CHRISTIANITY AND IMAGINATION.
THE strengthening effect of the teaching of Christianity
upon the mind, as distinguished from the soul and the moral nature, is often overlooked. A generation brought up in ignorance of the New Testament would be likely to suffer a serious mental as well as moral loss. The spread of Christianity during the first century and a half of the Christian era is one of the wonders of the world. Whatever weight we may give to the psychological moment, or to the Power of the Spirit, we must still admit that the obscure, and for the most part unlearned, men who propagated the Gospel while as yet it was " news " were men of great ability, though the early apologists were very poor logicians. Not. only had they courage and faith ; they had organising power and a knowledge of the human heart.,—that is, they were men of trained imagination. They must have had sympathy, judgment, and good sense, otherwise the foundation which they laid could not have supported the super- structure. Their courage astonished their generation, who believed that they owed it to the Gospel. Their faith filled their unconverted contemporaries with a sort of contemptuous envy ; this also they owed to the teaching of Christ. Is it not probable that their otherwise unaccountable strength of mind had the Same origin ? Christianity spread, not like the wildfire of a mad emotion which devastates the mind even while it illumines the spirit, but as our Lord said it would spread,—like seed upon the wind which springs up to seed itself once more. The optimistic imagination and the sober sense which went to the organisation of the early Churches are amazing.
We are continually told nowadays that Christianity as it appears in the Gospels makes little appeal to the intellect. The statement is false, though it is true that our Lord did not use argument as a method of teaching. It is true also that St. Paul, who argued at length, considered that the Church owed nothing to learning. Our Lard did not exhort His hearers to a study of the law, nor even to the reading of the Scriptures. There is no command to " search the Scriptures "—the sentence, as the Revisers point out, is not in the imperative, and should be preceded by the pronoun "Ye "—though He blamed the Scribes for trying to keep men ignorant. He took it for granted that the Jews knew their own literature, and does not seem to have pressed its study upon the Roman centurions with whom He made friends. Nevertheless it is evident that Christianity produced from the first men of strong mind; and the intellectual no less than the spiritual effect of Christianity should lead men of all opinions to dread any secularising of education. Our Lord made a tremendous demand upon the minds, and in the larger sense of the word upon the imaginations, of His followers. He saw that men cannot put themselves in the place of their neighbours while acquiescing in a state of slothful stupidity. Every genuine effort to carry out the moral law of Christ strengthens the understanding, though it may be unconsciously. There is no more fruitful mental effort than the effort to sympathise. There is a sense in which every citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven must be a man of the world. Really to forgive an enemy is in itself a liberal education.
There are a few sayings ascribed to our Lord in the Gospels which are startling, or indeed terrible,in their severity. Perhaps the most notable of all applies to mental sloth. "From him that bath not shall be taken away even, that which he bath." The words are often quoted with light-hearted cynicism in a material sense. Such an interpretation is out of keeping with the character of Christ, and is not borne out by the context. On the other hand, it is difficult to give to the parable of the talents any very direct spiritual application. It evidently refers primarily to the things of the mind. The condemnation of the man who would not make the best of very ordinary abilities is al moet pitiless in its completeness. He is to lose everything because he made no effort to develop anything. The master who pronounces his doom is plainly not God. He is not even e very good man. He is merciless as law is merciless. He accepts without demur the criticism that he is "an hard man, reaping where thou bast not sown, and gathering where thou bast not strewed." His only reply to this stricture is that. the man who is trying to excuse himself knew he was a hard man, and is the more to Warne bemuse he acted as though ignorant of the inevitable. "Thou wielned aui
slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strewed." In this parable, as in several others, our Lord forces His hearers to face the facts of life, and to submit to them simply because they are facts. Mentally men must be gaining or losing, He says in effect; there is no standing still. He would seem to admit that there is something ruthless in this law of mental toil, but it must be accepted as one of the conditions of our being: No teacher in the world has ever forced the common people to think as Christ forced them. The Christianity of the Gospels is a religion without ceremonial and without absolute rules. It is, as St. Paul truly said, a law of liberty which makes a man the servant of his conscience. The parables teach plain men to wring philosophy from the events of daily life, to read the signs of the times, to gain mental nourishment from everyday happenings, to be diligent scholars in the great public school of life. The Wisdom books taught in the same spirit. But "behold, a greater than Solomon is here." Above all, Christ exhorted men to leave their own small orbit, and to see from an opposite point of view,—to force themselves by the exercise of the imagination to be in a state of mind —not only of heart—in which they are able to see something to bless in an enemy. Our Lord when He prayed for the Roman soldiers who crucified Hira carried out perfectly His own injunction. He judged the Roman by the Roman standard and held him innocent Again, we see in the dramatic view of life which Christ so constantly encouraged the germ of Christian art. Christ's method of instruction led men to constant observation. It taught them to distinguish the prolific seed of the typical from the barren mass of actuality. It familiarised them with a. new world of symbolism in which the blind see. The parables were certainly designed to please as well as to instruct, to suggest a method of delight- ful mental exercise as well as carry home a moral. How many more parables must have been spoken. How many weary journeys on foot did our Lord shorten by such stories F St. John wrote of such a volume of tradition as the world could not contain, and we have only so much as will go, with masses of repetition, into four short pamphlets. Is it. not better so,—better for the followers of a Master who insisted that every man should think for himself, and learn to "judge righteous judgment." ? Enough remains, at any rate, to lead us to suppose that no man who deliberately refuses to think can. be a real Christian, and that no sane Christian can be entirely stupid.
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