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civilization is at this moment being swept down into a bottomless gulf. That is the application, at the rate of six thousand millions per annum, of the wealth produced and distributed by the labors of uncounted multitudes of brains and hands. Is it the intended application? Or does it represent something which has been done behind the back of industrial man, which those who produced this wealth or the great majority of them never contemplated for a moment, and which, had they ever foreseen it as possible, would have thrown a wet blanket over the whole industrial enterprise of the modern world? It is the latter. What a tragic disillusion of the hopes, aspirations, and theories of those who have put their hands and brains, their intellectual and it may be also their moral endowments into the great industrial enterprise, to have to tell them at the end of their labors that what they were doing all this time was mainly to build up the commissariat of a world-war! Could there be a more conclusive instance of the want of control on the part of society over the application of its wealth? The words of the Psalmist which I have already quoted seem to me very true when taken as addressed to the industrial age from which we are emerging. He walketh in a vain show:

he heapeth up riches and knoweth not who shall gather them.' They were heaped up in the belief that they would make somebody happy. They have been gathered for the war.

I am aware that this paper raises a question without providing an answer. As the reader has already perceived, the statement of the question has been sufficiently difficult. I am not afraid to confess my ignorance in these matters; and though it is unseemly to infer other people's ignorance from one's own, I cannot help thinking that we all know less about these things than we are prone to imagine. In the present confused state of the world it may be that a confession of ignorance is the best contribution one can make to the progress of knowledge. Something will be gained if we can realize the questions before us. For aught any of us knows to the contrary, it may be in accordance with the plan of the world's history that the present age should end with a note of interrogation. For my own part I should be content to have it so, provided I could read clearly the terms of the question behind that portentous stop. With the question before us we should not be wholly in the dark. And the next age would have its work in providing the answer. These things are not beyond the wit of man.

THE SYRIAN CHRIST

BY ABRAHAM MITRIE RIHBANY

I

JESUS CHRIST, the incarnation of the spirit of God, seer, teacher of the verities of the spiritual life, and preacher of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, is, in a higher sense, 'a man without a country.' As a prophet and a seer Jesus belongs to all races and all ages. Wherever the minds of men respond to simple truth, wherever the hearts of men thrill with pure love, wherever a temple of religion is dedicated to the worship of God and the service of man, there is Jesus' country and there are his friends. Therefore, in speaking of Jesus as the son of a certain country, I do not mean in the least to localize his Gospel, or to set bounds and limits to the flow of his spirit and the workings of his love.

Nor is it my aim in these papers to imitate the astute theologians by wrestling with the problem of Jesus' personality. To me the secret of personality, human and divine, is an impenetrable mystery. My more modest purpose in this writing is to remind the reader that, whatever else Jesus was, as regards his modes of thought and life and his method of teaching, he was a Syrian of the Syrians. According to authentic history Jesus never saw any other country than Palestine. There he was born; there he grew up to manhood, taught his Gospel, and died for it.

It is most natural, then, that Gospel truths should have come down to the succeeding generations and to the nations of the West-cast in Oriental

moulds of thought, and intimately intermingled with the simple domestic and social habits of Syria. The gold of the Gospel carries with it the sand and dust of its original home.

From the foregoing, therefore, it may be seen that my reason for undertaking to throw fresh light on the life and teachings of Christ, and other portions of the Bible whose correct understanding depends on accurate knowledge of their original environment, is not any claim on my part to great learning or a profound insight into the spiritual mysteries of the Gospel. The real reason is rather an accident of birth. From the fact that I was born not far from where the Master was born, and brought up under almost the identical conditions under which he lived, I have an 'inside view' of the Bible which, by the nature of things, a Westerner cannot have. I know this, not from the study of the mutilated tablets of the archeologist and the antiquarian, precious as such discoveries are, but from the simple fact that as a sojourner in this Western world, whenever I open my Bible it reads like a letter from home.

Its unrestrained effusiveness of expression; its vivid, almost flashy and fantastic imagery; its naïve narrations; the rugged unstudied simplicity of its parables; its unconventional (and to the more modest West rather unseemly) portrayal of certain human relations; as well as its all-permeating spiritual mysticism, — so far as these qualities are concerned, the Bible might all have been written in my

primitive village home, on the western slopes of Mount Lebanon some thirty years ago.1

You cannot study the life of a people successfully from the outside. You may by so doing succeed in discerning the few fundamental traits of character in their local colors, and in satisfying your curiosity with surface observations of the general modes of behavior; but the little things, the common things, those subtle connectives in the social vocabulary of a people, those agencies which are born and not made, and which give a race its rich distinctiveness, are bound to elude your grasp. Social life, like biological life, energizes from within, and from within it must be studied.

And it is those common things of Syrian life, so indissolubly interwoven with the spiritual truths of the Bible, which cause the Western readers of holy writ to stumble, and which rob those truths for them of much of their richness. By sheer force of genius, the aggressive, systematic Anglo-Saxon mind seeks to press into logical unity and creedal uniformity those undesigned, artless, and most natural manifestations of Oriental life, in order to 'understand the scriptures.'

'Yet show I unto you a more excellent way,' by personally conducting you into the inner chambers of Syrian life, and showing you, if I can, how simple it is for a humble fellow countryman of Christ to understand those so

1 I do not mean to assert or even to imply that the Western world has never succeeded in knowing the mind of Christ. Such an assertion would do violent injustice, not only to the Occidental mind, but to the Gospel itself as well, by making it an enigma, utterly foreign to the native spirituality of the majority of mankind. But what I have learned from intimate associations with the Western mind, during almost a score of years in the American pulpit, is that, with the exception of the few specialists, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a people to understand fully a literature which has not sprung from that people's own racial life. - THE AUTHOR.

cial phases of the scriptural passages which so greatly puzzle the august minds of the West.

II

In the Gospel story of Jesus' life there is not a single incident that is not in perfect harmony with the prevailing modes of thought and the current speech of the land of its origin. I do not know how many times I heard it stated in my native land and at our own fireside that heavenly messengers in the forms of patron saints or angels came to pious, childless wives, in dreams and visions, and cheered them with the promise of maternity. It was nothing uncommon for such women to spend a whole night in a shrine 'wrestling in prayer,' either with the blessed Virgin or some other saint, for such a divine assurance; and I remember a few of my own kindred to have done so.

In a most literal sense we always understood the saying of the psalmist, 'Children are a heritage from the Lord.' Above and beyond all natural agencies, it was He who turned barrenness to fecundity and worked the miracle of birth. To us every birth was miraculous, and childlessness an evidence of divine disfavor. From this it may be inferred how tenderly and reverently agreeable to the Syrian ear is the angel's salutation to Mary, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women!-Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son.'

A miracle? Yes. But a miracle means one thing to your Western science, which seeks to know what nature is and does by dealing with secondary causes, and quite another thing to an Oriental, to whom God's will is the law and gospel of nature. In times of intellectual trouble this man takes refuge in his all-embracing faith, — the

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faith that to God all things are possible. The Oriental does not try to meet an assault upon his belief in miracles by seeking to establish the historicity of concrete reports of miracles. His poetical, mystical temperament seeks its ends in another way. Relying upon his fundamental faith in the omnipotence of God, he throws the burden of proof upon his assailant by challenging him to substantiate his denial of the miracles. So did Paul (in the twenty-sixth chapter of the Book of Acts) put his opponents at a great disadvantage by asking, 'Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?'

But the story of Jesus' birth and kindred Bible records disclose not only the predisposition of the Syrian mind to accept miracles as divine acts, without critical examination, but also its attitude toward conception and birth, an attitude which differs fundamentally from that of the Anglo-Saxon mind. With the feeling of one who has been reminded of having ignorantly committed an improper act, I remember the time when kind American friends admonished me not to read from the pulpit such scriptural passages as detailed the accounts of conception and birth, but only to allude to them in a general way. I learned in a very short time to obey the kindly advice, but it was a long time before I could swing my psychology around and understand why in America such narratives were so greatly modified in transmission.

The very fact that such stories are found in the Bible shows that in my native land no such sifting of these narratives is ever undertaken when they are read to the people. From childhood I had been accustomed to hear them read at our church, related at the fireside, and discussed reverently by men and women at all times and places. There is nothing in the phraseology of

such statements which is not in perfect harmony with the common, everyday speech of my people.

To the Syrians, as I say, 'children are a heritage from the Lord.' From the days of Israel to the present time, barrenness has been looked upon as a sign of divine disfavor, an intolerable calamity. Rachel's cry, 'Give me children, or else I die,' does not exaggerate the agony of a childless Syrian wife. When Rececca was about to depart from her father's house to become Isaac's wife, her mother's ardent and effusively expressed wish for her was, 'Be thou the mother of thousands, of millions.' This mother's last message to her daughter was not spoken in a corner. I can see her following the bride to the door, lifting her open palms and turning her face toward heaven, and making her affectionate petition in the hearing of the multitude of guests, who must have echoed her words in chorus.

In the congratulations of guests at a marriage feast the central wish for the bridegroom and bride is invariably thus expressed: May you be happy, live long, and have many children!' And what contrasts very sharply with the American reticence in such matters is the fact that shortly after the wedding, the friends of the young couple, both men and women, begin to ask them about their 'prospects' for an heir. No more does a prospective mother undertake in any way to disguise the signs of the approaching event, than an American lady to conceal her engagement ring. Much mirth is enjoyed in such cases, also, when friends and neighbors, by consulting the stars, or computing the number of letters in the names of the parents and the month in which the miracle of conception is supposed to have occurred, undertake to foretell whether the promised offspring will be a son or a daughter. In that

part of the country where I was brought up, such wise prognosticators believed, and made us all believe, that if the calculations resulted in an odd number the birth would be a son, but if in an even number, a daughter, which, as a rule, is not considered so desirable.

Back of all these social traits and beyond the free realism of the Syrian in speaking of conception and birth, lies a deeper fact. To Eastern peoples, especially the Semites, reproduction in all the world of life is profoundly sacred. It is God's life reproducing itself in the life of man and in the living world below man; therefore the evidences of this reproduction should be looked upon and spoken of with rejoicing.

Notwithstanding the many and fundamental intellectual changes which I have undergone in this country of my adoption, I count as among the most precious memories of my childhood my going with my father to the vineyard, just as the vines began to 'come out,' and hearing him say as he touched the swelling buds, 'Blessed be the Creator. He is the Supreme Giver. May He protect the blessed increase.' Of this I almost always think when I read the words of the psalmist, 'The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof!'

Now I do not feel at all inclined to say whether the undisguised realism of the Orientals in speaking of reproduction is better than the delicate reserve of the Anglo-Saxons. In fact I have been so reconstructed under AngloSaxon auspices as to feel that the excessive reserve of this race with regard to such things is not a serious fault, but rather the defect of a great virtue. My purpose is to show that the unreconstructed Oriental, to whom reproduction is the most sublime manifestation of God's life, cannot see why one should be ashamed to speak anywhere in the world of the fruits of wedlock, of a 'woman with child.' One might as well

be ashamed to speak of the creative power as it reveals itself in the gardens of roses and the fruiting trees.

Here we have the background of the stories of Sarah, when the angel-guest prophesied fecundity for her in her old age; of Rebecca, and the wish of her mother for her, that she might become 'the mother of thousands'; of Elizabeth, when the 'babe leaped in her womb,' as she saw her cousin Mary; and of the declaration of the angel to Joseph's spouse, 'Thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son.'

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Here it is explained, also, why upon the birth of a 'man-child,' well-wishers troop into the house, troop into the house, even on the very day of birth, bring their presents, and congratulate the parents on the divine gift to them. It was because of this custom that those strangers, the three 'Wise Men' and Magi of the Far East, were permitted to come in and see the little Galilean family, while the mother was yet in childbed. So runs the Gospel narrative: 'And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts, — gold, frankincense, and myrrh.'

So also were the humble shepherds privileged to see the wondrous child shortly after birth. 'And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, "Let us now go to Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us." And they came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.'

In the twelfth verse of the second chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke, the English version says, 'And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.' Here the word clothes

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