Note 200.1 — CHRISTIANITY.

And this brings us to the second important point in the original attitude of Christianity, and the manner in which it moved the moral world. This point is the historical foundation on which the moral appeal stood; and this historical foundation was the miraculous life, death, and resurrection of the Founder of the ethical religion. It concerns us not to inquire here, whether Christ was a real person, or, as certain Germans with their ingenious whimsicality will have it, a mere myth; as little need we ask whether the miracles were really suspensions of the laws of nature, or were mere acts of remarkable power somewhat exaggerated by the wondering narrators; much less can it be necessary for the present argument to weigh the evidence for the great crowning miracle of the resurrection. Concerning these matters, every man must either judge for himself or take the authority of nearly two thousand years of effective Christian teaching as a sufficient guarantee. But what we have to do with here is simply this: that these facts were believed, that the Apostles stood upon these facts, and that the ethical efficiency of Christianity was rooted in these facts. Take the facts away, or the assured belief in the facts, and the existence of such an ethico-religious society as the Christian Church becomes, under the circumstances, impossible. Consider what an effect the personality of Socrates had in establishing what we with no great license of language may call the Socratic Church in Athens. The various schools of philosophy, first in Athens and then in Rome, were sects of that Church. Had Socrates not lived and died with visible power and effect before men, the existence of these schools, fathered by this great teacher, would have been impossible. A person is the necessary nucleus round which all social organisms form themselves. But the personality of Socrates was a much less important element in the formation of the Socratic schools than that of Christ was in the formation of the Christian Church. Socrates was only a teacher—one who, like other teachers, might in time create disciples as wise, perhaps wiser than, himself; Christ was a redeemer, whose function as such could be performed by no vicar, and transmitted to no successor: the one was a help and a guide, the other a foundation of faith and a fountain of life. Socrates taught his disciples to become independent of him, and rely on their own perfected reason; from Christ His disciples always derive nourishment, as the branches from the vine. And if the relation of Christ to His disciples, conceived only as a living Saviour walking on the earth, was so much closer than that of Socrates to his disciples, how much more intimate does the relation become, when He who lived and died to redeem humanity from sin rose from the dead as a living guarantee that all who walked in His ways, should follow up their redemption from sin by a speedy victory over that yet stronger enemy. Death![200.1] From the moment that the resurrection stood amongst the disciples as an accepted fact, the Founder of the religion was not merely a wonder-working man, a prophet and the greatest of all the prophets, but He was an altogether exceptional and miraculous Person, either God in some mysterious way combined into an incorporate unity with man, or at least a Person that, compared with the common type and expression of humanity, might pass for God. The influence which the belief in the actual existence of such a human, and yet in so many regards superhuman, character as the Founder of their faith, must have exercised on the early preachers of the gospel, cannot easily be over-estimated. Plato and Plotinus often talk of the raptures with which the human soul would be thrilled if not only, as now, the shadows and types of the Beautiful, but the very absolute Beautiful itself, the αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, stood revealed to mortal sight. But granting for the moment that the manifestation of such a vague abstraction is possible, it is quite certain that, when manifested, it could not possibly act upon men with anything like the power of a human Christ actually risen from the dead. Man, with all his range of imagination, is at bottom as much concrete as any creature, and as little capable of being moved by mere abstractions. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified; Christ risen from the dead; believe in Him—this was the short summation of that preaching of the gospel which regenerated the then world, lying as it did in all sorts of wickedness. See how emphatically the resurrection is alluded to as the main anchor in all the early preachings of the Apostles (Acts ii. 32; iii. 15; iv. 2; v. 30, etc.) And as to St. Paul, he declares again and again that if Christ be not risen, the faith of Christians is vain, and those to whom the world was indebted for its moral regeneration were justly to be accounted amongst the most miserable of men; a method of speaking which plainly implies that, in the Apostle’s estimation, the firm fact of a risen Saviour was the only real assurance that Christians had of a life beyond the grave. So true is the utterance of a distinguished modern divine that “the resurrection was the central point of the apostolic teaching, nay more, the central point of history, primarily of religious history, of which it is the soul. The resurrection is the one central link between the seen and the unseen.”[202.1] Let this, therefore, stand firm as the main principle of any just exposition of the machinery by which the ethics of the gospel achieved the conquest of the world. The Church—“the peculiar people zealous for good works,” of whom St. Peter speaks—was formed out of the world not by the clear cogency of logical arguments, but by the vivid belief in miraculous facts.