THE GREAT DILEMMA.*

THIS little book' draws an effective and very striking con- trast between the Christian view of Christ, and all the vari-

ous rationalistic views which explain away Christianity, with- out explaining it. It is thoughtfully and vigorously written, and shows a very wide extent of reading, and a sincere desire to enter into the heart of the rationalistic objections. We entirely agree with Mr. Ottley that there is a very great need for more decided intellectual conviction at the basis of the Christianity of the day than most Christians are prepared either to give, or definitely to refuse. It is certainly true that the half-and-half state of acquiescence, rather than belief, in Christianity, is preparing the way for a very sudden collapse of all faith, if it be not soon replaced by a very deep conviction of its substantial truth :—

" We are forced, then, to conclude that it is the fault of the pulpit itself when the congregations are attenuated or feminine. If the ideal which is put in front of the men be dwarfed and stunted, it must fail to commend itself to the masculine attention. The inference is wholly groundless that the truth itself must be at fault, because, if it be not presented in its objective grandeur, it appears often devoid of sinew, colourless, invertebrate. For, assuredly, mere sentiment must needs be sorry food for a robust Christianity. In days of close historical analysis like our own, a man's spiritual fibre will be withered, his soul will die of inanition, if emotion be its only nurse, pietism its only nourishment. Or, at best, if his faith survives the shock of circumstances at all, it will be but a poor, starveling babe. His body will not thrive without healthy meat and drink, nor will • The Great Dilemma. Christ his own Witness or his own Accuser. Six Lectures. By Henry Bickersteth Ottley, M.A., Vicar of St. Margaret's, Ilkley. London : C. Hagan Paul and 0o.

his spiritual manhood sustain its vigour without substantial food. No sweet Galilean vision' will suffice to brace men for the solemnities of life. The needs of humanity are not to be sated with assthetio rapture or with pseudo-religions ecstacy. Its hanger is not appeased by dreams of bread ; nor its thirst quenched by the vision of water that it cannot drink. And yet, unless the foregoing observations are wholly groundless, it will be admitted that there is among us a religious limbo—a chasm of vaporous unreality—to which the whole fabric of our so-called faith is not unfrequently consigned."

We need hardly say how thoroughly we concur in that view of Mr. Ottley's. At the same time, we are not sure that the best way of meeting this uncertainty of view is the mode which Mr. Ottley has chosen, of pushing hesitating minds into the corner between the two horns of a dilemma, and bidding them to choose between the two. At least the dilemma should be strictly an inevitable one, where this course is adopted. Now, as a rule, it is only the smaller and more limited issues of a very definite subject—like one of the mathematical subjects of in- quiry,—which lend themselves to successful treatment of this kind. On the greater subjects, which are far beyond the complete grasp, though not beyond the reverent apprehen- sion, of our minds, men are apt to resent an over-logical treat- ment, and to feel, with more or less distinctness, that sharp logical alternatives are misapplied to them. And we rather think that Mr. Ottley's mode of putting the great subject of Christ's divinity, though full of substance and real drift, is not, on the whole, the most convincing to the kind of minds for which he intends it. Take, for instance, the first of the dilemmas : —" The sinlessness of Christ, if admitted, logically necessitates his divinity. If denied, deposes him, fatally discredited, from the platform of even ordinary human excellence." We are far from disputing the moral force of such an argument as this, but we ourselves should deny its abso-

lutely logical force. In discussing the position of a being so unique as Christ, you can hardly say that if you do not admit him to be God, you cannot logically admit him to be anything but an inferior man. Is a sinless man impossible ? If strictly impossible, then all sin is not culpable ; if possible, why may

not a being so unique as Christ be that one exception to the all but universal rule of culpability P We may and do maintain that the moment you contemplate Christ as really sinless, you are already in a region of thought concerning him where you may well expect to be led much farther. We may and do admit that when, in addition to a conviction of his sinlessness, you get evidence of his personally asserted claim to almost unlimited supernatural power, and to the right of a future judge over the hearts of men, you can hardly help going beyond the conception of a perfectly sinless man. But we deny that if sin be really voluntary—something for which we deserve penalty—the conception of a sinless man is one logically contradictory ; and the Unitarian who accepts the sinlessness of Christ, yet maintains his pure humanity, has a perfect right to allege on his side of the controversy the undoubted and, to Trinitarians, certainly perplexing, though not inexplicable, reproof given to the young man who called him "good master," and who was reminded that " there is none good but one, that is God," and our Lord's distinct allegation that there was an event coming, of the day and hour of which he himself was ignorant. It seems to us going quite too far to assail the Unitarian who accepts the sinlessness of Christ, and yet believes in his pure humanity, for holding a position which, as a logi- cian, he should be ashamed of. Logically, the position seems to us perfectly tenable. Only, taken in combination with all the other claims of Christ, with his miracles, his resur- rection, and the spiritual dominion he has actually exerted over the hearts of men, his sinlessness certainly suggests very strongly the divinity which the Church of his own day, as expressed by the powerful intellect of St. Paul, unquestionably ascribed to him. We are not, of course, arguing against Mr. Ottley's conclusion, but only against the too sharp dilemma into which he tries to drive his antagonists.

Take another dilemma,—" Claiming to be the Messiah, he asserted that be fulfilled and superseded the Mosaic law. This implied his divine dignity or his blasphemy." And Mr. Ottley thus eloquently expounds his dilemma :-

"Again, I say, we are face to face with the same tremendous Dilemma as before. If God has spoken to the world by that wondrous people, the Jews ; if all the anticipations of Gentile philosophy are but a faint echo of that trumpet-note of prophecy which sounds along the Jewish history ; if, as the fulfilment of these antici- pations, and the fulfilment of these prophecies, Christ could claim to have fulfilled the law of Moses—surely now we begin to see that He is even more than a merely sinless One—we shall suspect that His Blood was shed to do that which the blood of balls and goats could never do, namely, to wash away the guilt of human sin. If it be true that he fulfils the Law as its first and only Teacher and Performer, He stands to the world at large in a relation- ship we dare not overlook. He becomes the righteous One who offers Himself, in our stead, as the great atoning Sacrifice for our guilt in• having broken the Law of God. In Him, in his death, is realised by the sinner the true use of the Law, which was to convince men of the unapproachable holiness of God, and the deadly destructiveness of sin. Bat, if otherwise : if the Holy Scriptures of the Jewish nation have, in reality, been lightly esteemed by Him who professed to fulfil them ; if, in all that sinless life, there is a vein of frivolous trifling with the solemn and awful teaching of the Mosaic Law ; if, in daring to denounce the literalism of the Pharisees, he was seeking to excuse His own sacrilegious tampering with the most august and pared code of laws the world has ever seen ;—then, surely, we must again start back from Christ horrified and appalled; horrified to find an• impious impostor beneath the mask of a pious and majestic law- giver; appalled at the daring blasphemy which led Him to claim a higher position than Abraham, or Moses, or Isaiah, in regard to the Jewish Scriptures. The Dilemma is again before you. Utter self- surrender to Him who could say, Before Abraham was, I AM ;' or indignant repudiation of any part with the rightly crucified Galilean impostor. Which alternative will you accept ? Choose ye. If Christ be God, humbly follow Him, obey Him, live in Him. If He be only man, away with Him from the earth, for the centuries have been built upon a lie V'

Again, we say that the dilemma into which Mr. Ottley tries to shut us up is too harsh and trenchant. Even on the humani- tarian hypothesis, there is no force in saying that because Christ spoke of the Son of Man as being Lord even of the Sabbath Day, in the sense of being able and bound to discrim- inate between the ceremonial and the moral ends of the Sab- bath, he was a "blasphemer." In point of fact, our Lord• appealed to the principles which guided the Jews themselves, when he asked whether any man would not pull an ox or ass out of a pit on the Sabbath Day, and claimed that it was right to do good on the Sabbath Day. It was not because he was God, but because, on the very principles of the Mosaic Law, as the Jews themselves, when aided by self-interest, interpreted it, it was obvious that the Sabbath was made for many and not man for the Sabbath, that Christ claimed to be fulfilling the spirit of the law, in breaking what some might regard as its letter. We do not see that even on the Unitarian hypothesis, our Lord is to be called a trifler " with the solemn and awful teaching of the Mosaic Law." Is it not admitted that wherever he claimed to super- sede it, he penetrated to its spirit, and enlarged instead of contracting its teaching ? He interpreted it as meaning more, not less, than it had been believed to mean, as a guide to the• heart, instead of as a mere guide to the will. Surely, even if Christ had been a mere man, and yet a man who had meditated on the divine meaning of the Law of Moses till he had reached' its very spirit, there was no" blasphemy " in this enlargement and freer interpretation of its meaning. We are far from disputing- in the least Mr. Ottley's general drift, which we believe to be- sound. But we do think he has overstated the force of the individual "dilemmas," between which he insists that his antagonists shall take their choice. Had he advanced for each branch of his argument less of a claim to be conclusive- in itself, and treated it more as a single thread in a cumula- tive proof which derives its force from the united strength of all its parts, he would, we think, have produced a greater effect with the very same materials. The following, for instance, is very powerful :-

"His [Christ's] self-assertion they [the Jews] could have ex- cused, had it been backed by the outward semblances of royalty. But self-assertion so tremendous, with self-abasement so humble, this was a paradox they could not contemplate without intense dismay. The result could not long be doubtful. It was, indeed,. impossible to shirk the grave issues of such astounding preten- sions. Other masters, other teachers, other kings, might claim much from their followers and subjects ; but here was one who, claimed all—the life, the soul itself. Here was ono who calmly sets aside, in his own favour, all the most sacred ties of family and kindred. Who and what is he who dares thus to advance this most imperious claim ? Follow me—Come unto me—Forsake all— Be my disciple—He who loves father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me. Who—those Jews might well ask—is he ? Is the claim tolerable, if he be only man P His audacity was in truth in- tolerable. For they dared not face the portentous alternative that perhaps, after all, his claims were justified in fact. And so, hoping to escape from the momentous dilemma, they executed him ; on grounds, moreover, that were entirely self-contradictory. They accused him to Pilate as a political conspirator ; in their hearts, they were angry because he was not politically ambitious. They informed against him as dangerous ; their real complaint was that he was not dangerous enough, so far as earthly power was concerned, to warrant. his vast pretensions. Pilate puts him to death as a political offender, a traitor against Caesar ; the Jews denounce him precisely because he will not claim rivalry with Caesar. Pilate wrote over his cross, The King of the Jews ;' the Jews themselves wanted to alter the inscrip- tion by adding that he said he was the King of the Jews ;—he said it, but he could not support his claim with earthly weapons. Pilate feared that his kingdom was of this world ; the Jews were angry pre- cisely because it was not. So, in their bewilderment, they crowned him king. They knew not what they did the while. They put on him a purple robe—in mockery ; they put the reed sceptre in his hand ; they bowed the knee, in scornful homage ; they gave him his crown—but it was of thorns ; and they placed him on his throne—it eras the shameful cross, the instrument of a slave's agony, the symbol of an utter detest. Little thought they of the issue of their deed. Little did they realise that Christ upon his cross would be the rallying-point of millions of human hearts in ages yet unborn ! Thou bast conquered, 0 Galilean !' The cry of the apostate emperor is the verdict of Christendom to-day ; for the King of the Jews upon his cross is, even by the admission of M. Rena; a king upon an ever- lasting throne."

To our minds, the case for the divinity of Christ is not so much the separate result of a number of final and distinct proofs, as the point in which a number of converging lines all meet. First, his Church undoubtedly began to worship him within a very few years of his death, whence we may conclude that that worship probably began with its very commencement, since this was a kind of change which would have shocked and powerfully repelled reverent Jewish minds, had they been previously accustomed to another conception of him. Next, Christ unquestionably asserted for himself the very great- est spiritual claims over the heart, claims such as it is hardly possible to accord to any but the Lord of the heart, —and these claims he made in connection with what he treated as trivial in the comparison,—the power of restoring life to the body. Thirdly, the concession of these claims did what nothing else could have done, — gave vitality to

his Church for all ages since the time when he lived and died for it; and not only gave vitality to his Church, but gave meaning to the Jewish Revelation, which, but for that Church, is a mere torso, one of the greatest failures of history. In the next place, there is, as Mr. Ottley points out, a marvellous combination in our Lord of claim to spiritual dignity surpassing all others, with a strange lowliness and almost trenchancy of humility in actual life, hardly intelligible in connection with such calm spiritual dignity, save on the assumption that it was founded in pure fact, and not in any illusive aspiration. Thus he who

claimed to be the moral judge of all human souls, repels the re- quest for a special act of judgment between the earthly claims of contending brothers, with severity, not to say scorn. Could

any man have been capable of such a strange combination of spiritual self-assertion with such scorn for the actual influence

of an arbiter of human quarrels ? Could such great spiritual claims, if false, have been suggested by anything but ambition ? Could ambition, if it had been in him, have permitted Jesus to ignore, with so supreme an indifference, the eager expectations of his Disciples and the Jews, and the various appeals of members of his race to his authority ? To all these con- siderations, there must be added the universal conviction among his disciples of the miraculous powers of Christ, the resurrection of his Church after his death depending as it did on the resurrection of the Lord of the Church, the alleged communion of his Disciples with him for forty days after his resurrection, and the vision and conversion of St. Paul, a few years later ; and finally, the wonderful revelation of the inner mind of Christ by St. John,—a miracle of the spiritual kind in itself. The drift of all these facts seems to us to be clear, but we think in the form into which Mr. Ottley has thrown the argument, several of the links are not separately very strong, though, taken altogether, they make out an impregnable case. We wish that he had not given his case in an over-logical form, and believe that he would have strengthened his argument by moderating the trenchancy of its " dilemmas."