L. C. 2

18 THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE.
I have said that “zz Christ” men know God—not merely through Christ. It is true that during His earthly ministry He revealed God; so that, in answer to the prayer of one of His disciples, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,’ He said, “Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know Me, Philip? he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” That revelation has eternal power and value; but there are other words spoken by Christ that same night which suggest that it is not merely by the revelation of God during His earthly ministry that Christ has made it possible for men to know the Father. He said: “I am the true vine, and ye are the branches. . . . Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine ; so neither can ye, except ye abide in Me. He that abideth in Me, and I in Him, the same beareth much fruit: for apart from Me ye can do nothing.” It is not certain that when Paul wrote his Epistle to the Galatian Christians he had heard of these words ; but what they meant he had learnt
Wiclif’s translation, which reads, “If for conscience of God men suffereth heaviness, and suffereth unjustly,” etc. In the older English writers the word “conscience” is often used where we should use “consciousness.” Hooker, for example, says, “The reason why the simpler sort are moved with authority is the comscéence of their own ignorance.” We should say “consciousness.” The Greek word which Peter uses has sometimes the one meaning, “consciousness,” sometimes the other, “conscience.” In 1 Pet. ii. 19 I believe that it means “ consciousness.”
THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 1g
for himself. He said, “I live: and yet no longer I, but Christ Liveth in me.” In various measures the experience of Paul has been the experience of Chris- tian men ever since. Their relationship to Christ— their conscious relationship to Christ—has been most mysterious, but most intimate and most certain. They have meditated on the infinite love which moved Him to descend from the heights of God and to become man, upon His graciousness and gentle- ness, His purity, His spontaneous goodness, His pity for suffering, His merciful words to the sinful, His patience and His longsuffering, and His fiery indig- nation against hypocrisy ; they have meditated on His teaching, on all the words of His that have been preserved concerning the love and grace of God, con- cerning the remission of sins, the gift of eternal life, the judgment to come, the eternal blessedness of the righteous, and the doom of the lost; they have felt the spell and the charm of that ideal perfection to which He calls them in His precepts, and which He illustrated and transcended in His own character: but they have been conscious that it was not merely by the power of the great and pathetic story of His earthly history, or by the power of His spiritual and ethical teaching, that He gives to men the life of God, and constantly renews, sustains, and augments it. They shared the very life of their Lord. He lived in them. They lived in Him. And it was in the power of this common life that they knew God. Nor is it only the immediate knowledge of God
20 THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE.
=—
that is rendered possible by this union with Christ. Christian men are conscious that they do not receive strength from Christ for common duty, as they might receive strength from One who, while He conferred the grace, stood apart from them, but that in some wonderful way they are strong in the strength of
Christ Himself. They are too often drawn down into the region of baser forces, and then they fail ; but their very failure verifies the truth of their happier experiences, for it brings home to them afresh what they are apart from Christ; and_when they recover their union with Him—which indeed had not been_lost, though for a time it was not
realized—they recover their power.
III.
The man who has had, and who still has, such experiences as these will listen with great tranquillity to criticisms which are intended to shake the his- torical credit of the Four Gospels, although the story they contain may have been the original ground of his faith in Christ. The criticism may be vigorous ; he may be wholly unable to answer it: but what then? Is he to cease to believe in Christ? Why should he ?
Let me answer these questions by an illustration. Towards the close of our Lord’s ministry, when he was in the neighbourhood of Jericho—just leaving the city or just entering it—Bartimzus, a blind man, who was begging at the side of the road, heard that
THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE, 21
Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, and he appealed to the great Prophet to have mercy upon him. Jesus answered his appeal, and gave him sight. Now it is possible that Bartimzus may have been told by some passing traveller, of whom he knew nothing, the story of a similar miracle which Jesus had worked a few weeks before in Jerusalem, and this may have been the ground, and the only ground, of his confidence in our Lord’s supernatural power. If, after he had received his sight, some sagacious friend of his had asked him how it was that he came to believe that the Nazarene Teacher could give sight to the blind, nothing would have been easier than for his friend to show that, whether the story of the : Jerusalem miracle was true or not, Bartimzeus had no trustworthy evidence of its truth. A tale told by an unknown stranger! This was no sufficient reason for believing that Jesus had given sight to a man born blind. Did the stranger who told the tale know the beggar who was said to have been cured? Was it certain that the man was blind? _ Had the stranger examined his eyes the very morn- ing of the day on which he received sight? Was it certain that the vision was not gradually returning? Was the stranger present when Jesus made the clay, and put it on the blind man’s eyes; close enough to 7 see that no delicate operation was performed during _ the process? The sending of the blind man to wash at the Pool of Siloam was suspicious: what could that washing have to do with a miracle? Did the
“2 THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE.
ee
stranger go with the man to the pool, and keep his eye upon him while he was there? Was it quite certain that the blind beggar who was sent to Siloam was, the man who came back to the city and declared that Jesus had healed him? Might not one man nave been sent to the pool, and another man have come back to Jerusalem? It looked very much as if there were some previous understanding between the blind man and the Nazarene Prophet. The Prophet had rich friends ; they could have made it worth the man’s while to come into the plot. Had Bartimzus considered all these. difficulties? Was it not more probable that the stranger’s story should be false than that the miracle should be true? Would it not be well for Bartimzeus to suspend his faith in Jesus until he had made further inquiries about the miracle ? ae
We can imagine the answer of Bartimeus. I think that he would have said: “ At first I believed in the power of Jesus of Nazareth, because I was told that He had given sight to another blind man ; xow I am sure of His power, because He has given sight to me. It is possible, as you say, that the story about the blind man in Jerusalem is not true. You have asked me many questions which I cannot answer. I cannot explain why he should have been sent to the Pool of Siloam. I acknowledge that the evidence which I have for the miracle is not decisive. As Jesus has restored my sight, I think that the story is probably true; but whether the story is true or
THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 23
not cannot disturb my faith in Him, for if He did not heal the other man, He has healed me.”
And so the faith in the Living Christ of those who have had the great experiences of His power and grace which I have described is not shaken by any assaults on the historical trustworthiness of the story of His earthly ministry. Much less can it be shaken by discussions concerning the nature and origin of the ancient Scriptures of the Jewish people. Their confidence in the books, both of the Old Testament and the New, may perhaps have to be suspended until the controversies of scholars are closed, or until, on historical and critical grounds, they can see their own way to firm and definite conclusions about the main questions at issue; but not their confidence in Christ. They may be uncertain about the books ; they are_sure about Him. Both Christian scholars and the commonalty of Christian people approach the controversies on these ancient records with a settled faith in the power and grace and glory of Christ. Their faith in Him rests on foundations which lie far _ beyond the reach of scientific and historical criticism. They know for themselves that Christ is the Saviour of men: for they have received through Him the remission of their own sins; He has translated them into the Divine kingdom; He has given them _ strength for righteousness, and through Him they have found God.
LECTURE IL.
THE VALIDITY OF THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE.
HE argument of the preceding Lecture may be
challenged. It rests on the experiences of Christian men. But are these experiences to be trusted? Do they satisfy the critical understanding? Are they sufficient to justify faith in Christ ?
I.
In reply to these questions it might be sufficient, for the moment, to say that, while experiences of this kind are strong and actually present they command certainty. They are as decisive and as irresistible as our physical perceptions of light and darkness. They leave no room for doubt. But I suppose that there
are times in the history of most Christian people when the consciousness of God and of union with
Christ becomes faint, and is even wholly lost, nor are they able by any effort to recover it; times when,
if they pray, they seem to be speaking into blank space, not to a living God to whom they are akin, whose knowledge of them is deeper than their know-
ledge of themselves, and whose love passes the 24
VALIDITY OF "HE ARGUMENT. 25
measures of their faith and hope; times when all traces of those diviner powers which were once active in them seem swept away by the insurgent forces of their _baser life, which spread over every province of their nature, creating everywhere con- fusion and desolation. In these dark and troubled days there are some firm and resolute souls that hold fast their faith in Christ, because they are still com- pletely assured of the reality of what they saw and felt in happier times. But there are very many who are assailed by terrible doubts. They ask whether, after all, they can be so certain of the true nature of their past experiences as to live on in the power of them. Those instantaneous moral _deliverances which, at the time, seemed to be the immediate effect of a definite volition of Christ’s, exerted in answer
to prayer, may they not have had ences cause ? Those movements of a mor e
which seemed at the time to be the manifestation of the exceeding greatness of God’s power, may they
not have come from unsuspected_fountains of strength in their own life? That consciousness of God as Another than themselves which gave them such tran-
scendent blessedness, that consciousness of living in Christ which made the invisible order so real, may
it not have been an illusion—a glorious illusion, but
still illusion, and nothing more? Are they sure that their personal life is so perfectly healthy, and
that their powers are so trustworthy, that no error was possible ?
26 THE VALIDITY OF THE
With Christian men whose temper is speculative and critical, these doubts will recur frequently ; and not only in times of spiritual desertion. They will recur most frequently with persons whos igious
life is predominantly subjecti nd whose chief and
almost exclusive concern_is, not to please God per- fectly, but to satisfy themselves that they are pleasing Him perfectly; who are very anxious to be sure of their own love for God, but who think very little of God’s love for them; who dwell, not too much on their own duty, but too little on God’s grace and on the glory of the Christian redemption. They believe
and yet they doubt; and their_introspective habit
makes the doubt always present; they are never so possessed and mastered by the great objects of faith
as wholly to forget it. There is very much in their experience that assures them of the presence and power of Christ: they are sometimes strong in a strength which does not seem to be their own; they are sometimes thrilled by the consciousness that their higher life is touching the very life of God; they sometimes think that they are living in Christ: but they are not sure of themselves. May not all these wonderful experiences be as unreal as the delusions which are the creations of a fevered brain?
)
II. “The creations of a fevered brain”: but why are we sure, when we are ascending the valley of Zermatt, ‘hat the majestic vision of the Matterhorn is not the
ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE, 27
creation of “a fevered brain”? or, when we are strolling through the bazars of Cairo, that the rich colours, and the strange costumes, and the latticed windows, and the crowds of people of many races, and the water-carriers, and the lounging camels, are not projected by an imagination which has been filled with the Avabian Nights? Or, when we are _ listening to Handel’s mighty hallelujahs, why are we sure that orchestra and chorus, and the tumult and the triumph of those exulting cries, and the rush of that glorious cataract_of sound are not a private fancy of our own, an illusion, a dream ?
If for a moment the doubt leaps ‘into the mind, it vanishes quickly, when we find that other_men see the majestic mountain or the delightful city, and that other men hear the victorious hallelujahs.
I sometimes wonder whether I should be sure that
my own perception of the sun and the stars is trust-
worthy if I alone saw them. Suppose—the supposi-
tion is no doubt grotesque—that when the sun rose,
though everybody saw and knew that the darkness had gone and the day come, nobody but myself ever saw the sun ; and that when the day was spent, though
everybody saw and knew that the light was lessening,
- nobody but myself ever saw the splendours dis- appearing behind the hills or sinking into the sea. Suppose that, although everybody saw and knew the _ difference between a clear and a cloudy night, no- body but myself saw the sparkling diamonds in Ursa | Major. Suppose that no trace could be found, either
28 THE VALIDITY OF THE
in ancient or modern literature, that men had ever seen these heavenly visions ; suppose that no word for sun or star existed in the languages of either the East or the West, of civilized or of barbarous races. Suppose, further, that, while I, and I alone, saw the sun and the stars, many other men had a keener and surer eye than mine for all earthly objects, whether great or small, whether remote or near. It is certain that my alleged perceptions would be regarded by other men as wholly untrustworthy, and would be dis- cussed by philosophical persons as the result of some abnormal and morbid condition. For myself, when I actually saw the sun rising morning after morning and ascending to the meridian, and when I actually saw the constellations glittering in the heavens at night, the conviction of their reality would be irre- sistible ; and yet, side by side with this conviction, there would be doubt—doubt mastered and suppressed, but with life in it still, and certain to grow large and strong if, for many days and weeks, brooding clouds concealed the celestial glories.
But if, here and there, another man came to see what I saw ; if, gradually, groups of men, men of very different descriptions, came to see what I saw; if these groups of men began to form in other countries, in distant latitudes and under distant skies; and if. their perceptions corresponded to my own ;—if then, by some surprising discovery of a lost literature, it became certain that the poets of a vanished people had sung of the stars and the sunrise and the sunset, and
ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 29
that their sailors through century after century had taken observations of the celestial bodies, in order to steer their course across the ocean: if all these cor- roborations of what had been my private experience came to me, I should become sure of myself, and all doubt would vanish. They would add nothing to the vividness and certainty of my consciousness that I saw the sun and stars, but they would destroy the doubt of their outward reality created by the know- ledge that other men did not see them. And so the knowledge that other men, as the result of their appeal to Christ, have passed into a diviner world, have found God, have received accessions of strength which they could not attribute to any sudden libera- tion of latent energy in their own life, have broken the chains of evil habits, have seen evil passions wither suddenly, as at the touch of an unseen hand, while it adds nothing to the distinctness or the power of similar experiences of my own, relieves me from the doubt which would worry my faith if my expe- riences were not shared by other men. It _saves me_ from distrust of my own consciousness.
To large numbers of men this distrust is unknown. Their life is wholesome, healthy, natural, undisterbed by the nervous solicitudes of the introspective habit. What they see they see, and they are sure that the thing they see is there; they would be sure of it against the world. What they hear they hear; that other men have not heard it suggests no uneasy suspicion ; that other men have heard it adds nothing
30 THE VALIDITY OF THE
to their confidence. But there are many—and per: haps in these days they are exceptionally numerous —who welcome every confirmation of the trustwor- thiness of their own consciousness. As an English chemist might be grateful that some unexpected results which he had reached in his own laboratory had been reached by chemists in Paris or Vienna, who had made their experiments under different con- ditions and subjected their results to different tests, so there are many men who, however sure they may be that their own consciousness bears unambiguous testimony to the nearness and free personal activity of the Lord Jesus Christ, value the support which their own experience receives from the experience of other Christian men.
This is probably a large part of the explanation of the additional strength and firmness which faith derives from the biographies of saints and from books of devotion. There issomething more than the kind- ling of the religious affections through contact with devout souls in their most ardent moods ; and there is something more than the access of power which results from receiving into the mind their finer con- ceptions of the majesty, the righteousness, and the infinite grace of God. Unconsciously to ourselves perhaps, there is a corroboration and verifying of the reality of our own experiences. What these elect saints saw we have seen, though less clearly. What they heard we have heard. We have passed into the
same world as that in which they lived ; we recognise
ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 31
the mountain ranges and the stars that shine in those fairer heavens: to them the glories of that diviner order were transcendently glorious; to us they are often partially concealed by cloud, and when the cloud breaks, our vision cannot bear the splendours for long, but the glories are the same. A\ll that they report concerning what the grace and power of Christ achieved for them, concerning their ascents to new heights of life, and their access to God through Him, reminds us of passage after passage in our own
personal history. What they found, not in the mere tradition of His earthly li teaching, much less in_the theology of the Church, but in Himself, we too have found, The more remote they were from ourselves in their ecclesiastical associations, in their speculative conceptions of Christian truth, in all the conditions and influences which determined their religious development, the more impressive is the identity between their experience and our own.
A similar corroboration of the trustworthiness of our religious consciousness is sometimes given to us by living men. I suppose that not unfrequently a Christian scholar, whose intellectual certainties con- cerning the Christian revelation have been violently shaken during a morning spent over his books, has had his personal faith in Christ immeasurably strengthened, within a very few hours, while visiting the sick, the aged, and the poor. He had begun to wonder whether, after all, the great historic conception of Christ in the Four Gospels, and the New Testament
32 THE VALIDITY OF THE
story of the rise and the triumphs of the Christian Church, might not be accounted for without assuming that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of the Eternal, the eternal Word who became flesh for us sinners and for our salvation. He was asking himself whether what he had believed were his own most definite experiences of the present power of Christ might not have been the product of subtle and mysterious forces in his own life— forces which, as they were unknown, and not under the direct control of his own will, he had perhaps too incon- siderately attributed to an external source. This in
the morning. In_the afternoon he sat by the side of some poor, aged, and illiterate man, whose strength _ was slowly wasting and _ the conditions of whose life were very cheerless; but the old_ man had travelled
by the same path that all the saints have travelled.
His words, simple and rude, about what Christ had been to him, and done for him, had the accent of reality. And as the scholar listened he could recall, at point after point, identical experiences of his own. It was as if the man were telling the story of years which he had spent in some foreign country, which the scholar also had visited. They had seen the same cities and harbours and churches and _ palaces, the same ruins, the same mountains and rivers, the same crops, the same trees and flowers. The old man’s account of them was very different from what his own account would have been; the old man’s theories and explanations of them and his own were
ARGUMEN1 FROM EXPERIENCE. 33
still more different: but it was certain that what he had seen the old man had seen.
As he walked home he remembered corresponding experiences which had been told him by other men, and of which he had read in the lives of saints of other Churches, other countries, other times. He_
felt sure that different men—men belonging to
different races and different_generations—could_not dream_the same dreams. A man’s private illusions
are his own. If other men see what he sees, hear 1 other men see what he sees, hear_
what he hears, feel what he feels, taste what he tastes,
he may dismiss the fear that his organs are unsound. And so before the scholar sat down to his desk again
at night he had recovered confidence in the trust- worthiness of his own experiences. He had still to learn whether the Four Gospels contain an authentic account of the words and deeds of Christ in Jerusalem and Galilee more than eighteen hundred years ago; but he was sure that in our own time, and here in England, the Living Christ is the Lord and Saviour of men.
III.
The question may still be asked whether, while the controversy concerning the dates and the authorship of the Four Gospels is undetermined, these expe- riences can be a valid ground for believing in Christ.
The terms of the question need explanation. What_ is meant_by believing in Christ? Believing in the traditional opinion concerning the dates and author-
LC: 3
x
34 THE VALIDITY OF THE
ship of the Four Gospels? Believing in their historical trustworthiness? Believing in Luke’s account of the birth of John the Baptist, and of the appearance to Mary of the angel who announced the birth of our Lord? Believing in the story, told by all the evan- gelists, of our Lord’s feeding five thousand men with five barley loaves and two small fishes on the north- eastern shore of the Lake of Galilee? Believing in the story told by.John of the raising of Lazarus from the dead? If this is what is meant by believing in Christ, then clearly no valid ground for believing in Him can be found in such experiences as those which I have described in this and in the preceding Lecture.
But to believe in Christ it is not necessary that men should believe that Matthew wrote the first Gospel, and Mark the second, and Luke the third, and
John the fourth; men believed in Christ and found
God_in Him before any one of the Gospels was written, Nor is it necessary to believe in the his-
torical trustworthiness of any one of the four. From Paul’s account of his own preaching, it appears that he told the Corinthians “first of all . . . that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures ; and that He was buried ; and that He hath been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures ; and that He appeared to Cephas; then to the twelve; then He appeared to above five hundred brethren at once; . . . then He appeared to James; then to all the apostles”; and last of all to himself. A Corinthian who had heard this wonderful story, had
ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 35
believed it, and had trusted in Christ for the remission of sins and for eternal glory, might have been a loyal and zealous Christian for many years before he met with any of our present Gospels. If the first that came into his hands happened to be the Gospel of Matthew, I can imagine that, without any faltering of his faith in Christ, he might, for a time, have been very doubt- ful whether it had really bce written by an apostle, and whether it was trustworthy. There is nothing in it about our Lord’s appearing to “Cephas” alone, or to “ James” alone ; or about His second appearance to “all the apostles”; or about His appearing to “ five hundred brethren at once.” He would find in the story many sayings of Christ of which probably he had never heard before, but which he would _ feel no other teacher could have spoken ; but there were other sayings about which for a time he might be doubtful. None of the miracles would appear to him too great for the power of One whom he worshipped as Son of God and Saviour of men; about some of them he might have heard in meetings of the Church from men who had “known Christ after the flesh,” and who were disposed on account of this knowledge to think they were better Christians than their brethren who, though they had not seen, had believed ; as to the rest, he might hesitate until he was fully assured about the authorship of the narrative. In the power of his faith in Christ he might be “steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the
Lord”; and yet he might be uncertain whether the
36 THE VALIDITY OF THE
new story of Christ’s life which had charmed him was really written by an apostle. To have faith in Christ
is one thing; to have a sound opinion about the authorship of a book is another thing altogether.
This was true in Corinth in the first century ; it is just as true in England in the nineteenth. It is by
faith in Christ_that_ men are saved, not by a belief that Matthew wrote the first Gospel.
As faith in Christ is something wholly different from the belief that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the four narratives of our Lord’s earthly life contained in the New Testament, so it is wholly different from a belief in the authenticity of these narratives. If, when my heart is dark with the sense of guilt, and all my strength is broken through despair of the Divine mercy, I trust in Christ for forgiveness, and the awful weight which crushed me is removed, and the light breaks, and I am conscious that in the mystery of my personal relations to the Eternal a great change has come, and that God has absolved me ; if, having known in past days the blessedness of living in the presence of God, I am lonely and desolate because no sign or intimation of the presence of God is given me, and I trust in Christ to restore me to God, and_the vision he power and the glory return ; if when
the springs of life seem to have dried up, and there is apathetic indifference to all those invisible and eternal things which once filled me with awe, kindled
fires of love for God and for man, created an exult- ing hope, transfigured the world, exalted the ideal
ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 37
of conduct, and inspired strength and resolution to attempt to achieve it—if then I trust in Christ to have pity on me, and the “river of water of life bright as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God,” returns to its deserted channels, and rises and overflows its banks: if, I say, Christ in answer to my faith does these great things for me, what more direct, appropriate, decisive evidence can I have that He is the Redeemer and Lord of men? It is the precise kind of evidence that I need to authenticate and confirm my faith in Him.
Suppose that we had an absolute certainty that Christ wrought every miracle attributed to Him by the four Evangelists, and that He delivered, not merely the substance of the discourses which they have recorded, but delivered them in the very words which have reached us: suppose that it had been possible to anticipate and to satisfy the conditions which alone, according to M. Renan, could make a miracle credible ; suppose that, before our Lord raised the son of the widow of Nain, a commission had been constituted, composed of physiologists, chemists, great physicians, men distinguished for the accuracy of their observation and their mastery of the laws of evidence ; suppose that the commissioners had fully assured themselves that the young man was really dead ; suppose that they had designated the chamber in which the miracle was to be wrought, and had taken all possible precautions to prevent deception ; and suppose that they had certified that, at the word
38 THE VALIDITY OF THE
of our Lord, the young man had risen from the dead
and walked home with his mother: and as this
single wonder, so certified, would not, in M. Renan’s
judgment, have been a decisive proof of the miraculous
power of our Lord, but would only have created “a probability almost equal to_certainty,” suppose that,
when Lazarus died, another commission similarly
constituted had sat, and with the same result:
suppose—for this is necessary to the hypothesis—
that the members of these commissions were men
who had as large and exact and varied a knowledge
of the physical sciences-as could be found in Paris,
Vienna, or London to-day, as keen a penetration,
and an intellectual habit as cautious and as watchful :
suppose that the conclusive evidence of their know-
edge and of their skill was in our hands, that their integrity was beyond all doubt, that the genuineness
of the separate reports in which they recorded what
they had seen could not be contested: suppose that
proofs different in kind,.but equally demonstrative,
assured us that Christ wrought the other miracles
preserved in the story of the evangelists—walked
on the sea, fed thousands of men with a few loaves
and fishes, gave health to the sick, sight to the blind,
and hearing to the deaf: suppose, in brief, that the
evidence of the historical truth of the Four Gospels
were of a kind, not_to invite, but to compel, un- reserved and unqualified belief in every fact that they contain : would this—this alone—be sufficient to com- mand faith in Christ ?
ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 39
Not without that continued experience of His great power and infinite grace to which every gene- ration of His disciples since the Ascension has borne
testimony. For what would be our condition, even _
though we were absolutely certain of the historic had risen from the dead and returned to the Father, He had given no sign of His presence and activity
in the spiritual order ; if through these eighteen hun-
dred years He had delivered no penitent from the consciousness of guilt; if no despairing man, weary
of his evil ways, but unable to forsake them, had ever received from Him strength to throw off evil habits
and to suppress sensual and malignant passions; if
He had never raised those who trusted in Him from
sin to saintliness ; if none of God’s lost children had
been found by Him, and brought home to their
| Father? Would faith in Him have been possible?
| Or, if the wonderful and gracious story of His earthly ministry created an invincible conviction that
He was one over whom death could have no power ;
and if we made a great venture, and appealed to Him
to forgive and pity and save ws, as He forgave and
pitied and saved men during His earthly life :_how
long would our faith in Him last, if there came_no answer—no breath of heavenly air, no touch of Diving, ° power, no light of comfort or of hope? The historic \uov4 certainty could not sustain, even if for a moment it ta created, faith in the Living Christ.
And now let me make another supposition. Ima-
4° THE VALIDITY OF THE
gine that, by some inexplicable fatality, the last three years of our Lord’s earthly life had sunk into abysses of silence and oblivion as deep as those in which nearly the whole of His years from childhood till He was thirty years old have been lost ; that the story of no miraculous work of mercy, the record of no word of power and comfort and grace, remained; that we knew nothing of His temptation, His tears at the grave of Lazarus, His agony in Gethsemane; that neither document nor tradition preserved the sermon on the mount, or His conversation with Nicodemus, or the parable of the sower, or the parable of the prodigal son, or the discourse which He delivered to His elect friends during the night in which He was betrayed ; imagine that we knew nothing more than this—that He was a great religious teacher, that He had been crucified, that those who had loved Him believed that He had risen from the dead. If this were all we knew of His earthly history, the loss to the thought and life, the strength and the joy of the Church would, no doubt, be immeasurable. But it would still be poSsible to believe in Him as the Lord and Saviour of the world, and to find in Him eternal life and blessedness. For the experience of the Church through century after century would remain to bear witness to His power to redeem men of every country and every race and every age who trust in Him for redemption. It would still be certain that, from the time His earthly friends had their last vision of Him to our own days, men of every description have dis.
ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE. 4!
covered that when they speak to Christ, they do not speak into the air, but that He answers them, gives them peace of conscience, strength for suffering and for righteousness, and the immediate knowledge of God, Those who knew Him “after the flesh” bore witness to His resurrection from the dead, and declared that through Him men were to receive the remission of sins and the gift of eternal life. When that generation passed away the Christian Gospel did not become a mere tradition, resting on the unsus- tained authority of its original preachers; new preachers arose who themselves had received through Christ the remission of sins and the gift of eternal life. And the succession has been unbroken. Every new generation has learnt the Christian Gospel from living and original witnesses to the power and grace of the Living Christ, and has then transmitted the truth, confirmed and authenticated by its own experience, to the next. And_so, if the books were lost which record the earthly life of Christ, my faith in Him as my Saviour from sin, the Lord of conduct, and the Giver of eternal life would still rest on strong and immovable foundations; for my personal experience_ of His power and love is confirmed by the experience of sixty generations of Christian men. 1 find that tary religious life; but I find that it is strong and vigorous in those who know the blessedness_and_ power of the communion of saints.
LECTURE III.
THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST TO THE SPIRIT OF MAN.
I.
IX or seven years ago, I had the honour of receiv- ing as my guest a Japanese gentleman who had become a Christian. He spent only a few hours under my roof—he came in the afternoon, and left the next morning ; but, brief as the time was, I was impressed by his moral dignity, his nobleness, devout- ness, veracity, and force. Those who knew him best had a deep admiration for him ; ‘and he had shown the energy of his loyalty to Christ by making a great personal sacrifice in the service of the Church of which he was a member. He seemed to me to be one of those men who, without effort, and by the mere massiveness of their nature, assert ascendency and authority o authority over other men. He had considerable intellectual culture, and great intellectual activity and vigour. At night, when the house was still, I asked him how it was that he became a Christian. I reminded
him that he and his countrymen were wholly sepa- 42
THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST. 43
rated from the traditions of Christendom, and from that unbroken line of historic continuity by which we ourselves are united to those who first received the Christian Gospel. As we Europeans look back over the Christian centuries, we can see a succession of scholars, theologians, and saints, extending from our own times to the very beginnings of the Christian Faith. We can ascend from age to age, listening in turn to the testimony of every generation to the power and grace of the Living Christ, until at last we listen to the words of those who saw and heard the original apostles. But to the Japanese this great Christian tradition is non-existent; to them no! Nitti cca eee Raa Geico vests which ‘separate the present genera: tion from the first generation of Christians. I also reminded him that, although the thought and civi- lization of Western Christendom had recently been exerting an immense and revolutionary power in Japan, the Christian Faith had not come to his countrymen with its authority unchallenged ; that in the foremost nations of Europe the historical trust- worthiness of the story of Christ had been assailed by men of great eminence; and that, side by side with Christianity, there had come to the Japanese a varied and powerful literature, which impeaches its claims, and calls upon Christian nations to surrender their Christian faith as an illusion. This, I believe, in substance, though not in form, is what I said to him in illustration of my question; and I then asked him
44 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIS1
again by what path he had reached his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as Son of God and Saviour of men.
His answer I can recall more closely and more accurately. He said: “I was a Confucian, and I studied the works of Confucius for many years. One thing at last perplexed me. Confucius often speaks of all good things as coming down from ‘heaven.’ Sometimes he speaks as if by ‘heaven’ he meant a living and benignant Person, who consciously be- stows blessings on mankind. In other parts of his writings it seems plain that this cannot be his mean- ing. But the thought came to me that, perhaps, there is a great and mighty and kindly Person above us, and this excited me. I wanted to know whether it was true ; and if it was, I wanted to learn all that could be learnt about Him. With this anxiety in my mind, I listened to the lectures of many learned men on the doctrine of Confucius, but did not find what I wanted. At last I heard a famous Japanese philo- sopher who was hostile to Confucianism, and was delivering a course of critical lectures on it. His lectures made me more dissatisfied with the system than ever.
“Just then a Japanese convert to Christianity gave me a Chinese Bible, and asked me to read it. He told me that the translation was a great achieve- ment of scholarship, and that I should be charmed with its literary beauty. I found that he was right ; the translation is admirable. I read page after page till I came to the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First
ZO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 45
eee eee ee Ee ee Epistle to the Corinthians, beginning, ‘If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.’ I read the whole chapter. I was arrested, fascinated. I had never seen or heard or dreamt of a morality like that. I felt that it was above the reach of the human race, that it must have come from heaven, that the man who wrote that chapter must have received light from God—from God, about whose existence I had been speculating. And then I read the Gospel of John, and the words of Christ filled me with wonder. They were not to be resisted. I could not refuse Him my faith.” And so he be- came a Christian. ‘
The story is worth considering.
When my Japanese friend received so profound an impression from the Epistle to the Corinthians, he asked no questions about the author to whom the Epistle is attributed : whether he claimed to have had a revelation from heaven; whether he was a man of a sound, healthy, reasonable mind, or whether he was likely to be the subject of illusions ; whether, if a revelation had really come to him, all his teaching was to be received as the exact expression of the mind of the Eternal; whether he wrought miracles in proof of his Divine commission to make known to men a new faith, and, if he claimed to work miracles, what evidence authenticated them; whether it was quite certain that the Epistle was written by the man whose authority was so accredited ; and whether, if
46 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
a
originally written by him, it was certain that the true, uncorrupted text had been preserved in the Christian Scriptures. None of these questions seem to have even occurred to my friend; if they occurred, they were at once dismissed as irrelevant. Had Paul received light from heaven? The light was there: my friend saw it—saw_ zt for himself, We was sure that it could have come from no inferior source.
And when he was reading the Fourth Gospel, he did not check his wonder and awe by asking ques- tions about the authorship of the book. He did not ask who John was, whose name stands in the title of it, or how he was to know that John wrote it. The story of the cure of the paralytic man at the Pool of Bethesda, the story of the feeding of five thousand men with five barley loaves and two fishes, the story of the gift of sight to the beggar who had been blind from his birth, the story of the resurrection of Lazarus—these were all very surprising, but my friend does not seem to have separated miracle from miracle, in order to find out whether the writer was actually present at every one of them. He did not subject each miracle to close scrutiny, in order to discover whether, after all, some natural explana- tion of it might not be possible. He had a mascu- line understanding, disciplined both by severe studies and by familiarity with affairs ; it would have been natural for him to withhold his belief from such stories as these: but the vision of glory which came to him while reading John’s account of our Lord’s
70 THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 4
life and teaching was a vision from another and diviner world ; he fell at the feet of Christ, exclaim- ing, My Lord and my God! He did not ask whether the transcendent perfection could have been the crea- tion of the love and reverence of Christ’s disciples: the question was impossible; it would have been as easy to ask whether the splendours of Orion could have been kindled from earthly fires. He saw the Divine majesty and the Divine grace of Christ: what could he do but worship Him?
If at any later time he had begun to doubt whether he had really seen God when he saw Christ, his doubt would have received its answer in his personal experience of the reality of the Christian redemption.
II.
This was a case in which faith was created by the clear vision of the Divine glory in Christ; but there had been a long and effective preparation for faith. When the question concerning the conscious life and personality of the Supreme was raised by the ambiguities of Confucius, my friend did not regard it as being nothing greater than a subject of curious and interesting philosophical inquiry. It was a question which gave him no rest. It reached down to the foundations of the world and of human life. The depths of his heart were moved. He was not afraid to learn that there is a Living God ; if he could only be certain that the “heaven” of which Confucius had spoken was the name of an august Person—
48 2HE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
od
righteous, beneficent, in whom men live and move and have their being—this would be strength and blessedness. The Light which lighteth every man had pierced the clouds, and he loved the light, and longed to be more sure of it. When he read John’s Gospel he found the light which he had been longing for. Men ought to know God when they see Him. My friend, when he saw God, knew Him.
In his case, as I have said, it was the vision of God in Christ which created faith; in the case of those who are already Christians, that vision confirms faith.
Their Conscience confesses that Christ is God. Apart_ from Christ, the authority of Conscience is supreme. She asks no inferior or co-ordinate power to support her claims ; her accent is regal; from her word there 4s no appeal. And to Christian men Christ becomes an_objective conscience. They do not argue that Christ wrought miracles; that therefore it is certain that He came from God ; and that therefore He must be obeyed. His ‘word is enough. Conscience recog- nises in Him the rightful Lord of conduct, and does Him homage. He speaks, “not as the scribes,” nor even as the prophets of the older Faith, or as the apostles of the new. He stands alone and apart, the very Voice and Word of the eternal Law of righteousness.
Nor is it conscience alone that discovers His glory. He appeals, and appeals immediately, to all those ele
TO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 49
ments and powers of life that give answer to the manifestations of the presence of God. What it is to find God or to be found of God every devout man knows, but the secret cannot be told. We feel His touch, and we know that the unseen Hand can be only His. There is a power upon us, and we need no visible sign or symbol to assure us that it is the
power of the Eternal. A light shines ; we know that
it is Divine. [n_solita laces,—on the hills, by the ~
sea, among th nfields, in the woods,—in the crowded streets of great cities, the glory finds us. It finds us when we do not seek it; sometimes when we seek we cannot find it. And to Christian men these great hours often come when they are reading the Four Gospels. They witness a diviner transfigura- tion than that which Peter, James, and John saw on the sides of Hermon. They become independent of the proof-texts on which biblical theologians have built their argument for our Lord’s divinity ; as they read, Christ commands their reverence, their love, their worship. They may know nothing of theological definitions, they may be perplexed by the terms of the creeds ; but to them Christ is what God is, and apart even from the authority of His own words, it would be in their hearts to say that, having seen Him, they have seen the Father.
III. Ave they deceived? May not the vision be a dream? Many of them would reply that, whether LC, 4
50 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
they are deceived or not, the impression produced on them by the story of Christ in the Gospels is
irresistible. As they are so made that fire burns and ice chills them, they are_so made that the story of Christ, in its substance, compels _by a kindly com- pulsion—or rather, inspires by a gracious force—a complete faith in its truth; they could as easily doubt the reality of the material universe as doubt the reality of the historic Christ. They would say that, however it may be with others, however it may be even with many who share their faith, there is for them no necessity that the historical “ wit- nesses” should show their credentials ; they care very little about the historical “witnesses”; for them the story itself is like one of the grander objects of nature—it could not have been man’s work. It may, indeed, bear traces, easily recognisable, of the intervention of human agency, as there are easily recognisable traces of the intervention of human agency in the roads and paths on the sides of Hel- vellyn, and in the piers and docks on the shores of the Atlantic. “But no human hands created Hel- vellyn or the Atlantic. The mountain was there, the ocean and its shores were there, before human hands touched them ; and what human hands have done has not effaced, has not obscured, their true origin and greatness. And no human devotion or genius created the Figure of the historic Christ. He was there, He must have been there, before His story was told by the evangelists; and whatever signs of human
TO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 51
limitation and infirmity may be found in the story cannot diminish the force of the impression that it is in substance a true account of a unique manifes- tation of the Person and Life of God under the conditions which determine the manifestation of the personality and life of man.
To those who have seen God in the historic Christ, the trustworthiness of the story, as satisfying the ordinary tests of historic credibility, is no doubt an inquiry of great interest, but it is not of primary importance. The proof that the writers were honest and intelligent men, and that they were actual wit- nesses of Christ’s wonderful works and actual hearers of His great discourses, or that they ‘learnt what they have told us from other persons who had this original knowledge of what Christ did and taught, or that their story was received as authentic by persons who had the best means of knowing whether it was the story which had been told by apostles, is not the condition precedent of confidence in the substantial truth of their narratives. For the history is not an ordinary history ; if it were, it would stand or fall by the ordinary historical tests. It is wholly exceptional. Instead of resting upon the demonstrated credibility of the evangelists, it demonstrates their credibility.
There is nothing unreasonable in this. On the Christian hypothesis that the Lord Jesus Christ was the eternal Word who became flesh and dwelt among men “full of grace and truth,” and that His disciples “beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten
52 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
from the Father,”—on this hypothesis, we may expect that the true story of His earthly life will carry with it its own authentication. Is it wonderful, is it in any sense contrary to reason, that those who know God should recognise the accent of God in the words of His eternal Son, and the power and life of God in His character and history ?
IV.
But, as I have said, even those whose direct vision of the glory of God in Christ has been clearest are not undisturbed by the clamorous protests of the inferior forces of their nature against the reality of the objects of faith; and they have to reckon with that critical faculty which is for ever questioning the trustworthiness and analysing the contents of consciousness.
Let no one suppose that Christian men know nothing of the philosophy of illusions, nothing of the mysteries and enchantments which are worked by invisible powers in the secret laboratories of life; that they have not discovered how easy it is for the mind to impress its own forms on the objects of perception, and to give them its own colour; how easy for the imagination and for strong emotion— apart from volition and against the strenuous effort of volition—to give such a body to subjective expe- riences that for the time they have all the solidity of objective’realities. They too have had their dreams; and the dreams were so vivid that, when they woke,
ZO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 53
the world of dreams seemed the real world, and the real world a world of dreams. They have seen ghosts—ghosts projected into the common air by some morbid and abnormal action of interior powers which have no name; ghosts gracious and kindly, ghosts cruel and terrible. They have learnt to scru- tinise and to test with the coolest and most judicial impartiality the higher experiences of the soul. And their perception of the Divine glory in the historic Christ stands the closest scrutiny and the severest tests.
They know that in the hours in which they are surest that they are living in the Divine order, the glory of Christ is clearest and most unclouded, and that when they have the calmest and yet the strongest consciousness of the nearness of the Eternal the glory of Christ is most Divine. They know that in some wonderful way the historic Christ clears and strengthens that great faculty—whatever it may be named—by which they are immediately conscious of God. They know that, instead of their conception of God being contracted, dimmed, impoverished by finding God in Him, it is indefinitely expanded and ennobled and filled with a purer and intenser light. The incarnation of Christ, His miracles, His good- ness, His sanctity, His gentleness, and His strength, His common human experiences, His blessed life in the Father, His promises, His menaces, the shedding of His blood for “the remission of sins,” His resur- rection, His ascension—these create a conception of
54 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
the Eternal far transcending, not merely in tender- ness, but in grandeur and in majesty, and in all those elements of power which command reverence and awe, any conception of Him created by the immensities of space filled with the splendours of His countless worlds, or by the immensities of time through which, unfainting and unwearied, God in His solitary strength has sustained the burden of all created things.
V.
That the vision of God in the historic Christ is no illusion is verified by its correspondence with that knowledge of the Lzving Christ which is given in the personal experience of Christian men. For the Living Christ, who is the object of Christian faith, and whose presence in the Christian consciousness is the most potent force in the Christian life, is God, and yet Another than God ; He is man, and yet in- finitely more than man. If His humanity is now trans- figured by His Divine glory, there was a time when His Divine glory was manifested under the common conditions of humanity. The Christ who is on the throne of the Eternal once lived here. And Christian men are certain that, whatever imperfections may be detected in the story, they recognise in the Christ of the Four Gospels the same august Person of whom they have an immediate knowledge, and in whom they have found eternal life and eternal redemption. The conception of the Historic Christ given in the
TO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 55
Gospels is, in its substance, identical with the concep-| tion of the Living Christ given in their own con- sciousness. They interlock. They blend into one. It is conceivable that we might have known nothing, either from authentic documents or from tradition, of our Lord’s earthly history. Our historic knowledge of Him might have been no ampler than that brief Gospel which Paul says that he preached to the Corinthians, and which I quoted in the last Lecture: “I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried; and that He hath been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures ; and that He appeared to Cephas ; then to the twelve; then He appeared to above five hundred brethren at once; . . . then He appeared to James; then to all the apostles ; and last of all, as unto one born out of due time, He appeared to me also.” Whatever Paul may have told the Corinthians afterwards, his Gospel appears to have begun with Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection; and he then went on to recite our Lord’s appearances to His apostles and disciples during the forty days between the resur- rection and the ascension, and last of all to himself. It is conceivable, I say, that we might have known nothing of that pathetic and glorious history which preceded the crucifixion ; for us, the Gospel might have begun with the death of Christ “for our sins.” Or, if we had known more, our additional knowledge
56 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
might have been limited to the brief summary of our Lord’s ministry contained in Peter’s discourse on the day of Pentecost: “Jesus of Nazareth, a Man approved of God unto you by mighty works and wonders and signs, which God did by Him in the midst of you, even as ye yourselves know; Him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay.” Of Christ “after the flesh ”—Christ in His place and work and sufferings in the natural and visible order of the world—we might have known nothing more than this.
Now, if all tradition of the earthly Christ had been lost to us, how impossible it would have been to construct an imaginary history of the years of His humiliation which would not have been incongruous with what we know of Him in His eternal glory— a history which would have given us the impression that He was really man, and yet the Son of the Eternal. But there is unbroken continuity between the earthly life of the Lord Jesus Christ as given in the Gospels and His present relations both to the Father and the human race. He is “the same yes- terday and to-day, yea, and for ever.” The earthly Christ and the heavenly Christ are one.
He was truly man: was born, grew up from in- fancy to childhood, and from childhood to youth and manhood. He hungered and thirsted ; when He was weary He slept ; the sweat fell off from Him in His agony ; He was crucified as a criminal; He
TO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 37
died. He grew in knowledge, and even in His maturity His knowledge, like ours, had its limits. He had the common affections as well as the common relationships of the race; some of His friends were dearer to Him than the rest. He was dependent on the Father as we are dependent; He was filled with the Holy Spirit ; He was tempted ; He prayed. When He was “made flesh,” He ac- cepted all the conditions of human life, and He never violated them. And yet from the very first there were premonitions and manifestations of His unique greatness. He was born—but not as other children are born. An angel came to the Jewish maiden who was destined to be His mother, and brought her this surprising message: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also that which is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of God.” Before His birth the power of prophecy came on her. Soon after He was born an angel appeared to shepherds who were watching their sheep, and told them that the Christ, for whose coming the elect nation had been waiting for centuries, had come at last; and then they heard “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men in whom He is well pleased.” While He was still at Bethle- hem, wise men from the East, who had seen a wonderful appearance in the heavens, which for them was the sign of the birth of that great Jewish Prince
58 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
of whose approaching advent there were vague anti- cipations in many lands, came to worship Him. Of His childhood we have only a passing glimpse. At twelve years of age He is in Jerusalem at a great feast; and for Him the temple is His “ Father’s house,” in which Mary and Joseph might have been certain that they would find Him ; and He is “sitting in the midst of the doctors,” with open mind, eager to learn all that they can tell Him, but asking such questions and giving such answers, that “all that heard Him were amazed at His understanding.”
When His public ministry began there was some- thing new and strange about His teaching. It had a singular attractiveness and charm ; men “ wondered at the words of grace which proceeded out of His mouth.” He spoke—men felt it—on the strength of an original and direct knowledge of God and the will of God ; He quoted the Scriptures, and they had their use for Him, else how could He have been man? but through Him a fresh word of God was heard: “ He taught as one having authority, and not as their scribes,”
His miracles fill the people with wonder. They are gracious, kindly miracles. He does not seek occasions for displaying His power; He exerts it as men need it. Some of these “signs” have a curiously felicitous, but most natural, connexion with events and circumstances which illustrate most vividly the reality of His human nature. He has had an ex- hausting day, and is sleeping in the boat in which
ZO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 59
He and His disciples were accustomed to pass from one point of the shore of the Lake of Galilee to another—sleeping so soundly because of His exhaus- tion that the storm does not wake Him. How truly human He is! But He is roused by His friends, who are in great terror; and as soon as He is awake, He stands up in the boat, and rebukes the winds and the sea, and there is a great calm. He is much more than man.—At the grave of Lazarus, for whom He had a strong affection, He is troubled ; the tears of Mary and of.the Jews who are wailing for the dead move Him profoundly ; He struggles with the violence of His emotion ; He weeps. There is all the anguish of human sympathy and human bereavement. But presently He cries with a loud voice, “ Lazarus, come forth!” And His dead friend appears at His call, and returns home with Martha and Mary. He speaks in the power of God.
The impression of “ authority,” and of an authority of an altogether unique kind, produced by His earlier ministry is deepened as His teaching becomes fuller and more explicit. There is a new accent in all His words, even in the simplest of them ; and there ar: passages in His discourses in which He assumes prerogatives and powers such as no prophet had ever claimed before. He forgives the sins of men. He calls to Himself all that labour and are heavy- laden, and promises that HE will give them rest. He declares that where two or three are gathered together in His name, He is in the midst of them ;
60 THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST
reminding us of the great Jewish saying, which was perhaps already current_in our Lord’s time, that where two of the devout s =
ing the Divine law together, there is the Shechinah, the
glory which is an assurance of the presence of the God of Israel. He is the Shepherd of the flock of God, whether they are in the Jewish fold, or scattered over the great waste and wilderness of heathenism ; He has come to lay down His life for the sheep, and they are to become one flock under one Shepherd. To all that listen to His voice and follow Him He gives eternal life ; and He says that they shall “never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of My hands.” The life which He gives is not given once for all; those who receive it are continuously depen- dent upon Him ; “apart” from Him they wither and die, like the branches apart from the vine. He Himself is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”; “no one cometh to the Father” but by Him. He is in the Father, and the Father is in Him. To have seen Him is to have seen the Father. He will pray the Father, and’the Father will send His disciples another Comforter—a Divine Person—to teach, strengthen, and defend them. He Himself will send the Comforter, and the Comforter will glorify Him. He associates Himself with the Eternal: “ He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father; and I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto him.
My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him.” He is to die, but
TO THE SPIRIT OF MAN. 61
His blood is to be “shed for many unto remission of sins.” As for Himself, He has no sins that need remission.
He is man—really man; but He is not as other men. He is tempted; but the temptations which assail Him are such as might well assail the Son of the Eternal who had been “made flesh”; their appeal is to One whose personality is unique, and who is destined to unique sorrows and to unique greatness. He prays; but He does not pray with His friends, though sometimes He prays in their presence, and they hear the great words which He addresses to His Father. They are words which, while they imply the humblest submission and the completest dependence, imply also a freedom of access to God, resting on community of life and com- munity of dignity, such as can belong to none but Himself. They express at once the reality of His eternal union with the Father, and the reality of His acceptance of all the conditions of humanity.!
The story transcends invention; it must be true. And this is the very Christ whom we know for our- selves, the Christ who has been known to Christian men for sixty generations.
1 The argument in the preceding paragraphs is admirably stated and illustrated in the Hulsean Lectures for 1856 by Dr. Harvey Goodwin: Zhe Glory of the Only Begotten of the Father seen in the Manhood of Christ.
LECTURE IV.
REPLY TO CRITICISMS ON THE PRECEDING LECTURES.
HIS morning I propose to discuss some con.
siderations which may appear to invalidate certain positions maintained in the preceding Lec- tures, and then to inquire to what extent the conclusions which we have reached support the historical trustworthiness of the Four Gospels.
You will remember that the substance of the first answer which I have given to the question, Why is’ it that those of us who believe in Christ have con- tinued to believe in Him, in the presence of the strong and persistent assaults which have been made from many quarters on the authority of the Christian Scriptures? is this: Whatever may have been the original grounds of our faith in Christ, our faith has been verified, and verified in many ways, in our own personal experience. Our case is the case of Barti- meus, the blind beggar of Jericho. His original reasons for believing in the miraculous power of the
Prophet of Nazareth may have been inadequate ; he 62
REPLY TO CRITICISMS. 63
may have had nothing more to go upon than the story of a passing stranger about a blind man in Jerusalem, whose eyes Jesus had anointed with clay, and who, after he had been sent to wash in the Pool of Siloam, came back to the city seeing ; the stranger himself might not have seen the miracle ; he might only have heard the report of it; or, if he professed to have seen it, Bartimzeus may have had no proof that he was an honest man, and that his word was to be trusted : but as soon as Bartimzeus himself had received sight, no doubts, however grave, about the truth of the stranger’s story would disturb his cer- tainty that our Lord could work miracles. His original faith may have rested on evidence which subsequent reflection and inquiry showed to be un- satisfactory ; but as soon as he himself saw the faces of his friends, and the streets and houses in the city of Jericho, and the waters of the Dead Sea, and the mountains of Moab standing like a great wall against the splendour of the clear, blue sky, his faith rested on immovable foundations of personal experience. And so the original faith of Christian people may have rested, or may have seemed to rest, on tradition, on the testimony of friends to the grace of Christ and the glory of the Christian redemption, on a belief in the inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures. They may discover that to build their faith on tradi- tion is to build on the sand ; after the lapse of years, the testimony of friends which at first so strongly impressed them may no longer retain its freshness
64 REPLY TO CRITICISMS
and power, and they may wonder that it should ever have had such decisive force; they may become familiar with the controversies concerning the authen- ticity and genuineness of the Four Gospels, and con- cerning the inspiration of the Scriptures generally, and they may be unable to see their way to any firm conclusions on some of the principal questions at issue. The original grounds of their faith—or what they supposed to be the original grounds. of their faith—have vanished. But their faith in Christ is firmer than ever; for they know from their own personal experience that the Living Christ is the way to the Father, the Lord and the Saviour of men.
I.
It may be objected that the adherents of false religions can make the same appeal to experience in verification of their faith, and that therefore the argument from experience cannot be valid. It has been suggested to me that a devout Mahometan, for example, may be certain that his experience confirms the Divine mission of Mahomet, just as a devout Christian is certain that his experience confirms the Divine mission of Christ.
It might not, perhaps, be wholly unreasonable to reply that very few of us know anything about the religious experience of devout Mahometans; that the objection rests on what we zmagine to be the experience of men of other races living in distant lands, and that it is alleged against what we know
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to be the actual experience of our own countrymen. But I am anxious to attribute the largest conceivable weight to the objection ; the consideration of it will give additional clearness to the real nature of the Christian argument.
What is it then that the experience of a devout Mahometan verifies? Does it verify anything more than the truth explicitly or implicitly contained in Mahomet’s great message: that there is one God, awful in His greatness, whose will is supreme, whose power is too mighty for heaven or earth to resist, who is the strong Defender and eternal Friend of the faithful, and in whom men may find strength
and courage and peace? This conception of God,
though inadequate, is true as far as it goes. The devout Mahometan would be wholly in the right in
maintaining that his experience confirmed his faith in the unity and awful greatness of God, and was an adequate reason for holding fast to it in the presence of the idolatries of heathen races, and of the de- generacy and superstitions of those Christian nations in which he could find no real and living sense of the august supremacy and the power and glory of the Eternal.
But from experience _he can learn nothing about Mahomet. All that his experience verifies is the truth of a part of Mahomet’s message. He may znfer that the man who delivered so great a message, with such power and effect, must have been sent of God to deliver it; and I should not care to dispute the
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inference. If he went on to infer, and to require me to admit, that everything that Mahomet taught— what he taught, for example, about the sensuous joys to which the faithful are destined in paradise—is also true, and is to be received as part of a message from heaven, I should raise an objection. I should say: “What you have verified in your own experience you are bound to hold as true ; but that Mahomet taught some great truths is no proof that he did not teach some serious errors. The truth of those parts of his teaching which you have verified does not compel you to regard as true, those parts of his teaching which, from their very nature, are as yet incapable of verification. This unverified teaching rests on Maho- met’s authority; and there is nothing in your personal experience which can assure you of either the nature or the limits of that authority.”
So much for what I might say to a devout Mahometan; I prefer to finish the discussion by addressing, not an imaginary Mahometan in Cairo, Constantinople, or Damascus, but yourselves,
The objection’ rests upon a false assumption. It assumes that what may be verified in the experience of a devout Mahometan corresponds to what may be verified in the experience of a devout Christian. ea as I have said, what the Mahometan can verif simply the truth of a part of Mahomet’s eee which was delivered twelve centuries and a half _ago. What the Christian /hat the Christian verifies is the present power and
grace ace of Jesus Christ H Himself. The truth verified
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by the Mahometan has only an extrinsic and acci- dental relation to Mahomet. It would be an august truth, whoever had first proclaimed it to the people of Arabia; it is an august truth, whatever errors may have been associated with it in the teaching of the great man who actually proclaimed it. But the Christian Gospel, verified by the Christian, is not merely a truth or a body of truths first taught by Christ: it is a truth, a body of truths, concerning Christ Himself; in its very essence and substance it is related to Christ. Mahomet delivered his mes- sage; men received it; and from that time the truth which it contained was a great, living force in the world ; and it is this truth which is verified in the experience of devout Mahometans: of Mahomet himself they have no experience. But Christ—not the truth which He taught, apart from Himself— Christ Himself is the effective Saviour of men in every country and in every age; and what is verified in Christian experience is that Christ Himself gives eternal life, quenches or subdues evil passions, and is the strength of all Christian righteousness ; Chris- tian men are conscious that, in the power, not of the truth which He taught, but of personal union with Himself, they have their place in the eternal order and know the blessedness of fellowship with God The devout Mahometan may xfer, from his expe- rience of the truth of Mahomet’s message concerning the unity and awful greatness of the Eternal, that Mahomet, who has been dead for twelve hundred
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years, was a prophet sent from God; within what limits, and with what qualifications, the inference is valid, is a question for discussion. The devout Chris- tian has an immediate knowledge of the Living Christ as the Saviour of men. This is not an inference from experience ; it is gcvem in experience.
It has also been objected, that the adherents of cor- rupt forms of Christianity may appeal to experience as verifying, not only the general substance of the Christian Gospel, but specific corruptions of it; and that therefore the appeal to experience is not decisive. For example, it is alleged that a superstitious Catholic who has committed murder, and who is tortured with a sense of guilt, may confess his crime to a priest, and leave the confessional with a light heart ; to him, therefore, it is certain that the priest has authority to absolve him from his crime. But this, again, is an imaginary experience brought forward to invalidate the force of an experience that is real. We Pro- testants know very little about Catholic criminals, or about the peace’ of heart which is given them by absolution.
But let us construct our case. We are to suppose that the criminal is oppressed with a horror of his guilt ; that he is not merely dreading the flames of hell. His conscience is inflicting on him intolerable torture ; it is the past crime which is the haunting, agonising terror, not the future penalty which may come upon him for having committed it. And we
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are to suppose that, after receiving absolution from the priest, he is liberated from the sense of guilt, and liberated completely ; his freedom is as buoyant as that which, according to our experience, comes in answer to our trust in the redemption and the infinite grace of Christ. This is the imaginary case.
But could this be a real case? Could it be a com- plete account of a real case? An imaginary criminal who has received from an imaginary absolution an imaginary release from the sense of guilt cannot be examined ; his experience cannot be tested. But if I met a murderer coming out of a Catholic church with a face in which I could see peace and hope and thankfulness, I should like to ask him a few questions, When he confessed his sin, did the priest remind him that Christ had died for the sins of men? Did he himself recall that gracious, that awful form, extended on the cross, before which he had been accustomed, from his childhood, to bow with penitence and worship? Did he pass in thought from the crucifix to Christ—Son of God, Son of man, sacrifice for the sin of the world? Did the priest pronounce the words of absolution in his own name or in Christ’s name? Was it in the authority and grace of the priest that he found rest of heart, or in the authority and grace of Christ, for whom, as he believed, the priest spoke? If the priest was but the channel of the mercy and power of Christ, then the man’s experience does not contradict, but confirm mine; it was from Christ that he received release, and to Christ, not to
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the priest, he would say with a grateful heart, “As far as the east is from the west, so far hast Thou removed my transgressions from me.” If, on the other hand, it is supposed that the criminal did not pass beyond the priest to Christ, I should deny that the imaginary case could ever be a real one.
II.
An objection of another kind may be taken to the line of argument in the preceding Lectures. It may be said that, if Christian men were asked why they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, they would not give either of the answers which I have given for them. Nine out of ten would reply that they believe in Christ because they believe that the whole Bible, from the first chapter in the book of Genesis to the last