xiv. 4-6). That passage shows the man — the keen observation, the memory, the short, quick, tell ing phrase, and the picture, alive with truth and imagination. There is the " [hot] wind from the 1 The text appears doubtful. The Greek of the LXX, shows con siderable variation. 2 Prelude, i. 586. 23 THE PILGRIM bare heights in the wilderness " (iv. ii), and in telling contrast we read : " ShaU the snow of Lebanon fail from the rock of the field ? or shall the cold waters that flow down from afar be dried up ? " (xviii. 14). " Are there any among the vanities of the heathen that can cause rain ? or can the heavens give showers ? art not thou He, O Lord our God ? " (xiv. 22). There is the constant and famihar mystery of day and night — " the shadows of the evening are stretched out " (vi. 4) and " the host of heaven that cannot be num bered " (xxxiii. 22) rise over the boy in the shepherds' camp, and the sense for God grows. Then back into the viUage to watch the potter busy at his wheel (xviii. 1-4), and the metal-worker (x. 4, 9) and the beUows blowing fiercely (vi. 29), the mud field-oven, familiar stiU in the East and elsewhere (i. 13). It is, in short, a boyhood like Wordsworth's in close touch with objects that endure. From what has been said, it will take little insight to infer a meditative temperament. There is a reflective cast about him from the start, tinged with melancholy. He is given to introspection, and hfe with many moods lacks ease. Popular talk has exaggerated — grossly — his weeping and his tears, and the impression has been strengthened by the ascrip tion to him of Lamentations. His contemporaries saw another Jeremiah — " a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole land " (xv. 10). He turns things over and over — " Thy words were found and I did eat them ; and thy words were unto me a joy and the rejoicing of mine heart : for I am called by thy name, O Lord God of hosts. I sat not in the 24 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET assembly of them that make merry, nor rejoiced. I sat alone because of thy hand ; for thou hast fined me with indignation " (xv. 16, 17). He looks into his own heart — " pained at my very heart ; my heart is disquieted within me " (iv. 19), — and, hke other men who look within, he is shocked and troubled at what he finds, for " the heart is deceitful above all things, and it is desperately sick ; who can know it ? " and he answers, only God (xvii. 9). " O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself : it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. O Lord, correct me " (x. 23, 24). As he grew to know better the hfe of his people — the hopelessness of effort to help or guide them — the inevitable doom descending on them, which he was to share — it is easy to under stand how melancholy grew upon him (viii. 18 ; ix. 1), and how he wished he had never been born (xx. 14) ; but even before all this, the seeds of disquiet were with him. A striking trait in his character is the extra ordinary frankness with which, deeply pious as he is, he challenges God to explain Himself — " Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee : yet I would reason the cause with thee ; wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper ? wherefore are all they at ease that deal very treacherously ? " (xii. 2). A similar question is asked by Theognis and other Greeks, but with them it is not a matter of rehgion. The Zeus to whom they address their inquiry is not the personal Jehovah of Jeremiah. The sensitive nature, coming graduaUy into the knowledge of the badness and rottenness of human character and 25 THE PILGRIM human life, suffers acutely ; the times are out of joint — there is so much to explain, and to endure ; and the prophet (not yet at all conscious of any prophetic gifts or call) cannot explain and cannot bear, for he has not in himself the power to do either. Such a man, as he sees later on, is not the type needed for a prophet, yet God calls him, and we after the event see why. It is the sensitive nature, for which things are unendurable and unintelhgible, that sees and reads the problem true. He, of all men, has the best chance to know, for he feels the irreconcilable elements that other men miss, and cannot rest with them in a peace that is no peace. Finally it has to be remembered that the clue which later Judaism found to unravel the mystery of pain and failure upon earth was not in Jeremiah's hand ; he has no doctrine of personal immortahty — a strange fact, when we realize the grasp he had of God and man as personahties. This then is our man, but now we reach a place where there is a gap in our story. With this type it is never easy to know where and when they become conscious of God — even when they teU us. For God is with them, and as they go they have, in George Fox's phrase, " great openings." Things stand out in a new way — they see — and all before seems dim by comparison. This happens again and again. When further, as in the case of Jeremiah, we depend on a book notoriously confused and uncertain in text and order, as the Septuagint translation sufficiently shows, a book about the writing of which we can never pronounce definitely how much the prophet 26 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET wrote or Baruch or others, we cannot get very far with a narrative. But we find sooner or later a man with an unspeakable consciousness of God. " Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off ? Can any hide in the secret places that I shall not see him ? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord " (xxiii. 23, 24). God, near and far, and fining all things — it is the knowledge of aU the mystics. How can there be other gods ? And yet the prophet's people neither see nor feel. " Hath a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods ? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the Lord " (ii. 11, 12), for over these very heavens God's people have set another. " Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem ? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven " (vii. 17, 18). Thus from childhood the minds of his people were being steeped in falsity, and years after in Egypt the women said that so long as they had burnt incense to the queen of heaven they had " plenty of victuals, and were weU, and saw no evil," and things had gone wrong since they left off (xliv. 18). There were other renunciations of God, too — " for according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah ; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have ye set up altars to the shameful thing, even altars to burn incense unto Baal " (xi. 13). Here we have the beginning of the caU— in the dreadful contrast 27 THE PILGRIM between God and No-gods, between the prophet's sense of God's nearness and wonder, and the people who turned their back to God, and not their face (ii. 27). The prophet looked out on the world around ; the vision of God does not duU the eyes of understanding. No, with keener gaze he looked and he saw other nations — armies and kings and great powers — danger ever nearer. But no one else saw it. Poor and great ahke are under delusion; false to God, false to one another, delusion has come upon them. Their very confidence in God is false. Isaiah had foretold the safety of Jerusalem from Sennacherib ; plenty of new Isaiahs foretold in the same strain her safety from Nebuchadnezzar. It was in vain; God's thoughts were other. " Amend your ways and your doings, and I wiU cause you to dweU in this place (or, I will dweU with you). Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these " (vii. 3, 4). The temple had been saved before, this time it would not be. God asked righteousness, but they were satisfied without it. But the place is fuU of prophets of peace — saying, " I have dreamed, I have dreamed " (xxiii. 25) ; and " they have healed also the hurt of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace ; when there is no peace " (vi. 14 ; viii. 11). The " hurt " here is a breakage not to be healed by words. " The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means ; and my people love to have it so ; and what will ye do in the end thereof ? " (v. 31). And God has heard what the prophets have said that prophesy lies in His name (xxiii. 25). 28 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET The caU comes to a point. The situation grows intolerable — false peace, real danger, rejection of God, rejection by God, captivity — " and my people love to have it so ! " Then Jeremiah hears God speaking, and speaking to him personally. It does not matter whether the conversation took a moment or six months — it came. " Before I formed thee in the beUy I knew thee, and before thou earnest out of the womb I sanctified thee ; I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations " (i. 5). This is indeed a dreadful outcome of the reahzation of God — this awful charge — to be a prophet — to quit field and quiet, to speak of God and His judgments to men who wiU not listen, when one is a man, sensitive, shrinking, and uneasy. God must have chosen the wrong man. " Then said I, Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.1 But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child : for to whom soever I shaU send thee thou shalt go, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces : for I am with thee to dehver thee, saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth His hand, and touched my mouth, and the Lord said unto me, Behold I have put my words in thy mouth. . . . Gird up thy loins, and arise and speak unto them aU that I command thee : be not dismayed at their faces, lest I dismay thee in their sight. For, behold, I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron piUar, and brazen waUs, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, 1 By " child " he means that he has never had responsibility ; he is not a person whose words will naturally carry weight, 29 THE PILGRIM and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee ; but they shaU not prevail against thee ; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to dehver thee." " Peace, peace," when there was no peace, was the message of the false prophet. Jeremiah's message was to be judgment, the destruction of temple and tower, captivity in a strange land and no speedy return. And when the false prophet promised a short exile, Jeremiah had to write and give his countrymen a strange message from God— to settle down, to marry and multiply, " and seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it ; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace " (xxix. 6, 7) ; for they were to be there seventy years. So far every word of God that He puts in Jeremiah's mouth is a word of terror and pain. No man would wish to speak them — least of all such a man. And yet he could not help it. That we learn from the burning utterance that follows the conflict with Pashhur (ch. xx.). Here we have to remember the contemporary behef that God would deceive a man to his damnation. The very word used by Jeremiah is employed by Ezekiel (xiv. 9), "if the prophet be deceived and speaketh a word, I the Lord have deceived that prophet and I wiU stretch out my hand upon him and will destroy him," and in the story told to Ahab by Micaiah (2 Kings xxii. J9-23)- Jeremiah has become charged with words from God, and finds, or thinks he finds, that God does not fulfil them. It is the most terrible mood that a sensitive nature can experience. " O Lord," cries 30 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET the prophet (xx. 7) after his public exhibition in the stocks, " thou hast deceived me and I was deceived ; thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed ; I am become a laughing-stock all the day, every one mocketh me. For as often as I speak, I cry out ; I cry, Violence and spoil : because the word of the Lord is made a reproach unto me, and a derision, all the day. And if I say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name, then there is in mine heart as it were a burning fire, shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing and I cannot contain." Such words need no comment — they are true of every prophet, every poet, every man to whom God speaks ; there is nothing for it but to speak what is given, and at last the given word comes out almost of itself. Even yet we have hardly got the whole of the call, but we have seen certain elements of it — the conscious ness of God and the sense of the all-importance of the God-directed hfe — the contrast offered by the nation's indifference to God, their need of God and their danger — the summons to speak, coupled with reluct ance and a deep feeling of unfitness, — the growing, burning inevitableness of obedience — and somehow the conviction that God, Who fills earth and heaven, Who picks His man before he is born, must go with His messenger. Pain there will be — endless conflict with the men of his nation, prophet and priest and king — contumely, stocks and dungeon — and, at last deportation — a long record of failure. The brazen waU and iron piUar, the man of strife and contention (as they called him), stout, dauntless and impenetrable — they little knew how he quivered and tingled and 3i THE PILGRIM suffered. The promise was fulfiUed to the letter that he should be like a " brazen wall " ; whatever his inward moods, revealed to us in his writings, his countrymen saw in him a man of brass, neither to be intimidated nor cajoled. At last he has to teU Israel that not only is God entirely independent of them and their worship, but that God is utterly done with them : "I have sworn by my great name, saith the Lord, that my name shall no more be in the mouth of any man of Judah in aU the land of Egypt, saying, As the Lord God liveth (i.e. God wiU no longer be the God they swear by ; he wiU no longer be their God at all). Behold, I watch over them for evfl and not for good. . . . They shaU know whose word shah stand, mine or theirs " (xhv. 26, 27, 28). The message was a hard one — doubly hard when it had to be given against his own people, when it bore the look of dis loyalty and bad patriotism — and he gave it at all costs. But then because he is obedient and risks every thing on God, he is given a stiU deeper insight into God's nature and God's ways. They have turned the back to God and not the face, though He has sent prophet after prophet, " rising up early and sending them " (vii. 13), — so God is to be frustrate of His purpose ? Is He ? " Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah, saying, Behold I am the Lord, the God of aU flesh ; is there anything too hard for me ? " (xxxii. 26, 27). God's message given through Jeremiah has failed, — not altogether, for there were some who listened and remembered and wrote down his words — but in the main it had failed, and God is 32 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET beaten ? It is early to say that. No, God is not likely to be beaten — hardly that. Then ? By and by, the prophet, despised and rejected along with his God, penetrates farther into the secrets of God. God's love of Israel and God's rejection by Israel meet, as it were (in Bunyan's phrase), in his soul ; and which wiU prove stronger ? " The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love " (xxxi. 3). If God's love is on the same scale as His other attributes, it wiU be as eternal as God Himself ; it will in the long run prevail over Israel, and will achieve its purpose. A new Israel, ransomed and redeemed from the hand of him that is stronger than he, shall come back from captivity, " and they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shaU flow together unto the goodness of the Lord . . . and my people shaU be satisfied with my goodness, saith the Lord " (xxxi. n-14). But it wiU be a changed Israel, and the change wiU be an inward one. " Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah. ... I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it ; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people ; and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord [the sorry task of the prophet himself] : for they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord ; for I wiU forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more " (xxxi. 31-34). The insight here is amazing — hundreds of years later the infant Christian church saw the c 33 THE PILGRIM meaning of the passage and took it, and gave the name of " New Covenant " to the book that told the story of God in Christ reconciling the world to Him self. The instinct that seized the quotation was sound ; but how came the thought to Jeremiah ? Surely by obedience to God's caU. God has many ways of calling men ; but when side by side a man grows conscious of the love of God in Christ, with aU it means of freedom and peace, and of the darkness. of the heathen world, given over to gods that are no gods, and aU they involve of falsity, cruelty, and lust — or when, in short, he realizes the distance between the actual and the ideal in any sphere — is it not legitimate to suggest that in such a contrast there hes a call for him also, and that, if he obeys, he too wiU enter into new knowledge of the love of God and of God's purposes ? 34 An Ancient Hymn of Hate SOMETIMES one opens an old book and a leaf of writing wiU flutter out — a letter written perhaps a hundred years ago or more, a letter that teUs of passionate feehng, and gives one a ghmpse of some great moment in the life of a man or woman forgotten, whose very name may have perished. There is something moving in thus stepping into the experience of another, seeing the eye flash, the lip quiver for a moment, and then realizing that this intensity of suffering or joy was long ago — long ago, and yet hving stiU— and the rest silence. There is just such a document in the Book of Psalms. Look at this : By the waters of Babylon, There we sat down, yea, we wept. When we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in the midst thereof We hanged our harps. For there they that led us captive required of us songs, And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying. Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song In a strange land ? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, If I remember thee not ; If I prefer not Jerusalem Above my chief joy. Remember, O Lord, against the children of Edom The day of Jerusalem ; Who said, Rase it, rase it. Even to the foundation thereof. 35 THE PILGRIM O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed, Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee As thou hast served us, Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones Against the rock. There is hardly so vivid a bit in the Old Testament itself, full as it is with gleams from the hfe of man. Look at the story of this unknown writer. He has seen the Babylonian come in appalling strength and sweep conquering through Palestine, from Damascus down to Jerusalem. There foUowed a siege, and then the city was captured, and the Babylonians marched in and sacked Jerusalem. There was unbridled ruth- lessness about these conquerors from the Euphrates, which went beyond what is usually conceded to modern armies. A number of the better families of the Jews were gathered to be transported to the other side of the world. The sickly were left to their fate ; needless infants in arms were disposed of, the psalmist tells us how. That savage cry at the end of his Hymn of Hate is a revelation ; it was his own child that he bad seen so treated. With his friends and feUow- citizens he was marched northwards, f oUowing more or less the route of General AUenby. There is no other way from Jerusalem to Babylon ; those who have tramped northward through Syria wiU best under stand what that march was like. At the point where the Euphrates most closely approaches the Mediter ranean they crossed the desert and marched eternaUy down the banks of that great river. The journey was long and tedious, but the fatigue and the hardship had this advantage, they kept men from thinking. At last 36 AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE they reached the place where they were to live, where their graves and the graves of their children are found to this day — Nippur. The journey was over, and they were in a new land. People have spoken of the pathos of seeing the emigrants embark at Liverpool for a new world ; but at least they embark in hope, and one who has seen it feels a greater pathos in their disembarkation as immigrants at Quebec or Ellis Island. The promised land does not flow with milk and honey on the landing-stage. Arrived in Babylonia, and sitting by the riverside, there is talk among the prisoners and their guards, for even Babylonians were human, and as they sit the Babylonians sing songs of their own land. By and by in a friendly spirit some one asks the Hebrew captives if they, too, wiU not sing. One of the happiest stories of our late war, whether it is true or not, describes a sing-song in an Enghsh trench, and then an English soldier says, addressing two prisoners : " Our friends Hans and Fritz will now oblige with the Hymn of Hate." The story does not say what Hans and Fritz did ; but one of the greater and finer features of the war was surely this, that, once made prisoners, they were among friends ; * their country was not destroyed, there was no sacked Jerusalem away behind them, no murdered children ; there was detention, and then a safe return for them. But for the Jew in Babylonia everything was different. There was no Jerusalem, there was no 1 I forgot, when I wrote this, the Hull magistrates who fined an Anglican clergyman three guineas for giving cigarettes to German prisoners at a railway station. The gift, I should wish to ttiink, represented our people better than the act of the bench. 37 THE PILGRIM home, there was no return, there was no child ; the child lay with its head dashed upon the rock where the ruins of the home stood, and dogs and birds had picked its bones. Nor was this aU. " How shall we sing the Lord's song," he asks, " in a strange land ? " For, hke many of the ancients, he seems to have held the view that gods, hke kings and princes, had their frontiers, within which they might be omni potent, but outside of which they had no power. David himself said to Saul : " If it be the children of men that have stirred thee up against me, cursed be they before Jehovah ; for they have driven me out this day that I should have no share in the inheritance of Jehovah, saying, ' Go, serve other gods ' " (i Sam. xxvi. 19). The Babylonian soldier thought that it would be interesting to hear a Hebrew melody, to enjoy for a moment the contrast of the strange tune, even if he did not understand the words. But he got no song. The whole nature of the poet rose up quivering with pain. He left the group by the waters of Babylon, he broke away from them, and out of the sorrow that surged through him he wrote a new song altogether, full of tears and memories, culminating in this crash of hatred — the one great authentic Hymn of Hate in the Bible. People speak of the cursing Psalms ; there is none of them with the concentrated, definite, distilled intensity of this. And so far as we know anything of the poet, there is the end of the story. Who he was, we do not know ; what became of him, we do not know. We only know that he had gone into exile, and that, whether his hfe was long or short, in exile he died. Was he among those to 38 AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE whom the prophet Jeremiah wrote the terrible letter from Jerusalem ? Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all the captivity, whom I have caused to be carried away captive from Jerusalem unto Babylon ; Build ye houses, and dwell in them ; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them ; take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons, and daughters, and multiply ye there, and be not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it ; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. For thus saith the Lord, After seventy years be accomplished for Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you hope in your latter end (Jeremiah xxix.). Think of the feelings with which he heard the letter. The exile was to be for seventy years. He would never return. If any of his should return, it would be his grandchildren, the third generation ; and he is to pray for the peace of Babylon ! To pray for the peace of Babylon — and he is exulting in the hope that somehow, some day, she may be destroyed, and he has prayed for blessing on the man who will kiU the babies of the Babylonians as the Babylonians kiUed his child. Pray for the peace of Babylon 1 However, it came to the seventy years. There the exiles were, and there they had to stay. It was not tiU Cyrus conquered Babylon that the Jews were aUowed to return. But it was not the same Israel that went into exile that returned to Jerusalem. It has been suggestively said that Israel went into exile 39 THE PILGRIM a nation and returned a church. Unlike the Bourbons of the nineteenth century, Israel in exue learnt some things and forgot others. Whether it was accident or genius that made the order of the Psalms, it is signifi cant to find in the 139th a measure of the distance that was really travelled in rehgious experience. " How shaU we sing Jehovah's song in a strange land ? " asks the earlier poet in exile. The question of the later poet (later by some centuries) is quite different : Whither shall I go from thy spirit ? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there : If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there : If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea. Even there shall thy hand leatl me. And thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me, And the Ught about me shall be night ; Even the darkness hideth not from thee, But the night shineth as the day ; The darkness and the hght are both alike to thee. Israel had gone into the uttermost parts of the earth, and had found that even there Jehovah's hand had led him, Jehovah's right hand had held him. Israel had learned that there is no land outside the range of God, that God is near aU the lands, and is in all the lands, that he was as near to Jehovah by the waters of Babylon, as by cool Siloam's shady riU, and the Lord's hand was not shortened. In Babylon itself Jehovah had searched him and known him. But the later poet goes further in thought than the wings of the morning can bear him ; he goes beyond 40 AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE the uttermost parts of the sea ; he reahzes (strangest of aU) that in the grave itself God wiU be waiting for him. To the Hebrew the world of the dead was a dim, sad, gloomy place, aU but without hght and life. The most vivid picture given of it is in Isaiah's fore cast of the f aUen King of Babylon : Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming" : it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth ; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall answer and say unto thee, Art thou become weak as we ? Art thou become hke unto us ? Thy pomp is brought down to hell, and the noise of thy viols : the worm is spread under thee, and worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning ! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst lay low the nations ! And thou saidst in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God ; . . .' I will ascend above the heights of the clouds : I will be like the Most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the uttermost parts of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, they shall consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms, that made the world as a wilderness, and overthrew the cities thereof ; that let not loose his prisoners to their home ? (Isaiah xiv. 9-17). It was long before Israel included in its faith a reaUy definite conviction of personal immortahty. The poet of the 139th Psalm is one of the forerunners of this behef. " If I make my bed in Sheol, in the world of the dead, behold Thou art there." What a glowing presentment of the range and power of God ! Down among the dead men in the dimness of Sheol, he finds Jehovah who has searched him and known 4i THE PILGRIM him, who knew him before he was born, and is with him still. The documents at which we have been looking are all genuine expressions of human experience ; every accent, every note, every hne is written, as it were, in heart's blood ; and we see what it has cost to travel the distance between the two poets. We look back and we ask : " What was the meaning of the agony and misery of the earlier poet ? " and we get the answer in the quiet happy faith of the later poet. Was it worth while, that deluge of disaster, those seventy years of exile ? What has mankind to say in answer ? Could we forgo the gain that Israel made in those years of suffering and hope deferred ? No 1 We feel that it has worked out aright, at any rate, so far as mankind is concerned ; we owe some thing to this poet by the waters of Babylon. And we sum up our conclusion as our own poets have summed it up — " Knowledge by suffering entereth " — " Our sweetest songs are those that teU of saddest thought." So it is again and again in the history of man ; tragedy and pain, and nothing to do but quietly work through them, and the issue is peace to those who come after the sufferers, for whom they do their suffering and their thinking. Once this is realized, men find a new value, a new reahty in suffer ing. It ceases to be mockery when it becomes in telligible ; and some of the deepest natures wiU not wish to forgo it, if their suffering wiU produce such results for those they love, for those who are to come after them. But what of the earher poet and his unhghtened 42 AN ANCIENT HYMN OF HATE pain, his anguish in the darkness ? He sees no solution, and his pain is the more for his seeing none. But the later poet makes it clear that even he was not outside the range and knowledge of God, for sooner or later, whether in the uttermost parts of the earth, or in the world of the dead itself, he would know the touch and the face of Jehovah, and learn the explanation and be satisfied. " How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land ? " The strange land may be the old familiar home made strange for ever by a vacant place, by the estrangement of those dear to us, or by the coming of new thoughts that raise questions and seem to leave no place for God. Most men and women sooner or later know this exile, have to live in this strange land. Our two old Hebrew poems give us the clue to find our way in the strange land which it may fall to us to travel. " Pray for the peace of the land," and do the ordinary duties of hfe, build up the home, care for the children, make friends with the Babylonians themselves ; the most commonplace duties come first, and in the doing of them comes the reahzation of the prophet's promises fulfilled. " I know the thoughts that I think towards you," saith the Lord, " thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you hope in your latter end." " Ye shall seek me and find me, and when ye shall search for me with all your heart, I wiU be found of you, and I will turn your captivity " (Jeremiah xxix. ii, 13, 14). Such is the story of the Old Testament, and the New Testament, as ever, gives it new value, and raises it to a higher point. It tells of one hanging on a cross, 43 THE PILGRIM who cries in agony, " My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" and dies without an answer from heaven. The New Testament also shows us the conviction of thousands that God was never more in earnest, never nearer, than when His Son hung upon the cross. " My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you " : so they teU us Jesus said, and they were speaking from their experience. In the cross men find peace with God, and that means peace with men. There are no more hymns of hate ; there is instead a New Song, and, as a New Testament poet says, it is sung by men of aU nations and kindreds and people and tongues ; the burden of it is thanks giving and the keynote is joy. 44 The Meaning of Christmas Day EVERYBODY knows what Christmas Day is We know it so well that we do not think about it. But it often repays us to think about the things that we know best, and without embarking on Theology we may say that Christmas Day commemorates the birth of the most interesting man known to history. If it is objected that we have no means of knowing when he really was born, we can admit that at once. It was not till the middle of the Fourth Century that December 25th was chosen for the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ. The day had its own associations ; it was a Roman festival time when, for a few days, aU slaves were free and their own masters. It was also over a large part of the world kept as " The Day of the Unconquered Sun." There was a widespread worship of the Sun ; and, after the shortest day of the year and the dark days round about it, the growth of the Sun's hght is evident on December 25th, and the day was kept as the birthday of the Sun. Not a bad day after all on which to remember the birth of Jesus, a day associated with freedom, the day that celebrates the birth of hght. This man's birth has meant both freedom and light to mankind, and it is worth while to let our minds rest on what he has done, on what he has meant to men. Jesus stands for the God-centred life. There never was anyone for whom God was so real, for whom God 45 THE PILGRIM was so near, and this sense of his for God hes at the very "heart of aU that he has done in bringing men freedom and hght. It was not that he did not know the darkness and the limitations of ordinary hfe. As we read his story we can see that his was no easy hfe. If he beheved in God it was not for want of knowledge of hell. He lived in a land enslaved by foreigners ; he was a carpenter, he was poor. One of the early Fathers of the Church reminded the Christian rich that the Lord Jesus brought no silver footbath from heaven. He had to work for a widowed mother, for little brothers and sisters ; he knew the tragedy of the money being lost, and the joy when it was found. He knew how hard it is to keep children in food and clothes, how fast they wear their clothes out, and how the time comes when clothes can be patched no more. He lived in a httle town which, hke other little towns, had its stories of squalor and pain, of broken hves, of prodigal sons, of oppression and tyranny. We can see in his story that he knew our problems, that he knew above all where they hurt. " He suffered," we read in the New Testament, and it teUs us what he did suffer — conflict of mind, temptation, repudia tion, betrayal. The story is summed up as agony. All these things he knew, the commonplace troubles of ordinary people, the soul-destroying tragedies that from time to time break down the best and most beautiful spirits. He knew hfe, and he had the in tellectual habit of taking the incidents of hfe without an anaesthetic, the hero's way of facing what is to be borne with open eyes and unflinching. This man brings home to us, both by his teaching 46 THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY and by the story of his life, the possibility of real contact with God, not in mere moments of exaltation, but in the steady, sober business of hfe, in its enjoy ments, in its sorrows, and in the happiness which we take without noticing. For him the centre of every thing is God. God is not for him a vague abstract noun ; he never defines God as if God were a problem in philosophy. But he lives on the basis of God, in the presence of God ; he accepts God as a child accepts the best sort of father ; God is there, God is good, and kind, and fatherly, and a friend, and a lover, One Who shares aU our interests, Who never excludes anything in our lives from His mind or from His heart. Children always know when their parents are really interested in their affairs ; the dohs, the stamp col lection, the httle house among the bushes, the bow and arrow. The great thing that Jesus gives us is this conviction that God is interested in us, down to the last details of everything that appeals to our own minds and natures, and that He is interested in us because He is fond of us. For example, if you have not thought about these things, track down through the Gospels the references of Jesus to God's interest in colours. Jesus speaks of God's interest in the hly, which, he says, for beauty beats " Solomon in all his glory." It is quite clear that colour, and movement, and form, all the things that make the life of nature, appealed to Jesus, and he saw that they all appeal to God. Other teachers had taught men to use the ingenuity of the universe as an argu ment for the existence of a Mind behind it. Jesus was touched by the beauty of living things, and he saw 47 THE PILGRIM that their beauty means that God, hke every other creative mind, loves beauty. In this way Jesus brings God near to us ; God, Who reaUy likes and enjoys flowers and sparrows, would probably hke httle children, and Jesus says that He does. It is not only that Jesus sees what a dehghtful nature God really has, but he is able to translate it into life. His knowledge of God is not hke our know ledge of some things which we use when we want them (if we ever use them at aU), but it is translated into life with this result, that it gives hfe a new worth-while-ness. His own hfe, his own personality, guarantee his insight into God. What is more, is the power he has of winning people to his outlook, of launching them on the new kind of hfe that he hved, and (seeing we are using a metaphor from ships) of steering them when they are launched, and safe guarding them from all the submarine activities of the enemy of life. That he does this stiU, is the ex perience of Christians. Let us look a httle at what his coming has meant in human history. Nothing has been more effective in safeguarding the individual man and woman from wrong and oppression than the conviction that he, or she, was one for whom Christ died. If Christ died for the slave, then we must at least be kind to him, and one day we shaU set him free. If Christ died for the prostitute, then we shaU have to re-think the conduct of hfe, and our whole estimate of women. There can be no exploiting people for whom Christ died. (This, by the way, is the essence of sin, the ex ploitation of man and the using of God's gifts against 48 THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY God.) HistoricaUy, where men and women have beheved that Christ died for the least important of us, there has been a new honour for men and women, a new love for them, and a growing resolve that everything shaU be theirs which their Great Friend could wish them to have. In this way Jesus has been the best champion of the people. Jesus increases the significance of men for one another; " he possessed and he conveys the genius for appreciation." The definition of a gentleman as " one who does not put his feehng before others' rights, or his rights before their feelings " is exactly in the vein of Jesus. There may be those who see httle in courtesy and good manners, but Jesus saw their inner meaning, and he taught and practised them. They are a recognition of the dignity of God's children. There was a charm about his love that he has been able to transmit to many of his followers. Charm is an unconscious thing, and it is never really acquired by practice, but Jesus taught his followers to forget themselves, and many of them have learnt the lesson, and catching his spirit have caught a great deal of his charm. Jesus was the great discoverer of the family. We are so familiar with the text " Suffer little children to come unto me " that we forget what a new and original thing it was for a great man and a great teacher to say. He beheved in family life ; he never taught that all the best men and women should not marry, he held with their marrying ; and biologists to-day emphasize the boundless spiritual and in tellectual gain to society, when, at the Reformation, marriage was given the significance that Jesus saw it D 49 THE PILGRIM has in God's scheme of things. It is pointed out how much the world owes to the good men and women who have married and brought up children. This is part of the freedom that Jesus has given us, and this, too, must be hnked with his consciousness of God. The Sixteenth Century saw the New Testament translated into Enghsh, the story of Jesus made available " for the boy that follows the plough " ; and the Seventeenth Century saw a great revolution in England, a great achievement of freedom. The Eighteenth Century saw the great campaign of the Wesleys to win men for Jesus Christ ; the Nine teenth Century saw England abolish the slave trade, humanize her own laws, emancipate woman, and give her mind as never before to the interests of httle children, not only on her own island, but aU over the world. Why is it that where Jesus becomes a hving reality for men, they are more human than before, larger of soul and of sympathy ? For a long time before Jesus was born, men had been wrestling with the idea that even foreigners are human. Jesus himself is the great pledge that we all are of one blood, " barbarian, Scythian, bond and free," Enghsh, German, Indian and Chinese. There is a certain truth in nationahsm, but Jesus made humanity a real thing in God. He must lay the founda tions for any League of Nations that is to be real and to last. For the individual, Jesus has done wonderful things. His very existence has historicaUy been a stimulus to thought. We forget sometimes that thought is a 5° THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY primary Christian duty. We forget the freedom of mind of Jesus, and his perpetual insistence on our thinking. " The truth shall make you free," we read ; but the truth is not found at random, in the streets. Jesus has committed us to finding out and incorporating in hfe all the truth there is in God, to capturing the whole of God, and making God in all His fulness our own. He has not only set men this task, but he helps them to achieve it. Very much the same can be said about art as about the other regions of thought and feehng. One function of art is the enjoyment and the interpretation of " God's real " in its whole complex of relations. Was there ever anyone who enjoyed God more than Jesus did ? or shared his joy in God more successfully with other people, communicating his joy to men and women ? Jesus was more than what we call original, he was originative ; he had the creative mind. His parables are masterpieces in the use of language, so easy and so simple that one would not suppose there was any art in them. That is the very acme of art. Jesus gave to the individual an infinite value, and by doing so he opened new fields to art. Wherever the story of Jesus has ruled, with its freedom and with its breadth, men have loved art and music and laughter, and have enjoyed all the simple and wonderful things that God gives. Humour has been defined as the sense of contrast touched by love, the power of seeing the finite on the background of the infinite. " The real sense of humour breaks into flower when we have overcome the world." Yes, and who overcomes the world ? Who has the real peace of mind that is 5i THE PILGRIM essential to humour, but those whom Jesus has made free of the whole world, by showing them that they are the children of God, and that the world is the home God has made for them, and by giving them the courage to see God and to enjoy Him ? Jesus has enlarged the capacity of men for God ; he has made us feel that the Author of every aspect of life touches the human spirit at every point. He has made us free, to develop our characters to the utmost ; we are to be perfect as God is perfect. That includes every kind of perfection, inteUectual and artistic, as well as moral and spiritual. Jesus has made God intelligible to us. He has brought God into our business and bosom, and he has given us the sense and the appetite for God. He has made us at home in God, and above all he has given us the feehng that the great joy of life is to reahze God in every fibre of one's being, and to explore God through all the in finite maze of wonder and of love in which He shows Himself. Jesus has lit up God for us, turned hght upon Him, and shown us that the great power of which we are afraid is the best Friend we have. In ancient days, and in the heathen world to-day, the object of rehgion is to get away from God. Jesus has changed all that, and made the object of our rehgion to get into the heart of God. He has inter preted God to us, for he himself is the bond of kinship between us. He is the author of peace, the giver of a happy mind, and that is why, to this day, we keep Christmas. Christmas is the Children's Day ; what better day is there for them to keep than the birthday of the Great Friend, who (as it were) discovered them, 52 THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS DAY who hked them, and was fonder of them than any of the world's great teachers, and who taught us all to love children with a new tenderness, and a new interest that the world had never known before ? So the ancient Church perhaps did not make a bad choice, when it chose the day associated with freedom and light, with the rebirth of nature, on which to remember the coming of Jesus. We shall use the day to the best purpose if we set our minds to work to discover, this Christmas, some new features of the Jesus whom we commemorate, if we read the Gospels over again and find out for ourselves what Jesus was and what he is. It is not a day on which we are caUed to celebrate a dead Jesus, but one which speaks to us of life and calls us to come face to face with a Friend, who is waiting to talk with us, to help us, to set us free, and to give us the light we need to face the darkness round about us. 53 The Training at Nazareth AMAN who is to make anything of hfe, who means to capture the truth of things, must be, so Plato teUs us,1 the " spectator of all time and aU existence " — " ever longing after the whole of things in its entirety, divine and human." In a universe which has a real unity about it, half-views will not do. We have to practise ourselves to get out of the habit of the half and be resolute to hve in the whole, the good, the beautiful. So Goethe taught ; and Thomas Carlyle used to hke to quote the German, and generaUy quoted it wrong, substituting for the beautiful the true.2 Perhaps a phuosopher would prefer Carlyle's version ; but in the end the difference grows less and less. Jesus has been described as a peasant, unlettered and untravelled. Without saying so much in so many words, a certain school of commentators and historians cannot get away from the notion that the marks of his date and place are indehbly upon him. Other men of his environment had certain behefs ; phrase suggestive of them is found among his sayings ; therefore we can reconstruct him on the lines of his contemporaries, and he proves to have been of no very unusual type, pious, moral and fervid, but hope lessly loyal to an outlook that no intelhgent man can keep, cloudy with dreams of miracle, and at last quite out of touch with reality, as unhke Plato's ideal man 1 Republic, vi., p. 486 A. • See p. 90. 54 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH as one can well imagine. He tried, they say, to force the hand of God at last, and involved himself in death as the result of a desperate and untenable conviction that God must bring him back on the clouds of heaven — — which did not happen ; he was thus the victim of vulgar haUucinations, a peasant who had lost his balance and all sense of reahty. It is curious that so great a change in human thought should have been inaugurated by such a person ; that so often a revival of rehgion has been brought about by a return to one whose central conviction was wrecked on the facts of history ; that again and again men have found the courage to face the re-thinking of the universe, physical and spiritual, in the stimulus of a poor creature with a central delusion. History is hardly to be interpreted on the hnes of such an airy paradox ; for history is always rational ; and a solution of historical problems, that depends on hfe and the universal proving irrational, cannot be true. Carlyle may be little read to-day, but he was right on many things, where fashion ignores him — right in his doctrine of the Hero, right in his conviction that aU rehgions that have reaUy moved mankind have a truth at the heart of them ; right in maintaining that man is everywhere the natural enemy of aU lies. A Christ who, however holy (whatever that vague word means), however pious, however beautiful, in his sublime morahty and his trust in God and so forth, was yet mentally so deficient, as to miss what men quite inferior to him could see at a glance, who would not face the facts of God but imposed on God a fanciful character 55 THE PHLGRIM of his own — such a Christ wiU not serve. Carlyle's Mahomed (I wiU not pronounce on his exact relation to the Mahomeds of more modern Arabists) was incom parably a stronger figure than this cloudy enthusiast ; — to say nothing of Socrates and even Zeno — for they at least were teachers who based themselves on fact and on the ascertainable laws of the universe. The Christ of the apocalyptic school is not Hero enough to carry a great movement ; and, ingeniously reconstructed as he may be, some very obvious his torical factors seem to be omitted. A peasant, unlettered and untraveUed — so was Robert Burns, and it is hardly necessary to read Matthew Arnold's stinging criticism of his provincial ism, or Carlyle's kindlier description of the narrow cranny in which Burns grew (Carlyle himself too a peasant), to reahze how local, how commonplace, and how desperately the unlovely chUd of vulgar sur roundings Burns could be ; and yet he was what all the world knows and loves : Deep in the general heart of men His power survives. So does the power of the Galilaean ; and on ordinary lines of sane criticism, it is reasonable to ask what that power was. Burns' greatness is compatible with his baseness. The power of Jesus is uninteUigible in conjunction with the imbecihty of mind attributed to him in some quarters ; and as the one is proved through all history and the other a theory of a day, further inquiry is obviously proper. Matthew Arnold was far nearer the mark when he said that Jesus was 56 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH above his reporters ; they were often peasants, and they certainly were not strong in letters, as Paul found and bluntly stated. Even modern historians have at times, involuntarily, shown us how trivial a great man can look in the portrayal of an inadequate interpreter. Probably few of us are quite adequate to the task of drawing Jesus as he was. In any case, an inquiry into the early training of Jesus may help us to a better understanding of his capacity for the ordinary business of testing and comparing the values of ideas. AU over the world we find more or less rehgious natures the ready prey of the first extravagant notion that is put plausibly to them ; they have no background and no criticism. But there is something to be said for the view that the training of Jesus provided him with both. If the Gospels supply the materials for the eschatologist's interpretation, they offer the evidence on which we can rely for a more natural one, one nearer the con ception of Jesus which rational men have generaUy held. It is a sound canon that the evangelists have to be judged by Jesus, rather than Jesus by the evan gelists. And after all they did not do their work so badly ! They drew a great figure, which has obscured their shps and has been readily interpretable for aU simple and sincere enough to recognize greatness when they see it. If the eschatologists insist on the letter of the Gospels where it suits them, a similar insistence may be forgiven to those who criticize their inferences. " Hast thou appealed unto Caesar ? unto Caesar shalt thou go ! " And it may be added that the texts and passages, to which we refer, have this advan- 57 THE PILGRIM tage ; they deal with ordinary and commonplace matters which do not involve miracle or marvel, which are taken for granted and only casually men tioned, and which could not appeal to any writer as bearing on any theory of the world's end. II To begin, then, with historical Galilee — " Gahlee of the Gentiles." The country was only added to the Jewish kingdom about ioo B.C. by the conquering arm of " Aristobulus the King of the Jews," as he would be known in the world of the foreigner — Judas the high priest, as he was in Jerusalem. The people, hke that of Edom, was forced to embrace Judaism, and " Aristobulus was thus the creator of the Gahlee which we know in our gospels — a region whose popula tion is Jewish in behef and practice, but Gentile to a large degree in descent." * In accent (Mark xiv. 70) and in environment the people differed from the Jews of the South. Twenty miles from Nazareth was the great Mediterranean port where Rome poured her soldiers and officials on the land.2 Westward, across the httle lake, was a region of Greek cities, famous in the history of Hellenistic culture ; did not Meleager himself come from Gadara ? Gahlee did not he out of the world, and the world, it must be remembered, was Greek. The constant struggle of Judaism, from Antiochus Epiphanes to 1 Edwyn Bevan, Jerusalem under the High Priests, p. 115 ; Josephus, Antt. xiii. n, 4 ; Sir G. A. Smith, Hist. Geogr. of Holy- Land, 414, says this conquest may have been in the previous reign. a Sir G. A. Smith, Hist. Geogr., p. 35. 58 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH Herod, was against Greek institutions and Greek ways — the Greek hat, the Greek wrestling-ground, the Greek theatre, the Greek temple, and Greek idolatry. The subtlest engine that could be turned against Hebrew ideahsm was Greek culture. The Greek language must have been heard everywhere; Greek names abound, and are found among the twelve apostles themselves : Andrew, the brother of the Gahlsean Simon Peter, bears witness in his name to the diffusion of Greek. Nor were the Jews and Gahlaeans stay-at-home people ; and, once outside the Aramaic-speaking countries, Greek would be their universal speech, the language of commerce, the " pidgin Enghsh " of the day ; more useful, at any rate as far as the Adriatic, than Latin, and the pre vailing tongue of Alexandria, the greatest of all Jewish centres, the ancient New York. That Jesus was bi-hngual, that he, like so many contemporaries, spoke both Aramaic and Greek, would be hard to refute. His reported conversation with Pilate is positive evidence, and all probability points the same way. No language difficulties are hinted at when he crosses the lake to Decapolis, or travels in the direction of Tyre. A bi-hngual man may be duU enough — duU as a polyglot waiter ; but there is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that Jesus was duU ; on any hypothesis, however humanistic, he had one of the clearest of minds (eschatology for the moment ignored) ; and an original intellect, reinforced with two spoken languages, will draw from them a great deal more than the polymath from many. At the same time there is no indication that 59 THE PILGRIM he had any acquaintance with Greek hterature. But genius has a great " gift of doing without." From external sources we know of the energy and enthusiasm with which the Jews taught" their children, or secured that others should teach them. The synagogue included a school and a schoolmaster. If it is asked in the Fourth Gospel : " How knoweth this man letters, having never learned ? " (John vii. 15),1 it may be pointed out that " letters " in Greek and Enghsh is ambiguous ; a " man of letters " commonly has gone beyond the alphabet. Quite apart from such an episode as that where Jesus reads Isaiah aloud in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16), the Synoptic Gospels imply a close knowledge of the Old Testament. Jesus refers to reading as freely and naturaUy as any modern teacher would : " Have you not read ? " he asks.2 Add then to two spoken languages a familiarity with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and you have a very fair refutation of the charge that Jesus was " unlettered." As to his being " untravelled," he did not see Greece and Italy, but he lived in a polychrome world, fuU of Greeks and Romans, and men of many other nationalities, in fuU consciousness of the Roman Empire and its universahty and not unaware (how could he not be aware ?) of the Parthian power beyond the Euphrates (Acts ii. 9). But all this discussion of languages and book- learning is very naive, after all. Heraclitus long ago 1 Cf. Acts iv. 13. " Mark xii. 26 ; Matt. xii. 3, 5 ; Matt. xix. 4 ; Matt. xxi. 42 ; passages referring to different incidents. 60 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH had said that polymathy does not train the mind, or certain other philosophers, whom he names, would have stood on a higher level.1 What did Jesus learn from what he read and saw and heard ? First, we can set down that freedom from the local and contemporary to which an intelhgent knowledge of the history of one's own race and of other races wiU always prompt. In the Bible, as he had it, as he learnt it intimately and famiharly, Jesus was brought into touch with " all time " so far as the Eastern world knew it. Of course the history of the world was larger than that of the Jews. But the Jews in their day had contact with all the great races of antiquity, and a bright Jewish boy who knew and visualized the history of his own people was in posses sion of background and atmosphere. That he both knew and visualized it, let " Solomon in all his glory " bear witness — it was Jesus' own phrase and it tells of the inward eye — and David helping himself in the hour of need to the shewbread, Elijah with the Tyrian widow, the much-travelled Queen, and Naaman ; and three of our instances are foreigners of three different races. So he does not quite lack the emancipating touch of History. But the Old Testament stood for much more ; it represented the sum of God's dealings with Israel, and of these he laid hold in no ordinary way. It is remarked that he preferred the prophets and psalmists. One scholar, at least, suggests that his favourite was Isaiah 2 ; but he was not a man of one book, and a 1 Heraclitus fr. 16 (By water). ' Arno Neumann, Jesus, p. 44 (Eng. tr.). 6l THE PILGRIM good case might be made for Hosea or Jeremiah.1 He has achieved, as his Jewish contemporaries did not, nor his Christian followers, at once an intimacy with the prophetic mind and an independence of it. He does not quote as the literahsts do ; he seizes the heart of the message or of the man. " There is an affinity of spiritual truth between the Old Testa ment passage cited and the use of it in Jesus' teaching. The spiritual significance is always there." 2 He propounds no theory of inspiration. It might be assumed that he simply accepted the current view, but his treatment of Moses and of the laws of the Pentateuch makes this unhkely. A teacher who quotes what Moses said, and foUows it up clause by clause with the words : " But I say unto you " ; who condemns Moses' opportunism on the question of divorce, can hardly be credited with the duU theories of automatic inspiration which other men held and still hold. He expresses his own experiences in Old Testament language (Mark iv. 12, vii. 6). Even in the hour of death on the cross the psalm comes to his lips (Mark xv. 34). Prophet and psalmist spoke to his soul from their own souls ; he recognized the truth and power of what they said ; his experience repeated theirs if it transcended it ; and their phrase gave him again and again the word he wanted. On one who grew up in the word of prophet and psalmist, to whom God, the God of prophet and psalmist, was all, what impression would books of 1 Oscar Holtemann, Life of Jesus, p. 92 (Eng. tr.). • Charles S. Macfarland, Jesus and the Prophets, p. 107 ; cf. pp. 193, 196. 62 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH the apocalyptic type make ? How many of them did he actuaUy know ? What evidence have we that they had anything like the diffusion or acceptance of the Scriptures ? If it is urged that he borrowed from them his conception of the Messiah, it may be con ceded that the Messiah is mentioned in some but not in aU of these books ; but once again we must guard against supposing that genius can borrow an idea from the mediocre without transforming it. If he borrowed the name, a very little reading will show how he changed the content. But the apocalyptic Messiah was a dim and changeable figure, varying with the writer. The picture of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah is far more congenial to Jesus. A simpler illustration wiU be found in his picture of the Last Judgment, where the framework is more or less that of common acceptance, and every principle and nuance of the story is his own. If a man's central ideas are any index to his mind, and if the ideas are of more importance than the form in which they may be conveyed, then it is clear how little is the essential debt of Jesus to apocalyptic hterature. It is trivial, discursive, tribal, duU in imagination, and poor in spiritual value. At the same time it should be remembered that the writers of the apocalyptic books were children of an age of difficult problems and widening out looks. It is not estabhshed whether they taught their ^contemporaries, or merely learnt with them, to enlarge their conception of God to include all history, past and future ; but that the habit of so conceiving of God was not unfamiliar is proved both 63 THE PILGRIM by their books and by the New Testament. If Jesus read or knew any of the apocalyptic books, any influence they could have upon him would, taken in conjunction with that of the prophets and psalmists, be in the direction of emancipation and range of mind. But stiU it is hard to suppose that he depended on such poor books for what is his outstanding characteristic. AU time and aU existence — real history and real insight into the spiritual — these he found in the prophets ; and trained in such a school, he had little difficulty in appraising the value of ideas, in books or out of them. From another point of view, it is significant to realize what he thought of the Old Testament. It cannot have been altogether easy for him to acquire his intimate knowledge of it. The rolls were read in the synagogue ; children were taught a good deal by heart ; private reading of the books was possible only for those who had access to them. Would a carpenter's family have a set of them ? Many questions rise here ; the cost of the reproduction of the books must have been great ; a carpenter's wages or earnings cannot have been big ; a family of boys and girls to feed and clothe and train does not, in common experience, increase the margin for books. It is conceivable that for private and personal reading he had to have recourse to the synagogue copies — in the leisure of a working carpenter, when the books might be available, and when dayhght served. That the family was one of quiet piety is proved by their habit of going to the synagogue, by their general surprise when Jesus preached there, by their affection- 64 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH ate dread of his new pubhcity, by his use of domestic phrase and illustration for the inmost things of the kingdom of God. The home training would be based on knowledge and love of the Old Testament ; but his special devotion to its reading was a matter of personal work and sacrifice, achieved at a cost. And, whatever we make of him, a spiritual genius of his dimensions found it a vital part of his rehgious life to read and re-read the Old Testament. It is a signifi cant fact. Matthew Arnold once defined culture briefly as a knowledge of the best that has been said ; it is his variant on the phrase of Plato with which we began. The individual supplements his experience and corrects his deductions from it by the experience and the thoughts of the best men who have gone before him. One feels that if prophet and psalmist had something to contribute to Jesus and his develop ment, we may not have realized how much more they have for us, nor what we lose by our slight assimilation of both the Testaments. Ill " As his custom was," says St Luke (iv. 16), " he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day." The Sabbath was perhaps kept with more strictness in Galilee and the north than in Jerusalem and the south. What it meant to Jews can be seen in the fanciful but suggestive sayings of the rabbis. The observance of the Sabbath makes a man a partner of God in the creation of the world ; by hallowing it Israel brings redemption to the world and bears E 65 THE PILGRIM testimony to the divine ordering of the universe.1 But perhaps even better may one gather the historical significance of the Sabbath from the half-flippant and yet serious poem of Heine, The Princess Sabbath, in which he describes how every Friday at sundown the fairy princess comes and transforms the dog to a man with a spiritual history, for twenty-four hours. Mr Abrahams teUs us that the New Testament accounts of the preaching in the synagogues are the most precise we possess, that they refer to the normal and not to the exceptional, and that we may rely on them completely.2 The books of the Maccabees show clearly that there was pubhc reading from the scroll of the law (i Mace. i. 57, iii. 48), gatherings for prayer (hi. 44), and above aU for the singing of hymns with such refrains as " His mercy is good, and en dureth for ever." 3 This procedure, as the New Testament, Pliny's letters, and Justin Martyr's account show, as weU as some passages of Tertullian, was taken over very naturally by the Christian church, and maintained tiU the end of the second century — with modifications required by the rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and perhaps the agapg. That it was Jesus' custom to go to the synagogue is confirmed by a number of sirmlar episodes which follow the one that Luke records ; but it is interesting to have the habits of Jesus noted for us as such. It is suggestive too. Here in the synagogue he found reinforcement ; once again he was given the oppor- 1 See Israel Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, pp. 131 ; 129. 2 Ibid., p. 7. 3 Ibid., p. 2. 66 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH tunity " to survey all time and all existence." Israel's law and Israel's history, in Pentateuch, prophet and hymn, are brought forward again in a manner haUowed by long association and by the knowledge that, all over the world, within and without the Roman Empire, wherever twelve Jews resided, a similar worship, rich with the same reminiscences, was being celebrated in the same simple and natural way. It was a step toward the fulfilment of Jeremiah's prophecy of the New Covenant (Jeremiah xxxi. 31). Israel and his history, the long quest of God, the great revelation, the Law of God — the public worship was indeed a survey of all time and all existence. It was more. One cannot imagine that the synagogue services in Nazareth — a town, it would appear, httle esteemed — would be anything but dull. Read the glowing account that Apuleius gives in his Golden Ass of the sacraments and ceremonies and pageants of Isis, and of her mysteries, with the vision of " gods of the world above, gods of the world below," and ask what he would have said to this httle group of laymen and women, whose worship is hstening to passages written in a book, reciting prayers and singing psalms — with the minimum of the music, the suggestion, the mystery, the exotic that he loved ; plain sense and no sacrament. It must have been dull enough ; and the addresses by " scribes " may have been rather heavy and too full of references to books ; " the learned are not light-handed," as a French critic has said. Yet Jesus evidently found something in it ; his imagination went deeper than Apuleius would have gone. If the sacred books gave him 67 THE PILGRIM insight into the past, the people showed him the present. He must have known them aU, and their family histories and characters ; and in the synagogue he learnt, hke Wordsworth, to see Into the depth of human souls. Souls that appear to have no depth at all To careless eyes.1 He had in a degree beyond us " among least things an undersense of greatest." 2 Here he saw them sub specie aeternitatis ; he looked before and after, realized the great traditions embodied in these lowly people, their part in handing them on and shaping the future (a lesson that may be remembered when we think of his extraordinary faith in his disciples), and above all God's interest in them aU. At a time when " organized Christianity " comes in for much censure, when hymn and prayer and sermon are found dull, it may be something to recall once more that for a mind of the buUd of Jesus there was contribution in sharing a much f ormahzed worship with quite duU people. It may not be a triumph of the imagination to find duU what he found fuU of appeal, full of the call of God — least of aU when it is his story that is read and sung and interpreted. Judaism was held together by the synagogue ; Christi anity too has always been maintained by the assembly of common people for a joint purpose, which no imaginative mind, no soul with a sense of history, can call dull — the association of men and women with a great past, a great future and an eternal God. If imagination fails us, there is a loyalty, a desire to 1 Wordsworth xiii, 166. • Wordsworth, Prelude, vii, 734. 68 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH know the experience of the Master, which must prompt to a deeper sense of the value of what at present fatigues us. But to return to the synagogue and his habit of going there, an intimate knowledge of common people and God's ordinary ways is a corrective to wild hopes and cloudy dreams. A soul full of the knowledge of God, and how God has borne Himself in crisis of Israel and agony of prophet, will go deeper into things than the restless and hurrying Apoca-lyptist, will be less dis posed to expect quick solutions of age-long processes, will have a deeper faith in God than to challenge Him to hurry and display. IV One last habit of Jesus remains — his practice of leisurely prayer on the hillside in the darkness. Leisurely — not that the hours or minutes were vacant, but there was no rush or hurry about it. "I will hear what God the Lord will speak," said the Psalmist (lxxxv. 8) ; and the rate at which one will hear what God says will not always be the same. I have tried elsewhere to write of Jesus' intercourse with God ; 1 it hes beyond us ; but till we fathom it and experience it, we shall not understand Jesus. But when one compares the conception of God, involved in what the eschatological school attribute to Jesus, with the picture of God which he actually gives us, and set it in the light of the long nights of prayer, of inter course with God, which the records preserve for us, the contrast makes the apocalyptic Jesus still less 1 The Jesus of History, pp. no ff. 69 THE PILGRIM possible. He has surveyed all time and all existence at leisure with God, gone deep into God's purposes for mankind and for himself; and the outlook, the shaUow- ness, the fever, attributed to him do not fit the man whom the gospels present to us. The whole character must be rethought. The relations of Jesus with John the Baptist are not very clear in the New Testament. We have definite statements, but they do not teU us aU that we could wish to know ; and no ingenuity can fiU the gaps in our knowledge. After baptism, Jesus turns to the desert for forty days, we are told. If we say in modern speech, that the carpenter leaves home and work, and spends six weeks in spiritual concentration, we may have some fresh ghmpse of what happened. At the end of it, Luke tells us, that Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Gahlee, that he taught in aU the synagogues, and, preceded by a great reputation, at last came to Nazareth (Luke iv. 16). There is some doubt as to the time of this visit, for Mark appears to put it later, and some scholars say bluntly that Luke dehberately moved it forward to a point earher than the ministry in Capernaum. It is, however, arguable that it belongs at the beginning. Mark, it is observed, records that there was a sermon in the synagogue, but he gives no account of its contents (Mark vi. 1-6). It is assumed as " very likely " that Jesus himself chose the lesson in Isaiah " which he would certainly understand in a Messianic sense " ; and it is conceded that Luke may have 70 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH taken the episode from a good tradition.1 But two comments may be made. First of all, the sermon is stiU lacking ; even its gist is not given, and the text survives, hanging almost loose, one might say ; while what follows hardly suggests that the discourse took a Messianic turn. If Mark is right in dividing clearly between his teaching before and after the confession at Caesarea Phihppi, one would not expect an abrupt announcement in the Nazareth synagogue. In the next place, Mr Israel Abrahams presents a good case for the view that Jesus did not choose the passage he read.2 The prophet Isaiah, says Mr Abrahams, was handed to Jesus ; it was not his own selection, it was put into his hands. The word " found " does not mean that he looked for the passage, but that he " found " it ready, when he opened the manuscript, a roll and not a book, which, when he was done with it, he " roUed up " and gave to the attendant. The manu script, being a roll, was unrolled as required, and as column after column was read it was rolled up again from the other end. Jesus then appears to have taken it into his hands, one rolled-up part in each hand, and as he drew them apart, he " opened " at the place already selected and found the passage of Isaiah ready for him to read. If the text is not given in Luke exactly as it is in the Septuagint or the Hebrew, that is of httle significance. The right to " skip " while reading the prophets is well attested. The passage then was very like what is called a sors Biblica ; 1 O. Holtzmann, Life of Jesus, pp. 276, 277. * See Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, pp. 7-8, 71 THE PILGRIM you open the Bible at random, or it may be Virgil, and the passage you light on is an oracle. It is said that King Charles I tried this with VirgU in the Bodleian, and hit on verses, only too prophetic for him, in the fourth Mneid.1 Let us see what would follow from Mr Abrahams' explanation, if St Luke's order of events holds. Jesus, after weeks of hard thinking in the sohtude of the waste lands, comes to Gahlee and begins to preach. He comes to Nazareth, the home-town, always the most difficult place, the centre of the least sympathetic criticism ; if he had previously stood up to read in the synagogue, it would appear, from the general surprise at " his words of charm," that his neighbours had never heard him expound before. He stands up to read, a roll is put into his hands ; he draws the rolled-up ends apart ; it proves to be Isaiah ; and there before his eyes, unsought, are the crucial words, his very commission : " The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor ; he hath sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach dehverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at hberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." A coincidence — or a message from God, a confirmation of all that has come to him in the wilderness ? For a coincidence to coincide, we must remember, a previous correspondence is needed ; if such thoughts were not in his mind, the passage might have been silent to him. It looks as if it spoke to him, as if (whatever became of the sermon and the 1 So Mr T. E. Page, in his Commentary on Mnrid, iv. 615-620. 72 THE TRAINING AT NAZARETH audience) the text were associated with one of those psychological experiences which men recall as land marks. Accident — you say ; the man may let you caU it what you hke ; what happened at that moment to soul and mind was decisive in his hfe. It is signifi cant that, when the messengers of John come to Jesus (which Luke puts after this reading in the synagogue), and ask for a message, Jesus substantially quotes this passage ; and there are other echoes of its phrases in his speech on other occasions. But, if we are building too much on the Lucan order, none the less the fact stands that this passage of Isaiah is associated in Jesus' mind with his caU, with his Messiahship, to use the word which Peter employed. His caU is linked with the words of a spiritual hero of his race of old time, one to whom in instinct and insight he stood very close ; his call has upon it the stamp of the highest and truest experience of his people. If apocalyptic books contributed, directly or indirectly, in his own reading or in other men's quotations, to him, their gifts are controlled by the prophetic view of life and of God ; the prophetic is not swamped in the apocalyptic. Further, the call shapes itself in words that describe the very people with whom he had worked and worshipped — the sad, the desolate, the broken, the poor, and poorer than they guessed themselves, that day in Nazareth. The past and the present are linked in the call, and both with God ; " the spirit of the Lord is upon me." The great disciphne of Bible, synagogue and prayer, " the survey of aU time and all existence," has borne its supreme fruit. 73 The Talents ONE of the things which, as the Gospels record, astonished Jesus was the slowness of men's minds, their want of insight, the dulness of their imagination. The Gospel of Mark gives instances of the disciples themselves shocking him by want of faith and want of inteUigence. " To you it is given to know the mysteries," he said ; and they did not know them ; they ought to see, but they only hah saw, only half realized, and constantly missed the point of what he was telling them. Not to pursue the subject over too wide a field, we may turn to a parable in which he sketches the danger of the slack or dull imagination. It comes hke a page of contemporary history. It would take some research in Tacitus and the other historians to say how often, since Rome had begun to interfere in the East down to the days when she was mistress of it to the Euphrates, members of royal and noble houses in the Eastern Mediterranean area went to Rome to secure thrones and kingdoms. Herod, so-called the Great, was plunged into danger after the death of Julius Caesar ; he concealed his family with great difficulty in a rock-stronghold on the border of Judaea, and then went off in search of Mark Antony, or some recognizable constituted Roman authority, to regain his Jewish kingdom. Permission was readily given him, and he returned with the royal title, but, as if he were a mere pretender, he had to 74 THE TALENTS recapture his kingdom from the patriots. He did it at last, by means of Samaritan and Edomite troops and other mercenaries, and with the support of Roman legionaries. Once he had recaptured Jerusalem, his capital, his executioners made havoc among the noble famUies there. So in substance says Mommsen.1 Again when Antony feU, Herod had to see Augustus and get his kingdom confirmed anew. He took the precaution of first kUling the last male descendant of the Maccabaean house, then went to Rhodes and saw the Emperor, who extended and consohdated the kingdom. Augustus had his own opinion of Herod ; he would feel safer, he said, as Herod's pig (us) than as his son (viofe) of the power of God And a clear effluence (&-n-6ppoM) of the glory of the Almighty ; There can nothing defiled find entrance into her, For she is an efflulgence (Amvyaa-pa) from everlasting hght. And an unspotted mirror of the working of God And an image (eU&v) of His goodness. And she, though but one, hath power to do all things. And remaining in herself reneweth all things ; And from generation to generation passing into holy souls, She maketh them friends of God and prophets. For nothing doth God love save him that dwelleth with wisdom.1 So writes the author of The Wisdom of Solomon. Mr Fairweather, on the writer's data, finds Wisdom in some midway position between an attribute of God, a poetic personification, and a divine personality subordinate to God ; and as such a personality Wisdom, according to the judgment of another scholar, is clad with all the attributes of Deity. The alterna tives seem to a prosaic mind, trained in Greek ways of thought, to be mutually exclusive ; but in this sphere literalism is predestined failure to capture the idea. At another place the writer borrows the greatest of all Greek words, and calls Wisdom " thy almighty Logos " (xviii. 15) — an identification fruitful in theological thought ; and in yet another place he asks, " Who knew Thy counsel, except Thou hadst given Wisdom, and sent Thy holy spirit (to ayiov aov Trvevpa) from the highest ? " (ix. 17). As the long passage already quoted attributes to Wisdom the 1 Wisdom vii. 24 fi. 138 THE HOLY SPIRIT making of prophets, it is an easy transition to that standard behef, which we find as an axiom of general acceptation in the New Testament, that the Scriptures are the work of the Holy Spirit. The Hebrews traveUed a long way from the gross and crude conceptions with which they started, and developed an idea of divine relations with man, which, in spite of obvious confusions, proved of real value. Ill When we come to the New Testament, the first thing is to look at our authorities ; x and, classifying them on the basis of their references to the Holy Spirit, we obtain a curious and new grouping of them. The Synoptic Gospels are generally and properly classed together, but in regard to the Holy Spirit Mark and Matthew are alike in the fewness of their allusions (apart from the birth, the baptism, and the temptation),2 while Luke is in striking contrast. There are passages in Matthew where Dr Denney 3 finds a colour from the language of a later day (vii. 22), but elsewhere that colour is remarkable by its absence, a guarantee of historicity (xvi. 18 ff., xviii. 15 f., passages dealing with the " church "). The trinitarian baptismal formula at the end, there is some reason 1 In what follows I draw a good deal from Dr James Denney's article on the Holy Spirit in The Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels ; references will be given briefly with his name and the page and column of that work. ' Mark six (one ref. to O.T.) ; Matthew eleven (with same ref. to O.T.). 3 Denney, pp. 734 b, 735 a. 139 THE PILGRIM for believing to be a revision after the Council of Nicaea, though this is disputed. Luke,1 on the other hand, is greatly interested in the Spirit and finds a place for it at a number of points in the experience of Jesus — at the temptation, both where it begins and ends (iv. i, 14) ; his rejoicing in the Spirit (x. 21) ; the substitution of the Spirit for the " good things " which God will give (xi. 13) ; and " the promise of my Father," viz. " power from high " (xxiv. 49) ; in the Acts the manifestations are naturally much more striking and numerous. Paul's writings abound in thoughts of the Holy Spirit, mentioned, it is said, one hundred and twenty times. The writer to the Hebrews in general is silent,2 while the fourth gospel is written largely on the basis of the Spirit as the keynote of the new rehgion. In the Gospels there is a very remarkable absence of the phenomena associated with the Spirit in the first century Church. That the contrast was felt by the early Christians is shown in their emphasis on Pente cost. The historian wiU feel a paraUel between some of these manifestations in the Church and those noted in Greece and elsewhere, and described in the story of King Saul and in the Mneid. The nearest thing to them in the hfe of Jesus is the statement of Luke that " he rejoiced in the spirit," though here another translation is possible if not probable, and a single passage and a doubtful piece of translation are hardly warrant for bringing him into hne with demonstra- 1 Denney, 735 a. » Of the seven references to the Spirit in Hebrews, three refer to the Scriptures or the tabernacle. 140 THE HOLY SPIRIT tions which the greater prophets did without, which the Church soon outgrew, and which are not akin to his general mind and character. Dr Denney, a scholar who had a name for caution and for essential orthodoxy, has a paragraph on this matter, which with reserve and sanity puts the case admirably. " If, then, we try to sum up the oldest Evangelic representation, we can hardly say more than that the Holy Spirit is the Divine power which from his baptism onward wrought in Jesus, making him mighty in word and deed — a power the character of which is shown by the teaching and by the saving miracles of Jesus — a power to which the sanctity of God attached, so that it is Divine also in the ethical sense, and to blaspheme it is the last degree of sin — a power in which Jesus enabled his disciples in some extent to share, and which he promised would be with them in the emergencies of their mission — a power, however, which (contrary to what we might have anticipated), the Evangelist [Mark] does not bring into prominence at any of the crises or intense moments of Jesus' life. It takes nothing less than that life itself, from beginning to end, to show us what the Spirit means. If the last Evangehst tells us that the Spirit interprets Jesus, the inference from the first is that Jesus also interprets the Spirit, and that only from him can we know what it means." IV In the early Church we find ourselves in confusion, of which it is well to remember that Paul says God 141 THE PILGRIM is not the author (i Cor. xiv. 33) — and this in a passage where he is speaking of spiritual manifestations. It is quite plain that the foUowers of Jesus in Jerusalem and in Corinth did not move on his plane of intel lectual clarity. They grouped a great many of their experiences together and attributed them aU to the Holy Spirit. First and most obvious were the psychopathic ; speaking with tongues and speaking in ecstasy impressed them, as they did the heathen around them, and as they have since impressed Christians in England and America, and in the nine teenth century.1 To us these things are evidence only of disturbance, to them they were proof of the presence of the Spirit. Prophecy, which Paul dis tinguishes from ecstatic speech, was as mysterious and as convincing ; and there were converts who brought over from heathenism mystical ideas not found in the Synoptic Gospels and not very cognate with the teaching of Jesus. " The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking," said Paul (Romans xiv. 17), but men and women, trained in heathen circles to believe that with food a daemon or a god might easily, and often did, enter the human system, took naturaUy another view of the Holy Spirit and its influence, and of the sacrament. But if the early Christians shared so far the psychological views of their contemporaries, there were things associated by them with the Holy Spirit quite 1 Once more let me refer to Mr Davenport's most interesting book, Primitive. Traits in Religious Revivals (Macmillan Co., New York). He gives a good many instances of such phenomena. John Wesley's Journal will also occur to readers, and the strange happenings in his early ministry in the neighbourhood of Bristol. 142 THE HOLY SPIRIT distinct from the psychopathic. Most important of all is conversion. The phenomena that accompany conversion and even conversion itself are, as we learnt from Dr Wilham James' famous book, not pecuharly Christian. Yet the conversion to a belief in Christ, with the moral changes which it inaugurates, with the uplifting conviction, the freedom (2 Cor. iii. 17), and the confidence in God (Rom. viii. 14), belonged to another order of things than the tongues and prophecies, and deserved the attention and the ascription it received. What else, they might well ask, could guarantee the eager sense of being the children of God (Rom. viii. 16) — of being free from the burdens of the law and (more wonderful) from aU that is summed up as " the mind of the flesh " (Rom. viii. 6-9), from the degrading impulses, and from the haunting sense of condemnation (Rom. viii. 1, 30) — of being free in prayer, free in outlook — of being safe and assured against aU the ills of this world, against assaults of " principahties and powers " here or hereafter, in the love of Christ — of victory beyond one's dreams ? The eighth chapter of Romans is not a theoretical picture ; it is the autobiography of one of the greatest and profoundest men in history, and it above all other writings teUs the tale of the new life. If the early Christian grouped all this with tongues and the rest, we need not ; and if we find an explanation for the glossolaly, we are bound to try to find one for the change that Paul experienced from death to life. The two groups of experiences do not stand together. This indeed Paul saw. He speaks of the fruits of 143 THE PILGRIM the Spirit as love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-government (Gal. v. 22, 23) ; and among the gifts of the Spirit he reckons such things as the word of wisdom, the word of know ledge, faith, and the faculty of telling the difference between one spirit and another (1 Cor. xii. 8-11). AU these are of one category, gifts that make the reality of hfe, without which men wiU not be really human. The list is not very Greek ; it includes virtues and graces n6t much cultivated by the Greeks and rather forgotten by the Stoics themselves. But among them we must particularly notice the last- named. It was above aU things needed in that early church. Paul surprises us by confessing that he himself " spoke with tongues " (1 Cor. xiv. 18), and giving thanks for it ; but he clearly prefers to speak intelligibly. Even if he does speak with tongues — tongues of men, if that is what they prove to be, or tongues of angels, which sounds hke a quotation from somebody addicted to uninteUigibihty (1 Cor. xiii. 1) — love matters a great deal more ; tongues will cease, love wiU abide (1 Cor. xiii. 8, 13). One of the tasks of love is to help other people, and to be intelligible to them especiaUy on the greatest of themes ; sanctified sense was what the Church needed, the gift of distinguishing between spirits. For it is plain that otherwise the Church would be swamped with foolery and blasphemy (1 Cor. xiv. 23, xii. 3). When once then the noisier and more trivial mani festations are put in their place, whether they come from the Holy Spirit or some other spirit or are, as we might say, pathological, there remains the task 144 THE HOLY SPIRIT of explaining the very great new gifts of the Church. With the language of the Old Testament written in the very hearts of Paul and the other Christian Jews, certain modes of speech were inevitable. Take the language of Isaiah, and read it with the commentary afforded by The Wisdom of Solomon (a book very familiar to Paul), and the ascription of the new life to the Spirit of God cannot be resisted. There was fluctuation as to the right way of naming it. Luke, in some texts, calls it " the spirit of Jesus " (Acts xvi. 7) ; and Paul at times identifies the Spirit and the Lord (2 Cor. iii. 17, 18) ; he urges now that " the spirit of God dwells in you " (1 Cor. iii. 16), now that " Jesus Christ is in you " (2 Cor. xiii. 5) ; he prays that his friends may be " strengthened with might by God's spirit in the inner man " and in the next sentence that " Christ may dwell in their hearts by faith " (Eph. iii. 16, 17), and then immediately equates knowing the love of Christ, and being filled with all the fulness of God (Eph. iii. 19). Greek theories of the world and of life pointed the same way. The Stoic never tired of telling men that they were fragments of God, particles of divine breath ; and this was not mere rhetoric, but part of a thought- out system. Through all nature went a Logos — a word or principle, intellectual, assimilable by the mind ; it was spermatikos, life-giving, the germinal secret of all hfe, and it was in man. Seneca wrote to Lucilius that there is " a holy spirit dwelling within us — our guardian. . . . None is good without God." x It is true that the same claim might be made — would 1 Seneca, Ep. 41, 1, 2. K 145 THE PILGRIM be made — by the Stoic for every animate creature and inanimate. The Stoic and the Christian con ceptions of the Holy Spirit were reaUy quite different ; the one relates it to all life, the lowest included, and involves it in the meanest and the wickedest actions ; x the other finds the highest hfe alone in the Spirit and not elsewhere. There is a gap between Greek and Hebrew here ; and the Greek wiU say that the Christian view is not free from vagueness, there is something undefined about it. To this there is a twofold reply. There is a great deal that is undefined about the early Christian doctrine of the Spirit ; " it doth not yet appear what we shaU be " (i John iii. 2) ; but in Paul's words, " God has given the earnest of the spirit in our hearts " (2 Cor. i. 22), the " earnest of our inheritance " (Eph. i. 14), while the fourth gospel attributes to Jesus himself the promise that the Spirit is to " guide you into aU truth" (or "in aU truth," John xvi. 13). How can men be precise tiU they have the whole of the facts before them ? But, meanwhile, the second line of reply is stronger. The people who use this language are trying to translate into words equal to conveying their meaning a new experience that echpses everything they have known. If a man is " born again," is " a new creation," if he has repeated in everyday life the mystical experience of Paul, and lives in the vision of things unspeakable (2 Cor. xii. 4), in joy unspeakable and glorified (1 Peter i. 8), how is he to express or account for what 1 This was pointed out by Plutarch in his tracts criticizing the Stoics, and by Clement of Alexandria ; Conflict of Religions, p. 97. 146 THE HOLY SPIRIT he only realizes with surprise and a constant sense of more beyond ? Is it of God this new life ? There are the splendid crop of new virtues, the manhood, the power, the other obvious signs of development and arete ; if it is not God Who ministers them to man, where do they come from ? But if after all God is coming into a man, as they used to believe that daemons did, and is expelling the daemons and their products, and fining a man with Himself, how is it to be expressed ? Paul is like a man in love, too sure and too happy to analyse or define ; more tongues than the " glossolalies " will pass away, vocabularies wear out and definitions grow old, but " who shall separate us from the love of Christ ? " (Rom. viii. 35). Whether this is a proper reply or not, in our judgment, may perhaps depend on whether we put experience or definition first. Both are good. The early Christian, when asked for an explanation, said " God " ; and if it was not clear how the great and ultimate God could come into a man, there was the great religious speech of the Hebrews available. God, Christ, the Spirit — which did he say ? Well, all of them, any of them ; it was the same thing, unspeakable. V It is a long way from this point of view to the so- called Athanasian Creed, with its language definite as a philosopher's and precise as a lawyer's, and a menace in every syllable. Yet we can see how that distance was traversed, and we shall remember that 147 THE PILGRIM no definition is necessarily final, that menace is not the language of philosophy or of the Gospel. If Athanasius might champion a view of Christ contra mundum, we have at least the same right to cross- examine him on his grounds of behef. It is not a new discovery that the Christology of the New Testament is not Athanasian. The Athanasian Trinity may indeed be a true and necessary outcome of the pre misses ' yielded by the experience described in the New Testament ; it may prove that there is ultimately no true philosophy of the universe but on the hnes indicated in that creed ; and if that be the case, whether we like it or not, some fundamental loss wiU be involved in a man's rejection of the real interpreta tion of God. Meanwhile, however, the creed, as it stands, is in a foreign tongue, doubly or trebly foreign. A pMlo- sophic training is needed if we are to understand the Greek of Athanasius ; and his Greek is at once old and not old enough ; he is thinking in the cate gories of an age of tradition, using his terms with pre cision and clearness, but perhaps with more precision and clearness than a greater or more original thinker would manage or aUow. All our categories, aU our modes of thought, our preconceptions are changed ; it is not necessary to say that they are inevitably sounder than those of Athanasius ; that is the lan guage of extreme youth in every period ; but we think on different lines, and are really more at home with Plato than with Athanasius' contemporaries who called themselves the New Platonists. Then the language of Athanasius is translated into Latin, and 148 THE HOLY SPIRIT that not the Latin we know best ; and from Latin long ago, as much by transhteration as by translation, it reached Enghsh ; and English has changed a good deal since those days. What are we to say to a creed, distant by so many removes from the language we use and the thoughts we think ? We have to remember that behind the theory of the Church lies experience, and another man's theory is not of much value to me without his experience. What is it that Athanasius, or the Church, is trying to convey to us ? That is one question, and a more urgent one is : What is the experience, what are the vital facts, that he behind that language ? From one point of view the theory of the early Church on the Holy Ghost is very mechanical. A cup cannot simultaneously be full of (let us say) ink and of coffee ; if you want to fiU it with coffee, you must pour out the ink, and vice versa. Here is a man full of sin (no mistake about that) ; to make him full of righteousness, you must get out of him the daemon that makes him bad, but you must not leave him empty, he must be spatially fiUed with another spirit, the spirit that produces righteousness. The laws of space and matter forbid both spirits being there together. The ancient attribution of material sub stance to what they called spirit had its part in shaping their doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Some even held that in some way the Holy Spirit was actually con veyed materially to the baptized by the water of baptism. The oddness of their doctrine of these alternative spirits is given by their materialism ; but beside the oddness, there is truth. A parable of 149 THE PILGRIM Jesus suggests that a man cannot safely remain empty x ; positive active good is the only way to get rid of evil — the interest of the man must be put actively on to something new and good. We hold, and we find evidence for it in the teaching of Jesus, that the evil in a man is not the intrusion of an ahen daemon, but an expression of something that is (at any rate for the time) himself. Space and matter are not involved ; but there must be a change of interest and attention. As Seeley said, no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic ; and if his adjective, natural and instinctive, recaUs to us in this connexion its ancient meaning, it is still true — perhaps we shall say, truer. The mechanical look, given by their materialism to their psychology, is not its most important feature. There are few thoughts so often or so beautifuUy emphasized by Plato as his behef that man .is not an earthly but a heavenly plant,2 born to be on terms of intimacy with God and to become hke God,3 that there is an essential aptitude between God and man, and that the real norm of human hfe, as of aU else, is God.4 This is the fundamental belief underlying aU religion — that relation between God and man is in evitable. The kinship in mind and ideas between God and man is Plato's contribution. How Jesus brought this kinship, re-inforced and heightened every way, into the hearts of men, the Gospels teU 1 Luke xi. 24-26. 2 Timcsus, 90 A ; on the parallels between Plato and the N.T. on this point, see Adam's Religious Teachers of Greece, 436-7. 3 ThecBtetus, 176 B. * Laws, 716. 150 THE HOLY SPIRIT us ; and the Christian community expressed it in one aspect in this doctrine of the Holy Spirit, in another in that of the Incarnation. It is hard to imagine a stronger ground for beheving a doctrine true than the visible transformation by it of character on a large scale, similarly over great areas and long periods, and among peoples of the most different racial and inteUectual antecedents. What impressed the early Christian wiU stiU impress any one candid enough to attend to it. The real struggle at Nicaea was over the Son, not over the Spirit. To-day the doctrine of the Holy Spirit suffers from its schematic precision, and from all the intellectual play that has been made by theologians with the number Three. Probably if it were again to formu late, it would take some different shape. But, im portant as adequate expression is for an idea, the form is not the supreme thing, but the fact which we are trying to express ; and, if that relation between God and man, which the Church taught in its doctrine of the Holy Spirit, be not true, it is hard to see how rehgion can endure. But man has never beheved that anything real is uninteUigible ; and the greatest venture he has made has been to assume that he can understand God. Jesus' whole life was given to demonstrating it, and history shows that the venture has been justified. I5i The Statue of the Good Shepherd THIS story is a page out of the history of the Christian Church, or, to be strictly accurate, it is more like a page of a scrap-book. The scraps joined together here are aU genuine, if what holds them together is conjecture. There was a statue made of the Good Shepherd or a waU-carving, and fairly early ; perhaps not first in North Africa. But in any case it was made. The authentic first example of it may very weU have perished ; none the less, at or about the period with which we are dealing, a man had the conception, which, under his own hand and tool, or under the hand and tool of another com missioned by him, took the form which estabhshed the type. " A man of sense," says Plato, in the Phcedo, speaking of one of his myths, " ought not to say, nor will I be too confident, that the description which I have given ... is exactly true. But I do say that ... he may venture to think that something of the kind is true." x The scraps joined together come mostly from Tertullian ; some come from his contemporary, Clement of Alexandria, and from other early Christian writers. The function of art, as Longinus says,2 is to seize the vital elements and combine them so that the product hves. It is. at least a high ideal to set before oneself. There was, then — or let there have been — a sculptor in North Africa, not a great artist, no Michael Angelo, 1 Plato, Phado, 114. s See p. 232. 152 THE STATUE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD but something hke those who to-day in England have their shops within a hundred yards of every con siderable cemetery, who make conventional angels kneehng in prayer or hovering over a strong marble support, crosses, urns and broken columns and the like. In India they are stiU making gods, and doing it to pattern ; holy men of old, we are told, invented the designs and they are still kept, and the first thing the sculptor has to do to make an idol is to get out his pattern. The man was rather the artisan than the artist, but this is not to say that he had no turn for his trade. Like Lucian the satirist, he may have been put in an uncle's shop, because as a schoolboy he would scrape the wax from the wax-tablet that served him for a slate at school, and mould it into figures ; but unhke Lucian, who ran away when his uncle grew angry at a clumsy breakage, this man who had no turn for books and hterature stuck to his trade. .ZEsop's fables give us as good a picture of him as we need. The god Hermes or Mercury, he tells us, became a little self-conscious, and wanted to know how men thought of him, what value for instance as compared with the other gods they set upon him. He dropped down to earth and went in disguise through a city tiU he found a sculptor. Through the open side of the shop he saw a number of gods stand ing there, and one of them was himself. So the god went in to see the sculptor, and, being the god of thieves and of shrewd people generaUy, he did not begin with the question he wished answered. He strolled about the shop and looked at the statues, and by and by 153 THE PILGRIM asked the price of Jupiter. So much, said the sculptor. " Ah ! and Juno over there, how much is she ? " Such and such a price. " And Hermes ? " " Look here ! " said the sculptor, " if you wiU buy Jupiter and Juno, I'U throw Mercury in." And .