THE INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER OF JESUS.

A more serious charge is brought against Jesus by those who impute to him the doctrine of endless punishments for the wicked; for this doctrine seems to implicate the spiritual no less than the intellectual nature, to betray an imperfection of heart and of conscience, as well as an infirmity of mind; and we should hold it to be fatal to a person's religious feeling, fatal to the spiritual faith, if we did not know that most devout and tender people had entertained it in all ages of the Church - or, to speak more justly perhaps, had allowed it to rest unchallenged and uncomprehended on the surface of their minds, without distinctly believing it at all.

But we will let Jesus speak for himself. If he spoke any of the words ascribed to him, he spoke these: "It is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than, having two hands or feet, to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than, having two eyes, to be cast into the Gehenna of fire."-Matt. xviii. 8, 9. The later Jews regarded with holy horror the Valley of Hinnom, on account of the sacrifices that had been offered to Moloch there, and used its name as a symbol of hell. As much as a century before Christ the Hebrew under-world was subdivided by imagination into two parts, Paradise and Gehenna; and in the age of the Apostles this word Gehenna had lost much of its vague, indeterminate sense as a figure of speech, and had taken on a technical meaning as descriptive of a place of future torment. But there are stronger phrases on Jesus' lips than those quoted above. Read this: "Depart from me, ye

cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the Devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink. These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal." Here the mention of the Devil and his angels gives a terrible emphasis to the language used, and a most ominous distinctness, too, to the doom pronounced. But still more fearfully precise than this, if possible, is the declaration in chapter xii. 31, 32: “Wherefore I say unto you, all manner of blasphemy and sin shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in the world to come." Efforts to prove these verses spurious have been unavailing. The manuscripts persist in reporting them. Indeed, Ewald, in his critical translation of the first three Gospels, prints them as a portion of the original "Spruchsammlung," or collection of proverbial sayings, which was the nucleus of the Evangeliical histories. "Here, at all events," says De Wette, "the 'nevermore' is pronounced absolutely; for whether the world to come' includes the Messiannic kingdom and the eternity afterward, or only the after eternity, the sense is the same." The phrase employed, as well as the iteration of the verdict, gives to the passage a deadly weight. No vague, rhetorical everlasting," with a gleam of hope shining through its thick and boundless haze of meaning, is put into the mouth of Jesus here. The sentence is, "He shall not be forgiven, either here or hereafter." The doom is therefore final : the mercy of God is shut off, and despair makes impertinent all question of time.

The doctrine of hopeless perdition is taught in the parable of the ten virgins, against five of whom "the door was shut ;" and likewise in the description of the end of the world, when "the angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth." This is strong language. And there is nothing to break its force. There are no words of opposite or even of qualifying import. Years ago, a theological professor at Cambridge, himself a restorationist, expressed to a class his opinion that the New Testament gave no direct encouragement of restoration to sinners: the sentiment of the Gospel was in favor of it,

but not the letter. It must be remembered, moreover, that the words put into the mouth of Jesus express the belief which was prevalent among the most religious people of his age, who must have understood him to mean what they meant when he used the terms which they used. The Pharisees, much the largest and most influential sect—the "evangelicals" of the day,-held that the souls of all the wicked were doomed to punishment in Gehenna forever, while the wickedest were shut up in a particular cell thereof, called the "Night of Terrors," never to be released. The Essenes, who were by eminence the spiritualists, the Quakers of the time, ascetics, and come-outers, maintaining the inherent immortality of the soul, held that "the souls of men, coming out of the most subtle and pure air, are bound up in their bodies as in so many prisons; but being freed at death, they rejoice, and are borne aloft, where a state of blissful life is decreed forever to the virtuous, but the vicious are appointed to eternal punishment in a dark, cold place."

The presumption then is, that Jesus shared the belief of his contemporaries in regard to the future judgment of the wicked. He put forth that belief, and he put forth no other. No criticism of the word aionios, no expositions of the term Gehenna, no descanting on the poetical character of Christ's phraseology, relieves us of this burden. The loveliness of his spirit alone gives him the benefit of a doubt. It is possible that in this, as in so many other respects, he was misrepresented; it is possible that, as we possess but a few fragments of his teaching, some instruction of more hopeful tenor may have been lost. But we must abide by such evidence as we have; and that, impartially weighed, justifies, we think, the opinion of the larger part of Christendom. Well, and what follows? That we must put on the doctrine, because Jesus was not able to put it off? Surely not - not even if it was his deliberately adopted persuasion, which we need not grant it was. His purest sentiments, his best affections were all against it. Could he have worked out by the understanding what his soul knew, he might have discarded the national belief and eradicated it from his mind completely. But it is easier for the spirit to receive new truth than for the intellect to repudiate old error. What the pious and humane faith of Jesus was is evident from the words that gushed out of his full heart, and from the benignity he exemplified towards the weakest and the worst. These declare his feeling. If he was

unable to mould that feeling into dogmatic shape, let us forget that partial failure in the department of logic; let us appeal from the Jesus of Matthew to the Jesus whom Matthew could not reportto the Jesus who could not even articulate himself the mystery of the Love that was in him.

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In most respects Jesus followed the opinions prevalent among the Pharisees. In one or two points he seems to incline towards those of the Essenes. The Essenes, Josephus tells us, held marriage in great contempt. They were willing to receive the children of others into their community, and educate them as their own. It was not their wish to abolish the marriage institution, seeing that it was necessary to perpetuate the human race; but they deemed celibacy a state of greater purity. Precisely in the spirit of these mild enthusiasts and gentle ascetics is the remarkable conversation which Christ is reported to have held with the Pharisees touching divorce, chapter xix. 3-13. The Pharisees ask if a man may lawfully put away his wife for every cause. Jesus answers no-adultery alone is a just cause; for marriage makes the man and the woman one. His disciples then say, If this is the case, it is not good to marry. Jesus to this, as if assenting to their remark, responds, "All can not receive this saying, save those to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs that are so born from the mother's womb; and there are some eunuchs that are made eunuchs by men; and there are eunuchs that have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive, let him receive." If language like this is to be construed literally and it is not easy to see how it can be construed otherwise - must we not admit that Jesus depreciates the marriage state and advises his hearers to abstain from it? Did we choose to press language to its last inference, we might detect a low esteem of wedlock in the saying, "In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, but all are as the angels." We might also allege imperfection in the doctrine which holds the wedding bond to be inviolate, save by the woman's infidelity. The Church Fathers found it easy to assign reasons for the celibacy of Jesus: his bride was the Church; he needed no earthly helpmate like ordinary mortals; being himself the only Begotten of God and eternal, he needed no progeny to perpetuate his line; he had no time for family cares, no room for personal attachments, and so forth. But it is quite as likely that ascetic reasons induced the first-born Son to neglect the

universal and sacred duty of Hebrew youth, by remaining unmarried.

The Jews never held the weaker sex in honor, never conceded to woman, nor dreamed of conceding to her the place claimed and allowed her in modern society. Jesus may have risen above this Eastern prejudice by sheer force of spirituality; but we have no evidence that he did so. Moved by compassion, he could pity woman's distresses; touched with tenderness, he could forgive her sins. But except in the single instance of the woman of Samaria, who is to us no historical personage, he does not appear to have recognized her ulterior capacity, or to have placed her even ideally on an equality with man. Could he have done so in that age- in that condition of civilization? Are not theories more or less conditioned and limited by actually existing facts? Could any oriental sage speak on this subject like Mad. Bodichau or the wife of Stuart Mill? Indeed, he must have been much more than mortal to have risen above sentiments which the civilization, the humanity and the piety of eighteen centuries have not reversed or corrected.

To those who have been accustomed to regard Jesus as an inspired Teacher in social ethics as well as in religious truth, any suggestion of his fallibility must be extremely painful. Many would rather be seriously unveracious themselves than allow that he could err in the least point. But fairness compels us to admit that he did err; that he was mistaken through lack of knowledge which he had no means of acquiring; that he was misled by the opinions of those about him. He did entertain beliefs which intelligent people in an enlightened age entertain no longer-which Time has almost erased from the cultivated consciousness-which uninquiring faith alone persists in keeping alive by menaces of wrath, and defends by casting doubt upon the human faculties and treating mortal wisdom with disdain. The proposition that Jesus could not and did not err is to be maintained only by a systematic misinterpretation of language or an unpardonable confusion of thought. Moreover, the proposition itself is unintelligible. There can be no such thing as intellectual infallibility. It is utterly impossible for absolute truth to be expressed in such perfect forms of speech that its very substance shall be conveyed to the human mind, and in a way to compel its instant and full reception. For this a double miracle would be required one to make the statement, another to explain it; one to frame a new vocabulary of eternal significance, another to in