Not only on the side of the Jews was this terror of hidden and revengeful and incalculable powers felt. The Greek-speaking world had become permeated by Mithraism with its hierarchies of evil potentates, and as a result men lived in gloom and in a temper which made the propitiation of the unseen a main element in their religion. This was swept away not so much by what Jesus said as by what he was, and the New Testament, as the result, is the most joyous of books. Our Lord revealed the Father; there was none between the Father and himself. He was the Door; not only were there no other doors, but there was no necessity for other doors. He came to give life and more abundant life. He linked himself deliberately with those Old Testament Messianic passages which declared that there was liberty for those who were in bondage. He overstepped the inhibitions and prohibitions of ecclesiasticism. He took the Jewish law, and, reaching through the letter to the spirit, he tore off the accretions which had overlain the original purifying and liberating purpose. He declared the spiritual manhood of believers and invited those who cast in their lot with him to take up their great inheritance.
It is in the setting forth of Christ that the New Testament is self-evidencing. No theory as to its origin and descent is needed to guarantee its inspiration. The evidence of experience goes to show that the New Testament has power within itself. It is the word of God because it effectively conveys the message of God. Its glow, its simplicity, is due to this, that it was written by men who had just come through an overwhelming religious experience, an experience differing in kind but related in each case to the same supreme Source. In the case of a great work of art we are able to trace an origin and an evolution. The development may be rapid but there is demonstrable sequence between the Byzantine art and Giotto, between Giotto and the great Umbrians. In pure literature the master does not arise like some volcano from the midst of a plain. He has his predecessors in form, and his rivals differ only in degree. But in the case of a religious movement, the first burst is the most powerful, the first vision the most clear. Every effect must have an adequate cause. What Cause was it which made of these plain disciples literary and religious figures of incomparable power and dignity? Who of mortals can have taught the writer of the Fourth Gospel the interpretation that he has to hand on to us? The power of the written Gospel is due to the unique power that was at work in these men’s hearts. After they were gone other Christian writers arose, better equipped in scholarship, and men of true piety as well, but they have left nothing that can be mentioned in the same breath with those narratives of the life of Christ, with the torrent of the Apostle Paul. Those who were nearest the source received most of the light. No naturalistic explanation has ever done anything to solve the riddle of those New Testament writings. An exercised Christian experience carries the truth. Almost all of those to whom we owe the New Testament died violent deaths, but their hearts were filled with singing, and their tribulations were matters only of joy. Base the inspiration of the Scriptures on their universal and ever youthful experience, and nothing can move the authority of the Gospels. Rest it on some theory of verbal inerrancy, and it is shaken by every negative critic. The vital question with regard to the New Testament is whether it does or does not reveal Jesus as God in the flesh. If it does this, then every other question as to the mere harmony of this account and that becomes almost irrelevant. We can admit and must admit the human element. God works through personalities, not through colorless nonentities. Every experienced Christian is a separate instrument, giving forth a separate tone. And men rejoice in the New Testament because other men two thousand years ago rejoiced, and their gladness and release still sound true.
Those who grasp this thought enter into the glorious liberty of the children of God. To-day all kinds of demons, even though they may not call themselves such, are supposed to be holding the ground between the truth-seeker and Jesus. It may be the general dread of life which always sees the possibilities of doom in to-morrow; it may be some carrying over into the spiritual sphere of an analogy from the physical law of causation; it may be some visualizing of the past, which makes reparation appear to be a prerequisite of any approach to a new life. Alas, reparation is no longer possible for most of the moral and spiritual failures, and in any case the kind of man we have become is a much more important matter than the mistakes which may come back to us on the selective wings of memory. And then there are other fears which deal not so much with spiritual things as with material and personal conditions. Not a few are haunted by their own suspicious natures. No man is to them wholly spontaneous or open-handed. The motive behind the generous or the brotherly thing must be sought, and that motive is invariably found to be something mean or selfish. How can there be any joy in the heart when there is this suspicion of one’s fellow? And others are dogged by their anxieties about their own ill health. One’s memories of the Riviera are sufficient to induce one to view Christian Science with a kindly eye. Those who have had the easiest of lives and endless leisure in which to indulge their whims cannot use the gifts they have by reason of the overstrain they would incur! As if life were worth having on the terms of a constant hypochondria. And others again are haunted by their fear for their own reputation. They have to dress in a certain way, walk with a certain gait, live in a certain type of house, spend money at a certain rate, choose their friends among those who will be useful to them, speak the safe and colorless theory when epigram is on their tongue and provocativeness in their heart—all because they have to maintain a reputation. Yet, He made himself of no reputation, and because He sought only to live in dependence on his Father He had no fear, no divided mind, no anxiety, only joy and peace in believing.
Is not the recovery of that joy something that the Christian Church and the Christians within the church are crying out for. It is so evidently one of the first-fruits of fellowship with Christ, and how really rare a gift it is! St. Francis had it because, like the birds he loved, he leaned only upon God. Some men in war, having given themselves wholly to a cause that they believed to be of God, learned the quiet of having the world behind them. We who are burdened about so many things, so anxious to assume the right attitude, to maintain the conventional opinion, to insure against every conceivable misfortune of worldly estate, how can we know the joy of living free, the release of casting the burden upon the great Burden-bearer? The stoic taught the Roman to endure by denying the presence of pain. His strength was in his passive receptivity. But Christ Himself felt pain, dreaded pain, was distressed by pain in the house of His friends; and, moved thus by the sombre and unkind things in life, He yet had an undisturbed peace. If the church is to regain its hold upon men, it must be composed of joyous Christians. Only then will there be removed those misapprehensions which have made for such multitudes the thought of religion the thought of gloom. Only thus shall we be conquerors through Christ who loved us.
2. The Faith Which He Possessed.
Although it is two years since its publication, Mr. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians still leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Mr. Strachey made it his business to destroy the halo around some well-known and long-venerated heads. He spoke what he believed to be the truth, not always in love, about Thomas Arnold and Florence Nightingale and General Gordon and others. He suggested that Gordon had been intemperate, and that some of his daring had been due to this fact. To read the insinuation was to remember the day, nearly forty years ago, when Gordon, at a few hours’ notice, stepped out of London and took his road for Khartoum and death and an immortal name. The magic of the story is felt beyond the bounds of the British Empire. A real hero is the possession of all mankind, and the thought of this one solitary and God-possessed soldier setting out alone by sheer personality to quench the rebellion that had spread over half a continent will always make the blood of the lethargic and the stay-at-home run a little faster. But that temper, if we could only grasp it, is essentially the temper of religion, and it means the possession of peace. The materialism of our day has overshot all our conceptions of peace, and we identify peace with comfort and a substantial bank balance and a fortification against the vicissitudes of chance. No wonder that the venture and the happiness have gone out of faith, which is the trust in the centuries as against the years, in the unseen instead of in the seen. There is little to be gained by society congratulating itself in its victory over alcohol if all the time it judges all success by outward and obvious standards. As things are, it is regarded almost as a crime not to have made money, and the doom of the “unsuccessful” is not pity but reprobation. How is it that, in a universe in which we believe that the fundamental factors are spiritual, such a conception should have come to rule! Simply because we have forgotten the rock from which we have been hewn, and have made a God after our own image. “He granted their request but sent leanness into their souls” (Ps. 106:15). We have had our reward. Is it any wonder that church life is stagnant? Why should it be otherwise if such conceptions virtually rule? Faith is become a comfortable dogma instead of a living conviction. The popular conception of faith implies no sacrifice. The faithful do not live in any way which marks them off from the faithless. Generally speaking, they pursue the same interests, follow out the same policy of insuring against most of the inevitable risks of life. Godly and ungodly alike, they meet the demand of charity, and are not wholly unmindful of their duty to their neighbors. But that the Christian Church should be composed of people who truly are casting their burden upon the Lord is an unknown conception. Nor can they ever think of themselves launching off like Gordon on a quest that was inspired simply by belief in a command of God, as the realization of a need, by faith in an ideal.
If the church of to-day is uninteresting and without appeal to youth, the reason may very well be found in the lack of any thought of a living faith. Our Lord depended absolutely upon the Father. The Father’s will was his will, and as the result quiet dwelt with Christ. But his was no prudential service. Peace had its willing price. “Peace be unto you ... and when he had thus spoken he showed them his hands and his side” (John 20:19, 20).
Public life will rise no higher than its source in personal religion. A quick sense of the brotherhood of man led to the antislavery movement. The removal of the merely penal idea in punishment has led to the new treatment of criminals. Every religious revival may be traced by changes in public administration. A new grasp of the meaning of faith, as the leading by God out into the wilderness, will draw out of their pessimism and social ineptitude men and women who loathe the publicity and mud-slinging of public life and have hitherto stood apart from it. If, however, they come to it out of an awakened conscience, they will step forth, not as unwilling recruits, obeying the uninspiring call of mere duty, but as crusaders to strive for the kingdom of God upon earth.
The great aim of this and of every day is definite and in itself simple—to make spiritual things real. Each man has to understand his dependence upon a world which he cannot control, which was before he was and will endure when he has gone, a world in which right rules inevitably and finally, where the secrets of all hearts are known. And then, having recognized with all its implications his place in this kingdom of the spirit, he has to play his part through the institutions of civilized life, the church, the state, the municipality, in making this unseen life an actuality in the region of things mundane. But first things come first. The social interest does not create the clean heart. The power of Christ alone can do that. The Salvation Army is a mighty factor in moral uplift but it had its origin in Methodism and in the Christian experiences of a godly man and of a still more God-inspired woman. Those churches are not wrong or out of date which lay stress on the relationship of the believer to his Lord. That, after all, is the fundamental thing, the source out of which all wider and more impersonal movements flow. Evangelical faith is not outgrown. It never can be outgrown. It needs, it is true, constant restatement. The living phrases of one generation become almost certainly the catchwords of the next. It is not only the right but the duty of each generation of exercised Christians to state its belief in its own way; and those who are older must have faith in those who are young and allow them to tell their story in their own words. It was a great friendship which existed between D. L. Moody and Henry Drummond. The older man was self-educated, brought up to a religious belief that was under attack by scholars and scientists. The younger man was both a scholar and a scientist, a setter forth of new views of things. But it was Drummond who was chosen by Moody to follow up his work, to gather together the results of the missions. For Moody, “the greatest of living humans,” as Drummond called him, saw that they were both striving for the same thing, actually saying it in different words. They both have had their reward in the affection of countless men and women who think of them as messengers of the new life. But an awakened soul is the beginning of things. He who has been truly aroused to the life of God will not be slack in the life of man.