116 Christ's 'plan' complete from the first. curtailments. In this place we all have heard that between the θεωρία and the γένεσις of art there may be a fatal interval. The few bold strokes by which a Raffaelle has suggested a new form of power or of beauty, may never be filled up upon his canvas. The working-drawings of a Phidias or a Michael Angelo may never be copied in stone or in marble. As has been said of S. T. Coleridge, art is perpetually throwing out designs which remain designs for ever; and yet the artist possesses over his material, and even over his hand and his eye, a control which is altogether wanting to the man who would reconstruct or regenerate human society. For human society is an aggregate of human intelligences and of human wills, that is to say, of profound and mysterious forces, upon the direction of which under absolutely new circumstances it is impossible for man to calculate. Accordingly, social reformers tell us despondingly that facts make sad havoc of their fairest theories; and that schemes which were designed to brighten and to beautify the life of nations are either forgotten altogether, or, like the Republic of Plato, are remembered only as famous samples of the impracticable. For whenever a great idea, affecting the well-being of society, is permitted to force its way into the world of facts, it is liable to be carried out of its course, to be thrust hither and thither, to be compressed, exaggerated, disfigured, mutilated, degraded, caricatured. It may encounter currents of hostile opinion and of incompatible facts, upon which its projector had never reckoned; its course may be forced into a direction the exact reverse of that which he most earnestly desired. In the first French Revolution some of the most humane sociological projects were distorted into becoming the very animating principles of wholesale and extraordinary barbarities. In England we are fond of repeating the political maxim that 'constitutions are not made, but grow;' we have a proverbial dread of the paper-schemes of government which from time to time are popular among our gifted and volatile neighbours. It is not that we English cannot admire the creations of political genius; but we hold that in the domain of human life genius must submit herself to the dictation of circumstances, and that she herself seems to shade off into erratic folly when she cannot clearly recognise the true limits of her power. Now Jesus Christ our Lord was in the true and very highest sense of the term a social reformer; yet He fully proclaimed the whole of His social plan before He began to realize it. Had He been merely a 'great man,' He would have been more prudent. He would have conditioned His design; He would have No evidence of change in our Lord's 'plan. 117 tested it; He would have developed it gradually; He would have made trial of its working power; and then He would have re-fashioned, or contracted, or expanded it, before finally proposing it to the consideration of the world. But His actual course must have seemed one of utter and reckless folly, unless the event had shewn it to be the dictate of a more than human wisdom. He speaks as One Who is sure of the compactness and faultlessness of His design; He is certain that no human obstacle can baulk its realization. He produces it simply without effort, without reserve, without exaggeration; He is calm, because He is in possession of the future, and sees His way clearly through its tangled maze. There is no proof, no distant intimation of a change or of a modification of His plan. He did not, for instance, first aim at a political success, and then cover His failure by giving a religious turn or interpretation to His previous manifestoes; He did not begin as a religious teacher, and afterwards aspire to convert His increasing religious influence into political capital. No attempts to demonstrate any such vacillation in His purpose have reached even a moderate measure of success u. Certainly, with the lapse of time, He enters upon a larger and larger area of ministerial action; Hé developes with majestic assurance, with decisive rapidity, the integral features of His work; His teaching centres more and more upon Himself as its central subject; but He nowhere retracts, or modifies, or speaks or acts as would one who feels that he is dependent upon events or agencies which he cannot control. A poor woman pays Him u Dr. Schenkel, in his Charakterbild Jesu, represents our Lord as a pious Jew, who did not assume to be the Messiah before the scene at Cæsarea Philippi. Kap. xii. § 4, p. 138: 'Dadurch, dass Jesus Sich nun wirklich zu dem Bekenntnisse des Simon bekannte, trat er mit einem Schlage aus der verworrenen und verwirrenden Läge heraus, in welche Er, durch die Unklarheit seiner Jünger und den Meinungstreit in seiner Umgebung gebracht war. Ein Stichwort war jetzt gesprochen.' This theory is obliged to reject the evangelical accounts of our Lord's Baptism and Temptation, and to distort from their plain meaning the narratives of our Lord's sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth (St. Luke iv. 16), of His call of the twelve Apostles, and of His claim to forgive sin. See the excellent remarks of M. Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, pp. 326, 327. Channing, Works, ii. 55. We feel that a new Being, of a new order of mind, is taking part in human affairs. There is a native tone of grandeur and authority in His teaching. He speaks as a Being related to the whole human race. A narrower sphere than the world never enters His thoughts. He speaks in a natural spontaneous style of accomplishing the most arduous and important change in human affairs. This unlaboured manner of expressing great thoughts is particularly worthy of attention. You never hear from Jesus that swelling, pompous, ostentatious language, which 118 Boldness of Christ's plan, considered ceremonial respect at a feast, and He simply announces that the act will be told as a memorial of her throughout the world ; He bids His Apostles do all things whatsoever He had commanded them; He promises them His Spirit as a Guide into all necessary trutha: but He invests them with no such discretionary powers, as might imply that His design would need revision under possible circumstances, or could be capable of improvement. He calmly turns the glance of His thought upon the long and chequered future which lies clearly displayed before Him, and in the immediate foreground of which is his own humiliating Death b. Other founders of systems or of societies have thanked a kindly Providence for shrouding from their gaze the vicissitudes of coming time; 'Prudens futuri temporis exitum Caliginosâ nocte premit deus;' 6 but the Son of Man speaks as One Who sees beyond the most distant possibilities, and Who knows full well that His work is indestructible. The gates of hell,' He calmly observes, shall not prevail against it d;' 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away.' Nor is the boldness of Christ's plan less observable in its actual substance, than in the fact of its original production in such completeness. Look at it, for the moment, from a political point of view. Here is, as it seems, a Galilean peasant, surrounded by a few followers taken like Himself from the lowest orders of society; yet He deliberately proposes to rule all human thought, to make Himself the Centre of all human affections, to be the Lawgiver of humanity, and the Object of man's adoration f. He founds a spiritual society, the thought almost necessarily springs from an attempt to sustain a character above our powers. He talks of His glories, as one to whom they were familiar... He speaks of saving and judging the world, of drawing all men to Himself, and of giving everlasting life, as we speak of the ordinary powers which we exert.' y St. Matt. xxvi. 13; St. Mark xiv. 9. z St. Matt. xxviii. 20. b St. Matt. xx. 19; St. Mark viii. 31. d St. Matt. xvi. 18. a St. John xvi. 13. c Hor. Od. iii. 29. 29. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 232. To Jesus alone, the simple Galilean carpenter, it happens... that, having never seen a map of the world in His whole life, or heard the name of half the great nations on it, He undertakes, coming out of His shop, a scheme as much vaster and more difficult than that of Alexander, as it proposes more, and what is more Divinely benevolent.' as a religious and social enterprise. 119 and heart and activity of which are to converge upon His Person, and He tells His followers that this society which He is forming is the real explanation of the highest visions of seers and prophets, that it will embrace all races and extend throughout all time. He places Himself before the world as the true goal of its expectations, and He points to His proposed work as the one hope for its future. There was to be a universal religion, and He would found it. A universal religion was just as foreign an idea to heathenisms as to Judaism. Heathenism held that the state was the highest form of social life; religious life, like family life, was deemed subordinate to political interests. Morality was pretty nearly dwarfed down to the measure of common political virtue; sin was little else than political misdemeanour; religion was but a subordinate function of national life, differing in different countries according to the varying genius of the people, and rightly liable to being created or controlled by the government. A century and a half after the Incarnation, in his attack upon the Church, Celsus ridicules the idea of a universal religion as a manifest folly h; yet Jesus Christ has staked His whole claim to respect and confidence upon announcing it. Jesus Christ made no concessions to the passions or to the prejudices of mankind. The laws and maxims of His kingdom are for the most part in entire contradiction to the instincts of average human nature; yet He predicts that His Gospel will be preached in all the world, and that finally there will be one flock and One Shepherd of meni. 'Go,' He says to His Apostles, 'make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world k' He founds a world-wide religion, and He promises to be the present invigorating force of that religion to the end of time. Are we not too accustomed to this language to feel the full force of its original meaning? How startlingly must it not have fallen upon the ears of Apostles! Words like these are not accounted for by any difference between the East and The Stoic 'cosmopolitanism' (Sir A. Grant's Ethics of Aristotle, vol. i. 255; Merivale on Conversion of Roman Empire, p. 60) did not amount to a religion. Origen. contr. Celsum, ii. 46. 1 St. John x. 16. Christ and His Apostles were to begin to preach to Israel. St. Matt. xv. 24, x. 5, 6. k St. Matt. xxviii. 19, 20. I 20 Realisation of our Lord's plan. the West, between ancient and modern modes of speech. They will not bear honest translation into any modern phrase that would enable good men to use them now. Can we imagine such a command as that of our Lord upon the lips of the best, of the wisest of men whom we have ever known? Would it not be simply to imagine that goodness or wisdom had been exchanged for the folly of an intolerable presumption? Such language as that before us is indeed folly, unless it be something else; unless it be proved by the event to have been the highest wisdom, the wisdom of One, Whose ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts1. II. But has the plan of Jesus Christ been carried out? Does the kingdom of heaven exist on earth? (1.) The Church of Christ is the living answer to that question. Boileau says somewhere that the Church is a great thought which every man ought to study. It would be more practical to say that the Church is a great fact which every man ought to measure. Probably we Christians are too familiarized with the blessed presence of the Church to do justice to her as a world-embracing institution, and as the nurse and guardian of our moral and mental life. Like the air we breathe, she bathes our whole being with influences which we do not analyse; and we hold her cheap in proportion to the magnitude of her unostentatious service. The sun rises or us day by day in the heavens, and we heed not his surpassing beauty until our languid sense is roused by some observant astronomer or artist. The Christian Church pours even upon those of us who love her least, floods of intellectual and moral light; and yet it is only by an occasional intellectual effort that we detach ourselves sufficiently from the tender monotony of her influences, to understand how intrinsically extraordinary is the double fact of her perpetuated existence and of her continuous expansion. Glance for a moment at the history of the Christian Church from the days of the Apostles until now. What is it but a history of the gradual, unceasing self-expansion of an institution which, from the first hour of its existence, deliberately aimed, as it is aiming even now, at the conquest of the world m? Compare the Church which sought refuge and which prayed in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, with the Church of which St. Paul 1 Isa. lv. 8. Cf. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 231-233; Félix, ubi supra, pp. 134-139. m St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8, ix. 15; St. Mark xvi. 20. |