Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

as though he had never been? Folly! Do what you will, you cannot escape him. His life and death underlie our institutions as the alphabet underlies our literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed are wrought ineffaceably into the civilization of Africa and Asia, so the life of Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilization, the nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your being and into mine. We are what we are to-night, as Englishmen and as citizens, largely because a Galilean peasant was born and grew to manhood, and preached, and loved, and died. And you think that a fact so tremendous can be just scoffed away--that we can get rid of it, and of our share in it, by a ribald paragraph and a caricature!'

'No. Your hatred and your ridicule are powerless. And thank God they are powerless. There is no wanton waste in the moral world, any more than in the material. There is only fruitful change and beneficent transformation. Granted that the true story of Jesus of Nazareth was from the beginning obscured by error and mistake; granted that those errors and mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are now its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time are now threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen the hold of Jesus on the love and remembrance of man. What then? The fact is merely a call to you and me, who recognize it, to go, back to the roots of things, to re-conceive the Christ, to bring him afresh into our lives, to make the life so freely given for man minister again in new ways to man's new needs. Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation. And woe to our human weakness if it loose its hold one instant before it must, on any of those rare and precious possessions which have helped it in the past, and may again inspire it in the future!'

'_To reconceive the Christ!_ It is the special task of our age, though in some sort and degree it has been the ever recurring task of Europe since the beginning.'

He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood by those who heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great operation worked by the best intellect of Europe during the last half-century--broadly speaking--on the facts and documents of primitive Christianity. From all sides and by the help of every conceivable instrument those facts have been investigated, and now at last the great result-'the revivified, reconceived truth--seems ready to emerge! Much may still be known--much can never be known; but if we will, we may now discern the true features of Jesus of Nazareth, as no generation but our own has been able to discern them, since those who had seen and handled, passed away.'

'Let me try, however feebly, and draw it afresh for you, that life of lives, that story of stories, as the labor of our own age in particular has patiently revealed it to us. Come back with me through the centuries; let us try and see the Christ of Galilee and the Christ of Jerusalem as he was, before a credulous love and Jewish tradition and Greek subtlety had at once dimmed and glorified the truth. Ah! do what we will, it is so scanty and poor, this knowledge of ours, compared with all that we yearn to know--but, such as it is, let me, very humbly and very tentatively, endeavor to put it before you.'

At this point Flaxman's attention was suddenly distracted by a stir round the door of entrance on his left hand. Looking round, he saw a Ritualist priest, in cassock and cloak, disputing in hurried undertones with the men about the door. At last he gained his point apparently, for the men, with half-angry, half-quizzing looks at each other, allowed him to come in, and he found a seat. Flaxman was greatly struck by the face--by its ascetic beauty, the stern and yet delicate whiteness and emaciation of it. He sat with both hands resting on the stick he held in front of him, intently listening, the perspiration of physical weakness on his brow and round his finely curved mouth. Clearly he could hardly see the lecturer, for the room had become inconveniently crowded, and the men about him were mostly standing.

'One of the St. Wilfrid's priests, I suppose,' Flaxman said to himself. 'What on earth is he doing _dans cette galere?_ Are we to have a disputation? That would be dramatic.'

He had no attention, however, to spare, and the intruder was promptly forgotten. When he turned back to the platform he found that Robert, with Mackay's help, had hung on a screen to his right, four or five large drawings of Nazareth, of the Lake of Gennesaret, of Jerusalem, and the Temple of Herod, of the ruins of that synagogue on the probable site of Capernaum in which conceivably Jesus may have stood. They were bold and striking, and filled the bare hall at once with suggestions of the East. He had used them often at Murewell. Then, adopting a somewhat different tone, he plunged, into the life of Jesus. He brought to it all his trained historical power, all his story-telling faculty, all his sympathy with the needs of feeling. And bit by bit, as the quick nervous sentences issued and struck, each like the touch of a chisel, the majestic figure emerged, set against its natural background, instinct with some fraction at least of the magic of reality, most human, most persuasive, most tragic. He brought out the great words of the new faith, to which, whatever may be their literal origin, Jesus, and Jesus only, gave currency and immortal force. He dwelt on the magic, the permanence, the expansiveness, of the young Nazarene's central conception--the spiritualized, universalized 'Kingdom of God.' Elsmere's thought, indeed, knew nothing of a perfect man, as it knew nothing of an incarnate God; he shrank from nothing that he believed true; but every limitation, every reserve he allowed himself, did but make the whole more poignantly real, and the claim of Jesus more penetrating.

'The world has grown since Jesus preached in Galilee and Judaea. We cannot learn the _whole_ of God's lesson from him now--nay, we could not then! But all that is most essential to man--all that saves the soul, all that purifies the heart--that he has still for you and me, as he had it for the men and women of his own time.'

Then he came to the last scenes. His voice sank a little his notes dropped from his hand; and the silence grew oppressive. The dramatic force, the tender passionate insight, the fearless modernness with which the story was told, made it almost unbearable. Those listening saw the trial, the streets of Jerusalem, that desolate place outside the northern gate; they were spectators of the torture, they heard the last cry. No one present had ever so seen, so heard before. Rose had hidden her face. Flaxman for the first time forgot to watch the audience; the men had forgotten each other; and for the first time that night, in many a cold embittered heart, there was born that love of the Son of Man which Nathaniel felt, and John, and Mary of Bethany, and which has in it now, as then, the promise of the future.

_'"He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock, and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb." The ashes of Jesus of Nazareth mingled with the earth of Palestin--_

'"Far hence he lies In the lorn Syrian town, And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down."'

He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. Then a gleam broke over the pale exhausted face--a gleam of extraordinary sweetness.

'And in the days and weeks that followed the devout and passionate fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the Resurrection. How natural--and amid all its falseness, how true--is that naive and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the hearts and imaginations of men.'...

'And now, my friends, what of all this? If these things I have been saying to you are true, what is the upshot of them for you and me? Simply this, as I conceive it--that instead of wasting your time, and degrading your souls, by indulgence in such grime as this'--and he pointed to the newspapers-'it is your urgent business and mine--at this moment--to do our very _utmost_ to bring this life of Jesus, our precious, invaluable possession as a people, back into some real and cogent relation with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not answer me that such an effort is a mere dream and futility, conceived in the vague, apart from reality--that men must have something to worship, and that if they cannot worship Jesus they will not trouble to love him. Is the world desolate with God still in it, and does it rest merely with us to love or not to love? Love and revere _something_ we must, if we are to be men and not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I have tried to show you, man has helped himself by the constant and passionate memory of those great ones of his race who have spoken to him most audibly of God and of eternal hope. And for us Europeans and Englishmen, as I have also tried to show you, history and inheritance have decided. If we turn away from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he has been disfigured and misrepresented by the Churches we turn away from that in which our weak will; and desponding souls are meant to find their most obvious and natural help and inspiration from that symbol of the Divine, which, of necessity, means' most to us. No! give him back your hearts--be ashamed that you have ever forgotten your debt to him! Let combination and brotherhood do for the newer and simpler faith what they did once for the old--let them give it a practical shape, a practical grip on human life. Then we too shall have our Easter!--we too shall have the right to say, _He is not here, he is risen_. Not here--in legend, in miracle, in the beautiful out-worn forms and crystallizations of older thought. _He is risen_--in a wiser reverence and a more reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help inspired by his memory, called afresh by his name!-Risen--if you and your children will it--in a church or company of the faithful--over the gates of which two sayings of man's past, in to which man's present has breathed new meanings, shall be written:--

'_In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust:_

and--

'_This do in remembrance of Me._'

The rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance