The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864

Christ has set up a far higher standard by his teaching, and example, never known before or since, except in imperfect imitation of him. He has revolutionized moral philosophy, and convinced the world that forgiving love to the enemy, holiness and humility, gentle patience in suffering, and cheerful submission to the holy will of God is the crowning excellency of moral greatness. 'If thy brother,' he says, 'trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.' 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.' This is a sublime maxim, truly, but still more sublime is its actual exhibition in his life.

Christ's passive virtue is not confined to the closing scenes of his ministry. As human life is beset at every step by trials, vexations, and hindrances, which should serve the educational purpose of developing its resources and proving its strength, so was Christ's. During the whole state of his humiliation he was 'a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,' and had to endure 'the contradiction of sinners.' He was poor, and suffered hunger and fatigue. He was tempted by the devil. His path was obstructed with apparently insurmountable difficulties from the outset. His words and miracles called forth the bitter hatred of the world, which resulted at last in the bloody counsel of death. The Pharisees and Sadducees forgot their jealousies and quarrels in opposing him. They rejected and perverted his testimony; they laid snares for him by insidious questions; they called him a glutton and a winebibber for eating and drinking like other men, a friend of publicans and sinners for his condescending love and mercy, a sabbath breaker for doing good on the sabbath day; they charged him with madness and blasphemy for asserting his unity with the Father, and derived his miracles from Beelzebub, the prince of devils. The common people, though astonished at his wisdom and mighty works, pointed sneeringly at his origin; his own country and native town refused him the honor of a prophet. Even his brothers, we are told, did not believe in him, and in their impatient zeal for a temporal kingdom, they found fault with his unostentatious proceeding. His apostles and disciples, with all their profound reverence for his character and faith in his divine origin and mission as the Messiah, of God, yet by their ignorance, their carnal Jewish notions, and their almost habitual misunderstanding of his spiritual discourses, must have constituted a severe trial of patience to a teacher of far less superiority to his pupils.

To all this must be added the constant sufferings from sympathy with human misery as it met him in ten thousand forms at every step. What a trial for him, the purest, gentlest, most tender hearted, to breath more than thirty years the foul atmosphere of this fallen world, to see the constant outbursts of sinful passions, to hear the great wail of humanity borne to his ear upon the four winds of heaven, to be brought into personal contact with the blind, the lame, the deaf, the paralytic, the lunatic, the possessed, the dead, and to be assaulted, as it were, by the concentrated force of sickness, sorrow, grief, and agony!

But how shall we describe his passion, more properly so called, with which no other suffering can be compared for a moment! There is a lonely grandeur in it, foreshadowed in the word of the prophet; 'I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with me.' If great men occupy a solitary position, far above the ordinary level, on the sublime heights of thought or action, how much more then Jesus in his sufferings; he, the purest and holiest of beings! The nearer a man approaches to moral perfection, the deeper are his sensibilities, the keener his sense of sin and evil and sorrow in this wicked world. Never did any man suffer more innocently, more unjustly, more intensely, than Jesus of Nazareth. Within the narrow limits of a few hours we have here a tragedy of universal significance, exhibiting every form of human weakness and infernal wickedness, of ingratitude, desertion, injury, and insult, of bodily and mental pain and anguish, culminating in the most ignominious death then known among the Jews and Gentiles, the death of a malefactor and a slave. The government and the people combined against him who came to save them. His own disciples forsook him; Peter denied him; Judas, under the inspiration of the devil, betrayed him. The rulers of the nation condemned him, rude soldiers mocked him, the furious mob cried: 'Crucify him!' He was seized in the night, hurried from tribunal to tribunal, arrayed in a crown of thorns, insulted, smitten, scourged, spit upon, and hung like a criminal and a slave between two robbers and murderers!

How did Christ bear all these little and great trials of life, and the death on the cross?

Let us remember first, that, unlike the icy stoics in their unnatural and repulsive pseudo-virtue, he had the keenest sensibilities and the deepest sympathies with all human grief, that made him even shed tears at the grave of a friend and in the agony of the garden, and provide a refuge for his mother in the last dying hour. But with this truly human tenderness and delicacy of feeling, he ever combined an unutterable dignity and majesty, a sublime self-control and imperturbable calmness of mind. There is a solitary grandeur and majesty in his deepest sufferings, which forbids a feeling of pity and compassion on our side as incompatible with the admiration and reverence for his character. We feel the force of his words to the women of Jerusalem, when they bewailed him on the way to Cavalry: 'Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and your children.' We never hear him break out in angry passion and violence, although he was at war with the whole ungodly world. He clearly and fully foresaw and repeatedly foretold his sufferings to his disciples.

And yet never murmured, never uttered discontent, displeasure, or resentment. He was never disheartened, discouraged, ruffled, or fretted, but full of unbounded confidence that all was well ordered in the providence of his Heavenly Father. His calmness in the tempest on the lake, when his disciples were trembling on the brink of destruction and despair, is an illustration of his heavenly frame of mind. All his works were performed with a quiet dignity and ease that contrasts most strikingly with the surrounding commotion and excitement. He never asked the favor, or heard the applause, or feared the threat of the world. He moved serenely like the sun above the clouds of human passions and trials and commotions, as they sailed under him. He was ever surrounded by the element of peace, even in his parting hour in that dark and solemn night, when he said to his disturbed disciples: 'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.' He was never what we call unhappy, but full of inward joy, which he bequeathed to his disciples in that sublimest of all prayers, 'that they might have his joy fulfilled in themselves.' With all his severe rebuke to the Pharisees, he never indulged in personalities. He ever returned good for evil. He forgave Peter for his denial, and would have forgiven Judas, if in the exercise of sincere repentance he had sought his pardon. Even while hanging on the cross, he had only the language of pity for the wretches who were driving the nails into his hands and feet, and prayed in their behalf: 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' He did not seek or hasten his martyrdom, like many of the early martyrs of the Ignatian type, in their morbid enthusiasm and ambitious humility, but quietly and patiently waited for the hour appointed by the will of his Heavenly Father.

But when the hour came, with what self-possession and calmness, with what strength and meekness, with what majesty and gentleness did he pass through its dark and trying scenes! A prisoner before Pilate, who represented the power of the Roman empire, he professes himself a king of truth, and makes the governor tremble before him. Charged with crime at the tribunal of the high priest, he speaks to him with the majesty and dignity of the judge of the world. And in the agony of death on the cross he dispenses a place in paradise to the penitent robber. In the history of the passion, every word and act are unutterably significant, from the agony in Gethsemane, when, overwhelmed with the sympathetic sense of the entire guilt of mankind, and in full view of the terrible scenes before him—the only guiltless being in the world—he prayed that the cup might pass from him, but immediately added, 'Not my but thy will be done,' to the triumphant exclamation on the cross, 'It is finished!' Even his dignified silence before the tribunal of his enemies and the furious mob, when 'as a lamb dumb before his shearers he opened not his mouth,' is more eloquent than any apology. Who will venture to bring a parallel from the annals of ancient or modern sages, when even a Rousseau confessed: 'If Socrates suffered and died like a philosopher, Christ suffered and died like a God!' The passion and crucifixion of Jesus, like his whole character, stands without a parallel, solitary and alone in its glory, and will ever continue to be what it has been for these eighteen hundred years, the most sacred theme of meditation, the highest exemplar of suffering virtue, the strongest weapon against sin and Satan, the deepest source of comfort to the noblest and best of men.

SUMMARY—CHRIST'S CHARACTER THE GREATEST MORAL MIRACLE IN HISTORY

Such was Jesus of Nazareth—a true man in body, soul, and spirit, yet differing from all men, a character absolutely unique and original, from tender childhood to ripe manhood moving in unbroken union with God, overflowing with the purest love to man, free from every sin and error, innocent and holy, teaching and practising all virtues in perfect harmony, devoted solely and uniformly to the noblest ends, sealing the purest life with the sublimest death, and ever acknowledged since as the one and only perfect model of goodness and holiness! All human greatness loses on closer inspection; but Christ's character grows more and more pure, sacred, and lovely, the better we know him.

No biographer, moralist, or artist can be satisfied with any attempt of his to set it forth. It is felt to be infinitely greater than any conception or representation of it by the mind, the tongue, and the pencil of man or angel. We might as well attempt to empty the waters of the boundless sea into a narrow well, or to portray the splendor of the risen sun and the starry heavens with ink. No picture of the Saviour, though drawn by the master hand of a Raphael or Dürer or Rubens—no epic, though conceived by the genius of a Dante or Milton or Klopstock, can improve on the artless narrative of the gospel, whose only but all-powerful charm is truth. In this case certainly truth is stranger and stronger than fiction, and speaks best itself without comment, explanation, and eulogy. Here and here alone the highest perfection of art falls short of the historical fact, and fancy finds no room for idealizing the real. For here we have the absolute ideal itself in living reality. It seems to me that this consideration alone should satisfy the reflecting mind that Christ's character, though truly natural and human, must be at the same time truly supernatural and divine.

Even Göthe, the most universal and finished, but at the same time the most intensely worldly of all modern poets, calls Christ 'the Divine Man,' the 'Holy One,' and represents him as the pattern and model of humanity. Thomas Carlyle, the great hero-worshipper, found no equal in all the range of ancient and modern heroism; he calls his life a 'perfect ideal poem,' and his person 'the greatest of all heroes,' whom he does not name, leaving 'sacred silence to meditate that sacred matter.' And Ernest Renan, the celebrated French orientalist and critic, who views Jesus from the standpoint of a pantheistic naturalism, and expels all miracles from the gospel history, calls him 'the incomparable man, to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of Son of God, and that with justice, since he caused religion to take a step in advance incomparably greater than any other in the past, and probably than any yet to come;' and he closes his 'Life of Jesus' with the remarkable concession: 'Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceasing; his legend will call forth tears without end; his sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus.'

The whole range of history and fiction furnishes no parallel to such a character. There never was anything even approaching to it before or since, except in faint imitation of his example. It cannot be explained on purely human principles, nor derived from any intellectual and moral forces of the age in which he lived. On the contrary, it stands in marked contrast to the whole surrounding world of Judaism and heathenism, which present to us the dreary picture of internal decay, and which actually crumbled into ruin before the new moral creation of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. He is the one absolute and unaccountable exception to the universal experience of mankind. He is the great central miracle of the whole gospel history, and all his miracles are but the natural and necessary manifestations of his miraculous person, performed with the same ease with which we perform our ordinary daily works.

In vain has infidelity, in ever-changing shapes and forms, assailed the everlasting foundation of this greatest and sublimest character that ever blessed or will bless the earth. He arises brighter and stronger from every fiery ordeal of criticism, and stands out to every beholder as the greatest benefactor of the race and the only Saviour from sin and ruin.

Yes! he still lives, the Divine Man and incarnate God, on the ever fresh and self-authenticating record of the Gospels, in the unbroken history of eighteen centuries, and in the hearts and lives of the wisest and best of our race. Jesus Christ is the most certain, the most sacred, and the most glorious of all facts, arrayed in a beauty and majesty which throws the 'starry heavens above us and the moral law within us' into obscurity, and fills us truly with ever-growing reverence and awe. He shines forth with the self-evidencing light of the noonday sun. He is too great, too pure, too perfect to have been invented by any sinful and erring man. His character and claims are confirmed by the sublimest doctrine, the purest ethics, the mightiest miracles, the grandest spiritual kingdom, and are daily and hourly exhibited in the virtues and graces of all who yield to the regenerating and sanctifying power of his spirit and example. The historical Christ meets and satisfies our deepest intellectual and moral wants. Our souls, if left to their noblest impulses and aspirations, instinctively turn to him as the needle to the magnet, as the flower to the sun, as the panting hart to the fresh fountain. We are made for him, and 'our heart is without rest until it rests in him.' He commands our assent, he wins our admiration, he overwhelms us to humble adoration and worship. We cannot look upon him without spiritual benefit. We cannot think of him without being elevated above all that is low and mean, and encouraged to all that is good and noble. The very hem of his garment is healing to the touch; one hour spent in his communion outweighs all the pleasures of sin. He is the most precious and indispensable gift of a merciful God to a fallen world. In him are the treasures of true wisdom, in him the fountain of pardon and peace, in him the only substantial hope and comfort of this world and that which is to come. Mankind could better afford to lose the whole literature of Greece and Rome, of Germany and France, of England and America, than the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Without him, history is a dreary waste, an inextricable enigma, a chaos of facts without meaning, connection, and aim; with him it is a beautiful, harmonious revelation, the slow but sure unfolding of a plan of infinite wisdom and love: all ancient history converging to his coming, all modern history receiving from him his higher life and impulse. He is the glory of the past, the life of the present, the hope of the future. We cannot even understand ourselves without him. According to an old Jewish proverb: 'The secret of man is the secret of the Messiah.' He is the great central light of history as a whole, and at the same time the light of every soul; he alone can solve the mystery of our being, and fulfil our intellectual desires after truth, all our moral aspirations after goodness and holiness, and the longing of our feelings after peace and happiness.

Not for all the wealth and wisdom of this world would I weaken the faith of the humblest Christian in his Divine Lord and Saviour; but if, by the grace of God, I could convert a single sceptic to a child-like faith in him, who lived and died for me and for all, I would feel that I had not lived in vain.

APHORISMS.—NO. XV

'Men,' saith my Lord Bacon, 'think to govern words by their own reason: but it also happens that words throw back their force upon the understanding;' and thus, we may justly add, often distort our thoughts, and lead us to very erroneous conclusions.

This is apparently the case with the word motive, in speaking of human volitions. A motive power in mechanics is one that produces motion; and hence the application of the word to the occasion or reason of any particular act of choice, with the all but inevitable fallacy of confounding the idea of a mechanical force with that of an influence upon the mind. That there is some analogy must be admitted; but that there is such similarity as is often assumed, we are obliged to deny. The almost total difference between a mechanical power and a thought or desire—between a material and spiritual subject of operation—is too apt to be left out of the account.

SKETCHES OF AMERICAN LIFE AND SCENERY

VI.—TO SARANAC AND BACK

Few indeed are the pleasures that can be compared with the keen enjoyment of travel in a new and beautiful country, where every sense is stimulated by the purest and most aromatic of atmospheres, and where rocks, trees, rivers, lakes, and skies offer every possibility of combination imaginable under the structural conditions of the region. The life of the scout and the pioneer is a constant succession of pleasant surprises and unanticipated adventure; every hilltop promises a new picture, every dawn and sunset an additional novelty for that gallery, longer than the Louvre, and fuller than the Vatican, of which memory holds the key and is sole warden. Hardship and even danger are enclosed in surroundings so beautiful, so fresh and invigorating, that they seem only to add zest to the pursuit, to give dignity and significance to an occupation which might perhaps otherwise be stigmatized as mere selfish vagabondage. Oh, the freedom of the wild woods! the rest to the soul of the shadowy forest and flower-strewn turf! The wind may toss the locks, the sun brown the skin, and the brambles tear the garments, but there are none to cavil, none to count the gray hairs or the freckles, or see that said garments are of last year's fashioning. If the eyes look kindly, the peering squirrels will be content, and if the voice be gentle, the birds will ask no more, except, perhaps, a crumb or two from the slender stock of woodsman's fare. The deer and the trout will not question our philosophy, knowing instinctively, as we do, that there is a great God who made us all, and who ever encompasseth us with a love surpassing every created conception. They will only ask of our good will, and that our absolute need be the limit of our tax upon their lives. With the sky for roof, and the beech and the pine for friends and teachers, the body has time to strengthen, and the conscience and inner self to grow steadily upright, that they may overtop trifles, rise to the height of heavenly inspirations, and hence win power to withstand the surging floods of bewildering human passion. When men meet such souls, they are amazed at their calmness and simplicity, and dimly guess that the All-Powerful, through His created universe, has been whispering to them secrets of strength, perseverance, patience, and charity.

But this subject is boundless as its origin, and we must now to the particulars of a personal experience, which, if limited, may yet be of service to others desirous of journeying in the same region.

Having made a thorough acquaintance with the environs of Elizabethtown, Elsie and I could no longer resist the blandishment of the blue mountains ever beckoning us westward through the rocky portal of the Keene Pass. July 13th, at six A.M., we started in the weekly stage for Saranac, thirty-six miles distant. The morning was bright; a few low clouds hung about the tops of the higher hills, and the wind blew from the east, a direction which here, contrary to our experience near the seaboard, by no means implies rain. So great is the distance of the Adirondac plateau from the sea, so numerous its ranges, and so great the elevation of the ridges lying between it and the ocean, that we found our ordinary weather calculations all come to nought, east winds blowing for days without a drop of rain, and western breezes bringing clouds and moisture.

The road to Keene winds along a branch of the Boquet River, on which are one or two quite pretty falls, with consequent mills; it ascends continually until it reaches the foot of the steep rocks forming the Keene Pass. The views back over the Boquet Valley and toward the Green Mountains of Vermont are very lovely, and those obtained in descending the western slope of this, the Boquet range, are magnificent. Soon left behind are the high cliffs and the steep slide, where a gathering avalanche of rocks and earth swept through a forest, carrying off a great belt of timber, wherewith to strew the little valley, and block the road and stream below. The rugged mountains on either hand have been burnt over, and send up into the blue ether bare, white, foot-enticing peaks. At the base of the western declivity lies the valley of the East Branch of the Au Sable, and beyond, the great Adirondac range, overtopped by Whiteface and Mount Tahawus. We greeted these giants with due reverence, hoping for a nearer acquaintance, for only their extreme summits are visible from that point, Whiteface bold and peaked, Tahawus round and indistinct. The great ridge, hiding all but their heads, is here jagged or flowing, steep, and dark with spruce and pine. It rises like an impassable wall; of a clear morning, a frowning barrier of granite and forest; of a hazy afternoon, the shining, glowing rampart of some celestial city.

The village of Keene is a straggling collection of dwellings, with an inn, a post office, and a store or two. It lies in the intervale bordering the East Branch of the Au Sable, and is twelve miles from Elizabethtown.

Thus far, our only fellow traveller had been a school girl, going home for the summer vacation. At Keene our number was increased by the addition of another damsel, with accompaniment of two hounds, Spart and Prince, bound for Saranac. When first fastened behind the open wagon (our stage), they began a vigorous quarrel, which struck us very much as a matrimonial squabble, both tied, and neither having a fair chance for a free fight. Our driver, an excellent specimen of the upright and intelligent man of Northern New York, cracked his whip, increased the existing merriment by calling out, 'Wal, dogs, hev ye done fightin'?' and started up the long declivity leading over the Adirondac range, through Pitch-off Mountain (another pass), to the plains of North Elba. The hill is a long one, the cliffs of the mountain pass exceedingly picturesque, and the black tarn under the beetling crags suggestive of Poe's 'House of Usher.' Long, however, ere we reached this point, Spart had gnawed through his rope, and was trotting beside the wagon. Our driver vainly endeavored to refasten him. Although mild of visage, and apparently good-natured, he showed so formidable a set of teeth, that it was thought prudent to desist, and trust to his following his companion, who still trotted along, coughing and choking, and almost stifled by our own dust, blown after us by the east wind. After this attempt, Spart evidently played shy of our whole party, and, having raced ahead during a few miles, finally disappeared in the woods, probably attracted by the scent of game.