SECTION V

the spiritual life of mankind

The spiritual life of mankind everywhere manifests an irrepressible attraction towards great personalities. Everywhere in the history of mind there is seen in full activity the impulse to behold human nature in its heroic proportions, to see the scattered characteristics of human power united in representations of great men, to be internally united with ‘the million’ by the strong organic centres and heads of the human circle, to contemplate the honours of the race in its higher representatives. The anticipation is everywhere prevalent, that each new great man will bring a new blessing, new help, new comfort (Gen 5:29),—that deliverance must be born into the world in the depths of elect personal life. The highest expectations are entertained of the very elect: it is they who are to declare the mysteries of the divine life; nay, the glory of God’s majesty is one day to burst forth victoriously from the most perfect and exalted human life. This universal gravitation of minds, attracting them towards great men, is the deepest and most natural basis of all that is christological in mankind at large. In its development and purification, it is more and more perceived to be a decided desire for the highest and most finished personality,-a desire to behold the human race in its spiritual unity, in its true and glorious destiny, in the fulness, beauty, and liberty of its sanctified spiritual power, in complete union with God, and in all the dignity and blessedness resulting from this union.

This christological feature of human nature may be recognised under manifold forms. The heart’s need of uniting and surrendering itself to a hero of God, to one nobler than itself, to an intellectual prince, and of becoming rich and strong in him, has been a thousand times perverted by levity, and the intoxication of vanity, into the most credulous and most miserable absurdity. Nay, absurdity itself is but the corrupt and perverted form of the need and destination of thousands to be united, saved, and glorified by the true Lord and Prince of their life. It appears in the wild delusions of the thousands who plunge themselves into the snare of any splendid error, as soon as the sound of its decoy is heard; it brings rich booty to adventurers, fanatics, and conquerors; it drives whole swarms of deluded and devoted enthusiasts, who failed to recognize the true, to every false Messiah; and it is the sphere in which the antichristian and demoniac powers will reap their harvest (Mat 24:24). Such a disposition of human nature must be fatal to it, if there be no salutary object to correspond with it. Men must be ruined by the magic attraction of brilliant but evil genius, if the attraction of the good do not prove more powerful still. They must be torn to pieces by the various attractions they experience from the glorious or strong personalities within whose influence they are placed, unless they be delivered from all lesser sympathies by one preponderating attraction, and be thus enabled to attain to unity of purpose and life. They must, finally, be irrecoverably lost to liberty, if this one personality be not identical with truth, righteousness, and love, and if surrender thereto be not the perfect emancipation of the spirit. Thus does this propensity, even in its perversion, point to the personality of Christ; for the very existence of a propensity capable of leading its subject into the arms of his destroyer, has by its very nature a strong reference to the Redeemer and Deliverer. None but the Prince over all the spiritual kings of the earth, could free all nations from the magic ties of all impure and unholy spirits. The effect of His agency is at once both constraint and liberty, for it is the effect of eternal love, of the divine Spirit.

As the earth, during the polar night, seeks to compensate for the want of daylight by the. production of the aurora borealis; so does every nation, impelled by a yearning after Christ, emit, during its night of heathen darkness, some glimmer of christological light. It was from this visionary impulse towards the dawn, that oracles, priests, lawgivers, and founders of religions arose. ‘The nations waited for Him.’

When the sun sets, the stars appear by thousands in the clear sky. If it were possible to conceal for a time from the world the actual life of Jesus, thousands of stars in the heaven of spiritual life would forthwith bear testimony to His image, yearnings after Him, remembrances of Him, promises concerning Him. No sooner does a critic succeed in impressing some circle of credulous enthusiasts with the notion that he has cast a shade upon the sun of Christ’s life in the Gospels, than aspirants forthwith arise by dozens, and offer themselves, as transcending all their predecessors, as founders of new religions, or even as new redeemers, to fill up the supposed vacancy. As counterfeits, they are themselves condemned to testify to the original. And in Christ’s Church, the image of His existence shines all the more brightly and gloriously in the hearts of His people as soon as such eclipses of His name occur.

The sense entertained by the human race of the dignity of prophets, high priests, and kings, is the sense for those exalted gifts of the Spirit which were to unite heaven with earth. Actual endowments, great characters, are the appropriate objects of this sense. From the interaction of the needs of the many and the gifts of the few have these high offices originated, under God’s all-ordaining government Each of these offices, however, requires the other, and none of them is perfect till their union and reality are complete. The true prophet must devote himself to the God who makes him the medium of His revelations; but thus he is at the same time a true priest. The priest who offers himself to God as a sacrifice, attains to a resurrection; and in this resurrection is a true king. If, then, the three offices are in their perfection one, no deep prophetic saying can be heard, not a breath of the priestly spirit can be emitted, not a ray of kingly majesty can shine forth, on earth, without involving a reference to the one personality of Christ. It was the obscure and arbitrary longing for the manifestation of this unity of the divine-human life, which led the ancient Roman to the apotheosis of Cæsar, and the medieval Roman to an idolatrous veneration of the Pope.

Thus the deep need felt by human nature to do homage to a superior, to find the depths and sublimities of life and its repose in great personalities, is a general prophecy of the God-man. This general reference to Christ seems, indeed, as yet to furnish no distinct image of the life of Jesus by an indication of any of its definite features. But when we analyse this sense of human nature for a higher personality, we shall perceive highly significant lines, appropriately filling up the general image of the anticipation of Christ.

For, first, this homage-paying impulse is evidently, in the majority of instances, a sense for the worker of miracles, and even for the miraculous. Even the dark world of magic is a mutilated and obscure anticipation of that life, in which the rude materiality of the world vanishes before the brightness and power of the pure spirit, which understands and controls it according to its destiny for the Eternal Word. But when, in their myths, the ancient heathen often represented the great heroes of spiritual life as sons of virgin mothers, conceived under the consecration or by the agency of a divine power, they expressed the truth, that the relations of the divine Spirit to the formation of separate individuals are infinitely various-that there are unhallowed, hallowed, and more hallowed births; and they were also tending towards the supreme, the most hallowed birth, in which spiritual agency and human cultivation, creation and baptism, the process of formation in time and the existence from eternity, were to meet in one.¹

But this sense for the miraculous is merely the sense for the Benefactor, the Deliverer, the Redeemer. There is in human nature an irrepressible tendency to hope for coming deliverers and benefactors. Poetry is full of tutelary spirits, helping genii, or angels. And what are all such subjective representations of angels, but a kind of ‘second sight,’ by which men behold their Redeemer? And just as plainly does a sense for the death of Christ on the cross, and its significance, show itself among mankind. We have already spoken of tragedy. Tragedy recognises the meaning of sin, of the curse, and of the catastrophe; and points to that wonderful relation in humanity, found to exist almost from house to house, that the innocent should suffer for the guilty, that the noblest heart in every human circle always bears the greatest part of that circle’s burden, that the full punishment of a family sin usually falls on a comparatively innocent head. By her representations of minor catastrophes and relative atonements, she leads to the idea of the great universal catastrophe of humanity, and the real and absolute atonement involved therein. Tragedy, in its christological meaning, opposes all those views of history and Christianity which would, with convenient superficiality, steal past the cross of Christ; while man’s proneness to be deeply moved and strangely elevated by tragic emotion, shows him to be fitted to experience and to discern both judgment and atonement in the great and sacred sufferings of one man. Tragic poetry has not, indeed, been the product of the intellectual life of all cultivated nations, but the need of sacrifice has; and the import of sacrifice has ever been justly viewed in its reference to the import of the death of Christ. Even in those horrible sacrifices which consciousness of guilt extorted from the excited frenzy of the heathen in the worship of Moloch, in the self-inflicted tortures of the fakeers, and in that most deeply degenerate form of the felt need of an atonement, self-murder, may be seen the actings of that spiritual impulse, which entertained the presentiment that dissolution of life would procure remission of guilt before God’s judgment-seat; and which, even in its darkest delusions, was tending towards the reality of an act of sacrifice, in which victim and priest, divine decree and human self-surrender, or, in other words, obedience and sacrifice, the suffering of an individual and the suffering of mankind, judgment and atonement, death and victory over death, are miraculously blended.

But if human nature could in its dreams and fictions thus forebode, and in its feverish delusions even rave of, the great atoning death, an obscure notion of a resurrection also could not but run through its mental life and the utterances of that life. Accordingly, we find that all nations have been inclined above all things to doubt the utter death of those great or terrible individuals who have either cheered or disturbed their lives. When Nero died, it was said by both Christians and heathens, that he had only retired into obscurity; the Christians said, he would return as Antichrist. Of Napoleon it was said, long after his death, that he still was living in concealment, and would one day reappear. Frederic Barbarossa was to awaken and come forth gloriously from the tomb, in which he was but slumbering till the appointed time. In the myths too of the ancient nations, it was through the sufferings of death that heroes attained to the glorification of their lives (e.g., Hercules). But to pass into the sphere of ordinary actual life, let us ask, what does man’s dread of death really mean? Is it a merely instinctive feeling, such as is sometimes seen even in the lower animals? Or is it not rather evident, that this dread is the expression of a spiritual feeling, of the indignation and protest of personal consciousness, against the appearance of dissolution—that it cries for, and proclaims a resurrection in some place or other, while the various degrees of joy which have been felt in death, form an assent to that exalted summit, the victory over death, which the Gospel history records?

Thus is the Gospel history surrounded by many concentric circles, in each of which the actual allusions to this history are either plainly or dimly perceived. Theology, in her relation to these general christological indications, seems still to occupy a position similar to that filled by natural philosophy, when fossil skeletons were taken for lusus naturæ. Her task, however, is to learn, like natural science, to infer the whole living organism from its fragmentary remains—the life of Christ from the separate fragments of christological allusion found among the human race. As the musical virtuoso can perceive the theme in almost every separate passage of a good composition, so will the Christian spirit learn to discern, with ever-increasing clearness, the theme of the world’s history in all its separate harmonies and discords.

───♦───

Notes

1. The preceding remarks are but an attempt to point out the principal incidents of christological allusion to be met with in the common history of mankind. The thorough working out of this subject cannot but be promoted by the researches of Christian missionaries, and must, in return, be of the greatest importance in the thorough carrying on of missionary operations. Paul at Athens argued from matters granted by his hearers, and by them made ready to his hand. Arguments of a like kind arise from a sense of the general christological allusions found throughout the world. If these allusions are ignored, and mythologies esteemed to be dark to their very foundations,—if the nations are regarded as autochthones, and their religions as mere local superstitions with no allusions to aught besides,—we shall hardly enter into their circle of ideas. The star of the magi, as well as the altar to the unknown God, though too commonly considered isolated instances of subjective combination, are, in this respect, striking New Testament indications of a general heathen Christology, as well as clear directions in missionary work. Is it not evident, for example, that most nations go beyond their merely national consciousness, and express their union with the whole race of mankind in some legend or expectation? In one, some great alteration of circumstances is expected to arise from the East, in another, from the West. Most heathen religions, Mohammedanism not excluded, express a foreboding of their own dissolution. The expectation or announcement of mysterious heaven-sent men, who are to unite heaven and earth, is everywhere prevalent.

1) Comp. Strauss, Leben Jesu, p. 229; Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, p. 15.