THE FACT OF CHRIST
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, y, 6d. 
 
 LONDON : HODDER AND STOUGHTON
 
 THE 
 
 FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 A Series of Lectures 
 
 BY 
 
 P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON, M.A. 
 
 MINISTER OP RENFIELO CHURCH, GLASGOW 
 
 POPULAR EDITION 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 PUBLISHERS, LONDON
 
 TRANSLATIONS OF 'THE FACT OF CHRIST.' 
 
 French. 
 
 Le Fait du Christ. P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON. Tra- 
 duit de 1'Anglais par le Dr. Maurice Dusolier. Paris : 
 Librairie Fischbacher, 1907. 
 
 Italian. 
 
 II Fatto di Cristo. P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON, M.A. 
 Conferenze tradotte dall' inglese da Enrico Rivoire. 
 Firenze : Tipografia Claudiana, 1908. 
 
 Spanish. 
 
 Jesu-Cristo: su realidad y su significado. Una 
 serie de Conferencias por P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON, 
 M.A. Traducido del Ingles. Buenos Aires: im- 
 prenta de J. H. Kidd & Cia. , 1905. 
 
 Norwegian. 
 
 Kjendsgjerningen Jesus Kristus. P. CARNEGIE 
 SIMPSON. Autoriseret oversaettelse ved Clara Thue 
 Ebbell. Med Forord af Stiftsprovst Gustav Jensen. 
 Kristiania : forlagt af H. Aschehoug & Co., 1906. 
 
 German. 
 
 (In active preparation.) 
 
 Also in Japanese and Chinese.
 
 Co mg Wife 
 
 2212427
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 MOB 
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY ... 3 
 
 II 
 
 WHAT is THE FACT OF CHRIST ? . 17 
 
 HI 
 
 THE FIRST MEANING OF THE FACT . . ji 
 
 L The Christian Character . . 55 
 
 u. The Moral Motive-Power . . .66 
 
 IV 
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING OF THE FACT . . 87 
 
 i. The Foundation of Faith . . .90 
 
 H. 'And the Word was God 1 . , , log
 
 viu THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 V 
 
 FAGB 
 
 THE FINAL MEANING OF THE FACT . , .123 
 
 i. The Reality of Sin . . . 127 
 
 ii. The Problem of Forgiveness . . 138 
 
 Addendum : The Principles of the Atonement . 1 54 
 
 VI 
 
 WHAT is A CHRISTIAN ? . . .171
 
 I 
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY
 
 'Christui ist nicht dcr Lchrer wie man zu sagen pflegt, 
 Christus nicht der Stifterj er ist der Inhalt des Christen- 
 thuim.' Sc HELLING.
 
 I 
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 WHEN the greatest religious Master whom the 
 world has ever known put one day to His first 
 disciples a certain question, and, on receiving an 
 answer to it, declared that on the strength of 
 this He could build His Church, it is evident that 
 here is to be found what He regarded as the 
 critical issue for religion and its proper point 
 of departure. To state the religious problem as 
 Jesus stated it is surely the most hopeful way of 
 approaching the subject not only of Christianity, 
 but also of religion generally, on which He is 
 the indisputably supreme authority. 
 
 It surprises us, however, when we look at what 
 this question was. The occasion referred to is, 
 of course, the scene near Caesarea Philippi, when 
 Jesus asked His disciples, ' Whom say yc that 
 I am ? ' The question is a notable one, but it
 
 4 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 astonishes us that it should be treated as a funda- 
 mental one. The inherent truth of a teacher's 
 message would always appear to be a more im- 
 portant matter than anything, however interesting, 
 about the teacher himself. We should there- 
 fore expect that the question which Jesus would 
 regard as of decisive importance for religion 
 would be about some cardinal theological belief 
 such as : Do you believe in the Father in heaven ? 
 or some primary ethical principle, such as : Do 
 you accept the law of the Sermon on the Mount ? 
 This is what we should expect. But the question 
 was not of this kind. It was not about God nor 
 about morals. It was a question simply about 
 Jesus Himself. It was neither theological nor 
 ethical, but personal. And this was the question 
 upon an answer to which Jesus declared, with 
 energy and enthusiasm, that His Church would 
 be built. The fact is a very remarkable one, and 
 we cannot too carefully impress its significance 
 upon our minds. This greatest of religious 
 teachers forms His religion for the building 
 of His Church cannot be less than that from 
 His followers' convictions regarding Himself. 
 What appears to be an irrelevancy to religion
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 5 
 
 the personality of the preacher He makes its 
 very root. It is to put the same thing in other 
 words to say that Jesus directed men to find the 
 data for Christianity primarily and essentially in 
 the phenomenon of Himself. 
 
 If such r. statement seem to need further evidence 
 than a single incident, that evidence is not far to 
 seek. It is found in the whole of the didactic 
 method of Jesus, which was such as no other 
 religious teacher has ever adopted. That, accord- 
 ing to the records, the strikingly distinctive thing 
 about the way Jesus taught and traineoS His 
 followers is that He so persistently and energeti- 
 cally presented Himself to them is a thesis that 
 is now almost a commonplace in any trustworthy 
 discussion of the subject. It strikes even the 
 casual reader of the Gospels ; all the more will 
 it do so if he compares with the manner and 
 method of Jesus as a teacher, the manner and 
 method of Moses or Isaiah or John the Baptist, 
 or if he opens his Plato or the Koran. All other 
 great teachers are profoundly conscious that they 
 are but pointing to a realm of truth, and all 
 the more if they are truly great teachers they 
 efface themselves before its eternal principles.
 
 6 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Alone, absolutely alone, among leaders of the 
 soul, Jesus absorbs the highest principles into 
 His own personality. To the seeker after eternal 
 life He said ' Follow Me ' ; of one who would 
 see the Father, He asked, * Hast thou not known 
 Me ? ' No other teacher has ever dared thus. 
 Who else has said of truth, not that he teaches 
 it, but that it is he ; of the vision of God, not 
 that he has found it, but that it is in the sight 
 of himself ; of that which supplies all man's need 
 of rest, of spiritual food, of strength, of pardon, 
 not that he can point to it, but that it is all in 
 him ? Not Moses so spake nor the prophets ; not 
 Plato nor the Buddha nor Mahomet. But Jesus 
 spoke thus. He did so habitually, deliberately, 
 pronouncedly. There is no doubt about this, and 
 it differentiates Him as a teacher from all other 
 teachers. Others know they are but messengers 
 of truth ; He is also the message. They are but 
 torchbearers ; He called Himself * the Light of 
 the world.' They point to truth ; He said, 
 * Come unto Me.* All this is the unique note 
 of Jesus' teaching. In His training of His dis- 
 ciples we see it .carried on systematically and step 
 by step so distinctly that an intelligent reader
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 7 
 
 perceives that the conversation at Caesarea Philippi 
 was not incidental, but a carefully planned climax, 
 and therefore its result so gladly welcomed a 
 consummation. 
 
 So Jesus, who came to preach religion, deliber- 
 ately and distinctly did so by making men 
 'think of Himself. As a German author of in- 
 sight says, ' He knew no more sacred task than 
 to point men to His own person.' 1 He came 
 not to elaborate a system of theology or ethics 
 but to introduce Himself to men's minds and 
 hearts, and left men with the question, not, ^What 
 think ye of this doctrine or that principle ? ' but, 
 * What think ye of Christ ? ' And this means 
 that, as has been said, Jesus directs us to find 
 the data for Christianity primarily and essentially 
 in the phenomenon of Himself, not in His ideas, 
 His teaching, His example merely, but in the fact 
 of Christ. To quote another eminent German 
 authority one of the most careful of examiners 
 and a critic unbiassed towards orthodoxy Keim 
 after saying that * the religion of Christ goes 
 mysteriously back to His person/ adds, * this 
 fundamental fact alone enables us to understand 
 
 1 Herrmann's Der Vtrkekr dit LAmten mit Gett, Eng. trans., p. 76
 
 8 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 the religion which sprang from it. i To under- 
 stand Christianity then is, in at least the first 
 place, to * think of Christ to say how our mind 
 and heart and conscience regard Him. The 
 philosophical mind, especially in the period known 
 as the Aufkl'drung, discusses Christianity, Jesus 
 apart, as the manifestation of eternal truths of the 
 reason ; and that, no doubt, it is. The modern, 
 practical mind discusses it mainly as a moral motive 
 and ideal; and these too doubtless it is. But 
 these were not the ways in which Jesus bade men 
 approach the subject. His direction to any one 
 who would consider the problem of religion was, 
 in effect if not always literally, the question of 
 Caesarea Philippi. And, be it remembered, He is 
 the greatest Master of religion that the world has 
 known. 
 
 Now here is nothing less than a revolution in 
 the whole study of the problem of religion. That 
 problem, which bewilders and baffles the quest of 
 the human spirit that is ever athirst for God, is 
 here restated in terms which we can hardly believe 
 to be sufficient because they are so simple. This 
 restatement has never been sufficiently regarded, 
 
 1 Jesu ven Nazara, i. 448.
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 9 
 
 considering the authority of its source ; certainly 
 it never more needed to be regarded than to-day. 
 
 There are two notable and significant features 
 in the condition of the question of religion at 
 present, one on either side of the question. On 
 the one side, unbelief has very markedly settled 
 down into agnosticism. On the other side, 
 Christendom, more perhaps than ever, is confused 
 and contradictory as to what Christianity most 
 simply and essentially is. A slight survey of 
 these features will, I think, show that^both of 
 them have, at least in part, arisen because we have 
 not approached the discussion of Christianity as 
 its Author directed us to do. 
 
 Unbelief has, in our day, settled down into 
 agnosticism. We are no longer in the days of 
 Voltaire. We are no longer in the days even 
 of the Deists, and hardly any one reads now 
 Shaftesbury or Toland or Bolingbroke. Nor, if 
 we are to have a religion at all, is there at present 
 any serious rival to Christianity. Vagaries such 
 as Neo-Buddhism make conversation rather than 
 converts. But these facts do not mean that the 
 age is agreeing to Christian faith. They mean 
 rather a more settled refusal of it. An opposition
 
 io THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 that contended, however fiercely, that Christianity 
 was false might always possibly be overcome ; but 
 an unbelief which submits, however courteously, 
 that Christianity is futile, because the whole topic 
 of religion is beyond human ken, is a far subtler 
 foe. It is the latter which is the mental mood of 
 very many in our time. They do not virulently 
 deny ; in many cases they long to believe. But 
 they are agnostic ; that is, they do not know. 
 No one surely knows. Religious faith is no more 
 than it was in Socrates' days a thing of 'fair 
 hopes.' It all seems far away, uncertain, unknown 
 and probably unknowable. I am referring not so 
 much to any philosophical statement of agnosti- 
 cism, but rather to the general uncertain attitude 
 towards religion of many a thinking man and 
 woman. Among such, a mental attitude of this 
 kind is very often to be found, and one serious 
 thing about it is that with the generality of people, 
 and despite not a few notable examples to the 
 contrary, where religious faith becomes a mere 
 perhaps, moral strenuousness is in danger of 
 becoming a counsel of perfection. 
 
 But what is the reason of this uncertainty, this 
 agnosticism? The reason is just that men more
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 11 
 
 than ever feel the difficulty, the impossibility of 
 answering at all the great questions of God and the 
 soul. The origin and meaning of the universe 
 are something so far and vast, and life is some- 
 thing so complex, that we cannot say much about 
 them on the religious side. Nature we can know, 
 but, though Nature stretches out to the Infinite, 
 we cannot see what meets her there. The battle 
 of faith and unbelief Bishop Butler or Paley 
 notwithstanding was always an inconclusive one, 
 and now less than ever are men able to^take as 
 decided in the affirmative the problems of God, 
 of revelation, of freedom, of immortality. These 
 questions are beyond us. Who knows ? And the 
 more serious read their Herbert Spencer and make 
 their agnosticism a philosophy, the more shallow 
 their Omar Khayyam and make it a pleasure, and 
 many, many a seeking soul is left unsatisfied. 
 
 Now to every such an one be his agnosticism 
 intellectually self-satisfied, sensually self-indulgent, 
 or neither of these, but only sad comes the 
 great Master of the soul with His revolutionary 
 restatement of the problem of religion. What 
 He says, in effect, is this. You say you cannot 
 answer the great question of God ; it is beyond
 
 12 
 
 your ken. Well, here is the way in which to 
 approach this question ; what is your attitude 
 towards Me? Now, whatever else this question 
 may be, it is at least this it is answerable. Your 
 agnosticism cannot apply here. If the being of 
 God is beyond your ken, the fact of Christ is not. 
 He is a fact of history, cognisable as any other 
 phenomenon. And your mental and moral con- 
 clusions on this answerable question are the true 
 beginnings of an answer to the apparently inscrut- 
 able problem of religion. 
 
 Thus does Jesus so restate the religious problem 
 as to make it at least answerable. He calls it 
 from the region of the inscrutable to that of the 
 positive. This is the practical answer of Chris- 
 tianity, as Jesus presented it, to agnosticism. 
 The late G. H. Lewes in his History of Philosophy 
 dismisses religion from the realm of verifiable 
 knowledge because 'it confesses its inability to 
 furnish Knowledge with any available data.' * 
 With the Christian religion, according to the 
 method of Jesus, the reverse is the case. He 
 furnished his followers with the most patent and 
 accessible of data the person standing before 
 
 * Voi. i. p, if.
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 13 
 
 them. The data of His religion were and are 
 in a positive fact. What are the data? Un- 
 verinable sentiments or ideas in the inscrutable 
 region of faith ? Not so. * Whom say ye that 
 I am?* 'What think ye of Christ?' 'I am 
 the truth.' * Come unto Me.' Here are the 
 data of Christianity. They are in an historical 
 person, a fact as available as any other fact. 
 Jesus drove agnosticism into the open when He 
 declared that the data of religion are in the fact 
 of Christ. 
 
 Of course it does not necessarily or] immedi- 
 ately follow that by driving it into the open He 
 has defeated it. Even a fair and honest facing of 
 the fact of Christ may not be sufficient to take us 
 to a religious faith. That, of course, remains to 
 be seen. But one may just now ask this : how many 
 of those who assume an agnostic attitude about 
 religion have tested this method? I mean how 
 many of them have honestly brought their minds 
 and hearts and consciences face to face with the 
 fact of Christ, and candidly considered if it means 
 anything to them for religion ? It is impossible 
 to say that no one has the right to be an agnostic. 
 But no one has the right to be an agnostic till he
 
 I 4 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 thus dealt with the question the certainly answer- 
 able question which Jesus regarded as the critical 
 issue and the true starting-point in the matter of 
 religion. Let us not give up if we are in earnest 
 we shall not give up the great question of 
 religion without being quite sure that there is no 
 help to be got from the method of the great 
 Master of religion. If an agnostic would be 
 honest, he must spend some serious days at 
 Caesarea Philippi ; after that, he may be an 
 agnostic if he can. 
 
 If the method of Jesus in stating the problem 
 of religion has thus a direct bearing on the agnostic 
 tendency which is one marked feature of the mind 
 of the day, not less direct is its bearing on the 
 other. To believe it is not the only difficulty 
 about Christianity to a present day inquirer ; the 
 other and almost greater difficulty is to discover 
 it. For Christendom is full of Christianities, and 
 to say what simply and essentially is the Christian 
 religion is one of the problems of the nineteenth 
 Christian century. The evidence of this is mani- 
 fold ; it appears alike within and without the pale 
 of the Church. 
 
 Looking without that pale, we cannot fail to be
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 15 
 
 struck with this feature in the most serious and 
 influential modern criticism of Christianity that 
 it is, or at least professes to be, not destructive 
 but reconstructive. It desires not the ruin of 
 Christianity, but its rescue. It comes not to 
 destroy, but to deliver. It would give us the true 
 and simple and pure Christian religion in place of 
 the beclouded and corrupt tradition of the centuries. 
 Christianity, it declares, has yet to be born, or at 
 least must be born again ; criticism comes not to 
 follow its obsequies but to attend its/ rebirth, for 
 at its first birth it was strangled in its cradle. In 
 this spirit and with this aim, so their authors assure 
 us, are written to name two popular examples 
 Literature arid Dogma and Robert Elsmerc. 
 
 I hope it may be said without offence that to 
 one with any grave historical sense there is some- 
 thing about this that savours a little of what might 
 be described as intellectual nouvelle richesse. To 
 propose to take down the structure of a Chris- 
 tianity that has stood for centuries, and to rebuild 
 it largely anew, to allege that the main idea of 
 the thing has been radically misconstrued, and 
 needs to be stated afresh, to say that the lines laid 
 down and followed by St. John and St. Paul, by
 
 16 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, are largely mislead- 
 ing and a new direction must at this hour of the 
 day be taken one cannot help feeling that all this, 
 like the philosophy of a man who has struck oil, 
 lacks historic background. Under what a melan- 
 choly mistake have these nineteen centuries been 
 labouring 1 On what a false scent those apostles 
 put us 1 We are all der allies we are off the rails I 
 What a pity that St. John, * who was so much 
 more metaphysical than his Master,' was ever 
 allowed to write about Him, or that St. Paul, 
 whom the older rationalism held to be the ' real 
 creator of Christianity,' appeared just at the critical 
 formative moment he did in Christian history I 
 And how thankful we should be that now, at 
 last, such a clever and still ingenuous man as the 
 author of Literature and Dogma has come to put 
 them and us right, and that such a gifted and 
 one must add, most earnest lady as the writer of 
 Robert Elsmere has shown us, in so unquestion- 
 ably interesting and also eminently convenient a 
 way, how the old construction of Christianity is 
 (in fiction) so helpless after half an hour of squire- 
 archical talk, and the new is (in fiction) so regene- 
 rating a power in East London. These recon-
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 17 
 
 structions have many aspects of value, for the 
 Church is constantly in danger of being a slave to 
 its past and of thinking that a quotation from a 
 Father or a confession is the final word of truth. 
 But it does not do to put a fool's cap on the 
 history of the Christian religion. 
 
 Nevertheless, the popularity which attends re- 
 constructions of Christianity that thus profess to 
 give us the simple and true reading of it, is very 
 significant. It is significant of an uncertainty as 
 to what Christianity is and how far the traditional 
 version of it is to be trusted as genuine. v \This is 
 a marked feature of the mind of our time, which, 
 in many quarters, is much disposed to echo the 
 well-known dictum that the Christian religion has 
 now been tried for eighteen centuries but tlV 
 religion of Christ remains to be tried. Much 
 of the most popular religious criticism of the day 
 is just the attempt to give us, in its simplest and 
 purest form, an answer to the question : What is 
 the religion of Christ ? 
 
 The difficulty of answering this question does 
 not appear to be lessened it appears rather to be 
 increased when we pass from without to within the 
 ecclesiastical pale. The inquirer is now bewildered 
 
 a
 
 1 8 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 by variant voices. That the world has been 
 divided into two camps on the indubitably difficult 
 question of whether Christianity be true is not 
 wonderful ; what is wonderful is that the professed 
 Christian authorities have been divided into sects 
 and schools upon the apparently simple question 
 of what Christianity is. It is bound up, in one 
 view of it, with an ecclesiastical rite, in another 
 with dogmatic belief, in a third with the morality 
 of a man's conduct, and in yet a fourth with his 
 inward experiences of faith and a 'new birth.' 
 One director will ask you about your baptism, 
 another about your conversion ; this one will 
 speak exclusively of the death of Jesus, that one 
 of your own life. Nor do these various guides of 
 the soul agree to regard their views as all different 
 aspects of one truth. On the contrary, of active 
 purpose and in express terms, will they exclude 
 each other. * He that believeth not shall be con- 
 demned ' the anathema, though usually in less 
 direct language, is as familiar as its application is 
 varied. Believeth not what ? The authority of 
 the Church, the necessity of the sacraments, the 
 assertions of the creeds, the doctrine of the Atone- 
 ment, the need of regeneration by the Spirit, the
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 19 
 
 all-importance of moral life ? In the household 
 of Christians and about the simplest essentials of 
 Christianity arises a strife of tongues to not only 
 the confusion of truth, but also, not seldom, the 
 extinction of charity. 
 
 And nowhere does this appear more significantly 
 than in the great and enduring conflict between 
 faith and unbelief. Here in the face of the com- 
 mon foe, one might expect that Christians could 
 agree upon a method of attack and concentrate 
 upon the really vital points of defence. It is far 
 from being so. One section is ever accusing the 
 other of imperilling the kernel with the husk, and, 
 in turn, is accused by the other of sacrificing 
 everything by surrendering the shell. Does 
 Christianity go if the infallibility of the Church 
 goes, or the inerrancy of the Bible ; if the dogmas 
 of the creed go, or miracles, or the ' doctrines of 
 grace ' ? Christendom answers ' Yes * and answers 
 also * No.' It is all very perplexing to plain- 
 minded men who, in the din of battle, never are 
 sure whether they need to tremble for the ark of 
 God or not ; and it is not less exasperating to 
 zealous opponents of Christian belief to be so 
 often told that some point which they have
 
 20 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 assailed with all their energies is not even within 
 the real field of battle. The result is 
 
 ' Confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
 Where ignorant armies clash by night.' * 
 
 False issues, vain victories and defeats what 
 examples of these are to be found in the records 
 of the Christian controversy 1 Sometimes it may 
 have been, intellectually or otherwise, magnificent ; 
 often it has been miserable. But it is not war. 
 It is not the war between truth and error, light 
 and darkness, faith and unbelief. 
 
 In all this confusion, the voice of Jesus, as 
 He asks the question of Cassarea Philippi, falls 
 on our ears with peculiar significance. Amid 
 all your reconstructions and all your versions, 
 He seems to say, here is the question. What 
 do you say of Me? What is your attitude to 
 Me ? Criticism must not banish nor the Church 
 bury these issues. If you would find Christianity, 
 find it in Me in what I am and mean to your 
 mind and . heart and conscience. So Jesus seems 
 to speak to us. The direction is surely, for 
 every reason, to be followed. It is from the 
 ultimate authority, for I do not imagine that 
 
 Matthew Arnold, Drvtr R**tk.
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 11 
 
 any one proposes to reconstruct the Christianity 
 of Jesus : it appeals to us distinctly and directly : 
 it is full of intellectual and moral interest. 
 And thus the Master whose restatement of the 
 problem of religion makes it to the agnostic 
 answerable, makes it also, by the same means, 
 to the inquirer clear clear, that is to say, not 
 indeed in the sense of easily fathomable, but 
 in that of being neither misconceived nor con- 
 fused. The inquirer knows at least his data 
 and can begin. He knows where Christianity 
 is, if not yet what it is; or, to put it at the 
 least, he knows where was its spring. Unsatis- 
 fied, perplexed, perhaps even repelled by the 
 many Christianities he finds around him, he can 
 * lift up his eyes unto the hills ' where Christianity 
 took its rise. It took its rise not in a philo- 
 sophic school, theological or ethical, not in an 
 ecclesiastical system, not in a social or political 
 proposal. It took its rise in men being brought 
 face to face with a certain phenomenon the 
 fact of the person of Jesus Christ. There, 
 indubitably, are the original data of Christianity. 
 Whatever may be said of the building, there is 
 the authentic site.
 
 ii THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 The first business in any inquiry is to deter- 
 mine your data. It appears, then, that, according 
 to Jesus, the data of Christianity are to be sought 
 for in the fact of Himself. If we would follow 
 His method, we must begin there. We must 
 not start from theological ideas or ethical pre- 
 cepts, but from a fact the fact of Christ. We 
 must examine what that fact is, and what it 
 means. This is the way of rightly, clearly and 
 simply learning Christianity and the way, at the 
 same time, of attacking the problem of religion 
 itself. The data of Christianity are in the fact 
 of Christ. 
 
 In words, this may appear to be satisfactory 
 enough. But an obvious reflection occurs to 
 our minds and seems to invalidate its whole 
 religious value. Is not this fact of Christ a 
 fact of nineteen hundred years ago? Possibly 
 to those who stood before Him, Jesus presented 
 Himself in the way that has been indicated and 
 thereby was of immediate religious significance 
 to them. But how can it be identically so with 
 us to-day? What truly and properly religious 
 value for us is there in a figure, however 
 wonderful, of centuries past? It is present,
 
 THE DATA OF CHRISTIANITY 23 
 
 Jiving truths of the spirit that religion demands. 
 Such truths may be in the teaching of Jesus, 
 and there therefore may be data for religion. 
 But is this insistence on the fact of Jesus Him- 
 self really religious ? How can religion, which 
 is other than historical and theological or ethical 
 opinion, find its data there? It may be our 
 misfortune, but is it not an inevitable mis- 
 fortune, that we cannot even if the first dis- 
 ciples could and did base our religion thus? 
 To examine this fact of Christ may lead us to 
 historical and other conclusions \ but to religion 
 how ? The data of religion can be only the 
 eternal truths of spiritual life present and living 
 in the soul. 
 
 The question thus raised which finds its most 
 authoritative expression in the opinion so fre- 
 quently insisted upon by Hegel, that the content 
 of Christianity is to be manifested by philosophy 
 and not by history is one we cannot and need 
 not here discuss at length. At present we are 
 concerned with it only as regards this point : 
 does the fact of Christ being (as of course it is) 
 one of past history prevent it from containing 
 to the mind and heart and conscience that examine
 
 24 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 it, real data for religion ? Well, let us sec. Let 
 us not prejudge this. We know the original 
 site ; let us examine for ourselves whether or 
 not for us it is still available. The original site 
 of Christianity is the fact of Christ. What is this 
 fact of Christ ? 
 
 To some, even this question may seem value- 
 less so intricately is it involved in philosophical 
 presuppositions and party prejudice. The mists 
 of controversy may appear to have settled too 
 densely on the Galilean hills. Let us not be 
 deterred easily by these difficulties. Let us not 
 so despair of what a plain intelligence and an 
 honest will can still find about this great fact. 
 We shall at least try this. ' The question whether 
 anything can be known,' says a master among 
 those that know, * is to be settled not by arguing 
 but by trying.' l 
 
 1 Bacon's Nov. Org.,prqfati.
 
 n 
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT OF CHRIST?
 
 ' Auctoi nominis ejus Christut Tiberio imperitante pet 
 procuratorein Pentium Pilatum supplicio affectus crat.' 
 
 TACITUS.
 
 II 
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT OF CHRIST? 
 
 JESUS CHRIST is, beyond all reasonable question, 
 the greatest man who ever lived. The greatness 
 of a man is to be estimated by two things: 
 first, by the extent of his influence upon man- 
 kind ; and, secondly, for no one is altogether 
 great who is not also good by the purity and 
 dignity of his character. Tried by both these 
 tests, Jesus is supreme among men. He is at 
 once the most influential and the best of man- 
 kind. 
 
 We are concerned at present with the fact of 
 Jesus Himself, with therefore the latter rather 
 than the former of the two qualities just named. 
 We are concerned with His character rather 
 than what He has done. As to the unparalleled 
 impression that He has made on human life and
 
 28 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 history, I shall content myself by quoting a 
 weighty sentence from Mr. Lecky's History of 
 European Morals. The * three short years* of 
 the active life of Jesus have, says Mr. Lecky, 
 'done more to regenerate and to soften man- 
 kind than all the disquisitions of philosophers 
 and all the exhortations of moralists.' * If this 
 statement be true and who will dispute it? 
 then the secular, historical greatness is unparalleled 
 of the man whom a Roman historian dismissed 
 in a sentence and a Greek satirist with a sneer. 1 
 
 Not less emphatically was He the supreme 
 man in the realm of moral character. It were 
 an easy task to compare Him in this respect 
 with any other saint or hero of history and 
 show He was morally better. To do this would 
 be, however, but to say the least part of the 
 truth about the character of Jesus. Let us state 
 the complete truth at once. He had not simply 
 less sin and more virtue than others. His 
 supremacy is not comparative. It is absolute. 
 Jesus is the stainless man, the one sinless human 
 being. 
 1 Vol. H. p. 9 . 
 
 1 Vide the quotation from Tacitu* (<Annales, i. 15, 44) prefixed 
 to this lecture. Lucian (De Morte Ptrtgrini, xi.) calls Jesus pryo.* 
 ironically.
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT? 29 
 
 To prove a negative is always difficult ; to prove 
 it absolutely often an impossibility. It is obviously 
 an impossibility absolutely to demonstrate that the 
 life and character of any man are entirely stainless 
 But in the case of Jesus the witness is as strong 
 as the very nature of the thing to be proved can 
 possibly admit. His enemies are witnesses to it 
 With all their ingenuity of hate and malice, never 
 once did they dare to prefer against Him any 
 moral charge, and insinuations such as that * this 
 man receiveth sinners and eateth with them * fell 
 harmless upon Him. His friends are witnesses. 
 They described Him as ' separate from sinners. 1 
 They were orthodox Jews, steeped in the doctrine 
 that ' there is none righteous, no, not one.' But 
 they were compelled to contradict themselves. 
 ' Yes, one,* they said against their scriptures ; * He 
 did no sin.' And we too are witnesses of the 
 stainless perfection of the character of Jesus. For 
 His friends have given us about Him far more 
 than a vague eulogy. They have given us 
 accounts, short indeed but particularised, of His 
 life. They do not merely affirm His stainlessness, 
 which were easy. They exhibit it, which it were 
 simply impossible to do except from the life. We
 
 30 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 have there what Jesus said and did in all kinds of 
 circumstances and on all manner of occasions in 
 public and private, in the sunshine of success and 
 the gloom of failure, in the houses of His friends 
 and in face of His foes, in life and in the last 
 great trial of death. It is the detailed picture of a 
 man who never made a false step, never said the 
 word that ought not to have been said, never, in 
 short, fell below perfection. Such a portrait is of 
 necessity a true portrait. It simply cannot be an 
 idealised picture. That which is so above human 
 criticism is not less above our conception. * It is 
 no use,' says the sane and acute J. S. Mill, * to say 
 that Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not 
 historical, and that we know not how much of 
 what is admirable has been superadded by the 
 traditions of His followers.' * It is no use because, 
 as Mill goes on to ask, who among His disciples 
 or their proselytes who, he might have asked, 
 among the poets and dramatists of the world ? 
 is * capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to 
 Jesus or of imagining the life and character 
 revealed in the Gospels ? ' l Artistic inspiration is a 
 fine thing ; but it is simply nonsense * it is no 
 
 * Ikru Euayt t* Reltgim, p. jjj.
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT t 31 
 
 use* to say that it reached such an unheard-of 
 height in four Jewish writers of the first century 
 as to enable them, and all of them harmoniously, 
 to draw from their imaginations the lines and 
 colours, the lights and shades of the life of the 
 perfect man. But they did it. Only one thing 
 accounts for their being able to do it. That is 
 simply veracity. They had a model and they 
 copied it faithfully. And because, first, the model 
 was faultless, the reproduction, being faithful, was 
 perfect too. 
 
 Our inquiry, then, as to what Jesus was receives 
 its first emphatic and astounding answer in an 
 assertion of something that He was not. He was 
 not a sinner. And this at once introduces and 
 explains to us that mysterious aloneness in Jesus 
 by which He who was the friend and brother of 
 the humblest is, nevertheless, in another category 
 from the best and greatest. The difficulty of 
 realising the true place of Jesus among men is that 
 of bringing Him into actual comparison with them, 
 for He has impressed the imagination, not only to 
 a degree, but also in a way that no other man has 
 done. Instinctively we do not class Him with 
 others. When one reads His name in a list
 
 32 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 beginning with Confucius and ending with Goethe 
 we feel it is an offence less against orthodoxy than 
 against decency. Jesus is not one of the group 
 of the world's great. Talk about Alexander the 
 Great and Charles the Great and Napoleon the 
 Great if you will. Jesus was as has been said, 
 from even the secular point of view incomparably 
 greater than any of these ; yet, who would speak 
 of Jesus the Great ? Jesus is apart. He is not 
 the Great : He is the Only. He is simply Jesus. 
 Nothing could add to that. 
 
 This aloneness of Jesus appears in two ways, or, 
 rather, has two degrees. First, His whole manner 
 betrays that His moral experience and that of 
 other men were not parallel. He who so search- 
 ingly told others of the evil within their hearts 
 made no confession for Himself. He who gave 
 the despairing sinner every other token of brother- 
 hood, never spoke as if He Himself had been in 
 the same case. He who was so morally sensitive 
 that He has become the supreme conscience of 
 mankind, yet challenged men to convict Him of 
 sin. All this reveals a singularness by which 
 He is not only ' separate from sinners,' but is also 
 distinct from the saints. The saints among men
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT ? 33 
 
 all tell us how they reached sanctity, if at all, only 
 from below, having toiled with tears and prayers 
 up the bitter path of repentance to a newness of 
 life. The Psalms tell us that, and the Confessions, 
 and the De Imitations ; the whole company of 
 holy and humble men of heart tell us that. But 
 Jesus never tells us that. 
 
 And this is not all. There is a second thing about 
 this strange moral aloneness of Jesus something, 
 not negative, but positive. Not only did Jesus 
 never betray a sense of any moral imperfection or 
 moral need, but, further, He regarded Himself as 
 the sufficer of all others' need. This was referred 
 to in the last lecture ; it needs no elaboration, for 
 it can hardly be denied, and the most laboured 
 exposition of it cannot be more expressive than the 
 simplest statement. Listen to this voice : * If any 
 man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink ' ; 
 * Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy 
 laden, and I will give you rest.' The quotations 
 suffice. They reveal one who not only is Himself 
 without moral distress, but can aid all distress. 
 Others are lost sheep ; He is not only not lost, 
 but is the shepherd. Others are sick ; He is not 
 only in health, but is the physician. Others' lives
 
 34 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 arc forfeit ; His is not only His own, but is the 
 ransom. Others all others are sinners ; He 
 not only is not a sinner, but is a Saviour. 
 
 These are things that cannot but impress pro- 
 foundly every candid and earnest mind. There 
 is nothing else like them in the whole range of 
 human nature. And they are not exaggerated 
 dogmas of orthodoxy; they are conclusions of 
 the most modern criticism. The most remarkable 
 feature of religious scholarship in recent times 
 is the study of the Jesus of nineteen hundred 
 years ago. In the Christian centuries His per- 
 sonal figure had been largely lost sight of and 
 His human face hid behind the clouds of mystic 
 devotion or the drapings of dogma. In the 
 Romish church Jesus was the vision of a far 
 face whose painful beauty won the wistful adora- 
 tion of the rapt religious, but whose living form, 
 as He was in Galilee, was hardly seen in the day- 
 light of thought and life ; to the Protestant He 
 was too easily an official personage, the executor 
 of certain functions, rather than the Son of Man. 
 From both of these have men in our day turned 
 to ask, with a new earnestness, in the name, not 
 only, nor perhaps even mainly, of religion, but
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT? 35 
 
 of history, the old demand : ' We would see 
 Jesus? The demand has had a remarkable 
 response. The historical spirit, which during 
 the past half century has profoundly influenced 
 almost every department of knowledge, has 
 affected none more markedly than the study of 
 Christianity, and, in particular, of the life and 
 character and person of Jesus. Biographies of 
 Jesus have appeared in great numbers, written 
 from all points of view ; critical research has been 
 lavished on every historical aspect of the question ; 
 His teaching, work, career, and personality have 
 been studied and appreciated as never before. 
 The result, it is not too much to say, is that 
 Jesus who lived in Palestine is better that is, 
 more distinctly and more critically known to 
 our age than He has been known to any age since 
 His own. And what has been the effect of all 
 this ? The effect has been that never was the 
 wonderful, strange, and mysterious loneliness of 
 Jesus more admitted. To modern criticism Jesus 
 is indubitably and emphatically a phenomenon 
 unique. As an illustration of this one may name 
 the great work of Keim, 1 where his irresistible 
 
 1 Geichichtt Jen von Naxara. (English translation published 
 by Messn. Williams and Norgate.)
 
 36 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 sense of the transcendence of his subject is ever 
 straining to the utmost and even bursting the 
 limits of naturalistic presuppositions. There is 
 found about Jesus what there is about no other, 
 and the more accurately and critically we know 
 Him the more profoundly we fe*i it. He is 
 beyond our analyses. He confounds our canons 
 of human nature. He compels our criticism to 
 overleap itself. He awes our spirits. There is 
 a saying of Charles Lamb, which is responded to 
 by a very deep feeling within the heart of every 
 really serious student of the person of Jesus, that 
 'if Shakespere was to come into this room we 
 should all rise up to meet him, but if that person 
 was to come into it, we should all fall down and 
 try to kiss the hem of his garment.' l 
 
 Yet, despite all that has been said which it 
 would be easy to elaborate along the same lines, 
 but that is unnecessary have we found in it 
 any real answer to the question we wish to 
 determine? The character of Jesus may have 
 been stainless, and His personality may be 
 mysteriously alone among the phenomena of 
 
 1 Quoted in Hazlitt'i essay on ' Persons one would wish to have
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT? 37 
 
 human nature. He may have been apparently 
 above the otherwise universal moral needs of 
 men, and even able to supply the needs of those 
 around Him. Still the old objection remains. 
 All this is long ago. However wonderful it 
 may all be, what properly religious data are there 
 in it for us to-day? The data of religion are 
 essentially present and living within the soul. 
 All that has been said about Jesus is historical ; 
 that does not make it religious. This fact of 
 Christ is a fact of history ; it has still to be shown 
 how as in the opening lecture was insisted 
 it contains the data of personal and spiritual 
 religion. 
 
 The answer to this is still to * think of Jesus, 
 to pursue to their issues these historical impres- 
 sions. We shall find that to consider the fact of 
 Christ has issues and that these are religious 
 issues. We discover on the cold page of history 
 this stainless one ; and in a very wonderful and 
 arresting way do thereupon our consciences dis- 
 cover, as never before, what kind of persons 
 morally we are. We read an historic evangel 
 a proclamation made long ago by Jesus to all 
 in moral need to listen to Him and to come to
 
 3 8 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Him and, as we read it, we growingly feel that 
 this demands a decision on our part. All this is 
 really religion, yet it is out of this fact of Christ 
 that it has directly risen. Let us try to under- 
 stand how we find our thoughts of Jesus thus 
 turning into moral and religious channels. 
 
 What we find is this. We find that this fact of 
 Christ, at all candidly considered in the conscience 
 and the will, raises great moral issues within us. 
 It is not merely that something in the example of 
 Jesus or in His teaching has suggested a duty or 
 made evident a defect. It is far more than that. 
 It is that the problem of our whole moral life 
 and character has been raised. The fact of Christ 
 is not just a fact of history ; it has become also a 
 fact of conscience. It has arrested and arraigned 
 our moral being ; it has interrogated it ; it has 
 asserted itself as an authoritative reviewer of our 
 life in the very fastnesses of our thoughts, our 
 affections, and our will. It does so with a strange 
 inevitableness and with a remarkable right to do 
 it. The more we candidly keep our minds and 
 hearts and consciences open to the impression 
 that even an historical appreciation of the fact of 
 Christ makes upon them, the more does that
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT ? 39 
 
 impression turn to moral issues within us. We 
 had thought intellectually to examine Him ; we 
 find He is spiritually examining us. The roles 
 are reversed between us. Not that historical and 
 intellectual questions on our part about Jesus end, 
 but far more serious and pressing and immediate 
 are these moral questions about ourselves that 
 have arisen out of them. All this is found true 
 by many and many an one who simply reads the 
 Gospels. It is a very singular phenomenon. 
 We study Aristotle and are intellectually edified 
 thereby ; we study Jesus and are, in the pro- 
 foundest way, spiritually disturbed. The question 
 apparently so innocently historical and morally 
 non-committal of ' What think ye of Christ ? ' 
 passes into the most morally practical and personal 
 of questions : * What shall I then do with Him ? ' 
 And this presses for an answer. 
 
 For it comes to this. It comes to it that we 
 are driven to do what it is a strange thing to do 
 towards a figure of history. We are constrained 
 to take up some inward moral attitude of heart 
 and will in relation to this Jesus ; or, to be more 
 precise, we find we actually are doing so. We 
 cannot escape it, A man may study Jesus with
 
 40 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 intellectual impartiality ; he cannot do it with 
 moral neutrality. If the words, the character, 
 the person of Jesus at all awaken within us such 
 issues as these, we cannot go on, nor can we even 
 leave off, as if they never had been raised. Such 
 questions, once asked, do have their answer ; to 
 try to ignore them is an answer as real as any 
 other. And thus it is that, as I say, we are 
 compelled to take up some attitude towards this 
 fact of Christ. Whether we are going to have 
 it that the inspiration and authority associated 
 with Jesus are to be welcomed and cherished and 
 obeyed, or whether we are going to evade them 
 and resist them this alternative becomes an in- 
 evitable question for us. Disguise it as we will 
 to ourselves, we know we are answering it. 
 What the answer is becomes the serious issue 
 for our moral state and moral future. Indeed, 
 here the great matter of our choice of a side 
 in the perennial opposition between the good and 
 the evil comes to a head. Ah 1 here is the war 
 we spoke of. Here are no longer, merely, the 
 'confused alarms' of 'ignorant armies.' Here 
 is the great conflict, near, real, personal ; and 
 we must declare our colours. To this has our
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT? 4I 
 
 unevasivc contact with Jesus brought us. We 
 began it in the calm of the study ; we are called 
 out to the field of moral decision, where, with 
 some of us at least, are forces that will not yield 
 without desperate struggle. We opened with the 
 question of Jesus : now the question is about our- 
 selves. And its answer depends on, or rather is, 
 the attitude we take towards Him. 
 
 This may seem vague ; this * attitude ' what 
 is it ? The most practical thing in the world. If 
 we put aside the stereotyped terms of religious 
 usage not necessarily as false but as easily lend- 
 ing themselves to unreality and face a few obvious 
 facts of life, then the matter becomes not only 
 clear but even rather clearer than at times we care 
 that it should be. The alternative directions in 
 life in thought and in act that lead, the one 
 towards, the other away from, the inspiration and 
 influence of Jesus are not obscure. We know 
 when we are honestly pressing towards Him and 
 when we are keeping Him out of sight. In every 
 man's life there are, both in little things and great, 
 these alternative paths, and, at every serious 
 moral choice, they diverge plainly before us. A 
 man, seeing that the fact of Christ is becoming
 
 42 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 within him a fact of conscience with grave moral 
 issues, may deliberately refuse to let it lead him 
 further, and may, when any matter upon which it 
 bears comes before him, take the path that does 
 not lead to where the voice of Jesus would be 
 more clear or His influence more authoritative. 
 If so, it is no wonder that the primary fact of 
 Christianity remains to him a merely historical 
 externality, and that he does not find in it the 
 data of religion. But a man may take the other 
 course. There is much in the words of Jesus that 
 calls him to this, and much in his own heart to 
 admonish him to it. He may choose to follow 
 the other way with strenuousness and simplicity, 
 and if he does so, and does so sincerely and 
 with no arriere-pensee of adhering to evil things 
 then this fact of Christ becomes for him really 
 a fact for religion. Christianity takes from it a 
 meaning and a shape. The Jesus that was first 
 the Jesus of history and criticism, and then the 
 Jesus of conscience and of moral inspiration and 
 decision, becomes now the Jesus of an inward 
 experience of spiritual promise and wellbeing 
 The name of Jesus becomes in a remarkable way 
 identical with the man's best self and his true life.
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT ? 43 
 
 Jesus is the man's true life, who with a hesitating 
 astonishment finds himself putting a real, even if 
 a small and variable, meaning into words he had 
 always regarded as mere hyperbole * I live, yet 
 not I, but Christ liveth in me.' 
 
 Now this which I only indicate here and which 
 we shall have occasion to pursue further and more 
 carefully later is religion. It is living, spiritual 
 truths. It is not dead history. But it sprang out 
 of history. It sprang out of the historical fact of 
 Christ. It is all traceable back not to abstract 
 ideas and principles but to that real phenomenon. 
 * Thinking of ' Him has given us not only historical 
 opinions but also the data of a faith. This fact, 
 which begins in history, develops in the conscience 
 and ends in religious experience, is indeed a fact 
 on which religion can be built, and we find the 
 ancient site of Christianity is still available for 
 religion to-day. 
 
 This then is the fact of Christ a fact of history, 
 of conscience, and of spiritual experience. What 
 we have to be careful about in stating the fact of 
 Christ is that we state it completely. We do not 
 state completely what Jesus is if we confine our- 
 elves to an account of what He said and did and
 
 44 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 was in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago. 
 Jesus is more than that. He is more than a fact 
 of ancient history. He is also an ever-living fact 
 of present or personal experience. You really 
 do not do justice to the fact of Christ unless you 
 thus treat it as, first indeed, an historical pheno- 
 menon, but also a phenomenon re-emerging and 
 asserting itself in an unique way as a fact of con- 
 sciousness an inward arraignment, call, promise, 
 renewal. You have not said what, as a matter 
 of fact, He is unless you recognise both these 
 elements. Neither is complete without the other. 
 *A perverted picture,' says a modern writer, * is 
 always the result when we take account of either 
 the spiritual or the historical Christ to the exclu- 
 sion of the other.' l 
 
 If then we are to build our Christianity upon the 
 fact of Christ, it must not be upon a * perverted 
 picture,' upon a one-sided presentation of what 
 that fact is. The fact is a dual fact. It is upon 
 Christ as a fact alike of history and of experience 
 that Christianity is based. We must hold to both 
 of these aspects. If we confine ourselves merely 
 
 1 Js, Ubtr den Ckrittl. Glaubrn Portrage, p. 68 (quoted in Dr 
 Somemlle't St. Patft Cuutption of CJtritt).
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT? 45 
 
 to * the Christ of history * in the sense of discuss- 
 ing a long dead teacher and his teaching, or if, 
 on the other hand, we consider only * the Christ of 
 experience ' without reference to what historically 
 Jesus was, we shall fail to build on the wide and 
 sure foundation. The foundation of Christianity 
 is Christ. There are not two Christs on one or 
 other of which we may build. There is but one 
 Christ. But He is found alike in outward his- 
 tory and in inward experience. And our Chris- 
 tianity must be built upon the complete fact of 
 Christ. *The Christian religion/ as Professor 
 Denney says, * depends not only upon what He 
 was, but upon what He is/ l depends, in other 
 words, upon a Christ who is a fact alike of history 
 and of experience. 
 
 Our inquiry seems thus to be opening up as we 
 proceed. We saw to begin with very briefly, for 
 it is a point which has often been established that 
 the original Christianity was based, not on theo- 
 logical or ethical ideas, but on the fact of the 
 person of Jesus Himself. When we went on, as 
 we have just been doing, to inquire if our Chris- 
 tianity could be built on this same site, we have 
 
 1 StnJut im Tfualo^j t p. 14.
 
 46 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 found that it can, for jthis fact, while an historical 
 event of nineteen hundred years ago, is also a fact 
 of conscience and of moral life and experience in 
 us to-day, and can thus be to us a source of present 
 living truth, that is, a source of religion. We have 
 thus not only found the authentic site ; we find 
 also that we can build upon it. With this building 
 we must now proceed. That is to say, we now 
 go on to examine and arrange and explicate what, 
 for religion, is in this fact ; in other words, we 
 inquire into the meaning of the fact of Christ. 
 
 In beginning this, there is one thing which we 
 must make very clear to ourselves. The whole suc- 
 cess of our inquiry depends on our recognition of it. 
 
 It has been insisted upon that we must state 
 and examine the complete fact of Christ. That 
 complete fact is one not only of outward history, 
 but also of inward experience. It is therefore 
 obvious that there is needed for an inquiry 
 into the meaning of such a fact more than 
 simply the rational intelligence. That will discuss 
 one aspect of it the historical ; and in its discus- 
 sion of that, all the powers of the intelligence, 
 aided by all the resources of scholarship, are wel- 
 come. But what is thus studied is not the whole
 
 WHAT IS THE FACT ? 47 
 
 fact of Christ, not the complete data of Chris- 
 tianity. That fact is also a fact of conscience ; 
 these data include a moral arraignment and choice 
 and promise and experience. All this must be 
 received as candidly as the other. If the fact of 
 Christ, in one aspect of it, calls, like every other 
 historical question, for the banishment of intellec- 
 tual prejudice, in another aspect of it, the same 
 fact calls for an honest conscience and an honest 
 will. From the very nature of the case, from the 
 dual character of the fact to be examined, you must, 
 if you would really and thoroughly study Chris- 
 tianity, study it, with a critical intelligence indeed, 
 for Jesus is a fact of history, but also with more 
 than a critical intelligence with a conscience and 
 will that are open to moral impression and direc- 
 tion, for He is also a fact of inward moral ex- 
 perience. If you would know what Christianity 
 is you must be open and honest in both directions. 
 If your investigation of the fact of Christ discloses 
 some historical point, you must have a candid 
 mind for that. So much every one will admit. 
 But if your investigation brings you face to face 
 as it will do, for this is a fact of conscience as well 
 as of history with some moral choice and moral
 
 48 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 call, then, not less, you must have a candid will to 
 receive that. This is apparent from the very 
 nature of the subject that is investigated, from 
 its dual nature as alike outward and inward. 
 Let us make this matter clear to ourselves. 
 Let us distinctly perceive that we shall never 
 understand what Christianity is if we have a 
 morally evasive or dishonest will. Let us per- 
 ceive there is a reason for this namely, because 
 the fact of Christ, in which are the data of 
 Christianity, is a fact of conscience as well as of 
 history. We must then meet that fact with moral 
 as well as mental candour, with not only a mind 
 open to historical facts but also a will honest with 
 moral issues. Otherwise is it not obvious that 
 our whole discussion is doomed from the outset ? 
 In insisting on this, we are still only following the 
 method of the great Master of Religion, for it was 
 particularly to the man * that willeth to do His 
 will,' even more than to the man of intellectual 
 superiority or historical erudition, that Jesus 
 promised that he * shall know of the doctrine.'
 
 Ill 
 
 THE FIRST MEANING OF THE FACT
 
 tovrtiv for} irpo$ir)WffiJ.evv, tiropfvov av ttrj rov jr 
 ya>ybv fjfjLcav 'Irjcrovv rov ^tov i^ 
 6cu, itai rov iv XKrr 
 
 CLEMENT Ot ALEXANDRIA.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE FIRST MEANING OF THE FACT 
 
 THE meaning of Christ is a large word. Such 
 a pivotal fact pivotal in the realms alike of 
 universal history and of individual experience 
 is surely not, as Aristotle would say, a mere 
 episode in a badly composed play. If human 
 history have a meaning, and if spiritual ex- 
 perience have a meaning, then the fact of Christ 
 has a meaning. So great a fact must indeed 
 have great meanings, and it should not surprise 
 us if, in the end, we find these stretching out 
 beyond what we are able fully to explain or 
 even to express. 
 
 But however the question of the meaning of 
 the fact of Christ may develop, there is no diffi- 
 culty about making a beginning in the answering 
 of it. Christ has at least some meanings that 
 ire immediate and plain and simple. I think
 
 52 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 I shall express the mind of perhaps most of us 
 if I say that the first of these is a meaning for 
 moral life and character. 1 
 
 This has indeed already appeared in the mere 
 statement of the fact of Christ. Historically 
 we have found Him to be an ideal, supreme 
 and stainless ; in the inner realm of conscience 
 we find Him to be a moral authority, personal 
 and pressing. No man can really open his mind 
 and conscience to the fact of Christ without 
 feeling that he ought to be a better man, and 
 that, if he and Christ are to continue near each 
 other, he must be a better man. His faults are 
 named to him and his duties as never before. 
 Whatever else the fact of Christ means, it means 
 this ; and a man well knows that any attempt 
 to lose sight of this meaning by a professed 
 earnestness about any other is a palpable evasion. 
 Christ indubitably means this much that you 
 revise your life and conduct and character by 
 
 1 The way in which the fact of Christ approaches the mind and 
 becomes meaningful of course varies. The meanings here discussed 
 last are often the first and immediate. But some order or other must 
 be chosen, and that I have adopted seems, on general grounds, natural 
 and logical, and it intelligible even to those whose personal ex- 
 perience may not have followed it.
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 53 
 
 t new standard, that you set before yourself new 
 ideas of what you will be and do, and that 
 you set out to realise these. Where this is 
 not felt, it were far better for a man to admit 
 that he is not facing and will not face the fact 
 of Christ. The example of Jesus in history 
 and the authority of Jesus in experience alike 
 mean this. And thus the question of our char- 
 acter at once arises in Christianity as a part of 
 the meaning of Christ. Whatever else it docs, 
 Christianity proposes to us a new character, and 
 it also for without this the other would be 
 futile declares the way of its achievement. Both 
 of these things we must examine a little. 
 
 One may observe, before going on to these 
 points, how notable and also how effective is 
 this element in the religion of Jesus. That a 
 religion should concern itself with character is 
 to us a matter of course ; but this was far from 
 being the case in the great world into which 
 the young Christian gospel made its way. In 
 the civilisation of the Roman empire a civilisa- 
 tion, in some respects, more elaborate than ours 
 religion was something absolutely apart from 
 morality. The priests and augurs of ancient
 
 54 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Greece and Rome never for one moment re- 
 garded it as any part of their duty to exhort 
 or help men to a purer life. Alike public life 
 and private were steeped in a heartlessness of 
 cruelty and an abandonment of vice such as we 
 can hardly realise ; but pagan religion made no 
 protest, for, on the contrary, its mysteries often 
 screened and its ministers sanctioned the grossest 
 iniquities. It is this entire divorce between 
 religion and morality in the ancient world which 
 supplies the explanation, as Mr. Lecky has 
 pointed out, 1 of the apparently strange circum- 
 stance that the classical philosophic moralists 
 pay so little attention to the appearance of 
 Christianity. One would suppose that that re- 
 ligion, as a mere system of ethics, apart from 
 any theological beliefs, would have commanded 
 the notice of all serious men. But so we can 
 imagine the philosophers who were in earnest 
 about moral things, saying is this not a re- 
 ligion? and what has a religion to do with the 
 matter of moral life ? Thus argued, and most 
 naturally, such men as Plutarch, or Seneca, or 
 Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, and thus before 
 
 1 History of Eurtjxax Mgralt, i. jj6 tt tyy.
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 55 
 
 the eyes of these great moralists emerged what 
 was to be the supreme moral phenomenon of 
 history and they gave it hardly a glance. How 
 were they to know that this religion was to belie 
 all their natural anticipation of the scope and 
 purpose of religion, was going to unite itself 
 so emphatically and essentially with morals, and 
 was going to mean, almost before anything else, 
 a new moral character for men ? If such thoughts 
 had been even for a moment conceivable, surely 
 a Seneca would have had a word about that 
 Christianity with some of the tenets of which 
 his own writings supply so interesting a parallel, 1 
 and surely history might have been spared what 
 has justly been called one of its 'most tragical 
 facts,'* that a Marcus Aurelius should have 
 persecuted the followers of Jesus Christ. 
 
 But, not to dwell on this, what is the character 
 which Christianity has brought into the world ? 
 
 i. THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 
 
 The norm of the Christian character is of 
 course the character of Jesus Himself. He is 
 
 1 Tide Lightfoot's Dissertation on Seneca and St. Paul in hit Com- 
 mentary on Philippituu. * J. S. Mill's Essay M Librrty, ii.
 
 56 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 its * living law,' l as an early apologist terms it. 
 We must therefore, in the first place, form 
 some definite impression of what were the dis- 
 tinctive features of the character of Jesus. I 
 say distinctive, for of course there were in Him 
 many qualities such as courage or truth or 
 fidelity which are not peculiarly Christian, and 
 these we do not need to dwell on here. Our 
 aim at present is not to discuss all the aspects 
 of the character that Jesus exhibited on earth, 
 but to recognise those that are distinctively and 
 specially what we call Christian. It is these we 
 wish to observe. 
 
 There were, I think, four such elements in the 
 character of Jesus. 
 
 The first of these was purity or holiness. I 
 call this distinctive because Jesus was not only, as 
 has been said, a perfectly unstained man, but the 
 only man to whom such a word as purity or 
 holiness can be applied without any reservation 
 whatever. Among the moral teachers and heroes 
 of the extra-Christian world are many who admired 
 and practised virtue to an eminent degree ; but 
 there is not one of whom we should say that to 
 
 1 Lactantius, Dvvin. IiuM. ir. 35.
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 57 
 
 him the very thought of impurity of any kind was 
 abhorrent and with whom the imagination shrinks 
 from associating the bare suggestion of evil. It is 
 Jesus who has introduced into virtue a passion 
 before which vice is not condemned but consumed 
 as by fire. It is He who has charged the ethical 
 nature with an intolerable radiance and raised it to 
 a white heat. And thus what we call purity the 
 virtue that is intense and vivid and sensitive to the 
 very suggestion of sin has, through Him, entered 
 into the moral ideal of human character. He has 
 made virtue a wholly new thing an inward, re- 
 fining passion in the soul. He has taught His 
 people to pray : * O God, make clean our hearts 
 within us.' Clean, transparent, pellucid as a 
 hillside spring in which all that is turbid and 
 foul has sunk, and which reflects in all its depths 
 only the sweet, glad light of heaven ! Who has 
 suggested to the sin-befouled soul of man such 
 a thought of virtue as this ? Who has shown the 
 way to its realisation ? He has who out of His 
 own experience said, * Blessed are the pure in heart 
 for they shall see God.* 
 
 The second distinctive feature in the character 
 of Jesus was love. This, too, in its true and
 
 5 8 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Christian sense He created. The apprehension of 
 what love really is and of the place it should have 
 in human life came into the world with Jesus and 
 had never been understood before. This is not 
 to say that human nature, apart from Jesus, had 
 no idea of what love is ; but He so enlarged, so 
 intensified, and so exalted that idea as to produce 
 a practically new creation. He enlarged it. He 
 made it a universal thing. It had been at best a 
 limited thing, and even so elevated a teacher as 
 Plato applauded an * unadulterated hate' 1 of a 
 foreigner. The very name for foreigner was to 
 the Greek the same as that for barbarian, to the 
 Roman the same as that for enemy. If the 
 ancients knew love at all, they did not know its 
 universal realm. Jesus has showed us that love is 
 of humanity ; that had never been thought of in 
 the Porch or the Academy. And He not only 
 thus enlarged the idea of love, but he also in- 
 tensified^it. If it be said that the Stoic philosophers, 
 at least, approached the idea of universal brother- 
 hood, be it admitted. Yet what a new thing to a 
 Stoic was the love of His brother-men that was in 
 Jesus. The former's view of the relation of man 
 
 1 MtMxmtt, 245.
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 59 
 
 to man was, at best, a tepid, theoretical affair ; 
 even when a Stoic was humane and he was far 
 from always being that he was studiously 
 temperate and restrained in his humanity. The 
 love of Jesus for men was an enthusiasm. It was 
 a heart's love He gave them and its activities were 
 pulsing with His heart's blood. In His love to 
 men He yearned over them, and prayed for them, 
 and laboured for them, and, in the end, He died 
 for them. This was indeed a new love, that amid 
 the cold of the first Christmas came upon the world 
 like the heat of a midsummer sun and its warmth 
 has never died since out of the heart of man. 
 And again, Jesus, who made love universal and 
 ardent, made it also the first and supreme law of 
 life. There have been in history many noble deeds 
 of self-sacrificing devotion. But He made love 
 the law the guiding principle of life and of all 
 life. It was His life to love, and He had no other 
 life than love. He was love. In all these ways, 
 then, Jesus so renewed the idea of love so enlarged 
 it, intensified it, and exalted it as really to create 
 it. The world had never seen love after this sort. 
 And if love after this sort love that is towards 
 all, that will do anything and that is recognised as
 
 60 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 life's first law has a place in the ideal of human 
 character, that dates from Him who, even literally, 1 
 has re-created the name of love in the world. 
 
 The third distinctive feature in the character of 
 Jesus was forgiveness. This, of course, springs 
 out of the last, and yet it must be mentioned 
 by itself, for it is, while not the greatest, perhaps 
 the most distinct innovation that Jesus made in 
 morality. The general feeling on the subject in 
 the pre-Christian world is well exhibited in the 
 famous inscription which Plutarch tells us was 
 written on the monument to Sulk in the Campus 
 Martius at Rome : * No friend ever did me so 
 much good or enemy so much harm but I repaid 
 him with interest.' Forgiveness was a thing not 
 unknown to the ancient mind as an idea, but it 
 was not really expected of any one in practice. 
 Jesus made it operative. He treasured no resent- 
 ments, kept no wrongs green, harboured no im- 
 placability, had never a moment's thought of 
 
 1 The word * love,' to us one of the most elevated in the language, 
 had in ancient classical use a very different reputation, and even in 
 the fourth century, Jerome, writing the Vulgate (in Latin) could not 
 use the ordinary word amor to express the Christian grace of love, 
 and had recourse to die unusual caritat. Hence the use of the word 
 1 charity ' in our A.V.
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 61 
 
 revenge ; and, not this only, but He acted daily in 
 the spirit of that prayer on the Cross, which, more 
 than anything, must have made the Roman 
 centurion wonder and watch till he worshipped : 
 ' Father, forgive them, for they know not what they 
 do.' What an innovation was here ! This law of 
 forgiveness 'has produced,' says the author of 
 Ecce Homo, * so much impression upon mankind 
 that it is commonly regarded as the whole or at 
 least the fundamental part of the Christian moral 
 system,' and ' when a Christian spirit is spoken of 
 it may be remarked that a forgiving spirit is 
 usually meant.' * 
 
 There is, however, yet a fourth feature in the 
 moral character of Jesus which was original and 
 distinctive as much as any other, and that was 
 humility. That this is peculiarly Christian hardly 
 needs to be said. In the pagan world, anything 
 approaching to it was despised, and the very virtues 
 of the best ethical schools were founded on a self- 
 pride. The humility of Jesus may appear to be a 
 feature of hardly such importance that it should be 
 ranked with the others that have been mentioned, 
 
 1 Ecce Homo, ch. zzii., from which one or two thoughts in this 
 paragraph are taken.
 
 62 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 but to think this is to fail to appreciate what a 
 place it had in His life. Of course humility is not 
 conspicuous ; just because it is humility it is always 
 
 the flower 
 
 'Half-hidden from the eye.' 
 
 And in this, humility is always to be distinguished 
 from self-humiliation, with which mediaeval religion 
 tended to identify it, and which may be, and often 
 is, obvious and ostentatious. Humility must be 
 looked for if we would discover it, like eidelweiss 
 upon the Alps. But when we find it in perfec- 
 tion, as we do in Jesus, how beautiful it is ! It 
 was not only that He was utterly free from vulgar 
 vanity and restless self-seeking, that He never 
 even listened for applause nor looked towards the 
 place of the popular hero. It was far more than 
 that. If ever there was a master among men it 
 was He ; yet He was among them as one that 
 serveth. If ever there was a teacher of genius 
 it was He ; yet He counted an afternoon not 
 wasted that was spent with the Samaritan woman, 
 nor a life lost that was lived, for the most part, 
 with the poor, the unlearned, the uninteresting 
 as men often judge of the land. He who was 
 the supreme person in history is best described as
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 63 
 
 the friend of publicans and sinners. This was the 
 humility of Jesus. It is a revelation of the true 
 greatness. There is at times something impres- 
 sive and fascinating about the lordly egotism of a 
 Caesar or a Napoleon men who seem almost of 
 right to regard themselves as of another than the 
 common clay, and the rest of men as made but to 
 swell the train of their triumph. Yet we see in 
 Jesus, who incomparably more than these world- 
 conquerors was one above His fellows, and who, 
 moreover, knew His power over them * Ye call 
 Me,' He said, ' Master and Lord, and ye say well, 
 for so I am* something that impresses us far 
 more than a proud ' bestriding of the narrow 
 world like a colossus,' and which stirs us to a 
 deeper reverence than we ever give to them. 
 Jesus had power, but he baptized His power with 
 the spirit of humble service. He was a world- 
 lord, but He was the lowly among His inferiors. 
 He was the Master, yet He ministered. Thus has 
 He taught us a new and the true grandeur of life. 
 It was one of the supreme moral triumphs of His 
 career, and, with forgiveness, its most original 
 feature. And there is in men to-day perhaps no 
 feature which more distinctly tells that a new
 
 64 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 influence has come to operate on human char- 
 acter than a spirit that has learned of Him who 
 was ' meek and lowly of heart,' and that * has let 
 this mind be in it ' which was also in the humble 
 spirit of Jesus ; for there is so much in the 
 natural man that dislikes and disputes this that 
 it is a peculiar sign of the character which is 
 Christian. ' Wellnigh the whole substance of the 
 Christian discipline,' says Augustine, * is humility.' 1 
 
 Purity, love, forgiveness, humility these are 
 four distinctive features of the character of Jesus. 
 No one can have to do with the fact of Christ 
 either historically in the record of His life and 
 teaching, or inwardly in the moral issues which 
 He raises without having these things set 
 before him. Whatever else Christianity has in it, 
 surely and urgently to be a Christian means to 
 be pure, to be loving, to be forgiving, and to be 
 humble. This moral meaning of Jesus for life 
 and character we cannot deny and cannot honestly 
 evade. 
 
 But if we cannot deny it and cannot honestly 
 evade it, how shall we really achieve it ? It is 
 easy to speak of purity, but how shall I, with any 
 
 Str. dt fanat. L 4.
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 65 
 
 sincerity, cleanse my heart? It is pleasant to 
 write of love, but how almost irresistibly difficult 
 to be wholly unselfish ? It is a fine thing to laud 
 forgiveness, but, when I am hurt and wronged, it is 
 not in human nature easily to forget it. It is not 
 hard to affect to be humble, but it is very hard 
 to be humble. A very slight practical observation 
 and experiment in these things will soon discover 
 to us that they do not evolve themselves within 
 us, and that they are ideals we like to praise but 
 are unready too strictly to practise. We lie on 
 the plains of life and look and talk of the heights 
 of purity and love and forgiveness and humility ; 
 but when it comes to climbing them, how human 
 nature is laggard, is impotent, is positively unwill- 
 ing and opposed to it ! No man who knows 
 himself will deny that. 
 
 And yet these heights have by many been 
 scaled. No one can survey the Christian cen- 
 turies without admitting that Jesus has not only 
 meant this kind of character, but, despite this 
 practical opposition to it in human nature, has, to 
 a very marked degree, meant it effectively. Men 
 have learned of Jesus not only what this character 
 is, but that it may be theirs. The Christian char- 
 
 B
 
 66 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 acter the character that is pure, loving, forgiv- 
 ing, humble has, to an undeniable extent, been 
 achieved in many lives. Most of us, I imagine, 
 have seen it, seen it perhaps in lives that have 
 passed from our sight, leaving us, as their sacred 
 legacy, an impression of the reality and beauty of 
 what is Christian that nothing can efface. The 
 character that is Christian is not a natural evolu- 
 tion but it is a fact. 
 
 It is then a fact that calls for some explanation. 
 What has made men pure, loving, forgiving, 
 humble ? What will make me all this ? The 
 ideal of the Christian character is not enough ; 
 where and what is the moral dynamic that will 
 realise it in human nature ? Can we find in the 
 fact of Christ this too ? 
 
 ii. THE MORAL MOTIVE-POWER 
 
 The loved late Henry Drummond whose own 
 character was a singularly clear example of those 
 who, as I have just been saying, show to us that 
 the Christian character can be achieved in human 
 nature begins his little brochure entitled The 
 Changed Life by quoting the following well- 
 known words of Huxley: 'I protest that if
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 67 
 
 some great power would agree to make me 
 always think what is true and do what is right on 
 condition of being turned into a sort of clock and 
 wound up every morning, I should instantly close 
 with the offer,' l and then he proceeds : * I pro- 
 pose to make that offer now : in all seriousness, 
 without being " turned into a sort of clock," the 
 end can be attained.' J It is a bold reply. Is 
 there anything which the fact of Christ means 
 which can make it good ? 
 
 In answering this question the things to be 
 carefully watched and avoided are unreality and 
 exaggeration. When one is speaking of historical 
 facts, it is easy to detect these faults, but when 
 one is speaking of such a topic as inward moral 
 power, they are faults into which it is very easy 
 to fall. There is a conscience in all teaching, 
 especially about experimental things ; and I do 
 not know any way in which that conscience is 
 more prostituted than when, on this very topic, a 
 man speaks loosely, and indulges in assertions that 
 have not facts behind them. 
 
 The first question for us to ask is plainly this : 
 
 1 ' Essay on Descartes ' (Scltcted Estayt, p. 13$). 
 * Addrestet, p. 179. (' The Changed Life,' out.)
 
 68 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 What kind of a motive-power is it that expresses 
 itself in what we call a character ? To this ques- 
 tion, answers seem apparent and simple. We 
 may say it is our choice or our will ; or we may 
 say that it is the force of an inspiring example or 
 a strong command. Such answers may be suffi- 
 cient when we are considering character on its 
 ordinary levels, but they are not sufficient when 
 the springs of character in its loftiest or deepest 
 levels are sought. They are not then sufficient 
 when we ask the motive-power of the Christian 
 character. They are not a sufficient motive- 
 power to produce purity, love, forgiveness, 
 humility. Choice and will are not, for we must 
 often admit with the Apostle that ' the good 
 which I would, I do not, and the evil which I 
 would not that I do* ; example is not, for we 
 must admit with the Roman poet, 
 
 ' Video raeliora proboque, dcteriora scquor ' ; l 
 
 while a bare command to such moral excellences 
 as those of the Christian ideal is obviously non- 
 effective. The motive-power we seek must be 
 something more than any of these. 
 
 1 Ovid, Met. iii. 19 (' I ice and approve the better; I follow the
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 69 
 
 What more is it ? If not merely choice or will 
 or an example or a command suffices to achieve 
 character in its highest and deepest forms, there- 
 fore not in the Christian form, what does ? Well, 
 what really makes your character is the kind of 
 spirit that is in you. It is of course difficult to 
 define this, and perhaps I shall make my meaning 
 most clear by an example. Take the example of 
 patriotism. What makes the patriotic character ? 
 Not just the choice of it as a fine and noble ideal ; 
 not just the assiduous imitation of the habits and 
 deeds of a Nelson or a Washington ; not just the 
 command of a government. Something, including, 
 perhaps, all these, but also deeper and subtler. 
 There must be stirred up what we call the 
 patriotic spirit. Create that in men and cherish 
 it, and the patriotic character is already there and 
 will express itself in life spontaneously and in- 
 evitably. So is it with any other high or deep 
 form of character. It is not manufactured, it is 
 not a studied process ; it is ' born of the spirit,* 
 and being so born can do almost anything that 
 that spirit requires. 
 
 Now if this is to be said of a type of character 
 such as the patriotic, it is to be said with tenfold
 
 ?q THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 emphasis of such a type as the Christian. The 
 patriotic spirit is indeed a fine and admirable 
 thing, but yet not a thing so lofty as to be 
 unattainable by various human means. But the 
 spirit, the very spirit, of purity, of love, of 
 forgiveness, of humility how that is too high 
 for us ! The externalities of these are hardly 
 reached by us, and who shall bring down their 
 very inspiration? If the white flowers of the 
 Christian moral ideal grow almost too far up 
 the mountain for our hands and feet to get to 
 them, how hopelessly inaccessible is the sun in 
 whose streaming light the flowers have grown ! 
 If we do not even attain to the acts of Christian 
 character, how shall we attain to the spirit 
 of it? And yet, if what has been said in the 
 foregoing paragraph be true, the only motive- 
 power that will achieve that character is the 
 creating and cherishing in us of the spirit of 
 Jesus. We seem to have made for ourselves 
 an impasse. 
 
 Let us remember what was said about the 
 importance, in discussing these things, of a con- 
 scientious regard to facts, and let us try to base 
 our way out, not as is so easily done on
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 71 
 
 moral rhetoric, but on certain recorded facts of 
 history. 
 
 In the first place, let us note that Jesus Himself 
 regarded the imparting to men of a new spirit 
 as the one thing that would make them right. 
 * Except a man be born again,' He said to one of 
 His most interesting inquirers, * he cannot see 
 the kingdom of God,' and this He explained to 
 mean a being re-born spiritually or * of the spirit.' 
 Jesus regarded this as axiomatic, and therefore 
 His moral aim and mission on earth were not 
 simply to teach morals, or even simply exemplify 
 them, but it is His own phrase * baptize with 
 the spirit.' And that He succeeded in this, His 
 transformation of a John and a Peter, a Mary 
 Magdalene and countless others shows. Most liter- 
 ally and obviously He put into them a new spirit, 
 His own spirit of purity, love, forgiveness, and 
 humility and thus made them new characters. 
 
 We can understand this so long as Jesus 
 actually was living on earth. The spirit of a 
 great personality enters into those who come into 
 actual contact with him. A brave man inspires 
 the spirit of bravery in others by his presence ; 
 a pure soul purifies us when we are with him.
 
 7 a THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 And when one thinks of what a marvellous 
 personality that of Jesus was, one can believe 
 that those who met Him, and heard His voice, 
 and felt His glance, not only were impressed by 
 His words, but were really changed in their whole 
 nature, and yielded themselves to His spirit. If 
 Napoleon could have this influence on his army, 
 certainly Jesus could have it on His friends. 
 But this has limits. This kind of influence on 
 men's spirits demands one thing that the author 
 of it be himself present. It is essentially personal, 
 and where the personal element is wanting, the 
 spiritual inspiration fades. And therefore, ob- 
 viously, when a great man dies, the influence 
 of his personality passes. It remains for a while 
 in the hearts of those who knew him, and it may 
 remain for future ages as a great memory and 
 example. But all this is but a phantom of the 
 man's personal inspiration. He is no longer 
 there. We must seek new inspirations. 
 
 It would thus appear that, while we can under- 
 stand that Jesus, so long as He was living on 
 this earth, was able literally to put a new spirit 
 into the minds and hearts and wills of those He 
 met (and therefore enable them to realise even
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 73 
 
 the Christian character), all this was only while 
 and only because He was personally alive and 
 present with them ; and when He passed from 
 this earth, we should expect it to pass too. It 
 does not appear therefore that there is anything 
 in all this to put a new spirit in us to-day, who 
 have never seen His face nor heard His voice. 
 
 But it is here that we meet with by far the 
 most remarkable phenomenon both of the New 
 Testament and of all moral history. 
 
 In the utterances of Jesus recorded in the 
 Gospel narratives which are here regarded simply 
 as historical records we find a very singular 
 point of view emerging on this subject. Jesus, 
 as has been said, exerted a marvellous spiritual 
 influence by His personality during His life ; 
 but, as that earthly life was drawing to its close, 
 we do not find Him contemplating the with- 
 drawal or diminution of that influence. The very 
 contrary. He promised its persistence and even 
 its augmentation. That very spirit with which 
 He had baptized men, and which it only too 
 inevitably seemed must pass with His earthly 
 presence, is the very thing which, most im- 
 pressively, He declared would be given more
 
 74 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 than ever. By this spirit, He clearly meant 
 certainly nothing less than all that His present 
 personality had been ; and indeed His meaning 
 He often simply expressed by saying that He 
 all that the personal contact with Himself had 
 meant would not pass. It is this note which is 
 the most remarkable characteristic of the latter 
 phases of the utterances of Jesus. There is 
 nothing like it in the later teaching of any other 
 man. He sums it up in His last recorded words : 
 ' I am with you always, even unto the end of the 
 world.* Consider these words. Imagine that 
 they were the last words to us of some loved 
 friend or some trusted leader. How infinitely 
 sad and pathetic would they be ! And why? 
 Simply because they were not and could not be 
 really, fully, literally true. They might have a 
 certain amount of poetic truth. Something 
 remains with us a dear memory, a great 
 example. Something remains, but, ah, not he ! 
 Not the loved presence, not the potent personal 
 inspiration : there remains not he \ We will 
 not say he is extinct, and that which was a soul 
 is clay ; but only too clearly, he is not here as 
 once he was. And we are lonelier, and sadder,
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 75 
 
 and poorer because he is not with us. If, 
 therefore, I say, some loved friend of ours or 
 leader left us saying, ' I am with you always,' 
 how pathetic it would be. These were the last 
 words of Jesus. 
 
 Let us turn now to the other writings of the 
 New Testament not, I repeat, as inspired autho- 
 rities, but as records. What do we find ? This 
 pathetic sense of irreparable personal loss, the 
 constant sigh that He were here to guide and 
 strengthen and inspire, the sad refrain * Now 
 He is dead ' ? This is the note we should 
 expect in the New Testament, a kind of * In 
 Memoriam ' strain. But we find that every page 
 is simply throbbing with the utter opposite. 
 Every book is filled with the witness to it that 
 the last words of Jesus are found fully, literally 
 true. His great idea had been towards the end 
 of His earthly life that all that spiritually He 
 had been to men all that He was for men, 
 above mere precept and example, in His per- 
 sonality would continue a living spirit within 
 them. The New Testament writers' chief thesis 
 I say it deliberately is that this is so. The 
 spirit of Jesus moving them, moulding them,
 
 7 6 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 transforming them as really, as directly, as power- 
 fully, as personally as when He walked on earth 
 and spoke to them that is unquestionably the 
 great feature of New Testament literature. There 
 is nothing like it in any other literature in the 
 world. All the writers are agreed about it. St. 
 John finds that Jesus is not a fading ideal, but 
 'has given us of His spirit.' St. Peter, who 
 knew Jesus so well in history, finds Him still 
 present in inward life in His spirit ' which is in 
 thee.* St. James, in almost parallel words, speaks 
 of it * dwelling in us.' St. Paul finds Jesus to be 
 just as much a victorious moral dynamic against 
 evil as ever His personal presence on earth was, 
 and declares that * the spirit of life in Jesus 
 Christ has made us free from the law of sin.' I 
 have given four quotations ; but any one who 
 reads the New Testament knows that the number 
 can be made unlimited. I repeat that the most 
 notable and unmistakable thing in the New 
 Testament is this assertion that all that Jesus 
 had been He still was found to be, that He was 
 not a dead memory but a living spirit. His last 
 words were no pathetic fiction ; He was with 
 them, in them a spirit, a power, a presence, a
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 77 
 
 personality as much as ever in the days of His 
 flesh. 
 
 Now what does all this mean? It is an im- 
 pressive witness the combination of the distinct 
 forecast of Jesus that it would be so and the 
 unwavering assertion of the early Christian writers 
 that it had proved to be so. Does it all mean no 
 more than that a great and good man's influence 
 is a powerful legacy to the moral force of the 
 world, or that the New Testament writers, when 
 they speak of * Christ living in them ' by His 
 spirit, means only that His ideas profoundly 
 influenced them still ? Those who say the 
 former think by a platitude to account for what 
 is the most remarkable phenomenon in history 
 the triumphant rise of the Christian church 
 immediately after the death of its Founder ; 
 those who say the ktter make the New Testa- 
 ment the most inflated and exaggerated religious 
 book in the world and therefore one of the worst, 
 for what is worse than a spirituality that is not 
 sane and a religiousness that has no conscience 
 about facts? And yet what does it mean to us 
 the spirit of Jesus still living about us and 
 within us ?
 
 78 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 A previous lecture has been enough to sho* 
 us that it is not all utterly meaningless. We 
 found the fact of Christ to be more than a bare 
 feet of ancient history ; we found it to be also an 
 mward authority and appeal and persuasion. And 
 what is this but at least the beginning of finding 
 that Jesus is spirit and life within us? Alike 
 the man who resists it and the man who yields to 
 it and obeys it confess this. 
 
 There is such a thing as resisting the appeal 
 and authority and influence of Jesus. Have not 
 many of us if we really ask ourselves done 
 this distinctly, persistently, emphatically? Have 
 we not at times said a ' No ' to something in His 
 words or example with a loudness that almost 
 startled ourselves ? But why this expenditure of 
 energy ? Why call up our resolution to take 
 arms against a precept or an example of nineteen 
 Hundred years ago ? We do not so resist Aristotle 
 even when he speaks to us of ethical things ; we 
 can decline to obey him without that expenditure. 
 But when we really let Jesus speak to us by His 
 words and examples, if we are going not to obey, 
 we must and do definitely and often determinedly 
 say ' No.' Again, I ask, why this expenditure of
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 79 
 
 energy ? Let us learn from the active reality of 
 our resistance the active reality of what we are 
 resisting. It is not simply an old ethical precept 
 nor a far ethical example. It is something more 
 active, more living. It is ' spirit and life.' It is 
 Jesus appealing to us to-day with just the same 
 spiritual, personal presence with which, as we can 
 well understand, He did to the rich young ruler 
 or the woman of Samaria. There are times when 
 our very refusal of something in Christianity, by 
 its very heat, discloses itself to be a refusal of far 
 more than an idea or precept, like the ideas or 
 precepts of, say, Epictetus. A spirit touched and 
 moved and almost persuaded us in it all ; there- 
 fore was our ' No ' so peculiarly distinct a thing. 
 It is an unwilling witness that Jesus is not a dead 
 tradition of precept or example, but is still all that 
 living spiritual personality can be. 
 
 If this be forced upon us by our refusals of 
 Him, how shall we say that it is clear to us by 
 our yieldings to Him ? Let us avoid all vague- 
 ness and unreality. Let us start from what is 
 plain and practical. When Jesus was speaking of 
 this spiritual realisation of Himself He reached 
 to lofty mystical heights, but He connected it
 
 8o THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 with things quite near. In particular He connected 
 it with His words that is, alike His commands 
 and promises. Let a man really face these, and 
 meditate on them, and apply them to his life, and 
 realise their meaning. What then ? He finds 
 he is doing far more than merely reading ' words, 
 words, words.' He is opening unseen forces 
 upon his mind and conscience and heart and 
 will forces that enlighten and quicken and 
 purify and enable him in a way that is a sur- 
 prise to himself. A day thus lived is lived in 
 a new spirit in the spirit of Jesus. And have 
 we created that in ourselves ? Have mere ethical 
 precepts, however elevated, done it? Surely 
 the apostle's account of it is the only just one. 
 c We are changed ... by the Spirit which is the 
 Lord.' Only Jesus Himself, only His living 
 personality, gives us the spirit of Jesus. The 
 most remarkable phenomenon of spiritual litera- 
 ture finds its echo in the fact of our moral 
 history, and what account of it can we give but 
 this that whereas the personalities, with all con- 
 tained therein, of all other moral and spiritual 
 leaders must pass away with the passing of their 
 earthly career, 'there is one grand exception to
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 81 
 
 this rule ? M The spint as something more than 
 example and precept which Jesus, when on earth 
 was able, as we can understand, to inspire into 
 the spirits of those He met, He still gives to us 
 to-day. In short He is ' with us.' His personal 
 presence with all the inspiration that is in per- 
 sonal presence has changed its form ; it is no 
 longer in the flesh. But it abides in essence and 
 in reality. It is spirit, and 
 
 4 Spirit with spirit can meet.' * 
 
 It can I should rather say He can, for spirit is 
 essentially a man's personality inform our spirits, 
 and if our spirits are informed by the spirit of 
 Jesus, then our lives will assuredly exhibit the 
 otherwise unattainable ideal of the Christian 
 character. 'The Lord' the Lawgiver of the 
 new ideal morality * is the Spirit ' the inspira- 
 tion of it. 
 
 This, then, is the meaning of the fact of Christ 
 for character its twofold meaning. Jesus is at 
 once its ideal and the power that inspires men to 
 its achievement. This meaning that Jesus has in 
 
 1 Principal Caird't fundamental Ideas of Christianity, ii. 257. 
 * Tennyion't Higher Pantheism. 
 
 F
 
 8i THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 the realm of character is without even an approach 
 to a parallel in the whole ethical world. The 
 world's masters of morals have simply trifled with 
 the question of character in comparison with Jesus. 
 What as a real solution of the problem of human 
 character what it is for man to be good, and 
 how man actually is to be made good are the 
 discussions of Aristotle, the aphorisms of Bacon, 
 even the virtues of Socrates or the example of 
 Gautama, in comparison with what Jesus has done 
 first by His example and teaching, and then, 
 even more wonderfully, by His enduring personal 
 spiritual presence and power giving to men that 
 very spirit by which alone a character can be 
 realised? In this domain His name holds the 
 field. 
 
 And is not this a great thing for each one of us 
 personally, as well as a great thing for the world 
 at large ? In our truest moments we know that, 
 after all, the question of our lives is the question 
 of our character. Our most profound and signi- 
 ficant success or failure is not in the secondary 
 issues on which the world judges us, but is there. 
 Indeed, it looks as if this strange life of ours were 
 made only for character. Not only the world of
 
 THE FIRST MEANING 83 
 
 conscience within suggests this, but also the world 
 of circumstance without. For all other purposes 
 the making of fortune, the enjoyment of pleasure, 
 the securing of worldly wealth or position or fame 
 this is a life ill-adapted. The flux of things, 
 the uncertainties of fate, the varied unforeseen 
 combinations of circumstances adverse to or 
 destructive of health or wealth or happiness 
 all these make life a place obviously not formed 
 primarily for these ends, the attempt to gain 
 which is so easily and often thwarted, and which, 
 even when gained, are held on so uncertain a 
 tenure. This is really not the world for worldli- 
 ness. But observe that all these conditions this 
 flux, this risk, this uncertainty are the very con- 
 ditions that help to form character. They make 
 just the discipline by which a man may become 
 tender and spiritual, patient and humble, un- 
 selfish and loving. The circumstances of life may 
 defeat all other ends, but they cannot defeat, and 
 they even must contribute towards, this end. 
 And so I say that it looks as if life were made 
 for character. And if this be so, then surely 
 life can never be properly or prosperously lived 
 without Him who is the only person who has
 
 84 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 dealt with the problem of human character fully 
 and effectively. To this extent, therefore, and 
 at least so far as this first meaning of the fact 
 of Christ goes, should not every one of us seek 
 to be a Christian ?
 
 Du den mi suchen uf so finstern WegCB 
 Mit forschendcn Gedanken nicht erfissen 
 Du hut dein heilig Dunkel einst erlassen 
 Uad tiatest sichtbar deinem Volk entgegen.* 
 
 UHLAMD.
 
 IV 
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING OF 
 THE FACT 
 
 ABOUT the meaning of the fact of Christ which 
 we have just discussed one thing is plain that it is 
 not the full meaning of that fact. It clearly raises 
 questions that call for further investigation. If it 
 be the first meaning of the fact it is only the first. 
 This meaning must itself have a meaning. We 
 have already said about Jesus more incomparably 
 more than can be said of any other man, but 
 just because we have said so much we must say 
 more still. With no mental satisfaction can we 
 halt at the present stage. To say that Jesus 
 Himself exhibited an absolutely stainless and ideal 
 character, and that moreover He is able, though 
 His form left this earth centuries ago, still to be 
 an inspiration of the most personal kind in men's 
 hearts, by which they too are, at least to some
 
 88 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 degree, enabled to realise that otherwise impossible 
 ideal to say all this and then lay down the pen is 
 utterly inconclusive. If it be ethically and spiritu- 
 ally impossible to say less, then it is intellectually 
 incumbent to say more. The finding of this first 
 meaning of the fact of Christ is the setting before 
 us of new questions that need a further answer. 
 
 The questions thus raised are of the following 
 kind. Is a phenomenon in history and experience, 
 such as has been described, not one of quite 
 peculiar and commanding significance for our 
 philosophy of life and nature ? Can it be 
 accounted for along with, and in the same way 
 as, other phenomena ? May we not, and must 
 we not, * amid the darkness of the world,' accept 
 it 'as throwing a vivid and particular light on 
 the nature of the force that is guiding the destinies 
 of man and of the soul ? ' l May we not through 
 it find some foundation for a faith for some real 
 assurance concerning a God such as our spirits 
 seek and often seek in vain ? 
 
 Ever since Jesus was in this world, men have 
 never been able to rid themselves of the feeling 
 that in Him, if at all, is the quest of faith 
 
 1 Mn. Humphry Ward in the Ttmtt, September 5, 1199.
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 89 
 
 most likely to find its answer. The fact of 
 this is indisputable and it is of extraordinary 
 significance. His very first associates felt it 
 when their spokesman said: 'Lord, to whom 
 shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal 
 life.' His very last and latest students feel it, 
 and the authoress of Robert Elsmere writes in 
 the year of grace 1899 to ^ e 7V (in the 
 earnest and interesting letter quoted above) that 
 the school she represents still ' say as Peter said 
 of old,' not indeed from Peter's standpoint, but 
 with Peter's persuasion that there is the light 
 to be sought. Think of that far fisherman in 
 Galilee and of this writer of to-day in England, 
 and of the inconceivable difference of their whole 
 intellectual atmosphere and surrounding and point 
 of view ; and yet both, in the soul's search for 
 God, unable to turn away from that figure. 
 Think of the unceasing and innumerable in- 
 quirers who, during the intervening centuries, 
 have confessed the same. And is not already 
 a prima facie case made out that in the fact of 
 Christ is something of entirely unique significance 
 for the great problem of faith ? 
 
 There is thus ample reason, alike from the
 
 90 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 meaning we have already found in the fact of 
 Christ, and from the feeling of earnest minds 
 in all the Christian ages towards that fact, to 
 go on to ask the questions that have been in- 
 dicated. In doing so let us not think that we 
 are leaving the simple data of Christianity and 
 are plunging into the dogmas of theology. It 
 is still the fact of Christ we are investigating, 
 still that living fact of history and experience ; 
 it is not theological theory. In passing, then, 
 from questions of character to questions of faith, 
 our inquiry need not, to use Goethe's metaphor, 
 assume the ' greyness * of ' all theory,' but should 
 preserve the glow and verdure of life. 1 
 
 x. THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 
 
 The quest of faith is not simply an intellec 
 tual exercise in dialectic as to whether there be 
 a God a first principle of which all things are 
 the manifestation and the result. It is far more 
 than that. It is essentially a personal quest, 
 undertaken not by the speculative side of man's 
 nature, but by the whole of his nature, and 
 
 1 ' Grau, theurer freund, it alle Theorie, 
 
 Und grim des Lebcni goldnrr baum.' FAUST.
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 91 
 
 therefore what it seeks is not a mere category 
 of thought, but what will meet and satisfy per- 
 sonal needs. Whether or not this be a hopeless 
 quest, certainly not less than this is what the 
 human spirit something much more profound, 
 complex, and passionate than a merely intellectu- 
 ally speculative spirit has ever sought and ever 
 will seek. It never found simpler, yet truer and 
 more pathetic utterance than in the old words 
 of the exiled Hebrew psalmist : * My soul is 
 athirst for God, even the living God.' 
 
 There is a tendency in certain philosophical 
 quarters to regard a prayer such as this almost 
 with contempt. We are sometimes exhorted 
 that we should be above this fond yearning 
 after a personal Friend and Father of our spirits, 
 and should be able to stand, sad a little, per- 
 haps, but strong, in our philosophy ; and that 
 even such a desire as that for immortality is in 
 reality a selfishness which it is the nobler part 
 to renounce. There is not a little of this sug- 
 gested to us in modern philosophy and litera- 
 ture. Goethe suggested it to us, and Hegel, 
 George Eliot, and Matthew Arnold. I believe 
 this to be an utterly false resignation, an entirely
 
 91 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 spurious heroism, * which prides itself on being 
 able to renounce what never ought to be re- 
 nounced.' * Man never ought to renounce these 
 yearnings after a personal God and a personal 
 immortality, for in these are his true self and 
 his true dignity. His true self is his personal 
 individuality, and ' over-against its I, it seeks 
 a Thou, and will rest satisfied with nothing less.' s 
 It is not treating man as man to bid him be 
 satisfied with less. It is an act of spiritual suicide 
 which, with whatever philosophical glory it may 
 disguise itself, is still dishonourable ; ' such honour 
 rooted in dishonour stands.' The true dignity 
 of man is in these very personal needs which 
 sometimes we would be too intellectually digni- 
 fied to confess. These prayers may be in vain. 
 We may seek the Father the living, personal 
 Father of our spirits and not find ; we may 
 knock at the gates of everlasting life and they 
 may not be opened. But the seeking, the knock- 
 ing it is these by which man declares, not his 
 littleness but his greatness, not the smallness of 
 selfishness but the infinity that is in and that is 
 
 * Profewor Seth'i Scottish Philosophy, TU 
 
 1 Professor Orr's Christian Htvo if God and the Wvrld, p. 13$.
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 93 
 
 himself. That is indeed a poor honour which 
 man pays himself in bidding himself attain to 
 be satisfied to be but a part of finite nature. 
 
 Whether or not this search for the Father of 
 our spirits will find its answer in the fact of 
 Christ, it is clear that it is not satisfied by 
 the facts of outward nature, of history, or of 
 even the moral realm within. I shall speak of 
 this only briefly. Nature tells us of great forces 
 impersonal and unconscious, indifferent to, and 
 apparently ever antagonistic to, the hap and hopes 
 of man. There is an aspect of Nature that is 
 benign and beautiful, but there is also an aspect 
 that is bloody and brutal ; there is one view in 
 which she seems full of marvellous thought for 
 even the smallest thing, but in another view how 
 little she seems to feel for even her noblest 
 works, flinging them aside to perish in utter 
 heartlessness. There is no answer here to faith ; 
 there are indeed but ' evil dreams.' Nature does 
 not meet but only mocks our quest with her 
 baffling and often brutal enigma 
 
 ' I bring to life, I bring to death . . . 
 I know no more.' 1 
 
 * Te&Bjion't IM Mtmtrimm, hi.
 
 94 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 We turn to history. In that realm in which, 
 more than in physical nature, human activity and 
 intelligence have had play, shall we not find 
 something of the supreme plan and purpose 
 which shall assure or encourage our faith ? 
 History what a disappointing and dubious mur- 
 mur of voices that is! Even if the ages have 
 * an increasing purpose,' how shall we find in it 
 a purpose that has any real meaning for us? 
 History may be a great drama ; the author of 
 it is unknown to the actors and never cares to 
 know them. 'All the world's a stage,' and we, 
 its tragic comedians, play perforce our little parts 
 and pass. But we turn, from nature and history, 
 to the world within us. Here surely, and especi- 
 ally in the realm of conscience, may we find some 
 evidence of the ( living God ' who shall be our God. 
 But hardly ! The law of conscience within us is 
 a remarkable command and constraint which, as 
 it asserts itself, does indeed suggest a law-giver 
 that is a moral personality; and yet, by itself, 
 I doubt if it takes us incontrovertibly and as- 
 suredly beyond a fact and principle of human life 
 the fact and principle, namely, that what we call 
 morality is, for us, a good and satisfaction and
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 95 
 
 strength, and the opposite is an evil, a source of 
 unquiet, and a weakness. It indeed, as I say, 
 suggests more ; but it hardly says more, or, at 
 least, hardly says it in such a way as to be able to 
 maintain itself as a foundation for a sure faith. 1 
 
 Not in nature, then, nor in history, nor even 
 in conscience does the quest of faith find its 
 satisfaction. It has not been said that these dis- 
 prove the hopes and yearning of faith ; that is by 
 no means true. But they do not fulfil them. The 
 wisest of men are agreed about this. I suppose 
 that among f the masters of those that know,' a 
 higher place as regards these matters for Shak- 
 spere does not deal with these questions can 
 hardly be given to any than is to be given to Plato 
 of the ancients, to Dante of the middle ages, to 
 Bacon of the moderns. There is nothing upon 
 which all three are more distinctly agreed than 
 the fruitlessness, or at least the frailty, of the 
 attempt of reason to satisfy the desires of faith 
 from nature and human life. It is, says Bacon, 
 *in my judgment, not safe.' 1 It is, says Dante 
 (more than once), * desiring fruitlessly.' * And 
 
 1 Cf. Dr. Rainy ' DeBvtry and Development if CAriitian Doctrine, 
 PP- >/ }? * JdvaxffiHtnt tf Learning, p. ixf. 
 
 * Purgaiano, iiL 38. Cf. Injtrno, IT. 39.
 
 96 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 one of the most pathetic passages in Plato * speaks 
 of our having to sail the seas of darkness and 
 doubt on * the raft ' of our understanding, * not 
 without risk,' he adds, * as I admit, if a man cannot 
 find some word of God which will more surely and 
 safely carry him.* J 
 
 This utterance of Plato is not only pathetic, but 
 is, to our minds, also suggestive. * Some word of 
 God that will more surely and safely carry him ' 
 we cannot but associate with such an expression 
 that of the evangelist that ' the word was made 
 flesh and dwelt among us.' Does, then, the fact 
 
 i Ph*do t 15. 
 
 * The topics referred to in this and the preceding paragraphs have 
 been discussed very briefly from considerations of time. I hope that 
 what has been said will not be taken to mean that one regards nature, 
 history, and moral life as ' godless.' What is said is that they do not 
 enable us to reach a ' living God,* who is the Father of our spirits and 
 recognises and treats us as His children. If even nature be moral 
 and history progressive, still they, at the most, tell us only of laws, 
 and ' law/ as the ablest of recent Bampton lecturers has said, ' is 
 universal in its action ; it does not individualise ; it has no equity, 
 no mercy j it does not treat us as persons * (Illingworth's Per tonality % 
 Human and Diirint, v). Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, regards 
 conscience as able to carry us further, but, as stated in the lecture, 
 while it suggests more and is a kind of circumstantial evidence for 
 more, it hardly itself really gives us more than a law of life that 
 'makes for righteousness.' Behind all these declarations of im- 
 personal principles and forces, our individual spirits still seek the 
 Father of our spirits.
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 97 
 
 of Christ mean such a word of God as the quest 
 of faith seeks in vain elsewhere ? ' Lord, to whom 
 shall we go ? ' that part of the Apostles' cry we 
 can understand ; but may we go on with him and 
 say, * Thou hast the words of eternal life ' ? 
 
 We are encouraged to ask this question not 
 merely by apostolic witness, which could not have 
 finally decisive weight with us to-day, but also and 
 much more by the fact that Jesus Himself so often 
 said that the satisfaction of the soul's search for 
 God was met in Him. I shall not refer to passages 
 such as, * He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
 Father,' which might raise exegetical and critical 
 discussion. There is at least one saying in the 
 Synoptics which serves our purpose, and in the 
 view of Beyschlag it 'possesses the highest 
 guarantee of genuineness as belonging to the 
 original collection of Logia.* * When Jesus said 
 that all things were given Him of the Father, and 
 that ' No man knoweth the Father except the Son ' 
 (that is Jesus Himself), or ' he to whom the Son 
 will reveal him,' * He virtually said three things. 
 He recognised that the object of the quest of faith 
 
 1 Neutettamentlufu lAeobgi*, <. iii 
 * S. Matt. xi. 27 ; S. Luke *. a& 
 

 
 98 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 was the Father the living, loving God. He 
 declared, as we have seen that Plato and Dante 
 and Bacon declared, that man could not reach it. 
 But, lastly, He affirmed that He had satisfied 
 this quest, and that others could through, but 
 only through, Him be satisfied also. He, who 
 was the greatest Master of religion the world had 
 ever known, at once thus appreciated man's position 
 in the quest of faith and also regarded it as met 
 in and by Himself. Here is no waiting, like Plato, 
 for a surer word ; here is the assurance of the 
 truth itself. And surely we already have found 
 enough in Jesus to make us ready to listen to Him 
 when He speaks thus. 
 
 When we consider what there is in the fact of 
 Christ that has a meaning of assurance for faith, 
 the essential thing we find is this that Jesus is 
 supernatural. I use the word, as lawyers say, 
 without prejudice, and in its strictly grammatical 
 sense. What I mean is that He is not to be 
 accounted for by the forces that make human 
 nature as we know it. It is really impossible 
 reasonably to deny this. I shall not raise here the 
 question of what are called the miracles, not from 
 any desire to shirk the question the purely
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 99 
 
 historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead 
 seems to me really quite unanswerable but 
 because it is rather a question of presuppositions 
 about God and Nature, to discuss which would lead 
 us too far afield. But if His miraculous works 
 are made subject of debate, His character attests 
 ever more emphatically that Jesus was a super- 
 natural person. It is, as Tennyson once said, * more 
 wonderful than the greatest miracle.' 1 The one 
 fact of His sinlessness suffices. That His sinless- 
 ness is historically a fact and cannot be an 
 imagining we have already found reason to be 
 assured. It is admitted to be a fact by a great 
 many persons who are above suspicion of a 
 dogmatic bias which prejudices their judgment. 
 Professor Orr, who delights in appealing to the 
 Germans, names 8 among those who are constrained 
 to admit it adherents of the Hegelian school like 
 Daub, Marheineke, Rosencranz, Vatke ; mediat- 
 ing theologians of all types like Schleiermacher, 
 Beyschlag, Rothe, and Ritschl ; liberal theologians 
 like Hase and Schenkel ; and so decided an 
 opponent of the miraculous even as Lipsius. Lists 
 
 1 Memoir, p. a 73. 
 
 * Christian Rrw of G^d and tlu Wtrld, p. atS
 
 ioo THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 of authorities are a weariness to the flesh rather 
 than illuminative to the spirit, but these names are 
 not without impressiveness when one realises what 
 is the subject-matter of their common admission 
 For, disguise it as you may, sinlessness is super- 
 natural. Sin is in human nature as we know 
 it, and where there is no sin there is what is 
 if not infra-human, as in the case of the beasts 
 supernatural. But let us suppose that even this 
 sinlessness is disputed. That Jesus is a super- 
 natural person is still brought home as a personal 
 conviction and impression, a thing of which he is 
 sure, to any man to whom the living spirit of 
 Jesus is such a power as has been already described 
 in life and character. Such a man needs to read 
 neither the claims of Jesus nor the concessions of 
 German critics ; he has the witness in himself. 
 As he finds Jesus the principle and potency of a 
 new life that is stronger than all the old forces 
 within him, he argues immediately and unhesita- 
 tingly, as was argued long ago, that * if this man 
 were not of God, He could do nothing.' What 
 the expression ' of God ' precisely means we are 
 hardly yet in a position to say. But it means at 
 least this that there is manifested in Jesus a power
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 101 
 
 greater than the natural forces in human life. 
 Here is a unique fact and which justly we call 
 supernatural. Here is a fact of unique significance 
 for the quest of faith : this supernatural fact will tell 
 us something over and above all other phenomena 
 about the great question to which we seek an 
 answer. The answer of Nature we have read ; here 
 is a fact supernatural which we have still to read. 
 
 This, then, is the position we have reached that 
 among the facts of the world, whose voice in 
 answer to the question of faith is so insufficient, 
 has appeared this fact of Christ which has a quite 
 peculiar significance just because it cannot be 
 classified with the other facts of history, but is over 
 and above them a fact by itself and transcendent. 
 Its meaning, then, is a final word, and is not to be 
 qualified or cancelled by the apparent meaning of 
 subordinate facts. All facts are subordinate to the 
 fact of Christ who has shown Himself to be greater 
 than such tremendous facts as sin and death. 1 
 Therefore to this fact the human spirit turns in its 
 
 1 I refer here primarily to that spiritual life after his departure 
 from earth which has already been described ; but, if this be admitted, 
 the recorded physical victory orer the tomb obtains a certain con- 
 gnioiistiejs, and, with its strong historical support, can hardly b* 
 dismissed as a preposterous incredibility.
 
 loa THE FACT Ot CHRIST 
 
 quest of faith for its final answer, and it asks what 
 is the character of the power that is in and with 
 the transcendent fact of Christ ? 
 
 To begin with, it is clearly a spiritual Power. 
 It is not a brutal, meaningless physical compulsion 
 to which, even if we had to yield to it, we as 
 rational spirits would be really superior. It is 
 spirit : it is the highest within our spirits. Its 
 compulsion is ever reason, and to obey it is our 
 freedom. Then, secondly, this Power that is 
 with Jesus is ethical. It is the very Power of 
 holiness and truth and love in our hearts, and 
 all that we know of these things we know 
 through it alone. Lastly, it is personal. By this 
 I mean not so much that it is a personal agent 
 though of course that is meant too, and it is really 
 implied in a power that is spirit but rather that 
 it treats us as persons. It does not deal with us 
 en masse. It individualises us and is almost as if 
 made for each of us alone. Whereas in the laws 
 of nature and processes of history we perceive 
 their general meaning but can hardly find in them 
 a meaning for ourselves, in the fact of Christ our 
 difficulty is to express it in geaeral terms, but we 
 are quite sure of what it has meant for our souls.
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 103 
 
 We describe, then, the Power that is in the 
 fact of Christ as spiritual, ethical, and one that 
 personally takes to do with us. Is not this to 
 name the God we seek ? Is not this, most simply 
 and really, to find the 'living God*? What is 
 this ' living God ' that our souls desire but a 
 Power precisely such as has been described : a 
 God who, at last we know, is not merely a part of 
 the machine of nature, but the Orderer of it and 
 is spirit as we are spirit who seek the Father of 
 spirits ; who is ethically holy, for we cannot call 
 that God which is not good ; who is, finally, one 
 who deals with us as persons and not, as Nature 
 seems to do, but as items in her eternal process ? 
 The Power that is with Jesus is surely and really 
 at least the beginning of the faith that there is 
 indeed a ' living God ' who is the Friend and 
 Father of our spirits, and our quest for Him, if 
 haply we might find Him, finds its rest in the 
 4 surer word * of the fact of Christ. 
 
 And so the fact of Christ is the foundation of 
 faith in the * living God.* It is, be it observed, 
 not the teaching or doctrine of Jesus that is this, 
 but the fact of what Jesus Himself is and means. 
 This distinction is of importance. Faith is based
 
 104 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 not on the ideas of even the noblest of teachers, 
 but on a fact which declares itself to mean the 
 supreme Word of God. It is not that Jesus has 
 spoken and His words are in the Gospels ; it is 
 that God has spoken and His word is in history 
 and experience. The importance of this lies here, 
 that what faith needs is not new ideas, but new 
 facts. As ideas, the central points of Christian 
 faith such as a trust in the Divine Fatherhood 
 and a hope beyond the grave are hardly wholly 
 new. Many earnest and noble souls have stretched 
 out their minds towards them. What, then, was 
 lacking for faith ? Just that, after all, there were 
 but ideas, speculations, yearnings ; and our 
 thoughts on these matters are not the sure 
 measure of what really is. Before the stern, 
 unyielding facts of life and especially before life's 
 final fact of death, how easily such thoughts falter 
 and fail. 
 
 ' Eternal hopes are man's 
 
 Which, when they should maintain themselves aloft, 
 Want due consistence : like a pillar of smoke 
 That with majestic energy from earth 
 Rises, but, having reached the thinner air, 
 Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen.' * 
 
 1 Words worth's Excursion, IT.
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 105 
 
 Who will assure us, in face of ' the thinner air ' 
 that is the breath of death, that these hopes -and 
 speculations are the sure ' pillar of cloud ' leading 
 us truly to a promised land and are not but a 
 ' pillar of smoke ' from the fires of human fancy ? 
 A faith thus founded will always be cherishable by 
 certain temperaments and it is largely a matter 
 of temperament but it will never really grip the 
 mass of men simply because it is a mere edifice 
 of conceptions insecurely founded on the bed-rock 
 of fact. But it is just this that Christian faith 
 possesses. Its basis, I repeat, is not the ideas of 
 Jesus but the fact. It brings not a new doctrine 
 merely, but new data. It comes not with the 
 theory of a fatherly God, but with a pheno- 
 menon, in history and experience, which means 
 that. Now all this is precisely what faith needs. 
 Faith as indeed may be said of all truth is like 
 Antaeus in Greek legend, who was invincible when 
 touching mother-earth ; and the mother-earth of 
 faith is fact the fact of Christ. 
 
 Perhaps it is well for us to recall here, in thus 
 basing faith on the fact of Christ, that, as we saw, 
 that is a dual fact one at once of outward history 
 and inward experience It is on this dual fact
 
 106 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 that our faith is to be based ; in other words, 
 faith has an historical as well as a spiritual witness. 
 There is an influential tendency in our day to re- 
 ceive the latter but discard the former. Teachers 
 such as the late T. H. Green or Dr. Martineau 
 would have faith find its sole authority in the 
 religious consciousness within and not lean on any 
 outward historical revelation. 1 Now it is indeed 
 true and it had become obscured under apolo- 
 gists like Paley that no external authority can 
 demonstrate faith. Only within are we really 
 made sure that this is of God. But it does not 
 follow that the inward experience is to be isolated, 
 and that in accepting it we do well to discard the 
 other. As a matter of fact the inward experience, 
 as has already been said, cannot always, when 
 isolated, maintain itself. It really is not an 
 assured, established witness. Now the Christian 
 assertion here is that God has spoken to men in 
 two corroborating ways the witness of the his- 
 torical Christ confirming and thus assuring (not, 
 as Green implies, superseding) the witness within. 
 This was certainly the method of Jesus Himself; 
 
 1 Vide Green's addreu on faith (IFtrii, iii.) and Martineau'i Seat 
 tf 4ut Parity in R/ligin.
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 107 
 
 as Canon Gore says, He 'undoubtedly intended 
 religious belief to rest on a double basis.* * It is 
 precisely this historical corroboration which is 
 needed not to create for that it cannot do but 
 confirm faith within us and to assure us we are 
 not mistaken. The outward and inward witness 
 about Christ interlock. The historical seals the 
 spiritual ; the spiritual signs the historical. On 
 the complete fact of Christ the fact that is alike 
 in history and in experience inexplicable except as 
 meaning the living God faith stands. 
 
 It is not necessary that we should discuss the 
 varied contents of faith, for obviously if Jesus be 
 the word of God to man, that includes every- 
 thing. If God have spoken and have so spoken 
 that ' sufficeth us/ It does not indeed show us 
 everything, but it shows us the one thing we need 
 to know the character of God. God is the God 
 who sent Jesus. Given that as an axiom, faith can 
 work out anything. Take, for example, immor- 
 tality. Christian faith has no demonstration that 
 death does not end all. But, assured about the 
 character of God, it knows who is the keeper of 
 the keys of the grave, and it can trust its dear ones 
 
 l Ikt Incarmatu* ^ thi Sm tf GW (Bamptoo Lecture, 1191), p. 57.
 
 io8 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 to Him with calm hope. How far is that better 
 than trying, as spiritualism does, to pick the lock! 
 The character of God is the question in all ques- 
 tions of faith, and when that has been answered 
 faith is at rest about everything. 
 
 May we then, now, lay down the pen and say 
 we have stated comprehensively, however slightly, 
 the meaning of the fact of Christ for faith ? It is 
 an impossibility. Again we have raised questions 
 that impel us further. We have found that Jesus 
 cannot be truly described or accounted for in the 
 terms of merely mundane phenomena. We say 
 He is, in some unique sense, * of God.' He was 
 more than a man as we know men. All this must 
 be explicated. Sooner or later we must say what 
 it means. It is obvious that, despite all that has 
 been said, we have still to say with defmiteness 
 and finality what this growingly profound fact of 
 Christ is. 
 
 ii. *AND THE WORD WAS GOD ' 
 
 The question that is now before us stands out 
 like the Matterhorn seen from the valley below. 
 It towers above us to dizziness ; but at the first
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 109 
 
 glance you see the summit. The question before 
 us is this : If Jesus be more than a man in His 
 own consciousness, His sinlessness, His immortal 
 personal presence and power, His mighty works, 
 His significance what then shall we say of Him? 
 There is only one answer to this question. It is 
 an answer which is not incredible utterly, wildly 
 incredible only because it is simply inevitable 
 alike to logic and to religion. 
 
 The rational or logical side of the argument can 
 be stated very briefly. If Jesus was more than a 
 man, as we know men, shall we then say that He 
 was a prodigy superhuman and demi-divine ? 
 To state such a position is to expose it. It is true 
 to the data about Christ neither in history nor in 
 experience, and at the same time it raises insuper- 
 able objections to itself. In Jesus are to be found 
 things characteristic of a man, and also things 
 such as His claim to forgive sins or His power to 
 create a new moral self characteristic of God ; 
 but there is nothing about Him characteristic of a 
 being neither man nor God. And the objections 
 to admitting into our thought such a being are 
 too obvious to need emphasis. Demi-divinity is 
 simply a relapse into heathenism. This Arian,
 
 no THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 or quasi-Arian, view of Jesus has absolutely 
 nothing to say for itself historically or experiment- 
 ally, and has everything against it philosophically. 
 It is a Christ which no reader of the Gospels would 
 recognise, and in which, as T. H. Green whom, 
 having named lately to differ from him, I wish to 
 name now with regard and gratitude says, ' no 
 philosopher who had outgrown the demonism of 
 ancient systems could for a moment acquiesce.* l 
 This should be fairly and fully faced. I think 
 there is just ground of complaint when, for 
 example, Keim describes Jesus as * superhuman 
 miracle,' f or Channing says he * believes Jesus 
 Christ to be more than a human being, 1 and there 
 they leave the matter. One compkins of this not 
 in the orthodox but in a purely intellectual interest. 
 These are meant to be serious and exact expres- 
 sions, or they are not. If they are not seriously 
 and exactly meant, they are intellectually un- 
 worthy evasions of the great problem of Christ. 
 If they are serious and exact, they involve let 
 this be clearly understood a position for which 
 
 IFtrkj, iii. 17*. 
 
 Gftcfuchte VOM J*s* von Nazara, Eng. trant., iii. 66*. 
 i, vr. io-
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING in 
 
 history has not the smallest support and philo- 
 sophy has only utter repudiation. 
 
 If this be so, what then ? There is only a 
 dernier ressort. It was reached at a very early 
 stage of Christian thought by a writer of inspired 
 insight who seized his pen and, without argument 
 or explanation, wrote : the Word was God. The 
 critical penetrativeness of that writer is too little 
 recognised. He overleapt centuries of con- 
 troversy. He saw at the first glance, what all 
 history has abundantly demonstrated, that all 
 intermediate compromises, such as the Arian, were 
 neither historically nor logically tenable, and that, 
 therefore, the issue was clean and clear between 
 mere humanity and very Deity. With that issue 
 direct before him, he wrote, not so much the best 
 or highest, but the only description of Jesus that 
 he could write. As a Christian, he could not 
 describe Christ as mere man ; nor can we. As a 
 thinker he could not describe Him as an interme- 
 diate divinity ; nor can we. If then he was to 
 write at all he could write but one thing, and if 
 we are to say at all what Christ is, we can say but 
 that one thing too. It is, I repeat, saved from being 
 quite incredible only by being quite inevitable.
 
 ii2 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 I have indicated this logical argument briefly, 
 and therefore, doubtless, very insufficiently, but I 
 do not propose to dwell on it further because, after 
 all, this is driving faith at the point of the bayonet, 
 and spiritual truth is not so reached with reality 
 and certainty. But the Divinity of Jesus is not 
 only a logical conclusion to which we are forced, 
 but is in the very woof of Christian experience. 
 The Christian as a Christian is profoundly involved 
 in it and committed to it. 
 
 That by which the Divinity of Jesus is seen to 
 be not a mere logical addendum to Christianity 
 but an integral part of Christianity itself is simply 
 these meanings of the fact of Christ which we 
 have been discussing. What the Christian man 
 finds he receives from Jesus is not simply teaching 
 about God, but is a life and power that are of 
 God Himself. He finds in the fact of Christ 
 all he looks to find in God. As he reads the 
 definition of eternal life as ' to know Thee (that 
 is, God) and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent,' 
 he is quite unable religiously to maintain the 
 distinction between the two. He finds God not 
 beyond Christ, but in Him. In the very human 
 life and person of Jesus we find not only a human
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 113 
 
 life and person that direct us to a higher source 
 of power ; we find already there the presence and 
 power of what declares itself to be not less than 
 God Himself. When Jesus deals with us and 
 works within us, He does what only God can do. 
 All Christian experience is nothing if it is not this. 
 And if this be so, then, again, we can only in one 
 way say what Jesus is. As Herrmann aptly puts 
 it, * when we confess His Deity, we simply give 
 Him His right name.' 1 What other name can 
 we give to one who is for us and in us what 
 assuredly only God can be? This is the really 
 Christian meaning of the Divinity of Christ. The 
 dogmatic definitions of the symbols are quite 
 secondary to this. There is no reality in your 
 assertion of the dogma of the Divinity of Jesus 
 unless you mean that for you Jesus is that which 
 only God Himself can be. If He is not this, 
 the orthodox formularies are mere verbiage. If 
 He is this, you cannot but give Him ' His right 
 name,' and, though possibly with considerable 
 stumbling at Athanasian or other expressions 
 rightly to judge of which requires an adequate 
 
 1 Dei Verkekr det Christens nut Gott, Eng trans., p. i n. Some oi 
 the expressions in this paragraph arc suggested by Herrmann. 
 
 H
 
 ii 4 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 recollection of their historical conditions you 
 surely may in words call Him that which in fact 
 He is. 
 
 Moreover, all deep and honest Christian life 
 goes on upon this foundation. It goes on if we 
 take Jesus to be not only a Friend, or Teacher, 
 or Leader, but, in the most strict and inward 
 sense, our Lord. That Lordship of Jesus obtains 
 over the very prerogatives of personal life. Our 
 hearts, our wills are to be His; our consciences 
 reserve no rights before Him whose authority is 
 our last moral appeal. In actual life, indeed, this 
 completeness of surrender is far from being 
 realised, but it is, in idea, inseparable from 
 Christianity. Now, all this is a relationship 
 utterly intolerable to be given to any save One. 
 It is the surrender of all self-respect and manhood, 
 intellectually or morally, to render it to any man, 
 It is, however, a relationship entirely proper to 
 render towards God, towards Him alone. If, 
 then, this be the relationship towards Jesus which 
 is the very constituent of Christian life, it surely 
 again appears that to confess His Divinity is only 
 to give its ' proper name * to that of which all 
 Christian life is a practical confession. It comes
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 115 
 
 put it more briefly to this. We cannot 
 be Christians unless we will say to Jesus, most 
 literally and unreservedly, * My Lord.' But we 
 simply ought not and must not say that to any 
 creature. If we say ' My Lord ' we should be 
 able to add with the honest Apostle, * My God.' 
 The Christian who will not maintain his Lord's 
 Godhead must find it hard to maintain his own 
 self-respecting manhood. 
 
 This, then, is the all but incredible but wholly 
 inevitable conclusion to which we are brought 
 that Jesus means God. 1 As reason cannot receive 
 J esus as a demi-god, and as religion cannot regard 
 Him as merely an intermediary revelation, we, who 
 say unalterably that He is more than a man, must 
 go on to say : * and the Word was God.' 
 
 The idea is so utterly staggering and over- 
 whelming that is, if one in the least thinks of 
 it that it is difficult to know what it means to 
 believe it Even when one admits its logical 
 sequence from the historical facts, and its essential 
 
 1 Of course I do not intend this expression in merely the Ritsch- 
 Han sense that Christ, having for us in religion the value of God, 
 may be ertimattd by us as God. The historical- logical argument is 
 to be combined with die religious, and corroborate* the latter'* 
 judgment at a fact.
 
 u6 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 admission in all Christian life and experience, 
 still one feels that such knowledge is too high for 
 us, and we cannot attain to it. Some of the 
 difficulties that are presented to us about it are 
 indeed to be boldly resisted, and even resented. 
 For example, we are sometimes reminded in this 
 connection that we no longer live in pre- 
 Copernican days. This planet, which men used 
 to believe was the centre of the universe, and its 
 inhabitants therefore, at least possibly, the apple 
 of its Creator's eye, we now know to be but a 
 speck amid infinite systems of worlds ; and we 
 are, therefore, scornfully asked if it be not but 
 an insanity to imagine that the Infinite Cause 
 whose universe is in endless space has taken the 
 likeness of the creatures of one of the most 
 infinitesimal of His worlds, and has * dwelt 
 among us.' Now, this is simply an attempt 
 to terrorise the imagination, and is not to be 
 yielded to. We know little or nothing of the 
 rest of the universe, and it may very well be that 
 in no other planet but this is there intelligent and 
 moral life ; and, if that be so, then this world, 
 despite its material insignificance, would remain 
 the real summit of creation. But even if this be
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 117 
 
 not so, still man remains man a spiritual being, 
 capable of knowing, loving, and glorifying God. 
 Man is that, be there what myriads of worlds 
 there may ; and is not less that, though in other 
 worlds were also beings like him. There is 
 therefore a spiritual interest at stake in this small 
 world, and it is therefore not a small world to a 
 God who knows the true proportionate value of the 
 material and the moral. * Is then/ asks Tertullian, 
 
 * the Incarnation unworthy of God ? ' and he justly 
 replies that ' it is in the highest worthy of God, 
 for nothing is so worthy of God as our salvation.' 
 When Mr. Spencer asks us if we can believe that 
 
 * the Cause to which we can put no limits in space 
 or time, and of which our entire solar system is a 
 relatively infinitesimal product, took the disguise 
 of a man,'* he may think he is giving us an 
 imposing conception of God ; but no conception 
 of God is less imposing than that which represents 
 Him as a kind of millionaire in worlds, so 
 materialised by the immensity of His possessions 
 as to have lost the sense of the incalculably greater 
 worth of the spiritual interests of even the smallest 
 part of them. 
 
 . Marcti*, u. 17, * Etcbtiajticai Inttttuttmt, 704.
 
 n8 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 And yet, though we may repel objections of 
 this kind, the essential difficulty of, with reality, 
 believing in the Incarnation remains. Even a 
 successful argument for it hardly establishes it 
 in our minds as a fact. There is but one thing 
 that will meet this, only one thing that enables us 
 to say not merely * I cannot deny it/ or * I admit 
 it/ but what is a great deal more ' I believe it.' 
 That one^ thing is to perceive the need for it. So 
 much is this the case, that I will say you cannot 
 with reality apprehend the Incarnation as a fact 
 unless you see, to some degree, a raison d'etre 
 for that fact. It appeals to us as a truth only 
 when it appeals to us as a divinely necessary 
 truth. And thus if we are to receive with reality 
 this stupendous meaning of the fact of Christ we 
 must ask the meaning of that meaning. We 
 must ask Cur Deus homo ? 
 
 The answer to this question is the final meaning 
 of the fact of Christ, and must be treated by itself 
 in the next lecture. But, introductory to that 
 and in closing this lecture, one thing may be said 
 of the bearing of the idea of the Incarnation on 
 the meaning of Christ we have just been con- 
 sidering, that, namely, for faith and as a revelation
 
 THE FURTHER MEANING 119 
 
 of the Divine character. It is the Incarnation and 
 the Incarnation alone that gives faith its supreme 
 word about God's character that God is love. 
 
 What is love? It is more than a kind in- 
 terest or generous regard. Love has its essential 
 qualities, and these are sacrifice, unselfishness, the 
 giving of one's own and of oneself. If then we 
 are to call God love, we must be able to say that 
 He is sacrificing and unselfish, generous of His 
 own and unsparing of Himself. Now if the word 
 or messenger or revealer of God be not one with 
 Him, then there is indeed an expression of the 
 Divine interest and regard and care, but not, in 
 the deepest sense, an expression necessarily or 
 clearly of love. It does not show really and 
 essentially a tt^-giving on God's part. But love 
 is just a self-giving. I do not say that in that 
 case God would not be love, but only that His 
 love, as love, has not been really exercised or 
 exhibited towards us. But if Jesus be a Divine 
 Incarnate word, then ' in this was the love of God 
 manifested.' Here is God giving Himself. Here 
 is not the sending of another, but the sacrifice 
 of Himself. Here, then, is a great word for faith. 
 God is not merely good, gracious, recognising us
 
 no THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 and helping us ; in the most real and essential and 
 literal sense He loves us. How great a word 
 that is * God loved the world 1 ' * How many 
 hearts have understood it who have never yet 
 understood what " God created the world " or 
 " God will judge the world " means ? M It is 
 now the superb commonplace of Christianity. But 
 nothing enables Christianity to say it quite truly 
 except the Incarnation, for nothing else shows us 
 the real self-giving, the personal unselfishness, the 
 literal love of Almighty God. 
 
 1 From Thought from the Writingi tf R. W. Harbour (privately 
 printed).
 
 THE FINAL MEANING OF THE FACT
 
 'La foi chretienne ne ra principalement qu'a etablir ce* 
 deux choses : la corruption de la nature et la redemption 
 de Jesus Chriit.' PASCAL.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING OF THE FACT 
 
 IF we are now going to ask the meaning of that 
 meaning which we have found in the fact of Christ, 
 it is of some importance that we should once more 
 put before our minds what that fact precisely was. 
 The meaning we have found in Christ is that He 
 is an incarnation of the Divine life and power. If 
 we feel we cannot with reality embrace this in our 
 minds unless we also perceive something of the 
 reason and ground of it, then it is, I say, im- 
 portant here to remember what historically that 
 Incarnation was. Let us again, as everywhere, 
 study the fact of Christ. 
 
 Why this is important is that there is a way 
 of thinking about this question which, treating it 
 philosophically and not historically, gives us a 
 solution which is no solution. We are told that 
 the idea of the Incarnation is really involved in
 
 i2 4 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 the very Being of God and His relations to man. 
 If God be spirit and love, He must ever seek to 
 reveal Himself to beings whom He has made 
 capable of receiving such a revelation, and this 
 consummates itself in the taking of manhood into 
 God. The Incarnation is thus part of the process 
 of the Divine life, and the ground and reason of it 
 are to be found there. This line of thought is 
 very characteristic of Hegel and of all philosophers 
 who seek to construe Christianity in terms of an 
 absolute dialectic. The same tendency appears in 
 theology, and the idea of the ' Gospel of Creation,' 
 as Dr. Westcott calls it l that is * the promise of 
 the Incarnation which was included in the Creation 
 of man* has received encouragement from con- 
 siderable, if not from the greatest, theologians. 1 
 It is a speculative nicety which has much about 
 it that is very attractive at first sight ; but its 
 attraction fades when we turn to history. For 
 philosophy is interesting and valuable only as it 
 deals with the facts of the world, and this way of 
 thinking hardly seriously deals with the historical 
 
 1 ride Essay at the close of his The Spittles of St. John. 
 
 1 Vide a just conclusion in Thomas Aquinas, Sum. TJieol., pars tu. 
 quest, i. art. 3. (Thomas is a theologian who should be more read 
 than he is in the Protestant Church.)
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 125 
 
 facts of the case. It is admitted that this Divine 
 self-manifestation reaches its highest in Christ. 
 And what was Christ? Ecce Homo! There is 
 a coming of God not simply to man, but to 
 sorrow and shame and suffering, to tears and 
 prayers and a sweat. There is an entering into 
 not only human trouble, but an agony unparalleled 
 and unfathomed. This is the Divine self-mani- 
 festation, this the Incarnation we have to ponder. 
 It is not Bethlehem only nor Nazareth, but Geth- 
 semane and Calvary. It is not a philosophical 
 idea of an Incarnation, but the historical fact of 
 the Incarnation. You have said nothing by saying 
 that self-revelation by becoming man is involved 
 in the idea of God as loving spirit ; do you mean 
 that there is involved in God's life that self- 
 manifestation which you see in the * man of 
 sorrows ' ? The question is to be faced. Our 
 philosophy must be a theory of the facts of the 
 case. An honoured writer on Christianity says 
 that ' the very idea of God may be seen to contain 
 that relation to humanity which is expressed in 
 the person of Christ/ 1 What is that relation? 
 Becoming man ? That is but a shallow way to 
 
 1 Principal Caird's tundajntntal Ideat oj Ckrutuuutj, ii. 101.
 
 126 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 state the facts. It was becoming that man that 
 'man of sorrows/ that * thorn-crowned man.' 
 I look at that man. I see His infinite sadness in 
 the upper-room, His agony and sweat in the 
 garden ; I hear His ' Father, if it be possible,' 
 His ' My God, my God ! ' And I ask, is this 
 relation to humanity in ' the very idea of God ' ? 
 Surely, whatever philosophical reflections may be 
 made about an Incarnation idea, we shall not 
 pretend that these explain the facts of the 
 Incarnation. Face the history and there is more 
 to be said. The reason and ground of that so 
 sweet and beautiful, but, in the end and essentially, 
 so awful and mysterious Incarnation are still to 
 seek. 
 
 Whether or not we shall ever find the more 
 that is to be said and be able to say it, the line 
 along which we must seek it is made clear for us 
 by Jesus Himself. At the impending of the 
 very crisis of the dark side of His life, He said 
 and I do not suppose that the authenticity of 
 the words of institution at the Last Supper are 
 seriously questioned that His blood was shed 
 ' for the remission of sins.' The word is a key 
 and suffices. It would be only perversity of
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 127 
 
 mind not to use it. The meaning of the Incar- 
 nation I say of the Incarnation is to be found 
 in the fact of sin. Jesus said so and that is 
 enough. 
 
 Ah ! what a problem this is we have set our- 
 selves if for light upon it we have to turn to what 
 is itself of all problems, the darkest, most difficult, 
 most despairing ! And, moreover, this to which 
 we are directed is of all topics, that which our 
 whole nature most dislikes to face ; we shall 
 dispute its facts, discount their significance, and, 
 above all, deny their personal application. Let 
 us therefore again say to ourselves that it is Jesus 
 Himself who forces those who would understand 
 Him to follow this line ; let us recognise from 
 Him that we cannot fully state the meaning of 
 Christ if we will not frankly study this matter 
 of sin. 
 
 I. THE REALITY OF SIN 
 
 The study of sin is, if it is to be really serious 
 and effective, a study of oneself. Nothing is 
 more easy than to bring in a charge of universal 
 tinfulness against humanity in general, and to
 
 128 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 substantiate that alike by facts and by the wit- 
 ness of even non-Christian authorities. 'Sin is 
 common to all men,' says one of the Greek 
 tragedians. 1 ' We have all sinned,' says a Roman 
 moralist.* And modern literature not least, 
 modern fiction is full of the same confession, 
 and indeed has often to defend itself from the 
 charge of being repulsive and immoral by saying 
 that it is only depicting what life is. But such a 
 general impeachment of humanity as sinful makes 
 hardly any impression on the conscience. It is 
 like the * all men are mortal ' of our logic-books, 
 which we all admitted as a major premise but 
 which never made us in the least realise that we 
 should die. Sin is, like death, not seriously 
 realised except as a personal fact, We really 
 know it only when we know it about ourselves. 
 The word * sin ' has really no serious meaning to a 
 man except when it means that he is a sinful 
 man. 
 
 If then a general impeachment of humanity is 
 not enough to show an individual man his personal 
 sinfulness, what is it that will do this? The 
 answer is that Jesus Christ does it. When a 
 
 1 Sophocles' Antigant 8 Seneca's De Clementia.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 129 
 
 man by his self-indulgence in wickedness has got 
 his life into misery, that may make him realise 
 that evil is a real thing and that he has played 
 the fool ; but even this is hardly a conviction of 
 sin. And while in a man's conscience there is 
 what might formulate the charge to him, still 
 even that often fails because it easily becomes 
 deadened and sered and apparently incapable of 
 bringing home its charges against us. It is 
 Jesus Christ who gives a spiritual edge to life's 
 judgments and revives the voice of conscience 
 within us. He Himself says His own spirit is 
 that which convinces men of sin. Let us not 
 think that in studying what sin is we are wander- 
 ing away from the bright and beneficent fact of 
 Christ. It is in and by facing this fact that we 
 have to confess that we have sinned. 
 
 For when a man lets the meaning of Christ 
 really fully and fairly shine upon his life then 
 it says to him three things about sin. 
 
 The first is this : that one has seen and known 
 the better and has chosen and done the worse. 
 The charge, if only we will face it, cannot but 
 go home. We have seen and known the better. 
 Not only the fact of Christ which, as we saw 
 
 I
 
 1 30 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 in an earlier lecture, is a fact of more than bare 
 history but also life and nature, have again and 
 again brought the issues before us, and we cannot 
 say that, like the brutes, we have had no know- 
 ledge of the better way of life. But we have 
 chosen and done the worse in thoughts and words 
 and acts. We know this not in a general sense 
 but concretely and particularly, and not as an 
 occasional or exceptional thing, but as a character- 
 istic of our lives. We recall last year or last week 
 or yesterday, and we name that evil habit or un- 
 kind word or selfish act or base thought. We 
 take one form of sin some besetting sin. We 
 begin to count how often we have yielded to it. 
 We find the number is more than that of the 
 hairs of our head. Our whole past life seems to 
 have been lived for that sin ; our whole character 
 to have been a companionship with it ; our whole 
 nature to have made itself its home. I am not 
 speaking of a notoriously wicked man nor, neces- 
 sarily, of what are called grosser vices. Let the 
 average man, who has never let Jesus Christ deal 
 with his conscience about the facts of his life, 
 review the last year of it with a mind and heart 
 quite open to all that we have been finding in
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 131 
 
 that fact, and will he not find that his dominant 
 tnd deepest note, his daily habit of thought or 
 life, his thousand-times repeated characteristic has 
 been, not a noble loving and choosing of the 
 highest when he saw it, but some worldly 'lust 
 of the eyes ' or sensual * lust of the flesh ' or 
 perhaps the most common of all petty * pride of 
 life ' which he did not blush to yield to even daily, 
 but which it is a shame to him to discover now 
 and to confess even to himself? 
 
 This develops into something more the 
 second thing that the spirit of Jesus brings home 
 to us about sin. It is a thing so individual and 
 personal that it is best stated in the first person. 
 He makes me feel that at least in me all this is 
 without excuse ; in other words, that I am not 
 only sinful, as all men probably are, but also 
 culpable and guilty with many and special aggra- 
 vations. This I cannot say in the same way of 
 others ; indeed, I often feel there may be and 
 are a hundred excuses for them. I therefore 
 cannot out and out condemn others without 
 Pharisaism. But there is no arrogance in my 
 judging myself. No doubt I have had my 
 temptations too, in circumstances without and
 
 132 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 temperament within, but I cannot find in these 
 any escape from the charge of being a culpably 
 guilty man. For two reasons I cannot In the 
 first place, whatever circumstances or temperament 
 may have brought, I have not only done evil but 
 liked to do it. This love of it, which often 
 created the desired circumstances and cherished 
 the suitable temperament, is a fact which I know 
 about my own heart but which I cannot in the 
 same way know of any other man's heart, and it 
 makes me condemn myself in a way in which I 
 can condemn no other. And, in the second 
 place, I know another thing about myself that 
 I know about no one else. I know the chances 
 I had of the better choice and the better way. 
 I knew the special reasons and arguments, arising 
 out of just my experience in life, which should 
 have made me a good man. I recall this mercy 
 and that other in my upbringing, this warning and 
 that in my life's discipline, this call to thought, 
 that appeal to everything worthy in me and so 
 on. I begin to count up these things which are 
 things I know nothing about in my neighbour. 
 And thus I find myself, apart from any general 
 impeachment of humanity or any charge against
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 133 
 
 any other man I find that at least I have been, 
 in a peculiarly inexcusable and shameful way, a 
 sinful man. And so is it that the very principle 
 on which I cannot judge others is one on which 
 I must judge myself. What that principle is 
 was never better stated than by Burns 
 
 * What '* done we partly may compute, 
 But know not what 't resisted/ l 
 
 It is true ; and I will not judge, say, the sad life 
 of Burns himself. But the plea cuts both ways. 
 In myself I know ' what 's resisted.' I know 
 the grace I have resisted. And therein I judge 
 myself, and feel, as Bunyan says, that ' every one 
 has a better heart than I have.' * Thus, to quote 
 another great English writer who often deals with 
 this subject, ' God has given no one any power of 
 knowing the true greatness of any sin but his own, 
 and therefore the greatest sinner that every one 
 knows is himself.' * This is strictly true ; and 
 this is how every man who has learned from the 
 spirit of Jesus Christ that his has been a sinful 
 
 * Address to the Unco Quid. 
 
 * Grace Abounding, 84. Readers of this book will remember how 
 Bunyan feels what is said abore when he begins to compare himself 
 with other sinners Darid, Peter, and even Judas. 
 
 * Law's Strioiu Call, chap.
 
 i 3 4 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 life, calls himself with the Apostle, for the clearest 
 reasons, * the chief of sinners.' 
 
 All this leads to a third thing. We condemn 
 ourselves because we know ourselves. But Jesus, 
 of whom the woman of Samaria said that ' He has 
 told us all things that ever we did,' makes us 
 realise with a new seriousness that Another knows 
 us too. That other is no mere human judge. 
 
 'But what will God say?' 1 
 
 the living, holy, personal God of whom just 
 Jesus has made us so sure. Is His judgment 
 laxer and less serious than our judgment of our- 
 selves ? He is indeed good, but ' He shows His 
 love of good by His hate of sin.' * What will 
 He say ? God cannot regard us as other than we 
 really are. And what is it that we really are ? 
 We have just been discovering that. We are 
 persons who knew the better and did the worse, 
 and that without excuse, with the deepest aggra- 
 vations and despite a thousand reasons and re- 
 straints that should have kept us. If God be 
 God, if God be morally worthy to be God, what 
 is and must be His relation towards such ? Our 
 religion comes to an unhappy pause. Our search 
 
 1 Browning's Wont of It. 
 
 ' Tertultian'i adv. Marcitn, IT. 6.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 135 
 
 for God, if haply we might find Him, is clouded 
 with a dark apprehension lest we should too really 
 and nearly find Him or He find us. Our cry of 
 * My soul is athirst for the living God ; when shall 
 I appear before the presence of God ? * becomes the 
 other cry of ' Whither shall I flee from His pres- 
 ence ? ' We dislike the thought of God. We avoid 
 the thought of the future. Our desire and effort 
 become to forget God, and to evade such things, 
 as death, that remind us of Him. * Thus con- 
 science doth make cowards of us all.' 
 
 Are these unworthy and degrading thoughts, 
 akin to the gloomy terrors of the heathen on 
 whom the beneficent light of Christ has not 
 dawned ? It is easy to call them such, but they 
 are not. The meaning of the fact of Christ for 
 faith indeed dispels all fears about God that arise 
 from the thought of Him as wicked and unjust and 
 unholy. But these solemn apprehensions which 
 arise in the mind of the man who perceives that he 
 is a sinful man come not from the thought of God 
 as wicked and unjust and unholy, but on the very 
 contrary, from the thought of Him as righteous 
 and just and holy in other words, from a true, 
 not an untrue, thought of what God is. From 
 these apprehensions many things would deliver us.
 
 136 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 but these things are the spirit of unbelief, the 
 narcotics of pleasure, the oplare non esse Deum. 1 
 The fact of Christ does not treat these apprehen- 
 sions as morbid and foolish dreams. He awakens 
 them and deepens them and makes our consciences 
 feel them to be eternal moral truths. He con- 
 vinces us not only * of sin/ but also * of judgment.' 
 And without the smallest morbidness or super- 
 stition, but only with moral sanity and seriousness 
 may it be asked wherewithal shall we, who cannot 
 stand before our own consciences, stand before 
 the Searcher of hearts and not be overwhelmed? 
 Nur das Vollkommnt vor Goft vorsteken kann* 
 The question may be evaded. It may be evaded 
 by a refusal seriously to think what on the one 
 hand God is, and on the other we are. It may 
 be evaded. But it remains. 
 
 It thus would appear that the problem of sin is 
 deepening and darkening. It is something far 
 more than the moral problem of character. As 
 we have already seen, there is a problem of char- 
 acter. Evil has its results in bad habits, sinful 
 
 1 ' The wish that God did not exist.' 
 
 Schleiermacher's Dtr Chnttliche Glaubt, ii. (' Only the perfect 
 can stand before God.')
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 137 
 
 disposition, and bears fruit in many moral and 
 even physical consequences in this life. But it 
 appears this is not all the meaning of evil in man 
 For it bears other than these temporal fruits, and 
 has eternal consequences towards God. Here is 
 a matter calling for more than we found in the 
 fact of Christ when we were discussing the first 
 meaning of that fact. The problem of immorality 
 that is, man's character viewed only by itself 
 is a small thing compared to the problem of sin 
 that is, man's character viewed sub specie <eterni- 
 tatis and under the condemnation of God. 
 
 What a sad confusion seems to have overtaken 
 us in our investigations ! The fact of Christ that 
 had opened to us such happy and hopeful pro- 
 spects in the spheres of character and of faith, has 
 now darkened the day of its own heralding and 
 has developed meanings that seemingly destroy 
 both hope and happiness. For think what is 
 meant by God's condemnation of sin of us who 
 are sinners. To say it means punishment is 
 only to say the same thing in another word, for 
 what is punishment but simply displeasure in 
 operation ? It means far more than punishment. 
 There is no good of which it docs not mean the
 
 138 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 loss ; there is no hope of good of which it does 
 not mean the abandonment. Is it to this that 
 after all Jesus has brought us? Is the fact of 
 Christ like one of Heine's poems that begin with 
 thoughts of beauty and of peace which, in the last 
 verse, they shatter by some word of bitterness and 
 despair ? 
 
 But this is not the last word of Jesus Christ 
 about our sin and about God's view of it. We 
 must read on 
 
 n. THE PROBLEM OF FORGIVENESS 
 
 The further word that is to be found in the 
 fact of Christ concerning sin and God's view of it 
 can be stated very shortly. It does not admit of 
 dispute. The light and liberty that Jesus brings 
 with Him whenever He is received honestly and 
 cordially mean despite all that has just been said 
 that we are being treated by God not with dis- 
 pleasure and condemnation but with favour and 
 approval. The word of the Gospel and the ex- 
 perience of the Christian man are a delusion if 
 this be not so. In the fact of Christ we are 
 assuredly called to a glad confidence towards God
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 139 
 
 and a happy expectancy not of evil but of good, 
 and we have the sure conviction that He is not 
 against us, but is and eternally will be for us. 
 Jesus has simply misled our hearts if the Christian, 
 finding all this in the fact of Christ, may not rest 
 upon it as final and true about God. 
 
 It is obvious that only one word solves the 
 paradox thus created, and reconciles this grace 
 and assurance on God's part towards us with that 
 displeasure and condemnation which the same fact 
 of Christ made us feel must also be in God 
 towards sinners. Observe that these two apparent 
 contradictions are to be reconciled. We are not 
 to admit one into our minds by simply ousting 
 or forgetting the other. In saying that God 
 receives us and welcomes us, we must also and 
 at the same moment remember that we are full of 
 sin and God's face is set against sin. These con- 
 traries must be fairly reconciled, and, I say, there 
 is obviously only one word that reconciles them. 
 That word is forgiveness. In forgiveness is con- 
 tained the reality of sin, else there were nothing 
 to forgive ; in it is contained also the reality of 
 God's free favour to us, else we were not forgiven. 
 We are really sinful men ; we are really received
 
 I 4 o THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 and welcomed by God. These two facts put 
 together can mean only that God has forgiven 
 our sins. 
 
 The conclusion may seem a very simple one. 
 It is not a simple conclusion. Here we have 
 reached the very crux of the fact of sin namely, 
 the problem of the forgiveness of sin. That God 
 forgives is something we are apt to take as 
 almost axiomatic. Let us think a little carefully 
 and exactly what it means for God to forgive sins. 
 
 We naturally assume that it means for Him 
 just what it means for us, and that there is in- 
 volved in the Divine forgiveness of our sins just 
 what is involved in one man forgiving an injury 
 done to him by another. Thus, Priestley a most 
 honest, truth-seeking man says that 'it is re- 
 quired of us that if our brother only repent we 
 should forgive him even though he should repeat 
 his offence seven times a day ; on the same 
 generous maxim, therefore, we cannot but con- 
 clude that the Divine Being acts towards us.' * 
 The conclusion appears, at first sight, undeniable, 
 unless, as Socinus says from whom the argu- 
 ment is taken * we wish to concede less to God 
 
 1 Ctrruptioiu f Christianity, L 151.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 141 
 
 than is conceded to men themselves.' l But a 
 more careful reflection will, I think, show us 
 that it is a conclusion containing an utterly in- 
 adequate conception of God, and that the ques- 
 tion is one of conceding not less to God than 
 to men, but infinitely more. One is inclined to 
 reply to Socinus and Priestley in the words which 
 Luther once used to Erasmus in their discussion 
 on free-will : * Your thoughts concerning God 
 are too human.' f 
 
 Consider the essential difference in the rela- 
 tions of God and of man to the fabric of 
 morality. We are merely private individuals, 
 and our passing over of our injuries, which are 
 but personal wrongs, does not in the least degree 
 involve that that Jaw by which, in an ethical 
 world, evil and its due reward are, as Plato 
 says, * riveted together'* is abrogated or com- 
 promised. The moral fabric of the universe does 
 not depend on us, nor is it altered by what we 
 do. Indeed, it is only as private individuals 
 that, in general, we can forgive, and if our for- 
 
 1 Prelect. TAeol., xvi. The objection if of course much oldei 
 till ; it is mentioned by Anselm, 
 * Luther's Dt Strvo Arbitrit, wet. rr. ' ?k*d* t ix.
 
 I 4 2 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 givcness would have social or public effects en- 
 dangering moral order in the community, then 
 it may be impossible. Now, Almighty God is 
 not a magnified private individual. He is the 
 very source and centre of the ethical order of 
 the universe, and it does depend on Him. Thus 
 the just and ethically true connection between 
 evil and its due judgment is abrogated if He 
 abrogate it; and that means ethical disorder and 
 ethical chaos and the world no longer a morally 
 constituted world. Such forgiveness would be on 
 God's part, what it is not on ours, an act in- 
 volving moral anarchy. It is of real importance 
 that this essential difference between God and 
 ourselves in this matter be recognised. A modern 
 American theological writer insists repeatedly that 
 this matter of forgiveness is c not a matter of 
 relation to law or to government ; it is primarily 
 and essentially a matter of the relations between 
 persons, God and man,' and that 'it is the per- 
 sonal relation that needs to be set right, and it 
 is through being right with God that men are 
 to be made right with the government of God.* * 
 
 1 Outline rf Christum TAtoIogy, by W. N. Clarke, D.D., New 
 York, p. 3z.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 143 
 
 The distinction seems to me of no essential value 
 it may have a use as a cneck to abstractly 
 forensic forms of speech for the law and the 
 person of God are one. God is the ethical 
 order. In Him, as Dr. Dale says, 'the law is 
 alive.' 1 It is, therefore, of no essential meaning 
 to speak of a * personal relation to God ' in 
 forgiveness as if that were ' not a matter of 
 relation to law.' I repeat that God is the moral 
 law. And because He is and we are not that, 
 there is no just comparison between forgiveness 
 in us and in Him. With us, indeed, what we 
 call forgiveness is rather a forgetting of our 
 injuries ; but there can be no mere forgetful- 
 ness in God's forgiveness. If the just and 
 eternal ethical order that is the very foundation 
 of a moral universe rivets together sin and its 
 due reward, how can He who is that very 
 order, separate them and yet be its God ? For- 
 giveness is to man the plainest of duties; to 
 God it is the profoundest of problems. 
 
 Is it not, indeed, as Dr. Chalmers used to 
 say, * a problem fit for a God ' ? It is no petty 
 question of personal unwillingness to forgive, or 
 
 * TJu Atonement, Lect. iz. 
 
 \
 
 I 4 4 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 of personal vindictivcness. It is a question of 
 the ethical order of the universe an order that 
 is of the very being of God. What is the 
 problem? It is to declare in one breath that 
 the wages of sin is death, and also that we 
 who are sinners are heirs of eternal life. It is 
 to save men, who, by the ethical order of a 
 moral universe, are condemned and yet at the 
 same time save the ethical order that condemns 
 them. It is to be eternally just and also . the 
 eternal justifier of the unjust. There is the 
 problem. No man has any such problem pre- 
 sented to him in forgiving another man. But 
 when God would forgive us, He has to face it. 
 It is a problem for God, and 'a problem fit for 
 a God: 
 
 All this means that in the end the question of 
 the forgiveness of sins is not simply a * whether ' 
 one of inclination merely but is a 'how.' 
 The problem falling to God and 'fit for a God* 
 is to find the way of forgiveness. There can 
 be little doubt as to where that is to be sought. 
 We turn again to Him who called Himself ' the 
 Way' to the fact of Christ. All through our 
 discussion, I have sought that we should never
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 145 
 
 for long be out of sight of history. The com- 
 pass of reasoning has its great uses, but it easily 
 gets out of gear ; facts are the infallible stars 
 by which the voyager seeking truth must ever 
 regulate his course. The facts about Jesus on 
 the matter that now is before us are plainly 
 as I have said He Himself connected them 
 the facts about His death ; and by that is meant, 
 as Professor Denney describes it, ' the experience 
 which the Son of God anticipated in Gethsemane 
 and underwent on Calvary.' l To this, then, we 
 turn. 
 
 It is to turn to the most profoundly perturbing 
 spectacle in history. We look at Him whom we 
 have raised in our faith to a very Deity, whose 
 every feature we have come to regard with an 
 adoration, whom we have found among men not 
 so much first as incomparable and only we look 
 at Him in what a great man 2 touchingly and 
 truly called ' the last trial,' and we find Him, at 
 the prospect of His death, in an agony. That 
 sweat of blood, that broken prayer, that falling 
 on His face again and yet again; that over 
 mastering sorrow and depression, that utter dread 
 
 > Studiei in Ttuologj, p. 105. * Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 K
 
 146 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 and horror, that inexpressible disquietude and 
 anxiety, and terrible consternation of spirit 1 
 what does all this mean? We scorn indeed the 
 baser sort of unbelievers who, with all disregard 
 of the decency which any martyr has a right to 
 expect in his hours of suffering, have pointed a 
 taunting finger to that figure. In the name of 
 decency, it is not to be mocked ; but how can it, 
 in the name of truth, be adored ? Is Jesus here 
 the incomparable, the only, even the supreme? 
 We recall the wonderful scene in the prison-cell 
 at Athens when Socrates met his ' last trial ' with 
 such calm and such good cheer. We read again 
 the closing pages of the Phado ; how beautiful 
 they are ! And then we look again at that 
 agonising figure, and our adoration of Jesus 
 receives a shock. Our minds dislike it as they 
 may, and resist it as they will seem forced to 
 admit to themselves that in one thing Jesus is not 
 our perfect example and inspiration. And that 
 single thought has enough in it to alter our ^hole 
 Christianity. 
 
 1 The expressions translated in the A.V. 'sorrowful,' 'sore 
 amazed/ and 'very heavy/ are immensely stronger in the original. 
 7ule the somewhat full note in Pearson. On the Creed, Art. IT. 
 (' Suffered.')
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 147 
 
 There is only one thing that saves us from this 
 conclusion, and that is that the comparison out 
 of which it arose be an impossible one. If * the 
 cup * which Socrates took * quite readily and 
 cheerfully,' l and * the cup ' from which Jesus 
 prayed in an agony to be delivered were alike but 
 death, then (even though the latter's was a more 
 painful and shameful death) the conclusion is 
 inevitable. It is good to say these things plainly 
 to our minds ; and if the death of Jesus was just 
 death, we have not given Him His entirely right 
 name when we say He is Divine, nor even His 
 entirely right place when we regard Him as our 
 perfect and complete ideal. But was it just 
 death ? Jesus Himself suggests otherwise. 
 
 We recall again His saying that His death was 
 * for the remission of sins.' And we recall what 
 we have been thinking about the meaning of the 
 remission or forgiveness of sins. We saw that 
 forgiveness that is, God's forgiveness, who alone 
 really ultimately forgives must include in its 
 meaning a dealing with the whole ethical order by 
 which sin and its due desert are, to use Plato's 
 phrase again, * riveted together.' It must in no 
 
 117.
 
 148 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 way subvert or compromise this, but on the 
 contrary must respect it, and do all that is right 
 by it. 1 Now Jesus said that His death was * for 
 the remission of sins.' Then in His death is the 
 doing right by that ethical order which binds 
 together sin and its due desert ; then it was that 
 bond (the terribleness of which, we, just because 
 we are forgiven, can only faintly and indeed 
 hardly at all imagine) which tightened at His 
 heart and pressed His brain the heart that had 
 known no other bond to God but love, the brain 
 that had never thought of Him but with joy. 
 One says these things simply, and the words in 
 which they are said are cold and colourless. Buf 
 when one really thinks of the realities which the 
 words cover, the mind is overwhelmed. Strange 
 and startling thoughts invade it. That agony of 
 Jesus, as we look on it, ' harrows us with fear and 
 wonder.' Does it find its meaning, not in a 
 human weakness, which though we should never 
 mock it, we could not adore, but in the un- 
 precedented strain of the meeting of human sin 
 and that moral order which condemns sin that 
 appallingly real and absolutely uncompromising 
 
 1 Thit last expreuioa i i'rincipal Rainy s. (Cf. German gnutgihun.)
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 149 
 
 meeting which had to take place somewhere, 
 somehow, if a Divine, an ethically true and 
 ultimate forgiveness was to be ? It has not taken 
 place in our lives; that we know. Did it take 
 place there ? How, then, would all comparisons 
 between the cup of hemlock and that cup be 
 hushed and shamed and awed 1 
 
 These seem wild, and may seem even monstrous, 
 thoughts, but it is Jesus Himself who suggests 
 them. And the Christian mind the mind led by 
 that Spirit which was to ' take the things of Christ 
 and show them unto us' does not recoil from 
 them appalled, but it is sure that they are true. 
 It has no doubt, that is to say, that, the meaning 
 of the death of Jesus is His bearing the respon- 
 sibility for sin in face of the law of God that 
 condemns sin. The Christian man is sure of it 
 not simply because the alternative is, as I have 
 indicated, the affecting of all his Christianity. 
 He is sure of it for another reason. In that 
 death and let us again remember that that means 
 the whole experience from Gethsemane to the 
 end the Christian man can recognise something 
 that should be his own but has not been, and, in 
 the evangel come in Jesus, is not to be his own.
 
 150 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 It brings home what would be his case if he, with 
 all his sins upon his head, 'unhousel'd, dis- 
 appointed, unaneled,' were brought to face God's 
 law. A dark and dreadful mystery hangs over 
 the Garden and the Cross, but one thing in it all 
 presses home clear there I might have been and 
 should have been. This is why the Christian 
 heart in all ages with doubtless varied inter- 
 pretation, yet with a common experience deeper 
 than its differences has said, * He was wounded 
 for our transgressions,' or, ' Who died for us/ 
 or, 'Who loved me, and gave Himself for me/ 
 There is nothing or little gained by multiplying 
 words about this. It cannot be said much better 
 or very differently in the end than at the 
 beginning, or by the most learned than by the 
 simplest. It is the 'our,' the 'us,' the 'me' 
 that say it all. You cannot state this great 
 meaning of the death of Jesus without personal 
 pronouns. When you can use these thus you 
 have said everything. You have found the final 
 meaning of the fact of Christ. 
 
 The final meaning of the fact of Christ, then, is 
 that He has opened up ' the way of forgiveness ' 
 for us by, on our account, doing right by the
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 151 
 
 ethical order which connects sin and its due 
 desert, and without respect to which a true, 
 ultimate, and Divine forgiveness could not be. 
 Thus He 'reconciles us to God,' who is that 
 ethical order, and on the strength of this, religion 
 as a fellowship and friendship between God and 
 us can begin and go on. Let us note the two 
 pillars on which all this view rests. One is ethical 
 principle, the other historical fact. The principle 
 is that forgiveness in God must not compromise 
 or subvert the order of a moral universe; the 
 fact is the death of Jesus as interpreted by His 
 own words, by the general impression of His life 
 and character and person, and by the consciousness 
 of the Christian man. On these pillars rests the 
 stupendous phenomenon of what, in theological 
 language, is called the Atonement. 
 
 There are many persons who, at this point, stop; 
 that is to say, as it is usually put, they accept * the 
 fact of the Atonement,' but profess no sort of 
 explanation of it. They say with Coleridge, 
 ' factum est; and, beyond the information con- 
 tained in the enunciation of the fact, it can be 
 characterised only by its consequences'; 1 or with 
 
 1 Aids to Rtflectio*. There does not eem to be much aid to 
 reflection in the bare enunciation of an impenetrable factum ett.
 
 152 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Butler, in more guarded terms, that ' if the 
 Scripture has, as surely it has, left this matter of 
 the satisfaction of Christ mysterious,* then ' it is 
 our wisdom thankfully to accept the benefit by 
 performing the conditions upon which it is offered 
 on our part, without disputing how it was procured 
 on His.* 1 Now, if what is meant by such 
 'language is that we cannot reduce to a final and 
 complete statement the principles involved in the 
 forgiveness of sins through the work of Jesus, 
 then it is all admitted. For to understand fully 
 the Atonement were to understand these three 
 things and their ultimate relation to each other 
 the greatest thing in God, which is His love ; the 
 strongest thing in the universe, which is law ; and 
 the darkest thing in man, which is sin. These are 
 matters which certainly stretch beyond our com- 
 prehension. But if what Coleridge and Butler 
 mean is that we cannot even exoect to discern any 
 moral or rational principles in this great fact, that 
 is quite another thing. In this case the Atonement 
 could be in no proper sense a fact for religion. 
 For religious truth is truth that has it in it to be 
 a motive and persuasion and appeal to the life of 
 
 1 Analogy, pt. II. cfa. v.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 153 
 
 thinking beings. Its facts, then, cannot be facts 
 impenetrable to thought. They must be luminous, 
 not opaque. To deny this of the Atonement is 
 really to dislodge it from religion and make it 
 a merely algebraical fact. It will indeed ever 
 stretch beyond us into mystery and it is good for 
 us thereby to be reminded that God's thoughts 
 are * greater than the measure of our minds * but 
 it cannot be merely a mystery. Its principles, 
 however inexhaustible, must be approachable. To 
 Christian thought and experience they must suggest 
 not the dumb darkness of mystery but the light 
 of rational and moral truth. 
 
 It is perhaps reasonable that, having said this, 
 one should add a few words in elucidation of these 
 principles. These lectures are not theological, and 
 it did not seem necessary in connection with 
 either of the other meanings of the fact of Christ 
 to discuss the doctrine, in the one case, of the 
 Holy Spirit, or, in the other, of a Christology. 
 In these cases the religious facts had their own 
 sufficient meaning and value. But for various 
 reasons the subject of the Atonement is in a 
 somewhat different position. It cannot have even 
 its purely religious value for us if we are in tht
 
 154 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 dark or in error as to any understanding of it. 
 And, therefore, one may add to what has been said 
 an addendum with some remarks on the spiritual 
 principles that seem to underlie the forgiveness of 
 our sins through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. 
 It must be understood that only the briefest out- 
 line is attempted here. 
 
 ADDENDUM : THE PRINCIPLES OF THE 
 ATONEMENT 
 
 The work of Jesus Christ in atoning for the 
 sins of men is not a new departure in His life. 
 It is but the carrying out to its bitter end that 
 saving of men which was His aim all through. 
 What, therefore, we should seek in it is not new 
 principles but rather new implications and applica- 
 tions of the ruling principles already discernible in 
 other and less mysterious aspects of His work. 
 And so I begin by asking what is the ruling 
 principle in all Christ's relations to man in His 
 coming to save us? 
 
 What that is it is not difficult to discover. It 
 has presented itself all through our investigations 
 of the fact of Christ. Let us recall the first and
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 155 
 
 simplest of the meanings we have found in this 
 fact. When we discussed the meaning of Christ 
 for ethical life and character we discovered that to 
 be more and other than His bequeathing to us a 
 lofty teaching and a supreme example. We found 
 that He gave us of His spirit, which means that, 
 in a wonderful but real way, He Himself entered 
 into and became part of our thoughts and affections 
 and will part of, in short, ourselves. ' I live, yet 
 not I, but Christ liveth in me.' He is the real 
 name of our better and true self. Something of 
 this is all through characteristic of Christianity, 
 and is distinctive something that has no pretence 
 to a parallel in Buddhism or Mohammedanism. 
 This is a clear and distinctive element in Christ's 
 saving relation to men, and the principle of it is 
 simply enough stated. It is that of a oneness, an 
 inward unitedness between Christ and humanity. 
 This is the idea expressed by Christ Himself under 
 such a figure as * I am the vine, ye are the 
 branches,' and St. Paul carries on the same idea 
 by such a figure as that of the head and the 
 members. This spiritual oneness with Christ, who 
 not only comes before us in history but becomes 
 one within us and identical with us Christ is in a
 
 156 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 wonderful way identical with a man's best self is 
 the principle in all His saving relations to men, and 
 Christianity cannot be stated apart from it. And 
 the principle that is at the root of forgiveness is 
 not, I repeat, a new departure, but is a further 
 application of the same idea. 
 
 The problem of forgiveness we have seen to be 
 this. God is the source and sustainer of the 
 ethical order of the universe rather, indeed, is 
 that order and an ethical order that is truly 
 ethical must condemn sin and ' rivet together ' (as 
 Plato said) sin and doom ; how then can God 
 forgive a humanity that is sinful ? The principle of 
 a oneness between Christ and humanity suggests, in 
 answer to this question, a counter-question, namely : 
 How can God condemn that wnich has Christ in 
 it ? If Christ be one with us, so that God cannot 
 look at us apart from Him, how shall condemna- 
 tion be God's verdict on us ? This is the principle 
 of the Atonement. It is the essential principle in 
 any aspect of Christianity, but it has, in connection 
 with this aspect of forgiveness, new and profound 
 implications and consequences. 
 
 Two quotations from two eminent teachers will 
 illustrate the directions in which these lie. There
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 
 
 '57 
 
 is a famous passage in Luther f s Commentary on the 
 Epistle to the Galatians in which he applies this 
 idea in one direction with characteristic vividness 
 and force. He represents God as saying to Christ: 
 * Be Thou Peter the denier, Paul the persecutor 
 . . . briefly, be Thou the person that hath com- 
 mitted the sins of all men/ Then, Luther goes 
 on : * The law cometh and saith, I find Him a 
 sinner . . . therefore let Him die.' * The quota- 
 tion needs no exposition ; there can be no dubiety 
 about Luther's meaning. But another eminent 
 writer on the subject applies the same idea ip 
 precisely the opposite way. M'Leod Campbell 
 whose work on the Atonement, however criticisable 
 in parts, is one of the few books of its kind that 
 command and repay careful study says in a strain 
 very similar to Luther : * Let us suppose that all 
 the sin of humanity has been committed by one 
 human spirit . . . and let us suppose this spirit, 
 loaded with all this guilt, to pass out of sin into 
 holiness . . becoming perfectly righteous, with 
 God's own righteousness.* In such a case, which 
 is c the actual case of Christ, the holy one of God, 
 bearing the sins of all men,' this righteousness 
 
 * In iff. iii. i J.
 
 i 5 8 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 would be, Dr. Campbell thinks, a * true and proper 
 satisfaction.* 1 In other words, and to contrast 
 this view with Luther's, when * the law comes ' it 
 finds not so much Him that is, Christ a sinner 
 and so says He must die, as rather that the sinner 
 is become Christ and so it is satisfied. 
 
 All views of the Atonement may be roughly 
 classified according to which of these two directions 
 they take. One class emphasises Christ's union 
 with us and our sin : ' Him that knew no sin God 
 made sin on our behalf.' The other emphasises 
 humanity's oneness with what He is : c by the obedi- 
 ence of one many were made righteous.' Now 
 the most intellectually irritating thing in the world 
 is a false alternative. There is a false alternative 
 when we are invited to pit these views against one 
 another, and choose one of them or the other. 
 Both views must be held ; both directions followed. 
 And for this clear reason. The principle is a 
 oneness, a union, between the sinner and Christ. 
 Well, a union just because it is a union, has two 
 complementary aspects and involves two sets of 
 consequences. If Christ and His people are one, 
 that has implications for us in view of what He 
 
 1 Nation oj i/u Atotununt, ch. ri.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 159 
 
 is, and also implications for Him in view of what 
 we are. The one result follows as much as the 
 other. We must look along the lines suggested 
 by the German doctor and also those suggested by 
 the Scottish. The Atonement, because its prin- 
 ciple is a union, has two sides, and non uno itinere 
 potest pervenire ad tarn grande secretum. 1 
 
 It is the implications in that aspect of this 
 union which Luther emphasised in the quotation 
 given above which are the more unwelcome to 
 many. But to become man surely must include 
 some relation on Christ's part to the position in 
 which man stood. For humanity was in a certain 
 position the position, namely, of being con- 
 demned by the ethical order which connects sin 
 and doom. If Christ became man with a reserva- 
 tion on this point, then He evaded the very point 
 of man's need. But there is no justification for 
 the suggestion of any such reservation. He took 
 upon Him to deliver man. To do so, He be- 
 came man under the condition that created the 
 need of deliverance, and that is the condition of 
 condemnation. By no word or act did Christ 
 disregard that condition or minimise it. On the 
 
 1 ' Not bjr one way only can we reach to so great a teovt.'
 
 160 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 contrary He accepted it as His condition because 
 it was the condition of the humanity with which 
 He identified Himself. And He then dealt with 
 it. He dealt with it in a great and serious and 
 real way ; not seeking to shirk it or subvert it, 
 but doing all that is right by it. And He did 
 right by it by letting all that such a condition had 
 to say be said to Himself. In saying this we 
 must take care not to say more than this. How 
 it works out, and what it precisely meant for Him 
 are not to be unguardedly stated. Expressions 
 such as that God punished Christ or that God 
 was angry with Him are inappropriate, and the 
 latter is as even Calvin admits 1 an impossibility. 
 But the things that are clearly to be asserted are 
 two : that the ethical law connecting sin and doom 
 was in no wise suppressed, but was given effect 
 to really and adequately ; and that this full and 
 adequate expression of it came upon Him. It has 
 not come upon us ; it is part of the evangel that 
 it will not come upon us. But it has not there 
 fore been cancelled. It has had right done by it 
 If you ask, Where? the answer is to be found 
 in the fact that when Christ became man He 
 
 1 liutuutto, 11. xvi. n.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 161 
 
 accepted the condition in which man stood and 
 its consequences, and He exhausted them on our 
 behalf. Whatever difficulty or mystery is about 
 this, it and it alone upholds an absolutely essential 
 principle in any forgiveness that can be of God 
 namely, that the ethical order of a moral universe 
 is not thereby compromised. The reality of this 
 identification with us of Him who * was numbered 
 with the transgressors' that He might make 
 answer on their behalf must be held to, though 
 in this as indeed in all His relations to us 
 Christ is more and undertakes more than we can 
 explain. 
 
 This is one side of that oneness between Christ 
 and us which is the principle of forgiveness. But 
 it is only one side. All this is fundamental, but 
 not final. It is only one half of an Atonement. 
 The need of the other side suggests itself 
 immediately. For even granting to the full the 
 facts of Christ making Himself answerable to 
 the ethical order connecting sin and doom, after 
 all, how does that affect me ? I am not Christ. 
 He may have made an answer, but that does not 
 make it my answer. If I were He, it were all 
 well ; but I un not He. I am still a sinner, 
 
 L
 
 1 62 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 and I am answerable still. It is here that the 
 principle of the Christian religion that of union 
 between Christ and man approaches us again, 
 and, with its complementary application, com- 
 pletes its evangel of forgiveness. 
 
 It comes saying this. Here is Christ who is 
 ' the righteous/ who has done right by all the 
 claims of ethical order that connect sin and doom, 
 and He would now be your true self. As He 
 has identified Himself with man as far as man's 
 general relation to God's laws was concerned, 
 so now He calls men individual hearts and wills 
 to admit Him to a personal union with them- 
 selves. This is the call of the evangel of forgive- 
 ness not to believe any mere fact or doctrine 
 such as Christ died for sins ; but to receive, to 
 become one with, in mind, heart, and will, the 
 Person who has thus answered for sin. Then, 
 in a real and spiritual sense, is not His answer 
 yours, if you in a real and spiritual sense are He ? 
 * There is therefore no condemnation to them 
 that are in Christ Jesus.' They are identified 
 with the perfect answer to the law connecting sin 
 and doom, because in inward reality they are 
 identified with the Answerer.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 163 
 
 Thus our union to Christ an inward union 
 of mind, heart, will, and life completes what He 
 did in identifying Himself with our condition, 
 and the result is the gospel of forgiveness. 
 Observe how ethical this gospel is. A spurious 
 evangel of forgiveness that merely rings the 
 changes on what Christ has done till we 'only 
 believe it ' may well be open to the charge of not 
 at least necessarily securing for forgiveness an 
 adequate and immediate ethical content. And 
 in evangelical Protestantism, the forgiveness of 
 sins is too often represented as one thing, and 
 Christian morality as another the latter to be 
 expected to follow the former from, generally, 
 the sense of gratitude. This is a very defective 
 and erroneous manner of stating it. The true 
 way of it is this. Forgiveness is not only be- 
 cause of Christ but in Him. 1 There is no such 
 thing in the gospel as mere forgiveness. There 
 is nothing in the gospel that is separable from 
 Christ. You cannot have forgiveness without 
 having the Forgiver, without admitting Him to 
 an inward union with your mind and heart and 
 life. Only thus is His answer yours. But you 
 
 1 This is a point greatly insisted upon bjr Luther.
 
 164 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 cannot thus admit Christ to mind and heart and 
 life without admitting the whole business of the 
 moral life. And so morality is no mere addendum 
 to forgiveness. It comes as an imperative and 
 indisputable part of Christ, of whom also forgive- 
 ness is an indissociable part. You cannot have 
 this which we are calling the final meaning of 
 the fact of Christ, without having also the first 
 meaning of the same fact, without finding that 
 He means for you a new life. Christ is not 
 divided. 
 
 But while this is to be said, there is something 
 else also to be said. I have tried to say that 
 forgiveness is inseparable from the moral ideal that 
 rises before us, and that it is only by our being 
 inwardly one with the great Answerer of the law's 
 claims that His answer is ours. Now our realisa- 
 tion of the moral ideal and our union in mind and 
 heart and life with Christ are really but begun. 
 It might therefore seem that our forgiveness is in 
 a merely embryo stage, a state of probation rather 
 than of assured achievement. But this is not the 
 note of the evangel. Whenever we are really 
 united in sincerity of heart and will to Christ, 
 even though it be, as it will be imperfectly, then,
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 165 
 
 already, His answer to the law of condemnation is 
 ours and that is a finished and complete answer. 
 With our point of contact with Him we find 
 something on which we can take a stand. He 
 has redeemed us from the curse of the law. And 
 thus arises, in all true evangelical Christianity, its 
 note of immortal assurance towards God. It is 
 not the dawn of the faint hope of forgiveness in 
 the end. It is 'a confidence stablished and firm 
 and sure. In our contact with Christ we find 
 also a call, as I have said, to begin and go on 
 with a holy life. But it is a great thing when 
 the Christian man goes forth to that conflict 
 animated with the sense of what his Lord has 
 done for him against His foes, and so fights with 
 the inspiration of a redemption achieved and 
 
 secure. 1 
 
 These few paragraphs, however fragmentary 
 they may be, must suffice here as a statement of 
 the principles of the Atonement for sin through 
 
 1 I venture to think that what this paragraph assert* is at the 
 heart of the evangel, the great truth ' of which is rather here than, 
 at Canon Gore tales, in that ' God deals with us by anticipation.' 
 (LuarnattOH of Sen of God, p. ^^^) Canon Gore quotes Augustine's 
 well-known expression, that God regard* us ' quabt ttuuu, tod 
 quaUt jittmri fummt,' which is true, but not so true as its ccavene. 
 It is a suggestive rather than a scriptural expression.
 
 1 66 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Jesus Christ. It is not to be expected that any 
 statement, even the most elaborate, can be an 
 exposition of the matter finally or shall answer all 
 difficulties about it. It must be remembered that 
 the whole event is essentially and absolutely un- 
 paralleled, and that therefore it cannot be brought 
 under general principles. It is unparalleled 
 simply and clearly because its primary condition 
 is unique. That is a oneness between Christ and 
 His people. This is a thing unparalleled in human 
 experience and cannot be reduced under any general 
 categories of friendship or the solidarity of the race 
 or any other. Of no other do we speak as we do 
 of Christ, who is, says a Father, * our inseparable 
 life ' ;* of no other leader or teacher do we say 
 that he and his are, as a great saint and doctor 
 describes Christ and Christians, ' quasi una persona 
 mystical * Here is the root principle of the whole 
 matter, and because it is something absolutely 
 unique, the Atonement itself cannot be brought 
 under any final general explanation. And if this 
 unique root principle were remembered, many of 
 the difficulties and objections that are raised on 
 
 1 Ignatius, Ad Ephes., in. 
 
 1 Thomu Aquinas, Summa, pan ill. qiuest. xliii. art. it.
 
 THE FINAL MEANING 167 
 
 this subject would disappear. The chief and 
 central objection to the whole idea is that thefe 
 is injustice in it ; it is unjust that one should thus 
 bear the sins of another. But are these words 
 ' one * and * another ' quite applicable ? Here is 
 really no 'other* ; as it is put in an old Scottish 
 catechism 'Christ is not another person from 
 His people properly.' 1 This, if you will, it 
 mystical, and I cannot explain in terms any point 
 where God touches man. But the mystery is fact 
 and in that fact is the answer to many an irrele- 
 vant and inappropriate charge against the Atone- 
 ment. Often these arise from the ' illustrations ' 
 of persons with unscriptural and inexact imagina- 
 tions. There can be no illustrations of the 
 Atonement. The Cross is its own interpreter 
 And if this be so, and is so because of its unique 
 central principle of the oneness of Christ and the 
 Christian, then we shall perceive that the reality 
 of it all is seen best, not from the disputings of 
 the divines, but in the school of the spirit's com- 
 munion with God. St. Paul deals most deeply 
 with it in his prayers. It is when a man con- 
 
 1 Craig"/ Cattchiim. A thought alto in Thomas Aquinas and
 
 1 68 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 fesses his moral bankruptcy before God and 
 realises it, that it comes home to his need how 
 the Holy and Harmless One so loved him as to 
 identify Himself with even his condemnation, and 
 has answered on his behalf. To mock at this 
 evangel is the jest of him who never felt the 
 wound. It is a sinner's only religion.
 
 VI 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?
 
 yap TO fl v Xptoro? u TO airodavelv Kep8os. 
 
 ST. PAUL.
 
 VI 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 
 
 WE have now reached a stage at which we may 
 pause and gather up some practical results from 
 the ground over which we have travelled. 
 
 In the first place we sought the original data 
 of Christianity, and these we saw to have been, 
 not in a philosophical or ethical system, but in 
 Jesus Christ Himself. We went on to ask how 
 far our religion of to-day could be based on such 
 data, and found that Christ is a fact not only of 
 history but also of present spiritual life and experi- 
 ence a fact, that is, within the proper sphere of 
 religion. Therefore we went further and inquired 
 what meanings this fact contains for religion, and 
 we found it to hold meanings of the profoundest 
 kind for character, for faith, and for conscience 
 a new moral life, a real revelation of the living 
 
 in
 
 172 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 God and an evangel of assured forgiveness. All 
 this is religion, and -this religion is Christianity, 
 which we cannot better define than as the meaning 
 of the fact of Christ. Indeed, that in that fact 
 are the data of the Christian religion has for its 
 correlate that Christianity is the content of these 
 data the meaning of Christ. 
 
 But after all, to have done all this is not to 
 have done the main thing. After all, the main 
 thing is not to understand Christianity but to be 
 a Christian. The Light must be the life. As 
 Dr. Chalmers always a great teacher on the 
 moral bearings of any truth said, our chief 
 business with Christianity is 'to proceed upon 
 it.' l We have described this religion ; we must 
 not close without considering what is to be done 
 with it. We have been asking what Christianity 
 is ; but what is a Christian ? 
 
 This question must be answered clearly and 
 simply, for to be a Christian is certainly not 
 something abstruse and difficult to understand. 
 On the other hand it must be answered with a 
 just and adequate relation to Christianity as a 
 whole, and not merely in respect to some one 
 
 * Ltcturtt M tht Romatu, bod.
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? 173 
 
 point in it. We shall guard ourselves in both 
 of these directions by remembering what we 
 have found Christianity to be. It is the mean- 
 ing of Christ. Well, a Christian would then 
 naturally be described as one who is responding 
 to that meaning. I shall explain the word Re- 
 sponding ' more fully presently, but I use it here 
 in preference to any such more usual word as 
 * believing,' because the latter has come to be 
 associated with merely matters of creed, while, 
 as we have seen, Christ has meanings for life 
 and character as well as, and perhaps even prior tq 
 faculties of intellect. Apart, however, from such 
 explanation, to speak of responding to the mean- 
 ing of the fact of Christ at once raises a question. 
 It will be said that we have been stating the 
 most stupendous meanings in the fact and mean- 
 ings that are, to many, surrounded with the 
 utmost intellectual difficulty. Is it to be said 
 that a Christian must be a man who responds 
 to all these? A moment's reflection will clear 
 this up. Have we not found in Christ meanings 
 for moral life and character that are, not to 
 many only, but to all of us, surrounded with 
 the utmost practical difficulty ? If it i difficult
 
 174 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 for some to respond to that intellectual meaning 
 of Christ for faith which, for example, declares 
 He is a God-man, it is also difficult for all to 
 respond to that moral meaning of Christ for 
 character which, for example, calls us to purity 
 or love in life. Our responding to Christ, then, 
 is an ideal. A perfect Christian would certainly 
 respond to the complete meaning for thought 
 and for life of the fact of Christ. Where is the 
 perfect Christian ? St. Paul counted not himself 
 to have apprehended. Luther described himself 
 as * almost a Christian.' 1 A response may be real 
 though not perfect. And here we must resist 
 and even resent the strong but quite unjustified 
 tendency to treat on different principles our 
 moral and our intellectual response to Christ, 
 and to mark a certain stage in specially the latter, 
 to which a man who can be called a Christian 
 must have advanced. There are those who will 
 call a man Christian even though his practical 
 response to the meanings of Christ for life be 
 very meagre, but will deny him the name if his 
 intellectual response to the meanings of Christ 
 for doctrinal belief be not very adequate. This 
 
 1 De Servo Arbitri*, icct. clrriii.
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 175 
 
 is untenable. The amount of response to the 
 meaning of Christ that is requisite to make a 
 man a Christian is to be determined in the same 
 way alike in matters of creed and matters of 
 conduct. And if it be asked, then, how it is 
 determined, the answer is clear. Men's mental 
 and moral constitution and circumstances are so 
 individual and so various, that no man can draw 
 the line in this matter in either of its respects 
 for another, nor can it be drawn for all men 
 at once ; but each man's responsibility, moral 
 and intellectual, can be determined only in the* 
 region of the conscience, and therefore only by 
 the Searcher of the conscience. 'The Lord 
 knoweth them that are His.' 
 
 And now from all this we may come to a 
 definition. If one were asked to state in terms 
 what a Christian is, I should say something like 
 this : a Christian is one who is responding to 
 whatever meanings of Christ are, through God's 
 Spirit, being brought home to his intellectual or 
 moral conscience. This is a definition at once 
 exhaustive of the profoundest Christianity and 
 admissive of the simplest. The meanings of 
 Christ, either for thought or life, that one man
 
 176 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 may be able to respond to with intellectual 
 assent or practical obedience, will be many and 
 advanced ; another man may, with equal earnest- 
 ness and effort, be able, from his constitution, 
 upbringing or circumstances, to respond to but 
 the most elementary. Yet both are Christians if 
 both are responding with a faithful conscience. 
 One is a more mature Christian than the other, 
 not, necessarily, a more real. Do not misunder- 
 stand me. I have not said, nor do I mean, that 
 a man may respond to just that in Christ which 
 he chooses ; I spoke of what God's Spirit brings 
 home to the conscience, and that is quite another 
 thing from the selection of our own inclination. 
 Nor do I imply that it does not seriously matter 
 how much meaning you put into Christ. It 
 matters immensely. The Christian who has not 
 something of the richness of the Christian faith 
 as well as the victory of the Christian life is 
 a great loser. But he is not 'lost.* He is to 
 be encouraged, not excommunicated. It is not 
 the amount of our achievement in either belief or 
 conduct that Christ first looks at, but the honesty 
 of our purpose. It is not the embarrassed follow- 
 ing of Himself He blames, but the unfaithful
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 177 
 
 Where is the master more ready than He to 
 take the will for the deed ? 
 
 But we must spell this out a little more par- 
 ticularly. I have been speaking of a man's ' re- 
 sponding* to the meanings of Christ, and this 
 expression requires some explanation. Well, to 
 respond to the meanings of Christ is to be what 
 one should and must be if these are really true. 
 Let us recall the meanings of the fact of Christ 
 we have been discussing meanings for character, 
 for faith, and for conscience and then ask, ' What 
 manner of persons ought we to be ? * What love 
 and trust and gratitude and obedience and ser- 
 vice should ring and rule in our being ? This 
 is not anything vague or far away from life. It 
 is life. Your being is just your life. The scenery, 
 the surroundings, the furniture of your life arc 
 those of your being. All the affairs, interests, 
 relations of your life contribute to make you 
 what you are to your being. Then it is in all 
 these that you are to respond to Christ to find 
 out what bearings and directions the fact of Christ 
 has for this fact of life and that, and to be true 
 to them. In short, to be a Christian or to 
 use Dr. Chalmers's phrase 'to proceed* upon 
 
 M
 
 178 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Christianity is, day by day, in all the varied cir- 
 cumstances of experience within and without, to 
 bring together and honestly relate to each other 
 two great facts or sets of facts which, when so 
 brought together, wonderfully elucidate and in- 
 terpret one another the fact of Christ and the 
 facts of life. 
 
 Thus is Christianity concerned, not with merely 
 t section of life with the ' affairs of the soul ' 
 but with all of it. No life as I think Luther 
 has said somewhere is more worldly than a 
 Christian's. It embraces everything that makes 
 us what we are all that, lived in a certain light 
 and treated from a certain point of view. One 
 of the great wrongs that ecclesiastical Christianity 
 has done religion is to disparage or deny this, 
 to give us the impression that a Christian life 
 lived in the cloister is higher and holier than 
 one lived in the family, the market, the secular 
 arena of the world, and to bid us look to types 
 of the former rather than the latter for saint- 
 ship. 1 I cannot find any meaning such as this 
 
 1 While saying this, one must, too, recognise the value and even 
 necessity of the ascetic ideal for certain periods of Christian history. 
 A* has been justly said (by, I suppose, the finest mind that Anglican-
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN' 179 
 
 in the fact of Christ. The carpenter of Nazareth, 
 who was among men * eating and drinking' 
 He is * our only Saint.' We must secularise saint- 
 ship by sanctifying the secular life. * What you 
 do now even after the flesh,' says an early Father, 
 'that is spiritual, for in Christ Jesus you do 
 everything.' 1 In that Christ Jesus, for it was 
 by Him that all things were made, the Christian 
 man can ( do everything ' except sin. 
 
 The exception, we all feel, is crucial. What- 
 ever other meanings of Christ may be difficult to 
 accept or disputable, this much is clear and 
 cardinal that the invitation and persuasion to 
 be one with Him mean a war with sin. We 
 know as an axiom that sin is something incon- 
 sistent with Christ in its whole aim and principle 
 and activity. Now we shall most assuredly not 
 live life this varied secular life and yet avoid 
 or overcome sin unless in addition to and, in a 
 sense, over against all that has been said of the 
 
 i*m has possessed since it lost the devout, subtle Newman) ' it must 
 be looked upon as a great war, the only one that could have made 
 any impression on the world of that day ' (Dean Church's Occasional 
 Papers, ii. 2*4). Christian morality, when fighting for its very life 
 against the violent, savage grossnes* of the times, fought with 
 corresponding violence. 
 1 Ignatius, Ad Ephtt^ viii.
 
 i8o THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 breadth and secularity of the religious life, we 
 honestly admit another side of the question and 
 observe, simply but really, two things. 
 
 One of these is prayer. Our Christianity is in 
 constant danger of becoming merely a system a 
 doctrine or a praxis to which more or less faith- 
 fully we adhere. If it be but this, it certainly 
 will not carry us victorious through the ceaseless, 
 subtle and varied temptations to sin which meet 
 us in life. There must be behind and in and 
 through all this something personal. We must 
 realise that Christ means that God is really 
 and nearly taking to do with us, very authori- 
 tatively, very graciously, very wonderfully. Our 
 religion must be less merely a doctrine to be 
 studied and a duty to be done, than a call, a 
 touch, an intercourse. Then is it a religion of a 
 listening conscience, a wondering spirit, an awed 
 soul, a loving and a contrite heart ; and it is to 
 these that sin is impotent. Now, all this * mutual 
 speaking and hearing between God and the soul ' * 
 finds its most real and most definite expression in 
 that most simple and necessary thing, prayer. 
 By it, as by hardly anything else, ' we come into 
 
 1 Profesaor Candlish'i Ckruiia* Salvatum, p. 104.
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 181 
 
 God's presence and assure ourselves again of what 
 He is in Himself and of what He is to us.' * 
 No one, without that, is sin-proof. Of, on the 
 other hand, the practical potency of prayer against 
 sin little need be said. Take any known besetting 
 sin in your life ; pray against it. What is the 
 result ? The result is that they cannot live to- 
 gether. Your prayer will kill your sin, or your 
 sin will kill your prayer. There is therefore no 
 surer and clearer test of how a man is dealing 
 with this crucial matter of sin in life than which, 
 in especially his secret life, is the survivor sin or 
 prayer ? 
 
 The other thing we must observe and admit is 
 self-discipline or self-denial. I have asserted the 
 breadth and worldliness of the Christian life the 
 life that responds to Christ. But a man will not 
 go through the range of this rich and engrossing 
 life saying * Yes ' to the meanings for it all of 
 Christ without saying a * No * to many things. 
 And this * No ' he must say, not only to what is 
 plainly of sin, but also to much, at times at least, 
 which cannot be so definitely characterised. The 
 reason lies here. We have to work out our 
 
 1 Professor Dennej's Goipel Sjiuttioiu and Atuwtrt, p. 51* 
 M 2
 
 1 82 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Christianity in the world with an imperfect and 
 unreliable instrument. Theologians call it 'our 
 fallen nature/ Well, whatever name you give to 
 human nature, this, at least, is true of it that it 
 is very readily seduced by even morally legitimate 
 things to another view and construction of life 
 than Christ's. A man is simply either uncandid 
 or unintelligent who does not admit this to be a 
 real fact in the situation. This world is the place 
 where men are to be Christians, but it is a place 
 certainly where very easily they become not 
 Christians ; here is our true religious opportunity, 
 but it is a perilous one. This is not a reason for 
 fleeing from life. Such perils as come to a man 
 in the path of his duty, he is meant to be ennobled 
 by overcoming. But it is a reason for self-dis- 
 cipline and self-denial. What will imperil or 
 deaden an honest and full response to Christ must 
 be * cut off.' This or that must be denied, and 
 what is perhaps more important all things must 
 be re-considered, re-valued, re-arranged in life. 
 Some of us, for our own sakes or our neighbours', 
 may have to do that more than others. Some 
 may have, as Christ Himself plainly put it, to cut 
 off their right hand or pluck out their right eye.
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 183 
 
 It is not, as the mediaeval church taught, the 
 higher, more saintly ideal. It is, as Christ said, 
 to ' enter the kingdom of Heaven maimed/ But 
 in some way and often the most real ways have, 
 to others than a man himself, least appearance of 
 being a self-denial at all it must be done by all 
 who would really mean to respond fully and faith- 
 fully to Christ in this complicated, compromising 
 life. There is something singularly ennobling 
 about the uncowled, unproclaimed self-discipline 
 of a rich and passionate nature that loves life not 
 the less but Christ the more. It can be done 
 gladly if it be done for His sake, and some day 
 He may very literally recompense it. That 
 the meaning of the lines : 
 
 ' Make me a cottage in the vale, the said, 
 
 Where I may mourn and pray ; 
 Yet pall not down my palace towers that are 
 
 So lightly, beautifully built ; 
 Perchance I may return with others there 
 
 When I hare purged my guilt.' l 
 
 The last couplet suggests another aspect of the 
 meaning of Christ in life, and on it I add a word 
 The poet's lines suggest a larger future. Now, I 
 
 1 Tennpoo'i PmUu* tf Art.
 
 i8 4 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 have spoken of this life as the real sphere in the 
 circumstances and conditions of which we must 
 be Christians, and yet as a place in which our 
 response to Christ is incomplete, imperilled, and 
 to be maintained only by a warfare and with 
 prayer and self-denial. At the end of life is the 
 fact of death. That is a very great and real fact, 
 so great and real a fact that any true or satisfying 
 view of life must take account of death and have 
 something to say about it. The fact of Christ 
 does so. The ultimate meaning of Christ is a 
 future meaning. He is He who not only * was * 
 in history and ' is ' in experience, but * is to come * 
 in the beyond. Of that we know very little ; it 
 is one of those places where even the true religion 
 hardly takes us out of agnosticism. But if Christ's 
 meanings here for character, for faith, and for con- 
 science are true promises, that meaning of Christ 
 who is to come will be, than anything in this life, 
 a * far better.' It will be that if it lead from a 
 good that is embarrassed, menaced, incomplete, to 
 that good made safe, victorious, abundant, and yet 
 not less but more real, personal and living. And 
 so St. Paul, who said ' To me life is Christ ' added 
 ' and death gain.'
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 185 
 
 This may seem unnatural and strained, and yet 
 I will say that there is nothing about Christianity 
 that more convinces of its Divine devising than 
 this, its suitability for both life here and life here- 
 after. It is thus that it declares itself to be the 
 religion that men need. Christ is for life in the 
 most real and secular sense. And we are for life 
 in the most real and secular sense we men to 
 whom this life calls so stirringly and strongly and 
 sweetly. But the more deeply and worthily we 
 answer that call, is it not a call to something else ? 
 This life is richly, really good ; but just in its very 
 good in truth or love or character or the service 
 of man are strange and subtle suggestions of a 
 better than itself. * I have found life,* said the 
 subject of a modern biography, 1 * sweet, bright, 
 beautiful ; I should dearly like to live it again. 
 Is this wish the true and deepest corollary to this 
 experience ? Is not the true and deepest thing in 
 this life's sweetness, brightness, beauty, an intima- 
 tion, a glimpse, an earnest of something sweeter 
 brighter, yet more beautiful ? Is it not this 
 which gives to our actions their tendcrest tints, to 
 our affections their purest pathos, and informi 
 
 StefAtm.
 
 1 86 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 even nature with that subtle significance which 
 makes us say that 
 
 * the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thought! that do often lie too deep for tears ' ? 1 
 
 The sea of the Infinite laps upon the shore of 
 the finite where we now live. When we sigh for 
 satisfaction here, we do not realise that in this 
 world satisfaction is for us a form of suicide, 
 We are made for this life, yet not for this life only, 
 but, after this, for a * far better.* And so is our 
 Christianity. The Christ who disclosed such fit 
 meanings for us in the discipline of our life here, 
 discloses a like fittedness for our nature when the 
 last chapter of that discipline comes and we look 
 out to the future. Thus a Christian man blesses 
 God every day of his life, and, on the greatest day 
 of a man's life, which is the day of his death, 
 blesses Him still and not fearfully or repiningly 
 enters into the untold meanings of the endless fact 
 of Christ. 
 
 I must close, but would at least mention one 
 question out of many that remain. We have 
 been speaking of what it is to be a Christian. 
 But why be a Christian ? 
 
 1 Wordsworth, Intimation* f Immortality.
 
 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 187 
 
 There are two voices neither of which is ever 
 long silent in the heart of any serious and honest- 
 thinking man. One is a voice within that speaks 
 to a man of himself. It shuts the door on the 
 throng of the world, in which so easily we forget 
 our personal responsibilities and even our own 
 moral identity, and confers with us solus cum solo 
 about our individual character and destiny. It is 
 a small voice, never overheard in another, easily 
 drowned even in oneself. But whenever there is 
 a stillness in our life especially if the great silence 
 has hushed our spirits by its nearness it speaks 
 out clear and makes us listen. The other is not 
 a small voice. It is the multitudinous murmur of 
 humanity in its labour and sorrow now an un- 
 couth roar as of the breaking sea, now a moan as 
 of the homeless wind. This, too, can be drowned 
 by a selfishness, even a religious selfishness, that 
 dulls the ears and deadens the heart, but again and 
 again it disturbs men and awakens within them 
 thoughts of a worthier life than that lived but for 
 themselves. These are the two great voices that 
 are ever speaking to the human heart. They are 
 two voices, yet they bear but one message. They 
 are both a call to look to and to learn of Teus
 
 1 88 THE FACT OF CHRIST 
 
 Christ. We need Him for our own sakes if we 
 are going to live rightly and die restfully ; we 
 need Him for others* sakes if in any deep and 
 real way we would serve them. Alike by every 
 reason of regard towards our true selves and 
 every call of love towards our brother, we are 
 bound to be Christians. And ah ! there is this 
 too, if only we will think of it and can read it 
 as it is written over our lives and in the fact of 
 Christ the unmeasured and unmerited goodness 
 and grace that God has shown to you and me. 
 
 These are reasons for being a Christian. They 
 sum themselves up in this. Jesus said of Himself, 
 * I am the Truth.* In these lectures I have not 
 argued from the authority of Church or Bible ; I 
 have tried to state Christ, who, if He be the 
 Truth, is His own authority. Does He not mean 
 to heart or mind or conscience some things that 
 are deeply and really truth ? Then, to be a 
 Christian is the first principle of a true life. 
 
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