Ecce Deus: essays on the life and doctrine of Jesus Christ. With controversial notes on "Ecce Homo".

Front matter

m

Messrs. ROBERTS BROTHERS

PUBLISH THE FOLLOWING

Preface

A careful consideration of the various points raised in Ecce Homo induced the present writer to undertake a re-survey of the Life and Doctrine of Jesus Christ. He found, however, that he could not occupy the stand-point from which Ecce Homo had been written without, as it appeared to him, ignoring the mystery of the Incarnation, and thus putting himself into a false relation to all subsequent facts in Christian history. The following pages will show that on several points the writer finds himself in perfect coincidence with the author of Ecce Homo; and he ventures to believe that on those points upon which the differences are irreconcilable he has not been betrayed into- a- tone .which, is inconsistent with the respect due to the finest genius and the frankest candor. In the following pages the writer proceeds upon four convictions : —

First : That it is not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, rightly to survey the Life and Work of Jesus Christ without distinctly acknowledging the unprecedented conditions under which Jesus Christ became incarnate.

Second : That those conditions can alone account for, and are essential to a true interpretation of, the

6 PREFACE.

entire doctrine and phenomena associated with the name of Jesus Christ.

Third : That those conditions and the whole course which they inaugurated (the miraculous conception, the doctrine, the miracle, the death and the resurrection), constitute a unity which necessitates the conclusion that Jesus Christ was God Incarnate. And —

Fourth : That the author of Ecce Homo, having overlooked or ignored those conditions, has worked from a wrong centre, and reached several sophistical and untenable conclusions.

It appears from his Preface that the author of Ecce Homo felt himself obliged to trace Christ's " 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." The present writer does not undertake to suggest that Church doctors and apostles did not critically weigh the facts themselves ; but he does undertake to say that no weighing of the facts can be satisfactory which ignores the fact which lies at the base of the Christian structure. Nor does he see how the author of Ecce Homo can trace the biography of Jesus Christ " from point to point," when he only professes to " place himself in imagination at the time when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply .... a young man of prom'se, popular with those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favor." How can a biography be traced " from point to point " when the " critical weighing of the facts themselves" does not begin

PREFACE. 7

until the subject of the biography has actually attained a " promising" and "popular position"? If a biography is to be traced from " point to point," how can it be done without referring to the birth, if not to the ancestry, of the person whose biography is traced? Suppose that a writer should undertake to trace from point to point the biography of the author of Ecce Homo, would the author, or would the public, be satisfied if the writer did not open the narrative earlier than the time of the appearance of that book? Yet this is what the author of Ecce Homo does with the biography of Jesus Christ, and with this disadvantage on his part, that he overlooks a fact without which all the succeeding facts never could have transpired. No " young man of promise, popular with those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favor" (and there have been tens of thousands of such young men), ever did what Jesus Christ did ; a fact which, " critically weighed/' certainly suggests the necessity of going farther back than the time of "promise" and " popularity," in order to find out whether there was a reason explanatory of the whole series of phenomena. The embarrassment of the present writer was considerably increased by another expression in the Preface to Ecce Homo: — -"After reading a good many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that there was no historical character whose motives, objects, and feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which has proved useful to himself may chance to be useful to others." How the author could diminish the incomprehensibleness of Christ's life by simply regarding Christ as " a

8 PREFACE.

young man of promise, popular with those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favor," does not appear. The present writer is " constrained to confess" that, in proportion as he regards Jesus Christ in this light merely, the Life as narrated in the New Testament becomes utterly ^comprehensible. Not until he realizes the fundamental fact of the Incarnation does he understand the sense in which Jesus Christ calls himself Son of God and Son of Man.

The present writer felt the difficulty of choosing a title for his book. It seemed to him that if the author of Ecce Homo intended to maintain the Godhead of Jesus Christ, it would not be unnatural for him to select the title of Ecce Deus; on this point, however, he was of course not informed, and he adopted the present name because it expresses most concisely the doctrine which is taught in the book.

Ecce Deus is not a reply to Ecce Homo. It claims to be an examination of the Life and Doctrine of Jesus Christ conducted on independent ground.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Holy Thing 13

II. The Written Word 24

Chapter I. The Holy Thing

MANY false Christs have gone out into the world. The Christ that was born in Bethlehem has now to compete with the Christ born in the poet's fancy, carved out of an ideal humanity, or developed out of a benevolent sentiment. This noble, simple Nazarene has been left behind somewhere, probably in the Temple, or has passed through so many guises that the characteristic lineaments have been lost. This circumstance is a significant feature of the spiritual civilization of the day. Deepest and truest among its lessons is the doctrine that men must have a Christ. There has ever been a motion, a gravitation, more or less palpable, towards a man who should be the complement of every other man ; and who, by the perfectness of his manhood, should be able to restore and preserve the equipoise which universal consciousness affirms to have been disturbed or lost.

The Incarnation is the radical mystery in the life of the Christ accepted by the Church. Without following the theologian into doctrine, we are bound to follow the historian into matters of fact. The historian introduces a man, under the name of Jesus, who was begotten as no other man was ever begotten. He does not represent the usual conditions of human birth, but stands alone among all men. The mysteriousness of his origin, even if it be but a supposition, will supply an easily available test of his entire life and teaching ; the man who begins as no other man ever began, must continue as no other man ever continued.

In other senses than that of the procreation of human life, there have been miraculous conceptions in every age — conceptions by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost too. Every foremost thought of God among men, every struggle of the soul in the direction in which God is supposed to have gone, has been an effect of divine operation upon the mind. In Jesus Christ alone have we a life which claims to have been produced immediately by a superhuman relation to the human body. Yet, though so produced, "the holy thing" born of the Virgin did not collide with the human race as an unexpected antagonistic element, but took his place in the human family by a process which, on one side, was fitted to awaken awe, and on the other, to excite sympathy. The world of the East had been accustomed to what may be termed miraculous conceptions in the intellectual sphere, as the world of the West has since become. Intellectual history presents a succession of births quite, in their degree and according to their nature, as inexplicable as any occurrence that could transpire in the merely material sphere. " The Holy Ghost has come upon, and the power of the Highest has overshadowed," all who have wrought upon the springs of civilization and enriched the resources of human life : poem and picture, book and statue, that have touched the world's soul, and given it any hint that there was a portion of the universe beyond the narrow visual line, or a deeper life in itself than could be sustained by bread alone, have been, notwithstanding the apparent irreverence of the expression, miraculous conceptions, fruits of the Spirit's strife with the human mind. The Spirit had to move upon intellectual chaos, and now all orderliness, or beauty, or music ; is attributable to his power. The grim spectre of traditional orthodoxy may shudder at the notion, yet rather than pronounce the genius of civilization atheistic, it may be more reverent to describe it as a conception and production of the divine energy operating through human instrumentalities. The excess of difficulty is on the side of atheism, not of inspiration. On such a subject men are not required to be more orthodox than the Bible itself. Moses hesitated not to say that the Lord had called by name Bezaleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and had " filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, and to devise curious works ; to work in gold and in silver and in brass, and in the cutting c f stones to set them ? and in carving of wood to make any manner of cunning work." Art is thus set among the miraculous conceptions, and civilization is robed as a worshipper in the outer court of the Temple. Stih we have not a man who claims, in a peculiar sense, '.c have God's life in his veins. We have seen Go d i* *r< r , can we see God in blood?

It is important to remember, what one would have thought could never have been forgotten, that there is a document written by many scribes, which professes to be an authentic history of a Man who openly claimed to have been begotten by the Holy Ghost. How can we test the validity of such a claim? Without inquiring whether there are any other ways, there is certainly this simple and effectual plan : Is the mystery of the life consistent with the alleged mystery of the origin ? Is the doctrine consistent with the birth ? If the man be found to be in perfect accord with the mystery, — in proportion, so to speak, to it ; if there be no break in the rhythm between the " sayings " of the teacher and the alleged revelation of the angel who foretold his birth, then this unity of mystery becomes itself an argument which compels certain conclusions. If, on the other hand, the phenomena of the birth and the tone of the doctrine be discrepant ; if the cloud of mystery has been employed to conceal defect of stature, then the claim to have been begotten by the Holy Ghost is not only unsupported, but positively contradicted. The present inquiry will revert again and again to the consistency between the declared divinity of the fatherhood and the teaching of Him who was begotten.

Omnipotence covers the whole ground of difficulty as to the possibility of such a conception as is claimed on behalf of Jesus Christ. No argument, therefore, need be started in defence of that side of the question. Given the existence of God, and the power required to bring out the alleged result will be granted too ; defect of power would be defect of Godhead, and defect of Godhead is an absurdity. Yet the entire Christ, so to speak, coming from God without human interposition, would have increased the difficulty of his acceptance among men. We can see how a union between the divine and human would have many advantages. If the Man spoke the language of earth with the accent of heaven ; if he encouraged men by his common human nature to approach him, and then gave them assurance that the human enshrined the divine, he would complete by his power what he had begun by his weakness. This much we can see merely as an argument, without conceding that the facts which are yet to be collated bear it out. Are there any traces of duality in Christ's life and teaching? Anything that would confirm his claim to have descended from heaven? On the very face of the life there are many such traces ; and in a more subtle and incidental way, there are hints and testimonies which should be scrutinized and estimated. We find Christ in the midst of a great multitude, and then he goes no man knowing whither ; he sends his disciples to buy food, and then tells them that he has meat to eat which they know not of; in the very act of talking to a man, he says that he is in heaven ; he is willing to be identified as the Son of Mary, yet never speaks of any father but God ; he is known to have had no opportunities of technical learning, yet his wisdom is acknowledged by the doctors of the law ; he submits to the fury of the ruffian band, yet talks of the legions of angels who wait but his prayer. All through we have these clualistic turns of speech — one part of the sentence plain, the other haloed with strange glory or lost in gloom.

This is a mere matter of fact, as found upon the face of the document which professes to contain the life of Jesus Christ. All this any sceptic would say, in common with any Christian. So far the matter is literary, not theological. Still there is an outline of an argument shaping itself from this view. The argument of consistency takes its inception at this point.

The so-called discrepancies on matters of fact, which some readers have professed to find upon a collation of the fourfold narrative, are less than nothing. History can never be written. It can only be hinted at, and most dimly outlined from the particular stand-point which the historian has chosen to occupy. It is only by courtesy that any man can be called an historian. Seldom do men so flatly contradict each other as upon points of fact. Incompleteness marks all narrations. No man can fully write even his own life. On reviewing the sheets which were to have told everything, the autobiographer is struck with their reticence and poverty. Two processes are synchronous in the act of writing, the process of the pen, and the process of the mind ; and because the mind sees the subject in all its magnitude and bearings, it considers itself rather than the reader, who approaches the question from an outside point. Men cannot print tones, glances, sighs, or tears. The heart always suffers by being translated into speech. Readers bring their own methods of reading, and often the book which is essentially musical is dishonored by a vitiated articulation. The life of Christ has suffered much in the same way. It suffered by being written at all, and that it has outlived its suffering is one of the firmest proofs that there is a

THE HOLY THING.

IO »

divine spirit in the earthly words. The life is before us in fragments only, and the most that we can do is to inquire whether the fragments lie in one direction, bear any evidence of having been cut out of the same rock, or testify to anything like unity of purpose.

It must be remembered that Jesus Christ had been the absorbing theme of all ages prior to his advent. This circumstance alone marks him off from all other men. The hope of his coming had kept society together, preserving it from intellectual and moral annihilation. When Christ came, long chapters of prophecy w T ere to be closed like gates through which a king or conqueror had passed. In Christ the prayers of many ages were to be answered. The prophecies respecting him were marked by that strange dualism which attached to his life : taken separately as mere statements of fact they are contradictory, but looked at in the light of the dual nature which he claimed there is immediate and perfect reconciliation. The great paradoxes of prophecy were harmonized in the greater paradox of the life. Christ was " a root out of a dry ground," yet he was " the flower of Jesse and the plant of renown ; " he was " despised and rejected of men," yet he was " the desire of all nations ; " he was " without form and comeliness," yet he was " the fairest among ten thousand, and altogether lovely ; " he was "the Child," yet he was "the Ancient of Days." Thus we are detained on the same line of mystery. Prophecy and fulfilment are different phases of the same paradox. The range of evidence is thus extended, so that any man claiming to be Christ must be brought for judgment to the standard of prophecy.

This fact does much to clear the field of intruders, and to narrow the ground of competition. Christ distinct- 1}' threw himself upon prophecy, and challenged scribe and doctor and rabbi to " search the Scriptures." There was no wish to escape the test of written prediction, but a determination to abide by a careful search of the records which were regarded as having been received immediately from God. He began at Moses and all the prophets, and showed from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. No challenge could be bolder. He stood at the close of the great prophetic dispensation and said, " the prophets wrote of me," and looking forward to the evolutions of time and tracing the course of religious education and development, he commanded that his name should be taught in " all nations." It was not, then, on some recondite and insignificant point that Christ claimed his position in the world, but on the broad ground of completed prophecy. He was the fruit which was to be produced by the roots of promise and hope which God had from the beginning put into the hearts of men. He closed the troubled era of prophecy, and opened a most gorgeous apocalypse, which took i. power and glory entirely from his own name. If any challenge could have developed a rival, or brought into prominence the lawful heir of the heritage described by the prophets, this would have done so. An unlearned man addressing the sages of his time, svho held the first literature of the world — not only unlearned but garbed as a peasant, poor in his known ancestry, and unsupported by any visible authority — said, l Open your scrolls and read the prediction of my person and power ; consult the prophets, and see if I bear not the hitherto mis-read signs of Messiahship ; recall the music of the minstrels of Israel, and say whether my heart be not in accord with their rhythm.' This made it hard work for an impostor.

The empiric may have brilliant visions of the future, but it is perilous for him to challenge his contemporaries to go far back in search of his ancestral roots. The case as laid down in the biographic document compels us to go beyond Bethlehem if we would understand the purpose of the birth. We have hardly turned the first page of the Bible until we feel that a new and marvellous element has been interjected into the history of man, which gives life and tone and purpose to the whole current of earthly affairs. The generations are centralized in one idea. From Abraham to David, from David to the carrying away into Babylon, and from Babylon until Herod reigned in Judea, there is a life far below the surface. From behind the prophetic veil, or through it, there glows the image of a man, stranger to everybody yet friendly to all. A marvellous image it is, so indistinct yet so positive ; gentle, yet carrying awful power, as the summer cloud carries lightning ; very near, yet distant as the unseen God. We feel this in coming along the biblical line ; feel that almost at any moment a Man might stand up in the very likeness and majesty of God ; and a strange, fascinating spell binds the reader, until having passed the prophecies he comes to the Star, and the Virgin, and the Child. That Child had been the mystery of all his reading ; there, in infant life, lay the explanation, itself a mystery, of all the tumultuous events and hopeful promises which made up the sum of prophetic history. We cannot understand the Child without at least recognizing that it is alleged that he came up from unbeginning time to express, audibly and visibly, what otherwise could never have been known of God.

The opening chapter of the Gospels is more than a catalogue of names. It is the Old Testament summarized ; it is human history in miniature ; an assembly of the Past convened to witness the birth of " the holy thing, called the Son of God." We go through the list to the manger-cradle, and the heart saddens at more than one point in this illustrious succession ; strange threads have been woven into this web ; — the patriarch is here, and the king ; the pure woman and the dissolute man ; eldest sons, and sons younger than their brethren ; names which make men proud of manhood, and names we would " willingly let die." Marvellous pedigree, indeed ! It will surely be a great risk to attempt to get out of this mass a Man who w r ill stand firm in all crises. The world has already lost one Adam, may it not lose another? In the case of the federal man the reading was brief and simple : we had the Creator and the creature at one sentence ; we moved at one step from God to Adam. In this second case, we have to proceed from Adam to God. In Genesis, the work was easy ; in Matthew, it seems as if through such a mass we could never find the promised Life. We wonder at what point of so desolate a Horeb God will fix his tabernacle of fire.

We are bound to consider the value of the fact that Christ throws himself upon the past ; he chooses his own tribunal, and it is one to which no Jew at least could object. Looking at the subject generally, this much is clear — that the mystery of the birth is in keeping with the mystery of the prophecy, and it now remains to be seen whether the mystery of the doctrine is in harmony with both. Whatever a fuller examination may disclose, there is before us, even so far, a great breadth of homogeneous mystery, — unique, unbroken, unparalleled. Any discrepancy here would vitiate the whole succession. No lapse of time, no combination of circumstances, can repair an error at this point. A well-known rule in law will hold good here : " Quod initio vitiosum est, tractu temporis convalescere non potest." If Christ is to command our confidence, he must continue to be what his claim to the prophetic past, and the alleged preternatural conditions of his incarnation, necessitate. A common man cannot be tolerated after so uncommon a beginning. If he be only a young man of high and most ambitious spirit, he has chosen a most perilous course, a course which must break down somewhere. It cannot be an easy task hypocritically to represent God upon the earth, without now and again letting the mask slip aside. How can the finite steadily carry the Infinite, when the Infinite is at w 7 ar with him ? Christ must be more than a good man, or worse than the worst man. If he be not God, he is the enemy of God.

2 4

Chapter II. The Written Word

THERE is a document which claims to be authentic, and which certainly comes before the world as no other book does. The Book claims to have had an origin as mysterious as the birth of Christ, — combining the human and divine. The hand is man's, the voice is God's. While this Christian document is before us, we are not called upon to write a life of Christ, but to interpret a life that is written, or to show cause for rejecting the document. Our relation to the document should be first ascertained. Are we to reserve the right of discrimination in reading the documentary evidence ? If so, by what law, or under what conditions, is the discriminative faculty to be regulated ? To receive the book just as it stands would be simply an exercise of faith ; to adopt an eclectic course, would involve the rendering of reasons for abandoning the immemorial orthodoxy of the Church. No doubt the Book is often thought of in a narrow and even unreasoning way by its admirers. Certainly, it is so sparing in details, as apparently to leave much of life unprovided for. It does not occupy a tenth part of the ground traversed by Plato, who, in connection with many lofty speculations, discoursed concerning lands and dwellings, hunting and fishing, cemeteries, monuments, and epitaphs, family quarrels and injury to property, rhetoric and geometry, with a thousand other subjects. Compared with this elaborate treatment of nearly all questions, the statements of the Christian writings are exceedingly bald and poor ; yet there may be more in those writings than in all the tomes of philosophy. God's first book, the book of nature, apparently leaves much of life unprovided for ; yet as men acquire skill to turn over the ponderous pages, they find that every want has been anticipated. Adam would hardly know the world of which he was the first occupant ; yet the primal forces and characteristics of nature are just the same as when he kept the garden of Eden. Modern civilization can hardly understand how men could subsist in ancient times, yet the earth abideth forever without appendix or supplement. What was wanting, was the faculty of interpretation. Men saw the water, but could not interpret it into steam ; they saw the lightning, but mistook it for an enemy ; they saw the sun, but could not fully interpret all he signified by the eloquence of light. The human power of interpretation grows ; yet after it has grown, it often forgets both the process and the fact. The volume of nature is precisely to-day as God published it ; but the latter readers are more sharp-sighted and inquisitive than the former. Civilization becomes wiser, keener, more ambitious and inclusive, year by year. Men were partly afraid, partly unable, to decipher the writing of nature ; they read the illuminated title, and settled down into contentment or indifference ; as if when " God finished the heavens and the earth," he also finished all the uses 2

26 ECCE PEUS.

and applications to which future ages would be disposed to put them.

The Christian writings abound in seminal ideas ; they are full of beginnings. The outlines are many, but there are no finished pictures. The value of those writings may be best represented by the term Life, We know they are inspired, because they are inspiring. The living man is the best confirmation of the living book. This book is not a plumb-line by which to test the perpendicularity of a wall ; it is a living spirit, quickening and regulating spirits capable of illimitable development. With infinite appropriateness, therefore, it cioses with an apocalypse, — not with a final line, but with prophecies of a future which shall eclipse the splendor of all earlier light. The Old Testament closed with a prophecy; the New Testament culminates in a revelation. The New Testament is only the beginning of books ; not a finished and sealed document, according to popular notions of finality, but the beginning of a literature punctuated and paragraphed by tears and laughter, by battle and pestilence, and all the changes of a tumultuous yet progressive civilization. The Apocalypse looks towards the future with ten thousand eager and glowing eyes. What if that apocalypse be fulfilling under our own observation, and Christ be saying to us, " Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the signs of the sky ; how is it ye cannot discern the signs of the times M ?

God is, so to speak, issuing ever-enlarging editions of the New Testament — so rapidly, indeed, that the world itself can hardly contain the books. Though we no longer know Christ after the flesh, yet we walk

THE WRITTEN WORD.

with him in the holy sanctuary of the spirit ; and from among the golden candlesticks, he throws out all the rays by which we read to-day's story and to-morrow's apocalypse. He is still " the light of the world," and still there is about him all the mystery of light. The light which reveals the landscape, needs itself to be revealed ; so paradoxical is nature, like nature's God, that we are dependent for revelation upon what is itself a mystery ! If we have ceased to know any of the facts of the Book — its temples, sacrifices, washings, oblations, and miracles — it is because we have come to a deeper sympathy with its spirit. We have now transcended the use of the grammar and the lexicon, except for the most rudimentary and initial purposes. We are not now entirely dependent upon the scribe, but by a divinely regulated instinct we know the hand and the voice of God. Our faith cannot be broken down by a misspelt word or a mistaken date ; the heart is enthroned as arbiter, and it knows the " going " of the divine step.