Preface

I have called these discourses ‘Lectures,’ not sermons. — They are strictly readings on the Gospel of St. Luke. But they were addressed to a congregation. The ordinary rules of preaching were observed in the delivery of them; a text was placed at the head of each. It was chosen because much of the sense of the surrounding passages seemed to be woven into it. That, I presume, is the meaning of a text;’ the justification for its use in the pulpit. It should always suggest, and in some sort compel, the study of the book from which it is taken; it should never be forgotten in the disquisition which is appended to it. When I revised the lectures, and prepared them for the press, I might, along with other alterations, have dropped these headings. But I was unwilling to give the book the form of a commentary, or to lose any of the links which connected the Gospel that is written with the Gospel that is preached. Why I felt this reluctance will be evident if I explain the object of the course, and the circumstances which suggested it.

The life of a Jesus who was not the Christ, who is not the King of Men, who came from no Father in heaven, who baptised with no Spirit, who did not rise from the dead, has been written with consummate ability. Though this Jesus claimed titles which were not his, though he practised mean deceptions, he has been recognised as a hero both by his biographer, and by numbers who have read the biography. Men and women, rich and poor, in all parts of what we still called Christendom, have been inclined to accept him as a substitute for the Person whom in their infancy they were taught to revere. If they could fully accept him, casting away all their old impressions, a great incubus, they think, would be taken from their spirits, they would breathe more freely.

In these Lectures I have endeavoured to ascertain what is told us respecting the life of Jesus by one of those Evangelists who proclaim Him to be the Christ, who says that He did come from a Father, that He did baptise with the Holy Spirit, that He did rise from the dead. I have chosen the one who is most directly connected with the later history of the Church, who was not an Apostle, who professedly wrote for the use of a man already instructed in the faith of the Apostles. I have followed the course of this writer’s narrative, not changing it under any pretext. I have adhered to his phraseology, striving to avoid the substitution of any other for his.

Can such a task be necessary in our days? Is not every Sunday-school child acquainted with the letter of the Gospels? Is it not our business to consider whence they were derived, how they may be interpreted and modified to suit the temper of our times, what divine and human elements there may be in them, how far they represent exactly the acts and words of Christ, how far they embody thoughts and beliefs of which the Evangelists became possessed after their Master had departed from them? I do not question the wisdom of discussing any of these questions. I am glad to profit by the learning and sagacity of those who take part in them on either side. But I have not found the other task, which requires no learning, superfluous for myself. I think it is not superfluous for our age.

If the children in Sunday-schools understand and accept the letter of the Gospels, their teachers and those who preach to them out of pulpits, I fear, do not. Certain conventional notions mingle themselves with it in all our minds; we read it as if they were inseparable from it. Clergymen receive these notions as sacred heirlooms. They are enforced by public opinion. If an ecclesiastical synod should acquire the power of imposing penalties, spiritual or civil, they will be enforced by those penalties. They subvert, as it seems to me, the words of the Bible and the principle of the Creeds. They create that wish to be rid of Him who is the centre and subject of the New Testament history which M. Renan’s book has developed. At the same time they contain the germs of the new faith. The Jesus of the Frenchman has been formed in orthodox schools and circles.

I purpose in this preface to indicate three or four of these conventional notions. I have done what I could that my reader might be able to test them by the Scriptures themselves. Whatever be his opinions, he will have every motive to expose me. I am about to encounter a set of interpretations which apologists for the Bible take for granted, which opposers of the Bible equally take for granted. I should not dare to dispute them if I were not convinced that God Himself is proving them to be untenable, and is calling upon us to abandon them as the only condition on which we can retain the belief of our forefathers.

I. In these Lectures I have had again and again to consider the question whether the Gospel of St. Luke exhibits to us a Christ who breaks through the order of the universe by strange and irregular acts of power. That He did so is assumed by the writers of our books of evidence. That He could transgress laws is said to be the proof of the truth of His mission. ‘All that reverence for fixed laws which characterises our time—which is the encouragement to our scientific inquiries, and the fruit of them—rebels against such a proof. ’The tokens,’ says the objector, ‘of One who comes from the God of order should be, that He upholds order, not that He violates it.’ That assertion seems to be incontrovertible. Gods made out of men’s own thoughts—gods made in the likeness of things in heaven, or earth or under the earth—may be capricious as those thoughts are capricious, may be variable as the things which we observe are variable. The proper ministers of such gods are enchanters and magicians, who play tricks with nature that they may prove how great and wise they are. The ministers of a God who gives the sea its bounds that it should not pass, who hath established the earth and it abideth, should take the very opposite course to that of these magicians. They should be witnesses for laws, against anomalies. They should shew that there is a living and eternal order which all the changes and vicissitudes of nature obey. They should shew that true power is exercised in obedience to this order, that all power which sets it aside is to be broken in pieces.

It seems to me that exactly the claim which the Evangelists put forth for Jesus is, that He was the revealer and assertor of the Divine order, that He entered into conflict with the anomalies which disturbed that order. He came, they say, preaching the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of the eternal, unchangeable God. The laws of that Kingdom He proclaimed as more fundamental, less capable of any suspension or modification, than the laws that were written on stone and were ratified by thunders and lightnings. This Kingdom of Heaven is a Kingdom over men. But Christ drew His illustrations of it from the facts and the course of nature. That He exhibited as another part of the same living order. What we call miracles are said to be the signs and powers of the heavenly kingdom, the signs of its permanent nature, the powers by which it works out its effects. How do they answer to these titles? They are directed against the confusions of the world, against the plagues and torments which distract human life. Is the novelty of these acts the proof of their greatness? The Evangelists’ language would lead us to exactly the contrary opinion. Christ is said to do the works of His Father in Heaven. If He was really the Son of God, if He might really claim to manifest His Father’s mind and will to men, this would be just the account of them which we should expect, which we should consider most reasonable. And therefore it must be a secret feeling that He was not this, that the words which seem to import this are not real but fictitious words, that has led to the theory upon which we are at times ready to rest the whole evidence of the Gospels. That such a view of things was very reasonable in the Unitarian apologists for the Gospels in the last century, that it may not have seemed very unreasonable to Paley, I quite understand. But can those who adhere to the words of our Creeds, can those who take the declaration of Christ’s Sonship in a strict sense, can those who think that all human sonship is the image of His, accept that hypothesis? These are thoughts which I would suggest to persons who are eager to uphold the popular notion of miracles. Before they charge any who dissent from it as heretics, they should consider carefully whether they are orthodox. At all events, they should ask themselves whether they are adhering to the letter of the statements in the Evangelists, or are departing from it; whether there is anywhere to be found in them a hint of that exaltation of power at the expense of law which is becoming characteristic of our divinity.

I admit, then, the full force of the objection which the advocates of the Renan Gospel allege against us—who profess to be the champions of the old Gospel. But I think that we have incurred this charge by departing from that old Gospel, and by practically accepting the premises upon which the new Gospel rests. We start from the idea of a natural Jesus: we attribute to Him certain supernatural exercises of power. All such exercises are by the very assumption irregular, anomalous. The old Gospel starts from the supernatural ground, assumes a supernatural Being to be the Author of the universe, to have created it according to laws which are the expression of His mind. The tendency has been apparent in human creatures at all times to make themselves the measures of the universe, to deduce laws from appearances, to mould the lawgiver after their conceptions. The revelation of a Creator is the counteraction of this tendency, the discovery of Him who preserves the harmonies of the universe, the witness that its discords cannot be perpetual. ‘There is no such revelation,’ says the new Gospel; everything begins from phenomena, or from man, the observer of phenomena.’ Then, if the past history of the world is true, there will be a succession of enchanters like the Jesus of Renan. The more any man is a reformer—the more impatient he is of the abuses he sees around him, of the evils which are besetting his fellow-creatures—the more he will practise these falsehoods; he has no other chance. He must cheat if he is to save his fellow-creatures from being cheated. He must lie, if he has the least care that truth should prevail.

II. The second notion to which I shall allude is this, ‘The New Testament is the proclamation of a certain religion. It is the true religion, the religion which all ought to believe. The Gospels contain the simpler part of this religion. The doctrines or mysteries are set forth in the Epistles.’ This statement would strike a number of readers as too obvious to be disputed. Whatever may be the evidence which supports the authority either of Gospels or Epistles, this account of them—that they announce or embody a religion—would be equally accepted by all parties of Christians, and by those who reject Christianity.

‘But then,’ say these last, though you are all agreed that these books contain a religion, and that it is the true religion, the only religion, the religion which all men ought to receive, you are not the least agreed what it is. Greeks, Romanists, Protestants, are at war upon that question. Protestants are split into a multitude of sects, each of which declares that its own is the Christian religion. When you are brought face to face with Hindoos or Buddhists, they ask you which of your different religions you wish them to accept; and you can make no answer, or only the most stammering answer. When you are brought face to face with Mahometans, they can boast that their religion grew up six centuries after yours; that it conquered a number of the countries which once were yours; that it does not yield at all to the force of your arguments.’

These facts are indisputable. If there are any special pleas to be urged against them, I have no such pleas. They seem to me just as important as any facts of nature. I cannot believe in God without regarding them as His facts. I cannot shut my eyes to them without trying to hide from myself some lessons, profound, tremendous lessons, which He is teaching us.

But are the Gospels the announcement of a religion? Is that what they profess to be? Is that the conception which would be formed of them by any one who simply read them as they are written? Does the word religion,’ or anything which answers to that word, even occur in them? Do they not profess to be the account of One who was born King of the Jews, who did certain acts proving in the judgment of the Evangelists, that that title was really His, whose claims were rejected by the Jewish priests and rulers? Do not the Evangelists say that Jesus preached the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven to all classes and conditions of men—that He claimed all as His subjects? Do they not say that this was the main cause of his rejection; that His greatest opponents were those who professed a strict and exclusive religion, and who drew sharp lines between themselves and the rest of their countrymen? Is not the connection between the Gospels and the other parts of the New Testament this, that the Apostles proclaimed the son of David to have risen from the dead, and ascended on high, that He might be the King of all men? Did not their battle with their countrymen turn upon the question, whether there was a Son of Man who might be announced by that name to Jews and Greeks, to Barbarians and Scythians, to bondsmen and freemen, whether there was One in whom God had reconciled the world to Himself, One in whom all things in Heaven and earth shall be at last gathered up?

If we adhere to this language, we must cast aside the other however plausible it sounds. We must treat it as an invention of men, as their substitute for the message of God. Those who hold the Bible not only to contain, but to be, the word of God, are especially bound to take this course. And if we do take it, the Gospels will themselves explain to us why the attempt to make men embrace a religion must have been, and must for ever be, futile. Men by their religion, seek to establish some meeting-place or reconciliation between them and God. The Gospel is the news that God is reconciled to man in His Son, that in Him there is a meeting-point between God and man. A religion must always be affected by the local habits, by the individual temperaments, of those who profess it. A Gospel is the unveiling or discovery to men of a common Head. At the message of a Son of Man in whom Jews and Greeks were one, a Church consisting of men with different languages, opposing habits, contracted educations, hostile religions, started into life. At the message of a Son of Man who had taken the nature of men, Goths rose out of their brutal condition, Latins rose out of a civilization which was worse than barbarism. Then there grew out of the conceptions which Latins formed of this Gospel, a Latin religion; out of the conceptions which Greeks formed of it, a Greek religion; out of the conceptions which Goths formed of it, a Gothic religion. These religions were at variance with each other. Within each of them there were elements of continual strife. They had no force before the Islamite shout, ‘There is one God; a man is His prophet and the conqueror in His Name.’ That mighty and living message could only be encountered by nations which confessed an actual King—one with man, one with God—as the bond of their fellowship. But the Islamite faith lasted on. For the West, while it could organise its polity and fight its battles in this Name, must have its religion, its schemes of drawing nigh to God, its methods of propitiation. In the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, the name of the Eternal Father confronted the mere ruler who was represented by Caliphs and Sultans. He was hidden from the people by mediators visible and invisible. He from whom all grace and love proceed was continually presented to the conscience as the great object of its terror, in the very likeness of the Evil Spirit. His perfect Image was of necessity darkened, as He was darkened. The Saints or the Virgin—generally some local virgin—must persuade the Son to persuade His Father not to punish crimes which it was infinitely desirable for the order of society, for the cause of righteousness, that He should punish, to ask toleration for sins by which His children were enslaved. Against this Latin religion came forth the Gospel, ‘God has made peace with us in His Son. We may trust the Son absolutely to put away sins. Indulgences are the devil’s gifts, not His.’ But the Gospel of Luther became the religion of Lutheranism. It was opposed by the religion of Geneva, by the religion of Zurich, by the religion of England. Each nation has been great while it has acknowledged Jesus as a King; each sect has been great when it has accepted a Gospel of Christ, and protested against some religion which was hiding Him from men. Each nation has become separate from every other when it has boasted some system of religion, and has rallied round that. Each sect has become narrow and persecuting as it has set up its own religion, and has called that the religion of Christ. And yet every nation has borne witness of the truth by shewing that it must prefer its own king, an actual man, to any system whatsoever; each sect has borne witness to the truth by shewing that the name of its founder was dearer to it, and a greater security for its continuance, than any system of opinions. The Latin Church has borne witness to the truth by confessing that its religious system must go to pieces if there is not a Bishop who is also a King (it signifies little whether he is the best or the worst man on earth, whether his government is the model of the Divine Government or concentrates in itself all the baseness, tyranny, and corruption that is diffused through the Governments of the world) to declare what the religion is, and to bind those who profess it into one. All these are testimonies to the need of a living Head. Nor till the Head of Humanity is proclaimed will the insufficiency of the partial heads be felt, will the counterfeit universal head shrink into nothingness.

These facts, then, are indeed of unspeakable value. They shew that Religion in the original Roman sense, as expressing obligation to some unseen ruler, is grand, sacred, imperishable. But what the obligation is, must be determined by the character of the ruler. If that is not righteous, or if the righteousness is not declared so that it may be known, the religion will become identical with superstition, with the mere dread of a power which can do the worshipper mischief. It will be supported by the State for its own purposes, the statesmen all the while mocking at its pretences. If the State, as in the case of Rome, becomes a despotism, ruling over many tribes which profess different religions, some of these will be treated as lawful, some as unlawful. Such as obviously interfere with the civil order will be put down; the rest will be protected, as affording a help more or less useful in keeping those who adopt it in subjection to the visible emperor. Only if there should be the announcement of a kingdom based on a foundation exactly the opposite to his, toleration will inevitably be changed into persecution; the kingdoms must fight till one of them fall. Such is the history of the struggle which occupied the first centuries of the modern world. It was not a struggle between a Christian religion and another religion, or a multitude of other religions. It was the struggle between a kingdom which was grounded on the dominion of a man raised to be a God, with the announcement that the true King of men is one who, being in the form of God, took upon Him the nature of His subjects, that He might deliver them from all their oppressors bodily and spiritual. Is there such a one? Is the kingdom real or imaginary? That has been the question in all periods; that is the question now. Mr. Carlyle has taught us how, in every age—in this democratic age as much as any—the demand of men is for a king; how any one who has exercised any influence over his fellows has come forth to meet that demand. He has made us acquainted with some of these kings; the best of them have surely been those who have confessed a kingdom of which they were only ministers; he asks reverence for them as for men who bowed to eternal laws. They died, and left the world, he thinks, very bare and sorrowful. Very bare indeed, if there is not a King who entirely obeyed and fulfilled the eternal laws, and who is not dead but alive. Very sorrowful, if the best message it can hear is this: ‘You have been dreaming for the last three-quarters of a century of a common humanity. You have been utterly unable to realise it without a head, a king. You have been convinced, by evidence more and more overwhelming that he who professes to be the Visible Head of humanity has no power to bind its limbs together; he cries for the help of earthly monarchs to uphold him. Philology and criticism have been trying to connect the present with the past; every man feels that connection, and confesses one with an interminable future. And now hear and understand! Criticism and philology have clearly ascertained that there is no Head of humanity, no one who binds the ages together; no Prince of the kings of the earth.’ The news may be very loudly proclaimed. For some reasons I have given already, for others I may state presently, it may eagerly be welcomed. Our unbelief has been anticipating it, and preparing for it. But it will not have the kind of success which those who send it forth anticipate. Men will have a Christ of some kind. He may be a mob Barabbas, he may be a Cesar. We may make our choice between these Christs, we may try them alternately. Either must have more reality and more influence than a Galilean Thaumaturgist, who feigned to contend with death and was overcome by it. But the tyranny of each will at last be intolerable, The cry for deliverance will again arise; God will shew who is His Christ.

III. The third of the prevalent opinions to which I shall refer depends upon the second. ‘There being a religion which men are required to accept, there must be sanctions to enforce it. They must consist of the most brilliant rewards for obedience, of the most tremendous punishments for disobedience. Pains and pleasures are the motives by which men are stimulated to act as the human legislator wishes them to act. The pains and pleasures which a Divine Legislator holds out cannot be limited by the three-score years and ten during which we stay upon this earth. They must stretch through illimitable ages; there can be no term to them.’

‘Yes,’ the believer in the Jesus of Renan says, beyond all doubt this must be the opinion of those who accept what you call the Gospels, who suppose them to have proceeded from a Divine Author; who think that they express the judgment of a Son of God; of one that rose from the dead. The words everlasting life and everlasting punishment are, those Gospels say, His words. Modern divines have not introduced them. Rather it has been the habit of our time to hide them from view, to explain them away. Only a few are honest enough to take them in all their horrible significance. Even those only use the threatening part of them occasionally for great offenders or desperate heretics—even they do not speak of the devil and of demons as the Gospels speak continually, almost in every page. We are told that we must acknowledge the existence of such beings; but in general little is said about them. It seems to be thought that they had tremendous power in Palestine, while Jesus walked the earth, but that their influence is not much exerted over us. We are very depraved, of course, utterly depraved. But that is the fault of our own nature. Malignant spiritual influences were believed in during the Middle Ages, were thought then to be present and active. What cultivated man dares confess a similar conviction now? Does not a clergyman, going into districts where such superstitions exist, labour to discourage them? Does not the English Clergyman denounce the Irish Priest for making use of them, that the people may tremble at his curse, and hope for his exorcism?

I acknowledge at once that we have evaded the express statements of the Gospels respecting eternal or everlasting life, respecting eternal or everlasting punishment. I acknowledge it as an indication of the same habit of mind, that we give so little prominence to the story of our Lord’s temptation by the devil, which stands at the very threshold of the Gospel narrative, to those stories of the casting out of demons which form one of their capital and obvious characteristics. I think any objector has a right to demand the reason of these omissions and prevarications. No reason seems to me so entirely to meet the facts of the case as this. We have regarded those phrases about everlasting life and everlasting punishment as the sanctions of a religion. We have translated the Gospels into Bentham-Dumont Traités des Peines et des Recompenses. We have believed that we were to outdo the Benthamite legislator by producing heavier punishments and greater recompenses than he could produce. And therefore these words have been kept as a reserved force, to be brought forth at the end of discourses, to clench the arguments and rhetoric of preachers. And the preacher has been supposed to exhibit his discretion in distributing promises and threatenings according to some theory of his as to the persons who might need the one and might not need the other.

Now when we read the Gospels, we find that the first announcement of the Christ is this: ‘He shall baptise with the Holy Ghost and with fire. His fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His floor, and will gather the wheat into the garner; but will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ No one can suppose the Gospels to be true and to have any order in them who does not take these words as cardinal words, words of which all the subsequent history is an illustration and fulfilment. The Evangelists never suffer us to forget them. The characteristic of the Christ is that which is indicated by the name; He is anointed with the Spirit. All His exercises of power are the works of the Spirit. They are not acts directed towards the outside of the man, but to the man himself. If they affect his body, they affect the springs of life in his body; that which determines its condition, but which the eye cannot see. And the conflict is always represented as being with powers which have usurped dominion over his thoughts, over his will—powers which have made him a slave. The Holy Spirit is at work to deliver him from this captivity. What would this regenerating baptism of the Spirit be worth if it were not accompanied with a fire to burn up whatever defiles man and the societies of man? Can that fire be a poor material fire, which, like all material things, must die out? If it is to purge an immortal being—a fellowship of immortal beings—must it not be an unquenchable fire, one that no evil with which it comes into contact can overcome or extinguish? Such a divine fire must be that with which the Son of man baptises; even as with such a fire He was Himself baptised.

But are there not threatenings of an ‘outer darkness,’ of ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ of a ‘damnation of Hell,’ which it is most hard to escape? Fearful indeed are these threatenings; fearful in the frequency of their repetition; fearful in the occasions which called them forth. Oh, let us meditate them well! Let us observe that they are not reserved for publicans or harlots, or heretics and heathens; that they are reserved, strictly, carefully reserved, for the most religious men, for those who were practising the most exclusive religion, for those who were using the sanctions of this religion, habitually, perseveringly, against publicans and harlots, and heretics and heathens. Let us ask ourselves whether the outer darkness is not that exclusion from the love which was seeking to embrace publicans, harlots, heretics, heathens; whether the weeping and gnashing of teeth is not for the loss of the fellowship with the Son of Man and with the race for which He died through this exclusiveness; whether the deep hell into which the Jewish nation and its rulers were sinking was not the hell of Covetousness, of Hypocrisy, of Malignity, out of which the Spirit of God was seeking to raise them, which the fires of God were seeking to consume in them. If we think over these things, the Epistles will interpret the Gospels to us. We shall understand how the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus delivered Saul of Tarsus (who had been living under the sanctions of his religion, and enforcing those sanctions upon all other men) from the law of sin and death; we may understand what his conversion meant, and what his Gospel to the world meant, and why that Gospel exposed him to the same bitter persecution which he had once enkindled.

And then, also, we shall never feel tempted to contract the meaning of the words eternal or everlasting when they are applied to the Divine fires, or the Divine punishments. We shall only complain of the contraction and mutilation which they have suffered—both in this relation and when they are associated with life—through the refusal to take them in their natural original sense. All through the Old Testament we hear of Him who is, and who was, and who is to come. If we suppose the New Testament to be in very deed the revelation of this God in a man, we must accept St. John’s words literally, that in Him the life of the Father, the Eternal Life, was manifested to us. And if so, the eternal fires must be those by which God has in all ages been purging His universe of its corruptions; the eternal punishment must be that which has been, and is, and will be directed to the extirpation of the great curse of moral evil.

Is there, then, no indication anywhere of fires which are not purifying but destructive, of punishments which do not aim at the cure of evil, but at the perpetual prolongation of evil? Such fires, such punishments, we are distinctly warned of. They are connected with those passages, which we are rightly accused of slurring over, respecting the Spirit of evil who tempted our Lord, respecting those demons whom He cast out. Not a part of the message of the Kingdom of Heaven, but every part of it, concerns the struggle of the Son of Man with the Accuser, the ’Tempter, the Destroyer; concerns the deliverance of men from the physical and moral slavery which he has brought into God’s universe. Everywhere the Son of Man is defying his claim to rule; everywhere He is asserting the creation to be the Creator’s. I accept this as the most glorious message ever brought to mankind. If I confess that the conflict came to its crisis when the Deliverer appeared in our world—that there is nothing in the Old Testament at all resembling the Temptation in the Wilderness, or the exorcisms of evil spirits—I do not therefore confine the meaning of those records by any limits of space or time. They reveal to us, I conceive, the principle and secret of the war that has been waged in every palace and every hovel from the beginning of the world. They contain the interpretation of that which has been most confused in the language, most radical in the convictions, of every nation, civilised and uncivilised. They give a sense to the most cowardly superstitions, to the cries and confessions of the bravest men. Abstractions about evil have satisfied schoolmen and lazy speculators. Such abstractions have never satisfied workers and sufferers. They have felt evil as a power which was threatening them or holding them in bondage. Take from biography, history, poetry, all that expresses and embodies this conviction, and what a ghastly skeleton of each will be left! Take from us the sense that we are wrestling with actual principalities and powers, and you turn our existence into a series of shadow-fights. Then the ghost assumes the place of the spirit; there is a dread of apparitions which may present themselves to the eye, because the dread of influences that corrupt the conscience and the heart has evaporated. We have, in our days, in the highest circles, even amongst scientific men, proofs enough that the sense of spiritual power, the desire for spiritual communications, has not passed away. But the sense and the desire have become fantastic and frivolous, and combined with gross materialism, because they have been divorced almost wholly from any association with moral good and evil. Far more venerable, pointing to far deeper human necessities, is the witch mythology of the Middle Ages, are the superstitions of peasants in all countries and ages. These may be often blended with a grotesque humour, but they are not playthings to fill up a vacant hour, new excitements to supply the place of old excitements that have been worn out. They have a dreadful seriousness. They have been the cause of unparalleled cruelties, especially when those who should have met them with the Gospel of a Spirit of Power, and Love, and a sound mind, have cultivated the servile terrors of the people, have confounded these terrors with godly fear, have turned them to the increase of their own influence. To such blending of light with darkness, to such dishonesty, whether in the priests of one communion or another, some of the darkest crimes in human history must be traced. The office of the true minister of God’s Kingdom is surely to labour for the extirpation of all such superstitions in all countries, Christian and heathen. He has a right to tell the Irish priests, or any priests who are fostering them, that they are doing the devil’s work. But his efforts and his denunciations will avail little if he only hovers between the demonology of the old world and the materialism of the modern. He will lose the loyalty to human experience which is latent under the first, the loyalty to the facts of nature which is obvious in the other. When we dare to accept the Gospels as they stand, we shall be able to oppose the Manicheeism which draws from the sense of moral and physical evil the inference that there are two rival Creators, each of whom requires some homage, the most malignant the greatest homage; we shall be able to spoil the occupation of the charlatan, whose art consists in blending the phenomena of the visible world with the terrors of the invisible, and making man the victim and slave of both. For we shall believe in a King of men, who went into death and the grave and hell, that He might destroy him that had the power of death and hell. We shall believe in a Spirit of God who makes us partakers of the deliverance that has been wrought for our race, who gives us power to be children of God and citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven.

What must one who asks this help of Jesus think of the Jesus of Renan? He is simply the Christ stripped of all power to overcome any terrors of human beings, to put down any superstition or priestcraft, to raise humanity out of any of the natural or supernatural miseries which have crushed and tormented it. He is the embodiment of an impotent wish to do men good and conquer their oppressors—a wish which could only succeed in its most partial efforts by practising the cheats which have been the greatest instruments of sacerdotal and imperial tyranny. And yet I see not where we can stop short of such a conception if we do not confess a Christ, who exhibited on earth the power which He has exerted and will exert through the ages till all enemies are put under His feet.¹

IV. The last of these notions is one to which I alluded at the beginning of this Preface. ‘The four Gospels are written documents. Before we can give credence to the message which they contain, we must be assured of their authenticity and inspiration. When we are assured of their authenticity and inspiration we must accept them absolutely, unreservedly. Therefore,’ says the objector, if you cannot prove the authenticity and inspiration of these books; if you are not agreed among yourselves what inspiration means, what is involved in authenticity; if questions about the composition of these books are giving you ever-increasing trouble, and leading you into ever-fresh evasions; if you long to hide these questions from the vulgar, and yet confess that you cannot hide them—where must your belief go? What security have you for its permanence in any class of men? There are some who already refuse to accept your books of evidence as inspired. With the increase of education, will not their number be multiplied indefinitely?’

All that I have said in this Preface implies that I recognise the Gospel narrative as a Divine message to mankind, and that I ask Christians to receive that message in a much more direct and simple sense than they are wont to receive it. Therefore do I recognise the truth of the arguments which I have just recited. If the Gospel is a Divine message to mankind, it cannot depend for the proof of its veracity, for its influence over men, upon any theories about the composition of the books which contain it, upon any arguments about their authenticity or inspiration, upon any definitions which we can give of the words ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Inspiration.? A Gospel to the poor, a Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, never did make its way, never could make its way, to the hearts, consciences, reasons of those for whom it was intended, by any such process. We deny history, we contradict in terms our own professions, when we assume that it did. And what has been the effect of that assumption upon our own minds? I have endeavoured. to shew in this Preface what it has been. We give the Gospels credit for being authentic, inspired, Divine. We lift our voices loudly against those who doubt their possession of any’ of the qualities which we associate or fancy we associate with these titles, And there our duty to them ends. What they actually say we do not inquire. We change their language into language of our own; we efface their most obvious characteristics; we, in effect, re-write them; all the while affirming that they not only contain, but are the Word of God.

And is it not inevitable that we should commit these great contradictions whilst we adhere to that formula? Looked at as documents, what is the great question respecting these Gospels—the question which is at the root of all others? It is this. ’Are not the three so-called synoptical Gospels histories mixed with a certain leaven of later theology? Is not the fourth Gospel the full development of that later theology, with a human history artificially and awkwardly grafted upon it?? This is the battle we have to fight with those who dispute the authority of the Gospels in France, Germany, and England. All other battles are child’s play to this. But with what weapons do we go into this? We have thrown away our weapons. We have to all intents and purposes admitted the conclusions of our opponents. For we say that St. John uses the expression Word of God in a sense which may be very convenient for a system of Divinity, but which has nothing to do with our habitual language, with our common life. In these the book shall mean the Word of God, shall be the Word of God. And therefore we cannot hear the Person, the Word, speaking out of the book. We must regard it as containing a set of letters and notions which we may twist and manipulate as much as we please. The awe of the Word, the power of the Word, has departed, while we are in the very act of asserting its awe and its power. The Word no longer convinces us, governs us. We are its masters, we are to enforce it on the acceptance and obedience of men.

Should this habit of mind continue among us, I believe we shall find more and more of our countrymen who only hesitate between the two opinions, whether the fourth Gospel is a feeble reproduction of Philo’s Theosophy, or whether, as Renan thinks, there are in it the footprints of a genuine narrative, which must have been written by a vain old man, jealous of the preference that had been given to Peter over him in the older Evangelists, and full of bitter spite against Judas. It is easy to denounce these as extreme and monstrous notions. It is far better and safer to inquire what has produced them, and how we may be led into either of them. If we do not habitually think of the Word of God as a living Person, it signifies little whether the first verse of the fourth Gospel, and all the rest of the writings which profess to set forth the operations of the Word, were derived from Philo or from anyone else. If we think that the Eternal Life which was with the Father has not been manifested, and according to the constitution of humanity cannot be manifested to us, we must treat the apostle who wrote to testify of its manifestation as the greatest of all impostors; that we do not feel the personal bitterness to such a deceiver which Renan feels, must be the accident of our circumstances or the effect of our indifference.

On the other hand, if we do heartily recognise these as the fundamental principles of our faith, the first three Gospels will become clear to us in the light of these; we shall examine their differences, not with trembling, but with satisfaction. The theology of the fourth Gospel will be the key to their history. We shall find that they have had power over men, because the divine Word has been making His Gospel heard in them, when those who were entrusted with it have most darkened it by their fancies, have most used the holy book to shut out the Holy God. We shall read them as the record not of a life which lasted thirty-three years, but of a life which has been the light of men in all ages, which is the source of all that is true and beautiful in human existence now, which will be revealed as the satisfaction of all that men have longed for, all that God has promised. The life of such a Jesus as Renan has described may be written by any one who has learning and artistic skill for the task. The life of Christ can only be contained in a Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven. If I should succeed in persuading a few readers to study that Gospel as it is, written in the manly and wholesome words of one of those by whom it was originally declared to mankind, and to forget any words of mine and of other interpreters which have concealed the import and weakened the power of his, the purpose of these Lectures will be accomplished.