“As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it,” may be a startling saying of Mr. Emerson’s, but is one which commends itself to our experience and reason, if we only consult them honestly. Let us take the most obvious examples of this law. Look at the relations of man to the brute creation. One of us shall have no difficulty in making friends of beasts and birds, while another excites their dread and hate, so that even dogs will scarcely come near him. There is no need to go back to the traditions of the hermits in the Thebaid, or St. Francis of Assisi, for instances of the former class. We all know the story of Cowper and his three hares, from his exquisite letters and poem, and most of you must have read, or heard of the terms on which Waterton lived with the birds and beasts in his Yorkshire home, and of Thoreau, unable to get rid of wild squirrels and birds who would come and live with him, or from a boat, taking fish which lay quietly in his hand till he chose to put them back again into the stream. But I suppose there is scarcely one of us who has not himself seen such instances again and again, persons of whom the old words seemed literally true, “At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh; neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth. For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.”

I remember myself several such; a boy who was friends even with rats, stoats, and snakes, and generally had one or other of them in his pockets; a groom upon whose shoulders the pigeons used to settle, and nestle against his cheeks, whenever he went out into the stable-yard or field. Is there any reasonable way of accounting for this? Only one, I think, which is, that those who have this power over, and attraction for, animals, have always felt toward them and treated them as their Maker intended – have unconsciously, perhaps, but still faithfully, followed God’s mind in their dealings with his creatures, and so have stood in true relations to them all, and have found the beasts of the field at peace with them.

In the same way the stones of the field are in league with the geologist, the trees and flowers with the botanist, the component parts of earth and air with the chemist, just in so far as each, consciously or unconsciously, follows God’s methods with them – each part of his creation yielding up its secrets and its treasures to the open mind of the humble and patient, who is also at bottom always the most courageous learner.

XXVIII

What is true of each of us beyond all question – what every man who walks with open eyes and open heart knows to be true of himself – must be true also of Christ. And so, though we may reject the stories of the clay birds, which he modeled as a child, taking wing and bursting into song round him, (as on a par with St. Francis’ address to his sisters, the swallows, at Alvia, or the flocks in the marshes of Venice, who thereupon kept silence from their twitterings and songs till his sermon was finished), we cannot doubt that in proportion as Christ was more perfectly in sympathy with God’s creation than any mediæval saint, or modern naturalist, or man of science, he had more power than they with all created things from his earliest youth. Nor could it be otherwise with the hearts and wills of men. Over these we know that, from that time to this, he has exercised a supreme sway, infinitely more wonderful than that over birds and beasts, because of man’s power of resistance to the will Christ came to teach and to do, which exists, so far as we can see, in no other part of creation.

I think, then, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he must have had all these powers from his childhood, that they must have been growing stronger from day to day, and he, at the same time, more and more conscious of possessing them, not to use on any impulse of curiosity or self-will, but only as the voice within prompted. And it seems the most convincing testimony to his perfect sonship, manifested in perfect obedience, that he should never have tested his powers during those thirty years as he did at once and with perfect confidence as soon as the call came. Had he done so his ministry must have commenced sooner; that is to say, before the method was matured by which he was to reconstruct, and lift into a new atmosphere and on to a higher plane, the faith and life of his own nation and of the whole world. For it is impossible to suppose that the works which he did, and the words he spoke, at thirty – which at once threw all Galilee and Judea into a ferment of hope and joy and doubt and anger – should have passed unnoticed had they been wrought and spoken when he was twenty. Here, as in all else, he waited for God’s mind: and so, when the time for action came, worked with the power of God. And this waiting and preparation must have been the supreme trial of his faith. The holding this position must have been, in those early years, the holding of the very centre of the citadel in man’s soul, (as Bunyan so quaintly terms it), against which the assaults of the tempter must have been delivered again and again while the garrison was in training for the victorious march out into the open field of the great world, carrying forth the standard which shall never go back.

And while it may be readily admitted that Christ wielded a dominion over all created things, as well as over man, which no other human being has ever approached, it seems to me to be going quite beyond what can be proved, or even fairly assumed, to speak of his miracles as supernatural, in the sense that no man has ever done, or can ever do, the like. The evidence is surely all the other way, and seems rather to indicate that if we could only have lived up to the standard which we acknowledge in our inmost hearts to be the true one – could only have obeyed every motion and warning of the voice of God speaking in our hearts from the day when we first became conscious of and could hear it – if, in other words, our wills had from the first been disciplined, like the will of Christ, so as to be in perfect accord with the will of God – I see no reason to doubt that we, too, should have gained the power and the courage to show signs, or, if you please, to work miracles, as Christ and his Apostles worked them.

XXIX

Christ’s whole life on earth was the assertion and example of true manliness – the setting forth in living act and word what man is meant to be, and how he should carry himself in this world of God’s – one long campaign, in which “the temptation” stands out as the first great battle and victory. The story has depths in it which we can never fathom, but also clear, sharp lessons which he who runs may read, and no man can master too thoroughly. We must follow him reverently into the wilderness, where he flies from the crowds who are pressing to the Baptist, and who to-morrow will be thronging around him, if he goes back among them, after what the Baptist has said about him to-day.

Day after day in the wilderness the struggle goes on in his heart. He is faint from insufficient food in those solitudes, and with bodily weakness the doubts grow in strength and persistence, and the tempter is always at his side, soliciting him to end them once for all, by one act of self-assertion. All those questionings and misgivings as to his origin and mission which we have pictured to ourselves as haunting him ever since his first visit to Jerusalem, are now, as it were, focussed. There are mocking voices whispering again as of old, but more scornfully and keenly in his ear, “Are you really the Messiah, the Son of God, so long looked for? What more proof have you to go upon than you have had for these many years, during which you have been living as a poor peasant in a Galilean village? The word of this wild man of the wilderness? He is your own cousin, and a powerful preacher no doubt, but a wayward, wilful man, clad and fed like a madman, who has been nursing mad fancies from his boyhood, away from the holy city, the centre of national life and learning. This sign of a descending dove, and a voice which no one has heard but yourself? Such signs come to many – are never wanting when men are ready to deceive themselves – and each man’s fancy gives them a different meaning. But the words, and the sign, and the voice, you say, only meet a conviction which has been growing these thirty years in your own heart and conscience? Well, then, at least for the sake of others if not for your own sake, put this conviction to the proof, here, at once, and make sure yourself, before you go forth and deceive poor men, your brethren, to their ruin. You are famishing here in the wilderness. This, at least, cannot be what God intends for his Son, who is to redeem the world. Exercise some control over the meanest part of your Father’s kingdom. Command these stones to become bread, and see whether they will obey you. Cast yourself down from this height. If you are what you think, your Father’s angels will bear you up. Then, after they have borne you up, you may go on with some reasonable assurance that your claim is not a mere delusion, and that you will not be leading these poor men whom you call your brethren to misery and destruction.”

And when neither long fasting and weakness, or natural doubt, distrust, impatience, or the most subtle suggestions of the tempter, can move his simple trust in his Father, or wring from him one act of self-assertion, the enemy changes front and the assault comes from another quarter. “You may be right,” the voices seemed now to be saying; “You may not be deceived, or dreaming, when you claim to be the Son of God, sent to redeem this fair world, which is now spread out before you in all its glory. That may be your origin, and that your work. But, living as you have done till now in a remote corner of a despised province, you have no experience or knowledge of the methods or powers which sway men, and establish and maintain these kingdoms of the world, the glory of which you are beholding. These methods and powers have been in use in your Father’s world, if it be his, ever since man has known good from evil. You have only to say the word, and you may use and control these methods and powers as you please. By their aid you may possibly ‘see of the travail of your soul and be satisfied;’ without them you will redeem nothing but perhaps a man here and there – without them you will postpone instead of hastening the coming of your Father’s kingdom, to the sorrow and ruin of many generations, and will die a foiled and lonely man, crushed by the very forces you have refused to use for your Father’s service. If they were wholly evil, wholly unfit for the fulfillment of any purpose of his, would he have left them in command of his world till this day? It is only through them that the world can be subdued. Your time is short, and you have already wasted much of it, standing shivering on the brink, and letting the years slip by in that cottage at Nazareth. The wisest of your ancestors acknowledged and used them, and spread His kingdom from the river to the Great Sea. Why should you reject them?”

This, very roughly and inadequately stated, is some shadow of the utmost part, or skirt as it were, of the trial-crisis, lasting forty days, through which Christ passed from his private to his public career. For forty days the struggle lasted before he could finally realize and accept his mission with all that it implied. At the end of that time he has fairly mastered and beaten down every doubt as to his call, every tempting suggestion to assert himself, or to accept or use any aid in establishing his Father’s kingdom which does not clearly bear his Father’s stamp and seal on the face of it. In the strength of this victory he returns from the desert, to take up the burden which has been laid on him, and to set up God’s kingdom in the world by the methods which he has learned of God himself – and by no other.

XXX

The second period of our Lord’s ministry is one, in the main, of joyful progress and triumph, in which the test of true manliness must be more subtle than when the surroundings are hostile. It consists, I think, at such times, in the careful watchfulness not to give wrong impressions, not to mislead those who are touched by enthusiasm, conscious of new life, grateful to him who has kindled that life in them.

It is then that the temptation to be all things to all men in a wrong sense – to adapt and accommodate teaching and life to a lower standard in order to maintain a hold upon the masses of average men and women who have been moved by the words of lips touched by fire from the altar of God – has generally proved too much for the best and strongest of the world’s great reformers. It is scarcely necessary to elaborate this point, which would, I think, be sorrowfully admitted by those who have studied most lovingly and carefully the lives of such men, for instance, as Savonarola or Wesley. If you will refer to a valuable work on the life of a greater than either of these, Mr. Bosworth Smith’s “Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” you will find there perhaps the best illustration which I can give you of this sad experience.

When Mohammed returns from Medina, sweeping at last all enemies out of his path, as the prophet of a new faith, and the leader of an awakened and repentant people, his biographer pauses to notice the lowering of the standard, both in his life and teaching. Power, he pleads, brings with it new temptations and new failures. The more thoroughly a man is carried away by his inspiration, and convinced of the truth and goodness of his cause and his message, the more likely is he to forget the means in the end, and to allow the end to justify whatever means seem to lead to its triumph. He must maintain as he can, and by any means, his power over the motley mass of followers that his mission has gathered round him, and will be apt to aim rather at what will hold them than at what will satisfy the highest promptings of his own conscience.

We may allow the plea in such cases, though with sorrow and humiliation. But the more minutely we examine the life of Christ the more we shall feel that here there is no place for it. We shall be impressed with the entire absence of any such bending to expediency, or forgetting the means in the end. He never for one moment accommodates his life or teaching to any standard but the highest: never lowers or relaxes that standard by a shade or a hair’s-breadth, to make the road easy to rich or powerful questioners, or to uphold the spirit of his poorer followers when they are startled and uneasy, as they begin half-blindly to recognize what spirit they are of. This unbending truthfulness is, then, what we have chiefly to look for in this period of triumphant progress and success, questioning each act and word in turn whether there is any swerving in it from the highest ideal.

XXXI

We may note that our Lord accepts at once the imprisonment of the Baptist as the final call to himself. Gathering, therefore, a few of John’s disciples round him, and welcoming the restless inquiring crowds who had been roused by the voice crying in the wilderness, he stands forward at once to proclaim and explain the nature of that new kingdom of God, which has now to be set up in the world. Standing forth alone, on the open hillside, the young Galilean peasant gives forth the great proclamation, which by one effort lifted mankind on to that new and higher ground on which it has been painfully struggling ever since, but on the whole with sure though slow success, to plant itself and maintain sure foothold.

In all history there is no parallel to it. It stands there, a miracle or sign of God’s reign in this world, far more wonderful than any of Christ’s miracles of healing. Unbelievers have been sneering at and ridiculing it, and Christian doctors paring and explaining it away ever since. But there it stands, as strong and fresh as ever, the calm declaration and witness of what mankind is intended by God to become on this earth of his.

As a question of courageous utterance, I would only ask you to read it through once more, bearing in mind who the preacher was – a peasant, already repudiated by his own neighbors and kinsfolk, and suspected by the national rulers and teachers; and who were the hearers – a motley crowd of Jewish peasants and fishermen, Romish legionaries, traders from Damascus, Tyre, and Sidon, and the distant isles of Greece, with a large sprinkling of publicans, scribes, Pharisees, and lawyers.

The immediate result of the sermon was to bow the hearts of this crowd for the time, so that he was able to choose followers from amongst them, much as he would. He takes fishermen and peasants, selecting only two at most, from any rank above the lowest, and one of these from a class more hated and despised by the Jews than the poorest peasant, the publicans. It is plain that he might at first have called apostles from amongst the upper classes had he desired it – as a teacher with any want of courage would surely have done. But the only scribe who offers himself is rejected.

The calling of the Apostles is followed by a succession of discourses and miracles, which move the people more and more, until, after that of the loaves, the popular enthusiasm rises to the point it had so often reached in the case of other preachers and leaders of this strange people. They are ready to take him by force and make him a king.

The Apostles apparently encouraged this enthusiasm, for which he constrains them into a ship, and sends them away before him. After rejoining them and rebuking their want of understanding and faith, he returns with them to the multitudes, and at once speaks of himself as the bread from heaven, in the discourse which offends many of his disciples, who from this time go back and walk no more with him. The brief season of triumphant progress is drawing to an end, during which he could rejoice in spirit in contemplating the human harvest which he and his disciples seem to be already successfully garnering.

XXXII

The more carefully we study the long wrestle of Christ with the blind leaders of a doomed nation, the more we shall recognize the perfect truthfulness, and therefore the perfect courage, which marks his conduct of it. From beginning to end there is no word or act which can mislead friend or foe. The strife, though for life and death, has left no trace or stain on his nature. Fresh from the last and final conflict in the temple court, he can pause on the side of Olivet to weep over the city, the sight of which can still wring from him the pathetic yearnings of a soul purified from all taint of bitterness.

It is this most tender and sensitive of the sons of men – with fibres answering to every touch and breath of human sympathy or human hate – who has borne with absolutely unshaken steadfastness the distrust and anger of kinsfolk, the ingratitude of converts, the blindness of disciples, the fitful and purblind worship and hatred, and fear, of the nation of the Jews. So far, we can estimate to some extent the burden and the strain, and realize the strength and beauty of the spirit which could bear it all. Beyond and behind lie depths into which we can but glance. For in those last hours of his life on earth the question was to be decided whether we men have in deed and truth a brotherhood, in a Son of Man, the head of humanity, who has united mankind to their Father, and can enable them to know him.

XXXIII

It is around the life of the Son of Man and Son of God that the fiercest controversies of our time are raging. Is it not also becoming clearer every day that they will continue to rage more and more fiercely – that there can be no rest or peace possible for mankind – until all things are subdued to him, and brought into harmony with his life?

It is to this work that all churches and sects, that all the leading nations of the world, known collectively as Christendom, are pledged: and the time for redeeming that pledge is running out rapidly, as the distress and perplexity, the threatening disruption and anarchy of Christendom too clearly show. It is to this work too that you and I, every man and woman of us, are also called; and if we would go about it with any hope and courage, it can only be by keeping the life of Christ vividly before us day by day, and turning to it as to a fountain in the desert, as to the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

From behind the shadow the still small voice – more awful than tempest or earthquake – more sure and persistent than day and night – is always sounding, full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”