time seems to have said anything like this of Jesus. What took them was that 'he spoke as never man spoke'; and although his face must have been transfigured by his emotion, still it was the message and not the face of the messenger which struck every one as most important.
Best of all his sayings, I love the story of the woman taken in adultery, the greatest story in the world, if I may judge it.
It is only recorded by John: was he the beloved disciple because he would recall the highest word?
Jesus had said time and again that he had come to fulfill the law of Moses and not to change it; and now the Jews brought him a woman 'taken in adultery, in the very act,' and said: 'Moses commanded that such should be stoned, but what sayest thou?'
Jesus was caught in a flagrant contradiction; he had always said that he had come to fulfill the law, so now to gain time for thought, he stooped and with his finger wrote upon the ground, 'as though he heard them not.'
And then he took counsel with his own soul and answered divinely: 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.'
And the Jews were so honest that 'being convicted by their own conscience,' they went out, one by one.
When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, 'Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?'
She said, 'No man, Lord!'
And Jesus said unto her, 'Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.'
Now what does this 'Neither do I condemn thee!' mean, save that he, too, was not without sin?
The puzzling things in the Gospel narrative are the contradictions in spirit: think of that verse in St. Luke: 'But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before ne. And in almost every one of the Gospels there is some dreadful contradiction of this sort which brings one near doubt. For example, Mark tells us in his first chapter how Jesus came from Nazareth and was baptized of John in Jordan, and the heavens opened and the Spirit like a dove descended upon him. And there came a voice from heaven saying: 'Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.'
Afterwards, John was cast into prison, and while there, if we can believe Matthew, he heard of the works of Christ and sent two of his disciples to ask him: 'Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?' In other words: 'Art thou the Messiah?'
But how extraordinary, for when John baptized Jesus, he must have seen the heavens opened and the spirit in the form of a dove descending and heard the voice saying: 'Thou art my beloved Son.' How then could John doubt?
Even the prayer Jesus taught his disciples hardly reaches his highest: 'Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation.' I should prefer simply:
'Give and forgive.'
Why then believe at all in the existence of Jesus? Why not accept the conclusion of Mr. Robertson and others, and, I am told, the great majority of Rabbis, who think that he never existed?
First of all, it is my conviction that every great movement in the world comes from a great man. I cannot believe that the verses: 'Love your enemies…' and 'Be ye therefore perfect…' ever came as a part of ordinary belief: such words are the very perfume, so to speak, of an extraordinary and noble nature.
Besides this, there are the two almost contemporary records: the one in Josephus and the other in Tacitus. The one in Josephus has been tampered with In the interest of so-called Christianity, but the fact that it was inserted already testifies to a personality: and the phrase in Tacitus: 'quidam Jesu,' confessing contempt-'a certain fellow called Jesus'-is purely Roman, and comes from the same man who thought the murder of fifty thousand Jews, men, women, and children, In the streets of Syracuse 'a good riddance.'
Beyond all doubt Jesus lived and died as his disciples tell us, and what consolation there is for all of us in his ultimate triumph. Here is a poor Jew, known only to a few fishermen in a small and despised province of the Roman Empire, speaking a dialect that was only understood by a handful of sectaries, and condemned when between thirty and forty years of age to a shameful death.
No record of what he said or did for fifty years after his crucifixion, and then nothing but fragmentary memories of three or four unlettered followers. Yet, by virtue of half a dozen sentences and a couple of little parables — how can one help recalling here the Prodigal Son with its message of pure affection- he has come to be a leader and teacher of hundreds of millions of the most intelligent peoples in the world-in some sort, their idol and God.
Is it not plain from this one example that the Good is imperishable and Divine and must ultimately conquer even in this world?
For two thousand years, now, Christianity has been preached to us as an ideal; even the ministers of the gospel have regarded its teaching as impracticable, and from St. Paul down, one and all have sought to mix some hard alloy of conventional morality with the golden evangel of Jesus, in order to give it currency among men.
I wish to go a step further, to push the light a space on into the all-encircling night. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stated his belief once for all:
I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.
And this is put aside as a counsel of perfection. It seems to me the impartial statement of scientific truth.
Jesus gave no reason for his gospel; did not attempt to prove it, save to the soul by its own virtue. For many centuries the saying was a stumbling block even to the wisest, but when it came to Shakespeare, he saw its everlasting truth and found a reason for it and so added a coping stone to the divine Temple of Humanity. The passage is in Timon of Athens:
He's truly valiant that can wisely suffer The worst that man can breathe, and make his wrongs His outsides, to wear them like his raiment, carelessly, And ne'er prefer his injuries to his heart, To bring it into danger.
In other words, if we nurse hatreds we are doing ourselves harm: we must love our enemies, for if we hate them we prefer our injuries to our heart's well being and bring it into danger.
Shakespeare did not go further than this; he saw that a man should take wrongs done to him lightly and for his own sake should not cherish resentment. It was a great step forward; but there is still a truth behind, which Shakespeare, the most articulate of men, would surely have expressed, had he seen. It is by the heart we grow; hatred injures the heart; dries up the sympathies; impoverishes the blood, so to speak; stops all growth.
This further truth was revealed to me by my art. I found that till I loved a man I could not understand him, could not see him as he saw himself, and so could not depict him fairly. But as soon as I began to like him, I began to make excuses for his faults, and when I grew to care for him really, I saw that he had no need even to be excused. Hatred gives nothing but the shadows in the portrait: you can make a likeness with shadows alone; but if you want to reveal a man's soul fully, to make a work of art, you must know the best in the man and use high lights as well; and these you can only get from loving comprehension.
The road up for all of us is sympathy. How fine the Greek word 'sympathy' is, and what a lesson it teaches of the divinity of pain; it means literally 'to suffer with.' We mortals grow near one another by 'suffering with' one another, and so come by pain to love and through love to comprehension. Shelley's word is forever true:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
The French proverb, 'tout comprendre est tout pardonner' (to understand all is to pardon all), does not go far enough. If we understand a man perfectly, there is no need to pardon, for we are then above forgiveness, even beyond good and evil; we see why and how he acted.
And this effort to love our enemy, and so come to see him as he sees himself, is soul-enriching in a thousand ways. First of all, the getting rid of an enemy is exhilarating and delightful. Then every new friend is an acquisition more precious by far than any great portrait to a collector in his gallery; and when we have forced ourselves to annex several of these rich prizes that we had no title to and money could not buy, we begin to see that this is no alien or difficult world, and not dangerous at all. The woods that seemed so dark and threatening to our childhood, now show us shady nooks and gay green glades and pleasant avenues sun-kissed. Love is the guide; and the good magician, Love.
