CHRISTIANITY
718
CHRISTIANITY
by raising Himself from the dead, He added another
proof to those establishing His Divine mission and
His Divine personality. But, naturally enough. He
left the more explicit teaching on these points to His
chosen witnesses, whose presentment of Christianity
we shall presently examine.
To turn now to what is new in the moral teachings of Christ, we may say, once for all, that it embodied ethical perfection. There may be development of doctrine, but, after the Sermon on the Mount, there can be no further evolution of morals. God's own perfection is set as the standard (Matt., v, 48). Duty was the principal motive in the Old Dispensation; in the New this was sublimated into love. Men were taught to serve not on account of the penalties at- tached to non-service, but on principles of generosity. Before, God's will was to be the aim of the creature's performance; now, His good pleasure also was to be sought. "What things are pleasing to Him, these do I always" (John, viii, 29), and by action even more than by word Christ taught the lesson of voluntary self-sacrifice. Never till His time were the Evangel- ical counsels — voluntary poverty, perpetual chastity, and entire obedience — preached or practised. From no previous moral code, however exalted, could the Beatitudes have been evolved. Meekness and humil- ity were unknown as virtues to the heathen, and de- spised by the Jew. Christ made them the ground- work of the whole moral edifice. To realize what new thing Christ's ethical teaching brought into the world and put within the grasp of everyone, we have only to think of the great host of the Christian saints. For they are the true disciples of the Cross, those who imbibed and expressed His spirit best, who had the courage to test the truth of that Divine paradox which forms the substance of Christ's moral message: "He that shall wish to save his soul shall lose it, but he that shall lose his soul on my account shall find it" (Matt., xvi,25; cf. Mark, viii, 35; Luke, ix,24; xvii. 33; John, xii, 25). That was the course He Himself adopted — the way of the Cross — and His disciples were not above their Master. Self-conquest as a pre- liminary to conquering the world for God — that was the lesson taught by Christ's life, and still more by His passion and death.
(2) The Teaching of the Apostles. — Does the Chris- tianity presented to us in the rest of the writings of the New Testament differ from that described in the Gospels? And if so, is the difference one of kind or one of degree? We have seen that Christianity must not be judged in the making, but as a finished product. It was never meant to be fully set forth in the Gos- pels, where it is presented mainly in action. " I have yet many things to say to you: but you cannot bear them now", said Christ in His last discourse. "But when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all truth . . . and the things that are to come he shall show you" (John, xvi, 12, 13). We may presume that Christ Himself told them these many things when "He showed himself alive after his passion, by many proofs, for forty days appearing to them, and speaking of the kingdom of God" (Acts, i, 3), and that they were rendered permanent in the minds of the Apostles by the indwelling of the Spirit of Truth after Pentecost. Accordingly, we must ex- pect to find in their teaching a more formal, more theoretic, and more dogmatic exposition of Christian- ity than in the drama of Christ's life. But what we have no right to expect, and what rationalists always do expect, is to find the whole of Christianity in its written records. Christ nowhere prescribed writing as a means of promulgating His Gospel. It was com- paratively late in the Apostolic Age, and apparently in obedience to no preconceived plan, that the sacred books began to appear. Many Christians must have lived and died before those books existed, or without knowledge of them. And so we cannot argue from
the non-appearance of any particular tenet to its
non-existence, nor from its first mention to its first
invention — fallacies which often vitiate the erudite
researches of the rationalists.
The main heads of the Apostolic preaching, as far as we can gather from the records, vary with the char- acter of the audiences they addressed. To the Jews they dwelt upon the marvellous fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ, showing that, in spite of the manner of His life and death, He was actually the Messias, and that their redemption from sin had really been accomplished by His sacrifice on the Cross. This was the burden of St. Peter's discourses (Acts, ii and iii) and those of St. Stephen and of all who ad- dressed the Jews in their synagogues (cf. Acts, xxvi, 22-23). Once convinced of the reality of Christ's mission and the seal God set upon it by His Resurrec- tion, they were received into the Christian body to discover more at leisure all the implications of their belief. In regard to the Gentiles, the same striking fact of the F.esurrection was in the forefront of the Apostolic teaching, but more stress was laid upon the Divinity of Christ. Still, St. Paul, whose peculiar mission it was to approve the new revelation to those that sat in darkness and had no common ground of belief with the Jews, did not consider that his Gospel was anything different from that of the others. " I have laboured more abundantly than all they: yet not I, but the grace of God with me: for, whether I, or they, so we preach, and so you have believed" (I Cor., xv, 10, 11). This definiteness and uniformity of content in the Apostolic message, and this sense of responsi- bility in regard to its character, is still more strikingly emphasized by the same Apostle in his next Epistle, wherein, rebuking the Galatians for giving heed to in- novators " who would pervert the Gospel of Christ he exclaims: " Yet, though we ourselves or an angel from Heaven preach a gospel other than that we ha \ e preached to you, let him be accursed" (Gal., i, 7, 8). There is no trace here of uncertainty or ignorance as to what Christianity meant, or of any tentative grop- ing in search of truth. Even then, when theological science was in its infancy, we find the Apostle exhort- ing Timothy to keep to the very phrases in which he has received the Faith, "the form of sound words", avoiding "profane novelties of expression" (I Tim., vi, 20; II Tim., i, 13). Once again, " Therefore, breth- ren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle" (II Thess., ii, 14). And those traditions were directly communicated by Christ Himself to His Apostle, as he tells us in many passages — "For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you" (I Cor., xi, 23), and again, "For I delivered unto you first of all what I received" (I Cor., xy, 3). Many rationalists have professed to discover in the Apos- tolic writings various kinds of Christianity mutually antagonistic and all alike illegitimate developments of the original Gospel. We have Pauline. Petrine, Joannine Christianity, as distinguished from the Christianity of Christ. But those theories which ignore Catholic tradition and supernatural guidance, and rest on the written records alone, are gradually being abandoned, helped to their disappearance by the critics themselves, who have little respect for each others' hypotheses. We may take the Apostolic messages as one self-consistent whole, any apparent discrepancies or want of coherence being amply ac- counted for by the different circumstances of theirde- liverance. This preaching, therefore, reduced to its simplest form, was: The Resurrection of Chris! as a proof of His Divinity and Incarnation, a guarantee of His teaching, and a pledge of man's salvation. On the historic fact of the Resurrection the whole of Christianity is based. If He was not truly slain. Chrisl cannot have been man; if He did not rise again, He cannot have been Cod. St. Paul does not hesi-
