MR. LEATHES' BAMPTON LECTURES.*
IT is a very remarkable outcome from the advanced criticism to which the primitive Christian documents have been for some time subjected, that the Life and Teaching of Christ have acquired a new prominence and significance. Not to speak of the Lives of Christ, from that of Neander downwards to the flushed rhetoric of Dr. Farrar, or of such sermons as those of Mr. Stop- ford Brooke, we would select as illustrative of our affirmation Mr. Mill's third posthumous essay, born as it was of sorrow, the epilogue of Supernatural Religion, and Mr. Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma. But the argument of the lectures of Mr. Leathes is, that it is not the life only, nor the ethical teaching of Christ, which constitutes Christianity. Christianity, accord- ing to the present lecturer, who is always lucid, solid, and scholarly in his statements, is not merely a reception of or belief in the formal announcements of Christ, great and novel, and all-important though these were, nor is it even the enthusiasm The Religion of the Christ; Us Historic and Literary Development considered as an Bvidence of its Origin. The Bampton Lectures, dm., 1574. By Stanley Leathes, ALA. London, Oxford, and Cambridge: Rivingtons. 1874. of aiming after conformity to his life of pervasive self-sacrifice— though these are necessarily implied—but, from the beginning, it was the recognition of Christ himself as a Divine Person, who had been beheld dead on the Cross, and had been buried, but who had by his reappearance from the other side of death converted a company, resembling scattered and craven sheep, into a fellow- ship of all-daring, all-enduring heroism. It is the aim of Mr. Leathes to demonstrate—in so far as demonstration is logically applicable to alleged historical occurrences—that only on one supposition can the phenomenon of the first Whit-Sunday k rationally accounted for, and that is the actual remanifestation Jesus after his death, to the perceptions of men, who were utterly unprepared for the revelation. The Christian Church originated not as a circle of disciples who were associated under the regretful memory of a loved teacher, and the enthusiastic desire of making his opinions known, but under the inspiration of a fact which had touched their consciousness with a quite new sense of eternal life.
For let any one ask himself why it is that the influence of two contemporary teachers like St. Paul and Seneca has been so wonderfully different in the lapse of eighteen centuries'? Lamar- tine preached to the multitudes who surged under his window in 1848 that, whereas the Drapeau Rouge had only been carried round the Champs de Mars, the Tricolor had been the emblem of the glory of France to the ends of the earth. With somewhat greater sobriety, we may say that while the lessons of Seneca are known only to a few scholars, the doctrines of St. Paul have gone forth into all lands, and created therein an entire newness of life. On what principle can we rationally account for the vast difference in the area of persuasion or acceptance covered by the respective essays of the two men ? Of course character tells immensely in the long-run ; and it is true that beside St. Paul's ideal of human character, as ex- hibited especially in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, the most rhetorical of Seneca's sentences are cold and pallid, though many of them are very splendid after a fashion, and curiously, while we read them, give us the sensation as if we were enjoying a good Latin translation of some passages of Emerson. But the secret of St. Paul's influence is this,—that he was not merely a moralist, but that his whole life from a given day bore witness to, and was the direct result of; his recognition of a transcendent fact. He asks in one place, "Am I not an Apostle, have 1 not seen the Lord ?" and these words, which even the Ttibingen writers accept as his, are the key to his history, and render his long career of devotion to the welfare of humanity a transparency; while, without the truth implied in them, the noblest and wisest life—always excepting that of St. Paul's master —which is to be found in the annals of mankind becomes either a tragic dream, or must be reprobated as the most consummate imposture which ever was perpetrated on the credulity of the world. The charity which St. Paul has painted in colours so fair and in proportions so exquisite was no mere fancy sketch. It was his summary of the life of Jesus ; but his gospel to the world, and the source of his own inspiration was this,—that He in whom this charity unfolded its lofty attributes was the Revelation of the Eternal Purpose of God for humanity, and that he had emerged from the eclipse of death, and was alive for evermore.
Now the excellent service which Mr. Leathes has rendered in this volume is that he has recalled the consideration of his readers to the faith of nascent Christendom, and that by a series of ad- mirably marshalled facts—facts for which we have in any case contemporary evidence in St. Paul's undisputed letters—he has reproduced the elements of the primitive Christian Creed. Within a period of not more than twenty-five years after the crucifixion of Jesus, the belief had spread from Jerusalem into Europe that a great and novel factor had been introduced into the development of human story, and with this belief a new power was descending upon the hearts and lives of men,—making the timid brave, and the impure chaste, and the worldly self-sacrificing, and at the same time, associating men of all nations into a brotherhood of recognition and sympathy and mutual helpfulness such as the world had never seen before. Men were called Christians, not because they reverenced the lessons which Jesus had taught, but because they believed that he was the Christ of God.
But while it is the object of Mr. Leathes to show that th - assumption of Christ's resurrection is the only rational hypothesis on which one can account for the creed of St. Paul and his fellow- Christians, with the simple rites and arrangements which had accompanied that creed from the very first, such as the meetings on the First Day of the week, the breaking of bread and baptism, he has proposed it to himself to establish these two antecedent positions,—that during the course of his ministry, Jesus claimed
for himself or accepted from others the recognition, that he was entrusted with a very special, nay, imperial, mission from Heaven ; and that, secondly, all the lines of Hebrew aspiration and hope had converged in him as their focus and consummation. Of course, our readers will be ready to say there is nothing exactly very new in these postulates of Mr. Leathes ; and some will, further, be of opinion that he has been guilty of reading a great deal too much of Christian event into Hebrew prediction. So far as the latter estimate of the value of the conclusions derived by
--.<4 Mr. Leathes from prophecy is concerned, we are not quite pre- pared to acquiesce in it. For the Jewish Church was born of hope. Account for the fact as we will, there is no doubt what- ever that the Founder of the Hebrew faith mysteriously looked for- ward to a great day, and there are utterances of prospective belief in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, which have no strict parallel in the literature of any ethnic people before the coming of Christ, and it must be added that the whole foregoing history of Israel was in the profoundest sense of the words typical and preparatory. It is quite true, as lselr. Myers has said, that no Hebrew prophet anticipated or foretold such a Messiah as Christ is, while the spiritual fulfilment of the central idea of all prophecy has surpassed all human expectation,—has revealed God to man, and reconciled man to God, in a way as much higher than Hebrew type or prophecy led the Jew to anticipate as the heavens are higher than the earth. At the same time, it is not leas incontrovertible that by the great fact of his Resurrection, the Jesus of history was believed by his first followers to be the Christ of prophecy. For a thousand passages of Old Testament suspiria de profundis were by this event touched with an endlessly deeper significance, were indeed filled to the full with new illumination. We do not affirm that Mr. Leathes substitutes predictive literalities in the place of the large and spiritual hopes which led the prophets of Israel to plant their golden age in the future ; he is too well acquainted with the modern literature of New Testament and Old Testament criticism to venture with assured footsteps on the old lines of alleged prophetic "fulfilment," and indeed Mr. Leathes is sagacious enough to discover that the less you strain the predictive argument, just so much the greater is the gain for the historical elements in the life of Christ,—still we would submit to the lecturer whether in his " scheme " of prophetic interpretation he has thoroughly recog- nised the wide import of the saying that "what eye had not seen, nor ear heard, and what it had not entered into the heart of man to conceive, had now been revealed by the Spirit?"
But to us the ablest and most satisfactory portion of Mr. Leathes' lectures is that in which he discusses the relative values, so to speak, of the Epistles, the Acts, and the Gospels, as they bear upon the great question of the Christhood of Jesus. Assuming as he does that the great Pauline Epistles are the oldest specimens of Christian literature, and that three of the Gospels are probably posterior in date to the Acts, he yet finds the contents of these three distinct portions of the New Testament to be of such a character, and such a character only, that the Epistles represent results, the Acts a process of formation, and the materials of the Gospels an indispensable preliminary to both results and process, but materials from which, as now reported to us, it would have been quite im- possible to conjecture or to construct, a priori, such a develop- ment as actually became matter of history. And on the other hand, it is equally impossible reasonably to believe that the Gospels, written at a time when the special consciousness of the Christ was working its great marvels in the hearts and habits of multitudes, could have come into the world in their glorious simplicity, their allusiveness, their reserve, if they had been merely, or mainly, the productions of men who were endeavouring to excogitate a suffi- cient cause for existing belief, and were not, on the whole, the faithful reflection of the actual life and doctrines of Jesus.
We hope that this valuable section of Mr. Leathes's lectures will meet with the careful consideration to which it is entitled. But the whole volume, if just a trifle ponderous, and not a little old-fashioned here and there, though not without some passages which can only be described as visitations of unwilled eloquence, is well worthy of perusal. And a second perusal will rather augment the claims of Mr. Leathes as an unpretending and reverent, but independent and scholarly inquirer into the pressing questions connected with the great subject of the early history of Christianity. Especially will one be struck with the width of the concessions which Mr. Leathes is ready to make respecting the antiquity of several books of the Old Testament, though these are found side by side with some curious statements, touching the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Hebrew history, a juxtaposition which would lead us to conclude that, on the whole, a few at least of the opinions of Mr. Leathes are more in a fluent than a fixed condition.
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