witness of our Lord's work to His Divinity. 151 Here surely is the common-sense of humanity. The victory of Christianity is the great standing miracle which Christ has wrought. Its significance is enhanced if the miracles of the New Testament are rejected 3, and if the Apostles are held to have received no illumination from on high y. Let those in our day who believe seriously that the work of Christ may be accounted for on natural and human grounds, say who among themselves will endeavour to rival it. Who of our contemporaries will dare to predict that eighteen hundred years hence his ideas, his maxims, his institutions, however noble or philanthropic they may be, will still survive in their completeness and in their vigour? Who can dream that his own name and history will be the rallying-point of a world-wide interest and enthusiasm in some distant age? Who can suppose that beyond the political, the social, the intellectual revolutions which lie in the future of humanity, he will himself still survive in the memory of men, not as a trivial fact of archæology, but as a moral power, as the object of a devoted and passionate affection? Paris 1863; in a small brochure attributed to M. le Pasteur Bersier, and published by the Religious Tract Society, Napoléon, Meyrueis, Paris, 1859; by M. Auguste Nicolas, in his Études Philosophiques sur le Christianisme, Bruxelles, 1849, tom. ii. pp. 352-356; and by the Chevalier de Beauterne in his Sentiment de Napoléon sur le Christianisme, édit. par M. Bathild Bouniol, Paris 1864, pp. 87-118. In the preface to General Bertrand's Campagnes d'Égypte et de Syrie, there is an allusion to some reported conversations of Napoleon on the questions of the existence of GOD and of our Lord's Divinity, which, the General says, never took place at all. But M. de Montholon, who with General Bertrand was present at the conversations which are recorded by the Chevalier de Beauterne, writes from Ham on May 30, 1841, to that author: 'J'ai lu avec un vif intérêt votre brochure; Sentiment de Napoléon sur la Divinité de Jésus-Christ, et je ne pense pas qu'il soit possible de mieux exprimer les croyances religieuses de l'empereur.' Sentiment de Napoléon, Avertissem. p. viii. Writing, as it would seem, in ignorance of this testimony, M. Nicolas says: 'Cité plusieurs fois et dans des circonstances solennelles, ce jugement passe généralement pour historique.' Études, ii. p. 352. note (1). 'Se il mondo si rivolse al cristianesmo Diss' io, senza miracoli, quest' uno È tal, che gli altri non sono il centesmo; Che tu entrasti povero e digiuno In campo, a seminar la buona pianta, Dante, Paradiso, xxiv. 106-III. 'Apres la mort de Jésus-Christ, douze pauvres pêcheurs et artisans entreprirent d'instruire et de convertir le monde. le succès fut prodigieux .... Tous les chrétiens couraient au martyre, tous les peuples couraient au baptême; l'histoire de ces premiers temps était un prodige continuel.' Rousseau, Réponse au Roi de Pologne, Paris, 1829, Discours, pp. 64, 65. 152 The redeemed soul owns a Divine Saviour. What man indeed that still retains, I will not say the faith of a Christian, but the modesty of a man of sense, must not feel that there is a literally infinite interval between himself and that Majestic One, Who, in the words of Jean Paul Richter, 'being the Holiest among the mighty, and the Mightiest among the holy, has lifted with His pierced Hand empires off their hinges, has turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages z?' The work of Jesus Christ is not merely a fact of history, it is a fact, blessed be God! of individual experience. If the world is one scene of His conquests, the soul of each true Christian is another. The soul is the microcosm within which, in all its strength, the kingdom of God is set up. Many of you know, from a witness that you can trust, Christ's power to restore to your inward life its original harmony. You are conscious that He is the fertilizing and elevating principle of your thought, the purifying principle of your affections, the invigorating principle of your wills. You need not to ask the question 'whence hath this Man this wisdom and these mighty works?' Man, you are well assured, cannot thus from age to age enlarge the realm of moral light, and make all things new; man cannot thus endow frail natures with determination, and rough natures with tenderness, and sluggish natures with keen energy, and restless natures with true and lasting peace. These every-day tokens of Christ's presence in His kingdom, of themselves answer the question of the text. If He Who could predict that by dying in shame He would secure the fulfilment of an extraordinary plan, and assure to Himself a world-wide empire, can be none other than the Lord of human history; so certainly the Friend, the Teacher, the Master Who has fathomed and controlled our deepest life of thought and passion, is welcomed by the Christian soul as something more than a student exploring its mysteries, or than a philanthropic experimentalist alleviating its sorrows. He is hailed, He is loved, He is worshipped, as One Who possesses a knowledge and a strength which human study and human skill fail to compass; it is felt that He is so manifestly the true Saviour of the soul, because He is none other than the Being Who made it. z Jean Paul: 'Ueber den Gott in der Geschichte und im Leben.' Sämmtl. Werke, xxxiii. 6; Stirm. p. 194. LECTURE IV. OUR LORD'S DIVINITY AS WITNESSED BY HIS CONSCIOUSNESS. The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good work we stone Thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that Thou, being a Man, makest Thyself God.-ST. JOHN X. 33. Ir is common with some modern writers to represent the questions at issue between the Faith and its opponents, in respect of the Person of our Lord, as being substantially a question between the historical spirit' and the spirit of dogmatism. The dogmatic temper is painted by them as a baseless but still powerful superstition, closely pressed by the critical enquiries and negative conclusions of our day, but culpably shutting its eyes against the advancing truth, the power of which nevertheless it cannot but instinctively feel, and clinging with the wrong-headed obstinacy of despair to the cherished but already condemned formulæ of its time-honoured and worn-out metaphysics. Opposed to it, we are told, is the 'historical spirit,' young, vigorous, fearless, truthful, flushed with successes already achieved, assured of successes yet to come. The 'historical spirit' is thus said to represent the cause of an enlightened progress in conflict with a stupid and immoral conservatism. The 'historical spirit' is described as the love of sheer reality, as the longing for hard fact, determined to make away with all 'idols of the den,' however ancient, venerated, and influential, in the sphere of theology. The 'historical spirit' accordingly undertakes to 'disentangle the real Person of Jesus from the metaphysical envelope' within which theology is said to have 'encased' Him. The Christ is to be rescued from that cloud-land of abstract and fanciful speculation, to which He is stated to have been banished by the patristic and scholastic divines; He is to be restored to Christendom in manifest subjection to all the actual conditions and laws of human history. 'Look,' it is said, 'at that figure of the Christ which you see traced in mosaics in the apsis of a Byzantine church. 154 The Christ of dogma and the Christ of history. That Countenance upon which you gaze, with its rigid, unalterable outline, with its calm, strong mien of unassailable majesty; that Form from which there has been stripped all the historic circumstance of life, all that belongs to the changes and chances of our mortal condition; what is it but an artistic equivalent and symbol of the Catholic dogma? Elevated thus to a world of unfading glory, and throned in an imperturbable repose, the Byzantine Christos Pantocrator must be viewed as the expression of an idea, rather than as the transcript of a fact. A certain interest may be allowed to attach to such a representation, from its illustrating a particular stage in the development of religious thought. But the "historical spirit" must create what it can consider a really "historical" Christ, who will be to the Christ of St. Athanasius and St. John what a Rembrandt or a Rubens is to a Giotto or a Cimabue.' If the illustration be objected to, at any rate, my brethren, the aim of the so-termed historical' school is sufficiently plain. It proposes to fashion a Christ who is to be æsthetically graceful and majestic, but strictly natural and human. This Christ will be emancipated from the bandages which supernaturalism has wrapped around the Prophet of Nazareth.' He will be divorced from any idea of incarnating essential Godhead; but, as we are assured, He will still be something, aye more than the Christ of the Creed has ever been yet, to Christendom. He will be at once a living man, and the very ideal of humanity; at once a being who obeys the invincible laws of nature, like ourselves, yet of moral proportions so mighty and so unrivalled that his appearance among men shall adequately account for the phenomenon of an existing and still expanding Church. 6 Accordingly by this representation it is intended to place us in a dilemma. 'You must choose,' men seem to say, "between history and dogma; you must choose between history which can be verified, and dogma which belongs to the sphere of inaccessible abstractions. You must make your choice; since the Catholic dogma of Christ's Divinity is pronounced by the higher criticism to be irreconcileable with the historical reality of the Life of Jesus.' And in answer to that challenge, let us proceed, my brethren, to choose history, and as a result of that choice, if it may be, to maintain that the Christ of history is either the God Whom we believers adore, or that He is far below the assumed moral level of the mere man, whose character rationalism still, at least generally, professes to respect in the pages of its mutilated Gospel. The Catholic dogma really historical. 155 For let us observe that the Catholic doctrine has thus much in its favour:—it takes for granted the only existing history of Jesus Christ. It is not compelled to mutilate or to enfeeble it, or to do it critical violence. It is in league with this history; it is at home, as is no other doctrine, in the pages of the Evangelists. Consider, first of all, the general impression respecting our Lord's Person, which arises upon a survey of the miracles ascribed to Him in all the extant accounts of His Life. To a thoughtful Humanitarian, who believes in the preternatural elements of the Gospel history, our Lord's miracles, taken as a whole, must needs present an embarrassing difficulty. The miraculous cures indeed, which, more particularly in the earlier days of Christ's ministry, drew the eyes of men towards Him, as to the Healer of sickness and of pain, have been explained,' however unsatisfactorily, by the singular methods generally accepted among the older rationalists. A Teacher, it used to be argued, of such character as Jesus Christ, must have created a profound impression; He must have inspired an entire confidence; and the cures which He seemed to work were the immediate results of the impression which He created; they were the natural consequences of the confidence which He inspired. Now, apart from other and many obvious objections to this theory, let us observe that it is altogether inapplicable to the 'miracles of power,' as they are frequently termed, which are recorded by the three first Evangelists, no less than by St. John. 'Miracles of this class,' says a freethinking writer, are not cures which could have been effected by the influence of a striking sanctity acting upon a simple faith. They are prodigies; they are, as it seems, works which Omnipotence Alone could achieve. In the case of these miracles it may be said that the laws of nature are simply suspended. Jesus does not here merely exhibit the power of moral and mental superiority over common men; He upsets and goes beyond the rules and bounds of the order of the universe. A word from His mouth stills a tempest. A few loaves and fishes are fashioned by His Almighty hand into an abundant feast, which satisfies thousands of hungry men. At His bidding life returns to inanimate corpses. By His curse a fig-tree which had no fruit on it is withered upa? The writer a Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 21. Dr. Schenkel concludes: 'Sonst erscheint Jesus in den drei ersten Evangelien durchgängig als ein wahrer, innerhalb der Grenzen menschlicher Beschränkung sich bewegender Mensch; durch Seine Wunderthätigkeit werden diese Grenzen durchbrochen; Allmachtswunder sind menschlich nicht mehr begreiflich,' |