166 MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
MERCY
last day ' He Avould awake and raise up ' every one tliat belioldeth the Son and believeth on Iiiin ' (Jn 6*"). For Himself, He looked through death to His own resurrection, which He again and again told His disciples to expect as the day of His de- parture drew nearer ; and for the rest, He recog- nized death with all its miserable and misleading associations as little as might be, and refused even to speak of it if this could be avoided (11"'"). With His strong sense of the continuity of life there went, however, a very remarkable reserve about the future. Concerning it He disclosed notliing of detail ; nothing that trust in the love of God and the assurance of life's continuity do not themselves imply. He plainly said He did not know the course of the future, and His disci]3les must not expect to do so (Mk 13^-, Ac V). But He never showed Himself averse to adopting the current religious language which rested on the prophecy and apocalyptics of tlie past, to clothe those ideas which He wished to impress about the life to come ; though it niay well be that the eschatological pass- ages in the Go.spels are considerably coloured and confused by the fact that they have come tlirougli the medium of disciples who were not equal to following their Master's higher thoughts.
It is in connexion with this far profounder view of life which we find in Hiiu that we are bast able to understand the 'powers that worked in ' the Lord .Jesus (inpyova-n a.1 hiiva.fj.u; iv xirai, Mk 61-*), and His consciousness in regard to them. The terin 'miracles' can hardly fail to prove misleading, as it is so closely associated with the 18th cent, point of view, which considered them as exceptions to natural law, and as owing their evidential value to the fact that they were exceptions. That view is quite obsolete and impossible now to a really scientific mind : it was always singularly unappreciative of ' the mind of Christ.' There can be no doubt that Jesus Himself felt complete certainty that He did wield powers of an extiaordinary and practically limit- less kind (cf. Mt 2651-53), and that His contemporaries never dreamt of disputing the fact. But to Him they were certainly neitlier ' unnatural ' nor ' supernatural.' The distinction drawn by the latter term is quite alien to His mind, and inconsistent with His point of view ; for Him the continuous character and flow of life was a fundamental idea, and the one unbroken reality included equally what we describe as 'natural' and 'super- natural.' The 'powers' of which He was conscious had their proper place and scope in life as He saw it; and if it is not possible for us to assign this, or to explain them, that is due probably to the single fact that, as already said, we try to see the reality of life from the standpoint of two dimensions, and can succeed so little in seeing it from that of three as He did (cf. Jit 16W 1818, Jn 2()2:t).
{b) The method which the Lord Jesus followed in carrying out His ])urpose as the world's Saviour was no less unique tlian His outlook on life, and it was the direct result of the latter. In the ordinary sense of the term Ho was no reformer ; He did not try to make the institutions which He found serve their end better, nor did He seek to substitute one expedient for another, to attain more successfully the aims before Him. He felt that His Kingdom was ' not of this world,' and all He sought was to open its portal to believers. He did not pit His Kingdom against those of the world to overthrow the latter ; ratlier He refused to let His followers do this or to do it Himself (Mt 26-'2-5^). Nor did He attempt to withdraw His followers from the ■world, as other rehgious leaders often have done, tliat they might serve God with less distraction. Even His prayers were not for change of the world itself, or tlie delivery of His disciples from it (Jn 17^--'). Tliougli His whole life was sacrificed to save the world. He just left the world alone. As in His teaching there was little that was negative, so in His work He tried to mido nothing. It is very surprising how content He always seemed to be to accoiuinodate Himself to the use of any means or circumstance that lay ready at hand, \\liile so unbending in aim tliroughout. Thus He spoke the religious language of J udaism, practised the customs in Israel, and respected its institutions, however much they were degraded and abused. He paid His half-sliekel to the Sanhedrin and His tribute-money
to the Caesar without protest. Browning again brings out with striking ett'ect this feature of the Master's in his portrait of Lazarus, whose ' especial marking ... is prone submission to the heavenly will,' so that he tries to change nothing ; but here again this characteristic, being isolated, lapses into quietism as it never did in Lazarus' Ma.ster. For, however willing Jesus was to use and leave unre- formed the things around Him, none of these ever bound Him. If there was fault or falsehood mingled with what He borrowed for the moment. He left that on one side and moved on towards His goal unaffected. He saw the truth too clearly to be diverted by aught else, and the truth made Him free. And He led His followers into the freedom tliat was His own. So, while He abstained from all political intervention, and declined to be mixed up with the ordinary business of life (Lk i2i*), and left religious institutions and traditions where He found them, He nevertlieless revolutionized all life. There is no department of human activity in the world to-day — except in some of its backwater.s which have not yet felt His iiiHuence — which is not profoundly altered in consequence of His life and work and words. His confidence that it would be so never faltered ; He saw here the sujjreme scope of the law of 'life through hjss.' So He declared lieforehand the result which is yet in progress under our eyes — ' I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, ■will draw all men unto myself (Jn 12^-). Of what import are the foam flakes which float upon its surface to him who plunges into the mighty stream of life ? Jesus' view of life, and His method of saving men, both .so original, both .so characteristic, are both vindicated in full by the results. They are alike summed uj) in the joyous conviction which many and many a soul has uttered when lifted to His higher plane, and which even the world itself has been forced to suspect, though not to share : ' If any man be in Christ, there is a new creation ! ' (2 Co 5^^, Gal 6'').