Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

person He meets, as we are with the features of our friends' faces. Nothing is hidden. You read his biographies. Constantly He moves about His countrymen as one who does not need that any should testify of men. When the most complicated and obscure cases of moral disorder are brought to Him to be cured, He makes no inquiries of the patient himself or of the bystanders; instantly He shows that He reads the malady in all its peculiar shades and workings, and administers to it precisely the healing influence it needs. So with the young man who fancied he had kept the commandments, but lacked the self-sacrifice without which he could not really keep one of them; so with the Pharisees and rulers; so with Judas and Pilate; so with the faithless wife and sinner whose sins everybody else knew, but everybody else misjudged and aggravated. When He was before the woman at that well of Samaria, He gave her, by a few penetrating words, the awful feeling that He knew all that ever she did. If He ever asked a question, it was evidently not for information, but only to fasten the attention and prepare the faith, and tone the feeling of the subject of the miracle, or of the witnesses that stood by, and the result is just what we should expect. The faith has entered into the great body of Christians in all Christendom, that Christ now knows them, and reads them through and can save them. Even men who speculatively deny His divinity cannot shake off the solemn and clinging sense of this omniscience of the Saviour. Indeed, how could He be a Saviour without knowing the real want and the real state of every personal heart He saves? How could He abide in any heart, an indwelling Lord, without beholding what is there? How could He be the light of the world without its lying all open to His inspection? How could He judge men for their individual characters, as He declares He will, unless He comprehends every motive and traces every line of secret and open error, and witnesses, as in the light of day, all the dark windings and delusions of desire and indulgence? No, my friends! there is no Christ for us save Him who has all knowledge, as He has all power in heaven and earth. And omniscience is an attribute of God alone. We pray rightly in the Litany, “O God, the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy upon us, miserable sinners." Let the arguments of controversy issue as they may, beyond and beneath all controversy, imbedded in the very secret framework and texture and historic truth of the

gospel, and living in the instincts of devout souls, rest these real proofs of the divinity of Christ.'

The Rev. T. T. Munger, whose volume of sermons, The Freedom of Faith, has attained great popularity, and deservedly so, says in a work of his, called On the Threshold, p. 223: 'I urge upon you a study of the character of Jesus Christ. It is almost a modern thing, this analysis and measurement of that Divine Person. In former days, when religious thought took chiefly theological forms, the Christ was but a factor of a system; but since we have begun to think from more practical standpoints, the question has arisen, What sort of a man was Christ? Dr. Bushnell, in the famous tenth chapter of his book, Nature and the Supernatural, first made the question a general one in this country. In England, it had found place in the writings of Coleridge, Dr. Arnold, Maurice, Robertson, and others of their school of thought. It became popular through Ecco Homo, and is to-day the favourite theme of religious speculation, as shown in Phillips Brooks's Influence of Jesus, and in Thomas Hughes's Manliness of Christ. Led by such teachers as these, you find that you have before you a character more curiously interesting, more wonderful than any other that history can show. You find that you cannot classify Him,-elusive and passing out of sight on some sides of His character, yet most near and tangible on other sides,—a Jew, yet not Jewish; of the first century and equally of all centuries; an idealist, but not transcending possibility; a reformer, but not a destroyer; making for the first time what is highest in character, the most effective in action; a true full member of the common humanity, but transcending it till He is one with God; a Being at the same time so weak that He can die, and so strong that He is superior to death; a Person at once so near and human that we call Him our Brother, and so high and mysterious that we bow at His feet as our Lord and Master. Now, no thoughtful person can get beyond the first superficial look at this Jesus, without ever after holding Him in highest veneration. Nor can one study this character long without perceiving that it contains the true order of humanity, and "points the way we are going" to the end of time. Nor can we long contemplate the Christ without feeling His Personality pressing upon ours with transforming power.'

The late Alfred J. Morris, of Holloway, a name well known in Nonconformist circles, and greatly honoured, in a volume of discourses by him, entitled Words for the Heart and Life, says, page 220: 'We lay stress on the representation of our text, ("Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,") as one of a large class which intimate and require the Divinity of Jesus Christ. Consider the exact point and nature of our argument. It is, that the place assigned to Christ in the scheme and providence of God is such, that only on the supposition of His Divine Nature can it be understood and explained. Christ underlies every truth, fills every institute, gives force to every law; is the ground, reason, virtue, end, and rule of all things. He is not a doctrine, but the doctrine of the gospel. Destroy Him, take Him away, and you do not merely violate the language but annihilate the very life of God's covenant. He is so revealed, having such vital connection with every part and principle of the Divine counsel and procedure, as to be the object of prime attraction in the words and ways of God. All eyes are directed to Him, all hearts fixed upon Him. To all intelligent and holy beings He is the glory. Living saints count Him "all and in all;" holy angels desire to understand "His sufferings," and their blessed results; returning men speak of "His decease;" and glorified spirits pay all honour and homage to His work and love. Apart from His Divinity, on the supposition of His mere, however pure and perfect, humanity, I cannot conceive that He could fill so central a place, exert so vital an attraction. Nor, if He could, how He should do so. It secures such "honour to the Son," it demands such trust and love for Him, it mixes Him up so thoroughly with the most essential views and worship and service of the everlasting God, that it seems impossible to comprehend how, if He were only human, He should escape the treatment and regard due only to the Divine, how there should be no trespassing on the prerogatives of Deity, how the very fact of being Christians should not as by inevitable necessity lead to the being idolaters. Surely, if Christianity be what we are accustomed to regard it, He who is its spirit, in the way and for the reasons which itself explains, can be no other than the “true God and eternal life.” '

The Rev. H. E. Von Stürmer, B.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge, in a little volume, entitled Christ the Divine Man, or Deity

Veiled, says, p. 164: 'If only His followers did not make so much of Christ, His enemies would be more willing to let Him alone. When lately a well-known preacher was arraigned on a charge of teaching false doctrine, he brought forward in his defence this very point, and went so far as to maintain that many Christians are positively idolaters in their worship of Christ: that they so accustom themselves to think of Him, and look upon His character and work, that instead of leading them up to the worship and love of God, He is set up as an idol, to come between God and the soul. Now of course if Christ be no more than human, this is perfectly just; but this is the very point at issue, and if He be GOD men cannot make too much of Him. If He be only a man, we say that He is simply unaccountable: Himself, His influence on the human heart, His influence on the progress of thought, His kingdom in the world today. Ever since His advent, men of every class of mind have employed all their powers of analysis and criticism, every possible hypothesis has been advanced, myth, imposture, delusion, but all to no purpose; every attempt to explain Christ is a failure while it stops short of His Deity. Place Him among men the most eminent for virtue. The justice of Aristides, the faithfulness of Achates, the piety of Æneas, the meekness of Moses, the patience of Job, the zeal of Elijah, they all meet in Christ, and the verdict of men is— "Perfect." Place Him among the foremost teachers and philosophers of any age. In Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, in Cato and Seneca and Pliny, in Confucius and Menu, there is ore of gold, but in Christ so fine is the gold, and so truly is it all gold, that the world continues to say of Him, "Never man spake like this man." Place Him among workers of miracles. Let Vespasian and Mahomet, Ignatius Loyola and Xavier and others, be put to Leslie's celebrated crucial test, and scarcely will they satisfy two out of the four criteria; whereas, in the miracles of Christ, the majesty, the beneficence, the facility, the necessity, the number, the publicity, the record, constrain us to recognise the hand of God, and substantiate His claims to be Divine. If heroism is the conquest of nations, the capture of strongholds, the destruction of cities, the slaughter of tens of thousands, then of course Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, and others like them bear away the palm; but if true heroism be a noble courage, sacrificing self and braving danger and death in the cause of truth and virtue,

and for the good of others, standing alone on the side of right, and enduring hatred, ignominy, and persecution, for the sake of good one day to be recognised; then, while men like Codrus, Leonidas, or Fabricius are indeed heroes, Christ, by the greatness of the cause for which He sacrificed Himself, by the greatness of the sacrifice of Himself which He made, and by the grandeur and lasting glory of the results He achieved, stands forth pre-eminently as the greatest hero the world has ever seen. Find if you can in the world's history a dominion so extensive, or subjects so devoted, or a rule so beneficent, so just and yet so mild, and so enduring as that of Christ. Compared with Him, what are the greatest among the world's lawgivers, Minos, or Solon, or Lycurgus, or even Moses? The Justinian Code has done much for the law of the land, but that of Christ is such as a Justinian could never have given, and it helped to shape the one he did give. "Euergetes" became the title of the Ptolemies as benefactors, and "Soter" that of the Syrian kings as deliverers; names like those of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Epaminondas, of Camillus, Marcellus, Fabius, and Scipio, emblazon the annals of Greece and Rome; Judea glories in her Maccabæans; and from the great Alfred to Washington, liberators and patriots claim the reverence and affection of mankind: but though Jesus headed no armies, fought no battles, drove out no invaders, liberated no nationalities, yet, in the civil, social, and religious liberty which unquestionably He has given to the world, in the freedom of thought, in freedom from ignorance and superstition and passion and vice, He has achieved a greater, a more glorious, a more effectual, and a more lasting deliverance than any which mankind has experienced.'

The following passage is taken from a volume of sermons entitled Incarnation of God, by the Rev. Henry Batchelor, formerly of Blackheath. At page 343 there are these words: 'The marvel of our Saviour's character is, that He is "the man." He has more than every man's excellence, and exhibits no man's defect. Human character is like the half illumined phases of the moon. There are gleaming horns and tracts of darkness. The character of Jesus is an orb of light. Its lustre does not wane before our contemplation. Our wonder grows with our study. There were foes blind to His glory in the days of His flesh; and inimical critics in our own age have done their worst to blur His stainless image. They have striven

« ÎnapoiContinuă »