only, but warmhearted, and not occupied so much with his own plans that he could not attend to a case of distress or mental perplexity. They found him full of sympathy and appreciation, dropping words of praise, ejaculations of admiration, tears. He surrounded himself with those who had tasted of his bounty, sick people whom he had cured, lepers whose death-in-life, demoniacs whose hell-in-life, he had terminated with a single powerful word. Among these came loving hearts who thanked him for friends and relatives rescued for them out of the jaws of premature death, and others whom he had saved, by a power which did not seem different, from vice and degradation.
This temperance in the use of supernatural power is the masterpiece of Christ. It is a moral miracle superinduced upon a physical one. This repose in greatness makes him surely the most sublime image ever offered to the human imagination. And it is precisely this trait which gave him his immense and immediate ascendency over men. If the question be put–Why was Christ so successful?–Why did men gather round him at his call, form themselves into a new society according to his wish, and accept him with unbounded devotion as their legislator and judge? some will answer, Because of the miracles which attested his divine character; others, Because of the intrinsic beauty and divinity of the great law of love which he propounded. But miracles, as we have seen, have not by themselves this persuasive power. That a man possesses a strange power which I cannot understand is no reason why I should receive his words as divine oracles of truth. The powerful man is not of necessity also wise; his power may terrify and yet not convince. On the other hand, the law of love, however divine, was but a precept. Undoubtedly it deserved that men should accept it for its intrinsic worth, but men are not commonly so eager to receive the words of wise men nor so unbounded in their gratitude to them. It was neither for his miracles nor for the beauty of his doctrine that Christ was worshipped. Nor was it for his winning personal character, nor for the persecutions he endured, nor for his martyrdom. It was for the inimitable unity which all these things made when taken together. In other words, it was for this that he whose power and greatness as shown in his miracles were overwhelming denied himself the use of his power, treated it as a slight thing, walked among men as though he were one of them, relieved them in distress, taught them to love each other, bore with undisturbed patience a perpetual hailstorm of calumny; and when his enemies grew fiercer, continued still to endure their attacks in silence, until, petrified and bewildered with astonishment, men saw him arrested and put to death with torture, refusing steadfastly to use in his own behalf the power he conceived he held for the benefit of others. It was the combination of greatness and self-sacrifice which won their hearts, the mighty powers held under a mighty control, the unspeakable condescension, the _Cross_ of _Christ_.
And he goes on to describe the effect upon the world; and what it was that “drew all men unto Him”:–
To sum up the results of this chapter. We began by remarking that an astonishing plan met with an astonishing success, and we raised the question to what instrumentality that success was due. Christ announced himself as the Founder and Legislator of a new Society, and as the Supreme Judge of men. Now by what means did he procure that these immense pretensions should be allowed? He might have done it by sheer power, he might have adopted persuasion, and pointed out the merits of the scheme and of the legislation he proposed to introduce. But he adopted a third plan, which had the effect not merely of securing obedience, but of exciting enthusiasm and devotion. He laid men under an immense _obligation_. He convinced them that he was a person of altogether transcendent greatness, one who needed nothing at their hands, one whom it was impossible to benefit by conferring riches, or fame, or dominion upon him, and that, being so great, he had devoted himself of mere benevolence to their good. He showed them that for their sakes he lived a hard and laborious life, and exposed himself to the utmost malice of powerful men. They saw him hungry, though they believed him able to turn the stones into bread; they saw his royal pretensions spurned, though they believed that he could in a moment take into his hand all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; they saw his life in danger; they saw him at last expire in agonies, though they believed that, had he so willed it, no danger could harm him, and that had he thrown himself from the topmost pinnacle of the temple he would have been softly received in the arms of ministering angels. Witnessing his sufferings, and convinced by the miracles they saw him work that they were voluntarily endured, men’s hearts were touched, and pity for weakness blending strangely with wondering admiration of unlimited power, an agitation of gratitude, sympathy, and astonishment, such as nothing else could ever excite, sprang up in them; and when, turning from his deeds to his words, they found this very self-denial which had guided his own life prescribed as the principle which should guide theirs, gratitude broke forth in joyful obedience, self-denial produced self-denial, and the Law and Lawgiver together were enshrined in their inmost hearts for inseparable veneration.
It is plain that whatever there is novel in such a line of argument must depend upon the way in which it is handled; and it is the extraordinary and sustained power with which this is done which gives its character to the book. The writer’s method consists in realising with a depth of feeling and thought which it would not be easy to match, what our Lord was in His human ministry, as that ministry is set before us by those who witnessed it; and next, in showing in detail the connection of that ministry, which wrought so much by teaching, but still more by the Divine example, “not sparing words but resting most on deeds,” with all that is highest, purest, and best in the morality of Christendom, and with what is most fruitful and most hopeful in the differences between the old world and our own. We cannot think we are wrong when we say that no one could speak of our Lord as this writer speaks, with the enthusiasm, the overwhelming sense of His inexpressible authority, of His unapproachable perfection, with the profound faith which lays everything at His feet, and not also believe all that the Divine Society which Christ founded has believed about Him. And though for the present his subject is history, and human morality as it appears to have been revolutionised and finally fixed by that history, and not the theology which subsequent in date is yet the foundation of both, it is difficult to imagine any reader going along with him and not breaking out at length into the burst, “My Lord and my God.” If it is not so, then the phenomenon is strange indeed; for a belief below the highest and truest has produced an appreciation, a reverence, an adoration which the highest belief has only produced in the choicest examples of those who have had it, and by the side of which the ordinary exhibitions of the divine history are pale and feeble. To few, indeed, as it seems to us, has it been given to feel, and to make others feel, what in all the marvellous complexity of high and low, and in all the Divine singleness of His goodness and power, the Son of Man appeared in the days of His flesh. It is not more vivid or more wonderful than what the Gospels with so much detail tell us of that awful ministry in real flesh and blood, with a human soul and with all the reality of man’s nature; but most of us, after all, read the Gospels with sealed and unwondering eyes. But, dwelling on the Manhood, so as almost to overpower us with the contrast between the distinct and living truth and the dead and dull familiarity of our thoughts of routine and custom, he does so in such a way that it is impossible to doubt, though the word Incarnation never occurs in the volume, that all the while he has before his thoughts the “taking of the manhood into God.” What is the Gospel picture?
And let us pause once more to consider that which remains throughout a subject of ever-recurring astonishment, the unbounded personal pretensions which Christ advances. It is common in human history to meet with those who claim some superiority over their fellows. Men assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or fellow-countrymen and become rulers of those who at first were their equals, but they dream of nothing greater than some partial control over the actions of others for the short space of a lifetime. Few indeed are those to whom it is given to influence future ages. Yet some men have appeared who have been “as levers to uplift the earth and roll it in another course.” Homer by creating literature, Socrates by creating science, Caesar by carrying civilisation inland from the shores of the Mediterranean, Newton by starting science upon a career of steady progress, may be said to have attained this eminence. But these men gave a single impact like that which is conceived to have first set the planets in motion; Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive power like the sun which determines their orbit. They contributed to men some discovery and passed away; Christ’s discovery is himself. To humanity struggling with its passions and its destiny he says, Cling to me, cling ever closer to me. If we believe St. John, he represented himself as the Light of the world, as the Shepherd of the souls of men, as the Way to immortality, as the Vine or Life-tree of humanity. And if we refuse to believe that he used those words, we cannot deny, without rejecting all the evidence before us, that he used words which have substantially the same meaning. We cannot deny that he commanded men to leave everything and attach themselves to him; that he declared himself king, master, and judge of men; that he promised to give rest to all the weary and heavy-laden; that he instructed his followers to hope for life from feeding on his body and blood.
But it is doubly surprising to observe that these enormous pretensions were advanced by one whose special peculiarity, not only among his contemporaries but among the remarkable men that have appeared before and since, was an almost feminine tenderness and humility. This characteristic was remarked, as we have seen, by the Baptist, and Christ himself was fully conscious of it. Yet so clear to him was his own dignity and infinite importance to the human race as an objective fact with which his own opinion of himself had nothing to do, that in the same breath in which he asserts it in the most unmeasured language, he alludes, apparently with entire unconsciousness, to his _humility_. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; _for I am meek and lowly of heart_.” And again, when speaking to his followers of the arrogance of the Pharisees, he says, “They love to be called Rabbi; but be not you called Rabbi: _for one is your master, even Christ_.”
Who is the humble man? It is he who resists with special watchfulness and success the temptations which the conditions of his life may offer to exaggerate his own importance…. If he judged himself correctly, and if the Baptist described him well when he compared him to a lamb, and, we may add, if his biographers have delineated his character faithfully, Christ was one naturally contented with obscurity, wanting the restless desire for distinction and eminence which is common in great men, hating to put forward personal claims, disliking competition and “disputes who should be greatest,” finding something bombastic in the titles of royalty, fond of what is simple and homely, of children, of poor people, occupying himself so much with the concerns of others, with the relief of sickness and want, that the temptation to exaggerate the importance of his own thoughts and plans was not likely to master him; lastly, entertaining for the human race a feeling so singularly fraternal that he was likely to reject as a sort of treason the impulse to set himself in any manner above them. Christ, it appears, was this humble man. When we have fully pondered the fact we may be in a condition to estimate the force of the evidence which, submitted to his mind, could induce him, in direct opposition to all his tastes and instincts, to lay claim, persistently, with the calmness of entire conviction, in opposition to the whole religious world, in spite of the offence which his own followers conceived, to a dominion more transcendent, more universal, more complete, than the most delirious votary of glory ever aspired to in his dreams.
And what is it that our Lord has done for man by being so truly man?
This then it is which is wanted to raise the feeling of humanity into an enthusiasm; when the precept of love has been given, an image must be set before the eyes of those who are called upon to obey it, an ideal or type of man which may be noble and amiable enough to raise the whole race and make the meanest member of it sacred with reflected glory.
Did not Christ do this? Did the command to love go forth to those who had never seen a human being they could revere? Could his followers turn upon him and say, How can we love a creature so degraded, full of vile wants and contemptible passions, whose little life is most harmlessly spent when it is an empty round of eating and sleeping; a creature destined for the grave and for oblivion when his allotted term of fretfulness and folly has expired? Of this race Christ himself was a member, and to this day is it not the best answer to all blasphemers of the species, the best consolation when our sense of its degradation is keenest, that a human brain was behind his forehead, and a human heart beating in his breast, and that within the whole creation of God nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been found than he? And if it be answered that there was in his nature something exceptional and peculiar, that humanity must not be measured by the stature of Christ, let us remember that it was precisely thus that he wished it to be measured, delighting to call himself the Son of Man, delighting to call the meanest of mankind his brothers. If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than he was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by preference with the meanest of the race; no contempt for them did he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ bore to it And it was because the Edict of Universal Love went forth to men whose hearts were in no cynical mood, but possessed with a spirit of devotion to a man, that words which at any other time, however grandly they might sound, would have been but words, penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of love the power of love was given. Therefore also the first Christians were enabled to dispense with philosophical phrases, and instead of saying that they loved the ideal of man in man, could simply say and feel that they loved Christ in every man.
We have here the very kernel of the Christian moral scheme. We have distinctly before us the end Christ proposed to himself, and the means he considered adequate to the attainment of it….
But how to give to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal sympathy? Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one condition–that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the cause and with the interests of all human beings; he was destined, as he began before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his life for them. Few of us sympathise originally and directly with this devotion; few of us can perceive in human nature itself any merit sufficient to evoke it. But it is not so hard to love and venerate him who felt it. So vast a passion of love, a devotion so comprehensive, elevated, deliberate, and profound, has not elsewhere been in any degree approached save by some of his imitators. And as love provokes love, many have found it possible to conceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of which no words can describe, a veneration so possessing and absorbing the man within them, that they have said, “I live no more, but Christ lives in me.”
And what, in fact, has been the result, after the utmost and freest abatement for the objections of those who criticise the philosophical theories or the practical effects of Christianity?
But that Christ’s method, when rightly applied, is really of mighty force may be shown by an argument which the severest censor of Christians will hardly refuse to admit. Compare the ancient with the modern world: “Look on this picture and on that.” The broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the epithet “holy.” In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice, regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ, where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
The principle of feeling and action which Christ implanted in that Divine Society which He founded, or in other words, His morality, had two peculiarities; it sprang, and it must spring still, from what this writer calls all through an “enthusiasm”; and this enthusiasm was kindled and maintained by the influence of a Person. There can be no goodness without impulses to goodness, any more than these impulses are enough without being directed by truth and reason; but the impulses must come before the guidance, and “Christ’s Theocracy” is described “as a great attempt to set all the virtues of the world on this basis, and to give it a visible centre and fountain.” He thus describes how personal influence is the great instrument of moral quickening and elevation:–
How do men become for the most part “pure, generous, and humane”? By personal, not by logical influences. They have been reared by parents who had these qualities, they have lived in a society which had a high tone, they have been accustomed to see just acts done, to hear gentle words spoken, and the justness and the gentleness have passed into their hearts, and slowly moulded their habits and made their moral discernment clear; they remember commands and prohibitions which it is a pleasure to obey for the sake of those who gave them; often they think of those who may be dead and say, “How would this action appear to him? Would he approve that word or disapprove it?” To such no baseness appears a small baseness because its consequences may be small, nor does the yoke of law seem burdensome although it is ever on their necks, nor do they dream of covering a sin by an atoning act of virtue. Often in solitude they blush when some impure fancy sails across the clear heaven of their minds, because they are never alone, because the absent Examples, the Authorities they still revere, rule not their actions only but their inmost hearts; because their conscience is indeed awake and alive, representing all the nobleness with which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the absent and the dead.
Of these two influences–that of Reason and that of Living Example–which would a wise reformer reinforce? Christ chose the last He gathered all men into a common relation to himself, and demanded that each should set him on the pedestal of his heart, giving a lower place to all other objects of worship, to father and mother, to husband or wife. In him should the loyalty of all hearts centre; he should be their pattern, their Authority and Judge. Of him and his service should no man be ashamed, but to those who acknowledged it morality should be an easy yoke, and the law of right as spontaneous as the law of life; sufferings should be easy to bear, and the loss of worldly friends repaired by a new home in the bosom of the Christian kingdom; finally, in death itself their sleep should be sweet upon whose tombstone it could be written “Obdormivit in Christo.”
In his treatment of this part of the subject, the work of Christ as the true Creator, through the Christian Church, of living morality, what is peculiar and impressive is the way in which sympathy with Christianity in its antique and original form, in its most austere, unearthly, exacting aspects, is combined with sympathy with the practical realities of modern life, with its boldness, its freedom, its love of improvement, its love of truth. It is no common grasp which can embrace both so easily and so firmly. He is one of those writers whose strong hold on their ideas is shown by the facility with which they can afford to make large admissions, which are at first sight startling. Nowhere are more tremendous passages written than in this book about the corruptions of that Christianity which yet the writer holds to be the one hope and safeguard of mankind. He is not afraid to pursue his investigation independently of any inquiry into the peculiar claims to authority of the documents on which it rests. He at once goes to their substance and their facts, and the Person and Life and Character which they witness to. He is not afraid to put Faith on exactly the same footing as Life, neither higher nor lower, as the title to membership in the Church; a doctrine which, if it makes imperfect and rudimentary faith as little a disqualification as imperfect and inconsistent life, obviously does not exclude the further belief that deliberate heresy is on the same level with deliberate profligacy. But the clear sense of what is substantial, the power of piercing through accidents and conditions to the real kernel of the matter, the scornful disregard of all entanglement of apparent contradictions and inconsistencies, enable him to bring out the lesson which he finds before him with overpowering force. He sees before him immense mercy, immense condescension, immense indulgence; but there are also immense requirements–requirements not to be fulfilled by rule or exhausted by the lapse of time, and which the higher they raise men the more they exact–an immense seriousness and strictness, an immense care for substance and truth, to the disregard, if necessary, of the letter and the form. The “Dispensation of the Spirit” has seldom had an interpreter more in earnest and more determined to see meaning in his words. We have room but for two illustrations. He is combating the notion that the work of Christianity and the Church nowadays is with the good, and that it is waste of hope and strength to try to reclaim the bad and the lost:–
Once more, however, the world may answer, Christ may be consistent in this, but is he wise? It may be true that he does demand an enthusiasm, and that such an enthusiasm may be capable of awakening the moral sense in hearts in which it seemed dead. But if, notwithstanding this demand, only a very few members of the Christian Church are capable of the enthusiasm, what use in imposing on the whole body a task which the vast majority are not qualified to perform? Would it not be well to recognise the fact which we cannot alter, and to abstain from demanding from frail human nature what human nature cannot render? Would it not be well for the Church to impose upon its ordinary members only ordinary duties? When the Bernard or the Whitefield appears let her by all means find occupation for him. Let her in such cases boldly invade the enemy’s country. But in ordinary times would it not be well for her to confine herself to more modest and practicable undertakings? There is much for her to do even though she should honestly confess herself unable to reclaim the lost. She may reclaim the young, administer reproof to slight lapses, maintain a high standard of virtue, soften manners, diffuse enlightenment. Would it not be well for her to adapt her ends to her means?
No, it would not be well; it would be fatal to do so; and Christ meant what he said, and said what was true, when he pronounced the Enthusiasm of Humanity to be everything, and the absence of it to be the absence of everything. The world understands its own routine well enough; what it does not understand is the mode of changing that routine. It has no appreciation of the nature or measure of the power of enthusiasm, and on this matter it learns nothing from experience, but after every fresh proof of that power, relapses from its brief astonishment into its old ignorance, and commits precisely the same miscalculation on the next occasion. The power of enthusiasm is, indeed, far from being unlimited; in some cases it is very small….
But one power enthusiasm has almost without limit–the power of propagating itself; and it was for this that Christ depended on it. He contemplated a Church in which the Enthusiasm of Humanity should not be felt by two or three only, but widely. In whatever heart it might be kindled, he calculated that it would pass rapidly into other hearts, and that as it can make its heat felt outside the Church, so it would preserve the Church itself from lukewarmncss. For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an entrancing view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over the streets and palaces of the city of God….
Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing; and if there sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt conventionalism.
Christianity, then, would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned its missionary character and became a mere educational institution. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true _articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae_. When the power of reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the Church. It may remain a useful institution, though it is most likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that “the tabernacle of God is with men.”
One more passage about those who in all Churches and sects think that all that Christ meant by His call was to give them a means to do what the French call _faire son salut_:–
It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a class of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion–the persons who call themselves one thing and are another. He describes them by a word which originally meant an “actor.” Probably it may in Christ’s time have already become current in the sense which we give to the word “hypocrite.” But no doubt whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any vice, it is with the words “Be not you like the actors.” In common with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a piece. For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion, is to _act_ a prayer. If we would keep down the rebellious flesh by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade before the world our self-mortification. And if we would put down sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor who begins by frowning at it in others. But there are subtler forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler creed. The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit with the people. His ends were those of the vulgar, though his means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another happiness laid up in heaven. Some, of course, would neither understand nor regard his words, others would understand and receive them. But a third class would receive them without understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ’s greatness, instinctively believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life. They would practise assiduously the rules by which Christ said heaven was to be won. They would patiently turn the left cheek, indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them spitefully. To love their enemies, to love any one, they would certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might easily be learnt. And thus there would arise a new class of actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible treasures, and to impose by their dramatic talent upon their Father in heaven.
We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work; between Christ and the Christian Church. He finds it impossible to speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come, which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself. This is where, for the present, he leaves the subject:–
For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from corruption than was the Old…. First the rottenness of dying superstitions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan’s philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science–all these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of individual character have disgraced it. The creed which makes human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a question whether mankind has gained on the whole….
But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is _there_–that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few select spirits, has spread itself over a vast space of the earth’s surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years, instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and inspired by its Founder’s universal and unquenchable spirit.
It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine power of Christianity appears. Again, it is in this, and not in any completeness or all-sufficiency….
But the achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether. Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate. Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were, implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which, it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be analysed. No architects’ designs were furnished for the New Jerusalem, no committee drew up rules for the Universal Commonwealth. If in the works of Nature we can trace the indications of calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of precaution, of ingenuity, then in Christ’s work it may be that the same indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present in the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable work was done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was noiselessly accomplished, attracting little attention. Who can describe that which unites men? Who has entered into the formation of speech which is the symbol of their union? Who can describe exhaustively the origin of civil society? He who can do these things can explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be enough to say, “the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed.” No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended _out of heaven from God_.
And here we leave this remarkable book. It seems to us one of those which permanently influence opinion, not so much by argument as such, as by opening larger views of the familiar and the long-debated, by deepening the ordinary channels of feeling, and by bringing men back to seriousness and rekindling their admiration, their awe, their love, about what they know best. We have not dwelt on minute criticisms about points to which exception might be taken. We have not noticed even positions on which, without further explanation, we should more or less widely disagree. The general scope of it, and the seriousness as well as the grandeur and power with which the main idea is worked out, seem to make mere secondary objections intolerable. It is a fragment, with the disadvantages of a fragment. What is put before us is far from complete, and it needs to be completed. In part at least an answer has been given to the question _what_ Christ was; but the question remains, not less important, and of which the answer is only here foreshadowed, _who_ He was. But so far as it goes, what it does is this: in the face of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy, it asserts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable, to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ, as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church to its “hidden fountains,” and pierce through the veils which hide from us the reality of the wonders in which it began.
The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is, in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of hearts in the object for which He created it.
X
THE AUTHOR OF “ROBERT ELSMERE” ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]
[12]
_Guardian_, 6th March 1889.
Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so, using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect, in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a _Summa Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a Calvin’s _Institutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an _Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a “New Reformation” Mrs. Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials and passionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad. Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience, and range of illustration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination; and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let them speak.
It is to imagination that _Robert Elsmere_ makes its main appeal, undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what, with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book like _Supernatural Religion_, that the gist of the argument lies. The alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins. Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that he had assurances and pledges which could not fail him, that God was in the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book, which was its guaranteed witness, and by which God still spoke to his soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible, far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanctity was not so to all–was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more knowing than himself–was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he thought himself in full possession of the truth which God had given him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of Christianity. He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further, that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another; the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere, comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been, which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve God in a Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than any of the old ones could be–of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper “A New Reformation.”
In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book. _Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism, chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between _bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless, narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts true life and character and human feeling and motives into the personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity–“A New Reformation.”
Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know, in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode. It combines two elements–a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which, when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of life, or make use of a poor and mean standard–_mesquin_ would be the French word–in the interpretation of actions and aims. It has impressed on us the lesson–not to be forgotten when we read Mrs. Ward’s lists of learned names–that weight and not number is the test of good evidence. German learning is decidedly imposing. But after all there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is bad–conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish. German criticism has been the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport–may we not say, without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares’ nests? When the question is asked, why all this mass of criticism has made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and variations, because of its negative results. Those who have been so eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction. Clever theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last lose themselves in the sand. Undoubtedly, it presents a very important, and, in many ways, interesting class of intellectual phenomena, among the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific, political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober thinker expects to see the end. If this vaunted criticism is still left to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a factor in the practical thought and life of the mass of mankind. Answers, and not merely questions, are what we want, who have to live, and work, and die. Criticism has pulled about the Bible without restraint or scruple. We are all of us steeped in its daring assumptions and shrewd objections. Have its leaders yet given us an account which it is reasonable to receive, clear, intelligible, self-consistent and consistent with all the facts, of what this mysterious book is?
Meanwhile, in the face of theories and conjectures and negative arguments, there is something in the world which is fact, and hard fact. The Christian Church is the most potent fact in the most important ages of the world’s progress. It is an institution like the world itself, which has grown up by its own strength and according to its own principle of life, full of good and evil, having as the law of its fate to be knocked about in the stern development of events, exposed, like human society, to all kinds of vicissitudes and alternations, giving occasion to many a scandal, and shaking the faith and loyalty of many a son, showing in ample measure the wear and tear of its existence, battered, injured, sometimes degenerate, sometimes improved, in one way or another, since those dim and long distant days when its course began; but showing in all these ways what a real thing it is, never in the extremity of storms and ruin, never in the deepest degradation of its unfaithfulness, losing hold of its own central unchanging faith, and never in its worst days of decay and corruption losing hold of the power of self-correction and hope of recovery. _Solvitur ambulando_ is an argument to which Mrs. Ward appeals, in reply to doubts about the solidity of the “New Reformation.” It could be urged more modestly if the march of the “New Reformation” had lasted for even half of one of the Christian centuries. The Church is in the world, as the family is in the world, as the State is in the world, as morality is in the world, a fact of the same order and greatness. Like these it has to make its account with the “all-dissolving” assaults of human thought. Like these it has to prove itself by living, and it does do so. In all its infinite influences and ministries, in infinite degrees and variations, it is the public source of light and good and hope. If there are select and aristocratic souls who can do without it, or owe it nothing, the multitude of us cannot. And the Christian Church is founded on a definite historic fact, that Jesus Christ who was crucified rose from the dead; and, coming from such an author, it comes to us, bringing with it the Bible. The fault of a book like _Robert Elsmere_ is that it is written with a deliberate ignoring that these two points are not merely important, but absolutely fundamental, in the problems with which it deals. With these not faced and settled it is like looking out at a prospect through a window of which all the glass is ribbed and twisted, distorting everything. It may be that even yet we imperfectly understand our wondrous Bible. It may be that we have yet much to learn about it. It may be that there is much that is very difficult about it. Let us reverently and fearlessly learn all we can about it. Let us take care not to misuse it, as it has been terribly misused. But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ’s resurrection, and using the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class of clever and cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and noble thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it is not Christianity. _Robert Elsmere_ may be true to life, as representing one of those tragedies which happen in critical moments of history. But a Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to life. It is as delusive to the conscience and the soul as it is illogical to reason.
XI
RENAN’S “VIE DE JESUS”[13]
[13]
_Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre I.–_Vie de Jesus_. Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 9th September 1863.
Unbelief is called upon nowadays, as well as belief, to give its account of the origin of that undeniable and most important fact which we call the Christian religion. And if it is true that in some respects the circumstances under which the controversy is carried on are, as it has been alleged, more than heretofore favourable to unbelief, it is also true that in some other respects the case of unbelief has difficulties which it had not once. It has to accept and admit, if it wishes to gain a favourable hearing from the present generation, the unique and surpassing moral grandeur, depth, and attractiveness of Christianity. The polemic method which set Christianity in broad contrast with what was supposed to be best and highest in human nature, and therefore found no difficulty in tracing to a bad source what was itself represented to be bad, is not a method suited to the ideas and feelings of our time; and the sneers and sarcasms of the last century, provoked by abuses and inconsistencies which have since received their ample and memorable punishment, cease to produce any effect on readers of the present day, except to call forth a passing feeling of repugnance at what is shallow and profane, mixed, it may be, sometimes, with an equally passing admiration for what is witty and brilliant. Even in M. Renan’s view, Voltaire has done his work, and is out of date. Those who now attack Christianity have to attack it under the disadvantage of the preliminary admission that its essential and distinguishing elements are, on the whole, in harmony and not in discordance with the best conceptions of human duty and life, and that its course and progress have been, at any rate, concurrent with all that is best and most hopeful in human history. First allowing that as a fact it contains in it things than which we cannot imagine anything better, and without which we should never have reached to where we are, they then have to dispute its divine claims. No man could write persuasively on religion now, _against_ it any more than _for_ it, who did not show that he was fully penetrated not only with its august and beneficent aspect, but with the essential and everlasting truths which, in however imperfect shapes, or whencesoever derived, are embodied in it and are ministered by it to society.
That Christianity is, as a matter of fact, a successful and a living religion, in a degree absolutely without parallel in any other religion, is the point from which its assailants have now to start. They have also to take account of the circumstance, to the recognition of which the whole course of modern thought and inquiry has brought us, that it has been successful, not by virtue merely of any outward and accidental favouring circumstances, but of its intrinsic power and of principles which are inseparable from its substance. This being the condition of the question, those who deny its claim to a direct Divine origin have to frame their theory of it so as to account, on principles supposed to be common to it and other religions, not merely for its rise and its conquests, but for those broad and startling differences which separate it, in character and in effects, from all other known religions. They have to show how that which is instinct with never-dying truth sprang out of what was false and mistaken, if not corrupt; how that which alone has revealed God to man’s conscience had no other origin than what in other instances has led men through enthusiasm and imposture to a barren or a mischievous superstition.
Such an attempt is the work before us–a work destined, probably, both from its ability and power and from its faults, to be for modern France what the work of Strauss was for Germany, the standard expression of an unbelief which shrinks with genuine distaste from the coarse and negative irreligion of older infidelity, and which is too refined, too profound and sympathetic in its views of human nature, to be insensible to those numberless points in which as a fact Christianity has given expression to the best and highest thoughts that man can have. Strauss, to account for what we see, imagined an idea, or a set of ideas, gradually worked out into the shape of a history, of which scarcely anything can be taken as real matter of fact, except the bare existence of the person who was clothed in the process of time with the attributes created by the idealising legend. Such a view is too vague and indistinct to satisfy French minds. A theory of this sort, to find general acceptance in France, must start with concrete history, and not be history held in solution in the cloudy shapes of myths which vanish as soon as touched. M. Renan’s process is in the main the reverse of Strauss’s. He undertakes to extract the real history recorded in the Gospels; and not only so, but to make it even more palpable and interesting, if not more wonderful, than it seems at first sight in the original records, by removing the crust of mistake and exaggeration which has concealed the true character of what the narrative records; by rewriting it according to those canons of what is probable and intelligible in human life and capacity which are recognised in the public whom he addresses.
Two of these canons govern the construction of the book. One of them is the assumption that in no part of the history of man is the supernatural to be admitted. This, of course, is not peculiar to M. Renan, though he lays it down with such emphasis in all his works, and is so anxious to bring it into distinct notice on every occasion, that it is manifestly one which he is desirous to impress on all who read him, as one of the ultimate and unquestionable foundations of all historical inquiry. The other canon is one of moral likelihood, and it is, that it is credible and agreeable to what we gather from experience, that the highest moral elevation ever attained by man should have admitted along with it, and for its ends, conscious imposture. On the first of these assumptions, all that is miraculous in the Gospel narratives is, not argued about, or, except perhaps in one instance–the raising of Lazarus–attempted to be accounted for or explained, but simply left out and ignored. On the second, the fact from which there is no escape–that He whom M. Renan venerates with a sincerity which no one can doubt as the purest and greatest of moral reformers, did claim power from God to work miracles–is harmonised with the assumption that the claim could not possibly have been a true one.
M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects, the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan’s view, Christ, the Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity, and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no shifts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history, overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel.
His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom, first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his own mission and office, to attack the institutions of Judaism, and perished in the conflict–and that this was the cause why Christianity and Christendom came to be and exist. This is the explanation which a great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so astonishing and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European history. There have been other enthusiasts for goodness and truth, more or less like the character which M. Renan draws in his book, but they have never yet founded a universal religion, or one which had the privilege of perpetual youth and unceasing self-renovation. There have been other great and imposing religions, commanding the allegiance for century after century of millions of men; but who will dare assert that any of these religions, that of Sakya-Mouni, of Mahomet, or that of the Vedas, could possibly be the religion, or satisfy the religious ideas and needs, of the civilised West?
When M. Renan comes to detail he is as strangely insensible to what seem at first sight the simplest demands of probability. As it were by a sort of reaction to the minute realising of particulars which has been in vogue among some Roman Catholic writers, M. Renan realises too–realises with no less force and vividness, and, according to his point of view, with no less affectionate and tender interest. He popularises the Gospels; but not for a religious set of readers–nor, we must add, for readers of thought and sense, whether interested for or against Christianity, but for a public who study life in the subtle and highly wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to those representations of human nature which aspire to pass beyond the conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he has composed it. The world is tolerably familiar with them. If there is a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in the Gospel records, it is that of the gravity, the plain downright seriousness, the laborious earnestness, impressed from first to last on the story. When we turn from these to his pages it is difficult to exaggerate the astounding impression which his epithets and descriptions have on the mind. We are told that there is a broad distinction between the early Galilean days of hope in our Lord’s ministry, and the later days of disappointment and conflict; and that if we look, we shall find in Galilee the “_fin et joyeux moraliste_,” full of a “_conversation pleine de gaiete et de charme_,” of “_douce gaiete et aimables plaisanteries_,” with a “_predication suave et douce, toute pleine de la nature et du parfum des champs_,” creating out of his originality of mind his “_innocents aphorismes_,” and the “_genre d’elicieux_” of parabolic teaching; “_le charmant docteur qui pardonnait a tous pourvu qu’on l’aimat_.” He lived in what was then an earthly paradise, in “_la joyeuse Galilee_” in the midst of the “_nature ravissante_” which gave to everything about the Sea of Galilee “_un tour idyllique et charmant_.” So the history of Christianity at its birth is a “_delicieuse pastorale_” an “_idylle_,” a “_milieu enivrant_” of joy and hope. The master was surrounded by a “_bande de joyeux enfants_,” a “_troupe gaie et vagabonde_,” whose existence in the open air was a “perpetual enchantment.” The disciples were “_ces petits comites de bonnes gens_,” very simple, very credulous, and like their country full of a “_sentiment gai et tendre de la vie_,” and of an “_imagination riante_.” Everything is spoken of as “delicious”–“_delicieuse pastorale,” “delicieuse beaute,” “delicieuses sentences,” “delicieuse theologie d’amour_.” Among the “tender and delicate souls of the North”–it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans–was set up an “_aimable communisme_.” Is it possible to imagine a more extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself inaccurately conceived of?–
Il parcourait ainsi la Galilee au milieu _d’une fete perpetuelle_. Il se servait d’une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sure, et dont le grand oeil noir, ombrage de longs cils, a beaucoup de douceur. Ses disciples deployarent quelquefois autour de lui une pompe rustique, dont leurs vetements, tenant lieu de tapis, faisaient les frais. Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait, ou les etendaient a terre sur son passage.
History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions, that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an idyllic gipsying party is the most grotesque. That these “_petits comites de bonnes gens_” though influenced by a great example and wakened out of their “delicious pastoral” by a heroic death, should have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect, and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome alternative.
M. Renan is willing to adopt everything in the Gospel history except what is miraculous. If he is difficult to satisfy as to the physical possibility or the proof of miracles, at least he is not hard to satisfy on points of moral likelihood; and he draws on his ample power of supposing the combination of moral opposites in order to get rid of the obstinate and refractory supernatural miracle. To some extent, indeed, he avails himself of that inexhaustible resource of unlimited guessing, by means of which he reverses the whole history, and makes it take a shape which it is hard to recognise in its original records. The feeding of the five thousand, the miracle described by all the four Evangelists, is thus curtly disposed of:–“Il se retira au desert. Beaucoup de monde l’y suivit. _Grace a une extreme frugalite_ la troupe sainte y vecut; _on crut naturellement_ voir en cela un miracle.” This is all he has to say. But miracles are too closely interwoven with the whole texture of the Gospel history to be, as a whole, thus disposed of. He has, of course, to admit that miracles are so mixed up with it that mere exaggeration is not a sufficient account of them. But be bids us remember that the time was one of great credulity, of slackness and incapacity in dealing with matters of evidence, a time when it might be said that there was an innocent disregard of exact and literal truth where men’s souls and affections were deeply interested. But, even supposing that this accounted for a belief in certain miracles growing up–which it does not, for the time was not one of mere childlike and uninquiring belief, but was as perfectly familiar as we are with the notion of false claims to miraculous power which could not stand examination–still this does not meet the great difficulty of all, to which he is at last brought. It is undeniable that our Lord professed to work miracles. They were not merely attributed to Him by those who came after Him. If we accept in any degree the Gospel account, He not only wrought miracles, but claimed to do so; and M. Renan admits it–that is, he admits that the highest, purest, most Divine person ever seen on earth (for all this he declares in the most unqualified terms) stooped to the arts of Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyana. He was a “thaumaturge”–“tard et a contre-coeur”–“avec une sorte de mauvaise humeur”–“en cachette”–“malgre lui”–“sentant le vanite de l’opinion”; but still a “thaumaturge.” Moreover, He was so almost of necessity; for M. Renan holds that without the support of an alleged supernatural character and power, His work must have perished. Everything, to succeed and be realised, must, we are told, be fortified with something of alloy. We are reminded of the “loi fatale qui condamne l’idee a dechoir des qu’elle cherche a convertir les hommes.” “Concevoir de bien, en efifet, ne suffit pas; il faut le faire reussir parmi les hommes. Pour cela, des voies moins pures sont necessaires.” If the Great Teacher had kept to the simplicity of His early lessons, He would have been greater, but “the truth would not have been promulgated.” “He had to choose between these two alternatives, either renouncing his mission or becoming a ‘thaumaturge.'” The miracles “were a violence done to him by his age, a concession which was wrung from him by a passing necessity.” And if we feel startled at such a view, we are reminded that we must not measure the sincerity of Orientals by our own rigid and critical idea of veracity; and that “such is the weakness of the human mind, that the best causes are not usually won but by bad reasons,” and that the greatest of discoverers and founders have only triumphed over their difficulties “by daily taking account of men’s weakness and by not always giving the true reasons of the truth.”
L’histoire est impossible si l’on n’admet hautement qu’il y a pour la sincerite plusieurs mesures. Toutes les grandes choses se font par le peuple, or on ne conduit pas le peuple qu’en se pretant a ses idees. Le philosophe, qui sachant cela, s’isole et se retranche dans sa noblesse, est hautement louable. Mais celui qui prend l’humanite avec ses illusions et cherche a agir sur elle et avec elle, ne saurait etre blame. Cesar savait fort bien qu’il n’etait pas fils de Venus; la France ne serait pas ce qu’elle est si l’on n’avait cru mille ans a la sainte ampoule de Reims. Il nous est facile a nous autres, impuissants que nous sommes, d’appeler cela mensonge, et fiers de notre timide honnetete, de traiter avec dedain les heros qui out accepte dans d’autres conditions la lutte de la vie. Quand nous aurons fait avec nos scrupules ce qu’ils firent avec leurs mensonges, nous aurons le droit d’etre pour eux severes.
Now let M. Renan or any one else realise what is involved, on his supposition, not merely, as he says, of “illusion or madness,” but of wilful deceit and falsehood, in the history of Lazarus, even according to his lame and hesitating attempt to soften it down and extenuate it; and then put side by side with it the terms in which M. Renan has summed up the moral greatness of Him of whom he writes:–
La foi, l’enthousiasme, la constance de la premiere generation chretienne ne s’expliquent qu’en supposant a l’origine de tout le mouvement un homme de proportions colossales…. Cette sublime personne, qui chaque jour preside encore au destin du monde, il est permis de l’appeler divine, non en ce sens que Jesus ait absorbe tout le divin, mais en ce sens que Jesus est l’individu qui a fait faire a son espece le plus grand pas vers le divin…. Au milieu de cette uniforme vulgarite, des colonnes s’elevent vers le ciel et attestent une plus noble destinee. Jesus est la plus haute de ces colonnes qui montrent a l’homme d’ou il vient et ou il doit tendre. En lui s’est condense tout ce qu’il y a de bon et d’eleve dans notre nature…. Quels que puissent etre les phenomenes inattendus de l’avenir, Jesus ne sera pas surpasse…. Tous les siecles proclameront qu’entre les fils des hommes il n’en est pas ne de plus grand que Jesus.
And of such an one we are told that it is a natural and reasonable view to take, not merely that He claimed a direct communication with God, which disordered reason could alone excuse Him for claiming, but that He based His whole mission on a pretension to such supernatural powers as a man could not pretend to without being conscious that they were delusions. The conscience of that age as to veracity or imposture was quite clear on such a point. Jew and Greek and Roman would have condemned as a deceiver one who, not having the power, took on him to say that by the finger of God he could raise the dead. And yet to a conscience immeasurably above his age, it seems, according to M. Renan, that this might be done. It is absurd to say that we must not judge such a proceeding by the ideas of our more exact and truth-loving age, when it would have been abundantly condemned by the ideas recognised in the religion and civilisation of the first century.
M. Renan repeatedly declares that his great aim is to save religion by relieving it of the supernatural. He does not argue; but instead of the old familiar view of the Great History, he presents an opposite theory of his own, framed to suit that combination of the revolutionary and the sentimental which just now happens to be in favour in the unbelieving schools. And this is the result: a representation which boldly invests its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and beauty, and yet does not shrink from associating with it also–and that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success–a deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to Christ in order to condemn Christianity.
XII
RENAN’S “LES APOTRES”[14]
[14]
_Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre II.–_Les Apotres_. Par Ernest Renan. _Saturday Review_, 14th July 1866.
In his recent volume, _Les Apotres_, M. Renan has undertaken two tasks of very unequal difficulty. He accounts for the origin of the Christian belief and religion, and he writes the history of its first propagation. These are very different things, and to do one of them is by no means to do the other. M. Renan’s historical sketch of the first steps of the Christian movement is, whatever we may think of its completeness and soundness, a survey of characters and facts, based on our ordinary experience of the ways in which men act and are influenced. Of course it opens questions and provokes dissent at every turn; but, after all, the history of a religion once introduced into the world is the history of the men who give it shape and preach it, who accept or oppose it. The spread and development of all religions have certain broad features in common, which admit of philosophical treatment simply as phenomena, and receive light from being compared with parallel examples of the same kind; and whether a man’s historical estimate is right, and his picture accurate and true, depends on his knowledge of the facts, and his power to understand them and to make them understood. No one can dispute M. Renan’s qualifications for being the historian of a religious movement. The study of religion as a phenomenon of human nature and activity has paramount attractions for him. His interest in it has furnished him with ample and varied materials for comparison and generalisation. He is a scholar and a man of learning, quick and wide in his sympathies, and he commands attention by the singular charm of his graceful and lucid style. When, therefore, he undertakes to relate how, as a matter of fact, the Christian Church grew up amid the circumstances of its first appearance, he has simply to tell the story of the progress of a religious cause; and this is a comparatively light task for him. But he also lays before us what he appears to consider an adequate account of the origin of the Christian belief. The Christian belief, it must be remembered, means, not merely the belief that there was such a person as he has described in his former, volume, but the belief that one who was crucified rose again from the dead, and lives for evermore above. It is in this belief that the Christian religion had its beginning; there is no connecting Christ and Christianity, except through the Resurrection. The origin, therefore, of the belief in the Resurrection, in the shape in which we have it, lies across M. Renan’s path to account for; and neither the picture which he has drawn in his former volume, nor the history which he follows out in this, dispense him from the necessity of facing this essential and paramount element in the problem which he has to solve. He attempts to deal with this, the knot of the great question. But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and practised a mind.
The Resurrection, we repeat, bars the way in M. Renan’s scheme for making an intelligible transition, from the life and character which he has sought to reproduce from the Gospels, to the first beginnings and preaching of Christianity. The Teacher, he says, is unique in wisdom, in goodness, in the height of his own moral stature and the Divine elevation of his aims. The religion is, with all abatements and imperfections, the only one known which could be the religion of humanity. After his portraiture of the Teacher, follows, naturally enough, as the result of that Teacher’s influence and life, a religion of corresponding elevation and promise. The passage from a teaching such as M. Renan supposes to a religion such as he allows Christianity to be may be reasonably understood as a natural consequence of well-known causes, but for one thing–the interposition between the two of an alleged event which simply throws out all reasonings drawn from ordinary human experience. From the teaching and life of Socrates follow, naturally enough, schools of philosophy, and an impulse which has affected scientific thought ever since. From the preaching and life of Mahomet follows, equally naturally, the religion of Islam. In each case the result is seen to be directly and distinctly linked on to the influences which gave it birth, and nothing more than these influences is wanted, or makes any claim, to account for it. So M. Renan holds that all that is needed to account for Christianity is such a personality and such a career as he has described in his last volume. But the facts will not bend to this. Christianity hangs on to Christ not merely as to a Person who lived and taught and died, but as to a Person who rose again from death. That is of the very essence of its alleged derivation from Christ. It knows Christ only as Christ risen; the only reason of its own existence that it recognises is the Resurrection. The only claim the Apostles set forth for preaching to the world is that their Master who was crucified was alive once more. Every one knows that this was the burden of all their words, the corner-stone of all their work. We may believe them or not. We may take Christianity or leave it. But we cannot derive Christianity from Christ, without meeting, as the bond which connects the two, the Resurrection. But for the Resurrection, M. Renan’s scheme might be intelligible. A Teacher unequalled for singleness of aim and nobleness of purpose lives and dies, and leaves the memory and the leaven of His teaching to disciples, who by them, even though in an ill-understood shape, and with incomparably inferior qualities themselves, purify and elevate the religious ideas and feelings of mankind. If that were all, if there were nothing but the common halo of the miraculous which is apt to gather about great names, the interpretation might be said to be coherent. But a theory of Christianity cannot neglect the most prominent fact connected with its beginning. It is impossible to leave it out of the account, in judging both of the Founder and of those whom his influence moulded and inspired.
M. Renan has to account for the prominence given to the Resurrection in the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and transmitted to us His principles. And this is something much more than can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to assume the supernatural and the miraculous. The way in which the Resurrection is circumstantially and unceasingly asserted, and made on every occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct agency of heaven in health or disease. It is too precise, too matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations. The various recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements. It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.
M. Renan’s method is–whilst of course not believing them, yet not supposing conscious fraud–to treat these records as the description of natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in the world, from excess of “idealism” and attachment. Unaffected by the circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more straightforwardly real–that they seem purposely framed to be a contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repetition and variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and passion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitement and crisis–unaffected by such considerations, M. Renan proceeds to tell, in his own way, the story of what he supposes to have occurred, without, of course, admitting the smallest real foundation for what was so positively asserted, but with very little reproach or discredit to the ardent and undoubting assertors. He begins with a statement which is meant to save the character of the Teacher. “Jesus, though he spoke unceasingly of resurrection, of new life, had never said quite clearly that he should rise again in the flesh.” He says this with the texts before him, for he quotes them and classifies them in a note. But this is his point of departure, laid down without qualification. Yet if there is anything which the existing records do say distinctly, it is that Jesus Christ said over and over again that He should rise again, and that He fixed the time within which He should rise. M. Renan is not bound to believe them. But he must take them as he finds them; and on this capital point either we know nothing at all, and have no evidence to go upon, or the evidence is simply inverted by M. Renan’s assertion. There may, of course, be reasons for believing one part of a man’s evidence and disbelieving another; but there is nothing in this case but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence either more or less worthy of credit than any other part. What is certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view, a position which the records on which the view professes to be based emphatically and unambiguously contradict. Whatever we may think of it, the evidence undoubtedly is, if evidence there is at all, that Jesus Christ did say, though He could not get His disciples at the time to understand and believe Him, that He should rise again on the third day. What M. Renan had to do, if he thought the contrary, was not to assume, but to prove, that in these repeated instances in which they report His announcements, the Evangelists mistook or misquoted the words of their Master.
He accepts, however, their statement that no one at first hoped that the words would be made good; and he proceeds to account for the extraordinary belief which, in spite of this original incredulity, grew up, and changed the course of things and the face of the world. We admire and respect many things in M. Renan; but it seems to us that his treatment of this matter is simply the _ne plus ultra_ of the degradation of the greatest of issues by the application to it of sentiment unworthy of a silly novel. In the first place, he lays down on general grounds that, though the disciples had confessedly given up all hope, it yet _was natural_ that they should expect to see their master alive again. “Mais I’enthousiasme et l’amour ne connaissent pas les situations sans issue.” Do they not? Are death and separation such light things to triumph over that imagination finds it easy to cheat them? “Ils se jouent de l’impossible et, plutot que d’abdiquer l’esperance, ils font violence a toute realite.” Is this an account of the world of fact or the world of romance? The disciples did not hope; but, says M. Renan, vague words about the future had dropped from their master, and these were enough to build upon, and to suggest that they would soon see him back. In vain it is said that in fact they did not expect it. “Une telle croyance etait d’ailleurs si naturelle, que la foi des disciples aurait suffi pour la creer de toutes pieces.” Was it indeed–in spite of Enoch and Elias, cases of an entirely different kind–so natural to think that the ruined leader of a crushed cause, whose hopeless followers had seen the last of him amid the lowest miseries of torment and scorn, should burst the grave?
Il devait arriver [he proceeds] pour Jesus ce qui arrive pour tous les hommes qui ont captive l’attention de leurs semblables. Le monde, habitue a leur attribuer des vertus surhumaines, ne peut admettre qu’ils aient subi la loi injuste, revoltante, inique, du trepas commun…. La mort est chose si absurde quand elle frappe l’homme de genie ou l’homme d’un grand coeur, que le peuple ne croit pas a la possibilite d’une telle erreur de la nature. Les heros ne meurent pas.
The history of the world presents a large range of instances to test the singular assertion that death is so “absurd” that “the people” cannot believe that great and good men literally die. But would it be easy to match the strangeness of a philosopher and a man of genius gravely writing this down as a reason–not why, at the interval of centuries, a delusion should grow up–but why, on the very morrow of a crucifixion and burial, the disciples should have believed that all the dreadful work they had seen a day or two before was in very fact and reality reversed? We confess we do not know what human experience is if it countenances such a supposition as this.
From this antecedent probability he proceeds to the facts. “The Sabbath day which followed the burial was occupied with these thoughts…. Never was the rest of the Sabbath so fruitful.” They all, the women especially, thought of him all day long in his bed of spices, watched over by angels; and the assurance grew that the wicked men who had killed him would not have their triumph, that he would not be left to decay, that he would be wafted on high to that Kingdom of the Father of which he had spoken. “Nous le verrons encore; nous entendrons sa voix charmante; c’est en vain qu’ils l’auront tue.” And as, with the Jews, a future life implied a resurrection of the body, the shape which their hope took was settled. “Reconnaitre que la mort pouvait etre victorieuse de Jesus, de celui qui venait de supprimer son empire, c’etait le comble de l’absurdite.” It is, we suppose, irrelevant to remark that we find not the faintest trace of this sense of absurdity. The disciples, he says, had no choice between hopelessness and “an heroic affirmation”; and he makes the bold surmise that “un homme penetrant aurait pu annoncer _des le samedi_ que Jesus revivrait.” This may be history, or philosophy, or criticism; what it is _not_ is the inference naturally arising from the only records we have of the time spoken of. But the force of historical imagination dispenses with the necessity of extrinsic support. “La petite societe chretienne, ce jour-la, opera le veritable miracle: elle ressuscita Jesus en son coeur par l’amour intense qu’elle lui porta. Elle decida que Jesus ne mourrait pas.” The Christian Church has done many remarkable things; but it never did anything so strange, or which so showed its power, as when it took that resolution.
How was the decision, involuntary and unconscious, and guiltless of intentional deception, if we can conceive of such an attitude of mind, carried out? M. Renan might leave the matter in obscurity. But he sees his way, in spite of incoherent traditions and the contradictions which they present, to a “sufficient degree of probability.” The belief in the Resurrection originated in an hallucination of the disordered fancy of Mary Magdalen, whose mind was thrown off its balance by her affection and sorrow; and, once suggested, the idea rapidly spread, and produced, through the Christian society, a series of corresponding visions, firmly believed to be real. But Mary Magdalen was the founder of it all:–
Elle eut, en ce moment solennel, une part d’action tout a fait hors ligne. C’est elle qu’il faut suivre pas a pas; car elle porta, ce jour-la, pendant une heure, tout le travail de la conscience chretienne; son temoignage decida la foi de l’avenir…. La vision legere s’ecarte et lui dit: “Ne me touche pas!” Peu a peu l’ombre disparait. Mais le miracle de l’amour est accompli. Ce que Cephas n’a pu faire, Marie l’a faite; elle a su tirer la vie, la parole douce et penetrante, du tombeau vide. Il ne s’agit plus de consequences a deduire ni de conjectures a former. Marie a vu et entendu. La resurrection a son premier temoin immediat.
He proceeds to criticise the accounts which ascribe the first vision to others; but in reality Mary Magdalen, he says, has done most, after the great Teacher, for the foundation of Christianity. “Queen and patroness of idealists,” she was able to “impose upon all the sacred vision of her impassioned soul.” All rests upon her first burst of entbusiasm, which gave the signal and kindled the faith of others. “Sa grande affirmation de femme, ‘il est ressuscite,’ a ete la base de la foi de l’humanite”:–
Paul ne parle pas de la vision de Marie et reporte tout l’honneur de la premiere apparition sur Pierre. Mais cette expression est tres~inexacte. Pierre ne vit que le caveau vide, le suaire et le linceul. Marie seule aima assez pour depasser la nature et faire revivre le fantome du maitre exquis. Dans ces sortes de crises merveilleuses, voir apres les autres n’est rien; tout le merite est de voir pour la premiere fois; car les autres modelent ensuite leur vision sur le type recu. C’est le propre des belles organisations de concevoir l’image promptement, avec justesse et par une sorte de sens intime du dessin. La gloire de la resurrection appartient donc a Marie de Magdala. Apres Jesus, c’est Marie qui a le plus fait pour la fondation du Christianisme. L’ombre creee par les sens delicats de Madeleine plane encore sur le monde…. Loin d’ici, raison impuissante! Ne va pas appliquer une froide analyse a ce chef-d’oeuvre de l’idealisme et de l’amour. Si la sagesse renonce a consoler cette pauvre race humaine, trahie par le sort, laisse la folie tenter l’aventure. Ou est le sage qui a donne au monde autant de joie, que la possedee Marie de Magdala?
He proceeds to describe, on the same supposition, the other events of the day, which he accepts as having in a certain very important sense happened, though, of course, only in the sense which excludes their reality. No doubt, for a series of hallucinations, anything will do in the way of explanation. The scene of the evening was really believed to have taken place as described, though it was the mere product of chance noises and breaths of air on minds intently expectant; and we are bidden to remember “that in these decisive hours a current of wind, a creaking window, an accidental rustle, settle the belief of nations for centuries.” But at any rate it was a decisive hour:–
Tels furent les incidents de ce jour qui a fixe le sort de l’humanite. L’opinion que Jesus etait ressuscite s’y fonda d’une maniere irrevocable. La secte, qu’on avait cru eteindre en tuant le maitre, fut des lors assuree d’un immense avenir.
We are willing to admit that Christian writers have often spoken unreally and unsatisfactorily enough in their comments on this subject. But what Christian comment, hard, rigid, and narrow in its view of possibilities, ever equalled this in its baselessness and supreme absence of all that makes a view look like the truth? It puts the most extravagant strain on documents which, truly or falsely, but at any rate in the most consistent and uniform manner, assert something different. What they assert in every conceivable form, and with distinct detail, are facts; it is not criticism, but mere arbitrary license, to say that all these stand for visions. The issue of truth or falsehood is intelligible; the middle supposition of confusion and mistake in that which is the basis of everything, and is definitely and in such varied ways repeated, is trifling and incredible. We may disbelieve, if we please, St. Paul’s enumeration of the appearances after the Resurrection; but to resolve it into a series of visions is to take refuge in the most unlikely of guesses. And, when we take into view the whole of the case–not merely the life and teaching out of which everything grew, but the aim and character of the movement which ensued, and the consequences of it, long tested and still continuing, to the history and development of mankind–we find it hard to measure the estimate of probability which is satisfied with the supposition that the incidents of one day of folly and delusion irrevocably decided the belief of ages, and the life and destiny of millions. Without the belief in the Resurrection there would have been no Christianity; if anything may be laid down as certain, this may. We should probably never have even heard of the great Teacher; He would not have been believed in, He would not have been preached to the world; the impulse to conversion would have been wanting; and all that was without parallel good and true and fruitful in His life would have perished, and have been lost in Judaea. And the belief in the Resurrection M. Renan thinks due to an hour of over-excited fancy in a woman agonized by sorrow and affection. When we are presented with an hypothesis on the basis of intrinsic probability, we cannot but remember that the power of delusion and self-deception, though undoubtedly shown in very remarkable instances, must yet be in a certain proportion to what it originates and produces, and that it is controlled by the numerous antagonistic influences of the world. Crazy women have founded superstitions; but we cannot help thinking that it would be more difficult than M. Renan supposes for crazy women to found a world-wide religion for ages, branching forth into infinite forms, and tested by its application to all varieties of civilisation, and to national and personal character. M. Renan points to La Salette. But the assumption would be a bold one that the La Salette people could have invented a religion for Christendom which would stand the wear of eighteen centuries, and satisfy such different minds. Pious frauds, as he says, may have built cathedrals. But you must take Christianity for what it has proved itself to be in its hard and unexampled trial. To start an order, a sect, an institution, even a local tradition or local set of miracles, on foundations already laid, is one thing; it is not the same to be the spring of the most serious and the deepest of moral movements for the improvement of the world, the most unpretending and the most careless of all outward form and show, the most severely searching and universal and lasting in its effects on mankind. To trace that back to the Teacher without the intervention of the belief in the Resurrection is manifestly impossible. We know what He is said to have taught; we know what has come of that teaching in the world at large; but if the link which connects the two be not a real one, it is vain to explain it by the dreams of affection. It was not a matter of a moment or an hour, but of days and weeks continually; not the assertion of one imaginative mourner or two, but of a numerous and variously constituted body of people. The story, if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture. We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens in the genesis of religions. But that between such a teacher and such teaching there should intervene such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or delusion, is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of probability conceivable, as well as one of the most desperate conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind for truth. Few thoughts can be less endurable than that the wisest and best of our race, men of the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid and judicial minds, should have been the victims and dupes of the mad affection of a crazy Magdalen, of “ces touchantes demoniaques, ces pecheresses converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme.” M. Renan shrinks from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or to truth.
We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan’s new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity. We do not pretend to go along with him in his general principles of judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by him to do duty for want of something stronger. But, from so keen and so deeply interested a writer, it is our own fault if we do not learn a good deal. And we may study in its full development that curious combination, of which M. Renan is the most conspicuous example, of profound veneration for Christianity and sympathy with its most characteristic aspects, with the scientific impulse to destroy in the public mind the belief in its truth.
XIII
M. RENAN’S HIBBERT LECTURES[15]
[15]
_Guardian_, 14th April 1880.
I
The object of M. Renan’s lectures at St. George’s Hall is, as we understand him, not merely to present a historical sketch of the influence of Rome on the early Church, but to reconcile the historical imagination with the results of his own and kindred speculations on the origin of Christianity. He has, with a good faith which we do not question, investigated the subject and formed his conclusions upon it. He on the present occasion assumes these investigations, and that he, at any rate, is satisfied with their result. He hardly pretends to carry the mixed popular audience whom he addresses into any real inquiry into the grounds on which he has satisfied himself that the received account of Christianity is not the true one. But he is aware that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs about the conditions of man’s existence, which has shaped the fortunes and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession of the world as much as the great tradition of right and wrong, or of the family, or of the State. How did it get there? It is most astonishing that it should have done so, what is the account of it? Of course people may inquire into this question as they may inquire into the basis of morality, or the origin of the family or the State. But here, as on those subjects, reason, and that imagination which is one of the forces of reason, by making the mind duly sensible of the magnitude of ideas and alternatives, are exacting. M. Renan’s task is to make the purely human origin of Christianity, its origin in the circumstances, the beliefs, the ideas, and the moral and political conditions of the first centuries, seem to us _natural_–as natural in the history of the world as other great and surprising events and changes–as natural as the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the idea of religion as such, and certainly with no feeble powers of recalling the past and investing it with colour and life, he has to show how these things can be–how a religion with such attributes as he freely ascribes to the Gospel, so grand, so pure, so lasting, can have sprung up not merely _in_ but _from_ a most corrupt and immoral time, and can have its root in the most portentous and impossible of falsehoods. It must be said to be a bold undertaking.
M. Renan has always aimed at doing justice to what he assailed; Christians, who realise what they believe, will say that he patronises their religion, and naturally they resent such patronage. Such candour adds doubtless to the literary effect of his method; but it is only due to him to acknowledge the fairness of his admissions. He starts with the declaration that there never was a nobler moment in human history than the beginnings of the Christian Church. It was the “most heroic episode in the annals of mankind.” “Never did man draw forth from his bosom more devotion, more love of the ideal, than in the 150 years which elapsed between the sweet Galilean vision and the death of Marcus Aurelius.” It was not only that the saints were admirable and beautiful in their lives; they had the secret of the future, and laid down the lines on which the goodness and hope of the coming world were to move.” Never was the religious conscience more eminently creative, never did it lay down with more authority the law of future ages.”
Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but unique, in the development of human character, but that here was created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul’s Epistles nor Tacitus nor Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate accident immeasurably superior to them.
This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead, he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to assure its victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; “it was Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and Christianity became synonymous words”; it was Jewish monotheism, the religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.
This may all be true, and is partially true; but how did that hated and partial Judaism break through its trammels, and become a religion for all men, and a religion to which all men gathered? The Roman organisation was an admirable vehicle for Christianity; but the vehicle does not make that which it carries, or account for it. M. Renan’s picture of the Empire abounds with all those picturesque details which he knows so well where to find, and knows so well, too, how to place in an interesting light. There were then, of course, conditions of the time more favourable to the Christian Church than would have been the conditions of other times. There was a certain increased liberty of thought, though there were also some pretty strong obstacles to it. M. Renan has Imperial proclivities, and reminds us truly enough that despotisms are sometimes more tolerant than democracies, and that political liberty is not the same as spiritual and mental freedom, and does not always favour it. It may be partially true, as he says, that “Virgil and Tibullus show that Roman harshness and cruelty were softening down”; that “equality and the rights of men were preached by the Stoics”; that “woman was more her own mistress, and slaves were better treated than in the days of Cato”; that “very humane and just laws were enacted under the very worst emperors; that Tiberius and Nero were able financiers”; that “after the terrible butcheries of the old centuries, mankind was crying with the voice of Virgil for peace and pity.” A good many qualifications and abatements start up in our minds on reading these statements, and a good many formidable doubts suggest themselves, if we can at all believe what has come down to us of the history of these times. It is hard to accept quite literally the bold assertion that “love for the poor, sympathy with all men, almsgiving, were becoming virtues.” But allow this as the fair and hopeful side of the Empire. Yet all this is a long way from accounting for the effects on the world of Christianity, even in the dim, vaporous form in which M. Renan imagines it, much more in the actual concrete reality in which, if we know anything, it appeared. “Christianity,” he says, “responded to the cry for peace and pity of all weary and tender souls.” No doubt it did; but what was it that responded, and what was its consolation, and whence was its power drawn? What was there in the known thoughts or hopes or motives of men at the time to furnish such a response? “Christianity,” he says, “could only have been born and spread at a time when men had no longer a country”; “it was that explosion of social and religious ideas which became inevitable after Augustus had put an end to political struggles,” after his policy had killed “patriotism.” It is true enough that the first Christians, believing themselves subjects of an Eternal King and in view of an eternal world, felt themselves strangers and pilgrims in this; yet did the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola? But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country? From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the world has ever known?
To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age, and the days when the Church appears fully constituted and recognised. German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question. There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan’s account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.
II[16]
[16]
_Guardian_, 21st April 1880.
M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire passing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power, as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled and as astonishing. The “Legend of the Roman Church–Peter and Paul,” “Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up,” and “Rome the Capital of Catholicism,” are the titles of the three lectures in which this thesis is explained and illustrated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius, at the Royal Institution, though not one of the series, is obviously connected with it, and concludes M. Renan’s work in England.
Except the brilliant bits of writing which, judging from the full abstracts given in translation in the _Times_, appear to have been interspersed, and except the undoubting self-confidence and _aplomb_ with which a historical survey, reversing the common ideas of mankind, was delivered, there was little new to be learned from M. Renan’s treatment of his subject. Perhaps it may be described as the Roman Catholic theory of the rise of the Church, put in an infidel point of view. It is Roman Catholic in concentrating all interest, all the sources of influence and power in the Christian religion and Christian Church, from the first moment at Rome. But for Rome the Christian Church would not have existed. The Church is inconceivable without Rome, and Rome as the seat and centre of its spiritual activity. Everything else is forgotten. There were Christian Churches all over the Empire, in Syria, in Egypt, in Africa, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in Greece. A great body of Christian literature, embodying the ideas and character of Christians all over the Empire, was growing up, and this was not Roman and had nothing to do with Rome; it was Greek as much as Latin, and local, not metropolitan, in its characteristics. Christianity was spreading here, there, and everywhere, slowly and imperceptibly as the tide comes in, or as cells multiply in the growing tissues of organised matter; it was spreading under its many distinct guides and teachers, and taking possession of the cities and provinces of the Empire. All this great movement, the real foundation of all that was to be, is overlooked and forgotten in the attention which is fixed on Rome and confined to it. As in the Roman Catholic view, M. Renan brings St. Paul and St. Peter together to Rome, to found that great Imperial Church in which the manifold and varied history of Christendom is merged and swallowed up. Only, of course, M. Renan brings them there as “fanatics” instead of Apostles and martyrs. We know something about St. Peter and St. Paul. We know them at any rate from their writings. In M. Renan’s representation they stand opposed to one another as leaders of factions, to whose fierce hatreds and jealousies there is nothing comparable. “All the differences,” he is reported to say, “which divide orthodox folks, heretics, schismatics, in our own day, are as nothing compared with the dissension between Peter and Paul.” It is, as every one knows, no new story; but there it is in M. Renan in all its crudity, as if it were the most manifest and accredited of truths. M. Renan first brings St. Paul to Rome. “It was,” he says, “a great event in the world’s history, almost as pregnant with consequences as his conversion.” How it was so M. Renan does not explain; but he brings St. Peter to Rome also, “following at the heels of St. Paul,” to counteract and neutralise his influence. And who is this St. Peter? He represents the Jewish element; and what that element was at Rome M. Renan takes great pains to put before us. He draws an elaborate picture of the Jews and Jewish quarter of Rome–a “longshore population” of beggars and pedlars, with a Ghetto resembling the Alsatia of _The Fortunes of Nigel_, seething with dirt and fanaticism. These were St. Peter’s congeners at Rome, whose ideas and claims, “timid trimmer” though he was, he came to Rome to support against the Hellenism and Protestantism of St. Paul. And at Rome they, both of them, probably, perished in Nero’s persecution, and that is the history of the success of Christianity. “Only fanatics can found anything. Judaism lives on because of the intense frenzy of its prophets and annalists, Christianity by means of its martyrs.”
But a certain Clement arose after their deaths, to arrange a reconciliation between the fiercely antagonistic factions of St. Peter and St. Paul. How he harmonised them M. Renan leaves us to imagine; but he did reconcile them; he gathered in his own person the authority of the Roman Church; he lectured the Corinthian Church on its turbulence and insubordination; he anticipated, M. Renan remarked, almost in words, the famous saying of the French Archbishop of Rouen, “My clergy are my regiment, and they are drilled to obey like a regiment.” On this showing, Clement might almost be described as the real founder of Christianity, of which neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, with their violent oppositions, can claim to be the complete representative; at any rate he was the first Pope, complete in all his attributes. And in accordance with this beginning M. Renan sees in the Roman Church, first, the centre in which Church authority grew up, and next, the capital of Catholicism. In Rome the congregation gave up its rights to its elders, and these rights the elders surrendered to the single ruler or Bishop. The creation of the Episcopate was eminently the work of Rome; and this Bishop of Rome caught the full spirit of the Caesar, on whose decay he became great; and troubling himself little about the deep questions which exercised the minds and wrung the hearts of thinkers and mystics, he made himself the foundation of order, authority, and subordination to all parts of the Imperial world.
Such is M. Renan’s explanation of the great march and triumph of the Christian Church. The Roman Empire, which we had supposed was the natural enemy of the Church, was really the founder of all that made the Church strong, and bequeathed to the Church its prerogatives and its spirit, and partly its machinery. We should hardly gather from this picture that there was, besides, a widespread Catholic Church, with its numerous centres of life and thought and teaching, and with very slight connection, in the early times, with the Church of the capital. And, in the next place, we should gather from it that there was little more in the Church than a powerful and strongly built system of centralised organisation and control; we should hardly suspect the existence of the real questions which interested or disturbed it; we should hardly suspect the existence of a living and all-engrossing theology, or the growth and energy in it of moral forces, or that the minds of Christians about the world were much more busy with the discipline of life, the teaching and meaning of the inspired words of Scripture, and the ever-recurring conflict with perverseness and error, than with their dependent connection on the Imperial Primacy of Rome, and the lessons they were to learn from it.
Disguised as it may be, M. Renan’s lectures represent not history, but scepticism as to all possibility of history. Pictures of a Jewish Ghetto, with its ragged mendicants smelling of garlic, in places where Christians have been wont to think of the Saints; ingenious explanations as to the way in which the “club” of the Christian Church surrendered its rights to a _bureau_ of its officers; exhortations to liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth; felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the obvious riddles of man’s life there is one stranger and more appalling still–that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than the grave.
We cannot help feeling that M. Renan himself is a true representative of that highly cultivated society of the Empire which would have crushed Christianity, and which Christianity, vanquished. He still owes something, and owns it, to what he has abandoned–“I am often tempted to say, as Job said, in our Latin version, _Etiam si occident me, in ipso sperabo_. But the next moment all is gone–all is but a symbol and a dream.” There is no possibility of solving the religious problem. He relapses into profound disbelief of the worth and success of moral efforts after truth. His last word is an exhortation to tolerance for “fanatics,” as the best mode of extinguishing them. “If, instead of leading _Polyeucte_ to punishment, the magistrate, with a smile and shake of the hand, had sent him home again, _Polyeucte_ would not have been caught offending again; perhaps, in his old age, he would even have laughed at his escapade, and would have become a sensible man.” It is as obvious and natural in our days to dispose of such difficulties in this way with a smile and a sneer as it was in the first century with a shout–_”Christiani ad leones.”_ But Corneille was as good a judge of the human heart as M. Renan. He had gauged the powers of faith and conviction; he certainly would have expected to find his _Polyeucte_ more obstinate.
XIV
RENAN’S “SOUVENIRS D’ENFANCE”[17]
[17]
_Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_. Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 18th July 1883.
The sketches which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we should have looked for from the writer of the _Vie de Jesus_. The story of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal Newman’s _Apologia_, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is, shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M. Renan’s story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid, contented. He calls his life the “_charmante promenade_” which the “cause of all good,” whatever that may be, has granted him through the realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and