Gamaliel

“Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people.” — Acts v. 34,

It is strange how a single name here and there out of the great multitude of perished and forgotten names secures remembrance. It is almost as when one stands upon the seashore and looks out across the sea, and here and there upon the surface of the great ocean, all gray and monotonous, there comes one flash of silver; one single wave all by itself leaps up as if it were alive, and burns with a lustre which compels the eye to look at it. You ask yourself why that especial wave should have such peculiar privilege, and there is only one answer you can give. It is not any larger wave than the rest, and it is made of no different water from them; it is simply that that wave happened to leap just where the sun was smiting, and so the

1 Preached at the Temple Church, London, Sunday morning, 1st July 18S3.

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sun smote it, and it became illustrious. So it is with the illustrious men. The sun of history shines on this great sea of human life; and the special career which happens to leap just where the sun is striking catches his glory and seizes men’s notice and remembrance. If the man’s life is larger than other lives, so much the better, — it catches so much more of sunshine. If it is of special fineness, made of more lustrous stuff than other men’s, so much the better still, — it turns the sunshine into a peculiar radiance. But still the essential thing is that it should leap at the right moment and should be turned the right way. With those conditions even a very common life becomes illustrious; and without them the largest and the finest character melts back into the bosom of the humanity out of which it sprung, unknown, unnoticed, unrcmembcrcd.

These illustrious men when they appear arc, as would follow from what I have been saying, of more than merely exceptional, phenomenal value. In their illumination the whole great mass of humanity finds its illustration and understands itself. This is true in the most general aspect of them. And when we come to look at them in their more personal characteristics, each of them becomes the representative of some smaller group of humankind, to which he almost gives his name.

Other men recognise themselves in these illuminated exhibitions of their qualities. They understand themselves better, and they are able better to declare the meaning of their lives to the world in the light of these their representatives.

There is always something interesting in seeing men thus realise themselves in the sight of the representative historic expressions of their characters. Often, indeed, it is only a degenerate caricature of the higher nature which they present. The dogmatist names himself by the great name of St. Paul, and thinks that his narrow dogmatism is of the same sort with the apostle’s large-minded faith. The feeble sentimentalist counts himself the twin-brother of St. John. The dainty sceptic, dabbling in unbelief, takes the name of earnest, puzzled, simple-souled St. Thomas to himself. But, after all, there is a constant tendency in their association with the highest types of their several natures and tendencies to draw them upward and to make each of them a more worthy expression of his characteristic qualities than he could be if he knew it only in himself. In this truth lies one of the greatest advantages of the study of the representative men of human history.

I ask you to turn with me this morning to the story of a man whose name flashes for a moment as the light of the New Testament history falls upon the life of Jerusalem at the beginning of the Christian Church. The flash is only for a moment, and yet the impression which it leaves is very clear. Gamaliel is peculiarly a representative man, and the nature which he represents is one which appeals peculiarly to our modern life.

Let us recall his history. He was one of the most famous teachers of the Jewish law at Jerusalem in the days of Christ and in the years which immediately followed Christ’s departure. It is not only from the New Testament that we know about him; all of the Jewish history of those days declares that he was one of the ablest and most famous of the learned men of the nation. He was the grandson of the great scholar and teacher Hillel, and he belonged distinctly to the same liberal school as his great ancestor. In those days there were two schools or parties among the orthodox religious Jews — the school of Shammai, which was strict and narrow; and the school of Hillel, which was liberal and free. Gamaliel was of the school of Hillel; he was a liberal Pharisee; he was of the same kind of men with Nicodcmus and Joseph of Arimathea, who appear in the gospels as both Pharisees and Liberals. Gamaliel was one of the few rabbis who allowed their students the study of the literature of the Greeks. He taught that soldiers in war-time, and all persons engaged in works of mercy, duty, or necessity, should be exempt from the more stringent sabbatical traditions; he bade his disciples greet even the pagans on their feast-days with the “Peace be with you.” In ways like these he showed the largeness of his spirit, and the people loved him. He was one of the seven among the Jewish doctors who alone have been honoured with the supreme title of Rabban. He lived to a good old age, and died about sixty years after the birth of Christ.

In the New Testament, Gamaliel appears twice, and both times in the most interesting way First, he is the teacher of St. Paul, and so we are constantly led to speculate as to what part of the training of his great pupil’s character is due to him; and in the second place, when the apostles were arrested very soon after the Pentecost for preaching Christ in Jerusalem, Gamaliel, a member of the Sanhedrim, before which they were brought for trial, uttered a memorable plea for toleration and delay of judgment. His words on that occasion are among the classic words of fairness and candour. He bids the hot-headed Jewish counsellors beware; he reminds them of how agitators before this have risen and soon come to nothing. “And now,” he goes on, “I say unto you, refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.” And his words had their effect, and the disciples were released.

In the light of all these facts about him, and especially in view of these last-quoted words of his, it is not hard to see what sort of man Gamaliel was. He was, in the first place, both a great teacher and also a great preacher of toleration. These two qualities unite in him as the book of Acts shows him to us. And they are two qualities which ought always to unite. Every great teacher, every great scholar, ought to be aware of the mystery and of the mightiness of truth, and therefore he ought to be prepared to sec truth linger and hesitate and seem to be retarded, and even seem to be turned back, and yet to keep a clear assurance that truth must come right in the end, and that the only way to help her is to keep her free, so that she shall be at liberty to help herself. There is something in Gamaliel which always reminds one of Milton, the great scholar and the great champion of toleration of the Puritan days. Gamaliel seems to feel what Milton feels so strongly, that any attempt to help truth save by securing her liberty is impertinent; that all attempts to make truth strong either by disarming her enemies or by choosing for her what weapons she shall fight her battles with, is not a homage to her strength, but an insulting insinuation of her weakness. The scholar of truth must trust truth; that is Gamaliel’s ground. The man of mere affairs may be a bigot, but not the scholar; the student must claim for himself and for all men, liberty.

How true this is. You may insist if you will that you have found not merely the best but the only true way of conducting business or of managing the affairs of State. You may, if you have the power, compel the business of the market or the government of the country to be conducted in your special way. Sometimes, and to some extent always, such arbitrary selection of methods is necessary in practical affairs. And the vital forces of commerce and the State will work on, even if they do not work at their best, under whatever special form you may have chosen. But if you limit the search after truth, and forbid men anywhere, in any way, to seek knowledge, you paralyse the vital force of truth itself. He who is seeking anywhere for truth loses the true spirit of his search if he forbids any other man to seek for truth anywhere else. That is what makes bigotry so disastrous to the bigot.

Gamaliel, then, is the man of wise and generous toleration. And this character, as I have said, has close connection with the fact that he was a teacher, the teacher of St. Paul. The world will always be most interested in him as the teacher of the greatest teacher, after Christ, of Christendom. In the picture of Christian history this Hebrew teacher finds a place, mainly because the future teacher of Christendom is sitting at his feet. He is, then, the broad-minded teacher, the man who earnestly inculcates his own views of truth, and at the same time knows and freely owns that truth is larger than his view. Such a teacher as that — such a man as that giving his life to teaching always has a special interest. He is one of those men who give other men the chance to make history rather than make it themselves. They themselves are almost of necessity relegated to obscurity. The very splendour of the career of their pupils, of which they are the creating cause, makes it impossible for the world to see them; as the flash of fire from the gun’s mouth, and the rush of the burning shell on its tremendous way, makes it impossible to sec the gun itself in whose deep heart the power of the explosion was conceived and born. It is evident that in this thought there lies a satisfaction which has been quite sufficient for many a noble mind. Many a great teacher has been perfectly satisfied with teachership, perfectly content to furnish the materials and conditions of effective and conspicuous activity to other minds, and to rest himself in obscurity as they went forth to prominence. We can picture to ourselves Gamaliel watching Paul. Sometimes approvingly, sometimes condemningly, we can think of the calm large-minded teacher following the career of his fiery-hearted scholar, and, however he disagreed with what he thought his delusions, rejoicing in his faithfulness and force. Always the teacher thus watching the pupil, who carries forth his teaching in new ways, is a most interesting sight, not without pathos.

And, if we look the other way, there are few things finer than to see the reverence and gratitude with which the best men of active life look back to the quiet teachers who furnished them with the materials of living. One of the most interesting things about many of our greatest statesmen has been their love and honour for their schoolmasters and college tutors. Even from the midst of his missionary journeys, even from his prison in Rome, we are able to believe that St. Paul looked back to the lessons of faithfulness and generosity which he had learned of the great teacher of his youth, and could see them still, though with a lustre grown faint and pale, even through the great light which had shone around him by Damascus, and the glory of the vision of the third heaven.

There are some of us whose work in life seems to assume mainly this character. Parents, teachers, quiet helpers of other lives, it seems as if we were rather providing other souls with the conditions of living than living ourselves. Indeed there are none of us whose lives in some of their aspects do not assume that look. It is good to know that he who makes nobler life possible by any conscious work of his for other people, therein lives nobly himself, not merely in their lives but in his own. Let us always remember that the perfect life was content as one of its highest titles to be called a teacher’s life. In the apparent stationariness of much of our experience, seeing life flow by us, as the river flows by the tree, it is good to live thus by the life to which we try to minister, as the tree lives by the river whose waters it at the same time docs something to colour and to direct.

But there is a larger view of Gamaliel than this. He has his relation not merely to St. Paul, but to the whole opening history of Christianity. I have quoted his words at the Sanhedrim when the apostles were on trial: “If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it;” therefore, “refrain from these men, and let them alone.”

There are some men whose whole influence is to keep history open, so that whatever good thing is trying to get done in the world can get done; not the doers of great things, but the men who help to keep the world so truly poised that good forces shall have a chance to work. These words of Gamaliel seem to point him out as being such a man. There are men who seem to shut up a community, so that, as far as their influence extends, if a new thought were waiting to be spoken or a new deed all ready to be done, it would be thrown back and made hopeless. Was not this exactly what Jesus charged upon the Scribes and Pharisees: “Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. Ye neither go in yourselves; neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in “? It was not their special persecutions of enterprising and original people, not their special opposition to His immediate teaching, of which He was speaking then; it was rather the effect which all their life and spirit had upon the world. They made great deeds, fresh thoughts, enthusiastic consecration to first principles appear impossible. There is a still stronger instance of the same blighting power in what St. Mark says of the possibility of Jesus working His miracles in His own country: He “could there do no mighty work, because of the people’s unbelief.” It was possible for men so to shut up a whole district of the land that even Christ’s marvellous power could not do its work there. And this is something which we can surely understand. In our own little circles are there not men so distrustful of the higher impulses, men in the largest and deepest sense so unbelieving and so scornful, that we see the young people, the earnest people, the fresh enthusiastic people, shut up their lives before them as the flowers shut up at night; and there is no hope for any great thing to be done or thought while they arc there. I do not mean the sober, thoughtful, accurate, critical men and women who insist on submitting every impulsive thought and plan to a careful examination. They are not the murderers of enthusiasm; they kill no impulse except the silliest and most superficial. They are like the healthy frost, which kills the gnats and mosquitoes, but makes every higher being live with a fuller life. The men I speak of are men who are set upon making all the world live in their way, and who have no real faith in God, and therefore no real faith in man. Human force and goodness seem to them to be not vital growths with real life in them, but skilfullyarranged devices all artificially planned and pinned together, where if you altered the place of any single pin the whole must fall. Such men must blight the possibilities of any community they live in. But there are other men who, not doing themselves perhaps great deeds, seem to make great deeds, or at least to make great life, possible. Such men in our community, in our family circles, in our own little groups, whatever they are, any of us may be — men who shall do something to hold the soul of our little group in such expectancy and readiness, in such unwillingness to settle down upon the imperfect present as a finality, that when the inspired word or deed shall come, as it is sure to come some time, it shall find the atmosphere ready to receive it and transmit it. We cannot make the wind to blow, — it bloweth where it listeth; but we can keep the windows open, so that when it blows the chambered life about us shall not fail to receive its freshness.

If I am right in thinking that Gamaliel was a good type of this kind of man who keeps the world open for what God has to give to it, then it will certainly be well for us to study him more closely, and especially to look at this typical speech of his to see what we can of where this kind of power lies. I must quote it to you once again. “If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought,” he said; “but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it.” The first thing that is evident about that speech is that the man who makes it believes in God; not a mere faith about God; he believes in God. To him evidently surrounding- all that man does — behind it and before it and working through it — there is God. And with God are the final issues and destinies of things. Work as man will, he cannot make a plan succeed which God disowns; work as man will, he cannot make a plan fail which God approves. That is a noble and distinct faith. It is stepping across the line between fear and courage, between restlessness and peace, between intolerance and charity, when a man thoroughly, heartily, enthusiastically enters into that faith, when he comes to really believe that with all his heart and soul. These words of Gamaliel are the words of all really progressive spirits. They were the words of Martin Luther, who opened Europe and made the best of modern history a possibility. Fitly do they stand to-day carved upon the pedestal of his great statue at Wittenberg.

And yet we want to know what it is to believe in God and to trust Him for the great results of things. It is not to rest in idleness. Luther worked; Gamaliel worked. Nobody can doubt that Gamaliel went back from the Sanhedrim meeting to teach with all his might that Christianity was wrong. He had his thoughts, and he upheld them. He said, “This is the truth;” only, as he said that, he must have said also to his scholars — young Saul of Tarsus sitting there among them — “There are some men here in Jerusalem — earnest, brave, enthusiastic, wofully deluded, as I think — who are asserting that not this which I tell you about the Messias, but something else quite the opposite is true. They are asserting that the Christ has come, and that His reign has begun. I think these men are wrong. I give you my reasons. By and by you will see their fanaticism wither and dry up because no life of God is in it. But now let them alone. Believe your truth, assert it, prove it, live it: so will you do your best to kill this folly.” That was Gamaliel. That is the true spirit always. To hold your truth, to believe it with all your heart, to work with all your might first to make it real to yourself and then to show its preciousness to other men, and then — not till then, but then — to leave the questions of when and how and by whom it shall prevail, to God; that is the true life of the true believer. There is no feeble unconcern and indiscriminateness there, and neither is there any excited hatred of the creed, the doctrine, or the Church which you think wholly wrong. You have not fled out of the furnace of bigotry only to freeze on the open and desolate plains of indifference. You believe, and 258 GAMALIEL. [xii.

yet you have no wish to persecute; and any reader of the history of faith — nay, any student of his own soul — knows how rarely these two conditions have met in perfect harmony.

When I say that word “persecute,” I dare say that I suggest the question which has been all the time upon some of your minds. Persecution sounds like a bygone word — a word of Gamaliel’s time but not of ours. And no doubt in its worst forms in the best parts of the earth persecution has quite passed away. The stake and the scaffold for opinion’s sake have disappeared in all enlightened lands. And yet all persecution did not pass away with them. There are far keener ways in which man may inflict pain on his fellow-man than by the axe or halter. Social disgrace and ostracism for the sake of one’s belief come in to take the place of the more crude and violent punishments of other days. It may be said, perhaps, that these too arc gone; and in great part they are. No man to-day with any sort of manly earnestness about his creed could mind, it would seem, for a moment the petty indications of dislike and unpopularity which his creed might incur. The form in which persecution lingers still is one yet more subtle. It is in the disposition to attach disastrous consequences in this world or the next to honest opinions which we hold to be mistaken; the desire to fasten upon intellectual convictions those stigmas of wickedness which can belong only to personal character, to call a man a bad man, and to make him, if we can, tremble at some future which we vaguely hold before him, who — just as honest and as faithful in the search for truth as we are — has seen truth differently from the way in which it has appeared to us. When that last form of terrorism shall have passed away — when we shall frankly own that there is nothing for which God in any world will punish any of His children except sin — then persecution will have finally perished. That day will come, partly by the advancement of man’s own standards, by his willing acceptance of the better way, but partly also by the acceptance of a more and more clearly perceived necessity. Man will cease persecuting his brother man, partly because he will outgrow the wish to persecute, but partly also because he will see how useless it is to persecute; always our necessities come thus to reinforce our feeble sense of duty. We shall come in the end to welcome all the honest and earnest thought of men, partly because we see the good of it, however it differs from our own, and partly because we cannot help ourselves. In history it is by the combined forces of these two causes that every great progress of human thought has taken place.

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And when all persecution goes, when the last effort to enforce opinion by any form of terror disappears, no doubt one of the greatest of all the blessings which its departure brings will be that there will come a chance and a demand for the two forms of human influence which will then have all the work to do. The greatest blessing of getting rid of the weeds is that the flowers can grow. Reason and life, these are the real forces which man always has a right to use to impress his belief upon his fellow-man. When you have thoroughly learned and thoroughly believed that it is both wrong and useless to try to frighten your fellow-man out of his faith into yours, then what remains? First, you may argue with him, tell him why you believe, show him how unreasonable his unbelief or his fanaticism is. That is legitimate, and it is good for any man or any creed when it is driven out of the dark ways of persecution and made to stand up fairly in the light and face the adversary in fair battle. And if you cannot argue, if your grounds for your belief, true as you know they are, arc such as you cannot put forth in convincing words, or if the friend whom you want to convince is one to whose mind stated arguments bring no conviction, then there is only one thing left — you must live your faith. Oh, how often we have seen it! A true soul cannot, and will not, force its faith upon another soul. It hates, and it despairs of persecution. And it says (how often we have heard it!), “I cannot argue. I always make the better reason seem the worst, and dishonour the cause for which I plead. Am I not helpless!” And then just going on, hopeless of influencing others, just trying to live out its own life, to turn its own assured belief into obedient action, gradually other people have become aware, even if it has never discovered the fact itself, that this true soul was bearing a witness to truth which must have power. Not all men are capable of arguing or of receiving argument; but all men are capable of living and of appreciating life. In a live State the soldiers have their useful duty, but it is not the fighting soldiers who make the State’s true strength or are its real defenders. Its faithful citizens, living their industrious lives within its institutions, which their lives are always filling with life, they are the true defenders of the State, making it strong, and making its strength impressively manifest to all the world. So the great faith needs learned reasoners; it cannot do without them. But it needs obedient servants and disciples more. And he who cannot argue, and will not persecute, may still know that his life is not useless for his faith. He may just live faithfully and leave the whole result to God, whose the faith really is if it is true.

And that brings us back once more to Gamaliel. Was he, then, right? Could he then, can a man to-day, leave all to God and be quietly sure that He will vindicate the truth? A thousand fluctuations in the varying battle make us doubt. Many and many a time it seems as if between the error and the truth it were merely a question of which had the cleverest men upon its side. And yet we know that, if there be a God at all, Gamaliel was right. There cannot be a God, and yet that which is of Him have no stronger assurance than that which is of man and of the earth. There must be time, there must be patience; but the real final question of two trees is the question of their roots. That which is rooted in God must live. There is no hope or peace anywhere in the world if this is not true. Who cares which way the fickle wind is blowing at this minute if there be no purpose which stands behind and governs it, no One who holds the winds in his hands? But if there be, who will not labour bravely, trying to put himself into the current of the great purpose of the world; begging to be defeated if he mistakes the great purpose and is helping evil when he thinks that he is helping good; read)- to wait and work through all delays; with infinite patience ready to see men blundering and going wrong; ready to help them if he can, — sure of one thing and only one, that in the end, through every hindrance and delay, God must do right?

The final glory of Gamaliel lies there. He believed that God was the only life of this world, that all which did not live in Him must die. We do not know whether Gamaliel ever became a Christian before he died, whether, in this life, he ever saw that the true light which these poor prisoners adored was true and gave himself to Christ. The legends say that he did. History seems to say that he did not. But at least we know that if we have rightly read his character and story, he made the Christian faith more possible for other men, and he must somewhere, sometime — if not here, then beyond — have come to the truth and to the Christ Himself. I wish that I could speak to the Gamaliels here to-day, men not Christians, but men who are earnest, thoughtful, tolerant, and sure of God, pure and sincere, and ready for the light which God shall show them. Be sure, so I would say to them, be sure that no man in this world can be earnest and sure of God without helping the world to faith, often to a faith clearer than his own, or without going on himself to a completer and completer faith, and certainly at last somewhere coming to the perfect faith himself. Therefore be earnest and keep sure of God! Be earnest and keep sure of God! Wc who believe in Christ dare to be confident and say that we know that to every such soul the Way, the Truth, the Life must show Himself at last!