Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/322

 does, quite unlike its predecessors, lend some sanction to that of unity in nature. The best proof of this is that Jesus never, at any period of his life, desired his followers to worship him, either as God or as the Son of God. Had he believed of himself what his followers subsequently believed of him, that he was one of the constituent persons in a divine trinity, he must have enjoined his apostles both to address him in prayer themselves, and to desire their converts to address him. It is quite plain that he did nothing of the kind, and that they never supposed him to have done so. Belief in Christ as the Messiah was taught as the first dogma of apostolic Christianity, but adoration of Christ as God was not taught at all. But we are not left in this matter to depend on conjectural inferences. The words of Jesus are plain. Whenever occasion arose, he asserted his inferiority to the Father (as Milton has proved to demonstration), though, as no one had then dreamt of his equality, it is natural that the occasions should not have been frequent. He made himself inferior in knowledge when he said that of the day and hour of the day of judgment no one knew, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son; no one except the Father (Mk. xiii. 32). He made himself inferior in power when he said that seats on his right hand and on his left in the kingdom of heaven were not his to give (Mk. x. 40); inferior in virtue when he desired a certain man not to address his as "Good master," for there was none good but God (Mk. x. 18). The words of his prayer at Gethsemane, "all things are possible unto thee," imply that all things were not possible to him; while its conclusion, "not what I will, but what thou wilt," indicates submission to a superior, not the mere execution of a purpose of his own (Mk. xiv. 36). Indeed, the whole prayer would have been a mockery, useless for any purpose but the deception of his disciples, if he had himself been identical with the Being to whom he prayed, and had merely been giving effect by his death to their common counsels. While the cry of agony from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mk. xv. 34,) would have been quite unmeaning if the person forsaken and the person forsaking had been one and the same. Either, then, we must assume that the language of Jesus has been misre-*