Robert Elsmere
faith--as short and simple as I can make it. You must let me describe
certain views of the universe and of man's place in it, which make the
framework, as it were, into which I shall ask you to fit the picture of
Jesus which will come after.'
Robert stood a moment considering. An instant's nervousness, a momentary
sign of self-consciousness, would have broken the spell and set the room
against him. He showed neither.
'My friends,' he said at last, speaking to the crowded benches of London
workmen with the same simplicity he would have used towards his boys at
Murewell, 'the man who is addressing you to-night believes in _God_; and
in _Conscience_, which is God's witness in the soul; and in
_Experience_, which is at once the record and the instrument of man's
education at God's hands. He places his whole trust, for life and death,
"_in God the Father Almighty_"--in that force at the root of things
which is revealed to us whenever a man helps his neighbour, or a mother
denies herself for her child; whenever a soldier dies without a murmur
for his country, or a sailor puts out in the darkness to rescue the
perishing; whenever a workman throws mind and conscience into his work,
or a statesman labours not for his own gain but for that of the State!
He believes in an Eternal Goodness--and an Eternal Mind--of which Nature
and Man are the continuous and the only revelation....'
The room grew absolutely still. And into the silence there fell, one by
one, the short terse sentences, in which the seer, the believer,
struggled to express what God has been, is, and will ever be to the soul
which trusts Him. In them the whole effort of the speaker was really to
restrain, to moderate, to depersonalise the voice of faith. But the
intensity of each word burnt it into the hearer as it was spoken. Even
Lady Charlotte turned a little pale--the tears stood in her eyes.
Then, from the witness of God in the soul, and in the history of man's
moral life, Elsmere turned to the glorification of _Experience_, 'of
that unvarying and rational order of the world which has been the
appointed instrument of man's training since life and thought began.'
'_There_,' he said slowly, 'in the unbroken sequences of nature, in the
physical history of the world, in the long history of man, physical,
intellectual, moral--_there_ lies the revelation of God. There is no
other, my friends!'
Then, while the room hung on his words, he entered on a brief exposition
of the text, '_Miracles do not happen_,' restating Hume's old argument,
and adding to it some of the most cogent of those modern arguments drawn
from literature, from history, from the comparative study of religions
and religious evidence, which were not practically at Hume's disposal,
but which are now affecting the popular mind as Hume's reasoning could
never have affected it.
'We are now able to show how miracle, or the belief in it, which is the
same thing, comes into being. The study of miracle in all nations, and
under all conditions, yields everywhere the same results. Miracle may
be the child of imagination, of love, nay, of a passionate sincerity,
but invariably it lives with ignorance and is withered by knowledge!'
And then, with lightning unexpectedness, he turned upon his audience, as
though the ardent soul reacted at once against a strain of mere
negation.
'But do not let yourselves imagine for an instant that, because in a
rational view of history there is no place for a Resurrection and
Ascension, therefore you may profitably allow yourself a mean and
miserable mirth of _this_ sort over the past!'--and his outstretched
hand struck the newspapers beside him with passion, 'Do not imagine for
an instant that what is binding, adorable, beautiful in that past is
done away with when miracle is given up! No, thank God! We still "live
by admiration, hope, and love." God only draws closer, great men become
greater, human life more wonderful as miracle disappears. Woe to you if
you cannot see it!--it is the testing truth of our day.
'And besides--do you suppose that mere violence, mere invective, and
savage mockery ever accomplished anything--nay, what is more to the
point, ever _destroyed_ anything in human history? No--an idea cannot be
killed from without--it can only be supplanted, transformed, by another
idea, and that one of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox! In the
moral world you cannot pull down except by gentleness--you cannot
revolutionise except by sympathy. Jesus only superseded Judaism by
absorbing and recreating all that was best in it. There are no
inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of humanity. The religion of
to-day, with all its faults and mistakes, will go on unshaken so long as
there is nothing else of equal loveliness and potency to put in its
place. The Jesus of the churches will remain paramount so long as the
man of to-day imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge
from loving the Jesus of history.
'But _why_? you will ask me. What does the Jesus of history matter to
me?'
And so he was brought to the place of great men in the development of
mankind--to the part played in the human story by those lives in which
men have seen all their noblest thoughts of God, of duty, and of law
embodied, realised before them with a shining and incomparable beauty.
'... You think--because it is becoming plain to the modern eye that the
ignorant love of his first followers wreathed his life in legend, that
therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, you can put him aside
as though he had never been? Folly! Do what you will, you cannot escape
him. His life and death underlie our institutions as the alphabet
underlies our literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed
are wrought ineffaceably into the civilisation of Africa and Asia, so
the life of Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilisation,
the nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your being
and into mine. We are what we are to-night, as Englishmen and as
citizens, largely because a Galilean peasant was born and grew to
manhood, and preached, and loved, and died. And you think that a fact so
tremendous can be just scoffed away--that we can get rid of it, and of
our share in it, by a ribald paragraph and a caricature!
'No. Your hatred and your ridicule are powerless. And thank God they are
powerless. There is no wanton waste in the moral world, any more than in
the material. There is only fruitful change and beneficent
transformation. Granted that the true story of Jesus of Nazareth was
from the beginning obscured by error and mistake; granted that those
errors and mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are now
its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time are now
threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen the hold of Jesus
on the love and remembrance of man. What then? The fact is merely a call
to you and me, who recognise it, to go back to the roots of things, to
reconceive the Christ, to bring him afresh into our lives, to make the
life so freely given for man minister again in new ways to man's new
needs. Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great
ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.
And woe to our human weakness if it loose its hold one instant before it
must on any of those rare and precious possessions which have helped it
in the past, and may again inspire it in the future!
'_To reconceive the Christ!_ It is the special task of our age, though
in some sort and degree it has been the ever-recurring task of Europe
since the beginning.'
He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood by those who
heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great operation worked by the
best intellect of Europe during the last half-century--broadly
speaking--on the facts and documents of primitive Christianity. From all
sides and by the help of every conceivable instrument those facts have
been investigated, and now at last the great result--'the revivified
reconceived truth'--seems ready to emerge! Much may still be known--much
can never be known; but if we will, we may now discern the true features
of Jesus of Nazareth, as no generation but our own has been able to
discern them, since those who had seen and handled passed away.
'Let me try, however feebly, and draw it afresh for you, that life of
lives, that story of stories, as the labour of our own age in particular
has patiently revealed it to us. Come back with me through the
centuries; let us try and see the Christ of Galilee and the Christ of
Jerusalem as he was, before a credulous love and Jewish tradition and
Greek subtlety had at once dimmed and glorified the truth. Ah! do what
we will, it is so scanty and poor, this knowledge of ours, compared with
all that we yearn to know--but, such as it is, let me, very humbly and
very tentatively, endeavour to put it before you.'
At this point Flaxman's attention was suddenly distracted by a stir
round the door of entrance on his left hand. Looking round, he saw a
Ritualist priest, in cassock and cloak, disputing in hurried undertones
with the men about the door. At last he gained his point apparently, for
the men, with half-angry, half-quizzing looks at each other, allowed him
to come in, and he found a seat. Flaxman was greatly struck by the
face--by its ascetic beauty, the stern and yet delicate whiteness and
emaciation of it. He sat with both hands resting on the stick he held in
front of him, intently listening, the perspiration of physical weakness
on his brow and round his finely curved mouth. Clearly he could hardly
see the lecturer, for the room had become inconveniently crowded, and
the men about him were mostly standing.
'One of the St. Wilfrid's priests, I suppose,' Flaxman said to himself.
'What on earth is he doing _dans cette galere_? Are we to have a
disputation? That would be dramatic.'
He had no attention, however, to spare, and the intruder was promptly
forgotten. When he turned back to the platform he found that Robert,
with Mackay's help, had hung on a screen to his right, four or five
large drawings of Nazareth, of the Lake of Gennesaret, of Jerusalem, and
the Temple of Herod, of the ruins of that synagogue on the probable site
of Capernaum in which conceivably Jesus may have stood. They were bold
and striking, and filled the bare hall at once with suggestions of the
East. He had used them often at Murewell. Then, adopting a somewhat
different tone, he plunged into the life of Jesus. He brought to it all
his trained historical power, all his story-telling faculty, all his
sympathy with the needs of feeling. And bit by bit, as the quick nervous
sentences issued and struck, each like the touch of a chisel, the
majestic figure emerged, set against its natural background, instinct
with some fraction at least of the magic of reality, most human, most
persuasive, most tragic. He brought out the great words of the new
faith, to which, whatever may be their literal origin, Jesus, and Jesus
only, gave currency and immortal force. He dwelt on the magic, the
permanence, the expansiveness, of the young Nazarene's central
conception--the spiritualised, universalised 'Kingdom of God.' Elsmere's
thought, indeed, knew nothing of a perfect man, as it knew nothing of an
incarnate God; he shrank from nothing that he believed true; but every
limitation, every reserve he allowed himself, did but make the whole
more poignantly real, and the claim of Jesus more penetrating.
'The world has grown since Jesus preached in Galilee and Judaea. We
cannot learn the _whole_ of God's lesson from him now--nay, we could not
then! But all that is most essential to man--all that saves the soul,