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3ol 
. 57£ 
1*11 



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Rev. James Stalker, D. IX 



* Dr. Stalker Ueirong in every eeeentimi. No inferior utorh 
ma charged against him. Volume after volume have placed 
t a$ an author on a high plane." 

— THJE PMEHBYTBBIAir 



The Life of Jesus Christ 12010, doth & .60 

44 Every one needs a brief, comprehensive, bat attractive Lilt 
of Christ, that may be almost committed to memory, so that 
whatever is read thereafter may tad its fitting place in our 
Lord's history. For this purpose I know of none equal to 
•Stalker's Life of Christ/ It is powerfully and charmingly 
written."—^. N. Peloubet. 

44 a remarkably lucid, accurate, and suggestive analysis of 
the Christ Life. We value it as a rare manual for the study of 
the Divine man. Dr. Stalker possesses the gift of literary 
etching. He takes his pencil and, with a few lines, he puts a 
lifelike and realistic picture upon his canvas."— The Christian 
Weekly. 

The Life of St Paul. iamo, cloth . , 60 

" Bristling with information. As an outline of Paul's life it 
cannot be surpassed."— The Christian Inquirer {N, Y.) 

Men and Morals. Addresses. iamo, cloth, git 

top 7S 

Contents :— Conscience ; Christ and the Wants of Humanity; 
The Religion of To-Day • The Evidences of Religion ; Public 
Spirit ; Temptation ; The Four Men ; Youth and Age. 

11 Pleasant as well as profitable reading, and is just the thing 
to put in the hands of a young man. . . . Admirable models 
of sermonizing."— The Christian Intelligencer. 

The Four Men. An Address delivered to the Students at 
Yale University. i6mo. Popular Vellum Series. . . .20 
Cheaper edition, 10c. ; per dozen net. 1.00 

1. The Man the World Sees. 2. The Man Seen by the Per- 
son Who Knows Him Best. 3. The Man Seen by Himself. 
4. The Man Whom God Sees. 

44 A better, address to young,persons there could hardly be, 
and it could hardly have been mof e effective in personal delivery 
than it is in print.'*— The Independent. 

Temptation. A Talk to Young Men. i6mo, Populat 

Vellum Series 20 

Cheaper edition, 10c. ; per dozen net, 1.00 

" An earnest plea for closer relations with Christ to 
to resist evfL"— The Baptist. , 



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The Life of Jesus Christ 



By Rev. James Stalker, M. A. 

Author of "Men and Morals," "Life of St. Paul,' 
"Imago Christi," etc., etc. 




New and Revised Edition 



American Tract Society 

150 Nassau Street 
NEW YORK 



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COPYBIOHT 1880 BY HeNBY A. SUMNEB & Co. 
COPYBIQHT 1891 BY FLEMING H. RKVELL COMPANY. 



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PREFACE TO NEW EDITION. 



" Since the first publication of this Life of Jesus Christ many 
important additions have been made to the literature of the 
subject, such as the Lives by Nicoll, Edersheim, Weiss, Bey- 
schlag, Vallings and Didon. But no other book has, as far 
as the author is aware, been written on the plan of this one 
— to exhibit in the briefest possible space the main features 
and the general course of the Life, so as to cause the well- 

. known details to flow together in the reader's mind and 
shape themselves into an easily comprehended whole. 
That, alongside of so many voluminous works, there is room 
for this little one has been amply proved by a large and 
steady demand for it up to the present time; and the author 
hopes that the changes introduced into this new edition, 
to bring the Notes up to date, may contribute to prolong 
its course of modest usefulness. 

Chapter II. of the former editions has been divided Ixxxr. 
two chapters. 

May 1392. 



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CONTENTS. 

OWL*. L— THE' BIRTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH OF JESUS, . 10 

CHAP. II. — THE NATION AND THE TIME, . 28 

CHAP. III. — THE FINAL STAGES OF HIS PREPARATION. . 39 

DIVISIONS OF HIS PUBLIC MINISTRY, .... 49 

CHAP. IV— THE YEAR OF OBSCURITY, - . . . 60 

CHAP. V. — THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR, ... 66 

CHAP. VI.— THE YEAR OF OPPOSITION, . . . . • 92 

CHAP. VII.— THE END, 112 

CONCLUSION, 161 

HINTS FOR TEACHERS AND QUESTIONS FOR PUPILS, . 163 



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CHAPTER I. 
TUB BIBTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH OF JESU8- 
Paragraphs 1-5. The Nativity. 

6-10. The Gkoup bound the Infant. 

7. The Shepherds; 8. Simeon and Anna; 9> Tht 
Wise Men; 10. Herod. 

11-24. The Silent Years at Nazareth. 
11, 12. Lack of Trustworthy Records. 
15, 16. His Home. 
17-24. Educational Influences — 

18. The Old Testament; 19. Human Nature • 
20. Scenery of Nazareth; 21-23. Visits to 
Jerusalem. 



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CHAPTER I. 

THE BERTH, INFANCY, AND YOUTH OF JESUS. 

/. The Kativity. — Augustus was sitting on the throne 
of the Roman empire, and the touch of his finger could set 
the machinery of government in motion over well-nigh 
the whole of the civilized world. He was proud of his 
power and wealth, and it was one of his favorite occupa- 
tions to compile a register of the populations and, revenues 
of his vast dominions. So he issued an edict, as the Evan- 
gelist Luke says, " that all the world should be taxed," or 
to express accurately what the words probably mean, that 
a census, to serve as a basis for future taxation, should be 
taken of all his subjects. One of the countries affected by 
this decree was Palestine, whose king, Herod the Great, 
was a vassal of Augustus. It set the whole land in mo- 
tion; for, in accordance with ancient Jewish custom, the 
census was taken, not at the places where the inhabitants 
were at the time residing, but at the places to which they 
belonged as members of the original twelve tribes. 

2. Among those whom the edict of Augustus thus from 
afar drove forth to the highways were a humble pair in the 
Galilean village of Nazareth — Joseph, the carpenter of the 
village, and Mary, his espoused wife. They had to go a 
journey of nearly a hundred miles in order to inscribe 
themselves in the proper register; for, though peasants, 
they had the blood of kings in their veins, and belonged to 
the ancient and royal town of Bethlehem, in the far south 
of the country. Day by day the emperor's will, like an in- 

it 



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12 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

visible hand, forced them southward along the weary road, 
till at last they climbed the rocky ascent that led to the gate * 
of the town,— he terrified with anxiety, and she well-nigh 
dead with fatigue. They reached the inn, but found it 
crowded with strangers, who, bent on the same errand as 
themselves, had arrived before them. No friendly house 
opened its door to receive them, and they were fain to 
clear for their lodging a corner of the inn-yard, else occu- 
pied by the beasts of the numerous travelers. There, that 
very night, she brought forth her first-born Son ; and be- 
cause there was neither womanly hand to assist her, nor 
couch to receive Him, she wrapped Him in swaddling- 
clothes and laid Him in a manger. 

3. Such was the manner of the birth of Jesus. I never 
felt the full pathos of the scene, till, standing one day in a 
room of an old inn in the market-town of Eisleben, in 
Central Germany, I was told chat on that very spot, four 
centuries ago, amidst the noise of a market-day and the 
bustle of a public-house, the wife of the poor miner, Hans 
Luther, who happened to be there on business, being sur- 
prised like Mary with sudden distress, brought forth in 
sorrow and poverty the child who was to become Martin 
Luther, the hero of the Reformation and the maker of 
modern Europe. 

4. Next morning the noise and bustle broke out again 
in the inn and inn-yard; the citizens of Bethlehem went 
about their work; the registration prooeeded; and in the 
meantime the greatest event in the history of the world 
had taken place. We never know where a great begin- 
ning may be happening. Every arrival of a new soul in 
the world is a mystery and a shut casket of possibilities. 
Joseph and Mary alone knew the tremendous secret — that 
on her, the peasant maiden and carpenter's bride, had been 



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BIRTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH, 13 

conferred the honor of being the mother of Him who was 
the Messiah of her race, the Savior of the world, and the 
Son of God. 

5. It had been foretold in ancient prophecy that He 
should be born on this very spot : " But thou, Bethlehem 
Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of 
Judah, yet out of thee shall He come forth unto me that is 
to be ruler in Israel." The proud emperor's decree drove 
southward the anxious couple. Yes ; but another hand 
was leading them on — the hand of Him who overrules the 
purposes of emperors and kings, of statesmen and parlia- 
ments, for the accomplishment of His designs, though they 
know them not ; who hardened the heart of Pharaoh, called 
Cyrus like a slave to His foot, made the mighty Nebuchad- 
nezzar His servant, and in the same way could overrule for 
His own far-reaching purpose the pride and ambition of 
Augustus. 

ft The Group Around the Infant —Although Jesus 
made His entry on the stage of life so humbly and silently; al- 
though the citizens of Bethlehem dreamed not what had 
happened in their midst ; although the emperor of Rome 
knew not that his decree had influenced the nativity of a 
king who was yet to bear rule, not only over the Roman 
world, but over many a land where Rome's eagles never 
flew ; although the history of mankind went thundering 
forward next morning in the channels of its ordinary in- 
terests, quite unconscious of the event which had happened, 
yet it did not altogether escape notice. As the babe leaped 
in the womb of the aged Elizabeth when the mother of her 
Lord approached her, so, when He who brought the new 
world with Him appeared, there sprang up anticipations 
and forebodings of the truth in various representatives 
of the old. world that was passing away. There went 



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14 THE LIFE OP JESUS CHRIST. 

through sensitive and waiting souls, here and there, a dim 
and half-conscious thrill, which drew them round the In- 
fant's cradle. Look at the group which gathered to gaze 
on Him ! It represented in miniature the whole of His 
future history. 

7. First came the Shepherds from the neighboring 
fields. That which was unnoticed by the kings and great 
ones of this world, was so absorbing a theme tp the princes 
of heaven, that they burst the bonds of the invisibility in 
which they shroud themselves, in order to express their 
joy and explain the significance of the great event. And 
seeking the most worthy hearts to which they might com- 
municate it, they found them in these simple shepherds, 
living the life of contemplation and prayer in the sugges- 
tive fields wljere Jacob had kept his flocks, where Boaz 
and Ruth had been wedded, and David, the great Old 
Testament type, had spent his youth, and there, by the 
study of the secrets and needs of their own hearts, learn- 
ing far more of the nature of the Savior who was to come 
than the Pharisee amidst the religious pomp of the temple, 
or the scribe, burrowing without the seeing eye among the 
prophecies of the Old Testament. The angel directed 
them where the Savior was, and they hastened to the 
town to find Him. They were the representatives of the 
peasant people, with the " honest and good heart," who 
afterwards formed the bulk of His disciples. 

8. Next to them came Simeon and Anna, the represent- 
atives of the devout and intelligent students of the Scrip- 
tures, who at that time were expecting the appearance of 
the Messiah, and afterwards contributed some of His most 
faithful followers. On the eighth day after His birth, the 
Child was circumcised, thus being " made under the law," 
entering into the covenant, and inscribing His name in His 
own blood in the roll of the nation. Soon thereafter. 



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BIBTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH. 15 

when the days of Mary's purification were ended, they 
carried Him from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to present Him 
to the Lord in the temple. It was " the Lord of the temple 
entering the temple of the Lord;" but few visitors to the 
spot could have been less noticed by the priests, for Mary, 
instead of offering the sacrifice usual in such cases, could 
only afford two turtle doves, the offering of the poor. Yet 
there were eyes looking on, undazzled by the shows and 
glitter of the world, from which His poverty could not 
conceal Him. Simeon, an aged saint, who in answer to 
many prayers had received a secret promise that he should 
not die till he had seen the Messiah, met the parents and 
the child, when suddenly it shot through him like a flash 
of lightning that this at last was He, and, taking Him up 
in his arms, he praised God for the advent of the Light to 
lighten the Gentiles and the Glory of His people Israel. 
While he was still speaking, another witness joined the 
group. It was Anna, a saintly widow, who literally dwelt 
in the courts of the Lord, and had purified the eye of her 
spirit with the euphrasy and rue of prayer and fasting till 
it could pierce with prophetic glance the veils of sense. 
She united her testimony to the old man's, praising God 
and confirming the mighty secret to the other expectant 
souls who were looking for redemption in Israel. 

9. The shepherds and these aged saints were near the 
spot where the new force entered the world. But it 
thrilled susceptible souls at a much greater distance. It 
was probably after the presentation in the temple and after 
the parents had carried back their child to Bethlehem, 
where it was their intention to reside instead of returning 
to Nazareth, that He was visited by the Wise Men of the 
East. These were members of the learned class of the 
Magians, the repositaries of science, philosophy, medioal 
skill, and religious mysteries in the countries beyond the 



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16 THB LIFE OF JESUS CHRlBr. 

Euphrates. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus tell us that 
in the regions from whence they came, there then pre- 
vailed an expectation that a great king was to arise in 
Judaea. We know also from the calculations of the great 
astronomer Kepler, that at this very time there was visible 
in the heavens a brilliant temporary star. Now the Magi 
were ardent students of astrology, and believed that any 
unusual phenomenon in the heavens was the sign of some 
remarkable event on earth; and it is possible that, connect- 
ing this star, to which their attention would undoubtedly 
be eagerly directed, with the expectation mentioned by the 
ancient historians, they were led westward to see if it had 
been fulfilled. But there must also have, been awakened 
in them a deeper want, to which God responded. If their 
search began in scientific curiosity and speculation, God 
led it on to the perfect truth. That is His way always. 
Instead of making tirades against the imperfect, He speaks 
to us in the language we understand, even if it express 
His meaning very imperfectly, and guides us thereby tq 
the perfect truth. Just as He used astrology to lead the 
world to astronomy, and alchemy to conduct it to chem- 
istry, and as the Revival of Learning preceded the Reform- 
ation, so He used the knowledge of these men, which was 
half falsehood and -superstition, to lead them to the Light 
of the world. Their visit was a prophecy of how in future 
the Gentile world would hail His doctrine and salvation, 
and bring its wealth and talents, its science and philosophy, 
to offer at His feet. 

10. All these gathered round His cradle to worship the 
Holy Child, — the shepherds with their simple wonder, 
Simeon and Anna with a reverence enriched by the trea- 
sured wisdom and piety of centuries, and the Magi with 
the lavish gifts of the Orient and the open brow of Gentile 
knowledge. But while these worthy worshippers were 



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BIBTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH. 1„ 

gazing down on Him, there came and looked over their 
shoulders a sinister and murderous face. It was the face of 
Herod. This prince then occupied the throne of the coun- 
try — the throne of David and the Maccabees. But he was 
an alien and low-born usurper. His subjects hated him 9 
and it was only by Roman favor that he was maintained in 
his seat. He was able, ambitious, and magnificent. Yet 
he had such a cruel, crafty, gloomy, and filthy mind as you 
must go among Oriental tyrants to meet with. He had 
been guilty of every crime. He had made his very palace 
swim in blood, having murdered his own favorite wife, 
three of his sons, and many others of his relatives. He 
was now old and tortured with disease, remorse, the sense 
of unpopularity, and a cruel terror of every possible aspi- 
rant to the throne which he had usurped. The Magi had 
naturally turned their steps to the capital, to inquire where 
He was to be born whose sign they had seen in the East, 
The suggestion touched Herod in his sorest place; but 
with diabolical hypocrisy he concealed his suspicions. 
Having learned from the priests that the Messiah was to 
be born in Bethlehem, he directed the strangers thither, 
but arranged that they should return and tell him the very 
house where the new King was. He hoped to cut Him off 
at a single blow. But he was foiled; for, being warned by 
God, they did not come back to tell him, but returned to 
their own country another way. Then his fury burst forth 
like a storm, and he sent his soldiers to murder every babe 
under two years of age in Bethlehem. As well might he 
have attempted to cut a mountain of adamant asunder as 
cut the chain of the divine purposes. "He thrust his 
sword into the nest, but the bird was flown." Joseph fled 
with the Child to Egypt, and remained there till Herod 
died, when he returned and dwelt at Nazareth; bein/r 
warned from Bethlehem, because there he would have be*n 
B t* 



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18 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

in the kingdom of Archelaus, the like-minded son of his 
blood-thirsty father. Herod's murderous face, glaring 
down on the Infant, was a sad prophecy of how the powers 
of the world would persecute Him and cut off His life 
from the earth. 

//. The Silent Year* at Mazareth. — The records whiob 
we possess up to this point are, as we have seen, compara* 
tively full. But with the settlement at Nazareth, after the 
return from Egypt, our information comes to a sudden 
stop, and over the rest of the life of Jesus, till His public 
ministry begins, a thick covering is drawn, which is only 
lifted once. We should have wished the narrative to con- 
tinue with the same fulness through the years of His boy* 
hood and youth. In modern biographies there are few 
parts more interesting than the anecdotes which they fur- 
nish of the childhood of their subjects, for in these we can 
often see in miniature and in charming simplicity the char* 
aoter and the plan of the future life. What would we not 
give to know the habits, the friendships, the thoughts, 
the words, and the actions of Jesus during so many years? 
Only one flower of anecdote has been thrown over the 
wall of the hidden garden, and it is so exquisite as to fill 
us with intense longing to see the garden itself. But it 
has pleased God, whose silence is no less wonderful than 
His words/to keep it shut. 

12. It was natural that, where God was silent and 
curiosity was strong, the fancy of man should attempt to 
fill up the blank. Accordingly, in the early Church there 
appeared Apocryphal Gospels, pretending to give full de- 
tails where the inspired Gospels were silent. They are 
particularly full of the sayings and doings of the childhood 
of Jesus. But they only show how unequal the human 
imagination was to sucn a theme, and bring out by the 



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BIBTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH. 19 

contrast of glitter and caricature the solidity and truthful- 
ness of the Scripture narrative. They make him a worker 
of frivolous and useless marvels, who moulded birds of 
clay and made them fly, changed his playmates into kids, 
and so forth. In short, they are compilak.,;-S of worthless 
and often blasphemous fables. 

13. These grotesque failures warn us not to intrude 
with the suggestions of fancy into the hallowed enclosure. 
It' is enough to know that He grew in wisdom and stature, 
and in favor with God and man. He was a real child and 
youth, and passed through all the stages of a natural de- 
velopment. Body and mind grew together, the one ex- 
panding to manly vigor, and the other acquiring more and 
more knowledge and power. His opening character ex- 
hibited a grace that made every one who saw it wonder 
and love its goodness and purity. 

14. But though we are forbidden to let the fancy loose 
here, we are not prohibited, but, on the contrary, it is our 
duty, to make use of such authentic materials as are sup- 
plied by the manners and customs of the time, or by inci- 
dents of His later life which refer back to His earlier 
years, in order to connect the infancy with the period when 
the narrative of the Gospels again takes up the thread of 
biography. It is possible in this way to gain, at least in 
some degree, a true conception of what He was as a boy 
and a young man, and what were the influences amidst 
which His development proceeded through so many silent 
years. 

15. We know amidst what kind of home influences He 
was brought up. His home was one of those which were 
the glory of His country, as they are of our own — the 
abodes of the godly and intelligent working class. Joseph, 
its head, was a man saintly and wise; but the fact that he 



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20 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST* 

is not mentioned in Christ's afterlife has generally been 
believed to indicate that he died during the youth of Jesus, 
perhaps leaving the care of the household on His shoulders. 
His 'mother probably exercised the most decisive of all ex- 
ternal influences on His development. What she was may 
be inferred from the fact that she was chosen from all the 
women of the world' to be crowned with the supreme honor 
of womanhood. The song which she poured forth on tho 
subject of her own great destiny shows her to have been a 
woman religious, fervently poetical, and patriotic; a stu* 
dent of scripture, and especially of its great women, for it 
is saturated with Old Testament ideas, and moulded on 
Hannah's song; a spirit exquisitely humble, yet capable 
of thoroughly appreciating the honor conferred upon her. 
She was no miraculous queen of heaven, as superstition 
has caricatured her, but a woman exquisitely pure, saintly, 
loving, and high-souled. This is aureole- enough. Jesus 
grew up in her love and passionately returned it. 

16. There were other inmates of the household. He 
had brothers and sisters. From two of them, James and 
Jude, we have epistles in Holy Scripture, in which we may 
read what their character was* Perhaps it is not irreverent 
to infer from the severe tone of their epistles, that, in their 
unbelieving state, they must have been somewhat harsh and 
unsympathetic men. At all x e vents, they never believed on 
Him during His lifetime, and it is not likely that they were 
close companions to Him in Nazareth. He was probably 
much alone; and the pathos of His saying, that a prophet 
is not without honor save in his own country and in his 
own house, probably reached back into the years before 
His ministry began. 

17. He received His education at home, or from a 
scribe attached to the village synagogue. It was only, 
however, a poor man's education. As the scribes con- 



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BIBTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH. 21 

temptuously said, He had never learned, or, as we should^ 
say, He was Dot college-bred. No; but the love of knowl- 
edge was early awake within Him. He daily knew the 
joy of deep and happy thought; He had the best of all 
keys to knowledge — the open mind and the loving heart; 
and the three great books lay ever open before Him — the i 
Bible, Man, and Nature. 

18. It is easy to understand with what fervent enthusi- 
asm He would devote Himself to the Old Testament; and 
His sayings, which are full of quotations from it, afford 
abundant proof of how constantly it formed the food of 
His mind and the comfort of His soul. His youthful study 
of it was the secret of the marvellous facility with which 
He made use of it afterwards in order to enrich His preach- 
ing and enforce His doctrine, to repel the assaults of oppo- 
nents and overcome the temptations of the Evil One. His 
quotations also show that He read it in the original He- 
brew, and not in the Greek translation, which wae then in 
general use. The Hebrew was a dead language even in 
Palestine, just as Latin now is in Italy; but He would 
naturally long to read it in the very words in which it was 
written. Those who have not enjoyed a liberal education, 
but amidst many difficulties have mastered Greek ip order 
to read their New Testament in the original, will perhaps 
best understand how, in a country village, He made Him- 
self master of the ancient tongue, and with what delight 
He was wont, in the rolls of the synagogue, or in such 
manuscripts as He may have Himself possessed, to pore 
over the sacred page. The language in which He thought 
and spoke familiarly was Aramaic, a branch of the same 
stem to which the Hebrew belongs. We have fragments 
of it in some recorded sayings of His, such as " Talitha, 
cumi," and "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani." He would 
have the same chance of learning Greek as a boy bom in 



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XX THE LI**. . / JESUS CHRIST. 

the Scottish Highlands has of learning English, " Galilee 
of the Gentiles " being then full of Greek-speaking in- 
habitants. Thus He was probably master of three lan- 
guages — one of them the grand religious language of the 
world, in whose literature He was deeply versed; another, 
the most perfect means of expressing secular thought 
which has ever existed, although there is no evidence that 
He had any acquaintance with the masterpieces of Greek 
literature; and the third, the language of the common peo- 
ple, to whom His preaching was to be specially addressed. 
19. There are few places where human nature can be 
better studied than in a country village; for there one sees 
the whole of each individual life and knows all one's neigh- 
bors thoroughly. In a city far more people are seen, but 
far fewer known; it is only the outside of life that is visi- 
ble. In a village the view outwards is circumscribed; but 
the view downwards is deep, and the view upwards unim- 
peded. Nazareth was a notoriously wicked town, as we 
learn from the proverbial question, Can any good thing 
come out of Nazareth? Jesus had no acquaintance with 
sin in His own soul, but in the town He had a full exhibi- 
tion of the awful problem with which it was to be His life- 
work to deal. He was still further brought into contact 
with human nature by His trade. That He worked as a 
carpenter in Joseph's shop there can be no doubt. Who 
could know better than His own townsmen, who asked, 
in their astonishment at His preaching, Is not this the car- 
penter? It would be difficult to exhaust the significance of 
the fact that God chose for His Son, when He dwelt among 
men, out of all the possible positions in which He might 
have placed Him, the lot of a working man. It stamped 
men 's common toils with everlasting honor. It acquainted 
Jesus with the feelings of the multitude, and helped Him 
to know what was in man. It was afterwards said that He 



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BIBTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH. 23 

knew this so well that He needed not that any man should 
teach Him. 

20. Travelers tell us that the spot where He grew up is 
one of the most beautiful on the face of the earth. Naza- 
reth is situated in a secluded, cup-like valley amid the 
mountains of Zebulon, just where they dip down into the 
plain of Esdraelon, with which it is connected by a steep 
and rocky path. Its white houses, with vines clinging to 
their walls, are embowered amidst gardens and groves of 
olive, fig, orange, and pomegranate trees. The fields are 
divided by hedges of cactus, and enamelled with innumer- 
able flowers of every hue. Behind the village rises a hill 
five hundred feet in height, from whose summit there is 
seen one of the most wonderful views in the world — the 
mountains of Galilee, with snowy Hermon towering above 
them, to the north ; the ridge of Carmel, the coast of Tyre, 
and the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean, to the west; 
a few miles to the east, the wooded, cone-like bulk of 
Tabor; and to the south, the plain of Esdraelon, with the 
mountains of Ephraim beyond. The preaching of Jesus 
shows how deeply He had drunk into the essence of nat- 
ural beauty and revelled in the changing aspects of the 
seasons. It was when wandering as a lad in these fields 
that He gathered the images of beauty which he poured 
out in His parables and addresses. It was on that hill that 
He acquired the habit of His after-life of retreating to the 
mountain-tops to spend the night in solitary prayer. The 
doctrines of His preaching were not thought out on the 
spur of the moment. They were poured out in a living 
stream when the occasion came, but the water had been 
gathered into the hidden well for many years before. In 
the fields and on the mountain-side he had thought them 
out during the years of happy and undisturbed meditation 
and prayer. 



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24 THX Lira OF JESUS CHRIST. 

21. There is still one important educational influence to 
be mentioned. Every year, after He was twelve years old, 
He went with His parents to the Passover at Jerusalem. 
Fortunately we have preserved to us an account of the first 
of these visits. It is the only occasion on which the veil is 
lifted during thirty years. Every one who can remember 
his own first journey from a village home to the capital of 
his country will understand the joy and excitement with 
which Jesus set out. He traveled over eighty miles of a 
country where nearly every mile teemed with historical 
and inspiring memories. He mingled with the constantly 
growing caravan of pilgrims, who were filled with the reli- 
gious enthusiasm of the great ecclesiastical event of the 
year. His destination was a city which was loved by every 
Jewish heart with a strength of affection that has never 
been given to any other capital — a city full of objects and 
memories fitted to touch the deepest springs of interest 
and emotion in his breast. It was swarming at the Pass- 
over-time with strangers from half-a-hundred countries, 
speaking as many languages and wearing as many different 
costumes. He went to take part for the first time in an 
ancient solemnity suggestive of countless patriotic and 
sacred memories. It was no wonder that, when the day 
came to return home, He was so excited with the new ob- 
jects of interest, that He failed to join His party at the 
appointed place and time. One spot above all fascinated 
His interest. It was the temple, and especially the school 
there in which the masters of wisdom taught. His mind 
was teeming with questions which these doctors might be 
asked to answer. His thirst for knowledge had an oppor- 
tunity for the first time to drink its fill. So it was there His 
anxious parents, who, missing Him after a day's journey 
northward, returned in anxiety to seek Him, found Him, 
listening with excited looks to the oraoles of the wisdom 



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BIRTH, INFANCY AND YOUTH. 25 

of the day. His answer to the reproachful question of His 
mother lays bare His childhood's mind, and for a moment 
affords a wide glance over the thoughts which used to en- 
gross Him in the fields of Nazareth. It shows that already, 
though so young, He had risen above the. great mass of 
men, who drift on through life without once inquiring what 
may be its meaning and its end. He was aware that He 
had a God-appointed life-work to do, which it was the one 
business of His existence to accomplish. It was the pas- 
sionate thought of all His after-life. It ought to be the 
first and last thought of every life. It recurred again and 
again in His later sayings, and pealed itself finally forth in 
the word with which He closed His career, — It is finished! 

22. It has often been asked whether Jesus knew all 
along that He was the Messiah, and, if not, when and how 
the knowledge dawned upon Him; whether it was sug- 
gested by hearing from His mother the story of His birth, 
or announced to Him from within. Did it dawn upon Him 
all at once, or gradually? When did the plan of His ca- 
reer, which He carried out so unhesitatingly from the be- 
ginning of His ministry, shape itself in His mind? Was 
it the slow result of years of reflection, or did it come to 
Him at once? These questions have occupied the greatest 
Christian minds and received very various answers. I will 
not venture to answer them, and especially with His reply 
to His mother before me, I can not trust myself even to 
think of a time when He did not know what His work in 
this world was to be. 

23. His subsequent visits to Jerusalem must have greatly 
influenced the development of His mind. If He often went 
back to hear and question the rabbis in the temple schools, 
He must soon have discovered how shallow was their far- 
famed learning. It was probably on these annual visits 
that He discovered the utter corruption of the religion of 



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26 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

the day and the need of a radical reform of both doctrine 
and practice, and marked the practices and the persons 
that He was by and by to assail with the yehemenoe of His 
holy indignation. 

24. Such were the external conditions amidst which the 
manhood of Jesus waxed towards maturity. It would be 
easy to exaggerate the influence which they may be sup- 
posed to have exerted on his development. The greater 
and more original a character is, the less dependent is it 
on the peculiarities of its environment. It is fed from deep 
well-springs within itself, and in its germ there is a type 
enclosed which expands in obedience to its own laws and 
bids defiance to circumstances. In any other circumstan* 
oes, Jesus would have grown to be in every important 
respect the very same person as He became in Nazareth. 



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CHAPTER IL 
THE NATION AND THE TIME. 

fc^ragraphs 25-39. 

25-26. The Interval between Malachi and Matthew 

27. The Political Condition of the Country. 
28-38. Its Religious and Social Condition — 
28, 29. External Religiosity but Inner Decline; 30, 
Pharisees; 31. Scribes; 32. Sadducees and 
Herodians; 33. Different Classes of Society; 
36-38. Messianic Hopes, 



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CHAPTER II. 



THE NATION AND THE TIME. 



25. We now approach the time when, after thirty years 
of silence and obscurity in Nazareth, Jesus was to step 
forth on the public stage. This is therefore the place at 
which to take a survey of the circumstances of the nation 
in whose midst His work was to be done, and also to form 
a clear conception of His character and aims. Every great 
biography is the record of the entrance into the world of a 
new force, bringing with it something different from all 
that was there before, and of the way in which it gradually 
gets itself incorporated with the old, so as to become a part 
of the future. Obviously, therefore, two things are needed 
by those who wish to understand it — first, a clear compre- 
hension of the nature of the new force itself; and secondly, 
a view of the world with which it is to be incorporated. 
Without the latter the specific difference of the former 
can not be understood, nor can the manner of its reception 
be appreciated — the welcome with which it is received, or 
the opposition with which it has to struggle. Jesus brought 
with Him into the world more that was original and des- 
tined to modify the future history of mankind than any 
one else who has ever entered it. But we can neither un- 
derstand Him nor the fortunes which He encountered in 
seeking to incorporate with history the gift He brought, 
without a clear view of the condition of the sphere within 
which His life was to be passed. 



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30 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

26. The Theater of His Life. — When, having finished 
the last chapter of the Old Testament, we turn over the 
leaf and see the first chapter of the Jlew, we are very apt 
to think that in Matthew we are still among the same peo- 
ple and the same state of things as we have left in Malachi. 
But no idea could be more erroneous. Four centuries 
elapsed between Malaohi and Matthew, and wrought as 
total a change in Palestine as a period of the same length 
has almost ever wrought in any country. The very lan- 
guage of the people had been changed, and customs, ideas, 
parties, and institutions had come into existence which 
would almost have prevented Malachi, if he had risen from 
the dead, from recognizing his country. 

27. Politically, the nation had passed through extra- 
ordinary vioissitudes. After the Exile, it had been or- 
ganized as a kind of sacred State under its high priests; 
but conqueror after conqueror had since marched over it, 
changing everything; the old hereditary monarchy had 
been restored for a time by the brave Maccabees; the 
battle of freedom had many times been won and lost; a 
usurper had sat on the throne of David; and now at last 
the country was completely under the mighty Roman 
power, which had extended its sway over the whole civil- 
ized world. It was divided into several small portions, 
which the foreigner held under different tenures, as the 
English at present hold India. Galilee and Persea were 
ruled by petty kings, sons of that Herod under whom Jesus 
was born, who occupied a relation to the Roman emperor 
similar to that which the subject Indian kings hold to our 
Queen; and Judaea was under the charge of a Roman offi- 
cial, a subordinate of the governor of the Roman province 
of Syria, who held a relation to that functionary similar to 
that whi©h the Governor of Bombay holds to the Governor- 
General at Calcutta. * Roman soldiers paraded the streets 



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THE NATION AND THE TIMS. 31 

of Jerusalem; Roman standards waved over the fastnesses 
of the country; Roman tax-gatherers sat at the gate of 
every town. To the Sanhedrim, the supreme Jewish organ 
of government, only a shadow of power was still conceded, 
its presidents, the high priests, being mere puppets of 
Rome, set up and put down with the utmost caprice. So 
low had the proud nation fallen whose ideal it had ever 
been to rule the world, and whose patriotism was a re- 
ligious and 'national passion as intense and unquenchable 
as ever burned in any country. 

28. In religion the changes had been equally great, and 
the fall equally low. In external appearance, indeed, it 
might have seemed as if progress had been made instead 
of retrogression. The nation was far more orthodox than 
it had been at many earlier periods of its history. Once 
its chief danger had been idolatry; but the chastisement 
of the Exile had corrected that tendency for ever, and 
thenceforward the Jews, wherever they might be living, 
were uncompromising monotheists. The priestly orders 
and offices had been thoroughly reorganized after the return 
from Babylon, and the temple services and annual feasts 
continued to be observed at Jerusalem with strict regular- 
ity. Besides, a new and most important religious institu- 
tion had arisen, which almost threw the temple with its 
priesthood into the background. This was the synagogue 
with its rabbis. It does not seem to have existed in ancient 
times at all, but was called into existence after the Exile 
by reverence for the written Word. Synagogues were 
multiplied wherever Jews lived; every Sabbath they were 
filled with praying congregations; exhortations were deliv 
ered by the rabbis — a new order created by the need of 
expounders to translate from the Hebrew, which had become 
a dead language ; and nearly the whole Old Testament was 
read over once a year in the hearing of the people. Schools 



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32 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

of theology, similar to oar divinity halls, had sprung up, in 
which the rabbis were trained and the sacred books inter- 
preted. 

29. But, in spite of all this religiosity, religion had 
sadly declined. The externals had been multiplied, but the 
inner spirit had disappeared. However rude and sinful 
the old nation had sometimes been, it was capable in its 
worst periods of producing majestic religious figures, who 
kept high the ideal of life and preserved the connection of 
the nation with Heaven; and the inspired voices of the 
prophets kept the stream of truth running fresh and clean. 
But during four hundred years no prophet's voice had been 
heard. The records of the old prophetic utterances were 
still preserved with almost idolatrous reverence, but there 
were not men with even the necessary amount of the 
Spirit's inspiration to understand what He had formerly- 
written. 

30. The representative religious men of the time were 
the Pharisees. As their name indicates, they originally 
arose as champions of the separateness of the Jews from 
other nations. This was a noble idea, so long as the dis- 
tinction emphasized was holiness. But it is far more diffi- 
cult to maintain this distinction than such external differ- 
ences as peculiarities of dress, food, language, etc. These 
were in course of time substituted for it. The Pharisees 
«vere ardent patriots, ever willing to lay down their lives 
for the independence of their country, and hating the for- 
eign yoke with impassioned bitterness. They despised and 
hated other races, and clung with undying faith to the hope 
of a glorious future for their nation. But they had so long 
harped on this idea, that they had come to believe them- 
selves the special favorites of Heaven, simply because they 
were descendants of Abraham, and to lose sight of the 
importance of personal character. They multiplied their 



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FHB NATION AND THE TIME. 35 

Jewish peculiarities, but substituted external observances, 
such as* fasts, prayers, tithes, washings, sacrifices, and so 
forth, for the grand distinctions of love to God and love to 
man. 

31. To the Pharisaic party belonged most of the scribes. 
They were so called because they were both the interpret- 
ers and copyists of the Scriptures and the lawyers of the 
people; for, the Jewish legal code being incorporated in 
the Holy Scriptures, jurisprudence became a branch of 
theology. They were the chief interpreters in the syna- 
gogues, although any male worshipper was permitted to 
speak if he chose. They professed unbounded reverence 
for the Scriptures, counting every word and letter in them. 
They had a splendid opportunity of diffusing the religious 
principles of the Old Testament among the people, exhib- 
iting the glorious examples of its heroes and sowing abroad 
the words of the prophets; for the synagogue was one of 
the most potent engines of instruction ever devised by any 
people. But they entirely missed their opportunity. They 
became a dry ecclesiastical and scholastic class, using their 
position for selfish aggrandisement, and scorning those to 
whom they gave stones for bread as a vulgar and unlettered 
canaille. Whatever was most spiritual, living, human, and 
grand in the Scriptures they passed by. Generation after 
generation the commentaries of their famous men multi- 
plied, and the pupils studied the commentaries instead of 
the text. Moreover, it was a rule with them that the cor- 
rect interpretation of a passage was as authoritative as the 
text itself; and, the interpretations of the famous masters 
being as a matter of course believed to be correct, the 
mass of opinions which were held to be as precious as the 
Bible itself grew to enormous proportions. These were 
"the traditions of the elders." By degrees an arbitrary 
system of exegesis came into vogue, by which almost any 
C 



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34 THE LIVE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

opinion whatever could be thus oonnected with some text 
and stamped with divine authority. Every new invention 
of Pharisaic peculiarities was sanctioned in this way. 
These were multiplied until they regulated every detail of 
life, personal, domestic, social, and public. They became 
so numerous, that it required a lifetime to learn them all ; 
and the learning of a scribe consisted in acquaintance with 
them, and with the dicta of the great rabbis and the forms 
of exegesis by which they were sanctioned. This was the 
chaff with which they fed the people in the synagogues. 
The conscience was burdened with innumerable details, 
every one of which was represented to be as divinely sanc- 
tioned as any of the ten commandments. This was the 
intolerable burden which Peter said neither he nor his 
fathers had been able to bear. This was the horrible night- 
mare which sat so long on Paul's conscience. But worse 
consequences flowed from it. It is a well-known principle 
in history, that, whenever the ceremonial is elevated to the 
same rank with the moral, the latter will soon be lost sight 
of. The scribes and Pharisees had learned hpw by arbi- 
trary exegesis and casuistical discussion to explain away 
the weightiest moral obligations, and make up for the neg- 
lect of them by increasing their ritual observances. Thus 
men were able to flaunt in the pride of sanctity while in- 
dulging their selfishness and vile passions. Society was 
rotten with vice within, and veneered over with a self-de- 
ceptive religiosity without. 

32. There was a party of protest. The Sadducees im- 
pugned the authority attached to the traditions of the 
fathers, demanding a return to the Bible and nothing but 
the Bible, and cried out for morality in place of ritual. 
But their protest was prompted merely by the spirit of de- 
nial, and not by a warm opposite principle of religion. 
They were sceptical, cold-hearted, worldly men. Though 



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THE NATION AND THE TIME. 35 

they praised morality, it was a morality unwarmed and un- 
illuminated by any contact with that upper region of divine 
forces from which the inspiration of the highest morality 
must always come. They refused to burden their conscien- 
ces with the painful punctilios of the Pharisees; but it was 
because they wished to live the life of comfort and self- 
indulgence. They ridiculed the Pharisaic exclusiveness, 
but had let go what was most peculiar in the character, the 
faith, and the hopes of the nation. They mingled freely 
with the Gentiles, affected Greek culture, enjoyed foreign 
amusements, and thought it useless to fight for the freedom 
of their country. An extreme section of them were the 
Herodians, who had given in to the usurpation of Herod, 
and with courtly flattery attached themselves to the favor 
of his sons. 

33. The Sadducees belonged chiefly to the upper and 
wealthy classes. The Pharisees and scribes formed what 
we should call the middle class, although also deriving 
many members from the higher ranks of life. The lower 
classes and the country people were separated by a great 
gulf from their wealthy neighbors, but attached themselves 
by admiration to the Pharisees, as the uneducated always 
do to the party of warmth. Down below all these was 
a large class of those who had lost all connection with 
religion and well-ordered social life — the publicans, harlots, 
and sinners, for whose souls no man cared. 

34. Suoh were the pitiable features of the society on 
which Jesus was about to discharge His influence — a na- 
tion enslaved; the upper classes devoting themselves to 
selfishness, courtiership, and scepticism; the teachers and 
chief professors of religion lost in mere shows of ceremo- 
nialism, and boasting themselves the favorites of God| 
while their souls were honeyoorabed with self-deception 
*nd vice) tbt body of the people milled by fait* ideftls) 



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36 THE LIFB OF JESUS CHRIST. 

and seething at the bottom of society, a negleeted mass of 
unblushing and unrestrained sin. 

35. And this was the people of God! Yes; in spite of 
their awful degradation, these were the children of Abra- 
ham, Isaac and Jacob, and the heirs of the covenant and 
the promises. Away back beyond the centuries of degra- 
dation towered the figures of the patriarchs, the kings after 
God's own heart, the psalmists, the prophets, the genera- 
tions of faith and hope. Ay, and in front there was great- 
ness too! The word of God, once sent forth from heaven 
and uttered by the mouths of His prophets, could not re- 
turn to Him void. He had said that to this nation was to 
be given the perfect revelation of Himself, that in it was 
to appear the perfect ideal of manhood, and that from it 
was to issue forth the regeneration of all mankind. There- 
fore a wonderful future still belonged to it. The river of 
Jewish history was for the time choked and lost in the 
sands of the desert, but it was destined to reappear again 
and flow forward on its God-appointed course. The time 
of fulfilment was at hand, much as the signs of the times 
might seem to forbid the hope. Had not all the prophets 
from Moses onward spoken of a great One to come, who, 
appearing just when the darkness was blackest and the 
degradation deepest, was to bring back the lost gloijjr of 
the past? 

36. So not a few faithful souls asked themselves in the 
weary and degraded time* There are good men in the 
worst of periods. There were good men even in the selfish 
and corrupt Jewish parties. But especially does piety 
linger in such epochs in the lowly homes of the people; 
and, just as we are permitted to hope that in the Romish 
Church at the present time there may be those who, 
through all the ceremonies put between the soul and Christ, 



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THE NATION AND THE TIME. 37 

reach forth to Him, and by the selection of a spiritual in- 
stinct seize the truth and pass the falsehood by, so among 
the common people of Palestine there were those who, 
hearing the Scriptures read in the synagogues and reading 
them in their homes, instinctively neglected the cumbrous 
and endless comments of their teachers, and saw the glory 
of the past, of holiness and of God, which the scribes 
failed to see. 

37. It was especially to the promises of a Deliverer that 
such spirits attachefl their interest. Feeling bitterly the 
shame of national slavery, the hollo wness of the times, and 
the awful wickedness which rotted under the surface of 
society, they longed and prayed for the advent of the 
coming One and the restoration of the national character 
and glory. 

38. The scribes also busied themselves with this ele- 
ment in the Scriptures; and the cherishing of Messianic 
hopes was one of the chief distinctions of the Pharisees. 
But they had caricatured the prophetic utterances on the 
subject by their arbitrary interpretations, and painted the 
future in colors borrowed from their own carnal imagina- 
tions. They spoke of the advent as the coming of the 
kingdom of God, and of the Messiah as the Son of God. 
But what they chiefly expected Him to do was, by the 
working of marvels and by irresistible force, to free the 
nation from servitude and raise it to the utmost worldly 
grandeur. They entertained no doubt that, simply because 
they were members of the chosen nation, they would be 
allotted high places in the kingdom, and never suspected 
that any change was needed in themselves to meet Him. 
The spiritual elements of the better time, holiness and 
love, were lost in their minds behind the dazzling forms of 
material glory.* 

* I have not thought It necessary to describe the state of the world beyond Pal- 
estine; for although the gifts Jesus brought were lor all mankind, yet His own 



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38 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHBI8T. 

39. Such was the aspect of Jewish history at the time 
when the hour of realizing the np.t^onal destiny was about 
to strike. It imparted to the work which lay before the 
Messiah a peculiar complexity. It might have been ex- 
pected that He would find a nation saturated with the ideas 
and inspired with the visions of His predecessors, the pro- 
phets, at whose head He might place Himself, and from 
which He might receive an enthusiastic and effective co- 
operation^ But it was not so. He appeared at a time 
when the nation had lapsed from its ideals and caricatured 
their sublimest features. Instead of meeting a nation ma- 
ture in holiness and consecrated to the heaven-ordained 
task of blessing all other peoples, which he might easily 
lead up to its own final development, and then lead forth 
to the spiritual conquest of the world, He found that the 
first work which lay before Him was to proclaim a re- 
formation in His own country, and encounter the opposi- 
tion of prejudices that had , accumulated there through 
centuries of degradation. 

activity wm confined Almost entirely to the house of Israel within Its original 
home. In a history of Early Christianity, or even a life of the Apostle Paul, it 
would be necessary to extend our view brer the whole disc of civilisation which 
surrounded the Mediterranean, and in which the world's center, which has since 
shifted to other latitudes, was then to be found; and to show how marvellously, by 
the dispersion of the Jews through all civilised countries, the elementary concep- 
tions of God which were necessary for the reception of Christianity had been dif- 
fused beforehand far and wide; how the conquests of Alexander had, by making 
the Greek language universally understood, prepared a vehicle by which the gospel 
might be carried to all nations: how a pathway for It had been provided by the 
Roman power, whose military system had made all lands accessible; and, above 
all, how the decay of the ancient religions and philosophies, the wearing out every- 
where of the old Ideals of life, and the prevalence of heart-sickening sin, had i 
the world ready for Him who was the Desire of all nations. 



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CHAPTER IlL 

THE FINAL STAGES OF HIS PREPARATION. 

40-53. The Final Stages of his Preparation. 
44-49. His Baptism— 

45. The Baptist; 46-48. Jesus Baptised; 49. Th* 
Descent of the Holy Ghost 
50-53. The Temptation. 



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CHAPTER III. 

THE FINAL STAGES OF HIS PREPARATION. 

40. Meanwhile He, whom so many in their own ways were 
hoping for, was in the midst of them, though they suspected 
it not. Little oould they think that He about whom they 
were speculating and praying was growing up in a carpen- 
ter's home awa^ in despised Nazareth. Yet so it was. 
There He was preparing Himself for His eareer. His mind 
was busy grasping the vast proportions of the task before 
Him, as the prophecies of the past and the facts of the case 
determined it; His eyes were looking forth on the country, 
and* His heart smarting with the sense of its sin and shame. 
In Himself He felt moving the gigantic powers necessary 
to cope with the vast design ; and the desire was gradually 
growing to an irresistible passion, to go forth and utter the 
thought within Him, and do the work which had been given 
Him to do. 

41. Jesus had only three years to accomplish His life- 
work. If we remember how quickly three years in an 
ordinary life pass away, and how little at their close there 
usually is to show for them, we shall see what must have 
been the size and quality of that character, and what the 
unity and intensity of design in that life, which in so mar- 
velously short a time made such a deep and ineffaceable 
impression on the world, and left to mankind such a heritage 
of truth and influence. 

42. It is generally allowed that Jesus appeared as a 
public man with a mind whose ideas were completely de- 
veloped and arranged, with a character sharpened over its 
whole surface into perfeot definiteness, and with designs 

89 



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40 THIS LIMB 09 JKSU8 CHRIST. 

that marched forward to their ends without hesitation. 
No deflection took place during the three years from the 
lines on which at the beginning of them He was moving. 
The reason of this must have been, that during the thirty 
years before His public work began, His ideas, His char- 
acter and designs went through all the stages of a thorough 
development. Unpretentious as the external aspects of 
His life at Nazareth were, it was, below the surface, a life 
of intensity, variety and grandeur. Beneath its silence 
and obscurity there went on all the processes of growth 
which issued in the magnificent flower and fruit to which 
all ages now look back with wonder. His preparation 
lasted long. For one with His powers at command, thirty 
years of complete reticence and reserve were a long time. 
Nothing was greater in Him afterwards than the majestic 
reserve in both speech and action which characterized 
Him. This, too, was learned in Nazareth. There He 
waited till the hour of the completion of His preparation 
struck. Nothing could tempt Him forth before the time — 
not the burning desire to interfere with indignant protest 
amidst the crying corruptions and mistakes of the age, hot 
even the swellings of the passion to do His fellow-men 
good. 

43. At last, however, He threw down the carpenter's 
tools, laid aside the workman's dress, and bade His home 
and the beloved valley of Nazareth farewell. Still, how- 
ever, all was not ready. His manhood, though it had waxed 
in secret to such noble proportions, still required a peouliar 
endowment for the work He had to do; and His ideas and 
designs, mature as they were, required to be hardened in 
the fire of a momentous trial. The two final incidents of 
His preparation — the Baptism and the Temptation — baa 
still to take place. 



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THE PINAL STAGES OP HIS PREPARATION. 41 

_44. His Baptism. —Jesus did not descend on the nation, 
from the obscurity of Nazareth without note of warning. 
His work may be said to have been begun before He Him- 
self put His hand to it. 

45. Once more, before hearing the voice of its Messiah, 
the nation was to hear the long-silent voice of prophecy. 
The news went through all the country that in the desert 
of Judaea a preacher had appeared, — not like the numbers 
of dead men's ideas who spoke in the synagogues, or the 
courtier-like, smooth-tongued teachers of Jerusalem but a 
rude, strong man, speaking from the heart to the heart, 
with the authority of one who was sure of his inspiration. 
He had been a Nazarite from the womb ; he had lived for 
years in the desert, wandering, in communion with his 
own heart, beside the lonely shores of the Dead Sea; he 
was clad in the hair cloak and leather girdle of the old 
prophets; and his ascetic rigor sought no finer fare than 
locusts and the wild honey which he found in the wilder- 
ness. Yet he knew life well; he was acquainted with all 
the evils of the time, the hypocrisy of the religious parties, 
and the corruption of the masses: he had a wonderful 
power of searching the heart and shaking the conscience, 
and without fear laid bare the darling sins of every class. 
But that which most of all attracted attention to him and 
thrilled every Jewish heart from one end of the land to the 
other, was the message which he bore. It was nothing less 
than that the Messiah was just at hand, and about to set up 
the kingdom of God. All Jerusalem poured out to him ; the 
Pharisees were eager to hear the Messianic news; and even 
the Sadducees were stirred for a moment from their leth- 
argy. The provinces sent forth their thousands to his 
preaching, and the scattered and hidden ones who longed 
and prayed for the redemption of Israel flocked to welcome 
the heart-stirring promise. But along with it John had 



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42 Tfifc tll'BJ 0# JESUS CHRIST. 

another message, which excited very different feelings in 
different minds. He had to tell his hearers that the nation 
as a whole was utterly unprepared for the Messiah; that 
the mere fact of their descent from Abraham would not be 
a sufficient token of admission to His kingdom; it was to 
be a kingdom of righteousness and holiness, and Christ's 
very first work would be to reject all who were not marked 
with these qualities, as the farmer winnows away the chaff 
with his fan, and the master of the vineyard hews down 
every tree that brings forth no fruit. Therefore he called 
the nation at large — every class and every individual — to 
repentance, so long as there still was time, as an indispen- 
sable preparation for enjoying the blessings of the new 
epoch; and, as an outward symbol of this inward change, 
he baptized in the Jordan all who received his message with 
faith. Many were stirred with fear and hope and submit- 
ted to the rite, but many more were irritated by the expo- 
sure of their sins and turned away in anger and unbelief. 
Among these were the Pharisees, upon whom he was spec- 
ially severe, and who were deeply offended because he had 
treated so lightly their descent from Abraham, on which 
they laid so much stress. 

46. One day there appeared among the Baptist's hearers 
One who particularly attracted his attention, and made his 
voice, which had never faltered when accusing in the most 
vigorous language of reproof even the highest teachers 
and priests of the nation, tremble with self-distrust. And 
when He presented Himself, after the discourse was done, 
among the candidates for baptism, John drew back, feeling 
that This was no subject for the bath of repentance, which 
without hesitation he had administered to all others, and 
that he himself had no right to baptize Him. There were 
in His face a majesty, a purity, and a peace which smote 
the man of rock with the sense of unworthiness and sin. 



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THE FINAL STAGES OF HIS PREPARATION. 43 

It was Jesus, who had come straight hither from the work- 
shop of Nazareth. John and Jesus appear never to have 
met before, though their families were related and the con- 
nection of their careers had been predicted before their 
birth. This may have been due to the distance of their 
homes in Galilee and Judaea, and still more to the Baptist's 
peculiar habits. But when, in obedience to the injunction 
of Jesus, John proceeded to administer the rite, he learned 
the meaning of the overpowering impression which the 
Stranger had made on him; for the sign was given by 
which, as God had instructed him, he was to recognize the 
Messiah, whose forerunner he was. The Holy Ghost de- 
scended on Jesus, as He emerged from the water in the 
attitude of prayer, and the voice of God pronounced Him 
in thunder His beloved Son. 

47. The impression made on John by the very look of 
Jesus reveals far better than many words could do His 
aspect when He was about to begin His work, and the 
qualities of the character which in Nazareth had been 
slowly ripening to full maturity. 

48. The baptism itself had an important significance for 
Jesus. To the other candidates who underwent the rite it 
had a double meaning; it signified the abandonment of 
their old sins, and their entrance into the new Messianic 
era. To Jesus it could not have the former meaning, ex- 
cept in so far as He may have identified Himself with His 
nation, and taken this way of expressing His sense of its 
need of cleansing. But it meant that He too was now 
entering through this door into the new epoch, of which 
He was Himself to be the Author. It expressed His sense 
that the time had come to leave behind the employments 
of Nazareth and devote himself to His peculiar work. 

49. But still more important was the descent upon Him 
of the Holy Ghost. This was neither a meaningless dis- 



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44 THK yUFS OF JBSUS CHRIST. 

play nor merely a signal to the Baptist. It was the symbol 
of a special gift then given to qualify Him for His work, 
and crown the long development of His peculiar powers. 
It is a forgotten truth that the manhood of Jesus was from 
first to last dependent on the Holy Ghost. We are apt to 
imagine that its connection with His divine nature rendered 
this unnecessary. On the contrary, it made it far more 
necessary, for in order to be the organ of His divine nature, 
His human nature had both to be endowed with the highest 
gifts and constantly sustained in their exercise. We are 
in the habit of attributing the wisdom and grace of His 
words, His supernatural knowledge of even the thoughts 
of men, and the miracles He performed, to His divine 
nature. But in the Gospels they are constantly attributed 
to the Holy Ghost. This does not mean that they were 
independent of His divine nature, but that in them His 
human nature was enabled to be the organ of His divine 
nature by a peculiar gift of the Holy Ghost. This gift was 
given Him at His baptism. It was analogous to the pos- 
session of prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, with the 
Spirit of inspiration on those occasions, of which they have 
left accounts, when they were called to begin their publio 
life, and to the special outpouring of the same influence 
still sometimes given at their ordination to those who are 
about to begin the work of the ministry. But to Him it 
was given without measure, while to others it has always 
been given only in measure ; and it comprised especially 
the gift of miraculous powers. ' 

50. The Temptation. — An immediate effect of this 
new endowment appears to have been one often 
experienced, in less degree, by others who, in their 
small measure, have received this same gift of the Spir- 
it for work. His whole being was excited about His 
work, His desires to be engaged in it were raised to the 



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THS F)NAL STAGES OF HIS PREPARATION. 45 

highest pitch, and his thoughts were intensely occupied 
about the means of its accomplishment. Although His 
preparation for it had been going on for many years, 
although His whole heart had long been fixed on it, and 
His plan had been clearly settled, it was natural that, when 
the divine signal had been given that it was forthwith to 
commence, and He felt Himself suddenly put in possession 
of the supernatural powers necessary for carrying it out, 
His mind should be in a tumult of crowding thoughts and 
feelings, and He should seek a place of solitude to revolve 
once more the whole situation. Accordingly, He hastily 
retreated from the bank of the Jordan, driven, we are told, 
by the Spirit^ which had just been given Him, into the wil- 
derness, where, for forty days, He wandered among the 
sandy dunes and wild mountains, His mind being so highly 
strung with the emotions and ideas which crowded on Him, 
that He forgot even to eat. 

51. But it is with surprise and awe we learn that His 
soul was, during those days, the scene of a frightful strug- 
gle. He was tempted of Satan, we are told. What could 
He be tempted with at a time so sacred? To understand 
this we must recall what has been said of the state of the 
Jewish nation, and especially the nature of the Messianic 
' hopes which they were indulging. They expected a Mes- 
siah who would work dazzling wonders and establish a 
world-wide empire with Jerusalem as its center, and they 
had postponed the ideas of righteousness and holiness to 
these. They completely inverted the divine conception of 
the kingdom, which could not but give the spiritual and 
moral elements precedence of material and political con- 
siderations. Now what Jesus was tempted to do was, in 
carrying out the great work which His Father bad com- 
mitted to Him, to yield in some measure to these expecta- 
tions He must have foreseen that, unless He did so, the 



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46 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

nation would be disappointed and probably turn away from 
Him in. unbelief and anger. The different temptations 
were only various modifications of this one thought. The 
suggestion that He should turn stones into bread to satisfy 
His hunger, was a temptation to use the power of working 
miracles, with which He had just been endowed, for a pur- 
pose inferior to those for which alone it had been given, 
and was the precurser of such temptations in His after-life 
as the demand of the multitude to show them a sign, or 
that He should come down from the cross, that they might 
believe Him. The suggestion that He should leap from 
the pinnacle of the temple was probably also a temptation 
to gratify the vulgar desire for wonders, because it was a 
part of the popular belief that the Messiah should appear 
suddenly, and in some marvellous way; as, for instance, by 
a leap from the temple roof into the midst of the crowds 
assembled below. The third and greatest temptation, to 
win the empire of all the kingdoms of the world by an act 
of worship to the Evil One, was manifestly only a symbol 
of obedience to the universal Jewish conception of the 
coming kingdom as a vast structure of material force. It 
was a temptation which every worker for God, weary with 
the slow progress of goodness, must often feel, and to 
which even good and earnest men have sometimes given 
way— to begin at the outside instead of within, to get 
first a great shell of external conformity to religion, and 
afterwards fill it with the reality. It was the temptation 
to which Mahomet yielded when he used the sword to sub- 
due those whom he was afterwards to make religious, and 
to which the Jesuits yielded when they baptized the 
heathen first and evangelized them afterwards. 

52. It is with awe we think of these suggestions pre- 
senting themselves to the holy soul of Jesus. Could He 
be tempted to distrust God, and even to worship the Evil 



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* THE FINAL STAGES OF HIS PREPARATION. 41 

One? No doubt the temptations were flung from Him, as 
the impotent billows retire broken from the breast of the 
rock on which they have dashed themselves. But these 
temptations pressed in on Him, not only at this time, but 
often before in the valley of Nazareth, and often after- 
wards, in the heats and crises of His life. We must re- 
member that it is no sin to be tempted, it is only sin to 
yield to temptation. And, indeed, the more absolutely 
pure a soul is, the more painful will be the point of the 
temptation, as it presses for admission into his breast. 

53. Although the tempter only departed from Jesus for 
a season, this was a decisive struggle^ he was thoroughly 
beaten back, and his power broken at its heart. Milton 
has indicated this by finishing his Paradise Regained at 
this point. Jesus emerged from the wilderness with the 
plan of His life, which, no doubt, had been, formed long 
before, hardened in the fire of trial. Nothing is more con- 
spicuous in His after-life than the resolution with which 
He carried it out. Other men, even those who have ac- 
complished the greatest tasks, have sometimes had no defi- 
nite plan, but only seen by degrees in the evolution of cir- 
cumstances the path to pursue; their purposes have been 
modified by events and the advice of others. But Jesus 
started with His plan perfected, and never deviated from 
it by a hair's-breadth. He resented the interference of 
His mother or His chief disciple with it as steadfastly as 
He bore it through the fiery opposition of open enemies. 
And His plan was to establish the kingdom of God in the 
hearts of individuals, and rely not on the weapons of polit- 
ical and material strength, but only on the power of love 
, and the force of truth. 



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THB DIVISIONS OP BIS PUBLIC MINISTRY. 

54. The publio ministry of Jesus is generally reokoned 
to have lasted three years. Each of them had peculiar 
features of its own. The first may be called the Year at 
Obscurity, both because the records of it which we possess 
are very scanty, and because He seems during it to have 
been only slowly emerging into publio notice. It was 
spent for the most part in Judaea. The second was the 
Year of Publio Favor, during which the country had be- 
come thoroughly aware of tliro, His activity was incessant, 
and His fame rang through the length and breadth of the 
land. It was almost wholly passed in Galilee. The third 
was the Year of Opposition, when the public favor ebbed 
away, His enemies multiplied and asailed Him with more 
and more pertinacity, and at last He fell a victim to their 
hatred. The first six months of this final year were passed 
in Galilee, and the last six in other parts of the land. 

55. Thus the life of the Savior in its external outline 
resembled that of many a reformer and benefactor of man- 
kind. Such a life often begins with a period during which 
the publio is gradually made aware of the new man in its 
midst, then passes into a period when his doctrine or reform 
is borne aloft on the shoulders of popularity, and ends with 
a reaction, when the old prejudices and interests whioh 
have been assailed by him rally from his attack, and, gain- 
ing to themselves the passions of the crowd, crush him in 
their rage. 



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\ \> 



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CHAPTER IV. 
THE YEAR OF 0B8CUBITY. 

Paragraphs 56-66. 

57. The First Disciples; 58. The First Miracle; 59 
The Cleansing of the Temple ; 60. Nicodemus. 

61-65. Reasons for the meagerness of the Record* 
of this Year. 



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CHAPTER IV, 

THE YEA$ OP OBSCURITY. 

56. The records of this year whioh we possess are ex- 
tremely meager, comprising only two or three incidents, 
whioh may be here enumerated, especially as they form a 
kind of programme of His future work. 

57. When He emerged from the wilderness after the 
forty days of temptation, with His grasp of His future 
plan tightened by that awful struggle and with the inspira- 
tion of His baptism still swelling His heart, He appeared 
once more on the bank of the Jordan, and John pointed 
Him out as the great Successor to himself of whom he had 
often spoken. He especially introduced Him to some of 
the choicest of His own disciples, who immediately became 
His followers. Probably the very first of these to whom 
He spoke was the man who was afterwards to be His favor- 
ite disciple, and to give to the world the divinest portrait \ 
of His character and life. John the Evangelist — for he it 
was — has left an account of this first meeting and the in- 
terview that followed it, which retains in all its freshness 
the impression which Christ's majesty and purity made on 
his receptive mind. The other young men who attached 
themselves to Him at the same time were Andrew, Peter, 
Philip, and Nathanael. They had been prepared for their 
new Master by their intercourse with the Baptist, and 
although they did not at once give up their employments 
and follow Him in the same way as they did at a later 
period, they received impressions at their very first meet- 



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52 THE LIFE OP JESUS CHBIST. 

ing which decided their whole after- career. The Baptist's 
disciples do not seem to have at once gone over in a body 
to Christ. But the best of them did so. Some mischief- 
makers endeavored to excite envy in his mind by pointing 
out how his influence was passing away to Another. But 
they little understood that great man, whose chief great- 
ness was his humility. He answered them that it was his 
joy to decrease, while Christ increased, for it was Christ 
who as the Bridegroom was to lead home the bride, while 
he was only the Bridegroom's friend, whose happiness con- 
sisted in seeing the crown of festal joy placed on the head 
of another. 

58. With His newly attached followers Jesus departed 
from the scene of John's ministry, and went north to Cana 
in Galilee, to attend a marriage to which He had been 
invited. Here He made the first display of the miraculous 
powers with which He had been recently endowed, by 
turning water into wine. It was a manifestation of His 
glory intended specially for his new disciples, who, we are 
told, thenceforward believed on Him, which means, no 
doubt, that they were fully convinced that He was the 
Messiah. It was intended also to strike the key-note of 
His ministry as altogether different from the Baptist's, 
John was an ascetic hermit, who fled from the abodes oi 
men and called his hearers out into the wilderness. Bui 
Jesus had glad tidings to bring to men's hearths; He was 
to mingle in their common life, and produce a happy revo- 
lution in their circumstances, which would be like the turn- 
ing of the water of their life into wine. 

59. Soon after this miracle He returned again to Judsea 
to attend the Passover, and gave a still more striking proof 
of the joyful and enthusiastic mood in which He was then 
living, by purging the temple of the sellers of animals and 
(he money-changers, who bad introduced thw traffic into 



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THE TEAR OP OBSCUBITY. 53 

its courts. These persons were allowed to carry on their 
sacrilegious trade under the pretence of accommodating 
strangers who came to worship at Jerusalem, by selling 
them the victims which they could not bring from foreign 
countries, and supplying, in exchange for foreign money, 
the Jewish coins in which alone they could pay their tem- 
ple dues. But what had been begun under the veil of a 
pious pretext had ended in gross disturbance of the worship, 
and in elbowing the Gentile proselytes from the place 
which God had allowed them in His house. Jesus had 
probably often witnessed the disgraceful scene with indig- 
nation during His visits to Jerusalem, and now, with the 
prophetic zeal of His baptism upon Him, He broke out 
against it. The same look of irresistible purity and 
majesty which had appalled John, when He sough£ baptism, 
prevented any resistance on the part of the ignoble crew, 
and made the onlookers recognize the lineaments of 
the prophets of ancient days, before whom kings and 
crowds alike were wont to quail. It was the beginning of 
His reformatory work against the religious abuses of the 
time. 

60. He wrought ofiher miracles during the feast, which 
must have excited much talk among the pilgrims* from 
every land who crowded the city. One result of them was 
to bring to His lodging one night the venerable and 
anxious inquirer to whom He delivered the marvellous dis- 
course on the nature of the new kingdom He had come to 
found, and the grounds of admission to it, which has been 
preserved to us in the third chapter of John. It seemed a 
hopeful sign that one of the heads of the nation should 
approach Him in a spirit so humble; but Nicodemus was 
the only one of them on whose mind the first display of the 
Messiah's power in the capital produced a deep and favor- 
able impression. 



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T 
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54 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

61. Thus far we follow clearly the first steps of Jesus. 
But at this point our information in regard to the first year 
of His ministry, after commencing with such fulness, comes 
to a sudden stop, and for the next eight months we learn 
nothing more about Him but that He was baptizing in, 
Judaea — "though Jesus Himself baptized not, but His dis- 
ciples " — and that He " made and baptized more disciples 
than John/' 

62. What can be the meaning of such a blank? It is to 
be noted, too, that it is only in the Fourth Gospel that we 
receive even the details given above. The Synoptists 
omit the first year of the ministry altogether, beginning 
their narrative with the ministry in Galilee, and merely 
indicating in the most cursory way that there was a min- 
istry in Judaea before. 

63. It is very difficult to explain all this. The most 
natural explanation would perhaps be, that the incidents of 
this year were imperfectly known at the time when the 
Gospels were composed. It would be quite natural that 
the details of the period when Jesus had not attracted 
much public attention should be much less accurately re- 
membered than those of the period when He was by far 
the best known personage in the country. But, indeed, 
the Synoptists all through take little notice of what hap* 
pened in Judsea, till the close of His life draws nigh. It i% 
to John we are indebted for the connected narrative of Hi* 
various visits to the south. 

64. But John, at least, could scarcely have been igno< 
rant of the incidents of eight months. We shall perhaps 
be conducted to the explanation by attending to the little- 
noticed fact, which John communicates, that for a time 
Jesus took up the work of the Baptist. He baptized by 
the hands of His disciples, and drew even larger crowds 
than John. Must not this mean that He was convinced, by 



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THE YEAR OP OBSCURITY. 55 

the small impression which His manifestation of Himself 
at the Passover had made, that the nation was utterly un- 
prepared for receiving Him yet as the Messiah, and that 
what was needed was the extension of the preparatory 
• work df repentance and baptism, and accordingly, keeping 
in the background His higher character, became for the 
time the colleague of John? Thfs view is confirmed by the 
fact, that it was upon John's imprisonment at this year's 
end that he opened fully His Messianic career in Galilee. 
65. A still deeper explanation of the silence of the 
Synoptists over this period, and their scant notice of 
Christ's subsequent visits to Jerusalem, has been suggested. 
Jesus came primarily to the Jewish nation, whose authori- 
tative representatives were to be found at Jerusalem. He 
was the Messiah promised to their fathers, the Fulfiller of 
the nation's history. He had indeed a far wider mission 
to the whole world, but He was to begin with the Jews, 
and at Jerusalem. The nation, however, in its heads at 
Jerusalem, rejected Him, and so He was compelled to 
found His world-wide community from a different center. 
This having become evident by the time the Gospels 
were written, the Synoptists passed His activity at the 
headquarters of the nation, as a work with merely negative 
results, in great measure by, and concentrated attention on 
the period of His ministry when He was gathering the 
company of believing souls that was to form the nucleus 
of the Christian Church. However this may be, certainly 
at the close of the first year of the ministry of Jesus there 
fell already over Judaea and Jerusalem the shadow of an 
awful coming event — the shadow of that most frightful oi 
all national crimes which the world has ever witnessed, the 
rejection and crucifixion by the Jews of their Messiah. 



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CHAPTER V, 

THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 

Paragraphs 66-73. Galilee, the Scene op this Year's Work. 
• 67, 68. Its Size and Population, the Sea of Galilee; 
69. Return of Jesus from the South; 70. Visit to 
Nazareth; 71. Removal of His Home to Caper- 
naum ; 72. Manner of His Life ; 73. His Popu- 
larity. 

/4-113. The Means He employed. 
76-83. Miracle*. 

77. Different Kinds of them; 78-83. Reasons 
why He wrought them. 

84-104. Preaching. 
86-89. The form of His Preaching. 
90-95. The Qualities of the Preacher ~- 91. Author- 
ity; 92. Boldness; 93. Power; 94. Gracious- 
ness; 95. Human Breadth. 
$6-102. The matter of His Teaching— 97-100. The 
Kingdom of God; 101. Himself; 102. Im- 
portant Themes which He only slightly 
touched. 
108-104 His Audiences. 

105-113. The Apoitolatt. 

105-108. Call and Training of the Twelve. 

109-114His Human Character — 109. Purposeful. 

ness; 110. Faith; 111. Originality; 112. 

Love to Men; 113. Love to God; 114. Sin- 

lessness. 
115 The Deity of Christ 



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CHAPTER V. 

THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 

66. After the year spent in the south, Jesus shifted the 
sphere of His activity to the north of the country. In Gali- 
lee He would be able to address Himself to minds that 
were unsophisticated with the prejudices and supercilious 
pride of Judaea, where the sacerdotal and learned classes 
had their headquarters; and He might hope that, if His 
doctrine and influence took a deep hold of one part of the 
country, even though it was remote from the center of 
authority, He might return to the south backed with an 
irresistible national acknowledgement, and carry fiy storm 
even the citadel of prejudice itself. 

67. Galilee. — The area of His activity for the next 
eighteen months was very limited. Even the whole of 
Palestine was a very limited country. Its length was a 
hundred miles less than that of Scotland, and its breadth 
considerably less than the average breadth of Scotland. It 
is important to remember this, because it renders intelligi- 
ble the rapidity with which the movement of Jesus spread 
over the land, and all parts of the country flocked to His 
ministry; and it is interesting to remember it as an illus- 
tration of the fact, that the nations which have contributed 
most to the civilization of the world have, during the 
period of their true greatness, been confined to very small 
territories. Rome was but a single city, and Greece a very 
small country. * 

57 



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58 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

68. Galilee was the most northerly of the four provinces 
into which Palestine was divided. It was sixty miles long 
Dy thirty broad; that is to say, it was less than some of 
our Scottish counties. It was about the size of Aberdeen- 
shire. It consisted for the most part of an elevated 
plateau, whose surface was varied by irregular mountain 
masses. Near its eastern boundary it suddenly dropped 
down into a great gulf, through which flowed the Jordan, 
and in the midst of which, at a depth of five hundred feet 
below the Mediterranean, lay the lovely, harp-shaped Sea 
of Galilee. The whole province was very fertile, and its sur- 
face thickly covered with large villages and towns. The 
population was perhaps as dense as that of Lancashire or 
the West Riding of Yorkshire. But the center of activity 
was the basin of the lake, a sheet of water thirteen miles 
long by six broad. Above its eastern shore, round which 
ran a fringe of green a quarter of a mile broad, there tow- 
ered high, bare hills, cloven with the channels of torrents. 
On the western side, the mountains were gently sloped and 
their sides richly cultivated, bearing splendid crops of every 
description ; while at their feet the shore was verdant with 
luxuriant groves of olives, oranges, figs, and every product 
of an almost tropical climate. At the northern end of the 
lake the space between the water and the mountains was 
broadened by the delta of the river, and watered with many 
streams from the hills, so that it was a perfect paradise of 
fertility and beauty. It was called the plain of Gennesa- 
reth, and even at this day, when the whole basin of the 
lake is little better than a torrid solitude, is still covered 
with magnificent corn-fields, wherever the hand of cultiva- 
tion touches it; and, where idleness leaves it untended, is 
overspread with thick jungles of thorn and oleander. In 
our Lord's time, it contained the chief cities on the lake, 
such as Capernaum* Bethsaida, and Chorazin. But the 



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THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 59 

whole shore was studded with towns and villages, and 
formed a perfect beehive of swarming human life. The 
means of existence were abundant in the crops and fruits 
of every description which the fields yielded so richly; and 
the waters of the lake teemed with fish, affording employ- 
ment to thousands of fishermen. Besides, the great high- 
ways from Egypt to Damascus, and from Phoenicia to the 
Euphrates, passed here, and made this a vast center of 
traffic. Thousands of boats for fishing, transport, and 
pleasure moved to and fro on the surface of the lake, so 
that the whole region was a focus of energy and prosperity. 

69. The report of the miracles which Jesus had wrought \ 
at Jerusalem, eight months before, had been brought home \ 
to Galilee by the pilgrims who had been south at the feast, ' 
and doubtless also the news of His preaching and baptism 

in Judaea had created talk and excitement before He ar- 
rived. Accordingly, the Galileans were in some measure 
prepared to receive Him when He returned to their 
midst. 

70. One of the first places He visited was Nazareth, the 
home of His childhood and youth. He appeared there one 
Sabbath in the synagogue, 'and, being now known as a 
preacher, was invited to read the Scriptures and address 
the congregation. He read a passage in Isaiah, in which a 
glowing description is given of the coming and work of 
the Messiah; "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, 
because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the 
poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach 
deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the 
blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the 
acceptable year of the Lord." As He commented on this 
text, picturing the features of the Messianic time, — the 
emancipation of the slave, the enriching of the poor, the 



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60 Tfifi tltlfi 62 Jti&m CHfitST. 

healing of the diseased, — their curiosity at hearing for the 
first time a young preacher who had been brought up 
among themselves passed into spell-bound wonder, and 
they burst into the applause which used to be allowed in 
the Jewish synagogues. But soon the reaction came. 
They began to whisper : Was not this the carpenter who 
had worked among them? Had not His father and mother 
been their neighbors? Were not His sisters married in 
the town? Their envy was excited. And when He pro- 
ceeded to tell them that the prophecy which He had read 
was fulfilled in Himself, they broke out into angry scorn. 
They demanded of Him a sign, such as it was reported He 
had given in Jerusalem ; and when He informed them that 
He could do no miracle among the unbelieving, they 
rushed on Him in a storm of jealousy and wrath, and hurry- 
ing Him out of the synagogue to a crag behind the town, 
would, if He had not miraculously taken Himself away 
from them, have flung Him over, and crowned their pro- 
verbial wickedness with a deed which would have robbed 
Jerusalem of her bad eminence of being the murderess of 
the Messiah. 

71. From that day Nazareth was Hiis home no more. 
Once again, indeed, in His yearning love for His old neigh- 
bors, He visited it, but with no better result. Hencefor- 
ward He made His home in Capernaum, on the northwest- 
ern shore of the Sea of Galilee. This town has completely 
vanished out of existence; its very site can not now be 
discovered with any certainty. This may be one reason 
why it is not connected in the Christian mind with the 
life of Jesus in the same prominent way as Bethlehem, 
where He was born, Nazareth, where He was brought up, 
and Jerusalem, where He died. But we ought to fix it in 
our memories side by side with these, for it was His home 
for eighteen of the most important months of His life. It 



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THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOB. 61 

is called His own city, and He was asked for tribute in it 
as a citizen of the place. It was thoroughly well adapted 
to be the center of His labors in Galilee, for it was the 
focus of the busy life in the basin of the lake, and was 
conveniently situated for excursions to all parts of the 
province. Whatever happened there was quickly heard 
of in all the regions round about. 

72. In Capernaum, then, He began His Galilean work; 
and for many months the method of His life was, to be 
frequently there as in His headquarters, and from this cen- 
ter to make tours in all directions, visiting the towns and 
villages of Galilee. Sometimes His journey would be in- 
land, away to the west. At other times it would be a tour 
of the villages on the lake, or a visit to the country on its 
eastern side. He had a boat that waited on Him, to con- 
vey Him wherever He might wish to go. He would come 
back to Capernaum, perhaps only for a day, perhaps for a 
week or two at a time. 

73. In a few weeks the whole province was ringing 
with His name; He was the subject of conversation in 
every boat on the lake and every house in the whole re- 
gion; men's minds were stirred with the profoundest ex- 
citement, and everyone desired to see Him. Crowds be- 
gan to gather about Him. They grew larger and larger. 
They multiplied to thousands and tens of thousands. They 
followed Him wherever He went. The news spread far 
and wide beyond Galilee, and brought hosts from Jerusa- 
lem, Judaea, and Persea, and even from Idumaea in the far 
south, and Tyre and Sidon in the far north. Sometimes 
He could not stay in any town, because the crowds blocked 
up the streets and trode one on another. He had to take 
them out to the fields and deserts. The country was stirred 
from end to end, and Galilee was all on fire with excite* 
meat about Him. 



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62 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

74. How was it that He produced so great and wide- 
spread a movement? It was not by declaring Himself the 
Messiah. That would indeed have caused to pass through 
every Jewish breast the deepest thrill which it could ex- 
perience. But although Jesus now and then, as at Naza- 
reth, revealed Himself, in general He rather concealed His 
true character. No doubt the reason of this was, that 
among the excitable crowds of rude Galilee, with their 
grossly materialistic hopes, the declaration would have Ex- 
cited a revolutionary rising against the Roman Government, 
which would have withdrawn men's minds from His true 
aims and brought down on His head the Roman sword, 
just as in Judaea it would have precipitated a murderous 
attack on His life by the Jewish authorities. To avert 
either kind of interruption, He kept the full revelation of 
Himself in reserve, endeavoring to prepare the public mind 
to receive it in its true inward and spiritual meaning, when 
the right moment for divulging it should come, and in the 
meantime leaving it to be inferred from His character and 
work who He was. 

75. The two great means which Jesus used in His work, 
and which created such attention and enthusiasm, were 
His Miracles and His Preaching. 

76. The Miracle-Worker. — Perhaps His miracles ex- 
cited the widest attention. We are told how 'the news of 
the first one which He wrought in Capernaum spread like 
wildfire through the town, and brought crowds about the 
house where He was; and whenever He performed a new 
one of extraordinary character, the excitement grew in- 
tense and the rumor of it spread on every hand. When, 
for instance, He first cured leprosy, the most malignant 
form of bodily disease in Palestine,- the amazement of the 
people knew no bounds. It was the same when He first 



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THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOB. 63 

overcame a case of possession; and when he raised to life 
the widow's son at Nain, there ensued a sort of stupor of 
fear, followed by delighted wonder and the talk of thous- 
ands of tongues. All Galilee was for a time in motion 
with the crowding of the diseased of every description 
who could walk or totter to be near Him, and with com- 
panies of anxious friends carrying on beds and couches 
those who could not come themselves. The streets of the 
villages and towns wore lined with the victims of disease 
as His benignant figure passed by. Sometimes He had so 
many to attend to that he could not find time even to eat; > 
and at one period He was so absorbed in His benevolent 
labors, and so carried along with the holy excitement which 
they caused, that His relatives, with indecorous rashness, 
endeavored to interfere, saying to each other that He was 
beside Himself. 

77. The miracles of Jesus, taken altogether, were of 
two classes — those wrought on man, and those wrought in 
the sphere of external nature, such as the turning of water 
into wine, stilling the tempest, and multiplying the loaves. 
The former were by far the more numerous. They con- 
sisted chiefly of cures of diseases less or more malignant, 
such as lameness, blindness, deafness, palsy, leprosy, and 
so forth. He appears to have varied very much His 
mode of acting, for reasons which we can scarcely explain. 
Sometimes He used means, such as a touch, or the laying\ 
of moistened clay on the part, or ordering the patient t<? \ 
wash in water. At other times He healed without any I 
means, and occasionally even at a distance. Besides these / 
bodily cures, He dealt with the diseases of the mind. 
These seem to have been peculiarly prevalent in Palestine 
at the time, and to have excited the utmost terror. They 
were believed to be accompanied by the entrance of de- 
mons into the poor imbecile or raving victims, and this 



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64 THE LIFB OF JESUS CHRIST. 

idea was only too true. The man whom Jesus cured 
among the tombs in the country of the Gadarenes was a 
frightful example of this class of disease; and the picture 
of him sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right 
mind, shows what an effect His kind, soothing, and authori- 
tative presence had on minds so distracted. But the most 
extraordinary of the miracles of Jesus upon man were the 
instances in which He raised the dead to life. They were 
not frequent, but naturally produced an overwhelmning 
impression whenever they occurred. The miracles of the 
other class — those on external nature — Were of the same 
inexplicable description. Some of His cures of mental 
disease, if standing by themselves, might be accounted for 
by the influence of a powerful nature on a troubled mind; 
and in the same way some of His bodily cures might be 
accounted for by His influencing the body through the 
mind. But such a miracle as walking on the tempestuous 
sea is utterly beyond the reach of natural explanation. 

78. Why did Jesus employ this means of working? 
Several answers may be given to this question. 

79. First, He wrought miracles because His Father 
gave Him these signs as proofs that He had sent Him. 
Many of the Old Testament prophets had received the 
same authentication of their mission, and although John, 
who revived the prophetic function, worked no miracles, as 
the Gospels inform us with the most simple veracity, it was 
to be expected that He who was a far greater prophet than 
the greatest who went before Him, should show even 
greater signs than any of them of His divine mission. It 
was a stupendous claim which He made on the faith of 
men when He announced Himself as the Messiah, and it 
would have been unreasonable to expect it to be conceded 
by a nation accustomed to miracles as the signs of a divine 
mission, if He had wrought nonet 



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THE TSAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 66 

80. Secondly, the miracles of Christ were the natural 
outflow of the divine fulness which dwelt in Him. God 
was in Him, and His human nature was endowed with the 
Holy Ghost without measure. It was natural, when such 
a Being was in the world, that mighty works should mani- 
fest themselves in Him. He was Himself the great mir- 
acle, of which His particular miracles were merely sparks 
or emanations. He was the great interruption of the order 
of nature, or rather a new element which had entered 
into the order of nature to enrich and ennoble it, and His 
miracles entered with Him, not to disturb, but to repair its 
harmony. Therefore all His miracles bore the stamp of 
His character. They were not mere exhibitions of power, 
but also of holiness, wisdom, and love. The Jews often 
sought from Him mere gigantesque prodigies, to gratify 
their mania for marvels. But He always refused them, 
working only such miracles as were helps to faith. He de- 
manded faith in all those whom He cured, and never re- 
sponded either to curiosity or unbelieving challenges to ex- 
hibit marvels. This distinguishes His miracles from those 
Cabled of ancient wonder-workers and mediaeval saints. 
They were marked by unvarying sobriety and benevolence, 
because they were the expressions of His character as a 
whole. 

81. Thirdly, His miracles were symbok of His spiritual 
and saving work. You have only to consider them for a 
moment to see that they wpre, as a whole, triumphs over ; 
the misery of the world. Mankind is the prey of a thous- ' 
and evils, and even the frame of external nature bears the 
mark of some past catastrophe: " The whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth in pain." This huge mass of phy- 
sical evil in the lot of mankind is the effect of sin. Not 
that every disease and misfortune can be traced to special 
sin, although some of them can; The consequences of 

E 3* 



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66 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

past sin are distributed in detail over the whole race. But 
yet the misery of the world is the shadow of its sin. Ma- 
terial and moral evil, being thus intimately related, mutually 
illustrate each other. When He healed bodily blindness, 
it was a type of the healing of the inner eye; when He 
raised the dead, He meant to suggest that He was the 
Resurrection and the Life in the spiritual world as well; 
when He cleansed the leper, His triumph spoke of .another 
over the leprosy of sin ; when He multiplied the loaves, He 
followed the miracle with a discourse on the bread of life; 
when He stilled the storm, it was an assurance that He 
could speak peace to the troubled conscience. 

82. Thus His miracles were a natural and essential part 
of His Messianic work. They were an excellent means of 
making Him known to the nation. They bound those 
whom He cured to Him with strong ties of gratitude; and 
without doubt, in many cases, the faith in Him as a miracle- 
worker led on to a higher faith. So it' was in the case of 
His devoted follower Mary Magdalene, out of whom He 
cast seven devils. 

83. To Himself this work must have brought both great 
pain and great joy. To His tender and exquisitely sym- 
pathetic heart, that never grew callous in the least degree, 
it must often have been harrowing to mingle with so much 
disease, and see the awful effects of sin. But He was in 
the right place; it suited His great love to be where help 

- was needed. And what a joy it must have been to Him to 
distribute blessings on every hand and erase the traces of 
sin; to see health returning beneath his touch; to meet the 
joyous and grateful glances of the opening eyes; to hear 
the blessings of mothers and sisters, as He restored their 
loved' ones to their arms; and to see the light of love and 
welcome in the faces of the poor, as He entered their towns 
and villages. He drank deeply of the well at which He 



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THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 67 

would have his followers to be ever drinking — tiae bliss of 
doing good. 

84. The Teacher. — The other great instrument with 
which Jesus did His work was His teaching. It was by 

*far the more important of the two. His miracles were 
only the bell tolled to bring the people to hear His words. 
They impressed those who might not yet be susceptible to 
the subtler influence, and brought them within its range. 

85. The miracles probably made most noise, but His 
preaching also spread His fame far and wide. There is 
no power whose attraction is more unfailing than that 
of the eloquent word. Barbarians, listening to their bards 
and story-tellers; Greeks, listening to the restrained pas- 
sion of their orators, and matter-of-fact nations like the 
Roman, have alike acknowledged its power to be irre- 
sistible. The Jews prized it above almost every other at- 
traction, and among the figures of their mighty dead re- 
vered none more highly than the prophets — those eloquent 
utterers of the truth, whom Heaven had &ent them from 
age to age. Though the Baptist did no miracles, multi- 
tudes flocked to Him, because in his accents they recog- 
nized the thunder of this power, which for so many gene- 
rations no Jewish ear had listened to. Jesus also was re- 
cognized as a prophet, and accordingly, His preaching 
created wide-spread excitement. " He spake in their syn- 
agogues, being glorified of all." His words were* heard 
with wonder and amazement. Sometimes the multitude 
on the beach of the lake so pressed upon Him to hear, that 
He had to enter into a ship and address them from the 
deck, as they spread themselves out in a semicircle on the 
ascending shore. His enemies themselves bore witness 
that " never man spake like this man; 9 ' and meager as are 
the remains of His preaching which we possess, they are 



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68 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHBIST. 

amply sufficient to make us echo the sentiment and under- \ 
stand the impression which He produced. All His words 1 
together which have been preserved to us would not oc- I 
cupy more space in print than half-a-dozen ordinary ser- I 
mous; yet it is not too much to say, that they are the most y 
precious literary heritage of the human race. His words, 1 
like His miracles, were expressions of Himself, and every J 
one of them has in it something of the grandeur of Hier 
character. 

86. The form of the preaching of Jesus was essentially 
Jewish. The Oriental mind does not work in the same 
way as the mind of the West. Our thinking and speaking, 
when at their best, are fluent, expansive, closely reasoned. 
The kind of discourse which we admire is one which takes 
up an important subject, divides it out into different 
branches, treats it fully under each of the heads, closely 
articulates part to part, and closes with a moving appeal to 
the feelings, so as to sway the wtyl to some practical result. 
The Oriental m*nd, on the contrary, loves to brood long on 
a single point, to turn it round and round, to gather up all 
the truth about it in a focus, and pour it forth in a few 
pointed and memorable words. It is concise, epigrammatic, 
oracular. A Western speaker's discourse is a systematic 
structure, or like a dhain in which link is firmly knit to 
link; an Oriental's is like the sky at night, full of innu- 
merable burning points shining forth from a dark back- 
ground. 

87. Such was the form of the teaching of Jesus. It 
consisted of numerous sayings, every one of which con- 
tained the greatest possible amount of truth in the 
smallest possible compass, and was expressed in language 
so concise and pointed as to stick in the memory like an 
arrow. Read them, and you will find that every one of 
them, as you ponder it, sucks the mind in and in like a 



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THE TEAR OP PUBLIC FAVOB. 69 

whirlpool, till it is lost in the depths. You will find, 
too, that there are very few of them which you do not 
know by heart. They have found their way into the 
memory of Christendom as no other words have done. 
Even before the meaning has been apprehended, the 
perfect, proverb-like expression lodges itself fast in the^ 
mind. 

88. But there was another characteristic of the form of 
Jesus 9 teaching. It was full of figures of speech. He 
thought in images. He had ever been a loving and accu- 
rate observer of nature around Him — of the colors of the 
flowers, the ways of the birds, the growth of the trees, the 
vicissitudes of the seasons — and an equally keen observer 
of the ways of men in all parts of life — in religion, in 
business, in the home. The result was that He could 
neither think nor speak without His thought running into 
the mould of some natural image. His preaching was 
alive with such references, and therefore full of color, 
movement, and changing forms. There were no abstract 
statements in it; they were all changed into pictures. 
Thus, in His sayings, we ' can still see the aspects of the 
country and the life of the time as in a panorama — the 
lilies, whose gorgeous beauty His eyes feasted on, waving 
in the fields; the sheep following the shepherd; the broad 
and narrow city gates; the virgins with their lamps await- 
ing in the darkness the bridal procession; the Pharisee 
with his broad phylacteries and the publican with bent 
head at prayer together in the temple; the rich man seated 
in his palace at a feast, and the beggar lying at his gate 
with the dogs licking his sores; and a hundred other pic- 
tures that lay bare the inner and minute life of the time, 
over which history in general sweeps heedlessly with ma- 
jestic stride. 

89. But the most characteristic form of speech He 



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70 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

made use of was the parable. It was a combination of 
the two qualities already mentioned — concise, memorable 
expression, and a figurative style. It used an incident, 
taken from common life and rounded into a gem-like pic- 
ture, to set forth scfme corresponding truth in the higher 
and spiritual region. It was a favorite Jewish mode of 
putting truth, but Jesus imparted to it by far the richest 
and most perfect development. About one-third of all 
His sayings which have been preserved to us consists of 
parables. This shows how they stuck in the memory. In 
the same way the hearers of the sermons of any preacher 
will probably, after a few years, remember the illustrations 
they have contained far better than anything else in them. 
How these parables have remained in the memory of all 
generations since! The Prodigal Son, the Sower, the Ten 
Virgins, the Good Samaritan, — these and many others are 
pictures hung up in millions of minds. What passages in 
the greatest masters of expression— in Homer, in Virgil, 
in Dante, in Shakspeare — have secured for themselves so 
universal a hold on men, or been felt to be so fadelessly 
fresh and true? He never went far for His illustrations. 
As a master of painting will make you, with a morsel of 
chalk or a burnt stick, a face at which you must laugh, or . 
weep, or wonder, so Jesus took the commonest objects and 
incidents around Him, — the sewing of a piece of cloth on 
an old garment, the bursting of an old bottle, the children 
playing in the market-place at weddings and funerals, or 
the tumbling of a hut in a storm, — to change them into 
perfect pictures, and to make them the vehicles for convey- 
ing to the world immortal truth. No wonder the crowds 
followed Him! Even the simplest could delight in such 
pictures and carry away as a life-long possession the 
expression at least of His ideas, though it might require 
the thought of centuries to pierce their crystalline depths. 



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THE TEAR OP PUBLIC FAVOR. 71 

There never was speaking so simple yet so profound, so 
pictorial yet so absolutely true. 

90. Such were the qualities of His style. The qualities 
of the Preacher Himself have been preserved to us in the 
criticism of His hearers, and are manifest in the remains 
of His addresses which the Gospels contain. 

91. The most prominent of them seems to have been 
Authority: " The people were astonished at His doctrine, 
for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the 
scribes." The first thing His hearers were struck with was 
the contrast between His words and the preaching which 
they were wont to hear from the scribes in the synagogues. 
These were the exponents of the deadest and driest sys- 
tem of theology that has ever passed in any age for 
religion. Instead of expounding the Scriptures, which 
were in their hands, and would have lent living power to 
their words, they retailed the opinions of commentators, 
and were afraid to advance any statement, unless it was 
backed by the authority of some master. Instead of 
dwelling on the great themes of justice and mercy, love 
and God, they tortured the sacred text into a ceremonial 
manual, and preached on the proper breadth of phylac- 
teries, the proper postures for prayer, the proper length of 
fasts, the distance which might be walked on the Sabbath, 
and so forth; for in these things the religion of the time 
consisted. In order to see anything in modern times at all 
like the preaching which then prevailed, we must go back 
to the Reformation period, when, as the historian of Knox 
tells us, the harangues delivered by the monks were empty, 
ridiculous, and wretched in the extreme. " Legendary 
tales concerning the founder of some religious order, the 
miracles he performed, his combats with the devil, his 
watchings, fastings, flagellations; the virtues of holy water, 



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72 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

chrism, crossing, and exorcism; the horrors of purgatory, 
and the numbers released from it by the intercessions of 
some powerful saint, — these, with low jests, table-talk, 
and fireside scandal, formed the favorite topics of the 
preachers, and were served up to the people instead of the 
pure, salutary, and sublime doctrines of the Bible." Per- 
haps the contrast which the Scottish people three and a 
half centuries ago felt between such harangues and the 
noble words of Wishart and Knox, may convey to our 
mind as good an idea as can be got of the effect of the 
preaching of Jesus on His contemporaries. He knew 
nothing of the authority of masters and schools of inter- 
pretation, but spoke as One whose own eyes had gazed on 
the objects of the eternal world. He needed none to tell 
Him of God or of man, for He knew both perfectly. He 
was possessed with the sense of a mission, which drove 
Him on and imparted earnestness to every word and ges- 
ture. He knew Himself sent from God, and the words He 
spoke to be not His own, but God's. He did not hesitate 
to tell those who neglected His words that in the judg- 
ment they would be condemned by the Ninevites and the 
Queen of Sheba, who had listened to Jonah and Solomon, 
for they were hearing One greater than any prophet or 
king of the olden time. He warned them that on their 
acceptance or rejection of the message He bore would 
depend their future weal or woe. This was the tone of 
earnestness, of majesty and authority that smote His hear- 
ers with awe. 

92. Another quality which the people remarked in Him 
was Boldness : " Lo, He speaketh boldly." This appeared 
the more wonderful because He was an unlettered man, 
who had not passed through the schools of Jerusalem or 
received the imprimatur of any earthly authority. But 
this quality came from the same source as Hi/» authority 



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THE YEAR OP PUBLIC PAVOR. 73 

tiven^ss. Timidity usually springs from self-consciousness. 
The preacher who is afraid of his audience, and respects 
fhe persons of the learned and the great, is thirking of 
himself and of what will be said of his performance. But 
he who feels himself driven on by a divine mission forgets 
himself.' All audiences are alike to him, be they gentle or 
simple; he is thinking only of the message he has to de- 
liver. Jesus was ever looking the spiritual and eternal 
realities in the face; the spell of their greatness held Him, 
and all human distinctions disappeared in their presence; 
men of every class were only men to Him. He ^as borne 
along on the torrent of His mission, and what might happen 
to Himself could not make Him stop to question or quail. 
He discovered His boldness chiefly in attacking the abuses 
and ideals of the time. It would be a complete m: stake to 
think of Him as all mildness and meekness. There is 
scarcely any element more conspicuous in His wo-ds than 
a strain of tierce indignation. It was an age or. shams 
above almost any that have ever been. They occupied all 
high places. They paraded themselves in social life*, occu- 
pied the chairs of learning, and above all debased every 
part of religion. Hypocrisy had become so universal that 
it had ceased even to doubt itself. The ideals of the peo- 
ple were utterly mean and mistaken. One can feel throb- 
bing through His words, from first to last, an indignation 
against all this, which had begun with His earliest obser- 
vation in Nazareth and ripened with His increasing knowl- 
edge of the times. The things which were highly esteemed 
among men, He broadly asserted, were abomination in the 
sight of God. There never was in the history of speech a 
polemic so scathing, so annihilating, as His against the 
figures to which the reverence of the multitude had been 
paid before His withering words fell on them — the scribe, 
the Pharisee, the priest, and the Levite. 
4 



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74 THE LIFE OP JESUS CHBIST. 

93. A third quality which His hearers remarked was 
Power : " His word was with power." This was the result 
of that unction of the Holy One, without which even the 
most solemn truths fall on the ear without effect. He was 
filled with the Spirit without measure. Therefore the 
truth possessed Him. It burned and swelled in His own 
bosom, and He spoke it forth from heart to heart. He had 
the Spirit not only in such degree as to fill Himself, but so 
as to be able to impart it to others. It overflowed with 
His words and seized the souls of His hearers, filling with 
enthusiasm the mind and the heart. 

94. A fourth quality which was observed in His preach- 
ing, and was surely a very prominent one, was Gracious- 
ness : " They wondered at the gracious words which pro- 
ceeded out of His mouth." In spite of His tone of au- 
thority and His fearless and scathing attacks on the times, 
there was diffused over all He said a glow of grace and 
love. Here especially His character spoke. How could 
He who was the incarnation of love help letting the glow 
and warmth of the heavenly fire that dwelt in Him spread 
over His words? The scribes of the time were hard, 
proud, and loveless. They flattered the rich and honored 
the learned, but of the great mass of their hearers they 
said, *' This people, which knoweth not the law, is cursed." 
But to Jesus every soul was infinitely precious. It mat- 
tered not under what humble dress or social deformity the 
pearl was hidden; it mattered not even beneath what rub- 
bish and filth of sin it was buried; He never missed it for 
a moment. Therefore He spoke to His hearers of every 
grade with the same respect. Surely it was the divine love 
itself, uttering itself from the innermost recess of the 
divine being, that spoke in the parables of the fifteenth of 
Luke. 

95. Such were some of the qualities of the Preacher. 



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THE YEAR OF PUBLIC PAVOB. 75 

And one more may be mentioned, which may be said to 
embrace all the rest, and is perhaps the highest quality of 
public speech. He addressed men as men, not as mem- 
bers of any class or possessors of any peculiar culture. 
The differences which divide men, such as wealth, rank, 
and education, are on the surface. The elements in which 
they are all alike — the broad sense of the understanding, 
the great passions of the heart, the primary instincts of the 
conscience — are profound. Not that these are the same 
in all men. In some they are deeper, in others shallower; 
but in all they are far deeper than aught else. He who 
addresses them appeals to the deepest thing in His hearers. 
He will be equally intelligible to all. Every hearer will 
receive his own portion from Him; the small and shallow 
mind will get as much as it can take, and the largest and 
deepest will get its fill at the same feast. This is why the 
words of Jesus are perennial in their freshness. They are 
for all generations, and equally for all. They appeal to the 
deepest elements in human nature to-day in England or 
China as much as they did in Palestine when they were 
spoken. 

96. When we come to inquire what the matter of Jesus 1 
preaching consisted of, we perhaps naturally expect to find 
Him expounding the system of doctrine which we are our- 
selves acquainted with, in the forms, say, of the Catechism 
or the Confession of Faith. But what we find is very dif- 
ferent. He did not make use of any system of doctrine. 
We can scarcely doubt, indeed, that all the numerous and 
varied ideas of His preaching, as well as those which He 
never expressed, co -existed in His mind as one world of 
rounded truth. But they did not so co-exist in His teach- 
ing. He did not use theological phraseology, speaking of 
the Trinity, of predestination, of effectual calling, although 



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76 THE LIFE OF JESTTS CHRIST. 

the ideas which these terms cover underlay His words, and 
it is the undoubted task of science to bring them forth. 
But He spoke in the language of life, and concentrated 
His preaching on a few burning points, that touched the 
heart, the conscience and the time. 

97. The central idea and the commonest phrase of His 
preaching was u the kingdom of God." It will be remem- 
bered how many of His parables begin with " The king- 
dom of Heaven is like," so and so. He said, " I must 
preach the kingdom of God to other cities also," thereby 
characterizing the matter of His preaching; and in the 
same way He is said to have sent forth the apostles " to 
preach' the kingdom of God." He did not invent the 
phrase. It was a historical one handed down from the 
past, and was common in the mouths of His contempora- 
ries. The Baptist had made large use of it, the burden 
of his message being, " The kingdom of God is at hand." 

98. What did it signify? It meant the new era, which 
the prophets had predicted and the saints had looked for. 
Jesus announced that it had come, and that He had brought 
it. The time of waiting was fulfilled. Many prophets and 
righteous men, He told His contemporaries, had desired t# 
see the things which they saw, but had not seen them. 
He declared that so great were the privileges and glories 
of the new time, that the least partaker of them was greater 
than the Baptist, though he had been the greatest repre- 
sentative of the old time. 

99. All this was no more than His contemporaries would 
have expected to hear, if they had recognized that the 
kingdom of God was really come. But they looked round, 
and asked where the new era was which Jesus said He had 
brought. Here He and they were at complete variance. 
They emphasized the first parti of the phrase, " the king- 
dom," He the second, " of God." They expected the new 



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TJM YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 77 

era to appear in magnificent material forms, — in a kingdom 
of which God indeed was to be the ruler, but which was 
to show itself in worldly splendor, in force of arms, in a 
universal empire. Jesus saw the new era in an empire of 
God over the loving heart and the obedient will. They 
looked for it outside. He said "It is within you." They 
looked for a period of external glory and happiness. He 
placed the glory and blessedness of the new time in char- 
acter. So He began His Sermon on the Mount, that great 
manifesto of the new era, with a series of "Blesseds." 
But the blessedness was entirely that of character. And 
it was a character totally different from that which was 
then looked up to as imparting glory and happiness to its 
possessor — that of the proud Pharisee, the wealthy Sad- 
ducee, or the learned scribe. Blessed, said He, are the 
poor in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, they whioh do 
hunger and thirst after righteousness, the merciful, the 
pure in heart, the peacemakers, they whioh are persecuted 
for righteousness' sake. 

100. The main drift of His preaching was to set forth 
this conception of the kingdom of God, the character of 
its members, their blessedness in the love and communion 
of their Father in heaven, and their prospects in the glory 
of the future world. He exhibited the contrast between it 
and the formal religion of the time, with its lack of spiritu- 
al ity and it& substitution of ceremonial observances for char- , 
acter. He invited all classes into the kingdom, — the rich 
by showing, as in the parable of the Rich Man and Laza- 
rus, the vanity and danger of seeking their blessedness in 
wealth; and the poor by penetrating them with the sense 
of their dignity, persuading them with the moat overflow- 
ing affection and winning words that the only true wealth 
was in character, and assuring them that, if they sought 
first the kingdom of God, their heavenly Father, who fed 



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78 THE LIFE OF. JESUS CHRIST. 

the ravens and clothed the lilies, would not suffer them im 
want. 

101. But the center and soul of His preaching was 
Himself. He contained within Himself the new era. He 
not only announced it, but created it. The new character 
which made men subjects of the kingdom and sharers of 
its privileges was to be got from Him alone. Therefore 
the practical issue of every address of Christ was the 
command to come to Him, to learn of Him, to follow Him. 
" Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden,'* 
was the key-note, the deepest and final word of all His 
discourses. 

102. It is impossible to read the discourses of Jesus 
without remarking that, wonderful as they are, yet some of 
the most characteristic doctrines of Christianity, as it is 
set forth in the epistles of Paul and now cherished in 
the minds of the most devoted and enlightened Chris- 
tians, hold a very inconsiderable place in them. . Espe- 
cially is this the case in regard to the great doctrines 
of the gospel as to how a sinner is reconciled to God, and 
how, in a pardoned soul, the character is gradually pro- 
duced which makes it like Christ and pleasing to the 
Father. The lack of reference to such doctrines may 
indeed be much exaggerated, the fact being that there is 
not one prominent doctrine of the great apostle the germs 
of which are not to be found in the teaching of Christ 
Himself. Yet the contrast is marked enough to have given 
some color for denying that the distinctive doctrines of 
Paul are genuine elements of Christianity. But the true 
explanation of the phenomenon is very different. Jesus 
was not a mere teacher. His character was greater than 
His words, and so was His work. The chief part of that 
work was to atone for the sins of the world by His death 
on the cross. But His nearest followers never would 



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THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 79 

believe that He was to die, and, until His death happened, 
it was impossible to explain its far-reaching significance. 
Paul's most distinctive doctrines are merely expositions of 
the meaning of two great facts, — the death of Christ, and 
the mission of the Spirit by the glorified Redeemer. It is 
obvious that these facts could not be fully explained in the 
words of Jesus Himself, when they had not yet taken 
place; but to suppress the inspired explanation of them 
would be to extinguish the light of the gospel and rob 
Christ of His crowning glory. 

103. The audience of Jesus varied exceedingly both in \ 
size and character on different occasions. Very frequently 
it was the great multitude. He addressed them every- 
where—on the mountain, on the sea-shore, on the highway, 
in the synagogues, in the temple courts. But He was 
quite as willing -to speak with a single individual, however 
humble. He seized every opportunity of doing so. Al- 
though He was worn-out with fatigue, He talked to the 
woman at the well; He received Nicodemus alone; He/ 
taught Mary in her home. There are said to be nineteen 
such private, interviews mentioned in the Gospels. The 
leave to His followers a memorable example. This is per- 
haps the most effective of all forms of instruction, as it is 
certainly the best test of earnestness. A man who 
preaches to thousands with enthusiasm may be a mere 
orator, but the man who seeks the opportunity of speaking 
closely of the welfare of their souls to individuals must 
have a real fire from heaven burning in his heart. 

104. Often His audience consisted of the circle of His 
disciples. His preaching divided His hearers. He has 
Himself, in such parables as the Sower, the Tares and the 
Wheat, the Wedding Feast, and so forth, described with 
unequalled vividness its effects on different classes. Some 



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80 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

it utterly repelled; others heard it with wonder, without 
being touched in the heart; others were affected for a time, 
but soon returned to their old interests. It is terrible to 
think how few there were, even when the Son of God was 
preaching, who heard unto salvation. Those who did so, 
gradually formed round Him a body of disciples. They 
followed Him about, hearing all his discourses, and often 
He spoke to them alone. Such were the five hundred to 
whom He appeared in Galilee after His resurrection. Some 
of them were women, such as Mary Magdalene, Susanna, 
and Joanna the wife of Herod's steward, who, being 
wealthy, gladly supplied His few simple wants. To these 
disciples He gave a more thorough instruction than to the 
crowd. He explained to them in private whatever was ob- 
scure in His public teaching. More than once He made 
the strange statement that He spake in parables to the 
multitudes in order that, though hearing, they might not 
understand. This could only mean, that those who had no 
real interest in the truth were sent away with the mere 
beautiful shell, but that the obscurity was intended to pro- 
voke to further inquiry, as a veil half-drawn over a beau- 
tiful face intensifies the desire to see it; and to those who 
had a spiritual craving for more He gladly communicated 
the hidden secret. These, when the nation as a whole de- 
clared itself unworthy of being the medium of the Mes- 
siah's world-wide influence, became the nucleus of that 
spiritual society, elevated above all local limitations and 
distinctions of rank and nationality, in which the spirit 
and doctrine of Christ were to be spread and perpetuated 
in the world. 

a 105. The Apostolate. — Perhaps the formation of the 
I Apostolate ought to be placed side by side with miracles 
\ and preaching as a third means by which He did His work. 



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THE TEAS OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 81 

The men who became the twelve apostles were at first only 
ordinary disciples like many others. This, at least, was the 
position of such of them as were already His followers 
during the first year of His ministry. At the opening of 
His Galilean activity, their attachment to Him entered on 
a second stage; He called them to give up their ordinary 
employments and be with Him constantly. And probably 
not many weeks afterwards, He promoted them to the third 
and final stage of nearness to Himself, by ordaining them 
to be apostles. x 

106. It was when His work grew so extensive and \ 
pressing that it was quite impossible for Him to overtake \ 
it all, that He multiplied Himself, so to speak, by appoint- \ 
ing them His assistants. He commissioned them to teach \ 
the simpler elements of His doctrine, and conferred on \ 
them miraculous powers similar to His own. In this way I 
many towns were evangelized which He had not time to / 
visit, and many persons cured who could not have been 
brought into contact with Himself. But, as future events \ 
proved, His aims in their appointment were much more 5 
far-reaching. His work was for all time and for the whole 
world. It could not be accomplished in a single lifetime. j 
He foresaw this, and made provision for it by the early j 
ehoice of agents who might take up His plans after He was } 
gone, and in whom He might still extend His influence \ 
over mankind. He Himself wrote nothing. It may be [ 
thought that writing would have been tho best way of per- j 
petuating His influence, and giving the world a perfect / 
image of Himself ; and we can not help imagining with a , 
glow of strong desire what a volume penned by His hand 
would have been. But for wise reasons He abstained from . 
this kind of work and resolved to live after death in the J ' 
lives of chosen men. 

107. It is surprising to see what sort of persons He 

F 



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82 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

selected for so grand a destiny. They did not belong to 
the influential and learned classes. No doubt the heads 
and leaders of the nation ought to have been the organs 
of their Messiah, but they proved themselves totally 
unworthy of the great vocation. He was able to do with- 
out them ; He needed not the influence of carnal power 
and wisdom. Ever wont to work with the elements of 
character that are not bound to any station of life or«grade 
/ of culture, He did not scruple to commit His cause to 
/ twelve simple men, destitute of learning and belonging to 
/ the common people. He made the selection after a night 
/ spent in prayer, and doubtless after many days of delibera- 
/ tion. The event showed with what insight into character 
| He had acted. They turned out to be instruments thor- 
I oughly fitted for the great design ; two at least, John and 
I Peter, were men of supreme gifts; and, though one turned 
1 out a traitor, and the choice of him will probably, after all 
\ explanations, ever remain a very partially explained mys- 
\ tery, yet the selection of agents who were at first so 
\ unlikely, but in the end proved so successful, will always 
be one of the chief monuments of the incomparable 
originality of Jesus. 

108. It would, however, be a very inadequate account 
of His relation to the Twelve merely to point out the 
insight with which He discerned in them the germs of fit- 
ness for their grand future. They became very great men, ) 
and in the founding of the Christian Church achieved a 
work of immeasurable importance. They may be said, in 
a sense they little dreamed of, to sit on thrones ruling the 
modern world. They stand like a row of noble pillars 
towering far across the flats of time. But the sunlight 
that shines on them, and makes them visible, comes entirely 
from Him. He gave them all their greatness; and theirs 
is one of the most striking evidences of His. What must 






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THE YEAR OP PUBLIC FAVOR. 83 

He have been whose influence imparted to them such mag- 
1 nitude of character, and made them fit for so gigantic a 
task! At first they were rude and carnal in the extreme. 
What hope was there that they would ever be able to 
appreciate the designs of a mind like His, to inherit His 
work, to possess in any degree a spirit so exquisite, and 
transmit to future generations a faithful image of His 
character? But He educated them with the most affec- 
tionate patience, bearing with their vulgar hopes and their 
clumsy misunderstandings of His meaning. Never forget- 
ting for a moment the part they were to play in the future, 
He made their training His most constant work. They 
were much more constantly in His company than even the 
general body of His disciples, seeing all He did in public 
and hearing all He said. They were often His only audi- 
ence, and then He unveiled to them the glories and mys- 
teries of His doctrine, sowing in their minds the seeds of 
truth, which time and experience were by and by to fructi- 
fy. But the most important part of their training was one 
which was perhaps at the time little noticed, though it was 
producing splendid results, — the silent and constant influ- 
ence of His character on theirs. He drew them to Him- 
self and stamped His own image on them. It was this 
which made them the men they became. For this, more 
than all else, the generations of those who love Him look 
back to them with envy. We admire and adore at a dis- 
tance the qualities of His character; but what must it - 
have been to see them in the unity of life, and for years to 
feel their moulding pressure! Can we recall with any 
fulness the features of this character whose glory they 
beheld and under whose power they lived? 

109. The Human Character of Jesus. — Perhaps the 
jnost obvious feature which they would remark in Him 



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84 THE LIFE OF JBSUS CHRIST. 

was Purposefulness. This certainly is the ground-tone 
which sounds in all His sayings which have been preserved 
to us, and the pulse which we feel beating in all His re- 
corded actions. He was possessed with a purpose which 
guided and drove Him on. Most lives aim at nothing in 
particular, but drift along, under the influence of varying 
moods and instincts or on the currents of societyj and 
achieve nothing. But Jesus evidently had a definite ob- 
ject before Him, which absorbed His thoughts and drew 
out His energies. He would often give as a reason for not 
doing something, " Mine hour is not yet come," as if His 
design absorbed every moment, and every hour had its 
own allotted part of the task. This imparted an earnest- 
ness and rapidity of execution to His life which most lives 
altogether lack. It saved Him, too, from that dispersion 
of energy on details, and carefulness about little things, on 
which those who obey no definite call throw themselves 
away, and made His life, various as were its activities, an 
unbroken unity. 

110. Very closely connected with this quality was an- 
other prominent one, which may be called Faith, and by 
which is meant His astonishing confidence in the accom- 
plishment of His purpose, and apparent disregard both of 
means and opposition. If it be considered in the most 
general way how vast His aim was — to reform His nation 
and begin an everlasting and world-wide religious move- 
ment; if the opposition which He encountered, and fore- 
saw His cause would have to meet at every stage of its 
progress, be considered; and if it be remembered what, as 
a man, He was — an unlettered Galilean peasant — His 
quiet and unwavering confidence in His success will appear 
only less remarkable than His success itself. After read- 
ing the Gospels through, one asks in wonder what He did 
to produce so mighty an impression on the world. He 



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.- ' THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOB. 85 

constructed no elaborate machinery to ensure the effect. 
He did nbt lay hold of the centers of influence — learning, 
wealth, government, etc. It is true He instituted the 
Church. But He left no detailed explanations of its nature 
or rules for its constitution. This was the simplicity of 
faith, which does n.ot contrive and prepare, but simply goes 
onward and does the work. It was the quality which He 
said could remove mountains, and which He chiefly desid- 
erated in His followers. This was the foolishness of the 
gospel, of which Paul boasted, as it was going forth, in 
the recklessness of power, but with laughable meagerness 
of equipment, to overcome the Greek and Roman world. 
111. A third prominent feature of His character was 
Originality. Most lives are easily explained. They are 
mere products of circumstances, and copies of thousands 
like them which surround or have preceded them. The 
habits and customs of the country to which we belong, the 
fashion and tastes of our generation, the traditions of our 
education, the prejudices of our class, the opinions of our 
school or sect, — these form us. We do work determined 
for us by a fortuitous concourse of circumstances; our con- 
victions are fixed on us by authority from without, instead 
of waxing naturally from within; our opinions are blown 
to us in fragments on every wind. But what circumstan- 
ces made the Man Christ Jesus? There never was an, age > 
oiore dry and barren than that in which He was born. He 
was like a tall, fresh palm springing out of a desert. What 
was there in the petty life of Nazareth to produce so gigah- , 
tic a character? How could the notoriously wicked village 
send forth such breathing purity? It may have been that 
a scribe taught Him the vocables and grammar of knowl- 
edge, but His doctrine was a complete contradiction of all 
that the scribes taught. The fashions of the sects never 
laid hold of His free spirit. How clearly, amidst the 



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80 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

sounds which filled the ears of His time, He heard the 
.neglected voice of truth, which was quite different from 
them! How clearly, behind all the pretentious and ac- 
cepted forms tff piety, He saw the lovely and neglected 
figure of real godliness! He can not be explained by any- 
thing which was in the world and might have produced 
Him. He grew from within. He directed His eyes straight 
on the facts of nature and life and believed what He saw, 
instead of 'allowing His vision to be tutored by what others 
had said they saw. He was equally loyal to the truth 
in His words. He went forth and spoke out without hesi- 
tation what He believed, though it shook to their founda- 
tions the institutions, the creeds, and customs of His coun- 
try, and loosened the opinions of the populace in a hun- 
dred points in which they 'had been educated. It may, in- 
deed, be said that, though the Jewish nation of His own 
time was an utterly dry ground, out of which no green 
and great thing could be expected to grow, He reverted to 
the earlier history of His nation and nourished His mind 
on the ideas of Moses and the prophets. There is some 
truth in this. But affectionate and constant as was His 
familiarity with them, He handled them with a free and 
fearless hand. He redeemed them from themselves and 
exhibited in perfection the ideas which they taught only in 
germ. What a contrast between the covenant God of 
Israel and the Father in heaven whom He revealed; be- 
tween the temple, with its priests and bloody sacrifices, 
and the worship in spirit and in truth ; between the national 
and ceremonial morality of the Law and the morality of 
the conscience and the heart ! Even in comparison with 
the figures of Moses, Elijah, and Isaiah, He towers aloft 
in lonely originality. 

112. A fourth and very glorious feature of His charac- 
ter was Love to Men. It has been already said that He 



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THE YEAR OF PUBLIC FAVOR. 87 

was possessed with an overmastering purpose. But be- 
neath a great life-purpose there must be a great passion, 
which shapes and sustains it. Love to men was the passion 
which directed and inspired Him. How it sprang up and 
grew in the seclusion of Nazareth, and on what materials 
it fed, we have not been informed with any detail. We 
only know that, when He appeared in public, it was a 
master-passion, which completely swallowed up self-love, 
filled Him with boundless pity for human misery, and 
enabled Him to go forward without once looking back in 
the undertaking to which He devoted Himself. We know 
only in general that it drew its support from the concep- 
tion He had of the infinite value of the human soul. It 
overleapt all the limits which other men have put to their 
benevolence. Differences of class and nationality usually 
cool men's interest in each other; in nearly all countries 
it has been considered a virtue to hate enemies; and it is 
generally agreed to loathe and avoid those who have out- 
raged the laws of respectability. But He paid no heed to 
these conventions; the overpowering sense of the precious- 
ness which He perceived in enemy, foreigner, and outcast 
alike, forbidding Him. This marvellous love shaped the 
purpose of His life. It gave Him the most tender and in- 
tense sympathy with every form of pain and misery. It 
was His deepest reason for adopting the calling of a healer. 
Wherever help was most needed, thither His merciful heart 
drew Him. But it was especially to save the soul that His 
love impelled Him. He knew this was the real jewel, 
which everything should be done to rescue, and that its 
miseries and perils were the most dangerous of all. There 
has sometimes been love to others without this vital aim. 
But His love was directed by wisdom to the truest weal of 
those He loved. He knew He was doing His very best 
for them when He was saving them from their sins* 



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88 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

113. But tbe crowning attribute of His human charac- 
ter was Love to God. It is the supreme honor and attain- 
ment of man to be one with God in feeling, thought, and 
purpose. Jesus had this in perfection. To us it is very 
difficult to realize God. The mass of men scarcely think 
about Him at all; and even the godliest confess that it costs 
them severe effort to discipline their minds into the habit 
of constantly realizing Him. When we do think of Him, 
it is with a painful sense of a disharmony between what is 
in us and what is in Him. We can not remain, even for a 
few minutes, in His presence without the sense in greater 
or less degree, that His thoughts are not our thoughts, nor 
His ways our ways. With Jesus it was not so. He real- 
ized God always. He never spent an hour, He never did 
an action, without direct reference to Him. God was 
about Him like the atmosphere He breathed, or the sun- 
light in which He walked. His thoughts were God's 
thoughts; His desires were never in the least different 
from God's; His purpose, He was perfectly sure, was God's 
purpose for Him. How did He attain this absolute har* 
mony with God? To a large extent it must be attributed 
to the perfect harmony of His nature within itself, yet in 
some measure He got it by the same means by which we 
laboriously seek it, — by the study of God's thoughts and 
purposes in His Word, which, from His childhood, was His 
constant delight; by cultivating all His life long the habit 
of prayer, for which He found time even when He had not 
time to eat; and by patiently resisting temptations to en- 
tertain thoughts and purposes of His own different from 
God's. This it was given which gave Him such faith and 
fearlessness in His work; He knew that the call to do it 
had come from God, and that He was immortal till it was 
done. This was what made Him, with all His self-con* 



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THE TEAE OF PUBLIC FAVOB. % 89 

soiousness and originality, the pattern of meekness and 
submission; for He was for ever bringing every thought 
and wish into obedienoe to His Father's will* This was 
the secret of the peace and majestic calmness which im- 
parted such a grandeur to His demeanor in the most trying 
hours of life. He knew that the worst that could happen 
to Him was His Father's will for Him; and this was enough. 
He had ever at hand a retreat of perfect rest, silence, and 
sunshine, into which He could retire from the clamor and 
confusion around Him. This was the great secret He be- 
queathed to His followers, when He said to them at paftK 
ing, " Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you.'O 

114. The Sinlessness of Jesus has been often dwelt on 
is the crowning attribute of His character. The Scrip* 
tures, which so frankly record the errors of their very 
greatest heroes, such as Abraham and Moses, have no sins 
of His to record. There is no more prominent character- 
istic of the saints of antiquity than their penitence: the 
more supremely saintly they were, the more abundant and 
bitter were their tears and lamentations over their sinful- 
ness. But although it is acknowledged by all that Jesus 
was the supreme religious figure of history, He never ex- 
hibited this characteristic of saintliness; He confessed no 
sin. Must it not have been because He had no sin to con- 
fess? Yet the idea of sinlessness is too negative to express 
the perfection of His character. He was sinless; but He 
was so because He was absolutely full of love. Sin against 
God is merely the expression of lack of love to God, and 
sin against man of lack of love to man. A being quite 
full of love to both God and man can not possibly sin 
against either. This fulness of love to His Father and His 
fellow-men, ruling every expression of His being, consti- 
tuted the perfection of His character. 
4* 



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90 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

115. To the impression produced on them by their long- 
continued contact with their Master the Twelve owed all 
they became. We can not trace with any fulness at what 
time they began to realize the central truth of the Chris- 
tianity they were afterwards to publisn to the world, that 
behind the tenderness and majesty of this human character 
there was in Him something still more august, or by what 
stages their impressions ripened to the full conviction that 
in Him perfect manhood was in union with perfect Deity. 
This was the goal of all the revelations of Himself which 
He made to them. But the breakdown of their faith at 
His death shows how immature up till that time must have 
been their convictions in regard to His personality, how- 
ever worthily they were able, in certain happy hours, to 
express their faith in Him. It was the experience of the 
Resurrection and Ascension which gave to the fluid impres- 
sions, which had long been accumulating in their minds, 
the touch by which they were made to crystallize into the 
immovable conviction, that in Him with, whom it had been 
vouchsafed to them to associate so intimately, God w*3 
manifest in the flesh. 



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CHAPTER VL 
TUB YEAR OF OPPOSITION 
Paragraphf 11M18. The Change of Sentiment towards Him. 

219-135. Th& Causes of Opposition. 

119-181. Opposition of the influential Classes. 

119. The Sadducees. 
120-180. The Pharisees' Reasons for opposing Him. 
122,128. Their Preconceptions; 124. His Lowly 
Origin; 125. His Followers; 126. His Di» 
regard of Traditions; 127. The Sabbath; 
128, 129. Imputations of Blasphemy and 
Alliance with the Evil One; 180. Progress 
of their Opposition. 

181. Herod. 

182-185. Alienation of the Common People. 

182. Popular Opinions of Him; 133. Effect of 
the Feeding of the Five Thousand; 134. 
Refusal of Jesus to be their King. 

136-148. The Changed Aspect of His Ministbt. 

136-138. The Sifting of the Disciples. 

187. Wanderings with them in Remote Parts, 
their Great Confession ; 138. Prediction of 
His Sufferings, their Blindness. 
189-142. His Own Thoughts and Feelings at this 
Period. 
140. Prayerfulness; 141. The Transfiguration; 
142. Departure from Galilee and Journey to 
Jerusalem. 
148. The Sanhedrim resolves on His Death. 



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CHAPTER VI. 



THE YEAR OF OPPOSITION. 



116. Fob a whole year Jesus pursued His work in Gali- 
lee with incessant energy, moving among the pitiable 
crowds that solicited His miraculous help, and seizing 
every opportunity of pouring His words of grace and truth 
into the ears of the multitude or of the solitary anxious 
inquirer. In hundreds of homes, to whose inmates He had 
restored health and joy, His name must have become a 
household word; in thousands of minds, whose depths His 
preaching had stirred, He must have been cherished with 
gratitude and love. Wider and wider rang the echoes of 
His fame. For a time it seemed as if all Galilee were to 
become His disciples, and as if the movement so set ago- 
ing might easily roll southward, overbearing all opposition, 
and enveloping the whole land in an enthusiasm of love 
for the Healer and of obedience to the Teacher. 

117. But the twelve months had scarcely passed when 
it became sadly evident that this was not to be. The Gal- 
ilean mind turned out to be stony ground, where the seed 
of the kingdom rushed quickly up, but just as quickly 
withered away. The change was sudden and complete, 
and at once altered all the features of the life of Jesus. 
He lingered in Galilee for six months longer; but these 
months were very unlike the first twelve. The voices that 
rose around Him were no longer the ringing shouts of 
gratitude and applause, but voices of opposition, bitter and 
blasphemous. He was no longer to be seen moving from 



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94 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

one populous place to another in the heart of the country, 
welcomed everywhere by those who waited to experience 
or to see His miracles, and followed by thousands eager not 
to lose a word of His discourses. He was a fugitive, seek- 
ing the most distant and outlandish places, and accom- 
panied only by a handful of followers. At the six months' 
end He left Galilee for ever, but not, as might at one time 
have been anticipated, borne aloft on the wave of public 
acknowledgment, to make an easy conquest of the hearts 
of the southern part of the country, and take victorious 
ppssession of a Jerusalem unable to resist the unanimous 
voice of the people. He did indeed labor for six months 
more in the southern part of the land — in Judaea and 
Peraea; nor were there awanting, where His miracles were 
seen for the first time, the same signs of public enthusiasm 
as had greeted Him in the first months of joy in Galilee; 
but the most which He effected was to add a few to the 
company of His faithful disciples. He did indeed, from 
the day He left Galilee, set His face steadfastly towards 
Jerusalem; and the six months He spent in Peraea and 
Judaea may be regarded as occupied with a slow journey 
thither; but the journey was begun in the full assurance, 
which He openly expressed to the disciples, that in the 
capital He was to receive no triumph over enthusiastic 
hearts and minds convinced, but meet with a final national 
rejection, and be killed instead of crowned. 

118. We must trace the causes and the progress of this 
change in the sentiment of the Galileans, and this sad 
turn in the career of Jesus. 

J 119. From the very first the learned and influential 
glasses had taken up an attitude of opposition to Him. 
\The more worldly sections of them, indeed — the Sadducees 
and Herodians — for a long time paid little attention to 



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THE YEAR OF OPPOSITION. 95 

Him. They had their own affairs to mind — their wealth, 
their court influence, their amusements. They cared little 
for a religious movement going on among the lower orders. 
The public rumor that one professing to be the Messiah 
had appeared did not excite their interest, for they did not 
share the popular expectations on the subject. They said 
to each other that this was only one more of the pretenders 
whom the peculiar ideas of the populace were sure to raise 
up from time to time. It was only when the movement 
seemed to them to be threatening to lead to a political re- 
volt, which would bring down the iron hand of the Roman 
masters on the country, afford the Procurator an excuse for 
new extortions, and imperil their property and comforts, 
that they roused themselves to pay any attention to 
Him. 

120. Very different was it, however, with the more 
religious sections of the upper class — the Pharisees and 
scribes. They took the deepest interest in all ecclesiastical 
and religious phenomena. A movement of a religious 
kind among the populace excited their eager attention, for 
they themselves aimed at popular influence. A new voice 
with the ring of prophecy in it, or the promulgation of any 
new doctrine or tenet, caught their ear at once. But, above 
all, any one putting himself forward as the Messiah pro- 
duced the utmost ferment among them; for they ardently 
cherished Messianic hopes, and were at the time smarting 
keenly under the foreign domination. In relation to the 
rest of the community, they corresponded to our clergy 
and leading religious laymen, and probably formed about 
the same proportion of the population, and exercised at 
least as great an influence as these do among us. It has 
been estimated that they may have numbered about six 
thousand. They passed for the best persons in the country, 
the conservators of respectability and orthodoxy; and the 



K 



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96 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

masses looked up to them as those who had the right to 
judge and determine in all religious matters. 

121. They can not be accused of having neglected Jes»tS. 
They turned their earnest attention to Him from the fir*t. 
They followed Him step by step. They discussed His 
doctrines and His claims, and made up their minds. Their 
decision was adverse, and they followed it up with acts, 
never becoming remiss in their activity for an hour. 

122. This is perhaps the most solemn and appalling 
circumstance in the whole tragedy of the life of Christ, 
that the men who rejected, hunted down, and murdered 
Him, were those reputed the best in the nation, its teachers 
and examples, the zealous conservators of the Bible and 
the traditions of the past, — men who were eagerly waiting 
for the Messiah, who judged Jesus, as they' believed, accord- 
ing to the Scriptures, and thought they were obeying the 
dictates of conscience and doing God service when they 
treated Him as they did.. There can not fail sometimes to 
sweep across the mind of a reader of the Gospels a strong 
feeling of pity for them, and a kind of sympathy with 
them. Jesus was so unlike the Messiah whom they were 
looking for and their fathers had taught them to expect! 
He so completely traversed their prejudices and maxims, 
and dishonored so many things which they had been taught 
to regard as sacred! They may surely be pitied; there 
never was a crime like their crime, and there was never 
punishment like their punishment. There is the same sad- 
ness about the fate of those who are thrown upon any 
great crisis of the world's history, and, not understanding 
the signs of the times, make fatal mistakes; as those did, 
for example, who at the Reformation were unable to go 
forth and join the march of Providence. 

123. Yet, at bottom, what was their case ? It was just 
this, that they were so blinded with sin that they could not 



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THE TSAB OF OPPOSITION. 97 

discern the light. Their views of the Messiah had been 
distorted by centuries of worldliness and un spirituality, 
of which they were the like-minded heirs. They thought 
Jesus a sinner, because He did not conform to ordinances 
which they and their fathers had profanely added to those 
of God's Word, and because their conception of a good 
man, to whom He did not answer, was utterly false. Jesus 
supplied them with evidence enough, but He could not 
give them eyes to see it. There is a something at the bot- 
tom of hearts that are honest and true, which, however 
long and deeply it may have been buried under prejudice 
and sin, leaps up with joy and desire to embrace what is 
true, what is reverend, what is pure and great, when it 
draws near. But nothing of the kind was found in them; 
their hearts were seared, hardened, and dead. They 
brought their stock rules and arbitrary standards to judge 
Him by, and were never shaken by His greatness from the 
fatal attitude of criticism. He brought truth near them, 
but they had not the truth-loving ear to recognize the 
enchanting sound. He brought the whitest purity, such as 
archangels would have veiled their faces at, near them, but 
they were not overawed. He brought near them the very 
face of mercy and heavenly love, but their dim eyes made 
no response. We may indeed pity the conduct of such 
men as an appalling misfortune, but it is better to fear and 
tremble at it as appalling guilt. The more utterly wicked 
men become, the more inevitable it is that they should sin; 
the vaster the mass of a nation's sin becomes, as it rolls 
down through the centuries, the more inevitable does some 
awful national crime become. But when the inevitable 
takes place, it is an object not tor pity only, but also for 
holy and jealous wrath. 

124. One thing about Jesus which from the first excited 
their opposition to Him was the humbleness of His origin. 
<? 9 



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98 THB LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

Their eyes were dazzled with the ordinary prejudices of 
the rich and the learned, and could not discern the grandeur 
of the soul apart from the accidents of position and culture. 
He was a son of the people; He had been a carpenter; 
they believed He had been born in rude and wicked Gali- 
lee; He had not passed through the schools of Jerusalem 
or drunk at the acknowledged wells of wisdom there. They 
thought that a prophet, and above all the Messiah, should 
have been born in Judaea, reared at Jerusalem in the center 
of culture and religion, and allied with all that was dis- 
tinguished and influential in the nation. 

125. For the same reason they were offended with the 
followers He chose and the company He kept. His chosen 
organs were not selected from among themselves, the wise 
and high-born, but were uneducated laymen, poor fisher- 
men. Nay, one of them was a publican. Nothing that 
Jesus did, perhaps, gave greater offence than the choice of 
Matthew, the tax-gatherer, to be an apostle. The tax- 
gatherers, as servants of the alien power, were hated by all 
who were patriotic and respectable, at once for their trade, 
their extortions, and their character. How could Jesus 
hope that respectable and learned men should enter a circle 
such as that which He had formed about Himself? Besides, 
He mingled freely with the lowest class of the population 
— with publicans, harlots, and sinners. In Christian times 
we have learned to love Him for this more than anything 
else. We easily see that, if He really was the Savior from 
sin, He could not have been found in more suitable com- 
pany than among those who needed salvation most. We 
know now how He could believe that many of the lost 
were more the Victims of circumstances than sinners by 
choice, and that, if He drew the magnet across the top of 
the rubbish, it would attract to itself many a piece of 
precious metal. The purest-minded and highest-born have 



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THE YEAB OF OPPOSITION. 99 

since learned to follow His footsteps down into the purlieus , 
of squalor and vice to seek and save the lost. But no 
such sentiment had up till His time been born into the 
world. The mass of sinners outside the pale of respecta- 
bility were despised and hated as the enemies of society, 
and no efforts were made to save them. On the contrary, 
all who aimed at religious distinction avoided their very 
touch as a defilement. Simon the Pharisee, when he was 
entertaining Jesus, never doubted that, if He had been a 
prophet and known who the woman was who was touching 
Him, He would have driven her off. Such was the senti- 
ment of the time. Yet when Jesus brought into the world 
the new sentiment, and showed them the divine face of 
mercy, they ought to have recognized it. If their hearts 
had not been utterly hard and cruel, they would have leapt 
up, to welcome this revelation of a diviner humanity. The 
sight' of sinners forsaking their evil ways, of wicked women 
sobbing for their lost lives, and extortioners like Zaccheus 
becoming earnest and generous, ought to have delighted 
them. Bui it did not, and they only hated Jesus for His 
compassion, calling Him a friend of publicans and sinners. 
126. A third and very serious ground of their opposi- 
tion was, that He 'did not Himself practice, nor encourage 
His disciples to practice, many ritual observances, such a? 
fasts, punctilious washing of the hands before meals, and 
so forth, which were then considered the marks of a saintly 
man. It has been already explained how these practices 
arose, They had been invented in an earnest but mechan- 
ical age in order to emphasize the peculiarities of Jewish 
character, and keep up the separation of the Jews from 
other nations. The original intention was good, but the 
result was deplorable. It was soon forgotten that they 
were merely human inventions; they were supposed to be 
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100 THE LIFE OP JESUS CHBIST. 

they regulated every hour of the day and every action of 
life. They were made the substitutes for real piety and 
morality by the majority; and to tender consciences they 
were an intolerable burden, for it was scarcely possible to 
move a step or lift a finger without the danger of sinning 
against one or other of them. But no one doubted their 
authority, and- the careful observance of them was reputed 
the badge of a godly life. Jesus regarded them as the 
great evil of the time. He therefore neglected them, and 
encouraged others to do so; not, however, without at the 
same time leading them back to the great principles of 
judgment, mercy, and faith, and making them feel the 
majesty of the conscience and the depth and spirituality of 
the law. But the result was, that He was looked upon as 
both an ungodly man Himself, and a deceiver of the 
people. 

127. It was especially in regard to the Sabbath that 
this difference between Him and the religious teachers 
came out. In this field their inventions of restrictions and 
arbitrary rules had run into the most portentous extrava- 
gance, till they had changed the day of rest, joy, and bles- 
sing into an intolerable burden. He was in the habit of 
performing His cures on the Sabbath. They thought such 
work a breach of the command. He exposed the wrong- 
ness of their objections again and again, by explaining the 
nature of the institution itself as " made for man," by re- 
ference to the practice of ancient saints, and even by the 
analogy of some of their own practices on the holy day. 
But they were not convinced; and, as He continued His 
practice in spite of their objections, this remained a stand- 
ing and biiter ground of their hatred. 

128. It will be easily understood that, having arrived at 
these conclusions on such low grounds, they were utterly 
disinclined to listen to Him when He put forward His 



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THE YEAR OP OPPOSITION. 101 

higher claims — when He announced Himself as the Mes- 
siah, professed to forgive sins, and threw out intimations of 
His high relation to God. Having concluded that He was 
an impostor and deceiver, they regarded such assertions as 
hideous blasphemies, and could not help wishing to stop the 
mouth which uttered them. 

129. It "may cause surprise," that they were not con- 
vinced by His miracles. If He really performed the nu- 
merous and stupendous miracles which are recorded of 
Him, how could they resist such evidence of His divine 
mission? The debate held with the authorities by the 
tough reasoner whom Jesus cured of blindness, and whose 
case is recorded in the ninth chapter of John, shows how 
sorely they may sometimes have been pressed with such 
reasoning. But they had satisfied themselves with an au- 
dacious reply to it. It is to be remembered that among the 
Jews miracles had never been looked upon as conclusive 
proofs of a divine mission. They might be wrought by 
false as well as true prophets. They might be traceable to 
diabolical instead of divine agency. Whether they were 
so or not, was to be determined on other grounds. On 
these other grounds they had come to the conclusion that 
He had not been sent from God; and so Hhey attributed 
His miracles to an alliance with the powers of darkness. 
Jesus met this blasphemous construction with the utmost 
force of holy indignation and conclusive argument; but it 
is easy to see that it was a position in which minds like 
those of His opponents might entrench themselves with 
the sense of much security. 

130. Very early they had formed their adverse judg- 
ment of Him, and they never changed it. Even during 
His first year in Judaea they had pretty well decided 
•gainst Him. When the news of His success in Galilee 



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102 THE LIFE OP JESUS CHRIST. 

spread, it filled them with consternation, and they sent 
deputations from Jerusalem to act in concert with their 
local adherents in opposing Him. Even during Jlis year 
of joy He clashed with them again and again. At first He 
treated them with consideration and appealed to their 
reason and heart. But He soon saw that this was hopeless 
and accepted their opposition as inevitable. He exposed 
the hollowness of their pretensions to His audiences and 
warned His disciples against them. Meanwhile they did 
everything to poison the public mind against Him. They 
succeeded only too well. When, at the year's end, the 
tide of His popularity began to recede, they pressed their 
advantage, assailing Him more and more boldly. 

131. They even succeeded thus early in arousing the 
cold minds of the Sadducees and Herodians against Him, 
no doubt by persuading them that He was fomenting a 
popular revolt, which would endanger the throne of their 
master Herod, who reigned over Galilee. That mean and 
characterless prince himself also became His persecutor. 
He had other reasons to dread Him besides those suggested 
by his courtiers. About this very time he had murdered 
John the Baptist. It was one of the meanest and foulest 
crimes recorded in history, an awful instance of the way in 
which sin leads to sin, and of the malicious perseverance 
with which a wicked woman will compass her revenge. 
Soon after it was committed, his courtiers came to tell him 
of the supposed political designs of Jesus. . But when he 
heard of the new prophet, an awful thought thrilled through 
his guilty conscience. " It is John the Baptist," he cried. 
" whom I beheaded, he is risen from the dead." Yet he 
desired to see Him, his curiosity getting the better of his 
terror. It was the desire of the lion to see the lamb. 
Jesus never responded to his invitation. But just on that 
account Herod may have been the more willing to listen to 



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THE TSAB OF OPPOSITION. 103 

the suggestions of his courtiers that he should arrest Him 
as a dangerous person. It was not long before he was 
seeking to kill Him. Jesus had to kee£> out of .his way, 
and no doubt this helped along with more important things 
to change the character of His life in Galilee during the 
last six months of His stay there. 

132. It had seemed for a time as if His hold on the 
mind and the heart of the common people might become 
so strong as to carry irresistibly a national recognition. 
Many a movement, frowned upon at first by authorities and 
dignitaries, has, by committing itself to the lower classes 
and securing their enthusiastic acknowledgment, risen to 
take possession of the upper classes and carry the centers 
of influence. There is a certain point of national consent 
at which any movement which reaches it becomes like a 
flood, which no amount of prejudice or official dislike can 
successfully Appose. Jesus gave Himself to the common 
people of Galilee, and they gave Him in return their love 
and admiration. Instead of hating Him like the Pharisees 
and scribes, and calling Him a glutton and a wine-bibber, 
they believed Him a prophet; they compared Him with the 
very greatest figures of the past, and many, according as 
they were more struck with the sublime or with the melt- 
ing side of His teaching, said He was Isaiah or Jeremiah 
risen from the dead. It was a common idea of the time 
that the coming of the Messiah was to be preceded by the 
rising again of some prophet. The one most commonly 
thought of was Elijah. Accordingly some took Jesus for 
Elijah. But it was only a precursor of the Messiah they 
supposed Him to be, not the Messiah Himself. He was 
not at all like their conception of the coming Deliverer, 
which was of the most grossly material kind. Now and 
then, indeed, after He had wrought some unusually striking 



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104 THE LIFE OF JfiStTS CHRIST. 

miracle, there might be raised a single voice or a few 
voices, suggesting, Is this not He? But, wonderful as 
were His deeds and His words, yet the whole aspect of His 
life was so unlike their preconceptions, that the truth failed 
to suggest itself forcibly and universally to their minds. 

133. At last, however, the decisive hour seemed to have 
arrived. It was just at that great turning-point to which 
allusion has frequently been made — the end of the twelve 
months in Galilee. Jesus had heard of the Baptist's death, 
and immediately hurried away into a desert place with His 
disciples, to brood and talk over the tragic event. He 
sailed to the eastern side of the lake, and, landing on the 
grassy plain of Bethsaida, went up to a hill with the Twelve. 
But soon at its feet there gathered an immense multitude 
to hear and see Him. They had found out where He was, 
and gathered to Him from every quarter. Ever ready 
to sacrifice Himself for others, He descended to address 
and heal them. The evening came on, as His discourse 
prolonged itself, when, moved with a great access of com- 
passion for the helpless multitude, He wrought the stupen- 
dous miracle of feeding the five thousand. Its effect was 
overwhelming. They became instantaneously convinced 
that This was none other than the Messiah, and, having 
only one conception of what this meant, they endeavored 
to take Him by force and make Him a king; that is, to 
force Him to become the leader of a Messianic revolt, by 
which they might wrest the throne from Caesar and the 
princelings he had set up over the different provinces. 

134. It seemed the crowning hour of success. But to 
Jesus Himself it was an hour of sad and bitter shame. 
This was all that His year's work had come to! This was 
the conception they yet had of Him! And they were to 
determine the course of His future action, instead of hum* 
bly asking what He would have them to do! He accepted 



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THB YBAB OF OPPOSITION. 105 

it as the decisive indication of the effect of His work in 
Galilee. He saw how shallow were its results. Galilee 
had judged itself unworthy of being the center from which 
His kingdom might extend itself to the rest of the land. 
He fled from their carnal desires, and the very next day, 
meeting them again at Capernaum, He told them how 
much they had been mistaken in Him; they were looking 
for a Bread-king, who would give them idleness and plenty, 
mountains of loaves, rivers of milk, every comfort without 
labor. What He had to give was the bread of eternal 
life. 

135. His discourse was like a stream of cold water 
directed upon the fiery enthusiasm of the crowd. From 
that hour His cause in Galilee was doomed; "many of His 
disciples went back and walked no more with Him." It 
was what He intended. It was Himself who struck the 
fatal blow at His popularity. He resolved to devote Him- 
self thenceforward to the few who really understood Him 
and were capable of being the adherents of a spiritual 
enterprise. 

136. The Changed Aspect of His Ministry. —Yet, although 
the people of Galilee at large had shown themselves 
unworthy of Him, there was a considerable remnant that 
proved true. At the center of it were the apostles; but 
there were also others, to the number probably of several 
hundreds. These now became the objects of His special 
care. He had saved them as brands plucked from the 
burning, when Galilee as a whole deserted Him. For 
them it must have been a time of crucial trial. Their 
views were to a large extent those of the populace. They 
also expected a Messiah of worldly splendor. They had 
indeed learned to include deeper and more spiritual ele- 
ments in their conception, but, along with these, it still 



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106 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

contained the traditional and material ones. It must have 
been a painful mystery to them that Jesus should so long 
delay the assumption of the crown. So painful had this 
been to the Baptist in his lonely prison, that he began to 
doubt whether the vision he had seen on the bank of the 
Jordan and the great convictions of his life had not been 
delusions, and sent to ask Jesus if He really was the Christ. 
The Baptist's death must have been an awful shock to 
them. If Jesus was the Mighty One they thought Him, 
how could He alilow His friend to come to such an end? 
Still they held on to Him. They showed what it was which 
kept them by their answer to Him, when, after the disper- 
sion which followed the discourse at Capernaum, He put 
to them the sad. question, " Will ye also go away?" They 
replied, " Lord, to whom shall we ( go? Thou hast the 
words of eternal life." Their opinions were not clear; 
they were in a mist of perplexities; but they knew that 
from Him they were getting eternal life. This held them 
close to Him, and made them willing to wait till He should 
make things clear. 

137. During the last six months He spent in Galilee, 
He abandoned to a large extent His old work of preaching 
and miracle-working, and devoted Himself to the instruc- 
tion of these adherents. He made long circuits with them 
in the most distant parts of the province, avoiding publicity 
as much as possible. Thus we find Him at Tyre and Sidon, 
far to the northwest; at Csesarea-Philippi, on the far north- 
east; and in Decapolis, to the south and east of the lake. 
These journeys, or rather flights, were due partly to the 
bitter opposition of the Pharisees, partly to fear of Herod, 
but chiefly to the desire to be alone with His disciples. 
The precious result of them was seen in an incident which 
happened at Caesarea-Philippi. Jesus began to ask His 
disciples what were the popular views about Himself, and 



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THE YEAR OP OPPOSITION, 107 

they told Him the various conjectures which were flying 
about, — that He was a prophet, that He was Elias, that He 
was John the Baptist, and so on. " But whom say ye that 
I am?" He asked; and Peter answered for them all, " Thou 
art the Christ, the Son of the living God." This was the 
deliberate and decisive conviction by which they were 
determined to abide, whatever might come. Jesus received 
the confession with great joy, and at once recognized in 
those who had made it the nucleus of the future Church, 
which was to be built on the truth to which they had given 
expression. 

138. But this attainment only prepared them for a 
new trial of faith. From that time, we are told, He began 
to inform them of His approaching sufferings and death. 
These now stood out clearly before His own mind as the 
only issue of His career to be looked for. He had hinted 
as much to them before, but, with that delicate and loving 
consideration which always graduated His teaching to their 
capacity, He did not refer to it often. But now they were 
in some degree able to bear it; and, as it was inevitable 
and near at hand* He kept insisting on it constantly. But 
they themselves tell us they did not in the least understand 
Him. In common with all their countrymen, they expected 
a Messiah who should sit on the throne of David, and of 
whose reign there should be no end. They believed Jesus 
was this Messiah; and it was to them utterly incomprehen- 
sible that, instead of reigning, He should be killed on His 
arrival in Jerusalem. They listened to Him, they discussed 
His .words among themselves, but they regarded their 
apparent meaning as a wild impossibility. They thought 
He was only using one of the parabolic sayings of which 
He was so fond, His real meaning being that the present 
lowly form of His work was to die and disappear, and His 
cause rise, as it were, out of the grave in a glorious and 



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108 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

triumphant shape. He endeavored to undeceive them, 
going more and more minutely into the details of His 
approaching sufferings. But their minds could not take 
the truth in. How completely even the best of them 
failed to do so is shown by the frequent wranglings among 
them at this period as to which of them should in the 
approaching kingdom be the greatest, and by the request 
of Salome for her sons, that they should sit the one on the 
right and the other on the left hand in His kingdom. When 
they left Galilee and went up towards Jerusalem, it was 
with the conviction that "the kingdom of God should 
immediately appear," — that is, that Jesus, on arriving in 
the capital, would throw off the guise of humiliation He 
had hitherto worn, and, overcoming all opposition by some 
forthputting of His concealed glory, take His place on the 
throne of His fathers. 

139. What were the thoughts and feelings of Jesus 
Himself during this year? To Him also it was a year of 
sore trial. Now for the first time the deep lines of care 
and pain were traced upon His face. During the twelve- 
month of successful work in Galilee, He was borne up 
with the joy of sustained achievement. But now He be* 
came, in the truest sense, the Man of Sorrows. Behind 
Him was His rejection by Galilee. The sorrow which He 
felt at seeing the ground on which He had bestowed so 
much labor turning out barren, is to be measured only by 
the greatness of His love to the souls He sought to save, 
and the depth of His devotion to His work. In front of 
Him was His rejection at Jerusalem. That was now cer- 
tain; it rose up and stood out constantly and unmistakably, 
meeting His eyes as often as He turned them to the future. 
It absorbed His thoughts. It was a terrible prospect; and, 



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THE TEAB OF OPPOSITION.* 109\ 

now that it drew nigh, it sometimes shook His soul with a 
conflict of feelings which we scarcely dare to picture to 
ourselves. 

140. He was very much in prayer. This had all along 
been His delight and resource. In His busiest period, 
when He was often so tired with the labors of the day that 
at the approach of evening He was ready to fling Himself 
down in utter fatigue, He would nevertheless escape away 
from the crowds and His disciples to the mountain-top, and 
spend the whole night in lonely communion with His 
Father. He never took any important step without such a 
night. But now He was far oftener alone than ever before, 
setting forth His case to His God with strong crying and 
tears. 

141. His prayers received a splendid answer in the 
Transfiguration. That glorious scene took place in the 
middle of the year of opposition, just before He quitted 
Galilee and set forth on the journey of doom. It was in- 
tended partly for the sake of the three disciples who accom- 
panied Him to the mountain-top, to strengthen their faith 
and make them fit to strengthen their brethren. But it was 
chiefly intended for Himself. It was a great gift of His 
Father, an acknowledgment of His faithfulness up to this 
point, and a preparation for what lay before Him. It was 
about the decease He was to accomplish at Jerusalem He 
conversed with His great predecessors, Moses and Eliasr 
who could thoroughly sympathize with Him, and whose 
work His death was to fulfill. 

142. Immediately after this event He left Galilee and 
went south. He spent six months on His way to Jerusalem. 
It was part of His mission to preach the kingdom over the 
whole land, and He did so. He sent seventy of His disci- 
ples on before Him to prepare the villages and towns to 



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110 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

receive Him. Again in this new field the same manifesta- 
tions as Galilee had witnessed during the first months 
of His labors there showed themselves, — the multitudes 
following Him, the wonderful cures, and so forth. We 
have not records of this period sufficient to enable us to 
follow Him step by step. We find Him on the borders 
of Samaria, in Peraea, on the banks of the Jordan, in Beth- 
any, in the village of Ephraim. But Jerusalem was His 
goal. His face was set like a flint for it. Sometimes He 
was so absorbed in the anticipation of what was to befall 
Him there, that His disciples, following His swift, mute 
figure along the highway, were amazed and afraid. Now 
and then, indeed, He would relax for a little, as when He 
was blessing the little children or visiting the home of His 
friends at Bethany. But His mood at this period was more 
stern, absorbed, and highly strung than ever before. His 
contests with His enemies were sharper, the conditions 
which He imposed on those who offered to be His disciples 
more stringent. Everything denoted that the end was 
drawing near. He was in the grip of His grand purpose 
of atoning for the sins of the world, and His soul was 
straitened till it should be accomplished. 

143. The catastrophe drew nigh apace. He paid two 
brief visits to Jerusalem, before the final one, during His 
last six months. On both occasions the opposition of the 
authorities assumed the most menacing form. They en- 
deavored to arrest Him on the first occasion, and took up 
stones to stone Him on the second. They had already 
issued a decree that any one acknowledging Him to be the 
Messiah should be excommunicated. But it was the ex- 
citement produced in the popular mind by the raising of 
Lazarus at the very gates of the ecclesiastical citadel which 
finally convinced the authorities that they could not satisfy 



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THE YEAR OF OPPOSITION. Ill 

themselves with anything short of His death. So they re- 
solved in council. This took place only a month or two 
before the end came, and it drove Him for the time from 
the neighborhood of Jerusalem. But He retired only until 
the hour which His Father had appointed Him should 
strike. 



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CHAPTER VIL 

THE END. 

l*arajcraphs 144-205. 

144. Thb Passover. 

145-152. The Pinal Breach with the "Natiov 

145. His Arrival in Bethany ; 146-149. The Tri- 
umphal Entry into Jerusalem ; 150. The Great 
Day of Controversy; 151> 152. Judas Iscariot 

153-162. Jesus in Presence op Death. 

153, 154. Multitude of His Thoughts ; 155. Pros- 
pect of Death, Visit of Greeks; 156. Com- 
passion for His Country; 157, 158. Loneliness; 
159. The Consolation of Prayer; 160. In the 
Upper Room; 161, 162. Gethsemane. 

163-189. The Trial. 

164, 165. Double Trial; Reason of This. 
166-173. Ecclesiastical Trial— 

166. Before Annas; 167-171. Before Caiaphaa, 
Condemnation for Blasphemy; 172. Irregu- 
larity; 173. Mockery of Jesus. 
174-189. Civil Trial— 

174-180. Before Pilate for the First Time— 
174-176. Procession to the Palace ; 177. 
The Case must be pled; 178. Civil 
Charges; 179. "What is Truth?" 180. 
He is pronounced innocent. 
181. Before Herod. 
182-189. Before Pilate again— 

182. Pilate's Diplomacy ; 183. Barabbas; 
184. Scourging ; 185. " Ecce Homo ; " 
186. Pilate's Religious Dread ; 187. Threat 
to complain to the Emperor; 188. Pilate 
gives way; 189. The Jews surrender their 
History. 

190-198. The Crucifixion. 

191. The Crowd; 192. Calvary; 193. Horrors of 
this Form of Death ; 194. His Triumph over 
them; 195. His Mental Sufferings; 196. Bear- 
ing the Sin of the World ; 197. Darkness; 
198. Last Words. 

199-205. The Resurrection and Ascension. 

199. Christianity Dead; 201, 202. Breakdown of 
Disciples; 203. Resurrection of Christianity; 
204. The Risen One; 205. The Ascension. 

808-208. Conclusion. 



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CHAPTER VIL 

f 

THE END. 

144. At length the third year of His ministry verged 
towards its close, and the revolving seasons brought round 
the great annual feast of the Passover. It is said that as 
many as two or three millions of strangers were gathered 
in Jerusalem on such an occasion. They not only flocked 
from eve ry part of Palestine, but came over sea and land 
from all the countries in which the seed of Abraham were 
dispersed, in order to celebrate the event in which their 
national history began. They were brought together by 
very various motives. Some came with the solemn thoughts 
and deep religious joy of minds responsive to the memor- 
ies of the venerable occasion. Some looked forward 
chiefly to reunion with relatives and friends who had been 
long parted from them by residence in distant places. Not 
a few of the baser sort brought with them the darling pas- 
sions of their race, and were chiefly intent on achieving in 
so great a concourse some important stroke of business. 
But this year the minds of tens of thousands were full of 
an unusual excitement, and they came up to the capital ex- 
pecting to see something more remarkable than they had 
ever witnessed there before. They hoped to see Jesus at 
the feast, and entertained many vague forebodings as to 
what might happen in connection with Him. His name 
was the word oftenest passing from mouth to mouth among 
the pilgrim bands that crowded along the highways, and 
among the Jewish groups that talked together on tbe (fcck* 



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114 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

of the ships coming from Asia Minor and Egypt. Nearly 
all His own disciples no doubt were there, and were ar* 
dently cherishing the hope that at last in this concourse of 
the nation He would throw off the guise of humility which 
concealed His glory, and in some irresistible way demon- 
strate His Messiahship. There must have been thousands 
from the southern portions of the country, in which He had 
recently been spending His time, who came full of the 
same enthusiastic views about Him as were entertained in 
Galilee at the close of His first year there; and no doubt 
there were multitudes of the Galileans themselves who 
were favorably disposed towards Him and ready to take the 
deepest interest in any new development of His affairs. 
Tens of thousands from more distant parts, who h xl heard 
of Him, but never seen Him, arrived in the capital in the 
hope that He might be there, and that they might enjoy 
the opportunity of seeing a miracle or listening to the 
words of the new prophet. The authorities in Jerusalem, 
too, awaited His coming with very mingled feelings. They 
hoped that some turn of events might give them the chance 
of at last suppressing Him; but they could not help fear- 
ing that He might appear at the head of a provincial fol- 
lowing which would place them at His mercy. 

145. The Final Breach with the Nation. — Six days be. 
fore the Passover began, He arrived in Bethany, the village 
of His friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, which lay half- 
an-hour from the city on the other side of the summit of 
the Mount of Olives. It was a convenient place to lodge 
during the feast, and He took up His quarters with His 
friends. The solemnities were to begin on a Thursdav, so 
that it was on the previous Friday He arrived there. He 
had been accompanied the last twenty miles of His journey 
by an immense multitude of the pilgrims, to whom He was 



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THE END. 115 

the center of interest. They had seen Him healing blind 
Bartimaeus at Jericho, and the miracle had produced among 
them extraordinary excitement. When they reached Beth- 
any, the village was ringing with the recent resurrection of 
Lazarus, and they carried on the news to the crowds who 
had already arrived from all quarters in Jerusalem, tha* 
Jesus had come. 

146. Accordingly, when, after resting over the Sabbath 
in Bethany, He came forth on the Sunday morning to pro- 
ceed to the city, He found the streets of the village and 
the neighboring roads thronged with a vast crowd, consist- 
ing partly of those who had accompanied Him on the 
Friday, partly of other companies who had come up behind 
Him from Jericho and heard of the miracles as they came 
along, and partly of those who, having heard that He was 
at hand, had flocked out from Jerusalem to see Him. They 
welcomed Him with enthusiasm, and began to shout 
"Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He that com- 
eth in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!" It 
was a Messianic demonstration such as He had formerly 
avoided. But now He yielded to it. Probably He was 
satisfied with the sincerity of the homage paid to Him; 
and the hour had come when no considerations could per- 
mit Him any longer to conceal from the nation the charac- 
ter in which He presented Himself and the claim He made 
on its faith. But, in yielding to the desires of the multi- 
tude that He should assume the style of a king, He made 
it unmistakable in what sense He accepted the honor. He 
sent for an ass-colt, and, His disciples having spread their 
garments on it, rode at the head of the crowd. Not armed 
to the teeth or bestriding a war-horse did He come, but as 
the King of simplicity and peace. The procession swept 
over the brow of Olivet and down the mountain-side; it 
crossed the Kedron, and, mounting the slope which led to 



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116 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

the gate of the city, passed oil through the streets to the 
temple. It swelled as it went, great numbers hurrying 
from every quarter to join it; the shouts rang louder and 
more loud; the processionists broke off twigs from the 
palms and olives, as they passed, and waved them in tri- 
umph. The citizens of Jerusalem ran to their doors and 
bent over their balconies to look, and asked, " Who is this?" 
to which the processionists replied with provincial pride, 
"This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth." It was, in fact 
an entirely provincial demonstration. The Jerusalemites 
took no part in it, but held coldly aloof. The authorities 
knew only too well what it meant, and beheld it with rage 
and dread. They came to Jesus, and ordered Him to bid 
His followers hold their peace, hinting no doubt that, if He 
did not do so, the Roman garrison, which was stationed in 
the immediate vicinity, would pounce on Him and them, 
and punish the city for an act of treason to Caesar. 

147. There is no point in the life of Jesus at which we 
are more urged to ask, What would have happened if His 
claim had been conceded — if the citizens of Jerusalem 
had been carried away with the enthusiasm of the provin- 
cials, and the prejudices of priests and scribes had been 
borne down before the torrent of public approval? Would 
Jesus have put Himself at the head of the nation and in- 
augurated an era of the world's history totally different 
from that which followed? These questions very soon carry 
us beyond our depth, yet no intelligent reader of the Gos- 
pels can help asking them. 

148. Jesus had formally made offer of Himself to the 
capital and the authorities of the nation, but met with no 
response. The provincial recognition of His claims was 
insufficient to carry a national assent. He accepted the 
decision as final. - The multitude expected a signal from 
Him, and in their excited moo4 would have obeyed it, what* 



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THE END. 11? 

ever it might have been. But He gave them none, and, 
after looking round about Him for a little in the temple, 
left them and returned to Bethany. 

149. Doubtless the disappointment of the multitude was 
extreme, and an opportunity was offered to the authorities 
which they did not fail to make use of. The Pharisees 
needed no stimulus; but even the Sadducees, those cold and 
haughty friends of order, espied danger to the public peace 
in the state of the popular mind, and leagued themselves 
with their bitter enemies in the resolution to suppress Him. 

150. On Monday and Tuesday He appeared again in 
the city and engaged in His old work of healing and teach- 
ing. But on the second of these days the authorities inter- 
posed. Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians, high priests, 
priests, and scribes were for once combined in a common 
cause. They came to Him, as He taught in the temple, 
and demanded by what authority He did such things. In 
all the pomp of official costume, of social pride and popu- 
lar renown, they set themselves against the simple Galilean, 
while the multitudes looked on. They entered into a keen 
and prolonged controversy with Him on points selected 
beforehand, putting forward their champions of debate to 
eitf angle Him in His talk, their distinct object ieing, either 
to discredit Him with the audience or to elicit something 
from His lips in the heat of argument which might form a 
ground of accusation against Him before the civil authority. 
Thus, for example, they asked Him if it was lawful to give 
tribute to Caesar. If He answered Yes, they knew that 
His popularity would perish on the instant, for it would be 
a complete contradiction of the popular Messianic ideas. 
If, on the contrary, He answered No, they would accuse 
Him of treason before the Roman governor. But Jesus 
was far more than a match for them. Hour by hour He 
steadfastly met the attack. His straightforwardness put 



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v 



118 THE LIFE OP JESUS CHRIST. 

their duplicity to shame, and His skill in argument turned 
every spear which they directed at Him round to their own** 
breasts. At last He carried the war into their own terri- 
tory, and convicted them of such ignorance or lack of can- 
dor as completely put them to shame before the onlookers. 
Then, when He had silenced them, He let loose the storm 
of His indignation, and delivered against them the philip- 
pic which is recorded in the twenty- third chapter of Mat- 
thew. Giving unrestrained expression to the pent-up criti- 
cism of a lifetime, He exposed their hypocritical practices 
in sentences that fell like strokes of lightning and made 
them a scorn and laughing-stock, not only to the hearers 
then, but to all the world since. 

151. It was the final breach between Him and them. 
They had been utterly humiliated before the whole people, 
over whom they were set in authority and honor. They 
felt-it to be intolerable, and resolved not to lose an hour 
in seeking their revenge. That very evening the Sanhe- 
drim met in passionate mood to devise a plan for making 
away with Him. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea 
may have raised a solitary protest against their precipitate 
proceedings; but they indignantly silenced them, and were 
unanimously of opinion that He should forthwith be put to 
death. But circumstances checked their cruel haste. At 
least the forms of justice would have to be gone through; 
and besides, Jesus evidently enjoyed an immense popular- 
ity among the strangers who filled the city. What might 
not the idle crowd do if He were arrested before their 
eyes? It was necessary to wait till the mass of the pil- 
grims had left the city. They had just, with great reluc- 
tance, arrived at this conclusion, when they received a 
most unexpected and gratifying surprise. One of His own 
disciples appeared, and offered to betray Him for a price. 

152. Judas Iscariot is the byword of the human race. 



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THE END. 119 

In his Vision of Hell, Dante has placed him in the lowest 
of the circles of the damned, as the sole sharer with Satan 
himself of the very uttermost punishment; and the poet's 
verdict is that of mankind. Yet he was not such a mon- 
ster of iniquity as to be utterly beyond comprehension or 
even sympathy. The history of his base and appalling 
lapse is perfectly intelligible. He had joined the disciple- 
ship of Jesus, as the other apostles did, in the hope of 
taking part in a political revolution and occupying a distin- 
guished place in an earthly kingdom. . It is inconceivable 
that Jesus would have made him an apostle if there had 
not at one time been some noble enthusiasm in him, and 
some attachment to Himself. That he was a man of supe- 
rior energy and administrative ability may be inferred from 
the fact that he was made the purse-bearer of the apostolic 
company. But there was a canker at the root of his char- 
acter, which gradually absorbed all that was excellent in 
him, and became a tyrannical passion. It was the love of 
money. He fed it by the petty peculations which he prac- 
tised on the small sums which Jesus received from His 
friends for the necessities of His company and for distribu- 
tion among the poor with whom He was daily mingling. 
He hoped to give it unrestrained gratification when He 
became chancellor of the exchequer in the new kingdom. 
The views of the other apostles were perhaps as worldly 
to begin with as his. But the history of their intercourse 
with their Master was totally different. They became ever 
more spiritual, he ever more worldly. They never, indeed, 
as long as Jesus lived, rose to the idea of a spiritual king- 
dom apart from an earthly one; but the spiritual elements 
which their Master had taught them to add to their material 
conception grew more and more prominent, till the earthly 
heart was eaten out of it, and merely the empty shell was 
left, to be in due time crushed and blown away. But 



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120 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

Judas 9 eathly views became more and more engrossing, and 
were more and more divested of every spiritual adjunct. 
He grew impatient for their realization. Preaching and 
healing seemed to him waste of time; the purity and un- 
worldliness of Jesus irritated him; why did He not bring 
on the kingdom at once, and then preach as much as He 
chose afterwards ! At last he began to suspect that there 
was to be no kingdom such as he had hoped for at all. He 
felt that he had been deceived, and began not only to des- 
pise but even hate his Master. The failure of Jesus to 
take advantage of the disposition of the people on Palm 
Sunday finally convinced him that it was useless to hold on 
to the cause any longer. He saw that the ship was sinking 
and resolved to get out of it. He carried out his resolu- 
tion in such a way as both to gratify his master-passion 
and secure the favor of the authorities. His offer came to 
them just at the right moment. They closed with it 
greedily, and, having arranged the price with the misera- 
ble man, sent him away to find a convenient opportunity 
for the betrayal. He found it sooner than they expected — 
on the next night but one after the dastardly bargain had 
been concluded. 

153. Jesus in the Prospect of Death. — Christianity has 
no more precious possession than the memory of Jesus 
during the week when He stood face to face with death. 
Unspeakably great as He always was, it may be rever- 
ently said that He was never so great as 'during those days 
of direst calamity. All that was grandest and all that was 
most tender, the most human and the most divine aspects 
of His character, were brought out as they had never been 
before. 

154. He came to Jerusalem well aware that He was 
about to die- For a whole year the fact had been staring 



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THE iND. 121 

Him constantly in the face, and the long-looked-for had 
come at last. He knew it was His Father's will, and, when 
the hour arrived, He bent His steps with sublime fortitude 
to the fatal spot. It was not, however, without a terrible 
conflict of feelings; the ebb and flow of the most diverse 
emotions — anguish and ecstasy, the most prolonged and 
crushing depression, the most triumphant joy and the most 
majestic peace — swayed hither and thither within Him 
like the moods of a vast ocean. 

J55. Some have hesitated to attribute to Him aught of 
that shrinking from death which is natural to man; but 
surely without good reason. It is an instinct perfectly in- 
nocent; and perhaps the very fact that His bodily organr 
ism was pure and perfect may have made it stronger in 
Him than it is in us. Remember how young He was — 
only three-and-thirty; the currents of life were powerful in 
Him; He was full of the instincts of action. To have 
these strong currents rolled back and the light and warmth 
Qf life quenched in the cold waters of death must have 
been utterly repugnant to Him. An incident which hap- 
pened on the Monday caused Him a great shock of this in- 
stinctive pain. Some Greeks who had come to the feast 
expressed through two of the apostles their desire for an 
interview with Him. There were many heathens in differ- 
ent parts of the Greek-speaking world who at this period 
had found refuge from the atheism and disgusting immor- 
ality of the times in the religion of the Jews settled in 
their midst, and had accordingly become proselytes of the 
worship of Jehovah. To this class these inquirers be- 
longed. But their application shook Him with thoughts 
which they little dreamt of. Only two or three times in 
the course of His ministry does He seem to have been 
brought into contact with representatives of the world 
lying outside the limits of His own people, His mission 
6 



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122 THB LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

being exclusively to the lost sheep of the house of Israel 
But on every such occasion He met with a faith, a courtesy 
and nobility, which He Himself contrasted with the unbe- 
lief, rudeness, and pettiness of the Jews. How could He 
help longing to pass beyond the narrow bounds of Pales- 
tine and visit nations of such simple and generous disposi- 
tion? He must often have seen visions of a career like that 
afterwards achieved by Paul, when He bore the glad tidings 
from land to land, and evangelized Athens, Rome, and 
the other great centers of the West. What joy such a 
career would have been to Jesus, who felt within Himself 
the energy and overflowing benevolence which it would 
have exactly suited! But death was at hand to extinguish 
all. The visit of the Greeks caused a great wave of such 
thoughts to break over Him. Instead of responding to 
their request, He became abstracted, His face darkened, and 
His frame was shaken with the tremor of an inward conflict. 
But He soon recovered Himself, and gave expression to the 
thoughts on which in those days He was steadying up His 
soul: " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, 
it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." 
"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
unto Me." He could see beyond death, terrible and ab- 
sorbing as the prospect of it was, and assure Himself that 
the effect of His self-sacrifice would be infinitely grander 
and more extensive than that of a personal mission to the 
heathen world could ever have been. Besides, death was 
what His Father had appointed for Him. This was the last 
and deepest consolation with which He soothed His hum- 
ble and trustful soul on this as on every similar occasion: 
" Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, 
save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto 
this hour. Father, glory Thyself." 

156. Death approached Him with every terrible accom- 



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THE END. 123 

paniment. He was to fall a victim to the treachery of a 
follower of His own, whom He had chosen and loved. His 
life was to be taken by the hands of His own nation, in the 
city of His heart. He had come to exalt His nation to 
heaven, and had loved her with a devotion nourished by 
the most intelligent and sympathetic acquaintance with her 
past history and with the great men who had loved her be- 
fore Him, as well as by the sense of all which He Himself 
was able to do for her. But His death would bring down 
the blight of a thousand curses on Palestine and Jerusalem. 
How clearly He foresaw what was coming was shown by 
the memorable prophetic discourse of the twenty-fourth of 
Matthew, which He spoke on Tuesday afternoon to His dis- 
ciples, sitting on the side of Mount Olivet, with the 
doomed city at His feet. How bitter was the anguish it 
caused Him was shown on the Sunday, when, even in His 
hour of triumph, as the joyful multitude bore Him down 
the mountain road, He stopped at the point where the city 
burst upon the view, and with tears and lamentations pre- 
dicted its fate. It ought to have been the fair city's bridal 
day, when she should have been married to the Son of God; 
but the pallor of death was on her face. He who would 
have taken her to His heart, as the hen gathers her chick- 
ens under her wings, saw the eagles already in the air, fly- 
ing fast to rend her in pieces. 

157.' In the evenings of this week He went out to 
Bethany; but in all probability He spent most of the 
nights alone in the open air. He wandered about in the 
solitude of the hill-top and among the olive-groves and 
gardens with which the sides of the mount were covered; 
many a time, perhaps, going alojig the same road down 
which the procession had passed, and, as He looked across 
the valley, from the point where He had stopped before, at 
.the city sleeping in the moonlight, startling the night with 



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124 THfc LItfE OF JfcStfS CHRIST 

cries more bitter than the lamentation which overawed the 
multitude; many a time repeating to His lonely heart the 
great truths He had uttered in the presence of the Greeks. 

158. He was terribly alone. The whole world was 
against Him, — Jerusalem panting for His life with passion- 
ate hate, the tens of thousands from the provinces turned 
from Him in disappointment. Not one even of His apos- 
tles, not even John, was in the least aware of the real 
situation, or able to be the confidant of His thoughts* This 
was one of the bitterest drops in His cup. He felt, as no 
other person has ever felt, the necessity of living on in the 
world after death. The cause He had inaugurated must 
not die. It was for the whole world, and was to endure 
through all generations and visit every part of the globe. 
But after His departure it would be left in the hands of 
His apostles, who were now showing themselves so weak, 
unsympathetic, and ignorant. Were they fit for the task? 
Had not one of them turned out a traitor? Would not 
the cause, when He was gone, — so perhaps the tempter 
whispered, — go to wreck, and all His far-reaching plans 
for the regeneration of the world vanish like the baseless 
fabric of a vision? 

159. Yet He was not alone. Among the deep shadows 
of the gardens and upon the summits of Olivet, He sought 
the unfailing resource of other and less troubled days, and 
found it still in His dire need. His Father was with Him ; 
and, pouring out supplications with strong crying and tears, 
He was heard in that He feared. He hushed His spirit 
with the sense that His Father's perfect love and wisdom 
were appointing all that was happening to Him, and that 
He was glorifying His Father and fulfilling the work given 
Him to do. This could banish every fear, and fill Him 
with a joy unspeakable and full of glory. 

160. At last the end drew very near. The Thursday 



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THE END 125 

evening arrived, when in every house in Jerusalem the 
Passover was eaten. Jesus also with the Twelve sat down 
to eat it. He knew that it was His last night on earth, 
and that this was His farewell meeting with His own. 
Happily there has been preserved to us a full account of 
it, with which every Christian mind is familiar. It was 
the greatest evening in His life. His soul overflowed in 
indescribable tenderness and grandeur. Some shadows 
indeed fell across His spirit in the earlier hours of the 
evening. But they soon passed; and throughout the 
scenes of the washing of the disciples 9 feet, the eating of 
the Passover, the institution of the Lord's Supper, the 
farewell address, and the great high-priestly prayer, the 
whole glory of His character shone out. He completely 
resigned Himself to the genial impulses of friendship, His 
love to His own flowing forth without limit; and, as if He 
had forgotten all their imperfections, He rejoiced in the 
anticipation of their future successes and the triumph of 
His cause. Not a shadow intercepted His view of the 
face of His Father or dimmed the satisfaction with which 
He looked on His own work just about to be completed. 
It was as if the Passion were already past, and the glory 
of His Exaltation were already breaking around Him. 

161. But the reaction came very soon. Rising from 
the table at midnight, they passed through the streets and 
out of the town by the eastern gate of the city, and, cross- 
ing the Kedron, reached a well-known haunt of His at the 
foot of Olivet, the garden of Geth3emane. Here ensued 
the awful aud memorable Agony. It was the final access 
of the mood of depression which had been struggling all 
the week with the mood of joy and trust whose culmination 
had been reached at the supper table. It was the final 
onset of temptation, from which His life had never been 
free. But we fear to analyze the elements of .the &Qtne f 



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126 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

We know that any conception of ours must be utterly 
unable to exhaust its meaning. How, above all, can we 
estimate in the faintest degree the chief element v in it, — 
the crushing, scorching pressure of the sin of the world, 
which He was then expiating? 

162. But the struggle ended in a complete victory. 
While the poor disciples were sleeping away the hours of 
preparation for the crisis which was at hand, He had thor- 
oughly equipped Himself for it; He had fought down the 
last remnants of temptation; the bitterness of death was 
past; and He was able to go through the scenes which fol- 
lowed with a calmness which nothing could ruffle, and a 
majesty which converted His trial and crucifixion into the 
pride and glory of humanity. 

163. The Trial. — He had just overcome in this struggle 
when through the branches of the olives He saw, moving 
in the moonlight down the opposite Slope, the mass of His 
enemies coming to arrest Him. The traitor was at their 
head. He was well acquainted with his Master's haunt and 
probably hoped to find Him there asleep. For this reason 
he had chosen the midnight hour for his dark deed. It 
suited his employers well too, for they were afraid to lay 
hands on Jesus in the day-time, dreading the temper of the 
Galilean strangers who filled the city. But they knew how 
it would overawe His friends, if, getting His trial over 
during the night, they could show Him in the morning, 
when the populace awoke, already a condemned criminal 
in the hands of the executors of the law. They had brought 
lanterns and torches with them, thinking they might find 
their victim crouching in some cave, or that they might 
have to pursue Him through the wood. But He came 
forth to meet them at the entrance to the garden, and they 
quailed like cravens before His majestic looks and wither- 



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THE END. 127 

# 

ing words. He freely surrendered Himself into their 
hands, and they led Him back to the city. It was probably 
about midnight; and the remaining hours of the night and 
the early hours of the morning were occupied with the 
legal proceedings which had to be gone through, before 
they could gratify their thirst for His life. 

164. There were two trials, an ecclesiastical one and a 
civil one, in each of which there were three stages. The 
former took place, first before Annas, then before Caiaphas 
and an informal committee of the Sanhedrim, and, lastly, 
before a regular meeting of this court; the latter took 
place, first before Pilate, then before Herod, and, lastly, 
before Pilate again. 

165. The reason of this double legal process was the 
political situation of the country. Judaea, as has been 
already explained, was directly subject to the Roman em- 
pire, forming a part of the province of Syria, and being 
governed by a Roman officer, who resided at Csesarea. 
But it was not the practice of Rome to strip those countries 
which she had subdued of all the forms of native govern- 
ment. Though she ruled with an iron hand, collecting her 
taxes with severity, suppressing every sign of rebellion 
with* promptitude, and asserting her paramount authority 
on great occasions, yet she conceded to the conquered as 
many of the insignia as possible of their ancient power. 
She was especially tolerant in' matters of religion. Thus 
the Sanhedrim, the supreme ecclesiastical court of the Jews, 
was still permitted to, try all religious causes. Only, if 
the sentence passed was a capital one, its execution could 
not take place without the case being tried over again be- 
fore the governor. So that, when a prisoner was convicted 
by the Jewish ecclesiastical tribunal of a capital crime, he 
had to be sent down to Caesarea and prosecuted before the 
civil court, unless the governor happened to be at the time 



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128 THE LIFE OF JE8VS CHRIST. 

in Jerusalem. The crime of which Jesus was aocutdd was 
one which naturally came before the ecclesiastical court. 
This court passed on Him a death sentence. But it had 
not the power to carry it out. It had to hand Him on to 
the tribunal of the governor, who happened at the time to 
be in the capital, which he generally visited at the Passover. 

166. Jesus was conducted first to the palace of Annas. 
He was an old man of seventy, who had been high priest 
a score of years before, and still retained the title, as did 
also five of his sons who had succeeded him, though his 
son-in-law Caiaphas was the actual high-priest. His age, 
ability, and family influence gave him immense social 
weight, and he was the virtual, though not formal, head of 
the Sanhedrim. He did not try Jesus, but merely wished 
to see Him and ask a few questions; so that He was very 
soon led away from the palace of Annas to that' of Caia- 
phas, which probably formed part of the same group of 
official buildings 

167. Caiaphas, as ruling high-priest, was president of 
the Sanhedrim, before which Jesus was tried. A legal 
meeting of this court could not be held before sunrise, per- 
haps about six o'clock. But there were many of its mem- 
bers already on the spot, who had been drawn together by 
their interest in the case. They were eager to get to work, 
both to gratify their own dislike to Him and to prevent the 
interference of the populace with their proceedings. Ac- 
cordingly they resolved to hold an informal meeting at 
once, at which the accusation, evidence and so forth might 
be put into shape, so that, when the legal hour for opening 
their doors arrived, there might be nothing to do but to 
repeat the necessary formalities and carry Him off to the 
governor. This was done; and, while Jerusalem slept, 
these eager judges )*urrie4 fbrward their dark designs. 



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THE END. 129 

168. They did not begin, as might have been expected, 
with a clear statement of the crime with which He was 
charged. Indeed, it would have been difficult for them to 
do so, for they were divided among themselves. Many 
things in His life which the Pharisees regarded as criminal 
were treated by the Sadducees with indifference; and other 
acts of His, like the cleansing of the temple, which had 
enraged the Sadducees, afforded gratification to the Phari- 
sees. 

169. The high-priest began with questioning Him as to 
His disciples and doctrine, evidently with the view of dis- 
covering whether He had taught any revolutionary tenets, 
which might form a ground of accusation before the gov- 
ernor. But Jesus repelled the insinuation, indignantly as- 
serting that He had ever spoken openly before the work 
and demanded a statement and proof of any evil He had 
done. This unusual reply induced one of the minions of 
the court to smite Him on the mouth with His fist — an 
act which the court apparently did not rebuke, and which 
showed what amount of justice He had to expect at the 
hands of His judges. An attempt was then made to bring 
proof against Him, a number of witness js repeating va* 
rious statements they had heard Him make, out of which it 
was hoped an accusation might be constructed. But it 
turned out a total failure. The witnesses could not agree 
among themselves; and when at last two were got to unite 
in a distorted report of a saying of His early ministry, 
which appeared to have some color of criminality, it turned 
out to be a thing so paltry that it would have been absurd 
to appear with it before the governor as the ground of a 
serious charge. 

170. They were resolved on His death, but the prey 
seemed slipping out of their hands. Jesus looked on in 
absolute silence, while contradictory testimonies of the 

I 



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130 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

witnesses demolished each other. He quietly took His 
natural position far above His judges. They felt it; and 
at last the president, in a transport of rage and irritation, 
started up and commanded Him to speak. Why was He 
so loud and shrill? The humiliating spectacle going on 
in the witness-box and the silent dignity of Jesus were be- 
ginning to trouble even these consciences, assembled in 
the dead of night. 

171. The case had completely broken down, when Caia- 
phas rose from his seat, and, with theatrical solemnity, 
asked the question: " I adjure Thee by the living God, that 
Thou tell us whether Thou be the Christ the Son of God." 
It was a question asked merely in order to induce Jesus 
to criminate Himself. Yet He who had kept silence when 
He might have spoken now spoke when He might have 
been silent. With great solemnity He answered in the 
affirmative, that He was the Messiah and the Son of God. 
Nothing more was needed by His judges. They unani- 
mously pronounced Him guilty of blasphemy and worthy 
of death. 

172. The whole trial had been conducted with precipi- 
tancy and total disregard of the formalities proper to a 
court of law. Everything was dictated by the desire to 
arrive at guilt, not justice. The same persons were both 
prosecutors and judges. No witnesses for the defence 
were thought of. Though the judges were doubtless per- 
fectly conscientious in their sentence, it was the decision 
of minds long ago shut against the truth and possessed 
with the most bitter and revengeful passions. 

173. The trial was now looked upon as past, the legal 
proceedings after sunrise being a mere formality, which 
would be got over in a few minutes. Accordingly, Jesus 
was given up as a condemned man to the cruelty of the 
jailors and the mob. Then ensued a scene over which one 



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THE BND. 131 

would gladly draw a veil. There broke forth on Him an 
Oriental brutality of abuse which makes the bloq,d run 
cold. Apparently the Sanhedrists themselves took part in 
it. This Man, who had baffled them, impaired their authority 
and exposed their hypocrisy, was very hateful to them. 
Sadducean coldness could boil up into heat enough when 
it was really roused. Pharisaic fanaticism was inventive 
in its cruelty. They smote Him with their fists, they spat 
on Him, they blindfolded Him, and, in derision of His 
prophetic claims, bade Him prophesy who struck Him, as 
they took their turn of smiting Him. But we will not 
dwell on a scene so disgraceful to human nature. 

174. It was probably between six and seven in the 
morning when they conducted Jesus, bound with chains, 
to the residence of the governor. What a spectacle that 
was! The priests, teachers, and judges of the Jewish 
nation leading their Messiah to ask the Gentile to put Him 
to death! It was the hour of the nation's suicide. This 
was all that had come of God's choosing them, bearing 
them on eagles' wings and carrying them all the days of 
old, sending them His prophets and deliverers, redeeming 
them from Egypt and Babylon, and causing His glory for 
so many centuries to pass before their eyes! Surely it was 
the very mockery of Providence. Yet God was not mocked. 
His designs march down through history with resistless 
tread, waiting not on the will of man ; and even this tragic ; 
hour, when the Jewish nation was turning His dealings 
into derision, was destined to demonstrate the depths of 
His wisdom and love. 

175. The man before whose judgment-seat Jesus was 
about to appear was Pontius Pilate, who had been governor 
of Judaea for six years. He was a typical Roman, not of 
the antique, simple stamp, but of the imperial period; a 



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132 THB LIFE OF JESUS CHBIST. 

man not without some remains of the ancient Roman jus- 
tice in his soul, yet pleasure-loving, imperious, and corrupt. 
He hated the Jews whom he ruled, and, in times of irrita- 
tion, freely shed their blood. They returned his hatred 
with cordiality, and accused him of every crime, malad- 
ministration, cruelty, and robbery. He visited Jerusalem 
as seldom as possible; for, indeed, to one accustomed to 
the pleasures of Rome, with its theaters, baths, games, and 
gay society, Jerusalem, with its religiousness' and ever- 
smoldering revolt, was a dreary residence. When he did 
visit it, he stayed in the magnificent palace of Herod the 
Great; it being common for the officers sent by Rome into 
conquered countries to occupy the palaces of the displaced 
sovereigns. 

176. Up the broad avenue, which led through a fine 
park, laid out with walks, ponds, and trees of various kinds, 
to the front of the building, the Sanhedrists and the crowd 
which had joined the procession, as it moved on through 
the streets, conducted Jesus. The court was held in the 
open air, on a mosaic pavement in front of that portion of 
the palace which united its two colossal wings. 

177. The Jewish authorities had hoped that Pilate would 
accept their decision as his own, and without going into 
the merits of the case, pass the sentence they desired. 
This was frequently done by provincial governors, espe- 
cially in matters of religion, which, as foreigners, they could 
not be expected to understand. Accordingly, when he 
asked what the crime of Jesus was, they replied, " If He 
were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered Him 
up unto thee." But he was not in the mood of concession, 
and told them that, if he was not to try the culprit, they 
must be content with such a punishment as the law per- 
mitted them to inflict. He seems to have known something 
of Jesus. "He knew that for envy they had delivered 



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THE END. 133 

Him." The triumphal procession of Sunday was sure to 
be reported to him; and the neglect of Jesus to make use 
of that demonstration for any political end may have con- 
vinced him that He was politically harmless. His wife's 
dream may imply that He had been the subject of conver- 
sation in the palace; and perhaps the polite man of the 
world and his lady had felt the ennui of their visit to Jeru- 
salem relieved by the story of the young peasant enthu- 
siast who was bearding the fanatic priests. 

178. Forced against their hopes to bring forward formal 
charges, the Jewish authorities poured out a volley of 
accusations, out of which these three clearly emerged, — 
that He had perverted the nation, that He forbade to pay 
the Roman tribute, and that He set Himself up as a king. 
In the Sanhedrim they had condemned Him for blasphemy; 
but such a charge would have been treated by Pilate, as 
they well knew, in the same way as it was afterwards 
treated by the Roman governor Gallio, when preferred 
against Paul by the Jews of Corinth. They had therefore 
to invent new charges, which might represent Jesus as 
formidable to the government. It is humiliating to think 
that, in doing so, they resorted not only to gross hypocrisy, 
but even to deliberate falsehood; for how else can we 
characterize the second charge, when we remember the 
answer He gave to their question on the same subject on 
the previous Tuesday? 

179. Pilate understood their pretended zeal for the 
Roman authority. He knew the value of this vehement 
anxiety that Rome's tribute should be paid. Rising from 
his seat to escape the fanatical cries of the mob, he took 
Jesus inside the palace to examine Him. It was a solemn 
moment for himself, though he knew it not. What a terri- 
ble fate it was which brought him to this spot at this time! 
There were hundreds of Roman officials scatter ~ J over the 



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134 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHEIST. 

empire, conducting their lives on the same principles as his 
was guided by; why did it fall to him to bring them to 
bear on this case? He had no idea of the issues he was 
deciding. The culprit may have seemed to him a little 
more interesting and perplexing than others; but He was 
only one of hundreds constantly passing through his hands. 
It could not occur to him that, though he appeared to be 
the judge, yet both he and the system he represented were 
on their trial before One whose perfection judged and 
exposed every man and every system which approached 
Him. He questioned Him in regard to the accusations 
brought against Him, asking especially if He pretended to 
be a king. Jesus replied that He made no such claim in 
the political sense, but only in a spiritual sense, as King of 
the Truth. This reply would have arrested any of the 
nobler spirits of heathendom, who spent their lives in the 
search for truth, and was perhaps framed in order to find 
out whether there was any response in Pilate's mind to 
such a suggestion. But he had no such cravings and dis- 
missed it with a laugh. However, he was convinced that, 
as he had supposed, there lurked nothing of the demagogue 
or Messianic revolutionist behind this pure, peaceful, and 
melancholy face; and, returning to the tribunal, he announced 
to His accusers that he had acquitted Him. 

180. The announcement was received with shrieks of 
disappointed rage and the loud reiteration of the charges 
against Him. It was a thoroughly Jewish spectacle. Many 
a time had this fanatical mob overcome the wishes and 
decisions of their foreign masters by the sheer force of 
clamor and pertinacity. Pilate ought at once to have 
released and protected Him. . But he was a true son of the 
system in which he had been brought up— the statecraft of 
compromise and manoeuvre. Amidst the cries with which 
they assailed his ears he was glad to hear one which offered 



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THE END. 135 

hrm an excuse for getting rid of the whole business. They 
were shouting that Jesus had excited the populace " through- 
out all Jewry, beginning from Galilee unto this place." It 
occurred to him that Herod, the ruler of Galilee, was in 
town, and that he might get rid of the troublesome affair 
by handing it over to him; for it was a common procedure 
in Roman law to transfer a culprit from the tribunal of the 
territory in which he was arrested to that of the territory 
in which he was domiciled. Accordingly, he sent Him 
away in the hands of his body-guard, and accompanied by 
His indefatigable accusers, ^o the palace of Herod. 

181. They found this princeling, who had come to 
Jerusalem to attend the feast, in the midst of his petty 
court of flatterers and boon companions, and surrounded 
by the bodyguard which he maintained in imitation of his 
foreign masters. He was delighted to see Jesus, whose 
fame had so Long been ringing through' the territory over 
which he ruled. He was a typical Oriental prince, who 
had only one thought in life — his own pleasure and amuse- 
ment. He came up to the Passover merely for the sake of 
the excitement. The appearance of Jesus seemed to prom- 
ise a new sensation, of which he and his court were often 
sorely in want; for he hoped to see Him work a miracle. 
He was a man utterly incapable of taking a serious view 
of anything, and even overlooked the business about which 
the Jews were so eager, for he began to pour out a flood of 
rambling questions and remarks, without pausing for any 
reply. At last, however, he exhausted himself, and waited 
for the response of Jesus. But he waited in vain, for Jesus 
did not vouchsafe him one word of any kind. Herod had 
forgotten the murder of the Baptist, every impression 
being written as if on water in his characterless mind; but 
Jesus had not forgotten it. He felt that Herod should 
have been ashamed to look the Baptist's friend in the face; 



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136 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

He would not stoop even to speak to a man who could treat 
Him as a mere wonder-worker, who might purchase his 
judge's favor by exhibiting his skill; He looked with sad 
shame on one who had abused himself till there was no 
conscience or manliness left in him. But Herod was utterly 
incapable of feeling the annihilating force of such silent 
disdain. He and his men of war set Jesus at naught, and, 
throwing over His shoulders a white robe, in imitation of 
that worn at Rome by candidates who were canvassing for 
office, to indicate that He was a candidate for the Jewish 
throne, but one so ridiculous that it would be useless to 
treat Him with anything but contempt, sent Him back to 
Pilate. In this guise He retraced His weary steps to the 
tribunal of the Roman. 

182. Then ensued a course of procedure on the part of 
Pilate by which he made himself an image of the time- 
server, to be exhibited to the centuries in the light falling 
on him from Christ. It was evidently his duty, when Jesus 
returned from Herod, to pronounce at once the sentence of 
acquittal. But, instead of doing so, he resorted to expedi- 
ency, and, being hurried on from one false step to another, 
was finally hurled down the slope of complete treachery to 
principle. He proposed to the Jews that, as both he and 
Herod had found Him innocent, he should scourge and 
then release Him ; the scourging being a sop to their rage, 
and the release a tribute to justice. 

183. The carrying out of this monstrous proposal was, 
however, interrupted by an incident which seemed to ofFer 
to Pilate once more a way of escape from his difficulty. It 
was the custom of the Roman governor on Passover morn- 
ing to release to the people any single prisoner they might 
desire. It was a privilege highly prized by the populace 
of Jerusalem, for there were always in jail plenty of pris- 
oners who, by rebellion against the detested foreign yoke, 



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THE END. 137 

had made themselves the heroes of the multitude. At this 
stage of the trial of Jesus, the mob of the city, pouring 
from street and alley in the excited Oriental fashion, came 
streaming up the avenue to the front of the palace, shout- 
ing for this annual gift. The cry was for once welcome to 
Pilate, for he saw in it a loophole of escape from his dis- 
agreeable position. It turned out, however, to be a noose 
through which he was slipping his neck. He offered the 
life of Jesus to the mob. For a moment they hesitated. 
But they had a favorite of their own, a noted leader of 
revolt against the Roman domination; and besides, voices 
instantly began to whisper busily in their ears, putting 
every art of persuasion into exercise in order to induce 
them not to accept Jesus. The Sanhedrists, in spite of the 
zeal they had manifested the hour before for law and order, 
did not scruple thus to take the side of the champion of 
sedition; and they succeeded only too well in poisoning 
the minds of the populace, who began to shout for their 
own hero, Barabbas. " What, then, shall I do with Jesus?" 
asked Pilate, expecting them to answer, "Give us Him too." 
But he was mistaken; the authorities had done their work 
successfully; the cry came from ten thousand throats, " Let 
Him be crucified! " Like priests, like people; it was the 
ratification by the nation of the decision of its heads. 
Pilate, completely baffled, angrily asked, " Why, what evil 
hath He done?" But he had put the decision into their 
power; they were now thoroughly fanaticized, and yelled 
forth, €i Away with Him; crucify Him, crucify Him!" 

184. Pilate did not yet mean to sacrifice justice utterly. 
He had still a move in reserve; but in the meantime He 
sent away Jesus to be scourged — the usual preliminary to 
crucifixion. The soldiers took Him to a room in their bar- 
racks, and feasted their cruel instincts on His sufferings. 
We will not describe the shame and pain of this revolting 



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138 THE LIFS OF JESUS CHRIST. 

punishment. What must it have been to Him, with His 
honor and love for human nature, to be handled by those 
coarse men, and to look so closely at human nature's utter- 
most brutality ! The soldiers enjoyed their work and 
heaped insult upon cruelty. When the scourging was over, 
they set Him down on a seat, and, fetching an old cast-off 
cloak, flung it, in derisive imitation of the royal purple, on 
His shoulders; they thrust a reed into His hands for a 
scepter; they stripped some thorn-twigs from a neighbor- 
ing bush, and, twining them into the rough semblance of a 
crown, crushed down their rending spikes upon His brow. 
Then, passing in front of Him, each of them in turn bent 
the knee, while, at the same time, he spat in His face, and 
plucking the read from His hand, smote Him with it over 
the head and face. 

185. At last, having glutted their cruelty, they led Rim 
back to the tribunal, wearing the crown of thorns and the 
purple robe. The crowds raised shouts of mad laughter at 
the soldiers' joke; and, with a sneer on his face, Pilate 
thrust Him forward, so as to meet the gaze of all, and 
cried, " Behold the man ! " He meant that surely there 
was no use of doing any more to Him; He was not worth 
their while; could one so broken and wretched do any 
harm? How little he understood his own words! That 
*' Ecce Homo " of his sounds over the world and draws the 
eyes of all generations to that marred visage. And lo, as 
we look, the shame is gone; it has lifted off Him and fallen 
on Pilate himself, on the soldiery, the priests, and the mob. 
His outflashing glory has scorched away every speck of 
disgrace, and tipped the crown of thorns with a hundred 
points of flaming brightness. But just as little did Pilate 
understand the temper of the people he ruled, when he 
supposed that the sight of the misery and helplessness of 
Jesus would satisfy their thirst for vengeance. Their ob- 



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THE END. 139 

jection to Him all along had been that one so poor and un* 
ambitious should claim to be their Messiah ; and the sight 
of Him now, scourged and scorned by the alien soldiery, 
yet still claiming to be their King, raised their hate to mad- 
ness, so that they cried louder than ever, " Crucify Him, 
crucify Him." 

186. Now at last, too, they gave vent to the real charge 
against Him, which had all along been burning at the bot- 
tom of their hearts, and which they could no longer sup- 
press: " We have a law," they cried, " and by that law 
He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of 
God." But these words struck a chord in Pilate's mind 
which they had not thought of. In the ancient traditions 
of his native land there were many legends of sons of the 
gods, who in the days of old had walked the earth in hum- 
ble guise, so that they were indistinguishable from common 
men. It was dangerous to meet them, for an injury done 
them might bring down on the offender the wrafch of the 
gods, their sires. Faith in these antique myths had long 
died out, because no men were seen on earth so different 
from their neighbors as to require such an explanation. 
But in Jesus Pilate had discerned an inexplicable some- 
thing which affected him with a vague terror. And now 
the words of the mob, "He made Himself the Son of 
God," came like a flash of lightning. They brought back 
out of the recesses of his memory the old, forgotten stories 
of his childhood, and revived the heathen terror, which 
forms the theme of some of the greatest Greek dramas, of 
committing unawares a crime which might evoke the dire 
vengeance of Heaven. Might not Jesus be the Son of the 
Hebrew Jehovah— so his heathen mind reasoned — as Cas- 
tor and Pollux were the sons of Jupiter? He hastily took 
Him inside the palace again, and, looking at Him with new 
awe and curiosity, asked, "Whence art Thou?" But 



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140 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHBIST. 

Jesus answered him not one word. Pilate had not listened 
to Him when He wished to explain every thing to him; he 
had outraged his own sense of justice by scourging Him; 
and if a man turns his back on Christ when He speaks, the 
hour will come when he will ask and receive no answer. 
The proud governor was both surprised and irritated, and 
demanded, " Speakest Thou not to me? Knowest Thou not 
that I have power to crucify Thee, and have power to re- 
lease Thee?" to which Jesus answered with the indescri- 
bable dignity of which £he brutal shame of His torture 
had in no way robbed Him, "Thou couldst have no power 
at all against Me, except it were given thee from above.'* 
187. Pilate had boasted of his power to do what he 
chose with the prisoner; but he was in reality very weak. 
He came forth from his private interview determined at 
once to release Him. The Jews saw it in His face; and it 
made them bring out their last weapon, which they had all 
along been keeping in reserve: they threatened to com- 
plain against him to the emperor. This was the meaning 
of the cry with which they interrupted his first words, " If 
thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend." This 
had been in both their minds and his all through the trial. 
It was this which made him so irresolute. There was no- 
thing a Roman governor dreaded so much as a complaint 
against him sent by his subjects to the emperor. At this 
time it was specially perilous; for the imperial throne was 
occupied by a morbid and ^suspicious tyrant, who delighted 
in disgracing his own servants, and would kindle in a mo- 
ment at the whisper of any of his subordinates favoring a 
pretender to royal power. Pilate knew too well that his 
administration could not bear inspection, for it had been 
cruel and corrupt in the extreme. Nothing is able so per- 
emptorily to forbid a man to do the good he would do as 
the evil of his past life. This was the blast of temptation 



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THX END, 141 

which finally swept Pilate off his feet, just when he had 
made up his mind to obey his conscience. He was no hero, 
who would obey his convictions at any cost. He was a 
thorough man of the world, and saw at once that he must 
surrender Jesus to their will. 

188. However, he was full not only of rage at being so 
completely foiled, but also of an overpowering religious 
dread. Calling for water, he washed his hands in the 
presence of the multitude, and cried, " I am innocent of 
the blood of this just Person." He washed his hands when 
he should have exerted them. Blood is not so easily 
washed off. But the mob, now completely triumphant, de- 
rided his scruples, rending the air with the cry, " His blood 
be upon us and on our children! " 

189. Pilate felt the insult keenly, and, turning on them 
in his anger, determined that he, too, should have his tri- 
umph. Thrusting Jesus forward more prominently into 
view, he began to mock them by pretending to regard Him 
as really their king, and asking, " Shall I crucify your 
king?" It was now their turn to feel the sting of mockery; 
and they cried out, " We have no king but Caesar." What 
a confession from Jewish lips! It was the surrender of the 
freedom and the history of the nation. Pilate took them 
at their word, and forthwith handed Jesus over to be cruci- 
fied. 

190. The Crucifixion. — They had succeeded in wresting 
their victim from Pilate's unwilling hands, "and they took 
Jesus and led Him away." At length they were able to 
gratify their hatred to the uttermost, and they hurried Him 
off to the place of execution with every demonstration of 
inhuman triumph. The actual executioners were the sol- 
diers of the governer's guard; but in moral significance the 
deed belonged entirely to the Jewish authorities. They 



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142 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

could not leave it in charge of the minions of the law to 
whom it belonged, but with undignified eagerness headed 
the procession themselves, in order to feast their vindic- 
tiveness on the sight of His sufferings. 

191. It must by this time have been about ten o'clock 
in the morning. The crowd at the palace had been grad- 
ually swelling. As the fatal procession, headed by the 
Sanhedrists, passed on through the streets, it attracted 
great multitudes. It happened to be a Passover holiday, 
so that there were thousands of idlers, prepared for any 
excitement. All those especially who had been inoculated 
with the fanaticism of the authorities poured forth to wit- 
ness the execution. It was therefore through the midst of 
myriads of cruel and unsympathizing onlookers that Jesus 
went to His death. 

192. The spot where He suffered can not now be idea- \ 
tified. It was outside the gates of the city, and was doubt- V 
less the common place of execution. It is usually called \ 
Mount Calvary, but there is nothing in the Gospels to jus- 1 
tify such a name*, nor does there seem to be any hill in the 1 
neighborhood on which it could have taken place. The I 
name Golgotha, " place of a skull," may signify a skull-like / 
knoll, but more probably refers to the ghastly relics of the / 
tragedies happening there that might be lying about. It / 
was probably a wide, open space, in which a multitude of / 
spectators might assemble; and it appears to have been on / 
the side of a much frequented thoroughfare, for, besides/ 
the stationary spectators, there were others passing to and 

fro who joined in mocking the Sufferer. 

193. Crucifixion was an unspeakably horrible death. 
As Cicero, who was well acquainted with it, says, it was 
the most cruel and shameful of all punishments. " Let it 
never," he adds, "come near the body of a Roman citizen; 
nay, not even near his thoughts, or eyes, or ears." It was 



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THE END. 143 

reserved for slaves and revolutionaries whose end was 
meant to be marked with special infamy. Nothing oould 
be more unnatural and revolting than to suspend a living 
man in such a position. The idea of it seems to have been 
suggested by the practice of nailing up vermin in a kind 
of revengeful merriment on some exposed place. Had the 
end come with the first strokes in the wounds, it would still 
have been an awful death. But the victim usually lingered 
two or three days, with the burning pain of the nails in his 
hands and feet, the torture of overcharged veins, and, 
worst of all, his intolerable thirst, constantly increasing. 
It was impossible to help moving the body so as to get re- 
lief from each new attitude of pain; yet every movement 
brought new and excruciating agony. 

194. But we gladly turn away from the awful sight, to 
think how by His strength of soul, His resignation, and 
His love, Jesus triumphed over the shame, the cruelty, and 
horror of it; and how, as the sunset with its crimson glory 
makes even the putrid pool burn like a shield of gold and 
drenches with brilliance the vilest object held up against 
its beams, He converted the symbol of slavery and wicked- 
ness into a symbol for whatever is most pure and glorious 
in the world. The head hung free in crucifixion, so that 
He was able not only to see what was going on beneath 
Him, but also to speak. He uttered seven sentences at in- 
tervals, which have been preserved to us. They are seven 
windows by which we can still look into His very mind and 
heart, and learn the impressions made on Him by what was 
happening. They show that He retained unimpaired the 
serenity and majesty which had characterized Him through- 
out His trial, and exhibited in their fullest exercise all the 
qualities which had already made His character illustrious. 
He triumphed over His sufferings not by the cold severity 
of a Stoic, but by self-forgettinjr love. When He was 



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144 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

fainting beneath the burden of the cross in the Via Dolo- 
rosa, He forgot His fatigue in His anxiety for the daughters 
of Jerusalem and their children. When they were nailhig 
Him to the tree, He was absorbed in a prayer for His mur- 
derers. He quenched the pain of the first hours of cruci- 
fixion by His interest in the penitent thief and His care to 
provide a new home for His mother. He never was more 
completely Himself — the absolutely unselfish Worker for 
others. 

195. It was, indeed, only through His love that He 
could be deeply wounded. His physical sufferings, though 
intense and prolonged, were not greater than have been 
borne by many other sufferers, unless the exquisiteness of 
His bodily organism may have heightened them to a degree 
which to other men is inconceivable. He did not linger 
more than five hours — a space of time so much briefer 
than usual, that the soldiers, who were about to break His 
legs,, were surprised to find Him already dead. His worst 
sufferings were those of the mind. He whose very life 
was love, who thirsted for love as the hart pants for the 
water-brooks, was encircled with a sea of hatred and of 
dark, bitter, hellish passion, that surged round Him and 
flung up its waves about His cross. His soul was spotlessly 
pure; holiness was its very life; but sin pressed itself 
against it, endeavoring to force upon it its loathsome con- 
tact, from which it shrank through every fiber. The mem- 
bers of the Sanhedrim took the lead in venting on Him 
every possible expression of contempt and malicious hate, 
and the populace faithfully followed their example. These 
were the men He had loved and still loved with an unquench- 
able passion; and they insulted, crushed, and trampled on 
His love. Through their lips the Evil One reiterated again 
and again the temptation by which He had been all His 
l.fe assaulted, to save Himself and win the faith of the 



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THE END. 145 

nation by some display of supernatural power made for 
His own advantage. That seething mass of human beings, 
whose faces, distorted with passion, glared upon Him, was 
an epitome of the wickedness of the human race. His 
eyes had to look down on it, and its coarseness, its sadness, 
its dishonor of God, its exhibition of the shame of human 
nature were like a sheaf of spears gathered in His breast. 

196. There was a still more mysterious woe. Not only 
did the world's sin thus press itself on His loving and holy 
soul in those near Him; it came from afar, — from the past, 
the distant, and the future, — and met on Him. He was 
bearing the sin of the world; and the consuming fire of 
God's nature, which is the reverse side of the light of His 
holiness and love, flamed forth against Him, to scorch it 
away. So it pleased the Lord to put Him to grief, when He 
who knew no sin was made sin for us. 

197. These were the sufferings which made the cross 
appalling. After some two hours, He withdrew Himself 
completely from the outer world and turned His face to- 
wards the eternal world. At the same time a strange dark- 
ness overspread the land, and Jerusalem trembled beneath 
a cloud whose murky shadows looked like a gathering 
doom. Golgotha was well-nigh deserted. He hung long 
silent amidst the darkness without and the darkness within, 
till at length, out of the depths of an anguish which human 
thought will never fathom, there issued the cry, " My God, 
my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? " It was the moment ; 
when the soul of the Sufferer touched the very bottom of 
His misery. 

198. But the darkness passed from the landscape and 
the sun shone forth again. The spirit of Christ, too, 
emerged from its eclipse. With the strength of victory 
won in the final struggle, He cried, "It is finished!" and 
then, with perfect serenity, breathed out His life on a verse 

K 7 



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146 THE LIFE OP JESUS CHRIST. 

of a favorite psalm : " Father, into Thy hands I commend 
My spirit." 

199. The Resurrection and Ascension. — There never 
was an enterprise in the world which seemed more com- 
pletely at an end than did that of Jesus on the last Old 
Testament Sabbath. Christianity died with Christ, and 
was laid with Him in the sepulcher. It is true that when, 
looking back at this distance, we see the stone rolled to the 
mouth of the tomb, we experience little emotion; for we 
are in the secret of Providence and know what is going to 
happen. But when He was buried, there was not a single 
human being that believed He would ever rise again before 
the day of the world's doom. 

200. The Jewish authorities were thoroughly satisfied 
of this. Death ends all controversies, and it had settled 
the one between Him and them triumphantly in their favor. 
He had put Himself forward as their Messiah, but had 
scarcely any of the marks which they looked for in one 
with such claims. He had never received any important 
national recognition. His followers were few and uninflu- 
ential. His career had been short. He was in the grave. 
Nothing more was to be thought of Him. 

201 . The breakdown of the disciples had been complete. 
When He was arrested, " they all forsook Him and fled." 
Peter, indeed, followed Him to the high-priest's palace, but 
only to fall more ignominiously than the rest. John fol- 
lowed even to Golgotha, and may have hoped against hope 
that, at the very last moment, He might descend from the 
cross to ascend the Messianic throne. But even the last 
moment went by with nothing done. What remained for 
them but to return to their homes and their fishing as dis- 
appointed men, who would be twitted during the rest of 
their lives with the folly of following a pretender, and 



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THE BND. 147 

asked where the thrones were which He bad promised to 
seat them on? 

202. Jesus had, indeed, foretold His sufferings, death, 
and resurrection. But they never understood these say- 
ings; they forgot them or gave them an allegorical turn; 
and, when He was actually dead, these yielded them no 
comfort whatever. The women came to the sepulcher on 
the first Christian Sabbath, not to see it empty, but to em- 
balm His body for its long sleep. Mary ran to tell the dis- 
ciples, not that He was risen, but that the body had been 
taken away and laid she knew not where. When the 
women told the other disciples how He had met them, 
" their words seemed to them as idle tales and they be- 
lieved them not." Peter and John, as John himself informs 
us, " knew not the Scripture, that He should rise from the 
dead." Could anything be more pathetic than the words 
of the two travelers to Emmaus, " We trusted that it had 
been He which should have redeemed Israel?" When the 
disciples were met together, " they mourned and wept." 
There never were men more utterly disappointed and 
dispirited. 

203. But we can now be glad that they were so sad. 
They doubted that we might believe. For how is it to be 
accounted for, that in a few days afterwards these very men 
were full of confidence and joy, their faith in Jesus had 
revived, and the enterprise of Christianity was again in 
motion with a far vaster vitality than it had ever before 
possessed? They say the reason of this was that Jesus had 
risen, and they had seen Him. They tell us about their 
visits to the empty tomb, and how He appeared to Mary 
Magdalene, to the other women, to Peter, to the two on the 
way to Emmaus, to ten of them at once, to eleven of them 
at once, to James, to the five hundred, and so forth. Are 
these stories credible? They might not be, if they stood 



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148 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

alone. But the alleged resurrection of Christ was accom- 
panied by the indisputable resurrection of Christianity. 
And how is the latter to be accounted for except .by the 
former? It might, indeed, be said that Jesus had filled 
their minds with imperial dreams, which He failed to real- 
ize; and that, having once caught sight of so magnificent 
a'career, they were unable to return to their fishing-nets, 
and so invented this story, in order to carry on the scheme 
on their own account. Or it might be said that they only 
fancied they saw what they tell about the Risen One. But 
the remarkable thing is that, when they resumed their faith 
in Him, they were found to be no longer pursuing worldly 
ends, but intensely spiritual ones; they were no longer ex- 
pecting thrones, but persecution and death; yet they ad- 
dressed themselves to their new work with a breadth of 
intelligence, an ardor of devotion, and a faith in results 
which they had never shown before. As Christ rose from 
the dead in a transfigured body, so did Christianity. It 
had put off its carnality. What effected this change? 
They say it was the resurrection and the sight of the risen 
Christ. But their testimony is not the proof that He rose. 
The incontestable proof is the change itself, — the fact that 
suddenly they had become courageous, hopeful, believing, 
wise, possessed with noble and reasonable views of the 
world's future, and equipped with resources sufficient to 
found the Church, convert the world, and establish Chris- 
tianity in its purity among irien. Between the last Old 
Testament Sabbath and the time, a few weeks afterwards, 
when this stupendous change had undeniably taken place, 
some event must have intervened which can be regarded 
as a sufficient cause for so great an effect. The resurrec- 
tion alone answers the exigencies of the problem, and is 
therefore proved by a demonstration far more cogent than 
perhaps any testimony could be. It is a happy thing that 



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THE SNt>* 146 

this event is capable of such a proof; for, if Christ be not 
risen, our faith is vain; but if He be risen, then the whole 
of His miraculous life becomes credible, for this was the 
greatest of all the miracles; His divine mission is demon- 
strated, for it must have been God who raised Him up; 
and the most assuring glance which history affords is given 
into the realities of the eternal world. 

204. The risen Christ lingered on earth long enough 
fully to satisfy His adherents of the truth of His resurrec- 
tion. They were not easily convinced. The apostles 
treated the reports of the holy women with scornful 
incredulity; Thomas doubted the testimony of the other 
apostles; and some of the five hundred to whom He appeared 
on a Galilean mountain doubted their own eyesight, and 
only believed when they heard His voice. The loving 
patience with which He treated these doubters showed 
that, though His bodily appearance was somewhat changed, 
He was still the same in heart as ever. This was pathetic- 
ally shown too by the places which He visited in His glori- 
fied form. They were the old haunts where He had prayed 
and preached, labored and suffered, — the Galilean moun- 
tain, the well-beloved lake, the Mount of Olives, the village 
of Bethany, and, above all, Jerusalem, the fatal city which 
had murdered her own Son, but which He could not cease 
to love. 

205. Yet there were obvious indications that He be- 
longed no more to this lower world. There was a new 
reserve about His risen humanity. He forbade Mary to 
touch Him, when she would have kissed His feet. He 
appeared in the midst of His own with mysterious sudden- 
ness, and just as suddenly vanished out of sight. He was 
only now and then in their company, no longer according 
them the constant and familiar intercourse of former days. 
At length, at the end of forty days, when the purpose for 



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150 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHBIST. 

which He had lingered on earth was fully accomplished 
and the apostles were ready in the power of their new joy 
to bear to all nations the tidings of His life and work, His 
glorified humanity was received up into that world to which 
it rightfully belonged. 



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CONCLUSION. 

206. No life ends even for this world when the body by 
which it has for a little been made visible disappears from 
the face of the earth. It enters into the stream of the ever- 
swelling life of mankind, and continues to act there with 
its whole force for evermore. Indeed, the true magnitude 
of a human being can often only be measured by what this 
after-life shows him to have been. So it was with Christ. 
The modest narrative of the Gospels scarcely prepares us 
for the outburst of creative force which issued from His 
life when it appeared to have ended. His influence on the 
modern world is the evidence of how great He was; for 
there must have been in the cause as much as there is in 
the effect. It has overspread the life of man and caused 
it to blossom with the vigor of a spiritual spring. It has 
absorbed into itself all other influences, as a mighty river, 
pouring along the center of a continent, receives tributa- 
ries from a hundred hills. And its quality has been even 
more exceptional than its quantity. 

207. But the most important evidence of what He was, 
18 to be found neither in the general history of modern civ- 
ilization nor in the public history of the visible Church, but 
in the experiences of the succession of genuine believers, 
who with linked hands stretch back to touch Him through 
the Christian generations. The experience of myriads of 
souls, redeemed by Him from themselves and from the 
world, proves that history was cut in twain by the appear- 
ance of a Regenerator, who was not a mere link in the 
chain of common men, but One whom the race could not 
from its own resources have produced — the perfect Type, 
the Man of men. The experience of myriads of conscien- 

151 



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152 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHBIST. 

ces, the most sensitive to both the holiness of the Divine 
Being and their own sinfulness that the world has ever seen 
yet able to rejoice in a peace with God which has been 
found the most potent motive of a holy life, proves that in 
the midst of the ages there was wrought out an act of rec- 
onciliation by which sinful men may be made one with a 
holy God. The experience of myriads of minds, rendered 
blessed by the vision of a God who to the eye purified by 
the Word of Christ is so completely Light that in Him 
there is no darkness at all, proves that the final revelation 
of the Eternal to the world has been made by One who 
knew Him so well that fie could not Himself have been 
less than Divine. 

208. The life of Christ in history can not cease. His in- 
fluence waxes more and more; the dead nations are waiting 
till it reach them, and it is the hope of the earnest spirits 
that are bringing in the new earth. All discoveries of the 
modern world, every development of juster ideas, of highor' 
powers, of more exquisite feelings in mankind, are onKy 
new helps to interpret Him; and the lifting-up of life to 
the level of His ideas and character is the programme of 
the human race. 



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HINTS FOR TEACHERS AND QUESTIONS FOR 
PUPILS. 

It will be observed that what has been attempted in the 
foregoing pages has been to throw into prominence the 
great masses of our Lord's life, and point clearly out its 
hinge-events, details being as much as possible curtailed. 
These details are more popularly known than any other 
part of human knowledge; what most readers of the Gos- 
pels need is a scheme let down on the details, in whose 
divisions they will naturally arrange themselves, so that the 
life may present itself to the eye as a whole; and an en- 
deavor has here been made to supply this want. But in a 
Bible-class course extending beyond twelve or fifteen les- ' 
sons, more of the details might be introduced with advan- 
tage. There is therefore subjoined the outline of a more 
extended course, along with a few questions on the text 
intended to stimulate pupils to further thought and inquiry.* 

Preliminary. 

/. Characteristics of the Four Gospels. — Matthew — 
Hebrew thought and diction; well acquainted with Old 
Testament in the original; frequent quotations, "That it 
might be fulfilled; " aim to prove that Jesus was the Mes- 

•At a teacher's apparatus I would recommend— (1) Andrews' Bible Student's 
l£WM 0V Otm LORD, an unpretentious bat excellent book in which the apologetic diffi- 
culties lathe details of the life are treated with much candor and success; (2) Nean 
dor's Lite ot Christ (Bohn series), the best life, in my opinion, yet published, though 
sadly marred by too great concessions to the spirit of denial, which had reached its 
elimaz in Germany at the time when it was written; and (8) Ferrer's, Geikie's or Eden- 
helm's Lira, which will lend TiTidness to the teacher's remarks. These books, along 
with a good Commentary on the Gospels, a Harmony of the Gospels, and a Handbook 
of Bible Geography, are sufficient. Eugene Stock's Lessons on the Live or oua 
JjORD are familiar to Sabbath-school teachers, an i the whole ground is carefully f 
•nt U Scrymgeour's Lemons on the Lzte of Ohbist. 



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154 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

siah;" iC the kingdom w very prominent; methodical grdttp* 
ings and combinations ; group of parables, chaps. xiii., 
xxiv., xxv.; of miracles, chaps, viii., ix. Mark — Graphic 
and epic; supposed to be pupil of Peter, whose fiery spirit 
pervades his book; poetic objectivity and minuteness; de- 
tails as to the looks, and gestures of Jesus,, the amazement 
He created, etc.; aim to show how He proved Himself to 
be the Messianic King by a succession of astonishing 
deeds; stormful haste, " forthwith," *' immediately," and 
the like, very frequent. Luke — More of the trained his- 
torian than the other Evangelists; Hellenic grace of style; 
series of cameos; gives reasons of events ; philosophic ; 
psychological comments; Pauline spirit and universality; 
Christ not only for the Jews but for mankind; genealogy 
of Jesus trafeed back beyond Abraham. John — Supplies 
what the other Evangelists omitted; dwells specially on 
the work of Jesus in Judsea; His private interviews; His 
interior life; His most profound and mysterious sayings; 
lyric fervor, profundity, and sublimity of farewell dis- 
courses. (See Lange, Life of Christ, i. 243-285, and arti- 
cle by Professor Bruce in Catholic Presbyterian for July, 
W79.) 

2* When were our Gospels Written?— See Tischendorfts 
little pamphlet of this name (translation published b^ Lon- 
don Tract Society)] Lange, vol. i. or Weiss; Westcottf on 
The Study of the Gospels, Salmon's^ Weiss' or Dodd's Intro 
duction to the New Testament. It would probably be out 
of place in a Bible-class course to go at any length into this 
vexed and vast question. The most important point is the 
date* of John's Gospel; seeLuthardt, St. John the Author of 
the Fourth Gospel (Clark), or Watkin*' Modern Criticism Con- 
sidered in Relation to the Fourth Gospel.,* "The man who 
bides from himself what Christianity and the Christian re?* 
elation are takes.the parts of it to pieces, and persuade* 



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HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 155 

himself that without divine interposition he can account 
for all the pieces. Here is something from the Jews and 
something from the Greeks. Here are miracles that may 
be partly odd natural events, partly nervous impressions, 
and partly gradually growing legends. Here are books, of 
which we may say that this element was contributed by 
this party, and the other by that, and the general coloring 
by people who held partly of both. In such ways as these 
Christianity is taken down and spread over several 
centuries. But when your operation is done, the living 
whole draws itself together again, looks you in the face, 
refuses to be conceived in that manner, reclaims its 
scattered members from the other centuries back to 
the first, and re-asserts itself to be a great burst of co- 
herent life and light, centering in Christ. Just so you 
might take to pieces a living tissue, and say there is 
here only so much nitrogen, carbon, lime, and so forth; 
but the energetic peculiarities of life going on before your 
eyes would refute you by the palpable presence of a mys- 
tery unaccounted for." (Principal Rainy, New College 
Inaugural Address, 1874.) 

3. Other Sources of the Life of Jesus. — References in 
Josephus, Tacitus, etc., of little moment except to show 
how small insight these observers had into the most im- 
portant event of their times. Jewish history and antiqui- 
ties explain the period. Ancient history exhibits "the full- 
ness of time." Geography of Palestine. 

4. The Annunciation. Prophecy of Baptist's birth. 
Visit of Mary to Elizabeth. Events connected with John's 
birth. 

1. For what reasons may the Life of Christ be regarded as the most 

interesting subject of human thought f 

2. Why are the first three Evangelists called the Synoptistst 

8. What is the meaning of the saying that the scenery of Palestine 
is the fifth Gospel f 



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156 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 



Chapteb I. 



Par. 1. On the exact date of the birth of Jesus, see the 
essays at the beginning of Andrews' Life. Luke's state- 
ment that the taxing took place " when Cyrenius was gov- 
ernor of Syria " used to be pointed to as a mistake, Cyre- 
nius having been governor ten years later; but the discov- 
ery that Cyrenius was twice governor (see Andrews, 3-6, 
70-73) is a remarkable instance of how alleged mistakes 
in the Gospels are often made to disappear by further 
inquiry. 

2. On the genealogies in Matthew and Luke, see An- 
drews, in loc. 

3. On Bethlehem, see Stanley, Sinai and Palestine. 

4. It has often been attempted to throw discredit on 
the story of our Lord's supernatural origin by comparing 
it to the heathen stories of how sons of the gods were born 
of mortal mothers; but, first, such an idea was utterly re- 
pugnant to the Jewish conception of God, and could not 
spring up on Jewish soil; and, secondly, even these stories, 
poured forth from the heathen mind, were indications of a 
deep sense in humanity of the need of the Incarnation. 

9. On the star, see Andrews and Pressense, in loc. 

10. The Herods of the Hew Testament — 1. Herod the 
Great, in whose reign Jesus was born, reigned over the 
whole of Palestine; died very soon after Jesus' birth; his 
kingdom was divided at his death among his sons. 2. 
Herod Antipas, son of the former, was at his father's death 
made tetrarch of Galilee and Persea; the murderer of the 
Baptist; Jesus was sent to him by Pilate. 3. Herod 
Agrippa I., grandson of Herod the Great, had as great 
dominions as he; put to death James, and imprisoned Peter; 



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HINTS AND QUESTION*. 157 

died miserably, as is related in Acts xii. 4. Herod Agrip- 
pa II., son of Agrippa I.; Paul appeared before him,Acts xxv. 

10, Archelaus was soon deposed from the throne of 
Judaea, which became a part of the Roman province of 
Syria. 

//. Farrar's chapter on the Youth of Jesus is particularly 
good, and Geikie and Edersheim have many interesting re- 
marks. 

12. See Aprocryphal Gospel^ in the Ante-Nicene Chris- 
tian Library. 

16. There are three opinions as to the brothers and 
sisters of Jesus: first, that they were His full brothers and 
sisters; secondly, that they were the children of Joseph by 
a former marriage; thirdly, that they were His cousins. 
The Greek word for " brethren " is used with such latitude 
as to cover all these meanings. See the note in Plumtre's 
Introduction to the Epistle of James. 

18. In Turpie's Old Testament in the New will be found 
much interesting information on the modes in which Christ 
and the Apostles quote the Old Testament Scriptures, 
showing where they adhere literally to the Hebrew text, 
wnere to the Septuagint, and where they deviate from both. 

20. When it is said at any point in His subsequent life 
that He retired to the mountain, 9 it is generally needless 
to enquire which mountain. It was any mountain which 
was accessible; there were few places in whose vicinity 
there was not mountainous land. 

9. To what extent must this star have been supernaturalt 
18. What portions of Scripture were most quoted by Jesus f What 
is the Septuagint t What indications are there that Jesus 
did not generally speak on the spur of the moment, but 
thought His discourses carefully out beforehand t 
22. What views has Milton expressed on this subject in "Paradise 
Regained? and what is their value? 



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158 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 



Chapter II. 



On the subjects treated in the first half of this chapter, 
the first 100 pages of Reuss' Christian Theology in the 
Apostolic Age will be found full of light. 

27. It would be useful here to give a sketch of the 
history of the interval between the Old and New Testament 
histories, of which so little is popularly known. See 
Ewald's History of Israel, vol. v., or Stanley's Jewish 
Church, vol. iii., or Skinner's Historical connection between 
the Old and New Testaments. On the various modes in 
which Rome ruled subject territories, see Ramsay's Roman 
Antiquities, pp. 131 ff. 

28. Synagogue arrangements, Farrar, i. 221 ff. The 
ritual of Presbyterian churches is a close imitation of that 
of the synagogue, whereas Catholic ritual imitates that of 
the temple. See Dods' JPresbyterianism older than Chris- 
tianity. 

30, 31. On the Pharisees, see Mozley's remarkable dis- 
course in his University Sermons. Farrar, i., chap, xxxi., 
will supply useful illustration of what is said in the text in 
regard to the Scribes. A fund of information on these 
paragraphs in Hausrath's New Testament Times. 

35. A somewhat lengthened lesson might here be intro- 
duced on the old Testament prophecies and types. See 
Fairbairn's Prophecy and Typology. 

45. John the Baptist, excellent subject for class essay. 

49. Owen has a remarkable chapter on this subject in 
his work on the Holy Spirit (Book II. chap, iv.) 

50. Potuit non peccare, or Non potuit peccare ? "Oil- 
man, Sinlessness of Jesus, and Christian Instructor for 
1830, pp. 1-96, and 118-224. 

51. The official significance of the Temptation is ex- 



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HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 159 

plained in the tey*: but it would be well to give also its 
personal significance lor the character of Jesus and His 
relation to His Father. Temptation to unbelief, presump- 
t»c *, and pride. Trench, Gospel Studies, 

53. On the plan of Jesus, see Neander, in loc. 

26. What are the Apocrypha t 

81, 32. Give parallels from the history of Christianity. 

33. Compare the aspects of society in our country at present with 

those of Palestine in the time of Christ. 
86. Give the names of persons who are said to have been waiting for 

the Messiah, and compile from the Song of Mary and else* 

where an outline of what ttieir expectations were. 
88. Compile from scattered references in the Gospels an outline of 

the conception which the scribes and the populace entertained 

of the Messiah and His era. 

41. Give instances of men who have achieved a great life-work in a 

short time and died young. 

42. It has been maintained that Jesus changed His plan, because He 

first addressed Himself to the Jewish nation as a whole, but 
afterwards organized the Christian Church from the nucleus 
of a few disciples. What would you say in answer to such a 
view ? 

45. What was the difference between John's baptism and Christian 

baptism? 

46. Some tfiink that Jesus and John had met before : is it likely? 

On what grounds may it be supposed that the dove and the 
voice from heaven were perceived only by Jesus and the Bap- 
tist? 

49. Collect the texts which speak of the influence of the Holy Ghost 
on the human nature of Jesus. 

58. Narrate Milton's account of the Temptation in "Paradise Re- 
gained." 

Divisions of the Ministry. 

What Andrews says on this subject, p. 109, is very 
fcocd and clear, and so are his characterizations of the dif- 
ferent periods, pp. 120, 167-173, 259, 296-301. 

54. Sketch of the Geography of Palestine. See Stanley, 



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160 



THE LIFE OF JB8US CHRIST. 



Sinai and Palestine; Thompson, The Zand and the Book ; 
Henderson's Palestine; brief sketch in Farrar, p. 52 ff. 



Chapter III. 

59. There were two cleansings of the temple, the one 
at the beginning and the other at the close of the ministry. 
Such double accounts of similar events in the Gospels 
have been seized upon as examples of the tendency in 
speech to multiply one event into two. But it is forgotten 
that this is a tendency not only of speech but of action, 
and that when a person has done anything once, there is a 
likelihood that he will do it again. 

The Great Feasts. — 1. The Passover, held in April, just 
before the harvest began. 2. Pentecost, held fifty days 
after the Passover, at the conclusion of the corn harvest 
and before the vintage. 3. The Feast of Tabernacles, held 
in autumn after all the fruits had been gathered in. 4. The 
Feast of Dedication, which Jesus once attended, took 
place in December. 

57. Collect the sayings of John about Jesus, and of Jesus about 
John. 



Chapter IV. 

On Galilee, see Farrar, i. chap. xii. Neander's account 
of the means of Jesus is very valuable. For the convenience 
of teachers who may wish to follow out in detail the inci- 
dents of each period, the following list of the events of 
this year may be given (see Andrews, pp. 198 ff. and 536): 



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HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 161 

Second call of Peter, Andrew, James, and John. 
Busy Sabbath: preaches in synagogue of Capernaum and 
cures demoniac; heals Peter's mother-in-law, and cures 
many after sunset 
Next morning goes to mountain to pray, then sets out on 
* preaching tour in the neighboring towns, in one of. which 

He cures a leper. 
Returns to Capernaum ; heals man " borne of four," forgiving 
his sins; accused of blasphemy; walks by seaside and 
teaches; calls Matthew; accused as Sabbath-breaker for 
allowing His disciples to pluck ears of corn and for heal- 
ing withered hand on Sabbath. 
Retires to a mountain ; calls the Twelve ; delivers the Sermon 

on the Mount. 
Again in Capernaum ; heals centurion's servant. 
Another preaching tour ; raises widow's son at Nain ; receives 
message from Baptist and delivers panegyric on him; 
dines with Simon the Pharisee, and is anointed by the 
woman who was a sinner; parable of Two Debtors. 
In Capernaum again ; casts out dumb devil ; visited by His 

mother and brethren; teaches from ship. 
Crossing the lake, He stills a tempest; cures demoniacs in 

country of Gadarenes. 
Back in Capernaum ; Matthew's feast ; raises J aims' daughter 

and cures woman with issue of blood. 
On another tour of the Galilean towns He revisits Nazareth ; 
sends forth the Twelve; hears of Baptist's murder. 
76. Some of the many questions in reference to the 
possibility and the proof of miracles would naturally, in an 
extended course, be treated here; see Mozley on Miracles. 
There can not, J think, be reasonable doubt that our Lord 
gave His sanction to the view that the demoniacs were 
actually possessed by evil spirits. 

70. The acknowledgment that the Baptist wrought no 
miracles is a strong point against the mythical theory. If 
it was natural for that age, as this theory asserts, to sur- 
round persons who had impressed its imagination with a 
halo of miracle, why were not miracles attributed to ths 
R&ptist? Very few qre narrated eveft of P$uL 



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162 THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

80. Connection of the work of Christ with the fate of 
nature. 

88. Monographs on our Lord's miracles by Trench, 
Bruce, Laidlaw, Steinmeyer. 

84. On the teaching of Jesus many good remarks will 
be found in Harris' Great Teacher. On its parabolic form, 
Trench's introductory chapters in his Parables are good. 
A much fuller account of what Jesus taught than is given 
in the text would be very desirable in an extended cpurse, 
and might be gathered from the relative portions of any of 
the handbooks of New Testament Theology (Weiss, Reuss, 
van Oosterzee, Schmidt). Monographs on the subject arc 
Meyer's Le Christianume du \,.*fist> Bruce's Kingdom, of God 
and Wendt's Der A. :M der Lehre Jem. On the Parables of 
- our Lord there is a rich literature, e.g. Lisco, Trench, Ar- 
not, Bruce, Dods, Taylor, Goebel. 

92, 94, fOO, 109-113. It would be a useful exercise fo* 
the members of a class to illustrate these paragraphs by 
abundant quotations from the Gospels. 

98. See Candish's Cunningham Lectures on The King- 
dom of God. 

103. Christ's method of dealing with inquirers. 

105. On the apostate, see Bruce, Training of the 
Twelve. 

107. Sketches of the leading apostles. The difficulty 
about the choice of Judas is only a fragment of the larger 
difficulty of reconciling the foreknowledge of God and 
man's free will. 

109. For some of the remarks on the character of Jesus 
I am indebted to Keim, Geschichte Jesu. 

114. Ullmann's Sinlessness of Jesus. 

115. Here the two names by which Jesus called Him- 
self — Son of man and Son of God — should be explained. 



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HINTS AND QUESTION!* 163 

See Beysehlag's Christologie, Stanton's Jewish Messiah, or 
BaJdensperger's Sclbstbeumsstsein Jesu; and an excellent 
article on the last two books by Rev. A. Halliday Douglas 
in The Theological Review, February 1889. 

76. Mention as many great and good men as you eon who ham been 

called mad. 

77. What reasons mag be suggested why Jesus sometimes used means 

and sometimes dispensed with them? 

79. What proof of the credibility of the gospel account of the mira- 

cles of Christ is afforded by the confession that John worked 
nonet 

80. Is it correct to speak of the miracles of Jesus as interruptions of 

the order of nature? 

81. What form of missionary effort seeks to imitate both the preach- 

ing and healing activity of Christ t 

82. Can the popular notions about the wicked life of Mary Magda- 

lene be proved from the Gospels to be incorrect t 

83. With what evidence would you support the statement that Jesus, 

though the Man of Sorrows, was yet the most joyful of ment 
86. What portions of the Old Testament specially justify this des- 
cription of the Oriental mind? 
89. Enumerate the parables of Jesus, and make a list of His other 
most remarkable figures of speech. 

96. How would you account for the great difference between the circle 

of Christ's ideas recorded by the Synoptists, and the circle of 
His ideas which we find in John? 

97. Which of the Evangelists uses the phrase, u the kingdom of 

heaven, 1 ' and what does it mean? 
108. Enumerate the private interviews of Jesus. 
108. What proof of their Master's supernatural greatness is affordeu 

by the character and achievements of the Twelve? 

114. What conclusions can you draw from the fact that Jesus was 

sinless ? 

115. Prove the divinity of Christ as fully as possible from the first 

thiree Evangelists, and show that it is a complete mistake to 
allege that it is taught only by the fourth of the Evangelists. 



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THUS LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 



Chapter V. 



Tiio events of this year were the following : — 

Leaving Capernaum, He crosses the lake; feeds five thousand; 
walks on the sea ; rescues sinking Peter. 

Again in Capernaum ; discourse on bread of life ; many dis- 
ciples forsake Him ; He says that Judas has a devil ; dis- 
cussion about eating bread with unwashen hands. 

Long journey to Tyre and Sidon, where He cures Syro-Phceni- 
cian woman's daughter; then to Decapolis, where He 
heals a deaf man and feeds four thousand; returns to 
Capernaum. 

Leaves it again ; cures blind man at Bethsaida; visits Ceesarea 
Philippi ; the great confession ; the Transfiguration ; cures 
demoniac boy ; announces His death. 

Again in Capernaum ; pays tribute. 

Visit to Jerusalem at Feast of Tabernacles; teaches in temple; 
attempt to arrest Him ; Nicodemus seeks justice for Him ; 
adulteress brought to Him ; heals blind man, who argues 
with rulers; parable of Good Shepherd. 

Final departure from Galilee. 

Journey towards Jerusalem ; John and James wish to rain 
fire on a Samaritan village; the Seventy sent ouf; journey 
through Peraa; parable of the Good Samaritan; the 
Lord's Prayer; dumb demoniac healed; encounters with 
Pharisees ; parable of Rich Fool ; %4 signs of the times ;" 
heals infirm woman ; warned against Herod. 

At Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem ; visit to Bethany; nearly 
stoned in the city. 

Retires to Bethabara; while at a feast in a Pharisee's house 
on the Sabbath, heals dropsical man, and speaks parable 
of Great Supper ; several parables directed against Phari 
sees. 

Raising of Lazarus. 

Retires to Ephraim; heals ten lepers; more parable* against 
the Pharisees; blesses children; the rich young man: 
Salome's request; Jericho— Bartimeeus, Zaccheus ; thence 
to Bethany. 



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HINTS AND. QUESTIONS. 16*) 

Luke gives by far the fullest account of the events of 
the period between the final departure from Galilee and 
the final arrival at Bethany, chaps, ix.-xix. 

124-128. It would be a good exercise for the pupils to 
collect texts from the Gospels illustrating these paragraphs. 

126. See Mackintosh's Christ and the Jewish Law. 

136. The effect of the Baptist's death on the adherents 
of Jesus is put in a very striking, perhaps exaggerated way 
n Philo-christus. 

143. At Feast of Tabernacles and Feast of Dedication. 

122. How far does conscientiousness justify conduct? Illustrate 
your answer by historical parallels to the conduct of the 
Pharisees. 

129. Can you show from the Old Testament that miracles were not 
necessarily evidences of a divine mission? 



Chapter VI. 

Details not referred to in the text :— 

Supper at Bethany and anointing of Jesus by Mary ; barren 

fig-tree cursed; second purging of temple; widow's 

N mites; several parables; details of parting meeting with 

the apostles ; the portents that accompanied His death j 

details of His burial ; restoration of Peter. 

145. The Passover took place this year on April 6th. 

146. The anachronism of using the days of the Chris- 
tian week will be condoned for the sake of clearness. 

152. I can not adopt the theory oF Judas' career ex- 
pounded in De Quincey's well-known and brilliant essay 
— that he thought Jesus too unworldly and hesitating, and 
prpoipit.-nrnl Him into a position in which He would ho 



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iijij lilK LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST. 

compelled to exhibit His divine glory, but with no. thought 
that He would suffer Himself to be executed. Its strong 
point is the suicide of Judas, which is held to have shown 
a kind of nobility in his nature. But it is inconsistent, I 
think, with his peculation and his kiss, and especially with 
the tone in which Scripture speaks of him. 

156. Here an acoount might be given of the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem, to be got from Josephus. 

160. On the difficult question whether it was the Pas- 
chal supper which Jesus ate with the apostles, and whether 
John places the crucifixion on the same day as the other 
Evangelists, see Andrews, 368 ff., and Farrar, Excursus x. ; 
also an article by Rev. G. Brown in tjjie British and For- 
eign Evangelical Review for October, 1879. 

169. The silence of Jesus. 

172. On the legal aspects of the trial, see articles by 
A. Taylor Innes, Advocate, in Contemporary Review, 
August and October, 1877. 

180. Herod was ultimately banished to GauL 

189. Pilate was also ultimately deprived of his position, 
and is said by Eusebius to have at length killed himself, 
" wearied with misfortunes." His wife, under the name of 
Claudia Procula, is included among the Catholic saints. 

193. The cross was probably of the form in which it is 
familiarly represented, though sometimes it was like the 
letter T or the letter X. It only raised the victim a foot or 
two above the ground. The soldier was able to reach the 
lips of Jesus with a hyssop-stalk. 

195. The circumstance that blood and water flowed from 
His pierced side has been held by eminent medical authori- 
ties to prove that Jesus died literally of a broken heart — 
broken with sorrow. See the opinions of Sir J. Y. Simp- 
son and others in the Appendix to Hanna's Last Day qf 
mi/r Lord's Passion. 



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\ 



HINTS AND QUESTIONS. 167 

199. With the argument of this section compare Paley, 
Evidences of Christianity, Part i. 

201. Details of Peter's fall. It was when passing from 
the committee- room, where He had been informally tried, 
to a barrack-room, where He was detained till the legal 
hour for opening the court arrived, that "Jesus turned and 
looked upon Peter." 

203. In some ways the most important appearance of 
all may have been that to His own brother James. On its 
results and their apologetic value, see Imago Christi, p. 50. 

144. Quote a passage from Acts to show from Jiow many different 

countries the scattered Jews gathered to the annual f east. 
147. The meaning of Hosanna and of Hallelujah ? 
155. Who were the persons not of Abraham's seed with whom 

Jesus came in contact in the course of His ministry? 
163. Collect the texts in which the majesty of our LorcPs appear- 

~ ance is mentioned. 
181. In what points was the trial of Paul which resulted in his 

being sent to Rome similar to that of Jesus ? 
194. What were the seven last sentences of Jesus t 
203. What is the meaning of the remark^ that the Christian 

Church is the best biography of Christ? 

'"? 21921 



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FQUR COURSES OF 
STUDY IN THE** 
ENGLISH BIBLE** 



1. SUPPLEMENTAL BIBLE 8TUDIE9 

2. BIBLE STUDY BY BOOKS 

3. BIBLE STUDY BY PERIODS 

4. BIBLE STUDY BY DOCTRINES 



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THE PLAN OF THESE 
STUDIES 



There have been many calls for short and comprehensive 
courses of study in the English Bible, which should be more 
than mere outlines and set forth the facts about the subjects 
discussed in a concise, realistic and systematic way. 

The purpose of this scholarly yet popular series is to meet 
this want and to make plain to every reader the contents of 
the Bible. The lessons are carefully constructed, brief and 
to the point; in three of the courses questions are added for 
class work. 

THB FIRST COURSE OP STUDY is upon the Structure, 
< Geography, Historv and Times of the Bible. The foun- 
dation is here laid for a more intimate and intelligent 
knowledge of the Scriptures. If a lesson a week is taken 
the course can be completed in six months. 

THB SECOND COURSE OP STUDY deals with the books of 
the Bible.their plan and purpose. A grasp of the analysis 
and contents ofeach book is essential to a knowledge of 
the spiritual truth contained in it. By judiciously coup- 
ling together certain books there are just fifty-two lessons, 
one for each week of the year. 

THB THIRD COURSE OP STUDY shows the general plan in 
the Bible and the six great divisions into which it may be 
divided. The student here sees that the Bible is one book 
revealing God's truth through many books. This is a six 
month's course, although a longer time may be spent 
upon it. 

THB FOURTH COURSE OP STUDY takes up the great es- 
sential doctrines of the Bible upon which Christians of 
the Protestant faith are united. We have here a brief 
course in Biblical theology. 



THESE STUDIES ARE EXTENSIVELY USED in Normal 
and Advanced Bible Classes, Colleges, Schools.Teachers' 
Meetings, the Young Men's Christian Associations, and 
for private study. 

AS TEXT BOOKS they have passed the' experimental stage 
and have received the endorsement of the leading denomi- 
national papers and the approval of the foremost Bible 
students and workers. 

AS REFERENCE WORKS under all lesson systems they are 
found to be very useful. 

CLASSES may be formed and begin to study at any time. 
Each course is complete in itself and if desired may be 
taken out of the order given here. 



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FIRST OOUR3E 



Supplemental Bible Studies 

By REV. HENRY T. SELL, A. M. 



Sixteenth Thousand* Revised and Enlarged 

24 CHAPTERS 

i. The Making of the Bible. 

2. How we got our English Bible. 

3. Why wetelieve the Bible. 

4. The Land of the Old Testament (with map), 
j. Order o! Events in the Old Testament. 

0. Why Jewish History is of Interest to us. 

7. The Institutions of the Bible. 

8. The Old Testament a necessary Preparation for Christ. 

9. The Land of the New Testament (with map). 

10. Why Four Gospels? 

11. Order of Events in the Life of Christ (with map). 

12. Order of Events in the Acts and Epistles. 

13. Condition of the World at the time of Christ. 

14. Characteristics of Christ's Teachings—The Miracles. 

15. Characteristics of Christ's Teachings— Discourses and 

Parables. 

16. Christ in the Home, State, Society and Church. 

17. The Effect of Christ's Teaching upon the Disciples. 

18. The Effect of Christ's Teaching upon the Jewish and 

Roman Nations. 

19. Christ and His Methods in Contrast with those of other 

Reformers. 

20. Characteristics of the Preaching of the Apostles. 

21. The Primitive Church. 

22. Christian Life as Revealed in the Catacombs of Rome. 

23. Reasons why we Believe Christ to be Divine. 

24. Reasons why the Christian Religion is fitted for all Peo- 

ples 



The Book Meets the Demand for a short and comprehensive 
course of study upon the Structure, Geography, History, 
Institutions and Times of the Bible. There are twenty 
four lessons, five maps, and a blackboard outline for every 
lesson. 



\6Q Pages, J2mo, 
Price*— Cloth, 50c* net; Paper* 25c* net 



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3EOOND OOURSE 



Bible Study by Books 

By REV. HENRY T. SELL, A. M. 



Sixth Thousand 

52 CHAPTERS, EMBRACING THE 66 BOOKS 
IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT 

An abridged Analysis of the first five Chapters is here given 

i. OBNBSIS: The Book of Beginnings. Origin of the 
World, Man, Sin, Salvation. Revelations of God asCre- 
ator,Preserver, Lawgiver, Judge and Merciful Sovereign. 
Principal Persons, Leading Events, Purpose, Plan, Re- 
ligious and Scientific Value. Analysis: The Ten Divi- 
sions. 

a. , BXODUS: The /taking of ■ Nation. Contents, Purpose- 

• Scope, the Two Great Divisions, Narrative and Legis, 

lative, the Moral, Ceremonial and Civil Laws, Historical 

Value. Analysis: The Nation, I. Called, II. Constituted, 

HI. Consecrated. 

3. LEVITICUS: The Government of the Nation. Connec- 

tion of Leviticus with Exodus, Contents, Purpose, The 
Law of Sacrifices, The Form and Significance. Analysis- 
I. Fundamental Laws of Sacrifice, Purification and 
Atonement: II. The Law of Holiness; HI. The Com* 
mutation of Vows and Tithes. 

4. NUMBERS: The Training of the Nation. Contents. 

Relation to Leviticus, Object and Accomplishment of 
the object in the Training of the Nation, Advantages of 
the Desert Wandering, Manner of the Desert Life. 
Analysis: I. The Preparation at Sinai; II. The March, 
Sinai and Moab; III. The Victory, the Plain of Moab. 
8. DEUTERONOMY: The Review Book. Situation of the 
Tribes, Review of the Law and History of Israel, Neces- 
sity for this Review, Contents, Purpose. Analysis: The 
Three Addresses of Moses, I. Remembrance of God's 
Care; II. Exposition of the Law; HI. Renewal of the 
Covenant. 



This Series of Studies "Aims to set forth clearly the purpose 
contents and analysis of each book and to show its rela- 
tive place among the other books, especially its share in 
revealing divine truth." 

"It presents one of the best possible plans of Bible 
study,that of analysis and mastery of a book as a whole." 
This book has been translated into the Spanish language 



273 Pages, J2mo 
Pricet— Cloth, 60c net; Paper, 35c net 



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THIRD COURSE 



Bible Study by Periods 

By REV. HENRY T. SELL, A. M. 



A Series of Historical Bible Studies from Genesis 
to Revelation 



6 PERIODS, 24 CHAPTERS 



PERIODS 

I. 

IN THE 

BEGINNING 

II. 

THE 

THEOCRACY 

III. 

THE 

KINODOM 

IV. 

THE 

CAPT1VTY 

AND RETURN 

V. 

CHRIST 

ON EARTH 

VI. 
THE FIRST 
CHURCHES 



„ . CHAPTERS 

Creation. 

The Garden of Eden. 

The Flood. 

The Ancient World. 

Abraham and the Chosen People. 

Moses and the Exodus. 

Joshua and the Conquest. 

The Judges of Israel. 

The Rise of the Kingdom. 

The Glory of the Kingdom. 

Division and Fall of the Kingdom. 

Prophets of the Kingdom. 

The Captivity. 

The Return from Exile. 

Prophets of the Exile and Return. 

Malachi to Christ. 

The Advent of the Messiah. 

The Life of Christ on Earth. 

The Resurrection and Ascension. 

Supremacy of Christ. 

The Churches in the Acts. 

The Epistles of Paul. 

The General Epistles. 

The Message of John to the Churches. 



Although the Bible is composed of many books, and each 
book has a plan and purpose peculiar to itself, yet there is a 
general plan and purpose in the Bible to which the books are 
subordinate and of which they form parts; it is for the pur- 
pose of showing this general plan and its parts that this series 
of Studies is written. 

Special attention has been paid to illustrations and allu- 
sions from the history of other nations. or what may be called 
the political, the social and religious environment of the 
chosen people in Old and New Testament times. 



285 Pages, 12mo 
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FOURTH OOURSE 



Bible Study by Doctrines 

By REV. HENRY T. SELL, A. M. 



Second Edition 

24 CHAPTERS 

i. The Divine Plan. 

2. The Being of God. 

3. The Attributes of God. 

4. The Trinity. 

5. The Deity of Christ. 

6. The Holy Spirit. 

7. Creation. 

8. Providence. 

9. Origin and Nature of M an. 

10. The Law of God. 

11. Sin and its Consequences. 

12. The Covenants. 

13. The Threefold Office of Christ 

14. The Miracles of Christ. 
The Humiliation and Exaltation of Christ 
Faith. 
Regeneration. 

__. Justification. 

19. Sanctification. 

20. The Scriptures. 

21. Prayer. 

22. The Early Church. 

23. The Future State of the Soul. 

24. The Kingdom of God. 



IS: 



Brief Studies of Oreat Doctrines. The design of these 
lessons is to give a summary of the leading Bible doctrines. 
No attempt has been made to seek after new or novel con- 
structions of the subjects treated, or to emphasize points of 
difference, but rather to show upon how many fundamental 
things all Christians are united. The standard of authority 
is the Bible, and the final appeal is always to its pages. 



152 
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COMMENDATIONS 

Supplemental Bible Studies. 

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various summaries of Scripture history to be used as SUP 
PLEMENTAL LESSONS. It is in these latter directions 
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impetus in Sabbath School progress in America/'— Rev. F. 
N. Pbloubet, D. D. 

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*A class cpuld take up this book and spend a year upon 
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Bible Study by Books* 

"It aims to set forth clearly the purpose, contents and 
analysis of each book and to snow its relative place among 
the other books, especially its share in revealing divine truth. 
It should' meet with a hearty reception."— Sunday School 
Times. 

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"The instruction given in most classes is textual and sec- 
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the greatness of the thoughts of the Biblical authors can be 
seen and the grandeur of the plan of salvation realized and 
appreciated, in 'Bible Study by Books' an attempt is 
made along this line, to set forth in a plain way the contents, 
plan, purpose and analysis of each book and its relations to 
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roan. The marked excellence of this as one plan of Bible 
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other way can the contents and purpose of the Scriptures be 
so clearly and firmly fixed in mind. For the purpose of illus- 
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COMMENDATIONS 



Bibk Study by Doctrines 

"We believe that Bible students will find this a very valu- 
able work. Fresh thought and sound doctrine are put forth 
• in an attractive manner. The statements are clear-cut and as 
a text-book it is admirably arranged."— Christian Observer. 

"This is a bony book of biblical theology. It reads like 
telegraphic dispatches. ... Its valuable point lies in the fact 
that it summarizes the things believed by the church univer- 
sal."-^* Standard. 

"It seems to me that you have done an important service 
in presenting so clearly and succinctly the great Christian 
doctrines and showing how they are unfolded in the Bible. 
Your book will strengthen and clarify the convictions of many 
who consider themselves orthodox and will discover to others 
that they are more orthodox than they thought they were. I 
congratulate you on your success."— From a letter of Rev. 
A. E. Dunning, D. D., Editor The Congre rationalist. 

"It is a catechism and system of theology combined in 



popular 
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form. _I anticipate for it ajarge sale/'— Rbv. C. C. 



rbegan, D. D., Dist. Sec. A. B. C. F. M. 



Bible Study by Periods 

Has just been issued from the press and the indica- 
tions are that it will prove to be a popular book. The 
author has been at work upon it for two years and 
has made every effort to have it scholarly, accurate 
and spiritual. , 

"Such a general survey of the whole Bible is of supreme 
value, being fundamental, indeed, to any valuable study of a 

Rortion. Tne author's standpoint is judiciously conservative. 
[e aims to emphasize only facts which are beyond dispute, 
and in respect to matters where scholars disagree, he is at 
pains to mention the authorities for the conclusions advo- 
cated. His work will fill the earnest student with a desire to 
explore even more fully the fascinating vistas of biblical re- 
search, and thus meets one supreme requisite of such a 
manual. Bible classes will find it as helpful as the popular 
manuals which preceded it. The whole series is attractively 
printed and bound, although sold at so low a price."— Sun- 
day School Times. 

Sample Copies, T^ettirnabJe, Sent for Examination 



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