The Chief End of Man

by George Spring Merriam

The writer shows no such close contact with the actual struggle of life as vivifies the other biographies of Jesus and the impassioned pleadings of Paul. He is a pure and lofty soul, but he writes as if in seclusion from the world. His favorite words are abstract and general. The parable and precept of the early gospels give place to polemic and metaphysic disquisition. The Christian communities for which he writes have left behind them the sharp antagonisms of the first generation, and have drawn together into a harmonious society, strong in their mutual affection, their inspiring faith, and their rule of life, and facing together the cruelty of the persecutor and the scorn of the philosopher. To this writer, all who are outside of the Christian fold and the Christian belief seem leagued together by the power of evil. The secret of their perversity and the seal of their doom is unbelief. Let them accept the Christ he portrays, and good shall supplant evil in their hearts. The ground of the acceptance is to be simply the self-evident beauty and therefore the self-evident truth of the Christ here set forth.

And so we have a portrayal of Christ which at many points profoundly appeals to the heart, yet which constantly dissipates into a metaphysical mythology; together with the admonition that only a full belief can save the soul and the world from ruin. The ethical and emotional elements of the new religion have thoroughly fused with the elements of dogma and exclusiveness.

A kind of self-exaltation is by this writer imputed to Jesus, which is as much less attractive than his attitude in the Synoptics as it is less genuine. "All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers"—this is the word of an idolatrous worshiper; far different from him whose only sense of superiority was expressed in a longing to impart his own treasure: "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

But the writer rises to a lofty plane where he conceives the parting words of Jesus to his friends. Here he is on the ground of what we know did in some wise really happen—a last interview between the Master and his disciples, when clouds of defeat and death lowered close before him, and his words deepened in their hearts the devotion which animated all their after-lives. That parting scene, preserved elsewhere in delineations brief and impressive, was now expanded by the brooding, creative thought of some one in closest sympathy with the occasion and with the vital impulse it had given. Literal and historical fidelity the description may lack, but it is in close accord with the realities of experience. The tender assurances, the prophecies beyond hope, which the Master is here supposed to speak, had indeed been fulfilled. The loss of his earthly presence had been more than made good to those in whose lives he had been felt as a saving power. The Comforter had truly come. The mutual love of the disciples, and their loyalty to the Master as they understood him, had planted a new social force in the world, and was working slowly to transform the world. Thoughts which had been the possession of philosophers in the schools were become working forces in the lives of common men and women and children. That deliverance from the fear of death which thinkers had vainly sought had been won even by the poor and lowly. All this and more was set forth as in a psalm or prophecy, in the parting words ascribed to Christ.

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth give I unto you." "Ye shall see me again, and your hearts shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you."

The predominant notes of the New Testament are tenderness and ardor, but inwrought with these is a vein of terror and sometimes of fierce wrath. It is like the denunciation in the Old Testament, to which the vision of a future world has added a more lurid hue. "Asia's rancor" has not disappeared, even in the presence of "Bethlehem's heart." Among the words attributed to Jesus are the threat of that perdition where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. To him is ascribed (whether truly or not) the story of Dives in hell, and father Abraham in whose bosom Lazarus is reposing denies even his prayer for a drop of water to cool his tongue. Here is the germ of all the horrors of the mediaeval imagination. The germs bore an early fruitage in that book which bears the name of "Revelation." It mirrors the passions which spring up amid the heats of faction and of persecution. Fell hatred fills its pages for the persecutor and for the heretic. The few gleams of Paradise for the saved are pale in comparison with the ghastly terrors. It is the first full outbreak of that disease of the imagination, bred of disease of the heart, which was to be the curse of Christianity.

We have dwelt upon the central facts and ideas in which Christianity took its rise. We shall pass with a few brief glances over a tract of many centuries. Our special concern in this work is with the birth-periods of the vital and lasting principles of man's higher life. One such phase was the Greek-Roman philosophy of which the best outcome was Stoicism. Another critical era was the birth of Christianity from its immediate lineage of Judaism. The next great epoch is the marriage of rational knowledge with the spiritual life—which is the story of these last centuries, in mid-action of which we are standing.

Viewing man's higher life upon its intellectual side, the common characteristic of the period between the time of the Apostles and our immediate forefathers is the prevalence of what may be called the Christian mythology. In other words, the moral rules and spiritual ideals were almost inextricably bound up with and based upon the conception of a supernatural world, certainly and definitely known, and disclosed to mankind through a series of revelations which centred in the incarnation of God in the man Jesus Christ. Upon this basis was reared a vast intellectual and imaginative structure—embodied in many creeds, pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced by multitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror.

It is the dissolving of this elaborate supernaturalism, and the growth of a different conception of the spiritual life, which is now going on before our eyes. To measure the essential significance of the change, we need not linger long upon the successive steps by which the mythology expanded and solidified itself. We have seen its germs in the story of Judaism, of Jesus and his immediate successors. The method and nature of its growth may be briefly indicated.

We are following only a single thread in the vast web of history. All the threads work in together, but we must be well content if we can trace the general line of one or two. It is the history of the moral ideas which have most directly and closely influenced the life of men, that we are trying to pursue. There was a wonderful embodiment and outshining of such ideas in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The truth he taught and lived was in some ways made more applicable and transmissible by his followers, and in some ways lowered. There grew up the society of the Christian church. Gradually it took its place among the important forces of the Roman empire. It won at last the nominal allegiance of the civilized world. Aiding or thwarting it, coloring and changing it, were a thousand influences,—side-currents from other religions and philosophies, social changes, Roman law and tradition, the new life of the barbarians; old ingrained habits of blood and brain; the constant push of primal instincts—hunger and sex; tides of war and trade and industry; slavery and serfdom; strong human personalities, swaying a little the tide that bore them; all the myriad forces that are always at work in history.