Then and Now | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 18, 1872

Then and Now.

[HERE is an article from the Christian Union, which every Seventh-day Adventist can appreciate. It compares, and justly too, the religious teachers of Christ’s time with those of our time. Who can fail to see the similarity? D. M. C.]

There is a strong disposition in men of intellectual culture to associate with their own class, and keep aloof from the uneducated multitude. It is the natural impulse of like seeking like. The disposition is not confined to those to whom culture is only a means of selfish enjoyment. Men who to an intellectual habit of mind add moral earnestness, and aim at noble ends, are largely controlled by the same instinct. It is very noticeable among many ministers. They live in their studies, among books, and in intellectual society, until their whole habit of mind and their very language differs from that of the mass of the community. The same thing holds good to a great extent of the whole class of literary and cultivated people.

A man who works by ideas may even feel himself necessitated to do this. Can one whose power lies in aptitude for thought be serviceable among those who hardly know how to think? Must not a man to whom abstractions are more real than things seen, be content to address himself to an audience, “fit, but few”?

It is worth while to look at the practice, in this respect, of Jesus. Humanly speaking, he was of transcendent genius. To him, the whole world was instinct with higher meanings than other men saw. The sacred literature of his people opened to him depths that no other had pierced. His thoughts took a sweep of marvelous height and depth and breadth. To no other man was ever the mere outside of life of so little account. And he conceived a purpose transcending the boldest flight of any other imagination. Other philosophers had tried to solve the problem of human existence. Other statesmen had founded nations, and even national religions. But the work he gave himself was not merely to answer the question as to man’s nature; but to practically meet the highest wants of that nature; to found, not a school of thinkers, not a nation, but a kingdom, which should in its progress embrace all nations, and provide for all schools of thought. He was to inaugurate a revolution, compared with which the revolutions wrought by Plato and Bacon in the realm of thought, or by Julius Cæsar in the world’s political system, were insignificant. For this immeasurable work he had but the space of three years. Within that time, he was to give firm foothold to these new principles, and prepare his followers to carry on the work.

Being a man of such ideas and purposes, he lived almost wholly among the common people. He spoke their language. Most of his public addresses were made to them. His intimate associates were chosen from them. With the educated class, he had comparatively little contact. Through his whole career, he was emphatically a man of the common people.

We must consider what was this educated class and what was the common people. In the former were the priests, the regular ministers of the true religion; the scribes, the men of letters; the Pharisees, the most respectable and orthodox part of the community; the Sadducees, acute, skeptical thinkers. Besides these, there came up to Jerusalem yearly representatives of the outside world, men like Paul, familiar with Greek literature and thought, men versed in the fertile philosophies of Alexandria. Jesus had easy access to scholars equipped with the world’s highest learning, trained under the intellectual culture of the Hebrews and the Greeks.

But he began his ministry and chiefly carried it on among a wholly different class. His first act was to choose as his intimate associates and disciples some fishermen and peasants of Galilee. In these rough, uncultivated men, he implanted the ideas which were to outshine the philosophy of Plato, the truths that Moses and Isaiah had not reached. In his daily life, he associated himself with the plain, unlettered class. He addressed them in most of his discourses. His language was that of common life; his illustrations were drawn from experiences and feelings common to all men.

The educated class was, as a whole, hostile to him. But he did not begin by trying to win them, nor does it appear that he ever looked especially to them for support, or was disappointed at their hostility. From the first, and throughout, he sought and found his listeners and adherents chiefly among the ignorant, the uncultivated, the unrefined. The “multitude,” among whom he chiefly labored, were as unaccustomed to deep thought, as unsusceptible to spiritual truth, as the mass of men always are.

And it may be doubted whether the educated class was more unreceptive of truth than the educated class usually is. The Pharisees were not so totally different from our Doctors of Divinity. The Sadducees might find something of a counterpart in our educated skeptics. Priests, Levites, lawyers, scribes, students of Greek philosophy, partook largely of the qualities that usually attach to the ministerial and scholarly character.

In a word, the educated and uneducated classes in the time of Christ differed much as the same classes always do; each had its own strength and its own weakness. And in this state of things, the greatest idealist, the man of amplest intellectual and spiritual nature that ever lived, made his daily companionship with the uneducated, and wrought chiefly through them the greatest work the world ever knew.

For those who live in the realm of moral ideas, and who would use them in the service of mankind, there is a lesson in this fact, the meaning of which is not easily or soon exhausted.