CHAPTER XXII.

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST.

The Origin of the Faith-The Doctrines of Jesus-A Glance at the Present State of Christianity in America.

THERE is a painting by Munkacsy called Christ Before Pilate, which gives at a glance a more truthful conception of the origin of Christianity than we might be enabled to form by years of careful study. All the minute researches of the great German theologians and religious historians of the present century, which have done so much to distinguish for us the historical from the ideal Christ, the critical studies of Renan, the scholarly and eminently devout treatment of the subject which such men as Channing, Parker, Frothingham, Clarke, and Emerson have advanced,-all this great and good effort to dispel the fictions and still retain for the world the inspiration of Christianity has been voiced in this striking. picture. Confronting the Roman Judge, calm, thoughtful, and determined, with blanched and even haggard face, a coarse, uncouth dress, surrounded by clamorous adversaries representing the different classes of the Jews of Palestine, this man of Galilee awaits his fate. There is nothing ideal about the picture. It carries us back to the event itself, and, banishing for the instant the accumulations of superstition. through which we are accustomed to view it, gives us a glimpse, startling but true, of what actually took place.

The art of the world has done its best to portray Jesus. The resources of the human face have been exhausted to find expressions of benignity, moral power, and sweetness, and all the nobler attributes of manhood, in trying to do justice to.

the portraits, real and ideal, of this great man. This artist simply tried to tell the truth, and has surpassed them all.

Jesus as a man is immeasurably grander than as a God. As a God, faith in him is so unnatural that it cannot be reconciled with the better views of history, of science, and of life; but as a man he is one of the most commanding personages of our race.

When we criticise the writings which describe the life of Jesus, our object is not to decide whether Christ was God, but whether Jesus thought that he was God, and what conception of Deity was possible to him. His education, his social and moral surroundings, the ideals of the civilization to which he belonged, were all factors in the conception which he formed of God. His moral worth can only be estimated by considering the time and circumstances of his life. Moral character consists in an individual's relations to actual surroundings. These surroundings are factors in his life, and largely determine its quality. Many of the principles of social reform promulgated by the hero of the Gospels would have been entirely out of place in such mature civilizations as those of China, India, or Egypt, in the time of Jesus; and they have since been demonstrated to be utterly impracticable in any civilization. But the ideals of personal purity which Jesus advocated were based on a clearer and better view of life. They had been taught in other nations ages before the time of Jesus, and have invariably been found practical and beneficent. There is every evidence which a sincere inquiry can demand that the conception which Jesus formed of God was cast in the mould of Israelitish thought and feeling, and was an inevitable consequence of the circumstances and history of his race. God to him was a person, not a principle. His mind had been little exercised in those methodical classifications which the thoughtful in Egypt, Greece, and other nations had carried to such perfection, and which constitute the germ of modern science. Jesus was not only entirely unconscious of the vast achievements of Greek culture, but he was ignorant of the only truly liberal Jewish culture of his own

time. The beautiful philosophic essays of Philo, his contemporary, a representative Jew of Alexandria, in which we find many moral and religious precepts at least equal in value to the teachings of the Nazarene, were not only unknown to Jesus, but belonged to a body of learning which was strictly interdicted by the religious authorities of Palestine. The virtues which we so much admire in the character of Jesus: his deep-laid moral purpose, coming as it did from an earnest and sincere nature, in which there is a constant play of the broadest and most delicate human sympathies; his patience and cheerfulness under the hardships of poverty; his stern opposition to the hollowness and hypocrisy of the established religion of his time, were not original with him, but had been set as an example to the Jews by Hillel, the moralist and reformer of fifty years before, who promulgated maxims which correspond, to a marvellous extent, with the best teachings of Jesus.

The atmosphere in which Jesus lived was charged with mysteries and superstitions. His crushed race, unable to maintain independence among the stronger nations surrounding it, gave vent to pent-up feelings of sorrow and vague hope by forming a religion which has few parallels in history for passionate imagery and sublime selfishness. Judaism is the religion of a race whose destiny is held to be of much greater importance than that of the rest of humanity, whose God is not only exclusive, but the violent enemy of all other nations who for any reason oppose the Hebrews. The canons of the sacred books of this religion were wrought into a vast allegory, fantastic, provincial, unenlightened, and breathing throughout a longing for some physical deliverer who should re-establish the Jewish state and give to the nation another lease of independence. That Jesus was not unaffected by these longings for a national deliverer is manifested in his life and teachings, as far as they can be discerned through the mists which surround them. The impassioned dreams and eloquence of the prophets, the legends, such as the Book of Daniel, which professes to see in the rise

and fall of empires but movements in a great drama which was being performed for the exclusive benefit of the Jews, cannot but have inspired him with that Semitic dream of dominion called the kingdom of God.

The countrymen of Jesus were continually looking forward to a universal catastrophe, in which their deliverance was to be the central figure. Nothing was lacking in the details which their imaginations bestowed upon this looked-for event. The most gorgeous cosmical phenomena were to accompany it, and to the mind of Jesus this programme, with all its marvellous superstitions, appeared simple and natural. "The earth to him appears still to be divided into kingdoms which were at war; he seems to be ignorant of the 'Roman peace' and the new state of society which his century inaugurated. He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the name of 'Cæsar' alone had reached him. He saw the building, in Galilee or its environs, of Tiberias, Julius, Diocesarea, and Cesarea,-pompous works of the Herods, who sought by these magnificent constructions to prove their admiration for Roman civilization and their devotion to the members of the family of Augustus, whose names, by a freak of fate, serve to-day, grotesquely mutilated, to designate the wretched hamlets of the Bedouins. ✶ ✶ ✶ But this luxury of power, this governmental and official art, was displeasing to him. What he loved was his Galilean villages, confused medleys of cabins, of threshing-floors and wine-presses cut in the rock, of wells and tombs, of fig and olive trees. He always continued near to nature. The court of the kings seemed to him a place where people wear fine clothes. The charming impossibilities with which his parables swarm when he puts kings and mighty men upon the scene prove that he had no conception of aristocratic society save that of a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his own simplicity."'

The idea of immortality, as we use the word, was first developed in Egypt. It was for a long time a stranger in

1 Renan: "Life of Jesus, " pp. 78, 79.

Palestine. Future life to the early Jews was the projection of their natural life, just as to the man of science and philosophy, future existence is the life of the human family passing through its generations. The ancient Hebrew writings contain no trace of future rewards and punishments. In the time of Jesus Judaism had its Sadducees, who maintained the old belief in the identity of body and soul, and the Pharisees, who believed that the just would live again. Between these parties or sects there was a controversy as to the correct principle of immortality, the one teaching that virtue should be its own reward, and the other that the soul is immortal in order that it may be rewarded or punished. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as it is now generally held by the different Christian sects, did not exist among the Jews of the time of Jesus, but was an outgrowth of the Pharisaic idea of the resurrection; the theory of the return of the just to Abraham's bosom, and of the New Jerusalem, with all its minute plans, varying from a reorganization of the nations of the world into a Jewish kingdom of God, to a new world which was to follow a season of universal wrath and destruction. It was a confirmed habit of the Jews of Palestine to torture the simple narratives of the old Hebrew scriptures, in order to make them yield all sorts of predictions concerning their race. Messianism was the pre-occupying subject of the national mind. The great principles of history were but poorly appreciated, if understood at all, by the Jews of the time of Jesus; and yet we are confronted with the unwelcome but incontrovertible fact, that their insufficient theories of life form the groundwork of nearly all of our religious conceptions. Into this narrow mould of Hebrew thought and feeling the minds and characters of millions of our fellowcountrymen are yearly cast, which accounts for much of the moral and intellectual imbecility which we see about us. Still we continue to teach the pernicious doctrine of future rewards and punishments as an incentive for virtue; still we detract from the awful responsibilities, the high privileges of