True Manliness

The keynote of it, in spite of certain short and beautiful interludes, appears to me to be a sense of loneliness and oppression, caused by the feeling that he has work to do, and words to speak, which those for whom they are to be done and spoken, and whom they are, first of all men, to bless, will either misunderstand or abhor. Here is all the visible result of his labor and of his travail, and the enemy is gathering strength every day.

This becomes clear, I think, at once, when, in the first days after his quitting the lake shores, he asks his disciples the question, “Whom do the world, and whom do ye, say that I am?” He is answered by Peter in the well-known burst of enthusiasm, that, though the people only look on him as a prophet, such as Elijah or Jeremiah, his own chosen followers see in him “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

It is this particular moment which he selects for telling them distinctly, that Christ will not triumph as they regard triumphing; that he will fall into the power of his enemies, and be humbled and slain by them. At once the proof comes of how little even the best of his own most intimate friends had caught the spirit of his teaching or of his kingdom. The announcement of his humiliation and death, which none but the most truthful and courageous of men would have made at such a moment, leaves them almost as much bewildered as the crowds in the lake cities had been a few days before.

Their hearts are faithful and simple, and upon them, as Peter has testified, the truth has flashed once for all, and there can be no other Saviour of men than this man with whom they are living. Still, by what means and to what end the salvation shall come, they are scarcely less ignorant than the people who had been in vain seeking from him a sign such as they desired. His own elect “understood not his saying, and it was hid from them, that they perceived it not.” Rather, indeed, they go straight from that teaching to dispute amongst themselves who of them shall be the greatest in that kingdom which they understand so little. And so their Master has to begin again at the beginning of his teaching, and, placing a little child amongst them, to declare that not of such men as they deem themselves, but of such as this child, is the kingdom of heaven.

The episode of the Transfiguration follows; and immediately after it, as though purposely to warn even the three chosen friends who had been present against new delusions, he repeats again the teaching as to his death and humiliation. And he reiterates it whenever any exhibition of power or wisdom seems likely to encourage the frame of mind in the twelve generally which had lately brought the great rebuke on Peter. How slowly it did its work, even with the foremost disciples, there are but too many proofs.

Amongst his kinsfolk and the people generally, his mission, thanks to the cabals of the rulers and elders, had come by this time to be looked upon with deep distrust and impatience. “How long dost thou make us to doubt? Go up to this coming feast, and there prove your title before those who know how to judge in such matters,” is the querulous cry of the former as the Feast of Tabernacles approaches. He does not go up publicly with the caravan, which would have been at this time needlessly to incur danger, but, when the feast is half over, suddenly appears in the temple. There he again openly affronts the rulers by justifying his former acts, and teaching and proclaiming that he who has sent him is true, and is their God.

It is evidently on account of this new proof of daring that the people now again begin to rally around him. “Behold, he speaketh boldly. Do our rulers know that this is Christ?” is the talk which fills the air, and induces the scribes and Pharisees, for the first time, to attempt his arrest by their officers.

The officers return without him, and their masters are, for the moment, powerless before the simple word of him who, as their own servants testify, “speaks as never man spake.” But if they cannot arrest and execute, they may entangle him further, and prepare for their day, which is surely and swiftly coming. So they bring to him the woman taken in adultery, and draw from him the discourse in which he tells them that the truth will make them free – the truth which he has come to tell them, but which they will not hear, because they are of their father the devil. He ends with asserting his claim to the name which every Jew held sacred, “before Abraham was, I am.” The narrative of the seventh and eighth chapters of St. John, which record these scenes at the Feast of Tabernacles, have, I believe, done more to make men courageous and truly manly than all the stirring accounts of bold deeds which ever were written elsewhere.

CXXXIX

All that was best and worst in the Jewish character and history combined to render the Roman yoke intolerably galling to the nation. The peculiar position of Jerusalem – a sort of Mecca to the tribes acknowledging the Mosaic law – made Syria the most dangerous of all the Roman provinces. To that city enormous crowds of pilgrims of the most stiff-necked and fanatical of all races flocked, three times at least in every year, bringing with them offerings and tribute for the temple and its guardians, on a scale which must have made the hierarchy at Jerusalem formidable even to the world’s master, by their mere command of wealth.

But this would be the least of the causes of anxiety to the Roman governor, as he spent year after year face to face with these terrible leaders of a terrible people.

These high priests and rulers of the Jews were indeed quite another kind of adversaries from the leaders, secular or religious, of any of those conquered countries which the Romans were wont to treat with contemptuous toleration. They still represented living traditions of the glory and sanctity of their nation, and of Jerusalem, and exercised still a power over that nation which the most resolute and ruthless of Roman procurators did not care wantonly to brave.

At the same time the yoke of high priest and scribe and Pharisee was even heavier on the necks of their own people than that of the Roman. They had built up a huge superstructure of traditions and ceremonies round the law of Moses, which they held up to the people as more sacred and binding than the law itself. This superstructure was their special charge. This was, according to them, the great national inheritance, the most valuable portion of the covenant which God had made with their fathers. To them, as leaders of their nation – a select, priestly, and learned caste – this precious inheritance had been committed. Outside that caste, the dim multitude, “the people which knoweth not the law,” were despised while they obeyed, accursed as soon as they showed any sign of disobedience. Such being the state of Judea, it would not be easy to name in all history a less hopeful place for the reforming mission of a young carpenter, a stranger from a despised province, one entirely outside the ruling caste, though of the royal race, and who had no position whatever in any rabbinical school.

In Galilee the surroundings were slightly different, but scarcely more promising. Herod Antipas, the weakest of that tyrant family, the seducer of his brother’s wife, the fawner on Cæsar, the spendthrift oppressor of the people of his tetrarchy, still ruled in name over the country, but with Roman garrisons in the cities and strongholds. Face to face with him, and exercising an imperium in imperio throughout Galilee were the same priestly caste, though far less formidable to the civil power and to the people, than in the southern province. Along the western coast of the Sea of Galilee, the chief scene of our Lord’s northern ministry, lay a net-work of towns densely inhabited, and containing a large admixture of Gentile traders. This infusion of foreign blood, the want of any such religious centre as Jerusalem, and the contempt with which the southern Jews regarded their provincial brethren of Galilee, had no doubt loosened to some extent the yoke of the priests and scribes and lawyers in that province. But even here their traditionary power over the masses of the people was very great, and the consequences of defying their authority as penal, though the penalty might be neither so swift or so certain, as in Jerusalem itself. Such was the society into which Christ came.

It is not easy to find a parallel case in the modern world, but perhaps the nearest exists in a portion of our own empire. The condition of parts of India in our day resembles in some respects that of Palestine in the year A. D. 30. In the Mahratta country, princes, not of the native dynasty, but the descendants of foreign courtiers (like the Idumean Herods), are reigning. British residents at their courts, hated and feared, but practically all-powerful as Roman procurators, answer to the officers and garrisons of Rome in Palestine. The people are in bondage to a priestly caste scarcely less heavy than that which weighed on the Judean and Galilean peasantry. If the Mahrattas were Mohammedans, and Mecca were situate in the territory of Scindia or Holkar; if the influence of twelve centuries of Christian training could be wiped out of the English character, and the stubborn and fierce nature of the Jew substituted for that of the Mahratta; a village reformer amongst them, whose preaching outraged the Brahmins, threatened the dynasties, and disturbed the English residents, would start under somewhat similar conditions to those which surrounded Christ when he commenced his ministry.

In one respect, and one only, the time seemed propitious. The mind and heart of the nation was full of the expectation of a coming Messiah – a King who should break every yoke from off the necks of his people, and should rule over the nations, sitting on the throne of David. The intensity of this expectation had, in the opening days of his ministry, drawn crowds into the wilderness beyond Jordan from all parts of Judea and Galilee, at the summons of a preacher who had caught up the last cadence of the song of their last great prophet, and was proclaiming that both the deliverance and the kingdom which they were looking for were at hand. In those crowds who flocked to hear John the Baptist there were doubtless some even amongst the priests and scribes, and many amongst the poor Jewish and Galilean peasantry, who felt that there was a heavier yoke upon them than that of Rome or of Herod Antipas. But the record of the next three years shows too clearly that even these were wholly unprepared for any other than a kingdom of this world, and a temporal throne to be set up in the holy city.

And so, from the first, Christ had to contend not only against the whole of the established powers of Palestine, but against the highest aspirations of the best of his countrymen. These very Messianic hopes, in fact, proved the greatest stumbling-block in his path. Those who entertained them most vividly had the greatest difficulty in accepting the carpenter’s son as the promised Deliverer. A few days only before the end he had sorrowfully to warn the most intimate and loving of his companions and disciples, “Ye know not what spirit ye are of.”

CXL

The Jews were always thinking of their exclusive religious privileges, of the sacredness of the Temple and of the law, and of the questionable and dangerous position of those who were outside the covenant. Now this habit of mind, undoubtedly religious as it was, is not held up to our admiration in the New Testament, but the contrary. It is denounced as being the opposite of a true spirituality. It is shown to us as associated with intolerance, bigotry, hardness, cruelty, as most offensive to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and fruitful of mischief in the world. St. Paul had to undergo the reproach of being disloyal to the religion of his fathers, because he contended against this ecclesiastical spirit. But the reproach was as unjust as it was painful to him. He loved the holy city and the temple and the ordinances of the law and his kindred according to the flesh; but he knew that the proper aim of a devout man was not to hedge round an organization, but to glorify and bear witness to the Divine Spirit.

CXLI

Not St. Paul only, but all the Apostles and Evangelists, were continually contemplating the heavenly glory of a brotherhood of men in full harmony with each other because all joined to Christ, of men walking in humility and meekness and love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is nothing in such an ideal less suited to us to-day than to the Christians of the first age. For ourselves, and for our neighbors and fellow-men, this hope should be in our hearts, this Divine ideal before our eyes. Let us believe that it is the Divine purpose, and that we are called to the fulfilment of it.

CXLII

Is it not an express principle in the teaching of our Lord himself and of his Apostles, that means and instruments and agencies are not to be worshipped in themselves but to be estimated with reference to the end they are to promote? Think, for example, what is implied in that pregnant sentence, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” Means and instruments are not dishonored by this principle. If the end they serve is high and precious, they also will deserve to be valued. If the spiritual freedom of man is important, then the ordinance of a Day of Rest, which ministers to it, may well be sacred. But it is often appointed in the Providence of God that an apparent dishonor should be cast on means, that the minds of men may be forced away from resting upon them. And means may be varied, according to circumstances, whilst the same permanent end is to be sought.

CXLIII

Wherever there is good, in whatever Samaritan or heathen we may see kindness and the fear of God, there we are to welcome it and rejoice in it in our Father’s name.

There is no respect of persons with God, no acceptance of any man on account of his religion or his profession; under whatever religious garb, he that loveth is born of God, he that doeth righteousness is born of God. There is no danger in being ready to appreciate simple goodness and to refer it to the working of the Divine Spirit wherever we may find it; there is the greatest danger in failing to appreciate it. This is doctrine of unquestionable Divine authority, which we may often have opportunities of putting into practice. Let us remember to cherish it in all our dealings with those who do not belong to our own church. Let us be afraid lest nature and the flesh should make us intolerant and unsympathetic; let us be sure that Christ and the Spirit would win us to modesty and reverence and sympathy.

CXLIV

“There is one body and one spirit, even as ye were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” With this unity, there are distinctions of function; and each member, St. Paul holds, has his own gift of endowment to enable him to fill his own place. Christ is the great Giver, and besides these gifts to the several members of the body, he gave to the body as a whole the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, by whose various ministries sinful and self-willed men were to be moulded into true members, and ultimate perfecting of the body to be accomplished. St. Paul looked forward in hope to the time when the Body of Christ might be not only ideally perfect, but actually perfect also, in its adult growth and in the harmonious co-operation of all its parts.

CXLV

There may be every sort of defect and irregularity in the men and women whom Christ has called to be his members. The unity is not made by them, and does not depend upon them. Their business is to keep the unity, to conform themselves to it. The supernatural body of Christ is the ideal one, and it is realized with various degrees of imperfection wherever men acknowledge Christ as their head.

CXLVI

As I understand the word “politician,” it means a man who, whatever his other engagements in life may be, and however he may earn his daily bread, feels above all things deeply interested, feels that he is bound to be deeply interested, and to take as active a part as he can, in the public affairs of his country. I believe that every Englishman, if he is worth anything at all, is bound to be a politician, and can’t for the life of him help taking a deep interest in the public affairs of his country. The object of politics is the well-being of the nation, or in other words to make “a wise and understanding people.” Now, what are the means by which a wise and an understanding people is to be made? Well, of course, the chief means of making a wise and understanding people is by training them up in wisdom and understanding. The State wants men who are brave, truthful, generous; the State wants women who are pure, simple, gentle. By what means is the State to get citizens of that kind?

Such a politician looking around him and seeing how the national conscience is to be touched – for unless the national conscience be touched you can never raise citizens of that kind – finds that the great power which alone can do it, is that which goes by the name of religion.

CXLVII

The true work of the Liberal Party in a Liberal age is, with singleness of purpose and all its might, to lift the people to a fair and full share of all the best things of this life, – its highest culture, hopes, aspirations, burdens – as well as its loaves and fishes – and, setting before them a truly noble ideal of citizenship, to help them to attain it. Whatever goes beyond that, or beside that, savors of Jacobinism, for then comes in that jealousy which is the bane of true democracy. The true democrat has no old scores to pay, covets no man’s good things, wants nothing for himself which is not open to his neighbors, will destroy nothing which others value merely because he doesn’t value it himself, unless it is palpably and incurably unjust and unrighteous. I need not go on to contrast the Jacobin with him, beyond saying that the one is before all things constructive, the other destructive.

CXLVIII

A liberal politician is a man who looks to the future and not to the past; he looks for progress; he desires to see the whole nation raised; he desires to go on from better things to better things, and he is not afraid of new things; he holds that every institution must be tried by its worth and its value to the nation; – he holds above all things that there should be equality before the law for every institution, for every society, and for every individual citizen.

CXLIX

Alfred the Great had his problems of anarchy, widespread lawlessness, terrorism, to meet. After the best thought he could give to the business, he met them and prevailed. Like diseases call for like cures; and we may assume without fear that a remedy which has been very successful in one age is at least worth looking at in another.

We too, like Alfred, have our own troubles – our land-questions, labor-questions, steady increase of pauperism, and others. In our struggle for life we fight with different weapons, and have our advantages of one kind or another over our ancestors; but when all is said and done there is scarcely more coherence in the English nation of to-day than in that of 1079. Individualism, no doubt, has its noble side; and “every man for himself” is a law which works wonders; but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that under their action English life has become more and more disjointed, threatening in some directions altogether to fall to pieces. What we specially want is something which shall bind us more closely together. Every nation of Christendom is feeling after the same thing. The need of getting done in some form that which frank-pledge did for Alfred’s people expresses itself in Germany in mutual-credit banks, open to every honest citizen; in France, in the productive associations of all kinds; at home, in our co-operative movements and trades-union.

No mere machinery, nothing that governments or legislatures can do in our day, will be of much help, but they may be great hindrances. The study of the modern statesman must be how to give such movements full scope and a fair chance, so that the people may be able without let or hindrance to work out in their own way the principle which Alfred brought practically home to his England, that in human society men cannot divest themselves of responsibility for their neighbors, and ought not to be allowed to attempt it.

CL

The more attentively we study Alfred’s life, the more clearly does the practical wisdom of his methods of government justify itself by results. Of strong princes, with minds “rectified and prepared” on the Machiavellian model, the world has had more than enough, who have won kingdoms for themselves, and used them for themselves, and so left a bitter inheritance to their children and their people. It is well that, here and there in history, we can point to a king whose reign has proved that the highest success in government is not only compatible with, but dependent upon, the highest Christian morality.

CLI

Think well over your important steps in life, and having made up your minds, never look behind.

CLII

A gentleman should shrink from the possibility of having to come on others, even on his own father, for the fulfilment of his obligations, as he would from a lie. I would sooner see a son of mine in his grave than crawling on through life a slave to wants and habits which he must gratify at other people’s expense.

CLIII

No two men take a thing just alike, and very few can sit down quietly when they have lost a fall in life’s wrestle, and say, “Well, here I am, beaten no doubt this time. By my own fault too. Now, take a good look at me, my good friends, as I know you all want to do, and say your say out, for I mean getting up again directly and having another turn at it.”

CLIV

No man who is worth his salt can leave a place where he has gone through hard and searching discipline, and been tried in the very depths of his heart, without regret, however much he may have winced under the discipline. It is no light thing to fold up and lay by for ever a portion of one’s life, even when it can be laid by with honor and in thankfulness.