The Christians out-thought the pagan world. How could they fail to? "We have peace with God," said Paul. They moved about in a new world, which was their Father's world. They would go to the shrines and ask uncomfortable questions. Lucian, who was a pagan and a scoffer, said that on one side of the shrines the notice was posted: "Christians outside." The Christians saw too much. The living god in that shrine was a big snake with a mask tied on—good enough for the pagan; but the Christian would see the strings. Even the daemons they dismissed to irrelevance and non-entity. The essence of magic was to be able to link the name of a daemon with the name of one's enemy, to set the daemon on the man. "Very well," said the Christian, "link my name with your daemons. Use my name in any magic you like. There is a name that is above every name; I am not afraid." That put the daemons into their right place, and by and by they vanished, dropped out, died of sheer inanition and neglect. Wherever Jesus Christ has been, the daemons have gone. "There used to be fairies," said an old woman in the Highlands of Scotland to a friend of mine, "but the Gospel came and drove them away." I do not know what is going to keep them away yet but Jesus Christ. The Christian read the ancient literature with the same freedom of mind, and was not in bondage to it; he had a new outlook; he could criticize more freely. One great principle is given by Clement of Alexandria: "The beautiful, wherever it is, is ours, because it came from our God." The Christian read the best books, assimilated them, and lived the freest intellectual life that the world had. Jesus had set him to be true to fact. Why had Christian churches to be so much larger than pagan temples? Why are they so still? Because the sermon is in the very centre of all Christian worship—clear, definite Christian teaching about Jesus Christ. There is no place for an ignorant Christian. From the very start every Christian had to know and to understand, and he had to read the Gospels; he had to be able to give the reason for his faith. He was committed to a great propaganda, to the preaching of Jesus, and he had to preach with penetration and appeal. There they were loyal to the essential idea of Jesus—they were "sons of fact." They read about Jesus,[32] and they knew him, and they knew where they stood. This has been the essence of the Christian religion. Put that alongside of the pitiful defence which Plutarch makes of obscene rites, filthy images, foolish traditions. Who did the thinking in that ancient world? Again and again it was the Christian. He out-thought the world.
The old religion crumbled and fell, beaten in thought, in morals, in life, in death. And by and by the only name for it was paganism, the religion of the back-country village, of the out-of-the-way places. Christ had conquered. "Dic tropoeum passionis, dic triumphalem Crucem", sang Prudentius—"Sing the trophy of the Passion; sing the all-triumphant Cross." The ancients thought that God repeated the whole history of the universe over and over again, like a cinema show. Some of them thought the kingdoms rise and fall by pure chance. No, said Prudentius, God planned; God developed the history of mankind; he made Rome for his own purposes, for Christ.
What is the explanation of it? We who live in a rational universe, where real results come from real causes, must ask what is the power that has carried the Christian Church to victory over that great old religion. And there is another question: is this story going to be repeated? What is there about Shiva, Kali, or Shri Krishna that essentially differentiates them from the gods of Greece and Rome and Egypt? Tradition, legend, philosophy—point by point, we find the same thing; and we find the same Christian Church, with the same ideals, facing the same conflict. What will be the result? The result will be the same. We have seen in China, in the last two decades, how the Christian Church is true to its traditions; how men can die for Jesus Christ. In the Greek Church—a suffering Church—on the round sacramental wafer there is a cross, and in the four corners there are the eight letters, IE, XE, NI, KA, "Jesus Christ conquers." That is the story of the Christian Church in the Roman Empire. That is the story which, please God, we shall see again in India. "Jesus Christ conquers."
CHAPTER X
JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
Jesus Christ came to men as a great new experience. He took them far outside all they had known of God and of man. He led them, historically, into what was, in truth, a new world, into a new understanding of life in all its relations. What they had never noticed before, he brought to their knowledge, he made interesting to them, and intelligible. In short, as Paul put it, "if any man be in Christ, it is a new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17). The aspects of things were different; the values were changed, and a new perspective made clear relations that were obscure and tangled before. Why should it have been so? Why should it be, that, when a man comes into contact, into some kind of sympathy with Jesus Christ, some living union with him, everything becomes new, and he by and by begins to feel with St. Paul: "To me to live is Christ" (Phil. 1:21)? Why has Jesus meant so much? Why should all this be associated with him?
Plato, in the sentence already quoted, tells us that "the unexamined life is unliveable for a human being, for a real man." Here, then, came into man's life a new experience altogether, like nothing known before altering everything, giving new sympathies, new passions, new enthusiasms—a new attitude to God and a new attitude to men. It was inevitable that thought must work upon it. Who was this Jesus that he should produce this result? Men asked themselves that very early; and if they were slow to do so, the criticism of the outsider drove them into it. The result has been nineteen centuries of endless question and speculation as to Jesus Christ—the rise of dogma, creed, and formula, as slowly all the philosophy of mankind has been re-thought in the light of the central experience of Jesus Christ. In spite of all that we may regret in the war of creeds, it was inevitable—it was part of the disturbance that Jesus foresaw he must make (Luke 12:51). Men "could do no other"—they had to determine for themselves the significance of Jesus in the real world, in the whole cosmos of God; and it meant fruitful conflict of opinion, the growth of the human mind, and an ever-heightened emphasis on Jesus.
An analogy may illustrate in some way the story before us. One of the most fascinating chapters of geography is the early exploration of America. Chesapeake Bay was missed by one explorer. Fog or darkness may have been the cause of his missing the place; but he missed it, and, though it is undoubtedly there, he made his map without it. Now let us suppose a similar case—for it must often have happened in early days—and this time we will say it was the Hudson, or some river of that magnitude. A later explorer came, and where the map showed a shore without a break, he found a huge inlet or outlet. Was it an arm of the sea, a vast bay, or was it a great river? A very great deal depended on which it was, and the first thing was to determine that. There were several ways of doing it. One was to sail up and map the course. A quicker way was to drop a bucket over the side of the ship. The bucket, we may be sure, went down; and it came up with fresh water; and the water was an instant revelation of several new and important facts. They had discovered, first of all, that where there was an unbroken coast-line on the map, there was nothing of the kind in reality; there was a broad waterway up into the country; and this was not a bay, but the mouth of a river, and a very great river indeed; and this implied yet another discovery—that men had to reckon with no mere island or narrow peninsula, but an immense continent, which it remained to explore.
Jesus Christ was in himself a very great discovery for those to whom he gave himself, and the exploration of him shows a somewhat similar story. Men have often said that they see nothing in him very different from the rest of us; while others have found in him, in the phrase of the Apocalypse (Rev. 22:1), the "water of life"; and the positive announcement is here, as in the other case, the more important of the two. The discovery of the volume of life, which comes from Jesus Christ, is one of the greatest that men have made. Merely to have dipped his bucket, as it were, in that great stream of life has again and again meant everything to a man. Think of what the new-found river of the New World meant to some of those early explorers after weeks at sea—
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink—