He not only claims, as no other prophet ever did, to represent the eternal Father, but he claims a perfect knowledge of God that no mere man can claim. “All things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.” The night before he died he said to his disciples: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.”
He says in many ways and in many places that he is, in origin and character, more than a man; that he is supernatural. He says, “I and my Father are one.” He says that he is divine—that he is God.
If Jesus was only a man such claims cannot be reconciled with his sanity or his sincerity. Augustine was right when he reduced this argument to its last analysis: “Christus, si non deus, non bonus”—Christ, if he be not God, is not good.
CHAPTER XVI.
JESUS THE ONE UNIVERSAL CHARACTER.
In considering Jesus as he is now in the world, not in the story of the evangelists and in books simply, but in human life, there are other views to be taken. We can take views only; we cannot see all that they indicate.
We must consider more carefully now what we looked at for a moment in the argument that compels us to believe that this character could not have been invented, and that such a personality could not have been a normal outgrowth of Hebrew life: Jesus is a universal character—the one and only universal character that has ever appeared in history, that has ever been described, that has ever had a place in human thought.
There are great differences in men. Some are so narrow and meager of soul as scarcely to have a thought or sympathy beyond the little circle in which they are born, in which they live, and out of which they go utterly when they die. There are lives so localized that men out of their sphere they cannot understand, and that men out of their sphere cannot understand them. For every limited dialect in human speech there are limited thoughts and lives back of it. What do we mean by “provincialism” as applied to a man, or to the people of a State or country? It means limitation. Illustrations are every-where. Take a Scotch Highlander, an Irishman of some seldom-visited farming region, or, in our own country, a New Englander born and bred, never from home; or a village Georgian, a thorough-going old time Southerner. These men are provincial. They may have admirable and indeed noble qualities, but they are limited in their views, narrow in their sympathies, and by so much they are cut off from the sympathies of their fellow-men of other conditions in life. Savage people show us the extremes of provincialism.
But let us take now our illustration from the loftiest ranges of life. Among the ancients take Plato—broad-minded as any. What is he? Grecian to the core. There was no greater Roman than Julius Cæsar. But he was essentially Roman; he was localized by race and country; there was much in him that only a Roman could understand, and therefore much that limited him in his knowledge of the men of other nations.