Christ'S Absolute Demand
XIV.
CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
THE ultimate test of an absolute religion is the demand it makes on its followers.
If that demand be local and temporary, or if it be such as after events prove to have been local and temporary, the religion is shown to have been only one of the many forms of public opinion which originate and end with the conditions of a certain time.
Mohammedanism is now rapidly fading from the face of Europe, because the demand of Mohammedanism is for Europe an anachronism.
Mohammed may have been the Prophet of God for the Middle Ages ; for the Europe of the nineteenth century he can be so no more.
The inability of the moral requirement to reach the conditions of our own day furnishes an incontrovertible proof of the special and transitory circumstances to which it owed its origin.
Of all religions the most absolute in its demand is Christianity ; it expresses itself from the outset without compromise and without qualification We say "from the outset," because this is a
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remarkable circumstance.
It might naturally be expected that the founder of a new faith would in the hour of its foundation be lenient.
We should expect him to present the new faith to his disciples in the fairest possible light; to soften down its difficulties, to smooth its asperities, to make it seem easier than it really was.
With Christ it is all the reverse.
That which He reveals to His followers before all other things is the vastness of His own claim upon them, the greatness of that moral demand which He has to make on their conscience.
He does not cloak nor dissemble it.
He does not say that it may be averted or avoided by any system of Jewish ceremonialism.
He sums up the requirements of the Sermon on the Mount —requirements which seem already to be superhuman enough—in one tremendous precept which comprehends and transcends them all: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."
It may seem strange that a faith which made its followers so humble as did the Christian religion should for a moment have encouraged so exalted an aim.
It appears at first view an inconsistency in men impressed above all things with their own nothingness to set before themselves an object of imitation so unspeakable and so transcendent as the Supreme Being.
But the paradox is altogether removed when we remember that principle of the Christian morality to which in another connection
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we have already alluded—the humbling power of a great ideal.
We have seen that in this morality the sense of darkness only begins when the light has come.
The impression of moral depravity is here deeper in proportion as the standard of morality is high.
If it be so, then the humility of the Christian disciple is the direct result of his lofty aim.
It is just because his standard of morals is an absolute standard that his life is a humble life.
It is his boundless view of the distance between what he is and what he ought to be, that makes him refuse to see the steps of his own progress.
If his view were more contracted his self-confidence would be more strong; his humility lies in the fact that the law imposed on him is this: Be perfect, as your Father in heaven. as perfect, Passing, however, from this point, we come to the more important question.
Is this demand of Christ within the reach of man's complhance ; is it something which humanity can perform?
The charge of impracticableness has sometimes been urged against the Christian law; it has been said that it asks from man more than he can do.
And we must confess that there is a sense in which this is true. No individual man could keep the Christian law any more than he could keep the Jewish law.
Not only so; but we hold such an impracticableness in the Christian demand to be essential to the individual Christian.
His weakness is his
Cade)
CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
strenoth.
His humility springs from his perception of an ideal above his head.
If that ideal can be lowered to him, or, which is the same thing, if he can be raised up so as to reach it, he shall thereby enter on another type of morals than that marked by the earthly form of Christianity; in Pauline phrase, he will henceforth be justified by works and not by faith.
In this sense, then, we may admit the charge.
We may admit that when Christ says, Be ye perfect, He asks something which the individual soul cannot give.
It does not follow, however, that it cannot be given by humanity.
The greatest philosophic dogma, perhaps the only philosophic dogma, which Christianity has incorporated with its moral system, is the existence of a life in man beyond the individual life—a life to which the individual life bears the same relation as a member of the body does to the body.
We hold that when Christ demands perfection it is the perfection of the Christian organism that He demands.
You and I can never be more than individual members of that organism.
We are not the whole body ; we are only a hand, a foot, an eye, or an ear.
No perfection as members could make us perfect as a body ; the most beautiful eye could not say to the hand: I have no need of thee.
The perfection of the body is reached through the mutual supply by each member of that which is lacking in the other.
This we understand to be the substance of the
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earliest and ablest commentary on Christ's demand for perfection—the commentary of St. Paul.
Why does he say:
'' Till we all come unto the unity of the faith, unto the measure of the stature of the perfect man?"
Would it not have been more natural to have said: of perfect men?
Certainly, if that had been his meaning.
But that clearly was not his meaning.
He did not mean to say that each of us would some day be a model of perfection independently of any light and support from the other, but, on the contrary, through the light and support which each lent to the other he had a hope that one day the many men would constitute together one penfection, that those diversities of gifts which in themselves indicated incompleteness would form in their combination one great spirit comprehending the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
That this is St. Paul's meaning is put beyond doubt by his own express declaration.
In speaking of Christ under the metaphor of the head of the body, he says, '' Ye are complete in Him."
It is as if he had said, In yourselves ye are each of you but fragments.
Not one of you, taken apart, has more than a single spark of the Divine life.
In your isolation you are all miserably incomplete.
But in your union the incompleteness shall vanish.
Ags members of a common organism united in one head the fragmentary nature of your lives and characters shall disappear, and in the combination
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of each part with its counterpart you will receive the symmetry of the finished whole.
This same view is taken by a somewhat later expositor of the Christian system—the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
In Hebrews xi. 39, 40, he says, "These all having obtained a good report through faith received not the promise, God having provided some better thing for us, that they without.us should not be made perfect."
The thought here is very suggestive.
The writer is speaking of the good and great men of the old world, He is telling how they had only an imperfect light to guide them.
He holds up their victories as an example to his own days, because they had fought under disadvantages.
He speaks of them as having been imperfect men, and as having died in their imperfection.
Yet, strange to say, he looks upon them as having been "made perfect" after death, not as we should expect by the fact of sublimation in a future state, but by the revelation of a new fact in the world of time.
That new revelation is the exhibition of humanity in Christ, no longer as a mere disconnected series of individual lives, but as the connected members of a complete organism, penetrating each other, supplementing each other, and justifying the existence of each other.
The character of these old worthies was not justified until we of later days appeared ; without us they were not perfected— v.e., the ground of their perfection was not revealed.
CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
But when we of the Christian age appeared—in other words, when the entire bodily organism of humanity came into view, the lower organs were seen to be as essential as the higher to the maintenance of the universal life, and the men of ancient days claimed their necessary share in the production of that completeness which belonged to the great whole.
Such is the Christian doctrine of human perfection, We have called it a philosophic doctrine.
It seems to us to form the single bridge between Christianity and ancient philosophy on the one hand, and between Christianity and modern science on the other.
It was held contemporaneously with St. Paul by Seneca and the later Stoics, and it is probable that the Apostle of the Gentiles rather adapted than suggested it.
Here, however, its form was more intellectual than moral, more speculative than practical.
It is when we turn to our own days—the days when philosophy has assumed the garb of science—that the real analogy appears between Christian doctrine and secular thought.
For this doctrine of St. Paul is the belief of a school which is generally reckoned the reverse of Pauline.
The doctrine that humanity is not merely a series of individuals, but the life of a connected organism, is the leading ethical idea of the nineteenth century.
It is the one positive element in the negations of Auguste Comte.
It is the one ideal feature in the empiricism of
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Mr. Herbert Spencer, of Mr. Leslie Stephen, and of Mr. G. H. Lewes.
It is, indeed, this element which gives to the doctrine of evolution its main charm, Its attraction lies in the message which it brings, that we are not moving in isolation, but in masses, that no man's life is in itself a perfect whole, that the being of each is linked by an iron chain to the being of all, that our virtues, such as they are, have had their origin in the development of the past, and shall receive their finishing touch only in the indefinite future.
This, we say, is that doctrine in the gospel of evolution which has made it to all minds attractive, to some minds divine.
Yet let us remember that this doctrine is not peculiar to the gospel of evolution; it is in it, but it is not exclusively of it.
It belongs to an earlier gospel than science; it is the central thought in the teaching of St. Paul.
It is no disparagement to the science of the nineteenth century that it has borrowed such an idea, nor does it tend in any sense to weaken her conclusions.
The fact, however remains that the leading principle of the modern science of ethics is identical with the leading principle of Pauline morality: the vision of human nature, not as a collection of units, but as the effluence of an ideally perfect life, of which the individual units are but the fragmentary forms and members.
Recurring now to this Pauline doctrine of perfection, we are disposed to give it an absolute
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O57 sense.
We do not understand it merely to mean _ that in this sublunary sphere of things the individual man cannot hope to be perfect.
We understand it to mean that in no sphere of things, sublunary or otherwise, could the individual as an individual ever be perfect, that a perfection of selfsufficiency would end in the destruction of morality, that, in short, the only hope for the perfectibility
— of the whole is that the individual should consent to be simply a part.
We take St. Paul, in fact, to be here not describing the present state of human morality, but enunciating that universal aud eternal law which must apply to all moral beings throughout all creation—that the perfection of the organism as a whole is made up of the mutual supply which the members give to one another of their varied and diverse gifts.
If this be St. Paul's view, it throws a curious uight upon the Christian conception of a future life
—a light in which it comes strangely near to the modern doctrine called corporate immortality.
As this doctrine has of late engrossed a large share of literary and scientific notice, and as it really belongs to the sphere of morals more than to that of theology, we shall endeavour briefly to state on. what grounds and to what extent we should be prepared to accept it, Stated in round terms, the doctrine of corporate immortality is the belief that the individual will only live in the race, On this formula St. Paul R
CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
and modern science are at one.
So far then there is no difference of opinion, that is to say, to the signing of the formula.
The disciple of Christianity and the disciple of Comtism are alike prepared to subscribe to the doctrine of a corporate immortality, and are ready to subscribe to that doctrine in the same words: "The individual will only live in the race."
But when we turn from the sound to the sense of the formula we find that it is being read in two different ways, whose difference amounts to a direct contradiction of meaning.
Let us begin with the interpretation of the Comtist and those who in this respect are his followers.
What he means by the life of the individual in the race is the annihilation of the individual.
In his view all that survives death is the race.
'The individuals of each age are but as drops in a stream.
They pass away to make room for new drops, and their place is found no more.
But the stream itself goes on, not in spite of, but by reason of, this transitoriness ; it lives by the death of its constituent elements.
In the interest of | morality the Comtist calls upon the individual to realise this fact.
He calls upon him to fix his eye upon the continuance of the stream, and to consider that its continuance is purchased by the successive coming and going of such drops of being as his own.
He tells him that he ought to be content to die in order that the race may live.
Let him give up the petty personality which he
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calls himself.
Let him seek corporate immortality —the immortality of the collective life of man.
Let it be enough for him that when he has had his little day, and has ceased to be, his life shall yet have done something to further the continuance of that great organic whole of which his own being was but a passing phase.
Now this is a form of the doctrine of corporate immortality which, for our part, we cannot accept.
We reject it, not in the interest of self-love, nor yet in the interest of a theological system, but in the interest of that very morality to which this doctrine specially claims to appeal.
It professes to evoke our spirit of self-sacrifice.
It is because we believe that such a doctrine would interfere with the spirit of self-sacrifice that we are impelled to deny it.
Let us understand the position.
I am to hold lightly my own life; on what ground ?
Not because it is mine, not because it is bad, but simply and solely because it is individual.
Be it observed, that logically I cannot stop here.
If I am to hold my own life in contempt by reason of its mere individuality, it is evident that the same reason must lead me to hold lightly all other lives.
Is this the spirit of sacrifice?
I am content that I should die, and I am content that others should die; I am satisfied that all concrete life should perish in order that an abstraction may live.
This may be Stoic heroism, but it is not Christian sacrifice.
CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
But there is a second form of the doctrine of a corporate immortality—that form in which we believe it to be held by St. Paul in particular, and by the writers of the New Testament in general.
According to this reading the formula that the individual will only live in the race has been framed, not in the interest of the race, but in the interest of the individual.
What it is taken to say is this: Our great hope in the immortality of our individual lives les in the conviction that each of us is bound to the other, and therefore that none of us shall ever be alone.
We hope that in the future we shall not be less, but more, individually strong than in the present, but our expectation rests on our belief that in the future we shall feel, not less, but more, our need of one another.
And a moment's reflection will convince us that this view of the subject is at all events a true reading of human nature.
For, let us only ask, wherein consists our difficulty of conceiving the state called heaven?
We shall find that it lies in our inability to imagine a state in which the individual shall be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
It is not the perfection that appals our judgment ; it is the effect of that perfection upon the moral life.
I am told to think of heaven as a place of unselfishness, and of its inhabitants as ministering spirits.
What is unselfishness?
What is ministration?
These words have a meaning in the present world, where men are not equal, and
CHRISY'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
where the fulness of one has to supply the want of another.
But what meaning can they have in a world in which by supposition neither you nor I have any need of each other, and there is no room for helpfulness on either side?
Surely in such a state of things as this the existence of ministering spirits is like the existence of useless organs in a physical body, or the manifestation by a human mind of faculties for which there is no sphere of action.
Now, it is just here that St. Paul steps in with his doctrine of corporate perfection—a doctrine which in a moment makes the moral life of the Christian heaven intelligible to the spirit of man.
He tells us that the unity and perfection of the Divine Life will always he in the fact that each of its members will always have its own special gift and its own special need.
I shall always have something which is not possessed by you; you will always have something which is not possessed by me. I shall always get support from you in that wherein you are superior to me; you will always get help from me in that wherein I am superior to you.
Our perfection will be our union ; our imperfection will be our need of union, but the imperfection shall itself be golden.
We shall be unable any longer to be selfish, for the very reason that we shall have ceased to be self-sufficient; the body of humanity shall be perfected by the mutual support of its members.
CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
° Need we say that this conception of the cor- | porate immortality opens up a new view of the future life of man—a view which for the first time brings that future within the circle of the moral philosopher.
For it must be confessed that the popular conception of the Christian heaven is one that defies all ethics.
Professing to describe a state of saintship, it only delineates a scene of selfsufficiency in which each man sits upon his own throne, and none has aught to ask of his brother.
We say that such a conception sets ethics at defiance, for it describes as a state of saintship a world where no man gives or receives.
But the Pauline view of a corporate immortality, which, old as it is, is only now receiving recognition, reveals a new heaven wherein dwelleth righteousness.
It shows us that the idea of a future world without individual want is a dangerous dream, because a dream born of selfishness.
It tells us that the time shall never come when the individual man shall have no more to desire; that every one of us shall have sufficient poverty in his nature to afford to one another the luxury of ministration.
It says that in no future of the soul shall the Sermon on the Mount be obsolete; that in no region of the universe shall mercy and love be anachronisms ; that in no sphere of creation shall benevolence lose its right or beneficence forfeit its power.
In the light of this doctrine we learn for the first time why it is that to the ministrant souls
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of the world it is said:
'" Inherit the kingdom."
It is because from the foundation of the world the kingdom is prepared for them.
In the eye of the Christian Founder the true city of Godis a city of spiritual commerce.
Each is weak where his brother is strong; each is strong where his brother is weak.
Each gives to the other that special kind of riches in which the other is poor; and from the mutual interchange of strength there at length emerges a perfect Divine Republic—a city which hath foundations whose builder and maker is God.
Here, in the recognition of a point where Christian morality becomes an eternal necessity, these studies may fitly close.
Perhaps at the end of our journey the strongest impression left on our mind is the permanent character of the ideas we have been considering.
We are made to feel irresistibly that in whatever departments the religion of Christ needs renewal, here, at least, it keeps its morning glow.
The advance of Biblical criticism may have torn many texts from their context and robbed many books of their reputed authors.
The advance of modern science may have made impossible many forms of thought which once were held identical with the laws of truth itself.
But neither the advance of Biblical criticism nor the progress of modern science has contributed in the least degree to modify our conception of Christian ethics.
The morality of the New Testament is unopposed
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either from without or from within.
It excites no sense of incongruity with the modern aspects of the universe.
Its main positions are accepted by the evolutionist as parts of his own system, and its leading precepts are still the standard by which men of every school judge the deeds of their brothers.
The morality of the Christian religion has retained its youth to our days.
Such, we say,.is the first and strongest impression left on the mind by a survey like this in which we have been engaged.
'There is, however, a second, which, if less strong, is not less suggestive, and it is this: the possibility that out of this unshaken element the things which have been shaken may be reconstructed.
There is one fact which must often have struck us throughout these studies, and that is the ease with which the moral shades into the theological.
Abstaining, as we have done, from all doctrinal discussion, we have yet at every step seen the precept illustrating the dogma.
Justification by faith, the Christian principle of prayer, the regenerating work of the Spirit, the kinghood and priesthood of the Son of Man, the membership in the divine body, the existence of a future life in which the saints shall rule—all have received an exposition from the interpretation of the moral nature of man.
We do not say that this moral exposition has exhausted the meaning of any formula.
The sight, the scent, and the touch combined do not exhaust the meaning of the flower.
Every man
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who thinks knows that behind all that he has seen and felt there is yet sleeping in the flower a world of undiscovered beauty, undiscovered for want of the appropriate sense to discern it.
Even so, if we believe any system to be a divine system, we shall, in proportion to the strength of that belief, expect that its symbols shall conceal more than they manifest.
But if the moral exposition cannot claim to be exhaustive, it claims within its limits to be true.
It has a guarantee for its truth which is superior to testimony and higher than miracle ; it is seen by its own light, and it is seen from within.
Its evidence is perceived at once as a fact of human experience, and it is legible by its own light.
So far as it goes, therefore, it is reliable ;-the only question is—How far does it go?
Is it capable of reconstructing in its own form, and in a consistent symmetry, the stones of that temple of Christian theology which have been shattered by storm and worn down by time?
Is it capable of raising from its ashes that life of enthusiastic faith which made the martyrs of the first Christian age? We believe that it is; and our belief is grounded on the persuasion that the faith of the first Christian age was itself not intellectual, but moral.
It is built upon the conviction that St. Paul, the greatest and almost the earliest Christian martyr, approached the problems of theology from the standpoint of morality, approached them from the side of his own sense
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of sin, his own moral struggle, his own aspiring conscience.
In the revival of that primitive conscience, in a regress to the days of the moral instinct of humanity, we see the promise and potence of the Christ that is to be.
THE END.
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