The chairman introduced the lecturer. The subject of the address would be, as they already knew, "The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life." It was not very likely, he imagined, that Mr. Elsmere"s opinions would square with those dominant in the club; but, whether or no, he claimed for him, as for everybody, a patient hearing, and the Englishman"s privilege of fair play.
The speaker, a cabinetmaker dressed in a decent brown suit, spoke with fluency, and at the same time with that accent of moderation and _savoir faire_ which some Englishmen in all cla.s.ses have obviously inherited from centuries of government by discussion. Lady Charlotte, whose Liberalism was the mere varnish of an essentially aristocratic temper, was conscious of a certain dismay at the culture of the democracy as the man sat down. Mr. Flaxman, glancing to the right, saw a group of men standing, and amongst them a slight sharp-featured thread-paper of a man, with a taller companion, whom he identified as the pair he had noticed on the night of the story-telling. The little gasfitter was clearly all nervous fidget and expectation; the other, large and gaunt in figure, with a square impa.s.sive face, and close-shut lips that had a perpetual mocking twist in the corners, stood beside him like some clumsy modern version, in a commoner clay, of Goethe"s "spirit that denies."
Robert came forward with a roll of papers in his hand.
His first words were hardly audible. Rose felt her colour rising, Lady Charlotte glanced at her nephew, the standing group of men cried, "Speak up!" The voice in the distance rose at once, braced by the touch of difficulty, and what it said came firmly down to them.
In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the experience of this evening. When he did he would generally say, briefly, that as an _intellectual_ effort he had never been inclined to rank this first public utterance very high among Elsmere"s performances. The speaker"s own emotion had stood somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps, when he feels less.
"I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more cogently in conversation," Flaxman would say--though only to his most intimate friends--"but what I never saw before or since was such an _effect of personality_ as he produced that night. From that moment, at any rate, I loved him, and I understood his secret!"
Elsmere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the club for the hearing they had promised him.
Then he pa.s.sed on to the occasion of his address--the vogue in the district of "certain newspapers which, I understand, are specially relished and patronised by your a.s.sociation."
And he laid down on a table beside him the copies of the _Freethinker_ and of _Faith and Fools_ which he had brought with him, and faced his audience again, his hands on his sides.
"Well! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. I want to reach your sympathies if I can in another way. If there is anybody here who takes pleasure in them, who thinks that such writing and such witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these sheets do really help the cause of truth and intellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position from the front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox Christian, or the Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but always and inevitably the man who writes it and the man who loves it! His mind is possessed of an inflaming and hateful image, which drives him to mockery and violence. I want to replace it, if I can, by one of calm, of beauty and tenderness, which may drive him to humility and sympathy. And this, indeed, is the only way in which opinion is ever really altered--by the subst.i.tution of one mental picture for another.
"But in the first place," resumed the speaker, after a moment"s pause, changing his note a little, "a word about myself. I am not here to-night quite in the position of the casual stranger, coming down to your district for the first time. As some of you know, I am endeavouring to make what is practically a settlement among you, asking you working-men to teach me, if you will, what you have to teach as to the wants and prospects of your order, and offering you in return whatever there is in me which may be worth your taking. Well, I imagine I should look at a man who preferred a claim of that sort with some closeness! You may well ask me for "antecedents," and I should like, if I may, to give them to you very shortly.
"Well, then, though I came down to this place under the wing of Mr.
Edwardes" (some cheering) "who is so greatly liked and respected here, I am not a Unitarian, nor am I an English Churchman. A year ago I was the vicar of an English country parish, where I should have been proud, so far as personal happiness went, to spend my life. Last autumn I left it and resigned my orders because I could no longer accept the creed of the English Church." Unconsciously the thin dignified figure drew itself up, the voice took a certain dryness. All this was distasteful, but the orator"s instinct was imperious.
As he spoke about a score of pipes which had till now been active in Flaxman"s neighbourhood went down. The silence in the room became suddenly of a perceptibly different quality.
"Since then I have joined no other religious a.s.sociation. But it is not--G.o.d forbid!--because there is nothing left me to believe, but because in this transition England it is well for a man who has broken with the old things, to be very _patient_. No good can come of forcing opinion or agreement prematurely. A generation, nay, more, may have to spend itself in mere waiting and preparing for those new leaders and those new forms of corporate action which any great revolution of opinion, such as that we are now living through, has always produced in the past, and will, we are justified in believing, produce again. But the hour and the men will come, and "they also serve who only stand and wait!""
Voice and look had kindled into fire. The consciousness of his audience was pa.s.sing from him--the world of ideas was growing clearer.
"So much, then, for personalities of one sort. There are some of another, however, which I must touch upon for a moment. I am to speak to you to-night of the Jesus of history, but not only as an historian.
History is good, but religion is better!--and if Jesus of Nazareth concerned me, and, in my belief, concerned you, only as an historical figure, I should not be here to-night.
"But if I am to talk religion to you, and I have begun by telling you I am not this and not that, it seems to me that for mere clearness" sake, for the sake of that round and whole image of thought which I want to present to you, you must let me run through a preliminary confession of faith--as short and simple as I can make it. You must let me describe certain views of the universe and of man"s place in it, which make the framework, as it were, into which I shall ask you to fit the picture of Jesus which will come after."
Robert stood a moment considering. An instant"s nervousness, a momentary sign of self-consciousness, would have broken the spell and set the room against him. He showed neither.
"My friends," he said at last, speaking to the crowded benches of London workmen with the same simplicity he would have used towards his boys at Murewell, "the man who is addressing you to-night believes in _G.o.d_; and in _Conscience_, which is G.o.d"s witness in the soul; and in _Experience_, which is at once the record and the instrument of man"s education at G.o.d"s hands. He places his whole trust, for life and death, "_in G.o.d the Father Almighty_"--in that force at the root of things which is revealed to us whenever a man helps his neighbour, or a mother denies herself for her child; whenever a soldier dies without a murmur for his country, or a sailor puts out in the darkness to rescue the perishing; whenever a workman throws mind and conscience into his work, or a statesman labours not for his own gain but for that of the State!
He believes in an Eternal Goodness--and an Eternal Mind--of which Nature and Man are the continuous and the only revelation...."
The room grew absolutely still. And into the silence there fell, one by one, the short terse sentences, in which the seer, the believer, struggled to express what G.o.d has been, is, and will ever be to the soul which trusts Him. In them the whole effort of the speaker was really to restrain, to moderate, to depersonalise the voice of faith. But the intensity of each word burnt it into the hearer as it was spoken. Even Lady Charlotte turned a little pale--the tears stood in her eyes.
Then, from the witness of G.o.d in the soul, and in the history of man"s moral life, Elsmere turned to the glorification of _Experience_, "of that unvarying and rational order of the world which has been the appointed instrument of man"s training since life and thought began."
"_There_," he said slowly, "in the unbroken sequences of nature, in the physical history of the world, in the long history of man, physical, intellectual, moral--_there_ lies the revelation of G.o.d. There is no other, my friends!"
Then, while the room hung on his words, he entered on a brief exposition of the text, "_Miracles do not happen_," restating Hume"s old argument, and adding to it some of the most cogent of those modern arguments drawn from literature, from history, from the comparative study of religions and religious evidence, which were not practically at Hume"s disposal, but which are now affecting the popular mind as Hume"s reasoning could never have affected it.
"We are now able to show how miracle, or the belief in it, which is the same thing, comes into being. The study of miracle in all nations, and under all conditions, yields everywhere the same results. Miracle may be the child of imagination, of love, nay, of a pa.s.sionate sincerity, but invariably it lives with ignorance and is withered by knowledge!"
And then, with lightning unexpectedness, he turned upon his audience, as though the ardent soul reacted at once against a strain of mere negation.
"But do not let yourselves imagine for an instant that, because in a rational view of history there is no place for a Resurrection and Ascension, therefore you may profitably allow yourself a mean and miserable mirth of _this_ sort over the past!"--and his outstretched hand struck the newspapers beside him with pa.s.sion, "Do not imagine for an instant that what is binding, adorable, beautiful in that past is done away with when miracle is given up! No, thank G.o.d! We still "live by admiration, hope, and love." G.o.d only draws closer, great men become greater, human life more wonderful as miracle disappears. Woe to you if you cannot see it!--it is the testing truth of our day.
"And besides--do you suppose that mere violence, mere invective, and savage mockery ever accomplished anything--nay, what is more to the point, ever _destroyed_ anything in human history? No--an idea cannot be killed from without--it can only be supplanted, transformed, by another idea, and that one of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox! In the moral world you cannot pull down except by gentleness--you cannot revolutionise except by sympathy. Jesus only superseded Judaism by absorbing and recreating all that was best in it. There are no inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of humanity. The religion of to-day, with all its faults and mistakes, will go on unshaken so long as there is nothing else of equal loveliness and potency to put in its place. The Jesus of the churches will remain paramount so long as the man of to-day imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge from loving the Jesus of history.
"But _why_? you will ask me. What does the Jesus of history matter to me?"
And so he was brought to the place of great men in the development of mankind--to the part played in the human story by those lives in which men have seen all their n.o.blest thoughts of G.o.d, of duty, and of law embodied, realised before them with a shining and incomparable beauty.
"... You think--because it is becoming plain to the modern eye that the ignorant love of his first followers wreathed his life in legend, that therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, you can put him aside as though he had never been? Folly! Do what you will, you cannot escape him. His life and death underlie our inst.i.tutions as the alphabet underlies our literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed are wrought ineffaceably into the civilisation of Africa and Asia, so the life of Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilisation, the n.o.bler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your being and into mine. We are what we are to-night, as Englishmen and as citizens, largely because a Galilean peasant was born and grew to manhood, and preached, and loved, and died. And you think that a fact so tremendous can be just scoffed away--that we can get rid of it, and of our share in it, by a ribald paragraph and a caricature!
"No. Your hatred and your ridicule are powerless. And thank G.o.d they are powerless. There is no wanton waste in the moral world, any more than in the material. There is only fruitful change and beneficent transformation. Granted that the true story of Jesus of Nazareth was from the beginning obscured by error and mistake; granted that those errors and mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are now its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time are now threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen the hold of Jesus on the love and remembrance of man. What then? The fact is merely a call to you and me, who recognise it, to go back to the roots of things, to reconceive the Christ, to bring him afresh into our lives, to make the life so freely given for man minister again in new ways to man"s new needs. Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.
And woe to our human weakness if it loose its hold one instant before it must on any of those rare and precious possessions which have helped it in the past, and may again inspire it in the future!
"_To reconceive the Christ!_ It is the special task of our age, though in some sort and degree it has been the ever-recurring task of Europe since the beginning."
He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood by those who heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great operation worked by the best intellect of Europe during the last half-century--broadly speaking--on the facts and doc.u.ments of primitive Christianity. From all sides and by the help of every conceivable instrument those facts have been investigated, and now at last the great result--"the revivified reconceived truth"--seems ready to emerge! Much may still be known--much can never be known; but if we will, we may now discern the true features of Jesus of Nazareth, as no generation but our own has been able to discern them, since those who had seen and handled pa.s.sed away.
"Let me try, however feebly, and draw it afresh for you, that life of lives, that story of stories, as the labour of our own age in particular has patiently revealed it to us. Come back with me through the centuries; let us try and see the Christ of Galilee and the Christ of Jerusalem as he was, before a credulous love and Jewish tradition and Greek subtlety had at once dimmed and glorified the truth. Ah! do what we will, it is so scanty and poor, this knowledge of ours, compared with all that we yearn to know--but, such as it is, let me, very humbly and very tentatively, endeavour to put it before you."
At this point Flaxman"s attention was suddenly distracted by a stir round the door of entrance on his left hand. Looking round, he saw a Ritualist priest, in ca.s.sock and cloak, disputing in hurried undertones with the men about the door. At last he gained his point apparently, for the men, with half-angry, half-quizzing looks at each other, allowed him to come in, and he found a seat. Flaxman was greatly struck by the face--by its ascetic beauty, the stern and yet delicate whiteness and emaciation of it. He sat with both hands resting on the stick he held in front of him, intently listening, the perspiration of physical weakness on his brow and round his finely curved mouth. Clearly he could hardly see the lecturer, for the room had become inconveniently crowded, and the men about him were mostly standing.
"One of the St. Wilfrid"s priests, I suppose," Flaxman said to himself.
"What on earth is he doing _dans cette galere_? Are we to have a disputation? That would be dramatic."
He had no attention, however, to spare, and the intruder was promptly forgotten. When he turned back to the platform he found that Robert, with Mackay"s help, had hung on a screen to his right, four or five large drawings of Nazareth, of the Lake of Gennesaret, of Jerusalem, and the Temple of Herod, of the ruins of that synagogue on the probable site of Capernaum in which conceivably Jesus may have stood. They were bold and striking, and filled the bare hall at once with suggestions of the East. He had used them often at Murewell. Then, adopting a somewhat different tone, he plunged into the life of Jesus. He brought to it all his trained historical power, all his story-telling faculty, all his sympathy with the needs of feeling. And bit by bit, as the quick nervous sentences issued and struck, each like the touch of a chisel, the majestic figure emerged, set against its natural background, instinct with some fraction at least of the magic of reality, most human, most persuasive, most tragic. He brought out the great words of the new faith, to which, whatever may be their literal origin, Jesus, and Jesus only, gave currency and immortal force. He dwelt on the magic, the permanence, the expansiveness, of the young Nazarene"s central conception--the spiritualised, universalised "Kingdom of G.o.d." Elsmere"s thought, indeed, knew nothing of a perfect man, as it knew nothing of an incarnate G.o.d; he shrank from nothing that he believed true; but every limitation, every reserve he allowed himself, did but make the whole more poignantly real, and the claim of Jesus more penetrating.
"The world has grown since Jesus preached in Galilee and Judaea. We cannot learn the _whole_ of G.o.d"s lesson from him now--nay, we could not then! But all that is most essential to man--all that saves the soul, all that purifies the heart--that he has still for you and me, as he had it for the men and women of his own time."
Then he came to the last scenes. His voice sank a little; his notes dropped from his hand; and the silence grew oppressive. The dramatic force, the tender pa.s.sionate insight, the fearless modernness with which the story was told, made it almost unbearable. Those listening saw the trial, the streets of Jerusalem, that desolate place outside the northern gate; they were spectators of the torture, they heard the last cry. No one present had ever so seen, so heard before. Rose had hidden her face. Flaxman for the first time forgot to watch the audience; the men had forgotten each other; and for the first time that night, in many a cold embittered heart, there was born that love of the Son of Man which Nathaniel felt, and John, and Mary of Bethany, and which has in it now, as then, the promise of the future.
""_He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock, and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb._" The ashes of Jesus of Nazareth mingled with the earth of Palestine--
""Far hence he lies In the lorn Syrian town, And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down.""
He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. Then a gleam broke over the pale exhausted face--a gleam of extraordinary sweetness.
"And in the days and weeks that followed the devout and pa.s.sionate fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the Resurrection. How natural--and amid all its falseness--how true, is that nave and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the hearts and imaginations of men....
"And now, my friends, what of all this? If these things I have been saying to you are true, what is the upshot of them for you and me?
Simply this, as I conceive it--that instead of wasting your time, and degrading your souls, by indulgence in such grime as this"--and he pointed to the newspapers--"it is your urgent business and mine--at this moment--to do our very _utmost_ to bring this life of Jesus, our precious invaluable possession as a people, back into some real and cogent relation with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not answer me that such an effort is a mere dream and futility, conceived in the vague, apart from reality--that men must have something to worship, and that if they cannot worship Jesus they will not trouble to love him.
Is the world desolate with G.o.d still in it, and does it rest merely with us to love or not to love? Love and revere _something_ we must, if we are to be men and not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I have tried to show you, man has helped himself by the constant and pa.s.sionate memory of those great ones of his race who have spoken to him most audibly of G.o.d and of eternal hope. And for us Europeans and Englishmen, as I have also tried to show you, history and inheritance have decided. If we turn away from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he has been disfigured and misrepresented by the Churches, we turn away from that in which our weak wills and desponding souls are meant to find their most obvious and natural help and inspiration--from that symbol of the Divine, which, of necessity, means most to _us_. No! give him back your hearts--be ashamed that you have ever forgotten your debt to him!
Let combination and brotherhood do for the newer and simpler faith what they did once for the old--let them give it a practical shape, a practical grip on human life.... Then we too shall have our Easter!--we too shall have the right to say, _He is not here, he is risen._ Not here--in legend, in miracle, in the beautiful outworn forms and crystallisations of older thought. _He is risen_--in a wiser reverence and a more reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help inspired by his memory, called afresh by his name! Risen--if you and your children will it--in a church or company of the faithful, over the gates of which two sayings of man"s past, into which man"s present has breathed new meanings, shall be written:--
"_In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust:_"
and--