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MACARTHUR
CHRIST―THE QUESTION OF THE CENTURIES
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Robert Stuabt MacAbthub was bom at Dalesville, Quebee, in 1841, and graduated from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1870. He has been pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, New York, continuously since 1870. From the very first he began to attract attention as pastor and preacher, and the success which has at- tended his ministry has been phenomenal. During his ministry his church has given for benevolent and missionary enterprises more than two million dollars.
MACARTHUR
Born in 1841
CHRIST―THE QUESTION OF THE CENTURIES 1
What think ye of Cfcrw^.― xxiL, 42.
THE ideal man has not yet been discovered. Humboldt, who traveled far, saw much and felt more, recorded in his diary this sentence, **The finest fruit earth holds up to its maker is a man. " It is here implied that this finest fruit is the ideal man. But Humboldt did not aflSrm that he had ever found this man. The ideal man has not yet been discovered among those who were mere men. No one of our noblest men was a spot- less sun; no one reached sinless perfection. From all our loftiest specimens of manhood I turn dissatisfied to Jesus Christ, and in Him I find the ideal becomes actual, the dream real, and the hope fruition. What Mount Tabor is, rising abruptly in its unique sym- metry and beauty from the northeastern arm of the plain of Esdraelon, that Jesus Christ is, rising in insulated grandeur and spotless per- fection above the plain reached by the noblest men of all the centuries.
1 Printed here by kind permission of Dr. liCacArthur, 75
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What Mount Blanc as the king of the Alps is, lifting its crystal domes and towers 15,781 feet above the level of the Mediterranean Sea, compared with the other snow-clad and doud- kissed mountains of the Alps, that Jesus Christ is compared with the loftiest men who have risen as mountain heights above their fellows through all the ages. What the Him- alaya range, the most elevated and stupen- dous mountain system on the globe, sweeping across historic lands as far as from New York to Chicago and back to New York, and rising so high tiiat the superb Matterhorn, if lifted bodily and placed upon the Jungfrau, would not reach the glittering Himalaya heights, that and more Jesus Christ is to the long line of men who have risen highest in mortal grandeur in the history of fiie human race. Jesus Christ is the pearl and crown of human- ity; He is the loftiest specimen of manhood the race has produced ; he is the fullest mani- festation of ^vinity God has given the world ; He is the eflfulgence of God's glory, and the very image of His substance. He rises in un- approachable glory, not only above men, but also above saints and seraphs, and above angels and archangels. Gazing upon Him, we can exclaim with inexpressible enthusiasm and un- utterable ecstasy, ^^Ecce Homo!^^ and with the same breadth and with equal truth we can also reverently exclaim, *^Ecce Deusl^*
The setting of this text is instructively sug-
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gestive. For some time in His discussion with the Pharisees, our Lord had been acting on the defensive. Both Sadducees and Pharisees had been asking Him questions. His answers put the Sadducees to silence, and their con- fusion greatly gratified the Pharisees. It is now their turn to experience similar confusion from the celerity and dexterity of His replies. Never was there so skilful a debater as Jesus Christ. He was masterful in His clarity of thought, simplicity of speech, and purity of motive.
In the case before us, He passes from the defensive to the oflfensive, and he convicts Scribes and Pharisees of entertaining false views of the Messiah. They had disputed His claims as a spiritual Messiah, and He now shows the irreconcilable contradiction between their views of Him as a mere worldly Messiah, and the teaching of their own prophetic Scrip- tures. They were silenced and even stunned by His rapid, aggressive, and unanswerable attack. We are significantly told that ** no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions."
It must, doubtless, be admitted that there are men in every community, who have no definite convictions regarding Jesus Christ. It seems almost incredible that in a commu- nity of culture and Christianity men and women should be found who have not reached
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definite conclusions regarding the person and character of Christ I put tiien the question with the utmost directness, ''What think ye of Christ?" This is the broadest, deepest, and loftiest question ever put to the human race. This is the question of all the ages. This question virtufidly engaged the thought of Abraham ; it evoked a response from Moses ; and it stirred the deepest emotions and lofti- est praise of David, as he swept his lyre and sang his immortal songs. . . .
In this congregation there are no liearers unwilling to admit that Jesus Christ is at least a great historic character. They frankly admit that He was born at Bethlehem, brought up at Nazareth, and crucified at Jerusalem. They are entirely correct in the outward fea- tures of His earthly career, but they have com- paratively little conception of the spiritual significance of His wonderful life and Hia vicarious death.
They think of the historical elements of His wonderful life as they would think ot those of Buddha, Zoroaster, or Mohammed. Their conception of His earthly life has no power over the development of their own lives, ex- cept as a mere character of history. They fail to see that His was a unique life, and that it was lived on earth by Him, that it might be lived in some measure over again on earth by us. They fail to see that He became the Son of man, that we might become the sons
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of (Jod. They do not learn that He revealed the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man that we should sweetly experience the one and constantly illustrate the other. The historic Christ has no more power over the practical lives of some, than the traditional heroes of classic legend. Virtually for them there is no Christ or God. Practically for them there is no historic Christ. Until the historic Christ is translated into a personal Savior and Master, controlling our acts, our. words, and our thoughts by His matchless ex- ample. His unique personality, and His spirit- ual purity, there is for us no historic Christ worthy the name.
There are those who think of the Christ as a dreamy, sentimental, and poetic char- acter. They are charmed by the commendable characteristics of His remarkable life. They refer to Him in terms of soothing speech and of dreamy aflfection. There is an element of poesy in all their conceptions of the divine- human Christ. They think of Him in language which the robust Chalmers called, in his lofty scorn, ''nursery endearments." They are ready to adopt the language of the renowned French theologian, eminent Orientalist, and brilliant rhetorician, Renan, when he speaks of the Christ of God as the ''sweet Galilean." Such epithets must be utterly unwelcome to Christ. If He be not more than man, then He is less than man. If He be not worthy of
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our loftiest devotion, He is certainly worthy of our severest reprehension. In a word, if He be not Ood, He is not a good man.
Carlyle described materialism as a ^^ gospel of dirt"; we might fittingly describe this sweet and silly sentimentalism as a ^'gospel of gush." Only as we bow down at Christ's feet, and worship Him as the divine-human Man, can we give Him the honor which He merits and demands. Then we can employ and sanctify the loftiest poetry in chanting His praise, the noblest art in limning His per- son, and the profoundest logic in urging Hii^ claims upon men as the divine-human Savior. There are many who are willing to admit and who earnestly aflSrm that Jesus Christ is the ideal man of the human race. They are ready to declare that it was a glorious thing that man was originally made like Ood, and that it was a still more condescending thing that Ood was made like man. The Christ was indeed the ideal man of the human race. He was the great exemplar, the perfect model, the sub- lime original to be imitated by all true men and women. In Him, and in Him only, the plant of humanity blossomed and bloomed into a perfect flower.
But how can we account for the perfection of His humanity, if we deny the reality of His divinity? We ought, as students of lit- erature and life, to account for Jesus the Christ We strive to account for Socrates and
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Plato, for David and Isaiah, for Paul and Luther, for Washington and Gladstone, for Lincoln and McKinley. Are we not under the strongest possible obligations to account for Jesus Christ? Men say that Jesus Christ was. good, but that He was not God. Out of their own mouths these men convict themselves of inconsistency in their locutions and illogicality in their reasonings. If Jesus Christ be not God, He is not good. He is either an unpar- donable egotist, or a hopeless lunatic, or he is the Christ of God, and God over all, blest forever more. He claimed to be God, and if His claim be not true, how can he be good? The stream of His life flowed through the human race on a higher level, and rose to a. vastly higher point, than any other stream known to human history or divine revelation. How shall we account for the height to which that stream rose? Water can never rise higher than its source. If that source were simply human, how can we account for tho superhuman height which it reached? If we admit the account given in the gospels of His virgin birth and divine origin, all His life is easily explicable.
But if we deny His unique origin, we can not logically account for His unique life. A life b^an as was never another life, we might expect to see continue as no other life con- tinued. A naturally skeptical man finds it easier to admit the account of Christ's remark-
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able birth than to attempt to explain His remarkable life if He deny the remarkable birth. The nnieity of His birth we would naturally expect to eventuate in the unicity of His life. His life can not be explained on any principle of heredity. We readily admit the royal element in His blood, altho the fortunes of His family had fallen before His birth; but no law of heredity will account for tiie physical attractiveness, the mental superiority, and the moral purity of Jesus, the Christ. Neither will environment account for His marvelous career and character. What was there in the peasant conditions of His family life to produce the uniqueness of His manhood? Neither will education account for the Christ. He was never in school, in the technical sense of that term, altho He doubt- less studied in the village synagog; and yet He rose above all the limitations, traditions, and bigotries by which He was surrounded. It is doubtful if He ever sat at the feet of the greatest rabbis of the time. It is certain that He never studied at the feet of the philoso- phers of Greece and Rome, nor of the dreamy Orient. He never traveled, except possibly barely across the confines of Palestine, a country about the size of the State of New Hampshire. How came He to emancipate Himself from the sectarianism and sectional- ism of His country and century? How came He to be the contemporary of all the ages?
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How came He to utter in the Sermon on the Mount truths which socially and religiously the foremost thinkers of to-day can barely understand, and dare not fully apply to the solution of the problems of the hour? No mere human thinker has ever approached the Sermon on the Mount. But in pure spiritu- ality of thought, our Lord surpassed it in His last address to His disciples. This address bears the ineffaceable marks of His supreme divinity and absolute deity. 0, ye critics, I ask you as a problem of literature and life to account for Jesus the Christ. I ask no favors for Him. It is you that need the favors, if you oppose the Christ. I demand for Him simple justice. **What think ye of the Christ!'*
Dr. Geikie, in his **Life of Christ," calls at- tention to the fact that the Jews confess great admiration for the character and words of Jesus ; that the Mohammedan world gives Him the high title of Messiah; that the myriad- minded Shakespeare paid Him lowly rever- ence, and that men like Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and Milton set the name of Christ above every other name. He also reminds us that Jean Paul Richter, whom his country- men call **Der Einzige," the unique, tells us that **the life of Christ concerns him who, being the holiest among the mighty, the might- iest among the holy, lifted with his pierced hands empires off tiieir hinges, and turned
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the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages." Spinoza, the great philosopher, son of Portuguese Jews, disciple of Aben-Ezra and Descartes, calls Christ the symbol of divine wisdom. Schelling and Hegel speak of Him as the union of the divine and human. The immortal Goethe, the ac- knowledged prince of German poets, and one of the most superbly accomplished men of the eighteenth century, says, **I esteem the gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have manifested upon earth."
What thinkest thou of the Christ, Jean Jacques Eousseau, with all the brilliancy of thy intellect, the singularity of thy character, and the enthusiasm of thy writings? Give place to the witness Rousseau ; hear his testi- mony. Rousseau speaks: **How petty are the books of the philosophers, compared with the gospels! Can it be that writings at once so sublime and so simple are the work of menf Can He whose life they tell be Himself no more than a mere man? . . . Yes, if the death of Socrates be that of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God. " What thinkest thou of the Christ, burly, brusk, brave, and heroic Thomas Carlyle, with all thy marvelous readilig, thy profound think-
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ing, and thy contempt of cant and love of truth? Carlyle steps forward and speaks: "Jesus of Nazareth, our divinest symbol! Higher has the human thought not yet reached." Let us summon Dr. Channing, the cultured and eloquent preacher and writer, the foremost man among American Unitarians in his day. What thinkest thou, Channing, of Jesus Christ? He makes reply: "The character of Jesus Christ is wholly inexpli- cable on human principles."
What thinkest thou, Herder, illustrious German thinker, broad scholar, and exquisite genius, of Jesus, the Christ? Superb is his reply: "Jesus Christ is in the noblest and most perfect sense the realized ideal of human- ity." What thinkest thou of the Christ, Napoleon, mighty son of Mars, striding through the world like a Colossus, darkening the brightness of noonday with the smoke, and lighting the darkness at midnight with the fires of battle? Hear this man of gigantic intellect, whatever may be said of his moral motives: "I think I understand somewhat of human nature, and I tell you all these (the heroes of antiquity) were men, and I am a man, but not one is like Him ; Jesus Christ was more than man. Alexander, Caesar, Charle- magne, and myself founded great empires ; but upon what did the creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day
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millions would die for him." Compared with such witnesses as these, the opponents of Jesus Christ of to-day are pigmies so contemptible in mentality and so questionable in morality as to be ruled out of every court of testimony, where intellectual ability and moral worth have weight.
I summon thee, O execrable Judas. Be- hold him flinging down the thirty pieces of silver before the chief priests and elders. Hear him speak in his agony of soul : **I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood." I summon thee, Pontius Pilate, with thy inmiortality of shame in the creeds of the ages. The Eoman Procurator washes his hands. Strange sight! He speaks: **I am innocent of the blood of this just person." He speaks again: **I find no fault in this man." I summon John, the heroic Baptist. Hear His testimony: ** Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world." loving and divine John, the Evangelist, what thinkest thou of the Christ! **He is the Vine, the Way, the Truth, the Light, and the Word, and the Word was God." I sum- mon thee, matchless Paul. What is thy testimony? **He is the image of the invisible God. . . . The blest and only Potentate, the King of kings, the Lord of lords." I sum- mon thee. Apostle Peter, once confessor, then denier, but afterward penitent witness and heroic martyr. What is thy testimony ? * ' He
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is the Christ, the Son of the living God.'* I summon thee, once doubting but idways brave Thomas. Hear the testimony of this witness as he falls at the Master's feet and exclaims, **My Lord and my God!"
I summon thee, O John Bunyan, immortal tinker; thy glorious Pilgrim, marching through the ages, telling the story of redeem- ing love, is thy testimony to the character of thy Lord. I summon thee, Charles Spur- geon, and the testimony of all thy volumes, of thy glorious life and of thy peerless min- istry is that ** Jesus Christ is the chief est among ten thousand and the One altogether lovely." I summon thee. De Wette, great Biblical critic of Germany: **This only I know, that there is salvation in no other name than in the name of Jesus Christ, the cruci- fied." I sununon thee, scholarly, cultured Macintosh; the attendants are watching thy last moments, they bend over thee to catch thy last whispers: ** Jesus, love! ―Jesus, love! ―The same thing." I might summon ten thousand more, who from the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, and from a thousand racks and stakes went up to glory and to God, and their testimony would be. **None but Jesus, none but Jesus." I summon thee, Toplady, and hear thee sing this great hymn, **Rock of Ages, cleft for me."
I summon thee, O Tennyson, immortal laureate, thou who hast fought thy doubts
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and found divine help. Let us hear the re- sult of thy conflicts :
Strong Son of God, immortal love.
Whom we, that have not seen Thj fsu^ By faith, and faith alone, embrace^
Believing where we can not prove.
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thon madest life in man and brute;
Thon madest death; and lol Thy foot Is on the skull which Thou hast made.
Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood Thou; Our wflls are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours to make them Thine.
I summon thee, Browning, poet of divine optimism and interpreter of the deeper in- stincts of the human heart, let us hear the conclusion of thy philosophic mind:
I saj the acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee AU questions in the world and out of it, And hath so far advanced thee to be wise.
I summon thee, O Gladstone, noblest of statesmen, uncrowned king of the world, thou who didst come in contact with the throbbing life of the world, of politics, letters, and re- ligions, what sayst thou concerning human- ity's greatest need? **I am asked what a man should chiefly look to in his progress through life as to the power that is to sustain him
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under trials and enable him manfully to con- front his afflictions. I must point to some- thing which, in a well-known hymn is called, 'The old, old story,' and taught with an old, old teaching, which is the best gift ever given to mankind. The older I grow, the more confirmed I am in the belief that Jesus Christ is the only hope of humanity."
I summon Thyself, O Thou Christ of God, Thou holiest of the holy, Thou who art God of very God. What sayst Thou of Thyself? ** Before Abraham was I am." '*I and my Father are one." **He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father."