CHAPTER VII.

JESUS, HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE.

O man will ever succeed in so reproducing an age long past

N°

that it shall seem to the beholder as it did to those who lived in it. Even if one is in possession of all the facts, and has skill to draw a perfect picture, he cannot prevent our looking upon a past age with modern eyes, and with feelings and associations that will put into the picture the coloring of our own time. But we can approach the times and spirit of Roman life, or of life in Athens in the days of Socrates, far more readily and easily than we can the Jewish life in the time of Christ. He was of the Shemitic race; we are of the Japhetic. The orderliness of our thought, the regulated perceptions, the logical arrangements, the rigorous subordination of feeling to volition, the supremacy of reason over sentiment and imagination, which characterize our day, make it almost impossible for us to be in full sympathy with people who had little genius for abstractions, and whose thought moved in such association with feeling and imagination that to the methodical man of the West much of Oriental literature which is most esteemed in its home seems like a glittering dream or a gorgeous fantasy.

But the attempt to reproduce the person and mind of Jesus, aside from the transcendent elevation of the subject, meets with a serious obstacle in our unconscious preconceptions. We cannot see him in Galilee, nor in Judæa, just as he was. We look back upon him through a blaze of light. The utmost care will not wholly prevent our beholding Jesus through the medium. of subsequent history. It is not the Jesus who suffered in Palestine that we behold, but the Christ that has since filled the world with his name. It is difficult to put back into the simple mechanic citizen Him whom ages have exalted to Divinity. Even if we could strain out the color of history, we could

not stop the beatings of the heart, nor disenchant the imagination, nor forget those personal struggles and deep experiences which have connected our lives in so strange a manner with his. We cannot lay aside our faith like a garment, nor change at will our yearning and affection for Christ, so as not to see him in the light of our own hearts. His very name is a lovename, and kindles in tender and grateful natures a kind of poetry of feeling. As at evening we see the sun through an atmosphere which the sun itself has filled with vapor, and by which its color and dimensions are changed to the eye, so we see in Jesus the qualities which he has inspired in us.

Such a state of mind inclines one to devotion, rather than to philosophical accuracy. The exalted idea which we hold of Jesus, and our implicit and reverential view of his Divinity, still tend, as they have tended hitherto, to give an ideal color to his person and to his actual appearance among men in the times in which he lived. It is unconsciously assumed that the inward Divinity manifested itself in his form and mien. We see him in imagination, not as they saw him who companied with him from the beginning, but under the dazzling reflection of two thousand years of adoration. To men of his own times he was simply a citizen. He came to earth to be a man, and succeeded so perfectly that he seemed to his own age and to his followers to be only a man. That he was remarkable for purity and for power of an extraordinary kind, that he was a great prophet, and lived in the enjoyment of peculiar favor with God, and in the exercise of prerogatives not vouchsafed to mere men, was fully admitted; but until after his resurrection, none even of his disciples, and still less any in the circle beyond, seem to have held that view of his person which we are prone to form when in imagination we go back to Palestine, carrying with us the ideas, the pictures, the worship, which long years of training have bred in us.

There is one conversation recorded which bears directly on this very point, namely, the impression which Jesus made upon his own time and countrymen. It was near the end of his first year of ministry. He was in the neighborhood of Cæsarea Philippi, north of Galilee, where he had been engaged in wayside prayer with his disciples. By combining the narratives

in the synoptic Gospels we have the following striking conversation.

"Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?"

And the disciples answered and said: "Some say that thou art John the Baptist; but some say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah, or that one of the old prophets is risen again.”

And Jesus saith unto them: "But whom say ye that I am?" Simon Peter answered and said unto him: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."

This, it is true, is an explicit avowal of the speaker's belief that Jesus was the Messiah. But how imperfect the reigning expectation of even the most intelligent Jews must have been, in regard to that long-expected personage, need not be set forth. That the disciples themselves had but the most vague and unsatisfying notion is shown, not alone by their whole career until after the Lord's ascension, but by the instruction which Jesus proceeded to give them in immediate connection with this conversation. He began to make known to them what should befall him at Jerusalem, his sufferings, his death and resurrection; whereat Peter rebuked him, and was himself reproved for the unworthiness of his conceptions.

There is absolutely nothing to determine the personal appearance of Jesus. Some ideas of his bearing, and many of his habits, may be gathered from incidental elements recorded in the Gospels. But to his form, his height, the character of his face, or of any single feature of it, there is not the slightest allusion. Had Jesus lived in Greece, we should have had a very close portraiture of his person and countenance. Of the great men of Greece—of Socrates, of Demosthenes, of Pericles, and of many others- we have more or less accurate details of personal appearance. Coins and statues reveal the features. of the Roman contemporaries of Jesus; but of Him, the one historic personage of whose form and face the whole world most desires some knowledge, there is not a trace or a hint. The disciples were neither literary nor artistic men. It is doubtful whether the genius of the race to which they belonged ever inclined them to personal descriptions or delineations.

The religion and the patriotism of the Greek incited him to fill his temples with statues of gods, and with the busts of heroes