Christ, The Absolute Morality
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'HEAVEN and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away."
"For verily I say unto you, until heaven and earth shall pass, one jot nor one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law until all be fulfilled."
Such is the striking claim put forth by the Founder of Christianity Himself in behalf of the moral system He came to inaugurate.
We say "the moral system," for it is of morality that these words are spoken.
Christ claims for the new ethical code, which He declares to have been all along at the root of the old ethical code, a permanent duration through all changes and all times.
He declares its permanence to rest upon a firmer basis than does the stability of the material universe.
Heaven and earth seem to be of all things the least affected by the march of time; we speak of the everlasting hills and the eternal stars, of the unwearied sun, and the brook that goes on for ever.
But Christ says that all this is only a metaphorical permanence, and as if in anticipation of the science of our own age, He declares
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that heaven and earth shall pass away.
They rest upon something which is contingent, which might have been otherwise, and which, therefore, may be otherwise again.
The law of nature gives no promise of its own continuance, no pledge beyond analogy that it will repeat itself to-morrow.
But Christ says that there is a law which rests upon no such contingency—the law of the moral life.
The thought He suggests is this: You can imagine that a time may come when other systems shall circle other suns, when the laws which now bind the material masses of creation shall be replaced by new laws, when the very elements of this present constitution shall melt with fervid heat.
But you can never imagine a time when the laws of My spiritual kingdom shall be other than they now are.
You can never imagine a time in which justice shall be other than just, truth less than true, love the reverse of lovely.
No circling of new systems can alter that.
No change in the old laws can ever make right cease to be right, or wrong be else than wrong.
The physical law as true, but the moral must be true; its contrary is unthinkable, its denial is death.
'' Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away."
The expression on which our attention fastens is the phrase, ''My word."
We said at the close of the last chapter that the abstract character of the Christian morality has been one great cause
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of its permanence.
Weare here called upon to supplement, and in some sense to qualify that statement.
The Christian morality is here said to be, not simply an abstract law, but an abstract law announced and illustrated in a human life; that which in Judaism was "the law" becomes in Christianity '" Jfy word."
The permanence of Christian morality is the permanence of a person.
It is the fadelessness of a concrete image—the image of a man.
It is the power of a moral personality to continue undimmed when all the associations of his earthly existence have passed away, when a new heaven and a new earth have risen upon the eyes of men, and a contrary mode of science has reversed the conclusions of the olden time.
Throuch all these changes the form of Him whom Christians call the Son of Man is found sitting unharmed, His eye undimmed, and His natural strength unabated.
This is the distinctive feature of the moral permanence of Christianity, the fact to be recognised and the problem to be explained.
Let us try first to recognise the fact.
Let us understand wherein lies the peculiarity of the Christian position.
It is not that a certain system of morality is habitually associated with the name of an individual life ; the same would hold true of the systems of Buddha, Confucius, and Mohammed.
The difference les here: Buddha, Confucius, and Mohammed are associated by name with their
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systems; Christ 2s his system.
If Buddha, Confucius, and Mohammed were forgotten, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism would still survive; if Christ were forgotten, Christianity as such would cease to be.
The result of the difference appears in a fact of history.
The personalities of Buddha, Confucius, and Mohammed have not kept pace even with their respective systems.
We can still describe minutely the rules which they taught and the doctrines which they propounded, but the men themselves are little more than phantoms.
We cannot tell whether Buddha existed.
We cannot see what made Confucius interesting even to his own age.
We cannot decide whether Mohammed were a devotee or an impostor.
The moral streams of Buddha, Confucius, and Mohammed are no longer modern streams, yet they are modern in comparison with the lives that profess to be their fountain-heads.
Far otherwise has it been with the stream of morality we are here considering.
It retains its early freshness, it keeps its ancient fulness, it preserves an unbroken connection with the Fountain whence it flowed.
If it looks less modern in one place than in another, it is precisely in those regions where it has left the Fountain-head behind.
The nearer we go to the source the more do we find ourselves in harmony with our present environment, and when we have reached the source itself our harmony is complete.
The person
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of Christ is no anachronism to the nineteenth century.
It is as youthful to-day as it was on the shores of the Galilean lake.
It is more adapted to the civilisation of our age than it was to the culture of that age in which it first appeared.
The powers which opposed it have become anachronisms; the spirit of Judaism is obsolete, and the forces of Paganism are superseded; but the personality of the Christian Founder has impressed itself upon the heart of the world and been borne along by the progress of the world's culture; this power has not passed away.
There is one very remarkable circumstance to be taken account of in estimating the force of this argument; and it is this: our vision of the person of Christ is now independent of His original historical surroundings.
It is no longer necessary to associate Him with a special country; He has risen "far above all principalities and powers."
The peculiarity of this position will be made evident by contrast.
Try to think of Mohammed apart from Arabia, or of Buddha apart from India, and you will find your thought reduced to a negation.
The personality will not be transplanted into a modern soil ; if you would render it visible at all, you must lift it along with its surroundings,
But it is altogether otherwise with the personality of Christ.
The land of His nativity has virtually passed away.
The special forms of culture in which He moved are far more effete than are those
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forms of culture in which moved the lives of Mohammed and Buddha, Yet it is not too much to say that the vividness of Christ's personality has rather gained than lost by the removal of His local associations.
'The facts of history have singularly illustrated the words ascribed to Him by the fourth
Evangelist: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me."
All the scenes of the earthly life of Jesus have to the modern mind attained an universal character.
The mountain on which He was tempted, the lake on which He taught, the desert where He fed the multitude, are no longer a Palestinian mountain, lake, or desert ; they are found in nature everywhere.
The scene of His domestic affections is no longer a room in the house of Bethany ; it is seen wherever the altar of family love is reared.
'The Cross on which He suffered is no longer the wooden Cross of Calvary ; it is felt in every sacrifice of will made in the cause of duty.
These are weighty facts, which speak for themselves and challenge observation.
The Christ after the flesh is as much an Asiatic as either Mohammed, or Buddha, or Confucius ; yet the moral personality of that Christ remains undimmed in a civilisation which has eclipsed theirs.
Many have come from the West as well as from the East to sit down in His kingdom; He has had other sheep not of His own fold.
What are the elements in this life which have given it such an absolute dominion?
We do not ask for an
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explanation of these elements; to do so would be to assume the human origin of Christianity.
It is not explanation, but analysis we seek.
We want to know what are the features of that moral portraiture which have contributed to make it a portrait for all time, which have left upon the canvas of history an impress so indelible as to become the perpetual mark of boundary between the annals which men call ancient and the events which they rank as modern.
It will be remembered that in the opening chapter of this volume we showed that the originality of the Christian religion les not in its absolute novelty, but in its absolute power of uniting and of reconciling things that before its coming were already old; that which makes it new is its discovery of a harmony between systems of ancient antagonism.
We have now to remark that the key to the absoluteness of Christ's person will be found in the same direction as lay the key to the originality of His religion.
It seems to us that in strict speaking we should not say that the life of Christ reveals a type of character ; it would be more correct to say that it combines all types.
The moral glory of Christ's person is no more an eccentric kind of goodness than the intellectual glory of His person is an eccentric kind of truth.
We have seen the truth which He taught to have been a combination into harmony of those types and symbols of human
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thought which before His time had been the watchwords of opposing schools.
We are now to see that the goodness which He exhibited was not a superhuman goodness in the sense of having no analogy to any moral type in man, but that it was superhuman just for the contrary reason— because it united in a single life those moral schools of humanity which, for want of a common basis, had mutually proscribed each other as schools of error.
To one who reads the life of Christ for the first time, the immediate impression produced is that of a Being whose goal was self-restraint.
We feel, looking on the surface, that the most comprehensive description of Him is that given by the Apostle of the Gentiles : " He pleased not Himself."
We see a life dedicated from its birth to a service of sorrow —its infancy, persecution, its childhood, obscurity, its youth, toil.
We see that life from the hour of its maturity taking upon itself voluntarily that destiny which hitherto had followed it, claiming the Cross as its peculiar mission, and crucifixion as the end of its being.
In every utterance of that life we hear the breathing of a self-denying spirit.
He who would be in communion with it is commanded to become partaker of its Cross, to renounce
_ itself, to be meek and lowly in heart, to turn his cheek to the smiter, to go two miles with him who insists on one, to surrender an additional garment to that which the litigant claims.
All this seems
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to point to one conclusion—that the Spirit of Him whom we call the Son of Man was essentially the spirit of Stoicism, a revival of that individual extinction which had enabled the philosophers of an earlier day to treat things that are as if they were not.
Ts this, then, a true impression of the moral life of Jesus?
Yes; so far as it goes it is perfectly true.
But deeper study shows us that it is not the whole truth; it only describes one hemisphere of the Christian life.
The Son of Man had in Him an element of Stoicism—the element which constitutes the truth of Stoicism; He did not make
His own personal advantage the end of His being, 'He pleased not Himself."
But now we are forced to look on another side of the picture, and a side which singularly enough is furnished by the writer to the Hebrews in the very same passage where he seems to eulogise the Stoicism of the Son of Man:
'Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the Cross, despising the shame."
The point which arrests attention is the suggested motive of the suffering: "For the joy that was set before Him."
We are made aware by these words that in the view of the first Christians, Christ, in spite of His voluntary Cross, was not a Stoic, that though He sought not personal advantage, He did seek personal joy.
If the Cross is the end of His being, it is only because the Cross is itself contemplated, not as an evil, but as a possible good, a potential source
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of blessing.
Here isa new and seemingly contrary aspect in the life of the Christian Founder.
He appears all at once to exhibit an opposite proclivity.
He has made a transition from the type called Stoic, Buddhist, Brahmin, to the type named Epicurean,
Confucian, Jew, Mohammedan.
The Christ, who at first view stood before us in the attitude of an Asiatic, stands before us now in the attitude of one who sees something good in life, who believes in the rewards of life, who hopes for the joy of life.
Has He not here passed over from the camp of the mystic to the camp of the utilitarian and the Hedonist ?
And when we come to the recorded life of Christ we find that His words and acts are capable of being read in this new light.
When, for example, in Matthew v. He deprecates the retaliation of physical injuries, and discourages the contention for physical possessions, are we sure that His sole, or even His main, motive is a sense of the value of self-restraint?
If we look at His words in the light of future utterances, we may be quite sure that it was not.
When He says, " My kingdom is not of this world; if My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight,' He expresses in the plainest terms the principle on which He lived and acted.
He says that the Christian must consider what is worth striving for.
It will be the duty of the Christian at all times to fight for his Master's Kingdom, but let him be sure what
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his Master's Kingdom is.
If the Kingdom of Christ were meat and drink, houses and lands, it would be the duty of the Christian to fight for these things.
But the Kingdom of Christ is not meat and drink, not houses and lands, not anything visible and tangible; it is the reign of righteousness.
Can it, then, be said that a Christian soldier is restraining himself in not fighting for that which is no part of His Kingdom?
Is it not clear that in Christ's view the injuries contemplated in Matthew v. do not even touch the true self of the man?
They are to be borne not because they give pain, but because they do not affect the well-spring of Christian joy.
They have no power to hurt on account of the presence of an inward glory—a peace that passeth understanding.
Let us pass now to a still more remarkable passage, relating, as 1t does, not to a mere bearing, but to an actual selection of the Cross,
In Matt. xi, 29 we read: "Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls."
The words may be viewed in many connections, but the standpoint from which we here survey them is somewhat unusual.
Christ here presents Himself to us in the aspect of what in modern times would be called an utilitarian moralist speaking from his own experience of life.
He declares as a matter which He has proved experientially that the Cross is valuable, not because it is painful, but
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because it is useful.
He says that the value of His own suffering has been its power to make Him calm amid storm, peaceful amid war, untroubled amid perplexity, and He asks all mankind to make trial of His method with the view of obtaining
His result.
Let us observe, too, that if the method be utilitarian, the goal is Epicurean, in the first and purest days of that philosophy, So far from seeking to sacrifice the individual, as the Stoic does, He declares His leading aim to be identical with the aim of the first followers of Epicurus— the production of calm in the individual soul, the fostering of a quiet repose amid the cares and solicitudes of a world of sorrow.
'" Ye shall find rest unto your souls."
Here, then, is an anomaly.
In one and the same life, and in the same acts of that life, there are seen two types of morality which in the previous history of the world had been deemed incompatible types.
What is the connection between these types?
What is that bridge in the life of the Son of Man which has united two hitherto incompatible ideas—the idea of an individual crucifixion and the thought of an individual joy?
The first of these was once the badge of the Stoic, and the second was once the goal of the Epicurean; Christ has claimed and appropriated both.
We want to know what is that element in the nature of Christ which has made such an union possible.
Wherein consists that Q
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reconciling medium which has bridged the distance between the two moral worlds and made the life of self-surrender identical with the life of joy ?
It consists in the fact that the life of Christ embraces yet a third type of character capable of uniting the other two.
That type is not to be found either in Stoic or in Epicurean or in any of the philosophers as such.
If we would see the germ of it we must go down to the domestic life of the masses, or to the philosophers become men.
It may be best described as the type of the heart.
It is the ideal which Plato sought to reach intellectually, and which for that reason he failed to reach.
It is the life which constitutes the life of home, which lights and consecrates the domestic altar, which makes fatherhood, motherhood, and brotherhood, possible realities.
Its nature is most clearly indicated in a single word—love.
Now, we can readily see how a perfect and unobstructed love would at one and the same moment be both an individual joy and an individual sacrifice.
Love, where it is unobstructed, is always a joy.
It is the deepest of all joys—the joy of the heart.
And yet who can fail to see that. this love is a specics of death?
It only exists by reason of a complete surrender of the very thought of self; the man loses himself in the being of another.
The joy of love is the actual fruit of sacrifice, and would have no being apart from sacrifice, It is the joy of a spirit that has ceased
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to behold ztself in the glass of consciousness.
It is the joy of a spirit which has lost its personal care in taking up the care of another, and which has found its own burden to fall in the lifting of a burden which is not its own.
When we have grasped this principle we have learned the secret of that marvellous balance of extremes which meet us in the character of the Son of Man, we have arrived at the explanation of the Christian paradox: "Take My yoke upon you, and ye shall find rest."
The yoke which He asked His followers to take was the burden of humanity.
He told them to enter into His own spirit of universal love.
He did not conceal from them that this yoke would bring a load of universal care, but He said that the universal care would destroy the individual care and to the personal life bring rest; the new yoke would be easy and the new burden light.
He said that He did not advance this doctrine as a speculative theory, but as a practical experience:
'Learn of Me."
He had tried it, He had proved it, and therefore He was able confidently to commend it.
It is the same thought which pervades the valedictory utterances ascribed to Him in the Fourth Gospel :—' These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full."
'Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world gives give I unto you."
The last clause expresses His own sense of the
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paradox involved in His words.
His lot in life was not certainly what the world would consider peace, or bequeath as a heritage of peace.
He spoke these words under the very shadow of a Cross.
How are we to explain them?
Shall we say that He was simply looking forward to the crown of a future world?
'To say so is to affirm that He bequeathed to His followers a peace which as yet He did not Himself possess.
Christ's peace was 7m the Cross, and it was in it for this reason, that His Cross was made, not of wood, but of love.
The cause of His suffering was the source of His individual rest.
He had become oblivious of all personal pain, because love had given Him a pain that was impersonal; the throbbing of the pulse of humanity stilled His own.
Here, then, we have the first exhibition of a new power—a power of universal love, of love for man as man.
Its earliest manifestation consists in making the subject of it a king; it brings hima cross of humanity, and in so doing it frees him from his own.
Hence it is that in this third aspect the Son of Man appears before us more in the attitude of the Platonist than in that of either the [Epicurean or the Stoic; at least He here effects what the Platonist tried in vain to accomplish— the founding of a great republic in which each man would be free.
We have already seen why, in the case of the Platonist, the effort was in vain: he, like all the rest of the Old World, approached,
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not humanity, but a Caste of humanity—the Caste of the intellectual.
The power of love, as we have seen, was here a very limited power; it could only promote sympathy amongst those already equals; it was a sympathy, not of persons, but of ideas, and therefore it did not demand sacrifice.
But tke object of Christ's love was humanity itself; not intellectual humanity, not aristocratic humanity, but suffering humanity, in every grade and of every order.
The class to which He appealed was that of the labouring and the heavy-laden, a category which, comprehending as it does the whole family both of active and of passive sufferers, is absolutely coextensive with the universal life of man.
Here is a field for a republic of which Plato never dreamed.
To every man of every shade of mental endowment Christ offers a sense of kinghood.
He offers it to all who shall follow His own method—the sacrifice of self by love.
He says that priesthood is the true road to kinghood.
He claims to be Himself a king on the ground of His sacrifice, and not in spite of it.
"Art Thou a king?" asks Pilate, struck apparently with the outward meanness of His condition.
The answer is striking and graphic:
''For this cause was I born, and to this end came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth," z.e., by martyrdom.
It is as if He had said: You think that My kinghood is disproved by the burdens that I bear.
I tell you that it is the bearing of these
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burdens that makes Me a king.
The new power which I bring into the world is a power of love, and therefore a power of sacrifice.
This cross which I carry, so far from being an obstruction to the realisation of My kingdom, is itself the very sceptre of that kingdom.
That which I have won, that which I offer to My followers, is not the power to avoid the calamities of life, but the power to lift these calamities.
I offer to make each man king in proportion as he becomes a priest, bears witness in his own life to the truth of sacrifice.
He shall be free and fearless and independent in proportion as he has died to self-interest, lost the thought of self in the thought of another, succumbed to the burden of love; that is the power which has made Me a king!
These, then, are the facts of the case; let us try to gather them up into one inference.
The thought which must strike us above all others in the enumeration of these facts is the number and variety of those human instincts to which this life appeals.
Within its brief compass there are comprebended impulses of human nature which apart from this life are converse.
Here are reconciled the love of life and the desire of death, and man is taught the truth, that to die unto himself is in the truest sense to live.
Here are united the gift of ministration and the thirst for power, and man is made to know that the service of love is the greatest empire.
Here are joined the streams of
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pleasure-seeking and asceticism, and man has the fact revealed to him that there may be a joy in sacrifice.
Here, in a word, we have the mecting of duty and interest, law and liberty, weakness and strength, dependence and rule.
Is it surprising that the result should have been what it is?
Is it strange that a life combining so many types of human nature should have been capable of outlasting so many human changes?
It is not the fact that this life contains different types of character that has made it universal; every man's life does that.
To say so is only to say in other words that we are all more or less inconsistent with ourselves.
There is no man that does not at times reveal features at variance with the natural bent of his character.
The strongest men have some weak moments; the weakest have moments when they are strong.
But we do not say at such times that either of these classes has illustrated the union of contrary types; they have illustrated only the inconsistency of human nature.
Their action presents itself as an incongruity, and we experience the sensation of beholding two lives in one body.
In Christ the phenomenon is altogether different in kind.
The difference lies in the fact that when in Him two types meet they at once unite.
'There is not borne in upon the mind the faintest sense of inconsistency in looking at the diverse types exhibited by the Son of Man.
We feel that somehow, somewhere, there has been a combination, a
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fusion, a reconciliation of once antagonistic elements into a consistent and harmonious whole.
The impression on the eye of the spectator is not one of incongruity, but of symmetry, of melody, of proportioned beauty.
Within this life of the Son of Man all the great types of the sons of men are as perfectly fused as are the minor and major notes in a piece of music.
We ask again, Is it surprising that its influence should have been abiding; surely humanity itself must pass ere this life can become an anachronism?
There is nothing local about the ministry of Jesus.
It is wider in aim than the scenes through which it moved.
It addresses no circle more limited than humanity, and therefore humanity has heard it, and will continue to hear it.
The absolute nature of that message which it brings will in the next chapter engage our attention.