The Chief End of Man Part 7

The note of the New Testament is exultant. There is keen sense of present evil, endurance, struggle; but there is a deeper sense of a great deliverance already begun and to be perfected in the future. The heart of this new energy, joy, and hope is love for a human yet celestial friend. This love was awakened by a personality of extraordinary n.o.bility and attractiveness. The personal affection inspired imagination and ideality to their highest flights. Its original object became invested with superhuman traits and elevated to a deity. To trace with certainty and minuteness the historic lineaments of the real man is not altogether possible; but the essential truth concerning him is sufficiently plain.

The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to a hundred years after his death. In these records memory and imagination are intimately blended. On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on the minds of his followers. But on the other hand, he was so suggestive and inspiring--there were among his disciples natures so susceptible, responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such a contagion of pa.s.sionate feeling unchecked by reason--that the seeds of his words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blent closely with the historic reality. And with the central inspiration of his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him, so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies certainty of a.n.a.lysis.

If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural forces for the benefit of mankind. As he is described, Jesus is before all a worker of beneficent miracles. He is a teacher, too, and an unexampled one. But he enforces his teaching by means utterly transcending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender human friend, but he expresses his friends.h.i.+p by services such as no other friend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread and wine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raises the dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It is this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has distinguished him in the eyes of his wors.h.i.+pers. What is the wisest word about immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Plato said--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself?

What need for any argument or a.s.surance about Providence, when here is one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of beneficent love?

But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in our time to a different conception.

The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life.

His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its interior harmony and its relations with the world about it. _Love your enemies_,--in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of conduct. _The pure in heart shall see G.o.d_,--with that he put in the hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.

The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chast.i.ty, justice, and piety. Jesus sublimated this,--in him chast.i.ty becomes purity; in place of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a love embracing earth and heaven.

Jesus taught in parables. A story--an outward, objective fact, something which the imagination can body forth--often facilitates the impartation to another mind of a spiritual experience. The soul has no adequate language of its own,--it must borrow from the senses and the imagination.

The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, "No man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son."

That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not even understand himself. And correspondingly, "No man knoweth the Father save the Son:" only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity.

G.o.d is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature.

Peace, a.s.surance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfast goodness.

Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son. What symbol could he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home? Like all statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it did not furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe.

But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest human relation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life.

Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,--not on abstract ideas, but on action. His teaching was always as to conduct.

Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes.

Above all, he lived what he taught. He left the memory of a life which to his followers seemed faultless. And ever since, those who felt their own inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, as somehow the pledge of theirs.

Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higher principle than Judaism. The historic lineage is not to be too much insisted on. When he said, "Love your enemies," "Forgive that ye may be forgiven," he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea.

Judaism was largely a religion of wrath. Jesus planted a religion of love.

The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coa.r.s.e growth, and for many centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate as fierce as the old Judaism. But blending with it, and struggling always for ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle of Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.

Of the Judaic traits in Jesus, conspicuous was the prophetic feeling and tone. He was possessed with an absolute fullness of conviction, and spoke in a tone of blended ardor and cert.i.tude. "He taught as one having authority." He rarely gave reasons. If in his words we find appeal to precedent or argument, it is really as little more than ill.u.s.tration or picture to clothe his own intuition. His followers believed his words, either because of some conscious witness in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, or because their love and reverence for him won for his a.s.sertions an unquestioning acceptance.

From Judaism he took the familiar idea of one all-powerful and holy G.o.d; a moral ideal which was chiefly distinguished from that of the Greek-Roman world by its greater emphasis on chast.i.ty; and also the belief in a constant divine interposition in human affairs, which soon was to culminate in the establishment of a divine kingdom on earth.

Jesus woke in his followers an ardor for goodness, a tenderness for their fellow men, and a supreme devotion to himself. His words went straight to the springs of character. He brushed aside religious ceremonial as of no importance. He sent the searching light of purity into the recesses of the heart. He made love the law of life and the key of the universe.

He interpreted love, as a principle of human conduct, by ill.u.s.trations the most homely, real, and tender. Love is no mere delicious emotion: it is giving our bread to the hungry, ourselves to the needy. It is not a mere felicity of kindred spirits,--love them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you!

Jesus was the greatest of poets. To every fact, to every idea, he gave its most beautiful and spiritual interpretation. When he speaks of G.o.d, his speech is the pure poetry of the soul. Yahveh becomes to him the All-father. His providence is over the lilies and the sparrows. His rain and suns.h.i.+ne are shed on the unjust as on the just. His inmost nature is set forth by the human father meeting his returning prodigal a great way off. His very life is shared with his children. It wells up in Jesus himself: the light in his eyes, the tenderness in his tones, the yearning in his heart,--it is _my Father_ ye know in me!

How does that Divine Power appear in the procedure of the universe? What real providence is there for the slain sparrow? What is the actual destiny of those human lives which show only frustration and failure?

Jesus does not answer these questions. It does not appear that he tried to answer them. His words are filled with a glad, unquestioning trust.

He is not the philosopher seeking to measure life. He is the lover living it, the poet delighting in it.

The secret of Jesus lay in his sense of the "kingdom of G.o.d" within him,--of obedience, peace, and joy, which was in itself sufficient.

Simply to communicate and impart that was to spread the Kingdom among men.

A teacher like John the Baptist--possessed by the idea of righteousness, and of the world's deficiency, but without tranquillity in his own heart--could look only for a divine interposition, a catastrophe. John is a sort of Carlyle. But Jesus, hearing him, and brooding the deeper truth, goes about proclaiming a present heaven.

The marks of this inner state defined themselves against the conditions of life he saw about him.

Thus, he shows his estimate of wealth in the story of the young ruler.

"Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!"

Toward the other prize which men most seek, reputation, his feeling is expressed to the two brethren asking chief places: "He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant."

As to learning, intellectual attainment, his characteristic word is, "Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." "Be as little children."

The prevalent forms of religious observance he quietly acquiesced in, except where they barred the free play of human charity. Then he set the form aside, as being only the servant of the spirit. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."

Such was his att.i.tude toward wealth, honor, intellectual wisdom, ceremonial.

Toward the outcasts, the publican and harlots, his att.i.tude was of pure compa.s.sion. Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory. Wealth of ceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn for others and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrath which broke in lightning-flashes. "Woe unto you! whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones, children of h.e.l.l!"

In the ethics of Jesus chast.i.ty has a high place, yet he has few words about it. His is an exalted and ardent goodness, of which purity is an almost silent element. His effect is like that of a n.o.ble woman, whose presence is felt as an atmosphere. When he speaks, his words set the highest mark,--"Be pure in _heart_."

We may contrast the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with that between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota. The philosopher is proof against allurement, and gives kindly advice, which clearly will have no effect; Jesus, without conscious effort, wakes a pa.s.sion of repentance which transforms the life. So again we may compare the check which Epictetus prescribes against undue tenderness, "Say while you kiss your child, he is mortal," with the habitual att.i.tude of Jesus toward children,--taking them in his arms, and saying, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." It is in such scenes as these--in his relations especially with women and with children--that we best see the genius of the heart, the newness which came into the world with Jesus.

While dwelling in an inner realm of joy, he had the keenest sense of the sin and sorrow in men's lives. "He was filled with compa.s.sion for the mult.i.tude, as sheep having no shepherd." Their epilepsies, leprosies,--the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higher life,--these moved him with a great pity. Scarcely save in little children did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom and happiness, which was his own. The hard-heartedness of the rich, the scorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation.

Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound sense of the trouble of other lives.

His reading of the trouble was very simple: there were but two forces in the world, moral good and evil, G.o.d and Satan, and G.o.d was shortly to give an absolute triumph to the good.

Among the chief impressions he made was that of commanding power. He must have been full of healthy and majestic manhood. Women and children were attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong. In the storm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage--as if upborne with delight by the sublime scene--that his companions forgot their fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea and wind grew calm at his word. His strength seemed to impart itself to the weak, his health to the sick. The stories of marvel which richly embroider the whole story are partly the halos of imagination investing a personality which commanded, charmed, inspired.

Sometimes evil was considered the work of wicked spirits,--so especially in cases of lunacy. Over some such cases Jesus had a peculiar power. He even imparted this power to some of the disciples, who caught his inspiration. The disciples, and probably Jesus, believed that this power extended to other sicknesses. Of the uniformity of nature there is no recognition in the New Testament. Man's power over events is believed to be measured by his spiritual nearness to G.o.d. "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed," ye can cast mountains into the sea.

When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt. Jesus found this manifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works,"

partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.

These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always and everywhere finds the divine presence. Man himself masters the forces of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power working through him. And he looks for a better future for himself and for mankind.

But the peculiarity of Jesus--looked at from a modern standpoint--was that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in G.o.d; and that the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine interposition. These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and save the lost.

In his teaching, G.o.d feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds and clothes the gra.s.s. There is no need that they should be anxious about their physical wants. Their troubles will be banished if they will pray in faith. Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before the presence of the trusting child of G.o.d. All the injustice and wrong of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of G.o.d. It is the old anthropomorphic idea of G.o.d--the idea of the Prophet and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender, through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary interpretation of the world.

What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most attractive human a.n.a.logy. If even an unjust human judge yields to the importunity of a pet.i.tioner, much more will the divine judge listen to the cry of the wronged and suffering. If a human father gives bread to his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.

We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life.

But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science. To the Jew of the New Testament period,--to Paul as much as to the fishermen of Galilee,--the world was directly administered by a personal being who habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events.

The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different conception. Thinkers like Aristotle had a.s.sumed the constancy of nature as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it.

But the great ma.s.s of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine personality. What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed mult.i.tude representing evil as well as good impulses. All Jewish history was written on this hypothesis. The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power.

The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only more marked and special instances of G.o.d's working. That a man especially beloved of G.o.d for his goodness should be given power to heal the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving compa.s.sion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the hypocrite.