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Pastor Pastorum; Or, The Schooling of the Apostles by Our Lord

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Title: Pastor Pastorum; Or, The Schooling of the Apostles by Our Lord

Author: Henry Latham


        
Release date: July 23, 2011 [eBook #36828]
                Most recently updated: June 17, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASTOR PASTORUM; OR, THE SCHOOLING OF THE APOSTLES BY OUR LORD ***





                             Pastor Pastorum

                                  Or The

                        Schooling of the Apostles

                               By Our Lord

                                    By

                          Rev. Henry Latham M.A.

                     Master of Trinity Hall Cambridge

                     Cambridge: Deighton Bell And Co.

                       London: George Bell And Sons

                                   1899





CONTENTS


Preface.
Introductory Chapter.
Chapter II. Human Freedom.
Chapter III. Of Revelation.
Chapter IV. Our Lord’s Use Of Signs.
Chapter V. The Laws Of The Working Of Signs.
Chapter VI. From The Temptation To The Ministry In Galilee.
Chapter VII. The Preaching To The Multitudes.
Chapter VIII. The Choosing Of The Apostles.
Chapter IX. The Schooling Of The Apostles. The Mission To The Cities.
Chapter X. To Those Who Have, Is Given.
Chapter XI. From The Mount To Jerusalem.
Chapter XII. The Later Lessons.
Chapter XIII. The Lessons Of The Resurrection.
Chronological Appendix.
Index Of Texts.
General Index.
Footnotes






PREFACE.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRINITY HALL LODGE,
_May 1st, 1890_.





INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the end of His coming had been to gain adherents, His purpose would
have been furthered by granting a Sign which would have struck the
imagination of the masses; but to raise a large immediate following was
_not_ our Lord’s design. He wanted only a few fit spirits as depositories
of His word.

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER II. HUMAN FREEDOM.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First let us consider the following passage from St John’s Gospel:(8)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    “To justify the ways of God to man.”


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





CHAPTER III. OF REVELATION.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    “The secrets of his heart are made manifest.”(20)


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

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

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





CHAPTER IV. OUR LORD’S USE OF SIGNS.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




(1) The attraction of hearers.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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




(2) Selection.


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

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

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




(3) Preparation.


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

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

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

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

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




(4) Setting forth the Kingdom of God.


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

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

“But if I by the finger of God cast out devils, then is the _kingdom of
God come upon you_.”(28)

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


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

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


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


    “And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working
    with them, and _confirming the word with signs following_.
    Amen.”(31)




(5) Teaching wrought by signs.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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


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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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


Of the next day it is related:


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


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

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

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

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

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

Lastly we come to the important subject of




(7) Miracles as a means of proof.


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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


    “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or
    _else_ believe me for the very works’ sake.”(46)


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

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

The chief texts adduced in disparagement of miracles are:


    “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise believe,”(47)


and


    “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.”(48)


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

Our Lord’s course of proceeding in a very important instance, the occasion
on which John the Baptist sends his disciples to Him, is a most
instructive instance of His use of Signs. These Signs furnished the kind
of evidence most available in that particular case.

When the Baptist is in prison he sends two of his disciples to our Lord
with the question, “Art Thou He that cometh, or look we for another?”(52)
Many months had passed since the baptism of our Lord, and it seemed that
nothing had been done. He was himself in prison, removed from the
presence, and personal influence of our Lord. His recollections of Him
were perhaps fading, and his faith growing low. He was then in the
position for which the argument from signs is especially suitable—nothing
would help him like facts. He was in the situation in which tens of
thousands of Christians are still—believing, and yet having misgivings now
and then whether what they call their Faith may not be fancy,—longing for
something positive to cling to, some support outside themselves. Such
support our Lord affords the Baptist; He puts him as nearly as possible in
the position of a witness of the miracles.

We read:


    “In that hour he cured many of diseases and plagues and evil
    spirits; and on many that were blind he bestowed sight. And he
    answered and said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what
    things ye have seen and heard; the blind receive their sight, the
    lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead
    are raised up, the poor have good tidings preached to them. And
    blessed is he, whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in
    me.”(53)


We have no other instance in which miracles are wrought in order to assist
one who is in doubt. Our Lord does not give a direct answer to the words
“Art thou He that cometh?” If He had said “I am He”—and yet had not
restored the kingdom to Israel as the Baptist expected, He would only have
led him into further bewilderment. So his disciples take back for sole
reply, an account of “what they hear and see.” The works are such as our
Lord continually performed; but John’s disciples are given a special
opportunity of witnessing them for their Master’s sake. The Baptist is
however certified of this; a great work of God was being carried on in the
world, through Him on whom he had seen the Spirit descend when He rose
from Jordan.(54)

Of the two grounds, then, on which our Lord claimed men’s allegiance—His
personal influence and the signs He worked—our Lord rests preferably on
the first, but the second has its place and it is an important one.

Our Lord is the great physician who deals with all according as the case
and the constitution require. In different ages men’s minds require
different kinds of proof. I believe that such different kinds are
provided—that there is lying ready for each generation and each type of
mind the degree of evidence which is good for it and of the kind which it
is fitted to assimilate. Miracles are not the sort of evidence most wanted
now; but it was the sort which for many centuries was looked on as the
most incontrovertible. It spoke to those who could understand nothing
else. It was for many ages what men especially wanted, and there it was to
their hand. A future generation may find their main ground of belief in
Christ in a realization of His Personality; and they may in this way
arrive at that kind of knowledge of Him which our Lord had hoped that
Philip might have gained. This we can scarcely obtain without a careful
study of our Lord’s ways of influencing men.

I have not yet spoken of our Lord’s miraculous knowledge of events or of
His insight into men’s hearts. There have been a few persons in the course
of the world’s history who have, in a wondrous way, discerned the ends
towards which events were working; and others who have divined the
thoughts of other men. These gifts in the fullest degree our Lord
possessed; and when He needed stronger illumination for the purpose of His
work these faculties were exalted beyond human range. The superhuman
supervened, proceeding along the lines of human action; and this, like the
powers whereby His other works were wrought, came from the Father in
answer to prayer. By displaying this divining power He converts Nathanael,
and He forcibly impresses the woman of Samaria. But effective as the
display of this superhuman penetration was for bringing about conviction,
it was much more than an evidence of Divine power. The knowledge of this
insight of their Master into their hearts played a large part in the
Apostles’ Schooling. They were habituated by means of it to feel that
their hearts were known, and this habit became so much a part of
themselves that when Christ had left the world they could realize to
themselves that they were under His eye still. This condition of mind was
required for their special work, and Christ’s training was directed to
develop it within them as I hope to show.

In the next Chapter I pass to the discussion of the Laws which our Lord
appears to follow in His working of Signs.





CHAPTER V. THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS.


I have already, in the introductory Chapter, given my view of the
principles which guided our Lord in the exercise of His superhuman powers.
He is tempted to employ them when He saw they should not be employed, and
the Laws are drawn from His refusals. Consequently they all take the form
that, for such and such a purpose, or under such and such circumstances
these superhuman powers are not to be brought into action.

I will recapitulate the Laws before stated—

(1) Our Lord will not provide by miracle what could be provided by human
endeavour or human foresight. He Himself, as far as we can see, never
employs superhuman power or illumination to effect what could be arrived
at by human effort.

(2) Our Lord will not use His special powers to provide for His personal
wants or for those of His immediate followers.

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

(4) No miracle is to be worked to supplement human policy or force—as (for
instance) those of Joshua were.

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

Before going into particulars about these Laws there is something to be
said about the narrative of the Temptation itself, and the form in which
it has come down to us.

The incident of the Temptation is recorded in all the Gospels except that
of St John; but the account in St Mark’s Gospel relates only that our Lord
withdrew into the wilderness, and that He was there “forty days tempted of
Satan.” In the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke we find, with some small
variations to be noted presently, what is commonly known as the History of
the Temptations of our Lord.

The narratives, taken from the Revised Version, are as follows:


    “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be
    tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty
    nights, he afterward hungered. And the tempter came and said unto
    him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become
    bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live
    by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
    of God. Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set
    him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art
    the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall
    give his angels charge concerning thee: And on their hands they
    shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone.
    Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the
    Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh him unto an exceeding high
    mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the
    glory of them; and he said unto him, All these things will I give
    thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto
    him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship
    the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil
    leaveth him; and behold, angels came and ministered unto him.”(55)

    “And straightway the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness.
    And he was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan; and he
    was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.”(56)

    “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and
    was led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days, being
    tempted of the devil. And he did eat nothing in those days: and
    when they were completed, he hungered. And the devil said unto
    him, If thou art the Son of God, command this stone that it become
    bread. And Jesus answered unto him, It is written, Man shall not
    live by bread alone. And he led him up; and shewed him all the
    kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto
    him, To thee will I give all this authority, and the glory of
    them: for it hath been delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will
    I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship before me, it shall all
    be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him, It is written,
    Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou
    serve. And he led him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of
    the temple, and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast
    thyself down from hence: for it is written, He shall give his
    angels charge concerning thee, to guard thee: and, On their hands
    they shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a
    stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt
    not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had completed every
    temptation, he departed from him for a season.”(57)


What we find in St Mark may have been generally known to our Lord’s
disciples from the earliest period of the ministry. But the account of the
Temptations themselves, which we find in St Matthew and St Luke, can only
have come from our Lord Himself. Assuming this to be the case, the passage
before us is singular in two respects.

First, Because the Evangelists have here, and here only, altered the form
of what our Lord delivered, and changed into a narration in the third
person what must, in the first instance, have been expressed in the first.

Secondly, Because this is the only instance in which our Lord breaks
through His reticence as to His own personal history on earth. Here and
here only does He give us a glimpse of what had befallen Him or of what
had passed within His breast.

St Matthew and St Luke differ as to the order of the second and third
Temptations. I have adopted that given by St Luke. According to my view,
our Lord in the one rejects the use of physical violence and in the other
that of moral compulsion. It is more after our Lord’s way to proceed from
what is concrete to what is abstract, than in the reverse order.

I feel strengthened in this view by some of the characteristics of the
Gospel of St Matthew, in the form in which it has come down to us. This
Evangelist has always _the Kingdom_ before his eyes. He would therefore be
inclined to account the rejection of “all the kingdoms of the world and
the glory of them” as the highest possible instance of the renunciation of
self; and as he accounted it the most severe of the temptations he would
naturally place it last. St Matthew moreover throughout his Gospel often
puts together the discourses of our Lord according to their
subject-matter, and not in the order in which they were spoken. He would
therefore have no scruple about changing the order of the account of the
Temptations which may have come before him as a detached document. On the
other hand we do not know of any bias of St Luke which should lead him to
prefer one order of events to another.

Another slight variation may be noticed. St Matthew tells us that He was
“led up of the Spirit _to be tempted_ of the devil.”(58) The words imply
that He was led up with a view to undergoing temptation. But in St Mark
and St Luke we have “being tempted” without any intimation of purpose.
Grave difficulties attach to the view that our Lord went into the desert
with the set purpose of seeking and confronting temptation. Moreover it is
of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares. If we
know that endeavours are about to be made to persuade us to a particular
course, we close our ears to all that pleads for it—being forewarned, we
are forearmed; so that, as regards these words, and indeed throughout the
passage, I place more confidence in the version of St Luke than in that of
St Matthew, or, to speak more accurately, that of his translator from
Hebrew.

The words “Get thee hence,” at the close of St Matthew’s relation of the
temptation on the mount, have been supposed to indicate the final
banishment of the Tempter, and therefore to shew that this temptation came
last. The force of the argument rests on our supposing, as no doubt the
author of St Matthew’s Gospel did, that the events here related formed
three distinct visible scenes, occurring in close succession, towards the
end of the forty days. Whereas I hold that we have here a representation
of our Lord’s inward conflicts, clothed by Him in a garb of outward
imagery, that they might be the better understood. If this view be taken,
the trials may have gone on simultaneously throughout the forty days, and
may have been so far like our own inward troubles that one harassing
perplexity may well have been most pressing at one moment and another at
the next. But if these struggles are represented by visible occurrences,
these occurrences must necessarily be related one after the other. The
words “Get thee hence” might refer not necessarily to a final banishment,
but only to the end of one assault. St Luke’s version is reconcileable
with the view that he understood our Lord to be speaking figuratively and
personifying the voices that tempted him.

It may be asked, “At what period of His ministry did our Lord give the
disciples the account of what passed in the desert?” We can only guess,
but the guess is worth making. We do not know whether the account which we
possess was contained in what critics call “the original document,” on
which the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark are supposed to be based. Its
omission by St Mark rather favours the supposition that it was not. It may
have been, in the first instance, put down in writing by one who heard the
recital from our Lord’s lips, and may have come into the hands of the
evangelists as a separate “parchment.”(59) This document might contain no
note of the time and place at which our Lord delivered the account—and, in
the absence of information on this point, the compiler of the gospel might
have made the alteration from the first person to the third, if it had not
been made before, and have inserted the account in the place belonging to
it in the order of events. I conjecture that the communication was made
near the end of the ministry, possibly after the feast of the
dedication,(60) at the time when


    “He went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John was at
    the first baptizing; and there he abode.”(61)


The place would recall what had happened after He had been “driven” from
that spot by the Spirit into the wilderness about two years before.

Other considerations also lead me to this conjecture.

It is strange that no allusion is ever made to so important a record: and
this would be far more strange if the knowledge had lain in the minds of
the Apostles all through the period of our Lord’s ministry, than if they
had only obtained it when the close was at hand. Moreover, the absence of
any account of the circumstances under which the relation was made
inclines me to think that this must have taken place at a time of which
our records are scanty; and there is no time in the sacred history of
which the narrative is less full than the period at which I place the
communication, viz., the early spring preceding the Passion of our Lord.

There is also this consideration of a different kind. In all education
there are two elements, that which is communicated by the teacher ready
made, and which the pupil has only to register, and that which the learner
elicits by turning over in his mind the matter which gives food for
thought. In our Lord’s teaching of the disciples the proportion of the
latter element to the former steadily increases from first to last. At
first, sayings are given them to remember; latterly, they receive
mysteries on which to meditate. In the Sermon on the Mount men are told
plainly what it was desirable for them to know; afterwards, the teaching
passes through parables and hard sayings up to the mysteries conveyed by
the Last Supper. The lessons of the Temptation have the form of the later
teaching of our Lord: they contain hard matters and only yield their fruit
by being long laid to heart.

Not only would the lessons of the Temptation have been more intelligible
to the Apostles towards the end of the ministry than at the beginning;
but, turning as they do on the use of superhuman powers, they would suit
the time when the Apostles were about to exercise similar powers
themselves.

Now comes the great question of all: In what sense is the narrative to be
taken?

Many writers accept it as literal history and suppose the Tempter to have
appeared in bodily form and to have conveyed our Lord, also in the body,
both to the mountain top and the pinnacle of the Temple. Others have
regarded it as a vision; and intermediate views have been adopted by many.

On one point fortunately we may be pretty confident. The substance of the
history came from our Lord. The most unfavourable critics allow this, from
the extreme difficulty of referring it to any other source. It cannot have
been introduced in order to make the Gospel fall in with Jewish notions of
the Messiah, for there are no traditions that the Messiah should be
tempted: and if the passage had been devised by men, the drift of it would
have been plainer, and the temptations would have been such as men would
feel might have come upon themselves. We have many accounts, in the
legends of the saints, of the sort of trials which present themselves to
the imagination of human writers; and they differ totally from these.

I have let fall already a few words shewing in what way I regard the
passage. I must now speak more fully on the subject.

It may be assumed that, in all our Lord’s dealings with His disciples, His
primary purpose was to do them good. He did not leave behind Him this
reference to His sojourn in the wilderness and its momentous results,
merely as materials for biographers. The trials which had beset Him would
soon beset them also in doing the work He destined for them; before He
left them He would therefore relate in what disguises the temptations had
appeared and how they had been repelled. Behind the Apostles, who formed
as it were the front rank of His audience, there stretched long files of
hearers,—all those to whom His words have since come. At the end of this
file we ourselves stand; and those among us who have special gifts, and
are tempted to use them for selfish ends, or for putting a yoke, physical
or mental, upon other men, may well take them to heart. My business
however now is with the Apostles. It was likely that our Lord would give
them some hint as to the principles on which superhuman power can be
safely employed: and it was certain that this lesson would be put by Him
in the form which would best convey it, and which would make the most
lasting impression. The _form_ then, as well as the matter of the lesson,
must be worth studying closely.

One reason why this passage has such a powerful interest for men is that
the history is a personal one. Our Lord riveted the most earnest attention
of His hearers by speaking to them of Himself; and something of the same
effect is felt by readers of the story now. We know how a teacher at once
enchains the interest of his class when, leaving things abstract, or what
he finds in books, he says, “Now I will tell you something that happened
to me;” and we can understand the eagerness with which the Apostles would
gather round our Lord, and can imagine how intently they would gaze upon
Him, when He told them that He, like them, had been tempted, that He too
had fought hard battles and that He would tell them what they were.

Another source of interest is that the story deals with inner struggles in
a figurative way—the voices are personified and the action is localised.

That Satan should have appeared in a bodily form is, to my mind, opposed
to the spirituality of all our Lord’s teaching. Such an appearance
presents endless difficulties, not only physical but moral. If our Lord
knew the tempter to be Satan, He was as I have said forearmed; if He did
not know him, this introduces other difficulties. He must at any rate have
been surprised at meeting a specious sophist in the wilderness. Milton
deals with the subject with great skill, from his point of view, in
_Paradise Regained_. Certain points he leaves unexplained, and those I
believe to be inexplicable. They are these. I cannot understand that our
Lord should suffer Satan to transport Him to the mountain top, or to the
pinnacle of the Temple, or that the Evil One should propose to Jesus to
fall down and worship him.

I can however readily comprehend that our Lord should represent under this
imagery and under these personifications what had passed within Himself.
He could not indeed bring the lesson home to His hearers in any other way.
To have represented mental emotions, to have spoken of the thoughts that
had passed through His mind, would have been wholly unsuited to His
hearers. We know how difficult it is to keep up an interest in a record of
inward struggles and experiences. Men want something to present to their
mind’s eye, and they soon weary of following an account of what has been
going on within a man’s heart, void of outward incident. A recital of what
had passed in our Lord’s mind would have taken no hold of men’s fancy and
would soon have faded from their thoughts. But the figure of Satan would
catch their eye, the appearance of contest would animate the hearers’
interest; while the survey of the realms of the earth, and the dizzy
station on the pinnacle of the Temple, would take possession of men’s
memories and minds.

The Apologue was to Orientals a favourite vehicle for conveying moral
lessons; and we have a familiar instance in English Literature of the
attraction of allegory. Would Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_ have possessed
itself, as it has done, of the hearts of whole sections of the British
race, if, shorn of its human characters and its scenery, it had only
analysed and depicted the inward conflicts, the mental vicissitudes and
religious difficulties of a sorely-tried Christian youth?

The use of the name Satan must be considered. This name, which means the
enemy, occurs in the Old Testament, in the book of Job and elsewhere but
not in the Pentateuch. The Jews we know had a dæmonology of their own. The
gods of the heathen they regarded as devils, of whom the Sidonian deity
Beelzebub was Prince. Our Lord never countenances these views. I believe
that He uses the word Satan in a _generic_ sense to personify evil
spiritual influences exercised upon earth.

When the Apostles returned safe after being sent through the cities, our
Lord regards this as an augury of their success in the great conflict and
says that He “beheld Satan fallen as lightning from Heaven.”(62) We have
clearly impersonation here. He says also “If Satan hath risen up against
himself and is divided,”(63) a supposition which excludes the idea of an
individual being, and agrees with the collective meaning I attribute to
the term. When St Peter rebukes our Lord for declaring before His
followers that He would be “rejected and killed and after three days rise
again,” our Lord says “Get thee behind me, Satan.” St Peter, by saying of
the suffering of which our Lord spake “this shall never be unto thee,”(64)
unwittingly had acted as the ally of those who would tempt our Lord from
yielding implicitly to His Father’s will, and our Lord therefore calls him
Satan. On the whole then I lean to the view that the communication, or
discourse of our Lord, which has been preserved in the form of the
narrative of the Temptation, was delivered by Him in the form of an
_apologue_ or species of parable, in which our Lord, after Eastern
fashion, introduced Satan as an embodiment of the powers of evil.

It must not be supposed that by giving up here the personality of the
tempter we are making an abatement of what is superhuman in the Gospel, in
order that, in virtue of having so done, we may hope to win this or that
section of doubters over to our side—the whole question of evil remains a
mystery, and in mystery there can be no degrees. It is of no use
endeavouring to make infinity a trifle less infinite.

Whether the word Satan be here used collectively or personally is
altogether a different question from the existence of intermediate
intelligences, and is quite an open one even for the most orthodox.




Temptation to turn stones into loaves.


I now come to the Temptations themselves. As these trials were mental, we
can only realise them by imagining what, consistently with our history,
_may_ have passed in our Lord’s mind. What _actually did_ so pass is of
course beyond our knowledge altogether. We are however justified in
supposing that, as our Lord was “tempted as man,” the thoughts and
feelings which actuated Him would be such as men might follow and more or
less understand.

It would appear that when God lays a work on a man He gives him a general
view of the end to be kept in sight, a vehement desire to accomplish it,
and a forefeeling of the capacity so to do. But He does not shew him how
he is to do it, He does not make the way clear so that he sees his course
before him and marks its several stages. If a man were so guided he would
not fulfil the conditions of human agency, there would be no room for his
own will to act, he would have no responsibility. He would move along a
pre-arranged path. God would, in effect, be doing all and he nothing, and
so it would come to much the same thing as if the work were done once for
all by God’s _fiat_, independently of human action—and this, as we have
already seen, is not God’s way of governing the world.

When St Paul takes his last journey to Jerusalem, the Spirit, he tells us,
“testifieth unto me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions abide
me.” That he must go to Jerusalem he knew and to go he was resolved, but
what course of conduct he was to adopt or what the result was to be he did
not know at all; afterwards in like manner, he knew that he was to bear
witness at Rome, but he had no directions as to what he was to do. It was
left to him to act as seemed to him to be the best. This may give us a
help towards understanding how it may have been with our Lord, when the
mighty charge unto which He was born came home to His mind, and He felt,
rising in Him, the wondrous powers given to aid Him in carrying it out.

Our Lord when driven by the Spirit into the wilderness would take no
thought of food or shelter. The one thing He craved for was to be alone;
He must have solitude, and the wilderness provided that.

When He reflected, He could hardly help asking Himself whether this light
which had shone upon Him—this voice from Heaven,—were the resuscitation of
His Diviner life or only something in His own eyes and ears? A sure test
lay ready: when He had heard Himself hailed as the Son of God a conviction
had risen in Him that God would give effect to His commands. He had only
to try whether this was so and all doubts would be resolved. Perhaps the
whisper came “Try this experiment in a _very small matter first_.” Who
could think this apparent caution and prudence came from an ill quarter?

Spiritual evil always chooses a trifle, something from which it seems that
no harm can possibly come, to win its victim to the first false step. Our
Lord was hungry, and loaf-shaped stones were lying all about Him. Why not
turn a few actually into the loaves they looked like? In so doing, how
could He possibly be wrong?

However plausible the appeal of the Tempter, it was not entertained. We
can conceive that a whole array of objections would arise; some may have
been such as these—

This putting of God to trial by a test of my own choosing, that I may
determine whether I will believe His words or not: this implying that I
will admit His authority if He speaks in one way and not if He speaks in
another—Is this befitting one called to a work like this?

Then came another point—He was hungry. As St Mark says nothing about the
fasting it will be best not to assume that the fasting was part of our
Lord’s original purpose; but as, in the desert of Judea, food could not be
got without a journey of some miles, our Lord, whether designedly or not,
had put Himself out of the immediate reach of food. Should He remedy this
by using the mysterious power with which He felt He was invested? This
power was given Him to forward God’s Kingdom upon earth—should He use it
for Himself?

Then the tempter might return to the assault. There are fluxes and
refluxes in human feeling; we are always afraid that we have gone too far
in one direction, or been too obstinate about our own point; it strikes us
that perhaps we have made more of it than it was worth, and then we listen
submissively to the other side.

Such a whisper as this may have come—"These powers are given you to enable
you to set up God’s Kingdom upon earth; for this you must win adherents.
These adherents must be maintained. Your opponents are supported by the
great ones of the earth; the God of Heaven has committed to you His powers
for the support of yours. This little incident of the loaves only points
the way to a much weightier matter; you _must_ use your special powers to
supply your own bodily wants in the coming contest,—why not begin with
using them for this purpose now?"

Here we have arrived at the gravest point of the debate—Were these powers
really to be used for His bodily wants or not? As the true conditions of
His work rose before Him, the principles grew clearer; He was to deliver
mankind as the Son of Man, He was to work as man, to suffer as man, that
suffering men might always look to Him, saying “He was one of us.” And how
could this be, if His lot was so unlike theirs that He met His own wants
by a word of command directly they arose? How could His followers own the
duty of labouring for their daily bread, if stones at a word were turned
into loaves for Him? How could He tell men not to think overmuch of the
meat that perisheth, if He had used Divine powers to provide it for
Himself as soon as He possessed them? If He were to be the stay of loving
human hearts, He must say to men, “As you live, I live: of all your ills
and troubles I claim my part.”

Our Lord’s answer points out a train of thought along which He may have
passed, until at length He reached a firm resolve and reduced the Tempter
to silence. It will not be irreverent to imagine what might, consistently
with what we learn, have been its nature.

Man wants no reminding that he lives by _bread_. There is no fear of his
not giving care enough to the needs of his body; but there is danger lest
he should think of nothing but these needs, and starve his soul and become
such that eternal life, without a body to care for, would only be a
condition of aimless weariness. He resolved therefore to keep His powers
apart for spiritual ends. He will work no miracle to shew that He _can_
work a miracle, or to assure either Himself or others that He is the Son
of God; neither will He use this power to provide what others win by toil,
or to preserve Himself or His followers from the common ills of human
life.

There are a few of our Lord’s Signs which might, at first sight, look as
if in them this principle were not observed. At the marriage of Cana in
Galilee, the Sign is worked as an act of kindness to save the host from
mortification arising from an accident.

I have mentioned, as regards the miracles of the loaves and fishes, that
on both occasions the supply which our Lord’s own company had with them
was sufficient for their immediate wants. The crowds, however, had, by
their rapt attention to our Lord, been detained away from their homes and
their supplies, and, if they had had to go a distance to buy bread, they
would have suffered from taking so long a journey fasting. The case was an
exceptional emergency parallel to that of illness, and our Lord meets it
by miraculous means.

The miraculous draughts of fishes benefited probably all who were partners
in the vessel, but they were not wrought to meet any necessity on the part
of our Lord. All night long they had taken nothing; this scarcity may have
been part of the lesson of the miracle, and the great draught is only a
bounteous compensation. This is a miracle of instruction, as I said in the
last chapter: it tells men that a turn comes at the moment when they are
about to give up, and that the faith which bears up long is rewarded.
Moreover, to recur to what I said in the last chapter, St Peter had been
told that he was to be henceforth a fisher of men; and when multitudes,
both of Jews and Gentiles, were gathered into the Church in Jerusalem he
must have thought of this as answering to the Sign.

The miracle of the stater in the fish’s mouth also requires notice. It is
not wrought to obtain the coin, but to keep before Peter’s mind that he as
well as his Master were the children and not the servants or tributaries
of God.

From St Peter’s answering without hesitation that his master would pay the
didrachm, it is clear that there was no difficulty about producing the
small sum. He does not speak to our Lord on the matter, but our Lord,
directly he enters the house, asks him, “What thinkest thou, Simon? the
kings of the earth, from whom do they receive toll or tribute? from their
sons, or from strangers?”(65)

This miracle, as we said in the last chapter, is one of instruction. The
payment according to the received view was the half-shekel that every
Israelite had to pay for providing victims for the Temple service. It gave
the idea of a tribute to God which stood in the way of the conception of
perfect sonship. It implied that Israelites alone had part or lot in the
worship of the living God. Our Lord would have St Peter regard God as the
Father of mankind and not only as the Lord and ruler of Israel. The whole
point of the lesson lies in the words “then are the children free.” These
words would be stamped on St Peter’s mind by the finding the stater in the
fish’s mouth; and they would recur to him and bring their proper lesson
with them when the right moment came. The circumstance is not in itself
necessarily miraculous, but it was rendered so in this case by our Lord’s
foreseeing that the coin would be found in the first fish that came.




The Temptation on the Mount.


Next comes a scene in which the Spirit of the World is represented as
pointing out all the glories of the empire of the inhabited earth, and
offering it to our Lord on the strange condition that He should fall down
and worship him. This represents, in plain and very forcible imagery, a
spiritual temptation to which those who have laboured to regenerate
mankind have fallen victims over and over again. Those who have most
nearly attained universal conquest, Mahomet, Zengis, Timour, and many
great political leaders as well, have begun with a genuine wish to
alleviate the ills of mankind, of whom eventually they became a scourge.

I believe that what our Lord sets before us here is the temptation to aim
at visible and comparatively immediate success, and to bring about our
ideal by using the arts of worldly policy; which were to be supported in
the case before us by superhuman power.

We can conceive a Tempter, such as the Satan of _Paradise Regained_,
saying as he does,


    “Great acts require great means of enterprise,”


and urging worldly counsels such as these:—“You seek to set up a perfect
kingdom upon earth, to minimise evil by wise laws, and to make men love
God and serve God out of love. You want success and you want it soon, in
order that in your lifetime you may see your plans matured. For this,
first of all, you must have at your back not merely disciples who shall
listen and meditate, but men who can advance _a cause_. The uppermost
feeling of the people among whom you have come is the desire to be free
from Rome. They have drawn from the Scriptures a notion that a Messiah
will soon come and restore the kingdom to Israel. With this view, be it
right or wrong, you must fall in. You carry with you powers like those
wielded by the prophets of old. Proclaim yourself such a Messiah as men
expect. Strike to the ground the Roman eagles that are sent against you.
Offer to all who fall on your side a paradise of palpable enjoyments such
as they can understand. Shew yourself invulnerable, and be everywhere
foremost in the fight. Your superhuman power will balance the enormous
might of Rome. In order to win the empire of the world you must employ
policy as well as arms. You must excite enthusiasm. You must fascinate
crowds by eloquence and lead them to serve your purpose when they think
that you are serving theirs. When you have secured the empire, you can
inaugurate a golden reign and call on men to bless your Father who sent
you to their aid.”

If suggestions such as these had been made to our Lord by such a Tempter
as Milton imagines, we can see from the reply in our narrative how they
would have been met. This kingdom, our Lord would say, so gained might
indeed be mine but assuredly it will not be God’s; and my business is not
to work for myself but for Him. It was this utter absence of self, in our
Lord, which men could not comprehend; their common standards could not
measure Him—they are bewildered by this, and all but the higher sort are
put out of touch with Him.

The picture which our Lord leaves us of His struggle with the evil
suggestions of His insidious foe teaches us many lessons, but the clearest
of all are these—If we fight the world with its own weapons we soon put
our hands out for using any others than those. If we seek what the world
has to give we soon fall down and worship it, without having the least
intention of doing anything of the kind. But besides giving a lesson for
after ages, our Lord here indicates a particular resolve which shaped His
action upon earth. It was this,—He would not employ His superhuman powers
to force men to obey, or even to resist the violence which might be
offered Him. He would not use them to assist in setting up the outward
fabric of a Kingdom of God: and then, going a little further, He
determines not to set up by His own hand any outward fabric of such a
Kingdom at all. He was not to be an aspirant for worldly distinction—He
was not to be the _leader of a cause_—He was not to be the founder of a
school of philosophy or of any external form of religion at all. He came
to do a _Work_, The Central Work of the History of mankind. He declared
God, and declared Himself to be united to God, and that He would be with
men for ever until the end of the world. But all that has to do with
organisation, outward customs, effective sanctions, or the condensing of
doctrines into the formulæ of creeds, belongs to the human side of
religion, and men of different climes and ages must shape such matters for
themselves. He came, as I have said, only to kindle the fire and to set a
new force moving in the world. This Law,—that neither force nor worldly
policy should be used to carry out the Work of God,—governs all our Lord’s
acts. It need hardly be said that there is no miracle of our Lord’s
recounted in the canonical Scriptures in which violence is either done or
repelled. In the apocryphal Gospels we find endless legends of the
retribution which our Lord brought on those who injured Him, especially in
His boyish years.

Neither do we ever find that our Lord so displays His signs or shapes His
conduct, as to win from the crowd material support for the work He is
carrying on. It was never more important for Him to win over the
enthusiasm of the people than when He taught in Jerusalem in the week of
the Passover: but no public miracle at all is then performed. It must have
seemed strange to the disciples that He did not confound Pilate on his
judgment seat, or Herod on his throne, but _we_ see that the whole meaning
of His coming would have been lost if He had. The disciples however are
not left at that time without some indication that His Divine power
remained unimpaired—the withering of the fig-tree, and the foretelling to
Peter that he should deny Him thrice, shewed them that Jesus was still the
Lord. When the Lord in the hands of His enemies turned and looked upon
Peter, how striking must have been the contrast between the Kingdoms of
the earth and of God!

There is one occasion where our Lord is urged to act in violation of this
principle. The sons of Zebedee ask whether they may not call down fire
from Heaven on those who would not receive them. “But He turned and
rebuked them.”(66)

Again, if He had come down from the cross when challenged to do so, this
principle would have been broken through. Those who said “He saved others,
Himself He cannot save,”(67) uttered a truth deeper than they dreamed of:
it was of the very essence of His mission that He should not use His
powers for Himself.

In connexion with this it may be noted that when St Peter is delivered
from the prison,(68) and St Paul and Silas at Philippi, these deliverances
are represented, not as being worked _by_ St Peter or St Paul, but as
being worked _for_ them by the Divine power, without any doing of theirs.




The Temptation on the Pinnacle of the Temple.


When the temptation to employ open force was repelled, a more insidious
one came in its stead. It was to use moral compulsion, and, by the public
display of a resistless manifestation, to make doubt and opposition
disappear.

Our Lord, as I believe, clothes this suggestion in imagery suited to His
hearers: He represents Himself as borne to the pinnacle of the Temple and
bidden to cast Himself down. Of this pinnacle an account is given by Dr
Edersheim: he considers it to have overlooked the Court of the Priests.
The following extracts are from his account:—

“In the next temptation Jesus stands on the watch-post which the
white-robed priest has just quitted. In the Priests’ Court below Him the
morning sacrifice has been offered.... Now let Him descend, Heaven-borne,
into the midst of priests and people. What shouts of acclamation would
greet His appearance! What homage of worship would be His!”(69)

This pinnacle, supposing my view to be correct, would offer a fitting
scene for the story of this trial, not only as being a giddy height, but
because also the spot was a public one, and a crowd of spectators would
witness the display. If our Lord had only been tempted to assure Himself
of His power by a miracle of adventurous rashness, any precipice would
have served as well. The essential force of the temptation lay in the
suggestion to prostrate men’s minds, and to subjugate their wills, by
performing before their eyes an appalling act, the superhuman nature of
which could not possibly be gainsaid.

When we leave the external imagery, and come to the gist of the lesson, we
find in it the truth which we have had before us over and over again.(70)
A man’s belief is not _his_ belief and will not be effective for moulding
his life unless his mind and his will have some part in the acceptance of
it; and if his own endeavours were to be on a sudden superseded by Divine
action, this would be inconsistent with that studious culture of man’s
distinctive freedom which runs through the conduct of the world. If will
and reason are to be dumbfounded by the interference of absolute power,
why should men possess them or care to put them to use? As a fact, God
_suggests_ but does not _compel_, and our Lord’s signs agree herewith.
They emphasise His lessons, and witness for God to those who have eyes for
Him—but men can reject the lesson, signs and all if they please.

Let us imagine the form the Tempter’s arguments might take in the mouth of
one like Milton’s Satan: “You wish,” he might suggest, “men to believe
that your power comes from on high. Leave them no room for doubt. People
about you look for a Sign from Heaven, such as Joshua worked in Ajalon,
and Isaiah displayed in the days of Hezekiah. Beelzebub, they think, may
work Signs on earth, but Heaven, they own, is God’s domain, and what is
written in the skies carries God’s hand and seal. Shew men these Signs for
which they ask, and display your wonders so as to strike men the most.
Cures and works of mercy, witnessed by a few score people, create but
little stir. Shew something that all Judea, or at least Jerusalem, can
behold _at once_;—great emotions take strongest hold among men in a mass:
display a comet or darken the sun; or, to begin with, stand on the
pinnacle of the Temple—there is a tradition that there the Messiah should
appear(71)—and in the presence of all the crowd hurl yourself into the
Priests’ Court below.”

To meet these thoughts suggested by the Tempter, there would rise in our
Lord’s mind a crowd of arguments: some of these I have already ventured to
imagine. If our Lord had displayed a Sign of overwhelming effect, and
bidden men deny it if they could, He would have paralysed intellectual
growth in mankind. Men had been gifted with faculties fitting them to
explore and to judge of spiritual things: if these were curtailed of room
for exercise, they would languish like limbs disused. Should He bar
investigation in one-half of reason’s realm? Shoul

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