The Fair Haven

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Some thirty or forty years, then, from the death of our Saviour the
case would stand thus. The Christ-ideal would have become infinitely
more vague, and hence infinitely more universal: but the causes
which had thus added to its value would also have destroyed whatever
primary evidence was superabundant, and the vagueness which had
overspread the ideal would have extended itself in some measure over
the evidences which had established its Divine origin.

But there would of course be limits to the gain caused by decay.
Time came when there would be danger of too much vagueness in the
ideal, and too little distinctness in the evidences. It became
necessary therefore to provide against this danger.

PRECISELY AT THAT EPOCH THE GOSPELS MADE THEIR APPEARANCE. Not
simultaneously, not in concert, and not in perfect harmony with each
other, yet with the error distributed skilfully among them, as in a
well-tuned instrument wherein each string is purposely something out
of tune with every other. Their divergence of aim, and different
authorship, secured the necessary breadth of effect when the accounts
were viewed together; their universal recognition afforded the
necessary permanency, and arrested further decay. If I may be
pardoned for using another illustration, I would say that as the
roundness of the stereoscopic image can only be attained by the
combination of two distinct pictures, neither of them in perfect
harmony with the other, so the highest possible conception of Christ,
cannot otherwise be produced than through the discrepancies of the
Gospels.

From the moment of the appearing of the Gospels, and, I should add,
of the Epistles of St. Paul, the external evidences of Christianity
became secured from further change; as they were then, so are they
now, they can neither be added to nor subtracted from; they have lain
as it were sleeping, till the time should come to awaken them. And
the time is surely now, for there has arisen a very numerous and
increasing class of persons, whose habits of mind unfit them for
appreciating the value of vagueness, but who have each one of them a
soul which may be lost or saved, and on whose behalf the evidences
for the authority whereby the Christ-ideal is sanctioned, should be
restored to something like their former sharpness. Christianity
contains provision for all needs upon their arising. The work of
restoration is easy. It demands this much only--the recognition that
time has made incrustations upon some parts of the evidences, and
that it has destroyed others; when this is admitted, it becomes easy,
after a little practice, to detect the parts that have been added,
and to remove them, the parts that are wanting, and to supply them.
Only let this be done outside the pages of the Bible itself, and not
to the disturbance of their present form and arrangement.

The above explanation of the causes for the obscurity which rests
upon much of our Lord's life and teaching, may give us ground for
hoping that some of those who have failed to feel the force of the
external evidences hitherto, may yet be saved, provided they have
fully recognised the Christ-ideal and endeavoured to imitate it,
although irrespectively of any belief in its historical character.

It is reasonable to suppose that the duty of belief was so
imperatively insisted upon, in order that the ideal might thus be
exalted above controversy, and made more sacred in the eyes of men
than it could have been if referable to a purely human source. May
not, then, one who recognises the ideal as his summum bonum find
grace although he knows not, or even cares not, how it should have
come to be so? For even a sceptic who regarded the whole New
Testament as a work of art, a poem, a pure fiction from beginning to
end, and who revered it for its intrinsic beauty only, as though it
were a picture or statue, even such a person might well find that it
engendered in him an ideal of goodness and power and love and human
sympathy, which could be derived from no other source. If, then, our
blessed Lord so causes the sun of His righteousness to shine upon
these men, shall we presume to say that He will not in another world
restore them to that full communion with Himself which can only come
from a belief in His Divinity?

We can understand that it should have been impossible to proclaim
this in the earliest ages of the Church, inasmuch as no weakening of
the sanctions of the ideal could be tolerated, but are we bound to
extend the operation of the many passages condemnatory of unbelief to
a time so remote as our own, and to circumstances so widely different
from those under which they were uttered? Do we so extend the
command not to eat things strangled or blood, or the assertion of St.
Paul that the unmarried state is higher than the married? May we not
therefore hope that certain kinds of unbelief have become less
hateful in the sight of God inasmuch as they are less dangerous to
the universal acceptance of our Lord as the one model for the
imitation of all men? For, after all, it is not belief in the facts
which constitutes the essence of Christianity, but rather the being
so impregnated with love at the contemplation of Christ that
imitation becomes almost instinctive; this it is which draws the
hearts of men to God the Father, far more than any intellectual
belief that God sent our Lord into the world, ordaining that he
should be crucified and rise from the dead. Christianity is
addressed rather to the infinite spirit of man than to his finite
intelligence, and the believing in Christ through love is more
precious in the sight of God than any loving through belief. May we
not hope, then, that those whose love is great may in the end find
acceptance, though their belief is small? We dare not answer this
positively; but we know that there are times of transition in the
clearness of the Christian evidences as in all else, and the
treatment of those whose lot is cast in such times will surely not
escape the consideration of our Heavenly Father.

But with reference to the many-sidedness of the Christ-ideal, as
having been part of the design of God, and not attainable otherwise
than as the creation of destruction--as coming out of the waste of
time--it is clear that the perception of such a design could only be
an offspring of modern thought; the conception of such an apparently
self-frustrating scheme could only arise in minds which were familiar
with the manner in which it is necessary "to hound nature in her
wanderings" before her feints can be eluded, and her prevarications
brought to book. A deep distrust of the over-obvious is wanted,
before men can be brought to turn aside from objections which at the
first blush appear to be very serious, and to take refuge in
solutions which seem harder than the problems which they are intended
to solve. What a shock must the discovery of the rotation of the
earth have given to the moral sense of the age in which it was made.
How it contradicted all human experience. How it must have outraged
common sense. How it must have encouraged scepticism even about the
most obvious truths of morality. No question could henceforth be
considered settled; everything seemed to require reopening; for if
man had once been deceived by Nature so entirely, if he had been so
utterly led astray and deluded by the plausibility of her pretence
that the earth was immovably fixed, what else, that seemed no less
incontrovertible, might not prove no less false?

It is probable that the opposition to Galileo on the part of the
Roman church was as much due to some such feelings as these, as to
theological objections; the discovery was felt to unsettle not only
the foundations of the earth, but those of every branch of human
knowledge and polity, and hence to be an outrage upon morality
itself. A man has no right to be very much in advance of other
people; he is as a sheep, which may lead the mob, but must not stray
forward a quarter of a mile in front of it; if he does this, he must
be rounded up again, no matter how right may have been his direction.
He has no right to be right, unless he can get a certain following to
keep him company; the shock to morality and the encouragement to
lawlessness do more harm than his discovery can atone for. Let him
hold himself back till he can get one or two more to come with him.
In like manner, had reflections as to the advantage gained by the
Christ ideal in consequence of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies
of the Gospels--reflections which must now occur to any one--been put
forward a hundred years ago, they would have met justly with the
severest condemnation. But now, even those to whom they may not have
occurred already will have little difficulty in admitting their
force.

But be this as it may, it is certain that the inability to understand
how the sense of Christ in the souls of men could be strengthened by
the loss of much knowledge of His character, and of the facts
connected with His history, lies at the root of the error even of the
Apostle St. Paul, who exclaims with his usual fervour, but with less
than his usual wisdom, "Has Christ been divided?" (I. Cor. i., 13).
"Yea," we may make answer, "He is divided and is yet divisible that
all may share in Him." St. Paul himself had realised that it was the
spiritual value of the Christ-ideal which was the purifier and
refresher of our souls, inasmuch as he elsewhere declares that even
though he had known Christ Himself after the flesh, he knew Him no
more; the spiritual Christ, that is to say the spirit of Christ as
recognisable by the spirits of men, was to him all in all. But he
lived too near the days of our Lord for a full comprehension of the
Christian scheme, and it is possible that had he known Christ after
the flesh, his soul might have been less capable of recognising the
spiritual essence, rather than more so. Have we here a faint
glimmering of the motive of the Almighty in not having allowed the
Gentile Apostle to see Christ after the flesh? We cannot say. But
we may say this much with certainty, that had he been living now, St.
Paul would have rejoiced at the many-sidedness of Christ, which he
appears to have hardly recognised in his own life-time.

The apparently contradictory portraits of our Lord which we find in
the Gospels--so long a stumbling-block to unbelievers--are now seen
to be the very means which enable men of all ranks, and all shades of
opinion, to accept Christ as their ideal; they are like the sea,
which from having seemed the most impassable of all objects, turns
out to be the greatest highway of communication. To the artisan, for
instance, who may have long been out of work, or who may have
suffered from the greed and selfishness of his employers, or again,
to the farm labourer who has been discharged perhaps at the approach
of winter, the parable of "the Labourers in the Vineyard" offers
itself as a divinely sanctioned picture of the dealings of God with
man; few but those who have mixed much with the less educated
classes, can have any idea of the priceless comfort which this
parable affords daily to those whose lot it has been to remain
unemployed when their more fortunate brethren have been in full work.
How many of the poor, again, are drawn to Christianity by the parable
of Dives and Lazarus. How many a humble-minded Christian while
reflecting upon the hardness of his lot, and tempted to cast a
longing eye upon the luxuries which are at the command of his richer
neighbours, is restrained from seriously coveting them, by
remembering the awful fate of Dives, and the happy future which was
in store for Lazarus. "Dives," they exclaim, "in his life-time
possessed good things and in like manner Lazarus evil things, but now
the one is comforted in the bosom of Abraham, and the other tormented
in a lake of fire." They remember, also, that it is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
into the kingdom of Heaven.

It has been said by some that the poor are thus encouraged to gloat
over the future misery of the rich, and that many of the sayings
ascribed to our Lord have an unhealthy influence over their minds. I
remember to have thought so once myself, but I have seen reason to
change my mind. Hope is given by these sayings to many whose lives
would be otherwise very nearly hopeless, and though I fully grant
that the parable of Dives and Lazarus can only afford comfort to the
very poor, yet it is most certain that it DOES afford comfort to this
numerous class, and helps to keep them contented with many things
which they would not otherwise endure.

On the other hand, though the poor are first provided for, the rich
are not left without their full share of consolation. Joseph of
Arimathaea was rich, and modern criticism forbids us to believe that
the parable of Dives and Lazarus was ever actually spoken by our
Lord--at any rate not in its present form. Neither are the children
of the rich forgotten; the son who repents at length of a course of
extravagant or riotous living is encouraged to return to virtue, and
to seek reconciliation with his father, by reflecting upon the
parable of the Prodigal Son, wherein he will find an everlasting
model for the conduct of all earthly fathers. I will say nothing of
the parable of the Unjust Steward, for it is one of which the
interpretation is most uncertain; nevertheless I am sure that it
affords comfort to a very large number of persons.

Christ came not to the whole, but to those that were sick; he came
not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Even our fallen
sisters are remembered in the story of the woman taken in adultery,
which reminds them that they can only be condemned justly by those
who are without sin. It is to the poor, the weak, the ignorant and
the infirm that Christianity appeals most strongly, and to whose
needs it is most especially adapted--but these form by far the
greater portion of mankind. "Blessed are they that mourn!" Whose
sorrow is not assuaged by the mere sound of these words? Who again
is not reassured by being reminded that our Heavenly Father feeds the
sparrows and clothes the lilies of the field, and that if we will
only seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness we need take no
heed for the morrow what we shall eat, and what we shall drink, nor
wherewithal we shall be clothed. God will provide these things for
us if we are true Christians, whether we take heed concerning them or
not. "I have been young and now am old," saith the Psalmist, "yet
never saw I the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging their bread."

How infinitely nobler and more soul-satisfying is the ideal of the
Christian saint with wasted limbs, and clothed in the garb of
poverty--his upturned eyes piercing the very heavens in the ecstasy
of a divine despair--than any of the fleshly ideals of gross human
conception such as have already been alluded to. If a man does not
feel this instinctively for himself, let him test it thus--whom does
his heart of hearts tell him that his son will be most like God in
resembling? The Theseus? The Discobolus? or the St. Peters and St.
Pauls of Guido and Domenichino? Who can hesitate for a moment as to
which ideal presents the higher development of human nature? And
this I take it should suffice; the natural instinct which draws us to
the Christ-ideal in preference to all others as soon as it has been
once presented to us, is a sufficient guarantee of its being the one
most tending to the general well-being of the world.

CHAPTER X--CONCLUSION

It only remains to return to the seventh and eighth chapters, and to
pass in review the reasons which will lead us to reject the
conclusions therein expressed by our opponents.

These conclusions have no real bearing upon the question at issue.
Our opponents can make out a strong case, so long as they confine
themselves to maintaining that exaggeration has to a certain extent
impaired the historic value of some of the Gospel records of the
Resurrection. They have made out this much, but have they made out
more? They have mistaken the question--which is this--"Did Jesus
Christ die and rise from the dead?" And in the place of it they have
raised another, namely, "Has there been any inaccuracy in the records
of the time and manner of His reappearing?"

Our error has been that instead of demurring to the relevancy of the
issue raised by our opponents, we have accepted it. We have thus
placed ourselves in a false position, and have encouraged our
opponents by doing so. We have undertaken to fight them upon ground
of their own choosing. We have been discomfited; but instead of
owning to our defeat, and beginning the battle anew from a fresh base
of operations, we have declared that we have not been defeated; hence
those lamentable and suicidal attempts at disingenuous reasoning
which we have seen reason to condemn so strongly in the works of Dean
Alford and others. How deplorable, how unchristian they are!

The moment that we take a truer ground, the conditions of the strife
change. The same spirit of candid criticism which led us to reject
the account of Matthew in toto, will make it easy for us to admit
that those of Mark, Luke, and John, may not be so accurate as we
could have wished, and yet to feel that our cause has sustained no
injury. There are probably very few who would pin their faith to the
fact that Julius Caesar fell exactly at the feet of Pompey's statue,
or that he uttered the words "Et tu, Brute." Yet there are still
fewer who would dispute the fact that Julius Caesar was assassinated
by conspirators of whom Brutus and Cassius were among the leaders.
As long as we can be sure that our Lord DIED AND ROSE FROM THE DEAD,
we may leave it to our opponents to contend about the details of the
manner in which each event took place.

We had thought that these details were known, and so thinking, we had
a certain consolation in realising to ourselves the precise manner in
which every incident occurred; yet on reflection we must feel that
the desire to realise is of the essence of idolatry, which, not
content with knowing that there is a God, will be satisfied with
nothing if it has not an effigy of His face and figure. If it has
not this it falls straight-way to the denial of God's existence,
being unable to conceive how a Being should exist and yet be
incapable of representation. We are as those who would fall down and
worship the idol; our opponents, as those who upon the destruction of
the idol would say that there was no God.

We have met sceptics hitherto by adhering to the opinions as to the
necessity of accuracy which prevailed among our forefathers, and
instead of saying, "You are right--we do NOT know all that we thought
we did--nevertheless we know enough--we know the fact, though the
manner of the fact be hidden," we have preferred to say, "You are
mistaken, our severe outline, our hard-and-fast lines are all
perfectly accurate, there is not a detail of our theories which we
are not prepared to stand by." On this comes recrimination and
mutual anger, and the strife grows hotter and hotter.

Let us now rather say to the unbeliever, "We do not deny the truth of
much which you assert. We give up Matthew's account of the
Resurrection; we may perhaps accept parts of those of Mark and Luke
and John, but it is impossible to say which parts, unless those in
which all three agree with one another; and this being so, it becomes
wiser to regard all the accounts as early and precious memorials of
the certainty felt by the Apostles that Christ died and rose again,
but as having little historic value with regard to the time and
manner of the Resurrection."

Once take this ground, and instead of demurring to the truth of many
of the assertions of our opponents, demur to their relevancy, and the
unbeliever will find the ground cut away from under his feet
independently of the fact that the reasonableness of the concession,
and the discovery that we are not fighting merely to maintain a
position, will incline him to calmness and to the reconsideration of
his own opinions--which will in itself be a great gain--he will soon
perceive that we are really standing upon firm ground, from which no
enemy can dislodge us. The discovery that we know less of the time
and manner of our Lord's death and Resurrection than we thought we
did, does not invalidate a single one of the irresistible arguments
whereby we can establish the fact of His having died and risen again.
The reader will now perhaps begin to perceive that the sad division
between Christians and unbelievers has been one of those common cases
in which both are right and both wrong; Christians being right in
their chief assertion, and wrong in standing out for the accuracy of
their details, while unbelievers are right in denying that our
details are accurate, but wrong in drawing the inference that because
certain facts have been inaccurately recorded, therefore certain
others never happened at all. Both the errors are natural; it is
high time, however, that upon both sides they should be recognised
and avoided.

But as regards the demolition of the structure raised in the seventh
and eighth chapters of this book, whereinsoever, that is to say, it
seems to menace the more vital part of our faith, the ease with which
this will effected may perhaps lead the reader to think that I have
not fulfilled the promise made in the outset, and have failed to put
the best possible case for our opponents. This supposition would be
unjust; I have done the very best for them that I could. For it is
plain that they can only take one of two positions, namely, EITHER
that Christ really died upon the Cross but was never seen alive again
afterwards at all, and that the stories of His having been so seen
are purely mythical, OR, if they admit that He was seen alive after
His Crucifixion, they must deny the completeness of the death; in
other words, if they are to escape miracle, they must either deny the
reappearances or the death.

Now in the commencement of this work I dealt with those who deny that
our Lord rose from the dead, and as the exponent of those who take
this view I selected Strauss, who is undoubtedly the ablest writer
they have. Whether I shewed sufficient reason for thinking that his
theory was unsound must remain for the decision of the reader, but I
certainly believe that I succeeded in doing so. Perhaps the ablest
of all the writers who have treated the facts given us in the Gospels
from the Rationalistic point of view, is the author of an anonymous
work called The Jesus of History (Williams and Norgate, 1866); but
this writer (and it is a characteristic feature of the Rationalistic
school to become vague precisely at this very point) leaves us
entirely in doubt as to whether he accepts the reappearances of
Christ or not, and his treatment of the facts connected both with the
Crucifixion and Resurrection is less definite than that of any other
part of the life of our Lord. He does not seem to see his own way
clearly, and appears to consider that it must for ever remain a
matter of doubt whether the Death of Christ or His reappearance is to
be rejected.

It is evident that it was most desirable to examine BOTH sets of
arguments, i.e., those against the Resurrection, and those against
the completeness of the Death; I have therefore mainly drawn the
opinions of those who deny the Death from the same pamphlet as that
from which I drew the criticisms on Dean Alford's notes. I know of
no other English work, indeed, in which whatever can be said against
us upon this all-important head has been put forward, and was
therefore compelled to draw from this source, or to invent the
arguments for our opponents, which would have subjected me to the
accusation of stating them in such way as should best suit my own
purpose. The reader, however, must now feel that since there can be
no other position taken but one or other of the two alluded to above,
and since the one taken by Strauss has been shewn to be untenable,
there remains nothing but to shew that the other is untenable also,
whereupon it will follow that our Saviour did actually die, and did
actually shew Himself subsequently alive; and this amounts to a
demonstration of the miraculous character of the Resurrection. If,
then, this one miracle be established, I think it unnecessary to
defend the others, because I cannot think that any will attack them.

But, as has been seen already, Strauss admits that our Lord died upon
the Cross, and denies the reality of the reappearances. It is not
probable that Strauss would have taken refuge in the hallucination
theory if he had felt that there was the remotest chance of
successfully denying our Lord's death; for the difficulties of his
present position are overwhelming, as was fully pointed out in the
second, third, and fourth chapters of this work. I regret, however,
to say that I can nowhere find any detailed account of the reasons
which have led him to feel so positively about our Lord's Death.
Such reasons must undoubtedly be at his command, or he would
indisputably have referred the Resurrection to natural causes. Is it
possible that he has thought it better to keep them to himself, as
proving the Death of our Lord TOO convincingly? If so, the course
which he has adopted is a cruel one.

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