The Galilee Charter

I have said little—some may think too little—so far in these pages about the devotional side of religion. I have approached the problem very largely from the standpoint of the fourth group of parents as they were classified in the fifth chapter, those who are ‘starting from scratch’ without any very definite pre-conceptions about religion except a profound inward hunger—that sense of restlessness which Augustine tells us will never be satisfied till we find our rest in God. The steady effort, spread over many weeks and months, to study the Gospel story in detail and to re-create imaginatively its central figure can have but one effect upon any man or woman who approaches the task with real humility of mind; they will be filled with wonder, reverence, and a very lively curiosity. The wonder and the reverence may remain for a time unexpressed, working like a yeast in the deeper levels of the soul, but the curiosity must be satisfied somehow, and I shall be surprised if it does not drive the explorer to search in other parts of the New Testament, and in the pages of History, for further clues to that amazing character—Jesus of Nazareth. What are we to think of Him? Are we to take Him at his own valuation, or, if we reject it, what valuation are we to substitute? The Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles form a vivid and illuminating commentary on the life and work of Jesus; they are shot through with a sense of haste—almost of hurry—and yet underneath it all there lies the stillness of a great peace. Something had happened in time—just there it took place, and just then—but its significance is concerned with eternity. Paul’s letters are full of this double content; he hurries from place to place with the restless energy of a commercial traveller seeking new markets, and yet underneath his restlessness there is a certainty which carries conviction to us as it did to his hearers in the Graeco-Roman world. The letters are intensely practical—almost 84business-letters sometimes—with their admonition, scolding, downright opinions, and advice about such matters as finance and diet, but he cannot scold for long—he is always breaking out into poetry, rising from his business-talk into a song of love and joy. And the theme is always the same, the eternal thing that has been done in the world of space and time, the eternal word that has been spoken to transitory man. “He lived for us!” Paul cries as he hurries across the world attending to a thousand petty trifles; “He died for us! He rose from the dead that we might share His conquest over all things! I never saw Him in the flesh, but I have seen Him since—seen Him and heard Him and felt Him. He has laid hold of me and made me His own; He is the answer to every question in heaven and earth, He is God’s triumphant ‘Yes’ to all the searchings of mankind!” The fourth Gospel—that of St. John—makes difficult reading if you take it directly after the first three; it is full of strange philosophisings and obscure interpretations which are hard to grasp after the direct simplicity of the others. But if you read the Epistles and the Acts in between the difficulty disappears and you plunge into that tremendous first chapter as into a long-familiar pool. Of course! That is what His friends had come to think of Him as the years went by and they saw Him under the aspect of eternity. And when we turn away from the Bible and search the records of the Christian Church throughout its two thousand years of history we find the same thing, the same sense of urgency overlying the sense of eternity, the same restlessness, the same love-songs, and the same stillness. You must study the best Christians, needless to say, if you are to find out the truth about Jesus just as you must study the best buildings if you are to apprehend the truth about architecture and the best paintings if you are to understand art. The existence of great art is not disproved by the crude daubs in a children’s penny Comic, Lincoln Cathedral is not non-suited because of the rows of mean hovels in a Manchester slum, and Christianity is not de-bunked because there were salacious mediaeval priests or because the Inquisition was cruel or because one of the Chapel Deacons at Looting-on-the-Sly 85has just been convicted of embezzling the Sunday Missionary collection. If you want to understand Christianity and get a true insight into the nature of its Founder you must study it at its best, not at its worst, and if you do that you will find that the experience of the Apostles has been verified countless thousands of times throughout the years that divide them from our busy modern age of science. You will discover, as I have said, that the same two notes are sounded again and again in almost the same words, the note of haste—of urgency—and the note of eternal stillness. You will find this in the great leaders of the Church—Augustine, Bernard, Francis, Loyola, Ken, Temple, Studdart-Kennedy, Dick Shepherd—and you will find it too in many so-called heretics, in Bunyan and Fox and Wesley, in the Salvation Army and the Plymouth Brethren, and in scores of humble mission-rooms throughout the land. And the note, when it is genuine, is always a paraphrase of the language of Paul. “He lived for us! He died for us! He rose from the dead that we might share His conquest over all things! I never saw Him in the flesh, but I have seen Him since—seen Him and heard Him and felt Him. He has laid hold of me and made me His own; He is the answer to every question in heaven and earth, He is God’s triumphant ‘Yes’ to all the searchings of mankind!”