THE

THE ESSENTIAL JESUS.

HE frequent attempts which are made to write a new life of Jesus, upon the basis of the New Testament, but from different points of view, are among the noticeable signs of the times. These attempts are chiefly made in European countries, where the critical faculty has been busy for a hundred years and more upon the books of the Bible, with various negative and positive results. But that even the negative results of the most sceptical criticism have all along been tending to some positive conclusions is shown in nothing more clearly than in this- that all the new biographies of Jesus are earnest attempts to set forth the permanent and divine elements of that character, separated from the chaff of slavish interpretation, and from mere doctrinal assumptions. We can count a dozen or more of these lives which have appeared within the last twenty years, all of

them written from a sincere and noble motive to understand their subject, to explain his influence, to recommend his real traits. It is significant that they have mostly appeared in that European society which is so profoundly agitated by the conflict between the rights of thrones and mitres, and the Rights of Mankind. At the moment when the new Society, founded upon the principle of Christian Brotherhood, is struggling to be recognized, we see these lives of a great expounder of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man composed, as if to help the people to lay hold of their redemption, by showing its private elements and its public applications. All of these lives, even the most orthodox of them, are so far imbued with the spirit of the times, that they cannot help exhibiting Jesus as a partaker of our human nature; they love to dwell upon his humanity, his sympathy with fallen men and women, with oppressed classes; they grow very minute over those delicate shades of his character where his meekness mingles with his wrath, as he turns from forgiving the sinner at his feet to denouncing the social tyrants who dislike to see the sinner there. They admire to show that a perfect harmony existed between this popular life and the religious doctrines that supported it, so as to convict the various Churches and political Societies of Christendom of zeal for doctrines at the expense of practical sympathy for mankind, and to recommend a purer and more enthusiastic love for the real life which Jesus led upon the earth. The human element of the man overpowers the supernatural element of the original narratives from which these lives are drawn. Even when this element is claimed for

him, such is the new inspiration of the times, such the new longing for the practical simplicity of Jesus, that it no longer tyrannizes, as it used to do, but becomes subordinate to his ministering, his converting, his redeeming, his transforming qualities; and the life touches our life at every point where we bleed, where we have grown weary and heavy-laden, where the fetters rub the wrists and gall the necks of men, where bad habits stabbed while kissing us, and wherever the world has broken through into the sanctuary of our immortality. There the divine life stands in the breach, and shows us how the human will can repair the damage with human elements. It is a most encouraging and inspiring aspect of modern thought. In the midst of materialism and reaction, it addresses itself to the task of purifying this Christian Ideal. Ever since that noble form was seen among men, all the dabsters have been busy with improving it, here a pat of clay and there a pat, more color to the cheeks, gilding to the robes, and props.behind for fear it cannot stand alone. The human heart would fain return to its first love: the throbs of the free blood in it throw down the props, shake off the clay and millinery, and mount up into the cheeks to give the real color of human nature to them, and we see it is our own morning-the true light that lighteneth every man.

Speculation was never so bold and at the same time so pious. When an avalanche, that has been slowly loosening all the season, slips at last over a hamlet, and millions of tons of rubbish stand upon the cottages, to put out the fires and the hearts there, how the neighbors gather, with what impetuous pity, what inspired resources, the cunningest of which is family kinship, to struggle down towards that buried human nature, that perchance it may breathe again, and live once more with its kind. So the cry of Jesus, buried beneath a load of exaggerations and traditions, comes to men's ears: he attacks this rubbish, he throws it right and left, he lifts centuries off from the Beatitudes, animated with the hope that hearts made for each other at last may meet.

In these new lives of Jesus we find that popular feeling and anticipation have been unconsciously influencing the scholars who write them, so that the books are not confined by a too learned treatment to a small circle, but go wherever religion and liberty dwell together. In the lifetime of Jesus there was a wide-spread popular expectation that the kingdom would be restored to Israel: but instead of building up a petty principality, he left his sense of human brotherhood to the world. To-day the people ask that this kingdom shall be restored to them. They turn away from political systems, and have ceased to expect that this Messiah will be found ministering in cathe

drals and churches. But their whole life, physical, mental, moral and spiritual, yearns to be redeemed.

How that ideal of a noble being, who lived in tender, intimate relations with the humble, took up the cause of the despised, poured his clear hope into defiled hearts, lifted outcast women from the dust and smiled away their blasted reputations, has been kept alive for so many years, while History has been parading and flourishing its trumpets all the noise and circumstance have not frightened away this cherished guest of the heart. And there are spring-times of human feeling when it returns from neglect, like a migrating bird, and fearlessly builds its nest close to man's dwellings, pitched beneath their very eaves, and the roar of the streets cannot shake its confidence. What is it that men cherish so, and couple with the name of Jesus. Why do they appeal to that memory against their priests and rulers, against trafficers in human emotions, against the despisers of their kind! Why does it make men's sins appear so odious, their motives so imperfect, their moral disposition often so unclean? It is because the life expressed what they long for, feel that they can attain, and are continually plunged into disgrace and misfortune till it is formed within them. Men say that Jesus is whatever feeds their destitution. They have all inherited this ideal of some divine power that can prevent them from being degraded by poverty, social neglect, bad habits, evil tempers; whatever approaches their suffering condition, be it a truth, a person, a popular movement, a time of moral enthusiasm, anything that is brave and devoted enough to break through the walls that separate us from each others' misery, is Jesus. At the end of eighteen hundred years we find that men remember his essential actions as though they had been performed yesterday, and telegraphed through the country by electric contacts of the heart. These actions are remembered because man hungers to have them repeated; and every man is a claim upon every other man that he should feed this hunger with the true bread that comes down out of heaven into his heart, and is there broken for the relief of all mankind.

To be more particular, what was the quality manifested by Jesus which people who are now living in the world long for the most, or are wretched without, though they may not long for it; thinking, suffering, despairing, anxious people—the workman, the slave, the politician, the man of science, the idle woman who devours her own heart for nourishment, all the dissatisfied and restless people, all who are jealous of providence, and all who follow pleasure for a living? Faith was that quality in its double aspect, faith in God and faith in Man.

This was not a mere opinion that visible life is derived from an invisible power, nor a general deference to such a power, like that which we express when we say that no doubt everything is for the best. That saying is no deeper than the lips. We send it in to our neighbor, who is ill or in trouble, as we send lint or medicines: it is a kind of charm to make them more effectual. But if the cure is not in the medicines it will never be found in the charm; and miserable people may have all the feeling of atheists while they keep repeating "it is all for the best." They do not believe it with all their soul and with all their mind. They are trying to cling by the lips to eternity: the shrivelled souls drop off by millions in the blight of an early frost. But Christian faith is eternity taking hold of man: it is God who sinks into his willing creatures as he sinks into all the worlds, and all the particles thereof, and assumes their responsibilities, so that not an atom can question His right to be there, nor criticize His undertaking. That is the Faith which the whole attitude of the soul of Jesus invited down from heaven. We see it in the confidence of his conscience that the moral principles of God are absolute, that it is not in man to qualify or to restrain them, and that all the mischief comes from our suspicion that they must be compromised, diluted, adapted to weakly constitutions, and to favor periods that are badly off for moral faith. When our heart thrills with an unqualified statement, God has instantly come to us: He saw his favorable moment, and we really expect that we shall remove mountains. Jesus pushed every moral truth to the uttermost, and we are reminded of something that we have not been resolute enough to express in life. Look at a few of them. Mercy must be absolute, even towards the private enemy: public enemies of truth and justice, like the Pharisees, must be justly dealt with for the sake of mercy: and if ever God concentrated himself for the sake of a word to men, it was when Jesus said to those confirmed sceptics in moral truth, "ye are they who shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: ye blind guides ye fools and blind!" Righteousness, or the one and only right way of doing everything, must be absolute, and the soul must hunger and thirst for it. Pure-mindedness must be absolute, to the extent of spotless thinking and imagining: if every man and woman had the heart of Jesus in this respect, I doubt if so many over-conscious books would be printed and devoured. We should canvass each others' feelings as little as a crowd of children do, who play in the open daylight, limpid sunshine in them and the limpid sun without. We think that perfect faith in this hard rule would lift the secret social life of America out of the mire, and give it the wings of a bird that gathers clean air