The life and teachings of Our Lord in verse, being a complete harmonized exposition of the four Gospels, with original notes, textual index, etc

Front matter

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Contents

I'AGE.

Symbols of the Evangelists, etc., .... vii.

Introduction, . viii.

Introduction

OF Lives of Christ, the present age is singularly prolific, but none of these are in verse. And yet it would be difficult to assign any good reason why a poetic Life should not be written— a veritable Life, not a Christiad. The Four Gospels, alike in the inspired Original and in our half-inspired Version, are semipoetic, and in a sense epical Who has not felt, in reading his English Bible, the rhythmic charm of its simple, sweet and melodious prose, rising in the lyric parts— in a manner so easy and natural as scarcely to be perceived, like the great ocean lifted upward by the tide— into the sounding sublimities and solemn organ harmonies of Hebrew verse— which has this divine peculiarity among others, that it does not, like the great master-pieces of Latin and Greek, for example, cease to be poetry when Hterally translated.

The Gospels— with this poetic base at the start, and an easy convertibility into metric form, of which Mr. Longfellow's *' Divine Tragedy" has afforded recent proof and excellent illustration— so far from forbidding, extend all possible sanction and encouragement to any viii, INTRODUCTION.

one who is willing to put them into verse. Doubtless, to do this worthily and well, something besides artistic skill is needed. As a first requisite, one must have mastered the meaning by diligent, critical, and reverential study of the text, aided by happy God-given power of insight, spiritual as well as poetic, so that in the inevitable change of words there may take place no change of sense, and no spilling of the life. While the task is confessedly delicate and difficult, and may be thought to argue presumption on the part of him who attempts it, the guilt ought not to be hastil}^ assumed, for a deep feeling of insufficiency is not incompatible with the boldness ol great undertakings.

God speaks by whomsoever He please's. He who made us, placed, we must believe, somewhere in the depths of our being a portion of His truth ; so that what a man utters, provided it comes from his truest and innermost, is, as it were, the voice of God speaking in him and from him. All truth, whether found within us or without us, is from Him. Out of the unsophisticated mouths of babes and sucklings He perfect^ praise, revealing to them divinest things hidden from the wise and prudent.

" The Evangel " is meant to be a poetic version, and verse by verse paraphrase, so far as it goes, of the Four Gospels, so called — anciently and properly regarded as

INTRODUCTION. Ix.

one — one Divine Evangelion (meaning Glad Tidings), synonymous with the history of one Life of the Son of God upon the earth. Irengeus, speaking of them collectively, calls them the '' four-sided or four-formed Gospel " (Evangelion tetramorphon); and this composite unity was further set forth in the Cherubic " Tetramorph" — made up of the Apocalyptic " four living creatures," blended and incorporated in a single form, not as now represented separately — symbolizing the Four Evangelists.

Although the narrative here given may seem to stop short of the end, it will be found, nevertheless, if we mistake not, to justify to some extent its claim, even in its present state, to be called a Life, by the fullness of its presentation of Christ's person, character, office and work, as foreshadowed in type, predicted in prophecy, and realized in His actual advent in the fullness of time — to which may be added, as reflected subsequently in the various Creeds of Christendom. A proper comprehension of what Fie was, is so inclusive of what He did, that His particular acts of power and mercy, in all the wonderfulness of their divinity, being no more than the necessary and inevitable outcome of His demonstrated Godhead, add little or nothing to the certainty of our faith or the completeness of our knowledge. The power of the Son of Man on earth to forgive sins is as well established by one miracle as a thousand.

X. INTRODUCTION.

Coleridge remarks : '' Commentators have a notable trick of passing siccissimis pcdilms (' with the driest feet') over difificult places." And Young too, satirizes :

" How commentators each dark passage shun And hold their farthing candle to the sun" —

but in all honesty the author of the Evangel pleads ''Not guilty," to the charge: for, not only has he not shunned, but he has even gone out of his way in pursuit of what is dark and difficult, not, he hopes, in the spirit of presumption, but from a deep conviction that the only way to be useful is to give help where help is needed ; to remove stumbling blocks ; and clear up passages " hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest unto their own destruction.'' Accordingly in his Notes on the Dead Sea and the site of the Cities of the Plain; on the Temptation; on the words and miracle of our Lord at the Marriage in Cana ; on Jephthah's Sacrifice of his Daughter ; and on Joshua's Command to the Sun to stand still, he has ventured to state his own views at considerable length, in the humble hope that they may contribute to give quiet to some minds dissatisfied with current theories and explanations. If any reader differs from him, he has the right to differ, and it need, therefore, be no ground of quarrel. He hopes to have said nothing to provoke the '' odium

INTRODUCTION. xi.

theologicum," whose unmeasured bitterness is proverbial. The author is notified that exception will probably be taken to the poetical form of the paraphrase. He confesses he does not see why rhyme should be a crime or verse felony. Poetry is older than prose. Of this we have what may be called paleontological proof in the structure of all languages. Our everyday speech is fossil poetry. Words which are now dead were once alive. The farther we recede and the lower we descend, the more do these wonderful petrifactions of old forms of poetic thought and feeling abound. They belong especially to the earliest times — to the fluid and formative period of language. Poetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other ; for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence, when

" With a soul as strong as mountain river

Man poured out praise to the Almighty Giver."

Words are free-born, and not the vassals of the gruff tyrants of prose to do their bidding only. They have the same right to dance and sing, as the dew-drops have to sparkle, and the stars to shine: and in the general jubilee consequent upon the angelic announcement of " the glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all people ; " when the hills are joyful, and the floods and the trees of the field are clapping their hands, and universal nature is testifying a miraculous delight, it were xii. INTRODUCTION.

Strange and pitiful if these free children of the air were not allowed to rejoice with the rest. But this general defence of poetry is not meant to be a defence of the author's own.

He wished to make an experiment in poetical hermeneutics. The admitted failure of all prose paraphrases, justified, he thought, the undertaking of a poetical one ; in the construction of which, he hoped to be able to avoid their capital error, that of substituting the general for the specific, the philosophic for the picturesque. *' The lower animals recognize and are grateful for kind treatment, but My rational creatures are insensible to it," may, as has been said, be the full philosophical equivalent of '' The ox knoweth its owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know, My people doth not consider," but what a difference in the effect of the two statements ! He believed that success in his attempt would mainly depend upon his ability to transfuse the Semetic life into Japhetic forms, to bring together thus the East and the West, unite the Orient with the Occident. A meter and a structure too artificial, like Pope's Messiah for example, he knew would defeat this. A simplicity bordering on homeliness, and a fetterless freedom allied to prose, he felt were essential ; and he framed his verse accordingly.

After this, he knew of no better way than, keeping as

INTRODUCTION. xiii.

near to the original as possible, to say what he had to say in the fewest and fittest words he could command, using- no term for any reason whatever that he would not use if he were writing prose ;* aiming in all cases to be faithful rather than fine ; and sparing no pains to be critically exact in giving the true sense of the Sacred Text, on the right interpretation of which hang all our hopes, and for that matter, too, all our creeds, for outside of this Record which God has given of His Son, we know nothing and can know nothing. In the prosecution of so mighty a task, covering the whole field of Theology, and constituting in itself, when completed, an entire Body of Divinity, it would not be strange if he had fallen short. In his daring attempt

'* On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object",

he is free to admit that there is a good deal of temerity, and it would argue his utter unfitness for his work if he did not profoundly feel it. He has sought to cast down and tread under foot all egotisms, vanities and low.

* Cowper remarks : " Every man conversant with verse-writing, knows, and knows by painful experience, that the familiar style is of all styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake."

xiv. INTRODUCTION.

ambitions ; and if in his weakness and unworthiness he has done anything to make the adorable Redeemer the object of a warmer love and a firmer trust; to draw closer the bands of a common brotherhood in an undivided fellowship of Christian love ; to make the Bible seem a dearer and diviner Book, its pages more luminous, its promises more precious, the heaven it reveals more certain, he would prize it infinitely more than the greatest epic success.

One of his objects has been, particularly in the Notes, to mediate between the student of Theology and the general reader, and put the latter in possession of knowledge not readily accessible. He has been careful to exclude everything fictitious, apocryphal and fabulous. In this respect his work differs from all Christiads and Messiads formed on the Homeric model, with their cumbrous machinery and gratuitous mythologies.

THE EVANGEL.

(second edition) BEING THE FIRST PART OF

The Life and Teachings of Our Lord.

IN VERSE.

These tilings are written, that ye might believe tJiaf Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing ye might have life through His name. — John xx :

To us there is but one God, the Father, of whom areall things, and we in Him ; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by Him. — I Cor. viii : 6.

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the propJiets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds. — Heb. i : 1,2.

PROEM.

SPIRIT DIVINE, the adding up of gifts, Communicable Godhead, be my Guest !

Grant me the true afflatus that uplifts, And be the oracle within my breast !

Guide me into all truth! bestow Thy best- Life, light, and love, that clarity of being Without which there can be no certainty of seeing,

No right discernment, singleness of eye !

In vain Thy beams illuminate the page : In vain the azure of that blessed sky Blazons dear attributes from age to age : Blinded philosopher, and darkling sage, The wise and prudent, seeing, nothing see.

Because there dwells in them no true sincerity.

O ignorance and folly of the wise !

Men never tire of endless labor, spent

In building Babels, and in babbling lies ;

Mere emptiness, on solemn trifling bent :

They from creation the Creator take,

And then th' astonished air with their Eurekas shake.

Of that called Science, much is only guess .

False as the Koran half that it declares : It feigns beginnings full of foolishness"^ — Faith hath its ladder which it climbs by prayers — This jumps the moon in fault of facts for stairs; And Ignorance, that cannot make a pin, Will make you myriad worlds and throw as many in.

* Mr. Darwin, in his recent work, " The Descent of Man," p. 198, says : " The early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards," etc. ; and further on: " Our progenitors no doubt were arboreal in their habits." Now, if Mr. D. had said simply, " / have no doubt," it would then have been merely a question of personal sincerity and credulity. But saying, as he does, there is no doubt, the proposition is so transparently false that he lays himself open to the charge of conscious falsehood; and of offering, moreover, direct insult to eminent physicists the world over, who, it is notorious, do doubt, scout and utterly deny what he so recklessly affirms.

Positiveness of assertion is a most unphilosophical substitute for proof. It savors of charlatanry. Mr. Huxley (one of Mr. D.'s warmest admirers, by the way) remarks: " One fact is as powerful in negativing a hypothesis as five hundred ; " and admits that the hypothesis of Natural Selection supplementing Evolution as an explanation of Origins, fails in the vital

Science is certainty, is truth found out, Not dreams about the genesis of man, Monstrous assumings, that admit no doubt He from the lowest forms of hfe began.

We dare to call him cheat and charlatan, Pretender, and no architect at all.

Who builds on airy guess a leaning, tottering wall.

A specious likelihood helps not the case ; One single proof were worth a million such : Science is never broader than its base ; Th' extended fabric topples at a touch, Jutting o'er fact— a hair's breadth is too much— For there is emptiness and the abyss, Hungry for unrealities as vain as this.

point of Hybridism. In other words, it trips at the threshold. It breaks down at the first trial. The first step conducts to a dead wall, or a closed door which the Darwinian key ought to open, but does not ; so we conclude so we are sure, so sure that the testimony of a thousand locksmiths would not make us surer, it is not the right one. The key is the proof. The right key is the key that unlocks ; and until we come with that, Nature sternly bids us away. It is an affront to her to seek, burglariously, to force an entrance by picking the lock or by breaking it : or by overleaping the ^yall. " He that entereth not by the door, but chmbeth up some other way, is a thief and a robber." .

But hybridism is not the only thing. Darwinism belies tendency. 1 his, if the monkey were the father of the man, ought to be always upward in the human direction, but it is not. The resemblance of the head of the baby ape to that of the human infant has been called " terrible." Now it is a si-nificant fact that development from this point is not manward

It is the greater that includes the less,

Not less the greater. One is not made four But by addition. From all singleness Th' involved unit is evolved, no more — Development increases not the store — After its kind each thing unfolds its powers : Man sums and tops them all — and by addition towers

Not evolution ; otherwise he ought, When dormant in the moUusk, to have woke, Growing to more till to perfection brought, Seen to be nearer as each morning broke — As from the acorn grows unstayed the oak — In straight progression to his goal and bound : Not mollusk after mollusk circling round and round,

but beastward. The chasm between the latent beast and the latent man grows wider and wider every hour. The largest ape, as Virchow remarks, keeps its baby brain. It is that part which grows least, while the growth of the jaws is enormous — whence he concludes that by progressive development an ape can never become a man ; on the contrary, that this very development has created the deep gulf between them. As a further mark of beasthood, he points to the fact that apes are born comparatively mature, soon reach their hmit of perfection, and die when man has scarcely outgrown his childhood. No species can, properly speaking, walk. They are climbmg animals, and the tree is their natural home. The arrest of development in the microcephalic idiot does not make him a monkey. He is a human being still, partially changed by disease.

But Evolutionists do not stop at the Ape ; do not stop even at the lower forms of life, but make the starting-point of genetic development to be raw Matter and Force ; and all that follows simply an affair of dynamics.

Through all the ages not advanced a jot.

Which is he, then, philosopher or fool ?

Who gropes in protoplasm and finds a dot, And calls it man, according to the school.

Far famed, of whittlers, whittling down by rule Humanity, till of humanity bereft, A microscopic cypher, meaning naught, is left :

And then, lest this primordial cell should hold Reason for Deity, they it invert And spill the life ; and of the mighty old Nothing retain, but simply dregs and dirt — Matter and force — whence rose, they dare assert, A Godless universe : blind struggle and endeavor Securing God-like ends infallibly forever.

Force is maker. Mind itself is but one of the innumerable results ot matter and motion. Intelligence, supreme or inferior, is not first but last : is found not at the centre but the circumference. The highest and greatest are the products of the lowest and the least. Gravitation given, there is no need of any other God. This, of course, is denied. It is denied that simple mechanical force ever can become vital, or anything but what it is. Evolution applies only to hfe. Any other application is a misnomer. Evolution presupposes a germ. What is in the germ it brings out, nothing more. What is involved, it evolves. A million cannot be evolved from one except in one way, that is by adding a million less one to the one. The germ must be enricKed by just so much by new endowments. For to unfold what is enfolded, prophesied, projected, provided for, potentially present and packed away, is the whole extent and possibility of its function. Below the level of life there is evidently no room for the differentiation and improvement arising from Natural Selection ; and so the stairs which

Since chey deny not to the world we see Birth and beginning, and are proud to show Their learned aptness in cosmogony^ How vulgar dust became, we seek to know, Germ of the Infinite, God in embryo.

Where hidden lay not only heaven and earth, But waiting Deity Himself, not come to birth.

Omniscience is somewhere : we must assume Omniscient atom, or omniscient mind — A boundless Unit in unbounded room — An All in all, or under or behind — Or God, or His equivalent, that designed After ideals this majestic whole, And gave to man a moral and religious soul.

serve us such an excellent purpose in our darksome descent down to this point, suddenly fail us, and the next step plunges us into the abyss. In the invariableness of mechanical and chemical laws there is nothing that can uplift. There is neither lever nor fulcrum. So it is God or nothing.

To evolve the Universe, we must first have the egg. But the question even then would arise, "Whence the egg?" and, "Why was it not hatched sooner?" Should the answer be, "It was hatched a million, billion, or a million billion years ago," the question would return, " Why not a million biUion years before that? " and so on, forever. If there was nothing extrinsic to the egg, no quickener, no incubator, it is impossible to conceive why it should be liable to take ort a state of activity at one point of the past eternity more than another. Evolutionists all admit a beginning; but self-evolution, to be consistent, ought to be without a beginning, for that implies an awakening and an awakener, and an awakener implies a God. It seems a pity, after all the pains taken to get rid of

Justice there is, administrative Right, Somewhere, in something, name it as you may, Wielding a sceptre of imperial might, Whose awful mandates none may disobey :

*' You ought, you shall, you must," we hear it say : The voice is God's, unless the voice deceive.

And we in high judicial atoms can believe.

If Nature does not juggle us, we are ; Not only are, but are the thing we seem- No docetism of science, making jar 'Twixt fact and fact, convinces us we dream : They sin against their Maker and blaspheme, Who trust the lower and distrust the higher.

And criminating consciousness make God a liar.

a Divine Cause, that the old exigency should continue. Seed and sowing, and a hand to sow, must go before ; then comes evolution. The farmer knows this, if not the philosopher.

Mind is, for we are. Personality belongs to it, for we are persons. To say mind depends upon the brain, is to say the Creator has brain. Brain is perishable, while God is eternal. The mind we discover in Nature is our mind, greater in degree, but the same in kind. Proofs of one great, originating, infinite Mind are so ubiquitous, so absolute, and so over^vhelming. that denial is little short of blasphemy. It is hke the sin against the Holy Ghost. We tolerate in scientists and philosophers what we condemn and punish in others. These, it seems, may blaspheme with impunity. What can be more atrocious than the advocacy of a doctrine that is universally subversive— that strikes at the foundations of the world ? According to it the Universe is a huge imposture. All is simular and illusive : we are the dupes of tricksy atoms. Our senses, our consciousness, play us false.

Mind is and rules, and matter is her slave^ Resistless might and monarchy of will Over wide realms a thousand sceptres wave, Making blind force her purposes fulfill — Supreme in freedom, knowing good and ill : Th' accountable I am, the moral me.

By no dissolving bands is joined to Deity,

Right and wrong are words. Our holiest intuitions and infinitudes are but the development of molluscous perceptions. God is not, or if He is, not separable, not knowable, and consequently not a Being to be loved or feared or worshiped. Let these men pray for eyes, it is their greatest need.

True science is modest. It confesses ignorance. It waits for proof. It does not dogmatize a guess. We do not find fault with science, but only with those cultivators of it, who indulge in altitudinous assumptions of superior wisdom, and are nescient or omniscient, as it best suits them. Men imbued with ancient prejudices in favor of morahty and religion may well be pardoned for a little backwardness in accepting doctrines destructive of both. It does not follow that they are hostile to scientific inquiry, because they distinguish between assertion and proof. Darwin's proof is certain remarkable variations brought about in domestic pigeons by selective breeding, on which he founds the assertion that man was not created, but evolved from a monkey or a molecule spontaneously, without (to use a Lucretian phrase) "the meddling of the gods." But Huxley admits that thus far "we have not produced from a common stock two breeds which are not more or less fertile with another," and so practically the utmost variation that has been reached stops indefinitely short of the difference between a horse and an ass, for the offspring of these is infertile. Such then is the whole Darwmian " proof," if proof it can be called, and its infinitesimal smallness forms so ridiculous a contrast with the boundlessness of the assumption based upon it, as to be comparable only to the sportive exaggeration of the famous rhyme of the nursery :

" Hi diddle diddle, the cat's in the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon," when in reality she only jumped over a rather high fence.

Agassiz, to whom these and all facts of like nature were perfectly familiar, found in them no such significance as transmutationists ascribe to them. He says: "we find endless discrepancies, endless incongruities, appalling anachronisms in the would-be uninterrupted series of progressive events as advocated by the supporters of the transmutation dogma. .The assertion

PROEM. II

Knowledge is good, divine it is to know — Man's earliest instinct is a cry for light.

O for some guiding certainty below I For full of doubt and terror is the night Vague threatening shapes the guilty soul affright : Reason and conscience sound alarms within, And tremble at the possibilities of sin.

does not bear serious examination." These are the latest utterances of the foremost naturalist of his time, after fifty years unintermitted devotion to physical studies and investigation ; and yet Mr. Darwin has the effrontery to declare that " none but a man content to look like a savage at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, can any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation." And again, "Any hypothesis is better than the miserable assumption of a special creation." D'Alembert thinks, that Diogenes was the greatest man of antiquity, only that he wanted decency. Mr. Darwin's preeminence is clearly subject to the same drawback. He further says: "The earliest progenitors of our race were no doubt inferior in intellect, and probably in social disposition to the lowest existing savages,"— that is to say, were half beast, half devil. This is a specimen of that " Gospel of Brutality " which it is the office uf the "mild light of science" to introduce as a substitute for the Gospel "which brings life and immortality to light."

If these men of the microscope, keen in their quest of the small, and who make Nothing their quarry, instead of atheistic assumptions could be induced, just tentatively and for the once, to take up the God of the Bible, which also is the God of human hearts, merely as a scientific hypothesis, and work from that, not only downwards in the direction of man's origin, but upwards in the direction of his aspirations and his hopes, they would find, not only that it meets the exigencies of the physical half of his nature, but the spiritual and grander half likewise, which the atheistic hypothesis utterly ignores. Will not the clay patronize the Potter that far ?

Science, or that which arrogates her title, ends in a confession of ignorance. Out of her own mouth is she judged. Her Arctic voyage of discovery is simply a record of di'=:astrous shipwreck and hopeless imprisonment in interminable continents of ice, with the North Pole unreached. We pity the unfortunate survivors. They return not as they went. The frost has entered the blood and affected the brain. " Poor Tom's a-cold." They go about mumbling in an imbecile way something respecting " the

Divine Evangel, from four trumpets blown, Filled with melodious and immortal breath, To all the world forgiveness making known.

And free salvation from eternal death !

O, hearken the glad news it witnesseth, Ye sons of men, beware how you despise The voice of your Redeemer speaking from the skies.

Unknowable," as indicative, however, not ot humility and a willingness to learn, but a vertiginous vanity and a boundless self conceit. There may be, they say, a First Cause, but they doubt it. If there is a sun in the heavens they do not know it. Science, if this be science, is a foolserviceable for low mechanical utihties, but worthless for anything higher, nay, worse than worthless, a pestilent subverter and destroyer of all good, which ought to be banished from our schools and our firesides as fatal to virtue and the best interests of mankind. Man is a being agitated with unutterable hopes and fears. Heaven is high and hell is deep. It is enough that science can tell him nothing of what he most wishes to knowhaving heard nothing, no voice speaking out of the darkness, out of the eternal silence— without shrieking in his ear her gratuitous ignorances and conjectures of despair. " Where is the wise ? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? " Physicists are great sticklers for freedom ; but we shrewdly suspect that no form of tyranny would be so insufferable as that which would tie them down to fact, and oblige them to bring proof for all assertions. They are so mercurial a race that they would find the breeding of pigeons a dull business, we fear, unless they were permitted to enliven it with a Terpsichorean reel of atoms to the tune of a musical world-making. They denounce bigotry, but there is no class more narrow and intolerant than themselves. They have an easy creduHty which would have sufficed to make them first rate fanatics had they occupied themselves with religion instead of science. Surely " the wise are caught in their own craftiness." In view of such folly one is tem.pted to extol with Pope, " Good sense, which only is the gift of Heaven, And though no science fairly worth the seven." And pray with Quarles,