LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 ROBERT L. CASHMAN
 
 ***-
 
 'Boljlctt Lectures 1879 
 
 INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RT. REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D. 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILA- 
 DELPHIA, IN FEBRUARY, 1879 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 31 WEST TWENTY-THIED ST. 
 
 1893 
 
 \-~J
 
 Copyright, 
 By E. P. DUTTOM & Cc.
 
 THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 
 
 JOHN BOHLEN, who died in this city on the 26th 
 day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of 
 One Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed 
 to religious and charitable objects in accordance with 
 the well-known wishes of the testator. 
 
 By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the 
 trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred and 
 paid over to " The Rector, Church Wardens, and Ves- 
 trymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Phila- 
 delphia," in trust, a sum of money for certain desig- 
 nated purposes, out of which fund the sum of Ten 
 Thousand Dollars was set apart for the endowment 
 of THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP, upon the fol- 
 lowing terms and conditions : 
 
 The money shall be invested in good substantial and 
 safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called 
 The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be 
 applied annually to the payment of a qualified person, 
 whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery and publi- 
 cation of at least one hundred copies of two or more 
 lecture sermons. These Lectures shall be delivered at 
 such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the 
 persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from time 
 to time determine, giving at least six months notice to
 
 vi The Bohlcn Lectureship. 
 
 the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same 
 may conveniently be clone, and in no case selecting the 
 same person as lecturer a second time within a period of 
 five years. The payment shall be made to said lecturer, 
 after the lectures have been printed and received by the 
 trustees, of all the income for the year derived from said 
 fund, after defraying the expense of printing the lectures 
 and the other incidental expenses attending the same. 
 
 The subject of such lectures shall be such as is 
 within the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John 
 Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the 
 '' Bampton Lectures," at Oxford, or any other subject 
 distinctively connected with or relating to the Christian 
 Religion. 
 
 The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month 
 of May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done, 
 by the persons, who for the time being, shall hold the 
 offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of 
 the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity ; 
 the Rector of said Church ; the Professor of Biblical 
 Learning, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the 
 Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School 
 of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. 
 
 In case either of said offices are vacant the others may 
 nominate the lecturer. 
 
 Under this trust the Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS, S.T.D., 
 of Boston, was appointed to deliver the lectures for 
 the year 1879. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, Easter, 1879. 
 
 \
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. PAGB 
 
 The Influence of Jesus on the Moral Life of Mar. . 9 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 The Influence of Jesus on the Social Life of Man . 71 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 The Influence of Jesus on the Emotional Life of 
 
 Man 139 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 The Influence of Jesus on the Intellectual Life 
 of Man 207
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JKSUS 
 
 ON THE MORAL LIFE OF MAN.
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 ON THE MORAL LIFE OF MAN. 
 
 "\T 7HAT is the power of Christianity over 
 man, its source, its character, its issue? 
 This is the question which I wish to study with 
 you in these four lectures which I have been 
 invited to deliver. But it is necessary at the 
 outset that I should indicate the limits within 
 which I wish to work. All that the subject, as 
 I have stated it, would include, not four nor forty 
 lectures could undertake to treat. 
 
 I have been led, then, to think of Christianity, 
 and to speak of it, at least in these lectures, 
 not as a system of doctrine, but as a personal 
 force, behind which and in which there lies one 
 great inspiring idea, which it is the work of the 
 personal force to impress upon the life of man, 
 with which the personal force is always strug- 
 gling to fill mankind. The personal force is the 
 nature of Jesus, full of humanity, full of divinity,
 
 12 The Influence of jFesus 
 
 and powerful with a love for man which com- 
 bines in itself every element that enters into love 
 of the completest kind. The inspiring idea is 
 the fatherhood of God, and the childhood of every 
 man to Him. Upon the race and upon the 
 individual, Jesus is always bringing into more 
 and more perfect revelation the certain truth 
 that man, and every man, is the child of God. 
 This is the sum of the work of the Incarnation. 
 A hundred other statements regarding it, regard- 
 ing Him who was incarnate, are true ; but all 
 statements concerning Him hold their truth 
 within this truth, that Jesus came to restore 
 the fact of God's fatherhood to man's knowledge, 
 and to its central place of power over man's life. 
 Jesus is mysteriously the Word of God made 
 flesh. He is the worker of amazing miracles 
 upon the bodies and the souls of men. He is 
 the convincer of sin. He is the Savior by suffer- 
 ing. But behind all these, as the purpose for 
 which He is all these, He is the redeemer of man 
 into the fatherhood of God. It would be deeply 
 interesting to dwell on any one of these special 
 aspects of His wondrous life ; but when we want
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 13 
 
 to gather into one great comprehensive statement 
 the purpose for which Jesus lived, and the power 
 which His life has had over the lives of men, we 
 must seize His great idea and find His power 
 
 there. For every man's power is his idea multi- N 
 
 < 
 plied by and projected through his personality. 
 
 The special actions which he does are only the 
 points at which his power shows itself, the 
 tips of his powerful life, where its magnetic force 
 is manifested, but not where it is created. And 
 so the power of Jesus is the idea of Jesus multi 
 plied and projected through the person of Jesus. 
 His power is not in the miracles that He did, not 
 even in the marvellous nature which He bore, but 
 in the great truth, the primal and final fact of all 
 the universe, so far as man has any part in it, 
 which the whole nature of the Savior uttered, 
 and with whose splendor every miraculous touch 
 of that nature on the world, or on man's body or 
 man's soul, burst forth into light. 
 
 I have said already what that idea is, the 
 relation of childhood and fatherhood between 
 mar. and God. Man is the child of God by na- 
 ture He is ignorant and rebellious, the prodi- 
 
 <
 
 14 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 gal child of God ; but his ignorance and rebellion 
 never break that first relationship. It is always 
 a. child ignorant of his Father; always a child 
 rebellious against his Father. That is what 
 makes the tragedy of human history, and always 
 prevents human sin from becoming an insignifi- 
 cant and squalid thing. To reassert the father- 
 hood and childhood as an unlost truth, and to 
 re-establish its power as the central fact of life ; 
 to tell men that they were, and to make them 
 actually be, the sons of God, that was the pur- 
 pose of the coming of Jesus, and the shaping 
 power of His life. 
 
 Of course it is not possible to speak of such an 
 idea which is indeed the idea of the universe 
 as if it were a message intrusted to the Son of 
 God when He came to be the Savior of man- 
 kind. It was not only something which He knew 
 and taught ; it was something which He was. 
 No other truth ever so inspires a merely human 
 teacher, so fills his whole life with itself, so 
 comes to be not merely the creed which his lips 
 declare but the life which his whole living utters, 
 as this truth of man's childhood to God. And in
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 
 
 Him who was at once the manifested God and the 
 completion of humanity, the idea and the person 
 are so mingled that we cannot separate them. 
 He is the truth, and whoever receives Him be- * 
 comes the son of God. 
 
 As I read the Gospels and see what Jesus is 
 trying to do with men, it seems to me as if this 
 truth that man is the child of God were to him, 
 in a certain genuine sense, a final truth, a 
 truth beyond which the soul cannot or at least 
 need not go, a truth which, if it could be really 
 laid upon the soul, would bring its own evidence 
 and its own interpretation. It is indeed capable 
 of being analyzed. It may be resolved into the 
 several elements which make up its meaning. 
 It includes the notions of a common nature be- 
 tween the Father and the son, of a spontaneous 
 affection of the Father, of an essential obligation " 
 of the son, and of a possibility of the son's un- * 
 s limited growth into the Father's likeness. All ' 
 these are present, are assumed in every declara- 
 tion of man's sonship to God which Jesus ever 
 makes. But He does not unfold them and define 
 them. It seems to Him as if, when He says to 
 
 V. &
 
 16 The Influence of Jestis 
 
 any human creature, " You are God's child," all 
 these included truths revealed themselves to the 
 soul in such degree as his spiritual nature was 
 then able to receive them. It seems to Him as if 
 when He says to a sinner, forgetful of his sonship, 
 " Rise up and be God's child," all these included 
 truths came in with their own power to restore 
 his life. He always treats the truth of Father- 
 hood as the best children of the best earthly 
 fathers treat it, not ignorant of the elemental 
 truths of which it is composed, but best satisfied 
 to let it rest in its own unity, as if any analysis 
 must disturb its beauty and its power. 
 
 It is more important than we often think, that 
 we should grasp the general idea, the general 
 purpose, of the life of Jesus. The Gospels be- 
 come to us a new book when we no longer read 
 them merely as the anecdotes of the life of one 
 who, with a great, kind heart, went through the 
 world promiscuously doing good as opportunities 
 occurred to Him. The drifting and haphazard 
 currents gather themselves together, and we are 
 borne on with the full and enthusiastic impulse 
 Df a great river which knows itself and knows
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 17 
 
 the sea it seeks. And when the ruling idea is 
 this which fills the life of Jesus, it is doubly true 
 that only by clearly seizing it can we get at the 
 heart and meaning of His life. For it is not only 
 an idea ; it is a religious inspiration. It is not 
 only the food of the mind ; it is the fire of the 
 soul. In all its human uses, the idea of father- 
 hood comes nearer to being a religious idea than 
 that of any other human relationship. And 
 when we catch sight of it as the expression of 
 man's relationship to God, it has all that mys- 
 terious and beautiful mingling of the most vast 
 and awful with the most near and personal and 
 urgent, all that vagueness which we know 
 includes definiteness, all that definiteness not 
 excluding vagueness, which is the very essence 
 of religious impressiveness. And when we think 
 of it as the idea of Jesus, it must always have 
 this special beauty connected with it, that Jesus 
 must have grown up into the apprehension of it 
 as He grew into the consciousness of His own life. 
 
 He must have become aware that all men were 
 
 x * 
 God's sons, and felt the desire to tell them so 
 
 and make their sonship a reality, kindling like
 
 1 8 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 fire within Him, just in proportion as He came to 
 know, softly and gradually, under the skies of 
 Galilee and the roof of the carpenter, the deep 
 and absorbing mystery that He himself was the 
 Son of God. 
 
 It is not my purpose to prove here that this 
 which I have given is a true statement of the 
 idea of Jesus. As He stands there in the broad 
 sunlight of the Gospels, as His clear words come 
 down to us through the atmosphere of centuries 
 which His spirit has purified, I do not see how 
 any one can have a doubt of what He means by 
 standing there, what the purpose of His life is 
 as He himself conceives it. If any man had a 
 doubt, I should only want to open the Gospels 
 _- with him at four most solemn places. Here is 
 
 * 
 
 the consummate teaching of Jesus. In His favor- 
 ite form of parable, with the widest gaze across 
 the vast field of man, with the most profound 
 and sad and hopeful sympathy with human life, 
 He tells His story of the Prodigal Son. It is the 
 everlasting picture of the double possibilities of 
 man, obedience and disobedience. The old 
 parable of Eden, the present mystery of your Hfe
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 19 
 
 and mine, the far-off Judgment Day, and the 
 great White Throne, are all gathered in together 
 and are lying in the crystal depths of that story. 
 And lo ! these two possibilities live in the house 
 \}f one great Fatherhood. " A certain man had 
 two sons," and from the embrace of that father's 
 love neither of the two sons ever departs. Or, if 
 this seems too metaphorical to be the revelation 
 of Christ's idea of man, turn to another scene, 
 
 f J * 
 
 and hear Him teaching all men to pray, " Our 
 Father who art in heaven." Not only the needy 
 child, who is going in a moment to beg for his 
 daily bread, but the sinful child, whose lip is 
 already trembling with the prayer to be forgiven, 
 begins his petition with the claim of the son 
 upon the father. In that idea alone the possi- 
 bility and privilege of prayer grow clear. Or, 
 still more solemn in its special circumstances, 
 there is the scene beside the tomb from which 
 He has just risen, when He draws back the cur- 
 tain, and with one word proclaims His life and 
 His disciples' life together. " I ascend unto my 
 Father and to your Father," He declares. And 
 when He has ascended, and years have passed
 
 2O The Influence of Jesus 
 
 away, and all that He did and was have grown 
 familial to the disciple who loved Him most and 
 knew Him best ; when that disciple sums up all 
 his conception of the life of Jesus, what he says 
 is only this : " To as many as received Him, to 
 them gave He power to become the sons of God." 
 Surely, we cannot be wrong if we say positively 
 that to Christ himself the truth that man was 
 God's child by nature was the great fact of man's 
 existence ; and the desire that man might be 
 God's child in reality was the motive of His own 
 life and work. 
 
 I have dwelt long upon this opening explana- 
 tion. But I must leave it now. My design, in 
 these lectures, is to try to show how this idea of 
 Jesus, inspiring and presented through his per- 
 sonality, becomes the shaping power of men's 
 lives I want to trace its presence in all of the 
 higher regions of man's life. I want to see how 
 it influences man's doing of duty, and his rela- 
 tion to his fellow-men, and his acceptance of 
 pain or pleasure, and his treatment of his own 
 intellectual powers These are my four lectures.
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 21 
 
 Man in his various life, touched and influenced 
 and shaped and led by the Fatherhood of God, 
 revealed and renewed to him by Jesus. To-day 
 I shall speak of man's moral life. The second 
 lecture will be of the child of God in all his social 
 existence. The next lecture will treat of his re- 
 lation to enjoyment and suffering, which are the 
 right hand and the left hand of the same Father. 
 And in the last lecture I shall speak of that life 
 of the intellect in which man is most ready to 
 forget his Father, or to think that his Father has 
 nothing that he can do for him. They will be 
 Biblical studies ; for I shall look solely to what 
 Jesus, the revealer of the Father, did for men in 
 the few years of which the Gospels tell, in order 
 to find the types of what it is His perpetual effort 
 and wish to do. I dare to hope, as the result of 
 all our studies, that we may be helped somewhat 
 in that which I think we all find the hardest and 
 ' most hopeless work of all our lives, the effort 
 to keep our highest ideas and our commonest 
 occupations in constant and healthy contact with 
 each other. 
 
 Forgive me one word more. It gives me also
 
 22 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 pleasure to believe that the subject which I have 
 chosen is one which would not have been un- 
 welcome to my dear friend of years ago, whose 
 honored name this lectureship bears, and in 
 whose behalf I shall in some sort speak. For, of 
 the men whom I have known, there has been 
 none whose daily moral life, whose association 
 with his fellow-men, whose meeting of the joy 
 and pain of living, and whose ways of thought 
 and study, have been more in the power of the 
 idea of Jesus, more inspired by his Lord's revela- 
 tion that he was, more obedient and trustful to 
 his Lord's authority in order that he might 
 become, the son of God. 
 
 f The manifestation of God's fatherhood which 
 was made in Jesus is the shaping power of 
 
 I Christian morals, that which makes the moral- 
 ity of Christian life distinct and different from 
 any other that the world has seen. In what does 
 that difference consist? In two things, as it 
 seems to me : First, in the complete combination 
 
 ^ - < .. w 
 
 of pattern and power in the source from which 
 the morality proceeds ; and, second, in the com 
 
 . 
 
 Avv^ 1
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 23 
 
 b'nation of reason and authority in the basis 
 upon which the morality is constantly recognized 
 as resting. These are the two great character- 
 istics of family morality, of that rectitude and 
 goodness which grow up in the child as he lives 
 in his father's house, sheltered by and fed out of 
 his father's character. Think of them both for 
 a moment. Where, except in that primal type 
 of human influence and benefaction, the human 
 family, do the pattern of goodness and the power 
 of goodness meet in such perfect unity ? Else- 
 where there may stand up models of excellence, 
 but they are distant and cold. They do not 
 carry in themselves their own enforcement. 
 They are not clothed with the impressiveness of 
 a deep natural affection. Elsewhere than in the 
 home there may be very winning persuasions to 
 goodness ; but nowhere so perfectly as in the 
 home does the persuasive appeal come from the 
 mouth of the very goodness which is the natural 
 pattern of the life which it tries to win. The 
 good father at once shows goodness as no other 
 being can show it to the child, and likewise in- 
 vites him to it with an influence that no other
 
 24 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 being can possess. And, besides this, the child, 
 when he has come to goodness like his father's 
 by obedience to his father, finds himself unable 
 to tell whether the good life which he tries to 
 live is something which holds him by its own 
 inherent fascination, or something to which he 
 submits in willing acceptance of his father's will. 
 The essential and the arbitrary blend, and are 
 lost in one another. The child's nature bears 
 witness to its oneness with the father's nature by 
 the way in which it makes its own choices those 
 duties which come to it in the first place as the 
 father's mandates. 
 
 Now these two qualities, shadowed forth in 
 every true home, come to their completeness in 
 the home of God, the home of man in God, which 
 is Christianity. It will be interesting, I hope, 
 to follow this truth out in some detail ; but first 
 we can see, perhaps, how true it is, if we turn 
 suddenly to our Gospels and open them at once 
 at what is, after all, the great text-book of Chris- 
 tian morals, the code of Christian life, the cor- 
 respondent and fulfilment in the New Testament 
 of the Ten Commandments in the Old. I mean
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 25 
 
 the Sermon on the Mount. To that discourse 
 let us give a few moments' study. In the late 
 summer, Jesus is coming home from one of his 
 teaching-tours in Galilee, and in the evening he 
 and the company that follow him approach Ca- 
 pernaum. They will not enter the city till to- 
 morrow morning. To-night the people sleep 
 around the foot of a great hill that rises near the 
 town. But Jesus, that he may be more alone, 
 climbs higher, and spends the night in prayer 
 and meditation. Out of this solitude, out of 
 this mysterious communion with His Father, in 
 which He has, as it were, refilled Himself with 
 the assurance that the human is son to the Di- 
 vine, He comes when morning breaks, and, gath- 
 ering His disciples around Him, He speaks to 
 them, and the multitude who have thronged 
 about Him, the Sermon on the Mount, which is 
 written in three chapters of St. Matthew's Gos- 
 pel. I do not see how any one who reads it care- 
 fully can fail to feel that in that sermon we have 
 what is essentially a unit, one single, separate 
 discourse of Jesus. It has no rhetorical order 
 or progress. It does not move in any argumenta-
 
 26 T/te Influence of Jesus 
 
 live development. We have but to feel ourselves 
 back into the bright air and sunshine of that fresh 
 morning far away in Galilee, with the sweet dis- 
 traction of the early birds filling the air, and 
 the soft, dreamy faces of the Galilean peasants 
 making the listening group, in order to become 
 aware how perfectly impossible it was that the 
 discourse should move to any such measure as 
 might have become the lecture-room of a new 
 Rabbi. It has its unity in its controlling pur- 
 pose. It is one by the life-blood of the one idea 
 which beats through it, and which those ready 
 and responsive peasant natures feel. And what 
 is that idea ? Neander calls the Sermon on the 
 Mount " the Magna Charta of the kingdom of 
 God." It is a fine phrase, and in one sense it 
 is completely true. But really the idea of God 
 which fills the great discourse is not the idea of 
 king, but the idea of father. No doubt the 
 two, in their original use and in the loftiest use 
 of them, when, as in the loftiest use of all words, 
 they refresh the lost memory of their origin, are 
 really one. The king was originally father. The 
 Basileia was a family. It belonged to the king,
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 27 
 
 as the family belongs to the father, by right of 
 blood. It was not like the Turannis, which im- 
 plied a usurpation, an unnatural and cruel thing. 
 Kingship included the three essential ideas of 
 fatherhood, which, as I reminded you, are one 
 ness of nature, natural impulse of obedience, and 
 the obligation of loving care. The noblest hea- 
 then always felt all this ; and Zeus is either 
 king of gods and men, or father of gods and 
 men, as if the two names meant the selfsame 
 thing. But yet the two words always tended to 
 drift apart. Lordship and command belonged to 
 kingship ; love and care belonged to fatherhood. 
 What we really have, then, in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, what gives it its great, everlasting value, 
 is the passing over of kingship into fatherhood ; 
 or, if you please to put it so, the opening and 
 deepening of kingship till it reveals the father- 
 hood which lies folded at the heart of it. This, 
 I am sure, is the key of the Sermon on the 
 Mount which alone can unlock its meaning. 
 Men have often pointed out how largely its sepa- 
 rate precepts can be matched out of other codes ; 
 as if the substance and power of a moral law lay
 
 28 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 in its commandments, and did not really rest in 
 the conception of the commander which breathed 
 through it and gave it life. 
 
 Here, then, is what the Sermon on the Mount 
 really means. And, in conformity with this, all 
 through it there are strung those two great com- 
 binations which I spoke of, the combination 
 of pattern and power, the combination of reason 
 and authority. The pattern is a personal nature, 
 ultimate and absolute, behind which it is im- 
 possible to go. The good is good because it is 
 like Him. The bad is bad because it is unlike 
 Him. There is no other standard in the whole 
 discourse than that. It is assumed that a man 
 may know God and then that he wants nothing 
 more, that in God he has the perfect test and 
 touchstone of all life. " Be ye therefore per- 
 fect," Jesus says, "even as your Father which 
 is in heaven is perfect." " Love your enemies, 
 bless them that curse you" ; and why? "That 
 ye may be the children of your Father which is in 
 heaven." " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and 
 His righteousness, and all these things shall be 
 added unto you." What do these words mean,
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 29 
 
 that close like a great choral amen the sweet 
 and rhythmical injunctions to a divine careless- 
 ness ? " Take no thought for your life." " Lay 
 not up treasures on the earth." " Take no thought, 
 saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we 
 drink." Let all things go. Only, and then 
 the words seem to concentrate out of their easy 
 carelessness into a deep intensity that is all thf 
 more intense by contrast, only, " seek God's 
 righteousness, seek to be righteous like Him, 
 with that divine capacity of likeness which is in 
 you, as His children, and then everything else 
 shall follow as it may." These are no solitary 
 texts. They are only special words in which 
 the whole current of the sermon flashes up into 
 peculiar distinctness, as a wave flashes on the 
 bosom of a stream and shows which way the 
 stream is running. 
 
 And as the Father is the standard of the 
 moral life that is enforced, so it is from Him and 
 from His fatherhood that the whole power 
 comes by which that standard is to be pursued 
 and finally attained. There is nothing abstract 
 and cold. Everything shines and burns with
 
 30 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 personal affection. I am to be good like my 
 Father ; I am to be good because of my Father ; 
 like His character, because of His love. " If ye 
 forgive men their trespasses, then your Heavenly 
 Father will forgive you." " Swear not by heaven, 
 for it is God's throne, nor by earth, for it is 
 His footstool." " Let your light shine before 
 men, that they may glorify your Father which is 
 in heaven." " Blessed are the peace-makers, for 
 they shall be called the children of God." These, 
 again, are not exceptional or accidental words. 
 They are the flashes on the stream which flows 
 the other way to meet the stream from God to 
 man which we were just now tracing. Already 
 it is true, as by and by an Apostle will declare, 
 that " of Him, and through Him, and to Him, 
 are all things." The pattern descends from the 
 Father to the Son. The responsive likeness 
 goes back from the Son to the Father ; and both 
 because they are Father and Son to one another. 
 It is all full of the spirit of spontaneousness. It 
 is " the Magna Charta of the kingdom of God," 
 indeed. But the picture fails if we think of the 
 reluctant king upon the plain at Runnymede with
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 3 1 
 
 his stern barons compelling him to give what he 
 gave only with hatred and rage. Rather it seems 
 to be the prophecy and anticipation of that 
 heavenly plain where the celestial King in the 
 mystic picture of the Revelation gives Himself 
 ungrudgingly to His beloved, whose natures, 
 perfectly redeemed by Him and conformed to 
 His, can take Him perfectly ; where "the Lamb 
 which is in the midst of the throne shall feed 
 them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of 
 waters," the anticipation of that and the memory 
 and completion of the garden at the other end of 
 human history, where the Father walked with his 
 children in their first innocence. 
 
 Along with this combination the Sermon on the 
 Mount always keeps the other, the combination 
 of reason and authority, or of essentialness and 
 arbitrariness, which is characteristic of the child's 
 obedience to the father. I must not dwell on 
 this, but I am sure that" all of us have felt, as we 
 have read those sacred chapters of St. Matthew, 
 how exquisitely these two lights play through 
 them and harmonize with one another, the 
 light that comes to any duty from the command
 
 of God that we should do it, and the light which 
 the same duty wins because we ourselves per- 
 ceive that it is the right thing to do. The 
 essence of every beatitude is in the human 
 heart, and yet the human heart loves to hear the 
 utterance of the beatitudes from the mouth of 
 God as if they were His arbitrary enactments. 
 I know by that of the nature of God which is in 
 me as His child, that they which hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness shall certainly be filled. I 
 am sure by that subtle knowledge of Him which 
 the child must have of the Father, that He could 
 not leave a really longing soul unsatisfied in all 
 His world. That importunate happiness, eager 
 to give itself away, must pour itself into every 
 ready life. But yet I accept the utterance which 
 Jesus makes of that which I already knew, as a 
 genuine revelation. The instinct of my wak- 
 ened childhood rests upon the strong confirma- 
 tion of the Father's uttered word. This runs 
 through all the great discourse. I leave it with 
 you to trace it there. Only I want you to notice 
 that this interplay of essentialness and arbitrari- 
 ness is exactly what characterizes every true home
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 33 
 
 life, where the children learn truth and receive 
 commandments from their father. The child's 
 partial and growing perception that it must be 
 so, chimes and harmonizes with the father's dis 
 tinct injunction that it shall be so. 
 
 I am sure that when the listening repose of 
 the multitude was broken as the sermon closed, 
 and, like a melted stream, the crowd flowed away 
 into the city, the people carried something more 
 with them than a few handfuls of good precepts. 
 I think that they went silently, or with few words, 
 with something of exaltation and wonder at 
 themselves in their faces. They had been taught 
 that they were God's children. One who was 
 evidently God's Son Himself had told them so. 
 He had bidden them, as God's children, at once 
 to see duty with something of His own immedi- 
 ateness of perception, and also to hear Him 
 announcing it to them out of a Father's lips. 
 Duty, the thing they ought to do, had shone 
 for them that morning at once with its own 
 essential sweetness and with the illumination 
 of their Father's will. No wonder that as they 
 walked together they said to one another, " He 
 3
 
 34 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 speaks to us with authority. It is not like the 
 Scribes." 
 
 I must not 1'nger on this hurried study of the 
 Sermon on the Mount. I have dwelt thus long 
 upon it because, as it is the longest and most 
 deliberate statement of moral duty in the Gospels, 
 I wanted to show how it was all pervaded by and 
 built about the idea of Jesus. Let us go on now 
 to see how that idea pervades likewise all His 
 treatment of the men and women whom His life 
 touched. It is the idea of a divine fatherhood, 
 of a natural belonging of every man's soul in 
 goodness, of wickedness as an exile, an unnatural, 
 unfilial state of life, and of the return to goodness 
 as the coming back to a homeland which the 
 soul recognizes as it enters into it and claims a? 
 its true place. I think that this idea of moral? 
 at once outgoes and comprehends the various 
 theories of moral life which men have framed and 
 set in opposition to each other. If in the family 
 the child's instinct of childhood unites in itself 
 the perception of his own best good with the 
 consciousness of obligation to his Father's will, 
 then in the world, turned by Christ a revelation
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 35 
 
 to one mighty family, the utilitarian and the 
 intuitional theories of duty may blend in har- 
 mony, and the soul serving God as its Father 
 may live under the combined power of the two. 
 
 But, not to dwell on this, the idea of Jesus 
 applied to men's moral life must include two 
 things, a revelation of the moral standard, and 
 a revelation of the moral motive. Let us take, 
 these in their order. 
 
 And first, the moral standard. What is it? 
 What am I to be conformed to as the work of 
 moral improvement goes on in me ? There may 
 be various answers. One man may say, "To 
 this law," holding up a scroll of precepts. 
 "That is to be your goal. When you obey 
 those, the work is done." Another man says, 
 "To this person," pointing to some one, human 
 or divine, whose life is moving along outside of 
 mine, a pattern, a model, which I am to emulate 
 as a dandle measures its twinkling light against 
 a star. Now the answer of Jesus is different 
 from both of these, I think. "You are to be 
 like your Father," He declares ; " but ; .t is in the 
 fact that He is your Father and that you are His
 
 36 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 child that the possibility of likeness lies, and 
 that the kind of possible likeness is decreed. 
 You are to be like Him, as the child is like the 
 father, by the attainment of that echo of the 
 father's nature which is the child's essential heri- 
 tage. You are to be like Him by coming to that 
 expression of Him which is the true idea of your 
 child-life. You are to fulfil the unfulfilled pro- 
 gramme of your own life, which is involved in 
 the fact that you are the child of God. You are 
 to become ' like your Father,' fulfilling the in- 
 junction of the Sermon on the Mount by ' com- 
 ing to yourself/ so realizing the picture of the 
 parable of the Prodigal Son." 
 
 Is there here an intelligible and practicable 
 moral standard ? Man is to return into the idea of 
 his own life as the son of God. He is to be equal 
 to his own conception, as that conception is written 
 in the nature of the Holy Being from whom he 
 came and to whom he belongs. At least, that is 
 a standard whose perpetual presence shaped out 
 Lord's treatment of the men and women whom 
 He was trying to restore. Note this in several 
 particulars. First, look at the combination of
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 37 
 
 sternness and kindliness, of mercy and severity, 
 which appears wherever Jesus touches a sinner's 
 life. One day they brought to Him a woman 
 taken in the act of sin. Their stern, hard faces 
 the faces of the Scribes and Pharisees 
 glared at their victim, and then turned away from 
 her to Him from whom they claimed her condem- 
 nation. " Moses in the Law commanded us that 
 such should be stoned," they said. It was purely 
 the reference to a law, to the appraisal of a sin 
 by its assigned, appointed penalty. There is no 
 thought of her, no consideration of what she is. 
 or of what she possibly may be. It is only the 
 sin, the law, and Moses, the appraiser of sins and 
 laws by the standards of an absolute justice that 
 is as impersonal and as free from, obtrusive sym- 
 pathies as the stars or winds. Then Jesus turns 
 and looks around upon them all. He lets a 
 silence fall through the great temple while He 
 stoops and seems to write upon the ground. It 
 is as if He wanted a gap, a blank of stillness, 
 to come between their view about it all and His. 
 Then He speaks : " He that is without sin among 
 you, let him first cast a stone at her." Do you not
 
 38 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 see the difference ? Everything is personal. It 
 is not " such as she," it is she. They are not mere 
 mechanical executors of a written law ; they are 
 men who cannot escape personal judgments them- 
 selves. They have something to do with her 
 besides to stone her. They are partners in sin. 
 They are beings with the same obligations, the 
 same temptations, the same history of failure. The 
 whole pulsates with personality. And when, after 
 the Scribes and Pharisees have crept away, He 
 turns to the woman and says, " I do not condemn 
 thee: go, and sin no more," along with a deep and 
 terrible sense of how dreadfully she had sinned, 
 along with the most complete self-condemnation, 
 there must have come into the poor creature's 
 heart a vision of the power of not sinning which 
 was in her, in which she thenceforth could be- 
 lieve because He believed in it, and in the con- 
 scious possession of which she knew herself to 
 be, in the first unlost but long unseen idea and 
 deepest truth of her existence, the child of God. 
 Or think about the other woman, who came 
 creeping in, with her box of ointment, to anoint 
 the feet of Jesus as He sat supping with the
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 39 
 
 Pharisee. The same contrast of treatment shines 
 out there. The shocked and scandalized Phari- 
 see cries out, " This man ought to have known 
 who and what manner of woman this is ! " It is 
 " what manner of woman." She is one of a class. 
 She is a kind of being, not a being, not one 
 live, loving, despairing woman. But Jesus begins 
 to speak, and instantly there she is ! No longer 
 this " manner of woman," but " this woman." 
 And then her story comes, the story of her 
 love for her rescuer, and of her humble and ab- 
 sorbing and self-forgetful desire to do something 
 for Him ; the story of her tears and kisses on 
 His feet, and the spilt ointment whose fragrance 
 yet filled the room. And it is told so that the 
 most supercilious guests turn with a wondering 
 recognition of a true human life among them ; 
 told so that the poor woman herself, while she 
 cowered with shame and glowed with love, must 
 have thrilled through and through with self- 
 recognition, with a knowledge of herself wholly 
 new but perfectly certain and clear ; told so that 
 no figure of woman's nature anywhere in history 
 stands more clearly before the eyes of men to-
 
 4O The Influence of Jesus 
 
 day. And it is her possibility, undestroyed by 
 all her sin ; it is her power of loving the mani- 
 festation of God, the power by which she may 
 rise out of her sin and be what she was made to 
 be, it is this that He touches by His words 
 and calls forth into life, and by its new life saves 
 her soul, which seemed to be lost and dead. 
 
 In both these stories see the severity and see 
 the gentleness ! There is no making light of 
 sin ; there is no cruelty to the sinner. These 
 two hands, one strong with stern holiness, the 
 other gentle with sympathy, untwist the cords 
 that bind the soul, and set it free to be itself. 
 The rebuked sin becomes itself the impulse that 
 sends the soul away from its sin into the revealed 
 possibility of goodness. And these two hands 
 they are which always Christ has used to rescue 
 men's souls. The perfect severity of holiness 
 and the perfect tenderness of love, which blend 
 nowhere but in the thought of the ideal family, 
 blend perfectly in the moral method of the Son 
 of God seeking His brethren. 
 
 Again, I think that this same idea appears in 
 the way in which Jesus uses self-sacrifice, that
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 41 
 
 instrument which all the moral disciplines that 
 the world has seen have always used, but of 
 which He always seems to make a higher and 
 peculiar use. One kind of moral training uses 
 self-sacrifice as punishment. Because you have 
 done so much which you ought not to have done, 
 therefore you shall surrender so much which it 
 would give you pleasure to possess. Another 
 uses self-sacrifice as an expression of the essen- 
 tial badness of the thing surrendered. Because 
 the earth is inherently, intrinsically wicked, 
 therefore come away from it and be separate. 
 Because the body is accursed, therefore pluck 
 out thy right eye, cut off thy right hand. But 
 to Jesus self-sacrifice always is a means of free- 
 dom. That is what always gives to the self- 
 denials which He demands a triumphant and 
 enthusiastic air. Not because you have not 
 deserved to enjoy it, not because it is wicked to 
 enjoy it, but because there is another enjoyment 
 more worthy of your nature, for which the native 
 appetite shall show itself in you the moment that 
 you really lay hold of it, therefore let this first 
 inferior enjoyment go ; and by this conception
 
 42 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 of the purpose of self-sacrifice, Christ's law and 
 limit of self-sacrifice is always settled. One day 
 a young man came to Jesus. He had seen some 
 glimpse of Jesus's idea. He dreamed that he 
 might be a son of God. " What shall I do 
 that I may reach eternal life ? " he said. And 
 Jesus lifted His finger and pointed out to him 
 the long line of milestones that marked the way 
 to his celestial aspiration, humanity, purity, 
 honesty, brotherly love. They did not satisfy 
 the youth. He knew them all, and yet he did 
 not get at what he wanted, what he dreamed of. 
 "All these have I done. What lack I yet?" 
 His soul was like a boat tied fast, but tied with 
 a long rope. It was able to struggle up the 
 channel, past headland and light and buoy that 
 marked the way; but always something held it 
 back from perfectly laying itself at rest beside 
 the golden shore. "What lack I yet? What 
 lack I yet ?" And then said Jesus, " Go and sell 
 all that thou hast, and thou shalt have treasure in 
 heaven ; and come and follow me." He did not 
 say, " You do not deserve wealth." He did not 
 say " It is wicked to be rich." He only said,
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 43 
 
 " You will be free if you are poor, and then I can 
 lead you to the Father, in whom you shall find 
 yourself." He went back, past the buoys and head- 
 lands, down the bay to where the rope was tied, 
 and cut the boat loose from its anchorage. The 
 sadness with which the young man went away 
 one would fain believe was the sadness of the 
 rescued slave, who misses and mourns for the 
 familiar fetter, even while his heart begins al- 
 ready to open to the embrace of the new life of 
 liberty that spreads bewilderingly, almost awfully 
 before him. 
 
 I mention only one more indication of the fact 
 that the standard which the morality of Jesus sets 
 up is something far more intimate than a law of 
 abstract right and wrong, or the example of a 
 person between whom and us there is no essen- 
 tial and indestructible relationship. It is found 
 in the vehement and passionate reaction which 
 his teachings and rebukes excited. Jesus went 
 about the cities which lined the upper shores of 
 the Sea of Galilee. He told the people of their 
 sins. He offered them the new life of obedience 
 to Him. Instantly there was an outbreak. They
 
 44 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 did not just ignore Him. He did not merely 
 seem to them an enthusiast, whom the) could 
 brush aside out of the reality that filled their 
 practical life. They were betrayed into that last 
 rage which no man feels until he is fighting with 
 the highest idea of himself, the last and most 
 desperate battle of the human soul. Jesus sees 
 this, and there is pity burning through and under 
 His indignation as He cries, " Thou Capernaum, 
 which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be cast down 
 to hell." It is the heaven where Capernaum be- 
 longs that makes the tragedy of the hell which 
 she chooses. And so, when the Gadarenes 
 begged the intrusive miracle-worker to depart 
 out of their coasts ; or when the congregation of 
 the synagogue at Nazareth sprang up in rage 
 when Jesus preached to them ; or when the cry 
 of blasphemy arose at the sight of the divine 
 power that was in Him passing beyond the work 
 of healing lameness, and beginning to claim its 
 holier and dearer privilege of forgiving sins ; or 
 when, unseen, unheard, in many a brooding heart 
 and many a suspicious whisper that vented its 
 querulous maliciousness in the country lanes and
 
 On the Moral Life of Man, 45 
 
 cottages, or in the palaces or hovels of Jerusalem, 
 the tide of hatred slowly gathered which broke 
 out at last with " Crucify him ! crucify him ! " 
 before Pilate's judgment seat, and raged in taunts 
 and jeers around the cross, through all these 
 scenes there is no sufficient explanation of it all, 
 until you get down to that seat wherein the deep- 
 est power of mortification and of rage resides, a 
 wounded and wronged conscience. It was the 
 national consciousness which, under that strange 
 mingling of nationality and individuality which 
 was the very genius of Judaism, meant likewise 
 the consciousness of every man, the conscious- 
 ness that the people was the people of God, that 
 every man in it was the son of God, it was 
 this consciousness, summoned to life by the pres- 
 ence among them of the Son of God, that rose 
 and beat against the low conditions of the life 
 under which they had buried it, and made the 
 tempest whose hoarse tumult we hear everywhere 
 behind the gentle voice of Jesus as we open the 
 Gospel doors. 
 
 This, then, I take to be the beginning of the 
 Gospel of the Son of God. It is the renewal
 
 46 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 of the divine consciousness in every man as the 
 standard by which he is to be judged. And the 
 power of that renewal is the Incarnation. " The 
 Word was made flesh and dwelt among us"; and, 
 " to as many as received Him, to them gave He 
 power to become the sons of God." This is 
 surely the moral power of that which Jesus, when 
 He talks with Nicodemus, calls the " being born 
 again." The Pharisee wonders. It seems to 
 him as if the new-found Rabbi told him some- 
 thing unnatural, something against the course of 
 nature. It seems to be a going back. " Can a 
 man enter a second time into his mother's womb 
 and be born ? " And Jesus answers : " Yes, it is 
 a going back, only back much farther than you 
 think, much farther than the mother's womb. 
 It must be a birth from heaven, taking you back 
 into heaven again. It must be a birth from 
 God, restoring in you the first idea of your exist- 
 ence, that you are His child. You can enter into 
 the kingdom of heaven only as, beneath all its 
 obscurations and accumulated hindrances, that 
 idea is stirred to life, and you are born at once 
 out of the highest heights of God and into the 
 deepest depths of yourself."
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 47 
 
 Surely such an idea of man makes abundantly 
 simple that which has often seemed so hard to 
 understand. I mean the way in which righteous- 
 ness and men's struggles to be good have always 
 refused to be confined to the limits of any specific 
 culture or even to those who knew the name 
 of Christ. Everywhere throughout the world, 
 everywhere throughout the ages, men have 
 sought holiness. The best and noblest men 
 everywhere have always been true seekers after 
 God. That is inexplicable if Christianity is a 
 new power, a new gift to the faculties of man, 
 nay, as it often seems to be stated, a new set of 
 faculties in man which he has not possessed 
 before. But how entirely explicable, how natural 
 it is, if what the Incarnation did was to redeem 
 men into what was their original and undestroyed 
 nature and privilege! What wonder that the 
 hidden sonship should have been forever flashing 
 forth wherever the crust of earthliness and sen- 
 suality and selfishness was thinnest ! How di- 
 vinely, as the dream and hope of all the best souls 
 that had ever lived, as " the desire of all na- 
 tions," comes at last the Son of God " to take
 
 48 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 away sin by the sacrifice of Himself/' by won- 
 drous and unutterable pain so to make manifest 
 the love of God that man's selfishness might be 
 broken into fragments, and the divine idea of 
 humanity which had flashed forth through cracks 
 should glow in one unhindered glory over all the 
 redeemed life of man. 
 
 There is not one word of the argument for 
 righteousness on abstract principles, or on the 
 ground of its utility, in all the Gospels. Jesus 
 and Socrates are absolutely incomparable. They 
 start from different points. They journey by 
 different roads. They come in sight of one an- 
 other when their separate journeys mount to their 
 highest elevations. They travel in the same di- 
 rection, but they do not travel together. The 
 one reveals ; the other argues. And it is cer- 
 tainly true of Jesus that the Christian's eagerness 
 to show that all good and all methods for all 
 good were embodied in Him has obscured the 
 definite and single method which He did use to 
 bring men into the service of duty. " I am the 
 Son of Goc " He said. " Yet I am one with
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 49 
 
 you. You, too, are the sons of God. His image, 
 all blurred and stained, is in yon. Let me set it 
 free, restore it, redeem it ; and then you shall 
 live by the law of your own renewed wills. The 
 pattern shall be in your hearts when those hearts 
 once more are pure. The image of God, mani- 
 fest first in Me, and from Me reawakened in your 
 own filial consciousness, that is the pattern of 
 your life, the standard of your duty." 
 
 And so we are ready now for the second point 
 of which I wished to speak. Nothing is so im- 
 perfect, nothing, indeed, is so melancholy, so 
 tragical, as a pattern set before a man which he 
 has no power to attain. It is like a boat at sea 
 with the best compass in the world on board, but 
 neither oars nor sails. The faithful needle tells 
 its story ; there is no doubt which way we ought 
 to sail ; but there we lie, tossing up and down, 
 without progress, or drifted only by the stupid 
 sea on which we float. Along with the revelation 
 of the Divine pattern in Christ finding its echo 
 in the people's selves to whom He spoke, there 
 must have come some motive, some stimulus to 
 follow and attain the pattern which He set ; and
 
 50 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 that, the more we read the Gospels, it grows 
 evident to us was just as simple and just as 
 peculiarly His own as was the setting up of the 
 pattern. The motive, too, was wholly personal, 
 and was all based upon man's filialness. It was 
 purely and solely the elevation to its highest 
 power of that same force which, in the human 
 family, causes the father's life to be repeated 
 in the child's. We call it love ; but we must 
 remember that full love always has two elements, 
 and we must be sure that we keep both of them 
 in our thought when we speak of the power by 
 which the human life is shaped into the image 
 of the Divine. Love is at once admiration and 
 affection. We often separate the two. We talk 
 of loving some poor creature in whom there is 
 nothing admirable. We talk of loving some cold 
 statue which makes no appeal to our affection. 
 But really these are only mangled parts of love. 
 True love, complete love, finely combines a pure, 
 unselfish perception of the essential quality of 
 a character with a warm personal gratitude for 
 what that character bestows on us. The per- 
 ception of absolute quality saves it from foolish
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 5 1 
 
 fondness, and the gratitude rescues it from being 
 the mere dilettanteism of the connoisseur. It is 
 a love like this which makes the power of Chris- 
 tian morals. Look, for instance, at that great 
 event in which the whole life and work of the 
 Savior found its completion. I mean His cruci- 
 fixion. I do not speak now of the essential mys- 
 tery which is in that wonderful event. I count 
 alike foolish and short-sighted the two men, both 
 of whom try to eliminate and scatter the mys- 
 teriousness of the cross of Christ, one of them 
 by saying that there is no peculiar and special 
 character in that strange and single death, the 
 other by dissecting its power into its elements 
 and trying to account for all its force. I know that 
 the death of the beggar, the death of the baby, has 
 in it a mystery of force which no wisest man can 
 comprehend. I know that He whose life was 
 one with the baby's and the beggar's, and yet in- 
 finitely deeper, vaster, must have had a mystery 
 in His death over which eternity shall keep guard, 
 husbanding its treasures, and giving them forth 
 to the eternally ripening soul as it shall need and 
 shall be able to receive them. He who tells me
 
 52 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 that he will read to me now the mystery of the 
 death of Jesus, shuts my ears with his very offer. 
 I will not let him tear for me the mystery of the 
 dawn which no hand can hasten as it slowly 
 brightens to the full morning. And so it is not 
 of the essential mystery of Christ's powerful 
 death, but of its immediate moral power that I 
 speak. It is the great renewing spectacle of 
 human life. When men look at it, there comes 
 up out of their hearts the pattern of divinity 
 which is there, their sonship to the Holy One ; 
 and to attain that holiness, to realize it perfectly, 
 becomes the passion of their lives. And it is 
 love for the Sufferer which makes that passion, 
 love with its two perfect elements perfectly com- 
 bined. It is admiration for what He is doing, 
 the unselfishness, the heroism, the godlike pa- 
 tience. And it is gratitude because He is doing 
 it for us. It is these two that blend into the pas- 
 sionate devotion with which a man, in the great 
 phrase of the Gospels, " follows after Christ," 
 seeks, that is, with his own essential sonship, to 
 realize in himself the sonship of the Son of God. 
 One loves to think, nay, one rejoices to be sure.
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 53 
 
 that under all the most artificial shall we not 
 say under all the most fantastic? theories which 
 men have framed and held concerning the power 
 of the death of Jesus, this sweet and reasonable 
 influence proceeding from it has always done its 
 blessed work. With silent, soft, and mighty 
 pressure, the sight of the Sufferer's holiness and 
 the gratitude for the Sufferer's pity, as one com- 
 plete power, one perfect love, has drawn the 
 depths of men's lives on to the nature of the Suf- 
 ferer, and there their oneness to Him has become 
 known to them, and they, in and through Him, 
 have been renewed into the image of their 
 Father and His Father. The robber who was 
 crucified with Him felt that power first. It was 
 a baptism of blood, and the power which our 
 baptisms re-echo found its first utterance in him. 
 " Being by nature born in sin and the child of 
 wrath," there by the fellowship of suffering, there 
 by the power of love, in which admiration and 
 gratitude met, he was made the " child of grace." 
 
 Let us trace now, if I have defined it clearly, 
 some of the qualities which this inherent charac-
 
 54 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 ter of the Christian impulse imprints upon the 
 Christian morality. And first of all I name that 
 union of discontent and hope which, in the first 
 disciples, and in all who have followed in their 
 footsteps, has always marked the progress of the 
 Christian's moral life. Remember one more scene 
 in the rich Gospels. It is once more the Sea of 
 Galilee. Simon Peter, that transparent nature 
 in whom we are able to trace, as in the simplest 
 organism, those changes and reactions which be- 
 come obscure and hard to trace in structures 
 that are more complete and complicated, Si- 
 mon Peter has Jesus in his little fishing-boat. 
 And this time it is by some exhibition of His 
 power, by some wonderful draught of fishes in 
 the before empty net, that the personality of the 
 Master has been pressed close upon His disciple. 
 And then Peter breaks out. Prostrate at Jesus's 
 knees, " Depart from me," he cries, " for I am a 
 sinful man, O Lord ! " Despondency, almost de- 
 spair, a deep sight into his own heart, a bitter 
 sense of contrast with the nature which the touch 
 of miracle, like a flash of lightning, had made 
 clear to him, all this is in those passionate and
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 55 
 
 hurried words. But what comes next ? " When 
 they had brought their ships to land, they forsook 
 all and followed Him." Peter and all the rest ! 
 Not only all the rest, but Peter! With the 
 imploring cry, " Depart ! " yet on his lips, he 
 follows Him whom he had begged to go away. 
 It was the power of love overwhelming the sense 
 of unworthiness, and filling him with hope. It 
 was the noble, beautiful inconsequence and in- 
 consistence of a great nature all in tumult, which 
 never felt the attraction of holiness so irresistibly 
 as when it seemed altogether beyond his reach, 
 and never so knew how unholy he was as at the 
 very moment when the power of holiness was 
 making him its slave and chaining him, a willing 
 follower and servant, to the feet of the Holy 
 One. Nothing but personal love can hold and 
 harmonize that inconsistency. Only in the com- 
 plete devotion of a soul that sees in the appar- 
 ently unattainable that which it knows, by a 
 sense beyond all reason, by a movement of its 
 own profoundest consciousness, that it can and 
 must attain, nothing but that could have made 
 strength out of such weakness, and hope out of 
 the very substance of despair.
 
 Again, I think that Christ's whole use of pun- 
 ishments and threats is characteristic of the idea 
 on which His whole moral treatment of humanity 
 proceeds. A tyrant uses threats and punish- 
 ments for restriction, desiring to repress that 
 which is mischievous and bad. A parent, if he 
 is truly parental, and not at all tyrannical, uses 
 threats and punishments as means of revelation 
 and enfranchisement, that he may set free for 
 their own higher action a knowledge and ability 
 which is held in prison. The blows of one are 
 struck to bind the fetters tight ; the other's blows 
 are struck to loose the fetters, that the limbs' na- 
 tive powers may go free. What are the blows of 
 Jesus ? He sends out His disciples to do His 
 work, to preach His gospel ; and He declares to 
 them what shall be the penalty of unfaithfulness 
 and partial, compromising consecration. "He 
 that loveth father or mother more than me is not 
 worthy of me. He that loveth son or daughter 
 more than me is not worthy of me. He that 
 findeth his life shall lose it." But instantly, 
 part of the same verse, before He takes His 
 breath, He cries, " He that loseth his life for My
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 57 
 
 sake shall find it." The threat is nothing to 
 Him. He does not care to inspire fear unless, 
 startled and stirred by danger, the men to whom 
 He speaks can be made to tremble down so deep 
 that the capacity of being all that He wants them 
 to be shall wake out of its slumber and stand 
 upon its feet, and, shaking the very thought of 
 fear away, go forth to a duty which has its only 
 inspiration in the consciousness of privilege and 
 in the thought of blessing. He always shakes 
 the sleepy soul, not as the jailer, who rouses the 
 wretch upon his execution morning, to lead him 
 to his death, but as the watchman, who puts the 
 sword into the drowsy soldier's hand that he may 
 go and fight his battle. It is as a revelation of 
 blessing by the dreadfulness of its opposite. It 
 is as the golden medal shown on its reverse, with 
 all its deep depressions only indicating the prom- 
 ontories of happiness and goodness which its 
 true face contains. It is thus that Jesus always 
 threatens men with punishment. The tutor of a 
 French prince, I have read, used to tie a rod to 
 the child's sash when he had deserved to be pun- 
 ished for a fault. It was an appeal to his prince-
 
 58 The Infltteiice of Jesus 
 
 liness. It was the suggestion and reminder of 
 how a prince ought to behave. It was an appeal 
 to his native nobility, and not to his fear of pain. 
 It seems to me as if every threatening of Christ 
 were an appeal to the native princeliness of man, 
 to his royal nature as the son of the King of 
 kings, a sacred being to whom sin is eternally 
 unnatural and punishment a dreadful anomaly 
 and shame. 
 
 And yet again I find the same meaning in the 
 wise and measured use which Jesus always makes 
 of the machinery of duty and of the forms of 
 righteousness in their relation to the impulse of 
 duty and the purpose of righteousness. These 
 last are never for a moment lost from sight. The 
 kingliness of the impulse, the subordination of 
 the instrument and the form, are never allowed 
 to become obscure. An abandonment of all 
 forms and outward instruments is very easy. A 
 true adjustment of them to the unseen purposes 
 which they subserve is as rare as it is hard, as 
 hard as it is rare. It is in the healthiest and 
 truest family life that their balance is most per- 
 fectly preserved. And when the Lord insists oo
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 59 
 
 celebrating His profound spiritual consecration 
 by being baptized in Jordan ; when, in His kingli- 
 ness, He does not refuse to pay His tribute ; when 
 He sends the poor leper, who is already cured, to 
 get his warrant of restored health from the priest; 
 when He bids His disciples observe and do what- 
 soever the Pharisees who sit in Moses's seat shall 
 bid them do, in all these cases it is the law of 
 the family life which He is laying down to them, 
 the law which reaches back to the fact, but yet 
 does not neglect the method, and through the 
 form tries to shape the substance for its maturer 
 life. It is the perfection of that instinct with 
 which the dying Socrates, having left his rich 
 legacy of spiritual teaching to his scholars, with 
 his last breath bids them not forget the cock 
 for ^Esculapius, which was the formal type and 
 expression of his piety. 
 
 I have only one more suggestion to offer on 
 this head. There are words of Jesus, here and 
 there, in which He distinctly sets His own faith 
 fulness as the type and inspiration of the faithful- 
 ness which He expects of His disciples. Listen 
 to the solemnity which is in His voice as, at the
 
 60 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 table of the Last Supper, He looks up into His 
 Father's face and prays for these, His brethren . 
 "As Thou has sent Me into the world, even so 
 have I also sent them into the world. Sanctify 
 them through Thy truth." Or, just before, look- 
 ing directly into the disciples' eyes, " This is my 
 commandment, that ye love one another as I 
 have loved you." And yet again, " I in them 
 and Thou in Me, that they all may be one in Us." 
 Who can read words like these and not catch 
 sight of what it was that was to fill these disci- 
 ples' lives with energy, and to be the atmos- 
 phere wherein their new goodness should get all 
 its growth ? God's fatherhood to them made 
 visible in Christ, His Son ; their sonship to God 
 made visible in Christ, their brother. It was as 
 if, at the beginning of all the ages down which 
 their Christian life has run, they lay, like Jacob 
 on the night when he went out to his new life 
 from his father's house, and to them, as to him. 
 a ladder seemed to stretch up into heaven, and 
 the angels of God ascended and descended on 
 it, the angels of duty bringing God's strength 
 to men, and carrying men's obedience to God, on
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 61 
 
 the ladder of the fatherhood and son ship that 
 bound the heavens to the earth, set up in the 
 new Beth-el, the new House of God, which was 
 the life of Jesus. 
 
 It only remains that we should point out what 
 must be some of the perpetual marks of a moral- 
 ity which is the outgrowth of such a faith as 
 ours. Those marks belong to the Christian 
 morality of all times. They are not separable 
 from it. When we look into the future and see 
 the goodness of humanity developing within the 
 idea of Jesus, we must expect to see a greater 
 and greater prominence of those marks in it. 
 When we seek our own moral development from 
 Him, we must look for it in the only kind 
 which His method can bestow. 
 
 The first mark will be the prominence of 
 what we may call the duties of sentiment. 
 " Thou shalt love the Lord." " Thou shalt love 
 thy brother." Thou shalt love. The duty of 
 loving, there is nothing of that in the codes of 
 abstract duty. It is impossible to exclude that 
 from its fundamental place in the system of duty 
 whose constant spring is in the fatherhood of
 
 62 The Inflitence of Jesus 
 
 God. But evidently this quality, this exaltation 
 of the duty of sentiment over the duty of action, 
 which makes the action valuable simply as an 
 utterance of the sentiment, this is a most im- 
 portant quality It cannot be ignored. It gives 
 the color and tone to all the morality which it 
 pervades. It exposes that morality, no doubt, 
 at the outset, to the charge and the danger 
 of weakness and sentimentality, but in the end 
 it gives it a buoyancy and elasticity and per- 
 petual vitality which prophesy for it a perma- 
 nence as endless as the Being in whose love it 
 lives is everlasting ; and so it is the one moral- 
 ity for which we can predict no end. Of this 
 quality in duty it is no Christian's place to be 
 ashamed or afraid. None of us may melt it 
 away or sink it out of sight. In its prominence 
 lies the soul of the duty that we do. We may 
 not try to make that duty cold and soulless which 
 has its true being in the central commandment 
 which is its living soul, " Thou shalt love." 
 
 Another mark of the Christian morality, the 
 morality whose root is in the sonship of the soul 
 to God, is the harmony with which it holds the
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 63 
 
 absoluteness of goodness and the various respon- 
 sibilities of men, It is full of discriminations 
 which yet never tamper with the unchangeable 
 sanctity of righteousness. As in the parable of 
 Him from whom it all proceeds, so, in the life 
 which that parable describes, the different talents 
 of different servants are fully taken into the 
 account. Duty is measured by chance, and yet 
 the essential idea of duty is never weakened. I 
 am bound to do less than you, but I am just as 
 severely bound to do my little as you are to do 
 your much. Where else could those ideas be 
 kept in perfect harmony and peace, neither of 
 them hurting the other, but within the larger 
 idea of fatherhood ? In what group could the 
 child take his little task, fitted to his little hands, 
 and do it, with the entire conviction that he 
 must do it, and, nevertheless, not vexed nor be- 
 wildered by the sight of tasks a thousand times 
 greater than his own being done close by his side ; 
 and, at the same time, the great man, the hero, 
 dedicate himself to his vast work with no sense 
 of oppression or injustice, nor with any feeling of 
 superiority or pride, in what group could these
 
 64 The Influence of Jesuit 
 
 two faithful souls work on, in such difference 
 and yet in such identity, but in a family where 
 every child has his own special duty, great or 
 small, clothed with the absoluteness of the Father- 
 hood which is over all ? Where, but in the family 
 idea of man, can these two necessary conceptions 
 of the difference of duties and the absoluteness of 
 duty meet in perfect peace ? 
 
 I note again, as a characteristic of the morality 
 of sonship, the way in which it secures humility 
 by aspiration and not by depression. How to se- 
 cure humility is the hard problem of all systems 
 of duty. He who does work, just in proportion to 
 the faithfulness with which he does it, is always 
 in danger of self-conceit. Very often men seem 
 to have given up the problem in despair, and they 
 lavish unstinted praise upon the vigorous, effec- 
 tive worker without any qualifying blame of the 
 arrogance with which he flaunts the duty that 
 he does in the world's face. " The only way to 
 make him humble," they would seem to say, 
 " would be to make him idle. Let him stop doing 
 duty and then, indeed, he might stop boasting. 
 His arrogance is only the necessary price that the
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 65 
 
 world and he pay for his faithfulness." To such a 
 problem the Christian morality brings its vast con- 
 ception of the universe. Above each man it sets 
 the infinite life. The identity of nature between 
 that life and his, while it enables him to emulate 
 that life, compels him, also, to compare himself 
 with it. The more zealously he aspires to imitate 
 it, the more clearly he must encounter the com- 
 parison. The higher he climbs the mountain, 
 the more he learns how the high mountain is past 
 his climbing. It is the oneness of the soul's life 
 with God's life that at once makes us try to be 
 like Him and brings forth our unlikeness to Him. 
 It is the source at once of aspiration and humility. 
 The more aspiration, the morehumility. Humility 
 comes by aspiration. If, in all Christian history, 
 it has been the souls which most looked up that 
 were the humblest souls ; if to-day the rescue of a 
 soul from foolish pride must be not by a deprecia- 
 tion of present attainment, but by opening more 
 and more the vastness of the future possibility ; 
 if the Christian man keeps his soul full of the 
 sense of littleness, even in all his hardest work 
 for Christ, not by denying his own stature, but 
 s
 
 66 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 by standing up at his "whole height, and then 
 looking up in love and awe and seeing God tower 
 into infinitude above him, certainly all this 
 stamps the morality which is wrought out within 
 the idea of Jesus with this singular excellence, 
 that it has solved the problem of faithfulness and 
 pride, and made possible humility by aspiration. 
 
 And yet, once more, the morality of Jesus in- 
 volves the only true secret of courage and of the 
 freedom that comes of courage. More and more 
 we come to see that courage is a positive thing. 
 It is not simply the absence of fear. To be brave 
 is not merely not to be afraid. Courage is that 
 compactness and clear coherence of all a man's 
 faculties and powers which makes his manhood 
 a single operative unit in the world. That is 
 the reason why narrowness of thought and life 
 often brings a kind of courage, and why, as men's 
 range of thought enlarges and their relations 
 with their fellowmen increase, there often comes 
 a strange timidity. The bigot is often very 
 brave. He is held fast unto a unit, and pos- 
 sesses himself completely in his own selfishness. 
 For such a bravery as that the man and the
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 67 
 
 world both pay very dear. But when the grasp 
 that holds a man and his powers is not his self- 
 consciousness but his obedience to his Father, 
 when loyalty to Him surrounds and aggregates 
 the man's capacities, so that, held in His hand, 
 the man feels his distinctiveness, his distinctive 
 duty, his distinctive privilege, then you have 
 reached the truth of which the bigot's courage 
 was the imitation. Then you have secured cour- 
 age, not by the limitation, but by the enlargement 
 of the life. Then the dependence upon God 
 makes the independence of man in which are 
 liberty and courage. The man's own personality 
 is found only in the household of his Father, and 
 only in the finding of his personality does he 
 come to absolute freedom and perfect fearlessness. 
 
 May I take a moment now before I close to 
 recapitulate the points along the journey which 
 we have travelled together to-night? We found 
 the family character of Christian duty the way 
 in which it gathered its source out of the essen- 
 tial sonship of man to God indicated in the 
 meeting, firr.t, of the pattern of righteousness
 
 68 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 and the power of righteousness ; and, second, of 
 reasonableness and authority in all the duty 
 which the New Testament enjoins. This I tried 
 to show you in the text-book of duty, the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount. 
 
 Then I tried to show where the moral standard 
 was put by Jesus. It is in the heart of every 
 son of God made conscious of his sonship by the 
 Son of God, who is Jesus. 
 
 Then we traced the nature of this standard as 
 it was actually shown, first, in the combination 
 of severity and goodness in the treatment cf man 
 by Jesus ; second, in the character of His teaching 
 about self-sacrifice ; and third, in the vehement 
 opposition and hatred which His life excited. 
 
 At the same time we saw that while this 
 standard came to its full manifestation in Chris- 
 tianity, it had been struggling for utterance 
 through all the religious life of man. 
 
 Passing, then, from the standard of morals to 
 the motive of morals as Jesus established it, it 
 seemed to be love, justly and fully composed of 
 its two elements of admiring appreciation and 
 personal gratitude.
 
 On the Moral Life of Man. 69 
 
 The working of this motive we saw, first, in 
 the play of discontent and hope which charac- 
 terizes all the moral life of Christianity ; second, 
 in the use which Jesus makes of threats and 
 punishments ; third, in the relation which He 
 establishes between forms and methods on the 
 one hand and impulses and purposes upon the 
 other; and, fourth, in His distinct embrace of all 
 motive within His own person. 
 
 And last of all I tried to show how Christian 
 morality, as the result of all that I had pointed 
 out before, was marked supremely by the duties 
 of sentiment, by combination of absoluteness and 
 breadth with personal definiteness, by the effort 
 to secure humility through aspiration, and by 
 the courage which is born of obedience. 
 
 I know full well how lightly I have travelled 
 over such vast, rich ground, and how much of its 
 riches I have left ungathered. I can only hope 
 that I have shown some thoughtful people where 
 the riches lie, that they may go themselves and 
 gather them. 
 
 It was in His sonship to God that the secret 
 of the holiness of Jesus lay. His Father's busi-
 
 7O The Influence of Jesus. 
 
 ness was the sum of all His life. He knew no 
 motive except that which was summed up in 
 the gratitude of His great prayer: "Father, I 
 have glorified Thee on the earth : I have fin- 
 ished the work which Thou gavest Me to do." 
 The model and the impulse of all duty He 
 carried in His own filial heart, which was forever 
 bearing witness to Him of His Father's perfect- 
 ness. His incarnate days, with all their common 
 duties held and illuminated in that high con- 
 sciousness of sonship, must have been one with 
 the eternity of the past and the eternity that was 
 to be. Duty must have been its own revealer 
 and its own reward. Liberty must have been 
 sublimely consistent with the most scrupulous 
 obedience. The doing right and the being right 
 must have been like the sunshine and the sun. 
 And what duty was to our Master it shall be to 
 us just as soon as we are filled with His idea, 
 just as soon as His spirit bears witness with our 
 spirits that we too are the sons of God
 
 II. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 ON THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN.
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 ON THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 
 
 A TRAVELLER in the Old World is deeply 
 interested in seeing what are the most 
 complete embodiments of themselves which the 
 different struggles of human nature in thought and 
 devotion, have left in art. I remember well the 
 impression of contrast which I received from two 
 when I saw them for the first time, many years 
 ago. In one of the most rich and beautiful of 
 European galleries hangs Raphael's greatest Ma- 
 donna, called the Madonna of St. Sixtus. Among 
 the dreary sands at the edge of the Egyptian 
 desert, under the shadow of the Pyramids, stands 
 the mighty Sphinx, the work of unknown hands, 
 so calm and so eternal in its solitude that it is 
 hard to think of it as the work of human hands 
 at all ; as true a part of the great earth, it seems, 
 as any mountain that pierces upward from its 
 bosom. These two suggest comparisons which
 
 74 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 are certainly not fancies. They are the two 
 great expressions, in art, of the two religions, 
 the religion of the East and of the West. 
 Fatalism and Providence they seem to mean. 
 Both have tried to express a union of humanity 
 with something which is its superior; but one 
 has joined it only to the superior strength of the 
 animal, while the other has filled it with the 
 superior spirituality of a divine nature. One 
 unites wisdom and power, and claims man's hom- 
 age for that conjunction. The other combines 
 wisdom and love, and says, "Worship this." The 
 Sphinx has life in its human face written into a 
 riddle, a puzzle, a mocking bewilderment. The 
 Virgin's face is full of a mystery we cannot fathom* 
 but it unfolds to us a thousand of the mysteries 
 of life. It does not mock, but blesses us. The 
 Sphinx oppresses us with colossal size. The Vir- 
 gin is not a distortion or exaggeration, but a glo- 
 rification of humanity. The Egyptian monster is 
 alone amid its sands, to be worshipped, not loved. 
 The Christian woman has her child clasped in 
 her arms, enters into the societies and sympathies 
 of men, and claims no worship except love.
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 75 
 
 It is in this last difference the difference 
 between the solitude of one and the companion- 
 ship of the other that we feel, I think, mos 1 
 distinctly how different is the Christianity of the 
 picture from the sublime paganism of the statue. 
 The picture is Christian, because it is so truly hu- 
 man. It has not lost humanity in trying to inter- 
 pret Deity. It invites, entices, wins the soul of the 
 man who studies it. It folds itself about his life 
 with a kindred life. It wants him. It seeks him. 
 It is not satisfied till it has found him. Then, 
 as if it were satisfied, there seems to come a new 
 depth in its color, a new sweetness in its celestial 
 light. 
 
 I am to speak to you to-day of the way in 
 which the influence of Jesus enters into the 
 social life of man. I have been led to this 
 remembrance of what we may almost call the 
 constructive power in a great work of Christian 
 art. It is positive, and finds and fastens the re- 
 lationship of human souls to the Divine soul, and so 
 of human souls to one another. As I began to 
 write this lecture, in the midst of the Christmas 
 days, I could not help feeling how the same idea
 
 76 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 was present in that ever-vivid scene of Bethlehem, 
 which shines in the simple and inspired words of 
 the first chapters of the Gospels with a clearness 
 and a depth that the pencil of Raphael could 
 never give. A father, a mother, and a child are 
 there. No religion which began like that could 
 ever lose its character. The first unit of human life, 
 the soul, is there in the new-born personality of 
 the childhood. But the second unit of human 
 life, the family, is just as truly there in the 
 familiar relation of husband and wife, and the sa- 
 cred, eternal mystery of motherhood. He who 
 would know the whole about this Jesus must learn 
 not merely what his own soul will grow to be, but 
 likewise what new life the presence of Jesus in 
 the midst of it will give to this the primal typal 
 group of human life and to all the other groups, 
 the larger families which this one represents. 
 
 Let me define, then, in a few words, what I 
 want to do to-day. It is to show how the idea of 
 Jesus is the constructive power of the social life 
 of man in all its various degrees. That idea we 
 saw in our last lecture was the sonship of man 
 to God, levealed in the sonship to God of Jesus
 
 On the Social Life of Man, 77 
 
 Christ himself. All that He had to show man He 
 had first in Himself; and it was by the develop- 
 ment in men's sight of His own gradually con- 
 scious life that He revealed to men all that they 
 might become. If this -be true, then it is by 
 a study of the social life of Jesus, by seeing 
 how His experience from the very beginning 
 opened into successive relationships, and claimed 
 for itself larger and yet larger intercourses, 
 that we can get His true idea of how the rela- 
 tionships and intercourses of all men ought to 
 be built, how that idea of the Divine Father 
 may become the shaping and cohesive power of 
 them all. This makes the duty that lies before 
 us once more a Biblical study. In those old 
 stories of the Gospels lies our material. Every 
 one of those stories is the idea of Jesus flashed 
 from a new side of His jewel life. All that the 
 fatherhood of God may be to any of His children 
 it was first and perfectly to that only-begotten 
 Son. If we can see what He was among his 
 fellow-men and what His life among them was to 
 Him, we shall have the key to all the mysteries 
 and prob'ems of our own social life.
 
 78 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 In the first place, then, the social life of 
 Jesus underwent the natural and human progress 
 and change from an instinctive impulse to a de- 
 liberate and reasonable conduct. He would have 
 been no true child and man, He would have been 
 a human monster, if it had not been so. I think 
 that it is a most happy sign of the healthy reality 
 which the life of Jesus is gaining in men's 
 thoughts in these our modern days, thax this 
 idea of the development of his consciousness, 
 the gradual growth into the knowledge and the 
 use of His own nature, is no longer an idea that 
 bewilders and shocks the believer in the Lord's 
 divinity. It is felt to be a necessary part of the 
 belief in His humanity. Two centuries, perhaps 
 one century, ago, I think that Christ was far less 
 real to men than He is now. However it may 
 have been with the last century, the century be- 
 fore the last was a religious age. But its religion 
 had grown strangely impersonal. It believed 
 doctrines far more than it believed in the Son of 
 Man. The seventeenth century believed the di- 
 vinity of Christ, but its belief in the divine Christ 
 was weak, and the belief in the human Christ
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 79 
 
 was wellnigh lost, and with this loss I cannot but 
 feel that we must in some way connect the dis- 
 like of Christmas and its observance which 
 then arose, and which is but just now passing 
 entirely away. It had its local causes, which 
 account for it, no doubt. But the whole idea of 
 childhood, with its necessary concomitant idea 
 of growth, was a bewilderment and almost an 
 offence to that theology whose Christ was a mys- 
 terious and unaccountable being, a true spiritual 
 Melchisedec, without vivid and real human asso- 
 ciations, without age, without realized locality, a 
 dogma, a creed, a fulfilment of prophecy, an ad- 
 justment of relations, not a man. It is because 
 Jesus to-day is intensely real, intensely human 
 to us, that we welcome and do not dread 
 the truth of increase and development from 
 babyhood to the full strength and stature of a 
 man. 
 
 And nowhere is this clearer or more beautiful 
 than in that feature of His life which we have to- 
 day to study. The social life of Christ was first 
 an instinct. The child clasped His tiny arms 
 about His mother's neck, or laid His little hand
 
 8o The Influence of Jesus 
 
 into the strong hand of Joseph, as they walked 
 on the long road to Egypt, with the same simple 
 desire to utter love and to find love which is the 
 first sign of Life akin to their own that millions of 
 parents' hearts have leaped to recognize in their 
 first-born. Nay, he but little understands the 
 dignity and unity of all God's vast creation who 
 is offended or distressed when he is told that in the 
 Lord of Life these primal affections were of the 
 same sort with those which make the beauty of 
 the life of the beings which are less than man. 
 Even the dog, the bird, the lion, know these first 
 instincts of companionship which found their con- 
 summate exhibition upon earth when the Son of 
 Mary clung to a human mother with a human love. 
 That instinctive character never passed out of the 
 relationships of Christ. When He bade the disci- 
 ples go with Him to the mountain of transfigura- 
 tion or to the garden of the agony, beneath every 
 design of their enlargement or enlightenment, who 
 does not feel beating the simple human desire 
 for company in the supremely triumphant or 
 supremely terrible moments of life ? When 
 He looks at His disciples, as the multitude are
 
 On the Social Life of Man, 8 1 
 
 leaving Him, and asks them, " Will ye also go 
 away?" or when these same disciples forsake 
 Him and flee upon the night of trial, below the 
 sorrow that He feels for their defection as a sign 
 of their unworthiness, who does not hear the poor 
 heart cry out with that same dread of being left 
 alone which the forlorn wretch in his prison feels 
 as the cell door clashes to between him and hu- 
 manity ? We must start with this instinct, and 
 always this instinct must remain, felt like the 
 beating heart which makes it live, underneath 
 all the fuller understanding of itself into which 
 the companionship of Christ, his social life, 
 may grow. But such a growing understand- 
 ing comes. As Jesus develops into manhood, the 
 idea of His existence grows and rounds itself to 
 clearness. By and by He is full of the conscious- 
 ness that He is the Son of God, and that through 
 His sonship this world-full of men is to learn that 
 they are God's sons and are to be brought back 
 to their Father. And when He had been filled 
 with that idea, then the instinct which had 
 already drawn Him to his brethren found its in- 
 terpretation. He knew why He sought them.
 
 82 7 he Influence of Jesus 
 
 It was for the self-indulgence of His own con- 
 sciousness, and it was for the enlightenment of 
 theirs. By and by, if I ask why Jesus shrink? 
 from solitude, and craves to have John and James 
 and Peter with him, I find myself able to say, 
 I find myself compelled to say, something more 
 than just that such is His healthy human instinct. 
 I recognize that He is deliberately seeking two 
 things there : first, the self-knowledge of His own 
 sonship to God ; and, second, the enlightenment 
 of these men's consciousness to know that they 
 are the sons of God. I see the sun break in with 
 a triumphant burst of light upon a chamber set 
 with countless jewels, but which has thus far 
 been wholly shut up in the dark. There is a 
 double joy, I think, in the great heart of the sun- 
 light as, almost with a shout that one can hear, 
 it floods the opened chamber with itself. First, it 
 finds new interpretation of itself, it finds itself, as 
 it were, in the new stories of its glory which the 
 jewels tell, as, one by one, they burn under its 
 touch ; and, second, it feels every jewel quiver 
 under its fiery hand with the transporting discov- 
 ery of its own nature. I see a good man, long
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 83 
 
 shut out from human company, come among his 
 brethren. With a leap and burst almost like the 
 sunshine, he casts his solitude behind him and 
 flings himself into their sympathies and hopes. I 
 let the explanation of it at first rest in the mere 
 unexplained instinct of humanity ; but when 
 I come to analyze his motive to its elements, I 
 know that it must be made up of these two im- 
 pulses, the desire of self-knowledge and the de- 
 sire of illuminating others, the desire of burning 
 and -the desire of shining, which are the two 
 strong, ineradicable passions of the soul. The man 
 goes into the multitude that he may find himself 
 and that he may declare them to themselves. 
 All human society which has not these impulses 
 more or less consciously within it is but the 
 herding of animals for the mere fear of being 
 alone or the mere joy of being together. 
 
 All this is illustrated with great clearness in 
 that event which has a profound interest as 
 marking the first recorded time when Jesus ever 
 deliberately and of His own accord sought the 
 society of His fellow-men. He lingered behind 
 the group into which the mere circumstances of
 
 84 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 His life had cast Him, and for Himself He sought 
 the venerable doctors in the Temple. What took 
 Him there ? To find Himself and to show them 
 to themselves. The two great, everlasting hu- 
 man impulses, the impulse of the student seeking 
 to know himself, and the impulse of the mis- 
 sionary seeking to enlighten men, these two, 
 which partial men call inconsistent and incom- 
 patible with one another, burned with a single 
 flame the first no doubt the brightest, but yet 
 incapable of being separated from the other in 
 the soul of Jesus, as, among His brethren, He 
 began to " be about His Father's business." 
 
 In general, then, the social nature of man is 
 the provision at once for his most complete self- 
 consciousness and for his fullest activity and 
 efficiency. It was by losing His life in the mul- 
 titude and mass of lives, in the body of the 
 humanity to which He belonged, that Jesus at 
 once found His own life and found the lives of 
 the lost whom He had come to seek. At the 
 very outset He bore witness that not in absolute 
 singleness, not in elemental unity and perfeci 
 solitude of being, is the highest existence to be
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 85 
 
 found. He recognized at once in man that 
 multiplicity and power of relationship within the 
 unit of humanity which makes the richness of 
 our human life. If it be so, as we believe it is, 
 that in the constitution of humanity we have the 
 fairest written analogue and picture of the Divine 
 existence, then shall we not say that the human 
 Christ gave us, in the value which He set on 
 human relationships, in His social thought of 
 man, an insight into the essentialness and 
 value of that social thought of God which we 
 call the doctrine of the Trinity ? May it not be 
 that only by multiplicity and interior self-relation- 
 ship can Divinity have the completest self-con- 
 sciousness and energy ? Surely, the reverent 
 and thoughtful eye must see some such meaning 
 when Jesus Himself makes the eternal compan- 
 ionship of the life of Deity the pattern and pic- 
 ture of the best society of the souls of earth, and 
 breathes out to His Father these deep and won- 
 drous words, " As thou Father art in Me and 
 I in Thee, that they all may be one in Us." 
 
 Let us pass on now to examine in more detail 
 the social life of Jesus as it is written in the Gos-
 
 86 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 pels, and to see, if we can, what suggestions come 
 from it to throw light upon the true methods of 
 all social living. It naturally divides itself into 
 the three sections into which all our relations to 
 our fellow-men fall ; and in that division it will 
 be natural for us to consider it. I shall speak 
 first of the natural relationships of Jesus with 
 individuals ; and then of His relation to the group 
 of disciples which was the rudimentary church ; 
 and then of His relation to His country. The 
 purely social, the ecclesiastical, and the patriotic 
 life demand our study. 
 
 Every now and then there are flashes of 
 light upon the Gospel page which let us see what 
 a bright, sunny, sympathetic life the Savior lived, 
 how perfectly free from harshness and asceti- 
 cism was that character which, at the same time, 
 carried a sweet and gentle seriousness and a 
 robust earnestness with it wherever it went. 
 " The son of man came eating and drinking, and 
 they say, a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a 
 friend of publicans and sinners." So Jesus Him- 
 self described one day the current impression 
 that His life made upon the people of Jerusalem.
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 87 
 
 The words are like an instantaneous photograph 
 of that far distant time. Where one's enemies 
 find chance to taunt, one's friends almost always 
 find occasion to be puzzled. In those words we 
 can see friends and enemies alike busied with the 
 strange life of Jesus, and only gradually finding 
 out that it was they who were strange, and not 
 He, gradually coming first to feel and then to 
 understand that this life of His, so bright and 
 yet so serious, so individual and yet so social, 
 had reached completely what their lives were 
 only crudely struggling after. The same feeling 
 broke forth upon another day. Jesus was supping 
 at a " great feast " in the house of Levi, no 
 sumptuous Venetian banquet, such as the great 
 master's hand has painted, but a half-barbaric 
 scene of profuse hospitality which merely told the 
 host's good-will, and the Pharisees looked on 
 and said, " Why do the disciples of John fast, 
 and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees, but 
 thine eat and drink ? " They hated John the 
 Baptist, but they understood him. They found 
 him in the same region of spiritual endeavor in 
 which they livei themselves. They recognized
 
 88 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 in him the same desire to realize individual 
 responsibility and the seriousness of life by iso- 
 lation, by surrender, by cutting off everything 
 which by completing life should confuse it. Jesus 
 had pushed on where they could not follow Him. 
 He had gone into the very heart of the society 
 where men lose their individuality to find His, 
 and into the very centre of that world where 
 seriousness is ordinarily lost, to find there the 
 true solemnity of living. 
 
 For always there are these three possible 
 stages in every advancing moral and spiritual 
 life. There is, first, safety in simplicity ; and, 
 second, the loss of self in complication ; and then, 
 at last, the higher self-possession in a sym- 
 metrical and harmonized multiplicity. They are 
 the stages which are represented by childhood 
 and young manhood and middle life, in every 
 complete career. The child, with his simple, 
 serene, uncomplicated thought of life, seems 
 master of himself ; the young man, tossed like a 
 helpless swimmer in the midst of the billowy 
 world, has lost himself; the man of middle age, 
 who has reached the profoundest faiths and prin-
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 89 
 
 ciples of living, has found himself, and lives in 
 a steady self-possession which is to the child's 
 security like the noonday to the dawn. Now 
 the Pharisees were children. They were afraid 
 of life. They wanted to perpetuate childhood 
 by keeping it out of the power of life. John 
 Baptist's disciples, too, were children ; only the 
 difference was that their great master knew that 
 the true childhood does not last, but turns to 
 something greater. He sent his disciples forth 
 into life, the life of exposure, and so the life 
 of true attainment, when he pointed them to 
 Jesus and said, " Behold the Lamb of God which 
 taketh away the sins of the world," not merely 
 stifles them and keeps them down, but " taketh 
 them away." 
 
 Nowhere is Jesus satisfied until He himself 
 has reached, and till He has led His disciples 
 on towards, this third region of completed char- 
 acter, and made them possess themselves, not in 
 solitude, where character would be so much easier 
 and so much more imperfect, but in contact with 
 the world. I know that we lose much of the 
 beauty of His treatmer.t, both of Himself and
 
 9O The Influence of Jesus 
 
 of His servants, when we feel about in its clear 
 depths for conscious and definite intentions. I 
 know that He, above all men, did what He did 
 because He was what He was, from a deepei 
 necessity than any deliberate persuasion that 
 His disciples needed this or that teaching at this 
 or that special time. But still, as we formulate 
 the impulses of nature into the laws of nature, 
 and find reasons, which the winds and suns do 
 not care themselves to know, why they should 
 blow and shine just as we feel and see them, 
 reasons true, though not the truest or the deep- 
 est, so we may dare to say about the acts of 
 Jesus, " He must have done this act for this," if 
 we can only keep the deeper knowledge that He 
 did every act just as He did it because He was 
 Jesus, and could not do it otherwise. Using such 
 reverent liberty, I think we may love to study 
 the way in which He opened every social event 
 into its deeper meaning, so that the men who 
 were in danger of losing themselves in the crowd 
 might really find themselves, might enter into a 
 self-possess; Dn there which they could not attain 
 in solitude. Let us look at a few.
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 91 
 
 Jesus went one day to a marriage feast at the 
 little town of Cana. Why did He go ? I know 
 no reason except that for which we go to where 
 our friends are happy, to make them know 
 that we are glad because of their happiness. 
 When He came there, the rooms were full of 
 men and women, all vividly conscious that they 
 belonged to one another. Husbands and wives, 
 brothers and sisters, all degrees of kinship, all 
 kinds of cousins, all feeling their common blood 
 upon this family holiday. To Him, the grave, 
 strong, sweet-faced man who stood among them, 
 so familiar yet so strange, they were His Father's 
 children. They had forgotten that. They were 
 so absorbed in t'heir brotherhoods that they had 
 forgotten their Father. The miracle which Jesus 
 did was like the opening of a window upward, 
 so that that truth shone down upon them. They 
 were giving one another bread and meat in token 
 of their brotherhood. Suddenly Jesus spoke to 
 the water in the jars, and there was wine before 
 them, so suddenly, so mysteriously, so apart from 
 any ministry which they were doing to each 
 other, that they looked into one another's faces
 
 92 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 and felt divinity. They said, " Our Father must 
 be here. We are not only brothers, we are 
 children. Let us remember that." And each 
 remembered it the better because he did not 
 drink the mysterious wine alone, but saw his 
 brethren drinking it beside him. Each found 
 himself the child of God more easily because of 
 the fragment of the universal family in which 
 the wonder and awakening came to him. 
 
 Or turn again to one of the scenes of which I 
 spoke in the last lecture. Jesus went once to 
 supper in a ruler's house. Again the conscious- 
 ness of brotherhood lay like a rich atmosphere 
 through the great, softly lighted hall. While 
 they are eating, behold a poor creature comes 
 creeping in, and casts herself at the feet of the 
 honored Guest, and begins (what other words can 
 describe it except those dear words of the story ?) 
 to "wash His feet with her tears, and did wipe 
 them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His 
 feet and anointed them with the ointment." Jesus 
 looked up, and with clear, brave, simple words 
 told the perplexed company that she was one 
 of them, able to love, able to trust, able to be
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 93 
 
 forgiven. What then? All these are privileges 
 and powers of childhood knowing a fatherhood 
 above it. The guests listened ; and as when a 
 group of men, all prosperous, all respectable, 
 brothers to one another, talking together, see 
 suddenly among them one, their brother too, 
 but poor, sick, wretched, pitiable, and then their 
 thoughts turn back to the house where they all 
 were children, and the father who was father 
 to them all; as the very sight of inequality 
 compels the simple sense of brotherhood to 
 complete itself with the memory of fatherhood ; 
 so, when Jesus lifted this poor creature up and 
 said, as He looked round upon the upright, 
 reputable men, "This is your sister," the brother- 
 hood that filled the hall warmed with the deeper 
 memory of fatherhood, and the guests found 
 their childhood to God in the strange society of 
 the noblest of His sons and the most degraded 
 of His daughters. 
 
 There was one house where Jesus went very 
 often, the cottage of Mary and Martha and 
 Lazarus at Bethany. There He lived not merely 
 a social but a domestic life, not merely a life
 
 94 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 of society, but a life of home. In that house, 
 brotherhood and sisterhood bloomed into such 
 perfect flower that it has been fragrant and 
 beautiful to all the generations. They were 
 religious people. No doubt each of them in soli- 
 tude strove after and found the fatherhood of 
 God. But we can well imagine that when they 
 were together it was their brotherhood and sis- 
 terhood that was most prominent. And what 
 did Jesus do for them ? Silver and gold, like 
 His disciple, He had none ; but such as He 
 had, His own supreme consciousness, such as He 
 was, He gave to them. One day He told the 
 anxious elder sister that there was a "better 
 part " in life than the most faithful work for the 
 comfort of brother and of sister. He taught her 
 His own lesson, that man doth not live by bread 
 alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
 the mouth of God his Father. On another sol- 
 emn day He allowed the household life to feel 
 the shock of death and to be broken, in order 
 that He might call upon His Father and their 
 Father to restore it by what was like to a new 
 birth. And as the coming of a child into a
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 95 
 
 household breaks open its narrowness to let in 
 the broad thought of God, so the brotherhood 
 and sisterhood of Bethany must have been deep- 
 ened and filled with the consciousness of sonship 
 and daughtership, whenever that boy-man 
 young forever with something of the perpetual 
 youth of those who have passed through the 
 grave and come out in the timeless life beyond 
 went about among them. 
 
 I turn to one scene more. Jesus was teaching 
 one day in the Temple, doing His Father's busi- 
 ness, and some one told Him that far off, on the 
 outside of the crowd, His mother and His broth- 
 ers were waiting to talk with Him. He paused 
 perhaps a moment, as if pondering whether He 
 should leave His work, and then, just, it seems 
 to me, as if He stooped down and took hold of 
 the human relationship which had been offered 
 Him, and turned it over to show men its diviner 
 side, He looked around and said, " Who are My 
 mother and My brethren ? " And then, stretch- 
 ing out His hand to His disciples, "These are 
 My mother and My brethren." It was as if He 
 said, " Motherhood and brotherhood are true and
 
 g6 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 real only within the fatherhood of God. When- 
 ever that common fatherhood is real, there is a 
 true relationship to which the tender associations 
 of earthly kinship are in themselves inferior. 
 The earthly kinships are the symbol of this 
 celestial reality. The beauty of the household is 
 in the reality, not in the symbol. The symbol 
 and the reality belong together. My brothers 
 and My mother after the flesh do represent to 
 Me, as no other beings can, the dear fatherhood 
 of God, the relations of eternity. But sometimes 
 the symbol must wait, lest it hinder instead of 
 helping the reality." Therefore, Mary waited 
 while Jesus went on and preached to those 
 whom He claimed as " brother and sister and 
 mother," because they were doing the will of 
 His Father which was in heaven. 
 
 All these are illustrations. In every one of 
 them, I take it, the meaning is the same. Jesus 
 begins with the individual. He always does. 
 His first and deepest touches are upon the single 
 soul. Before all social life there is the personal 
 consciousness and its mysterious private rela- 
 tions to the Father from whom it came. The
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 97 
 
 father cannot teach his boy so early that God 
 shall not have taught him first. The mother 
 cannot drop such soft, unconscious influence 
 into her child's soul that it shall not find the soul 
 itself already full of the influence of God. In the 
 individual experience man's life always begins. 
 But there are some things of the individual life 
 which the individual cannot get save in the com- 
 pany of fellow-men. There are some parts of 
 his own true life always in his brethren's keeping, 
 for which he must go to them. That the indi- 
 vidual may find and be his own truest and fullest 
 self, Jesus, his Master, leads him to his fellows. 
 The wedding guest at Cana, the Pharisee at 
 Levi's table, the sisters with their restored 
 brother, the brothers of the Lord in the house 
 of the carpenter, all, just as soon as Jesus 
 sanctified and blessed the society in which they 
 lived, saw coming to them as it were out of the 
 heart of that society a selfhood which no solitary 
 contemplation could have gained. Each of them 
 found his Father among his brethren, reached 
 God through the revelation of other human 
 lives. 
 
 7
 
 98 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 This is the fundamental truth out of which 
 comes the regulative law of Jesus about social 
 life. Society does not exist for itself, but for the 
 individual ; and man goes into it not to lose, but 
 to find himself. The ancient society, the heathen 
 society of to-day, whether in some savage island 
 or in some fashionable parlor, is ready always to 
 sacrifice the personal nature, the individual soul. 
 As if society itself were an object worthy of per- 
 fecting for its own value, it overwhelms individ- 
 ual character and pitilessly sees lives lost in its 
 great whirlpool. I think the great charge that 
 Jesus, if He spoke to-day, would bring against our 
 modern social life, our present society, as it in 
 large part exists, would be this. He would see 
 its impurity ; He would recognize the falseness 
 that pervades it ; He would turn away from its 
 sordidness with disappointment ; but, most of 
 all, He would miss in it that power to cultivate the 
 personal life of the individual by the revelation of 
 the divine side of human existence which is every- 
 where His ideal of social living. It is not always 
 so. There are small groups of men gathered on 
 such high ground that each of them becomes
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 99 
 
 aware of himself, of his capacities and duties, in 
 the association with his brethren. Especially 
 there are friendships, the sympathetic meeting of 
 man and man, in which each knows himself as he 
 could not in solitude. But our ordinary life with 
 one another, what, in the language of the world, 
 we call society, has so left and lost the spontane- 
 ousness of natural impulse and so failed to attain 
 the highest conception of itself as the family of 
 God, it so hangs fast in the dull middle regions 
 of conventional propriety and selfish expediency, 
 that it becomes not the fountain, but the grave, of 
 individuality. Men go to it to escape themselves. 
 Men dread it, as they grow older, for younger 
 men, because its influences seem to be fatal to 
 original and positive character. Men flee to soli- 
 tude to recruit their personality. Nowhere do 
 we find on earth that picture of society recon- 
 structed by the idea of Jesus, society around the 
 thrcne of God, which shines out upon us from 
 the mysterious promises of the Apocalypse ; the 
 glory of which society is to be this, that while 
 the souls stand in their vast choruses of hundreds 
 of thousands, and all chant the same anthems
 
 ioo The Influence of 
 
 and all work together in the same transcendent 
 duties, yet each bears the sacred name written 
 on the flesh of his own forehead, and carries in 
 his hand a white stone, on which is written a new 
 name which no man knoweth saving he that 
 receiveth it. It is individuality emphasized by 
 company, and not lost in it, because the atmos- 
 phere in which the company is met is the idea of 
 Jesus, which is the fatherhood of God. 
 
 And here we come where we can understand 
 some other things which the great Teacher 
 said, which, if they stood alone, would puzzle us 
 hopelessly. Here He is, in His mountain sermon, 
 telling of. what is to be the issue of His work. It 
 is almost as if He spoke in reverie. He hardly 
 seems to be speaking to the people, or to be con- 
 scious of them. He seems to be reading for the 
 first time a page of the future which has never 
 opened to Him before ; or to be rereading one 
 which, however often He may read it, is forever 
 new and wonderful. " Think not that I am come 
 to send peace on the earth," He says ; "I can.e 
 not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to 
 set a man at variance against his father, and the
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 101 
 
 daughter against her mother, and the daughter- 
 in-law against her mother-in-law : and a. .nan's 
 foes shall be they of his own household." And 
 at another time, when He looked around, and saw 
 a superficial multitude following Him, He seemed 
 seized with that desire which many a true man 
 has felt, to test and sift the allegiance that 
 seemed to be gathering only too easily. He 
 paused and turned, and stopped the crowd that 
 was pursuing Him, and He cried out across their 
 heads, so that the farthest heard Him, " If any man 
 come to Me and hate not his father and mother 
 and wife and children and brethren and sisters, 
 he cannot be My disciple." There is almost 
 defiance in the words. But they seem to me to 
 be like so many words of Jesus which we cannot 
 understand if we think of Him only as a teacher, 
 only as a giver of lessons to men whom He 
 counted His pupils. We must think of Jesus as 
 a soul, undergoing experiences, living a life all 
 through those years, or else the Gospels are a 
 very dead and barren book. And if we have 
 known what it is to look forward and see, with 
 terror which yet is glorified by hope, that the
 
 IO2 The Influence of jfesus 
 
 great purpose on which our heart is set is to be 
 won only by first casting it, with seeming reck- 
 lessness, away, if, for instance, we have seen that 
 we must lay the foundations of a boy's true faith 
 upon the very ruins of what he has been calling 
 his creed ; if the reformer, full of the visions 
 of a bright, free, happy land, knows often 
 that he must take the firebrand and set the land 
 on fire before he can begin his work ; if every 
 one of us has had to disturb the unreal quiet of 
 what called itself a friendship in order that we 
 might be deeply and truly a friend to some heart 
 which he coveted, if all these are familiar things, 
 then we can understand how the Rebuilder of 
 human life about the fatherhood of God dwelt 
 with pathetic certainty upon the destruction that 
 must come before that construction could begin. 
 The more intensely He knew the preciousness of 
 the end, the more necessary and the more terrible 
 became the seeming sacrifice of that end over which 
 He must go to reach it. The more He gloried, 
 with His heart full of the memories of heaven, in 
 the prospect of the re-established family of God, 
 where each child should find his own distinctive
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 103 
 
 childhood in the common filial life of all, so much 
 the more He saw with sadness, but with certainty, 
 that the merely human groupings of men, in 
 which each man lost his own true self among his 
 brethren, must be broken up. The more He 
 longed to see the Temple full of consecrated wor- 
 shippers, the more ruthlessly He drove out the 
 barterers and hucksters who had monopolized its 
 courts. 
 
 The key, then, to all Christ's treatment of 
 man's social life lies here, in the constant de- 
 sire to foster the consciousness of divine sonship 
 by intercourse with those who are fellow-sons of 
 the same Father. And here we see what is 
 meant by the constant alternation, the effort after 
 balance, as it were, between society and solitude, 
 first in the life of Jesus himself, and then in the life 
 which He enjoined on His disciples. Think over 
 some of the purely solitary moments which Jesus 
 passed. No sooner was His work fairly begun, no 
 sooner was He completely consecrated to it, than 
 the Spirit, His Spirit, took Him away from the 
 company of His home, and the solitude of the 
 Temptation followed. The need of realizing
 
 IO4 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 Himself had come. He must struggle into the 
 knowledge of what it meant to be in the world. 
 He must meet the devil of doubt and of despair. 
 It is a most mysterious event, but its mystery is 
 of that sort which becomes more and more myste- 
 rious to us, not because it is so unlike, but because it 
 is so like, what goes on in our own careers. That 
 is always the most wonderful sort of mystery. 
 Jesus, there in the desert, shakes His life free, as 
 it were, from the shell of childhood, and thereby, 
 for the first time, takes possession of the perfectly 
 childlike soul He is a man, and the secret which 
 manhood whispers into His ear in that moment of 
 initiation, a secret not new and yet forever 
 new, because it is infinite, is simply that God is 
 His Father. Care, obedience, trust, the holding 
 back of the life until the Father bids it go, the 
 sending forth of the life wherever the Father de- 
 mands it, these, which are the elements of con- 
 scious childhood, Jesus took up there in the desert. 
 That totality of life, that unity of it in a single con- 
 ception and a single use, which often afterwards 
 cameso grandly from His lips, it must have been 
 there in the desert that He came to know it first.
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 105 
 
 All that was done in solitude. And then, when the 
 idea is there, when the core and. centre of life has 
 been set, He comes down, and instantly Redraws 
 near to men and draws men to Him. About that 
 core, both for its own satisfaction and safety and 
 for the blessing of the lives He summons, He must 
 group the souls into a society. He sees Simon 
 Peter and Andrew, and they are no sooner with 
 Him than James and John are beckoned with a 
 bright gesture or challenged with a ringing word 
 from their half-mended nets ; and then, with 
 them around Him, He plunges into populous Gali- 
 lee, and all its villages begin to know His face and 
 watch for His coming, and make their contribution 
 to His company. Solitude makes the conscious- 
 ness ; society develops, multiplies, and confirms 
 it. That which would have remained only a 
 quality in Him, if He had stayed in the desert, 
 becomes a life when He goes forth into the world. 
 What Goethe wisely says of all men does not 
 lose its truth when we are thinking of the Son of 
 Man : " A talent shapes itself in stillness, but a 
 character in the tumult of the world." This is 
 Christ's balance between solitude and society.
 
 106 The Influence of 
 
 Each makes the other necessary. With us they 
 often lose this value, because they are not set in 
 any relation to each other. Solitude is barren, 
 and so society is frivolous. Solitude creates no con- 
 sciousness for society to ripen. Solitude is like an 
 unfertile seed, and society is like an unplanted 
 ground. Each craves the other, not because it 
 wants its complement, but because it is tired of 
 itself and longs to change. 
 
 I think there is something exquisitely beauti- 
 liil in the unerring play of this balance in the life 
 of Jesus. Not more surely does the night open 
 into day than solitude fulfils itself with company. 
 Once and again He goes apart into a mountain 
 and prays by Himself all night. No one is there but 
 Him and God. The silence is like heaven about 
 Him. But as the morning comes a new need cer- 
 tainly comes with it. No longer loneliness, but 
 company ; not solitude, but voices ; and so the 
 earliest light finds Him among the crowd of His 
 disciples choosing His twelve apostles, or walking 
 across the boisterous waters of Gcnnesaret to 
 join His toiling servants in their boat. Every- 
 body must have felt how the two needs trera-
 
 On the Social- Life of Man. 107 
 
 ble in response to one another in the intense 
 atmosphere of that vivid night before His cru- 
 cifixion. It seems as if He took great deep 
 draughts of the idea of His life, of the father- 
 hood of His Father, as if it entered by great 
 waves into His soul, and as if each wave so 
 overwhelmed the soul it filled that He needed 
 to reassure and recover Himself in the familiar 
 company of His disciples. First there is the long 
 conversation of the Supper. Then comes the 
 terrible solitude of the Garden of Gethsemane. 
 Again and again the Sufferer comes wandering 
 back to where the tired and unconscious men 
 are lying. It is as one who was passing through 
 some deep experience might go into the chamber 
 where a child was sleeping and find relief when 
 the burden of the solitary crisis was too great to 
 bear. Then, as the Lord's career sweeps more 
 and more into that channel where it must run 
 alone, where none can share it, how, still, the 
 craving for society seems to beat responsive to 
 every new throb of suffering ! He turns and 
 looks at Peter ; He would almost open his heart 
 to Pilate ; He looks back and tells the women
 
 io8 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 who follow him to Calvary about the future of 
 the beloved land that murdered Him; and at 
 last, even upon the cross, He has mercy to give 
 to the robber at His side, and c?re still for 
 His mother and the disciple whom He loved. 
 Every moment of deepening communion with 
 His Father has its corresponding moment of 
 sympathy with His brother men. The two halves 
 of the great heart die together as they have lived 
 together. The balance trembles more and more 
 lightly as the life beats lower, but it trembles 
 still even to the last, and Jesus ceases to love 
 only when He ceases to live. 
 
 And this same poise and mutual supply which 
 was between society and solitude in the life of 
 Jesus Himself He was always trying to establish 
 in the lives of those whom He taught. One day 
 He cured a man of lunacy. It was a deep mys- 
 tery to the poor creature. He wanted to go 
 with Jesus, to leave his house and friends and 
 country, to hide his life under the shelter of this 
 power of God, and to study it forever. Jesus 
 quietly lays the finger of His authority upon the 
 other scale and says, " Go h 2ie to thy friends."
 
 On the Social Life of Man, 109 
 
 Another day He raises a dead girl to life, and, 
 just as the glad father and mother and all the 
 eager friends are rushing forth into the street to 
 tell their joy and wonder, He lifts his finger and 
 says, " See that no man knows it ! " And so 
 it is always with the separate scholars of His 
 school. Peter wants to stay upon the mountain 
 of transfiguration, and his Master leads him 
 down among the needs of men, to where the 
 poor boy with the unclean spirit is foaming and 
 raving at the mountain's foot. Nicodemus sits 
 with Him in the midnight chamber. The next 
 time we see him he is saying a timid word for 
 the Lord in the Sanhedrim. The woman of 
 Sychar fulfils the quiet conversation at the 
 well by the impetuous seeking of the men whom 
 she knew in the city, that they might be the 
 sharers of her joy. Everywhere the solitary 
 completes itself in the social. Solitude shapes 
 and colors the precious forms of character which 
 then the furnace of society burns to solidity 
 and brilliancy and permanence. 
 
 I am often struck by seeing how the loftiness 
 of the life of Jesus altogether escaped the per-
 
 I IO The Influence of Jesus* 
 
 plexity of many of the questions with which our 
 lives are troubled, as the eagle flying through 
 the sky is not worried how to cross the rivers. 
 We debate whether self-culture or our brethren's 
 service is the true purpose of our life. We vacil- 
 late aimlessly. Now we shut ourselves up and 
 meditate and try to grow. Now we rush forth 
 and make the wide world ring with what we 
 call our work. The two so often have no con- 
 nection with each other. We are so apt to live 
 two lives. But Jesus knows but one. All cul- 
 ture of His soul is part of our salvation. All 
 doing of His work is ripening His nature. Jesus 
 in the still night far off upon a solitary hill-top, 
 Jesus in broad daylight dragged by a hooting 
 mob from Pilate's judgment-seat to Calvary, both 
 of them are Jesus saving the world ; both of 
 them are Jesus living His life. And not until 
 our brawling ceases and the champion of each 
 side of the question rounds his truth witli his 
 adversary's truth which he has been denouncing, 
 not until the apostle of self-culture knows that 
 no man can come to his best by selfishness, and 
 the apostle of usefulness knows that no man can
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 1 1 1 
 
 do much for other men who is not much him- 
 self, not until then shall men have fairly started 
 on the broad road to the completeness of God 
 their Father in the footsteps of the Son of Man. 
 It remains only to speak of one or two of the 
 special exhibitions of the social life of Jesus in 
 illustration of what I have been saying. One 
 of the most interesting is His treatment of men 
 in classes. It is always saved from the extrava- 
 gance and grotesqueness into which the empha- 
 sis of class lines tends to run by the strong value 
 of the individual life which lay at the bottom of 
 His consciousness. Indeed, I think that as one 
 reads that interesting story of how the various 
 groups of men came up to John the Baptist and 
 received his teaching about their special duties, 
 first " the people," then " the publicans," and 
 then "the soldiers," one feels how different 
 that is from anything in the life of Jesus. He 
 deals, indeed, with the great classes into which 
 men were divided in His time. He was known 
 as the friend of publicans. He cried aloud be- 
 fore the multitude, " Woe unto you, Scribes and 
 Pharisees," but He was no partisan of wealth noi
 
 112 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 any more of poverty ; whoever listened to Him 
 could not help feeling that in His view the class 
 was good or bad only as it made the individual 
 good or bad, and that no class condition could 
 overrule the essential condition of the personal 
 souls within it. Here is where all party spirit 
 shows its viciousness. Here is where all social- 
 ism shows its weakness. Here is where all the 
 weak idolatry of organic methods fails. It loses 
 sight of the final unit in its watch over some 
 of the accidental and temporary combinations of 
 mankind. The final unit is the man. And that 
 unit of value was never out of the soul of Jesus. 
 After the day when He told them the story 
 which they never could forget, of how there was 
 a man with a hundred sheep and how one of 
 them xvandered from the flock and got astray 
 among the hills, and of how the shepherd left all 
 the rest and went and found that one and came 
 down out of the hills si-nging, with the rescued 
 sheep across his shoulders, after that keynote 
 of the preciousness of the individual had been 
 struck, it never ceased to be heard through 
 everything that Jesus said and did. When He
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 113 
 
 sat at rich men's tables His proud hosts knew 
 that it was not because they were rich but be- 
 cause they were men that He had come to them. 
 When He entered poor men's huts they knew that 
 it was not their poverty but their manhood that 
 He honored. And that which, on the whole, has 
 kept Christianity from becoming the religion of 
 any class as against other classes, that which 
 has always made it able, just when it seemed 
 on the point of lending itself to such monopoly, 
 to break out of the grasp of those who would put 
 it to such partisan and partial use, has been the 
 healthy and ineradicable individualism which is 
 at its heart. Men cry to-day, " Christianity is the 
 religion of the rich and comfortable," and while 
 they speak their cry is drowned in the rush of 
 the poor, the hungry, and the wretched to some 
 common men's revival. They cry again, " The 
 Christian belief belongs to the ignorant," and lo, 
 the wisest thought of the world comes back 
 again as it is ever coming to the mystery of 
 Christ and of His treatment of the soul of man. 
 It is not that they have mistaken the class to 
 
 which they should assign the Christian faith. 
 8
 
 H4 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 Their mistake has been in giving it to any class. 
 It belongs to the individual. It always has its 
 eye fastened on him. One of the noblest func- 
 tions of Christianity in the world is to lie be- 
 hind the class crystallizations of mankind, like a 
 solvent into which they shall return and blend 
 with one another, to crystallize, no doubt, again, 
 but always to be reminded that the classes into 
 which they crystallize are lesser facts than the 
 manhood into which they are repeatedly dis- 
 solved. 
 
 We must put here, no doubt, the deep interest 
 with which Jesus looked always at the young. 
 He was talking of deep and difficult things, and 
 through the crowd there came a little company 
 of women bringing their children for Him to 
 bless. Instantly He turned aside from the grown 
 men and women, and, waving His disciples' inter- 
 ference back, His hands were on the little won- 
 dering creatures' heads. And when a young 
 man came with a puzzled question, the teller of 
 the story years afterwards remembered the look 
 which was in the eyes of Jesus as He answered 
 him. " Jesus beholding him loved him, 11 Mark
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 115 
 
 writes. In both these stories, and perhaps still 
 more in the way in which He surrounded Him- 
 self with that garland of vigor and enthusiasm, 
 the cluster of young men whom He called His 
 disciples, everywhere there is the value set on 
 youth. And youth is the period of individual 
 life, of individual hope. Class life has not be- 
 gun. The child of the king and the child of 
 the beggar will play together if no older wisdom 
 or folly interferes. Nay, the queen who will not 
 let the beggar's fingers touch her robe will take 
 the beggar's baby in her arms and clasp it to 
 her bosom. He who touches a child of any class 
 touches, as it were, the undivided humanity, and 
 his touch may be felt anywhere through all its 
 classifications. He who speaks to the infant 
 speaks to mankind behind the Babel of its di- 
 visions. No wonder that Socrates was accused 
 at Athens that he corrupted the youth. No 
 wonder that Jesus said of little children, " Of 
 such is the kingdom of Heaven." 
 
 Another interesting point in the social life of 
 Jesus is His courtesy. There is perhaps, no 
 part of our life that is so unre? 1 and unsatisfac
 
 u 6 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 tory, none of which we find it so hard to give 
 an account to ourselves, as the courtesy which 
 we pay to one another. And there is none 
 which, in the life of Jesus, is more thoroughly 
 satisfactory and perfect. I find the secret of it 
 in the clear perception and value of the per- 
 sonal life behind the class condition of which we 
 have just been speaking. True courtesy gets its 
 essence from honor of the individual, while it 
 gets its special form from consideration of the 
 class condition. I may be just as courteous to the 
 beggar as to the king, but I do not treat them 
 both alike. Now, when Jesus met the woman 
 of Samaria at the well He honored her ; He val- 
 ued and reverenced her soul. When He met 
 Pontius Pilate, He honored him. When He 
 dealt day after day with the ripening treachery 
 of Judas Iscariot, He honored him. When He 
 found John the Baptist making the door ready 
 through which He was to enter on His work, 
 He honored him. The spiritual nature, the 
 special humanity, of each of them seemed to 
 Him, not in any mere fiction but in simple truth, 
 to be a beautiful and precious thing. His honor
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 117 
 
 for that was the soul of His courteousness. And 
 then the special words He said, whether of sym- 
 pathy or of rebuke, might be just what the spe- 
 cial occasion bade them be. Different as the} 
 were, they were all courteous alike because of 
 this personal honor and value that filled them 
 all. There is no complete courtesy that has not 
 such a soul and such a body, a soul of honor 
 for the individual, living in and uttering itself 
 through the intelligent recognition of the class 
 condition. 
 
 Or, look at the way in which this principle 
 governs all the treatment by Jesus of the hard 
 question of privilege. Privilege, which is a per- 
 vading, obstinate fact in the world, becomes an 
 exasperating fact from the crude confusion of 
 personal nature with official life or accidental 
 circumstances. Let the two be finely and con- 
 stantly discriminated, and privilege loses the 
 largest part of its obnoxiousness, loses all its 
 obnoxiousness for the best and noblest men. 
 Perhaps this discrimination was never more finely 
 or clearly made than on that day when, after one 
 of the discussions with the rulers of the people.
 
 1 1 8 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 in which they had tried to browbeat Him with 
 the authority of their position, Jesus quietly 
 turned to the multitude and His disciples and 
 said to them, " The Scribes and the Pharisees sit 
 in Moses' seat. All therefore whatsoever they 
 bid you observe, that observe and do, but do not 
 ye after their works." I can easily conceive of 
 how the scales may have dropped from the eyes 
 of some ingenuous Jew as he listened to those 
 words. Behold, it was possible to own and 
 recognize these men's position, and yet not be 
 obliged to call them good when they were bad, or 
 great when they were little. Behold, one might 
 keep his own intellect and conscience true, and 
 yet not seize the sword to destroy all present 
 social order. Behold, one might obey present 
 authority, and yet be expectant of the coming 
 day when only the best should rule. To the 
 listener who heard all that in the words of Jesus, 
 the privilege of the Scribes and Pharisees was 
 no longer an exasperation. His hate and envy 
 of them turned to pity. There might be other 
 men not morally within the sound of the Lord's 
 voice, who would still be jealous of the soft cush-
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 1:9 
 
 ions and the pompous words of the men who sat 
 in Moses's seat ; but they were only Scribes and 
 Pharisees out of office emulating the vices of 
 the Scribes and Pharisees who happened to 
 be in. 
 
 As Jesus in His earthly life was always feeding 
 His human nature out of the Divine nature on 
 which it rested in mysterious unity, so were His 
 special judgments always drawing largeness and 
 truth from the simple and eternal principles 
 which lay below them in His consciousness. 
 This was the secret both of His boldness and 
 His prudence. Indeed, I think that we can 
 hardly speak of Jesus as either bold or prudent 
 in the way in which we speak of other men. 
 The region of principles, of absolute righteous- 
 ness and truth, lies above the consciousness of 
 prudence and of boldness ; and it was in that 
 region that He lived and moved. An illustration 
 of this is found in His dealing with yet another 
 of the perplexing questions of men's social life. 
 They brought to Him, one morning in the Tem- 
 ple, the poor shame-stricken creature whom they 
 had arrested in adultery. And Jesus, no doubt
 
 I2O The Influence of Jesus 
 
 seeing first that He had touched her conscience, 
 bade her go free and live a better life, in a way 
 that must have seemed, even to thoughtful and 
 sympathetic Jews, to open the door to dangerous 
 license in family life and personal chastity. Then, 
 when perhaps this impression was still fresh in 
 the minds of men, there came another morning. 
 Jesus was in Judea again. And one day His old 
 enemies, the Pharisees, remembering, perhaps, 
 what He had said to the wretched woman, 
 began to ask Him about marriage and di- 
 vorce. And then Jesus amazed them with the 
 lofty stringency of His ideas. He went back 
 beyond Moses. What Moses had allowed He 
 would allow no longer. "Whosoever shall put 
 away his wife, except it be for fornication, and 
 shall marry another," He declares, " committeth 
 adultery." But along with His decree comes the 
 deep principle on which it is based, " Have ye 
 not read that He which made them at the begin- 
 ning made them male and female?" It all goes 
 back to the creation. It is part of the birthright 
 of man from the hand of his Father, this right of 
 the w : fe to th* husband and of the husband to
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 121 
 
 the wife. It is no mere arrangement for the 
 good order of society. It is in the very nature 
 of the children of God. It is in this fundamental- 
 ness of its character that the secret of His large 
 treatment of it lay. If it had been an arbitrary 
 rule of society, it could not have been trifled with. 
 A single indulgence would have scattered it for- 
 ever. But an essential principle has flexibility 
 which an arbitrary rule cannot have. A mere 
 rule-maker can have no personal considerations. 
 But God, in whom all principles reside, from 
 whom they all proceed, finds room for personal 
 discrimination and education within the applica- 
 tion of His principles. It is the depth of His 
 government that makes the specialness of His 
 government. It is because His government 
 comes out of the profoundest secrets of His 
 character, that it is able to adapt itself to all the 
 individual peculiarities of our lives. Who can 
 say how this truth may affect that seeming con- 
 flict between the law of God and the mercy of 
 God which has driven men to shape for them- 
 selves such strange and artificial doctrines of 
 atonement ? And it is in the wonderful com'
 
 122 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 bination of the vast and transcendental with the 
 minute and the familiar in Him who was both 
 "conceived of the Holy Ghost" and also " born of 
 the Virgin Mary," that the fitness of the Savior 
 not merely for the rescue of the soul, but for the 
 salvation of society, is found. 
 
 I have dwelt so very long upon the influ- 
 ence of Jesus upon the general social life of 
 man, that not many moments are left to speak 
 of His life in the Church and in the State, which 
 were parts of the subject that I undertook to 
 treat. But not many moments are needed for 
 the little that I want to say on each. I am not 
 called upon to write an ecclesiastical or a political 
 treatise. I only want to try to see, according to 
 the simple picture which the Gospel gives us, 
 how these two great organisms which have so 
 filled history with their power, the Church and 
 the State, looked in the eyes and stood forth 
 in the words of the deep, transparent man of 
 Judea and Galilee whose influence we have been 
 endeavoring to feel. 
 
 Of the Church of Jesus I think we nevei
 
 On the Social I if e of Man. 123 
 
 cease to be surprised when we see, as we read 
 the Gospels with eyes out of which the mist of 
 ecclesiastical history has been wiped, how natu- 
 rally and simply and artlessly it was the expres- 
 sion of the life of Jesus. I wish that I could 
 tell the story with as entire an absence of the 
 institutional and magical and artificial air which 
 the subsequent centuries have breathed around 
 it as it has while it lies shining there in that un- 
 conscious and immortal story. 
 
 The great French writer who has told the 
 story of the life of Jesus has at least revived for 
 us one picture which we had almost lost be- 
 hind the curtaining mists of the long Christian 
 history. He has shown us the Master walking 
 with His group of disciples along the borders 
 of Gennesaret, now lingering in a little village, 
 now traversing a field of corn, now pausing on 
 the high bluff beyond Capernaum that overlooks 
 the lake, now sitting in the boat and talking to 
 His friends while they were fishing. A curious 
 picture the Frenchman has made out of the 
 scene. It is partly an idyl of careless peasants, 
 partly a conclave of conspirators, partly a sym-
 
 124 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 posium of philosophers. It is half Arf.adia and 
 half the Agora of Athens. But through all the 
 confused conception this at least is kept, 
 clear, fresh sense of personal companionship, 
 of a group gathered and held about a personal 
 centre, and gradually becoming fired with the 
 idea with which that central life was burning, 
 until, regenerated by that idea itself, the group 
 became the regenerating power of the world. If 
 we look simply at the transparent story of the 
 Gospels, that picture gives us, beyond all doubt, 
 the cradle, the cell-life, of the Christian Church. 
 The history is full of human nature. The open- 
 ing life of Jesus was full of His consciousness 
 that He was the Son of God. The ambition of 
 which His soul was full was the desire to let 
 men know that they, too, were the sons of God, 
 and to rescue them into the full enjoyment of 
 their sonship. That desire gave to the young 
 man's opening life a relationship to all humanity. 
 All these men about Him were His unconscious 
 brethren, the unconscious children of the Father 
 in whose life all His life was bound up. I can 
 think of the boy Jesus, as this consciousness
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 125 
 
 grew in Him, going from day to day with deep- 
 ening awe about the streets of the Galilean vil- 
 lage which was His world. The men who laid 
 their hands upon His head, ths women who 
 chattered to Him with their motherly good-will, 
 the boys and girls He played with, it was 
 dawning upon Him that these were all children 
 of His Father. But by and by, out of the multi- 
 tude, began to gather about Him those in whom 
 this consciousness of His awoke some kindred 
 consciousness. A young man here, a woman 
 there, sometimes a very child, with a child's 
 insight and a child's strange outlook, all these 
 began to find themselves interpreted in Him. 
 Their deepest questions of their own life found 
 some answer in what they saw Him being every 
 day. The process was miraculous, was a wonder, 
 not in its kind, but in its degree, in the depth 
 to which it opened their souls and filled their 
 doubts with light. First came the mere attrac- 
 tion of His presence and His person. Then it 
 was found that this attractior had its source in 
 a nature which they gradually came to know. 
 Then the sight of this nature became a revela
 
 126 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 tion of their own possibilities ; a new life for 
 themselves, like His life, opened to them. Then 
 there gradually shone out from this revelation 
 its central idea, that which made their possibility 
 possible, that in whose full realization their 
 possibility should be perfectly attained. They 
 were the sons of God ; and then every kindness, 
 every self-sacrifice, every devotion of His life 
 with them, softened their lives more deeply with 
 love, for the more and more complete reception 
 of this transforming idea into their heart of 
 hearts. This little group of people, who had 
 more or less thoroughly learned what Jesus was 
 revealing every day, made up the slowly com- 
 pacted company of the disciples. It seemed as 
 if it were going to stop there, perhaps. If it had, 
 there would have been only another sect added 
 to the many sects of religionists that filled the 
 world. But what came next ? One morning, 
 after Jesus had been praying on a mountain by 
 Himself all night, as soon as it was day, " He 
 called unto Him His disciples, and of them He 
 chose twelve whom also He named apostles." 
 Out of the heart of the discipleship comes the
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 127 
 
 apostleship. Out of the centre of the learning 
 comes the transmission. The inward tendency 
 reacts into the outward tendency. The idea of 
 Jesus, which has been revealing itself to a few 
 and enshrining itself in their experience, reclaims 
 its essential universalness ; and the best of the 
 learners are the first to be sent forth into the 
 world, which is the true partner in all that they 
 have found. Jesus says to the most earnest of 
 them all, " I will give unto thee the key of the 
 kingdom of heaven." He touches their experi- 
 ence, and bids them remember all that they have 
 learned. " Ye are witnesses of these things," 
 He declares. Some outward force gave sign of 
 the idea they carried. " He gave them power 
 over unclean spirits." All these things sur- 
 rounded them with certain personal importance. 
 But after all it was only the necessary pulsing 
 forth of that which had been gathered inward 
 for the outward spring. It was He that really 
 went torth, and His going forth was the going 
 forth of the Father whose revelation He was. 
 " He that receive th you receiveth Me, and He 
 that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me."
 
 1 28 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 It is interesting to see how deep this relation- 
 ship between discipleship and apostleship lies. 
 It bears witness at once that the influence of 
 Jesus is based upon and fed from a personal idea, 
 and also that it belongs to all the world. By 
 and by the outgoing Christian life began to draw 
 in upon itself again. The dogmatic ages came. 
 The apostles were again disciples. Then, once 
 again, there came the expansive impulse. The 
 later missionary work began. The newly elabo- 
 rated doctrine, the deepened knowledge of God 
 the Father in Christ the Son, reached out and 
 craved to fill the world. It is the history of all 
 life, this history of the Christian Church. The 
 knowing of Jesus and the telling of Jesus minis- 
 ter to and succeed each other, the scholar life 
 and the missionary life, the inward and the out- 
 ward movement, the systole and diastole of the 
 Great Heart which beats eternally with the idea 
 of Jesus. 
 
 Let us dwell with what interest and delight 
 we will upon the rich history of the Church 
 which has come since, the germ and essence of 
 it all is in that body of disciples bound to each
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 129 
 
 other by the revelation of their human sonship 
 to the Father. It is a family picture. The Lord's 
 Supper realized in the simplest way as the Fa- 
 ther's table is its transparent sacrament. I would 
 let a man forget, or never know, all about councils 
 and bishops, all about corruptions and reforma- 
 tions, all about creeds and confessions. If he 
 kept that picture, he would know the open secret 
 of the Christian Church. He would keep these 
 truths which are the great saving truths of eccle- 
 siastical history, again and again submerged in 
 the waves of angry times, but forever reappear- 
 ing in their power, the truth that the ministry 
 of the Church is not distinct from and above the 
 Church, but is only the Church itself in its utter- 
 ance, doing and saying representatively what all 
 the Church in all its membership has the right 
 and the duty to say and do ; and the truth that, 
 as an elect body, the Church is but the type of 
 the complete humanity, elect, not that it may 
 be saved out of the world, but that the woild 
 may be saved by its witness and specimen of 
 what the whole world is in its idea. It is the 
 sons of the Father who have learned their son- 
 
 9
 
 1 3O The Influence of Jesus 
 
 ship through the Son crying to all the family oi 
 God, and bearing witness that to be a son of man 
 is to be a child of the Almighty. 
 
 The church spire is nothing, after all, but the 
 elevated and prolonged house-roof. And so the 
 battlemented city wall is but the enlargement 
 and solidification of the simple fence that encloses 
 the familiar homestead. If the idea of Jesus is 
 the constructive power of the Christian Church, 
 it lies no less at the heart of the whole conception 
 of the State as He conceived it. Jesus was a 
 patriot. That sentiment which makes so much 
 of the poetry of the earth the love of men for 
 their native land was very strong in His 
 bosom. With our modern, half-personal, un- 
 localized ideas of Jesus, it must always be strik- 
 ing sometimes it is startling to remember 
 that there was one little district of a few miles 
 square upon the surface of this earth which was 
 known as " His own country." That little group 
 of hills with the quiet valleys among them which 
 lies between Nazareth and the Sea of Tiberias 
 He loved as we love the streets or farms where
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 131 
 
 we were born. And not very far off to the 
 southward lay the great city of His race, where 
 His feet never seemed to enter except solemnly, 
 and over which He wept with a lamentation 
 that is the type and pattern of every sincerest 
 patriot's most loving and unselfish sorrow for his 
 sinful land. And the great indignation with 
 which Jesus lashes the Scribes and Pharisees 
 has its primary meaning in that same passionate 
 remonstrance which the heart of every patriot 
 utters when the land he loves is so ruled by bad 
 hands that he cannot give his love free utterance 
 in approbation and support, but is compelled, 
 perhaps, to work against his country because he 
 must work for righteousness. No one who reads 
 the Gospels can miss these simple, recognizable 
 signs of the true patriotism of Jesus. But why 
 is it that His patriotism is a part of His life to 
 which we least often turn ? It is not only that 
 He lived a larger life and did a larger work, 
 which has far outreached the Jewish people and 
 touched us with its influence. There is some- 
 thing in the quality of His patriotism which is 
 peculiar, which separates it from the patriotism
 
 132 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 of the Athenian or the Roman. What is that 
 quality ? It is the constant predominance of the 
 sonship to God over the sonship to David in his 
 consciousness, making him always eager for the 
 land of David, because of the interests of God 
 which it enshrined. This is a distinct and defi- 
 nite quality when it appears in a man's patriot- 
 ism. It makes his patriotism fine and lofty 
 above the measure of the common patriotic feel- 
 ing of mankind. It makes the patriot's relation 
 to his land very like the man's relation to his 
 body. The man loves his body. He works for 
 it by natural impulse. He is not always thinking 
 of the soul which the body contains, and which 
 gives to it its value. And yet it always is the 
 soul which makes the body worthy of his care 
 and work. The body without the soul the 
 poor dead corpse, or the beautiful or powerful 
 structure of an idiot is dreadful. No man can 
 work with healthy joy for them. And so it is, 
 as Jesus reveals and illustrates it to us, with ref- 
 erence to a man's relation to his country. A 
 true man's patriotic impulse is spontaneous. It 
 springs up without thought. No conscious cal-
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 133 
 
 culation makes me love the hills and valleys, the 
 streets and houses, of the land where I was born. 
 But yet, unless I know of something underneath 
 all this, I am not satisfied. My patriotism lives 
 and flutters as a sentiment unless I know that 
 the land I love is really making, by its constant 
 life, a contribution to the righteousness and prog- 
 ress of the world. When I know that, then I set 
 my patriotic impulse free to act. My land be- 
 comes to me merely the special spot where I am 
 placed to labor for the universal spiritual benefit 
 of man. Then the old Psalmist's words become 
 real to me ; and as I live my life of citizen or 
 public officer, as I take my office or cast my vote 
 or pay my tax, I say with David, " Because of 
 the house of the Lord our God, I will seek to do 
 thee good." Such was the perpetual, self-limited 
 character of the love of Jesus for His native 
 land. 
 
 I know that here is the essence of what most 
 men, as they look at history, are apt to dread to- 
 day, of a theocracy, of a religious State and of 
 a State religion. If this which I have said be 
 true, if the State and its machineries be valu-
 
 134 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 able to the Christian patriot, as His State was 
 valuable to Jesus, because of the spiritual in- 
 terests which they enshrine, because of the 
 family life of man with God which they repre- 
 sent, then why should he not ask that the 
 State should manifest its spiritual function to 
 the fullest degree by becoming distinctively and 
 openly the minister of Christ ? Why should he 
 not ask that Christianity, as he conceives it and 
 as it seems to him to be unspeakably important, 
 should be taught in the State schools? Nay, why 
 should he not ask that only men distinctively 
 and positively Christian in belief and life should 
 be intrusted with the conduct of the nation ? 
 How can he live, how can he be a patriot, in any 
 land which is as purely secular in its administra- 
 tion as all our lands are growing more and more 
 to be ? It is an urgent question. We can only 
 find its answer, I think, in two considerations 
 which nc? man can ignore. One is that the ideas 
 and methods of spiritual men, and even of Chris- 
 tian men, are so divergent from one another that 
 it is only on the broadest basis of the most gen- 
 eral purposes of spiritual life that they can meet,
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 135 
 
 not in their special methods or their special 
 creeds, but only in the desire and assertion of 
 righteousness and truth to which all their meth- 
 ods and their creeds belong. The other consid- 
 eration is that, even were all spiritual men at 
 one, they still might doubt whether it would be 
 well to make the government of their land the 
 agent and maintainer of their faith. Any ma- 
 chinery of government which men have yet 
 devised is too coarse and clumsy for so delicate 
 a task as the inculcation and encouragement of 
 faith. Government works by compulsion ; faith, 
 by inspirations. Government lays its hand on 
 actions ; faith nestles into unseen affections. 
 Government estimates appearances ; faith looks 
 only at realities. And so government, though 
 all the land were unanimously and harmoniously 
 Christian, would still be a poor minister of Chris- 
 tianity. These are the considerations which 
 make the Christian man consent to live in a 
 State whose chosen policy is secular, and yet 
 lets him feel that there are unowned spiritual 
 influences and powers in her to which he may 
 rejoice to lend his aid.
 
 136 The Influence of jfesus 
 
 Let these considerations pass away, let all 
 the spiritual desire and aspiration of the land be 
 fused into a perfect unanimity of thought and 
 action, and let some new finer machinery of 
 governmental action be devised or developed 
 which shall be capable of spiritual uses ; and then 
 theocracy, a religious State, a State religion, a 
 national creed, a Christian public education, a 
 divine responsibility in every officer, all these 
 would be not merely conceivable, they would be 
 the only methods which the Christianized State 
 could think of for a moment. There could be 
 nothing secular in such a heavenly community 
 as that. Only it would be altered utterly from 
 what we see now. It would be the New Jeru- 
 salem for which we hope, and not the old earthly 
 city which we know so well. At present we can 
 only keep it constantly before our eyes and 
 always proclaim it as the true ideal. We can, 
 and I think we ought to, earnestly assert, when 
 men praise it most loudly, that secularism, how- 
 ever we may accept it cheerfully, as the only ex- 
 pedient for the present time, is not the highest 
 nor the eternal type of government. We may
 
 On the Social Life of Man. 137 
 
 strive, by that devotion to the spiritual element 
 in national life which even pure secularity of 
 public methods still leaves possible, to hasten 
 the day, which must come if Christ be what we 
 know He is, when the idea of Jesus shall be the 
 shaping and moving power of the Christian State ; 
 and among the happy sons of God the Son of 
 God shall evidently reign, as the old phrase de- 
 scribes, " King of nations as King of saints." 
 
 I must not even stop to gather into a summary 
 what I have said to-night. I have spoken of the 
 principles which underlay and gave form and 
 color to the whole social life which Jesus lived ; 
 and then specially His life with His disciples 
 and His life with His nation. Those principles 
 were always the same. Jesus the Friend, the 
 Teacher, the Patriot, is always first Jesus the 
 Son of God. 
 
 The social influence of Jesus all issues from 
 the fatherhood of God which He reveals, and 
 into which He claims God's children. By it the 
 family, the Church, the State, exist. It is the 
 power of construction and reform and education
 
 138 The Influence of Jesu*. 
 
 As it is realized in each, the life of each becomes 
 exalted and inspired. It makes all history di- 
 vine. And even the world that is not yet 
 becomes intelligible when we can look through 
 the glowing window of the revelation and see 
 the idea of Jesus still the constructive power of 
 the society of heaven. " I looked," says John, 
 "and lo ! a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with 
 Him an hundred and forty and four thousand 
 having His Father's name written in their fore- 
 heads."
 
 III. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 ON THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF MAN
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 ON THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF MAN. 
 
 ~\ T 7E say that life is made up of joy and pain. 
 But it is not really so. At least, when we 
 speak in those words, we are talking of life only 
 in its most superficial sense. Joy and pain are 
 the expressions of life, but not life itself, not its 
 true substance. Far down beneath them both 
 lie the real processes of which they try to tell the 
 tale. And even the tale they try to tell they 
 cannot tell with certainty. The same essential 
 life which makes one man happy makes an- 
 other man sad. And so even as symptoms they 
 perpetually mislead us. If I am really trying to 
 get at the quality of a man's living, it means very 
 little to me at first to know that he is a happy 
 man. I must know a great deal more about 
 him before I can make any use of the fact that 
 he is happy. And when we are trying to test 
 not the quality of another man's life but the
 
 142 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 quality of our own, all of us who are thoughtful 
 discover very early that happiness or unhappi- 
 ness may mean very much or very little, that 
 there is a consciousness underneath sorrow and 
 joy into which we must penetrate, in which we 
 must live, before we can know our true lives. 
 
 And yet it is by joy and pain that lives mostly 
 communicate with one another. The man who 
 lacks emotion lacks expression. That which is 
 in him remains within him, and he cannot utter 
 it or make it influential. And on the other 
 hand the man who lacks emotion lacks recep- 
 tiveness. That which other men are, if it does 
 not make him glad or sorry, if it gives him 
 neither joy nor pain, does not become his. The 
 emotion of lives is the magnetism that they 
 emit, something closely associated with their 
 substance and yet distinct from it, in which 
 they communicate with one another. There is 
 a condition conceivable in which the emotions 
 should be so delicately and perfectly true to the 
 quality, of the lives from which they issue that 
 they should furnish a perfect medium of com- 
 munication. That would be a state of existence
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 143 
 
 in which truth and goodness should inevitably 
 shine forth in gladness from the man who was 
 true and good, and should instantly be answered 
 in gladness from every other man on whom they 
 struck. The poet sings, 
 
 " Serene shall be our days, and bright 
 And happy shall our nature be, 
 When love is an unerring light, 
 And joy its own security." 
 
 The prophecy declares itself not yet fulfilled. 
 It is a noble, truthful condition for which we 
 are waiting. Until it comes he who would find 
 life must look behind joy and sorrow, and, while 
 He questions them, can never let their answers 
 pass unchallenged, must always cross-question 
 and examine them, and see what this especial 
 joy or sorrow means. 
 
 I am to speak to-day about the influence of 
 Jesus through joy and sorrow, the way, that 
 is, in which the life that was in Him came forth 
 from Him through His evident happiness and 
 suffering, and entered into other men through 
 the happiness and suffering that He awoke in 
 them. It is the study of a subtle history,
 
 144 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 crowded with pathetic interest, which is going 
 on through all these years of the Gospels. As 
 I took up the subject it seemed to me to be 
 necessary that I should say first of all what I 
 have said, that both in Jesus and in those who 
 come under His influence there is something 
 behind the suffering and happiness in which 
 they meet each other, and that the happi- 
 ness and suffering are but the light or the 
 aroma which come from the life behind. " Can 
 any connection be traced between the chemical 
 nature of a substance, or the conditions under 
 which it burns, and the nature of the light 
 which it emits ? " That is the statement of 
 one of the most interesting problems which 
 natural science has met in this day of its many 
 triumphs, the problem whose study has led on 
 to the spectrum analysis and all its wonders. 
 Can any true connection be reliably traced 
 between the way that a man lives and the joy 
 or sorrow that his life emits ? That is the cor- 
 responding question in moral science for which 
 no man has yet devised its spectroscope, but 
 which, as it finds its solution more and more,
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 145 
 
 must deepen a hundred-fold the intercourse of 
 man with man and man's understanding of 
 himself. 
 
 What, then, was it that lay behind the phe- 
 nomena of pleasure and pain in Jesus ? First 
 of all, no doubt, experience, the simple doing 
 of acts and undergoing of contacts, without 
 regard to the emotions they produced. It is a 
 striking fact that many of the words which, in 
 long use of them, have become exclusively ap- 
 propriated to pain originally belonged simply 
 to experience without reference to whether it 
 brought distress or pleasure. The old Greek 
 and Latin words from which our words for suf- 
 fering come simply meant " to undergo," and 
 were used of the contact with happy as well as 
 with unhappy things. It was to touch and be 
 touched by the furniture of the great crowded 
 world. And even our English words which 
 are stained all through with the associations 
 of pain, the very word " suffering " itself, and 
 " patience " and " submission " and that hard 
 word "bear," they all essentially mean nothing 
 but experience. It is something taken on the 
 10
 
 146 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 back and carried, but that may be either a 
 burden under which the bent back groans, or 
 an inspiration and delight under which the 
 shoulders leap and grow buoyant as the proud 
 mother's arms do, when she carries her first- 
 born child. Is it not a sign that human misery 
 overweighs human joy, or at least a sign that 
 men have come to think that there is far more 
 of pain than of happiness to be suffered in the 
 world, that the words of experience have come 
 to be words of sadness, as if the touch of life 
 must wound us all and make us sore ? At any 
 rate, the history of such words bears witness that 
 there is a conception of experience back of pain 
 and pleasure, in a region where the conception 
 of them has not yet been born, that the life, 
 which shows itself in enjoyment or distress, con- 
 sists in the actions and contacts out of which 
 the enjoyment or distress proceeds. And so 
 our first step is to trace the real influential 
 life of Jesus back into the actual experiences 
 of His life. It is not essentially because He 
 was happy or was sad that He has such power 
 over men to-day. It is because of what He did
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 147 
 
 It is because of His part in our human lot and 
 the way in which He bore that part. If He 
 had borne pain somewhere else, in some region 
 of transcendental experience which we could not 
 understand, whatever mysterious power might 
 have been attributed to that pain in influencing 
 ths- currents of the universe and its government, 
 it never could have come to any direct influence 
 upon the hearts and lives of men. And on the 
 other hand, if it had been possible for Him to live 
 our life and share our lot completely and yet 
 have known no pain, have passed in sunny joy 
 from Bethlehem to Olivet, His life would still 
 have been the influential power of the world. 
 That was not possible. To live a life like His 
 in such a world as ours, by a deep inevitable 
 necessity involved the pain. The cross was 
 the predestined seal on that experience. But 
 yet the experience is separable from the pain, 
 and it was in the experience, not in the pain, 
 that the true life abode. 
 
 This is the first step backward. But we can- 
 not rest here. The mere experiences which 
 make up any man's career cannot really consti-
 
 148 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 tute his life. They are too incoherent. Our 
 histories are not our lives. The idea of life is 
 unity. Experiences are manifold. Underneath 
 their superficial variety they must find unity 
 in some controlling law. They have no char- 
 acter save what they get from it ; and without 
 character there is no true life. The next step 
 back, then, in the true life of Jesus is to the law 
 which lies behind the experiences, in which 
 must rest the reason and the meaning of His 
 going hither and thither and meeting this and 
 that man, now up to Jerusalem, now down to 
 Galilee, now sitting arguing with Nicodemus, 
 now pouring out His heart to His disciples, now 
 in calm dignity replying to the taunts of the 
 Pharisees. His own conception of the law of 
 life is clear enough. ' My meat is to do the 
 will of Him that sent Me," He once said. It 
 was God's will, not His own choice, not their 
 own fitness, not even directly the good of the 
 men about Him, that made him do the acts and 
 incur the contacts that filled up His days. 
 God willed these things. That was the unity 
 in which all His experiences found their con-
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 149 
 
 sistency. That was the soil in which their roots 
 were set, from which they drew their nourish- 
 ment. That, in the deeper meaning, was His 
 life ; the Law by which He lived, the will of God. 
 And yet there is another step. A law is not 
 the final life. It cannot be. Law is external, 
 but life is something which must fill every inmost 
 part of a man's being. It must think in his 
 brain, throb in his heart, and make the will leap 
 like a resolute muscle to its task. A law cannot 
 do that. It is not intimate enough. That must be 
 done by something which is part of the man him 
 self, something that is his own, some form in which 
 the world outside himself has passed into his being 
 and given itself to him, some conception which is 
 a fountain of force and inspiration. Now, all that 
 can only be fulfilled in some controlling and 
 inspiring idea, some idea or conception which, 
 taking possession of the intelligence, has then set 
 fire to the affections, and so possesses the whole 
 man. When you get back to that you can go 
 back no farther. Here, then, we are, where we 
 have started in each of our lectures. Here we 
 are, once again at the idea of Jesus. That idea,
 
 150 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 as 1 conceive it, as I am sure you know by this 
 time that I conceive it, is the fatherhood of God 
 to man, to be made known by Jesus to mankind 
 through the clear manifestation of His own son- 
 ship to God. Ideas make for themselves laws 
 by their own inherent and divine creativeness. 
 The law which Christ's sonship to God makes is 
 obedience to God. The way in which Christ's 
 obedience to God enters into Him and becomes 
 more than a rule of action, becomes the very 
 element in which He lives, is by its being per- 
 petually fastened to, perpetually fed out of, His 
 idea that He was the Son of God. In that idea, 
 that fundamental conception of His mind, that 
 fundamental affection of His soul, you find at last 
 what you have been seeking, His real life. You 
 can go back no farther. You have laid your 
 hand upon the Man of the Gospels, where His 
 being becomes one with the uncaused Existence 
 of eternity. At last you have found the true life 
 of Jesus. 
 
 I think that it is like that marvel and mystery 
 of nature, so familial* and yet so strange, so per- 
 petually repeated in our sight and yet so far
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 151 
 
 away from the apprehension of anything in us 
 save our imagination, the wonder that fills the 
 woods and will burst forth between the very 
 bricks of cit) streets, the ever old, ever new 
 mystery of the growing and flowering of a plant. 
 The flower opens on the stalk ; but the flower is 
 not the life, for you may pluck it off leaf by leaf, 
 and the plant still lives. The stalk builds its 
 strong fibre ; but its fibres are not life, for they 
 may all be perfect and the plant be dead. The 
 hungry roots reach out into the fertile ground ; 
 but the roots are not life, only wonderful channels 
 to bear the life that has been given them. Not 
 until you see the earth give itself to the plant, 
 and, turning into sap, send itself through the wait- 
 ing veins until it flushes into color far up in the 
 air, not until then have you gone back where 
 you can go back no farther, and really found the 
 life. So here is the perfect flower of the life of 
 Jesus. It is the blood-red flower of the cross. Is 
 that pain life ? Surely not. The thief beside him 
 bears pain too, and we can call it only death. Is 
 life, then, the experience that brings the pain? 
 The injustice of the rulers, the mocking of the
 
 I 52 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 people, the brutality of the soldiers, is that 
 His life? No, surely not. The deadest soul 
 might have encountered all of these experiences. 
 Is it, then, that deep compulsion that lay under- 
 neath it all ? Is it that necessity which has been 
 on Him all His days that He should do His 
 Father's will, that compulsion which has brought 
 Him to the cross? Not yet have we attained 
 the life, for mere obedience may be mere death. 
 But behind all there lies the idea of Jesus, that 
 God is His Father, and that He may make these 
 men know that He is their Father too. When 
 that is touched, behold the miracle ! See how 
 the dry roots of obedience fill themselves with 
 love ; see how the hard stalk of experience 
 grows soft and pliable with purpose ; and then 
 see how the flower of pain utters a life profoundly 
 deeper than itself, and tells the world that story 
 which it is the struggle of all pain and pleasure 
 in the career of Christ to tell, which all healthy 
 pain or pleasure in the career of man is tempting 
 him to learn, of man's unbroken sonship to his 
 Father, of the belonging of his soul to the soul 
 of God.
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 153 
 
 I have dwelt long upon this analysis of the 
 real seat of influential life in Jesus, because onl) 
 by understanding this can we truly understand 
 the position and meaning which He would give 
 to suffering and enjoyment in His life or in ours. 
 I trust that the importance of what I have been 
 saying will appear as I go on. It will be enough 
 at present to suggest as the principle which gov- 
 erns all Christ's treatment of these phenomena 
 of life that in His thought of them they are 
 phenomena. They are not essential, they are 
 accidental. Consequently they are neither to 
 be sought nor shunned, but to be accepted as 
 they come, with a welcome which goes below 
 them and deals with the conditions out of which 
 they spring. Jesus always thinks of Himself as 
 undergoing the will of God, because God is His 
 Father. The pain and pleasure which come to 
 Him in undergoing that will come not simply 
 with their own inherent qualities of comfort or 
 discomfort, but with the values which they get 
 from that obedience of which they are the signs 
 and consequences. This is the key to all His 
 attitude towards them. And of this principle all
 
 154 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 the special study to which we now proceed will 
 be in illustration. 
 
 Our subject properly divides itself into two 
 parts : I. What is the position and meaning 
 of enjoyment and sorrow in the life of Jesus ? 
 2. What is the position and meaning of enjoy- 
 ment and sorrow in the life of His disciples ? It 
 is once more a Biblical study in which we are 
 to engage, and the ground over which we are to 
 ange is the rich field of the four Gospels. 
 
 I ask you to recall as simply as you can, as 
 much as possible as if you read it for the first 
 time, the story of the life of Jesus. One of the 
 things which, if we can do that, will, I think, 
 impress us most, will be the constant presence of 
 the emotions of pleasure and of pain in the ex- 
 perience of Him whose history we are reading, 
 whose person in those graphic pages stands be- 
 fore us. We shall have occasion in a few mo- 
 ments to go over in detail the series of special 
 instances ; but just now remember merely the 
 general impression which the story makes. It 
 is a country with an atmcsphere. Clouds and
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 155 
 
 sunshine are playing across its surface all the 
 time. The actual features of the varied land- 
 scape are always changing their aspect with the 
 light that falls upon them. The special events 
 which happen have an additional character as 
 they lie in the light or in the shade. What a 
 landscape would be which had no atmosphere 
 above it, which received no shadow and no sun- 
 light on it, that would a life be which was made 
 up of events but knew no emotions. A dreadful 
 place ! Hills, valleys, oceans, rivers, fields, all 
 perfect, all grouped with one another in complet- 
 est symmetry, but all bathed in one monotonous, 
 unchanging light ; all the same every day and 
 every hour ; no soft transitions from the solemn 
 gloom into the happy brilliance, none of that 
 change of smile and frown with one another that 
 makes us feel the fitness when we talk about the 
 " face of nature " ! A dreadful world ! A world 
 in which no character could grow, no manhood 
 ripen. The life of Jesus shows us no such world 
 as that. It is changing every moment with the 
 light and shade. A sensitiveness whose quick- 
 ness to impressions we feel almost painfully
 
 1 56 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 trembles in every line. Only and here is 
 where the principles which I have just been 
 stating show their influence in His life Jesus, 
 with all His sensitiveness to pain and joy, still 
 never allows pain or joy to be either the purpose 
 of life or the test of life with Him. The country, 
 to renew our figure, is bright with sunshine or se- 
 rious with shadow, and gets its ever-changing 
 beauty from their constant alternation ; but it 
 never sets itself to work to make the clouds 
 whose shadows are to rest upon it, nor does it 
 judge its landscape by the special gloom or glory 
 which is cast on it at any moment. So, to speak 
 not in figure, the sensitiveness of Jesus to pain 
 and joy never leads Him for a moment to try to be 
 sad or happy with direct endeavor ; nor is there 
 any sign that He ever judges the real character 
 of Himself or any other man by the sadness or 
 the happiness that for the moment covers His life. 
 He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from 
 His living, and cast their brightness and their 
 gloominess back upon His life ; but there is no 
 sorrow and no joy that He ever sought for itself, 
 and He always kept a self-knowledge underneath
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 157 
 
 the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment's 
 nappiness or unhappiness. They were like rip- 
 ples on the surface of the stream, made by its 
 flow, and, we are ready to imagine, enjoyed by 
 the stream that made them, not sought by the 
 stream for themselves, nor ever obscuring the 
 stream's consciousness of its deeper currents. 
 The supreme sorrow of the cross was never 
 sought because it was sorrowful, and even while 
 He hung in agony it never obscured the certainty 
 of His own holiness in the great Sufferer's soul. 
 These are the perpetual characteristics of the 
 emotional life of Jesus, which our theology has 
 often conjured out of sight, but which are of un- 
 speakable value, as I think ; for a clear under- 
 standing of them puts the Man who suffered and 
 enjoyed more than any other man that ever lived 
 in a noble and true relation to His suffering and 
 joy, and makes His pain and pleasure a gospel 
 to men in their sadness and their gladness every- 
 where. 
 
 I turn to a more minute examination of the 
 illustrations of this. The pleasures and suffer- 
 ings of Jesus lie in three different classes, and 
 each of them demands our careful study.
 
 158 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 The first class is composed of those which 
 belonged to His physical nature, those which 
 could not have come to Him, which could not 
 come to any man, except through the medium of 
 a human body. It is good to see how manifold 
 these joys and sorrows are. They begin in that 
 strange, half-conscious life of infancy, where it is 
 always so hard to estimate pleasure and pain, 
 where it is so hard to tell what value to give to a 
 cry that issues from an infant's lips or a smile 
 that plays across his face. And yet the pain 
 and delight of childhood we know are realities, 
 inextricably snarled in with the first possession 
 of a mortal body which breathes the breath of this 
 alert and exacting world. The poverty and pri- 
 vation of the inn at Bethlehem and the forced 
 and hurried journey into Egypt are instances of 
 what I mean. They are not events on which 
 we need to dwell. What they were to Jesus we 
 cannot tell. They touch the outmost rim of the 
 capacity of pain ; but they open the way, for 
 what comes afterwards. They declare what life 
 is goinf to mean to this new mortal who has 
 come "into its power. They are the first few
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 159 
 
 notes, not clearly intelligible in themselves, but 
 giving us the key in which the opening life 
 is to be lived. But as soon as the dim thicket 
 of infancy opens into the clear path of manl} 
 life it becomes apparent that all the spiritual ex- 
 periences of Jesus have an almost unexampled 
 association with His physical life. Very few 
 men's souls are so bound in with their bodies as 
 was His with the frame He wore. At the very 
 outset of His public career, when His self-under- 
 standing was gathering itself up for the work Hd 
 had to do, He went away into the desert and 
 was tempted. What happened there is at once 
 one of the most mysterious and one of the most 
 intelligible passages in the life of Jesus. To 
 any man who has been young, who has faced 
 life, who has listened while many voices called 
 him to turn aside into plausible paths, and the 
 one great voice of the God of Duty called him 
 right onward to whatever might await him, to 
 every such man the essential meaning of the 
 Temptation is beyond all doubt. At the same 
 time its special scenery and action is very vague. 
 Material fact and impalpable vision shoot through
 
 160 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 each other and cannot be unsnarled. But this, 
 at least, is plain, the body shared in the expe- 
 rience. Long, painful hunger went before the 
 spiritual trial, and it is out of lips at once weak 
 and tense with physical exhaustion that the pat- 
 tern answers of all tempted souls proceed. By 
 and by came another event which brings some- 
 thing of the same confusion of the mysterious 
 and the intelligible. Jesus goes up into another 
 mountain, and is transfigured. Indeed, in many 
 respects this story belongs beside the story of 
 the Temptation. The two mountains are the 
 complements of one another. As the Tempta- 
 tion was the typical utterance of the perplexed 
 conditions of human living, so the Transfigu- 
 ration was the irrepressible utterance of the 
 essential glory of human nature filled with di- 
 vinity, reclaimed and openly asserted to be the 
 Son of God. And in the Transfiguration, as in 
 the Temptation, the body has its share. Not 
 merely does the soul enjoy sublime converse with 
 G>d and with the past. A sweet and awful glad- 
 ness shines out from the face and hands, and 
 even pierces from the hidden limbs through the
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 161 
 
 coarse garments which shine "white as the light." 
 I do not know the meaning of it all, but I know 
 that what came to the spiritual came in some 
 echo to the physical, and the body shared the 
 gladness of the soul. And when we turn the 
 page again and look into Gethsemane, the same 
 completeness of the human life is there. " Being 
 in an agony, He prayed more earnestly, and His 
 sweat was as it were great drops of blood." 
 However it may be swathed about and purified 
 and glorified by the suffering of the consecrated 
 soul, there was physical pain there in the Garden 
 on the night before the cross. The next day came 
 the cross itself, and the struggle of the devout- 
 est souls with themselves has always been to keep 
 the sight of the body's agony from monopolizing 
 all their pity, and hiding from their sight the 
 nobler and deeper suffering of the tortured spirit 
 of the Crucified. In all of these scenes, is it not 
 striking to see how the body bore the spirit 
 company, how there came no spiritual delight or 
 mi ;cry but that the physical chords were struck 
 and could be heard sounding through the finer 
 and more subtle music? 
 ii
 
 1 62 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 Again, it is not possible for one who really 
 wants to know the sort of life that Jesus lived to 
 turn away indifferently from what the people said 
 about Him who used to see Him every day 
 Morning by morning, night by night, He went 
 about those strange old streets where men looked 
 at Him curiously, exactly as we should look 
 at any wondrous life that came and set itself in 
 the familiar framing of these streets which we 
 know so well. All the more, often, because 
 they had no keen spiritual sympathy with Him, 
 the outward life which He lived photographed 
 itself upon their watchful observation. They 
 were like reporters, not like disciples, and so 
 their superficial account of what He did was per- 
 haps all the more true. What did they say ? 
 One day He told them what He had often over- 
 heard : " The Son of man is come eating and 
 drinking, and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man 
 and a wine-bibber." Coarse, brutal, full of hostile 
 caricature, no doubt the words are ; but still 
 they give us the sort of picture which we would 
 like to have, from his foe's pencil, of any man 
 whom we desired to know. At least there must
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 163 
 
 be an indication in what direction His life was 
 lived. No man with callous, stolid body, that 
 could not suffer and could not enjoy, could ever 
 have been taunted with that peculiar tone of 
 mockery. 
 
 But there is something else in Jesus that 
 always gives me a profound and vivid sense of 
 how that human body which He wore was full of 
 the capacity of suffering, and of how large a part 
 of His total experience its emotions made. The 
 fear of death, or rather, perhaps, the fear of dying, 
 is something almost wholly physical. I know it 
 is not conscience, it is not the dread of meet- 
 ing, as we feebly say, a God with whom she has 
 lived in tenderest and most trusting communion 
 for these forty years, I know it is not these that 
 make a true, pure saint turn white-cheeked and 
 tremble when you go and tell her that she is to 
 die. The emotion really has its birth where you 
 behold its symptoms, in the body. It is the flesh 
 that shrinks from the thought of dissolution with 
 as truly a physical instinct as that with which 
 the finger draws back from the knife that pricks 
 it. Now through the Gospels there runs, almost
 
 164 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 from the beginning, a Via Dolorosa whose stones 
 you can almost feel still tremble under the 
 feet of Jesus walking to His more and more 
 clearly realized death. One day at Crcsarea Phi- 
 lippi we can begin to trace it first. " From that 
 day forth began Jesus to shew unto His disciples 
 how that He must suffer many things of the elders 
 and chief priests and scribes, and be killed." 
 Then dow,n in Galilee, " Jesus said unto them, 
 The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands 
 of men, and they shall kill Him." Then, on the 
 way up to the city where the cross was waiting, 
 " Behold we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of 
 man shall be betrayed, and they shall condemn 
 Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gen- 
 tiles to crucify Him." It is a horror that belongs 
 to a man whose body loves to live. " If it be 
 possible, let this cup pass from Me." It was the 
 cup of death, long watched and waited for, at 
 last felt pressing with its cold rim on the lips. 
 " It is finished." It was the same cup, drained 
 at last, and the body giving itself ever to the 
 peace of death which lay on the othei side of the 
 drea.dfulness of dying.
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 163 
 
 It is an unnatural, a somehow unhumanized 
 eye that does not fiftd these signs of the physi- 
 cal sensibility of Jesus scattered all through the 
 Gospels. A poor sick woman crawls up and lays 
 her finger on His garment's hem. Instantly He 
 turns and asks, " Who touched Me ? " He has 
 felt her finger through the sensitive body and 
 the sensitive soul together. Who can picture the 
 pain and pleasure which always must have been 
 beating into His nature through the sensitive 
 substance of a body such as that ? 
 
 But there is another region in which the physical 
 conditions are unmistakably active, while it yet 
 lies close on the borders of the purely spiritual 
 being. Into that region we must follow Jesus 
 before we can understand all the susceptibility 
 to pain and joy that was bound up with the body 
 that He wore. It is the region in which man 
 feels the influences of external nature, and gath- 
 ers delight or sorrow, is exalted or depressed, 
 by the touches of the world around him. How 
 wide and rich that region is in the best and com- 
 pletest men, all of us know ; and I do not believe 
 that any one can consider the way in which Jesus
 
 1 66 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 treated the world of nature, and especially can 
 read His parables, without being sure that He 
 lived in that region and was open to its influences 
 always. " Consider the lilies of the field, how 
 they grow," He cried, as they walked together, 
 treading the autumnal crocus under foot. " Lift 
 up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are 
 white already to harvest." So He caught the 
 picture of His truth as He sat by the well at 
 Sichera and gazed down the bright open valley 
 that leads toward Jerusalem. " When it is even- 
 ing ye say, Fair weather, for the sky is red ; and 
 in the morning, Foul weather to-day, for the sky 
 is red and lowering." So the influence of the 
 sky overhead flowed down into His teaching. 
 \nd in one parable so short, so perfect, the 
 exquisite jewel among the parables all the 
 work that He was doing, all the promise of God 
 for humanity, shone out in the picture which 
 had sunk into His soul in countless quiet walks 
 through peaceful fields. " So is the kingdom of 
 God as if a man should cast seed into the ground, 
 and should sleep and rise night and day, and the 
 seed should spring up and grow he knoweth not
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 167 
 
 how." In all these there is pleasure. Joy comes 
 in through the quick, delighted eyes, and runs 
 through all the physical frame, which is part of 
 that natural beauty to which it responds, a joy 
 that interprets to the healthy man the happiness 
 of the happy brutes, as there is another joy that 
 gives him some understanding of the bliss of 
 God. 
 
 " How good is man's life, the mere living ; how fit to em- 
 ploy 
 
 Ail the heart and the soul and the senses forever in 
 joy ! " 
 
 This is the joy that sings itself under the deep 
 lessons of the parables, like the music under the 
 pathos of a hymn, or the tingle of blood under 
 the solemn consecration of the soldier who rushes 
 to the fight. 
 
 And now what is the meaning of this sensi- 
 bility to pain and pleasure which belonged to 
 His body ? What did it mean to Jesus ? It is 
 not hard to read. It is a witness of the com- 
 pleteness of human life in Him. Pure health it 
 is which answers instantly to external physical 
 conditions with their appropriate reply. True 
 healthiness is always sensitive. To go into any
 
 1 68 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 Gethsem me and not to feel the body sympathize 
 with the soul, is not completeness but meagre- 
 ness of life. To stand where food is spread be- 
 fore us and either morosely to hate it or greedily 
 to clutch it, both are morbid. Both the ascetic 
 and the glutton are self-conscious. The true 
 human being forgets the body, not because the 
 body is detached and cast away, but because the 
 body is doing its work perfectly, as the passen- 
 ger on the great ship forgets the engine only 
 because the engine's healthy pulse has become 
 part and parcel of his shipboard life. 
 
 And again, the physical sensibility of Jesus 
 bore testimony to the condition of the world He 
 dwelt in. How wonderfully interesting it be- 
 comes in this regard ! The perfect health regis- 
 ters disorder by its pain as truly as it proclaims 
 and praises order by its happiness. And here was 
 Jesus, standing with His representative human 
 body in this manifold and complicated world. 
 How will the world utter itself on Him ? Behold, 
 now a quick pain leaps through Him as He treads 
 on some serpent in the way; now a sweet joy 
 falls through the body on the spirit, as the breath
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 169 
 
 of heaven blows upon His cheek. Pain and joy, 
 joy and pain, in quick succession ! What shall 
 we say ? What can we say, but that here in the 
 centre of the Bible the philosophy that runs 
 through the Bible, the philosophy which makes 
 man the centre arid registering test of nature, 
 comes to its perfection ? The Old Testament 
 had told of how nature to obedient man had been 
 all good ; how nature to man disobedient had 
 declared its sympathy in thorns and thistles and 
 angry beasts. The New Testament was to tell 
 of a whole creation groaning and travailing, wait- 
 ing for the redemption of the human body. Here 
 in the midst of Scripture stands the sensitive 
 body of the Son of Man, fully in the present lot 
 of His brother men; and to Him the mottled 
 world, the world that was God's child, and 
 yet was full of selfishness and sin, the world 
 whose name, as He Himself gave it, was the 
 Prodigal Son, a son, but prodigal; prodigal, yet 
 a son, to Him this mingled world declared 
 itself in mingled pain and pleasure, and wrote 
 the story of its own condition in what He suf- 
 fered and enjoyed.
 
 170 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 And yet once more. The physical sensitive- 
 ness of Jesus no doubt helped, as no other 
 medium could have helped, that deep, mysterious 
 process, the development of the self-conscious- 
 ness of Jesus. Why should I not believe that 
 out of the physical difficulties which tore His 
 hands He plucked the full flower of His knowl- 
 edge of His own soul, and, wrapped up at the 
 heart of that, His knowledge of the soul of His 
 Father? Why should I not believe that His 
 gratitude for the pure joy of physical living was 
 one of the doors through which He entered into 
 the complete sense of how His soul's life issued 
 from and belonged to God ? That which is the 
 sign of any condition always, by a subtle law, 
 deepens and ripens and confirms that condition. 
 And so when Jesus said to Pilate, who was 
 threatening Him with the physical pain of cruci- 
 fixion, "Thoucouldst have no power at all against 
 Me except it were given thee from above," it was 
 not merely a testimony that He felt already the 
 holding of His soul in His Father's everlasting 
 hand, it was also a nestling of the soul yet 
 more deeply and tenderly into the hollov of the 
 hand that held it.
 
 On the Emotijnal Life of Man. 171 
 
 This was what the succession of physical pain 
 and pleasure meant to Jesus. It was the witness 
 of His complete human life ; it was the register 
 of the disordered world ; and it was the instru- 
 ment for the development of His spiritual con- 
 sciousness. And now have we not the answer 
 to our second question upon this first point ? 
 What did He intend that pain and joy should 
 mean to His disciples ? These same three things, 
 no doubt. Think of the times when He dis- 
 tinctly recognized the susceptibilities of their 
 bodily life. Once on the Sabbath day he walked 
 through a cornfield, and the hungry men plucked 
 the ripe ears and rubbed them in their hands and 
 ate them. Jesus said, " The Son of man is Lord 
 of the Sabbath." His recognition of human 
 nature and its needs lay behind the positive in- 
 stitution v'^ich He did not dishonor. Even in 
 Gethscmane the tired friends who were keeping 
 Him company fell asleep ; and it was only with 
 the wonder of one who for the -moment was out 
 of the power or hope of rest that He dropped His 
 gentle reproach upon them. When the crowd 
 followed Him across the lake, He was as quick
 
 172 The Influence of J^esus 
 
 to see their starved faces as He \vas to read their 
 sinful hearts. " I have compassion upon the 
 multitude," He said, " because they continue with 
 Me now three Jays and have nothing to eat." It 
 is simply to Him the sign that they are men. 
 He touches the fact of their humanity in helping 
 them, and that seems to give Him joy. The 
 same appeared when men came to Him and 
 complained that His disciples were not ascetics 
 like the disciples of John. " Why do the disci- 
 ples of John fast often, but Thine eat and drink ? " 
 "Can ye make the children of the bridechamber 
 fast while the bridegroom is with them ? " He re- 
 plied. That physical pleasure should be the 
 accompaniment of spiritual joy, He accepted as 
 part of the harmony of the universe. 
 
 Nor is it less true that Jesus accepted the pain 
 of other men, like His own pain, as an utterance 
 of the condition of the world in which they all 
 were living together. When, as He put His 
 fingers in the deaf man's ears and looked up to 
 heaven before He gave the poor creature hearing, 
 He sent a sigh up with the prayer, it must have 
 been that He felt thr ugh this one crack the
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 173 
 
 whole tumult of the disturbed creation in which 
 all deformity and suffering had their deep roots. 
 And we may almost turn at random to His mira- 
 cles : see Him with the nobleman who came from 
 Capernaum to Cana, cultivating his faith at the 
 same time that He cured his son ; stand with 
 Him in the boat and see Him send calm into the 
 tempest and into His disciples' frightened hearts 
 at once ; look across the stormy water and see 
 Him lift Peter out of the waves and out of his 
 doubt at the same time, to recognize how He 
 always used the body's sensibilities to develop 
 the soul's consciousness, how by physical pain 
 and joy He helped the spirit to know itself and 
 to knew its Father. 
 
 To Jesus, and to His disciples, and to all men 
 who know the bodily life as He knew it and 
 taught them to know it, the pain and happiness 
 of which the human body is capable must be 
 very noble messages. When I suffer or when 
 I enjoy, when down these nerves the quick 
 agony shoots and leaves me trembling like a 
 poor tree which the blast has shivered, or when 
 through the healthy blood peace runs like the
 
 1 74 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 sunlight on a flowing river, when, in the 
 gate of life, benea f h affections, thoughts, dreams, 
 memories, desires, there is always felt this human 
 body with its pangs and blisses, what a noble 
 meaning there is in it all as it lies open to the 
 influence of Jesus ! " Lo, I am human ! " And all 
 the dignity and pathos of humanity surrounds 
 me. "Behold in what a disturbed and struggling 
 world I live ! " And hope and fear, twin cap- 
 tains of the soul, patience and expectation, 
 spring to life. " See here, touching this very 
 flesh of mine, the fingers of the hand whose heart 
 is my Father's," and through the passions which 
 the body feels opens a way into the deepest woes 
 and loftiest pleasures, which can belong only to 
 the sons of God. 
 
 I must pass on to the joys and sorrows of the 
 next deeper grade, to those which have their roots 
 not in the senses but in the affections. They are a 
 great deal deeper. The way in which the body's 
 pains will easily be borne or the body's pleasures 
 easily be sacrificed in order that we may delight 
 ourselves in the indulgence of the affections or 
 escape their wounds, is proof enough how we all
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 175 
 
 feel that the heart is the true seat of life, and not 
 the body. " When the numbness comes up to my 
 heart, then I shall depart," said Socrates, after he 
 had drunk the poison. The passions of the body 
 may mean much, but they can never mean life or 
 death. Only in the loves we have for others than 
 ourselves can we truly live or die. 
 
 When we come to study this region of the life 
 of Jesus, the field that opens to us is very wide. 
 We can do hardly more than just point out its 
 features. And the most prominent among them 
 all must be the absorbing affection of His life, 
 the pure love that He had for His Father, God. 
 We go about and about this centre of the life of 
 Jesus, we talk of what it made Him do, we talk of 
 how He tried to communicate it to those whom He 
 taught. But it very often seems to me as if those 
 of us who have read the Gospels most have but 
 seldom grasped the love which Jesus had for His 
 Father and understood it as a simple conscious- 
 ness ; not as a motive, but as a pure atmosphere of 
 pleasure, the perpetual bright flower of the abso- 
 lute unity of will which was between them. There 
 are some simple expressions of this in the Gospel.
 
 176 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 which get their profoundest beauty only as we 
 think of them with the most absolute simplicity. 
 Jesus one evening went away by Himself into a 
 mountain and "continued all night in prayer to 
 God." We say that He was seeking preparation 
 for the solemn task of selecting His disciples, 
 which He undertook the next day. Certainly 
 the communion of that night must have prepared 
 Him for the task, but in itself what was it but 
 the simple resting of one nature on the bosom 
 of the nature which it loved, and in the fact of 
 loving which it found its perfect joy ? I think 
 that if we go behind that simplicity we lose the 
 beauty and majesty of it all. The most majestic 
 is always the simple, not the complicated. And so 
 it is not what I may picture to myself that Jesus 
 asked of His Father in those sacred hours ; it is 
 simply that Jesus was with His Father, every inter- 
 ference of the daytime being completely set aside ; 
 that life touched life in the complete communion 
 of love, that is the final fact on which the mind 
 which is seeking the happiness of Jesus in the life 
 o''the affections rests without asking for analysis. 
 That is only one instance. Another corn *
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 1 7? 
 
 before us in that deep and eager cry wilich broke 
 forth from the lips of Jesus on the cross. " My 
 God, M} God," He cried out, " why hast Thou 
 forsaken Me?" I do not pretend to understand 
 all the meaning of that cry. Nobody understands 
 it. What wonder is it if, when the last words 
 of any faithful man finishing his noble life have 
 always something in them which the most true 
 and lifelong sympathy that stands about his bed 
 cannot comprehend, the dying words of Jesus 
 should have mystery in them and suggest strange 
 questions which we cannot answer ? But though 
 I do not understand it fully, I know that I come 
 nearest to its meaning when its meaning seems to 
 me most simple. It is pure love, love thwarted, 
 hindered, and perplexed, but yet pure love, with 
 that triumph which love always carries in its 
 very existence whether it reach its object and 
 call back response or not. Jesus does not beg 
 for release. He does- not even ask for vindication. 
 He only utters love. And that cry after His 
 Father lets us look down into His heart and see 
 that in loving His Father and being loved by 
 Him was His perpetual joy.
 
 178 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 And yet see how this cry of Jesus illustrates 
 what I said about the position which pleasure 
 and pain always took in His life. They are 
 always subordinated to the doing of a will, which 
 will in its turn gets its value from the idea which 
 inspires it. So here. The joy of loving and the 
 pain which only love can bring beat tumultu- 
 ously together in this cry. But underneath them 
 both there is obedience, and the idea from which 
 obedience proceeds. Not for one moment does 
 He think of coming down from the cross to find 
 His Father. Whether He find Him or lose Him, 
 whether the issue of His love be the perfect joy 
 of union or the exquisite suffering that separa- 
 tion brings, He must obey Him first. Even if 
 His doing of His Father's will seems to shut 
 Him out of His Father's presence, there cannot 
 be a question ; the will must be done. Oh, how 
 often souls have forgotten, as they weighed the 
 raptures, the ecstasies of faith against its hard 
 and present duties when the two seemed to be 
 not compatible with one another, how often 
 they have forgotten that the question which was 
 greater and more sacred of the two, the rapture
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 179 
 
 or the obedience, was settled once forever on the 
 cross ! 
 
 We pass from this supreme affection of Jesus 
 to the others which are included in it. I had 
 occasion in my last lecture to speak of the rela- 
 tions which Jesus held to those persons who 
 were immediately connected with Him by the 
 ties of kindred. I refer again to the family life 
 in which He lived, only to notice what was the 
 kind of pleasure and suffering that it brought 
 to Him which He could not otherwise have 
 met. That it did bring Him both there can 
 be no doubt. In all his intercourse with John 
 the Baptist we never can lose remembrance of 
 the relationship between them. The old pic- 
 tures which have grouped them as children by 
 the Virgin's knee express a feeling which we 
 can never cast aside. It is impossible to make 
 their connection simply official. When John 
 baptizes Jesus, it is a kinsman's hand that leads 
 the exalted youth into the water. And by and 
 by, when the disciples went to the prison and 
 took the body of the murdered Baptist and 
 buried it, and came and told their Master, it
 
 180 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 was for one of His own family blood as well 
 as for one of His own divine spirit that Jesus 
 mourned. And there is another passage which 
 always seems to me to open a glimpse of the 
 family affection which was in the heart of Jesus. 
 He had avoided Judea because it was not safe 
 for Him to work there. He was laboring in 
 Galilee. And his brethren came to Him and 
 said, " Depart hence and go into Judea. If 
 Thou do these things, show Thyself unto the 
 world." It was almost a jeering mockery. 
 " Neither did His brethren believe in Him," 
 the writer adds. The pain of having those 
 doubt Him who ought to know Him best, of 
 having His own flesh and blood turn on Him 
 and mock Him, it is evident that Jesus knew 
 what that pain was, and that it was something 
 peculiar to Him, something different from the 
 unbelief and hostility of the promiscuous crowd. 
 Then turn for another instance to the cruci- 
 fixion, to those few hours of distress which 
 sometimes seem to epitomize all that there was 
 in His entire life. " There stood by the cross 
 of Jesus His mother and His mothei's sister,"
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 181 
 
 and just as He was dying the Sufferer turned 
 and gave His mother to the care of His disciple. 
 " Woman, behold thy son ! " " Son, behold thy 
 mother ! " It was a pang within all the other 
 pangs, a woe that perceptibly added to their 
 wretchedness, when among the faces that pitied 
 Him He saw her face who bore Him, the face 
 into which He had looked up from His cradle. 
 When I think over these three stories, it seems 
 to me that I discover what the real meaning was 
 of that additional element of joy and pain which 
 came to Jesus through His family affections. 
 In each I seem to see that the family relation- 
 ship was representative of something deeper 
 that lay in behind. His special connection with 
 those special lives was, as it were, the manifesta- 
 tion point of His relationship to all the world. 
 What He was to those brethren who had always 
 lived in the same house with Him he was essen- 
 tially to all mankind. In them He realized with 
 peculiar vividness what was true of all the 
 world. All men were sons of God along with 
 Him, but that sonship shone forth in a peculiar 
 clearness in these men, who were also of Mary's
 
 1 82 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 blood as well as He. It gave him joy when 
 any of His brethren in the most remote degree 
 realized the sonship which was revealed in 
 Him or (as He himself expressed it) came to 
 the Father through Him. But that joy was 
 vividest when one of His brethren in the nearest 
 and most special sense attained that high belie 
 The pain of any human being touched Him, 
 but in His mother's pain humanity pressed itself 
 closest to His sensibility and gave Him a special 
 distress proportioned to His special love. In 
 general, the woes and pleasures through His 
 family affections were those which belonged to 
 His whole contact with humanity, only deepened 
 and emphasized and vivified by the particular 
 dearness in which these kindred lives stood to 
 His own. 
 
 And yet I hasten on to say that such an 
 account of the emotions which belong to 
 Christ's domestic life does not in the least con- 
 flict with that spontaneous character which is 
 of the every essence of such emotions always. 
 Indeed, the best and noblest natures, as I think, 
 are marked by hardly anything so much as
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 183 
 
 this, the simultaneous spontaneousness and 
 reasonableness of the lives they live. One kind 
 of man is all spontaneous, and can furnish no 
 account of what he feels and does. Another 
 kind of man is all reasonable, and lets no impul- 
 sive action slip from his will till it has ac- 
 counted for itself to his conscious understanding. 
 Both of these men are partial. There is a man 
 who is more complete than either, who is as 
 impulsive as a child and yet in the heart of 
 whose impulsive action there always lies the 
 true reasonableness of manhood. He does the 
 natural human acts because he must do them, 
 and yet he knows why he does them. The 
 spontaneousness does not obscure the reason, 
 and the reason does not hamper and clog the 
 spontaneousness. So it always seems to me 
 that it is with Jesus. He presses His brother's 
 hand with brotherly affection. His brother's 
 sneer wounds Him as no stranger's can. His 
 mother's sorrow enters into its own secret 
 chamber of sympathy in Him where no other 
 sorrow can intrude. And yet all the while, 
 with all the instinctive value which He gave to
 
 184 Tks Influence of Jesus 
 
 them for their own sake, these home affections 
 all are ties to bind Him to humanity, windows 
 through which He looks into the depths of 
 human life, interpretations to His soul of the 
 wider brotherhood in the vaster family. 
 
 Surely there is here a noble indication of 
 what the family affections as sources of suffering 
 and happiness may be to all men, of what they 
 must be to all men who dwell in them within the 
 larger family which Jesus shows. It is dreadful 
 if we lose their spontaneousness. Beyond all 
 analysis there lies the relation which every true 
 son holds to a true father. It is a final fact. 
 You cannot dissolve it in any abstract theory. 
 It issues from the mysterious sympathy of the 
 two lives, one of which gave birth to the other. 
 It has ripened and mellowed through all the rich 
 intercourse of dependent childhood and imitative 
 youth and sympathetic manhood. It is an eter- 
 nal fact. Death cannot destroy it. The grown- 
 up man feels his father's life beating from beyond 
 the grave, and is sure that in his own eternity 
 the child relation to that life will be in some 
 mysterious and perfect way resumed and glori-
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 185 
 
 fied, that he will be something to that dear life 
 and it to him forever. All this remains Its 
 bright spontaneousness nothing is allowed ;o tar- 
 nish. And yet the adult son delights to learn 
 how, through his intimacy with that nature out 
 of which his sprang, he is introduced into an 
 understanding of the whole human race. In a 
 deeper sense than we are apt to give the words, 
 his father "brings him into the world." His 
 father's life is to him the illumination point of 
 all humanity. In loving his father he loves his 
 race. And all the joy and pain, all the rich- 
 ness and pathos of his home life, while they 
 keep their freshness and peculiar sanctity, have 
 in them and below them all the multitudinous 
 happiness and sorrow of the larger life in the 
 great household of the world. The child feels 
 something of this truth by instinct. The thought- 
 ful man delights to realize it more and more as 
 he grows older. 
 
 To come back, however, to the life of Jesus, 
 we are aware that His relations to those who 
 held the ties of kinship with Him, while they 
 were clear and real, were not a large or promi
 
 1 86 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 nent element in His life. He quickly went be- 
 yond the household of the carpenter in His 
 eagerness to attain the household of God. He 
 was the brother of all men. And the truth of 
 all the emotion which filled the social life of 
 Jesus when we sum it up, seems to be this : that 
 all multiplied and deepened relationships with 
 men bring mingled joy and sorrow ; a joy and a 
 sorrow which it is not possible to separate and 
 weigh against each other, because they are so 
 subtly and intricately mingled that the joy makes 
 part of the sorrow and the sorrow makes part of 
 the joy, and you cannot take away either without 
 finding that the other has eluded you ; a joy and 
 sorrow also which no man can ever gain by di- 
 rectly and deliberately seeking them, but which 
 come unsought to every man who, regardless of 
 the pleasure or the pain they bring, enters into 
 profound connections with his fellow-men. These 
 are the two key truths of any social life which 
 goes beyond a club acquaintance or a parlor 
 friendship. He will certainly fail who hopes to 
 know men deeply and only to get happiness 
 never to get anxiety, distress, disappointment
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 187 
 
 out of knowing them ; and he has mistaken the 
 first idea of human companionship who seeks 
 friendships and contacts with mankind directly 
 and simply for the pleasures they will give him. 
 
 Now Jesus quietly and steadily met both these 
 laws. He calmly deepened His relations to 
 mankind as much as possible, accepting all the 
 pain that such profound relationships might 
 bring; and always with Him the happiness or 
 unhappiness of His associations were but acci- 
 dents, and not the final purposes for which He 
 won His friends or encountered the hostility 
 of His enemies. Here is one of His disciples, 
 Simon Peter. Two picturesque moments stand 
 out in the history of the intercourse of Jesus 
 tfith that interesting man. At the foot of Her- 
 mon, tempted by a question of his Master, Peter 
 burst forth with a hearty and enthusiastic utter- 
 ance of his conviction of the divine nature which 
 had been steadily impressing itself upon him. 
 " And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed 
 art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath 
 not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which 
 is in heaven." In the high-priest's house at Je-
 
 1 88 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 rusalem, when Jesus was standing a culprit on 
 the night of His arrest, waiting for the scourging 
 and the cross, He overheard this same Peter say 
 twice, " I do not know Him," when some ser- 
 vants questioned him about the prisoner whose 
 fate was the question of the hour. " And the 
 Lord turned and looked on Peter. And Peter 
 went out and wept bitterly." See what two in- 
 fluences came out of this friendship. See what 
 joy and sorrow issued from the bosom of this 
 love. See how the joy at hearing the confession 
 of such a profound, far-reaching truth as His 
 own divinity must have been full of fear which 
 was almost certainty that the disciple would fail 
 in some of the inevitable applications of the 
 truth which he must be so imperfectly appreci- 
 ating even while he enthusiastically proclaimed 
 it. See how the suffering which the treason 
 brought must still have had in it a consolation, 
 as Jesus detected in the very passion of the de- 
 nial the crushed remonstrance of the love which, 
 even under the denial, was living still. Or take 
 a yet harder case. Jesus had another disciple 
 whom He saw slipping more and more away
 
 On the Emotional Life jf Man. 189 
 
 from Him, who He saw would some day betray 
 Him with the worst ingratitude. And yet I think 
 that every man whose sad and anxious office it 
 has ever been to try to lift a soul which in spite 
 of all his struggles has been always sinking 
 deeper and deeper into the depths, will bear me 
 witness that in the patience and wisdom and 
 faithfulness which his Master lavished upon 
 Judas Iscariot for years there must have been a 
 pathetic pleasure, peculiar and subtle because of 
 the growing hopelessness of results which com- 
 pelled each effort to find its satisfaction in its 
 own essential nature. It must have had some- 
 thing of the delight in mere service with which 
 one watches at the bedside of a sick friend, of 
 whose recovery all hope is gone. And both in 
 Peter and in Judas the second of the truths of 
 which I spoke appears, that it was not for the 
 joy or for the sorrow that their society would 
 bring that Jesus sought them. Peter and Judas 
 alike He sought because they were the sons of 
 God ; the pain or pleasure they would give Him 
 came afterwards and as an accident. 
 
 Ir all of Christ's associations the same inevi-
 
 190 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 table mingling of the sad and glad appears. 
 There was a little family at Bethany in which 
 He often made His home, and the last time He 
 left the hospitable door He carried out with Him 
 two memories, the memory of how the eyes of 
 Mary had looked up into His face, eager with 
 the desire to understand all His sacred truth, 
 and the memory of how the same eyes had 
 streamed with tears beside her brother's tomb. 
 The same voices of the populace at Jerusalem 
 which cried " Hosanna !" cried " Crucify him !" 
 before the week was done. The happiness of 
 promising heaven to a dying thief was filled with 
 pity that only by a torturing death had the poor 
 wretch been brought into the sight and hope of 
 life. One day He saw a poor widow in the Tem- 
 ple give a true charity ; but the same sensitive- 
 ness of soul which made Him find pleasure in 
 her simple act laid Him open to the distress 
 which only such a soul could feel at the ostenta- 
 tious hypocrisy of the Pharisees. And all through 
 His life the deep, enthusiastic happiness at giv- 
 ing men the chance of their divine inheritance 
 was mingled with the distress of knowing that
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 191 
 
 men who would not take what He held out to 
 them must be worse off than if He had not come 
 to them. " He that heareth My word hath ever- 
 lasting life," and " On whomsoever this stone 
 shall fall it shall grind him to powder," the 
 opposite fates of men, with the emotions they 
 awakened, the two were always on His heart 
 together and crowded each other on His lips. 
 
 So it must always be. To be a true minister 
 to men is always to accept new happiness and 
 new distress, both of them forever deepening 
 and entering into closer and more inseparable 
 union with each other the more profound and 
 spiritual the ministry becomes. The man who 
 gives himself to other men can never be a 
 wholly sad man ; but no more can he be a 
 man of unclouded gladness. To him shall 
 come with every deeper consecration a before 
 untasted joy, but in the same cup shall be mixed 
 a sorrow that it was beyond his power to feel 
 before. They who long to sit with Jesus on 
 His throne may sit there if the Father sees 
 them pure an J worthy, but they must be bap- 
 tized with the baptism that He is baptized with
 
 192 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 All truly consecrated men learn little by little 
 that what they are consecrated to is not joy 01 
 sorrow, b'lt a divine idea and a profound obedi- 
 ence, which can find their full outward expres- 
 sion not in joy, and not in sorrow, but in the 
 mysterious and inseparable mingling of the two. 
 
 There yet remains one other class of pleasures 
 and sufferings which belong to all devoted and 
 ideal natures, and in which Jesus had a share. 
 It consists of the moral joys and pains, of those 
 which come from the acute perception of right 
 and wrong, of moral fitness or unfitness in the 
 things about us. You cannot put a man very 
 high unless you give him a good share of that 
 quality. Merely to see that things are right or 
 wrong, and not to feel a pleasure in their right- 
 ness and a pain in their wrongness, does not in- 
 dicate a finely moulded character. The moral 
 perceptions, even the moral obediences, do not 
 make a full moral life. The moral emotions must 
 be there too. That such a power as this was in 
 Jesus nobody can doubt who knows Him. And 
 yet we are a good deal surprised, I think, when
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man, , 193 
 
 we survey His history and see how few are the 
 moments in which this power prominently ap- 
 pears. The reason is that the life of Jesus, and 
 all His thoughts and feelings, had personal shapes 
 and directions. We do not know how largely 
 this is true until we read the Gospels with this 
 thought in our minds. The great moral enthu- 
 siasts kindle when they see a good deed done, 
 rejoice in the progress of humanity, have a keen 
 happiness when some new instance brings out 
 the fitness for virtue which is in the whole great 
 world, and on the other hand suffer as if a spear 
 pierced them or a club smote them when a bad 
 action makes a discord and wrongs the funda- 
 mental purpose of the world. There is very 
 little indeed of that in Jesus. We cannot think 
 of Him as a pure moral enthusiast. With Him 
 almost everything is personal. He is glad 
 when a man is good because the man's own life 
 is illuminated, and still more because the man 
 glorifies His Father which is in heaven. A 
 wickedness wounds Him because it is a degra- 
 dation to the man who does it and an insult to 
 God. Behold Him as He goes into the Temple^
 
 194 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 which the greedy people had turned into a 
 market-house. It is " My Father's house " for 
 which he is so jealous. It is no abstraction of 
 reverence for which He burns. It is exactly 
 as if a child came home and found his moth- 
 er's chamber turned into a huckster's shop. It 
 is as literal, as personal, as that. The profound 
 sense of unfitness, of discord, is there, but it is 
 held in solution in this more vehement feeling 
 of personal wrong. It is this personalness of 
 all His moral enthusiasms, as it seems to me, 
 that keeps us from ever feeling or fearing in 
 Jesus any of that moral pedantry or what, with 
 a word that has no dignified equivalent, we call 
 that priggishness which haunts the words of 
 the moral enthusiasts who kindle at the har- 
 r.onies and discords of abstractions, whether they 
 './!k as utilitarians or as transcendentalists. 
 
 Nevertheless, though this is true, the sense of 
 the absolute must underlie and must appear 
 through the personal enthusiasms of Jesus. 
 Otherwise the moral quality would evaporate, 
 and His personal emotions would come to be only 
 mere fondnesses and prejudices. And there are
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 195 
 
 instances enough in which we can feel, beating 
 and shining through His personal affections, the 
 delight and sorrow with which His soul recog- 
 nized the essential qualities of holiness anfl sin. 
 I have already spoken of the indignation which 
 possessed Him in the desecrated Temple. As 
 an illustration of the opposite emotion, there 
 occurs that beautiful outburst in which, almost 
 with surprise, certainly with a sudden overflow 
 of gladness, as He saw the perfection of the 
 method of God's treatment of the world and 
 revelation of Himself through innocence, Jesus 
 breaks out and cries, "I thank Thee, O Father, 
 Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid 
 these things from the wise and prudent and hast 
 revealed them unto babes." What a happy 
 heart is there ! It is all personal, and yet the 
 personalness holds clearly in its heart a sense of 
 the beauty of a moral idea, the idea that the 
 profoundest belongs to the purest, the loftiest 
 truth to the innocent and guileless heart. One 
 day a centurion came to Jesus and wanted Him 
 to work a miracle ; and as they talked about it, 
 the simplicity of the man's trust came out. He
 
 196 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 illustrated His belief in the power of Jesus by 
 describing his own relation to the forces which 
 were under him. " I say to this man, Go, and 
 he goeth ; and to another, Come, and he cometh." 
 Instantly, as it would seem, so large and true a 
 conception of the world all held together in one 
 sublime system of authority and obedience, run- 
 ning up to the highest, running down to the 
 least of its activities, filled the soul of Jesus with 
 delight. " I have not seen so great faith, no, not 
 in Israel," He said. One other day, in a remote 
 country village, He met ten lepers. As the poor 
 wretches stood afar off and cried to Him, He bade 
 them go and show themselves to the priests. 
 And as they went, lo, their leprosy was gone and 
 they were clean. Then one of them turned back, 
 all radiant with gratitude, and fell down at his 
 healer's feet. National prejudice, for the man 
 was a Samaritan, old bitterness, the selfishness 
 which comes with sudden happiness, all these 
 were broken through, and there he lay, all over- 
 whelmed with thankfulness and love. Mean- 
 while the other nine went cheerily upon their 
 way, meanly satisfied with the mere fact of
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 197 
 
 health. There comes a sorrow and a joy into 
 the face and words of Jesus which are primarily 
 and formally personal, but are not wholly so. In 
 at the heart of it, it is the joy which every noble 
 heart feels at the very sight of gratefulness, and 
 the pain that each true soul experiences at the 
 very presence of ingratitude. That such things 
 are, ; their very being and essential qualities, 
 these are what wake responses of gladness or of 
 sadness in the soul. You have to reach in and 
 find that feeling underneath the personal emo- 
 tions of Jesus. But it is always there. When 
 He pities Jerusalem, His pity has an eternal 
 dignity about it, because the woe which He com- 
 miserates is but part of the universal tragedy 
 of sin. When the poor woman stops Him by 
 the roadside, and with the wit of wretchedness 
 claims even for a dog some crumb of the precious 
 mercy, His praise of her is more than recognition 
 of her quick rejoinder; it is a pleasure in the 
 sight of that clear hold on the right of the weaker 
 over the stronger which is part of the moral 
 structure of the universe. And at the last, when 
 the supreme joy of His life comes, and wi'b
 
 198 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 an appeal to His Father's perfect knowledge He 
 exclaims, " I have glorified Thee on the earth, I 
 have finished the work that Thou gavest Me to 
 do," there is heard inside of that appeal a pure 
 joy in the establishment of righteousness and 
 the setting up of the kingdom of salvation which 
 is the basis of the personal gratulation that the 
 words express. I must not multiply illustra- 
 tions. I do not know one instance of Christ's 
 joy in moral harmony that is not held in the 
 bosom of some personal affection. But, on the 
 other hand, I do not know one instance of per- 
 sonal affection which does not get its value from 
 some moral emotion at the centre of it. That is 
 the kind of moral enthusiasm which the influence 
 of Jesus has spread throughout the world. It is 
 not calm, cool approbation of goodness, it is 
 delight in a good man, with which the Christian 
 kindles. But it is always certainly his goodness 
 in him not his mere person, but the moral 
 nature which his person vividly exhibits that 
 excites the Christian's admiration. And so it is 
 neither an enthusiasm for goodness nor an en- 
 thusiasm ol humanity that the influence of Jesus
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 199 
 
 is creating in the world, but a communion of 
 saints, a race of men each delighting in the 
 other for his holiness, and each delighting in 
 holiness for the brightness that it gives the 
 others' lives. 
 
 I do not think that it would be right to close 
 this study of the pleasure and the pain which 
 Jesus experienced and into which His disciples 
 are constantly led, without saying two or three 
 words upon a point which may often suggest a 
 difficulty. I have been speaking of the certain 
 satisfaction of His soul in moral fitness, in the 
 harmony of righteousness. But, some one asks, 
 how is it with those other harmonies in which 
 we are always finding delight, the fitnesses 
 which the aesthetic nature recognizes and loves? 
 Was there anything of those in Jesus ? Had He 
 anything of what we call the sense of artistic 
 beauty ? Did He get any of that joy of taste oi 
 which our modern life makes so much ? It is 
 not an easy question to answer in a word. We 
 may point to the special earnest purpose which 
 filled all of the life of Jesus. We may say that
 
 2OO The Influence of Jesus 
 
 He who was walking on to Calvary had no 
 time in the intenseness of His moral life for art 
 and its luxuriousness. We may say that He 
 was a Jew, and it was not in the nature of His 
 race to gather from beautiful things that happi- 
 ness which they imparted to the quick-eyed 
 Greek. We may say that it was a mere ques- 
 tion of the accidental circumstances and furni- 
 ture of the life of Christ, that the physical 
 sensibility and the moral impressibleness which 
 we have been studying in Him make un- 
 doubtedly a large part, while undoubtedly they 
 do not make the whole of that only half- 
 accountable element in us which we call the 
 aesthetic nature, and so that the capacity of the 
 pleasure which that nature values only waited 
 in Him for some circumstances to develop it. 
 We may say that though Jesus made nothing 
 of artistic beauty, yet His religion has made 
 much of it, and out of Christianity the highest 
 artistic life has come. We may say all these 
 things, and no doubt all of them have truth. 
 But still the great impression of the life of 
 Jesus, as it seems to me, must always be of the
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 20 1 
 
 subordinate importance of those things in 
 which only the aesthetic nature finds its pleas- 
 ure. There is no condemnation of them in that 
 wise, deep life. But the fact always must remain 
 that the wisest, deepest life that was ever lived 
 left them on one side, was satisfied without 
 them. And His religion, while it has developed 
 and delighted in their culture, has always kept 
 two strong habits with reference to art which 
 showed that in it was still the spirit of its Mas- 
 ter. It has always been restless under the sway 
 of any art that did not breathe with spiritual and 
 moral purpose. Never has Christian art reached 
 the pure sestheticism of the classics. And in its 
 more earnest moods, in its reformations, in its 
 puritanisms, it has always stood ready to sacri- 
 fice the choicest works of artistic beauty for the 
 restoration or preservation of the simple maj- 
 esty of righteousness, the purity of truth, or the 
 glory of God. 
 
 I have intimated already, once or twice to-day, 
 what significance there is, not merely in the 
 separate presences of joy and trouble in the life
 
 202 The Influence of 'Jesus 
 
 of Jesus, but also in the proportions which they 
 hold to one another, and the way in which they 
 are perpetually mingled. Let me recur to that 
 a moment as I close. In that respect, as in 
 many others, the last day of Jesus, the day of 
 His crucifixion, presents no unreal picture of 
 what His whole life was. That day, in spite 
 of the tragedy which was ripening fast all through 
 the morning, and the cross upon which the sun 
 went down, was not all dark. Strange glimpses of 
 a light which must have brought deep delight to 
 the soul of Jesus shone out through all its course. 
 Follow Him in your thought from the time when 
 He met His disciples in Jerusalem the night 
 before. First came the sitting down at supper 
 with them, a feast of joy, the only familiar 
 board at which we ever see Jesus through His 
 life before His crucifixion. No sooner is He 
 there, and the quiet happiness begun, than the 
 disciples begin to quarrel about some foolish 
 question of precedence, and Jesus is distressed. 
 Then comes the beautiful action in which, as it 
 were, He refreshes the joy of devotion which had 
 filled the years of labor that were all over now.
 
 On the Emotional Lijs of Mai. 203 
 
 He bends and washes the disciples' feet. No 
 sooner is that done than Judas has to be con- 
 victed and dismissed. Then comes the bright 
 moment when St. Peter bursts out with his 
 promise of loyalty, followed the next instant by 
 the Savior's sad prophecy of how near His disci- 
 ple's weakness lay to his promised strength. 
 Next follows the encouraging description of the 
 Spirit of comfort and strength which was to come 
 when Jesus had departed. Then, looking in the 
 blank, unsuspicious faces of the men about Him, 
 the Lord's voice sinks again as He foretells how 
 they will be persecuted. In an instant all that 
 is forgotten, and He is wrapt away from all the 
 present in a celestial memory and a divine antici- 
 pation. " Now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with 
 the glory which I had with Thee before the 
 foundation of the world." With that ecstasy 
 still filling Him, He goes out to the Garden and 
 its agony. He is betrayed and deserted. Yet 
 still one last poor flash of Peter's loyalty lightens 
 the darkness for an instant. The denial, the 
 trial, the scourging, the crucifixion, follow fast. 
 Yet even in the midst of their horror there is
 
 2CU Tlie Influence of Jesus 
 
 room for some momentary gleams of joy. The 
 wavering of Pilate ; the cries of a few sympathetic 
 voices among the hooting mobs as He passed 
 through the street ; the group of friends at the 
 foot of the cross ; and then that great joy which 
 must have fallen into His spirit when from the 
 other cross there came a cry of faith and hope ; 
 at last the utter satisfaction which fills His soul 
 as He exclaims, "It is finished," all of these 
 come in to show that the very agony of agonies 
 was charged with the divine capacity of joy. 
 As we gather the total impression of that won- 
 drous day, how complete it is ! How joy and 
 sorrow interfuse and blend with one another! 
 And the result is a new compound of life which 
 is different from either. How evident it is that 
 by some principle more deep than just that joy 
 is pleasant and pain is hard to bear, they are 
 distributed. It is as if Jesus walked under a 
 cloud, and yet felt always that in the very sub- 
 stance of cloud there was suffused and softened 
 light. The cloud had light in its darkness and 
 darkness in its light ; and so the explanation of 
 it all was clear. A sunlight through the cloud
 
 On the Emotional Life of Man. 205 
 
 He felt, and behind the sunlight there must be 
 a sun. Behind the bitter circumstances lay a law, 
 the blessed law of obedience, which was fellow- 
 ship with God ; and behind the law a truth which 
 was God Himself. 
 
 Under that same cloud of circumstances we 
 must walk; but if there is behind it, for us, too, 
 that law and that truth which really made the 
 life of Jesus, the law of obedience and the truth 
 of sonship, then for us, too, light shall come 
 through the cloud, and, mingling with its dark- 
 ness, make that new condition in which it is best 
 for a man's soul to live, that sweet and strong 
 condition in which both joy and sorrow may 
 have place, but which is greater than either of 
 them, the condition which He called peace.
 
 IV. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 ON THE INTELLFHTUAL LIFE OF MAN.
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS 
 
 ON THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MAN. 
 
 "TV /TEN and books have their favorite words, 
 As the result of years of thoughtful life, 
 of constant and studious dwelling upon one class 
 of ideas, almost all men appropriate out of the 
 great treasury of the language certain words 
 which they make their own. Their friends grow 
 used to hearing those words from their lips. 
 The words become filled with their personality. 
 Some color or shade or tone comes into them, as 
 such a speaker habitually uses them, which indi- 
 cates on which side he has approached their 
 meaning, and they who honor him can hardly 
 hear the words or speak them without entering 
 into communion with his spirit. 
 
 If such an habitual use of certain words with cer- 
 tain tones is true and always fresh, if it does not 
 come out of affectation and does not degenerate 
 into mannerism, it often gives us the material for 
 u
 
 210 
 
 The Influence of ^ 
 
 an excellent study of a man's life and nature. If 
 he is only real, we may judge him by his words. 
 As he speaketh with his mouth so is he. Tell 
 me what words a man uses most, and reproduce 
 for me the tones in which he speaks them, and I 
 ought to be able to tell you a good deal about 
 what sort of man he is. Count for me the 
 favorite words of any book, and give me some 
 idea of the association in which they stand, and 
 I ought to know much of the book's quality and 
 of what influence it will exert on those who 
 read it. 
 
 I am to speak to-day of the influence of Jesus 
 upon intellectual life, upon the world of thought ; 
 and I know no better way to approach a sub- 
 ject so interesting, so rich, and yet, as it seems to 
 me, in its central point so simple, than by ob- 
 serving the prominence of one word and the 
 very marked and characteristic way in which 
 that word is used in the book which tells us 
 most of what we know about the mind of Jesus. 
 The book is the Gospel of St. John. The word 
 is truth. It is only in that one book that the 
 word is found upon the lips of Jesus with any of
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 211 
 
 that special intonation which is peculiarly His 
 own. There are three other Gospels, three 
 other accounts of the Lord's life, but in neither 
 of them does this, which is his most characteris- 
 tic utterance in the fourth Gospel, once appear. 
 I need not pause to say that such a fact suggests 
 no real difficulty or discrepancy between the 
 records. As different as Matthew and John 
 were from each other, so different must have 
 been the words of their Master which were 
 caught in the memory and treasured in the heart 
 of each. In the same way in which Zenophon 
 and Plato both wrote of Socrates, and, holding 
 different mirrors on different sides of that won- 
 derfully interesting figure, have given us, not two 
 Socrateses, but a completer Socrates than we 
 could have had if only one of them had seen him 
 and described him, so the first Gospel and the 
 fourth enlarge each other, and the historic Jesus 
 comes in the stereoscopic fulness of His recorded 
 life and nature from the two. But Plato is more 
 to us than Zenophon. The great Athenian lives 
 in the Dialogues as he does not in the Memora- 
 bilia. And John is more to us than Matthew,
 
 212 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 A word of Jesus constantly appearing in those 
 discourses of Jesus which most impressed the 
 most sympathetic and spiritual of his disciples 
 will, if we can see what He meant by it, admit 
 us very deeply into His heart and will. Such a 
 word is truth, as it is used by Jesus constantly 
 in the Gospel of St. John. 
 
 The word, then, is distinctly a word of the 
 intellect. Whatever other elements may enter 
 in, however it may enlarge itself and become a 
 word of the entire nature, the intellectual element 
 can never be cast out of it. He whose favorite 
 word is truth must be a man who values intel- 
 lectual life, who is not satisfied unless his own 
 intellect is living, and who conceives of his fellow- 
 men as beings in whom the intellect is an impor- 
 tant and valuable part. This must belong to any 
 habitual use of the word at all ; and so, when 
 we find it appearing constantly upon the lips of 
 Jesus, in the record of that one of His disciples 
 who understood Him best, we feel that we know 
 this at least about Him, that He cared for the 
 intellect of man, that He desired to exercise 
 some influence upon it, that He was not satisfied
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 213 
 
 simply to win man's affection by His kindness, 
 nor to govern man's will by His authority, but 
 that He_also wished to persuade man's mind~ 
 with truth. 
 
 But we must know something more of what 
 a man's conception about truth is before we can 
 see what sort of influence he will exert upon 
 men's intellects. Take Martin Luther's idea of 
 truth, and Professor Huxley's idea, and Mr. 
 Emerson's idea. How evident it is that the 
 same word would be spoken in distinguishably 
 different tones, and would strike with different 
 force upon the hearer's ears and character as 
 it came from three such different men. And 
 so it is not enough that we should know the 
 fact that Jesus constantly talked of truth. That 
 would assure us that He sought an intellectual 
 influence. We must also know what He meant 
 by truth, and how He spoke of it. That will 
 reveal to us what kind of intellectual influence 
 it was that He desired. Let us turn then to 
 some of the sayings of Jesus concerning truth. 
 And, as we look at them, remember it is not the 
 essential importance of what He says that we
 
 214 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 want to dwell on, but merely the indication in 
 His saying of what He means by truth, of which 
 He speaks so much. On one occasion, when He 
 had been speaking very powerfully about His 
 own personal relation to His Father, a great 
 many of His hearers were persuaded and be- 
 lieved on Him. Then Jesus said to those Jews 
 that believed on Him, " If ye continue in My 
 word, then are ye My disciples indeed ; and } 
 shall know the truth, and the truth shall make 
 you jree." That puzzled them. It stirred their 
 Jewish blood. They told Him that they were 
 born of Abraham, and were no man's slaves. 
 " How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free ? " 
 And Jesus answered them, " Truly I say unto you, 
 every man that committeth sin is the servant of 
 sin." That was the freedom that His truth was 
 to bring, a spiritual freedom, a freedom from 
 wickedness, an untwisting of the tight cords 
 from their hold on the personal nature. Truth 
 was something which, when it came, would set 
 the whole man free. By and by, in the same 
 talk, He warmed into earnest pity not unmixed 
 with indignation. Poor people ! there they stood
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 215 
 
 before Him, and would not, could not, under- 
 stand the things He said to them. Would not 
 and could not were all mixed together. But 
 His indignation reaches back behind them. It 
 cannot stop short of the Evil Spirit who is their 
 deluder. " Ye are of your father the Devil, ana 
 the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a 
 liar from the beginning and abode not in the 
 truth." Again, see what a moral thing the 
 truth is. He who does not abide in it is not 
 merely a doubter, not merely a disbeliever, he 
 is a liar. The truth is truthfulness. The sub- 
 jective and objective lose themselves in one 
 another. Then let the whole strain change. 
 The warm discussion, the earnest indignation, 
 is long past and over. Jesus is sitting with the 
 men who loved Him in the quiet atmosphere of 
 the Last Supper. A question of one of the 
 disciples drew from Him the words which per- 
 haps have fascinated and mysteriously fed as 
 many souls as any words He ever spoke. "I 
 am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life," He 
 said. " I am the Truth." We must have some 
 notion of what truth meant to Him which shall
 
 ?i6 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 be large enough to contain those words. A truth 
 which a man could be ; a truth which could sum 
 up and consist of personal qualities. Evidently 
 it is not mere fact, this truth of His ; not some- 
 thing merely done, merely made, and standing 
 finished and recognizable, to be walked around 
 and measured and studied on the outside by any 
 patient eye. It is something living, something 
 ever taking shape, something spiritual, and to 
 be known only from the inside by spiritual sym- 
 pathy. The evening passed on, and by and by 
 Jesus began to unfold to His disciples the prom- 
 ise of what He would do for them even after He 
 had left them. He is going to send them the 
 Comforter, He says. And this Comforter, when 
 He is come, is to " reprove the world of sin, of 
 righteousness, and of judgment." Deep words, 
 and full of meaning, much of which we have not 
 fathomed yet. But this, at least, we know is in 
 them. It is a spiritual helper who is coming ; 
 a soul coming to help souls ; a moral mastei 
 who shall judge and rule the moral life. And 
 so when in a minute Jesus, as He goes on speak- 
 ing, gives this Comforter another name, and says,
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 217 
 
 " When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will 
 lead you into all truth," we know again that 
 truth cannot mean in Him merely objective 
 verity ; it must have in it the elements of char- 
 acter, since the leading of man into it by the 
 Divine soul is to be the perfection of man's life. 
 The evening wears on still, and by and by Jesus 
 has ceased to speak directly to His friends. His 
 voice is heard in prayer. And in His prayer 
 there comes what we may almost call His sum- 
 ming up and report of all His life to His Father. 
 " For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they 
 also might be sanctified through the truth," He 
 says. It is His own character through which 
 alone truth can come to make character in His 
 disciples. It is the deep and satisfied declara- 
 tion that His whole life had been given to seek- 
 ing the fulfilment of the petition which He had 
 just offered, " Sanctify them through Thy truth." 
 The same crowded night slowly creeps away, 
 and in the morning everything is once more 
 altered. Jesus is standing before Pilate. And 
 as the strange interview goes on, He has once 
 more occasion to declare the sum and purpose
 
 218 The Influence of jfestts 
 
 I 
 of His life. " To this end was I born," lie 
 
 says, " and for this cause came I into the world, 
 that I should bear witness to the truth. Every 
 one that is of the truth heareth My voice." 
 " Every man of the truth." Again you see how 
 the air grows hazy with the meeting of the 
 subjective and objective conceptions. They are 
 words of character. A " man of the truth " is 
 something more than a man who knows the truth, 
 whose intellect has seized it ; that, we are sure, 
 would be the very tamest paraphrase of the sug- 
 gestive words. It would take the whole life and 
 depth out of them. A " man of the truth " is a 
 man into all whose life the truth has been pressed 
 till he is full of it, till he has been given to it, 
 and it has been given to him, he being always 
 the complete being whose unity is in that total 
 of moral, intellectual, and spiritual life which 
 makes what we call character. He is the man 
 of whom Pilate's prisoner said, " He hears my 
 voice." No wonder that Pilate, hearing a new 
 sound in an old familiar word, felt all his old 
 questions stir again within him, and asked with 
 an interest which was too weary to be called a 
 hope, " What is truth ? "
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 219 
 
 These passages will show how the word truth 
 sounds when Jesus says it. I have not hesitated 
 to multiply them, because out of them all comes 
 forth, I think, a perfectly clear conception of 
 what the intellectual life was in Jesus. The 
 great fact concerning it is this, that in Him the 
 intellect never works alone. You never can 
 separate its workings from the complete opera- 
 tion of the whole nature. He never simply 
 knows, but always loves and resolves at the 
 same time. Truth which the mind discovers 
 becomes immediately the possession of the af- 
 fections and the will. It cannot remain in the 
 condition of mere knowledge. Indeed, knowl- 
 edge is no word of Jesus. Solomon in the Book 
 of Proverbs is always talking about knowledge. 
 Jesus, in the Gospel of John, is always talking 
 about truth. So genuine is the unity of His 
 being, that what comes to Him as knowledge 
 is pressed and gathered into every part of Him, 
 and fills His entire nature as truth. The rays 
 of intellectual light are absorbed into the whole 
 substance of the spontaneous affections and the 
 unerring will. The rig ' t and the true, the wrong
 
 22O The Influence of Jesus 
 
 and the false, are not separable from one another. 
 The life is simple because of its completeness. 
 It is the true unity of a man. 
 
 When we see how constantly it is the crudity 
 of an unappropriated, unassimilated intellectual- 
 ity that disappoints us in intellectual people; 
 when we find ourselves turning away from many 
 a learned man whose knowledge has not been 
 pressed into character ; when we find that the 
 action of the intellect forcing itself upon our 
 notice because it is working out of proportion to 
 or out of harmony with the other parts of a man's 
 nature, his conscience, his affections, and his 
 active powers, always dissatisfies and makes us 
 restless, and, with all the interest which we may 
 feel in him, does not let us think that we have 
 found the fullest and most perfect man, when 
 we see all this, it becomes clear to us what a 
 distinguishing thing in Jesus was this unity of 
 life in which the special action of the intellect 
 was lost. We catch something of the spirit 
 with which His disciple, fondly recurring years 
 afterwards to the bright days when He first knew 
 Jesus, twice used the same description of Him:
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 221 
 
 "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, 
 full of grace and truth." " The law was given by 
 Moses, but by Jesus Christ came grace and truth*" 
 We have only to dwell upon men's best con- 
 ception of a Deity to see how distinct and how 
 lofty this conception of intellectuality is which 
 the life of Jesus sets be/ore us. The partialness 
 which we see in man, and which lets us easily 
 divide our fellow-men into classes and label 
 them the men of intellect or the men of action, 
 passes away as we mount to any thought of God 
 which is at all worthy of Him. What God 
 knows is one and the same with the love with 
 which He loves and the resolve with which He 
 wills. You cannot draw a fence through the 
 great ocean of infinity. Mythology dreams of 
 its many gods with many functions. The mo- 
 ment that one God stands forth above all gods, 
 the many things which the partial deities do lose 
 themselves in the one perfect thing which the 
 one only Deity is. And all wisdom unites 
 with all power and all love no less in the guid- 
 ing of a little child along the slippery path 
 which leads to manhood, than in the vast con-
 
 222 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 duct of the destinies of the colossal man who 
 lives through all the generations of the race. 
 
 We need only to think of the kind of human 
 creature who has always most easily commanded 
 the instinctive admiration of his brethren, and 
 we shall see that the same character reappears in 
 him. It is not the intellectual man as such, not 
 the man in whom intellect stands crudely forth 
 as the controlling element in life, that other men 
 are drawn to most. The greatest men that ever 
 lived are those in whom you cannot separate the 
 mental and moral lives. YOM cannot say just 
 what part of their power and success is due to a 
 good heart and what to a sound understanding. 
 And in every circle there are apt to appear some 
 persons of great influence and great attractive- 
 ness, of whom you never think as being specially 
 intellectual. If any one calls them intellectual, 
 it startles you ; but as you think about your 
 wonder, you discover that it does not come from 
 an absence of the intellectual life in those who 
 are thus spoken of, but from the fact that the 
 intellectual part of them is so blended and lost 
 in the rounded and symmetrical unity of their
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 223 
 
 life that you have never been led to think of it 
 by itself. All this is very frequently true con : 
 earning women, whose unity of life is often more 
 apparent than is that of men. 
 
 Again, the superiority of this sort of life is 
 seen in the instinctive way with which men seek 
 to produce it in their systems of education for the 
 young. In the family and in the school parents 
 and teachers whose own ambitions are purely 
 and hardly intellectual will rarely seek for chil- 
 dren so narrow an existence as they are prac- 
 tically seeking for themselves. All men who 
 have anything to do with education are drawn 
 irresistibly into the valuing of character. They 
 cannot disregard subjective life. They cannot 
 sow seed over the fallow ground till they have 
 first made it fertile with right emotion. And, on 
 the other hand, the intellectual culture of the 
 race, strong as the motives are that incite men to 
 it for its own sake, could probably never main- 
 tain its ground and keep the enthusiastic interest 
 of the best and wisest men if, in spite of count- 
 1< ss disappointments, it were not clearly seen to 
 1 tve, upon the whole, a olose connection with
 
 224 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 men's moral conditions and the symmetrical 
 completeness of their lives. 
 
 But perhaps what I am urging is seen most 
 clearly if we watch the change which conies to 
 all our natures in their loftiest, which are their 
 truest, moods. The best study of essential hu- 
 man nature is to be found, not in the exceptional 
 men who stand out distinct above their fellows, 
 nor in the ordinary man in his ordinary moments, 
 when the fire of his life burns low, but in those 
 states which come to all healthily susceptible 
 human natures, in which their powers are most 
 active with the least distortion, times of exalta- 
 tion, in which the exalted man is conscious that 
 he is not transported out of himself, but is simply 
 realizing himself in a supreme degree. And one 
 of the characteristics of such times of healthy 
 exaltation is the manifest unity of the life, and 
 especially the way in which intellectual action, 
 without being quenched, nay, burning at its very 
 brightest, blends with the quickened activity of 
 all the being, and is not even thought of by it- 
 self. A time of heroic sacrifice brings quick per- 
 ceptions, which yet the hero has no time to dwelJ
 
 On tlie Intettectnal Life of Man. 225 
 
 upon with pride before they are lost in the tor- 
 rent of rich impulses which is sweeping through 
 his life. The days when death comes near our 
 life with that freedom and refinement which it 
 always tries to bring, are days in which we think 
 the truest and profoundest thoughts about the 
 overpowering mystery ; but it is so much else to 
 us then besides a thing to think about, it is 
 something so much nearer and greater than a 
 problem of the brain, that we hardly know 
 that we are thinking about it at all. So love and 
 hope and joy and indignation and fervent admi- 
 ration for a noble man, and any sudden sight of 
 our own best possibilities, all of these are con- 
 ditions in which the intellect works vigorously, 
 but it works in the midst of a being all quickened 
 and exalted together, and so it is lost in th*; large 
 action of the whole. " He who does not lose his 
 reason in certain things," says Lessing, " has none 
 to lose." But the reason is lost, not by any palsy 
 or death that falls on it, but by the vehement 
 life of will and affections, among which the life 
 of the reason takes its true place as but one 
 member of the perfect whole. 
 15
 
 226 The Influence of y 
 
 There is a noble passage of Wordsworth which 
 tells this same story, and shows how under the 
 greatest influences of nature the same rich blend- 
 ing of the life takes place. He is describing the 
 consecrating effects of early dawn : 
 
 " What soul was his when from the naked top 
 Of some bold headland he beheld the sun 
 Rise up and bathe the world in light. He looked 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay 
 In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched 
 And in their silent faces did he read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed not 
 Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
 The spectacle ; sensation, soul, and form 
 All melted into him. They swallowed up 
 His animal being ; in them did he live 
 And by them did he live. They were his life. 
 In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the Living God, 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
 No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ; 
 Rapt into still communion that transcends 
 The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power 
 That made him ; it was blessedness and love ! ** 
 
 I must not dwell longer on these illustrations. 
 This fact, so abundantly set forth in our own 
 best experiences, is the fact that fills and ex-
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 227 
 
 ./Yi 
 plain? the intellectual history of Jesus. The 
 
 "mind of Christ," of which one of His followers 
 spoke years afterwards, is mingled and lost in 
 the completeness of His life ; and that com- 
 pleteness, to take one step farther, is represented 
 to Himself by the obedience which He owed 
 and always rendered to His Father. The unity 
 of life is rescued from vagueness and made a true 
 reality to Jesus by the one enveloping relation 
 to God which comprehends it all. We shall un- 
 derstand that, I think, if we turn again to the 
 unique and precious story in which is told us all 
 that we know about the boyhood of Jesus. The 
 child of twelve years old finds his way back to 
 the Temple, where the sacredness of life and 
 the connection of man with God had for the 
 first time been set forth before Him in ceremo- 
 nial richness. He cannot turn His back upon 
 the wonderful, delightful place. He cannot go 
 quietly down into Galilee, and leave the Temple, 
 which is radiant with knowledge and holiness, 
 behind Him. We must remember that the 
 Temple was indeed the centre of knowledge for 
 the Jews. There sat the doctors. There the
 
 228 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 law was taught. When Jesus, then, tarried in 
 Jerusalem and clung about the Temple courts, 
 it was the craving after knowledge, it was that 
 sweet, vague outlook into vast cloud-swept fields 
 of possible intelligence, which makes the poetry 
 of every pure boy's life to-day, it was this lofty 
 wish to know, that kept Him -there. But when 
 His parents came back and found Him, and 
 when, with a boy's directness and a boy's ab- 
 sorption in the present task, He looked up at 
 them in surprise, as if it were a wonderful thing 
 that any one should think He could be doing 
 anything but just what He was doing then, 
 and answered, " Wist ye not that I must be 
 about My Father's business ? " it was an answer 
 of obedience ; all alive with thought ; yet, when 
 He stated the purpose of His life, it was not 
 thought, but duty. The intellectual activity was 
 held in the bosom of an obedience which made 
 the boy's life a unit. Out of that obedience the 
 intellectual activity received its impulse, and to 
 the more and more complete fulfilment of that 
 obedience it contributed its results. 
 
 Thus the character of the intellectual life of
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 229 
 
 Jesus was indicated at the very start. We have 
 only to look at some of the striking moments of 
 His mental experience, to see how that character 
 ran through them all. There is much that might 
 be said about the Temptation, that mysterious 
 experience in the wilderness with which His 
 early life of contemplation passed over into the 
 later life of action. All that I point out to you 
 now is this, that, while it is evident that in 
 those terrible hours the whole nature of Jesus 
 was submitted to a fearful struggle, and that, 
 as not the least among the elements that made 
 up the ordeal, His intellectual judgments were 
 shaken, His knowledge of truth was invaded by 
 tumultuous doubt, His sight of His Father was 
 obscured, yet, at the last, and as the sum of 
 all, the question was not one of intelligence but 
 of will. It was a choice of obediences that made 
 the real crisis. It was the rejection of Satan's 
 " Fall down and worship me," and the clear 
 acceptance of " Thou shalt serve the Lord Thy 
 God," that marked the victory. " Then the 
 Devil leaveth Him, and behold angels came 
 and ministered unto Him." The moment that
 
 230 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 the obedience of the life was established, the 
 mental tumult settled into peace within it. 
 
 At the other end of the career of Jesus the 
 same thing was seen. In the Garden of Geth- 
 semane reason seemed to totter on her throne. 
 For the last time the desperate hands had to 
 cling to the truth in instant fear. But there, 
 too, it is not by the direct conviction of the 
 reason ; it is by the adjustment of the whole 
 life in obedience to which, no doubt, the rea- 
 son gave its assent, but which was a transaction 
 far beyond the reason's limits that the trem- 
 bling reason finds composure. When He said, 
 ' Thy will be done," all the obscurity began to 
 scatter, and those words which He said four 
 days later, after He had risen, to His disciples, 
 "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things ?" 
 words with the echo in them of the same sur- 
 prise with which He long before spoke to His 
 parents in the Temple, words full of the peace 
 of satisfied intelligence, began to take shape 
 upon His lips. 
 
 It is a poor and pitiable life indeed that can- 
 not understand in some degree, out of its own
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 231 
 
 history, this experience of the Temptation and 
 of Gethsemane. Who of us has not bowed his 
 will to some supreme law, accepted some obe- 
 dience as the atmosphere in which his life must 
 live, and found at once that his mind's darkness 
 turned to light, and that many a hard ques- 
 tion found its answer ? Who has not sometimes 
 seemed to see it all as clear as daylight, that 
 not by the sharpening of the intellect to super 
 natural acuteness, but by the submission of the 
 nature to its true authority, man was at last to 
 conquer truth ; that not by agonizing struggles 
 over contradictory evidence, but by the har- 
 mony with Him in whom the answers to all our 
 doubts are folded, a harmony with Him brought 
 by obedience to Him, our doubts must be en- 
 lightened ? 
 
 But to return to Jesus, I think we have in 
 what we have been saying the best light that 
 we can get upon the method of His inspiration 
 by His Father, and so, by inference, upon the 
 method of all the inspiration of the holy men 
 who spoke for God. When I hear Jesus say, 
 " As My Father hath taught Me I speak these
 
 232 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 things ; and He that sent Me is with Me : the 
 Father hath not left Me alone ; for I do always 
 those things that please Him," I cannot be sur- 
 prised as I read on to the next verse and find 
 that "As He spake those words many believed 
 on Him." For the words made the breadth and 
 depth of His inspiration plain. At the base of 
 it all lay His obedience : " For I do always those 
 things that please Him." Out of that obedience 
 came continual communion. "He that sent Me 
 is with Me. The Father hath not left Me alone." 
 And to the spirit lying close in that communion 
 to the Father's spirit, to the soul of the Son 
 lying in its completeness on the soul of the 
 Father, came the wisdom of the Father to be 
 given to the world. What did they think of 
 the next truth that Jesus uttered after He had 
 thus explained Himself? Did it seem to them 
 something which He by unusual penetration had 
 discovered ? Did it seem to them a single, sepa- 
 rate message, apart from all other communica- 
 tion, told by God to Jesus to be told to them ? 
 They must have understood Him better than 
 that. They must have known that, however the
 
 On I he Intellectual Life of Man. 233 
 
 intelligence of Jesus had been illuminated to know 
 this special truth, that special illumination of the 
 intelligence was subordinate to and included in 
 the consecration of the whole life by obedience ; 
 that in whatever sense Jesus knew this because 
 God told Him, He never could have been told 
 if underneath all the communication between 
 Him and His Father it had not been true at 
 the base of everything that He and His Father 
 were one. I cannot conceive of the true hearer 
 of Jesus losing that large thought of His Lord's 
 inspiration ever again. Not a mere message- 
 bringer could He ever seem ; but the eternal 
 truth manifest first in character before it pre- 
 sented itself in specific revelation ; the Word of 
 God, in which and by which the words of God 
 through Him gained their authority and value. 
 
 Once or twice Jesus declares with perfect 
 frankness the limits of His knowledge. There 
 are some things which He does not know. " Of 
 that day and hour knoweth not the Son," He 
 says, " but the Father." What does it mean ? 
 The ancient oracle or the modern fortune-teller 
 could not dD that and yet keep men's faith.
 
 234 The Influence of Jesns 
 
 They have no self, no character behind their 
 words. Men do not believe properly in them, 
 but only in their words. But Jesus always is 
 behind His words. " Ye believe not," He said 
 once to the Jews, " because ye are not of My 
 sheep." He must possess men before His words 
 could take possession of them. We must believe 
 Him inspired, see Him full of God, before we 
 can believe His words inspired, and see them 
 burn with truth. Not from simple brain to 
 simple brain, as the reasoning of Euclid comes 
 to its students, but from total character to total 
 character, comes the New Testament from God 
 to men. 
 
 If we turn now from the thought of Christ's 
 ^ own intellectual life to think of the immediate 
 influence which He exercised upon His disciples, 
 I do not know how to approach that part of our 
 subject better than through the medium of an 
 analogy which must be suggested to any one 
 who thoughtfully reads the record of Jesus along 
 with the record of that only one among purely 
 human teachers whom Christian men have ever
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 235 
 
 ventured to compare with Him. No one can 
 read the Gospel of St. John and then turn to 
 what is left us of the life of Socrates, without 
 being struck and almost startled with the sug- 
 gested comparison between the account of Christ's 
 last talk with His disciples before His crucifixion, 
 which is given in five chapters of that Gospel, 
 and the beautiful story of what Socrates said to 
 Simmias and Cebes and his other friends in the 
 prison at Athens just before he drank the hem- 
 lock, - -the story which Plato has written for us 
 in the Phaedo. And nowhere could the essential 
 difference as well as the likeness of fhe two 
 great teachers become more apparent. Nowhere 
 could the critics who loosely class Jesus and Soc- 
 rates together see more distinctly where their 
 classification fails, where the line runs beyond 
 which Socrates cannot go, beyond which the 
 nature of Jesus sweeps out of our sight. 
 
 I should like to dwell for a few moments on 
 this comparison. The story in St. John is famil- 
 ,ar enough. The points in the story which Plato 
 tells I may venture to recall to you. The two 
 may stand in our imagination side by side. And
 
 236 Tht Influence of Jesus 
 
 in their mere details there is much that suggests 
 comparison. The quiet upper chamber at Jeru- 
 salem where the young man sits with His young 
 companions at the simple supper, where vener- 
 able traditions blend with the joy of present 
 companionship and the pain of coming separa- 
 tion, is set off against the rugged prison open- 
 ing upon the Agora at Athens, where, in the 
 inner chamber, the friends of Socrates have 
 come to talk with him once more before he dies. 
 The old man sits on the bed at first, with his leg 
 drawn up, rubbing the spot from which the fetter 
 had just been taken off preparatory to his death. 
 The relief that he feels in his leg opens his talk 
 with a remark upon the strange connection be- 
 tween pain and pleasure. By and by he drops 
 his feet upon the floor, and so sits on the bed- 
 side, calmly talking. Once he drops his hand 
 affectionately upon the head of Phaedo, as if he, 
 too, would have a " disciple whom he loved," and 
 draw one trusting heart closer to him than the 
 rest. His wife comes in to him with their three 
 boys, and he talks with them kindly, but there 
 is no tenderness, and after a little while he bids
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 237 
 
 them to be taken away, for they evidently trouble 
 him. The humor that had played through all 
 his life is with him to the last. Once he makes 
 a pun. And at the very end, when the disciples 
 asked him how they should bury him, he bids 
 them bury him what way they will, " if only you 
 can catch me and I do not give you the slip " ; 
 and as he speaks, he gently smiles to see how 
 lightly all that he has been saying has sunk into 
 them, and to fancy these clumsy affectionate 
 Athenians chasing his fleeting spirit to cage it 
 in a tomb. Once comes a message from the 
 executioner to tell him about the poison he will 
 have to drink, which is a sharp, violent note, 
 intruding on the music of his thought, that some- 
 how reminds us of the departure of Judas from 
 the Passover table. For an instant the coming 
 woe starts up dramatically real. There is one 
 beautiful moment when the disciples are half 
 convinced, but still frightened and trembling. 
 Socrates sees it in their faces, and tells 
 them of it. And Cebes answers, " Well, Soc- 
 rates, suppose that we are frightened ; do you 
 encourage and comfort us. Or rather, suppose
 
 238 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 not that we are frightened, but that there is a 
 child within us who is so." And Socrates play- 
 fully takes up the pretty thought. " Ah, yes," 
 he says, " we must find some charm that we can 
 sing over this frightened child to quiet him," and 
 so he goes on with his talk again. The words 
 in which Phaedo afterwards recalls the impression 
 that his master's presence made on him that day 
 might almost have been on the lips of John. " I 
 had no painful feeling of pity, as might seem 
 natural to a person present at such a catastrophe, 
 nor did I feel a pleasure as on ordinary occasions 
 when we talked philosophy, though the dis- 
 course was of the same kind. It was a peculiar 
 feeling that possessed me, a strange mixture of 
 pleasure and grief, when I thought that he 
 would soon cease to be." All through the con- 
 versation we can hear the religious festival in 
 which the Athenians are engaged outside, to cele- 
 brate the return of the sacred ship from Delos, 
 the Passover, as it were, of the Athenian life. 
 At last, without a shock, continuing the calm and 
 peaceful teaching to the last, the great man takes 
 the cup and drinks the poison, and all is over
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 239 
 
 There lies his body before them, more eloquent 
 in silence than any of the words he said. 
 
 And now what was it that they talked about on 
 that last day ? The discussion hovered and flut- 
 tered a little at first before it settled to its work ; 
 but it soon became a sustained argument for im- 
 mortality. It is very hard to think that this man 
 is just going to die, and knows it, who sits here 
 calmly arguing that the soul must be immortal. 
 And what were his arguments ? Really, they 
 were three. The first was the distinctness be- 
 tween the soul and the body, as testified by what 
 was the favorite doctrine of Socrates, the soul's 
 pre-existence. If the soul existed before the 
 body, it surely might outlive it. Nay, it must be 
 ready for the other bodies which are waiting foi 
 it. In support of this belief he dwells upon his 
 theory of recollection to account for the presence 
 of ideas in man which man never cc ild have ac- 
 quired by the senses. Then comes his second 
 argument, in which he pleads the indestructi- 
 bility of the soul from its simplicity, its incom- 
 posite nature. Then Simmias and Cebes interpose 
 two exquisitely stated difficulties ; one suggest
 
 240 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 ing that, after all, the soul may be to the bod) 
 what the music is to the lyre ; the other wonder- 
 ing whether the body may not possibly outlive 
 the soul, as the unthinking cloth outlives the 
 wise and skilful weaver by whose hand it was 
 made. Socrates replies to both of them and 
 satisfies them ; and then goes on to his third 
 argument, which is a long and very subtle one 
 about ideas and their accessory attributes, in 
 which he tries to draw the distinction between 
 the imperishable idea and the perishable attri- 
 butes of life. 
 
 These are his arguments. They are sur- 
 rounded with an atmosphere of feeling. Rev- 
 erence and gratitude to God, affection for his 
 disciples, and a tender sense of duty, these 
 play around and through the whole discussion 
 and give it softness and richness. It is not hard 
 and cold. It does not rely wholly upon the 
 worth of its arguments for its power. That is 
 seen in the fact that, though the arguments in 
 the shape in which Socrates puts them would 
 convince no man of the truth of immortality 
 to-day, still the whole scene remains as one of
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 241 
 
 the sacred pictures of the human soul. That 
 prison cell is one of the temples of man's faith, 
 one of the vestibules of immortality. But still 
 the discourse is an argument. It is a search 
 after knowledge. It is a struggle of the intel- 
 lect. It is consoled by the thought of a divinity 
 behind it which will make allowance for its de- 
 ficiencies ; but it feels no direct and present in- 
 fluence from the wisdom of that divinity. What 
 it knows it must discover for itself, and hold, 
 when it is won, as an intellectual conviction. 
 Now turn the leaves of four hundred years, and 
 in the chamber of the Passover feel the differ- 
 ence. As Jesus speaks, argument disappears. 
 Conviction is attained by the immediate per- 
 ception of life by life. "If ye had known Me, 
 ye should have known My Father also, and 
 from henceforth ye both know Him and have 
 seen Him." " In My Father's house are many 
 mansions : I go to prepare a place for you." 
 That is the argument of Jesus for immortality. 
 It is not right to say that Socrates appeals to 
 the reason and fails, while Jesus speaks to the 
 heart and succeeds. The appeal of Jesus is to 
 
 16
 
 242 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 the reason, too, only it is to that spiritual reason 
 which is no special function of the nature, but 
 is the best action of the whole nature working 
 together, the affection and the will being the 
 partners of the brain ; or rather, for that does 
 not express the intimacy of their life, the affec- 
 tion and the will being one manhood with the 
 brain and sharing its intelligence. The difference 
 of result is, in one word, the difference between con- 
 vincing the intellect and making the man believe. 
 I do not know that I can make this clearer, 
 and I must not steal the time to quote largely 
 from the discourse of Jesus in support of what 
 I mean. But let us put one or two pairs of pas- 
 sages together. The philosopher asks, " Shall 
 a man who really loves knowledge, and who is 
 firmly persuaded that he shall never truly attain 
 it except in Hades, be angry and sorry to have 
 to die ? " The Son of God says, " Now I go to 
 Him that sent Me." Socrates says, "Be well 
 assured I do expect this, that I shall be among 
 good men, though this I do not feel so confident 
 about ; but I shall go to gods who are good gov- 
 ernors " Jesus cries, " Now, O Father, glorify
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 243 
 
 thou Me with Thine own self." Socrates draws 
 in confused but elaborate detail the road to Hades 
 and its geography. Jesus says, " In My Father's 
 house are many mansions " ; and, " Father, I will 
 that they whom Thou hast given Me be with Me 
 where I am." Socrates is noble in his frank 
 uncertainty about his life. " Whether I tried in. 
 the right way and with what success I shall 
 know certainly when I arrive there, if it please 
 God." Jesus is divine in His certainty. " O 
 righteous Father, the world hath not known 
 Thee, but I have known Thee." " I have fin- 
 ished the work which Thou gavest Me to do." 
 Socrates tells of a "demon," or angel, who has 
 the care of every man while he is alive, and 
 when he is dead takes him to the place of judg- 
 ment. Jesus says, " I will pray the Father, and 
 He shall give you another Comforter, that He 
 may abide with you forever." " He shall testify 
 of Me." The sage consoles his disciples by send- 
 ing them out to find other teachers. " Greece is 
 a wide place, Cebes, and there are in it many 
 goid men. And there are, besides, many races 
 of barbarians, all of whom are to be explored in
 
 244 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 search of some who can perform such a charm 
 as we have spoken of." The Savior declares 
 simply, " I will not leave you comfortless. I will 
 come unto you." Socrates says, when they ask 
 him for his last legacy, " If you take good care 
 of yourselves, you will always gratify me and 
 mine most." Jesus says, "This is My command- 
 ment, that ye love one another as I have loved 
 you." And, if we let our eye run out beyond 
 the times when both the tragedies the tragedy 
 of Athens and the tragedy of Jerusalem were 
 finished, and see what thoughts of the two suf- 
 ferers were left behind them, we hear Phaedo 
 closing his long story with these words : " This 
 was the end, Echecrates, of our friend : of all the 
 men whom we have known, the best, the wisest, 
 and the most just." Nay; before the poison was 
 given by the jailer's hand we hear him say to his 
 great prisoner, " I have found you the most gen- 
 erous and gentle and best of all who ever came 
 here." And then our thoughts run to Jerusa- 
 lem, and hear the centurion who commanded the 
 soldiers who crucified Jesus say, as he sees the 
 Crucified give up the ghost, " Truly this was 
 the Son of God."
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 245 
 
 I know not what to say to any man who does 
 not feel the difference. I can almost dream 
 what Socrates would say to any man who said 
 there was no difference between Jesus and him. 
 But how shall we state the difference ? One 
 is divine and human ; the other is human only. 
 One is Redeemer ; the other is philosopher. One 
 is inspired, and the other questions. One re- 
 veals, and the other argues. These statements, 
 doubtless, are all true. And in them all there 
 is wrapped up this, which is the truth of all the 
 influence of Jesus over men's minds, that where 
 Socrates brings an argument to meet an objec- 
 tion, Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nat- 
 ure, a whole being which the truth has filled 
 with strength, to meet another whole being which 
 error has filled with feebleness. 
 
 I must hasten on to speak of the special 
 characteristics which this general character of 
 His teaching gave to the influence which Jesus 
 exercised over the intellectual life of His disci- 
 ples. But let me ask you first to remember two 
 notable utterances of His, in which He distinctly
 
 246 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 stated this theory of the mind and its work, which 
 we have gathered by inference from many of His 
 words. One of them is in those words which it 
 would seem as if a great deal of the broadest 
 and best religious thought of our age had almost 
 taken for its motto. No doubt, like all mottoes, 
 it has been often in danger of losing some of 
 its profoundness by the very familiarity which it 
 has gained, as a coin loses sharpness by the con- 
 stant circulation which proves that men know 
 its value ; but, on the whole, I do not know what 
 verse there is in the New Testament which any 
 man who longed to see the intellect of men 
 most alive and most thoroughly consecrated to 
 the best uses, would sooner choose to write upon 
 the walls of his thoughtful century than that 
 which Jesus spoke in the Temple about the 
 midst of the feast : " If any man will do My will, 
 He shall know of the doctrine." The other 
 passage is that beautiful account of the simple 
 and humble wonder of Judas, not Iscariot,- who 
 found it hard to believe that he and his brother 
 disciples were to receive enlightenments from 
 God which did not come to other men. And
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 247 
 
 Jesus went on to explain the process to him. 
 "If a man love Me," He said, "he will keep My 
 words, and My Father will love him, and We will 
 come to Him and make our abode with Him." 
 Those, I think, are the two critical passages in 
 which Jesus gives us His doctrine of the intel- 
 lectual Jife. They are as clear and definite as 
 if they were written in a book of science. They 
 both declare that in the highest things the in- 
 tellect can never work alone for the discovery of 
 truth. Truth, when it is won, is the possession 
 of the whole nature. By the action of the whole 
 nature only can it be gained. The king must 
 go with his counsellors at his side and his army 
 at his back, or he makes no conquest. The in- 
 tellect must be surrounded by the richness of the 
 affections and backed by the power of the will, 
 or it attains no perfect truth. 
 
 Of such an influence, what was the effect on 
 those disciples ? What sort of an intellectual 
 life did they attain ? It is not hard to point out 
 some, at least, of the habits of mind into which 
 Jesus led them. The first is their habit of re- 
 garding the physical world as the utterance of a
 
 248 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 divine will, in sympathy with the divine char- 
 acter. There are two ways of looking at the 
 earth which have divided men in all time. The 
 one has counted it something outside of man, 
 with only external relation to him, holding him, 
 feeding him, forcing him to work. The other 
 has counted it in some true sense a medium of 
 revelation and influence from God to man. The 
 first view is the view of science, and is always 
 tending to hard superficialness, to the spiritual 
 poverty of the fingering slave who will " peep and 
 botanize upon his mother's grave." The other 
 view is the view of poetry, and its corrupt ten- 
 dency is toward superstition, toward that exces- 
 sive human self-consciousness which thinks that 
 stars move and winds blow only to bring us mes- 
 sages out of the unseen world. Between these two 
 conceptions of nature all human thought divides. 
 "Poetry," says Coleridge, "is not the proper an- 
 tithesis to prose, but to science." Science looks 
 to the world for facts and knowledge ; poetry 
 asks of it influence and character. Science han- 
 dles the material; poetry questions the creative 
 soul within Each has its proper business with
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 249 
 
 this wondrous earth. Each makes its admirable 
 kind of man. Sometimes, though very rarely, 
 the two meet in the same man ; but never so 
 that one or the other is not in clear preponder- 
 ance and does not give a distinct color to the 
 character. Now of the Apostles there can be no 
 doubt which view of the earth their Lord had 
 led them to. His parables, the stories of the 
 wheat and tares in the field, of the fig-tree on the 
 hillside, of the sheep wandering in the moun- 
 tains, of the net dragged through the rushing 
 waters of the lake, all of them were poems ; all 
 of them sought in nature not the form, but the 
 soul, not the shape, but the meaning. And 
 when the disciples wanted to call down the fire 
 from heaven to destroy a village of the Samari- 
 tans where Jesus had not been received, it was 
 the poetic thought of nature that was in their 
 minds. Nothing could have been more unscien- 
 tific. It was very crude and ignorant, poor 
 poetry, poor sense of the meaning of the natural 
 forces, of the purpose of the heavens and their 
 fire, and of the way in which their power could 
 be shown, but it was the crudeness of the
 
 250 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 poet, not of the scientist ; it was the vague and 
 coarse effort of that same power which, made 
 clear and fine, enabled them to understand the 
 parables of Jesus and not to be offended at His 
 miracles, which finally prepared them for the 
 resurrection, and made St. Matthew not afraid 
 to write that when Jesus expired on the cross 
 the earth quaked, and the rocks rent, and the 
 graves were opened. 
 
 To this same spirit it belonged to easily ac- 
 knowledge mystery, or the largeness of life, its 
 necessary extension into regions which they had 
 not explored. Men are made quite as much by 
 their sense of what there is in the world which 
 they do not know, as by the few truths of which 
 they think that they have gained the mastery. 
 The outlook into mystery has even a stronger in- 
 tellectual influence than the inspection of discov- 
 ered fact. The sin with which Jesus was always 
 upbraiding the Pharisees what He called hy- 
 pocrisjj is at once a spiritual and an intellectual 
 vice. It was a disbelief of the greatness of God 
 which made it possible for them to dream of 
 imposing upon Him. It was a pride in then
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 251 
 
 selves which could not look into the vastness of 
 truth. The unbelief which Jesus upbraids is not 
 the doubt of special doctrine, but that narrow 
 and worldly temper to which the whole world of 
 mystery was inconceivable. The doubter whom 
 Christ rebukes is not the earnest and eager be- 
 liever who has become lost in the highways of 
 faith. It is the unventuresome spirit which is 
 incapable of faith at all, which has reduced the 
 world to materialism like the Sadducee, or made 
 duty into law and religion into ceremony like 
 the Pharisee. For neither of them was there 
 any outlook. For His disciples, the word of 
 intellectual life, as of moral discipline, was 
 "Watch." "Expect new things. The world is 
 large. Out of the darkness shall come light. 
 Be ready for surprises." Such readiness is the 
 rightful possession only of men who live not in 
 the forms but in the principles of things ; and so 
 the spiritual thoroughness into which Jesus led 
 His disciples is bound up closely with the intel 
 lectual progress which they attained. 
 
 Again, Jesus inspired them with His own 
 view of the actual condition of things around
 
 252 The Influen:e of Jesus 
 
 them, and of the way in which the better life of 
 the world was to come. The character of Christ's 
 own reforming spirit was clear enough. He said 
 that He wanted not to destroy, but to fulfil the 
 agencies which He found here in the world. He 
 never cared to reshape circumstances until He 
 had regenerated men. He let the shell stand as 
 He found it until the new life within could burst 
 it for itself. It is very wonderful to me to see 
 how thoroughly His disciples caught His method. 
 They could not have caught it so completely and 
 so soon if it had not been that it was based on 
 a large principle, if it had not been more than a 
 special trick or tact. Almost instantly, as soon 
 as the disciples began their work, they seem to 
 have been filled with a true conception of its 
 divine method, that not from outside, but from 
 inside ; not by the remodelling of institutions, 
 but by the change of character ; not by the sup- 
 pression of vices, but by the destruction of sin, 
 the world was to be saved. That truth with 
 whose vitality all modern life has flourished, with 
 the forgetfulness of which all modern history 
 has always tended to corruption, that truth only
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 253 
 
 dreamed of by a few spiritual philosophers in the 
 ancient world, it is one of the marvellous phe- 
 nomena of human thought, that it should have 
 leaped full-grown to life with the first influence 
 of Christianity. A few faint flutterings about 
 the old methods of repression, and the disciples 
 of Jesus settle at once to the new methods of 
 development. 
 
 Another of the intellectual habits which 
 naturally grew out of the first principles of Jesus 
 was His discovery of interest in people whom 
 the world generally would have found most un- 
 interesting. And this same habit, passing over 
 into His disciples, made the wide and democratic 
 character of the new faith. There are signs 
 enough that Jesus had His special feelings to- 
 wards these men who were most congenial to 
 Him. As the most prominent of all such signs, 
 we all remember His peculiar love for the per- 
 ceptive and appreciative John. At the table of 
 the Last Supper, by the cross from which the 
 Sufferer looked down on His few faithful friends, 
 on the morning of the resurrection, at the Sea 
 of Tiberias, where the risen Jesus met the famil-
 
 254 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 iar company again, everywhere John appears as 
 the disciple whom Jesus loved. We cannot pic- 
 ture to ourselves a character so definite as that 
 of Jesus which should be destitute )f such affin- 
 ities ; and yet, always, as we read the Gospels, 
 there is a larger fact behind this special friend- 
 ship, there is a value of human nature and of 
 all men who bear it, on the bosom of which this 
 special friendship floats like a mere accident. 
 The result is, a true freedom from fastidiousness, 
 a breadth and quickness of sympathy and hope 
 which gives a singular largeness to the intellec- 
 tual life of Jesus, which we all recognize. Some- 
 thing of the same sort begins to show itself at 
 once in His disciples. I do not know how we 
 better can describe it than by saying that it 
 keeps all the warmth and directness of personal 
 intercourse without its distortions and partiali- 
 ties. This is an intellectual as well as a spiritual 
 condition. It keeps thought and observation 
 large, and makes the judgment at once earnest 
 and true. It is the power that redeems the 
 mind from narrowness while it still keeps it eager 
 and intense.
 
 On the Intellect. lal Life of Man. 255 
 
 There is one other habit which character- 
 ized always the thought of Jesus, and which alsc 
 passed out from Him to his disciples. It is not 
 easy to describe, but it seems to consist in a con- 
 stant progress from the arbitrary and special to 
 the essential and universal forms of thought. In 
 one part of the Sermon on the Mount this habit 
 of Jesus is supremely manifest. It is told in the 
 fifth chapter of St. Matthew. The Pharisees 
 those dull and earthly spirits who yet have drawn 
 forth for us the divinest words of Jesus had 
 followed the great Teacher and were persecuting 
 Him with questions. Those questions were all 
 of the same sort. They all began with some 
 special law, sometimes of the Old Testament, 
 sometimes of the Rabbinical traditions, and went 
 on to the inevitable conflict of that law in its 
 letter with the conditions of human life. The 
 law was good, but the mere letter of the law be- 
 came exhausted or confused before it had accom- 
 plished the purpose for which the law was 
 evidently made. Jesus takes each of these laws 
 and opens it. Its principle appears underneath 
 its letter. It is seen to be no arbitrary enact-
 
 256 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 ment for the settlement of a special difficulty, but 
 an essential truth, true everywhere. For in- 
 stance, the prohibition of murder opens into the 
 picture of a vigorous and vital peace out of which 
 all malice and hatred should have faded away, 
 The prohibition of adultery enlarges itself into 
 the picture of a world all bright with purity. 
 The command to perform an oath expands into 
 the promise of a life so simply pure and faithful 
 that in it no oath should ever need be spoken. 
 The " eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth " 
 changes into " resist not evil," and men see how 
 all justice has mercy at its heart. There is noth- 
 ing that marks the limits of men's intellectual life 
 more than the degree in which they have the 
 power of this progress from the local to the uni- 
 versal, from the partial to the complete. All 
 thought, like all life, must begin with specialness, 
 must fasten itself upon one point of the great 
 earth; but just as Jesus in his influence upon 
 our race has left behind Judea and its geography 
 and gone forth to become the possession of the 
 world, so it would seem as if His teaching were 
 always starting from special problems only to
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 257 
 
 extend itself to the great principles which under- 
 lie those problems and which have their applica- 
 tions throughout all human life. 
 
 Indeed, I think that the figure which 1 just 
 suggested is one that may give us a good deU of 
 light. I remember years ago how the first sight 
 of Palestine seemed to adjust for me the two 
 thoughts of the local and the universal Christ as 
 I had never been able to adjust them before. 
 As one travels through that land, the New Tes- 
 tament story is rescued from vagueness and ob- 
 scurity, and the historic life becomes a clear and 
 realized fact ; while at the same time the poverty 
 of the country, the failure of the material to sat- 
 isfy and account for and accompany the spiritual, 
 sets one free for a larger and truer grasping of 
 the Divine power. It is like the relation between 
 an immortal word and the mortal lips that uttered 
 it. The lips die, and you look at them when they 
 are dead, and see at once how they were made to 
 speak the word, how their whole mechanism was 
 Inii't for it, and yet how, even while they uttered 
 it, they were dying in giving expression to what 
 by its very nature was eternal. So Palestine, the 
 17
 
 258 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 home-land of Jesus, opens into Christendom; and 
 so each arbitrary command and special revelation 
 which He gave opens into eternal principles and 
 universal truths. 
 
 A poetic conception of the world we live in, 
 a willing acceptance of mystery, an expectation 
 of progress by development, an absence of 
 fastidiousness that comes from a sense of the 
 possibilities of all humanity, and a perpetual 
 enlargement of thought from the arbitrary into 
 the essential, these, then, I think, are the intel- 
 lectual characteristics which Christ's disciples 
 gathered from their Master; and I think that we 
 can see that these characteristics make, as we set 
 them all together, a certain definite and recog- 
 nizable type of mental life, one that we should 
 know from every other if we met to-day a man 
 in whom it was embodied. It is a type in which, 
 according to the description which I tried to give, 
 the intellect, while it is plentifully present, does 
 not stand alone and force itself upon our thought 
 It is a type in which character is the result that 
 impresses us, character holding in harmony all 
 the elements of the nature, rather than intellect
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 259 
 
 uality, which is the predominant presence of one 
 clement. It is a type in which righteousness and 
 reason so coincide and co-operate that you can- 
 not separate them, and do not want to. It is a 
 type of life in which, fulfilling the conjunction 
 which David loved so much to describe, " Mercy 
 and Truth are met together." 
 
 If I have rightly traced the general character 
 of the mental life and influence of Jesus, we are 
 prepared now, I think, to bring it home into asso- 
 ciation with that which through all these lectures 
 we have held to be the central and formative idea 
 of Jesus. I have drawn the indications of His 
 intellectual character from what is told us in 
 the Gospel of John. One key-word, truth, ap- 
 pears, as I said, upon His lips, almost exclusively 
 in that book. And now in that same book it is 
 almost alone that Jesus is always calling God His 
 Father. Mark does not quote at all such words, 
 and Matthew and Luke quote them very seldom. 
 The two, then, go together. That same pro- 
 founder insight into the mind of Jesus which sees 
 His intellectual life and influence not standing 
 alone, but part of the whole nature, seizes also
 
 260 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 upon that representation which sums up His 
 whole life as the life of a son lived in the house- 
 hold of his father. And we can see ourselves 
 why this is so. As soon as we unite in our minds 
 the various characteristics which we have seen 
 to belong to the intellectuality of Jesus, and then 
 look about the world for any picture of an intel- 
 lectual life which shall present to us, however 
 faintly, the total impression which they make, we 
 find ourselves drawn at once to the learning 
 child in His Father's house. The poetic concep- 
 tion of the world, the satisfied acceptance of mys- 
 tery, the constant thought of development, the 
 absence of fastidiousness, and the perpetual open- 
 ing of the arbitrary into the essential, all of 
 these blend most healthily in that primary type 
 of intellectual influence which is seen wherever 
 a docile child stands learning truth within his 
 father's house. It is no hard touch of intellect 
 on intellect. It is a warm approach of life to life, 
 in which it is not merely knowledge but charac- 
 ter, in which knowledge is held in solution, that 
 passes over from the wiser to the foolisher. If 
 this be true, then see what we have reached
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 20 1 
 
 Here at the bottom of His intellectual life and 
 influence, as at the bottom of all His other life 
 and influence, lies the idea of Jesus. Still before 
 all things, at the root and source of everything 
 else that He is, He is the Son of God. Once, 
 when they would not understand Him, He turned 
 sadly and looked forward past the crucifixion into 
 the prospect of a fuller comprehension of it, 
 which, it may be, we are only now beginning to 
 attain ; and as He pictured it to his hope, this 
 truth of His Sonship lay at the bottom of it. 
 " When ye have lifted up the Son of Man," He 
 said, " then shall ye know that I am He, and that 
 I do nothing of Myself, but as My Father hath 
 taught Me I speak these things." At the bottom 
 of His whole conception of intellectual life lies 
 the never- failing, never-fading consciousness that 
 He is the child of God. You touch some flower 
 of a parable, you are pierced by the sharp thorn 
 of some rebuke, and when you ask for the secret of 
 the sweetness or the pain you find it in the life- 
 blood of this idea that comes up out of the 
 deep heart of His life. You ask yourself what 
 is the one quality that you must put into the
 
 262 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 wonderful talk of Socrates to make it approach 
 the vastly more wonderful talk of Jesus, and you 
 can name nothing but this, so wholly lacking in 
 the sage of Athens, so totally pervading every 
 word of the Man of Palestine, the consciousness 
 that He is God's child, knowing God as a son 
 knows a father, speaking with an authority which 
 no scribe can have, not because He knows more 
 things, but because He knows everything differ- 
 ently in that ever-present sense of Sonship. 
 
 There is one short story in the Gospel of St. 
 John, which, if we had the time to study it in 
 detail, would teem with illustration of what I 
 have been saying. It is the story of Nicodemus, 
 a very precious passage for the understanding 
 of the intellectual method, of Jesus. Nicodemus 
 is one of St. John's men. Neither of the other 
 writers is drawn to him. But St. John seems, as 
 he writes the narrative, to feel that he is opening 
 to us his Master's very heart. If we had time 
 to dwell minutely on the story, we should see 
 how Jesus does for Nicodemus the three things 
 which every thorough teacher must do for every 
 scholar. He gives him new ideas, He deepens
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 263 
 
 with these ideas his personal character and re- 
 sponsibility, and He builds for him new rela- 
 tions with his fellow-men. When Nicodemus 
 goes away from Jesus, he carries with him the 
 new truth of regeneration ; he is trembling with 
 the sense that, to make that truth thoroughly 
 his, he himself must be a better man ; and by 
 and by he is seen setting himself against the 
 current of his fellow-judges to speak a word for 
 the Master who had spoken such educating 
 words to him. These are the elements that 
 make up the effect of all effective influence, 
 new truth, new character, new duty, not distinct, 
 not distinguishable from each other, but all 
 mingled in one complete change and eleva- 
 tion of the man's whole nature. And when 
 we look for the spring on which Christ laid 
 His hand for such a comprehensive awakening 
 of the man's life, we find it where we should 
 have looked for it, in the truth of sonship 
 brought to the world in Him, " God so loved 
 the world that He gave His only-begotten Son." 
 There is an old legend which says that Nico- 
 demus and Gamaliel and St. Stephen were
 
 264 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 buried close together, and that years afterwards 
 their bodies were found side by side. In a cer- 
 tain way they belong together. They were all 
 students of the things of God, various types of 
 sacred wisdom. But if we want to rate them 
 rightly, we shall find the fineness and the lofti- 
 ness of their intellectual life to stand just in pro- 
 portion to the fulness and clearness with which 
 at the heart of each man's knowledge lay the 
 idea of Jesus, that man is the son of God. 
 
 I want to spend what little time is yet left me 
 in this lecture and this course in trying to trace 
 the presence in all the intellectual life of Chris- 
 tendom of those peculiar characteristics, or rather 
 of that peculiar character, which we have seen 
 to-day to belong to the intellectual life of Jesus and 
 His disciples. Christ's method of knowledge has 
 been always present under the currents of modern 
 thought and the impulses of modern study, and 
 he who watches closely can see how they bear 
 witness to its presence even while they are not 
 conscious of it as they move upon its bosom. In 
 one brief statement of it, the method of Jesus
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 265 
 
 may be summed up thus : At the bottom of all 
 truth lies the truth of truths, that man is the 
 child of God. All that man knows is really a 
 knowing of his Father, and can be thoroughly 
 won only by obedience. And so the moral, the 
 spiritual, and the intellectual lives are one. 
 
 The first consequence of the constant presence 
 of this method is in a continual struggle after 
 symmetry in the intellectual action of mankind. 
 The tendency of modern times, often thwarted 
 and defeated, is not to be thoroughly and finally 
 content with one-sided development, with the 
 use and development of certain special faculties 
 of men. Sometimes this symmetry will be con- 
 ceived of as something only to be attained by 
 the race at large ; others, more bold and ideal- 
 istic, will dare to anticipate it even for the indi- 
 vidual ; but before all men who watch the human 
 intellect there will hover a dream of the fulfilment 
 of human life on every side, of the ultimate shaping 
 of a symmetrical manhood in which the functions 
 which seem contrary or independent shall be 
 brought into absolute harmony and co-operation. 
 Lacordaire writes of the "tortures of conscience
 
 266 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 struggling with genius." The highest Christian 
 hope for man pictures the issue of that struggle 
 in a lofty peace where both shall find their per- 
 fect satisfaction. Goldsmith, when he dedicates 
 his comedy of "She Stoops to Conquer" to Dr. 
 Johnson, says, " It may serve the interests of 
 mankind, also, to inform them that the greatest 
 wit may be found in a character without impair- 
 ing the most affected piety." It may be doubted 
 whether a somewhat finer wit and a somewhat 
 loftier piety than the great London sage pos- 
 sessed must not be shown before the harmony of 
 wit and piety shall be complete; but no man who 
 is a Christian is willing to accept an impious wit 
 or a witless piety as the final accomplishment of 
 man, and all modern education, while it some- 
 times seems to attempt their union only by the 
 rapid succession, and not by the harmonious 
 mingling of the scientific and the moral instruc- 
 tions, acknowledges that both are necessary to 
 the perfect man. 
 
 Again, the Christian thought of knowledge 
 must always seek, not merely symmetry in the 
 knowing man, but also harmony in all the knowl-
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 267 
 
 edge he can win. Under one fatherhood the 
 whole world becomes sacred. The old distinc- 
 tions of useful and useless knowledge will not 
 hold. The responsibility of each man for the 
 working of his intellect must be acknowledged. 
 The sin of mental carelessness or wilfulness must 
 take its place among the sins against which men 
 struggle and for which they repent. The appli- 
 cation of moral standards to history, to art, and 
 to pure letters must be learned and taught. The 
 isolation of the artistic impulse from all moral 
 judgments and purposes must be restrained and 
 remedied. The whole thought of art must be 
 enlarged and mellowed till it develops a relation 
 to the spiritual and moral natures as well as to 
 the senses of mankind. It will lose, perhaps, the 
 purity and simplicity which has belonged to the 
 idea of art in classic and unchristian times, but 
 it will become more and more a part of the gen- 
 eral culture of human life. That is the change 
 which has come between the Venus of Milo and 
 the Moses of Michael Angelo ; between the 
 Iliad and Paradise Lost ; between the Idyls of 
 Theocritus and the best modern novel. Mere
 
 268 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 simplicity of method and effect have given place 
 to harmony of method and effect, littleness to 
 largeness, fastidiousness to sympathy, and the 
 Christian world has really learned more and more 
 to believe what the Christian poet sang, that 
 
 " He who feels contempt 
 For any living thing, hath faculties 
 That he hath never used : and Thought with him 
 Is in its infancy." 
 
 Another truth which modern and Christian 
 thought must make more and more of as it 
 grows riper is the immediateness of divine influ- 
 ence. The ancient poet invoked his muse as he 
 began his poem, but the invocation must have 
 meant very little to him. It was the striking of 
 the strings before he settled into the full strain 
 he meant to play ; as if he said to the world, 
 " Listen, for I am ready with my song." The 
 Christian thinker summons no muse, but as he 
 speaks there is a sense of something vast behind 
 him out of which influences come to him; there 
 is conviction which is not born out of mere 
 self-conceit ; there is earnestness which is not 
 the self-excitement of the Pythian damsel on her
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 269 
 
 tripod. There is in all men who command the 
 ears of other men a sense of something behind 
 them some call it truth, some call it God 
 for which, for whom, they speak. This is the 
 loftier tone in modern speculation. This is the 
 feminine element in modern thought, perpetually 
 inspiring and leading and lifting that masculine 
 reason, 
 
 "Whose halting wisdom after knows 
 What her diviner virtue fore discerns." 
 
 The intellectual life of Christendom, again, 
 tends to democracy. Less and less will it con- 
 sent to be the privilege of the selected few. 
 The fact is plain. The reason of the fact is no 
 less clear to one who traces the idea of Jesus 
 everywhere. It is impossible to keep the bounds 
 of mental life shut against any man when the 
 source of all men's knowledge is in God, whc 
 is the Father of us all, and when the faculty of 
 knowledge is closely connected with the faculty 
 of moral obedience, which is the right and duty 
 of mankind. Instantly this began when Chris- 
 tianity was once a living fact. Peter stepped 
 out of the chamber of the Pentecost and spoke
 
 2/o The Influence of Jesus 
 
 to the great multitude in words which assumed 
 in them the power of understanding, of judging, 
 of deciding questions which up to that time had 
 been the sacred possession of the scribes and 
 doctors. There was nothing like that speech 
 before that day. The germs of the modern ser- 
 mon, the modern lecture, and the modern school 
 were in it. Thenceforth men's intellects might 
 differ, but the intellectual chance was open to 
 every man. To the dullest child belonged the 
 right to learn all that he could learn, all that it 
 was in him to learn, of His Father. 
 
 And yet once more. The everlasting progress 
 of knowledge was assured. Once stretch an in- 
 finite life behind our human lives, on which they 
 rest, in which they belong, and how the everlast- 
 ing contradiction between the little that we know 
 already, and the vast uncertain bulk of what 
 we do not know, is robbed of its oppressive- 
 ness. There are two classes of men, with two 
 dispositions, which come from that contradiction. 
 One man, frightened at the great bulk of 
 ignorance, refuses to look it in the face, flees 
 for the preservation of his self-content to the
 
 Ou the Intellectual Life of Man. 271 
 
 little that he knows, makes believe that that is 
 all there is to know, and refuses to hear of any 
 more. He is the bigot who lives through all the 
 ages and is found in every climate of the globe 
 and every region of human study. Another 
 man is so fascinated by the unknown that he 
 refuses to place value on the known. The little 
 which man has gained amounts to nothing. And 
 with the depreciation of all present knowledge 
 comes the loss of any solid starting-point for 
 advance into the great vague world that lies be- 
 yond. He is the sceptic who mocks the bigot 
 for his obstructiveness, and yet himself makes 
 no progress because he has no foothold from 
 which he can move. It is like the vague air 
 taunting the solid rock. If in our modern Chris- 
 tian times there is a better spirit than either of 
 these men can show ; if it is not necessary for 
 us that we should be bigots or sceptics either ; 
 if it is possible for us to value every fragment of 
 knowledge, not for itself alone, but for the whole, 
 of which it is a part, and which it prophecies and 
 promises ; if, as we gaze into the darkness of the
 
 272 The Influence of Jesus 
 
 unknown we are not paralyzed, but inspired, be- 
 cause in what we know already we hold the clew 
 which, as it runs out into the darkness, we can 
 feel fastened at the other end to the throne around 
 which burns the unapproachable light oi perfect 
 knowledge toward which we may freely and 
 eternally advance, the reason of it all must be 
 that the idea of Jesus has bound our ignorance 
 and the knowledge of God together, and made it 
 possible for man so to count all that his Father 
 knows as the great region for his soul to grow in, 
 and so to value the little he knows as the gift 
 and pledge and promise of his Father, who knows 
 all, that he can neither be proud of his own wis- 
 dom nor be dismayed before his own ignorance ; 
 but must live, as the child lives in his father's 
 house, the happy life of complete humility and 
 unlimited hope. 
 
 I must not linger at the close. If in these 
 lectures I have failed to show that which it has 
 been upon my mind and heart to describe, I 
 shall not in a few last words redeem my failure.
 
 On the Intellectual Life of Man. 273 
 
 I dare not, I do not hope that I have succeeded ; 
 but I hope that I have not wholly failed. For 
 to me what I have tried to say is more and more 
 the glory and the richness and the sweetness of 
 all life. The idea of Jesus is the illumination and 
 the inspiration of existence. Without it moral 
 life becomes a barren expediency, and social life 
 a hollow shell, and emotional life a meaningless 
 excitement, and intellectual life an 'rile play or 
 stupid drudgery. Without it the world is a puz- 
 zle, and death a horror, and eternity a blank. 
 More and more it shines the only hope of what 
 without it is all darkness. More and more the 
 wild, sad, frightened cries of men who believe 
 nothing, and the calm, earnest, patient prayers 
 of men who believe so much that they long for 
 perfect faith, seem to blend into the great appeal 
 which Philip of Bethsaida made to Jesus at that 
 Last Supper, where so much of our time in these 
 four hours has been spent, " Lord, show us the 
 Father, and it sufficeth us." And more and more 
 the only answer to that appeal seems to come 
 from the same blessed lips that answered Philip,
 
 274 The Influence of Jesus. 
 
 the lips of the Mediator Jesus, who replies, " Have 
 I been so long with you and yet hast thou not 
 known Me ? He that hath seen Me hath seen 
 the Father."
 
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