CHAPTER III.

HE IS TO BE GOD’S POWER IN WORKING SUCH RECOVERY.

IN ordinary cases where a work is undertaken, it signifies nothing more to say that the doer undertakes to be a power to that effect; for whatever is to be done, by action, supposes, of course, a power acting. But where there is something to be done, not by action, but by quality of being, or by the worth, and beauty, and divine greatness of a character, the action is nothing and the power to be effective thus, in simply being what it is, every thing. Therefore, when we say, and show that Christ is here to new-create, or regenerate, fallen character, it is not insignificant to add that he is here to be, or become, so great a power. For the new creation we speak of is not a work to be carried by any kind of doing, or efficient activity, or even by the fiat-force of omnipotence itself, but only by such higher kind of potency, as can do so great a thing, through our consent, and without infringing our liberty; do it, that is, Two kinds of power. by the felt quality of being, or holy impulsion of worth and beauty it embodies. How far it may be the way of the Holy Spirit to operate in the regeneration of character by action, or the doing method, we do not know; doubtless God will 169do for us by the force-principle all that may be done by it; but the force-principle is not related plainly to the doing of all which requires to be done in the matter of so great a change, unless it be in ways circuitous, and one remove distant from the will; for to operate this change, by any method that overrides, or even omits our concurrent choice, is not to change our character, but to demolish our personality. A great power then is wanted, which can pierce, and press, and draw, and sway, and, as it were, new crystalize the soul, which still is not any kind of force. And considering what the change is which the Scripture itself proposes, we even look to see some different, higher kind of power brought into the field, and magnified as the hope of our salvation. In Christ, accordingly, we find this higher power so magnified—a power that we may call the Moral Power of God. And the representation is that Christ, by his incarnate Christ in his sacrifice becomes the moral power of God. life and passion, becomes that higher kind of power—executing, in that manner, or by virtue of that kind of power, the internal new creation, for which, as was shown in the last chapter, he came into the world.

My present chapter, accordingly, will be occupied with the fact that Christ’s saving mission turns upon his having become such a power. And then my next will show how he becomes such a power in the facts of his personal history.

In pursuing the subject assigned, a first matter will 170be to distinguish accurately what we are to understand, by the supposed moral power.

Is it then that Christ is to be such a kind of power as we mean when we speak of example? Certainly not, His moral power is not the power of example. if we take the word example, in its most proper and common signification. An example, we conceive, is a model that we copy, and set ourselves, by our own will, to reproduce in ourselves. Many teachers have been rising up, in all the past ages, and propounding it as the true theory of the gospel, that Christ came forth to be a Redeemer, in the way of being an example. But no theory of the kind has ever been able, under the very meager and restricted word example, to get any show of general acceptance. For the truth is that we consciously want something better than a model to be copied; some vehicle of God to the soul, that is able to copy God into it. Something is wanted that shall go before and beget, in us, the disposition to copy an example.

Sometimes the example theory has been stated broadly enough to include the demonstration of the divine love in Christ’s life. Sometimes, Not by the revelation merely of God’s love. also, this demonstration of the divine love, apart from any thing said of example, has been put forward as the object of his mission; love being regarded as the sufficient reconciling power of God on human character. But no such view has ever gained a wide acceptance; not for the reason, I must think, that God’s love is not a great power on the feeling of mankind, or that, when it is revealed in 171Christ, it does not go far to make up the requisite power; but that consciously we need other and sturdier elements to produce impressions, equal to the change proposed in our spiritual transformation. Mere love, as we commonly conceive the word, suffers disrespect. We need somehow to feel that the love is a principled love, grounded in immovable convictions of right. There is no so very intense power in love, when descending even to the greatest possible sacrifice, if we are allowed to think of it as being only a mood of natural softness, or merely instinctive sympathy. Many animals will rush after one of their kind in distress, and pitch themselves into the toils of their captors, by mere sympathy of kind. To magnify love therefore, even the love of the cross, as being itself the new-creating power of God, would be a very great mistake, if the righteous rule of God is not somehow included. When Jesus in his sacrifice takes our lot upon his feeling, and goes even to the cross for us, we need also to conceive that he does this for the right, and because the everlasting word of righteousness commands him. Not all that belongs to this matter can be said as effectively here as it may be, when we come, in the Third Part, to consider the relations of the sacrifice to law. So much is added here only to fasten, or sufficiently affirm, the conviction, that no purely favoring, sympathetic kind of intervention, however self-sacrificing, can be any sufficient power on character to be a salvation.

By the moral power of God, or of Christ as the manifested reality of God, we understand, comprehensively 172the power of all God’s moral perfections, in one word, of his greatness. And by greatness we mean greatness The moral power of God is the greatness of God. of character; for there is no greatness in force, no greatness in quantity, or height, or antiquity of being, no greatness any where but in character. In this it is that so great moral power is conceived to be developed, in the self-devoting sacrifice of Christ’s life and death.

It would even be a kind of irreverence, not to assume that God is mightiest, and capable of doing the most difficult things, even as great men are, by his moral power. Alexander, for example, leads the tramp of force and victory across resisting empires, finally to be vanquished, in turn, by the fascinations of a woman, and to die, a second time vanquished by his appetites, in a fit of debauch. But those great souls of his countrymen who rose into power by their virtues, and died for their virtue’s sake, such as Aristides and Socrates—why they keep on vanquishing the world and binding it to the sway of their character, and will as long as it exists. The power of Napoleon is, in the same way, force; that of Washington, character. One is the terror of his time, and when his time is over, is no more any thing but a prodigy of force remembered. The other holds the spell of a morally great, ever-increasing name, felt by all rulers of men both good and bad, penetrating more and more resistlessly the revolutions, and laws, and legislations of all proudest empires, and newest commonwealths of the globe; more to be felt than now, just in proportion as the world grows older, and is 173more advanced in good. So also it is that God is doing always, and to do, what is most difficult and nearest to being impossible, not by his omnipotence, The greatest power of God. but by his great character and feeling. When he commands—“Let there be light”—and the new sprung day flashes athwart all orbs and skies, it is indeed a mighty and sublime power that he wields, but his great character in good, what he is, and loves to do, and is willing to suffer, as discovered in the incarnate mission of Jesus—how much vaster, and nobler, and more sovereign, is the power, new-creating all the fallen sentiments, affinities and choices of souls. It did not burst fiat-like on the world, six thousand years ago, and stop, but it flows out continuously, as a river of great sentiment, bathing men’s feeling as a power of life, raising their conceptions of good and of God, and dissolving their bad will into conscious affinity with His. Doing this from age to age, it will finally transform, we can easily believe, the general apostasy and corruption of mankind. Now that Christ came into the world to be this kind of power, was most evidently the impression that he had of himself. Thus it is to this very point that he is brought, in his remarkable discourse on re-generation, where he passes on to say—“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, Christ has this conception himself. even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” According to the analogy of the figure referred to, he is here, and is in fact to be lifted up, that he may be a quickening, 174healing power—“eternal life”—in men’s hearts. The representation is that he will be the regenerator of souls, not by action upon them, but by what he is to sight. There shall be that in him, that quality of good and glory, which, being fixedly beheld, shall go through all inmost distemper and subtilty of sin, as a power of immortal healing.

It comes to very nearly the same thing when he says—“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” The supposition is, we perceive, that he is going to the cross for men, and that by that powerful argument he will draw them, as by new-born affinities, away from their sin, to a lasting and fixed unity with his person.

We distinguish the same thing under a different version, where he gives it so expressly as the meaning of his errand, that he is come to be the king of truth, and sway men’s hearts by the truth-power of his life. “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” In a very important sense, he is to be the truth; for all that is most quickening in God’s feeling and beauty, all that is most powerful to sway the convictions and constrain the free allegiance of souls, is to be shown, not in his doctrine only, but more mightily far in his healing ministry and death of sorrow. And so he is to gain subjects for his kingdom, not so much by any direct doing in them, or action upon them, but by the sublime royalties of his character.

Beginning thus at the conception Christ has of himself we should naturally look to find expectations going before, and impressions of witnesses coming after, holding a perceptible agreement The ancient Scriptures have this conception of the Messiah. with him. Thus we have a picture given of his coming in the stately Messianic Psalm—“He shall come down, like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. In his days shall the righteous flourish, and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth. He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the rivers to the ends of the earth.” Being thus like rain, or like showers, he will quicken men’s hearts by absorption, as it were, of his fertilizing properties, and so take “dominion” from within.

So the famous vicarious prophecy of Isaiah is a prophecy, in fact, of power. He shall heal by the “stripes” of his patience. He shall even be a great conqueror—not by his prowess, but by his suffering death. “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death.” To the same general effect is the prophet’s word, when he writes—“Who is this that cometh from Edom, and with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel traveling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness mighty to save.” There is a mixture of suffering and power, crowding each the other, as it were, all through the picture. His apparel is “red” with stains of blood, and yet it is “glorious 176apparel.” He “treads the wine-press alone,” yet “travels in the greatness of his strength.” Finding “none to help or uphold,” he is none the less “mighty to save.” And what is the solution but that power is to be the fruit of his suffering?

It is generally understood that Ezekiel’s rill, flowing out from under the threshhold of the temple, widening into a river in its flow, and pouring on through desert regions, “healing the fishes,” and causing “every thing to live, where it cometh,” fringing also its border all the way with trees whose “fruit shall be for meat and leaf for medicine,” is a picture of that originally despised but ever increasing power, by which Christ will renovate and restore the world. It will be that kind of power which is at once silent and sovereign, moving by no shock, but only as health, when it creeps in after, and along the subtle paths of disease.

With these more ancient prophecies and expectations the contemporaneous impressions of John correspond. He announces a great king at hand, who shall be so transcendent in dignity, that he himself shall not be worthy even to untie his sandals—“He must increase, but I must decrease.” Some of the imagery he employs is energetic and almost violent; but when the Great Expected appears, what but this is the greeting he offers—“Behold the Lamb of God!”

In this manner we are prepared, when we come to the apostles and first preachers after Christ, to hear them break into expression, by some word more adequate and thought more definite. And therefore we are 177not surprised, when they put down their testimony, in the word power. And this we shall find is their impression of the gospel and of Christ as the His apostles coming after have the same. sum of it. They have other, more circuitous and tropical expressions, but when they come directly to the matter as it is, they say Power—“declared to be the Son of God with power”—“to us who are saved the power of God”—“the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”

Of these three several testimonies, the first is connected with the fact of the resurrection. “Declared to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead;” with which another expression corresponds; viz., “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection.” The impression is not that there is any such renewing power in Christ’s resurrection itself, but that in the fact of his resurrection comes out the real height of his person, and that so the moral wonder of his sacrifice is there, for the first time, discovered. Before in his death he was but a man, a defeated and prostrate man, covered with unutterable ignominy; but when he rises, the fact of some transcendent nature is discovered in him, and a great revision follows in the impressions had of his person. He becomes, at once, a wholly different being, whose life and death take, both, a wholly different meaning. In respect of the flesh, he was the seed of David; now he is the Son of God with power, according to the higher divine Spirit working in his person.

In the second passage cited, the preaching of the 178cross is the subject, and any kind of preaching, which undertakes to catch men by fine words, and tricks of philosophic subtilty, is deprecated, because it makes “the preaching of the cross of none effect.” All genuine effect, the apostle is showing, comes of the power of the cross itself. This to us who are saved is even the power of God; or, as he says again shortly after, unable to get away from the ruling thought of his ministry—“Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Again, in the third passage, the apostle is giving his deliberate account of the gospel, that which constitutes the essential meaning and operative value of the gift—“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” Therefore he was always sighing—“that the power of Christ may rest on me.” I know not how it is, but this word power appears to pass for nothing in common use, and the passage is apparently understood as if it read only—“the way of God unto salvation”—the understanding had of it being, that Christ has purchased forgiveness for us and made salvation possible and nothing more. Whereas it was the particular intent of the apostle to give his deliberate summation of the gospel in this very word power, and to magnify Christ in it, as being the new-creating life of God in souls—in that sense and no other a salvation. And if any one still doubts, whether he has any so stringent and decisive meaning in this word, imagining that he does not think, after all, of asserting any thing in that 179precise way, but only throws in the word for declamation’s sake, as a word of emphasis, or enhancement, it will be found that he uses the word again in a connection that shows him to be thinking specially of the moral efficacy of Christ, and also with a predicate of degree that fixes the meaning. For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness [saying, “Let there be light”] hath shined [with a like moral sovereignty] in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” [as if vessels of power in ourselves.] If he means, after all, to only magnify the gospel in a declamatory way by this word power, why does he fasten our attention down upon the degree of its efficacy by this predicate of “excellency?”

Thus far we appeal to Paul. Peter also expresses the same conception of the gospel, only less vigorously, when he says—“According as his divine power hath given us all things pertaining to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him [Christ] that hath called us by glory and virtue;” that is, by the manifested glory and excellence of his life. The English translation, “called us to glory and virtue” it is generally agreed is mistaken.

John again expresses the same thing in many ways, as when he says—“the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin;” or again when he says—“Ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins.” To cleanse us from all sin, to take it away, by 180force of what is manifested in him, is the same thing as to be the moral power which masters the soul’s inward disorder, and renews it in holiness of life.

I will not go on to multiply citations, but, lest it should seem that we are obliged to glean for them, I will simply say that this moral power of God in Christ bears The apostles make use of all most violent figures when they speak of it. such immense sway, in the feeling of all the New Testament writers, that they are continually seizing on this or that image, or fact of physical power in the world, to give their impression. Even the most forcefully violent and terrible images are laid hold of—any thing to represent the all-subduing, all- transforming, inwardly renewing, outwardly dominating, efficacy of Christ and the kingdom of God, revealed in his Messiahship.

They conceive him as a wondrously detergent power in souls, “washing and making white,” “cleansing from sin,” “purging the conscience.”

They conceive him going through the sick, disordered mind, even as some healing medicine, or miracle, goes through the hidden maladies of bodies, to search out and expel disease.

They call him a power of leaven, brought into the world to work; heaving in the general mass and willful stupor of it, till all is leavened.

They call him the day-star, because he heralds the mind’s day and the expulsion of its dreadful night; and the light, because the instant flash of that element strikes farthest into God’s physical empire, and changes most the face of it; and the sun, because the exhaustless heat 181of that central fire in the sky, has power to keep the planet in habitable order, and even to vivify the otherwise dead matter of it in processes of growth.

They call him Life itself, because the quickening spell of it, among the world’s dead atoms, carpets the ground with beauty and fills the air itself with hovering motion.

They conceive him as a fire that is already kindled, in the rubbish of the world’s prescriptive falsities and wrongs, whose burning nothing can stop.

His kingdom and the resistless moral power of his gospel, they resemble to lightning, darting from east to west, and flashing across all boundaries.

His word they compare to the swing of an earthquake, “shaking not the earth only but also heaven”—shaking down, that is, all stoutest fabrics of error and prescriptive wrong, and leaving nothing to stand, but that immortal truth and good that can not be shaken.¹⁶¹⁶The passage referred to (Heb. xii, 36-7) is commonly interpreted as relating to the second coming of Christ, and perhaps it is partly so used by the apostle, but the promise cited from Haggai (ii, 6) plainly relates to his first coming, in which view the things shaken are the old religion; those which remain and can not be shaken, the gospel.

They describe him in his cross as an immense, world-compelling attraction, moving such control in the once dead feelings and convictions of sin as will “draw all men unto him,” even as the whirlpool draws all drifting objects and even passing ships into its vortex.

He is even to be a chariot of thunder in the clouds—“coming in the clouds of heaven in power and great 182glory”—by that oriental sign of royal majesty, showing that the kingdom of God is come with power.

It is, in short, as if some new, great power had broken, or was breaking into the world, in the life and cross of Jesus, which all the known causations of the land, and sea, and air, and sky, can but feebly represent. The difficulty appears to be that no force-figures can be forcible enough, to express the wondrously divine, all-renovating, all-revolutionizing, moral power of God in the gospel of his Son.

I have only to add, as a considerable argument for the moral view of Christ and his sacrifice, in distinction The day of his coming coincides. from all others, that the time of his coming coincides with this only. Had he come, having it for his principal object to satisfy God’s justice and be substituted, in that manner, for the release of transgression, there appears to be no reason why he should have delayed his coming for so many ages. If the effect was to be on God, God was just as capable, at the very first, of feeling the worth of his sacrifice, as at any time afterward; and, if this was to be the salvation, why should the salvation be delayed? But if lie came to be the moral power of God on men, nothing is so difficult as the due development of any such moral power; because the capacity, or necessary receptivity for it, has itself to be prepared. Thus, if Christ had come to the monster age before the flood, when raw force was every thing, and moral greatness nothing, his death and passion, all the 183significance of his suffering and sacrifice, would have been lost, and probably would not even have been preserved in the remembrance of history. The world was too coarse, and too deep in the force-principle of violence, to apprehend a visitation so thoughtful and deep in the merit of character. There was no room or receptivity, as yet, for Christ in the world. A long drawn scheme of economy is previously needed, to prepare that receptivity; a drill of outward sacrifice and ceremony, a providential milling of captivities, deliverances, wars, plagues, and other public judgments; commemorated in hymns, interpreted and set home by the preaching of a prophet ministry; till finally there is a culture of mind, or of moral perception produced, that is sufficiently advanced, to receive the meaning of Christ in his sacrifice, and allow him to get an accepted place in the moral impressions of mankind. Conceiving, in this manner, that he came to be the moral power of God on character, there is good and sufficient reason for his delay. He came as soon as he could, or, as the Scripture says, “in the fullness of time;” came in fact, at the very earliest moment, when it was possible to get hold of history.

Indeed, so very slow is the world in getting ready for the due impression of what lies in moral power, that only a very partial opening to it is prepared even now. The world is still too coarse, too deep in sense and the force-principle, to feel, in any but a very small degree, the moral power of God in the Christian history. Slowly and sluggishly this higher sense is unfolding, 184but there is a perceptible advance, and we may anticipate the day, when there will be a sense opened wide enough for Christ, in his true power, to enter; thus to fill, and new-create in good, all souls that live. Then, and not till then, will it be known how grand a fact the moral power of God in the person of his Son may be.