03. The Christ of a Growing Experience

CHAPTER III THE CHRIST OF A GROWING EXPERIENCE IN the preceding chapter I endeavored to show that an adequate realization of the person and mission of Jesus could only be obtained by the inclusive use of all material available for the purpose. As already noted, this material is derived from the written records, the experiential contacts with the Master extending through nineteen centuries, and the organic life and activity of the Christian Church during those centuries. Some criticisms and comments were offered concerning previous attempts of scholars and thinkers to discover the fuller significance of Jesus by means of the exclusive use of any one of these sources of evidence. Reference was made to the synthetic method which construes and harmonizes all of them to that end. It is pertinent to add that the investigator of our Lord’s character and career also needs the impartiality of the historian, the integrity of the scientist, the insight of the philosopher, and the fervor of the religionist. To assert with Canon Quick, for example, that Christianity is essentially a sacramental religion, and at the same time, to concede, as he does, that there is no clear historical evidence that Jesus instituted the Eucharist, is an instance of the failure to establish a true correlation between the expanding life of the Church and the documents which portray her actual beginnings. 1 We cannot interpret Christian ideas solely in the terms of their ancestry, without doing violence to the larger meanings those ideas acquire from the mystery cults and pagan rites of the earlier Christian eras. On the other hand, we should guard against a common temptation of students of history to conclude that there was an intentional borrowing from those cults and rites because of their occasional coincidence with Christian language and ritual. To be frank, 1 The Christian Sacraments, p. 188ff.

Christianity never assumed unique originality in all respects. “The glory of Christianity,” said Doctor Benjamin Jowett of Balliol, “is not to be as unlike other religions as possible, but to be their perfection and their judgment.” In this respect it claims to satisfy the eager desires and aspirations of man by means of an Evangel, which gives him the consciousness of conquest over self and an accordance with the Infinite not found elsewhere.

These primal values are not recognized, as they should be, by Bruce Barton in his widely read volume, The Man Nobody Knows. Its arresting title is scarcely justified in view of the testimony of the Gospels, and of countless souls who in every subsequent age have confessed their indebtedness to Jesus as their Savior and Lord. Nor does Mr. Barton’s delineation of the Master accord with the conception of the Evangelists and Apostles of the New Testament. However sympathetic may be his presentation of Jesus as a man of affairs, a typical captain of industry and trade, shrewd and adroit in His social manipulations, possessing resilient physical strength, and a consummate acquaintance with human nature, this curiously mundane figure is a stranger to those who have rightly appraised the portrayals of New Testament literature. Certainly Mr. Barton has not introduced us to the stainless Being of redemptive passion, through whose manifestation believers have in many places and times found peace with God, with themselves and with their fellows.

Artists, to say nothing of theologians, instinctively antagonize a portraiture which makes that Being subservient to the tumult of the market place and the standards of its devotees. This book of the hour sets Christ’s sublime personality in typical American sceneries, at the antipodes from those in which He moved and achieved His triumph of sacrificial love and reconciliation. Written for that somewhat delusive creature “the man of the street,” the graphic story in question does not do credit to its author’s undoubted reverence for Jesus. It belongs to the perishable writings of which the present age is prolific, and, toward which the future will be utterly indifferent. In its pages mysticism and spiritual sensibility are as ill fated as was the dove Noah sent out of the ark over the inhospitable waters of the Deluge. Imaginative descriptions are here employed for perishable affairs, to the obscuration of the eternal realities at stake. In saying this one does not forget that every period must write its own books. Nor is it of any use for pedants and pundits to affirm, with pontifical ardor, that contemporary bookmakers are pigmies in comparison with the past masters of literature. The reading public of any era will not be bullied into reading those authors who have reached the dignity of classics, sacred or secular. Nevertheless, modern attempts to bring Jesus into the regions of ordinary life must be made in an extraordinary way, and evince some traces of that transcendent temper which first launched Him upon the world. This achievement is not within Mr. Barton’s metier, and its absence makes what he writes ephemeral.

Kenan’s Vie de Jesus belongs to a very different order. It is a genuinely artistic production, quite superior to Canon Liddon’s sweeping stricture that Renan portrayed Jesus as “a lewd Frenchman of the lesser sort.”

2 It has a haunting felicity of style and beauty of allusion, a charm of reference and an exalted humanitarian tone, which often leave emotion in the heart and music in the memory.

Yet its fatal drawback is that when the devout look beneath this elaborate vesture of rhetoric and learning, the Lord they adore is not there.

They search in vain for the Christ of their actual fellowship. He is absent from the stately edifice the French savant so skillfully built. Nor is it possible to give unqualified assent to so manifestly sincere an effort as that of J.

Middleton Murry’s volume on Jesus, Man of Genius. Such He assuredly was because He was infinitely more, but the “more” is not present, nor even hinted by this eminent authority on English letters. While cheerfully 8 The Divinity of our Lord: (Bampton Lectures) p. 15; also compare Note A, section 5. conceding certain privileges to literary scholarship, despite loud protests against its intellectual refinements and cultural precisions, it is hardly possible to admit Mr. Murry’s plea that his “training as a literary writer might be the equivalent of the more specialised training of the professor of divinity.” 8 By the same token the law could be placed at the mercy of earnest amateurs, and the healing sciences practiced by enthusiasts ignorant of their technique.

It may be recalled that Matthew Arnold made trenchant use of a suggestion akin to Mr. Murry’s in Literature and Dogma. But its author wandered far afield from the theological problems he essayed to solve.

Believing souls definitely revolt against Mr. Murry’s bald assertion that Jesus sought baptism by His forerunner John because He was “conscious of sin.” The qualifying clause immediately follows that “these sins were the sins of a man of supreme spiritual genius, who knew and taught that the outward act was 8 Jesus, Man of Genius, p. viii. Cf. his volume, Things to Come, p. 99ff. less significant than the inward attitude”; and that the sins involved consisted essentially in a spirit of doubt and despair/ Since when, however, were geniuses exempt from the moral law? And at what moment in His most crucial circumstances did Jesus exhibit either doubt or despair which was morally blameworthy?

Surely He had but to know the Will of the Father to accept and fulfill it. Moreover, the notion that we exalt our Lord by attributing minor imperfections to His character is fundamentally false to the New Testament record of that character. It presupposes what experience verifies: that sinful humanity, aware of its frailty and helplessness, has always found its enablement in the Divine Daysman who was without spot or blame. To rob men of this confidence, and to do it at the behest of a purely theoretical process, is to render the race a depressing disservice.

We are indebted to Doctor Gamaliel Bradford for a series of illuminating biographies, the latest of which, Life and I, is characterized by him as “an autobiography of humanity.”

He rightly regards Jesus as the central influence of religion. “Among all the varied agencies for disciplining the mutinous, rebellious, all-engrossing I, none probably has been more notable or more efficient than the life and teaching of Jesus.” But this “critical outsider,” as the author styles himself, evinces a serious misunderstanding of the spirit and purpose of the Master. He enlarges upon His “perpetual diatribe against riches,” which implies “a good deal of ignorance of actual conditions, and, if one dares to suggest it, even a trifle of jealousy, perhaps not for oneself, but for those whom one represents.” If the havoc riches have wrought in the social order does not convince Mr. Bradford that Jesus was justified in pointing out their inherent perils, perhaps a reminder of the seamy side of that order, or in the circles vitiated by Mammonism, might do so. Moreover, our Lord’s animadversions were directed against that lust for wealth which is the admitted source of multitudinous evils, rather than against wealth per se. Again, it is a clear misreading of the New Testament to assert that “the interest of beauty, of esthetic emotion, and of intellectual curiosity, of the abstract passion for the truth,” does not exist in its pages. To one who has recently returned from wandering through the European art galleries this sounds rather farfetched. Provided Mr. Bradford’s criticism is correct, one wonders whence the celebrities of mediseval and renaissance religious art received their subjects and their inspiration, if not from the Gospels and Epistles. The idyll of the Nativity alone, as idealized by them, flatly contradicts Mr. Bradford’s superficial reflections on “beauty” and “sesthetic emotion.”

Still, these are not so surprising in the light of his admission that he has “not read a chapter of the Bible continuously for over ten years,” nor “the Gospels as a whole for a great many more years than ten.” B Such candid confession of unconcern is naive, to say the least. But on what does this author base his right to instruct others concerning so paramount an 6 Cf. Life and I, p. 155f.; 172ff. issue if he has omitted a rereading of the original sources? It is precisely this indirect, second-hand approach to Jesus, which accounts in great measure for the misapprehensions and erroneous estimates of Him and of His relation to mankind, which hamper the progress of knowledge. It is trite to observe that experts in one realm may be and frequently are bunglers in another. Eminent in a given department of inquiry, they seem impotent beyond it, and carry over from it prepossessions and methods which either stultify research or blind its makers to realities they should consider.

These observations apply to The Son of Man, by Emil Ludwig, another biographer of deserved reputation. His preface states that “one who would venture to ascribe to Jesus imaginary sayings and doings should be a person at least equal to Jesus in intuitive power.”

Yet this discriminating condition is discarded by Herr Ludwig when he comes into closer touch with his theme. While he is occupied with the backgrounds of Palestinian life and manners, or the doctrines and customs of the Orient, he displays the fecundity of ideas and constructive force we have been taught to anticipate from his previous works upon the Ex-Emperor William, Prince Bismarck and Napoleon the First. But the soul of Jesus is entirely beyond his apprehension. To cover the hiatus in his interpretation, he indulges in melodramatic assertions and romantic conjectures, indicative of preconceptions entirely foreign to the Master’s nature and utterances. The biting words “hectoring,” “fanatical,” “overbearing,” and “arrogant,” applied to Jesus as the creator of the then novel virtue of humility, reveal Ludwig’s petulance rather than his biographical discernment. It is nothing short of the perversion of the records, and shows an astonishing lack of critical insight to insist that Jesus called Himself “the Son of Man” in the earlier period of His ministry, and “the Son of God” in its later period. In brief, the psychological bias prevalent in Ludwig’s writings here makes him gullible of fancies and disdainful of facts. Not a few of his suppositions are too flimsy to be regarded seriously, and they are of such a kind as would pass unnoticed but for the name attached to them.

One lays aside his book with the feeling that if this is the best evaluation of Jesus that can be made by one of the leading analytical biographers of the age, St. Paul’s verdict that the world by wisdom knows not God is reaffirmed. An error common to certain historical writers is to follow the line of reasoning, post hoc ergo propter hoc. This fallacy obtains in The Paganism in our Christianity by Arthur Weigall. He quotes as analogies to the Virgin Birth heathen legends of the union of gods with the daughters of men, but fails to note that these ceased to be virgins after their union. His assertion that the phrase “the blood of bulls” in the Epistle to the Hebrews is due to the influence of Mithraism grievously overlooks the Levitical ritual of the Old Testament. The Church absorbed some things from the pagan mysteries, but they were subordinate to the truth of her Lord’s Person. “Those who tell us what Christianity took over, whether from Hebrew religion, Greek philosophy, Stoicism or the pagan cults, too often forget to tell us what it refused and rejected.

Yet in that process of assimilation and rejection is the proof of the living organism.” 8 These words of a competent authority on comparative religion establish a test which many are inclined to overlook. A fatal misconception of the Jesus of history is seen in Mr. Weigall’s ingenious reading of the Gospel story in the light of myths and legends. It is not surprising that he revives the swoon hypothesis of Paulus, prevalent among the earlier rationalists, that Jesus did not die on the cross but only suffered a temporary lapse of consciousness. To accept such a theory is to discountenance the clear testimony of the Evangelists that Jesus was actually dead.

Indeed, it would have been nothing short of a miracle if a ghastly and exhausted Figure had induced the disciples to believe that He was alive with power. It might be said of Mr.

8 Kenneth Saunders: The Gospel for Asia, p. 182.

Weigall’s theories that “what is new is not true and what is true is not new.” No explanation that fails to give full credit to Jesus for the spiritual impulse which He inaugurated and advanced has yet been found satisfactory.

What is propounded in this book is akin to a theory of music offered by a deaf mute.

Nevertheless, the suspicions of critical scholarship to which allusion has been made receive some countenance in certain theological coteries. An accomplished writer of this liberal persuasion asserts that “every statement in the records is to be judged by the degree of its suitableness to the distinctive environment of Jesus, on the one hand, and to that of the framers of Gospel tradition at one or another stage in the history of Christianity, on the other.” * Yet if everything in the sacred narratives which cannot be explained as an echo of its “distinctive environment” is to be regarded as negligible, the whole idea and fact of creative personality is discarded. Who can integrate the second Isaiah’s prophetic majesty T Shirley J. Case: Jesus, A New Biography, p. 115. with a harassed band of exiles in Babylonia, or the unequaled poetry of the drama of Job with the provincialism of post-exilic Judaism? A similar historical obtuseness is seen in Doctor Warschauer’s Historical Life of Christ 3 in which he maintains that the Gospels are “records of the Passion extended backwards,” and that many elements of a miraculous nature were read into the narratives by His credulous followers, who did not testify to the reality of the events, but to their impressions, actual or otherwise, and mostly the latter. For example, the genealogies were fabricated because of a desire to prove the Davidic descent of Jesus. The accounts of the Nativity reflect current legends about Mithra and Buddha, and were accommodations to the Old Testament’s Messianic prophecies. The baptism of the Master embodies the belief of the early church that He was anointed with the Holy Spirit, whereby He became conscious of a mission which He afterwards understood. The betrayal by Judas consisted in his giving away the Messianic secret reserved in the keeping of the Twelve. The Resurrection story was an apocryphal product of floating traditions due to imagination. 8

Professor Benjamin W. Bacon rightly points out in The Story of Jesus and the Beginnings of the Church 3 that there could be no Gospel of Jesus apart from the Gospel about Jesus. They who desire a return to the simple religion of Jesus, “the paternalistic theism of the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer,” do not realize that the ethics of Jesus cannot be separated from his theology without devitalizing His religion. Indeed, the Gospel of Jesus is in reality the Gospel about Jesus, for the Four Gospels as well as the Pauline and other writings of the New Testament harmoniously convey the apostolic testimony “even as truth is in Jesus.” * It is here that Professor Bacon’s negative criticism undermines the solid construction of the Faith. His very acuteness and resourcefulness lead to many ingenious conclu- 8 J. Warschauer: The Historical Life of Christ, pp. 16ff.; 46; 298; 344 ff.

8 Ephesians 4:21. sions, based upon strained combinations, due to the dangerous tendency toward subjectivism, which has wrought so disastrously in the reconstruction of the Gospel narrative. It is simply conjecture to assert that Jesus did not identify Himself with the Suffering Servant of Messianic promise, and that He did not consider that death was the inevitable outcome of the agony in Gethsemane. If Jesus is “the greatest religious Teacher that ever lived,” as Doctor Bacon acknowledges, it is incredible that He should have misread the purpose of His mission. It is hardly possible that His disciples showed greater insight, and that especially St. Paul, who was not an original disciple, had a more profound grasp of the religion of Jesus than did Jesus Himself. Such a view runs directly counter to the teaching of the New Testament, which is our final literary authority on the claims of our Lord.

These gratuitous explanations of effects after dismissing their ascribed causes necessitate reasoning within a circle carried to the nth power. One ventures to submit that it is not within the province even of professional capacity to assign world-shaping events to fond deceits and fantastic legends which were the common property of the proletariat. Marked liberties have been taken with Shakespeare, and an extensive literature dedicated to the denial of his authorship of the plays and sonnets that bear his name. But until now no censor has hinted that their imperial flights should be assigned to the gossip of a rural community, or to the current tittle-tattle of London’s taverns and the alleyways of its primitive theaters. Yet such an attribution would be facility itself compared with the task of wholly explaining Jesus by the age and environment in which He lived. In passing from the forced interpretations of ill-digested knowledge and theoretical speculation to those of real magistrates of divinity, it is as though one left a crowded and noisy room for the mountain side with its unintercepted vision and purer air. The three Anglican bishops, Doctors Headlam, Temple and, Gore, may be classed as conservatives. But theirs is the conservatism of men in whom the historical sense is virile and intelligent. They properly appreciate the tremendous importance of the order, life and energies of the Church. Their outlook is not confined to a solitary era of the past, however momentous.

They visualize it as the progenitor of a growing future, the potencies of which make the beginning moment the supreme moment; a future, in which, after the debate is silenced, a few stars of righteousness and truth shine resplendently in man’s spiritual firmament, with Jesus as their sun.

Bishop Headlam, who collaborated with the late Professor Sanday in one of the most satisfactory commentaries extant on the Epistle to the Romans, is as fully cognizant of the problems connected with New Testament literature as any living authority. He writes: “To those who deny the historical character of the documents which narrate the life of Christ, we may reply that they give us a coherent and consistent narrative of events; that they contain the record of a teaching harmonious with the period to which it belongs, unaffected, or but slightly affected, by the development of Christian history; that they present to us a Person whose character and message are unique; and that they form an adequate cause for the events which followed them.” 10 In an earlier volume Bishop Headlam stressed the truth that the teaching of Jesus as contained in the Gospels, is not a collection of diversified estimates and opinions held by various individuals during a period of from fifty to seventy years, but a homogeneous whole with conspicuous internal oneness, derived from a Teacher of intense spiritual authority, whose dominance was acknowledged alike by His disciples and adversaries. 11 This is reasoning without rage, critical but cautious, by a divine who exercises restraint and eschews evasion. Its spiritual refinement and acute insight are admirably adapted to the nature of the theme. When the occasion requires, the bishop can forge the 10 Jesus Christ in History and Faith, p. 37f.

11 The Life and Teaching of Jesus the Christ, p. 314. anchors of faith as well as define its more delicate issues, and dismiss with appropriate peremptoriness what he calls “learned trifling.”

Many entitled to judge esteem Bishop Gore’s volume on Belief in Christ his magnum opus. Others contend, however, that it but reaffirms his previous position taken in earlier days in the volume of essays entitled Luce Mundij and more completely set forth in his Bampton Lectures on The Incarnation of the Son of God. Some who are familiar with Bishop Gore’s ecclesiastical convictions assert that his maintenance of the Chalcedonian Christology, while consistent with AngloCatholicism, disqualifies him as an effective apologist for “the modern mind.” Whatever this somewhat intangible mind may happen to be, it is presumable that wisdom was not born with it, nor will it necessarily share its disappearance. Besides, when a Christological conclusion nearly identical with that of Bishop Gore is reached by Archbishop William Temple in his Christ the Truth and also by Canon B. H. Streeter in his lucid chapter on “The Christ” found in his remarkable volume, Reality, these three very dissimilar apologists should be heeded. If Bishop Gore favors Biblical and historical methods for the process, Bishop Temple proceeds according to the canons of philosophical inquiry, and Doctor Streeter agrees with both bishops after a fresh and comprehensive survey of all the relevant testimony. This agreement is further strengthened by his more recent essay on “Finality in Religion,” contained in the book entitled Adventure, The Faith of Science and the Science of Faith. The competence of these Anglican leaders for the task they have discharged is beyond successful dispute. They fortify the conviction that Christianity’s received doctrine of its Founder’s person is inseparably related with enduring realities, which neither hypothetical criticisms, conjectural explanations, nor undisciplined imagery disguised in scholastic dialect can displace.

Any conception of Jesus which invalidates the historic experience of the Church, and by dispelling her assurance of pardon and peace to the penitent, invites her dissolution as the worshiping center of His redeemed brotherhood, cannot be viewed with equanimity by those to whom God’s honor and man’s welfare are alike precious. When the chief argument adduced for this reversal of Christian consciousness is that the historic doctrine of Jesus is “a strain on our credulity,” one begs leave to dissent. The strain, if there be any, is in the opposite direction. Since the fullest proof of Christianity is original Christianity itself, much credulity is presumptively demanded by those who lightly ascribe the world’s noblest religion to entirely inadequate sources. If we realize, as we should, that none can “explain” life’s most ordinary forms, we shall not be confounded by the apostolic declaration that, in Jesus as the Christ, the Eternal entered Time. Professor H. R. Mackintosh appositely observes: “Everywhere in life, in nature, in history, in personality, there are, for each of us, irreducible and enigmatic facts, which we can touch and recognize and register, but of which we never become masters intellectually. Nature itself is full of new beginnings of real increase, of novel fact not deducible from the previous phases of the cosmos... There is an alogical element in things, not to be measured by the canons of discursive mind... Being is too rich and manifold for us to lay down a priori regulations to the effect that this or that, even though worthy and morally credible, is impossible for God.”

How then with all the ascertainable subject matter before us are we to appraise the values which abound in Jesus? The question should be answered before any attempt is made to apply those values to the multiplex needs of our own life. We might begin by urging that He has made an immeasurably larger differential in the world than any other being who has ever lived. This observation trespasses on the obvious, yet it has the initial advantage of a practically universal indorsement in countries enjoying the highest civilization. It may be 12 The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, p. 471. further predicated that He is abundantly able to amplify the differential when men shall correspondingly appropriate its meanings.

Everywhere to-day the beneficial realities of His mission are acknowledged. Its incalculable good profoundly impresses the general mind, and kindles the eagerness to know more of Jesus, shown by believers and non-believers in the self -manifestation of the Father in Him. The average man or woman pays little heed to scholars, who, while bent on what they deem “the Jesus of history,” at the same time ignore the relations He has established between the Creator and His children. It is instinctively felt by the mass that unaided mortals, however erudite, cannot encompass the entire revelation which Jesus made. This would involve nothing less than an inerrant analysis and interpretation of nineteen centuries of Christian history and progress.

Again, students of the past are aware that in its decisive moments those super-personalities have emerged, who possessed a combination of gifts which found its expression in the guidance of events. The very contradictions of their age expanded their ability to direct its passional forces into new channels. Such a personality was John Wesley, vigorous without vehemence, neither loud nor labored, a fixed luminary of private and public virtue, who shone on the just and the unjust. Annalists long since rejected the idea that Wesley’s significance, or that of other kindred spirits, was exclusively religious. Doubtless after his conversion in Aldersgate Street, London, on May the twenty-fourth, 1738, it was his absorbing business to rekindle in Englishspeaking lands the spiritual fires which sloth, sensuality and unfaith had almost quenched.

But, to quote Lecky: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the scene which took place in that humble meeting house in Aldersgate Street formed an epoch in English history. The conviction which then flashed upon o’Se of the most powerful and most active intellects... is the true source of English Methodism.” 18 This verdict is altogether too modest.

18 England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. Ill, p. 48.

Neither England nor her Methodism was the sole recipient of Wesley’s illumination. His transcendence was diffused among the nations; his words have gone out to the ends of the earth. He would have been the first to assert that no soul shines in its own radiance, or transmits more light than it is able to receive. The strength and extent of his influence but reflect his intimacy with the Light of lights.

He found his spiritual lineage and leverage in the Crucified and Risen Jesus. By His aid Wesley proposed to upraise the deserted and shepherdless folk of the period not only to decency but to holiness. It was through the vision of the Christ that he foresaw an apparently hopeless and degenerate populace gathered into an ideal Communion broadly and securely based on love, on justice, on social and religious responsibility.

These passing references to the foremost Protestant statesman-evangelist of the past three hundred years simply emphasize our inability to depict the moral preeminence and spiritual distinction of the Christ of the Graseo Roman Empire and of subsequent States.

Gibbon and later historians show that St. Paul’s arraignment of that ancient organization in his letter to the Romans was well within the mark. The marvelous political system which for seven hundred years had governed earth’s most habitable provinces with magnanimity, courage, prudence and firmness was then on the verge of collapse. The heart of Rome was decrepit through carnality and corruption. Neither Cicero’s ethical writings nor those of Marcus Aurelius or Seneca could avert her impending doom any more than they could redistribute the solar system. Yet while her decline was hastened by lust, luxury, oppression and war, a new life was injected into Roman society by an obscure and despised band of sectaries. It was the life of Christ and the life in Christ. His disciples could not save the venerable political fabric which tottered to its fall almost unaware of their existence. But they did something better. They inaugurated the civilization we inherit, which, notwithstanding its lamentable blunders and crimes, contains the promise of a universal betterment which was unknown before Christ’s appearance, except by prophetic Judaism.

Grant Showerman, in his Eternal Rome, objects to that appearance and its results, because, according to him, they destroyed the Roman Empire; an event which he mourns as the bitterest tragedy of time. His antipathy to Christianity probably preceded this astounding discovery. The causes of Imperial Rome’s fall were certainly in no way related to the new Faith. On the contrary, they were due to facts, habits and principles which were the antithesis of that Faith. Moreover, to assume that the world’s future depended upon the perpetuity of the Poos Romano, is to show oneself devoid of historical imagination, and unaware of the inevitable outcome of glaring social evils in physical and moral bankruptcy. The contention of Edward Lucas White, another writer predisposed against Christianity, that Rome’s overthrow was brought aboul by the insidious undermining of the Christians) is virtually a repetition of Gibbon’s circuitous arguments. Mr. White’s facts are out of focus when he states that the religion of Jesus stressed thoughts and not deeds, and that its disciples were intolerant fanatics and hypocrites, whose other-worldliness induced them to conspire against the State. 1 * Such are the nebulous sentimentalities enlisted to explain a crucified Jew’s unique conquest of the best conceived and administered political sovereignty of antiquity. To return to realities, the Caesars forfeited the world’s allegiance because when the gods arrive the half gods depart. Yet this is a strange reason for antagonizing a religion which ushered in what Napoleon himself exalted as the imperishable Kingdom of the spiritualities.

What began in the remote province of Judaea has not stayed its beneficent march.

Modern society owes much to Rome and more to Greece. But its essential elements have been conserved and hallowed by the Gospel of Jesus, which was first heralded in the GraacoRoman Empire during its decadence. What 14 Cf. Edward Lucas White: Why Rome Fell, p. 296ff. happened then has happened since and is happening now. The Christ of a growing experience is not confined to institutional Christianity or to anything it covers. He takes the kingdoms of the earth for His operating stage, and coordinates their peoples and their policies in behalf of His redemptive purpose. Remove from our age what is discernibly there because He lived, loved, taught and died; because men willingly surrender themselves to His will; and what have you left in it of vital consequence?

Enter a great library, and set apart the volumes which are in more or less degree motivated by Jesus. Walk through the art galleries and museums of capital cities, and remove from them the masterpieces inspired by Christian sentiment, or portraying Christian events. Stand in the Angel Choir of Lincoln or the transepts of Notre Dame in Paris and consider their adumbrations of eternity; their power to make even the secularized spectator conscious of, A presence that disturbs him with the joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, and to hypnotize him, so to speak, into religious feeling. Banish these visible evidences of Christ’s great differential, and how bare and desolate life would be! 1B

Think of the benevolent Christian influences that have humanized the customs and laws of once barbarous nations. Challenged by the doctrines of the Master, mighty States, prone to license, outrage and persecution, have measurably exterminated these iniquities, and attained civic integrity and honor. The selfish tyrannies of capricious princes were tamed. The fickleness, perversity and cruelty of the populace were modified. The dissoluteness of the aristocracies and the turpitude of the multitudes were lessened. The finer elements of existence were restored to primacy. Conduct was won to better courses. Time ceased to be “a maniac scattering dust, and life a fury flinging flame.” On the low dark verge of humanity’s horizon the dawn of a new day was visible. These things have not been done in a 16 Cf. James R. Cameron: Jesus and Art; Ernest H. Short, The House of God. corner. The upper room where the first disciples barred the door for fear of their foes has given way to places of public concourse.

Christianity has cried aloud in the streets and from the house tops. Its message is to all the sons of men. Its issues are now an open contention, fraught with such matters as the honorable dealings of trade and politics, social reconstruction, national well-being, international concord, the cultivation of righteousness in the entire life and activity of mankind in a word, the supremacy of Christ’s Kingdom in all world affairs.

Troeltsch comments on the extent to which the Calvinistic interpretation of Christianity affected modern society by instilling in the peoples of northern Europe the ideal of “selfdevotion to work and gain, production for production’s sake as the Will of God for every man.” lfl On the other hand, how often and tragically we have been taught that industry and trade, or even knowledge and the cultural

19 Cf. R. S. Sleigh: The Sufficiency of Christianity, an exposition of the religious philosophy of Dr. Ernst Troeltsch, p. 169ff. arts rub elbows with disaster when separated from Christ’s control, and subjected to the discords of hate or the anarchy of physical violence.

Allow me to commend in this connection Charles Loring Brace’s Gesta CTiristi. Few authors have more succinctly described the peaceful interpretations of Christianity in human progress. Ideas, principles, practices now looked upon as the alphabet of ethics, have either been implanted or stimulated and sustained by the religion of Jesus. Among these are “regard for the personality of the weakest and poorest; respect for woman; the absolute duty of each member of the fortunate classes to raise up the unfortunate; humanity to the child, the prisoner, the stranger, the needy, and even the brute; unceasing opposition to all forms of cruelty, oppression and slavery; the duty of personal purity and the sacredness of marriage; the necessity of temperance; the obligation of a more equitable division of the profits of labor, and of greater cooperation between employers and employed; the right of every human being to have the utmost opportunity of developing his faculties, and of all persons to enjoy equal political and social privileges; the principle that the injury of one nation is the injury of all, and the expediency and duty of unrestricted trade and intercourse between all countries; and finally and principally, a profound opposition to war, a determination to limit its evils when existing, and to prevent its arising by means of international arbitration.” 1T The reading of this list of actual achievements is a reminder that, although Jesus has not yet been accepted with consistent seriousness by his Church, it cannot be said that His will has been wholly disregarded. Nevertheless a wide gulf still yawns between the theory and the practice of organized religion. Christ’s followers everywhere should therefore hasten to bridge that gulf by a more unreserved consecration to His teachings, in order that God’s Kingdom might come with power to earth’s remotest bounds.

17 C. Loring Brace: Gesta Christi, A History of Humane Progress under Christianity, p. xii.