a complete and satisfactory view of the Christ.* It is also the assumption of traditional theology that the primitive Chris tianity of the first century was perfect and harmonious, free from factions and heresies, being of one opinion and spirit. We have been taught that all the early disciples of Jesus thought of him from the first not only as the Messiah long foretold by the prophets, but as the incarnate Logos, the second person of the Godhead, who endured the wrath of heaven on the cross, that guilty man, believing in him, might escape the penalty of his sins and share the infinite glory of his Lord. There were then among believers, we are told, no differences of opinion and no uncertainties of belief respecting the absolute deity of Jesus and his redemptive office. From the calling of Matthew at the beginning of his ministry to the moment when the last word of the New Testament was written, every disciple believed in Jesus as God, treated him as God, and worshiped him as God. Such is the claim of Orthodoxy, which must be made good or the whole edifice of traditional theology will tumble into hopeless ruins. This unity and purity of faith, the product of supernatural influence, continued, it is argued, throughout the apostolic age; while this, and this alone, is expressed in the New Testament writings. It was not, we are told, until Christianity became mixed, in the second century, with paganism, that heresies sprang up and false views of Jesus as merely a man, or as a created being, came into existence. But to a rational mind, it seems unaccountable that Christianity, if a supernatural system, should have so soon become corrupted by contact with paganism. If under miraculous superintendence, why was error so soon allowed to mix with the pure faith and produce noxious heresies? *A fair and complete statement of this claim is made by Schaff, History Christian Church, vol. i., §8 66-79, new and revised edition. + For the strongest possible presentation of this claim see Liddon, Bampton Lectures: Divinity of Our Lord. His argument was convincingly answered in the anonymous work, Divinity of Christ. See also, Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, chaps. vii. and viii. POSTULATES OF MODERN THOUGHT. Over against these assumptions of traditional theology, we would place the postulates of modern historical science. To the modern mind, every period of human history presents movement in some direction. Nothing is absolutely established but everything is fluent; nothing is fixed but everything is changing. The dogma called infallible to-day is obsolete to-morrow. However rigid a code may be made, it is constantly adapted to new conditions. by some ingenious method of interpretation. The law of Moses seemed inflexible, but the rabbis made it mean what they pleased by their method of allegorical interpretation, as any one may see by reading the Talmud. The judiciary always responds to the pressing needs of the hour and finds some way by which to expand the written constitution, so that it may give sanction and warrant to new and unfore seen agencies. Belief may be tied up to the most rigid and explicit definitions, but growth will go on in spite of all possible prohibitions, even as Andover Seminary abundantly illustrates. So that, movement in some direction is the law of human affairs and opinions, as interpreted by historical science. And the modern mind not only sees movement everywhere, but a certain order in all historic movements; there are definite causes for all these changes; and moreover, these historic forces which come to expression in affairs and opinions are human and natural, rather than mechanical and supernatural. The postulates of modern historical science are then, in brief, these: movement everywhere, but always along the lines of unbroken law, and as the outcome of forces inherent in man and nature.* Now, it is evident that, if the primary principle of historical science is applied to primitive Christianity, we must revise all the old conceptions of the origins of the church. If we study that age by this method, we should expect to find intimate relations between the Christian This has been the position of all historical writers since Herder. See Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, chap. i. Also, Hillebrand, German Thought, lecture iv. movement and its historical antecedents And if various New Testament writers and environment; to find an evolution did have radically different views of of beliefs respecting Jesus which can be Jesus, which were the outcome of hisreferred to natural causes; and also, to toric influences at work in their midst, find in Christianity itself no phenomena then we must cease to look upon primiexcept what can be readily included tive Christianity as a perfect and harwithin the possibilities of human nature. monious system, and we must also cease This is the way we must look upon to look upon the New Testament as the primitive Christianity, if we look upon infallible description of one faith; while it as a part of human history.* But we must come to regard the Christian traditional theology has taught us to movement as a purely historical dispenlook upon the Christian movement as a sation, and the New Testament as the system let down, like a fallen meteorite, priceless but imperfect record of diverfrom heaven; supernatural in origin and gent religious tendencies, which, howcharacter; perfect from the first and ever noble, were essentially human. unrelated to human conditions; one And to decide which of these positions complete faith recorded in the New is true, let us appeal to that record itTestament with absolute harmony of self. expression, and impelled along the course of history by miraculous influences lying outside of all human forces. The point at issue has indeed vast importance, for it involves all our theories of human progress and all our ways of thinking respecting human life. It is briefly this: Shall we apply the historical method to the interpretation of Christianity, or shall we treat this system as an exception where the laws of human action and opinion have not operated? Taking up one phase of the problem, let us inquire, Did all the disciples, from the first of Jesus' ministry to the date of the last writing of the New Testament, have the same view of his nature and mission? If so, then the presumption is warranted that we have here a supernatural realm outside the region of historic law. But if their views of Jesus were radically different; if the writers of the New Testament describe Jesus in terms which, more or less, contradict each other; and if the different portraitures there given can not all be accepted as absolutely true descriptions of the same being, then we find these characteristics which com pel us to regard primitive Christianity as a part of human history, separated from other human affairs by no supernatural features or elements. *See for the discussion of this point, Baur, Church History, Part First. Also. Harnack, Present State of Research in Early Church History, Contemporary Review, vol. 1., p. 221. THE EARLIEST VIEW OF JESUS. Though not the oldest writings of the New Testament, yet the first three Gospels, commonly called the Synoptics, record the traditions which embody the earliest beliefs respecting Jesus. Careful analysis shows that these Gospels are far from absolutely harmonious in their representations of Jesus,* while they cannot be said to give the precise thought of the disciples in the years just after the crucifixion, but they present a general agreement of views and set forth what the primitive and original belief had come to be after the Master's death; that is, in the near the close of the second generation period from A. D. 80 to A. D. 100.† In these Gospels, Jesus is represented simply and solely as the Jewish Messiah; he stands before us as a noble and alted to Messiahship by self-mastery sublime man, purely human, being exand self-dedication rather than by peculiar nature or special appointment. He grew precisely like other children; "The child grew and waxed strong in *Strauss first worked this out by exhaustive analysis, and though his general point of view has been abandoned, yet his central results have never been overthrown. For a masterly treatment of the contradictions in the Gospel accounts of the trial, crucifixion and resurrection, see Keim, Jesus of Nazara, vol vi.. chaps. i. and ii +For a clear and conservative summary of the conclusions of modern scholarship, see the article, "Gospels," by Edwin A. Abbott, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, ninth edition, Davidson, Introduction to the New Testament, is the best work in English. A brief statement of the same subject may be found in my own little book, Jesus Brought Back, chap. ii.,-How the Gospels were written. spirit. . . . and Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” * That is, he won his way even before God, not by special election, but by consecrated effort. He worked at a trade like a man, for when he began to preach men said, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda and Simon? + Certainly this statement made by his neighbors shows that they knew nothing of the story of his miraculous birth, for they placed him on an equality with the other children of his mother. vout of his race; * he felt the obligation to worship God, common to all men; † he spoke of God as his Father in the same sense that he was the Father of all men, his words being "My Father";‡ he refused to be addressed in any words which might even imply divine honors: "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God"; § and he prayed to God for strength and guidance like other holy men. According to the record, Jesus applied to himself these words of Scripture, just as though he felt himself to be a man and nothing more: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God." ** As one of the most learned and pious writers of recent years has said: "As for himself, he boasts of no equality with God, not even of a divine origin; he never desires worship for himself, but always only for God; he places himself with other men under the omnipotence, omniscience, wisdom, and goodness of God, admitting in all these points the limitation of his own human capacity, and thus by anticipation putting to blush the towering, deifying expressions of after centuries. †† We read that Jesus was hungry like other men and had to eat to sustain life: "As he returned into the city he hungered." He was even limited in knowledge; for on this occasion he went for fruit to a tree that was barren. § While on another occasion, in speaking of the end of the world, he acknowledged that the hour was unknown to him. He was sorrowful, ** and wept like a purely human being.†† Jesus expressed in a most pathetic manner his conscious ness of his humanity, even his poverty as a man, in these words: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head." †† The question is, Did Jesus here speak the truth? Certainly not, if he were God. Jesus is represented in these Gospels as calling himself simply the "Son of man," SS never the "Son of God," a term which implied no divine rank or superhuman origin; he called Nazareth his home in a manner which precludes the supposition that he thought of him self as a celestial being; he humbled himself before God like the most de * Luke ii., 40, 52. + Mark vi., 3. + Matthew xxi., 18; also, iv, 2. The attempts to reconcile this statement with the assumption of Jesus' deity must be ranked among the many curiosities produced by unreason ing dogmatism. See Trench, Notes on the Miracles. pp. 462-174. Now, the very beauty and loveliness of Jesus' character consists in this simplicity and humility as a man; in his trust and worshipfulness before God; but if we call him deity, then all this becomes mere show and pretense; for what seems sublime in him as a man becomes merely theatrical in him as God. If he were himself God, how could he worship God? There is meaning, interest, and inspiration in his temptation, self-sacrifice, devoutness, and sympathy, if he were human, "like as we are"; but if he were absolute deity, all these acts and attitudes become fictitious and unmeaning. How could the King of Heaven be tempted in the wilderness by the offer from Satan of what was his own handiwork?‡‡ The fact is that the character of Jesus *Luke ix., 18 + Matthew iv., 10. Matthew x., 32; xit, 50; Luke x., 21. $ Mark x.. 18. Matthew xxvi., 39; Mark i., 35; Luke v., 16. *Luke iv.. 4. +Keim, Jesus of Nazara. vol. vi., p. 389. ‡‡ Luke iv.. 5-7. There ends a poem, truly Christian in its spirit of trustfulness, hope and manliness. Browning was a Christian poet; that must always be remembered with joy when we think of the wide power that his writings will yet have. Christianity's great conceptions of the world and human destiny, its lofty hopes and pure ideals, found and held. him, interwove themselves with the texture of his mind as its spirit per"He battered his meated his soul. brain against his creed till he believed it." The life of Christ, the onward sweep of Christ's kingdom in the world, Christ's profound conception of humanity as related to the unseen world, the struggle of man for spiritual attainment,-all were practically treated by him and were to him, not myths nor dogmas, but the poetic interpretation of spiritual facts. No poet has with such Fancies that broke through language and sympathy and power interpreted the escaped;" All that we could never be, all that men ignored in us, this we are worth to God. And then putting life's meaning into a beautiful metaphor, comparing God to a potter and the soul to the clay on his wheel, he says: "He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, Christian ideas, or better seen what they have done in the life and thought of man. God, the soul, earth, heaven, hell, evil overcome, these were his wide interpretation of the Christian Religion. The Christian Religion was true to him, not because he was concerned with the doctrines grown up around it, but because he accepted the spirit and ideal of This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain Christ. I need not say how he, equally arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed." On each cup the potter's fingers will impress designs, now laughing loves and now grim senll things, but in the end each shall bear, on festal board, 'mid lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, the new wine for the Master's lips. The Rabbi is sure of God,-through the strains and hardships of life he cannot once lose his faith that God is moulding him for a divine purpose, and his concluding prayer is"So, take and use Thy work, Amend what flaws may lurk, with all the greatest leaders of our thought, doubted certain traditional phases of Christianity, because he believed what is of fundamental importance. Faith in the thing was more to him than faith in the record of the thing. Christianity was to him, not something written in a book, but the law of the everlasting incarnation of God in man. His faith was too firm to be formal, too earnest to be conventional; ordinary thoughts about God did not in the least satisfy him; no statement of creed or theology was enough to gain his whole assent. He had small respect for the externals of religion, for he had the deep inner spirit of Christianity; he What strain o' the stuff, what warpings desired heaven born Truth,-that found, past the aim ! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!" all forms and names and party cries slip away to nothingness. Christ was to him the key, the controlling test of all Christianity: "I prefer, if you please, for my expounder Of the laws of the Feast, the Feast's own Founder." And what was Christ to him? Not a mere leader of the hosts of men, not a mere captain of our salvation, but the realized explanation of all God is to men in his infinite tenderness and love. Second only to his noble testimony to the spiritual truth of Christianity, Browning's great value to us lies in his fresh and forcible expression of moral truths. There is nothing new discoverable in moral truth; there is no scope for originality in the realm of morals; what is morally new is morally false. What we want is a statement of the old truth so that the attention is caught, the conscience compelled, the will stimulated. Such statement does Browning give. Here, e. g., is the foundation truth of morals, "For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, And hope and fear, Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love." And here, by a flash, is another principle set forth, the adventurous soul, he find God's And with what sympathy Browning enters into the life-struggles of any human soul; true are those words of his: "To the soul that loveth all There is no great and no small." Never with more tireless energy or more consummate knowledge of human motives has any master tracked the will along its mazes than he; and no more varied collection of human characters was massed in any man's books since the days of Shakspeare. Abt Vogler the great musician, Andrea del Sarto the artist-genius who sacrificed himself to his beautiful and selfish wife, Hervé Riel the gallant Breton pilot, Karshish the Arab physician, Johannes Agricola "Tis not what man does which exalts him, in meditation, Fra Lippo Lippi the but what man would do." And again, "When the fight begins within himself A man's worth something." These are lightning gleams of vision into man's moral life. The soul is the thing of main interest to Browning; little else, says he, is worth study. It is something in the midst of our materially-rich and money piling civilization to have a man who resolutely teaches that the soul is the greatest thing. We knew it before, but we want fresh, virile statements of the fact every day. Frankly accepting the flesh as the basis of life, he yet claims for the spiritual, sovereign rights. To man propose this test, Thy body at its best, How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?" pleasure-loving artist-priest, the Bishop who orders his tomb in Saint Praxed's church, Luria the Moorish general, King Saul, the Spanish monk so savage with his brother monk, Pippa the sweet little peasant girl, Colombe the Duchess, the Patriot without a name, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Paracelsus the revolutionary in medicine, these and a crowd of others are resuscitated from the world of which we are so little conscious and made to live before us in vigorous individuality. Browning throws himself sympathetically into all of them and speaks characteristically for each. With ample range he scrutinizes low and high, wherever there is a human soul that has a history he can examine, patiently he investigates it till he has made it yield him some treasure of the moral world. Caliban sprawling flat on The real life of man to him lies not his belly in the mire of Setebos, while in the abundance of things which he small eft-things run in and out each possesses, but in waking and rising and arm and make him laugh, is not too pressing up from earth's level to to coarse a being for Browning to hear talk; heaven's height, far and steep, where, he sets him speculating about God and amid the strifes and storms that await systematizes his queer philosophy. |