268

St. John's writings fatal to the theory.

of Ewald, 'we are prepared knowingly to receive falsehood and to reject truth.' But we have also seen that in the fourth Gospel, Jesus Christ is proclaimed to be God by the whole drift of the argument, and in terms as explicit as those of the Nicene Creed. We have not then to deal with any supposed process of deification, whereby the Person of Jesus was transfigured' in the apprehension of sub-apostolic, or post-apostolic Christendom. It is St. John who proclaims that Jesus is the Word Incarnate, and that the Word is God. How can we account for St. John's conduct in representing Him as God, if He was in truth only man? It will not avail to argue that St. John wrote his Gospel in his old age, and that the memories of his youthful companionship with Jesus had been coloured, heightened, transformed, idealized, by the meditative enthusiasm of more than half a century. It will not avail to say that the reverence of the beloved disciple for his ascended Master was fatal to the accuracy of the portrait which he drew of Him. For what is this but to misapprehend the very fundamental nature of reverence? Truth is the basis, as it is the object of reverence, not less than of every other virtue. Reverence prostrates herself before a greatness the reality of which is obvious to her; but she would cease to be reverence if she could exaggerate the greatness which provokes her homage, not less surely than if she could depreciate or deny it. The sentiment which, in contemplating its object, abandons the guidance of fact for that of imagination, is disloyal to that honesty of purpose which is of the essence of reverence; and it is certain at last to subserve the purposes of the scorner and the spoiler. St. John insists that he teaches the Church only that which he has seen and heard. Even a slight swerving from truth must be painful to genuine reverence; but what shall we say of an exaggeration so gigantic, if an exaggeration. it be, as that which transforms a human friend into the Almighty and Everlasting God? If Jesus Christ is not God, how is it that the most intimate of His earthly friends, came to believe and to teach that He really is God?

Place yourselves, my brethren, fairly face to face with this difficulty; imagine yourselves, for the moment, in the position of St. John. Think of any whom you have loved and revered, beyond measure, as it has seemed, in past years. He has gone; but you cling to him more earnestly in thought and affection than while he was here. You treasure his words, you revisit his haunts, you delight in the company of his friends, you represent to yourself his wonted turns of thought and phrase,

Could St. John have 'deified' a human friend? 269

you con over his handwriting, you fondle his likeness. These things are for you precious and sacred. Even now, there are times when the tones of that welcome voice seem to fall with living power upon your strained ear. Even now, the outline of that countenance, upon which the grave has closed, flits, as if capriciously, before your eye of sense. The air around you yields it perchance to your intent gaze, radiant with a higher beauty than it wore of old. Others, you feel, may be forgotten as memory grows weak, and the passing years bring with them the quick succession of new fields and objects of interest, pressing importunately upon the heart and thoughts. But one such memory as I have glanced at, fades not at the bidding of time. It cannot fade; it has become a part of the mind which clings to it. Some who are here may have known those whom they thus remember; a few of us assuredly have known such. But can we conceive it possible that, after any lapse of time, we should ever express our reverence and love for the unearthly goodness, the moral strength, the tenderness of heart, the fearlessness, the justice, the unselfishness of our friend, by saying that he was not an ordinary human being, but a superhuman person? Can we imagine ourselves incorporating our recollections about him with some current theosophic doctrine elevating him to the rank of a Divine hypostasis? While he lies in his silent grave, can we picture ourselves describing him as the very absolute Light and Life, as the Incarnate Thought of the Most High, as standing in a relationship altogether unique to the Eternal and Selfexistent Being, nay, as being literally God? To say that St. John lived in a different intellectual atmosphere from our own,' does not meet the difficulty. If Jesus was merely human, St. John's statements about Him are among the most preposterous fictions which have imposed upon the world. They were advanced with a full knowledge of all that they involved. St. John was at least as profoundly convinced as we are of the truth of the unity of the Supreme Being. St. John was at least as alive as we can be to the infinite interval which parts the highest of creatures from the Great Creator. If we are not naturally lured on by some irresistible fascination, by the poetry or by the credulity of our advancing years, to believe in the Godhead of the best man whom we have ever known, neither was St. John. If Jesus had been merely human, St. John would have felt what we feel about a loved and revered friend whom we have lost. In proportion to our belief in our friend's goodness, in proportion to our loving reverence for his character, is the strength of our conviction that

270 Mankind not prone to 'deify' human virtue.

we could not now do him a more cruel injury than by entwining a blasphemous fable, such as the ascription of Divinity would be, around the simple story of his merely human life. This 'deification of Jesus by the enthusiasm' of St. John would have been consistent neither with St. John's reverence for God, nor with his real loyalty to a merely human friend and teacher. St. John worshipped the 'jealous' God of Israel; and he has recorded the warning which he himself received against worshipping the angel of the Apocalypsex. If Christ had not really been Divine, the real beauty of His Human Character would have been disfigured by any association with such legendary exaggeration, and Christianity would assuredly have perished within the limits of the first century.

The theory that Jesus was deified by enthusiasm assumes the existence of a general disposition in mankind which is unwarranted by experience. Generally speaking men are not eager to believe in the exalted virtue, much less in the superhuman origin or dignity, of their fellow-men. And to do them justice, the writers who maintain that Jesus was invested with Divine honours by popular fervour, illustrate the weakness of their own principle very conspicuously. While they assert that nothing was more easy and obvious for the disciple of the apostolic age than to believe in the Divinity of his Master, they themselves reject that truth with the greatest possible obstinacy and determination; well-attested though it be, now as then, by historical miracles and by overwhelming moral considerations; but also proclaimed now, as it was not then, by the faith of eighteen centuries, and by the suffrages of all that is purest and truest in our existing civilization.

But, it is suggested that the apostolic narrative itself bears. out the doctrine that Jesus was deified through enthusiasm by its account of the functions which are ascribed, especially in St. John's Gospel, to the Comforter. Was not the Comforter sent to testify of Jesus? Is it not said, 'He shall glorify Me?' Does not this language look like the later endeavour of a religious phrenzy, to account for exaggerations of which it is conscious, by a bold claim to supernatural illumination ?

Now this suggestion implies that the last Discourse of our Lord is in reality a forgery, which can no more claim to represent His real thought than the political speeches in Thucydides can be seriously supposed to express the minds of the speakers to whom they are severally attributed. Or, at the least, it im- Rev. xxii. 9.

Illuminative Office of the Holy Ghost. 271

plies that a purely human feeling is here clothed by language ascribed to our Lord Himself with the attributes of a Divine Person. Of course, if St. John was capable of deliberately attributing to his Master that which He did not say, he was equally capable of attributing to Him actions which He did not do and we are driven to imagine that the closest friend of Jesus was believed by apostolical Christendom to be writing a history, when in truth he was only composing a biographical novel. But, as Rousseau has observed in words which have been already quoted, the original inventor of the Gospel history would have been as miraculous a being as its historical Subject. And the moral fascination which the last discourse possesses for every pure and true soul at this hour, combines with the testimony of the Church to assure us that it could have been spoken by no merely human lips, and that it is beyond the inventive scope of even the highest human genius. Those three chapters which M. Renan pronounces to be full of 'the dryness of metaphysics and the darkness of abstract dogmas' have been, as a matter of fact, watered by the tears of all the purest love and deepest sorrow of Christian humanity for eighteen centuries. Never is the New Testament more able to dispense with external evidence than in those matchless words; nowhere more than here is it sensibly divine.

с

Undoubtedly it is a fact that in these chapters our Lord does promise to His apostles the supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit. It is true that the Spirit was to testify of Christy and to glorify Christ, and to guide the disciples into all a truth. But how? 'He shall take of Mine and shall shew it unto you b;' 'He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you c.' The Holy Spirit was to bring the words and works and character of Jesus before the illuminated intelligence of the Apostles. The school of the Spirit was to be the school of reflection. But it was not to be the school of legendary invention. Acts, which, at the time of their being witnessed, might have appeared trivial or commonplace, would be seen, under the guidance of the Spirit, to have had a deeper interest. Words, to which a transient or local

y St. John xv. 26: ἐκεῖνος μαρτυρήσει περὶ ἐμοῦ.

z Ibid. xvi. 14 : ἐκεῖνος ἐμὲ δοξάσει.

* Ibid. ver. 13: ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν.

b Ibid. vers. 14, 15: ἐκ τοῦ ἐμοῦ λήψεται, καὶ ἀναγγελεῖ ὑμῖν.

• Ibid. xiv. 26 : ἐκεῖνος ὑμᾶς διδάξει πάντα, καὶ ὑπομνήσει ὑμᾶς πάντα ἃ εἶπον ὑμῖν.

272 Guidance of the Spirit and natural observation.

value had been assigned at first, would now be felt to invite a world-wide and eternal meaning. These things understood not His disciples at the first,' is true of much else besides the entry into Jerusalem d. Moral, spiritual, physical powers which, though unexplained, could never have passed for the product of purely human activity, would in time be referred by the Invisible Teacher to their true source; they would be regarded with awe as the very rays of Deity.

Thus the work of the Spirit would but complete, systematize, digest the results of previous natural observation. Certainly it was always impossible that any man could say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost e.' The inward teaching of the Holy Ghost alone could make the Godhead of Jesus a certainty of faith as well as a conclusion of the intellect. But the intellectual conditions of belief were at first inseparable from natural contact with the living Human Form of Jesus during the years of His earthly life. Our Lord implies this in saying Ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with Me from the beginning.' The Apostles lived with One Who combined an exercise of the highest miraculous powers with a faultless human character, and Who asserted Himself, by implication and expressly, to be personally God. The Spirit strengthened and formalized that earlier and more vague belief which was created by His language; but it was His language which had fallen on the natural ears of the Apostles, and which was the germinal principle of their riper faith in His Divinity.

The unbelief of our day is naturally anxious to evade the startling fact that the most intimate of the companions of Jesus is also the most strenuous assertor of His Godhead. There is a proverb to the effect that no man's life should be written by his private servant. That proverb expresses the general conviction of mankind that, as a rule, like some mountain scenery or ruined castles, moral greatness in men is more picturesque when it is viewed from a distance. The proverb bids you not to scrutinize even a good man too narrowly, lest perchance you should discover flaws in his character which will somewhat rudely shake your conviction of his goodness. It is hinted that some unobtrusive weaknesses which escape public observation will be obvious to a man's everyday companion, and will be fatal to the higher estimate which, but for such close scrutiny, might have been formed respecting him. But in the case of Jesus Christ d St. John xii. 14–16.

I

e 1 Cor. xii. 3 : οὐδεὶς δύναται εἰπεῖν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν, εἰ μὴ ἐν Πνεύματι Αγίῳ.