Читать книгу Albert Dürer - T. Sturge Moore - Страница 17

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"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." Every one knows how anxious great artists become for the preservation of their works, how highly they value permanence in the materials employed, and immunity from the more obvious chances of destruction in the positions they are to occupy. Michael Angelo is said to have painted cracks on the Sistina ceiling to force the architect to strengthen the roof. When Jesus made the assertion that his teaching would outlast the influence of the visible world of nature and the societies of men--the kingdoms of earth and the glory of the earth--he did no more than every victorious soul strives to effect, and to feel assured that it has in some large degree effected; the difference between him and them is one of degree. It may be objected that different hearts harbour and cherish contradictory conceptions. Doubtless; but does the desire to win the co-operation and approval of other men consist with the higher developments of human faculties? Is it, perhaps, essential to them? If so, in so far as every man increases in vitality and the employment of his powers, he will be forced to reverence and desire the solidarity of the race, and consequently to relinquish or neglect whatever in his own ideal militates against such solidarity. And this will be the case whether he judge such eccentric elements to be nobler or less noble than the qualities which are fostered in him by the co-operation of his fellows. Jesus, at any rate, affirmed that the law of the kingdom within a man's soul was: "Love thy neighbour as thyself"; and that obedience to it would work in every man like leaven, which is lost sight of in the lump of dough, and seems to add nothing to it, yet transforms the whole in raising up the loaf; or as the corn of wheat which is buried in the glebe like a dead body, yet brings forth the blade, and nourishes a new life.

So he that should follow Jesus by obeying the laws of the kingdom, by loving God (the begetter or fountainhead of a man's most essential conception of what is right and good) and his neighbour, was assured by his mild and gracious Master that he would inherit, by way of a return for the sacrifices which such obedience would entail, a new and better life. (Follow me, I laid down my life in order that I might take it again. He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake--as I did, in imitation of me--shall find it.) For in order to make this very difficult obedience possible, it was to be turned into a labour of love done for the Master's sake. As Goethe said:

"Against the superiority of another, there is no remedy

but love."

Is it not true that the superiority of another man humiliates, crushes and degrades us in our own eyes, if we envy it or hate it instead of loving it? while by loving it we make it in a sense ours, and can rejoice in it. So Jesus affirmed that he had made the superiority of the ideal his; so that he was in it, and it was in him, so that men who could no longer fix their attention on it in their own souls might love it in him. He was their master-conception, their true ideal, acting before them, captivating the attention of their senses and emotions. This is what a man of our times, possessed of rare receptivity and great range of comprehension, considered to be the pith of Jesus' teaching. Matthew Arnold gave much time and labour to trying to persuade men that this was what the religion they professed, or which was professed around them, most essentially meant. And he reminded us that the adequacy of such ideas for governing man's life depended not on the authority of a book or writings by eye-witnesses with or without intelligence, but on whether they were true in experience. He quoted Goethe's test for every idea about life, "But is it true, is it true for me, now?" "Taste and see," as the prophets put it; or as Jesus said, "Follow me." For an ideal must be followed, as a man woos a woman; the pursuit may have to be dropped, in order to be more surely recovered; an ideal must be humoured, not seized at once as a man seizes command over a machine. This secret of success was was only to be won by the development of a temper, a spirit of docility. To love it in an example was the best, perhaps the only way of gaining possession of it.