* J. Learraount, In ChxTs Orchard, 221.
ST. JOHN X. II 455
11 This question, " Was Christ merely a good Man and a great Teacher, or was He something more ? Is He to be to us simply one of many teachers, to be discarded possibly sooner or later because, however valuable in the past, the world is destined more and more to outgrow His teaching ? Is He to be merely one of many, or are His claims upon us unique, supreme, paramount ? " — this is a question which I do not think you can afford to leave wholly unanswered. To this extent the question, " What think ye of Christ ? " is one which you must face. To leave it on one side is virtually to negative any exceptional claim on Christ's part.i
1[ We have just lost one who was at the time of his death, with one exception, the greatest master of the English language still left among us. Some of the press notices of the late Professor Seeley show a strangely inadequate recognition, as it seems to me, of his true place both in English literature and in English religion. Thto advance of criticism may have somewhat diminished the value of Ecce Homo as an historical study : I do not think it has touched its usefulness as a help to practical Christianity. To many in our generation Ecce Homo has taught far more than such a book as Imitatio Christi (with all its truth and beauty) can teach to men who do not live in a medieval monastery, about the practical application of our Lord's moral teaching to the spiritual needs and the everyday duties of modern life. To some of us it has come to seem almost like the very Gospel itself rewritten in the language of the nineteenth century. Its declared purpose is simply to constitute an historical inquiry into the ethical teaching of Jesus Christ. With Theology, strictly speaking, it does not avowedly concern itself at all. And yet the writer who summed up the essence of Christ's teaching in the famous phrase, "the enthusiasm of humanity," found that he could not give an historical account of what Christ taught or of the reasons of His success without recognizing in the fullest and most explicit manner the claim to a unique personal authority which is implied as much in the Sermon on the Mount as in the Johannine version of the Master's life. A morality which is essentially bound up with a devotion to a Person is already a religion. I hardly know of any book that appeals so directly to the conscience of a man anxious, amid all difficulties intellectual and practical, to get an answer for his own soul's sake to the old question, " What must I do to be saved ? " The book is throughout intensely practical, and yet it distinctly implies a Theology, a Theology which may be all the more impressive to some minds because it is more often
* H. Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, 83.
456 THE GOOD SHEPHERD
implied than expressed. Had its author attempted to sum up that implied Theology in a sentence, he would perhaps have ex- pressed himself in some such words as these, which I take from a like-minded writer whose name is revered in this place [Oxford] : " For most of us," said Arnold Toynbee, " Christ is the ex- pression of God, i.e., the eternal fact within us and without us. In time of peril, of failing, and of falsehood, the one power that enables us to transcend weakness is the feeling of the communion of the two eternal facts in Christ." ^
II.
The Significance of Christ's Claim.
"The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep." Christ not only proclaims Himself the Good Shepherd; He expounds the significance of this great word. In His exposition, He leads us into depths of Divine wisdom which must evermore constitute the subject of profound study.
1. "The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep." Christ's love as portrayed in His death illustrates the law of Sacrifice. The goodness of Jesus Christ shines forth from Him, and in His death finds its crown and consummation. That death is not an isolated fact, for it is associated with the whole history of Christ's redemption. The Lord, throughout His earthly ministry, set that before Him, and said of it as His baptism, " How am I straitened tiU it be accomplished." Thus that death was no mere accident or afterthought. It was the necessary outcome of the life and ministry of the incarnate Son of God. Messiah had been represented as the Shepherd of Israel, but it remained for the Son of God, in His supreme revelation, to represent the Shepherd as dying for His flock. And so He says, " the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep."
(1) We must observe the perfect voluntariness of His self- devotion. " No man," He says of His sacrificed life, " taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." There was no external need for Jesus dying an early, violent death. If He had so willed it. He could have kept Himself out of the hands of the men who