The way, a little book of Christian truth

Foreword

This little book is not a contribution to theology. If it contains any technicalities, the reader may be sure that they have escaped the writer's eye; and if, perchance it should come to any theologian's table, the writer asks that he lay it aside unread; it was not made for him.

It is merely the setting down of the things that lie nearest the writer's heart. He believes that any man ought to be able to say in simple language the things that he really believes. After twenty years of preaching and teaching he has felt the need of putting in some connected form of plain words the convictions that he holds about the things that are most worth while.

It has been written in the odd moments of a somewhat busy life, and is now offered to men and women who, amid the questionings of an age that is not on the whole an age of faith, feel that they need some iv FOREWORD

simple statement of elementary Christian truth. If it shall find a few such readers, and contribute somewhat to the strengthening of their faith in Him Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, it will have accomplished the purpose to which it has been sent.

Contents

I. The Church of Jesus Christ 7

II. Human Nature ; . . 19

III. Jesus 28

CHAPTER I The Church of Jesus Christ

While Jesus was living on earth, He gathered around Him a small number of close followers. They were men and women who "believed on Him," that is, who had come to trust Him and were willing to obey Him. They had heard His teaching, and had learned to know His goodness and His power. They saw in Him the Only One Who could give them the comfort and the courage and the knowledge of truth which they needed in this life, and could make them certain that all would be well with them when this life was over. They saw in Him the link that connected them with God. They called Him "Master" and "Lord"; He called them "disciples," or "pupils."

These men and women were the first members of the Christian Church- Jesus Himself said very little about the Church. He often spoke about u the kingdom of God," or "the kingdom of heaven," but that is not quite the same thing, though the thought of the Church and the thought of the kingdom are related. The name "Church" means "an assembly," "a gathering of people who have been called together," "a mass-meeting," "a community." We know of only two times that Jesus used the word. Once He said, "If thy brother sin against thee .... tell it to the Church" 1 ; that might mean simply "the assembly of the brethren." The other time He said, "On this rock will I build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" 2 ; that evidently means something more.

After Christ's Ascension the word became more common. It was used most often by St. Paul. Sometimes it meant the society of Christian people living at a certain place, like

1 Matthew xviii, 17. a Matthew xvi, 18.

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 9

Ephesus or Corinth; sometimes it meant all the Christians in the world. But when Paul used the word in this larger meaning, it is clear that he thought of all these Christians as forming one single great society, as bound together into one great brotherhood, which is the Church. They make up one Body, of which Christ is the Head ; they form a single Temple, of which He is the Foundation 3 .

By and by the name of "Church" came to have other meanings too. It was applied to those bodies of Christians which had bishops at their head; it was given to societies of Christians who had certain creeds ; it was given even to the buildings in which Christian people met for worship. But all of these meanings of the word are later than the time of the New Testament.

Now, we have kept them all in constant use- We say, "Are you going to Church?", meaning, "Are you going to the Churchbuilding?" or, "Are you going to a gathering for worship?" We ask, "To what Church do you belong?" and mean, "With what special society of Christian people are you

* Ephesians ii, 20 ; iv, 4.

connected?'' We say, "The Church believes in Jesus Christ," meaning either, "That special society of Christians to which I belong believes in Christ," or, "All Christians believe in Christ." We even speak of Jews "going to Church" though they do not believe in Christ at all. Thus, when we speak about the Church there are many things that we may mean, and those who hear us cannot be sure which one of them we really do mean; indeed, we are not always sure ourselves. Let us try to get this clear.

The word Church, then, is a name for a great spiritual society. Its members are all those who believe in Jesus Christ, and accept Him as their Lord- That is the truest and largest meaning of the word. It is what Christian people ought to have in their minds when they say, "I believe in the Holy Catholic, or Christian, Church, the Communion of Saints." All those who accept Christ as their Lord, and trust Him to be their Saviour, their Guide and their Commander form one great spiritual brother-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST n

hood. They belong to one another, because they belong to Christ. Their bodies may be tens or hundreds or thousands of miles apart, but that does not matter in the least. Wherever a man is with Christ, there a member of the Church is with the Church's Head, and there is the Church. Thus the Church can be, indeed it is, in a hundred places or a thousand places at the same time. No man can enter it unless he trusts Christ as his Lord; no man can be driven out of it, unless he ceases to trust in Christ; if that happens, nothing can keep him in the Church.

Of course there can be only one such spiritual brotherhood, only one Church of Jesus Christ, but for that very reason, it must show itself in many places and in many forms. A single river, running under ground, rises to the surface in a thousand springs; a single vein of ore comes to the top of the earth in a hundred "outcroppings." So this one great Church of all Christians displays itself in thousands of larger and smaller societies. These societies are made up of men and women who profess to believe in Christ. They have different names; they have different customs of worship, different forms of organization; they differ in many of their beliefs; but in one thing they all agree, — they wish to be known as Christian, they "profess Christ before men." Individual members of these societies may be hypocrites; they may be thoroughly wicked in their daily lives, but they want men to think of them as followers of Jesus and servants of Christ. These societies, too, are called churches.

These churches differ very greatly in size and extent. Some of them have millions of members, others have only hundreds; some of them are found in many lands, others in only a little corner of a single country. But each of them has its own distinguishing marks. It may be some special belief that is found only in that one group of Christians; or it may be some special form of organization or government; or it may happen, especially in America, that two or more of these societies differ in little else than in the time and place of their origin. Thus we have a Baptist Church, which re-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 13

fuses baptism to children and baptizes adults only by immersion; we have a Presbyterian or "Elders' " Church, and an Episcopal, or "Bishops' " Church, named after the kind of organization which they believe all churches ought to have ; we have a Lutheran Church, teaching a view of Christianity that was first taught, in its completeness, in the time of the Reformation; we have a Roman Catholic Church, claiming that all Christians ought to be subject to the spiritual authority of the Bishop of Rome- On the other hand, we have some churches which differ very little from some of the rest, except that they have arisen at different times and in different lands. Everywhere we look, then, we see churches; indeed, we see so many of them that it is hard for us to realize that there is, after all, only one great spiritual brotherhood, of whose existence these many churches are the sign.

There are many good people, indeed, to whom these divisions are a cause of offence. They feel that we are doing wrong in keeping them alive; that we ought to do away with them as speedily as possible, and have only one great organization in which all professing Christians would be numbered. And yet there is something to be said for the churches. There are important differences between them. We do not all agree as yet; indeed, there are many very important things about which we entirely disagree. So long as this is true, it is better that we should have our many churches, each standing for its own beliefs, than to have a single organization, filled with disagreement and contention. Our divisions are harmful only when they do not express real differences, or when they become the servants of intolerance and bigotry.

There are two ways, then, in which we can rightly use the word "Church." We can use it of the great spiritual brotherhood of all believers in Jesus Christ, or we can use it of those societies of men and women who profess to believe in Him.

As we look about us, and observe these societies of professing Christians actually at work, we notice that there are some things at which all of them are busy. Individuals

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 15

may be cold or lukewarm toward these tasks, but the churches are working at them all the time. Indeed, it is for these tasks that they exist.

For one thing, they are always declaring their faith in Jesus Christ as their Lord. That is one of the reasons why a man who really believes in Christ can hardly help belonging to a church. We can scarcely think of a man really believing in Christ and wishing to keep his faith concealed. He will almost certainly want other people to know about it. He will remember that Jesus said, "Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him w T ill I also confess before My Father which is in heaven." 4 He will recall Christ's word about the candle, "No man lighteth a candle and setteth it under a peckmeasure, but placed it on a candle-stick." 5 There have been times when it has been dangerous to be known as a Christian, but even in those times the more earnest believers in Christ's lordship have been willing to let their faith be known-

Again, they are always preaching the 4 Matthew x, 32. 6 Matthew v, 15.

Gospel, telling and retelling the story of the life of Jesus and explaining and re-explaining the meaning of His life for men. They have two purposes in this. One of them is to make the faith of their own members stronger, to increase the measure of their devotion to the Christ Whom they have called their Lord; the other is to lead other men to that same faith, and thus increase the number of those who are followers of Christ.

A third thing that all of them are doing is helping people to live according to the standards that Christ has set. They do this partly by preaching, partly by giving Christians a chance to work together in deeds of love and mercy for their fellow men. We seldom realize how much the churches have accomplished by this patient and persistent preaching and illustrating of the standards of Jesus Christ, how they have made people think things wrong that everybody once thought right, how they have raised the purposes of men, and even of nations, above selfishness, how they have lifted burdens from the shoulders of the weak.

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 17

We notice, too, that all of these churches regard their tasks as God-given. They are God's work, not their own. They labor at them because they know that these are the things that God wants done, and are sure that He has appointed them to do them. Therefore they work at them with gladness, for all their labor is just a part of the reasonable service which Christ has a right to ask of those who call him Lord and Master* They work at them with courage, because they feel themselves borne along by the power of God, and recall the words of Jesus, "On this rock will I build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." 6

To sum it all up, then, in a few words! The greatest of all the spiritual facts of life is the lordship of Jesus Christ. He has a right to our trust and our obedience. When we acknowledge that right and yield Him our loyal allegiance, we enter at once into the spiritual brotherhood of the Church. But that brotherhood — to return to a figure that has been used before — is like a river •Matthew xvi, 18.

flowing under ground, which wells up to the surface in a thousand springs. Each one of those springs is the river; but it is the river at work, turning the desert into a garden, clothing the earth with green, giving life to man and beast. So the societies of Christians, which we call churches, are the Church; but they are the Church at w r ork, preaching the Gospel, spreading the message of the lordship of Jesus and the love of God, doing God's work of mercy, and thus adding continually to the spiritual brotherhood of those who believe in Christ.

Chapter II

Christians are men and women. They have professed loyalty to Christ, and if they are true Christians they are really loyal to Him, but they have not got rid of their human nature. They never will be rid of it. If we wish to understand them, then, we must know something about this human nature.

It is a strange thing, this human nature of ours. We all share it, and it might be supposed that we would know all about it, and yet most of us know it as little as the rain-drop knows the ocean, out of which it has come and into which it falls. The mass of it lies all around us, but only a few of us study it, and those few chiefly that they may take advantage of its weaknesses. It is the most changeable thing in creation, and the thing that changes least. It moves through history like a great tide, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling, taking on some new appearance every instant, but remaining all the while the same. Indeed, the strangest thing about it is that it does not change. As far back as history reaches we find men fighting and loving and praying and cursing, just as they are doing today, and about the same things. That is why Jesus could say, "As it was in the days of Noah" — away back on the borderland of history — "so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man" 1 — which will end recorded time.

Now it stands to reason that our human nature has a great deal to do with our Christianity, and so has what we think of our human nature. What we think of Christ depends very largely on what we think of ourselves, and what we think of ourselves depends very much on what we think of other men. The higher our opinion of men, the lower our opinion of Christ is likely to be. If we feel that men are good enough without Him, we shall not think very highly of Him; if we believe that everything would have gone along just as well if He had not been

1 Luke xvii, 26.

born, then we shall not estimate the value of His coming very highly. On the other hand, if we are persuaded that Christ gives men something which it is necessary for them to have, takes away from our human nature some defects that are a part of it, and adds to it some element which only He can supply, then we shall look on Him very differently. That is, in fact, the way that we become Christians, for Christian loyalty to Christ is born, after all, in gratitude; "we love Him because He first loved us." 2

When we come to study this human nature of ours, the very first discovery we make is that it has two sides, — a bright side and a dark side, a good side and a bad side- Not every man is willing to look at both of them. One man is an optimist about it; he sees only good in himself and his fellow-men and in the world. Another is a pessimist; he sees only the wrong and the evil. They argue vigorously which of them is right, when the truth is that neither of them is right, because neither of them will see all there is to see.

a I John iv, 19.

Jesus saw both sides; He spoke of the world as a field where wheat and tares are growing up together. 3

Now when we turn our eyes upon human nature, looking for the bright side which it may reveal to us, the first thing that impresses us is its capacity for greatness. We are lost in astonishment at men's ability to do things. There is something awe-inspiring, for example, in the vast accumulation of knowledge that men have stored up. To be sure, the process of gathering that knowledge has been going on for centuries, but it has moved so rapidly in the last hundred years or so that it has become impossible for a single mind to keep track of it at all. Now and then this knowledge takes practical form in some spectacular achievement, — the sending of a message through the air, the flying of an airplane across an ocean. Even then we are scarcely surprised at it, for we have long since ceased to place a limit to the things that men can do.

Tt is just as hard to set a limit to what men may become. The possibilities are too

* Matthew xiii, 24-30.

great. A man may become almost anything. We see them coming up from the humblest beginnings to places where they control the earthly destinies of millions of their fellow-men. They seem to do this by a mysterious power that they possess, and there are so many cases of the kind that we conclude that the power must be a power of human nature. We see boys growing up to leadership among the thinkers of the world, thinking great thoughts and teaching others to think those same thoughts after them. Here and there we see in history the towering figure of some spiritual giant, some man who has risen to heights of character and wisdom; he may be long dead, but still he speaks; he becomes the teacher, the example, the inspiration of those who have come after him. These "super-men" are a constant warning against setting our estimate of human nature all too low.

But human nature has another side, a discouraging and disheartening side. It is forever disappointing us- With all the possibilities of greatness which it has, it gets such a little way forward. The one man rises, the many stay back; the one man shows what can be, the many show what is. Even the greatest and the best show themselves, when we come to see them closely, touched with weaknesses and faults which they ought not to have. They fail, somehow, to become quite all that they might be.

Then, too, when we study these men who have grown up to what we call greatness, we find that all of them have had to fight their way up. They have had to contend with every kind of obstacle. Some of these obstacles have been deliberately thrown in their way by other men, but the most serious handicaps which they have had to overcome, have been those that were in themselves. They have had to resist a downward pull all the time, and when we look, as we sometimes must, into our own lives we find that same downward pull at work on us. The drift of human nature is downward, not upward.

And the most disappointing thing about this human nature of ours is its perpetual failure in goodness. We all know that failure; we find it in ourselves, we observe it in other men. Of course, we have not all the same standards by which to judge it, one man's is higher than another's; and yet it is scarcely possible to find a man who will even pretend that he has actually lived up to the standards he accepts. We have to struggle toward them, advancing a little way and then slipping back, moving up again and once more falling down. We feel ourselves in constant battle with some hidden force. We cannot well define it, but we are conscious of its presence. It is working steadily to make it hard for us to do the things we know we ought to do and to become the kind of men we know we ought to be. We are conscious that other men, too, are struggling just as we are, and we know that if any one of us lets go and stops fighting, he will slip down and down, till he has reached the bottom. What it means to be at the bottom of the human scale we can only dimly guess. We can imagine ourselves as vile as our vilest thought, as base as our most degraded impulse; but even then we have not fathomed the possibilities of evil that lie in human nature.

For it is human nature that is at fault. Its possibilities are as great one way as they are the other; we can no more set its downward than we can its upward limit Thus we find ourselves with endless possibilities both ways. Both are ours because we are human. They are the inheritance which we receive at birth.

All of this we can learn without Christ. It is the simplest lesson of experience. The world is a place of struggle between good and evil, both of them making their home in us, and the advantage is on the side of evil. The Bible teaches the same truth. It tells us that we were "made in the image of God," carrying within us the possibility of heaven; it also tells us that we are "carnal, sold under sin," carrying within us something more than the mere possibility of evil. The everlasting problem of humanity is, "How to defeat the evil and move upward toward the best."

Christians find the answer in Jesus Christ. He gives us a goal and the power to live toward it. He shows us human nature at its supreme best, setting us a standard by which to measure all goodness. And then, when the real evil of our human nature comes into clearest light, He gives the power by which we can grow upward to the goodness that He has shown. Thus He becomes a source of gladness and confidence and courage.

Chapter III

Christianity is the religion of Jesus Christ. It is the religion He lived and taught; it is also the religion of which He is the center. It is therefore, in the strictest sense, an historical religion, for it had its origin in a definite place and at a time that we can fix, it had its complete expression in a human life, and it centers around a Person Who has actually lived among men. That Person is Jesus of Nazareth.

Along the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and stretching but a few miles back into the mountains, lies the land that we know as Palestine- For many centuries it was the home of the Jewish people. In this land and among this people Jesus lived. His home was a little village close up by the northern hills of Galilee. Out of this village Jesus went to become a public teacher of religion. He was about thirty years of age when His teaching-years began, and there is nothing to show that before then He had ever attracted any special attention to Himself. In three short years, or less, the work of His life was done. In those years He had no home, and no friends except the little group of pupils whom He gathered around Him. "Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, " He said once, "but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." 1 Another time He said, "Whosoever doeth the will of God he is My mother and sister and brother." 2 Judged by their consequences to the world, no other three years in all the centuries of human history have been so fruitful. The seeds of truth that Jesus sowed in those years have been bearing fruit in all the centuries that have followed, and still are bearing fruit today.

To be sure, the soil into which that seed was sown had already been prepared for it. That is what St. Paul meant when He said,

1 Matthew viii, 20. 2 Mark iii, 35.

"In the fullness of the times, God sent forth His Son." 3 The people among whom Jesus lived was a religious people. Their religion was peculiarly their own; no other people shared it. They believed in the One God, while others believed in many gods ; they had a religious law of righteousness higher than any other nation had ever had; they had done more thinking, and clearer and truer thinking, about God and righteousness and truth than had been done by any others. This had prepared them for the work that Jesus was to do, and men who believe in Jesus look back now to the time when this preparation was going on and see in it the work of God Himself.

Thus Jesus did not have to begin at the beginning, as does a Christian teacher who goes into a heathen land today. The foundations were already laid- The people to whom He came had u the law and the prophets." For centuries, too, they had been expecting the advent of a great religious leader whom God was to send. They spoke of this Expected One as the "Mes-

3 Galatians iv, 4.

siah," the "Anointed." When Jesus came, He claimed that name for Himself. He has it still in the name of "Christ," which means "Messiah." He took the religion of the Jews as true within its limits, and transformed it into a new religion, deeper and broader and more wonderful. He could say, "Ye have heard that it hath been said to them of old time," and quote the sacred writings of the Jews, adding, "But I say unto you." 4

The teaching of Jesus drew to Him the attention of great crowds of people. They found in it things that made them think more deeply and more seriously than ever they had thought before. He touched their consciences and made them feel that they were sinners, because He set the standards of human character higher than ever any one had done. He taught them that a lustful thought broke the commandment against adultery, that anger violated the command, "Thou shalt not kill." 5 He taught the evil of selfishness as it had never been taught,

and the men who heard His words learned from Him that selfishness is the one great sin that is always dragging human nature down. He tore away the cloak of selfrighteousness and self-conceit that was making some men think themselves perfect, and men who were looked upon as saints found themselves pictured in His teaching as "white-washed sepulchres, outwardly beautiful, but inwardly full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." 6 It was a terrifying and humiliating message that Jesus preached to men who thought that human nature was very good, for He taught that human nature is not good as long as it has room for selfishness of any kind and still retains a single weakness or a single fault.

Nor was Jesus' teaching the only thing about Him that made men think. He actually lived the standards which He taught. That is one of the great differences between Him and all other teachers. Many men have given the world high and noble thoughts about life and character and conduct, though

e Matthew xxiii, 27.

none of them, not even the very greatest, has ever approached in his teaching the pure perfection of the thought of Jesus; but none of them has lived out his teaching as Jesus did. With enemies all around Him, seeking some flaw in His character which they might make a ground of accusation, he went quietly about His work, and foiled them by the completeness of His holiness. Most wonderful of all, the men who knew Him best, who lived with Him day by day for most of those three years, thought of Him at last as God, and called Him God; so completely did He satisfy the pure and lofty ideas of what God ought to be, which they had learned partly as Jews, partly as His disciples.