Conversations with Christ

Front matter

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CONVERSATIONS

WITH

Introduction

EXECUTIVE MANSION.

WASHINGTON^

The following is the last official invitation proffered

BISHOP NEWMAN.

It was beautifully embossed and forwarded to San Francisco, California, his episcopal residence, but did not reach Saratoga (his summer home) until after he had passed from earth. It reads thus :

The United States Government Building, Chicago.

To Bishop John P. Newman.

Greeting :

The people of Chicago request the honor of your presence to assist the President in the ceremonies of laying the corner stone of the United States Government Building in that city, on Monday, October ninth, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine.

Governor of Illinois. Mayor of Chicago.

Contents

CHRIST'S CONVERSATIONS:

PAGE

I. With the Doctors and with His Mother 17

II Christ's Conversation with the Pharisees Touching His Age

"Before Abraham was, I am." — John tfiii, 58.

This conversation took place in Jerusalem on the Temple Area, within Solomon's Porch, hard by the treasury, where in the early morning the Master sat and beheld the rich and the poor casting in their offerings to the Lord. The scene was worthy this memorable event. The glorious temple of God was the most magnificent ever dedicated to divinity. Covering a thousand feet from the Jews' Wailing Place to the Golden Gate, and fifteen hundred feet from the Tower of Antonia to the Ophel Wall, on the south, it was inclosed with white marble galleries three hundred feet high; and within this splendid inclosure were cloisters for the priests, courts for the women, for the men, and for the strangers ; and in the center thereof stood the holy shrine wherein God conversed with mortal man.

The Master had spent the previous night on the Mount of Olives, and he "who had not 25 where to lay his head" had rested somewhere within its friendly bowers. When the morning dawned he returned to the city and entered the holy temple. A sad scene was presented to his gaze. A mob of men brought to him a woman taken in a crime. He did not defend her in her sin, but turned upon her accusers with terrible rebukes; one by one the lecherous wretches withdrew from his presence, and the poor victim of their passions stood alone before him. With a divine compassion, all his own, he said to the erring girl, "Go, sin no more."

It was on this occasion that he wrote ; it may have been the only time ; and this time he wrote upon the pavement of the Temple Area. Would that that writing had been preserved for our eyes to read!

His enemies were now fully aroused. They had been disquieted, confused, dispersed; but they soon rallied in the person of the Pharisees, who at that time represented the most wealthy and influential portion of the Jewish commonwealth. They gathered around him in clamorous multitudes and demanded his authority for his mission, his utterances, and his works. They accused him of self-glorification ; that he had placed himself upon a pedestal of

renown and demanded that all men should pay 26 him homage. His answer angered them to fury. He claimed to be the "only begotten Son of the Father;" that he possessed the sources of endless life; and that "If any man keep my saying, he shall never die." Quick as spark from smitten steel the Pharisees caught the expression and said: "Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets are dead. Whom makest thou thyself? •Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?" Then Christ rose in the majesty of thought and declared his preexistence : "I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but God sent me." "Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and was glad" — an immense truth! Abraham's body had been in the cave of Machpelah more than two thousand years, and for the Master to say that Abraham had seen his day, who had been on the earth less than thirty-three years, seemed preposterous. It was an immense claim ; a vast stretch of faith demanded of his people. The climax was in sight. The Pharisees pressed him harder, and then Christ advanced to the ultimate truth, saying, "Before Abraham was, I am." This is the Hebrew equivalent of eternal self-existence, like the answer that God

made to Moses, "I am that I am."

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If Christ did not come from beyond the grave, what is he to us more than any other good and wise man ? Humanity needed a visitation from the unseen world; some one to flood the world with light touching the future life, that state of deathless love, whither our disembodied friends are, for whose society we yearn with that "hope that springs immortal in the human breast." Our Lord's preexistence is the most satisfying assurance of our immortality. Send us a messenger from out the unseen has been the cry of all the ages. Have we heard from beyond the grave? is the greatest of questions. Socrates was wont to say to his disciples, "Go search for a charmer who can charm away death," conscious of the insufficiency of his own teachings. Confucius said in his dying moments, "A sage shall come from the West." And to comfort his friends in the hour of death Zoroaster promised that Sosiosh — Messiah — would come to abolish death and bring immortality to light.

We draw presumptive arguments from mind and matter. Out of entology we make deductions to sustain our belief. Justice and mercy seem to demand an eternal period for the law of compensation, to vindicate the ways of God

to man, and readjust the relations of man to 28 man, and man to the Supreme. All have entertained this belief. We quote from the best and wisest of philosophers, and sing the "hymns of the ages," whose refrain is immortality. Yet doubt will not down. Some one must come from the spirit world.

Christ's preexistence is the corner stone of immortality. Limit his existence from the manger, and his assurance of our future state weighs no more than the speculations of the classic philosophers. But accepting as a fact his reply to the Pharisees, that he had lived in the eternal past, that his incarnation was the manifestation of God in the flesh, that he came to "bring life and immortality to light," he is then to us the truest and sweetest of teachers. Why do we cling to the story of Mount Tabor with deathless tenacity — the reappearance of Moses and Elijah? Why are we spellbound under the revelation of St. Paul's temporary translation into the "third heaven?" Why are the visions of Patmos so entrancing to our imaginations and affections? These are the confirmations of the Lord's reply to the Pharisees in this great conversation. How beautiful the words of John the Baptist, "He that cometh after me is preferred before me ; for he

was before me." He was six months younger 29 than John. How sublime the declaration of St. John, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.'' How conclusive the saying of St. Paul. "Jesus Christ the same yesterday" — in all the past; "to-day" — in all the present; "and forever" — in all the future. These are the three grand divisions of time.

Three prophets were inspired to anticipate the coming of this illustrious One who would lift the veil of our future. Micah sings of him, "Whose goings forth have been from old, even from everlasting." Daniel calls him the "Ancient of days." Isaiah beholds the "Wonderful Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father." He claimed these descriptive prophecies, and when the Pharisees declared, 4 'Thou art not yet fifty years old," he replied, "Before Abraham was, I am." And what else did he say of himself to those in conversation with him ? "Ye are from beneath ; I am from above. Ye are of this world ; I am not of this world." "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." "And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I

had with thee before the world was." How 30 magnificent! He could truly say: "I was in the bosom of the Father Almighty; alone with him before creation; I heard him speak, and it was done; command, and it stood fast. I was with him when he called matter into being, glowing with the white heat of his power, and when he imparted the impulse to the vast body of primordial matter which sent it on its first revolution; I saw him light the stars and kindle the exhaustless fires of the sun ; I beheld the first day and the first night, the first year and the first procession of seasons, with thq first flower that bloomed, and the first bird that sang ; I heard the 'morning stars sing together and all the sons of God shout for joy.' I was there when he called the first archangel into existence and the first seraph to do his bidding. I was with him in Eden when he made Adam, and when Eve leaped full-grown from his side. And I was the contemporary of all the ages since man fell. I became his surety, and my Spirit has never left this earth, which I shall redeem. I tread the summits of the ages. I was in the ark with Noah, with Abraham on the plains of Mamre, with Moses in the wilderness, with Samuel in the temple, with David in his battles, with Solomon in his dreams, with Isaiah in his visions of glory, with Daniel on 31 the banks of the Ulai; I was the 'form of the fourth' in the furnace with the three Hebrew children, and with Gabriel in the annunciation to Mary my mother."

The incarnation of Christ is one of his many epiphanies to mankind, and the grandest of them all. The Old Testament is his biography. He came to his friends in the dreams of the night, in the visions of the day, in a "burning bush,''' in the "still small voice," in the guise of a weary traveler, in the majestic form of an angel. His appearance as a man is only another guise. His epiphanies continue, and will probably appear until he appears in glory. One year after his ascension he appeared to St. Stephen, "standing at the right hand of God ;" three years later to St. Paul on the way to Damascus; and thirty-two years thereafter to St. John on Patmos, where he renewed the sweet friendship of yore. His friends understood him to claim that he is the contemporary of the ages. St. John applies Isaiah's vision to Jesus. "Our fathers drank of that spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ." "Neither let us tempt Christ as some of them tempted him, and were destroyed of serpents." Moses esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt.

The appearance of Divinity to talk and walk with man is cardinal in the creeds of the ages. The avatars of Vishnu are claimed to be incarnations. The rationalists of China hold that their founder is an embodiment, and assert that eighty years passed between his conception and birth, and that when born his hair and beard were white, and hence his name, Laots — the "Old Boy." The Shintoists of Japan believe that in the distant past one of the inferior gods came to earth, married a mortal woman, and of that marriage was the first Mikado. This belief runs through classic history. Alexander the Great claimed divine paternity, which caused the separation between the parents of the renowned Macedonian.

What is the genesis of this idea of the incarnation? Older than Rome, older than Egypt, older than Babylon, it is as old as Eden. It cheered the broken heart of Eve ; it was the hope of Noah ; it quickened the steps of Abram on his westward journey. Its first historic record is in the Pentateuch, which anticipates by five hundred years the sacred writings of any other religion known to mankind.

No greater injustice was ever perpetrated against history than the boast of modern infidelity that there are sacred writings extant

3 33 which anticipate the utterance of this blessed truth, and that by many centuries ; whereas all history is in proof that the oldest expression of alphabetic writing is the Decalogue, in the Pentateuch, which gives Moses a margin of hundreds of years over the Zend-Avesta of the Persians, the Five Kings of the Chinese, and the Tripitaka of the Buddhists. All the beautiful truths contained therein can be traced to this central source of religious truth, held by the people of God. Under the reign of Solomon his merchants sailed all seas and traversed all continents and carried with them copies of their holy books. Africa's queen came to the Holy City and returned with the promise of the Messiah. John carried the glad tidings into the Euphratean valley eight hundred years before our era ; a hundred years later the Hebrew captives peopled that famous valley; a century thereafter Daniel was in Babylon, and then in Persia, and one hundred and fifty years subsequently Esther was queen of the Persian empire. In B. C. 320 Ptolemy Lagus transported one hundred thousand Hebrews into Egypt, and Seleucus Nicator built thirty cities in Asia, by Jewish captives, whose distinguishing faith was the incarnation of our Lord.

This better view of Christ's presence on our earth is in harmony with our better revelations of the paternity of God. It is impossible for us to suppose for a moment that the heavenly Father would abandon his human children to struggle in doubt and darkness, uninformed of his will, character, and government during four thousand years ; and then, as if he had aroused himself from this long sleep of cruel indifference, he sent his Son into the world. But how apparent is his tenderness and regardfulness of our souls when we behold his "only begotten Son" treading the summits of centuries as they pass in review before the Father Almighty.

Some overzealous defenders of Christianity contrast the age of the advent with the subsequent condition of the world, and ascribe this better estate of man to the coming of the Lord. Justice, kindness, and power impatiently ask why he delayed his advent. Such defenders forget that the grand characters in our sacred books lived centuries before the Messiah came, who were the offspring of his power, the products of his grace, and the embodiment of himself, who inspired their thoughts, animated their virtues, and made them the light of the world. Where in our own era shall we find nobler characters than Joseph and Moses among the rulers, Samuel and Daniel among the prophets, Hannah and Ruth among the mothers ? The age of his advent was not worse than the world has been since. Art and learning had culminated in glory. Law had held universal empire. Comforts multiplied under Augustus. It was the time of the sweetest poets, most brilliant orators, most profound philosophers. True, it was a century of moral degeneracy, but not more so than the Dark Ages, a night of a thousand years from the extinction of the Western empire to the fall of Constantinople, when popes were monsters and emperors were butchers, when murders, robberies, and incest in high places filled the calendar of each day. France under Louis XI was as cruel and profligate, and Spain under Philip II was as base and bloody, and England under Richard III was as corrupt and polluted, as Rome under Caesar Augustus.

One of the crimes of modern infidelity, a crime against reason and history, is the claim that Christ is an evolution, a product of antecedent conditions. An evolution mania has smitten the intellect of our age, and it is assumed that there is an evolution of worlds, minerals, plants, animals, of art, science, government, and religion. This craze will have 36 its day ; some new fad will take its place, when all that is true and grand in the science of evolution will receive the approval of reason and piety. If evolution means anything when applied to personality and character, it means a precedence and the persistent survival of the fittest. But in the history of the world there are immense gaps — periods of light and periods of darkness. Evolution demands an unbroken series from the inferior to the superior, whereas the history of our race is made up of progressions to a point of exhaustion. The illustrious characters who have illuminated our history have appeared without an antecedent and departed without a subsequent. What had preceded Homer to produce a Homer, or Solomon to produce a Solomon, or a Luther to produce a Luther ? Such men are heaven-born ; coruscations from the throne of the Eternal, to light up the human intellect and quicken the universal conscience, and standing on the summits of the receding centuries, they shouted, "The morning cometh."

What was there in the antecedent condition of the world in general or in the Jewish commonwealth in particular for six hundred years prior to the advent to produce the Christ, so pure, so wise, so exalted? If we go backward 37 along his ancestral lines for thousands of years, we shall fail to discover his prototype in the lines thereof; we will find in the three times fourteen generations murderers, adulterers, liars, rebels, idolaters; yet the splendor of his moral character challenged the admiration of the world, and the judicial verdict was, "I find no fault in this man." He astonished the scholars of Jerusalem by the wealth of his knowledge; they engaged him in conversation and demanded the source of his learning, and reluctantly confessed, "Never man spake like this man." Familiar with all the intricacies of the traditions of the elders and with the civil and religious jurisprudence of his countrymen, he met them at every point in controversy and covered them with confusion by the cogency of his replies. He drew illustration and argument from nature, and ever with scientific accuracy. He touched nature on every side, and nature responded. His works were the credentials that he is the "Ancient of days," who had heard the music of the spheres when the morning stars sang together.

No other Christ can satisfy my soul. He must be preexistent ; he must inhabit the praises of eternity; he must come traveling down the

everlasting ages of the Godhead and tell me of 38 a world beyond this "vale of tears." All other arguments for my soul's immortality are absolutely worthless without this. This alone is all-sufficient. Assured of this blessed certitude, I care not whether Moses and Elias came to Mount Tabor, or whether Paul was caught up into the third heaven and heard things not lawful for men to speak, or whether modern spiritualism is fact or fancy, but with this certitude then I am prepared to believe and accept all other manifestations.

The religious evolutionists of our day assume that Christianity is the outgrowth of Judaism, and that Judaism is the outgrowth of a primitive nature- worship. How plausible this assumption! But studies in comparative religion and discoveries in biblical archaeology are in proof that pure monotheism preceded Moses and is the form of faith in all the earlier religions of mankind. Nature-worship is a degeneracy from the worship of nature's God, when men substituted the heavenly bodies, once held as symbols, for God himself. Judaism is not a growth, but an organization, to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah, and Christianity is the realization of all the types and prophecies of the preliminary system. Christianity and Judaism are parts of one great 39 whole. Because a man builds a mansion and is the first to occupy it is not proof that the mansion produced the man; nor does first occupancy prove that he did not build it. The Bible from Genesis to Revelation is the biography of Christ.

There is something captivating in this theory of development; it seems to explain so many difficulties, and is so gratifying to the pride of our understanding. The arguments advanced in its support have such a show of reason. The crimes of the Church, the oppressive laws of Christian nations, and the sectarian persecutions which have prevailed in each century are quoted as primary evidence that Christianity is at best an imperfect development, and that society will advance to a better future of ethical culture when these evils will cease. The allegations are true, but the conclusions are false. The Church is human ; Christianity is divine. Light is one thing, and the telescope is another thing; the former is perfect, the latter may be imperfect. The Church is the medium through which Christ is manifested to the world; the medium is often so imperfect that we have but a distorted view of its divine Founder. The Christian religion is no more responsible for

the oppressive laws and the persecutions waged 40 by so-called Christian nations than is literature responsible for its prostitution to the vilest purposes by some literary men. Shall we reject the masters of the English classics because certain writers for fame or funds degrade the high art of composition?

Nor is there logical force in the assumption that Christianity is a human growth because some men outside the Church have been the advocates of great and generous ideas. Were the religion of our Lord confined to sects or creeds or Church organizations, there would be point and pith in the proposition ; but it permeates society far beyond the confined limits of its professed disciples. It has friends within and friends without, as it has foes within and foes without. It is not too much to affirm that every sentiment of justice, every principle of law, every Godlike charity, by whomsoever and wheresoever advocated, may be found in the Bible, and can be traced to it as to a primal source.

And what was the final issue of this heated and prolonged conversation between Christ and the Pharisees on the preexistence of our Lord ? How intense the excitement! How vehement the replies! What elevation of thought, dignity of language, and consciousness of truth on 41 the part of the "Ancient of clays" in contrast with the limited views, the astute repartee, the rabbinical subterfuge of the Pharisees! Follow this celebrated conversation to the end as each in turn asserts or denies :

Christ: "I am the light of the world."

Pharisees: "Thou bearest record of thyself; thy record is not true."

Christ: "The Father that sent me beareth witness of me."

Pharisees: "Where is thy Father?"

Christ: "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also. I go my way, and whither I go, ye cannot come."

Pharisees: "Will he kill himself?"

Christ: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above."

Pharisees: "Who art thou?"

Christ: "Even the same that I said unto you from the beginning. He that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him."

Great excitement followed these lofty, holy declarations. There was commotion in the throng of listeners who had heard the conversation. Yielding to the truth of his replies, "many believed on him," to whom he turned

and addressed them thus : "If ye continue in 42 my word, then are ye my disciples indeed ; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Pharisees: "We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man : how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?"

Christ: "I know that ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you."

Pharisees: "Abraham is our father."

Christ: "If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God : this did not Abraham."

Pharisees: "We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God."

Christ: "If God were your Father, ye would love me : for I proceeded forth and came from God. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do : he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own : for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not."

Pharisees: "Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" 43

Christ: "I have not a devil; but I honor my Father, and ye do dishonor me. Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."

Pharisees: "Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets ; and thou sayest, If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death. Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead ? and the prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself?"

Christ: "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day : and he saw it, and was glad."

Pharisees: "Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?"

Christ: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am."

The conversation ends in tumult. The Pharisees, enraged by their defeat in argument, resort to violence. They rend the air with curses; they rush upon him; they tear up the stones of the streets to stone him to death. See that Jewish mob, those Pharisees with their phylacteries, often seen on the corner of the street making long prayers to be seen of men; see them pick up the stones and hurl at his sacred head.

But he was not there; he had vanished; he had dematerialized in their very presence. 44

He had this wondrous power of invisibility. This was the only kind of miracle Jesus performed to defend himself. Once in Nazareth and three times in the Holy City, St. Luke says of the Nazareth mob, "He passing through the midst of them went his way." St. John says of the Jerusalem riot, "He went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by." He did not fly in fear, but his familiar saying was, "My hour is not yet come." He always had this marvelous power. He could appear and disappear at will. He belonged to two worlds. From the bosom of the everlasting Father he came and dwelt on earth thirty-three years; and at death passed into the heavens for three days; returned and lived with his earthly friends forty days, and then ascended to his invisible throne, whence he will come again with all his holy angels. 45

" Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you."

— James.

" Let your conversation be without covetousness."

" Ye have heard of my conversation in time past."

— Paul.

"Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past." — Paul to the Ephesians.

" And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conver sat ion of the wicked." — Pete?'.

III Christ's Conversation with Satan

"Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan." — Luke iv, 8.

They had known each other in the spirit world. In those happier days one was on the throne of his Father, adored by angelic hosts ; the other was chief among the angels, a prince to the King immortal. In his primal estate the tempter was a glorious being, one of the "firstborn sons of light," who shouted for joy when the "morning" stars sang together." Of splendid intellect, he outranked all his fellows in the brilliancy of his endowments. He was more majestic than Gabriel, more powerful than Michael, and blazed in beatific vision before the throne of the Supreme. When he "kept not his first estate, but left his own habitation" and descended to earth, he appeared as "lightning falling from heaven." How magnificent ! The test of his loyalty to the throne of the universe was to remain in the heavenly sphere assigned him. But a knowledge of a new creation on our earth, of beings in the

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''image of God," had excited his ambition, and he descended to our Eden. What a descent! In the twinkling of an eye he was changed from an angel to a devil I He never left our planet, and is now as ever the "prince of this world."

The splendor of his mind is seen in the consummate ingenuity of his plans. He solicits to sin with the promise of some reward. The wisdom of the serpent is the symbol of his genius, and the strength of the lion is the measure of his power. He is monarch of all he surveys. This world is his dominion, and he claims the right to offer it to another. The elements obey his command. He is the "prince of the power of the air." "The fire of God fell from heaven" at his invocation and consumed the flocks of Job; at his call the "winds came from the wilderness," and smote the good man's house to the death of his sons ; disease, poverty, and death are in his awful retinue. His disguises are many; now a serpent and anon an "angel of light;" he comes as a friend to relieve hunger, as an inquirer for the Messiah, as a proprietor to offer a world for an alliance.