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ness and intolerance they came to destroy; we may expect that they will be driven into extremes; but instead of crying out failure on Christianity, we should realise that these things are natural, that ideas when first sown, or when first reclothed in new forms, are almost always carried beyond their golden mean by the excitement which they create; that it seems to be a law that before ideas are clearly seen as they are, men must exhaust all their possible excesses and defects, must experience all their wrong forms before they can grasp their essence.

Such at least has been, and often will be in the future, the fate of the Christian ideas. But they still endure, rising out of all error and mistake, like Alpine summits after tempest, pure, and clean, and fair. They still live under a thousand forms, the elements of life and movement in mankind-the Fatherhood of God, the progress of man through evil to eternal good, the brotherhood of the race. These are the leading rays which stream from the Sun of Christianity-the idea of the union of Manhood and Godhead in Christ.

THE BEAUTY OF CHRIST'S CHARACTER.

'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty.'-Isaiah xxxiii. 17.

WITHIN the last ten years, the human nature of Christ has been brought prominently forward in England. This has been due partly to the more direct historical interest awakened in his life by a book like that of Strauss, partly to various foreign studies of his life from the merely biographical point of view; partly to the influence of Unitarians like Channing on our Church, and partly to that of some of our own teachers.

A great deal has been done to present Him more vividly and more historically before us, but we cannot say that enough has been done. There have been but few attempts to trace in Him those subtile shades of feeling, those finer touches of intellectual and poetic sentiment, which, after all, make a man real to us. It is on these I propose to dwell for some Sundays: less on the moral majesty, and more on the exquisiteness of his character; less on the suffering lover of man, and more on the King in his beauty. So doing, we may add something to our conception of his individuality. For when men tell us of his life, and describe his death, and dwell upon his love, He remains still a vague outline

to many of us; but when He stops by the wayside and the women cluster round Him, and He stoops to lay his hand on the children's heads and claim them for his own and for his kingdom; or when, resting by the well, He wakes the uncultured woman's interest by halfmysterious sayings, tinged with something of the Socratic irony, but with greater solemnity and profounder meaning than that of the Sage of Athens-then his personality begins to shape itself within us. We recognise the uniqueness which belongs to a living character. It is by dwelling on these things, and by an analysis of character based upon them, that we may arrive at a deeper, as well as a more critical, knowledge of the intense and universal character of his Human Nature.

In mediæval times this humanisation of Christ for men was done by art. The exquisite simplicity and naturalness of frescoes, such as those in the Arena Chapel, brought Christ and his life home to men's minds. But though natural, these representations did not dwell enough on the distinctly human traits in his life. Series like Giotto's were connected with doctrine, and so far, removed from simple humanity. They grew still more doctrinal afterwards, till, from step to step of idealisation, the Manhood of Christ grew fainter and fainter in art, and He became only Divine and clothed with the terrors of Divinity.

But in the thirteenth century, also, the Dominicans and Franciscans seized on the Passion of Christ as the special object of religious emotion in his life, and taking that piece of his Manhood out of the rest, concentrated men's minds on it alone. Art at once began to supply

the religious demand for representations of the days of the Passion, and the people, taught as much by the paintings as by the preachers, saw the Manhood of Christ only as a suffering manhood. The rest of his human life passed into all but absolute extinction in the intense light which was thrown upon the Passion. Later on, the natural conclusion followed upon this isolation of one part of Christ's human life in art. He became only a fine head or a noble figure in the centre of a picture. He was painted only as a good subject around which artists could throw a poetical or æsthetic air. All awe, all faith, all sublimity, all touch of what was Divine in Him passed away when the last trace of his pure and natural Manhood was lost in art. For they go together.

There are many curious analogies in theology to this limitation in art of the idea of Christ's Manhood. I will only dwell upon a few. After the reformation, and almost up to the present day, Christ, as a man, has been continually more and more hidden from us by the accumulation of theological doctrines round Him. Our theologians have, like the artists, taken Him farther and farther from earth, and isolated Him in his divinity in heaven. We had no Virgin to fall back upon, and the result was that English Christianity was severed more and more from natural human life; and I do not know what might have happened had it not been for the ceaseless protest of the Unitarians, which rose at last into the spiritual beauty of the figure of Christ as presented to us by Channing.

But this is not the only analogy. As art, by insisting

only on the Passion, put out of sight the rest of Christ's life, and produced a maimed representation of his humanity, so did, and so do those theologians, whether Evangelical or Anglican, who dwell too exclusively on the atonement, the death, and the sacrifice of the Passion. The result was and is, that Christianity has been so much made into a religion of suffering, endurance, sacrifice, and asceticism, that all that side of human life which has to do with healthy, natural joy, with love of beauty, with what is called profane poetry and art, with delight in natural scenery, with social companionship, has been, to a large extent, left unchristianised, relegated to the realm of the irreligious.

The result of both these tendencies is similar to that which followed in art, and is seen in the way in which the Life of Jesus' by Renan was taken up in England. In a certain sense, that book brought back to reality the human life of Christ, but it was only as a good subject for a piece of artistic work; He was surrounded by all the faded feebleness of Arcadian sentiment; He was the human figure which enlivened pictorial descriptions of Palestine; his character was made to lose, in the midst of a detestable sentimentalism, all moral sublimity.

Let me pursue the analogy one step further. Among all the artists who represented Christ's life, one stands alone for his unique, unconventional, and manifold treatment of it and its subject. Others have represented Him in the common humanities of his life, but they have lacked the power to give with equal grandeur the awful moments in which his mission was concen

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