By James Stalker
IN the foregoing chapter we have seen the feelings produced in the sensitive heart of Christ by the persons and things He was brought into contact with. In the present one we have to deal with the feelings which He produced, by His presence and actions, in the hearts of men. If much attention is paid in the records of His life to the depth and variety of the impressions which others made on Him, no less surprising is the number of notices they contain of the impressions which He made on others.
Simeon the aged, when he held the child Jesus in his arms in the Temple, prophesied that by con tact with Him the thoughts of many hearts would be revealed; and this was one of the most outstanding features of His subsequent life. None who came near Him could remain indifferent. They might hate or they might love, they might admire or they might scorn Him; but in any case they were compelled to show the deepest that was in them. In the Talmud there is a fable that King Solomon wore a ring engraven with the divine name, and everyone towards whom he turned the inscription was forced to speak out whatever he was thinking at the moment. So Jesus, by His mere presence among men, brought to the surface their deepest thoughts and feelings and made them display the best and the worst which their hearts concealed.
I.
The commonest impression which He is narrated in the Gospels to have excited is Wonder. " They marvelled at Him; " " they wondered; " " they were astonished with a great astonishment ", such are the phrases which recur continually in the records of His life. Sometimes it was at His teaching that they marvelled at its gracefulness, originality and power or at the knowledge displayed by one who had never learned. Still more noisy was their wonder at His miracles. People ran together to the spot where a miracle was taking place; those who had been cured spread abroad the fame of what had happened to themselves; and, wherever He went, there rose around Him a cloud of notoriety.
Though this was the commonest impression made on people's minds, it was far from the most valuable. To Himself it was an unpleasant necessity. His soul shrank from the importunities of the crowd, and He gauged the depth of their shallow adulation. The one advantage of it, for the sake of which He submitted to the necessity, was that it brought to Him, among the rest, those who really wanted Him and whom He wanted, as in the case of the woman who came behind Him in the crowd, when He was on the way to the house of Jairus, and touched the hem of His garment, that she might be healed. The crowd was thronging Him, many no doubt touching His very person; but they got nothing from this contact. She came in dire need and trembling faith, and, at her touch, virtue went out of Him and healed her. But she would hardly have been there but for the crowd: it was by the noise and excitement that she was informed that He was near; at all events the crowd supplied her with her opportunity.
This may still be the one advantage, which compensates for the many drawbacks of the rumour that rises round religion in some of its forms. The sensation is a bell that rings into church those who need Christ. The appearance of popular preachers is trumpeted abroad, and crowd's flock to hear them. When a distinguished evangelist appears or a revival of religion breaks out, the country is moved with wonder. Much of this noise is silly enough, but some may derive advantage from it While the multitudes throng, one here and there touches. The crowd comes talking and buzzing out of church, but someone, hurrying silently through the throng to escape into solitude, carries away a blessing.
II.
Sometimes wonder deepened into Fear. Thus, when He rose from sleep during the storm and rebuked the winds and waves, it is said, "they feared exceedingly; " and, when He raised to life the widow's son at Nain, " there came a fear on all."
From other parts of Scripture also it maybe inferred that this was the natural result of witnessing a miracle. A miracle, seen close at hand, produced the sense of the immediate presence of the Almighty; and any unmistakable manifestation of the divine excites fear. At loud and sudden thunder there falls an awe over the spirit; and I have heard those who have experienced an earthquake describe the sensation of terror it awakens as unique and quite beyond the control of the will. It is the sense of being utterly helpless in the grasp of immeasurable power. Those who saw Christ perform a miracle felt that there was in Him that which could do what it pleased with them and with nature round about them; and it was this vague impression of the divine in Him which made them afraid.
But the fear He inspired was at other times a genuine tribute to the majesty of His human character; and we get no more authentic glimpses of the moral stature of Jesus than "by observing the impressions which He produced on the minds of others in the great moments of His life. At the gate of Gethsemane, when He encountered the band sent to arrest Him, the traces of the experiences which He had passed through in the garden were still upon Him, and the effect of His rapt and tragic air was extraordinary. At the sight of Him " they went backward and fell to the ground." All through the last six months of His life, indeed, He seems habitually to have been invested, through brooding on His approaching fate, with an awful dignity. His great purpose sharpened His features, straightened His figure and quickened His step; and some times, as He pushed ahead of the Twelve, absorbed in His own thoughts, " they were amazed; and, as they followed, they were afraid."
Earlier, however, even in the serene beginning of His ministry, there were manifestations of this overpowering moral dignity. When He drove the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, in the first access of His prophetic inspiration, why did they flee crouching before Him? They were many, while He was but one; they were wealthy and influential, while He was but a peasant. Yet there was that in Him which they never thought of resisting. They felt how awful goodness is. There is a majesty in virtue indignant before which the loftiest sinners cower. I have known a youth from the country enter an office in the city, where the daily conversation was so foul and profane that it would almost have disgraced the hulks; but a month after his arrival not a man in the place dared to utter an unchaste word when he was present. Yet he had scarcely spoken a syllable of reproof; it was simply the dignity of manly goodness that quelled conscious iniquity.
III.
The fear excited by Jesus sometimes deepened into repulsion. The fear He caused was the fear of the finite in the grasp of the Infinite. But those who felt themselves helpless in the hands of the Almighty felt themselves at the same time exposed in the sight of the All-seeing and the All pure.
As the ignorant speak with fluency in the company of the ignorant, but if introduced among the learned, stammer and become afraid of their own voices; or as the beggar, who is quite unconscious of his rags when moving among his equals, if brought into a drawing-room filled with well-dressed people, becomes suddenly aware of every patch on his coat and every hole in his looped and windowed raggedness; so, when confronted with spotless holiness, the human soul turns round upon itself and recognises its imperfections. It was this which made St. Peter, when he saw the miraculous draught of fishes, put up his hands in deprecation and cry to Jesus, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 0 Lord." And for the same reason the Gadarenes, when they beheld the miracle which Jesus had wrought in their midst, besought Him to depart out of their coasts. They felt the instinctive shrinking of the guilty from the holy.
In the tragedy of Faust, Margaret, who is meant to represent virgin purity, cannot bear the sight of Mephistopheles, though he is disguised as a knight and she has no idea who he really is. She shrinks from him instinctively: -
In all my life not anything
Has given my heart so sharp a sting
As that man's loathsome visage.
Christ's presence produced precisely the opposite effect: in the unholy it awoke repulsion and the desire to flee from Him. As He held down His head with burning shame and wrote on the ground, when the sinful woman was brought to Him, her accusers, at length dimly recognising what was going on in His mind, grew afraid and, " being convicted in their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst." When He drew near to possessed persons, His mere proximity threw them into paroxysms of excitement, and they entreated Him to depart and not torment them; for merely to see one so holy was a torment.
The presence of superlative goodness, if it does not subdue, stirs up the wild beasts, which lurk in the subterranean caverns of the human heart into angry opposition to itself. Christ made the evil in those who opposed Him show itself at its very worst. Pilate, for example, only applied to the case of Jesus the same principles of administration which he had made use of in hundreds of other cases-the principles of the self-seeker and time-server dressed in the garb of justice; but never did these principles appear in all their ghastly unrighteousness till he released Barabbas and handed over Jesus to the executioner. The inhumanity and hollowness of Sadducee and Pharisee were never seen in their true colours till the light, which streamed from Jesus fell on them and exposed every spot and wrinkle of the hypocrite's robe. Christ's very meekness provoked them to deeper scorn of His pretensions; His silence under their accusations made them gnash their teeth with baffled malice; the castigation of His polemic made them cling to their errors with more desperate tenacity.
Thus are hearts hardened by the very excellence of those with whom they have to deal. As Ahab, when he met Elijah, hissed at him, " Hast thou found me, 0 mine enemy? " so the mere sense that his godly mother is praying for him, or that good people are planning for his spiritual welfare, may excite in one who is going determinedly down the broad road a diabolical scorn and rage. The contempt with which one who bears witness for God is flouted by his comrades is often only an evidence that they feel his presence a reproach to their own evil characters, and it is a real, though undesigned, tribute to his superiority. "Marvel not if the world hate you; ye know that it hated Me before it hated you."
IV.
Although the presence of Jesus repelled some, it exerted on others the most powerful attraction, and the most characteristic feature of His character was Moral Attractiveness. He repelled those who were wedded to their sins and unwilling to abandon them, but He attracted all who in any degree were feeling after a new and better life.
Strong as the power of sin is in the soul of man, it never altogether overcomes the opposite principle. There is that in every man which opposes his sin and protests against it. It reminds the prodigal of the Father's house, from which he has wandered, and makes him feel the shame of serving among the swine. It warns him in solitary hours that the sin to which he is attached is his worst enemy, and that he will never be happy till he is separated from it.
This redeeming principle in human nature is the conscience; and without its feeling for what is holy and divine the condition of man would be hopeless. But it exists even in the wicked; who cannot withhold their admiration from the truly good and, though following the worse, approve the better, course. It makes men afraid and ashamed of their own sin, even when they are most abandoned to it. It may be stimulated by denunciations of sin, like those of the Baptist; but it is touched even more effectively by the sight of exceptional purity or by the compassion which pities ungodliness. This reminds man of something he has lost; it causes the sinful enjoyments with which he is occupied to appear cheap and vulgar; it makes him uneasy and dissatisfied.
Jesus naturally exerted this kind of influence in the strongest degree. Wherever there existed any tenderness or susceptibility towards what is high and pure, it was stimulated by His presence. Conscience, hearing His voice in its prison, woke up and came to the windows to demand emancipation. As the presence of a physician armed with a cure for some virulent disease excites a sensation among those afflicted with the malady, who communicate the news of relief to one another with the swiftness of a secret telegraphy, so, wherever Jesus went, the heavy-laden and the aspiring heard of Him and found Him. In publicans and sinners, and even in Pharisees, unaccustomed movements showed themselves: Nicodemus sought Him by night; Zacchaeus climbed into the sycamore tree to see Him; the woman who was a sinner stole to His feet to bathe them with her tears.
Moral attractiveness is of two kinds-the passive and the active.
There is a goodness, which draws men by the mere force of its own beauty. It is not thinking of any such effect; for it is inward and self-absorbed; its attention is concentrated on an inner vision and occupied with following a secret law. It would never think of crediting itself with an influence on others; for it is not aware of its own beauty and that which sets off all its qualities is the ornament of humility. This is the goodness especially of the feminine virtues and the characters which exhibit it in a marked degree have always a womanly element. "Such have many of us seen-some times in humble life, faithful and devoted, loyal to man and full of melody in their hearts to God, their life one act of praise; some in a higher sphere, living amid the pride of life, but wholly untouched by its spells; free and unensnared souls, that had never been lighted up with the false lights and aspirations of human life, or been fascinated by the evil of the world, though sympathizing with all that is good in it, and enjoying it becomingly; who give us, as far as human character now can do, an insight into the realms of light, the light that comes from neither sun nor moon, but from Him who is the light everlasting."*
Of such characters Jesus is the head and crown. His image shines through all the centuries with the beauty of holiness. This is why the eyes of men, sweeping the fields of history in search of excellence, always rest at last on Him as its perfect and final embodiment. This is why none can write of Christ without falling into a kind of rapture and ecstasy of admiration, and even those who are bitter and blustering in their opposition to everything Christian grow hushed and reverent when they speak of Christ Himself. No pen can fully render the impression made on the reader by His life in the Gospels. It is easy to make a catalogue of the qualities, which entered into His human character; but the blending and the harmony and the perfection, the delight and the subduing charm, who can express? Yet all this walked the earth in the flesh, and men and women saw it with their eyes!
The moral attractiveness of the active sort influences in a different way. There are natures, which we call magnetic. People cannot help being drawn to them and following where they go. Whatever such natures do, they act with all their might, and others are drawn into the rush and current of their course. It may be an evil course, and then they are ringleaders in sin; for the kingdom of darkness have its missionaries as well as the kingdom of heaven. Like other forces of human nature, this one requires to be redeemed and consecrated. Then it becomes the spirit of the missionary, the apostle, the religious pioneer.
Nothing in the memoirs of Jesus is more surprising than the apparent ease with which He induced men to quit their occupations and follow Him. John and James are in their ship mending their nets; but, when He calls, they instantly leave the ship and nets and their father Zebedee and go after Him. Matthew is at the seat of custom, and that is a seat not easily left; but no sooner is he called than he forsakes all and follows Jesus. Zacchaeus, who had been an extortioner for a lifetime, was no sooner asked to receive Him into his house than he began to make proposals and promises of the utmost generosity. Jesus was engaged in a splendid work, whose idea and results touched the imagination of all who were capable of anything noble. He was wholly absorbed in it; and to see unselfish devotion always awakens imitation. He was the author and leader of a new movement, which grew around Him, and the enthusiasm of those who had joined it drew others in. The same power has belonged in remarkable measure to all great spiritual leaders-to St. Paul, to Savonarola, to Luther, to Wesley and many more; who, filled themselves with the Holy Ghost, have been able to lift men above the instincts of pleasure and comfort and make them willing to deny themselves for a great cause. And no earnest life, in which the enthusiasm of Jesus burns, fails to exercise in some degree the same influence.
It is one of the healthiest features of our day that all thinking people are growing sensitive about their influence. To many the chief dread of sin arises from perceiving that they cannot sin themselves without directly or indirectly involving others; and it would be to them the greatest of satisfactions to be able to believe that they are doing good to those with whom they are brought into contact, and not harm.
This is a feeling worthy of the solemn nature of our earthly existence, and it ought certainly to be one of the guiding principles of life. Yet it is not without its dangers. If allowed too prominent a place among our motives, it would crush the mind with an intolerable weight and cause conduct to appear so responsible that the spring of energy would be broken. It might easily betray us into living so much for effect as to fall into hypocrisy. The healthiest influence is unsought and unconscious. It is not always when we are trying to impress others that we impress them most. They elude the direct efforts which we make, but they are observing us when we are not thinking of it. They detect from an unconscious gesture or chance word the secret we are trying to conceal. They know quite well whether our being is a palace fair within or only a shabby structure with a pretentious elevation. They estimate the mass and weight of our character with curious accuracy; and it is this alone that really tells. Our influence is the precise equivalent of our human worth or worthlessness.
A man may strive for influence and miss it. But let him grow within himself, in self-control, in conscientiousness, in purity and submission, and then he will not miss it. Every step of inward progress makes us worth more to the world and to every cause with which we may be identified. The road to influence is simply the highway of duty and loyalty. Let a man press nearer to Christ and open his nature more widely to admit the energy of Christ, and, whether he knows it or not, it is better perhaps if he does not know it, he will certainly be growing in power for God with men, and for men with God. " Abide in Me, and I in you: as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me."
Finis.
* Mozley, University Sermons.
