The best record of the thoughts that grew and fructified in those momentous early years is to be found not in the Acts but in the Gospels; and the fact that it is to be sought there shows whence the impulse really came. It may seem a truism to maintain that Jesus Christ was the real Founder of Christianity, and that He founded it by what He was, and not by what men imagined Him to be. Of course to many Christians it will seem a truism to say this; the simple Christian never thought otherwise; but there are Christians who are not simple, and who may be encouraged to search with a closer scrutiny to see if the old account of the origin of Christianity is not the best, indeed the only account possible. The New Testament is scattered with hints, which are not more than hints, arrow-heads as it were pointing back to Christ. These are a profitable subject of study—none more profitable. If we pay attention to these hints, and if we look for the roots of St. Paul’s teaching, I do not think we shall say that Christianity—the Christianity of nineteen centuries—was his invention, and that St. John did but follow in his train.
6. Larger Objections.
The kind of study that I have just been recommending is strictly critical; but the theory of which I have been speaking carries us out beyond the narrower ground of criticism into the wider field of history and teleology. I may just for a moment in conclusion touch on this. It may supply us with a warning that there is at least a strong presumption that the theory which fathers the teaching of St. John upon that of St. Paul, and St. Paul’s teaching upon itself, with no higher sanction behind, cannot well be true. Such a theory would mean that quite a half, and the most important half, of the fundamental theses of historical Christianity, were a mere human invention which those who have had the wit to discover them to be a human invention may go on to treat as nothing better,—to bestow on them perhaps a certain amount of praise in relation to their time, but to regard them as something that the world has outgrown. This is a view that in the present day, avowedly or unavowedly, is very largely taken. On this view there is a real nucleus of truth in biblical Christianity, but that nucleus in the light of modern science is seen to be very small indeed; all the rest is surplusage. The misfortune for the theory is that it is not only on the nucleus of truth, but very largely upon the surplusage, that nineteen centuries of Christians have lived.
Now I am quite prepared to believe that most great truths that do not come under the head of Mathematics or Physical Science have had a certain amount of surplusage attached to them; there has been husk and kernel, flower and sheath. I quite believe that men do
‘rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.’
But I cannot help thinking that, on the theory of Wernle and his friends, the surplusage is too great, the dead self too large. The course of history, as this theory would describe it, seems to me contrary to the analogy of what we otherwise know of the dealings of God with man. If we look, for instance, at the Old Testament, we see a gradual preparation for the coming of Christ, a gradual elevation and expansion of religious ideas, on the whole a nearer approximation to truth. All of us, critics and non-critics, would give substantially the same account of this; we should all of us at least see in it progress. But when we come to Christianity, Wernle and his friends see in it a far larger proportion of what is not progress but depravation and corruption, not the gradual expansion and purification of true ideas, but the wider dissemination of ideas that are false. There are nearly fourteen centuries of the dissemination of these false ideas; then comes a sudden spasmodic effort of partial relief; and at last, in the latter half of the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries, there is some sort of approach to a rediscovery of truth. It seems to me difficult to describe this view of history as anything else than a systematic impeachment of Divine Providence.
I do not wish to press the point. As I have said, we have left behind the region of criticism, and entered upon another that is not only very wide but that some of you may think rather outside my subject. The Christian, it seems to me, ought to have a comprehensive view of the purpose of God in history; he ought to be able to adjust this to his fundamental beliefs. And I would only ask you to consider how far this can be done on the theory I have been discussing.