12 MARCH 1910, Page 9

CHRIST'S WORDS CONCERNING HIMSELF.

MANY men and women to-day who do not claim to belong to what is called the religions world strive ardently to realise to themselves the character of Christ, to bring to life in their own minds the personality which has extorted the supreme homage, and in great measure modified the actual nature, of the white race. Thousands of men and women in the past have found the realities of life explicable, and the reality of death endurable, simply because they have been able to realise the personality of our Lord, and have found in that realisation an all-sufficient religion. The task is less easy than it used to be. Perhaps it would not be untrue to say that in no age has it been attempted by so many or accomplished by so few. There are some still who count themselves to have attained in this respect, but they cannot impart the inspired secret. The Gospels remain open before us all, but the white light which has played upon them for a generation has not served to outline the figure of Christ. He still speaks from the sacred pages as never man spake, and surely it is not untrue to say that the world never listened so intently; but when Evangelical preachers describe to their hearers a "personal relation " with Christ, the number of those who turn away in sad uncomprehension becomes daily more and more.

Can we gain any clear conception from the study of those sentences of our Lord which apply directly to Himself? What did He say directly of Himself to the world ? The sentences are very hard to reconcile with each other, and it would be idle to expect a complete picture when we consider the words, "If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true." The end for which He was born was not, He distinctly declared, to bear witness to Himself, but "to the truth." He admitted unhesitatingly the soundness of the homely wisdom which leads men to suspect the sincerity of the man who vaunts his power and his personality. He did not wish that wonders should be regarded as proof of inspiration. " If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself," He said. Again, He seems to care little through what source the revelation reaches any one. The truth may come to a man through a Disciple, through a child even. " He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me ; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me."

But when we have considered all this we are still tempted to ask with Pilate, " What is truth ? " for it is certain that Christ made no attempt to proclaim all truth, even in the very limited degree in which man has since found it out. He never alludes to what we call science, or in any scientific spirit to history or the arts. He seems to allude to that truth which should make men free, which should save them from bitterness, desperation, and reckless sin, from being utterly confounded by the pain and distress, and apparent meaninglessness, of a large portion of life. At the very beginning of His mission the Evangelist describes an impressive scene in the synagogue wherein the young, and as yet unknown, teacher expressed in the words of Isaiah the object of His life. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," He declared, " because he bath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor ; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." That portion of the truth which will do this is the portion that men want, and there are times when we have all felt that no other form of truth is of any more value than (he veriest opinion. We shall, we know, be contradicted by many theologians ; but to the ordinary man who is not interested in theology the plain inference from all our Lord's references to Himself is that His great object was the relief of human misery, mental, moral, and physical; to comfort the sad, the poverty-stricken, the oppressed, and the sick ; and to enlighten those whom intel- lectual darkness stupefies, brutalises, or maddens. No one will deny that this is the noblest of conceivable ambitions.

To turn to another group of sayings. What did our Lord say of a more intimate nature concerning Himself ? The most puzzling, yet perhaps the most attractive, sentence of all is in the form of a deprecatory question : " Why called thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God." Now it cannot be denied that one of the per- fections of character is humility. It is not in human nature to acknowledge perfection where perfection is proclaimed Our Lord, however, gave no countenance to that rather despicable scrupulosity which has led many religions men to contemplate with lugubrious enjoyment the profound and equal wickedness of the human heart. While all good men would always, He knew, acknowledge themselves unprofitable servants, there were, He took it for granted, scores of good people who could receive no benefit from the preaching of repentance, and to alter them was not, He said, the object of His mission. Again, He puts aside with some impatience that acknowledgment of His greatness which the Church all through the ages has been tempted to confuse with faith. Willingness to say " Lord, Lord," did not, He said with an almost satiric trenchancy, proclaim a man's citizenship to be in heaven. He put the will to act well before the will to worship.

But there are sayings of our Lord which appear at first sight to be in absolute contradiction of those that we have quoted. "I am," He said, "the way," "the life," "the light of the world," "the door" through which men approach God; "No man cometh unto the Father, but by me." Either we must set wholly aside the first set of sayings, or we must regard these as metaphorical. He must have meant: "In my message are all these things, and only those who can accept this theory of life can conceive of God as a Father." Plainly this is the truth. Can reason alone conceive of God in that light ? The love of God is an inspiration. Will reason alone pronounce a blessing on the mourners, the meek, the peacemakers, the pure in heart ? Can reason deliver us from the maddening thought of chance, the lust of revenge, and the terror of death? Yet from the moment that man leaves a savage state behind him he is conscious of voices in his heart which overpower his reason, and he suspects that these voices are divine. Christ confirmed his hope. He pro- claims Himself the rest-giver. He tells men to rely upon an intuition. Does not what He says awake some answer in their hearts ? " Ye believe in God, believe also in me," He exhorts His words must have set His hearers thinking of His teaching as a whole. Can they not believe what the Prophets have already suspected,—that man stands in direct relation to the Giver of his spirit ; that he is not here by accident ; that might is not right; that body and soul do not die together ; that revenge is the justice of beasts, and sympathy the prerogative of man, the sign of his relation to God? All these things Christ taught with certainty, never swerving from His attitude of knowledge. By this assurance alone could He support men's souls, lighten the burden of trouble, ease the yoke of endless thought. We see Him in the Gospel strong and certain, yet full of compassion. But how elusive is the picture.

There are words of our Lord about Himself which transcend the spiritual comprehension of to-day,--those in which he spoke of His unity with God and His return whence He came. Masters of theology in the past have interpreted them to the world. Now as we read their metaphysical explanations we seem to be reading a dead language. Will these words ever

be satisfactorily explained again P Probably. Meanwhile may not ordinary men content themselves in the belief that our Lord was not always teaching, but sometimes speaking out of a full heart a truth above the comprehension of the simple and the poor, who in a spiritual sense we are in these days of change and materialism ?

There are surely some good signs to-day, signs of a living Christianity, difficult as we find it to realise Christ. The Disciples were Christians after the Crucifixion and before the Resurrection, though to their eyes the world grew dark. They could not recognise the Light of the World upon His reappearance, but they were spellbound by His words, and looked back at a happier period to this time of spiritual despondency without self-reproach. "Did not our heart burn within us ?" they said, while as yet they had not recognised the speaker.