Chapter X: Part VIII: The Last Act

“Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, Thou!”

TENNYSON.

WE have reached the last stage, which is also the most critical one, of our inquiry. It is upon the accounts which we have of Christ’s Agony that the scornful denials of his manliness mainly rest. How, it is asked, can you Christians recognise as perfect man, as the head and representative of humanity, one who showed such signs of physical fear and weakness as Christ, by your own confession, showed in the garden of Gethsemane? Even without going to the roll of saints and martyrs, hundreds of men and women can be named who have looked a cruel death in the face without flinching, and endured tortures at least as painful as His with a constancy which was wanting in Him.

It was, indeed, a speech of this kind, in which the death of the Abolitionist leader, John Brown, was contrasted with that of Christ, as one so far superior in manliness that it ought to be enough of itself to shame Christians out of their superstition, which confirmed me in proposing this inquiry to you, as the most necessary and useful one we could engage in.

Now I freely admit that there is no recorded end of a life that I know of more entirely brave and manly than this one of Captain John Brown, of which we know every minutest detail, as it happened in the full glare of our modern life not twenty years ago. About that I think there would scarcely be disagreement anywhere. The very men who allowed him to lie in his bloody clothes till the day of his execution, and then hanged him, recognised this. “You are a game man, Captain Brown,” the southern sheriff said in the waggon. “Yes,” he answered, “I was so brought up. It was one of my mother’s lessons. From infancy I have not suffered from physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness”; and then he kissed a negro child in its mother’s arms, and walked cheerfully on to the scaffold, thankful that he was “allowed to die for a cause, and not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.”

There is no simpler or nobler record in the Book of Martyrs, and in passing I would only remind you, that he at least was ready to acknowledge from whence came his strength. “Christ, the great Captain of liberty as well as of salvation,” he wrote just before his death, “saw fit to take from me the sword of steel after I had carried it for a time. But He has put another in my hand, the sword of the Spirit, and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever He may send me.” And to a friend who left him with the words, “If you can be true to yourself to the end how glad we shall be,” he answered, “I cannot say, but I do not think I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.” The old Abolitionist would have been as amazed as any man at such a comparison as we are dealing with, and would have reminded us that, so far from treading the wine-press alone, he was upheld by the sympathy and enthusiasm of all of his own nation, and of the world outside his own nation, for whom he cared.

No such support had Christ. He knew too well that even the strongest of the little band which came with Him to the garden would deny Him before the light dawned over Olivet. And that sense of utter loneliness it was, more probably than all the rest of the burthen which He was carrying, that wrung from Him the prayer of agony, recalled almost before it was uttered, that the cup might pass from Him, and caused the sweat as it were great drops of blood to fall from His brow as He knelt and prayed.

How the tradition of that agony and bloody sweat has come to us is hard to say, as the nearest witnesses were asleep; but no Christian doubts that it is a true one, or that the passion of human weakness which then passed over His soul was a genuine shrinking from the unutterable anguish which was weighing it down to the dust.

But even admitting frankly all that is recorded of the agony and bloody sweat, such admission can only enhance the sublime courage of all that follows. It is his action when the danger comes, not when he is in solitary preparation for it, which marks the man of courage.

Let us just glance at this action. As Judas with his torchmen draws near He gathers Himself together, rouses His sleepy followers, and meets His enemy in the gate. There could have been no quailing in the glance before which the armed crowd of priests’ retainers went backward and fell to the ground.

Follow Him through that long night: to the Sanhedrim chamber, where He Himself furnishes the evidence which the chief priest sought for in vain while He was silent—to the court of the palace, where He bore the ribaldry and dastard tortures and insults of the low Jewish crowd till morning, turning in the midst of them with the reminding look to Peter, which sent His last friend, broken down by the consciousness of his own cowardice, weeping into the night—to the judgment-seat of Pilate, and the scourgings of the Roman soldiers—to Herod’s hall and the insults of the base Galilean court—back again to the judgment-seat of the representative of the divine Tiberius, and so to the final brutalities in the prætorium while the cross is preparing, and the blood which is dripping from the crown of thorns on His brow, mingles with that which flows from the wounds of His scourgings—and find, if you can, one momentary sign of terror or of weakness.

In all the world’s annals there is nothing which approaches, in the sublimity of its courage, that last conversation between the peasant prisoner, by this time a mass of filth and blood, and the Roman procurator, before Pilate led Him forth for the last time, and pleaded scornfully with His nation for the life of their King. The canon from which we started must guide us to the end. There must be no flaw or spot on Christ’s courage, any more than on His wisdom, and tenderness, and sympathy. And for the last time I repeat, the more unflinchingly we apply the test, the more clear and sure will the response come back to us.

We have been told recently, by more than one of those who profess to have weighed and measured Christianity and found it wanting, that religion must rest on reason, based on phenomena of this visible tangible world in which we are living.

Be it so. There is no need for a Christian to object. He can meet this challenge as well as any other. We need never be careful about choosing our own battle-field. Looking, then, at that world as we see it, labouring heavily along in our own time—as we hear of it through the records of the ages—I must repeat that there is no phenomenon in it comparable for a moment to this of Christ’s life and work. The more we canvass and sift and weigh and balance the materials, the more clearly and grandly does His figure rise before us, as the true Head of humanity, the perfect Ideal not only of wisdom and tenderness and love, but of courage also, because He was and is the simple Truth of God—the expression, at last, in flesh and blood, of what He who created us means each one of our race to be.

* * * * *

We have now finished our endeavour to look at the life of Christ from one point of view, and in special connection with one human quality. I trust it may prove to be only the first step for many of you in a study which will last your lives. At any rate it is one which the reverence which is felt by every member of this College for our founder ought to commend to us above all others.

He, as you all know, was never weary of impressing on us, term after term, year after year, that the aim of this place is to make good citizens, and that this can only be done by keeping vividly before ourselves, in all our work here, that common humanity which binds us all together by the ties of family, of neighbourhood, of country. What that common humanity means and implies, he taught us, can only be understood by reference to a Son of man, and Son of God, in whom we have all a common interest, through whom we have all a common spiritual relationship to His and our Father.

To bring this home to us all, as the central truth of our own lives, as the master-key of the confusions and perplexities in our own hearts, and in the world around us, was the crowning work of his life, and I trust we have been true to his principle and his method in our attempt to realise the life of this Son of Man, and Son of God, on this earth, which is so mysteriously at strife with the will of its Creator and Redeemer.

Into the heart of the mystery of that strife the wisest and best of us cannot penetrate, but the wayfaring man cannot help seeing that it is precisely around this 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, Catholic and Protestant, 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.”

πορεύου καὶ σὺ ποίει ὁμοίως.

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