248 Humble Beginnings [LECT. while the development in character was often precisely the same as in other nations; and that resultant Christianity was no natural product, but the outcome of divine help? III.--DIVINE, UNIVERSAL. For 400 years before Jesus appeared, no prophet had arisen in Israel. The people had been completely cured of idolatry, and had become even fanatically wedded to the form and name of their religious inheritance. But the natural downward tendency was at work. Religion had become a sterile form, God was felt to be far away, morality was confined to the very few. The expectation of a succouring Messiah became more intense as the national collapse became more humanly certain. A few only had some indefinite notions of spiritual help in the promised Deliverer. From contemptible Nazareth, a mountain village of Galilee, there came down to Jerusalem a poor despised carpenter's son, without prestige, without patronage, without the learning of the schools. He went about doing good. He rebuked wrong and denounced in scathing terms all hypocrisy. He showed a marvellous sympathy for suffering, sinful man. He talked of man's Heavenly Father, and taught men how to be morally, spiritually one with him. For about three years he toiled incessantly, was then nailed to a cross and lifted up, and by that lifting-up he now draws all men unto himself. He told his few followers, as poor and humble as himself, to go into all the world, and conquer all nations-not politically but morally. His followers were despised, persecuted, slain. But they multiplied, "the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church," and people said, "How these Christians love one another!" For two hundred years the church was pure in doctrine, in moral life and influence, steadily growing in moral power. Alien practices gradually crept in, and with in V.] Augustine's Influence. 249 crease of external power early simplicity was threatened; eventually nominal Christianity sat on the throne of the Cæsars, controlling the civilized world. To be true to history, the student must learn to distinguish, in subsequent development, between the work of Christianity as such, and the work of the Church, or of men in the name of Christianity, while they ignored the teachings of Christ. Monasticism was borrowed from the east, and asceticism became an enormous factor. At times it did good work, when darkness, intellectual and moral, prevailed; but monasticism is not Christianity. Mature Christianity outgrows it. One strong man stands out in those early days (354-432 A. D.) as representative of two separate tendencies, in the future development of which he had very much to do. From Augustine, the eloquent Bishop of Hippo, may be traced the ecclesiastical development which made the church into a vast and powerful hierarchy, whose network held together the tribes and nations when Imperial bonds were loosened, and tamed the savage barbarians of Europe into milder moods. But Christianity is not ecclesiasticism, and as she matures, the church becomes more and more an organized Brotherhood, in which no man lords it over God's heritage, but where mutual love is universal Master. From Augustine also may be traced a line of dogmatic development, a cast-iron framework of doctrine whose gaunt skeleton-like appearance seemed to require strong faith indeed to receive it. But those iron dogmas seemed to breed an iron race amid the crags and glens of Scotland, just when they were needed, to stand for a century in the Thermopyla of the world's liberty, and beat back from modern progress the threatening doom of medieval relapse, and thus to make Britain the vanguard and leader of freedom. But Christianity is not dogma, least of all, harsh dogma. Christianity has doctrinal teaching, the stout framework of her organism, 250 Divine Guidance [LECT. but over and above it, beautifying and hiding it, if you please, the flesh and sinews of moral life and holy deeds; within and through it all, the divine soul of hearty love to God and man. Thus the sons of toil need no monastic asceticism to rise to the highest moral standard; the simplest of earth's sons need no splended ritual or ecclesiastical machinery to receive a fitness for and a title to a spiritual and eternal inheritance; and the most unlearned and childish among men, regardless of profound study of the wise, may become wise towards God and know a Saviour whom they simply accept. And it is this most un-Shemite of all religions, brought to us by the hands of the children of Shem,-this simple story of God's love to man, of man's answering love to God, and outflowing of love from man to man-which wherever accepted and followed, re-makes the individual, the society, the state, the world. The simple secret of all is, that it is the way back to man's normal place in the universe, the proper harmony and development of human powers, the legitimate outworking of the original constitution with which the Creator endowed him. A. secret made plain by a revelation from God to man. To understand this hypothesis of Christianity, this belief in a revelation from God to man, and to trace its development in the Bible, we must bear in mind several cardinal points. One of these is the fact of man's original creation, or the original idea in his creation, in the image of God so far as his intellectual, moral and spiritual nature are concerned. Another is the essential freedom of man's will, without which morality would be impossible. Another is the disharmony between God and man, the fact of man's sin, which according to the plan of the universe, according to the framework of the principles of justice and truth, must entail punishment, banishment from a holy God. And then the most difficult point of all: if God in love wills to save sinful man, he must do it while man's freedom and V.] for Moral Development. 251 all that he can call his own are left perfectly in his own control, for if salvation be by force or by emasculating humanity, it will be no salvation at all-rather a degradation. And so we find all through the Old Testament a marvellous blending of human weakness and divine power, a continual assertion of the sovereignty of God over man de jure, the absolute dependence of man upon God for every good, and yet the independence of man's choice-he can always damn himself if he will. At times, where men yield to the divine influence and guidance, human powers transcend themselves and become the mouth-piece of the Eternal; grand types of character are developed or described, and still grander types are promised in future days. But when Old Testament days have passed by, the law, our schoolmaster, having taught the needed lesson, the perfect man appears. In Christ we find humanity, but free from all human flaw; we find in him the divine voice unhindered by human passion, untainted by human sin. He is the Word of God. The apostles living so near the source, reflect the light of their risen Lord, as none after them have done. The Church struggles now after his likeness. Humanity sighs still after the higher type; but with divine help man's struggles are now on a higher plane, in a brighter light, with the nobler ideal of a realized fact—an actual perfect historical example for all human endeavor. The Bible is no mere compilation of fast and final ethics, which men must do or die, but a continual training of men from present possibilities to higher moral sympathies and purer deeds. What is at one time perfectly allowable and is overlooked, at another time with advancing light in the conscience becomes immoral, sin. For instance, in Patriarchal times polygamy was allowed in deference to a crude stage of human progress, but the Bible regulates it among the early Israelites in such a way as to regulate it eventually out of existence, as men 252 The Bible raises the Moral Standard. [LECT. advanced still further. So that at the time of Christ they were already prepared for his enunciation of an advanced marriage law, which after all was nothing more than God's original idea, one man and one woman making one union for life. And wherever Christ's teachings prevail, the old ethics of polygamy, in the intenser light of the gospel, become as the darkness of moral crime. So with slavery. It is not forbidden in the Bible, but is so regulated as to be first denuded of its horrors, and then to cease altogether. Not many years ago Britain purchased the freedom of her slaves, and only lately the last great Christian nation has washed her hands of what had come to be in the whiter light of Christ's influence, the blackness of Satanic wrong. The same with war. Soldiers are not commanded to lay down their arms. Nations are not commanded never to draw the sword. But war was regulated, and principles were introduced, which have made the history of modern war a very different thing from that of ancient or heathen struggles. War is not yet regulated out of existence, but the beginning of the end has come. As nations become Christian in character as well as in name, the arbitration of friendly consultation will take the place of arbitration by the sword. The leaven is already working, and will work on, until men "beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." And so all the way through, a continuous education of man back to primitive purity, up to higher things. The aim of God's revelation is to bring about a harmony between God and man, to infuse into man the higher nature of God, to make man love as truly as "God is Love." All through the Christian centuries there are continued in unbroken succession, splendid examples of organized and fruitful charity. And to-day the examples are beyond all compute. In the one city of London alone there |