CHAPTER V

HIS PLAN

JESUS had a plan. There is a decisiveness in his proclamations and a sure-footedness in his goings, which bespeak a goal clearly in view. What was this goal? and how did he propose practically to attain it?

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As has already been hinted, Jesus was conversant with the world politics of his time. For this Workingman of Nazareth had an intellect of the first magnitude point in him that has not received the attention it deserves. To turn the stream of history from its wonted channel and give it a new direction argues a great heart, but it argues even more a great mind. Ecstatics, such as Francis of Assissi, create a stir; but the world, with a passing attention to the rhapsodizer, continues to jog along pretty much the same. When however an epoch is made, so much so that the world redates its calendar, we are certified that a thinker has appeared. Jesus had one of the master intellects of all time. In its sweep, its incisiveness, its granitic texture and firmness, and in its masculine power to impregnate other minds, it yields to the intellect of no Aristotle or Bacon or Newton. Above every other trait in him, the Carpenter of Galilee was a thinker. To know one's own time is the surest mark of mentality. This mark was his he applied his master intellect to the world politics of his day.

In fact the march of world events occupies so fundamental a position in his teaching, that his mission can almost be summed up in the phrase he himself used

to awaken the people to "the signs of the times." Jesus was a publicist. He had in highest degree the journalist temperament. No other person of that day, not the emperor himself on his uplifted throne by the Tiber, read the times so discerningly nor traced the trend of events with so statesmanly an eye.

For such a reading of the world, Palestine was a more favourable location than Italy. It was more at the centre. In the clash between Europe and Asia which was impending, this hill country of Judah occupied a midmost position. The great eras in human history have lain at the collision point of ideas. The Norman Conquest is an instance; also the Renaissance, when the Crusaders had brought Europe and Asia into contact. Ever the conflict between the East and the West has been the most prolific source of humanity's awakenment, and therefore of humanity's advancement. Such a conflict was about to take place now, with Palestine the meeting point of the racial currents. This was not the first time she had played the part of a buffer state. In earlier days the history of the world had centred around the clash between Egypt and Mesopotamia. To the Old Testament prophets have been ascribed supernatural powers of insight, because they discerned so clearly the outlines of this clash. But their geographical position was in large part the secret. Palestine, set square between these rival powers, and yet aloof from them because of its mountain fastness-hedged in by sea on one side and

what shall we do?" He makes no clear reply. John is like a rapt sermon that leaves out the application. His preaching ends up in the air. So long as John is denunciatory, he soars and is a very buzzard for majesty of flight. But when, in response to the repeated summons of the listeners, he comes down to earth and attempts a practical programme, he is like that same buzzard when it is on the ground-wobbly to the point of the comic. John's plan for social reconstruction is an extension of alms giving, and for the soldiery to cease extorting on their own private account, content with their wages. Confronted with "The System" in the person of Herod, John limits his indictment to the incest that is in the Herodian palace, as though the times would be all right again if Herod would but become decent in his marital relations.

But we must not bear too hard on John. With all of his shortcomings he had a virtue which in large measure atoned for them a clear recognition of those shortcomings. He was not a constructive thinker and he said so. He described himself as merely a Voice:

An infant, crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language but a cry.

John's work was to call aloud against the crooked paths in the prevailing landscape of society, and then usher in another, greater than he, who would make those paths straight: his to exclaim against the precipitous inequalities of human fortune, and then trust to his successor to fill those valleys and to bring low those dizzy mountain

peaks of a too great prosperity. John could do little more with the poison tree than to prune away a few of its branches. But there would come one after him who would lay the axe to the root.

John seems to have suggested to Jesus that he himself was to be this greater and mightier one. Charming is the picture these cousins present, each effacing himself for the other, each in honour preferring the other. Their followers tried to bring about a rivalry between them. In vain. In fact, the bearing of the two cousins toward each other is so harmonious throughout, that it suggests some covenant to a common Cause, wherewith they had covenanted themselves back in boyhood; so that now each cared not for himself but only that the Cause be advanced. There is even a hint in the nativity narratives that their two mothers had vowed them each to the other before birth, and now they did not depart therefrom.

So long as John was succeeding, Jesus refused to put his own personality forward. It was only after John was imprisoned that he stepped forth into a public and authoritative position. There is a whisper in the records that it was his indignation at this imprisonment of his cousin which brought Jesus to the deciding point — the straw that broke at last the back of his too patient endurance. For it revealed to him the uselessness any longer of palliative measures: "From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, Get a new mind; for the Restoration is at hand." In the career of The Carpenter from that moment we see force of character aroused by the sense of a great wrong.

desert on the other was a natural observatory. This had been more of a help to those Old Testament journalists than they themselves probably realized.

Now Egypt was replaced by Rome. And instead of the eastern empires of Nineveh and Babylon, were the hosts of Persia - Parthian warriors waiting to dispute Rome's claim; with India and the Far East dim in the mists of vast distances, but now bearing into view since the campaigns of Alexander. Mark Antony had sensed this awakening of the East, due to the aggressions of the invasive Roman, and had displayed a real quality of statesmanship in his move to build up from Alexandria as a centre an empire of the East which should rival that of Rome. The importance at this time of the East, as compared with the raw and undeveloped West, appears in the persistent rumours, toward the end of his career, that Julius Cæsar was planning to move the capital of the empire to Ilion, Alexandria, or some eastern centre rumours which eventually found their fulfilment when the capital was transferred to Constantinople. Had Antony been master of himself, as was Augustus, to give to preparations for war the priceless hours which he spent in dalliance with Cleopatra, the outcome of his fight with Italy might have been different, and a new direction imparted to history.

The clash was to be one between materialism and idealism. From Palestine, to the westward stretched a civilization of roofs; to the eastward, a civilization of tents. The Asiatic mind, bred to the eternal mystery of the desert and evaluating exterior things as but instrumental and tributary to man, has developed soul