BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $46. The concord of philosophy. separate framework or part of the framework appropriated to it, while the clearness and distinctness in the other case are changes in the framework, separate religion and additions to it, which can be expressed in words, and the knowledge of them communicated to men of less intellectual power. Hence the progressiveness of knowledge, science, philosophy, in contrast to the non-progressiveness of intellectual power and emotional vigour, the work of knowledge being carried on by all workers who add each his own separate elaboration. To use Bacon's image, the disciples are dwarfs, but dwarfs standing on the shoulders of a giant. Now it is the framework of the emotion of the great Master of those who feel that his disciples have taken up and elaborated, but without its vividness; a framework founded in great part upon the very words of the master himself, since he necessarily used the images, shared the intellectual beliefs, and expressed them in the language, which were current in his day. His disciples think that in elaborating the framework they are obeying the commands of the master; but surely they misconceive him; it was not these images, this framework, this philosophy, for which he cared, but his aim was to set religion free from being trammelled by any framework whatever. 3. I am far from saying that there is no progress in emotion, moral and religious; but the great groups or kinds of emotion are to be compared to the great kinds of classes of science, such as those, for instance, which form Comte's hierarchy of the sciences. In both these cases the list of kinds is complete ; further changes, the arising of new emotions in the one, of new sciences in the other, will be by compo sition and recomposition of sciences and of emotions which lie within the limits thus marked out, by more complete organisation of matters already comprehended generally or provisionally. This in the case of the emotions will be to render them more numerous, more complicated, and more subtil. Their greater vividness or intensity will remain, as hitherto, the prerogative of the great religious teachers, as intellectual power of the great scientific and philosophical leaders. History exhibits an illustrious series of Masters of either kind, majestic in their sublime isolation, like mountain summits unknown to the dwellers at their base, but communing with each other in mutual sympathy and comprehension. But while in the series of the great chiefs of intellect there is no strongly marked superiority of one over another, but all, so far as we can judge them, are equals in dignity and power, in that of religion and morality there is One, Jesus of Nazareth, to whom all the rest do homage, as their Master and Lord, in right of an immeasurable preeminence. BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. § 46. The concord of religion and philosophy. $47. Provisional of God. § 47. 1. Let us now turn back to the consideration of the provisional nature of the embodiment of manifestation the Ideal Object of religion. Love and justice are personal qualities, but it is impossible for us to imagine these emotions alone as constituting by themselves an entire or complete person. Hence the immateriality and unsearchability of God, since the remaining qualities of his personality are, by his very definition, unknown to us, and are therefore completely provisional. When however we wish to realise him in thought and feeling, which is a process of imagination idealising truly, we are led by a natural tendency to supply in imagination some embodiment BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $ 47. Provisional of God. to complete the image. Dante and Milton have, as poets, taken the physical object Light to serve as this embodiment. Every such choice of object is manifestation confessedly poetical and arbitrary. But in the natural tendency to make the choice lies the connection between religion and mythology, poetry, idolatry, worship of heroes, ancestors, and departed friends; or, to express the same thing more generally, between religion itself and particular religious systems. It is not true to characterise all such worship and such imagination as irreligious, or even as non-religious. It has one basis in religion itself, that is, in the religious emotions as they are felt from time to time, or in those emotions which are from time to time felt as religion, and another in the tendency to realise, which is apparently ineradicable in man's nature. But all such imagination must be strictly criticised, in order not only that it may have its objects truly compatible with the true Ideal Object, but also that it may not substitute for that its own objects, but that, to use St. Paul's expression, "God may be all in all." Most, if not all, religious systems have split upon this rock; they have identified an Actual with an Ideal, and therefore involve a logical contradiction. But the selection of such an embodiment can be no arbitrary choice, no merely poetical imagination; it is the religious imagination which makes it, and the embodiment when selected becomes to the mind the manifestation of the Ideal Object of religion, that is, of God himself. If there is an arbitrary or merely poetical choice, the embodiment selected will not be to the mind the manifestation of God, and will not secure belief. The Christian Church has selected a single man, a real person in BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $ 47. Provisional of God. history, as the manifestation of God; that man who was the founder of the Church, and who in his own. person manifested to his disciples the combination of love and justice in their purest and intensest shape, manifestation so that the manifestation was to them originally, and is still to their successors, the revelation of a new life. It was the character of Jesus Christ, displayed in his ministry, which was the actually determinant cause, in history, of imprinting in the conscience of mankind the perception of justice and love as the essential characteristics of God; that is, it was the revelation of God to mankind in that character. And therefore it remains, so long as that perception shall last, its purest realisation and embodiment. 2. If the question is asked, as it is not only necessary but just that it should be, What are the characteristics which define or constitute for us at the present day the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the answer must be something like the following. It is he who gave the precepts known, in their collected form, as the Sermon on the Mount, together with many other of the precepts, exhortations, and parables, which are found in the three synoptic Gospels; whose life corresponded completely to his words; thinking no evil, forgiving, fearless, tender, desiring the love and tenderness of others; who in some form or other instituted the Lord's Supper; who finally suffered crucifixion as the consequence of his adhering to the law of his life; and these are all points which historical criticism, so far at least as I am acquainted with it, not only does not overthrow, but tends strongly to establish. We know in fact, from the testimony of Papias, preserved by Eusebius, that Matthew made a collection of λóya, and that Mark BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $47. Provisional of God. wrote the things said and done by Christ; these are no doubt comprised in the two first Gospels as we read them at present; and to these Luke may have manifestation added other trustworthy notices. (See Prof. J. H. Scholten's work Das älteste Evangelium, translated into German by Dr. Redepenning.) And it must be remembered, that, whatever might be the difficulties in establishing such points as those mentioned above by a consideration of the Gospels alone, as we read them at present, owing to their many discrepancies, their close interweaving of the miraculous in the narrative, and the uncertainty of the dates of their composition, we are yet compelled to assume, as a fact preliminary to the criticism of these documents, that the person of whom they speak was not only an actual person in history, but also one of a most impressive moral and religious character, from the fact of the formation, in his name, of the closely united Church immediately after his death, and from the firmly held beliefs about him in that church, particularly the belief in his resurrection. But this very dependence on, or necessity of appealing to, actual history, and the evidence of particular facts, shows the essential difference between the adoption of this or any other embodiment of the great Ideal Object of religion and faith in, or worship of, that Ideal Object himself; for the latter excludes all inferential evidence, being immediately certain and self-evident. Still, whatever the embodiment, it becomes invested, in the eyes of those who have chosen it, and by the very fact of choice, with some of the attributes of divinity, that is, becomes an object of worship, of faith, and of prayer, a mediation or a mediator between God and the man who seeks to approach him |