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Page 22
Their spiritual experiences are the sensitive plate which caught and
kept for all time the image of the historic Jesus; but their experience
is a memory, and there must be a further experience in us upon which
this memory throws and fixes His image before we know Jesus Christ for
ourselves. Unless a man's soul is unimpressionable, he cannot be faced
with the Christ of the New Testament without being deeply affected. "We
needs must love the highest when we see it," and to millions
throughout the earth Jesus is their highest inspiration. For them He
ceases to belong to the past and becomes their most significant
Contemporary. They do not look back to Him; they look up to Him as their
present Comrade and Lord; and in loyalty to Him they find themselves
possessed of a new life.
In a previous chapter, we used the phrase "man's response to his highest
inspirations" as a description of religious experience; and in
responding to the appeal of Jesus, His followers pass into the
characteristically Christian experience of the Divine--an experience
which involves two main elements: communion through Jesus with God, and
communion with Jesus in God.
_Communion through Jesus with God_. His singular religious experience
they find themselves sharing to some degree. They repeat His discoveries
in the unseen and corroborate them. God, the God and Father of Jesus
Christ, becomes their God and Father, with whom they live in the trust
and love and obedience of children. And for them Jesus' consciousness of
God becomes _authoritative_. It is not that they consider Him in
possession of secret sources of information inaccessible to them, but
that, incomparably more expert, He has penetrated farther and more
surely into the unseen, and they trustfully follow Him. He does not lord
it over them as servants, but leads them as His friends. "Man," says
Keats, in a remark which illustrates Jesus' method with His disciples,
"Man should not dispute or assert, but whisper results to his neighbor."
He, who of old did not strive nor cry aloud, still so quietly gives
those who obey Him His attitude towards God, that they scarcely realize
how much they owe Him. Only here and there a discerning follower, like
Luther, is aware how all-important is the contribution that comes
through a conscious sharing of Christ's revelation, "Whosoever loses
Christ, all faiths (of the Pope, the Jews, the Turks, the common rabble)
become one faith."
And when once Jesus is authoritative for a man, He is the _supreme_
religious authority. A tolerant Roman, like Alexander Severus, set
statues of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, "and others of that
sort," in his lararium; and many today are inclined to make a similar
religious combination. Where Christ is concerned, there can be for His
followers no other "of that sort." We cherish every discovery of the
Divine by any saint of any faith which does not conflict with the
revelation of Jesus; but to those who have found Him the Way to the
Father, His consciousness of God is decisive. In the margin of his copy
of Bacon's _Essays_, William Blake wrote opposite some statement of that
worldly-wiseman, "This is certain: if what Bacon says is true, what
Christ says is false." A loyal Christian must set every opinion he meets
as clearly in the light of his Lord's mind, and choose accordingly his
course in the seen and in the unseen.
When through Jesus we are in fellowship with His God, Jesus Himself
becomes to us _the revelation of God_. The Deity to whom we are led
through His faith discloses Himself to us in Jesus' character. What we
call Divine, as we worship it in One whom we picture in the heavens or
indwelling within us, we discover at our side in Jesus; and if we are
impelled to speak of the Deity of the Father, when we characterize our
highest inspirations from the unseen, we cannot do less than speak of
the Deity of the Son, through whom in the seen these same inspirations
pass to us. Jesus Himself awakens in us a religious response. We
instinctively adore Him, devote our all to Him, trust Him with a
confidence as complete as we repose in God. We are either idolaters, or
Jesus is the unveiling in a human life of the Most High; He is to us God
manifest in the flesh.
And Jesus is also _the revelation of what man may become_. None ever had
a sublimer faith in man than He who dared bid His followers be perfect
as their Father is perfect. He did not close His eyes to men's glaring
unlikeness to God; He said to His auditors, "ye being evil"; He believed
in the necessity of their complete transformation through repentance.
But when He asked them to follow Him, He set no limits to the distance
they would be able to go. He did not warn them that they must stop at
the foot of Calvary, while He climbed to the top; or that they could not
go with Him in His intimacy with the Father. Some Christians, out of
reverence for Jesus, think it necessary to draw a sharp line between Him
and ourselves, and remind us that we cannot overpass it; but He drew no
such line. He believed in the divine possibilities of divinely changed
men. As a matter of fact we find ourselves immeasurably beneath Him,
and, the more we long to be like Him, the greater the distance between
us seems to become. But He is as confident that He can conform us to His
likeness, as that He Himself is at one with His Father.
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