GIFT OF 
 Author 
 
The Wit and Wisdom 
 of Jesus 
 
 ALSO 
 
 Carlyle and Emerson: 
 a Contrast 
 
 By 
 George Wright Buckley 
 
 "Humor is an invisible tear through 
 a visible smile" 
 
 FROM THE RUSSIAN 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 ELLIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 Battle Creek. Michigan 
 
The Wit and Wisdom 
 of Jesus 
 
 676083 
 
Copyright, 1901 
 By James H. West Company 
 
Contents 
 
 ^ 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface 3 
 
 Introduction n 
 
 I. Humor Versus Criticism . . 23 
 II. Life-Sketches: Turning "Men's 
 
 Ears into Eyes " .... 43 
 
 III. Misunderstood 59 
 
 IV. Kindred and Neighbors ... 71 
 V. Pithy Sayings and Retorts . 8 87 
 
 VI. Opposition and Quotation . 105 
 
 VII. Miracles; Practical Religion . 123 
 
 VIII. Vanquished Craft 14$ 
 
 IX. Hypocrisy and Self-Righteous- 
 ness ........ 159 
 
 X. Closing of the Conflict ... 173 
 
 Conclusion 1 97 
 
 Index 203 
 
 (5) 
 
Behold the man ! Behold the God ! 
 
 Ah, which to say, and how, and why ! 
 
 In vain our tangled reasons try 
 The path so many feet have trod. 
 
 O man of sorrows, man of joy ! 
 Of joy for all thy strife and scars, 
 Whereso thou art among the stars, 
 
 In peace that nothing can destroy, 
 
 Though we our voices may not blend 
 
 With that hoarse chant the centuries raise, 
 Yet is it not a sweeter praise 
 
 To say, " Our brother and our friend " ? 
 
 And if beyond this verge of time 
 We know thee better as thou art, 
 Wilt thou not clasp us heart to heart, 
 
 As fills our ears the heavenly chime ? 
 
 John W. Cb&dwick. 
 (7) 
 
"Who art tbou, Lord?" the question, still, of old ! 
 
 Thy silver speech hath opened man's dull ears, 
 Thy wisdom hath turned spirit's dross to gold, 
 And calms us yet, through maze of tangled years. 
 
 " Whence earnest tbou ?" The Galilean hills 
 
 Which knew thy eager feet and pulsing speech 
 Could they alone inspire the Word that thrills 
 The souls of men to farthest ages' reach ? 
 
 Or for thy birth, from Heav'n with rapture rife 
 Didst thou indeed descend earth's woes to leaven ? 
 
 We know not ! but we know thy words of life 
 From mortal birth lift man to birth of Heaven ! 
 
 James H. West. 
 (8) 
 
Introduction 
 
Sometimes wit lieth in pat allusion to a known story, 
 or in seasonable application of a trivial saying, or in 
 forging an apposite tale ; sometimes it playeth in words 
 and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of 
 their sense, or the affinity of their sound ; sometimes 
 it lurketh under an odd similitude ; sometimes it is 
 lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a quick- 
 ish reason, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly divert- 
 ing or cleverly retorting an objection ; sometimes it is 
 couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, 
 in a lusty hyperbole, in a startling metaphor ; . . . 
 sometimes a scenical representation of persons or things, 
 a counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture, passeth 
 for wit ; . . . sometimes it riseth only from a lucky 
 hitting upon what is strange. . . . Often it consisteth 
 in one knows not what, and springeth up one can 
 hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and 
 inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rov- 
 ings of fancy and windings of language. Barrow. 
 
 (10) 
 
Introduction 
 
 exempt nothing from inquiry is the 
 * marked attitude of our age. The maxim 
 of Greek philosophy, " Man is the measure of 
 all things/' has become our maxim too. In 
 this unfettered and searching temper of the 
 time the old theological distinction of profane 
 and sacred loses dominion over thoughtful 
 men : the Bible, and even the teachings and 
 character of Jesus, are subjected to honest and 
 comparative analysis. It is well, this free 
 measurement of him, if only one preserve a 
 truly reverent and grateful relation to his 
 peerless personality. 
 
 More than a decade since, the writer was 
 much taken with the title of a helpful little 
 volume of "higher criticism," from the pen of 
 Reverend Joseph Henry Crooker. The title 
 
12 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 was "Jesus Brought Back." The title was 
 very taking, because it so strikingly signifies 
 what has been transpiring these latter days. 
 As some of the choicest specimens of antique 
 art were lost in the accumulated rubbish of 
 centuries, to be resurrected by the zealous 
 efforts of modern archaeologists, so the Son 
 of man was lost in the disfiguring theology 
 and superstition of the Christian Church, to 
 be found again in our age of discovering and 
 restoring manifold things. The real Jesus is 
 being brought back. In literature, in art, in 
 the pulpit itself, there is no mistaking the 
 tendency to view him in human aspects and 
 relations to view him as under a universal 
 law of human development and limitation, 
 whereby even the greatest of men are linked 
 to the imperfect age in which they live and to 
 the more or less specialized nature of the 
 work given them to do. 
 
 Just as we say that Aristotle and Herbert 
 Spencer were specially gifted for philosophy, 
 Humboldt and Darwin for science, Shake- 
 
Introduction IJ 
 
 speare for poetry, Edison for invention, the 
 Rothschilds for banking, so may we not say 
 of Jesus that his special genius was for relig- 
 ion and ethics ? To the paramount end of 
 bearing witness to truth on its spiritual and 
 moral side, and in such a way as most effect- 
 ually to give it vital relation to life, he was-*- 
 endowed with certain powers. Among these 
 were clear perceptions of religious and moral 
 obligation, poetic sensibility, insight and sym- 
 pathetic imagination to enter readily into the 
 consciousness of others into their motives 
 and reasoning, their hopes and fears, loves and 
 hates, joys and sorrows. To these qualities 
 add a passion for service, a gift for oratory of 
 a genuine and persuasive kind, and, withal, a 
 faculty of wit and humor, most assuredly 
 wit, sui generis in pre-eminent degree. This 
 latter faculty had immeasurably to do with 
 making his sayings stick to the memory of 
 his hearers and become the transmitted inher- 
 itance of the race. 
 
 Who has not marveled at the apparent self- 
 
/</ The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 contradictions of individual men individual 
 great men ? Shakespeare, almost overmas- 
 tered by the heat and luxuriance of his imag- 
 ination, magic sovereign of impalpable subjects 
 in an impalpable kingdom above how sane 
 and true his measurements of human forces 
 here below ! What a discriminative vision of 
 the systems and affairs of men may be given 
 to a shy and sensitive unworldling ! witness 
 the serene and spotless Emerson. On occa- 
 sion, how mighty in action the cloistered 
 dreamer ! timid and sickly Calvin (called 
 "a walking hospital"), drawn from scholarly 
 privacy into the strenuous and combative 
 publicity of his regenerative career at Geneva ; 
 or Luther, the studious monk of Erfurt, before 
 the Diet of Worms, wishing " to be quiet, yet 
 hurried into the midst of tumults." So, in- 
 deed, a soul big with earnest intent, yea, with 
 divine sadness, may also have a spring of 
 humor to refresh men and disclose the heart 
 of things amiss in this world ; humor often 
 playing across some somber background as 
 
Introduction 75 
 
 the sunlight plays across a dark cloud of the 
 heavens. Strangely close to truth is the defi- 
 nition of a Russian, that " Humor is an invis- 
 ible tear through a visible smile." Even thus 
 was it with Thomas Carlyle in literature, the 
 melancholy Lincoln in politics, and, in religion, 
 "the man of sorrows," Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 Recognizing the legitimacy and effective- 
 ness of well-timed wit and humor, the prince 
 of righteousness exercised them to a purpose 
 befitting one mindful of the gravity of his 
 mission and profoundly sensitive to the tragic 
 side of life. Sometimes he used them to 
 season serious discourse, simply as we use salt 
 and sugar to season food ; sometimes to pierce 
 with his thought the thick mental integuments 
 of one or another class of his hearers ; some- 
 times as victorious weapons of battle with 
 unscrupulous enemies. What concerns the 
 author of these pages is not that he classify 
 the wit and wisdom of Jesus under definite 
 categories ; but rather that he give them some 
 living relation to the sublime personality 
 
1 6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 whence they sprang, and that, too, with a 
 religious and moral motive, and with the free- 
 dom of a broad interpretation of terms and 
 incidents. 
 
 The utterances of the most independent 
 minds are the resultant of outer and inner 
 conditions in process of change. Influences 
 of race, heredity, environment ; influences 
 which come from increased knowledge of the 
 conduct and motives of men, which come from 
 the noblest aspirations of them when disap- 
 pointed, from the rasping sense of unavoidable 
 combat with stupidity and selfishness, from 
 the suffering of it all who shall measure 
 the potency of these to shape the usage of 
 the mental faculties, wit and humor and the 
 rest ? Untrammeled by traditionary premises 
 and prejudices about Jesus, may we not inter- 
 pret what he did and said in the light of such 
 influences operative in his brief career ? His 
 life was progress and tragedy, from the pre- 
 cocious boy in the temple, amazing the doctors, 
 to the agony-crowned victor of Gethsemane 
 
Introduction // 
 
 and Calvary. The supreme integrity of his god- 
 ward aim holds to the fatal end ; but the shift- 
 ing scenes and situations of the drama must 
 needs work some change in his thought and 
 treatment as physician to the soul of man. 
 
 Never to the eye of the most reverent 
 Israelite, standing on the Mount of Olives, 
 looked more enchanting the distant sanctuary 
 of the temple in Jerusalem, with its white 
 marble parapets and its golden-plated sides, 
 shining in the sunlight, now " like a mountain 
 of glittering snow, now like a sea of fire " 
 never more enchanting than in the opening of 
 his ministry looked to this Messiah's untried 
 hope and faith the prospect of life in loving, 
 helpful fellowship with men. But thorns mul- 
 tiplied along the way. Pushed on by an im- 
 perative vision and conscience into conflict 
 with established powers, the shadows cast by 
 growing opposition encroach upon the lights 
 as that conflict proceeds. Touching the will- 
 ingness of his countrymen to accept him as 
 the king of a "kingdom not of this world, "he 
 
1 8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 had meted out to him the sore disappointment 
 of all the prophets of God. Hope and faith 
 lost some of their early joyousness, as the rich 
 flush of fruit fades out with too much cold- 
 ness and shade. The boy's cruelty that de- 
 spoils the nest of its birdlings makes the 
 mother's voice more sad and piercing. And 
 society's cruelty to its prophet, which despoils 
 him of his cherished expectations, offspring 
 of divine intent, makes more sad and piercing 
 his voice in the wilderness of this world : 
 " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the 
 prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto 
 thee ! How often would I have gathered thy 
 children together, even as a hen gathereth her 
 chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! " 
 
 The view above expressed of the Galilean's 
 career has partly determined the order in 
 which the wit and wisdom of Jesus are pre- 
 sented in this book ; the supposition being 
 that, in general, the more genial forms found 
 expression before he was subjected to positive 
 antagonism from various quarters. Note the 
 
Introduction iy 
 
 qualifying phrase, " in general " ; because to 
 make the supposition more sweeping by assert- 
 ing that these more genial forms must needs 
 all be credited to his earlier career, and those 
 less so to his later career, would surely not 
 tally with human nature and experience. 
 
 Let this word also be spoken, namely, that 
 with all our latter-day research into the com- 
 position of the gospels, and into the times of 
 nascent Christianity, it is possible to go wrong 
 in using our freedom to stamp as genuine or 
 spurious this, that, and the other recorded 
 utterance of Jesus. For whatever one's con- 
 ception of him, that conception presides over 
 one's exercise of this freedom, whether one 
 be conscious of it or not. The writer makes 
 no pretense that it is otherwise with himself. 
 Here and there he uses some parable or say- 
 ing across which some higher critic or other 
 draws the line as doubtful or spurious. But 
 
 As the higher critics disagree, 
 By what authority shall we see ? 
 
i 
 
 Humor Versus Criticism 
 
Among those great elements of human nature which 
 have shown themselves to be rooted in the deep, un- 
 conscious life of man, must be placed the sense of the 
 ludicrous. ... There are persons almost wholly 
 destitute of it. Such persons are tied down to the 
 substantial facts of life, whether these be important 
 or unimportant. I will not say that they suffer more 
 than those who have the sense of the ludicrous, for 
 the power of the imagination that goes with this may 
 sometimes create sorrows. They are, however, hard 
 and wooden. Intercourse with them is like driving 
 in a wagon without springs. ... A natural, hearty 
 laugh is at once a sign of sanity, and a preserver of it. 
 One who can laugh naturally is for the moment free 
 from any idee fixe that may be haunting him. Fie 
 shows, for the moment at least, a superiority to the 
 hard facts of life. Dr. C. C. Everett. 
 
 (22) 
 
The Wit and Wisdom 
 
 [esus 
 
 of J, 
 
 I 
 
 Humor Versus Criticism 
 
 "If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished 
 from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. 
 If we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from 
 it, and bow often it breaks the gloom which is apt 
 to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with 
 transient unexpected gleams of joy, one would take 
 care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure 
 of fife." ADDISON. 
 
 A CONTEMPORARY of Emerson, in de- 
 scribing this American seer and prophet 
 on the lecture-platform, speaks of his indulg- 
 ing in the " inaudible laugh," as here and there 
 he slipped into grave discourse some expres- 
 
24 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 sion of subtle and quiet humor. Very likely, 
 too, the " inaudible laugh " and pleasant humor 
 lent, not infrequently, winsome grace both to 
 the preaching and the social converse of the 
 seer and prophet of Galilee. I imagine him in 
 his early ministry going forth with buoyant 
 faith in men, body healthy, mind teeming 
 with lively imagery ; loving Nature and soli- 
 tude, heartily loving men and their comrade- 
 ship ; open to the comedy of life rather more 
 than when further along the journey, when 
 the tragedy of it projects itself more conspic- 
 uously into the foreground. 
 
 To behold him a son of joyous humor as 
 well as of tragic sadness surely enhances the 
 lovableness and perfection of his character. 
 Yea, to think of his having now and then a 
 good laugh in him, a free and genuine laugh, 
 with the ring of innocent childhood and 
 Nature's own sincerity this also is not so 
 shocking to the writer as once it was. With- 
 out losing his "weeping Christ," he sees him 
 otherwise than holding the finical sentiment 
 
Humor Versus Criticism 2$ 
 
 which Emerson seems to quote with approval 
 from Lord Chesterfield, "I am sure that 
 since I have had the full use of my reason, 
 nobody has ever heard me laugh. " But in- 
 deed, the same Emerson, who had true Platonic 
 vision of both sides of all questions, speaks 
 much more to our notion elsewhere : " A per- 
 ception of the comic seems to be a balance- 
 wheel in our metaphysical structure. It 
 appears to be an essential element in a fine 
 character. Wherever the intellect is con- 
 structive, it will be found. We feel the ab- 
 sence of it as a defect in the noblest and most 
 oracular soul. The perception of the comic 
 is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge 
 of sanity, and a protection from those perverse 
 tendencies and gloomy insanities in which 
 fine intellects sometimes lose themselves." 
 And Carlyle, too, England's prophet how 
 strongly he declares himself on this matter : 
 " How much lies in laughter : the cipher-key 
 wherewith we decipher the whole man ! . . . 
 The man who cannot laugh is not only fit 
 
26 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, but 
 his own life is already a treason and a 
 stratagem/' 
 
 Humor and laughter, with due measure 
 of gravity behind them, are sign and seal of 
 health and sanity ; sign and seal of true 
 kinship with humanity. Therefore Jesus, 
 when he took upon him, or had put upon him, 
 this humanity, was given them in goodly 
 measure. No vender of jokes ; but perceiver 
 and revealer of disparities between folly and 
 wisdom, pretense and practice perceiver and 
 revealer of the lie masquerading as truth, of 
 wickedness skulking under outward seemings 
 of the good. 
 
 Meager as the records are, they disclose 
 plays of humor on the part of the Son of man 
 which, whatever his own bearing, must have 
 worked the risibles of some hearers into no 
 uncertain smile, perhaps sometimes into ex- 
 plosive laugh. 
 
 " Folly-painting humor, grave himself, 
 Calls laughter forth." 
 
Humor Versus Criticism 27 
 
 Let the reader catch this aspect from a few 
 illustrations in the present chapter, and also 
 from some in the succeeding chapter. 
 
 The traditional habit of viewing Jesus as 
 given only to grave discourse has invested 
 some of his utterances with a significance 
 altogether different from what they have when 
 the fine flavor of the speaker's humor is tasted 
 in them. A curious instance of this is the 
 account given in the fifteenth chapter of 
 Matthew, which describes the peculiar treat- 
 ment of the poor Canaanitish woman who be- 
 seeches him to heal her daughter, " grievously 
 vexed with a devil." When the disciples try 
 to keep her away, she cries the more, " Lord, 
 help me ! " And what reply does she get ? 
 Surely, one neither consistent nor pleasant to 
 hear from the lips of the Messiah of all na- 
 tions, if we construe it with literal serious- 
 ness : 
 
 " I was not sent, but unto the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel." " It is not meet to take 
 the children's bread, and cast it to the dogs." 
 
28 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Some would make these words convict 
 Jesus of that Jewish narrowness so prevalent 
 with his countrymen at the time ; and indeed, 
 a certain learned rabbi of to-day finds in 
 them a warning against throwing the bread of 
 the new gospel to strangers, instead of keep- 
 ing it wholly for his own people, a view less 
 tenable than the opposite one. 
 
 Had we the complete record of this inci- 
 dent, we should behold no narrowness on the 
 part of the master, but only on the part of 
 the disciples and the author of the Matthew 
 gospel. Likely enough these words were 
 thrown into the interrogatory form : " Is it 
 not that I was sent only to the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel ? " " Is it meet to take 
 the children's bread and cast it to the dogs ? " 
 The very witty reply comes, " Yea, Lord, for 
 even the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from 
 their master's table." According to the text in 
 Mark, Jesus so far appreciated the wit of the 
 woman that he healed her daughter because 
 of it : " For this saying, go thy way," and so 
 forth. 
 
Humor Versus Criticism 2() 
 
 Taking the story in this form, the intent 
 seems to be to get the Gentile woman's point 
 of view, to test her faith, to rebuke the 
 national exclusiveness of the disciples and 
 teach a lesson of toleration. It may be, the 
 reply ascribed to the woman was uttered by 
 Jesus himself, uttered in response to objec- 
 tions made to the extension of his mission 
 of fellowship and Good-Samaritanship to the 
 " heathen." 
 
 The master's freer and broader outlook 
 early subjected him to criticism, both from 
 within and from without the new movement 
 in religion. Later in his career, his increased 
 hospitality provokes among his Jewish fol- 
 lowers murmurs of provincial prejudice and 
 jealousy. "Are these last converts to share 
 equally with us, who belong to God's chosen 
 people and were first to come into the service 
 of the Messianic kingdom ? " Jesus, as is his 
 wont, makes use of the parable to rebuke this 
 natural but selfish spirit. He draws the 
 graphic and lively picture of the workers in 
 the vineyard : 
 
JO The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a 
 man that is a householder, who went out early 
 in the morning to hire laborers into his vine- 
 yard. And when he had agreed with his 
 laborers for a penny a day, he sent them into 
 his vineyard. And he went out about the 
 third hour, and saw others standing in the 
 market-place idle ; and to them he said, Go ye 
 also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right 
 I will give you. And they went their way. 
 Again he went out about the sixth and the 
 ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the 
 eleventh hour he went out, and found others 
 standing ; and he saith unto them, Why stand 
 ye here all the day idle ? They say unto him, 
 Because no man has hired us. He saith unto 
 them, Go ye also into the vineyard. And 
 when evening was come, the lord of the vine- 
 yard saith unto his steward, Call the laborers, 
 and pay them their hire, beginning from the 
 last unto the first. And when they came that 
 were hired about the eleventh hour, they re- 
 ceived every man a penny. And when the 
 
Humor Versus Criticism JI 
 
 first came, they supposed they would receive 
 more ; and they likewise received every man 
 a penny. And when they received it, they 
 murmured against the householder, saying, 
 These last have spent but one hour, and thou 
 hast made them equal unto us, who have borne 
 the burden of the day and the scorching heat. 
 But he answered and said to one of them, 
 Friend, I do thee no wrong ; didst thou not 
 agree with me for a penny ? Take that which 
 is thine, and go thy way ; it is my will to give 
 unto these last even as unto thee. Is it not 
 lawful for me to do what I will with mine 
 own ? or is thine eye evil because I am good ? 
 So the last shall be first, and the first last.'' * 
 
 This parable contains a passage or so which 
 the devil may quote for his purpose ; and yet 
 within it lies one of the most comprehensive 
 truths of justice and love. It is much more 
 than a rebuke to the selfish pride and desire 
 for precedence among his disciples. It has a 
 universal application to human relations and 
 * Matt. 20, i -i 6. 
 
32 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 obligations. First, it rebukes a complaining 
 attitude toward God, which, put into words, 
 is this : " My neighbor has a larger slice of 
 cake than I. Greater success and happiness 
 are his, and yet he works no harder to get 
 them. Ergo, I am defrauded of part of my 
 wages." Second, it rebukes persons of two 
 opposite classes in society : on the one hand, 
 those of a " serving class," who see their 
 superiors through the " evil eye " of envy ; on 
 the other hand, those of a ruling class, whose 
 proud, self-assertive egoism overvalues their 
 particular work, forgetting that 
 
 " All service is the same with God 
 With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we ; there is no last or first." 
 
 In the gospel accounts we get intimations 
 of some disposition on the part of John's dis- 
 ciples to question the ways of Jesus. These 
 two prophets stood, to their age, as conspicu- 
 ously different as, to our age, have stood Car- 
 lyle and Emerson. But they recognized, as 
 
Humor Versus Criticism JJ 
 
 did the latter prophets, that they were work- 
 ing in unity of spirit for the new dispensa- 
 tion. 
 
 Most admirable are the tact and temper of 
 the Nazarene when taken to task because his 
 disciples do not fast, as is the custom of the 
 Pharisees and the disciples of John ! In reply 
 he shows how little he values fasting as an 
 obligatory rite, not so much by opposing his 
 questioners with grave argument, as by using 
 that which is more effectual, a playful humor. 
 Behold his face light up with a good-natured 
 smile as he compares himself and his disciples 
 to a bridegroom and his wedding-friends : 
 " Can the sons of the bride-chamber mourn, 
 as long as the bridegroom is with them ? But 
 the days will come when the bridegroom shall 
 be taken away from them, and then will they 
 fast." 
 
 Touching the argument for keeping old 
 forms with new thought argument held in 
 stock by the conservative of every age he 
 goes on to make this analogy : 
 
34 TJic Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 " No man rendeth a piece from a new gar- 
 ment and putteth it upon an old garment ; else 
 he will rend the new, and also the piece from 
 the new will not agree with the old. And no 
 man putteth new wine into old wine-skins ; 
 else the new wine will burst the skins, and 
 itself will be spilled, and the skins will perish. 
 But new wine must be put into fresh wine- 
 skins. And no man having drunk old wine 
 desireth new : for he saith, The old is good/' * 
 
 The humor of the last sentence reflects 
 true insight into the conservative nature of 
 the far larger part of human society at all 
 times. For it, "The old is good." 
 
 According to all three of the synoptic 
 gospels, it is in this connection that Jesus is 
 censured for the opposite of fasting, namely, 
 for feasting and fellowship with publicans and 
 sinners. And how does he meet the censure ? 
 By a reply memorable to all succeeding gen- 
 erations for the sympathetic wit and wisdom 
 of it : " They that are whole have no need of 
 * Matt. 9, 14-17 ; Luke 5, 33-39. 
 
Humor Versus Criticism JJ 
 
 a physician, but they that are sick. But go 
 ye and learn what this meaneth: I desire 
 mercy, and not sacrifice ; for I came not to 
 call the righteous but sinners to repentance." 
 Many a minister has had occasion to rebuke 
 with this pregnant saying the manifestation, 
 in or out of his flock, of this self-righteous 
 and exclusive attitude toward individual sin- 
 ners, or toward some lower strata of society. 
 
 Having come repeatedly in contact with 
 this fault-finding temper, directed sometimes 
 against John the Baptist, sometimes against 
 himself, he sets it forth in this happy com- 
 parison : 
 
 " But whereunto shall I liken the men of 
 this generation ? They are like children that 
 sit in the market-places and call to one another, 
 saying, We piped unto you, and ye did not 
 dance; we wailed, and ye did not mourn. 
 For John is come neither eating nor drink- 
 ing, and they say, He hath a devil ; the Son 
 of man is come eating and drinking, and they 
 say, Behold a gluttonous man and a wine- 
 
j6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. 
 But wisdom is justified by her works," or, 
 as Luke has more poetically put it, " of her 
 children/' The generation is a frivolous and 
 carping generation ; whimsical and petulant as 
 a lot of children playing at mock weddings 
 and funerals. It is predisposed to set its face 
 against the new dispensation, whether it appear 
 in the form of John's austere morality and 
 asceticism, or in the broader and more cheer- 
 ful comradeship of Jesus. By reason of the 
 contrast, the humor of the passage is all the 
 more effective for being preceded in the text - 
 as likely it was in fact by that generous and 
 truly eloquent tribute to his contemporary, 
 reaching a climax in the words, " Among them 
 born of woman there is none greater than 
 John." 
 
 I cannot forbear noting here the contrast 
 between Jesus and Gautama the Buddha in 
 reference to their method of meeting crit- 
 icism, the latter's dialectic gravity, the 
 former's nimble wit, or playful humor, which 
 
Humor Versus Criticism jy 
 
 quickly closes controversy. Jesus had that 
 highest wit which disarms a contestant with a 
 single answer. 
 
 To illustrate the difference : When Deva- 
 detta (the Judas among the disciples of the 
 Hindu sage) upbraids his master for not ob- 
 serving more stringent rules and self-mortifi- 
 cation, the Buddha makes reply after this 
 fashion : 
 
 " Truly, the body is full of impurity and its 
 end is the charnal-house, for it is imperma- 
 nent and destined to be dissolved into its 
 elements. ... It is not good to indulge in 
 the pleasures of the body ; but neither is it 
 good to neglect our bodily needs and to heap 
 filth upon its impurities. The lamp that is 
 not cleansed and filled with oil will be extin- 
 guished, and a body that is unkempt, unwashed 
 and weakened by penance will not be a fit 
 receptacle for the light of truth. " 
 
 When the Buddha approaches the nearest 
 to Jesus' pregnant wit and humor, he still 
 speaks as a dialectician. Nowhere is he more 
 
j8 TJic Wit and Wisdom of Jestts 
 
 happy than in the reputed conversation with a 
 young ascetic, called Sona. The latter has 
 become so disgusted with austere repression 
 of himself that he is about to turn into the 
 opposite course of unrestrained pleasure. On 
 bringing the matter to his master's attention 
 the following dialogue takes place : 
 
 " How is it, Sona ; were you able to play 
 the lute before you left home ? " 
 
 "Yes, sire." 
 
 " What do you think then, Sona ; if the 
 strings of your lute are too tightly strung, 
 will the lute give out the proper tone, and be 
 fit to play ? " 
 
 " It will not, sire." 
 
 "And what do you think, Sona; if the 
 strings of your lute be strung too slack, will 
 the lute then give out the proper tone, and be 
 fit to play ? " 
 
 " It will not, sire." 
 
 " But, how, Sona, if the strings of your lute 
 be not strung too tight or too slack ; if they 
 have the proper degree of tension, will the 
 
Humor Versus Criticism Jp 
 
 lute then give out the proper sound and be 
 fit to play?" 
 
 "Yes, sire." 
 
 " In the same way, Sona, energy too much 
 strained tends to excessive zeal, and energy 
 too much relaxed tends to apathy. Therefore, 
 Sona, cultivate in yourself the mean of energy, 
 and press on to the mean in your mental 
 powers, and place this before you as your 
 aim." * 
 
 Broadly speaking, these two oriental found- 
 ers of a new religion may be said to differ 
 somewhat as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson 
 differ in literature. Wisdom comes from 
 Jesus as the flash of insight, in the form of 
 apotheme, proverb, picturesque parable ; from 
 the Buddha it comes usually as a syllogism, or 
 chain of closely related and dependent prop- 
 ositions. Jesus darts to the heart of the 
 matter on the wings of that adjusting imag- 
 ination and intuition which sees at once the 
 principle that unites things apparently differ- 
 
 * Oldenberg's " Buddha," p. 189. 
 
40 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 ent, and the principle that differentiates things 
 apparently alike. The Buddha moves more 
 slowly in detail, encumbered rather by his 
 more heavy armor of much learning and logic. 
 In replying to questioners he reveals truth as 
 the sun sheds light at early morn, gradually 
 making objects stand out clear and distinct. 
 Jesus reveals truth rather as the sun which 
 at mid-day escapes from a dark cloud : in- 
 stantly all shadows are dispelled with effulgent 
 light. 
 
II 
 
 Life-Sketches: Turning " Men's 
 Ears into Eyes " 
 
Folly, conceit, foppery, silliness, affectation, hypoc- 
 risy, attitudinizing and pedantry of all shades, and in 
 all forms, everything that poses, prances, bridles, struts, 
 bedizens, and plumes itself, everything that takes itself 
 seriously and tries to impose itself on mankind, all 
 this is the natural prey of the satirist, so many targets 
 ready for his arrows, so many victims offered to his 
 attack. And we all know how rich the world is in 
 prey of this kind ! Amiel* 
 
 All wit does but divert men from the road 
 In which things vulgarly are understood, 
 And force mistake and ignorance to own 
 A better sense than commonly is known. 
 
 Butler. 
 (42) 
 
II 
 
 Life-Sketches : Turning " Men's 
 Ears Into Eyes " 
 
 ft Tbe presence of the ideal of right and of truth in 
 all action makes the yawning delinquenci-es of prac- 
 tice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the 
 interest, but droll to the intellect." 
 
 EMERSON. 
 
 BREVITY may be "the soul of wit/' but 
 J ' not so surely is it the soul of humor. 
 Often by extension, rather, does the latter 
 come to effective head. Because of the very 
 brevity of the gospel text I believe the humor 
 of Jesus is less conspicuous than otherwise it 
 would be. With fuller text I also question if 
 certain parables in which is found humor would 
 be open to the psychological objection made 
 against their genuineness in some quarters. 
 
44 The Wit arid Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Belonging to this class are the parables 
 about the widow and the judge, and the per- 
 sistent man who clamored at his neighbor's 
 door for bread until from sheer weariness the 
 latter handed out, or threw out, all he asked 
 for.* 
 
 " Which of you shall have a friend, and go 
 unto him at midnight, and say to him, Friend, 
 lend me three loaves ; for a friend of mine has 
 come from a journey, and I have nothing to 
 set before him. And he from within shall 
 answer, Trouble me not, the door is now shut, 
 and my children are with me in bed ; I cannot 
 rise and give thee. I say unto you, though he 
 will not rise and give him because he is his 
 friend, yet because of his importunity he will 
 rise, and give him as many as he needeth." 
 
 The picture of the irrepressible widow, pes- 
 tering the unrighteous judge into granting her 
 request, is companion to this : 
 
 "There was in a city a judge which feared 
 not God, and regarded not man; and there 
 
 * Luke n, 5-13; 18, 1-8. 
 
Life-Sketches 4$ 
 
 was a widow in that city ; and she came oft 
 unto him, saying, Do me justice of mine 
 adversary. And he would not for a while; 
 but afterward he said within himself, Though 
 I fear not God, nor regard man ; yet, because 
 this widow troubleth me, I will do her justice, 
 lest she wear me out by her continual coming. 
 And shall not God do justice by his children 
 who cry to him clay and night, and he is long- 
 suffering over them ? " The phrase, " though 
 I fear not God nor regard man," has the edge 
 of fine satire if directed, as I believe it was, 
 at a class of judicial magistrates of the time 
 more noted for skepticism and cynicism than 
 for righteous judgment. 
 
 Respecting the application made in the text 
 of the two preceding parables, objection is 
 offered that Jesus would not have thus repre- 
 sented God as wearied by the importunities of 
 men into granting their petitions. He may, 
 however, have glided momentarily into the 
 humor of these parables, in some discourse or 
 other on the power and virtue of prayerful 
 
46 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 persistence and patience in well-doing despite 
 much discouragement and long-deferred re- 
 ward. The central thought is, if unrighteous 
 men comply with just requests, how much 
 more shall the righteous Father of men ! 
 "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
 right ? " With quick mind for the incongru- 
 ous, Jesus presses on his hearers the interrog- 
 atories which admit of but one answer : 
 
 " Of which of you that is a father shall his 
 son ask a loaf, and he give him a stone ? or a 
 fish, and he for a fish give him a serpent ? 
 or if he shall ask an egg, will he give him a 
 scorpion ? If ye then, being evil, know how 
 to give good gifts unto your children, how 
 much more shall your heavenly Father give 
 the Holy Spirit to them that ask him ? " 
 
 With all his idealism, Jesus had an observ- 
 ing eye for the practical activities of men, and 
 was not without a sense of the comic in their 
 push and pull for material things. Why should 
 they not display equal devotedness, equal heat 
 and energy, in the pursuit of spiritual things ? 
 
Life-Sketches 4? 
 
 In the parable of the Cunning Steward we 
 have another analogy drawn from the self- 
 seeking affairs of business, which blends 
 serious admonition with humor. It was prob- 
 ably spoken more especially for the benefit of 
 Judas and some of the newly converted pub- 
 licans and sinners, who were trying to be 
 citizens of two kingdoms, that of God and 
 that of the devil : 
 
 " There was a certain rich man who had a 
 steward ; and the same was accused unto him 
 that he was wasting his goods. And he called 
 him, and said unto him, What is this that I 
 hear of thee? render the account of thy 
 stewardship ; for thou canst be no longer 
 steward. And the steward said within him- 
 self, What shall I do, seeing that my lord 
 taketh away the stewardship from me? I 
 have not the strength to dig ; to beg I am 
 ashamed. I am resolved what to do, that 
 when I am put out of the stewardship they 
 may receive me into their houses. And call- 
 ing to him each one of his lord's debtors, he 
 
48 The Wit arid Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 said to the first, How much owest thou unto 
 my lord ? And he said, A hundred measures 
 of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bond, 
 and sit down quickly and write fifty. Then 
 said he to another, And how much owest thou ? 
 And he said, A hundred measures of wheat. 
 He saith unto him, Take thy bond, and write 
 fourscore. And his lord commended the 
 unrighteous steward because he had done 
 wisely [evinced worldly smartness] : for the 
 sons of this world are, for their own genera- 
 tion, wiser than the sons of the light." * 
 That is, they show more thought and diligence 
 in the transient affairs of earth than some of 
 my disciples in the permanent affairs of heaven. 
 Be ye faithful in the higher prudence, as they 
 are faithful in the lower, f 
 
 "He that is faithful in a very little is 
 faithful also in much, and he that is unright- 
 
 * Luke 1 6, 1-13. 
 
 t One of the sorriest illustrations of the mischief of 
 literal interpretation is furnished by the fact that the good 
 pagan emperor, Julian, and others, have made this parable 
 reflect on the ethics of Jesus. 
 
Life-Sketches 4g 
 
 ecus in a very little is unrighteous in much. . . . 
 No servant can serve two masters : for either 
 he will hate the one, and love the other ; or 
 else he will hold to one, and despise the other. 
 Ye cannot serve God and mammon." You 
 cannot divide your allegiance in the spirit of 
 the Spaniard who, on his death-bed, being 
 told by his confessor how the devil tortured 
 people in hell, replied, "I hope my lord the 
 devil is not so cruel," Rebuked for referring 
 to the devil as "my lord," he retorted again, 
 " Excuse me for calling him so ; but I know 
 not into what hands I may fall ; and if I happen 
 into his, I hope he will use me the better for 
 giving him good words." The " good-lord-and- 
 good-devil " people Jesus found numerous 
 enough in his times, as they are in all 
 times. 
 
 In Luke 12, 42-48, we have another humor- 
 ous description of a different sort of unfaithful 
 steward ; per contra, one without even worldly 
 calculation or cunning foresight, a stupid, 
 lawless, stomach-mongering, abusive steward. 
 
$O TJic Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 But this is another parable across which some 
 draw the line. To them it expresses only a 
 disappointed expectation of the master's second 
 coming to earth, and the desire to keep waver- 
 ing ones steadfast in the faith. Despite the 
 objection to some of the setting, the picture 
 may be taken as one by Jesus. 
 
 Reading between the lines, I see him 
 engaged in conversation with his disciples 
 about the need of a more commanding faith 
 in a God of righteousness as a never-absent 
 presence in the world. I hear him speak of 
 a class of people acting as though they thought 
 the just Rewarder and Punisher is at times 
 off duty, that he "goeth on a journey," or 
 " peradventure sleepeth," as Elijah mockingly 
 said to the prophets of Baal. In breaking 
 away from the constraint of moral obedience 
 and patient waiting, they are like the foolish 
 servant who, because his lord went on a jour- 
 ney and delayed his return, abandoned him- 
 self to lawless revelry and abuse of authority. 
 " He beat the man-servants and maid-servants, 
 
Life- Sketches 5/ 
 
 ate and drank and was drunken." But lo, the 
 lord unexpectedly appears on the scene to 
 catch him, chastise him and cast him out. The 
 Divine Master of every such servant "shall 
 come in a day when he expecteth not, and in 
 an hour when he knoweth not, and shall cut 
 him asunder (from the reward of the righteous), 
 and appoint his portion with the unfaithful," 
 according to the inherent nature of things. 
 
 In this connection, the whole law of trustee- 
 ship, or personal responsibility, is condensed 
 into a single sentence: "To whomsoever 
 much is given, of him shall much be required ; 
 and to whom they commit much, of him will 
 they ask the more." * 
 
 The parable of the Ten Talents (Matt. 25, 
 14-30) may fall into line here, a most mem- 
 orable vehicle of a vital truth about the gifts 
 and deserts and trusteeship of men ! In 
 deserved fashion it lays bare the culpability of 
 much too numerous a class in the social 
 structure of every age and clime. It is the 
 * Matt. 24, 45-51 ; Luke 12, 42-48. 
 
$2 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 class who covet somebody else's gift and cir 
 cumstances, and, because they have them not, 
 go moping and disgruntled through life, a 
 grievous burden to their betters. It is they 
 of small talent who waste life and power in 
 ill-natured complaining of those of larger 
 talent forever complaining of their want of 
 opportunity, yet making no sufficient effort to 
 improve well the opportunity they have, much 
 less to seek to create opportunity. Jesus tells 
 these people they shall not escape the visita- 
 tion of that universal law of cause and effect 
 operative both in the material and spiritual 
 world the law which the parable sums up 
 in the maxim, "Unto every one that hath 
 shall be given, and he shall have abundance ; 
 but from him that hath not, even that which 
 he hath shall be taken away." 
 
 Humor, and genial humor, too, lies behind 
 most of the illustrations thus far given, and 
 others that might be given in this connection. 
 It is an element in the lively image of the 
 woman searching with candle and broom for 
 
Life-Sketches 5J 
 
 the lost coin, and so delighted on finding it 
 that she calls in the neighbors to rejoice with 
 her verily, like a woman, indeed ! * It is 
 in the picture of the guest appearing at the 
 wedding-feast improperly dressed for the occa- 
 sion, and thrown into speechless embarassment 
 by the challenge of the host : " Friend, how 
 earnest thou in hither not having a wedding- 
 garment ? " Spiritually translated, Why hast 
 thou not prepared, or disciplined thyself, to be 
 a citizen in the kingdom of God ? f It is in 
 the description of the good man sowing wheat 
 by day and the bad man sowing tares by night, 
 so that the one can hardly be rooted out with- 
 out destroying the other, $ a realistic bit of 
 symbolism in its application to the actual 
 status of human society everywhere and at 
 all times; a "palpable hit," too, at the over- 
 impatient radical who wants to take the king- 
 dom of heaven by violence, despite God's law 
 of evolution. That the attainment of divine 
 
 * Luke 15, 8-1 o. 
 t Matt. 23, 1-13. | Matt. 13, 24-30. 
 
5^ The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 ends by growth, rather than by sudden leaps 
 and miraculous removal of obstructions, was 
 his Father's method became more clear to the 
 parabolist himself, as life's drama moved to its 
 consummation. 
 
 Yet again, humor free and vivid is displayed 
 in the parable of the Ten Virgins (Matt. 25, 
 1-13), a parable, however, ascribed by some 
 authorities to the apostolic age. It may have 
 received touches from another than Jesus, but 
 the picture in the main bears the stamp of the 
 same mind from which emanated the parable 
 of the Ten Talents. If another's, surely its 
 author had a superb genius for parables, very 
 like that of Jesus. And why must we forever 
 be giving a theological or party twist to such 
 parables ? Jesus had a high instinct for the 
 universal and perennial symbolism we find in 
 this story of the Ten Virgins. It is a telling 
 satire on the thoughtless and thriftless, who 
 never stock themselves with the oil of knowl- 
 edge and discipline, which in this world, or 
 any world, is exacted as the price of adequacy 
 
Life-Sketches 55 
 
 to meet the golden hours that glide upon us 
 unawares for our betterment. Foolish-virgin 
 class ! is it that we must always have them 
 with us, they always relying on the wise-virgin 
 class to supply in time of need the oil they 
 have neglected to provide for themselves ? 
 Verily, a rational imitation by society of the 
 refusal of the wise virgins in the parable to 
 supply oil for the negligent might help 
 immensely to discourage much folly and 
 wickedness in Israel. 
 
 Would you have a different sort of inter- 
 pretation ? a more spiritual one ? Well, 
 Jesus may have used the bridegroom figura- 
 tively, somewhat as the parable is written. 
 He may have used the symbolism of the wise 
 virgins, with lamps and oil to fill them, as 
 illustrating both the form and substance of 
 the true religious faith; while the foolish 
 virgins may indicate those who have only the 
 form, or appearance, of the faith. The lamp 
 may stand for outwardness, and the oil for 
 inwardness, of religion. He who would be 
 
56 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 wise, religious and moral in the future must 
 be wise, religious and moral now. 
 
 "Many are called, but few are chosen." 
 Would you be one of the chosen company of 
 the bridegroom of knowledge and power and 
 righteousness, and of peace and joy in the 
 Holy Spirit ? then 
 
 Friend, put oil in the lamp to-day, 
 For light to-morrow on thy way. 
 
Ill 
 
 Misunderstood 
 
To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves 
 is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of 
 that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men 
 which so few understand ; it is the crudest trial reserved 
 for self-devotion ; it is what must have oftenest have 
 wrung the heart of the Son of man ; and if God could 
 suffer, it would be the wound we should ever be inflict- 
 ing upon Him. He also He above all is the 
 great misunderstood, the least comprehended. 
 
 AmieL 
 
 There are people who can never understand a trope, 
 or any second or expanded sense given to your words, 
 or any humor ; but remain literalists, after hearing the 
 music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy 
 or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon 
 or clergy. Emerson. 
 
 (58) 
 
Ill 
 
 Misunderstood 
 
 *4P5 
 
 "He that bath ears to hear, let him bear" 
 
 JESUS. 
 
 < < Wby do ye not understand my speech ? Even because 
 ye cannot hear my word" JESUS. 
 
 t( Tbou art like the Spirit which thou comprebendest" 
 
 GOETHE. 
 
 WE are wont to speak of Jesus as address- 
 ing himself to a common humanity; 
 and so he did. " The common people heard 
 him gladly." But let it not be forgotten how 
 much he spoke to an uncommon humanity. 
 He felt the unity of the race, but he also 
 realized the tremendous diversity of it. Not 
 very long had he been in the ministry before 
 he had ample objective evidence of the great 
 difference existing among men in capacity to 
 
60 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 apprehend spiritual truth, and still more in 
 disposition and will to apply it to life. In the 
 happiest vein of covert criticism he sets forth 
 this difference, in the parable of the Sower : * 
 " Behold, the sower went forth to sow ; and 
 as he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside, 
 and the birds came and devoured them." 
 Under this figure of speech he dismisses at 
 once as hopeless the people who are incapable 
 of understanding his message, through their 
 want of the sense of spiritual things. "And 
 others fell upon rocky places, where they had 
 not much earth ; and straightway they sprang 
 up because they had no deepness of earth; 
 and when the sun was risen they were scorched ; 
 and because they had no root, they withered 
 away." This second set of people manifest 
 great delight the first time they hear the word, 
 comprehending it a little, but not in any full- 
 ness of meaning. Young ministers, and young 
 leaders generally of any good cause, get 
 sorely deceived by this class of superficial 
 
 * Matt. 13, 3-9; Mark 4, 3-9; Luke 8, 5-8. 
 
Misunderstood 6l 
 
 hearers, with their superficial enthusiasms. 
 "And others fell among thorns; and the 
 thorns grew up and choked them." A third 
 class of hearers understand the word, and 
 really open their hearts to it. But they have 
 not the moral stamina to hold fast when the 
 actual stress and strain of care and temptation 
 come. "And others fell into good ground, 
 and yielded fruit, growing up and increasing, 
 and brought forth, some thirty fold, some sixty, 
 and some a hundred fold." These last are 
 the hearers who not only understand well the 
 word, but earnestly, according to capacity, 
 disseminate it and put it into their daily 
 conduct. Jesus concludes very laconically 
 when he exclaims, "He that hath ears to 
 hear, let him hear." 
 
 This parable is a fine example of his gift 
 for using figuratively the operations of Nature 
 to present the intellectual and moral character- 
 istics of classes in society. He doubtless 
 beheld in the multitude before him represent- 
 atives of all the four classes above described, 
 
62 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 And some, it is to be hoped, recognized them- 
 selves in the picture, notwithstanding the 
 statement that among the disciples there were 
 those dull enough to require a private exposi- 
 tion. They seemed to belong to that multitude 
 of whom he said, " Seeing they see not, and 
 hearing they hear not, neither do they under- 
 stand." 
 
 Here I am led to note a phase of Jesus' life 
 which presents a strange mixture of both 
 humor and pathos. It is that phase which 
 caused him now and then to be misunderstood 
 by the multitude, and even by his own dis- 
 ciples, on account of his use of figurative and 
 mystical language. They comprehended only 
 in the letter, much as did little Pip in " Great 
 Expectations." Hearing his sister speak of 
 bringing him up "by hand," he supposed she 
 referred to the frequent application upon him 
 of her "hard and heavy hand." 
 
 Fatal bias of men for materialistic and 
 literal interpretation ! To the idealistic and 
 poetic temperament, is it the cause more of 
 
Misunderstood 6j 
 
 smiles or tears ? Did it not at times evoke 
 the former from the Son of man ? And is it 
 not possible there were occasions when he 
 felt inclined to test his hearers' apprehension 
 in this respect ? Some passages in the gos- 
 pels seem to imply this. 
 
 Instead of saying, " Beware of the teach- 
 ings of the Pharisees and Sadducees," he 
 says, " Beware of the leaven," and so forth. 
 This sets his disciples, or the more stupid 
 of them, to questioning whether the master 
 uses such speech because they have no 
 bread, and to warn them against the kind 
 of leaven in the bread eaten by those sects. 
 At another time, refusing food with the 
 remark, " I have meat to eat that ye know 
 not of," they wonder if somebody has handed 
 in an extra dish for his special delectation. 
 
 If they so misunderstood the master, how 
 much the more a simple Samaritan woman, or 
 a promiscuous crowd of his countrymen, when 
 treated to certain mystical and symbolical say- 
 ings as related in the fourth gospel ! Did he 
 
64 TJie Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 indulge in such language, with such people, 
 on any occasion, then no marvel if many 
 thought, "This is a hard saying," and "went 
 back, and walked no more with him " ; no 
 marvel if " even his brethren did not believe 
 on him/ 1 
 
 Historically not altogether reliable, these 
 dialogues in "John"; but, it would seem, 
 psychologically not so exceedingly difficult to 
 accept, as is clear when one remembers how 
 transubstantiation and consubstantiation have 
 been doctrines of the Christian Church, built 
 by the literalist upon the phrases, "eat my 
 flesh" and "drink my blood." Reading in 
 the Koran that God opened and cleansed 
 Mohammed's heart, have not millions in the 
 Orient supposed that the physical heart of 
 the prophet was miraculously detached from 
 his body, thoroughly washed, and reattached 
 to perform again its life-invigorating func- 
 tions ? 
 
 Amid all the beautiful and ingenious blend- 
 ing of fact and fiction in the fourth gospel, 
 
Misunderstood 6$ 
 
 we get here and there a quite probable like- 
 ness of Jesus, as to his inclination to use 
 paradoxical, figurative, and mystical language, 
 startling his hearers, and sometimes causing 
 misunderstanding bordering on the comic. 
 The scene in which Nicodemus is told he 
 "must be born again " ; still more, the follow- 
 ing scene with his conservative countrymen, 
 read like a satire on the general incapacity of 
 those who live in the letter which "killeth" 
 to enter into the thought of those who live in 
 the spirit which "giveth life." 
 
 Jesus is represented as calling himself 
 "the bread which came down out of ' 
 heaven." " If any man eat of this bread, 
 he shall live forever ; and the bread which 
 I will give is my flesh, for the life of 
 the world." His hearers wonder what such 
 strange speech is all about. "Is not this 
 Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and 
 mother we know ? How doth he now say, I 
 am come down out of heaven? How can 
 this man give us his flesh to eat ? " 
 
66 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Again, he tells them, "If God were your 
 father, ye would love me ; for I came forth 
 and am come of God ; for neither have I come 
 of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not 
 understand my speech? Even because ye 
 cannot hear my word. . . . He that is of God 
 heareth the words of God ; for this cause ye 
 hear them not, because ye are not of God. 
 The Jews answered and said unto him, Say 
 we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and 
 hast a devil ? " 
 
 Still more mystified and vexed are they 
 when he declares, " If a man keep my word, 
 he shall never see death." 
 
 " Now we know thou hast a devil. Abraham 
 is dead, and the prophets ; and thou sayest, If 
 a man keep my word, he shall never taste 
 death. Art thou greater than our father 
 Abraham, who is dead ? " 
 
 " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my 
 day ; and he saw it, and was glad." 
 
 " Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast 
 thou seen Abraham ? " 
 
Misunderstood 6/ 
 
 "Verily, verily," responds Jesus, " before 
 Abraham was, I am." * 
 
 By this time, we are told, they were ready 
 to stone him. Not in Goethe's " Faust " do 
 the poetic outbursts of the hero fall more life- 
 less on the dull ears of the prosaic, material- 
 istic Wagner than falls such speech on the 
 ears of the Jews in this scene from " John." 
 
 * John 6, 41-42; 8, 51-58. 
 
IV 
 Kindred and Neighbors 
 
They expressed their surprise at his (Jesus' ) assum- 
 ing the prophetic function, . . . they showed no 
 sympathy when he spoke of his mission ; in short, 
 they gave him a thousand proofs that they did not 
 understand him. They were far too much accustomed 
 to him, had too often seen him go in and out, seen 
 him work and rest, eat and drink, to be able to look 
 on him as a prophet. . . . And so [from kindred and 
 neighbors] he met with no appreciation, no enthusiasm, 
 no faith ; and such faint hopes as he had ever enter- 
 tained were dashed to the ground. . . . And to this 
 day the ordinary run of mankind judge by the same 
 kind of purely accidental circumstances. No height 
 of moral grandeur will convince them that those with 
 whom they are familiar are anything but very ordinary 
 sort of people. Dr. L Hooykaas. 
 
 (70) 
 
IV 
 Kindred and Neighbors 
 
 "Is not this the carpenter's son ?" NEW TESTAMENT. 
 "He is beside himself." NEW TESTAMENT. 
 
 WITH what spontaneity of wit our spirit- 
 ual leader meets and masters varied 
 objections and opposing elements that rise 
 unbidden in his way ! His answers often 
 come as a searchlight unexpectedly turned on 
 obscure objects in the darkness. They sur- 
 prise the hearer from a new point of view with 
 apt quotation, startling epigram, puzzling par- 
 adox, or vivid parable, minted as fresh coin in 
 his own brain. It was a favorite method of 
 Jesus to administer rebuke and criticism by 
 means of the parable. He used it on friend 
 
J2 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 and foe, much as Lincoln used his humor- 
 ous stories, to make his admonitions more 
 graciously received or more readily appre- 
 hended. " By a parable/' observes the Buddha, 
 " many a wise man perceives the meaning of 
 what is being said." The simple man may 
 sometimes the better perceive it, too. 
 
 Striking proof Jesus shows of wit and 
 insight into human nature when, early in his 
 ministry, he returns home to preach in the 
 synagogue of his native village. * His former 
 townsmen "wondered at the words of grace 
 which proceeded out of his mouth." But 
 yes, but " Is not this the carpenter's son ? 
 And his mother and brothers and sisters 
 are they not all with us ? " Some were 
 offended at his manifest superiority to their 
 standard of mediocrity. Offended also was 
 the young evangelist : in the consciousness of 
 his spiritual authority offended. Alas for 
 sensitive genius seeking early recognition in 
 the native town ! Wise words spoken there 
 
 * Matt. 13, 54-58; Mark 6, 1-6; Luke 4, 18-30. 
 
Kindred and Neighbors 73 
 
 are but half wise, and good deeds but half 
 good. 
 
 " Doubtless ye will say unto me, Physician, 
 heal thyself [it is likely they did say that] : 
 whatsoever we have heard done at Capernaum, 
 do also here in this country. But of a truth, 
 I say unto you, there were many widows in 
 Israel in the days of Elijah, . . . when there 
 came a great famine over the land ; and unto 
 none of them was Elijah sent, but only to 
 Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, unto a woman 
 that was a widow. And there were many 
 lepers in Israel, in the time of Elisha the 
 prophet ; and none of them was cleansed, 
 but only Naaman the Syrian." This deft 
 application of what they accepted as historical 
 facts he clinches with the famous utterance, 
 " Verily, a prophet is not without honor, save 
 in his own country, among his own kin, and 
 in his own house." 
 
 Many a moral and religious teacher has 
 realized the force of the last saying since it 
 sprang from the lips of the greatest among 
 
7^ The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 prophets. I have little doubt that he had 
 been in some measure prepared for skepticism 
 in the synagogue by skepticism in the home. 
 Perhaps there is less poetry in this view than 
 in the one so prevalent in the Christian Church ; 
 but the writer cannot avoid reading, between 
 the lines, that Jesus of Nazareth felt the want 
 of appreciative sympathy on the part even of 
 his own mother. With him the first obliga- 
 tion was "to bear witness to truth." Re- 
 proved by his parents for tarrying in the 
 temple, he exclaims, "Wist ye not that I 
 must be about my Father's business ? " 
 Again, when word is brought him, while 
 preaching in the open air, that his mother 
 and brothers wait on the outskirts of the 
 crowd to speak with him, he evinces the 
 remarkable facility of his mind to convert 
 trivial incidents into the enforcement of the 
 nature of that momentous business. Upon 
 his hearers flashes the comprehensive thought 
 that the ties of spiritual affinity are more 
 binding than those of flesh and blood. 
 
Kindred and Neighbors 75 
 
 " Who is my mother ? and who are my 
 brethren ? Behold, my mother and my 
 brethren are they who hear the word of 
 God, and do it." 
 
 Still another retort of this surprising char- 
 acter springs to his lips when some " woman 
 out of the multitude," in the ecstasy of her 
 feeling, cries out, " Blessed is the womb that 
 bare thee, and the breasts that thou didst 
 suck ! " 
 
 "Yea, rather," comes the reply, "blessed 
 are they that hear the word of God, and 
 do it ! " 
 
 Probably the kindred of Jesus in general 
 looked upon him as a fanatic (in the language 
 of these days, a "crank") because of his 
 intense absorption in his work of evangelism, 
 to the disregard of the so-called practical 
 interests of life. I suppose they advised 
 him to be a carpenter like his father, instead 
 of tramping about the country, preaching 
 without pay. He did not take the advice, 
 and so he was "beside himself." How little 
 
f6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Jesus was troubled about "material" things, 
 the craving for which causes so much dis- 
 content and contention among the sons and 
 daughters of men ! When the good-hearted 
 Martha, like many housewives, makes so much 
 of her dinner that she has no time for the 
 word of the wise man under her roof ; when 
 she emerges from the kitchen hot and flushed, 
 and complains of her sister for leaving the 
 "work" to sit "at the Lord's feet," he 
 presents a contrast of the utmost serenity. 
 Seriously, yet, I apprehend, with the smile of 
 humor, he replies, " Martha, Martha, thou art 
 anxious and troubled about many things ; one 
 thing only is needful [or, few things are need- 
 ful] ; for Mary hath chosen the good part, 
 which shall not be taken away from her." * 
 
 At another time some one wants him to 
 intercede with a brother to divide an inher- 
 itance ; and the only satisfaction he gets is a 
 humorous picture of what frequently occurs 
 on this planet : 
 
 * Luke 10, 38-42. 
 
Kindred and Neighbors ff 
 
 " The ground of a certain rich man brought 
 forth plentifully ; and he reasoned within him- 
 self, saying, What shall I do because I have 
 not where to bestow my fruits ? And he said, 
 This will I do : I will pull down my barns, and 
 build greater ; and there will I bestow all my 
 corn and goods. And I will say to my soul, 
 Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many 
 years ; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be 
 merry. But God said unto him, Thou foolish 
 one, this night is thy soul required of thee ; 
 and the things which thou hast prepared, 
 whose shall they be ? So is he that layeth 
 up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward 
 God." Therefore, "take heed, and keep your- 
 selves from all covetousness : for a man's life 
 consisteth not in the abundance of the things 
 which he possesseth." * 
 
 Again he observes, " Lay up for yourselves 
 treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor 
 rust doth consume, and where thieves do not 
 break through nor steal : for where thy treas- 
 
 * Luke 12, 16-21. 
 
j8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 ure is, there will thy heart be also." Then, 
 chiding his disciples for that over-anxiety 
 about the future which doubles pain, he sums 
 up, laconically, " Be not, therefore, anxious for 
 the morrow : for the morrow will be anxious 
 for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil 
 thereof." 
 
 Some excellent proverbs and sayings, ex- 
 pressing the above thought of Jesus, are afloat 
 among the nations, such as the following : 
 
 "Let your trouble tarry till its own day 
 comes." 
 
 " He is miserable once, who feels it ; but 
 twice, who fears it before it comes." 
 
 Sir Thomas More speaks, if I remember 
 well, the same thought in rhyme : 
 
 " If evils come not, then our fears are vain ; 
 And if they do, fear but augments the pain." 
 
 Jesus wears no fetters. Freely he judges 
 the ways of men, unblinded by conventional 
 views about wealth, social customs, or filial 
 obligations. Continually, therefore, he runs 
 
Kindred and Neighbors f() 
 
 counter to prevailing opinion and prejudice 
 Continually he says and does the unexpected. 
 How he astonishes the hearer by showing him 
 to himself in a new relation, and in such a way 
 as to convict him of his error ! How he 
 exposes selfishness, whether manifested by 
 those outside, or inside, the fold ! His wit 
 reveals it as a sunbeam reveals the floating 
 dust of a room. On witnessing at some place 
 of feasting the swine-like exhibition (very 
 common at church-suppers and similar min- 
 istrations to the human animal) of a lot of 
 people scrambling for the best seats at table, 
 he must have appreciated the comedy as well 
 as the gravity in the scene, when he rebuked 
 them in this wise : 
 
 " When thou art bidden to a feast, do not 
 sit down in the chief seat, lest haply a more 
 honorable man than thou be bidden, and he 
 that bade thee and him shall come and say to 
 thee, Give this man place; and then shalt 
 thou begin with shame to take the lowest 
 place. But when thou art bidden, go and sit 
 
So The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 down in the lowest place, that when he that 
 hath bidden thee cometh, he may say to thee, 
 Friend, go up higher : then shalt thou have 
 glory in the presence of all that sit at meat 
 with thee. For every one that exalteth him- 
 self shall be humbled ; and he that humbleth 
 himself shall be exalted." * 
 
 This incident in the life of Jesus recalls at 
 the present writing a long-forgotten incident 
 in the life of Emerson, as related to me 
 some years ago by a friend. One evening 
 when Mr. Emerson was to lecture in a small 
 western town, he was invited to a church 
 supper; and there he was treated to just 
 about the sort of spectacle recorded in Luke. 
 In serene, benevolent dignity he stood at one 
 side watching the unseemly haste to get first 
 seated at the table. He did not say any thing, 
 as did Jesus; but the amused expression of 
 his face plainly said, " O human biped, thou 
 art a comic beast ! " 
 
 The dramatic Luke makes Jesus amaze his 
 
 * Luke 14, 7-14. 
 
Kindred and Neighbors 8l 
 
 hearers still more when he prescribes to his 
 host the following remarkable rule of conduct, 
 exacting an unselfishness so positively in con- 
 trast to the all but universal practice of 
 men: 
 
 "When thou makest a dinner or supper, 
 call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy 
 kinsmen, nor rich neighbors ; lest haply they 
 also bid thee again, and a recompense be 
 made thee. But when thou makest a feast, 
 bid the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind : 
 and thou shalt be blessed ; because they have 
 not wherewith to recompense thee : for thou 
 shalt be recompensed in the resurrection of 
 the just." 
 
 A striking parallel to this admonishment of 
 Jesus, found in the " Phaedrus " of Plato, 
 written some four hundred years before the 
 time of Jesus, is worthy of reproduction 
 in this connection. In Plato's dialogue, 
 Socrates is reported as saying: "In gen- 
 eral, when you make a feast, invite not your 
 friend, but the beggar and the empty soul, 
 
82 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 for they will love you, and attend you, and 
 come about your doors, and will be the 
 best pleased and the most grateful, and will 
 invoke blessings on your head." * 
 
 The prompt wit of Jesus to admonish and 
 rebuke, by planting in the foreground a stand- 
 ard of life and duty astonishingly at variance 
 with the general sentiment of his hearers, is 
 displayed on divers occasions. Not to mul- 
 tiply illustrations in this connection, let ref- 
 erence be made to only two other instances. 
 The one is that of the dialogue with Simon 
 (Luke 7, 36-50) respecting the "fallen 
 woman" kneeling repentant at the master's 
 feet. Mark the refinement of Socratic wit 
 with which he gets the " holier-than-thou " 
 Pharisee committed to the sentiment he 
 desires to exalt : 
 
 "Simon, I have something to say unto 
 
 thee. ... A certain lender had two debtors : 
 
 the one owed five hundred pence and the 
 
 other fifty. When they had not wherewith 
 
 * Jowett's " Plato," I., 539. 
 
Kindred and Neighbors Sj 
 
 to pay, he forgave them both. Which of 
 them therefore will love him most ? Simon 
 answered and said, He, I suppose, to whom 
 he forgave most. And he said unto him, 
 Thou hast rightly judged. And turning to 
 the woman, he said unto Simon, Seest thou 
 this woman ? I entered into thine house, thou 
 gavest me no water for my feet : but she hath 
 wet my feet with her tears, and wiped them 
 with her hair. Thou gavest me no kiss : but 
 she, since the time I came in, hath not ceased 
 to kiss my feet [or kiss much]. My head 
 with oil thou didst not anoint : but she hath 
 anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore 
 I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are 
 forgiven ; for she loved much : but to whom 
 little is forgiven, the same loveth little." 
 
 The other instance is the unique treatment 
 of the foolish question as to which of Jesus' 
 followers should be greatest in the kingdom 
 of heaven. Nothing could have been more 
 surprising, or better calculated to produce the 
 desired impression, than to set a child in their 
 
</ The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 midst, with the remark, "Verily I say unto 
 you, except ye turn and become as little chil- 
 dren, ye shall in nowise enter into the king- 
 dom of heaven," and so forth.* 
 
 * Matt. 18, 1-7; Mark 10, 13-16; Luke 18, 15-17. 
 
V 
 Pithy Sayings and Retorts 
 
Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and 
 worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphor- 
 isms, and the greatest and best of men is but an 
 aphorism. Coleridge. 
 
 Like all the rabbis of the time, Jesus, little given to 
 consecutive reasonings, compressed his doctrine into 
 aphorisms concise and of an expressive form, some- 
 times strange and enigmatical. Renan. 
 
 (86) 
 
V 
 
 Pithy Sayings and Retorts 
 
 "In a numerous collection of our Savior* s apothegms 
 there is not to be found one example of sophistry or 
 of false subtilty, or of anything approaching there- 
 unto." PALEY. 
 
 A PROVERB is the generalization of 
 much human experience in a brief say- 
 ing that sticks to the memory of ordinary 
 men. As Lord John Russell has finely said, 
 it " is the wit of one man, and the wisdom of 
 many." In the mint of the superb wit of the 
 man of Galilee were coined the most pregnant 
 sayings which have gone into the world's per- 
 manent circulation. How much are we his 
 debtors daily for some pleasantry, or epigram, 
 that gives pith and point to speech ! This 
 
88 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 chapter is devoted to a few of his more sen- 
 tentious utterances (some of them in the form 
 of retorts), which do not fall into line else- 
 where in these pages. The experiences of 
 life frequently bring these to the lips : 
 
 " There is nothing covered which shall not 
 be revealed." The Latins had it, "Time 
 reveals all things." 
 
 " It is impossible but that occasions of 
 stumbling should come, but woe unto him 
 through whom they come.'\ 
 
 " Agree with thine adversary quickly, whilst 
 thou art with him in the way." 
 
 " Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the 
 eagles be gathered " a pithy proverb having 
 more than local application to the Roman 
 power carrying its eagles into all the ancient 
 world ; having the solemn and universal mean- 
 ing that moral and spiritual degeneracy, in 
 individual or nation, must meet stern judg- 
 ment, even though it come by other forces of 
 selfishness, or by carrion eagles whatsoever. 
 
 "Many are called, but few are chosen." 
 
PitJiy Sayings and Retorts 89 
 
 Only a few respond to the call and make 
 themselves worthy to be chosen. The 
 Buddha said, "Few are there among men 
 who cross the river, and reach the goal. 
 The great multitude are running up and 
 down the shore." 
 
 When Jesus urges the simple fishermen to 
 become apostles of his truth, he wittily 
 remarks, " Follow me, and I will make you 
 fishers of men." Exhorting his disciples to 
 let their "light shine before men," he says, 
 " A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither 
 do men light a lamp, and put it under a 
 bushel, but on the stand ; and it shineth unto 
 all that are in the house." 
 
 Delegating his disciples for missionary 
 work, he tells them, "The harvest is plen- 
 teous, but the laborers are few." "The 
 laborer is worthy of his hire." Again, he 
 admonishes them, "Behold I send you forth 
 as sheep in the midst of wolves ; be ye, there- 
 fore, wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." 
 " If they have called the master of the house 
 
po The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Beelzebub, how much more shall they call 
 them of his household ! " 
 
 Realizing the tragic fate of the prophet to 
 bring division among men through his witness 
 to truth, he exclaimed, "Think not that I 
 came to send peace, but a sword." "A man's 
 foes shall be they of his own household." If 
 objection be made to the doctrine, "love your 
 enemies," "do good to them that hate you," 
 and the like, how surely he punctures its self- 
 ishness, and sweeps away all props, in this 
 keen logic : " If ye love them that love you, 
 what thank have ye ? for even sinners love 
 those that love them. And if ye do good to 
 them that do good to you, what thank have 
 ye ? for even sinners do the same. And if ye 
 lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what 
 thank have ye ? even sinners lend to sinners, 
 to receive again as much. Be ye, therefore, 
 better than they, even as your heavenly Father, 
 who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on 
 the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on 
 the unjust." * 
 
 * Matt. 5, 45 ; Luke 6, 32-34. 
 
Pithy Sayings and Retorts qi 
 
 When, in the overflow of her gratitude, the 
 Magdalen pours on the master's head the 
 precious ointment, and some of the disciples 
 (Judas, according to " John ") show displeasure 
 because it might have been sold for the benefit 
 of the poor, he, with smiling serenity, reminds 
 them, " Ye have the poor always with you, 
 and whensoever ye will ye can do them good, 
 but me ye have not always." 
 
 Having been questioned as to one's duty 
 toward those in authority, he discriminately 
 says, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on 
 Moses* seat ; all things, therefore, whatsoever 
 they bid you, these do and observe ; but do 
 not ye after their works ; for they say, and do 
 not." This is in line with the Spanish saying, 
 " Do as the friar says, and not as he does." 
 
 Hearing some of his countrymen boast of 
 having Abraham for their father, he presses 
 home to their attention the chasm between 
 their professions and practices, in the signifi- 
 cant reflection, " If ye were Abraham's chil- 
 dren ye would do the works of Abraham." 
 
Q2 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 When he perceives that the multitude are 
 prompted to follow him by motives belonging 
 to the animal man rather than the spiritual 
 man, he turns on them with the just rebuke, 
 " Ye seek me, not because ye saw signs 
 [evidences of power to satisfy spiritual 
 hunger] ; but because ye ate of the loaves, 
 and were filled. In these latter days we 
 frequently hear the sarcasm, " they seek after 
 the loaves and fishes," flung at a class of 
 office-seekers whose profuseness in phrases 
 of patriotism is only exceeded by their zeal 
 in henchmanship to the dispensers of political 
 patronage. 
 
 People profess that they will follow him 
 whithersoever he goes ; and with a touch of 
 humor, a touch of sadness too, he describes 
 the homelessness his mission necessitates, in 
 the saying, "The foxes have holes, and the 
 birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of 
 man hath not where to lay his head/' Then, 
 taking these people at their word, he summons 
 them forthwith to follow him and wholly sur- 
 
Pithy Sayings and Retorts yj 
 
 render themselves to the new movement for 
 righteousness* sake. But they offer excuses, 
 both on account of the dead and the living, 
 and so the pregnant replies : " Let the dead 
 bury their dead," and, " No man, having put 
 his hand to the plough, and looking backward, 
 is fit for the kingdom of God." 
 
 An exalted faith had Jesus in the reform- 
 able capacity of men, but he had a notion, 
 likewise, that what we call heredity and 
 environment figured somewhat in the matter. 
 And the notion very likely grew upon him as 
 he came in contact more and more with differ- 
 ing varieties of the genus homo. 
 
 " Continuous pounding will reform the 
 world," said a distinguished divine. Oh, 
 yes, but, meanwhile, exceedingly trying is 
 the world to the patience even of the saints ! 
 Jesus, the lofty idealist and patient son of 
 faith, learned by repeated failure how hard a 
 thing it is to lodge the divine word in some 
 ears. There were those who could not receive 
 it if they would, and others who would not 
 
94 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 receive it if they could " for their hardness 
 of heart " would not receive it. Hence the 
 significant remark, "He that hath ears to 
 hear, let him hear." Hence, too, the oft- 
 quoted admonition, "Give not that which is 
 holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls 
 before swine, lest haply they trample them 
 under their feet, and turn and rend you." 
 
 The above passage is thought by some to 
 have been written in the interest of the Peter- 
 party, as against the Paul-party. To me, how- 
 ever, it sounds genuine, and the connection 
 above intimated seems natural. Jesus verified, 
 in the years of his ministry, the everlasting 
 truth of similar sayings, which had sprung 
 from the oriental mind and passed on from 
 the far East ; which indeed had come to him 
 early, in the . proverbs of his own Bible, 
 namely, the exceeding difficulty of imparting 
 high things to the very foolish or the very 
 wicked. This is not a pleasant conclusion, 
 but, being drawn from general human experi- 
 ence, it has found expression among many 
 
Pithy Sayings and Retorts y$ 
 
 people, from the lore of the ancient Brahmins 
 to the " Faust " of modern Goethe. In the 
 book of Proverbs are such sayings as these : 
 
 " He that reproveth a scorner getteth him- 
 self shame; and he that rebuketh a wicked 
 man getteth himself a blot." "Speak not in 
 the ears of a fool; for he will despise the 
 wisdom of thy words. " The Jews had also 
 the saying, "A dog returneth to his vomit, 
 and a hog that is washed to his wallowings 
 in the mire." "Though you anoint an ass all 
 over with perfumes, it feels not your fondness, 
 but will turn again and kick you." So says 
 the Veman.* The Tamal has it: "Though 
 religious instruction be whispered into the ears 
 of the ass, nothing will come of it but the 
 accustomed braying." * One of the Buddha's 
 parables declares : " A fool, though he live 
 in the company of the wise, understands 
 nothing of the true doctrine, as a spoon tastes 
 not the flavor of the soup." 
 
 Varied and striking is the utterance of the 
 
 * Doctor Shutter's " Wit and Humor of the Bible." 
 
C)6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 same truth among the moderns : " The sow 
 prefers bran to roses " (French). " To wash 
 the head of an ass is loss of suds " (Spanish). 
 Some character of Shakespeare exclaims, 
 
 "Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile." 
 Goethe's " Faust " has the line, 
 
 " Wise words in dull ears are but lifeless lore " ; 
 
 while another German speaks in humorous 
 rhyme, 
 
 "Set a frog on a golden stool, 
 Off it hops again into the pool." 
 
 When questioned about riches and rich 
 men, the working of Jesus' mind is prompt 
 and facile, in a way peculiarly his own. 
 While some of the utterances in Luke may 
 be taken as expressing the antipathy of the 
 author of that book toward the wealthy 
 classes, it is not permissible to cast out on 
 this ground all passages that do not happen 
 to adjust well to the western mind in an age 
 of commercialism. 
 
Pithy Sayings and Retorts <?/ 
 
 Take the reflections called forth by the 
 scene with the rich young man, described in 
 all the synoptic gospels. The narrator relates 
 that when told to part with the "great pos- 
 sessions " which were preventing him from a 
 complete espousal of the cause for which the 
 master was fighting the incomparable fight, 
 "he went away sorrowful." The writer once 
 heard Phillips Brooks remark that the young 
 man was enjoined to give away his wealth 
 because he did not know how to use it. The 
 attitude of this truly noble divine, and of Jesus 
 as he presented it, seems to have been much 
 the same as that of the Buddha. The Hindu 
 sage, we infer from the records, pronounced 
 not against wealth and power, but against the 
 selfish use of them, and "the cleaving to 
 wealth and power." 
 
 Whatever the reader thinks about Jesus' 
 advice to the rich young man, mark the drift 
 of the conversation that follows close upon it 
 (Mark 10, 17-27). First he startles his dis- 
 ciples with an oriental exaggeration, and then 
 
$8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 he puts in the qualifications which link his 
 teaching closer to our modern view of the 
 matter. 
 
 " Looking round about, he saith unto his 
 disciples, How hardly shall they that have 
 riches enter into the kingdom of God ! And 
 the disciples were amazed at his words. But 
 Jesus answereth them, Children, how hard is 
 it for them that trust in riches to enter into 
 the kingdom of God ! It is easier for a camel 
 to go through the needle's eye than for a rich 
 man to enter into the kingdom of God. And 
 they were astonished exceedingly, saying unto 
 him, Then who can be saved ? " 
 
 Faith in an omnipotent power at once fur- 
 nishes the answer : 
 
 "With men it is impossible, but not with 
 God : for all things are possible with God." 
 
 The Italians have a saying, "He that is 
 afraid of the devil does not grow rich " ; while 
 the French put it in this way : " To grow rich 
 one needs but to turn his back on God." To 
 many literal people such sayings are stumbling- 
 
Pithy Sayings and Retorts 99 
 
 blocks. They must be taken as "truth on 
 the half-shell," else are they positively mis- 
 chievous. 
 
 Every teacher and leader of men who speaks 
 with brave sincerity about the abuses of 
 wealth, and other abuses on the part of those 
 having power and influence, has the devil 
 appear to him in the guise of friend or foe 
 warning against straight speech, lest it bring 
 loss of money, position, friendship, loss of 
 this, that, or the other personal advantage. 
 More than once, I doubt not, Jesus heard the 
 caution, " Look out, my young man ; you 
 will make yourself very unpopular. Believe 
 as you like. In private speak for yourself: 
 but in public speak for others." 
 
 The caution served, once at least, to call 
 from Jesus one of his most striking paradoxes, 
 promulgating a sentiment contrary to that in 
 general acceptance, but profoundly true never- 
 theless. They warn him against the danger 
 of unpopularity : he warns them against the 
 danger of popularity. " Woe unto you when 
 
IOO The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 all men shall speak well of you ! for in the 
 same manner did their fathers to the false 
 prophets." 
 
 In similar vein spoke the Chinese sage, 
 Confucius : " When the multitude hate a man, 
 it is necessary to examine into the case. 
 When the multitude like a man, it is neces- 
 sary to examine into the case." So also said 
 a Greek, something like this : " When I am 
 popular I am afraid of myself." 
 
 Did Jesus sometimes feel as did Carlyle 
 when he wrote to Emerson : " If the Devil 
 will be pleased to set all the popularities 
 against you, . . . perhaps that is of all things 
 the very kindest any Angel can do " ? 
 
 In these days of much shallow shouting of 
 " Vox populi, vox Dei" it might be salutary 
 for politicians to wear in public the above say- 
 ings, after the fashion of the ancient Jews who 
 used to go to worship with bands of scripture 
 on their person. 
 
 A Jewish proverb says, " If the people wish 
 to silence a man they must stop his mouth 
 
Pithy Sayings and Retorts IOI 
 
 with broth." But here was a man, a prophet 
 of Israel indeed, whose mouth could not be 
 stopped by broth, nor by fear of unpopularity, 
 nor by fear of losing life itself. Tempted by 
 the affectionate but timid Peter, his heroic 
 passion for truth and right gave vent to the 
 most astounding rebuke in history, and the 
 profoundest of all his paradoxes : " Get thee 
 behind me, Satan : thou art a stumbling-block 
 unto me : for thou mindest not the things of 
 God, but the things of men. . . . Whosoever 
 would save his life, shall lose it ; and who- 
 soever shall lose his life, for my sake and the 
 gospel's, shall save it. For what does it profit 
 a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his 
 soul ? or what should a man give in exchange 
 for his soul ? " " Be not afraid of those who 
 can kill the body, but are not able to kill the 
 soul: but rather fear Him that is able to 
 destroy both soul and body in hell." 
 
VI 
 Opposition and Quotation 
 
A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on 
 his invention when his memory serves him with a word 
 as good. . . . Genius borrows nobly. When Shake- 
 speare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor 
 replies : " Yet he was more original than his originals. 
 He breathed upon dead bodies, and brought them into 
 life." . . . Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good 
 thing, caught it up, meditated upon it, and very soon 
 reproduced it in his conversation and writing. If De 
 Quincey said, "That is what I told you," he replied, 
 "No: that is mine, mine, and not yours." On 
 the whole, we like the valor of it. ... It betrays 
 the consciousness that truth is the property of no indi- 
 vidual, but is the treasure of all men. Emerson. 
 
 People are always talking about originality, but what 
 do they mean ? As soon as we are born the world 
 begins to work upon us ; and this goes on to the 
 end. . . . If I could give an account of all that I 
 owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there 
 would be but a small balance in my favor. 
 
 Goethe. 
 (104) 
 
VI 
 
 Opposition and Quotation 
 
 "Have ye not read in your Bible ? " JESUS. 
 
 REPEATED reading of the gospel nar- 
 ratives has touched in me more and 
 more the dramatic sense. I follow the 
 fortunes of a hero whose swing is ever more 
 heroic as the scenes shift on under the 
 laws of growth, a spiritual hero ; speech tak- 
 ing form and color from meditation sad and 
 solitary, and from enlarging experience with 
 men and their ways. 
 
 Thus far we have not seen him on unfriendly 
 terms with the established and orthodox sects 
 of his day. For a while he was welcome to 
 speak in the synagogues, invited to social 
 
IO6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 gatherings at the houses of the Pharisees, 
 looked upon no doubt by the latter as a prom- 
 ising young man whom it would be very 
 desirable to keep within the fold. Like great 
 reformers in general, political or religious, it 
 was his hope at first to regenerate society at 
 large by working in unison with the old 
 organization. Gradually, however, irreconcil- 
 able differences are made manifest. 
 
 The instructions of "time and tide" force 
 him to look upon the leaders of the Pharisees, 
 and of the opposite party to them, the Sad- 
 ducees, as "blind guides," wily, and cunning 
 in resource. To meet them, how does he 
 equip himself ? Surely, not with the heavy 
 and juiceless learning of the Jewish schools ; 
 for this too often petrified the man after 
 the fashion of the average divinity school, 
 which Theodore Parker described in his sharp 
 sarcasm : " It used to take the Egyptians 
 seven years to make a mummy out of a dead 
 man ; but it only takes Harvard Divinity 
 School three years to make a mummy out of 
 
Opposition and Quotation IOJ 
 
 a live man." Happily the sarcasm has much 
 less point now respecting that particular insti- 
 tution. 
 
 Of foreign lore, Greek or Hindu, Jesus 
 seems to have known but little ; though some 
 floating fragments of the literatures and relig- 
 ions of other peoples, East and West, may 
 have lodged with him during all those years 
 concerning which the gospels are strangely 
 silent. Not from these sources then did his 
 equipment come ; but rather from self-reliant 
 reflection, swift intuition, and a goodly under- 
 standing of the Law and the Prophets which 
 his opponents expounded as authority in relig- 
 ion and morals. 
 
 An interesting phase of his wit and humor 
 in dealing with opposition lies in his use of 
 apt quotations from the Old Testament. 
 Sometimes these are applied to himself, 
 sometimes to the age in which he lives, 
 sometimes to certain classes of his country- 
 men. Thus, recognizing in the multitude 
 those afflicted with gross and willful blind- 
 
IO8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 ness, he represents them as fulfilling the 
 prophecy of Isaiah, 
 
 " By hearing ye shall hear, and shall in nowise under- 
 stand ; 
 
 And seeing ye shall see, and shall in no wise perceive. 
 For this people's heart is waxed gross, 
 And their eyes they have closed ; 
 Lest haply they should perceive with their eyes, 
 And hear with their ears, 
 And understand with their heart, 
 And should turn again, 
 And I should heal them." 
 
 The opponents of Jesus were very stren- 
 uous for the local and external elements of 
 their religion, while he valued the elements 
 universal and internal. They made great pre- 
 tensions to a knowledge of the Law of Moses, 
 and to a veneration for the word of the fathers. 
 For that reason, and because he was made 
 to feel their proud and underrating attitude 
 toward him, it need not seem strange to think 
 of his having a certain satisfaction in turning 
 
Opposition and Quotation IOC} 
 
 their own scripture against them. At any 
 rate, when they came with carping questions 
 and accusations, he had ready the acknowl- 
 edged Word. Not that the Word was 
 authority with him above the progressive 
 private soul, the original source of the Word, 
 but that they, at least in theory, had so made 
 it themselves. 
 
 Do they complain that he or his disciples 
 transgress the Law or some tradition of the 
 elders, straightway come from him citations 
 to show them the real offenders in much 
 weightier matters : " Did not Moses give you 
 the Law, and yet none of you doeth it ? " 
 
 To adjust it to the changing conditions and 
 tastes of the people, the original Mosaic Law 
 had been twisted by ingenious interpretation 
 of the scribes until it became in many respects 
 practically of no effect. Sometimes this was 
 for the better, sometimes for the worse. 
 Layer after layer of tradition accumulated, 
 prescribing one or another ceremonial trivial- 
 ity. On behalf of the tradition, Jesus was 
 
IIO TJie Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 peremptorily asked why his disciples ate bread 
 "with defiled hands," that is, without observ- 
 ing the elders' rites of purification before 
 meals. Jesus makes no defense, but becomes 
 the accuser himself : " Full well do ye reject 
 the commandment of God, that ye may keep 
 your tradition." [Some rabbi even declared, 
 "The words of the scribes are more noble 
 than the words of the Law."] "For Moses 
 said, Honor thy father and thy mother ; and 
 he that speaketh evil of father or mother, let 
 him die the death ; but ye say, If a man shall 
 say to his father or mother, That wherewith 
 thou might est have been profited by me is 
 Corbaii, that is to say, Given to God, ye no 
 longer suffer him to do aught for his father 
 or his mother [under pretext of helping the 
 church you deprive the parent of rightful 
 support], making void the word of God by 
 your tradition, which ye have delivered ; and 
 many such like things ye do." * 
 
 Touching the word Corban, Luther, with 
 
 * Matt. 15, 1-20 ; Mark 7, 5-23. 
 
Opposition and Quotation III 
 
 characteristic sarcasm, remarked, "As much 
 as to say, Dear father, I would willingly give 
 it [the offering] to thee, but it is Corban : I 
 count it better to give it to God than to thee, 
 and it will help thee better." 
 
 Having put his complainants in the above 
 undesirable light before the people, Jesus said 
 to them, "Hear me, all of you, and under- 
 stand : Not that which entereth into the 
 mouth defileth the man; but that which 
 proceedeth out of the mouth " ; because 
 "things which proceed out of the mouth 
 come out of the heart : evil thoughts, fornica- 
 tions, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, 
 wickednesses, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil 
 eye, railing, pride, foolishness ; all these evil 
 things proceed from within, and defile the 
 man." . . . "Well did Isaiah prophesy of 
 these hypocrites : 
 
 t This people honoreth me with their lips ; 
 Yet their heart is far from me ; 
 But in vain do they worship me, 
 Teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.' ' 
 
112 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Withdrawing to one side with his disciples, 
 he is told that the Pharisees were offended at 
 his saying. But he answers back : " Every 
 plant which my heavenly Father planted not 
 shall be rooted up. Let them alone : they 
 are blind guides, and if the blind guide the 
 blind, shall they not both fall into the 
 ditch ? " 
 
 On being repeatedly questioned in public 
 by his antagonists, Jesus saw fit, on one occa- 
 sion at least, to take the offensive. He did 
 so in the important matter of the long- 
 expected Messiah, as whom, in some quarters, 
 he had come to be regarded. Perhaps he 
 desired to supplant the general aristocratic 
 notion of the divinity of kings, and the 
 superiority of royal lineation, by the dem- 
 ocratic notion that the Messiah might spring 
 from the loins of the common people, and 
 not of necessity be a descendant of David, 
 as the Pharisees and scribes especially main- 
 tained. 
 
 Be that as it may, he asked them, " What 
 
Opposition and Quotation 7/J 
 
 think ye of the Christ ? Whose son is he ? " 
 Getting the anticipated reply, "The son of 
 David," he quotes against them the Psalms, 
 which all parties accepted as the veritable 
 utterances of that king. " How then doth 
 David in the spirit call him Lord, saying, 
 
 *" The Lord said unto my Lord, 
 Sit thou on my right hand, 
 Until I put thine enemies underneath thy feet ' ? 
 
 If David then calleth him Lord, how is he 
 his son ? " 
 
 Concerning the Mosaic Law touching the 
 matter of divorce, some of the rabbis had 
 interpreted it, after a very lax fashion, to the 
 disfavor of woman. Even the good Hillel 
 (preceding Jesus by only a few years) declared 
 it sufficient cause for divorce that the wife 
 had burned her husband's dinner, or perchance 
 had made it too salty the husband of course 
 being the judge. 
 
 Very loose indeed had public sentiment 
 become when the Pharisees undertook to trip 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 the Galilean on this question. " Is it lawful," 
 they ask, " for a man to put away his wife for 
 every cause ? " * And he makes answer by 
 referring to the Pentateuch : 
 
 "Have ye not read that He which made 
 them from the beginning made them male 
 and female, and said, For this cause shall a 
 man leave father and mother, and shall cleave 
 to his wife ; and the twain shall become one 
 flesh ? What therefore God hath joined to- 
 gether, let not man put asunder. " 
 
 To this the questioners not inaptly rejoin, 
 " Why then did Moses command to give a bill 
 of divorcement, and to put her away ? " They 
 seemed to have drawn him into an inconsist- 
 ency ; but he wisely and wittily turns the edge 
 of the second question with the reply : 
 
 " Moses for your hardness of heart suffered 
 you to put away your wives; but from the 
 beginning it hath not been so." In other 
 words, Moses, like every practical lawgiver, 
 was constrained to adjust his laws to the 
 * Matt 19, 3-8 ; Mark 10, 1-9. 
 
Opposition and Quotation 7/5 
 
 social conditions and moral development of 
 his people. Not his laxity, but the laxity of 
 the fathers, made the laxity of the Law. The 
 reply is in the vein of the response made by 
 Solon when questioned as to whether he had 
 given the best laws to the Athenians. He 
 wisely answered, " I have given them the best 
 they were able to bear." It was also in this 
 spirit of wise expediency that Lincoln wrote 
 to a friend, " Die when I may, I want it said 
 of me by those who know me best that I 
 always plucked a thistle and planted a flower 
 when I thought a flower would grow." 
 
 Somewhat embarrassing and nettling to his 
 adversaries is Jesus' way of turning on them 
 with the remark, " Have ye not read in your 
 Bible that ? " and so forth ; or, " Ye do err, 
 not knowing the scripture " ; sometimes add- 
 ing, "nor the power of God." Embarrassing 
 and nettling, because they especially plumed 
 themselves on being authority in these very 
 matters. When they show irritation at the 
 enthusiastic hosannas shouted in the temple 
 
lid The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 even by the children, he asks with somewhat 
 provoking serenity, " Did ye never read, Out 
 of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou 
 hast perfected praise ? " On being threatened 
 with stoning for the mystical saying, " I and the 
 Father are one," he coolly says, "Many good 
 works have I showed you from the Father ; 
 for which of those works do ye stone me ? " 
 And when they reply, " It is because, being a 
 man, he makes himself God," he asks again, 
 " Is it not written in your Law, I said ye are 
 gods ? " 
 
 How trenchant and deep plough the rejoin- 
 ders of Jesus concerning the observance of 
 the Sabbath ! On the charge being preferred 
 that his disciples profaned that day by pluck- 
 ing ears of corn, he instantly cuts off contro- 
 versy by simply reminding the complainants 
 that the accused did but follow a precedent 
 made by their most venerated king, and even 
 by the priests themselves. 
 
 " Have ye not read what David did when 
 he was hungered ? . . . how he entered into 
 
Opposition and Quotation IIJ 
 
 the house of God, and did eat the sacred shew- 
 bread, which it was not lawful for him to eat, 
 neither for them that were with him, but only 
 for the priests ? " Or, " Have ye not read, in 
 the Law, how on the Sabbath-day the priests 
 in the temple [by their sacrifices] profane the 
 Sabbath, and are guiltless ? " They complain 
 of his healing on the Sabbath, and he rejoins 
 that to keep the Law of Moses they inflict on 
 little children on the Sabbath the barbarous 
 rite of circumcision ; " and shall I not make 
 the sick every whit whole ? Judge not accord- 
 ing to appearance, but judge righteous judg- 
 ment." * 
 
 On one occasion, when ministering to a 
 woman, he indignantly asks the objectors, 
 "You hypocrites, does not each one of you 
 loose his ox or ass from the crib, and water 
 him, on the Sabbath-day ? And shall not this 
 daughter of Abraham be loosed [from her 
 infirmity] on the Sabbath-day ? " At another 
 time, the case being that of a man, he asks if 
 * Matt. 12, 1-6. 
 
II 8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 they had an ox or a sheep fall into a pit on 
 the Sabbath, whether they would not straight- 
 way draw him out ? Taking silence for con- 
 sent, the conclusion follows: "How much, 
 then, is a man of more value than a sheep ! " 
 Again he asks, " Is it lawful on the Sabbath- 
 day to do good, or to do harm ? to save life, 
 or destroy it ? " 
 
 Apropos of the above pertinent questions 
 of Jesus, there is an interesting passage in 
 the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which 
 book, in the Council of Nice, failed by a vote 
 or two to become sacred. Pilate, in taking 
 the testimony respecting the accusation made 
 against Jesus, asks certain witnesses, "Why 
 have the Jews a mind to kill Jesus ? " Being an- 
 swered, " They are angry because he wrought 
 cures on the Sabbath-day," Pilate sarcastically 
 retorts, "Will they kill him for a good 
 work?" 
 
 With what sharp logic the Galilean deals 
 with conventional objections, so as to bring 
 a universal principle of common sense and 
 
Opposition and Quotation 
 
 common humanity to govern in the use of 
 the Sabbath ! Talk of profaning the temple : 
 " One greater than the temple is here. But 
 if ye had known what this meaneth, * I desire 
 mercy, and not sacrifice/ ye would not have 
 condemned the guiltless. For the Son of 
 man is lord of the Sabbath/' Or, still 
 stronger, "The Sabbath was made for man, 
 and not man for the Sabbath/' 
 
 " Inspired common sense " is the mother 
 of such wit. 
 
VII 
 Miracles ; Practical Religion 
 
Men will not see that miracle is a perception of the 
 soul ; a vision of the Divine behind Nature ; a psy- 
 chical crisis, analogous to that of JEncas on the last 
 day of Troy, which reveals to us the heavenly powers 
 prompting and directing human action. Their passion 
 for the facts which are objective, isolated, and past, 
 prevents them from seeing the facts which are eternal 
 and spiritual. They can only adore what comes to 
 them from without. As soon as their dramaturgy is 
 interpreted symbolically all seems to them lost. They 
 must have their local prodigies their vanished un- 
 verifiable miracles, because for them the divine is there 
 and only there. AmieL 
 
 Let no man deceive you ; he that doeth righteous- 
 ness is righteous. In this the children of God are 
 manifest : whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of 
 God. He that loveth not % knoweth not God, for God 
 
 is love. John. 
 
 (122) 
 
VII 
 
 Miracles ; Practical Religion 
 
 "The desire to perform miracles arises either from 
 covetousness or from vanity" "What is more 
 wondrous, more mysterious, more miraculous than 
 Amitabba [that is, light or truth]?" 
 
 THE BUDDHA. 
 
 "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, delud- 
 ing your own selves. . . . Pure religion and 
 undejiled before our God and Father is this, to visit 
 the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to 
 keep one 9 s self unspotted from the world." 
 
 JAMES. 
 
 ONE of the most invincible obstacles to 
 the acceptance of Jesus by the people 
 was their craving for miracles. He had satis- 
 fied them very well in reference to healing 
 certain diseases, for the successful treatment 
 of which, it is quite believable, his transcend- 
 
124 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 ent spiritual nature eminently fitted him. But 
 they wanted further manifestation of power 
 for wonder-working. This gives significance 
 to the saying of Jesus, " Except ye see signs 
 and wonders, ye will in no wise believe " ; and 
 to Paul's independent and discriminative re- 
 mark, " Jews ask for a sign, and Greeks seek 
 after wisdom." 
 
 To teach spiritual truth, and demonstrate 
 it with a life to match, for the Jewish 
 multitude this was not sufficient. For the 
 multitude, is it ever sufficient ? The truth- 
 loving Buddha, vexed by this disposition, for- 
 bade his disciples to cater to it, and applied 
 the term " miracle-mongers " to those who did. 
 The enemies of Jesus did not fail to take 
 advantage of it and press him in several ways 
 to prove his Messianic mission by such 
 material evidence. Once he puts them off 
 with the pregnant utterance, "The kingdom 
 of God cometh not with observation ; neither 
 shall they say, Lo here ! or, Lo there ! for lo, 
 the kingdom of God is within you." 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion 
 
 Disappointed in getting an answer not good 
 for campaign purposes, they come at him, 
 another time, with a more specific request. 
 They ask him to show them a sign from 
 heaven, and he turns on them sharply : 
 
 " When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair 
 weather, for the sky is red. And in the 
 morning, It will be foul weather to-day, for 
 the sky is red and lowering. Ye know how 
 to discern the face of the sky ; but ye cannot 
 discern the signs of the time. An evil and 
 adulterous generation seeketh after a sign/' * 
 
 I like the form in which this reply is given 
 in Luke 12, 54-57. It may have been spoken 
 thus differently on different occasions : 
 
 " When ye see a cloud rising in the west, 
 straightway ye say, There cometh a shower ; 
 and so it cometh to pass. And when ye see 
 a south wind blowing, ye say, There will be a 
 scorching heat ; and it cometh to pass. Ye 
 hypocrites, ye know how to interpret the face 
 of the earth and the heavens ; but how is it 
 * Matt. 1 6, 1-4. 
 
126 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 that ye know not how to interpret this time 
 [the spiritual signs of this age] ? Why even 
 of yourselves judge ye not what is right ? " 
 
 In the last chapter we saw how Jesus met 
 the opposition of the Pharisees to his healing 
 on the Sabbath-day. Now, this opposition 
 sprang not more out of their stricter Sab- 
 batarian views than out of envy of his greater 
 success in the exercise of a power they them- 
 selves claimed. That Pilate probably believed 
 this, one may infer, especially from the book 
 before mentioned, the Gospel of Nicodemus. 
 Therein it is related that the enemies of the 
 Nazarene admitted that he cast out devils, 
 and that this called from the Roman the 
 sneer, "Why are not the devils subject to 
 your doctors ? " Their attitude, and also the 
 attitude of some among the disciples, was like 
 that of certain healers of the present day 
 toward other healers not working under their 
 name, an attitude, surely, not in the spirit 
 of the master. When complaint was made 
 to him that somebody outside the fold was 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion I2J 
 
 casting out devils in his name, he simply 
 replied, " Forbid him not ; for there is no man 
 who shall do a mighty work in my name, and 
 be able quickly to speak evil of me. He that 
 is not against us is for us." 
 
 How much better it had been for the Phar- 
 isees if they had spoken as wisely of Jesus. 
 But no, they made the foolish and unfortunate 
 charge, "This man doth not cast out devils 
 except by Beelzebub, the prince of devils/' 
 Unfortunate, indeed; for, with the most 
 nimble wit, the young preacher forges out 
 of their own logic the following unerring 
 boomerang : 
 
 "Every kingdom divided against itself is 
 brought to desolation ; and a house divided 
 against itself shall not stand. If Satan cast- 
 eth out Satan, he is divided against himself ; 
 how then shall his kingdom stand ? And if 
 by Beelzebub I cast out devils, by whom do 
 your sons cast them out ? therefore shall they 
 be your judges. But if I by the Spirit of 
 God cast out devils, then is the kingdom of 
 
128 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 God come upon you. Or how can one enter 
 into the house of the strong man, and spoil 
 his goods, except he first bind the strong 
 man ? and then he will spoil his house. He 
 that is not with me is against me; and he 
 that gathereth not with me scattereth." 
 
 It was Lincoln's application of the words 
 " A house divided against itself shall not 
 stand " that had more to do with making him 
 President of these United States than any 
 other utterance of his life. They supplanted 
 Seward's "irrepressible conflict," good as it 
 was. Lincoln read his Bible and Shake- 
 speare, and they determined his style beyond 
 all other books. It were well for oratory and 
 wit if more of our public men imitated him in 
 this respect. It is deplorable, the ignorance 
 of this generation respecting the Bible, even 
 as literature. 
 
 In Jesus' crushing reply as given above, he 
 does not stop ; he follows it up with a charge 
 of blasphemy "against the Holy Spirit/' in 
 that they have, through sheer envy, ascribed 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion 
 
 what they admit to be good works to the 
 Devil himself. That sin "shall not be for- 
 given, neither in this world, nor the world to 
 come." Be consistent ; " either make the 
 tree good, and its fruit good, or make the 
 tree corrupt, and its fruit corrupt ; for the 
 tree is known by its fruit. Ye offspring of 
 vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good 
 things ? for out of the abundance of the 
 heart the mouth speaketh. The good man 
 out of his treasure bringeth forth good 
 things; and the evil man out of his evil 
 treasure bringeth forth evil things. ... By 
 thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy 
 words thou shalt be condemned." * 
 
 The chief priests and elders were all the 
 more envious of the growing influence of the 
 teacher from Galilee because he held no com- 
 mission from any divinity school or ecclesias- 
 tical body. On one occasion, likely with an 
 overbearing and impertinent manner, they 
 accosted him, " By what authority doest thou 
 
 * Matt. 12, 25-37; Luke 11, 14-24. 
 
fJO The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 these things ? " Jesus must have thought, 
 " You assumed depositaries of truth ! what 
 right have you to catechise me as though a 
 prisoner up for judgment ? " They touch in 
 him the just pride of self-respect, and spring 
 the spring of wit which catches them in a 
 trap: 
 
 " I will ask of you one question, which if 
 you answer, I will tell you by what authority 
 I do these things : The baptism of John, 
 whence was it ? from heaven or from men ? 
 answer me/' 
 
 "And they reasoned with themselves'' [so 
 runs the account], "If we shall say, From 
 heaven, he will say, Why then did ye not 
 believe him ? But if we say, From men, we 
 fear the multitude" [or, in Luke, "all the 
 people will stone us "] : " for all hold John as 
 a prophet." The only refuge left them was 
 the confession of ignorance: "We know 
 not," which in their case was especially 
 humiliating. * 
 
 * Matt. 21. 23-28; Mark u, 27-33; Luke 20, 1-8. 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion 7J7 
 
 It is a most commanding aspect of the 
 genius of the Galilean prophet that, in coping 
 with captious questioners, he used his victori- 
 ous wit so as to inculcate supreme ethical and 
 spiritual truth. A wonderful example of this 
 is that parable of the Good Samaritan, 
 strangely enough reported only in Luke. We 
 can hardly fail to taste the flavor of fine 
 satire in the telling form of the contrast 
 drawn between his own sentiment of universal 
 brotherhood and the provincial, sectarian sen- 
 timent dominating the Jewish Church and 
 State. The lawyer appears on the scene 
 probably not so much for earnest truth-seek- 
 ing as to entangle the teacher and justify his 
 own religious affiliation. 
 
 Under these conditions he himself is made 
 to answer the question, " What shall I do to 
 inherit eternal life ? " " You are a lawyer : 
 how readest thou ? " Then follows the cita- 
 tion from Deuteronomy and Leviticus (pos- 
 sibly repeated by Jesus), "Thou shalt love 
 the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
 
132 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, 
 and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as 
 thyself ! " 
 
 The serene dignity with which are pro- 
 nounced the words, " This do and thou shalt 
 live," wounds the self-love of the lawyer. 
 Hoping to appear to better advantage before 
 his fellows, he pushes his questioning further. 
 " Who is my neighbor ? " 
 
 Then, as if an inspiration, like the gush- 
 ing forth of a fresh spring of water, comes 
 the parable : " A certain man, a Jew, was 
 going down from Jerusalem to Jericho ; and 
 he fell among robbers, who both stripped him 
 and beat him, and departed, leaving him half 
 dead. And by chance a certain priest was 
 going that way ; and when he saw him, he 
 passed by on the other side." [The priest, 
 on whom was specially laid the obligation to 
 minister unto the suffering, would not tarry 
 even to save the life of a fellow-countryman, 
 if he happened not to be of his fold in relig- 
 ion. Here, under cover of a fictitious individ- 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion IJJ 
 
 ual, censure is aimed at a class. In this vein 
 Jesus proceeds.] " In like manner a Levite 
 also, when he came to the place and saw the 
 wounded man, passed by on the other side." 
 [The Levite stood next to the priest, con- 
 secrated by the supposed Law of Moses to 
 services in God's temple. And now follows 
 the climax of this satire, in its implied con- 
 demnation of the hard and exclusive attitude 
 of the lawyer's sect. Hated and despised as 
 the Samaritans were, the master yet selects 
 one of them, a common layman at that, to 
 embody the true spirit of religion the spirit 
 opposite to that evinced by the Jewish priest 
 and the Levite.] " But a certain Samaritan, 
 as he journeyed that way, came where he was, 
 and when he saw him, he was moved with 
 compassion." [What deeps of divine-human 
 love lie in this favorite phrase of the Christ- 
 man !] " He was moved with compassion, 
 and came to him, and bound up his wounds, 
 pouring on them oil and wine ; and he set him 
 on his beast, and brought him to an inn, and 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 took care of him. And on the morrow he 
 took out two pence, and gave them to the 
 host, and said, Take care of him, and what- 
 soever thou spendest more, I will, when I 
 come again, repay thee. Which of these 
 three, thinkest thou, proved neighbor to him 
 that fell among the robbers ? " 
 
 The only answer admissible condemns the 
 Jewish scribe and his sect. But how can the 
 lawyer speak the detestable word, Samaritan ? 
 He cannot. Like Macbeth's " amen," it sticks 
 in his throat. He is driven, however, to say 
 the equivalent thing, in the reply, " He that 
 shewed mercy on him." To one afflicted with 
 pride and self-righteousness his dismissal had 
 no relish in it "Go, and do thou like- 
 wise. " * 
 
 In this connection may be placed the so- 
 called parable of the Last Judgment, in the 
 sense that it expounds by humorous contrast 
 the same fundamental truth that brotherly 
 service is of the essence of real religion, and 
 
 * Luke 10, 25-37. 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion 135 
 
 the pass-key to the heavenly city. The 
 strokes of original genius lie in this vivid 
 picture of the two opposite sorts of people 
 brought to judgment before the king of right- 
 eousness, the professing people and the 
 doing people ; those who live to be ministered 
 unto, and those who live to minister. The 
 king says "unto them on his right hand, 
 Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the 
 kingdom prepared for you from the foundation 
 of the world : for I was hungry, and ye gave 
 me meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me 
 drink ; I was a stranger, and ye took me in ; 
 naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and 
 ye visited me ; I was in prison, and ye came 
 unto me. Then shall the righteous answer, 
 saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and 
 fed thee? or athirst, and gave thee drink? 
 And when saw we thee a stranger, and took 
 thee in ? or naked, and clothed thee ? And 
 when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came 
 unto thee ? And the king shall answer, and 
 say unto them, Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch 
 
fj6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 as ye did it unto one of these, my brethren, 
 even these least, ye did it unto me/' 
 
 Then follow the antithetical verses, which 
 much enhance the impressiveness of the 
 thought : Ye on the left, depart from me 
 accursed: "for I was hungry, and ye gave 
 me no meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me 
 no drink ; I was a stranger, and ye took me 
 not in ; naked, and ye clothed me not ; sick, 
 and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then 
 shall they also answer, saying, Lord, when 
 saw we thee hungry, or athirst, or a stranger, 
 or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not 
 minister unto thee ? Then shall he answer 
 them, saying, Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch 
 as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye 
 did it not unto me." * 
 
 In admitting this parable among his illus- 
 trations, has the writer hereof furnished oppor- 
 tunity for some Sir-Oracle on Biblical author- 
 ship to smile the smile of pity or contempt ? 
 " What ! does the man not know that I have 
 * Matt. 25, 33-45. 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion 
 
 tried and sentenced these passages to be not 
 the utterances of Jesus any more forever ? " 
 Yes, the man does know ; and yet the impres- 
 sion obstinately abides with him that it is 
 possible Sir-Oracle, in this case, has made a 
 mistake. Possible it is that a too literal inter- 
 pretation of this picturesque parable has caused 
 not alone the theological commentators of the 
 old school to stumble, but some of the " higher 
 critics" of the new school. The latter, as 
 well as the former, can be literalists and " blind 
 guides." We may write Spurious across the 
 after-the-fact prophecies in the twenty-fourth 
 chapter of Matthew; and Spurious across 
 some portions of the twenty-fifth. We may 
 also say of the parable in question, Perhaps 
 it was somewhat tampered with to give expres- 
 sion to a certain feeling of intolerance man- 
 ifested in the early Christian Church. But 
 the unique enforcement it makes of the 
 Nazarene's dominant idea of salvation by 
 service, in the sharp distinction (true to-day 
 as ever) which it draws between the self- 
 
Ij8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 seeking goat-element in society and the others- 
 seeking sheep-element this unique contrast 
 shall have place here as the probable, legitimate 
 child of Jesus' imaginative humor. 
 
 To pass upon this parable as a specific 
 statement of theological belief is as irrational 
 as it will be for one who shall live a thousand 
 or more years hence to interpret after the 
 same literal fashion certain parables of the 
 present age. Take, for instance, our current 
 Saint-Peter-at-the-gate parables, in which the 
 two types of people, the professional pietist 
 and dogmatist and the unpretentious doer of 
 practical righteousness, are set over against 
 one another. Both knock at the gate of the 
 heavenly city. Saint Peter asks for their 
 credentials, the result being, as good sense 
 dictates, that the gate is always shut against 
 the former class, and opened with due alacrity 
 for the latter. What modern preacher or 
 platform-speaker soever has thought of using 
 these parables as belonging to other than the 
 category of figurative humor ? And is it so very 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion 
 
 unlikely that the greatest among preachers 
 used in similar manner this so-called parable 
 of the Last Judgment ? used it in some 
 sermon on practical religion, directed against 
 those who profess much and do little ? Its 
 vitalizing thought, namely, that ministration 
 unto the suffering sons of men, even unto 
 the least of them, is ministration to God 
 and the sign and seal of the discipleship 
 of Jesus this thought has inspired many 
 fine lines from the poets, both humorous and 
 pathetic. 
 
 Looked at more from the view-point of 
 humor, and less from that of theology, may 
 not several of the parables cast into the cat- 
 egory of the probably spurious be brought back 
 into that of the probably genuine ? Even the 
 parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus may be 
 one of these. Under its cover we can think 
 of Jesus reproaching a certain class among the 
 aristocratic and wealthy, most likely the 
 Sadducees, who were conspicuous for their 
 selfish luxury, their proud contempt for the 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 common people, and their general skepti- 
 cism. 
 
 At the latter temper of mind is the conclu- 
 sion aimed. When the rich man tells Abraham 
 that his five brothers will repent if only some 
 one should be allowed to go to them from the 
 dead, the reply is, " If they hear not Moses 
 and the prophets, neither will they be per- 
 suaded though one rise from the dead/' 
 
 True conversion must be inward, by the 
 grace of truth itself, not outward, by the 
 miraculous by visitation of ghosts, or other- 
 wise. 
 
 The parable of the two men building their 
 houses, the one on rock, the other on sand, 
 furnishes, along with the sheep-and-goat par- 
 able, another positive distinction between 
 those who practise and those who do not 
 practise the truths they hear and pretend to 
 believe. This parable, and the remarks lead- 
 ing up to it, have also elements of serious 
 humor. 
 
 " Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, 
 
Miracles ; Practical Religion 
 
 Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; 
 but he that doeth the will of my Father which 
 is in heaven." The speaker then describes 
 the people of creed rather than deed, who 
 join the procession after the kingdom gets 
 well under headway, and take great credit to 
 themselves for professing the faith. " Lord, 
 Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and 
 by thy name cast out devils, and by thy name 
 do many mighty works ? And then will I 
 profess unto them, I never knew you : depart 
 from me, ye that work iniquity. Every one 
 therefore who heareth these words of mine, 
 and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise 
 man, who built his house upon the rock ; and 
 the rains descended, and the floods came, and 
 the winds blew, and beat upon that house; 
 aud it fell not, for it was founded upon the 
 rock. And every one who heareth these 
 words of mine, and doeth them not, shall be 
 likened unto a foolish man, who built his 
 house upon the sand ; and the rain descended, 
 and the floods came, and the winds blew, and 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 smote upon that house ; and it fell : and great 
 was the fall thereof." Whatever the appear- 
 ances to the contrary, you are playing the part 
 of this foolish man, if you are building on any 
 other basis than the marriage of religion 
 to life. 
 
 Some Persian king, I think it was, in these 
 words emphasized religion as the basis of 
 good government : " Every building which 
 possesseth not a sound foundation is quickly 
 overthrown, and every house which possesseth 
 no keeper is speedily despoiled." 
 
VIII 
 Vanquished Craft 
 
He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that 
 their hands cannot perform their enterprise. He taketh 
 the wise in their own craftiness, and the counsel of 
 the fro ward is carried headlong. Job. 
 
 He is the Answerer, 
 
 What can be answer 'd he answers, and what cannot 
 be answer 'd he shows how it cannot be answer 'd. 
 
 A man is a summons and challenge, 
 
 (It is vain to skulk do you hear that mocking and 
 laughter ? do you hear the ironical echoes ?) 
 
 Books, friendships, philosophers, priests, action, pleas- 
 ure, pride, beat up and down seeking to give 
 satisfaction, 
 
 He indicates the satisfaction, and indicates them that 
 beat up and down also. Walt Whitman. 
 
 He that can answer a question so as to admit of no 
 further answer is the best man. Emerson. 
 
 (M4) 
 
VIII 
 
 Vanquished Craft 
 
 "The chief priests and the scribes sought how they 
 might take him by craft." MARK. 
 
 "No man after that durst ask him any question." 
 
 MARK. 
 
 IT became more and more evident that the 
 standard of truth and life set up by Jesus 
 was irreconcilable with the standard main- 
 tained by the more influential and conserv- 
 ative in religion, and in politics also. They 
 recognized in the young Galilean preacher a 
 personal force dangerous to their supposed 
 interests. His enemies multiplied, not merely 
 because of his religious protestation, but 
 partly because there was in his teachings a 
 spirit of protest also against certain unjust 
 
1^.6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 economic and social relations existing among 
 his countrymen. 
 
 Completer records, I doubt not, would 
 make this more apparent. To the aristocratic 
 and favored classes he became no less obnox- 
 ious than were Garrison, Sumner and other 
 brave leaders of the Abolition movement to 
 the American Slavocracy of the South. To 
 them he bore the front of a radical of the 
 radicals, which indeed he was a front not 
 at all pleasant to those in league with special 
 privileges and " organized hypocrisy " in 
 Church and State. To paraphrase another's 
 saying, Well might they beware when God 
 let loose this thinker on the planet. He was 
 not mortgaged to the powerful and wealthy 
 by any fear of losing position and salary, or 
 by any craving for worldly advancement. 
 Quite another mission was his than deliver- 
 ing dilettante essays on sin and virtue in the 
 abstract. He made preaching a personal 
 matter to the hearer ; he convicted not only 
 man in general, but some men in particular, 
 
Vanquished Craft 
 
 and not more a past, dead generation than his 
 own present, living generation. Right specif- 
 ically he sometimes said to the worker of 
 iniquity, as the prophet Nathan said to King 
 David, "Thou art the man." 
 
 As the "irrepressible conflict " grew more 
 irrepressible, the enemies of the divine Com- 
 moner sought in more deliberate ways to 
 entrap him into disfavor with the people. 
 Instances of the swift and matchless play of 
 his wit to extricate himself and turn the tables 
 against the enemy probably occurred which 
 have not gotten into the record. Sadducees, 
 Herodians, scribes and Pharisees, all have 
 their unsuccessful bouts with him. 
 
 One of the puzzles which the materialistic, 
 sneering Sadducees gave him for solution was 
 the hypothetical case of a widow surviving the 
 death of seven husbands, all of whom were 
 brothers. Although themselves not believing 
 in the future life, they ask Jesus the question, 
 "In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife 
 shall she be of the seven ? for they all had 
 
1^8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 her." They hoped, I suppose, to get from 
 him an answer as clumsy as that made to this 
 same question by some of the Pharisees : the 
 latter had maintained that she would be the 
 wife of the first husband. Not so. He sim- 
 ply turned the scripture against their unbelief, 
 and taught a more spiritual conception than 
 theirs of love and the future life; one like 
 unto what Plato or Emerson, under similar 
 circumstances, might have taught. "Ye do 
 err, not knowing the scripture, nor the power 
 of God. The sons of this world marry and 
 are given in marriage; but they that are 
 accounted worthy to attain to that world, and 
 the resurrection from the dead, neither marry 
 nor are given in marriage : for they are as 
 angels in heaven." Then he asks these 
 materialists if they have not read in their 
 own scripture, " that which was spoken unto 
 you by God, saying, I am the God of 
 Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the 
 God of Jacob ? Now, he is not the God of 
 the dead, but of the living." * 
 
 * Matt. 22, 27-33; Luke 20 27-38. 
 
Vanquished Craft 
 
 To their credit, the Pharisees were more 
 patriotic and earnest than the Sadducees ; but 
 they were also more positive and crafty in 
 their opposition to the Galilean reformer. In 
 order to put him in bad odor either with the 
 Romans, or with his own countrymen, they 
 connived (according to Matthew and Mark) 
 even with their hated enemies, the Herodians. 
 Joining forces with the latter they sought 
 Jesus out, and, with insulting flattery, opened 
 on him in this fashion : " Master, we know 
 that thou art true, and carest not for any one : 
 for thou regardest not the person of man, but 
 of a truth teachest the way to God. Tell us, 
 therefore, is it lawful to give tribute unto 
 Caesar, or not? Shall we give or shall we 
 not give ? " 
 
 A most cunningly framed question this : 
 for it demanded an answer which, if it should 
 be Yes, would deeply offend the national 
 prejudices of his people, and so destroy the 
 influence he had gained with them as a 
 prophet ; and if it should be No, would place 
 
I$O The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 him in great danger of apprehension by the 
 Roman government for political treason. We 
 have it from Luke that he was actually accused 
 before Pilate of " forbidding to give tribute to 
 Caesar." At any rate, the previous experience 
 of Jesus with this sort of craftiness had pre- 
 pared him to apply to these oily pretenders 
 the severe epithet they fully merited. 
 
 Some friend of Lincoln has recorded that 
 he never saw him look positively handsome 
 but once, and that was when he was angry, 
 righteously angry. I fancy a flush of divine 
 indignation glorifying the face of Jesus as he 
 exclaims, " Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites ? 
 Bring me the tribute -money. Whose is this 
 image and superscription ? " 
 
 " Caesar's." 
 
 Momentarily, perhaps, scorn flashes in his 
 eye, as the words burst forth with radical 
 stress, "Render, therefore, unto Caesar the 
 things that are Caesar's " ; then rising above 
 scorn to a sublime consciousness of the 
 debtor relation of all men to one Father, 
 
Vanquished Craft 151 
 
 he adds, "and unto God the things that 
 are God's." 
 
 The reply must have struck upon the 
 enemy's ear like the unexpected discharge of 
 a gun. It pierced the heart of the matter, 
 a grand triumph of intellectual adroitness and 
 spiritual insight over worldly outsight and 
 cunning. 
 
 But of all the victories of Jesus over those 
 who endeavored to ensnare him, none are 
 quite so dramatic and impressive as the 
 victory recorded in the first eleven verses of 
 the eighth chapter of "John." Touching the 
 sin of the adulterous woman, the Roman law 
 was more lenient, and more in general favor 
 with the Jews themselves, than the Mosaic. 
 In application the rabbis had modified the 
 rigor of the latter, and the teachings of Jesus 
 were distinctly of a milder cast. When, there- 
 fore, the Pharisees and scribes reminded him 
 that the law of Moses required an adulteress 
 to be stoned to death, and put the question, 
 "What, then, sayest thou of her?" the 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 intent was again to hedge him in a double 
 dilemma. They hoped, as in springing the 
 question of the tribute-money, that he would 
 side either for the Mosaic law or the Roman 
 law, or else that he would raise an issue 
 between the strict constructionists of the 
 Mosaic law and the lax constructionists. 
 Pronouncing for the strict constructionists he 
 would go counter to rabbis of high authority, 
 and to the inclinations of the people as a 
 whole. Moreover, he would be charged with 
 contradicting himself as the teacher of a more 
 humane doctrine. On the other hand, pro- 
 nouncing for the lax constructionists, he would 
 offend what may be called the Puritan element 
 among the Jews. The charge then would be, 
 " Thou hast gone against scripture, and against 
 Moses himself." In case, however, he avoided 
 these issues, there yet remained the expecta- 
 tion that he would lay down, on his own 
 authority, a new rule of practice, and so appear 
 to be setting himself above the Roman law, 
 the Mosaic law, and the rulings of the rabbis. 
 
Vanquished Craft /5J 
 
 Surely, they thought, he must answer so as 
 to bring himself into disrepute with some 
 important class of his countrymen. 
 
 In such a complicated dilemma as this, is 
 it not quite supposable that even the swift 
 intellect of Jesus required a moment or so to 
 consider how to deal with his crafty enemies ? 
 He stooped down, and drew marks on the 
 earth, while he framed a reply the wisest, 
 wittiest, kindest possible to the situation. 
 
 Right marvelous encounter this, between 
 the sons of darkness and the son of light ! 
 Around about stand the people, wondering 
 what he will say. Within the circle, some- 
 what nearer the master, wait his disciples in 
 breathless anxiety, both hopeful and fearful 
 of the result. In the center stands the 
 woman, frightened and trembling, scarlet- 
 faced in her shame, guilty of the charge 
 against her, no doubt as to that. Close upon 
 Jesus, eyes involuntarily gleaming hatred, 
 faces advertising exultant expectation of vic- 
 tory this time, close upon him, in his sup- 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 posed confusion, his adversaries press their 
 cunning question, " What sayest thou ? " 
 
 They have full opportunity to be secretly 
 exultant. Then slowly he raises himself, 
 and, with all commanding gravity, and in- 
 sight into the infirmity of man in gen- 
 eral, perhaps of these men in particular, 
 he answers, "He that is without sin among 
 you, let him first cast a stone at her" 
 
 To one of highly sympathetic imagination 
 it is painful to see even an enemy put to con- 
 fusion by a stinging retort, though that enemy 
 has justly merited it by some malicious ques- 
 tion of his own. The sensitive, responsive 
 Jesus feels the pain of the questioners him- 
 self. No resentful exultation detracts from 
 the glory of his victory. Magnanimously he 
 spares them further embarrassment : stooping 
 again he marks on the ground while they have 
 time to slink away. 
 
 Were they dressed in ecclesiastical robes 
 these self-righteous dignitaries ? Then the 
 more chagrined, as slowly and sneakingly they 
 
Vanquished Craft 755 
 
 move out before the staring (some grinning) 
 witnesses to their defeat. 
 
 The accusers themselves convicted by an 
 answer implying a truth universal and immor- 
 tal, how now shall he deal with the accused ? 
 Shall he mete out harsh censure to this guilty, 
 trembling woman ? or shall he excuse her 
 crime ? Verily, neither. Magnanimous again, 
 Jesus condemns not ; but with a bearing 
 toward her in tone of voice, in words full of 
 sad and gracious rebuke, the most effectual to 
 insure reform, he gravely charges her, "Go 
 thy way: from henceforth sin no more." 
 
 It is no special wonder that, to the ascetic 
 temper prevailing at one time in the Christian 
 communities, this anecdote cast reflection on 
 the master of religion and morals. It seemed 
 to encourage a view too lax respecting a sin 
 which, in the Eastern Church at least, made 
 a member who was guilty of it amenable to 
 severe discipline. Hence, it is thought, the 
 story was excluded by the authors of the 
 earlier, or synoptic, gospels. Hence, also, it 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 may be, its rejection by a considerable number 
 of Biblical scholars. Whether originally 
 included even in the book of "John " or not, 
 I unhesitatingly accept it as an actual fact in 
 the life of the same capacious and compas- 
 sionate soul who said in the house of Simon 
 to the repentant Magdalen at his feet : " Thy 
 sins, which are many, are forgiven thee." 
 Subjectively considered, no account of the 
 Nazarene's trials of wit bears any more gen- 
 uine stamp than this story of the adulterous 
 woman. Sublime demonstration of his ele- 
 vated mind and character, to me it is true to 
 the core of it. You son of " sweetness and 
 light," what power was yours of invincible wit 
 to baffle the wiles of wily men ! How fit- 
 tingly, on occasions many, might you have 
 flung at the enemy these lines of a Greek 
 tragedy : 
 
 " O shameless one all daring, weaving still 
 Some crafty scheme from every righteous word, 
 Why triest thou again ? " 
 
IX 
 
 Hypocrisy and Self-Righteousness 
 
Jesus addresses himself always to the delicacy of the 
 moral sentiment. . . . His exquisite irony, his arch 
 provocations, always struck to the heart. Eternal 
 darts, they remain fixed in the wound. The Nessus- 
 shirt of ridicule was woven by Jesus with divine art. 
 Masterpieces of lofty raillery, his traits are written in 
 lines of fire upon the flesh of the hypocrite and the 
 pretended devotee. Incomparable traits, traits worthy 
 of a Son of God ! Thus, a God alone can kill. 
 Socrates and Moliere but graze the skin. He carries 
 fire and madness into the marrow of the bones. 
 
 Renan. 
 
 Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks 
 Invisible, except to God alone, 
 By his permissive will, through heav'n and earth. 
 
 Milton. 
 
 Two went to pray ? Oh ! rather say, 
 One went to brag, the other to pray. 
 
 One stands up close, and treads on high, 
 Where the other dares not lend his eye. 
 
 One nearer to God's altar trod ; 
 The other to the altar's God. 
 
 Richard Crash aw. 
 (158) 
 
IX 
 
 Hypocrisy and Self-Righteousness 
 ^ 
 
 "/ know not seems." HAMLET. 
 
 "As the religious sentiment is the most real and 
 earnest thing in nature, . , . the vitiating this 
 is the greatest lie. Therefore, the oldest gibe in 
 literature is the ridicule of false religion" 
 
 EMERSON. 
 
 T^HE wise teachers of the race have ever 
 * extolled sincerity as a central jewel in the 
 crown of virtue. It so lies at the root of true 
 manhood and the power of ministration unto 
 men that Confucius declared it to be "the 
 beginning and end of things." "The way 
 of heaven and earth is without any double- 
 ness." 
 
 Sincerity being held in such high esteem, 
 
l6o The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 no other type of sinner has been more satirized 
 and ridiculed than the hypocrite. Of his 
 special vice, Montaigne, frankest of skeptics, 
 has remarked, " I find none that does evidence 
 so much of baseness and meanness of spirit." 
 So mean that Hugo has said, " Its odiousness 
 is obscurely felt by the hypocrite himself." 
 " The elements of his body will laugh within 
 him/' declares an ancient Hindu. How mer- 
 cilessly Rabelais, Voltaire and Hugo, Carlyle, 
 Thackeray and Dickens have painted him as 
 an object of reprobation ! What a searching 
 dissection is the painting of the character of 
 Judge Pyncheon, in the " House of the Seven 
 Gables"; of Captain Clubin, in the "Toilers 
 of the Sea"; still better, of the oily Peck- 
 sniff, in " Martin Chuzzlewit " ! A right true 
 friend of the sincerities is the ironical picture 
 of this Pecksniff riding on a cold day, with his 
 warm wraps about him, thanking God that he 
 was better off than other men. "A very 
 beautiful arrangement, to feel in keen weather 
 that many other people are not as warm as 
 
Hypocrisy and Self -Righteousness 161 
 
 you are. For if every one were warm and 
 well fed, we should lose the satisfaction of 
 admiring the fortitude with which certain con- 
 ditions of men bear cold and hunger. And 
 if we were no better off than anybody else, 
 what would become of our sense of gratitude ? 
 which, says Mr. Pecksniff, with tears in his 
 eyes, as he shook his fist at a beggar who 
 wanted to get up behind, is one of the holiest 
 feelings of our common nature." 
 
 " Hypocritical piety is double iniquity," as 
 the proverb says. It dupes the multitude, 
 and masks a moral leprosy contaminating the 
 individual's whole nature. Therefore the gen- 
 erous lovers of men do generously hate cant 
 and hypocrisy. Jesus hated them also. No 
 other form of vice aroused in him such aver- 
 sion. The detection of its existence among 
 the more influential classes drew from his 
 intellectual quiver his sharpest arrows. 
 
 The hypocrite not unfrequently pretends to 
 the greater virtue by his severer censure of 
 the frailties of others. Against such Jesus 
 
162 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 warned his disciples, saying, "Judge not, lest 
 ye be judged. For with what judgment ye 
 judge ye shall be judged ; and with what 
 measure ye mete it shall be measured unto 
 you. And why beholdest thou the mote that 
 is in thy brother's eye, and considerest not 
 the beam that is in thine own eye ? Or how 
 wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast the 
 mote out of thine eye ; and lo, the beam is in 
 thine own eye ? Thou hypocrite ! first cast 
 the beam out of thine own eye; and then 
 shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of 
 thy brother's eye." 
 
 Now comes a shaft for spectacular piety 
 and charity. "Take heed that ye do not 
 your righteousness before men, to be seen of 
 them; else you have no reward of your 
 Father. When, therefore, thou doest alms, 
 sound not a trumpet before thee, as the 
 hypocrites do in the synagogue and in the 
 street, that they may have glory of men. 
 Verily I say unto you, they have received 
 their reward. But when thou doest alms, let 
 
Hypocrisy and Self-Righteousness l6j 
 
 not thy left hand know what thy right hand 
 doeth." * 
 
 Let us rejoice at the progress of the latter 
 days. We have finer agencies now than 
 synagogue and street for publishing our char- 
 ities. We have only to whisper them to the 
 reporter, and the newspaper takes them into 
 every home. So solemnly we read on Sun- 
 day, " Let not thy left hand know what thy 
 right hand doeth " ; so eagerly we print on 
 Monday what both hands do ! 
 
 "Moreover," continues Jesus, "when ye 
 fast, be not as the hypocrites, of a sad coun- 
 tenance ; for they disfigure their faces [assume 
 a dismal expression], that they may be seen 
 of men to fast." . . . "And when ye pray [or 
 worship], ye shall not be as the hypocrites ; 
 for they love to stand and pray in the syn- 
 agogues, and in the corners of the street, that 
 they may be seen of men. But thou, when 
 thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, 
 and, having shut the door, pray to thy Father 
 * Matt. 7, 1-5 ; Luke 6, 37-42. 
 
164 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 who is in secret, and thy Father who seeth 
 in secret shall recompense thee." There is 
 satire in the repetition of the phrases, "to 
 be seen of men," and "verily, they have their 
 reward/' Observe, too, his censure of long 
 and detailed prayers : " In praying, use not 
 vain repetitions, as the heathen do ; for they 
 think they shall be heard for their much speak- 
 ing. Be not, therefore, like unto them ; for 
 your Father knoweth what things ye have 
 need of, before ye ask him." * 
 
 Alas, in this matter of prayer the heathen, 
 more than Jesus, find imitation yet in many 
 Christian pulpits. The petitions sent up come 
 nigh unto blasphemy, so much do they imply 
 that God does not know that he knows that 
 he needs instruction and reminding in the 
 mysterious business of governing the uni- 
 verse. 
 
 Commenting on the foregoing utterances of 
 Jesus, a great Biblical critic exclaims : " With 
 what a masterly hand he throws off in a few 
 * Matt. 6, 1-18. 
 
Hypocrisy and Self -Righteousness 165 
 
 rapid touches these brief but living portrait- 
 ures ! A holy satire on every school or fashion 
 that makes religion a coat to put on, a part to 
 study, a thing of outward show. Can we not 
 see that friend of the poor who is so proud of 
 his charitable disposition, but prouder still of 
 his reputation for it ? Can we not see the 
 punctual devotee who goes to the synagogue 
 every day to say his prayers, but is not dis- 
 pleased should the hour sometimes overtake him 
 in the street, especially at a much-frequented 
 spot ? then he stops short and offers up 
 his long petition where he stands, while the 
 passers-by turn aside in reverence and lower 
 their voices to a whisper ! Can we not see 
 that saintly ascetic, with his head bowed down 
 and strewed with ashes, with his unkempt hair 
 and beard and his penitential garb ? The 
 people point to him in wonder, and say, Fast- 
 ing again ! What a man he is ! He never 
 spares himself ! " 
 
 "A man may smile and smile and be a 
 villain/' Jesus was forced to see how possible 
 
1 66 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 this was to some of the men with whom he 
 had to deal; and he denounced them as 
 "whited sepulchers, outwardly beautiful, but 
 inwardly full of dead men's bones." " Be- 
 ware of the scribes, who like to walk about 
 in long robes, and love salutations in the 
 markets, and the chief seats in the synagogues, 
 and the first places at feasts; who devour 
 widows' houses, and for a pretense make 
 long prayers. These will receive the greater 
 damnation." 
 
 " With devotion's visage 
 And pious action we do sugar o'er 
 The devil himself." 
 
 Jesus always goes from the outward action 
 to the inward motive, from seeming to being. 
 With Hamlet he could say, "I know not 
 seems." 
 
 The scene of the widow's mite, both in 
 Mark and Luke, happily follows the denun- 
 ciation of the devourers of "widows' houses." 
 When he saw the rich casting into the church- 
 
Hypocrisy and Self -Righteousness 167 
 
 treasury, more or less ostentatiously, he de- 
 clared that the poor woman, giving her two 
 mites, had " cast in more than they all ; for 
 they did of their superfluity cast in unto the 
 gifts ; but she of her want did cast in all the 
 living that she had." As Jesus watched the 
 givers, he now and then beheld one belonging 
 to the class described by an English poet : 
 
 " With one hand he put 
 A penny in the urn of poverty, 
 And with the other took a shilling out." 
 
 Listen again : " Beware of false prophets, 
 who come in sheep's clothing, but inwardly 
 are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall 
 know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, 
 or figs of thistles ? Even so every good tree 
 bringeth forth good fruit : but the corrupt tree 
 bringeth forth evil fruit." The Romans had 
 the proverb : " The wolf changes his coat, but 
 not his disposition." 
 
 In Luke 18, 9-14, we have the climax of 
 the Galilean's incisive satire on professional 
 
1 68 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 piety, sectarian pride, and self-righteousness : 
 it comes in the parable of the Publican and 
 the Pharisee. He was inculcating the sweet 
 virtue of humility, when he turned the hearers' 
 " ears into eyes " with this bold and graphic 
 portraiture of what Carlyle, in subtle paradox, 
 calls " the sincere hypocrite " : 
 
 " Two men went up into the temple to pray, 
 the one a Pharisee, the other a publican. The 
 Pharisee stood, and prayed thus within him- 
 self : God, I thank thee that I am not as other 
 men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even 
 as this publican. I fast twice in the week ; I 
 give tithes of all I get." Now, how sharp and 
 vivid the antithesis ! " But the publican, stand- 
 ing afar off, would not so much as lift up his 
 eyes to heaven, but smote his breast, saying, 
 God be merciful to me a sinner. I say unto 
 you, this man went down to his house justified, 
 rather than the other; for every one that 
 exalt eth himself shall be humbled, but he that 
 humbleth himself shall be exalted." 
 
 The concluding words, as we have already 
 
Hypocrisy and Self-Righteousness l6g 
 
 seen, are reported to have been given also on 
 a different occasion. They are fitting and 
 effective in both connections. Who can tell 
 what gestures, what play of the features, 
 what glancings of the eye, what intonations 
 of voice may have enhanced the ridicule in 
 this incomparable picture of the two opposite 
 and generic types of character therein set 
 forth ! 
 
X 
 
 Closing of the Conflict 
 
Christ, therefore, concentrates all his wrath upon 
 the self-righteous Pharisee, the unfaithful leader of the 
 unfaithful, who would neither enter heaven himself, 
 nor allow others to enter. ... He could bear any 
 amount of unholiness, because he knew faith could 
 cure that. But he could not bear the absence of faith, 
 because what could be the cure of that ? . . . The 
 gentleness and sympathy of Jesus must not be con- 
 founded with weakness, timidity, and toleration of 
 evil. He had gentle pity and forgiveness for the vic- 
 tims of mistake and passion, but the deliberate slaves 
 of falsehood, faithlessness, and religious vanity are only 
 fit for the fire and brimstone which Jesus hurled at 
 them. Mozoomdar 
 
 So let it be. In God's own might 
 
 We gird us for the coming fight, 
 
 And strong in Him whose cause is ours 
 
 In conflict with unholy powers, 
 
 We grasp the weapons He has given, 
 
 The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven. 
 
 Wbittier. 
 (172) 
 
X 
 
 Closing of the Conflict 
 
 -> 
 "Woe unto you!" 
 
 "And they cast him out of the vineyard, and killed 
 
 him." 
 "Fill ye up, then, the measure of your fathers." 
 
 JESUS. 
 
 THE discovery that he has overrated the 
 capacity or disposition of men to be raised 
 from a lower to a higher plane of life does 
 this not make one of the saddest crosses of 
 the teacher of the things of the spirit ? Did 
 it not make one of the saddest crosses of the 
 Nazarene who was to be crucified ? " Surely," 
 one might fancy him communing with himself, 
 "a message so sweet and reasonable ought 
 to go at once to the mind and heart of man. 
 But lo, how many find it neither sweet nor 
 reasonable ! " 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 As the rejection of his Messiahship by his 
 own countrymen in general, and the ruling 
 classes in particular, was made more and more 
 evident, the idea waxed strong upon him 
 of substituting in their place the so-called 
 heathen, who showed comparatively such grat- 
 ifying readiness to accept him. In presenting 
 this idea he came to indulge more freely in 
 the parable of figurative satire. A fine ex- 
 ample is that of the Supper and Invited 
 Guests ; though this parable may be regarded 
 more genial in the humor of it than the other 
 parables of the same class. As appears from 
 Luke, it was probably delivered before the 
 fatal visit to Jerusalem. It is given quite 
 differently, in this book, from the form in 
 Matthew, and is much the preferable: 
 
 " A certain man made a great supper ; and 
 invited a large number of guests. And when 
 the time came he sent forth his servant to say 
 to them who were bidden, Come, for all things 
 are now ready. But they all with one consent 
 began to make excuse. One said, I have just 
 
Closing of the Conflict 
 
 bought a field, and I must go to look at it : 
 I pray thee have me excused. Another said, 
 I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I 
 want to try them : I pray thee have me ex- 
 cused. A third said, I have married a wife ; 
 of course I cannot come." Fancy here one 
 of those gracious smiles which used to enhance 
 the fine humor in Emerson's public lectures. 
 Perhaps the speaker recalled the passage in 
 Deuteronomy 24, 5 : " When a man hath 
 taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, 
 neither shall he be charged with any business : 
 but he shall be free at home one year, and 
 shall cheer up his wife whom he hath taken." 
 
 Without enumerating any further excuses, 
 the parable goes on to relate with what indig- 
 nation the host receives them. The invita- 
 tion to the Messianic kingdom being refused 
 by " respectable " and prosperous Jews, own- 
 ing farms, stock, and the like, salvation is 
 proffered to the outcasts and the Gentiles. 
 " Then the master of the house, being angry, 
 said to his servant, Go out quickly into the 
 
7/6 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the 
 poor and maimed and blind and lame. And 
 the servant said, Lord, what thou didst com- 
 mand is done, and yet there is room. And 
 the lord said unto the servant, Go out [of the 
 city] into the highways and hedges, and con- 
 strain them to come in, that my house may be 
 filled. For I say unto you, that none of 
 those men which were bidden shall taste of my 
 supper. " 
 
 Before entering on his evangelism at 
 Jerusalem, Jesus had witnessed much to 
 weaken his earlier faith in the spiritual 
 capacity and willingness of his countrymen; 
 and all too much had he been subjected to 
 irritating and crafty antagonisms. " He came 
 unto his own, and they that were his own 
 received him not." This was the thorn that 
 rankled, and that provoked from him cer- 
 tain anathemas recorded in different parts 
 of the gospel accounts, as similar treat- 
 ment had provoked their " Woe unto you " 
 from other prophets before him. The blood 
 
Closing of the Conflict 
 
 of Israel's Great Rejected Ones flowed in 
 his veins the blood of those not given to 
 hyper-refined toleration. In no other race 
 than the Hebrew has the prophet been driven 
 by such concentration of vision, such intensity 
 of moral and religious passion. In the litera- 
 ture of this age, who answers to his type, 
 unless it be Thomas Carlyle ? Jesus only 
 obeyed the law of the Jewish temperament 
 when, to him, his rejection by his own country- 
 men made them seem worse than the heathen 
 Ninevites ; since the latter were open to con- 
 version by the preaching of Jonah, as many 
 of the Gentiles were open to conversion by 
 the preaching of a far " greater than Jonah." 
 "Even," he says, "as Jonah became a sign" 
 [a teacher of truth and righteousness] " unto 
 the Ninevites, so also shall the Son of man be 
 unto this generation." Therefore "the men 
 of Nineveh shall stand up in the judgment 
 with this generation, and shall condemn it : 
 for they repented at the preaching of Jonah ; 
 and behold, a greater than Jonah is here. The 
 
//<? The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 queen of the south shall rise up in the judg- 
 ment with this generation, and shall condemn 
 it ; for she came from the ends of the earth 
 to hear the wisdom of Solomon ; and behold, 
 a greater than Solomon is here/' 
 
 Let not the passage which immediately fol- 
 lows in Matthew be passed unnoticed, though 
 the meaning be not readily apprehended. It 
 is one of the most keen and original of Jesus* 
 thrusts at the Jewish hierarchy and its blind 
 devotees. He seems to speak here with the 
 feeling that certain of the preceding prophets, 
 in some measure, had purged the temple of 
 the State religion from " the unclean spirit " 
 of spiritual deadness and unbelief ; and with 
 the feeling also that he himself at first had 
 been received with favor. But the conviction 
 grew strong that there was a fatal relapse into 
 soulless formality and willful hostility toward 
 a gospel of truth, righteousness and love. 
 "The unclean spirit/' he says, "when he is 
 gone out of the man, passeth through water- 
 less places, seeking rest and finding it not. 
 
Closing of the Conflict 7/p 
 
 Then he saith, I will return into mine house 
 whence I came out ; and when he is come, he 
 findeth it empty, swept and garnished [spirit- 
 ual life departed]. Then goeth he, and taketh 
 with himself seven other spirits more evil than 
 himself, and they enter in and dwell there ; 
 and the last state of that man becometh worse 
 than the first. Even so shall it be unto this 
 evil generation." * 
 
 When society reaches the extreme of hard- 
 ened unbelief and immorality, then the founder 
 of a new dispensation in government or relig- 
 ion is at hand. As before intimated, Jesus 
 had had revealed to him in the smaller cities 
 enough of hypocrisy, craft and resisting sen- 
 sualism to work in him moral resentment. But 
 it was within the walls of the sacred city of 
 Jewdom that this resentment attained its cul- 
 minating passion. At metropolitan centers 
 social diseases appear in the most shocking 
 and incurable form. There it is that the 
 prophet meets with the most hopelessly wise 
 * Matt. 12, 40-45; Luke n, 29-32. 
 
l8o The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 and dogmatic skepticism, the most withering 
 and sneering cynicism, among the educated 
 classes ; the most debasing luxury and display 
 of pride and vanity, on the part of the power- 
 ful and wealthy ; the most offensive observance 
 of caste, and the widest chasm between the 
 top and bottom of the social fabric. So was 
 it at Florence, when the people's sins made 
 Savonarola, as he said, a prophet a prophet 
 whose Hebraic rebukes kindled the enmity 
 which wove for him the martyr's shroud of 
 fire. So was it at Geneva, when the austere 
 Calvin applied a surgeon's knife to the vices 
 of that city, and transformed it into a habita- 
 tion of virtue. And so was it at the home of 
 the Popes, when valiant Luther was staggered 
 and incensed by the flagrant corruption and 
 unbelief of the ecclesiastical keepers of relig- 
 ion. "There is a saying in Italy," he says, 
 "which they make use of when they go to 
 church : ' Come and let us conform to the 
 popular error.' " 
 
 Much the same hardness of heart, immoral- 
 
Closing of the Conflict l8l 
 
 ity and hypocrisy opened themselves up to 
 Jesus at Jerusalem as opened themselves up to 
 the German monk at Rome. According to a 
 Jewish proverb, nine out of ten hypocrites of 
 the world were to be found in the metropolis 
 of " God's chosen people." Here the mech- 
 anism of worship was most mechanical, the 
 sterility of spirit most sterile, the hardness of 
 heart most hardened. Here his high instincts 
 received their severest shock ; here enemies 
 laid pitfalls for him and nagged him at every 
 turn. Here was he pricked to the utterance 
 of those most caustic parables and denuncia- 
 tions which precipitated the final catastrophe. 
 Here, or nowhere, a noble and just indigna- 
 tion called for the most crushing weapons of 
 satire and invective producible in the armory 
 of his inventive genius. There was more 
 hope of the Gentile and of the lower classes 
 than of the aristocratic, cynical Sadducee and 
 the canting, self-righteous Pharisee. 
 
 "What think ye ? " he says to them. "A 
 man had two sons ; and he came to the first, 
 
1 82 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. 
 And he answered and said, I will not; but 
 afterwards repented himself and went. And 
 he came to the second, and said likewise. 
 And he answered and said, I go, sir ; and 
 went not. Which of the twain did the will 
 of his father?" Being answered, "the first," 
 the conclusion follows : " Verily, then, the 
 publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom 
 before you. For John came unto you in the 
 way of righteousness, and ye believed him 
 not; but the publicans and harlots believed 
 him; and ye when ye saw it did not even 
 repent yourselves that ye might believe 
 him." 
 
 As in line with the preceding utterances, 
 Matthew follows with the vigorous and graphic 
 parable of the Husbandmen and the Vineyard, 
 which is given substantially alike by all three 
 evangelists : 
 
 " There was a man that was a householder, 
 which planted a vineyard, and set a hedge 
 about it, and digged a wine-press in it, and 
 
Closing of the Conflict 
 
 built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, 
 and went into another country. And when 
 the harvest drew near, he sent a servant to 
 the husbandmen to receive his fruits. But 
 they took him, and beat him, and sent him 
 away empty. And he sent another servant, 
 and him also they shamefully maltreated and 
 turned away empty. And still he sent a 
 third, and him also they wounded and cast 
 forth. Likewise did they unto other servants, 
 beating one, stoning another, and killing 
 another. Finally the lord of the vineyard 
 said, " What shall I do ? I will send my son : 
 it may be they will reverence him. But the 
 husbandmen, when they saw the son, said 
 among themselves, This is the heir ! come, let 
 us kill him, and have the inheritance ourselves. 
 And they cast him out of the vineyard, and 
 killed him." 
 
 Pausing here, for his words to take effect, 
 the speaker continues, " What, therefore, will 
 the lord of the vineyard do unto them ? He 
 will miserably destroy those miserable men, 
 
iS-f. The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 and let out the vineyard unto other husband- 
 men, who shall render him the fruits in their 
 season." Then Jesus springs the happy quo- 
 tation from Psalms 18, 22-23, as relevant to 
 his own Messiahship : 
 
 f( The stone which the builders rejected, 
 The same was made the head of the corner : 
 This was from the Lord, 
 And it was marvelous in our eyes." * 
 
 This parable, the record tells us, so incensed 
 the scribes and Pharisees that, had they not 
 feared the multitude, who took Jesus for a 
 prophet, they would have seized him then and 
 there. None the less determined, however, 
 was their purpose to compass the death of 
 this most invincible of all the sons of God 
 sent to gather His fruits in Israel. 
 
 Conscious of this, Jesus yet turns not back ; 
 rather does he press forward toward the final . 
 tragedy by still more bold and resolute censure 
 of them and their ways. Each day at Jerusalem 
 
 * Matt. 21, 33-46; Mark 12, 1-12; Luke 20, 9-18. 
 
Closing of the Conflict 185 
 
 strengthens his conviction of the hollowness 
 of the established Church, and of the selfish- 
 ness and cant of its chief defenders. To cite 
 again the example of Luther, as the latter's 
 moral sense and fellow-feeling were outraged 
 at the spectacle of priests filching from the 
 scanty substance of the common people by 
 the sale of the Papal indulgences, so the pain 
 of the compassionate Jesus, in witnessing the 
 deceptions practised on his countrymen and 
 the oppressions of the poor by the rich, burns 
 deeper and deeper, kindling at the core of him 
 a flame of wrath divine. 
 
 On one of the last days of the conflict, not 
 unlikely the last, he appears in the court of 
 that great temple which was the pride of the 
 Jew to the remotest outskirts of Roman 
 supremacy. The iniquity of " organized 
 hypocrisy " assumes for him more colossal 
 proportions than ever. More than ever is 
 his heart big with the grievances of the weak 
 against the strong. Religion itself seems 
 harnessed to the chariot of commercial lust. 
 
1 86 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 In the righteous heat of the moment he would 
 fain, by physical prowess, drive from the 
 sacred precincts the money-changers. " It is 
 written, My house shall be called a house of 
 prayer; but ye make it a den of robbers." 
 
 Under the stress of these influences we 
 may well imagine him spurred to attack 
 hypocrisy and social injustice with unusual 
 vehemence. No time this for moral essays 
 of "glittering generalities," which convict 
 nobody; no time for persuasive utterances 
 that persuade not. Time rather for specific 
 woes against the offenders of a just God. 
 The vast heart of the Son of man quivers 
 with the wrongs of the people as his wrongs. 
 He becomes the real orator, fashioned by 
 occasion ; the quiver extends into an awful 
 impressiveness of voice, gesture and facial 
 expression, as the pent-up "anger of love" 
 for his weaker fellows discharges itself in the 
 fire-speech of this invective : 
 
 " Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees ! 
 for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be 
 
Closing of the Conflict 187 
 
 borne, and ye yourselves move not the burdens 
 with one of your fingers. All your works you 
 do to be seen of men ; for you make broad 
 your phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of 
 your garments, and love the chief place at 
 feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, 
 and the salutations in the market-places, and 
 to be called of men, Rabbi. 
 
 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, 
 hypocrites ! because ye shut the kingdom of 
 heaven against men, and have taken away the 
 key of knowledge ; for ye enter not in your- 
 selves, neither suffer ye them that are enter- 
 ing in to enter. 
 
 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, 
 hypocrites ! for ye compass sea and land to 
 make one proselyte ; and when he is become 
 so, ye make him two-fold more a son of hell 
 than yourselves. 
 
 " Woe unto you, ye blind guides ! who say, 
 Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is 
 nothing, but whosoever shall swear by the 
 gold of the temple, it is binding. Ye fools 
 
1 88 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 and blind ! for whether is greater, the gold, 
 or the temple that hath sanctified the gold ? 
 And whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is 
 nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the 
 gift that is upon it, he is bound. Ye blind ! 
 for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar 
 that sanctifieth the gift ? He, therefore, that 
 sweareth by the altar, sweareth by it and all 
 things thereon. And he that sweareth by 
 the temple, sweareth by it, and by Him that 
 dwelleth therein. And he that sweareth by 
 the heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, 
 and by Him that sitteth thereon. 
 
 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, 
 hypocrites ! for ye pay tithes of mint and 
 anise and cummin, and have left undone the 
 weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy 
 and faith. Ye blind guides ! who strain out 
 the gnat and swallow the camel ! 
 
 " Woe unto you ! for ye devour widows' 
 houses, even while for a pretense ye make 
 long prayers : therefore shall ye receive the 
 greater damnation. 
 
Closing of the Conflict lS(} 
 
 " Woe unto you ! for ye cleanse the outside 
 of the cup and the platter, but within they 
 are full from extortion and excess. Ye are 
 like unto whited sepulchers, which outwardly 
 appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead 
 men's bones and of all uncleanness. Even 
 so ye appear outwardly righteous unto men, 
 but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and 
 iniquity. Blind Pharisee! cleanse first the 
 inside of the cup and platter, that the outside 
 may become clean also. 
 
 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, 
 hypocrites ! for ye build the sepulchers of 
 the prophets, and garnish the tombs of the 
 righteous, and say, If we had been in the days 
 of our fathers, we should not have been par- 
 takers with them in the blood of the prophets. 
 Wherefore ye witness to yourselves that ye 
 are the sons of them that slew the prophets. 
 Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers ! " 
 
 Such impassioned denunciation from the 
 prince of peace and good-will exalts the mean^ 
 ing of Shakespeare's lines, 
 
I go The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 " Great affection, wrestling in thy bosom, 
 Doth make an earthquake of nobility." 
 
 Offended by what they regard a too harsh 
 usage of his wit and humor, some apostles of 
 higher criticism like to explain away parts of 
 the record. But they, too, may be inconsist- 
 ent over-anxious to hold Jesus to their 
 standard of the ideal, to make him their 
 Jesus. Utterances not in the fashion of that 
 good taste, mutual courtesy, and compliment, 
 which prevail at a Congress of All Religions 
 in this border-time between two centuries 
 these are conveniently dropped out, on the 
 theory of misreporting, or of interpolation 
 for partisan and theological purposes. Some- 
 times the incisive invective given in the twenty- 
 third chapter of Matthew and the eleventh 
 chapter of Luke is disposed of in this way. 
 I take these woes to be in the main genuine, 
 whatever may have been the occasion and 
 order of delivery. I have not adhered strictly 
 to the order followed in either gospel. 
 
Closing of the Conflict H)I 
 
 In his fondness for making Jesus figure as 
 an after-dinner speaker, though in nowise 
 of our latter-day type, Luke pictures him 
 furiously hurling his woes at the Pharisees 
 and scribes while actually, as an invited guest, 
 partaking of their hospitality. A dramatic 
 situation, surely, but one not less improbable 
 than unbeautiful to look upon. Much more 
 acceptable is Matthew, when he presents 
 them as part of the last public discourse of 
 the Nazarene. In such connection they nat- 
 urally come at the end of a conflict in which 
 this compassionate and dauntless friend of the 
 " weary and heavy-laden " has been pushed on 
 by the stern "logic of events'* to act more 
 the part of aggressive reformer, with his love- 
 angers and " heroic-angers," than was the case 
 when he set out on his divine mission, all- 
 radiant in the hope of converting his country- 
 men, all-boundless in charity and faith. 
 
 Moreover, let the plain word be spoken, 
 that this God-like man had some sublimer 
 business than that of the mere saint teaching 
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 non-resistance and the amiabilities of life. 
 After due buffeting in this storm-and-battle 
 world, he was driven to the sad conviction, 
 even as are all heroic buffeters for higher laws 
 of comradeship the conviction that, in order 
 to advance higher human relations, he must 
 needs " cast fire upon the earth," " bring not 
 [merely] peace, but a sword." It is possible 
 the peace-seeking Jesus was not wholly a 
 stranger to the sentiment so strenuously ex- 
 pressed in one of Carlyle's letters to Emerson, 
 the prophet of the New World : " There is 
 good in all," he says. " Let us well remem- 
 ber it ; and yet remember, too, that it is not 
 good always, or ever, to be ( at ease in Zion ' ; 
 good often to be in fierce rage in Zion ; and 
 that the vile Pythons of this mud-world do 
 verily require to have sun-arrows shot into 
 them, and red-hot pokers struck through 
 them, according to occasion : woe to the man 
 that carries either of these weapons, and does 
 not use it in their presence/' 
 
 It is not a sign of progress, so much as of 
 
Closing of the Conflict 
 
 degeneracy, that we have lost somewhat the 
 brave and corrective faculty of public wrath 
 at iniquity. " There is no more sovereign 
 eloquence," remarks Victor Hugo, "than the 
 truth in indignation." And Luther even said, 
 "When I am angry, I can pray well and 
 preach well." 
 
 The Jesus seen by the writer in certain old 
 paintings of Catholic Europe, with face so 
 softened into sickly sainthood that no hero at 
 all of virile mind and resolute will glances at 
 you, this is not the Jesus of these pages. 
 Quite otherwise. The Jesus here set forth 
 has healthy red blood in him, and electric 
 manhood, and a sublime potency for righteous 
 combat, living not in passive goodness, 
 but coping in all true knighthood with the 
 "powers of darkness " among men. In 
 Browning's lines, he knew 
 
 " How to grow good and great, 
 Rather than simply good, and bring thereby 
 Goodness to breathe and live, nor, born i' the brain, 
 Die there." 
 
Conclusion 
 
Looking forth on eve of frost, 
 Ere day's ruddy lights be lost, 
 High in the blue east I see 
 Planet of Epiphany. 
 
 Stood the star, authentic sign, 
 In the nights of Palestine ? 
 Or is it but a legend fair 
 Born in memory's teeming air, 
 And by loyal hearts of old 
 Dowered with magic manifold 
 
 Very God, or highest man, 
 Brother cosmopolitan 
 Naught it boots to such as find 
 Touch of his inspiring mind ; 
 The main matter is that we 
 Catch that life's sublimity, 
 And in sacramental mood 
 Eat the flesh and drink the blood 
 Of his moral lovelihood. 
 
 Joseph Truman. 
 
Conclusion 
 
 ** 
 
 THESE pages might be multiplied with 
 still other expressions of that aspect of 
 Jesus' nature made prominent herein. Some 
 omitted sayings the reader may be disposed 
 to supply. Others, admitted, he may perhaps 
 be equally disposed to exclude, as not fittingly 
 covered by the terms of the subject. This is 
 to be expected. For, the manifestation of 
 what we call wit, as an aspect of wisdom in 
 the great task of teaching, so varies in form 
 and degree, from the most rollicking pleas- 
 antry and coarsest ridicule, comprehended by 
 all, to the subtlest satire and irony, compre- 
 hended by few, that diverse people are as 
 diversely affected by the same utterance as 
 they are diversely affected by the same tem- 
 perature of the air they breathe. 
 
iy8 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 I confess it never occurred to me to read 
 the far-reaching parable of the Prodigal Son 
 as a representative example of humor, until I 
 happened to meet with Mr. Shorthouse's ex- 
 position of it as such, quoted in Dr. M. D. 
 Shutter's "Wit and Humor of the Bible." 
 I suppose I had previously been perhaps 
 ever shall be too completely under the spell 
 of its searching pathos to be much open to 
 the Humorous side of it. Let this be said, 
 however, that in it we have an undercurrent 
 of humor similar to that welling up in several 
 parables from the same fount. It embodies 
 one more of the vivid, clear-cut antitheses 
 that the Nazarene drew between the typical 
 "frozen Pharisee, " fast matrixed in conven- 
 tional religion and morality, self-complacent, 
 unpoetic, unsympathetic, and the hearty, 
 impulsive, passionate wanderer from God who 
 after a season returns home through the 
 saving consciousness and repentance of sin. 
 
 Making broad, then, the term wit as an 
 accompaniment and manifestation of wisdom, 
 
Conclusion 
 
 we may see that striking evidences of it are 
 constantly furnished in Jesus' parables, in 
 his laconic sayings, in the unique and pictur- 
 esque illustrations of his thought. Now he 
 lights up his grave discourse with a bit of 
 pleasantry, like a flash of sunlight on a flow- 
 ing river. Now he excites his hearers to new 
 and unconventional reasoning by startling 
 paradoxes or unexpected questions and an- 
 swers. Now he confounds captious critics, 
 or crafty adversaries, with close-welded wit 
 and logic ; sometimes shutting off all contro- 
 versy with a single retort that goes straight 
 to the heart of the matter. Yet again, he 
 lays bare shams and shammers with satire 
 and ridicule, ay, on occasion, with invec- 
 tive, sharp and sure of aim. 
 
 And pleasantry, repartee, satire, ridicule, 
 irony, invective, all these manifestations of 
 Jesus' wit and wisdom were sanctified in his 
 master motive of advancing the kingdom of 
 heaven on earth. What the writer has en- 
 deavored to display in the preceding pages 
 
2OO The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 has been with purpose not merely intellectual, 
 but very positively religious and ethical. In- 
 deed, he may appear as offender against the 
 "unities" in his elastic use of his subject, 
 precisely because of the supremacy of this 
 purpose. If upon the reader the personality 
 of Jesus has not grown more commanding of 
 homage, by reason not alone of his invincible 
 greatness of mind, but, more, by reason of 
 his spiritual kingship, of his divine heroism 
 and self-abnegation if through these pages 
 the reader is not knit closer to that massive 
 personality in bonds of gratitude and love, 
 then has the writer labored for naught. 
 
 A son of "grace and truth/' sent into this 
 world of flesh and spirit to show forth the 
 Father ! Pure and uncompromising citizen 
 of heaven, yet with feet on earth, treading 
 the way of salvation in healthy fellowship 
 with men ! Prophet, with all the prophet's 
 prayings and servings, his sorrows and per- 
 secutions for righteousness' sake ; but also 
 a comrade mingling in the relaxations and 
 
Conchision 2OI 
 
 friendships, the rejoicings and feast ings of the 
 social man ! In roundness of sympathy, a 
 " high-priest " indeed, " touched with the feel- 
 ing of our infirmities " ! rich in all endowment 
 to "weep with those who weep and rejoice 
 with those who rejoice/' rich in all high- 
 est responsiveness to the smile in life as 
 well as the tear; with the sadness and 
 dignity of a god, and the joy and humility of 
 a child ! This poetic, social Jesus, this deep- 
 feeling, quick-glancing, heaven-piercing Jesus, 
 sweeps with his master touch, and for godward 
 ends, the chords of wit, of humor, of pathos ! 
 Marvelous revealer of the eternal verities; 
 divine satirist of wrong and unveracity ; 
 supreme of heroic smiters and loving sac- 
 rificers, what reverent Tennyson says I also 
 will say : 
 
 "Thou seemest human and divine, 
 The highest, holiest manhood, thou." 
 
My spirit to yours, dear brother, 
 
 Do not mind because many sounding your name do 
 not understand you, 
 
 I do not sound your name, but I understand you, 
 
 I specify you with joy, O my comrade, to salute you, 
 and to salute those who are with you, before and 
 since, and those to come also, 
 
 That we all labor together transmitting the same charge 
 and succession, 
 
 We few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of 
 nations, 
 
 We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers 
 of all theologies, 
 
 Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men, 
 
 We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but re 
 ject not the disputers nor anything that is asserted, 
 
 We hear the bawling and din, we are reach 'd at by 
 divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side, 
 
 They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my 
 comrade, 
 
 Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, jour- 
 neying up and down till we make our inefface- 
 able mark upon time and the diverse eras, 
 
 Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women 
 of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and 
 lovers as we are. 
 
 Walt Whitman 
 ("To Him that Was Crucified"}. 
 
 (202) 
 
Index 
 
 ABOLITION movement, in America, referred to, 146. 
 
 Addison, on laughter, 23. 
 
 Adulterous woman, Jesus' treatment of, 151-156. 
 
 Alms-giving, to be in secret, 162-163. 
 
 Amiel, on satire, 42 ; on the pain of being misunderstood, 
 
 58; on miracles, 122. 
 Aphorisms, Coleridge on the value of, 86; Renan on 
 
 Jesus' use of, 86. 
 Aristotle, 12. 
 Authority, rational respect for, inculcated by Jesus, 91, 
 
 149-151 ; of Jesus, to teach, 127-130. 
 
 BAPTISM of John, 130. 
 
 Barrow, Isaac, on wit, 10. 
 
 Beelzebub, 90, 127. 
 
 Biblical criticism (see " Higher criticism "). 
 
 Brooks, Phillips, on the rich young man, 97. 
 
 Browning, Robert, on greatness with goodness, 193. 
 
 Buddha, the, his method contrasted to that of Jesus, 36- 
 
 40; on parables, 72; quotation from a parable by, 95; 
 
 on riches, 97 ; on miracles, 1 23, 1 24. 
 Butler, Bishop, on wit, 42. 
 
 CALVIN, JOHN, his strenuous career, 14, 180. 
 
 Canaanitish woman, Jesus and the, 27-29. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, his humor, 1 5 ; on the virtue of laughter, 
 
204 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 25-26; contrasted to Emerson, 32-33; on popularity, 
 100; the modern prophet, 177; on the hypocrite, 160; 
 his defense of righteous wrath, 192. 
 
 Chad wick, John W., verses on Jesus, quoted, 7. 
 
 Charitable judgment inculcated by Jesus, 162. 
 
 Chesterfield, on laughter, 25. 
 
 Cities, social sins of, 179-181. 
 
 CLOSING OF THE CONFLICT, 173-193. 
 
 Clubin, Captain, example of a hypocrite, 160. 
 
 Coleridge, on aphorisms, 86. 
 
 Comic, the, Dr. Everett on, 22; Emerson on, 25. 
 
 Complaining spirit, rebuked by Jesus, 32, 52. 
 
 CONCLUSION, 197-201. 
 
 Confucius, on popularity, 100; on sincerity, 159. 
 
 Consistency, in religion, demanded by Jesus, 129. 
 
 CONTENTS, 5. 
 
 Corban, no; Luther on the word, no-ill. 
 
 Crashaw, Richard, verses on the Pharisee and Publican, 1 58. 
 
 Criticism, Biblical (see " Higher criticism "). 
 
 Crooker, Joseph Henry, his" Jesus Brought Back," 11-12. 
 
 DARWIN, CHARLES, 12. 
 
 David, his eating of the shew-bread, 116-117. 
 
 Devadetta, 37. 
 
 Deuteronomy, quoted by Jesus, 131-132 ; referred to by 
 
 Jesus, 175. 
 Denunciations of willful evil-doers, by Jesus, 176-193; 
 
 comment on by Mozoomdar, 172. 
 Devil, the, 49, 100 129, 166. 
 
 Devils, affliction with, 27, 35, 66, 127, 141, 178-179. 
 Dickens, Charles, reference to " Great Expectations," 62 ; 
 
 his fine characterization of a hypocrite in Pecksniff, 160- 
 
 161. 
 Divorce, Jesus and Moses on, 113-114; Hillel on, 113. 
 
Index 205 
 
 EDISON, THOMAS A., 13. 
 
 Elijah, 50, 73. 
 
 Elisha, 73. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, referred to, 14, 23, 32, loo, 148, 
 192; his "inaudible laugh," 23; on the sense of the 
 comic, 25 ; quoted, 43, 58, 104, 144, 146, 159 ; an incident 
 in his life, 80; his fine humor, 175. 
 
 Envy, rebuke of, by Jesus, 32, 52. 
 
 Everett, Dr. Charles Carroll, quoted, 22. 
 
 Evolution, the method of Jesus, 53-54. 
 
 FASTING and feasting, 33, 35-36. 
 Fault-finding with Jesus, by the people, 35. 
 French proverbs, quoted, 96, 98. 
 
 GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD, 146. 
 
 Gentiles, admitted to the kingdom, 27-31 ; 174-176,^^., 
 
 181. 
 
 German proverb, quoted, 96. 
 German scholarship, 4. 
 
 Goethe, quoted, 59, 96, 104; his "Faust" referred to, 67. 
 Grecian proverbs, quoted, n, 100. 
 Grecian tragedy, quoted, 156. 
 
 HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL, his depiction of hypocrisy, 160. 
 
 Healing, envy of Jesus' success in, 117, 126-127. 
 
 " Heathen," Jesus' tendencies toward the, 27-31 ; 1 74-178 ; 
 
 181. 
 
 Hebrew prophets, intensity of the, 177. 
 Hebrew proverbs, quoted, 95, 100. 
 Herodians, 147, 149. 
 Higher criticism, 4, 11-12, 19; corrected by the sense of 
 
 humor, 23-40, 43~45> 
 Hillel, on divorce, 113. 
 
206 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Holy Spirit, the sin against the, 128-129. 
 
 Homelessness of Jesus, 92. 
 
 Hooykaas, Dr. I., on the inappreciation of Jesus by his 
 kinsmen, 70. 
 
 " House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne's, 160. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, his characterization of the hypocrite, 160; 
 his Captain Clubin, 160; quoted, 193. 
 
 Humboldt, Alexander von, 12. 
 
 Humility, 79-80, 136, 168. 
 
 Humor, of Jesus, 13, 15, et seq.\ versus criticism, 23-40; 
 in the parables, 43-56, 60-6 1 ; in his shorter sayings, 62- 
 67, 73-83 ; in replies to opponents, 105-1 19 ; in his prac- 
 tical teachings, 130-142; in his verbal contests, 145-156; 
 in his moral exhortations, 162-169; in the injunctions of 
 his closing days, 1 73-1 93 ; the characteristics of, reviewed, 
 197-200. 
 
 HUMOR VERSUS CRITICISM, 23-40. 
 
 HYPOCRISY AND SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, 157-169. 
 
 Hypocrisy, of the people, concerning gifts to God, no; 
 of all kinds, rebuked by Jesus, 146, 159-169; at Jeru- 
 salem, condemned by Jesus, 179-189; Renan on Jesus' 
 condemnation of, 1 58 ; Milton on, 1 58 ; Emerson on, 1 59 ; 
 Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Rabelais, Voltaire, Carlyle, 
 Thackeray, Dickens and Hawthorne, referred to or 
 quoted on, 160. 
 
 IDEALISM of Jesus, 93. 
 
 Importunity, 44-45. 
 
 Inquiry, the attitude of our age, n. 
 
 INTRODUCTION, 11-19. 
 
 Inwardness of Jesus' teaching, in, 124, 140-142, 162-169. 
 
 Irony of Jesus, 1 58, et seq. 
 
 Isaiah, quoted, 108, in. 
 
 Italian proverbs, quoted, 98, 180. 
 
Index 20? 
 
 JAMES, the Apostle, quoted, 123. 
 
 "Jesus Brought Back," J. H. Crocker's, 12. 
 
 Jesus, his re-discovery in modern times, 12 ; his genius for 
 religion and ethics, 13; his passion for service, 13; his 
 wit and wisdom, 13, et seq. (see "Wit and Wisdom of 
 Jesus") ; his sublime personality, 15-16; his health and 
 cheerfulness, 24 ; his human insight, 26 ; his reply to the 
 Canaanitish woman, 27-29; his parable of the Vineyard, 
 29-32 (see "Parables of Jesus"); his reply to John's 
 disciples, 33-34 ; his rebuke of self- righteousness, 34-35 ; 
 his defense of John the Baptist and himself, 35-36 ; com- 
 pared with the Buddha, 36-40 ; the wit and wisdom of 
 his parables, 29-32, 44-45, 47~49> 5 I- 5 2 53~5^' 60-62, 
 131-142, 168-169, I 74~ I 79> 181-184, 198; his satires on 
 importunity, 44-45 ; his apt comparisons, 46 ; his doc- 
 trine of responsibility, 5 1 ; his evolutionary method, 53 ; 
 his ministry to the common people, 59-60 ; his teaching 
 misunderstood, 59-67 ; his rebuke of superficiality, 60- 
 62 ; his contest with the spirit of literalism, 62-65 ; his 
 symbolism, 63-67; unappreciated at home, 72-76; his 
 unfettered judgments, 78-80 ; he enjoins modesty at a 
 feast, 79-81 ; on inviting the poor, 81 ; on Simon and the 
 fallen woman, 82-83 ; " who is greatest in the kingdom 
 of heaven ? " 83-84 ; his pithy sayings and retorts, 87- 
 10 1 ; his sincerity, 90-92 ; his knowledge of men, 93-96 ; 
 on riches, 98-99; on the dangers of popularity, 99-100; 
 his reply to Peter, 101 ; his lack of foreign lore, 107 ; his 
 interpretation of the Law, 108-119; his detestation of 
 hypocrisy, 1 1 1 ; his conception of the Messianic hope, 
 112-113; on divorce, 113-114; on the Sabbath, 116-119; 
 his attitude toward miracles, 123-129 ; his practical relig- 
 ion, 129-142; his doctrine of salvation by service, 132- 
 139 ; on the inwardness of true religion, 140-142 ; hated 
 for his economic and social teachings, 145-146; his con- 
 
208 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 tests with opponents, 146-156; concerning the widow of 
 seven husbands, 147-148; the tribute-money, 149-151 ; 
 the adulterous woman, 151-156; rebuke of self- righteous- 
 ness, 159-169; his final conflict at Jerusalem, 173-193; 
 parable of the Two Sons, 181-182 ; of the Wicked Hus- 
 bandmen, 182-184; the denunciations, 179-193; the 
 characteristics of his wit and wisdom reviewed, 197-200; 
 his supreme humanity, 200-201 ; poetical and prose 
 quotations concerning, viz., Chadwick, 7; West, 8; 
 Amiel, 58; Hooykaas, 70; Renan, 86, 158; Paley, 87; 
 Mozoomdar, 172; Truman, 196; Tennyson, 201 ; Whit- 
 man, 202. 
 
 Jews, pithy sayings of, 95, 100-101, 181. 
 
 Job, quoted, 67, 144. 
 
 John the Baptist, his disciples compared with those of 
 Jesus, 32-33; Jesus' defense of, 35-36; rejected, 182. 
 
 John, the First Epistle of, quoted, 122. 
 
 " John," the Gospel of, referred to, 64-65 ; quoted, 65-67, 
 
 154. 
 
 Jonah, 177. 
 Jonson, Ben, 39. 
 Julian, the Emperor, his criticism of the ethics of Jesus, 
 
 48 note. 
 
 KINDRED AND NEIGHBORS, 71-84. 
 
 Koran, popular literal interpretation of the, 64. 
 
 LATIN proverb, quoted, 88. 
 
 Laughter, Dr. Everett on, 22 ; Addison on, 23 ; Jesus and, 
 
 24, 26; Emerson, Lord Chesterfield and Carlyle on, 
 
 25-26. 
 
 Leviticus, quoted by Jesus, 131-132. 
 LIFE-SKETCHES : TURNING " MEN'S EARS INTO EYES," 
 
 43-56. 
 
Index 2OQ 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, his humor and melancholy, 1 5 ; quoted, 
 115; his knowledge of and quotation from the Bible and 
 Shakespeare, 1 28 ; his righteous anger, 1 50. 
 
 Lip-service, in. 
 
 Literalism rebuked, 62-67, 147-148. 
 
 Luke, quoted, 34, 44, 47-48, 51, 53, 60, 72-73* 7 6, 77, 80, 
 81, 84, 90, 125-126, 129-130, 132-134, 148, 163-164, 168, 
 178-179, 183-184, 186-189. 
 
 Luther, Martin, his career, 14; on the word Corban, in ; 
 his strenuous labors, 180; his opposition to indulgences, 
 185 ; on righteous indignation, 193. 
 
 MAGDALEN, the, 91. 
 
 Mammon, the service of, 49. 
 
 Mark, quoted, 84, no, 114, 130, 145, 166. 
 
 Marriage, 147-148; and divorce, 113-115. 
 
 "Martin Chuzzlewit," 160. 
 
 Mary and Martha, 76. 
 
 Matthew, quoted, 27, 30-31, 33, 34, 35, 46, 51, 53, 56, 60, 
 61, 72-73, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, no, in, 112, 
 114, 116-117, n8, 119, 124, 125, 127-128, 129-130, 135- 
 136, 148, 150-151, 163-164, 174-176, i77-!78> *79 l8l ~ 
 182, 183-184, 186-189. 
 
 Messiahship, 112-113, 124, 174-177, 184. 
 
 Milton, John, quoted, 158. 
 
 MIRACLES; PRACTICAL RELIGION, 123-142. 
 
 Miracles, Amiel on, 122 ; the attitude of Jesus toward, 123- 
 129; of the Buddha toward, 123, 124. 
 
 MISUNDERSTOOD, 59-67. 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, on the hypocrite, 160. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, quoted, 78. 
 
 Mosaic Law, twisted by scribes, 91, 108-1 12 ; Jesus' under- 
 standing of, 107; on divorce, 113-115; on the Sabbath, 
 114-119; on adultery, 151-152. 
 
2IO The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 Mozoomdar, Protap Chunder, on Jesus' condemnation of 
 the Pharisees, 172. 
 
 NAAMAN the Syrian, 73. 
 
 Nathan the Prophet, 147. 
 
 Nature, Jesus' use of illustrations from, 61. 
 
 Nicodemus, Gospel of, quoted, 118; referred to, 126. 
 
 OLD. conservative regard for the, 34. 
 OPPOSITION AND QUOTATION, 105-119. 
 
 PALEY, on the correctness of Jesus' use of rhetorical fig- 
 ures, 87. 
 
 Parable, the Buddha on the value of the, 72 ; by a Persian 
 king, 142. 
 
 Parables of Jesus considered : the Laborers in the Vine- 
 yard, 29-32 ; the Friend at Midnight, 44 ; the Widow 
 and the Judge, 44-45; t* 16 Cunning Steward, 47-49; 
 the Lawless Steward, 49-51 ; the Ten Talents, 51-52; 
 the Lost Coin, 53; the Wedding-garment, 53 ; the Wheat 
 and the Tares, 53 ; the Ten Virgins, 54-56 ; the Sower, 
 60-62 ; the Foolish Rich Man, 77 ; the Good Samaritan, 
 131-134; the Last Judgment, 134-139; the Rich Man 
 and Lazarus, 139-140; the Houses Built on the Sand 
 and on the Rock, 140-142 ; the Pharisee and the Pub- 
 lican, 168-179; the Supper and Invited Guests, 176-179; 
 the Two Sons, 181-182 ; the Wicked Husbandmen, 182- 
 184 ; the Prodigal Son, 198. 
 
 Parallel sayings to some of Jesus', 78-82, 142. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, on divinity-school training, 106-107. 
 
 Paul, quoted, 124. 
 
 Pecksniff, as an example of the hypocrite, 160-161. 
 
 Persian saying, quoted, 142. 
 
 Peter, rebuke of, by Jesus, JQI, 
 
Index 211 
 
 "Phaedras" of Plato, Socrates in, quoted on inviting the 
 poor, 81-82. 
 
 Pharisee and the Publican, parable of the, 167-169. 
 
 Pharisees, 33, 63, 106, 112, 113, 126, 127, 147, 149, 151, 168, 
 172, 181, 187-189, 191, 198. 
 
 Pilate, his sarcasm concerning hatred of Jesus, 118, 126. 
 
 PITHY SAYINGS AND RETORTS, 87-101. 
 
 Plato, 148; his report of a saying by Socrates parallel to 
 one by Jesus, 81-82. 
 
 Poor, Jesus on the, 91. 
 
 Popularity, indifference of Jesus to, 79, 99-101. 
 
 Practical religion, 46 ; 123-142; 186-189. 
 
 Prayer and piety, 44-46, 161-169. 
 
 PREFACE, 3. 
 
 Prophets, not honored at home, 73. 
 
 Proverbs, parallels to some of Jesus', 78-82; from the 
 Grecian, 1 1, 100 ; from the Latin, 88 ; from Gautama the 
 Buddha, 89, 95; from the Spanish, 91, 96; from the 
 Hebrew, 95, 100; from the Veman and the Tamal, 95; 
 from the French, 96, 98; from the German, 96; from 
 the Italian, 98, 180; from Confucius, 100. 
 
 Psalms, quoted, 184. 
 
 Pyncheon, Judge, Hawthorne's creation of, 160. 
 
 QUOTATION, Emerson and Renan on, 104 ; opposition and, 
 in the life of Jesus, 105-119. 
 
 RABELAIS, on hypocrisy, referred to, 160. 
 
 Renan, Ernest, on Jesus' use of aphorisms, 86; on the 
 
 force and permanence of Jesus' rhetoric, 158. 
 Riches, 49, 77-81, 96-99, 139-140. 
 Rothschilds, the, 13. 
 Russell, Lord John, quoted, 87. 
 Russian saying, title-page and 1 5. 
 
212 The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus 
 
 SABBATH, the, Jesus on, 116-119, 126. 
 
 Sadducees, 63, 106, 139, 147, 149, 181. 
 
 Satan, 101. 
 
 Satire, of Jesus, 54, et seq. t 133. 
 
 Savonarola, his rebukes of the sins of Florence which 
 
 made him a martyr, 180. 
 Scribes, 91, 147, 151, 184, 186-189. 
 Self-righteousness, rebuked by Jesus, 34-35, 159-169. 
 Service, 132. 
 
 Seward, William H., 128. 
 Shakespeare, 12-13, 39 I2 ^; h* 8 sanity and truth, 14; 
 
 quoted, 96, 159, 190. 
 Shorthouse, his exposition of parable of the Prodigal Son, 
 
 .98 
 
 Shutter, Dr. Marion D., his " Wit and Humor of the 
 
 Bible," 4, 95 and note, 198. 
 
 Sincerity, the beauty of, 159-160; Confucius on, 159. 
 Sins of cities, 179-181. 
 Socrates, on inviting the poor, 81-82. 
 Solon, quoted, 115. 
 Spanish proverbs, quoted, 91, 96. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 12. 
 Sumner, Charles, 146. 
 Symbolism, of Jesus, 53-56, 65-67, et seq. 
 
 TAMAL, the, quoted, 95. 
 
 Temple in Jerusalem, beauty and enchantment of the, as 
 
 seen from the Mount of Olives, 17. 
 Tennyson, Alfred, quoted, 201. 
 Thackeray on hypocrisy, referred to, 1 60. 
 " Toilers of the Sea," Victor Hugo's depiction of Captain 
 
 Lubin in, as example of hypocrisy, 160. 
 Truman, Joseph, verses on Jesus, 196. 
 Trusteeship, 51-52. 
 
Index 
 
 UNBELIEF at Jerusalem, 179-181. 
 
 VANQUISHED CRAFT, 145-146. 
 
 Veman, the, quoted, 95. 
 
 Voltaire, on hypocrisy, referred to, 160. 
 
 WEST, JAMES H., verses on Jesus, quoted, 8. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, quoted : " He is the Answerer," 144 ; " To 
 Him That Was Crucified," 202. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, quoted, 172. 
 
 " Wit and Humor of the Bible," Dr. Shutter's, 4, 95 and 
 note, 198. 
 
 Wit and Wisdom of Jesus, 13, 15, et seq.; in the parables, 
 43-56, 60-61 ; in his shorter sayings, 62-67, 73-83; in 
 replies to opponents, 105-1 19 ; in his practical teachings, 
 130-142; in his verbal contests, 145-156; in his moral 
 exhortations, 162-169; in the injunctions of his closing 
 days, 173-193 ; the characteristics of, reviewed, 197-200. 
 
 Wit, Isaac Barrow on, 10; Bishop Butler on, 42. 
 
 Work, comparative value of different kinds of, 32. 
 
 Worry, comment of Jesus on, 76. 
 
 ZAREPHATH, 73. 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: 
 a Contrast 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: 
 a Contrast 
 
 JN SETTING down the salient differences 
 of Carlyle and Emerson, the writer of this 
 articlejs quite conscious of the difficulty, how 
 "to^trongly^tat^one fact without seeming to 
 belie some other." Radically unlike^jiideed, 
 were these two prophets of the century^jas to 
 heredity and environment, temperament and 
 taste, intellectual affinities, means and meth- 
 ods of work. Reared in the home-environ- 
 ment of a poor peasant father, of gloomy, de- 
 spairing temperament, and in the social atmos- 
 phere of a gloomy, despairing Scotch Calvin- 
 ism; in bondage much of his life to grinding 
 poverty and irritating dyspepsia truly, a 
 full share of the shadows attended Thomas 
 Carlyle 's steadfast journey across the earth. 
 
 Born neither to riches nor to poverty, 
 Emerson's lot cast him in a civilization hav- 
 ing the freshness and hope of youth about it. 
 Heir to a constitution not vigorous nor buoy- 
 ant, yet, by dint of temperance, both in work 
 
2 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 and living, after thirty he averaged well most 
 of his years. His mother was superb in spirit 
 and sense; his father, a prominent Boston 
 minister, of marked literary tastes, handsome 
 and courteous, with the manners of a gentle- 
 man. On the whole, both as to heredity and 
 environment, Nature was exceptionally kind 
 to the Concord Sage. 
 
 Nigh forty years old was the Sage of Chelsea 
 before he terminated his selfbanishment to 
 the grim solitude of "the loneliest nook in 
 Britain." Here were black and bleak moor- 
 lands, wild, sombre scenery enough; no social 
 intercourse to correct prejudice and headiness ; 
 no child, with its tyrannies, disorders, merry 
 laughters, to break in upon the monotony of 
 his isolated life far apart from men he work- 
 ed, sustained only by brave-hearted Jane , 
 Welsh, and his own Promethean faith and will. 
 
 Emerson, likewise, valued full well the 
 worth of solitude, but he kept from early 
 years on more intimate terms with the centres 
 of culture and many-sided life. 
 
 / Heredity and environment conspired to 
 make the Scotchman paint a world of imperi- 
 ous force, in which shadows predominate. 
 On the contrary, they conspired to make the 
 American paint that same world one of fructi- 
 fying love, with excess of lights. Both, how- 
 ever, were one in the faith of faiths, that God, 
 not the Devil, Right, not Wrong, rules invin- 
 cibly this universe. Both were spiritualists 
 as opposed to materialists; matter is only the 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 3 
 
 symbol and changing vesture of "the Over- 
 Soul. \ Both felt the mystic ties of the least 
 w tmtcPthe greatest, the manifold kinships and 
 correspondences of the Infinite Organism. In 
 this also they were in accord, that the regen- 
 eration of society must come through the re- 
 generation of individual men. Underneath 
 all their striking divergences there is funda- 
 mental agreement in spirit and purpose. 
 /^'Though I see well enough," writes Carlyle to 
 f his friend, "what a great deep cleft divides us 
 ' in our ways of practically looking at this 
 "\ world, I see, also (as probably you do your- 
 self), where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite 
 i again; and the two poor souls are at one/' 
 
 I Setting high value on one another's char- 
 acter and mission, each was advocate of the 
 other to his countrymen. Emerson admires 
 Carlyle's invincible manhood, his massive 
 strength, his royal rush of rhetoric. In turn, 
 Carlyle rejoices in the pure insight and sin- 
 cerity of his friend's intellect, in his gentleness 
 and power of repose, yet to the last he seemed 
 deluded with the conceit that he was the 
 superior man of the two. Mrs. Carlyle even 
 writes him, "He (Emerson) had no ideas (ex- 
 cept mad ones) that he had not got out of 
 you." 
 
 Each writer moves in his own orbit, inde- 
 pendent of the other the most independent 
 of minds. Neither has any kinship in litera- 
 ture with the milliner or conventional tailor. 
 But their styles are as antithetical as the men. 
 
4 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 Of his contemporary Emerson declares: 
 11 There is more character than intellect in 
 every sentence." But of Emerson's sentences 
 who will affirm which is the predominant 
 force, so even-footed are the two? To the 
 uninitiated, the Scotchman's vehicle of ex- 
 pression is generally forbidding and irritating. 
 In describing the style of Richter, and that of 
 the hero of "Sartor Resartus," he very nearly 
 describes his own style./" Verily, a new style, 
 plentiful in coined words, Germanic com- 
 pounds, allusions not common, double-action- 
 ed phrases, parenthetical sentences in abund- 
 ance, wheels within wheels, whole clocks in 
 fact sentences broken and loose-jointed, 
 angular and sprawling, trip-hammer exag- 
 gerations, sharp antitheses of the great and 
 little, quips of humor, familiar quotations 
 new-minted, bends and surprises, as of the 
 winding streets of some European cities- 
 heterogeneous elements many, yet molten and 
 flowing, with strange picturesqueness, and 
 fascination, too/if once you get afloat in the 
 current of it all. 
 
 Not so unique and imposing is our Ameri- 
 can seer's medium of communication to his 
 fellows. Less emancipated is he from classic 
 models. Yet how freely he also swings his 
 thought! How refreshingly void of affecta- 
 tion! He, too, indulges, not a little, in rhe- 
 torical antitheses, paradoxes, and the exag- 
 gerations of strong statement. There is a 
 mingling of surprising boldness, tempered 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 5 
 
 with such gentle and winsome courtesy. 
 There are the most classic and the most home- 
 ly allusions, the most masculine virility and 
 equally feminine delicacy and persuasiveness. 
 Unlike his contemporary, he delights in the 
 epigrammatic structure, in short sentences, 
 plentiful in choice Anglo-Saxon words, and 
 sparse in compounds, adjectives, and super- 
 latives. For making maxims his genius is of 
 the first order. His sentences are held to- 
 gether about as so many pearls are held to- 
 gether by a thread, yet in inward unity withal. 
 Seldom do they come encumbered with the 
 parenthesis, or in a form sprawling, ragged- 
 edged, askew, or (though poetic) overdressed 
 in any fashion. They are not the ponderous 
 battle-axe; rather the trim arrow of Apollo, 
 shot straight at the target. If there be dif- 
 ficulty in apprehending the thought of these 
 writers, it is in the one case due more to the 
 affluent and novel complexity of the rhetoric^ 
 in the other more to the brevity of it. What 
 writer than Emerson ever more faithfully ap- 
 plied Carlyle's own suggestion to him con- 
 cerning authorship : "The true value is deter- 
 mined by what we do not write?" 
 
 Serious and weighty of matter as they are, 
 neither author falls into the style of "dry-as- 
 dust." Both have the glance of the man of 
 humor. They know well how to light up 
 their pages with its relishable vein; to salt 
 them with pregnant wit and satire. Yet how 
 differently do they manifest this quality of 
 ^mind! Carlyle is full of abandon in their 
 
6 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 use almost a reveller. As to his piercing and 
 pictorial wit his generous admirer, Emerson, 
 put the praise of "Frederick The Great" this 
 strong "infinitely the wittiest book that 
 ever was written." In humor he floats every- 
 thing, even the most sacred subjects. More 
 prone than his contemporary to seperate the 
 part from the whole, he gives humor a more 
 pessimistic shading. In exaggerating the 
 sins and follies of his fellowmen he not un- 
 frequently plays the bear and "horse jockey." 
 
 Though not less sleepless in his critical 
 faculty, Emerson's kindlier judgment and 
 more delicate taste temper the e^rcise of it. 
 The humor that takes you out or yourself, on 
 a splashing wave of laughter well, look not 
 for that in one who could quote with apparent 
 approval Chesterfield's saying, "I am sure, 
 since I had the use of my reason, no human 
 being has heard me laugh." One cannot but 
 feel that Margaret Fuller was right. Return- 
 ing from England, and being asked by her 
 Concord friend, /if she visited Carlyle, she 
 frankly retorted: v Yes, and his laugh is worth, 
 twenty of yours." It is the "inaudible laugh," 
 gently raising your risibles, that frequently 
 lies in wait for the understanding reader of 
 Emerson. The fountain of wit and humor 
 is more intermittent than in the hearty 
 Scotchman, with a more stinted stream. But 
 the quality is finer, the- light flashed upon the 
 matter in hand purer, f Perhaps, however, it 
 is sometimes too subtle and hidden in the 
 folds of serious discourse, to be readily ap- 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 7 
 
 prehended. /By citing two or three illustra- 
 tions from the pages of each of these writers 
 the reader will better realize how marked is 
 the contrast in the manifestations of their 
 wit and humor. Take the following from 
 "English Traits," that profound and just 
 analysis of another people's character/" When 
 you see on the Continent the well-dressed 
 Englishman come into his ambassador's 
 chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into 
 his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot help feel- 
 ing how much national pride prays with him, 
 and the religion of a gentleman. So far is he 
 from attaching any meaning to the words, 
 that he believes himself to have done almost 
 the generous thing, and that it is very conde- 
 scending in him to pray to God./ 
 
 "The Anglican church is marked by the 
 grace and good sense of its forms, by the man- 
 ly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches 
 is, 'By taste are ye saved.' It keeps the old 
 structures in repair, spends a world of money 
 in music and building; and in buying Pugin, 
 and architectural literature. It has a general 
 good name for amenity and mildness. It is 
 not in ordinary a persecuting church ; it is not 
 inquisitorial, not even inquisitive, is perfectly 
 well bred, and can shut its eyes on all proper 
 occasions. If you let it alone, it will let you 
 alone. But its instinct is hostile to all change 
 in politics, literature, or social arts. 
 
 "The doctrine of the Old Testament is the 
 religion of England. The first leaf of the 
 
8 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 New Testament it does not open. It be- 
 lieves in a Providence which does not treat 
 with levity a pound sterling. They are 
 neither transcendentalists nor Christains. 
 They put up no Socratic prayer, much less 
 any saintly prayer for the queen's mind; ask 
 neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, 
 'Grant her in health and wealth long to live.' 
 And this from the " Conduct of Life," a de- 
 lightfully piquant description, duplicating the 
 experience of so many other men of the writing 
 guild. 
 
 "With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale 
 scholar leaves his desk to draw a freer breath, 
 and get a juster statement of his thought, in 
 the garden-walk. He stoops to pull up a 
 purslain, or a dock, that is choking the young 
 corn, and finds there are two: close behind 
 the last is a third; he reaches out his hand to 
 a fourth; behind that are four thousand and 
 one. He is heated and untuned, and, by and 
 by, wakes up from his idiot dream of chick- 
 weed and red-root, to remember his morning 
 thought, and to find, that, with his adaman- 
 tine purposes, he has been duped by a dande- 
 lion. A garden is like those pernicious ma- 
 chineries we read of, every month, in the news- 
 papers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his 
 hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his 
 whole body to irresistible destruction. In an 
 evil hour he pulled down his wall, and added 
 a field to his homestead. No land is bad, but 
 land is worse. If a man own land, the land 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 9 
 
 owns him. Now let him leave home, if he 
 dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of 
 melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he 
 has done, and all he means to do, stand in his 
 way, like duns, when he would go out of his 
 gate. The devotion to these vines and trees 
 he finds poisonous. Long free walks, a circuit 
 of miles, free his brain, and serve his body. 
 Long marches are no hardship to him. He 
 believes he composes easily on the hills. But 
 this pottering in a few square yards of garden 
 is dispiriting and drivelling. The smell of 
 the plants has drugged him, and robbed him 
 of energy. He finds a catalepsy in his bones. 
 He grows peevish and poor-spirited. The 
 genius of reading and of gardening are anta- 
 gonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricty. 
 One is concentrative in sparks and shocks : the 
 other is diffuse strength; so that each dis- 
 qualifies its workman for the other's duties. 
 
 As Emerson has presented an English trait, 
 let Carlyle wield his more ponderous weapon 
 against his countrymen. 
 
 "Alas, it will be found, I doubt not, that in 
 England more than in any country, our 
 Public Life and our Private, our State and 
 our Religion, and all that we do and speak 
 (and the most even of what we think), is a 
 tissue of half-truths and whole-lies; of hypo- 
 crisies, conventionalisms, worn-out tradi- 
 tionary rags and cobwebs; such a life-garment 
 of beggarly incredible and uncredited falsities 
 as no honest souls of Adam's Posterity were 
 
10 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 ever enveloped in before/ And we walk 
 about in it with a stately gesture, as if it were 
 some priestly stole or imperial mantle; not 
 the foulest beggar's-gabardine that ever was. 
 No Englishman dare believe the truth. He 
 stands, for these two-hundred years, en- 
 veloped in lies of every kind; from nadir to 
 zenith an ocean of traditionary cant surrounds 
 him as his life-element. He really thinks the 
 truth dangerous. Poor wretch, you see him 
 everywhere endeavouring to temper the truth 
 by taking the falsity along with it, and weld- 
 ing them together; this he calls 'safe course,' 
 1 moderate course/ and other fine names; 
 there, balanced between God and the Devil, 
 he thinks he can serve two masters, and that 
 things will go well with him/ ' 
 
 "Anyone acquainted with the life of Coler- 
 idge, that poetic, mystical, vague though vast 
 genius, must appreciate the unique critical 
 humor of the following description of him, as 
 a conversationalist. 
 
 "It was talk not flowing any whither like 
 a river, but everywhither in inextricable cur- 
 rents and regurgitations, like a lake or sea; 
 terribly deficient in definite goal or aim; nay 
 often in logical intelligibility; what you are to 
 believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly 
 thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. 
 
 "To sit as a passive bucket of water and 
 be pumped into whether you consent or not, 
 can in the long run be exhilarating to no 
 creature, how eloquent soever the flood of 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 11 
 
 utterance that is descending. But if it be 
 withal a confused unintelligible flood of 
 utterance threatening to submerge all known 
 landmarks of thought, and drown the world 
 and you! I have heard Coleridge talk with 
 eager musical energy two stricken hours, his 
 face radiant and moist, and communicate no 
 meaning whatsoever to any individual of his 
 hearers. 
 
 "He began anywhere. You put some 
 question to him, made some suggestive ob- 
 servation. Instead of answering this, or de- 
 cidedly setting out toward answer of it, he 
 would accumulate formidable apparatus, log- 
 ical swim-bladders, transcendental life-pre- 
 servers, and other precautionary and vehicula- 
 tory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last 
 get under way, but was swiftly solicited, turn- 
 ed aside by the glance of some radiant new 
 game on this hand or that into new courses, 
 and ever into new; and before long into all the 
 Universe, where it was uncertain what game 
 you would catch, or whether any." 
 
 Carlyle and Emerson are both poet-proph- 
 ets of the highest order. In prose they use 
 the language of the poet-prophet. But the 
 one is epic, the other lyric. The former 
 dramatizes the outward forces acting upon 
 man as divine coercive agencies of his growth. 
 "The actual well seen," he reminds Emerson, 
 "is the ideal." The latter does not lose sight 
 of this truth, but he looks at the ideal as the 
 actual. His gaze fixes more upon the inward, 
 
12 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 spiritual, creative nature of man, giving shape 
 and color to the external world. To Carlyle 
 he truly remarks, "You have a whim for deal- 
 ing en grand monarque." The poetic appears 
 on a massive scale, largely as ruin and devas- 
 tation, the Juggernaut chariot of the gods of 
 force. He plays the symphonies of the awful 
 and Plutonic, the sublime in conflict and 
 destruction the symphonies of "truth clad 
 in hell-fire." As Wagner is in music, so is he 
 in literature. 
 
 Emerson is rather Mozart and Mendels- 
 sohn fused in one. He catches the poetic in 
 the gentler and more veiled aspects of cosmic- 
 life. He is poet of the inner essence and 
 beauty of common things, of the hidden tie 
 of flower and star, of bird-song and voice of 
 man, of a sunbeam and a human emotion 
 the poet of constructive harmonies and mystic 
 unities, whereby "the universe duplicates it- 
 self in every atom," and coheres in the soul 
 of God. The little and, common he makes 
 matters of mystery, and 
 
 "Makes mysteries matters of mere every-day." 
 
 Carylw^s the mountain torrent in spring- 
 time, often vexed by its own impetuosity a 
 mighty, rushing torrent, sweeping downward 
 in wild strength, over-leaping barriers, up- 
 rooting trees, foaming and splashing over 
 rocks, irresistibly scooping out a channel for 
 itself. Emerson is rather the river when it 
 reaches the lowlands, and flows through 
 generous forests and valleys, broadening and 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 13 
 
 moving with calm strength to the great ocean. 
 | In reading Carlyle, one often feels himself in 
 1 wild solitudes of the lofty mountains, or tossed 
 on the raging billows of the stormy sea. Again 
 you think of ^Etna and Vesuvius in eruption 
 in the night-time. What terrific splendor in 
 the billowy sheets of fire and smoke, the 
 belchings of black flame-masses, as if, in very 
 truth, Titans lay at the base madly struggling 
 to be free! This Titan of dramatic power 
 seems an imprisoned spirit, striving to deliver 
 himself from a mountain of accumulated 
 knowledge, fusing in the Hebraist feeling, 
 that, "God is a consuming fire/' With power 
 and splendor, with Shakspearian abandon, 
 he frees himself from all constraints of con- 
 ventional writing. He sports, as it were, 
 with vasty heights and depths, the eternities, 
 the fateful destinies, the ever challenging 
 mysteries of a cosmos of conflict, and of the 
 "storm and stress" of man, as chief player in 
 this whirling earth-drama. 
 
 Egierson, surely, may not be described in 
 such fashion. Never do we get from speech 
 of his the impression of a nature in eruption 
 or in conflagration. He is never a god in a 
 fury. He is not Jehovah in the awful light- 
 ning of Sinai, nor Jove hurling thunderbolts 
 from Olympus. He is more as Brahma, des- 
 cribed in his poem of that name. His antag- 
 onism to wrong rarely spends itself in wrath, 
 sublime or otherwise. With self-control and 
 calm dignity, he holds steady the reins of all 
 passion, and dissolves all darkness in light. 
 
14 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 In delivering the truth, Carlyle is more 
 concrete and personal. Emerson is more im- 
 personal and abstract; he deals more with 
 classes and universal principles. Power with 
 the one is dynamical; with the other it is re- 
 pose. One is the whirlwind and heat-light- 
 ning; the other is the gentle south-wind and 
 silent energy of tempered sunshine. One is 
 passion and fire; the other serenity and light. 
 And "light," Carlyle himself somewhere re- 
 minds us, "is stronger than fire." 
 
 Striking, in the matter of style, as is the 
 contrast of these two minds, it is hardly less 
 striking when we contemplate their literary 
 taste, and their attitude toward the world. 
 How characteristic that Carlyle should relish 
 the wild, picturesque strength of the grotesque 
 myths of the Norsemen, and that Emerson's 
 more aesthetic sense should prefer the beauty 
 and grace of those of the Greeks! that the 
 latter gravitated readily to Plato, as the model 
 of philosophers, while the former scarcely 
 deemed him worth his reading. Both, how- 
 ever, had that catholic sympathy and imagi- 
 nation whereby they could place themselves 
 in the interior natures of many types of men. 
 But, on the whole, Carlyle evinces the more 
 special genius for biography. No writer goes 
 with deeper passion into the heart of his hero. 
 He gravitates more readily toward, and better 
 appreciates, the mighty men of action the 
 Cromwells, the Fredericks, the Mirabeaus; 
 while the affinities of the saintly Emerson are 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 15 
 
 more the seers and poets, the men of contem- 
 plation in human history. 
 
 Both these tonic and reforming intellects 
 aimed to free men in the power of truth and 
 justice. But how free them? Herein lay 
 the parting of the ways. Carlyle thought 
 that men's chief necessity is to be well gov- 
 erned. They are a flock of sheep, requiring 
 a shepherd to watch and lead them. Your 
 pet ideas of liberty are trending devilward, to 
 social anarchy and disintegration. Emerson 
 threw himself on the opposite thought. Men 
 need to be let alone. In the unwritten law of 
 the moral sentiment each shall find his trusty 
 shepherd. One was monarchical, the other 
 democratic. In political philosophy one ex- 
 pressed more the spirit of the German Bis- 
 marck, "the man of Iron;" the other the 
 spirit of the American Jefferson, the apostle 
 of liberty, and faith in the common people. ~ 
 Emerson tells how he opened to Carlyle his 
 "theory of no government," and got from him 
 little else than, "objections and fun." For 
 Carlyle the "can-man" shall have all worship, 
 as the source of progress in state and church; 
 and the use of force shall be the divine agency 
 to effect his will. With pregnant sarcasm, 
 Lowell dubs him, "the volunteer laureate of 
 the rod." To get men to do right, he swings 
 his terrific "fire-whip" of retribution over in- 
 dividuals and nations. He is the modern 
 Jeremiah and John the Baptist, with much 
 the same intensity and narrowness. 
 
 Contrary wise, Emerson is more Greek than 
 
16 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 Hebrew, more like Plato or Plutarch than 
 the Old Testament prophets. To the method 
 of the rod he has a decided aversion. He 
 challenges the manhood of men, and reveals 
 their spiritual possibilities. He would lead 
 them to the right, not so much by unfolding 
 the penal terror of the law, as by unfolding its 
 beneficence ; not so much by making evil ugly 
 and hateful, as by making the good beautiful 
 and lovable. "Love and justice alone" can 
 rule and reform a state. His point of view 
 is the genius of humanity rather than the 
 genius of the great man. No hero-worship- 
 per he. I cannot recall one tribute, even to 
 Jesus, which really glows with fervid and 
 grateful sympathy. Out of the inexhaustible 
 energies of the race the "can-man" is created. 
 
 "Oh what are heroes, prophets, men, 
 But pipes through which the breath of man 
 
 blow 
 A, momentary music! " 
 
 Carlyle banked too much on the lifting 
 power of organization and institutional agen- 
 cies. Emerson just as surely undervalued 
 these, and banked too much on the self- 
 helpfulness and self-willingness to be helped 
 of the masses of men. One erred on the side 
 of magnifying the uncommon man, the other 
 on the side of magnifying the common man. 
 One evinced too little faith in the self-gov- 
 erning capacity of the people, the other, 
 perhaps, evinced too much. 
 
 In their way of looking either at God or 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 17 
 
 man, the temper of Carlyle is Calvinistic; 
 the temper of Emerson is that of the modern 
 liber alist and rationalist. One sees more 
 might and majesty in the universe, the other 
 more beauty and love. One shows more of 
 the meanness, the other more of the nobleness, 
 of human nature. With the one the Hebrew 
 sense of sin is stronger, with the other the 
 Greek sense of law. To Carlyle the world is 
 a tragic drama of imperious, ons weeping force. 
 Man is a "fire-breathing, spirit-host, issuing 
 from Cimmerian Night," emerging from the 
 Inane, hasting stormfully across the aston- 
 ished earth, plunging again into the Inane. 
 He feels himself, a very ghost among ghosts, 
 marching in this host his tragic march "O 
 heaven whither?" Overwhelmed with the 
 sense of universal force and combat, he magni- 
 fies evil and pain. To Emerson there is far 
 less storm and tragedy. He, also, feels him- 
 self a spirit in transit on our earth-planet. 
 Miraculous, too, is the panorama of flux and 
 change; but he seems to sit serenely nearer the 
 Mover of it all. Through a clearer photo- 
 sphere he watches the world-drama with 
 Argus-eyes of preternatural sight. A self- 
 contained, unimpassioned onlooker, viewing 
 all subjects and particulars in universal re- 
 lations, he veils the shadows of evil and suffer- 
 ing with supernal light. 
 
 The great difference in the way the two- 
 seers looked at mankind justifies the common 
 application of optimist and pessimist. In 
 Emerson's vision there is more of the glory 
 
18 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 of the rising sun; in Carlyle's more that of the 
 setting sun. Backward the latter glances for 
 his heroes and heroisms, exalting the past at 
 the expense of the present. The former de- 
 preciates the past compared with the present. 
 Despite grave social diseases, out of resident 
 forces he sees evolving the perfecter humanity. 
 To Carlyle the present world was a "mad 
 one," quite "out of joint," and unmistakably 
 he was "born to set it right" not, however, 
 in "cursed spite," so much did he relish the 
 business. He is a right valiant knight, in 
 quest of trials of strength; and he will have 
 them, though he fight at times good and true 
 knights travelling a different way to the same 
 goal. As eagles are said to sometimes swoop 
 down upon little children, as well as upon 
 legitimate prey, so this eagle-minded man 
 sometimes bears down on the really true and 
 beautiful treasures of men. With all his 
 veracity, like old Dr. Johnson, whom he much 
 resembles and makes one of his heroes, he 
 had a perversity for opposition; not infre- 
 quently he seemed to talk for victory more 
 than truth; to display his gift for caustic wit, 
 rather than to render just judgment. 
 
 But if Carlyle is the voice of a pessimism 
 oftentimes neither sweet nor reasonable, 
 Emerson is sometimes the voice of an optim- 
 ism hardly more acceptable. One may be 
 blinded by too little passion as well as by too 
 much. Here and there his utterances en- 
 courage the selfishness of a passive quietism 
 and unsympathetic apathy, though happily 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 19 
 
 offset by other utterances of contrary tone. 
 11 OUT painful labors are unnecessary." "None 
 of us can wrong the universe." The rumble 
 and grumble of Thomas Carlyle have more 
 life-making music the martial music of the 
 gods. Have they not a relish the words he 
 shoots at his placid brother over the sea? 
 "Truly, it is most indubitable, there is good in 
 all; and if you see an Oliver Cromwell [or 
 Abraham Lincoln] assassinated it is certain 
 you may get a cart-load of turnips from his 
 carcass. . . . Let us well remember it; 
 and yet remember too that it is not good al- 
 ways, or ever, to be 'at ease in Zion'; good 
 often to be in fierce rage in Zion ; and that the 
 vile Pythons of this Mud-World do verily 
 require to have sun-arrows shot into them, 
 and red-hot pokers struck through them 
 according to occasion. Woe to the man that 
 carries either of these weapons, and does not 
 use it in their presence." 
 
 Sympathy with Emerson was extensive 
 jrather than intensive. His heart did not 
 sweat drops of blood over the battle-waging 
 and cross-dragging of mortal men. "Man- 
 kind's collected woe o'erwhelms me!" is not 
 one of his lines. "Heroic, angers" and love- 
 angers seldom perturb his tranquil spirit. 
 And yet be it remembered, not without sat- 
 isfaction, too, that more than once did he 
 descend into the arena of actual combat, and 
 shoot the "sun-arrows" into "the vile Pythons 
 of this Mud-World." Forget not, how, in 
 1851, he stumped his own Congressional dis- 
 
20 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 trict for a righteous cause braving the sneer 
 and laugh of the worldly wise, and the hissing 
 of the vulgarly foolish! Forget not his 
 valiant and scathing attack upon Webster, 
 for defending the Fugitive Slave Law! "All 
 the drops of his blood have eyes that look 
 downward, and his finely developed under- 
 standing only works truly and with all its 
 force when it stands for animal good, that is 
 for property." Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 
 voice of vision, of conscience and the future; 
 Daniel Webster, the voice of his present of 
 a blind leader of the blind who have no higher 
 aim than commercial gain and physical grat- 
 ification. 
 
 Let the writer indulge himself in one other 
 quotation illustrative of the courage and 
 vision of Emerson. It is the conclusion of 
 his speech prompted by the hanging of John 
 Brown, a speech that ought to rank among 
 the most precious jewels of the world's ora- 
 tory. "Nothing is more absurb than to com- 
 plain of this sympathy, or to complain of a 
 party of men united in opposition to Slavery. 
 As well complain of gravity, or the ebb 
 of the tide. Who makes the Abolitionist? 
 The slaveholder. The sentiment of mercy is 
 the natural recoil which the laws of the uni- 
 verse provide to protect mankind from des- 
 truction by savage passions. And our blind 
 Statesmen go up and down, with committees 
 of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin 
 of this new heresy. They will need a very 
 vigilant committee, indeed, to find its birth- 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 21 
 
 place, and a very strong force to root it out. 
 For the arch- Abolitionist, older than Brown, 
 and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, 
 is Love, whose other name is Justice, which 
 was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before 
 Slavery, and will be after it." 
 
 Carlyle carried into his work and life, in 
 large measure, the virtues and vices of the 
 Stoic. Self-sufficient pride, contempt, cen- 
 soriousness, even envy, were too manifestly 
 housed in his nature. Very trying, indeed, 
 nigh to meanness, are his reflections on some 
 of the noblest men of his time, especially on 
 his steadfast friend in America. 
 
 Macaulay's erudite, yet vivacious and 
 brilliant history was to him, "Flat, without 
 a ray of genius." Coleridge, that mystical 
 genius of dream and critical insight is a 
 "rotten hulk," "a poor, greedy, sensual 
 creature, who could not keep from his laud- 
 num bottle." And what of Wordsworth, the 
 author of "Intimations of Immortality," the 
 poet whom Emerson declared a seer of "the 
 truly great," a restorer of sanity to cultivated 
 society." What of Wordsworth? Why, this 
 "A genuine, but a small diluted man." 
 
 Referring to "The Nemesis of Faith," 
 written by the historian Froude, his intimate 
 friend, Carlyle pronounced it "not worth its 
 paper and ink," and asks "what on earth is 
 the use of a wretched mortal's vomiting up 
 all his inferior crudities, dubitations, and 
 Spiritual agonizing belly-aches into the view 
 
22 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 of the public, and howling tragically, 'See!' ' 
 John Stuart Mill was generally recognized 
 as a profound thinker, of marked toleration 
 and breadth of mind. Moreover, he was a 
 1 generous appreciator and encourager of con- 
 temporaries, especially of Herbert Spencer, 
 and Thomas Carlyle, himself. But while the 
 former, despite his public controversy with 
 Mill, paid him- high tribute, Carlyle made 
 him, on his death, the object of such splenetic 
 criticsim as this: speaking of his autobio- 
 graphy, he writes to brother John, that he 
 had not read "a sillier;" "wholly the life of a 
 logic-chopping engine. *** 
 I suppose it will deliver us from the cock-a- 
 leery crow about 'the Great Thinker of his 
 age/ " 
 
 But of all Carlyle' s captious and worm- 
 wood strictures on contempraries that upon 
 Emerson, who exerted himself so much to 
 prepare for him, in this "plastic" new world, 
 an appreciative public that upon Emerson 
 is about the most unforgivable. What shall 
 one say of his communicating to Duffy, the 
 young Irish revolutionist, such disparage- 
 ment of his faithful friend as this, that prac- 
 tically Emerson stole his "system" from 
 certain works of himself, and was only origi- 
 nal [verily, as Shakespeare, himself was 
 original] in working it up in his own way. 
 Then this ridiculing description and mimicry : 
 "He has a sharp, perking little face, and 
 keeps bobbing it up and down (so), with 
 'yissir, yissir' in answer to objections." Add 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 23 
 
 to the above the following: written, when 
 many of his own disciples were attending 
 Emerson's lectures? "Emerson is now in 
 England, in the North, lecturing to Mechan- 
 ics' Institutes, etc. ; in fact, though he knows 
 it not, to a kind of intellectual canaille. Came 
 here and stayed with us some days on his first 
 arrival. Very exotic; of smaller dimensions, 
 too, and differed much from me, as a gymno- 
 sophist sitting idle on a flowery bank may do 
 from a wearied worker and wrestler, passing 
 that way with many of his bones broken. 
 Good of him I could get none, except from 
 his friendly looks and elevated, exotic, polite 
 ways ; and he would not let me sit silent for a 
 minute. " The last observation approaches 
 the comic, when one remembers Carlyle's 
 fondness for doing the talking the most 
 copious talker anywhere, Mrs. Carlyle 
 thought until she fell in with Macaulay. (In 
 fact, Emerson preached "the divine wisdom 
 of silence" much less and practiced it much 
 more. In pessimistic and dyspeptic moods 
 Carlyle poured forth his harsh, sometimes 
 shallow, criticisms on his contemporaries, 
 and men in general. He despairs, rails and 
 cavils yea degenerates now and then into 
 the mere rhetorical termigant, indiscrimin- 
 ately scolding and fault-finding. 
 
 In all this how conspicuously unlike the 
 Chelsea Sage is the Sage of Concord. Hardly 
 could one be moved less to write or speak from 
 personal whim, prejudice, desire for victory 
 of argument or of wit any motive other than 
 
24 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 the supreme one of being a vehicle of God's 
 thought, expressed through him in his best 
 moods, which moods he conscientiously 
 watched for and utilized, so as to have as little 
 padding or desert wastes as possible in his 
 pages. Well-poised, serene, peering through 
 a personal atmosphere comparatively un- 
 clouded, he seldom, almost never, falls below 
 just and wholesome criticism. He may ir- 
 ritate a little by depreciative judgment, as, 
 for instance, his diary observations that 
 Alcott and Hawthorne " together would make 
 a man," and that our entrancing versifier, 
 Tennyson, is only "a beautiful half of a poet," 
 producing, "the poetry of an exquisite." But 
 never does he say mean things of his contem- 
 poraries. It is a marked beauty of his char- 
 acter, that he could so highly appreciate the 
 talent and work of others in the world; was, 
 withal, so modest and courteous in all his 
 relations to his fellowmen. The more praise- 
 worthy this, because though naturally fastid- 
 ious and shrinking from coarse and unculti- 
 vated natures, he yet disciplined himself to 
 treat all men as carrying divinity within. He 
 respected men everywhere; pronounced him 
 shallow "who rails at them and their con- 
 trivances." Quite in contrast to his friend 
 over the sea, he mastered the virtues of pa- 
 tience and forbearance, and came very nigh 
 attaining the wisdom expressed in his own 
 lines, 
 
 "Of all wit's uses, the main one 
 Is to live well with who has none." 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 25 
 
 Britain's seer never learned how to live 
 with common men, in fact to live with uncom- 
 mon men yea, how to live with himself. He 
 is wonderfully rich in all unrest and warlike 
 energy an old Thor, with iron glove and 
 mallet, shivering men's idols to smitherines, 
 the iclnoclast Whittier had in mind: 
 
 "All grim and soiled and brown with tan, 
 
 I saw a strong one, in his wrath, 
 Smiting the godless shrines of man 
 Along his path." 
 
 Emerson, be it said, is in the world, also, 
 with a sword. He knows what is amiss, but 
 he rights to set it right as one who sees a reas- 
 on for the enemy's side. His breadth of 
 vision and sympathy embrace the slave- 
 holder as well as the slave. He brings to 
 battle the spirit of cheerful prophecy, music, 
 and the cultured humanities. What finer 
 figure than that of Dr. Holmes? "Car- 
 lyle is an iconoclast with a hammer. Emerson 
 is an iconoclast without a hammer. He takes 
 down your idols so tenderly it seems an act 
 of worship." In either case, however, the 
 iconoclast each, sui generis, a "scourge and 
 minister" to his generation, cleanser divine of 
 earth's moral miasms. Brave and sincere, 
 with right royal disrelish of cant of whatso- 
 ever kind, neither of these seers will flatter 
 his countrymen, nor in anywise peddle cam- 
 paign sugar-pills. *They deal with the ve- 
 racities of life veracity of insight, veracity 
 
26 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 of speech. Of the one not less than the 
 other must it be said, 
 
 "He would not flatter Neptune for his trident, 
 Or Jove for his power to thunder." 
 
 In any critical estimate of these contempo- 
 rary writers, the question forces itself : Which 
 will have the broader influence, and better 
 stand the test of time ? This is not a question 
 easy to answer. 
 
 While both are intellectual and moral at- 
 mospheres of the highest tonic qualities, 
 Emerson is the purer and more inclusive of 
 the two. His vision sweeps over wider pros- 
 pects and relations; it detects divinity lurking 
 under more multifarious forms. Both aiming 
 to deal with subjects, not of local and tem- 
 porary, but of univeral and perennial interest, 
 Emerson realized more completely that aim. 
 His thought, too, is broader and juster, and 
 his style better adapted to make it the world's 
 currency. Above all, by reason of a gospel 
 more optimistic and inspiring, enforced with 
 a life of superior goodness and beauty, Emer- 
 son shall speak with greater authority among 
 the seers and prophets of the earth. From 
 birth he was baptized to the pure intellec- 
 tualities and spiritualities. No drop of his 
 blood pointed downward. The gods fash- 
 ioned him for victory on the higher levels of 
 life. And he lifts those who wish to be lifted, 
 not more by the power of his teachings than 
 by the power of his elevated personality. 
 To men, high or low, or of whatsoever 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 27 
 
 doctrine, he was a subtle and persuasive in- 
 fluence. After a visit, having parted from 
 Carlyle, the latter wrote in his diary, a most 
 pleasant contrast to his harsh criticism, !"I 
 saw him go up the hill ; I did not go with him 
 to see him descend. I preferred to watch him 
 mount, and vanish like an angel." To Father 
 Taylor, the Methodist sailor preacher, the 
 suggestion of his friend being sent to hell was 
 little less than absurd. "He must go to 
 heaven when he dies, for if he went to hell the 
 devil would not know what to do with him." 
 "But if he should go there, so sweet is his 
 character, that he would change the climate, 
 and emigration would set that way." Radical 
 as his attitude was, he yet very largely killed 
 out during his own life the prejudice against 
 him, by virtue of his exemplary personal 
 traits. 
 
 Once simply meeting and passing a few 
 words with this wise man, it was in his own 
 town and in his latter days, the impression 
 made upon the writer abides forever. I see 
 again his face with the flush of the Autumn 
 leaves in the woods, made sacred by his 
 visitations. I see that benignant smile play- 
 ing over his countenance, even as the last 
 beaming of the setting sun on the October 
 foliage of the maples. In that face shone 
 divine strength and repose, the imperishable 
 beauty of wisdom and virtue. Here, I said, 
 is the harmony of one who has made his 
 peace with God, with himself, with the 
 world of persons and things. 
 
28 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 In 1837 Emerson gave this advice: "Sit 
 apart, write; let them hear or let them for- 
 bear; the written word abides until slowly 
 and unexpectedly, and in widely sundered 
 places, it has created its own church." Faith- 
 fully the advisor kept the advice. And the 
 written word has created its own church. 
 With all joy and far-reaching hope I per- 
 ceive, amid the darker signs of the time, this 
 great sign of light, viz., that our foremost 
 seer of the "new world," and of the modern 
 age, is making, albeit slowly, his silent con- 
 quest of men and women, on two continents, 
 who really want to be liberated from the 
 bonds of the sensual and selfish. From 
 painstaking inquiry, I affirm, especially that 
 he is becoming a shaping influence in the 
 minds of the more enlightened of that class 
 in American society whose throne is the 
 pulpit. Thus shall his soul diffuse itself 
 among his countrymen, "from above down- 
 wards." 
 
 Thomas Carlyle was sent to the Old World 
 with the flaming sword of righteousness, to 
 wage valiant warfare against the unveracities 
 and wrong-goings of man; but the light of 
 truth emanating through him suffered dis- 
 coloration from his passionate prejudice and 
 dyspeptic, pessimistic temperament, There- 
 fore, 
 
 "God said, 
 
 I will have a purer gift ; 
 
 There is smoke in the flame." 
 
 To be that gift was sent to the New World 
 
Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 29 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson among modern men 
 of letters supremely endowed to be what 
 England's Matthew Arnold so discerningly 
 pronounced him to be "The Friend and 
 Aider of those who wish to live in the Spirit. " 
 Not an intellect of passionate demonstration, 
 of dynamic and dramatic imagination, of 
 contagious enthusiasm, yet there burned at 
 his altar a steady vestal flame of extensive 
 human sympathy. Sensitive and shrinking 
 from strife, tender of the rights of others, but 
 of such imperative sense of duty that none 
 spoke with more frank and manly directness 
 than he. What he saw to be true he bravely 
 set down, with naught of malice to any man. 
 So broadsighted that he could understand the 
 conservative's side, and wrap him along with 
 the radical in his ample mantle of charity. 
 The courage and heart of the reformer were 
 his, but not less also the humility and gentle- 
 ness of the saint. With the courtesy of the 
 true gentleman of the world he united the 
 independence, the simplicity, the unconven- 
 tional genuineness of solitude. 
 
 Regenerative eclectic spirit of the world's 
 literature! The calm, peering gaze and self- 
 surrender of the Hindoo sage, the wide-sweep- 
 ing vision of Plato, the sterling common sense 
 of the New England Yankee, the poetic, mys- 
 tical spirit of the Orient, the practical, ethical 
 spirit of the Occident these meet in him. 
 Who has preserved finer equilibrium between 
 the patriotic and the cosmopolitan, between the 
 real and the ideal, liberty and obedience, the 
 
30 Carlyle and Emerson: a Contrast 
 
 nay and the yea, "the waster and the builder, 
 too"? Feet on the earth, head in the serene 
 and silent eternities, his "go-cart hitched to 
 a star" thus he lived and worked his allotted 
 time with men, though, as it were, veiled 
 from them by a diviner atmosphere, suggest- 
 ing seraphic personalities of some city of God 
 "not made with hands, eternal in the heav- 
 ens." 
 
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