M. Renan maintains, it ever was identified by Pagan opinion,

with the cetus iliciti, with the collegia tllicita, with the burial- clubs of the imperial epoch; this would only have rendered it more than ever an object of suspicion to the government}, Between the new doctrine and the old Paganism there was a deadly feud; and the question for the Church was simply whether she could suffer as long as her enemies could perse- cute. Before she could triumph in the western world, the soil of the empire had to be reddened by Christian blood. Ignatius of Antioch given to the lions at Romei; Polycarp of Smyrna
& Dillinger, Heidenth. und Judenth., bk. ix. pt. 2. § 6. has some very interesting remarks on the characteristics of the later Stoicism. It was a recoil from the corruption of the time. ‘Wie die Aerzte in Zeiten grosser Krankheiten ihre besten Studien machen, so hatten auch die Stoiker in dem allgemein herrschenden Sittenverderben ihren moralischen Blick geschirft.’ p.729. Seneca’s knowledge of the human heart, the pathos and solemnity of M. Aurelius, the self-control, patience, and self-denying courage preached by Epictetus and Arrian, are fully acknowledged. But Stoicism was virtue upon paper, unrealized except in the instance of a few coteries of educated people. It was virtue, affecting Divine strength in the midst of human weakness. Nothing could really be done for humanity by ‘diesen selbstgeralligen Tugendstolz, der alles nur sich selbst verdanken wollte, der sich der Gottheit gleich setzte, und bei aller men- schlichen Gebrechlichkeit doch die Sicherheit der Gottheit fiir sich in Anspruch nahm.’ (Sen. Ep. 53.) Stoicism had no lever with which to raise man as man from his degradations: and its earlier expositors even prescribed suicide as a means of escape from the miseries of life, and from a sense of moral failure. (Déll. ubi supra, p. 728; comp. Sir A. Grant’s Ethics of Arist. vol. i. p. 272.) Who can marvel at its instinctive hatred of a religion which proclaimed a higher code of Ethics than its own, and which, moreover, possessed the secret of teaching that code practically to all classes of mankind ?
h Les Apdtres, pp. 355, 361, 362. 1 A.D. 107.
; [ LEcT.
Christ's Person the stay of the suffering Church. 147
condemned to the flamesi; the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, and among them the tender Blandina‘, extorting by her for- titude the admiration of the very heathen; Perpetua and Felicitas at Carthage! conquering a mother’s love by a stronger love for Christ ™ ;—these are but samples of the ‘noble army’ which vanquished heathendom. ‘Plures efficimur, cries Ter- tullian, spokesman of the Church in her exultation and in her agony, ‘quoties metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum4,’ ΤῸ the heathen it seems a senseless ob- stinacy; but with a presentiment of the coming victory, the Apologist exclaims, ‘Illa ipsa obstinatio quam exprobatis, magistra est °,’
Who was He That had thus created a moral force which could embrace three centuries of a protracted agony, in the confidence that victory would come at lastP? What was it in Him, so fascinating and sustaining to the thought of His followers, that for Him men and women of all ages and ranks in life gladly sacrificed all that is dearest to man’s heart and nature? Was it only His miracles? But the evidential force of miracle may be easily evaded. St. John’s Gospel appears to have been written with a view to furnishing, among other things, an authoritative explanation of the moral causes which actually prevented the Jews from recognising the significance of our Lord’s miracles. Was it simply His character? But to understand a perfect character you must be attracted to it, and have some strong sympathies with it. And the language of human nature in the presence of superior goodness is often that of the Epicurean in the Book of Wisdom: ‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous, because he is not for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our doings...... He was made to reprove our thoughts; he is grievous unto us even to behold ; for his life is not like other men’s, his ways are of another fashion4.’ Was it His teaching ἢ True, never man spake like this Man; but taken alone, the highest and holiest teaching might have seemed to humanity to be no more than ‘the sound of one that had a pleasant voice,
J A.D. 169. E A.D. 177. 1 a.D. 202. τὰ So Dionysia in Alexandria; Eus. H. E. vi. 41. n Apol. c. 50. © Thid.
ΡΜ. Renan observes scornfully, 41] n’y a pas eu beaucoup de martyrs tres -intelligents.” Apdtres, p. 382. Possibly not, if intelligence is but another name for scepticism. Certain it is that martyrdom requires other and higher qualities than any which mere intelligence can supply.
@ Wisd. ii, 12, 15. ᾿ ur | L2
148 Christendom implies the Divinity of Christ.
and could play well upon an instrument.’ His Death? Certainly He predicted that in dying He would draw all men unto Him; but Who was He That could thus turn the instrument of His humiliation into the certificate of His glory? His Resurrection ? His Resurrection indeed was emphatically to be the reversal of a false impression, but it was to witness to a truth beyond itself; our Lord had expressly predicted that He would rise from the grave, and that His Resurrection would attest His claims’. None of these things taken separately will account for the power of Christ in history. In the convergence of all these; of these majestic miracles; of that Character, which commands at once our love and our reverence; of that teaching, so startling, so awful, so searching, so tender; of that Death of agony, encircled with such a halo of moral glory; of that deserted tomb, and the majestic splendour of the Risen One ;—a deeper truth, underlying all, justifying all, explaining all, is seen to reveal itself. We discern, as did the first Christians, beneath and beyond all that meets the eye of sense and the eye of conscience, the Eternal Person of our Lord Himself. It is not the miracles, but the Worker; not the character, but its living Subject; not the teaching, but the Master; not even the Death or the Resurrec- tion, but He Who died and rose, upon Whom Christian thought, Christian love, Christian resolution ultimately rest. The truth which really and only accounts for the establishment in this our human world of such a religion as Christianity, and of such an institution as the Church, is the truth that Jesus Christ was believed to be more than Man, the truth that Jesus Christ is what men believed Him to be, the truth that Jesus Christ is God,
It is here that we are enabled duly to estimate one broad feature of the criticism of Strauss. Both in his earlier and scientific work, published some thirty years ago for scholars, and in his more recent publication addressed to the German people, that writer strips Jesus Christ our Lord of all that makes Him superhuman. Strauss eliminates from the Gospel most of Christ’s discourses, all of His miracles, His supernatural Birth, and His Resurrection from the grave. The so-termed ‘historical’ resi- duum might easily be compressed within the limits of a newspaper paragraph, and it retains nothing that can rouse a moderate measure, I do not say of enthusiasm, but even of interest. And
¥ St. Matt. xii. 39; Rom. i. 4. 5 Cf. Milman, Hist. Christ. i. 50; Pusey, Univ Sermons, 1859-1872, p. 28, - ᾿ ᾿ A [ Lect:
The Christ of Strauss, and Christendom. 149
yet few minds on laying down either of these unhappy books can escape the rising question: ‘Is this hero of a baseless legend, this impotent, fallible, erring Christ of the “higher criticism,” in very deed the Founder of the Christian Church?’ The difficulty of accounting for the phenomenon presented by the Church, on the supposition that the ‘historical’ account of its Founder is that of Dr. Strauss, does not present itself forcibly to an Hege- lian, who loses himself in ἃ priori theories as to the necessary development of a thought, and is thus entranced in a sublime forgetfulness of the actual facts and laws of human life and his- tory. But here M. Renan is unwittingly a witness against the writer to whom he is mainly indebted for his own critical appa- ratus. The finer political instinct, the truer sense of the necessary proportions between causes and effects in human history, which might be expected to characterize a thoughtful Frenchman, will account for those points in which M. Renan has departed from the path traced by his master. He feels that there is an impass- able chasm between the life of Jesus according to Strauss, and the actual history of Christendom. He is keenly alive to the absurdity of supposing that such an impoverished Christ as the Christ of Strauss, can have created Christendom. Although therefore, as we have seen, he subsequently t endeavours to account for the growth of the Church in a naturalistic way, his native sense of the fitting proportions of things impels him to retouch the picture traced by the German, and to ascribe to Jesus of Nazareth, if not the reality, yet some shadowy semblance of Divinity". Hence such features of M. Renan’s work as his concessions in respect of St. John’s Gospel. In making these concessions, he is for the moment impressed with the political absurdity of ascribing Christendom to the thought and will of a merely human Christ. Although his unbelief is too radical to allow him to do adequate justice to such a consideration, his indirect admission of its force has a value, to which Christian believers will not be insensible.
But a greater than M. Renan is said to have expressed the common-sense of mankind in respect of the Agency which alone can account for the existence of the Christian Church. If the first Napoleon was not a theologian, he was at least a man whom vast experience had taught what kind of forces can really produce a lasting effect upon mankind, and under what conditions they may be expected to do so. A time came when the good Provi-
f his later work, Les Apétres, Ὁ Vie de Jésus, pp. 250, 426, 457. τ :
150 Opinion of Napoleon the First respecting the
dence of God had chained down that great but ambitious spirit to the rock of St. Helena; and the conqueror of civilized Europe had leisure to gather up the results of his unparalleled life, and to ascertain with an accuracy, not often attainable by monarchs or warriors, his own true place ia history. When conversing, as was his habit, about the great men of the ancient world, and comparing himself with them, he turned, it is said, to Count Montholon with the enquiry, ‘Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?’ The question was declined, and Napoleon proceeded, § Well, then, I will tell you. Alexander, Cesar, Charlemagne, and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions would die for Him..... I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, and Iama man: none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than man. .. 1 have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me,.. but to do this it was neces- sary that I should be vistbly present with the electric influence of my looks, of my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts... . Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man towards the Unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart; He will have it entirely to Himself. He demands it unconditionally; and forthwith His demand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, ex- perience that remarkable supernatural love towards Him. This phenomenon is unaccountable ; it is altogether beyond the scope of man’s creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its ‘strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it which strikes me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ ν᾽
τ This is freely translated from the passages quoted by Luthardt, Apolo- getische Vortrige, pp. 234, 293; and Bersier, Serm. p. 334. The same con- versation is given substantially by Chauvelot, Divinité du Christ, pp. 11-13,
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witness of our Lord's work to His Divinity. 151
Here surely is the common-sense of humanity. The victory of Christianity is the great standing miracle which Christ has wrought. Its significance is enhanced if the miracles of the New Testament are rejected x, and if the Apostles are held to have received no illumination from on high¥. Let those in our day who believe seriously that the work of Christ may be accounted for on natural and human grounds, say who among themselves will endeavour to rival it. Who of our contem- poraries will dare to predict that eighteen hundred years hence his ideas, his maxims, his institutions, however noble or philan- thropic they may be, will still survive in their completeness and in their vigour? Who can dream that his own name and history will be the rallying-point of a world-wide interest and enthu- siasm in some distant age? Who can suppose that beyond the political, the social, the intellectual revolutions which lie in the future of humanity, he will himself still survive in the memory of men, not as a trivial fact of archeology, but as a moral power, as the object of a devoted and passionate affection?
Paris 1863; in a small brochure attributed to M. le Pasteur Bersier, and published by the Religious Tract Society, Napoléon, Meyrueis, Paris, 1859 ; by M. Auguste Nicolas, i in his Etudes Philosophiques sur le Christianisme, Evnxelien: 1849, tom. ii. pp. 352-356; and by the Chevalier de Beauterne in his Sentiment de Napoléon sur le Christianisme, édit. par M. Bathild Bouniol, Paris 1864, pp. 87-118. In the preface to General: Bertrand’s Campagnes ἃ Egypte et de Syrie, there is an allusion to some reported conversations of Napoleon on the questions of the existence of Gop and of our Lord’s Divinity, which, the General says, never took place at all. But M. de Montholon, who with General Bertrand was present at the conversations which are recorded by the Chevalier de Beauterne, writes from Ham on May 30, 1841, to that author: ‘J’ai lu avec un vif intérét votre brochure; Sentiment de Napoléon sur la Divinité de Jésus-Christ, et je ne pense pas qu ὮΙ soit possible de mieux exprimer les croyances religieuses de Vempereur,’ Senti- ment de Napoléon, Avertissem. p. viii. Writing, as it would seem, in ignorance of this testimony, M. Nicolas says: ‘Cité plusieurs fois et dans des circonstances solennelles, ce jugement passe généralement pour his- torique.’ Etudes, ii. p. 352. note (1). * «Se il mondo si rivolse al cristianesmo iss’ io, senza miracoli, quest’ uno tal, che gli altri non sono il centesmo; Che tu entrasti povero e digiuno In campo, a seminar la buona pianta, | Che fu gid vite, ed ora ὃ fatta pruno.’ Dante, Paradiso, xxiv. 106-111. ¥ ‘Apres la mort de Jésus-Christ, douze pauvres pécheurs et artisans en- treprirent d'instruire et de convertir le monde. . . . le succts fut prodigieux .... Tous les chrétiens couraient au martyre, tous les peuples couraient au baptéme ; Vhistoire de ces premiers temps était un prodige continuel.’ = ae Réponse au Roi de Pologne, Paris, 1829, Discours, pp. 64, 65. HiT
152 Lhe redeemed soul owns a Divine Saviour.
What man indeed that still retains, I will not say the faith of a Christian, but the modesty of a man of sense, must not feel that there is a literally infinite interval between himself and that Majestic One, Who, in the words of Jean Paul Richter, ‘ being the Holiest among the mighty, and the Mightiest among the holy, has lifted with His pierced Hand empires off their hinges, has turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages 2%’ : The work of Jesus Christ is not merely a fact of history, it is
a fact, blessed be God! of individual experience. If the world is one scene of His conquests, the soul of each true Christian is another. The soul is the microcosm within which, in all its strength, the kingdom of God is set up. Many of you know, from a witness that you can trust, Christ’s power to restore to your inward life its original harmony. You are conscious that He is the fertilizing and elevating principle of your thought, the purifying principle of your affections, the invigorating principle of your wills. You need not to ask the question ‘whence hath this Man this wisdom and these mighty works?’ Man, you are well assured, cannot thus from age to age enlarge the realm of moral light, and make all things new; man cannot thus endow frail natures with determination, and rough natures with tender- ness, and sluggish natures with keen energy, and restless natures with true and lasting peace. These every-day tokens of Christ's presence in His kingdom, of themselves answer the question of the text. If He Who could predict that by dying in shame He would secure the fulfilment of an extraordinary plan, and assure to Himself a world-wide empire, can be none other than the Lord of human history; so certainly the Friend, the Teacher, the Master Who has fathomed and controlled our deepest life of thought and passion, is welcomed by the Christian soul as some- thing more than a student exploring its mysteries, or than a aan a experimentalist alleviating its sorrows. He is
ailed, He is loved, He is worshipped, as One Who possesses a knowledge and a strength which human study and human skill fail to compass; it is felt that He is so manifestly the true Saviour of the soul, because He is none other than the Being Who made it.
2 Jean Paul: ‘Ueber den Gott in der Geschichte und im Leben.’ Simmtl, Werke, xxxiii. 6; Stirm. p. 194.
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LECTURE IV.
OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS WITNESSED BY HIS CONSCIOUSNESS.
The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good work we stone Thee not; but Sor blasphemy; and because that Thou, being a Man, makest Thyself God.—St. JOHN x. 33.
Ir is common with some modern writers to represent the ques- tions at issue between the Faith and its opponents, in respect of the Person of our Lord, as being substantially a question between the ‘historical spirit’ and the spirit of dogmatism. The dog- matic temper is painted by them as a baseless but still powerful superstition, closely pressed by the critical enquiries and negative conclusions of our day, but culpably shutting its eyes against the advancing truth, the power of which nevertheless it cannot but instinctively feel, and clinging with the wrong-headed obstinacy of despair to the cherished but already condemned formule of its time-honoured and worn-out metaphysics. Opposed to it, we are told, is the ‘historical spirit,’ young, vigorous, fearless, truthful, flushed with successes already achieved, assured of suc- cesses yet to come. The ‘historical spirit’ is thus said to repre- sent the cause of an enlightened progress in conflict with a stupid and immoral conservatism. The ‘historical spirit’ is described as the love of sheer reality, as the longing for hard fact, deter- mined to make away with all ‘idols of the den,’ however ancient, venerated, and influential, in the sphere of theology. The ‘his- torical spirit’ accordingly undertakes to ‘disentangle the real Person of Jesus from the metaphysical envelope’ within which theology is said to have ‘encased’ Him. The Christ is to be rescued from that cloud-land of abstract and fanciful speculation, to which He is stated to have been banished by the patristic and scholastic divines ; He is to be restored to Christendom in mani- fest subjection to all the actual conditions and laws of human history. ‘Look,’ it is said, ‘at that figure of the Christ which a see traced in mosaics in the apsis of a Byzantine church. Iv
154 The Christ of dogma and the Christ of history.
That Countenance upon which you gaze, with its rigid, unalter- able outline, with its calm, strong mien of unassailable majesty ; that Form from which there has been stripped all the historic circumstance of life, all that belongs to the changes and chances of our mortal condition ; what is it but an artistic equivalent and symbol of the Catholic dogma? Elevated thus to a world of unfading glory, and throned in an imperturbable repose, the Byzantine Christos Pantocrator must be viewed as the expression of an idea, rather than as the transcript of a fact. A certain interest may be allowed to attach to such a representation, from its illustrating a particular stage in the development of religious thought. But the “historical spirit” must create what it can consider a really “historical” Christ, who will be to the Christ of St. Athanasius and St. John what a Rembrandt or a Rubens is to a Giotto or a Cimabue.’ If the illustration be objected to, at any rate, my brethren, the aim of the so-termed ‘historical’ school is sufficiently plain. It proposes to fashion a Christ who is to be esthetically graceful and majestic, but strictly natural and human. This Christ will be emancipated from the bandages which ‘ supernaturalism has wrapped around the Pro- phet of Nazareth. He will be divorced from any idea of incar- nating essential Godhead ; but, as we are assured, He will still be something, aye more than the Christ of the Creed has ever been yet, to Christendom. He will be at once a living man, and
τς, the very ideal of humanity; at once a being who obeys the in-
vincible laws of nature, like ourselves, yet of moral proportions so mighty and so unrivalled that his appearance among men shall adequately account for the phenomenon of an existing and still expanding Church.
Accordingly by this representation it is intended to place us inadilemma. ‘You must choose,’ men seem to say, ‘ between history and dogma; you must choose between history which can be verified, and dogma which belongs to the sphere of inaccessible abstractions. You must make your choice; since the Catholic dogma of Christ’s Divinity is pronounced by the higher criticism to be irreconcileable with the historical reality of the Life of Jesus. And in answer to that challenge, let us proceed, my brethren, to choose history, and as a result of that choice, if it may be, to maintain that the Christ of history is either the God Whom we believers adore, or that He is far below the assumed moral level of the mere man, whose character rationalism still, at least generally, professes to respect in the pages of its mutilated Gospel.
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The Catholic dogma really historical, 155
For let us observe that the Catholic doctrine has thus much in its favour :—it takes for granted the only existing history of Jesus Christ. It is not compelled to mutilate or to enfeeble it, or to do it critical violence. It is in league with this history; it is at home, as is no other doctrine, in the pages of the Evangelists.
Consider, first of all, the general impression respecting our Lord’s Person, which arises upon a survey of the miracles ascribed to Him in all the extant accounts of His Life. Toa thoughtful Humanitarian, who believes in the preternatural elements of the Gospel history, our Lord’s miracles, taken as a whole, must needs present an embarrassing difficulty. The miraculous cures indeed, which, more particularly in the earlier
days of Christ’s ministry, drew the eyes of men towards Him, as
to the Healer of sickness and of pain, have been ‘explained,’ however unsatisfactorily, by the singular methods generally ac- cepted among the older rationalists. A Teacher, it used to be argued, of such character as Jesus Christ, must have created a profound impression; He must have inspired an entire confi- dence ; and the cures which He seemed to work were the imme- diate results of the impression which He created ; they were the natural consequences of the confidence which He inspired. Now, apart from other and many obvious objections to this theory, let us observe that it is altogether inapplicable to the ‘ miracles of power,’ as they are frequently termed, which are recorded by the three first Evangelists, no less than by St. John. ‘Miracles of this class,’ says a freethinking writer, ‘are not cures which could have been effected by the influence of a striking sanctity acting upon a simple faith. They are prodigies; they are, as it seems, works which Omnipotence Alone could achieve. In the case of these miracles it may be said that the laws of nature are simply suspended. Jesus does not here merely exhibit the power of moral and mental superiority over common men; He upsets and goes beyond the rules and bounds of the order of the universe. A word from His mouth stills a tempest. A few — loaves and fishes are fashioned by His Almighty hand into an abundant feast, which satisfies thousands of hungry men. At His bidding life returns to inanimate corpses. By His curse a fig-tree which had no fruit on it is withered ἀρ ἃ. The writer
® Schenkel, Charakterb'ld Jesu, p.21. Dr. Schenkel concludes: ‘Sonst erscheint Jesus in den drei ersten Evangelien durchgiingig als ein wahrer, innerhalb der Grenzen menschlicher Beschriinkung sich bewegender Mensch ; durch Seine Wunderthitigkeit werden diese Grenzen durchbrochen; All- a5 aa sind menschlich nicht mehr begreiflich,’ ιν
156 The Resurrection, and the truth of Christianity.
proceeds to argue that such miracles must be expelled from any Life of Christ which ‘criticism’ will condescend to accept. They belong, he contends, to that ‘torrent of legend,’ with which, according to the rationalistic creed, Jesus was surrounded after His Death by the unthinking enthusiasm of His disciples», But then a question arises as to how much is to be included within this legendary ‘torrent.’ In particular, and above all else, is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave to be regarded as a part of its contributions to the Life of Christ? Here there is a division among the rationalizing critics. There are writers who reject our Lord’s miracles of power, His miraculous Conception, and even His Ascension into heaven, and who yet shrink from denying that very fundamental fact of all, the fact that on ‘the - third day He rose from the dead, according to the Scriptures δ. A man must have made up his mind against Christianity more conclusively than men are generally willing to avow, if he is te speculate with M. Renan in the face of Christendom, as to the exact spot in which ‘the worms consumed the lifeless body’ of Jesus4, This explicit denial of the literal Resurrection of Jesus from the grave is not compensated for by some theory identical with, or analogous to, that of Hymenzus and Philetus®¢ respecting the general Resurrection, whereby the essential subject of Christ’s Resurrection is changed, and the idea of Christianity, or the soul of the converted Christian, as distinct from the Body of the Lord Jesus, is said to have,been raised from the dead. For such a denial, let us mark it well, of the literal Resurrection of the Human Body of Jesus involves nothing less than an absolute and total rejection of Christianity. All orthodox Churches, all the great heresies, even Socinianism, have believed in the Resurrec- tion of Jesus. The literal Resurrection of Jesus was the cardinal
> Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 21: ‘Dass ein Lebensbild, wie das-
jenige des Erlisers, bald nach dessen irdischem Hinscheiden von einem
_reichen Sagenstrom umflossen wurde, liegt in der Natur der Sache.’ It may be asked—Why? If these legendary decorations are the inevitable consequences of a life of devotion to moral truth and to philanthropy, how are we to explain their absence in the cases of so many moralists and philanthropists ancient and modern ?
ο Cf. Hase, Leben Jesu, p. 281, compared with p. 267.
4 Les Apétres, p. 38: ‘Pendant que la conviction inébranlable des A pdtres se formait, et que la foi du monde se préparait, en quel endroit les vers consumaient-ils le corps inanimé qui avait été, le samedi soir, déposé au sépulcre ? On ignorera toujours ce détail; car, naturellement, les traditions chrétiennes ne peuvent rien nous apprendre 14-dessus.’
© 2 Tim. ii. 18: Ὑμέναιος καὶ Φίλητος, οἵτινες περὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἠἡστόχη- σαν, λέγοντες τὴν ἀνάστασιν ἤδη γεγονέναι. 1 Tim. i, 20.
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Lhe Resurrection, and other Christian miracles, 157
fact upon which the earliest Peer of Christianity based their appeal to the Jewish peoplef. St. Paul, writing to a Gentile Church, expressly makes Christianity answer with its life for the literal ἜΠΗ of the Resurrection. ‘If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain... Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished’. Some modern writers would possibly have reproached St. Paul with offering a harsh alternative instead of an argument. But St. Paul would have replied, first, that our Lord’s honour and credit were entirely staked upon the issue, since He had foretold His Resurrection as the ‘sign’ which would justify His claims}; and secondly, that the fact of the Resurrection was attested by evidence which must outweigh everything except an @ priori conviction of the impossibility of miracle, since it was attested by the word of more than two hundred and fifty living persons who had actually seen the Risen Jesusi. As to objections to miracle of an ἃ priori character, St. Paul would have argued, as most Theists, and even the French philosopher, have argued, that such objections could not be urged by any man who believed seriously in a living God at alli, But on the other hand, if the Resur-
f Acts i. 22, ii. 24, 32, iii. 15, iv. 10, v. 30, x. 40, xiii. 30, 33, 34, ΧΥΠ 31. & 1 Cor. xv. 14, 18. h St. Matt. xii. 39, 40. iy Cor. xv. 6: Ἔπειτα ὥφθη ἐπάνω πεντακοσίοις ἀδελφοῖς ἐφάπαξ, ἐξ ὧν οἱ πλείους μένουσιν ἕως ἄρτι, τινὲς δὲ καὶ ἐκοιμήθησαν. It is quite arbitrary to say that ‘the Resurrection with Paul is by no means a human corporeal re- surrection as with the Evangelists,’ that ‘his ὥφθη κἀμοί implies no more than a flash and a sound, which he interpreted as a presence of Christ.’ (Westm. Rev. Oct. 1867, p. 529.) On this shewing, the ὥφθη Σίμωνι in St. Luke xxiv. 34 might similarly be resolved into an illusion. The ἑωράκαμεν of St. John xx. 25 might be as unreal as the ἑώρακα of 1 Cor. ix. τ. Con- trast with the positive tone of 1 Cor. xv. 6 the measured hesitation of 2 Cor. xii. 2. It is also a mere assumption to say that a ‘palpable body’ could not be seen at once by 500 persons; and the suggestion that St. Paul’s own belief in ‘a continued celestial life of Christ,’ and in the moral resur- rection of Christians was ‘afterwards materialized’ into ‘the history of a bodily resurrection of Christ, and the expectation of a bodily resurrection of mankind from the grave,’ is nothing less than to fasten upon the Apostle the pseudo-spiritualistic error, against which in this chapter he so pas- sionately contends. On this subject, see ‘The Resurrection of Jesus Christ,’ by R. Macpherson, D.D., pp.127, 346; Pressensé, Jesus Christ, pp. 660- 665. J ‘Dieu peut-IIl faire des miracles, c’est ἃ dire, peut-I] déroger aux lois, qu ἾΙ a établies? Cette question sérieusement traitée serait impie, si elle n'était absurde. Ce serait faire trop d’honneur ἃ celui, qui la resoudrait negativement, que de le punir; il suffirait de l’enfermer. Mais aussi, quel homme a jamais nié, que Dieu pit faire des miracles?’ Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, Lettre iii. 4 -
Iv |
158 Christ's miracles how related to His Divinity.
rection be admitted to be a fact, it is puerile to object to the other miracles of Jesus, or to any other Christian miracles, provided they be sufficiently attested. To have admitted the stupendous truth that Jesus, after predicting that He would be put to a vio- lent death, and then rise from the dead, was actually so killed, and then did actually so rise, must incapacitate any thoughtful man for objecting to the supernatural Conception or to the Ascen-
sion into heaven, or to the more striking wonders wrought by Jesus, on any such ground as that of intrinsic improbability. The Resurrection has, as compared with the other miraculous occur- rences narrated in the Gospels, all the force of an ἃ fortiort argument ; they follow, if we may use the term, naturally from it; they are fitly complemental incidents of a history in which the Resurrection has already made it plain, that we are dealing with One in Whose case our ordinary experience of the limits and conditions of human power is altogether at fault.
But if the miracles of Jesus be admitted in the block, as by a ‘rational’ believer in the Resurrection they must be admitted ; they do point, as I have said, to the Catholic belief, as distinct from any lower conceptions respecting the Person of Jesus Christ. They differ from the miracles of prophets and Apostles in that, instead of being answers to prayer, granted by a Higher Power, they manifestly flow forth from the majestic Life resident in the Worker, And instead of presenting so many ‘difficulties’ which have to be surmounted or set aside, they are in entire harmony with that representation of our Saviour’s Personal glory which is embodied in the Creeds. St. John accordingly calls them Christ’s ‘works,’ meaning that they were just such acts as might be expected from Him, being such as He was. For our Lord’s miracles are something more than evidences that He was the organ of a Divine revelation. They do not merely secure a deferential attention to His disclosures respecting the nature of God, the duty and destiny of man, His own Person, mission, and work. Certainly they have this properly evidential force; He Himself appealed to them as having it!, But it would be difficult altogether to account for their form, or for their varieties, or for the times at which they were wrought, or for the motives which were actually assigned for working them, on the supposition that their value was only evidential. They are like the kind deeds of the wealthy, or the good advice of the
* Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p.g1, note 11. Christian Remem- brancer, Oct. 1863, p. 274. 1 St. John x. Ἴ LECT.
Their value not merely evidential, 159
wise ; they are like that debt of charity which is due from the possessors of great endowments to suffering humanity. Christ as Man owed this tribute of mercy which His Godhead had _rendered it possible for Him to pay, to those whom (such was “His love) He was not ashamed to call His brethren. But besides this, Christ’s miracles are physical and symbolic repre- sentations of His redemptive action as the Divine Saviour of mankind. Their form is carefully adapted to express this action. By healing the palsied, the blind, the lame, Christ clothed with a visible form His plenary power to cure spiritual diseases, such as the weakness, the: darkness, the deadly torpor of the soul. By casting out devils from the possessed, He pointed to His victory over the principalities and powers of evil, whereby man would be freed from their thraldom and restored to moral liberty™, By raising Lazarus from the corruption of the grave, He proclaimed Himself not merely a Revealer of the Resurrection, but the Resurrection and the Life itself. The drift and meaning of such a miracle as that in which our Lord’s ‘Ephphatha’ brought hearing and speech to the deaf and dumb is at once apparent when we place it in the light of the Sacra- ment of baptism, The feeding of the five thousand is remark- able as the one miracle which is narrated by all the Evangelists ; and even the least careful among readers of the Gospel cannot fail to be struck with the solemn actions which precede the wonder-work, as well as by the startling magnificence of the result. Yet the permanent significance of that extraordinary scene at Bethsaida Julias is never really understood, until our Lord’s great discourse in the synagogue of Capernaum, which immediately follows it, is read as the spiritual exposition of the physical miracle, which is thus seen to be a commentary, pal- pable to sense, upon the vital efficacy of the Holy Communion®.
m St. Matt. xii. 28; St. Luke xi. 20.
n St. Mark viii. 34, 35.
ο Compare St. John vi. 26-59; and observe the correspondence between the actions described in St. Matt. xiv. 19, and xxvi. 26. The deeper Lutheran commentators are noticeably distinguished from the Calvinistic ones in re- cognising the plain Sacramental reference of St. John vi. 53, sqq. See Stier, ‘“Reden Jesu,’ in loc.; Olshausen, Comm. in loc.; Kahnis, H. Abendmahl, Ῥ. 104, sqq. For the ancient Church, see St. Chrys. Hom. in loc. ; Tertull. De Orat. 6; Clem, Alex. Pedagog. I. vi. p.123; St. Cyprian, De Oratione Dominica, p.192; St. Hilary, De Trin. viii. 14, cited in Wilb. H. Euch. p. 199. The Church of England authoritatively adopts the sacramental interpretation of the passage by her use of it in the Exhortation at the I of the celebration of the Holy Communion. ‘The benefit is great, Iv
160 Zhe mysteries of our Lord’s earthly Life
In our Lord’s miracles then we have before us something more than a set of credentials; since they manifest forth His Mediatorial Glory. They exhibit various aspects of that re- demptive power whereby He designed to save lost man from sin and death ; and they lead us to study, from many separate points of view, Christ’s majestic Personality, as the Source of the various wonders which radiate from it. And assuredly such a study can have but one result for those who honestly believe in the literal reality of the wonders described; it must force upon them a conviction of the Divinity of the worker P.
if with a true penitent heart and lively faith we receive that Holy Sacra- ment: for then we spiritually eat the Flesh of Christ and drink His Blood ; then we dwell in Christ and Christ in us; we are one with Christ and Christ with us.’ Cf. too the ‘Prayer of Humble Access.’
P It may be urged that Socinians have been earnest believers in the Resurrection and other preternatural facts of the Life of Christ, while ex- plicitly denying His Godhead. This is true; but it is strictly true only of past times, or of those of our contemporaries who are more or less inacces- sible, happily for themselves, to the intellectual influences of modern scepticism. It would be difficult to find a modern Socinian of high edu- cation who believed in the literal truth of all the miraculous incidents recorded in the Gospels. This is not merely a result of modern objections to miracle; it is a result of the connexion, more clearly felt, even by sceptics, than of old, between the admission of miracles and the obligation to admit attendant dogma. In his Essay on Channing, M. Renan has given expression to this instinct of modern sceptical thought. ‘II est certain,’ he observes, ‘que si l’esprit moderne a raison de vouloir une religion, qui, sans exclure le surnaturel, en diminue la dose autant que possible, la religion de Channing est la plus parfaite et la plus épurée qui ait paru jusqu’ici. Mais est-ce Ἰὰ tout, en vérité, et quand le symbole sera réduit ἃ croire ἃ Dieu et au Christ, qu’y aura-t-on gagnéP Le scepticisme se tiendra-t’il pour satisfait? La formule de lunivers en sera-t-elle plus complete et plus claire? La destinée de homme et de ’humanité moins impénétrable? Avec son symbole épuré, Channing évite-t-il mieux que les théologiens catholiques les objections de Vinerédulité? Hélas! non. ΠῚ admet la résurrection de Jésus-Christ, et n’admet pas sa Divinité; il admet le Bible, et n’admet pasl’enfer. Il déploie toutes les susceptibilités d’un scholastique pour établir contre les Trinitaires, en quel sens le Christ est fils de Dieu, et en quel sens il ne lest pas. Or, δὲ Pon accorde qwil y a eu une Existence réelle et miraculeuse d’un bout ἃ Vautre, pourquoi ne pas franchement Vappeler Divine? L’un ne demande pas un plus grand effort de croyance que l’autre. En vérité, dans cette voie, il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute; il ne faut pas marchander avec le surnaturel ; la foi va d’une seule pitce, et, le sacrifice accompli, il ne sied pas de réclamer en détail les droits dont on a fait une fois pour toutes Ventitre cession.’ Etudes d’Histoire Religieuse, pp. 377, 378. Who would not rather, a thousand times over, have been Channing than be M. Renan ? Yet is it not clear that, half a century later, Channing must have believed much less, or, as we may well trust, much more, than was believed by the minister of Federal-street Chapel, Boston ?
[ Lect,
imply that His Person ts Superhuman, 161
But the miracles which especially point to the Catholic doc- trine as their justification, and which are simply incumbrances blocking up the way of a Humanitarian theorist, are those of which our Lord’s Manhood is itself the subject. According to the Gospel narrative, Jesus enters this world by one miracle, and He leaves it by another. His human manifestation centres in that miracle of miracles, His Resurrection from the grave after death. The Resurrection is the central fact up to which all leads, and from which all radiates. Such wonders as Christ’s Birth of a Virgin-mother, His Resurrection from the tomb, and His Ascension into heaven, are not merely the credentials of our redemption, they are distinct stages and processes of the re- demptive work itself. Taken in their entirety, they interpose a measureless interval between the Life of Jesus and the lives of the greatest of prophets or of Apostles, even of those to whom it was given to still the elements and to raise the dead. To expel these miracles from the Life of Jesus is to destroy the identity of the Christ of the Gospels; it is to substitute a new Christ for the Christ of Christendom. Who would recognise the true Christ in the natural son of a human father, or in the crucified prophet whose body has rotted in an earthly grave? Yet on the other hand, who will not admit that He Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of a Virgin-mother, Who, after being crucified, dead, and buried, rose again the third day from tlie dead, and then went up into heaven before the eyes of His Apostles, must needs be an altogether superhuman Being? The Catholic doctrine then is at home among the facts of the Gospel narrative by the mere fact of its proclaiming a superhuman Christ, while the modern Humanitarian theories are ill at ease among those facts. The four Evangelists, amid their dis- tinguishing peculiarities, concur in representing a Christ Whose Life is encased in a setting of miracles. The Catholic doctrine
‘meets these representations more than half-way; they are in
sympathy with, if they are not admitted to anticipate, its as- sertion. The Gospel miracles point at the very least to a Christ Who is altogether above the range of human experience; and the Creeds recognise and confirm this indication by saying that He is Divine. Thus the Christ of dogma is the Christ of history: He is the Christ of the only extant history which describes the Founder of Christendom at all. He may not be the Christ of some modern commentators upon that history ; but these commentators do not affect to take the history as it tr] come down to us. As the Gospel narratives stand, they Iv M :
162 Can our Lord’s miracles be denied or zgnored ?
present a block of difficulties to Humanitarian theories; and these difficulties can only be removed by mutilations of the narratives so wholesale and radical as to destroy their sub- stantial interest, besides rendering the retention of the fragments which may be retained, a purely arbitrary procedure. The Gospel narratives describe the Author of Christianity as the Worker and the subject of extraordinary miracles; and these miracles are such as to afford a natural lodgment for, nay, to demand as their correlative, the doctrine of the Creed. That doctrine must be admitted to be, if not the divinely authorized explanation, at least the best intellectual conception and réswmé of the evangelical history. A man need not be a believer in order to admit, that in asserting Christ’s Divinity we make a fair translation of the Gospel story into the language of abstract thought ; and that we have the best key to that story when we see in it the doctrine that Christ is God, unfolding itself in a series of occurrences which on any other supposition seem to wear an air of nothing less than legendary extravagance.
It may—it probably will—be objected to all this, that a large number of men and women at the present day are on the oue hand strongly prepossessed against the credibility of all miracles whatever, while on the other they are sincere ‘admirers’ of the moral character of Jesus Christ. They may not wish explicitly and in terms to reject the miraculous history recorded in the Gospels ; but still less do they desire to commit themselves to an unreserved acceptance of it. Whether from indifference to miraculous occurrences, or because their judgment is altogether in suspense, they would rather keep the preternatural element in our Lord’s Life out of sight, or shut their eyes to it. But they are open to the impressions which may be produced by the spectacle of high ethical beauty, if only the character of Christ can be disentangled from a series of wonders, which, as tran- scending all ordinary human experience, do not touch the motives that compel their assent to religious truth. Accordingly we are warned, that if it is not a piece of spiritual thoughtlessness, and even cruelty, it is at any rate a rhetorical mistake to insist upon a consideration so opposed to the intellectual temper of the time.
This is what may be urged: but let it be observed, that the objector assumes a point which should rather have been proved. He assumes the possibility of putting forward an honest picture of the Life of Jesus, which shall uphold the beauty, and even the
perfection of His moral character, while denying the eee LECT.
Our Lora’s references to His Person. 163
reality of His miracles, or at any rate while ignoring them. Whereas, if the only records which we possess of the Life of Jesus are to be believed at all, they make it certain that Jesus Christ did claim to work, and was Himself the embodiment of, startling miracles?. How can this fact be dealt with by a modern disbeliever in the miraculous? Was Christ then the ignorant victim and promoter of a crude superstition? Or was He, as