But Prophetism was not to end in the Talmud. The Isaiahs and Jeremiahs were to have other heirs and successors than the Pharisees and the sons of the Synagogue. Prophetism had in it the promise and the germ of a higher and more human religion. The prophets had accents which their immediate successors in history seem never to have heard. They attacked nothing with more vehemence than formalistic piety or practical religion divorced from righteousness. Listen to Amos, as he makes Jehovah utter words like these: "I hate, I despise your feast days," etc. (Amos v. 21 _et seq._); or to Isaiah on the same theme in his first chapter. Hosea declares that heart-piety and mercy are better than sacrifices. Jeremiah predicts the time when G.o.d will make a new Covenant with His people, and write His laws in their hearts, instead of on tables of stone. Or think of Elijah in the cave of h.o.r.eb. Fatigued with fighting, almost in despair, the terrible adversary of Baal, who had just had 450 of the priests of Baal put to death, has retired to the mountains and is asleep in a cave. You know the narrative (1 Kings xix. 9-13). The still small voice! Is there in all the Bible a finer image containing a profounder thought? What is this supreme revelation of the G.o.d of Israel but an apparition by antic.i.p.ation of the G.o.d of the Gospel? And the still, small voice, "the sound of gentle stillness," what is it but the first faint accents of the gracious, tender words: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light" (Matt.
xi. 28-30).
Beneath the breathings of this creative inspiration the religion of legal righteousness and rigorous retributions is softened into the religion of love. The G.o.d who punishes becomes the G.o.d who pardons and restores. Beneath the tears of the poor, the vanquished, the afflicted in Israel the gospel of divine compa.s.sion germinated and sprang up.
What tones of tenderness are heard in the later prophets, the prophets of consolation, properly so called. "Comfort ye, comfort ye My people.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem. Say unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned." Read the chapter through (Is. xl.), and the forty-second and the sixty-sixth, and Psalms xxiii.
and ciii. Such words as these announce and prepare the way for the great religious revolution called by Jesus the New Covenant. The relations between G.o.d and the human soul are in course of being changed. From the beginning, a pact existed between Jehovah and His people; a compact expressed and guaranteed in a Law on which depended the destiny of the nation and of the individual. The Covenant has become more inward and profound. To the law of strict remunerations is now joined a bond of love. Between G.o.d and His people the relations are those of Husband and wife. The wife has proved unfaithful to Him who had loved her, who had found her poor and naked in the desert, and had been desirous to enrich her. She has followed other G.o.ds.
Jehovah, by the mouth of His messengers, covers her with reproaches, in order to excite her to repentance; but He has learnt to pity, and, in the end, He pardons. The more the nation"s miseries are multiplied, the more its tears flow on the soil of alien lands, the more His heart is melted in Him and the tenderer become His words. "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compa.s.sion on the son of her womb? yea, she may forget, yet will not I forget thee" (Is.
xlix. 15).
The idea beneath these words is the Christian idea. G.o.d loves His people with a boundless love. His mercy extends infinitely beyond the sins of the children of men. In the consciousness of the great unknown prophet whom we call the second Isaiah, we see sketched, five centuries beforehand, the drama of repentance and forgiveness, which Jesus, in profounder and yet simpler words, sums up for all mankind in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
The long period of affliction and of misery between the Captivity and the Advent of the Christ is like a time of painful gestation, during which, in the bosom of the Hebraic tradition, fecundated by the spirit of the prophets, was prepared in obscurity the gospel of the Beat.i.tudes and of the Parables. What a revolution! The ancient theocratic law promised to the righteous length of days and great abundance of material goods. The friends of Job regarded him as criminal because they saw him in adversity. The problem of human destiny appeared to the later prophets as less simple and more tragic. "Why do the wicked prosper?" is the question ever on their lips. "Why do the righteous suffer?" This spectacle has become so constant that the correlation of the words has been reversed. "Rich and wicked" in the Psalmists, and in the second Isaiah, are equivalent terms. "Poor and afflicted" are synonymous with "the righteous" and "the friends of G.o.d." Riches and high looks are the signs of malediction; humility, poverty, persecution, tears, are the marks of piety and the pledges of divine affection. It was at this time that the words were born that edified the early Christians: "G.o.d resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble." Gather together in a common hope this family of little ones, of the defeated and unhappy ones whose hearts were crushed and whose eyes were filled with tears, and you have the true people of G.o.d, the heirs of all the promises, the "little flock" to whom it is the Father"s pleasure to give the kingdom. It was from their ranks that was to come the "Man of Sorrows," who should be scourged and put to death for the sins of His people. The religion of suffering is born.
For the suffering of "the Servant of Jehovah," in whom is no iniquity, cannot be the chastis.e.m.e.nt of His own crimes; it will henceforth be accepted as the necessary part that fraternal solidarity imposes on the best for the redemption of the rest. A tender, fragile flower, a bud as yet scarce opened in the writings of the prophets, this thought will expand into the Gospel and become the religion of mankind.
Pity joined to a severe ideal of righteousness in the notion of G.o.d; morality introduced into religion by the subordination of rites to rect.i.tude of heart and will; hope of a future of peace and happiness by the realisation of righteousness: these are the three great ideas bequeathed by Prophetism to the Gospel. This heritage is a rich and lovely one, but it must not be over-estimated or misunderstood. We are still a long way off the Gospel. The thought of the prophets did not go beyond the narrow limits of a national Messianism; it remained Jewish, not only by its forms and symbols, but also by the religious privilege which is to guard the people of Israel in the future as in the past. The destiny of humanity is still bound up with the destiny of Jerusalem, and the triumph of the Jews implies the partial or total defeat and subjection of the Gentiles in the days of the Messiah and after they are admitted into the kingdom of G.o.d. The saints of Israel are the children of the household; the heathen may enter, and even share in the felicity which fills them, but only as servants and tributaries.
It should also be noted that, in the theology of the prophets, the object of Jehovah"s love is not the individual as a moral being, but the chosen people. Only the nation counts in the eyes of the Eternal.
In its deliverance and triumph the citizens find salvation.... There is something great and thrilling in this Messianic doctrine. It elevated the soul of a people and of a religion to the point of the sublime. It is something to have given hope to a defeated people and a dying world. In this doctrine also we may note this admirable trait: this national triumph is identified with the advent of righteousness to all the earth. Nor have the hopes of Israel been belied. The dream of the prophets was realised in ways of which they did not think, but in a manner not less marvellous. The descendants of j.a.phet lodge to-day beneath the tents of the children of Shem, and our eyes may see the day approaching when the ancient promise made to Abraham and his seed shall be fulfilled, and all the families of the earth be blessed in Him.
Between the religion of the prophets and the religion of Jesus, however, there is one more barrier to be broken down. In the "Kingdom of G.o.d," the idea of the nation must give place to the idea of humanity. The universal G.o.d must be represented as the immanent G.o.d, as present in every human soul. His seat and temple could not be in Jerusalem or in Palestine; it could only be in pure and humble hearts.
A supreme crisis was necessary. The Hebrew nation must perish in order to free the human conscience from its Jewish yoke. A divine flower had been formed in the heart of Prophetism; but it would have been a barren ornament, had there not been deposited in its calix a living and a fruitful germ. The transformation of the piety of the prophets into a purely moral creation and a Covenant really new with G.o.d, this was the work of Jesus Christ. That is why Jesus is "He that should come," He whom the prophets half unconsciously desired, He in whom, to the profit of all mankind, was completed the religious development of Israel. Its whole history ends in Jesus. Apart from Him the inspiration of the prophets dies into rabbinical Talmudism or wanders into the vagaries and delirium of the apocalypses. After giving birth to the Gospel, Judaism dries up and withers like a tree that has borne its fruit and whose season is past.
CHAPTER II
THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY
1. _The Problem_
We come at last to Christianity. What is its principle or essence?
This question must be answered or we cannot judge of it aright.
Now, during the eighteen centuries of its history, Christianity has taken so many and such various forms, it has received so many developments in every sense, it has become a thing so rich and luxuriant, that it is far from easy to discover beneath this thick growth of inst.i.tutions, dogmas, ceremonies, and devotions the tap-root of the tree from which it all has sprung, and from which it still derives its nutriment. It would be next to useless to interrogate the Churches. They would each answer according to their official theologies and Confessions of Faith. This, they would say, is the essence of Christianity. The Catholics would say it is the inst.i.tution and infallible authority of the Church, because everything rests on this first foundation, and because no one can be in Christian truth who is outside the Church. The Protestants would not be agreed: one would propose the dogma of Justification by Faith; another the authority of Scripture; a third the metaphysical divinity and the eternal pre-existence of Jesus Christ, under the pretext that they could not conceive the possibility of the subsistence of Christianity without these dogmas. In entering on this examination we enter on an interminable dispute.
The problem, happily, is simplified for the historian and the psychologist. In asking what is the principle of Christianity, what do we wish to know? Simply what it is that makes a Christian a Christian.
We desire to ascertain what is the inward element, present in the soul, which compensates, at need, for the absence or defect of all the rest, and which, being wanting, cannot be supplied or compensated for by anything else. In short, we want to get at the religious experience which determines and marks out the consciousness of all Christians, which makes them members of one moral family, and which makes them to be recognised as such in spite of differences of times and place, of language and of culture, of rites and even of beliefs. To seize this common feature there is no need of polemics; all we need is a little history and psychology.
In history, Christianity offers itself to us as the term and crown of the religious evolution of humanity. In the consciousness of the Christian it is something more; it there reveals itself as the perfect religion. How must we understand this perfection? Is it the perfection of a complete system of supernatural knowledge, of a religious science which would have been strange to former generations, and which was shared by Christians alone? In no wise. If there are enlightened Christians, there are many who are very ignorant. And yet they are all Christians by one and the same principle, which is entirely independent of degrees of culture. No Christian will maintain that his knowledge is perfect. They all agree with St. Paul that at present it is very imperfect. We see divine things dimly. What, then, do they affirm who say with so much a.s.surance that Christianity is the perfect religion? They affirm that, religion not being an idea but a relation to G.o.d, the perfect religion is the perfect realisation of their relation to G.o.d and of G.o.d"s relation to them. And this is not, on their part, a theoretical speculation; it is the immediate and practical result of their inward experience. They feel that their religious need is entirely satisfied, that G.o.d has entered with them, and they with Him, into a relation so intimate and so happy that, in the matter of practical religion, not only can they imagine nothing, but that they can desire nothing above it or beyond. They simply set themselves to realise more fully and more effectually in themselves this supreme relation, this piety whose principle is immanent to themselves; they know that in it they have the germ of perfect spiritual development and eternal life. This is why they affirm without the slightest doubt that Christianity is the ideal and perfect religion, the definitive religion of humanity.
Such is the first affirmation of the Christian consciousness. Here is the second.
This perfect relation between G.o.d and my soul, this supreme religious good, this kind of piety which const.i.tutes my joy and strength, which enlightens, renovates, sustains my whole inner life, does not date from myself, and I well know that it is not my own virtue that has created it. Nor can I refer the origin of it to my parents, although I may perhaps have received it through them or through my teachers; nor to my Church, although I still remain its catechumen; for parents, teachers, churches, will acknowledge, with myself, that they have only transmitted that which they themselves received. Remounting thus the living chain of Christian experiences, I reach a first experience, a creative and inaugural experience, which has made possible and engendered all the rest. That experience was realised in the consciousness of Jesus Christ. I affirm, then, not only that Christ was the author of Christianity, but that the first germ of it was formed in His inner life, and that in that life, first of all, that divine revelation was made which, repeating and multiplying itself, has enlightened and quickened all mankind. Christianity is therefore not only the ideal, but an historical religion, inseparably connected not only with the maxims of morality and with the doctrines of Jesus, but with His person itself, and with the permanent action of the new spirit which animated Him, and which lives from generation to generation in His disciples.
These are the two affirmations, equally immediate and equally essential, of every Christian consciousness. Now, the whole theological problem is how to reconcile the two. How can that which is ideal and perfect be realised in history? How can that which is historical be held to be ideal and eternal? Does it not seem as if these attributes were contradictory and exclusive of each other, and that Christianity could not become an ideal religion without severing all its links with a particular history, or that if it would remain an historical religion it must renounce all pretensions to absolute perfection? On the other hand, these two attributes, are they not equally necessary to it? How can it subsist if it obeys the formal and summary logic which summons us to choose between them? Will it be anything more than a speculative philosophy if cut off from its historic tradition? Will it continue to inspire me with confidence, will it place me in security, if it ceases to appear to me to be the perfect and definitive religion?
Theology, from the beginning, has had no other task; at all events, it has had no task more arduous or pressing than that of reconciling these two data. There have always been two tendencies amongst theologians corresponding to two families of minds: the _Idealist_ tendency--that of Origen and his emulators, which puts the emphasis en ideas and constructs a religious metaphysic or gnosis, which of necessity rationalises dogma, and for which history is but a temporary envelope, a sort of external and sensible ill.u.s.tration; and the _Realist_ tendency, represented by the genius of Tertullian, which, obeying an opposite instinct, materialises ideas, gives an anthropomorphic body to everything, even to G.o.d, deifies phenomena, and changes contingent history into an eternal metaphysic. From these two tendencies, perpetual and parallel, have issued the two solutions given by Rationalism and by Orthodoxy to the problem as to the essence of Christianity.
The first finds that essence in a few simple truths of reason or of consciousness, which are of all time and all lands, and which impose themselves on every man by their own natural evidence. Jesus of Nazareth was the preacher and the martyr of these truths; but it is clear that His personality is no more essential to Christianity than that of Plato is to his philosophy. Only, mind, in thus severing itself from Christ the Christian Religion ceases to be positive and becomes an abstract and dead doctrine; it loses its religious pith and power.
Orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, avoids this reef but strikes upon another. In making of Christ the Second Person of the Eternal Trinity, the Son of the Father, consubstantial and equal, it removes Him from history and transports Him into metaphysics. But thus to deify history is also in a fashion to destroy it. The dogma annuls the limited, contingent, and human character of the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. His life loses all reality. We have no longer a man before our eyes, although the Church, theoretically, maintains the humanity of Christ alongside His divinity. This fatally absorbs everything. We have only a deity walking in the midst of His contemporaries, hidden beneath a human figure. The traditional Christology has been so incurably Docetic that it has been practically impossible, from this point of view, to write a serious Life of Jesus without falling into the heresy at once modern and semi-pagan of _Kenosis_, the theory according to which the pre-existent and eternal deity commits suicide by incarnating Himself in order gradually to be re-born and find Himself G.o.d again at the end of His human life. Can this strait be crossed? Is there a pa.s.sage between Scylla and Charybdis? Not so long as you cling to the intellectualist conception which forms the error common to both Rationalism and Orthodoxy, and ensures their final failure. If the essence of Christianity lies in the revelation of natural truths or supernatural dogmas, the problem is insoluble. All Apologetics will inevitably dash themselves to pieces against the insurmountable contradiction that they will soon encounter. Strauss"s argumentation, which the philosophers do not cease to repeat, and which the theologians pretend not to hear, springs into one"s mind. So far from weakening it, the historical studies of the past half century have only added sharpness to its edge. "The idea does not pour all its riches into a single individual. The Absolute does not descend into history. It is against all a.n.a.logy that the fulness of perfection should be met with at the outset of any evolution whatsoever; those who place it at the origin of Christianity are victims of the same illusion as the ancients, who placed the Golden Age at the beginning of human history."
Before going further it may be convenient to estimate the strength and weakness of this famous dilemma, and to inquire how we may escape from it. The traditional theology succ.u.mbs to it. But this only proves that that theology needs reforming. Let us place ourselves at a different point of view, and examine for a moment the idea of perfection which serves as the premise to Strauss"s reasoning. When he speaks of the total or plenary perfection which cannot be found in the first link of an historical chain, he doubtless means a quant.i.tative perfection--that is to say, a complete collection of virtues, merits, and faculties the numerical addition of which makes the notion entire.
Now, from this point of view, Strauss"s observation is incontestable.
Neither the perfection of science comprising all scientific discoveries, nor the perfection of civilisation embracing all the progress and all the forms of human life, are ever found or could be found at the beginning or at any given moment in the course of history.
One individual, however great, could not exhaust the life or labour of the species so as to render evolution useless. But have you noticed that this idea of perfection is contradictory, and therefore chimerical? Under the category of quant.i.ty or of extension there could be no real perfection either for the individual or for the species. No sooner is anything that can be counted or measured conceived than the mind instantly conceives something greater. There is no such thing as perfect number. Here therefore it is needful to make an essential distinction. We must distinguish between the quant.i.ty and the quality, or rather, the intensity, of being. Now, between the degrees of both these things there is not the slightest relation, nor consequently any common measure. And that which is true in the one becomes false in the other. Take a cubic metre of stone, multiply it by a thousand or a million, you will still have the same stone--that is to say, there is not more true reality in a million cubic metres of stone than there is in one. But let a bit of moss spring up in a fissure in that stone; in that bit of living moss there is more being, or, if you will, being of a higher quality than that of a whole ma.s.s of rocks. Still, do not forget that it needed a germ to produce it, and that this germ was a sort of positive perfection in relation to all inorganic matter, whose last end is life. This is why we may boldly say that evolution is not the cause of anything; that no development ever gives more than what is hidden in the new germ which engenders it; that a hundred thousand imbeciles do not make a man of genius, and that if man descended from a monkey all the monkeys in creation put together do not make up one human consciousness. From this synthetic point of view, it will no longer seem contradictory, but natural, and in full accordance with the a.n.a.logies of history, that we should meet in the person of the Founder of Christianity that perfect relation to G.o.d, that perfection of piety which every Christian still experiences within himself, and which he declares he has drawn from communion with Him.
Lastly, let us fortify ourselves, and finish this brief statement of this somewhat novel view with Pascal"s pregnant words. There are, he says, three orders of greatness. From all bodies put together you could not extract one thought, if there were not first a mind to conceive it. From all thoughts you could not draw a single movement of charity, if there were not there a heart to produce and feel it So far from needing to manifest themselves by the same attributes, these various kinds of greatness are absolutely independent of each other and even incommensurable. That which makes one shine forth would diminish or obscure the others. Alexander came with a pomp which dazzled the eyes and astonished the imaginations of mere carnal men. Archimedes had no need of the pomp of Alexander in order to impress the minds of men; his greatness, purely intellectual, was of an altogether different order. And, so, the Christ did not come with the _eclat_ of Alexander or Archimedes. His greatness is of another order still. It is in fact so different that neither the glory of the conqueror nor the potency of genius would add anything to it, and that it had need, the better to shine forth to all, to appear in lowliness and humiliation. Therefore He was humble, patient, gentle, holy towards G.o.d, merciful towards man, terrible to all the hosts of darkness. Without sin, without external goods, without the productions of science, He was in His own order.
Oh, with what pomp, with what transcendent magnificence, did He appear to the eyes of the heart that discerns true wisdom!
2. _The Christian Principle_
We must therefore come to the religious consciousness of Jesus Christ as to the fountainhead from which the Christian stream has flowed. It is certain that we shall find in it the principle and essence of Christianity itself, for it would be too paradoxical to maintain that the Master alone was excluded from the benefit of the religion that He has bequeathed to all His disciples. No; we may affirm in all security that the principle of Christianity was at first the very principle of the consciousness of Christ. To determine the one will be to define the other.
What we call the religious consciousness of a man is the feeling of the relation in which he stands, and wills to stand, to the universal principle on which he knows himself to depend, and with the universe in which he sees himself to be a part of one great whole. If then we would know exactly what was the essential element in the consciousness of Jesus, what was the distinctive characteristic of His piety, we must ask in what relation did He feel Himself to stand towards G.o.d and towards the universe. The answer will be neither difficult nor uncertain. If there are matters on which the true thought of the Master remains obscure, nothing shines out with more evidence and continuity through all His teaching and His life than the religious att.i.tude of His soul towards G.o.d and man.
He felt Himself to be in a filial relation towards G.o.d, and He felt that G.o.d was in a paternal relation towards Him. The name of Father that He gives to G.o.d continually, exclusively, uniquely; the name of Son that He takes to Himself; the nature of His adoration; the form of His prayer; the motive of His devoted obedience even unto death; the way in which He works His cures, hails His first successes, accepts the apparent failure of His work, and explains the incredulity of His people,--all announce, manifest, and confirm that intimate relation, that communion and union of spirit, by which a father prolongs his life in the life of his child, and the child feels himself to live by the life of his father. This was clearly the essential element in His consciousness, the distinctive and original feature of His piety; it is also the principle and essence of Christianity.
That which we observe in the consciousness of Jesus we find in the experience of all Christians. They are Christians exactly in proportion as the filial piety of Jesus is reproduced in them. They are recognised by this unique but sufficient sign, by the confidence with which they call G.o.d their Father, abandoning themselves to His love for all that regards their present or future destiny, and living a life of self-renunciation and of devotion to the good of others. All whose inner life has been raised from the region of selfishness and pride to the higher realm of love and life in G.o.d,--who have found in that profound conversion, together with the pardon and oblivion of their past, the germ of a higher life,--of the perfect, and, by consequence, eternal life, are the true religious posterity of Christ; they reproduce His spirit, continue His work, and are as dependent upon Him and as like Him religiously as are the descendants of an ancestor whose blood and whose life have not ceased for an instant to flow in their veins.
This feeling, filial in regard to G.o.d, fraternal in regard to man, is that which makes a Christian, and consequently it is the common trait of all Christians. It should be added that this principle of Christianity admirably corresponds to the two fundamental affirmations of the Christian consciousness already established. The contradiction that appeared to us so menacing is thus resolved and reconciled. On the one hand, Christianity, by this filial union with G.o.d, is seen to be the ideal and perfect religion; on the other, it appears as a real fact in the consciousness of Jesus Christ, so that this religious reality comes to us with the imperative character of the ideal.
Through prejudice men may neglect religion, but if they desire to have one they can neither desire nor imagine a relation at once closer and more moral, more sacred and more joyous, freer and more trustful, than that which was inaugurated in the filial consciousness of Jesus Christ.
What can they have in the shape of life superior to the life of perfect and reciprocal affection,--G.o.d giving Himself to man and realising in him His paternity, man giving himself to G.o.d without fear, and realising in Him his humanity? Is not religious evolution accomplished when these two terms, G.o.d and man, opposed to each other at the origin of conscious life on earth, interpenetrate each other till they reach the moral unity of love, in which G.o.d becomes interior to man and lives in him, in which man becomes interior to G.o.d and finds in G.o.d the full expansion of his being? Christianity is therefore the absolute and final religion of mankind.
At the same time, this filial piety in the person of Jesus and His followers is an observable phenomenon; so that the ideally perfect religion has manifested itself from the beginning as an historical and positive religion. It is not an abstract ideal, a theoretical doctrine, floating above humanity, but a principle and a tradition of new life, an inexhaustibly fruitful germ inserted in human life to raise it, not in idea but in fact, to a higher form. That which the first human consciousness was on earth, separating itself from its maternal animality, and bringing with it the kingdom of man, the initiative consciousness of Christ, issuing from the bosom of antique humanity, has been, and it has founded on our humble planet the kingdom of G.o.d, the kingdom, _i.e._, of free, pure spirit, of righteousness and love. We are no longer therefore in face of a rational doctrine or a speculative view, but of a positive force, of a power of life with which no one can break (I do not say in form and from without, but in fact and in the inner man) without at the same time breaking with the higher life of spirit as well as with all hope and joy, and health of soul.
3. _The Gospel of Jesus_
The Christian principle appears in its simple and naked form, in the form of feeling and of inspiration, in the soul of Jesus. It is described, explained, expanded, in His Gospel. The Gospel in fact is merely the popular translation and the immediate application of the principle of the piety of Jesus in the social _milieu_ in which He lived. Everything springs from His filial consciousness as a natural and wonderful efflorescence: His messianic vocation, His twofold ministry of preaching and healing, His deeds and His discourses, His ethics and His doctrine, the absolute gift of Himself in life and death. We must place ourselves at this luminous centre if we would see the rest dart forth like rays. In it is found the inner, living unity of His teaching and His destination. He promulgates no law or dogma; He founds no official inst.i.tution. His intention is quite different: He wishes, before everything else, to awaken the moral life, to rouse the soul from its inertia, to break its chains, to lighten its burden, to make it active, free, and fruitful. He regards His work as finished when He has communicated His life, His piety, to a few poor consciousnesses that He found asleep and dead. Never man spake like this man, because never had man less concern about what we call "orthodoxy"--that is, about abstract and accurate formulas. He prefers the language of the people to the language of the schools; He makes use of images, parables, paradoxes, of current and traditional ideas, of every form of expression which, taken literally, is the most inadequate in the world, but which, on the other hand, is the most living and stimulating. Each of His sentences or parables is enclosed in a hard sh.e.l.l that has to be broken before you can get at the kernel. Jesus wished to force His hearers to interpret His words, because He called them to an inward, personal, autonomous activity, because He wished to put an end to the religion of the letter and of rites, and to found the religion of the spirit. Even now, he that does not give himself to this labour of interpretation and a.s.similation in reading the Gospel,--he who does not penetrate through the letter and the form to the inspiration and the inmost consciousness of the Master,--cannot understand or profit by His teaching. He who does not collaborate with Him while listening to Him, who does not pierce through His words to His soul, will come away empty. He only gives to those who have, or at least desire to have. He only leads the seeker to the truth. He only pardons those who repent, or comforts those who mourn, or fills the hungerers and the thirsters after righteousness.
Such is the character of His Gospel. We cannot here set forth its contents; we can only note the religious att.i.tude of Jesus with regard to things and men, to Nature and Society.
At peace with G.o.d, Jesus found Himself at peace with the universe. The idea of Nature, that formidable screen erected between ourselves and G.o.d, destroying hope and quenching prayer, did not exist for Him.
Nature--that was the Will of His Father. He submitted to it with confidence and joy, whereas we submit to it with desperate resignation.
He did not feel Himself to be an orphan or an exile in the world; He conducted Himself in it with ease and in security, not as a slave, but as a son in the house which the Father filled with His presence. It is the Father that directs all things; He makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good; He watches over the sparrows; He clothes the lilies of the field; He gives life and food, the body and raiment; He notices the work we have to do, the trials we must bear. He never leaves us to ourselves. His spirit vivifies and fortifies our own. He is at the origin of our life and at the end. We are ever in the Father"s hands.
The outlook of Jesus, it is true, is not our own. He shared the outlook of His race and time.... But His filial piety did not depend upon His knowledge of the universe. The amount of culture does not count in this order of feelings. Irreligion was not less easy or less frequent then than now, and if His outlook on the universe was narrower, it must not be imagined that it was less full of scandalous fatalities, of moral difficulties, of rude shocks to piety and faith.
The world of the apocalypses, which was the world in which Jesus had to live and act, was not less full of mysteries and terrors than our own.
His filial piety alone gave Him the means and strength by which to overcome them. The duty of man, He considered, was to change his heart rather than to change the order of things, _i.e._ the will of G.o.d.
There is no trace of sorcery or magic or the appet.i.te for miracles in the prayer He taught to His disciples. At bottom it amounts to this: "Our Father, let Thy will be done!" His heart-obedience was composed half of childlike confidence, half of heroic renunciation. In face of His trials He submitted without weakness and without complaint, and in face of death He breathed the prayer of faith, the only one that still remains to us: "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit."
In face of the universe and its laws the individual ego is necessarily called on to submit and to renounce itself. The only matter of importance is to know upon what altar we shall make this sacrifice.
Those who offer it on the altar of that blind divinity, "the nature of things," remain still unconsoled. Those who, with Jesus, make it in the arms of the Heavenly Father, accomplish it with strength and joy.
From the awakening of consciousness to its highest point of development, man carries within him this radical contradiction: he feels that there is a mortal conflict between the idea that he gradually forms of the world and the idea he forms of himself. The ego wishes to conquer and does actually conquer the world; it even goes beyond it by thought; but the world has its revenge; it dominates the ego, it crushes it beneath the weight of its invincible laws, and it swallows it up,--itself, its efforts, its works, its thought,--like an ephemeral nonent.i.ty. Jesus felt this opposition; He suffered from this conflict. He resolved the ant.i.thesis by a third term, in which was realised the other two: the notion of the Father, whose beneficent will is equally sovereign in man and in the universe. And it is this happy solution of the enigma of life that still renders the religion of Jesus the religion of hope.