CHAPTER IV.

HOW HE BECOMES SO GREAT A POWER.

IN his descent to the flesh, we might naturally expect that Christ would bring all deific perfections with him, and have them expressed in his person. And this, indeed, is true; but with the large qualification that they will be expressed only by degrees, and under conditions of time; that is, under such laws of expression as pertain to humanity. In one view, God is emptied of his perfections in becoming incarnate, and has them all to acquire and bring into evidence, by the same process of right living that obtains character and weight for men. Otherwise the incarnation would be no real fact. It must be with Christ as with men, and moral power, as we commonly use the term, among men, is the power that a man finally gets, by the courses and achievements of a great and worthy life, to impress and sway other men. The subject may be dead, or he may be still alive; his name awakens homage, inspires, becomes an argument in itself, by which opposition is concluded, or assent determined; all because of some great virtue, or victory, or championship of right and beneficence, accomplished in his life. It is a power cumulative in its very nature. Once the man had it 186not; as regards any such thing, he was virtually nobody. But the process of his life was such that Moral power is cumulative. power grew up with it, rolled up into volume and majesty, in the facts and doings of it. If he was a benefactor, like Howard, his name became a power, through the trains of good, led on by his works and sacrifices. If he was a saint, like Savonarola or George Fox, his inspirations obtained for him the homage due to God’s oracle. If he was a preacher, like Whitfield, the immense crowds, conquered by his words, prepared other and greater crowds, to be half-conquered even before he spoke. If he was a hero, proved by many righteous victories, his soldiers went to the fight, with victory perched on their banners beforehand. In all such examples, we perceive that moral power is a growth, and the result of a process. It is what a man once had not, but now has. It was not in his nature, as a child, or a youth, or even as a man; but it has been conquered, or obtained by the conduct of his life. We sometimes say that it is contributed by the admiration of men, but it is not contributed gratis; it is won by deeds and represented by facts.

And this, exactly, is what we are to understand by the moral power of God in the gospel of his Son. It Attribute power is different. is a new kind of power—the greatest and most sovereign power we know—which God undertakes to have by obtaining it, under the human laws and methods. Hence the incarnation. God had a certain kind of power before; viz., that which 187may be called attribute power. By attributes we mean what we attribute to God, when we think God, or unfold our idea of God as the Absolute Being. As being infinite and absolute, we ascribe to him certain attributes, or perfections. Such attributes, or perfections, are a kind of abstract excellence, such as we bring out, or generate, by our own intellectual refinements on the idea of God, to answer to our own intellectual demands. Still, as God is infinite, the perfections are distant. We hardly dare think them, if we could, into our finite molds. We almost reason them away. Thus God, we say, is omnipotent, therefore he will bring to pass exactly all that he desires; and does, in fact, desire nothing but what comes to pass. Again, God is eternally sovereign; therefore he regrets nothing, as we do; for what he wills he does. Again, God is omniscient, knowing every thing beforehand; therefore every thing is immovably fixed beforehand. Still again, God is infinitely happy; therefore he is impassible and can not suffer in feeling any way. Yet once more, God is immutably just; and must therefore have his justice satisfied by the necessary quantum of suffering. And so it turns out that, in making up an attribute power, we very nearly think away, or annihilate, all that creates an effective impress on our sentiment and character We make him great, but we also make him thin and cold. We feel him as a platitude, more than as a person. His great attributes became dry words; a kind of milky-way over our heads; vast enough in the matter of extension, but evanescently dim to our feeling.

This result had been mitigated, somewhat, by his works and word and Providence, before the coming of Christ. But the tendency still was to carry back all the more genial impressions thus unfolded, and merge them in the attribute-power, by which, as an unseen, infinite being, we had before contrived to think and to Christ incarnated to obtain moral power. measure his character. Till, finally, in the fullness of time, he is constrained to institute a new movement on the world, in the incarnation of his Son. The undertaking is to obtain, through him, and the facts and processes of his life, a new kind of power; viz., moral power; the same that is obtained by human conduct under human methods. It will be divine power still, only it will not be attribute power. That is the power of his idea. This new power is to be the power cumulative, gained by Him among men, as truly as they gain it with each other. Only it will turn out, in the end, to be the grandest, closest to feeling, most impressive, most soul-renovating, and spiritually sublime power that was ever obtained in this or any other world.

Hence that peculiar and continually recurring set of expressions in the New Testament which appear, in one form or another, to attribute so much to the name of Jesus. For if we can rightly distinguish between a name and a fame, if we can exclude the airy fictions of repute and coveted applause, conceiving that the name obtained by Jesus signifies the condensed reality of all that he is, no power will be so genuine, or vital, or so like a sun-rising on transgression.

There will, accordingly, be distinguished, more or less clearly, in all the varied uses referred to, some notion or associated impression of power; The “name” of Jesus is the power he obtains. as if there were embodied, somehow, in this name Jesus, a fund of universal soul-help; or as if, being in this name were the same as to be in a really divine element of good. This too, for the manifest reason, that the whole personal life-history of Jesus, all that he was, felt, suffered, and did, is gathered into it, and was originally designed to be, that he might be the new moral power of God. Thus, to glorify this name and make it such a power is seen to be God’s purpose from the first. Which purpose glimmers dimly in the direction, “they shall call his name Jesus;” for it is to be a saving name. And again it appears more visibly afterwards, when he answers the prayer of Jesus, “Father glorify [in me] thy name,” by a voice out of heaven, saying—“I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” And again, at a still later period, when his work is complete, and he gives it to his apostle to say, magnifying both the power and the name together—“showing us the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe, by setting him [in our mortal apprehension] above all principalities, and powers, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come.”

Christ, also, we can easily perceive, has a like impression of God’s purpose in his life; as when speaking of, or to, or before, his disciples, he says—“gathered in my name;” “ask in my name;” “cast out devils in 190my name;” “a chosen vessel in my name;” “I have manifested thy name.”

The apostles coming after are even more explicit, as we should expect them to be. They even dare to How the apostles do every thing in this name. speak of this great name as a name obtained—“Being made so much better in this name. than the angels, as he hath, for his heritage, obtained a more excellent name than they.” They are “baptized” in it. They are “justified in” it. They “do all for” it. They “are reproached for” it. They “teach in his name.” They “preach it boldly.” They promise salvation to such as “believe in it.” They “have life through” it. They work miracles and say, “by the name of Jesus this man is made whole.” Having it consciously upon them, in their inmost feeling, they “hold it fast,” and are “hated of all men for” it. Every one “that nameth it” they conceive must “depart from all iniquity.” And, last of all, they read this name “in the forehead” of the glorified. How could it be otherwise when God Himself comes into human life, and makes himself a name there, by human acts, in human molds of conduct, that represents even the pleroma of his divine perfections?

Accordingly when, Peter, another apostle, declares that “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we can be saved,” we shall not take the “name whereby” as a cold, theoretic, far-off method of reference, to some theologic matter of judicial satisfaction, but as meaning just what the language implies; viz., power—the power of God unto salvation. 191We only recognize in his language the fact, so abundantly testified in all the other terms referred to, that the incarnate ministry and life of Christ are designed of God, to obtain, and have, in fact, obtained a new moral power for the regeneration of lost men. What we say, at this point, is not theory but is constantly affirmed by the New Testament Scriptures.

Assuming, now, this view of Christ and his gospel, it remains to go forward and trace the process of his life; showing how, and by what methods, and stages, this grand, cumulative, power is rolled up into the requisite body and volume.

Of course, it will be understood, that Christ is not aiming directly at the. obtaining of such a name, or such a power of impression. He can not, How he obtains the name. of course, be ignorant of the result to be perfected thus in his life. Not even a man of ordinary intelligence will be ignorant of the respect and homage that must be obtained, by what is morally great and good in action. But that is not the motive for such action. It was not with Christ. As some great hero thinks of his country, when he takes the field to serve his country, so Christ thought of the world to be saved, when he came to save the world. He came with the lost world upon his feeling, gave himself to it in sacrifice, bore it in vicarious sacrifice, plead with it, suffered for it, made himself of no reputation, took upon him the form of a servant and a servant’s labor; whereupon God hath highly exalted him and given him a name 192that is above every name, a power that is itself salvation. The moral power obtained is a result and not any direct motive.

How then does it come?—let us see if we can trace the process. When the holy child is born, he has no Nothing in his name at the first. moral power at all. The halo which the painters show about his head is not there. He is simply the child of two very humble people, in a very mean provincial town. There was a good deal more circumstance and prospect in Washington’s infancy than in his; and yet the moral power of that little one’s name, George, had nothing of the ring that a great life and history will afterwards give it. Nor is it any thing if the name is called Immanuel; nobody will see any meaning in that, at present. The meaning itself is yet to be obtained.

There had been some remarkable prophecies over the child, not much regarded, of course, till afterwards. A few very pleasant facts are given concerning his childhood and youth, which will signify a great deal more, as recollections, than they do to present observation. His look and manner, as he grows up, are winning to every body. He is subject to his parents and a model of filial duty. His custom is to be always at the synagogue worship. On a certain occasion, when he is but twelve years old, he astonishes the doctors of the temple, by his wonderful questions; and there it is that he drops the remarkable intimation, specially noted by his mother, that he “must be about his Father’s business;” in which, as we can see, he already 193begins to be a little conscious of his great calling, which makes it all the more remarkable, that he still struggles on eighteen years longer, hurried by no forwardness, or impatience, till the full idea of his great ministry takes possession of his life. During this whole period, he confesses no sin, and, as far as we can judge, rectifies no mistake; and, if these negative facts had been noted by any body, as plainly they could not be, his piety would certainly have been seen to be of a most singular and even superhuman order.

On the whole, it does not appear that, previous to entering on his public ministry, when he was thirty years old, he has done any thing more The name is not obtained before his ministry. than to beautifully and exactly fulfill his duties. His name is good, true, lovely; but as far as possible from being a name above every name. A certain moral power is felt in him, of course, by those who are with him, but. what he is to be, in this respect, is, as yet, quite hidden from discovery.

But the time has now come for his great ministry to begin. The dim presentiment of his work, which he called his “Father’s business” opens into a definite, settled, consciousness of his call. As it were by the revelation of the Spirit, he clearly perceives what he is to do, and what to suffer; that he is to go down into the hell of the world’s corporate evil, to be wounded and galled by the world’s malice, and bear the burden of the world’s undoing as a charge upon his love; and so, by agonies of sacrifice, including a most bitter death, to reconcile men to God and establish the eternal kingdom 194of God in their hearts. The work attracts him, and yet his soul, or at least his natural human feeling, recoils. Smitten, as it were, by a kind of horror, he is hurried off into the wilderness, to wrestle with his temptations; groaning there alone, under the heavy load he is to bear, and bowing his reluctant humanity to the call, by the discipline of fasting. He comes out victorious, but as a victor spent. The angels of God recruit him by their tender and cheering ministry, and he goes to his work.

No man of the race, it is quite safe to say, ever went to the calling of his life against impediments of natural sensibility so appalling. Men do often make great and heroic sacrifices in a cause already undertaken, but he undertakes the forlornest, most appalling sacrifice, fully perceiving what it is to be beforehand. Men have the brave will raised in them afterwards, by the heat of encounter; he has his victory at the beginning, alone, in a desert, where only love and God, in the moods of silence, come to his aid. In this simple beginning of Christ, there is character enough to create a moral power never before conceived, never since realized. But it does not appear that even the facts of his temptation were made known, till some time after—when, or how, we can only guess. He goes into his work, therefore, as a merely common man, a Nazarene carpenter, respected for nothing, save as he compels respect by ]his works and his words.

Meantime John has been testifying, as a prophet, of another, who is to come, or is even now at hand, whose 195shoes even he is not worthy to untie, and by whom the kingdom of heaven is to be set up on earth. And this other, viz., Jesus, comes to him shortly after to be baptized; when he breaks out, in prophetic vision, as soon as he perceives him coming—“Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.” The consecrating dove lights upon him in his baptism, and a voice out of heaven declares—“This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” And yet even John is so little impressed, or so little believes in what he hears, shortly after, of his miracles and his doctrine, that he sends to inquire, as if he might still be only an ordinary man, possibly an impostor, “art thou he that should come, or look we for another?” As yet he has not made impression enough for God’s love and power by his ministry, beautiful and wonderful as it is, to even hold a prophet’s opinion of him up to the pitch of his own prophetic testimony!

But he goes on with his ministry for three years; traveling on foot, sleeping in desert places and upon the mountain tops, associating mostly with How the ministry goes on. the poor and humble, who have scarcely cultivation enough to yield him any fit return of sympathy, or even to be duly impressed by his miracles. The learned and select are alienated from him, partly for this reason. They deny his miracles, or they charge them openly to his conspiracy with devils.

His doctrine is wonderful to every body—what can be more wonderful than his sermon on the mount? The people were astonished and rightly; for there was 196never any such utterance in the world before. There was no learning, no cabalistic juggle in his words; he taught them “as one having authority and not as the scribes.” This kind of impression was always made by him, and the puzzle was that a man who had never learned—the son of a mean provincial, in a mean provincial town—could discourse with such intelligence, in a manner so nearly divine. A company of bailiffs sent out to arrest him, just before the close of his ministry, were as profoundly impressed by his manner and words as if the angel in the sun had spoken to them, and could only go back and report—“Never man spake like this man.” And yet it does not appear that Christ grew, at all, on the public sentiment, by means of his discourses. He only mystified, a little, the public feeling, and made himself a character about as much more suspicious and dangerous.

A few persons of a specially honest and fair temperament were so wrought upon, by his miracles, and manners, and words, as to feel the impression of some very strange, or even sacred power in his life; Mary and Martha, for example, and the centurion, and the two senators Nicodemus and Joseph, and probably all his apostles—not excluding even Pilate, who was evidently shaken out of all confidence, by the sense he had of some strange quality, in the manner and bearing of the victim he is compelled to sacrifice. And yet there was a certain wavering, probably, in all these minds, as if they could not imagine him, or guess, after all, how he might turn out. Their misgivings half took away what 197would have been their opinions. What they felt in him, therefore, was not so much a power as a possibility of power. Nothing was immovably fastened, save, perhaps, in the centurion, or the woman that came with her box of ointment, and, it may be, one or two other of his disciples. Great things have been done by him, wonderful beauties of feeling unfolded, and yet all these are felt dubiously under a kind of peradventure.

And the reason plainly enough is, that no point of view, as respects his person, has yet been attained to, that will verify the facts and impressions of his life. His friends think he is the Messiah, but they have only the faintest notions who the Messiah is, or is to be. His person is not conceived, and so it results that his doings make a seemingly rough compound of strange things, jumbled together in a kind of moral confusion that has really no right to be very impressive.

As we go back to inventory the matter of his life, we find some things that are wonderfully sublime, some that are deep in the spirit of wisdom, Sublime and wise, and so far impressive. some that repel and hold aloof, some that bear a grotesque look, some that are attractive and subduing to feeling as nothing else ever was, and some that even discourage confidence. The sublime things are such as these; the virtue that went out of him, when faith touched the hem of his garment; the raising of the widow’s son; the healing of the lepers; the voice out of heaven; the stilling of the sea; the transfiguration, and all the matter of his last discourses and prayer as given by John. In these 198facts the glory of deity and of heaven appears to be let into the world, and made visible in it. But they were witnessed only here and there, and, for the most part) by different classes of persons; creating rather mazes of’ wonder, than a settled feeling of homage and awe.

The wise things, such as indicated even a marvelous diplomatic talent, in the good sense of the term, were his answer to the Pharisees, who came to entangle him with the government—“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;” the confusion he brought upon the chief priests and elders, coming with a like artful design, when he answered their question—“By what authority,” by another question—“The baptism of John, whence was it;” his reply to the puzzle or catch of the Sadducees—“Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be,” by his Scripture citation and his inference from it—“I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob; God is not the God of the dead, but of the living;” and more than all by his fearfully impressive reserve, and the brief, but immensely significant intimations he gave to Pilate about his kingship, as the king of truth; taking, in fact, all courage out of the man, by the superstitious dread awakened in his feeling. No teacher, prophet, or champion of truth, ever evinced such complete insight of men, or was ever able to reduce them to utter confusion so easily, by his mastery of their motives and points of weakness. His profoundly artful enemies in fact, were all in sunlight before him.

The points in which he repelled and set aloof multitudes 199that came to be his clients and followers were such as these—he would not have a partisan, and as most men expect to be taken as partisans, Sometimes he repelled by his manner. when they adhere to another, they were chilled and could not long follow him; he offended their Jewish prejudices without scruple m the matter of the Sabbath, and also in the matter of their exclusive nationality by the declaration of a universal kingdom, where the men of all nations should come from the east, and the west, and the north, and the south, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; he turned the preposterous learning of the lawyers and scribes to derision; he galled the consciences of many who were righteous in the law, by his terrible exposures of their motives and their hearts; he made God fearfully great and holy by his doctrine of future punishment; his terms of discipleship were uninviting and severe—ye shall be baptized with my baptism, hated of all men for my name’s sake; take up your cross and follow me; if any man hate not father and mother yea and his own life also he can not be my disciple; resist not evil; consent to serve and suffer, even as the Son of man came to minister, and give his life a ransom for many. He made nothing of the popular favor, nothing of gaining or retaining friends, which, though it was one of the sublimities, even of his character, as regarded by us, was in fact only a continual offense to the men of his time.

Some few of the facts of his life bore a grotesque look, at the time, and could easily be turned to ridicule, 200as indeed they have been since. Thus when the woman is brought before him craftily, by her accusers, to Sometimes he was grotesque. obtain his judgment on her sin, he writes abstractedly on the ground, lifting himself up at length to shoot in his bolt—“let him that is without sin cast the first stone”—and then stooping down again to write on the ground as before. This would be ridiculed in a man, as a figure of mere hocus-pocus. And yet the mystery of the manner, the silence, the abstraction, roused the consciences of the accusers to such a degree, that they heard even terrible thunders within, and shortly drew off, one by one, and left him quite alone. No most eloquent sermon could have done as much. No stroke of natural eloquence was ever more impressive. We have also what some have called another grotesque figure in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Multitudes go forth to meet him, branches of palm-trees are thrown in his way, as if it were the day of his crowning, and the great concourse of the people and the children in the temple, after he arrives, fill the air, as it were by some outburst of inspiration, with the cry, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!” And yet he comes riding upon an ass! Neither does it raise at all the dignity of his figure, that he fulfills a prophecy; for that is probably not observed at the time. Besides a prophecy that requires the great Messiah to celebrate his triumph in such a figure puts inspiration itself under a ban of derision, till we are able to see as could not be seen till some time after, how 201this outward type represents a king riding into power among men, through a suffering and sadly humiliated life. What livery or mounting then will he most fitly take for his type, in such a procession? on what shall he ride, but on one of the humblest and least airy-gaited of the animals?

The facts, in which he drew on human feeling by the loving and subduing energy of his own, compose the staple, we may almost say, of his life. His tenderness. All his healings, raised in dignity by the manifestly divine power in which they are wrought, display such assiduity of kindness and devotion to the forlornest conditions and bitterest pains of a world under sin, as to make up a kind of gospel in the plane of bodily treatment; engaging most tenderly just those fallen sensibilities that must be engaged, and yet could not, by mere demonstrations of spiritual excellence. His union to the poor in their sad lot, and his beautiful tenderness to their wants and troubles, attract their personal sympathy and gratitude in the same manner. His call, “come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden”—it is as if heaven’s love to the world were going forth to its weary, sin-burdened millions, from a heart large enough to contain them all, and strong enough to give them rest. His love to little children takes the feeling, not of children, but of every body. His domestic, home-like feeling when with Mary and Martha, and his yet more intensely human sensibility, when he weeps and groans at the grave-side of their brother—what a spell of more than mortal majesty is there in 202his, “Lazarus, come forth,” answered by the bursting tomb and rising form of the man! How touching his delicacy, when, by loving anticipation, he calls those “friends,” who were not, and speaks of his death as a laying down of his life for his friends. What woman’s heart will not be drawn to him by his manner to Mary, when she comes to him with her box of ointment, and when he commends her, in her simple tribute of love, as he never did any other of mankind; telling her that her little gospel shall go down the ages with his, to be witnessed for a memorial of her. His “one of you shall betray me,” how sadly and tenderly is it spoken, bitter and dreadful as the charge it lays most certainly is. His whole farewell discourse and prayer, as given at large by John, full of the loftiest assumptions, and tenderest promises, and lowliest protestations of brotherhood—warm, and gentle, and strong, as inherent divinity should be—what greater, more subduing power of love, on a race broken loose from God, can we even imagine to be embodied in mortal words!

And yet, over against all these affecting and subduing demonstrations in his life, there were a great many Baffled expectation. things, we know, which, at the time, seemed even to discourage confidence in him. For example he was baffling always the expectations of his friends; they could hardly name an expectation, and they had abundance of them, which he did not forthwith take away, by the notification of some loss, or cross of dejection, which to them wore a look totally opposite to every feeling they had respecting the 203great Messiah. Not to multiply instances in which he tried their confidence by other methods, we pass directly to the two great closing facts of his life, his agony and crucifixion. His work is now done, and nothing remains, but to let others bring him to the murderous end they are planning to accomplish. His whole feeling is now loose upon him, respited by no occupation; and the dreadful burdens of concern for men, which his divine love, too strong for the body, rolls down upon him, press him, as it were, to the ground. He beholds the corporate curse, too, of the world’s evil and madness just ready to burst upon his person, and though he is not moved by fear, his pure innocence struggles heavily, with instinctive horror, before that retributive phrensy, which is going to baptize itself in his blood! No so grand mystery of divine feeling was ever before or after set before the gaze of mortals. But his friends are at no point of view, where they can even begin to conceive it. His person, his errand, his work, are as yet wholly beyond the reach even of their guesses. They have seen strange gleams of quality in him, they have been drawn, repelled, impressed, astounded and thoroughly posed by his mystery, and they only try to settle the whirl of their brain by calling him a great prophet, Messiah, the Christ, thinking him virtually always as a man. And now, in the agony, just after his triumphal entry into the city, when they look to see him rise and take on his kingship, he collapses in weakness, without any visible reason; falling on the ground, groaning, writhing, dripping in bloody sweat, 204like grapes in the wine-press, and calling on God and men for help, in meeting some unknown calamity that he does not name. It is as if he were just at the end of his pretensions, and struggling, as a convict might, under his impending doom. All heart is taken away from his disciples at once; their confidence in him is fatally broken; as we can plainly see in the fact that when he is arrested, an hour or two after, they forsake him utterly. Peter makes one or two wild slashes for him with his sword, and then he too is gone; only he will hang about the hall when the trial goes on, carefully denying his discipleship.

In this manner Jesus goes to his cross; and the manner of his trial and death, though supported with a His death takes away all confidence. transcendent dignity on his part, that makes him even the chief figure in the scene, are yet so thoroughly contemptuous and ignominious, that the poor disciples are obliged to confess to themselves, if not to others, that their much loved Messiah is now stamped as another exploded pretender! A great reaction begins however, to be visible in the minds of the multitude. As the Roman governor himself, before whom he was dragged to a mock trial for sedition, was quite shaken out of self-possession, by the dignity of his manner under the questioning—quailing visibly in the sense of a mysterious something in the man, justifying, equivocating, consenting, condemning, giving him up to his accusers, and washing his hands to be clear of the innocent blood—so in the death-scene of the cross, slave’s death though 205it be, in the outward ignominy of the form, the multitude grow serious, and drop out their jeers in awe of his felt majesty, and finally go home, at another swing of oscillation, smiting their breasts in dumb confession of their murderous crime. They had expected nothing of him, and, for just that reason, they are the more easily impressed by the strange power in him—under such ignominy, dying in such majesty. Not so with his disciples. They had expected every thing of him, and now that he is dead, every expectation is blasted. Even their profound respect, unwilling as they are to shake it off, and tenderly as they would fain cling to it still, is yet a really blasted confidence, now that he is dead under such ignominy. The two senators, Nicodemus and Joseph, come with their spices, revealing what impressions they have felt of his wonderful character, and daring now to show their respect just because he is dead. Finally, on the third day morning, it is rumored among the disciples that he is risen, but their soul is under such a weight of stupor that they can not believe it. And two of them we find trudging back homeward to Galilee, sad, and heavy-hearted, and weeping, as it were, in doleful refrain —“We thought it had been he that should have redeemed Israel!”

Where now is the power? We have been exploring a large field, hunting down along the whole course of Christ’s life, expecting, looking to see, The power is not yet. the great name rolled up into volume and majesty, but that any thing we have found should have 206power to new-create the moral sentiments and affinities of mankind, we can hardly believe. We have seen, between the infancy and the death, a great many strange things, and a great many lovely. Coruscations of glory have been shooting out, all along the remarkable history. But there have been severities, and repellences, and discouraging tokens, blended so continually with the story, and the end of it is so dark, if not weak, that we get no such densely compacted unity of impression, as belongs to a great moral power. We are put in a maze, or even a thrilling kind of mystery, but that all-the-while cumulative power and weight, that great name which is to be a gospel of life in men’s hearts, does not appear. And yet there is, it may be, a certain latent heat in the facts we have noted, that is finally to become sensible heat, or blaze into splendor. No life becomes a power, till we somehow get the clue of it. A great many human characters are very much of a riddle, till they come on to the crisis of fact, where their objects, and ends, and secret aims, are all discovered, and where the seeming faults and contrarieties, that were mysterious, get their solution—all to be approved in the admirable and wise unity that could not sooner appear.

Christ only differs here from such mysterious, peculiar men, in the fact that he dies before the clue is The resurrection is the crisis of his glory. given. It is only the resurrection and ascension back into glory, that bring us out the true point of understanding. Now his most extraordinary nature and mission, for the first time, come distinctly into thought. Now, since he 207has gone up visibly into heaven, we begin to understand what he meant, when he said, that he came down from heaven. We conceive him as the incarnate Word, and begin to look upon his glory, as the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. In him now there may be more than we saw, a greater name and power; for the righteousness and love of God are in him, and it puts a new face on his whole life, that he is here to save the world.

We begin back now at the point of his infancy and we follow him onward again, going over all the points we have named, but with results how different! Every thing falls into place, and every step onward is the unfolding of power. The wonderful authority becomes more wonderful; in the right of a superior nature to give it sanction, the severity becomes majesty; knowing who the teacher is, what before was truth brightens into a glorious wisdom; the soft-looking innocence of the life becomes a kind of general transfiguration; the agony, that seemed to be wanting in magnanimity, becomes the love-groan, as it were, of his mysterious nature; the crushing defeat of the death breaks into immortal victory. Whatever, in a word, seemed weak, distracted, contrarious, takes on a look of progressive order, and falls into chime, as a necessary factor in his divinely great character. And so the merely human beginning grows into what is more and more visibly superhuman, dying into boundlessness and glory, as the sun when it sets in the sea. The rising and the ascension put us on the revision, and helped us to conceive 208who he was; but now he is so great that the rising does not raise him any more, and the ascension does not glorify him.

When we conceive the glorification of Christ, and the completion of his great name, as a revision or revised How revisions of character affect our impressions. impression, to which we are incited by his resurrection and ascension, we are not without many illustrations. I send these sheets to the press, when our great nation is dissolving, as it were, in its tears of mourning, for the great and true Father whom the assassins of law and liberty have sent on his way to the grave. What now do we see in him, but all that is wisest, and most faithful, and worthiest of his perilous magistracy. A halo rests upon his character, and we find no longer any thing to blame, scarcely any thing not to admire, in the measures and counsels of his gloriously upright, impartial, passionless, undiscourageable rule. But we did not always see him in that figure. When, already three full years of his time were gone by, many of us were doubtful whether most to blame or to praise, and many who most wanted to praise, had well nigh lost their confidence in him, and even retained their respect with difficulty. But the successes he deserved began, at last, to come, and the merit of his rule to appear. We only doubted still whether wholly to approve and praise. A certain grotesqueness and over-simplicity, in spite of all our favoring judgments, kept off still the just impression of his dignity, and suffered us to only half believe. But the tragic close of his life added a new element, and 209brought on a second revision; setting him in a character only the more sublime, because it is original and quite unmatched in history. The great name now of Abraham Lincoln emerges complete, a power of blessing on mankind, and a bond of homage in the feeling of his country forever. Shall we not see, in this humbler and yet striking example, how it is that moral power, even the moral power of Christ, emerges finally and is crowned, only when the necessary point of revision is reached? So it is that Christ begins to be known as “the wisdom of God and the power”—“the power of God unto salvation.” This, too, is what an apostle means when he prays, that he may “know him, and the power of his resurrection.” It is not the omnipotent power that raised him, which he longs to know, but the heart-power, the power of his great name and glory, which began to be discovered and conceived, when he rose from the dead. And the same exactly is true of another famous passage, if only we had time to make out the interpretation, where he says—“And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.”

If then so great a power has been obtained by Christ, in the matter of his life, we shall expect, of course, to see it in effects on human life and character The power is proved by its effects. that correspond. And we have not far to go before we find them. A few weeks after, when the disciples are waiting to be endued with power from on high, even for the promised 210Spirit, who should take the things of Christ and show them unto men, convincing thus of sin, of righteousness, and a judgment to come, a new scene is suddenly opened in their assembly, by the arrival of the promise; whereupon the preaching of the great, hitherto unknown, gospel is inaugurated as a power on the world. The cloud that was on Peter’s mind is now taken away; his understanding is opened; and suddenly grasping the true meaning of his Master’s life and death, as a gospel of salvation for men, he begins to preach it. He goes over the outline of his Lord’s miracles and death, turning his discourse principally on the matter of the resurrection, and proclaiming him boldly, as the ascended king of the world. “Therefore being by the right of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.” And then he turns directly down upon the consciences of the assembly all the tremendous guilt of their crime in his crucifixion.—“Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified both Lord and Christ.”

The result was that thousands in the immense assembly, overwhelmed and utterly broken down, by the sense of their guilt, turned themselves, by faith, as the apostles exhorted, to the now ascended victim of their malice, for the remission of their sins. And how mightily are they changed! It is as if some irruption of heaven’s love had broken into them; as it verily has, in the person of the just now hated and murdered Nazarene. 211They appear to hardly know, as yet, what has befallen them. They are so happy in their dear, mysterious fellowship, that there are not hours enough in the day and the night for their enjoyment of it. The city converts sell their goods and possessions to feed the pilgrims on a longer stay, and they go on breaking bread, in open hospitality, from house to house, eating their meat with gladness, and praising God as they go.

This now is the power; first a convincing power, next a power of love begetting love —how great a power it is and is to be, we may perceive in these its first effects. By this power it was that the apostles and first Christians gained their rapid victories over the learning and philosophy, and finally the military empire of the heathen world. They went every where preaching Christ and his resurrection, testified every where the great name Jesus, saying—“there is none other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.”

And this name is a greater power now than it was then, and has a greater hold of the world. It penetrates more and more visibly our sentiments, The power increases still. opinions, laws, sciences, inventions, modes of commerce, modes of society, advancing, as it were, by the slow measured step of centuries, to a complete dominion over the race. So the power is working and so it will till it reigns. Not that Christ grows better, but that he is more and more competently apprehended, as he becomes more widely incarnated among men, and obtains a fitter representation to 212thought, in the thoughts, and works of his people. If in some particular century the gospel seems to suffer a wave of retrocession, it is only gathering power for an other great advance. Bad power dies, right power never. Prophecy, or no prophecy, such a Christ of God could not come into the world, without a certainty coming in his train, that all the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever.

I can not better close this exposition, than by citing a single passage of Scripture, that contains and sums up Glorious affirmation of the power. all we have been trying to show, in the briefest and most pregnant testimony possible, every syllable of which deserves to be profoundly meditated by itself—“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and, being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name that is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The historical exposition of the moral power of Christ, or of the process by which it is obtained, is now 213finished, and yet certain points of rational consequence remain to be suggested, which could not be crowded into the body of it, without creating an No dogmatic statement possible. appearance of distraction. The view of Christ’s mission, I have been trying to establish, excludes the possibility, it will be seen, of any dogmatic formula, in which it may be adequately stated. It is not a theorem, or form of thought, but a process, and the process includes all the facts of a life. It will also be seen how the apostle labors, in the passage just cited, even to condense an outline view of it into seven full verses of his epistle; in which also it is made sufficiently evident, that the Scriptures themselves do not know how to make up any formula of three or four lines, that will adequately express, in the manner of our theologians, the import of Christ’s reconciling work. That work, accurately speaking, consisted in exactly the whole life of Jesus; all that he said and did, and, to human impression, was, in the conditions through which he passed. No such life was ever written even of a man. Not even the gospels themselves are any thing more than brief outline records. And one of the writers distinctly intimates the impossibility of a complete narrative, because it would make the record too cumbersome to have any value—the world itself would scarcely contain the books. How then can any formula, or brief summation of words, be imagined to fitly represent the meaning of the life-work of Christ, when that meaning is exactly the power obtained by the life, and can be represented only 214by the facts, of which it is the character and expression.

Christ I just said is not a form of thought. He is no proposition. He is given, neither by nor to, logical The reality of Christ is what he expresses. definition. He is no quantitative matter, like a credit set in a book, or a punishment graduated by satisfaction. His reality is what he expresses, under laws of expression; the power, the great name, he thus obtains under forms of human conduct that make their address to reason, conviction, feeling, passion, sympathy, imagination, faith, and the receptivities generally of the moral nature. What rational person ever imagined that he could state, in a defined formula, the import of any great character; Moses, for example, Plato, Scipio, Washington. Hence the necessary poverty, and almost mockery, of all attempts to put the work of Christ in formula, or to dogmatize it in a proposition, or church article. The Iliad, or Paradise Lost could as well be formulized in that manner as his gospel. We can give the “Argument” of these, in so many headings for so many books; but the epic power will be wholly in the acts and incidents that fill the books, never in their “Argument.” So we can say of Christ’s work, and of the sublime art-mystery of his incarnate life, what is not absurd, what may even be of use—we do so when we call it God’s method of obtaining power over fallen character—still it must be left us to feel, that just nothing of the power, that is of the whole living truth, is in the account we have given. Nothing we can say of 215the power will appear to have much power in it; for nothing raises the true sense of that power, but just what he did, taken just as he did it. The most that can be hoped is, that, by what of dissertation we may indulge, the sense of his work and the facts by which his power is obtained, may be unlocked more easily.

In this manner, four points, in particular, may yet be made, in regard to the process and effect of his life, that will render the power of it still more intelligible, and so far more impressive.

1. That the kind of moral power obtained by Christ is different from any which had been obtained by men, more difficult, deeper, and holier. He No similar power among men. founds no school of philosophy, heads no revolution, fights no great battle, achieves no title to honor, such as the world’s great men have achieved. Men consciously feel, that a strong power is somehow gathering about his person, but will only know, by and by, what it is. It is the power, in great part, of sorrow, suffering, sacrifice, death, a paradox of ignominy and grandeur not easily solved. Honor, in the common sense of that term, can make nothing of it. Fame will not lift her airy trumpet, to publish it, and would only mock it if she did. If we call him a hero, as some are trying to do, then all other heroes appear to be scarcely more than mock heroes in the comparison.

There is no wrong or impropriety in calling Christ a hero, if we do not assume that, having found him in the class of heroes, we have thus accounted for his wonderful 216eminence, on the ground of his mere natural manhood. I believe that I have once or twice spoken, casually, of the heroic element in his life; and I In what sense Christ was a hero. have hesitated much, whether I should not present him more deliberately in this figure. The only reason why I should not is that, regarding him as the manifestation, or demonstration, of God, the honor I should claim for him might only seem to put him below the scale of divinity and not in it. And yet, in as far as he ranges in the scale, or under the conditions, of humanity, obtaining a name and a power under such conditions, it is even a gloriously divine token for him, that he so visibly, remarkably, immeasurably, transcends all known examples of heroism. Besides there is a very important matter to be gained by such a conception of his character. We conceive him in the travail of his suffering life and sacrifice, we magnify his tenderness and patience and submission to the cross, we call him the Lamb that is offered for our sin, and pressing wholly on this side of passivity, we are in no small danger of enfeebling the moral power he is obtaining by his life. Accordingly, to right the conception we get by such overdoing of his passive and submissive virtue, there is needed also some just reference to the energetic, and positive, and really grand heroism of his mission. For really there is nothing, in all the heroic characters, whether of history, or fiction, at all comparable to the sublime figure he maintains, in his very humble, or, as we might even say, dejected ministry.

He plainly does not think himself that he is in the passive key, even when he suffers most; but he calmly asserts the power he has to keep his life unharmed against all enemies—“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again.” Nothing compels him to die, but the grandly heroic motive supplied by his love to his enemies. All true martyrs we conceive to be God’s heroes; but what martyr ever bore witness to the truth, whose death had not some reference to the original, transcendent martyrdom of the Son of God? Heroes throw their life upon their cause, by inspiration from it; he had meat and drink and home for his houseless body, in the work he had taken upon him, and knowing that he must die for his cause, he could say “how am I straitened till it be accomplished.” Heroes are men who go above all the low resentments; he could even pray the prayer of pity and apology for his enemies, when dying under their hands. Great souls are not flurried and disconcerted by the irruption of great dangers; behold the solid majesty of this man’s silence, this provincial man, this country mechanic, when so many fierce accusations, by so many fierce conspirators in high life, are hurled against him. Heroes that die, and bear themselves nobly in the terrible hour of their conflict, are commonly caught without much warning, and are fortified by the tremendous excitement of the hour; Christ was facing death for at least three whole years, and waiting for his time to come; yet never weakened, or swerved, by the doom that he knew to be on 218him, but comforting his great mind constantly in the hope that, when he should be lifted up, he would draw all men to him. The great causes of heroes are commonly under the eye, and are more or less computable in their time; but Christ, the poor rustic of Nazareth, undertakes a cause and kingdom that comprehend the world, and require a run of time outreaching all definite computation, and shows not half the misgivings of the great heroes of the world, who expect their triumph and perhaps their meed of fame, within a few short years.. There was never, we may safely say, any such instance of self-devotion among men, never so little of heat or excitement, never such firmness coupled with such tenderness and gentleness, never such oblivion of popularity, never such incapacity to be humbled by ignominy. So that if we speak of heroes, we are tempted either to say that he is no hero at all, or else the only hero. And here it is that the moral power we have seen him obtaining culminates. In this fact, the almost feminine passivity we are likely to figure as the total account of his character, reveals the mighty underwork and robust vigor of a really immortal confidence and tenacity. The moral power he obtains, in a character of such transcendent heroism corresponds. We make no true account of it, till we take it as the supernatural flowering on earth, of a glory that he had before the world was.

The example most nearly correspondent, among men is that of Socrates, and yet the superficial, almost flashy merit of his power, heroic as he certainly was, is about 219the most striking result of a just comparison. There had been different opinions about Socrates before, and many scholars even now do not hesitate Socrates the nearest human example. to speak lightly of his coarse manners, and the general lightness and rudeness of his character. Be the truth what it may, in regard to these matters, there was certainly a remarkable dignity, and even sublimity in his death. Arraigned and sentenced to death unjustly, for a mere political offense, he refused, as a philosopher and good citizen, to save his life by an escape that would make him a violator of the laws of his country; and the Athenian people had been sufficiently exercised in political matters to appreciate the merit of such a sacrifice. A great popular reaction immediately followed, that overwhelmed his accusers, and made his name, forever after, one of the great powers of the world. A merely casual reaction followed the death of Christ, in the same manner, but it came to no practical issue, just because the sacrifice he made of his life was too deep in its heroic meaning to be practically valued, and too profoundly accusatory to awaken sympathy. He died for no ends of patriotic devotion, or even of moral reformation, as regards the social wrongs and destructive vices of the world, but for the state of sin itself and the recovery of souls to God—just that kind of benefaction which only a very few of mankind, such as Plato, for example, and like meditative teachers here and there, had once thought of as a want, or could even begin to conceive. To such a kind of sacrifice the 220world itself was a dead receptivity, and it was to be the glory of his power, that he could open a receptivity where there was none; that he could stir the consciousness of lost men deeply enough to make the state of sin a dread reality, and the want of reconciliation to God the prime necessity of their being. And just here lies the wonder of his power; that he opens such a sense of the holy and of men’s relations to a holy God, as to make his own public, where there was none, and create the very homage by which he is to be received; raising nature up to ask the supernatural, and join herself to it, in a faith that goes above all of this world’s honors, homages, and applauses.

2. It is a very great point, as regards the kind of power, Christ is obtaining, that he humanizes God to God humanized to us. men. I have already spoken of the necessary distance and coldness of a mere attribute power, such as we ourselves generate, when trying to think God as the Absolute Being. The incarnate life and history of Jesus meet us here, at the point of our weakness. God is in Christ, consenting to obtain the power, by which he will regain us to him. self, under our own human conditions. He is in our plane, acting with us and for us, interpreted to our sympathies by what he does and is, in social relationship with us. His perfections meet us in our own measures, not in the impossible measures of infinity; and so he becomes a world-king in the world, and not above it and far away from it. We know him, in just the same way as we know one another. He becomes the 221great Head Character in human history, by living in it Himself—such a kind of power, as being once in it, can never be gotten out of it, any more than if it were a new diffusive element in the world’s atmosphere. God is no more a theosophy, or mere phosphorescence of our human intelligence; no more a theophany, like those casual appearances of the Jehovah Angel in the old dispensation—all which left him a God more separate, in a sense, than before, as any such unveiling by mere phantasm must—but a God-human or God-man, born into our race itself, and even into a place in our human tables of genealogy. And since we are so deep in the senses, he contrives to meet us there, that we may hear, see with our eyes, look upon, handle him with our hands. Nay, he comes directly into our bodies themselves, by the healing of his inward touch, and occupies a great part of his ministry in works that take hold of our sympathy, by means of our diseases. No greater advance on human sensibility, we may fairly say, could possibly be made, than is in fact made, in this wonderful chapter of humanization, that contains the teachings, healings, tender condescensions, and sufferings, of the divine man Jesus. He builds up anew, so to speak, and before our eyes, in the open facts of his ministry, the divine perfections themselves, and the moral power he obtains in doing it is just what it must be; a name that is above every name.

3. It is another great article of his power, that he is able to raise, at once, the sense of guilt and attract the confidence of the guilty. By his purity of life, by the 222sublime reach of his very simple doctrine, by his terrible warnings and reproofs, by his persistent coupling of It both wakens guilt and draws confidence. disease, in all his healings, with sin, by the sorrows and the suffering patience of his life, by the bitter ignominy of his death, followed by the Spirit coming after his resurrection, to show the things of his life to men in their true light of meaning—by all these piercing demonstrations he stirs the conviction of guilt, as never it was stirred before, and yet with no such consequences of revulsion from God, as belongs to the natural action of guilt. The feeling of guilt, under mere natural conviction, is a feeling of recoil. The instinctive language of it is—“I was afraid and hid myself.” It shoves the soul off from God and then it pictures God as being withdrawn from it. A certain chill is felt when he is thought of, and the soul shivers in cold dread of his purity. But the incarnate Saviour, taking his place with us in our bad level, after the manner just described, stops the natural recoil of our guilt, and marries even our self-condemnation to confidence. Great as our guilt is, Christ, we see, can be our sponsor for all the wrong and damage of it. As the guilt kept him not away from us, so it shall not keep us away from him. Nay as it even drew him after us, shall it not also draw us after him? True we have sinned, our sin is upon us, and not even his forgiveness can ever annihilate the fact of our sin; but if he has come over it all to be the righteousness of God upon us, may we not come away from it, and be the righteousness of God in 223him? And so when the tough and sturdy fact of our guilt would thrust us quite away from God, Christ so far reverses every thing with us by the wonderful power of his ministry, that our guilt is even made to be the argument that draws us, and, as it were, fastens our confidence. It would almost seem to be a miracle, and yet the result is only a simple incident of that great moral power, by which he is able to reverse every thing in the fallen condition of our sin. We come now—

4. To another and last point, where the moral power obtained by Christ gets even its principal weight of impression; viz., to the fact made evident, The culminating fact is God’s affliction for sin. by his vicarious sacrifice, that God suffers on account of evil, or with and for created beings under evil—a fact very commonly disallowed and rejected, I am sorry to add, even by Christian theology itself, as being rationally irreconcilable with God’s greatness and sufficiency.

It was very natural that the coarse, crude mind of the world, blunted to greater coarseness and crudity by the chill of guilt in its feeling, should be overmuch occupied in conceiving God’s infinity and the merely dynamic energies and magnitudes of his nature; the sovereignty of his will, his omnipotent force, his necessary impassibility to force external to himself, his essential beatitude as excluding all inflictions of pain or loss. Hence it has been very generally held, even to this day, as a matter of necessary inference, that God is superior, in every sense, to suffering. Our theologians are commonly 224shocked, as by some frightful word of derogation, when the contrary is affirmed, and when they come to the matter of Christ’s suffering, they’ are careful to show, regarding it as a necessary point of reverence, that it was only the human nature that suffered, not the divine, suffering by itself. Besides, it will even be admitted, perhaps unwittingly, by those who dare to obtrude in this manner upon the interior mystery of Christ’s person, where all reasonings about the physical suffering must be at fault, that even God himself, as well out of Christ as in the incarnate person of Christ, does incur a profoundly real suffering—not physical suffering, as I now speak, yet a suffering more deep than any physical suffering can be.

The principal suffering of any really great being and especially of God is because of his moral sensibility, God’s perfections even require him to suffer. nay, because of his moral perfection. He would not be perfect, if he did not feel appropriately to what is bad, base, wrong, destructive, cruel, and to every thing opposite to perfection. If the sight of wrong were to meet the discovery of God, only as a disgusting spectacle meets a glass eye, his perfection would be the perfection of a glass eye and nothing more. None of us conceive Him in this manner, but we conceive him as having a right sensibility to every thing. We say that he is displeased, and what is displeasure but an experience opposite to pleasure? so far a kind of suffering. We say that he “loathes” all baseness and impurity, and what is closer to a pain than loathing? We say that he “hates” 225all unrighteousness, and what is hatred but a fire of suffering? Is he not a “long suffering” God, and is there no suffering in long suffering? Is he not a patient God, and what is patience but a regulated suffering? So of compassion, pity, sympathy, indignations suppressed, wounds of ingratitude, bonds of faith violated by treachery. So far we all admit the fact of divine suffering, no matter how sturdily we deny it in theory. The suffering is moral suffering it is true, but it is the greatest and most real suffering in the world—so great that a perfect being would be likely, under it, to quite forget physical suffering, even if it were upon him. Making then so vast an admission, what does it signify, afterward, to turn ourselves round, in what we conceive to be our logical sagacity, and raise the petty inference that God, being infinite, must be impassible!

But we must not omit, in this connection, to notice a fact, as regards the moral suffering of God, that is not commonly admitted, or even observed, God’s beatitude not diminished by the suffering of is love. like the others just referred to. Thus we conceive, that God is a being whose moral nature is pervaded and charactered, all through, by love. Some teachers even go so far as to insist that the Scripture declaration—“God is love”—is no rhetorical figure, but a logical and literal teaching; that God’s very substance, or essence, is love. And yet love is an element, or principle, whether substance or not, so essentially vicarious, that it even mortgages the subject to suffering, in all cases where there is no ground of complacency. 226As certainly as God is love, the burdens of love must be upon him. He must bear the lot of his enemies, and even the wrongs of his enemies. In pity, in patience, in sacrifice, in all kinds of holy concern, he must take them on his heart, and be afflicted for them as well as by them. In his greatness there is no bar to this kind of suffering; He will suffer because he is great, and be great because he suffers. Neither is his everlasting beatitude any bar to his suffering; for there is nothing so essentially blessed as to suffer well. Moral greatness culminates in great and good suffering; culminates also in blessedness, for there is a law of compensation in all moral natures, human as well as divine, divine as well as human, by which their suffering for love’s sake becomes always a transcendent and more consciously sovereign joy. There ought to be no incredible paradox in this; for it is a fact every day proved—always to be known by mortal experience.

Now it is this moral suffering of God, the very fact which our human thinking is so slow to receive, that Christ unfolds and works into a character Christ’s moral power consummated in the agony and the cross. and a power, in his human life. His compassions burdened for guilty men, his patient sensibilities, sorrows, sacrifices, the intense fellow-feeling of his ministry, his rejected sympathies, wrongs, ignominies—under and by all these it is that he verifies, and builds into a character, the moral suffering of the divine love.

Hence what is called the agony, which gives, in a sense, the key-note of his ministry; because it is pure 227moral suffering; the suffering, that is, of a burdened love and of a holy and pure sensibility, on which the hell of the world’s curse and retributive madness is just about to burst. There is here no physical suffering, save what results from his moral and mental suffering. There is no fear; for, to human appearance, there is nothing as yet to fear; and, besides, the pathology of the suffering is exactly opposite to that of fear; in which the blood flies the skin, retreating on the heart, instead of being forced outward and exuding from it. There is, too, no appearance of panic in the sufferer’s action, and he expresses, no doubt truly, what he feels when he says, that his “soul is exceeding sorrowful.” We discover, also, at several distinct points in his ministry before, that he is under a tendency to just this kind of agony; as when he groans in Spirit, declares that his soul is troubled, spends whole nights in prayer. It is as if there were a load upon his sensibility which his mere human organization could with difficulty support. And accordingly, now that his active labors are ended, and his feeling is no longer diverted and drawn off by occupation, now that he has made his farewell discourse, offered his parting prayer, instituted his supper of communion, the surge of burdened sensibility rolls in upon him all too heavily to be sustained. And this is the agony. It is just what such a nature, made the vehicle of such feeling, facing such a juncture, ought to suffer and could not, humanly speaking, avoid. It is the moral pain of his love, sharpened by the crisis of his love; and, and a bloody sweat is wrung from his 228too frail body, by the overload of divine feeling struggling under it.

In his cross there is also a physical suffering, of which something is made by the Scriptures, and a great deal more by theology; for multitudes conceive that this physical suffering is the pain God takes for satisfaction, when he releases the pains that are due under the just liabilities of sin. I will not undertake to solve the mystery of these physical pains; for it must be admitted that God is a being physically impassible. But it is something to observe that there is nothing peculiar in them, as distinct from the mystery of the incarnation. God is not finite, or subject, any more than he is impassible, and yet he is, in some sense, uninvestigable by us, both finite and subject. Enough for us, as regards the subject state of Christ, that he is able to express so much of the glory of the Father. So of the pains or physical sufferings. Their importance to us lies probably, not in what they are, but in what they express, or morally signify. They are the symbol of God’s moral suffering. The moral tragedy of the garden is supplemented by the physical tragedy of the cross; where Jesus, by not shrinking from so great bodily pains, which the coarse and sensuous mind of the world will more easily appreciate, shows the moral suffering of God for sinners more affectingly, because he does it in the lower plane of natural sensibility. And yet even the suffering of the cross appears to be principally moral suffering; for the struggle and tension of his feeling is so great that he dies, it is discovered, 229long before the two others crucified with him, and sooner than, by mere natural torment, was to be expected.

But there is a much harsher and sharper meaning frequently given to the agony and the cross, as if Jesus were in the lot of sin a great deal more Nothing penal in the agony and the cross. literally than I have conceived him to be, and God were giving him a cup of judicial anger to drink, from which his soul recoils This conception is supposed to be specially justified by his exclamation from the cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me;” where it is imagined that God is dealing with him in severity, hiding his face behind a cloud of ire, and leaving him to bear the penal woe of transgression; or, if not this, so far withdrawing from him as to drape the scene of his death in a felt darkness of soul, that shall somehow express the divine abhorrence to sin. The assumption, whether in one form or the other, appears to be gratuitous. That the soul of Jesus, just reeling into death, should utter such a cry was most natural, and it should be printed with a point of exclamation, as being a cry of distress, not with a point of interrogation, as if he were raising a question of remonstrance about a matter of fact. When will theologic dogmatism understand the language of passion? Besides an angel is sent to him in his agony to strengthen him-an angel sent to support him in the desertion of God? Does he not also protest that he can have twelve legions of angels to help him, by simply asking for them? And in what does he close the scene of his suffering, just after his 230bitter cry on the cross, but these most open, trustful words of confidence—“Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” It is hardly necessary to say that this hard and revolting conception of the agony and the cross has a purely theologic origin. At no other two points, in the ministry of Jesus, would the eternal Father have testified with a warmer approbation or a sympathy more close—“This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Nay, the Father did, in fact, give just this testimony for him beforehand, in this article of his suffering; for when he was speaking of his death now at hand, and his soul was troubled, falling into a kind of incipient agony, how does he quell his feeling but in the petition, “Father, glorify thy name;” whereupon there comes a voice from heaven, saying, “I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” Comforted by such a testimony, and daring, in his last prayer, to say—“I have glorified thee on the earth,” will it be imagined that God, beholding such an accession of glory in his death, is even hiding from him still, when the last hour comes, in grim displeasure?

Here then it is, in the revelation of a suffering God, that the great name of Jesus becomes the embodied glory and the Great Moral Power of God. In it, as in a sun, the divine feeling henceforth shines; so that whoever believes in his name takes the power of it, and is transformed radically, even at the deepest center of life, by it—born of God.