Pilate had been a public man. He knew life; he had mixed much with the world's business and the world's politics: had come across a multiplicity of opinions, and gained a smattering of them all. He knew how many philosophies and religions pretended to an exclusive possession of Truth; and how the pretensions of each were overthrown by another. And his incredulity was but a specimen of the scepticism fashionable in his day-the scepticism of a polished educated Roman, a sagacious man of the world, too much behind the scenes of public life to trust professions of goodness or disinterestedness, or to believe in enthusiasm and a sublime life. And his merciful language, and his desire to save Jesus, was precisely the liberalism current in our day as in his-an utter disbelief in the truths of a world unseen, but at the same time an easy, careless toleration, a halfbenevolent, half-indolent unwillingness to molest the poor dreamers who chose to believe in such superstitions.
And such is Pilate in our modern life-the superior person, restrained and worldly-wise, emancipated from vulgar enthusiasms, not entangled in other people's troubles, unaffected by the majesty of truth even when it stands straight before his face. And over against this jaunty neutrality stands, to-day, as it stood in this Passion Week in Jerusalem, the spirit of Jesus Christ, the erect and self-respecting faith of man in communion with the Eternal. Over against the trimmer in political life stands the loyal worker for political reform; over against the literary critic with his fine contempt stands the creative scholar with his unstained ideals and aims. Before the self-indulgent woman of the conventional world, smiling at the folly of serious views, stands the woman who has found a great new joy in the service of less favoured lives.
I see these types of the Christian life coming up one by one to-day before Pilate's judgment-seat. I see the patient student stand before the scoffing critic; I see the persistent reformer smiled at by the stay-at-home; I see the self-forgetting servant of the common good fail, and the self-indulgent time-server succeed; I see the life that tries to be faithful bearing heavy burdens, and the life that is content to be worldly gain its end. It is all as if Jesus Christ passed once more from Pilate's judgment-hall to the agony of Gethsemane, while Pilate withdrew once more behind his curtains to the composure of his self-satisfied life; as if the Christian life had still to defend itself, and the neutral had but to judge and go; as if right were for ever on the scaffold and wrong for ever on the throne. I see the intellectual dilettantism of the present day, and its moral levity, and its religious indifferentism, sitting on the scorner's judgment-seat, and I hear their light-hearted fling of, “What is Truth?” as they go their way of self-satisfied success. And then I wait; and I see these Pilates of the present time, like him who thought he sat in judgment on the Christ, have their little day of imaginary importance, and then simply shrivel up into specks in the world's history; remembered only because they happened one day to stand near the life which they jauntily condemned. And I see the faithful servants of the truth, as they go their way with their crosses upon their shoulders, finishing the work that is given them to do; and they have the confident step of those whose passion is a victory, whose cross is a crown, and whose place is not among the Cæsars but among the saviours, not with the courtiers of Pilate but with the disciples of Christ.1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 213.]
To an old pupil at Oxford, Dr. Arnold wrote from Rugby in the spring of 1835, lamenting the spread of a spirit of indifference and dilettantism. “I suppose,” he said, “that Pococuranteism (excuse the word) is much the order of the day amongst young men. I observe symptoms of it here, and am always dreading its ascendancy, though we have some who struggle nobly against it. I believe that ‘Nil admirari' in this sense is the Devil's favourite text; and he could not choose a better to introduce his pupils into the more esoteric parts of his doctrine. And therefore I have always looked upon a man infected with this disorder as on one who has lost the finest part of his nature, and his best protection against every thing low and foolish.”2 [Note: A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, i. 419.]
Dilettantism he abhorred. He earnestly warned the students attending the local schools of art against it, exhorting them to painstaking work and faithful, persistent endeavours after excellence. “There is not the slightest hope,” he told them, “for the dabbler or the dilettante. Of all the contemptible creatures to be found in this earth it contains none more contemptible than a dabbler or dilettante in art, science, or social philosophy.” He pointed to Michael Angelo, with his beetle brows, large, square, prominent cheekbones, straight-cut, hard-pressed mouth, and bruised nose, all proclaiming, “There is no dilettantism here.”3 [Note: A. B. Bruce, The Life of William Denny, 265.]
