Consider him next as a teacher; his method and manner, and the other
characteristics of his excellence, apart from his doctrine. That will be
distinctly considered in another place.
Original and independent as no man is.
First of all, we notice the perfect originality and independence of his teaching. We have a great many men who are original, in the sense of being originators within a certain boundary of educated thought. But the originality of Christ is uneducated. That he draws nothing from the stores of learning, can be seen at a glance. The impression we have in reading his instructions, justifies to the letter, the language of his contemporaries, when they say, “this man hath never learned.”
There is nothing in any of his allusions, or forms of speech that
indicates learning. Indeed, there is nothing in him that belongs to his age or
country—no one opinion, or task, or prejudice. The attempts that have been
made, in a way of establishing his mere natural manhood, to show that he
borrowed his sentiments from the
Persians and the eastern forms of religion, or that he had been intimate with
the Essenes, and borrowed from them, or that he must have been acquainted with
the schools and religions of Egypt, deriving his doctrine from them—all
attempts of the kind have so palpably failed, as not even to require a
deliberate answer.
If he is simply a man, as we hear, then he is most certainly a new and singular kind of man, never before heard of; one who visibly is quite as great a miracle in the world as if he were not a man. We can see for ourselves, in the simple directness and freedom of his teachings, that whatever he advances is from himself.
Shakspeare, for instance, whom we name as being probably the most creative and original spirit the world has ever produced, one of the class, too, that are called self-made men, is yet tinged, in all his works, with human learning. His glory is, indeed, that so much of what is great in history and historic character, lives and appears in his dramatic creation. He is the high priest, we sometimes hear, of human nature.
But Christ, understanding human nature so as to address it more skilfully than
he, derives no help from historic examples. He is the high-priest, rather, of
the divine nature, speaking as one that has come out from God, and has nothing
to borrow from the world. It is not to be detected, by any sign, that the human
sphere in which he moved imparted any thing to him. His teachings are just
as full of divine nature, as Shakspeare’s of human.
Teaches by no human method.
Neither does he teach by the human methods. He does not speculate about God, as a school professor, drawing out conclusions by a practice on words, and deeming that the way of proof; he does not build up a frame of evidence from below, by some constructive process, such as the philosophers delight in; but he simply speaks of God and spiritual things as one who has come out from Him, to tell us what he knows.
And his simple telling brings us the reality; proves it to us in
its own sublime self-evidence; awakens even the consciousness of it in our own
bosom; so that formal arguments or dialectic proofs offend as by their
coldness, and seem, in fact, to be only opaque substances set between us and
the light. Indeed, be makes even the world luminous by his words—fills it with
an immediate and new sense of God, which nothing has ever been able to expel.
The incense of the upper world is brought out, in his garments, and flows
abroad, as perfume, on the poisoned air.
Warped by no desire to gain assent.
At the same time, he never reveals the infirmity so commonly shown by human teachers, when they veer a little from their point, or turn their doctrine off by shades of variation, to catch the assent of multitudes. He never conforms to an expectation, even of his friend. When they look to find a great prophet in him, he offers nothing, in the modes of the prophet. When they ask for places of distinction in his kingdom, he rebukes their folly, and tells them he has nothing to give, but a share in his reproaches and his poverty. When they look to see him take the sword as the Great Messiah of their nation, calling the people to his standard, he tells them he is no warrior and no king, but only a messenger of love to lost men; one that has come to minister and die, but not to set up or restore the kingdom.
Every expectation that rises up
to greet him, is repulsed; and yet, so great is the power of his manner, that
multitudes are held fast, and can not yield their confidence. Enveloped as he
is in the darkest mystery, they trust him still; going after him, hanging on
his words, as if detained by some charmed influence, which they cannot shake
off or resist. Never was there a teacher that so uniformly baffled every
expectation of his followers, never one that was followed so persistently.
Comprehensive, under no human conditions.
Again, the singular balance of character displayed in the teachings of Jesus, indicates an exemption from the standing infirmity of human nature. Human opinions are formed under a law that seems to be universal. First, two opposite extremes are thrown up, in two opposite leaders or parties; then a third party enters, trying to find what truth they both are endeavoring to vindicate, and settle thus a view of the subject, that includes the truth and clears the one-sided extremes, which opposing words or figures, not yet measured in their force, had produced.
It results, in this
manner, that no man, even the broadest in his apprehensions, is ever at the
point of equilibrium as regards all subjects. Even the ripest of us are continually
falling into some extreme, and losing our balance, afterward to be corrected by
some other who discovers our error, or that of our school.
Could not hold a one-sided view.
But Christ was of no school or party, and never went to any extreme—words could never turn him to a one-sided view of anything. This is the remarkable fact that distinguishes him from any other known teacher of the world. Having nothing to work out in a word-process, but every thing clear in the simple intuition of his superhuman intelligence, he never pushes himself to any human eccentricity. It does not even appear that he is trying, as we do, to balance opposites and clear extravagances, but he does it, as one who can not imagine a one-sided view of any thing.
He is never a radical, never a conservative. He will not allow his disciples to deny him before kings and governments, be will not let them renounce their allegiance to Cæsar. He exposes the oppressions of the Pharisees in Moses’ seat, but, encouraging no factious resistance, says—“do as they command you.” His position as a reformer was universal; according to his principles almost nothing, whether in church or state, or in social life, was right, and yet he is thrown into no antagonism against the world.
How a man will do, when he engages only in some one reform,
acting from his own human force; the fuming, storming phrenzy, the holy rage
and tragic smoke of his violence, how he kindles against opposition, grows
bitter and restive because of delay, and finally comes to maturity in a
character thoroughly detestable—all this we know. But Christ, with all the
world upon his hands, and a reform to be carried in almost every thing, is yet
as quiet and cordial, and as little in the attitude of bitterness or
impatience, as if all hearts were with him, or the work already done; so
perfect is the balance of his feeling, so intuitively moderated is it by a
wisdom not human.
Clear of all the current superstitions.
We can not stay to sketch a full outline of this particular and sublime excellence, as it was displayed in his life. It will be seen as clearly in a single comparison or contrast as in many, or in a more extended inquiry. Take, then, for an example, what may be observed in his open repugnance to all superstition, combined with his equal repugnance to what is commonly praised as a mode of liberality.
He lived in a superstitious age and among a superstitious people. He was a person of low education, and nothing, as we know, clings to the uneducated mind with the tenacity of a superstition. Lord Bacon, for example, a man certainly of the very highest intellectual training, was yet harmed by superstitions too childish to be named with respect, and which clung to him despite of all his philosophy, even to his death.
But Christ, with no learned culture at all, comes forth out of Galilee, as perfectly clean of all the superstitions of his time, as if he had been a disciple, from his childhood, of Hume or Strauss. “You children of superstition think,” he says, “that those Galileans, whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, and those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, must have been monsters, to suffer such things. I tell you, nay; but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”
To another company he says—“You imagine, in your Pharisaic and legal morality, that the Sabbath of Moses stands in the letter; but I tell you that the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath; little honor, therefore, do you pay to God, when you teach that it is not lawful to do good on this day. Your washings are a great point, you tithe herbs and seeds with a sanctimonious fidelity, would it not be as well for you, teachers of the law, to have some respect to the weightier matters of justice, faith, and benevolence?"
Thus, while Socrates, one of the greatest and purest of human souls, a man who has. attained to many worthy conceptions of God, hidden from his idolatrous countrymen, is constrained to sacrifice a cock to Esculapius, the uneducated Jesus lives and dies superior to every superstition of his time; believing nothing because it is believed, respecting nothing because it is sanctified by custom and by human observance.
Even in the closing
scene of his life, we see his learned and priestly associates refusing to go
into the judgment-hall of Caiaphas, lest they should be ceremonially defiled
and disqualified for the feast; though detained by no scruple at all as regards
the instigation of a murder! While he, on the other hand, pitying their
delusions, prays for them from his cross—“Father, forgive them, for they know
not what they do.”
But no liberalist.
And yet Christ is no liberal, never takes the ground or boasts the distinction of a liberal among his countrymen, because it is not a part of his infirmity, in discovering an error here, to fly to an excess there. His ground is charity, not liberality; and the two are as wide apart in their practical implications, as adhering to all truth, and being loose in all.
Charity holds fast the minutest atoms of truth, as being precious and divine, offended by even so much as a thought of laxity. Liberality loosens the terms of truth; permitting easily and with careless magnanimity variations from it; consenting, as it were, in its own sovereignty, to overlook or allow them; and subsiding thus, ere long, into a licentious indifference to all truth, and a general defect of responsibility in regard to it.
Charity extends allowance to men; liberality, to falsities themselves. Charity takes the truth to be sacred and immovable; liberality allows it to be marred and maimed at pleasure. How different the manner of Jesus in this respect from that unreverent, feeble laxity, that lets the errors be as good as the truths, and takes it for a sign of intellectual eminence, that one can be floated comfortably in the abysses of liberalism.
“Judge not," he says, in holy charity, “that ye be not judged"; and again, in holy exactness, “whosoever shall break, or teach to break, one of these least commandments shall be least in the kingdom of God”—in the same way, “he that is not with us is against us"; and again, “he that is not against us is for us”—in the same way also, “ye tithe mint, anise, and cummin"; and again, “these things ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone”—once more, too, in the same way, “he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone"; and again, “go, and sin no more."
So
magnificent and sublime, so plainly divine, is the balance of Jesus, Nothing
throws him off the centre on which truth rests; no prejudice, no opposition, no
attempt to right a mistake, or rectify a delusion, or reform a practice. If
this be human, I do not know, for one, what it is to be human.
His simplicity is perfect.
Again, it is a remarkable and even superhuman distinction of Jesus, that, while he is advancing doctrines so far transcending all deductions of philosophy, and opening mysteries that defy all human powers of explication, he is yet able to set his teachings in a form of simplicity, that accommodates all classes of minds. And this, for the reason that he speaks directly to men’s convictions themselves, without and apart from any learned and curious elaboration, such as the uncultivated can not follow.
No one of the great writers of antiquity had even propounded, as yet, a doctrine of virtue which the multitude could understand. It was taught as being το καλον [the fair], or το πρεπον, [the becoming], or something of that nature, as distant from all their apprehensions, and as destitute of motive power, as if it were a doctrine of mineralogy. Considered as a gift to the world at large, it was the gift of a stone, not of bread.
But
Jesus tells them directly, in a manner level to their understanding, what they
want, what they must do and be, to inherit eternal life, and their inmost convictions
answer to his words. Besides, his doctrine is not so much a doctrine as a
biography, a personal power, a truth all motivity, a love walking the earth in
the proximity of a mortal fellowship. He only speaks what goes forth as a
feeling and a power in his life, breathing into all hearts. To be capable of
his doctrine, only requires that the hearer be a human creature, wanting to
know the truth.
Shining as pure light.
Call
him, then, who will, a man, a human teacher; what human teacher ever came down
thus upon the soul of the race, as a beam of light
from the skies—pure light, shining directly into the visual orb of the mind, a
light for all that live, a full transparent day, in which truth bathes the
spirit as an element. Others talk and speculate about truth, and those who can
may follow; but Jesus is the truth, and lives it, and if he is a mere human
teacher, he is the first who was ever able to find a form for truth, at all
adequate to the world’s uses. And yet the truths he teaches outreach all the
doctrines of all the philosophers of the world. He excels them a hundred-fold
more, in the scope and grandeur of his doctrine, than he does in his simplicity
itself.
Is this human, or is it plainly divine? If you will see what is human, or what the wisdom of humanity would ordain, it is this—exactly what the subtle and accomplished Celsus, the great adversary of Christianity in its original promulgation, alleges for one of his principal arguments against it. “Woollen manufacturers,” he says, “shoemakers and curriers, the most uneducated and boorish of men are zealous advocates of this religion; men who can not open their mouths before the learned, and who only try to gain over the women and children in families.”[1]
And again, what is only the same objection, under a different form, assuming that religion, like a philosophy, must be for the learned, he says, “He must be void of understanding who can believe that Greeks and barbarians, in Asia, Europe, and Lybia—all nations to the ends of the earth—can unite in one and the same religious doctrine.”[2]
So also, Plato says, “it is not easy to find the Father and Creator of all existence, and when he is found it is impossible to make him known to all."[3] “But exactly this,” says Justin Martyr, “is what our Christ has effected by his power.” And Tertullian, also, glorying in the simplicity of the gospel, so already proved to be a truly divine excellence, says, “Every Christian artisan has found God, and points him out to thee, and in fact, shows thee every thing which is sought for in God, although Plato maintains that the Creator of the world is not easily found, and that, when he is found, he can not be made known to all,”[4]
Here, then, we have Christ
against Celsus, and Christ against Plato. These agree in assuming that we have
a God, whom only the great can mount high enough in argument to know. Christ
reveals a God whom the humblest artisan can teach, and all mankind embrace,
with a faith that unifies them all.
This morality is not artistic.
Again, the morality of Jesus has a practical superiority to that of all human teachers, in the fact that it is not an artistic, or theoretically elaborated scheme, but one that is propounded in precepts that carry their own evidence, and are, in fact, great spiritual laws ordained by God, in the throne of religion. He did not draw long arguments to settle what the summum bonum is, and then produce a scheme of ethics to correspond. He did not go into the vexed question, what is the foundation of virtue? and hang a system upon his answer.
Nothing falls into an artistic
shape, as when Plato or Socrates tusked what kind of action is beautiful in
action? reducing the principles of morality to a form as difficult for the
uncultivated, as the art of sculpture itself. Yet Christ excels them all in the
beauty of his precepts, without once appearing to consider their beauty. He
simply comes forth telling us, from God, what to do, without deducing any thing
in a critical way; and yet, while nothing has ever yet been settled by the
critics and theorizing philosophers, that could stand fast and compel the
assent of the race, even for a year, the morality of Christ is about as firmly
seated in the convictions of men, as the law of gravity in their bodies.
But intuitive and original.
He comes into the world full of all moral beauty, as God of physical; and as God was not obliged to set himself to a course of æsthetic study, when he created the forms and landscapes of the world, so Christ comes to his rules, by no critical practice in words. He opens his lips, and the creative glory of his mind pours itself forth in living precepts—Do to others as ye would that others should do to you—Blessed are the peacemakers—Smitten upon one cheek, turn the other—Resist not evil—Forgive your enemies—Do good to them that hate you—Lend not, hoping to receive—Receive the truth as little children.
Omitting all the deep spiritual doctrines he taught, and taking all the human teachers on their own ground, the ground of preceptive morality, they are seen at once to be meager and cold; little artistic inventions, gleams of high conceptions caught by study, having about the same relation to the Christian morality that a statue has to the flexibility, the self-active force, and flushing warmth of man, as he goes forth in the image of his Creator, to be the reflection of His beauty and the living instrument of his will.
Indeed, it
is the very distinction of Jesus that he teaches, not a verbal, but an original,
vital, and divine morality. He does not dress up a moral picture and ask you to
observe its beauty, he only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful
characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived his
precepts without once conceiving their beauty.
Never anxious for success.
Once more, it is a high distinction of Christ’s character, as seen in his teachings, that he is never anxious for the success of his doctrine. Fully conscious of the fact that the world is against him, scoffed at, despised, hated, alone too, in his cause, and without partisans that have any public influence, no man has ever been able to detect in him the least anxiety for the final success of his doctrine. He is never jealous of contradiction.
When his friends display their dulness and incapacity, or even when they forsake him, he is never ruffled or disturbed. He rests on his words, with a composure as majestic as if he were sitting on the circle of the heavens. Now the consciousness of truth, we are not about to deny, has an effect of this nature in every truly great mind. But when it has had an effect so complete?
What human teacher, what great philosopher, has not shown some traces of anxiety for his school, that indicated his weakness; some pride in his friends, some dislike of his enemies, some traces of wounded ambition, when disputed or denied? But here is a lone man, a humble, uneducated man, never schooled into the elegant fiction of an assumed composure, or practised in the conventional dignities of manners, and yet, finding all the world against him, the world does not rest on its axle more firmly than he upon his doctrine.
Questioned by Pilate what he means by truth, it is enough to answer—“He that is
of the truth heareth my voice.” If this be human, no other man of the race, we
are sure, has ever dignified humanity by a like example.
Such is Christ as a teacher. When has the world seen a phenomenon like this; a lonely uninstructed youth, coming forth amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from his age, and from every thing around him, than a Plato would be rising up alone in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world, and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of his life and doctrine! Does he this by the force of mere human talent or genius? If so, it is time that we begin to look to genius for miracles; for there in really no greater miracle.
To go to Part 6.
[1]Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, p. 29.
[2]Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, p. 33.
[3]Timæus.
[4]Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, p. 29.
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