Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2007 witin funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.archive.org/details/ethicsofjesusOOI Copyright, 1910, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910. Nortnoofi i^tess J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. PREFACE The aim of this book and the writer's concep- tion of its task are pretty fully set forth in the introductory chapter; and that discussion should not be repeated here. It need only be said that the method of approach adopted involves a rather detailed survey of all the passages in the teaching of Jesus that can be regarded as clearly ethical, and should itself help to make more objective the results of the inquiry as well as more completely insure that the teaching itself should be unfolded, rather than simply talked about. While I have tried to keep constantly in mind the ethical aspect of the teaching, as the one prob- lem of this book, it should not be forgotten that Jesus' teaching is so completely permeated with the religious spirit, that it is impossible wholly to ignore the rehgious and still do justice to the ethical teaching. Jesus has no dual standpoint, corresponding to a sharp separation of the two realms of the religious and the ethical. As one in a series of New Testament Hand- books this volume is, of course, intended to reward study but it is most earnestly hoped that that intention has not meant that the priceless vitality of the ethical teaching of Jesus has escaped in the 196302 VI PREFACE process. A book on the ethics of Jesus that is not vital through and through beHes its theme. I can but hope, therefore, that the book may help a little to bring the unity, the sweep, the depth, and the inspiration of the ethical teaching of Jesus to many readers who do not think of them- selves at all as professional students. Jesus was interested in life rather than in technical discus- sions about life. HENRY CHURCHILL KING. Oberlin College, September, 1909, CONTENTS PAGE Preface v CHAPTER I NTRODUCTION I Jesus' teaching its own best witness — Extent of lit- erature — Aim of the book — Light upon the personality of Jesus — Fresh historical interpretation — Psychological interpretation — Unfolding the teaching — Criticism of the ethics of Jesus — Application of the teaching — The entire teaching as a background — The method of a composite photograph — Critical position — Trustworthi- ness of the ethical teaching as given in the Synoptic Gos- pels — Schmiedel's " foundation-pillars " — Burkitt's " doubly attested sayings " — Limitation of theme — Jesus never separates religion and ethics — Summary of the entire teaching of Jesus as given in Luke — Amount and permanence of the ethical teaching — Emphasis on honesty — Emphasis on love — Trends in the entire teaching. CHAPTER II The Ethical Teaching in Schmiedel's Foundation- pillar Passages, and in the Doubly Ati'ested Sayings. Criteria 33 Schmiedel's foundation- pillars — Classification of pas- sages — Discussion of passages — Passages bearing on Jesus' character as a whole — Passages bearing on Jesus' character as a miracle worker — Passages showing in what Jesus' greatness consists — Schmiedel's inferences — Our own inferences — The inferences logically ar- ranged — Conclusion. The "doubly attested sayings " — Selection of the ethi- vii VIU CONTENTS PAGE cal passages in the doubly attested sayings— The funda- mental laws of life involved — Discussion of the passages — Summary of inferences — Logical grouping of infer- ences — The moral end — Faith in the triumph of the good — Love the sum of life — Moral evidence — Fidelity to the inner light — Moral means for the inner life of the man himself — Unity, integrity, and inwardness of life — Earnestness and watchfulness — The laws of habit and efficiency — The unity of the life in love — In relation to others — The laws of the contagion of the good — Of sacrifice — Of self-giving love — Of reverence for the person — Of priority by service — Of the sharing of all goods — The unity of the whole moral conception of Jesus — Conclusion. CHAPTER III The Ethical Teaching in Mark and in the Other Common Source of Matthew and Luke. The Oldest Sources 87 The ethical teaching in Q — Selection of passages — The temptation repHes — Three ethical emphases — The contrast with the Pharisaic spirit — The necessity of sym- pathetic and tender forgiveness — The sense of the seri- ousness of life — The reason for Jesus' position as to the Pharisees — Conclusion on Q. The ethical teaching in Mark — Outline of the entire teaching in Mark — Selection of the ethical passages to be discussed — Mark's ethical notes — Jesus' message, method, motive, goal, and the revolutionary contrast in his teaching — The great paradox — The great command- ment — The demand for the childlike qualities — Social applications of his teaching — Mark's parables — Sum- mary of the ethical teaching in Mark. CHAPTER IV Estimate of the Ethical Teaching in the Sayings of Jesus Peculiar to either Matthew or Luke . . 145 The ethical teaching peculiar to Matthew — Summary CONTENTS IX PAGE of ethical passages selected — Matthew shows both the notes of warning and judgment, and the notes of mercy, humility, and forgiveness — Comparison of the ethical inferences from the ethical teaching peculiar to Matthew, with the laws of life derived from the doubly attested sayings — Summary of the teaching peculiar to Matthew. The peculiar teaching in Luke — Amount and credi- bility of this peculiar material — Summary of ethical passages chosen — The discussion of Luke's peculiar material in two divisions — Consideration of the parables of grace with their related sayings — Consideration of the parables of warning and the sayings akin to these — Parables of grace — Parable of the two debtors — Of the Good Samaritan — Of the lost coin — Of the lost son — The aspect of judgment and warning — Parables of the rich fool — Of the watchful servants — Of the barren fig tree — Of the chief seats — Of the Pharisee and the pub- lican — Of the rash builder and the rash king — Of extra service — Of the unrighteous steward — Summary on the parables of grace — Summary on the parables of warning — Comparison with doubly attested sayings — Conclu- sion. CHAPTER V The Sermon on the Mount as a Whole . . .191 Genuineness of the teaching here — Outlines of the entire Sermon — The originality of Jesus — The elements in that originality — The spiritual discoveries of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount summarized. CHAPTER VI Jesus' Conception of the Basic Qualities of Life: Study of the Beatitudes The basic qualities for character, happiness, and influ- ence set forth in the Beatitudes — Qualities of character involved — Teachable — Penitent — Self-controlled — Genuinely earnest in pursuit of the highest — Sympathetic with men — Reverent toward men — Promoting love 204 X CONTENTS PAGE among men — Sacrificing for men — The Beatitudes as a progress — The basic qualities of happiness — The Beatitudes a reversal of the world's code — Their quali- ties as to the supreme conditions of happiness — The qualities of the Beatitudes as the natural conditions for . influence — Summary. CHAPTER VII The Great Motives to Living in the Sermon on the Mount 232 The ultimate problem — Four great motives used by Jesus in the Sermon — The unity of the inner life — The inner fulfillment of the law — The motive of God as Father — The motive of men as brothers — The motives in the divisions of the Sermon — Jesus' putting of the principle of the unity of the inner life — Jesus' use of the motive of men as brothers — Jesus' use of the motive of God as Father — The unity of the four motives in the thought of God as Father — Summary of the great motives to hv- ing as seen in the Sermon on the Mount — Jesus' use of the four great motives as against impurity, falsity, and retaliation. CHAPTER VIII Conclusion 267 The Sermon on the Mount itself a summary of Jesus' teaching — Evidenced in the preceding tliscussion — Con- tains the ethical notes and laws of Schmiedel's passages and of the doubly attested sayings — In harmony with Q and Mark — And with the peculiar teaching in Matthew and Luke — A thoroughgoing unity in his teaching — Seen in the inevitable inferences from the thought of God as Father — Has Jesus an ethical system? — His conception of the highest good — His conception of duty — His assumption of conscience and of freedom — Con- clusion. Bibliography 277 Index of Subjects . . . ' 281 Index of Scripture Texts 289 THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late William Belden Noble of Washington, D.C. (Harvard, 1885). The deed of gift provides that the lectures shall be not less than six in number, that they shall be delivered annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House, during the season of Advent. Each lec- turer shall have ample notice of his appointment, and the publication of each course of lectures is required. The purpose of the Lectureship will be further seen in the following citation from the deed of gift by which it was established : — " The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue the mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life; to make known the meaning of the words of Jesus, ' I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.' In accordance with the large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose memory the Lectures are established and also the founder of the Lectures were in. deep sympathy, it is intended that the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest in- terests of humanity. With this end in view, — the perfection of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of Xll THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature, art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociology, ethics, history both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as theology and the more direct interests of the religious life. Beyond a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as thus defined, no restriction is placed upon the lecturer." THE ETHICS OF JESUS THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES FOR 1909 THE ETHICS OF JESUS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION One feels inevitably the hopelessness of trying Jesus' teach- to add to the value of the teachings of Jesus by b^ft^^^itness. further comment upon them. The comment seems so often only to dilute and weaken the teaching rather than to strengthen its hold upon the mind. To any man able to enter in even small degree into the reality of the teaching of Jesus, that teaching must always seem its own best witness. It is possible to go over many books on the teach- ing of Jesus, excellently done though they seem, and yet feel curiously unrewarded, when the out- come is compared with the results of one's own first-hand study of the words of Jesus themselves. It is impossible, too, to ignore the fact that the Extent of literature upon every aspect of the life and teach- ^^^^^^t^^- ing of Jesus has immensely increased in recent years; and that, with the growth of the depart- ment of biblical theology, the last years have seen such attention to the teaching of Jesus as has never been witnessed before. In the light of all this literature, one can well appreciate Burkitt's remark, ''that the only time when Christians B I 2 THE ETHICS OF JESUS would have cause to be afraid was when the far- off figure of Jesus no longer attracted the critic and the student ; but that there was no evidence that that day was within sight." ^ And yet, at the same time, one can hardly be blamed for asking himself, somewhat despairingly. Is there any ex- cuse for adding another book to this list ? What can our discussion do ? Light upon First of all, it may be said that it is possible for ity oUe'sus!" ^^ ^^ throw some light (quite incidentally, for this is in no sense a volume of apologetics) upon ques- tions of historicity and credibihty ; and it is not a small matter that the world should not lose the conviction of the reality of any great personality, most of all that of Jesus. Now it is not only true that general considerations must always weigh heavily against the hypercritical judgments of a few modern writers, who ask us to believe that the character, that is most necessary to under- stand the history of the Christian centuries, is itself unhistorical ; but it may also be said, that the present critical situation may well be considered rather reassuring than otherwise. In any case, a careful study of the most certain portions of the teaching of Jesus must be one of the best and surest ways of coming to the life and person of Jesus. The man Jesus must stand revealed in this teaching with singular decisiveness. In the second place, it may be possible for us to 1 Quoted by Knowling, art. " Criticism," Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, p. 393. INTRODUCTION 3 see a little more clearly what portions of the teach- ings of Jesus are most certain, and to realize how- much we have in these portions that cannot be doubted. Moreover, for the surest interpretation of any Fresh histori- teaching, we must be able to see it in its full his- tation^^''^''^" torical setting, and such historical interpretation is always a fresh problem, needing ever to be faced anew in view of the results of constantly advancing research. Here, for example, we must take account not only of the general influence of the Jewish literature of the time, but particularly of its Messianism, and of the religious position of the Pharisees. Though all this has far less appli- cation to the ethical than to other parts of the teaching of Jesus. To this historical imagination one must add, as Psychoiogi- well, what may be called a psychological imagina- j^tion*^'^^'^^" tion, to make the teaching real to himself. Here the problem especially is to get all possible light on Christ's own state of mind at the time of the teaching, and so to see how the teaching grew up first of all out of his own experience and thought. And in all this the attempt must be to keep Unfolding close to the teaching itself, to unfold it, rather than *^^ teaching. to write about it. No need is greater than that i* the teaching of Jesus should be allowed to speak for itself. One recalls Horton's striking sentence, ** It is the unhappy delusion of the Church that it knows the teaching of Jesus." ^ To similar import 1 The Teaching of Jesus, p. viii. 4 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Mr. Peile says, in his Bampton lectures, " It cannot, I think, be questioned that the striking contrast between the Uves of Christians and the rules which they profess to accept is the great re- . ligious difficulty of the present day." ^ We must, therefore, do our utmost to approach the teaching in such a way as to allow it to make its own un- biased impression. Our single-minded endeavor must be to see life through Christ's eyes, to share his discernment of its laws. Only then shall we be able to bring out the relations of the parts of the teaching each to each, and the unity of all. Criticism of On the Other hand, singularly violent attacks oMesus!^ are being made just now, in some quarters, even upon the ethics of Jesus. It is not only that many " even professedly Christian writers have declared that teaching impracticable, always impossible of direct application to life ; but that others are in- sisting that the ethics of Jesus is always " end- ethics," that is, teaching given only in view of an almost immediate end of the present world-age, X and so clearly not of value for ordinary daily life. Still others are attributing to Jesus in a most ex- traordinary manner ethical judgments, which any scientific and sober exegesis must say unhesitat- ingly were quite the reverse of his true position.^ And, finally, a recent and professedly very modem book says, for example, amid a large amount of similar assertion, " Luke is especially full of teach- 1 The Reproach of the Gospel y p. 6. 2 See art. " Jesus or Christ," Hibbert Journal^ January, 1909. INTRODUCTION 5 ings quite as hard for the conscience as the wonder- stories of the Bible are difficult for the reason." ^ It would seem, then, abundantly worth while to Need of make a careful objective study of the distinctly gtudy!^^*^ ethical teaching of Jesus. But this volume at- tempts nowhere any direct defense of the teaching of Jesus as against such criticisms, nor any direct attack upon the assumptions underlying these criticisms; except so far as such defense or attack is involved in a clear objective understanding of Jesus' ethical teaching itself. Though it would not be difficult to show, in many cases at least, that the criticisms come from failure to follow sound canons of literary or historical interpretation, from a curi- ously inconsistent mixture of older and newer points of view, or from a supposed higher ethical viewpoint, that takes all seriousness out of life, is sentimentalism pure and simple, justifiable neither scientifically nor philosophically. y. It must be regarded, also, as of no small moment Application that the student of the teaching of Jesus should tg^^^lng. try to see that teaching in its application to his own time. We are to be doers, not hearers only. And if our modern psychological emphasis upon doing in order to knowing is at all correct, it must be recognized that in this preeminently ethical realm we shall only really profit by the teaching, and rightly evaluate it, as we honestly attempt its application to the life-problems of our own time. This does not mean a mere homiletic drawing of ^ Dole, What we know about Jesus, p. 46 note. 6 THE ETHICS OF JESUS morals ; for moral teaching can be truly and fully seen, only as it is brought home to our own situa- tion and to our own problems. We shall only appreciate the insight of Jesus when we share it ; and we shall not truly share it until we have tried to apply it to problems that for ourselves are real and pressing. Just here lies a great part of the virtue of Tolstoy's writing upon Christianity. He has come into a thorough conviction of certain basic principles, as he sees them, in the teaching of Jesus, and is trying with all his heart to apply them to our own time. To relieve the minds of those who conjure with the word "scientific," it might be added that this insistence upon the mod- ern application of the teaching of Jesus is not less scientific, but really more so, because it is the one way to genuine insight in the realm of the ethical. If the author does not do this, the reader must do it for himself, if he is to come to clear convictions. No excuses, therefore, need to be made for the occasional but deliberate present-day applications of the teaching. Probably it is just here that there lies the largest part of what we can do in making the teaching real. Limitation Our attempt may find a further justification in of theme. ^^^ strict limitation of its theme. The book is not to undertake all the problems of New Testament introduction. On the contrary, it aims to build directly on what others have done in this field. Particularly, it is not its business to cover the ground of other books of this series of New Tes- INTRODUCTION 7 tament Handbooks. The very plan of the series rather requires strict limitation. Nor is the book to deal with all the teaching of Jesus. Two books of this series have already touched, one at length and another in an important part, upon this teach- ing in its entirety. Our discussion must rather be confined to the purely ethical teaching, to a spe- cific field less frequently covered ; though the gen- eral books on the teaching of Jesus and on Christian ethics have had not a little to say, at least inciden- tally, upon our own theme ; and there are not wholly lacking books almost confined to this field. In reaching our theme, moreover, it seems wise The entire to begin with an analytic statement of the teach- bTc'kground^ ing as a whole, as it stands in the Gospels, in order to appreciate the Evangelists' point of view, and to recognize the relative unity of the entire teaching as it has been placed before the disciples of Christ through the centuries in the longest of the Gospels. We are thus to work from the whole to the parts, and not vice versa. But it is particularly to be noticed that, in order The method to keep the results as objective as possible, the l)ske°"^~ method of this volume is that of a composite photograph, photograph. Against the background of Luke's putting of the entire teaching of Jesus, the ethical teaching is presented in a series of pictures taken from different and carefully chosen points of view, superimposed one upon the other. The ethical emphases which so result, we may be certain, will give us authentic and central points in the ethics 8 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Summary as to aim. An individ- ual reaction. of Jesus. In other words, the volume undertakes seven successive studies of the ethical teaching of Jesus : two from the points of view of suggested but contrasted criteria for that teaching — the criterion of the exceptional, in Schmiedel's " foun- dation-pillar " passages, and the criterion of the recurring, in Burkitt's ** doubly attested sayings"; two from the points of view of the admittedly oldest sources — Mark, and the other common source of Matthew and Luke; two from the points of view of material peculiar to Matthew, and material peculiar to Luke ; and a concluding study of the Sermon on the Mount, as an early, authentic, and intentional summary of the teach- ing of Jesus, and as furnishing a further test of the results reached in the previous studies. The justification, then, of our undertaking may perhaps be found in its aim to make a direct, first- hand, historico-psychological, pragmatic study of a strictly limited field, approached by the method of the composite photograph ; a method that, if it treats the teaching topically at all, will do so at the end rather than at the beginning. In any case, the theme is of endless significance, and it can only be seen in its fullness and richness in many individual reflections of it. Any genu- inely honest, individual reaction upon the teach- ing of Jesus will probably be not without its value for others. But if this method is to be adopted, the Hmitations of space demand illustrative rather than exhaustive treatment. INTRODUCTION Critical Position Without attempting any discussion of the synop- tic problem, which properly belongs to other vol- umes, it may be said that there is, fortunately, an increasing consensus of opinion among scholars upon that problem, and I may content myself with quoting Sanday's recent summary : ^ "I shall as- Sanday on sume the facts on which most scholars at the pres- ^^ sources, ent time, including Dr. Wright, are substantially agreed. I shall assume that there are three main sources, or classes of sources, of our present Gos- pels : (i) our present St. Mark — the actual Gos- pel, not an Urmarciis or older form of the Gospel, — which has supplied the outline and broad nar- rative of our Lord's public ministry as it is found in the other two Gospels ; (2) a collection consist- ing for the most part of discourses, which an ancient tradition would lead us to think was the work of St. Matthew, and which was drawn upon by both the first Evangelist and St. Luke, but not or in a much less degree by St. Mark ; we may follow the example of many scholars at the present time by using for this document the symbol Q ; (3) certain special material peculiar to the First Gospel and St. Luke, and amounting in the latter '^Expository Times, December, 1908, p. 105; see also his TAg Life of Christ in Recent Research. Cf. Stanton, art. "Gospels," Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible ; White, art. " Gospels," Diction- ary of Christ and the Gospels ; Knowling, art. " Criticism," D. C. G.; Bacon, art. " Logia," D. C. G. ; Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, the critical introduction. lO THE ETHICS OF JESUS Reconstruc- tions of Q. Trustwor- thiness of the ethical teaching as given in the Synoptic Gospels. Gospel, at what is perhaps a maximum reckoning, to nearly five hundred verses."^ Various attempts to reconstruct the document Q have been made by Wendt, Resch, A. Wright, Reville, Wernle, Hawkins, Wellhausen (1905), Harnack (1907), and B. Weiss (i9o8).2 With the exception of Weiss', Harnack's reconstruction is the most recent, and may also probably be re- garded as the fruit of the most thoroughgoing study ; and as Weiss differs from most scholars in believing that Mark also made considerable use of Q, our study will be based upon Harnack's recon- struction, in his The Sayings of Jesus, It may also be said that there is general agreement among scholars regarding the trustworthiness of the Synoptic Gospels as to no small part of the teaching of Jesus. While this general agreement does not by any means cover all topics and details, nor exclude the admission of editorial additions, it is reassuring as to the basis of our ethical studies. Thus, even so radical a critic as Schmiedel, after discussing his "foundation-pillars," says : ^ "We must therefore work upon the principle that, to- gether with the * foundation-pillars,' and as a re- 1 It is, of course, not forgotten that the sources of these sources, especially of Mark, may be also sought, as in some of the most re- cent inquiries. See Menzies, " Survey of Recent Literature on the Synoptic Gospels," Review of Theology and Philosophy, June, and July, 1909. 2 Cf. Bacon, art. " Logia," D. C. G. ; Moffatt, The Historical New Testament, pp. 641 ff. ^ Jesus in Modern Criticism, p. 27. INTRODUCTION II suit of them, everything in the first three Gospels deserves belief which would tend to establish Jesus' greatness, provided that it harmonizes with the picture produced by the 'foundation-pillars,* and in other respects does not raise suspicion. And this gives us nothing less than pretty well the whole bulk of Jesus' teaching, in so far as its object is to explain in a purely religious and ethical way what God requires of man, and wherein man receives comfort and consolation from God." The limitation to a certain kind of teaching should here be noted.^ So too, Harnack, in discussing the historical value of Q, says : " Our knowledge of the teaching and the history of our Lord, in their main features at least, thus depends upon two authorities [Mark and Q] independent of one another, yet composed at nearly the same time. Where they agree their testimony is strong, and they agree often and on important points. On the rock of their united testimony, the 1 As to making these " foundation-pillars " sole criterion for a life of Jesus, I think Sanday's criticism holds : " The position that he takes up is the paradoxical one of insisting upon certain passages because they seem to run counter to the main tenor of Christian tradition, but at the same time practically ignoring this main tenor, which is really that which gives them their value. In other words, he builds on the exceptions, and ignores the rule to which they are exceptions. Is it not a much fairer way of proceeding to treat the passages of which we have been speaking as so much striking evi- dence of the generally high historical character of the documents in which they occur ? " (^Expository Times^ December, 1908, p. i lo.) But this does not affect our discussion of the ethical teaching, nor the use of Schmiedel's passages as one criterion for that ethical teaching. 12 THE ETHICS OF JESUS assault of destructive critical views, however neces- sary these are to easily self-satisfied research, will ever be shattered to pieces." ^ Ramsay is even in- clined to believe that Q "was written while Christ was still living," and Salmon takes a similar view.^ While these views of Ramsay and Salmon are prob- ably, as Sanday thinks, somewhat optimistic, Allen, Wright, Plummer, Bacon, Burkitt, Loisy, Jiilicher, Wernle, and many others, may all be quoted as affirming the general trustworthiness of the Synop- tic Gospels as to the simpler ethical and religious teaching of Jesus.^ This sentence, typical of all, may be quoted from Wernle, speaking of Q: ** On the whole, the historical value of these discourses is very high, higher than that of anything else; to- gether with the words of the Lord in Mark, they give us our truest insight into the heart of the Gos- pel." And again, '* The chief thing is how Jesus looked upon God, upon the world, upon mankind ; and how he answered the question of questions, — what really matters before God, what is religion. And this we can know; we can see it in bright daylight"* In our examination of this teaching, we may ^ The Sayings of/estis^ p. 249. 2 Cf. Sanday, The Life of Christ in Recent Research^ p. 172. * Cf., e.g.^ Allen, The International Critical Commentary, " St. Matthew," pp. 309 ff ; Wernle, Sources of our Knowledge of the Life of Jesus, pp. 99 ff, 129, 131, 152; Jiilicher, An Introduction to the New Testament, § 29, " The historical value of the Synoptic Gos- pels," pp. 371-372, 373» 374- * Op. cit., pp. 138-139, and 1 60-1 61. INTRODUCTION 1 3 well begin with what is most certain, indeed prac- tically undisputed, — Schmiedel's " foundation-pil- lars," and " the doubly attested sayings " of Burkitt. Schmiedel selects certain specific passages which Schmiedel's he says must be regarded as " not open to ques- "fuars1f^^°°" tion." Concerning these passages, he says : ^ "I select nine such passages, and in order to empha- size their importance, give them a special name ; I call them the foundation-pillars of a really sci- entific life of Jesus. Now the important point is that they are chosen on the same principles which guide every critical historian in extra-theological fields. When we make our first acquaintance with a historical person in a book which is throughout influenced by a feeling of worship for its hero, as the Gospels are by a feeling of worship for Jesus, in the first rank of credibiHty we place those passages of the book which really run counter to this feeling; for we realize that, the writer's sentiments being what they were, such passages cannot have been invented by the author of the book ; nor would they have been taken from the records at his service if their absolute truth- fulness had not forced itself upon him." With these nine passages he couples three others, which he says ^ " any impartial inquirer would admit . . . are of the same truthful nature." In starting with these twelve passages, which Schmiedel thinks that no critical historian could question, for our own study, it is of course to be borne in mind that we '^ Jesus in Modern Criticism, p. 15. ^ Op. cit., p. 25. 14 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Burkitt's doubly attested sayings. are using them not as he does, as a beginning of a scientific life of Jesus, but solely for disclosure of the ethical teaching of Jesus. With these "foundation-pillars" of Schmiedel may well be grouped the doubly attested saying^ collected by Burkitt in his book, The Gospel History and Its Transmission. By the doubly attested sayings, Burkitt does not mean simply those which appear in any two of the Synoptics. As he says, " To those who hold that Matthew and Luke actually used our Mark and another document besides, it is evident that the consensus of all three Synoptics resolves itself into the single witness of Mark, and the consensus of Matthew and Luke is in many cases only to be regarded as the single witness of the lost docu- ment (Q)." He holds therefore that "the only real double attestation is to be found in those few passages, mostly short, striking sayings, which ap- pear to have found a place in the common source of Matthew and Luke (Q) as well as in Mark."^ He adds later that we need "a kind of starting- point for the consideration of our Lord's doctrine, some external test that will give us a generaf as- surance that the Saying we have before us is really from him, and is not the half-conscious product of one school of his followers. Where shall we find such a test } It appeared to me that the starting-point we require may be found in those Sayings which have a real double attestation. 1 Op. cit., pp. 132-133. '^ OF THE be covered. UNIVERSITY ^^ K j^TRODUCTION 1$ The main documents out of which the Synoptic Gospels are compiled are (i) the Gospel of Mark, and (2) the lost common origin of the non-Markan portions of Matthew and Luke, i.e.^ the source called Q. Where Q and Mark appear to report the same Saying, we have the nearest approach that we can hope to get to the common tradition of the earliest Christian society about Our Lord's words. What we glean in this way will indicate the general impression his teaching made upon his disciples." ^ Burkitt beHeves that we can be sure of thirty such doubly attested sayings. These foundation-pillar passages of Schmiedel, Ground to and Burkitt's list of the doubly attested sayings, give us a starting-point for the study of the teach- ing of Jesus which can hardly be questioned ; and in some important respects furnish at the same time criteria for the remaining study — the criteria of the exceptional and of the recurring. Where these contrasted criteria agree in ethical emphasis, the result should be indubitable. As already sug- gested, the study of these passages would naturally be followed by a study of the teaching in the oldest sources: Mark, and Q, where Harnack's recon- struction of the latter document will be taken as basis. An estimate of the ethical teaching of Jesus peculiar to either Matthew or Luke, and a special illustrative study of the Sermon on the Mount, will complete our survey. That is, our study will be confined to the Synoptics, and will try to build 1 op. cit.y p. 147. i6 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Exclusion of narrative. Other exclusions. Jesus never separates religion and ethics. there continuously upon the assured results of criticism. Limitation of Theme The necessarily strict limitation of our theme will require the exclusion of any detailed considera- tion of the narrative portions of the Gospels, ex- cept so far as this may be necessary to make clear the teaching, though the historical background, of course, must be always in mind. The restriction to the ethical teaching of Jesus means, too, that any large consideration of the religious teaching is necessarily shut out, as well as any treatment of the doctrine of the person of Christ, and also all consideration of the eschato- logical teaching. These exclusions of themselves would largely exclude John, which, also, as a less primary source, is left out of account.^ And yet it should be made perfectly clear that no sharp line is to be drawn, or can be drawn, be- tween the ethical and the religious, either in fact or in the teaching of Jesus. If one is to say, with Professor Palmer, that ethics is " a criticism of the formation, maintenance, and comparative worth of human customs," then certainly, from the point of view of Jesus, the ethical could not be shut oif from the religious. To believe in ethical aims and laws, as involved in the very constitution of our beings, and as possible of any kind of fulfillment in But see summary of ethical teaching in John, in Strong, art. " Ethics," H. D. B., p. 784. INTRODUCTION 1 7 the world, is itself implicitly and logically a faith essentially religious. For it implies the friendli- ness of the universe to such an ethical aim.^ Cer- tainly to the thought of Jesus, the ethical and re- ligious are inextricably interwoven. One cannot do justice to his standpoint without freely admitting, with J. Weiss,^ that " we cannot in strictness speak of the ethics of Jesus at all, . . . but we may see how a great personality creates a moral standard by what he does and suffers, and how he illustrates it in his words." ^ " We speak accurately of ethics or natural science only when we regard the conduct of men in their mutual relations as something by itself, abstracted from rehgious feeling and action, . . . and such an independent position of ethics ... is simply beside the mark in the case of Jesus." * Let it be, therefore, clearly and emphatically said from the start that, in speaking of the ethics of Jesus, we never mean to imply that Jesus him- self separates the ethical problem from the re- ligious. The line we here draw is an arbitrary line of our own, though it is not without value to draw it. In drawing the line in these studies, we are simply to ask what Jesus conceived to be the fundamental laws of human life, in the relation of man to man, setting aside, except incidentally, all discussion of the relation of man to God. 1 Cf. Mackenzie, A Manual of Ethics, pp. 30, 317. 2 Art. " Ethics," D. C. G. 8 Cf. Contentio Veritatis, The Teaching of Christ, pp. 105 ff., 1 16- 121, 148-149, 165-166. *Cf. Gilbert, The Revelation of Jesus, p. 131. c i8 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The ethical emphasis in the teaching of Jesus. The religious assumption of the ethical teaching of Jesus. But even if one makes no attempt to draw so sharp a line, a faithful study of the teaching of Jesus cannot help impressing the student with the fact that a surprisingly large proportion of the teaching of Jesus is simply and distinctly ethical, having only the constant religious implication in the background, that any fundamental law of human life must be at the same time the will of God. And his expressly religious teaching, more- over, is, in very large part, of the simplest possible sort, that connects itself most directly with funda- mental ethical assumptions. We are certain, there- fore, to find a fruitful and large field of study in the ethical teaching, and it is a study that will have very much to contribute to what has proved to be through the generations the abiding picture of Jesus.^ Summary of the Entire Teaching of Jesus We shall best estimate the ethical teaching of Jesus as gathered from the earliest sources, criti- cally determined, when we see it against the back- ground of the entire teaching as set forth in Matthew or Luke. We may the more appro- priately attempt such a brief survey of the whole, not only because of the general advantage of working from the whole to the parts rather than simply from the parts to the whole, but also be- iCf. Roberts, art. "Gospel," D. C. G., p. 66i : " Much of the teaching of Jesus could not be directly classed under the ' Gospel ' as sketched above ; it was ethical teaching." INTRODUCTION I9 cause all the elements of the teaching of Jesus do necessarily affect the ethical teaching. It is well to see, for example, that religious teaching, in the thought of Jesus, is always involved in what may seem to be the plainest ethical principles, because every duty which he recognizes is felt by him to be the will of God, and the will of God always some duty. The situation in the mind of Jesus, I sup- pose, is in this respect precisely like that of every religious man of the modern time, who, if he be- lieves in God at all as his Creator, must conceive of the fundamental laws of his own nature as at the same time expressions of the will of the crea- tive God. '^So, too, our conception of the person of Christ The life of is closely related to our view of his ethics. And Jf^"^ ^! •' illustrating while primarily we shall have nothing to do with and reaiiz- his life, it must still be recognized that in the ex- ^"g ^^^ ample of Jesus, for instance, we have the best pos- .^.-^ sible illustration of the translation of his principles into life, and we cannot wholly ignore the impres- sion made by the spirit of his life in the interpre- tation of his teaching.^ And so far as we find our highest ideal embodied in him, he becomes for us, as even John Stuart Mill could feel, a kind of per- sonalized conscience. Moreover, no abstract state- ment of ethical principles can possibly influence life as the personal incarnation of those principles does ; and the influence of the life of Jesus must 1 Cf. Horton, The Teaching of Jesus, pp. 274 fF. ; Ross, The Teaching of Jesus y"^. 119; and many others. 20 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Ethical bearing of the eschato- logical. Why Luke is chosen. doubtless be conceived as far more potent, even, than his teaching. And if the greatest means to the true Hfe we know is personal association with the high and noble, then it need not seem strange that love for Christ as a person has, as a matter of \ fact, proved the mightiest of historical motives to noble living.^ , Once more, it is plain that even the strict es- chatological teaching of Jesus may have a direct ethical bearing in its implied emphasis on the worth of men. As it seems fairly clear that Matthew is inclined to group his material in large sections, topically, and as the most important of these sections, the so-called Sermon on the Mount, will be the subject of special study later, we may perhaps best use Luke for our summary of the entire teaching of Jesus. Having reference, then, solely to the teaching, 1 Cf. Hunger, The Freedom of Faith, pp. 109 ff : "We must go by the eternally ordained path of love to him who is the revelation of eternal Love, — a Person, — and suffer his love to charm us into a kindred love; we must lay our hearts close beside his, that they may learn to beat with the same motion; our wills near his, that they may fall into its harmony," p. 127. Cf. also Bushnell, Ser- mons for the New Life, pp. 127 ff. This sentence illustrates his thought, " Follow without question the impulse of love to Christ's own person; for this, when really full and sovereign, will put you along easily in a kind of infallible way, and make your conduct chime, as it were, naturally with all God's future, even when that future is unknown; untying the most difficult questions of casuistry without so much as a question raised." Cf. also Charles E. Jeffer- son's The Character ofjesus^ and Stalker's Imago Christi. INTRODUCTION 21 not to the narratives of the Gospel, the teaching Outline of of Jesus in Luke may perhaps be compactly in- *^ ^^^^ r dicated in the following outline : — Jesus in I. T/ie great characteristics of his ministry (illustrated in the rest of the book). 4 : 16-6 : 49. A. His own chosen view of his ministry. 4 : 16-30 ; (cf. 7 : 18-23). A gospel of joy, of hope, of liberty, of health for body, mind, and spirit, of universal grace. 4: 18, 25-27. Cf. chapters 9 and 10. B. His note of authority. 4:31-44. (Cf. 5:33-39; 10 : 17-24 ; 19 : 28-21 : 36 ; especially 4 : 32, 35, 36, 39, 41 ; 5 : 13 ; 6:5, 20, 27, and many other pas- sages.) C. The motive of his ministry. 5 : 30-32. (Cf. 7 : 40- 50; 9: 1-6; 10: 1-16; and ch. 15.) "I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repent- ance." D. The revolutionary character of his teaching. 5 : 33- 6:11. 1. As to fasting. 5 : 33-39. 2. As to the law of the Sabbath. 6 : i-i r. j/'E. The qualities of disciples, and the fundamental prin- ciples of the Kingdom. 6 : 20-49. Cf. divisions III, V, and VII. Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount ; illustrated throughout the rest of the Gospel. 1. A new and revolutionary standard of happiness. 6 : 20-26. 2. The characteristics of the true righteousness. 6 : 27-49. i) Universal love the one great ruling principle, vv. 27-36. (Cf. 5:30-32.) 2) The sin and folly of the judging attitude, vv. 37-45. (Cf. 18:9-14.) 3) Demand for fruit in life. vv. 46-49. (Cf. vv. 43-45? and ch. 14.) Luke. 22 THE ETHICS OF JESUS This section means that love forbids the judging attitude, and requires concrete expression in life. Jesus is here giving a great, relatively new, ethical emphasis in religion. The whole of the first great division of Jesus' teach- ing, as given in Luke, may be thus summed "P- (i) good tidings; (2) authoritatively given; (3) born of love ] (4) bursting the bonds of much previous religion; and (5) calling for the new righteousness of universal love in its votaries. II. Tke varied response. 7 : 18-8 : 21. A. How Jesus meets the growing distrust of a previous warm friend. 7 : 18-35. B. How Jesus meets the misgivings and misconstruction of a broader Pharisee. 7 : 36-50. A sympathetic, forgiving, redeeming love, as over against a hard, unsympathetic, separating judgment. Cf. ch. 15. C. In general, results depend on hearer. 8 : 4-21. 1 . Parable of the sower — reception given the seed. vv. 4-15. 2. Parable of the lamp — " Take heed how ye hear." vv. 16-18. 3. " My mother and my brethren " — '' hear and do." vv. 19-21. Division II may be summed up in saying that Christ meets all with the one great message of seeking, self- giving love; what reception that message will get de- pends on the man himself. III. Jesus' method the leaven of the disciple of the right quali- ties. 9:1-11:13. A. The mission of the Twelve, and their charge. 9*. 1-6. B. The qualities of discipleship required. 9 : 18-62. 1. The one call of self-sacrificing love for master and disciples alike, vv. 18-27. (Cf. vv. 44-45.) 2. " The greatest." vv. 46-48. 3. Tolerance — " Forbid him not." vv. 49-50. 4. Counting the cost. vv. 57-62. INTRODUCTION 23 Thus, the disciple will be self-sacrificing, humble, tolerant, and heroic in the love he manifests. C. The still wider mission of the Seventy, and their charge. lo : 1-16, D. The qualities of discipleship. 10 : 17-I1 : 13. 1. Joy of discipleship. 10:17-24. , 2. True neighborliness. 10:25-37. Love concretely illustrated in the parable of the Good Samari- tan. A rebuke of narrow prejudice at every point. 3. Underestimating spiritual opportunity. 10:38-42. (Note especially vv. 41-42.) 4. Exhortation to prayer. 11:1-13. i) The disciples' prayer, expressing the very spirit of discipleship. vv. 1-4. 2) "Ask; seek; knock." vv. 5-13. There is, thus, here asked from the disciple : love born of the love of God in Christ, prizing its mean- ing, practically shown, and depending on God. The disciple is to live a joyful, neighborly. Christ- like, prayerful life. IV. The deepening conflict with the Pharisaic forces. 11:14- 16:31. Introductory. Throughout this central section, Jesus is developing his own positive teaching, as set over against the prevailing religious spirit of his time. The whole section is probably primarily directed to the training of the Twelve, to bringing them into his own spirit and thought, and guarding them against the insidious, ever present, ever corrupting Pharisaic spirit. It is a solemn task which Jesus so sets himself; the whole survival of true religion seems to him to be at stake. This whole section (chs. 11-16), hke chapter 11 in particular, may be re- garded as a study in moral blindness ; and like chap- ter 12, as giving motives against the Pharisaic spirit; the whole section, too, might well be considered. 24 THE ETHICS OF JESUS like chapter 13, as warning against the Pharisaic spirit ; though there is some propriety in giving these special titles to the chapters named. A. A study in moral blindness. 1 1 : 14-52. 1. The moral blindness of the Pharisees reveals itself in the ascription of good to evil; they have trifled with their own moral instincts, vv. 14-23. 2. It involves satisfaction with mere emptiness of soul. vv. 24-26. 3. It necessarily fells back upon ''sign seeking," rather than response to the moral and spiritual appeal. It involves rejection of the highest, vv. 29-32. 4. All this grows directly out of a self-perverted spiritual vision, vv. 33-36. 5. And this moral blindness is illustrated in i) valuing the outer rather than the inner, w. 37-41 ; 2) valuing the petty rather than the great, w. 42-44; 3) valuing the " hedge of the law " rather than the law, vv. 45-52. As over against these characteristics of the Pharisaic spirit, the disciple must be true, positive, desiring the real, seeing straight. B. Motives against the Pharisaic spirit ; the enemies of life. Ch. 12. Introductory. In a peculiar degree, this chapter contains a multiplication of motives for the right- eous life, and deals prevailingly with the moral as- pect of the relation to God. 1. Motives against hypocrisy, vv. 1-12. 2. Motives against covetousness. vv. 13-21. 3. Motives against anxiety, vv. 22-34. 4. Motives against the ungirt life. vv. 35-53. 5. Motives against lack of moral insight, vv. 54-59. As over against these characteristics of the Pharisaic INTRODUCTION 2$ Spirit, the disciple of Christ must be absolutely honest, unselfish, trusting in God, vigilantly watch- ful, seeing the true. C. Continued warning against the Pharisaic spirit. Ch. 13. 1. Against uncharitable judgment of others on ac- count of calamities ; and against forgetfmg the absolute need of life in the individual, vv. 1-5. 2. Against fruitlessness, — mere harmlessness of life. vv. 6-9. 3. Against deadness to mercy, exalting sacrifice above mercy in the legalistic spirit ; misread- ing God himself, and so all life. vv. 10-17. 4. Against a small and petty view of the Kingdom. vv. 18-21. 5. Against lack of earnestness — striving to the end. vv. 22-30. 6. Against the desolateness of the life that is blind to the messengers of God. vv. 31-35. As over against these characteristics of the Pharisaic spirit, the disciple must be charitable in his judg- ment, have life in himself, be fruitful, vitally merci- ful, have faith in the greatness of the plans of God, be consistently earnest, awake to the message of God. l/D. The Kingdom for all who will have it ; or, life for v" all who will sow to life. Ch. 14. 1. Mercy, not legalism, vv. 1-6. 2. The true measure of a man is not sitting in the chief seats, but worthiness to sit in them ; not -^^ self-exaltation, but real humility, vv. 7-11. 3. The great test is really unselfish service ; " not for recompense." vv. 12-14. 4. Not height of natural privilege, but response, insures the great values of the Kingdom, vv. 15-24. 5. The one vital element of discipleship is willing- 26 THE ETHICS OF JESUS ness to follow Jesus in the sacrificial, self-giving spirit, vv. 25-35. As over against these elements of failure in Pharisa- ism, Jesus asks that his disciples should be merci- ful in spirit, genuinely humble, unselfishly serving, deeply caring for the Kingdom, self-sacrificing. The salt of self-sacrifice can alone give savor to life. E. The seeking, suffering love of God. Ch. 15. This chapter contains the very heart of the teaching of Jesus, and clearly involves his great convictions that : — 1. God is Father, and therefore cares, seeks, rejoices in the return of his child, and grieves over his wandering. 2. Man is son beloved, made for God and associa- tion with him. 3. Sin is the unfilial attitude toward God, going away from the Father. 4. Repentance is coming to oneself, and this is to come back to God. 5. Redemption is God's seeking, forgiving, suffering love, winning back the son into the filial life with the Father. Here the spirit of the disciple is represented as being simply that of the true child of God, and ready to show, in the sharing of the Father's life, the same spirit which the Father shows. F. The law of consequences in the moral life, especially as illustrated in the love and use of money. Ch. 16. 1 . The true use of riches ; or, foresight in the spirit- ual life. vv. 1-13. 2. Christ's answer to the Pharisaic scoffing ; the law of consequences, vv. 14-18. 3. No way of escaping the consequences of the selfish abuse of riches, even in the future life, vv. 19-31. INTRODUCTION 27 As contrasted with this spirit, the demand here made upon the disciple of Christ is that he should show foresight in the spiritual life, wisely using his riches, act ever in view of the law of the harvest, and use unselfishly all means committed to him. V. The more direct training of the Twelve : the spirit required in the Disciple. 17 : 1-19 : 27. A. Patience. Ch. 17. 1 . Patient care not to stumble even the least, vv. 1-2. 2. The spirit of patient and tender forgiveness. vv. 3-4. 3. The power of even a little genuine faith, vv. 5-^- . . ^ 4. The spirit of patient and meek humility in service. ^ vv. 7-10. 5. The duty and beauty of expressed gratitude. vv. 11-19. 6. Patient faith in the invisible Kingdom, vv. 20-21. 7. Readiness to meet the times of crisis: patient endurance to the end. vv. 22-37. B. Chapter 18. 1. Persistent and humbly penitent in prayer. vv. 1-14. 2. Valuing the childlike spirit, vv. 15-17. 3. Withstanding the peril of riches, — the peril of the lower attainment, vv. 18-30. 4. Readiness to follow a suffering Lord, v v. 31-34. C. FideUty in the trusts of the Kingdom. 19: 11-27. VI . Pressing his claijus at the center of power. 1 9 : 28-2 1:36. A. The claim of Messiahship — of universal and eternal significance, in the triumphal entry, and in the lamentation over Jerusalem. 19 : 28-46. B. Controversy with the national leaders. 20: 1-21 14. 1. As to his authority. 20 : 1-8. 2. A parable of judgment on the nation. 20 : 9-18. 28 THE ETHICS OF JESUS 3. The tribute to Caesar. 20 : 19-26. 4. As to the resurrection. 20 : 27-40. 5. Christ as David's son. 20 : 41-44. 6. Warning against the scribes. 20 : 45-47. 7. The contrast of the poor widow. 21:1-4. C. The eschatological discourse ; Christ's claim to world significance. 21 : 5-36. All this means that the disciple will recognize Christ's universal and eternal significance, his moral and spirit- ual lordship. VII. Last Counsels to the disciples. A. The new conditions. 22 : 14-38. 1. The new covenant, vv. 14-23. 2. Rank in the new Kingdom, vv. 24-30. 3. Peter's sifting, vv. 31-34. 4. Changed conditions to be faced, vv. 35-38. B. Suffering and glory and universal mission. 24 : 13-49. The Lord of seeking, suffering love is the Lord of glory and the Lord of all. Amount and Permanence of the Ethical Teaching Even this very rapid survey of the entire teach- ing of Jesus, just as we find it in the longest of the Gospels, furnishes the best background for our special study of the ethical teaching of Jesus, and serves at the same time to bring out two things clearly: (i) the very large proportion of his teach- ing that deals with the simplest principles of the ethical and religious life; and (2) the recurrence of certain great emphases in his teaching. One is reminded of Harnack's words in his discussion of Q : " It is astonishing that at a time when St. Paul was actively engaged in his mission, INTRODUCTION 29 and when the problem of apologetics and the con- Hamack troversy concerning the law were burning ques- ^^ ^^^^^ ^ tions, the teaching of Our Lord should have been ethical still so clearly and distinctly preserved in the mem- ^^^ ^^^^' ory of Christians in the simple force of its es- sentially ethical character." ^ To similar import Burkitt says : "The evangelists are not mechanical chroniclers ; they are not afraid to treat the ma- terial before them with great literary freedom, and here and there we actually see unhistorical legends growing as it were before our eyes. Under these circumstances, the real miracle, which only escapes our notice because it is so familiar, is the irresist- ible vitality of the ethical teaching of the Gospel." ^ As to the repeated emphases in the teaching The of Jesus, there is especially to be noted the vital, g^p^ases. concrete characterization of the life of the dis- ciple of Jesus, as it comes out in the various sec- tions of Luke. Two emphases recur again and again in this characterization of the true disciple : the emphasis on the need of absolute truth and honesty in his disciples, and the emphasis on the essential need of a genuine, self-giving love. On the one hand, many other points in Jesus' Emphasis teaching are seen to connect themselves at once ^^ ^^^^^^y- with his repeated emphasis on the need of abso- lute truth and honesty in his disciples. If the dis- ciple is absolutely true and honest (11:14-23; 12 : 1-12), he will desire the real (11 : 29-32); he ^ The Sayings of Jesus, p. 209. 2 The Gospel History and lis Transmission^ p. 27. 30 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Trends in the entire teaching. will be able to see straight (i i : 33-36 ; 12 : 54-59); he will be vigilantly watchful (12 : 35-53), persist- ently earnest (13:22-30), and positively fruitful (13 : 6-9; of. II : 24-26). And in this cooperation with the purposes of God, he will have a grow- ing faith in the greatness of the plans of God (13:18-21), and not doubt the presence of law in his moral and spiritual life (chs. 12, 14, and 16). On the other hand, the true love, too, which Jesus calls for from his disciples, is fully charac- terized in the teaching in Luke. It will be a love for all (6 : 27-36), unjudging (6 : 37-45), practically fruitful (6:46-49), tenderly compassionate and forgiving (7 : 36-50), humble (9 : 46-48 ; 14 : 7-11), and tolerant (9 : 49-50), heroic in its self-sacrifice (9:18-27, 57-62), vitally merciful (10:25-37; cf. 13:10-17, and 14:1-6), using all means unself- ishly (12:13-21; 14:12-14; 16:1-31), faithful and watchful in its trusts (14:15-24; 16:1-13; 19 : 1 1-27), absolutely genuine in its self-giving (14:25-35; ch. 15; 18:31-34). This loving life, too, it should be noted, is thought of everywhere as the natural response to the love of God him- self. And, moreover, the great method of the new Kingdom is seen to be the personal association of the loving life. Finally, if we are to see the strictly ethical teaching of Jesus in its proper relations to the rest of his teaching, certain great trends and in- ferences from this survey of his entire teaching should be noted. INTRODUCTION 3 I First, there is here brought out the revolution- The teach- ary character of the rehgion of Jesus. This is seen Jf^r^^^^" in all the great divisions of the teaching of Jesus in Luke ; but the disciples were slow to recognize the fact ; and this has produced, as Scott has pointed out, a progressive apologetic for Chris- tianity, even within the New Testament.^ In the second place, the teaching of Jesus, as Jesus' given in Luke, seems to set forth the absoluteness ^^^^"^^• of his own claims. This is also to be seen in prac- tically every great section in Luke's version of the teaching of Jesus.^ In the third place, while the conception never The occurs in form, it is the plain implication that the ^^^oiute ^ ^ rehgion. religion of Christ must be the absolute religion, because he brings the culmination of all that re- ligion could ever bring, putting men finally into filial relation with God as Father. (Cf. chs. 7, 10, 12, and 15.) And, finally, it is plain that at the very center Love as life. of the teaching of Jesus lies the all-dominating conviction that a genuine seeking love is at the heart of all Hfe, whether in God, in Christ, or in the disciple of Christ. While, then, our own study is to be confined to The ethical the directly ethical teaching of Jesus, there must ^!^^ "^^^ be clear discernment that in that teaching, as it is Jesus' represented in the Gospels, and as it has been ^^^^^^'^e- 1 Cf. Scott, The Apologetic of the New Testament. 2 Cf. Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus^ pp. 233-246; Cambridge Theological Essays, p. 538. 32 THE ETHICS OF JESUS accepted through the centuries by the Church, the ethical and religious are constantly interwoven ; that Jesus thinks of his message always as a mes- sage of great good news to men, that goes back to his great conviction of God as true Father. But this very conviction of God as Father, of essential love at the heart of the universe, makes Jesus cer- tain that the laws of the universe, and of the world of men, as laws of the loving God, must be laws of life, to be studied, to be heartily welcomed, to be joyfully obeyed. And this insight into the laws of the relations of man to man is the more sure and deep and significant because these relations are seen in the light of the whole. Even for the man who can find no sure religious message in Jesus, his strictly ethical teaching contains a priceless treasure.^ 1 Cf. Schmiedel, /esus in Modern Criticism, pp. 90-91 ; Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, pp. 11S-119, cf. pp. 177, 178, 193 ff., 325. CHAPTER II THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN SCHMIEDEL'S FOUNDATION-PILLAR PASSAGES, AND IN THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS. CRITERIA I. SchmiedeVs *^Fo7indation-pillars'' As we have already seen, Schmiedel, in seek- Schmiedel's ing what he calls "foundation-pillars of a really ^lassifica- scientific life of Jesus," selects nine passages passages. **whose contents," he thinks, " could not have been invented ";i and with them groups three others, which, he says, " any impartial inquirer would admit are of the same truthful nature." ^ Upon these twelve passages he believes that we may unhesi- tatingly build. He divides these passages into three groups : the first five as those " which throw light on Jesus' character as a whole " ; the next four, "which have a special bearing upon his character as a worker of wonders " ;^ and the last three he adds, " because it is incumbent upon every critic of his [Jesus'] life to say in what his greatness con- sistedr * We begin our study of the ethical teach- ing of Jesus with these twelve passages. The nine " foundation-pillars " which Schmiedel The pas- selects, and the three supplementary, equally cer- f^Tted b' tain, passages, are : — Schmiedel. "^ Jesus in Modern Criticism^ p. 15. ^ Op. cit., p. 25. « Op, cit.t p. 18. * Op. cit., p. 25. D 33 34 THE ETHICS OF JESUS I . The ''^foundation-pillars.'''' i) Indicating Jesus' " character as a whole." (i) And when his friends heard it, they went out to lay hold on him : for they said, He is beside himself. And there come his mother and his brethren ; and, standing without, they sent in to him, calling him. And a multitude was sitting about him; and ^ they say unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. And he answer- eth them, and saith. Who is my mother and my brethren ? And looking round on them that sat round about him, he saith, Behold, my mother and my brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. Mark 3:21, 31-35. (2) But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Mark 13 : 32. (3) And Jesus said unto him. Why callest thou me good ? none is good save one, even God. Mark 10:18. (4) And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him ; but who- soever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come. Matt. 12 : 32. (5) And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ? which is, being in- terpreted. My God, my God, why hast thou for- saken me .'* Mark 1 5 : 34. 2) Indicating Jesus' " character as a worker of wonders." (6) And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and said. Why doth this generation seek a sign? verily I say unto you. There shall no sign be given unto this generation. Mark 8 : 12. (7) And he could do there no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and SCHMIEDEL S "FOUNDATION-PILLARS 3$ healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. Mark 6 : 5-6. (8) The blind receive their sight, and the lame W2dk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached to them. Matt. 11 : 2-6. v. 5. (9) And Jesus said unto them, Take heed and be- ware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sad- ducees. Matt. 16: 5-12. v. 6. 2. Passages " of the same truthful nature," indicating " in what his greatness consisted." (10) For he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes. Matt. 7 : 29. (11) And he came forth and saw a great multitude, and he had compassion on them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd : and he began to teach them many things. Mark 6 : 34. (12) Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matt. 1 1 : 28. I. In Schmiedel's first passage there are to be Passages seen at least the downnVht earnestness of the life bearing on *=• Jesus char- of Jesus, and especially his sense of the necessity acter as a of moral and spiritual independence, even against ^°^^" the attempted dictation of those near and dear. 31-35- This is certainly involved in his words, " For who- soever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." Herrmann's words might be quoted as an almost direct com- ment upon this passage (Mark 3 : 31-35) : " Mental and spiritual fellowship among men, and mental and spiritual independence on the part of the in- dividual — that is what we can ourselves recognize to be prescribed to us by the moral law." "Reli- 36 THE ETHICS OF JESUS gious tradition is indispensable for us. But it helps us only if it leads us on to listen to what God says to ourselves." ^ That is to say, every soul must come into a moral and spiritual life of his own^ be absolutely true to his own best light, do what is for him now "the will of God" (v. 35). Only so can he come into kinship with the spirit of Jesus. Jesus here plainly indicates that spiritual dictation by another may become a sore temptation, but it must be resisted at any cost. It is striking that in this first passage of Schmiedel's there should come out so unmistakably this absolutely funda- mental moral principle of the necessity of moral and spiritual independence, of life in oneself. There is plainly to be seen here, too, an absolutely ethical conception of religion, as well as the reli- gious conception of the ethical life. The sum of life is doing the will of God. ^ There is no slightest suggestion of the possibility of a true religious relation to God except in this ethically obedient conduct ; and yet duty is thought of as no mere abstraction, but as the will of the personal God. Mark 2. Schmiedel's sccond passage — "Of that day ^^ • 2^* or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father " — occurs in the eschatological discourse as given in Mark, and seems not only to show a sense of limi- tation of knowledge at a certain point, but also clearly to imply a consciousness on the part of '^ Faith and Morals, pp. 129-130, 192. 2Cf. Briggs, The Ethical Teaching of Jesus, pp. 34 ff. SCHMIEDEL S " FOUNDATION-PILLARS 3/ Jesus of unique relation to God ; but it contains no direct ethical suggestion. 3. Schmiedel's inference from the third passage Mark — "Why callest thou me good ? none is good save ^° * ^^' one, even God " — " that Jesus refused to allow the epithet *good' to be applied to him," seems to prove a little too much even for Schmiedel's pur- pose. The saying seems rather to reflect again the deep earnestness of the life of Jesus, answering as he so often did the question which was back in the inquirer's mind. There was to be no bandying of compliments ; he wishes to bring the man into an absolutely honest attitude at once, an attitude in which he was not idly to ascribe goodness to any one. It indicates, also, Jesus' sense of the holiness of God, as the one great source of life and charac- ter;^ and the rebuke contains, thus, in itself, a partial answer to the young man's question as to eternal life. Jesus is reminding him of the match- less purity of the true standard of holiness in God, and that must mean that, in earnest seeking after eternal life, there must be no paltering with ideals in false and easy compromise. The remainder of the incident, as given in Mark, carries out this point of view. 4. Upon the passage concerning blasphemy Matt. against the Son of man, Schmiedel says that it ^^ * ^^' shows that Jesus " attached importance not to his own person, but simply to the Holy Spirit; in other words, to the sacred cause which he represented." ^ ^Cf. Martensen, Christian Ethics, pp. 61 ff. 2 op. cit., p. 23. 38 THE ETHICS OF JESUS And if one is to take the context into account, that certainly does show that Jesus is thinking of that bHndness of prejudice which will not recognize a good work as good, which will not trust its own instinctive moral judgments, — that essential false- ness of character which is absolutely recreant to the inner light, which puts out its own eyes, puts dark- ness for light in ascribing good to evil. This is blasphemy against the very Spirit of holiness and truth, where the distinctions of good and evil are gone. Jesus sees this as a fatal sin, as moral sui- cide, — in Mark's language, as being "guilty of an eternal sin." This passage is Hke the first, then, in its insistence on truth to oneself, on fidelity to the inner light. The warning is, thus, not against some fantastic form of profanity, but against that blind prejudice, that supreme devotion to external rules and ends, that obtuseness of mind and heart, that playing fast and loose with one's conscience, which blur the moral and spiritual vision, blurring all distinctions, until one loses the sense of dis- cerning between righteousness and wickedness, and excuses and follows evil as good. The pas- sage is a most solemn call to utter truth to our own best vision, without sophisticating excuses.^ Mark 5. Upon the very difficult passage — ** My God, IS : 34. j^y Qod, why hast thou forsaken me ? " — one may certainly say, with Schmiedel, that, as indicating a 1 Cf. W. T. Davison, art. "Forgiveness," D. C. G., p. 617: "The only sin thus pronounced unpardonable is that of wilful and per- sistent sinning against light till light itself is turned into darkness." SCHMIEDEL S " FOUNDATION-PILLARS 39 moment of desperate darkness on Jesus' part, the saying is not likely to have been fabricated ; it is impossible to imagine its being gratuitously as- cribed to Jesus later. And in this very fact we may see evidence of the greater trustworthiness of the narrative, of the unusual degree in which it may be regarded as objective. Schmiedel himself is unwilling to admit that this saying on the cross shows that " Jesus died in despair." " Can we really be sure," he says, *' that these words indi- cate an abandonment of all that gave Jesus strength and stay during his life ^ Do we really know so precisely what they mean ? " ^ The incident does have undoubted difficulties, and we may not be able wholly to explain it. In any case the whole ex- planation does not belong here. But, whatever the explanation, the cry at least shows the reality of his life and struggle, that it was no drama, no play-life ; it feels real, and it is real. However we are to adjust our formulations of Jesus' nature, the reality of his life and struggle cannot be denied. He has a bitter fight to make, a calling to fulfill, a trust to which he must not prove recreant. The cry shows him in the midst of his soul struggle, suddenly confronted with the experience of the apparently hidden face of God. The incident also indicates that, in spite of this awful sense of deso- lation, there is no faltering of purpose. He is to be absolutely true to the end, even when he can- not longer see God. The startled, astonished cry 1 (9/. «V., pp. 50, 51. 40 THE ETHICS OF JESUS bearing on miracle- working. Mark 8 : 12. implies, too, that he was in the habit of living in the strong sense of the presence of God.^ With this passage we turn from those which Schmiedel regards as throwing "light on Jesus' character as a whole" to those which *'have a special bearing on his character as a worker of wonders." 6. The passage — *'There shall no sign be given " — Schmiedel interprets as meaning, " that on prin- ciple he declined to work a sign, that is to say, to do something which seemed to be a miracle, when this was to be done with the purpose of proving his divine right." ^ With this judgment of Schmiedel I wholly agree. It is most significant that this saying should be preserved in spite of the record of mir- acles. It is not too much to say that it indicates a fundamental principle upon which Jesus con- stantly acted, — the principle of the necessary inwardness of the moral and religious life, and the consequent necessity of perpetually observing rev- erence for the person. The context shows that iCf. The Creed of Christ, p. 193. 2 Op. cit, pp. 23-24. Schmiedel is probably correct in recognizing the accuracy of Luke's version here — "There shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah," etc. (Luke 11 : 29-30), and in rejecting Matt. 12:40 as an added clause, due to misunderstanding. The very point of the refusal of the sign would seem, otherwise, to be lost. Jesus seems to have been struck with the fact that Jonah gave no sign of his message from God ; he only spoke directly to the reason and conscience of the Ninevites in his warning. He made only the inner appeal. schmiedel's V foundation-pillars " 41 the saying is called out by the fact that the Phari- sees are seeking some overwhelming, external test that they can tie to ; even Jesus' works of healing do not satisfy them. He refuses to submit to such a test, or to defend his claims in that way. Why ? He is seeking to bring men into a moral and spir- itual life of their own. His kingdom, in his con- ception, can only so come. In that kingdom every man is an elector. Nothing is achieved without this inward moral and spiritual life. This sense of the inevitable inwardness of the moral and spiritual life necessarily leads to constant rev- erence, on the part of Jesus, for the person, and to the habitual way in which he distinctly subor- dinates all miracle working to his moral and reli- gious mission. ^ 7. To the same principle the next passage — Mark "He could do there no mighty work" — also bears ' ^~ * witness. Even his work of healing goes forward on moral conditions, on faith ; it is no mere magic. Just as is implied in the narrative of the tempta- tions, so in this particular case all the rest of his work is to be subordinated to the moral and spir- itual. The passage clearly indicates, too, that Jesus was not relieved from the conditions that beset similar work of other men ; for him, too, some receptivity was requisite. What he can do 1 Cf. Bennett, Life of Christ According to St. Mark, pp. 25 ff . ; Harnack, What is Christianity? p. 28; Matheson, Studies in the Portrait of Christ, \o\. I, pp. 173 ff.; Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, p. 156. 42 THE ETHICS OF JESUS for men depends also upon them. God himself ca.nnot/orce moral choice and spiritual growth and attainment upon men. i^att. ^- I^ 1^'k^ manner, Jesus' answer to John's II : 2-6. question — " Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another .? " — shows that Jesus is not relieved from conditions like ours. He had here to face the distrust of a previous warm friend. Schmiedel, rather curiously and inconsistently, makes this pas- sage an argument against the reality of the works of healing. It would have been more consistent with his own emphasis, just referred to, if he had seen that, in the evidence for his mission to which Christ appeals, he makes it a culminating proof, beyond all works of healing, that ** the poor have good tidings preached to them." Above all works of wonder is this work of bringing good tidings to the poor. The best proof of his Mes- siahship is, thus, in the thought of Jesus, moral and spiritual, and the appeal is once more to the inner vision ; and this seems plainly to be the point, too, of the last verse of the passage — " Blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of stumbling in me." Matt. 9- Schmiedel's next passage, so far as it bears i6 : S-I2. on the teaching of Jesus, has its significance almost wholly in the sixth verse — " Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." This passage indicates that, at least in the mind of Jesus, his teaching is set over against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees in plain SCHMIEDEL S "FOUNDATION-PILLARS 43 contrast. Their teaching is not even to be con- sidered a supplement of his ; no compromise seems to him really possible. In some sense, at least, his teaching is thought of as new, and revolution- ary of the common standards. He seeks to build up a discipleship characterized by another spirit. This passage does not indicate in w^hat the con- trast consists, but does make the contrast itself unmistakable.^ lo. The first of the three added passages of Passages Schmiedel, intended to make clear in what Tesus' showing in •' what Jesus greatness consists, emphasizes the evident strik- greatness ing impression of authority in his speech, as con- ^°'^^^^^^- trasted with the dependence on tradition shown by the scribes. This impression of authority, of course, exactly Matt, matches Jesus' own insistence on the necessary 7:29- inwardness of the moral and spiritual life. He speaks out of such a life, and therefore with con- viction and with the impression of authority. And it is impossible to run even cursorily over the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, to which this saying is attached, without seeing how this im- pression of spiritual authority must have been given. In these sayings his own view is set in fearless contrast to the spirit of the times ; he trusts completely his own insights and dares ex- press them. Here are spiritual discoveries of qualities counted by him essential to character and happiness and influence, which men had scarcely 1 Cf. Eaton, art. " Pharisees," H. D. B., p. 828. , >^ OF THE iiMivPRSlTY 44 THE ETHICS OF JESUS recognized. Here Jesus undertakes to judge even as to the law, the oracles of God, and makes him- self standard and judge of conduct. And it is equally plain that the authority which Jesus here claims is not external, but is due to his own inner appeal to the reason and conscience of man, to the self-evidencing power of his words. His religion, in this sense, is not at all a religion of authority, but of the spirit, as Sabatier has con- tended ; 1 he does not wish to lay down even his own commands as rules from outside ; if even they are to be of value, they must become self-legislation, laid down for every man from within. But in this deeper, inner sense, his teaching still makes this same impression of authority, and he has, just for this reason, become the supreme moral and spiritual authority (in the scientific sense of the word) of the world, our personalized conscience, our best guide. We hardly realize the greatness of the gift to the race that is to be found in such an ideal as he both shows and teaches. Mark II. The sccond quality in which Schmiedcl finds ^ • 34- the greatness of Jesus is compassion^ as reflected in the words — " And he came forth and saw a great multitude, and he had compassion on them, be- cause they were as sheep not having a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things." Here it seems evident that Jesus must have given the 1 Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit, bks. I and II, pp. viii, xxxi, xx-xxii; cf. Foster, The Finality of the Christian Religion, ch. IV. schmiedel's "foundation-pillars" 45 impression of a mighty understanding pity for men as preeminently characteristic of him, — the sense of an unbounded, unHmited compassion for the multitude, for men as men. This compassion is thought of as steadily characteristic of Jesus, and it is indeed his great contribution to the spir- itual convictions of the race, — the deep sense of the value of all men as men, as all alike children of God, and so calling out his great compassion. The reason for his compassion in this passage is found in their likeness to sheep gone astray from pasture and fold, having no shepherd, without guiding faith and convictions, with no key to life's secret, no clear way into life, missing everywhere life's best, seeking life in desert places, missing happiness, missing the great springs of character, missing significant lives of achievement and influence. The passage implies, at the same time, Jesus* own sense of the possession of life's secret, — that he has much to give them. He has the great good news, he needs only to share with them his own secret, and therefore he " began to teach them many things." In this passage, then, we have as the ground for reverence for Christ his great boundless, but intelligent, compassion for men. 12. Schmiedel's last passage is the great invita- Matt. tion — "Come unto me all ye that labor and are ^^ = 28. heavy laden." This passage has in it the sense of authority of the first of these three added pas- sages, and the boundless compassion of the second, coupled once more with the sense of the ability to 46 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Schmiedel's inferences. Our own ethical inferences. give rest to all men ; and it seems hardly possible to avoid in this passage also the impression that he feels that what he has to give is connected with him personally, that he feels a unique relation to men that goes back to a sense of unique mission from God. When one tries, now, to summarize the infer- ences from these " foundation-pillar " passages of Schmiedel, he may note, in the first place, that Schmiedel's own treatment emphasizes the com- plete trustworthiness of these passages, as well as much else; namely: the entire earnestness and genuineness of Jesus, his subordination of all else in his work to the moral and spiritual, his own great qualities and claims growing out of an experi- ence that forces him to believe he is Messiah, in Schmiedel's judgment,^ and yet the conviction that Jesus lived a truly human life. Studying these passages from a different point of view, not to get the foundations for a scientific life of Jesus, but for their bearing on his ethical teaching, our own study has given us these main inferences : — In the first passage (Mark 3:21, 31-35) we noted Jesus* downright earnestness, his insistence on the necessity of moral and spiritual independence, on the inwardness of the spiritual life, and upon reli- gion as essentially ethical. The second passage (Mark 13 : 32) has no direct ethical teaching, but implies Jesus' sense of unique knowledge and mission. 1 Op, cit.y p. 46. SCHMIEDEL's " FOUNDATION-PILLARS " 4/ The third passage (Mark io:i8, "Why callest thou me good? ") shows again the earnestness of Jesus, his reverent sense of the holiness of God, and (in the context) his ethical conception of religion. The fourth passage, as to blasphemy against the Spirit (Matt. 12 : 32), shows his insistence upon the seriousness of life, upon genuineness and truth to the inner light as absolutely essential, and again suggests a radically ethical conception of religion. The fifth passage (Mark 15 : 34, *' My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me .-* ") we cannot be sure that we are able to fathom ; but it shows at least the reality of Jesus* life and struggle, his earnestness again, since there is no suspicion of faltering, and his usually constant sense of the presence of God. These five passages, then, bearing, as Schmiedel says, on Jesus' " character as a whole," show, on the ethical side, his earnestness, genuineness, and moral and spiritual independence, his demand for the same qualities in others, and his essentially ethical conception of religion. Of the next four passages (in Schmiedel's classi- fication, dealing with Jesus' " character as a worker of wonders"), the first (Mark 8:12) emphasizes again the necessary inwardness of the moral and spiritual life, and Jesus' reverence for the person. The second (Mark 6 : 5-6, " He could do there no mighty work") shows that all his work was subordinated to the moral and spiritual, and illus- trates his confidence in his own mission. 48 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The third (Matt. 1 1 : 2-6, his answer to John's question) indicates his supreme estimate of the ethical and simply religious, the climax of the most marvelous works being found in the simple preaching of the gospel to the poor. The last passage in this group (Matt. 16:5-12, *' Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees,") indicates Jesus' sense of the contrast of his teaching with the prevailing teaching, that in some real sense his teaching is new and revolutionary, and that he must seek a discipleship characterized by another spirit than that of either Pharisees or Sadducees. Throughout this second group there is, thus, to be clearly felt Jesus' deep and fundamental convic- tion of the supremacy of the ethical and of the simply religious, even in the midst of the work of healing. In Schmiedel's last group, showing " in what his greatness consisted," the first passage (Matt. 7 : 29) emphasizes his impression of authority^ and the sources of that impression of authority are evinced in the sermon to which this passage is attached. The impression throughout evidently grows out of his own manifest conviction, his clear insight, his experience in the moral and spiritual world, and his sense of mission. The second passage (Mark 6 : 34) emphasizes his great compassion for all men, as constantly charac- teristic of him, and implies upon his own part the sense of the possession of the secret of life which he would share with men. SCHMIEDEL S " FOUNDATION-PILLARS 49 And the third passage (Matt, ii : 28), the great invitation, evinces the same sense of power, the same compassion, and a like sense of unique rela- tion and mission to men. The inferences from Schmiedel's twelve pas- The infer- sages as a whole, arranged in a kind of logical wicluy order, might be said to be as follows : — arranged. (i) The earnestness of the life of Jesus, and the demand for like earnestness in others, no frivo- lousness of life. Passages i, 3, 4, 5.^ (2) Absolute genuineness^ integrity of life, truth to the inner light, as essential ; falseness, on the other hand, the fatal sin. Passages 4, 5 ; cf. 9.^ (3) The necessary inwardness of all true moral and spiritual life ; the insistence upon moral and spiritual independence; that all else in one's life must be subordinate to the moral and spiritual. Passages 1,6; cf. 9, 10.^ 1 Cf. Ecce Homo, p. 299. 2 Cf. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 3CX); Bousset, Jesus, p. 139, — "His passion for truth and reality"; Herrmann, Faith and Morals, pp. 132 ff.; Royce, 7^he Philosophy of Loyalty, pp. 67, 68, 112 ff., 121 ff., 357. 3Cf. Patrick, art. " Apostles," D. C. G., p. 109: " Not less evident was his desire that the Apostles should not be mere echoes of him- self, but men of originality, courage, and resource." Kilpatrick, art. " Character of Christ," D. C. G., pp. 287, 292 : " His teaching, therefore, is inexhaustible, begetting, in the process of studying it, the faculty of ethical insight, and continuously raising, in the effort to practice it, the standard of the moral judgment." " With his idea of man, and his conception of his vocation, it was impos- sible for Jesus to regard human personality as other than sacred." Herrmann, Faith and Morals, pp. 229 ff. " It is certain that he who fought against nothing so vehemently as the divided state of 50 THE ETHICS OF JESUS (4) The resulting fundamental principle of rever- ence for the person. Passages i, 6, 7, 8.^ (5) The ethical conception of religion^ and also the religious conception of the ethical. Jesus' own work is thought of as primarily moral and spiritual. Passages 3, 4, 6, 7, 8.^ With this is to be closely connected (6) Jesus* sense of the contrast of his teaching with that of his times. Passages 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, \2? mind of insincere men, never wished to entice others by words of his into a mere external doing " (p. 183). See also pp. 129, 180 ff., 190, 384. Philochristus, p. 140. Dale does not seem wholly to escape the idea of external obedience, in his chapter " On Obeying Christ," in Laws of Christ for Common Life^ pp. 273 ff. The Creed of Christ, pp. 27 fT. ; Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Christian Char- acter, pp. 39, 75, 99; "Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, vol. I, pp. 265 ff., 277 ff.; Swete, Studies in the Teaching of Our Lord, p. 61. 1 How fundamental this principle is with Jesus will appear as the discussion goes forward. Cf. Bartlet, art. " Teaching of Jesus," D. C. G., pp. 701, 704, 705 : " In all his sayings and doings our Lord was most careful to leave the individual room to grow." " He cher- ishes and respects personality." (Quoted from Latham, Pastor Pastorum.) Rowland, art. " Personality," D. C. G., p. 343; Willia, art. " Accommodation," D. C. G., p. 21 ; Kilpatrick, art, " Character of Christ," D. C. G., pp. 287, 292. Cf. Ecce Homo, pp. 1 55 ff. ; Herr- mann, Faith and Morals, pp. 180 ff"., 182, 229, 384; Mackenzie, A Manual of Ethics, pp. 138, 195 ff., 202; Nash, Ethics and Reve- lation, pp. 252-258; " With infinite self-restraint He must respect the individuality of his children," p. 253. 2 Cf. Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, pp. 13 AT., 17, 22, 192 ff., 512; Harnack, What is Christianity?, pp. 75 ff.; Clouston, The Hygiene of Mind, p. 191; Bowne, The Principles of Ethics, pp. 200-204; Harris, Moral Evolution, pp. 237-238; Forrest, The Christ of History and Experience, pp. 112 ff., 132 flf., 318. 8 This is nowhere, perhaps, brought out more strongly than in the anonymous The Creed of Christ, pp. 25, 27 flf., *' systematic SCHMIEDEL S "FOUNDATION-PILLARS 5 I (7) His own deep and characteristic compass ion^ carrying with it a demand for a like spirit in others. Passages ii, 12, 8. (8) Jesus* sense of insight, conviction, message, calling. Passages 7, 8, 10, 11, 12. (9) His sense of unique relation to God and men, of possessing the message of life for men. Pas- sages 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, II, 12.1 (10) The resulting impression of authority. Passage 10; cf. 12.2 It is particularly worth noting how much of Conclusion, fundamental ethical teaching is involved in even this short list of passages ; though they were chosen by Schmiedel not for their ethical content at all, but only as of peculiar trustworthiness, because at some point at variance with the common point of view of the narrator. These exceptional passages evidently are able to furnish a valuable criterion for the ethical teaching of Jesus. Nearly all these externalization " ; cf. Mathews, Messianic Hope in the New Testa- ment, pp. 108, 109, — "Broke utterly with Pharisaism as a system," p. 108; cf. Harnack, What is Christianity ?, p. 238; Swete, op. cit., pp. 19 ff.; Stevens, Teaching of Jesus, p. 94; Briggs, The Ethi- cal Teaching of Jesus, pp. 167 ff.; Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, pp. 69 ff., 155 ff.; Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, pp. 71 ff., cf. ch. IV, "Why has Christianity never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?"; Ecce Homo, pp. 286 ff. ^ Swete, op. cit., pp. 26 ff. ; Stevens, Teaching of Jesus, pp. 99 ff. ; Sanday, The Life of Christ in Recent Research, pp. 193 ff. 2 Harnack, What is Christianity?, p. 51; Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, pp. 52 ff.; Swete, op. cit., pp. 16 ff., 64; Burkitt, op. cit., pp. 1 74 ff. ; Fairbairn, Studies in the Life of Christ, p. lOI. 52 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The ethical doubly attested sayings not already covered. inferences, it is to be further noted, are, in the first place, virtually ethical, though of course never excluding the religious. In the second place, they imply Jesus' thought of himself as having life to give, a message of life ; and therefore, in the third place, all point forward to some further content in the teaching of Jesus, as even Schmiedel himself sees. II. The doubly attested sayings For a portion of that further content we turn now from these "foundation-pillar" passages of Schmiedel to the " doubly attested sayings " of Jesus, as given by Burkitt, — those sayings which we may believe to be found not only in Mark, but also in the other common source of Matthew and Luke. These passages may be said to include what we most surely know of the teaching of Jesus, and of the resulting portrait of him. For our ethical inferences we may omit from Burkitt's list the passages already covered, and those that are non-ethical, and so make the follow- ing seventeen passages the basis of our discussion, retaining Burkitt's numbers for convenience of reference : — I. 8. Is it lawful on the sabbath day to do good, or to do harm ? to save a life, or to kill ? Mark 3:4. Is the lamp brought to be put under the bushel, or under the bed, and not to be put on the stand ? Mark 4:21. For there is nothing hid, save that it should be mani- fested ; neither was anything made secret, but that it should come to light. Mark 4 : 22. If any man hath ears to hear, let him hear. Mark 4 : 23. THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS 53 10. With what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you; and more shall be given unto you. Mark 4: 24 b. 1 1 . For he that hath, to him shall be given : and he that hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath. Mark 4:25. 12. How shall we liken the kingdom of God ? or in what parable shall we set it forth ? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown upon the earth, though it be less than all the seeds that are upon the earth, yet when it is sown, groweth up, and becometh greater than all the herbs, and putteth out great branches ; so that the birds of the heaven can lodge under the shadow thereof. Mark 4 : 30-32. 14. Wheresoever ye enter into a house, there abide till ye depart thence. And whatsoever place shall not re- ceive you, and they hear you not, as ye go forth thence, shake off the dust that is under your feet for a testi- mony unto them. Mark 6:10-11. 17. If any man would come after me, let him deny him- self, and take up his cross and follow me. Mark 8:34. 18. And whosoever shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it were better for him if a great millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. Mark 9 : 42. 19. And if thy hand cause thee to stumble, cut it off: it is good for thee to enter into life maimed, rather than having thy two hands to go into hell, into the un- quenchable fire. And if thy foot cause thee to stumble, cut it off: it is good for thee to enter into hfe halt, rather than having thy two feet to be cast into hell. And if thine eye cause thee to stumble, cast it out : it is good for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell ; where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. Mark 9:43-48. 54 THE ETHICS OF JESUS 20. Salt is good : but if the salt have lost its saltness, where- with will ye season it ? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another. Mark 9 : 50. 21. Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her : and if she herself shall put away her husband, and marry another, she com- mitteth adultery. Mark 10:11-12. 22. Ye know that they who are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them ; and their great ones ex- ercise authority over them. But it is not so among you : but whosoever would become great among you, shall be your minister ; and whosoever would be first among you, shall be servant of all. For the Son of man also came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. Mark 10 : 42-45. 27. Beware of the scribes, who desire to walk in long robes, and to have salutations in the marketplaces, and chief seats in the synagogues, and chief places at feasts. Mark 12:38-39. 28. And when they lead you to judgment, and deliver you up, be not anxious beforehand what ye shall speak : but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye ; for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Spirit. Mark 13: 11. 31. It is as when a man, sojourning in another country, hav- ing left his house, and given authority to his servants, to each one his work, commanded also the porter to watch. Watch therefore: for ye know not when the lord of the house cometh, whether at even, or at mid- night, or at cockcrowing, or in the morning. Mark 13:34-35-^ 1 In his discussion of the doubly attested sayings, Burkitt prints a list of thirty-one, but says explicitly that number 26 (Mark 12: 32-34 a), dealing with the summary of the law, while at first glance a doublet, is not really so. And the sixth saying in his list (Mark 4 : 3-9) » the parable of the sower, he admits can be put into Q only by conjecture ; and his reasons do not seem to be convincing for THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS 55 As one reviews the passages as a whole, it is The form plain that they are all of very simple character, almost always either in the form of a proverb or condensed parable. They are sayings of the kind that would be most certain to stick in the memory, regarding number 13 (Mark 6 : 4) as doubly attested, — the passage ** A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country." Of this list of 31, also, 6 passages (Burkitt's numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 15, 16) may be omitted as virtually covered already in the discussion of Schmiedel's passages : the three sayings contained in the Beelzebub passage, and the sayings, " Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother; " " Why doth this generation seek a sign? " " Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees." (Mark 3:22-26; Mark 3:27; Mark 3:28-30; Mark 3:31-34; Mark 8: 12b; Mark 8: 15.) Five other passages may be omitted from our consideration as non-ethical, — numbers 23, 24, 25, 29, and 30. (Mark 1 1 : 22-23, 24, 25 ; Mark 13: 15-16; Mark 13: 21.) These passages deal with prayer and with the coming of Christ. Not all these doubly attested sayings of Burkitt are given in the various reconstructions of Q attempted by different scholars; but the differences from Hawkins and Wendt and Wernle and Har- nack are not to be pressed too far, since — what Burkitt seems to overlook — the double attestation may be not simply by Mark and Q, but by Mark and one of the peculiar sources; and one scholar may incline to put the saying into one of these peculiar sources where another would put it into Q. As a matter of fact, however, seven of the sayings, those numbered by Burkitt 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 20, and 30, all these four scholars agree in putting into Q. Eight of the sayings, numbers 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 21, 23, 24, all but one of them put in Q. Eight others may be regarded as still in all prob- ability doubly attested, — and in every case at least one other scholar besides Burkitt puts the saying into Q, — Burkitt's numbers i, 9, 18, 19, 22, 27, 28, and 31. With the omissions already noted, this gives seventeen doubly attested sayings, in all, to be considered for their ethical teaching, Burkitt's numbers i, 7, 8,9, 10, ii, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, and 31. of the sayings. 56 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Two kinds of sayings. Fundamen- tal laws of life in the doubly attested sayings. and they have, thus, a kind of internal evidence of being exactly the sort of sayings that might be expected to be most current, and therefore most easily doubly attested. Burkitt himself has a suggestive remark upon the sayings that deserves a moment's consideration : "When we study the life and work of the great personages of history and thought, there are two distinct things that we should desire to know about them. We desire to know their deeper teaching, to see and recognize the first formulation of some great idea, which comes new and strange from the brain of a man in advance of his time, an idea per- haps not destined to be fully understood and ap- preciated for many a long day. But we need also to understand the impression made by the man on his contemporaries; we want to know what he stood for to them, as well as what he stands for to us. And this last kind of knowledge is the most necessary for us to have when we are studying those who are great because of the in- fluence they have had upon the general course of events, not only because of what they wrote or said."^ Burkitt himself believes that these doubly at- tested sayings are to be regarded as those " which impressed his followers generally," which showed " what was the main impression made by his teach- ing." But the two things of which Burkitt speaks are plainly not necessarily disassociated. The say- ^ The Gospel History and Its Transmission^ p. 167. THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS 5/ ings which the teacher regards as most important are pretty certain to be frequently and emphatically repeated, and to be put into such form as to be re- tained in the memory, although they may come only later into full understanding and appreciation. One's own experience must be evidence of the way in which some early teaching was long held in memory, not because its significance was then clearly understood, but simply because some early teacher made it so emphatic. And in the case of these doubly attested sayings of Jesus, I think we shall find clear evidence not only that they are those teachings which most impressed the disciples, but that they not less clearly include as well prin- ciples which must have been absolutely central in Jesus* own thought. The very use, indeed, of a proverb or a parable seems to be to hold in memory and before the mind for further considera- tion truths only partly comprehended. We may regard, therefore, these doubly attested sayings as a kind of statement on Jesus' part of at least many of Xh.Q fundamental laws of life. We are to turn, then, to a rapid consideration of seventeen sayings of Jesus that may be regarded as clearly doubly attested, and having direct ethi- cal bearing. As recurring passages, they naturally supplement the exceptional passages of Schmiedel, and serve as a still more certain and adequate cri- terion for the entire teaching of Jesus. Certainly, in combination with those passages, these give a basis upon which we may securely build. 58 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Mark I. The first passage — "Is it lawful on the ^ ■ '^' Sabbath day to do good, or to do harm ? to save a life, or to kill ? " — grows out of a situation which was probably intended to be a definite chal- lenge on the part of the Pharisees, and which constituted a crisis in the ministry of Jesus.^ This challenge and crisis he deliberately and defi- nitely faced. The passage shows Jesus applying his principle of love to the highest of Jewish insti- tutions, — the Sabbath, — and brings out his insist- ence that even this highest of institutions is to be regarded as means, not end, that it must serve men, that love is to dominate all means, that love is the supreme law. Mark /. The gcrm-parablc of the lamp is probably to be connected directly with the parable of the sower. It contains, indeed, in itself an explana- tion of the use of parables. "Is the lamp brought to be put under the bushel, or under the bed, and not to be put on the stand .? " The saying makes an inner appeal to the reason and conscience of his hearers, and insists that light is given that it may be used, that the only reason for the posses- sion of truth, of power, of privilege, is that they may be of service. This constitutes the only rea- son for the being or the bestowal of aught. The teaching is, thus, an unmistakable insistence that men must use their light, must be true to it them- selves and bear honest witness for others. 1 Cf. Mark 3 : 2, 6. See Bennett, TAe Life of Christ According to St. Mark, pp. 38-47 ff., and E. A. Abbott, Philochristus, pp. 127-128. 4 : 21. THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS $9 8. The next saying is at least closely akin to Mark this, if not spoken by Jesus in immediate connec- ^ • ^''' tion with it — " For there is nothing hid, save that it should be manifested ; neither was any4;hing made secret, but that it should come to light." The say- ing is possibly an answer to the implied objection to the preceding saying — that the light is too precious to waste, that we are saving it. Or per- haps, rather, Jesus is here simply taking another analogy to show the folly of not using what we have; like the folly of the old-fashioned parlors that no one ever enjoyed, or of never eating any- thing but specked apples. There is no sense, Jesus is here saying, of saving a thing if you are not saving it for some use ; nothing of value is to be kept always hid. That which is hid is hid with reference to later use or manifestation in some way. Its hiding, if rational, is preservation for future use ; this is its sole justification. Do not be so foolish, therefore, Jesus here urges, as to think that hoarding and preserving are ends in them- selves; they point forward to use, to service. Have you anything of value ? some special knack, talent, power, gift 6f entertainment, some inspir- ing truth, some great new revelation ? use it, share it. This seems to be the clear bearing of this teaching of Jesus. 9. The saying — " If any man hath ears to hear, let Mark him hear," — is of a kind that must have been often ^ ' ^^' repeated. It is a clear summons to attention, to thought, to the use of one's powers, and is the inner 60 THE ETHICS OF JESUS appeal, again, for obedience to present light as the very way into further enlightenment and growth. Attention and thought make the road to the under- standing and the heeding of the truth. There are no limits to be set to the growth of the attentive, open mind. One's own attention is the great fac- tor in his growth. This takes up again the under- lying lesson in the parable of the sower. This undoubtedly repeated saying of Jesus is the chal- lenge everywhere of life, of the whole of God's world, of all real education. In all there are great opportunities, but only opportunities. The best of life will not and cannot be thrust on one. Here is opportunity, of growth, of developing insight, of power, of moral conquest. ** Will you, or will you not, have it so .•* " " If any man hath ears to hear, let him hear." Here lies the very possibility of the ethical life, and the reason for its inevitable seriousness. Mark 10. The Saying — " With what measure ye mete, 4:24b. j^ shall be measured unto you" — seems to have been a proverb of the time, as it is said to occur repeatedly in the Talmud. It is possible, if not probable, that the saying may have its primary reference to what God shall measure out to us ; but it seems also, as Jesus takes it up here, a fundamental law in all personal relations. Men, too, tend to respond to one in like coin to that which one brings. Jesus' use of the proverb seems to mean that he has clearly seen that the world and men are so. made that a stingy man THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS 6 1 gets, necessarily, a stingy life. In the connection in which the passage is here found, it seems to have this force, — that in sharing with others, and only so, can much be shared with you. As you give out to others, you shall receive the more. Bear witness to the truth you see. Share your visions. So may you share in others* insights, and in the very sharing get, yourself, the more. Here is plainly a fundamental law of Hfe, or an illustration, perhaps, of Christ's all-inclusive law of life through death. No soul can thus steadily, persistently share its best with others and not it- self be greatly enriched. In human relations this willingness to measure liberally is a prime condi- tion, too, of the triumph of the good, since it is the one way to secure not good treatment, alone, from others, but the really right spirit in others. 1 1 . The saying — " For he that hath, to him shall Mark be given : and he that hath not, from him shall be ^ ' ^^* taken away even that which he hath " — strikes one at first as unjust; and yet one cannot think upon it long without seeing that here, too, we have an- other law of life, another inevitable condition of the triumph of the good. It is really only Jesus' statement of the law of growth, of the modern psychological law of habit, and probably means that power in any line grows by exercise. It might also be called the law of interest, as Dr. Ballantine has suggested, and might be phrased, " He that hath interest, to him shall be given more principal; and he that hath not interest, 62 THE ETHICS OF JESUS from him shall be taken away even that principal which he hath." Have you, therefore, anything of value ? Its use will increase it. Love, and you will love more. Serve, and you will gain in power of service. You stand always on the vantage ground of that already attained; and this is ex- actly the law of habit. On the other hand, refusal to use your powers, to share your truth, to witness to your insights, means steady loss ; your original gift tends steadily to decrease. In a dynamic world you cannot keep your force in a napkin. Jesus is here declaring his clear insight that, contrary to the selfish maxims of the world, the world and men are so made that life and power steadily lessen where there is the selfish refusal to share. This is the spiritual law of " diminishing returns," and it means that the world and men are made for love. Mark 12. The next doubly attested saying is the 4 : 30-33. parable of the mustard seed, which, though it uses the phrase " Kingdom of God," seems to me plainly not primarily eschatological.^ It is a state- ment, again, rather of the law of growth in the ^Cf. Bacon, art. "Jewish Eschatology and the Teaching of Jesus," Biblical Worlds July, 1909; Harnack, What is Christianity?, pp. 53 ff. Even the future kingdom, however brought in, is in any case conceived by Jesus as finally ethical and spiritual, so that the eschatological cannot be the dominating conception. Cf. Muirhead, The Eschatology of Jesus, pp. 108, 1 14: "The Kingdom of God is the sum of all good things belonging to the supernatural life of God's children "/ and " these good things are, primarily, powers of holy truth and love acting on the human conscience and will." Cf. Bousset,/«Mj, pp. 87, 89, 103; Nestle, art. " Lord's Prayer," D. C. G., p. 59, eschatological element " remarkably thrown into the back- THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS 63 moral and spiritual world, a word of encourage- ment as to the growth of this whole Kingdom of God among men, Jesus' revealing of his faith in the marvelous growth of good from small begin- nings. It is one of his own encouragements of himself, upon which we, too, may count.^ It con- ground." So Harnack, These three principles of Jesus — of the unity "The of life, the necessity of the complete integrity of ^^^^^ion life, and of the inevitable independence and in- Spirit." wardness of the moral life — all plainly belong together, and they mark the point of sharpest contrast with the religious spirit of the times. It is here that Jesus sets "the religion of the Spirit " over against " the religions of authority,'* — his own teaching over against that of the Phari- sees. And it is just here, if Protestantism has any message for the world at all, that its message lies, as over against the message of Catholicism.^ Jesus knows no moral or religious life that can be called genuine at all that is not the man's own, the ex- pression of his own insight and his own choice. He feels an element of pretense wherever the inner life takes on, as its own, what is not really so. One must see for himself, and he must choose for himself. This basic conception of the necessary inward- Earnestness ness of the moral and spiritual life inevitably de- f^,^ watch- ^ -' fulness. mands from Jesus that deadly earnestness on his various situations of life. Cf. pp. 32, 53, 78, 108, 237, 241. Cf. Herrmann, Ethik, § 23, pp. 126 ff., especially p. 127. ^Cf. Herrmann, Ethik, § 23, pp. I26ff'.; Dunn, "The Romantic Element in the Ethics of Christ," Hibhert Journal, July, 1908. 2Cf. Herrmann, Faith and Morals, pp. 115 ff., 118 ff., 174 ff., 262 ff. J Harnack, What is Christianity ?, pp. 268 ff. G 82 THE ETHICS OF JESUS part which we have noted, as to the seriousness of life, and leads him to require just such thorough- going earnestness in others. If it is true that, in order that there may be any spiritual life at all, it must be thorough, unified, and one's own, then nothing but thoroughgoing earnestness will suf- fice (17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22). And out of this sense of the momentous seriousness of life grows, naturally, his demand for vigilant watchfulness (31; cf. 29). Laws of Jesus' Statement of the laws of use and of habit, habit and — ^^^^ ^^^ must use his powcrs or lose them efl&ciency. ^ (7, 8, 11), and of the law of efficiency^ or of the simple life, — the sacrifice of the relative goods (17, 19, 29), are simply particular illustrations of this same earnestness, and indicate places at which watchfulness must be applied. The unity But Jesus* Conception of the end of life as love, bving life n^akes it clear that the unity of life sought is the unity of a loving life (i, [26] ) ; and this genuinely and thoroughly loving Hfe requires complete denial of the selfish life (17). And all these demands on the individual life may be derived from love : love is thoroughgoing, taking on every obligation of love, hence the unity and integrity of life; love must be absolutely genuine, from the heart, hence, the inwardness of life ; love, therefore, cannot help being in earnest, and consequently watchful for opportunity and against failure ; love, therefore, demands expression in obedience, in the law of use and habit ; whatever interferes with the best ser- H UNIVtKJ>ll T THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS 83 vice and expression of love must go, hence the law of efficiency and simplicity. Jesus' ideal for the individual, thus, involves The ideal complete unity of life, absolute integrity of Hfe, |°^^^uai moral independence and inwardness, earnestness, vigilant watchfulness, simplicity, and efficiency, and the life of unselfish love. In relation to others} this same sense of the in relation momentous seriousness of life, as the saying on *° °^ ^'^^' the stumbling of others indicates, still pervades all, and calls for obedience to the law of contagion of the good (10, 20), to the law of sacrifice, of self- giving love (i, 17), to the law of reverence for the person ([6], 14, 15, 18), to the law of priority by service (22; cf. 27), and to the law of the sharing of all goods (14). The thoroughgoing unity of the whole moral The unity conception of Jesus, as reflected in these doubly ^^ J^^^ ^^°^^ attested sayings, may be thus brought out : Jesus ception of seeks a genuine moral and spiritual life for every J^^^' man that shall be truly his own, the fruit of his own insight, of his own choice. To the mind of Jesus there is no moral and spiritual life at all inwardness without this. He must, therefore, demand of all, p^^^j^^jf^J^ even with reference to himself, inwardness and in- dependence of moral and spiritual life (in the sense of being one's own, not in the sense of ignoring others, or cutting himself off from others). Jesus is certain, that is, that neither God nor man can iCf. Macfadyen, "Social Theories and the Teaching of Jesus," Expository Times, February, 1908, p. 222. candor. 84 THE ETHICS OF JESUS hand over insights and choices of good, as so much dead, passive property, to another. In this sphere, therefore, nothing can be achieved simply by au- thority, nothing is merely external, nothing is laid on from without ; all is necessarily a growth from within. Absolute But if the man of the right life (the disciple of Jesus) is to be absolutely true to the inner vision, he needs to see straight ; and that will require, in the next place, that he be honest, candid, open- minded, humble or teachable, free from prejudice. That is, he must have what we moderns call the scientific spirit. He must not declare against a manifest good work as due to evil. There will be no end of self-stultification if he starts on that course. Only utter inner moral confusion could result. He would have no insights that he could trust ; having played fast and loose with his moral judgment, he could not rely upon it (2, 3, 4). Just as the scientist's one desire is to get at the exact facts, and just as he has the wholesome sense that any furthering of his pet theory in the end could be of no avail against the facts, so the disciple of the righteous life has one sole desire, — to know the truth (or, in rehgious language, to know and do the will of God), to learn to Hve the life of love, to follow Jesus as the master of the ideal life, with- out prejudice, without willfulness, with no trace of falseness. All these — prejudice, willfulness, falseness — would only hinder the disciple's one great end. THE DOUBLY ATTESTED SAYINGS 85 Now the one desire to know and do the truth, Conditions to do the true and right thing (to do the will of ^^^^^i"" God), in itself gives great singleness of vision.^ insight. And a truly loving life has, moreover, deep instinc- tive insights. The humble, unprejudiced, deeply earnest life has a right to expect, therefore, the needed clearness of inner vision ; for his very single- ness of aim assures the single eye,^ and the ear- nestly loving life will have in that very love a further guard against erring insight. All this, then, clearly demands, from the man Earnestness, who is to have an inner spiritual life and to be able watchfui- ^ ness, open- to trust his inner vision, to trust his moral insights, mindedness. earnestness, — that is, the conviction that life means something, is thoroughly worth while, and that there is law in it; and vigilajtt watchfulness ; and honest, candid, humble, open-mindedness, — that is, the scientific qualities. So, and only so, can come a justified trust in the inner vision, and truth to the inner vision. When the ethical inferences from the doubly at- Conclusion, tested sayings are compared with the ethical em- phases in the Schmiedel passages,^ it will be seen that every one of those ethical emphases appears again in the doubly attested sayings. And, in both cases, it is not merely subsidiary but plainly basic, moral principles, which come into view. This ethical agreement of two groups of undoubtedly 1 Cf. John 5 : 30; Drummond, The Ideal Life, pp. 302 ff. 2 Cf. Matt. 6 : 22-23. ^ See pp. 46-47. S6 THE ETHICS OF JESUS authentic sayings of Jesus, originally selected from different and even contrasted points of view, is significant, and gives assurance that in these pas- sages we have a secure foundation for the study of the ethics of Jesus. CHAPTER III THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK AND IN THE OTHER COMMON SOURCE OF MATTHEW AND LUKE. THE OLDEST SOURCES. From the bird's-eye view of the entire teaching of Jesus in Luke, from the ethical notes in Schmie- del's ** foundation-pillar " passages, and from the laws of life discerned in the doubly attested say- ings, we turn now, in seeking our composite photo- graph of the teaching, to the writings recognized as in all probability the oldest and most certain sources for the life and teaching of Jesus as a whole, — the Gospel of Mark, and the other com- mon source of Matthew and Luke, called Q. And we are first to take up the ethical teaching in Q, building upon Harnack's reconstruction of that document. I. The ethical teaching in Q. It is hardly too much to say that in Q we prob- Estimate ably have an even older source for the life and teaching of Jesus than in Mark.^ Harnack's own conclusions as to the value of Q are indicated in these sentences : " If we consider Q apart from its introduction (sections i and 2), we see at once that we are dealing with a document of the highest ^ Cf. Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus, pp. 193 ff., 220 ff., 246 ff., especially 226-228, 246-249. 87 of Q. 88 THE ETHICS OF JESUS antiquity — there is here no need of proof; but even if we take into our view Q together with the intro- duction, there is little difference in the final verdict." " Q, a compilation of sayings originally written in Aramaic {vide Wellhausen, Nestle, and others), be- longs to the apostolic epoch. This is shown by its form and contents, nor can I discern any reasons for a contrary opinion." " But whoever the author, or rather the redactor, of Q may have been, he was a man deserving of the highest respect. To his reverence and faithfulness, to his simple-minded common sense, we owe this priceless compilation of the sayings of Jesus." ^ The entire extent of Q as reconstructed by Harnack is 201 verses. The order of the sayings, in his judgment, is not in any case specially significant and is usually doubtful, and certainly is not material for our study of the ethical teaching.^ Matthew's form of the sayings in Q is probably, all things considered, to be pre- ferred in most cases to that of Luke, ^ and our dis- cussion will follow Matthew's version.* 1 Harnack, op. cii., pp. 246, 247-248, 249. Cf. von Soden, History of Early Christian Literature, pp. 129 ff.; Jiilicher, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 358. 2Cf. Harnack, op. cit., pp. 171, 178-179. *Cf. Harnack, op. cit., pp. xii, 37, 180 note; Wernle, The Sources of our Knowledge of the Life of Jesus, p. 142; Bacon, Introduction to the New Testament, p. 203. *The teaching passages in Q in Matthew's order include, in Harnack's reconstruction, Jesus' replies in the temptation narrative; 58 out of 97 verses of Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount; and then a series of longer and shorter sayings in chapters 8 to 25 in Matthew; the incident of the scribe and another who THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q 89 Omitting all narrative, all the non-ethical, all the The passages already covered, and all passages from Q^^^^be ^^ the Sermon on the Mount, the sayings in Q to be studied. would follow Jesus (Matt. 8 : 19-22) ; the saying as to the plenteous harvest (Matt. 9 : 37-38) ; 23 verses in the discourse on the com- mission of the Twelve (Matt. 10 : 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 24-40); considerable parts of the discourse as to John the Baptist, the up- braiding of the cities, and the great thanksgiving (Matt, ii : 2-13, 16-27); the Beelzebub section and the denial of a sign (Matt. 12: 25, 27-30, 32, 33, 38-45) ; the saying " Blessed are your eyes," and the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven (Matt. 13 :i6- 17, 31-33); the short sayings, — "If the blind lead the blind" (Matt. 15 : 14), and *' If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed" (Matt. 17: 20); various sayings in the i8th chapter, — "occasions of stumbling," the parable of the lost sheep, " If thy brother sin, how oft forgive" (Matt. 18: 7, 12, 13, 15, 21, 22); "Ye shall sit on twelve thrones" (Matt. 19:28); "the publicans and harlots believed him" (John) (Matt. 21 : 32) ; the parable of the marriage of the king's son (Matt. 22: 2-1 1) (doubtful); ii verses giving the "woes" on the Pharisees (Matt. 23:4, 12, 13, 23, 25-39); and 17 verses from the eschatological discourse (Matt. 24:26-28, 37-41, 43-51), and the parable of the talents (Matt. 25 : 14-30) (doubtful). In other words, the teaching sections in Q, as given in Matthew's form, may be said to include the temptation replies of Jesus; the Sermon on the Mount; considerable parts of grouped sayings of Matthew, — the commission of the Twelve in chapter 10, the dis- course on John the Baptist, etc., in chapter 11, the "woes" on the Pharisees in chapter 23, and the eschatological discourse in chapter 24; the three parables of the mustard seed, the leaven, and the lost sheep; and " perhaps " the two parables of the marriage of the king's son, and of the talents; the sayings in the Beelzebub section and the sign denied, in chapter 12; and nine other short sayings. In the list of the passages so given, for our present discussion we may omit, in the first place, those already covered in the discussion of Schmiedel and of the doubly attested sayings. This will enable us to leave out of present consideration the commission, proper, of the Twelve in chapter 10, the first part of the discourse on John the 90 THE ETHICS OF JESUS taken up for present consideration are the follow- ing, as arranged in the order of Matthew : — 1. Matt. 4: 4, 7, 10. The temptation replies. 2. Matt. 8 : 19-22. "The foxes have holes," etc. "Leave the dead to bury their own dead." 3. Matt. 10 : 24-39. " A disciple is not above his teacher," etc. " Be not afraid of them that kill the body," etc. "Think not that I am come to send peace," etc. 4. Matt. II : 16-19. The children in the market places. 5. Matt. 15 : 14. "If the blind guide the blind," etc. 6. Matt. 18: 12-13, 15) 21-22. Parable of the lost sheep. " Shew him his fault between thee and him alone," etc. " How oft forgive." 7. Matt. 21 : 32. " The publicans and harlots believed him " (John). 8. Matt. 22:2-11. Parable of the marriage of the king's son. (Doubtful.) 9. Matt. 23:4, 12, 13, 23, 25-36. Denunciation of the Pharisees. 10. Matt. 25 : 14-30. Parable of the talents. (Doubtful.) Baptist, all the passages in chapter 12, the parable of the mustard seed, with which perhaps the parable of the leaven may be taken, and the short sayings, — " If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed " (Matt. 17 : 20), and as to "occasions of stumbling" (Matt. 18: 7). The Sermon on the Mount, also, is deferred for later, separate con- sideration. For our special study of the ethical teaching of Jesus, all purely eschatological passages, and those bearing on the person and special claims of Christ, of which there are many (cf. Harnack's list, The Sayings of Jesus, pp. 235 ff.), also may be omitted. This would leave out of consideration the saying concerning the twelve thrones, which Harnack regards as doubtfully belonging to Q in any case, all the eschatological discourse in chapter 24, the dis- course as to John the Baptist (Matt. 11 : 2-13), the " woes " to the cities (11 : 20-24), the great thanksgiving (11 : 25-27), two verses in the loth chapter (15 and 40), the saying " Blessed are your eyes" (13:16-17), and the saying as to the plenteous harvest (9:37-38). THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q 9 1 It should be carefully borne in mind that these passages must be supplemented by the doubly attested sayings and by a large part of the Sermon on the Mount, to get a true impression of the en- tire ethical teaching in Q. In the study of this special material in Q, we The back- turn naturally, first of all, to Jesus' replies in the fhrtempL narrative of the temptation. As Professor Bacon tions. has pointed outji the temptation narrative is probably the surest bit of autobiography that comes to us from Jesus, and his replies are particularly signifi- cant as indicating his point of view from the begin- ning of his pubhc ministry. Even in Q it seems probable that these temptations of Jesus come at a time when he has definitely left his private life be- hind him, and follow the special experience of the baptism, in which he had received, in some way, assurance of his divine sonship, with all that that must mean of mission and power. It seems plain that this threefold consciousness of Jesus — of son- ship, of divine mission, and of its implied power — determines the form, the meaning, and the appeal of the temptations. They gather about the ques- tions now pressing so irresistibly upon him : what does it mean to be the Son of God ? what exactly is my mission ? how may I use the power involved P^ The elements of this threefold consciousness — jesus' of power, of mission, and of sonship — are for 1 American Journal of Theology^ July, 1898. 2 Cf. Sanday, art. "Jesus Christ," H. D. B., p. 612; Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 349 ff . answers. 92 THE ETHICS OF JESUS No abuse of trust. Spiritual sensitiveness. No relief in change of circum- stances. Jesus a divine call, to which he makes answer: I must be worthy of the power granted ; I must be a consistent founder of a spiritual kingdom ; I must prove a true son. And one cannot be a consistent founder of a spiritual kingdom, it is to be noted, except upon three conditions : constant spiritual sensitiveness, undying faith in men, and refusal to seek relief in change of circumstances rather than in change of self. Each of the temptations of Jesus, thus, from one point of view, was a temptation to the abuse of trusty and, to all alike, his answer is simply the insistence that his power is given him for the sake of the kingdom. It is a great trust, and not to be used for any personal advantage. And if one is never to abuse his trust, he may not fall below his highest spiritual sensitiveness. This was the only way of deliverance for Jesus himself. He needed the clearest spiritual insight, to see the meaning of his trust, to see that, as founder of a spiritual kingdom calling to funda- mental love and self-sacrifice, he must fight as his disciples ; he cannot himself refuse to live the un- selfish life, to share the common lot. He may not, therefore, in the third place, escape hard situations by changing the circumstances. This is neither the road to character, nor is it one in which he can call others to walk. ** Man doth not live by bread alone." His victory must be inner, not outer. Jesus' answers to these temptations, again, were THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q 93 the resistance, from another point of view, of the Faith in temptation to disbelief in me7t ; for all three forms °^^°' of his temptation urge the advisability of begin- ning with the lower appeal, the appeal either to men's bodily needs, or to their love of the marvel- ous, or to their sense of fear. And in repudiating wholly the primary claim of any of these lower appeals, Jesus affirms his deep faith in men. He will have no kingdom simply by bread, nor by marvel and ecstasy, nor by force. He will be fol- lowed by those who follow him for his own sake, because of his inner appeal. Once more, " Man doth not live by bread alone." And, finally, Jesus' answers here are the resist- Faith in ance of the temptation to distrust of God, For when one believes that there is no possibility of using effectively with men purely moral and spiritual forces, he disbelieves not only in men, but he shows an even deeper distrust in the character of God. And Jesus knew that if he was to be a con- sistent builder of a genuinely spiritual kingdom, he must be willing to use the highest means, and trust the results with God. He must not demand from God victory on some lower terms. " Thou shalt not make trial of the Lord thy God." " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Since the doubly attested sayings are all, in Three Burkitt's view, contained in Q, it is evident that ^^''^^} ^°*5^ ' ^=^' to guide dis- we should find expressed in Q all those laws of cussion. life, which, in the last chapter, were derived from 94 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Contrast with Pharisaic spirit. The reason for Jesus' position. the doubly attested sayings. To these we need not return. But in the ethical passages listed from Q, outside of the Sermon on the Mount and the temptation replies just considered, there are three thoughts more fully developed than in the briefer statements of the doubly attested sayings : the contrast with the Pharisaic spirit, the necessity of sympathetic and tender forgiveness, and the sense of the seriousness of life. And these three recurring ethical notes may guide the discussion of the passages selected from Q. I. These sayings in Q, as reported by Matthew, bring out with special sharpness the sense of the contrast of his message and spirit with that of the Pharisees; for Q includes not only the passages of this kind already considered, but many of those sayings of direct denunciation of the Pharisaic spirit which Matthew has grouped in his 23d chapter. That is, Q brings out not only that Jesus himself conceived his message as contrasted with the prevalent religious spirit of his time, but sets forth with some precision the points of con- trast as they lie in his mind. One can hardly doubt that the remarkable study of moral blindness, which Luke gives in the group- ing of passages in his chapter 11,^ furnishes at least the true psychological setting for these denuncia- tions of the Pharisaic spirit. It evidently seems to Jesus that he may not evade the conflict, or allow the issue to be disguised ; his position must 1 See pp. 23-24. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q 95 be decisively discriminated from the religious spirit of his time, for he feels that they have betrayed the very sanctuary of religion. In their moral blindness they cannot see the real values involved. That is to say, the reason for Christ's indignant vehemence here is found in the fact that he feels that, in this self-perverted vision, he faces the possibility of utter spiritual ruin, where the very conscience that should prompt to right urges wrong and justifies itself as right, where the man can give pious reasons for shameless moral apostasy. The text of all might be said to be the saying in the parallel passage in Luke, " Look therefore whether the light that is in thee be not darkness." To take these denunciatory sayings (Matt. 23 : Shutting 4, 12, 13, 23, 25-36)1 in the order in which Harnack ^^^^^_ believes that they occurred in Q, Jesus is here set- ting in contrast with his own moral and spiritual demand, first, the spirit that satisfies itself with deducing theoretically the heavy burdens of the law for others, but excuses itself from any prac- tical undertaking of these burdens, — the danger, always, of the professional reformer, the theo- retical moralist, the exegete, or the theologian. "They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders ; but they themselves will not move them with their finger " (Matt. 23 : 4). This is the spirit that, by its in- terpretation of the truth, turns men away from the path of righteousness, while it makes no attempt 1 Cf. Ecce Homo, pp. 286 ff. ; Bruce, Tht Kingdom of God, ch. VIII. 96 THE ETHICS OF JESUS to enter itself. " Ye shut the kingdom of heaven against men : for ye enter not in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering in to enter" (Matt. 23 : 13). The real content and truth of righteous- ness, Jesus believes, in the teaching at least of many of the Pharisees, was obscured and hid- den, rather than brought forth into the light. Making The Spirit which Jesus here denounces is, too, uty pe y. ^j^^^ which makes duty petty and naggings neces- sarily destitute of the great enthusiasms, of judg- ment and mercy, and begets only an anxious abiding by little rules. " Ye tithe mint and anise and cummin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law, justice, and mercy, and faith ** (Matt. 23 : 23). Jesus is here protesting against the danger of those petty enactments that were originally in all good faith intended by the Pharisee to protect the law of righteousness,^ but are so likely to become a substitute for that law. The whole history of asceticism justifies the protest which here he makes. Men have always been prone to seek out petty self-crucifixions to be put in place of the plain and common demands of everyday human relations, — to tithe with much painstaking and self-satisfaction the herbs of the back kitchen garden — mint and anise and caraway seed — and feel no remorse for rank injustice and the constantly unmerciful spirit. This criticism of Jesus is precisely like that which is being made 1 Mathews, A History of New Testament Times in Palestincy pp. 64 fF. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q 9/ to-day of overtechnical interpretations of the law by the aid of great lawyers, that enable the real ends of the law to be evaded; and he is demand- ing that the lawyers of every period should have the sense of being put in trust with the weighty ends of the law, — justice and mercy; and not with the mere study of technicalities for personal gain. Jesus here protests, also, against the punctilious Carelessness care for the outside^ for that which shall appear in ^^^^^^^ ^°^^ the sight of men, when one does not care that the inner spirit of the life is intemperate and tyran- nical. He knows no life that penetrates from without in, but only the life that grows from within out. "Ye cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full from extortion and excess" (Matt. 23:25). "Woe unto you! for ye are as tombs which appear not, and the men that walk over them know it not" (Luke II : 44; cf. Matt. 23 : 27). These verses are only another evidence of the xheinevi- constant insistence of Jesus upon the necessary in- J^wardness wardness of the moral and spiritual life. He fears of life, nothing for men more than that, stopping with the outward requirements of the religious life, with respectability in the sight of men, they should forget altogether the absolute necessity of inner integrity, of life within. He cannot forget the awful danger of these men about him, so absorbed in punctilious observances, that quite unwittingly it should be true of them that they shall be like 98 THE ETHICS OF JESUS tombs that have been whitened, " which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness " (Matt. 23 : 27). With his deep conviction of the inevitable inwardness of life, I suppose that this simile of the whitened tomb or of the grave over which men walked and knew it not, had burned itself into his soul again and again, as one of the awful possibil- ities of life. It is in no mere spirit of denuncia- tion, therefore, I suppose, that he speaks these awful words ; but rather out of deep consciousness of the need . of the searching warning of the prophet, whose words must get home to lives deadened the more to the appeal to conscience, because content in religious observance. And, if these themselves may not be reached, he would at least save others from following them in their peril of wreck of character. Tradition- It is Only another part of the possible and ^rSrinn-"^ awful couscquences of the same spirit of self- sight, deception that leads him to add, " Ye build the sepulchres of the prophets and say. If we had been in the days of our fathers, we should not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye bear witness to your- selves, that ye are sons of them that slew the prophets!" (Matt. 23:29-31). For this, too, is a danger of the whole external conception of the moral and spiritual Hfe. Men can regard themselves in all honesty as rendering honor to the prophets of the former time, — an honor which THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q 99 has now become conventional, traditional, and re- spectable ; while at the same time they have no ear for the message of the prophet that to-day- would search their heart, and no willingness to obey that message. The very fact that they are traditional followers of the former prophets makes them dead to the voice of the living prophet. In harmony with this sense of the contrast of his message and spirit with that of the Pharisees, there is to be seen here, once more, his insistence upon the inevitable inwardness and independence of the moral and spiritual life, in the succinct sar- casm of the saying, "If the blind guide the blind, both shall fall into a pit" (Matt. 15 : 14). 2. The sympathetic and forgiving tenderness'^' Seeking and which Jesus asks from the man of the righteous J^^'g^^^^s life, aside from the passages still to be considered in the Sermon on the Mount, comes out in Q, especially in three sayings which Matthew gathers in the i8th chapter. Thus, in the parable of the lost sheep, there is the implied demand upon man for a like spirit in the relation of man to man as is here ascribed to God, the spirit which does not only barely forgive, but must seek out and rejoice over the reconciliation and return of even the least 1 Cf. Bethune-Baker, art. "Forgiveness," H. D. B., p. 56: "So closely indeed is the principle associated with the teaching and work of Christ that forgiveness has been called * Christ's most strik- ing innovation in morality ' and the phrase * a Christian spirit ' is commonly regarded as synonymous with the disposition of readiness to forgive an injury." Cf. also Ecce Homo, pp. 303 ff., 316-312, 318, 322. lOO THE ETHICS OF JESUS worthy (i8 : 12-13). The saying, "If thy brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault between thee and him alone : if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother" (v. 15), reveals peculiarly Jesus' sense of the sacredness of the person and the value of the brother, in his tender suggestion that even the one sinned against is to seek out the other, that the matter is to be between the two alone, and in the reminder that in thus bringing one back from his sin, one has "gained his brother," — has not only restored the relation, that is, for ' himself, but won the brother back into life. J. The duty of The duty of unlimited forgiveness is expressed unlimited even more clearly in Jesus' answer to the question forgiveness. j j ~y. of Peter, "How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him } until seven times } " " I say not unto thee. Until seven times ; but, Until seventy times seven" (18:21-22). The parallel passage in Luke (17:3-4) has also prefaced this saying with another, " If thy brother sin, rebuke him ; and if he repent, forgive him." Taken to- gether, these sayings plainly teach, on the one hand, that for the disciple of the true life there can be no limit in the forgiving spirit. On the other hand, the command to " rebuke " sets forth the duty of holding the other to his best, of reminding him that he has done that which is not worthy of him, — the duty to be no flatterers, spoiling our friends and ministering to their weaknesses, but to prove ourselves able to give the faithful " wounds of a friend." There is, of course, involved in this THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q lOI duty of rebuke the corresponding willingness on one's own part to take rebuke, patiently to hear, candidly to consider, and, if the case demands, honestly to amend. The clause, " If he repent, forgive him," is no excuse for cherishing the un- forgiving spirit, but the recognition of the fact that one person alone cannot restore the relation be- tween two ; but the forgiving spirit is, nevertheless, imperative always, whether the other repents or not, as the insistence on the duty of unlimited forgiveness impKes. That is, the true disciple stands always ready to restore the relation, where- ever and whenever possible. 3. The strongest emphasis in these passages The serious- selected from Q is that upon the seriousness of life^ '^^^^ ° ^ ^' and often recurs. At the same time it should be noted that with Not ascetic, this dominating sense of the momentous serious- ness of life, there is, in the teaching of Jesus here, a definite setting aside of the merely ascetic spirit, in the contrast he makes between his spirit and that of John the Baptist, in the application of the parable of the children in the marketplace (Matt. II : 16-19), "The Son of man came eating and drinking." This combination in Jesus of the earnest with the anti-ascetic spirit is always to be kept in view, and it is one of the evidences of the clearness and sanity of his ethical judgment. To take up in detail the passages upon the seri- Counting ousness of life, it may first be noted that the re- *^^ ^°^*' plies to the scribe and to another who would follow I02 THE ETHICS OF JESUS him, like a similar passage in Luke (14: 28-33), show how clearly Jesus wished those who were to follow him to count the cost. "The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests ; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head," is meant to bring home to the scribe that the call of Jesus is no easy-going one, but a heroic one, — a call to self-sacrifice, a call which in its very nature is intended to sift men. They were to count the cost of following from the beginning, and still to choose to follow with all their hearts. In the an- swer to the other who would follow him, — "Leave the dead to bury their own dead," — Jesus is prob- ably making use of a common proverb ^ to set aside what he feels to be an evasive excuse on the part of the man. This facility in making excuses, in deceiving oneself into believing that one is loyal to a cause while he excuses himself from its ser- vice, Jesus cuts in on by this reply. The disciple of the right life takes on at once new and tran- scendent claims. There can be no indefinite defer- ring of obedience to those claims ; one is to act in the new life, and according to its spirit, and let the dead past bury its dead. The risks The saying, " Behold, I send you forth as sheep rigSeous ^^ *^^ midst of wolves " (10 : 16) is a recognition of life. the risks and difficulty of the mission of the man who has determined to live the right life, who is trying to make another spirit than the selfish one prevail in the world. Jesus does not shut his own 1 Cf. D. Smith, art. " Proverbs," D. C. G. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q IO3 eyes, and he means that his disciples shall not shut theirs, to the inevitable conflict of aims between the selfish life of the world and that genuinely un- selfish love to which he calls. In the saying, "A disciple is not above his Motives to teacher" (10: 24-25 a), Jesus is insisting that the gervicfuke same spirit of self-sacrifice which he has held him- that of Jesus, self bound to show, must hold for every disciple of the righteous life. All are to manifest the same characteristics and to expect like experiences with him. Their lives are to be lived upon the same principle and are to evince the same service. Ex- periences like his, therefore, they are to expect, to count on ; by them they are not to be dismayed. They are to be prepared for opposition. Jesus never anywhere teaches that the righteous life means exemption from hard things. But he does assure his disciples that the true spirit will save them from the greatest disaster, the only one that is really to be feared, utter wreck of life (lo: 26- 33). "Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed " ; and " Be not afraid of them that kill the body." If you are right and true, he is here saying in sub- stance, you may be glad to have the truth come out; you have no occasion to fear it; and the truth will out, be sure (v. 26). Moreover, your vic- tory is the victory of truth; speak out boldly, therefore, the message that is given you (v. 27). Your adversaries, at the worst, without your own consent, can only destroy the body ; the real thing 104 THE ETHICS OF JESUS to be feared is not death of the body, but the triumph of temptation in the loss of the real meaning of life (v. 28). And out of his religious faith he adds, You can be sure of the loving knowledge of the Father who knows and cares ; he has not forgotten, though it may so seem (vv. 29-31); though here, too, it is to be noted there is no promise of exemption from trial. And even the purely ethical teacher, as we have seen, must build on a similar faith in the ethical trend of the uni- verse and in the ultimate triumph of the good. He, too, will have a faith answering somewhat to Jesus' further assurance that faithful loyalty shall be owned, even in the presence of God, while disloyalty can have no such reward ; it can only be disowned before the Father (vv. 32-33). Duty's Matthew's next paragraph also (vv. 34-39) em- cW^^^ phasizes this same sense of the earnestness of the righteous life, — " Think not that I came to send peace on the earth." In this paragraph Jesus is virtually calling attention to the ethical principle that duty makes an absolute claim^ and will necessarily divide in spirit those who will obey from those who will not. The disciple of the truth must face whatever of hardship and separation, even from the dearest, is involved in loyalty to truth and righteousness as they are proclaimed in his own heart. The great The whole teaching upon the earnestness of the righteous life may perhaps be regarded as summed up in Jesus' great paradox, that must often have paradox. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q IO5 recurred in his teaching, given in the 39th verse, — " He that findeth his life shall lose it ; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it," — the great principle of life through death, of self- development through self-surrender, of the life of love through the giving up of the selfish life, of a life that is like that of the self-giving God as the only true life. As has been indicated, Harnack does not feel certain that the parables of the marriage of the king's son, and of the talents, were found in Q ; but as there seems no good reason to deny them a place in the teaching of Jesus, they may be fitly considered here. The parable of the marriage of the king's son Blind in- (22: 2-1 1) expresses Jesus' sense of the folly of fo^thegreat the strange indifference of men to the greatest values. values of life. Without crowding the parable into detailed application, Jesus is clearly asserting upon the ethical side two closely related truths : first, the strange indifference of some of the most privi- leged to the greatest values of life ; and, second, that these values are for those who care, not for those "bidden" by natural opportunity and a kind of inherent privilege, but for those who feel the sense of need, who care ; it is to these that the values of life are open. On the one hand, then, Jesus is illustrating here the strange and blind indifference to the greatest values, whether it be found in those simply engrossed in other things, or in those who suffer from the stupefying effect I06 THE ETHICS OF JESUS of material prosperity, or from what Professor Peabody has called ** spiritual satiety," " living on a kind of left-over morality," who do not prize the truth because they have not fought for it, who have not made it their own, to live and to die for. For such any excuse will do, for they do not really care. And yet how strange and blind this indif- ference to the greatest, this curious obsession of the passionate pursuit of trifles, as over against enthusiasm for the highest aims, for a life abun- dant, abiding, eternal, because it is of such quality that it cannot pass. The King- The great values of life belong, Jesus insists fiwse^who here, in the second place, not to those who do not care. carc, for whom any excuse will do, but only to those who care. There is no value for a man where he does not care. Is there anything, then, for which one cares greatly, concerning which he has great affections, strong interests, enduring enthusiasm, where indignation is deeply stirred ? Has one awakened to what "the summoner's call" to life really means ? For he may be sure, that the Kingdom is for those who care, only for those who care. Once again, then, here is seen in strong colors Jesus* sense of the need of downright earnestness of spirit. Parable of The parable of the talents, also, emphasizes the talents, jggus' sensc of the scriousncss of life from a slightly different point of view. Back of the parable which, as Bruce says, is almost an alle- THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN Q 10/ gory, lie a series of plain truths. First of all, that life and all its powers are a trust given to all. This is exactly the conception that is taking hold on men to-day as never before, that their calling is a social and a divine trust ; and where this has been forgotten, there has been sordid selfishness, if not flaunting injustice and neglect. The par- able brings out, also, the varying degrees of dili- gence in use of opportunity, and the reward of still larger trusts in proportion to that diligence. The parable expresses, as well, Jesus' sense of the pitiful and blameworthy failure of the life that is willing to be simply useless, a barren life, a cum- berer of the ground, having a spirit Uke that set forth in the parable of the barren fig tree in Luke. In the ethical teaching in Q, outside the Sermon Conclusion on the Mount, there are to be found, then, the laws °^ ^' of life, seen in the doubly attested sayings, to- gether with the clear vision of life's fundamental temptations, shown in the Temptation replies of Jesus, and the three special emphases, — contrast with the Pharisaic spirit, the necessity of sympa- thetic and tender forgiveness, and the sense of the seriousness of life. These results confirm and en- large the conclusions of the previous studies. The Temptation replies show, as truly now as the day they were spoken, the spirit in which all high work must be conceived, and the conditions by which alone it can be carried to success. They are a single application of Jesus* fundamental principles, as brought out in "the laws of life," while the io8 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Outline of the entire teaching in Mark. three special emphases make still more clear the depth and breadth of his ethical vision. II. The ethical teaching in Mark. In turning to the ethical teaching in Mark, the second of the oldest sources, it may be worth while, first of all, to see that teaching against the back- ground of a summary statement of the entire teaching in Mark. The entire teaching in Mark may be thus grouped according to the great divi- sions of the book.i I. The proclamation of the Kingdom, i : 14-4 : 34. 1. The highest good; life for all on spiritual conditions. 1:14-15. 2. His method ; the good seed ; the children of the Kingdom. 1:17. Cf. 3 : 13-19. 3. His motive and goal : love and the civilization of the loving life. 2:17. Cf. i : 38. 4. His revolutionary relation to the older epoch. 2 : 19-3 : 6. i) The new spirit of rejoicing sonship is too great for any of the old forms. The parables of the undressed cloth and of the new wine-skins. 2 : 19-22. 2) A revolution at the center and climax of the in- stitutional system, the Sabbath. "The sab- bath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath." 2 : 23-3 : 6. No institution, even the best and most sacred, is an end in itself; it must serve. 5. The opposing spirit : the most dominating and fatal of all perils is juggling with the truth ; it disrupts one's very being. 3 : 22-30. 1 Cf. summary of propositions from Mark in Ecce Homo, Preface Supplementary, pp. v-vi. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK IO9 6. The mark of kinship to Christ : doing the will of God. 3:31-35- 7. The nature of the Kingdom in parables. 4 : 1-34. i) Man's own choice a constant element. The para- bles of the sower and of the lamp. 4:1-20, 21-25. By attention, heeding, sharing; so, and only so, comes growth. Men will not drift into great things. 4 : 23-24. The con- trary perils are set forth in the parable of the sower. 2) The opposition of evil is to be expected, and we are not to be discouraged thereby. The para- ble of the sower. 3) We are to rely on the one great positive method of the growth of good. The parables of the fruit-bearing earth, and of the mustard seed. 4 : 26-32. 4) In the growth of the good, and in its final triumph, we may have faith. Parables of the fruit-bearing earth, and of the mustard seed. 5) These same parables bear witness to the greatness of the aim of the Kingdom. II. The 7nore intimate training of the Twelve. Chs. 7-10 : 1. "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees." 7: 1-23; 8: 11-21. i) Falseness and insincerity; unethical religiosity. 7:1-13. Consequent sign seeking. 8:11-12. Corrupt all ; are utterly fatal. Cf. 3 : 23-30. From this time on, no possible line is to be drawn between the right and the religious life. 2) The insistence upon inner righteousness. 7 : 14-23. 2. The heart of Jesus' message. 8 : 27-38. i) The self-sacrificing master, and a self-sacrificing disciple. 8 : 27-34. 2) The sole omnipotence of love as the law of life and the way to glory; Christ's fundamental paradox. 8:35-9:1. Cf. 9 : 30-50. no THE ETHICS OF JESUS (i) Illustrated in his own case. 8 : 31 ; 9: 30- 32; 10:32-34. (2) Illustrated in warning against false ambition. "If any man would be first." 9:33-37. Cf. 10 : 35-45. (3) No selfish exclusiveness in Christ's service. " Forbid him not." 9 : 38-41. (4) Willingness to pay the price for the highest achievement. " If thy hand cause thee to stumble, cut it off." 9 : 43-50. 3. Jesus' applications of his principle to social questions. Ch. 10. i) Marriage and divorce. 10:2-12. The unselfish (v. 5), reverent spirit (vv. 11-12), the great es- sential to marriage. No true marriage without. Not a merely private concern (v. 9). 2) The significance of childhood. 10 : 13-16. Cf. 9:36-37- (i) The priceless value of the child ; reverence for him. 10 : 14. Cf 9 : 37. (2) The essential significance of the childlike qualities. 10:14-15. Cf. 9:35-37. 3) Wealth. 10: 17-31. (i) The peril of the lesser goods. 10 : 21-25. (2) The larger goal. 10 : 28-31. 4) Ambition. 10 : 35-45. " Whosoever would be- come great among you, shall be your minister." III. Jesus presentiiighis claims to spiritual lordship ^ Messiah' ship, at the center of power. 10 : 46 ff. 1. The title accepted. 10 : 46-52. 2. Asserted in symbolic action; the triumphal entry. II : i-io. 3. Asserted in action of judgment. 1 1 : 1 1-25. Parabolic action : the cursing of the fig tree and the cleansing of the temple. 4. Asserted in denial of leaders' right to judge him in im- plied judgment on them. 1 1 : 27-33. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK III 5. Asserted in parable of historic judgment. Wicked husbandmen. 12:1-12. 6. Manifested in spiritual discernment and far-sighted vision as against ensnaring questions. 12 : 13-44. i) To end quibbles that keep off the true Kingdom of God. Appeal for God and good. '' Render unto Caesar," etc. 12 : 13-17. 2) To end mere partisan puzzles that gather about the future life ; to dignify and clear up the theme. 12: 18-27. 3) To bring out the eternal life of love, the simplicity and glory of life, above all varieties and ques- tions. " Thou shalt love." 12 : 28-34. 7. Asserted in criticism of current conceptions. 12:35- 44. i) In discernment of Messiahship as quite above Davidic kingship. 12 : 35-37. 2) In warning against other religious teachers. 12 : 38-40. 3) In standard of benevolence. The widow's mite. 12 : 41-44. 8. Assertion of his perpetual lordship. History to be read in his light. The eschatological discourse. Ch. 13. The logical development and grouping of the Characteris- teaching material in Mark are to be noted. At- ^^^°!g tention may also be directed to the way in which treatment, the parables in the 4th chapter fit the situation created by the increasing opposition, and to the compact but comprehensive treatment which Mark gives to the teaching in the more intimate train- ing of the Twelve.^ 1 Of this entire teaching in Mark we are to deal only with those passages that may be regarded as distinctly ethical, though it is not 112 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The ethical passages in Mark here discussed. Of the ethical passages in Mark there may be omitted in the present discussion all those pas- sages which have been covered in the previous chapters, as well as all parallels to the Sermon on the Mount, which is to receive later, special con- sideration. The passages in the ethical teaching of Jesus, as given in Mark, which concern us here, may be thus indicated : — 1. Mark i : 15, 17, 38. Jesus' message, method, motive, and goal. 2. Mark 2 : 17, 19-22 (cf. 3 14), 2 : 25-28. Jesus' motive, and the revolutionary nature of his teaching. 3. Mark 4 : 3-9, 11-20, 26-29. Parable of the sower and ex- planation. Parable of the fruit-bearing earth. Mark 7:6-15, 18-23. The tradition of the elders. ^ 5. Mark 8: 35-36. The great paradox. 6. Mark 9:37, 39-41, 49? 50 b. " Whosoever shall receive one of such little children," etc. "Forbid him not." "Every one salted with fire." " Have salt in yourselves." Mark 10:2-9, I4-I5> 23-25, 27, 29-31, 38-40. As to divorce ; as to children ; as to wealth ; as to ambition. Mark 12: 15-17, 29-31, 34, 38-40, 43-44. "Render unto Caesar." The great commandment. " Beware of the scribes." The widow's mite. Among these sayings are particularly to be noted Jesus' great paradox, "Whosoever would easy to draw a sharp line between those in which some ethical principle is clearly involved, and those which are exclusively ethical. A list of the passages which this discussion regards as ethical may be added: i : 15, 17, 38; 2: 17, 19-22,25-28; 3:4, 23-29, 33-35; 4:3-9, 11-20, 21-25, 26-29, 30-32; 6:4,8-11; 7:6-15,18-23; 8: 12, 15, 17-21, 34-38; 9: 35-37» 39-50; 10: 2-9, 11-12, 14-15, 18-19, 21, 23-25, 27, 29-31, 38-40, 42-45; 12: 15-17, 29-31, 34, 38-40,43-44; 13:33-37- THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK II 3 save his life shall lose it " (8 : 35-37), and the state- Notable ment of the summary of the whole law in love"^^^^^^^^ (12:29-31); the social teachings in chapters 10 treatment. ,„ and 12; and the four short sayings peculiar to Mark : the priceless word, *' The sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath " (2 : 27), the parable of the fruit-bearing earth (4 : 26-29), ** For every one shall be salted with fire" (9:49), and "Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace one with another " (9 : 50 b). In our discussion we may well follow Mark's Mark's own initial notes, so getting the peculiar flavor of ^^^^^^^ °°^^^* his reflection of the teaching of Jesus ; and see, thus, in Mark's presentation: (i) Jesus' message, method, motive, goal, and the revolutionary con- trast in his teaching ; (2) the great paradox, the great commandment, and the demand for the child- like qualities; and (3) the social applications of his teachings. The passages peculiar to Mark find their natural The passages place in even so brief a summary ; for it should ^^^f'^^ *° not be forgotten that those which are commonly spoken of as peculiar to him are so very few, simply because both the other Synoptic Gospels appropriated so completely the teaching as Mark had set it forth. It would be quite unfair, there- fore, to Mark, to judge his conception of the teach- ing of Jesus chiefly by these few peculiar passages. It may be noted, also, that the same ethical notes which disclosed themselves even in Schmie- del's few passages, and still more fully in the I 114 THE ETHICS OF JESUS here re- peated. The ethical doubly attested sayings, and in Q, are of course Schmiedei's ^^^^ more here in evidence, and are further de- veloped : the sense of the seriousness of life evinced in the sayings in chapters 8 and 9 (8*35-37; 9-49> 50 b), and in the social applica- tions in chapters 10 and 12; the demand for ab- solute genuineness and integrity of life in chapter 7 (7 : 14-23) ; the necessary inwardness of all true moral and spiritual life, also in chapter 7(7 : I4-I5> 18-19, 21-23); the principle of reverence for the person in the teaching concerning children and di- vorce ; the absolutely ethical conception of religion, in chapters i and 2 (1:38; 2:17); the sense of contrast with the religious life of his times in chap- ters 2, 3, 7, 8 ; his deep and characteristic compas- sion, and the requirement of a like spirit in others, in chapters 9 and 10. Turning now to the characteristic notes of Mark's presentation, we may take them up essentially in ^ his own order. Jesus* \/ I. Jesus' message — "The time is fulfilled, and message. ^^ kingdom of God is at hand : repent ye, and be- lieve in the gospel " (Mark i : 15), — on the strictly ethical side, may be regarded as expressing his faith in that moral trend of the universe which logi- cally underlies all moral struggle for character, and all social endeavor for the progress of the race. Men are to believe in this good news, and realize that individual and racial progress depend upon spiritual conditions, — upon the getting of a new mind, and upon this initial faith in the possibility THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 11$ of moral living, and in the further certainty, to use Nash's language, that " the universe is on the side of the will " in its fight for righteousness. Jesus' method of leavening the race by the men jesus' of the right spirit is set forth in his call to his first "^^thod. disciples, — " Come ye after me and I will make you to become fishers of men." It is Hke the later saying, "The good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom." The law is the law of the contagion of life, and those associated with him are, in turn, by the touch of a life like his, to win others also. And the inducement is of the highest : they are to count among men and for the highest interests of men. The condition here suggested by Jesus is coming after him ; and, quite aside from any reli- gious interpretation of his life, and purely with , reference to the accomplishment of the ethical ends / of the race, it may still be said that no one so min- ) isters to men as the man who can make the spirit of Jesus a reality to men in his own life and speech. There is no way so sure for awakening men to new spiritual insights and new ethical aspirations, to great hopes and ideals, as to bring them into close touch with the mind of Jesus. The next saying in Mark (2:17; cf. 1:38) — The motive " They that are whole have no need of a physician, ^f je^u7°^^ but they that are sick : I came not to call the right- eous, but sinners " — indicates both the motive and the purpose that Jesus puts back of his own life, and implies should underlie every true life. The motive is love, and the purpose, to give one's *^ Ii6 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The revo- lutionary character of the teaching of Jesus. The spirit of rejoicing sonship. life where it is most needed and will count for most. Mark makes the saying an answer to the complaint, " How is it that he eateth and drinketh with pub- licans and sinners ? " Jesus' answer, therefore, is, in substance, As surely as a good physician will seek to bring his skill to those who need it most, so surely must the man who seeks the moral health of men wish to invest his life where the need is greatest. As the method is the contagion of life, so surely must the motive be love, and the goal the loving life for the individual and for the race, the civilization of brotherly men. Mark next brings out, in his presentation of the teaching of Jesus, the revolutionary character of his teaching, and of his relation to the previous age, in Jesus' discussion of fasting and of the Sabbath (2 : 18-28 ; 3 : 1-4), in his parables of the undressed cloth and of the old wine-skins, and in the saying, "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath." The same clear sense of contrast with the prevalent religious spirit of his time is recognized, thus, in the beginning of this earliest gospel, as in Schmiedel's "foundation-pillars," in the doubly attested sayings, and in Q. The saying, " Can the sons of the bride chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them .? " (2 : 19), is characteristic of the constant inwardness of Jesus* thought, that it is, of course, to be assumed that fasting must correspond to the inner spirit, and it " cannot " therefore be for those who have the spirit of rejoicing sonship. Jesus will have nothing THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 11/ merely put on, no motions simply gone through. There is here, again, clear repudiation of asceticism, as such. This one point may be said to be typical, thus, of the whole relation of the epoch that Jesus would introduce to the older epoch. It is as though he would say : You cannot put this new spirit of rejoicing sonship, the new ethical spirit that recog- nizes a life from within, into the old forms ; they are not the natural expression of it. The new spirit necessarily breaks through these, if it is to be really honest and true to itself. / And one may well believe that the parables of The new the undressed cloth and of the old wine-skins are ^^^^^^^ds arguments that Jesus had first of all used with him- new forms, self, in determining the relation in which he was to stand to the old teaching. He must have repeat- edly asked himself. Can I keep and use the old forms ? Will they suffice for the new spirit ? Jesus must have had a conviction, growing through the years, that he could not simply patch up the ^Id religious conceptions and method of thought, that he was not simply to add a " lean-to " to Juda- ism ; the unshrunk cloth would, in the end, make a worse tear in the old religion. And so in the parable of the new wine and the old wine-skins, Jesus is virtually saying to himself, There is such fermenting power in these new principles that they would inevitably break through these old forms, and the spirit itself, having no appropriate embodi- ment, perish. " And no man putteth new wine into old wine-skins ; else the wine will burst the skins, ii8 THE ETHICS OF JESUS A revolu- tionary principle. Jesus' thorough- going con- sistency. and the wine perisheth, and the skins : but they put new wine into fresh wine-skins " (Mark 2 : 22). He is saying, therefore, I have no recourse, I must seek new embodiment for the new spirit. In other words, Jesus believes that in his " good news of God " (i : 14) as essentially Father, he has a faith and a principle that may be applied to every part of life, and that will prove everywhere revolutionary ; and in these two brief parables of the unshrunk cloth and of the old wine-skins, he is justifying the fundamental demand always to be made for honest readjustment to the new thought and spirit, for carrying through with logical con- sistency the great new conviction. There may be an unwise conservatism — such as has been mani- fested again and again in the history of the church — that, striving to hold to the old forms, really loses the true spirit. Indeed, it is perhaps not too much to say that the greatest contribution of even the thinking of Jesus is not so much the mere conception of God as Father, and of every man as having the value and privilege of a child of God, but the absolutely thorough way, the complete logical consistency, with which he carries this principle out into every part of his life and thinking and teaching. The originality of the teaching of Jesus, that is, does not consist primarily in mere discernment of this or that or the other truth as one among ten thousand, but in his unerring judgment as to the proportions of truth, and his dominating sense of the supreme THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK IIQ place to be given to certain truths as compared with others. It is this, as we shall see, that brings such unity and simplicity into his thinking, and this that makes his teaching and living a harmoni- ous whole. Jesus* sense of the revolutionary nature of his AU institu- teaching is still more clearly seen in the attitude o°J!f^eans which he takes toward the Sabbath, where it is not too much to say that he seeks a revolution at the climax and center of the institutional system of ^"^ Judaism (2 : 23-3 : 6). In answer to the complaint of the Pharisees against the conduct of his dis- ciples in plucking the ears of wheat as they went through the grain fields on the Sabbath day, Jesus first, in an argumentum ad hominem, appeals to their own Scriptures and to the conduct of their own best-loved king, as a recognition that mere ceremonial requirements, even of a pretty serious kind, are not to set aside the common needs of men ; and then he adds the fundamental principle, in one of the four sayings peculiar to Mark, — " The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (2:27; cf. 3:4). That is, institu-'' tions, even the highest and most sacred of all, are intended for means, and are never to be exalted into ends in themselves. Bruce may well say, " For this saying alone, and the parable of gradual growth, his Gospel was worth preserving." For the principle so enunciated is plainly fundamental and far-reaching ; it means nothing less than that r persons alone are truly valuable and sacred in 120 THE ETHICS OF JESUS themselves, that the sacredness of all places, and of all institutions, even of the church and of the sacraments and of the Sabbath, is wholly bor- rowed.^ Mark clearly and truly sees — what Jesus must have plainly realized — that this attitude on the part of Jesus meant an inevitable and fatal crisis with the Pharisees : " And the Pharisees," Mark says, " went out, and straightway with the Hero- dians took counsel against him, how they might destroy him " (Mark 3 : 6)? In this position, that is, concerning the Sabbath, it seemed to the Phari- sees, not unreasonably, that Jesus was challenging the whole Judaistic system, considered as an end in itself, in its highest and most important institu- tion. It is probably on account of this growing intensity of opposition, that there comes at this point in Jesus' ministry a real change in the form of his teaching to the use of parables.^ Jesus could not have failed to understand what such a chal- lenge of the conventional teaching as to the Sabbath meant, and his challenge thus evinces unmistakably his sense of the impossibility of com- promise, of the truly revolutionary contrast there 1 Cf. Lotze, Practical Philosophy, p. 125 : " Every institution — no matter how magnificent a mystical significance it might have — would still be of indifferent value if it were of no use in life." 2 Cf. Bennett, The Life of Jesus According to St. Mark, pp. 38, 47 ff., 54 ff.; E. A. Abbott, Philochristus, pp. 168 ff.; Burkitt, The Gospel History and Its Transmission, pp. 81 ff. 3 Cf. Matt. 13:10; Mark 4:9-11, 22-24, 33-34. See above, p. 58. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 121 was between the inner spirit of loving service of men which he sought, and any possible idea of a ruling of men by external institutions and com- mands thought to be in themselves sacred. It is perhaps the greatest glory of our own gen- -jartie service eration that it is applying more rigorously to all °^ ^^^' institutions of every kind, social, economic, politi- cal, educational, religious, this supreme test of the service of men. It will not do longer to evoke age, or precedent, or convention, or respectability, or the difficulties of change ; every institution alike must justify itself on the ground of service rendered. In so far as this is characteristic of our v^ time, we are simply applying this principle of the ethical teaching of Jesus, that no institution, even the best and most sacred, is an end in itself; it must serve. This sense of the contrast between his teaching Discussion and that at least all too prevalent in his time, °^ ^^^. comes out perhaps even more pointedly in the dis- of the cussion of the tradition of the elders, in the 7th ^^^^^^* chapter (7 : 1-23). A determined effort has been made to break down the historicity of this passage, an effort which I judge must be regarded as, in the main, unsuccessful. So far as it is justifiable, it suggests at the most only that we do not make Christ's language at all points apply indiscrimi- nately to all Pharisees.^ It is too largely left out 1 Cf. Burkitt, T^e Gospel History and Its Transmission y pp. 169-174, especially 173-174; Moffatt, "Survey of Recent Litera- ture on the Pharisees and Sadducees," Review of Theology and Philosophy^ September, 1908. 122 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Religious observance versus hu- man duty. of account in some present-day discussions of Phar- isaism from the Jewish side, that it is not at all intentional hypocrisy that Jesus mainly has in mind, but that traditionalism and externalism, that putting of the "hedge of the law " above the main principles of the moral life, to which the history of Pharisaism shows indisputably that it so easily lent itself, and which is certain to end in virtual hypocrisy. And in this passage, the two great significant things are his protest against the place given to tradition as over against the plain demands of common obligation, — " Ye leave the command- ment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men " {7'-^), and his virtual attack on the whole principle of ceremonial defilement (vv. 14-23). For Mark's comment at the close of verse 19 — "This he said, making all meats clean '* — must be regarded as the practically inevitable inference from the whole teaching of the passage : " Hear me all of you, and understand : there is nothing from without the man, that going into him can defile him ; but the things which proceed out of the man are those that defile the man " (vv. 14-15). In both parts of the passage, that is, the insist- ence upon the inwardness of the moral and spirit- ual' life once more comes out as contrasted with every possible external and traditional requirement. It is, of course, clearly to be recognized in the his- tory of Pharisaism, that both the traditions of the elders and the ceremonial requirements were originally intended to guard the life of the Phari- THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 123 see the more perfectly. But just because they were thus honestly taken on from the religious motive, they were a constant danger. With Jesus' clear insight that there is no true life at all ex- cept it be from within, he can only attack with vehemence these traditions and ceremonial laws, that seemed to him all the worse and the more beguiling and imperiling because they are in- troduced under the guise of religion.^ They are in great danger of becoming pious reasons for unvarnished sin, for setting aside the clearest human duties on the plea of religion (vv. 10-13), for setting aside the will of God on the plea of serving God, for setting aside unmistakable obli- gations arising out of the plainest providential re- lations of life, to undertake special rehgious duties. Whether or not the specific illustration of this charge in verses 10 to 13 is to be finally historically justified, the danger which Jesus here points out was an undoubted one, not only for his generation, but for every generation. Jesus wishes to make it clear that he will have nothing of this conflict of human obligation and of divine will. And it is to be feared that to-day Jesus would find much con- venient and conventional Christianity in clear con- flict with his teaching ; that in many present-day apologies for war, for enormous navies, and for various industrial and business methods, he could see only a plain setting aside of the clearest moral 1 No one has brought out this danger of externalism more strongly than Herrmann in many passages in his Faith and Morals, 124 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The danger of the tradi- tional and ceremonial. principles. It is a part of the insistent ethical spirit of Jesus that he will have nothing of elevat- ing supposed pious observances above simple hu- man duties. It is not, then, external ceremonial defilement, not disobedience to religious traditions, but inner impurity, which is to be avoided (vv. 18-23). Here once more the true contribution of Jesus will not be measured aright, unless one sees the unerring logical consistency with which he carries through his principle of the inwardness of the moral life. The Pharisees thought, and many others think to- day, that various traditions and rules are of impor- tance, and they virtually ask the question of the Pharisees and scribes, " Why walk not thy disci- ) pies according to the tradition of the elders, but they pray with defiled hands?" And they wonder that men of inner spiritual insight should take offence that the importance of these outward observances should be pressed. But to Jesus' mind it is plainly not an insignificant matter, when petty things are elevated to a place of steady im- portance beside the greatest duties. What really so results is not that you have succeeded in giving profound ethical significance to ecclesiasticisms and ceremonialisms, but that you have brought down the supreme glory of the ethical and funda- mental religious demands to the level of indifferent external observances. There is here, therefore, for Jesus the revolutionary laying aside of ceremo- nial as essential to religion, the repudiation of what THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 125 has been well called the heresy of heresies, — the separation of the sacred and the secular. So Jesus says, " For from within, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed " (v. 2 1 ). The real defilement is from within ; here is the great fight. We can ill spare time and strength on indifferent issues. It is this same sense of contrast with the Phari- The sign- saic spirit that once more expresses itself in Mark spirit^ in the passage concerning the " seeking a sign from heaven," and the warning to " beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod " (8: 11-13, 15). Jesus "sighed deeply in his spirit," Mark says, that the Pharisees should seek a sign from heaven, while they had no discernment of the significance of his love for men and his loving work among men, because they were blind to the moral evidence. The spirit that tends to emphasize the external and traditional, can hardly fail in the end to give to it, first, undue importance, and then to make it seem to be the essence of the religious and righteous life, and so to lead to a self- deceiving, unethical, and sign-seeking spirit. If this spirit begins to prevail in the little group of chosen men who are to be the seed for the new kingdom, the salt to keep the earth sound, the leaven to leaven its lump, all is lost. Jesus believes that the inevitable trend of this spirit, just because it tends to set aside the man's own instinc- tive moral judgments, is toward a kind of double- ness of the inner life, toward falseness and in- sincerity. 126 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Renewed emphasis on the in- wardness of life. The great paradox and the great com- mandment. What Jesus means by " the leaven of Herod," in verse 15, is not made clear in this passage, but it probably is the simply worldly policy, the spirit of which is brought out in other passages in the teaching of Jesus. In line with this persistent emphasis of Jesus on the inwardness of the true life, are two other pas- sages in the 12th chapter of Mark (vv. 40, 43-44) : " They that devour widow's houses, and for a pre- tense make long prayers," and the comment on the two mites of the poor widow. The first passage is Jesus' indignant protest against a spirit, which it is to be feared is still not unknown. Beware, he says in substance, of religious leaders who affect the outward titles and trappings of their office, and offset their lack of humanity by a show of piety. And Gould expresses certainly the inner essence of Jesus' comment on the widow's two mites, when he speaks of it as setting forth " the contrast be- tween the outward meagerness and inner richness of the widow's service, and the outward ostentation and inward barrenness of the Pharisee's religion." ** It is only as the gift measures the moral value of the giver that it counts with him who looks at the heart." ^ 2. From this survey of Jesus' message, method, motive, goal, and the revolutionary contrast of his teaching with that of his times, we may fitly turn to his statement of the great paradox of life, and 1 The International Critical Commentary^ St, Mark^ pp. 238, 239. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 12/ of the great commandment, and to two closely re- lated sayings, peculiar to Mark, — " For every one shall be salted with fire " (9 : 49), and " Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace one with another " (9: 50 b). In the statement of the fundamental paradox of The great life — " For whosoever would save his Hfe shall lose p^'^^^o^- it; and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's shall save it. For what doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life?" (8: 35-36) — some believe that Jesus is quoting a proverb.^ The parallels suggested make this seem to me rather doubtful ; but even if so, it is plain that its meaning for Jesus is greatly deep- ened. It is no mere "military proverb," but a statement of a fundamental law of life for Jesus himself, and for his disciples, a call to steady self- giving as the basic law of life. Against the whole selfish spirit of men and of his time, he affirms this universal law of self-giving love as the one law of life. In view of such a challenge, it is hardly strange that a great Chinese statesman should have found his strongest impression of Christ the impres- sion of his courage.^ Jesus moves forward, in calm of spirit, to the issue of certain external defeat and death, in faith in the sole omnipotence of self-sacrificing love as the law of life and the way to glory. He believes, and he acts upon the belief, that life is achieved in the proportion in which a man gives himself in service, 1 Cf. D. Smith, art. « Proverbs," D. C.G. ^ Bibbert Journal, October, 1908, p. 22. 128 THE ETHICS OF JESUS in the proportion in which he has come into a gen- uine love; just as Browning has made the aged John say : — "For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, And hope and fear . . . Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love." •^ Jesus has discovered for himself, and holds un- flinchingly for others, that a genuinely unselfish love is the most rewarding of all things, that the para- doxical secret of hfe, therefore, is to find one's life by losing it, — fulfillment of life by the surren- der of the selfish self, just because in every per- sonal relation there is no enlarging life without such continuous self-giving. What is the world worth without such worthful personal relations, that is, without such self -giving love ? " What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life?" (v. 36). This paradox of Jesus is the one saying which occurs in each of the four gospels, and is twice repeated in two of them. It would seem plainly to belong among the most surely at- tested sayings, and to express what must have been a fundamental and constantly recurring teaching of Jesus. Sharing the From Jcsus' religious point of view, it is exactly such self -giving love that he believes is the very life of God himself as Father. And it is for him, therefore, self-evident that to lose this, whatever one gains in things, is to fail to share in the life of God himself, and so to lose all that is best worth while in life. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 1 29 The 38th verse, with its eschatological reference The dwin- — " For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of "^ ®* my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of man shall be ashamed of him, when he Cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels " — like the parallel passage already con- sidered in Q (Matt. lo : 32-33)» is, after all, only a religious putting of an ethical conviction. It is as though Jesus had said, Whosoever shall be ashamed of my spirit and the fundamental principle of my life, will have and be nothing in which I can glory at the end. This seems to Jesus to be a mere matter of inevitable cause and effect ; there is nothing arbitrary; there could be no other pos- sible issue. It is no threat which he here voices, but a solemn, sobering, inevitable law. The man who refuses the law of this paradox of life has taken the way of the steadily dwindling Hfe, and there is nothing more to be said. There is never any blind sentimentalism in the teaching of Jesus. It is worth noting that it is this very principle The modem of self-sacrifice, as set over against the counsels of YelnJ"^ self-regarding prudence, which on the one hand principle has made the Christian teaching seem so impracti- sacrifice, cable, and yet on the other hand, as civilization advances, is seen to be absolutely indispensable, not only to the progress of that civilization as a whole, but to the larger life of the individual him- self. Much has been made, even on the part of those counting themselves disciples of Jesus, of the I30 THE ETHICS OF JESUS impracticableness of his teaching ; and yet one can hardly help saying with Schmidt, that before the teaching of Jesus " is pronounced impracticable, an application of its fundamental principles should be tried on a larger scale than has hitherto been the case."^ What gives the pungency and sting to many of Tolstoy's words, is his quite justified con- viction that there has not been a thoroughgoing attempt practically to apply the principles of the teaching of Jesus, and the vision that he has caught (even though his interpretation be often so literal- istic as to deny the spirit of Jesus* teaching) of the glorious possibilities for the race of a determined attempt to carry through to the utmost the princi- ples of Jesus' teaching. And we are coming daily more clearly to see, that a civilization necessarily so unified and interdependent as ours, even compels a cooperation that must be vastly extended and more and more complex ; and that that cooperation can- not reach its full possibilities without the intelligent and gladly voluntary participation on the part of each individual. Nor can the individual himself, therefore, share in the largest social life without this same self-surrender to the interests of the whole. As civilization reaches its goal, there- fore, we may be sure that the distinctive Chris- tian virtues, instead of seeming impracticable either for the individual or for society, must seem to be rather the fundamental and essential 1 The Prophet of Nazareth^ p. 309. Similarly, Lessing and Tol- stoy. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK I3I virtues, without which the highest civilization is impossible.^ With this paradox of the self-sacrificing life, may Other calls be coupled the short saying already quoted, " For ^°^ ^^. , every one shall be salted with fire," as probably spirit, pointing to the same sacrificial spirit. And the other brief saying, " Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace one with another," in Mark's connection, seems to be an exhortation to that absolute integ- rity and soundness of life to which a previous phrase — " If the salt have lost its saltness, where- with will ye season it ? " — points. And as the one genuine life seems to Jesus to be that of a life of love, it is not unnatural that to the exhortation, " Have salt in yourselves," should be added, "And be at peace one with another." With the great paradox is to be joined, clearly. The great as simply its logical outcome, or perhaps rather command- presupposition, the statement of the ^reai command- ment {Msivk 12:29-31): "The first is. Hear, O Israel ; The Lord our God, the Lord is one : and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. The second is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these." There ^ Cf. Miss Scudder, " The Social Conscience of the Future," Hibbert Journal, January, 1909; Fremantle, The World as the Sub- ject of Redemption, pp. i, 15, 28 ff.; Maurice, Social Morality, pp. 392, 408; Peabody,/«Mj Christ and the Christian Character y pp. 196 ff. 132 THE ETHICS OF JESUS is here expressed Jesus* clear positive statement of love as the all-inclusive virtue, the very essence and sum of life, whether religious or ethical. And the principle is clearly connected in the closest and most indissoluble way with Jesus' religious conviction of God as Father. Such a conception of God must have as its first inference just such a summing up of the whole ethical life. For, if the highest possible conception of life for the reli- gious man would be the sharing of the life of God, and if the very life of God is the unselfish self-giv- ing life of the Father, then, obviously, one can come into the sharing of the life of God only through taking on the unselfish life of love, and in taking this on, he thereby takes on every helpful ministry that the insight of love itself can suggest. Out- side of such suggestion lies no moral law. This very thought of the ideal of the personal life as one of love, it is to be noted, makes it impossible to draw any sharp line between the personal and so- cial ethics of Jesus. In his thought, it is impos- sible for one to be what he ought in his own life without evincing love in all the varied relations and spheres of life.^ Life made Oncc morc, Jcsus' Contribution here is not the one and simple assertion of this truth of the summing up glorious. ^ , . of all duty in love, but the way in which he brmgs it into an absolutely unique prominence, and sees that it appHes everywhere in life and makes life one and glorious, and the way in which, by what he 1 Cf. Haering, The Ethics of the Christian Life, pp. 315-318. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 1 33 iSy he enables us to believe it.^ The conception, as has been said, is an immediate inference from his principle of the fatherhood of God, direct, profound, and profoundly simple. It has been hard for men to understand how profound this summary of the law is. It has taken the laboratory practice of generations, as we have just seen, for us to dis- cover its full reach. This generation seems to us to be the first to come, even gradually, into its full meaning. The principle of love as the fulfilling of v^ the law brings out the glory and the simplicity of life at the same time. It raises life above all vari- ations of lesser doctrines even about Jesus himself, above all party shibboleths, above all one-sided em- phases of any one age, modern or ancient. The persistent life of love — that itself holds the key to all the special problems.^ ^ 3. And it is really this single principle of the Social ap- iQving life of which Jesus is making various social ^ ^^^*^°"^' applications^^ as we have already seen in the gen- ^Cf. Vtzbody, Jesus Christ and the Social Questiony p. 127. 2 Cf. Harnack, What is Christianity?,^^. 8, 17, 1 21; Peabody, op. cit.,pp. 104 ff. : Jesus' emphasis on both the personal and the social, pp. 102, 119, 125, 132-133, 256, 352. s.Cf. Votaw, art. "Sermon on the Mount," H. D. B., extra volume, p. 30 : " Social ethics and individual ethics cannot rest upon difierent principtes." This is doubtless one reason why Jesus gives at most only illustrative applications of his principles to social ques- tions. This reticence, too, is more in harmony with his method, which is that of gradual growth rather than of revolution (cf. Ramsay, The Education of Christ, pp. 72-76), and with his prin- ciple of reverence for the person. He wishes to have the applica- tions grow up naturally, and to bring men to insights of their own 134 THE ETHICS OF JESUS eral outline of the teaching in Mark, in chapters 9, lo, and 12. For here this principle of a self- giving love is applied to ambition, to the treatment of children, to marriage, to wealth, and to duties to the state. The am- And, first, as to ambition^ if the only true life surpasfrng ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ loving scrvicc, then plainly the service. ambition that seeks to take selfish advantage of another is quite misdirected (9 : 33-37 ; 10 : 35-45). As the teaching of Jesus, already considered, has brought out, to Jesus' mind it is absolutely clear that, "if any man would be fjrst, he shall be last of all, and servant of all" (9:35). If the very aim of life is to learn to love, then he whose fundamental principle is selfishness, thereby shuts himself out from life. Truly, if Jesus* principle of love as life is true, such am- bitious self-seekers " know not what they ask " (10:38). To "sit on his right hand," to share in his " glory," means only to drink the more deeply of the cup of his sacrificial spirit, and to be baptized with his baptism of service. The ambition, thus, that Jesus suggests, is the ambition for surpassing service ; the only priority that, upon his principle, can seem worth while, is priority in such unselfish service. rather than to the following of rules. (Cf. Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, p. 202; Ross, The Teaching of Jesus, pp. loi, 104, 119 ff.; Yi?LXX\%, Moral Evolution, pp. 220 ff.; Harnack, What is Christianity?, pp. 99-100; Brooks, The Influence of Jesus, pp. 73-138, especially 84, 88, 98, 105.) THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 1 35 It means much that this generation is bringing New pro- men in all professions increasingly to this stand- s^ndards. ard, and more and more making it certain that no one of any profession may keep self-respect, not only if he does not render service commensurate to the reward given, but also if he fails to give the service demanded by the social trust involved in his profession, even when there is no external reward, and when life itself may be in danger. And it is this same sense of self -giving love that Reverence guides Jesus in what he has to say concerning the ^nVthV^^^^ child {g: 16-^7) 10:13-16). One sees in Jesus* chUdUke sense of the priceless value of the child and his ^^^^^®^- reverence for him as a person (9:37; 10 : 14), and in his conviction of the essential significance of the childlike qualities (10: 14, 15), once again, an immediate and inevitable inference from his key- thought of God as Father, or of a reverent love as the very essence of life. For if God is Father, and we his children, then our main business will be to show the true spirit of children, the childlike quali- ties. And toward every child, as a child of God, we shall have that reverence that betokens a true sense of the sacredness and value of his personal- ity, and we shall prize his fundamental qualities of trust and teachableness. For if there is love at the heart of the world, if there is a real moral trend in the universe, then all our ethical life roots in initial faith in that love, in the certainty of that moral trend. When, then, Jesus says : " Suffer the little children to come unto me; forbid them 136 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The emancipa- tion of the child. Tolerance. not: for to such belongeth the kingdom of God. Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein " (lo: 14-15),^ — he is not only insisting upon the value of the child himself, but he is insisting at the same time, in rehgious phrase, upon the fun- damental nature of the qualities of trust and open- mindedness for all moral and spiritual development, just as the scientist insists upon a like trust in the rationality of the world, and a like absolute open- mindedness toward the facts, for progress in the scientific world. These passages and the other — "Whosoever shall receive one of such little children in my name receiveth me; and whosoever receiveth me re- ceiveth not me but him that sent me" — are nothing less than an emancipation of the child, and they make an epoch in the history of humanity. For it is here once for all declared that the child is not property, nor slave, but a sacred personality, to be reverenced and treated as such. This rever- ent ministry to the child, Jesus says, he accepts as ministry to himself and as ministry to God. So, too, the spirit of ministering love may not maintain selfish exclusiveness in that ministry. And here falls Mark's notable incident of the one whom the disciples found casting out demons in the name of Jesus, and whom they forbade, " because he followed not" with them (9:38-41). Jesus' answer is : " Forbid him not : for there is no man ^ Cf. S. A. Brooke, Christ in Modern Life^ pp. 275 ff. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 1 37 who shall do a mighty work in my name, and be able quickly to speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is for us. For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink, because ye are Christ's, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward." That is to say, the spirit of loving ser- vice must fruit in appreciation of such service in any other, and in the broad tolerance which issues from such appreciation. The spirit of love, as we saw, rises high above all party shibboleths and all divisions; for in the service of love there is no room for selfish exclusiveness. And love changes not only the self-seeking am- Reverent bition into ambition for surpassing service, and con- J^arriage tempt for children into reverence for childhood and the childlike qualities, and the spirit of selfish exclu- siveness into the broad tolerance that looks to the spirit of the man and not to his party affiliations ; but, as we have already seen in the doubly attested sayings, it applies equally to the problem of mar- riage. The sayings that are added in Mark to the doubly attested saying on this topic, only make the more clear that Jesus' great contention is that true marriage allows no tyrannical spirit in either hus- band or wife (Mark 10:5), but demands a reverent love (v. 7), that seeks a relation that shall be com- plete and permanent (vv. 8-9).^ And, once more, it is but an application of the 1 Ctr. the remarkable imputing to Jesus teaching which he here distinctly repudiates, in the article " Jesus or Christ," in the Hib- bert Journal, January, 1909. 138 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The peril of same spirit of ministering love which Jesus ap- wealth. ^YiQs to the problem of wealth ^ in the incident of the rich young man and his comment upon it (Mark 10: 17-31). Just as in all these other cases Jesus has not been cutting down hfe and hemming it in, but, in accordance with his fundamental prin- ciple of love as life, has pointed the way to larger life, so here, too, it is the peril of the lower attain- ment which Jesus feels, the danger that there is for the man that he will be possessed by things instead of possessing them. He knows how heavy a price is often paid for wealth, how treacherously distracting and absorbing wealth may be, eating the heart out of life ; he knows how appetite for acquisition may become a disease, an insanity without compensating reward; he knows how it tends to blind the eyes and to paralyze the powers for the best things ; he knows men come to trust in riches to the exclusion of all else, and so to let go of any worthy goal in life. He knows how more than likely it is that wealth will mean the sacri- fice of children, that where the need is for the severest training and self-discipline as for a king's task, there will really be easy self-indulgence, with- out goal, and without self-control. Jesus has 1 See the later discussions of Luke's parables of the rich fool, of the unrighteous steward, and of Dives and Lazarus, pp. 174, 183, 187. Cf. Mathews, The Social Teaching of Jesus, ch. VI; Pea- body, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, chs. IV, V, VI ; Peile, The Reproach of the Gospel, pp. 108 ff.; Murray, Handbook of Chris- tian Ethics, pp. 278 ff. ; Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, pp. 74 ff. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 1 39 really set before himself the problem our own time feels, the perilous problem of conquering wealth, more perilous than the problem of conquer- ing poverty. He knows how imperatively wealth demands unusual self-control, disciplined powers, and the domination of these material interests by larger and more ideal interests. For, in his thought, wealth is both a trust and a peril.^ He does not doubt that wealth is a good, but it is a good only in its lower relative place, and as mastered by greater ends than itself, — made a servant of self- forgetful love. And he knows quite as surely the peril which is involved in its possession. The un- varnished chronicle of events in our own land in the last ten years would seem to be an all-sufficient commentary on these sayings of Jesus : " How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God. How hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God " (10:23-24). The spirit called for here, it is to be once more The loving noticed, is not asceticism ;2 but there is a clear ^.f^^ierlif recognition of the peril of the lower attainment, of letting the lesser possessions jeopardize the greater, of sacrificing life to ** the abundance of the things " a man possesseth.^ That Jesus does not believe, and cannot believe, on his principle of a self -giving love as life, that he is thereby calling the men of 1 Cf. Peabody, op. cii., p. 212. 2 See above, pp. 66, loi. * Cf. Peile, The Reproach of the Gospel, pp. 114 ff. I40 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Modern progress toward this principle of Jesus. the true life to something less, is clearly seen in his answer to Peter, — " There is no man that has left house, or brethren, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands, for my sake, and for the gospel's sake, but he shall receive a hundred- fold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions ; and in the world to come eternal life " (lO : 29-30). Jesus has no doubt, and if his principle is true he can have no doubt, that the man of the loving life is to get, that is, vastly more out of life than the selfish man possibly can. His phrase, " with persecutions," clearly recognizes that he does not mean, nor believe, that the loving Hfe will be without its difficulties and hardships and trials, but that nevertheless now and here, as well as in the life to come which he posits, the life will be far more significant and far more re- warding. The life of loving service need have no envy of the mean and selfish and self-centered life dominated by material possessions. That is to say, Jesus believes that a world that is fundamentally moral is made on such a principle that selfishness is an inevitable limitation of life, and love just as inevitably an enlargement. And here, too, our generation has made, on the part at least of the far-seeing, rapid progress toward some sharing of this vision of Jesus. We are fast coming to the time when unearned, spe- cial privileges shall be no longer counted a badge of honor, but rather a mark of shame; when THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK I4I the possession of wealth for which a man has rendered no adequate service to society shall be accounted not honorable but disgraceful; when it shall be clear to all men that the larger the pos- session of power of any kind, the greater is the service which in all honor must be rendered to society. That is to say, here, too, we are fast com- ing to see that the teaching of Jesus is not only not impracticable, but is the only teaching upon which any civilization, that our reason and con- science can recognize as justifiable, can be built. There is one other, almost incidental, application Duty to of his fundamental principle which Mark records, ^^^^f ^^ ^^^ ^ ^ ' aside by in Jesus' answer to the question as to tribute to religious Caesar, — " Render unto Caesar the things that are ^""p^^^- Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's " (12:17). Jesus solve% the puzzle of policy, or of seeming conflict of duties to the theocracy on the one hand, and to the Roman government on the other, by simple, straightforward, honest discrimi- nation. The coin itself showed a government responsible for law and the machinery of civiliza- tion, rendering a real and accepted service; and hence having a right, at least so far, to support, as recognized in their own act in using the coin. There is, therefore, here a just obligation to be met as a part of duty, not to be refused on the ground of religious scruples ; there was no real opposition. It does not seem to me to be pressing this saying too far to say that it gives just recog- nition to the relative independence of the state. OF THE 142 THE ETHICS OF JESUS and sees that religion is not an exclusive interest, and is never to be made an excuse for avoiding the just claims of society. Farther than that it is not to be pressed.^ As contrasted with some comments upon the passage, it seems to me rather that it is to be said, that there is at least no hint here that the state is of no account. There is no suggestion of mere " ethics of the end." Jesus speaks here with true moral insight, without a trace of fanati- cism, not evading the question, but putting his answer on impregnable ground, on the justness of the claims both of the Roman government and of God. Or, as Gould puts the matter, " Jesus* answer is practically. Do not try to make one duty exclude another, but fulfill one so as to consist with all the rest." Mark's The parables which Mark uses, though so few, parables. ^^^ ^jj fundamental to the whole method and faith and aim of Jesus, — the parables of the sower, of the light, of the fruit-bearing earth, and of the mustard seed. The parables of the light and of the mustard seed have already been dealt with. In the parable of the sower, Jesus indicates his clear discernment that results in moral and spir- itual work depend not alone on the seed but also on the soil, not alone on the truth but also on the choice of the hearer; and he suggests the ways in which the truth may be hindered in the hearts of men. And so he brings home once more his 1 Cf. Mathews, T^e Social Teaching of JesuSy p. Ii8; Rauschen- busch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, p. 88. THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN MARK 1 43 sense of the seriousness of life. In the parable of the fruit-bearing earth, Jesus shows his faith in the growth of the good, and hence of the adaptation of the truth to the human soul, and he builds directly upon this assurance, while he recognizes at the same time that the truth must come to frui- tion gradually. This faith in the working of God or of the truth in men, is one more evidence of Jesus' great underlying faith in the moral trend of the universe, expressed ethically, or in the fatherhood of God, expressed in religious terms. All these, we may be sure, were vital insights for Jesus himself in the prosecution of his own work in face of increasing opposition and certain final external defeat. He needed to steady his soul with these truths of his fundamental faith ; and he simply shares them with others in these parables. When one reviews the ethical teaching in Mark, Summary he finds that Jesus* message involved the ethical ^^.^^ faith in the moral trend of the universe; that his teaching in method is the contagion of the good life ; that his ^^^^* motive is love and the sense of the need of men ; that his goal is the establishment of the kingdom of love; that Jesus sees his teaching as plainly contrasted with that prevalent in his time with its trend toward externalism, traditionalism, and cere- monialism ; and that he has such a sense of the necessity of a mental and spiritual inwardness and independence, as makes him certain that none of the old forms are adequate to his new spirit; that Jesus discerns the basic nature of the childlike 144 THE ETHICS OF JESUS qualities, and states his one all-embracing principle of love in the great paradox and the great com- mandment ; and applies this principle — that one is to do always and only what love enjoins — sugges- tively to the social problems of ambition, wealth, the child, marriage, and the state. Conclusion. The summaries of the ethical teaching in Q and in Mark, thus show that into that teaching, in both these oldest sources, the ethical teaching of the earlier criteria clearly fits. In these longer sources the same ethical notes and emphases are to be found only further confirmed and amplified. The different presentations are thoroughly har- monious. CHAPTER IV ESTIMATES OF THE ETHICAL TEACHING IN THE SAYINGS OF JESUS PECULIAR TO EITHER MATTHEW OR LUKE I. The ethical teaching peculiar to Matthew. Building directly upon Allen's analysis of Mat- thew, in the International Critical Commentary^ and j^^^^ to"be^ omitting, from his list of matter found only in considered. Matthew, all narrative passages, all passages in- dicated as editorial, all the non-ethical, all passages from the Sermon on the Mount and all parallels to it, and omitting also passages already covered, there remain to be treated here the following list of passages : — 1. Matt. io:i6b, 41. "Wise as serpents." "Hethatre- ceiveth a prophet." 2. Matt. 12 : 7, 1 1-12 a, 36-37. " I desire mercy," etc. Sheep fallen into a pit on the Sabbath. " Idle word." 3. Matt. 13 : 51-52. Every scribe like a householder. 4. Matt. 15:13. " Every plant my Father planted not." 5. Matt. 18:3-4, 10, 14, 23-35. "Except become as little children." " Despise not one of these little ones." " Not the will of Father one should perish." Parable of unforgiving servant. 6. Matt. 19:12. Eunuchs for the kingdom. 7. Matt. 20:1-15. Parable of laborers in the vineyard. 8. Matt. 21:16, 28-31. "Out of the mouth of babes.'' Parable of two sons. L 145 146 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Summary of these The note of warning and judg- ment. The note of mercy. . J9. Matt. 22 : 40. " On these two commandments the whole law hangeth." 10. Matt. 23:2-3, 5, 7 b-io, 15-22, 24,32-33. "On Moses' seat." " To be seen of men." " Be not called Rabbi." Proselyting. Blind guides. " Strain out the gnat." " Fill up measure of your fathers." 11. Matt. 25:1-13, 31-46. Parable of the ten virgins. Judgment scene. These passages consist of four parables, — those of the unforgiving servant, of the laborers in the vine- yard, of the two sons, and of the ten virgins; con- siderable portions of the two discourses on the denunciation of the Pharisees and on the Last Judgment ; a few short sayings ; and three grouped sayings on the child and the childlike qualities (18: 3-4, 10, 14). It will be seen that the passages peculiar to Matthew strongly emphasize, on the one hand, the notes of warning and judgment ^ as in the denuncia- tion of the Pharisees (ch. 23), the picture of the Last Judgment (ch. 25 ; cf. the eschatological dis- course, ch. 24), the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (20:1-15), the saying, "Every plant which my Heavenly Father planted not shall be rooted up " (15 : 13), and the warning concerning the "idle word" (12:36-37), illustrating once again Jesus' sense of the seriousness of life. At the same time, there are as clearly to be seen the notes of mercy ^ humility^ and forgiveness y in the saying, " I desire mercy, and not sacrifice " (12 : 7), in the reference to the rescue of the sheep on the Sabbath (12 : ii-i2a), in the supreme place given THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO MATTHEW 1 47 to the law of love (22 : 40), in the parable of the unforgiving servant (18 : 23-35), and in the judg- ment of life by loving service (25 : 3 1-46). Indeed, the warning of judgment is particularly for those who show lack of sympathy and love (cf. 10 : 41 ; 12 : 7, ii-i2a; ch. 18). In connection with these passages peculiar to Matthew's Matthew, there is naturally to be raised the ques- editorial ,,.,-.,. viewpoint. tion. What is to be found m Matthew's gospel that might be referred to the editorial point of view, rather than to be thought of as belonging directly to Jesus ? 1 For our purposes Allen's brief sum- mary in the article on Matthew in the Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels may be adopted. At three points, he thinks that the influence of the editor's own point of view is pretty clearly to be seen : as to the permanence of the law, as to the near approach of the Kingdom, and as to the scope of the gospel.^ These peculiarities of Matthew 1 Cf. arts. " Matthew," H. D. B., and Encyclopedia Biblica ; The International Critical Commentary, " Matthew," pp. 309 ff. '^ As to " the permanence of the law," Allen thinks, " it is prob- able that we must make allowance here for some over-emphasis due to local and national prejudice which interpreted Christ's sayings in the direction which the history of the Jewish people seemed to warrant " (p. 148). As to "the near approach of the Kingdom," Allen reaches this conclusion : " These facts suggest irresistibly the conclusion that the editor or the tradition which he follows has, by accumulating sayings of one kind, and by modifying others to some slight extent in order to give them the required meaning, given the impression that the Lord taught a nearness of his coming to in- augurate the Kingdom, which goes beyond what he himself origi- nally intended" (p. 149). As to narrowing "the scope of the 148 THE ETHICS OF JESUS practically affect no part of the ethical teaching, as we have taken the passages, and for these passages Schmiedel's statement fairly holds : ^ "It is when the purely religious-ethical utterances of Jesus come under consideration that we are most advantageously placed. Here especially applies the maxim laid down that we may accept as cred- ible everything that harmonizes with the idea of Jesus which has been derived from what we have called the foundation-pillars, and is not otherwise open to fatal objection. Even though such utter- ances may have been liable to Ebionitic heighten- ing, and already, as showing traces of this, cannot lay claim to literal accuracy — even though they may have been unconsciously modified into accord with conditions of the Christian community that arose only at a later date — even though they may have undergone some distortion of their meaning through transference to a connection that does not belong to them — the spirit which speaks in them is quite unmistakable. Here we have a wide field of the wholly credible in which to expatiate." Since Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount is deferred for later discussion, it will be possible to deal quite briefly with the other special ethical passages peculiar to him, guiding the dis- Gospel," Allen believes that " here again we must, as it would seem, make some allowance for over-emphasis, due partly to artificial arrangement of Christ's sayings, partly to a limited insight into their true scope and meaning, which was due to past religious training " (p. 150). 1 Encyclopedia Biblica, art. "Gospels," col. 1889. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO MATTHEW 1 49 cussion by comparison with " the laws of life " as brought out in the doubly attested sayings. We find, then, in the first place, that Matthew Love the expresses, as clearly as Mark, Jesus' faith in the ^°^^ °^ goal of life : in his belief in the certain defeat of evil, — " Every plant which my heavenly Father planted shall not be rooted up" (15 : 13); ^ in the assertion of opportunity for all, in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (20 : 1-15) ; and in the conviction that love is the sum of life, in the say- ing, " On these two commandments the whole law hangeth, and the prophets " (22 : 40), and in the standard of the Last Judgment (25 : 31-46). At the same time, these sayings of Jesus peculiar The de- to Matthew point out clearly the laws of life for "^^^^^ oneself and for his relations to others. For the man individual. himself there is the same demand for absolute genuineness (23:5, 15-22, 24, 32-33), for inward- ness of life (23 : 3, 15-22, 24, 28, 32-33), for vigi- lant watchfulness (the parable of the ten virgins, 25 : 1-13), and for willingness to obey to the end, in the possibility of sacrifice suggested in the say- ing : ** There are eunuchs, that made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it " ( 19 : 12). The demand for genuineness and inwardness of life is seen especially in the denunciation of the Pharisees, where (in addition to like sayings in Q) Jesus repudiates the motive of being seen of men, 1 Cf. the positive faith in the triumph of the good in the parables of the mustard seed and of the leaven. 150 THE ETHICS OF JESUS unholy proselytism, the spirit of the blind guide, the straining out of the gnat, and the filling up of the measure of false fathers. Relations j As to relations to others, Jesus demands again the to others. fundamental and all-embracing spirit of love (22 : 40 ; 12:7, ii-i2a;23:7b-io), with its active minister- ing service (25 : 31-46), its steady reverence for personality (10:41; 18:3-4, iOj 14? 21:16; 23:2-3), and its duty of forgiveness (18 : 23-25). There is involved at the same time, once more, the recognition of the basic value of the childlike quali- ties, in the passages in chapter 18, and in 23:7 b- 10. Solemn responsibility for one's speech is affirmed in the saying concerning the " idle word" (12:36-37): "And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." Tact and adaptation are enjoined in the saying, " Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves "(10: 16 b), and in the parable of the scribe of the Kingdom bring- ing forth " out of his treasure things new and old " (13 : 51-52). And the perpetual need, in judging men, of taking account of temperament and the final issue of their conduct, is set forth in the par- able of the two sons (21 : 28-31). Jesus uses this parable specifically, according to Matthew, to con- trast the more hopeful attitude of the publicans and harlots with the blind rejection of his mes- sage by the religious authorities. Not those who THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO MATTHEW I5I "say," but those who "go," do the will of God (21:31-32). As one looks back over the spirit, thus demanded The extent in relation to others, he sees that it is hardly pos- demands sible to put more strongly the insistence upon the here made, active ministry of love than in the picture of the Last Judgment scene, — " Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least," etc. Has the church ever recognized how deep-going Jesus' utterance here is ? ^ The spirit of reverence for the person also is expressed most decisively in the requirement of the spirit of a little child (18 : 3-4), in the saying, " See that ye despise not one of these little ones" (18 : 10), and in the further saying, " Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish " (18:14). And the unthinkableness that the unforgiving spirit should accompany the loving life is set forth in the parable of the unforgiving servant (18 : 23- 35), in almost the only language of sarcasm which Jesus is known to have employed. The unforgiv- ing spirit inevitably shuts out from life (18 : 34-35). All this is only to say that the ethical notes of Summary. Jesus' teaching, as they come out in these teaching passages peculiar to Matthew, confirm the trends previously seen, and fit harmoniously into them. There can be no mistaking, thus, the earnestness of Jesus and his sense of the seriousness of life, in these passages in Matthew, no mistaking his iCf. The Creed of Christ, pp. 16-18. 152 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Amount and credi- bility of material peculiar to Luke. in Luke here to be con- sidered. demand for genuineness and inwardness in the moral life, no doubt of his insistence on reverence for the person in relation to others, no doubt that religion seems to him ethical through and through. The sense of the contrast of his teaching with that of his times is also manifest; and at the same time the spirit of compassion permeates the whole. II. The peculiar teaching in Luke} Hawkins estimates that 612 verses out of 1149 in Luke are peculiar to him ; and this material pe- culiar to Luke includes, in Plummer's summary, 6 miracles and 18 parables.^ The large amount of this pecuHar material in Luke, most of which, so far as the teaching is concerned, there seems no reason to question,^ naturally requires a somewhat extended treatment. When this material peculiar to Luke is carefully surveyed, omitting the narra- tive material, the non-ethical passages, the parallels to the Sermon on the Mount, and passages already covered or virtually covered, we have left (follow- ing Hawkins' classification) for special considera- tion here the following list of passages : — I. Longer sections peculiar to Luke. i) 7 : 40-50. Simon and the woman ; and the parable of the two debtors. 1 Cf. Swete, Studies in the Teaching of Our Lord, pp. 97 ff. 2 See Bebb, art. " Luke," H. D. B. ; Hawkins, flora Synoptica^ pp. 158 ff. ; Plummer, International Critical Commentary, " Luke," p. xli. 8 Cf. Wright, art. "Luke," D. C. G., p. 88 : « It would be mere scepticism to throw much doubt on these utterances." See also Wernle, Sources of Our Knoiv ledge of the Life of Jesus, pp. 145 ff., 152. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 53 2) 9 : 62. " No man having put his hand to the plow," etc. 3) 10 : 28-37. Parable of the Good Samaritan. 4) 12 : 14-21, 47-50. Avaricious brother; parable of the rich fool ; " Beaten with many stripes " ; and " bap- tism to be baptized with." 5) 13:2-5,6-9,15-16. The slain Galileans. Parable of barren fig tree. Ox and woman. 6) 14:7-11, 12-14, 28-33. Parable of the chief seats. " When thou makest a dinner." Counting the cost. 7) 15 : 8-32. Parables of lost coin and lost son. 8) 16:1-12, 14-15, 19-31- Parable of the unrighteous steward. Comment on scoffing of Pharisees. Parable of rich man and Lazarus. 9) 17 : 7-10. Parable of extra service. 10) 18 : 9-14. Parable of Pharisee and publican. 11) 19:9-10. As to Zacchaeus. 2. Shorter passages^ excluding virtual repetitions. i) 12:35-38. "Let your loins be girded about," etc. Cf. 21 : 34-36. 2) 21 : 19. " In your patience ye shall win your souls." 3) 23 : 34. " Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do." ^ 1 The "longer sections " in this material peculiar to Luke include 13 parables and 8 shorter sayings. These 13 parables, out of Plummer's 18, may be regarded as distinctly ethical, and omit from consideration, thus, the parables of the great supper and of the pounds, as already virtually covered in the parables of the marriage of the king's son and of the talents; the parable of the watchful servants as only amplifying teaching already considered; as well as the parables of the friend at midnight, and the unrighteous judge, as not directly ethical. These 13 parables are the parables of the two debtors, of the Good Samaritan, of the rich fool, of the barren fig tree, of the chief seats, of the rash builder, of the rash king, of the lost coin, of the lost son, of the unrighteous steward, of the rich man and Lazarus, of the unprofitable servants, and of the Pharisee and the publican. The 8 shorter sayings are the sayings concerning putting the 154 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The notes Two aspccts of the teaching of Jesus stand out and wSaing. ^^^^ ^^ Luke, in these " longer sections," as in the material peculiar to Matthew, — the aspect of gra- ciousness and the aspect of warning ; and, as there, the warning is directed impliedly against those who '^refuse to take on the life of love. The note of gra- i cious mercy ^ comes out in the parables of the two i debtors, of the Good Samaritan, of the lost coin, of ;the lost son, and of the Pharisee and the publican, ias well as in the sayings concerning the ox and the iwoman, the Galileans, the falling of the tower of Siloam, making a dinner, and concerning Zacchaeus. The note of warning comes out not less unmistak- ably in the parables of the rich fool, of the barren fig tree, of the chief seats, of the rash builder, of the rash king, of the unrighteous steward, of the rich man and Lazarus, of extra service, and of the Pharisee and the publican ; and in the sayings con- cerning putting the hand to the plow and concern- ing fire and baptism, and in the answer to the scoffing of the Pharisees. The notes of It is plain at once, from this very brief survey, rnd^micy ^^^ impossible it is to connect with Matthew, on not incon- the oue hand, simply the note of warning and sistent. hand to the plow (9:62), the servant beaten with many stripes (12:47-48), the fire and the baptism (12:49-50), the Galileans slain by Pilate, and the falling of the tower in Siloam (13: 2-5), the ox and the woman (13 : 15-16; cf. 14:5), the making of a dinner (14: 12-14), Jesus' answer to the Pharisaic scoffing (16: 14- 15), the saying as to Zacchaeus (19:9-10), and the saying con- cerning the changed conditions which the disciples must face (22 : 35-38). 1 Cf. Swete, op. cit., pp. 117 ff. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 55 judgment, or with Luke, on the other, simply that of grace and mercy. In fact, in this pecuUar mate- rial, Luke has more parables of warning than of grace. But both Evangelists present the teaching of Jesus as having inevitably this double aspect. For it is impossible to come to see that the very life of God is the loving life, and not see at the same time the solemn seriousness that attaches to life, in the necessity of this choice of the loving life for oneself ; and that if that choice of the loving life is not made, dwindling life must follow. It is the very urgency of grace, therefore, which is to be found not less in the passages of warning than in those of tender invitation. This is the inevitable fact, that some critics of the teaching of Jesus seem to have quite failed to see. Of the 1 1 3 verses of shorter peculiar variations Luke's in Luke which Hawkins makes out, there are only ^^°f*f5 ' J variations. two that are directly ethical that have not been al- ready virtually covered : the single sentence, " In your patience ye shall win your souls" (21 : 19), and the prayer on the cross, ** Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do " (23 : 34) ; though it should be noted that these passages do include an emphatic amplification of the exhortation to vigilant watchfulness. The discussion of Luke's peculiar material natu- The two rally falls into two divisions : the consideration of ^J^^^^^^ the so-called ** parables of grace" with their re- discussion. lated sayings, and the consideration of the parables of warning and the sayings akin to these. 156 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Faith and love over against suspicion and pride. I. To turn to Luke's characteristic parables of grace, the first is found in the story of Simon and the woman, with its parable of the two debtors (7 • 36-50).^ One hesitates to touch this beautiful story ; if it could be read with simple full under- standing it were enough. The story is character- istic of Luke, as intended to show Christ's breadth of sympathy and kindly touch, both in eating with the Pharisee, and in forgiving the sinner. There is here illustrated the artistic selection by Luke of an incident that brings out these points in vivid pictorial contrasts. The whole incident is an em- bodiment of penitent loving faith on the part of the woman and trusting and forgiving love on the part of Jesus, against the background of cold lack of sympathy and suspicion and pride that has no sense of need. The incident brings Jesus into touch with the two marked classes of his time, the Pharisees on the one hand, and the publicans and sinners on the other, — his world in little. It illustrates in the case of one Pharisee, of evidently broader mind than was usual, still the greater ease with which Jesus could reach, with his message of a Father of forgiving love, the recognized sinner than the respectable Pharisee. This concrete sit- uation of his time had its own part, no doubt, in leading Jesus to his emphasis upon humility and trust as the fundamental qualities of the religious life, and to his corresponding sense of the damn- ing nature of the sins of contemptuous pride and ^ Cf. Matheson, Studies in the Portrait 0/ Jesus, vol. II, pp. 94 ff . tude of separation. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 5/ distrust. These sins Jesus feels to be deadly, both for oneself and for others. For oneself, be- cause pride prevents all sense of need, all teach- ableness, and therefore all growth ; while distrust prevents one's believing in the love of God and of men, and believing the worst gets only the worst. For others, because we cannot win men by patro- nizing them ; we must understand them ; that is, we must see their likeness to us, and so get some sympathy with them, and respect for them ; while distrust, at the same time, breeds its own suspicions. The story illustrates, also, the point of view of The atti- the Pharisee, in his thought of the mark of the prophet (v. 39). That mark he felt would be the discernment of the sinner, and consequent instant unsympathetic separation from her, instead of love and a sympathetic redeeming of the wrongdoer to righteousness. It is the folly and sin of this spirit, as constituting too much the sum total of the state's entire attitude toward the evildoer, to which our generation is slowly awakening. Just here lies the strength of much of Tolstoy's constant con- tention in his Resurrection, For Luke brings out more clearly than any of the other gospels the fact that Jesus' quarrel with the Pharisaic point of view is not only with their externalism, but with their negative conception of righteousness as separation from evil. The separatism to which their very name points, permeates all their reli- gious thought. So God is conceived as separating 158 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The parable of the two debtors. Daring to use the highest forces. himself from sinners; so the godly man; so the way of life. Simon sees not only no mark of divineness in Jesus in his tender, sympathetic, forgiving love, but rather evidence that he is not a prophet at all. This will come out still more clearly in the parable of the lost son, in the set- ting which Luke gives it. One might perhaps paraphrase Jesus' answer to Simon's evident inner disapproval, in the par- able of the two debtors and in his words, " Where- fore I say unto thee. Her sins, which are many, are forgiven ; for she loved much : but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little" (v. 47), — by saying. Her abundant love shows the fruits of forgiveness, shows her own sense of deep sin, and shows in her penitence her sense that she has been forgiven much; and it is her faith (v. 50), which was called out by my attitude of sympa- thetic love — ;?^^ by unsympathetic, hard condem- nation and withdrawal from her — exactly this that has drawn her out of her sin into desire for right- eousness, — into the loving life, exactly this that has "saved" her. Her sins are forgiven (v. 48); she is saved now in real reconciliation of purpose and aim with God, in peace (v. 50) as a child of the Father. And, even in the merely ethical aspect, our modern life calls everywhere for this sympathetic redeeming spirit of Jesus. In the Christian era there have been centuries of blundering of an al- most criminal kind in dealing with the child and THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 59 with the wrongdoer. All the gains in modern prison discipline and reform and in the criminal courts lie in the direction of this spirit of Jesus, in the aim to redeem the criminal to a useful and righteous life, as the best possible protection of society; in the consequent aim, therefore, to understand the man, to respect him, to awaken him to self-respect, to call out his respect and love, to help him to self-conquest by faith and love — the mightiest of all forces. All this is no sentimental namby-pambyism, but the determina- tion to pay the cost of using the really strongest forces for bringing men into righteousness, instead of the weakest forces — physical force and vio- lence — simply to restrain them from evil. It is the chief glory of Judge Lindsey's work, and the deepest secret of his achievement, that he has dared to trust the highest forces. Is it too much to hope that in the widespread recognition of work like that of Judge Lindsey, a great new divine prin- ciple and spirit are coming into government, into the interpretation of law, into social and civic life, — a new faith that we can trust the highest forces, those which Jesus himself dared to use } Luke's second peculiar parable, that of the Good Parable of Samaritan (10: 30-37), while it is a parable of the samStLn. loving life, is just as plainly, of course, a parable of warning against the unloving spirit. Whether Luke is right in the setting that he gives to this parable or not, as told in answer to the question, " Who is my neighbor ? " — and there seems to me [6o THE ETHICS OF JESUS A minister- ing love. Response to need. to have been some rather superciUous criticism at this point, — it is at least plain that the parable does set forth the true neighborly spirit. And whether or not it was immediately connected with the saying summing up the law in love, Luke cannot be mistaken in seeing in the story, as told by Jesus, a practical illustration of the love that he demanded. Without pressing in any way the details of the parable, three things at least stand out. In the first place, there is here to be seen Jesus' deep conviction that the loving life demands expression, is not merely a mood, to be sentimentally indulged in private, but is active and ministering. (Cf. Matt. 25:31-46; and John 13:1-16.) It is no mere pity, but a practical showing of mercy. Pity the priest and the Levite may have had, but they quite lacked a love that manifested constant thoughtfulness, willingness to put oneself out, to take pains, not to excuse oneself on account of the pressure of other things. They had " engage- ments " probably, and wanted to avoid "uncom- fortable entanglements." In the second place, Jesus' illustrative interpre- tation of the law of love, if this parable is so to be taken, is to keep men from emptying that love of all its real content. There is no real love, in Jesus' thought, where one is not willing to recognize and minister to the son of the Father in each man, ac- cording to his need. The " neighbor," the parable teaches, is the man in need. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE l6l In the third place, it is not by accident that the Tolerance, hero of this story is a Samaritan, not a priest nor a Levite. Jesus so emphasizes the central point of his answer to the lawyer, if Luke's setting is correct, that eternal Hfe is in love alone, not in orthodoxy, not in religious practices, not in holy office; and so illustrates at the same time the spirit of broad tolerance which must grow out of the recognition of the loving spirit in all men. But the two great outstanding parables of grace, Luke 15. of course, peculiar to Luke, are the parables of the lost coin and the lost son (15 :8-io, 11-32). And if Bruce might say that for Mark's two peculiar sayings his whole gospel was worth preservation, surely we may say of Luke that it would have been worth preservation for the single story of the lost son. His 15th chapter, indeed, including the parable, contained in the other gospels, of the lost sheep, may be said to be his great peculiar and characteristic chapter. It contains, to his mind evidently, as to ours, the very heart of Christ's whole teaching. Luke's setting of the parables has been ques- Luke's tioned, and in any case it may well be noted that the^pfrabies the significance of the teaching of the parable in chapter does not depend upon this setting ; but for myself, in verses 1-2, Luke seems accurately to give the circumstances, for the parables exactly fit the situa- tion there described. Jesus' universal sympathy and desire to help are manifestly showing them- selves more and more. The " publicans and sin- M 1 62 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Contrasted views of holiness. The Pharisaic theory of holiness. Jesus* view of holiness. ners " are consequently " drawing near " to him increasingly. This very thing leads to growing criticism on the part of the Scribes and Pharisees, who see in the publicans and sinners his favorite associates, and in this, evidence that he is himself but a poor saint and a poor teacher of religion. The mere fact that he thus welcomes these com- parative outcasts settles the matter for them. There is no feeling of joy in the thought that these are being won to something better, to life and good and God. The two attitudes of the Pharisees and of Christ turn on two quite contrasted views of holi- ness, still prevailing. The Pharisaic theory makes hoHness freedom from all contamination of evil, where evil is treated as the positive force, like soiling dirt. Here holiness is shown by punctilious separation from all possible contagion of the evil. The initial intent of the Pharisee was good ; but his position involved plain dangers : assuming that oneself is right and superior to others ; a total lack of appre- ciation and of sympathy with others and willing- ness truly to do for them ; and consequent failure in love, and failure to see that only this positive love really counts, or can be any adequate defense against evil. Holiness becomes here exclusiveness, separation from the contamination of death. From Jesus* point of view, it is rather true that holiness is wholeness, health, and its contagion of life. He believes that health is more contagious THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 63 than disease, and righteousness than evil, and that the great protection against evil is abounding love and righteousness, just as the great protection against disease is abounding health. From this point of view, therefore, the saint must bring his touch of life ; he cannot be allowed to shut himself off from the rest of men ; and the only way to promote holiness among men is for the whole life, the healthy life, the life of God, to be brought into touch with the imperfect, the diseased, and the sinful. This view assumes that holiness or love, not evil, is the great positive force, and is itself the only true defense against evil. HoHness, for Jesus, is God's life ; and that life, Jesus is ever show- ing — and here especially — is love, the tender, gracious, tireless, seeking love of God. For Christ, therefore, we come into holiness in just the pro- portion in which we share that sympathy and love of God in our relation to others. All the three parables, thus, of the chapter, — jesus' the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and ^pp^^^ "^ the lost son, are ( i ) a direct answer to the Phari- parables, saic criticism by (2) revealing the love of God in an appeal to their own feehng and reason, and (3) so showing that the only attitude for men to take is not the attitude of Pharisaic exclusiveness, but the same longing, seeking love which God has for all his children. Jesus seeks to stir the pity and love even of the Pharisees in appeal to their own experience, and so to help them to see the inevi- tableness of his own course with the publicans and 164 THE ETHICS OF JESUS sinners. This is the force of the appeal in the 4th verse, for example, "What man of you.'" (4) It should be noticed, thus, that Jesus is drawing ten- derly near to both classes in the appeal of these parables. The Pharisees, too, are among the most needy of God's sons, whom also the Father seeks, whom, therefore, Jesus must earnestly strive to win, even though they may be less responsive than the so-called "sinners." And the appeal to the elder son, in verse 31, — " child " — is a direct and tender appeal to the Pharisees. These three simple, appealing stories, thus, of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, break forth, as inevitably, from the heart and lips of Christ. The cloth- The parables are so simple and direct that their p£a°bies^^ clothing requires no special attention; and the great outstanding truths of all three are so much the same, that the parables need not be treated separately. I see nothing to confirm the reason- ableness of Pfleiderer's theory that the story of the elder brother, in the parable of the prodigal son, does not belong to Jesus' original utterance. In fact, it fits exactly into the general circum- stances in which Jesus found himself, and is a di- rect and powerful part of Jesus* answer to the Pharisees' common complaint. It is wholly worthy of the rest of the parable. Jesus' thought, indeed, would be incomplete without it. I am, of course, not forgetting that the primary significance of these parables is religious, in setting THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 65 forth the gracious and tireless seeking love of Ethical God ; but nevertheless, the parables cannot be left l^^)^^^ '° out of account in any adequate setting forth of the form. ethical teaching of Jesus either, because this spirit which is here ascribed to God must, of course, be at the same time a picture of the ideal attitude that Jesus must demand from every man. They be- long, therefore, to the very heart of his ethical teaching, as well as constitute the center of his " good tidings of God." We shall therefore prob- ably best get at the ethical implications by stat- ing first simply the teaching of the parable in its plain, primary religious significance. The great outstanding truths of the parables of The Luke 15, then, may be said to be these :— Ihe'^pa'Sb/es. ( I ) God is not a taskmaster or legal accountant^ God no with a set of arbitrary rules and laws to judge you ^^kmaster. by or reward you for, without pity or mercy or love, as the Pharisees conceived, and many others still conceive. One needs to get thoroughly rid of this blasphemous and untrue idea of God. God's severity is the fidelity of love, that would hold a child to the Hues of his largest life, and that only, — that would bring him back to himself, to life and to God. It is impossible to fit the Phari- saic attitude toward sinning, needy men into the character of God. Each of the three parables em- phatically denies this possibility. Try to conceive the possibility : " The valued sheep is lost ; curse it and let it go. The cherished coin of the per- sonal treasure dowry is gone ; make no attempt to 1 66 THE ETHICS OF JESUS find it ; forget it and let it go. The son has gone out from the father's house to a life away from all sympathy with the father ; he richly deserves his swine-feeding fate ; curse him and forget him." The parables show that Jesus knows no such God. As over against every such attitude toward sinning men, he appeals even to men's own more merciful attitude toward sheep. God cares. (2) God caves. Jesus is insisting upon the fact that God cares, as over against the hopeless, deso- late, desperate feeling that sometimes comes, that ** nobody cares what becomes of me." God cares ; heaven is interested. This is the reiterated insist- ence of the parables (vv. 7, 10, 22, 32). Those in- telligences, in closest sympathy with God, seeing values most clearly and surely, care. After all, what is so great as a man } What value is to be reckoned for him } An animal one may come to care greatly for, a coin to prize ; but what shall make good the lost son.? Distance, separation, death, diminished strength or health or opportu- nity of a child, — all these may be causes for sor- row. But what comparison do any or all of them bear to the single fact that a child has turned his back on righteousness and life and God } As surely and as deeply as you know even the human heart at its best (v. 4), you may know that God cares for this child of his, of infinite possibilities, but now gone wrong. Even the shepherd cares for the sheep, the woman for the lost coin, the human father for the rebellious, willful son ; " how THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 16/ much more " God cares ! This is the simple, in- evitable truth to the mind of Jesus. " You are a child of God," Jesus is here repeatedly asserting. He cares. You are " missed " at home. The other sheep are in the fold ; the rest of the pre- cious string of coins are in the hand ; the other children are at home. But you are away, and you are missed, sorely missed ; and no joy is complete, nay, all joy is tinged with sadness, for you are missed. (3) All these parables make not less clear that, The seeking just because God cares, he seeks metiy and rejoices ^^'^^ °^ ^*'**- in the return of men to himself. So Erskine can say : ** What is Christianity } It is the beHef in the inexhaustible love of God for man. He came to seek that which is lost, until he find it."^ This seeking and rejoicing love of God is so clearly in- volved in the previous thought that God cares, that it hardly needs to be dwelt upon. Numerous details in the parables bring out both the tireless seeking and the great joy in the return, with its contrasted implied grief in the wandering. Jesus' contention seems to be that we have a right to believe that God does bear witness to himself in the glad sacrificial longings, seekings, and suffer- ings of the best human love. Is he not himself so speaking in us } Contrast with Jesus' saying con- cerning the "joy in heaven" the awful saying of the Pharisees quoted by Plummer, "There is joy 1 Quoted by Moffatt, Literary Illustrations of the Bible : St. Lukey p. 105. for God. 1 68 THE ETHICS OF JESUS before God when those who provoke him perish from the world." Here is no least sense of men as children of God. Man made (4) In particular, the parables mean th3.t man is made for God and for the life with God. Going away from God, to Christ's thought, is going into " a far country," not native to us, where desolation is certain. With God is the source of all life and light and joy, because he is the source of all love. With him, therefore, and in the sharing of his great purposes and ends, alone is life. And all this means that man only " comes to himself " when he comes back to God. That is finding one- self, coming home, coming into life. This is Christ's conception of the very meaning of re- ligion, — that it is life, the sharing of God's own life. The un- (5) And the latter part of the parable of the sDiri? prodigal son has its own insistent lesson : one may as really go away from the Father by the way of the Uftloving spirit, as by the way of appetite and passion. The parable in truth ought to be called the parable of the two lost sons. In each case the sin lies in the refusal to take the father's attitude and will, — to live the unself- ish, truly loving life of God. The son who has no joy in a brother brought back to real sonship, brought out of sin back to the father and to life with the father, is himself no true son of the father. His unloving spirit is as far from the father's heart as is " the far country " from spint. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 69 the father's house. This is distance from God. The father, therefore, in his love for the elder son, and his desire to win him, too, entreats (v. 28), tenderly expostulates (v. 31), sorrowfully rebukes (v. 32). The "elder son" represents the very spirit in the Pharisees which Jesus set out to rebuke, and out of which he was trying to win them. And yet how readily we still see the sin of the younger son as compared with the sin of the elder, who yet has no real love (this is the real point of all the parables), who cannot conceive or enter into the father's feeling toward either the sinning or the re- pentant son, or into the father's joy over his boy's return in his right mind, who is not able even to take the part of neighbors rejoicing over a sheep found. (6) To be "lost," this parable indicates, is to be Being lost lost away from God. As Emerson says, " Profli- ^^^ ^°°^ gacy consists not in spending years of time or chests of money, but in spending them off the line of your career^ In like manner, to be "lost," is to be lost off the line of God's own will for us, lost away from home, and from the Father's presence and from the loving spirit of his life. To be "saved," on the other hand, is, once more, the simple sharing in the Father's life and in his love for men. There is no other way than these of being either " lost " or " saved." I have ventured, thus, to express somewhat fully the plain religious teaching of Jesus in these parables. 170 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the teachin ^^^^ ^^^' ^ecausc it has seemed to me that only so of these could the full significance of their ethical teaching be best brought out. (i) If, in the thought of Jesus, God may not take the attitude of task- master, or legal accountant, still less may man in his relation to his fellowman. (2) If it must be required even of God that he should care un- ceasingly for every man, not less must be asked from men in their relation to each other. The ethics of Jesus requires that the good of no man ♦ shall be to us an alien thing ; that his loss to right- eousness and good and happiness and life shall be to us no indifferent thing. (3) And not less clearly the teaching of these parables shows that even the ethics of Jesus must demand that a life that he can think of as at all ideal must have the positive s eeking ^ quality in it, and the great joy in the coming of any man to himself, in his coming back into the true life. (4) And the religious proposition that man is made for God and for the life with God has an ethical meaning that cannot be spared. It is, once more, the conviction which must underlie all our moral struggle and all our social endeavor, that man is a fundamentally ethi- cal being and cannot come into largest life apart from the fulfillment of his ethical ideals, that he never truly comes to himself until he takes on all to which the moral laws of his being call him. (5) And the ethical lesson of the latter part of the parable of the lost son is not less unmistakable all institu- tions. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE I /I and not to be spared. It expresses Jesus' clear insight, that one may fail in the truly ethical life quite as certainly by way of hard lack of sympathy as by way of appetite and passion. This is only another inevitable inference from Jesus' funda- mental notion of life as love. With the teaching of these parables is to be con- nected immediately Jesus' saying in his words to Zacchaeus, ** For the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost" (19 : 10). With these parables of grace may be associated Love above three of the shorter sayings of Jesus peculiar to Luke. The first illustrates, again, that sense of the supremacy of love above all institutions, and that conviction that even the highest of these in- stitutions, the Sabbath, " is made for man, and not man for the sabbath " (which we have already seen reflected in the doubly attested sayings, and in Mark) : " Ye hypocrites, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering ? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan had bound, lo, these eighteen years, to have been loosed from this bond on the day of the sabbath.?" (13:15-16; cf. also 14:5). The indignation Jesus here feels is at the purely legal spirit which his objectors show, the total deadness to the work of mercy. Christ argues here in act, as well as in word, once again, that even the high- est of all observances and institutions have their sole right to exist on their ground of service to 1/2 THE ETHICS OF JESUS men, for love's sake only; they may never stand in the way of the service of love. Need, not The same spirit of really unselfish service is SeTidT' ui-ged in the brief paragraph (14: 12-14), "When of love. thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen, nor rich neighbors ; lest haply they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee," etc. The prin- ciple underlying this whole exhortation seems clearly to be, Give yourself and your service where they are needed, and not for "recompense." Need, not recompense, is constantly to guide the loving life. Jesus is not laying down, I suppose, a social rule, but he is declaring a great principle, and going back to the heart of the matter. He is virtually asking those to whom he speaks to deter- mine their controlling motive : Do you really mean to serve in love's name ? And will you serve with genuine unselfishness, not for recompense, but in answer to need ? Some of the neediest may, in truth, be among the rich and the near of kin ; they may need deeply your expressed friendship and the touch of other friendly lives. On the other hand, some commonly counted needy might resent the formal social invitation as patronizing. In that case you must find some other way of giving yourself to them that will show plain respect for them. The principle is that an unselfish love must guide in social life, as everywhere else. Is there any doubt that this principle of Jesus would not only greatly simplify society life, but make it vastly better worth while ? THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 73 The words of grace which this peculiar material Forgiving in Luke puts in the mouth of Jesus may fittingly ^°^^- be concluded with the prayer on the cross and its far reach of understanding, forgiving love, " Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." Doubtless it is no intended teaching; but it ex- presses in his own life the spirit that, beyond ques- tion, he believed should characterize every disciple of the true life. Even as he could not conceive that God should fail in forgiving love, so he may not admit that love has reached its fulfillment in men until it can voice itself in even such a prayer as this. 2. When we turn from this gracious aspect of The aspect the teaching of Jesus to the aspect of judgment of judgment , , "^ y y y «b and warning. and warning, it is to be remembered that we have already seen, in the survey of the entire teaching of Jesus as set forth in Luke, that his whole central section, chapters 11 to 16, can well be considered as warning against the Pharisaic spirit in its vari- ous manifestations. Here belong the parable of the rich fool, with its warning against selfish en- grossment in things (12:14-21); the incident of the Galileans and the tower of Siloam, with its warning against uncharitable judgment on account of calamities, and against forgetting the absolute need of life in the individual (13 : 1-5); the par- able of the barren fig tree, with its warning against fruitlessness, mere harmlessness of life (13:6-9); the parable of the chief seats, with its warning against self -exaltation (14:7-11); the parables of 174 THE ETHICS OF JESUS the rash builder and the rash king, with their de- mand that one should count the cost of discipleship (14 : 28-33), with which are to be taken the saying as to putting one's hand to the plow (9 : 62), and the appHcation of the same principle to his own life, " I came to cast fire upon the earth," etc. (12:49-50); the parable of the unrighteous steward (16: 1-13), with its demand for foresight in the spiritual life, and for the true use of riches, and that of the rich man and Lazarus (16: 19-31), with its insistence on the inevitable consequences of the abuse of riches ; the parable of extra service (17: 7-10), with its demand upon the disciple of the true life for patient readiness for the most exacting service ; and the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, with its rebuke of self-complacent pride and its exaltation of humble penitence. The parable In the parable of the rich fool, with the introduc- tory incident of the avaricious brother, Jesus is not only warning against the spirit of covetousness, but giving the motives which may be used against this spirit. Jesus sums up his entire argument against the covetous life in the sentence, "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." The motives against covetousness in this paragraph of the teaching of Jesus may be thus summarized : (i) life lies not in things (v. 15) ; (2) put the growth of the self over against the growth of things (vv. 19-20); (3) re- member the danger of the benumbing effects of material prosperity (w. 17-19); (4) merely mate- of the rich fool THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1/5 rial aims shut out all really great ambitions ; one can, then, only "build greater" barns, and mul- tiply things, instead of building a greater life, and multiplying interests in common with the Kingdom of God (vv. 18-21); (5) and the covetous life means inevitable, irretrievable defeat in the end; it is not " rich toward God " ; there is no shar- ing of the eternal purposes anJ life of God (v. 21). The parable of the watchful servants (12 : 35-48), The parable while only a part of it peculiar to Luke, does mass °^ ^,^, , . . 1 . ..r , . M watchful the motives against the ungirt life and to vigilant servants, watchfulness as no other single connected passage in the teaching of Jesus, and may properly, there- fore, find connected treatment at this point. Jesus seems to think of the Pharisaic spirit as having crept in through failure to be true to the light al- ready given, and so smothering further light. In the words of Professor Peabody, " Spiritual insen- sibility is not an intellectual, but a moral defect — the sheer indolence and satiety of a loose and ungirt habit of life." Moral blindness (vv. 54-59) and inability to face the stern crises (vv. 49-53) are the natural result of the ungirt, indolent life (vv. 35-48). Vigilant watchfulness, therefore, is ^ the price of all attainment. Lack of watchfulness, in Christ's thought, belongs, thus, among the great enemies of life ; and in this passage he brings the following motives to bear : — ( I ) Every man is a servant put in trust with life and capacities. This calls for the vigilant alert- 176 THE ETHICS OF JESUS ness of servants momentarily expecting their lord's return (vv. 35-36). (2) Our watchful fidelity has the great reward of the approval of our Lord^ and of his own giving of himself in larger measure to us. God does not forget untarnished fidelity to great trusts under trial. Our very life is blessed thereby (v. 37). (3) The greater the trial in which one is true, the greater the honor of the life (v. 38). (4) Neglect and negligence are never safe. There is no good or safe time to fall below one's best. " Be ye also ready " (vv. 39-40). (5) The motive of trust for others y as well as for oneself (for in verses 41-48 Jesus seems to be speaking to the disciples as leaders). The higher the calling, the greater the trust and the need of watchfulness. The leader can least of all afford the ungirt life. He must be worthy, and more than worthy, of his best associates ; and every man needs for his own upgirding the thought that if he fails, he imperils not himself alone but many others; if he conquers, he wins not for himself alone, but adds strength to other lives also (vv. 41-43). (6) Fidelity means still larger trusts , ever larger opportunities crowding in on the life. Not only, then, because of the trusts already given, but also for the sake of the vastly larger trusts in store, that are jeopardized by every lack of watchfulness, one is to be faithful (v. 44). (7) Resist the subtle temptation which urges THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE I// that the fact of the high place of service, already won, allows laxness and use of the intrusted power for selfish tyranny. Be doubly on your guard against the beguilements of your own success (v. 45). Success and power are sterner triers of the souls of men than hardship and defeat. The fatal series too often is this : a Httle success, con- sequent laxness, laziness, easy self-indulgence, excusing oneself from hard things, tyranny over others, failure to grow, degeneration, and defeat. (8) The certain and inevitable penalty of abuse of trust is to be borne in mind. One cannot play false and have the reward of honest fidelity. His building is false ; in some hour of stress it will tumble about his ears. Literally "his portion is with the unfaithful" (v. 46). (9) Judgment is according to light. Where much is given, as to the favored and to leaders, there much shall be required. Your greater trust requires not less but greater watchfulness, not less but greater fidelity (w. 47-48). These motives against the ungirt life, while These there clearly underUes them all in the mind of "f^^l^^ Jesus religious conviction, are still all, at the same mentally time, capable of definite ethical interpretation, and ^^ ^^^ ' belong, thus, clearly enough to his distinct ethical teaching. For ethical should certainly bring out the motives to conduct. The story of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate Luke had mingled with their sacrifices, and of those ^^ * ^~^' upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, with Jesus' 1/8 THE ETHICS OF JESUS question, " Think ye that these were sinners above all?" and his answer — "I tell you, Nay, but ex- cept ye repent, ye shall all in like manner perish," — is a plain double warning, first, against unchar- itable judgment of others on account of calamities that have come to them; and, second, and at the same time, a warning against forgetting the abso- lute need of life in oneself. No hiding behind another's sin can be of the slightest value. The clear impHcation of Jesus' teaching here is, once more, that of the necessity of the inward life ; life comes only from life ; one is to see to it that the seed of life is in himself. Nothing is accomplished except one repent, — get a new mind. The parable The parable of the barren fig tree (13:6-9), birren fig which immediately follows in Luke's presentation, tree. is plain warning against fruitlessness, mere harm- lessness of life. It is another revelation of Jesus* constant sense of the seriousness of life, of the earnestness of living. In Martineau's words, "The severe prerogatives of an existence half divine are ours, to wear away life in unproductive harmlessness is innocent no more." The fruitless life is not only itself useless, but cumbers ground that might nourish a fruitful life. The positive note is, thus, found unmistakably in this bit of the teaching of Jesus. He can find no satisfac- tion in a merely negative righteousness. The life must be positively fruitful. The lesson of the parable of the chief seats (14 : 7-1 1), " When thou art bidden of any man to a THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 79 marriage feast, sit not down in the chief seat," etc., The Jesus himself sums up in the sentence, " For ^f ^^^6**°° every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled ; humble, and he that humble th himself shall be exalted " (v. ii). We may be sure there is no exhorta- tion here to a shrewd, diplomatic pride that poses as humility, in order that it may be ex- alted; for nothing is so clear to Jesus as that there is no getting the real reward of character without character. Jesus speaks, thus, of real humility, and of real exaltation. No mere playing the part of the humble can secure real exaltation. This lesson of the exaltation of the humble is also the lesson in Luke's presentation of the par- able of the Pharisee and the publican, and the lesson there is less liable to perversion than in this more external parable of the chief seats at dinner. For in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, it is unmistakably clear that it is no outward con- duct, in any case, that Jesus has in mind, but the contrast between self-complacent pride and the humility of a genuine penitence. And as certainly as Jesus knows that the one spirit shuts out all possibility of growth and of reception of good from either God or men, so surely, on the other hand, he knows that the spirit of penitent humility is the very seed of all growth, of all achievement, of all real exaltation. The really humble^ he insists, shall be really exalted. We may be sure that the teaching of the two parables is practically identical. The truly humble soul, deeply dependent on God and the cost. 1 80 THE ETHICS OF JESUS open-minded toward men is taking the road of steady, inevitable growth in all that is best, is thus himself becoming steadily, inevitably larger and better ; and hence is really " exalted " whether men know it or not. And even the tribute of men to real worth is pretty certain to come; for the world needs, as it needs nothing else, real worth. The true measure, thus, and the true exaltation of a man is not sitting in the chief seats, but worthi- ness to sit in them. Counting The two parables of the rash builder and of the rash king (14:28-33), with their exhorta- tion to the counting of the cost, and Jesus' comment — " So therefore whosoever he be of you that renounceth not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple " — express, upon Jesus* part, the double conviction that there can be no discipleship of the true life that is not willing to count the full cost to the end, and that is not will- ing to renounce all claims on self. It is, thus, as though Jesus here said, Make no mistake as to what the demands of the true life mean; let there be no bUnding of the eyes to the real mean- ing of the call ; be ready for it all. Say with the glad abandon of a soldier in a great cause, of the undaunted seeker after truth, of the true lover, No call that can be made upon me can surpass my willingness to give (vv. 28-32). And this counting of the cost to the end means the renunciation of the selfish self, holding all one's powers at the bidding of truth and righteousness, THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE l8l like a soldier, like a friend. This devotedness of life calls for no mere giving up of things, but the giving up of the selfish will, the giving up of the selfish self (v. 33). No man can be even a true friend, who is not willing to give himself in the friendship, and this giving of the self is all that gives the highest value to the gift of other things. Of the same import is that other saying of The heroic Jesus, peculiar to Luke, — " No man, having put ^^^^ °^ ^^^^^' his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." (9:62). All who were to follow him in the life of truth and righteousness and self-sacrificing love, were to count the cost. Real kindness itself demanded that there should be no coaxing with sugar plums ; they were to understand how serious was the demand that he made upon them, how great the struggle to be made, how dead in earnest the men who would share in it must be. It is a part of Jesus' great belief in men that he does not hesitate to make these strenuously heroic calls and still expects men to heed and answer. There can be no halfway measures, he insists, in the moral life. This is also a part of his conviction of the inevitable unity of the spiritual life that we shall later see coming out so clearly in the Sermon on the Mount. I cannot help thinking that we have the same Girding thought applied by Jesus to himself in the saying, ^°^ ^"^^^' " I came to cast fire upon the earth ; and what do I desire, if it is already kindled ? But I have a baptism to be baptized with ; and how am I 1 82 THE ETHICS OF JESUS No flinch- ing from exacting service. Winning one's soul in patience. Straightened till it be accomplished ! " (12 : 49-50). Jesus clearly sees the stern crisis that awaits him, and he already girds himself for it. And to a spirit like this he urges every true man. Precisely akin is the parable of extra service (17 : 7-10). In this, as in any parable, the details are not to be pressed. Jesus is using this com- parison with a human master and servant to bring out the single point which alone is to be insisted upon, — that in the disciple of the righteous life there must be always patient readiness for the most exacting service. The parable, thus, is in- tended to suggest the spirit which is required in the man who means to live in thoroughgoing fashion the ethical life : he must humbly admit that, in any case, he is only fulfilling his duty and cannot claim to be bringing anything beyond what that duty requires (v. 10). With this parable of extra service, and its demand for patient readiness for the most exacting call, may be coupled the brief sentence, peculiar to Luke, in the eschatological discourse, " In your patience ye shall win your souls" (21 : 19). For this pregnant saying seems to have application quite beyond the crisis days of the destruction of Jerusalem, and to suggest the vigilant and stead- fast endurance unto the end that must mark all those who are to be accounted worthy disciples of the truth. In the two parables in chapter 16, Jesus con- tinues in the line of his general purpose of the THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 83 training of the Twelve (cf. i6: i), to bring them Teaching into his own spirit and thought, and to guard them ^eai™°^ against the insidious, ever present, and ever cor- rupting Pharisaic spirit. In these two parables Jesus centers his teaching on the point of the Pharisaic love of money (vv. 14, 10, 11, 19). For Jesus thinks of the spirit of avarice and covetous- ness as eating into all the rest of life, if allowed to take its course.^ The most of Luke's chapter i6, therefore, might be regarded as warning against the Pharisaic love of money, — an attitude which ignores the law of consequences, or, as teaching concerning the right use of money. All through this central section of the teaching of Jesus as given in Luke, is to be noted the self-evidence of the teaching of Jesus, as tracing out the inevitable inner consequences of the moral and spiritual laws of men's inner natures. The parable of the unrighteous steward (i6 : i- The parable 13) might be called the true use of riches, or, the r/ghteo"s' need of foresight in the spiritual life. The parable steward. has been the occasion of what Plummer rightly calls an " enormous and unrewarding literature." This parable is preeminently a case where the interpre- tation must be held to the one main point of the parable. If this point had been kept in mind, the literature upon it would have been less enormous and more rewarding. It is not pretended that the steward's procedure was right ; he is called " un- righteous." The single point of approval is of his 1 Cf. parable of the rich fool. 1 84 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The direct teaching of the parable. The need of foresight in the moral life. wise foresight in providing^ through his present opportunity, for the future. Jesus, in his comments on the parable (if we may trust the position given by the Evangelist to the remarks following), seems to have taken unusual pains to prevent a misuse of the parable, by a succession of clear points in verses 8-13. (v. 13, found also in Matthew, seems most likely to have been brought in here by the Evangelist as logically akin to the other comments.) It is perhaps not unlikely that some such actual recent case of a steward may have come under Jesus* observation, and led him to use it to urge — what must have constantly oppressed him (cf. 14 : 1 5-24) — the contrasted singular lack of foresight shown by men in their moral and spiritual life (v. 8); especially in the possible use of money (v. 9). The more clear-sighted and loving Christ was, the more must this stubborn, heart-breaking folly of men in the carelessness of their highest interests have oppressed him. He might well concentrate the whole force of one parable on the unspeakable folly of sin, rather than on its sinful- ness ; for words cannot adequately characterize that folly. The direct teaching of the parable and of the comments subjoined by Luke particularly concern our time, and may be thus indicated : (i) The 8th verse emphasizes particularly the lack a7id fieed of foresight in the moral and spiritual life, in which so generally there is no forecasting of the future or of the certain consequences of one's THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 85 action; no such prudent foresight as men con- stantly show in material affairs. Jesus is here protesting against a moral and spiritual shiftless- ness, a spiritual living from hand to mouth ; against the reckless jeopardizing of all that is most valu- able in life for the gratification of present desire ; against dooming oneself to endless regret, staking without foresight reputation, not only, but charac- ter, one's own happiness and life opportunity, and the happiness and honor of children, kindred, and friends as well. The questions suggested by this brief comment in the 8th verse are such as these : Are you providing for any certain growth in char- acter and faith, — carefully planning far ahead for a sure development of your highest life ? have you taken your bearings and seen the inevitable direction and trend of your present choices, your present tastes and enjoyments, your present habits of thought and life.** are you thinking what you are coming to .-* are you preparing for certain fruit in maturity, for an old age that shall not be filled with vain regret and repining ? are you investing in permanent values that will not decline, but rather continually grow in value ? (2) Jesus applies the principle especially to Making pointing out how royally even money can be used J^°^^y ^ in providing for one's future best self and service, in the rich store of friendships for all the future (v. 9). The exhortation here is to use your money (see the Revised Version) in such a way, in such friendly, loving service of men, that you shall be 1 86 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Training for greater trusts. From trust of the outer to trust of the inner. The necessary unity of life. making great investments of love and service, that are eternal, and the sure fruit of which shall be yours in all the future. We cannot carry our money, or the things which it can buy, with us through death into another life, but we can carry the results of its loving ministering use in eternal friendships. (3) Jesus further suggests that in the use of one's money one is being tested and trained in that which is comparatively "little," for trusts in matters far more important, for that which is "much." If you cannot be trusted to use un- selfishly money, — "a comparatively low form of power," 1 — how can you be trusted with far greater and richer powers, — power of prayer, power of deep moral and spiritual influence and leadership, — "the true riches" .? (vv. 10, 11). (4) Again, if you cannot be trusted to use unself- ishly money and material possessions — that which can never be in any full sense one's own — how can you be trusted with that which would be pe- culiarly and absolutely "your own," — greatly de- veloped inner capacities, intellectual, moral, and spiritual powers .•* (v. 12). (5) Once more, it is urged in close connection with the last thought, that one cannot serve God and mammon. The law is an inevitable one, growing out of the certain unity of the spiritual life (v. 13). This principle suggests that if you ^ Bosworth, Studies in the Teaching of Jesus and His Apostles^ p. 177. THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 87 are not using your money for service, if you are not subordinating all lesser goods to the great ends of the Kingdom, then you are really making money your god ; you cannot serve God and con- tinue in selfishness. On the other hand, the true service of God in the loving, ministering life de- livers from bondage to mammon and selfishness ; they cannot go together. Gladstone's comment on the lust for gold in times of war may be taken as an illustration of the fearful power of the greed of money in uprooting all ideals ; and modern life is full of similar illustrations. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus (i6 : 19- The parable 31) might have as its secondary title, the inevitable and Lazarus consequences in another life of the selfish use of money, and, upon the ethical side, it may be taken as illustrating the lessons of the preceding parable.^ The peculiar teaching in Luke is represented, of Summary course, mainly in the peculiar parables. The par- °°grace. ^^ ables of graces as we have called them, set forth a sympathetic, forgiving love (the two debtors), an active, ministering love that is willing to put itself out (the Good Samaritan), and a love that cares, that longs, that seeks, that grieves over loss and rejoices over finding (the parables of the lost coin and the lost son). The parables of warning set forth the folly of Summary heaping up things instead of enlarging one's life ^J" ISni'ng! (the rich fool), the necessity of vigilant watchful- ness (the watchful servants), the condemnation of 1 Cf. Dods, The Parables of Our Lord^ Second Series, pp. 167 ff. i88 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Comparison with doubly attested sayings. fruitlessness (the barren fig tree), the humiliation of the proud and the exaltation of the humble (the chief seats, and the Pharisee and the publican), the necessity of counting the cost of attainment in character (the rash builder and the rash king), the folly of the lack of foresight in the spiritual life, especially in the use of money, and the law of consequences in the selfish use of money (the un- righteous steward, and Dives and Lazarus), and the demand for patient readiness for exacting serv- ice (the parable of extra service). When one compares the teaching in these sec- tions peculiar to Luke with the ethical notes brought out in "the laws of life" set forth in the doubly attested sayings, he cannot fail to see the manifest kinship of this teaching peculiar to Luke, and find the same great ethical emphases recurring. The laws of Ufe set forth in those sayings, we saw, gathered about the moral end^ the moral evidencey and the moral means. And those laws meant as to the end or goal of life that we could build con- fidently on faith in the moral trend of the uni- verse, on love at the very heart of the world, and therefore on faith that love is life. The law as to moral evidence meant that one was to be abso- lutely true to his inner sense of obligation, to his own best vision. And as to moral meanSy these laws meant for oneself that one was not to forget the unity of his nature and the absolute necessity of a genuine inner life of his own, and to this end was to be dead in earnest, remembering the law of THE TEACHING PECULIAR TO LUKE 1 89 habit and the law of efficiency in seeking his one goal, — the reign of an unselfish love in his own life. And that in relations to others it meant equal earnestness of life, the recognition of the law of the contagion of the good, of the necessity of witness in the sharing of the good, of reverence for the person, and of priority by service, in the fulfilment of a self -giving love. Every one of these notes, it may fairly be said, All these is to be found in this peculiar teaching in Luke, "^ Luke^°^ and confirmed and extended. Nowhere quite so perfectly, in the first place, is the ground laid for faith in the love of God, in love at the heart of the world, as in the story of Simon and the woman and the parable of the two debtors, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the parable of the lost coin, and above all, the parable of the lost son. No- where more surely is love revealed as life itself. And in these all, as well as in the parables of warning, there is in marked degree that direct inner appeal upon which Jesus everywhere relied as the sole moral evidence needed. The parables of warning all illustrate the thoroughgoing ear- nestness of Jesus' ethical conception and demand, and the need of vigilant watchfulness. And the other demands upon one's own life are practically all reflected, also, in these parables of warning. Judged by the criterion of the doubly attested Conclusion, sayings, there seems to be no good reason for call- ing in question the genuineness of the general tenor of the peculiar teaching in Luke, though it 1 90 THE ETHICS OF JESUS is possible that, as we have found in Matthew, the eschatological coloring of certain passages may have been unconsciously deepened by the inherited presuppositions of the writers, and of those from whom their traditions were obtained. CHAPTER V THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS A WHOLE. In turning, in the three chapters following, to the Sermon on the Mount, we enter a field in which very many have worked, through all the Christian centuries. As to critical positions, we may properly build directly upon the exhaustive study of Professor Votaw,^ written in the light of all the literature upon this Sermon. I may do this the more properly because I find myself in so general agreement with Professor Votaw's conclu- sions, confirmed, as they are at most points, by at least a large consensus of scholars, and by two of the latest Studies in this field.^ In the first place, then, it may be said that " it Genuine- is the prevailing opinion among New Testament ^ea^^Wn^^ scholars that in Matthew 5-7 we have an account here, of a discourse actually delivered by Jesus, the theme and substance of which are here preserved." ^ Harnack believes that 58 out of the 97 verses in Matthew's account of the Sermon were found in Q, and thinks that it may be said with certainty 1 H. D. B., extra volume. 2 Allen, International Critical Comtnentary^ Matthew ; Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus. 3 H. D. B., extra volume, p. i. 191 192 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Passages not in the original discourse. " that even in Q, large portions of the Sermon on the Mount occurred together." ^ And of those passages of the Sermon on the Mount which stood in Q, he says further, *' We notice scarcely any- thing which might not pass as primary tradition." ^ Of all this material in Q he says still more emphati- cally, " Judged in detail and as a whole, all that is presented as teaching of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount bears the stamp of unalloyed genu- ineness.^ Doubtless some elements are brought into Mat- thew's version of the Sermon *' which did not form a part of the original discourse." And this changed connection may, at certain points, affect the impression made by the passage.* There is no reason, however, to question even these sayings as genuine sayings of Jesus, and they are there- fore available for our purpose, whether they were parts of the original discourse or not. In Votaw*s language, " The added matter is just as valuable and trustworthy as the nucleus matter, being equally the authentic utterances of Jesus." ° * The Sayings of/esus, p. 74. 2 Op. cit, p. 200. 8 Qp^ cit^^ p_ 209. * The passages concerning which there has been most doubt as to whether they form a part of the original Sermon are 5 : 25, 26, 31,32; 6:7-15; 7:6,7-11,22-23. ^ Op. cit., p. 2. The main caution to be observed as to Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount is to be seen in Allen's remark : " It is clear that the editor [of our gospel of Matthew] regarded the Mosaic law as still binding in all its details on Christian men. Now it is probable that we must make allowance here for some overemphasis due to local and national prejudice, which inter- THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS A WHOLE 1 93 It may be further regarded as practically settled Matthew's for our study of the Sermon on the Mount that ''^'"r'' ^ -^ preferred. Matthew and Luke give " essentially one dis- course. . . . This is the almost unanimous opin- ion of scholars." ^ Some, at least, of the reasons for Luke's omissions may be reasonably dis- preted Christ's sayings in the direction which the history of the Jewish people seemed to warrant, and which took effect in the selection, and arrangement, and interpretation of such of his sayings as lent themselves to the impression which it was desired to pro- duce." Illustrations of this tendency in the Sermon on the Mount he finds in 5 : 18-19, — " One jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law," etc., and in 5 : 32, in the addition of the phrase "saving for the cause of fornication" (art. "Matthew," D. C. G., vol. II, p. 148). Cf. 5: 18-19. Allen says, "It is quite probable that verses 18 and 19 are genuine sayings of Christ spoken on some occasion when their meaning could not be mistaken, as a paradoxi- cal expression of the permanent value of the moral elements in the Old Testament. But as they now stand they hopelessly confuse the plain tenor of the Sermon." (^Op. cit.y p. 149.) To similar import Votaw says as to the relation of Jesus to the Old Testament law, that in verse 17 — "Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets : I came not to destroy, but to fulfil " — " Jesus could only have meant that he came to fulfil the law and the prophets by first perfecting them and then accomplishing them. This is now the generally accepted interpretation." But as to verses 18 and 19 Votaw adds, " An increasing number of scholars have come to ques- tion the precise authenticity of the utterances as they stand reported in Matthew 5 : 18-19. • • • The two verses seem to have a real nucleus of something said by Jesus on this occasion. But a certain Jewish- Christian coloring they may have received in transmission. ... What these verses now say is inconsistent with Jesus' other teaching and with his practice regarding the Old Testament law " (H. D. B., extra volume, pp. 24, 25). With the exception of these two verses, in their literal interpretation, there is perhaps nothing else in the entire Sermon in Matthew that need be called in question as genuine sayings of Jesus. ^ Votaw, op. cit., p. 3. o 194 THE ETHICS OF JESUS cerned.^ Matthew's version is preferred and fol- lowed in our study here, because, in Votaw's lan- guage, he " presents a much more complete account of the Sermon," and "in wording a like ver- dict of superior excellence falls to the Gospel of Matthew. . . . There are many indications that Matthew gives the better record. . . . There would seem, therefore, to be no room for ques- tion that, historically considered, the Sermon as given by Matthew is of much greater authenticity than the Sermon of Luke. ... In this prefer- ence for the Matthean report of the Sermon, nearly all scholars are now agreed." ^ We may turn, then, with assured conviction, to Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount as containing in its practical entirety, with the excep- tions already noted, genuine teaching of Jesus. For our ethical study it is not, in any ordinary case, of special importance whether the passages originally all occurred in this connection or not. The material, however, will be more clearly grasped by presenting it, in the first place, in an outline of the whole ; and there are presented, therefore, here, my own outline, and for compari- son, the very suggestive outline given in Professor Votaw's article.^ 1 Cf. Votaw, op. cit.y p. 7; Adeney, art. " Sermon on the Mount," D. C. G., vol. II, p. 609. 2 Votaw, op. cit., pp. 7, 8, 9, 10. This judgment of Votaw is confirmed by Harnack's study of Matthew and Luke's treatment of Q, in his The Sayings of Jesus, pp. xii, 37. 8 Cf. also Bacon, The Sermon on the Mounts pp. 85 ff.j Gore, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. xi-xii. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS A WHOLE 1 9$ OUTLINE OF THE SERMON Matthew 5:3-7: 27 The Principles of the Kingdom set forth in Contrast WITH THE Spirit of the Times. I. The subjects of the Kingdom. 5 : 3-16. A. Their character, the source of their blessedness. 5:3-12. B. The hope of the world. 5 : 13-16. II. The righteousness of the Kingdom of Heaven. 5 : 17-7 : 27. A. Inward righteousness. The Izxg&si fulfillment of the law as contrasted with the practice and interpreta- tion of the Pharisees. 5 : 17-48. Introduction. The theme, vv. 17-20. 1. Not only no killing, but no spirit of hatred, vv. 21-26. 2. Not only no adultery, but no impurity of thought. vv. 27-32. 3. Replacing oaths by simple truthfulness, vv. 33-37. 4. Not only no retaliation, but service outrunning selfish demands, vv. 38-42. 5. Universal love like God's. Summary conclusion. vv. 43-48. B. Righteousness unto the Father j in the inward, filial spirit, as contrasted with Pharisaic righteousness before men. ch. 6. 1. Secret alms, as unto the Father. VV.-2-4. 2. Secret prayer, as unto the Father, vv. 5-15. 3. Secret fasting, as unto the Father, vv. 16-18. 4. Heavenly treasure in single-hearted and trustful service of God. Summary conclusion, vv. 19-34. C. The righteousness of the sacred reverence for the per- son. 7 : 1-14. I. Judging oneself, not irreverent judging of others. vv. 1-5. 196 THE ETHICS OF JESUS 2. Reverence for one's own personality, v. 6. 3. Reverent trust in the Father's reverent love. vv. 7-1 1. 4. The all-embracing law of love. Reverencing other* as yourself, v. 12.^ 5. The consequent narrow entrance to the Kingdom. vv. 13-14. Summary conclusion. The true and false subjects contrasted. " By their fruits." 7 : 1 5-27. Jesus' discoveries in the Sermon. PROFESSOR VOTAW'S OUTLINE Theme: The Ideal Life: its Characteristics, Mission, AND OUTWORKINGS, AND THE DUTY OF ATTAINING It. A. The ideal life described. Matt. 5 : 1-16. Luke 6 : 20-26. a. Its characteristics. Matt. 5 : 1-12. Luke 6: 20-26. b. Its mission. Matt. 5 : 13-16. B. Its relation to the earlier Hebrew ideal. Matt. 5 : 17-20. C. The outworkings of the ideal life. Matt. 5:21-7: 12. Luke 6 : 27-42. a. In deeds and motives. Matt. 5 : 21-48. Luke 6 : 27-30, 32-36. b. In real religious worship. Matt. 6 : 1-18. c. In trust and self-devotion. Matt. 6: 19-34. d. In treatment of others. Matt. 7 : 1-12. Luke 6:31,37-42. D. The duty of living the ideal life. Matt. 7 : 13-27. Luke 6 : 43-49- Side by side with these outlines of the entire thought of the Sermon on the Mount may well be put what may be called the spiritual discover- ies of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, those main contentions of the teaching here considered, 1 Cf. Votaw, op. ciL, p. 42 : " Let each man respect the individ- uality and observe the rights of every other man." THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS A WHOLE 1 9/ which, while often not absolutely originating with him, yet are here carried out in a way nowhere else to be found. For, as previously intimated, the originality of Jesus does not consist in the fact that no one else has said anything that he says, but that he discerns with such unerring cer- tainty what is truly significant, and sifts it out from the less significant, giving it its due prominence and carrying the principle through to the end, consistently and thoroughly. So Votaw says, "Jesus' originality — and the term is not mis- applied — consisted in his divine ability to sepa- rate the true from the false, the permanent from the transient, the perfect from the imperfect; and then to carry forward the whole circle of ideas and practices to their ideal expression." ^ The rabbinical parallels to isolated utterances do The not gainsay this marked quaHty of originaHty in o" jesus*^ Jesus ; for, in Wellhausen's words, " The originality of Jesus consists in this, that he had the feeling for what was true and eternal amid a chaotic mass of rubbish, and that he enunciated it with the greatest emphasis." 2 1 op. cit., p. 34. 2 Quoted by Stewart, art. " Originality," D. C.G., vol. II, p. 290. Cf. J. E. Carpenter, The First Three Gospels, pp. 316, 321, 322, 328; Harnack, What is Christianity ?, pp. 63 ff., 68, 70, 71 ff.; 'Loizt,The MicrocosmuSy vol. II, pp. 470 ff.; Wundt, The Facts of the Moral Life, p. 291 ; Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Christian Character^ p. 118; Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, p. 178; Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, vol. I, pp. 332, 337, 339, 350; Jiilicher, Paulus und Jesus ; McGiffert, " "Was Jesus or Paul the t'ounder of Chris- tianity? " American Journal of Theology, January, 1909, pp. 18-20. 1 98 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Points of For myself, I should say that the question of origina ity. ^^^ originality of the teaching of Jesus is not prop- erly the question of the origin of a phrase. It need not surprise us, as Lotze has suggested, to find con- siderable similarity in ways of putting the same moral precepts. Nor is there any need that one should lack the fullest appreciation of all the ele- ments of value in non-Christian systems. Jesus* great originality lies not in the fact that there are no anticipations in any degree of even those elements of his teaching that are essentially pe- culiar, but rather in his marvelous supremacy when brought into comparison with all other moral and religious teachers ; in the wonderful unity of life and teaching and influence ; in his deep insight into the very heart of all life, into the secret of all living. One finds in him no elaborate deductions, no painstakingly preserved system, but rather an insight so complete as to allow even scattered maxims to be brought into a perfect unity, with- out contradictions and without inconsistencies. In particular, to put the matter in the briefest compass, I should say: — (i) That Jesus' teaching, in a peculiar degree, gives unity to the spiritual life in its conception of love as fulfilling all righteousness. And the obligation of universal love is peculiarly its con- tribution to the ethical thought of the world. (2) As Lotze has suggested,^ it really gives much deeper meaning to the things in which it 1 Op, dt,i vol. II, pp. 470-472. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS A WHOLE 1 99 seems to agree with other religions. The moral law becomes the will of the personal Father. (3) Practically, it may be said to add a whole new realm of morality — that of the so-called pas- sive virtues of the Beatitudes. (4) It brings into morality an absolutely new spirit — the spirit of the free and joyful obedience of a child to the Father. (5) It may be added, as Romanes suggests, that the teaching of Jesus is equally remarkable for what it does not contain. He speaks, therefore, of " the absence from the biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth of human knowledge — whether in natural science, ethics, political economy, or elsewhere — has had to dis- count. This negative argument is really almost as strong as is the positive one from what Christ did teach." (6) But the great and unique contribution which, above all else, Jesus makes to ethics and religion is himself. No personality can for an instant be placed beside his as worthy of comparison with him; and therein lies the great, peculiar, unique contribution of Jesus to the moral and religious life. (7) In close connection with this it is to be said that the world's experience with Christianity has amply proven, also, Jesus' peculiar power to make his moral teaching effective in the lives of men. This power of moral energizing, Lecky, for ex- ample, explicitly recognizes, and it lies on the face 200 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The spiritual discoveries of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. of the historical record. In Fairbairn's words, ** Love to him is the only thing in the region of moral motive that can be described as an imperish- able yet convertible force, whose changes of form never mean decrease of energy or loss of power." ^ And it is this kind of originality which justifies us in speaking here of the spiritual discoveries of Jesus, as contained in the Sermon on the Mount.^ These spiritual discoveries of Jesus may be thus phrased : ^ — I. The nature of true righteousness. (i) The indissoluble unity of the ethical and religious life ; the proof of relation to God is fruit in life. 5 : 3-12, 20, 23-24, 45> 48 ; 6 : I, 2 ; 7:12, 20-27. The necessity of mental and spiritual independence — the authority of self-evident truth. " But I say," etc. 5 : 3-12, 17, 22, 28, 34, 39, 44; 6:1, 7, 9-13, 22-24, 25 ; 7 : 12, 21-23, 24-27, cf. 29. The true righteousness is inner always. 5 : 17-48. Love is the sum of righteousness — sharing God's (5=) (3) (4) 1 See Fairbairn's whole strong summary of the verdict of history on Christ, in his The Place of Christ in Modern Theology^ pp. 378- 382. 2 For our detailed ethical study, however, we may omit the sections distinctly religious (Matt. 6:5-21, 25-34; 7:7-11), as well as three brief passages covered in previous discussions (5 : 13, 29-30» 31-32). * Cf. the summary of Jesus' services to morality in The Creed of Christ, 'p'^' 125 ff.; Bacon, The Sermon on the Mount; Wendt, The Teaching offesus, vol. II, pp. 388 fF. ; Anthony, " The Ethical Prin- ciples of Jesus," Biblical World, July, 1909; Swete, Studies in the Teaching of Our Lord, ^^. 184-185; Schmiedel, /(fx«5 in Modern Criticism, pp. 90-91; Brooks, The Influence of fesus, pp. 28 fF.; Burton, " Jesus as a Thinker," Biblical Worldy October, 1897, PP* 245 ff.; Ecce Homo, pp. 195 ff. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS A WHOLE 201 own life. Do always and only what love requires. 5 : 44-48, 39-42. (5) A deep reverence for the priceless value and sacred- ness of the person is fundamental. 7:1-14. Cf. 5 : 8, 22, 28, 32, 45.1 2. Inferences from the Beatitudes. (i) Christ's deep optimism. Happiness is possible to men even with suffering. 5 : 3-12. (2) The discovery of a whole new division of happiness, the happiness of a deep and abiding faith and hope and love. 5 : 3-12. (3) The prime conditions of happiness lie in character, and can be definitely pointed out — the qualities of the Beatitudes. 5 : 3-12. (4) The discovery of a new continent of virtues, as well, hardly recognized by the ancient world — the mis- called "passive" virtues. 5 13-12.2 (5) These are made the fundamental virtues — the facets of the one jewel of love. 5 : 3-12.^ (6) Upon just these, summed up in love, society must be built. 5 : 13-16.* 3. Motives to living. (i) The inevitable unity oi a man's inner life; the de- mand for thoroughgoing consistency of life. 5:18, 19, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 37, 48 ; 6 : 4, 6, 22-24 ; 7 : 5» 12, 13, 14. (2) At the heart of the world and life is a God, who is a loving Father of all. 5 : 45, 48.^ iCf. l^oiie, Practical Philosophy, pp. 68, 74, 78 ff.; T.B. Strong, Christian Ethics, pp. 129-134; Ecce Homo, pp. 155 ff., 176, 266- 269, 345; Murray, Handbook of Christian Ethics, pp. 91 ff. 2 Cf. Bushnell, Sermons for the New Life, pp. 399 ff. 3 Cf. King, The Laws of Friendship, ch. XV. * Cf. Rauschen- busch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, pp. 67 ff. 5 Cf. Bousset, fesus, p. 114: "No shallow optimism;" Gladden, The Church and Modern Life, pp. 15, 48, 162 ff.; Harnack, What is Christianity ?, pp. 63 ff.; Brooks, The Influence of fesus, pp. 12, I5» 20. 202 THE ETHICS OF JESUS (3) man is a Summary on these main con- tentions. (4) If God is Father, and love is life, every brother, and so to be treated. 5 : 22-24, 37? 39-42, 44-47. The law of God is a part of the revelation of the love of God. Not avoidance of the law, but completest fulfillment, is the way to life.^ The true extension of the law is not outer and mechanical, but in- ner and ideal. Ctr. danger from hedge of law. 5:17-48. The involved conception of the religious life. (i) The blessing of God is not an external reward to be earned by hateful tasks, but the inner, inevitable joy of the trustful and obedient spirit. Love is its own reward, since love itself is life, and life enlarges as one gives himself more fully and in more and larger relations. 5 : 17-48 ; 6 : 1-34 ; 7 : 1-27. If God is Father, the religious life inevitably takes on a new spirit of desiring simply the true filial rela- tion to him (cf. 5 : 45) — a fact of the inner life with its inner reward (6: i, 4, 6, 18), not possibly a show before men. Every religious act must there- fore be a genuine desire for a drawing near to God, not a showing off before men which vitiates it all. 6:1-18. If God is Father, the religious life becomes one of natural, single-hearted, complete trust in the Father. The silent moral and spiritual forces may be abso- lutely trusted. 6 : 19-34 ; 7 : 7-1 1. (2) (3) This statement of the main contentions of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount brings out distinctly a number of the emphases already noted in other parts of the teaching of Jesus : the ethical concep- tion of religion, the necessity of mental and spirit- ual independence, the inevitable inwardness of the 1 Cf. Drummond, TAe Ideal Life, p. 275. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS A WHOLE 203 moral life, the demand for reverence for the person, and the summary of the true life in love. It is not necessary to return to these points in detail, but the clearness and strength with which they are here set forth should be noted. These principles, in- deed, permeate the entire Sermon, as will be seen in the special discussions to follow. Passing over the conception of the religious life here involved, our discussion then naturally turns to a more detailed study, in the next chapter, of the Beatitudes as giving the basic qualities of life, and in chapter VII to a study of the great motives of Jesus as set forth in the entire Sermon. CHAPTER VI Definition of basic qualities. The answer in the Beatitudes. Character. Happiness. JESUS' CONCEPTION OF THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE : A STUDY OF THE BEATITUDES. What are the basic qualities in life ? That is, what are the qualities essential to character, to hap- piness, and to influence ? The question is absolutely- vital. Has a precise and commanding answer ever been given ? The Beatitudes of Jesus, I suppose, are intended to give just such an answer. In them, the supreme artist in living, facing the whole problem of life for all men, distinctly challenges the ruHng conceptions of his time, and definitely points out the qualities of character that must mark the citizen of the coming civilization of brotherly men ; and declares that these quaUties are at the same time the supreme conditions of happiness^ and that they contain as well the secret of all powerful influence for good. Oppressed with the false standards as well as with the false acts of men, he has begun his preaching with the charge : Repent, get a new mind. That new mind and character he defines in the Beatitudes. The man who speaks is no enemy of life or of men. Rather rejoicing in life himself, and con- scious of the power to bring the largest life to 204 THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 205 Others, he has looked out on the multitudes with compassion, as sheep having no shepherd, eager for happiness, but seeking it in desert places, utterly mistaking its real conditions. Those real condi- tions of happiness, he points out in the Beatitudes. Clearly conscious, also, of his call to revolution- influence. ize the selfish civilization of the world, he seeks those men, who shall be the salt to preserve the world sound, the light to enlighten its darkness, the quickening yeast to permeate its every ele- ment, the living seed of the great organic kingdom that is to come. And he is certain that only men marked by the qualities of the Beatitudes can so count in the world. Elsewhere he shows that he believes that the Love as whole law of righteousness can be summed up in ^^^ °^ ^ * love — to God and to men. Moreover, he has such faith in men, that he is certain that no abiding happiness can come to the unloving. And he also definitely sets before himself as the world-goal that civilization in which men shall recognize themselves as children of God and as brothers one of another — the civiHzation of the loving life. One single need and one remedy for the life of the world — to live the life of love ! Here are character, happi- ness, influence. So simply, so deeply, he sees the problem. But here in the Beatitudes, as though still The eie- further to simplify the problem, he attempts to J^^g^^°^ analyze into its elements this all-inclusive virtue of love, to give its different aspects — the facets of 206 THE ETHICS OF JESUS this one priceless jewel. Or, perhaps rather, he wishes to indicate the steps of progress in the lov- ing life, from its beginning in open-minded humil- ity to its climax in a life of courageous self-sacrifice. And he plainly aims, besides, to show just how these constituent qualities bless the life into which they come. And, once more, having so defined the meaning of the loving life, and shown it to be the unfailing source of true happiness, he goes on to say that men characterized by just these qualities are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the most powerful and beneficent influences in the on- going life of men. Jesus' map The Beatitudes, then, are Jesus' " map of life." of life. Positive, simple, inner, deep, they cut quite under the decalogue of the Old Testament, and remain, even in the New Testament, the most perfect ex- pression, in words, of "the life that is life indeed" — the life that is really worth while. And no man who wishes to be what he ought, to enjoy what he may, to count as he can, may wisely ignore them. The In other words, the clearest seer of the spiritual Beatitudes jjf^ ^^isit the world has ever known, definitely sets as giving , -' the basic forth in the Beatitudes what he regards as the qualities. really basic qualities of life, and says straightly : Just here is the secret of character, of happiness, of influence. Here, then, are our chart and our sailing orders.^ 1 As we take up the Beatitudes in detail, we may well bear in mind Tholuck's wise suggestion : " There can be no doubt — and this should be carefully noted — that all the ideas which meet us THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 20/ I. Character. And, first, here are the elements of true character. (i) The qualities involved. Just what are these qualities which Jesus here singles out as funda- mental in life ? The quality, *' poor in spirit," recalls the current The use of the term "poor" as applied to *' the party SJ^e^g^t"^ of the faithful and God-fearing Israelites." ^ It Beatitude, describes " the man who has a deep sense of his spiritual deficiency and dependence upon God." ^ Ethically characterized, the poor in spirit are the humble, the teachable, the open-minded, and in- clude as well the trustful. They are to be con- trasted with those who are filled with pride, conceit, self-satisfaction, and self-will. Nor is the humble spirit, in Jesus' view, one of false self-depreciation. Rather it is a fundamental conviction of Jesus', permeating all his teaching, that every man is to know the worth of his own being and calling as a child of God, and to rejoice in it; but he also knows that to each of his brethren, too, belong his unique personality and calling. Rejoicing, then, in his own mission and message, he must recognize equally those of others, and be glad in the larger life and service that are open to him through them. here in the Sermon on the Mount, those of the Kingdom of God, the righteousness of that Kingdom, the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, seeing God, etc., were no new ideas, but well-known ones, of which Christ only revealed the deepest meaning." (Quoted by Votaw, op. cit., p. 17.) 1 See Driver, art. "Poor," H. D. B., p. 20. 2 Votaw, op. cit., p. 1 7. 208 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The quality of tiie second Beatitude. The quality of the third Beatitude. So seeing, he cannot "think of himself more highly than he ought to think." And, thus, with frank self-respect, he is as frankly humble, teachable, persistently open-minded toward all others. This quality of humble teachableness is fitly placed first in this sketch of the ideal life, for it is the first es- sential of all growth into better things. It is the door of entrance to the kingdom of science, as well as to the Kingdom of Heaven. The true character must have humility as a chief corner-stone. Since all the other Beatitudes touch upon defi- nitely moral qualities, it seems clear that, by those that mourn, Jesus means those who sorrow for their sins, who are conscious of their defects, and lament them, who are genuinely repentant. His interest is in inner qualities of character that carry with them inevitable blessing.^ They are to be con- trasted with those who are without scruple, and who feel free to follow every impulse without com- punction. Penitence is the negative side of that ** new mind " that Jesus expects to find in the true man. It implies that persistent sensitiveness of conscience that is both the condition and the effect of steady duty-doing even in little things. No progress in character is possible where such penitence is lacking. The meek are set over against those who are perpetually jealous of their rights, and as persist- ^Cf. Tholuck, quoted by Votaw, op, cif.^ p. 19; and Allen, International Critical Commentary^ St. Matthew, UNlVEK5>ii T a OF ^ "the basic qualities of life 209 ently claiming everything for themselves, — those of brazen assurance. As contrasted with these, the meek do not press even their plain rights ; but un- der the provocation of the invasion of their rights, maintain their self-control, and bear and forbear, "enduring all things." Meekness is, thus, self- control at its highest power. This is clearly im- plied in the three best definitions of meekness I have ever seen. Meekness, Thomas says, " is the soul in the majesty of self-possession, elevated above the irascible, the boisterous, and the revengeful." So Bishop Moberly writes, " Divine meekness re- quires strength, self-control, tranquil courage, and all these in a high degree." And Beecher says : " It is the best side of a man under provocation maintaining itself in the best mood, and controlling all men." " In any given man, meekness is the strongest mood in which he can carry himself."^ Meekness, then, let us be sure, is no milk and water virtue, and still less a superfluous virtue. It is a root-virtue, and essential to the strong man. To " hunger and thirst after righteousness " — The not mere reputation — implies persistent eagerness 3^e^/o^r°h for high character. Hunger and thirst are import- Beatitude, unate and imperative ; and this Beatitude requires, 1 This element of self-control in meekness is clearly brought out in Findlay's admirable article, "Meekness," D. C. G., p. 159 : " It is the spirit of one who is not easily provoked, but keeps under control the natural instinct to assert oneself and to retaliate." Even the quality of patient and calm endurance under affliction and persecu- tion, which other commentators are inclined here to emphasize, it is to be noted, really involves strong self-control. P 210 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The quality of the fifth Beatitude. The quality of the sixth Beatitude. therefore, the insatiable desire for character itself, the unfailing pursuit of the best in conduct and inner spirit. This is the positive side of the " new- mind," and involves especially thoroughgoing hon- esty. Its goal is complete integrity of character. It is in dead earnest in its fight for character. This spirit is the direct opposite of that which has no care for character, which harbors sin unchecked, which desires only the reward of righteousness, not righteousness itself. To be hungry and thirsty for real righteousness means that the deepest trend of one's being is set toward the righteousness of God. Evidently such a spirit is indispensable to the highest attainment in character. The merciful are the compassionate and sympa- thetic. They are set over against the tyrannical, the hard, and the intolerant. Mercy involves not only pity and courtesy, but positive kindness. It implies an understanding of men, and a judgment kindly, because intelligent and sympathetic. It is far more than any mere outward treatment ; it is merciful to the inner person. And such real mercy is no easy accomplishment. One can count upon it only from the best — from those who know out of their own experience what temptation and struggle mean. Every human relation calls aloud for such mercy. The pure in heart — as the phrase plainly im- plies — must have inner purity.^ Jesus clearly be- 1 1 cannot doubt that, in harmony with the other Beatitudes, Jesus has in mind here a specific quality of the righteous life, not THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 211 lieves that such purity in heart can belong only to those who have a deep reverence for the sacred- ness of the person — who are reverent throughout and under the severest temptation. And social purity is one of the chief forms of such purity in heart. No love is a pure love that lacks some real reverence — to which the one loved is not really sacred. And a pure love becomes, for this very reason, the strongest of all human motives to self-control. The pure in heart recognize the child of God in every soul, and treat him, accordingly, not as a thing but as a holy person. How absolutely fundamental is this spirit, every thoughtful student of moral growth, whether in the individual or in the race, well knows. simply a general description of that life. While emphasis is laid upon its necessary innerness, the Beatitude calls for the specific quality of purity, as involving everywhere a deep reverence for the person. Without this, only a negative purity, quite unsatisfying to Jesus, is achieved. This Beatitude, therefore, seems to me to be quite inadequately dealt with by most writers. I have long be- lieved that the positive side of purity could not be truly charac- terized without bringing into prominence the spirit of reverence for the person, as essential to it. I was glad, therefore, to have this judgment confirmed by the clear insight of the article of Boys-Smith on " Purity," in the Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels. Building directly on Jesus' teaching, he says: "To make common, i.e., to vulgarize, is the way to make impure : profanity is the ruin of purity. A well-spring of living water, fenced about by reverence, — that is purity. When reverence is broken through . . . then purity is gone. . . . Reverence is the root from which purity grows; and never was the essential nature of purity set in more vivid contrast with that blind and brutal profanity which is its opposite, than in Christ's striking utterance, * Give not that which is holy to the dogs,' " etc., p. 459. 212 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The quality of the seventh Beatitude. The quality of the eighth Beatitude. The peacemaker is more than a peace-keeper. He belongs to that high order of men who are able to be reconcilers of their fellowmen, who actively promote peace among men, who enter into God's own work of bringing men into unity. They are set over against those who stir up strife and promote war, whether in large or small ways. They have no part in the activity of those of whom the Proverbs speak so contemptuously, — the whisperer, the meddler, the tale-bearer, the busybody, the tattler, and the mischief-maker. The peacemaker not only withstands hate, but positively promotes the reign of love among men. The peacemaker plainly renders to society a- service of the highest value. " They that have been persecuted for righteous- ness' sake" include the noble array of all those who, for the sake of the promotion of righteous- ness and truth among men, have been willing to endure hardness, to face the trying experience of the pioneer in every realm, to give the one incon- testable proof of love that is found in sacrifice and suffering. It is no virtue for the lackadaisical, the luxurious, and self-indulgent. It sounds the call to heroic service, and it challenges all our easy- going piety with its uncompromising questions : Have you really sacrificed at all.? have you put yourself out anywhere ? have you really stood for your convictions, for right, and purity, and truth, at the risk of some unpopularity ? have you been in any sense a prophet.? have you spoken what THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 213 God gave you ? have there been at least the thou- sand little sacrifices of a loving heart, of a con- stant thoughtfulness ? How poverty-stricken, how swept clean of the best that life holds, would that world be in which this last Beatitude had no place. Plainly these are all basic qualities. Not one can be spared in the complete character. Looking, now, at the Beatitudes as a whole, and The order as a sketch of the highest character, Jesus seemis ^ ^^? , to have intended to indicate the completeness and unity of the character he has sketched by the very order of the Beatitudes. For myself, the perfec- tion of the grouping and of the order seems, in- deed, one of the best evidences of the accuracy of the record. (2) T/ie Beatitudes as a progress. I think it not fanciful to see that the eight Beatitudes fall into two groups of four each, of which the first group is personal, treating of the Kingdom of God in our own hearts ; and the second group, social, dealing with the Kingdom in our relation to others. Moreover, the eight taken together seem to form a definite progress, each quality leading up naturally to the one that follows, and each pre- supposing and containing in itself, in a way, all that have preceded. The Beatitudes as a prog- ress and a unity may be thus given : — Personal. 1. A teachable humility, v. 3. 2. Genuine penitence, v. 4. 214 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Humility and peni- tence. Self-control and per- sistent pur- suit of righteous- ness. Sympathy and rever- ence for the person. 3. Self-control at its highest power, v. 5. 4. A persistent eagerness for the highest character, v. 6. Social. 5. Sympathy with men. v. 7. 6. Deepest reverence toward men. v. 8. 7. Promoting love among men. v. 9. 8. Sacrificing for men. vv. 10-12. A teachable humility plainly belongs first. It is the first condition of all possible growth. It is that spirit of the little child without which one cannot enter the kingdom of righteousness at all. And such a spirit leads most naturally to peni- tence. And a true penitence, on the other hand, involves humility. So meekness, the self-control of the one who maintains himself at his best under provocation, requires as its chief aids the humble spirit and the penitent spirit. He will best bear with others, who best knows his own needs. And, on the other hand, this self-control at its highest, as a root-virtue of all virtues, prepares the way, there- fore, for the whole-souled pursuit of righteous- ness, of which the fourth Beatitude speaks. And, again, this persistent eagerness for the highest character implies humility, and penitence, and self- control. And all these personal qualities are carried over into the different expressions of the love toward men which follow. It is exactly the best, we have seen, those most eager for high attainment in char- acter themselves, who will be most merciful, most THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 21$ sympathetic with men. And, as humility is the first condition of personal growth, so intelligent sympathy with others is the first condition of the true social life, of fine personal relations, and of influence with men. The blessing upon the merci- ful, therefore, properly begins the group of social Beatitudes. And, because the earnestly righteous man must be sympathetic with men, especially in their struggle for character, he will stand against the two great foes of the loving life — lust and anger; and in true purity of heart be reverent toward men, and promote love among men. That reverence for the person, moreover, which is in- volved in purity of heart, is the second and the greatest condition of all high personal relations, and of all true influence, and' naturally stands sec- ond, therefore, in these basic social qualities. At the same time, it demands the highest righteous- ness in that relation that lies at the very basis of society ; and itself presupposes and requires sym- pathy with men. And, once more, he who reverently sees in each Peace- man a child of God must seek to promote peace ^^ ^^' and love among men. He can do no less than to aim to secure the prevalence of his own spirit of reverence, which saps at once all anger and jeal- ousy. Any deep and permanent peace-making in- volves purity in heart. And, finally, he who is in earnest in promoting Sacrificial the reign of peace and love among men must be ^°^^* prepared to sacrifice for men — to face suffering 2l6 THE ETHICS OF JESUS and persecution. And this sacrificial love includes all the qualities that have preceded, and builds upon them, and is itself their climax and final glorification. We know nothing higher than a courageous, suffering, sacrificial love. Summary. These, then, Jesus seems to say, are the basic qualities of character : teachable, penitent, self- 1 controlled, genuinely earnest in the pursuit of the highest, sympathetic with men, reverent toward men, promoting love among men, sacrificing for men. 2. Happiness. And just these same qualities Christ believes are the supreme conditions of hap- piness as well. Indeed, as the repeated " blessed " implies, he seems to have had this thought first of all in mind. He faced, as does every man, a code of the world, that runs much like this : — The world's Happy are the proud, for theirs is this world. Happy are the unscrupulous, for they shall need no comfort. Happy are those who claim everything, for they shall possess the earth. Happy are those who hold back from no sin, for they shall drain pleasure's cup. Happy are the tyrants, for they need no mercy. Happy are the impure, to whose lust no bound can be put, for they shall see many harlots. Happy are they who can stir anger unhindered, whose ambition is unchecked, for they shall be as gods. code. THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 21/ Happy are they who have never sacrificed, for theirs is all the world. And over against these judgments of the world Jesus' Jesus sets his own, in which he deliberately chal- Jhr^^orid' lenges and reverses every statement of this world's code, code. And the blessing — the happiness — that he promises, in each case grows inevitably out of the quality named. And it is just this inevitable connection that is here to be considered. He promises the highest good — the Kingdom Humility of God 1 — to the humble, not to the proud. For no ^^^^ ^j^"^'" good can be finally withheld from the teachable, happiness. since he possesses the prime condition of growth, and no limits can be set to his attainment. The growing life is the life of continuous youth and of continuous joy. The humble is open to the best that either God or man can give. Of course, then, potentially, the highest good is already his, as Jesus says. What source of happiness is more fundamental than this possibility of endless progress ? And how certainly is its great condition this single moral quality of teachableness ! So, too, Jesus is confident that it is not the un- Penitence scrupulous and the conscienceless to whom can f.^ ^ ^°^^' ^ ^ tion of come any final comfort. To lose sensitiveness of happiness. conscience is to lose, at the same time, that sensi- tiveness to personal relations which is the inevitable condition of all the finest and highest happiness. 1 Cf. Votaw, op. cit., p. 1 6, upon the blessings of Jesus as not merely eschatological. 2l8 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Meekness as a condi- tion of happiness. Reasons. It shuts one out inviolably from the best joys of the two greatest sources of happiness — work and friendship. Jesus knows that men are made on too large a plan to be really satisfied with an im- penitent life. They are made for personal rela- tions, made for love, made for work that is service ; and the soul that has no sorrow for its sins against love is shut out by flaming swords from any true paradise. The penitent alone shall be really com- forted — comforted with the only true comfort of the assurance of steady progress into that char- acter whose lack they mourn. The conscienceless man must live the life of a being continually baffled of the end for which it was made. The penitent spirit, the sensitive conscience, is an indispensable condition of the finest joys that the life of man affords. To the meek — those who in self-control main- tain themselves at their best, even under provo- cation — Jesus promises that they shall inherit the earth. Beginning as a ** popular phrase of the Hebrew covenant conception," ** after the Israel- ites had come into possession of Canaan, the conception was enlarged, and the phrase became figuratively used to designate an anticipated mate- rial, moral, and spiritual supremacy of the people of God on the earth." ^ Aside then from the religious hopes of a future life or new Messianic age, from the ethical point of view, there is here the promise, I suppose, that the meek shall really get the most 1 Vet aw, op. cit.t p. 19. THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 219 out of life now and here. He commends the quality as the one royal road to the best enjoy- ment of life, even as it passes. And this, I suppose, for several reasons. In the first place, because humility and penitence, the implications of meekness, and the spirit that refuses to make extravagant claims for self, themselves remove the chief sources of unrest and discontent; for, as Drummond says, "wounded vanity, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness, these are the old vulgar universal sources of man's unrest." Now these causes the spirit of meekness attacks at the root, and therefore tends naturally to give one some real opportunity for peace and joy. Moreover, the spirit of meekness with its im- plied humility, because it carries with it a modest estimate of self, escapes the feeling of being con- stantly slighted and offended. As it does not feel that everything is due to it, so it is content and cheerful, where pride and assumption would be only miserable. And such a spirit gets far more out of life. Reducing our pretensions is good counsel for cheerfulness. We may learn to be content. And, as modest and free from the envious spirit, the meek are able also to enter into the joy of others, and so to share in a very real sense in all joy. They own the world, as only such spirits can. The spirit of meekness, too, has a natural effect on others also. In the case of those who claim everything for themselves, others naturally oppose ; 220 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Thirst for character as a condi- tion of happiness. but one gives gladly to the meek. They readily secure the good-will of all, and so come easily and naturally into the best of life. Moreover, as self-control even under provocation, meekness has a very real contribution to make to the enjoyment of life. He rules all who rules himself. He has himself always in hand, and therefore loses no opportunity ; he can continually sacrifice the lower to the higher, the temporary to the permanent, and so find life meaning ever more and more to him. The largest inheritance cannot help being his. The best things in life are always only for the self-controlled. There is no possibil- ity of the highest attainment anywhere along any line without self-control. And, once more, meekness gets the most out of life in still another sense. It inevitably deepens the inner life of the man himself. Holding one- self perpetually at one's highest, in one's strongest mood, carries sure results in the self, in a steady deepening of the significance of life. Surely the meek shall inherit the earth. They get the most out of life even now and here. Meekness, doubtless, is a fundamental condition of happiness. Those that hunger and thirst after righteousness, Jesus pronounces blessed, because they shall be" filled, — filled with that for which they hunger, — genuine righteousness. They shall share the char- acter and so the life of God. Jesus evidently counts God's life as the life of highest blessedness THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 221 as well as of character; and he cannot conceive how any one can come, therefore, into the highest blessedness without coming at the same time into character. The promise here, then, is not merely some substitute for righteousness, some makeshift for it, some simply treating a man as if he were righteous, but by the divine co-working, the mak- ing of him righteous. The insatiable thirst for character shall be quenched. He who has this eager positive desire cannot be satisfied without real character. Not what men think him, but what he is troubles him. Is it tolerable to one that he should be proud, impenitent, contemptuous, cen- sorious, without self-control, false, impure, and unloving } Is his deepest ambition the ambition for righteousness.? God will not fail him. He shall be filled. It is the deadhest of all revelations of character, on the other hand, that one does not care for the best. And that means that he has definitely given up the highest end for which he was made ; he has strayed from his orbit ; he is fundamentally out of harmony with the aims of the universe in which he is ; he is at ceaseless war with God's own purpose of love. He has, therefore, made any deep and abiding happiness impossible. The deepest condition of happiness is the eager persistent pursuit of character. And the merciful shall obtain mercy — of God Mercy as and of men. "With what measure ye mete, it ^^o'''^'-''''' J ' of happiness shall be measured unto you." It is the unjust and Reasons. 222 THE ETHICS OF JESUS the unmerciful that provoke retaliation. The very bearing of the hard man calls out hardness. He does not even know how to make a gracious appeal for sympathy. We speak literally of such a one when we say, " He does not appeal to me." On the other hand, the habitual mood and man- ner of the sympathetic win ; they get mercy. He who has habitually entered with real sympathy into the life of others will not be left alone at the end. One may be admired, envied, deferred to, feared ; but if he has been unmerciful, his doom is coming ; even by men he will be left in the dread- ful loneliness of the selfish life. He will seek for mercy and not find it. He has cut the bonds that bind him to men. He abides alone. Brilliant, selfish, hard, scheming men get their reward even here. They have made impossible the best gifts of friendship — the surest source of happiness. And the unmerciful spirit works an even greater damage to the inner man. The fundamentally unmerciful are scarcely able to understand, to believe in, or to receive mercy, even of God. " Blessed are the merciful ; for they shall obtain mercy " — of men, of God. It is a practically universal law: men tend to respond in like coin to what you bring — mercy with mercy, frankness with frankness, deceit with deceit, distrust with distrust, insistence on legal rights with the same. " Be noble ! and the nobleness that lies In other men, sleeping, but never dead, THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 223 Will rise in majesty to meet thine own ; Then wilt thou see it gleam in many eyes, Then will pure light around thy path be shed And thou wilt nevermore be sad and lone." And the blessing of mercy has a yet deeper root. Man is made for personal relations. When he refuses that sympathy, without which personal relations can never deepen, he shuts the door upon happiness. He cannot be happy in hard lack of sympathy. Mercy is a prime condition of happiness. The blessing of the pure in heart is the vision Purity in of God — in ethical terms, the deepest and com- conditSn^ pletest revelation of personality. And to see God, of happiness. Jesus is sure, means great joy. Our highest joy is always joy in personal Hfe ; and the more rich and significant the personality, the greater the gift to Hfe which the revelation of that personality has to make. He who gets the vision of the riches of the life of God has, therefore, unfathomable re- sources of joy. And just this, Jesus insists, is the happiness of the pure in heart. Now it is no random promise which Jesus so Reverence makes. The connection between the quality and p^g^g/ the promised blessing is close and inevitable. Reverence for the person against strong passion naturally leads to the higher reverence to which God reveals himself. For all reverence is really of a piece ; since to see and recognize God in men ought naturally to give power to see God in him- self. To be pure in heart, therefore, is to see God. 224 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Deep Jesus' fundamental teaching of the fatherhood onT^toThe ^^ ^^^ brings us to the same result. For this reverent. means that God desires to reveal himself as fully as possible to men, and waits only for the capacity of vision in men. But the completest and deepest revelation of personality — human or divine — can be made only to the reverent. You do not reveal your best and hoHest to the profane, to the scorn- ful, to the heedless — to the irreverent. If you tried to do so, he could not receive it. The real meaning of the revelation lies quite beyond him. It is on this account, therefore, that Jesus must say, " Cast not your pearls before swine.'* To the reverent, then, shall be peculiarly given the vision of God. And reverence is found at its highest only in the pure in heart. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him." The way to Would One sce God ? Men have talked much of the " beatific vision," and have had many coun- sels for attaining seraphic experiences, and visions of God. Jesus seems to say, The way is nigh thee, at thy very hand. Say not. Who shall ascend into heaven, or descend into the deep ? Only he pure; recognize the child of God in every soul, and treat accordingly, not as a thing, but as a person. What nearness to God in such a victory ! You shall see me, Jesus seems to say, — right there, you shall find me. " Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these, my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me." And, ** He that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me." How quickly and inevitably a little God. THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 225 impurity clouds our vision of God. Reverence is our window manward, Godward ; impurity clouds it. This is, then, no chance connection. God reveals himself to the reverent soul, and most of all to that soul that is reverent throughout and under the severest pressure. Be right with men and you shall find God. " Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God." From the point of view of the ethical, this is a promise that the spirit of purity, as Jesus conceives it, is able to bring into life in peculiar degree the deep sense of the unity and harmony of life. Purity in heart is fundamental to the highest happiness. To the peacemaker Jesus promises the happi- Promoting ness of being recognized as the children of God ; ^Q^^^tj^^^ in ethical terms, as belonging to the highest in of happiness, character and life. Naturally so ; for the work of promoting peace and love among men is the very work of God himself. Those who enter preemi- nently into that work, share in God's own joy of giving, and not merely receiving; they enter as sons into the work and joy of the Father. Surely, they shall be, and be called, sons of God. Steadily there shall deepen for them the sense of their kin- ship with God, the high meaning of this highest personal relation. As they enter more and more into God's loving purpose for men, — into the work of the Spirit of God, their own sense of his love shall strengthen and the joy of the full con- sciousness of sonship be theirs. And they shall Q 226 THE ETHICS OF JESUS have the added joy, that men will increasingly rec- ognize their spirit and call them children of God. The unselfish, peace-making life shaJ not be per- manently misunderstood. The work of the peacemaker is a clear road to happiness. Sacrificial And Jcsus IS not afraid to face, even from the condi^on point of vicw of happiness, the quality called for of happiness, in the last Beatitude. In unfaltering tones he says : " Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake : for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He knows that men are made for love and for high action — for heroic service ; and that they cannot be really satisfied with less. Unhesi- tatingly, therefore, he appeals to the experience of the prophets, and he rings out to men the chal- lenge of his own heroic call — to take up the cross and follow him. " The cup that I drink ye shall drink." And like him, his disciples must be able to " take the cup and give thanks." Blind- ing himself in no way to the sins of men, no re- ligious teacher ever believed so much in the essen- tial possibihties and glory of men. There is no slightest trace of cynicism in him. He calls to courageous self-sacrifice, and yet expects loyal, enthusiastic following. He knows, as Hinton puts it, that "all pains may be summed up in sacrifice, and sacrifice is the instrument of joy." As George Eliot says, "We can indeed only have the highest happiness, such as goes with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 22/ much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves ; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we should choose above everything." This is only part of that great paradox of life which Jesus so plainly saw : He who would save his life must lose it. ** Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone." No wonder that Jesus promises to this coura- sharing geous, suffering, self-sacrificing love, the Kingdom ^°^'® ^^^' of Heaven, not merely potentially, as to the hum- ble, but actually. Joyful, self-sacrificing love ^as the kingdom, already possesses it in its own heart. Love is the supreme gift, and includes all else. It is life at its highest, God's own life, " the life that is life indeed." It never fails. This is the one eternal thing. To such, Christ must say, " Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom pre- pared for you from the foundation of the world." The best, the eternal best, belongs to love, is love. " Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake : for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," — the highest good. They share, as no others can, the full inner depth of the very mean- ing of the life and joy of God. Sacrificial love is the highest condition of happi- The ness. qj^^Jjt^^^ of the In all this, Jesus does not play with the prob- Beatitudes lem of human happiness. He loves men ; and ^on^^tfo^s he loves them too much to wish to cheat them of happiness. 228 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The qualities of the Beatitudes the natural conditions for influence. The in- fluence of the joyous life. with husks. He knows well that he who would make men deeply and permanently happy, cannot stop on the surface, as most pleasure-seekers and pleasure-makers do, but must pierce deeply to the heart of man's being, must see how great he is, and satisfy the greatest in him. The conditions of happiness, therefore, which he prescribes, are fundamental and thoroughgoing. Here, in the Beatitudes, are the great conditions of happiness of life. These qualities are the inevitable con- ditions of growth, and of the highest work and of the highest friendship ; and these alone insure happiness. 3. Influence. And here, not less, are the prime conditions of influence. For these qualities are, in the first place, the natural conditions for affect- ing others. The open-minded man, who is known to be without prejudice or one-sidedness, natu- rally carries special weight with others. And a modest sense of one's own defects disarms opposi- tion and makes possible a service to others that would be denied to self-conceit. He will most cer- tainly rule others who in severe self-mastery has himself in hand. The earnestness of the eager pursuit of righteousness carries conviction. Intel- ligent sympathy and a real respect for the person of another, the evident seeking of his good, and willingness to sacrifice for it, make your influence with him absolutely certain. As the great conditions of happiness, too, these qualities inevitably count with others. Happiness THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 229 itself attracts, wins, weighs with men. And that man, that by his joy shows that he is living the true, normal, harmonious life, cannot help being strongly influential. But when Jesus declares that those who have The con- these qualities of the Beatitudes shall be the salt ^e^goo*d of the earth and the light of the world, he is thinking, of course, of influence for good, influence in bringing on that great coming civilization of brotherly men, upon which he has set his heart. Here, obviously, those shall count most who already, in their characters, belong to that civili- zation. Character comes by contagion. We must be what we would have others become. Every such man as Jesus describes in the Beatitudes is a liv- ing seed of the coming civilization of brotherly men. And the men of these qualities count, besides, work for because these qualities involve work, immediate ^^^^^^s- and direct, for that coming civilization. Every stroke by such men counts in the upbuilding of the true society. They are not dreaming of the goal, or longing for the goal merely. Promoting peace among men, and sacrificing for men, they are steadily making the goal more certain. Here in the Beatitudes, then, are to be found the su- preme conditions of influence also. Character, happiness, influence — these make Summary, life. And their prime conditions Jesus has named in the Beatitudes. Here, then, indeed, are our map of life, our chart, our sailing orders, even in the purely ethical sphere. 230 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Character. Happiness. Influence. In the Beatitudes, therefore, Jesus is virtually saying to the " disciple multitude " before him : I wish you, first and most of all, character. These qualities which I have named are the really basic qualities of character. They are not popular vir- tues ; the world has hardly counted them virtues at all ; and they will still be regarded by many even of my professed disciples as rather subsidiary and only "passive." Nevertheless are they essential and absolutely basic. I wish you character. And I wish you joy. Not carelessly, as those who know not what they wish ! But fully, know- ing what it costs, I wish you joy — the best, the largest, the richest, the deepest joy that life can give. And I wish it though I know that, in my wish, I am really praying that God would deepen in you humility, and penitence, and self-control, and undying earnestness, and sympathy, and pu- rity, and the spirit of reconciliation and of coura- geous self-sacrifice. Because I covet for you the best, I wish you joy — joy of growth, joy of self- conquest, joy of friendship, joy of service, joy of sacrifice, joy of God. And I wish you influence, that you may count. The steady oncoming of the civilization of brotherly men demands in its leaders just these qualities of which I have spoken. Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Not so shall it be among you ; but whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister, and whosoever THE BASIC QUALITIES OF LIFE 23 1 would be first among you shall be your servant; even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. Knowing the cost of leadership, I wish for you influence — that you may count. CHAPTER VII THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING, IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. Even in the study of the Beatitudes, as the out- lines of the Sermon themselves suggest, we have been dealing implicitly with the principles of the entire Sermon. But those principles come out still more plainly in a study of the motives to living, which Jesus here points out. The uiti- If Jesus is right in his insistence on love — un- mate prob- selfish friendship — as the one indispensable thing in life, then for individual and for national life, for character and for social service, for ethics and for religion, for the earthly life and for the eternal outlook, the ultimate problem for every man is simply the problem of learning to live the life of a genuine, intelligent, thoroughgoing love. No deeper, no more difficult, no more significant task anywhere confronts us. This is our ultimate problem in living, to which we must ever return. And the true final examination, in the thought of Jesus, in any education for life has just one ques- tion: How much does a person mean to you ? have you learned really to be a good friend ? luh ^ofthe ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ might believe, and yet be entirely problem. hopeless in view of it. It too often seems to us 232 \ THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 233 men that the one thing we cannot do is to rise to an impartial and unselfish love of men. What is the actual practical way out of suspicion, and meanness, and envy, and jealousy, and malice, and slander, and hate, and lust, into friendship and brotherliness ? Who can show it ? Who can make us able to tread it ? Now in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus faced Jesus' just this problem for all men, as it had never been ^° ^^^°^' faced before. And his vigorous grappling with the /ww of love mightily concerns us all. It is not the hardness, but the possibility and the way of the loving life, which he is constrained here to bring out. After defining the elements of a true love in the Beatitudes, Jesus goes on to use with men, more or less definitely, four great motives to the loving life, that he believed were able to drive out hate (5 : 21-26), and lust (5 : 27-32), and falsity (5 : 33-37), and retaliation (5 : 38-42), and i Pharisaic righteousness (6 : 1-18), and the spirit of \ contempt (7 : 1-12), and to bring in a true and all- * comprehending love. He appeals, that is, (i) to the principle of the unity of the inner life, (2) to his own thought of the fulfillment of the law, '(3) to the fact that every man is a brother, and (4) to the further fact that God is Father. Three of these motives correspond closely to The the main divisions of the Sermon in its charac- "^°*V^^! ?^ i ^ the divisions terization of the righteousness of the new civiliza- of the tion: as an inner fulfillment of the law — the motive ^^™°^- of fulfilling; as a secret righteousness unto the 234 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Are the motives adequate ? The central motive, God as Father. Jesus' putting of the principle. Father — the motive, "thy Father"; and as the righteousness of a sacred reverence for the person — the motive, " thy brother " ; though no one of these thoughts is confined to any one of the sec- tions. The fourth motive — the unity of the inner life — lies back of the entire Sermon, as a constant law of man's nature, often appealed to by Jesus, as we have already seen, and here several times explicitly repeated. Are these motives adequate.? Have they real power to save to the genuinely friendly life ? Let us not hesitate to see the matter through. We may test thus, practically, the ethics of Jesus as in no other way. These motives, no doubt, are all involved in the one great central motive and message of Jesus — God as Father, the ethical conviction of love at the heart of the world. And still each has a certain independent force that deserves separate recogni- tion. I. T/ie unity of the inner life And, first, Jesus appeals, in the Sermon on the Mount, again and again to that principle which is one of the main contentions of modern psychology, the unity of our life. Both the keeping and the transgression of the law, in Jesus' thought, tend to a consistent unity ; " one of these least com- mandments " is vital (5 : 19). The contemptuous, the condemnatory, and the angry spirit are all of a piece and must have their full logical results (5 : 22, 26). The evil of the stumbling member THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 235 is SO sure to permeate the whole, that life can be kept at all only by the resolute cutting off of the evil (5 : 29-30). So dominant is this principle of the unity in the life, that danger lurks in all speech, even, that is not simple, direct, accurate, and genuine (5:37). No aim, indeed, is really safe but the harmonious perfection of the Father's life (5 : 48). The true reward of righteous char- acter is that inner inevitable recompense not seen of men, but given by "the Father that seeth in secret" (6:1, 4, 6). Unless there is singleness of vision, the whole life is darkened ; the impos- sible double service of " two masters " is attempted (6 : 22-24). There can be, too, no reliable moral insight into another, where evil is cherished ; the cherished evil is a beam in the eye (7 : 5). One single principle of consistent putting yourself in the other's place would fulfill all righteousness (7:12). It is a narrow way that leads to life (7:13-14). Even so, repeatedly, Jesus uses with men, in this The unity part of his teaching, this principle of the unity J^g^^^^^^ig of the inner life. The whole inner life is a unity ; it is all of a piece. No part of the life can go up or down alone. Good or evil cherished anywhere tends to permeate the whole. There is no possible stopping of this inner consequence. Every sin is thus its own worst punishment, it tends to repro- duce its kind ; so, too, every bit of righteousness is its own best reward. In the fight for character we are not, therefore, embracing or rejecting things 236 THE ETHICS OF JESUS No double standard possible. All love a seed of life. laid on miscellaneously and from without, but re- ceiving in ourselves the simple, inevitable, logical consequences of our own choices. Every intelligent observer of his own life knows that he cannot consciously fall below his best at any point, and not invite a moral slump all along the line. On the other hand, how certainly the will, thoroughly aroused at one point, is strength- ened at every point of attack! Or, we may say that if, according to the teaching of Jesus, only love is life, and if man is made for love, then every bit of hate in me works for death ; every bit of love works for life. When, then, our ideals and aims are at their lowest, when we can hardly conceive that God is Father, or that man is brother, then still we can say, " Let me not die ; my life is a unit, and love is life and hate is death ; let me learn to love for my very life's sake." Upon this principle of the unity of our life, then, the ineradi- cable and insatiable love of life itself drives men forward into the life of love. For, on the one hand, I am compelled to see that, however injured I have been, however de- served the other's punishment, still suspicion and contempt and hate are the very working of death in me. This other may have acted most un- worthily ; at least, I must not allow his ignoble spirit to provoke me into a like unworthiness ; that would be injury indeed. And this holds for races and classes as well as for individuals. The race that hates is punished far more than the race THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 23/ hated. We are failing in the very end of our own being, when we allow the spirit contrary to love. Every bit of hate counts for death, and must there- fore be resolutely cut out at any cost, like an eat- ing cancer. On the other hand, every bit of true love counts for good. To be a good son, a good brother, a good husband, a good father, a good friend, a good neighbor, a good citizen, — these are the great homely ways of life, and are seeds of life, and themselves enlargements of life. How a single, honest, unselfish kindness to another tends to reproduce itself, irradiates the day, and makes every righteous impulse more natural and easy ! Men are prone enough to deny this strenuous The de- principle of Jesus, of the unity of life, and to say ^^sfsten^c to themselves : " We can fail here and it will make no difference yonder. We can be cowardly and vacillating here and still equally brave and decisive elsewhere. We may fall below the highest in our love now, and find it meaning the same afterward. We can be impure, and still leave our honesty unaffected. We can be false, and still be pure." But we cannot. And the severity and strictness of Jesus' demands are only calls for a completer, more perfect love, that is, for completer life. These demands only voice Jesus' deep conviction, that the very nature of man calls for a thorough- going consistency in the inner life. TT T7 1J:J1 * Jesus' USC II. fulfillment of this The same principle of unity in the life, thus, Principle 11 1 \ r -r , in the leads naturally to the second of Jesus great sermon. 238 THE ETHICS OF JESUS motives, to emphasis on thoroughness^ carrying the right course fully through to the end, to its full fruit. One mvist Jill full thQ law of righteousness if he would receive its complete results. As in our thinking, all our greatest difficulties come from " terminating investigation prematurely," refusing to carry to the end the demands of reason, so in our practical living, the unsatisfactory results arise from the fact that we have not been in dead earnest with the principle of righteousness and life. Jesus makes, therefore, the very key-note of his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount this thought of fulfillment. " I came," he says, " not to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfill " (5 : 17). You are to follow, he says, the least hint of the law of duty (5 : 18, 19). Your righteousness must exceed that of the most scrupulous Pharisee (5 : 20). You will carry your fight against evil back of the murderous act to the spirit of anger and contempt in the heart, and replace it with the spirit that would rather seek rec- onciliation (5:21-26). You will carry your fight against evil back of the licentious act to the spirit of impurity in the heart, at whatever cost (5:27- 30). You will not be content merely to perform your oaths, but will press forward to the attainment of the spirit of the simplest truthfulness, that makes all oaths unnecessary (5 : 33-37). You will not be content merely to observe some seemingly just limi- tation in retaUation for injury, but you will rather go forward to the setting aside of all retaUation, and replacing it by the positive spirit of love, that THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 239 would serve far beyond the demands that the self- ishness of the other might make upon you (5 : 38- 42). You will thus fulfill and perfect and carry out into its full fruitage the law of righteousness in a completing love toward all men, that will make you true sons of the Father (5 : 43-48). You will not be content with a righteousness of the outward act that may approve itself to men, but will demand from yourself rather that inner secret righteous- ness of the heart, seen of the Father alone, and that he may approve (6: i, 4, 6, 18). Beyond all acquisition of external possessions, you will give your heart only to that treasure of the inner char- acter that shall abide on into the ages (6: 19-21). You will recognize the narrow gate and the strait- ened way of the genuinely unselfish life, and spare no pains to find it (7 : 14). And beyond all devout profession and all diligent hearing of the word of duty you will count the doing of the will of the Father, the departing from iniquity (7: 21-23). All this means that, in the thought of Jesus, it The true is not the avoidance of the law of God as far extension of the law as possible, but the completest fulfillment of it, inner and which is the road to life and happiness, carrying ^^^^^ ^°^ the spirit of the law into the remotest ramifications, and me- into the inmost spirit of the life. The blessing of ^^^^'^^^^l- God, to Jesus' thought, is not, then, an external reward to be won by the doing of some particu- larly distasteful task, one to which, with great pains, you have even added disagreeable elements. Rather the true extension of the law of God is not 240 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The danger of the ex- ternal exten- sion of the law. The inner extension of the law tends to humility. outer and mechanical, but inner and ideal, in spirit not letter. The vast extent of the Buddhist com- mand not to kill anything, for example, does not so much elevate the life of the gnat as degrade the life of man ; the punctilious observance of Jewish tithings and washings did not so much guard the great essentials of the law, as tend to draw time and attention away from these essentials. Mo- nastic asceticism and works of supererogation do not so much extend genuine righteousness, as tend to replace the great requirements of righteous- ness. It may well be noted, too, how inevitably the mechanical and external extension of the law every- where promotes a spiritual pride. The man seems to himself to be doing more than he is required to do, and so to be deserving of some special recog- nition from God and men. There is always danger in exalting certain externals as infallible signs of righteousness or religion. Men need always to be on their guard against erecting those external rules, which they may rightly enough have laid down for themselves, into universal standards of righteous- ness. Jesus himself refuses to submit to any of these external tests, as determining the attitude of his spirit, whether the external test be washings, or fastings, or association with publicans and sin- ners, or the external law of the Sabbath. On the other hand, the inner extension of the law, the clear discernment that its only true obedi- ence must be from within, just because it is inevi- THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 24 1 tably connected with continually growing insight into the possibilities of moral growth, into the much that is yet to be attained, tends directly to humility, where the external extension tended to pride. Now, this thought of the need of thoroughgoing Duty points fulfillment may well become a powerful motive to *^ way to •' ^ larger life. help us into the life of unselfish love. If you would really find your way to righteousness and peace and freedom and life in relation to the man who has wronged you, Jesus suggests, do not try to see how short a way you can go in obedience to God's command, " Thou shalt not kill," or in rec- onciliation to the other, but how far you can go. Take the command as merely a gracious hint of the line along which the largest life may come to you. Go as far as you can go. Fill full this law Leave not one jot or one tittle undone, one least commandment in this direction unfulfilled (5 : 17, 18, 19, 21, 22). Do much more than you must do; do all that love could suggest (5 : 39-42). So and only so can we find peace and freedom and life. Duty, Jesus never forgets, is the Father's will; and the Father's will is our life, not a limitation of life. Or, in ethical terms, duty is but the law of one's own being, and only in the line of that law can life lie. Duty, thus, points the way to greater life and blessing ; it does not hinder our life at any point. Not, then, the transgression of the law of duty, and not the abrogation of the law of duty, but rather welcoming it, throwing oneself with all one's heart into the completest fulfillment of it, can freedom. 242 THE ETHICS OF JESUS bring real life. We need not fear, therefore ; the fullest obedience leads to the fullest life. A new It has often been said of the Sermon on the Mount, that it only gives to men a deeper condem- nation because it insists upon a higher standard of righteousness. This, I think, is to misconceive its main thought.^ For Jesus is urging a view of the law of duty quite contrary to that often held, that in itself contains promise of deliverance from the sense of bondage to the law. In harmony with the modern conception of duty as simply the law of our own natures, and therefore the law of life for us, Jesus does not set the law of God over against the love of God, but rather sees that the law of God is a priceless part of the revelation of the love of God, — God's disclosure of the way of growing life for us. If, therefore, he is virtually saying, you really believe in the love of God, you will have no desire to fight his will; you will recognize each command, however hard it now seems, as in truth a blessed loving hint of the line of life. And when one so sees it, he will welcome the call of duty, not fight it. He is given free- dom. He chooses, of his own will, the line of duty. He looks at duty in a different light. He 1 Nor is the Sermon on the Mount merely ethics; it contains the essential religion of Jesus, also, as its main contentions show. (See above, p. 200.) It is often too narrowly limited to ethics in the characterization of it. (Cf. Gore, op. cit., p. i; Augustine, Nicene and Ante- Nicene Fathers, \o\. Nl^ p. 3; ctr. Gladden, The Church and Modern Life, pp. 162-163.) THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 243 has a new spirit that welcomes the whole of duty. He desires to fill the law full.i If, with this new feeling toward duty, now, one is in dead earnest in the fulfilling of the law of righteousness, he will be driven not to the multi- plying of external observances, but rather driven back to deal with the in7ier spirit of his life, out of which all outward action springs, determined to plant there the true spirit of love to which the command always looks. And the supreme mo- tives that must lie back of every such positive method of dealing with the inner spirit of selfish- ness, are to be found only in Jesus' faith in God as Father, and in man as brother. III. '' Thy brother'' We shall hardly come into a real love of another Jesus' use unless we can beheve that in some way he deserves c[pie\^n^Se' our love. And we have to fall back, therefore, on Sermon. that thought of men as our brothers so certainly involved in Jesus' thought of God as Father. It seems to Jesus to be an inevitable inference from the thought that God is Father — that is, that there is love at the very heart of the world — that men should necessarily think of one another as brothers, all alike children of the Father, and to be treated and loved as such. The motive is not the less powerful that it seems with Jesus so inci- dental; rather is it incidental because it carries inevitable force with it. He would have men re- member that it is their brother with whom they ^ Cf. Gould, The Biblical Theology of the New Testament^ pp. 29 ff . 244 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The mean- ing of brotherhood. Our indis- soluble connection with others. are angry, their brother of whom they are willing to speak with such contempt, their brother that has somewhat against them, their brother to whom they must be reconciled (5 : 22-24). Even those who are enemies and persecutors are nevertheless to be loved as brothers (5 : 44, 47). He reminds men, who are so ready to judge, that it is a brother whose fault they are magnifying, a brother whom in pride they feel quite able to correct, blind to their own fault (7 : 3-5). If I am to love men, then, I need to believe that they are my brothers, that is, (i) that the life of every man is knit up indissolubly with my own ; (2) that he is like me ; and (3) that in some true sense he has a sacred and priceless personality in Jesus' thought, — is a child of God. Then I can- not wish to kill or hate or despise or condemn him. That men are my brothers means, then, in the first place, that our lives are indissolubly knit up together. For, to mention no other consideration, for one's own life, according to Jesus' fundamental principle, one needs most of all to love. We have much to say, in education, of self-development, and of enlarging and enriching life. Have we made it quite clear to ourselves that the one life that makes enlargement or enrichment absolutely impossible is the selfish life ? " Selfish culture," from Jesus* point of view, is a contradiction in terms. The whole trend of the life of selfishness is toward loveless and fruitless loneliness, the deso- lation of the desert waste. To real enlargement THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 245 of life there is one sole way — through the giving of ourselves in loving self-sacrifice to others. Let us, then, make it quite clear to ourselves that this other who so wearies and tires and exasperates us, with whom we seem to have so little in common, whose wrong toward us we cannot forget, and whose spirit, even, we may not be able to approve, is still knit up with our life in a way not to be spared. He is our brother. In loving him, even if he despises our love, we shall find the larger life for ourselves ; for love itself is life. And that the other man is our brother means Essential also that, whether we will or not, he is really very l^^^^^^^- like us. We strive to put him in quite another class, and yet, if we will be honest, we are con- strained to admit that he is, nevertheless, in the great essentials just like us, with the same faculties, the same fundamental doubleness of nature, the same variableness, the same great possibilities, the same great universal interests ; and these respects which are common to us all are, after all, greater than those which divide class from class. Duty may compel us to judge; we may have to disap- prove ; but we are not to yield to a loveless zeal. With clear perception, then, that in the great Discerning essentials the other is like us, " intensely human," ^^^ likeness. let us put ourselves really in his place. Let us apply with some real imagination Jesus' principle of the golden rule (Matt. 7 : 12), and ask ourselves how the treatment which we give him we would ourselves feel. We are not to lord it over others. 246 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Sympathetic under- standing. No class barriers. And we are to get rid, above all, of contempt.^ We are to get this other's angle of vision, and not drug our conscience with the deadly sedative that this other — of the other temperament, the other class, or the other race — is quite a different being from ourselves. The most horrible cruelties of history have flowed spontaneously from this lying denial of the Ukeness of men. And that the other is like us means, too, that we may be sure that, as we are conscious that there is much of good in us that others do not recognize, so in him there is no doubt a nobler side than that turned toward us. Temperamental differences here may hide much from us. We may well fix our attention on his best, not on his worst. It is difficult enough in any case to find our way with sureness into the real inner life of another ; we shall find it quite impossible if we attempt it in any hard and unsympathetic spirit. It requires "a heart at leisure from itself " even to understand another. We can hardly claim, indeed, to have risen to the level of even the common consciousness of our time, if we are not ready to recognize the ideals of others, though expressed in quite unconventional forms. The willingness to see and to cherish ideals, and the heroism persistently to live or unhesitatingly to die for them, let us be sure, is not confined to our clique or to our race. Have 1 Cf. Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace ^ pp. 39, 49, 50, 58, 59, I50» 153- THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 24/ we really open eyes for the hidden ideals in the lives that seem to us unlike our own, — laborer, cap- italist, negro, white, educated, uneducated, quick, or slow ? It is not a true interpretation of the Christian law of love which insists upon either racial or class barriers to the setting aside of the far more fundamental likeness of men. We owe reverence and faith and love not merely to those whom we call our own, but to all, — in the sig- nificant words of Jesus, " despairing of no man " (Luke 6: 35, margin). And we shall have no final peace, either as individuals or as a nation, until we recognize in its entirety this primal law of Jesus. And that the other is like us means, once more, Likeness in that he is a man with like limitations and tempta- temptations. tions and struggles^ with like self-condemnation and like suffering. And if we really believe it, how- ever impossible it may be for us always to approve, it will still be possible always to pity and always to seek his real good. To us may be visible only the hard and haughty bearing which he puts on as a kind of shell between himself and the world. But we do not know the hours of bitter self -judgment — the times of struggle, though it may be weak ; the moments, at least, of appeal to God. He is our brother, he is like us ; we can love him, we must love him. So, too, that every man is a child of God is Every man no commonplace, though the language is familiar q^^^^^^^ enough. The ethical and religious motives evi- dently here come together ; but the full sweep of 248 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Loved by God. Of infinite possibilities. The brother not a judge. the ethical will not be seen, without consideration of Jesus' religious putting of the matter. And that men are children of God means, in the first place, to Jesus, that this one against whom we harbor the bitter and revengeful spirit is, though he may be in the wrong, still a child of the heavenly Father, loved of God, grieved over, 'longed for, sought out. God loves us; God loves him. We can hardly recognize for ourselves what it means to be children of God and still maintain a spirit of bitterness and enmity toward this other, in like manner also a child of the heavenly Father. And that any one should have this place in the thought of God means that he is in himself of priceless interest, with the power of the endless life upon him, and with infinite possibilities. No limits can be set to his growth in knowledge, in power, in character, in the ongoing of his sharing of the life of God. It is this being whom we are asked to take into account in our thought, even as God thinks of him. And when we really think of the infinite outlook involved in these possibilities, we can hardly wish to do other than to share in God's own work of patient, long-suffering, self- sacrificing love on behalf of this man. The being for whom God cares is not unworthy of our love. And if he is your brother, you too are only brother, and you are not to play the judge (7 : 2-5). The more like he is to you, the more clear it should be to you that no one can stand unsym- THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 249 pathetically without and rightly judge him. Get down off from the judge's bench. Judge yourself, not him. And yet this same respect which you would Seif- thus show the value and sacredness of his person- ^^v^^^^<=^- ality, you must have for yourself. And you are to allow none to exploit your inner life, to profane it at its sources. You can and you may reveal your best only to the reverent (7 : 6). IV. ** Thy Father'' And when we turn to Jesus' fourth motive, we Jesus' use cannot fail to see that the thought of God as ""^ ^f^ . ° motive in Father, or, in ethical terms, of love at the heart the Sermon. of the world, is the basic assumption in the entire Sermon on the Mount, and permeates its teaching throughout, explicitly recurring, also, again and again. Those who promote peace among men are to be recognized as sons of God (5 19). The ear- nest life of men, like the obedient spirit of chil- dren, is to bring glory to God as Father (5 : 16). In sharing the life of God, in the spirit of universal love, men show that they are the true sons of the Father (5 : 44-48). The Father desires in his chil- dren the genuine filial spirit, and a love akin to his own, and can take no satisfaction in acts that spring out of any other spirit. His blessing can be upon no other (6 : i, 4, 6, 14, 15, 18). Men may come to God in prayer, in the profoundest trust in his knowledge of them and his love for them (6 : 8, 9-13 ; 7 : 7-1 1). And if God is Father, and there is love at the very heart of the world, then 250 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Man made for love. Love at the heart of the world. God's for- giving love for us. surely men may be freed from anxiety and live in trust and peace (6 : 25-34). This is the great motive underlying all other motives, the conviction out of which the rest spring. It means that you yourself are made for love, it is the law of your own nature; only love can bring harmony into that nature ; without love you are constantly at cross-purposes with yourself. If, therefore, you would have unity even in your own nature, you must learn to love. And not only is love the law of your own nature. This motive of the Father means, too, that there is love at the heart of the world, that the universe is on the side of the loving will. In religious terms, God is your Father ; you cannot fail to respond to the Father's love. Jesus puts strongly this religious appeal. There is involved in Jesus' repeated reference to " thy Father " a close and personal appeal. God's forgiving love for us, Jesus seems to say, must send us in shame and humility to our brother (5 : 23-24; 6:14, 15). We cannot for a moment clearly see the position in which we have put ourselves in relation to God, and not feel the biting sarcasm of Jesus' parable of the unforgiving servant. To awake to the real meaning of the long-suffering and forgiving love of God toward us can hardly fail to stir at least some beginnings of forgiveness and love toward our fellow servant. And there is a genuine ethical conviction embedded in this warm religious appeal. It is just that assurance of which THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 2$! we have spoken, of a moral trend in the universe, that the universe is on the side of the loving will. To avoid much circumlocution, Jesus' religious form of statement is retained. The thought of God as the loving Father means, Sharing also, that we cannot share the life of the Father f"^ ^^^^^'^' ' love. without love. That while we still cherish the un- forgiving spirit, we are irrevocably shut out from God's life (5 123-24; 6: 14, 15). And this, not at all on account of any vindictive unwillingness on God's part to forgive, without some similar con- cession on the man's part to balance it. Even in a great human friendship, the relation is inevita- bly hindered when we allow ourselves consciously to fall below the spirit of the nobler life. So, still more, in our relation to God must the harbored evil build a wall of separation. One comes to de- spise himself, indeed, that it can be a temptation at all, — this hate, this envy, this jealousy, this half joy in another's failure, especially where any comparison with oneself is involved. One cannot draw near to God with this spirit in his heart. It is the insurmountable something between him and God. The thought of God as Father, as living love, Real means also that love is the very life of God, and '^^^°^' that, therefore, in Jesus' thought, love is life ; that hate, consequently, can give no blessing, that it only lessens our power to love and to be loved, chills the whole stream of life in us, makes us in- evitably less and able to enjoy less. And it gives, 252 THE ETHICS OF JESUS besides, no real victory over the other. Whatever the injustice you have suffered, not even the kill- ing of the other can give any real gain. Brown- ing faces this thought through to the end in his "After": — "Take the cloak from his face, and at first Let the corpse do its worst ! How he lies in his rights of a man ! Death has done all death can. And, absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike. And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change. Ha, what avails death to erase His offense, my disgrace ? I would we were boys as of old In the field, by the fold; His outrage, God's patience, man's scorn Were so easily borne. I stand here now, he lies in his place ; Cover the face." There can be no final victory over the other, but the victory over yourself in the attainment of a better spirit, in turning the other's hate into love, in making him love you, in at least making sure that in his very heart, so far as he knows you, he has reason to respect you, to believe in you. Or- ville Dewey is but following out Christ's own teaching when he says : *' Every relation to man- kind, of hate or scorn or neglect, is full of vexa- THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 253 tion and torment. There is nothing to do with men but to love them; to contemplate their vir- tues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness. Task all the ingenuity of your mind to devise some other thing, but you never can find it. To hate your adversary will not help you ; to kill him will not help you ; nothing within the compass of the universe can help you, but to love him." But that is real victory and real life for both. And this thought of God as Father, the genuine The conse- faith in living love at the heart of the world, makes q^^f.^' °^ ° ' trust in the possible a life of trust, of peace, of hope, of cour- Father, age (6 : 4, 6, 8, 9-13, 18, 25-34), of love like the Highest (5 : 44-48), and of undismayed service (5 : 39-42). And these are all ethical results of the highest significance. These four principles, then, are Christ's great The thought motives to living, his secret of life. All spring °|,dtif,f^u from one faith, love at the heart of the world, God the other our Father. All look to one spirit, love. Back of "^^^^^s- all of them stands the personaHty of Jesus himself, both showing and interpreting the love of God and unstinted love for men, and enabling us to be- lieve in such love and to catch at least some meas- ure of it from the contagion of his own life.^ God is Father. Love cannot be partial. There- fore, also, life is a marvelous unity, and sin is its own worst punishment and love its own best re- ward. The power of a consistent love is ours. 1 Cf. Haering, The Ethics of the Christian Life, pp. 174, 178. 254 THE ETHICS OF JESUS God is Father. Therefore his commands are our life, and both the keeping of the law and deliver- ance from the law, both righteousness and freedom, come from simply filling the law full, carrying the spirit to which the law looks down deep into the inmost recesses of the life. The power of a radical love is ours. God is Father. Therefore every man is a child of God, like us, knit up in life with us. The power of a gracious love is ours. God is Father. And love is life. Love, infinite and eternal, is at the heart of things. We can think and still live at the same time, because it is given us to start from this primal faith in the love of God. The power of a godlike love is ours. Consistent, radical, gracious, godHke ! And if we will not be consistent and radical, we shall not be gracious and godlike. As the unity and comprehensiveness of Jesus' ethical teaching come out especially in a consid- eration of the great motives to living as set forth in the Sermon on the Mount, it may be helpful to give here a condensed summary of these motives in ethical form, as derived from the thought of God as Father, and so briefly to recapitulate the entire discussion. THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 255 THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING AS SEEN IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT i I. " Thy Father:^ 5 : 9, 16, 44-48 ; 6 : i, 4, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15, 18, 26,32; 7: II, 21.2 This is the great motive underlying all other motives, the conviction out of which the rest spring. It means : — 1 . You yourself are made for love ; it is the law of your own nature. Only love can bring harmony into it ; without it you are constantly at cross-purposes with yourself. 2. And there is love at the heart of the world. The uni- verse is on the side of the loving will. (God is your Father. You cannot fail to respond to the Father's love, — to the contagion of the loving life of God.) 3. Love alone, therefore, is life, sharing in the highest life (sharing in the life of God himself). 4. This makes possible a life of trust, of peace, of hope^ of courage (6: 4, 6, 8, 9-13, 18, 25-34) ; of love, like the highest (like the Father) (5 : 44-48) ; and of undismayed service (5 : 39-42). II. The unity of life. Life all of a piece. No isolated sec- tions. " No man can serve two masters." 5 : 18, 19, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 37, 48; 6:4, 6, 22-24; 7:5> 12, 13-14.8 I. If man is a unity, then good or evil cherished any- where tends to permeate the whole, tends to repro- duce its kind. iCf. Mathews, The Social Teaching of fesus, ch. VIII, "The Forces of Human Progress." 2 Cf. Harnack, What is Christianity ?, pp. 63 ff. ; Beyschlag, New Testament Theology, vol. I, pp. 80-82 ; Bruce, The Kingdom of God, ch. IV; Haering, The Ethics of the Christian Life, pp. 178 ff. ^ Cf. Ecce Homo, p. 344 ; Peabody, fesus Christ and the Social Question, pp. 342 ff. 256 THE ETHICS OF JESUS 2. And if only love is life, and man is made for love, ■then every bit of hate in me works for death; every bit of love works for life. 3. This principle urges, thus, thoroughgoing consistency in a genuine love. III. Fulfilling the law of duty. " I came to fulfil." " Except your righteousness exceed." 5 : 17-20, 21-48 ; 6 : i, 4, 6, 18,21; 7: 14,21,24.1 1. If the sum of duty is love, if you are really made for love, and love is the law of your being, then love is life, and the requirements of duty are your life, not a limitation of life. (In religious terms, if God is really Father, then his commands are your life, not a limitation of life.) ^ 2. Hence not the transgression or evasion of the law of duty, nor the abrogation of the law of duty, but rather welcoming it, throwing oneself with all one's heart into the completest fulfillment of tlie law of duty, brings real life. Following to the utmost every hint of the law of duty (the will of God). 3. But if the sum of duty is love, that completest fulfill- ment will be, not in multiplying external observ- ances (cf. the " hedge of the law "), but in the complete reign of love in the inner spirit, — a new spirit. (" Out of the heart.") This is the keep- ing of the law ; this, filling it full? 4. And if men are made for love, if love is life, this com- plete reign of love in the inner spirit, out of which all true manifestations of love will grow, is seen to be no alien reign, but a very source of life, and the 1 Cf . Dale, Laws of Christ for Common Life, pp. 208 flF. 2 Cf. Wendt, The Teaching offesus, vol. I, p. 314. 8 Cf. Herrmann, Faith and Morals, p. 384 : " All the require- ments uttered in the 5th chapter of Matthew can be fulfilled only by a man who imposes them upon himself." THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 2$^ sense of bondage to law is gone, and freedom comes in.^ ,^ 5. This principle, thus, urges a dead-in-earnest radical- ism in a genuine love (cf. 5 : 20) (implying vigilant watchfulness, and the sacrifice of relative goods). IV. ''Thy brother:' 5:22, 23, 24, 44, 47 i 7 = 3? 4, Sr 12. This motive means three things : ^ — 1. The lives of men are indissolubly knit up together — " members one of another " — inevitably, desirably, mdispensably. For your own life's sake, you can- not spare the relation to your brother. 2. The other man is very like us — in all the great es- sentials of nature, in cherishing some ideals, with like limitations, and temptations, and struggles. You who desire love, cannot reasonably withhold your love from this other, so like you. 3. The other man has like us a personality, — sacred and infinitely valuable (a child of God), worthy of patient, long-suffering, self-sacrificing love.* These four great motives in living are more or Jesus' use less explicitly applied by Jesus in the illustrations in the 5th chapter, as helps against hate, impurity, Tn the falsity, and the spirit of retaHation (5 : 21-42). In [jJus^ations the treatment of these motives as reasons for a life in chapter 5. of positive love, we have already seen how Jesus would deal with the spirit of hate. But we may well follow a little more closely his line of thought in his further illustrations. As against impurity^ the motives of the unity 1 Cf. Coe, Education in Religion and Morals, p. 147: Christ as the restorer of the play spirit. 2 Cf. Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, vol. I, pp. 325 ff.; Ecce Homo, pp. 139 ff., 153, 154, 169 ff., 174. ^ Cf. Harnack, What is Christianity ?, pp. 67-68. s of the four great motives 2S8 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The motives against impurity. The motives of unity and fulfiU- ment. A funda- mental sin. The subtle- ness of the temptation to impurity. of life and of Jesus' thought of the inner fulfilling of the law, mean that sin is in the inner consent, in any case, and works out on the rest of the life from that, so that the life may be absolutely foul with impurity at its source, though there is not at present any overt act (v. 28). And these mental states certainly and promptly affect bodily states, and tend to diffuse themselves through the whole nature of the man, and so weaken him for every fight for righteousness. A man cannot throw his whole self into the struggle anywhere else (vv. 29-30). Moreover, the sin of impurity so affects the very foundation of society, of which the family is the real unit, and so involves the violation of the most intimate possible relation of life, — of the sacred- ness of the person, that this sin is peculiarly fatal in its effect on the rest of the man. It spoils the whole man ; the rest of his life rings hollow. What violation is not possible to one who wiUingly trans- gresses here ? (v. 32). No price is too great to pay for deliverance at this point (vv. 29-30). None of us are likely to be too sensitive as to this fundamental reverence which underlies purity. That reverence for the person which is involved in steadfast, thoroughgoing purity, counts as do few other qualities, for it is the deepest condition of fine personal relations (cf. 7 : 1-6), and the best defense against the most subtle temptations, — the most subtle, because connected so closely with the deepest and best in us. THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 259 The deliverance from impurity, thus, must be inner inner absolutely. Mere asceticism and a simply deliverance, negative fighting will not conquer it ; only a higher love can conquer the lower, — only such a sense of the sacredness of the personaUty as makes this sin intolerable even in thought. The motive of God as Father has here, too, its The motive application. For a man who really beheves that pathef ^^ God is Father will respect his will in the laws of his being, will believe in the love of God in these very laws, and will therefore fulfill them, not grudgingly, but earnestly. And his sense of God's reverence for his personality can hardly help prompting to a similar reverence for others. He will therefore avoid not only the gross, overt act, but every violation of the inner sanctities of an- other's life. And into the highest love of another, a love that is taken on in the thought and the love of God, there enter a thousand heightening ele- ments that have no place in mere passion, that are not possible to it. Underneath such a love lies faith in the love of God himself, as the sure foun- dation that enables even this love between these finite personalities to take hold on the eternities. Such faith in God, too, brings the hope that may look to the life of endless love, and may believe in its own love as one that God can bless at every step, for it is a part of the love of God himself. And against impurity, too, the other motive of The motive the thought of men as brothers also serves. For ^roThe^s^^ just so soon as one recognizes the priceless value 26o THE ETHICS OF JESUS Jesus* use of the four great motives against falsity. The motive of unity. and sacredness of the other personality, — that he is Hke himself, he cannot bear to treat him as a thing ; for he knows that that is only to help to doom a soul of infinite possibilities and just like himself to infamy, inner and outer, earthly and ageless. No man can really think what that means and find it a pleasant reflection. Moreover, every blow at the purity of another is just as real a blow at oneself. For here too, as everywhere, one can- not treat another as a slave and not become himself a slave. We are bound up indissolubly together, and that measure that we mete to another is in- evitably measured unto us. And the same four great motives are available against falsity (5 : 33-37). When Jesus concludes this brief section in the 37th verse, " But let your speech be Yea, yea ; Nay, nay : and whatsoever is more than these is of the evil one," he is distinctly stating the principle of the unity of the inner life. For he is virtually saying, You cannot safely tam- per with the simple, straight, genuine truth ; there is danger in anything else. And the principle means, also, that falsity in speech threatens the rest of the life as well. One cannot be false in one thing and leave the rest unaffected. False speaking in one realm leads to false speaking else- where, and to false dealing everywhere. The man who plays you false at one point you can hardly entirely trust anywhere else. A He, Jesus is in- sisting, is serious business, whether told or acted, whether expressed or ingeniously insinuated. And of fulfillment. THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 26 1 the principle means, also, that falsity is its own curse, brings its inevitable reward. One cannot play fast and loose with his own sense of truth, and not find himself finally unable to tell the truth, unable to make himself understood. The habit of diplomatic speech is disintegrating. Sus- picion of others inevitably follows, and hollowness of one's own life, which carries with it the certain reward of lack of trust from others. And Jesus' thought of fulfillment^ as applied to The motive the sin of falsity, is an insistence that here, too, one must go back to the inner spirit. You cannot cure falsity by requiring the oath (vv. 34-36). Rather one must cultivate a spirit that needs and takes no recourse to the oath. When Jesus says, " Swear not at all " (v. 34), he is simply following out his principle of the inner fulfilling of the law, not laying down some new external command. To conceive the command as external is quite to misunderstand him, and even to reverse the spirit of his teaching. In effect he says to those who would follow him. You must be such true men at the very heart as to carry naturally the faith of men, and to need no recourse to oath ; and least of all, to use it to cover trickery. Thinking the truth, seeing things just as they are, candor, freedom from all prejudice and willfulness and from all treachery and deceitfulness, these lie back of all telling the truth. There must be such simplicity and transparency of character as shall reflect itself naturally in simplicity and transparency of speech. 262 THE ETHICS OF JESUS in the "Yea, yea," and the "Nay, nay" (v. 37). The truth, therefore, cannot be gotten from an- other by any external contrivance of the oath. You cannot get truth where truth is not. Not the oath, but only the true heart that hates a lie, said or lived, in big or little, that hates all trickery and deceit, all playing with honesty, brings real deliverance from the sin of falsity. As against the sin of falsity, the motive of the fulfilling of the law drives one back to the sense of the neces- sity of an absolutely honest, transparent soul, that hates sham and prejudice, and all coming short of truth and honesty. The motive And the thought of the other man as your brother bro^ers^^ brings, also, a motive against falsity. All falsity, or dishonesty, all lack of truthfulness, is a sin against your brother, a sin against love. For no sin is greater than treachery. The one thing a friend- ship cannot stand is falseness ; for friendship has so no possible basis. For all friendship and all society are and must be built on trust. If one is not truthful, therefore, not trustworthy, he is doing something to undermine the very foundations of society. Moreover, the attitude of untruthfulness, of fal- sity, is absolutely self -contradictory. For every man wants faithful dealing from God and from all others ; he must give the same. And the thought that, because the other man is your brother, he is like you, means that you may therefore know that what you need and require from him, he rightly THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 263 needs and requires from you. You may, not, there- fore, deny him what you must have from him. And as a child of God, a person of infinite possi- biHties, he deserves from you the truth, nothing less. So, too, the thought of God as Father becomes The motive a powerful motive to truthfulness. The oath is ^3^^°^ ^^ supposed to appeal especially to him, but he is always a God at hand, in every man ; every given word is in his presence, as really as is the form of oath, and just as binding (vv. 34-36). And as Father, this law of truthfulness, which he has made a law of your being, is a law of life, and you may not evade it without suffering in your own life. And as, in your relation to the Father, you have to do with a " faithful Creator," you must be in like manner faithful in relation to others. That which you seek from God, you must not less certainly give to your brother. And these four great motives have their applica- The use of tion, once more, as against the spirit of retaliation great°motives (5 : 38-42). The desire for retaliation is, of course, against re- only an outworking of the spirit of hate, a violation of the fundamental law of love, and therefore vir- tually involved in what has already been said. But Jesus' application at this point is inevitable. The motive Where the disciple of the older law might have °^ "°^^* regarded himself as virtuous in restricting his re- taliation to retaliation in kind, — " an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," Jesus insists that there is no victory in this realm except by an absolute 264 THE ETHICS OF JESUS The motive of fulfill- ment. The motive of men as brothers. replacing of the entire spirit of retaliation by a spirit of abounding love. For, if love is life, and hate is death, then any cherishing of the spirit of retaliation must work sure consequences of evil in oneself. And the victory over this spirit must come through that inner fulfillment of the requirement of righteousness upon which Jesus is insisting throughout this chapter. It means, as his illustra- tions in verses 39-42 show, that one must be will- ing to carry the opposite spirit, of a loving service, far beyond what the other in hate would demand. Out of a spirit of love, Jesus is suggesting, you will do all that the selfish hate of the other could require, and more. Your desire to serve will outrun his selfish demand. You will be ready to turn the other cheek, to let him have the coat, to go the two miles, to lend. Here, once again, Jesus is giving no external, infallible rules, but illus- trations of that thoroughgoing inner spirit which alone may bring deliverance from the spirit of retaliation, because it is a true fulfillment of the law of love. The motive involved in the thought of the other man as your brother brings the same result. Let one think, for example, of the treatment that a true father or mother gladly gives to an unworthy son, who has justly forfeited all loving service, and yet in a spirit of arrogant selfishness demands certain things from the father or mother. How certainly will the answer of the grieving, loving THE GREAT MOTIVES TO LIVING 265 father or mother be exactly in the line of Jesus' illustrations: "Why, my son, it is a small thing that you ask. Have you any doubt that there is nothing within my power that I would not gladly do, if it would be of any real good to you ? " It is only love at its best and highest that can properly understand and estimate these words of Jesus here.^ And so, in like manner, the thought of God as The motive Father can hardly fail to drive out the unforgiving Ya^ev ^^ and retaliatory spirit. There can be no true filial relation to God, no sharing in his life of forgiv- ing and serving love, where the unforgiving and retaliatory spirit still abides. This is Jesus' ex- press insistence in his injunction, " first be rec- onciled to thy brother " (5 : 23-24), and in the comment on the forgiving of men's trespasses (6: 14-15). The inevitable logic of this motive of God as Father comes out at once, as soon as one tries to transfer the spirit of retaliation to God. If God is Father, and his life is the life of forgiv- ing and serving love, then love is life, and hate is death, and one can only love even enemies and persecutors (v. 44) ; so alone can he share the life of God (v. 45) ; so alone can he aim at a spirit and life like his (v. 48). To take a less standard than this is to be satisfied with the most ordinary and conventional attainment (vv. 46-47). 1 Cf. Votaw, art. " Sermon on the Mount," H. D. B., extra vol- ume, p. 30 : The guiding principle here is that " love knows no limits but those which love itself imposes." See also Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, p. 68, 266 THE ETHICS OF JESUS So Jesus uses these great motives in the Sermon, and thus suggests their use in all of life. They indicate for him the source of moral motive. The fact that they all root in faith in God as Father shows how inevitably for Jesus the ethical life builds on the religious, and suggests that, in his own thought, his service to men is not merely pointing out these motives, but because of the greatness of his spirit, enabling us to believe them — enabling tis to believe that God is Father, that there is love at the heart of the world.^ ^ Cf. Herrmann, Communion of the Christian with God (1895), p. no; Weiss, art. "Ethics," D. C. G., p. 547. CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION. As we turn, now, to a summary of the results The Sermon of our entire survey of the ethical teaching of ^ount Jesus, we can hardly fail to be impressed with the itself a fact that the Sermon on the Mount is itself a kind of^Su? of summary of all that is most significant and es- teaching, sential in Jesus' entire teaching. Doubtless it was so in the mind of Matthew, and it is certainly so in fact.^ For our study of the Sermon on the Mount must have made it plain that there are to be found here the great central conceptions of Jesus as to God, as to men, as to life. Here are set forth in unmistakable terms the life of love toward God and men, and all that that love involves. How truly the Sermon on the Mount is such a Evidenced summary, has perhaps already been sufficiently ceding ^S" shown in those main propositions of the Sermon cussion. which we have called the spiritual discoveries of Jesus; in the comprehensive unity of the character- ization of the ideal life in the Beatitudes, as giving the basic qualities of character, and influence, and happiness, — the very elements of love itself, the necessary conditions of the friendly life every- iCf. Bartlet, "Teaching of Jesus," D. C. G., p. 701; D'Arcy, " Leading Ideas," D. C. G., p. 770. 267 268 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Contains the ethical notes of Schmiedel's passages. Contains the ethical laws of the doubly attested sayings. In harmony with Q. where and in every age ; and in the setting forth of the great motives for living involved in this teaching. And when we look back over the divisions of our inquiry, it is equally manifest that here, in the Sermon on the Mount, is found a true summary of all the ethical teaching. All the notes of Schmiedel's passages come out in this Sermon : the demand for a life that shall be characterized by earnestness, absolute genuineness, inwardness, and independence, and reverence for the person; the sense of religion as through and through ethi- cal, of the contrast of his teaching with that of his times ; and in Jesus himself the impression of com- passion and authority. And here, too, it may be said, that there is hardly lacking any one of the laws of life brought out in the doubly attested sayings : the clear view of the supremacy of love as universal, as serving, and sacrificial ; the fundamental faith in love at the heart of the world ; the laws of use, habit, efficiency, vigilant watchfulness, the contagion of the good, and of reverence for the person, with the recognition of the supreme value of the quahties of childhood, and the demand for forgiveness. Moreover, the Sermon itself constitutes no small part of Q — 58 out of 201 verses, and the rest of Q is completely in harmony with this portion. Harnack's concluding estimate of Q may be taken as confirmatory of this judgment :^ " The collection 1 The Sayings of Jesus ^ pp. 250-251. CONCLUSION 269 of sayings and St. Mark must remain in power, but the former takes precedence. Above all, the tendency to exaggerate the apocalyptic and eschatological element in our Lord's message, and to subordinate to this the purely religious and ethical elements, will ever find its refuta- tion in Q. This source is the authority for that which formed the central theme of the message of our Lord — that is, the revelation of the knowl- edge of God, and the moral call to repent and to believe, to renounce the world and to gain heaven — this and nothing else." And when one compares the teaching of the Ser- in harmony mon on the Mount with Mark, with his thought of ^^thSg in Jesus' message, method, motive, goal, and the revolu- Mark, and tionary contrast of his teaching, his emphasis on the JeacMng^in^ great paradox and the great commandment and the Matthew social applications of this commandment of love, one ^" ^ ^* must say, once again, that there is very little here that is not repeated in some form in this Sermon. And practically the same thing may be added as to the peculiar teaching in both Matthew and Luke. Our survey sufficiently makes clear that Jesus' No technical teaching is not put before us in the form of a ^y^^^"^- technically constructed system. On the contrary, there is an apparent lack of all system, and what we seem to have is a collection of miscellaneous sayings called out on various occasions. In speaking upon the moral and rehgious life, Jesus does not speak like an amateur, who must be punctiliously careful to put things always in the 270 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Yet a thorough- going unity in Jesus* teaching. same way, for fear he may get off the line of his exact meaning; but he speaks rather like a master, who can be careless of form and system, because he knows that true insights cannot help fitting one another. Nevertheless, no earnest student of the teach- ing of Jesus can fail to see that there is in that teaching, in point of fact, a marvelously thorough- going unity .1 And in fact it is not too much to say upon this, in the first place, that Jesus' entire ethi- cal and religious teaching springs from one single thought, his faith in God as Father. All that he teaches may be said, thus, to be a direct reflection of his own filial consciousness. This faith in God as Father, this unshakable conviction that there is love at the heart of the world, and that the universe is on the side of the righteous will, this is not merely a religious faith, as we have seen, but the great fundamental moral conviction which is necessary to an earnest and hopeful moral life. In the words of Muirhead, summing up the central problem of the recent International Congress on Moral Education, " *A man's confi- dence in himself,' said Hegel, *is much the same as his confidence in the universe and in God.' What is true of the individual is true of humanity. Without such confidence, it is difficult to see with what ultimate convincingness appeal can be made to the ideals of humanity." ^ This thought of God ^ Cf. e.g., Wendt's summary, The Teaching of Jesus, vol. II, pp. 384 flf. 2 Hibbert Journal, January, 1909, p. 351. CONCLUSION 271 as Father, this conviction of love at the heart of the world, Jesus simply carries through to its full logical consequences for every sphere of life.^ And all the rest of his teaching may be regarded as simply the detailed statement and appHcation of these logical consequences. From this primary conviction there directly fol- inferences lows, thus, (i) that love is the highest life, the Jhoughl^f sum and end of all true living, and that this love, God as like God's, must be not partial but for all, worthy and unworthy alike ; that it must be a love willing to serve and willing to sacrifice, and a love always forgiving. From this same premise follows not less certainly that the basic qualities for character, and influence, and happiness, will be the elements which make up the true love. And out of this same conviction of God as Father we have seen fol- low inevitably the great motives to Uving. Jesus' thought of God as in his very nature Father, as love, means, too, (2) that the highest possible good is the reign of God, the dominion of love in both the individual, and the social Hfe; and (3) that every man is a child of God, of infinite value, always to be reverenced as such, to be treated, therefore, as end and never as means. It follows not less certainly, if the all-inclusive virtue is love, (4) that righteousness must be inner, must spring from within, and can never be simply laid on from 1 Cf. Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, vol. I, pp. 184 ff., 197, 199, 297 ff., 329 fif., 337 ; vol. II, pp. 48 fif.; Augusta Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, pp. 152 ff. 2/2 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Jesus holds no senti- mental view of father- hood. without; and (5) that, therefore, every man must have an independent moral and spiritual life of his own. (6) Just because, also, the command of duty is the command of love, freedom is brought into the ethical life. (7) It is to be noticed particularly that Jesus brings out the logical consequences of this thought of God as Father in no sentimental fashion. He does not make the mistake of some of the most recent critics of his teaching, in forgetting that every deep truth, just because it has a fundamen- tally gracious side, has just as inevitably a reverse side. Jesus never forgets that, just because God is Father, men may take toward him the attitude either of obedient or disobedient sons ; that, just because the real essence of life is love, the life that is selfish and hateful must find itself at war with itself, and with the whole universe of God. Jesus, just because he conceives God as true Fa- ther, knows that sin is a more awful thing to the Father than it can possibly be to judge or legis- lator.i Just because life, in Jesus' thought, opens to man the possibility of boundless achievement and joy, there is borne home upon him also the awfulness of the loss of those who refuse to take on the filial spirit. Jesus feels profoundly the seriousness of life, and it is this that gives him that impressive earnestness that we have had to note again and again, and that comes out so clearly 1 Cf. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology^ p. 444. CONCLUSION 273 in the closing paragraphs of the Sermon on the Mount (7: 13-27).! (8) It is this same conviction of God as Father The chiid- which leads to the emphasis of Jesus on the child- i^^^e qualities, like qualities of humble teachableness and trust as the very gateway into his Kingdom, as well as to his repeated emphasis on repentance and faith. For as soon as one thinks of the possibility of coming into a relation to a great personality, trust must be seen at once to be absolutely basic. No personal relation, human or divine, can go forward except upon the basis of mutual self-revelation and answering trust. And if one is to come into the sharing of the life of God, there must be, beyond doubt, the willingness to take on a life like God's, to get the new mind which is in Jesus' idea of re- pentance. One may put the matter slightly differently in Another saying that, in Jesus' thought, (i) the basic convic- ^niTy^oV ^ tion is that of love at the heart of the world ; Jesus^ (2) that the goal, therefore, of all Ufe is the estab- ^^^^^'""S- lishment of loving relations between all personali- ties ; (3) that the basic qualities of life for character, influence, and happiness will be those qualities of character that are essential elements of lovfe; (4) that, if there is love at the heart of the world, we may trust our own natures, and our final moral evidence must be the appeal to our own reason and conscience, to our own best vision ; (5) that the great motives to righteous living must be those 1 Cf. £cce Jlomo, pp. 299, 351. T 2/4 THE ETHICS OF JESUS Has Jesus an ethical system ? His con- ception of the highest good. His concep- tion of duty. that grow immediately out of the fundamental con- viction of love at the heart of the world ; and (6) that the chief means in both individual and vSocial upbuilding must be obedience to these subsidiary laws of life which, under various circumstances love demands, and which human experience confirms. If the inquiry is finally raised whether Jesus has an ethical system, this would mean, Does he face explicitly (i) the question of the highest good or wellbeing of men, including both virtue and pleas- ure ; (2) the question of duty or right conduct, or of the moral law ; (3) the question of the faculty of the moral life, conscience ; (4) the question of the necessary presupposition of the moral life, free will } In answer to this inquiry, it must be said that, while Jesus probably never puts these questions to himself in this form, he plainly does conceive as the highest good of men, involving the full play of all the activities of the entire man, the Kingdom of God, the reign of love in the life of the indi- vidual and of society, the possibility open, thus, to men of sharing in the eternal, ongoing purposes of God. It becomes most natural, therefore, that the central petition of the prayer that was to char- acterize his disciples should be, ** Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth." In the second place, duty^ or right conduct, obedi- ence to the moral law, for Jesus, as we have seen, is summed up in the one great all-inclusive virtue of a love such as he conceives in the Father, and CONCLUSION 275 such as he himself revealed in his own life, — a forgiving, serving, self-sacrificing love.^ As to the question of the moral faculty, conscience^ Assumes it is only to be said that, in all his insistence upon conscience, the independence and inwardness of the moral life, and in his own direct appeal to men, Jesus only assumes, but nowhere discusses, conscience,^ as the sense of moral obligation and as rational judgment concerning conduct. And his emphasis upon the seriousness of life. Assumes as well as his explicit teaching, makes not less clear ^°q^^[ ?^jjj^_ that he assumes everywhere, on the part of men, tive in men. power of moral initiative, power to choose the life of love or the Hfe of selfishness. An ethical system, then, in the sense of a mod- Conclusion, ern, ordered discussion of technical theoretical problems, Jesus certainly does not have. But an ethical system, in the sense of thoroughly unified and consistent thinking on life, its end, spirit, motives, and means, he as certainly does have. And all this is put with marvelous practical incen- tive to living. 1 Cf. Stevens, The Theology of the New Testament, pp. 109 fF. art. " Righteousness in the New Testament," H. D. B., p. 283 Peabody,/*?^^^ Christ and the Christian Character, pp. 120 ff., 196 ff. Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, pp. 69 ff . ; von Schrenck, Jesus and His Teaching, ^^. 118, 123; Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, pp. 311 ff.; Harnack, What is Christianity ?, pp. 70 ff.; Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, vol. I, pp. 335 ff.; Patterson DuBois, The Culture of Justice, pp. 61, 83-85: "Justice is methodized love"; Harris, Moral Evolution, pp. 237-238: "the perfect and final type"; and many others. 2 Cf. Kilpatrick, art. " Conscience," H. D. B., p. 468. BIBLIOGRAPHY See Votaw's carefully annotated list of books " for New Testa- ment study," ^?M^a/ PVor/d, October, 1905 ; and the bibliographies in the Bible dictionaries and religioiis encyclopaedias. I. General Works on Ethics. The general works on ethics usually have some dis- cussion of Christian ethics, in certain of its aspects : Paulsen, Wundt, Lotze, Green, Sidgwick, Stephen, Alex- ander, Dewey and Tufts, Palmer, Bowne, Mezes, Harris (Moral Evolution), DuBois (The Culture of Justice), Addams (Newer Ideals of Peace), Williams (A Review of Evolutional Ethics), Post (Ethics of Democracy), Raahdall (Theory of Good and Evil), etc. II. Works on Christian or Theological Ethics. The older discussions here are rather a priori ; the later discussions much more inductive. Martensen, Wuttke, Schleiermacher, Rothe, Dorner, H. Weiss, Harless, Hof- mann, Frank, Luthardt, Beck, Kiibel, Kahler, Pfleiderer, Schultz, Krarup, Kostlin, Herrmann (Ethik, Faith and Morals, Communion of the Christian with God), Thoma, Jacoby, T. B. Strong, Knight, Smyth, Ottley, W. L. Davidson, Mackintosh, Murray, Maurice (Social Morality), Nash (Ethics and Revelation), Dobschutz (Christian Life in the Primitive Church), Clark (The Christian Method of Ethics), Mathews (The Church and the Changing Order), Fremantle (The World as the Subject of Redemp- 277 278 BIBLIOGRAPHY tion, and the Gospel of the Secular Life), Drummond (The Ideal Life), Gladden (Applied Christianity, and The Church and Modern Life), Leckie (Life and Religion), J. Smith (Christian Character as a Social Power), Rau- schenbusch (Christianity and the Social Crisis), R. J. Campbell (Christianity and the Social Order), Peile (The Reproach of the Gospel), The Gospel for the Nineteenth Century, Coe (Education in Religion and Morals), Haering (The Ethics of the Christian Life). See also Review of Theology and Philosophy ^ " Survey of Recent Literature on Christian Ethics," January, 1909. III. Works on New Testament Theology. These, of course, include full sections on the teachings of Jesus : Weiss, H. J. Holtzmann, Beyschlag, Harnack (What is Christianity?), Stevens, Wernle (The Beginnings of Christianity), Adeney, Gould, Gardner (Exploratio Evangelica), Bosworth (The Teaching of Jesus and the Apostles), Mathews (The Messianic Hope in the New Testament), Briggs (The Messiah of the Gospels). IV. Works on the Life of Christ. These, of course, involve much reference to the teach- ing : Keim, Weiss, O. Holtzmann, Beyschlag, Reville, Seeley (EcceHomo), Sanday, Edersheim, Farrar, Geikie, Broadus, Wernle, Weinel, Schmidt (The Prophet of Nazareth), Bousset, Fairbairn (Studies in the Life of Christ), Smith (The Days of His Flesh), Rhees, Gilbert, Dawson, Abbott (Philochristus), Briggs (New Light on the Life of Christ), Matheson (Studies in the Portrait of Christ), Bennett (The Life of Christ According to St. Mark), Garvie (Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus), H. J. Holtzmann (Das Messianische Bewusstsein Jesu), Parkin BIBLIOGRAPHY 2/9 (The New Testament Portrait of Jesus), Selbie (The Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ), Forrest (The Christ of History and of Experience). V. Works on the Teaching of Jesus. Wendt (The Teaching of Jesus), Bruce (The Kingdom of God, The Training of the Twelve, The ParaboHc Teach- ing of Christ, With Open Face), Stevens, Gilbert (The Revelation of Jesus), Horton, Jackson, Svvete, Latham (Pastor Pastorum), Walker, Moorhouse, von Schrenck (Jesus and His Teaching), Brooks (The Influence of Jesus), Tolstoy (My Religion), Pullan, Ross, Contentio Veritatis (has one essay on The Teaching of Christ), Muirhead (The Eschatology of Jesus), Goebel (The Parables of Jesus), Jiilicher (Die Gleichnisreden Jesu), Dods (The Parables of Our Lord), Harnack (The Sayings of Jesus), The Creed of Christ. For the extensive and important literature on the Sermon on the Mount, see Votaw's article in the extra volume of Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. VI. Works on the Ethics of Jesus. The inductive study of the ethics of Jesus, and indeed of Christian ethics is, as Professor Peabody remarks (Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, pp. 21, 23, 26), a comparatively recent study, and the specific Hterature covering the whole field is not large. Briggs (The Ethical Teaching of Jesus) , Peabody (Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, Jesus Christ and the Social Question), Stalker (Imago Christi, and The Ethics of Jesus [announced]), Herrmann (Ethik, Faith and Morals, Die sittlichen Weisungen Jesu : Ihr richtiger und ihr falscher Gebrauch), A. Rau (Die Ethik Jesu), E. 280 BIBLIOGRAPHY Grimm (Die Ethik Jesu), Ehrhardt (Der Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu, im Verhaltniss zu den Messianischen Hoffnungen seines Volkes und zu seinem eigenen Messi- anbewusstsein), Seeley (Ecce Homo, pp. ii8 ff.), Brooks (The Influence of Jesus, lectures i and 2), F. P. Cobbe (Studies New and Old, chapter on " Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Christ"), Feddersen (Jesus und die sozialen Dinge), Mathews (The Social Teaching of Jesus), Heuver (The Teachings of Jesus concerning Wealth), Horton (Commandments of Jesus), Dale (Laws of Christ for Common Life), Gardner (Exploratio Evangelica, has special chapter on "The Ethics of Jesus," pp. 193 ff.). Some of the most valuable material on the ethics of Jesus is to be found in the special articles in the Bible dictionaries and religious encyclopaedias (Hastings' Dic- tionary of the Bible, Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, The Encyclopaedia Biblica, the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge, etc.), especially Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, and the Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels. See index of the Dictionary of the Bible under " Jesus Christ, teaching of;" and the various articles on "Ethics," " Jesus Christ," " Sermon on the Mount," and " Lord's Prayer," in H. D. B., D. C. G., the Encyclopaedia Biblica, and the new Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia, and note the many articles on various ethical topics, especially in tlie Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, and in the Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, such as "Asceticism," "Almsgiving," "Brotherhood," "Care," "Conscience," "Common Life," "Commandments," "Forgiveness," "Friendship," "Ideal," "Love," "Meekness," "Per- sonality," " Purity," " Righteousness," " Self-denial," "Truth," etc. INDEX Abbott, E. A., 58, 78, 120. Accommodation, Willia, note, 50. Addams, Jane, note, 246 Adeney, 194. Allen, note, 12, 68, 191, 192, 193; Analysis of Matthew, 145. Ambition, 134. American Journal of Theology, note, 78, 91, 197. Apologetic, in New Testament, 31- "Apostles," Patrick, note, 49. Asceticism, note, 66; loi, 139. Augustine, note, 242. Background of the Gospels, The, Fairweather, note, 63. Bacon, note, 9, 10, 12, 62, 88, 91, 194. Ballantine, 61. Bampton Lectures, The Reproach of the Gospel, 4. Bartlet, note, 50, 63, 267. Basic qualities, 204-231. Beatitudes, 204-231 ; as a progress, 213. Bebb, note, 152. Beecher, 209. Bennett, note, 41, 58, 63, 120. Bethune-Baker, 99. Beyschlag, note, 79, 255. Biblical Theology of the New Testament, The, Gould, note, 243- Biblical World, note, 62. Bibliography, 277-280. Bosworth, note, 186. Bousset, note, 49, 62, 201. Bowne, note, 50. Boys-Smith, note, 211. Briggs, note, 36, 51, 66, 78. Brooke, S. A., note, 136. Brooks, note, 134, 201. Brotherhood, 244, 257, 259, 264. Browning, 128, 252. Bruce, 51, 79, 95, 106, 119, 255. Burkitt, F. C, i, 8, 12, 13, 14, 29, 51, 52-54; 56> 63,93, 121- Burton, note, 68. Bushnell, note, 20, 201. Cambridge Theological Essays, note, 31. Carpenter, J. E., 197. Catholicism, 81. Character, 204, 230. Character of Christ, The, Kil- patrick, note, 49, 50, Character of Jesus, The, Jefferson, note, 20. Child, the, 135; emancipation of, 136; qualities of, 143, 150. Christ, see Jesus; doctrine of the person of, 16. Christ of History and Experi- ence, The, Forrest, note, 50, 51. Christian Ethics, Martensen, note, 37, 78. Christian Ethics, Strong, T. B., note, 201. Christian Life in the Primitive Church, Dobschutz, note, 66. Christian Method of Ethics, The, Clark, 80. Christianity and the Social Crisis^ Rauschenbusch, note, 51, 138, 142, 201, 265. Church and Modern Life, The, Gladden, note, 201, 242, Clark, 80. 281 282 INDEX Clouslon, note, 50. Coe, note, 257. Communion of the Christian with God, Herrmann, note, 266. Consequences, law of, 74. Contentio Veritatis, note, 17. Contagion of the good, 68, 76, 83. Covetousness, 174. Creed of Christ, The, note, 40, 50, 73, 151, 200. Critical position, 9. Culture of Justice, The, Du Bois, note, 275. Dale, note, 50, 78, 256. D'Arcy, note, 267. Davidson, W. T., note, 38. Dewey, note, 78, 252. Dictionary of the Bible, Hastings, note, 9, 16, 43, 91, 99, 133, 152, 191, 207, 275. Dictionary of Christ and the Gos- pels, Hastings, note, 2, 9, 10, 17, 18, 49, 50, 62, 63, 66, 102, 127, 147, 152, 194, 197. 209. 211, 266, 267. "Divorce," Burton, on, note, 68. Dobschiitz, note, 66. Dods, note, 187. Dole, note, 5, 78. "Doubly Attested Sayings," 8, 13, 14, 52-86, 114; form of, 55; fundamental laws of, 56; unity of, 83; compared, 188, 268. Drummond, 85, 202, 219. Du Bois, note, 275. Dudden, note, 66. Dunn, 81. Duty, 104, 122, 241, 256, 274. Eaton, note, 43. EcceHomo, note, 49, 50, 51, 78, 95, 99, 108, 201, 25s, 273. Education of Christ, The, Ramsay, note, 133. Education in Religion and Morals, Coe, note, 257. Efficiency, law of, 75, 82. Ehrhardt, note, 63. Eliot, George, 226. Encyclopedia Biblica, note, 147, 148. "End Ethics," 4. Erskine, 167. Eschatological teaching, 20. Eschatology of Jesus, The, Muir- head, note, 62, 63; Jewish, 63. Ethik, Herrmann, 81. Ethical Teaching of Jesus, The, Briggs, note, 36, 51, 66, 78. Ethics and Revelation, Nash, note, 50, 78. Ethics of the Christian Life, Haering, note, 79, 132, 253, 255. Exploratio Evangelica, Gardner, note, 32, 50, 134, 197- Expository Times, note, 9, 11, 83. Facts of Moral Life, The, Wundt, note, 197. Fairbairn, note, 51, 91, 200, 272. Fairweather, note, 63. Faith and Morals, Herrmann, note, 36, 49, 50. 81, 123, 256. Faith, law of, 74 ; in men, 93 ; in God, 93. Falseness, 68, 260. Fasting, 116. Findlay, 209. Forgiveness, duty of, 100. "Forgiveness," Davidson, note^ 38; Bethune-Baker, note, 99. Forrest, note, 50. Foster, note, 44, 78. "Foundation-pillar" passages, Schmiedel, 8, 10, 11, 13, 33-52; Sanday on, 11. Freedom, a new, 242. Freedom of Faith, The, Munger, note, 20. Fremantle, note, 131. Future, The Teaching of Jesus about the, Sharman, note, 63. Gardner, note, 32, 50, 134, 197. Gaxvie, note, 9. INDEX 283 Gilbert, note, 17. Gladden, note, 201, 242. Gladstone, 187. Goal, laws of the, 77. God, holiness of, 37; as Father, 77, 243, 249, 254, 259, 263, 271; as taskmaster, 165; sharing life of, 227. Good, triumph of the, 77; con- tagion of, 68, 229. Gore, note, 67, 242. Gospel and the Church, The, Loisy, note, 275. Gospel History and Its Transmis- sion, The, Burkett, note, 14, 15, 29. 55. 56, 63, 79, 120, 121. Gould, note, 65, 126, 243. Grace, parables of, 156. Growth, law of, 61, 74. Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu, Der, Ehrhardt, note, 63. Habit, law of, 61, 74, 82. Haering, note, 79, 132, 253, 255. Handbook of Christian Ethics, Murray, note, 69, 78, 138, 201. Happiness, 204, 216 flF., 230. Harnack, note, 12, 29, 31, 41, 50, 51, 55, 62, 65, 66, 81, 87, 88, 90, 95. 105. 133. 134, 191. 192. 194, 197, 201, 255, 257, 268, 275. Harris, note, 50, 134, 275. Hastings, see under Dictionary of the Bible; Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels. Hawkins, 10, note, 55, 152, 155. Hegel, 270. Herrmann, 35, note, 36, 49, 50, 81, 123, 256, 266. Hibbert Journal, 4, note, 64, 66, 81, 127, 131, 137, 270. Hinton, 226. Historical New Testament, note, 10. History of Early Christian Litera- ture, Von Soden, note 88. History of New Testament Times in Palestine, Mathews, note, 96. Holiness, 162. Holy Spirit, importance of, 37. Horae Synopticae, Hawkins, note, 152. Horton, note, 3, 19. Humility, 214, 217. Hygiene of the Mind, The, Clous- ton, note, 50. Ideal Life, The, Drummond, note, 85, 202. Imago Christi, Stalker, note, 20. Impurity, 258. Inferences, ethical, from "founda- tion-pillars," 46-52. Influence, 204, 228-231. Influence of Jesus, The, Brooks, note, 134, 201. Inner light, fidelity to, 79. Integrity of life, 76, 80. International Critical Commen- tary, see Matthew, Mark, Luke. Introduction to the New Testa- ment, Bacon, note, 88. Introduction to the New Testa- ment, An, Jiilicher, note, 12, 88. Inwardness and independence of moral life, 73, 81, 83, 97. Jefferson, C. E., note, 20. Jerusalem, G. A. Smith, note, 63. Jesus and his Teaching, Von Schrenck, note, 275. Jesus, Bousset, note, 49, 62. Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, Peabody, note, 50, 66, 73. 78, 131. 197, 275. Jesus Christ and the Social Ques- tion, Peabody, note, 68, 133, 138, 139, 255. Jesus, historicity and credibility of personality, 2; teaching of, 2; ethics of, criticised, 4 ; claims of, in Luke, 31 ; earnestness of, 35; character as a whole, 35 ; unique consciousness, 36, 49, 50, 51; as a worker of wonders, 40; 284 INDEX greatness of, 43; authority of, 43, 48, 51; compassion of, 44-45, 48, 51; ability to give rest, 46; earnestness of, 47; moral and spiritual independ- ence, 47 ; confidence in his own mission, 47; insight, 51; temp- tation of, 91; consciousness of power, mission, sonship, 91; message of, 114, 143; method of, 115, 143; purpose of, 115, 143; consistency, 119; original- ity, 197 flf.; ethical system, 274 ff. Jesus in Modern Criticism^ Schmiedel, note, 10, 15, 32, 33, 37, 39. 46. "Jesus or Christ," note, 4, 137. Jewish literature, influence of, 3. John, see Index of Biblical Refer- ences. Judgment, 146, 173. Jiilicher, note, 12, 88, 197. Kilpatrick, note, 49, 50, 275. King, note, 201. Kingdom of God, The, Bruce, note, 79, 95, 255. Kingdom of God, 62; growth of, 63- Latham, note, 50. Law, in the spiritual world, 73; extension of, 240. Laws of Christ for Common Life, Dale, note, 50, 78, 256. Laws of Friendship, King, note, 201. Lecky, 199. Lessing, note, 130. Life, laws of, in " Doubly Attested Sayings," 56, 65, 73-77; in Matthew, 149. Life of Christ According to St. Mark, Bennett, note, 41, 58, 63, 120. Life of Christ in Recent Research, Sanday, note, 9, 12; note, 51. Life, values of, 105 ; paradox of, 127; dwindling, 129; unity of, 186. Literary Illustrations of the Bible: St. Luke, Moffatt, note, 167. Literature, on ethics of Jesus, i; Jewish, 3. Logia, note, 9, 10. Loisy, 12, note, 275. "Lord's Prayer," Nestle, note, 62. Lotze, note, 120, 197, 198. Love, emphasis on, 30 ; as life, 31 ; supremacy of, 73; service of, 79; seeking and forgiving, 99, 173; life of God, 128; the great commandment of, 131, 144; goal of life, 149; in relations to others, 150, see also 156 ; of God, 167; above institutions, 171; sum of all, 205; sacrificial, 215, 226; the ultimate problem of living, 232 £f., 250, 255, 271. Luke, see Index of Biblical Refer- ences; outline of entire teaching in, 21-28; peculiar teaching in, 152-190; iee Plummer. Macfadyen, note, 83. McGiffert, note, 197. Mackenzie, note, 17, 50. Manual of Ethics, Mackenzie, note, 17, 50. Mark, see Index of Biblical References; Gould on, 65, 126; ethical teaching of, 108-144; summary of teaching, 143. Marriage, 69, 137. Martensen, note, 37, 78. Martineau, 178. Matheson, note, 41, 156. Mathews, note, 51, 63, 65, 66, 69, 96, 142, 255. Matthew, see Index of Biblical References; Allen on, 12, 68, 147, 191 ; ethical teaching, 145- 152; see H. B. D. Maurice, note, 131. INDEX 285 Meekness, 208, 218. Menzies, noie, 10. Mercy, 146, 154, 210, 221. Messianic Hope in the New Testa- ment, The, Mathews, note, 51, 63, 66. Microcosmus, Lotze, note, 197, 198. Miracle working of Jesus, 40. Moberly, 209. Mofifatt, note, 10, 121, 167. Money, 185. Moral Evolution, Harris, note, 50, 134, 275- Muirhead, note, 62, 63, 270. Munger, note, 20. Murray, note, 69, 78, 138, 201. Mustard Seed, parable of, 62, 142. Nash, note, 50, 78. Nestle, note, 62 ; 88. New Testament Theology, Bey- schlag, note, 79, 255. Newer Ideals of Peace, Addams, note, 246. Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers, note, 242. Outlines of Ethics, Dewey, note, 78. Outlines of a Philosophy of Reli- gion, Sabatier, note, 271. Palmer, 16. Parable, use of, 58, 63 ; of talents, 106; of fig tree, 107; of sower, of light, of fruit-bearing earth, of mustard seed, 142; unfor- giving servant, laborers in the vineyard, two sons, ten virgins, 146; of grace, 156, 187; two debtors, 158; Good Samaritan, 159; lost sheep, lost coin, lost son, 161 ff. ; ethical teaching of Luke 15, 161; of rich fool, 174; of watchful servants, 175; bar- ren fig tree, 178; rash builder, rash king, 180; extra service. 182; unrighteous steward, 183; Dives and Lazarus, 187; of warning, summary, 187. Parables of Our Lord, The, Dods, note, 187. Paradox of life, 127. Pastor Pastorum, Latham, note, 50- Patrick, note, 49. Paulus and Jesus, Jtilicher, note, 197. Peabody, note, 50, 66, 68, 73, 78, 106, 131, 133, 138, 139, 17s, 197, 255. 275- Peacemaker, 212, 215, 225. Peile, 4, note, 138, 139. Peirce, C. S., note, 64. Penitence, 214, 217. Personality of Jesus, historicity of, 2. Pfleiderer, 164. Pharisees, teaching of, 42 ; Eaton on, 43 ; spirit of, 94 ; crisis with, 120; literature on, 121. Philochristus, note, 50, 58, 120. Philosophy of Loyalty, The, Royce, note, 49. Place of Christ in Modern Theol- ogy, Fairbaim, note, gi, 200, 272. Plummer, 12, note, 152; 167, 183. Practical Philosophy, 'Lotze, note, 120, 201. Principles of Ethics, The, Bowne, note, 50. Priority by service, law of, 71, 76, 83, 134. Prophet of Nazareth, The, Schmidt, note, 49, 130. Protestantism, 81. Proverb, 102, 127. Purity, 210, 223. "Q," symbol for source-docu- ment, 9; reconstruction of, 10; Harnack on, 11, 28; reference to, 14, 28, 54, 55; ethical teach- ing in, 87-108, 114, 129, 144, 191, 192, 268. 286 INDEX Ramsay, 12, noie, 133. Rauschenbusch, noie, 51, 138, 142, 201, 265, Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit, Sabatier, note, 44. Religion, absolute, 31. Reproach of the Gospel, The, note, 4, 138, 139. Resch, 10. Resurrection, Tolstoy, 157. Retaliation, 263, 265. Reverence for the person, 76, 83, 223. Review of Evolutional Ethics, Williams, note, 68. Review of Theology and Philoso- phy, note, 10, 63, 121. Reville, 10. Roberts, note, 18. Romanes, 199. Ross, note, 19, 134. Rowland, note, 50. Royce, note, 49. Sabatier, note, 44, 271. Sabbath, 58, 116, 119, 120. Sadducees, note, 121. Salmon, 12. Sanday, note, 9, 10, 12, 51, 91. Sayings of Jesus, The, Harnack, note, 12, 29, 31, 55, 65, 87, 88, 90, 191, 192, 194, 268. Schmidt, note, 49, 130, 275. Schmiedel, 8, 10, 11, 13, 33-52, 57, 85, 87, 113, 268; Jesus in Modern Criticism, note, 10, 15, 32, 33, 37, 39, 46; inferences from "foundation-pillars," 46. Scott, note, 31. Scudder, note, 131. Self-control, 214. Self-reverence, 249. Self-sacrifice, law of, 75; demand for, 102; motives to, 103; modern need of, 129. Sermon on the Mount, 8, 20, 43; Gore on, note, 67, 242; Votaw on, 133; as a whole, 191-203; outline of, 195-196; Adeney on, note, 194; Bacon on, 194, 200; Jesus' discoveries in, 196, 200; the Beatitudes, 232-266; motives to living, 255 ff.; con- clusion on, 267 ff. Sermons for the New Life, Bush- nell, note, 20, 201. Service, law of, 70; demand for, 135- Seth, James, note, 66. Shairp, note, 78. Sham, 68. Sharing good, law of, 75, 83. Sharman, note, 63. Silanus the Christian, Abbott, note, 78. Sin, eternal, 38. Smith, D., note, 102, 127. Smith, G. A., note, 63, Social Morality, Maurice, note, 131- Social Teaching of Jesus, Mathews, note, 65, 69, 139, 142, 255. Sources of our Knowledge of the Teaching of Jesus, Wernle, note, 12. Sources of teaching of Jesus, 8; Sanday on, 9; Wright on, 9. Spirit of Democracy, The, Dole, note, 78. Stalker, note, 20. Stanton, note, 9. State, duty to the, 141. Stevens, note, 51, 66, 275. Stewart, 197. Strong, note, 16, 201. Studies in the Life of Christ, Fairbairn, note, 51. Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, Shairp, note, 78. Studies in the Portrait of Christ, Matheson, note, 41, 156. Studies in the Teaching of Jesus and his Apostles, Bosworth, note, 186. Studies in the Teaching of Our INDEX 287 Lord^ Swete, note, 50, 51, 152, 154. Swete, note, 50, 51, 152, 154. Synoptic Gospels, 10, 113. Talents, parable of, 106. Talmud, 60. Teaching of Jesus, see contents; historical interpretation of, 3; psychological interpretation of, 3 ; application of, 5 ; criteria of, 8; limitation of, 11, 17; ethical and religious, 17, 50; eschato- logical, 20, 62; in Luke, 21-28; amount and permanence of the ethical, 28; on wonder-working, 40; on inwardness of the reli- gious life, 40, 41, 49, 73, 81, 83, 97,126; new and revolutionary, 48, 116; supremacy of ethical and simply religious, 48; on integrity of life, 49; reverence for the person, 50, 76; in con- trast to teaching of his times, 50 ; Bartlet on, 50, 63, 267; demand for compassion, 5 1 ; on Sabbath, 58, 116, 119, 120; uselessness of "hoarding," 58; asceticism, 66, loi, 137; contagion of the good, 68, 77; marriage, 69, 137; service, 70; love, 73, 78; candor, 84; watchfulness, 77, 82, 85; Pharisaic spirit, 94 ; traditional- ism, 98, 124; self-sacrifice, 102; earnestness of life, 105; fast- ing, 116; rejoicing sonship, 116; social applications of, 133; am- bition, 134; the child, 135; warning judgment, 146; mercy, 146, 210; humility, 146, 214; for- giveness, 146 ; holiness, 162 ; cov- etousness, 174; meekness, 208; purity, 210; unity of , 270, 273. Teaching of Jesus, The, Horton, note, 3, 19; Ross, note, 19, 134; Stevens, note, 51, 66; Wendt, note, 50, 55, 197, 200, 256, 257, 270, 271, 275. Temptation, narrative of the, 91. Temptations, 247. Theology of the New Testament, The, Stevens, note, 66, 275. Tholuck, note, 206, 208. Thomas, 209. Tolerance, 136, 161. Tolstoy, 6, 157; note, 130. Traditionalism, 98, 121, 124. Training of the Twelve, The, Bruce, note, 41, 51. Truth, emphasis on, 29. Ungirt life, 176. Unity of life, 80, 234, 255, 263. Urmarcus, 9. Ultimate problem. The, 232. Use, law of, 74, 82. Utterance, law of, 76. Von Schrenk, note, 275. Von Soden, note, 88. Votaw, note, 133, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 207, 208, 217, 318, 265. Warning, 146, 154, i73- Watchfulness, law of, 77, 82. Wealth, 138, 183. Weiss, B., 10. Weiss, J., note, 17, 266. Wellhausen, 10, 88, 197. Wendt, 10; note, 50, 55, 197, 200, 256, 257, 270, 271, 275. Wernle, 10, note, 12, 55, 88, 152. What is Christianity? Harnack, note, 41, 50, 51, 62, 65, 81, 133, 134, 197, 201, 255, 257, 275. White, note, 9. Willia, note, 50. Williams, note, 68. World's code, 216. World as the Subject of Redemp- tion, The, Fremantle, note^ 131. Wright, 9, 10, 12; note, 152. Wundt, note, 197. INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFER- ENCES . 4 ■4 90 Matt. 5 : 32 68, 201 4 •7 90 5 : 32-37 238, 260 4 lO 90 5 :34 200 5 1-48 196 5 : 34-36 261, 263 5 3-4 213 5:37 201, 202, 235, 5 3-12 200, 201 255, 262 5 •3-16 195, 201 5 : 38-42 263 5 S-12 213 5 : 38-48 239 5 8 201 5:39 200 5 9 249. 2SS 5 : 39-42 201, 202, 241, 5 13 200 253, 255. 264 5 16 249, 255 5 =44 200, 244 5 17 200 238, 241 5 : 44-47 202, 257 5 17-20 256 5 : 44-48 201, 249, 253, 5 17-48 19s, 200, 202 255, 265 5 17-7 : 27 195 5:45 201, 202 5 18 238 241, 255 5:47 244 5 18-19 193, 201 5:48 201, 235, 255 5 :i9 234 241, 255 6: I 200 202, 235, 239, S 20 238, 257 249, 255, 256 5 21-22 241 6 : 1-34 196, 202 5 21-26 238 6:2 200 5 21-42 233. 257 6 : 2-34 256 5 21-48 256 6:4 201, 202, 235, 239, S 22 200, 201, 234, 255,257 6 : 5-21 249 253, 255, 256 200 S 22-24 202, 244 6:6 201, 202, 235, 239, 5 23-24 200, 249, 251, 257, 265 6:7 249 253, 255, 256 200, 256 5 25-26 192 6:8 249, 255 5 26 201, 234, 255 6:9 255 5 27-30 238 6 : 9-13 200, 249, 5 28 200, 201, 255 253, 255 5 28-30 258 6:14 249,250,251, 5 29-30 200, 201, 235, 255 6:15 255,265 249, 250, 251, 5 31-32 u 192 193, 200 28 59 255,265 290 INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES Matt. 6 6 : i8 202 .239 249.253. 255.256 6 : 19-21 239 6 : 19-34 202 6:21 256 6 : 22-23 85 6 : 22-24 201 235, 255 6:25 200 6 : 25-34 20c ,250 .253.255 7:1-5 196 7:1-6 258 7 : 1-12 233 7 : 1-14 201 7 : 1-27 196, 201 7:3 257 7:3-5 244 7:4 257 7 : 5 201, 235, 255. 257 7:6 192, 249 7:6-27 196 7:7-11 192, 200, 202, 249 7 : 12 200, 201, 235, 245. 255. 257 7:13 201, 235, 255 7 : 13-27 273 7:14 201, 235. 239. 255,256 7 : 20-27 200 7:21 256 7 : 21-23 239 7 : 22-23 192 7:24 256 7 : 29 35, 42 , 48, 200 8 : 19-22 89,90 9 : 37-38 89,90 10:7 89 10 : 10 89 10 : 12 89 10: 13 89 10: IS 89 10 : 16 89. 102, 145. 147. 150 10 : 16-19 lOI 10 : 24-25 103 10 : 24-39 90 10 : 24-40 89 10 : 26-33 103 10 : 32-33 129 Matt. 10 10 : 34-39 104 10 :4i 147, 150 II : 2-6 25. 42, 48 II :2-i3 89,90 II : 16-19 90 II : 16-27 89 II : 20-24 90 II : 25-27 90 II 128 35. 45. 49 12 : 7 146 147. 150 12 : 11-12 146, 147. 150 12 :25 89 12 : 27-30 89 12 : 32 32, 34, 37, 47, 89 12 = 33 89 12 : 36-37 146, 150 12 : 38-45 89 12 :40 40 13 10 120 13 16-17 89,90 13 31-33 89 13 51-52 145. 150 15 13 145. 146, 149 IS 14 89, 90, 99 16 5-12 33. 42, 48 17 20 89,90 18 3-4 145. 146, 150 18 7 89,90 18 10 145, 146, 150, 151 18 12 89 , 90, 100 18 13 85 , 90, 100 18 14 145, 146, 150, 151 18 15 89 , 90, 100 18 21 89 , 90, 100 18: 22 89 , 90, 100 18: 23-25 145, 147, 150, 151 19: 3-9 68 19: 12 145. 149 19: 28 89 20 : 1-15 145, 146, 149 21 : 16 145. 150 21 : 28-31 145. 150 21 : 31-32 151 21 : 32 89, 90 22 : 2-11 89 , 90, 105 22 : 40 146, 147. 149, 150 23: 2-3 146, 150 INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES 291 Matt. 23 : 3 149 Mark 3 : 33-35 112 23:4 89, 90, 95 4 : 1-34 109 23:5 146, 149 4:3-9 54, "2 23 : 7-10 146, 150 4:9-11 120 23: 12 89, 90, 95 4 : 11-20 112 23:13 89. 90. 95, 96 4:21 52,58 23 : 15-22 146, 149 4 : 21-25 112 23:23 89, 90, 95, 96 4:22 52,59 23:24 142 , 146, 149 4 : 22-24 120 23:25 97 4:23 52,59 23 : 25-36 90,95 4:24 53 23 : 25-39 89 4 : 24b 59 23:27 97,98 4:25 53,61 23 :28 149 4 : 26-29 113, 120 23 : 29-31 98 4 : 30-32 53, 62, 112 ^3 : 32-33 146, 149 4 : 33-34 120 24 : 26-28 89 6:4 55, I" . 24 : 37-41 89 6:5-6 35. 41, 47 24 : 43-51 89 6:8-11 112 25 : 1-13 146 , 147, 149 6: 10 64 25 : 13-46 146 147, 149 6 : lo-i I 53 25 : 14-30 89,90 6:34 35, 44, 48 25:31-46 150, 160 7 : 1-23 121, 124 Mark i : 14-4 : 34 108 7:1-9:1 109 I : 14-15 108 7 : 6-15 112 I : 15-17 112 7 : 14-23 114 I :i4 118 7 : 18-23 112 1:15 114 8:11-13 125 I :i7 108 8:12 34, 40, 47, 112 1:38 112, 114, "5 8: 12b 55 2 : 17 108 112, 114, 115 8:15 55, 125 2 : 19-22 112 8: 17-21 112 2 : 19-3 : 6 108 8:34 53, 64, 112 2 : 22 118 8 : 35-36 112, 127 2 : 23-3 : 6 119 8 : 35-37 "3, 114 2 : 25-28 112 8 : 37-38 112 2:27 113, "9 9 : 30-50 108 3:2-6 58 9 : 33-37 134 3:4 5 2.58, 112, 119 9 : 35-36 112 3:6 120 9 : 36-37 135 3:21 34, 35, 46 1 9:37 112 3 : 22-26 55 9 : 38-41 136 3 : 22-30 108 9 : 39-50 112 3 : 23-29 112 9:42 53,66 3:27 55 9 : 43-48 53,66 3 : 28-30 55 9:49 113, 114, 127 3 : 31-34 55 9:50a 67 3 : 31-3S 34, 35, 46, 109 I 9:50 54 292 INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES Mark 9 : 50b 113, 114, 127 Luke 6 : 37-45 30 10 : i-ii : 33 no 6 : 43-49 196 10 : 2-9 112 6 : 46-49 30 10:5 137 7 ■ 36-50 30, 156 10:7-9 137 7:39 157 10 : 11-12 54, 68, 112 7 '■ 40-50 152 10 : 13-16 135 7:47 158 10 : 14-15 112, 136 7:48 158 10 : 17-31 138 7:50 158 10 : 18 35, 36, 46 9 : 18-27 30 10 : 18-19 112 9 : 49-50 30 10 : 23-24 139 9:57 30 10 : 23-25 112 9 : 62 30, 153, 154 10 : 27 1X2 10 : 25-37 30 10 : 29-30 140 10 : 28-37 153 10 : 29-31 112 II : 14-23 29 10 : 35-45 134 II : 14-52 24 10 : 38-40 112 1 1 : 24-26 30 10 : 42-45 54, 70, 112 II : 29-30 40 II : 22-23 55 II : 29-32 29 II : 24 55 11:33-36 30 11:25 55 II :44 97 II : 29-30 40 12 : 1-12 29 12 : x-44 III 12 : 13-21 30 12 : 15-17 112 12 : 14-21 153, 173 12: 17 141 12 : 35-36 176 12 : 29-31 112, 113, 131 12 : 35-38 153 12 : 32-34a 54 12 : 35-48 17s 12:34 112 12 : 35-53 30 12 : 38-39 54, 70 12:37 176 12 : 38-40 112 12:38 176 12 : 40 126 12 : 39-40 176 12:43 126 12 : 41-43 176 12 : 43-44 112 12 :44 176 12 :44 126 12 :45 176 13:11 54, 71 12 : 46 177 13 : 15-16 55 12 : 47-48 154, 177 13:21 55 12 : 47-50 153 13 :32 34, 36, 46 12 : 49-50 154, 174, 182 13 : 33-37 112 12 : 49-53 30, 175 13 : 34-35 54, 72 12 : 54-59 175 15:34 34, 38, 47 13 : 1-5 173, 177 Luke 6 : 20-26 196 13 : 2-5 153, 154 6 : 27-36 30 13 : 6-9 30, 153, 173. 178 6 : 27 : 42 196 13 : 10-17 30 6:31 196 13 : 15-16 153. 154, 171 6:35 247 13 : 18-21 30 6 : 37-42 196 13 : 22-30 30 INDEX OF SCRIPTURE REFERENCES 293 Luke 14 : 1-6 30 Luke 16 : 9 185 14:5 154, 171 16 : 10 183, 186 14:7-11 30. 153. 178 16 : II 183, 186 14: II 179 16 : 12 186 14 : 12-14 30. 153. 16: 13 186 154, 172, 173 16 : 14 183 14 : 15-24 30, 184 16 : 14-15 153. 154 14 : 25-35 30 16 : 15 174 14 : 28-33 102, 153, 16 : 17-19 174 174, 180 16 : 18-21 174 14:33 181 16 : 19 183 15:4 166 16 : 19-20 174 15:7 166 16 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