But possibly you think that the Gospels have been so long in our hands, and the Christian religion so long in practice and under discussion, that nothing new can now be said or thought about them? Just so Francis Bacon, in 1603, expressed his conviction (the innocent philosopher!) that there had at last come about a complete “consumption of all things that could be said on controversies of theology.” Reflect a moment. How long have the stars been with us “under discussion”? And how recent have been our discoveries of the real truth about them! How recently have these discoveries been even possible? In the same way the exact criticism of the New Testament has only become recently practicable. The subject matter and thought could of course be appreciated centuries ago, and often perhaps by the simple-minded and unlearned as well as by the subtle and profound theologian; though, even as to the thought of the New Testament, I often think that we are greatly to blame if our increased knowledge of history and psychology does not illuminate much that was dark in its pages for those who had not our advantages. But we are speaking of that kind of intellectual criticism which dispels illusions; and for the purposes of the critical analysis of the First Three Gospels, Bruder’s Concordance was as necessary as Galileo’s telescope was for the discovery of Jupiter’s moons, or the thermometer for the investigation of the laws of heat. Other influences have been at work, as well as mere mechanical aids, to throw light on the central event of the world’s history. And surely if Abraham could wait nineteen hundred years for the coming of Christ, the spiritual descendants of Abraham—for such we claim to be—may well wait another nineteen hundred years to realize His nature and enter into the full meaning of His worship.
You see I am not now trying to prove the existence of any illusion in our present form of Christianity; I am simply arguing against your prejudice that, if the present form of Christianity be not true, then any new form must necessarily be false. You say, or perhaps till lately you were inclined to say, “If I could only breathe the atmosphere of Augustine! If only I could have been a companion of the Ante-Nicene or (better still) of the Apostolic Fathers! Or (best of all) of the Apostles! Or of Christ Himself! Then I should have been free from illusions.” I reply, “No, you would not; and your aspiration is a mark of ingratitude to God. You deliberately reject the commentary He has given you in the History of the Church during these eighteen centuries. You think the story of Christ is completely told and completely explained. It is not so. All the created world is intended to bear witness and illustration to His life and work. Shakespeare and Newton and Darwin, as well as Origen, Augustine, and Chrysostom, have added to the divine commentary. All the good and all the evil of eighteen hundred years have borne witness to the divine nature of His mission; to the impotence and ruin which await the nations that cast Him off; to the blessing that attends those who follow His Spirit; to the mischief that dogs those who substitute for His Spirit a lifeless code of rules or a fabric of superstitions.”
And now one last word as to the special illusion from which (in my belief) we must in the short remnant of this century strive to deliver ourselves. I think we have worshipped Christ too much as God, and too little as Man. We have erroneously supposed that He exempted Himself during His manhood from the laws of humanity. Like the Roman soldiers, we have stripped from Him the carpenter’s clothes, and put upon Him the purple rags of wonder-working imperialism, and placed in His hand the sceptre of worldly ostentation, and in that guise we have bowed the knee to the purple and the sceptre, and, doing homage to these things, we have cried, “Behold our God.” But now the time has come when we must take from off Him these tawdry trappings, and give Him back His workman’s garments. Then we may find ourselves constrained to bow the knee again in a purer homage offered no longer to the clothes but to the Man.
Call this homage by what name we will, it is already of the nature of worship. And as we grow older and more able to distinguish the realities from the mirage of life, more capable of trust, love, and reverence, and better able to discriminate what must be, and what must not be, loved, trusted, and revered—looking from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth, we shall ask in vain where we can find anything, above or below, nobler, and better, and more powerful for good, than this Man to whom our hearts go forth in spontaneous love and trust and reverence. Then we shall turn once more to the Cross finding that we have been betrayed into worship while we knew it not, and while we cry, “Behold the Man,” we shall feel “Behold our God.”
XI
WHAT IS WORSHIP?
My dear ——,
Admitting the doctrine of illusion, and dismissing all prejudice against what is new, you declare that still my position remains absolutely unintelligible to you. I will set down your objection in your own words: “Apparently you maintain that Christ is a mere man who came into the world, lived, worked, and died according to the laws of human nature; even His resurrection you apparently intend to explain away till it becomes a mere vision, and therefore not a sign of any other than a human existence. Now worship is a tribute conceded to God alone. To a mere man, who lived eighteen centuries ago, how can you force yourself, by any effort of the will, to pay worship simply because you have reason to believe that this individual was pre-eminently good”?
In reply, I ask you, “What else is more worthy of worship?” There is no question of “forcing myself” at all. I worship Christ naturally. That is to say I love, trust, and reverence Him more than I love, trust, and reverence any other person or thing or universe of things. This I do because I cannot help it; and if I have brought myself to do this naturally by fixing my thoughts on the power of Goodness, and on Christ as the incarnate representation of Goodness, this causes me no shame and involves me in no conflict with my Reason.
But you—have you not omitted some important features in the description of this “mere man”? Jesus was not only pre-eminently good, He was also pre-eminently powerful and wise for spiritual purposes. His influence regenerated the civilized world; it is manifest around us. He Himself spoke of Himself in language which shews that He believed Himself to be endowed with a divine authority over men, and to stand in a unique relation to God. In a fanatic or a fool that would mean nothing: in one so wise, so soberly wise, so utterly unselfish, so marvellously successful, it must needs count for much. Although I reject the miraculous, I do not reject—nor understand how any one can reject—the supernatural. I regard Jesus as being a “mere man” indeed, if by “mere man” you mean a “real man”; non-miraculous, subjected to all the material limitations of humanity; but still a man such as is described in the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel; the Word of God incarnate; the Man in whom was concentrated God’s expression of Himself; the Divine Perfection made humanly perceptible. This I believed once upon the authority of the Fourth Gospel; but I believe it now on the testimony of history and my own conscience.
Put yourself in my place. Suppose, as I suppose, that Christ was what He was, and did what He did, naturally and without miracles. Does not that make His personality in a certain sense more wonderful and certainly more lovable? It is comparatively easy, with miracles at command, to persuade men to anything; but, without miracles, to introduce a new religion, to bring in a new power of forgiving sins, to offer up one’s life, not for friends, nor for country, but for mankind, to manifest oneself so to one’s disciples during life that after your death they shall see you and shall be convinced that you have triumphed over death; to disarm an armed world by non-resistance, and to breathe a spirit of enthusiasm for righteousness and a passionate love of mankind into myriads of a remote posterity—these surely are feats which, if natural, should make us exclaim, “Verily we have here a divine nature.”