The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 17

{123}

Wild nature, too, he knew and loved. The wild lily, which the women used to burn in their ovens never thinking of its beauty, was to him something finer than King Solomon, and he probably had seen Herodian princes on the Galilean roads. (It is a curious thing that he has more than one allusion to royal draperies.) He bade men study the flowers (_katamanthanein_). It is perhaps worth remark that flower-poetry came into Greek literature from regions familiar to us in the life of Jesus; Meleager was a Gadarene. The Psalmist long ago had said of the birds that they had their meat from G.o.d; but Jesus brought them into the human family--"Your Heavenly Father feedeth them." Even his knowledge of weather signs is recorded. Not all flowers keep in literature the scent and colour of life; they are a little apt to become "natural objects." But if they are to retain their charm in print, something is wanted that is not very common--the open heart and the open eye, to which birds and flowers are willing to tell their secret. There are other things which point to the fact that Jesus had this endowment,--and not least his being able to find in the flower a link so strong and so beautiful between G.o.d and man. Here as elsewhere he was in touch with his environment, for he loved Nature as Nature, and was true to it. His parables are not like aesop's Fables. His lost sheep has no arguments; his lily is not a Solomon, though it is better dressed; and his sparrows are neither moralists nor theologians--but sparrows, which might be sold at two for a farthing, and in the meantime are chirping and nesting. And all this life of Nature spoke to him of the character of G.o.d, of G.o.d's delight in beauty and G.o.d's love. G.o.d is for him the ever-present thought in it all--real too, to others, whenever he speaks of him.

An amiable feeling for Nature is often to be found in sentimental characters. But sentimentalism is essentially self-deception; and the Gospels make it clear that of all human sins and weaknesses none seems to have stirred the anger of Jesus as did self-deception. When the Pharisees in the synagogue watched to see whether Jesus would heal on the Sabbath, he "looked round about upon them all with anger," says Mark. This gaze of Jesus is often mentioned in the Gospels--almost unconsciously--but Luke and Matthew drop the last two words in quoting this pa.s.sage, and do so at the cost {124} of a most characteristic touch. Matthew elsewhere, in accordance with his habit of grouping his matter by subject, gathers together a collection of the utterances of Jesus upon the Pharisees, with the recurring refrain "Scribes and Pharisees, actors." The Mediterranean world was full of Greek actors; we hear of them even among the Parthians in 53 B.C., and in Mesopotamia for centuries; and as there had long been Greek cities in Palestine, and a strong movement for generations toward Greek ways of life, the actor cannot have been an unfamiliar figure. To call the Pharisees "actors" was a new and strong thing to say, but Jesus said such things.

Of the grosser cla.s.ses of sinners he was tolerant to a point that amazed his contemporaries and gave great occasion of criticism to such enemies as Celsus and Julian. He had apparently no anger for the woman taken in adultery; and he was the "friend of publicans and sinners"--even eating with them.

[Sidenote: His sense of the real]

The explanation lies partly in Jesus' instinct for reality and truth.

Sensualist and money-lover were at least occupied with a sort of reality; pleasure and money in their way are real, and the pursuit of them brings a man, sooner or later, into contact with realities genuine enough. Whatever illusions publican and harlot might have, the world saw to it that they did not keep them long. The danger for such people was that they might be disillusioned overmuch. But the Pharisee lied with himself. If at times he traded on his righteousness to over-reach others, his chief victim was himself, as Jesus saw, and as Paul found.

Paul, brought up in their school to practise righteousness, gave the whole thing up as a pretence and a lie--he would no longer have anything to do with "his own righteousness." But he was an exception; Pharisees in general believed in their own righteousness; and, by tampering with their sense of the proportions of things, they lost all feeling for reality, and with it all consciousness of the value and dignity of man and the very possibility of any conception of G.o.d.

Jesus had been bred in another atmosphere, in a school of realities.

When he said "Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of heaven,"

his words were the record of experience--the paradox was the story of his life. He had known poverty and hand-labour; he had been "exposed to feel what wretches feel." Whatever criticism may make of the story of his feeding {125} mult.i.tudes, it remains that he was markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger--over and over he urged the feeding of the poor, the maimed and the blind; he suggested the payment of a day's wage for an hour's work, where a day's food was needed and only an hour's work could be had; he even reminded a too happy father that his little girl would be the better of food. No thinker of his day, or for long before and after, was so deeply conscious of the appeal of sheer misery, and this is one of the things on which his followers have never lost the mind of Jesus. Poverty was perhaps even for himself a key to the door into the Kingdom of G.o.d. At any rate, he always emphasizes the advantage of disadvantages, for they at least make a man in earnest with himself.

There is a revelation of the seriousness of his whole mind and nature in his reply to the follower who would go away and return. "No man, having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is _fit_ for the Kingdom of G.o.d." This every one knows who has tried to drive a furrow, and all men of action know only too well that the man, whom Jesus so describes, is fit for no kind of Kingdom. It is only the sentimentalism of the church that supposes the flabby-minded to be at home in the Kingdom of G.o.d. Jesus did not. The same kind of energy is in the parables. The unjust steward was a knave, but he was in earnest; and so was the questionably honest man who found treasure in a field. The merchant let everything go for the one pearl of great price. Mary chose "the one thing needful." We may be sure that in one shop in Nazareth benches were made to stand on four feet and doors to open and shut. The parables from nature, as we have seen, are true to the facts of nature. They too stand on four feet. The church laid hold of a characteristic word, when it adopted for all time Jesus'

_Amen_--"in truth." Jesus was always explicit with his followers--they should know from the first that their goal was the cross, and that meantime they would have no place where to lay their heads. They were to begin with hard realities, and to consort with him on the basis of the real.

The world in the age of Jesus was living a good deal upon its past, looking to old books and old cults, as we see in Plutarch and many others. The Jews no less lived upon their great books. Even Philo was fettered to the Old Testament, {126} except when he could dissolve his fetters by allegory, and even then he believed himself loyal to the higher meaning of the text. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in Jesus. His knowledge of Psalmist and Prophet excited wonder; but in all his quotations of the Old Testament that have reached us, there is no trace of servitude to the letter and no hint of allegory. He does not quote Scripture as his followers did. Here too he spoke as having authority. If sometimes he quoted words for their own sake, it was always as an _argumentum ad hominem_. But his own way was to grasp the writer's mind--a very difficult thing in his day, and little done--and to go straight to the root of the matter, regardless of authority and tradition. Like draws to like, and an intensely real man at once grasped his kins.h.i.+p with other intensely real men; and he found in the prophets, not reeds shaken with the wind, courtiers of king or of people, but men in touch with reality, with their eyes open for G.o.d, friends and fore-runners, whose experience illumined his own. This type of manhood needed no explanation for him. The other sort perplexed him--"Why can you not judge for yourselves?" how was it that men could see and yet not see? From his inner sympathy with the prophetic mind, came his freedom in dealing with the prophets. He read and understood, and decided for himself. No sincere man would ever wish his word to be final for another. Jesus was conscious of his own right to think and to see and to judge, and for him, as for the modern temper, the final thing was not opinion, nor scripture, nor authority, but reality and experience. There lay the road to G.o.d. Hence it is that Jesus is so tranquil,--he does "not strive nor cry"--for the man who has experienced in himself the power of the real has no doubts about it being able to maintain itself in a world, where at heart men want nothing else.

[Sidenote: The temptations of Jesus]

When so clear an eye for reality is turned upon the great questions of man's life and of man's relations with G.o.d, it is apt here too to reach the centre. From the first, men lingered over the thought that Jesus had gone to the bottom of human experience and found in this fact his power to help them. He was made like to his brethren; he was touched with the feeling of our infirmities; he was "able to sympathize"

(_dynamenon sympathesai_) for he was "tempted in all respects like us."

In {127} the Gospel, as it is handed down to us, the temptation of Christ is summed up in three episodes set at the beginning of the story and told in a symbolic form, which may or may not have been given to them by Jesus himself. Then "the devil left him"--Luke adding significantly "till a time." The interpretation is not very clear.

Strong men do not discuss their own feelings very much, but it is possible now and then to divine some experience from an involuntary tone, or the unconscious sensitiveness with which certain things are mentioned; or, more rarely, emotion may open the lips for a moment of self-revelation, in which a word lays bare a lifetime's struggle. It will add to the significance of his general att.i.tude toward G.o.d and man's life, if we can catch any glimpse of the inner mind of Jesus.

We have records of his being exhausted and seeking quiet. Biographers of that day concealed such things in their heroes, but the Gospels freely reveal what contemporary critics counted weaknesses in Jesus.

He weeps, he hungers, he is worn out. He has to be alone--on the mountain by night, in a desert-place before dawn. Such exhaustion is never merely physical or merely spiritual; the two things are one. Men crowded upon Jesus, till he had not leisure to eat; he came into touch with a ceaseless stream of human personalities; and those who have been through any such experience will understand what it cost him. To communicate an idea or to share a feeling is exhausting work, and we read further of deeds of healing, which, Jesus himself said, took "virtue" (_dynamin_) out of him, and he had to withdraw. When the Syro-Phoenician woman called for his aid, it was a question with him whether he should spend on a foreigner the "virtue" that could with difficulty meet the claims of Israel, for he was not conscious of the "omnipotence" which has been lightly attributed to him. It was the woman's brilliant answer about the little dogs eating the children's crumbs that gained her request. The turn of speech showed a vein of humour, and he consented "for this saying."[14] If human experience goes for anything in such a case, contact with a spirit so delicate and sympathetic gave him something of the {128} strength he spent. The incident throws light upon the "fluxes and refluxes of feeling" within him, and the effect upon him of a spirit with something of his own tenderness and humour. For the moment, though, his sense of having reached his limits should be noticed.

The church has never forgotten the agony in the garden, but that episode has lost some of its significance because it has not been recognized to be one link in a chain of experience, which we must try to reconstruct. It has been a.s.sumed that Jesus never expected to influence the Pharisees and scribes; but this is to misinterpret the common temper of idealists, and to miss the pain of Jesus' words when he found his hopes of the Pharisees to be vain. Gradually, from their pressure upon his spirit, he grew conscious of the outcome--they would not be content with logomachies; the end might be death. Few of us have any experience to tell us at what cost to the spirit such a discovery is made. The common people he read easily enough and recognized their levity. And now, in exile, as Mr Burkitt has lately suggested,[15] he began to concentrate himself upon the twelve. It was not till Peter, by a sudden flash of insight, grasped his Messiahs.h.i.+p--a character, which Jesus had realized already, though we do not know by what process, and had for reasons of his own concealed,--it was not till then that Jesus disclosed his belief that he would be killed at last. From that moment we may date the falling away of Judas, and what this man's constant presence must have meant to Jesus, ordinary experience may suggest. Shrewd, clever and disappointed, he must have been a chill upon his Master at all hours.

His influence upon the rest of the group must have been consciously and increasingly antipathetic. Night by night Jesus could read in the faces which of them had been with Judas during the day. The sour triumph of Judas when the Son of man was told to go on to another village after a day's journey, and the uncomfortable air of one or more of the others, all entered into Jesus' experience; and night by night he had to undo Judas' work. He "learnt by what he suffered" from the man's tone and look that there would be desertion, perhaps betrayal.

The daily suffering involved in trying to recapture the man, in going to seek the lost sheep in the wilderness of bitterness, may be {129} imagined. Side by side, King, Pharisee and disciple are against him, and the tension, heightened by the uncertainty as to the how, when and where of the issue must have been great. Luke's graphic word says his face was "set" for Jerusalem--it would be, he knew, a focus for the growing forces of hatred.

Day by day the strain increased. Finally Jesus spoke. The where and how of the betrayal he could not determine; the when he could. At the supper, he looked at Judas and then he spoke.[16] "What thou doest, do quickly." The man's face as he hurried out said "Yes" to the unspoken question--and for the moment it brought relief. This is the background of the garden-scene. What the agony meant spiritually, we can hardly divine. The physical cost is attested by the memory of his face which haunted the disciples. The profuse sweat that goes with acute mental strain is a familiar phenomenon, and its traces were upon him--visible in the torchlight. Last of all, upon the cross, Nature reclaimed her due from him. Jesus had drawn, as men say, upon the body, and in such cases Nature repays herself from the spirit. The worn-out frame dragged the spirit with it, and he died with the cry--"My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Turning back, we find in Luke[17] that Jesus said to his disciples "Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations." Dr John Brown[18] used to speak of Jesus having "a disposition for private friends.h.i.+ps." A mind with the genius for friendliness is not only active but pa.s.sive. We constantly find in history instances of men with such a gift failing in great crises because of it--they yield to the friendly word; it means so much to them. Thus when Peter, a friend of old standing and of far greater value since his confession at Philippi, spoke and reinforced the impressions made on Jesus' mind by his prevision of failure and death, the temptation was of a terrible kind. The sudden rejoinder, in which Jesus identifies the man he loved with Satan, shows what had happened. But, if friends.h.i.+p carried with it temptation, yet when physical exhaustion brought spiritual exhaustion in its train, the love and tenderness {130} of his friends upheld him. But, more still, their belief in him and in his ideas, their need of him, drove the tempter away. He could not disappoint them. The faces that softened to him,--all that came to his mind as he thought of his friends name by name--gave him hope and comfort, though the body might do its worst. It was perhaps in part this experience of the friends.h.i.+p of simple and commonplace men that differentiated the teaching of Jesus from the best the world had yet had. No other teacher dreamed that common men could possess a tenth part of the moral grandeur and spiritual power, which Jesus elicited from them--chiefly by believing in them. Here, to any one who will study the period, the sheer originality of Jesus is bewildering. This belief in men Jesus gave to his followers and they have never lost it.

[Sidenote: Man's relations with G.o.d]

It was in the new life and happiness in G.o.d that he was bringing to the common people that Jesus saw his firmest credentials. He laid stress indeed upon the expulsion of devils and the cure of disease--matters explained to-day by "suggestion." But the culmination was "the good news for the poor." "Gospel" and "Evangelical" have in time become technical terms, and have no longer the pulse of sheer happiness which Jesus felt in them, and which the early church likewise experienced.

"Be of good cheer!" is the familiar English rendering of one of the words of Jesus, often on his lips--"Courage!" he said. One text of Luke represents him as saying it even on the cross, when he spoke to the penitent thief.

Summing up what we have so far reached, we may remark the broad contrast between the att.i.tude of Jesus to human life and the views of the world around him. A simple home with an atmosphere of love and truth and intelligence, where life was not lost sight of in its refinements, where ordinary needs and common duties were the daily facts, where G.o.d was a constant and friendly presence--this was his early environment. Later on it was the carpenter's bench, the fisherman's boat, wind on the mountain and storm on the lake, leaven in the meal and wheat in the field. Everywhere his life is rooted in the normal and the natural, and everywhere he finds G.o.d filling the meanest detail of man's life with glory and revelation.

Philosophers were anxious to keep G.o.d clear of contact with matter; Marcus Aurelius found "decay in the substance {131} of all things--nothing but water, dust, bones, stench."[19] Jesus saw life in all things--G.o.d clothing the gra.s.s and watching over little birds.

To-day the old ant.i.thesis of G.o.d and matter is gone, and it comes as a relief to find that Jesus antic.i.p.ated its disappearance. The religious in his day looked for G.o.d in trance and ritual, in the abnormal and unusual, but for him, as for every man who has ever helped mankind, the ordinary and the commonplace were enough. The Kingdom of G.o.d is among you, or even within you--in the common people, of whom all the other teachers despaired.

We come now to the central question of man's relation with G.o.d, never before so vital a matter to serious people in the Mediterranean world.

Jew and Greek and Egyptian were all full of it, and men's talk ran much upon it. Men were anxious to be right with G.o.d, and sought earnestly in the ways of their fathers for the means of communion with G.o.d and the attainment of some kind of safety in their position with regard to him. Jew and Greek alike talked of heaven and h.e.l.l and of the ways to them. They talked of righteousness and holiness--"holy" is one of the great words of the period--and they sought these things in ritual and abstinence. Modern Jews resent the suggestion that the thousand and one regulations as to ceremonial purity, and the casuistries, as many or more, spun out of the law and the traditions, ranked with the great commandments of neighbourly love and the wors.h.i.+p of the One G.o.d. No doubt they are right, but it is noticeable that in practice the common type of mind is more impressed with minutiae than with principles. The Southern European to-day will do murder on little provocation, but to eat meat in Lent is sin. But, without attributing such conspicuous sins as theft and adultery and murder to the Pharisees, it is clear that in establis.h.i.+ng their own righteousness they laid excessive stress on the details of the law, on Sabbath-keeping (a constant topic with the Christian apologists), on t.i.thes, and temple ritual, on the was.h.i.+ng of pots and plates--still rigorously maintained by the modern Jew--and all this was supposed to const.i.tute holiness. Jesus with the clear incisive word of genius dismissed it all as "acting." The Pharisee was essentially an actor--playing to himself the most contemptible little comedies of holiness. {132} Listen, cries Jesus, and he tells the tale of the man fallen among thieves and left for dead, and how priest and Levite pa.s.sed by on the other side, fearing the pollution of a corpse, and how they left mercy, G.o.d's own work--"I will have mercy and not sacrifice" was one of his quotations from Hosea,--to be done by one unclean and d.a.m.ned--the Samaritan. Whited sepulchres! he cries, pretty to look at, but full of what? of death, corruption and foulness.

"How _can_ you escape from the judgment of h.e.l.l?" he asked them, and no one records what they answered or could answer.

[Sidenote: Jesus the liberator]

It is clear, however, that, outside Palestine, the Jews in the great world were moving to a more purely moral conception of religion--their environment made mere Pharisaism impossible, and Greek criticism compelled them to think more or less in the terms of the fundamental.

The debt of the Jew to the Gentile is not very generously acknowledged.

None the less, the distinctive badge of all his tribe was and remained what the Greeks called fussiness (_t psophodees_).[20] The Sabbath, circ.u.mcision, the blood and b.u.t.ter taboos remained--as they still remain in the most liberal of "Liberal Judaisms"--tribe marks with no religious value, but maintained by patriotism. And side by side with this lived and lives that hatred of the Gentile, which is attributed to Christian persecution, but which Juvenal saw and noted before the Christian had ceased to be persecuted by the Jew. The extravagant nonsense found in Jewish speculation as to how many Gentile souls were equivalent in G.o.d's sight to that of one Jew is symptomatic. To this day it is confessedly the weakness of Judaism that it offers no impulse and knows no enthusiasm for self-sacrificing love where the interests of the tribe are not concerned.[21]

The great work of Jesus in this matter was the final and decisive cleavage with antiquity. Greek rationalism had long since laughed at the puerilities of the Greek cults; but rationalism and laughter are'

unequally matched against Religion, and it triumphed over them, and, as we see in Plutarch {133} and the Neo-Platonists, it imposed its puerilities--yes, and its obscenities--upon Philosophy and made her in sober truth "procuress to the lords of h.e.l.l." It was a new thing when Religion, in the name of truth and for the love of G.o.d, abolished the connexion with a trivial past. Jesus cut away at once every vestige of the primitive and every savage survival--all natural growths perhaps, and helpful too to primitive man and to the savage, but confusing to men on a higher plane,--either mere play-acting or the "d.a.m.nation of h.e.l.l." Pagan cults he summed up as much speaking. Once for all he set Religion free from all taboos and rituals. Paul, once, on the spur of the moment, called Jesus the "Yes" of all the promises of G.o.d--a most suggestive name for the vindicator and exponent of G.o.d's realities. It is such a man as this who liberates mankind, cutting us clear of make-believes and negations and taboos, and living in the open-air, whether it is cloud or sun. That Jesus shocked his contemporaries with the abrupt nakedness of his religious ideas is not surprising. The church made decent haste to cover a good many of them up, but not very successfully. A mind like that of Jesus propagates itself, and reappears with startling vitality, as history in many a strange page can reveal.

We must now consider what was the thought of Jesus upon G.o.d and how he conceived of the relation between G.o.d and man. He approached the matter originally from the standpoint of Judaism, and no attempt to prove the influence of Greek philosophy is likely to succeed. The result of Greek speculation upon G.o.d--where it did not end in pure pantheism--was that of G.o.d nothing whatever could be predicated--not even being, but that he was to be expressed by the negation of every idea that could be formed of him. To this men had been led by their preconception of absolute being, and so strong was the influence of contemporary philosophy that Christian thinkers adopted the same conclusion, managing what clumsy combinations they could of it and of the doctrine of incarnation. Clement of Alexandria is a marked example of this method.

To the philosophic mind G.o.d remains a difficult problem, but to the religious temper things are very different. To it G.o.d is the one great reality never very far away, and is conceived not as an abstraction, nor as a force, but as a personality. {134} It has been and is the strength and redemption of Judaism, that G.o.d is the G.o.d of Israel--"Oh G.o.d, thou art my G.o.d!" How intuition is to be reconciled with philosophy has been the problem of Christian thinkers in every age, but it may be remarked that the varying term is philosophy. To the intuition of Jesus Christians have held fast--though Greeks and others have called it "folly"; and in the meantime a good many philosophies have had their day.

The central thought of Jesus is the Fatherhood of G.o.d. For this, as for much else, parallels have been found in the words of Hebrew thinkers, ancient and contemporary, and we may readily concede that it was not original with Jesus to call G.o.d Father. The name was given to G.o.d by the prophets, but it was also given to him by the Stoics--and by Homer; so that to speak of G.o.d's Fatherhood might mean anything between the two extremes of everything and nothing. Christian theology, for instance, starting with the idea of the Fatherhood of G.o.d, has not hesitated to speak in the same breath of his "vindicating his majesty"--a phrase which there is no record or suggestion that Jesus ever used. There may be fathers who vindicate their majesty, as there are many other kinds, but until we realize the connotation of the word for men who speak of G.o.d as Father, it is idle to speak of it being a thought common to them. The name may be in the Old Testament and in Homer, but the meaning which Jesus gave to it is his own.

Jesus never uses the name Father without an air of gladness. Men are anxious as to what they shall eat, and what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be clothed--"your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Children ask father and mother for bread--will they receive a stone? The women had hid the leaven in the three measures of meal long before the children began to feel hungry.

And as to clothes--G.o.d has clothed the flower far better than Solomon ever clothed himself, "and shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" The picture is one of the strong and tender parent, smiling at the child's anxiety with no notion of his own majesty or of anything but love. So incredibly simple is the relation between G.o.d and man--simple, unconstrained, heedless and tender as the talk round a table in Nazareth. Jesus is greater than the men who have elaborated {135} his ideas, and majesty is the foible of little minds. The great man, if he thinks of his dignity, lets it take care of itself; he is more interested in love and truth, and he forgets to think of what is due to himself. Aristotle said that his "magnificent man" would never run; but, says Jesus, when the prodigal son was yet a great way off, "his father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him."

This contrast measures the distance between the thought of Jesus and some Christian theologies. It is worth noting that in the two parables, in which a father directly addresses his son, it is with the tender word _teknon_, which is more like a pet name. It adds to the meaning of the parable of the prodigal, when the father calls the elder brother by the little name that has come down from childhood. It was a word which Jesus himself used in speaking to his friends.[22] The heavenly Father does not cease to be a father because his children are ungracious and bad. He sends rain and sun--and all they mean--to evil and to good. The whole New Testament is tuned to the thought of Jesus--"the philanthropy of G.o.d our saviour."[23]

Plato had long before defined the object of human life as "becoming like to G.o.d." Jesus finds the means to this likeness to G.o.d in the simplest of every day's opportunities. "Love your enemies and do good, and ye shall be sons of the Highest, for he is good and pitiful."

"Blessed are the peace-makers," he said, "for they shall be called children of G.o.d." This is sometimes limited to the reconciliation of quarrels, but the worst of quarrels is the rift in a man's own soul, the "division of his spiritual substance against itself" which is the essence of all tragedy. There are some whose least word, or whose momentary presence, can somehow make peace wherever they go, and leave men stronger for the rest they have found in another's soul. This, according to Jesus, is the family likeness by which G.o.d's children are recognized in all sorts of company. To have the faculty of communicating peace of mind--and it is more often than not done unconsciously, as most great things are--is no light or accidental gift.

Jesus lays a good deal more stress upon unconscious instinct than most moralists do. Once only he is reported to have spoken of the Last Judgment, which was a favourite theme {136} with the eschatologists of his period, Jewish, pagan, and Christian. He borrowed the whole framework of the scene, but he changed, and doubly changed, the significance of it. For he discarded the national or political criterion which the Jew preferred, and he did not have recourse to the rather individualistic moral test which Greek thinkers proposed, in imitation of Plato; still less did it occur to him to suggest a _Credo_. With him the ultimate standard was one of sheer kindness and good-heartedness--"inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these my brethren." But it is still more interesting to note how this standard is applied. Every one at the Last Judgment accepts it, just as every one accepts the propositions of moralists in general. But the real cleavage between the cla.s.ses of men does not depend on morality, as the chilly suggestion of the mere word reminds us. Men judge other men not by their morality, professed or practised, so much as by their unconscious selves--by instinct, impulse and so forth, the things that really give a clue to the innermost man. The most noticeable point then in Jesus' picture of the Last Judgment is that, when "sheep" and "goats" are separated, neither party at once understands the reasons of the decision. These are conscious of duties done; the others have no very clear idea about it. Elsewhere Jesus suggests that, when men have done all required of them, they may still have the feeling that they are unprofitable servants; and it is precisely the peace-makers and the pure in heart who do not realize how near they come to G.o.d. The priest and the Levite in the parable were conscious of their purity, but Jesus gives no hint that they saw G.o.d. The Samaritan lived in another atmosphere, but it was natural to him and he breathed it unconsciously.

The cultivation of likeness to G.o.d by Greek philosophers and their pupils was very different. Plutarch has left a tract, kindly and sensible, on "How a man may recognize his own progress in virtue," but there is no native Christian product of the kind.

[Sidenote: The Kingdom of G.o.d]

From what Jesus directly says of G.o.d, and from what he says of G.o.d's children, we may conclude that he cla.s.ses G.o.d with the strong and sunny natures; with the people of bright eyes who see through things and into things, who have the feeling for reality, and love every aspect of the real. G.o.d has that sense which is peculiar to the creative mind--the keen joy {137} in beauty, that loves star and bird and child. G.o.d has the father's instinct, a full understanding of human nature, and a heart open for the prodigal son, the publican and the woman with seven devils. "In his will is our peace," wrote the great Christian poet of the middle ages. "Doing the will we find rest," said a humble and forgotten Christian of the second century.[24] They both learnt the thought from Jesus, who set it in the prayer beginning with _Abba_ which he taught his disciples, and who prayed it himself in the garden with the same _Abba_ in his heart. "In the Lord's prayer," said Tertullian, "there is an epitome of the whole Gospel."[25]

At this point two questions rise, which are of some historical importance, and bear upon Jesus' view of G.o.d. It is clear, first of all, that the expression "the Kingdom of G.o.d" was much upon the lips of Jesus, at least in the earlier part of his ministry. It was not of his own coining, and scholars have differed as to what he really meant.

Such controversy always rises about the terms in which a great mind expresses itself. The great thinker, even the statesman, has to use the best language he can find to convey his ideas, and if the ideas are new, the difficulty of expression is sometimes very great. The words imply one thing to the listener, and another to the speaker who is really trying (as Diogenes put it) to "re-mint the currency," and how far he succeeds depends mostly upon his personality. To-day "the Kingdom," or more accurately "the Kings.h.i.+p of G.o.d," is in some quarters interpreted rather vigorously in the sense which the ordinary Jew gave to the phrase in the age of Jesus; but it is more than usually unsound criticism to take the words of such a man as meaning merely what they would in the common talk of unreflective persons, who use words as counters and nothing else. There was a vulgar interpretation of the "Kings.h.i.+p of G.o.d," and there was a higher one, current among the better spirits; and it is only reasonable to interpret this phrase, or any other, in the light of the total mind of the man who uses it. It is clear then that, when Jesus used "the Kings.h.i.+p of G.o.d," he must have subordinated it to his general idea of G.o.d; and what {138} that was, we have seen. To-day the phrase is returning into religious speech to signify the permeation of society by the mind of Christ, which cannot be far from what it meant to the earliest disciples. It is significant that the author of the fourth gospel virtually dropped the phrase altogether, that Paul preferred other expressions as a rule, and that it was merged and lost in the idea of the church.

Closely bound up with the "Kingdom of G.o.d" is the name Messiah, with a similarly wide range of meanings. The question has also been raised as to how far Jesus identified himself with the Messiah. It might be more pertinent to ask with which Messiah. On the whole, the importance of the matter can be gauged by the fate of the word. It was translated into Greek, and very soon Christos, or Chrestos, was a proper name and hardly a t.i.tle at all except in apologetics, where alone the conception retained some importance. The Divine Son and the Divine Logos--terms which Jesus did not use--superseded the old Hebrew t.i.tle, at any rate in the Gentile world, and this could hardly have occurred if the idea had been of fundamental moment in Jesus' mind and speech. If he used the name, as seems probable, it too must have been subordinated to his master-thought of G.o.d's fatherhood. It would then imply at most a close relation to the purposes of G.o.d, and a mission to men, the stewards.h.i.+p of thoughts that would put mankind on a new footing with G.o.d. The idea of his being a mediator in the Pauline sense is foreign to the gospels, and the later conception of a purchase of mankind from the devil, or from the justice of G.o.d, by the blood of a victim is still more alien to Jesus' mind.

[Sidenote: The cross]

These are some of the features of the founder of the new religion as revealed in the Gospels--features that permanently compel attention, but after all it was not the consideration of these that conquered the world. Of far more account in winning the world was the death of this man upon the cross. It was the cross that gave certainty to all that Jesus had taught about G.o.d. The church st.u.r.dily and indignantly repudiated any suggestion, however philosophic, that in any way seemed likely to lessen the significance of the cross. That he should taste the ultimate bitterness of death undisguised, that he should refuse the palliative wine and myrrh (an action symbolic of his {139} whole att.i.tude to everything and to death itself), that with open eyes he should set his face for Jerusalem, and with all the sensitiveness of a character, so susceptive of impression and so rich in imagination, he should expose himself to our experience--to the foretaste of death, to the horror of the unknown, and to the supreme fear--the dread of the extinction of personality; and that he should actually undergo all he foresaw, as the last cry upon the cross testified--all this let the world into the real meaning of his central thought upon G.o.d. It was the pledge of his truth, and thus made possible our reconciliation with G.o.d. If we may take an ill.u.s.tration from English literature, Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_ may suggest something here. It has been noticed how small a part Caesar plays in the drama--how little he speaks; what weakness he shows--epilepsy, deafness, arrogance, vacillation; and how soon he disappears. Would not the play have been better named _Brutus_? Yet Shakespeare knew what he was doing; for the whole play is Julius Caesar, from the outbreak of Ca.s.sius at the beginning--

Why! man he doth bestride the narrow world Like a colossus,

to the bitter cry of Brutus at the end--

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!

Caesar determines everything in the story. Every character in it is a mirror in which we see some figure of him, and the life of every man there is made or unmade by his mind toward Caesar. Caesar is the one great determining factor in the story; living and dead, he is the centre and explanation of it all.