Part 7 (1/2)
The note of the New Testament is exultant. There is keen sense of present evil, endurance, struggle; but there is a deeper sense of a great deliverance already begun and to be perfected in the future. The heart of this new energy, joy, and hope is love for a human yet celestial friend. This love was awakened by a personality of extraordinary n.o.bility and attractiveness. The personal affection inspired imagination and ideality to their highest flights. Its original object became invested with superhuman traits and elevated to a deity. To trace with certainty and minuteness the historic lineaments of the real man is not altogether possible; but the essential truth concerning him is sufficiently plain.
The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to a hundred years after his death. In these records memory and imagination are intimately blended. On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on the minds of his followers. But on the other hand, he was so suggestive and inspiring--there were among his disciples natures so susceptible, responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such a contagion of pa.s.sionate feeling unchecked by reason--that the seeds of his words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blent closely with the historic reality. And with the central inspiration of his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him, so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies certainty of a.n.a.lysis.
If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural forces for the benefit of mankind. As he is described, Jesus is before all a worker of beneficent miracles. He is a teacher, too, and an unexampled one. But he enforces his teaching by means utterly transcending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender human friend, but he expresses his friends.h.i.+p by services such as no other friend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread and wine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raises the dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It is this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has distinguished him in the eyes of his wors.h.i.+pers. What is the wisest word about immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Plato said--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself?
What need for any argument or a.s.surance about Providence, when here is one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of beneficent love?
But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in our time to a different conception.
The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life.
His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its interior harmony and its relations with the world about it. _Love your enemies_,--in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of conduct. _The pure in heart shall see G.o.d_,--with that he put in the hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.
The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chast.i.ty, justice, and piety. Jesus sublimated this,--in him chast.i.ty becomes purity; in place of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a love embracing earth and heaven.
Jesus taught in parables. A story--an outward, objective fact, something which the imagination can body forth--often facilitates the impartation to another mind of a spiritual experience. The soul has no adequate language of its own,--it must borrow from the senses and the imagination.
The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, ”No man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son.”
That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not even understand himself. And correspondingly, ”No man knoweth the Father save the Son:” only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity.
G.o.d is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature.
Peace, a.s.surance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfast goodness.
Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son. What symbol could he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home? Like all statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it did not furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe.
But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest human relation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life.
Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,--not on abstract ideas, but on action. His teaching was always as to conduct.
Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes.
Above all, he lived what he taught. He left the memory of a life which to his followers seemed faultless. And ever since, those who felt their own inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, as somehow the pledge of theirs.
Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higher principle than Judaism. The historic lineage is not to be too much insisted on. When he said, ”Love your enemies,” ”Forgive that ye may be forgiven,” he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea.
Judaism was largely a religion of wrath. Jesus planted a religion of love.
The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coa.r.s.e growth, and for many centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate as fierce as the old Judaism. But blending with it, and struggling always for ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle of Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.
Of the Judaic traits in Jesus, conspicuous was the prophetic feeling and tone. He was possessed with an absolute fullness of conviction, and spoke in a tone of blended ardor and cert.i.tude. ”He taught as one having authority.” He rarely gave reasons. If in his words we find appeal to precedent or argument, it is really as little more than ill.u.s.tration or picture to clothe his own intuition. His followers believed his words, either because of some conscious witness in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, or because their love and reverence for him won for his a.s.sertions an unquestioning acceptance.
From Judaism he took the familiar idea of one all-powerful and holy G.o.d; a moral ideal which was chiefly distinguished from that of the Greek-Roman world by its greater emphasis on chast.i.ty; and also the belief in a constant divine interposition in human affairs, which soon was to culminate in the establishment of a divine kingdom on earth.
Jesus woke in his followers an ardor for goodness, a tenderness for their fellow men, and a supreme devotion to himself. His words went straight to the springs of character. He brushed aside religious ceremonial as of no importance. He sent the searching light of purity into the recesses of the heart. He made love the law of life and the key of the universe.
He interpreted love, as a principle of human conduct, by ill.u.s.trations the most homely, real, and tender. Love is no mere delicious emotion: it is giving our bread to the hungry, ourselves to the needy. It is not a mere felicity of kindred spirits,--love them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you!
Jesus was the greatest of poets. To every fact, to every idea, he gave its most beautiful and spiritual interpretation. When he speaks of G.o.d, his speech is the pure poetry of the soul. Yahveh becomes to him the All-father. His providence is over the lilies and the sparrows. His rain and suns.h.i.+ne are shed on the unjust as on the just. His inmost nature is set forth by the human father meeting his returning prodigal a great way off. His very life is shared with his children. It wells up in Jesus himself: the light in his eyes, the tenderness in his tones, the yearning in his heart,--it is _my Father_ ye know in me!
How does that Divine Power appear in the procedure of the universe? What real providence is there for the slain sparrow? What is the actual destiny of those human lives which show only frustration and failure?
Jesus does not answer these questions. It does not appear that he tried to answer them. His words are filled with a glad, unquestioning trust.
He is not the philosopher seeking to measure life. He is the lover living it, the poet delighting in it.
The secret of Jesus lay in his sense of the ”kingdom of G.o.d” within him,--of obedience, peace, and joy, which was in itself sufficient.