Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

It is probable that all the dogmas were originally shots at the same truth, nets cast over the same truth, digests of the same vision. There is no other way of accounting for their power. If the doctrine of the Trinity signified no more than what I can see in it, it would never have been regarded as important. Unless the words “Salvation by Grace” had at one time stood for the most powerful conviction of the most holy minds, we should never have heard the phrase. Our nearest way to come at the meaning of such things is to guess that the dogmas are the dress our own thought might have worn, had we lived in times when they arose. We must translate our best selves back into the past in order to understand the phrases.

Of course, these dogmas, like our own dogmas, are no sooner uttered than they change. Somebody traduces them, or expounds them, or founds a sect or a prosecution upon them. Then comes a new vision and a new digest. And so the controversy goes rolling down through the centuries, changing its forms but not its substance. And it has rolled down to us, and we are asking the question, “What is truth?” as eagerly, as sincerely, and as patiently as we may.

Truth is a state of mind. All of us have known it and have known the loss of it. We enter it unconsciously; we pass out of it before we are aware. It comes and goes like a searchlight from an unknown source. At one moment we see all things clearly, at the next we are fighting a fog. At one moment we are as weak as rags, at the next we are in contact with some explaining power that courses through us, making us feel like electrical conductors, or the agents of universal will. In the language of Christ these latter feelings are moments of “faith”; and faith is one of the very few words which he used a great many times in just the same sense, as a name for a certain kind of experience. He did not define the word, but he seems to have given it a specific meaning.

The state of mind in which Christ lived is the truth he taught. How he reached that state of mind we do not know; how he maintained it, and what it is, he spent the last two years of his life in expressing. Whatever he was saying or doing, he was always conveying the same truth—the whole of it. It was never twice alike and yet it was always the same; even when he spoke very few words, as to Pilate “Thou sayest it,” or to Peter “Feed my sheep”; or when he said nothing, but wrote on the ground. He not only expressed this truth because he could not help expressing it, but because he wished and strove to express it. His teaching, his parables, his sayings showed that he spared no pains to think of illustrations and suggestions; he used every device of speech to make his thought carry.

Take his directest words: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; “Love your enemies.” One might call these things descriptions of his own state of mind. Or take his philosophical remarks. They are not merely statements as to what truth is; but hints as to how it must be sought, how the state of mind can be entered into and in what it consists. “Whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” “That which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” Or more prosaically still. “If any man shall do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.” To this class belongs the expression “Resist not evil.”

The parables are little anecdotes which serve to remind the hearer of his own moments of tenderness and self-sacrifice. The Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Repentant Sinner, are illustrations of Christ’s way of feeling toward human nature. They are less powerful than his words and acts, because no constructed thing has the power of a real thing. The reply of the Greek woman who besought Christ to cure her daughter, “Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs,” is one of the most affecting things in the New Testament. It is more powerful than the tale of the Prodigal Son. But you will see that if the Prodigal’s father had been a real father, and the Greek mother had been a personage in a parable, the power would have been the other way.

And so it is that Christ’s most powerful means of conveying his thought was neither by his preaching nor by his parables; but by what he himself said and did incidentally. This expressed his doctrine because his state of feeling was his doctrine. The things Christ did by himself and the words he said to himself, these things are Christianity—his washing the disciples’ feet, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” his crucifixion.

I have recalled all these sayings and acts of Christ almost at random. They seem to me to be equivalent one to another as a thousand is equivalent to a thousand. They are all messages sent out by the same man in the same state of feeling. If he had lived longer, there would have been more of them. If you should summarize them all into a philosophy and then reduce that philosophy to a phrase, you would have another dogma.

The reason I called this lecture Non-resistance instead of using some more general religious title, is that I happened to be led into re-examining the meaning of Christ’s sayings through his phrase “Resist not evil; but overcome evil with good.” It came about in the course of many struggles over practical reforms. I had not the smallest religious or theoretical bias in entering the field of politics. Here were certain actual cruelties, injurious things done by particular men, in plain sight. They ought to be stopped.