MR. GLADSTONE ON "ECCE HOMO."
/VER. GLADSTONE has contributed to the January number 1 of Good Words the first part of a curiously delicate essay on the method pursued in " Ecce Homo," the fine and complicated texture of which is in strange contrast both with the bold doubts and bold dogmatisms of "modern thought." Mr. Gladstone's intellectual workmanship is always fine. Spontaneously and almost involuntarily he chooses the most delicate intellectual instruments within his reach even for the broadest, and in a certain sense, coarsest work. As he insisted on assaulting the late Reform Bill not so much by exposing the ends of the measure as by minutely criticizing the means, and made the Compounder the chief fulcrum of his crowbar for breaking up the Reform policy of the Ministry, so in dealing with the great theological subject before him, he turns the discussion by choice not on the direct truth or falsehood of his author's view, but on the interior struc- ture of the method he has pursued, evidently believing that the subtle c3nsiderationf3 which he is thus compelled to elaborate will reflect back more light on the main issue than if he had attacked it directly. Mr. Gladstone's is a mind on which the subtle con- necting links and structural economy even of Revelation make, not, perhaps, a more powerful, but a more definite and vivid im- pression than even the great light so revealed itself,—just as the fine veins and exquisite tracery of a leaf or petal are calcu- lated to impress many observers far more vividly than the grandeur of the tree, or even the rich colour and beauty of the flower. Thus Mr. Gladstone at once admits in his essay on " Ecce Homo" that "the astounding fact of the manifestation of the Lord of Glory in the veil of human flesh may, and does, stagger in some minds the whole 'faculty of belief." But he does not on that account address himself straight to that one point. On the con- trary, he evidently inclines to the policy of withdrawing the attention of such persons as are here referred to from the direct contemplation of the great paradox, and fixing it on the conse- quences which result from temporarily assuming its truth ; for he goes on, "those minds, however, guided by equity, will admit, that if this great Christian postulate be sound, much must follow from it. For then we must in reason expect to find, not only an elaborate preparation in the outer world for an event which, by the very statement of the terms, dwarfs the dimensions of every ether known transaction, but likewise a most careful adjustment of the means by which, being so vast in itself, it could find entrance into the human mind and heart." And following this line of suggestion, what Mr. Gladstone here attempts is to vindicate the method pursued in " Ecce Homo," that is, the attempt to study our Lord's nature from its human side, on the express ground that this was the primitive and divine mode of so adjusting the means to the end, that an event " so vast in itself" could find "entrance to the human mind and heart." He points out that if a divine incarna- tion of God in man be true at all, and if it is to be made the basis of a new morality and a new spiritual life, it will follow that there will be a constant danger of disturbing the true balance between the human and divine side of our conception of this wonderful union, and especially a danger of our worship of the divinity in Christ altogether overbalancing our worship of the humanity in Christ, and leaving us with a bare and sterile caput mortuum of deity, from which the fresh and vivid human life has alto- gether withered away. "It is very difficult," declares Mr. Glad- stone, "it is, humanly speaking, almost impossible, to maintain a just balance, together with a close union, between two ideas of such immense disparity as God and man ; the wailing infant and the supreme Creator ; the Victim of Death and the Lord of Death ; the despised of all, and the judge of all." He shows us how the Roman Church has evaded the real stress of the difficulty by "intercepting by devotion primarily addressed to intermediate objects [like the Virgin and the Saints, we presume], and too often apt to rest there," what belonged in the first form of Christian belief to the true humanity of Christ. In England and Scotland, on the other hand, there is, says Mr. Gladstone, too much tendency "to merge the humanity in the divinity of our Lord, to under-rate or overlook its continued existence and action, in some cases even to suppose that it terminated with the theophany or manifestation of the Divine Person in the flesh. If this be so, then, perhaps, on the part of a book like" Ecce Homo" it may be right to retort a friendly expostulation and to entreat objectors to consider with themselves whether their impatience of a detailed picture of our Lord in His humanity is really so unequivocal a sign of orthodoxy as they sup- pose ; or whether, on the contrary, it may rather be a token that the religious mind amongst us has, from want of habitual cultivation, grown dry and irreceptive on that side of the Christian Creed ; so that the kind of writing which they encounter with rebuke and sus- picion is the very kind which is needed to bring us back to the full region of that mixed conception of the character and person of .our Lord, which in reality forms, according to the acknowledgment of nearly all communions of the Christian name, the central idea of the Christian system." And the rest of the essay is a development of this suggestion, that in order to reflect truly the divine union of the two natures, it was primarily essential to keep the higher in the background, and not to let the vision of it dazzle and blind the imagination of those who needed first to take hold of the living humanity of Christ. "We were neither to be consumed by the heat of the Divine presence nor dazzled by its brightness. God was not in the storm, nor in the fire, nor in the flood ; but He was in the still small voice." The revelation must necessarily have begun in secret springs of motive, and not in a vision of overpower- ing splendour. It was to be "tender, careful, considerate of all that it found in the world, neither breaking the bruised reed' nor 'quenching the smoking flax,'—respecting so much of it as had any title to respect, and enduring with much patience, 'for the hardness of their hearts,' all such evils as could only have been removed at the cost of introducing greater evils." This was in itself an overwhelming reason for the development of the human side of our Lord's character before exhibiting its nexus with the divine. But to this Mr. Gladstone adds that both the Jewish and the Greek anticipatory' conceptions of Incarnation were themselves morally twisted, and needed reforming before they could fit the great Christian reality. "The form or matrix" of the idea of Incarnation was itself deformed both among the Jews and Greeks, and "in receiving the idea was but too likely to deprave and dis- tort it." For the Jewish Messianic idea, which was that to which appeal would be made, was a narrowly political idea bound up with, the earthly supremacy and glory of the Jewish people ; and the Greek idea was immorally anthropomorphic, bound up with the sanction of human vices and passions. Hence on this ac- count also men's secret ideal of the perfect union of God with man needed reforming and renewing, before the event could be pro- claimed without leading their minds into falsehood instead of truth. There needed a revolution in the inmost cravings of the heart for an incarnation, before the fact of the incarnation could be a source of true spiritual life and hope. The world needed teaching that the first results of union between God and man could not be in the first instance a halo of political glory, still less an infinite command of human enjoyments and self- indulgences, before the proclamation of that union could even tend to renew its moral and spiritual life. The disciples of our Lord themselves needed a new conception of divine birth and its spiritual meaning, before they would even be safe in believing that thdy had amongst them the true Son of God. And
Mr. Gladstone shows accordingly that in the order of the Scriptures the books which delineate the human side of Christ's life and work precede those which declare its eternal source and law,—the synoptic gospels, in which the divine foundation is comparatively vaguely given, preceding by some years the fourth gospel, in which the whole strength is spent on the divine origination ; and the Acts of the Apostles, which delineate the human growth of the Christian Churches and society, preceding probably most of the apostolic epistles, which develop the theological bases of those churches and that society. Mr. Gladstone intends to bring out in another essay that this was so also in our Lord's own teaching,— that He reserved to the last the theological revelation, and took great pains to let His human life root itself first in the affections and imaginations of His disciples,—that he insisted on the suffering and the self-denials before He prophesied the future, and gave to the cross, and the grief, and the humiliation a far larger and far earlier emphasis than to the resurrection, the glory, and the judg- ment. And this is to be the substance of his defence of " Ecce Homo," that its author's mind has in this respect only followed the divine method, rooting itself thoroughly in the humanity of Christ, before proceeding to deduce any inferences as to His higher nature and His eternal life.
We have said that Mr. Gladstone, though ostensibly he only insists on this characteristic of the Christian revelation,—namely, that it pat the human side of the Incarnation foremost, and kept the divine for a time almost in shadow,—with a view of vindicat- ing the method of " Ecce Homo," yet gives us the impression of himself drawing from it a larger inference, indeed one tending to a solution of the problem which the able author of that work professedly left unsolved. If we were to try and express the latent thought of his essay, it would be, perhaps, that this reserve and delay in declaring the divine foundation of our Lord's nature, this prominence, both in time and emphasis, given to the ineffable Inman beauty and power of our Lord's character, could have proceeded only from so perfect a union with the Godhead as was incapable of distrust or diffidence as to the eternal life and infinite purposes in which this human life was rooted. A , mere human being with visions of a possible divine origin floating .dimly before his eyes, would have harped perpetually on this primary point as the one central justification of his claim, instead of anxiously keeping back its premature assertion, and leaving calmly to time and the operation of the Divine Spirit on his disciples' hearts the great discovery which he had hoped that he had made. The gradual development of the deep theology of St. -John's Gospel, and the marked predominance, both in the early Church at large and in the early ministry of our Lord himself, of the human morality and piety which we see in the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistles of Peter, are evidences not of doubt about that theology, —for, as Mr. Gladstone notices, the theology is assumed everywhere before it is elaborated and explained,—but rather of an absolute confidence, concerning the Divinity of our Lord which had not yet recognized the urgent necessity of careful -discussion and definition. It was those who were nearest to Him, and at the time in which they were nearest to His earthly life, who felt that need least. It was those who were furthest removed from His humanity, and at that time of their lives when they were furthest removed from it, who felt the deepest need of recalling all He had said that had a close bearing on the nature of His divinity, and of so contemplating it as to explain that union of natures which they had hitherto half unconsciously assumed. But had this been the weak instead of the strong point of the new revelation, it would have been put in the front of the battle, and anxious stress laid upon it from the first, instead of being in great measure reserved for the retrospective glance of the victorious faith. Anyhow, Mr. Gladstone is, we think, right in attaching some importance to the internal evidence afforded by the method .of revelation in relation to this great cardinal faith. It is, at all events, in strict keeping with the method of the prior revelation as to God's own existence, omnipotence, and omnipresence,—which has always been so far held back from the soul of man as to leave him a sphere of true free agency and spontaneous life such as he never could have enjoyed in the full blaze of the presence of a seen and realized Omniscience. What marked the unveiling of the Father would naturally mark also the unveiling of His Son's entrance into human history, and Mr. Gladstone has rendered a service to theology by calling attention anew to the importance and even necessity of putting back the theology into its true place, as the final explanation of the humanity of our Lord,—instead of disen- chanting that humanity of all its life and truth, by representing it as a mere dissolving pageant, summoned up for our instruction by an Almighty Will.
Previous page
