03 The Apostolic Age

LECTURE III THE APOSTOLIC AGE THE great succession of the Hebrew prophets came to its conclusion and consummation in John the Baptist. He was of the school of Elijah. He practiced rigorous austerities. By his mode of life he evidenced the contempt in which he held the fashionable habits and ambitions of the day. The simplicities and severities of his existence harmonized well with the type of ministry to which he knew himself elect. It might appear from the substance of his preaching that he knew more of the necessity for repentance and reform than of the secret of regeneration. But however that may be he had no new vision of God; and his greatness lay in the sublime humility with which he pointed the people away from himself to One who had the new Gospel that was to regenerate humanity and change the world. Yet John’s preaching when he descended from the mountain solitude’s to the fords of Jordan is worthy of your study. He was one of those fearless and clear-sighted souls who by his own utter sincerity, spiritual discipline and sacrificial life, had earned the right to strip society of its shams, expose and denounce its sins, and generally become its conscience in a way that only the most absolutely disinterested and single-minded men can ever dare to do.

I have said there was nothing exactly new in his ministry. His call to repentance was as old as the race. The spirit and forms of asceticism were not rare among his predecessors. His indifference to the materialistic aims on which most men’s hearts were set was a genuine note of prophethood, but by no means unique. John’s significance lies first of all in his sense of the nearness of the Messianic kingdom for which the ages had been in travail; and secondly, I think, in a very deep and true view of the social evils which had sprung from the corruption of religion. His first movement is to fling down a challenge to the ecclesiastical leaders because they had imbibed the worst vices of a self-constituted aristocracy. The senseless pride in blood and lineage, the perilous illusion, "We have Abraham for our father," had blinded them to reality and wrought their spiritual ruin. Johns sane soul recognized the fatal error and folly which have so often been used to buttress up vast and illusive claims whether of ancestral descent or spiritual succession; and with the courage and frankness of the true preacher he smote his sword through this web of lies. "God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham," he cried; and with that sharp final epigram, the whole baseless fabric of an artificial spiritual aristocracy crumbled to the dust.

Then he turned to the mixed multitude, who were asking to be shown their way of life, with a command which proved him as resolute to teach equality to them as to the religious magnates whom he had just humbled. "He that hath two coats let him impart to him that hath none," he cried, and left them to digest that unwelcome counsel of socialism as best they could. The revenue-raisers came next, and the Word of God in the person of John was heard for the first time in the New Testament in denunciation of "graft." This thunderbolt was followed swiftly by another when he flamed out against the military oppression and coercion which in Palestine was only typical of the age-long crucifixion of Right at the hands of Might. With a final affirmation that to end this reign of Wrong, and establish the Kingdom of Righteousness, One mightier than he was needed, and was on the way, John ended one of the shortest and most scathing sermons of which there is any record. On that mighty canvas of history where the figure of the Preacher is incomparably the most romantic of all, is there any more heroic and pathetic personality than this son of the desert with his ascetic frame and soul of fire, bringing his ministry to a consummation in a sublime act of self-effacement, and with courage unquenched turning his back on all scenes of popularity, and setting his face like a flint to a dungeon and a scaffold

I am now to invite you to concentrate your thought on the amazing era of apostolic preaching which followed the death and resurrection of our Lord, and of which the new vision of God that broke over the souls of the first disciples was the creative cause. It is common ground among the historians that this we call the apostolic age is the Romance of all history. The story is of a dozen inspired workmen, who were lifted by an ineffable experience out of the deepest depths of humiliation and shame to serene heights of faith, whence they went forth to write the incomparable epic of world-conquest. There are no words in any language that can express how dear they held their faith and how cheap they held their lives. In all the instrumentalities on which we too often rely to win our victories they took no stock. They knew nothing of art, architecture, or music, nor for the most part did they wreck much of education. They met the mailed hand of Rome unarmed and defenseless. With no material weapon, no organized army, no display of force, they shook the mightiest of world empires till it trembled and tottered. From the handful of recreant apostles who in the crisis of His fate had failed their Leader, sprang the invincible legion that did not know the meaning of fear, and that, to use the words of one of our own Puritan fathers in exile, "triumphed over cruelty with courage, over persecution with patience and over death itself by dying!" Rome had conquered every race, and trampled upon every creed only to be baffled by men whose bodies she could burn but whose hate she could not provoke; nay, whose love she could not alienate. When the sand of the Coliseum was red with their blood; when in Nero’s gardens, converted into torches, they passed through smoke and flame to their rest, their message swept in triumph from convert to convert; while in the subterranean seclusion of the catacombs the martyr missionaries preached and prayed and signed the galleries of Death with the symbols of eternal Hope. But before I come to some illustrations of this heroic age, there is a preliminary question to which I must attempt an answer. Let me ask what was the new Revelation that fired men’s souls with such sublime faith and fortitude? What was the new music that was to enchant its disciples and render them insensitive to torture and death. What was it that came to them through the Cross of Christ, and possessed them with a spiritual passion to which all history provides no parallel For at Pentecost not only was faith born in the hearts of doubters, and courage in the hearts of cowards, but the passion for preaching was born in them all. "They all spake with tongues, and prophesied." Every one had a vision to describe, an experience to relate, a secret to tell. "All the Lord’s servants were prophets." Something had been kindled within them that the terrors of Jerusalem could not chill. What was the new consciousness, the new conviction, that exalted them and made men and women of crudest speech eloquent ?What was it that woke the slumbering poet in these simple natures, and charged their homely utterance with a power that the rhetoricians might well have envied? No doubt it is difficult, it may even seem presumptuous, to analyze their emotions. But we have the records to help us. We can trace the leading ideas that found expression in the first Christian sermons and the earliest Christian literature. We know what Peter taught, what Stephen testified, what Paul elaborated. We can read the challenge flung down to ancient creeds and civilizations. May I submit to you that the great new doctrines that received their inspiration and confirmation from Christ, and that became the very substance of the new Evangel, and the secret of its spiritual and social power, were two—Immortality and Equality? There, if you come to think of it, are the two supreme gifts of our religion—Life and Love.

(1) That Christ’s gift of life was more than the assurance of immortality we are all agreed. To do the Christians of that first century justice it was Christ they valued; and they would rather have been mortal with Christ than immortal without Him. But the fact remains that the theme of the first Christian preachers was the Resurrection and all its consequences. Life suddenly revealed itself to them in a glory that took their breath away and smote them to their knees in awe and rapture. For they knew themselves now as "immortals" and the splendor of the destiny humbled and exalted them. You remember the famous king who appointed a man to say ever to him, "Philip, thou art mortal" lest an unworthy pride should be his undoing. But henceforth the pilgrim church was to whisper in the ear of Humanity, "Man, thou art immortal; live as one of the immortals, and may a noble pride in thy origin and thy destiny save thee from baseness and dishonor."

It has become a favorite criticism of the Christian fathers that, overwhelmed by the vision of eternal life in Christ, they became other worldly and counted life here of little moment if only they could make sure of bliss hereafter. For my part I could wish that every modern Christian had passed even an hour under the stress of the emotion which a realization of immortality ought to bring to each human soul. You have to conceive, not a solitary prophet like Paul, but a very host of triumphant evangelists chanting the ecstatic challenge, "0 Death, where is thy sting O Grave, where is thy victory" What Egyptian and Jew had timidly and darkly received, and to which Greek Philosophy had occasionally uttered a pale and bloodless "perhaps," became to these witnesses the certainty of certainties, the truth of truths. History has to recognize that whatever did, or did not, happen on that first Easter morning, at that "lone Syrian grave," the effect was to shatter the incredulity and uncertainty of centuries, and out of dark abysses of speculation drag life and immortality to light, and set man henceforth to fulfill his earthly destiny conscious of an unconquerable and indestructible soul. Whether it is conceivable that that result was produced by an illusion, and was the fruit of falsehood, every one of us must judge for himself. When I see similar far-reaching effects of greatness spring from fallacy I shall myself believe the illusion theory, and not till then. The picture that we owe to St. Luke of the early Church is of men and women living in the rapture of a great beatitude. They are illuminated with "the glory of the lighted mind." If you come to think of it, the Resurrection of Christ meant everything to them. It was the vindication of that Fatherhood of God which must have suffered eclipse in the seeming tragedy of Calvary; it was equally the Divine vindication of Jesus, and the seal set upon His teaching and His life; it was moreover the vindication of the greatness of the human soul and its amazing destiny. When you add to these the conscious leadership of the living Christ, and the creative power of the sublime faith Ubi Christus ibi Ecclesia, you begin to understand the light that transfigured the Christian people of Jerusalem, and transformed one obscure upper room into the very Gate of Heaven. If we were not so slow and hard of heart today we should still feel the uplift of this magnificent revelation; we should still look upwards with the transports of the first Christians, and outwards with their reverence for humanity and faith in its future.

I confess to you I sometimes wonder whether our hearts are big enough and brave enough to attempt the Christian enterprise; whether something of the world’s morbid and skeptic spirit has not darkened our sanctuary and paralyzed our very souls. Is it not true that our ark lies prostrate in the temple of Dagon instead of humbling to the dust the pagan and heathen conceptions against which we are professedly at war.?We have the most exquisite instrument wherewith to discourse the most melting and ravishing of music; but we play our Stradvarius with a mute. We are afraid of its full tones. We fall back on the language of Tennyson and count it a great thing if we can say "We stretch lame hands of faith," or "We faintly trust the larger hope."

Lame hands and faint trust! With these we think to win the victories that are only possible to the heroes of religion. Little wonder that as the perplexed people listen on the one hand to the arrogant dogmatism of materialistic science and on the other to the halting and hesitating and semi-apologetic discourse of the modern prophet of religion, we make but a poor appearance in the competition.

I do not want you to misunderstand me. It may be that the preacher of open and sincere mind has been wrestling by the ford Jabbok with the Angel of Truth and has halted on his thigh. He is conscious that somehow he walks lame in the paths his fathers trod with sure steps and upright carriage. It may be that if we knew all, we should take it for distinction; but the preacher himself is only conscious that the world has observed that he is lame, and is asking if not where is thy God, at least where is thy theology? And, believe me, we can do nothing without the sublime simplicities of Christianity. If a man does not know of a surety that personal God whom even the Prodigal at his husks can still speak of as "My Father," if he cannot kneel by the sin-stricken and announce to him with unclouded faith the certainty of forgiveness in Christ, if he cannot stand by the bedside of the dying, and encourage him in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, he may still do for the study, or the store, or the country house, but the Christian pulpit should know him no more.

I make even that last admission with some hesitation. For if we are in earnest in this matter we are bound to believe that this great creed is so determinative of character and life that no man--whatsoever his calling in life--can do his best work without it, and that apart from it every man’s attitude to his fellows must be defective. Let me call to my aid a very brilliant leader of the medical profession in my own country. Addressing a meeting of medical students in the city of Sheffield, Sir James Crichton Browne advised them to beware of the materialistic school which regards a man’s brain as no more than so much phosphorus and so much glue; and suggested that if a man is good and wise it is because his brain has a maximum of phosphorus and a minimum of glue, while if he is evil and foolish it is because his brain has a maximum of glue and a mini mum of phosphorus. Sir James went on to say that if the students adopted this materialistic conception of man’s nature they would be disqualified from treating any one successfully as a patient even on the physical side. To be a true physician a doctor must understand the spiritual nature of his patients. The merely materialistic theory spells failure here and everywhere. The best type of labor leader in my own land knows perfectly well how much is at stake in this great issue as to whether man is merely an animal of a higher order, and no more; or whether he is, as Christ taught, an immortal being. If our workmen listen to the materialism that is preached to them from a thousand platforms and in a thousand journals, they lose the most powerful of all motives for social betterment. If they think and talk of one another as no more than animals they only have themselves to thank if employers treat them as if they were no more than animals. We, on the other hand, who believe with Christ in the nobility and dignity of human nature, must press upon the conscience of the community such questions as these. If the children of poverty and vice in the slums and alleys of our crowded cities, in cellars and garrets of tenement houses and elsewhere, are indeed immortal spirits destined to eternal existence, what is our duty to them. How can we sit with folded hands while men and women are wallowing in filth and slime who are sons and daughters of the Eternal? What new ideals of society are forced upon us when we dare to look at human life in the light of the Resurrection? In other words--what must our practice be, if we are still resolved to preach this magnificent Gospel ?

(2) To the effect which the Evangelists of the Resurrection produced by their Gospel justice has been done by many historians. The violent antipathy of the Sadducaic school, which is always with us, manifested itself in an astonishing desire to exterminate all teachers who affirmed man’s immortality. The heroic constancy of the Christian confessors in treating Death as no more than an incident in Life, while it impressed the beholders, made the last dread weapon of the persecurer of none effect; and so paralyzed his arm. Of all this much has been written again and again. But I think less justice has been done to the effect of that new doctrine of Equality which found expression in the organized life of the first Christian communities, and was a definite challenge to every other social structure of the then world. The principle running through these primitive Christian societies was so simple that it is difficult to realize how profoundly revolutionary it was, and how subversive of the existing order of things. But any one can see that a church that offered equal privileges to, and conferred equal rights upon, the slave and the freeman; and acknowledged no authority of rank or station within its borders, but reverenced faith and character alone, threw down the gauntlet of defiance to the most deep-seated prejudices of our human nature.

Many a proud heart must have been the theatre of a life-and-death struggle between hereditary scorn of the "canaille" and a consciousness of the truth of the new Religion such a struggle as Bulwer Lytton portrayed in the patrician breast of Glaucus in "The Last Days of Pompeii." One realizes that it was far less a matter of embracing the Christian doctrine than of accepting the Christian society that antagonized the aristocrats of Greece and Rome. When the waves of an invading and resistless Christianity flowed inward to the Imperial Throne itself, the terror it inspired was due, not so much to any of its distinctive dogmas, as to this amazing fraternity, the unity of which no extremity of coercion could injure or destroy. You are to imagine men and women, with a new and evident inspiration upon them, preaching this uncompromising truth that God holds all human souls at equal value, and thinks no more of a Constantine than of the humblest day laborer whom he has treated as dirt beneath his feet. No doubt it was strong meat, difficult of digestion at any time and in any place, but most of all in a civilization founded upon slavery. But what are we to say when Paul gives this social teaching its widest application, and abolishes in one sublime phrase all the distinctions that lay behind the national antagonisms of that ancient world "There is neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." What idols with feet of clay this new Hammer in the hands of this new Iconoclast was to shatter to pieces! What painstaking genius has been consecrated in subsequent centuries to the task of patching up these idols again! "Neither Jew nor Greek." Was all that cultivation of the spirit of exclusiveness, which is commonly called patriotism, to go for nothing? Was the Roman to have no pride of preeminence over the Barbarian? Was the fair child of classic Greece to be regarded as on an exact equality with the swarthy and uncivilized Scythian? Will these wild apostles of equality lay their disrespectful hands on the altars of hereditary aristocracy, social and racial, and suggest that the Roman is not to count for more than the "Angles" who are bought and sold in his slave-market? I am speaking now of the great days when the faith was free and uncorrupt, the days before its unholy compromises with the world, the days before, in one splendid and fatal hour, it conquered the Roman Empire and was conquered by it. I am speaking of the time of its romance, when it surrendered nothing, and never dreamed of becoming safe and tame and respectable and even fashionable; the time when it feared no one and flattered no one; the time when its confessors were the men and women whom the world could not bully and could not buy. Then it was demonstrated that the Christian love, which is the creation of Christ, welded those who received it into a Brotherhood where external differences melted away and became non-existent, and the only realities in the world were the faith, the hope, and the love which were the enduring property of every believer.

If I seem to labor this point, it is because I touch here upon the real secret of the power which the first Christian preachers and confessors exercised, and which won their victory against such formidable odds. They were sincerely indifferent to all that made up the ambitions of the world amid which they lived; and this indifference to the mere externals of life gave the powers and principalities no weapon with which to assail them. Nothing in all the marvelous records stands out clearer than the sense of hopelessness and failure that gradually overwhelmed their enemies. Nothing could be done against such men as these first Christian ancestors of ours which they either feared or felt. The dignities and emoluments on which princes and governments rely, not in vain, for dealing with awkward critics, or persons of inconvenient knowledge, had no attraction for these idealists. They were supremely disinterested. You and I are so accustomed to hearing the sneer of the cynics who assume that we are no more indifferent than the rest of mankind to the luxuries and resources of civilization that we have gradually consented to their theory; and in doing so have unintentionally impoverished our office of its kingly power. No cynic ever whispered such depreciation of the men and women who held all their possessions cheap, and passed even from the mansion to the mine with serene tranquillity, turning every loss and deprivation into a sacrament. Open your Church History in its early chapters and read at random the thrilling letter of Cyprian to those ministers and members who had been condemned to labor in the mines. Some of them had been delicately nurtured. They had as much, one would suppose, to line their brows with care as the modern pastor who writes pathetically of the difficulty of "making good" in congested city or deserted village. But they certainly never pitied themselves, nor did their brethren offer them sympathy, but congratulation. Here is how Cyprian writes to them. "In the mines the body is refreshed, not by beds and pillows, but by the comforts and joys of Christ. Your limbs, wearied with labor, recline upon the earth, but it is no punishment to lie there with Christ. Your bread is scanty, but man lives not by bread alone but by the word of God. You are in want of clothing to defend you from the cold, but he who has put on Christ has clothing and ornament enough. Even though, my dearest brethren, you cannot celebrate the communion of the Lord’s Supper, your faith need feel no want. You do celebrate the most glorious communion; you do bring God the most costly oblation, since the Holy Scriptures declare that God will not despise a broken and a contrite spirit. Your example has been followed by a large portion of the Church who have confessed with you and been crowned. United to you by ties of the strongest love, they could not be separated from their pastors by dungeons and mines. Even young maidens and boys are with you. What power have you now in a victorious con-science--what triumph in your hearts, when you can walk through the mines with enslaved bodies but with souls conscious of mastery; when you know that Christ is with you, rejoicing in the patience of His servants, who in His footsteps and by His ways are entering into the Kingdom of eternity." That is how Cyprian offers these disciples and witnesses who had lost everything the world values, not his compassion but his congratulation. I am pressing upon you that the preachers of the first Christian centuries felt themselves the representatives of a new society, or as Dr. Harnack says, a new people, with unique standards. It is of immense importance that you should realize that Jews, Romans, Greeks, Barbarians, were offered citizenship in this new nation on equal terms; and that no differences of rank, education or wealth were allowed any consideration whatsoever. Not immediately perhaps, but gradually, they came to the consciousness that they were a new world-state, destined eventually to conquer and subdue all political nations, and supply the basis of a universal civilization. You will never understand the thoughts and passions that burned and blazed in these men’s souls if you do not realize something of what this conception meant to them, and how attractive it was to those who listened. Dr. Hatch of Oxford in writing upon the early Christian centuries defined the eternal mission of the Church as this--"to substitute for the socialism that is based upon the assumption of clashing interests, the socialism that is based on the sense of spiritual union." The preachers of the apostolic age and the great centuries that followed were the heralds of that higher socialism. What their Gospel meant you can all estimate when you reflect that the members of the Roman nobility or the proudest family among the Jewish Pharisees had to confess the slave who had become a Christian as a social equal. But when you realize that, you will realize also why the ideals of the Christian society swept over the Roman Empire like a conflagration. For it is not the case in this much-maligned world, that a great human response awaits the carefully calculated and shrewdly balanced compromises, that aim at softening the susceptibilities of the rich without violently antagonizing the poor. The truths that conquer the world are not compromises at all, but certain splendid simplicities, not only courageously and unambiguously stated but, equally without qualification, accepted and applied. Within the borders of this new people the social contrast was unchallenged; and the preacher could without the shadow of hypocrisy or insincerity proclaim its reality to all the world. Do you ever wonder why it is that today, in our championship of our faith and order, our witness sometimes falters; that we fall back upon apologies where we need to use unconditional affirmations? Can any preacher of today say from his pulpit, with the same fervor and sincerity as the first Christian preachers, that the Christian Church is a unique society of people where social distinctions do not exist, and where men and women of every race and condition may meet on the basis of absolute equality?

Yet for that we were created. Not to accept the old standards and have imposed upon us the old distinctions of an ancient pagan civilization, but to present a society which is a new creation in Christ Jesus, and which will kindle the enthusiasm and revive the hope of those who have found neither hope nor help in any other society in the world. Much of this that I am saying may apply less to you than to my own land. These old caste feelings are only slowly dissolving before the nobler democratic influences that are now coming into play; and many generations, and even centuries will pass before the Christian ideal will be realized. Any preacher who talked of the church as the home where social distinctions were unknown would not only be laughed to scorn, he would laugh his own statement to scorn. And the fact of the matter is we do not realize how large a section of Christian apologetic we have sacrificed; nor how invaluable and irreplaceable is the strategical position we have evacuated.

It is perhaps enough that I should say as I close that this that has been called Christian Socialism springs, as every worthy socialism does, out of a high individualism--a sense of the incalculable and imperishable worth of the human soul. This may seem to some of you the most old-fashioned truth to have thrust upon you in these modern days, but I am certain that no preacher is going to count for much who has not seen every soul in the world in the light of the Christ who died for it. It seems sometimes as if modern civilization holds some souls very cheap. That may be. But it is the business of the Christian preacher to stand by his Gospel. What is that Gospel? It is contained in a verse of one of the greatest Christian hymns:

"Were the whole realm of Nature mine, That were a present far too small!

Love so amazing, so Divine, Demands my Soul." That is to say that my soul is a greater and bigger thing than "the whole realm of nature." Do you believe it? I agree it is the most romantic of all beliefs. It affirms that the soul of every forced laborer on the Amazon is of more value than all the mines of Johannesburg, all the diamonds of Kimberly, all the millions of all the magnates of America. It affirms that in God’s sight all the suns and stars that people infinite space, are of inferior worth to one human spirit dwelling, it may be, in the degraded body of some victim of drink or lust, some member of the gutter population of a great city who has descended to his doom by means of the multiplied temptations with which our so-called society environs him. It is a romantic creed. But if it is not true Christianity itself is false; and certain it is that there has never been any triumphant Christian movement in the history of the Church save as that high doctrine of the human soul has been preached. For Christianity lives by the majesty of its beliefs. It lives by its uncompromising truths. It lives by demanding of its disciples, not the minimum, but the maximum of faith and service.

To-day we are witnessing many audacious and inspiring endeavors to construct in this world new and more Christian civilizations. This principle that we hear so often on both sides of the Atlantic, that every man, woman and child shall have a fair chance—what does it mean? Who will be the prophets of that ideal if not ourselves? What argument can sustain so high and sacred a conception of duty except the argument as to the supreme worth of each individual soul? It is from that that the real rights of man must spring. And for the overthrow of every system of government, or organization of society that is injurious to, or oppressive of the individual life, this is the revolutionary doctrine that can be relied on. I charge you, as the inheritors of the peerless traditions and golden ideals of the primitive Christian society, as the modern prophets of the "new People," as the interpreters to this marvelous century of the eternal principles for which the Christian churches stand, that you steep yourselves in the thoughts and beliefs of the apostolic age, face bravely and unflinchingly their doctrines, and the social consequences of their doctrines, and that at all costs you hold back nothing of the truth for any fear or favor of man. For only thus shall we see in our time a growing reverence and enthusiasm for the Church of Christ, and the fulfillment of that hope which Dr. Hatch confessed in the most eloquent of his Bampton lectures, "a Church that shall outshine even the golden glory of its dawn by the splendor of its eternal noon."