Amongst men, in the midst of society, Jesus felt other relations and new obligations formed in His heart. His filial piety became a fraternal piety. The first commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thine heart," necessarily gave birth to the second: "And thy neighbour as thyself." The Father who lives in me lives equally in my neighbour; He loves him as much as He loves me. I ought therefore to love Him in my neighbour as well as in myself. This paternal presence of G.o.d in all human souls creates in them not only a link but a substantial and moral unity which makes them members of one body, whatever may be the external and contingent differences which separate them. From the Fatherhood in heaven flows the brotherhood on earth.
From a relation of righteousness and love towards G.o.d springs a similar relation between men.
In thus defining the religious connection of Jesus with His brethren I am afraid of weakening it. For Him it was not a matter of theory; for He never constructed any theory or formulated any doctrine of human fraternity; it was with Him a pa.s.sionate sentiment, a deep-felt solidarity and kinship, a true family life, in which this Elder Brother"s heart reverberated on the one hand with the love and pity of the Father, and, on the other, with the miseries and distresses of His brethren. In His parables Jesus does not say "The Father" simply; He habitually says "the father of the family," "the head of the house."
It is because the father does not exist without his children, and because humanity, on earth at least, is the family, by means of which the paternity of G.o.d is realised.
But in the society of men Jesus encountered sin with all its effects in the shape of moral deformity and physical suffering. From the contact of His filial piety with this enormous human misery sprang a twofold appeal: the voice of His Father in His soul, the plaint of His brethren all around; and to this double cry the answer was--His ministry of relief, of consolation, and salvation: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke iv. 18, 19, R.V.).
It all flows from the same source. It was not only individuals who needed to be healed and saved. The family of G.o.d was not less broken down, oppressed, disorganised, by all the powers of evil, a prey to hatred, selfish ambition, intestine wars. Would it not be necessary here also to effect a work of restoration, to reconstruct this family so highly-favoured of the Father for the salvation of the world, to inaugurate the kingdom of G.o.d announced by so many of the prophets, and expected so impatiently by all pious souls and all the victims of unrighteousness? This was His messianic vocation. But how would this victory of the Messiah be realised? Would it be the work of Divine power, flashing forth and executing its pitiless reprisals? Since the paternal heart of G.o.d had been opened and poured into His own, Jesus had perceived another law and another force, the law and force of love, which triumphs by self-sacrifice. Soon there arose in His consciousness a new image of the Messiah, that of the Servant of Jehovah, bearing the sins and miseries of His people, bruised, humiliated, dying to procure them life and healing. It was the gospel of the Cross. The further He advanced in this emptying of self, and in this work of love and pain, the larger and more luminous became the revelation of the Father in His soul. When at last He had the clear and perfect consciousness that He had no longer any will to do but the will of G.o.d, no other plan to follow than His mysterious designs, no other cause to serve and to defend but His, He did not doubt the final victory; His faith shone forth triumphantly, appropriating to itself, to express itself in perfect freedom, the boldest promises of the Ancient Testament and of the contemporary apocalyptic seers. By His union with the Father, the heir of the past felt Himself master of the future. On the throne of immolated love He has founded a kingdom that will never end. Such is the inner secret of His hope, such the moral and religious meaning of His prophecies of speedy victory, and of His return upon the clouds of heaven.
Jesus was fond of saying that a wise man knew how to bring forth from the treasury of his heart things new and old. It was in this way that He accomplished the most radical of religious revolutions while seeming only to fulfil the law and the prophets. What was there then that was so new and potent in the least of His discourses? The treasure of His filial consciousness. The inner inspiration springing up in them incessantly gives to every detail of His teaching, the oldest words, the most familiar metaphors, a meaning altogether new, a reach and bearing infinite. His speech confines itself to the ant.i.thesis that had become traditional with all the prophets, of man"s weakness and G.o.d"s strength, of sin and pardon, of repentance and confidence, of sickness and healing, of humility and exaltation. But He had a way of looking at them, and even of making them spring out of each other, that entirely renovated them. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven! Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted! Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled!" To press thus and to stimulate the sense of need, of misery and sin, so far that it changes into its opposite; to draw riches out of poverty, comfort out of sorrow, victorious strength from weakness; to find in sorrow for sin the germ of saintly life and in hunger and thirst the very source of satisfaction; to make every human soul thus pa.s.s through this inward drama of repentance and conversion in which it is regenerated and renewed,--such is the unique but admirable and all potent mystery of the Gospel.
Christ did not construct a theory of man, of his moral life, any more than He constructed a theory with respect to G.o.d and the universe. He was content to place Himself at the centre of the human consciousness, and to dig down to the source of life. He takes man as he is in all climates and in all conditions. He does not declare him to be radically impotent for good, but neither does He flatter him by veiling his natural misery. He knows him to be ardent and feeble, full of needs and of illusions, capable of conversion, subject to all pa.s.sions, the victim of all slaveries. He treats him as diseased, which is the truth, and He does not think He can make him find the principle of a serious cure, save in the very sense of his malady. So far from blunting the edge of the moral law, He sharpens it as one sharpens a dissecting knife in order the better to pierce the living flesh and penetrate to the very joints and marrow; He infinitely enhances the demands of the traditional ideal; from the outward act He descends to the inward feeling; He makes l.u.s.t equal to adultery, and anger or hatred to murder itself. He tells His disciples to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, to answer violence by gentleness, and injuries by love. He speaks thus not to weaken the vigour of righteousness, but because He sees in love and gentleness a higher righteousness and the sole means of securing the final triumph of good over evil. That is why the righteousness of His friends exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. It is no longer dictated by an outward letter, but it has, for soul, the very spirit of the Father, and, for inward rule, the ideal the Master has lit up in the conscience: "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."
This morality would easily become ascetic and appear impossible if it were not blended with an opposite element which renders it human and fruitful without either lowering or destroying it. That element is mercy and forgiveness; it is pure, unconditional grace which in misery makes room for hope, and in repentance opens the door to faith and to the work of faith. These two elements, inexorable law and unconditional grace, are so intimately blended in the Gospel of Christ that the Gospel only subsists in its originality and with its power by their perfect fusion and reciprocal and constant action. Without the inflexible rigours of the moral ideal, repentance would not be possible--at least it would never be profound enough to produce the renovation of the heart; but, without faith in the divine mercy, repentance itself, changing into despair, would be barren and ineffectual. These two elements of the Christian life are as fruitful by their union as they are impotent and liable to degeneration when isolated or opposed. What does Christian law become without the sentiment of love, without the impulse of mercy, but a sort of moral Stoicism, rigid and severe? And what would be the doctrine of grace apart from the sacred obligation of the law but the theory of a mischievous indulgence or a Pagan mysticism? To decompose the Gospel salt is to destroy its savour.
4. _A Necessary Distinction_
At the close of this long meditation, one thing seems to me very clear, the necessity, or rather the obligation under which I stand henceforth of distinguishing between the purely moral essence of Christianity and all its historical expressions or realisations, even the highest and most faithful of them. If religion is an inward life, a real and felt relation between G.o.d and man, and if Christianity is that life carried to a higher degree, it is certain that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, must have the two characteristics of all living things. Life is a force, ideal in its essence, real in its manifestations. It can only manifest itself in the organisms that it creates and animates. But, while incarnating itself in its works, it does not exhaust itself or remain imprisoned in any of them. Jesus was well aware of this when He compared His gospel to the leaven which raises the dough and to the seed which germinates in the soil into which it falls.
This necessary distinction will neither be made nor admitted by everybody. Many who concede it in theory deny it in practice.
Protestants smile at the Catholics, who identify Christianity with the Church. But while admitting and making the distinction, when it comes to particular churches and particular systems of dogmas, they resist and protest in their turn, if it becomes necessary to apply it to the Bible, and to distinguish between the Word and its human and historical expression.
Should we go further still? May we, ought we in all fidelity to apply the distinction to the Gospel of Christ itself and to the primitive form in which it has come down to us? Most of those who have accompanied us thus far will now recoil and leave us. They will employ against us the very same arguments which appear to them so pitiful when used with respect to the Church and to the Bible. For my part, I cannot comprehend this fear of the freedom left to criticism. It seems to me impossible to deny that in the teaching of Jesus there are parts which are uncertain, things which have been either badly understood or badly reported, an oriental and contingent form which needs to be translated into our modern languages. Who does not see that neither in His language nor in His thought is there anything absolute? Both of them are constantly determined by the generally received ideas of His time, the state of mind of His interlocutors; and unless you desire to deny that Jesus was a man of His age and of His race, how can you abstract Him from His environment and attribute to Him ideas which have neither date nor place? I have already compared Christianity to an oak which has lived and grown for eighteen centuries, and the Gospel to the acorn from which it sprang. But in that acorn itself, as in the tree, it is manifest that there are two things: a principle of life, and some matter borrowed from the Hebraic soil, with which the creating principle was obliged to amalgamate itself in order to enter into history and to become fruitful. The characteristic of life is to render possible and to inst.i.tute the constant exchange of the materials with which it builds up its works. When this exchange has ceased, life has disappeared. If the Gospel of Jesus were something fixed and finished like a code of laws or a collection of formulas, it would no longer be a power of life. His words defy the centuries and never wither; they are truly eternal, because they leave free and do not imprison in a rigid and immutable letter the spirit of life which animates them.
Arrived at this point of view, I see the relations between Christianity and historical criticism change completely, and find myself once more in the greatest religious security. Criticism will always be a just cause of alarm to those who elevate any historical and contingent form whatever into the absolute, for the excellent reason that an historical phenomenon, being always conditioned, can never have the characteristics of the absolute. But criticism can do nothing against the Christian principle, which, brought back to the consciousness, always disengages itself from the relative and fleeting expressions in which it has clothed itself by the way. Criticism makes it to appear again in its ideal purity and eternal worth. Far from being injurious, it becomes necessary to it. It is not doubtful that the teaching and the work of Christ, having been preserved in the simple oral tradition for half a century, have not been transmitted to us without some corruptions and some legendary elements. What then does historical criticism, with all its rigour, do? Nothing but purify this uncertain tradition, remove the veils, set forth more certainly the authentic soul of Christ, and, consequently, place the Christian principle in its surest, clearest light.
What has been said of the Master"s teaching is still more true of that of His disciples. The Christian plants have all sprung from the same seed; but they vary according to the soil in which they grow. They are all of the same species, but in that species there are innumerable varieties. How could the external result possibly have been the same whether the divine seed fell into the heart of a simple fisherman of Galilee, or a rabbi of genius, or a thinker brought up in the school of Alexandria? Could you possibly have the same Church, the same theology, the same ritual in Arabia and in Greece, among a savage race and in the university circles of Germany, at Rome or in England, in the Middle Ages in a feudal society, and in our democracies in a time of emanc.i.p.ated reason and free government?
And here it will be convenient to pause and reflect a moment on that wonderful variety in the historical forms of Christianity, none of which are perfect and none contemptible. A superficial examination may draw from this spectacle a lesson of indifference; a more conscientious and attentive study finds in it an opposite lesson, the lesson of an ever-pressing obligation on both individuals and churches never to repose in a deceitful satisfaction, but to progress unceasingly; for Christianity is nothing if it is not in us at once an ideal which is never reached and an inner force which ever urges us beyond ourselves.
5. _The Corruptions of the Christian Principle_
The differences which separate the historical forms of Christianity are, like those of religion in general, of two kinds: there are differences of kind and differences of degree. The differences of kind are those which arise from diversity of races, languages, civilisations, temperaments, genius. The differences of degree are those connected with the very intensity and purity of the Christian faith and life. Churches and peoples are diversified at once by their const.i.tution and by their degree of culture and of moral life. It goes without saying that these two cla.s.ses of differences are not juxtaposed; they are mixed incessantly and complicated endlessly. It remains none the less true that they provoke and legitimate two sorts of judgment. The first are accepted with tolerance and sympathy, since it would not be reasonable to blame a man for the colour of his skin.
But the second may and should be discussed and a.n.a.lysed, for they imply intellectual errors or moral defects, the corruption or the weakness of the Christian principle, and they can only be corrected and remedied by discussion and criticism.
The Christian seed is never sown in a neutral and empty soil. No soul, no social state, is a _tabula rasa_. The place is always occupied by anterior traditions of ideas, rites, or customs, by inst.i.tutions in possession. Christianity cannot therefore root itself anywhere without entering into conflict with the regnant powers, without giving battle to prejudices, manners, and superst.i.tions which naturally resist, and which, when conquered, spring up again in other forms in the victorious religion. Take the Ebionite Christianity of the first centuries: what is it but a mixture, a compromise between Jewish and Christian elements? What shall we say of the Catholic Church after Constantine?
Is it not true that, in the religious transformation at that time effected, there was a double and mutual conversion, and that it is hard to say whether the pagan world was more modified by Christianity or Christianity more deeply penetrated and invaded by the manners and the religion that it was supposed to replace?
In this order the most striking victories are never complete. Even after the most radical conversion, the old man survives, at least by its roots, in the new man. The Pharisee long survived in St. Paul after he became an Apostle of Christ. The same in human societies: political or moral revolutions never abolish the past. After those great battles in which pa.s.sions and interests have often as much weight as n.o.ble ideas and generous sentiments, there is always established a sort of equilibrium by mutual concessions and spontaneous alliances between the vanquished and the victorious tendencies. Hence come what we have named the corruptions of the Christian principle in the course of historical Christianity, for which alone should be reserved the name of heresies.
It must not be imagined, however, that these corruptions or heresies, against which it is the duty of Christian criticism ceaselessly to protest, are arbitrary things, or that their number is unlimited. On the contrary, they fall, and must necessarily fall, into two categories. The cause of the corruptions of the Christian principle in social life can only be found in the previous tradition, in one of the moral and religious tendencies that Christianity aspires to conquer and replace. Now, these tendencies may be reduced to two: the tendencies of the religions of Nature, or Pagan; and the tendency of the legal, or Jewish, religion. Closely examine all that has disfigured or that still disfigures historical Christianity, and you will see that each of these corruptions is connected, by its character, with a Jewish or a Pagan root. The Gospel as the religion of free spirit and pure morality has never had, and could never have had, any other enemies than Judaism or Paganism, ever ready to spring up in its bosom and transform it either into the religion of Nature or into the religion of the Law.
Christianity, for example, in its pure essence, implies the absoluteness of G.o.d--that is to say, His perfect spirituality and His perfect independence. Hence, worship in spirit and in truth, the only worship that can be universal, the only one that corresponds to the Christian idea of G.o.d. Therefore every tendency, even in Christianity itself, to shut up G.o.d in a phenomenal form, to bind Him to something material, local, or temporary, to blend the Creator with the creature, or to fill up the gap between them by a hierarchy of divine beings which, under pretext of serving us as intermediaries, interrupt our free and immediate communion with the Father, is, properly speaking, a resurrection of Paganism, and a return to idolatry. Paganism and idolatry, of which we pretend to have so much horror, are simply the localisation and materialisation, more or less conscious, of the divine spirit and of divine grace, whatever may be the visible organ to which you bind them, or on which you make their action to depend,--Pope of Rome or Pythoness of Delphi, images of G.o.ds or images of virgin and of saints, sacramental liturgies, the deification of a church, a priesthood, or a book.
Take another example: Christianity is not only the liberty of G.o.d; it is also His holiness; it is pure morality placed above all the instincts of nature; it is, finally, the unity of morality and religion. Hence, all that tends to break this unity, every blow at the divine law, every attempt to cultivate religious emotion apart from conscience, all magic and mystagogy, aesthetic piety, religious romanticism, Christianity a la Chateaubriand, sensuous mysticism,--these essays, so numerous in our day, at philosophic or at literary gnosis, these new religions without repentance or conversion, all these cults without any element of moral sanctification--these are so many corruptions of the Christian principle, and consequences more or less immediate of the Paganism always latent in the human heart.
By the side of this Pagan is the Judaising heresy. Christianity is not only moral law and intransigeant holiness; it is also unconditional love, grace, mercy, the inward action of the Spirit of G.o.d in the spirit of man in order to produce in it that which He desires to find, and to realise that which His law commands; it is everything that scandalised Pharisaism in the teaching and conduct of Jesus in regard to the sinful and the lost: pardon without reproach, rehabilitation and salvation through repentance and affection, the sincere impulse of the heart that has been raised above external works; the very opposite of legal compacts, meritorious and atoning virtue, formalist religion and ritual piety. All that tends to separate the Father from the child; that places the liberty and virtue of man outside and apart from G.o.d as having some merit in His sight; all Pelagianism, every theory of salvation by works, every condition laid down to divine grace except faith to receive it: adhesion to a doctrinal formula, sacramental usages, priestly absolution, outward mortification, asceticism whether monkish or puritanical, which divides morality and, in the name of a fantastic sanct.i.ty, introduces dualism into the work of G.o.d,--all this should be called by its right name; it should be taken for what it really is--a relapse into the legal and formalist spirit of Jewish Pharisaism.
Finally, I see on what condition Christianity may remain faithful to itself while realising itself in history. It is only by an incessant struggle of the Christian principle against all the elements of the past which find, alas, in human propensities, and in the inertia of the mult.i.tude, a complicity so constant and effectual. So far from religious indifference being permissible, critical action and Christian prayer become, in every church and every life, permanent duties. I now understand the paradox of Christ: "I am not come to send peace on the earth, but a sword." For the Christian principle, in fact, war is life. To cease to fight is to succ.u.mb; it is to allow yourself to be submerged by the rising tide of human superst.i.tions; it is to die. Who does not see the danger of allowing Christianity to become absorbed in one church form, Christian truth in one formula, the Christian principle in one of its particular realisations? All these contingent expressions, being imperfect, must be reformed sooner or later. How can they be unless the spirit of Christianity disengages itself without ceasing and floats above them as an ideal? For eighteen centuries a river of life has flowed through human history. Break down the barriers which fanaticism and superst.i.tion are always setting up athwart its course. If the waters cease to flow they stagnate, and corrupt and poison the very land it was their mission to fertilise.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT HISTORICAL FORMS OF CHRISTIANITY
1. _The Evolution of the Christian Principle_
The distinction between the Christian principle and its successive realisations renders it easy to resolve the question, formerly so much debated, as to the perfectibility of Christianity. It is perfect piety, plenary union with G.o.d, consequently the absolute and definitive Religion. But, regarded in its historical evolution, not only is it perfectible, but it must ceaselessly progress, since, for it, to progress is to realise itself. The germ could not be perfected in its essence, as germ and ideal type of the tree that it potentially contains. But the tree itself only comes into existence by the development of the germ. No reform, no progress, no perfecting, could raise Christianity above itself--that is to say, above its principle; for these reforms and this progress only bring it into closer conformity with that principle--that is, make it more Christian. On the other hand, the principle itself must enter into evolution in history in order to manifest its originality and its force, to realise in individual and social life, in the realm of thought and in the realm of action, in a word in the whole of civilisation, all its virtualities and all its consequences. Jesus saw this when He spoke the Parable of the Mustard Seed (Matt. xiii. 31-32).
This distinction has another advantage. It alone permits the Christian thinker to be equitable in his judgments in regard to all religious forms, to place himself at a truly historical point of view, and to reconcile, without weakness and without violence, what is due to truth and what to charity. Every sincere endeavour to express or to realise Christianity in a system or in a church becomes respectable so soon as you know how to discover in it, under formulas however strange and practices however gross, some effects of the Christian principle or some signs of its presence. If disdain and contempt are not permissible with regard to any type of Christianity however different from our own, neither is illusion to be tolerated with regard to our own church or to our personal piety. Perfection is nowhere to be found. Each community may repeat, and the larger, older, and more numerous it becomes the more will it need to repeat, the words of the Apostle Paul: "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended," etc.
(Phil. iii. 13, 14). The habit we have got into of putting all the truth on our side and all error on the side of others, of thus opposing light and darkness, not only falsifies the judgment; it sours the heart and poisons piety, it dries up the feeling of fraternity, and is the perpetual sign of individual or collective vanity. Let each examine himself, let him judge his church without complacence in the light and spirit of Christ; he will soon attain to more humility and truth. He will never identify any particular church or its dogma with Christianity itself. However pure its teaching, however generous its deeds, he will reckon that this is, after all, but a commencement of Christianity, a mere nothing compared with what the Christian principle should have accomplished in the world in eighteen centuries.
Such is the feeling with which we should approach the history of Christianity. The field is vast; the vegetation in it is infinite; we must content ourselves with incompleteness. Being neither able nor desirous to say everything, I have been obliged to seek a commanding point of view from which it would be possible to take in that history in its entirety, and to take a bird"s-eye view of the course it has followed. Faithful to this idea, namely, that the Christian principle is like leaven or a seed thrown into a gross, heavy ma.s.s of anterior traditions which it was meant gradually to raise and to transform, it is this struggle and this progress that I desire especially to describe. I shall endeavour to show how Christianity, always borrowing its forms from the environment in which it realises itself, after enduring them for a time, subsequently frees itself from and triumphs over the inferior and temporary elements which fetter it, and manifests from age to age a greater independence and a purer and higher spirituality. This progress is slow, obscure, oft interrupted, hindered by reactions or by moments of arrest; none the less striking, however, does it appear when, rising above these secondary complications, one measures the distance between the points of departure and arrival. Not only has Christianity never been better understood than in our own day, but never were civilisation or the soul of humanity taken in their entirety more fundamentally Christian. When one follows the history of Christianity from this higher point of view, one sees that it has pa.s.sed through three very distinct phases and a.s.sumed three essentially different forms: the Jewish or Messianic, the Graeco-Roman or Catholic, the Protestant or modern, form. Let us see how it has pa.s.sed from the one to the other.
2. _Jewish, or Messianic Christianity_
The first of these periods is usually omitted or suppressed. Being unable to admit that Catholicism is not the work of Christ and the apostles, or that the Church has varied its dogma or its inst.i.tutions, Catholic theologians navely imagine that the first Christian communities of Jerusalem and Antioch resembled those of Rome, Milan, and Lyons in the fourth century; that Peter was the first of the popes and exercised for five-and-twenty years the supreme pontificate; that the apostles appointed bishops everywhere as their successors and the heirs of their power. In this way the history of Christianity became, in the Catholic tradition, a tissue of legends.
The theologians of Protestantism arrived by another road at an a.n.a.lagous conclusion. Under the influence of the dogma of the verbal inspiration of the New Testament, they were led to make of apostolic Christianity an ideal and abstract type which all the ages ought to force themselves to imitate and reproduce. And, as they profess to have returned to this type both in regard to ideas and to inst.i.tutions and morals, they have made of this apostolic period the first chapter of the history of Protestantism, just as the Catholics have made of it the first chapter of the history of Catholicism. In both cases, it loses all distinct physiognomy and all reality.
By dissipating these prejudices, historical criticism has completely resuscitated that first form of Christianity. It is no longer possible to confound it with any other. It had its contrasts, its pa.s.sions, its storms. Neither Jesus nor the apostles lived in the ideal or in paradisiacal peace. They quarrelled and were divided in the Church of Jerusalem as in our own. The subjects of the quarrels were different, but they did not consider them less grave than those which vex and trouble us. Peter, James, and Paul were not less divided in the first century over the question of circ.u.mcision and of the relations between Jews and Gentiles, than were Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin in the sixteenth over the doctrine of the Lord"s Supper. From both camps, then as now, they sent forth pamphlets and anathemas. There were two opposite parties. There were the stubborn holders of tradition and its authority, and there were the innovators, or the partisans, sometimes as rash as they, of liberty of faith and individual inspiration; and between the two there were the men of conciliation and the golden mean who were preoccupied especially in preventing schisms and arranging truces and treaties of peace, to be followed in their turn by new crises and fresh storms.
In this first form of Christianity, as in all that have followed it, there was a certain dualism, a mixture of heterogeneous and soon hostile elements. The struggle was bound to arise between the Christian principle and Jewish tradition. The new seed sown in that ancient soil could not germinate without rising in it and in places breaking up the thick hard crust. In the books of the New Testament that have preserved to us the picture of that first and powerful germination, side by side with the principle to which belongs the future we necessarily find old things which are on the way to death.
It will be seen what an error they commit and what a wrong they do themselves who, misconceiving this historical complexity, sanctify and deify both these opposite elements, and place on the same level the eternally fruitful grain, and the chaff to-day dried up and utterly inert, a mere remnant of the Jewish stalk that bore it.
Conceived in this religious matrix of Judaism, the Christian principle, if I may so speak, could only take in it a body essentially Jewish in structure, substance, colour. I only speak, of course, of the body of this primitive Christianity, not of its soul, which, as I have shown, was altogether new. Now, its body was Jewish on two sides and in two aspects: by the persistence of the authority of the Law of Moses, and the practical observance of its precepts, from which the disciples of Jesus did not dream of detaching themselves; and, secondly, by the apocalyptic Messianism which dominated Jewish thought from the time of the Maccabees, and with which the first Christians were perhaps more imbued and more possessed than all the rest of their people.
Faith in the evangel of Jesus, full and joyful communion with the Father, habits of Jewish devotion, Messianic hopes,--all this formed, in the consciousness of the first disciples, a mixture of various elements and of things of very unequal value. These elements, in gradually revealing their disparate nature, could not fail to enter into contradiction and to engender conflicts in the very heart of apostolic Christianity. It was these contradictions and conflicts which set Christian thought in movement, and produced the life and progress of that early age, so that one may always rightly consider it as a creative and cla.s.sic epoch, and hold it up as a normal example to the churches of all time; on condition, however, that it be not considered as an immutable ma.s.s of eternal verities, but taken in its natural movement, in its constant effort of progressive enfranchis.e.m.e.nt with regard to the past, in its heroic ascent towards religious forms and ideas, freer, more human, more conformed to the universal character, to the spirituality, and to the pure morality of the religion of Jesus.
"What, then," it will be said, "did not the Christ set His disciples free at the outset from all the errors and superst.i.tions of the past?
Did He not at once give them perfect dogmas, a completed form of worship, an immutable and completed system of ethics?" No; Jesus did nothing of the kind. So far from formally and systematically criticising the traditional religion of His people, so far from making _ex cathedra_ that selection which the vulgar looked for, Jesus expressly refused it, as a method essentially false and irreligious.
He did not wish to abolish anything by mere authority; He preferred rather to confirm the tradition in its totality, of which He was the heir and not the executioner. "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matt. v.
17).
His method was quite different. It was the method of the sower to whom He loved to compare Himself. In the furrow made by His word in the ancient soil of Judaism, He quietly and gently deposited new germs. In the traditional and theocratic notions of His race He placed contents altogether different drawn from His own religious experience, and from the sense of His filial relation to the Father. He then left time to do its work, to develop one after another the consequences of the principles He had planted in human souls. He sowed, and He and others reap from age to age the harvest He has sown.
Consider His att.i.tude towards the Law of Moses. Not a jot or t.i.ttle of it is to fail or be neglected. He strengthens it rather than relaxes its claims; He deepens it, carries it inward, makes it infinitely more spiritual and searching. He gathers it up into two great commandments, and constrains the Law itself, if I may so speak, to surpa.s.s itself and transform itself into pure evangelical morality. That is what He meant by declaring that His work would be the fulfilment of the Law. Nothing was less violent; but nothing, at bottom, was more revolutionary....
It is easy now to see the consequences of this method; history has revealed them. But those who heard the words of Jesus could not perceive these consequences. They had no idea probably that the day would come when to be faithful to the Master they would be obliged to break with Moses. They did not suddenly break with Judaism. Indeed, they had found in their new faith new motives for fervour and exact.i.tude in their Mosaic piety. The first Christians in Jerusalem were honoured of all the people because of their a.s.siduity in the Temple worship and for their exemplary devotion. They are therefore not enfranchised yet; they will have to free themselves from Judaism in the school of events into which they will be led by the Spirit of Jesus that is with them and dwells in them. The Christian principle will have to reconquer its independence of the Judaism which dominates and hems them in on every side. This will be the work of more than a century of conflict and controversy. All Christians will not enter into the movement with the same decision; they will not march abreast on the path of liberty. Many will be stupid and turn back. Progress would not have been made if the Divine Spirit that had raised up Jesus had not raised up valiant men like Stephen, Saul of Tarsus, Barnabas, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and that of the Fourth Gospel, to carry on the struggle against the bondage of Judaism and carry it to complete victory. When you pa.s.s from the one to the other, from the discourse of Stephen to the Epistle to the Galatians, from the Epistle to the Romans to the Johannean theology, you clearly see the march of progress. At the end of the first century Christianity is so independent of national and traditional Judaism that the one treats the other, without any further scruple, as an alien and hostile religion.
More adhesive still to the Christian principle, less easy to strip off, was the second Jewish wrappage, apocalyptic Messianism. Jesus had so thoroughly consecrated it by calling Himself the Messiah and by inaugurating the kingdom of G.o.d, that His Gospel might be named a "Christian Messianism." In His discourses He seems to have confirmed it still more expressly than the Law of Moses. No doubt He proceeded in both cases alike. In all the theocratic notions which const.i.tuted this popular Messianism, He lodged a new content, a religious and moral element which must, in the long run, make them burst their trammels and elevate Messianism above itself. But He did not bring to it any negative and abstract criticism, any more than He did to the divers parts of the Mosaic tradition; He never said either that it must be abandoned or that it must be retained; He deposited in it the new principle; but He left in it many obscurities, abandoning to time and to the force of things the care of drawing forth the consequences and clearing up confusions.