The Christ Ideal · 3 of 9

The Kingdom of Man

We have thus far considered the doctrine of Jesus largely from the Godward side. When we turn to the more human point of view, it at once becomes evident that if there be detailed guidance for each soul, which the Father knows even before we ask him, there must also be a lifeplan for each man, an ideal which man is called upon to realise.

Moreover, since all life is an ultimate harmony, the special plan for each must blend with the plans for all others. In seeking to know the Father’s will concerning our daily conduct, we may therefore rest assured that we shall never be called upon to do anything contrary to the best interests of our fellows. All those relationships have been provided for. We need not fear. We need not be troubled. Our part is to do our work. If we do that, the Father will care for all that bears relation to it. Tolerance follows as an inevitable consequence. What another does in his truest moments is as much from God as what we do. If the other is not always true, he may be trying as earnestly as we. Therefore we should not condemn him. If his way is different from ours that is his privilege; ours is to be true to the individual prompting, not ours to say how the two ways shall blend. Only the total perspective reveals the harmony of all human lives.

If each soul has an individual work, each must learn in his own way what that work is and how to perform it. No one can sincerely believe Jesus without also believing that there is no separation between the Father and “the son of man,”—any son of man.

It follows that there is in man a faculty which transcends that of sense perception. God is revealed everywhere, it is true. The Kingdom of God includes all space and all time. But through nature and through our fellowmen the revelation is indirect; it is only in the precincts where God alone may enter that there is direct communion with him.

On this side of the soul’s life, therefore, there is no translating medium by which our consciousness is conditioned, as in the case of the sensations of heat or light, and the other modes of feeling by which we are made aware of the existence of the physical world. It may be our capacity is decidedly limited. It may be that our inner hearing is so dull that we detect only the most distinct intonations of the divine voice. But so far as the Father is concerned there can be no impenetrable obstacle, else were he greatly limited in power, shut out from communion with his children. And if there be no impenetrable obstacle the soul is not an absolute prisoner of the flesh; God can quicken our hearts even though the soul be immersed in the density of the darkest materialism.

The psychology of Jesus is therefore truly spiritual; it is not in bondage to the grasping arms of sordid physiology. God is Spirit. Man is a son of God and therefore spiritual. In that eternal Kingdom for which we are exhorted to store our treasure, there is a union of Father and son which no cataclysm of the physical world can break. Let existence be as carnal as it may, the Father cares for us all, and is present with us every moment of our life.

There is only one attitude which shuts us away from the Father, as long as the attitude endures. This is “the sin against the Holy Ghost,” the sin of nonreceptivity. If a man turn wholly away, he must suffer until he turn back again. The Father does not enforce obedience. He does not excuse us and make the pathway easy, while we stand obdurate, refusing to recognise him. We must at least be receptive; there is nothing changed,that is, forgiven, until we are.

Yet even while we refuse to listen the Father is ever here, knowing our needs, tenderly watching over our troubled days and hours, so that not even the sin of sins separates us from the transcendental world of his loving care, his unspeakable peace.

Again, it follows that since Jesus believes in this orderly relationship of Father and son, he also believes in the freedom of the will.

From one point of view, it might seem that Jesus was a fatalist; for if all things are prearranged, even unto minute details, there would appear to be room for naught except the irresistible unfolding of the divine plan. But if this were all, how could man sin? If this were all, what would be the significance of the injunction to enter into harmony with the divine guidance, to display love instead of hate, to deny ourselves and follow the Christ?

If all events were part and parcel of a rigidly foreordained system, our sins would also be a part of that plan, consequently they would not be sins at all. The entire theory of sin and its cure is based on the presupposition that there is both the divine activity which makes for righteousness and the power in man either to disregard it or to obey. Sweep way man’s power to act and you sweep away human life. Grant the power of human action and you must at the same time concede that man is morally free.

Finally, if man be morally free the injunction to love, to do the Father’s will, makes clear a realm of possibilities which give sublime significance to Jesus’s teaching.

Let the divine plan be as detailed and unyielding as it may; let divine care watch over every moment, it is still possible for man to pursue his own course oblivious of the divine care, and postpone the day when that care shall be welcomed.

There is both the divine plan and the human by-play which sports around it. Say that the byplay is a part of the divine plan, and you must still grant man the liberty to disregard it or pursue it through free choice, although the Father may sometime turn it all to account and teach man the lesson of his waywardness.

From no point of view is it possible to say that all is one hard-and-fast piece. The Father’s ways are many and rich. He permits his children to wander through the forest of ignorance, hiding where they may, devising whatever scheme fancy may dictate. But no pathway is so far astray that the weary soul shall emerge comfortless, and no man’s steps are so devious and flighty as to outwit the Father. Man is free, yet in the end all life is moral. God’s plan is changeless, yet it permits infinite play to human genius; and thus in the end there is neither paradox nor inconsistency.

It is noticeable that Jesus nowhere tells us that such and such events are bound to happen, and nothing else can happen. It is not decreed that on an appointed day, at a predetermined hour, a certain man shall enter his inner sanctuary and receive the divine blessing. But “Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find.” If we love, we shall reap the results of love. If we hate, we must receive the punishments of hatred.

Both courses are open to us. If we consecrate ourselves, the Father will speak through us, but if we close the door the Father will not come. For there is both the son and the Father. What the Father does is the wisest that can be done. What the son does depends upon his choice between the selfish prompting and the divine guidance. Consequently, whether the wisest possible deed be done in given circumstances depends upon whether man be true or false to the divine guidance.

If God alone acted, one could say without qualification, everything that occurs is the best that could occur. But until man shall be perfect we can never truly say this.

Here the critic contends that if man did not choose the divine guidance in preference to the selfish prompting, it was not possible; hence nothing else could have happened, and therefore whatever was, was right.

By this, of course, the critic means that the man did not follow the divine guidance because he was not developed to the point where he could.

But this is fatalism, the exact opposite of Jesus’s teaching. If we always do as well as we can, there is no sin. Sin is not sin unless it be simultaneously possible for us to act righteously instead of unrighteously. If we do only what we can we are mere automata.

That we know far better than we do every honest person will admit whose conscience is not dulled by the constant self-persuasion that “whatever is, is right,” “There is no evil.”

Jesus nowhere compromises with evil. He does not soften it into “socalled evil.” He calls it by its name, unsparingly condemns it, and puts it in sharpest contrast with the good. His doctrine is in fact unmistakable on this point. Evil is evil, and good is good. We must despise the one and love the other. We are not fated to do this. We ought to do it. It is an ethical imperative. We must conquer the one to win the other, and the two are not to be confounded.

He who would grasp the real meaning of Jesus’s doctrine must therefore avoid the pitfalls of the modern heterodoxy which sweeps away the distinctions between lower and higher, and plunges the mind into the deceitful snares of optimistic indifferentism and self-complacent fatalism.

The divine tendency is with every soul, but in the majority it is latent. There are countless millions of souls that know the way of righteousness, but they do not follow it, and our part is to help them to be true. Consequently, our philosophy must be of the sort which meets people where they are; and in the world, with all its beauty and moral possibility, there is an abundance of wrong to be righted—as the Father may direct.

If you say the wrong is right because good is brought out of it, you lose the opportunity to deal with it triumphantly. The fact that the criminal may sometime become a good man by no means makes his crime good. With Jesus, we must unqualifiedly condemn the crime while making every effort to help our brother who has sinned. Thus must we ever bear in mind the distinctions implied in the doctrine of love.

Since the philosophy of Jesus is ethical, it follows that it is very far from pantheism in any form. Spiritual pantheism identifies the soul with God, but Jesus everywhere speaks of the Father and the son. It is reported of him that he “continued all night in prayer to God.” Nothing could be farther from pantheism than this.

In the fourth gospel there are many passages of a character so mystical as to imply pantheistic conclusions. Yet even in this mystical record of Jesus’s doctrine, Jesus speaks of God as the Father; and his saying, “I and my Father are one,” may be taken to mean the oneness of spirit or purpose, the harmony of will, rather than the complete identification of the human son with the divine universal Father. Throughout this gospel, the Master distinguishes himself from the Father by constant references to his mission as the Christ.

“I am come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me.”

“I can of myself do nothing; as I bear I judge.”

Moreover, Jesus says, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” It is not a Kingdom of absolute monotony or identity, like the ocean of infinite wisdom and bliss of the Vedantists. It has room for the individuality of each. It is a wonderfully varied, rich, diversified world. “I go to prepare a place for you.” This is very far from the Oriental theory of absorption, very far from the Buddhistic “Nirvana.” “If the reader remembers that in many passages Jesus, the teacher, is speaking for the universal Christ—the highest union of God and man—the entire gospel becomes intelligible.

As the Christ, Jesus can truly say that he is literally “in” the Father, and in his disciples. For he knew that the Christ self was latent in his disciples as it is latent in all; that through its universal quickening all men might become one in spirit, though differing in individuality.

Jesus neither identified God and the soul nor God and nature.

Physical pantheism declares that God and nature are one substance. If this were true, there would be no invisible world, no soul, no Kingdom of God.

Jesus, who very frequently illustrates his teaching by references to nature, nowhere speaks of nature as God.

He pictures the Father as watching over and caring for nature as he watches over and cares for men. He describes nature as a revelation, a product of God, not as the substance of God. Jesus is thus to be classed as a theist, and not in any sense as a pantheist.

It is also significant that the Master does not employ any of the metaphysical terms by which abstruse reasoners describe nature. He nowhere assures us that nature is a thought world simply. He does not affirm that the mind creates the physical world through ignorance or “Maya.” The world is no dream of unmetaphysical speculation, it is not an “illusion of sense.” The sweet and tender ears of corn are very real for him, and he loves the waving fields and vine-clad hills whose health and beauty reveal the Father’s care.

Nature may be secondary to the spirit, but its existence is not thereby denied, as we shall see more clearly in another chapter. The soul may reveal the divine presence in greater measure, yet nature, too, is instinct with the divine life. And although Jesus possessed great power over nature, he nevertheless displays much reverence for natural law.

We may therefore conclude that nature, in the eyes of Jesus, was a real existence, manifesting the power and beauty of God, a part, though a subordinate part, in the divine order the highest purpose of which is the realisation of the spiritual ideal.

It is needless to examine the other conceptions of reality which, like fatalism and pantheism, are incompatible with the theism of Jesus. Since Jesus believed in God the Father, it follows that he did not believe in these metaphysical gods. His was not a speculative scheme. He went not out in search of abstract truth without regard to its practical bearing upon the lives of men. He possessed the evidence of the Father within, he saw the Father’s hand in all nature, and the Father’s heart in the lives of all mankind. His first desire was to quicken the same vivid sense of reality in all men, well knowing that if they felt the presence all else would be clear.

Moreover, his was an ethical scheme of things, and therefore it was not this and that doctrine which in comparison proves to be subversive of ethics.

There was first the Father, then the son. First the spiritual Kingdom, then its embodiment, the realms of nature and human society. First the law of righteousness, then the law of its gradual fulfilment. Accordingly, we must view the whole organism as a means to an end—the ethical perfection of man through the contests and relationships of the soul with this graduated series.

For the law of evolution, or development from lower to higher, is an important part of the moral order as Jesus viewed it. There are constant references to the word of God as a seed, or as the leaven which slowly attains fruition.

First comes the tiny blade, then the waving corn, and finally the ripened corn in the ear, as the result of weeks of preparation. So there is first the ideal, the divine quickening, then the weeks and months in which the tender young life of the Spirit contends with the robust life of the flesh and the subtleties of self. Wise is he who trusts the Father in these darker times, believing that as the seed passes through its gestative period in the soil, so the spiritual seed will break through the densities of the unregenerate lower nature.

While, therefore, Jesus did not enunciate an elaborate theory of evolution, we may well believe that he regarded all life, physical, mental, and moral, as a process, a progressive result of the divine quickening. The Kingdom of the Spirit comes first, the creative power of God. The simplest forms of life come next, and the entire series of forms, species and events up to the Christ, is the outward or manifested result of the inward or divine quickening.

It is noticeable that the philosophy of Jesus at no point halts at mere individualism. It takes account of man’s part in the universe, it acknowledges man’s freedom and individuality, yet its beginning is found, not in the Kingdom of man but the Kingdom of God. Jesus does not start with finite consciousness and construct everything from that. He does not affirm that a man should build his own world from within. He starts in the large world of divine and social consciousness, of God, man and nature; and never enters a smaller world.

Nor does Jesus try to prove the existence of God. He believes in God because he is aware of the divine presence in the soul. He accepts the existence of the world as given. His philosophy is thus founded on experience; it is wholly of the practical, not of the speculative type. His point of view is always that of the one who takes the world as he finds it and seeks to make it better. Even when condemning the age in which he lived, he is not a pessimist. He is throughout a believer in the beauty of the divine order, and in the regenerative power of human righteousness.

Nor does Jesus inquire into the validity of human knowledge; his teaching is everywhere founded upon an intuitive basis.

The ultimate solution of the world problem which Jesus’s teaching suggests is therefore the splendid possibility that all men may sometime do the Father’s will. Men shall thus know the full truth when they live it. They shall understand virtue by being virtuous, beauty by being beautiful, love by loving.

This solution at once appeals to the reason as the true one. For even if philosophers could solve all problems in regard to the validity of knowledge, or propound a theory which should appeal to the reason of all men as the true solution of life’s mystery, the ultimate proof would be the life, not the theory; only the Christ fully knows, because only the Christ truly lives. There is not the least taint of agnosticism in the faith thus offered as the solution of the problems of life. It is the faith of the seer who knows because he is. Yet in that very knowledge there is an implied solution to all the doubts of agnosticism. While, therefore, Jesus is not confessedly a philosopher, his teaching meets the requirements of a completely reasoned faith.

It is noticeable also that the solution which Jesus offers is not a reconciliation between an angry God and a repentant man. Man’s ultimate harmony with God will therefore be a first attainment, a conscious adjustment to the divine will after varied experience has taught him what that will is. This relationship of God and man will, however, become clearer if we first search for the truth in the doctrine of the “fall of man,” then consider Jesus’s doctrine of salvation.