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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