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Lecture 4. Authorities.

Brethren and Sisters in the Monotheistic Faith:—

There is an old Latin proverb, well-known to everybody, even in its Latin form, Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis, "The times change and we change with them." Illustrations of the truth of this adage are constantly presenting themselves in life, but I know none equal to the changes that take place in modes of thought and the resulting opinions. In books, for instance, the great classic of one age often becomes the neglected fossil of the next, and this, not because the world has refuted it, but because the world has simply outgrown it. In metaphysics, for example, what book ever had a greater vogue, and that for nearly two centuries, than John Locke's "Essay on The Human Understanding?" It was not only the universal text book on the subject in the colleges of England, but no less a genius than Voltaire translated it into French, and always looked upon that translation as one of his most useful contributions to the progress of the age in which he lived. But who dreams of reading Locke's Essay now, unless it be some unhappy theological student of an orthodox college, who has it imposed upon him as a task, as I had it imposed on me some fifty years ago? But there is another famous book which illustrates the adage I quoted even better than that, viz., the book known as Paley's Horæ Paulinæ, once supposed to be an absolute demonstration of the impregnable truth of the New Testament generally, and especially of the Acts of the Apostles. Now you will remember that last Sunday evening I showed the utterly untrustworthy character of the book of the Acts by comparing its statements with those of the Pauline Epistles. But that is the very argument by which Dean Paley in his Horæ Paulinæ establishes the credibility, not of one, but of both those documents, the Acts and the Epistles both. He supposes somebody to discover in an old library a Diary and a Volume of Letters evidently referring to the same series of events but professedly by different authors, and, by pointing out innumerable instances of slight variations between them amid general agreement, he claims to have established the independence of the witnesses, and the consequent truth of the story in question. page 50 But so completely has the point of view now changed from that of Paley's day, that, though little more than a century has elapsed, Rationalists now use his own argument to demolish his conclusion. Surely the irony of things could go no further than that.

But now to our task. Last Sunday night, you will remember, we attempted a running criticism of the whole contents of the book of Acts, or rather perhaps we should say of its principal incidents. But we did not quite complete our labours. We left off at the conclusion of the three great missionary tours of St. Paul, i.e., at his return to Jerusalem after his last tour. There remains to be considered therefore the chapters relating to his imprisonment at Cæsarea, his voyage to Rome, and his imprisonment there, chapters far too interesting and important for us altogether to neglect. What have we to say then as to the historicity of these sections of the Acts?

Of course we must have some better testimony than that of our so-called Luke to feel sure that he is here telling us the truth with respect to Paul's life at Cæsarea and Rome. And we will put the matter this way :—Did Paul ever make a journey to Rome and suffer imprisonment there? When we have settled that question we shall be able to answer the smaller one about a previous imprisonment at Cæsarea in very brief terms.

Well then there seems very little doubt that Paul's imprisonment at Rome was a real historical fact; and that for this reason :—The section of the Acts that leads up to this result is a journal-section and therefore apparently entitled to our confidence. The long and interesting account of the apostle's voyage as a prisoner from Cæsarea to Rome and ending in his arrival there is contained in the 27th and part of the 28th chapters of the Acts, and the whole of that is a continuous journal section. The journal closes with the words :—"And when we entered into Rome Paul was suffered to abide by himself with the soldier that guarded him" (28/16). There are fifteen more verses of the Acts, but these are no part of the journal. However that does not much matter, because, as we have now seen, the journal settles the question.

Naturally, however, we turn again at this point to the epistles, to see what confirmation, if any, they give to the concluding story of Paul's life as found in the book of Acts. Were any of them written in prison? or, do any of them profess to have been written in prison? and, of those from prison, were any written in Rome? In reply I would observe at least three page 51 of the epistles bear marks of the prison stamp; and of these one makes it very plain that the office of origin was the imperial city on the Seven Hills. Thus the letter to the Christians of Colosse concludes with the pathetic words, "Remember my bonds;" whilst in the short cognate epistle to Philemon the writer speaks still more plainly of himself as, not only "Paul the aged." but "Paul the prisoner." From these two letters, however, we learn nothing as to the locality of his imprisonment, whether Cæsarea or Rome. All the same we may discover even that from another epistle, the one to the Philippians, the most pathetic and surely the most beautiful of them all. Here too the burden of the letter is the same, "my bonds," "O my bonds," but this epistle is probably a little later than the two I have just mentioned, for the writer is looking death in the face now, death by martyrdom. "Yea," he says, "and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy and rejoice with you all." (2/17). That, of course, might have been written either at Cæsarea or Rome, but here are similar extracts that can be true of Rome only, for they imply that the writer was well-known at Cæsar's palace and was in fact on familiar terms with the Christians in Cæsar's household, whose greetings he sends to the Philippians. "So that my bonds in Christ," he says, "are manifest in all the palace and in all the other places." (1/13). And again, "All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Cæsar's household." (4/22.) The epistles, therefore, though only in a feeble sort of way, confirm the statement of the journalist and of the author of Acts that the great Mediterranean missionary ended his shining course within the walls of a dungeon in the capital of the then known world. It is true that "the Acts" says nothing of his death, that would not have suited one of the minor purposes of our author in writing his Eirenicon, which was always to show up the Roman government as favourable to Christianity. You will find he is careful to do that all through his book. But when you remember that Paul must have arrived at Rome about the year 62 A.D., and that the conflagration of Rome and the subsequent outbreak against the Christians occurred in the year 64, there is only one conclusion possible :—the biggest man among the Christians of Rome would not be the last to receive the summons to martyrdom. We can almost hear the carnifex of the prison calling for Paul of Tarsus and the prompt reply of the captive :—adsum. Not Colonel Newcombe himself would pronounce the word more eagerly.

There was then an imprisonment of Paul at Rome; was there also a previous imprisonment at Cæsarea? That is our next and final question. Here unfortunately the epistles fail to page 52 help us at all, and even the journal itself is not quite explicit. The chapters of the Acts (chapters XXI to XXVI) which tell of the imprisonment of Paul at Cæsarea are not a journal section and do not contain a journal section, that is our difficulty; so that trustworthy evidence here is not easily to be obtained; nevertheless we can get a little, and in this way. As I have already remarked the next chapter, chapter XXVII, that which describes the voyage to Rome, is a journal section, and, though it doesn't tell us that Paul sailed from Cæsarea, what it does say is that (27/1-3) he sailed from a port 24 hours to the south of Sidon, which of course may well mean Cæsarea, whilst it tells us besides that he was put on board a prisoner. In saying what it does therefore here the journal undoubtedly not only sanctions the idea of an imprisonment at Cæsarea but gives also a general confirmation to the narrative of the previous six chapters (XXI to XXVI) which professes to furnish us in detail with an account of this imprisonment, with all that led up to it, including his arrest at Jerusalem. I do not think, therefore, we need cherish any doubt of the general purport of these chapters but may in fact say that they are based on history. To affirm on the other hand that the whole narrative is historical would show great credulity on our part after all that we have learnt of the weakness of our author for romance. Thus these chapters contain no less than five long speeches, mostly by Paul, not one of which can have any claim to genuineness. But that is not all. The scene opens with the arrest of Paul in the temple at Jerusalem, and that under circumstances very discreditable to the apostle. Luke makes him play the hypocrite, and that on a large scale too, in order to escape the ill-will of the Jewish populace. The fundamental principle of Paul's creed, as we know, was, that the Mosaic law was abolished for everybody, a principle that made him absolutely loathed by all the Jews of Jerusalem, including the Jewish Christians. In the chapters before us, however, Paul, in fear of his life, is persuaded to attempt to deceive his fellow-countrymen by showing himself in the temple as a good Jew completing a Nazarite vow, and so obeying the Mosaic law. The result, usual in such cases, followed here; nobody was deceived by this act of hypocrisy for a moment, but, on the contrary, everybody was all the more enraged by it, and Paul was only saved from immediate death by the arrival of Roman soldiers from the castle of Antonia, who snatched him from the hands of his would-be murderers and carried him into the fortress. Is any one prepared to believe such a yarn as that of Paul of Tarsus, and on the authority alone of our Luke? Why, our Paul, the Paul of the epistles, would have faced a thousand deaths rather than have been false to his principles like that. Possibly he was attacked, and that page 53 in the temple, but not because he was completing a Nazarite vow, or playing the hypocrite in any shape. That version of the arrest was invented by our author, to carry out the purpose of his book, which was to show that Paul was quite as good a Jew as Peter, or any of the Twelve. The book is, as I have said before, an Eirenicon, or Peacemaker, between the Pauline and Petrine factions of the early church. As a matter of fact we may be quite sure Paul was attacked by the mob, if at all, not because he was showing respect to the Mosaic law, but because he was not.

I need not go into the details that follow the arrest in our book; they may or may not be true, but probably not, save perhaps in the matter of the removal of the prisoner to Cæsarea, the seat of the Roman government at the time. It is not at all likely that the commander of the Roman garrison at Jerusalem allowed his prisoner to address the enraged mob from the steps of the castle, especially as he did not know but what his prisoner might be a malefactor, worthy of death. There certainly may have been an examination of Paul before the Sanhedrim, and even a conspiracy of some Jews to assassinate him, but we have no authority for this. Nor have we any authority either for the dispatch which Lysias is said to have sent with the prisoner to Felix in Cæsarea. There is no explanation given as to how Luke came to know the verbatim contents of this dispatch, which therefore we can only regard as another product of the very active imagination of our author. But the story is all of a piece. For instance, the military guard sent with the prisoner to save him from assassination by a few civilians is just a small army, an army of Roman legionaries, 470 in number, probably more than there were in the castle of Antonia to send, all told. One can only suppose it another invention of our romancer to show how great a man our prisoner is. Finally, when Cæsarea is at last reached, the prisoner is put on his trial twice, once before the civil governor, Felix, and subsequently before a royal guest of the governor, Agrippa by name, whose sister also actually takes her seat on the judicial bench, thus anticipating our female enfranchisement movement by about 2000 years. We can do such things in fiction. And that this trial before Agrippa is a fiction seems plain for another reason. It will be remembered that one of the evangelists, and only one, actually puts Jesus on his trial twice, once before Pontius Pilate, and again before Herod Antipas. (Luke 23/15). I need hardly say that the evangelist in question is the same author, Luke, to whom the Acts is ascribed. It is a little weakness of his to put prisoners on their trial twice, once before the foreigner and again before the native prince. This is evidently part of the general page 54 machinery of his novels, his stock-in-trade. And in both trials in both cases the prisoner is pronounced innocent. I do not deny that, not only the trial of Paul before Agrippa, but the whole narrative of these chapters is very dramatic, very cleverly done, and very interesting, so interesting indeed that one could wish it all to be true; but fiction is generally interesting, far more so indeed than cold matters of fact, and our romancer could give points to a good many modern novelists in this matter. But brilliant fiction is not history in either ancient or modern times.

One more incident and we have completed our investigation of the narrative of the Acts. The final section of the book (XXVIII, 17-31) is not a journal-section, and certainly is not a historical section; in fact, it implies about the most hardy assertion in the whole book. It implies that there was no Christian church at Rome when the apostle Paul got there in the year 62 A.D. Paul, you remember, according to the Acts, on his arrival in the great city sends, not for any Christians to come and see him, but for the leading Jews of the capital, whilst these latter inform him in their turn that they have never heard anything about his doings in the East, good or bad, and know nothing of Christianity, except that the Christians are everywhere spoken against. Well, if this were true, of course there could have been no Christian church in Rome up to this date, and that is evidently what our artist in literature wishes us to understand. But no one who knows anything at all of Christian Origins, or even of ancient history in general, will believe this for a moment. It is true we cannot do now, as former scholars have done, we cannot appeal to the fact that Paul had himself been in communication with the Roman church years before this, because we cannot now be sure that Paul himself ever wrote our epistle to the Romans; but we know there must have been a considerable population of Christians at Rome about this time, inasmuch as the historian Suetonius informs us that amongst the good deeds of the emperor Nero was a fearful persecution which he initiated against a most criminal sect of people called Christians (Weizsäcker, A.A., II, 141). There is of course a much more full account of this persecution in what is called the Annals of Tacitus, but, as the authenticity of this work is more than doubtful, I don't quote it. The testimony of Suetonius is sufficient and there is no doubt about the genuineness of that. Not only then were there Christians in Rome when Paul got there but they were there in such numbers and had been there so long that they were publicly known as a most abominable sect of people, obnoxious to the ministers of justice. What spirit of perversity then, you may ask, could page 55 possibly possess our Luke to induce him to ignore this fact altogether and represent Rome as virgin soil on which the gospel had yet to be planted? The reason is plain enough, he is not writing history but simply embodying his own theories in a romance. His theory about Paul's action is this, that wherever he goes he appeals first to the Jews, and then, when they refuse to hear him, he turns away from them and preaches to the Gentiles. He has made Paul do that in every town to which he has taken him, and so determines he shall do the same at Rome. Had Luke recognised a Christian church at Rome this would have been impossible. The facts were dead against him; well then that is so much the worse for the facts, says Luke, my theory must be carried out.

And thus from first to last we have found the book of Acts a tissue of misrepresentations, and, I am sorry to say, of misrepresentations purposely fabricated. That the fabrication has been very cleverly done, and by the adoption of a literary style the most plausible and insinuating, such a style as to deceive, if possible, the very elect—the very German scholars themselves—that only makes the matter ten times worse. Ecclesiastical writers have always had a bad name for veracity, and Luke, the first of them, is one of the worst. The Roman Catholic "Lives of the Saints" with all their mendacities, are only Luke continued. This will seem a bard judgment, I know, to many, but I have given reasons for every statement I have made, and I will now confirm my judgment by what some people like much better than reasons, and that is the authority of great names.

Here then are the opinions of scholars on the question, famous scholars, scholars too who are free to think and free to say what they think. Let us take the great French scholar Renan to begin with, a man who in the two great crises of his life himself played the hero on a grand scale, sacrificing his livelihood and his future prospects to his conscience. Speaking of the Jerusalem decree Renan says:—"The decree which the council (of Jerusalem) is said to have decided upon is assuredly a fiction." (The Apostles, p. XVIII). Or again, referring to the anonymous author of Acts, he says :—"Historical fidelity is a matter of indifference to him; edification is all he cares for." (p.XII.) And similar to this is the language used by Mr. Cassells on the subject, the author of the once anonymous master-piece entitled Supernatural Religion," which made such a commotion in the religious world nearly forty years ago. Thus, referring to what is called the martyrdom of Stephen, Mr. Cassells says :—"With the exception of the narrative in the Acts there is no evidence whatever that such a person as page 56 Stephen ever existed" (p. 661), and, "considering the generosity of Paul's character on the one hand, and the important position assigned to Stephen on the other, .... it is perfectly unaccountable that, if Stephen really be a historical personage, no mention of him occurs elsewhere in the New Testament." And the writer then goes on to say that "miraculous agency is more freely employed in this book (of Acts) than in any other in the canon" (p. 662). The same writer then sums up his judgment on the book generally in these emphatic words (p. 751):—"Written by an author who was not an eyewitness of the miracles related; who describes events, not as they really occured, but as his pious imagination supposed they ought to have occurred, who seldom touches history without distorting it by legend, until the original elements can scarcely be distinguished; who puts his own words and sentiments into the mouths of the apostles and other persons of his narrative; and who represents almost every phase of the church in the apostolic age as influenced, or directly produced, by supernatural agency;—such a work is of no value as evidence for occurrences which are in contradiction to all experience. The Acts of the Apostles therefore is not only an anonymous work, but upon due examination its claims to be considered sober and veracious history must be emphatically rejected. It cannot strengthen the foundations of supernatural religion, but, on the contrary, by its profuse and indiscriminate use of the miraculous, it discredits miracles, and affords a clearer insight into their origin and fictitious character" (p. 751).

A later writer of the same order is the learned Dr. Schmiedel, the author of the article on the Acts of the Apostles in the great Encyclopaedia Biblica, now so well known. In this article Dr. Schmiedel distinctly imputes to our author a deliberate attempt to deceive his readers. This is how the Doctor expresses himself:—"It is upon this assumption of a distinct authorship for the we-sections that we are best able to pass a comparatively favourable judgment on the compiler's deviations from historical facts in other parts of the book. But there is one charge from which he cannot be freed, viz., that he has followed the method of retaining the "we" without change. In the case of so capable a writer, in whom hardly a trace can be detected, either in vocabulary or in style, of the use of documents, this fact is not to be explained by lack of skill, such as is sometimes met with in the mediaeval chroniclers. The inference is inevitable that he wished—what has actually happened—that the whole book should be regarded as the work of an eyewitness." (§ 1.) And again, "the results then with regard to the trustworthiness of Acts, as far as its facts are concerned, page 57 are these. Apart from the we-sections no statement merits immediate acceptance on the mere ground of its presence in the book. All that contradicts the Pauline epistles must be absolutely given up, unless we are to regard these as spurious. Positive proofs of the trustworthiness of Acts must be tested with the greatest caution." (§ 13).

But far away the greatest work on the book of the Acts of the Apostles produced by German scholars in these later generations, greatest because the most thorough, searching and exhaustive in its method, is, in my judgment, that of Dr. Edward Zeller of the University of Berlin. I need hardly tell you that the views I have expressed in this present course of lectures on the book of Acts are the result of my own independent and original researches. In this, as in all my other courses, I have been my own authority. Nevertheless, if I were under compulsion to give some famous name as patron of my theories on this book, I should undoubtedly mention that of Dr. Zeller. Anyway he is the man to whom I am more indebted for help than to anybody else. The whole of tnese lectures may therefore be considered to some extent as one long quotation from this most un-compromising author, and I will in consequence only give you two or three further sentences from his book on the subject. Speaking of the Jerusalem council he says:—"The contradictions quoted would alone suffice to make us look upon the apostolic council of the Acts as a fiction traceable to the pragmatism of the work, a fiction which indeed harmonized with the pacific objects of our author but which can have no place in history." (II. 40). And, more generally, speaking of the book as a whole, he says :—"But, if the usual view of the object of the Acts cannot be carried out even on the traditional premises respecting its historical credibility, it loses all foundation when it is seen how much that is unhistorical it records, and how much of this unhistorical material can be explained only by reflection" (i.e., only by deliberate manufacture) "on the part of the author, and not by purposeless legend. If the description is from the commencement adapted to the parallel between Peter and Paul, and if this parallel is obtained only by a thorough alteration of history" (in English we should say only by a thorough falsification of history) "by unhistorical episodes, additions, and changes in the historical material, it is quite obvious that the writer with whom this description originated has some other object in view than the mere transmission of history" (p. 134).

After this it is hardly worth while mentioning Baron von Soden, another professor of theology in the University of Berlin page 58 and also a writer in the "Biblica." I will however just quote a line or two from his well-known work in the Crown Theological Library. Thus in reference to the earliest chapters of the Acts he observes :—"The description of the church of Jerusalem proves that (the author) lacks all accurate and detailed information. ... It is no doubt the author's own ideal of a Christian church which he thus transplants into those early days—a church where all are good, pious, obedient to the apostles, and where no "spiritual gifts" disturb unity and order" (p. 214). And again :—"We cannot realise for ourselves the event of Pentecost as (our author) describes it—he is not clear even as to the locality—while the miracle of tongues with the immediate conversion and even baptism of 3,000 souls is an impossibility." (p. 220). And, later on:—"All these things and much besides are only intelligible on the supposition that the author is moved by no kind of historical interest in the scenes which he describes. Moreover the plan of the book shows that the author does not intend simply to narrate the course of history" (p. 221).

My penultimate extract, a short sentence only, is from a book recently issued by the well-known Thomas Whittaker, entitled "Origins of Christianity," and is to this effect:—"The Acts of the Apostles can of course no more be regarded as critical history than the first decade of Livy. A critical historian like Thucydides is unthinkable among the early Christians." (p. 80).

Amongst specifically Unitarian divines there is one for whom I myself have a great regard, I mean the Rev. John Chadwick of Boston, U.S.A. In his beautiful little work entitled "The Bible of To-day" he of course discusses the book of the Acts of the Apostles, which he describes as "A Theological Romance," and elegantly styles it, after Renan, the Christian Odyssey. That he is in entire agreement with the views I have advocated in these lectures of mine will appear from what he says of our book on p. 250 of his own work. Here it is:—"We may accept in full the charges which the Tubingen critics make on its veracity and still return to it with unabated interest. It may not be history and biography, but it is at least one of the most charming fictions that were ever written."

I shall quote nothing from Weizsächer's great work on The Apostolic Age, although substantially it agrees with me and I have made considerable use of it in the preparation of the present course of lectures. The book does not lend itself readily to quotation, and there is, I think, no need of further authorities. It is time we faced the general conclusion to be deduced from the discussion contained in these four lectures of ours.

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The question presumably that will now be uppermost in the minds of my hearers is this :—If the book of the Acts of the Apostles is as unhistorical as Mr. Gammell now claims it to be, how can we pretend to know anything at all of the origin of Christianity? The four gospels are undoubtedly mythical, to a very large extent, if not entirely; if now Luke's second volume turns out to be as unhistorical as his first, surely there is nothing left for us but to acknowledge that we know little or nothing of the way in which Christianity first came into existence. If Jesus is gone, and all that precedes the journal-sections in the Acts of the Apostles is more or less imaginary, mostly more, who is to tell us what were the real events which issued in that system of religion we know as Christianity? The Christian church comes into view in due time in secular literature and history, but, apparently, we don't know how it got there. It comes upon us full-orbed, like Minerva from the head of Jove, and the previous growth of it is either not known at all, or must apparently be sought for outside the pages of the New Testament. We don't even know for certain the time at which Christianity first appeared in human history. Our New Testament traditions say it was in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius and the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate in Judea, but we can't be sure even of this. There seems to have been a Jesus, Jesus ben Pandera, a thaumaturgist who lived and was ultimately put to a violent death and hanged upon a tree, a hundred years before our era, in the reign of the Maccabean or Asmonean King Alexander Jannaeus, and this is the Jesus undoubtedly to which all the references in the Talmud point. It is also the Jesus which all the early opponents of Christiauity have in mind, such as Celsus and Porphyry, and, what is most remarkable of all, it is actually to this date that Epiphanius, the popular bishop of Constantia, about A.D. 400, assigns the life of the Jesus Christ whom the Christian Church worshipped. This, in fact, is one of the standing puzzles of Christian Origins. And more than that. If the historical Jesus did appear in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, as we have just said, then the apostle Paul ought to have come on the scene soon after, and there is actually some ground in the Pauline epistles themselves for such a theory. I have before now called your attention to the fact how utterly bare of all indications of date are the Pauline epistles. It seems as if somebody had in early days gone carefully through them and eliminated every trace of the date at which they were written. Nevertheless, one note of time has been inadvertently left in them, and that one note, strange to say, fixes the writer just about a century earlier than does the Acts of the Apostles. The place I refer to is II Corinthians XI, 32,83. "In Damascus" says Paul, "the governor under page 60 Aretas the King kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison desirous to apprehend me; and throngh a window in a basket was I let down by the wall and escaped his hands." You see Paul was in Damascus when Aretas was King thereof. Aretas was the family name of the Kings of Nabathea, whose capital was Petra, and the only time, as far as history knows, when Damascus was under the rule of any Aretas was early in the first century B.C., i.e., in the days of Alexander Jannaeus, which is just when Paul ought to have lived if Jesus ben Pandera was the original of our gospel Jesus. And so you see how reasonable was my remark just now that we don't really know for certain, not within 100 years or so, when the Jesus of our gospels actually did live, i.e., if he was ever a historical person at all. Plainly, if we plant our religion in the realm of history, we shall be in sorry plight. Plainly, we have got to face the fact that we really know nothing, or almost nothing, of the Origins of Christianity, and, if we flatter ourselves that we do know, we are only living in a fool's paradise, a locality, I must say, very pleasing to many people.

Perhaps you will ask here, Is there really no direction in which the microscope of the critic could be turned to obtain some positive as well as negative facts on this famous question? When so many acute and powerful minds have been exploring the records of these remote ages have they never stumbled upon any indications of the actual origin of the Christian religion? If the traditional account is erroneous must we be content with an utter blank in our minds as far as this great subject is concerned? Is not criticism strong enough to paint a picture of the reality, if only in rude outline, as well as obliterate the traditional picture? In reply I would say I think it can, and that some such attempt may perhaps be made someday in some future lectures.

But the principal moral of our story remains yet to be drawn. The fall of history should turn our thoughts to philosophy. The kernel of Christianity, for us Unitarians at least, is not any thoughts about a person at all, whether Paul or Jesus or anybody else. According even to our own New Tessament traditions the kernel of Christianity originally was an ethical principle. "Repent," Jesus is made to say, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." There you see the important matter is not the preacher but his message. It is the unhappy fate of most religions to get perverted from a code of ethical principles to the personality of the founder. The religion that has suffered least from this evil is Mohammedanism, which has never made a god of its prophet. Yet even here there has been page 61 perversion, for originally Mohammed was no essential part of Mohammedanism. Mohammedanism was originally the assertion of the Divine unity alone, that was all the prophet maintained. Later however, and especially after his death, the personality of Mohammed was made part of the creed. Men were now required to believe, not simply that Allah alone is Allah, but that Mohammed was his prophet, and so far the original religion was corrupted. But just as Monotheism remains as the essential part of Mohammedanism, so the ethical teaching ascribed to Jesus still persists after all theories and dogmas relating to the personality of the great Teacher of it have been exploded. It is quite true that there are indications in the New Testament, especially in the Pauline epistle and fourth gospel, that the personality of Jesus was a part of the gospel, and an essential part of the gospel, from the very first, as orthodox preachers to-day are always maintaining, was in fact the essence and substance of the gospel; Jesus Christ was Christianity, but that is not the story told by the synoptic gospellers; according to them Christianity consisted at first of an ethical movement only, the inculcation of a moral reformation as a prelude to the commencement of God's Kingdom on earth. And so true is this, that many critics, such as Dr. Martineau, have maintained that Jesus never set himself up as Messiah or supposed himself to be Messiah. He thought only of his work, the moral reformation of men; He himself was no part of his own gospel.

That original Christianity therefore remains to us still. The Christ is gone, and most of his apostles are gone too, but the sermon on the Mount remains and all the high ethical ideals which it contains. This is the true Christianity, and it is on this that our sermons must dwell in the future. Nor will it be otherwise with the New Testament epistles. Their dogmas have all been exploded, their mythology has all faded away, but the exhortations to goodness and brotherly love in which they abound are as divine as ever. Your religion is not gone because the book of Acts is little more than a romance. The apostolic remonstrance still holds good and is still as salutary and important a thought as ever, "if a man love not his brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?" Such teachings as these are the very marrow of Christianity, and have always been so in reality. These philosophic principles are the proper themes for the preacher, themes which no criticism can invalidate, because they belong, not to the past alone but to the eternal present, not to history but to philosophy.

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And, as you know, there is no lack of material in the New Testament for such sermons as these I have been speaking of. Wherever the Sermon on the Mount originally came from, whether from an Essenian monastery or not, it undoubtedly embodies in itself a whole ethical system, a system complete in itself, one too that breathes a spirit divinely heroic, sternly virtuous, the product of the heart. The atmosphere of it is most salubrious but most Alpine. Its characteristic principle is sincerity, truthfulness in the inward parts; and this it is which has given it its divine power in all lands, in all ages, and in all hearts. "Except your righteousness," it says, "shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." The internal disposition, not the outward act, still less the theoretical belief, is that which is of worth in the eyes of God. Perhaps indeed even this is not the root principle of the earliest Christianity, its root principle is that of altruism. The word altruism does not occur of course in the Sermon on the Mount, but the thing itself is involved in every word of it. If we know anything at all of the earliest Christian movement it was a communistic one, a life in common, where each studied, not his own, but the other's welfare. They did not call this altruism, they called it love, but the idea was the same. Every true moral reformer from those days to this has felt and taught that the only principle that will save humanity is that of the substitution of the common good for the individual good as the driving power in human nature, and this is the characteristic Christian principle, judging by the sermon on the Mount. So judged Christianity is as true to-day as it was 2,000 years ago. Had Christian teachers confined their attention to the principles ascribed to the Messiah at the beginning instead of substituting for them the personality of the Messiah himself, the Christian church would never have been torn into sections, or excited the opposition of any one. And more than that, were Christian teaching to revert to-day to what its ideal Master said, and not to what he was, the present walls of separation between the churches would at once collapse of themselves, and so a church universal, a true church catholic, would spontaneously and immediately arise and introduce that milleunium of peace and goodwill at present regarded as Utopian. Not a word of ours to-day is directed to the destruction of this earliest Christianity. It is only against bad history and not against good ethics that our iconoclastic efforts are directed.

One other thought and I have done. Altruism is good, not because Jesus taught it, but because of its own essential nature. Some people find fault with us for destroying the basis of page 63 morality by our attacks on dogmatic theology. Prove Jesus to be a myth, they say, and why should any man do right or abstain from doing wrong? Now I might reply to this by pointing out that it is unsupported by the nominal founder of Christianity. In the Sermon on the Mount the Teacher, whoever he was, always gives a philosophic reason for his injunctions, he never bases them on his own personality. "Take no thought for raiment," he says; Why not? Because I bid you? Not at all, but because, if you reflect, you will see that the lilies of the field take no thought, yet all their wants are supplied. Are ye not much better than they? Just a bit of rationalistic reasoning you see; the Jesus of the New Testament was himself a Rationalist; he based his teaching on argument, and not on authority—not even his own authority.

But of course the proper answer to our accusers is that you cannot base a system of ethics on personal or external authority, whether that of Jesus or anybody else, you can only base it on the nature of things. It is the fundamental error of orthodoxy to substitute external authority for internal fitness as the reason for conduct. Rationalism may destroy the external authority, and then, on orthodox principles, morality is in danger. But Rationalism can never destroy the internal fitness of things, and therefore an ethical system based on reason can never be in danger either from Rationalism or anything else. Show a man that all the good he enjoys is just the product of the co-operative action of society and he will see at once that he is the servant of society, bound by his very life to study its interests. A rational being can be content with nothing short of a philosophical reason for his conduct, mere authority is beside the question altogether, and it is intellectual degradation to act on any other principle. In this respect, I think, the generations that preceded Christianity had an advantage over the Christian generations that followed. If you read the ancient Latin and Greek classics you will find their authors always founded their ethics on philosophy, not on authority. The disciples of Plato adopted their puinciples, not because Plato taught them, but because he gave them good reasons why they should adopt them. It was a retrograde movement intellectually when the authority of the Master was substituted for rational argument as a principle of belief. However, perhaps the best result that will accrue from our iconoclastic criticism will be that ethics will be strengthened by being built once more on the impregnable foundations of reason and conscience. The unspeakable blunder that was made when dogmatic Christianity was substituted for ethical Christianity will thus be corrected.

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Rejoice, dear friends, in your privileges as Unitarians. It is only in a Unitarian place of worship that these great principles can be discussed and advocated—at least with any consistency. The church of the Unitarians is the church of reason and a rational faith. We recognise no higher court than that, and we never can. When the reason and the intellect are disparaged in a Unitarian pulpit, as they sometimes are, when emotion is made to dominate logic, when mysticism takes the place of rationalism, then will the the Unitarian Church be guilty of the act of suicide, and that robust, healthy tone of mind that has hitherto characterised its members will be ex-changed for the morbidness, the weakness, and the decay of a dying community. But I will not conclude with words of gloom. This is the hour of Unitarian triumph, and you and I, thank God, have lived to see it. The principles of reason and science advocated for centuries by our spiritual ancestors are now rapidly becoming the accepted principles of all other Christian churches. Soon the popular creeds will be so renovated and transformed that religion will cease to be the laughing-stock of the wise, its principles will so purify human nature as to make mankind one vast family, a family no longer distracted by wars and strikes, by physical, social, and intellectual evils of all kinds, but one which by wisdom and benevoleuce universally distributed, shall advance step by step to the full satisfaction, alike of the head and the heart of all its myriad members,—a consummation worthy of the thousand lives of toil, self-denial, isolation, and heroism by which it will have been achieved.

—Amen.