A DEATH IN THE DESERT. There be not found, that day the world shall end, Can a mere man 359 680 do this? 685 Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do. Call Christ, then, the illimitable God, Or lost!" But 'twas Cerinthus that is lost.] 683. That is, With me as with Pamphylax, with him as with John: See Gospel of John, xvii. 11, 21–23. "In the critical examination of the evangelical records, the fourth Gospel suffered most. Strauss-in this instance following his early master and later antagonist, Baur - denied that St. John had anything to do with its composition. The author, he held, was neither St. John nor any one else who had personally known Christ: nor, in accordance with a widely accepted theory, did he believe it to be the work of a pupil of St. John, who, after the death of his master, related, from memory or from fragmentary notes, traditions and sayings which had been taught him, and made out of them a continuous history. Strauss pronounced it to be a controversial work, written late in the second century after Christ, by a profound theologian of the Greek Gnostic and anti-Jewish school, whose design was not to add another to the existing biographies of Christ, not to represent him as a real man, nor to give an account of any human life, but to produce an elaborate theological work in which, under the veil of allegory, the Neo-platonic conception of Christ as the Logos, the realized Word of God, the divine principle of light and life, should be developed. With this purpose, the writer made a free selection from the sayings and doings of Christ as recorded in the three Gospels already written, and as freely invented others. All the events, all the words, of the Gospel thus composed,. are subordinate to the main design, which was worked out by the author with an artistic completeness most ingeniously traced by his German interpreters. Each miracle symbolizes some important dogma, and its narration must be understood to mean that it embodies some deep spiritual truth, not, necessarily, that it ever actually took place. The author manifests, throughout, his ignorance of Jewish customs, and his antagonism to Jewish sentiments." "The general purport of the poem can scarcely be doubted, as we look back upon it as a whole and consider its main conclusions. The tendency of the argu 358 A DEATH IN THE DESERT. Believe ye will not see him any more [Cerinthus read and mused; one added this: 665 "If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men Mere man, the first and best but nothing more, - For see; Himself conceived of life as love, 670 Conceived of love as what must enter in, Fill up, make one with His each soul He loved : Thus much for man's joy, all men's joy for Him. 675 And very many still retained alive : Nay, should His coming be delayed awhile, Say, ten years longer (twelve years, some compute) 662. regard: look. "To whom thus Michael, with regard benign: P. L., XI., 334. "From that placid aspèct and meek regard." - P. R., III., 217. De Quincey remarks (Milton vs. Southey and Landor) in reply to Landor's demurring that "meek regard conveys no new idea to placid aspect:" "But aspect is the countenance of Christ when passive to the gaze of others; regard is the same countenance in active contemplation of those others whom he loves or pities. The placid aspect expresses, therefore, the divine rest; the meek regard expresses the divine benignity; the one is the self-absorption of the total Godhead, the other the external emanation of the Filial Godhead." 665. Cerinthus read and mused: It must be supposed that an opportunity had been afforded Cerinthus of reading the MS. by the one who added the postscript, which is addressed to him, and who sought his conversion. |