of the Lord; how, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he had defended himself from the charge of desecrating the Sabbath by pointing out the fact that the Temple service justified an habitual exception to the Sabbath law, and claimed for his service an equal exemption;† how, twice in Galilean homes, without pretense of priestly function, he assumed to pronounce sins forgiven; how, in the Temple at Jerusalem, he had justified his working on the Sabbath by claiming for himself the same right in this regard which was exercised by his Father, God,§ and how, in all his preaching, he appealed to Scripture not often, to reason less, to tradition never, his highest authority being a simple "Verily, verily, I say unto you."|| Let us not wonder that to these Jewish Rabbis, who recognized in Jesus only the son of Joseph, these assumptions would seem blasphemous. It could not well be otherwise. They can only be justified by the faith which perceives in him the Son of God. But, if their conscience was shocked, still more their pride was wounded, for pride brooks nothing so illy as the self-assertion in another of superiority; and Christ not only assumed such superiority, but, worst of all, the people with almost universal acclaim accorded it to him. For, after all, the greatest ground of complaint against Jesus was that the people believed in him. They crowded the synagogues to hear him, and, when the rulers no longer left open that door of access to the multitude, they crowded to hear him in the streets and fields. In every conflict they sided with him; in every defeat of his adversaries they rejoiced.** His success was his greatest crime. If he had gathered but few auditors, he would have been pitied, not pun+ Matt. xii., 5, 6. * Luke iv., 21. Matt. ix., 2; Mark ii., 5; Luke vi., 20; Luke vii., 47-50. § John v., 17. Matt. v., 18; vi., 16, 25; Matt. viii., 10; x., 15, 23, 42. Matt. v., 1; viii., 1; xiii., 1, 2; Mark iv., 1; Luke viii., 4. **Luke xiii., 17; xi., 27. ished; but his influence measured their decay, and there were none among them that, with John the Baptist, recognizing the fact, "He must increase, but I must decrease," could with John the Baptist say, "My joy, therefore, is fulfilled."* Pharisaism had fulfilled its mission. Its death-hour had come. But the dying rarely recognize their own decay, and, despite the signs of the times, it struggled hard, though unavailingly, for its life. Thus wider and wider grew the chasm between the popu lace and the Pharisaic party. The more the people gathered about Jesus, the more their leaders withdrew from following and from fellowship. Already, with the sword of Truth, Jesus was cleaving the nation in sunder, and setting family against family. Magnetized by his truth, it lost already its putrescent peace, and gathered in antagonistic currents about opposite poles. Judgment had, in truth, already come to the earth. Humanity separated itself; and, from this time forth, more and more it has flowed in divergent streams, the issue whereof is in that final separation which will be seen when the encrowned King shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. In this growing antagonism there was one argument which the Pharisees could not countervail-the argument which Christ silently addressed to John the Baptist-the Miracles.t The miracles are no longer the best evidences of Christianity. Nay, Christianity is itself the best evidence of the miracles. The full-grown tree is the clearest attestation of the fact that the seed has sprouted. The superstructure itself witnesses the firmness of the foundation which it hides from view. The wonders of the past, effaced by the hands of time, grow dim, and the faith of the Church rests less on the works Jesus wrought in the first century than on those which Christ is performing in the nineteenth. But that century which had not the greater miracle of an *John iii., 30. Matt. xi., 4-6; Luke vii., 21-23. immortal Christianity, possessed the lesser works which attended its advent among mankind. Jesus, come to found a kingdom, possessed the signet-ring of the Most High, and impressed its seal on nature and on man as his credentials. The faith of the people in Jesus rested not in the purity of his life and doctrines, which they did not appreciate, but on “the miracles, wonders, and signs which God did by him."* They who could not understand how this man should forgive sins, could understand that "the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up." Even Renan is compelled reluctantly to admit, as matter of indisputable history, that "only miracles and the fulfillment of prophecy could, in the opinion of the contemporaries of Jesus, establish a supernatural mission," and that, without the miracles," the truth would not have been propagated, and the world had not profited by the immense moral superiority which his (Christ's) Father had imparted to him."§ It does not seem to have occurred to Renan as possible that God was as wise as himself, and took the precaution that his truth should not lack this necessary attestation to give it acceptance among men. The Pharisees, at all events, could not and did not attempt to deny the reality of the miracles. They were matters of common observation and of universal belief. But apparent miracles are not always conclusive evidence of a divine commission. The witch of Endor, without authority from God, seemed to summon the spirit of Samuel from his shadowy resting-place. The magicians of Egypt vied with Moses in working miracles with their enchantments.** The Jews thoroughly believed in a king and a kingdom of evil. Satan was no shadowy embodiment of human guilt, but a real and potent person. Sharing, in a modified form, the dualism which in part they may have borrowed from the philosophy of Per+ Matt. xi., 5. * Acts ii., 22. § Ibid., p. 116. **Exod. vii., 11, 22; viii., 7, 18. Renan's Life of Jesus, chapter on Miracles. sia, they believed in a perpetual, though not doubtful conflict between the Prince of Darkness and the God of Light, and the miracles of false prophets and of false religions they attributed, not to sleight of hand, but to supernatural though diabolic agency. The miracles of Jesus left the Pharisees but one alternative to acknowledge his divine commission, or to charge him with complicity with the devil. They chose the latter, and he compelled them to proclaim their position. Thus: As Jesus was teaching in Galilee, there was brought to him a demoniac, a peculiarly sad and hopeless case, already deprived of both sight and hearing. Christ cast the devil out, and so effectually healed the victim that the blind and dumb both spake and saw.* The amazed people began to suspect at last that Christ was more even than an inspired prophet. "It was never," they said, "so seen in Israel." "Is not this," they asked, "that promised son of David who should come to re-establish the throne of his Father?" The Pharisees dared not openly stem the current which was thus setting so strongly toward Jesus; but among themselves, those that had come down from Jerusalem§ whispered their contempt. This fellow, said they, does not cast out devils but by Beelzebub, the prince of devils. He has indeed come to establish a kingdom, but it is the kingdom of evil. He possesses supernatural powers, but they are those with which Satan endows his agents. An open enmity is better than a secret one; and Jesus, who might well have read their thoughts in their faces, if he had not in their hearts, unearthed them, and by his calm but. powerful invective compelled the conflict for which they were not yet prepared. "Satan," he said in substance, "does not work against himself. The wonders of the magician were wrought, not to emancipate, but to enslave Israel; not to glorify, but to withstand Jehovah. These very Pharisees + Matt. ix., 33. Matt. xii., 23. Luke xi., 17. * Matt. xii., 22, 23. § Mark iii., 22. assume to exorcise evil spirits. Is their power also borrowed from Beelzebub? No! The people are right, and the ecclesiastics wrong. If by the power of God the devils are cast out, then is the kingdom of God truly come; for first must this old tenant of the human heart be bound before he can be despoiled of his ancient possession. Let these Pharisees beware. There is an unpardonable sin.* It has not been committed by the Roman who has oppressed the people of God; nor by the publican who has participated in that oppression that he may share in its profits; nor by the drunkard, the violence of whose appetite it would seem that nothing but divine power could quell; nor by the harlot, who has sold more than her birthright for less than a mess of miserable pottage; but the ecclesiastic, who in the Church opposes all reformations and renovation, the divine instrument of which the Church was meant to be, in the name of God deliberately withstands the cause of God, and not only employs the livery of Jehovah to serve the devil in, but imputes the livery of Satan to the Son of God, he is in danger of passing that great gulf fixed which even divine love can never bridge. In the Church, not without it; among the irreligious and ungodly professors of religion rather than among the openly vicious and profane, are chiefly to be found the unpardonable sinners—they that, "wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight," call evil good, and good evil; put light for darkness, and darkness for light; bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter-in one word, God for Satan, and Satan for God.t Surprised by this sudden unmasking, the Pharisees remon It belongs to the theologian rather than to the historian to define the unpardonable sin, which indeed Christ seems to have left purposely somewhat undefined. It is doubtless correctly described rather as a state than an act (Alford in loco), consisting not so much in any specific sin as in that general hardness of heart in which it becomes inaccessible even to the influence of God's Holy Spirit, one of the chiefest indications of which is openly attributing the evident work of God to the agency of Satan. But it is certainly significant that Christ warns of it only those who, in the Church of God, deliberately oppose God's cause. † Matt. xii., 22-37; Luke xi., 17–23. |