the same is the greatest in it.'[1] Here are both inward appraisal and self-renouncement; but what is most admirable is the sweet reasonableness, the exquisite, mild, winning felicity, with which the renouncement and the inward appraisal are applied and conveyed. And the conjunction of the three in Jesus,—the method of inwardness, and the secret of self-renouncement, working in and through this element of mildness,—produced the total impression of his 'epieikeia', or sweet reasonableness; a total impression ineffable and indescribable for the disciples, as also it was irresistible for them, but at which their descriptive words, words like this 'sweet reasonableness,' and like 'full of grace and truth,' are thrown out and aimed.[2]
And this total stamp of 'grace and truth,' this exquisite conjunction and balance, in an element of mildness, of a method of inwardness perfectly handled and a self-renouncement perfectly kept, was found in Jesus alone. What are the method of inwardness and the secret of self-renouncement without the sure balance of Jesus, without his epieikeia? Much, but very far indeed from what he showed or what he meant; they come to be used blindly, used mechanically, used amiss, and lead to the strangest aberrations. St. Simeon Stylites on his column, Pascal girdled with spikes, Lacordaire flogging himself on his death-bed, are what the secret by itself produces. The method by itself gives us our political Dissenter, pluming himself on some irrational 'conscientious objections,' and not knowing, that with conscience he has done nothing until he has got to the bottom of conscience, and made it tell him right. Therefore the disciples of Jesus were not told to believe in his method, or to believe in his secret, but to believe in him; they were not told to follow
- ↑ Matth., xviii, 1–4; Mark, ix, 15.
- ↑ Bossuet calles him le débonnaire Jésus; Cowper speaks of his questioning the disciples going to Emmaus 'with a kind, engaging air.'
