The Character of Jesus - Part 7

 

The fact of his miracles implied.  To go to Part 1

Here, then, is a being who has broken into the world, and is not of it; one who has come out from God, and is even an expression to us of the complete beauty of God—such as he should be, if he actually was, what he is affirmed to be, the Eternal Word of the Father incarnate. Did he work miracles? This now is the question that waits for our decision—did he work miracles? By the supposition, he is superhuman. By the supposition, too, he is in the world as a miracle. 

Agreeing that the laws of nature will not be suspended, any more than they are by our own supernatural action, will they yet be so subordinated to his power, as to permit the performance of signs and wonders, in which we may recognize a superhuman force? Since he is shown to be a superhuman being, manifestly nature will have a relation to him, under and by her own laws, such as accords with his superhuman quality, and it will be very singular if he does not do superhuman things; nay, it is even philosophically incredible that he should not, and that without any breach upon the integrity of nature.

Thus an organ is a certain instrument, curiously framed or adjusted in its paste, and prepared to yield itself to any force which touches the keys. An animal runs back and forth across the key-board, and produces a jarring, disagreeable jumble of sounds. Thereupon he begins to reason, and convinces himself that it is in the nature of the instrument to make such sounds, and no other. But a skilful player comes to the instrument, as a higher presence, endowed with a super-animal sense and skill. He strikes the keys, and all-melodious and heavenly sounds roll out upon the enchanted air. Will the animal now go on to reason that this is impossible, incredible, because it violates the nature of the instrument, and is contrary to his own experience?

Perhaps he may, and men may sometimes not be wiser than he. But the player himself, and all that can think it possible for him to do what the animal can not, will have no doubt that the music is made by the same laws that made the jargon. Just so Christ, to whose will or touch the mundane system is pliant as to ours, may be able to execute results through its very laws subordinated to him, which to us are impossible. Nay, it would be itself a contradiction of all order and fit relation if he could not. 

To suppose that a being out of humanity, will be shut up within all the limitations of humanity, is incredible, and contrary to reason. The very laws of nature themselves, having him present to them, as a new agent and higher first term, would require the development of new consequences and incidents, in the nature of wonders. Being a miracle himself, it would be the greatest of all miracles if he did not work miracles. 

His errand is order itself.

 

Let it be further noted, that Christ is here on an errand high enough to justify his appearing, and also of a nature to exclude any suspicion that he is going to overthrow the order of God’s works. He declares that he has come out from God, to be a restorer of sin, a regenerator of all things, a new moral creator of the world; thus to do a work that is, at once, the hope of all order, and the greatest of all miracle. He tells us, indeed, that he is come to set up the kingdom of God, and fulfil the highest ends of the divine goodness in the creation of the world itself; and the dignity of his work, certified by the dignity also of his character, sets all things in proportion, and commends him to our confidence in all the wonders he performs.

No disruption of law or system. 

Nor shall we apprehend in his miracles any disruption of law; for we shall see that he is executing that true system, above nature and more comprehensive, which is itself the basis of all stability, and contains the real import of all things. Dwelling from eternity in this higher system himself, and having it centred in his person, wheeling and subordinating thus all physical instruments, as doubtless he may, to serve those better ends in which all order lies, it will not be in us when he comes forth from the Father, on the Father’s errand, to forbid that he shall work in the prerogatives of the Father. 

Visibly not one of us, but a visitant who has come out from a realm of spiritual majesty, back of the sensuous orb on which our moth-eyes dwell as in congenial dimness and obscurity of light, what shall we think when we see diseases fly before him, and blindness letting fall the scales of obscured vision, and death retreating from its prey, but that the seeming disruption of our retributive state under sin, is made to let in mercy and order from above? For, if man has buried himself in sense, and married all sense to sin, which sin is itself the soul of all disorder, can it be to us a frightful thing that he lays his hand upon the perverted casualties, and says, “thou art made whole?" 

If the bad empire, the bitter un-nature of our sin, is somewhere touched by his healing power, must we apprehend some fatal shock of disorder? If, by his miraculous force, some crevice is made in the senses, to let in the light of heaven’s peace and order, must we tremble lest the scientific laws are shaken, and the scientific causes violated? 

Better is it to say—“This beginning of miracles did Jesus make in Galilee, and manifested forth his glory, and we believe in him.” Glory breaks in through his incarnate person, to chase away the darkness. In him, peace and order descend to rebuild the realm below, they have maintained above. Sin, the damned miracle and misery of the groaning creation, yields to the stronger miracle of Jesus and his works, and the great good minds of this and the upper worlds behold integrity and rest returning, and the peace of universal empire secure. Out of the disorder that was, rises order; out of chaos, beauty. Amen! Alleluia! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth!

The mythical hypothesis impossible. 

At the same time, it must not be overlooked, that the account which is made of the Christian miracles, by the critics who deny them, is itself impossible. It is that they are myths or legendary tales, that grew up out of the story-telling and marvelling habit of the disciples of Christ, within the first thirty years after their Master’s death. They were developed, in other words, in the lifetime of the eye-witnesses of Christ’s ministry, and recorded by eye-witnesses themselves. We are also required to believe that four common men are able to preserve such a character as that of Christ, while loading down the history thus, with so many mythical wonders that are the garb of their very grotesque and childish credulity! 

By what accident, then, we are compelled to ask, was an age of myths and fables able to develop and set forth the only conception of a perfect character ever known in our world? Were these four mythological dreamers, believing their own dreams and all others beside, the men to produce the perfect character of Jesus, and a system of teachings that transcend all other teachings ever given to the race? If there be a greater miracle, or a tax on human credulity more severe, we know not where it is. 

Nothing is so difficult, will human literature testifies, as to draw a character, and keep it in its living proportions. How much more to draw a perfect character, and not discolor it fatally by marks from the imperfection of the biographer. How is it, then, that four humble men, in an age of marvels and Rabbinical exaggerations, have done it—done what none, not even the wisest and greatest of mankind, have ever been able to do?

Their success Mr. Parker concedes. 

So far, even Mr. Parker concedes the right of my argument. “Measure,” he says, “the religious doctrine of Jesus by that of the time and place he lived in, or that of any time and any place. Yes, by the doctrine of eternal truth. Consider what a work his words and deeds have wrought in the world. Remember that the greatest minds have seen no farther, and added nothing to the doctrine of religion; that the richest hearts have felt no deeper, and added nothing to the sentiment of religion; have set no loftier aim, no truer method than his, of perfect love to God and man. Measure him by the shadow he has cast into the world—no, by the light he has shed upon it. Shall we be told such a man never lived? the whole story is a lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived. But who did their wonders, and who thought their thought? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus.”[1]

Exactly so. And yet, in the middle of the very paragraph from which these words are gleaned, Mr. Parker says, “We can learn few facts about Jesus”; also, that in certain things—to wit, his miracles, we suppose—“Hercules was his equal, and Vishnu his superior.” Few facts about Jesus! all the miracles recited of him, as destitute of credibility as the stories of Hercules and Vishnu! 

And yet these evangelists, retailing so many absurd fictions and so much childish gossip, have been able to give us a doctrine upon which the world has never advanced, a character so deep that the richest hearts have felt nothing deeper, and added nothing to the sentiment of it. They have done, that is, the difficult thing, and broken down under the easy! preserved, in the life and discourses of Jesus, what exceeds all human philosophy, all mortal beauty, and yet have not been able to recite the simplest facts! Is it so that any intelligent critic will reason?

The miracles are in place in a gospel. 

Neither let it be objected that, since the miracles have in themselves no moral quality, there is no rational, or valuable, or even proper place for them in a gospel, considered as a new-creating grace for the world. For it is a thing of no secondary importance for a sinner, down under sin, and held fast in its bitter terms of bondage, to see that God has entered into his case with a force that is adequate.

 These mighty works of Jesus, which have been done and duly certified, are fit expressions to us of the fact that he can do for us all that we want. Doubtless it is a great and difficult thing to regenerate a fallen nature; no person, really awake to his miserable and dreadful bondage, ever thought otherwise. But he that touched the blind eyes and commanded the leprosy away, he that trod the sea, and raised the dead, and burst the bars of death himself, can tame the passions, sweeten the bitter affections, regenerate the inbred diseases, and roll back all the storms of the mind. 

Assured in this manner by his miracles, they become arguments of trust, a storehouse of powerful images, that invigorate courage and stimulate hope. Broken as we are by our sorrow, cast down as we are by our guiltiness, ashamed, and weak, and ready to despair, we can yet venture a hope that our great soul-miracle may be done; that, if we can but touch the hem of Christ’s garment, a virtue will go out of him to heal us. 

In all dark days and darker struggles of the mind, in all outward disasters, and amid all storms upon the sea of life, we can yet descry him treading the billows, and hear him saying, “It is I, be not afraid.” And lest we should believe the miracles faintly, for there is a busy infidel lurking always in our hearts to cheat us of our faith, when he cannot reason it away, the character of Jesus in ever shining with and through them, in clear self-evidence, leaving them never to stand as raw wonders only of might, but covering them with glory, as tokens of a heavenly love, and note that only suit the proportions of his personal greatness and majesty.

There are many in our day, as we know, who, without making any speculative point of the objection we are discussing, have so far yielded to the current misbelief as to profess, with a certain air of self-compliment, that they are quite content to accept the spirit of Jesus; and let the miracles go for what they are worth. Little figure will they make as Christians in that kind of gospel. They will not, in fact, receive the spirit of Jesus; for that, unabridged, is itself the Grand Miracle of Christianity, about which all the others play as scintillations only of the central fire. 

Still less will they believe that Jesus can do any thing in them which their sin requires. They will only compliment his beauty, imitate or ape his ways in a feeble lifting of themselves, but that he can roll back the currents of nature, loosened by the disorders of sin and raise them to a new birth in holiness, they will not believe. No such watery gospel of imitation, separated from grace, will have any living power in their life, or set them in any bond of unity with God. Nothing but to say—“Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God by miracles and signs which God did by him,” can draw the soul to faith, and open it to the power of a supernatural and new-creative mercy.

Jesus himself the all-sufficient evidence. 

We come back, then, to the self-evidencing superhuman character of Jesus, and there we rest. He is the sun that holds all the minor orbs of revelation to their places, and pours a sovereign, self-evidencing light into all religious knowledge. We have been debating much, and ranging over a wide field, in chase of the many phantoms of doubt and false argument, still we have not far to go for light, if only we could cease debating and sit down to see. 

It is no ingenious fetches of argument that we want; no external testimony, gathered here and there from the records of past ages, suffices to end our doubts; but it is the new sense opened in us by Jesus himself—a sense deeper than words and more immediate than inference—of the miraculous grandeur of his life; a glorious agreement felt between his works and his person, such that his miracles themselves are proved to us in our feeling, believed in by that inward testimony. On this inward testimony we are willing to stake every thing, even the life that now is, and that which is to come. 

If the miracles, if revelation itself, can not stand upon the superhuman ohmmeter of Jesus, then let it fall. If that character does not contain all truth and centralize all truth in itself, then let there be no truth. If there is any thing worthy of belief not found in this, we may well consent to live and die without it. Before this sovereign light, streaming out from God, the deep questions, and dark surmises, and doubts unresolved, which make a night so gloomy and terrible about us, hurry away to their native abyss. 

God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This it is that has conquered the assaults of doubt and false learning in all past ages, and will in all ages to come. No argument against the sun will drive it from the sky. No mole-eyed skepticism, dazzled by its brightness, can turn away the shining it refuses to look upon. And they who long after God, will be ever turning their eyes thitherward, and either with reason or without reason, or, if need be, against manifold impediments of reason, will see and believe.

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But before we drop a theme like this, let us note more distinctly the immense significance to our religious feeling of this glorious advent of Jesus, and have our congratulations in it, This one perfect character has come into our world, and lived in it; filling all the molds of action, all the terms of duty and love, with his own divine manners, works and charities. All the conditions of our life are raised thus, by the meaning he has shown to be in them, and the grace he has put upon them. The world itself is changed, and is no more the same that it was; it has never been the same since Jesus left it. The air is charged with heavenly odors, and a kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, is wafted on us in its breath.

 Let the dark ages come, let society roll backward and churches perish in whole regions of the earth, let infidelity deny, and, what is worse, let spurious piety dishonor the truth; still there is a something here that was not, and a something that has immortality in it. Still our confidence remains unshaken, that Christ and his all-quickening life are in the world, as fixed elements, and will be to the end of time; for Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine, as of a perfect character; and how can a perfect character, once entered into life and history, be separated and finally expelled? It were easier to untwist all the beams of light in the sky, separating and expunging one of the colors, than to get the character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of the world. 

Look ye hither, meantime, all ye blinded and fallen of mankind, a better nature is among you, a pure heart, out of some pure world, is come into your prison and walks it with you. Do you require of us to show who he is, and definitely to expound his person? We may not be able. Enough to know that he is not of us—some strange being out of nature and above it, whose name is Wonderful. Enough that sin has never touched his hallowed nature, and that he is a friend. In him dawns a hope—purity has not come into the world, except to purify. Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world! Light breaks in, peace settles on the air, lo! the prison walls are giving way—rise, let us go.

END.

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[1]Life of Jesus, p. 363.

On Horace Bushnell from Encyclepedia Britannica

Horace Bushnell, (born April 14, 1802, Bantam, Connecticut, U.S.—died February 17, 1876, Hartford, Connecticut), Congregational minister and controversial theologian, sometimes called “the father of American religious liberalism.” He grew up in the rural surroundings of New Preston, Connecticut, joined the Congregational Church in 1821, and in 1823 entered Yale with plans to become a minister. After his graduation in 1827, however, he taught school briefly, served as associate editor of the New York Journal of Commerce, and studied law at Yale. Not until 1831, after he had qualified for the bar, did his religious doubts diminish sufficiently for him to begin his theological education. He entered Yale Divinity School and in 1833 was ordained minister of the North Congregational Church in Hartford, where he served for more than 20 years until ill health forced his resignation.

A major figure in American intellectual history, Bushnell stood between the orthodox tradition of Puritan New England and the new romantic impulses represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher. His first significant publication, Christian Nurture (1847), was a thorough critique of the prevailing emphasis placed on the conversion experience by revivalists. In God in Christ (1849), published in the year of his mystical experience that illumined the gospel for him, Bushnell challenged the traditional, substitutionary view of the atonement (i.e., that the death of Christ was the substitute for man’s punishment for sin) and considered problems of language, emphasizing the social, symbolic, and evocative nature of language as related to religious faith and the mysteries of God. Christ in Theology (1851) amplified and defended his attitude toward theological language, giving special attention to metaphoric language and to an instrumental view of the Trinity. In Nature and the Supernatural (1858) he viewed the twin elements of the title as constituting the one “system of God” and sought to defend from skeptical attack the Christian position on sin, miracles, incarnation, revelation, and Christ’s divinity.

Bushnell’s views were bitterly attacked, and in 1852 North Church withdrew from the local “consociation” in order to preclude an ecclesiastical heresy trial. Despite such opposition, however, his ability to assemble and present coherent arguments guaranteed the impact and influence of his interpretation of Christianity. Among his numerous works are The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866), Forgiveness and Law (1874), and six volumes of essays and sermons. An essay on “Science and Religion” (1868) shows his resistance to Darwinian evolutionary theory. His moderate and cautious views on social issues are recorded in A Discourse on the Slavery Question (1839); The Census and Slavery (1860); and Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (1869).

Horace Bushnell

The Congregational clergyman Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) was the pivotal American theologian who freed mainstream Protestant theology from its Puritan scholasticism and established the basis for religious liberalism.

Horace Bushnell was born April 14, 1802, at Bantam, Conn. He graduated from Yale College in 1827. For a time he taught school and served as an editor, but in 1829 he returned to Yale to study law. A spiritual revival in 1831 led him to transfer to the Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1833. He studied under Nathaniel W. Taylor, leader of the "New Haven theology" in vogue then, but he was unimpressed by the dry theological scholasticism. In 1833 Bushnell was ordained as pastor of North Church, Hartford, Conn., where he remained for 26 years until poor health forced him to retire.

It was as a theologian rather than as a pastor that Bushnell was most significant. Primarily, he provided the intellectual method and content to break the dogmatic system-building approach of Puritan theology. His first major work, Christian Nurture (1847, rev. 1861), refuted the prevalent focus on the necessity of conversion by arguing that a child of believing parents should grow up so that he never knows he is anything but a Christian. A profound mystical experience during 1848 led him to overlook the hostility his views had aroused.

In God in Christ (1848) Bushnell included a preliminary discourse on language which is the crucial explanation of his basic method. Maintaining that language consists of symbols agreed on by social groups, he insisted that the historical context of words is crucial for understanding and that changing situations require new definitions. Conservative clergymen immediately saw the threat this posed to their use of traditional doctrine, and charges of heresy were prepared. Only the withdrawal of Bushnell's congregation from the local consociation in 1852 enabled him to avoid trial.

Bushnell's Nature and the Supernatural (1858) was so sweeping in scope that it contained all creation in one divine system, which laid the basis of the Kingdom of God emphasis of liberalism. In The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866) and Forgiveness and Law (1874) he stressed the moral theory of the atonement, which liberalism embraced. At his death on Feb. 17, 1876, his views were still considered heretical by most contemporaries, but within a few decades his works became regarded as the basic literature for Christ-centered liberalism. Though later liberals altered his ideas, he may rightly be called the father of the liberal movement, which has been so important in Protestant theology in the past century.

https://biography.yourdictionary.com/horace-bushnell

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The Character of Jesus - Part 6

The Character of Jesus, Part 6

There is yet one other and more inclusive distinction of the character of Jesus, which must not be omitted, and which sets him off more widely from all the mere men of the race, just because it raises a contrast which is, at once, total and experimental. Human characters are always reduced in their eminence, and the impressions of awe they have raised, by a closer and more complete acquaintance. Weakness and blemish are discovered by familiarity; admiration lets in qualifiers; on approach, the halo dims a little. But it was not so with Christ. 

With his disciples, in closest terms of intercourse, for three whole years; their brother, friend, teacher, monitor, guest, fellow-traveler; seen by them under all the conditions of public ministry, and private society, where the ambition of show, or the pride of power, or the ill-nature provoked by annoyance, or the vanity drawn out by confidence, would most certainly be reducing him to the criticism even of persons most unsophisticated, he is yet visibly raising their sense of his degree and quality; becoming a greater wonder and holier mystery, and gathering to his person feelings of reverence and awe, at once more general and more sacred. Familiarity operates a kind of apotheosis, and the man becomes divinity, in simply being known.

At first, he is the Son of Mary and the Nazarene carpenter. Next, he is heard speaking with authority, as contrasted even with the Scribes. Next, he is conceived by some to be certainly Elias, or some one of the prophets, returned in power to the world. Peter takes him up, at that point, as being certainly the Christ, the great mysterious Messiah; only not so great that he is not able to reprove him, when he begins to talk of being killed by his enemies; protesting “be it far from thee, Lord.” 

But the next we see of the once bold apostle, he is beckoning to another, at the table, to whisper the Lord and ask who it is that is going to betray him; unable himself to so much as invade the sacred ear of his Master with the audible and open question. Then, shortly after, when he comes out of the hall of Caiaphas, flushed and flurried with his threefold lie, and his base hypocrisy of cursing, what do we see but that, simply catching the great Master’s eye, his heart breaks down, riven with insupportable anguish, and is utterly dissolved in childish tears. And so it will be discovered in all the disciples, that Christ is more separated from them, and holds them in deeper awe, the closer he comes to them and the more perfectly they know him.

The same, too, is true of his enemies. At first, they look on him only as some new fanatic, that has come to turn the heads of the people. Next, they want to know whence he drew his opinion, and his singular accomplishments in the matter of public address; not being, as all that knew him testify, an educated man. Next, they send out a company to arrest him, and, when they hear him speak, they are so deeply impressed that they dare not do it, but go back, under a kind of invincible awe, testifying--“never man spake like this man.”

 Afterward, to break some fancied spell there may be in him, they hire one of his own friends to betray him; and even then, when they come directly before him and hear him speak, they are in such tremor of apprehension, lest he should suddenly annihilate them, that they reel incontinently backward and are pitched on the ground. Pilate trembles visibly before him, and the more because of his silence and his wonderful submission. And then, when the fatal deed is done, what do we see but that the multitude, awed by some dread mystery in the person of the crucified, return home smiting on their breasts for anguish, in the sense of what their infatuated and guilty rage has done.

Our experience of men reverse in him. 

The most conspicuous matter, therefore, in the history of Jesus, is, that what holds true, in all our experience of men, is inverted in him. He grows sacred, peculiar, wonderful, divine, as acquaintance reveals him. At first he is only a man, as the senses report him to be; knowledge, observation, familiarity, raise him into the God-man. He grows pure and perfect, more than mortal in wisdom, a being enveloped in sacred mystery, a friend to be loved in awe—dies into awe, and a sorrow that contains the element of worship! And exactly this appears in the history, without any token of art, or even apparent consciousness that it does appear—appears because it is true. Probably no one of the evangelists ever so much as noticed this remarkable inversion of what holds good respecting men, in the life and character of Jesus. Is this character human, or is it plainly divine?

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Recapitulation. 

We have now sketched some of the principal distinctions of the superhuman character of Jesus. We have seen him unfolding as a flower, from the germ of a perfect youth; growing up to enter into great scenes and have his part in great trials; harmonious in all with himself and truth, a miracle of celestial beauty. He is a Lamb in innocence, a God in dignity; revealing an impenitent but faultless piety, such as no mortal ever attempted, such as, to the highest of mortals, is inherently impossible. 

He advances the most extravagant pretensions, without any show of conceit, or even seeming fault of modesty. He suffers without affectation of composure and without restraint of pride; suffers as no mortal sensibility can, and where, to mortal view, there was no reason for pain at all; giving us not only an example of gentleness and patience in all the small trials of life, but revealing the depths even of the passive virtues of God, in his agony and the patience of his suffering love. 

He undertakes also a plan, universal in extent, perpetual in time; to unite all nations in a kingdom of righteousness under God; laying his foundations in the hearts of the poor, as no great teacher had ever done before, and yet without creating ever a faction, or stirring one partisan feeling in his followers. In his teachings he is perfectly original, distinct from his age and from all ages; never warped by the expectation of his friends; always in a balance of truth, swayed by no excesses, running to no oppositions or extremes; clear of all superstition, and equally clear of all liberalism; presenting the highest doctrines in the lowest and simplest forms; establishing a pure, universal morality, never before established; and, with all his intense devotion to the truth, never anxious, perceptibly, for the success of his doctrine. 

Finally, to sum up all in one, he grows more great and wise, and sacred, the more he is known—needs, in fact, to be known, to have his perfection seen. And we say, is Jesus, the Christ; manifestly not human, not of our world—some being who has burst into it, and is not of it. Call him for the present, that “Holy Thing,” and say, “by this we believe that thou camest from God.”

Not to say that we are dissatisfied with this sketch, would be almost an irreverence of itself, to the subject of it. Who can satisfy himself with any thing that he can say of Jesus Christ? We have seen, how many pictures of the sacred person of Jesus, by the first masters; but not one, among them all, that did not rebuke the weakness which could dare attempt an impossible subject. So of the character of Jesus. 

It is necessary, for the holy interest of truth, that we should explore it, as we are best able; but what are human thoughts and human conceptions, on a subject that dwarfs all thought and immediately outgrows whatever is conceived. And yet, for the reason that we have failed, we seem also to have succeeded. For the more impossible it is found to be, to grasp the character and set it forth, the more clearly it is seen to be above our range—a miracle and a mystery.

Did such a being actually exist? 

Two questions now remain, which our argument requires to be answered. And the first is this—did any such character, as this we have been tracing, actually exist? Admitting that the character, whether it be fact or fiction, is such as we have seen it to be, two supposition are open; either that such a character actually lived, and was possible to be described, because it furnished the matter of the picture, itself; or else, that Jesus, being a merely human character as he lived, was adorned to set off in this manner, by the exaggeration of fancy, and fable, and wild tradition afterward. 

In the former alternative, we have the insuperable difficulty of believing, that any so perfect and glorious character was ever attained to by a mortal. If Christ was a merely natural man, then was he under all the condition privative, as regards the security of his virtue, that we have discovered in man. He was a new-created being, as such to be perfected in a character of steadfast holiness, only by the experiment of evil and redemption from it. We can believe any miracle, therefore, more easily than that Christ was a man, and yet a perfect character, such as here is given.

In the latter alternative, we have four different writers, widely distinguished in their style and mental habit—inferior persons, all, as regards their accomplishments, and none of them remarkable for gifts of genius—contributing their parts, and coalescing thus in the representation of a character perfectly harmonious with itself, and, withal, a character whose ideal no poet had been able to create, no philosopher, by the profoundest effort of thought, to conceive and set forth to the world. 

What is more, these four writers are, by the supposition, children all of credulity, retailing the absurd gossip and the fabulous stories of an age of marvels, and yet, by some accident, they are found to have conceived and sketched the only perfect character known to mankind. To believe this, requires a more credulous age than these writers ever saw. We fall back, then, upon our conclusion, and there we rest. Such was the real historic character of Jesus. Thus he lived; the character is possible to be conceived, because it was actualized in a living example. The only solution is that which is given try Jesus himself, when he says—“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world.”

Was he a sinless character? 

The second question is this: whether this character is to be conceived as an actually existing sinless character in the world? That it is I maintain, because the character can no otherwise be accounted for in its known excellences. How was it that a simple-minded peasant of Galilee, was able to put himself in advance, in this manner, of all human teaching and excellence; unfolding a character so peculiar in its combinations, and so plainly impossible to any mere man of the race? Because his soul was filled with internal beauty and purity, having no spot, or stain, distorted by no obliquity of view or feeling, lapsing, therefore, into no eccentricity or deformity. 

We can make out no account of him so easy to believe, as that he was sinless; indeed, we can make no other account of him at all. He realized what are, humanly speaking, impossibilities; for his soul was warped and weakened by no human infirmities, doing all in a way of ease and naturalness, just because it is easy for clear waters to flow from a pure spring. To believe that Jesus got up these high conceptions artistically, and then acted them, in spite of the conscious disturbance of his internal harmony, and the conscious clouding of his internal purity by sin, would involve a degree of credulity and a want of perception, as regards the laws of the soul and their necessary action under sin, so lamentable as to be a proper subject of pity. We could sooner believe all the fables of the Talmud.

Besides, if Jesus was a sinner, he was conscious of sin as all sinners are, and, therefore, was a hypocrite in the whole fabric of his character; realizing so muck of divine beauty in it, maintaining the show of such unfaltering harmony and celestial grace, and doing all this with a mind confused and fouled by the affectations acted for true virtues! Such an example of successful hypocrisy would be itself the greatest miracle ever heard of in the world.

Furthermore, if Jesus was a sinner, then he was, of course, a fallen being; down under the bondage, distorted by the perversity of sin and its desolating effects, as men are. The root, therefore, of all his beauty is guilt. Evil has broken loose in him, he is held fast under evil. Bad thoughts are streaming through his soul in bad successions; his tempers have lost their tune; his affections have been touched by leprosy; remorse scowls upon his heart; his views have lost their balance and contracted obliquity; in a word, he is fallen. Is it then such a being, one who has been touched, in this manner, by the demon spell of evil—is it he that is unfolding such a character? 

Mr. Parker’s estimate of him. 

What, then, do our critics in the school of naturalism say of this character of Christ? Of course they are obliged to say many handsome and almost saintly things of it. Mr. Parker says of him, that “He unites in himself the sublimed precepts and divinest practices, thus more than realizing the dream of prophets and sages; rises free from all prejudice of his age, nation, or sect; gives free range to the Spirit of God, in his breast; sets aside the law, sacred and true—honored as it was, its forms, its sacrifice, its temple, its priests; puts away the doctors of the law, subtle, irrefragable, and pours out a doctrine beautiful as the light, sublime as Heaven, and true as God.”[1] 

Again—as if to challenge for his doctrine, the distinction of a really supernatural excellence—“Try him as we try other teachers. They deliver their word, find a few waiting for the consolation who accept the new tidings, follow the new method, and soon go beyond their teacher, though less mighty minds than he. Though humble men, we see what Socrates and Luther never saw. But eighteen centuries have passed since the Sun of humanity rose so high in Jesus; what man, what sect has mastered his thought, comprehended his method, and so fully applied it to life.”[2]

Mr. Hennel’s estimate. 

Mr. Hennel, who writes in a colder mood, but has, on the whole, produced the ablest of all the arguments yet offered on this side, speaks more cautiously. He says, “While no human character, in the history of the world, can be brought to mind, which, in proportion as it could be closely examined, did not present some defects, disqualifying it for being the emblem of moral perfection, we can rest, with least check or sense of incongruity, on the imperfectly known character of Jesus of Nazareth.”[3]

Faults charged. 

But the intimation here is, that the character is not perfect; it is only one in which the sense of perfection suffers “least check.” And where is the fault charged? Why, it is discovered that Jesus cursed a fig-tree, in which he is seen to be both angry and unreasonable. He denounced the Pharisees in terms of bitter animosity. He also drove the money changers out of the temple with a scourge of rode, in which he is even betrayed into an act of physical violence. These and such like specks of fault are discovered, as they think, in the life of Jesus. 

So graceless in our conceit, have we of this age grown, that we can think it a point of scholarly dignity and reason, to spot the only perfect beauty that has ever graced our world, with such discovered blemishes as these! As if sin could ever need to be made out against a real sinner, in this small way of special pleading; or as if it were ever the way of sin to err in single particles or homoeopathic quantities of wrong! A more just sensibility would denounce this malignant style of criticism, as a heartless and really low-minded pleasure in letting down the honors of goodness.

Faults supposed and intimated. 

In justice to Mr. Parker, it must be admitted that he does not actually charge these points of history as faults, or blemishes in the character of Jesus. And yet, in justice also, it must be added that he does compose a section under the heading—“The Negative Side, or the Limitations of Jesus,”—where these, with other like matters, are thrown in by insinuation, as possible charges sometimes advanced by others. 

For himself, he alleges nothing positive, but that Jesus was under the popular delusion of his time, in respect to devils or demoniacal possessions, and that he was mistaken in some of his references to the Old Testament. What, now, is to be thought of such material, brought forward under such a heading, to flaw such a character! Is it sure that Christ was mistaken in his belief of the foul spirits? Is it certain that a sufficient mode of interpretation will not clear his references of mistake? 

And so, when it is suggested, at second hand, that his invective is too fierce against the Pharisees, is there no escape, but to acknowledge that, “considering his youth, it was a venial error?" Or, if there be no charge but this, “at all affecting the moral and religious character of Jesus,” should not a just reverence to one whose life is so nearly faultless, constrain us to look for some more favorable construction, that takes the solitary blemish away? Is it true that invective is a necessary token of ill-nature? Are there no occasions where even holiness will be most forward in it? 

And when a single men stands out alone, facing a whole living order and caste, that rule the time—oppressors of the poor, hypocrites and pretenders in religion, corrupters of all truth and faith, under the names of learning and religion—is the malediction, the woe, that he hurls against them, to be taken as a fault of violence and unregulated passion; or considering what amount of force and public influence he dares to confront and set in deadly enmity against his person, is he rather to be accepted as God’s champion, in the honors of great and genuinely heroic spirit?

His invective against the Pharisees. 

Considering how fond the world is of invective, how ready to admire the rhetoric of sharp words, how many speakers study to excel in the fine art of excoriation, how many reformers are applauded in vehement attacks on character, and win a great repute of fearlessness, just because of their severity, when, in fact, there is nothing to fear—when possibly the subject is a dead man, not yet buried—it is really a most striking tribute to the more than human character of Jesus, that we are found to be so apprehensive respecting him in particular, lest his plain, unstudied, unrhetorical severities on this or that occasion, may imply some possible defect, or “venial error,” in him. Why this special sensibility to fault in him? save that, by his beautiful and perfect life, he has raised our conceptions so high as to make, what we might applaud in a man, a possible blemish in his divine excellence?

The glorious old reformer and blind poet of Puritanism—vindicator of a free commonwealth and a free, unprelatical religion—holds, in our view, a far worthier and manlier conception of Christ’s dealing with the Pharisees, and of what is due to all the usurpations of titled conceit and oppression in the world. With truly refreshing vehemence, he writes—

“For in times of opposition, when against new heresies arising, or old corruptions to be reformed, this cool, impassionate mildness of positive wisdom, is not enough to damp and astonish the proud resistance of carnal and false doctors, then (that I may have leave to soar awhile, as the poets use,) Zeal, whose substance is ethereal, arming in complete diamond, ascends his fiery chariot, drawn by two blazing meteors figured like beasts, but of a higher breed than any the zodiac yields, resembling those four which Ezekiel and St. John saw—the one visaged like a lion, to express power, high authority, and indignation; the other of man, to cast derision and scorn upon perverse and fraudulent seducers—with them the invincible warrior, Zeal, shaking loosely the slack reins, drives over the heads of scarlet prelates and such as are insolent to maintain traditions, bruising their stiff necks under his flaming wheels. Thus did the true prophets of old combat with the false; thus Christ, himself the fountain of meekness, found acrimony enough to be still galling and vexing the prelatical Pharisee. But ye will say, these had immediate warrant from God to be thus bitter; and I say, so much the plainer is it found that there may be a sanctified bitterness against the enemies of the truth.”[4]

Probably Christ himself had no other account to give of his conduct, on the occasion referred to; and no other was needed, than that he felt a zeal within him (answering to Milton’s picture), which could not, must not be repressed. His disciples felt his terrible severity, and were going to be shocked by it, but they remembered the Scripture—“The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up.” After all, it was, when rightly viewed, the necessary outburst, only, of that indignant fire, which is kindled in the sweet bosom of innocence, by the insolence of hypocrisy and oppression.

I conclude, then, (1.) that Christ actually lived, and bore the real character ascribed to him in the history. And (2.) that he was a sinless character. How far off is he now from any possible classification in the genus humanity!

To go to Part 7

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[1]Discourses of Religion, p. 294.

[2]Discourses of Religion, p. 303.

[3]Inquiry, p. 451.

[4]Apology for Smectymnus, Sect. I.

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The Character of Jesus, Part 5

 

The Character of Jesus, Forbidding His Possible Classification With Men. Part 5  To go to Part 1.

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.

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[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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