for the beauty of the world in which He had delighted? Perhaps this is the real commentary on that deep word -"By his stripes we are healed." "Medieval Art," says Sir Wyke Bayliss, "in its first splendour was art transfigured by contact with the divine character and person of Christ." It was not until the sixth century that Christian art ventured on an attempt to paint the Crucifixion; but that was in the gloomy millennium and it came to nothing. With the Renascence came a fuller and deeper appreciation of the significance of the Son of Man, who came to give His life a ransom for many and by that act to give men "life more abundant"; and out of that new abundance of life came first a revitalized art and then a revitalized religion. The great discovery of that period was assuredly this-that suffering is the price of redemption, that "without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins," nor anything else worth while. The Man of Sorrows turned out to be the author of true joy.

"The one central figure that in the splendour of His divine beauty consecrated Art for ever was that of Jesus.'

Second Week, Fourth Day

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with the publicans and sinners? But when he heard it, he said, They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what this meaneth, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice: for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.-Matt. 9:10-13.

We have seen how Art has in the main fastened on and perpetuated two elements in the personality of Jesus, the joyous simplicity of His bearing and the tragic grandeur of His passion. This is not unnatural; for Art tends to

"Christ and the Christian Character," p. 46.

seek its chief sustenance in the contemplation of the beauty and the tragedy of life.

This serves to illustrate a point which we shall encounter several times in the course of our study-namely, the almost inevitable way in which forward-looking men have found a "kindred spirit" in Jesus.

Another and the best example of this tendency is to be found in the fact that the Carpenter of Nazareth has been as rich a source of inspiration and courage as the Good Shepherd or the Suffering Saviour. There has hardly been a great "rebel" from John Ball to John Brown who has not sought and found his justification in Jesus; and every man who has had a feeling for the "common people," the great human mass in all its need and its possibilities, has found strength and courage in the story and example of Jesus.

Dr. Peabody has put on record a number of statements made by German working men about Jesus. "Christ was a true friend of the working people," said one of them (and we need not quote any other), "not in His words alone but in His deeds." And when Dr. Abbott longed that the working men of England should say: "We used to think that Christ was a fiction of the priests . . . but now we find that He was a man, after all, like us, a poor working man who had a heart for the poor . . . now we understand this, we say, though we do not understand it all or anything like it, He is the man for us," he was only anticipating a day when a meeting of workers in Hyde Park in London gave "three cheers for Jesus Christ.'

The sense of this broad fundamental human appeal of Jesus is, of course, no new thing. When Wyclif's "poor priests" were impregnating the peasantry of England with those social ideals which led up to the Peasants' Revolt, when John Ball the "mad priest of Kent" led the men of Kent to fight the social oppression of the time, William

In "Jesus Christ and the Social Problem."

Langland gave expression in verse to the spirit which inspired this insurgency:

"For our joy and our health, Jesus Christ of heaven In poor man's apparel pursueth us ever;

For all we are Christ's creatures, and of His coffers rich And brethren of one blood, as well beggars as earls."

Langland's great poem "Piers Plowman" is the poor man's Odyssey. Piers Plowman, the "hero" of the poem, is indeed no other than Jesus Himself-"the people's man, the people's Christ, poor humanity adorned with love, hardworking humanity armed with indignation, sympathetic humanity clad in the intelligence that knows all -and makes allowances; at one time setting highborn ladies to work, at another attacking the insolent priest, at another calling upon Famine to help him against the loafing growling wastrel of the streets; but always encouraging the penitent sinful, helping the weak, leading the way in the great journey, a strange figure, Christ in humanity, humanity Christ-clothed, neither all a poor man, nor all a ploughman, nor all a Jesus, but fading and vanishing and reappearing in all forms of His humanized divinity and ending as the Christ-conqueror that from the Cross went down and burst the doors and defied the brazen guns of hell."

995

Second Week, Fifth Day

Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For verily not of angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behoved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make

5 Arthur Burrell, Introduction to "Piers Plowman," p. x, (Everyman's Library).

propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.-Heb. 2: 14-18.

The identification of Jesus with humanity which we have seen in "Piers Plowman" is not confined to William Langland. When we come to study Mazzini in detail, we shall find him full of the same thought. Nor is it in the least a forced or arbitrary interpretation, for it is in a very real sense what Jesus Himself meant when He called Himself the "Son of Man," the typical, representative, ordinary man-not merely one of us, but all of us. And it may be questioned whether if an instinctive human response to an idea is a guarantee of its truth, any idea is more completely validated than this. Is there any one who can fail to feel the essential truth of the vision recorded by the great Russian Turgeniev?

"I saw myself, a youth, almost a boy, in a lowpitched wooden church. The slim wax-candles gleamed, spots of red, before the old pictures of the Saints. There stood before me many people, all fair-haired peasant heads. From time to time, they began swaying, falling, rising again, like the ripe ears of wheat when the wind in summer passes over them. All at once a man came up from behind and stood beside me. I did not turn towards him, but I felt that the man was Christ. Emotion, curiosity, awe overmastered me. I made an effort and looked at my neighbour. A face like everyone's, a face like all men's faces. The eyes looked a little upward, quietly and intently; the lips closed, not compressed; the upper lip as it were resting on the other; a small beard parted in two; the hands folded and still; and the clothes on him like everyone's. 'What sort of Christ is this?' I thought. 'Such an ordinary, ordinary man. It cannot be.' I turned away, but I had hardly turned my eyes from this ordinary man when I felt again that it was really none other than Christ standing beside me. Suddenly my heart sank and I came to myself. Only then I realized that just such

a face is the face of Christ-a face like all men's faces." The moral involved in this thought has been beautifully put in a poem by Alice Meynell. Despite its Catholic and sacramentarian background, the truth is no less valid for Protestants:

"O Christ, in this man's life

This stranger who is thine-in all his strife
All his felicity, his good and ill

In the assaulted stronghold of his will;

I do confess Thee here,

Alive within this life; I know Thee near
Within this lonely conscience, closed away
Within this brother's solitary day.

Christ in his unknown heart,

His intellect unknown, this love, this art,
This battle and this peace, this destiny
That I shall never know, look upon me.

Christ in his numbered breath,

Christ in his beating heart and in his death,
Christ in his mystery! From that secret place,
And from that separate dwelling, give me grace!"

It surely must be true that we shall not see the face of Jesus Christ except as we discern it in each other's faces; or, to put it in another way, without a vivid social sense we shall not descry all the meaning of "that one Face."

Second Week, Sixth Day

And from thence he arose, and went away into the borders of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered into a house, and would have no man know it: and he could not be hid. -Mark 7:24.

There are few writers of any great account in the Christian era in whose works we fail to find material for