True Manliness. Hughes Thomas
your work. But, living as you have done till now in a remote corner of a despised province, you have no experience or knowledge of the methods or powers which sway men, and establish and maintain these kingdoms of the world, the glory of which you are beholding. These methods and powers have been in use in your Father’s world, if it be his, ever since man has known good from evil. You have only to say the word, and you may use and control these methods and powers as you please. By their aid you may possibly ‘see of the travail of your soul and be satisfied;’ without them you will redeem nothing but perhaps a man here and there – without them you will postpone instead of hastening the coming of your Father’s kingdom, to the sorrow and ruin of many generations, and will die a foiled and lonely man, crushed by the very forces you have refused to use for your Father’s service. If they were wholly evil, wholly unfit for the fulfillment of any purpose of his, would he have left them in command of his world till this day? It is only through them that the world can be subdued. Your time is short, and you have already wasted much of it, standing shivering on the brink, and letting the years slip by in that cottage at Nazareth. The wisest of your ancestors acknowledged and used them, and spread His kingdom from the river to the Great Sea. Why should you reject them?”
This, very roughly and inadequately stated, is some shadow of the utmost part, or skirt as it were, of the trial-crisis, lasting forty days, through which Christ passed from his private to his public career. For forty days the struggle lasted before he could finally realize and accept his mission with all that it implied. At the end of that time he has fairly mastered and beaten down every doubt as to his call, every tempting suggestion to assert himself, or to accept or use any aid in establishing his Father’s kingdom which does not clearly bear his Father’s stamp and seal on the face of it. In the strength of this victory he returns from the desert, to take up the burden which has been laid on him, and to set up God’s kingdom in the world by the methods which he has learned of God himself – and by no other.
XXX
The second period of our Lord’s ministry is one, in the main, of joyful progress and triumph, in which the test of true manliness must be more subtle than when the surroundings are hostile. It consists, I think, at such times, in the careful watchfulness not to give wrong impressions, not to mislead those who are touched by enthusiasm, conscious of new life, grateful to him who has kindled that life in them.
It is then that the temptation to be all things to all men in a wrong sense – to adapt and accommodate teaching and life to a lower standard in order to maintain a hold upon the masses of average men and women who have been moved by the words of lips touched by fire from the altar of God – has generally proved too much for the best and strongest of the world’s great reformers. It is scarcely necessary to elaborate this point, which would, I think, be sorrowfully admitted by those who have studied most lovingly and carefully the lives of such men, for instance, as Savonarola or Wesley. If you will refer to a valuable work on the life of a greater than either of these, Mr. Bosworth Smith’s “Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” you will find there perhaps the best illustration which I can give you of this sad experience.
When Mohammed returns from Medina, sweeping at last all enemies out of his path, as the prophet of a new faith, and the leader of an awakened and repentant people, his biographer pauses to notice the lowering of the standard, both in his life and teaching. Power, he pleads, brings with it new temptations and new failures. The more thoroughly a man is carried away by his inspiration, and convinced of the truth and goodness of his cause and his message, the more likely is he to forget the means in the end, and to allow the end to justify whatever means seem to lead to its triumph. He must maintain as he can, and by any means, his power over the motley mass of followers that his mission has gathered round him, and will be apt to aim rather at what will hold them than at what will satisfy the highest promptings of his own conscience.
We may allow the plea in such cases, though with sorrow and humiliation. But the more minutely we examine the life of Christ the more we shall feel that here there is no place for it. We shall be impressed with the entire absence of any such bending to expediency, or forgetting the means in the end. He never for one moment accommodates his life or teaching to any standard but the highest: never lowers or relaxes that standard by a shade or a hair’s-breadth, to make the road easy to rich or powerful questioners, or to uphold the spirit of his poorer followers when they are startled and uneasy, as they begin half-blindly to recognize what spirit they are of. This unbending truthfulness is, then, what we have chiefly to look for in this period of triumphant progress and success, questioning each act and word in turn whether there is any swerving in it from the highest ideal.
XXXI
We may note that our Lord accepts at once the imprisonment of the Baptist as the final call to himself. Gathering, therefore, a few of John’s disciples round him, and welcoming the restless inquiring crowds who had been roused by the voice crying in the wilderness, he stands forward at once to proclaim and explain the nature of that new kingdom of God, which has now to be set up in the world. Standing forth alone, on the open hillside, the young Galilean peasant gives forth the great proclamation, which by one effort lifted mankind on to that new and higher ground on which it has been painfully struggling ever since, but on the whole with sure though slow success, to plant itself and maintain sure foothold.
In all history there is no parallel to it. It stands there, a miracle or sign of God’s reign in this world, far more wonderful than any of Christ’s miracles of healing. Unbelievers have been sneering at and ridiculing it, and Christian doctors paring and explaining it away ever since. But there it stands, as strong and fresh as ever, the calm declaration and witness of what mankind is intended by God to become on this earth of his.
As a question of courageous utterance, I would only ask you to read it through once more, bearing in mind who the preacher was – a peasant, already repudiated by his own neighbors and kinsfolk, and suspected by the national rulers and teachers; and who were the hearers – a motley crowd of Jewish peasants and fishermen, Romish legionaries, traders from Damascus, Tyre, and Sidon, and the distant isles of Greece, with a large sprinkling of publicans, scribes, Pharisees, and lawyers.
The immediate result of the sermon was to bow the hearts of this crowd for the time, so that he was able to choose followers from amongst them, much as he would. He takes fishermen and peasants, selecting only two at most, from any rank above the lowest, and one of these from a class more hated and despised by the Jews than the poorest peasant, the publicans. It is plain that he might at first have called apostles from amongst the upper classes had he desired it – as a teacher with any want of courage would surely have done. But the only scribe who offers himself is rejected.
The calling of the Apostles is followed by a succession of discourses and miracles, which move the people more and more, until, after that of the loaves, the popular enthusiasm rises to the point it had so often reached in the case of other preachers and leaders of this strange people. They are ready to take him by force and make him a king.
The Apostles apparently encouraged this enthusiasm, for which he constrains them into a ship, and sends them away before him. After rejoining them and rebuking their want of understanding and faith, he returns with them to the multitudes, and at once speaks of himself as the bread from heaven, in the discourse which offends many of his disciples, who from this time go back and walk no more with him. The brief season of triumphant progress is drawing to an end, during which he could rejoice in spirit in contemplating the human harvest which he and his disciples seem to be already successfully garnering.
XXXII
The more carefully we study the long wrestle of Christ with the blind leaders of a doomed nation, the more we shall recognize the perfect truthfulness, and therefore the perfect courage, which marks his conduct of it. From beginning to end there is no word or act which can mislead friend or foe. The strife, though for life and death, has left no trace or stain on his nature. Fresh from the last and final conflict in the temple court, he can pause on the side of Olivet to weep over the city, the sight of which can still wring from him the pathetic yearnings of a soul purified from all taint of bitterness.
It is this most tender and sensitive of the sons of men – with fibres answering to every touch and breath of human sympathy or human hate – who has borne with absolutely