I. When modern writers examine and discuss the proportions

and character of our Lord’s ‘plan,’ a Christian believer may rightly feel that such a term can only be used in such a connec- tion with some mental caution. He may urge that in forming an estimate of strictly human action, we can distinguish between a plan and its realization; but that this distinction is obviously inapplicable to Him with Whom resolve means achievement, and Who completes His action, really if not visibly, when He simply wills to act. It might further be maintained, and with great truth, that the pretension to exhibit our Lord’s entire design in His Life and Death proceeds upon a misapprehension. It is far from being true that our Lord has really laid bare to the eyes of men the whole purpose of the Eternal Mind in respect of His Incarnation. Indeed nothing is plainer, or more upon the very face of the New Testament, than the limitations and reserve of His disclosures on this head. We see enough for faith and for practical purposes, but we see no more. Amid the glimpses which are offered us respecting the scope and range of the In- carnation, the obvious shades off continually into mystery, the visible commingles with the unseen. We Christians know just enough to take the measure of our ignorance ; we feel ourselves hovering intellectually on the outskirts of a vast economy of mercy, the complete extent and the inner harmonies of which One Eye alone can survey.
If however we have before us only a part of the plan which our Lord meant to carry out. by His Incarnation and Death, assuredly we do know something and that from His Own Lips. If it is true that success can never be really doubtful to Omni- potence, and that no period of suspense can be presumed to intervene between a resolve and its accomplishment in the Eternal Mind ; yet, on the other hand, it is a part of our Lord’s gracious condescension that He has, if we may so speak, entered into the lists of history. He has come among us as one of our- selves; He has made Himself of no reputation, and has been found in fashion as a man. He has despoiled Himself of His advantages; He has actually stated what He proposed to do in the world, and has thus submitted Himself to the verdict of
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the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ or ‘of Gon. 101
man’s experience. His own Words are our warrant for compar- ing them with His Work; and He has interposed the struggles of centuries between His Words and their fulfilment.. He has so shrouded His Hand of might as at times to seem as if He would court at least the possibilities of failure. Putting aside then for the moment any recorded intimations of Christ’s Will in respect of other spheres of being, with all their mighty issues of life and death, let us enquire what it was that He purposed to effect within the province of human action and history.
Now the answer to this question is simply, that He proclaimed Himself the Founder of a world-wide and imperishable Society. He did not propose to act powerfully upon the convictions and the characters of individual men, and then to leave to them, when they believed and felt alike, the liberty of voluntarily forming themselves into an association, with a view to reciprocal sympathy and united action. From the first, the formation of a society was not less an essential feature of Christ’s plan, than was His redemptive action upon single souls. This society was not to be a school of thinkers, nor a self-associated company of enter- prising fellow-workers; it was to be a Kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, or, as it is also called, the kingdom of God® For ages indeed the Jewish theocracy had been a kingdom of God upon earthb, God was the one true King of ancient Israel. He was felt to be present in Israel as a Monarch living among His subjects. The temple was His palace; its sacrifices and ritual were the public acknowledgment of His present but in- visible Majesty. But the Jewish polity, considered as a system, was an external rather than an internal kingdom of God. Doubtless there were great saints in ancient Israel; doubtless Israel had prayers and hymns such as may be found in the Psalter, than which nothing more searching and more spiritual has been since produced in Christendom. Looking however to the popular working of the Jewish theocratic system, and to what is implied as to its character in Jeremiah’s prophecy of a profoundly spiritual kingdom which was to succeed 109, may we not conclude that the Royalty of God was represented rather to
® βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν occurs thirty-two times in St. Matthew’s Gospel, to which it is peculiar; βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ five times. The latter term occurs fifteen times in St. Mark, thirty-three times in St. Luke, twice in St. John, seven times in the Acts of the Apostles. In St. Matt. xiii. 43, xxvi. 29, we find ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Πατρός. Our Lord speaks of ἡ βασιλεία 7 ἐμὴ three times, St. John xviii. 36. b St. Matt. xxi. 43.
a er, xxxi, 31-34, quoted in Heb, viii. 8-11. pees
102 Laws of the Kingdom of Fleaven, as given
the senses than to the heart and intelligence of at least the mass of His ancient subjects? Jesus Christ our Lord announced a new kingdom of God; and, by terming it the Kingdom of God, He implied that it would first fully deserve that sacred name, as corresponding with Daniel’s prophecy of a fifth empired, Let us moreover note, in passing, that when using the word ‘ king- dom,’ our Lord did not announce a republic. Writers who carry into their interpretation of the Gospels ideas which have been gained from a study of the Platonic dialogues or of the recent history of France, may permit themselves to describe our Lord as Founder of the Christian republic. And certainly St. Paul, when accommodating himself to political traditions and aspira- tions which still prevailed largely throughout the Roman world, represents and recommends the Church of Christ as the source and home of the highest moral and mental liberty, by speaking freely of our Christian ‘ citizenship,’ and of our coming at baptism to the ‘city’ of the living God*. Not that the Apostle would press the metaphor to the extent of implying that the new society was to be a spiritual democracy; since he very earnestly taught that even the inmost thoughts of its members were to be ruled by their Invisible King‘. This indeed had been the claim of the Founder of the kingdom Himself%; He willed to be King, absolutely and without a rival, in the new society; and the nature and extent of His legislation plainly shews us in what sense He meant to reign.
The original laws of the new kingdom are for the most part set forth by its Founder in His Sermon on the Mount. After a preliminary statement of the distinctive character which was to mark the life and bearing of those who would fully correspond to His Mind and Will}, and a further sketch of the nature and depth of the influence which His subjects were to exert upon other meni, He proceeds to define the general relation of the new law which He is promulgating to the law that had preceded itk, The vital principle of His legislation, namely, that moral obedience shall be enforced, not merely in the performance of or in the abstinence from outward acts, but in the deepest and most
ἃ Dan. vii. 9-15. © Phil. iii. 20: ἡμῶν γὰρ τὸ πολίτευμα ἐν οὐρανοῖς ὑπάρχει. Cf. Acts xxiii, 1: πεπολίτευμαι τῷ Θεῷ. Phil. i. 27: ἀξίως τοῦ εὐαγγελίου πολιτεύεσθε. Heb. xiii. 14. In Heb. xi. 1ο, xii. 22, πόλις apparently embraces the whole Church of Christ, visible and invisible; in Heb. xi. 16, xiii. 14, it is re- stricted to the latter. f 2 Cor. x. 5. ε St. Matt. xxiii. 8. h Tbid. v. 1-12. 1 Tbid. vers. 13-16. ® Ibid. vers. 17-20. [ LECT.
RNa ane
hat Sisal alta a i BI Neth nih
af i eh lat
an the Sermon on the Mount. 103
secret springs of thought and motive, is traced in its application to certain specific prescriptions of the older Law!; while other ancient enactments are modified or set aside by the stricter purity ™, the genuine simplicity of motive and character», the entire unselfishness 9, and the superiority to personal prejudices and exclusivenessP which the New Lawgiver insisted on. The required life of the new kingdom is then exhibited in detail; the duties of almsgiving4, of prayer', and of fasting’, are successively enforced; but the rectification of the ruling motive is chiefly insisted on as essential. In performing religious duties, God’s Will, and not any conventional standard of human opinion, is to be kept steadily before the eye of the soul. The Legislator insists upon the need of a single, supreme, unrivalled motive in thought and action, unless all is to be lost. The uncorruptible | treasure must be in heaven ; the body of the moral life will only be full of light if ‘the eye is single; no man can serve two masterst, The birds and the flowers suggest the lesson of trust in and devotion to the One Source and End of life; all will really be well with those who in very deed seek His kingdom and His righteousness¥, Charity in judgment of other men, circumspection in communicating sacred truth Y, confidence and constancy in prayer’, perfect consideration for the wishes of others®, yet also a determination to seek the paths of difficulty and sacrifice, rather than the broad easy ways trodden by the mass of mankind »;—these features will mark the conduct of loyal subjects of the kingdom. They will beware too of false prophets, that is, of the movers of spiritual sedition, of teachers who are false to the truths upon which the kingdom is based and to the temper which is required of its real children. The false prophets will be known by their moral unfruitfulness¢, rather than by any lack of popularity or success. Finally, obedience to the law of the kingdom is insisted on as the one condition of safety; obedience 4,—as distinct from professions of loyalty ; obedience,—which will be found to have really based a man’s life upon the immoveable rock at that solemn moment when all that stands upon the sand must utterly perishe.
Such a proclamation of the law of the kingdom as was the
1 St. Matt. v. 21-30. τὰ Tbid. vers. 31, 32. » Tbid. vers. 33 -37. ° Ibid. vers. 38-42. P Ibid. vers. 43-47. 4 Ibid. vi. 1-4.
t Tbid. vers. 5-8. 8 Ibid. vers. 16 18. * Thid. ver. 24.
ἃ Tbid. vers. 25-34. x Ibid. vii. 1-5. Υ Ibid. ver. 6.
* Tbid. vers. 7-11. ® Ibid. ver. 12. Ὁ Ibid. vers. 13, 14. ¢ Ibid. vers, 15-20, ἃ Ibid, vers, 21-23. ὁ Ibid. vers. 24 27.
15]
104 The Kingdom both visible and invisible.
Sermon on the Mount, already implied that the kingdom would be at once visible and invisible. On the one hand certain out- ward duties, such as the use of the Lord’s Prayer and fasting, are prescribed‘; on the other, the new law urgently pushes its claim of jurisdiction far beyond the range of material acts into the invisible world of thought and motive. The visibility of the kingdom lay already in the fact of its being a society of men, and not a society solely made up of incorporeal beings such as the angels. The King never professes that He will be satisfied with a measure of obedience which sloth or timidity might con- fine to the region of inoperative feelings and convictions; He insists with great emphasis upon the payment of homage to His Invisible Majesty, outwardly, and before the eyes of men. Not to confess Him before men is to break with Him for ever&; it is to forfeit His blessing and protection when these would most be needed. The consistent bearing, then, of His loyal subjects will bring the reality of His rule before the sight of men; but, besides this, He provides His realm with a visible government, deriving its authority from Himself, and entitled on this account to deferential and entire obedience on the part of His subjects. To the first members of this government His commission runs thus :—‘ He that receiveth you, receiveth Me,’ It is the King Who will Himself reign throughout all history on the thrones of His representatives; it is He Who, in their persons, will be acknowledged or rejected. In this way His empire will have an external and political side; nor is its visibility to be limited to its governmental organization. The form of prayeri which the King enjoins on His subjects, and the outward visible actions by which, according to His appointment, membership in His king- dom is to be begunj and maintained *, make the very life and movement of the new society, up to a certain point, visible. But undoubtedly the real strength of the kingdom, its deepest life, its truest action, are veiled from sight. At bottom it is to be a moral, not a material empire ; it is to be a realm not merely of bodies but of souls, of souls instinct with intelligence and love. Its seat of power will be the conscience of mankind. Not ‘here’ or ‘there’ in outward signs of establishment and supremacy, but in the free conformity of the thought and heart of its members to the Will of their Unseen Sovereign, shall its power be most
f St. Matt. vi. 9-13, 16. & Ibid. x. 32; St. Luke xii, 8, h St. Matt. x. 40; comp. St. Lukex.16. Ἢ St. Matt. vi. 9-13. } Ibid. xxviii, 19; St. John iii, 5. * St. Luke xxii. 19; 1 Cor. xi. 24; St. John vi. 53. [ LECT.
Parables of the Kingdom. 105
clearly recognised. Not as an oppressive outward code, but as an inward buoyant exhilarating motive, will the King’s Law mould the life of His subjects. Thus the kingdom of God will be found to be ‘within’ men!; it will be set up, not like an earthly empire by military conquest or by violent revolution, but noiselessly and ‘not with observation™,’ It will be maintained by weapons more spiritual than the sword. ‘If, said the Monarch, ‘My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight, but now is My kingdom not from hence ®,’
The charge to the twelve Apostles exhibits the outward agency by which the kingdom would be established®; and the discourse in the supper-room unveils yet more fully the secret sources of its strength and the natwe of its influence?. But the ‘plan’ of its Founder with reference to its establish- ment in the world is perhaps most fully developed in that series of parables, which, from their common object and from their juxtaposition in St. Matthew’s Gospel, are commonly termed Parables of the Kingdom.
How various would be the attitudes of the human heart towards the ‘word of the kingdom,’ that is, towards the authoritative announcement of its establishment upon the earth, is pointed out in the Parable of the Sower. The seed of truth would fall from His Hand throughout all time by the wayside, upon stony places, and among thorns, as well as upon the good ground4. It might be antecedently supposed that within the limits of the new kingdom none were to be looked for save the holy and the faithful. But the Parable of the Tares corrects this too idealistic anticipation; the king- dom is to be a field in which until the final harvest the tares must grow side by side with the wheatt. The astonishing expansion of the kingdom throughout the world is illustrated by ‘the grain of mustard seed, which indeed is the least of
1 St. Luke xvii. 21. τὰ Tbid. ver. 20. ἃ St. John xviii. 36.
ο St. Matt. x. 5-42. P St. John xiv. xv. xvi.
4 St. Matt. xiii. 3-8, 19-23.
τ St. Matt. xiii. 24-30, 36-43. ‘In catholic& enim ecclesia, que non in sola Africé sicut pars Donati, sed per omnes gentes, sicut promissa est, dilatatur atque diffunditur, in universo mundo, sicut dicit Apostolus, fruc- tificans et crescens, et boni sunt et mali.’ St. Aug. Ep. 208, n. 6. ‘Si boni sumus in ecclesia Christi, framenta sumus; si mali sumus in ecclesia Christi, palea sumus, tamen ab are&é non recedimus. Tu qui vento tenta- tionis foris volasti, quid es? Triticum non tollit ventus ex ared. Ex eo ergo, ubi es, agnosce quid es. In Ps. lxx, (Vulg.) Serm. ii. n. 12. Civ. Dei, i. 35, and especially Retract. ii, 18, mH |
106 Parables of the Kingdom.
all seeds, but when it is grown it is the greatest among herbs.’ The principle and method of that expansion are to be observed in the action of ‘the leaven hid in the three measures of meal ἵν᾽ A secret invisible influence, a soul-attracting, soul-subduing enthusiasm for the King and His work, would presently pene- trate the dull, dense, dead mass of human society, and its hard heart and stagnant thought would expand, in virtue of this inward impulse, into a new life of light and love. Thus the kingdom is not merely represented as a mighty whole, of which each subject soul is a fractional part. It is exhibited as an attractive influence, acting energetically upon the inner personal life of individuals. It is itself the great intellectual and moral prize of which each truth-seeking soul is in quest, and to obtain which all else may wisely and well be left behind. The kingdom is a treasure hid in a field 4, that is, in a line of thought and enquiry, or in a particular discipline and mode of life; and the wise man will gladly part with all that he has to buy that field. Or the kingdom is like a merchant-man seeking ‘goodly pearls’; he sells all his possessions that he may buy the ‘one pear! of great price.’ Here it is hinted that entrance into the kingdom is a costly conquest and mastery of truth, of that one absolute and highest Truth, which is contrasted with the lower and relative truths current among men. The preciousness of membership in the kingdom is only to be completely realized by an unreserved submission to the law of sacrifice; the kingdom flashes forth in its full moral beauty before the eye of the soul, as the merchant- man resigns his all in favour of the one priceless pearl. In these two parables, then, the individual soul is represented as seeking the kingdom; and it is suggested how tragic in many cases would be the incidents, how excessive the sacrifices, attendant upon ‘ pressing into it.’ Buta last parable is added in which the kingdom is pictured, not as a prize which can be seized by separate souls, but as a vast imperial system, as a world-wide home of all the races of mankind¥. Like a net* thrown into the Galilean lake, so would the kingdom extend its toils around entire tribes and nations of men; the vast struggling multitude would be drawn nearer and nearer to the eternal shore; until at last the awful and final
5 St. Matt. xiii. 31, 32. ὁ Ibid. ver. 33. « Thid. ver. 44.
v Ibid. vers. 45, 46. w Soin Rev. xi. 15: ἐγένετο ἣ βασιλεία τοῦ κόσμου τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ. = St. Matt. xiii. 47-50. ‘oe
Two characteristics of the ‘plan’ of Fesus Christ. 107
separation would take place beneath the eye of Absolute Jus- tice; the good would be gathered into vessels, but the bad would be cast away.
The proclamation of this kingdom was termed the Gospel, that is, the good news of God. It was good news for mankind, Jewish as well as Pagan, that a society was set up on earth wherein the human soul might rise to the height of its original destiny, might practically understand the blessedness and the awfulness of life, and might hold constant communion in a free, trustful, joyous, childlike spirit with the Author and the End of its existence. The ministerial work of our Lord was one long proclamation of this kingdom. He was per- petually defining its outline, or promulgating and codifying its laws, or instituting and explaining the channels of its organic and individual life, or gathering new subjects into it by His words of wisdom or by His deeds of power, or perfecting and refining the temper and cast of character which was to distinguish them. When at length He had Himself overcome the sharpness of death, He opened this kingdom of heaven to all believers on the Day of Pentecost. His ministry had begun with the words, ‘Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at handy,’ He left the world, bidding His followers carry forward the frontier of His kingdom to the utmost limits of the human family%, and promising them that His presence within it would be nothing less than co-enduring with time ἃ,
Let us note more especially two features in the ‘plan’ of our Blessed Lord.
(a) And, first, its originality. Need I say, brethren, that real originality is rare? In this place many of us spend our time very largely in imitating, recombining, reproducing existing thought. Conscious as we are that for the most part we are only passing on under a new form that which in its substance has come to us from others, we honestly say so; yet it may chance to us at some time to imagine that in our brain an idea or a design has taken shape, which is originally and in truth our own creation—
‘Libera per vacuum posui vestigia princeps;
Non aliena meo pressi pede »,’ Those few, rapid, decisive moments in which genius consciously enjoys the exhilarating sense of wielding creative power, may
Υ St. Matt. iv. 17. 5 Ibid. xxviii. 19 ; St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i.8. ® St. Matt. xxviii. 20. b Hor. Ep. i. 19. 21. m1 |
108 ‘Originality’ of our Lora’s ‘plan; as
naturally be treasured in memory; and yet, even in these, how hard must it be to verify the assumed fact of an absolute originality! We of this day find the atmosphere of human thought, even more than the surface of the earth, preoccupied and thronged with the results of man’s activity in times past and present. In proportion to our consciousness of our real obligations to this general stock of mental wealth, must we not hesitate to presume that any one idea, the immediate origin of which we cannot trace, is in reality our own? Suppose that in this or that instance we do believe ourselves, in perfect good faith, to have produced an idea which is really entitled to the merit of originality. May it not be, that if at the right moment we could have examined the intellectual air around us with a sufficiently powerful microscope, we should have detected the germ of our idea ‘floating in upon our personal thought from without¢?’ We only imagine ourselves to have created the idea because, at the time of our inhaling it, we were not conscious of doing so. The idea perhaps was suggested indirectly; it came to us along with some other idea upon which our attention was mainly fixed; it came to us so dis- guised or so undeveloped, that we cannot recognise it, so as to trace the history of its growth. It came to us during the course of a casual conversation; or from a book the very name of which we have forgotten; and our relationship towards it has been after all that of a nurse, not that of a parent. We have protected it, cherished it, warmed it, and at length it has grown within the chambers of our mind, until we have recognised its value and led it forth into the sunlight, shaping it, colouring it, expressing it after a manner strictly our own, and believing in good faith that because we have so entirely determined its form, we are the creators of its substance 4, At any rate, my brethren, genius herself has not been slow to confess how difficult it is to say that any one of her triumphs is certainly due to a true originality. In one of his later recorded conversations Goethe was endeavouring to decide what are the real obligations of genius to the influences which inevitably affect it. ‘ Much,’ said he, ‘is talked about originality ; but what does originality mean? We are no sooner born than the world around begins to act upon us; its action lasts to the end of our lives and enters into everything. All that we
© This illustration was suggested to me, some years ago, by a well-known Oxford tutor. It is developed, with his usual force, by Félix, Jésus-Christ,
p. 128. 4 Bautain, Etude sur l’art de parler en ae LECT.
guaranteed by the tsolation of Hrs early Life. 109
can truly call our own is our energy, our vigour, our will. If I,’ he continued, ‘could enumerate all that I really owe to the great men who have preceded me, and to those of my own day, it would be seen that very little is really my own. It is a point of capital importance to observe at what time of life the influence of a great character is brought to bear on us. Lessing, Winkelmann, and Kant, were older than I, and it has been of the greatest consequence to me that the two first powerfully influenced my youth and the last my old age®,’ On such a subject, Goethe may be deemed a high authority, and he certainly was not likely to do an injustice to genius, or to be guilty of a false humility when speaking of himself. But our Lord’s design to establish upon the earth a kingdom of souls was an original design. Remark, as bearing upon this originality, our Lord’s isolation in His early life. His social obscurity is, in the eyes of thoughtful men, the safeguard and guarantee of His originality. It is not seriously pretended, on any side, that Jesus Christ was enriched with one single ray of His thought from Athens, from Alexandria, from the mystics of the Ganges or of the Indus, from the disciples of Zoroaster or of Confucius. The centurion whose servant He healed, the Greeks whom He met at the instance of St. Philip, the Syro-pheenician woman, the judge who condemned and the soldiers who crucified Him, are the few Gentiles with whom He is recorded to have had dealings during His earthly life. But was our Lord equally isolated from the world of Jewish speculation? M. Renan, indeed, impatient at the spectacle of an unrivalled originality, suggests, not without some hesitation, that Hillel was the real teacher of Jesusf. But Dr. Schenkel
“ Conversations de Goethe, trad. Delerot, tom. ii. p. 342, quoted in the Rev. des Deux Mondes, 15 Oct. 1865.
‘ «Hillel fut le vrai maitre de Jésus, 511 est permis de parler de maitre quand il s’agit d’une si haute originalité.’? Vie de Jésus, p. 35. As an instance of our Lord’s real independence of Hillel, a single example may suffice. A recent writer on ‘the Talmud’ gives the following story. ‘One day a heathen went to Shammai, the head of the rival academy, and asked him mockingly to convert him to the law while he stood on one leg. The irate master turned him from the door. He then went to Hillel, who gave him that reply—since so widely propagated—“ Do not unto another what thou wouldest not have another do unto thee. This is the whole law: the rest is mere commentary.”’ Quarterly Review, Oct. 1867, p. 441. art. ‘The Talmud.’ Or, as Hillel’s words are rendered by Lightfoot: ‘Quod tibi ipsi odiosum est, proximo ne feceris: nam hee est tota lex.’ Hor. Hebr. in Matt. p. 129. The writer in the Quarterly Review appears to ae: the identity of Hille]’s saying with the precept of our Blessed Lord, UI
110 6‘Originality’ of our Lord’s ‘plan, as
will tell us that this suggestion rests on no historical basis whatever 5, while we may remark in passing that it is at issue with a theory which you would not care to notice at length, but which M. Renan cherishes with much fondness, and which represents our Lord’s ‘tone of thought’ as a psychological result of the scenery of north-eastern Palestine», The kindred assumption that when making His yearly visits to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover, or at other times, Jesus must have become the pupil of some of the leading Jewish doctors of the day, is altogether gratuitous. Once indeed, when He was twelve years old, He was found in a synagogue, hard by the temple, in close intellectual contact with aged teachers of the Law. But all who hear Him, even then, in His early Boyhood, are astonished at His understanding and answers; and the narrative of the Evangelist implies that the occurrence
was not repeated. Moreover there was no teaching in Judea _
at that era, which had not, in the true sense of the expression, a sectarian colouring. But what is there in the doctrine or in the character of Jesus that connects Him with a Pharisee or a Sadducee, or an Herodian, or an Essenei type of education ? Is it not significant that, as Schleiermacher remarks, ‘of all the sects then in vogue none ever claimed Jesus as representing
St. Matt. vii. 12; St. Luke vi. 31. Yet in truth how wide is the interval between the merely negative rule of the Jewish President (which had
already been given in Tobit iv. 15), and the positive precept—ioa ἂν θέλητε,
ἵνα ποιῶσιν ὑμῖν of ἄνθρωποι, οὕτω καὶ ὑμεῖς ποιεῖτε αὐτοῖς---οὗ the Divine Master. On Gibbon’s citation from Isocrates of a precept equivalent to Hillel’s, see Archbishop Trench, Huls. Lect. p. 157. Hillel said that there would be no Messiah, since the promise and its fulfilment belonged to the time of Hezekiah; Westcott, Introd. p. 123.
ε ‘Ganz unbewiesen ist es,’ Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 39, note. When however Dr. Schenkel himself says, ‘Den Einblick, den Er [sc. Jesus] in das Wesen und Treiben der religidsen Richtungen und Parteiungen seines Volkes in so hohem Masse befass, hat Er aus persénlicher Wahrneh- mung und unmittelbarem Verkehr mit den Hiuptern und Vertretern der verschiedenen Paiteistandpunkte gewonnen’ (ibid.), where is the justifi- cation of this assertion, except in the Humanitarian and Naturalistic theory of the writer, which makes some such assumption necessary ?
h Vie de Jésus, p. 64: ‘Une nature ravissante contribuait & former cet esprit.’ Then follows a description of the flowers, the animals, the insects, and the mountains (p. 65), the farms, the fruit-gardens, and the vintage (p. 66), of Northern Galilee. M. Renan concludes, ‘cette vie contente et facilement satisfaite . . se spiritualisait en réves éthérés, en une sorte de mysticisme poétique confondant le ciel et la terre. . . . Toute Vhistoire du Christianisme naissant est devenue de la sorte une délicieuse pastorale.’ p. 67.
1 Milman, Hist. Christ. i. p. 153, note x.
[ LEcT.
guaranteed by the tsolation of His carly Life.
it, none branded Him with the reproach of apostasy from its tenetsi?’ Even if we lend an ear to the precarious conjecture that He may have attended some elementary school at Nazareth, it is plain that the people believed Him to have gone through no formal course of theological training. ‘How knoweth This Man letters, having never learnedk?’ was a question which betrayed the popular surprise created by a Teacher Who spoke with the highest authority, and Who yet had never sat at the feet of an accredited doctor. It was the homage of public enthusiasm which honoured Him with the title of Rabbi; since this title did not then imply that one who bore it had been qualified by any intellectual exercises for an official teaching position. Isolated, as it seemed, obscure, uncultivated, illiterate, the Son of Mary did not concern Himself to struggle against or to reverse what man would deem the crushing disadvantages of His lot. He did not, like philosophers of antiquity, or like the active spirits of the middle ages, spend His Life in perpetual transit between one lecturer of reputation and another, between this and that focus of earnest and progressive thought. He was not a Goethe, continually enriching and refining his con- ceptions by contact with a long succession of intellectual friends, reaching from Lavater to Eckermann. Still less did He, during His early Manhood, live in any such atmosphere as that of this place, where interpenetrating all our differences of age and occupation, and even of conviction, there is the magnificent inheritance of a common fund of thought, to which, whether we know it or not, we are all constantly and inevitably debtors. He mingled neither with great thinkers who could mould educated opinion, nor with men of gentle blood who could give its toné to society; He passed those thirty years as an under-workman in a carpenter’s shop; He lived in what might have seemed the depths of mental solitude and of social obscurity; and then He went forth, not to foment a political revolution, nor yet to found a logal school of evanescent sen- timent, but to proclaim an enduring and world-wide Kingdom of souls, based upon the culture of a common moral character, and upon intellectual submission to a common creed.
Christ’s isolation, then, is the guarantee of His originality; yet had He lived as much in public as He lived in obscurity, where, let me ask, is the kingdom of heaven anticipated as a practical project in the ancient world? What, beyond the inter-
J Leben Jesu, vorl. xvi, x St. John vii. 15.
112 Who could have suggested Christ’s ‘plan’?
change of thought on moral subjects, has the kingdom proclaimed by our Lord in common with the philosophical schools or coteries which grouped themselves around Socrates and other teachers of classical Greece!? These schools, indeed, differed from the kingdom of heaven, not merely in their lack of any pretensions to supernatural aims or powers, but yet more, in that they only existed for the sake of a temporary convenience, and that their members were bound to each other by no necessary ties™. Again, what was there in any of the sects of Judaism that could have suggested such a conception as the kingdom of heaven ? Each and all they differ from it, I will not say in organization and structure, but in range and compass, in life and action, in spirit and aim. Or was the kingdom of heaven even traced in outline by the vague yearnings and aspirations after a better time, which entered so mysteriously into the popular thought of the heathen populations in the Augustan age? Certainly it was an answer, complete yet unexpected, to these aspirations. They did not originate it; they could not have originated it; they primarily pointed to a material rather than to a moral Utopia, to an idea of improvement which did not enter into the plan of
1 Mr. Lecky makes an observation upon the originality of our Lord’s moral teaching, considered generally, which is well worthy of attention. Rational- ism in Europe, i. p. 338. ‘Nothing too, can, as I conceive, be more er- roneous or superficial than the reasonings of those who maintain that the moral element in Christianity has in it nothing distinctive or peculiar. The method of this school, of which Bolingbroke may be regarded as the type, is to collect from the writings of different heathen writers, certain isolated passages embodying precepts that were inculcated by Christianity ; and when the collection had become very large the task was supposed to be accomplished, But the true originality of a system of moral teaching depends not so much upon the elements of which it is composed, as upon the manner in which they are fused into a symmetrical whole, upon the proportionate value that is attached to different qualities, or, to state the same thing by a single word, upon the type of character that is formed. Now it is quite certain that the Christian type differs, not only in degree, but in kind from the Pagan one.’ This general observation might legitimately include the vital differences which sever all merely human schemes of moral association and co-operation from that of the Founder of the Christian Church. See also Tulloch on The Christ of the Gospels, p. 190.
m This point is well stated in Ecce Homo, p. 91, sqq. The writer ob- serves that if Socrates were to appear at the present day, he would form no society, as the invention of printing would have rendered it unnecessary. But the formation of an organized society was of the very essence of the work of Christ. It is a pleasure to recognise the fulness with which this vital truth is set forth by one from whom serious Churchmen must feel themselves to be separated by some deep differences of belief and principle.
Ὁ Virgil, ἘΠ]. iv., Ain. vi. 793, and Suetonius, Vespasianus, iv.
LECT.
Fee eee
Its ‘originality’ substantial, not verbal. 113
the Founder of the new kingdom. But you ask if the announce- ment of the kingdom of heaven by our Lord was not really a continuation of the announcement of the kingdom of heaven by St.John the Baptist ? You might go further, and enquire, whether this proclamation of the kingdom of heaven is not to be traced up to the prophecy of Daniel respecting a fifth empire? For the present of course I waive the question which an Apostle 9 would have raised, as to whether the Spirit That spoke in St. John and in Daniel was not the Spirit of the Christ Himself. But let us enquire whether Daniel or St. John do anticipate our Lord’s plan in such a sense as to rob it of its immediate originality. The Baptist and the prophet foretell the kingdom of heaven. Be it so. But a name is one thing, and the vivid complete grasp of an idea is another. We are accustomed to distinguish with some wholesome severity between originality of phrase and originality of thought. An intrinsic poverty of thought may at times succeed in formulating an original expression; while a true originality will often, nay generally, welcome a time- honoured and conventional phraseology, if it can thus secure currency and acceptance for the truth which it has brought to light and which it desires to set forth P. The originality of our Lord’s plan lay not in its name, but in its substance. When St. John said that the kingdom of heaven was at hand 4, when Daniel represented it as a world-wide and imperishable empire, neither prophet nor Baptist had really anticipated the idea; one
° x St. Peter i. 11.
P Pascal, Pensées, art. vii. 9 (ed. Havet. p. 123): ‘Qu’on ne dise pas que je n’ai rien dit de nouveau; la disposition des matitres est nouvelle. Quand on joue ἃ la paume, c’est une méme balle dont on joue l’un et l’autre; mais l'un la place mieux, J’aimerais autant qu’on me dit que je me suis servi des mots anciens. Et comme si les mémes pensées ne formaient pas un autre corps de discours par une disposition différente, aussi bien que les mémes mots forment d’autres pensées par leur différente disposition.’
4 The teaching of St. John Baptist centred around three points: (1) the call to penitence (St. Matt. iii. 2, 8-10; St. Mark i. 4; St. Luke iii. 3, 10-14); (2) the relative greatness of Christ (St. Matt. iii. 11-14; St. Mark i. 7; St. Luke iii. 16; St. John i. 15, 26, 27, 30-34); (3) the Judicial (οὗ τὸ πτύον ἐν τῇ χειρὶ αὐτοῦ, St. Matt. iii. 12; St. Luke iii. 17) and Atoning (ἴδε ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου, St. John i. 29, 36) Work of Christ. In this way St. John corresponded to prophecy as preparing the way of the Lord (St. Matt. iii. 3; St. Mark i: 3; St. Luke iii. 4; St. Johni. 23; Isa. xl. 3); but beyond naming the kingdom, the nature of the prepara- tion required for entering it, the supernatural greatness, and two of the functions of the King, St. John did not anticipate our Lord’s disclosures. St. John’s teaching left men quite uninformed as to what the kingdom of heaven was to be in itself. 1π] I
114 WVotes of ‘originality’ in our Lord’s ‘plan.
furnished the name of a coming system, the other a measure of its greatness. But what was the new institution to be in itself; what were to be its controlling laws and principles; what the animating spirit of its inhabitants ; what the sources of its life ; what the vicissitudes of its establishment and triumph? These and other elements of His plan are exhibited by our Lord Him- self, in His discourses, His parables, His institutions. That which had been more or less vague, He made definite; that which had been abstract, He threw into a concrete form ; that which had been ideal, He clothed with the properties of working reality; that which had been scattered over many books and ages, He brought into a focus. If prophecy supplied Him with some of the materials which He employed, prophecy could not have enabled Him to succeed in combining them. He combined them because He was Himself; His Person supplied the secret of their combination. His originality is indeed seen in the reality and life with which He lighted up the language used by men who had been sent in earlier ages to prepare His way; but if His creative thought employed these older materials, it did not depend on them. He actually gave a practical and ener- getic form to the idea of a strictly independent society of spiritual beings, with enlightened and purified consciences, cramped by no national or local bounds of privilege, and destined to spread throughout earth and heaven'. When He did this,
τ Guizot, Essence de la Religion chrétienne, p. 307: ‘Je reprends ces deux grands principes, ces deux grandes actes de Jésus-Christ, l’abolition de tout privilége dans les rapports des hommes avec Dieu, et la distinction de la vie religieuse, et de la vie civile; je les place en regard de tous les faits, de tous les états sociaux antérieurs ἃ la venue de Jésus-Christ, et je ne puis découvrir ἃ ces caractéres essentiels de la religion chrétienne, aucune filia- tion, aucune origine humaine. Partout, avant Jésus-Christ, les religions étaient nationales, locales, établissant entre les peuples, les classes, les in- dividus, des distances et des inégalités énormes. Partout aussi avant Jésus- Christ, la vie civile et la vie religieuse étaient confondues et s’opprimaient mutuellement ; la religion ou les religions étaient des institutions incorporées dans l'état, et que l'état réglait ou réprimait selon son intérét. Dans l’uni- versalité de la foi religieuse, et l’indépendance de la société religieuse, je suis constraint de voir des nouveautés sublimes, des éclairs de la lumitre divine! Even Channing, who understates our Lord’s ‘plan,’ is alive to the originality and greatness of that part of it which he recognises; Works, ii. 57. ‘The plans and labours of: statesmen sink into the sports of children, when compared with the work which Jesus announced...... The idea of changing the moral aspect of the whole earth, of recovering all nations to the pure and inward worship of the one God, and to a Spirit of Divine and fraternal love (our Lord proposed much more than this), was one of which we meet not a trace in philosopher or legislator before Him. ae
LECT.
Boldness of the ‘plan’ of Fesus Christ. 115
prophets were not His masters; they had only foreshadowed His work. His plan can be traced in that masterful com- pleteness and symmetry, which is the seal of its intrinsic originality, to no source beyond Himself. Well might we ask with His astonished countrymen the question which was indeed prompted by their jealous curiosity, but which is natural to a very different temper, ‘Whence hath this Man this wisdom ?’§
(8) And this opens upon us the second characteristic of our Lord’s plan, I mean that which in any merely human plan, we should call its audacity. This audacity is observable, first of all, in the fact that the plan is originally proposed to the world with what might appear to us to be such hazardous completeness. The idea of the kingdom of God issues almost ‘as if in a single jet” and with a fully developed body from the thought of Jesus Christ. Put together the Sermon on the Mount, the Charge to the Twelve Apostles, the Parables of the Kingdom, the Discourse in the Supper-room, and the institution of the two great Sacra- ments, and the plan of our Saviour is before you. And it is enunciated with an accent of calm unfaltering conviction that it will be realized in human history.
This is a phenomenon which we can only appreciate by con- trasting it with the law to which it is so signal an exception. Generally speaking, an ambitious idea appears at first as a mere outline, and it challenges attention in a tentative way. It is put forward enquiringly, timidly, that it may be completed by the suggestions of friends or modified by the criticism of opponents. The highest genius is always most keenly alive to the vicissitudes which may await its own creations ; it knows with what difficulty a promising project is launched safely and unimpaired out of the domain of abstract speculation into the region of practical human life. Even in art, where the materials to be moulded are, as compared with the subjects of moral or political endeavour, so much under command, it is not prudent to presume that a design or a conception will be carried out without additions or without
mind had given no promise of this extent of view...... We witness a vastness of purpose, a grandeur of thought and feeling, so original, so superior to the workings of all other minds, that nothing but our familiarity can prevent our contemplation of it with wonder and profound awe.’
5. See Félix, Jésus-Christ et la Critique Nouvelle, pp. 127-133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 237-8. Keim has exaggerated the in- fluence of Pharisaism upon the language and teaching of our Lord, which only resembled Pharisaism as being addressed to the Jewish mind in terms which it understood. Geschichtliche Christus, pp. 18-22.
* Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 325.
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116 Christ's ‘plan’ complete from the first.
curtailments. In this place we all have heard that between the θεωρία and the γένεσις of art there may be a fatal interval. The few bold strokes by which a Raffaelle has suggested a new form of power or of beauty, may never be filled up upon his canvas, The working-drawings of a Phidias or a Michael Angelo may never be copied in stone or in marble. As has been said of 8. T. Coleridge, art is perpetually throwing out designs which remain designs for ever; and yet the artist possesses over his material, and even over his hand and his eye, a control which is altogether wanting to the man who would reconstruct or regenerate human society. For human society is an aggregate of human intelli- gences and of human wills, that is to say, of profound and mys- terious forces, upon the direction of which under absolutely new circumstances it is impossible for man to calculate. Accordingly, social reformers tell us despondingly that facts make sad havoc of their fairest theories; and that schemes which were designed to brighten and to beautify the life of nations are either forgotten altogether, or, like the Republic of Plato, are remembered only as famous samples of the impracticable. For whenever a great idea, affecting the well-being of society, is permitted to force its way into the world of facts, it is liable to be carried out of its course, to be thrust hither and thither, to be compressed, exag- gerated, disfigured, mutilated, degraded, caricatured. It may encounter currents of hostile opinion and of incompatible facts, upon which its projector had never reckoned ; its course may be forced into a direction the exact reverse of that which he most earnestly desired. In the first French Revolution some of the most humane sociological projects were distorted into becoming the very animating principles of wholesale and extraordinary barbarities. In England we are fond of repeating the political maxim that ‘constitutions are not made, but grow ;’ we have a proverbial dread of the paper-schemes of government which from time to time are popular among our gifted and volatile neigh- bours. It is not that we English cannot admire the creations of political genius; but we hold that in the domain of human life genius must submit herself to the dictation of circumstances, and that she herself seems to shade off into erratic folly when she cannot clearly recognise the true limits of her power.
Now Jesus Christ our Lord was in the true and very highest sense of the term a social reformer; yet He fully proclaimed the whole of His social plan before He began to realize it. Had He been merely a ‘great man,’ He would have been more pru- dent. He would have conditioned His design; He or have
LECT.
No evidence of change in our Lora’s ‘plan? 117
tested it; He would have developed it gradually; He would have made trial of its working power; and then He would have re-fashioned, or contracted, or expanded it, before finally pro- posing it to the consideration of the world. But His actual course must have seemed one of utter and reckless folly, unless the event had shewn it to be the dictate of a more than human wisdom. He speaks as One Who is sure of the eompactness and faultlessness of His design; He is certain that no human obstacle ean baulk its realization. He produces it simply without effort, without reserve, without exaggeration ; He is calm, because He is in possession of the future, and sees His way clearly through its tangled maze. There is no proof, no distant intimation of a change or of a modification of His plan. He did not, for instance, first aim at a political success, and then cover His failure by giving a religious turn or interpretation to His previous mani- festoes; He did not begin as a religious teacher, and afterwards aspire to convert His increasing religious influence into political capital. No attempts to demonstrate any such vacillation in His purpose have reached even a moderate measure of success ἅν. Certainly, with the lapse of time, He enters upon a larger and larger area of ministerial action; He developes with majestic assurance, with decisive rapidity, the integral features of His work; His teaching centres more and more upon Himself as its central subject ; but He nowhere retracts, or modifies, or speaks or acts as would one who feels that he is dependent upon events or agencies which he cannot control ¥. A poor woman pays Him
« Dr. Schenkel, in his Charakterbild Jesu, represents our Lord as a pious Jew, who did not assume to be the Messiah before the scene at Czesarea Philippi. Kap. xii. § 4, Ρ. 138: ‘Dadurch, dass Jesug Sich nun wirklich zu dem Bekenntnisse des Simon bekannte, trat er mit einem Schlage aus der verworrenen und verwirrenden Liige heraus, in welche Er, durch die Unklar- heit seiner Jiinger und den Meinungstreit in seiner Umgebung gebracht war. Ein Stichwort war jetzt gesprochen.’ This theory is obliged to reject the evangelical accounts of our Lord’s Baptism and Temptation, and to distort from their plain meaning the narratives of our Lord’s sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth (St. Luke iv. 16), of His call of the twelve Apostles, and of His claim to forgive sin. See the excellent remarks of