The Things of Man
Matt. vi. 2-4; ix. 13; x. 8; xii. 7 5 xxiii. 23; xxv. 31-46.
Mark i. 41; ii. 5, 11; v. 43; vi. 7, 13, 30, 31, 37, 41, 55, 56; viii. 1-
9; ix. 25, 41; x. 45, 49; xi. 25; xii. 41-44; xiv. 3-9.
Luke iv. 40; v. 15; vi. 1 7- 19; vii. 21, 22; ix. I, 2, 1 3, 14, 56; x 9, 3 3‘35> 37; xi. 4, 5-13, 41; xii. 33; xiv. 1-14; xvi. 9; xviii. 18- 27; xxi. 1-4; xxiii. 34.
Matt. iv. 19; v. 14, 15, 19; ix. 37, 38; x. 5-42; xiii. 31-33, 52; xxii. 9, 10; xxvi. 13; xxviii. 16-20.
Mark i. 17, 21, 22, 38, 39; ii. 2, 13, 17; iii. 14; iv. 1, 2, 3-9, 21, 22,
33> 34; v. 19; vi. 1-6, 12, 30, 34; xii. 1; xiii. 10, n; xiv. 9. 49.
Luke ix. 15, 32, 43, 44; v. 1, 3, 10, 17; vi. 6; vii. 22; viii. 1, 4-18; xii. 2, 3; xiii. 26; xvi. 1 6; xxii. 32; xxiv. 47, 48.
IN the same way as love to God involves love to the things of God, so love to man has to manifest itself in sympathy and consideration for what may be called the things of man. And these manifestations of a Christian spirit may go out either to men in general or to our fellow-creatures in the relationships of life. Let us begin with duties to others in general.
On this subject no one has written more attractively
than the author of Ecce Homo, in the second part
of that work, where he deals with what he calls
the Legislation of the Kingdom. It is true that this
portion of the author’s performance is less original
than his opening chapters; but it was the first
attempt in English to set forth, as a connected whole,
the ethical teaching of Jesus, and the author selected
a method which gave full scope to his own rare
acquirements; exhibiting the outlines of Christian
morality by contrasting it, point by point, with the
ethics of the classical nations. With a sovereign
survey not only over the philosophical speculation
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THE ETHIC OF JESUS
of the ancients, but over the illustrative material supplied by the history and literature of Greece and Rome, he presents, against the background of the ancient beliefs and practices, the ideals of the new life introduced by Jesus. These he comprehends under five heads — the Law of Philanthropy, the Law of Edification, the Law of Mercy, the Law of Resentment, and the Law of Forgiveness. No method of teaching anything that is new can be more instructive and illuminative than thus to compare it with some¬ thing else of the same kind with which the student is already familiar; and in this case everyone imbued with any tincture of classical knowledge must enjoy the saliency with which the features of the Christian ideal are brought out, especially as the ethical instincts of the author are as refined as his scholar¬ ship is thorough.
Yet it has long been manifest to scholars in this department that the analysis is not only limited but misleading. It is thoroughly English, and the point of view is that of an Oxford or Cambridge tutor, whose Moral Philosophy embraces only the duties of men to men, but not the duties of man to God. It was characteristic of the school of thought to which the author belonged to substitute favourite ideas of its own for the whole testimony of the Word of God; and it is only necessary to compare the texts which can, with the utmost stretching, be quoted in illustration of the five laws with the whole sum of the ethical teaching of Jesus to see how defective the representation is. In reality, the author takes account only of the Sermon on the Mount — or rather of as much of this as is found in the sixth chapter of St. Luke — but this is no more than a tenth of the material in our hands.
Count Tolstoy knows a little better what he is doing. He is aware that the few sayings out of which he constructs his view of Christianity form but an inconsiderable portion of what has come down to us from the lips of Christ. But he also deliberately confines himself to about the same amount of material as the author of Ecce Homo, giving as his reason the fact that these few sayings have always seemed to him the essence of Christianity, all the rest, even when put in the mouth of the Founder, being wood, hay, stubble, in comparison. With this there are, no doubt, many who will sympathize; because, to the popular mind, choice selections from any great or beautiful production are, as a rule, more agreeable and acceptable than the thing itself. But this is not the temper of the genuine disciple, who, while recognising the incomparable freshness and aroma of the few sayings picked out by such writers, yet prefers the entire record, believing that the whole is greater than the parts, and that even those members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary.
The sayings alluded to would embrace such as the
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Golden Rule, the exquisite word about a cup of cold water given in the name of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the address of the Judge at the Last Day to those on His right hand, and the like. As has been already hinted, there is a group of these in the report of the Sermon on the Mount in the sixth chapter of St. Luke: “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every one that asketh of thee, and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. For, if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And, if ye do good to them who do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And, if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest, for He is kind unto the unthankful and the evil”
In this class of the sayings of our Lord there is a tone of exaggeration by no means easy to account for. There are sayings which not only
3!3
carry on the face of them an air of absurdity but stand in open contradiction to the conduct of Jesus as reported by the Evangelists. Thus, in one place He appears to forbid the taking of an oath in any circumstances, yet, on His trial, He made no scruple about the form of oath administered to Him by the high-priest. In one of the verses just quoted He demands that, when struck on the one cheek, we should turn the other also; but, when struck Himself, at the bidding of the high-priest, by a minion of the court during His trial, so far from turning the other cheek, He hurled at the official who was profaning the seat of justice an indignant protest. In another verse just cited, He commands to give to everyone who asks, but nothing was more characteristic in His own behaviour than the resolution with which He went His own way, turning a deaf ear to those who pestered Him with requests, as if they knew better than Himself the course which he ought to pursue; His fellow-townsmen thus being balked in their thirst for miracles, even His own mother not escaping sharp reproof for such interference, and His foremost disciple being dismissed with the rebuke, “Get thee behind Me, Satan.”
In the interpretation of such paradoxes Count Tolstoy has taken the bull by the horns, not only accepting every word literally, but even giving to some of them an application more drastic than
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appears on the surface. Thus, the commandment, “Judge not,” is not only taken literally as forbidding all criticism by private individuals of the conduct of others, but applied to all forms of legal procedure, which he would totally suppress. He narrates how, at the crisis of his own life, the saying in the Sermon on the Mount, “Resist not evil,” dawned upon him as the master-utterance of the whole Bible, the consistent application of which all round would remedy the wrongs of society and effect the perfection of human character; and, with this key, he goes through the entire Sermon, intrepreting it as a manifesto of anarchy. While, however, the attitude of this thinker to the existing order of society no doubt receives explanation and perhaps, to a certain extent, justification from the maladministration of the Russian government, from which, in recent years, the veil has been so ruthlessly drawn, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by respect for the man to the insuperable barriers which his teaching, if accepted as the genuine version of the Gospel of the New Testament, would erect between Jesus and the intelligence of the world. Such a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount would rob it of all poetry and transmute the Preacher into a prosaic martinet.
Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, believes himself to have discovered a principle for explaining such difficult sayings, which he thus formulates: “In the cases which He chooses for examples, He abstracts from all such circumstances and considerations as prevent the general rule from being clearly seen, although, when closely studied, these do not, in point of fact, invalidate or limit the application of the rule.” To this principle he subjoins the observation, that Jesus was led to adopt this mode of emphasis by the casuistical rmctices of the scribes, which He abhorred. These were wont to accumulate difficult and exceptional cases for the purpose of evaporating the spirit of general commandments, whereas Jesus did the same thing with the intention of showing that, even when the fulfilment of the letter of the law might not be practicable, it might still be possible to carry out its spirit, provided the heart were possessed with the love of man and the love of God.*
I should be inclined to ascribe the phenomenon rather to a peculiarity of disposition in Jesus Himself, and to the unconscious tact of a supreme teacher In the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke there has been preserved an account of His table-talk at the board of a Pharisee, who had invited Him to dinner. Some of His remarks on this occasion, if understood literally and prosaically, would not only be in bad taste, as seeming to find fault with domestic arrangements of which He was at the time taking advantage, but would be the
* Pp. 96 ft.
THE ETHIC OF JESUS
reverse of good advice from a moral point of view; for, as Calvin observes*: “To condemn the feasts which friends and relatives give to one another would be to take away from men a portion of their human nature; and to exclude our friends from the hospitable board, and give access to it only to strangers, would be a mark not so much of austerity as of barbarity.” But the appearance of harshness vanishes, if we conceive Him to have uttered the words, as would have been fit and natural on such an occasion, with a kindly smile. By people incapable of under¬ standing Him the tradition has been invented that He was never seen to laugh, but there are not a few of His dark sayings which become luminous the moment we admit the notion that He may have uttered them in a tone of pleasantry; and this is a case in point, because the Speaker lightly and archlysatirises the commercial spirit in hospitality, when entertainers give only to receive as much again, while He puts the signature of His commendation on the true hospitality, which gives out of an over¬ flowing heart without thought of recompense.
I venture to think that the ordinary reader, having a little humour in his composition, is not confused by these peculiarities of the teaching of Jesus. y He perceives that what is described is an ideal; it is with the direction in which everyone’s face is turned that the Teacher is concerned rather than with the
* Commentary, in loo.
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several steps of the journey; it is not to slaves of the letter He is addressing Himself, but to lovers of the spirit. In short, it is the love of man He is teaching, not an array of new commandments in¬ tended to rival the endless traditions of the scribes. This we must hold even if it leaves it open to those so disposed to evaporate the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount into mere counsels of perfection, having nothing to do with the regulation of ordinary existence — a course not infrequently taken even by those who revere the Great Teacher.*
As has been remarked above, the author of Ecce Homo reduces the sayings of Jesus with which we are at present dealing to five laws; and he sometimes brings down the number to three. Indeed, they might be reduced to one. If all the sayings of this sort be examined, they will be found to express, in every form, the Law of Giving. It is as if Jesus set Himself to contradict the advice of the natural heart, which is always counselling to acquire and to keep. Self is the centre to which the thoughts and the efforts of men all run; Jesus, on the contrary, directed all thought and effort to run from this
* Dr. Sanday, in his famous article on Jesus Christ in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, speaks of the morality of the Sermon on the Mount as only fitted for individuals or, at most, a limited circle of the initiated, instead of being intended for the great world, which leads one to ask: Who is, then, the legislator for the world, if it be not Jesus?
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centre in the direction of others. The essence of sin is selfishness; and Jesus wished to counteract this most native tendency of human nature. By getting and keeping, men seek their own happiness; but they would consult it more by doing the reverse; for, as He said in the one great saying of His found in the New Testament outside the Gospels, “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Every¬ one grudges what his neighbour gets, imagining his own happiness to be jeopardised thereby; but, if he could be persuaded to act on the opposite assumption, he would find himself overloaded with the means of happiness; for others, surprised and astonished at his benevolence, would be melted in turn, and would radiate back the warmth received from him: “Give, and it shall be given unto you: good measure, pressed down and shaken together and running over, shall men give into your bosom.” Usually this is cited as a great promise of divine giving, but, in reality, as can be seen at a glance, it is a promise of what men will do under the genial influence of unselfish treatment. The earth would be changed into a paradise if, instead of hating, human beings loved; if, instead of speaking evil of one another, they spoke only good; if, instead of grasping and holding, they gave away. It seems so simple that one often asks in perplexity why they do not do it. That is a deep mystery, but it takes us outside the sphere of Ethics. That Jesus not only knew why, but knew, besides, the only way in which this radical evil can be cured, is proved by His great saying: “Freely ye have received, freely give.” In the same way as Christian forgiveness is only possible to the forgiven, so is Christian giving only possible in proportion as anyone has experienced the infinite giving of God.
“Ye have the poor with you always,” said our Lord; and this is a prophecy which has not failed of fulfilment Every generation has been confronted by the problem of poverty in a form peculiar to itself. The form of it which the present generation has to face is not less formidable than that of any preceding age; for the problem of poverty, in our day, is, at the same time, the problem of the city, the problem of housing, the problem of unemploy¬ ment. Some would add, that it is, more than any of these, the problem of drunkenness; there being comparatively little dire poverty unconnected with this cause. Others would contend that this is a partial view, drunkenness itself being not only a cause but a consequence — the consequence of in¬ salubrious dwellings, of insufficient wages, of the hopelessness of multitudes, who, seeing no prospect of rising out of the misery in which they are sunk, plunge into intoxication to forget their sorrows. The facts are appalling and even maddening; and, for the sake of the children especially, who have to grow up in an environment of squalor and riot, the
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call is loud and urgent for the betterment of social conditions. But, if Jesus said, “Woe to you that are rich,” this proves that the mere improvement of outward conditions would not necessarily be a solution of the problem; for the most fortunate had no more attained the true end of life than the most unfortunate: on the contrary, their failure to do so was even more palpable. Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands to another may be inspired by the same passions as have blinded the present holders to their own highest good, and may be accompanied with injustice as extreme as has ever been manifested by the rich and the powerful.* It is no novelty in the world to see any class, whether high or low, standing on its rights and clamouring for its privileges; but the novelty and the miracle would be to see one forgetting its own claims and vindicating the rights of others. By the promptings of the natural heart, by the spirit of the world, and
* The fallacy in many amateur disquisitions on economic subjects, as well as in many pulpit utterances on Socialism, is the assumption that employers of labour could pay better wages to their workpeople if they were so disposed. But many, if they did so, would be employers of labour no longer; because they would be bankrupt. Those who are earning large, steady and increasing profits cannot be urged too much to consider the claims of those in their employment to a more generous share; but multitudes of employers are carrying on business in the face of keen competition, on a narrow margin ot profit; and any considerable increase of their wages-bill would simply throw them out of business altogether. by the eloquence of many an innovator, man is urged to say to his neighbour, “What is thine is mine”; but Jesus prompts him to reverse the statement and say to his neighbour, “What is mine is thine”; and St. Paul was able to describe the primitive Christians “as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things.”
It is not uncommon to try to commit Jesus as a partisan either for or against Socialism; but His words elude the attempt. Thus, the case, already quoted, in which He refused to be made a judge or a divider between two brethren seems to separate a large section of human life from the religious sphere and hand it over to the control of the civil magistrate, and it is often quoted as a reason why ministers and Church-courts should not meddle with certain subjects. But how easy it is to retort, that this is only a form of the plea of the priest and the Levite, to excuse themselves from doing anything for the man fallen amongst thieves! It is well that the words of Jesus do not settle such great issues, apart from the accumulating knowledge of the race and the growth of Christian sentiment. He will not spare us either the tasks of science or the discipline of sympathy; and it is safe to suspect the argument when either all the logic or all the sentiment appears to be on our side. There are two opposite maxims in the teaching of Jesus — “He that is not with us is against us” and “He that is not against us is
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for us” — which seem to be contradictory; but the one is a safe guide for judging ourselves, and the other is equally useful in judging others; and this may supply a hint for interpreting the apparently Contradictory sayings of our Lord on this subject.
If, now, we inquire what is to be given, the first answer which springs to the lips is, alms to the poor. And for this there is plenty of support in the record. Though our Lord was Himself so poor in earthly goods that He could say, “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head,” still a bag was kept in His company, out of which relief was dispensed to the indigent. Even when reproving the giving of alms in a wrong way, He hinted that they ought to be given in a right way — “But, when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” When exposing the ceremonies of the Pharisees, He said in so many words: “But rather give alms of such things as ye have, and, behold, all things are clean unto you.” The most striking case of all is that of the rich youth whom He told to go and sell all he possessed and give to the poor, and then to come and be His follower. It is well known how, in subsequent centuries, this saying was used as the great lever of the monastic movement. Those who forsook the world for the convent and those called to ecclesiastical office began their new career by divesting themselves as quickly as possible of all earthly possessions. But there were not wanting voices at the time giving warning of the breach of duty which this might imply, and the experience of history has passed sentence on the whole experiment of which this was a manifestation. To divest oneself at once of all property may be far easier than to expend it wisely and well, but the latter may be the use of a talent received from above and involving lifelong responsibility. The effect on the receivers, also, must be considered: when money was distributed wholesale, it is not likely to have done much good, while it may often have done harm. The rich young man’s must have been a special case, in which some peculiarity of dis¬ position or circumstances justified the treatment, and such cases may occur in any age; but the purpose of the Saviour was not to lay down the path prescribed for him as a rule for all, but to emphasize the supreme value of the blessings of the kingdom of heaven, to attain which any sacrifice is justifiable.
Money is not, however, the only thing, or even the chief thing, to be given away. Though Jesus Himself gave money, He gave far oftener sympathy, health, relief from disablement. Wherever He went, He was distributing such blessings on every hand, re¬ storing to the diseased and deformed the power of earning money for themselves. In the Gospel of
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St. Mark especially, our Lord’s entire earthly career is represented as one manifold distribution of such gifts. In the same spirit He said to the Twelve, as He sent them forth: “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils.” At the present moment the belief begins to prevail in many quarters that, had the Church continued faithful, she would never have lost a large power of overcoming disease by faith and prayer, and of communicating even to the body a more abundant life. At any rate, the flourishing of medical science under Christian auspices has placed in the hands of all desirous of assisting the poor and needy the means of relieving the victims of disease to an extent which, in former ages, could only have been accomplished by miracle; and medical missions, both home and foreign, are the most indubitable modern imitation of the daily life of Jesus.
Even this, however, does not nearly exhaust the range of the giving recommended by Jesus. It was not only upon the poor that He directed the fulness of the unselfish heart to flow forth. Unlike His forerunner, who avoided the habitations of men and abode in the wilderness, Jesus was a friend of the forms of social intercourse which tend to expansive¬ ness and charity. His first miracle was wrought at a wedding. He accepted offers of hospitality with equal freedom from Pharisee and publican, and so unconstrained was His conduct on such occasions
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as to draw down on Himself the criticism of the sour-visaged and narrow-minded, who called Him “a friend of publicans and sinners.” As has been mentioned above, there has been preserved in Holy Writ an account of His table-talk on one such occasion, from which it is manifest how fully He appreciated the power of social intercourse to obliterate prejudice and suspicion and to unloose the kindlier instincts of the heart. Even courtesies still more humble were not beneath His notice, for He said: “And, if ye salute your brethren only, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans so?” And, when sending out the Twelve, He took the trouble to say to them, “And, when ye come into an house, salute it.”
In the nature of the case, however, the most precious gift that can be offered to men is the Gospel. Of this Jesus proved His own appreciation when, in reply to the messengers of the Baptist, He first enumerated the works of benevolence He was engaged in performing, and then added, as the crown and climax, “And to the poor the Gospel is preached.” It was the pressure of the Word within His soul that drove Him forth from Nazareth, to exchange the occupation of a carpenter for that of a preacher; and, in the description of the mission of a prophet which He read in the synagogue of Nazareth and appropriated to Himself, we learn the kind of passion which, at the beginning of His
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ministry, was burning in His soul. It was this internal pressure which drove Him from one scene of sin and misery to another, and made Him say, “I must preach the Gospel to other cities also; for therefore am I sent.” In such parables as those of the fifteenth of St. Luke we feel the hunger and thirst for the salvation of men which underlay His activity, while in those of the thirteenth of St. Matthew we see His estimate of the results. His personal ministry was confined to the lost sheep of the house of Israel; but, while acquiescing in the will of His Father in this arrangement, he turned wistfully to the regions beyond and anticipated the time when the Gospel would be preached in the whole world.* The Twelve He called from the very first “to be fishers of men,” thus, with His ready use of metaphor, causing their preceding experience to illuminate that which was still to come. The wrords in which He empowered them to perform works of mercy on men’s bodies have been quoted above; but these are preceded in the record by the more solemn words, “As ye go, say, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” In the tenth chapter of St. Matthew and the tenth of St. Luke respectively have been preserved the addresses of instruction with which He sent forth the Twelve and the Seventy; and these are the prototypes of all the exhortations with which the messengers of peace have been sent forth, in
* Compare J. Clark Murray, Christian Ethics, pp. 109 ff. the centuries since, as ministers or missionaries. The wider work which Providence did not permit Him to do in person was to be undertaken by these objects of His training, and, before He parted from them, He showed how He conceived this task, when He said: “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.... And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”
The Twelve and the Seventy were officially called to the work of evangelization; and it may have been in view of the need there would always be for men to devote their whole time and strength to the spread of His kingdom that Jesus said, “The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He would send forth labourers into His harvest.” But, while official consecration may quicken and sustain the impulses from which evangelization springs, these do not belong solely to a consecrated class, but are native to the spiritual life itself. The desire to communicate the gift of salvation is natural to all who have received it themselves; and, the more any are imbued with the elementary convictions of Jesus, such as the value of the soul, the love of God for the lost, and the hopes and fears of the life to come, the more must they hunger for the awakening of their fellow-creatures and rejoice with the angels over sinners repenting. It has been the greatest error of Christendom to make the work of evangeliza-THE ETHIC OF JESUStion the perquisite of a class; and the Gospel will never really conquer the world till all to whom the message of Christ has come with power begin to give to others the words of life eternal.
Though little dwelt upon in systems of Ethics, this obligation to evangelize lay nearer the heart of Jesus than most of those features which have been put forward as the leading characteristics of His teaching. And, even from the point of view of benevolence, its virtue goes deeper than any other service that can be rendered by man to man. While ordinary benevolence may feed the hungry and clothe the naked, evangelization enables the poor to feed and clothe themselves; because it touches the springs of manhood and self-respect and transforms the whole condition from within; and, while it does so on the small scale in the individual and the family, it does so no less on the great scale in the nation or the race; for the whole course of history ever since the Advent goes to prove that, wherever the light of the Gospel shines, the blessings of civilisation abound also. Those, therefore, in whom the spirit of Christianity prevails to such a degree as to overflow upon others are both the true disciples of Jesus and the true bene¬ factors of humanity; and they hold in their keeping the secret of Jesus.