Chapter II: Positive Proofs That The Scriptures Are A Divine Revelation (4)

1. _Confucianism._ Confucius (_Kung-fu-tse_), B. C. 551-478,
contemporary with Pythagoras and Buddha. Socrates was born ten
years after Confucius died. Mencius (371-278) was a disciple of
Confucius. Matheson, in Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures),
73-108, claims that Confucianism was “an attempt to substitute a
morality for theology.” Legge, however, in Present Day Tracts, 3:
no. 18, shows that this is a mistake. Confucius simply left
religion where he found it. God, or Heaven, is worshiped in China,
but only by the Emperor. Chinese religion is apparently a survival
of the worship of the patriarchal family. The father of the family
was its only head and priest. In China, though the family widened
into the tribe, and the tribe into the nation, the father still
retained his sole authority, and, as the father of his people, the
Emperor alone officially offered sacrifice to God. Between God and
the people the gulf has so widened that the people may be said to
have no practical knowledge of God or communication with him. Dr.
W. A. P. Martin: “Confucianism has degenerated into a pantheistic
medley, and renders worship to an impersonal ‘anima mundi,’ under
the leading forms of visible nature.”

Dr. William Ashmore, private letter: “The common people of China
have: (1) Ancestor-worship, and the worship of deified heroes: (2)
Geomancy, or belief in the controlling power of the elements of
nature; but back of these, and antedating them, is (3) the worship
of Heaven and Earth, or Father and Mother, a very ancient dualism;
this belongs to the common people also, though once a year the
Emperor, as a sort of high-priest of his people, offers sacrifice
on the altar of Heaven; in this he acts alone. ‘Joss’ is not a
Chinese word at all. It is the corrupted form of the Portuguese
word ‘Deos.’ The word ‘pidgin’ is similarly an attempt to say
‘business’ (big-i-ness or bidgin). ‘Joss-pidgin’ therefore means
simply ‘divine service,’ or service offered to Heaven and Earth,
or to spirits of any kind, good or bad. There are many gods, a
Queen of Heaven, King of Hades, God of War, god of literature,
gods of the hills, valleys, streams, a goddess of small-pox, of
child-bearing, and all the various trades have their gods. The
most lofty expression the Chinese have is ‘Heaven,’ or ‘Supreme
Heaven,’ or ‘Azure Heaven.’ This is the surviving indication that
in the most remote times they had knowledge of one supreme,
intelligent and personal Power who ruled over all.” Mr. Yugoro
Chiba has shown that the Chinese classics permit sacrifice by all
the people. But it still remains true that sacrifice to “Supreme
Heaven” is practically confined to the Emperor, who like the
Jewish high-priest offers for his people once a year.

Confucius did nothing to put morality upon a religious basis. In
practice, the relations between man and man are the only relations
considered. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom,
sincerity, are enjoined, but not a word is said with regard to
man’s relations to God. Love to God is not only not commanded—it
is not thought of as possible. Though man’s being is theoretically
an ordinance of God, man is practically a law to himself. The
first commandment of Confucius is that of filial piety. But this
includes worship of dead ancestors, and is so exaggerated as to
bury from sight the related duties of husband to wife and of
parent to child. Confucius made it the duty of a son to slay his
father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly
retaliatory penalty for bloodshed; see J. A. Farrer, Primitive
Manners and Customs, 80. He treated invisible and superior beings
with respect, but held them at a distance. He recognized the
“Heaven” of tradition; but, instead of adding to our knowledge of
it, he stifled inquiry. Dr. Legge: “I have been reading Chinese
books for more than forty years, and any general requirement to
love God, or the mention of any one as actually loving him, has
yet to come for the first time under my eye.”

Ezra Abbot asserts that Confucius gave the golden rule in positive
as well as negative form; see Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism,
222. This however seems to be denied by Dr. Legge, Religions of
China, 1-58. Wu Ting Fang, former Chinese minister to Washington,
assents to the statement that Confucius gave the golden rule only
in its negative form, and he says this difference is the
difference between a passive and an aggressive civilization, which
last is therefore dominant. The golden rule, as Confucius gives
it, is: “Do not unto others that which you would not they should
do unto you.” Compare with this, Isocrates: “Be to your parents
what you would have your children be to you.... Do not to others
the things which make you angry when others do them to you”;
Herodotus: “What I punish in another man, I will myself, as far as
I can, refrain from”; Aristotle: “We should behave toward our
friends as we should wish them to behave toward us”; Tobit,
4:15—“What thou hatest, do to no one”; Philo: “What one hates to
endure, let him not do”; Seneca bids us “give as we wish to
receive”; Rabbi Hillel: “Whatsoever is hateful to you, do not to
another; this is the whole law, and all the rest is explanation.”

Broadus, in Am. Com. on Matthew, 161—“The sayings of Confucius,
Isocrates, and the three Jewish teachers, are merely negative;
that of Seneca is confined to giving, and that of Aristotle to the
treatment of friends. Christ lays down a rule for positive action,
and that toward all men.” He teaches that I am bound to do to
others all that they could rightly desire me to do to them. The
golden rule therefore requires a supplement, to show what others
can rightly desire, namely, God’s glory first, and their good as
second and incidental thereto. Christianity furnishes this divine
and perfect standard; Confucianism is defective in that it has no
standard higher than human convention. While Confucianism excludes
polytheism, idolatry, and deification of vice, it is a shallow and
tantalizing system, because it does not recognize the hereditary
corruption of human nature, or furnish any remedy for moral evil
except the “doctrines of the sages.” “The heart of man,” it says,
“is naturally perfectly upright and correct.” Sin is simply “a
disease, to be cured by self-discipline; a debt, to be canceled by
meritorious acts; an ignorance, to be removed by study and
contemplation.” See Bib. Sac., 1883:292, 293; N. Englander,
1883:565; Marcus Dods, in Erasmus and other Essays, 239.

2. THE INDIAN SYSTEMS. _Brahmanism_, as expressed in the Vedas,
dates back to 1000-1500 B. C. As Caird (in Faiths of the World,
St. Giles Lectures, lecture 1) has shown, it originated in the
contemplation of the power in nature apart from the moral
Personality that works in and through nature. Indeed we may say
that all heathenism is man’s choice of a non-moral in place of a
moral God. Brahmanism is a system of pantheism, “a false or
illegitimate consecration of the finite.” All things are a
manifestation of Brahma. Hence evil is deified as well as good.
And many thousand gods are worshiped as partial representations of
the living principle which moves through all. “How many gods have
the Hindus?” asked Dr. Duff of his class. Henry Drummond thought
there were about twenty-five. “Twenty-five?” responded the
indignant professor; “twenty-five millions of millions!” While the
early Vedas present a comparatively pure nature-worship, later
Brahmanism becomes a worship of the vicious and the vile, of the
unnatural and the cruel. Juggernaut and the suttee did not belong
to original Hindu religion.

Bruce, Apologetics, 15—“Pantheism in theory always means
polytheism in practice.” The early Vedas are hopeful in spirit;
later Brahmanism is a religion of disappointment. Caste is fixed
and consecrated as a manifestation of God. Originally intended to
express, in its four divisions of priest, soldier, agriculturist,
slave, the different degrees of unworldliness and divine
indwelling, it becomes an iron fetter to prevent all aspiration
and progress. Indian religion sought to exalt receptivity, the
unity of existence, and rest from self-determination and its
struggles. Hence it ascribed to its gods the same character as
nature-forces. God was the common source of good and of evil. Its
ethics is an ethics of moral indifference. Its charity is a
charity for sin, and the temperance it desires is a temperance
that will let the intemperate alone. Mozoomdar, for example, is
ready to welcome everything in Christianity but its reproof of sin
and its demand for righteousness. Brahmanism degrades woman, but
it deifies the cow.

_Buddhism_, beginning with Buddha, 600 B. C., “recalls the mind to
its elevation above the finite,” from which Brahmanism had fallen
away. Buddha was in certain respects a reformer. He protested
against caste, and proclaimed that truth and morality are for all.
Hence Buddhism, through its possession of this one grain of truth,
appealed to the human heart, and became, next to Christianity, the
greatest missionary religion. Notice then, first, its
_universalism_. But notice also that this is a false universalism,
for it ignores individualism and leads to universal stagnation and
slavery. While Christianity is a religion of history, of will, of
optimism, Buddhism is a religion of illusion, of quietism, of
pessimism; see Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 107-109. In
characterizing Buddhism as a missionary religion, we must notice,
secondly, its element of _altruism_. But this altruism is one
which destroys the self, instead of preserving it. The future
Buddha, out of compassion for a famished tiger, permits the tiger
to devour him. “Incarnated as a hare, he jumps into the fire to
cook himself for a meal for a beggar,—having previously shaken
himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should
perish with him”; see William James, Varieties of Religious
Experience, 283. Buddha would deliver man, not by philosophy, nor
by asceticism, but by self-renunciation. All isolation and
personality are sin, the guilt of which rests, however, not on
man, but on existence in general.

While Brahmanism is pantheistic, Buddhism is atheistic in its
spirit. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:285—“The Brahmanic
Akosmism, that had explained the world as mere seeming, led to the
Buddhistic Atheism.” Finiteness and separateness are evil, and the
only way to purity and rest is by ceasing to exist. This is
essential pessimism. The highest morality is to endure that which
must be, and to escape from reality and from personal existence as
soon as possible. Hence the doctrine of _Nirvana_. Rhys Davids, in
his Hibbert Lectures, claims that early Buddhism meant by
_Nirvana_, not annihilation, but the extinction of the self-life,
and that this was attainable during man’s present mortal
existence. But the term _Nirvana_ now means, to the great mass of
those who use it, the loss of all personality and consciousness,
and absorption into the general life of the universe. Originally
the term denoted only freedom from individual desire, and those
who had entered into _Nirvana_ might again come out of it; see
Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 238. But even in its original form,
_Nirvana_ was sought only from a selfish motive. Self-renunciation
and absorption in the whole was not the enthusiasm of
benevolence,—it was the refuge of despair. It is a religion
without god or sacrifice. Instead of communion with a personal
God, Buddhism has in prospect only an extinction of personality,
as reward for untold ages of lonely self-conquest, extending
through many transmigrations. Of Buddha it has been truly said
“That all the all he had for needy man Was nothing, and his best
of being was But not to be.” Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 296—“He by
his own act dying all the time, In ceaseless effort utterly to
cease, Will willing not to will, desire desiring To be desire no
more, until at last The fugitive go free, emancipate But by
becoming naught.” Of Christ Bruce well says: “What a contrast this
Healer of disease and Preacher of pardon to the worst, to Buddha,
with his religion of despair!”

Buddhism is also fatalistic. It inculcates submission and
compassion—merely negative virtues. But it knows nothing of manly
freedom, or of active love—the positive virtues of Christianity.
It leads men to spare others, but not to help them. Its morality
revolves around self, not around God. It has in it no organizing
principle, for it recognizes no God, no inspiration, no soul, no
salvation, no personal immortality. Buddhism would save men only
by inducing them to flee from existence. To the Hindu, family life
involves sin. The perfect man must forsake wife and children. All
gratification of natural appetites and passions is evil. Salvation
is not from sin, but from desire, and from this men can be saved
only by escaping from life itself. Christianity buries sin, but
saves the man; Buddha would save the man by killing him.
Christianity symbolizes the convert’s entrance upon a new life by
raising him from the baptismal waters; the baptism of Buddhism
should be immersion without emersion. The fundamental idea of
Brahmanism, extinction of personality, remains the same in
Buddhism; the only difference being that the result is secured by
active atonement in the former, by passive contemplation in the
latter. Virtue, and the knowledge that everything earthly is a
vanishing spark of the original light, delivers man from existence
and from misery.

Prof. G. H. Palmer, of Harvard, in The Outlook, June 19,
1897—“Buddhism is unlike Christianity in that it abolishes misery
by abolishing desire; denies personality instead of asserting it;
has many gods, but no one God who is living and conscious; makes a
shortening of existence rather than a lengthening of it to be the
reward of righteousness. Buddhism makes no provision for family,
church, state, science, or art. It gives us a religion that is
little, when we want one that is large.” Dr. E. Benjamin Andrews:
“Schopenhauer and Spencer are merely teachers of Buddhism. They
regard the central source of all as unknowable force, instead of
regarding it as a Spirit, living and holy. This takes away all
impulse to scientific investigation. We need to start from a
Person, and not from a thing.”

For comparison of the sage of India, Sakya Muni, more commonly
called Buddha (properly “the Buddha” = the enlightened; but who,
in spite of Edwin Arnold’s “Light of Asia,” is represented as not
pure from carnal pleasures before he began his work), with Jesus
Christ, see Bib. Sac., July, 1882:458-498; W. C. Wilkinson, Edwin
Arnold, Poetizer and Paganizer; Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the
Light of the World. Buddhism and Christianity are compared in
Presb. Rev., July, 1883:505-548; Wuttke, Christian Ethics,
1:47-54; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 33. See also
Oldenberg, Buddha; Lillie, Popular Life of Buddha; Beal, Catena of
Buddhist Scriptures, 153—“Buddhism declares itself ignorant of any
mode of personal existence compatible with the idea of spiritual
perfection, and so far it is ignorant of God”; 157—“The earliest
idea of _Nirvana_ seems to have included in it no more than the
enjoyment of a state of rest consequent on the extinction of all
causes of sorrow.” The impossibility of satisfying the human heart
with a system of atheism is shown by the fact that the Buddha
himself has been apotheosized to furnish an object of worship.
Thus Buddhism has reverted to Brahmanism.

Monier Williams: “Mohammed has as much claim to be ‘the Light of
Asia’ as Buddha has. What light from Buddha? Not about the heart’s
depravity, or the origin of sin, or the goodness, justice,
holiness, fatherhood of God, or the remedy for sin, but only the
ridding self from suffering by ridding self from life—a doctrine
of merit, of self-trust, of pessimism, and annihilation of
personality.” Christ, himself personal, loving and holy, shows
that God is a person of holiness and love. Robert Browning: “He
that created love, shall not he love?” Only because Jesus is God,
have we a gospel for the world. The claim that Buddha is “the
Light of Asia” reminds one of the man who declared the moon to be
of greater value than the sun, because it gives light in the
darkness when it is needed, while the sun gives light in the
daytime when it is not needed.

3. THE GREEK SYSTEMS. _Pythagoras_ (584-504) based morality upon
the principle of numbers. “Moral good was identified with unity;
evil with multiplicity; virtue was harmony of the soul and its
likeness to God. The aim of life was to make it represent the
beautiful order of the Universe. The whole practical tendency of
Pythagoreanism was ascetic, and included a strict self-control and
an earnest culture.” Here already we seem to see the defect of
Greek morality in confounding the good with the beautiful, and in
making morality a mere self-development. Matheson, Messages of the
Old Religions: Greece reveals the intensity of the hour, the value
of the present life, the beauty of the world that now is. Its
religion is the religion of beautiful humanity. It anticipates the
new heaven and the new earth. Rome on the other hand stood for
union, incorporation, a universal kingdom. But its religion
deified only the Emperor, not all humanity. It was the religion,
not of love, but of power, and it identified the church with the
state.

_Socrates_ (469-400) made knowledge to be virtue. Morality
consisted in subordinating irrational desires to rational
knowledge. Although here we rise above a subjectively determined
good as the goal of moral effort, we have no proper sense of sin.
Knowledge, and not love, is the motive. If men know the right,
they will do the right. This is a great overvaluing of knowledge.
With Socrates, teaching is a sort of midwifery—not depositing
information in the mind, but drawing out the contents of our own
inner consciousness. Lewis Morris describes it as the life-work of
Socrates to “doubt our doubts away.” Socrates holds it right to
injure one’s enemies. He shows proud self-praise in his dying
address. He warns against pederasty, yet compromises with it. He
does not insist upon the same purity of family life which Homer
describes in Ulysses and Penelope. Charles Kingsley, in Alton
Locke, remarks that the spirit of the Greek tragedy was ’man
mastered by circumstance’; that of modern tragedy is “man
mastering circumstance.” But the Greek tragedians, while showing
man thus mastered, do still represent him as inwardly free, as in
the case of Prometheus, and this sense of human freedom and
responsibility appears to some extent in Socrates.

_Plato_ (430-348) held that morality is pleasure in the good, as
the truly beautiful, and that knowledge produces virtue. The good
is likeness to God,—here we have glimpses of an extra-human goal
and model. The body, like all matter, being inherently evil, is a
hindrance to the soul,—here we have a glimpse of hereditary
depravity. But Plato “reduced moral evil to the category of
natural evil.” He failed to recognize God as creator and master of
matter; failed to recognize man’s depravity as due to his own
apostasy from God; failed to found morality on the divine will
rather than on man’s own consciousness. He knew nothing of a
common humanity, and regarded virtue as only for the few. As there
was no common sin, so there was no common redemption. Plato
thought to reach God by intellect alone, when only conscience and
heart could lead to him. He believed in a freedom of the soul in a
preëxistent state where a choice was made between good and evil,
but he believed that, after that antemundane decision had been
made, the fates determined men’s acts and lives irreversibly.
Reason drives two horses, appetite and emotion, but their course
has been predetermined.

Man acts as reason prompts. All sin is ignorance. There is nothing
in this life but determinism. Martineau, Types, 13, 48, 49, 78,
88—Plato in general has no proper notion of responsibility; he
reduces moral evil to the category of natural evil. His Ideas with
one exception are not causes. Cause is mind, and mind is the Good.
The Good is the apex and crown of Ideas. The Good is the highest
Idea, and this highest Idea is a Cause. Plato has a feeble
conception of personality, whether in God or in man. Yet God is a
person in whatever sense man is a person, and man’s personality is
reflective self-consciousness. Will in God or man is not so clear.
The Right is dissolved into the Good. Plato advocated infanticide
and the killing off of the old and the helpless.

_Aristotle_ (384-322) leaves out of view even the element of
God-likeness and antemundane evil which Plato so dimly recognized,
and makes morality the fruit of mere rational self-consciousness.
He grants evil proclivities, but he refuses to call them immoral.
He advocates a certain freedom of will, and he recognizes inborn
tendencies which war against this freedom, but how these
tendencies originated he cannot say, nor how men may be delivered
from them. Not all can be moral; the majority must be restrained
by fear. He finds in God no motive, and love to God is not so much
as mentioned as the source of moral action. A proud, composed,
self-centered, and self-contained man is his ideal character. See
Nicomachean Ethics, 7:6, and 10:10; Wuttke, Christian Ethics,
1:92-126. Alexander, Theories of Will, 39-54—Aristotle held that
desire and reason are the springs of action. Yet he did not hold
that knowledge of itself would make men virtuous. He was a
determinist. Actions are free only in the sense of being devoid of
external compulsion. He viewed slavery as both rational and right.
Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 76—“While Aristotle attributed
to the State a more complete personality than it really possessed,
he did not grasp the depth and meaning of the personality of the
individual.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 289—Aristotle had
no conception of the unity of humanity. His doctrine of unity did
not extend beyond the State. “He said that ‘the whole is before
the parts,’ but he meant by ‘the whole’ only the pan-Hellenic
world, the commonwealth of Greeks; he never thought of humanity,
and the word ‘mankind’ never fell from his lips. He could not
understand the unity of humanity, because he knew nothing of
Christ, its organizing principle.” On Aristotle’s conception of
God, see James Ten Broeke, in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892—God is
recognized as personal, yet he is only the Greek Reason, and not
the living, loving, providential Father of the Hebrew revelation.
Aristotle substitutes the logical for the dynamical in his dealing
with the divine causality. God is thought, not power.

_Epicurus_ (342-270) regarded happiness, the subjective feeling of
pleasure, as the highest criterion of truth and good. A prudent
calculating for prolonged pleasure is the highest wisdom. He
regards only this life. Concern for retribution and for a future
existence is folly. If there are gods, they have no concern for
men. “Epicurus, on pretense of consulting for their ease,
complimented the gods, and bowed them out of existence.” Death is
the falling apart of material atoms and the eternal cessation of
consciousness. The miseries of this life are due to imperfection
in the fortuitously constructed universe. The more numerous these
undeserved miseries, the greater our right to seek pleasure.
Alexander, Theories of the Will, 55-75—The Epicureans held that
the soul is composed of atoms, yet that the will is free. The
atoms of the soul are excepted from the law of cause and effect.
An atom may decline or deviate in the universal descent, and this
is the Epicurean idea of freedom. This indeterminism was held by
all the Greek sceptics, materialists though they were.

_Zeno_, the founder of the Stoic philosophy (340-264), regarded
virtue as the only good. Thought is to subdue nature. The free
spirit is self-legislating, self-dependent, self-sufficient.
Thinking, not feeling, is the criterion of the true and the good.
Pleasure is the consequence, not the end of moral action. There is
an irreconcilable antagonism of existence. Man cannot reform the
world, but he can make himself perfect. Hence an unbounded pride
in virtue. The sage never repents. There is not the least
recognition of the moral corruption of mankind. There is no
objective divine ideal, or revealed divine will. The Stoic
discovers moral law only within, and never suspects his own moral
perversion. Hence he shows self-control and justice, but never
humility or love. He needs no compassion or forgiveness, and he
grants none to others. Virtue is not an actively outworking
character, but a passive resistance to irrational reality. Man may
retreat into himself. The Stoic is indifferent to pleasure and
pain, not because he believes in a divine government, or in a
divine love for mankind, but as a proud defiance of the irrational
world. He has no need of God or of redemption. As the Epicurean
gives himself to enjoyment of the world, the Stoic gives himself
to contempt of the world. In all afflictions, each can say, “The
door is open.” To the Epicurean, the refuge is intoxication; to
the Stoic, the refuge is suicide: “If the house smokes, quit it.”
Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:62-161, from whom much of this account
of the Greeks systems is condensed, describes Epicureanism and
Stoicism as alike making morality subjective, although
Epicureanism regarded spirit as determined by nature, while
Stoicism regarded nature as determined by spirit.

The Stoics were materialists and pantheists. Though they speak of
a personal God, this is a figure of speech. False opinion is at
the root of all vice. Chrysippus denied what we now call the
liberty of indifference, saying that there could not be an effect
without a cause. Man is enslaved to passion. The Stoics could not
explain how a vicious man could become virtuous. The result is
apathy. Men act only according to character, and this a doctrine
of fate. The Stoic indifference or apathy in misfortune is not a
bearing of it at all, but rather a cowardly retreat from it. It is
in the actual suffering of evil that Christianity finds “the soul
of good.” The office of misfortune is disciplinary and purifying;
see Seth, Ethical Principles, 417. “The shadow of the sage’s self,
projected on vacancy, was called God, and, as the sage had long
since abandoned interest in practical life, he expected his
Divinity to do the same.”

The Stoic reverenced God just because of his unapproachable
majesty. Christianity sees in God a Father, a Redeemer, a carer
for our minute wants, a deliverer from our sin. It teaches us to
see in Christ the humanity of the divine, affinity with God, God’s
supreme interest in his handiwork. For the least of his creatures
Christ died. Kinship with God gives dignity to man. The
individuality that Stoicism lost in the whole, Christianity makes
the end of the creation. The State exists to develop and promote
it. Paul took up and infused new meaning into certain phrases of
the Stoic philosophy about the freedom and royalty of the wise
man, just as John adopted and glorified certain phrases of
Alexandrian philosophy about the Word. Stoicism was lonely and
pessimistic. The Stoics said that the best thing was not to be
born; the next best thing was to die. Because Stoicism had no God
of helpfulness and sympathy, its virtue was mere conformity to
nature, majestic egoism and self-complacency. In the Roman
_Epictetus_ (89), _Seneca_ (65), and _Marcus Aurelius_ (121-180),
the religious element comes more into the foreground, and virtue
appears once more as God-likeness; but it is possible that this
later Stoicism was influenced by Christianity. On Marcus Aurelius,
see New Englander, July, 1881:415-431; Capes, Stoicism.

4. SYSTEMS OF WESTERN ASIA. _Zoroaster_ (1000 B. C. ?), the
founder of the Parsees, was a dualist, at least so far as to
explain the existence of evil and of good by the original presence
in the author of all things of two opposing principles. Here is
evidently a limit put upon the sovereignty and holiness of God.
Man is not perfectly dependent upon him, nor is God’s will an
unconditional law for his creatures. As opposed to the Indian
systems, Zoroaster’s insistence upon the divine personality
furnished a far better basis for a vigorous and manly morality.
Virtue was to be won by hard struggle of free beings against evil.
But then, on the other hand, this evil was conceived as originally
due, not to finite beings themselves, but either to an evil deity
who warred against the good, or to an evil principle in the one
deity himself. The burden of guilt is therefore shifted from man
to his maker. Morality becomes subjective and unsettled. Not love
to God or imitation of God, but rather self-love and
self-development, furnish the motive and aim of morality. No
fatherhood or love is recognized in the deity, and other things
besides God (_e. g._, fire) are worshiped. There can be no depth
to the consciousness of sin, and no hope of divine deliverance.

It is the one merit of Parseeism that it recognizes the moral
conflict of the world; its error is that it carries this moral
conflict into the very nature of God. We can apply to Parseeism
the words of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards to the
Buddhists of Japan: “All religions are expressions of man’s sense
of dependence, but only one provides fellowship with God. All
religions speak of a higher truth, but only one speaks of that
truth as found in a loving personal God, our Father. All religions
show man’s helplessness, but only one tells of a divine Savior,
who offers to man forgiveness of sin, and salvation through his
death, and who is now a living person, working in and with all who
believe in him, to make them holy and righteous and pure.”
Matheson, Messages of Old Religions, says that Parseeism
recognizes an obstructive element in the nature of God himself.
Moral evil is reality; but there is no reconciliation, nor is it
shown that all things work together for good. See Wuttke,
Christian Ethics, 1:47-54; Faiths of the World (St. Giles
Lectures), 109-144; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 25;
Whitney on the Avesta, in Oriental and Linguistic Studies.

_Mohammed_ (570-632 A. D.), the founder of Islam, gives us in the
Koran a system containing four dogmas of fundamental immorality,
namely, polygamy, slavery, persecution, and suppression of private
judgement. Mohammedanism is heathenism in monotheistic form. Its
good points are its conscientiousness and its relation to God. It
has prospered because it has preached the unity of God, and
because it is a book-religion. But both these it got from Judaism
and Christianity. It has appropriated the Old Testament saints and
even Jesus. But it denies the death of Christ and sees no need of
atonement. The power of sin is not recognized. The idea of sin, in
Moslems, is emptied of all positive content. Sin is simply a
falling short, accounted for by the weakness and shortsightedness
of man, inevitable in the fatalistic universe, or not remembered
in wrath by the indulgent and merciful Father. Forgiveness is
indulgence, and the conception of God is emptied of the quality of
justice. Evil belongs only to the individual, not to the race. Man
attains the favor of God by good works, based on prophetic
teaching. Morality is not a fruit of salvation, but a means. There
is no penitence or humility, but only self-righteousness; and this
self-righteousness is consistent with great sensuality, unlimited
divorce, and with absolute despotism in family, civil and
religious affairs. There is no knowledge of the fatherhood of God
or of the brotherhood of man. In all the Koran, there is no such
declaration as that “God so loved the world”_ (John 3:16)_.

The submission of Islam is submission to an arbitrary will, not to
a God of love. There is no basing of morality in love. The highest
good is the sensuous happiness of the individual. God and man are
external to one another. Mohammed is a teacher but not a priest.
Mozley, Miracles, 140, 141—“Mohammed had no faith in human nature.
There were two things which he thought men could do, and would do,
for the glory of God—transact religious _forms_, and _fight_, and
upon these two points he was severe; but within the sphere of
common practical life, where man’s great trial lies, his code
exhibits the disdainful laxity of a legislator who accomodates his
rule to the recipient, and shows his estimate of the recipient by
the accommodation which he adopts.... ‘Human nature is weak,’ said
he.” Lord Houghton: The Koran is all wisdom, all law, all
religion, for all time. Dead men bow before a dead God. “Though
the world rolls on from change to change, And realms of thought
expand, The letter stands without expanse or range, Stiff as a
dead man’s hand.” Wherever Mohammedanism has gone, it has either
found a desert or made one. Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Dec.
1882:866—“The Koran has frozen Mohammedan thought; to obey is to
abandon progress.” Muir, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no.
14—“Mohammedanism reduces men to a dead level of social
depression, despotism, and semi-barbarism. Islam is the work of
man; Christianity of God.” See also Faiths of the World (St. Giles
Lectures, Second Series), 361-396; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great
Religions, 1:448-488; 280-317; Great Religions of the World,
published by the Harpers; Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.

3. The person and character of Christ.

A. The conception of Christ’s person as presenting deity and humanity indissolubly united, and the conception of Christ’s character, with its faultless and all-comprehending excellence, cannot be accounted for upon any other hypothesis than that they were historical realities.

The stylobate of the Parthenon at Athens rises about three inches
in the middle of the 101 feet of the front, and four inches in the
middle of the 228 feet of the flanks. A nearly parallel line is
found in the entablature. The axes of the columns lean inward
nearly three inches in their height of 34 feet, thus giving a sort
of pyramidal character to the structure. Thus the architect
overcame the apparent sagging of horizontal lines, and at the same
time increased the apparent height of the edifice; see Murray,
Handbook of Greece, 5th ed., 1884, 1:308, 309; Ferguson, Handbook
of Architecture, 268-270. The neglect to counteract this optical
illusion has rendered the Madeleine in Paris a stiff and
ineffective copy of the Parthenon. The Galilean peasant who should
minutely describe these peculiarities of the Parthenon would
prove, not only that the edifice was a historical reality, but
that he had actually seen it. Bruce, Apologetics, 343—“In reading
the memoirs of the evangelists, you feel as one sometimes feels in
a picture-gallery. Your eye alights on the portrait of a person
whom you do not know. You look at it intently for a few moments
and then remark to a companion: ‘That must be like the
original,—it is so life-like.’ ” Theodore Parker: “It would take a
Jesus to forge a Jesus.” See Row, Bampton Lectures, 1877:178-219,
and in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 22; F. W. Farrar, Witness of
History to Christ; Barry, Boyle Lecture on Manifold Witness for
Christ.

(_a_) No source can be assigned from which the evangelists could have derived such a conception. The Hindu avatars were only temporary unions of deity with humanity. The Greeks had men half-deified, but no unions of God and man. The monotheism of the Jews found the person of Christ a perpetual stumbling-block. The Essenes were in principle more opposed to Christianity than the Rabbinists.

Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, 279—“The coëxistence of a perfect
man and an imperfect society is impossible; and could the two
coëxist, the resulting conduct would not furnish the ethical
standard sought.” We must conclude that the perfect manhood of
Christ is a miracle, and the greatest of miracles. Bruce,
Apologetics, 346, 351—“When Jesus asks: ‘Why callest thou me
good?’ he means: ‘Learn first what goodness is, and call no man
good till you are sure that he deserves it.’ Jesus’ goodness was
entirely free from religious scrupulosity; it was distinguished by
humanity; it was full of modesty and lowliness.... Buddhism has
flourished 2000 years, though little is known of its founder.
Christianity might have been so perpetuated, but it is not so. I
want to be sure that the ideal has been embodied in an actual
life. Otherwise it is only poetry, and the obligation to conform
to it ceases.” For comparison of Christ’s incarnation with Hindu,
Greek, Jewish, and Essene ideas, see Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of
Christ, Introduction. On the Essenes, see Herzog, Encyclop., art,:
Essener; Pressensé, Jesus Christ, Life, Times and Work, 84-87;
Lightfoot on Colossians, 349-419; Godet, Lectures in Defence of
the Christian Faith.

(_b_) No mere human genius, and much less the genius of Jewish fishermen, could have originated this conception. Bad men invent only such characters as they sympathize with. But Christ’s character condemns badness. Such a portrait could not have been drawn without supernatural aid. But such aid would not have been given to fabrication. The conception can be explained only by granting that Christ’s person and character were historical realities.

Between Pilate and Titus 30,000 Jews are said to have been
crucified around the walls of Jerusalem. Many of these were young
men. What makes one of them stand out on the pages of history?
There are two answers: The character of Jesus was a perfect
character, and, He was God as well as man. Gore, Incarnation,
63—“The Christ of the gospels, if he be not true to history,
represents a combined effort of the creative imagination without
parallel in literature. But the literary characteristics of
Palestine in the first century make the hypothesis of such an
effort morally impossible.” The Apocryphal gospels show us what
mere imagination was capable of producing. That the portrait of
Christ is not puerile, inane, hysterical, selfishly assertive, and
self-contradictory, can be due only to the fact that it is the
photograph from real life.

For a remarkable exhibition of the argument from the character of
Jesus, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332.
Bushnell mentions the originality and vastness of Christ’s plan,
yet its simplicity and practical adaptation; his moral traits of
independence, compassion, meekness, wisdom, zeal, humility,
patience; the combination in him of seemingly opposite qualities.
With all his greatness, he was condescending and simple; he was
unworldly, yet not austere; he had strong feelings, yet was
self-possessed; he had indignation toward sin, yet compassion
toward the sinner; he showed devotion to his work, yet calmness
under opposition; universal philanthropy, yet susceptibility to
private attachments; the authority of a Savior and Judge, yet the
gratitude and the tenderness of a son; the most elevated devotion,
yet a life of activity and exertion. See chapter on The Moral
Miracle, in Bruce, Miraculous Element of the Gospels, 43-78.

B. The acceptance and belief in the New Testament descriptions of Jesus Christ cannot be accounted for except upon the ground that the person and character described had an actual existence.

(_a_) If these descriptions were false, there were witnesses still living who had known Christ and who would have contradicted them. (_b_) There was no motive to induce acceptance of such false accounts, but every motive to the contrary. (_c_) The success of such falsehoods could be explained only by supernatural aid, but God would never have thus aided falsehood. This person and character, therefore, must have been not fictitious but real; and if real, then Christ’s words are true, and the system of which his person and character are a part is a revelation from God.

“The counterfeit may for a season Deceive the wide earth; But the
lie waxing great comes to labor, And truth has its birth.” Matthew
Arnold, The Better Part: “Was Christ a man like us? Ah, let us
see, If we then too can be Such men as he!” When the blatant
sceptic declared: “I do not believe that such a man as Jesus
Christ ever lived,” George Warren merely replied: “I wish I were
like him!” Dwight L. Moody was called a hypocrite, but the
stalwart evangelist answered: “Well, suppose I am. How does that
make your case any better? I know some pretty mean things about
myself; but you cannot say anything against my Master.” Goethe:
“Let the culture of the spirit advance forever; let the human
spirit broaden itself as it will; yet it will never go beyond the
height and moral culture of Christianity, as it glitters and
shines in the gospels.”

Renan, Life of Jesus: “Jesus founded the absolute religion,
excluding nothing, determining nothing, save its essence.... The
foundation of the true religion is indeed his work. After him,
there is nothing left but to develop and fructify.” And a
Christian scholar has remarked: “It is an astonishing proof of the
divine guidance vouchsafed to the evangelists that no man, of
their time or since, has been able to touch the picture of Christ
without debasing it.” We may find an illustration of this in the
words of Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 207—“Jesus’ doctrine
of marriage was ascetic, his doctrine of property was communistic,
his doctrine of charity was sentimental, his doctrine of
non-resistance was such as commends itself to Tolstoi, but not to
many others of our time. With the example of Jesus, it is the same
as with his teachings. Followed unreservedly, would it not justify
those who say: ‘The hope of the race is in its extinction’; and
bring all our joys and sorrows to a sudden end?” To this we may
answer in the words of Huxley, who declares that Jesus Christ is
“the noblest ideal of humanity which mankind has yet worshiped.”
Gordon, Christ of To-Day, 179—“The question is not whether Christ
is good enough to represent the Supreme Being, but whether the
Supreme Being is good enough to have Christ for his
representative. John Stuart Mill looks upon the Christian religion
as the worship of Christ, rather than the worship of God, and in
this way he explains the beneficence of its influence.”

John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 254—“The most valuable part
of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced, by
holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model
for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and
can never more be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than
God whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of
perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the
God of the Jews or of nature, who, being idealized, has taken so
great and salutary hold on the modern mind. And whatever else may
be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left:
a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his
followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal
preaching.... Who among his disciples, or among their proselytes,
was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of
imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels?... About
the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal
originality combined with profundity of insight which, if we
abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where
something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of
Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in
his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime
genius of whom our species can boast. When this preëminent genius
is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral
reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth,
religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on
this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor
even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a
better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into
the concrete than the endeavor so to live that Christ would
approve our life. When to this we add that, to the conception of
the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ
actually was ... a man charged with a special, express and unique
commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue, we may
well conclude that the influences of religion on the character,
which will remain after rational criticism has done its utmost
against the evidences of religion, are well worth preserving, and
that what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a
firmer belief is more than compensated by the greater truth and
rectitude of the morality they sanction.” See also Ullmann,
Sinlessness of Jesus; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 129-157;
Schaff, Person of Christ; Young, The Christ in History; George
Dana Boardman, The Problem of Jesus.

4. The testimony of Christ to himself—as being a messenger from God and as being one with God.

Only one personage in history has claimed to teach absolute truth, to be one with God, and to attest his divine mission by works such as only God could perform.

A. This testimony cannot be accounted for upon the hypothesis that Jesus was an intentional deceiver: for (_a_) the perfectly consistent holiness of his life; (_b_) the unwavering confidence with which he challenged investigation of his claims and staked all upon the result; (_c_) the vast improbability of a lifelong lie in the avowed interests of truth; and (_d_) the impossibility that deception should have wrought such blessing to the world,—all show that Jesus was no conscious impostor.

Fisher, Essays on the Supernat. Origin of Christianity,
515-538—Christ knew how vast his claims were, yet he staked all
upon them. Though others doubted, he never doubted himself. Though
persecuted unto death, he never ceased his consistent testimony.
Yet he lays claim to humility: _Mat. 11:29—_“I am meek and lowly
in heart.” How can we reconcile with humility his constant
self-assertion? We answer that Jesus’ self-assertion was
absolutely essential to his mission, for he and the truth were
one: he could not assert the truth without asserting himself, and
he could not assert himself without asserting the truth. Since he
was the truth, he needed to say so, for men’s sake and for the
truth’s sake, and he could be meek and lowly in heart in saying
so. Humility is not self-depreciation, but only the judging of
ourselves according to God’s perfect standard. “Humility” is
derived from “_humus_”. It is the coming down from airy and vain
self-exploitation to the solid ground, the hard-pan, of actual
fact.

God requires of us only so much humility as is consistent with
truth. The self-glorification of the egotist is nauseating,
because it indicates gross ignorance or misrepresentation of self.
But it is a duty to be self-asserting, just so far as we represent
the truth and righteousness of God. There is a noble
self-assertion which is perfectly consistent with humility. Job
must stand for his integrity. Paul’s humility was not of the Uriah
Heep variety. When occasion required, he could assert his manhood
and his rights, as at Philippi and at the Castle of Antonia. So
the Christian should frankly say out the truth that is in him.
Each Christian has an experience of his own, and should tell it to
others. In testifying to the truth he is only following the
example of “Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the
good confession”_ (1 Tim. 6:13)_.

B. Nor can Jesus’ testimony to himself be explained upon the hypothesis that he was self-deceived: for this would argue (_a_) a weakness and folly amounting to positive insanity. But his whole character and life exhibit a calmness, dignity, equipoise, insight, self-mastery, utterly inconsistent with such a theory. Or it would argue (_b_) a self-ignorance and self-exaggeration which could spring only from the deepest moral perversion. But the absolute purity of his conscience, the humility of his spirit, the self-denying beneficence of his life, show this hypothesis to be incredible.

Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 39—If he were man, then to
demand that all the world should bow down to him would be worthy
of scorn like that which we feel for some straw-crowned monarch of
Bedlam. Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, 22,
76—Christ never united with his disciples in prayer. He went up
into the mountain to pray, but not to pray _with them_: _Luke
9:18—_“as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him.” The
consciousness of preëxistence is the indispensable precondition of
the total demand which he makes in the Synoptics. Adamson, The
Mind in Christ, 81, 82—We value the testimony of Christians to
their communion with God. Much more should we value the testimony
of Christ. Only one who, first being divine, also knew that he was
divine, could reveal heavenly things with the clearness and
certainty that belong to the utterances of Jesus. In him we have
something very different from the momentary flashes of insight
which leave us in all the greater darkness.

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 5—“Self-respect is bottomed upon the
ability to become what one desires to be; and, if the ability
steadily falls short of the task, the springs of self-respect dry
up; the motives of happy and heroic action wither. Science, art,
generous civic life, and especially religion, come to man’s
rescue,”—showing him his true greatness and breadth of being in
God. The State is the individual’s larger self. Humanity, and even
the universe, are parts of him. It is the duty of man to enable
all men to be men. It is possible for men not only truthfully but
also rationally to assert themselves, even in earthly affairs.
Chatham to the Duke of Devonshire: “My Lord, I believe I can save
this country, and that no one else can.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his
thirtieth year, to the Duke of Milan: “I can carry through every
kind of work in sculpture, in clay, marble, and bronze; also in
painting I can execute everything that can be demanded, as well as
any one whosoever.”

Horace: “Exegi monumentum ære perennius.” Savage, Life beyond
Death, 209—A famous old minister said once, when a young and
zealous enthusiast tried to get him to talk, and failing, burst
out with, “Have you no religion at all?” “None _to speak of_,” was
the reply. When Jesus perceived a tendency in his disciples to
self-glorification, he urged silence; but when he saw the tendency
to introspection and inertness, he bade them proclaim what he had
done for them (_Mat. 8:4_; _Mark 5:19_). It is never right for the
Christian to proclaim himself; but, if Christ had not proclaimed
himself, the world could never have been saved. Rush Rhees. Life
of Jesus of Nazareth, 235-237—“In the teaching of Jesus, two
topics have the leading place—the Kingdom of God, and himself. He
sought to be Lord, rather than Teacher only. Yet the Kingdom is
not one of power, national and external, but one of fatherly love
and of mutual brotherhood.”

Did Jesus do anything for effect, or as a mere example? Not so.
His baptism had meaning for him as a consecration of himself to
death for the sins of the world, and his washing of the disciples’
feet was the fit beginning of the paschal supper and the symbol of
his laying aside his heavenly glory to purify us for the marriage
supper of the Lamb. Thomas à Kempis: “Thou art none the holier
because thou art praised, and none the worse because thou art
censured. What thou art, that thou art, and it avails thee naught
to be called any better than thou art in the sight of God.” Jesus’
consciousness of his absolute sinlessness and of his perfect
communion with God is the strongest of testimonies to his divine
nature and mission. See Theological Eclectic, 4:137; Liddon, Our
Lord’s Divinity, 153; J. S. Mill, Essays on Religion, 253; Young,
Christ of History; Divinity of Jesus Christ, by Andover
Professors, 37-62.

If Jesus, then, cannot be charged with either mental or moral unsoundness, his testimony must be true, and he himself must be one with God and the revealer of God to men.

Neither Confucius nor Buddha claimed to be divine, or the organs
of divine revelation, though both were moral teachers and
reformers. Zoroaster and Pythagoras apparently believed themselves
charged with a divine mission, though their earliest biographers
wrote centuries after their death. Socrates claimed nothing for
himself which was beyond the power of others. Mohammed believed
his extraordinary states of body and soul to be due to the action
of celestial beings; he gave forth the Koran as “a warning to all
creatures,” and sent a summons to the King of Persia and the
Emperor of Constantinople, as well as to other potentates, to
accept the religion of Islam; yet he mourned when he died that he
could not have opportunity to correct the mistakes of the Koran
and of his own life. For Confucius or Buddha, Zoroaster or
Pythagoras, Socrates or Mohammed to claim all power in heaven and
earth, would show insanity or moral perversion. But this is
precisely what Jesus claimed. He was either mentally or morally
unsound, or his testimony is true. See Baldensperger,
Selbstbewusstsein Jesu; E. Ballentine, Christ his own Witness.

IV. The Historical Results of the Propagation of Scripture Doctrine.

1. _The rapid progress of the gospel in the first centuries of our era shows its divine origin._

A. That Paganism should have been in three centuries supplanted by Christianity, is an acknowledged wonder of history.