Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/700

670 JESUS those of a sage," said Rousseau, " the life and death of Jesus are those of a God." 1 " He is," says Strauss, "the highest object we can possibly imagine with respect to religion, the Being without whose presence in the mind perfect piety is impossible." 2 " The Christ of the Gospels," says Eenan, " is the most beautiful incarnation of God in the most beautiful of forms. His beauty is eternal ; His reign will never end." 3 John Stuart Mill spoke of Him as " a man charged with a special, express, and unique com mission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue." 4 The transcendent power of His personality, which is betokened in such expressions as those quoted above, is due, not only to His devotion and self-sacrifice, but to His absolute sinlessness. This constitutes the unique character of His individuality. He alone of mankind has claimed to be sinless, and has had the claim granted by unanimous consent both in His lifetime and in subse quent ages. He alone among men has never even been assailed by the breath of moral calumny, and never even in His most sacred utterances and prayers betrayed the faintest consciousness of any evil as present in His soul. He therefore alone has furnished mankind with a perfect ideal ; and, though no saint has ever even distantly attained to the perfectness of that ideal, yet those who have done so in greatest measure have always said that they have done so solely by the aid of His grace, and the imitation of His example. Nor was His teaching less unique than His personality. It was marked by a tone of sovereign authority ; " Ye have heard that it was said but I say unto you." In this it was the very opposite to the teaching of His own day and of centuries afterwards, which relied exclusively upon precedent. It was also marked by absolute originality. The test of its originality is the world s acceptance of it as specifically His. Isolated fragments of it may be compared with truths uttered by others ; but it stands alone in its breadth and in its power, in its absence of narrow exclu- siveness and scholastic system and abstract speculation. It was fresh, simple, natural, abounding in illustrations at once the most beautiful and the most intelligible, drawn from all the common sights and sounds of nature, and all the daily incidents and objects of social and domestic life. It flowed forth without reserve to all and on every fitting occasion, on the road, on the hillside, on the lake, or by the lonely well, or at the banquet whether of the Pharisee or the publican. Expressed in the form of parables, it has seized the imagination of mankind with a force and tena city which is not distantly approached even by the sacred writers, and even when not directly parabolic it was so full of picturesqueness and directness that there is not one recorded sentence of it which has not been treasured up in the memory of mankind. His utterances not only rival and surpass all that preceded and all that has followed them, but " they complement all beginnings." Sometimes they consist of short suggestive sayings (gnomes), full of depth, yet free from all affectation or obscurity, 5 which make even what is most mysterious and spiritual humanly perceptible, throwing over it the glamour both of poetry and of a long ing presentiment, and incessantly enticing man towards something yet higher. There is never in them a lurking fallacy nor a superfluous word, but all is " vivacity, nature, intelligibility, directly enlightening grace," intended only to convince and to save. And while such was the incompar- 1 fimile. 2 Vergangl. u. Bleibendes in Christenthum, 132. In his Leben Jesu, ii. 229, he says that Jesus "in His all but perfect life stood alone and unapproached in history." 3 Etudes d Hist. Rel., 213, 214. 4 Three Essays, p. 254, where he also speaks of Christ as "the ideal representative and guide of humanity." 5 See Keim. Jesu von Nazara, ii. 1,3. able form of His teaching, its force was even more remark able. It is all centred in the two great truths of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man ; from the former springs every truth of theology, from the latter every application of morals. Judaism had sunk into a religion of hatreds ; the one message of Jesus was love. In this He differs even from John the Baptist and the prophets. " Their emblem is the storms, His the sun." Once more, as regards, the work of Jesus, the Christian believer contemplates it in that aspect in which it is pre sented by St Paul as a work of atonement, the redemption of a guilty race ; G but even apart from this the mere historical student must admit that Christ elevated both the individual and the race as none have ever done before or since. His doctrine purified the world from the loathly degradation of lust and luxury into which society had fallen. By con vincing men of the inherent dignity of manhood, He added to the value of human life. He made holiness a common possession. Heathen morality had reached its loftiest point in tho Stoic philosophy ; but Stoicism was scornful, ineffectual, despairing, and Christ gave a moral system infinitely more perfect, more hopeful, and more tender to all mankind. To Him is alone due the Christian signifi cance of such words as charity, humility, and humanity. He first taught the sacredness of the body as a temple of the Holy Ghost. He has inspired the aims of the noblest culture, while at the same time He has restored the souls of men, and made the care of the moral and spiritual being the supreme end of life. The gradual emancipation of the world from the tyrannies of sensuality, cruelty, and serfdom has been won step after step from His principles. The supremacy of the spiritual, the solidarity of nations, the universality of God s love, the essential equality of all men in His sight, are but a few of the great and fruitful con ceptions which have sprung directly from His teaching, and which still have an unexhausted force, to bring about, in ever-increasing measure, the amelioration of the world. VII. It only remains to touch on the growth and progress of Christian doctrine relative to the Person of Christ. It would have been impossible for the Christian world to have drawn from the teaching of the apostles and evangelists any other conclusion respect ing Jesus than that He was more than man, that He was " God manifest in the flesh." The Gospels spoke of His incarnation, His sinlessness, His miraculous power, His claims far loftier than would have been possible to simple man, His fearless conjunction of His own name with that of the Eternal Creator. Alike the Gospels and the Epistles testify to His pre-existence (Johni. 15, vi. 52, viii. 58), His eternal existence (1 Pet. iii. 18-20; Phil. ii. 6, 7; Rev. i. 11), His tions the writings of St John and of St Paul, could possibly suppose that the Saviour, in whom he was taught to trust, and into whose name he was baptized, was a mere human being like himself. And yet, that Jesus was perfectly human, as well as divine, they could not for a single moment doubt. He was born of a woman. He grew like other children. He suffered hunger, and thirst, and weari ness, and pain, and wounds, and death. He had flesh and bones like all other men, and passed through the stages of life as others do. And His soul was a human soul no less than His body was a human body, for He increased gradually in wisdom no less than in stature ; and felt sorrow and sympathy, and was" subject to temptation, and was liable to the common emotions of our mortal nature. With these facts the earliest teachers of the church were content. When they had asserted that Christ was both human and divine, "borii and unborn, God in flesh, life in death, born of Mary and born of God " (Iren., Ep. ad Splits., 7), they entered into no specu lations respecting the mode and definition of that union of natures. But such reticence soon became impossible. The .doctrine of a Gou-maii was openly assailed or secretly undermined by twofold 6 For St Paul s two most elaborate and concentrated statements of his theology see Rom. iii. 20-26 ; 1 Tim. ii.-5, 6 (iii. 16). See also 2 Tim. i. 9, 10. 7 Col. ii. 9; John xii. 41 ; Matt, xxviii. 18 ; 1 Thess. iii. 2; 2 Thess. ii. 16, 17 ; Phil. iii. 21 ; 1 Cor. iv. 5 ; 2 Cor. v. 10 ; 2 Tim. iv. 1 ; the Gospel and Epistles of St John, the Epistles to the Colos- sians and Ephesians, and the Apocalypse passim, &c.