"Jesus," says Dr. Cairns, "said that no one ever trusted God enough, and that was the source of all the sin and tragedy." Look at his emphasis again and again on faith; and the language is not that of guesswork; they are the words of the great Son of Fact, who based himself on experience. "Have faith in God" (Mark 11:22). "Be not afraid, only believe" (Mark 5:36). "All things are possible to him that believeth" (Mark 9:23). When he criticizes his disciples, it is on the score of their want of faith—"O ye of little faith"—it has been taken as almost a nickname for them. In the hour of trial and danger they may trust to "the Spirit of your Father" (Matt. 10:20). It is remarkable what value he attaches to faith even of the slightest—"faith as a grain of mustard seed" (Matt. 17:90)—it is little, but it is of the seed order, a living thing of the most immense vitality with the promise of growth and usefulness in it.

This brings us to the question of Prayer. Some of us, of course, do not believe very much in prayer for certain philosophical reasons, which perhaps, as a matter of fact, are not quite as sound as we think, because our definition of prayer is a wrong one, resting on insufficient experience and insufficient reflection. What is prayer?

We shall agree that it is the act by which man definitely tries to relate his soul and life to God. What Jesus then teaches on prayer will illuminate what he means by God; and conversely his conception of God will throw new light upon the whole problem of prayer. It is plain history that Jesus, the great Son of Fact, believed in prayer, told men to pray, and prayed himself. The Gospels and the Epistle to the Hebrews lay emphasis on his practice. Early in the morning he withdrew to the desert (Mark 1:35), late at night he remained on the hillside for prayer (Mark 6:46). Wearied by the crowds that thronged him, he kept apart and continued in prayer. He prays before he chooses the disciples (Luke 6:12). He gives thanks to God on the return of the seventy from their missionary journey (Luke 10:21). Prayer is associated with the confession of Caesarea Philippi (Luke 9:18), with the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9:29), with Gethsemane (Luke 22:41). The writer to the Hebrews speaks of his "strong crying and tears" (Heb. 5:7) in prayer. The Gospels even mention what we should call his unanswered prayers. The prayer before the calling of the Twelve does not exclude Judas; and the cup does not pass in spite of the prayer in Gethsemane. It is as if we had something to learn from the unanswered prayers of our Master. Certainly the content of the Gospel for us would have been poorer if they had been answered in our sense of the word; and this fact, taken with his own teaching on prayer, and his own submission to the Father's will, may help us over some of our difficulties. But Jesus had no doubt or fear about prayer being answered. "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Luke 11:9)—are not ambiguous statements in the least; and they come from one "who based himself on experience." It is worth thinking out that the experience of Jesus lies behind his recommendation of prayer. All his clear-eyed knowledge of God speaks in these plain sentences.

"As he was praying, they ask him, Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). It looks as if at times his disciples caught him at prayer or even overheard him, and felt that here was prayer that took them out beyond all they had ever known of prayer. There were men whom John had taught to pray; was it they who asked Jesus to teach them over again? There may have been some of them who had learnt the Pharisee's way in prayer, and some who stuck to the simpler way they had been taught in childhood. In each case the old ways were outgrown.

We can put together what he taught them. In the first place, the thing must be real and individual—the first requirement always with Jesus. The public prayer of ostentation is out of the reckoning; it is nothing. Jesus chooses the quiet and solitary place for his intercourse with his Father. The real prayer is to the Father in secret—His affair. And it will be earnest beyond what most of us think. We are so familiar with Gospel and parable that we do not take in the strenuousness of Jesus' way in prayer. The importunate widow (Luke 18:2) and the friend at midnight (Luke 11:5) are his types of insistent and incessant earnestness. Do you, he asks, pray with anything like their determination to be heard? The knock at the door and the pleading voice continue till the request is granted—in each case by a reluctant giver. But God is not reluctant, Jesus says, though God, too, will choose his own time to answer (Luke 18:7). It does not mean the mechanical reiteration of the heathen (Matt. 6:7)—not at all, that is not the business of praying; but the steady earnest concentration on the purpose, with the deeper and deeper clarification of the thought as we press home into God's presence till we get there. It was so that he prayed, we may be sure. It is not idly that prayer has been called "the greatest task of the Christian man"; it will not be an easy thing, but a strenuous.

One part of the difficulty of prayer is recognized by Jesus over and over again. Men do not really quite believe that they will be answered—they are "of little faith." But he tells them with emphasis, in one form of words and another, driving it home into them, that "all things are possible with God" (Mark 10:27)—"have faith in God" (Mark 11:22). One can imagine how he fixes them with the familiar steady gaze, pauses, and then with the full weight of his personality in his words, and meaning them to give to his words the full value he intends, says: "Have faith in God." To see him and to hear him must have given that faith of itself. If the friend in the house to your knowledge has the loaves, you will knock till you get them; and has not God the gifts for you that you need? Is he short of the power to help, or is it the will to help that is wanting in God?

Once more the vital thing is Jesus' conception of God. Here, as elsewhere, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our lazy way of using his words without making the effort to give them his connotation. To turn again to passages already quoted, will a father give his son a serpent instead of the fish for which he asks, a stone for bread? It is unthinkable; God—will God do less? It all goes back again to the relation of father and child, to the love of God; only into the thought, Jesus puts a significance which we have not character or love enough to grasp. "Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things," he says about the matters that weigh heaviest with us (Luke 12:30). Even if we suppose Luke's reference to the Father giving the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13), to owe something to the editor's hand—it was an editor with some Christian experience—it is clear that Jesus steadily implies that the heavenly Father has better things than food and clothing for his children. How much of a human father is available for his children? Then will not the heavenly Father, Jesus suggests, give on a larger scale, and give Himself; in short, be available for the least significant of His own children in all His fullness and all His Fatherhood? And even if they do not ask, because they do not know their need, will he not answer the prayers that others, who do know, make for them? Jesus at all events made a practice of intercession—"I prayed for thee," he said to Peter (Luke 22:32)—and the writers of the New Testament feel that it is only natural for Jesus, Risen, Ascended, and Glorified, to make intercession for us still (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25).

We have again to think out what God's Fatherhood implies and carries with it for Jesus.

"The recurrence of the sweet and deep name, Father, unveils the secret of his being. His heart is at rest in God."[23] Rest in God is the very note of all his being, of all his teaching—the keynote of all prayer in his thought. "Our Father, who art in heaven," our prayers are to begin—and perhaps they are not to go on till we realize what we are saying in that great form of speech. It is certain that as these words grow for us into the full stature of their meaning for Jesus, we shall understand in a more intimate way what the whole Gospel is in reality.

The writer to the Hebrews has here an interesting suggestion for us. Using the symbolism of the Hebrew religion and its tabernacle, he compares Jesus to the High Priest, but Jesus, he says, does not enter into the holiest alone. "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us ... let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith" (Heb. 10:19). In the previous chapter he discards the symbol and "speaks things"—"Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us" (Heb. 9:24). There he touches what has been the faith of the Church throughout—that in Christ we reach the presence of God. Without saying so much in so many words, Jesus implies this in all his attitude to prayer. God is there, and God loves you, and loves to have you speak with him. No one has ever believed this very much outside the radius of Christ's person and influence. It is, when we give the words full weight, an essentially Christian faith, and it depends on our relation to Jesus Christ.

Jesus was quite explicit with his friends in telling them they did not know what to ask, but he showed them himself what they should ask. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness" (Matt. 6:33), he says, and tells us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for deliverance from evil. Pray, too, "Thy kingdom come." "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest" (Matt. 9:38). This is perhaps the only place where he asked his disciples to pray for his great work. Identification with God's purposes—identification with the individual needs of those we love and those we ought to love—identification with the world's sin and misery—these seem to be his canons of prayer for us, as for himself. For both in what he teaches others and in what he does himself, he makes it a definite prerequisite of all prayer that we say: "Thy will be done." Prayer is essentially dedication, deeper and fuller as we use it more and come more into the presence of God. Obedience goes with it; "we must cease to pray or cease to disobey," one or the other. If we are half-surrendered, we are not very bright about our prayers, because we do not quite believe that God will really look after the things about which we are anxious. We must indeed go back to what Jesus said about God; we had better even leave off praying for a moment till we see what he says, and then begin again with a clearer mind.

"Ask, and ye shall receive," he says; and if we have no obedience, or love, or faith, or any of the great things that make prayer possible, he suggests that we can ask for them and have them. The Gospel gives us an illustration in the man who prayed: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" (Mark 9:24). But it is plain we have to understand that we are asking for great things, and it is to them rather than to the obvious little things that Jesus directs our thoughts. Not away from the little things, for if God is a real Father he will wish to have his children talk them over with him—"little things please little minds," yes, and great minds when the little minds are dear to them—but not little things all the time. There is a variant to the saying about seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven, which Clement of Alexandria preserves. Perhaps it is a mere slip, but God, it has been said, can use misquotations; and Clement's quotation, or misquotation, certainly represents the thought of Jesus, and it may give us a hint for our own practice: "Ask," saith he, "the great things, and the little things will be added unto you" (Strom. i. 158).

The object of Jesus was to induce men to base all life on God. Short-range thinking, like the rich fool's, may lead to our forgetting God; but Jesus incessantly lays the emphasis on the thought-out life; and that, in the long run, means a new reckoning with God. That is what Jesus urges—that we should think life out, that we should come face to face with God and see him for what he is, and accept him. He means us to live a life utterly and absolutely based on God—life on God's lines of peacemaking and ministry, the "denial of self," a complete forgetfulness of self in surrender to God, obedience to God, faith in God, and the acceptance of the sunshine of God's Fatherhood. He means us to go about things in God's way—forgiving our enemies, cherishing kind thoughts about those who hate us or despise us or use us badly (Matt. 5:44), praying for them. This takes us right back into the common world, where we have to live in any case; and it is there that he means us to live with God—not in trance, but at work, in the family, in business, shop, and street, doing all the little things and all the great things that God wants us to do, and glad to do them just because we are his children and he is our Father. Above all, he would have us "think like God" (Mark 8:33); and to reach this habit of "thinking like God," we have to live in the atmosphere of Jesus, "with him" (Mark 3:14). All this new life he made possible for us by being what he was—once again a challenge to re-explore Jesus. "The way to faith in God and to love for man," said Dr. Cairns at Mohonk, "is, as of old, to come nearer to the living Jesus."



CHAPTER VI

JESUS AND MAN

When, on his last journey, Jesus came in sight of Jerusalem, Luke tells us that he wept (Luke 19:41). There is an obvious explanation of this in the extreme tension under which he was living—everything turned upon the next few days, and everything would be decided at Jerusalem; but while he must have felt this, it cannot have been the cause of his weeping. Nor should we look for it altogether in the appeal which a great city makes to emotion.

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.

Yet it was not the architecture that so deeply moved Jesus; the temple, which was full in view, was comparatively new and foreign. There is little suggestion in the Gospels that Art meant anything to him, perhaps it meant little to the writers. As for the temple, he found it "a den of thieves" (Luke 19:46); and he prophesied that it would be demolished, and of all its splendid buildings, its goodly stones and votive offerings, which so much impressed his disciples, not one stone would be left upon another stone (Mark 13:9; Luke 21:5). But the traditions of Jerusalem wakened thoughts in him of the story of his people, thoughts with a tragic colour. Jerusalem was the place where prophets were killed (Luke 13:34), the scene and centre, at once, of Israel's deepest emotions, highest hopes, and most awful failures. "O Jerusalem! Jerusalem!" he had said in sadness as he thought of Israel's holy city, "which killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" (Luke 13:34).

And now he is in sight of Jerusalem. The city and the temple suddenly meet his view, as he reaches the height, and he is deeply moved. Any reflective mind might well have been stirred by the thought of the masses of men gathered there. Nothing is so futile as an arithmetical numbering of people, for after a certain point figures paralyse the imagination, and after that they tell the mind little or nothing. But here was actually assembled the Jewish people, coming in swarms from all the world, for the feast; here was Judaism at its most pious; here was the pilgrim centre with all it meant of aspiration and blindness, of simple folly and gross sin. The sight of the city—the doomed city, as he foresaw—the thought of his people, their zeal for God and their alienation from God—it all comes over him at once, and, with a sudden rush of feeling, he apostrophizes Jerusalem—"If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes . . . . Thou knewest not the time of thy visitation!" (Luke 19:42-44).

It is quite plain from the Gospels that crowds had always an appeal for Jesus. At times he avoided them; but when they came about him, they claimed him and possessed him. Over and over again, we read of his pity for them—"he saw a great multitude and was moved with compassion toward them" (Matt. 14:14)—of his thought for their weariness and hunger, his reflection that they might "faint by the way" on their long homeward journeys (Mark 8:3), and his solicitude about their food. Whatever modern criticism makes of the story of his feeding multitudes, it remains that he was markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger. Jairus is reminded that his little girl will be the better for food (Mark 5:43). The rich are urged to make feasts for the poor, the maimed and the blind (Luke 14:12). The owner of the vineyard, in the parable, pays a day's wage for an hour's work, when an hour was all the chance that the unemployed labourer could find (Matt. 20:9). No sanctity could condone for the devouring of widows' houses (Matt. 23:14).

The great hungry multitudes haunt his mind. The story of the rich young ruler shows this (Mark 10:17-22). Here was a man of birth and education, whose face and whose speech told of a good heart and conscience—a man of charm, of the impulsive type that appealed to Jesus. Jesus "looked on him," we read. The words recall Plato's picture of Socrates looking at the jailer, how "he looked up at him in his peculiar way, like a bull"—the old man's prominent eyes were fixed on the fellow, glaring through the brows above them, and Socrates' friends saw them and remembered them when they thought of the scene. As Jesus' eyes rested steadily on this young man, the disciples saw in them an expression they knew—"Jesus, looking on him, loved him." Their talk was of eternal life; and, no doubt to his surprise, Jesus asked the youth if he had kept the commandments; how did he stand as regarded murder, theft, adultery? The steady gaze followed the youth's impetuous answer, and then came the recommendation to sell all that he had and give to the poor—"and, Come! Follow me!" At this, we read in a fragment of the "Gospel according to the Hebrews" (preserved by Origen), "the rich man began to scratch his head, and it did not please him. And the Lord said to him, 'How sayest thou, "The law I have kept and the prophets?" For it is written in the law, "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"; and behold! many who are thy brethren, sons of Abraham, are clad in filth and dying of hunger, and thy house is full of many good things, and nothing at all goes out from it to them.' And he turned and said to Simon, his disciple, who was sitting beside him: 'Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.'" We need not altogether reject this variant of the story.

But it was more than the physical needs of the multitude that appealed to Jesus. "Man's Unhappiness, as I construe," says Teufelsdroeckh in "Sartor Resartus", "comes of his Greatness, it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack happy?" We read in a passage, which it is true, is largely symbolic, that one of Jesus' quotations from the Old Testament was that "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Luke 4:4). Hunger is a real thing—horribly real; but it is comparatively easy to deal with, and man has deeper needs. The Shoeblack, according to Teufelsdroeckh, wants "God's infinite universe altogether to himself." In the simpler words of Jesus, he is never happy till he says, "I will arise and go to my Father" (Luke 15:18).

This craving for the Father the men of Jesus' day tried to fill with the law; and, when the law failed to satisfy it, they had nothing further to suggest, except their fixed idea that "God heareth not sinners" (John 9:31). They despaired of the great masses and left them alone. They did not realize, as Jesus did, that the Father also craves for his children. When Jesus saw the simpler folk thus forsaken, the picture rose in his mind of sheep, worried by dogs or wolves, till they fell, worn out—sheep without a shepherd (Matt. 9:36). Every one remembers the shepherd of the parable who sought the one lost sheep until he found it, and how he brought it home on his shoulders (Luke 15:5). But there is another parable, we might almost say, of ninety and nine lost sheep—a parable, not developed, but implied in the passage of Matthew, and it is as significant as the other, for our Good Shepherd has to ask his friends to help him in this case. The appeal that lay in the sheer misery and helplessness of masses of men was one of the foundations of the Christian Church. (The Good Shepherd, by the way, is a phrase from the Fourth Gospel (John 10:11), but we think most often of the Good Shepherd as carrying the sheep, and that comes from Luke, and is in all likelihood nearer the parable of Jesus.)

It is worth noticing that Jesus stands alone in refusing to despair of the greater part of mankind. Contempt was in his eyes the unpardonable sin (Matt. 5:22). How swift and decisive is his anger with those who make others stumble! (Luke 17:2). The parable of the lost sheep reveals what he held to be God's feeling for the hopeless man; and, as we have seen, his constant aim is to lead men to "think like God." The lost soul matters to God. He sums up his own work in the world in much the same language as he uses about the shepherd in the parable: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost" (Luke 19:10). The taunt that he was the "friend of publicans and sinners" really described what he was and wished to be (Luke 7:34). God was their Heavenly Father. The sight, then, of the masses of his countrymen, like worried sheep, worn, scattered, lost, and hopeless, waked in him no shade of doubt—on the contrary, it was further proof to him of the soundness of his message. Changing his simile, he told his disciples that the harvest was great, but the labourers few, and he asked them to pray the Lord of the harvest to thrust forth labourers into His harvest (Matt. 9:38). The very name "Lord of the harvest" implies faith in God's competence and understanding. From the first, he seems to have held up before his followers that this wide service was to be their work—"Come ye after me," he said, "and I will make you to become fishers of men" (Mark 1:17)—men, who should really "catch men" (Luke 5:10).

Like all for whom the world has had a meaning, Jesus, as we have seen, accepted the necessary conditions of man's life. Human misery and need were widespread, but God's Fatherhood was of compass fully as wide, and Jesus relied upon it. "Your heavenly Father knows," he said (Matt. 6:32), and "with God all things are possible" (Mark 10:27). The very miseries of the oppressed and hopeless people added grounds to his confidence. People who had touched bottom in sounding the human spirit's capacity for misery, were for him the "ripe harvest" (Matt. 9:37), only needing to be gathered (Mark 4:29). He understood them, and he knew that he had the healing for all their troubles. With full assurance of the truth of his words, he cried: "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). He spoke of a rest which careless familiarity obscures for us. What understanding and sympathy he shows, when he adds: "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light!" Misery, poverty and hunger, he had found, taught men to see realities. The hungry, at least, were not likely to mistake a stone for bread—they had a ready test for it, on which they could rely. Poverty threw open the road to the Kingdom of God. The clearing away of all temporary satisfactions, of all that cloaked the soul's deepest needs, prepared men for real relations with the greatest Reality—with God. So that Jesus boldly said: "Blessed are ye poor"; "Blessed are ye that hunger now"; "Blessed are ye that weep now" (Luke 6:20, 21); but he had no idea that they were always to weep. If it was his to care for men's hunger, it was not likely that he would have no comfort for their tears—"Ye shall find rest unto your souls" (Matt. 11:29)—"They shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4).

It was in large part upon the happiness which he was to bring to the poor that Jesus based his claim to be heard. There is little reasonable ground for doubt that he healed diseases. Of course we cannot definitely pronounce upon any individual case reported; the diagnosis might be too hasty, and the trouble other than was supposed; but it is well known that such healings do occur—and that they occurred in Jesus' ministry, we can well believe. So when he was challenged as to his credentials, he pointed to misery relieved; and the culmination of everything, the crowning feature of his work, he found in his "good news for the poor." The phrase he borrowed from Isaiah (61:1), but he made it his own—the splendid promises in Isaiah for "the poor, the broken-hearted, captives, blind and bruised," appealed to him. Time has laid its hand upon his word, and dulled its freshness. "Gospel" and "evangelical" are no longer words of sheer happiness like Jesus' "good news"—they are technical terms, used in handbooks and in controversy; while for Jesus the "good news for the poor" was a new word of delight and inspiration.

The centre in all the thoughts of Jesus, as we have to remind ourselves again and again, is God. If, as Dr. D. S. Cairns puts it, "Jesus Christ is the great believer in man," it is—if we are reading him aright at all—because God believes in man. Let us remind ourselves often of that. "Thou hast made us for Thyself," said Augustine in the famous sentence, of which we are apt to emphasize the latter half, "and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Confessions, i. 1). Jesus would have us emphasize the former clause as well, and believe it. The keynote of his whole story is God's love; the Father is a real father—strange that one should have to write the small f to get the meaning! All that Jesus has taught us of God, we must bring to bear on man. For it is hard to believe in man—"What is man that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?" quotes the author of "Job" in a great ironical passage (Job 7:17; from Psalm 8:4). The elements and the stars come over us, as they came over George Fox in the Vale of Beavor; what is man? Can one out of fifteen hundred millions of human beings living on one planet matter to God, when there are so many planets and stars, and there have been so many generations? Can he matter? It all depends on how we conceive of God. Here it is essential to give all the meaning to the term "God" that Jesus gave to it, to believe in God as Jesus believed in God, if we are to understand the fullness of Jesus' "good news." It all depends on God—on whether Jesus was right about God; and after all on Jesus himself. "A thing of price is man," wrote Synesius about 410 A.D., "because for him Christ died." The two things go together—Jesus' death and Jesus' Theocentric thought of man.

It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young hearts, that it is easy to idealize what one does not know. "Omne ignotum pro magnifico" is the old epigram of Tacitus. It is not every believer in man, nor every "Friend of man," who knows men as Jesus did. Like Burns and Carlyle and others who have interpreted man to us to some purpose, he grew up in the home of labouring people. He was a working man himself, a carpenter. He must have learnt his carpentry exactly as every boy learns it, by hammering his fingers instead of the nail, sawing his own skin instead of the wood—and not doing it again. He knew what it was to have an aching back and sweat on the face; how hard money is to earn, and how quickly it goes. He makes it clear that money is a temptation to men, and a great danger; but he never joins the moralists and cranks in denouncing it. He always talks sense—if the expression is not too lowly to apply to him. He sees what can be done with money, what a tool it can be in a wise man's hands—how he can make friends "by means of the mammon of unrighteousness" (Luke 16:9), for example, by giving unexpectedly generous wages to men who missed their chances (Matt. 20:15), by feeding Lazarus at the gate, and perhaps by having his sores properly attended to (Luke 16:20). That he understood how pitifully the loss of a coin may affect a household of working people, one of his most beautiful parables bears witness (Luke 15:8-10). With work he had no quarrel. He draws many of his parables from labour, and he implies throughout that it is the natural and right thing for man. To be holy in his sense, a man need not leave his work. Clement of Alexandria, in his famous saying about the ploughman continuing to plough, and knowing God as he ploughs, and the seafaring man, sticking to his ship and calling on the heavenly pilot as he sails, is in the vein of Jesus.[24] There were those whom he called to leave all, to distribute their wealth, and to follow him; but he chose them (Mark 3:13, 14); it was not his one command for all men (cf. Mark 5:19). But, as we shall shortly see, it is implied by his judgements of men that he believed in work and liked men who "put their backs into it"—their backs, eyes, and their brains too.

Pain, the constant problem of man, and perhaps more, of woman—of unmarried woman more especially—he never discussed as modern people discuss it. He never made light of pain any more than of poverty; he understood physical as well as moral distress. Nor did he, like some of his contemporaries and some modern people, exaggerate the place of pain in human experience. He shared pain, he sympathized with suffering; and his understanding of pain, and, above all, his choice of pain, taught men to reconsider it and to understand it, and altered the attitude of the world toward it. His tenderness for the suffering of others taught mankind a new sympathy, and the "nosokomeion", the hospital for the sick, was one of the first of Christian institutions to rise, when persecution stopped and Christians could build. "And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them," says Matthew (21:14) in a memorable phrase. I have heard it suggested that it was irregular for them to come into the temple courts; but they gravitated naturally to Jesus.

The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people's feelings and sufferings; he is essentially an individualist; he must have his own intercourse with God, and other people's affairs are apt to be an interruption, an impertinence. "I have not been thinking of the community; I have been thinking of Christ," said a Bengali to me, who was wavering between the Brahmo Samaj and Christianity. The blessed Angela of Foligno was rather glad to be relieved of her husband and children, who died and left her leisure to enjoy the love of God. All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the historical Jesus. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses," was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively to the minds of his followers (Matt. 8:17, roughly after Isaiah 53:4). Perhaps when we begin to understand what is meant by the Incarnation, we may find that omnipotence has a great deal more to do than we have supposed with natural sympathy and the genius for entering into the sorrows and sufferings of other people.

One side of the work of Jesus must never be forgotten. His attitude to woman has altered her position in the world. No one can study society in classical antiquity or in non-Christian lands with any intimacy and not realize this. Widowhood in Hinduism, marriage among Muslims—they are proverbs for the misery of women. Even the Jew still prays: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God! King of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman." The Jewish woman has to be grateful to God, because He "hath made me according to His will"—a thanksgiving with a different note, as the modern Jewess, Amy Levy, emphasized in her brilliant novel, where her heroine, very like herself, corrected her prayerbook to make it more explicit "cursed art Thou, O Lord our God! Who hast made me a woman." Paul must have known these Jewish prayers, for he emphasized that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28). Paul had his views—the familiar old ways of Tarsus inspired them[25]—as to woman's dress and deportment, especially the veil; but he struck the real Christian note here, and laid stress on the fact of what Jesus had done and is doing for women. There is no reference made by Jesus to woman that is not respectful and sympathetic; he never warns men against women. Even the most degraded women find in him an amazing sympathy; for he has the secret of being pure and kind at the same time—his purity has not to be protected; it is itself a purifying force. He draws some of his most delightful parables from woman's work, as we have seen. It is recorded how, when he spoke of the coming disaster of Jerusalem, he paused to pity poor pregnant women and mothers with little babies in those bad times (Luke 21:23; Matt. 24:19). Critics have remarked on the place of woman in Luke's Gospel, and some have played with fancies as to the feminine sources whence he drew his knowledge—did the women who ministered to Jesus, Joanna, for instance, the wife of Chuza (Luke 8:3), tell him these illuminative stories of the Master? In any case Jesus' new attitude to woman is in the record; and it has so reshaped the thought of mankind, and made it so hard to imagine anything else, that we do not readily grasp what a revolution he made—here as always by referring men's thoughts back to the standard of God's thoughts, and supporting what he taught by what he was.

Mark has given us one of our most familiar pictures of Jesus sitting with a little child on his knee and "in the crook of his arm." (The Greek participle which gives this in Mark 9:36 and 10:16 is worth remembering—it is vivid enough.) Mothers brought their children to him, "that he should put his hands on them and pray" (Matt. 19:13). Matthew (21:15) says that children took part in the Triumphal Entry; and Jesus, clear as he was how little the Hosannas of the grown people meant, seems to have enjoyed the children's part in the strange scene. Classical literature, and Christian literature of those ages, offer no parallel to his interest in children. The beautiful words, "suffer little children to come unto me," are his, and they are characteristic of him (Matt. 19:14); and he speaks of God's interest in children (Matt. 18:14)—once more a reference of everything to God to get it in its true perspective. How Jesus likes children!—for their simplicity (Luke 18:17), their intuition, their teachableness, we say. But was it not, perhaps, for far simpler and more natural reasons just because they were children, and little, and delightful? We forget his little brothers and sisters, or we eliminate them for theological purposes.

Jesus lays quite an unexpected emphasis on sheer tenderness—on kindness to neighbour and stranger, the instinctive humanity that helps men, if it be only by the swift offer of a cup of cold water (Matt. 10:42). The Good Samaritan came as a surprise to some of his hearers (Luke 10:30). "It is our religion," said a Hindu to a missionary, to explain why he and other Hindus did not help to rescue a fainting man from the railway tracks, nor even offer water to restore him, when the missionary had hauled him on to the platform unaided. Not so the religion of Jesus—"bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," wrote Paul (Gal. 6:2)—"pursue hospitality" (Rom. 12:13; the very word runs through the Epistles of the New Testament). And, as we shall see in a later chapter, the Last Judgement itself turns on whether a man has kindly instincts or not. Matthew quotes (12:20) to describe Jesus' own tenderness the impressive phrase of Isaiah (42:3), "A bruised reed shall he not break."

If it is urged that such things are natural to man—"do not even the publicans the same?" (Matt. 5:46)—Jesus carries the matter a long way further. "Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain" (Matt. 5:41). The man who would use such compulsion would be the alien soldier, the hireling of Herod or of Rome; and who would wish to cart him and his goods even one mile? "Go two miles," says Jesus—or, if the Syriac translation preserves the right reading, "Go two extra." Why? Well, the soldier is a man after all, and by such unsolicited kindness you may make a friend even of a government official—not always an easy thing to do—at any rate you can help him; God helps him; "be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). Ordinary kindness and tenderness could hardly be urged beyond that point; and yet Jesus goes further still. He would have us pray for those that despitefully use us (Matt. 5:44)—and in no Pharisaic way, but with the same instinctive love and friendliness that he always used himself. "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). There are religions which inculcate the tolerance of wrong aiming at equanimity of mind or acquisition of merit. But Jesus implies on the contrary that in all this also the Christian denies himself, does not seek even in this way to save his own soul, but forgets all about it in the service of others, though he finds by and by, with a start, that he has saved it far more effectually than he could have expected (Mark 8:35; Matt. 25:37, 40). The emphasis falls on our duty of kindness and tenderness to all men and women, because we and they are alike God's children.

With his emphasis on tenderness we may group his teaching on forgiveness. He makes the forgiving spirit an antecedent of prayer—"when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses" (Mark 11:25). "If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift" (Matt. 5:23, 24). The parable of the king and his debtor (Matt. 18:23), painfully true to human nature, brings out the whole matter of our forgiveness of one another into the light; we are shown it from God's outlook. The teaching as ever is Theocentric. To Peter, Jesus says that a man should be prepared to forgive his brother to seventy times seven—if anybody can keep count so far (Matt. 18:21-35). He sees how quarrels injure life, and alienate a man from God. Hence comes the famous saying: "Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matt. 5:39). He would have men even avoid criticism of one another (Matt. 7:1-5). Epigrams are seductive, and there is a fascination in the dissection of character; but there is always a danger that a clever characterization, a witty label, may conclude the matter, that a possible friendship may be lost through the very ingenuity with which the man has been labelled, who might have been a friend. It is not a small matter in Jesus' eyes, he puts his view very strongly (Matt. 5:22); and, as we must always remember, he bases himself on fact. We may lose a great deal more than we think by letting our labels stand between us and his words, by our habit of calling them paradoxes and letting them go at that.

It is worth while to look at the type of character that he admires. Modern painters have often pictured Jesus as something of a dreamer, a longhaired, sleepy, abstract kind of person. What a contrast we find in the energy of the real Jesus—in the straight and powerful language which he uses to men, in the sweep and range of his mind, in the profundity of his insight, the drive and compulsiveness of his thinking, in the venturesomeness of his actions. How many of the parables turn on energy? The real trouble with men, he seems to say, is again and again sheer slackness; they will not put their minds to the thing before them, whether it be thought or action. Thus, for instance, the parable of the talents turns on energetic thinking and decisive action; and these are the things that Jesus admires—in the widow who will have justice (Luke 18:21)—in the virgins who thought ahead and brought extra oil (Matt. 25:4)—in the vigorous man who found the treasure and made sure of it (Matt. 13:44)—in the friend at midnight, who hammered, hammered, hammered, till he got his loaves (Luke 11:8)—in the "violent," who "take the Kingdom of Heaven by force" (Matt. 11:12; Luke 16:16)—in the man who will hack off his hand to enter into life (Mark 9:43). Even the bad steward he commends, because he definitely put his mind on his situation (Luke 16:8). As we shall see later on, indecision is one of the things that in his judgement will keep a man outside the Kingdom of God, that make him unfit for it. The matter deserves more study than we commonly give it. You must have a righteousness, he says, which exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees (Matt. 5:20)—and the Pharisees were professionals in righteousness. His tests of discipleship illumine his ideal of character—Theocentric thinking—negation of self—the thought-out life. He will have his disciples count the cost, reckon their forces, calculate quietly the risks before them—right up to the cross (Luke 14:27-33)—like John Bunyan in Bedford Gaol, where he thought things out to the pillory and thence to the gallows, so that, if it came to the gallows, he should be ready, as he says, to leap off the ladder blindfold into eternity. That is the energy of mind that Jesus asks of men, that he admires in men.

On the other side, he is always against the life of drift, the half-thought-out life. There they were, he says, in the days of Noah, eating and drinking, marrying, dreaming—and the floods came and destroyed them (Luke 17:27). So ran the old familiar story, and, says Jesus, it is always true; men will drift and dream for ever, heedless of fact, heedless of God—and then ruin, life gone, the soul lost, the Son of Man come, and "you yourselves thrust out" (Luke 13:28, with Matt. 25:10-13). It is quite striking with what a variety of impressive pictures Jesus drives home his lesson. There is the person who everlastingly says and does not do (Matt. 23:3)—who promises to work and does not work (Matt. 21:28)—who receives a new idea with enthusiasm, but has not depth enough of nature for it to root itself (Mark 4:6)—who builds on sand, the "Mr. Anything" of Bunyan's allegory; nor these alone, for Jesus is as plain on the unpunctual (Luke 13:25), the easy-going (Luke 12:47), the sort that compromises, that tries to serve God and Mammon (Matt. 6:24)—all the practical half-and-half people that take their bills quickly and write fifty, that offer God and man about half what they owe them of thought and character and action, and bid others do the same, and count themselves men of the world for their acuteness (Luke 16:1-8). And to do them justice, Jesus commends them; they have taken the exact measure of things "in their generation." Their mistake lies in their equation of the fugitive and the eternal; and it is the final and fatal mistake according to Jesus, and a very common one—forgetfulness of God in fact (Luke 12:20), a mistake that comes from not thinking things out. Jesus will have men think everything out to the very end. "He never says: Come unto me, all ye who are too lazy to think for yourselves" (H. S. Coffin). It is energy of mind that he calls for—either with me or against me. He does not recognize neutrals in his war—"he that is not against us is for us" (Luke 9:50)—"he that is not with me is against me" (Matt. 12:30).

Where does a man's Will point him? That is the question. "Out of the abundance, the overflow, of the heart, the mouth speaketh" (Matt. 12:34). What is it that a man wills, purity or impurity (Matt. 5:28)? It is the inner energy that makes a man; what he says and does is an overflow from what is within—an overflow, it is true, with a reaction. It is what a man chooses, and what he wills, that Jesus always emphasizes; "God knoweth your hearts" (Luke 16:15). Very well then; does a man choose God? That is the vital issue. Does he choose God without reserve, and in a way that God, knowing his heart, will call a whole-hearted choice?

St. Augustine, in a very interesting passage ("Confessions", viii. 9, 21), remarks upon the fact that, when the mind commands the body, obedience is instantaneous, but that when it commands itself, it meets with resistance. "The mind commands that the mind shall will—it is one and the same mind, and it does not obey." He finds the reason; the mind does not absolutely and entirely ("ex toto") will the thing, and so it does not absolutely and entirely command it. "There is nothing strange after all in this," he says, "partly to will, partly not to will; but it is a weakness of the mind that it does not arise in its entirety, uplifted by truth, because it is borne down by habit. Thus there are two Wills, because one of them is not complete."

The same thought is to be traced in the teaching of Jesus. It is implied in what he says about prayer. There is a want of faith, a half-heartedness about men's prayers; they pray as Augustine says he himself did: "Give me chastity and continence, but not now" (Conf, viii. 7, 17). That is not what Jesus means by prayer—the utterance of the half-Will. Nor is it this sort of surrender to God that Jesus calls for—no, the question is, how thoroughly is a man going to put himself into God's hands? Does he mean to be God's up to the cross and beyond? Does he enlist absolutely on God's terms without a bargain with God, prepared to accept God's will, whatever it is, whether it squares with his liking or not? (cf. Luke 17:7-10). Are his own desires finally out of the reckoning? Does he, in fact, deny—negate—himself (Mark 8:34)? Jesus calls for disciples, with questions so penetrating on his lips. What a demand to make of men! What faith, too, in men it shows, that he can ask all this with no hint of diminished seriousness!

Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in the choice of his twelve. To that group of disciples he trusts the supremest task men ever had assigned to them. Not many wise, not many mighty, Paul found at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:26); and it has always been so. Is it not still the gist of the Gospel that Jesus believes in the writer and the reader of these lines—trusts them with the propagation of God's Kingdom, incredible commission? Jesus was always at leisure for individuals; this was the natural outcome of his faith in men. What else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in giving the utmost spiritual truth—no easy task, as experience shows us—even to a solitary listener? If we accept what he tells us of God, we can believe that the individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for him, but hardly otherwise. His gift of discovering interest in uninteresting people, says Phillips Brooks, was an intellectual habit that he gave to his disciples. We think too much "like men"; he would have us "think like God," and think better of odd units and items of humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to do. It has been pointed out lately how fierce he is about the man who puts a stumbling-block in the way of even "a little one"—"better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea"; no mere phrase—for when he draws a picture, he sees it; he sees this scene, and "better so—for him too!" is his comment (Mark 9:42). There was, we may remember, a view current in antiquity that when a man was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though I do not know if the Jews held this opinion. It is not likely that Jesus did. What is God's mind, God's conduct, toward those people whom men think they can afford to despise? "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). And to whom did he say this? To the most ordinary people—to Peter and James and John; for all sorts of people he held up this impossible ideal of a perfection like God's. What a faith in man it implies! "All things are possible to him that believes" (Mark 9:9.3). Why should not you believe? he says.

His faith in the soul's possibilities is boundless, and in marked contrast with what men think of themselves. A man, for instance, will say that he has done his best; but nine times out of ten it means mere fatigue; he is not going to trouble to do any more. How can a man know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus comes with its message of the grace of God, and the power of God, to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of their days; and Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service, perfectly incredible to them. No man, he suggests, need be so inured to the stupidity of middle age but there may be a miraculous change in him. A great many people need re-conversion at forty, however Christian they have been before. This belief of his in the individual man and in the worth of the individual is the very charter of democracy. The original writings of William Tyndale, who first translated the New Testament from Greek into English, contain the essential ideas of democracy already in 1526—the outcome of familiar study of the Gospel. Jesus himself said of Herod: "Go and tell that fox" (Luke 13:32). Herod was a king, but he was not above criticism; and Christians have not failed at times to make the criticism of the great that truth requires.

Jesus had no illusions about men; he sees the weak spots; he recognizes the "whited sepulchre" (Matt. 23:27). He is astonished at the unbelief of men and women (Mark 6:6). He does not understand why they cannot think (Mark 8:21), but he notes how they see and yet do not see, hear and do not understand (Matt. 13:13). He is impressed by their falsity, even in religion (Matt. 15:8). He knows perfectly well the evil of which the human heart is capable (Matt. 15:19). A man who steadily looks forward to being crucified by the people he is trying to help is hardly one of the absent-minded enthusiasts, mis-called idealists. There never was, we feel, one who so thoroughly looked through his friends, who loved them so much and yet without a shade of illusion. This brings us to the subject of the next chapter.

In the meantime let us recall what he makes of the wasted life. "In thinking of the case," said Seeley. "they had forgotten the woman"—a common occurrence with those who deal in "cases." It was once severely said of the Head of a College that "if he would leave off caring for his students' souls and care for them, he would do better." Jesus does not forget the man in caring for his soul—he likes him. He is "the friend of publicans and sinners" (Luke 7:34); he eats and drinks with them (Mark 2:14). Let us remember again that these were taunts and were meant to sting; they were not conventional phrases. See how he can enter into the life of a poor creature. There is the wretched little publican, Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10)—a squalid little figure of a man, whom people despised. He was used to contempt—it was the portion of the tax-collector enlisted in Roman service against his own people. Jesus comes and sees him up in the tree; he instantly realizes what is happening and invites himself to the house of Zacchaeus as a guest; something passes between them without spoken word. The little man slides down the tree—not a proceeding that makes for dignity; and then, with all his inches, he stands up before the whole town, that knew him so well, in a new moral grandeur that adds cubits to his stature. "Half my goods," he says, "I give to the poor. If I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, he shall have it back fourfold." That man belonged to the despised classes. Jesus came into his life; the man became a new man, a pioneer of Christian generosity. Again, there is the woman with the alabaster box, the mere possession of which stamped her for what she was. It was simply a case of the wasted life. I have long wondered if she meant to give him only some of the ointment. A little of it would have been a great gift. But perhaps the lid of the box jammed, and she realized in a moment that it was to be all or nothing—she drew off her sandal and smashed the box to pieces. However she broke it, and whatever her reasons, Mark's words mean that it was thoroughly and finally shivered (Mark 14:3). Something had happened which made this woman the pioneer of the Christian habit of giving all for Jesus. The disciples said they had done so (Matt. 19:27), but they were looking for thrones in exchange (Mark 10:37); she was not. The thief on the cross himself becomes a pioneer for mankind in the Christian way of prayer. "Jesus, remember me!" he says (Luke 23:42). How is it that Jesus comes into the wasted life and makes it new? "One loving heart sets another on fire."

With all his wide outlook on mankind, his great purpose to capture all men, Jesus is remarkable for his omission to devise machinery or organization for the accomplishment of his ends. The tares are left to grow with the wheat (Matt. 13:30)—as if Jesus trusted the wheat a good deal more than we do. Alive as he is to the evil in human nature, he never tries to scare men from it, and he seems to have been very little afraid of it. He believed in the power of good—because, after all, God is "Lord of the Harvest" (Matt. 9:38). He invents no special methods—a loving heart will hit the method needed in the particular case; the Holy Spirit will teach this as well as other things (Matt. 10:19, 20). How far he even organized his church, or left it to organize itself if it so wished, students may discuss. Would he have trusted even the best organized church as such? Does not what we mean by the Incarnation imply putting everything in the long run on the individual, quickened into new life by a new relation with God and taught a new love of men by Jesus himself? The heart of friendship and the heart of the Incarnation are in essence the same thing—giving oneself in frankness and love to him who will accept, and by them winning him who refuses. Has not this been the secret of the spread of the Gospel? The simplicity of the whole thing, and the power of it, grow upon us as we study them. But after all, as Tertullian said, simplicity and power are the constant marks of God's work—simplicity in method, power in effect ("de Baptismo", 2).



CHAPTER VII

JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN

"For clear-thinking ethical natures," writes a modern scholar, "for natures such as those of Jesus and St. Paul, it is a downright necessity to separate heaven and hell as distinctly as possible. It is only ethically worthless speculations that have always tried to minimize this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our times of how men even to-day once more enthusiastically welcome the conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good and bad becomes all-important to them."[26]

Here in strong terms a challenge is put to many of our current ideas. Is not this to revert to an outworn view of the Christian religion—to reassert its dark side, better forgotten, all the horrible emphasis on sin and its consequences introduced into the sunny teaching of Jesus by Paul of Tarsus, and alien to it? Before we answer this question in any direct way, it is worth while to realize for how many of the real thinkers, and the great teachers of mankind, this distinction between good and evil has been fundamental. They have not invented it as a theory on which to base religion, but they have found it in human life, one and all of them. If Walt Whitman or Swami Vivekananda overlook the difference between virtue and vice, and do honour to the courtesan, it simply means that they are bad thinkers, bad observers. The deeper minds see more clearly and escape the confusion into which the slight and quick, the sentimental, hurl themselves. Above all, when God in any degree grows real to a man, when a man seriously gives himself not to some mere vague "contemplation" of God but to the earnest study of God's ways in human affairs, and of God's laws and their working, the great contrasts in men's responses to God's rule become luminous.

When God matters to a man, all life shows the result. Good and bad, right and wrong stand out clear as the contrast between light and darkness—they cannot be mistaken, and they matter—and matter for ever. They are no concern of a moment. Action makes character; and, until the action is undone again, the effect on character is not undone. Right and wrong are of eternal significance now in virtue of the reality of God.

Gautama Buddha, for instance, and the greater Hindu thinkers, in their doctrine of Karma, have taught a significance inherent in good and evil, which we can only not call boundless. Buddha did this without any great consciousness of God; and many Indian thinkers have so emphasized the doctrine that it has taken all the stress laid on "Bhakti" by Ramanuja and others to restore to life a perspective or a balance, however it should be described, that will save men from utter despair. Nor is it Eastern thinkers only who have taught men the reality of heaven and hell. The poetry of Aeschylus is full of his great realization of the nexus between act and outcome. With all the humour and charm there is in Plato, we cannot escape his tremendous teaching on the age-long consequences of good and evil in a cosmos ordered by God. Carlyle, in our own days, realized the same thing—he learnt it no doubt from his mother; and learnt it again in London. In Mrs. Austen's drawing-room, with "Sidney Smith guffawing," and "other people prating, jargoning, to me through these thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he asks, "and before the Creator of Man?" When someone in his old age challenged him with the question, "Who will be judge?"—(it is curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original idea, on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore—apparently, if their thought has any consequence—are as good one as another)—Who will be judge? "Hell fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God Almighty will be the judge now and always." There is a gulf between good and evil, and each is inexorably fertile of consequence. There is no escaping the issue of moral choice. That is the conclusion of men who have handled human experience in a serious spirit. As physical laws are deducible from the reactions of matter and force, and are found to be uniform and inevitable, fundamental in the nature of matter and force, so clear-thinking men in the course of ages have deduced moral laws from their observation of human nature, laws as uniform, inevitable and fundamental. In neither case has it been that men invented or imagined the laws; in both cases it has been genuine discovery of what was already existent and operative, and often the discovery has involved surprise.

If Jesus had failed to see laws so fundamental, which other teachers of mankind have recognized, it is hardly likely that his teaching would have survived or influenced men as it has done. Mankind can dispense with a teacher who misses patent facts, whatever his charm. But there never was any doubt that Jesus was alive to the difference between right and wrong. His critics saw this, but they held that he confused moral issues, and that his distinctions in the ethical sphere were badly drawn.

Jesus could not have ignored the problem of sin and forgiveness, even if he had wished to ignore it. To this the thought of mankind had been gravitating, and in Jewish and in Greek thought, conduct was more and more the centre of everything. For the Stoics morals were the dominant part of philosophy; but for our present purpose we need not go outside the literature of the New Testament. Sin was the keynote of the preaching of John the Baptist. It is customary to connect the mission of Jesus with that of John, and to find in the Baptist's preaching either the announcement of his Successor (as is said with most emphasis in the Fourth Gospel), or (as some now say) the impulse which drove Jesus of Nazareth into his public ministry. Whatever may be the historical connexion between them, it is as important for us at least to realize the broad gulf that separates them. They meet, it is true; both use the phrase "Kingdom of God," both preach repentance in view of the coming of the Kingdom; and we are apt to assume they mean the same thing; but Jesus took some pains to make it clear, though in the gentlest and most sympathetic way, that they did not.

On the famous occasion, when John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to Jesus with his striking message: "Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?" (Luke 7:19-35; Matt. 11:1-19), Jesus, when the messengers were gone, spoke to the people about the Baptist. "What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? A man clothed in soft raiment? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet. Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist, but he that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he." I am not sure which is the right translation, whether it is "he that is less, least, or little," and I do not propose to discuss it. The judgement is remarkable enough in any case, and the words of Jesus, as we have seen, have a close relation to real fact as he saw it. Why does he speak in this way? Our answer to this question, if we can answer it, will help us forward to the larger problem before us. But, for this, we shall have to study John with some care.

There is a growing agreement among scholars that there is some confusion in our data as to John the Baptist. There are gaps in the record—for instance, how and why did the school of John survive as it did (Acts 18:25, 19:1-7)? And again there are, in the judgement of some, developments of the story. The Gospel, with varying degrees of explicitness, and St. Paul by inference (Acts 19:4) tell us that John pointed to "him which should come after him." Christians, at any rate, after the Resurrection, had no doubt that this was Jesus. Whether John was as definite as the narratives now represent him to have been, has been doubted in view of his message to Jesus. But that is not our present subject. We are concerned less with John as precursor than as teacher and thinker.

Even if our data are defective, still enough is given us to let us see a very striking and commanding figure. We have a picture of him, his dress, his diet, his style of speech, his method of action—in every way he is a signal and arresting man. The son of a priest, he is an ascetic, who lives in the wilderness, dresses like a peasant, and eats the meanest and most meagre of food—a man of the desert and of solitude. And the whole life reacts on him and we can see him, lean and worn, though still a young man, a keen, rather excitable spirit—in every feature the marks of revolt against a civilization which he views as an apostasy. Luke, using a phrase from the Old Testament, says, "The word of God came upon John in the wilderness" (Luke 3:2). Luke leans to Old Testament phrase, and here is one that hits off the man to the very life. Jesus himself confirms Luke's judgement (Mark 11:29-33). The Word of the Lord has come on this ascetic figure, and he goes to the people with the message; he draws their attention and they crowd out to see him. He makes a great sensation. He is not like other men—for Jesus quotes their remark that "he had a devil" (Luke 7:33)—a rough and ready way of explaining unlikeness to the average man. When he sees his congregation his words are not conciliatory; he addresses them as a "generation of vipers" (Luke 3:7); and his text is the "wrath to come."

Jesus asks whether they went out to see a reed shaken by the wind, or someone dressed like a courtier—the last things to which anyone would compare John. There was nothing supple about him, as Herod found, and Herodias (Mark 6:17-20); he was not shaken by the wind; there was no trimming of his sails. The austerity of his life and the austerity of his spirit go together, and he preached in a tone and a language that scorched. He preached righteousness, social righteousness, and he did it in a great way. He brought back the minds of his people, like Amos and others, to God's conceptions and away from their own. Crowds of people went out to hear him (Mark 1:5). And he made a deep impression on many whose lives needed amendment (Matt. 21:26, 32; Luke 20:6).[27] We have the substance of what he said in the third chapter of St. Luke; how he told the tax-collectors to be honest and not make things worse than they need be; the soldiers to do violence to no man and accuse no man falsely, and to be content with their wages; and to ordinary people he preached humanity: "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." It may be remarked of John, and it is true also of Jesus, that neither attacked the absent nor inveighed against economic conditions, as some modern preachers do with, let us say, capitalists and the morality of other nations. Neither says a word against the Roman Empire. Slavery is not condemned explicitly even by Jesus, though he gave the dynamic that abolished it. The practical guidance that John gave, he gave in response to men's inquiries.

Like an Old Testament prophet (cf. Amos 3:2), John tore to tatters any plea that could be offered that his listeners were God's chosen people, the children of Abraham. Does God want children of Abraham?—John pointed to the stones on the ground, and said, if God wanted, he could make children of Abraham out of them; a word and he could have as many children of Abraham as he wished. It was something else that God sought.

"John," writes the historian Josephus a generation later, "was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue both in justice toward one another and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for so baptism would be acceptable to God if they made use of it, not to excuse certain sins, but for the purification of the body, provided that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness."[28] This interpretation of John's baptism makes it look very like the baptisms and other purificatory rites of the heathen. The Gospels attribute to John a message, richer and more powerful, but essentially the same; and the criticism of Jesus confirms the account. The great note in his preaching is judgement; the Kingdom of God is coming, and it begins with judgement. Again, it is like Amos—"The axe is at the root of the tree," "His fan is in His hand." And as men listened to the man and looked at him—his intense belief in his message, backed up by a stern self-discipline, a whole life inspired, infused by conviction—they believed this message of the axe, the fan, and the fire. They asked and as we have seen received his guidance on the conduct of life; they accepted his baptism, and set about the amending of character (Matt. 21:32).

Jesus makes it quite clear that he held John to be an entirely exceptional man, and that he had no doubt that John's teaching was from God (Matt. 21:32; Luke 7:35, 20:4; and, of course, Luke 7:26-28). It was all in the line of the great prophets; and the Fourth Gospel shows it us once more in the work of the Holy Spirit—"when he is come, he will reprove (convict) the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement" (John 16:8). And yet, as Jesus says, there is all the difference in the world between his own Gospel and the teaching of the Baptist.

In Mark's narrative (2:18) a very significant episode is recorded. John inculcated fasting, and his disciples fasted a great deal ("pykna", Luke 5:33); and once, Mark tells us, when they were actually fasting, they asked Jesus why his disciples did not do the same? Jesus' answer is a little cryptic at first sight. "Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?" Who fasts at the wedding feast, in the hour of gladness? And then he passes on to speak about the new patch on the old garment, the new wine in the old wine skins; and it looks as if it were not merely a criticism of John's disciples but of John himself. John, indeed, brings home with terrific force and conviction that truth of God which the prophets had preached before; but he leaves it there. He emphasizes once more the old laws of God, the judgements of God, but he brings no transforming power into men's lives. The old characters, the old motives more or less, are to be patched by a new fear.

"Repent, repent," John cries, "the judgement is coming." And men do repent, and John baptises them as a symbol that God has forgiven them. But how are they to go on? What is the power that is to carry John's disciples through the rest of their lives? We are not in possession of everything that John says, but there is no indication that John had very much to say about any force or power that should keep men on the plane of repentance. It is our experience that we repent and fall again; what else was the experience of the people whom John baptised? What was to keep them on the new level—not only in the isolation of the desert, but in the ordinary routine of town and village? In John's teaching there is not a word about that; and this is a weakness of double import. For, as Jesus puts it, the new patch on the old garment makes the rent worse; it does not leave it merely as it was. If the "unclean spirit" regain its footing in a man, it does not come alone—"the last state of that man is worse than the first" (Luke 11:24-26). Jesus is very familiar with the type that welcomes new ideas and new impulses in religion and yet does nothing, grows tired or afraid, and relapses (Mark 4:17).

Again, in John's teaching, as far as we have it, there is a striking absence of any clear word about any relation to God, beyond that of debtor and creditor, judge and prisoner on trial, king and subject. God may forgive and God will judge; but so far as our knowledge of John's teaching goes, these are the only two points at which man and God will touch each other; and these are not intimate relations. There is no promise and no gladness in them; no "good news." John taught prayer—all sorts of people teach prayer; but what sort of prayer? It has been remarked of the Greek poet, Apollonius Rhodius, that his heroes used prayers, but their prayers were like official documents. Of what character were the prayers that John taught his disciples? None of them survive; but there is perhaps a tacit criticism of them in the request made to the New Teacher: "Teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). One feels that the men wanted something different from John's prayers. Great and strenuous prayers they may have been, but in marked contrast to the prayers of Jesus and his followers, because of the absence in John's message of any strong note of the love and tenderness of God.

Finally, the very righteousness that John preaches with such fire and energy is open to criticism. Far more serious than the righteousness of the Pharisees, stronger in insight and more generous in its scope, it fails in the same way; it is self-directed. It aims at a man's own salvation, and it is to be achieved by a man's own strength in self-discipline, with what little help John's system of prayer and fasting may win for a man from God. John fails precisely where his strength is greatest and most conspicuous. His theme is sin; his emphasis all falls on sin; but his psychology of sin is insufficient, it is not deep enough. The simple, strenuous ascetic did not realize the seriousness of sin after all—its deep roots, its haunting power, its insidious charm. St. Paul saw far deeper into it "I am carnal, sold under sin. What I hate that do I. The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. I see a law in my members bringing me into captivity to the law of sin. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:14-24). Sin, in John's thought, is contumacy or rebellion against the law of God; he does not look at it in relation to the love of God—a view of it which gives it another character altogether. Nor has John any great conception of forgiveness—a man, he thinks, may win it by "fruits worthy of repentance" (Luke 3:8). Here again Paul is the pioneer in the universal Christian experience that fruits of repentance can never buy God's forgiveness. That is God's gift. That forgiveness may cost a man much—an amended life, the practices of prayer and fasting and almsgiving—John conceives; but we are not led to think that he thought of what it might cost God. John has no evangel, no really good news, with gladness and singing in it (1 Peter 1:8).

When we return to the teaching of Jesus, we find that he draws a clear and sharp line between right and wrong. He indicates that right is right to the end of all creation, and wrong is wrong up to the very Judgement Throne of God (Matt. 25). He views these things, as the old phrase puts it, "sub specie aeternitatis", from the outlook of eternity. Right and wrong do not meet at infinity. There is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the same thing. Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and until God changes there will be no very great change in right and wrong. Partly because he uses the language of his day, partly because he thinks as a rule in pictures, his language is apt to be misconstrued by moderns. But the central ideas are clear enough. "How are you to escape the judgement of Gehenna?" he asks the Pharisees (Matt. 23:33; the subjunctive mood is worth study). It is not a threat, but a question. There yawns the chasm; with your driving, how do you think you can avoid disaster? He warns men of a doom where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; a man will do well to sacrifice hand, foot or eye, to save the rest of himself from that (Mark 9:43-48). But a more striking picture, though commonly less noticed, he draws or suggests in talk at the last supper. "Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked for you to sift you as wheat, but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou, when thou comest back, strengthen thy brethren" (Luke 22:31, 32). The scene suggested is not unlike that at the beginning of the Book of Job, or that in the Book of Zechariah (chap. 3). There is the throne of God, and into that Presence pushes Satan with a demand—the verb in the Greek is a strong one, though not so strong as the Revised Version suggests. Satan "made a push to have you." "But I prayed for thee."

To any reader who has any feeling or imagination, what do these short sentences mean? What can they mean, from the lips of a thinker so clear and so serious, and a friend so tender? What but unspeakable peril? The language has for us a certain strangeness; but it shows plainly enough that, to Jesus' mind, the disciples, and Peter in particular, stood in danger, a danger so urgent that it called for the Saviour's prayer. So much it meant to him, and he himself tells Peter what he had realized, what he had done, in language that could not be mistaken or forgotten. To the nature of the danger that sin involves, we shall return. Meanwhile we may consider what Jesus means by sin before we discuss its consequences.

"The Son of Man," says Jesus, in a sentence that is famous but still insufficiently studied, "is come to seek and to save that which is lost" (Luke 19:10). Our rule has been to endeavour to give to the terms of Jesus the connotation he meant them to carry. The scholar will linger over the "Son of Man"—a difficult phrase, with a literary and linguistic history that is very complicated. For the present purpose the significant words are at the other end of the sentence. What does Jesus mean by "lost"? It is a strong word, the value of which we have in some degree lost through familiarity. And whom would he describe as "lost"? We have once more to recall his criticism of Peter—that Peter "thought like a man and not like God" (Mark 8:33)—and to be on our guard lest we think too quickly and too slightly. We may remark, too, that for Jesus sin is not, as for Paul and theologians in general, primarily an intellectual problem. He does not use the abstraction Sin as Paul does. But the clear, steady gaze turned on men and women misses little.

There are four outstanding classes, whom he warns of the danger of hell in one form or other.

To begin, there is the famous description of the Last Judgement (Matt. 25:31-46)—a description in itself not altogether new. Plenty of writers and thinkers had described the scene, and the broad outlines of the picture were naturally common property; yet it is to these more or less conventional traits that attention has often been too exclusively devoted. Jesus, however, altered the whole character of the Judgement Day scene by his account of the principles on which the Judge decides the cases brought before him. On the right hand of the Judge are—not the Jews confronting the Gentiles on the left—nor exactly the well-conducted and well-balanced people who get there in Greek allegories—but a group of men and women who realize where they are with a gasp of surprise. How has it come about? The Judge tells them: "I was an hungered and ye gave me meat," and the rest of the familiar words. But this does not quite settle the question. Embarrassment rises on their faces—is it a mistake? One of them speaks for the rest: "Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee?" They do not remember it. There is something characteristic there of the whole school of Jesus; these people are "children of fact," honest as their Master, and they will not accept heaven in virtue of a possible mistake. And it appears from the Judge's answer that such instinctive deeds go further than men think, even if they are forgotten. Wordsworth speaks of the "little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love" that are "the best portion of a good man's life."[29] The acts of kindness were forgotten just because they were instinctive, but, Jesus emphasizes the point, they are decisive; they come, as another of his telling phrases suggests, from "the overflow of the heart," and they reveal it. With the people on the left hand it was the other way. They were fairly well in possession of their good records, but they had missed the decisive fact—they were instinctively hard. Such people Jesus warns. So familiar are his words that there is a danger of our limiting them to their first obvious meaning. Eighty years ago Thomas Carlyle looked out on the England he knew, and remarked that it was strange that the great battle of civilized man should be still the battle of the savage against famine, and with that he observed that the people were "needier than ever of inward sustenance." Is there a warning in this picture of the people on the left hand that applies to deeper things than physical hunger? A warning to those who do not heed another's need of "inward sustenance," of spiritual life, of God? It looks likely. Otherwise there is a risk of our declining upon a "Social Righteousness" that falls a long way short of John the Baptist's, and does less for any soul, our own or another's.

The second class warned by Jesus consists of several groups dealt with in the Sermon on the Mount—people whose sin is not murder or adultery, but merely anger and the unclean thought—not the people who actually give themselves away, like the publicans and harlots—but those who would not be sorry to have that ring of Gyges which Plato described, who would like to do certain things if they could, who at all events are not unwilling to picture what they would wish to do, if it were available, and meanwhile enjoy the thought (Matt. 5:21, 22, 27-29). Here St. Paul can supply commentary with his suggestion that one form of God's condemnation is where he gives up a man to his own reprobate mind (Romans 1:28—the whole passage is worth study in the Greek). The mind, in Paul's phrases, becomes darkened (Rom. 1:21), stained (Titus 1:15), and cauterized (1 Tim. 4:2), invalidated for the discharge of its proper functions, as a burnt hand loses the sense of touch, or a stained glass gives the man a blue or red world instead of the real one. Blindness and mutilation are better, Jesus said, than the eye of lust (Matt. 5:28). How different from the moralists, for whom sin lies in action, and all actions are physical! The idle word is to condemn a man, not because it is idle, but because, being unstudied, it speaks of his heart and reveals, unconsciously but plainly, what he is in reality (Matt. 12:36). Thus it is that what comes out of the mouth defiles a man (Matt. 15:18)—with the curious suggestion, whether intended or not, that the formulation of a floating thought gives it new power to injure or to help. That is true; impression loose, as it were, in the mind, mere thought—stuff, is one thing; formulated, brought to phrase and form, it takes on new life and force; and when it is evil, it does defile, and in a permanent way. Marcus Aurelius has a very similar warning (v. 16)—"Whatever the colour of the thoughts often before thy mind, that colour will thy mind take. For the mind is dyed (or stained) by its thoughts." "Phantazesthai" and "phantasiai" are the words—and they suggest something between thoughts and imaginations—mental pictures would be very near it.

The third group whom Jesus warned, the most notorious of all, was the Pharisee class. They played at religion—tithed mint and anise and cumin, and forgot judgement and mercy and faith (Matt. 23:23). Jesus said that the Pharisee was never quite sure whether the creature he was looking at was a camel or a mosquito—he got them mixed (Matt. 23:24). Once we realize what this tremendous irony means, we are better able to grasp his thought. The Pharisee was living in a world that was not the real one—it was a highly artificial one, picturesque and charming no doubt, but dangerous. For, after all, we do live in the real world—there is only one world, however many we may invent; and to live in any other is danger. Blindness, that is partial and uneven, lands a man in peril whenever he tries to come downstairs or to cross the street—he steps on the doorstep that is not there and misses the real one. He is involved in false appearances at every turn. And so it is in the moral world—there is one real, however many unreals there are, and to trust to the unreal is to come to grief on the real. "The beginning of a man's doom," wrote Carlyle, "is that vision be withdrawn from him." "Thou blind Pharisee!" (Matt. 23:26). The cup is clean enough without; it is septic and poisonous within—and from which side of it do you drink, outside or inside? (Matt. 23:25). As we study the teaching of Jesus here, we see anew the profundity of the saying attributed to him in the Fourth Gospel, "The truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). The man with astigmatism, or myopia, or whatever else it is, must get the glasses that will show him the real world, and he is safe, and free to go and come as he pleases. See the real in the moral sphere, and the first great peril is gone. Nothing need be said at this point of the Pharisee who used righteousness and long prayers as a screen for villainy. Probably his doom was that in the end he came to think his righteousness and his prayers real, and to reckon them as credit with a God, who did not see through them any more than he did himself. It is a mistake to over-emphasize here the devouring of widow' houses by the Pharisee (Matt. 23:14), for it was no peculiar weakness of his; publicans and unjust judges did the same. Only the publican and the unjust judge told themselves no lies about it. The Pharisee lied—lying to oneself or lying to another, which is the worse? The more dangerous probably is lying to oneself, though the two practices generally will go together in the long run. The worst forms of lying, then, are lying to oneself and lying about God; and the Pharisee combined them, and told himself that, once God's proper dues of prayer and tithe were paid, his treatment of the widow and her house was correct. Hence, says Jesus, he receives "greater damnation" (A.V.)—or judgement on a higher scale ("perissoteron krima").

The Pharisees were men who believed in God—only that with his world, they re-created him (as we are all apt to do for want of vision or by choice); but what is atheism, what can it be, but indifference to God's facts and to God's nature? If religion is union with God, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the mystics, how can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different altogether from God? Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament. prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of God, what is our religion, if after all we are not seeing God at all, but something else—a dummy god, like that of the Pharisees, some trifling martinet who can be humbugged—or, to come to ourselves, a majestic bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in impersonality? For all such Jesus has a caution. Indifference to God's facts leads to one end only. We admit it ourselves. There are those who scold Bunyan for sending Ignorance to hell, but we omit to ask where else could Ignorance go, whether Bunyan sent him or not. Ignorance, as to germs or precipices or what not, leads to destruction "in pari materia"; in the moral sphere can it be otherwise? This serves in some measure to explain why Jesus is so tender to gross and flagrant sinners, a fact which some have noted with surprise. Surely it is because publican and harlot have fewer illusions; they were left little chance of imagining their lives to be right before God. What Jesus thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen already, but heedless as they were of God's requirements of them, they were not guilty of the intricate atheism of the Pharisees. Further, whether it was in his mind or not, it is also true that the frankly gross temptations do bring a man face to face with his own need of God, as the subtler do not; and so far they make for reality.