Here, in my room under the eaves, with my mother's Bible before me, and the clamor of history a mere murmur in the distance, I am to write for those who wish to read, be they young or be they old, this outline of the life of Jesus, the Christ of God. I am to write as one who has, for himself, watched great men and great events, but can recall none so great as He, and what He did. When I think of the men whose names are historic, I realize that JESUS stands alone. What I here present is not a fifth biography of Him, where incidents are set out in order of date, but a portrait, in which many aspects are blended, stroke by stroke and sentence by sentence, until His face, His form, His character are gradually revealed, as on a canvas. Yet He is more than any such picture--for He lives and moves amongst us, even to-day. And if this book teaches anything, it is that we must see Him, if at all, each for himself.
Two thousand years ago, He came, conquering and to conquer. Think first of His ambitious humility, His kingly and imperial modesty. Go to the British Museum and count the statues of Rameses, how many they are and in how hard a stone. See how every Roman Emperor has his bust. Note the faces of monarchs on coin and postage stamp. Trace the cipher of Louis XIV on window and portal of his chapel at Versailles. How familiar are the moldered features of Napoleon. But the countenance of Christ, which did not see corruption--although instantly recognized by Paul, who never saw Him in the flesh--rose above this world, unrecorded by any sculptor or painter. Not a photograph remains of Him who made the sun. Yet who, of all rulers of men, was as ambitious as He? The potentates of history built cities and destroyed them, changed the names of provinces and lorded it over the map. He claimed the hearts of men. And because He was of no reputation among the classic artists of His day, whose dim frescoes still adorn what is left of pleasure-places, like Pompeii, long desolate, He has since been highly exalted. The reverent brush of supremest genius has labored to reveal the glorious lineaments of the Son of Man. His countenance, faint or clear, is known, as if by instinct, to us all. The crude coloring of the Armenian altarpiece is one with the glowing splendors of Holman Hunt or Rubens, and no artist, whether of the brush, the chisel, the pen, or of daily life, can honestly endeavor to show Him forth without rising nobler from the effort.
The Unreported Christ
Possibly men's hearts would have been more richly satisfied if, instead of crucifixes, ikons, painted windows, and pictures, there had been a fuller knowledge of Christ's words and deeds. The truth is that the word came first--a creative word, inspiring, at the outset, the heroism of the missionary, and afterwards, the perspective of the builder, the colors of the artist, and the harmonies of the musician. One need only compare a London music-hall with Westminster Abbey--each, mind you, the best of its kind--or the Madonna of a Raphael with the meretricious triumphs of profane art, in order to measure what modern lands would have been, bad though they often are, if the irrepressible genius of mankind had been cut off from the purifying mysticism of the Incarnation. Yet the words of Christ, which have thus determined the fate of civilization, were left, in the first instance, almost, as it would seem, to chance. At a time when Emperors of Rome carved their titles on marble, much as schoolboys cut their names on their desks, and philosophers of Alexandria vainly amassed huge libraries of clay tablets and papyrus, with which in due course the Moslems were to stoke the furnaces beneath the baths of that city, Jesus--so far as we are told--wrote only once, and then on the ground ; nor do we know what phrase it was that rid a sinful woman of her pious persecutors, there in the cold portico of the unfeeling Temple. Over and over again, we read of Him teaching, but do not know what He taught. Yet no man who ever spoke better deserved a verbatim report. If Jesus returned to-day, every syllable, as it fell from His lips, would be taken down in shorthand, translated into a hundred tongues, and flashed, as the news of the day, to the ends of the earth. Each gesture and mannerism would be described with a minuteness derived from admiration, curiosity, or malice; and I like to think of Him as One whose wisdom is unexhausted-a Friend who, when we meet Him, has still new things to say to us.
The historians of Rome, like Dio, ignored Him, and He was content to come without their observation. Knowing the fallibility of man, He yet entrusted His message to the memory of those who loved Him through death. He took no visible precautions to secure what the Speaker of the House of Commons calls "the greater accuracy" of their reminiscences. He applied no critical safeguards. He wished nothing to survive that had not helped someone who needed help. And His confidence in the generation that slew Him was incredibly justified.
The Gospels and their Writers
Incomparably the most illustrious books ever written in the immortal language of Homer and Ęschylus have been neither Homer nor Ęschylus, but the colloquial and declassical Gospels. Merely as translated they have become, by consent, the noblest masterpiece of English literature. They are, like Jesus, both human and Divine. On the one hand, He said and did these things. On the other hand, they only come to us in so far as somebody of our own flesh and blood treasured them in his heart and handed them on.
We find the Sermon on the Mount both in St. Matthew and St. Luke. The first report is fuller than the second, yet the second contains sentences not included in the first. As one who has devoted his life to the task of summarizing speeches, and can speak with a practical experience not possessed by any critical scholar, who spends his time among books, I am entitled to the opinion that these are vivid and nervous accounts, of a real utterance, by a real Teacher--the very variations showing that we have here, not error or carelessness, but the corroboration of more than one witness. And when I am told by German critics that our Lord could not have uttered the discourses set out in the Fourth Gospel, I appeal once more to my own experience. I have been writing some anonymous articles which aroused curiosity. Not only have my friends decided, on internal evidence as it is called, that I did not write them, but I have heard already of one person, of high literary attainments, who does not deny that he is the author. If one considers how literature is actually produced, one becomes profoundly skeptical of what are called the results of modern research. The proof is often merely hypothesis, and the hypotheses vary, like the fashions.
Our Lord did not inscribe a Koran, to be learnt by rote and transcribed from parchment to parchment, like some Abracadabra. When He said that we must worship the Father in spirit and in truth, His only audience was an erring Samaritan woman, to whose good faith He trusted with an implicitness which was vindicated by one of the most dramatic and moving dialogues ever incorporated in biography. For this reason, we read the Gospels--not as Wordsworth is read, in selections, because all have been preserved--but as a whole, because all have been sifted, arranged, and illuminated by gratitude and admiration. John--as he assures us--could have filled the world with books. In the result, he left us less than an advertisement page of the Times. We talk of the higher criticism, but no criticism was higher than that of the Evangelists, for the crucible in which they refined their gold, till it was pure as glass, was a crucible, not of scholarship, hug of experience. And while here have been innumerable attempts to undermine the authenticity of the Gospels, is to be noted that in these two thousand years not one alternative biography, based on malice, on superstition, or on skepticism, has replaced them.
Fourfold Portrait
The Gospels are like quarterings on the royal escutcheon of the Saviour. In the Book of Revelation we find a resplendent symbol of His glowing coat-of-arms. There we read of the four living creatures: the lion, the lamb, the human face, and the flying eagle, all singing their "Holy, holy, holy," to the Source of their being and ours. These mystical personages, foreshadowed by the poet Isaiah, have their six wings--with twain to cover the face, which is reverence; with twain to cover the feet, which is humility; and with twain to fly, which is service. Reverence, humility, service--these were the characteristics of the biographers, who, writing anonymously, desired no literary rewards, but set down their narratives in crabbed penmanship, as part of their daily work and worship.
In Mark we see the lion-like man--active, untiring, with an imperial energy, and masterful in every impulse. There, at Venice, the Lion of Mark still stands glorious; and in a greater empire than the Venetian, the lion is the hall-mark of true metal, the exemplar of vigilant courage; massive, not easily stirred, but when aroused, irresistible. Such was the Hero of Judah and Prince of the House of David, General of twelve legions of angels, in whose crowded life the watchword was "immediately."
The lamb--signature of Matthew--does not in nature easily lie down with the lion. But in Christ they are one. The lamb has two qualities of infinite significance: first, a readiness to die while life is still unspent, and, secondly, an utter inability to injure others. When Christ was cut off, He was still in His prime. There is no hint that He ever suffered from mental or physical disease. No one has ever attributed to Him the epilepsy of Mohammed. He was a perfect victim. And He died unresisting. Of His miracles, two only did a hurt. In the first, He taught us that many swine are not worth one man's soul--the swine being to Him that wealth which is contrary to God's law. In the other, it was by withering a figtree that, in mercy, He warned a nation drifting to its doom.
In Luke's record, we see the face of a friend--moved by deep, human sympathy. The appeal is there to the best emotion of our race. What man of you, having a hundred sheep, will leave the hundredth to perish in the wilderness? What woman of you, having ten pieces of silver, will lose the tenth and not search till she find it? What father, having two sons, will throw off the younger when he returns, disgraced, from the far country? That is Luke's approach to Christ.
John's is as the flying eagle, who rises far above earth, and gazes with keen eye right into the eternities. The eagle, which has symbolized the Republic of the West, the daring exploits of Napoleon, the pride and power of Germany and Austria, and the great autocracy of Russia, was first devoted to the blazonry of the Redeemer, nor is there any prestige claimed, whether for despotism or democracy, which was not His first, and will not be His at the last. Yet, summing up as He did, the best in creation--the sacrifice not the waywardness of the lamb, the courage not the ferocity of the lion, the wisdom not the poison of the serpent, so it is the vision of the eagle, not the eagle's cruelty, that helps us to understand Him.
Energy, obedience, sympathy, vision--these are what we find in Him. We are invited to approach Him, not from one but from every point of view, and from whatever direction we thus come to Him we shall find that He will in no wise cast us out.