 CHAPTER IX. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Imperial Rome governed the whole of the Mediterranean world. A larger proportion and a greater variety of the human race than has ever been under one government. So far as numbers go, the Russian Empire today, the Chinese and the British, each far exceed it, for the population of the world is vastly greater than it was in Rome's days. But there was a peculiar unity about the Roman Empire, for it embraced, as men thought, all civilised mankind. It was known that, far away in the East, there were people called Indians, who had fought with Alexander the Great, but there was little real knowledge of them. Beyond India, there were vague rumours of a land where silk grew on the leaves of the trees, but civilised mankind was under the control of Rome. It was one rule of many races, many kingdoms, princedoms, cities, cantons, and tribes. A wise rule, a rule that allowed the maximum of local government and traditional usage. Rome not merely conquered but captured men all over the world, ruled them, as a poet said, like a mother, not a queen, and bound them to herself. Men were eager, not so much as to shake off her yoke, has to be Romans. And from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, men, not of Roman blood, were proud to bear Roman names, and to be Roman citizens. I was free-born, said St. Paul, not without a touch of satisfaction. A general peace prevailed through the Roman world, a peace that was new to mankind. There was freedom of intercourse. One of the boasts made by the writers of the Roman Empire is of this new freedom to travel, to go anywhere one pleased. Piracy on the sea, brigandage on the land, had been put down, and there was a very great deal of travel. The Roman became an inveterate tourist. He went to the famous scenes of Asia Minor, to Troy above all, to sunny roads, and Middle-Een, to Egypt. Merchants went everywhere, and there was a fusing of cultures, traditions, and creeds, all over the Mediterranean world. Centuries before, Alexander the Great had struck out the splendid idea of the marriage of east and west. He secured it by breaking down the Persian Empire, and making one empire from the Adriatic to this side of the Sutledge, or Bias. He desired to cement this marriage of east and west in a way of his own. He took three hundred captive princesses and ladies, and married them in a batch to Macedonian officers. A very characteristic piece of symbolism. But his idea was greater and truer than the symbol. The Roman marriage of east and west was a more real thing, for behind it lay three centuries of growing intercourse and knowledge, along Alexander's lines. In the sphere of religion we find it most clearly. There rises a resultant world religion, a religion that embraces all the cults, all the creeds, and at last all the philosophies in one great system. That religion held the world. It is true there were exceptions. There was a small and objectionable race called the Jews. There were possibly some druids in southern Britain, and here and there was a solitary atheist who represented no one but himself. These few exceptions were the freaks amongst mankind. Apart from them, mankind was united in its general beliefs about the gods. The world had one religion. First of all, let us try to estimate the strength of this old Mediterranean paganism. It was strong in its great traditions. Plutarch, who lived from about 50 AD to 117 or so, is our great exponent of this old religion. To him I shall have to refer constantly. He was a writer of charm, a man with many gifts. Plutarch's lives was the great staple of education in the Renaissance, and as good a one perhaps as we have yet discovered, even in this age when there are so many theories of education with foreign names. Plutarch, then, writing about Delphi, the shrine and oracle of the god Apollo, said that men had been in anguish and fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years, and Delphi has not lost it. For ninety generations the god has been giving oracles to the Greek world, to private people, to kings, to cities, to nations, and on all sorts of subjects, on the foundation of colonies, the declaration of wars, personal guidance, and the hope of heirs. You may test the god where you will, Plutarch claimed. You will not find an instance of a false oracle. Readers of Greek history will remember another great writer of as much charm, five hundred years before Herodotus, who was not so sure about the oracles. But let us think what it means, to look back over three thousand years of one faith, unbroken. Egyptian religion had been unchallenged for longer still, even if we allow Plutarch's three thousand years. The oldest remains in Egypt, and to date, we are told, four thousand BC, and all through history, with the exception of the solitary reign of Amenhotep III, Egypt worshipped the same gods, with additions as time went on. Again, an unbroken tradition. And how long, and in various names, had Sibley, mother of the gods, been worshipped in Asia? By our era, all these religions were fused into one religion, of many cults, and rites, and ancient traditions, and the incredible weight of old tradition in that world is hard to overestimate. The old tradition was strong in the splendor of its art and its architecture. The severe beautiful lines of the Greek temple are familiar to us still, and, until I saw the Taj, I thought I should have doubted whether there could be anything more beautiful. Architecture was consecrated to the gods, and so was art. You go to Delphi, said Plutarch, and see those wonderful works of the ancient artists and sculptors, as fresh still as if they had left the chisel yesterday, and they had stood there for hundreds of years, wonderful in their beauty. Think of some of the remains of the Greek art, of that victory, for instance, which the Messenians settled the Temple of Olympia in 421 B.C. She stood on a block of stone on the temple. But the block was painted blue, so that, as the spectator came up, he saw the temple, and the angle of its roof, and then a gap of blue sky, and the goddess just alighting on the summit of the temple. From what is left of her, broken and headless, but still beautiful, we can picture her flying through the air. The wind has blown her dress back against her, and you see its folds freshly caught by the breeze. And all this the artist has disentangled from a rough block of stone, so vivid was his conception of the goddess, and so sure his hand. There are those who say that the conventional picture of God of the great artists is moulded after the Zeus of Phadias. Egypt had other portrayals of the gods, on a pattern of her own, strange and massive and huge, far older. About 600 years before Christ, the Egyptian king, Sametikos, hired Greek soldiers, and marched them hundreds of miles up the Nile. The Greek soldiers, one idle day, carved their names on the legs of the colossal gods, seated at Abu Simnol. Their names are found there to-day, so old are these gods. The religion was strong in the splendour of its ceremony. Every year, the Athenian people went to Elyusis in splendid procession, to worship, to be initiated into the rites of the earth-mother, and her virgin daughter, who had taught men the use of grain, and the arts of farming rites linked with an immemorial past, awful rites that gave men a new hope of eternal life. The mother of the gods, from Phrygia in Asia Minor, had her rites too, and her cults spread all over the world. When the Roman poet Lucretius wanted to describe the wonder and magic of the pageant of nature in the springtime, he goes to the pomp of Sibili. The nearest thing to it, which we can imagine, is Botticelli's picture of the triumph of spring. Lucretius was a poet to whom the gods were idle and irrelevant, yet to that pageant he goes for a picture of the miraculous life of nature. All splendid still were the rites of the Egyptian Isis, celebrated all over the world. Her priests, Shaven and Linenclad carried symbols of an unguessed antiquity in magical power. They launched a boat with a flame upon it, on the river in Egypt from the sea in Greece. All these cults made deep impressions on the worshippers, as our records tell us. The appeal of religious emotion was noticed by Aristotle, who remarked, however, that it was feeling rather than intellect, that was touched. A shrewd criticism that deserves to be remembered still. The gods were strong in their actual manifestations of themselves. Apollo for ninety generations had spoken in Delphi. At Epidaeros there was a shrine of Asclepius. Its monuments have been collected and edited by Dr. Caten of Liverpool. There, sick men and women came, lived a quiet life of diet and religious ceremony, preparing for the night on which they should sleep in the temple. On that night the gods came to them, they said, in that mood or state where they lay, between asleep and awake, sometimes as in a dream, and then as in a waking vision. One's hair stood on end, but one shed tears of joy and felt light hearted. Others said they definitely saw him. He came and told them what to do. On waking they did it and were healed, for he touched them then and there and cured them as they lay. Some of the cures recorded on the monuments are perhaps strange to our ideas of medicine. One records how the god came to man dreadfully afflicted with dropsy, cut off his head, turned him upside down, and let the fluid run out, and then replaced his head with a neat join. Some modern readers may doubt this story, but that the god did heal people men firmly believed. We too may believe that people were healed, perhaps by living a healthy life in a quiet place, a life of regimen and diet, and perhaps faith healing or suggestion played a stronger part as anything else. Even the Christians believed that these gods had a certain power. They were evil spirits. Not only the gods of the temples would manifest themselves with their grace, every man had a guardian spirit, a genius, and by proper means he could be compelled to show himself visibly. The pupils of Plotinus cundered up his genius, and it came, not a demon but a god. The right formula and the right stone in the hand, and a man had a wonderful power over the gods themselves. This was called Theogy, but the great strength of this old religion was its infinite adaptability. It made peace with every god and goddess that it met. It adopted them all. As a French scholar has said, where there is polytheism there are no false gods. All the religions were fused, and the gods were blended. The Roman went to Greece and identified Jupiter with Zeus. He went to Egypt and found him in Amon. He went to Syria and found him in Baal. If the Jew had been not so foolish and awkward there might have been a Jupiter Jehovah as well. It was a Catholic faith embracing everything, cult and creed and philosophy, strong in all the ways that we have surveyed, and in many more, above all because it was unchallenged. And yet, where is that religion today? That, to me, is one of the most significant questions in history. More so, the longer I stay in India. Men knew that religion of Greece and Rome was eternal. Yet it is utterly gone. Why? How could it go? What conceivable power was there? I do not say to bring it down, but to abolish it so thoroughly that not a soul in Egypt worships Isis. How many even know her name? Not a soul in Italy thinks of Jehovah, but as a fancy, and Palisthenian Athens is a mere memory. That is the problem, the historical problem, with which we now have to deal. First of all, let us look again, and more closely, at that old religion. We shall find in it at least four cardinal weaknesses. First, it stands for the unexamined life, as Plato called it. The unexamined life, he says, is not liveable for a human being. A man, who is a man, must cross-examine life, must make life face up to him, and yield its secrets. He must know what it means. The significance of every relation of life, father and child, man and wife, citizen and city, subject and king, man and the world, above all, man and God. We must examine and know. But this old religion stood by tradition and not reflection. There was no deep sense of truth. Plutarch admired his father, and he describes with warm approval how his father once said to a man, that is a dangerous question, not to be discussed at all. When you question the opinion we hold about the gods and ask reason and demonstration for everything, such an attitude means mistrust. It means, at bottom, a fundamental unfaith. The house is beautiful. Do not touch it. It is riddled by white ants, by dry rot, and it would fall. That is not faith. It is a strange confession, but all who hesitate at changes, I think, make that confession sooner or later. There is a line of Kabu which puts the essence of this. Penance is not equal to truth. Nor is there any sin like untruth. This was one of the essential weaknesses of that old religion, its fear and the absence of a deep sense of truth. In the next place there is no real association of morals with the religion. The old stories were full of the adventures of Jupiter or Zeus with the heroines, mortal women whom he loved, of some 1900 wall paintings at Pompeii examined by a Joan scholar and antiquary, some 1400 represent mythological subjects, largely as stories of the loves of Jupiter. The Latin dramatist Terence pictures the young man looking at one of these paintings and saying to himself, if Jupiter did it, why should not I? Centuries later we find Augustine quoting that sentence. It has been said that few things tended more strongly against morality than the stories of the gods preserved by Homer and Hesiod. Plato loved Homer, so much more than striking his resolve that in his Republic there should be no Homer. Men said, ah, but you don't understand, those stories are allegories. They do not mean what they say, they mean something deeper. But Plato said, we must speak of God always as he is. We must in no case tell lies about God whether they are allegories or whether they are not allegories. Plato, like every real thinker, sees that this presence of allegory is a sham. The story did its mischief whether it was allegory or not. It stood between man and God, and headed men onto wrong lines, turned men away from the moral standard. There was more. Every year, as we saw, men went to be initiated into the rites of Demeter at Elyusis, a few miles from Athens. And we read how one of the great Athenian orators, Lyceus, went there and took with him to be initiated a harlot with whom he was living and the woman's proprietress, a squalid party, and they were initiated. Their morals made no difference. The priests and the goddesses offered no objection. In the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth there were women slaves dedicated to the Goddess, who owned them, and who received the wages of their shame. With what voice could religion speak for morality in Corinth? At Commander in Syria, we read in Strabo the Geographer about the time of Christ, there was a temple where there were six thousand of these temple slaves. I say again, that is the unexamined life. God and Goddess have nothing to say about some of the most sacred relations in life. God, Goddess, priest, worshipper, never gave a thought to these poor creatures, dedicated not by themselves to this awful life. Human natures with the craving of the real woman for husband and child, for the love of home, but never to know it. That was associated with religion, that was religion. There was always a minimum of protest from the Greek temples against wrong or for right. It is remarked again and again that all the great lessons came, not from the temples, not from the priests, but from the poets and philosophers, from the thinkers and revolts against the religion of their people. Curiously enough, even in Homer himself, it is plain that the heroes, the men, are on a higher moral plane than the gods. And all through Greek history, the gods are a dragon morality. What a weakness in religion. The sense of wrong and right is innate in man. It may be undeveloped, or it may be deadened. But it is instinctive. And religion which does not know it, or which finds the difference between right and wrong to lie in matters of taboo or ceremonial defilement, cannot speak to one of the deepest needs of the human heart, the need of forgiveness. There is no righteousness in the long run about these gods. In the third place, the religion has the common weakness of all polytheism. Men were afraid of the gods. There were thousands and thousands, hosts of them. At every turn you ran into one, a new one. You could never be certain that you would not offend some unknown god or goddess. Superstition was the curse of the day. You had to make peace with all these god and goddesses, and not with them alone. For there was another class of supernatural beings, dangerous, if unpropitiated, the demons, the spirits that inhabited the air that presided over life and its stages, that helped or hated the human soul, spiteful and evil half-divine beings that sent illness, bad luck, madness, that stole the honors of the gods themselves and insisted on rituals and worship, often unclean, often cruel, but inevitable. A man must watch himself closely if he was to be safe from the wall, if he was to keep his wife and child, and home, safe. Superstition, men said, was the one curse of life that made no truce with sleep. A famous Christian writer of the second century, Tatian, speaks of the enormous relief that he found in getting away from the tyranny of ten thousand gods to be under a monarchy of one. A modern Japanese, Uchimura, said the same thing. One god, not eight millions. That was joyful news to me. Fourthly, this religion took from the grave none of its terrors. There might be a world beyond, and there might not. At any rate, be initiated, said the priests, you will have to pay us something, but it is worth it. Profit and quacks, said Plato, came to rich men's doors and made them believe that they could rid them of all alarm for the next world, by incantations, and charms, and other, by a series of feasts and prolifications. So they said, and men did what they were told, but it did not take away the fear of death. From the first century onwards, men began systematically to defend this old paganism. Plutarch wrote a series of books on its behalf. He brings in something like love of God for man. He speaks of the friendly Apollo. But the weakness of Plutarch as an apologist is his weakness as a biographer. He never really gets at the bottom of anything. In biography he gives us the characteristic rather than the character. Here he never faces the real issue. It is all defense, apology, ingenuity. But he defends far too much. He admits there are obscene rites. There had been human sacrifices. But the gods cannot have ordained them. Demons, who stole the names of gods, imposed those on men. Not the gods. Men practised them to avert the anger of the demons. The gods are good. Waving the fact that he had not much evidence for this in the mythology, how was a man to distinguish God from demon to know which was which? He does not tell us. Again, he speaks of the image of Osiris with three lingams. He apologizes for it. He defends it, for the traplicity is a symbol of Godhead, and it means that God is the origin of all life. Yes, but what that religion needed was a great reformer who should have cut the religion clear adrift from idols of every kind. From the old mythology. From obscenity. It may very well be that such a reformer was unthinkable, even if he had appeared, he would have been for doomed to fail, as the compromise of the Stoics shows. Plutarch and his kind did not attempt this. They loved the past and the old ways. At heart, they were afraid of the gods, and were afraid of tradition. Culture and child will do a great deal, but they do not suffice for a religion, either to make one, or to redeem it. The Stoics reached, I think, the highest moral level in that Roman world. Great men, great teachers of morals, great characters. But as for the crowds, they said, let them go on in the religions of their own cities. What they had learned from their fathers, let them do. So much for the ignorant. For us, of course, something else. That seems to be a fundamentally wrong defensive religion. It gets the proportions wrong. It means that we, who are people of culture, are a great deal nearer to God than the crowd. But if we realize God at all, we feel that we are none of us very far apart down here. The most brilliant men are amenable to the temptations of the savage and of the dock labourer. There was a further danger, little noticed at first, that life is apt to be over-born by the vulgar, the ignorant, if there is not a steady campaign to enlighten every man. The Roman house was full of slaves. They taught the children, taught them about God and goddesses, from Syria, from Egypt, and kept thought and life and morals on a low plain. An ignorant public is an unspeakable danger everywhere, but especially in religion. The last system of defense was the new Platonism. It had not very much to do with Plato, except that it read him and quoted him as a great authority. The new Platonists did not face facts as Plato did. They lived on quotations, on authority and fancy, great thinkers as some of them were. They pictured the universe as one vast unity, far beyond all things is God. Of God man can form no conception. Think, they would say, of all the exalted and wonderful and beautiful concepts you can imagine. Then deny them. God is beyond. God is beyond being. You can conceive of being, and therefore to predicate being of God is to limit him. You cannot think of God, for if you could think of God, God would be in relation with you. God is insusceptible of relation with man. He neither wills, nor thinks of man, nor can man think of him. A modern philosopher has summed up their God as the deification of the word not. This God then, who is not, willed, no, not willed, he could not will. But whether he willed or did not will, in some way or other there was an emanation. Not God, but very much of God. Very divine. But not all God, from this another and another, in a descending series, down to the demons, and down to men. All that is, is God. Evil is not being. One of the great features of the system was that it guaranteed all the old religions, for the crowd, while for the initiated, for the esoteric, it had something more. It had mystic trance, mystic vision, mystic comprehension. Twice, or three times, plotterness, by a great leap away from mortal things, saw God. In the meantime, the philosophy justified all the old rites. Side by side with this great defence were what are known as the Christian heresies. They are not exactly Christian. Groups of people endeavoured to combine Christianity with the old thought, with philosophy, theotophy, theology, and magic. They were eclectics. They compromised. The German thinker, Navalis, said very justly that all eclectics are skeptics. And the more eclectic, the more skeptic. These mixtures could not prevail. But religions have historically a wonderful way of living in spite of their weakness. Yes, and in spite of their apologetics. A religion may be stained with all sorts of evil, and may communicate it, and yet it will survive, until there is an alternative with more truth, and more dynamic. The old paganism outlived Plato's criticisms and Plutarch's defences. For the great masses of people neither might have been written. Into this world came the Christian Church. I have tried to draw the picture of the great pagan religion, with its enormous strength, its universal acceptance, its great traditions, its splendours of art and ceremony, its manifest proofs of its gods. Everything that, to the ordinary mind, could make for reality and for power. To show how absolutely inconceivable it was, that it could ever pass away. Then comes the Christian Church. A ludicrous collection of trivial people. Very ignorant, and very common. Fishermen, and publicans, as the gospel show us. The baker and the fuller, as Celsus said with a sneer. Yes, and every kind of unclean and disreputable person, they urged to join them. Quite unlike all decent and established religions. And they took the children and women of the family away into a corner, and whispered to them, and misled them. Only believe was there one great word. The whole thing was incredibly silly. Paul went to Athens and they asked him there about its religion. And when he spoke to them about Jesus rising from the dead, they sniggered, and the more polite suggested, another day. Everybody knew that dead men do not rise. It was a silly religion. Celsus pictured the frogs and symposium around a swamp, croaking to one another, how God forsakes the whole universe, the spheres of heaven, to dwell with us. We frogs are so like God. He never ceases to seek how we may dwell with him forever. But some of us are sinners, so God will come, or send his son, and burn them up. And the rest of us will live with him for eternity. Is not that very like the Christian religion, Celsus asked. It has been replied that, if the frogs really could say this and did say this, then their statement might be quite reasonable. But our main purpose for the moment is to realize the utterly inconceivable absurdity of this bunch of Galilean fishermen, and fools and rascals and maniacs, setting out to capture the world. One of them wrote an apocalypse. He was in a penal settlement on Patmos when he wrote it. The sect was in a fair way of being stamped out in blood, as a matter of fact. But this dreamer saw a triumphant church of ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands. There were hardly as many people in the world at that time. The great Rome had fallen, and the Lamb ruled. Imagine the amusement of a Roman pagan of a hundred AD who read the absurd book. Yet the dream has come true. That church has triumphed. Where is the old religion? Christ has conquered, and all the old gods have gone, utterly gone. They are memories now, and nothing more. Why did they go? The Christian church refused no compromise. A pagan could have seen no reason why Jesus should not be a demigod like Heracles or Dionysus. No reason, either, why a man should not worship Jesus as well of these. One of the Roman emperors, a little after two hundred AD, had, in his private sanctuary, four or five statues of gods, and one of them was Jesus. Why not? The Roman world had opened arms for Jesus as well as any other god or demigod, if people would be sensible. But the Christian said, no. He would not allow Jesus to be put into that pantheon, nor would he worship the gods himself, not even the genius of the emperor, his guardian spirit. The Christian proclaimed a war of religion in which there shall be no compromise and no peace till Christ is Lord of all. The thing shall be fought out to the bitter end. And it has been. He was resolved that the old gods should go, and they have gone. How was it done? Here we touch what I think is one of the greatest wonders that history has to show. How did the church do it? If I may invent or adapt three words, the Christian outlived the pagan, outdied him, and outthought him. He came into the world and lived a great deal better than the pagan. He beat him hollow in living. Paul's epistles to the Corinthians do not indicate a high standard of life at Corinth. The Corinthians were a very poor sort of Christians. But another epistle, written to the Corinthians a generation later, speaks of their passion for being kind to men, and of a broadened and deeper life in spite of their weaknesses. Here and there one recognises failure all along the line. Yes, but the line advances. The old world had morals, plenty of morals. The Stoics overflowed with morals. But the Christian came into the world, not with a system of morality. He had rules, indeed, which asks Tertullian, is the ample rule. Thou shalt not commit adultery, or the rule that forbids a single lustful look. But it was not rules so much that he brought into the world as a great passion. The Son of God, he said, loved me, and gave himself for me. That man, Jesus Christ loved him, gave himself for him. He is the friend of my best friend. My best friend loves that man, gave himself for him, died for him. How it alters all the relations of life. Who can kill or rob another man when he remembers whose hands were nailed to the cross with that man? See how it bears on another side of morality. Tertullian strikes out a great phrase, a new idea altogether, when he speaks of the victim of the common lust. Christ died for her. How it safeguards her and uplifts her. Men came into the world full of this passion for Jesus Christ. They went to the slave and to the temple woman, and told them, the Son of God loved you, and gave himself for you. And they believed it and rose into a new life. To be redeemed by the Son of God gave the slave a new self-respect, a new manhood. He astonished people by his truth, his honesty, his cleanness. And there was a new brightness and gaiety about him. So there was about the woman. They sang, they overflowed with good temper. It was as if they had been born again. As Clement of Rome wrote, the Holy Spirit was a glad spirit. The word used both by him and by Saint Augustine is that which gives us the English word, hilarious. There was a new gladness and happiness about these people. It befits truth to laugh because she is glad. To play with her rivals because she is free from fear. So said Tertullian. Of course there were those who broke down, but Julian the Apostate, in his letters to his heathen priests, is a reluctant witness to the higher character of the Christian life. And it was Jesus who was the secret of it. The pagan noticed the new fortitude in the face of death. Tertullian himself was immensely impressed with it. He had never troubled to look at the Gospels. Nobody bothered to read them unless they were converted already, he said. But he seems to have seen these Christian martyrs die. Every man, he said, who sees it, is moved with some misgiving, and is set on fire to learn the reason. He inquires and is taught, and when he has learnt the truth he instantly follows it himself as well. No one would have wished to be killed unless he was in possession of the truth. I think that is autobiography. The intellectual energy of the man is worth noting. His insistence on understanding, his instant resolution. Such qualities, we saw, had won the admiration of Jesus. Here is a man who sacrifices a great career. His genius, his wit, his humour, fire, power, learning, philosophy, everything thrown at Christ's feet. And Christ uses them all. Then came a day when persecution was breaking out again. Some Christians were fulfilling to the next city. It was the one text in their Bible, he said. He said, I stay here. Any day the mob might get excited and shout, the Christians to the lions. They knew the street in which he lived, and they would drag him, the scholar, the man of letters and of imagination, naked through the streets, torn and bleeding. They would tie him to the stake in the middle of the amphitheatre and pile faggots around him. And there he would stand, waiting to be burned alive, or it might be to be killed by the beasts. Any hour. Any day. I stay here, he said. What does it cost a man to do that? People asked what was the magic of it? The magic of it was just this. On the other side of the fire was the same friend. If he wants me to be burned alive, I am here. Jesus Christ was the secret of it. The Christians outpour the pagan world. How could they fail to? We have peace with God, said Paul. They moved about in a new world, which was their father's world. They would go to the shrines and ask uncomfortable questions. Lucian, who was a pagan and a scoffer, said that on one side of the shrines the notice was posted, Christians outside. The Christians saw too much. The living god on that shrine was a big snake with a mask dyed on. Good enough for the pagan, but the Christian would see the strings. Even the demons they dismissed to irrelevance and non-entity. The essence of magic was to be able to link the name of a demon with the name of one's enemy to set the demon on the man. Very well, said the Christian, link my name with your demons. Use my name in any magic you like. There is a name that is above every name. I am not afraid. That put the demons in their right place, and by and by they vanished, dropped out, died, of sheer innination and neglect. Wherever Jesus Christ has been, the demons have gone. They used to be fairies, said an old woman in the Highlands of Scotland to a friend of mine, but the Gospel came and drove them away. I do not know what is going to keep them away yet, but Jesus Christ. The Christian read the ancient literature with the same freedom of mind, and was not in bondage to it. He had a new outlook. He could criticise more freely. One great principle is given by Clement of Alexandria. The beautiful, wherever it is, is ours, because it came from our God. The Christian read the best books, assimilated them, and lived the freest intellectual life that the world had. Jesus had set him to be true to fact. Why had Christian churches to be so much larger than pagan temples? Why are they so, still? Because the sermon is in the very centre of all Christian worship. Clear, definite Christian teaching about Jesus Christ. There is no place for an ignorant Christian. From the very start every Christian had to know and had to understand. And he had to read the Gospels. He had to be able to give the reason for his faith. He was committed to a great propaganda, to the preaching of Jesus, and he had to preach with penetration and appeal. There they were loyal to the essential idea of Jesus. They were sons of fact. They read about Jesus, and they knew him, and they knew where they stood. This has been the essence of the Christian religion. Put that alongside the pitiful defence, which Plutarch makes of obscene rights, filthy images, foolish traditions. Who did the thinking of that ancient world? Again and again it was the Christian. He outthought the world. The old religion crumbled and fell, beaten in thought, in morals, in life, in death. And by and by the only name-frid was paganism, the religion of the backcountry village, of the out-of-the-way places. Christ had conquered. San Prudentius sing the trophy of the passion, sing the all-triumphant cross. The ancients thought that God repeated the whole history of the universe over and over again, like a cinema show. Some of them thought that kingdoms rise and fall by pure chance. No said Prudentius. God planned. God developed the history of mankind. He made Rome for his own purposes. For Christ. What is the explanation of it? We who live in a rational universe, where real results come from real causes, must ask. What is the power that has carried the Christian Church to victory over that great old religion? And there is another question. Is this story going to be repeated? What is there about Shiva, Kali, or Sri Krishna that essentially differentiates them from the gods of Greece and Rome and Egypt? Tradition, legend, philosophy. Point by point we find the same thing. And we find the same Christian Church with the same ideals facing the same conflict. What will be the result? The result will be the same. We have seen in China in the last two decades, how the Christian Church is true to its traditions. How men can die for Jesus Christ. In the Greek Church, a suffering church, on the round sacramental wafer, there is a cross. And in the four corners, there are eight letters. IE, XE, NI, KA. Jesus Christ conquers. That is the story of the Christian Church in the Roman Empire. That is the story which, please God, we shall see again in India. Jesus Christ conquers. End of chapter 9. Chapter 10 of The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 10, Jesus in Christian Thought. Jesus Christ came to men as a great new experience. He took them far outside all they had known of God and of man. He led them, historically, into what was, in truth, a new world, into a new understanding of life in all its relations. What they had never noticed before. He brought their knowledge. He made interesting to them and intelligible. In short, as Paul put it, if any man being Christ, he is a new creation. The aspects of things were different. The values were changed. And a new perspective made clear relations that were obscure and tangled before. Why should it have been so? Why should it be that when a man comes into contact, into some kind of sympathy with Jesus Christ, some living union with him, everything becomes new. And he, by and by, begins to feel with St. Paul, to me to live his Christ. Why has Jesus meant so much? Why should all this be associated with him? Plato, in the sentence already quoted, tells us that the unexamined life is unlivable for a human being, for a real man. Here, then, came into man's life a new experience altogether, like nothing known before, altering everything, giving new sympathies, new passions, new enthousiasms, a new attitude to God, and a new attitude to man. It was inevitable that thought must work upon it. Who was this Jesus that he should produce this result? Men asked themselves that very early. And if they were slow to do so, the criticism of the outsider drove them into it. The result has been 19 centuries of endless question and speculation as to Jesus Christ. The rise of dogma, creed, and formula, as slowly all the philosophy of mankind has been rethought in the light of the central experience of Jesus Christ. In spite of all that we may regret in the War of Creeds, it was inevitable. It was part of the disturbance that Jesus foresaw he must make. Men could do no other. They had to determine for themselves the significance of Jesus in the real world, in the whole cosmos of God, and it meant fruitful conflict of opinion, the growth of the human mind, and an ever-heightened emphasis on Jesus. An analogy may illustrate in some way the story before us. One of the most fascinating chapters of geography is the early exploration of America. Chesapeake Bay was missed by one explorer. Fog, or darkness, may have been the cause of his missing the place, but he missed it. And though it is undoubtedly there, he made his map without it. Now let us suppose a similar case, for it must often have happened in early days, and this time we will say it was the Hudson or some river of that magnitude. A later explorer came, and where the map showed a shore without a break, he found a huge inlet or outlet. Was it the arm of the sea, a vast bay, or was it a great river? A very great deal depended on which it was, and the first thing was to determine that. There were several ways of doing it. One was to sail up and map the course. A quicker way was to drop a bucket over the side of the ship. The bucket, we may be sure, went down, and it came up with fresh water, and the water was an instant revelation of several new and important facts. They had discovered, first of all, that where there was an unbroken coastline on the map, there was nothing of the kind in reality. There was a broad waterway up into the country. And this was not a bay, but the mouth of a river, and a very great river indeed. And this implied yet another discovery, that men had to reckon with no mere island or narrow peninsula, but an immense continent where it remained to explore. Jesus Christ was, in himself, a very great discovery for those to whom he gave himself. And the exploration of him shows a somewhat similar story. Men have often said that they see nothing in him very different from the rest of us, while others have found in him, in the phrase of the apocalypse, the water of life. And the positive announcement is here, as in the other case, the more important of the two. The discovery of the volume of life, which comes from Jesus Christ, is one of the greatest that men have made, merely to have dipped his bucket, as it were, in that great stream of life, has again and again meant everything to a man. Think what the newfound river of the new world meant to some of those early explorers after weeks at sea. Water, water everywhere, nor any dropped drink, and they reach an immense flood of river water. It was new life at once, but it did not necessarily mean the immediate exploration of everything, the instant completion of geographical discovery. It was life and the promise of more to follow. The history of the church is a record, we may put it, both of the discovery of the river of life, and of the exploration of its course and its sources, and what lies beyond it. But the discovery and the exploration are different things, and the first is quicker and more certain than the second. Most of us will admit that we have not gone very far up into that continent. The object of this chapter is not to attempt to survey or compendiarise Christian exploration of Jesus, but to try to find for ourselves a new approach to an estimate of the historical figure who has been, and remains, the center of everything. We may classify the records of the Christian exploration, roughly in three groups. In the early Christian centuries, we find endless thoughts given to the philosophical study of the relation of Christ and God. It fills the library of the early church, and practically all the early controversies turn upon it. The weak spot in all this was the use of the a priori method. Men started with preconceptions about God, not unnaturally, for we all have some theories about God, which we are apt to regard as knowledge. But knowledge is a difficult thing to reach in any sphere of study. And men assumed too quickly that they had attained a sound philosophical account of God. They overestimated their actual knowledge of God, and did not recognize to the full the importance of their new expertise. This may seem ungenerous to men who gave life and everything for Jesus Christ, and to whose devotion, to whose love of Jesus, we owe it that we know Him, an ungenerous criticism of their brave thinking, and their independence in a hundred ways of old tradition. Still, it is true that the weakness of much of their Christology, and of ours, is that it starts with a borrowed notion of God, which really has very little to do with the Christian religion. To this, we shall return. But in the meantime, we may note that here is elsewhere, preconceptions have to be lightly held by the serious student. Huxley once wrote to Charles Kingsley, Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth that is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before the fact as a little child. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever end nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind, since I have resolved at all risks to do this. So Huxley wrote about the study of natural science. In this great inquiry of ours, we have to learn to be patient enough. We might say ignorant enough to do the same. The early church had a faith in Greek philosophy which stood in its way, brave and splendid as its thinkers were. Our second group is represented roughly by the hymn book. The evidential value of a good hymn book will stand investigation. Of course a great many hymns are mere copies and poor copies, but the hymn book at its best is a collection of first hand records of experience. In the story of the Christian church, doxology comes before dogma. When the writer of the apocalypse breaks out at the very beginning, unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins, in his own blood be glory and dominion for ever and ever, he is recording a great experience. And his doxology leads him on to an explanation of what he has felt and known, to an intellectual judgment, and an appreciation of Christ. The order is experience, happiness and song, and then reflection. The love and the cleansing and the joy supply the materials on which thought has to work. We always have to remember that thought does not strictly supply its own material, however much it may help us to find it. Philosophy and theology do not give us our facts. Their function is to group and interpret them. Our third group of records is given to us by the men of the Reformation. We have their two great movements side by side. There is Bible translation, which means, in plain language, a decision or conviction on the part of scholars and thinkers, that the knowledge of the historical Jesus and of men's first experiences of him is of the highest importance in the Christian life. The whole Reformation follows, or runs parallel with, that movement. It is essentially a new exploration of what Jesus Christ can do and of what he can be. In dealing with all these three groups of records, we have to note the seriousness of the men who made the experiments, their energy of mind, their determination to reach real facts, and in Cromwell's great phrase, to speak things. They will have the truth of the matter, intricate and entangled as the history, for instance, of the Aryan controversy, that controversy which turned under diphthong, as Carlisle said in his younger days. It represented more than mere logomachi, as Carlisle saw later on. It followed on from a determination to get at the real fact of who and what Jesus Christ is, and the two words that differed by diphthong embodied diametrically opposite conceptions of him. With all the super subtlety that sometimes characterizes the allergens, these men had a passion for truth. It led them into paths where our minds find a difficulty in following. But the motive was the imperative sense that thinking men must examine and understand their supreme experience. A motive that must weigh with men who are in earnest about life. The great hymns of the church, such as the Diez Eire of Thomas of Solano, or Bernard J. Augustus Memoria, or Toplody's Rock of Ages, are transcripts from life made by deep going and serious minds. The writers are recording with deep conviction of its worth, what they have discovered in experience. A man who takes Christ seriously, and will examine life, will often find in these great hymns, it may be with some surprise, an anticipation of his own experience, as Bunyan did in Luther's commentary on Galatians. Livingstone had Jesu Dolcis Memoria, the Latin of it, ringing in his head as he travelled in unexplored Africa. Men who did such work, work that lasts, and is recognized again and again to be genuine by others busy in the same field, cannot have been random, light-hearted creatures. They were, in fact, men tested in life. Men of experience, of wide and deep experience. Men with a gift for living, developed in heart as well as in brain. The finest of Greek critics, Longinus, said that the great style is an echo of a great soul. Neander said, and it is again and again true, that it is the heart that makes the theologian. Where we find a great hymn, or a great theology, we may be sure of finding a great nature and a great experience behind it. Let us sum up our general results so far. First of all, whatever be the worth of the consensus of Christian opinion, and we have to decide how much it is worth, bearing in mind the type of man who has worked and suffered to make it in every age, and, I think, it runs high as the work of serious and explorative minds. The consensus of Christian opinion gives the very highest name to Jesus Christ. Men who did not begin with any preconception in his favour, and who have often had a great deal of difficulty in explaining to others, and perhaps to themselves, the course by which they have reached their conclusions, claimed the utmost for Jesus. And this, in spite of the most desperate philosophical difficulties about monotheism, with a strong sense of fact, with a deepening feeling for reality, with a growing value for experience, and with bolder ventures upon experience, men have found that their conception of Jesus deepens and grows. He means more to them the more they are. And, as was noted in the first chapter, in a rational universe where truth counts and error fails, the Church has risen in power with every real emphasis laid on Jesus Christ. What does this involve? So far our records. Today we are living in an era when great scientific discoveries are made and more are promised. Geology once unsettled people about Genesis, but closer study of the Bible and of science has given truer views of both, and thinking people are as little troubled about geology now as about Copernican astronomy. At present heredity and psychology are dominating our minds, or rather theories as to both, for though beginnings have been made, the state has not yet been reached a very wide or certain discovery. There is still a great deal of the soul unexplored and unmapped. No reasonable person would wish to be little the study, either of evolution or of psychology, but the real men of science would probably urge that lay people should take more pains to know the exact meaning and scope of scientific terms, and to have some more or less clear idea in their minds when they use them. However, all these modern discoveries and theories are, to many men's minds, a challenge to the right of Christians to speak of Jesus Christ, as they have spoken of him, and challenge to our right to represent the facts of Christian life, as we have represented them. In other words, they are a challenge to us to return to experience and to see what we really mean. If our study of Jesus in the preceding chapters has been on sound lines, we shall feel that the challenge to face facts is in his vein. It was what he urged upon men throughout. The old problem returned upon us. Who and what is this Jesus Christ? We are involved in the recurrent need to re-examine him and re-explore him. There are several ways of doing so. Like every other historical character, Jesus is to be known by what he does, rather than by a priori speculation as to what he might be. In the study of history, the first thing is to know our original documents. There are the Gospels, and like other historical records, they must be studied in earnest on scientific lines without preconception. And there are later records which tell us as plainly and truthfully of what he has done in the world's history. We can begin then with the serious study of the actual historical Jesus, whom people met in the road, and with whom they ate their meals, whom the soldiers nailed to the cross, and whom his disciples took to worshipping, and who has, historically, re-created the world. The second line of approach is rather more difficult, but with care we can use Christological theories to recover the facts which those who framed the theories intended to explain. We must remember here once more the three historical cannons laid down at the beginning. We must, above all things, give the man's term his meaning, and ask what was the experience behind his thought. When we come upon such descriptions of Jesus as Christ our Passover, or find him called the Messiah, we must not let our own preconceptions as to the value of the theories implied by the use of such language, nor again our existing views of what is orthodox, determine our conclusions. But we must ask what those who so explained Jesus really meant to say, and what they had experienced, which they thought were worth expressing. These people, as we see, were face to face with a very great new experience, and they cast about for some means of describing and explaining it. A slight illustration may suggest the natural law in accordance with which they set about their task of explanation. A child of between two and three years old was watching his first snowstorm gazing very intensely at the flying snowflake and evidently trying to think out what they were. At last he hit it. They were little birds. It is so that the mind infant or adult is up to work, explaining the new and unknown by reference to the familiar. Snowflakes are not little birds. They are something quite different, and yet there is a common element. They both go flying through the air, and it was that fact that the child's brain noticed and used. To explain Jesus, his friends and contemporaries spoke of him as the Logos, the Sacrifice, Christ our Passover, the Messiah, and so forth. Of those terms not one is intelligible to us today without a commentary. To ordinary people Jesus is at once intelligible, far more so than the explanations of him. Historically it is he himself who has antiquated every one of those conceptions, and so far as they have survived it has been in virtue of association with him. They are the familiar language of another day. No one, said Dr. Randall Harris, can sing how sweet the name of Logos sounds. Cinesius of Cyrene did try to sing it, but most human beings prefer St. Bernard or John Newton. The inner significance of each term will point to the real experience of the man using it. He employs a metaphor, a simile, or a technical term to explain something. Can we penetrate to the analogy which he finds between the Jesus of the new experience and the old term which he uses? Can we, when we see what he has experienced, grasp the substance and build on that to the neglect of the term? When we look at the terms we find that the essence of sacrifice was reconciliation between God and man. We shall return to this little later. And that the Messiah was understood to be destined to achieve God's purpose and God's meaning for mankind and for each man. We find again that the inner meaning of the Logos is that through it and in it God and man come in touch with each other and become mutually intelligible. Reconciliation, the victory of God, the mutual intelligibility of God and man, all three terms centre into one great thought. A new union between God and man. That, so far as I can see, is the common element, and that is, as men have conceived it, the very heart of the Christian experience. In the third place we can utilise the new experiments made upon Jesus Christ in the Reformation and in other revivals. They come nearer to us, for the men who report are more practical and more scholarly in the modern way. They are more akin to us both in blood and in ideas. Luther, for example, is a great spirit of the explorer type. He went to scholarship and learnt the true meaning of metanoia, that it was rethinking and not penance, and he grasped a new view of God there. From scholarship he gained a true view of church history than he had been taught, and this too helped to clear his mind. Above all, as a great son of fact, Carl Isle's name for him, his chief interest was the exploration of Jesus Christ. Would Christ stand all the weight that a man could throw upon him without assistance? And Luther found that Christ could, and he had once turned his knowledge into action, as the world knows. Justification by faith was his phrase, and he meant that we may trust Jesus Christ with all that we are, all that we have been, and all that we hope to be, that Jesus himself will carry all, that Jesus himself is all, that Jesus is at once Luther's eternal salvation and his sure help in the next day's difficulty, his saviour forever from sin, and his great standby in translating the Bible for the German people and in writing hymns for boys and girls. "'Note nihilsumus,' he wrote, Christus solus et omnia.' In the case of every great revival, the Wesleyan revival and the smaller ones in the United States, in the north of Ireland, in Wales, in every one we find that where anything is really achieved, it is done by a new and thoroughgoing emphasis on Jesus Christ. It may be put in language, which to some years is repulsive, in metaphors, strange or uncouth, but whatever the language, the fact that underlies it is this. Men are brought back to the reality, the presence, the power, and the friendship of Jesus Christ. They are called to a fresh venture on Jesus Christ, a fresh exploration, and again and again the experience of a lifetime has justified the venture. This brings us to the most effective and fundamental method in the exploration of Jesus. In some ways the most difficult of all, or else the very simplest. The church has been clear that there is nothing like personal experiment, the personal venture. It is the only clue to the experience. The saying of Saint Augustine, imo credo ut intelligas, is to many of our minds offensive, I think because we do not give quite the right meaning to his credo, but if the illustrations are not too simple, swimming and bicycling offer parallels. A man will never understand how water holds up a human body as long as he stays on dry land. In practical things the venture comes first, and it is hard to see how a man is to understand Christ without a personal experience of him. All parents know how much better bachelors and maiden sisters understand children than they do, but as soon as these great authorities have children of their own the position is altered a little. The changes that Jesus definitely operates in men they have described in various ways, rebirth, salvation, a new heart, and so forth. What they have always emphasized in Jesus Christ is that they find he changes their outlook and develops new instincts in them, and that in one way or another he saves from sin, and they have been men who have learned and adopted Jesus's own estimate of sin. When then we remember that with his serious view of sin he undertook men redemption from it. When we add to this some real reflection upon how much he already has done, as plain matter of history, to take away the sin of the world, we surely have something to go upon in our attempt to determine who he is. The question will rise, have Christians overstated their experience, or even misunderstood it? Has forgiveness been, in fact, achieved or salvation from sin? Can sin be put away at all? What will the evidence for this be? I do not know what the evidence could be except the new life of peace with God and all the sunshine and blessing that go with it. This new life is at all events all the evidence available, and how much it means is very difficult to estimate without some personal experience. Here again the great theories of redemption will help us to recover the experience they are to explain, and once more we may note that they are not the work of small minds or trivial natures, however badly they have been echoed. Substitution implies at any rate some serious confession of guilt before God, some strong sense of a great indebtedness to Christ. The theory of sacrifice implies the need of reunion with God. Robinson Smith, in his early religion of the Semites, brings out that the essence of ancient sacrifice was that the tribe, the sacrificial beast and the God were all of one blood. The God was supposed to be alienated. The sacrifice was offered by the party to the quarrel who was seeking reconciliation, namely the tribe. When we look at the New Testament we find that the emphasis always lies on God seeking reconciliation with man. The theory of ransom, the most moving term in the world of slavery, implies the need of new freedom for the mind, for the heart and for the whole nature from the tyranny of sin. All these are similes, and tremendous structures of theory have been built on every one of them. And for some of these structures, similarly or in plainer language analogy, is not a sufficient foundation. It is probably true that all our current explanations of the work of Christ in redemption have in them too large an element of metaphor and simile, yet Christian people are reluctant to discard any one of them, and their reluctance is intelligible. There is a value in the old association which is found by new experience. Every one of these old similes will contribute to our realization of the work of Christ insofar as it is a record of experience of Christ verified in one generation after another. We shall make the best use of them when we are no longer intimidated by the terminology, but go at once to what is meant to the facts. We come still closer to the facts in the less metaphorical terms of the New Testament. For example, there is the New Covenant. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews went back to a great phrase in Jeremiah, and by his emphasis on it he helped to give its name to the whole New Testament. I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah. Using this passage, he brings out that there is a new relation, a new union between God and man in Jesus. He speaks of Jesus as a mediator, bringing man and God together. Language far planer to us than the terminology of sacrifice, which he employed rather to bring home the work of Jesus with feeling and passion to those who had no other vocabulary than to impose upon Christian thinkers a scheme of things which he clearly saw to be exhausted. Then there is Paul's great conception of reconciliation. Half the difficulties connected with the word atonement disappear when we grasp that the word in Greek means primarily reconciliation. As Paul uses the noun and the verb, it is very plain what he means. God is in Christ trying to reconcile the world to himself. These attempts to express Christ's work in plain words take us back to the great central Christian experience, to the great initial discovery that the discord of man's making between God and man has been removed by God's overtures in Christ, that the obstacles which man has felt in his approach to God in the unclean hands and the unclean lips have been taken away and that with a heart such as the human heart is, a man may yet come to God in Jesus because of Jesus, through Jesus. The historical character of Christian life and thought is surely evidence that Jesus Christ has accomplished something real and when we get a better hold of that the problem of his person should be more within our reach. The splendid phrase of Paul, therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. All that of one Peter, in whom he rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory, gives us the keynote. The gaiety of the early church in its union with Jesus Christ rings through the New Testament and the Christian fathers from Hermas to Augustine. The church has come singing down the ages. The victory over sin, no easy thing at any time, is another permanent feature of Christian experience. The psychological value of what Dr. Chalmers called the expulsive power of a new affectation is not enough studied by us. Look at the freedom, the growth, the power of the Christian life. Where do they all come from? We cannot leave God out of this. At any rate, there they are in the Christian experience. And where does anything that matters flow from but from God? There is, again, the evidence of Christian achievement and it should be remarked that the Christian always tells us that he himself is not the power, that it comes from God, that he asks for it and God gives it. Has for the easy explanation of all religious life by auto-suggestion, we may note that it involves a loose and unscientific use of a more or less scientific theory, never a very safe way to knowledge. In any case, it has been pointed out the word adds nothing to the number of our facts. Nor is it quite clear yet that it eliminates God from the story any more than the term digestion makes it inappropriate to say grace before a meal. All these things, peace, joy, victory and the rest, follow from the taking away of sin and imply that it no longer stands between God and man. All this is the work of the historical Jesus. It is he who has changed the attitude of man to God and by changing it has made it possible for God to do what he has done. If God in Paul's phrase hath shined in our hearts it was Jesus who induced men to take down the shutters and open the windows. It is all associated historically with the ever-living Jesus Christ and with God in him. This brings us to the central question, the relation of Jesus with God, the problem of incarnation. After all that has been said we shall not approach it a priori. We are too apt to put the incarnation more or less in an algebraic form x plus y equals a, where a stands for the historical Jesus Christ and x and y respectively for God and man. But what do we mean by x and y? Let us face our facts. What do we know of man apart from Jesus Christ? Surely it is only in him that we realise man, only in him that we grasp what human depravity really is. The real meaning and implications of human sin. It is those who have lived with Jesus Christ who are most conscious of sin and this is no mere morbid imagination or fancy. It rests on a much deeper exploration of human nature than men in general attempt. Not until we know what he is do we see how very little we are and how far we have gone wrong. It is his power of help and sympathy that teaches us the hardness of our own hearts, our own fundamental want of sympathy. Again until a man knows Jesus Christ he has little chance of even guessing the grandeur of which he himself is capable. A man has, as he says, done his best. For years it might be a strenuous endeavour and then comes the new experience of Jesus Christ and he is lifted high above his record. He gains a new power, a new tenderness, and he does things incredible. We do not know the wrong or the right of which man is capable till we know Jesus Christ. The y of our equation then does not tell us very much. When it comes to the x is it not very often a mixture, an ill-adjusted mixture of the father of Jesus with the rather negative beyond all being of later Greek speculation and perhaps the judge of Roman law. The exact proportions in the mixture will vary with the thinker but in fact is it not true now that we only really know God through Jesus? For it is only in and through Jesus that we take the trouble and have the faith to explore and test God, to try experiments upon God, to know what he can do and what he will do. It is only in Jesus that the love of God in the New Testament sense is tenable at all. It is evanescent apart from Jesus. It rests on the assurance of his words, his work, his personality. A vague diffused love of God for everything in general and nothing in particular we saw to be a quite different thing from the personal attachment with which according to Jesus God loves the individual man. That is the center of the gospel. It is belief in that which has done everything in a rational world as we saw at the beginning and it is a most impossible belief never long or very actively held apart from Jesus. Only in him can we believe it. Only in him too is the new experience of God's forgiveness and redemption possible in all its fullness and sureness and power. Do me pardonera, said Heiner, say mommitia, but he had not the Christian sense of what it was that God was to forgive. It is only in Jesus that we can live the real life of prayer in the intimate way of Jesus. All this means is that we have to solve our X from Jesus, not to discover him through it. The plain fact is that we actually know Jesus a great deal better than we know our X and we know our Y, the elements from which we hope to reconstruct him. What does this mean? It means, bluntly, that we have to rethink our theories of incarnation on eight posteriori lines to begin on facts that we know and to base ourselves on a continuous exploration and experience of Jesus Christ first. The simple, homey rule of knowing things before we talk about them holds in every other sphere of study and it is the rule which Jesus himself inculcated. We begin then with Jesus Christ and set out to see how far he will take us. Experience comes first. Follow me, he said. He chose the twelve men that they might be with him and he let them find out in that great intercourse what he had for them and from what he could give and did give they drew their conclusions as to who and what he is. There can be no other way of knowing him. Luther's Reformation doctrines, says Herman in his fine book, The Communion of the Christian with God, only countenance such a confession with the deity of Christ as springs naturally to the lips of the man whom Jesus has already made blessed. Malangthon said the same thing, this it is to know Christ, to receive his benefits, not to contemplate his natures or the modes of his incarnation. Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. End of chapter 10. End of The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover.