The Chief End of Man

by George Spring Merriam

When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt. Jesus found this manifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works," partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.

These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always and everywhere finds the divine presence. Man himself masters the forces of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power working through him. And he looks for a better future for himself and for mankind.

But the peculiarity of Jesus—looked at from a modern standpoint—was that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in God; and that the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine interposition. These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and save the lost.

In his teaching, God feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds and clothes the grass. There is no need that they should be anxious about their physical wants. Their troubles will be banished if they will pray in faith. Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before the presence of the trusting child of God. All the injustice and wrong of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of God. It is the old anthropomorphic idea of God—the idea of the Prophet and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender, through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary interpretation of the world.

What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most attractive human analogy. If even an unjust human judge yields to the importunity of a petitioner, much more will the divine judge listen to the cry of the wronged and suffering. If a human father gives bread to his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.

We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life. But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science. To the Jew of the New Testament period,—to Paul as much as to the fishermen of Galilee,—the world was directly administered by a personal being who habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events. The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different conception. Thinkers like Aristotle had assumed the constancy of nature as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it. But the great mass of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine personality. What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed multitude representing evil as well as good impulses. All Jewish history was written on this hypothesis. The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power. The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only more marked and special instances of God's working. That a man especially beloved of God for his goodness should be given power to heal the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving compassion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the hypocrite.

It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded his power over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his character and mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring. What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvels of far less relative account than they did. Obscure as the detailed narratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habitually discouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing. His spiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity and expectation in this direction diverted men from the principal business of life, and the essential purport of his message,—to love, obey, and trust.

The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriously affected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of a speedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdom of truth and righteousness. His earlier teachings include striking utterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slow ripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower. Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness. But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution; as the lofty passion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of the lover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia of humanity,—so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of some swift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word of ancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul.

The later chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored with this anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand. The promise, the threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early church. They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church. But that modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from all this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or to attribute it to the misconception of the disciples. This modern Christianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritual and universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke. This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element may suffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity. But if we are to study the historical development of our religion, and not merely its present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in the Judgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story.

Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine kingdom on earth. The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels is pervaded by this idea. The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of teaching and event, the overstrained eagerness,—which will not suffer a son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous fruit,—all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this tremendous expectation.