T. R. Glover

“ Pleasant and easy-going, a perpetual source of interest and rest of mind, the friendship continues, till we find to our surprise that we are changed. Stage by stage, as one comes to know one's friend, by unconscious and freely given sympathy, one lives the other man's life, sees and feels things as he does, slips into his language, and, by degrees, into his thoughts—and then wakes up to find oneself, as it were, remade by the other's personality, so close has been the identification with the man we grew to love. ”

“ When life and thought have such a centre, a simplicity and an integrity follow beyond what we might readily guess. "When thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light, ... if thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light" (Luke 11:34-36) . It is this fullness of light that we find in Jesus; and as the light plays on one object and another, how clear and simple everything grows! ”

“ Is not this to revert to an outworn view of the Christian religion—to reassert its dark side, better forgotten, all the horrible emphasis on sin and its consequences introduced into the sunny teaching of Jesus by Paul of Tarsus, and alien to it? Before we answer this question in any direct way, it is worth while to realize for how many of the real thinkers, and the great teachers of mankind, this distinction between good and evil has been fundamental. They have not invented it as a theory on which to base religion, but they have found it in human life, one and all of them. ”

“ To see God, to know God—that is what Jesus means—to get away from "all the fuss and trouble" of life into the presence of God, to know he is ours, to see him smile, to realize that he wants us to stay there, that he is a real Father with a father's heart, that his love is on the same wonderful scale as every one of his attributes, and in reality far more intelligible than any of them. ”

“ It is worth while to look at the type of character that he admires. Modern painters have often pictured Jesus as something of a dreamer, a longhaired, sleepy, abstract kind of person. What a contrast we find in the energy of the real Jesus—in the straight and powerful language which he uses to men, in the sweep and range of his mind, in the profundity of his insight, the drive and compulsiveness of his thinking, in the venturesomeness of his actions. How many of the parables turn on energy? The real trouble with men, he seems to say, is again and again sheer slackness ”

“ What this new Kingdom of God is, or will be, he does not attempt fully to explain or analyse. In the parables, the treasure-finder and the pearl merchant achieve a great enrichment of life; so much they know at once; but what do they do with it? How do they look at it? What does it mean to them? He does not tell us. We only see that they are moving on a new plane, seeing life from a new angle, living in a fuller sense. What the new life means in its fullness, we know only when we gain the deeper knowledge of God. ”

“ On the whole, how slowly Jesus comes to work with men! He never "rushes" the human spirit; he respects men's personalities. Men and women are never pawns with him. He does not think of them in masses. The masses appeal to him, but that is because he sees the individual all the time. To one of his disciples he says, "I have prayed for thee" (Luke 22:32) . What a contrast to the conventional "friend of man" in the abstract! With all that hangs upon him, he has leisure to pray intensely, for a single man. It gives us an idea of his gifts in friendship. ”

“ Christian history bears witness, in every year of it, to what salvation means, in Jesus' sense. Punishment, consequences, crippled resources—no, he does not ask to escape them now; all as God pleases; these are not the things that matter. Life is all to be boundless love and gratitude and trust; and by and by the new man wakes up to find sin taken away, its consequences undone, the lost faculties restored, and life a fuller and richer thing than ever it was before.
Somehow so, if we read the Gospels aright, does Jesus conceive of Salvation. To achieve this for men is his purpose ”

“ Does not what we mean by the Incarnation imply putting everything in the long run on the individual, quickened into new life by a new relation with God and taught a new love of men by Jesus himself? The heart of friendship and the heart of the Incarnation are in essence the same thing—giving oneself in frankness and love to him who will accept, and by them winning him who refuses. ”

“ How can a man know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus comes with its message of the grace of God, and the power of God, to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of their days; and Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service, perfectly incredible to them. ”

“ A dreamer, with the clouds of the visionaries and apocalyptists ever in his head? When we look at the ancient world, the great men are not archaic figures. Matthew Arnold found in Homer something of the clearness and shrewdness of Voltaire. There is thing archaic about Plato or Virgil or Paul—to keep abreast of their thinking is no easy task for the strongest of our brains, so modern, eternal, and original they are. They have shaped the thinking of the world and are still shaping it. How much more Jesus of Nazareth! ”

“ Good and bad, right and wrong stand out clear as the contrast between light and darkness—they cannot be mistaken, and they matter—and matter for ever. They are no concern of a moment. Action makes character; and, until the action is undone again, the effect on character is not undone. Right and wrong are of eternal significance now in virtue of the reality of God.
Gautama Buddha, for instance, and the greater Hindu thinkers, in their doctrine of Karma, have taught a significance inherent in good and evil, which we can only not call boundless. ”

“ The Gospel began with friendship, and we know from common life what that is, and how it works. Old acquaintance and intimacy are the heart of it. The mind is on the alert when we meet the stranger—quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought, to see who and what he is—it is critical, self-protective, rather than receptive. But, as time goes on, we notice less, we study the man less as we see more of him. ”

“ What do we know of man apart from Jesus Christ? Surely it is only in him that we realize man—only in him that we grasp what human depravity really is, the real meaning and implications of human sin. It is those who have lived with Jesus Christ, who are most conscious of sin; and this is no mere morbid imagination or fancy, it rests on a much deeper exploration of human nature than men in general attempt. ”

“ What was it in him that changed Peter and James and John and the rest from companions into worshippers, that in every age has captured and controlled the best, the deepest, and tenderest of men? Are we afraid that our picture will be too modern, too little Jewish? These are not the real dangers. Again, and again our danger is that we under-estimate the great men of our race, and we always lose by so doing. That we should over-estimate Jesus is not a real risk; the story of the Church shows that the danger has always been the other way. ”

“ Has a man been in earnest with himself about God's dealings with him? Hardness and lust make a man play the fool with human souls whom God loves and cares for—a declaration of war on God himself. Wilful self-deception about God needs no comment; to shilly-shally and let decision slide, where God is concerned, is atheism too. In a word, what is a man's fundamental attitude to God and God's facts? That is Jesus' question. Sin is tracked home to the innermost and most essential part of the man—his will. It is no outward thing, it is inward. It is not that evil befalls us, but that we are evil. ”

“ Men who did such work—work that lasts and is recognized again and again to be genuine by others busy in the same field—cannot have been random, light-hearted creatures. They were, in fact, men tested in life, men of experience of wide and deep experience—men with a gift for living, developed in heart as well as in brain. The finest of Greek critics, Longinus, said that, "The great style ("hupsos") is an echo of a great soul." ”

“ The "reconstruction of a personality"—to borrow a phrase from some psychologists—is a very difficult matter, even when we are masters of our detail. There is a proportion, a perspective, a balance, a poise about a character—my terms may involve some mixture of metaphors, but if the mixture brings out the complexity and difficulty of our task, it will be justified. Above all there is life, and as a life deepens and widens, it grows complex, unintelligible, and wonderful. It is more so than ever in the case of Jesus. ”

“ Yes, but what that religion needed was a great reformer, who should have cut the religion clear adrift from idols of every kind, from the old mythology, from obscenity. It may very well be that such a reformer was unthinkable; even if he had appeared, he would have been foredoomed to fail, as the compromise of the Stoics shows. Plutarch and his kind did not attempt this. They loved the past and the old ways. At heart they were afraid of the gods and were afraid of tradition. Culture and charm will do a great deal, but they do not suffice for a religion—either to make one or to redeem it. ”

“ We have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves, what is the experience which led him to think as he did? In the simpler language of the Gospels, quite plain and easy to understand, the call to follow comes first—the call to deeper association with Jesus Christ in his love for men. Do not our consciences tell us that, if we really loved people as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympathetically and cared as much for them, the cross would be far more intelligible to us? ”

“ Our practical steps betray that we half think God did go away, when he had made the world. Prayer to us is not a real thing—it is not intercourse face to face; far too often it is like conversation over a telephone wire of infinite length which gets out of order. Even if words travel along that wire, there is so much "buzzing" that they are hardly recognizable. No, says Jesus, God is near, God is here—so near, that Jesus never feels that men have any need of a priesthood to come between, or to help them to God ”

“ CHAPTER V THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD It is worth taking some trouble to realize how profoundly Jesus has changed the thinking of mankind about God. "Since Jesus lived," Dr. Fairbairn wrote, "God has been another and nearer Being to man." "Jesus," writes Dr. Fosdick, "had the most joyous idea of God that ever was thought of." That joyous sense of God he has given to his followers, and it stands in vivid contrast with the feelings men have toward God in the other religions. Christianity is the religion of joy. The New Testament is full of it. ”

“ It had not very much to do with Plato, except that it read him and quoted him as a great authority. The Neo-Platonists did not face facts as Plato did. They lived on quotations, on authority and fancy, great thinkers as some of them were. They pictured the universe as one vast unity. Far beyond all things is God. Of God man can form no conception. Think, they would say, of all the exalted and wonderful and beautiful concepts you can imagine; then deny them. God is beyond. God is beyond being; you can conceive of being, and therefore to predicate being of God is to limit him. ”

“ Mankind can dispense with a teacher who misses patent facts, whatever his charm. But there never was any doubt that Jesus was alive to the difference between right and wrong. His critics saw this, but they held that he confused moral issues, and that his distinctions in the ethical sphere were badly drawn.
Jesus could not have ignored the problem of sin and forgiveness, even if he had wished to ignore it. To this the thought of mankind had been gravitating, and in Jewish and in Greek thought, conduct was more and more the centre of everything. ”

“ And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man spoke: "I don't care if he does. My father all his life looked forward to that. What does it matter now, if God redeems his people, or if he does not? My father is dead." The answer was, why should your father not come with the redeemed Israel? But what evidence is there for that? Does God care for people beyond the grave? Is there personal immortality?—that became the anxious question. [18]
But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven? ”

“ If religion is union with God, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the mystics, how can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different altogether from God? Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament. prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of God, what is our religion, if after all we are not seeing God at all, but something else—a dummy god, like that of the Pharisees, some trifling martinet who can be humbugged—or, to come to ourselves, a majestic bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in impersonality? ”

“ We cannot easily realize all that slavery meant. When we read in the Fourth Gospel that "the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29) , that was written before Jesus Christ had abolished slavery; for, we remember, it was done by his people against the judgement of the business experts. Slavery meant robbing the man of every right that Nature gave him; and, as Homer said long ago, "Farseeing Zeus takes away half a man's manhood, when he brings the day of slavery upon him." ”

“ It is his power of help and sympathy that teaches us the hardness of our own hearts, our own fundamental want of sympathy. Again, until a man knows Jesus Christ, he has little chance of even guessing the grandeur of which he himself is capable. A man has, as he says, done his best—for years, it may be, of strenuous endeavour; and then comes the new experience of Jesus Christ, and he is lifted high above his record, he gains a new power, a new tenderness, and he does things incredible. We do not know the wrong or the right of which man is capable, till we know Jesus Christ. ”

“ How does a man come to think and feel as he does? That is the question antecedent to any real criticism. What is it that has led him to such a view? It is more important for us to determine that, than to decide at once whether we think him right or wrong. Again and again the quiet and sympathetic study of what a man has been through will modify our judgement upon his conclusions; it will often change our own conclusions, or even our way of thinking. We have, then, to ask ourselves, What is the experience that leads Jesus to speak as he does, to think as he does? ”

“ Nothing is so futile as an arithmetical numbering of people, for after a certain point figures paralyse the imagination, and after that they tell the mind little or nothing. But here was actually assembled the Jewish people, coming in swarms from all the world, for the feast; here was Judaism at its most pious; here was the pilgrim centre with all it meant of aspiration and blindness, of simple folly and gross sin. ”