The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

Jesus wrote no book—not a line. He founded no school or other training institution; his three years’ loving and painstaking companionship with his disciples was indeed a training, but it was not an institution. This does not mean that his friends should not do such things; it is the only way they can do: but he did not do such things.

He did not so much as establish a Church; the Church grew out of his life as well as out of his teachings; it was compacted by the sympathy of men, women, and little children of common beliefs and hopes; above all, by the sympathy born of a common love for him—this far more, then as now, than by what they understood or believed of his teachings. He left for the government of the Church “no rules of order,” no book of “discipline.” He ordained no form of church government, “with checks and balances,” whatever. All those things may be good, and order in government is necessary; but he did not provide them. He left all such things to the common sense and best judgment, guided by providence and the Holy Spirit, of his disciples. In Church as well as State the principle is this: God ordains the power; he does not prescribe the form; he ordains government, but leaves the form of it to the good sense and personal preferences of those who are to live under it.

All these things we have mentioned here belong to the works and ways of men; they are good or bad as they serve the ends of his kingdom. Moses, though an inspired lawgiver, yet a mere man, gave many forms and prescribed the order of doing many things; Jesus, the divine man, gave none.

In nothing is Jesus more unlike men than in his utter disregard of “forms” in the doing of the duties he enjoined. He has no word about forms except the terrible words he used concerning the many forms punctiliously observed by certain Pharisees and hypocrites who were playing at religion. His life was full of worship, but he left not a hint as to any forms or attitudes for devotion. That simplest and most comprehensive of all prayers, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” is not a form; he said, “After this manner pray ye.” The prayer might take any form of words, or leave all words unsaid. And this prayer he gave his disciples in response to a request for a form. Jesus had no forms; he cared for none.

Nor did Jesus care for the “letter,” except as to the danger that good men might make a fetish of it. He said of the “letter, it killeth;” “the Spirit giveth life.” The Spirit is every thing, the letter nothing. If we were to use of him the language that fits the case of a man we would feel like saying, Jesus looked upon punctilious eagerness about “forms” and the “letter” as mere child’s play, that he scorned such unspiritual folly.

This is certain: the only thing he denounced in a tone that was almost anger was zealous adherence to the form and to the letter, and sanctimonious contentment with this poor substitute for religion when the spirit of worship and service was dead. It will be the plainer to us that his was very far from being a man’s way when we remember that, with men, the less of spirit and reality an institution has the more anxious they are about mere form and letter. A spiritually dead man will contend more zealously about the form of a duty than the duty itself. And this is not unnatural; when a Church is dead there is nothing left but form—a body ready for burial.

What terrific words Jesus used in what he said of such things! Let us hear him and try to understand how much he means for us of to-day:

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

“Ye blind guides, which strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.