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the United States, over yonder in Wall Street,— such insistence would not, I think, be a whit more irrational than it is for any one who has studied the New Testament and early Christianity, as they can be studied in our time, to insist that the fourth-century Christ, the God-man, the infinite God, is no ideal development, clothed upon with the conceptions of Greek metaphysics, but the original Jesus of Nazareth; seeing that we know every step by which the simplicity of Jesus was overlaid and overborne by the vast and splendid disfigurement of ecclesiastical tradition. That my comparison is a homely one I am well aware; but, the homelier, the better, if so only I can make it plain how utterly preposterous ap pears to me the dogma of the deified Christ in the face of what we know the course of deification to have been.

Endeavoring to pass beyond all this and to come face to face with Jesus as he actually was in his short life, the facts appear to shape themselves into a story after this fashion: Jesus was born in Nazareth, a little town of Southern Galilee, about 1895 years ago,— three or four years before the beginning of the Christian era, which avowedly, but not really, is reckoned from his birth. He was one of many chil

The father was a carpenter;

dren of Joseph and Mary, peasant folk living in Nazareth. He was Mary's first-born child; but quite possibly Joseph had children by a former wife, who shared with the new swarm the narrow home. The brothers of Jesus had not much faith in him during his lifetime, yet claimed a certain royalty on him after his death. and the young Jesus learned his trade, and followed it for many years. As for his education, it was mainly such as the hazzan, or village teacher, could give him in the synagogue,a learning of Old Testament texts deaconed out to the children as they sat, cross-legged, on the floor. As for his sports and pastimes, we know that he played at weddings and funerals in the market-place; and that he made mud sparrows, if he could not make them fly according to the fable, is easily within the bounds of probability. The time on which his boyhood fell was eager and intense. The coming

of the Messiah was the universal theme of conversation. The heart of Palestine was shaken with a vague unrest. Suddenly there was heard the voice of one crying in the wilderness of Judea, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" The impassioned herald was John the Baptist, in whom the ancient prophetism, which had seemed to perish. centuries before, attained a second birth. A harsh ascetic,

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rudely clad, his food locusts and wild honey,- a delicacy approved by certain modern travellers, he proclaimed the speedy coming of the Messiah's kingdom, and endeavored to prepare the people by the amendment of their lives for the enjoyment of its felicity. The rumor of his preaching reached to Nazareth; and Jesus left his carpentering and became a follower of John, receiving baptism at his hands.

Whether, if John had lived and kept up his activity, Jesus would have remained contented with the position of discipleship, we do not know. What we know is that John was seized by Herod Antipas, and put to death. Immediately upon the interruption of his ministry Jesus took up his work, not at first claiming to be the Messiah any more than John had done so, in whose preaching the idea of a personal Messiah entirely disappeared. But the nature of Jesus was unlike that of John. He was more social and humane. John came neither eating nor drinking. With such asceticism Jesus had little sympathy, while at the same time celibacy appears to have been with him a counsel of perfection too hard for the majority of men. Instead of retreating into the wilderness and summoning men to him, he went to them in one of the busiest centres of Galilean life, Capernaum, on the commercial road to Syria. From Capernaum he sallied out in all directions to the towns and villages about, including his own Nazareth, where his fellow-townsmen found it hard to think of him as a prophet. Out of his followers he chose twelve as his more immediate disciples,- not, we may be sure, in the haphazard way the Gospels represent, but not, as proved by the event, with any nice prevision of their charac

ters.

For a year or more he continued his Galilean preaching, which was so little different from the best Pharisaic preaching of the time, especially the great Rabbi Hillel's, who was still living in the infancy of Jesus, that it may well be that we have many of his sayings and others of like quality attributed to Jesus. His own teaching was at first made up almost entirely of parables and ethical maxims, but we must never think of them as poured out in any such fashion as is represented in the Sermon on the Mount. As he went on, his preaching aroused the enmity of the Pharisees; and then it became much more direct and vehement, and swept along in a great fiery torrent of denunciation and rebuke. Jesus, a myth! Enveloped in mythology he was from head to foot, the more to prove his absolute reality, his magnificent virility, by the consummate energy with which he triumphs over these integuments, plunging the sword of his invective through them all, and through the hypocrites of his own time, straight to the heart of your hypocrisy and mine and every man's self-righteousness.

His relation to the organized religion of his time was not an iconoclastic one. The difference between him and the ecclesiastics of his time was one of emphasis. Their emphasis was on Sabbath-keeping, Levitical cleanness, and so on. His was upon rectitude and compassion. Nor was it enough for him that the outward life should be correct and clean. Beyond the act he saw the disposition. A deep inwardness, an intense spirituality, was his most characteristic mark. To look upon a woman to lust after her was to commit adultery of the heart. How many saw themselves, as in a mirror, by that lightning flash? And it was so with every aspect of the moral life. Were men keeping fast in expectation of a carnival, or were their hearts enamoured of the good and true? And so it was that, from being quite as much as Paul a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and looking upon these first as his guides, and next as his colaborers, he came at length to find himself arrayed against them with all the energy of his great soul, and with all the passion of his eager, flaming

heart. The things they cared for most were least of all to him. The things they cared for least to him were all in all. Their characteristic trait, self-righteousness, became to him. the one most deadly sin. "The publicans and harlots shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you." To these amenities they made such answer as a dominant ecclesiasticism always makes to those that question its authority. They called him a blasphemer, a wine-bibber, and a glutton; they said that he was mad; they said he had a devil; and they set about to compass his destruction by fair means or foul.

The consciousness of their enmity, and also of their baleful power, came home to the young prophet with appalling force. He had been full of hope and confidence. The kingdom of heaven was at hand,-a society of just men on earth. He saw Satan like lightning fall from heaven; that is to say, the bad cast out by no long and tedious process, but with immediate and sudden force. These sanguine expectations soon gave place to others, dark as these were bright and cheering. The fate of John the Baptist he accepted as his own, and he began to grow impatient for its consummation.

With increasing opposition he asserted himself more strongly. At first he had no thought of claiming for himself the Messianic office. It may be doubted whether he associated with his idea of the coming regeneration of society the idea of a personal Messiah. John the Baptist certainly. did not. Anything to the contrary is mere pious afterthought. But gradually the idea shaped itself in Jesus' mind that he was himself the Messiah. Martineau, who once agreed to this, now doubts it altogether, insisting that the whole representation of Jesus as the self-conscious MesIsiah is the reflection of a later time. But I cannot readily unlearn the lesson which I first learned at this great master's knee. There is a wonderful air of reality in that passage where, upon some lonely northern journey, trying his own heart, he sounds the minds of his apostles, asking them, 'Whom do men say that I am?" They answer that the ma

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jority consider him the forerunner of the Messiah's kingdom. But whom do you say that I am?" "Thou art the Messiah," says Peter. "Thou answerest well," says Jesus. "So I am." But he forbids them to disclose the fact.

Now, I must beg you to remember that the Messianic conception, as it entered into Jewish thought and feeling in the time of Jesus, was as variable as the wind and sea. It varied with every prophet, with every rabbi, with particular localities, with each new claimant for the solemn and majestic rôle. There was nothing to prevent Jesus from having a conception of his own, and measuring himself thereby. It is by this that we should measure him, not by the gross materialistic conceptions of his disciples and his countrymen at large. Nevertheless, his individual conception seems to have been largely formed by meditation on certain passages in the Deutero-Isaiah, notably by chapter fifty-third. When you are listening to the oratorio of "The Messiah,”—to the words of it,—you are listening, for the most part, to the Messianic mythology and theology in their grossest form. But when you come to the solo, “He was despised and rejected," you are very near to the reality of Jesus' inmost consciousness. With this key Jesus unlocked his heart, and we can do

it now.

On these words he shaped his vision of the things that must shortly come to pass. The Messiah of the popular imagination he certainly was not. The spiritual Messiah of his own deepest thought, his own divinest dream, his own most soaring aspiration, he just as certainly was. The mistake he made was in overrating the regenerating power of moral principle. But this is a mistake so seldom made that it is worth a thousand of the most indubitable certainties of those who never make mistakes, because they

"dare not put it to the touch

To win or lose it all."

And now, having inwardly resolved that he was himself the Messiah, he found himself drawn with irresistible attraction to Jerusalem, the holy city of his people. Why, but that it

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