Missing the Highest Good
Matt. vi. 25.
x. 28, 39.
xvi. 25, 26.
Matt. v. 22. 26, 29, 30.
vii. 2, 21, 23-27.
viii. 12.
x. 15, 28.
xi. 22, 24.
xii. 32, 36, 41,
42.
xiii. 3°> 39, 42,
5°-
xvi. 27.
xviii. 6, 8, 9, 14.
xxi. 44.
xxii. 13.
xxiii. 14, 15, 33.
xxiv. 51.
xxv. 30, 41, 46.
xxvi. 24.
Mark viii. 35, 36, 37.
xi. 14.
Mark iii. 29.
vi. II.
viii. 38.
ix. 42-50.
xii. 40.
xiv. 21.
xvi. 16.
Luke ix. 24, 25.
xv. 4, 8, 13.
xvii. 33.
xix. 10-27.
Luke vi. 25. 49.
ix. 26.
x. 10-16.
xi. 31.
xii. 5, 9, 46
. ?8’ 59‘
xiii. 1-5, 6-9
23-3°-
xvi. 19-31. ’
xvii. 2.
xx. 18, 47.
HOWEVER the end of life may be conceived — whether as Blessedness, or as the Kingdom of God, or as Righteousness — one thing is indubitable in the entire teaching of Jesus — that He looks upon the end of life as capable of being missed, and as actually having been missed, by the children of men.* When He speaks of Blessedness, He at the same time utters woes, which will be the portion of some instead of blessedness; when He speaks of the King¬ dom, He distinctly thinks of some who will not be able to enter into it; and when He speaks of Righteousness, He glances at many who are living in unrighteousness. In short, there is a considerable proportion of the words of Christ occupied with the description and the denunciation of sin.
This is the point at which the ethical teaching of Jesus differs most widely from the similar teaching of philosophy. The ethics of the philosophers bear a considerable resemblance to the teaching of Jesus
* A conception of sin which agrees closely with that expressed in both the Hebrew NDil and the Greek apapravco.
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in so far as the setting up of an ideal of character and conduct is concerned; but little or nothing is said by philosophers about the inability of men to attain to the standard, or of the manifold forms of failure exhibited in actual experience. In English Moral Philosophy, especially, this ignoring of the facts of the case is painfully universal; and it imparts an air of unreality to the whole. This may be the reason why philosophy is spoken of, in common language, with distrust, and moralists are in but indifferent repute. For, though the common man may listen for a while to eloquent descriptions of an ideal life, and may look with aspiration towards the moral altitudes to which he is directed, yet he knows very well that his own moral life is a lament¬ able failure, and that the history of human nature is the same on a vastly larger scale; and he distrusts an account of his condition which says nothing about this painful fact. In spite of its tendency to self-satisfaction, humanity is aware of its own broken bones, and it knows that these must be dealt with before there is any prospect of climbing the heights of moral attainment.
While the sayings of Jesus abound with warnings, couched in many different forms of expression, that the end of life may be missed, there is not, in the entire catalogue of His words, one in which this is so impressively embodied as the saying which has arrested the attention oi every generation: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
It so happens that, in the English translation, this possibility appears in three forms — it is represented as possible that a man may lose “himself,” or lose his “life,” or lose his “soul”; and, although this is accidental,* the circumstance may be taken advantage of, in order to bring out all sides of Christ’s idea, as these three alternatives enable us to do.
The possibility that a man may lose “himself” is the possibility that he may never attain to the moral and spiritual stature for which he was designed, but be dwarfed into a nonentity. As a benevolent eye, looking on a group of children in a degraded neighbourhood, may see a vision of the rosy health which might have filled out their bloodless features and emaciated limbs, if they had been reared in a more favourable environment, so, we have reason to believe, from His own words, Jesus habitually saw with the mind’s eye the spiritual development which those around Him might have attained had their desire been fixed more steadily on the true end of life.
What He thought of most frequently as impeding
* But, after writing the above, I found in Wellhausen the very same idea, of course without any reference to the English translation. Commenting on Mark viii. 35, he observes: “Fur iy/vxri gibt es kein ausreichendes Equivalent; es steht zugleich Seele, Leben, und das Reflexiv (sich selbst).’’
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the growth of true manhood was the pursuit of wealth and property. Thus, when invited on a certain occasion to divide the property of two brothers, who had fallen out about their respective shares, He said to them sadly, “Take heed, and beware of covetousness, for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” Then He proceeded to tell the story of the Rich Fool, finishing up with the statement, “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, but is not rich towards God.” In this final phrase — “rich towards God” — we have, it is clear, a very perfect description of Christ’s ideal; and what it suggests is a development of the Godward side of human nature in prayer, aspiration, charity, generosity, and all the other qualities that go to the fashioning of a noble man¬ hood. This was what Jesus desiderated for every¬ one; and to miss it, which was fatally possible, was, in His eyes, the greatest of calamities.*
But Jesus was hardly less sensible of the danger to which the poor were exposed of missing the prize
* Not only the loss of the self, but even injury to it — any avoidable restraint on its development or diminution of its powers — is deprecated in the strongest terms. This seems to be the force of the alternative in Luke ix. 25, iavrov de anoXiaas fj (rjiiuodeis. The Authorised Version translates, “If he lose him¬ self or be cast away,” and the Revised, no better, “If he lose or forfeit his own self.” Field, Otium Norvice?isey seems to have been the first to detect the true force of the alternative: If iavrov is to be taken in connexion with both verbs, we may through an opposite cause — on account, not of the glamour of riches, but the pressure of poverty. Indeed, the commencement of His ministry among the fisher¬ men and peasantry of Galilee is burdened with the pathos of this aspect of the condition of His hearers.
It cut Him to the heart to see that His fellow-men and fellow-countrymen should be so stunted and un-’ developed; and all for what? Slender was the livelihood, and attended by few pleasures, which they extracted from the grudging soil. Yet for this they were sacrificing themselves. They had no time to pray, to think, to cultivate spiritual beauty or dignity. This is the reflection that echoes through those match¬ less portions of the Sermon on the Mount in which He reminds them that their heavenly Father feeds the ravens and arrays the lilies in a glory beyond that of Solomon; and His logic is: You do not require to toil and moil so perpetually: you have time to improve your higher nature: even before the bread for your bodies and for the mouths of your children, you are to seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness. His was not a gospel of meat
understand anoXecras of a total, and {lyucddeis of a partial loss: * And lose, or receive damage in, his own self.’” This is expanded by Bruce, in his own racy, pithy style, in The Expositoi’’s Gi’eek Testament: “The idea expressed by the second participle seems to be, that, even though it does not come to absolute loss, yet if gaining the world involve damage to the self, the moral personality — taint, lowering of the tone, vulgarising of the soul — we lose much more than we gain.”
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and drink, of loaves and fishes, of better clothes and better houses; yet well did He know that all these things would follow in their own order: “All these y things shall be added unto you.” Let the spiritual nature be awakened, and the whole environment will be transformed as a matter of course.
In studying deeply the teaching of Jesus, it is often startling to note how He anticipated the ideas of modern times. This thought, for example, that the prime vocation of every man is to be himself — all that his Maker intended him to be, all that the original make of his faculties renders it possible for him to become — is one of the most potent conceptions of modern ethical speculation. The German poet and philosopher, Goethe, especially constituted himself its apostle, considering it, however, to be an original thought of his own. His watchword was Culture — a. word which he has made a shibboleth among the educated of his countrymen — and by culture he meant nothing else than that which I have been expounding — that every man comes into the world capable of being, not a nonentity, but a man of a certain inward stature; and his primary duty, which eclipses all others, is to be this man. To this Goethe consecrated his own life, and he even sacrificed to it the lives of others; for he was of opinion that these had not lived in vain if they had contributed to his development. In our own country the same ideas have been circulated in the writings of Matthew Arnold,
George Eliot, and other disciples of Goethe; and culture is a shibboleth among us too. Between the
moral teaching of such authors and that of Jesus
* ...
there is a close resemblance. The difference will lie
in the disparity between their ideal man and the figure indicated in such a phrase as that already quoted — “rich towards God” — or in the precept, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” To these modern moralists the measure of the man is intellect; to Jesus it was spiritual power.
j.
A second sense in which the end of life may be missed is suggested by the translation of His famous warning with the word “life.” And this also brings us right into the midst of many of the most character¬ istic thoughts of Jesus.
The most literal meaning of losing one’s life is, of course, dying by accident; and there may be circumstances in which Christ’s warning, so read, has a tragic significance: if a man loses his life by accident, what is the whole world to him? He is snatched away out of it; and all his toil and trouble, in winning for himself a footing and a place in it, are in vain. But it was something more characteristic that Jesus put into the phrase. Life is the opportunity of doing a life-work. Not only has the Creator appointed to every human being, in the constitution of his manhood, a certain stature to which he may and ought to attain; but He has appointed a corre-THE ETHIC OF JESUS
sponding task for him to fulfil, determined by the providential circumstances in which he is placed. In fact, this is his life; and not to fulfil this God-appointed purpose of his existence is to lose his life — a calamity for which the gaining of the whole world would be no compensation.
This idea lay near to the heart of Jesus, first of all, in relation to Himself. He thoroughly realised, from first to last, that He had a work to do, so accurately arranged and fitted to the length of His life that every hour had its own part of the whole to clear off, and He was not allowed either to anticipate or lag behind. This consciousness is far more frequently, indeed, expressed in St. John, the Gospel of the interior life of our Lord, than in the Synoptists; but we have it in them too, as, for example, in His saying when Herod sent to threaten Him, “Go ye and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. Nevertheless I must walk to-day and to-morrow and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.” It is expressed also in the utterance emitted on the last journey to Jerusalem, when He was going before the disciples in such a rapt state of mind that, as they followed, they were afraid: “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.” To everyone His saying at the age of twelve will occur as the motto of His whole life, “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business”; but this is one of the cases in which exegetic conscientiousness compels us to forego a tempting proof-text, because, in my opinion, its un¬ doubted and only meaning is, “Wist ye not that I must be in My Father’s house?”
In many different forms; * the variety of which betrays the hold they had on His mind, He gave expression to this danger in reference to others. It will be remembered how frequently He represented this life as a trust or stewardship, for which an account would have to be rendered by and by. The Author of man’s existence is like a proprietor going on a journey to a far country, who gives to his servants their work to do in his absence and will, at his return, hold a strict reckoning with them all. He distributes to his servants so many pounds, and says, “Occupy till I come.” On one occasion Jesus manifested extraordinary irritation, for which some have taken it upon themselves to censure Him, at the sight of a tree that was barren; but this was a manifestation of an impatience, which beset Him always, with objects that were not answering the end of their existence, and especially with human lives which were failing to yield to man and God
* Compare the logion attributed to Jesus, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Codex C, Palestinian Syriac Library: “And I say unto you, that men must give an account of every good word which they shall not speak.”
THE ETHIC OF JESUS
the fruit which might have been expected from them. To this sentiment He gave expression in the solemn parable of the Fig-tree planted in a Vineyard, which, indeed, referred in the first place to the Jewish nation but has, at the same time, an application to the individual; for the principle is the same; and it is this, that, seeing the Creator never makes anything without a purpose, any created thing which fails in this respect is contemptible.*
To lose the “soul” is the third form in which the danger is threatened; and this is the form in which the solemn saying of our Lord is oftenest quoted. The meaning usually attached to it relates to the life to come — to the possibility of missing one’s destiny there. In fixing on this as the sole reference of this phrase, Evangelism has omitted much of the thought of Christ, as has been shown in the preceding paragraphs, yet it cannot be denied that it has
* It may be thought that the word which is the one used when Jesus is speaking of the possibility of losing our life, is too slight to bear all the weight here put on it. But, if so, Jesus employs the other and much more significant term, £cdi) ( e.g. Luke xii. 15), for the end of life, substituting it now and then for other terms signifying man’s chief end; and far) certainly includes all that I have put into the other term, and more. Zcor is life potentiated with all that makes it worth living and filled with all that makes it valuable to God as well as to ourselves; and to miss such life is “death” in a sense equally profound, but recognised in all parts of Scripture, New Testament and Old alike.
emphasized what is the most appalling feature of the threatened danger. The loss of oneself in the sense already explained — of missing one’s opportunities of moral and spiritual development, or of failing to accomplish the task which one has been born to accomplish — may end in the loss of the “soul” in the awful sense of being cast away forever.
On this solemn subject the teaching of our Lord is extraordinarily copious; indeed, it is to Him — and one might also say, to Him alone — that the popular conceptions about a Day of Judgment and the retributions of a future existence are due. Not only did He adopt these conceptions, but he allowed His imagination to play about them, till they were adorned with those realistic and pictorial touches which have made an ineffaceable impression on the mind of every age.
The idea of a general judgment must, one would suppose, have been a current one in the popular theology; because He refers to it as “that day,” taking it for granted apparently that it was familiar to every hearer as the one day that mattered among all the days. At other times He gave to it its full title of “the day of judgment,” or the abbreviated designation of the “judgment.” The grandiose scene, which so captivated the fancy of the mediaeval artists, is all His — the rending heavens and the glory in the clouds; the procession of angels from the open sky, with the Judge n the midst, shining with unspeakable
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glory; the terror, trembling, and loud wailing of the unprepared; the angels moving hither and thither through the innumerable multitude and severing the wicked from among the just; the judgment set and the presentation of everyone to be examined in the audience of all; then, the separation into two great companies, on the right and the left; the sentence of the blessed, pronounced in accents of divine welcome, and that on the lost, uttered in tones of angry thunder; then, the passing away of the visible heavens and earth, as the one company depart to their doom, and the other, with Christ and the angels at their head, disappear through the everlasting gates into the place of felicity.
Of heaven there has been occasion to speak already; but of the place of woe Jesus spoke still more frequently. Two representations seem to struggle with each other in His words. On the one hand, it is a furnace of fire, the Gehenna of fire; on the other, it is a place of pitchy darkness, through which are heard, without interval or relief, sounds of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Only one more trait is needed to complete the terror of the picture: it is the abode of the devil and his angels, for whom it was prepared. The most detailed and graphic representation is in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus — if, indeed, that be a parable. The rich man is not only tormented in flame, so that he prays in agony for a drop of water to cool his tongue, but his suffering and despair are increased tenfold by the sight of the felicity of the beggar, whom he had despised and neglected, now in Abraham’s bosom.* Properly speaking, this is a representation of the condition of the lost before the judgment-day; but there can be little risk in accept¬ ing it as true of the state of the same persons after that event.
Two ways have been suggested of escaping the apparent conclusions to be drawn from these words of the Saviour. The one is to suppose that He took over this portion of His teaching from the popular religion of His time f; and the other that the whole is figurative.
There can be no doubt that, in some of its features, the representation of the other world in the teaching of Jesus can be matched with quotations from the apocryphal books belonging to the period between the Old Testament and the New. During that period the conceptions of the other world, which are very elementary in the Old Testament, had been maturing, the germs growing to developed doctrines. But the teaching of Jesus is far more rounded and self-consistent; and it has every m?rkolqf originality. Jesus never gropes or hesitates, as all who had gone
* Reclining there, as St. John did on Jesus’ bosom at the Last Supper. Lazarus is at a heavenly banquet.
t This assumption is made by Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus% with great frequency.
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before Him had done, when speaking on this subject: He speaks as one who has seen what he describes. Is it conceivable that this was a subject on which He could take over the ideas of the popular faith without making Himself responsible for them? If a religious teacher is responsible for anything, one would suppose it would be for such statements as these. It may be convenient to have a receptacle into which to cast any elements of the teaching of Jesus which may seem to be obnoxious, and so get rid of them; but, when exegesis, by such devices, deprives of all effect words which their Author obviously in¬ tended to impress and arrest, and which have, in point of fact, solemnised all generations which have read them with an open mind, it may be questioned whether it deserves the name of learning.
As for the words being figurative, there can be no reasonable doubt that they are in the highest degree figurative. And it is a sound canon of exegesis that parables ought not to be used as proof-texts.* This is, however, a rule which can be grossly abused. The idea that definite truth is never taught in figurative language is one which can only be maintained for a purpose. For all fair minds the drift of figurative language is frequently as unquestionable as that of the plainest prose. In the parable just quoted, for example, Abraham says to the rich man, “Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed;
* “Theologici Jarcibolica non est demonstratives? so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence”; and I should say that the doctrinal effect of this statement is as obvious as that of a mathematical proposition.*
On this problem of the endlessness of punishment, there are some words of Jesus which have been quoted in favour of the view that the fire of Gehenna is disciplinary, and that, when it has done its work, the prisoners of God will be led forth from it purified, and admitted to the fellowship of the blessed. Such, for example, is the following: “That servant which knew his Lord’s will and prepared not himself shall be beaten with many stripes, but he that knew not and did commit things worthy of stripes shall be beaten with few stripes.” This might mean that,
* Philippson, in his Religion oj Israel, says: “The Rabbis do not believe in the eternity ot future punishments; even the greatest sinners are punished only for generations. They express this figuratively by saying that between hell and paradise there is only the breadth ot a couple of fingers; so that it is very easy for the penitent sinner to pass out of the one into the other.” Similarly, as we learn from Eisenmenger, the distance between hell and heaven is, according to Johannan, only a wall, and, according to Acha, a palm; according to other Rabbis only a finger. In recent controversies such passages have been cited triumphantly as it they were weighty contributions to one of the sides; but is it not evident that, if such notions are older than Christ, His language in the parable is an express contradiction ot them, and that, if His teaching is the elder, the rabbinic expressions were deliberately framed in contradiction of His?
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after the few stripes are exhausted, the servant will be restored to his place in the house; but it may only indicate that there will be degrees of punishment, without saying anything about its duration. The parable of the Unmerciful Servant ends with the words, “His Lord was wroth and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him,” which, it has been argued, contemplates a date, however distant, when the debt will all be liquidated. But, as the debt is put down in the parable as ten thousand talents — two million pounds — and the imprisoned servant is penniless, the encouragement afforded by this saying is but faint. There remains the well-known saying about the sin against the Holy Ghost: “Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him, but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.” This might mean that there is to be forgiveness of certain sins in the world to come; but, as it asserts that the sins of some persons at all events will not be forgiven even there, the real crux still remains.
On behalf of the other alternative to eternal punishment — that, namely, of conditional immortality — a much larger number of texts can be quoted from the sayings of Jesus the mere words of which might mean the total extinction of the wicked; because Jesus, in accordance with the general tenor of Scripture, does speak of the wicked being destroyed, ground to powder, and the like. Such terms might mean extinction, but also they might not. For example, Jesus says, in one of His parables, “The Lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, and shall cut him asunder”; no image could more realistically express destruction; but what follows? “And appoint him his portion with
the hypocrites; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The. strong point of the theory of Conditional Immortality is the denial of natural immortality. I am not sure if there be any explicit statement of Jesus on this point; but one thing may be remarked: this view, if accepted, would bring man’s natural dignity far down beneath the level of even the nobler heathen systems, whereas the whole tendency of the teaching of Jesus was to place it higher than it had ever been placed before. Does not the denial of natural immortality take the greatness out of such a saying as “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul”?
The truth on this solemn and mysterious subject seems to be as follows: Jesus frequently divide human history into two portions — “this aeon” or world, and “that aeon” or world. “This aeon” is a time of probation, of opportunity, of change; but “that aeon” appears in Christ’s words as a vast level plain, stretching away on the farther side of the
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judgment-day, on the surface of which, as far as the eye can reach, there is no change whatever. “Dispensation” would be a translation of “a son” corresponding exactly to the idea of Jesus. Now, He knows only the two dispensations — this one, extending to the judgment-day, and that one, extending beyond it. What belongs to the aeon beyond the judgment-day is, in His vocabulary, emphatically termed ever¬ lasting or eternal *; and this term He applies to both the life of the righteous and the punishment of the wicked. If there is to be a third aeon, supervening in a future yet more distant, the eye of Jesus did not see so far, or, if He saw, He did not speak; and it will be wise in us to follow His example.f
* altovLov.
t My late beloved colleague, Principal Salmond, in his standard work, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, after a thorough examination of the whole teaching of Jesus as to His Return, the General Judgment, the Resurrection, the Inter¬ mediate State, the Final Destinies, sums up as follows on this particular point: “Christ’s own teaching, we must conclude, gives the significance of finality to the moral decision of the present life. If there are possibilities of change, forgiveness, relaxation ot penalty, or cessation of punishment in the future life, His words at least do not reveal them. He never softens the awful responsibilities of this life, even by the dim adumbration of such possibilities. His recorded sayings nowhere suggest the provision of ministries oi grace, whether new or continued, in the after-existence. They nowhere speak of a place of repentance unto life in the other world. They nowhere open the prospect of remedial discipline in the disembodied state, or of terminable award in the condition which follows the great day. They bring the two events, death and judgment, into ioi
On nearly every aspect of the teaching of Jesus there can be found among His words a locus classicus, to which it is the duty of an expositor to direct special attention; and on the subject of the present chapter there is one long passage wholly taken up with the thoughts just developed; where, also, they occur in the same order as has here been followed. In the twenty-fifth of St. Matthew there are three successive parables — the Ten Virgins, the Talents and the Last Judgment — in which we have three aspects of the divine estimate of human life. They
relation, and give no disclosure of an intermediate state with untold potentialities of divine love and human surrender. They never traverse the principle that this life is the scene of opportunity, and this world the theatre of human fates” (p. 392). “Such,” he concludes, “is the testimony which an unprejudiced exegesis has to offer” (p. 393); but he finally adds (p.394): “Yet Christ’s words are words of grace, and His doctrine is a revelation of life.”
Strikingly similar are the words of another scholar: “What¬ ever God’s hidden purpose of mercy may conceivably be, His revealed purpose is clear — He will judge men according to their works. The New Testament states no limitation to the doctrine of our probation. It remains a glorious if an awful truth. The infinite gulf between right and wrong would be hidden if we ceased to think of the infinite contrast between heaven and the outer darkness.” — Mackintosh’s Christia?i Ethics. This is the latest among the books on Christian Ethics which, in the scarcity ot large ones, to match the Continental works, our native theology can boast of, as being, though small in bulk, not smal in value. Amongst others may be mentioned Dr. Cameron Lees’ Life and Conduct, Dr. W. L. Davidson’s Christian Ethics) and Dr. Kilpatrick’s Christian Character.
TILE ETHIC OF JESUS
exhibit, at the same time, the three principles on which the grand assize will be conducted; for there is no point of view from which the divine method of estimating human life can be more clearly seen than the judgment-seat.
The parable of the Ten Virgins, in spite of its movement and variety, is intended to illustrate only a single point of truth — namely, that it is fatal to live in this life without preparation for the life to come. The want of oil is the centre round which all turns. Many opinions have been started as to what the oil is — Catholics maintaining it to stand for good works and Protestants for justification by faith — but it is more simple and general than any of these: it is merely this, that there must be preparation, the nature of the preparation being left for subsequent definition. This, as the teaching of Jesus, as well as the experience of every age, shows, is the standing mistake of the human race — to live as if they were to live here always, and forget the future and their own high destiny. In short, it is the tendency which, as has been shown in this chapter, Jesus tried to correct in the poor and the rich alike of His time — to miss being the men and women they might be, and to sink into nonentities. This rustic mistake is represented by making the delinquents young girls: they are the “foolish,” not the wicked virgins; yet they are shut out. No excuse will be accepted for missing the end of existence.
In the parable of the Talents we have the most perfect expression of the danger of leaving undone the work of life. The man with one talent had not fulfilled his task. This is the only delinquency imputed to him. Indeed, Jesus piles up the points in his favour, as if for the very purpose of exciting sympathy on his behalf: he had only one talent; he did not squander it, as many do; his reason for not trading with it was the modest one that he distrusted his own capacities: in trade he might have lost his talent, but he brings it back safe to his master, who at any rate should be no loser through him. Nevertheless, with everything in his favour, except the one charge, that he had done nothing, the man with the one talent was cast into the outer darkness. Jesus insists on a positive morality, He will not be satisfied with negatives.
The third parable — that of the Last Judgment — is the most detailed description in existence of this magnificent spectacle; but the very point of the moral teaching of Jesus in it is frequently missed. When the wicked are accused of failing to feed the judge when He was hungry, to clothe Him when He was naked, and to visit Him when He was in prison, they ask in astonishment when it was that hey had failed to do any of these things. But their astonishment was only feigned; of course they were aware that the accusation was true? So, I believe, the scene is usually understood. But this is a mis-THE ETHIC OF JESUS
take. The point is that they are genuinely and unaffectedly astonished. They are not aware that they have done what they are accused of, and they are virtuously indignant at being condemned for crimes they have never committed. Had it been one so distinguished as Jesus they were invited to succour, they would have been delighted to do so; but the cases they neglected were those of a few beggars, children, old women; and now Jesus says, “I was in everyone of these, and in them ye neglected Me.” What a moralist! What a height and what a breadth in His commandment! While the question of Moral Philosophy is, What must we do? is it not evident that the question of Christian philosophy must be the far deeper one, What must we do to be saved?