IV. Faith Born of Need
CHAPTER IV
FAITH BORN OF NEED
It has been shown in the last chapter that the Jesus who is presented in the New Testament is one whom a man can trust; there are no limits to His goodness and no limits to His power. But that presentation in itself does not afford a sufficient basis for faith; no matter how great and good be the Saviour, we cannot trust Him unless there be some contact specifically between ourselves and Him.
Faith in a person involves not merely the conviction that the person trusted is able to save, but also the conviction that he is able and willing to save us; that there should be faith, there must be some definite relation between the person trusted and a specific need of the person who trusts. The men and women to whom Jesus said in the Gospels (in substance or in word): "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace," all had very definite needs that they trusted Jesus to relieve. One was sick, one was deaf, one was blind; and when they came to Jesus they were not merely convinced that He was in general a powerful healer, but each of them was convinced, more or less firmly, that He could heal his peculiar infirmity, and each of them sought healing in his own specific case. So it is with us today. It is not enough for us to know that Jesus is great and good; it is not enough for us to know that He was instrumental in the creation of the world and that He is now seated on the throne of all being. These things are indeed necessary to faith, but they are not all that is necessary; if we are to trust Jesus, we must come to Him personally and individually with some need of the soul which He alone can relieve.
That need of the soul from which Jesus alone can save is sin. But when I say "sin," I do not mean merely the sins of the world or the sins of other people, but I mean your sin—your sin and mine.
Consideration of the sins of other people is the deadliest of moral anodynes; it relieves the pain of conscience, but it also destroys moral life. Very different is that conviction of sin which leads a man to have faith in Christ.
That true conviction of sin appears as the prerequisite of faith in a great verse in the Epistle to the Galatians, which describes in briefest compass the true Christian way of approach to Christ. "Wherefore," says Paul, "the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ." No doubt Paul is referring specifically to the law of Moses as the schoolmaster to bring the Jews to Christ; but we are fully justified in giving the verse a far wider application. The particular way in which the Old Testament law, according to Paul, led the Jews to Christ was that it brought them to despair because of their sin, and so made them willing to accept the Saviour when He came. The "schoolmaster" of the Pauline figure of speech was not, in ancient life, a teacher; but he was a slave appointed in well-to-do families of the time to go with the children to school and in general prevent them from having any liberty. The figure of speech in that verse is only slightly varied, therefore, from that which appears just before, where the law is represented as a jailer. But for the law, Paul means, the Jews might have thought that their own righteousness was sufficient; but every time that they were tempted to seek escape from condemnation, the high standard of the law showed to them how very far short they had come of the will of God, and so they were prevented from false hopes.
Of course, this is only one aspect of the old dispensation; even under the old dispensation, according to Paul, there was faith as well as
law; the grace of God was revealed as well as His awful righteousness; the religion of the Old Testament is by no means represented by Paul as one of unrelieved gloom. But so far as man's own efforts were concerned, the gloom, according to Paul, was complete; hope was to be found, not in man, but in God's gracious promise of a salvation that was to come.
Thus the law of Moses, according to Paul, was a schoolmaster to bring the Jews to Christ because it produced the consciousness of sin. But if so, it is natural to suppose that any revelation of the law of God which, like the law of Moses, produces the consciousness of sin may similarly serve as a schoolmaster unto Christ. Indeed we have direct warrant for this wide extension of the application of the verse.
"When the Gentiles," Paul says in another passage, "which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves." Here the law of Moses is plainly brought into relation to a law under which all men stand; the Old Testament Scriptures make the law of God plainer than it is to other men, but all men have received, in their consciences, some manifestation of God's will, and are without excuse when they disobey. However the law is manifested, then, whether in the Old
Testament, or (still more clearly) in the teaching and example of Jesus, or in the voice of conscience, it may be a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ if it produces the consciousness of sin.
That is the old way of coming to Christ—first penitence at the dread voice of the law, then joy at the gracious invitation of the Saviour.
But that way, in recent years, is being sadly neglected; nothing is more characteristic of present religious conditions than the loss of the consciousness of sin; confidence in human resources has now been substituted for the thankful acceptance of the grace of God.
This confidence in human resources is expressed in many ways; it is expressed even in prayer. I remember a service which I attended a year or so ago in an attractive village church. The preacher, who was a well-educated, earnest man, had at least the courage of his convictions, and gave expression to his optimistic religion of humanity not only in his sermon but also in his prayers. After quoting the verse in Jeremiah which reads, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," he said, in effect (though I cannot remember his exact words): "O Lord, thou knowest that we cannot accept this interpretation; for we believe that man does not will to do evil but fails only from lack of knowledge." That was at least frank and consistent, and I must confess that I had much more respect for it than for the pious phrases in which the modern religion of humanity is usually veiled. It was paganism pure and simple, but it was at least a respectable paganism not afraid of plainness of speech.
And indeed it ought not to be forgotten that paganism can be a very respectable thing; the modern confidence in man is not unlike that of the ancient Stoics; and Stoicism, with its doctrine of a universal human brotherhood and its anticipations of modern humanitarian effort, has some high ethical achievements to its account.
But the gospel of paganism, ancient and modern, the gospel that a preacher, whom I heard preach recently, commended as "the simple gospel of human worth," has its limitations; its optimism remains, after all, upon the surface of life, and underneath there are depths that it can never touch. It is at any rate quite different from Christian belief; for at the root of Christianity is a profound consciousness of sin. Superficially, indeed, there is some similarity; the Modernist preacher speaks with apparent humility of the sad defects of human life, and of the need of divine assistance. But such humility does not touch the heart of the matter at all; indeed it really implies a similarity in kind, though not in degree, between what now is and
what ought to be. Very different is the Christian attitude. To the Christian, sin does not differ from goodness merely in the degree which achievement has attained; but it is regarded as transgression of a law that is absolutely fixed; the pagan sense of imperfection is widely different from the Christian sense of sin.
At the root of the Christian attitude is a profound consciousness of the majesty of the moral law. But the majesty of the moral law is obscured in many ways at the present time, and most seriously of all in the sphere of education. Indeed, strangely enough, it is obscured in the sphere of education just by those who are becoming most keenly conscious of the moral bankruptcy of modern life. There is something radically wrong with our public education, it is said; an education that trains the mind without training the moral sense is a menace to civilization rather than a help; and something must quickly be done to check the impending moral collapse. To meet this need, various provisions are being made for moral training in our
American public schools; various ethical codes are being formed for the instruction of children who are under the care of the State. But the sad thing is that these efforts are only making the situation tenfold worse; far from checking the ravages of immorality, they are for the most part themselves non-moral at the root. Sometimes they are also faulty in details, as when a recent moral code indulges in a veiled anti-Christian polemic by a reference to differences of "creed" that will no doubt be taken as belittling, and adopts the pagan notion of a human brotherhood already established, in distinction from the Christian notion of a brotherhood to be established by bringing men into a common union with Christ. But the real objection to some, if not all, of these efforts does not depend upon details; it depends rather upon the fact that the basis of the effort is radically wrong.
The radical error appears with particular clearness in a "Children's Morality Code" recently proposed by "The Character Education
Institution" in Washington. That code contains eleven divisions, the sub-headings of which are as follows: I, "Good Americans Control
Themselves"; II, "Good Americans Try to Gain and Keep Good Health"; III, "Good Americans are Kind"; IV, "Good Americans Play
Fair"; V, "Good Americans are Self-Reliant"; VI, "Good Americans Do Their Duty"; VII, "Good Americans are Reliable"; VIII, "Good
Americans are True"; IX, "Good Americans Try to do the Right Thing in the Right Way"; X, "Good Americans Work in Friendly
Cooperation with Fellow-Workers"; XI, "Good Americans are Loyal."
Here we have morality regarded as a consequence of patriotism; the experience of the nation is regarded as the norm by which a morality code is to be formulated. This (thoroughly non-moral) principle appears in particularly crass form in "Point Two" of the Institution's
Five-Point Plan for Character Education in Elementary School Classrooms: "The teacher," says the pamphlet, "presents the Children's Morality Code as a reliable statement of the conduct which is considered right among boys and girls who are loyal to Uncle Sam, and which is justified by the experience of multitudes of worthy citizens who have been Uncle Sam's boys and girls since the foundation of the nation. The teacher advises the children to study this Morality Code in order to find out what Uncle Sam thinks is right.…"
But what of those not infrequent cases where what "Uncle Sam" thinks is right is what God thinks is wrong? To say to a child, "Do not tell a lie because you are an American," is at bottom an immoral thing. The right thing to say is, "Do not tell a lie because it is wrong to tell a lie." And I do not think that it is an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into the public schools for a teacher to say that.
In general, the holier-than-thou attitude toward other peoples, which seems to be implied in the program of the Character Education
Institution almost from beginning to end, is surely, at the present crisis in the history of the world, nothing short of appalling. The child ought indeed to be taught to love America, and to feel that whether it is good or bad it is our country. But the love of country is a very tender thing, and the best way to kill it is to attempt to inculcate it by force. And to teach, in defiance of the facts, that honesty and kindness and purity are peculiarly American virtues—this is surely harmful in the extreme. We blamed Germany, rightly or wrongly, for this kind of thing; yet now in the name of patriotism we advocate as truculent an inculcation of the same spirit as Prussia could ever have been accused of at its worst. Surely the only truly patriotic thing to teach the child is that there is one majestic moral law to which our own country and all the countries of the world are subject.
But the most serious fault of this program for "character building" is that it makes morality a product of experience, that it finds the norm of right conduct in the determination of that "which is justified by the experience of multitudes of worthy citizens who have been Uncle
Sam's boys and girls since the foundation of the nation." That is wrong, as we have already observed, because it bases morality upon the experience of the nation; but it would also be wrong if it based it upon the experience of the whole human race. A code which is the mere result of human experimentation is not morality at all (despite the lowly etymological origin of our English word), but it is the negation of morality. And certainly it will not work. Moral standards were powerful only when they were invested with an unearthly glory and were treated as quite different in kind from all rules of expediency. The truth is that decency cannot be produced without principle. It is useless to try to keep back the raging sea of passion with the flimsy mud-embankments of an appeal to experience.
Instead, there will have to be recourse again, despite the props afforded by the materialistic paternalism of the modern State, to the stern, solid masonry of the law of God. An authority which is manmade can never secure the reverence of man; society can endure only if it is founded upon the rock of God's commands.
It will not now be possible to propose in full our own solution of the difficult educational problem of which we have just been speaking.
We have indeed such a solution. Most important of all, we think, is the encouragement of private schools and Church schools; a secularized public education, though perhaps necessary, is a necessary evil; the true hope of any people lies in a kind of education in which learning and piety go hand and hand. Christianity, we believe, is founded upon a body of facts; it is, therefore, a thing that must be taught; and it should be taught in Christian schools.
But taking the public school as an established institution, and as being, under present conditions, necessary, there are certain ways in which the danger of that institution may be diminished.
1. The function of the public school should be limited rather than increased. The present tendency to usurp parental authority should be checked.
2. The public school should pay attention to the limited, but highly important, function which it is now neglecting—namely, the impartation of knowledge.
3. The moral influence of the public-school teacher should be exerted in practical rather than in theoretical ways. Certainly the (thoroughly destructive and immoral) grounding of morality in experience should be avoided. Unfortunately, the true grounding of morality in the will of God may, in our public schools, also have to be avoided. But if the
teacher himself knows the absolute distinction between right and wrong, his personal influence, without theoretical grounding and without "morality codes," will appeal to the distinction between right and wrong which is implanted in the soul of the child, and the moral tone of the school will be maintained. We do not for a moment mean that that sort of training is sufficient; for the only true grounding of morality is found in the revealed will of God: but at least it will avoid doing harm.
4. The public-school system should be kept healthy by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools and Church schools, and the State should refrain from such regulation of these schools as to make their freedom illusory.
5. Uniformity in education—the tendency which is manifested in the proposal of a Federal department of education in the United States— should be avoided as one of the very greatest calamities into which any nation can fall.
6. The reading of selected passages from the Bible, in which Jews and Catholics and Protestants and others can presumably agree, should not be encouraged, and still less should be required by law.
The real centre of the Bible is redemption; and to create the impression that other things in the Bible contain any hope for humanity apart from that is to contradict the Bible at its root. Even the best of books, if it is presented in garbled form, may be made to say the exact opposite of what it means.
7. Public-school children should be released at certain convenient hours during the week, so that the parents, if they choose, may provide for their religious instruction; but the State should entirely refrain both from granting school credit for work done in these hours
and from exercising any control whatever either upon attendance or upon the character of the instruction.
Such are in general the alternative proposals that we might make if we were dealing with the problem which has led to the efforts at "character building" of which we have spoken. We recognize to the full the good motives of those who are making such efforts; but the efforts are vitiated by the false principle that morality is based upon experience; and so they will only serve, yet further, we fear, to undermine in the hearts of the people a sense of the majesty of the law of God.
Certainly if there be no absolute law of God, there can be no consciousness of sin; and if there be no consciousness of sin, there can be no faith in the Saviour Jesus Christ. It is no wonder that many persons regard Jesus merely as the initiator of a "Christ life" into which they are perfectly able, without more ado, to enter; it is no wonder that they regard their lives as differing only in degree from His. They will never catch a real glimpse of the majesty of His Person and they will never understand His redeeming work, until they come again into contact with the majesty of the law. Then and then only will they recognize their sin and need, and so come to that renunciation of all confidence in themselves which is the basis of faith.
It must be admitted that this way of approach to Christ is often rough and thorny. That does not mean, indeed, that faith in Christ must always be preceded by agony of soul. Almost unlimited is the variety of Christian experience; and often faith seems to come at the same moment as contrition. The children of Christian parents, in particular, often come to trust Christ as their Saviour almost as soon as consciousness begins; these children of the covenant know the
grace of God almost as soon as they know sin. But whatever be the particular form of Christian experience, the way of approach to Christ through the law of God always involves a rebuke to human pride.
It is not surprising, therefore, that other ways of approach are often proposed. This way being rough and thorny, other ways are being sought. It seems hard to many men to enter into the Christian life through the little wicket gate; and many therefore are clambering up over the wall.
In the first place, there is the purely intellectual way. The claims of Christianity, it is said, must be investigated on their merits, by the use of a rigidly scientific method; and only if they are established as true may they be allowed to control the emotional and volitional life.
For this method of approach, as will be clear from all that has been said in the preceding exposition, we have the warmest sympathy; indeed, we believe, there is nothing wrong with the method itself, so far as it goes, but the trouble lies in the application of the method. If a man were truly scientific, we think, he would be convinced of the truth of Christianity whether he were a saint or a demon; since the truth of Christianity does not at all depend upon the state of the soul of the investigator, but is objectively fixed. But the question is whether a method which ignores the consciousness of sin is really scientific or not; and the answer must be, we think, that it is not. If you take account of all the facts, you will be convinced of the truth of Christianity; but you cannot take account of all the facts if you ignore the fact of sin. You cannot take account of all the facts if, while searching the heavens above and the earth beneath, you neglect the facts of your own soul.
Let us see how the ostensibly scientific approach to Christianity works out. In pursuance of it we begin in a systematic way; we bring forward, first, our arguments for the existence of a personal God.
And I for my part believe that they are rather good arguments; they have not altogether been demolished, I think, by the criticism of Kant. If, then, we have established the existence of God, the question arises whether He has revealed Himself in such fashion as that personal communion with Him becomes possible for mankind.
Probably it will be admitted that if He has done so at all, He has done so in the Christian religion; Christianity will probably be admitted to offer the most plausible claim, at least, among all the religions of the world to be based upon a real revelation of God. But has even the Christian claim accredited itself? It has done so—to put the matter in briefest compass and deal with it at the really crucial point—if Jesus rose from the dead; it has not done so if He did not rise. Now there is certainly some evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Admittedly His intimate friends believed that He had risen, and upon that belief the Church was founded. But what in turn caused that belief? Many answers have been proposed to this question; but none of them is thoroughly satisfactory, except the simple answer that the belief of the disciples was founded upon fact. So much will be rather widely admitted; the origin of the Christian Church is admittedly a very puzzling fact; only ignorance can deny the difficulty of the historical problem that it involves for all naturalistic historians.
But a difficulty, it will be said, is also found in the traditional solution, as well as in the naturalistic solutions. The difficulty appears in the supernatural character of the alleged event. If the resurrection were an ordinary event, the evidence for it would admittedly be sufficient; but then as a matter of fact it is not an ordinary event but a miracle, and against the acceptance of any such thing there is an enormous weight of presumption.
This objection I for my part am not at all inclined to take lightly.
Indeed, if the evidence for the resurrection, as we have outlined it, stood alone, it might, I think, be insufficient. Even if a dozen men for whose character and attainments I had the highest respect were to come into the room and tell me, quite independently, that they had seen a man rise from the dead, I am not sure whether I should believe them for a moment. Why, then, do I accord to witnesses of so long ago—witnesses too, who lived in a comparatively unscientific age (though its unscientific character is often enormously exaggerated)—a degree of credence which I might refuse to trained observers of the present day? Why do I believe in the resurrection of Jesus when I might not believe, even on the basis of overwhelming testimony, in the resurrection of one of my contemporaries?
The question seems at first sight hard to answer, but the answer is really not so difficult as it seems. The answer is that I believe in the miracle which is at the foundation of the Christian Church because in that case the question does not concern merely the resurrection of a person about whom I know nothing, a mere x or y, but it concerns specifically the resurrection of Jesus; and Jesus was like no person who has ever lived. It is unbelievable, I say, that any ordinary man should be raised from the dead, but then Jesus was no ordinary man; in His case the enormous presumption against miracle is reversed; in His case, far from its being inconceivable that He should have been raised, it is inconceivable that He should not have been raised; such an one as He could not possibly have been holden of death. Thus the direct evidence for the resurrection is supplemented by an impression of the moral uniqueness of Jesus' person. That does not mean that if we are impressed by the moral uniqueness of Jesus' person, the direct evidence for the resurrection is unnecessary, or that the Christian can be indifferent to it; but it does mean that that
impression must be added to the direct evidence in order to produce conviction.
But how do we know that Jesus' moral character is absolutely unique? We do so only because of our conviction of sin. Convinced of our own impurity, as revealed by the majesty of the divine law, we become convinced of His dissimilarity in kind from us, and thus we say that He alone was pure. Thus even in order to establish the fact of the resurrection, the lesson of the law must be learned.
In another way also the conviction of sin is necessary in order that we may believe in the resurrection of Christ and thus accept the claims of Christianity. The resurrection, as we have seen, if it really took place, was a miracle; it involved an intrusion of the creative power of God into the course of the world. So stupendous an event is difficult to accept unless we can detect for it an adequate purpose; and the adequate purpose is detected only by the man who is under conviction of sin. Such a man alone can understand the need of redemption; he alone knows that sin has introduced a great rent into the very structure of the universe, which only a creative act of God can close. The truly penitent man rejoices in the supernatural; for he knows that nothing natural can possibly meet his need. He rejoices even in the new consciousness of the uniformity and unity of nature which has been so widely disseminated by modern science; for that uniformity of nature only reveals with new clearness the sheer uniqueness of the redemption offered by Christ.
Thus even in order to exhibit the truth of Christianity at the bar of reason, it is necessary to learn the lesson of the law. It is impossible to prove first that Christianity is true, and then proceed on the basis of its truth to become conscious of one's sin; for the fact of sin is itself one of the chief foundations upon which the proof is based.
When that fact of sin is recognized, and when to the recognition of it is added a fair scrutiny of the historical evidence, then it seems thoroughly reasonable to believe that Christianity is true. Anyone whose mind is clear, no matter what his personal attitude may be, will, we think, accept the truth of Christianity; but no one's mind is clear who denies the facts of his own soul: in order to come to the Christian view of Christ it is necessary only to be scientific; but no one can be truly scientific who ignores the fact of sin.
We are not ignoring the emotional and volitional aspects of faith; we are not denying that as a matter of fact, in humanity as it is actually constituted, an intellectual conviction of the truth of Christianity is always accompanied by a change of heart and a new direction for the will. That does not mean that Christianity is true only for those who thus will to accept it, and that it is not true for others; on the contrary it is true, we think, even for the demons in hell as well as for the saints in heaven, though its truth does the demons no good. But for a thing to be true is one thing and for it to be recognized as true is another; and in order that Christianity may be recognized as true by men upon this earth the blinding effects of sin must be removed. The blinding effects of sin are removed by the Spirit of God; and the Spirit chooses to do that only for those whom He brings by the new birth into the Kingdom of God. Regeneration, or the new birth, therefore, does not stand in opposition to a truly scientific attitude toward the evidence, but on the contrary it is necessary in order that that truly scientific attitude may be attained; it is not a substitute for the intellect, but on the contrary by it the intellect is made to be a trustworthy instrument for apprehending truth. The true state of the case appears in the comprehensive answer of the Westminster
Shorter Catechism to the question, "What is effectual calling?"
"Effectual calling," says the Catechism, "is the work of God's Spirit, whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our
minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, He doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel." That does justice to all aspects of the matter; conviction of sin and misery as the prerequisite of faith, the enlightening of a mind blinded by sin, the renewing of the will; and all these things produced by the Spirit of God.
In the second place, instead of following the purely intellectual way that has just been discussed, men sometimes try to come to Christ through the sense of beauty. And indeed it is a beautiful thing—this life of Christ rising like a fair flower amid the foulness of the Roman
Empire, this strange teaching so simple and yet so profound. But there is at least one objection to the sense of beauty as the way of approach to Christ—it cannot be forced upon those who desire it not.
There is no disputing about tastes: one man may admire Jesus, another may prefer the pagan glories of ancient Greece or of the Italian Renaissance; and if it is a merely esthetic question, no universally valid decision can be attained. If the way of approach is merely through the sense of beauty, then the universality of the Christian religion, at any rate, must be given up.
Is the life and teaching of Jesus, moreover, so beautiful after all?
Jesus said some things that offend the sensibilities of many people, as when He spoke of the outer darkness and the everlasting fire, and of the sin that shall not be forgiven either in this world or in that which is to come. These things cannot be called exactly "pretty"; and by many men they are simply ignored. Some years ago I heard a preacher who, after the customary abuse of Calvin and others, obtained a smile from his congregation by quoting something that Cotton Mather had said about hell. The question that might have occurred to me as I listened was why the preacher had to go so far afield. Why should he have had recourse to Cotton Mather, when
Jesus would have done just as well? There are words of Jesus about hell, just as terrible as any that can be found in the writings of the theologians; and those words might have obtained as good a smile— from that congregation—as the words of Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather or the rest.
There is, however, one class of persons from whom those words would have obtained no such smile, and to whom they would have seemed not to mar one whit the beauty of the teaching of our Lord.
These are the persons who have passed through the strange experience of the conviction of sin, the persons who hold the same view of sin and retribution that Jesus held. To such persons, and to such persons alone, the beauty of Jesus is without a flaw. That beauty cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of the holiness upon which it is based; and the holiness is unknown except to those who have been convicted of their own sin through learning the lesson of the law.
In the third place, men try to come to Christ through the desire for companionship; they seek in Him a friend who will be faithful when other friends depart. But companionship with Jesus is not always the comfortable thing that it is sometimes thought to be; Jesus did not always make it easy to be a disciple of Him. "Let the dead bury their dead," He told the enthusiast who came eagerly to Him but was not willing at once to forsake all. "one thing thou lackest," He said to the rich young ruler, and the young man went sorrowing away. "He that is not with me," He said to men who wanted to enjoy His companionship without definitely taking sides, "is against me." "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children … he cannot be my disciple." It was a very serious thing, in those Galilean days, to be a disciple of Christ.
And it was a serious thing not only in the sphere of conduct but also in the sphere of thought. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that a man in those days could think as he liked and still be a follower of Jesus. On the contrary the offence lay just as much in the sphere of doctrine as in the sphere of life; the exclusive claims of Jesus—that a man should if necessary forsake all to follow Him— were grounded in the stupendous view which He held of His own
Person and mission; no man could really enjoy the companionship of Jesus who did not admit His absolute sway.
There were some indeed to whom His yoke was easy and His burden was light; there were some who rejoiced in His lofty demands as the very hope of their lives. These were the men who had come under the conviction of sin—the sinners, who without a plea except in His mercy heard the gracious words, "Thy sins are forgiven thee."
As it was then, so also it will be today: the companionship of Jesus is indeed a gracious thing for burdened souls; but it is a terrible thing for those who have any trust in a righteousness of their own. No man can call Jesus friend who does not also call Him Lord; and no man can call Him Lord who could not say first: "Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord." At the root of all true companionship with Jesus, therefore, is the consciousness of sin and with it the reliance upon His mercy; to have fellowship with Him it is necessary to learn the terrible lesson of God's law.
Finally, men seek to come to Christ through the desire for a worthy ideal; indeed that way is just now the most commonly followed of all.
"I may not be very orthodox," says many a modern man, "but I am a Christian because I believe that the principles of Jesus will solve all the problems of my life and also all the problems of society."
The most obvious objection to this way of approach to Jesus is that it will not work; an ideal is quite powerless to a man who is under the thraldom of sin; and the real glory of Jesus is that He breaks that thraldom, and instead of giving merely guidance, as an ideal would do, gives also power.
There is, however, also another objection. Jesus, it is said, can be taken as the supreme and perfect ideal for humanity. But is He really a perfect ideal? There is one difficulty which modern men find about taking Him as such—the difficulty due to His stupendous claims.
There can be no real doubt, in the mind of a historian who examines the facts, but that Jesus of Nazareth regarded Himself as the Messiah; and there can also be no real doubt but that He regarded
Himself as the Messiah not merely in some lower meaning of the term, but in the lofty meaning by which it designated the heavenly
Son of Man, the glorious figure who appears in the seventh chapter of Daniel in the presence of the Ancient of Days. This Jesus of Nazareth, in other words, who is to be taken as the supreme moral ideal of the race, actually believed, as He looked out upon His contemporaries, that He was one day to sit upon the throne of God and be their Judge and the Judge of all the earth! Would not such a person have been, if not actually insane, at least unbalanced and unworthy of the full confidence of men?
There is only one way of overcoming this difficulty—it is to accept the lofty claims of Jesus as sober truth. If the claims are denied, then— argue as men will—the Galilean prophet ceases to be a supreme and perfect ideal. But the claims can be accepted as true only when one takes the same view of Jesus' mission as that which Jesus took, only when one regards Him as the divine Redeemer who came voluntarily into the world to save mankind from the guilt and power of sin. If Jesus is only an ideal, He is not a perfect ideal; for He claimed to be
far more: but if He is the Saviour from sin, then He is the perfect Example that can never be surpassed. But He can be accepted as the Saviour from sin only by those who hold the same view of sin as that which He held; and that view can be held only by those who have learned the lesson of the law.
The fact is, then, that there is no other way of coming to Christ except the old, old way that is found in the conviction of sin. The truth of Christianity cannot be established by the intellect unless an important part of the argument is based upon the fact of sin which is revealed by the law of God; the beauty of Jesus, which attracts the gaze of men, cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of the holiness upon which it is based; the companionship of Jesus is possible only to those who say first, in deep contrition: "Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord"; the example of Jesus is powerless to those who are in the bondage of evil habit, and it is not even a perfect example unless He be the divine Redeemer that He claimed to be. The true schoolmaster to bring men to Christ is found, therefore, now and always in the law of God—the law of God that gives to men the consciousness of sin.
A new and more powerful proclamation of that law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour; men would have little difficulty with the gospel if they had only learned the lesson of the law. As it is, they are turning aside from the Christian pathway; they are turning to the village of Morality, and to the house of Mr. Legality, who is reported to be very skillful in relieving men of their burdens. Mr. Legality has indeed in our day disguised himself somewhat, but he is the same deceiver as the one of whom Bunyan wrote. "Making Christ Master" in the life, putting into practice "the principles of Christ" by one's own efforts—these are merely new ways of earning salvation by one's own obedience to God's commands. And they are undertaken