Ecce Homo

Preface

Those who feel dissatisfied with the current con¬ ceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what to persons not so dissatisfied it seems audacious and perilous to do. They may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the begirning, and placing themselves in imagination at the time when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as St. Luke describes him, a young man

of promise, popular with those who knew him and appearing to enjoy the Divine favor, to trace his biography from point to point, and accept those conclusions about him, not which church doctors or even apostles have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves, critically weighed, appear to warrant.

This is what the present writer undertook to do for the satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that there was no his-

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PREFACE.

torical character whose motives, objects, and feel¬ ings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.

What is now published is a fragment. No theolo¬ gical questions whatever are here discussed. Christ, as the creator of modern theology and religion, will make the subject of another volume, which, how¬ ever, the author does not hope to publish for some time to come. In the mean while he has endeavored to furnish an answer to the question, What was Christ’s object in founding the Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to attain that object?

Contents

FIRST PART.

CHAP. PAGB

I. The Baptist.7

Chapter I. The Baptist

T 1 IE Christian Church sprang from a move¬ ment which was not begun by Christ. When he appeared upon the scene the first wave of this move¬ ment had already passed over the surface of the Jew¬ ish nation. He found their hearts recently stirred by thoughts and hopes which prepared them to listen to his words. It is indeed true that not Judasa only but the whole Roman Empire was in a condition singularly favorable to the reception of a doctrine and an organization such as that of the Christian Church. The drama of ancient society had been played out; the ancient city life, with the traditions and morality belonging to it, was obsolete ; a vast empire, built upon the ruins of so many nationalities and upon the disgrace of so many national gods, demanded new usages and new objects of worship; a vast peace, where war between neighboring cities had been the accustomed condition of life and the only recognized

ECCE HOMO.

teacher of virtue, called for a new morality. There was a clear stage, as it afterwards appeared, for a Universal Church. But Palestine was not only ready to receive such an innovation, but prepared, even before the predestined Founder appeared, to make more or less abortive essays towards it. At the moment of his almost unobserved entrance, the whole nation were intent upon the career of one who was attempting in an imperfect manner that which Christ afterwards fully accomplished.

It was the glory of John the Baptist to have success¬ fully revived the function of the prophet. For several centuries the function had remained in abeyance. It had become a remote, though it was still a fondly cherished, tradition that there had been a time when the nation had received guidance from commissioned representatives of its invisible King. We possess still the utterances of many of these prophets, and when we consider the age in which they were delivered, w r e can clearly perceive that no more precious treasure was ever bestowed upon a nation than these oracles of God which were committed to the Jews. They unite in what was then the most effective way all that is highest in poetry and most fundamental in political science with what is most practical in philosophy and most inspiring in religion. But prophecy was one of those gifts which, Like poetry or high art, are particu¬ larly apt to die out under change of times. Several centuries had succeeded each other which w r ere all alike incapable of producing it. When John the Baptist appeared, not the oldest man in Palestine could remember to have spoken even in his earliest

THE BAPTIM .

childhood with any man who had seen a prophet, The ancient scrolls remained, as amongst ourselves those Gothic cathedrals remain, of which we may produce more or less faithful imitations, but to the number of which we shall never add another. In these circumstances it was an occurrence of the first magnitude, more important far than war or revolution, when a new prophet actually appeared. John the Baptist defied all the opposition of those scribes , who in the long silence of the prophetic inspiration had become the teachers of the nation, and who resisted him with the conservatism of lawyers united to the bigotry of priests. He made his way back to the hidden fountains, and received at last that national acknowledgment which silenced even these profes* sional jealousies, that irresistible voice of the people in which the Jew was accustomed to hear the voice of God. Armed with the prophetic authority, he under¬ took a singular enterprise, of which probably most of those who witnessed it died without suspecting the importance, but which we can see to have been the foundation of the Universal Church.

There may have been many who listened with awe to his prophetic summons, and presented themselves as candidates for his baptism in implicit faith that the ordinance was divine, who nevertheless in after years asked themselves what purpose it had served. It was a solemn scene doubtless, when crowds from every part of Palestine gathered by the side of Jordan, and there renewed, as it were, the covenant made between their ancestor and Jehovah. It seemed the beginning of a new age, the restoration of the ancient theocracy,

IO

ECCE HOMO.

the final close of that dismal period in which the race had lost its peculiarity, had taken a varnish of Greek manners, and had contributed nothing but a few dull chapters of profane history, filled with the usual chaos of faction fights, usurpations, royal crimes, and out¬ breaks, blind and brave, of patriotism and the love of liberty. But many of those who witnessed the scene and shared in the enthusiasm which it awakened must have remembered it in later days as having inspired hopes which had not been realized. It must have seemed to many that the theocracy had not in fact been restored, that the old routine had been inter¬ rupted only for a moment, that the baptized nation had speedily contracted new pollution, and that no deliverance had been wrought from the ‘ wrath to come.’ And they may have asked in doubt, Is God so little parsimonious of His noblest gift, as to waste upon a doomed generation that which He did not vouchsafe to many nobler generations that had pre¬ ceded them, and to send a second and far greater Elijah to prophesy in vain?

But if there were such persons, they were ignorant of one important fact. John the Baptist was like the Emperor Nerva. In his career it was given him to do two things—to inaugurate a new regime, and also to nominate a successor who was far greater than himself. And by this successor his work was taken up, developed, completed, and made permanent; so that, however John may have seemed to his own gen¬ eration to have lived in vain, and those scenes on the banks of Jordan to have been the delusive promise of a future that was never to be, at the distance of neai

THE BAPTIST.

two thousand years he appears not less but far greater than he appeared to his contemporaries, and all that his baptism promised to do appears utterly insignifi¬ cant compared with what it has actually done.

The Baptist addressed all who came to him in the same stern tone of authority. Young and old gath¬ ered round him, and among them must have been many whom he had known in earlier life, and some to whom he had been taught to look up with humility and respect. But in his capacity’ of prophet he made no distinction. All alike he exhorted to repentance ; all alike he found courage to baptize. In a single case, however, his confidence failed him. There appeared among the candidates a young man of nearly his own age, who was related to his family. We must suppose that he had had personal inter¬ course with Christ before; for though one of our authorities represents John as saying that he knew him not except by the supernatural sign that pointed him out at his baptism, yet we must interpret this as meaning only that he did not before know him for his successor. For it appears that before the appearance of the sign John had addressed Christ with expressions of reverence, and had declared him¬ self unfit to baptize him. After this meeting we are told that on several occasions he pointed out Christ as the hope of the nation, as destined to develop the work he himself had begun into something far more memorable, and as so greatly superior to himself, that, to repeat his emphatic words, he was not worthy to untie his shoe.

Now, before we enter into an examination of Christ’s

ECCE HOMO.

ia

own public career, it will be interesting to conside; what definite qualities this contemporary and sagacious observer remarked in him, and exactly what he ex¬ pected him to do. The Baptist’s opinion of Christ’s character then is summed up for 11s in the title he gave him —* the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world. There seems to be in the last part of this de¬ scription an allusion to the usages of the Jewish sacri¬ ficial system, and in order to explain it fully it would be necessary to anticipate much that will come more conveniently later in this treatise. But when we re¬ member that the Baptist’s mind was doubtless full of imagery drawn from the Old Testament, and that the conception of a lamb of God makes the subject of one of the most striking of the Psalms, we shall per ceive what he meant to convey by this phrase. The Psalmist describes himself as one of Jehovah’s flock, safe under His care, absolved from all anxieties by the sense of His protection, and gaining from this confi¬ dence of safety the leisure to enjoy without satiety all the simple pleasures which make up life, the freshness of the meadow, the coolness of the stream. It is the most complete picture of happiness that ever was or can be drawn. It represents that state of mind lor which all alike sigh, and the want of which makes life a failure to most; it represents that Heaven which is everywhere if we could but enter it, and yet almost nowhere because so few of us can. The tw r o or three who win it may be called victors in life’s conflict; to them belongs the regnum et diadema tutum. They may pass obscure lives in humble dwellings, or like Fra Angelico in a narrow monastic cell, but they are

THE BAPTIST.

vexed with no flap of unclean wings about the ceiling. From some such humble dwelling Christ came to receive the prophet’s baptism. The Baptist was no lamb of God. He was a wrestler with life, one to whom peace of mind does not come easily, but only after a long struggle. His restlessness had driven him into the desert, where he had contended for years with thoughts he could not master, and from whence he had uttered his startling alarum to the nation. He was among the dogs rather than among the lambs of the Shepherd. He recognized the superiority of him whose confidence had never been disturbed, whose steadfast peace no agitations of life had ever ruffled. He did obeisance to the royalty of inward happiness.

One who was to earn the name of Saviour of man¬ kind had need of this gift more than of any other. Fie who was to reconcile God and man needed to be first at peace himself. The door of heaven, so to speak, can be opened only from within. Such then was the impression of Christ’s character which the Baptist formed. What now did he exjiect him to do?

He said that Christ bore a fan in his hand, with which he would winnow the nation, gathering the good around him, separating and rejecting the bad. We shall find occasion soon to speak of this more particularly ; at present let us remark that it shows us what course the Baptist imagined that the movement he had commenced would take. He had renewed the old theocratic covenant with the nation. But not all the nation was fit to remain in such a covenant. A sifting was necessary; from the approaching downfall of the Jewish nationality, from the wrath to come, an

ECCE HOMO.

r 4

election should be rescued who should perpetuate the covenant. It is superfluous to remark how just this anticipation was, and how precisely it describes Christ’s work, which consisted in collecting all the better spirits of the nation, and bringing them under that revised covenant which we call Christianity, and which survived and diffused itself after the fall of the Temple.

Further, Christ was to baptize with a holy spirit and with fire. John felt his own baptism to have something cold and negative about it. It was a re¬ nouncing of definite bad practices. The soldier bound himself to refrain from violence, the tax-gath¬ erer from extortion. But more than this was wanting. It was necessary that an enthusiasm should be kindled. The phrase 4 baptize with fire 9 seems at first sight to contain a mixture of metaphors. Baptism means cleansing, and fire means warmth. How can warmtn cleanse? The answer is, that moral warmth does cleanse. No heart is pure that is not passionate ; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. And such an enthusiastic virtue Christ was to introduce. The whole of the present volume will be a comment on this text.

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Chapter II. The Temptation

L ET us delay a few more moments on the threshold of our subject, while we consider an incident which is said to have occurred just before Christ entered upon the work of his life.

Signs miraculous or considered miraculous are said to have attested the greatness of Christ’s mission at the moment of his baptism. There settled on his head a dove, in which the Baptist saw a visible incar¬ nation of that Holy Spirit with which he declared that Christ should baptize. A sound was heard in the sky which was interpreted as the voice of God Himself, acknowledging His beloved Son. In the agitation of mind caused by his baptism, by the Baptist’s designa¬ tion of him as the future prophet, and by these signs, Christ retired into the wilderness; and there in soli¬ tude, and after a mental struggle such as John per¬ il aps had undergone before he appeared as the prophet of the nation, matured that plan of action which we see him executing with the firmest assurance and con¬ sistency from the moment of his return to society. A particular account, also involving some miraculous circumstances, of the temptations with which he con¬ tended successfully in the wilderness, is given in oui biographies.

i6

ECCE HOMO.

Miracles are, in themselves, extremely improbable tilings, and cannot be admitted unless supported by a great concurrence of evidence. For some of the Evangelical miracles there is a concurrence of evi¬ dence which, when fairly considered, is very great indeed; for example, for the Resurrection, for the appearance of Christ to St. Paul, for the general fact that Christ was a miraculous healer of disease. The evidence by which tiiese facts are supported cannot be tolerably accounted for by any hypothesis except that of their being true. And if they are once admitted, the antecedent improbability of many miracles less strongly attested is much diminished. Nevertheless nothing' is more natural than that exaggerations and even inventions should be mixed in our biographies with genuine facts. Now the miracles of the baptism are not among those which are attested by strong external evidence. There is nothing necessarily mi¬ raculous in the appearance of the dove, and a peal of thunder might be shaped into intelligible words by the excited imagination of men accustomed to consider thunder as the voice of God. Of the incidents of the temptation it is to be remarked that they are not described to us by eye-witnesses ; they may have been communicated to his followers by Christ himself, the best of witnesses, but we have no positive assurance that they were so communicated.

On the other hand, a retirement of Christ into the desert, and a remarkable mental struggle at the begin¬ ning of his career, are incidents extremely probable in themselves; and the account of the temptation, from whatever source derived, has a very striking

THE TEMPTATION.

*7 internal consistency, a certain inimitable probability of improbability, if the expression may be allowed. That popular imagination which gives birth to rumors and then believes them, is not generally capable of great or sublime or well-sustained efforts.

The popular imagination is fertile and tenacious, but not very powerful or profound. Christ in the wilder¬ ness was a subject upon which the imagination would very readily work, but at the same time far too great a subject for it to work upon successfully ; we should ex¬ pect strange stories to be told of his adventures in such a solitude, but we should also expect the stories to be very childish. Now the story of Christ’s temptation is as unique as Christ’s character. It is such a tempta¬ tion as was never experienced by any one else, yet just such a temptation as Christ, and Christ in those pecu¬ liar circumstances, might be expected to experience. And further, this appropriateness of all the circum¬ stances hardly seems to be perceived by the Evange¬ lists themselves who narrate them. Their narrative is not like a poem, though it affords the materials for a poem ; it is rather a dry chronicle.

Let us consider the situation. We are to fix in our minds Christ’s peculiar character, as it has been gath¬ ered from the Baptist’s description of him. His char¬ acter then was such that he was compared to a lamb, a lamb of God. He was without ambition, and he had a peculiar, unrivalled simplicity of devout confi¬ dence in God. Such is the person to whom it is now announced by a great prophet that he has been called

ECCE HOMO.

I S to a most peculiar, a preeminent career. But this does not fully describe the situation; a most important circumstance has yet to be mentioned. From the time of his temptation, Christ appeared as a worker of miracles. We are expressly told by St. John that he had wrought none before, but all our authorities con¬ cur in representing him as possessing and using the gift after this time. We are to conceive him therefore as becoming now for the first time conscious of mirac¬ ulous powers. Now none of our biographies point this out, and yet it is visibly the key to the whole nar¬ ration. What is called Christ’s temptation is the ex¬ citement of his mind which was caused by the nascent consciousness of supernatural power.

He finds himself in a barren region without food. The tumult of his mind has hitherto kept him uncon¬ scious of his bodily wants, but the overwhelming reac¬ tion of lassitude now comes on. And with the hunger comes the temptation, ‘ Son of God, into whose ser¬ vice all natural forces have been given, command that these stones become bread.’ The possession of special power, and nothing else, constitutes the temptation here; it is the greatest with which virtue can be as¬ sailed. By it the virtuous man is removed from ordi¬ nary rules, from the safe course which has been marked by the footsteps of countless good men before him, and has to make, as it were, a new morality for him¬ self. In difficult circumstances few men can wield extraordinary power long without positively commit¬ ting crime. But here we see the good man placed in a position utterly strange, deprived of the stay of all pre¬ cedent or example, gifted with power not only extraor-

THE TEMPTATION.

} 9 ehnary but supernatural and unlimited, and thrown lor his morality entirely upon the instinct cf viitue within him. Philosophers had imagined son e such situation, and had presented it under the fable of the ring of Gyges, but with them the only question was whether distinctions of right and wrong would not vanish altogether in such circumstances. The ques¬ tion by which Christ’s mind was perplexed was far different; it was what newer .and stricter obligations are involved in the possession of new powers.

A strange, and yet, given the exceptional circum¬ stances, a most natural and necessary temptation. Still more unique, and yet at the same time natural, is Christ’s resistance to it. Unique by its elevation, and natural by its ajDpropriateness to his character. He is awe-struck rather than elated by his new gifts ; he de¬ clines to use for his own convenience what he regards as a sacred deposit committed to him for the good of others. In his extreme need he prefers to suffer rather than to help himself from resources which he con¬ ceives placed in his hands in trust for the kingdom of God. Did ever inventor or poet dare to picture to himself a self-denial like this? But, on the other hand, what course could so exactly suit the character of Christ as the Baptist painted it? What answer could more exquisitely become the Lamb of God than that quotation — ‘Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God ’ ? Is it not substantially the same as that which the Psalmist uses in the very psalm in which he pictures himself as one of God’s lambs, ‘ Pie prepareth for me a table in the wilderness’?

ECCE HOMO.

Then follows a temptation, which again is extremely appropriate, because it is founded upon this 'very con¬ fidence of Divine protection. A new temptation arises by reaction out of the triumph of faith : 4 Throw thy self down, for it is written, He shall give His angels charge over thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up.’ To no other person but Christ could such a temptation occur; to him, we may boldly say, such a temptation must , at some time, have occurred. And if in the Son of God there was filial reverence as well as filial confidence, it must have been resisted, as it is lecorded to have been resisted, 4 Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’

The third temptation is somewhat less easy to un¬ derstand, but its appropriateness to the character and condition of Christ, and its utter inappropriateness to every other character and condition, are quite as clear. A vision of universal monarchy rose before him. What suggested such thoughts to the son of a carpen¬ ter? What but the same new sense of supernatural po wer which tempted him to turn stones into bread, and to throw himself into the arms of ministering angels? This, together with the Baptist’s predictions, and those Messianic predictions of the ancient proph¬ ets, on which we can imagine that he had been in¬ ter sely brooding, might naturally suggest such an imagination. He pictured himself enthroned in Jeru¬ salem as Messiah, and the gold of Arabia offered in tribute to him. But, says the narrative, the devil said to Hi?n , If thou wilt fall down and worship me , all shall be thine . This, at least, it may be thought, was not a temptation likely to overcome the Lamb of

THE TEMPTATION.

God. One remarkable for simplicity of character, one who was struggling with the fresh conviction that he was himself that Messiah, that beloved Son of God, whose glorious reign wise men had been permitted to foresee from a distance of centuries; was he, in the moment of his first enthusiasm, and fresh in the pos¬ session of sacred prerogatives of power, which he feared to use in self-defence even against famine, likely to do homage to a spirit of evil for that which he must have believed to be surely his by gift of God? We should remember that the report of these tempta¬ tions, if trustworthy, must have come to us through Christ himself, and that it may probably contain the facts mixed with his comments upon them. We are perhaps to understand that he was tempted to do something which on reflection appeared to him equivalent to an act of homage to the evil spirit. What then could this be ? It will explain much that follows in Christ’s life, and render the whole story very complete and consistent, if we suppose that what he was tempted to do was to employ force in the estab¬ lishment of his Messianic kingdom. On this hypothe¬ sis, the third temptation arises from the same source as the others ; the mental struggle is still caused by the question how to use the supernatural power. Nothing more natural than that it should occur to Christ that this power was expressly given to him for the purpose of establishing, in defiance of all resistance, his ever¬ lasting kingdom. He must have heard from his in¬ structors that the Messiah was to put all enemies under his feet, and to crush all opposition by irresistible Godgiven might This certainly was the general expecta*

ECCE HOMO.

tion ; this appeared legibly written in the prophetical books. And. in the sequel, it was because Christ refused to use ms supernatural power in this way that his countrymen rejected him. It was not that they expected a king, and that he appeared only as a teacher; on the contrary, he systematically described himself as a king. The stumbling-block was this, that, professing to be a king, he declined to use the weapons of force and compulsion that belong to kings. And as this caused so much surprise to his countrymen, it is natural that he should himself have undergone a struggle before he determined thus to run counter to the traditional theory of the Messiah and to all the prejudices of the nation. The tempter, we may suppose, approached him with the whisper, ‘ Gird thee with thy sword upon thy thigh ; ride on, and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things.’

If this was the temptation, then again how charac¬ teristic of the Lamb of God was the resistance to it, and at the same time how incomparably great the self-restraint involved in that resistance! One who be¬ lieves himself born for universal monarchy, and capable by his rule of giving happiness to the world, is intrusted with powers which seem to afford the ready means of attaining that supremacy. By the overwhelming force of visible miracle it is possible foi him to establish an absolute dominion, and to give to the race the laws which may make it happy. But he deliberately determines to adopt another course, to found his empire upon the consent and not the fears of mankind, to trust himself with his royal claims and his terrible purity and superiority defenceless among

THE TEMPTATION.

mankind, and, however bitterly their envy may perse¬ cute him, to use his supernatural powers only in doing them good. This he actually did, and evidently in pursuance of a fixed plan; he persevered in this course, although politically, so to speak, it was fatal to his position, and though it bewildered his most attached followers ; but by doing so he raised himself to a throne on which he has been seated for nigh two thousand years, and gained an authority over men greater far than they have allowed to any legislator, greater than prophecy had ever attributed to the Messiah himself.

As the time of his retirement in the wilderness was Tie season in which we may suppose the plan of his subsequent career was formed, and the only season in which he betrayed any hesitation or mental perplexity, jt is natural to suppose that he formed this particular determination at this time ; and, if so, the narrative gains completeness and consistency by the hypothesis that the act of homage to the evil spirit to which Christ was tempted, was the founding his Messianic kingdom upon force.

Such then is the story of Christ’s temptation. It rests, indeed, on no very strong external evidence, and there may be exaggeration in its details; but in its substance it can scarcely be other than true, first, because it is so much stranger than fiction, and next, because in its strangeness it is so nicely adapted to the character of Christ as we already know it, and still more as it will unfold itself to us in the course of this investigation

Chapter III. The Kingdom Of God

I T is the object of the present treatise to exhibit Christ’s career in outline. No other career ever had so much unity; no other biography is so simple, or can so well afford to dispense with details. Men in general take up scheme after scheme, as circum¬ stances suggest one or another, and therefore most biographies are compelled to pass from one subject to another, and to enter into a multitude of minute questions, to divide the life carefully into periods by chronological landmarks accurately determined, to trace the gradual development of character and ripen¬ ing or change of opinions. But Christ formed one plan and executed it; no important change took place in his mode of thinking, speaking, or acting; at least the evidence before us does not enable us to trace any such change. It is possible, indeed, for students of his life to find details which they may occupy them¬ selves with discussing; they may map out the chro¬ nology of it, and devise methods of harmonizing the different accounts; but such details are of little importance compared with the one grand question, what was Christ’s plan, and throw scarcely any light upon that question. What was Christ’s plan, is the main question which will be investigated in the