Personality involves three elements. The first is freedom; the second, a purpose freely chosen; the third, devotion to this purpose. There is no slavery like sin. Absolute freedom, and thus absolute personality, can be found only in a nature wholly pure and unselfish. Christ was thus free. His purpose was the vastest that any human soul has grasped; and he gave himself to it with all the power of his nature. Thus Christ possessed the most intense personality ever felt upon the earth. His teaching came forth glowing with its fire. We feel to-day the effect which his personality produced upon those who came into direct contact with it. This influence has propagated itself from age to age. The Church grew out of it, and its influence is felt to-day far beyond the limits of the Church. Besides this indirect power of the personality of Jesus, we may feel its force directly, as we bring ourselves into personal relation with him. It has not lost its original might. It still tends to reproduce itself in the present.
The form in which truth first utters itself has a power which no subsequent repetition can equal. There is a kind of work that can be done only once. The first discoverer or announcer of any truth stands in a relation to it which no other can ever fill. Many navigators have crossed the sea, but there is only one Columbus. Many astronomers have searched the heavens, but there has been no second Newton. This fact is most noticeable in regard to truths that represent not merely the intellect, but the whole moral and spiritual nature of him who first uttered them in their fulness. There is a fact in science strange, apparently illogical, but yet unquestionable. It is this: The power of heat-bearing rays to pass through any resisting medium depends not upon the temperature of the rays, but upon that of the body from which they come. The heat-bearing rays of the sun that approach the earth hardly differ in temperature from the rays that are reflected from it; but the former pass almost unimpeded through the atmosphere by which the latter are to a great extent imprisoned. The rays reach the earth without difficulty, but are entrapped by the principle referred to, and remain to bless the world. The first have this power to pass through the atmosphere because they come direct from the burning body of the sun. The reflected rays have lost this power, because they proceed from the colder earth. This law is as true in the intellectual and spiritual as it is in the physical world. The power of moral and spiritual truths to penetrate to the hearts of men has this strange dependence upon the moral and spiritual power of him who utters them. The very spontaneity of this utterance is a revelation of this power. It is because the truth that Jesus uttered came forth from his glowing heart of love, it is because it sprang fresh and spontaneous from the intensity of his spiritual life, that it has such power to-day to touch the hearts of men. As the sun's rays preserve their penetrating force through all the interplanetary spaces, so the teachings of Christ have preserved it through all the reaches of history. No subsequent repetition of these truths can ever have quite the power that their first complete utterance still retains. And the power that they exercise is largely in this, that they excite in the hearts of men a spiritual life akin to that from which they originally sprang. Scientific truths are taught by demonstration. Spiritual truths are taught chiefly by stimulating the spiritual life. When we live merely in the contemplation of laws, in the study of external relations, our intellect is stimulated, but our moral and spiritual nature may be comparatively dormant. Our life is stimulated as we are brought into living relationship with the universe. As our inner nature is thus stimulated, as it rounds itself into completeness, the moral and spiritual consciousness is awakened. This is the reason why it so often happens that spiritual truths are so real in moments of sorrow. In its sorrow the soul lives wholly in love, and it receives the enlightenment of love. Our nation had almost forgotten God; but in those terrible years of war, when every soul was full of life and earnestness, the earth and the heavens were full of God. Our nation's history became transparent to us, as the history of the Hebrews was transparent to them, and we saw God's providence in it all. Theology has wrestled vainly with science. In such a struggle it will always be the loser. Christian theology can never conquer science. Christian life must absorb science into itself.
The truths that Jesus uttered, as they have been absorbed into the common thought of men, or as they are received directly from the record of his life, have a mighty power to purify the thought and elevate the hearts of men. But I think that the greatest power of Christ to-day is that of imparting his life to the men and women who are now living in the world. The power of the Church will depend upon its power to receive this life and to impart it. It is well to have a true theology; but the church that has the most of the life of Christ will accomplish the most for men. It brings to this truth-seeking and law-investigating age the pure personality which it needs. And it will at last possess the truest theology, for now and evermore it is the life that is the light of men.
THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT
IN THE
NEW TESTAMENT.
By FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE.
| [a]"Φιλοσοφωτερον και σπουδαιοτερον ποιησις ἱστοριας εστιν."] |
| Aristotle. |