The Laws above mentioned will be found to [pg 026] regulate the course of our Lord's actions as regards the performance of Signs and Wonders. They are frequently violated in the Apocryphal Gospels, never, I think, in the Canonical ones. There are other Laws which I shall have to trace; one, which is very important, is stated on at least two occasions; I have referred to it as being paradoxical in form, and the more fitted to force itself on men's minds on that account. It is the text, “For whosoever hath to him shall be given, but whosoever hath not from him shall be taken away even that which he hath.” This looks as if it would fall in strangely with the Law of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest, in the organic world. What I believe our Lord to have meant by it will be discussed in its proper place.
I shall have also to speak of the prospective bearing of much that our Lord says and does, and to shew how this gives us a greater assurance of our Lord's being “with us always to the end of the world.” Christ seems to me to look over the heads of the generation about Him far into the future; His eye is fixed on the distance, but it does not look out vaguely into space; it is turned in a direction that is precisely determined. He walks with the assured step of one who marches to a goal. But what that goal is He never tells men, and when He designedly keeps men's curiosity unsatisfied, we may conjecture that no answer could be given without touching on conditions of spiritual existence [pg 027] beyond our ken. There may be such conditions which we could no more conceive than we could imagine space with another dimension, beside length and breadth and height.
The history of the Church and of the workings of men's minds may disclose the existence of Laws, lying under the events of ages and operating through them, analogous to those laid down by our Lord for his own conduct; and we may look along the direction in which these Laws point. Some have thought they descried, at the end, a time, in which peace and righteousness should reign over the whole world. But Christ Himself doubted whether He should find faith upon the earth when He came.[5] However, if He should not, still He will not have failed, we can be sure of this. What He meant to effect, whatever it was, will have come about. Righteous souls may be garnered elsewhere, and this earth may be only a school of life, a training ground for the education and selection (for these two go together) of beings who shall be fitted to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Chapter II. Human Freedom.
I have spoken in the foregoing chapter of certain characteristics of our Lord's ways of dealing with men. In considering these ways we find ourselves, at almost every turn, face to face with the great enigmas of life which underlie all Theology. Questions about Divine government and human freedom will, I see, force themselves upon us.
It would keep this book more close to its purpose, if I could proceed at once with the examination of what our Lord says and does, and leave all these difficulties on one side, taking it for granted that all my readers had arrived at their own views about them; or if I were to refer them to works in which they are formally discussed.
But I trust my readers will forgive me, if I suppose that it may be with them as with those I have been used to teach—that is to say, that they will be attracted by these perplexities, and that they will be impatient at being told that just what they want to ask lies outside my province. Many too, I know, would never turn to any of the [pg 029] learned works on these matters, of which I might give them the names.
I have resolved, therefore, to deal with these matters once for all, in as familiar a way as I can. I cannot, of course, give my readers solutions of these questions; I can only tell them how I manage to do without a solution myself, and put before them the view of these matters which I hold till I can get a better, so that they may more readily enter into my views of Christ's Laws of action, and understand what I write.