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 N A. BUTTON 
 
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CORNELL 
 
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Cornell University Library 
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 Authority and person of our Lord / by Jo 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 375 098 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029375098 
 
THE AUTHORITY AND PERSON 
 OF OUR LORD 
 
THE AUTHORITY and 
 PERSON o/OUR LORD 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN A. HUTTON, M.A. 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1910, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago : 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto : 25 Richmond St., W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
PAGE 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY: The Nature of Christ's 
 
 Authority 9 
 
 LECTURE I : The Voice of the New Testa- 
 ment Concerning the Person of Our Lord 27 
 
 LECTURE II: The Voice of the New Testa- 
 ment Concerning the Person of Our Lord . 63 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 THE NATURE OF CHRIST'S AUTHORITY 
 
"... I judge no man, 
 
 And yet if I judge, my judgment is true, for 
 
 I am not alone, but I and the Father 
 
 that sent me." 
 
 S. John viii: 15, 16. 
 
THE NATURE OF CHRIST'S AUTHORITY 
 
 WHEREVER Jesus Christ has won a 
 place for Himself, it has soon or 
 late come to be the Highest place. Wher- 
 ever He has come to be really known, He 
 has come to be acknowledged as the su- 
 preme authority for man in things pertaining 
 to God. In human societies where Jesus has 
 really entered as a Force and Spirit, men may 
 continue to order their lives in ways which He 
 does not approve; but if such men have really 
 become aware of Christ, they are not able — 
 except by doing violence to certain delicate 
 but fundamental susceptibilities — to rid them- 
 selves of a haunting accusation and moral un- 
 easiness. If they know, however imperfectly, 
 that they are behaving contrary to the mind 
 of Christ, they may still go on as though 
 they were at peace with themselves. But they 
 
12 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 are not at peace with themselves: they are at 
 war with themselves. They may try to free 
 themselves of the private shadow, they may 
 surround themselves with gaiety, they may as- 
 sure themselves that it is all right; but they 
 know all the time that it is all wrong, that 
 they are only acting a very difficult part and 
 with poor success ; they know that they are not 
 behaving honourably by certain obscure and in- 
 domitable voices of their personality, — so long 
 as they are not living in harmony with the 
 mind of Jesus Christ as they know it. They 
 may sit down to life as to a feast, but nothing 
 has its true taste and relish for them so long 
 as they know that there is One, Jesus Christ, 
 whom they cannot honestly ask to sit down 
 with them. And because of the averted Face 
 of that Son of Man, they know that they are 
 not at home, that they are not living naturally 
 and candidly, that they are avoiding an entire 
 world of reality within which and through 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 13 
 
 which, as they suspect, a man comes unto God, 
 if he can come unto God at all. 
 
 Now all this is from one point of view, the 
 Authority, the Deity of Jesus Christ. Where- 
 ever He has really come to be known, He has, 
 inevitably, by virtue of His own Quality, won 
 even from His enemies, indeed always first 
 from His enemies, the name that is above 
 every name. Entering on the scene, in any 
 community of people, or in any individual 
 heart, as the Son of Man, as a real and truly 
 human Personality, Jesus, with the consent of 
 some, under the execration of others, but al- 
 ways by the indomitable Force and Excellence 
 of His own Person, has moved up to the place 
 of God, and is seated now on the right hand of 
 God in all the heavenly places. That is simply 
 indisputable — wherever He has come to be 
 known, He has sooner or later become merged 
 in God : so that men, as a matter of fact, can no 
 longer conceive of God without seeing Jesus 
 
14 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 only in a halo of glory, and can no longer con- 
 ceive of Jesus except as the Incarnation, the 
 Fulfilment, the Expression in conditions of 
 time and space, of that Intending Will which 
 is coming to itself in the universe of human 
 souls — which we name and adore as God. 
 
 James Martineau, to whom the Christian 
 thought of the last two generations owes so 
 much, although on grounds of pure reason 
 (as he believed) he could not give to Jesus 
 Christ the name and place which the Uni- 
 versal Church has given Him, was compelled 
 to make, and did make without reserve, con- 
 cessions with regard to Christ, which, I think, 
 ought to have carried him nearer to the ortho- 
 dox view of His nature than he allowed him- 
 self to go. For example, he was ready to con- 
 fess that there was nothing in the essential na- 
 ture of Christ which conflicted with the purest 
 conception of God. Contending as he did for 
 the Unity of the Godhead, he had at the same 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 15 
 
 time to admit that the only Unity, the only 
 One whom he and all others were worshipping, 
 was not an abstract Deity, — synonym for the 
 immense and unspeakable Good — but was 
 simply Jesus Christ, with His essential features 
 exalted into infinity; that the actual presence 
 of God in and over this world is now inex- 
 tricably mingled with the Christ of history and 
 of faith, that if we do not know God in Christ, 
 then we do not know Him at all. 
 
 Now that is how the Christian confession 
 with regard to Christ is beginning to be stated, 
 and what is of more consequence, is beginning 
 to be embraced and believed by our living 
 hearts. We are beginning to free ourselves 
 from the bondage of the Confessions, in order 
 that we may come under a new and happy 
 bondage to the great claim on behalf of Jesus 
 Christ which all the Confessions made and 
 which they sought to defend from the criti- 
 cism of their various days. 
 
16 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 And that living truth, that unfaltering as- 
 sertion concerning Christ, is this — that for be- 
 ings such as we are and placed as we are, 
 Jesus Christ, to use a dominant word in the 
 theology of our time, has the value of God. 
 He is God, He is the Supreme One, the De- 
 cisive Spiritual Personality, the moral Judge 
 of the whole earth. Whatever conflicts with 
 Jesus Christ in our attitude, conflicts with God 
 and does violence to our spiritual nature. And 
 whatever is in harmony with Jesus Christ is 
 even now in harmony with and promotes our 
 human blessedness, and is in eventual harmony 
 with the nature o'f things, with the Holy and 
 Incorruptible Will which is in all and through 
 all and over all, God blessed for ever. 
 
 2. Now Jesus throughout His ministry, and 
 most serenely in its darkest days, foresaw that 
 it would be just as it has come to pass. That 
 He would be seated at the right Hand of God. 
 That He would build up and cast down. That 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 17 
 
 He would be the Judge of the whole earth. 
 That nations would be established which hon- 
 oured Him; that nations which repudiated Him 
 would thereby let loose forces which would 
 make them desolate. That men would fall 
 asleep in death quietly and with hope, or un- 
 easily and without hope, according as, know- 
 ing Him, they had given themselves by faith 
 to Him, and to that cause of God in the world 
 for which He had lived and died. 
 
 Let the world explain this moral uniqueness 
 of Jesus Christ as it may, it cannot deny the 
 fact of it. Men may not accept Christ as the 
 Master of their Soul. They may dispute His 
 claim, — although, strictly speaking, Christ 
 made no claim. But if they have really come 
 to know Him, . they can disregard "Him only 
 with a certain secret trouble in their hearts, 
 or with a certain violence and passion, such as 
 a man shows who is determined to do some- 
 thing which all the time he knows to be wrong, 
 
18 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 and so he first smashes something within him- 
 self or blows out a light within his soul — a 
 candle of the Lord — which, though feeble, was 
 nevertheless a barrier. 
 
 3. Again and again, while Jesus was on 
 earth, men questioned Him as to His author- 
 ity: but He would never answer them di- 
 rectly. If men approached Him in the spirit 
 of controversy, He did nothing to help them. 
 
 It was only when people, one by one, and for 
 
 1 
 overwhelming reasons of their own, were pre- 
 pared to give Him the highest name, the di- 
 vine Name, that He assured them that in so 
 doing they had not been deceived. But when- 
 ever men, partly hostile, partly merely curious 
 and trifling, came to Jesus, and asked Him for 
 His authority, He for the most part gave them 
 no answer, or He said something which 
 showed them that they were only trifling. The 
 only authority which Jesus claimed was the 
 authority which the person himself at that mo- 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 19 
 
 ment was prepared to grant Him. When men 
 asked, " Who art Thou ? ", He answered for 
 the most part, " Whom say ye that I am?" 
 It was as though He had said, " Am I any- 
 thing to you ? Have I any influence with you ? 
 Do I rebuke any evil spirit within you? Do I 
 check some passion, or cool some fever of the 
 blood? Do I make it harder for you to do 
 wrong? Do I make it easier for you to do 
 right? — Then, in that case, I am so far God 
 to you, I am so far the Saviour for you. Act 
 loyally by that appreciation of me which you 
 yourself have formed. Let it take you as far 
 as it would like to take you. Be obedient to 
 whatever I have become for you. While ye 
 have light, believe in the light, and walk in it. 
 Do not put yourself off by raising metaphys- 
 ical questions. Do I impress you as the Way 
 and the Truth and the Life? Do I help you 
 on towards what is best, or towards what at 
 least is better than your practice hitherto? 
 
20 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 Then, once again I am for you, at your pres- 
 ent stage, God, God absolute because God per- 
 sonal and immediate. I am He with whom 
 you have to do." 
 
 In short, Christ's dealings did not properly 
 begin in any human heart until somehow, as 
 the result of some kind of pressure, that heart 
 had become engaged, touched, excited, stung 
 to life, to misgiving, to tenderness, by some- 
 thing already acknowledged in Christ. At 
 that point in the career of a man, Jesus would 
 have said to him, " Do not raise questions 
 about my authority, about my nature. Simply 
 obey that interior guidance, that vision of the 
 true life which has come to you from me, and 
 you will be led on to firmer ground." As one 
 might say on being asked the way to the top 
 of a mountain : " having struck a footpath on 
 the mountain-side which plainly leads upwards, 
 follow it, looking around indeed, but not ex- 
 pecting from the outset to see everything. Be 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 21 
 
 content to follow on, and whenever you come 
 to a point where two ways offer, take you 
 the high way. At times you may see nothing 
 for mist and cloud, and you may know that 
 you are rising only by the strain and difficulty 
 of your progress. Be faithful unto the end: 
 that is your part. It is God's part to cause a 
 wind to come and cleanse the sky." 
 
 4. On one occasion Jesus was asked directly 
 and with the purpose of entangling Him, to 
 say what was His authority and who had given 
 it to Him. The incident is related by all three 
 Synoptists. He replied by putting a question 
 to His questioners. The question which He 
 put to them was this : " The baptism of John, 
 was it from heaven or of men?" "And," 
 we read, " they reasoned with themselves, if 
 we say from heaven, He will say why then did 
 ye not believe him? And if we say from men, 
 we fear the people, for all men count John a 
 prophet. So they answered: We cannot tell. 
 
22 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 And He said, Neither tell I you by what 
 authority I do these things." 
 
 Now that incident enforces two things which 
 are to be kept in mind. Here were men who 
 had been impressed by Christ. They felt that 
 He had authority. They felt that somehow 
 He had the right — for He had the power — 
 to interfere with their personal lives. Instead 
 of acting upon that fact, and yielding to 
 Christ's influence over them so far as it would 
 take them, they were really seeking for some 
 pretext for getting away from the fascina- 
 tion of Christ. Had Jesus said plainly, " I 
 am the Son of God," that would have been 
 enough for them. It would have served their 
 turn exactly. They would have said, pre- 
 posterous, blasphemous, as indeed they did 
 say later. And that would have served to 
 come between them and the living appeal of 
 Jesus which they, a moment before, could not 
 gainsay. They would have escaped from a 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 23 
 
 certain moral obligation by raising a dust 
 about a matter on the abstract or intellectual 
 plane. 
 
 And so Jesus virtually said, " I am that I 
 am " : as though He had said : your business 
 with any holy influence which is inviting you, 
 is not to question it, not to try to get behind 
 it, but to act upon it. 
 
 And the second thing which we see in the 
 incident and must always remember when we 
 are dealing with the authority of Jesus Christ, 
 is this, that there is no further vision of God, 
 no further apprehension of Christ to those who 
 are not meanwhile obedient to that true call of 
 Christ which they themselves acknowledge in 
 the region of personal life and conduct. Here 
 were men who on their own showing had not 
 yet made up their minds whether it was a man's 
 duty to speak the truth, presuming, neverthe- 
 less, to raise a question involving the true na- 
 ture of God ! 
 
24 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 5. We conclude: Christ's authority is Him- 
 self, His moral beauty and perfection. His 
 authority is that Power of God which inheres 
 in the purely Good for those who see it. His 
 authority comes from a certain indestructible 
 correspondence between what He is, and what 
 we, who were made in the image of God, in 
 spite of all things, are. His authority is to 
 be discerned in that Summons and invitation 
 and reinforcement which we find in Him, to 
 our complex nature, body, soul, spirit, reason, 
 imagination, desire, will. This is His author- 
 ity: on this He is ready to begin His Revela- 
 tion of Himself to us one by one — the appeal 
 of His own moral Excellence, the new Con- 
 fidence in God and in the high meaning of our 
 life which comes to us because of His Faith. 
 
 For " He died, the just for the unjust to 
 bring us to God," to take us (as I believe the 
 idea really is) into the presence of God and 
 to leave us there, to let us see God in such a 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 25 
 
 way as to lead us to seek Him out of every 
 possible form of human impotence and despair. 
 
 6. You have, it seems to me, the Evangelical 
 statement of Christ's authority, and you see 
 it from the New Testament point of view in 
 a drawing of Dante Gabriel Rossetti which I 
 can recall. 
 
 In it we see Mary Magdalene in her un- 
 happy, unwise days passing down a street, 
 wild, unkempt, excited, — when, looking up, 
 she sees a serious but kind Face, looking at 
 her through an open window. It is the Face of 
 Jesus Christ. And immediately, as she looked, 
 something was struck dead within her, and 
 something came to life; seven devils were cast 
 out, and from that hour she lived a pure sweet 
 life, in devotion to Him who had saved her. 
 
 There you have the Unconquerable Power 
 of Christ. This is what shall secure the Su- 
 preme Place for Him so long as man has to 
 feel and urge his difficult way through life — 
 
26 PERSON OF OUR LORD 
 
 this, that Jesus, in virtue of what He is, has 
 the power to speak to us one by one, to call 
 us by name, by His very silence and love to 
 deliver us from the dominion of baser things, 
 and set us on our feet again. We have seen 
 what we have seen, and we can never be as 
 though we had not seen it. We have seen 
 Christ, and " that' One Face, far from vanish, 
 rather grows ! " 
 
 As Marius lay dying (in Walter Pater's 
 great biography), he finds himself, with that 
 incurable spirit of analysis, trying to bring un- 
 der one category the many lines of influence 
 which Jesus Christ was plainly exerting upon 
 the world, and, before death comes, he per- 
 ceives that " in Jesus Christ, there has been 
 established in this world a permanent protest, a 
 plea, a perpetual afterthought which humanity 
 will ever possess in reserve, against any wholly 
 mean or mechanical theory of itself and its con- 
 ditions," 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE VOICE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 CONCERNING THE PERSON OF OUR 
 LORD JESUS CHRIST 
 
THE VOICE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 CONCERNING THE PERSON OF OUR 
 LORD JESUS CHRIST 
 
 WE hear it said on all hands to-day — 
 so very frequently, indeed, that we 
 are probably right to suspect that it is no 
 genuine conviction of our age, but simply a 
 fashion, a word which suits a very great num- 
 ber of people — we hear it said on all sides 
 to-day that people have no interest in the 
 doctrinal statement of Christianity. That 
 what they want — from their teachers and 
 preachers — is guidance, inspiration, sympathy, 
 advice. And this is declared to be a sign 
 that the situation for faith is improving, as 
 though this impatience with dogma marked a 
 profounder insight into the meaning of Christ. 
 But, apart from the fact that what must de- 
 cide our practice is not simply what people 
 29 
 
30 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 want, but what God has considered needful 
 for us all, — apart from that — I do not be- 
 lieve that people go to church for such things 
 chiefly as sympathy and advice. Or rather; 
 I do not believe that people would go to church 
 at all for such things if they did not at the 
 same time assume that the Church had more 
 to give, that she possessed a holier treasure 
 and profounder Word. Who wants mere ad- 
 vice in the deepest hours of his life? Who 
 wants to be told merely how to walk, how to 
 avoid this thing and make for that thing, in 
 those hours when one is not sure that there is 
 any use in walking further, or in making for 
 anything? A man whose soul has become 
 agitated and solitary by reason of some tre- 
 mendous misgiving as to his own moral condi- 
 tion, or as to the whole meaning of life, has 
 meanwhile no ear for religious small-talk; and 
 will not attend, because he cannot, until the 
 agitation of his heart, the distress at the centre 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 31 
 
 of his being, has been composed by some faith, 
 by some belief, by something which is objec- 
 tively true — true, i.e., in itself — concerning life 
 and death, concerning everything. So long as 
 men have to face and to live with their own 
 unhappy memories, so long as men die, — the 
 light of life seeming to go out irrevocably in 
 the lonely night, so long will men, — men at their 
 best, at their truest, — ask for something more 
 than mere advice. They will ask for that 
 which lies behind all advisings, that which gives 
 advice any value it may come to have. They 
 will ask for truth, for revelation, for a word 
 from God, a word about Himself, and about 
 us, why we are here, and whither bound, and 
 how we may read the signs. 
 
 For we live by our faith. Our faith is our 
 working theory of life. Now the Christian 
 faith in one view is that Conception of God 
 and the world which comes to us in Jesus 
 Christ. It claims to rest upon certain facts 
 
32 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 of history. The Christian faith, i.e., is not 
 simply a mood of the soul which the long and 
 painful experience of mankind has found to 
 be safest, and most becoming for us. The 
 Christian faith is built upon the intrusion into 
 our world of Jesus Christ, who was and is the 
 Revelation in history of the true God. In the 
 words from the Epistle of S. Paul to the 
 Philippians, which I desire you to have in 
 mind, is the following : " Christ Jesus Him- 
 self of the form and essential nature of God, 
 took upon Himself our flesh and lived, being 
 the Son of God, among men. He willingly suf- 
 fered death for our sakes, but God raised Him 
 from the dead, and restored Him to His seat 
 and place of power in heaven." That is the tre- 
 mendous assertion and claim of the Christian 
 faith : — we believe in God Almighty and in 
 Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, who was 
 and is in the bosom of God from all Eternity. 
 And now there are one or two things which, 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 33 
 
 it may be, need to be said here on the threshold 
 before we enter upon our study. The first is 
 that once for all we must be on our guard 
 against the sin of supposing that what God 
 desires of any of us is the mere intellectual 
 acceptance of any statement with regard to 
 Him. Christian belief is only to a limited 
 extent a thing of the head. Yes ; let even the 
 pledged servants of Jesus Christ beware of the 
 awful snare of setting mere correctness of 
 theological opinion above personal holiness. I 
 shall say nothing more upon that. The Bible 
 is full of warnings. The New Testament is 
 full of warnings. Our Lord in many a par- 
 able put His own grave emphasis upon it — 
 the danger of exalting the Confession of the 
 lips above the private obedience of the heart, of 
 holding the truth in unrighteousness. 
 
 The other thing which I wish to say on 
 the threshold is, that the whole-hearted accept- 
 ance of Christ's exalted nature is not a mat- 
 
34 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 ter upon which the mere external evidence is 
 sufficient. Here as everywhere in the re- 
 gion of faith, the evidence never reaches the 
 point of being overwhelming or coercive. The 
 evidence takes you so far, but only so far. At 
 the last, it is always " by faith " that you un- 
 derstand. The evidence is overwhelming only 
 for those who by the secret desire of their 
 hearts, by the total cry of their being, are wait- 
 ing for that very disclosure from the side of 
 God which Christ so gloriously is. Here as 
 elsewhere, and as in all great transactions of 
 the Soul, you must take a leap in the dark,* you 
 must at a certain stage " let go," surrender, 
 leap in the line of the external evidence, though 
 beyond it ; but the happy assurance which rises 
 within you, once you have given yourself up 
 
 * Rather, In the light. Cf. " Walk while ye have the 
 light, lest darkness come upon you." — " While ye have 
 light believe in the light," also, "Arise, shine; for thy 
 light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon 
 thee." 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 35 
 
 without reserve, must be held to be proof that 
 now you are upon the very ground which God 
 all the while was meaning you to take. In 
 short, the thing that makes faith faith, involv- 
 ing secret, private qualities, is that it needs 
 something more than external evidence — in a 
 word, it needs the working together of a holy 
 Pressure upon our hearts which disposes us 
 to give the evidence its most radiant and 
 blessed Significance. As the Scripture puts it, 
 anticipating a thousand books and magazine 
 articles on the subject of the relations be- 
 tween faith and reason, — " no man can say that 
 Jesus is the Christ but by the Holy Ghost." 
 
 But though the personal confession concern- 
 ing Christ as true Son of God, and Eternally 
 in God, requires something more than external 
 evidence, though it requires a certain spiritual 
 discernment which enables us to give the proper 
 weight to the evidence, nevertheless there is 
 evidence, and it is not apart from the evidence 
 
36 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 — not apart from the facts and events and the 
 history — that the Holy Spirit has, first and 
 last, enlightened the Souls of men concerning 
 Jesus Christ our Lord. There is the danger 
 in our own day that the Christian religion 
 may come to be conceived by even Christian 
 people as only a vague, undefined pietism, a 
 mood of the human soul that has sinned or 
 suffered. On the contrary, the Christian faith 
 had a definite beginning. There was a day 
 when it began to be. Something took place on 
 this earth of ours, something so unique, so 
 significant, as to awaken the heart of the world 
 and to place us all within hearing of a new and 
 deathless appeal from the side of God. In the 
 last analysis Christianity is not an affair of 
 psychology, but of history. It is not a mood 
 of the human spirit, but a fact — The Fact of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 And now let us proceed. 
 
 " A great man," it has been said, " con- 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 37 
 
 demns the world to the task of explaining 
 him." That is to say, we cannot but think of 
 a great man who has lived and has spoken, 
 and is gone. We mean by " a great man " 
 one particularly who has been great in the 
 Spiritual side of his nature. We mean a man 
 of vision, who speaks a new word from God, 
 a word intelligible to us now that it has been 
 spoken, a word concerning the depths and the 
 silences of our mysterious and unrealized life. 
 Henceforth we must see the whole of life 
 through that man's eyes ; or we must have rea- 
 son for refusing so to see it. If he is a true 
 prophet of the Invisible God, and if we have 
 really heard his voice, we fall under his author- 
 ity and cannot disregard him even though his 
 word conflicts with our own habits and worldly 
 interests. We must either confute him and so 
 be done with him, or we must accept him and 
 live on the bread from heaven which he has 
 brought to us, or — most miserable of human 
 
38 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 conditions — we must go on our old ways as 
 though we had not heard the Call of God in 
 him, in a horrible uneasiness and want of 
 honour — for we know that there is some One 
 knocking at our door and we are simply pre- 
 tending that we do not hear. 
 
 Thus a truly great and original man can- 
 not be allowed simply to come and go. He 
 comes and goes away, but he comes back again 
 to our unforgetting heart in a spiritual and 
 abiding form. And by the force of an instinct 
 with which God has endowed our reasonable 
 nature, we cannot but proceed to have our 
 thoughts about One who wields such power 
 over our spirits. We cannot but move on and 
 arrive at doctrines concerning what must lie 
 at the back of his so penetrating influence, and 
 this process in certain elect minds may work 
 backwards and upwards and inwards until it 
 comes to rest in a coherent body of doctrines 
 concerning God and man and all things. 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 39 
 
 It was in this way (we may believe) that 
 doctrines concerning the Person of our Lord 
 were first arrived at, and accepted by His first 
 disciples. Those doctrines were serious en- 
 deavours to account for One who had exer- 
 cised such an Influence over their own lives. 
 Jesus had encountered those men as they were 
 engaged in their daily work. He had spoken 
 to them about God and about themselves. His 
 words had a power, a force and background 
 such as they had never been aware of, who first 
 heard Him speak. And more : the very Pres- 
 ence of Jesus had a cleansing influence upon 
 them. A man felt his secret breaking away 
 from him, when Jesus stood before him, as in 
 the case of Peter, who once upon a time when 
 Christ appeared before him suddenly, cried 
 out uneasily, " Depart from me, for I am a 
 sinful man, O Lord." In short, certain men 
 and women who had companied with Jesus, 
 who had seen Him live, had been so impressed 
 
40 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 by Him that, when He went away, they under- 
 stood and boldly affirmed that, in their view, 
 He was none other than the very Son of God. 
 In their view, this tremendous idea, that in 
 Jesus Christ, we have the definite and literal 
 intrusion and appearance of God in human 
 conditions, this tremendous idea was the 
 blessed and only satisfactory explanation of 
 the total impression which Jesus first and last 
 had made upon them. 
 
 And there is still no other valid and honest 
 interpretation of the events of the New Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 i. In the first place, it is surely beyond all 
 doubt that the Apostles and the Christians of 
 the first century regarded Jesus as Divine, as 
 true Son of God. But it might be objected, 
 as has been alleged once again and quite re- 
 cently in certain quarters, " man as man is the 
 child of God, man as man bears within him 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 41 
 
 the image, concealed and marred it may be, 
 of his Heavenly Father. To say, therefore, 
 that Jesus is the Son of God may only mean, 
 even in the mouth of an Apostle, that Jesus 
 is merely man, first indeed and most perfect 
 of the race, but still only one of ourselves." 
 To that line of argument, I think it is enough 
 to say that the Apostles and the first Chris- 
 tians were plain people, who used words in 
 their natural and obvious sense. If they had 
 intended to say that Jesus was one of them- 
 selves, however distinguished, it would have 
 been a very simple thing for them to say it. 
 But if proof be still required that, in the 
 habitual view of the Apostles and of the primi- 
 tive Church, Jesus was different from all 
 others, not in degree only, but in kind (as 
 we say), not only in attainment, but in the 
 very nature of His Being, here is a fair and 
 simple test. Try to read a chapter of any 
 Epistle, and wherever you come upon the name 
 
42 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 of Christ, try to understand the Apostle as at- 
 tributing to Christ only a human rank, how- 
 ever exalted. Try such an exercise and abide 
 by the result, abide by your own instinctive and 
 natural feelings on the whole experiment. You 
 will find such expressions as these, and you 
 will find them occurring, never with any self- 
 consciousness as though the writer was putting 
 a strain upon the spiritual allegiance of his 
 readers, but always with entire naturalness in 
 the manner of one who is making use of lan- 
 guage which is understood by his readers and 
 accepted by them in his sense. You will find, 
 I say, such expressions as these : " To us there 
 is One God, the Father, of whom are all 
 things and we unto Him; and One Lord Jesus 
 Christ, through whom are all things and we 
 through Him." (i Corin. viii. 6.) Or this: 
 " Giving thanks unto the Father . . . who 
 hath delivered us from the power of darkness 
 and hath translated us into the Kingdom of the 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 43 
 
 Son of His Love, in whom we have redemp- 
 tion through His blood, even the forgiveness 
 of sins, who is the Image of the Invisible God, 
 the first-born of every Creature. For by Him 
 were all things created that are in heaven and 
 that are in the earth, visible and invisible, 
 whether they be thrones, or dominions, or 
 principalities, or powers; all things were cre- 
 ated by Him and for Him; and He is before 
 all things and by Him all things consist." 
 (Col. i. 12-16.) Or in the great passage in 
 the Epistle to the Philippians : " Christ Jesus, 
 who pre-existed in the form of God, but hum- 
 bled Himself to death; wherefore also God 
 highly exalted Him and gave unto Him the 
 name that is above every name, that in the 
 name of Jesus every knee should bow, of 
 things in heaven and things on earth, and 
 things under the earth, and that every tongue 
 should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to 
 the glory of God the Father," 
 
44 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 I ask you, can you conceive such expressions 
 being applied even to the most transcendent 
 example of human worth and excellence? 
 
 But further, almost every Epistle opens and 
 closes with a prayer addressed to God and to 
 Jesus Christ as on the same plane of being: 
 " Grace to you and peace from God the Father 
 and the Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 Further still, the formula for Baptism which 
 is acknowledged by the most searching criti- 
 cism to be a primitive expression of the Apos- 
 tolic ritual, ascribes to Jesus Christ with the 
 Father and the Holy Ghost, a place in the 
 Eternal Godhead: Christians were baptised 
 into the name of the Father and the Son and 
 the Holy Ghost. Now in this great matter 
 there is not even a shade of difference in the 
 tone of one New Testament writer from the 
 tone of every other. I think that is a very 
 notable point. We know, especially from the 
 Galatian Epistle and from the Book of Acts, 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 45 
 
 perhaps also from the Epistle of S. James, 
 that on one or two matters — such as the place 
 of the Ceremonial Law in the New Dispensa- 
 tion — the Apostles were seriously and even pas- 
 sionately divided in opinion; but not even the 
 most unfriendly ear has detected a discordant 
 note in that spontaneous and lyrical outpour- 
 ing of their hearts with regard to Christ — in 
 which the one thing that we always feel is 
 that they know they cannot go too far or far 
 enough, and that having said all that they have 
 said, their words still fall short. 
 
 S. John writes : " In the beginning was the 
 Word, and the Word was with God, and the 
 Word was God. The same was in the begin- 
 ing with God. By Him all things came to be, 
 and without Him did not anything come to be 
 that has come to be." And, he continues, put- 
 ting the reference beyond all doubt : " The 
 Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and 
 we beheld His glory, glory as of the only- 
 
46 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 begotten from the Father, full of grace and 
 truth ;" ... and concludes, " no man hath 
 seen God at any time, the only-begotten Son 
 which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath 
 declared Him." 
 
 The second Epistle of S. Peter is so unmis- 
 takable as to speak of " the righteousness of 
 our God and Saviour Jesus Christ," as though, 
 in the writer's view, there was no dividing line 
 between Christ and God. 
 
 S. James, although his motive in writing his 
 Epistle was not theological, but moral and 
 practical, nevertheless ascribes to Jesus Christ, 
 as it were by the way and instinctively, the rank 
 and attribute of Deity: "James, a servant of 
 God and the Lord Jesus Christ," and once 
 again — " the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 the Lord of Glory." 
 
 Testimony of this kind, conclusive as it is 
 in itself as to the voice of the Apostolic circle 
 concerning Jesus, acquires additional value for 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 47 
 
 us when we recall that the Apostles who thus 
 bear witness were Jews* Paul, Peter, James, 
 John, — had the hereditary instincts and the 
 religious training of the Jews of their day. 
 And what was the outstanding feature of that 
 religion? What was its very characteristic? 
 Was it not the sense which pervaded it, of the 
 Ineffable Holiness, the Eternal Aloofness (so 
 to say) of God? What is the Great Thought 
 which moulds the entire Hebrew ritual, — that 
 ritual which prescribes that only One out of a 
 Consecrated people, and he only after wash- 
 ings and fastings, and even then with prayer 
 and in fear, shall enter — and that once in a 
 
 * All who have lived where races meet know how in- 
 veterate is a Race-Prejudice. Well there was a Race- 
 Prejudice which had to be overcome before any one of 
 the Apostles could say concerning Christ what they did 
 all say. Their doctrine of Christ was never one to 
 which they could have gradually arrived — as the result, 
 I mean, of the play of memory. It must have come to 
 them bearing down the obstacles of centuries, with a 
 crash of proof such as there was no withstanding. 
 
48 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 year — into the Holy of Holies? What is it 
 that the Hebrew conscience is trying there to 
 express? It is the Unapproachable Sanctity 
 of the Being with whom we have to do. For 
 remember that, to the Jew, the Holy of Holies 
 which could be entered so rarely and only with 
 such scrupulosity, was but the vestibule into 
 the very Presence of God, was but the Place 
 where God vouchsafed to appear not in reality, 
 but in a Symbol. Yet even into such a Place, 
 once only in a long year, one cleansed man of 
 a whole nation might enter, and he with soft 
 and trembling foot. And not even to him was 
 the very God made manifest. There in that 
 innermost solitude burned, indeed, the 
 Shekinah Light which bore witness that God 
 was present, though Invisible. But it was 
 away beyond, in a region far removed from 
 symbols, in the midst of unapproachable Sanc- 
 tities, girded about with light inaccessible, the 
 devout Jew conceived God Himself to be. 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 49 
 
 Why, — in those very days when the Apostles 
 were speaking of Jesus Christ as in the bosom 
 of God, in those same days the very name of 
 Jehovah was held in such reverence that it 
 might not be pronounced by mortal lips. When 
 in the public reading of his ancient Scriptures 
 he came upon the word Jehovah, the Jew was 
 either silent or he used another word — 
 Adonai. 
 
 Now, remembering such things, I would 
 have you face the invincible fact of the New 
 Testament, that the Apostles — who were Jews 
 — with one voice proclaimed Jesus Christ the 
 Son of God from all eternity. In the midst 
 of that light which encircled Jehovah as with 
 flaming swords, they dare to believe that Jesus 
 Christ has gone, for in such a place they con- 
 ceived He had been world without end. S. 
 Paul had not forgotten the inviolable Sanctity 
 of God's place when he seemed to see Jesus 
 there. No, rather he was remembering it: 
 
50 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 " Keep this Commandment without spot un- 
 rebukable until the appearing of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ . . . who is the blessed and only 
 Potentate, the King of Kings, and Lord of 
 Lords, who only hath Immortality, dwelling 
 in the Light which no man can approach unto, 
 whom no eye hath seen or can see, to whom be 
 honour and Power everlasting." (i Tim. vi. 
 IS, 16.) 
 
 Whatever, then, the world may make of it, 
 it is simply not to be disputed or qualified that 
 the Apostles believed and taught and the Apos- 
 tolic community accepted that Apprehension 
 of the Person of Jesus Christ which we 
 mean when we call Him the true and only- 
 begotten Son of God, not to be separated in 
 our thought or in the outgoing of our 
 hearts from Him " who is in all and 
 through all, and over all, God blessed for 
 ever." 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 51 
 
 2. And now consider for a moment that 
 the witness which these men bore to Christ had 
 the immediate effect of involving them in per- 
 secutions and in separations from their kin- 
 dred, and in apparent hostility to their coun- 
 try. To believe in Jesus Christ in the days 
 when S. Paul believed was to become an out- 
 cast from society, was to be reckoned a traitor 
 to one's own country and an apostate from 
 God. To believe in Jesus Christ at that time 
 or at any time for the next three hundred 
 years, was to put oneself in a minority, was 
 to have the proud, unscrupulous world against 
 one, was to take upon oneself the risk of pun- 
 ishments and death. 
 
 Surely it is the only natural and reasonable 
 explanation ^Lwhat had happened, to sup- 
 pose, that when the belief in Christ's Divine 
 Rank was first embraced, it was embraced be- 
 cause it had been borne into the hearts of a 
 certain number of people with such a force 
 
52 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 of evidence that for them it was only a ques- 
 tion of accepting the doctrine with all the 
 perils it involved, or of trampling upon the 
 evidence, thus giving over their souls to the 
 tormentors. " Necessity is laid upon me," 
 said S. Paul, " yea, woe is me if I preach not 
 the Gospel." There is no explanation of the 
 eleventh chapter of the Second Corinthian 
 Epistle, where Paul pours out his extraor- 
 dinary story of perils by sea and land, down 
 to his being let over the wall of Damascus in 
 a basket — there is no natural or sufficient ex- 
 planation of that, except the explanation of- 
 fered in the ninth chapter of the Acts which 
 tells us that once upon a time Paul, a Jew with 
 the prejudices of a Jew and the theology of 
 a Jew, was drawing near to that same Damas- 
 cus with a heart hot with disbelief and hatred, 
 when something felled him to the ground, and 
 he heard the withstanding voice of the Exalted 
 Christ. 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 53 
 
 3. There is a way of looking at this whole 
 matter which has always had great force for 
 myself, giving the Apostolic testimony con- 
 cerning Christ a certain freshness. I can state 
 it in this way. We know, who know anything 
 about the life of the Soul, how we shrink from 
 saying anything that would unsettle the 
 religious beliefs of other people, how we are 
 often willing rather to permit something to 
 remain which we may consider as of no value 
 or as even needing correction, lest by pur in- 
 truding we should disturb some delicate root 
 of spiritual life. Probably our Lord had this 
 also in His view when He gave the Parable 
 of the Wheat and the Tares : " let them grow 
 together." Nevertheless the Apostles appealed 
 to Jew and Greek alike to break away from 
 their religious traditions and to yield them- 
 selves up to Jesus Christ as unto God. Think 
 of that and remember that they knew and con- 
 tinually declared that what a man believes, de- 
 
54 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 cides what he is in this world, and what he shall 
 be as an immortal soul eternally! In asking 
 their fellows to believe in Jesus Christ the Son 
 of God and to commit themselves to Him in 
 life and death, the Apostles became responsible 
 for all who should obey them in their own 
 age and in all ages. And the Apostles were 
 well aware of this immense responsibility. An 
 immense responsibility, indeed, it has become, 
 for, as a simple matter of fact, Jesus Christ 
 has now taken His seat at the right hand of 
 the Majesty of God. There is no serious rival 
 to-day to that manifestation of God which the 
 world received in Christ. There are masses 
 of men, alas ! who deny all reality to the things 
 of faith and of the Spirit, for whom there is no 
 Heavenly throne, or if there is such a throne, 
 it is vacant. But wherever there is to-day a 
 living belief in God, wherever the faith still 
 breathes that a Divine Will, a Divine Heart 
 throbs at the source of all things, wherever 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 55 
 
 God is honoured, it is the God and Father of 
 our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Where- 
 ever it is acknowledged that the throne of 
 Heaven is occupied at all, it is occupied by 
 none other than Jesus Christ. He is the only 
 God of the Western world. Either men deny 
 God outright, or the God whom they adore or 
 seek is a God penetrated by Jesus Christ. 
 Think of Christ long and steadfastly, and God 
 in His Majesty or God in His Pity — accord- 
 ing to your inward condition — draws near. Or 
 try to think of God — of a God whom you can 
 know at all, — and whom do you see but Jesus 
 Christ with no longer a Crown of thorns, 
 but encircled in an Amazing Light of which 
 He is at once the Emanation and the 
 Source ? 
 
 4. There are, to conclude this stage of the 
 matter, two possibilities remaining, which, if 
 either of them could be made out, might affect 
 
56 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 the value for us of the Apostolic testimony- 
 concerning Christ. 
 
 (a) The first is this. If it could be shown 
 that the Apostles had a narrow or limited 
 notion of God, of what He must be to be at 
 all, then, although they conceived that Jesus 
 was the Son of God, it might be that we, be- 
 cause we have a loftier conception of Deity, 
 could not accept their testimony or adopt their 
 inference. But it is surely enough to reply 
 that, as we have already said, the Apostles were 
 Hebrews by birth and training. The thought 
 of God was not less, but more majestic, more 
 lonely and awful to them than to us. We 
 simply have not the faculty for the Sublime 
 which labours and adores in Prophecy and 
 Psalm. They felt the crushing majesty of the 
 silent heavens; the level sea, the cloud-girt 
 mountain made their souls ache and shrink, 
 more keenly it may be than ours, with 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 57 
 
 thoughts of infinite space and infinite time. 
 They knew that if God is, He is greater 
 than nature and able to take up all things in 
 the Hollow of His hand. S. Paul speaks to 
 the Romans as any serious thinker — if he were 
 likewise a devout man — might speak to-day : 
 " that which may be known of God is manifest 
 in men, for God hath shewn it unto them. For 
 the invisible things of God from the creation 
 of the world are clearly seen, being under- 
 stood by the things that are made, even His 
 eternal Power and Godhead." Or what wider 
 thought of God's Being could be expressed 
 than that which S. Paul discloses to the 
 Athenians : " Whom ye ignorantly worship, 
 Him declare I unto you. God made heaven 
 and earth . . . and in Him we live and move 
 and have our being " ? But the Apostles had 
 not only a due sense of God's Almightiness ; 
 they conceived Him always as Personal to 
 every man, as brooding over every human Soul. 
 
58 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 The New Testament sense of the holiness of 
 God may be measured by the rigour of its 
 sense of man's sin. God as the Apostles con- 
 ceived Him is the Holy One before whom the 
 holiest of men must stand abashed. 
 
 It was not, then, because they had themselves 
 only a meagre and unworthy sense of the 
 Majesty and Holiness of God that they found 
 little difficulty in clothing Jesus with the At- 
 tributes of Deity. No, it must, on the con- 
 trary, have been that they felt the Majesty and 
 Holiness of Christ to be such, — so transcend- 
 ent, so manifestly not-of-this- world — that they 
 could not, in loyalty to the facts, hinder Him 
 from ascending to the right hand of God. 
 
 (b) The second possibility which, if it could 
 be made out, might weaken for us the value 
 of the Apostolic testimony to the Person of 
 Christ is this : perhaps the Apostles had such a 
 poor conception of man, of what he is, of the 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 59 
 
 capacity and reach of his nature, that when 
 One like Jesus appeared amongst them, with 
 His confessedly pure and beautiful Soul, He 
 seemed to go beyond the bounds of the merely 
 human, and in a kind of panic of appreciation 
 they hailed Him as the Incarnate Son of God. 
 But the Apostles knew very well how high 
 the human spirit might soar. They knew that 
 the human soul could drink in the Spirit of 
 God until the whole man was transformed and 
 his very face shone with the exaltation. For, 
 once more, the Apostles were Hebrews. They 
 could look back across the centuries and see 
 Saint after Saint, peak overtopping peak 
 towards the last horizon where earth touched 
 heaven. Moses was theirs, and him they saw 
 in the halo of a pious and patriotic memory. 
 They saw him in the glory of his setting when 
 the Hand of God carried him so that men 
 saw his face no more. And Jeremiah was 
 theirs, with his breaking heart, and Isaiah with 
 
60 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 his visions. And the Daniel of the story was 
 theirs, with his innocence and his strength in 
 God. And besides all these, the Apostles 
 might well know of what heights and depths 
 the human soul was capable; for they knew 
 the Psalms. They knew how man can cry 
 out for God; how likewise he can rejoice in 
 God in the midst of ruin and sing songs of 
 praise in the very pitch of night. The Apostles 
 knew quite well what a piece of work a man is, 
 and what infinite and tremendous faculties lie 
 coiled within him like a spring ready to break 
 out at the proper summons. Jesus Christ 
 could not have startled them into a mistake. 
 They had read of human excellence such as 
 they had not been privileged to see. But what 
 they saw and felt in Jesus Christ must have 
 been more and other than all that. For, as 
 we have seen, they hailed Him as the Son of 
 God ; they prayed to Him : and since they were 
 Hebrews and believed that only God could be 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 61 
 
 worshipped, they thereby confessed that Christ 
 was not to be separated from God in the out- 
 goings of our spirit. Knowing all the heroes 
 of the Old Testament, the notable saints of 
 their history, they yet gave to Jesus Christ, the 
 name which is above every name. 
 
 " And I saw in the midst of the throne and 
 of the four living creatures, and in the midst of 
 the elders, a Lamb standing as though it had 
 been slain, having seven horns and, seven eyes, 
 which are the seven spirits of God sent forth 
 into all the earth. And He came and He 
 taketh it out of the right hand of Him that 
 sat on the throne. And when He had taken 
 the book, the four living creatures and the four 
 and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, 
 having each one a harp and golden bowls full 
 of incense, which are the prayers of saints. 
 And they sang a new song saying, Worthy 
 art Thou to take the book and to open the 
 Seals thereof : for Thou wast slain, and didst 
 
62 PERSON OF OUR LORD 
 
 purchase unto God with Thy blood men of 
 every tribe and tongue and people and nation, 
 and madest them to be unto our God a king- 
 dom and priests, and they reign upon the 
 earth. And I saw and I heard a voice of many 
 angels round about the throne, and the living 
 creatures, and the elders, and the number of 
 them was ten thousand times ten thousand and 
 thousands of thousands; saying with a great 
 voice, Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain 
 to receive power and riches and wisdom and 
 might and honour and glory and blessing. 
 And every created thing which is in the heaven 
 and on the earth and under the earth and in 
 the sea and all things that are in them heard 
 I say : Unto Him that sitteth on the throne and 
 unto the Lamb, be the blessing and the honour 
 and the glory and the dominion for ever and 
 ever. And the four living creatures said 
 Amen. And the elders fell down and wor- 
 shipped." 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE VOICE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 CONCERNING THE PERSON OF OUR 
 LORD JESUS CHRIST 
 
THE VOICE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 CONCERNING THE PERSON OF OUR 
 LORD JESUS CHRIST 
 
 IN our last lecture on the Person of our 
 Lord we passed under review some points 
 in the testimony of the Apostles. We saw 
 that they unanimously and, as a matter of 
 course, used language concerning Christ, such 
 as they, who were Hebrews, knew was suit- 
 able only in regard to the Divine Being. They 
 prayed to Him, and in His name. In the 
 formula of baptism, they adored Him with 
 God the Father and the Holy Ghost. In ask- 
 ing all men, nay, in pleading with all men to 
 adopt their belief, the Apostles must have been 
 aware of the immense responsibility which they 
 were assuming. They themselves held that it 
 was no light matter what a man believed con- 
 cerning God; and they must have known that 
 65 
 
66 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 it would be no light matter for themselves if 
 they had taught men to believe a blasphemy- 
 concerning God. The awful alternatives 
 which S. Paul held before his own eyes with 
 regard to the Resurrection, hung by the same 
 necessity on the question of the true Nature of 
 Jesus Christ: "If Christ be not risen, then is 
 our preaching vain, and your faith is also 
 vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses 
 of God, because we have testified of God that 
 He raised up Christ, whom He raised not up 
 if so be that the dead rise not. For if the 
 dead rise not, then is not Christ raised. And 
 if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye 
 are yet in your sins. Then they also which 
 are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." [There 
 you have the sudden sense of his responsibility 
 for those who through his word have believed.] 
 " If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we 
 are of all men most miserable." But the 
 burden of all that we said in the preceding 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 67 
 
 paper was, that the Apostles believed in Jesus 
 Christ as a Divine Being hardly to be separated 
 from God in thought, not to be separated at all 
 in prayer and adoration; and this, in conse- 
 quence of evidence, in consequence of facts to 
 them so commanding, so overwhelming, that 
 they simply could not withstand the facts, or 
 turn the edge and challenge of the evidence. 
 Necessity was laid upon them to preach the 
 Gospel of Christ. We proceed then to ask, — 
 what was this evidence which they could not 
 gainsay ? 
 
 Here, at the outset, however, it might be a 
 good thing to raise a more general question 
 and to inquire, whether external evidence, the 
 evidence of facts and events, can of itself pro- 
 duce the attitude of assent and love in any one 
 who has merely witnessed them; I mean with- 
 out a certain previous preparation and instruc- 
 tion of the heart. When we put the same 
 
68 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 question in another form, we see at once what 
 the answer must be. If it be asked, will every 
 one be convinced of the Divine Rank of Jesus 
 Christ who has had the Evidence laid before 
 him, we must reply, " Every one will not be 
 convinced." And we have only to come a 
 little more closely to the whole matter, hover- 
 ing for a moment on the margin of the abyss 
 of " subject-and-object " to understand that 
 this necessity for something more than mere 
 external evidence is a necessity of thought, 
 which operates in every region of knowledge. 
 We have the proverb that " seeing is believ- 
 ing;" and it is a very common remark that a 
 man's view is determined by his point of view. 
 There is the man to whom 
 
 " A primrose by the river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 And there is another kind of man to whom 
 " the meanest flower that blows can give 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 69 
 
 thoughts that do often lie too deep for 
 tears." 
 
 " Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies ! 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower! But if I could understand, 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is.' - 
 
 Before any fact or body of facts can have 
 such weight with us that we shall yield to their 
 holiest or most beautiful significance., before 
 indeed they can have any value as evidence, we 
 must have sympathy with them; we must be 
 conscious of that within ourselves, an appetite, 
 a hunger, a dream, of which the facts supply a 
 possible satisfaction or defence. The last and 
 finest interpretation of facts must always de- 
 pend upon the inclination of the soul, upon a 
 man's own private vote. In short, it is the 
 soul, the man himself, the desire and will of 
 the observer which gives to external facts, 
 events, theories, their peculiar force. It is the 
 
70 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 spirit of a man which is the candle of the Lord. 
 Nay, the deepest statement of the case is to put 
 it in still other words of the Holy Scriptures : 
 " there is a spirit in man, but the inspiration 
 of the Lord giveth him understanding." That 
 is all to say, that the truth about a fact or 
 about a body of facts is always personal; it is 
 always revealed in me. My soul summons the 
 very truth out of the heart of the facts. It 
 is something already within me which lights up 
 the facts, or it is something within me which 
 makes them dark and secular. Knowledge is 
 appreciation. If this be true of our knowl- 
 edge of another life, it is more strictly true 
 of any real knowledge of the Exalted Person 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ. A bad man can- 
 not really understand a good man: as Satan 
 for all his cleverness did not really understand 
 Job, because he did not understand the ways 
 of a good man. It is the pure in heart who 
 see God. The true knowledge of a Person is 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 71 
 
 communion of Spirit with him, and so the 
 Apostle moved right up to the end of this whole 
 matter when he wrote, " No man can say that 
 Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." 
 
 Any attempt, therefore, to see the Glory of 
 Christ and to feel His Power must begin in 
 the suppliant attitude, in prayer. For Christ 
 is not our equal, upon any hypothesis, upon 
 any serious interpretation of Him. He is our 
 Saviour who must be trusted before He can be 
 known and loved. We know that many people 
 saw Jesus live who did not confess His Divin- 
 ity or His Lordship over their souls. Many 
 admitted His miraculous powers and His moral 
 authority in certain moments, who did not 
 feel compelled to let go their last reluctance 
 and throw in their lot with Him for life and 
 death. And what happened at the first hap- 
 pens now. We must go to the Gospel story 
 seeking for ourselves light and pardon and 
 strength from God, before we shall see such 
 
72 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 graces in the face of Jesus Christ. We must 
 turn to Christ in some lonely hour, when some 
 crisis has delivered us from the hard crust of 
 our ordinary thoughts, and has shown us in a 
 flash our own forlorn and insecure position; 
 we must go to Christ in an hour when for 
 some reason our heart and flesh is crying 
 out, before we are in a position to say what, in 
 the matter of Deity, Christ is, and whether 
 there is anything in the matter of Deity that 
 He is not. For the Divinity of Jesus Christ 
 was a Discovery of the Soul before it became a 
 Doctrine of the Church: and that is still the 
 sound and beautiful order. 
 
 We know how, as a matter of history, the 
 Holy Spirit fell upon the disciples and those 
 who had companied with Jesus before they 
 were persuaded that He who had been with 
 them and had gone away was none other than 
 the Son of God. When the Presence and 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 73 
 
 Power of God was upon them, they knew it 
 was still the Presence and Power of Christ. 
 In that deep hour, when for the first time they 
 knew God personally, they knew that Christ 
 was in the bosom of God. It was not until 
 Pentecost that the followers of Jesus saw the 
 halo round the Head where but lately the 
 thorns had been. 
 
 We, too, must be under the Spirit of God, 
 conscious of the mystery of God, conscious of 
 a burden or a grief or a shame, of something 
 that shakes us to our centre, — we must feel 
 God near and personal to ourselves, with 
 nothing between Him and our souls ; otherwise 
 we have not yet had the spiritual discipline 
 which alone gives a man the seeing eye for 
 the Glory of Jesus Christ. 
 
 But although it was the illumination of Pen- 
 tecost which persuaded the disciples of the 
 Glory and Godhead of Christ, they could re- 
 call His earthly life and find now reason upon 
 
74 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 reason for their new faith. Their belief had 
 its basis in facts and in a history. The Spirit, 
 as, indeed, Jesus had promised, testified of 
 Him, and called to their remembrance His 
 words and deeds. And so it is for ourselves; 
 though nothing but spiritual sympathy will 
 lead any one to see the Divinity of our Lord, 
 yet His earthly life, and His own conscious- 
 ness disclose things which can only mean that 
 Jesus is not to be ranked as, in His nature, a 
 mere son of mortal man. We have evidence, 
 though only God can persuade any one, and 
 although one may never be persuaded until 
 under the power of some profound distress, or 
 tenderness of heart, he cries unto Christ as 
 unto God, and finds in the peace of the 
 answer the proof of his wisdom, the cor- 
 roboration of his faith. In short, we can 
 give reasons; only God can give to men an 
 understanding. 
 
 We say, then, there is Evidence. S. Paul, 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 75 
 
 speaking before Festus, said of the life of 
 Jesus, " The King knoweth these things be- 
 fore whom also I speak freely : for I am per- 
 suaded that none of these things are hidden 
 from him: for this thing was not done in a 
 comer." That is to say, there were circum- 
 stances about the life of Jesus which no one, 
 not even an enemy, could gainsay. 
 
 It would lead us further than I have time 
 to go, to consider with thoroughness the Evi- 
 dence of our Lord's nature from the narrative 
 of His life and ministry, which we have in the 
 Gospels. But it is well worth recalling at this 
 point, that the testimony to the Exalted Nature 
 of Christ was felt by the Apostolic and Sub- 
 Apostolic communities to be so overwhelming 
 and masterful, that for the first three centuries 
 it was not His Divine Nature which was de- 
 nied. The successors of the Apostles and the 
 Apostles themselves had to contend for the 
 Real Human Nature of our Lord; because, for 
 
76 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 those who first read the Gospels, for those, 
 also, who first came within the stir and glory 
 of His mighty working in their own hearts 
 and in the world, the difficulty was to believe, 
 not that Jesus was Divine, but that He was, in 
 any sense, Human! The Church in her high 
 doctrine of Christ's Person recognises and de- 
 fends the final mysteriousness of it, affirming 
 on the one hand, that Jesus our Master was 
 truly man, yet at the same time claiming that 
 no word shall be said in any final sense about 
 Jesus, no definition shall be placed upon Him, 
 as though it included all that is ever to be said 
 about Him. The Church, in her high 
 doctrine of Christ, claims that, though truly 
 man, nothing shall ever be accepted as giving 
 the whole truth about Him which could have 
 the effect of separating Him (even by an iota) 
 from the Everlasting Spirit, who is at the heart 
 of all things, on whose Inviolable Will hang all 
 our hopes and fears. 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 77 
 
 (a) We cannot read those Gospels with- 
 out feeling that He whom they portray was 
 truly man. We read that Jesus thirsted; that 
 He hungered. A long journey wearied Him, 
 as it would one of ourselves. And not only did 
 He share our human body, " partaking of our 
 flesh ; " He had a human mind and heart. He 
 felt things in a way that we all understand. 
 Before the grave of Lazarus, He shed tears. 
 He had His human friendships. He was angry 
 with the anger of a righteous man. There 
 were moments when He chose rather not to be 
 alone, when He asked, it might be three of His 
 disciples, or four of them, to accompany Him, 
 and to be near Him, while He faced something 
 in His own solitary Soul. His voice could take 
 on the note of pity, or of sorrow, or of dis- 
 appointment, as, on the other hand, His whole 
 being could thrill with gratitude, with happi- 
 ness, with victory, as when He rejoiced in the 
 faith of the Centurion, or when, after the in- 
 
78 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 cident at the well, He turned to the disciples 
 and said, "The fields are white to harvest;" 
 or when, hearing that men from afar had come 
 to seek Him, He raised His eyes to heaven 
 and said, " Father, the hour is come." And 
 life with its tasks, its ebb and flow of for- 
 tunate and contrary circumstances, its care for 
 others, life with all its work of faith and la- 
 bour of love and patience of hope had its ef- 
 fect upon Him likewise, making Him look 
 older than He was, for the Pharisees thought 
 Him about fifty when He was only thirty- 
 three. As the last days drew near we never 
 lose sight of the true man in the travail of His 
 Soul. We read that in the Garden, " He was 
 greatly amazed and sore troubled." He con- 
 fessed that " His Soul was exceeding sorrow- 
 ful, even unto death." 
 
 Remembering all these things, we feel in- 
 dubitably that in the case of Jesus Christ, what- 
 ever more or other is to be said, we are in the 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD' 79 
 
 presence of true humanity. And yet, if we de- 
 cide to call Him man, with the purpose of de- 
 fining, i.e., limiting, His Personality, immedi- 
 ately, out of the same narratives arise a multi- 
 tude of recollections, hints, words, silences, 
 deeds, impressions, and a general sense of won- 
 der, which compel us to withdraw the name, 
 and to leave an open door for Jesus to enter, if 
 our heart decrees it, into the very Godhead. 
 For, when we think again, we feel just as in- 
 disputably that He whom those Gospels por- 
 tray is not one of us. Even when He uses 
 words which others have used, they are dif- 
 ferent, coming from Him. They have a dif- 
 ferent authority and background. 
 
 I stood, one morning, by the shore of an 
 island in the Orkney group. The waves that 
 broke at my feet had behind them the undis- 
 tracted might of the Atlantic. It was a shore 
 of white sand and shells and pebbles. Over 
 
80 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 these one trod carelessly, for at every step it 
 was the same. But suddenly I stood still, for 
 my eye had fallen upon a shell which, lying 
 amongst the others, was yet a stranger to all 
 its fellows. There it lay, with a tone, a colour, 
 which separated it from the surrounding grey- 
 ness. I stooped to gaze and peer at its un- 
 wonted texture and grain, and these only in- 
 creased the sense which had come to me with 
 the wonder of its colouring, that it was a 
 stranger to those cold and formidable shores. 
 And as I mused, the fire burned. I remem- 
 bered that I was standing on a shore which 
 from all time has been washed by a generous 
 flood. The Gulf Stream passes that way, and 
 once in passing it had cast the shell upon that 
 dreary waste of rock and sand. The Gulf 
 Stream, pouring eternally from the Golden 
 Sea, had borne it from afar, and cast it where 
 it lay — to make one man here and there stand 
 still on the journey of his life, and consider 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 81 
 
 it, and dream of its homeland under a clearer 
 Sun beyond the seas. Just so did the out- 
 going heart of God, that Eternal tide of love, 
 bear Him to us, casting Him upon this bank 
 and shoal of time, to break the weary tyranny 
 of things, the curse of fate and custom and iron 
 law ; to urge one here and there to pause upon 
 his way and consider, and in one brave ejacula- 
 tion make the great and blessed Inference of 
 Faith. 
 
 (b) To return: you observe that, through- 
 out His earthly life, Jesus was quite well aware 
 that He was different from all other men. He 
 claimed to be apart, and acted always with a 
 certain aloofness. He never put Himself on 
 a level with even His closest disciples. Never 
 even in the moments when they were nearest to 
 one another, did Jesus suggest or allow them 
 to suppose that He and they were in one case. 
 He does not speak in their hearing of God as 
 
82 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 " our Father." The words He uses are, 
 " When ye pray, say ye our Father." 
 Speaking of God in relation to Himself, and 
 to them, He says, with a kind of care and preci- 
 sion : " My Father and your Father ; My God 
 and your God." He claims, — without pausing 
 to defend the claim, — to be greater than Solo- 
 mon, greater than Jonah, greater than the 
 Temple. Yet is He acknowledged to have 
 been the humblest, the meekest Soul that ever 
 breathed our air. We feel no surprise at all 
 when we hear Him make such claims. It is 
 all quite natural, quite in harmony with the in- 
 exhaustible worth of His Person. In the 
 mouth of even the saintliest of men, it would 
 disquiet us to hear such claims put forward. 
 As Jesus makes such claims, there is something 
 in us, something far within, which is not aston- 
 ished. 
 
 This consciousness that He was different 
 from all men appears likewise in the moral 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 83 
 
 authority which He claimed and which He 
 wielded : — the very authority which He wields 
 to-day beyond all serious dispute. From the 
 first Jesus ascended the throne of the human 
 conscience, and it is simply the fact that to 
 this day, wherever Jesus Christ has been 
 preached or manifested, wherever He has se- 
 cured any place at all, it has sooner or later 
 become the highest place. To this day the 
 human conscience which has once come within 
 sight of Jesus Christ can never again be as 
 though it had not seen Him. To this day no 
 man can be at peace with God, having the com- 
 fort of his own thoughts, if meanwhile he is 
 at war with Jesus Christ in any particular of 
 his life, even down to the least movement of 
 his imagination. To this hour, no man dares 
 to say that Jesus Christ has not the right 
 to dictate to him how he shall order his 
 life! And in these matters, what is happen- 
 ing now must have happened before, and 
 
84 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 will happen again and again, even unto the 
 end. 
 
 Jesus could say to the men with whom He 
 took to do in His earthly ministry, " Ye have 
 heard that it hath been said of them of old, 
 Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit 
 adultery, thou shalt not steal, but I say unto 
 you . . ." He could assume that tone, and 
 every conscience felt His searching claim as 
 though, in dealing with Christ, it was dealing 
 with its Judge. Even His enemies confessed 
 that " no man ever spake like this." 
 
 But it was not only in regard to matters of 
 detail in moral practice that Jesus assumed the 
 right to issue ultimatums from which there 
 might be no appeal. He demanded from all 
 who would follow Him an utter consecration, 
 an absolute surrender. He knew what, in the 
 way of suffering, devotion to Him would in- 
 volve : yet He did not hesitate to ask it. " Ye 
 shall be persecuted, pursued from city to city; " 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 85 
 
 " the time cometh when they that destroy you 
 will think that they are doing God service." 
 But, notwithstanding all that, He insisted that 
 they who would should follow Him. " Let a 
 man forsake all that he hath, and take up 
 his cross and follow Me." So conscious was 
 Jesus of His own identity with the living 
 heart of all life, so identified was He in His 
 own thought with God and God's destiny for 
 man, that He could say, "If any man come 
 to me and hate not his father and mother and 
 wife and children and brethren and sisters, 
 and his own life also, he cannot be My 
 disciple." These words, mark you, from Him 
 who created the home as we know it, who also 
 has spoken the sternest words against those 
 who in any age would loosen or do violence to 
 its sacred bonds. Now, no one but God has 
 the right to claim absolute and unconditional 
 faith. In making such a claim for Himself, 
 Jesus assumed the prerogative of God. 
 
86 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 It is at this point that we can best allude 
 to that one fact in the self -consciousness of 
 Jesus which separates Him from all mere men, 
 even from the saintliest: I mean His sinless- 
 ness. Jesus had no sense of moral failure. 
 Remorse never visited Him, or regret for any- 
 thing He had ever done. In the deepest 
 prayers that broke from His heart, in those 
 awful searchings of His own Soul which we 
 are permitted to overhear in Gethsemane and 
 on the Cross, there is no cry of penitence, or 
 for pardon. He looked into His own heart, 
 and nothing in His memory had the power to 
 give Him pain. He could say, " I do always 
 the Will of my Father." Let us think of that, 
 remembering at the same time this, — that the 
 holier we ourselves become, the more sensitive 
 do we grow to the approach of sin. 
 
 Remember this, also, which I can call to 
 your minds by an illustration. Perhaps you 
 have at some time been left in a room alone 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 87 
 
 with a truly saintly person. Immediately you 
 feel your distance in spirit from him. With- 
 out intending it in the least, his goodness 
 passes judgment upon you. It seems to your- 
 self that every word you speak betrays you. 
 You are like one speaking to a stranger in his 
 language. Even when you use the correct 
 words, there is an accent, a want of ease which 
 betrays you. So, in the presence of an en- 
 tirely good man, in the presence of one who is 
 quite done with self-seeking, you feel awkward, 
 and, as it were, a burden to yourself. There 
 are two courses open to you as you stand in 
 the holy presence of a fellow-man, and you 
 are tempted now to take one course and now 
 the other, and it will depend upon certain deep 
 and final things in yourself and in him, which 
 course you would most like to take; (1) you 
 would like to rush out of the room, or (2) you 
 would like to bury your head upon his breast ! 
 But my point is, — the presence of a holy one 
 
88 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 passes judgment upon you, and covers you 
 with a secret trouble and impotence, if you are 
 spiritually on a lower level. Now, Jesus 
 Christ, by the admission of every serious mind, 
 lived not in the presence of a holy man, but 
 in the Presence of the Absolutely Good, in 
 the presence of God. He was always alone with 
 God. Yet in that Searching Presence, in that 
 consuming Fire, under that unbroken "judg- 
 ment of Light," He felt no discomfort, no 
 heart-breaking distance between His own per- 
 sonal achievement and the Supreme Holiness : 
 felt only the Friendliness, the Comradeship, the 
 Identity with Himself of pure Deity. 
 
 Now, we say, going back to the self-con- 
 sciousness of Jesus, as we are recommended to 
 do in order to have our views of Christ's per- 
 sonality readjusted, we say, here is a Person 
 not to be explained as a man, not to be classed 
 alongside any one who had gone before, or 
 should come after Him. If Jesus Christ is to 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 89 
 
 be explained at all in these most characteristic 
 depths and reaches of His Personality, then we 
 are not qualified, unaided, to explain Him. The 
 best we can do is to say that He is not one of 
 us. St. Augustine we know, Dante we know, 
 Shakespeare we know — in certain circum- 
 stances, as Charles Lamb said, " If we had the 
 mind to " — we might have been any one of 
 them, for wherever they have gone in thought 
 and imagination, we have it in us to follow 
 them. Were they to come into this room just 
 now, as the same Charles Lamb once put it, we 
 should stand up to receive them; but if Jesus 
 Christ, if He, who could see God and not die, 
 but live, were to come in, we should kneel 
 down, acknowledging that here our restless 
 spirit of analysis and criticism stood face to 
 face with something Absolute, Inexplicable, 
 and only to be adored. If Jesus is to be ex- 
 plained, He must explain Himself. A man can 
 only be judged by his peers, and Jesus Christ 
 
90 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 has had no peer. " I think I know men," said 
 Napoleon, " and this was no man." 
 
 Still, keeping close to the self-consciousness 
 of Jesus, one would like to speak with greater 
 fulness than is possible now, of our Lord's 
 Knowledge of the Future, of His unfaltering 
 Confidence that, now that He had come into 
 the world, man would never be able to with- 
 stand His Rebuke and Invitation, would never 
 be able to confuse beyond recognition that 
 Meaning and Calling of life which He had ut- 
 tered and bequeathed. It was an element in 
 the Mind of Christ, that He had taken His 
 place for ever in the leading and control of 
 man's destiny. When a woman crept to His 
 feet and anointed them with spikenard, Jesus 
 said, " Verily, I say unto you, wheresoever 
 this Gospel shall be preached throughout the 
 world, this also that she hath done shall be 
 spoken of for a memorial of her." Shortly 
 before His death He said, " I, if I be lifted up 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 91 
 
 from the earth, will draw all men unto me." 
 On the very night before His death, not 
 despair, but an extraordinary confidence, filled 
 His Soul. He instituted the Supper and or- 
 dained it as a Sacrament, in which, through all 
 the ages, His disciples should dedicate them- 
 selves anew to Him, in which also they should 
 receive strength and peace from His Presence 
 in their midst. And just before He left this 
 earth, He ordained — with no hint of doubt or 
 foreboding in His anticipations — that the na- 
 tions throughout the world should be baptized 
 into His name, as into the Name of the Father, 
 and of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Finally, under the head of the self-conscious- 
 ness of Jesus, He claimed to be the End of 
 History, and the Judge both of the Living and 
 of the Dead. He spoke calmly and with the 
 sense of an awful reality and certainty in His 
 words, of a day when the Son of Man should 
 suddenly come and bring human existence to 
 
92 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 an end : " The Son of Man shall come in the 
 Glory of His Father, with His Angels, and 
 then shall He render unto every man according 
 to his deeds." 
 
 Who is He, who alone can He be, who speaks 
 in such ways, who holds Himself with such a 
 fundamental aloofness, that though He gives 
 Himself even unto death for man, man has 
 always acknowledged not only His supremacy, 
 but His difference ? 
 
 That question was one which the first 
 Apostles and the first body of believers had to 
 ask themselves, and in the glory and thrill of 
 their own fresh experiences, to answer. I re- 
 call a sentence from our first lecture: "A 
 great man condemns the world to the task of 
 explaining him." It was simply inevitable 
 that a doctrine of Christ's Rank and Person 
 should be formed as soon as the disciples had 
 had time to reflect upon the marvellous One 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 93 
 
 who had visited their lives, and had left them 
 now as to His bodily Presence. Jesus was the 
 most powerful personality whom they had yet 
 encountered. He had made the deepest appeal 
 to them. He had demanded obedience from 
 them, and this not so much by His words as 
 simply by His own natural authority. Never 
 once, not even in the darkest hours, did it oc- 
 cur to the disciples that Jesus had asked more 
 from them than He had the right to ask. And 
 so, it was not in human nature that the 
 disciples should close their minds and think no 
 more of this One who had so distinguished 
 and exalted them by having taken to do with 
 them. 
 
 We know, many of us know, how death 
 makes a loved one sacred, how words which 
 were common when they were spoken, become 
 treasured memories when the voice is still. We 
 know how we blame ourselves and beat our 
 
94 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 breasts when we recall a word which we once 
 upon a time spoke hastily towards one whom 
 death has now removed from us. It is ex- 
 pedient for us that they whom we love should 
 go away : for with all our love, there are 
 depths and significances in them which we 
 cannot see, until we see them out of the tender- 
 ness and desolation of our hearts and in the 
 light that is far off. 
 
 If our hearts feel the spell of a person even 
 more keenly, if we see him more truly when 
 death has taken him from us, what Influence 
 must Jesus have acquired for His followers, 
 when, after the consternation of the Cross, 
 they looked back ! 
 
 We can trace the very shades of feeling 
 through which the hearts of the disciples 
 passed from that day of their desolation to the 
 time when, under the illumination of the Holy 
 Ghost, the iron bands of sorrow were burst 
 in sunder from their souls, and they behaved 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 95 
 
 like men " drunk with truth stagnant within 
 them." 
 
 First, their amazement at the ignominious 
 death, when, in the bitterness of their disap- 
 pointment, some of them even spoke angrily 
 of their Lord. Then, as the tumult of their 
 spirits subsided somewhat, the Face of Christ 
 began to come near to them. It is at this stage 
 that we find them meeting together and speak- 
 ing of Him whom they had loved and lost. 
 
 We see the disciples at this stage of their re- 
 covery, in the story of the two on the way to 
 Emmaus. They talked together of all the 
 things which had happened, and " they were 
 sad." And One drew near to them and en- 
 tered into speech with them. And we learn 
 the reason for their perplexity and sorrow. 
 Why had Christ died ? " We trusted that it 
 had been He which should have redeemed Is- 
 rael." " But," pleaded the stranger, " ought 
 not the Christ to have suffered these things 
 
96 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 and to enter into His Glory ? " And He 
 showed them from their own Scriptures, in 
 which they trusted, that to such a life of suf- 
 fering and to such a death the Saviour had 
 been ordained. Jesus taught the disciples (as 
 He has taught the world) that it is the Glory 
 of God to stoop, to suffer, in order that He 
 may redeem. This new thought began to con- 
 tend with their doubt and grief, as the dawn 
 thrills through the darkness. And their hearts 
 burned within them as new heavens and a new 
 earth came into being under the power of this 
 new Conception of Deity. 
 
 At length the Stranger sat at meat with 
 them. He took bread and blessed it and 
 brake and gave to them. And even as they 
 were taking the bread from His hands, they 
 remembered the night of the last Supper. And 
 they looked up to see if it was really He; but 
 behold, He was gone, leaving it, as always, 
 to their own awakened hearts to find the com- 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 97 
 
 pleted proof that it was indeed He. With 
 the great news singing in their souls they re- 
 turned to Jerusalem and found the other 
 disciples gathered together. " We have seen 
 the Lord," they whispered. And the others 
 answered : " The Lord is risen, indeed, and 
 hath appeared unto Simon." 
 
 Thus, over the hearts of those who had 
 known Him, the Face of Jesus kept coming, 
 persuading them of His divineness; and the 
 voice of Jesus began to arise increasingly out 
 of the depths of their experience, bidding them 
 believe as utterly as they felt they were being 
 urged to. And they kept their hearts true 
 with prayer until at last the Holy Ghost — the 
 true presence of God, not to be explained but 
 to be received by hearts that yearn for Christ 
 — the Holy Ghost came upon them, ending all 
 their misgivings, confirming all their dim and 
 difficult hopes, settling them and sealing them 
 in that great venture of faith by which they de- 
 
98 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 clared that He who had been crucified, dead, 
 and buried, was none other than the true Son 
 of God who is alive for evermore. 
 
 My task, for the present, and limited as it 
 was by the opportunity, is done. But before I 
 close, I should like at least to try to make this 
 supreme belief more actual and credible to 
 ourselves. I remember a sentence — I think it 
 is from Richard Holt Hutton of the " Spec- 
 tator," whose service to faith should be hon- 
 oured everywhere. It is to the effect that it is 
 a great thing when we cannot only believe 
 what we do believe, but can also imagine it. I 
 do hold that it is possible not only to believe in 
 Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, but 
 also to imagine it, to think it, so that it shall 
 be, so to speak, visible to the eye of our mind. 
 I should like, then, in closing, to show how the 
 doctrine of Christ's Eternal Existence in God 
 is not opposed to our highest reason, how it 
 does not paralyse our minds when we try to 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 99 
 
 grasp it; how this doctrine is no curious and 
 baffling irrelevance to us as thinking beings, 
 but a mighty Revelation which, once made, the 
 soul of man may reasonably embrace. I 
 should like, also, to show how this doctrine of 
 Christ's Eternal Existence in God has prob- 
 abilities and considerations in its favour suf- 
 ficient to assure and persuade those who al- 
 ready for personal reasons do worship Jesus 
 Christ as Lord. For, remember, a man may 
 believe in something which, nevertheless, is a 
 mystery and not to be discovered by his own 
 unaided reason. We believe, for example, in 
 " life," though we cannot define " life." We 
 believe in " the Soul," although the keenest re- 
 search has not discovered an organ in man 
 which is entirely spiritual, and independent of 
 its bodily circumstances as we believe the soul in 
 some way to be. And so of many things equally 
 mysterious. Indeed, when one comes to think 
 of it, it is with regard to the mysterious things 
 
ioo THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 in the midst of which we live — the Uniformity 
 of Nature, the Reasonableness of life — that 
 somehow we are most confident. We are al- 
 ways acting as though these things were true, 
 although, that they are true is simply a mat- 
 ter of faith, and can never really be proved. 
 Indeed, one is beginning to see that the very 
 things by which we live cannot be proved, can- 
 not be demonstrated to the intellectual eye : but 
 they can be verified, the hazard of faith by 
 which we adopt them can be corroborated. 
 Just so with regard to this supreme matter; — 
 I may be persuaded that Jesus Christ is the 
 Son of God, and was and is in God eternally, 
 for no reason which could pass as proof with 
 reluctant or hostile minds, but from the inner 
 persuasion of my whole being which, once per- 
 suaded, finds corroborations and verifications 
 everywhere. 
 
 Well, then, in the first place, we all be- 
 lieve that every good gift and every perfect 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 101 
 
 gift cometh down from above, from the 
 Father of Lights. We must believe that all 
 human intelligence and virtue have their source 
 in God, and that the holiest Love which ever 
 appeared on this earth was, as it were, a gleam 
 from the life of God. If there has ever ap- 
 peared on this earth a holy and beautiful soul, 
 it must all have been in God before it came to 
 light here. We must believe that, if we be- 
 lieve really in God. He cannot be conceived 
 as inferior to any of His creatures or to all of 
 them. Thus, the good Spirit of every life 
 that has been lived had its Source and Home in 
 the bosom of God. Every life of holy love 
 had its pulse and throb from the Great Heart 
 beyond the Veil ! 
 
 Looking, then, at Jesus Christ merely as one 
 of God's creatures, as One who lived, we say 
 that all the grace and beauty which He mani- 
 fested while on earth, was in God, and must 
 have been in God before it came to light. As 
 
102 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 water will not rise higher than its source, so 
 no life can go beyond, — in its conception or in 
 its achievement — what lay within the bosom of 
 its Creator. Jesus Christ, then, in the beauty 
 and holiness of His Person, in all His pity and 
 passion of love, was potentially somewhere, 
 and must have been potentially somewhere be- 
 fore He appeared on this human scene. Now, 
 that Somewhere is God! I mean to say, that 
 there must have been in God room for Christ. 
 There must have been a fulness in God such as 
 could spare Christ, else Christ had never come. 
 The effect cannot be greater than the cause. 
 Christ, therefore, must have been in God po- 
 tentially. The power to give Christ to the 
 world — that must have been in God from all 
 eternity. The Spirit of Jesus Christ must for 
 ever have throbbed in the bosom of God, ready 
 to be revealed in the fulness of the times. As 
 the Evangelist puts it : " In the beginning was 
 the Word, and the Word was with God, and the 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 103 
 
 Word was God. The same was in the begin- 
 ning with God." 
 
 Now, there are many who are willing to ad- 
 mit so much who are not willing to admit more. 
 There are many who understand such a sen- 
 tence as " in the beginning was the Word " to 
 mean that from all eternity God had designed 
 to reveal Himself to man, that the thought of 
 Christ, the idea of Christ had always been in 
 the bosom of God. But to admit that the 
 thought or idea of Christ was always present 
 to God is to admit that always, from all eter- 
 nity, Christ was an object of thought for God, 
 — that from the beginning, One existed for 
 God, not Himself, yet not to be conceived apart 
 from Himself. But, I repeat, simply because 
 we must believe that " every good gift and 
 every perfect gift cometh down from above, 
 from the Father of Lights," we cannot stop 
 short of believing that Jesus Christ came out 
 from God, and that every grace for which we 
 
104 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 adore Jesus Christ must have been hid in God 
 from before all time. 
 
 To put the matter in another light: — Now 
 that Jesus Christ has appeared, we are com- 
 pelled, just as the Apostles were compelled, to 
 revise and to abandon our purely deistic con- 
 ception of God. Our conception of God must 
 have room within itself for the entire Person- 
 ality — the spirit, the soul, the love, the tears — 
 of Jesus Christ. God may no longer be con- 
 ceived by us as the Solitary Sovereign of the 
 worlds. He must no longer be conceived as 
 mere Might or Force. He must no longer be 
 thought of as merely " a great millionaire in 
 suns and stars," who might be excused for 
 not noticing- such beings as we are. It is no 
 honour to God now to say that He might well 
 have neglected us. That is all past, now that 
 Christ has come. We must now conceive of 
 God as that One who, from all eternity, in- 
 tended Christ; as that One who, from all 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 105 
 
 eternity, was pondering some way whereby He 
 might stoop to the rescue and recovery of 
 man : " that He loved us before we loved 
 Him." 
 
 I do not suppose for one moment that faith 
 can ever be compelled by reason, or that much 
 good is bound to come of trying to convince 
 people on matters of religion against their 
 will. We cannot in matters of faith * do a 
 great deal for each other. No man can give 
 his faith to another any more than he can give 
 another his imagination or his private history. 
 The deepest is unspeakable: a man's faith is 
 the blessed inclination of his whole being, urged 
 by its own reasons and by the Holy Ghost. 
 What I have been trying to do is to show, as I 
 find it good for myself to see, that once you 
 have been led by the necessities of your own 
 
 * Cf . my" Introduction to " Pilgrims in the Region of 
 Faith ; " also " Guidance from Robert Browning in 
 Matters of Faith." Chap. I.—" The Case for Belief." 
 
106 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 life, of your own thoughts, and your own feel- 
 ings, to lean with all your weight and weak- 
 ness upon Jesus Christ as upon the breast of 
 God, — there is really no contradiction between 
 such a faith and your reason: that they can 
 both dwell together in unity. It is all a great 
 mystery: but there must be mystery with any 
 conception of God. What I feel is, that to 
 believe in Christ as eternally with God is no 
 harder than to believe in God in eternal soli- 
 tude. In the deepest hour of His earthly life, 
 Jesus poured out His soul and said, " Father, 
 glorify Thou me with Thine own self with the 
 glory which I had with Thee before the world 
 was," — and in my own truest hours, when so 
 far as I can bear it I am alone — those words 
 come home to me as a Revelation which is not 
 to be discussed in the language of the schools, 
 — they come home to me as great music comes 
 home to me, provoking no definite question, 
 but baptizing my spirit in unworldliness. They 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 107 
 
 light up this world with such a meaning and 
 such a prospect that I say here or nowhere I 
 have come upon the truth! 
 
 I close with a consideration which is not 
 without force for certain minds. Unless we 
 know God in the Face of Jesus Christ we do 
 not know Him at all. Nay, in that case, we 
 know nothing for certain. You go to Nature 
 for some conception of God. But Nature only 
 illustrates and confirms the belief in God or the 
 denial of God with which you approach her 
 and examine her processes, 'lis a fine hour, 
 indeed, the dawn, and it quickens the piety and 
 hope of all honourable souls to see the sun 
 burst fresh upon the world. But there is more 
 than dawn in any day : there is twilight, there 
 is darkness; and if the morning brings joy to 
 man's soul, the night by the same law should 
 bring despair. There are beautiful things in 
 this world, indeed, things on which noble souls 
 might base a genial doctrine concerning the 
 
io8 THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 Author of all. There are twittering birds nest- 
 ing under the eaves of charming homes. But 
 in this world there are terrible things likewise. 
 There are sheer precipices which crush the soul 
 of man, there are yawning depths of moun- 
 tains which, had man no other ground for 
 faith, would pour contempt upon his hopes. 
 There is fire, there is tempest, there are dis- 
 eases, hatreds afflicting man. There is the un- 
 pitying warfare among beasts. There are ice- 
 bergs, tornadoes, sharks, and all the terrors of 
 the intolerable sea. And a faith which would 
 erect itself upon nature's humane and gentle 
 things must suffer shipwreck upon these sin- 
 ister aspects. 
 
 Or you go to history for some clue to the 
 mystery of things, for some light on " what 
 God and man is." But history shows disorder 
 just as resolutely as she manifests order, and 
 deplorable backsliding as unmistakably as 
 progress. Your massacres of S. Bartholomew 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD 109 
 
 and downfall-of-Polands would, if we had 
 nothing else to go by, give a sad and heart- 
 breaking guidance concerning Him who is in 
 all and through all and over all. In history 
 there are as many proofs of cruelty as there 
 are of kindness, of chance as of providence, of 
 evil as of good. 
 
 Yes, it is simply the fact that man, if he is 
 to bear up for ever against life and death, and 
 the multitudinous evil in things, and still more 
 if he is to become himself the Apostle of the 
 Good, undertaking trials and self-denials, his 
 own strength meanwhile growing feebler, the 
 grave awaiting him at the last, must have some 
 sign entirely above change, a point to stand 
 upon clear of the vortex of his warfare, some- 
 thing like a rock above the ebb and flow of 
 things, some Revelation in short of what God 
 is in Himself. " If I looked into a mirror," 
 said Newman, " and did not see my face, I 
 should have the sort of feeling which actually 
 
no THE AUTHORITY AND 
 
 comes upon me while I look into this living 
 busy world and see no Reflexion of its 
 Creator." 
 
 And so, in the face of every sad and terrible 
 conclusion to which the human mind might be 
 driven, as man kept looking without deeper in- 
 struction upon the life of races and nations, 
 and upon the lots of individual men, God has 
 sent His Son, placing Him in the highway of 
 human history, where the continents, the civ- 
 ilizations, the colours meet, that He might save 
 the soul in man from despair and confusion, 
 and weariness and shame and death ! " Truly, 
 if it had not been the Lord who was on our 
 side ... the stream had gone over our Soul." 
 
 In a most pathetic passage in Plato, we 
 are told that, in face of the great darkness and 
 mystery which are round about us in this 
 world, there is nothing for a man to do except 
 to take the best advice he can get as to how to 
 live, and then to take his chance, like a man 
 
PERSON OF OUR LORD m 
 
 crossing the lonely sea upon a raft, " not with- 
 out risk unless," the passage concludes, " we 
 can find some vessel more safe and solid, 
 some word from God on which we may make 
 this passage." And still there is no victory 
 over the world, no triumphant answer to its 
 monotonous challenge, no personal and un- 
 faltering ground for hope, for living greatly 
 and for praise, except by a humble and rever- 
 ent confidence, nurtured on the New Testa- 
 ment facts, breathing the New Testament at- 
 mosphere of spiritual miracle and wonder, that 
 in Jesus Christ we have the authentic voice 
 from out the silence, that in Jesus Christ there 
 dwells for us the fulness of the Godhead in 
 bodily form! 
 
 Lord, open Thou our eyes — that we may 
 see how Awful was and is our need of the 
 Coming of Thy Holy Son; and that we may 
 praise Thee for Thine overflowing answer to 
 the cry of that need, world without end. Amen. 
 

 §1181