Yet experiences on the physical plane are of little comparative value—comparative. Jesus bade the doubting Thomas to reach forth his hand and touch Him, that he might have tangible evidence: Now, Thomas, you believe because you have seen and felt; but blessed is he who believes on the higher plane of spiritual knowing. It is “an evil and adulterous generation” that seeketh after proofs of spiritual things on the sensuous level. Men saw and touched Jesus in Palestine who were millions of miles from Him. Were Christ to appear in visible form, it might easily be of no value whatever to come into physical contact with Him, to meet Him on Broadway or on the Strand; but who can measure the value of having Christ recreated in himself, as the leaven is recreated in the meal, and as a seed is recreated in new seed, so that men, when they see that man, and talk to him, and deal with him, shall feel that they have been with Christ?
One day I saw in a neighbor’s flower-bed a little plant, that, as it pushed its way above the ground, had brought with it the mother seed from which it grew. That was a literal reappearance of the planted seed; but it was not the reappearance, not the resurrection of the seed, for which a seed grows.
Christ came the first time into men’s vision by coming on the plane of their senses; He comes the second time into men’s vision by lifting them up to His plane of spiritual comprehension.
This coming of Christ involves a new birth, a new creation, a new kingdom. It means a new step in the evolution of man. As man has stepped from the mineral kingdom to the vegetable kingdom, and from the vegetable kingdom to the animal kingdom, and from the animal kingdom to the kingdom of the natural man,[B] so now he steps from the kingdom of the natural man to the kingdom of the spiritual man, every portion of this step a natural process subject to critical scientific analysis, if that analysis goes deep enough, wide enough, far enough. It is the continuance of evolution without a break, without a leap (“Nature never makes leaps,” says Leibnitz; the leaps are only seeming), lifting the race by a new birth through Christ the type-life up to the plane of spiritual being and knowing.
Is the visible second coming of Jesus fancy or truth? Our author believed it true, and increasing multitudes to-day believe it true. Among these are many of the foremost Christian teachers of this generation, as that trio of great preachers recently dead, Charles H. Spurgeon, A. J. Gordon, and Dwight L. Moody; Newman Hall, Theodore Monod, Arthur T. Pierson, F. B. Meyer, J. H. Brookes, C. Cuthbert Hall. There is evidently near at hand an extraordinary revival of this belief.
In the republication of this remarkable story about the Jew who is “to wander on earth until Christ comes again,” it has seemed to me that it would not be inappropriate to give, by way of Introduction, and in the Appendix, several lines of thought bearing upon the coming of Christ.
The Essential Coming of Christ
I
This coming is in harmony with the laws of sequence and continuity.