CHAPTER XII

The Universal Jesus

The inquiry upon which we have been engaged could, of course, be continued indefinitely; and some of those who have gone thus far may desire to go yet farther. There is much territory still to be explored in this matter of the personal witness of great souls-more detailed inquiry, for instance, into the witness of the mystics, John Tauler, Brother Lawrence, Thomas à Kempis, Henry Suso, Miguel de Molinos, Richard Rolle of Hampole, and others of this gentle company. We might also examine more closely the place of Jesus in philosophy; and there is a rich vein to be worked out in the region of the social and political consequences of His appearance. Still another approach might be made from the side of "specialist" interpretations of Jesus-for example, the mystical interpretation of the life of Jesus by Miss Evelyn Underhill, the economic interpretation by Dr. Bernard Shaw, the psychological interpretation by Dr. Stanley Hall, and the like. Even the bare mention of these possibilities goes to show the singular distinction of Jesus.

In our present inquiry we have seen from how many different angles men have looked upon Jesus, and under how many aspects men have seen Him. To Dante, He

was the glorified Redeemer; to Shelley, the supreme poet and reformer; to William Blake, the incarnation of that divine energy which is for ever creating life and beauty and fellowship; to Browning, the clue to the mystery of the universe; to Tennyson, the divine revealer and

interpreter of God and man; to Francis Thompson, the ever-present Lover who will not let us go. To Savonarola, He was the overlord of cities; to Mazzini, the symbol and promise of universal human unity; to John Ruskin, the living Master who puts us all to work and sustains us while we are at it.

And so comes this tremendous question-How does it happen that all these different characters should be ascribed to one person? How could one man fill so many rôles? Of course, it may be answered that each of these people of whom we have inquired may have simply identified his own personal ideal with Jesus and found in Jesus what it suited him to find. That may be true, of course, and yet the remarkable fact remains that all these various ideals seemed to sit easily and without strain upon Jesus. We know that other persons have been idealized and deified in history; but none have been treated in this way so consistently and so continuously as Jesus. He seems to stand alone.

Yet there are those who say that Jesus never existed, that He is a fictitious, mythical figure. There may have been once an uncommonly good man in Palestine called Jesus, but he is a very shadowy form. The person we

find in the gospels is a composite picture, built up around this obscure individual of whom we can know next to nothing for certain-in which case you have to explain the extraordinary art which clothed this diaphanous figure with so much life that he has imposed himself in this royal and various way upon the generations of men. You are confronted with a choice of two miracles, the miracle of Jesus or the miracle of art. In either case, you have a miracle.

Criticism has its place and office in religion; and it is stupid ignorance that cries out against it. But the danger of criticism is to suppose that its own method covers the whole field. Now the fact is that, because criticism is so preoccupied with the examination of texts

and the scrutiny of details, it is sometimes unable to see the wood for the trees. Of course, we must avoid the other danger of not seeing the trees for the wood and missing the real significance of the exact and scientific study of the gospels. What we have to remember is that, when criticism and exegesis have done their work, they have yet to be submitted to the test of the whole human impression of Jesus. The study of the total impact of the person of Jesus upon the whole man is as necessary for the purpose of securing a just proportion in our thought of Jesus, as is the minute and microscopic examination of records. It is this study upon which we have been engaged.

DAILY READINGS

Twelfth Week, First Day

Then came to him the mother of the sons of Zebedee with her sons, worshipping him, and asking a certain thing of him. And he said unto her, What wouldest thou? She saith unto him, Command that these my two sons may sit, one on thy right hand, and one on thy left hand, in thy kingdom. But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink the cup that I am about to drink? They say unto him, We are able. He saith unto them, My cup indeed ye shall drink: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left hand, is not mine to give, but it is for them for whom it hath been prepared of my Father. And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation concerning the two brethren. But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Not so shall it be among you: but whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister; and whosoever would be first among you shall be your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.-Matt. 20: 20-28.

Jesus seems not so much a person as a universe of

personality. That is the moral to which our inquiry apparently leads. By universe is meant a single whole, which includes everything within itself in a self-consistent unity; and the fact that so many different people discover their own ideal type of personality in Jesus justifies our speaking of Him as a universe of personality. Yet not without one large qualification.

Not every one who has looked upon Jesus has found Him admirable; and in our time there has been one loud and direct challenge to Jesus and the whole view of things that Jesus represents. The name of Nietzsche has been upon everybody's lips now for some years. He is taken to represent the theoretical and philosophical side of the exaggerated national self-consciousness of Germany in the past generation, its worship of power, and its ruthlessness in war. This is not altogether fair to Nietzsche, who would have been the last person to justify the mere worship of massed brute force. Nietzsche's concern was for personality; and because he believed that the Christian doctrine of self-renunciation undermined the foundations of personality, he preached over against it the doctrine of self-assertion.

As a matter of fact, Nietzsche was not without some reason for this attitude. Christianity has too often appeared as a sickly sentimentality, a weak and yielding emotionalism. Its graces of compassion and sympathy have seemed soft and backboneless concessions to weak

Against this kind of thing Nietzsche loudly and rightly protested. But, like most protesters, he protested too much. He mistook a perversion of the real thing for the real thing itself, and assailed Christianity when he was really assailing a degenerate form of it. He did not discriminate clearly. And there can be no question that this vehement challenge was needed, in order to brace up our conception and practice of the Christian morality.

At the same time, Nietzsche's own philosophical prin

ciple is in effect a direct denial of the Christian. He believed it to be possible to produce a type of manhood as much superior to the one we know as the one we know is superior to the highest types of animal life. To this superior type he gave the name of the "superman." But the superman was to grow by the process of self-assertion, by exercising "the will to power"; and in time he would emerge out of this general chaos of self-assertiveness the unchallenged master and lord. So Nietzsche exalts individualism; and the real type of manhood which on this showing proves to be admirable is Napoleon, the masterful, self-assertive, dominant, imperious man.

Now, whether that view is true or untrue, it is, of course, in direct contradiction of Jesus. For, instead of self-assertion, Jesus required self-denial; instead of the "will to power," Jesus preached the "will to love." Nietzsche preached the doctrine of struggle as the process of producing the superman, but Jesus preached the doctrine of cooperation. And not only did He preach, but He also practiced. We know Him as the perfect exemplar of self-denial, and as the living embodiment of the "will to love."

So we may say that the contrast between Napoleon and Jesus sets out the two broad antagonistic views of life. When Professor Cramb looked upon the growing militarization of Europe, he said that Corsica had conquered Galilee; he forgot to add that Corsica ended in St. Helena, and Galilee in an empty grave. But he was right in putting Corsica in antithesis to Galilee. There is no room for the Napoleonic view of life in the philosophy of Jesus. The two are mutually exclusive. So that if we speak of Jesus as a universe of personality, it is with the qualification that the Napoleonic type is outside of it. Which represents the true type, whether Jesus or Napoleon is the real superman, it should not be difficult today to decide.