I

THE IMPRESSION OF THE EARTHLY LIFE OF JESUS

We are, in this part of our work, to study the Gospel upon the lower plane of the common humanity which our Lord shared with ourselves. From the records of which we are to make use we exclude not only the Fourth Gospel, but the Gospel of the Birth and Infancy and whatever other portions of the Synoptic Gospels may reasonably be supposed to belong to a later stage of gospel representation. Confining ourselves then as nearly as we may to the primitive gospel of pure record, we are prepared to make to criticism the following admissions:

In the first place, the historical appearance of Jesus Christ, taken as a whole, was distinctly and completely a human appearance. He made a great, a boundless claim upon human faith and allegiance, but it was not a claim which He Himself based upon any essential personal difference between Himself and the common or universal humanity. He did not demand allegiance upon the ground of His being more than man, but solely upon the ground of what He was as man. He nowhere in His lifetime asserts, or was understood by those who stood nearest Him to assert, His divine

personality. The highest claim He admits is that in response to Peter's confession: Thou art the Christ, or Thou art the Christ of God, or - in the fullest form reported - Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. These were all alike well understood Messianic expressions. The Messiah was to be in a very high sense the representative and expression of God's presence upon earth, but in no sense, as yet, which implied his own personal deity. Indeed the passive form and signification of the word Messiah or Anointed One emphasized the fact that the essence of Messiahship was humanity indwelt and sanctified by Deity. This is not at all to deny that there was a higher claim involved in our Lord's personality. But the claim did not appear, was not asserted, in His earthly life. The claim of divinity was to rest solely upon what He was and accomplished in humanity, and it waited upon that consummation to assert itself. Meanwhile, Jesus' whole appearance was, as we have said, distinctively a human one, a man indeed always with God, and with whom God always was, but still always, in His highest knowledge, in His most mysterious powers, a man. Even after His resurrection He is still to St. Peter "Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved unto you of God by mighty works which God did by Him in the midst of you."

Upon what grounds in His lifetime did the Apostles accept our Lord's Messiahship? Not, certainly, upon any which had been anticipated or expected as signs of the Messiah. Not chiefly, I think we may say, upon the ground of His possession and exercise of mysterious

powers. To the mind of His time He Himself had to distinguish those powers from those of Beelzebub by an appeal to their opposite quality or character. He deprecated, and trusted not Himself to, a faith that rested only on miracles. I think we may say that what He was really believed on for was - Himself, what He was as man. It was His divinity indeed, but a divinity manifested or visible to them only in the quality and character of His humanity, in the perfection of His human holiness, in the spiritual power of His human life. Why did they cling to Him through every trial of their faith? To whom else, having even imperfectly known Him, could they go? To them He had the words, already

to them He was The Word, of eternal life. That was His permanent credential, and that was His only plea.

If we turn to those who still in our own day decline to go for their gospel beyond the earthly life and the common humanity of our Lord what answer will they give for clinging to His person and finding their salvation in His life? I think we may say that the answer as it has shaped itself to that question is something like the following: Humanity continues, and will always continue, to believe and to find itself in Jesus, because Jesus embodies and expresses to humanity the truth of itself; the truth, the beauty and the goodness of itself. And truth, beauty, and goodness are the sum of what is of value, and ought to be of interest, to humanity. But why and how does Jesus Christ represent to us all that? We do not know; we need not know. He does; we accept the fact, because it is

self-demonstrating; we cannot go the length of the explanations, because we believe they extend beyond the limits of our knowledge or proof.

Well, let us go just so far, and no farther, and find in so much the truth and power contained in it. We believe in Jesus because we find in Jesus the truth and good that most concern us, the truth and good of ourselves. Men of profoundest thought and of sincerest life in our own time have, in spiritual and moral extremity, found salvation in Jesus Christ, simply because they discovered in Him what did not exist for them without Him a meaning and a reason for human existence and human life. The revelation to us, no matter how it comes, of the truth, the meaning, the reason, the good, the value, and above all the way, the secret, of the infinitely interesting and important mystery we call life, ought to be to us surely nothing short of a gospel and a salvation.

The personality and life of Jesus could never have taken, and still less could maintain in perpetuity, the hold it has upon the world, if it were not true to the facts of the world. If Jesus Christ were not the truth, the beauty, the good sought by all the best thought and touched by all the best experience of humanity humanity would not have given Him, would not give Him, its highest, its final allegiance. Every knee would not bow to Him, every tongue confess Him Lord. It will be interesting to recall a few of the leading principles of our Lord's life and character, and to correlate them with the best that has been thought or done before or apart from Him.

In the first place, Jesus took definite part with the West against the East in making the distinctive note of life not apatheia but energeia. Thought, desire, will were not to be abjured and disowned in despair, through the overpowering sense of their futility. Life was not to be reduced to zero through their renunciation, but raised to infinity through their affirmation and satisfaction. The life of Christianity is a life of infinite energy because it is a life of infinite faith and hope. It can be all things, do all things, endure all things. It feels no limit in itself, it sets no limit to itself, short of absolute perfection. It sets no limit to knowledge, because it believes itself made for the truth, and that the truth best worth knowing, the truth of self and of life, will more and more reveal and verify itself to us the more we know and love and live it. It sets no limit to desire, but covets earnestly the best things. It is conscious of an infinite poverty, and finds in it only the potency and promise of an infinite riches and satisfaction. Pleasure and happiness are not things to be denied and mortified. They are to be placed and found in the right objects, and to be swallowed up but not lost in the blessedness of the perfect life. And so finally it sets no limit to will, to activity, to achievement and attainment. If our wills are ours only as we surrender them to the larger will that comprehends and embraces all our wills are His only as we have made His ours, and have found in His the highest freedom, realization, and satisfaction of our own. And so not only as against the aged pessimism of the East, but equally against the most modern fatalistic necessi