The life of lives; further studies in the life of Christ

Front matter

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Preface

Twenty-SIX years ago* I was led by “God’s unseen Providence, which men nickname ‘ Chance,’ ” to write and publish a “ Life of Christ.” It was based on long study, primarily of the Four Gospels and the Old and New Testaments, and, next, of all the sources of knowledge open to me, from the most ancient to the most modern. Manifold as were the imperfections of my work — of which no one is more conscious than I am myself — the book was found useful, and has not only been read in all parts of the English-speaking world, but has also been translated into many languages — even into Japanese. It has been most widely disseminated in two translations throughout the whole of the Russian Empire, and has brought me many expressions of gratitude alike from English-speaking readers and from foreigners of every rank. I desire to record my humble thankfulness to God for permitting me to render this service — however small — to what I believe from my heart to be the cause of Righteousness and Truth.

Since my “ Life of Christ ” was published, much criticism, alike favourable and adverse, has been written upon it. But with perfect readiness to modify any statement which can be disproved, and to alter any error which can be demonstrated, I have seen no reason to correct a single conclusion of the smallest vital importance. It is therefore needless for me, and it would be superfluous, to attempt to re-narrate the external incidents in the mortal days of the Saviour of Mankind. In some pages, however, the subject has obliged me to revert to considerations on which I have already dwelt.

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PREFACE.

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The object of the present book is different. It deals with questions of high importance, which the Gospels suggest, and aims at deepening the faith and brightening the hope in Christ of all who read it honestly. “Sis sus, sis Divus , sum Caltha, et non tibi spiroS

And so I send it forth with the humble petition, offered “ with bent head and beseeching hand,” that He who deigned to bless my former efforts will bless this effort also, to the furtherance of His Kingdom, and the good of His Church.

He came to “holy and humble men of heart”; and those who believe in Him, and would fain go to Him — and to Him only — for knowledge and for wisdom, will say with St. Paul: “To me it is a very small thing to be judged by man’s brief day.”* They desire no approval,, save that of Him whose “lie ” and “ Venite" shall settle all questions and controversies for ever. •

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Chapter 1. The Divine Birth

“ Who . . . emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of man.” — Phil. ii. 7.

“ The unfathomable depths of the divine counsels were moved ; the fountains of the great deep were broken up ; the healing of the nations was issuing forth ; but nothing was seen on the surface of human society but this slight rippling of the water.” — Isaac Williams, The Nativity.

To the vast majority of true Christians the unalterable belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, the Saviour of the World, comes from the witness of the Spirit in their hearts. It is not mainly derived from any one process of argument, or even from the convergence of many different lines of demonstration. Confluent streams of probability may have helped to swell the current of their conviction, but the main reason why their faith remains unshaken by any doubt is because they know Christ and are known of Him. The light which lighteth every man that is born into the world came from Him, and was concentrated upon Him in the fulness of its illuminating splendour. There are many whose whole life is lived by faith in the Son of God. They would say with St. Paul : “ With me to live is Christ.” We may indeed lose this blessed certainty —

“ For when we in our viciousness grow hard,

O misery on’t, the wise gods seal our eyes,

In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut To our confusion.”

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But “ Belief lives in us through Conduct,” * and while an immoral Deism produces men like Aretino and Marat, the faith in Christ has produced thousands of such saints as Francis of Assisi and Vincent de Paul. To all whose daily experience is that Christ is with them, and within them, belief has become part of their inmost being. With a power which transcends all earthly knowledge, the Spirit beareth witness with their spirits that they are “ sons of God,” because they have been admitted into the Brotherhood of Him who was the Son of God. To them He is not only “ Verax " and “ Verus ,” but “ ipsa Veritas .”

To those who abound in this beautitude of certainty — and they are, thank God, “ a great multitude whom no man can number” — argument has become needless. We may modify the words of the Poet and say that —

“ In such high hours Of inspiration from the living God,

Thought is not, in devotion it expires.'*

But there are millions who have never attained to this experience. To us it seems as though man lived in the very midst of miracles — miracles stupendous, innumerable, incessant. To us “ the starry heavens above,” and still more “ the moral law within,” are a perpetual miracle ; nor would the supernaturalness of those miracles be to us diminished, even though every phenomenon of the material, moral, and spiritual Universe could be directly explained by what are called “natural” laws. To us the outer Universe is but an atom in God’s infinitude, or, as the Rabbis expressed it, “God (who in Talmudic literature is often called Maqom or ‘Space’) is not the Universe (Ha- Maqom), but all the Universe is in God.” f To us the natural is itself a supernatural phenomenon. Nature is but a name to express the laws which God has impressed upon His Universe.

* Schleiermacher.

f See Hershon, Genesis acc. to the Talmud , p. 170.

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Those who hold these views — those who think not only that God is but that He “ worketh hitherto ” ; those who believe in God’s perpetual Providence, and do not reduce Him to the Blind Fate of the Stoics, or the Supernal Indifference of the Epicureans; those who accept the words of Scripture that “ He careth for us,” and “ is about our path, and about our bed, and spieth out all our ways” — constitute the immense majority of mankind, to whatever religion they may belong. We do not observe that such are, in any respect, less wise, less learned, or less intellectually clear-sighted, nor have they rendered fewer services to mankind, than the minority who take upon them to set aside such views as childish and obsolete superstitions. In this majority are numbered all the most supremely great of those who, compared with their brethren, have been “ among the molehills as mountains, and among the thistles as forest trees.” In all the histories of the nations you can scarcely find one man of epochmaking eminence who has not believed in the God who is not far from every one of us, since in Him we live, and move, and have our being. Are we not, then, entitled to say with confidence, as all the best, greatest, and wisest of men have believed, that God has not resigned His care for the creatures of His hand to the exclusive working of what are called “ natural laws”? Securus judicat orbis terrarum.

Again, may we not urge a second argument upon those who, because of the supposed invariableness of natural laws, cannot conceive that God ever works, or has worked, in the affairs of man except in exact accordance with the observed order? May we not ask them to consider that miracles themselves are nothing but an outcome of that Natural Law which, after all, is but a partial synonym for the will of God? If it be perfectly within the power of man to make a machine which should, in unvarying sequence, push out, one by one, every number, from a unit to (say) ten millions, and then — simply by the pre-arranged

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construction of the machine itself — should skip a number, and go from ten million to ten million and two , how absurd is it to suppose that even the apparent violation, or supersession, of laws may not be due to the very laws themselves — just, for instance, as a balloon, very heavy and laden with human beings, mounts upwards by the very law of gravitation which seems to draw all objects downwards^ To start, as sceptics haye often done, with the dogma that “ Miracles do not ” — or even that “ miracles cannot — happen” is surely short-sighted and unphilosophical ; to say nothing of the fact that such an axiom sets aside masses of evidence — accumulated in age after age and still accumulating — that miracles (i. e ., events which apparently supersede or transcend the every-day order) have happened, and do happen continually. “ Nature ” is but a name for God’s normal and continuous government; and “ chance is but a nickname for His unseen Providence. “ What is disturbed by a miracle,” said Professor Mozley, “is the mechanical expectation of a recurrence.”* “Law I know; but what is this necessity but an empty shadow of my own mind’s throwing ? ” f

Why, then, should the supernatural birth of the Saviour of the World appear to sceptics to be a difficulty so stupendous, and so insuperable, that it is only fit to be contemptuously set aside?;): Is it wise to feel such confidence in arguments which, after all, convince very few, and which have not shaken the belief of men whose transcendent intellectual powers could be questioned by none? Are myriads of the most brilliant men of action and men of genius whom the world has ever seen, such utter fools that a sceptic, because of his own peculiar idiosyncrasy, may

* Mozley, Bampton Lects., p. 56. f Huxley, Lay Sermons , p. 158.

\ It should be observed that, as Weber points out, the story of a Virgin-birth was not likely to have been invented by Jewish Christians, for it formed no part of the current Messianic expectation {Die Lehren des Talmuds , 339- 342) ; and, even among the Jews, Is. vii. 14, was not understood in this sense.

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sweep away, as though it were a mere contemptible nullity, the initial fact in the faith of Christians? If the Virgin-birth of the Saviour of Mankind had stood alone — if nothing had led up to it ; if nothing had sprung from it ; if the witnesses to it were untrustworthy liars, who were morally capable of having palmed off upon the world a conscious fiction — then doubt would have been natural. But when the event stands, as it does, — quite apart from religion, — as the central point of the destinies of mankind ; when we see that all the history of the past led up to it, and that all the illimitable future was, and must still be, dominated by it ; when we see how it fulfilled the prophecies and yearnings of Humanity among the heathen as well as among the Jewish race, and how it has been the germ of all that was best and greatest in the progress of the ages which have followed — the fact ceases to stand alone. Had “ the man Christ Jesus” been but one of the millions — if He had been merely distinguished above His fellows by ordinary human greatness — doubt might have been excusable. But when we see in that Babe lying in the cradle One of whom all the Prophets had spoken, and One to whom ever since that Nativity — amid the intensification of all Light, and all Knowledge, and amid the undreamed-of splendour of immeasurable Progress — alike the humblest and the greatest of human intellects have looked; — when we see that (to use the words of the German historian whom a study of history converted to Christianity from unbelief) “ Christ lifted the gate of the centuries off its hinges with His bleeding hand ” — the case becomes far different. The greatness of Jesus, even if we regard Him simply as a man among men, not only transcends, but transcends inconceivably and immeasurably, the combination of all the forms and varieties of human greatness. The ages which have followed have all looked to

“ Him first, Him last, Him midst, and without end.

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As they have contemplated Him, in the Unity of the Father and the Holy Spirit, they have exclaimed, “ Whom have we in heaven but Thee ? ” and as they have felt the penetrative, all-absorbing influence of His human personality, they have exclaimed, “ There is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.” *

i. History has borne its witness to Him. The Jews, who in their decadence no longer listened to Moses and the Prophets, but to Sadducean Priests and posing Pharisees, fell into utter and immediate ruin in accordance with His prophecy. The grandeur of the Roman Empire was humbled to the dust, and vanished before Him. The Northern nations, abandoning their ignorance and savagery, knelt humbly before “ The White Christ,” and, conquerors though they were, accepted the religion of the Christians whom they had conquered. “ In all my study of the ancient times,” wrote the German historian Johann von Muller, “ I have always felt the want of something, and it was not till I knew our Lord that all was clear to me ; with Him there is nothing that I am not able to solve.”

The great rulers have claimed their authority from Him alone, and have confessed His absolute pre-eminence. The first Christian Emperor wove upon the labarum of his armies His cross of shame; and it is set in jewels on the diadems of many kings. The oldest crown of Europe — the famous iron crown of Lombardy — was venerated most because it was believed to be made of an iron nail from the cross on Golgotha. “ Bow thy head, Sicambrian,” said St. Remigius to Clovis after the victory of Tolbiac ; “ burn what thou hast adored, adore what thou hast burned ! ” Godfrey of Bouillon, when crowned King of Jerusalem, would not wear a crown of gold where his Saviour had worn a crown of thorns. Rudolph of Hapsburg, founder of the great Empire of Germany, when no sceptre could be found amid the tumult of his coronation, grasped a crucifix and swore that that should be his sceptre. Napoleon, the last

* Ps. lxxiii. 25.

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great conqueror of modern days, said in his exile, “ I know men, and Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christ and all other religions whatsoever the distance of infinity : from the first day to the last He is the same — always the same, majestic, simple, infinitely firm and infinitely gentle. Between Him and whoever else in the world there is no possible term of comparison.” *

2 . POETRY is the choicest flower of all human thought ; and just as the greatest poets of the ancient world who knew God — like Isaiah, and Amos, and the Psalmists — had sung of the coming Christ, so, since He was born, all the supremest poets without exception — Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson — have come to Him with their singing robes about them, and laid their garlands most humbly at His feet. Truly

“ Piety hath found

Friends in the friends of Science, and true prayer Has flowed from lips wet with Castalian dews.”

Nay, even in the ancient heathen world, supreme poets have stretched blind hands of faith and prayer to the Unknown Deliverer. ALschylus, sublimest of the Athenian tragedians, in his greatest drama, makes Hermes say to Prometheus: “ Expect not at all any termination of this thy anguish till some one of the gods appear as a successor to thy toils, and be willing to go down into the unlighted Hades, and around the gloomy depths of Tartarus.”f And Virgil, sweetest of all the Roman singers, wrote in his Fourth Eclogue a prophecy of the Golden Age which was at hand, and the Child* whose manhood would inaugurate a reign of peace in a world of

* In a conversation with Genl. Bertrand, Comte de Montholon, Rhit de la Captiv. de V Empereur Napoleon.

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beauty ; and this he wrote in such strains as almost elevated him to the rank of an inspired Seer.

3. Philosophy has occupied the minds of some of the loftiest of the human race, and it has been the lifelong pui suit of many a

“ Grey spirit, yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a guiding star,

Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought.”

But these grave and earnest students of the problem of the world have often either sunk into despondency, like Zeno and Marcus Aurelius, for lack of the hope which Christ has inspired into the hearts of men ; or, like Plato, they have looked yearningly forward to some Unseen Deliverer whom as yet they knew not, though they were convinced of the awful necessity for His Advent. Kant used indignantly to repel every word spoken against the historic Saviour, and regarded himself as a mere bungler, interpreting Him as best he could.* “ Philosophy,” said Pico della Mirandola, “ seeks truth. . . Religion possesses it.” f

4. Art reveals to us the Unseen. It teaches us to see, and what to see, and to see more than we see with our bodily eyes; and since Christ was born, all the greatest Art in the world, without exception, has been consecrated to His glory. To Him have been reared those “ Epic poems in stone,” those glorious Churches and Cathedrals, shadowy with immortal memories, which make us exclaim,

“ They dreamt not of a perishable home Who thus could build ”;

and under whose hallowed shade we feel that

“ Bubbles burst, and folly’s dancing foam Melts if it cross the threshold.”

To His glory the greatest of sculptors set free the imprisoned angels which, to his imagination, seemed to be strug-

* Vorowski, Life of Kant, p. 86.

f Pic. Mirand., Opp. 359.

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gling in the blocks of unhewn marble; to His glory Giotto and Leonardo, Raphael and Luini, Vittore Pisano and Lorenzo di Credi, Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio, Albrecht Diirer and Holbein — and with them the greatest of all the painters, down to our own Millais, and Burne-Jones, and Holman Hunt — have devoted the strongest and purest of their powers. For love of Him, and with no thought of gain, Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli painted their soft and silent pictures, even as, long centuries earlier, the poor and persecuted Christians of the Catacombs had made the walls of those dark corpse-crowded galleries bright with their emblems of Orpheus, the Dove, the Fish, the Vine, and the Fair Shepherd with the lamb or kid upon His shoulder. From the earliest dawn of the Gospel down to the present day, no pictures have been comparable in greatness to those in which the supremest artists have consecrated to the memory of Christ the glory of the fair colours, and the inspiration of hallowed thoughts.

c. And to take one other all-embracing sphere of human intellect, the sphere of SCIENCE, in that region, too, the most eminent human souls — men like Copernicus, Bacon, Leibnitz, Descartes, Haller, Pascal, Ray, Franklin, Herschell, Agassiz, Faraday, and many others — not losing sight of the Creator in the multitudinous marvels of His creatures, have looked to Christ as their Lord and their God. “ A little Philosophic,” as Bacon said, “ inclineth a man’s mind to Atheism, but depth in Philosophic bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”* Among the Coryphaei of Science two names stand supreme — Kepler and Newton. Kepler wrote of Christ with the profoundest reverence, and Newton — “ the whitest of human souls ” as well as one of the most richly endowed — raised his adoring eyes to heaven in uttermost simplicity, and sincerely believed in the Lord Jesus Christ with all his heart. The first mortal eyes which ever observed the transit of Venus were those of * Bacon, Essay 16. Of Atheisme.

IO

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Jeremiah Horrocks, then a humble curate at Hoole. He hurried to his telescope in the intervals between three Sunday services, and, though his observation was of such consummate astronomical importance, he recorded in his diary — a nd the sentence is carved upon the tablet placed to his memory two centuries later in Westminster Abbey — that he broke off his work to goto the humble service in the little village church — “ ad majora avocatus quae ob haec parerga negligi non decuit .”

On one occasion a friend, Sir Henry Acland, found Michael Faraday in tears ; with his head bent over an open Bible. “I fear you are feeling worse,” he said. “No,” answered Faraday, “ it is not that ; but why, oh, why will not men believe the blessed truths here revealed to them ?” A humble and reverent study of the laws which God has impressed upon the Universe has made

“ The pale-featured sage’s trembling hand Strong as a host of armed deities,

Such as the blind Ionian fabled erst : ”

and yet of those sages, from Copernicus to Faraday, and down to the most eminent of our living students of Science, the foremost have not only had faith in God, but also have believed rightly in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

6. So, then, for Earth’s loftiest intellects — as one of the foremost and most learned poets of our own generation has sung —

“ The acknowledgment of God in Christ,

Accepted by the reason, solves for thee All problems in the world, and out of it.”

And the same is true of those who have evinced a yet diviner greatness by scaling the loftiest moral heights and showing the utmost glories of self-sacrifice. If the men of loftiest genius in the world have acknowledged Christ, this was if possible even more the case with those who have

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conferred on the human race the highest and most deep-reaching services of pity and goodness. What was it but the Divine trembling pity which he had learned from Christ, and the commission which he had received from Him, that sent forth St. Paul to preach the Gospel amid his daily death of hatreds, miseries, and cruel persecutions, till, like the blaze of beacon fires kindled from hill to hill, its glory flashed from Jerusalem to Antioch, to Ephesus, and to Troas, and thence leapt over the sea to Athens, to Corinth, to Imperial Rome, and even to our Britain, the Ultima Thule of the World? What made the Roman lady Fabiola spend her fortune in founding hospitals at Rome, and in distant lands? Why did St. Jerome bury himself in the Cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem to translate the Bible from the Hebrew into Latin ? What made the boy St. Benedict fly from the allurements of Rome to the Rocks of Subiaco and found the order to which learning owes so deep a debt? Why did St. Bonaventura, when asked the source of his great learning, point in silence to his Crucifix? Why did St. Thomas Aquinas, when asked by Christ in vision, Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma. Quam mercedem recipies ? reply immediately “ Non aliam nisi Te , Domine ? " Why did sweet St. Francis of Assisi strip himself of everything, and, by living as a pauper and a beggar, infuse new life and holiness into an apostatising and luxurious world? What led St. Francis Xavier to lay aside his rank and his pleasures, and become a wandering missionary, gaining by his sacrifice a happiness so intense that he even prayed God not to pour upon him such a flood-tide of rapturous beatitude ? What sent the Baptist cobbler, William Carey, with his first collection of £13 2s. 6d., to evangelise the mighty Continent of Hindostan ? Every one of these, and thousands more of all those whose lives have been a blessing to the world, would have answered “ CHRIST.”

What but the love of Christ constraining him led John

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Howard to toil among plague-stricken prisoners, until his death at Cherson, on the Black Sea, “ clothed a nation in spontaneous mourning,” and/ 4 he went down to his grave amid the benedictions of the poor * ? What made Elizabeth Fry go unaccompanied among the wild, degraded, brutalised women of Newgate, and take them by the hand, and raise them from the depths of their fallen humanity? Why did men like Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharpe, Zachary Macaulay, and William Wilberforce, with an energy which nothing could daunt, with a persistence nothing could interrupt, use their time, their talents, their fortunes, and every energy of their minds and bodies — and that in spite of ridicule, hatred, peril, and reproach — “ to save England from the guilt of using the arm of freedom to forge the fetters of the slave ” ? * What sent Father Damien to wretched and squalor-stricken Molokai, to live, and catch the leprosy, and die a leper among the lepers in the dismal isle? What made Lord Shaftesbury vow himself, while yet he was a Harrow boy, to works of mercy which added the brightest jewel to the glory of Queen Victoria’s reign ? What enabled him — amid the venomous attacks of the Press and the world, and the chill aloofness of the clergy — to toil on until he had inaugurated the Ragged School movement, and passed the Ten Hours and the Factory Bills ? Why should the poor Portsmouth cobbler, John Pounds, have troubled himself, day after day, to gather the ragged waifs into his stall, and teach them with letters torn down from the advertisements upon the walls, and so — poor and ignorant as he was — to give an impulse to our great national system of education? What influenced Robert Raikes, the Gloucester printer, to begin the work which established Sunday Schools throughout the length and breadth of the world ? “ I thought, Can 1

do nothing for all these wandering little ones ? A voice said to me ‘ Try.’ I did try, and lo ! What hath God wrought ! ”

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Or take the best and most widely known of the effective workers of to-day amid the slums of unutterable squalor and degradation. Ask them what is the hidden force which sustains them in the long and thankless self-sacrifice of their lives, amid the scorn of worldlings and formalists, who look down upon them from the lordly altitudes of their own utter inferiority. What made General Sir Henry Havelock face so many sneers for holding Bible classes among his soldiers, and winning them to Total Abstinence ? What made General Gordon so kind to the poor, ragged, homeless boys of Greenwich ?

One and all, they would give the same answer, “ The Love of Christ constraineth us.” They would be ready to say with St. Ignatius, “ Come fire, and the cross, and crowds of wild beasts ; come tearings, breakings, and crunching of my bones; come the mutilation of my members, and shatterings of my whole body, and all the dreadful torments of the Devil, so I may but attain to Jesus Christ.”* He felt that “ he who is near to the sword, he who is among the wild beasts, is near to God.” f

We are trying, they would say, to walk in the footsteps, we are trying to continue the work, of Him who was the Good Physician, of Him who went about doing good. We would fain be imitators of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — of Him who taught that Love is the fulfilling of the Law ; of Him who summed up the Law of God in Love to Him and to our neighbour. Has any unbeliever rendered to mankind the millionth part of such immortal services ? I am not aware of a single supreme effort for the amelioration of the manifold miseries of mankind which has not been due to the inspiration of Christian enthusiasm. “ There is nothing fruitful but sacrifice ” — and the noblest and most continuous self-sacrifice which the world has seen has sprung simply from the belief in, and the imitation of, Jesus Christ.