Title: The First True Gentleman - A Study of the Human Nature of Our Lord
Author: Anonymous
Language: English
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[Illustration: Cover]



                               THE FIRST
                             TRUE GENTLEMAN


                         _A Study in the Human
                          Nature of Our Lord_



                          _With a Foreword by_
                       EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D.



                                 BOSTON
                         JOHN W. LUCE & COMPANY
                                  1907



                        _Copyright_, 1907, _by_
                         JOHN W. LUCE & COMPANY
                        _Boston, Mass., U.S.A._



                   _The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass._



                               A FOREWORD


The dictionaries and the students of words have a great deal to
say,--perhaps more than is worth while,--of the origin of the word
Gentleman,--whether a gentleman in England and a _gentilhomme_ in France
mean the same thing, and so on.  The really interesting thing is that in
a republic where a man’s a man, the gentleman is not created by
dictionaries or by laws.  You cannot make him by parchment.

As matter of philology, the original gentleman was _gentilis_. That is,
he belonged to a _gens_ or clan or family, which was established in
Roman history. He was somebody.  If he had been nobody he would have had
no name.  Indeed, it is worth observing that this was the condition
found among the islanders of the South Sea. Exactly as on a great farm
the distinguished sheep, when they were sent to a cattle fair might have
specific names, while for the great flock nobody pretends to name the
individuals, so certain people, even in feudal times, were _gentilis_,
or belonged to a _gens_, while the great body of men were dignified by
no such privilege.

The word gentleman, however, has bravely won for itself, as Christian
civilisation has gone on, a much nobler meaning.

The reader of this little book will see that the poet Dekker, surrounded
by the gentlemen of Queen Elizabeth’s Court, already comprehended the
larger sense of this great word.  The writer of this essay, taking the
familiar language of the Established Church of England, follows out in
some of the great crises of the Saviour’s life some of the noblest
illustrations of the poet’s phrase.

It is well worth remembering that the Received Version of the New
Testament, which belongs to Dekker’s own generation, accepts his noble
use of language in one of the great central passages.  In the very
little which we know of the early arrangements of apostleship, we are
given to understand that the Apostle James lived at Jerusalem, and that
in what he wrote he addressed the Christians of every race and habit in
all parts of that world of which Jerusalem is the centre.  The Epistle
of James may be called the first encyclical addressed to all sorts and
conditions of men who accepted Jesus of Nazareth as the leader of their
lives. To this day its practical and straightforward simplicity
challenges the admiration of all those believers who know that the tree
is to be judged by its fruits,--that it is not enough to cry "Lord,
Lord,"--that it is not enough to say, "I believe in this" or "I believe
in that";--but rather that the follower of Christ must do what He says.
And how does this gentle apostle of apostles define in word the "wisdom
which is from above?"  The wisdom from above is first pure, as the
Master had said, "Blessed are the pure in heart."  Then the Wisdom from
above is peaceable, as the angels said when He was born.  Then the
wisdom from above is gentle.  The man who follows Christ is a gentle
man.  The woman who follows Christ is a gentle woman.

And if anyone eager for accuracy in the use of language choose to hunt
the Greek word which we find in St. James’s Epistle through the
lexicons, he learns that the gentleman whom St. James knew is he who in
dealing with others "abates something from his absolute right."  He is
so large and unselfish that he can grant more than he is compelled to
grant by rigorous justice.  He is the man who can love his brothers
better than himself.  These are phrases from the old dictionaries.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for
his friends."

EDWARD E. HALE.



                        The First True Gentleman


The Elizabethan poet Dekker said of our Lord that He was "the first true
gentleman that ever breathed."  The passage is worth quotation:--

    "Patience! why, ’tis the soul of peace,
    Of all the virtues nearest kin to Heaven.
    It makes men look like gods, the best of men
    That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer--
    A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
    The first true gentleman that ever breathed."


All through English literature the word "gentleman" has had two
meanings, and has been used to describe a man of certain qualities as
well as a man of a certain birth.  A hundred and fifty years before
Dekker wrote it was declared that "truth, pity, freedom, and hardiness"
were the essential qualities of a gentleman.  Our Lord in His human
nature personified these things.  Every gentleman in Christendom derives
his ideal from Christ whatever may be his dogmatic creed.  No virtue,
perhaps, was so characteristic of our Lord as His devotion to truth.  He
declared before Pilate that it was the end for which He was born. He
condemned all those who hindered its diffusion and tried to make it the
monopoly of a caste.  He tabooed all absurd asseverations, the
occasional use of which was but a confession of habitual lying.  He
taught that lies were of the Devil, and that it was the Holy Spirit who
led men into all truth.  He said that sincerity was the great light of
the Spirit, that all double-minded men were in the dark, and that their
fear of the light of day was their own sufficient condemnation. The
ideal gentleman all through the ages has conformed his conduct in the
matter of truth to the Christian standard. He has avoided mental
reservation, abhorred lying, and, though he has garnished his speech
with oaths, his yea has meant yea, and his nay, nay, and he has regarded
his word as his bond.

Again, courage and pity were combined in the character of Christ as they
had never been combined before.  Now the combination is common enough.
We have the seed and can grow the flower; but every man who excels in
both is in some sense a follower of Christ.  The courage of our Lord,
though it included physical courage, was not of that calibre which is
more properly called animal,--animal courage implies a want of
imagination, and is probably incompatible with pity.  Christ in the
garden of Gethsemane "tasted death for every man," and held out a hand
of sympathy to that vast majority who must for ever regard it with
strong dread.  Yet by His precepts, by His life, and by His death He
taught men that fear can be mastered, though it is a form of suffering
seldom altogether spared to the highest type of man.

Apart from their religious significance, the trial and crucifixion of
Christ form the scene in the world’s history of which humanity has most
reason to be proud.  Christ, in His human nature, was a Galilean
peasant.  He excused to his face the Roman Governor who stooped to
threaten a prisoner in Whom he found no fault. Judge and prisoner
changed places.  The distinctions of the world dissolved before the
distinctions of God.  At Pilate’s bar all gentlemen recognise their
hero, an example for ever of the powerlessness of circumstances to
humiliate.

On the Cross not only did our Lord maintain that composure which
witnesses to the supreme power of the soul, but with still balanced
judgment He refused to impute sin to the Roman conscripts whose orders
were to crucify.  He made a last effort to console the grief of His
mother and His friend, and set Himself to give hope and encouragement to
the suffering thief who believed he was receiving the due reward of his
deeds.  A genius however great, a gentleman however perfect, could
imagine no story of courage more noble or more inspiring than the one
set down in the Gospels.

A new pity came into the world with Christ.  The lump is not yet
leavened; even the white race is not yet pitiful. All the same, the
emotion of pity is a power, and does, broadly speaking, distinguish
Christendom from the heathen world.  It is part of the ideal of all
those who are conscious of having an ideal at all.  Gusts of anger, both
national and individual, sweep it out of sight; it is paralysed by fear,
rendered blind by use and wont; again and again its scope is narrowed by
the reaction which follows upon affectations and exaggerations; but it
is never killed.  It has been part of the moral equipment of a gentleman
since Christ "went about doing good," revealing to men the secret Nature
could not teach them--breaking, as it seemed to them, the uniformity of
her relentlessness--the secret of the divine compassion.

The independence of mind and manner inculcated by our Lord still marks a
gentleman to-day.  Did He not teach that a man’s conduct must at all
times be ruled by his code and not regulated by his company? He must
maintain the same attitude towards life whether he find himself among
just or unjust, friends or enemies.  He must not salute his brethren
only, nor be only kind to those that love him.  He must remain an honest
man among thieves, ready to rebuke an offender to his face, but still a
gentleman, who does not "revile again" or suffer the passion of revenge
to destroy his judgment.  This moral independence is the rock on which
character is built. The man whose actions depend upon his environment
has but a sandy foundation to his moral nature.  Upon this strong rock
of moral independence rest also the best manners.  Self-assertion and
self-distrust are singularly allied.  It is the ill-assured who push in
their ardent desire to be like somebody else.  It is dignity rather than
humility which is recommended to us in the parable of those who chose
the chief seats at feasts. It is a common thing to hear it said by
simple people in praise of some one they regard as pre-eminently a
gentleman that "he is always the same."  No doubt the publicans and
sinners whose friendly advances Christ accepted without apparent
condescension said this of Him. He was so entirely Himself among them
that the vulgar-minded Pharisees whispered to one another that He must
be ignorant of the sort of company He was in, or surely He would make
plain the gulf fixed between Himself and them.  By conventionality our
Lord seems never to have been bound.  On the other hand, He did not
wantonly overthrow the conventions of His day.  When a social custom
struck Him as injurious, He told those who gave in to it that it stood
in the way of better things, substituting custom for conscience.  On the
other hand, He fell in with the usual ways of respectable people in a
great many particulars, praying in a village place of worship beside
Pharisees who stood up to bless themselves and publicans who dared not
so much as lift their eyes to heaven, taking part in a service which was
far enough removed from the sincere, spiritual, and wholly
unsuperstitious worship to which He looked forward as He talked beside
the well.

Christ had a horror of tyranny in every form, and He seems to have
regarded it as a peculiarly heathen vice.  "The kings of the Gentiles
exercise lordship over them," He said. Some bold translators emphasise
His meaning by saying "lord it" over them.  Dekker was right.  A true
gentleman is not harsh, implacable, or capricious.  The breaking of
other men’s wills gives him no pleasure.  Christ’s followers, He said,
must avoid all selfish wish for ascendency.  A ruler, He said, should
regard himself as the servant of all.  Where ruling is concerned the
counsels of Christ seem, like all His most characteristic utterances, to
be calculated rather to inspire aspiration in the minds of good men than
definitely to regulate their action, for in more than one of the
parables His words imply that an ambition to rule is a lawful ambition,
and that increased responsibility may be looked to as a reward.

Theoretically the Christian attitude towards power has always been the
gentlemanlike attitude.  Hall, the chronicler, writing in 1548, says in
the "Chronicles of Henry VI.": "In this matter Lord Clyfford was
accounted a tyrant, and no gentleman."

It is commonly said to-day that Christianity has never been tried.  Such
a judgment is superficial in the extreme.  The moral teaching of Christ
has never been entirely carried out by any community nor perhaps by any
man, but to speak as though it had no great influence is sheer
affectation.  The white people have wasted, it is true, their time and
their blood in quarrelling about dogma; but every Christian sect has
recognised in the divine character of the Nazarene Carpenter who
suffered upon the Cross the perfectibility of the human race, and in
their highest moments of aspiration and repentance peoples and rulers
alike have pleaded His merits before God. Nothing but this recognition
could have curbed the cruel pride of the ancient world, have undermined
the barriers of race and caste with a sense of human brotherhood, have
cast at least a suspicion upon the theory that might is right, and made
respect for women a necessary part of every good man’s creed.  Entirely
apart from what is usually called religion in England to-day, "truth,
pity, freedom, and hardiness" are the ideals of the race because
nineteen hundred years ago Christ was born in the stable of a Jewish
inn.





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