Pastor Pastorum

Or The

Schooling of the Apostles

By Our Lord

By

Rev. Henry Latham M.A.

Master of Trinity Hall Cambridge

Cambridge: Deighton Bell And Co.

London: George Bell And Sons

1899

Contents

[pg iii]

Preface.

Of the general purport of this book, and of what led to the writing, I have said all that is necessary in the Introductory Chapter. The ideas it contains were growing into distinctness during the five and thirty years of my College work, and to many of my old pupils they will offer little that is new.

But although the book took its source from teaching; and instruction—but instruction divorced from examinations—is in some degree my object still, yet it is meant, not so much for professed students, as for that large body of the public, who entertain the desire, happily spreading fast among the young, of understanding with as great exactness as possible what it was that Christ visibly effected, and what means He employed in bringing it about.

I have avoided all technical terms of Divinity or Philosophy, and where, as in Chapters II. and III., I have been led to touch on theological speculations, I have tried to present the matter in as familiar a form as I could. Frequently, I have [pg iv] explained in the notes some geographical and other particulars which a large majority among my readers may not require to be told; in this case I must be pardoned for consulting the interest of the minority.

A didactic purpose and a literary one, do not always run readily side by side. A teacher who desires to inculcate certain principles or ideas, is ever on the look out for illustrations and recurs to his topic again and again. So, having, as I thought, certain topics to teach, I have brought them back into view more often than I should have done if I had written solely with a literary view.

I have not commonly given accounts of what has been said by others on the points of which I treat, or criticised conclusions different from mine, for I know that this manner of treatment is not in favour with the present generation. I recollect the reason of an undergraduate, in my early days, for preferring the instruction of his private tutor to that officially provided—“The Lecturer tells you that Hermann says it is this, and Wunder says it is that, but Blank (the private tutor) tells you what it is.”

With the same view of making the book readable by the general public, I have abstained from [pg v] apologising when I have advanced a notion not commonly received. In my first draft I had made such apologies for what I say on the second and third Temptations, on the Mission to the Cities, the Transfiguration, the Denials of Peter and some minor points—but I afterwards thought it better to leave them out, and to disclaim here once for all, any intention to dogmatize, or to fail in respect toward the weighty authorities with whom I have ventured to disagree.

In many cases, however, the views that I have taken rather supplement than supplant those that are commonly received. Writers on Divinity have not so much opposed them, as failed to notice the points on which I dwell. There is however one topic—the parable of the Unjust Steward, on which I find myself at variance with all the writers on the subject I know of, excepting perhaps Calvin, who begins his Comment on Luke xvi. 1 by saying “The main drift of this parable, is, that we must shew kindness and lenity in dealing with our neighbours.” He does not, however, follow up this view as I have done.

Though in so difficult a matter I cannot be confident of being right, yet I do feel convinced, [pg vi] that the accepted interpretation of the parable, viz. that it is intended to teach the right use of riches—“the really wise use of mammon” as Göbel puts it—is wholly inadequate. So simple a moral would have been pointed by a simpler tale. Surely the riches would have been made the giver's own. Moreover the salient point of the outward story, that which first catches attention, always answers in our Lord's parables to a cardinal matter in the interpretation. Here that salient point lies in the words “Take thy bond and sit down quickly and write fifty” and this has but a very oblique bearing on the true use of riches; the distinctive point of the outward parable is the exercise of delegated power, and the spiritual bearing must be in conformity with this.

I have everywhere followed the Revised Version, and I must warn readers that where italics occur in the longer passages they are not mine, except in passage on p. [101]. They are introduced, not to mark words important for my purpose, but simply because they are found in the Revised Version where they indicate, of course, that the corresponding word is wanting in the Greek. For the course of events I have generally followed the Gospel of St Mark up to the time of [pg vii] the feast of Tabernacles; and after that the Gospel of St John. Of the great historical value of the latter I have, like most biblical students, become more deeply sensible, the more closely I have studied it. Speaking of the absence of miracles wrought in public during the week of the Passion, p. [430], I have not noticed Matt. xxi. 14, because I believe the Evangelist to refer to miracles that had taken place during earlier visits to Jerusalem. It was beyond the scope of my book to discuss the differences of character of the different Gospels.

In a few instances I follow an order of events different from that which is most commonly taken. This order I have shewn in a Chronological [Appendix], in which I have tabulated the chief events of our Lord's Ministry, taking them month by month from the time of the Baptism to that of the great day of Pentecost. I have made this Appendix more full, in point of reference and arguments in support of the dates, than would have been quite necessary for readers of this book, because I thought it might be made useful generally to students of the Gospel History.

I have to thank several persons for their assistance and advice, especially Canon Huxtable, without whose kind encouragement at the outset [pg viii] the book might not have been written. I must note that I have made use of an idea on Luke xii. 49, which I first came upon, many years ago, in a small publication of the Rev. A. H. Wratislaw, then one of the Tutors of Christ's College; and that I was in like manner set on a track of thought by a sermon on the Temptation, by T. Colani, published at Strasburg in 1860. I have acknowledged my obligations to Bishop Ellicott's “Historical Lectures,” and Edersheim's “Jesus the Messiah.” Many members of my own College, and many other friends have assisted me greatly with advice and corrections.

Although my book is not written with any thesis about the Gospels to support, still I trust that I have cleared away difficulties here and there, and have shewn, in small matters, how one account undesignedly supports another. If what I have said shall lead to discussion on some of the questions raised, or if I shall induce younger men to apply themselves, in some of those directions towards which I have pointed, to work of a literary kind waiting to be done, I shall not have spent my time and pains without result.

Trinity Hall Lodge,
May 1st, 1890.

Introductory Chapter.

In this opening chapter I propose to lay before the reader the leading ideas which will be developed in the book. This will necessitate some repetition, but many readers want to know at starting whither the author is going to take them, and whether his notions are such that they will care for his company.

In the course of lecturing on the Gospels, being myself interested in questions of education, my attention turned to the way in which our Lord taught His disciples. Following the Gospel History with this view, I recognised in the train of circumstances through which Christ led the disciples, no less than in what He said to them, an assiduous care in training them to acquire certain qualities and habits of mind. I observed also method and uniformity both in what He did and in what He refrained from doing. Certain principles seem to govern His actions and to be observed regularly so far as we can see, but we have no ground for stating [pg 002] that our Lord came to resolutions on these points and bound Himself to observe them. A man sometimes sees his duty so clearly at one moment that he wishes to make the decision of that moment dominant over his life and he embodies it in a resolve, but we must suppose that Christ at each moment did what was best. So that what I call a Law of His conduct is only a generalization from His biography, and means no more than that, in such and such circumstances He usually acted in such and such ways. I can easily conceive that He might have swerved from these Laws had there been occasion.

I have fancied that I got glimpses of the processes by means of which the Apostles of the Gospels—striving among themselves who should be greatest, looking for the restoration of the kingdom to Israel, and dismayed at the apprehension of their Master—were trained to become the Apostles of the Acts,—testifying boldly before rulers and councils, giving the right hand of fellowship to one who had not companied with them, and breaking through Jewish prejudices, to own that there were no men made by God who were common or unclean. The shape which much of the outward course of Christ's life took, His choice of Galilee as a scene of action, His withdrawal from crowds and His wanderings in secluded regions were admirably adapted to the educating of the Apostles; while His sending them, two and two, [pg 003] through the cities was a direct lesson in that self-reliance which reposes on a trust in God. Were not these courses ordered to these ends? The training was wonderfully fitted to bring about the changes which occurred.

That this fashioning of the disciples should have been a very principal object with our Lord is easy to conceive. For what, except His followers, did He leave behind as the visible outcome of His work? He had founded no institution and had left no writings as a possession for after time. The Apostles were the salt to season and preserve the world, and if they had not savour whence could help be sought? Is it not then likely that the best means would be employed for choosing and shaping instruments for the work; and can we do better than mark the Divine wisdom so engaged?

On many sides the work of Christ stretches away into infinity. God's purpose in having created the world, and put free intelligences into it, as well as the changes which Christ's death may have wrought in the relation of men's souls to God, belong to that infinite side of things, which we cannot explore. But we can follow the treatment by which Christ moulded the disciples, because the changes are not wrought in them by a magical transformation, but come about gradually as the result of what they saw and heard and did.

Changes are brought about in the disciples by an education, superhuman indeed in its wisdom, [pg 004] superhuman in its insight into the habits of mind which were wanted, and into the modes by which such habits might be fostered, but not superhuman in the means employed. We can analyse the influences which are brought to bear, judge what they were likely to effect, and estimate fairly well what they did effect, because they were the same in kind as we now find working in the world. Christ's ways, therefore, in this province of His work fall within the range of our understanding. The learners are taught less by what they are told than by what they see and do. They are trained not only by listening, but by following and—what was above all—by being suffered, as in the mission to the cities of Israel, to take part in their Master's work.

They are altered by their companionship with our Lord, insensibly, just as we see the complexion of a man's character alter by his being thrown into the constant society of a stronger nature. But Christ works on them no magical change. Our Lord never transforms men so as to obliterate their old nature, and substitute a new one; new powers and a new life spring up from contact with Him, but the powers work through the old organs, and the life flows through the old channels; they would not be the same men, or preserve their individual responsibility if it were otherwise. God's grace works with men, it is true, but it uses the organization it finds; and as much cultivation and [pg 005] shaping of the disposition is required for turning God's Grace to account, as for making the most of any other good gift.

Christ's particular care to leave the disciples their proper independence is everywhere apparent. They come to Him of their deliberate will. They are not stricken by any over-mastering impression, or led captive by moving words. They are not forced to break with their old selves; their growth in steadfastness comes of a better knowledge of their Lord, and the more they advance in understanding God's ways and therefore in believing, the stronger are the grounds of assurance which are granted to them; the more they have, the more is given them; the most attached are granted most.

Christ, we find, draws out in His disciples the desired qualities of self-devotion and of healthy trust in God, without effacing the stamp of the individual nature of each man. He cherishes and respects personality. The leader of a sect or school of thought is often inclined to lose thought of the individual in his care for the society which he is establishing, or to expect his pupils to take his own opinions ready made, in a block. He is apt to be impatient if one of them attempts to think for himself. His aim very commonly is

“To make his own the mind of other men,”

and a pupil who asserts his own personality, and is not content with reflecting his master's, is not of the sort he wants.

But our Lord was a teacher of a very different kind. He reverenced whatever the learner had in him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth. He was glad when His words roused a man into thinking on his own account, even in the way of objection. When the Syro-phœnician woman turns His own saying against Him, with the rejoinder, “Yes Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs,” He applauds her Faith the more for the independent thought that went with it. Men, in His eyes, were not mere clay in the hands of the potter, matter to be moulded to shape. They were organic beings, each growing from within, with a life of his own—a personal life which was exceedingly precious in His and His Father's eyes—and He would foster this growth so that it might take after the highest type.

Neither did He mean that what He told men should only be stored in their memories as in a treasure-house, there to be kept intact. They were to “take heed how they heard.” With Christ, the part that the man had to do of himself went for infinitely more than what was done for him by another. If men had the will and the power to turn to their own moral nutriment the mental food which was given them, it would be well; but if His words merely lay in their memories, without affecting them or germinating within them, then they were only as seeds falling on sterile spots.

The training of the disciples was partly practical, turning on what they saw our Lord do and were set or suffered to do themselves, and partly it came from what they heard. I want the reader to go along with me in marking how this training of the Apostles was adapted to generate the qualities which the circumstances of their situation demanded when Christ left the world; and it is in the practical part of the work that this is most readily traced.

The selection of the Apostles may serve as an instance of what I mean. They were to preach a gospel to the poor—the movement was to spread upward from below. This will be found to be the law of growth of great moral principles which have established their sway among mankind. The Apostles therefore were chosen from a class which, though not the poorest, had sympathies with the poor. Again the Apostles were to be witnesses of the resurrection to after times; it was important, therefore, that they should possess qualities which would make men trust them; had they been imaginative, had they been enthusiasts, this would have been a bar to the accepting of their evidence; but the Apostles were singularly literal-minded men, so little suspecting a metaphorical meaning in their Master's sayings, that when He told them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, they thought it meant that, having no bread with them, they would be constrained to eat some not made in [pg 008] the proper way. We see no exaggeration in them, no wild fervour, nothing that belongs to the religious fanatic. Our Lord never employs the force that such fanaticism affords; when He meets with what seems the result of emotion, as when the woman breaks out with “Blessed is the womb that bare thee,” He always brings back to mind that doing is more than feeling.

We shall have to note, moreover, the progressive way in which our Lord taught His followers self-reliance and faith, and the tender care with which He lets His hold of them go by degrees. Wandering along with our Lord, they grow into a capacity for marking greatness, and trusting themselves to a superior nature. When they are sent, two and two, through the cities of Israel, they learn to use responsibility, and to feel that His power could still protect them even when He was not by. They lacked nothing then, for Christ provided for them; but the time should come when they would complete their training and have real work to do, and then they would have to employ all gifts which had fallen to them. For the real conflict, both the purse and the sword are to be taken; prudence and judgment and courage must be brought into play in doing God's work as they are in doing that of every day life.

And when Christ leaves the world, the disciples are not for long exposed to the revulsion which the crucifixion would cause. They are not suffered to feel their Master's loss and miss Him all at [pg 009] once. They are not left to suppose that He had altogether gone, that His cause had failed and all was over; so that they had better wake from their delusion and go back, with blighted hope and faith, to Galilee and their boats and nets. Soon comfort came. The work for which they had been trained was still to go on, only not in the way they had expected. Their following Christ was not to be a mere episode in their lives: they had not been wrong in thinking that they should serve Him all their days. Christ is near them still, and they see Him now and again. For forty days or more they felt that He was in their neighbourhood, and might at any time appear; any stranger who accosted them might turn out to be He. Thus they are carried through the time when the effects of shock on their mind and moral nature was most to be feared, and they are brought one step nearer to the power of realising that Christ is with them. After the Ascension, He is withdrawn from the eye of sense altogether, His presence will henceforth be purely spiritual, but no sooner do they lose sight of Him in the body than the Comforter comes to their souls. So long as men walked by the guidance of one whom they saw by their side, they would not throw themselves on unseen spiritual aid. The Comforter would not come unless the Lord went away, but as soon as He was gone the comfort came.

I now come to the oral teaching. Here we note the same fitness of the means to the end, [pg 010] but the purpose in view is a more abstract one: a quality very essential for Christ's purpose is expansiveness. The truths which He revealed and the commandments He gave were to be accepted by different nations, and in various states of society: they belonged therefore to what is primary in the nature of man. It is in this that Christ's doctrine differs from all systems. It does not belong to one age or one nationality but to all. Whether this character of Universality was due to prospective wisdom or to chance, I do not now discuss; I only say that the substance of Christ's teaching is suitable for men in different conditions; that the form in which it is put makes this teaching easy for the ignorant to retain; and that the circumstances which accompanied it were singularly conducive to its spread. Christ arose amongst a nation which was the most strikingly individualised of all peoples, but He transmitted the type of Humanity in its most general form. We mark in Him no trace of one race or of one epoch; He was emphatically the Son of Man.

In all His sayings and doings, our Lord was most careful to leave the individual room to grow. Some of the “negative characteristics” of our Lord's teaching arise out of this universality. If we go to Him looking for a Social system or an Ecclesiastical polity we find nothing of the sort. Humanitarian theorists have turned in disappointment from His word; but a system suited to our [pg 011] age must have been unsuited to Gospel times. Christ gave no system for recasting Society by positive Law, and no ecclesiastical Polity, for men could make laws better when the circumstances which called for them arose. He gave no system of philosophy, for such systems are only the ways of looking at some of the enigmas of life, which suit the cast of mind of the nation or the generation which shapes the system. So different nations and generations should be left to make their systems as of old, only a new truth was declared, and a new force was set to work, which systems would henceforth have to take into account.

Again, the next world is what all want to know about. If the founder of a religion would win men's ears, he must set this before them. But, as we cannot conceive a life under conditions wholly different from that we lead, any description must be misleading. False notions besides engendering devotees and fanatics, would sap human activity and arrest progress. Hence Christ speaks to the fact of a future existence, but says nothing of the mode. He assures us that eternal life awaits those accounted worthy, but of the nature of this life He says nothing. He gives no details on which imagination can dwell.

Farther, Christ leaves no ritual. For a ritual belongs to those outward things which must change; it would in time symbolize a view no longer taken, and if some should still cling to it from the idea [pg 012] that it had a magic worth of its own, then it would stand in the way of the truth it was meant to set forth.

Laws, Systems, and Ritual, then, were raiment to be changed as times went on; with them therefore succeeding generations were left to deal. The form must come of man, so to man the shaping of it is left. But Christ gave what was more than raiment and more than form. “The words that I have spoken unto you,” said He, “are Spirit and are life.” He gave seed thoughts which should lie in men's hearts, and germinate when fit occasion came.

These thoughts were clothed in terse sayings, such as a man would carry in his head and dwell on the more because he did not see to the bottom of them all at once. Moreover some of these sayings, for instance, “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given,”[1] will startle the hearer as being contrary to what he would expect; and the more he is perplexed, the more he is provoked to think, and thereby a greater impression is made.

Other truths are wrapped up in parables. The form of the parable, not the matter it conveys, concerns me now. It is a form of speech which imbeds itself deeply in the memories of men and was admirably suited to preserve a genuine record during the time when the Gospel should subsist as an oral tradition. It put what was most important into the shape which made it most easy to recollect. [pg 013] Nothing except proverbs takes hold of men's memories so firmly as tales. The most ancient literary possessions of the world are, probably, certain stories containing a moral. Of course our Lord's teaching in parables answered greater ends than this of making His lessons easy to retain: but this form of teaching agreed wonderfully well with what the circumstances required. Next to tales in respect of being easily remembered, come narratives of detached striking acts. So the materials of the Gospel History, sayings, parables, narratives of signs and wonders, are cast into the forms best calculated for safe transmission through a period of tradition.

We find the same suitableness of the form to the needs of the case, in the shape in which the whole Gospel has been delivered to us. I refer to its being narrative instead of didactic, and coming from the Evangelists instead of from Christ. If our Lord had left writings of His own, every letter of them would have been invested with such sanctity that there could have been no independent investigation of truth. Its place would have been taken by commentatorial works on the delivered word. When writings are set before us and we are told, “All truth lies there; look no further;” then our ingenuity is directed to extract diversities of meanings from the given words; for matter must be set forth in human speech, and human speech conveys different meanings to differently biased minds.

The Jews regarded their sacred books as the actual words of God; hence came that subserviency to the letter, and that stretching of formulae which brought them to play fast and loose with their consciences. The Scribes looked on their Law as a conveyancer on a deed: they were bound by the letter, and this led them to regard the Almighty as One dealing with men under the terms of a contract. This drew them out of the road which led to a true knowledge of God, and helped to make them “blind leaders of the blind.” Our Lord breaks down this slavery to the letter of the Scripture which He found existing, and He is careful not to build up a new bondage to His own words.

When matter has come down by oral tradition, men can hardly worship the letter of it. We possess only brief memoirs collected by men, the dates and history of the composition of which are far from certain, so that room is left for criticism and judgment. The revelation of God is, therefore, not so direct that men will be awestricken and shut their minds at the sight of it; but human intelligence can be brought to bear on the records, whereby their meaning is brought out, and men's intellects are braced by the exploration of lofty regions. Men may without irreverence raise the question, whether the narrator had rightly understood Christ's sayings, and properly connected them with the circumstances out of which they arose.

Our Lord, in Galilee at any rate, spoke Aramaic, [pg 015] and we have merely the Greek; we have only fragments of His teaching; we possess different versions, agreeing indeed in essentials, but with such differences, that we are forced to admit in the writers a human possibility of error. We have our Lord's words it is true, but not in the order, or in the connection, in which they were spoken. There is not only room for human judgment but a necessity for it. Hence the form in which our Lord's utterances have come down to us is suited to the plan which seems to run through all our Lord's teaching; it calls for the free play of the human mind, and leaves room for the admission of a certain choice as to what we accept as revealed truth.

It is true that some Divines have endeavoured to do what our Lord was careful not to do—they have, by theories of verbal inspiration, endeavoured to put our Gospels in the position that actual writings of our Lord would have held; and, so far as they have succeeded, they have brought about the evils which attended the notions of the scribes. But the form in which we have the Gospels does not lend itself to such a theory. If men go wrong in this way they have only themselves to blame.

There is another way in which this form of the Gospels answers to the plan of Christ's teaching. He impressed men, above all, by His Personality, and the record of His life is preserved to us in that form which is best adapted to preserve personality [pg 016] and store it up for the future, viz. the form of memoirs put together by contemporaries, or by those who were familiar with contemporaries.

History and literature furnish many instances of men who have made their mark in virtue of a striking personality; whose reputation rests, not on any visible tokens,—not on kingdoms conquered, institutions founded, books written, or inventions perfected or anything else that they did,—but mainly on what they were. Their merely having passed along a course on earth, and lived and talked and acted with others, has left lasting effects on mankind.

This may serve to put us in the way of understanding what was wrought by the Personality of Christ: for our Lord's disciples followed Jesus of Nazareth for this above all,—that he was Jesus of Nazareth. Those of His own time had felt this Personality working on them while they saw Him and listened to Him. It is consistent, then, with what we gather of His prospective care, that He should so provide, that after generations should have as nearly as possible, the same advantages as that with which He lived upon the earth. This is effected by His being presented to them in the Gospels, not as a writer is in his works, not as a lawgiver is in his codes, but as the man Christ Jesus, mixing with men, sharing their feasts, helping their troubles, going journeys with them, and in all these occasions turning their thoughts, gently, with a touch that is [pg 017] scarcely observed, towards that knowledge of God which He came to bring.

Which is it that sways us most? Is it the teacher who tells us,—This is the way you are to think, this is what you are to believe and what you are to do? Or is it the friend who blends his life and heart and mind with ours, with whom we argue and differ, but take something each from the other, which assimilates with what is most our own? Surely we yield more freely to the one who helps to foster our particular personality than to him who would thrust it aside, and replace it by his own.

Now Christ, as portrayed in the Gospels, is such a friend. He trusts to men's believing that the Father is in Him, not because He has declared it in set dogmas, but because He has been “so long with them.” He is a friend who lifts us out of our common selves, and helps each one of us to find his own truest self: we catch fire from the new light which he kindles in us, and we become conscious of a new force, a spiritual one. When the narrative brings us to the sacrifice on the Cross, we see what the spectators saw, and something more, for we see this new inward force transcending all outward violence. When we turn to the Sufferer on the Cross, we say “after all, the Victory is there.”

But not only is our Lord's Personality presented to us in the literary form in which it can best be put forth, that of the informal memoir, but we [pg 018] are given four such memoirs, each regarding its subject from a different point. We have then four different projections of what we want to construct. The help of this is obvious; and it is worth mentioning that hereby there is more scope for man's mental action than if we had only one Gospel. By diligently comparing and fitting in each with the other, we cultivate our mind's eye to catch the lineaments of Christ's figure. A painter, who has to produce a portrait from four photographs, has a less simple task than if only a single photograph existed; but his work will be more intellectual; it will do him more good, and the result will be more of a conception and less of a copy.

I believe that the education of man to a knowledge of God is part of the Divine purpose running through God's ways, and I detect in the narrative form in which our knowledge of Christ has been delivered to us, a wise tenderness for the spiritual freedom of man and a help to keep his faculties alive.

I spoke just now of Laws of Christ's conduct. The more we look at Christ's life and teaching as a whole, the more we discern in it the observance of certain Laws, which give it unity and order. When we stand near some large painting, or masterpiece of Art, we are taken up with the portion of it just under our eye; we scan this or that group and admire its finish and its truth. [pg 019] But when we go a little way off, and again look, and give our minds to it, we become aware of a different order of perfections in it, namely those perfections which belong to it as a whole, as the completed conception of a gifted mind.

So it is with the Gospel History. While we read chapter by chapter we see what answers to one group in the great picture; but when we have the whole in our mind, we see a consistent purpose holding it all together: we find that our Lord always acts along certain lines, and carries out certain principles. One of these, which lies at the root of His ways of dealing with men, is His carefulness to keep alive in each man the sense of his personal responsibility, and of the dignity of such responsibility. He would seem to say to each man, “It is no small thing to have been entrusted by God with the care of a soul which you may educate for fitness for eternal life.” We find in our Lord, indignation, once, at least, even anger,[2] towards men and their ways, but never contempt or scorn. A man is, merely as a man, entitled to be treated with respect. The enforcing of this on the world is, among all the “Gesta Christi,” perhaps the most noticeable now.

The simple fact of His dealing directly with men themselves, shews that He owned their free agency more or less. If men had been merely puppets moved by strings, Christ could only have [pg 020] benefited them by swaying the powers who held these strings, and there would have been no meaning in His addressing Himself to the puppets themselves and giving His life for them. Now, if men are free they must be at liberty to go in a direction different from that which is best for them—that is to go wrong; and so it must needs be that “occasions of stumbling” come, and cause suffering. I mention these principles now, because they are the bases of the Laws of which I am going to speak. They will come before us again further on.

The marking of uniformities in Christ's conduct, and in His modes of conveying instruction, is serviceable in this way. We perceive the Laws (defined as in p. [2]) by regarding Christ's career as a whole; and in return, the Laws, when perceived, help us to grasp its unity and completeness in a more thorough way; and, besides this, we strengthen our critical faculty, and arm it with a new criterion which may become an effective weapon in arguing on questions of internal evidence. For if we find in any newly-discovered fragment, or even in the Gospels themselves, that which runs counter to what we think we have established as a Law, then we have to ask ourselves whether it is likely that the passage is spurious or imperfect or put out of its right place; or, on the other hand, whether our Law has been framed too narrowly, and ought to be restated or enlarged.

Again, when we find a Law constantly observed, and are sure that the narrative cannot have been written up to the Law, because the narrators knew nothing of such a Law; then we come on a new variety of internal evidence. If, in matters which only a student would observe, our Lord is found to adhere to certain ways, this favours the view that the materials for the portrait came from life; for an artist drawing from description or following an idea of his own must have missed these delicate details now and then. This consistency uniformly observed forms a sort of undesigned coincidence ramifying through the mass, and holding it all together. The notion of Laws underlying our Lord's action, and shewing their traces on the surface from time to time, will be best illustrated by an example. I shall take the rules which our Lord observes in the working of Signs and Wonders; and so I must here anticipate something of that, which I shall make the subject of a whole chapter further on.

Our Lord is set apart from all other teachers by His use of Signs and Wonders. We shall enquire, how He regarded them? What use He designed to make of them? And, what more especially concerns us now, what Laws He observes when He employs them? These Laws we shall find—wrapped up as it were—in our Lord's answers to the Tempter in the wilderness. The narrative of the Temptation, which seems, at first sight, to be a fragment unconnected with the course of the action of the Gospel History, [pg 022] becomes, when the Laws are noted, the key to the interpretation of much. Isolated phenomena fall into system. I will relate the Temptations in the order given by St Luke, and briefly state the Laws indicated in the Tempter's suggestions together with our Lord's replies.

I. Christ will not turn stones into loaves to appease His hunger in the wilderness. This refusal contains two principles to which our Lord will be found to adhere.

(1) He will not use His special powers to provide for His personal wants or for those of His immediate followers.

When our Lord provided food for the five thousand, the loaves and fishes the Apostles had with them were enough for their own party.[3]

(2) Christ will not provide by miracle what could be provided by human endeavour or human foresight.

Our Lord will not even make men better by action on them from without; He will not change their being by any spiritual action without their cooperation. When the Apostles said “Increase our Faith,” He worked no sudden change in them, but He pointed out to them the efficacy of Faith, in order that by longing for it, they might attain to it.

II. Christ will not purchase the visible “kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” by [pg 023] worshipping Satan—that is to say, He will not do homage to the Spirit of the world to win the world's support. He will not ally Himself with worldly policy. He will not fight the world with its own weapons, and become its master by giving in to its views and its ways. In addressing the people He runs counter to the notions they cherished the most. He would not proclaim Himself as the Messiah, or allow Himself to be made a King though thousands, who were looking for a national deliverer, would have rallied round Him if He had done so.[4] He would not conciliate the favour of the great. He would not display His powers, for a matter of wonderment, to satisfy the curiosity of Herod, nor would He use them to repel violence by open force. He would not hearken to the temptation which said, “Use your miraculous powers to establish a visible kingdom upon earth; and when this is done you can frame a perfect form of society by positive Law.”

III. Christ will not throw Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple. The Temptation must have been to do this in the sight of the people. Else, why is this pinnacle chosen rather than any other height? The refusal points to the following important Laws.

(1) No miracle is to be worked merely for miracles' sake, apart from an end of benevolence or instruction.

What appear to be exceptions to this rule cease to be so when fully considered.

The walking on the waters, as we shall see further on, was a step in training the Apostles to realize His nearness to them, when He was not before their eyes. The withering of the fig-tree, which had leaves before its time, but no fruit, was an acted parable bearing on the Jewish people. These are miracles of instruction. We shall find others of the same kind.

(2) No miracle is to be worked which should be so overwhelming in point of awfulness, as to terrify men into acceptance, or which should be unanswerably certain, leaving no loop-hole for unbelief.

As, in the second Temptation, our Lord refused to allow physical force to be used to bring men to adopt His cause, so here He refuses to employ moral compulsion. The miracles only convinced the willing, men might always disbelieve if they would. They might allow the fact of the prodigies, and yet set them down to magic or witchcraft: it was with many an open question whether to ascribe them to God or to Beelzebub, for the latter had, it was supposed, a share of power upon the earth. But one popular criterion there was of the power being God's: in heaven, said the Jews, God reigned supreme and alone. A Sign worked there would carry with it the autograph of God. When Joshua would convince their fathers, he had wrought a Sign in heaven; he had made the sun [pg 025] and moon stand still. Let Christ do this and they would believe. No such Sign will Christ work. If the world was to be converted nolens volens it might as well have been peopled from the first by beings incapable of error.

If the end of His coming had been to gain adherents, His purpose would have been furthered by granting a Sign which would have struck the imagination of the masses; but to raise a large immediate following was not our Lord's design. He wanted only a few fit spirits as depositories of His word.

He came to educate men to know God. In this knowledge lay the assurance of immortality. The knowledge reached through this education could not be imparted by any mere telling or express communication, but had to be unfolded from within the learner's self. Belief was to grow and not to be imposed. It had two elements, a perception of a Divine agency at work in the world, and a personal trust in Christ who manifested God,—a trust based on something like the devotion of a soldier to his chief. That the probability that His mission did really come from God, should be made to exceed by a little the probability that it did not, and that this balance of arguments should lead people to acknowledge Him, was not what Christ had in view. He sought only the homage of free, loving, human hearts.

The Laws above mentioned will be found to [pg 026] regulate the course of our Lord's actions as regards the performance of Signs and Wonders. They are frequently violated in the Apocryphal Gospels, never, I think, in the Canonical ones. There are other Laws which I shall have to trace; one, which is very important, is stated on at least two occasions; I have referred to it as being paradoxical in form, and the more fitted to force itself on men's minds on that account. It is the text, “For whosoever hath to him shall be given, but whosoever hath not from him shall be taken away even that which he hath.” This looks as if it would fall in strangely with the Law of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest, in the organic world. What I believe our Lord to have meant by it will be discussed in its proper place.

I shall have also to speak of the prospective bearing of much that our Lord says and does, and to shew how this gives us a greater assurance of our Lord's being “with us always to the end of the world.” Christ seems to me to look over the heads of the generation about Him far into the future; His eye is fixed on the distance, but it does not look out vaguely into space; it is turned in a direction that is precisely determined. He walks with the assured step of one who marches to a goal. But what that goal is He never tells men, and when He designedly keeps men's curiosity unsatisfied, we may conjecture that no answer could be given without touching on conditions of spiritual existence [pg 027] beyond our ken. There may be such conditions which we could no more conceive than we could imagine space with another dimension, beside length and breadth and height.

The history of the Church and of the workings of men's minds may disclose the existence of Laws, lying under the events of ages and operating through them, analogous to those laid down by our Lord for his own conduct; and we may look along the direction in which these Laws point. Some have thought they descried, at the end, a time, in which peace and righteousness should reign over the whole world. But Christ Himself doubted whether He should find faith upon the earth when He came.[5] However, if He should not, still He will not have failed, we can be sure of this. What He meant to effect, whatever it was, will have come about. Righteous souls may be garnered elsewhere, and this earth may be only a school of life, a training ground for the education and selection (for these two go together) of beings who shall be fitted to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Chapter II. Human Freedom.

I have spoken in the foregoing chapter of certain characteristics of our Lord's ways of dealing with men. In considering these ways we find ourselves, at almost every turn, face to face with the great enigmas of life which underlie all Theology. Questions about Divine government and human freedom will, I see, force themselves upon us.

It would keep this book more close to its purpose, if I could proceed at once with the examination of what our Lord says and does, and leave all these difficulties on one side, taking it for granted that all my readers had arrived at their own views about them; or if I were to refer them to works in which they are formally discussed.

But I trust my readers will forgive me, if I suppose that it may be with them as with those I have been used to teach—that is to say, that they will be attracted by these perplexities, and that they will be impatient at being told that just what they want to ask lies outside my province. Many too, I know, would never turn to any of the [pg 029] learned works on these matters, of which I might give them the names.

I have resolved, therefore, to deal with these matters once for all, in as familiar a way as I can. I cannot, of course, give my readers solutions of these questions; I can only tell them how I manage to do without a solution myself, and put before them the view of these matters which I hold till I can get a better, so that they may more readily enter into my views of Christ's Laws of action, and understand what I write.

The characteristics of our Lord's ways which particularly bring us in contact with these mysteries, and which therefore concern us most now, are (1) His care to keep alive in His hearers their sense of being free and responsible agents; (2) His tolerance of the existence of evil in the world.

These questions of free will and the existence of evil have been for ages the battle-ground of divines, and they come before us every day. “Why did not God make every one good?” is a question which occurs to every intelligent child. He runs to his first teachers with it, and finding himself put off with an answer that is no answer—for a child is quick in detecting this—he gets his first notion that there are matters which even grown-up people know nothing about.

So, that I may not serve my readers in this way, I give them all I have myself. I can no more tell them “How” or “Why” God brought about the [pg 030] present state of things, than I can solve the great mystery which is at the bottom of all mysteries: “How, or Why, God and the world ever existed at all?” But I think I can shew that free agency in men, and the existence of evil, and also a reserve in the revelation of God's ways—a question I shall have to deal with next—are consistent with our situation in this world; supposing that the mental and spiritual development of God's creatures is the proximate end and aim of the Spiritual Order. Some hypothesis we must make as to a purpose in the world, if we regard it as the work of a mind; and this is the purpose which most seems to fall in with what I observe.

Our Lord speaks of Divine action as “The mystery of the kingdom of God.”[6] He directs the thoughts of His disciples to these ways by telling them, not what they are, but to what they are like. We shall never, while on earth, perfectly know these ways, but Christ thinks it well for His disciples to strive after this knowledge, and to look for lessons in all they see to help them towards it.

Not only does Christ give us what I have called seed-thoughts on these matters, but He puts us in possession of a unique method for leading men towards the truth about them. He takes an incident of familiar life, and uses it to set forth spiritual verities. So when we must discourse of these hard matters our safest course is to follow [pg 031] our Lord's way. No doubt, He meant to shew us how to teach, as well as to tell us what to teach; so if we begin with a sort of allegory or parable, we cannot be far wrong in point of form, however feeble and faulty the execution may be. I believe that the relation of a parent to his household affords likeness enough to that of the Father to His world, to be used as the ground of a parable on God's Will and Human Freedom.

Let us suppose that the father of a family, a man of strong will, and steadfastly abhorring evil, should conceive the project of forcibly shutting it out from his home. We will suppose the household planted in a spot remote from human intercourse, in some self-supplying island or dale among the hills; and, as I do not mean to touch on physical evil, let us suppose that no external calamity comes nigh the dwelling. Here, let us suppose, the children grow up, uncontaminated by ill, knowing no temptation, reared in love and kindness, treated wisely and with such even justice that envy and jealousy find no room to enter.

The parent proposes to himself to do away with all temptation, all chance of individual aberration, and to cast his children's character in a perfect mould. He would have them merge themselves in him as much as possible, repeating his thoughts and accepting his views without questioning them, or supposing they could be questioned. All society, all books, but what he approves, [pg 032] are banished from that house, so that no whisper of evil, no pernicious notions can possibly intrude. Evil is by him regarded as a pestilent weed, which only exists, owing to some oversight in the making of the world, for which he is at a loss to account. It is at once to be eradicated whenever it is espied.

Let us suppose that all goes well in our imagined household—that the children love their father and believe implicitly in him; that they are so happy in their home and home pursuits that they do not look beyond; and that the healthy labour, which their common wants necessitate, gives room for all their energies. Hence, there is no repining at their narrow sphere, no longing for more strenuous activity or more varied life. Each does his daily work, and returns to pleasant rest and a happy home, and no more asks himself whether he is happy than he asks whether the valves of his heart are opening and closing as they should. The father, then, looks around him, and sees his ideal accomplished. He has a family of which no member does anything but what he approves, or has a thought but what he shares with him: not one of them sets up an opinion different from what he holds. It never occurs to them to doubt the wisdom of any injunction. Life presents to them no moral difficulties, because, as soon as any question occurs to them, they run with it to their father, and on receiving his reply put aside the [pg 033] matter, as being decided and disposed of for good and all.

We might suppose the parent would look around with unalloyed satisfaction. But a moment comes when he finds something wanting. He is not so thoroughly satisfied as he had expected to be with the ideal which he has worked out. Some misgiving obtrudes itself. He asks himself—Is this condition, this merging of my children's wills in mine, what is best for them or what is best for me? Is not this goodness of theirs too negative? Is it not rather the absence of evil than the presence of good?

Further he asks, am not I substantially alone? Is not mine the only independent mind in the place, of which all the rest are mere reflections? Am I not intensifying my loneliness and all the moral disadvantages that attach to it, by thus rendering all who surround me merely portions of myself? For my children are not separate persons, but bits of me. Are not whole provinces of moral activity shut out from me, by the very fact of my having everything my own way? Are there not virtues which require opposition to call them out? Is it not good to have to ask ourselves whether we are dealing fairly with opponents? Is it not good to forgive wrongs? Is it not good to reach out a helping hand, and lift one who has stumbled, back into his self-respect? I engage in no struggles. In my world there are no misdoings [pg 034] to forgive and no misdoers to restore. Have I not closed against myself whole worlds of moral action and of moral life?

Then, as to my children, “Have I not been wrong in supposing that they must be good because they have never done wrong? They have been so kept from the suggestion of evil that they could hardly help going right. But could they resist temptation if it came? They have never been braced by a struggle with it, nor marked the ill fruits of evil. They take it on trust from me that evil brings sorrow; but it usually comes in disguise and declares itself harmless, and how should they recognise it if it came?” So, question after question suggests itself, all destructive of his satisfaction. “Can it be,” he says at last, “that I have brought up these children so as to be fit for no world but that which I have carefully constructed for them? I used to delight in their goodness; but since I have suspected it to be mainly instinctive—an innocence that is the outcome of ignorance—my satisfaction in it is half gone.”

At length, he is harassed with the idea that he may have given up his life to a mistake, that what he has done has cramped his own mental and moral expansion, and that the excellence of his blameless family is only fair-weather goodness after all. He casts about to think why it is that they have “neither savour nor salt,” and concludes “What they want is personality—and how should they have [pg 035] got it, living in a household where I have taken care to be all in all?”

Then his thoughts run upon evil, which he has been at such pains to shut out, closing against it every cranny and chink. “God,” he may say, “has let evil into His world—was I right in keeping it forcibly out of mine? May not the resisting and assuaging of evil give occasion for good to grow up, and feel its own strength? Are there not many kinds of goodness, brought out in this way, which we could no more have without evil than we could have light in a picture without shade? If there is no room for my children to go wrong, what moral significance,” he asks, “is there in saying that they go right?”

So he is disheartened with his project, and gives it up. He abandons his isolated way of life, and gives his children freedom. He encourages them to act and judge for themselves. Henceforth they can choose their own books, their own friends their own pursuits, and go forth into life, outside their charmed circle.

Of course this involves the giving up of his absolute power; this is inherent in the nature of things. A man cannot be an autocrat and have free people about him. If he would have intercourse with free intelligences, in order to get the advantages to his own cultivation and expansion of character which spring from such intercourse; this must be purchased by abdicating some of his [pg 036] powers, or putting them in abeyance. So the parent forbears using his power, in order that his children may learn to be free, and that he may hold communion with free, loving hearts, and engage in discussion with unfettered minds.

Soon, he finds that he has to encounter opposition. The children are free to go wrong, and wrong some of them will go: evil appears in that household where it was not known. The father sorrows over this, but when he reviews his condition he finds that he has a countervailing comfort; the good that is left about him is now real good. It is the good of persons who have known and resisted evil. Besides this, there is more life and greater vigour of character in his family, than there was before. They no longer sit with folded hands always waiting for direction; they have the air of persons who see a purpose before them; and they move along their way “with the certain step of man.” So he concludes that it is better that all should engage in the struggle with evil, even though some should fail, than that they should move along paths ready shaped out for them, shewing a merely mechanical goodness.

A great change has come over his life in another respect, he is now no longer alone. Other wills come into contact, sometimes into collision, with his will; a host of qualities, which had been folded up and laid by for years, come again into use. He is no longer among echoes of himself, but there [pg 037] are real voices in his new world. His views may still prevail, but it must be, not merely because they are his, but because they stand on solid ground. He may still lead in action; but it must be because he has the leader's strength, because he will venture when others waver, and decide when others doubt.

Here we must leave him, and say a word or two before making the obvious application of the parable: We must not press the application too closely or draw conclusions from the mere machinery of the parable: it must not, of course, be supposed that I conceive God to have dealt with man as the father does with his children; that is to say, to have kept him at first in tutelage, and then found it desirable to enfranchise him. The sole object of the story is to familiarise the reader with the need of freedom in moral growth. It shews that for education to be carried out, the will must be free to act. When we have brought this home to his mind, we shall be the better able “to justify the ways of God to man” in some important particulars.

The parable is designed to apply to the condition of men on earth on the supposition, that their education—in the largest sense of the word—is the main work held in view: all depends on the hypothesis that man is placed on earth to develop his powers. The need of freedom for members of the imagined family depends on their being in a [pg 038] state of growth. The parable would not apply to spiritual beings, if we could conceive such, whose qualities and character were unalterable. Perfected beings have done with growth and struggle, and have attained to the highest condition, viz. existence in unison with God. But for imperfect beings, struggling on to their goal, freedom is required and the opposition of evil is indispensable, in order that the moral thews and sinews may harden.

Whenever we come upon an objection to the ways of God's ordering of the world, which is put in the form of a question, such as “Why was not the world made in this way or that?” we shall find it a good plan, to follow out the line indicated in the complaint, and see what would have come about, supposing that God had made the world in the way which is suggested.

From the imaginary case here put, we see to what the common child's question leads us—the question “Why did not God make all people good and keep them so?”—If people had been “made good and kept good,” that is to say if they had been constructed by God so as always to act as His will prompted, then they would not in the proper sense of the word have been people at all; they would have been mechanisms worked by God, and so they could not have been “good” in the sense in which we use the word of a man, but only in that in which we apply it to a watch. There [pg 039] could be no moral life without freedom; there could be no growth of character without temptations and difficulties to overcome; no heroism, no self-denial, no sympathising tenderness, no forgiving love, without suffering or wrongdoing to call them forth.

Moreover if not only people on earth, but all created intelligences had, in like manner, been constrained to respond to every motion of the Divine will, God would have been the one spiritual being in the world and would therefore have been absolutely alone.

Let us now suppose, and the supposition falls in with what our conscience and the Bible tell us, that in God all goodness dwells. This goodness cannot lie stored away as in a treasure-house, so as to be merely an object of contemplation, it must be active and in operation. This is essential to our idea of goodness, and it agrees with the view of God which Christ presents to us, which is that of a being ever operating. “My Father worketh hitherto,” says our Lord, “and I work.” For good to unfold, and advance toward perfection in its manifold ways, an arena is wanted. The world we know of affords the arena required; in this, God has been working from the first One kind of His work we can conceive to be the suggesting thoughts to men; but if it be so, He leaves the will free either to entertain or to reject the suggestions, as we might those of a friend.

That we may not lose ourselves in the immensity of God and eternity, we will withdraw our gaze from the rest of the Universe, and fix it on this planet of ours, when organic life first began to appear upon it. The spiritual and material world might, before this, have been going on, each apart, through countless ages; but a moment came when the spiritual and the material were wondrously blended, and life began upon the earth. Different orders of being succeeded each other, and fresh forces came into play. We may suppose that God sympathised with all His creation, and that the qualities that appeared in it reflected something in Himself. God may have rejoiced in seeing the animal creation happy. The animals were in a degree free, but they were not self-conscious; they did not know that they were happy, or that they were loved, and God may have required for the full unfolding of His infinite capacity for sympathy and love, to be in relation with beings who could know Him and love Him, and know that they loved Him.

Mr Erskine of Linlathen, in his excellent book on the Spiritual Order, says “Is there not a comfort in the doctrine of the eternal Sonship, as a deliverance from the thought of a God, whose very nature is Love, dwelling in absolute solitude from all eternity without an object of love?” We may extend this observation to other qualities besides love, from the exercise of which, a being who is [pg 041] alone in the world is necessarily debarred. Is it not likely that a God of mercy, truth and justice would frame a world of beings, in His dealing with whom all these qualities should find scope and exercise? Without self-conscious beings having free wills, how could this be done?

Close by the side of this question of free will, lies that of the existence of moral evil, in a world made by a being who, by the hypothesis, is perfectly good. When we supposed the world to be formed for the evolution of moral goodness, we, perhaps without knowing it, introduced the idea of moral evil, implied in that of goodness; for actual good is evolved in resisting evil and repairing the mischief it has done; indeed many forms of it can no more exist without evil as an antagonist, than a wheel can turn without the friction of the road.

Now, as I have said, if men be left free, they must have liberty to go wrong. For if they had been originally made so perfect that they could not go wrong, this would only mean that they were like watches very excellently fabricated; they could only move in one particular way, viz. the way in which they had been designed to move by God. Inasmuch as such beings would not be persons, we could not feel gratitude or anger towards them, nor influence them in any way. If men were like this, there could be little or no growth, little or no action of man on man. If, to take another supposition, man had been so made that it would be [pg 042] possible for him to go wrong, but that he had been sedulously kept out of temptation and placed in an abode where innocence reigned undisturbed; then we come to a case very like that sketched in the foregoing parable.

There is a third case possible. God might make men capable of going wrong, but might watch over them and protect them, whether they craved His help or not, whenever temptation approached. This constant supernatural interference would soon have destroyed all self-helpfulness; men would never have formed habits of avoiding or resisting temptation. “God,” the man would say, “will not let me sin—I may go as near to danger as I like, and need take no care of myself, because I am sure of God's protection.” We know that a child does not learn to take care of himself, so long as he feels that it is the nurse's business to see that no harm happens to him. We come then to this result. God requires free self-conscious beings, for the full exercise of the moral goodness in Himself and for its development and manifestation in the world.

But He cannot give others freedom, and at the same time provide that they should act only in the way that He approves: because this in itself would be a contradiction, and a contradiction not even Divine power can effect. Hence these free, intelligent beings must be at liberty to go wrong, and God must, in exchange for having free wills about him, forego part of His absolute prerogative: [pg 043] and so He must allow evil a place in the world because this is involved in the “liberty to go wrong” just spoken of.

This brings us to the mystery of the “origin of evil.” I shall not lay myself open to the charge made against divines, “That they no sooner declare a subject to be a mystery than they set to work to explain it.” I can see that if man is to be left free, evil must needs come, and that without evil in the world none of the more masculine virtues can be brought to the birth—that is to say, I see that evil, being in the world, serves to discharge a function—but I do not pretend to say how it came. I do not maintain that it came, solely, from man's misuse of his freedom.

From what we see in the world arises a fancy that every thing must have its opposite, that light presupposes darkness, and pleasure pain, and so good may presuppose evil; but this fancy is not substantial enough to build upon. Our Lord's words on the occasions when He deals with evil, are, to my judgment, most easily reconciled with one another, and with the circumstances which call them forth, by supposing Him to recognise a personal spiritual influence, presenting evil thoughts to the minds of men; the man remaining free to choose whether he will entertain these suggestions or not.

I return to my immediate subject—the function that evil performs in the existing moral world. We [pg 044] read in the Book of Genesis that the earth was to bring forth “thorns and thistles,” and that man was “to eat bread in the sweat of his brow.”[7] This is the result of a change worked, we are told, “for man's sake.” It was indeed for man's sake—though in a different sense—that this was so. He would have remained a very poor creature if the earth had produced just what he wanted, without any labour of his. This illustrates the function of evil in the ordering of the world. Man's qualities, moral and physical, are developed by it. It subserves the progress of the human race.

We should have less heroism, without cruelty and oppression from without; and could have no self-restraint, without temptation from within. Piety and love indeed, when they had once come into being, might exist without evil; we may believe that they satisfy the souls of the saints in heaven; but among men they commonly owe their birth to a feeling of shelter against evil, and to a sense of pardoned wrong.

Another office which evil performs is this. The contention with it helps to bring out the difference between man and man. If any members of the family of my parable had possessed the germs of a strong character, they could hardly have brought fruit to perfection: the conditions of their innocent life tended to uniformity. But as soon as temptations came, latent differences would forthwith [pg 045] appear; the strong would grow stronger and the bad worse. Now there is need of strong men for human progress. They form the steps in the stairway by which the race mounts. If life were smooth and easy, men would, as it were, advance in line, and the stronger men would not so surely come in front of the rest. It is in times of trouble that men are most apt to recognise worth and capacity, and make much of them. So that the trials and difficulties of human life which come of evil, have this good effect among others, they help to pick out the men who are fitted to be the leaders of human movements and of human thought.

It may have struck us as strange that Christ does not deal directly with these perplexing questions which trouble so many minds. We shall see, later on, that His not doing so is quite consistent with the uniform “tenour of His way.” But though our Lord does not lay down dogmas on these points, yet His own actions and expressions would, of course, accord with what He knew: if, then, when we hit upon some view of this “riddle of the painful earth,” which commends itself to our minds, we find that it clashes with what our Lord does or says, then we may throw it aside at once: and, on the other hand, if we arrive at a way of looking at the matter which seems to harmonise with what falls from Him; then, we may hope, not indeed that we have found a solution of the riddle, but that our hypothesis will not mislead us, so [pg 046] long as we own it to be an hypothesis, and nothing more.

We may be supposed then to have arrived at this position. We assume the existence of a mighty Divine being, in whom all goodness dwells. We suppose that this world is an arena in which a struggle is to be carried on between good and evil by the agency of free intelligent beings; that by means of this struggle the better natures will be strengthened and developed, and come more and more into action; we suppose also that God whispers counsel and comfort on the side of good. Further than this we need not now go.

As regards the presence of evil in the world, there are several sayings of our Lord which might be noted. I must confine myself to one or two of the most important.

First let us consider the following passage from St John's Gospel:[8]

“And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

Here the disciples take it for granted, that the blindness was a punishment for sin, either on the part of the man or his parents. It is our Lord's practice—and [pg 047] a practice so uniform that we may call it a Law of proceeding—not to enter into controversy about wide-spread mistaken views on merely speculative subjects: He usually gives a hint, and leaves it to work in the hearer's mind.

Our Lord's answer in this case means, not, of course, that the man and his parents had never committed sin, but that the blindness was not the result of that sin; and He passes rapidly on to state His view of one purpose answered by this infliction.

In His few words of answer our Lord lets fall one of those hints, seed thoughts, as I have called them, which lie so thickly in the Gospels.

Our Lord tells us, that the works of God were to be made manifest by this man's infirmity. A light is thrown by these words on one of the “uses of adversity.” Suffering gives room for moral goodness to come into play. The world is full of instances easy enough to note. Does not a sick child in a family educate all around it to tenderness and self-denial? What more touching lesson in patience can be given than the sight of the little sufferer, grieved at nothing so much as the trouble it causes, making the most of every alleviation, grateful beyond measure for every look or word of love. Rough brothers learn forbearance and gentleness; and to all the household it becomes natural to think of something else before, or at least beside, themselves. Wordsworth tells us of [pg 048] a half-witted boy whose helplessness and simplicity fostered a spirit of kindliness in all the poor of the village, and taught them to respect affliction.

Again in the parable of the Prodigal Son, we are taught how there is “a soul of goodness in things evil.” The wickedness of the prodigal is made a means of revealing to him and to all the bystanders the Divine beauty and efficacy of forgiving love.

We will now[9] turn to the history of the cure of the Dæmoniac in the country of the Gadarenes. I take the history in what seems to me the plain literal sense, and I must suppose that our Lord recognised some real evil existence, which had possessed itself of the man, and which, by its presence in him, had unhinged his whole mental or nervous organisation. This existence is separable from him, but it requires, it would seem, some body to inhabit and to work upon. The dæmon begs not to be suppressed or annihilated, and our Lord grants his petition and lets him go among the swine. He saves the man—what other evils this dæmon may work in the world, so that he lets men go, is no concern of His. The Son of Man is concerned only with lives and souls—not with property in any way.

The point for us to note is this: Our Lord does not annihilate evil. He does not regard it as an outlawed intruder who had eluded God's notice, [pg 049] and who, as soon as he is discovered, is to be expelled from the universe at once. His Father has suffered evil to be, and He, Christ, follows in His Father's ways: evil may still do its work, only not on men. This evil influence, we must observe, is something external to the man; it would seem to belong to an order of existences, engaged in working ill as their congenial business; whispering bad counsel, something in the way that God's Spirit whispers good, only, of course, not in such deep authoritative tones; and, in these cases of possession, it masters the whole being of the sufferer. Why this was allowed to be, is of course a mystery, but yet it is hardly a greater mystery than why evil in its other forms should be allowed to exist, and without evil in some shape, as we have seen, this earth would be a very imperfect exercise-ground for mankind.

To represent this case to our minds, let us imagine some malignant “germ” that has caused a plague amongst men, and which in time takes a slightly different form, so that it is no longer adapted to human beings, but finds its prey in cattle instead. Then the plague among men is exchanged for a murrain among cattle, which, as a matter of fact, has been known to happen: this answers to the allowing the dæmon to go to the swine. Evil is not forcibly exterminated, but it is transferred from man to the lower animals.

So our Lord is gentle even with the powers of [pg 050] evil. They had their function, or they would not have been there, and they were not to be crushed out of existence before the time.

If it be, as I have argued, that evil had a function in the world, then we can see why it could not be removed by a universal decree. But a single act of relief might be admissible in order to testify to the presence of an exceptional power; this would not engender in people the habit of helplessly throwing themselves upon God. For instance, Christ cures the son of the centurion merely by speaking the word, but if He had abolished all fevers by one decree, this would have been to disorganise the existing order in the universe. A King going on a royal progress relieves the misery that comes in his way; his own kindliness, his royal dignity, and the need of impressing on the people that their King delights in doing good, and can do it, require him so to do. But a regal donation for the relief of all distress in the kingdom would turn it into a nation of paupers. So our Lord bestows His bounty on those who fall in His way.

He who asks, Why did not Christ suppress evil? may naturally ask also, Why did not Christ sweep away all human error as to the relations of God with man? And why did He not so vouch for the authenticity of His communication that any doubt about it should be impossible? Now we believe, that God has revealed Himself to man, [pg 051] and yet has left men in some degree free as to what they will think about Him, and as fully at liberty to examine the credentials of those who have claimed to be His messengers, and to judge of their authenticity, as they would be in a purely human matter.

We find, as a matter of fact, that men who have accepted Christ's revelation are not fettered in mind by it; but are most often enterprising, energetic and bold searchers after truth. I believe that it would have been unfavourable to the preservation of this vigour of mind and to the temper which should “try all things and hold fast those which are good,” if the full and absolute revelation which some demand had been delivered to mankind, and all the problems which beset human life had thereby been settled once for all. To the questions “Why we are told what we are told?” “Why we are not told more?” and “Why doubt and ambiguities are not all cleared away?”—we cannot hope to give answers, but we may find ways of looking at them which shall help in some degree

“To justify the ways of God to man.”

It will be best to discuss this subject in a separate Chapter.

Chapter III. Of Revelation.

If I took the word Revelation in its widest sense I should not attempt to treat of it here, for it would comprise nothing less than God's education of the human race. We talk of Natural Religion and Revealed Religion, but all Religion has in it an element of revelation from God. If God had not provided man with a mind's eye suited to see Him by, and also something that shadowed Him forth which that eye could behold, we could have no religion at all. Of the processes by which belief has come about in men not the least notable is this. Men have recognised in some new tidings what they seemed to have been looking for, without being aware of it. Some new teacher has become the spokesman of thoughts which were lying in them in a state too vague for utterance. Thus “thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.”[10] Now it is God who has planted these thoughts in men, and He brings about the occasions which reveal them.

There are for man two worlds, that which is without him and that which is within. Some races from temperament or circumstances have been most taken up with the former, with the workings of nature and with active social life; while others have looked within rather than without;—their minds have found most congenial play in the contemplation of their own natures, and in brooding over the mystery of how they came to be what they were. Corresponding to these two leading diversities of the human mind, there are two modes by which men are brought to recognise a great spiritual agency in the world.

The man of Aryan race, the type of the first variety, caught sight of an infinite force underlying all the workings of nature, and so conceived Deities, with a personal will like his own, animating the physical world. For the people of the Semitic race on the other hand, the surpassing wonder was their own selves—their minds turned to contemplating their own nature. In so doing they noted this; they found something within them which caused them to be happy when they acted in one way—when they had done a kindness for example—and made them unhappy when they had behaved differently. This was so, even when no one knew of the act, and when they looked to no consequences from it. They called such actions right and wrong; but they asked, Where can this notion of right and wrong come from? This conscience [pg 054] too which witnessed of it—which strove with them just as a friend might, and seemed to be something outside them—Where did that come from? They were led by this to conceive a spiritual personal Being in the world who had left some trace of himself in men's hearts, and kept up some communion with them through this voice of conscience. Thus men of different stamps of mind were led along different roads, to the notion of something Divine in the world; and we may say that God revealed himself to man in these two ways. Now for knowledge to be sure and solid two elements must go to the making of it. One from outside the learner, and the other supplied by him. This outside element is in physical science provided by observed fact, and what answers to it in theology is authoritative revelation. Men can never feel fully assured about what is wholly spun out of their own brains, and has no external sign or testimony to lend it support.

Revelation, in the sense in which I have to do with it just now, means an authoritative communication from the Almighty, vouched by some outward sign, or manifestation. It is with this outward sign, and with the difficulties attending the ways of bringing it about, that I am now chiefly concerned.

For the present we will suppose that among the elements of human knowledge are truths revealed by God. How is this element of absolutely certain knowledge to be made to fit in with that which is [pg 055] only matter of opinion or provisionally true? Here we come on the great problem of Revelation. How can the infinite be brought into the same account with the finite? We know that if we give one term in an algebraical expression an infinite value, all the rest go for nothing; so likewise do probable judgments vanish in the face of absolute authority. But if Revelation is delivered in such a mode that its declarations admit of no question whatever, then its statements possess absolute certainty. Compared with such certainty all our judgments would be doubtful and dim, like candles in the presence of electric light. Would not this sharp contrast discourage man from using his own powers? But is it not by regarding this world as an exercise ground for these same powers that we come most near to understanding it? Is it consistent with God's ways, such as we make them out to be, that after giving us faculties which would find their amplest field in the consideration of spiritual problems he should preclude the investigation of them by solving them all Himself.

Again the truth delivered in any Divine Revelation of the problems of the Universe would come into contact with views based on supposed facts drawn from History or Geology, or with truths discovered by the human mind, and difficulties would occur all along the line of demarcation between what was infallible and what was not. For instance, if the history of one nation were [pg 056] absolutely revealed, much of that of the nations contiguous would be revealed too; more particularly the results of the wars between them: and if isolated facts belonging to science, such as those relating to the formation of our globe, were communicated on Divine Authority, then systems of Natural Philosophy, starting from these facts as axioms, might claim, upon religious grounds, acceptance for every one of their conclusions. If an independent system essayed to rear its head, it would be crushed by coming into collision with some statement that brooked no question. Such scientific investigation as would be possible could only proceed by deduction from truths authoritatively delivered. Observation and induction, which have led up to the knowledge of nature we now possess, would find no place. Man would be discouraged from using his own endeavours to understand the problems of the universe, and instead of so doing, he would only pray the Almighty to tell him all he wanted to know.

These ill effects do not follow in the case of Christ's religion for two reasons. First, because Christ does not reveal what man could find out for himself; and therefore this revelation does not come, so to say, into competition with human investigations. Secondly, because the genuineness of the revelation is not vouched for by evidence which is overwhelming and which finally settles the question; but is only supported by just enough [pg 057] external testimony to command attentive consideration and respect. The evidence that the Sign is of God is not so cogent that there is no escape from it. If it were so, it would silence all discussion about the fact of Revelation having been given, in the way in question, and would narrow the area for the exercise of religious thought.

Reason may agree to bow to Revelation as being God's declaration; but she has a right to satisfy herself that it is God's declaration, and she will call in learning and rules of criticism to help her in determining the question. Even when Reason has satisfied herself as to the credentials of this Revelation, there comes another question which gives play for human intelligence. It is asked “What does this Revelation mean?” Language is the outcome of the human mind, and all statements made in language, this Revelation among the rest, must be subject to the laws of the human understanding.

We see then, that both as to its credentials and its meaning Revelation must always be open to question; and that a man is as much bound to exercise his judgment upon these points as upon the other problems of life. This would seem a very natural state of things, yet it causes dismay to some persons when they first begin to look into these matters for themselves. They had expected, moreover, to find such a balance of evidence on their own side, that no one except from wilfulness and perversity could decide the other way. Examination [pg 058] shews that, regarding the question as one of historical evidence, and putting all prepossessions apart, the two sides are more nearly in a state of equipoise than they had been supposed to be; and it is remarkable that this kind of equipoise has been maintained, as far as we can make out by history, from the time of the Apostles till now. Arguments and testimony have, from time to time, appeared on one side, and have been answered from the other; and now and then some discovery has been made turning the balance on this side or that; but soon some new idea has been started which has put another complexion on the matter. So that positive evidence has never been so complete and decisive on either side as to prevent a man's habits or the bent of his mind from swaying his verdict.

When young men first look into these matters for themselves, having heretofore taken certain notions on trust, they are apt to be aghast at the unsettlement, and at the call on them to use their own judgments and make up their minds. Unhappily they have often been led to suppose that to hold a particular set of opinions, merely as opinions, without any effect being produced in their character thereby, gives them a claim to some degree of favour in the eyes of the Almighty: while to question these opinions, or to enquire too closely into the grounds on which they rest, is dangerous, and calculated to bring them into disfavour with Him. I cannot stop to combat this notion now. [pg 059] But whatever the reason may be, the fact is certain, that when persons begin to investigate for themselves the bases of their belief, they find that many statements which they had regarded as true beyond all question are found to stand on less sure ground than they had thought; and since they fancy that if the authority of any word of the Bible is shaken they will soon have no standing ground left, they become much disturbed.

Then it is that we hear the outcry: “Why cannot all be made clear? Or, if we cannot be told every thing, why, at any rate, is not that which we are told put so plainly, that there can only be one way of looking at it? Why were not things so written that one who runs may read? Why are we not given quite positive assurance of the truth of what is revealed? Why have we not a Sign in Heaven as the Jews demanded, or, what would suit our times better, an incontestable demonstration of the truth of Christianity?” “Why, in short,” to use the words of the objectors of the last century, “If God desired to make a Revelation to man, did He not write it in the skies?”

To none of these “Whys” can we supply its proper “Because.” We cannot give the reasons of a man's conduct unless we can enter into his mind; and as we cannot enter into God's mind, we cannot give His reasons for having made the ways of the universe such as we find them. But though we cannot give the enquirer what he [pg 060] asks, we can do something to help him all the same.

We may be able to shew him that it is better for him only “to know in part;” and we may also be able to explain to him that a certain fringe of shadow must needs encompass those portions of truth which are revealed; for if they had clear-cut edges and hard outlines, when we had to fit them together, like pieces in a dissected map of knowledge, we should meet with all those difficulties about a line of demarcation between truth absolute and beliefs of opinion of which I spoke just now. The service of all Revelation is to supply our craving after infinity; and if our demand to have this infinity presented to us in a finite form—for that is really what we are clamouring for—could be approximately gratified, then we should find that, though a certain portion of the infinite field lying outside human knowledge had been enclosed and added on to our intellectual possessions, still we were as far as ever from having what we wanted: this new possession would have become finite, and what we wanted was the infinite. We should have got a new science in exchange for our old religion, but the craving after infinitude would still remain. The very definiteness introduced into these matters we should find destructive of their fascination for us.

To take one point at a time, I will begin with a side of the question which fits on to the subject of the last chapter. These cries after certitude [pg 061] are, in fact, petitions to be relieved of free will and responsibility in deciding religious matters for ourselves. What the complaints come to is this: Why am not I and every one else compelled to believe certain truths about God's dealings with man whether we like to do so or not?

The point of the matter lies in these last words. If we had no part of our own to perform in accepting this belief, if it were no more a matter of our own choice and feeling whether or not we admitted the revealed truths, than whether we admitted some indisputable fact in history or some proposition in science; then this belief would not be religion for us at all, it would be a branch of science and nothing more. It would have no more moral significance than a proposition in Euclid. To admit that a certain system may be built up from premises that are undoubted, is merely a matter of intellect. One man may have a head to follow the steps and another not, but conscience has no part in the matter.

It was distinctive of the Son of Man that His Gospel was to be preached to the poor; and a system which addressed only minds capable of clear reasoning, could not be suited to all mankind; in fact, it would necessarily set up a Hierarchy of intellectual culture. So our Lord did not speak to the understandings but to the hearts of His hearers. He dealt with His disciples on the supposition, that there was in them a germ [pg 062] which would respond to the quickening influences of His teaching, and grow into a capacity for eternal life. Just as the dormant seed germinates when warmth and moisture reach it, so would what was dormant in their hearts burst into life and growth, when the required vivifying influence was brought to bear. Our spiritual life is made to depend not only on what is delivered to us, but on our recognising the truth we want, and seizing on it as what we are craving after: so that we say, “I have always felt that there was something I was in want of; now I know what it is, and I have it here.”

The Jews, who would not believe, wanted to be shewn a Sign from Heaven. They said, “Give us a proof which is beyond contradiction, and we will believe,” which comes to saying: If we cannot help believing, believe we will. But they did not mean the same thing by the word “believe” as our Lord did. Our Lord did not call on His disciples to accept notions about Him, but to believe in Him, to trust Him as a child does his parent, or a soldier his commander. What the Jews meant was, that they would give credence to a particular kind of evidence, as to the fact of His being their Messiah.

The demand for additional proof is dealt with by our Lord in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. The drift of a parable is usually pointed out in the concluding words; and the verse “If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe [pg 063] though one rose from the dead,”[11] spoken of the rich man's brethren, is, I believe, the key to one intent of this parable.[12] The state of mind here pointed at is a common one enough. It is that of the man who is rather uneasy at his own want of belief; but thinks the blame should be laid, not on any defect in himself, but on the want of proper proofs and external light. He thinks that his difficulty comes from the scanty evidence offered him; he has no idea that what he really wants is a better moral eyesight to see it by. So he begs for a little bit more of proof. If he could only be satisfied, he says, on this point and that, he would believe. But what would his belief be worth? Our Lord's answer goes to this:—No amount of external testimony can supply what you want, because the defect is within you. If a man did come to you from the dead, you might be terrified into acquiescence in everything he told you—you would probably be stupefied into the most abject submission—but instead of being elevated into trust in God, you would, very likely, be so cowed and paralysed, as to be incapable of any feeling of a noble or spiritual kind.

In the present day people do not ask for Signs from Heaven, or that men should rise from the dead—but the same spirit shews itself in the same [pg 064] way. The corresponding demand is, “Give us an undeniable philosophical proof of the truth of Christianity.” “Shew us this,” say men, “and we will believe.” Accept the demonstration of course they must, if it be irrefragable; just as they must accept the truth that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; but such acceptance is a mental act of a wholly different order from adopting a religious belief—from feeling for instance that “Christ is with us to the end of the world.” Much confusion has arisen from this difference not being properly marked.

From what I said at first, as to the nature of a revelation it appears that there are two elements in it, one within us and one without us. We must have “ears to hear” when God speaks—a faculty that discerns His voice—and also we must have some outward sign cognisable by human senses, or by such judgments based on experience as we form about historical evidence. I have just shewn that the first requisite is essential for any religious belief, and that it is a quality different from the logical understanding. But when we come to the attestation of the Sign which vouches the revelation, then the understanding assumes its ordinary jurisdiction. We are to judge by the common rules of evidence as to the authenticity of this Sign and the genuineness of our information. Reason and instructed judgment are to be used in these matters as in all others, and external evidence is allowed [pg 065] its weight by our Lord. When the Baptist sends his disciples to enquire, our Lord works cures before them, and bids them report what they saw.

A man wants some testimony to which he may turn, which is independent of himself. There are times when the surest believers mistrust themselves and their intuitions and ask, “How am I to know that this persuasion of mine is not a creature of my own brain, due to my temperament and mental conformation.” “How can I call on other men to accept it?” Men are not left, unaided, to the distress of this kind of doubt. The Apostles were allowed to witness the Transfiguration and the presence of Jesus risen from the dead that doubt might not overcome them in moments of physical weakness or distress of mind. They could always turn to these recollections and say “We know the glory of God; for we have seen it.”

We are not to expect that the Sign which attests a Revelation shall be guaranteed by a standing miracle; because such a standing miracle would be out of harmony with all God's ways as revealed in the Universe. For a standing miracle means that God is always, in one particular direction, visibly displaying the power elsewhere concealed. If such a miracle existed there would be one set of facts in the world not of a piece with the rest. If instead of working the world as He does by self-acting machinery, God were to reserve one department for His personal management, He might as [pg 066] well interpose in all, and direct all the movements in the world; in which case, as I said in the last chapter, the world would cease to have any independent existence, and would become merely a portion of the Divine existence.

So when it is demanded “That a revelation should be written in the skies” we may ask, How would you have God's autograph attested? The Jews, it will be said, had the visible Shechinah, the light between the Cherubim; but if this light existed now, there would be no proof of its being Divine: it would only be another phenomenon, and science would take cognisance of it. If we had an oracle declaring future events, all human enterprise would perish—for enterprise rests on hope and fear. The Delphic oracles would have paralysed action, if they had been unerring, unambiguous, and easy of access. A series of prophecies, it may be thought, fulfilled from time to time, would serve to authenticate revelation: and this aid is, indeed, admissible in attestation of the Sign we speak of; but it must be subject to the same condition which must attach to all external testimony: it must not be too clear or too strong. Men must always be able to reject it, if they like: either by ascribing the coincidences to chance, by declaring that the prophecy brought about its own fulfilment, or by some similar argument. If we had a series of prophecies all of which, up to the present time, had been fulfilled with due regularity, so that no one [pg 067] could doubt but that the rest would punctually come to pass, human action would be very much paralysed.

The miracles of our Lord's life serve us for our “Signs;” and our assurance that they occurred is to be based both on the external evidence, which in this case is the testimony to the authenticity of the record, and on the internal probability, which comes out of the conformity of the miracles with the Laws of Christ's action and the declared purpose of His coming. The miracles could always be referred to Beelzebub in old days, and they can always be disbelieved or explained away now.

Since the external evidence is not conclusive on this side or on that, the judgment formed must depend partly on the degree in which the Scriptures establish their own authority; and this degree depends on the mind and heart which the investigator brings to his work. One critic will see nothing but difficulties. Another will say, Our histories are photographs, imperfect no doubt, but what they show must have been there when they were taken: we see the main figures under different aspects, but we know them for the same. Some will feel as much convinced, from the character of thought and expression, that certain sayings came from our Lord, as a connoisseur in art might be that a certain picture came from the easel of a great master whose works had been the study of his life: he knows the touch.

Christ's great Revelation was not given in a book, not in a history or a treatise, but in a Life and Death. He shewed the world a Man who knew not Self, and He also shewed it the Force that came from God. Men will realize this Revelation in different ways in different ages; part may come to light at one time, part at another. Sayings which have long lain hardly noticed are one day found to be keys to unlock a treasure, and give insight beyond what we dreamt of. But besides this Revelation, personal to individuals, broad Truths are conveyed which we should not otherwise possess.

Some of the leading Truths are these. That Jesus came from the Father. That the Father loved men who believed in Him, and owned them as sons, and sent into their hearts[13] a filial spirit which should enable them to lay hold more firmly of this Revelation. Christ tells them that He came to manifest God to the world,[14] and that, whether they chose to believe it or not, the kingdom of God was drawn nigh to them.[15] He tells them that to know God is eternal life,[16] and that they who are counted worthy will attain a resurrection to such a life.[17] Above all he tells them—and this is the very charter of the Christian Church, without which her Doctrines would be only a set of notions, destitute [pg 069] of real vital power—“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”[18]

There is no clashing with human knowledge here, nothing that can tie the hands of the enquirer. The advance in spiritual knowledge is not brought about, simply by the communication of a new truth from without, which had never been dreamt of before: men feel rather as if they were reminded of something they must once have known. There appears, if I may so say, a tenderness of God in dealing with man, a carefulness so to reveal himself as not to obliterate a man's own personality, but to leave him to feel that any resolution he has reached is his own, arrived at, no doubt, by listening to God's prompting; without such prompting superseding the action of his proper self. No two men represent God to themselves quite in the same way: He was not the same for Peter that He was for John.

I believe that a revelation of God is needed for the education of what is highest in man, and for bringing him to the highest point he can reach; and that God has been always revealing Himself in one way or another. But the revelation of every age must be suited to the character of that age. Man must be educated up to it, or he cannot receive it. Our Lord tells his disciples “I have yet many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now.”[19] Later generations are taught in this same way. The events related in the Acts, and the labours [pg 070] which came upon the Apostles fitted them by degrees for fresh revelations. If our Lord had declared to St Peter when he first joined him in Galilee that the Gentiles should have as full a share in Him and in the Kingdom as he would have; might not he too have turned away? Or if, as is likely, he had been personally drawn to Christ too powerfully to quit Him, yet such a sudden shock to all his notions might have closed his mind spasmodically against new ideas? For when a man recoils from a view which unsettles him and turns him giddy, he clutches at his supports with iron grip. Many have been made bigots in this way. Our Lord is careful to avoid for the disciples all turmoil of mind; the new seed must be left undisturbed that it may take firm root; so that for our Lord to have disordered all St Peter's convictions by a premature disclosure, would have been contrary to His ways of acting.

An age must be ripe for the truth, and the truth must be ripe for the age for the last to profit by the first. If the theory of gravitation had appeared ten centuries ago, it would have passed unregarded away, for then, nobody thought the outer world worth scrutiny. On the other hand the neo-Platonic philosophy which once moved masses of men has now become so many words. How then is Christ's revelation to last for all time? It is enabled to do so, because there is life in it and growth along with life; because Christ does [pg 071] not deliver propositions about God which men are passively to receive once for all, but his sayings fall upon the human heart, and are quickened there, some in one generation and some in another: each generation seizes on its proper nutriment, and brings out of His sayings the special lesson it requires.

St Paul, to recur to the quotation which is, in fact, the burden of this chapter, speaking of the effect produced by the preaching of the word on the hearers says—

“The secrets of his heart are made manifest.”[20]

Christ's words reveal for a man the secrets of his own heart to himself. They interpret to him his own confused and dreamy thoughts. This was what drew men so mightily to Him. It was not so much the novelty of what He told them that attracted them, as that they recognised in His teaching old familiar puzzles, which had come and gone through their minds, times without number, only in such shadowy guise that they could not fix and scrutinize them. Christ spake and then men said “This is what has been always troubling us.” Here is what we have always been wanting to say, and could not put into plain words—and now these floating impressions of ours are found not to have come by chance but to belong to truths set in our [pg 072] being. God has “sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying Abba, Father.”[21] But He would not have done so if we had not had the capacity for being sons, to begin with.

We shall see too, when we think of it, that a revelation to men can only come by man, or in a voice or words like those of a man. Man's understanding is fashioned in a certain way; his language is the creature of his understanding; ideas could not be conveyed to him unless they were clothed in language which he could understand; Revelation therefore must express itself in terms of human notions because they alone can be made intelligible in human speech. If God speaks, He must speak after the fashion of men, or His words will be an unknown tongue.

To take an illustration: If a man, owing to something abnormal in his vision, became aware of a new colour, something which had nothing to do with red or yellow or blue; he could not communicate his new sensation because he could find no pigment which would in any degree represent it, and he could not describe it in words, by likeness to anything in the world. So God can only reveal to man about spiritual existence what man can conceive, that is to say only that to which he finds something analogous in his own being; for all must be put into that form with which man's understanding can deal; and the [pg 073] only spiritual creature he can conceive is man; the only ideas he can conceive are human ideas; his mind must work on the lines along which men's minds move; the only creature with whom he can sympathise, and whom he can believe to sympathise with him is man, and so—since there can be no real teaching without mutual understanding—by man he must be taught. Christ's revelation meets this need. It was as the Son of Man that Christ declared Himself, and in this character He conveyed to men the germs of all the spiritual enlightenment they can receive. Does not this throw light on the words, “No one knoweth who the Father is save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him,”[22] and again, “No man cometh to the Father but by me?”[23]

Chapter IV. Our Lord's Use Of Signs.

It has been already observed that there is one feature of our Lord's way of revealing truths to men which distinguishes Him from all teachers before or since. This is the use of Signs.

Miracles may have been attributed to those who have promulgated creeds at various times, but these miracles did not form a constituent part of the teaching; they were not blended with it as those of our Lord were. They are introduced only to serve for credentials, so that an appeal to them may silence incredulity; they convey no lesson, they only serve for proof. I hope to shew that it was otherwise with the signs wrought by Christ.

My especial concern in this chapter is not with the nature or the credibility of miracles in general, but only with the purposes for which Christ introduced them; and with the questions of how far they were performed with a view to draw men to listen and to set forth God's kingdom, and how far for the purpose of working conviction. In the first [pg 075] chapter I have stated certain Laws, which our Lord observed in working Signs. These I shall presently discuss; but what I am concerned with now is the general question “Why did our Lord work Signs?”

I use the word “Signs” instead of miracles because it is our Lord's own word. The latter expression fastens attention on the wonderment which these deeds raised in men. But our Lord uses the word “Sign,” which implies that these acts were tokens of some underlying power which, in these instances, passed into operation in an exceptional way. To our Lord, they of course were not wonders, and He never dwells on their wondrousness.

In the accounts of St Matthew, St Mark and St Luke, the word “Signs” is that most commonly employed by our Lord when speaking of His own working of miracles; while in the Gospel of St John, the term “works” is generally found in the like case, though “powers” sometimes takes its place. The expression “Signs and wonders” means, not two separate sorts of works, but signs that make men wonder: it means prodigies, worked to shew a divine commission, taken on the side of the awe they inspire. Our Lord only uses this expression twice—once when He says that false prophets shall come and “shew great signs and wonders,”[24] and again in His answers to the nobleman [pg 076] whose son was sick at Capernaum, “Unless ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe.”[25] On these occasions the term refers to the popular conception of the form which Divine interposition would take. The expression “signs and wonders” occurs very frequently in the Acts of the Apostles.

When, as here, we are in search of the purposes which our Lord had in view, in something that He did, it is of service to ask, “What purpose or purposes did it actually fulfil?” What He did would not be likely to fail in producing the effect intended, or to bring about a result not contemplated by Him. So we must try to unravel the complex effects of these signs, and to discriminate the several ways in which they worked.

Some were witnessed both by the people and by the disciples, and some by the disciples and apostles only. The function of the miracles may have been different in the different cases. But, besides their effect on the actual witnesses, the record of these mighty doings has had a prodigious effect on generation after generation, from the time when our Lord walked in Galilee to the present day; and we may suppose that this posthumous effect was included in the Divine design.

The character of our Lord's miracles we shall find to be determined by the nature of the work He came to do. The work and miracles were adapted each to the other, and, owing to this, the study of [pg 077] the miracles throws a light on His purpose, and the more insight we get into His purpose the more reason we see for the miracles being of the kind they were.

We will consider, under different heads, the various functions which Our Lord's miracles fulfilled. That which comes naturally first in order is

(1) The attraction of hearers.

One effect of signs on the beholders lay on the surface. They awoke attention; they caused men's eyes to be turned to the Son of Man. Jesus won a mastery over men's souls both by what He did and what He said; but the doing had to come first, because without this He would not so soon have gained a hearing. From a district of small towns and scattered hamlets a crowd was not drawn together without some cogent influence. It was the rumour of the things “done in Capernaum”[26] and of other mighty works that caused the crowd to gather, and attracted the multitudes who listened, both in the synagogue and on the Mount.

The works of healing would be attractive enough to draw within the reach of our Lord's influence all who were likely to profit, as well as some who were not: while His words and the influence of His presence would attach to Him as true disciples those, and those only, who had “ears to hear:” in this way the crowd would be sifted.

One of the characteristics of our Lord, which puzzled His followers, and which also strikes us, was His seeming indifference about the number, or the worldly position of His adherents. He does not aim at gaining converts; when His popularity seems at its height He withdraws from the people. A warrior Messiah, or a prophet seeking to convince the world, would have displayed signs suited to attract the blind devotion of the multitude: he would have wanted to prove his pretensions by the striking character of his signs and wonders. Such was the Messiah whom the Jews were led to expect; in general they imagined no other, and for no other did they care: so we find that it surprised the disciples and the brethren of Jesus, that He should content himself with healing poor sick people in hamlets of Galilee, instead of confounding Herod in Tiberias, or the scribes in Jerusalem.

And if we regard our Lord as a leader looking to an immediate purpose and depending for success on His influence with those of His own day, his conduct is indeed inexplicable; but the whole tenour of it falls in well with the view which regards Him as setting afoot a movement which was to go on working to the end of the world. Hurry belongs to the mortal who wants to see the outcome of his work, while eternity is lavish of time.[27]

We shall see later on that it is foreign to our Lord's ways to inflame the feelings and blind the eyes of men by kindling speech.

The overmastering influence of a great leader will “take the prisoned soul” of the people and make it follow his will. But Christ's first care is to leave each man master of his own will—the man who is no longer so, ceases to count as a unit. Just as this is seen in our Lord's teaching, so is it also in the miracles which set that teaching forth—they are not worked in the ways or the place that a Thaumaturge would have chosen—people are not invited to a spectacle—nor are the wonders so overwhelming as to cause a whole population to fall prostrate at our Lord's feet. The rumour of them is sufficient to make those who “have ears to hear” enquire further and “come and see;” and a further function of “Signs” is then called into play.

This function is that they should serve to select from the multitude those fitted to follow our Lord.

(2) Selection.

I have said in a previous chapter that education and selection are inseparable. Any process that unfolds the powers which lie within men, emphasizes, so to say, the differences between them.

The witnessing of wonders, declared to be wrought by the finger of God, must have stirred [pg 080] men's minds, and so brought about in them a species of education, well calculated to winnow out the chaff from the grain.

But the quality, which this kind of education seizes upon and develops, is not intellectual ability, but the capacity for “savouring the things of God.” The miracles served as a touchstone for detecting this. Many would look, and wonder, and go their way—they had seen a strange sight, that they would allow, but it did not touch their souls: while to a few others it would seem as if they had lighted on what they had been watching for all their lives. They had always seen dimly that there must be in the world a living power; not a dead God in the keeping of the scribes, but a living God who should speak in their hearts and to their hearts, and they had found Him now. The minds of those who were worth rousing were put on the alert, and the sense of God's kingdom being near them, the sense that this every day world was His and worked by Him, was expanded within them.

(3) Preparation.

We have a distinct instance of the use of “Signs” to produce preparation. The seventy were sent working these Signs, “in every city unto which He Himself would come.” This preparation would consist, partly, in the drawing out from the mass those who were likely to profit. When our Lord Himself came, these latter would be eager to hear [pg 081] Him, and the great announcements He made would not strike them as altogether strange. The district over which these messengers were sent probably lay outside the country where our Lord's ministry had been chiefly carried on, and was only visited by Him on this one occasion. This made it the more important that the right men, rightly prepared, should form His audience. His truths were not to fail of taking root, from want of the soil having been loosened beforehand. We shall see, over and over again, how careful our Lord is to prevent the opportunities He gives being lost. He never neglects or underrates the need of properly preparing men for receiving new truths: He employs the ordinary means for effecting this, and He would have the Children of Light be as wise in their generation, and as judicious in the use of such means, as the children of this world.

Again, the display of the miracles roused some, the Scribes and Pharisees in particular, into active hostility—they watched the Signs to find ground for charges of blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking. Priesthoods, occupied with the externals of their function are aghast at the assertion of a living and working God. The worldly are terrified also and with the terror that awakens fury. These classes answer to those servants in the parable who said, “We will not have this man to reign over us.” Whenever a vital religion has been proclaimed it has found opponents of both characters.

History witnesses to this, from the stoning of the prophets to the assaults on religionists in modern times. The miracles divided men into three great sections: there were those who were for Christ, and those who were against Him, and between these came a body who were not wholly indifferent or unaffected, but who quieted themselves with saying that such weighty matters were no business of theirs.

This breaking up of men into friends and foes was a kind of preparation for the Apostles' work. When men begin to take sides their minds cannot lie torpid: evil passion and selfishness mix with their doings, no doubt; but in the storm and stress men get to the bottom of their own hearts and find out their true selves; and men's truest selves were wanted by Christ.

So far we have spoken of miracles as means of rousing attention and drawing out from the mass those who had ears to hear. We will now consider them as practical illustrations accompanying the preaching, and

(4) Setting forth the Kingdom of God.

They shew not only how close this Kingdom is to us but they also convey visible lessons, to help men to conceive it aright.

We learn from our Lord's own lips that one purpose for which He wrought Signs was to make men sure that the Kingdom of Heaven was come [pg 083] upon them. When He was charged with casting out devils through Beelzebub, He says, after disposing of the accusation,

“But if I by the finger of God cast out devils, then is the kingdom of God come upon you.”[28]

Whether Our Lord preached in the villages Himself, or the Apostles or the Seventy, going two by two, did so in His name the burden of their preaching was always the same. They call on men to change to a better mind, and declare that the Kingdom of God is come nigh. The seventy are bid to say to those who rejected them, “Howbeit know this that the Kingdom of God is come nigh.”[29] Whether men chose to own it or not, God's Kingdom was near them even at their doors. St Mark, at the outset of his history of our Lord's Ministry, tells us[30]

“Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God,

“And saying, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.”

Christ declared that God was working underneath the ordinary agencies, which seemed to men to be working of themselves. God had been so working all along from the very beginning, but now Christ had come to reveal God—that is to say [pg 084] to make men sensible of the Divine presence and Divine agency in all that went on both within them and without. This revelation He would effect in the ways best adapted to make men understand it. And as the unlearned are most readily taught by what is set before their eyes; and as the teacher is much helped by having something to shew; so Christ declares the Kingdom and its nature, not only in parables and discourses, but by practical instances and illustrations as well; namely by the Signs He wrought. It was as though He had said, “I have told you that God's power was lying close about you: Behold it operating here.” The combination of the word and the Sign, as the two essential elements of the teaching, is expressly put before us in one passage: we read,

“And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.”[31]

(5) Teaching wrought by signs.

The Signs shew us, not only that the Kingdom is God's, but something also of the nature of that Kingdom as well.

Our Lord speaks of the power displayed in miracles as God's power working through Him. It is “by the finger of God” that He casts out devils and the man who is healed is bidden to tell his friends what God has done for him.[32]

Christ nowhere claims the power as His own. It rests in God's hands; but it is granted to His prayer, because His will and God's are one.

Moreover the Signs set forth God's love and goodness to men, and thereby they tell us something of His nature. All the Signs worked by our Lord before the people at large, and all the works which the Twelve and the Seventy performed in their mission among the cities of Israel, were works of healing; with the exception of the two instances of the feeding of the multitudes, which also were works of Divine beneficence. There are other miracles of a different character, as we shall see presently, but those were witnessed either by the disciples only, or by a circle of private friends as at Cana of Galilee.

The men of Galilee had hitherto known the Lord as the God of Israel, who was especially concerned with the fortunes of their race and nation as a whole; but now they were told that He was the Father of every person in that nation, and was sent especially to the lost sheep among them. It was this declaration—that of the individual relation of each man to God, and of the preciousness of the very hairs of his head in God's eyes—that constituted, in great part, the comforting nature of the “good tidings of God.” The miracles wrought in connection with the preaching could not bring this point very prominently forward: but so far as the miracles bear on the point they are in accord with the teaching. [pg 086] They were worked, not upon masses of men at once, but on individuals, and our Lord addresses Himself personally to each particular sufferer, as though his case was considered by itself. I shall soon, for another purpose, notice two miracles recorded by St Mark which afford good instances of our Lord's sympathetic insight into individual cases. He does not, on entering a village, ordain that all the lepers in it shall be cleansed, or all the palsied restored to the use of their limbs. He condescends to take each case by itself.

There is hardly a case of healing narrated in St Mark, who, of all our authorities, gives the most detailed account, which does not shew traces of special attention on the part of our Lord to the spiritual and physical features of the particular case. We will take for an instance the cure of the sick of the palsy. The connection of what is spiritual with that which is physical is here very strongly marked. Our Lord begins by saying to the man “thy sins be forgiven thee.” It is possible that the man's condition may have been due to imprudence or something worse; the thought of this may have rankled in his mind and the mental trouble may have aggravated the physical infirmity: the great physician cures both together. His restoration seems to come with the sense of pardon, but he does not shew himself aware of his recovery, until our Lord bids him arise.

The shewing that the Divine power worked [pg 087] blessings on men one by one, contained in itself a lesson as to God's infinity; for a finite being would have been incapable of concerning himself for every unit of the world's population. Any supply of energy, short of an infinite one, would have been exhausted. Hence the notion of God's personal care for each soul is bound up with the conception of His infinity.

Christ does not begin with the abstract and say: “God is infinite and therefore He can find room in His heart to love men, every one;” but He begins with the concrete and says, “God does love you and every one else:” and He leaves it to men to arrive at the truth at the other end of the proposition: viz. that if God's strength is not lessened by drawing upon it, this can only be because there is no limit to it. From this infinity of God it also follows that the distinction between what we call great occasions and small ones—between occasions that we think would justify Divine interposition and those which would not—may not exist in God's eyes. In the presence of His infinity, the difference between great and small things may disappear; certainly His measure will be a very different one from ours.

This brings us to another point in the use of miracles to illustrate the ways of God's Kingdom: they exemplify the truth that God is no respecter of persons. Neither the persons on whom they are wrought, or before whom they are wrought, obtain [pg 088] this privilege by any merit or superiority. Men are not healed because they deserve it. As God sends rain on the just and unjust, so Christ cures the sick who come in His way, rich and poor alike—the son of the nobleman, and the blind beggar; for our Lord, worldly distinctions do not seem to exist. A man, as man, was of such transcendent value in the eyes of the Son of Man that, compared to this, little outer differences were but as the hills and dales of the earth, which scarcely roughen the surface of the globe when seen as a whole. Men, too, are not, except for very special purposes, picked out by Christ to witness the miracles; any more than they are in God's world to receive special mercies, or the lessons, or the afflictions of life. Those who were passing by saw the Signs, some profited and some did not: Herod and other great men would gladly have witnessed a miracle, but it was not granted them.

The Signs wrought by Christ harmonise with His teaching in another way: they never have the air of ostentatiously overriding and superseding Nature. His power, in its tranquil might, proceeded calmly along the homely track of every-day life; just as if it had always been present ruling quietly in its own domain, and might at any time have interposed without effort, if the Spiritual Order had needed it. A man is healed and an evil spirit is quelled by a word, and a multitude in the desert is supplied with food they do not know [pg 089] how,—all proceeds in a calm continuous way. Fresh energy is given to natural powers, and effects are produced of vast magnitude and with astonishing rapidity; but these powers seem to work through the organs and along the channels which nature provides: to our Lord there is one primary source of all life and movement and light and force, and that is God, from Whom all His power comes. He does not call certain visible manifestations nature, and refer others to God, as though nature and God were different powers. The Signs, accordingly, are worked in such a way that it is hard to mark the particular point where what is called the supernatural comes into play—to say, in fact, when nature ends and God begins. The cures, so far as we can trace them, are effected by the renewal of vitality in a disordered organ; this vitality would seem to proceed from Christ; just as the power which set life going on earth proceeded from God.

“For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.”[33]

Here, of course, we pass beyond the realm of the forces we can measure, but this imparted force only restores the organs needed for the cure; the optic nerve is reinvigorated or the absorbent vessels are stimulated to abnormal action, and the eye becomes again efficient. The man is not enabled to see without an eye, as was claimed to be done by [pg 090] some workers of miracles in the middle ages; and there is no miracle in the Gospels like that mentioned in Paley's Evidences, where a man who had only one leg becomes possessed of two. Christ restores organs and withered limbs. He does not dispense with the proper organ or create new ones.

St Mark gives us full particulars of two cures, of which we can in some degree trace the process.

“And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.”[34]

From this it appears that the eye was gradually restored, and our Lord's question shews that He did not expect an instantaneous cure. He speaks as a surgeon might who had performed an operation. He does not take it for granted that the man must have received his sight. He applies His hands, a second time and then the ill-defined dark objects which the man spoke of, become distinct.

The other case is that of one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech.

“And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and [pg 091] saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”[35]

The restoration of the disabled organs is clearly indicated here. I have referred to these two cases a few pages back. We now come to—

(6) Miracles as a practical lesson to the disciples.

So far, we have spoken of miracles as performed for the sake of the multitude; in order to draw them to listen and to sift from among them those fit to become disciples: I have remarked too how the “Signs” incidentally conveyed instruction, how they exhibited to the crowd the goodness and the power of God. But there were some miracles, as I have said in the first chapter, which were especially miracles of instruction, and I would say a word or two about those, before I pass on to miracles as means of assurance. These miracles of instruction were, in almost all cases, performed when but few of the disciples were by; and they are mostly wrought in the later period of our Lord's Ministry.

Among the miracles of this class are, The miraculous draughts of fishes, The walking on the sea, The stater in the fish's mouth, The withering of the fig tree, and the Transfiguration. The last named, is not usually classed among miracles [pg 092] or considered in books which treat of them, but a “Sign” it certainly was and it carries lessons with it which, bit by bit, the world is learning still.

That miracles should be employed as a means of impressing truths on the learner, we can well understand.

In no way could a great truth be presented so forcibly to the mind as by being clothed in the garb of a miracle. The wondrous circumstances would print themselves on the mind's eye at once and for ever; and as they recurred in lonely hours of thought, something more of their drift and purport would peep out every time. It is characteristic of our Lord's ways, that His teaching yields its fruit gradually; much as a seed-vessel driven by the wind, which scatters the contents, now of one cell, now of another, as it whirls along.

I trace in many miracles of instruction, a bearing on the great movement in which St Peter was the chief actor; namely, the calling of the Gentiles, and the taking from the Jews thereby their exclusive position, as the one people who knew God. Our Lord quietly, and by slow degrees familiarizes St Peter with this idea. He is not suddenly brought face to face with a notion which would cause a violent shock to his mind. With men like the Apostles new ideas want a little time to grow into shape: we know how easily a man is startled into shutting his mind against novelty when it is suddenly presented. St Peter [pg 093] could not have been instructed as to God's plans without a long course of explanation which it was not our Lord's way to give: so He lets the lesson lie in St Peter's mind till the circumstances shall come which shall be the key to it.

Of what I call miracles of instruction, I propose to consider two briefly, with a view chiefly to illustrating the way in which the instruction was conveyed.

There is this singularity about the Transfiguration, that our Lord foretells it, and in most remarkable words.

“And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.”[36]

This promise I understand to mean that some of the Apostles should, even while yet alive on the earth, be vouchsafed a glimpse of another world, and behold Christ in the glorified state which belongs to Him. The expression “in no wise taste of death,” which occurs in all three accounts, must mean that they should not only have this experience after passing from this life to another, but even while yet in mortal frame. For six days these words are allowed to work in the minds of the disciples, and then:

“Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them.”[37]

During the six days and on the way up the mountain after they were taken from the rest, Peter, James, and John must have wondered what the “coming of the kingdom of God with power” would be. This prevented their being so stupefied with astonishment as to miss the lesson of the appearance. Here again we note our Lord's mode of preparation for the receiving of truths.

I do not discuss the nature of the vision, because I have now only to deal with the matter as to its educational effect. When the Apostles saw the glorified Lord with Moses and Elijah—their impression was not fear but joy.—“It is good for us to be here” says St Peter. He thought they had arrived in another world, and he proposes to build tents, as if he had landed in a strange island. He expects to be always there.

But what, in the view I am taking is the cardinal point of all, is the voice out of the cloud—“This is my beloved Son, Hear ye Him.”[38] In these last words the old covenant is replaced by the new. Moses representing the Law, and Elijah the Prophets—they [pg 095] who had been hitherto the spiritual teachers of men,—stood there to hand over their office to the Son. Their work in nursing the minds of a people set apart as the depositary of the knowledge of God was now at an end; now Humanity had succeeded to its heritage, and its teacher was to be the Son of Man. A religion which is shaped by the history and the mind of a particular people will be cast in a particular mould: its outward form must be rendered plastic if it is to become Universal. So Moses and Elijah the teachers of Israel lay down their functions in the presence of the chosen three, who hear their Master owned as God's own Son, to whom the world is henceforth to listen.

And when, many years later, the truth broke upon St Peter so that he said:

“Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to him,”[39]

then a new light might illumine these recollections, which had been laid by in his mind, and they would draw a fuller meaning from the new idea by which he was impelled; and he would see how God's purposes, long entertained, work to the surface by degrees.

There is one miracle in which I can see no other intent, than that of the instruction of the [pg 096] disciples and, as it may not come before us again, I will say a few words on it now. The withering of the fig tree was, as I have said in the Introduction, an acted parable: the most circumstantial account is that given by St Mark.

“And on the morrow, when they were come from Bethany, he was hungry: and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it.”[40]

Of the next day it is related:

“And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away. And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.”[41]

When our Lord remarked from a distance one fig tree—probably one out of several, for Bethphage was named from its figs—which alone was in full leaf, He was drawn to it; whether this was because He saw occasion for impressing a lesson which He had at heart to give, or because He really expected to find refreshment, we cannot decide. The last motive is not excluded, for though the time of figs was not yet, still we are told that in Judæa the fruit of the fig is ripe by the time the leaves have reached [pg 097] their full size; and this display of foliage therefore gave prospect of fruit. We must not argue that our Lord would, of his superhuman illumination, have known that the tree was barren, for our Lord never uses this source of knowledge to find out what may be learned by ordinary means.

But whether our Lord approached the fig tree with the lesson in His mind or not, the aptness of the circumstance struck Him and the lesson it furnished was given on the spot. It was unusual for a tree to have leaves at that early season: by putting them forth, however, it held out hopes of fruit which it disappointed. This presented in a parable the situation of “the Jews' religion.”[42] They made a show, and contrasted themselves with other nations, they dwelt on the fact that they alone worshipped the true God, and knew and observed His laws—they invited admiration on this ground—but of all this nothing came. So the fig tree seemed to say: “See I am green when other trees are leafless, you may look to me for fruit.” It is said that this precocious putting forth of leaves shews that the tree is diseased and should be cut down, in like manner it was time that the Jewish Hierarchy should lose its office. It is to this Hierarchy that the words “No man eat fruit of thee henceforth and for ever” are really spoken. Mankind was no longer to draw its teaching from the scribes and priesthood of the Jews.

Individual Israelites might of course enlighten the world, as indeed they have done in a most remarkable degree; but the Jewish nation as a body was no longer to be the one recognised channel of God's communication with mankind. The leading people among them had wrapped themselves up in self-complacency and self-sufficiency; they had moreover enslaved themselves to the letter of their canonical books and to rabbinical traditions: they were therefore neither ready nor able to expand when expansion was needed. In other words, they were no longer fitted for a living world; which must, of its very nature, grow and change and discard all that will not change along with it; and so like the pretentious tree they were to wither away, and no man henceforth was to eat fruit of them for ever.

It would have been long before an Israelite could have brought himself to see this meaning in the words of our Lord; but St Peter must have thought over this last miracle, all the more from the apparent harshness of our Lord shewn in it—from its being the solitary instance of a final condemnation from His lips—and he must have asked himself; What did it mean?

There are many other miracles in which the instruction of the Apostles and notably of St Peter seems to be the leading aim. The walking on the water might have taught him how closely failure treads on the heels of impulse: the prophecy, [pg 099] “Before the cock crow thou shalt deny me thrice,” again conveyed this same lesson together with much beside: and the words “Then are the children free,” which point the moral of the finding of the stater in the fish's mouth, must have recurred to St Peter when the Church at Jerusalem was debating as to how far she could free her Gentile members from the burdens of the Law. Of this I shall speak again. I have adduced sufficient instances to shew what I mean by miracles of instruction and the way in which they worked.

Lastly we come to the important subject of

(7) Miracles as a means of proof.

The signs, worked by our Lord, whatever other functions they fulfilled, had one office which in the eyes of some apologists is so important as to drive all other functions into the back-ground. They are regarded as the main ground of conviction. The Apostles, it is true, make little appeal to the Signs worked by Christ: this may have been because they worked similar Signs themselves, and knew that their enemies ascribed them to magic. Their favourite arguments were the fulfilment of prophecy and the resurrection of the Lord. The earlier hearers were Jews, and the question with them was, “Did Jesus of Nazareth answer to the prophetic notices of the expected deliverer of their race?” The Jews we hear “were mightily convinced” [pg 100] by Apollos, not because he declared Christ's works but because he “shewed by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.”[43]

But in time the early preachers addressed themselves to the Gentiles. The Jewish notion of the Messiah was strange to hearers, who had never heard of the prophets; while the idea that God should love the world and reveal Himself to it commended itself to them, and they would expect that such a revelation would be accompanied by manifestations beyond human experience. The consequence was that, after a century or two, less was made of prophecy and more was made of miracles: and if the question “What makes you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God?” had then been put to all Christendom, the answer of an overwhelming majority would have been, “Because of the wondrous works which He performed.”

We shall see, however, that our Lord does not Himself put Signs in the very forefront of His claims to the allegiance of men. He only appeals to them as subsidiary proofs; on which He would rest His cause when, owing to the situation or the disposition of the hearer, no higher kind of proof was available.[44]

It will be asked, “If miracles were only a subsidiary ground on which our Lord claimed belief; What was the primary one?” We shall see that our [pg 101] Lord's first appeal was Personal; He claimed men's allegiance from what they had seen of Him and from what they knew.

There is a passage in St John's Gospel which brings this very clearly before us. The naturalness of it and its fidelity to character and situation are such, that I am as sure that these words passed between Philip and our Lord, as if they were found in all four of the Gospels, though they only occur in the last. They occur in the final discourse of our Lord when He and the Apostles are on the way to the garden of Gethsemane. Our Lord has said,

“And whither I go, ye know the way. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how know we the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also: from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Shew us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I say unto you I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake.”[45]

In Philip's words we perceive an assurance of the reasonableness of what he asks, which is most true to the life. He never doubts but that God could be brought before his eyes;—he supposed that the clouds might be rolled away, so as to reveal a form of awful majesty clothed with resplendent light, and with one glimpse of this he would be content. He thinks that he makes a most moderate request.

Our Lord shews a sort of surprise, that after having been so long with them, going in and out among them, they should have missed seeing that God was in Him. It was perhaps this constant companionship that stood in Philip's way; that what was Divine should have mingled with his daily life was beyond his conception. God, he supposed, could only shew Himself in some strange and appalling manner. That God's presence is reflected, in the least broken way, in that course of things which is most normal and most ordinary, was an idea that did not belong to Philip's race or time; but Christ drops a germ from which it should arise.

It is the concluding verse of the passage with which I am most concerned—

“Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake.”[46]

The first appeal is to that belief, which ought [pg 103] to have grown up from personal knowledge; that failing, He points to the works. This belief was of the same order as that which we have in the rectitude of an honoured friend. In knowing a man, we get to a deeper kind of knowledge than we do in knowing an object: all we can tell about an object is what its properties are, we know nothing about what it is; but we do get nearer to knowing what a friend is, our souls interpenetrate, as it were, a little. So that if Philip had known our Lord as Peter did, he would, like him, have recognised the “Son of the living God.” Supposing, however, that he was not sufficiently “finely touched” for such a knowledge, that he judged mainly from his senses, and needed proofs of which they could take cognisance; then—as an alternative course though a very inferior one—He might believe for the mere Signs' sake. Signs were provided to suit the cases of those who could not believe without them.

But while many take it for granted that Christ rested His claims on miracles and worked His Signs to provide Himself with credentials; others have gone to the other extreme, and have urged that Christ disparaged the belief that was engendered by the sight of wonders. No doubt the principle—“Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed” runs through all our Lord's teaching, but it was better they should believe from the sight of such Signs as our Lord worked—Signs [pg 104] which were not coercive—than not believe at all. Signs, certainly, have led men to believe, when, either from inward or outward causes, they would not have believed without. This effect I regard as a good one, and all good that has ensued from what our Lord did, I believe that He intended to do.

The chief texts adduced in disparagement of miracles are:

“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise believe,”[47]

and

“An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.”[48]

If signs and wonders were the appointed means of bringing men to believe, “Why,” ask the objectors, “are those blamed who cannot believe without seeing them?” “Our Lord,” they say, “here shews that He sets little value on the belief that comes of seeing signs.” This is, no doubt, quite true of the sort of belief that comes of the mere assent of a terrified man: but our Lord did not terrify men, and the belief that sprung from seeing His signs involved a will and a disposition to recognize God's hand.

I do not feel sure, however, that the first text really bears on the matter. I think it quite possible [pg 105] that the stress should be laid on the word see. The nobleman “besought him that he would come down, and heal his son; for he was at the point of death.”[49] He thought that our Lord must go down to Capernaum with him and work the cure there; he cannot believe that it will be done unless it is wrought before his eyes. When he began to speak he had not the faith of the Roman centurion; he could not suppose that the power of healing could be exercised from afar; but he soon caught this confidence from looking on our Lord. If the text have this sense it does not touch the question before us.

The second text refers to a sign from Heaven. It is spoken of those who wanted an overwhelming miracle to be wrought, which should settle the question and compel assent in the unwilling. The generation is not called “evil and adulterous” for seeking after such Signs as our Lord wrought, for crowding to see the cures for instance, but, for challenging Him to produce a Sign of a very different character, a magical one, which, for reasons explained in the last chapter, He would not do.

Our Lord Himself on several occasions points [pg 106] to another result of His working of Signs. It rendered the rejection of Him a sin; this was because the will was called into operation to explain these Signs away. The leaders among those adverse to Him invented loopholes, such as referring the works to Beelzebub, and those who wanted to escape being convinced availed themselves of them. In this way, the acceptance or non-acceptance of Signs formed a touchstone for discriminating those who virtually said “We will not have this man to reign over us”—a section of people to whom I alluded in the earlier part of the chapter. Men were pardoned the unbelief of blindness and dulness, but not the wilful hatred which went out of its way to find grounds for rejection, and which would refer works of pure beneficence to the chief of the devils; this shewed innate aversion. The following are passages in point:

“Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon which were done in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.”[50]

“He that hateth me hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father.”[51]

Again, it is easier to convey to another by [pg 107] description an external fact than a personal impression: and thus the evidence from Signs is easier to transmit from man to man than that which arises from realising a Personality. Those who followed our Lord were subjugated by His influence; some of us too may extract from His memoirs a conception of His Personality: but it is only those possessing the gift of seeing the reality in the outline, who can lay hold of this source of belief; while in a miracle, all can perceive credentials given by God.