By. T. R. Glover. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1913. (Being the Eighth Course of the Angus Lectures, 1912.)
The Nature and Purpose of a Christian Society. By T. R. Glover. Third Edition. London: Headley Brothers. 1912. (Being the Fifth of the Swarthmore Lectures, 1912.)1
Under the title of “Life and Letters in the Fourth Century,” Mr. Glover published some dozen or more years ago (1901) fifteen studies of typical figures and movements in the literature of that century in which heathenism was dying and the Church was advancing to take its place as the governing force of the Roman world. It is a delightful volume full of insight and marked by great delicacy of touch and it gave us great pleasure to say as much, in reviewing the book in The Presbyterian and Reformed Review (xiii. 1902, pp. 664–666). When, a few years later (1907), he was called upon to deliver the Dale Lectures in Mansfield College, Oxford, Mr. Glover was well advised to adopt for them the same method of treatment which he had so successfully used in his earlier volume. The subject he chose was “The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire,” and the resulting volume (1909) contains ten graphic studies of the various forms of religion which jostled each other in the opening centuries of the Christian era, presented, as he says, “not in the abstract, but as they show themselves in character and personality.” This too is a delightful volume, vivid and illuminating. There are essays on the Roman Religion, the Stoics, and Plutarch; on Celsus and Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian; on the Conflict of Christian and Jew and the struggle between “Gods and Atoms.” In the midst of them there stand essays also on “Jesus of Nazareth” and “The Followers of Jesus.” These are not the best essays in the book. Mr. Glover is essentially a humanist; his interest lies in literature and the expression of personality in literature; his charm consists in his lightness of touch, the daintiness of his handling of his material, a certain fastidious humor which is poured over all. These are not the qualities which fit one best to deal with Jesus of Nazareth or those first missionaries of the cross who, “in deaths oft,” broke a way through the ingrained prejudices of the old world’s life and thought for the entrance of Christianity. Nor are Harnack and von Dobschütz and Weinel, Wernle and Pfleiderer, Wellhausen and Bousset, nor even Prof. Burkitt, and certainly not Mr. Conybeare, the best guides to the understanding of the beginnings of Christianity or the person of its founder.
Not that Mr. Glover fails in appreciation of the human personality of Jesus, or of the new spirit which animated His followers. He only fails to appreciate that there was anything more than a human personality in Jesus or that His followers were animated by any other spirit than may be summed up in the immense impression made upon them by Jesus’ human personality. In his attempt to portray this human personality he says many fine and beautiful things about Jesus; many of the traits which really characterized Him he catches and knows how to throw vividly forward. He understands His uniqueness and the uniqueness of the religion He founded, and has such things as this to say about it: “As its opponents were quick to point out,—and they still find a curious pleasure in rediscovering it—there was little new in Christian teaching. Men had been monotheists before, they had worshipped, they had loved their neighbors, they had displayed the virtues of Christians—what was there peculiar in Christianity? Plato, says Celsus, had taught long ago everything of the least value in the Christian scheme of things. The Talmud, according to the modern Jew, contains a parallel to everything that Jesus said—(‘and how much else!’ adds Wellhausen). What was new in the new religion, in this ‘third race’ of men? The Christians had their answer ready. In clear speech, and in aphasia, they indicated their founder. He was new” (p. 116). But of the real uniqueness of Jesus Christ and of the religion which He founded—of the redemption of the world in His blood (“the blood of God,” Paul calls it), of the regeneration of the world by His Spirit (“the Spirit of Jesus” is, with Mr. Glover, but His influence, His character “repeating itself in the lives of men and women”: pp. 139–140), Mr. Glover has no sense. And therefore his chapters on “Jesus of Nazareth” and “the Followers of Jesus” flat dreadfully among the more sympathetic studies which otherwise fill the volume. Jesus Christ is too high for him: he cannot attain to Him. Accordingly there creeps over one as he reads these chapters something of the feeling of unreality and insufficiency, though happily in indefinably less degree, that assaults the soul as we read the pages of, say, Renan. As an expounder of the color and movement of life in the ages of transition from heathenism to Christianity, Mr. Glover moves with firm step and shows unending skill: when he passes to expound Jesus Christ and His gospel he has got beyond his métier.