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PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB, T. & LONDON, DUBLIN, NEW YORK, FOR T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. GEORGE HERBERT. SCRIBNER AND WELFORD. THE KINGDOM OF GOD BIBLICALLY AND HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED. 2ftje Quntfj Series of tfje (Eunm'nijfjam lectures. JAMES S. CANDLISH, D.D., PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY', FREE CHORCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW. EDINBURGH: T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET. 1884. / _ _ EXTEACT DECLAEATION OF TEUST. March 1, 1862. I, William Binny Webster, late Surgeon in the H.E.I.C.S., presently residing in Edin¬ burgh, — Considering that I feel deeply interested in the success of the Free Church College, Edinburgh, and am desirous of advancing the Theological Literature of Scotland, and for this end to establish a Lectureship similar to those of a like kind connected with the Church of England and the Congregational body in England, and that I have made over to the General Trustees of the Free Church of Scotland the sum of £2000 sterling, in trust, for the purpose of founding a Lectureship in memory of the late Reverend William Cunningham, D.D., Principal of the Free Church College, Edinburgh, and Professor of Divinity and Church History therein, and under the following conditions, namely, — First, The Lectureship shall bear the name, and be called, ‘ The Cunningham Lectureship.’ Second, The Lecturer shall be a Minister or Professor of the Free Church of Scotland, and shall hold the appointment for not less than two years, nor more than three years, and be entitled for the period of his holding the appointment to the income of the endowment as declared by the General Trustees, it being understood that the Council after referred to may occasionally appoint a Minister or Professor from other denominations, provided this be approved of by not fewer than Eight Members of the Council, and it being further understood that the Council are to regulate the terms of payment of the Lecturer. Third, The Lecturer shall be at liberty to choose his own subject within the range of Apologetical, Doctrinal, Controversial, Exegetical, Pastoral, or Historical Theology, including what bears on Missions, Home and Foreign, subject to the consent of the Council. Fourth, The Lecturer shall be bound to deliver publicly at Edinburgh a Course of Lectures on the subjects thus chosen at some time immediately preceding the expiry of his appointment, and during the Session of the New College, Edinburgh ; the Lectures to be not fewer than six in number, and to be delivered in presence of the Professors and Students under such arrangements as the Council may appoint ; the Lecturer shall be bound also to print and publish, at his own risk, not fewer than 750 copies of the Lectures within a year after their delivery, and to deposit three copies of the same in the Library of the New College ; the form of the publication shall be regulated by the Council. Fifth, A Council shall be constituted, consisting of (first) Two Members of their own body, to be chosen annually in the month of March, by the Senatus of the New College, other than the Principal ; (second) Five Members to be chosen annually by the General Assembly, in addition to the Moderator of the said Free Church of Scotland ; together with (third) the Principal of the said New College for the time being, the Moderator of the said General Assembly for the time being, the Procu¬ rator or Law Adviser of the Church, and myself the said William Binny Webster, or such person as I may nominate to be my successor : the Principal of the said College to be Convener of the Council, and any Five Members duly convened to be entitled to act notwithstanding the non-election of others. Sixth, The duties of the Council shall be the following : — (first), To appoint the Lecturer and determine the period of his holding the appointment, the appointment to be made before the close of the Session of College immediately preceding the termination of the previous Lecturer’s engagement ; (second), To arrange details as to the delivery of the Lectures, and to take charge of any additional income and expenditure of an incidental kind that may be connected therewith, it being understood that the obligation upon the Lecturer is simply to deliver the Course of Lectures free of expense to himself. Seventh, The Council shall be at liberty, on the expiry of five years, to make any alteration that experience may suggest as desirable in the details of this plan, provided such alterations shall be approved of by not fewer than Eight Members of the Council. . I CONTENTS. - o - LECTURE I. THE KINGDOM OF GOD THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS. PAGE Introductory, ....... 1-14 Patriarchal Society, ....... 14-19 Ancient Oriental Empires, ...... 19-22 Greek Commonwealths, ...... 22-29 Greek Philosophy, ....... 29-33 The Roman Empire and Law, ..... 33-36 Failure of all these efforts, ...... 36-45 LECTURE II. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. Its Beginning at the Exodus, ..... 49-52 Its real Nature, ....... 53-57 How far realized in Israel, ...... 58-63 Its apparent Failure but lasting Effects, .... 64-67 Prophecy of a better Kingdom of God, .... 67-78 Return from the Exile, ...... 78-83 The Theocracy and the Law, ..... 83-88 SUPPLEMENT TO LECTURE II. POST-CANONICAL JEWISH LITERATURE. Wisdom of Ben Sirach, ...... 89-91 Baruch, . . . • • . . . 91, 92 1 Maccabees, . . . . . . 92-94 Pharisees and Sadducees, . . . . : . 95-97 Psalms of Solomon, ....... 97-104 Wisdom of Solomon, ...... 104, 105 viii CONTENTS. Apocalyptic Literature, Sibylline Oracles, Book of Enoch, John the Baptist, LECTURE III. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE TEACHING OF CHRIST. His initial Proclamation, ..... Nature of the Kingdom He proclaimed, Its Blessings spiritual, ..... To be enjoyed in Affliction, . . . . Way of entering the Kingdom, .... The Kingdom a Vital Power compared to Seed, The Righteousness of the Kingdom of God, Its Inwardness ; Brotherly Love and Forgiveness, . Its Universality, ...... Jesus the King of God’s Kingdom, Son of God, and Son of Man, His present Rule, ...... His Coming again to Judgment, SUPPLEMENT TO LECTURE III. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE TEACHING OF THE APOSTLES. Epistle to the Hebrews, ... - Peter, ........ James, Views of the original Apostles, . . . . . Views of Paul, . . ..... Why the Kingdom is less prominent in the Epistles than in Jesus’ Teaching, . ...... The Kingdom of God in the Apocalypse, .... .LECTURE IV. DOCTRINAL IDEA OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. Distinctively and comprehensively Christian, Leading Sayings of Christ, ..... Definition proposed, ...... Really established by Christ, .... Relation of the Kingdom of God to the Church, A Fellowship of Men with God, .... Its Motive Power that of a New Life, PAGE 106-110 110-114 114,115 115-117 121-123 123-142 121-134 131-134 135-138 138-142 143- 154 144- 148 148-154 154-159 159-164 164-167 168, 169 170, 171 171 172-174 174-180 180-185 185-189 193-195 195, 196 197 198-200 200-208 209-216 216,217 CONTENTS. IX PAGE The Holy Spirit, ....... 217-219 The Kingdom established by Redeeming Love, . . . 219-224 Confirmation of this from Views of Ecce Homo and Ritsclil, . 224-231 LECTURE V. ATTEMPTS TO REALIZE THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE PAST. Views of the Early Fathers, ..... 235-242 Rise of the Idea and Reality of the Catholic Church, . . 242-249 Conversion of the Empire and Constantine’s Policy, . . 249-252 Rise of the Papacy, ...... 252-258 The Holy Roman Empire, ...... 259, 260 Imperial and Papal Theories, ..... 260-267 Failure of these and Protests against them, . . . 267-270 Forerunners of the Reformation, ..... 270-274 The Humanists, ....... 274-277 The Reformation, ....... 277-279 The Anabaptists, ....... 279-283 The Lutheran Church, ...... 283-287 Views of Zwingli, ....... 287-289 Calvin and the System of Alliance of Church and State, . . 287-293 Views of the English Puritans, ..... 293-298 LECTURE VI. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN RELATION TO MODERN SOCIAL IDEALS. Systems that rely on Human Power, .... 302-309 Democratic Socialism, ...... 303-306 Its Relation to Christianity, ..... 306-309 Systems that rely on Natural Laws, .... 309-320 Philosophy of the Aufklarung, ..... 311-314 Philosophy of Kant, ...... 314-318 Political Economy and its Hopes, .... 318-320 Systems that rely on Divine Grace, .... 321-343 Roman Catholic Doctrine, ..... 321 Theory of Identity of Church and State, .... 321-326 Theoiy of Alliance of Church and State, .... 327-330 Theory of Absolute Separation of Church and State, . . 330-334 Millennialism, ....... 335-339 Conclusion, ....... 339-343 X CONTENTS. APPENDIX. NOTES TO LECTURE I. A. The Kingdom of God in Modelm Theological Literature, B. Theocratic Ideas in the Ancient Oriental Empires, C. Plato’s Relation to the Athenian Democracy, . D. Philosophical Basis of Roman Law, E. Naturalism and Pessimism, .... NOTES TO LECTURE II. F. On the Phrase “ Kingdom of Priests,” G. On the Early Religion of Israel, H. Views of the Kingdom of God in the Psalms, . I. The Doctrine of a Suffering Messiah in the Old Testament, J. The Teaching of John the Baptist on the Kingdom of God, NOTES TO LECTURE III. K. On the Phrase “ Kingdom of Heaven,” L. The Kingdom in Jesus’ Teaching a Present Reality, . M. Jesus’ Last Controversy with the Jews, N. Jesus’ Teaching as to His Coming again, O. The Notion of the City of God, NOTES TO LECTURE IV. P. On Luke xvii. 20, 21, . Q. Definitions of the Kingdom of God, . . . R. Views of the Relation of the Church to the Kingdom of God, . S. The Doctrine of Atonement implied in the Kingdom of God, . NOTES TO LECTURE V. T. The Kingdom of God in the Writings of the Early Fathers, U. Augustine on the City of God, ..... V. Toleration in connection with Attempts to realize the Kingdom of God, ....... NOTE TO LECTURE VI. W. On the System of Alliance of Church and State, PAGE 347-350 350, 351 352, 353 353-355 355-357 357-360 360-362 362-365 365-368 36S-371 371-375 376-380 380-385 385-3S7 388-390 390-392 392-396 396-405 405, 406 406-409 409-415 415-420 420-423 LECTURE I. THE KINGDOM OF GOD THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS, Acts xvii. 26. — “ He made of one every nation of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons and the hounds of their habitation ; that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” Daniel ii. 43, 44. — “ And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men : but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed : and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” LECTURE I. THE KINGDOM OF GOD THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS. 0 one can read attentively many modern theological 1 works, without observing that the kingdom of God occupies a much more prominent place in them than it had in the writings of former times. This is partly due to the fact, that scholars of the present day are more careful to preserve the genuine historical ideas of other ages and peoples, instead of casting them into the forms or moulds of later thought. Hence, as the kingdom or reign of God was undoubtedly the leading idea of the prophets of Israel and of our Lord himself, the historical spirit of study leads men to consider their teaching as centring in that, rather than in the more modern ideas of religion, incarnation, atonement, the Church, or the like. But it is not only in treatises on the history of Israel, or on prophecy, or on the teaching and life of Jesus, that we find the kingdom of God made a leading subject of con¬ sideration ; it plays as important a part in the best modern works on Christian doctrine and Christian ethics. This shows that the interest in the idea is not merely an historical one ; but that it is felt by many to be of great importance, even in the present day, for the right understanding of Christian truth and Christian duty. It is not merely an old Jewish 8 4 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. form of thought, which it is useful to study for the elucidation of the Biblical literature, but which as a form of conceiving Christianity may be superseded by more abstract or philosophical notions ; it is regarded by many as the most natural and adequate conception that we can take to guide us in forming a system of Christian theology. Further, this notion of the kingdom of God has not merely a speculative but a practical bearing ; it is an idea that craves to be realized in fact, or rather, it is not merely an idea, but a great reality, which has not yet fully attained its perfection, but in the perfecting of which men’s help and labour may and should be employed. Yet, though on these accounts the subject of the kingdom of God has deservedly gained a prominent place in modern theological thought, it has not to any great extent been made matter of express and systematic study for itself, and it is to be feared that to many minds the term conveys only a very indefinite meaning, or that it may not be always understood in the same sense. Though it has been habitually used by Christians in all ages, its occurrence in the Lord’s Prayer of itself having assured that, it has not had its sense cleared and defined by theological discussion like so many other Christian phrases ; and in its practical aspect, we need only recall in the most hasty manner the history of Christendom, to be aware in how many various forms the kingdom of God has been expected or attempted to be set up. Such phrases as, the Millennial Reign, the City of God, the Holy Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Fifth Monarchy, Christ’s Crown and Covenant, the Christian State, are LECT. I.] IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECT. 5 some of the historical expressions that the idea has had, whether as devout imaginations or as stern practical applications. How these various forms of realizing the kingdom of God arose, how far each of them deviated from Christ’s institution and design, and what is the true way in which that design is to be carried out, are questions that suggest inquiries full of interest and instruction.1 There seems, therefore, to be a need and prospect of usefulness in a discussion of the kingdom of God, which I propose to consider in these lectures in its Biblical and historical aspect. The central part of the whole inquiry must be the question, What was that kingdom that Jesus proclaimed and founded ? but for the understanding of his teaching about it, it will be necessary first to consider what had been said and done in Old Testament times in regard to the kingdom of God, and what was the ideas of those to whom Jesus spoke ; and it may also be useful to inquire what desires and longings for a perfect society had appeared in the heathen world as unsatisfied cravings that were to be satisfied in Christianity. Then the true meaning and bearing of our Lord’s teaching may be more clearly brought out, if we follow the investigation of the kingdom of God in the New Testament with a historical survey of the different ways in which it has been understood, or misunderstood, and attempted to be realized, in after ages. This may enable us to see what practically the kingdom of God is now, and how it is to be promoted. For our inquiry cannot stop with the teaching of Christ. If we wish to under- 1 See Appendix, Note A. 6 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. stand, not merely the truths he taught about the kingdom, but the kingdom itself which he founded, we must consider the historical results of his work. The kingdom of God is, as I have already said, and as will appear more fully in the sequel, the name by which our Lord himself habitually spoke of his work. It is not, indeed, the only name he gave to that work ; he spoke of it also as the saving that which was lost, the bearing witness to the truth, the giving eternal life ; and some of these expressions have formed the basis of conceptions of Christianity that have been more systematically studied than that of the kingdom of God ; but this last is that which he most frequently uses, and comprehends all the rest. It has this also to distinguish it from the others, that it describes an aim that is not yet fully realized. When we think of Christ’s work as a salvation of the lost soul, we find that, in the case of multitudes, to be an accomplished fact ; the believer in Jesus has received forgiveness, peace with God, and new spiritual and eternal life. So, when we think of it as a revelation of truth, or the introduction of a new and perfect religion, we see that already done by the work of Christ to which nothing remains to be added. On that very account these conceptions may be better fitted to be dogmas in a system of theology than the more comprehensive idea of the kingdom of God. For that describes a thing that in its perfection is not yet realized, and shall not be till the end of the world. It is an idea that brings in the social element of Christianity, and that can only be made a perfect reality when Christianity has been fully developed, i.e. when all the saved have been LECT. I.] AN IDEAL TO BE REALIZED. 7 gathered out of the world and united to Christ. The other notions by which we think of Christ’s work, as the salvation of the soul, the revealing the perfect religion, giving a new life, may be fully realized in the experience of any single soul already ; but the kingdom of God is a world-historical thing, covering ages with its growth, and coming gradually in the course of these to perfection. It is a thing at the realization of which all Christians are called to labour, and it is important to understand its true form and nature ; because many attempts have been made to realize it, which have been partial, mistaken, or pre¬ mature. Further, as expressed in this great idea, Christ’s work is one of a series of efforts that have been made or designed by the greatest minds in many lands, for the elevation and amelioration of mankind. It is the idea of a commonwealth in which humanity is to attain its perfection ; and this has been the aim of all the noblest legislators, statesmen, and philoso¬ phers. Many different schemes have been imagined in speculation, or proposed in practice, for this end ; and these have been anticipations and unconscious prophecies, or competitors and rivals, of the real and perfect kingdom of God set up by Christ. The consideration of the more outstanding ideal states, that have been sketched by philosophers, or attempted to be realized by legislators, may be useful as indicating the reality and greatness of the need that is met by the proclamation of the kingdom of God, and also as bringing out by comparison and contrast its real nature. We may see how far those who aimed at 8 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. such Utopias were working in the right line, and what led to the failure of their schemes ; and thus we may learn what are the conditions of the problem to be solved, and the difficulties to be surmounted by any successful attempt to unite men in a right moral society, and to gather all men into one. We shall be able in the light of those things better to under¬ stand Christ’s design and work ; and we shall find that some of the ideals and actual attempts of men after a perfect state have exercised an influence on the way in which the Christian kingdom of God has been conceived and sought to be realized. Not only have Old Testament ideas often been carried over without due discrimination to New Testament times ; but the principles of the Platonic Republic, and even of the Roman Empire, have more or less unconsciously been allowed to influence men’s ideas of the Christian society, and their measures for its realization. I shall endeavour therefore, treating the subject historically, to take into account, not only the prepara¬ tion for the Christian idea of the kingdom of God in the line of God’s special revelation to Israel, but also those aims and ideas of other nations that partially strove after the same end, and that came afterwards into contact, for good or evil, with the carrying out of Christ’s ideal and aim. There are further questions in regard to the kingdom of God that are both interesting and important, bearing on its relation to the doctrines of Christianity, what other truths it implies as its presuppositions and foundations on the one hand, and as its consequences or corollaries on the other ; and how far it is fitted LECT. I.] TO BE STUDIED HISTORICALLY. 9 to be a central idea round which the various doctrines of the Christian system may be grouped, or to throw light on any of them. It is, we believe, capable of many such applications with great advantage ; but these are all questions belonging to the province of dogmatic or systematic theology ; and to enter on a discussion of them without a solid basis having been previously laid on Biblical investigation, would be to build without a foundation on what might prove to be mere shifting sand. If we are assured that the kingdom of God as Christ conceived it is a reality, and if we understand its nature aright ; then, when we consider what other views as to God and man and the world are implied in it, we are pursuing an investigation of realities that are sure and firmly established, and so what we ascertain may be of great value : but if the idea of the kingdom be a mere temporary form in which Christ’s work has been clothed ; then in making it a basis for theological inference or construction wTe may be merely forming a logical system around an arbitrarily chosen notion. The Biblical study of the subject must therefore precede the dogmatic ; though if the former be fruitful, it may and should be followed up by the latter, to gather and arrange its fruits. But the Biblical inquiry is itself so large and important as fully to occupy these lectures ; and the theological working out of its results must be left unattempted here. This limitation of scope is all the more necessary, because the Biblical inquiry must be regarded, in the light of a true idea of Scripture, as essentially historical ; and therefore including or requiring, for its full prosecution, a study of the history of the notion of the kingdom of 10 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [lect. I, God before and since the coining of Christ. Biblical theology is, strictly speaking, a branch of historical theology, and to be successful must be historical in its nature and method. The aim, therefore, of these lectures will be to pursue a historical inquiry as to the origin, import, and practical use of the Christian idea of the kingdom of God. As the investigation is historical and mainly Biblical, it is clearly impossible to give at the outset any full defini¬ tion or description of the kingdom of God : that must be the result of inquiry, and cannot be assumed as its basis. Yet, in order to guide us in the general direction of our inquiry, we may fairly take for granted, what even a first view of the use of the term in Scripture shows, that it denotes in general the Christian ideal of human society. What is the precise nature of that ideal must be gathered from a study of the Christian records and institutions in the light of the historical causes that led to them. Now the preparation for Christianity was twofold, in heathendom and in Israel, the former being mainly, though not exclusively, negative, and the latter mainly, but not entirely, positive. In the Gentile world men and nations were suffered to walk in their own ways, that they might feel after God and find him, who is not far from any one of us, and has never left himself without a witness. Their preparation for a city or kingdom of God consisted mainly in the wants and longings awakened by the failure of earthly cities and kingdoms, making them ready to welcome one from above. But theirs was not entirely a negative pre¬ paration for Christianity : there were also elements, though comparatively few, of a more positive kind ; LECT. I.] PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY. 11 ideas and principles were readied by heathen thinkers, without which Christianity would have been defective or distorted. In Israel, again, there was a tlieistic and ethical religion, which gave men, by divine teach¬ ing, the main foundation-principles of Christianity, and a promise that gave firm and unquenchable hopes for the future. But the preparation for Christianity by Judaism was not all positive, since in a very important aspect of it the law was a schoolmaster to Christ, pro¬ ducing a sense of sin that men might be shut up to faith in the Saviour. Both of these lines of preparation have therefore a right to be considered, with a view to understand the historical meaning and relations of the Christian kingdom of God. Had the relation of either been purely negative, it might have been left out of account with¬ out any positive loss, though even then it might have been considered with interest and advantage ; but if in any degree, however small, Gentile thought and ex¬ perience contributed positive elements to Christianity, these cannot be neglected without the danger of an imperfect understanding of its history. It is certain that philosophical and political ideas derived from the Gentile world have largely influenced the theology and organization of the Christian Church ; so that however little a study of heathen thought on this subject may contribute positively to the comprehension of New Testament Christianity, it is a necessary preliminary to the appreciation of its later forms and development. Whether, for example, Platonism had any appreciable influence on the theology of the apostles, may be a fair question ; but we cannot understand that of the Fathers 12 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [lect. I. without taking into account its history and tendency. So too, as has been recently shown, the organization of the primitive Church has been formed partly after Gentile as well as Jewish types.1 If thus we are entitled or even required to trace the efforts, ideas, and hopes of a perfect human society, without as well as within the bounds of the Hebrew race, which we believe to have been the object of a more direct divine training than any other ; it will be natural and suitable to begin with the Gentile preparation for Christianity, and then proceed to the more special Jewish one. I propose in the remaining part of this lecture to consider the efforts and lonffino-s in the Gentile world © © after a perfect society, which show the kingdom of God to be the desire of all nations.2 Then in the second lecture I will consider the pre¬ paration in Israel for the kingdom of God, or the national theocracy of the Old Testament and its prophecies of a universal kingdom of God. The subject of the third will be the teaching of Jesus Christ as to the kingdom of God, which he came to proclaim and to found. In the fourth it will be my endeavour to bring out as clearly as possible, in a doctrinal form, what the kingdom of God, thus prepared for and introduced into the world, really is. In the fifth lecture I propose to take a survey of the history of the kingdom of God, so as to observe the 1 See Hatch, Organization of the Early Christian Church. Rivingtons, 1881. 2 1 am aware that this is not a correct rendering of Hag. ii. 7, and I do not use it as such, but simply as a happy and appropriate expression for an idea that is true and scriptural. LECT. I.] PLAN OF THE COURSE. 13 chief forms in which it has been attempted to be realized. Lastly, in the sixth lecture I shall consider the practical question how the kingdom of God is to be realized, and compare this as the Christian ideal with other social ideals of the present day. Such is the general plan that I propose to follow in the discussion of this subject. It is one that em¬ braces a very wide field, even though I leave out of view some aspects of it that are important and interesting. I cannot profess to deal thoroughly or at first hand with the materials of more than the Biblical, and particularly the New Testament inquiry, though I have thought it desirable for the right understanding of these to enter on more general fields of history, trusting to competent authorities. I trust that the inquiry on which we are entering, by showing that Jesus Christ has really originated a kingdom of God which affords the only promise of a perfect human society that the world has ever seen, may be of use for confirming our faith in Chris¬ tianity ; and by showing what Christ’s institution really was, may help to point out in what way we ought to work for the realization of the high ideal. An additional reason for taking up this subject is, that some of those who have in modern times most successfully and fruitfully brought out the notion of the kingdom of God in Scripture, as in this country F. D. Maurice and the author of Ecce Homo , and in Germany Dr. Albert Ritschl, have done this in con¬ nection with views of the work of Christ that are seriously defective, as compared with those which the 14 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [lect. I. great body of Christian scholars have drawn from Scripture. It is well to examine, whether a true apprehension of the kingdom of God, as Christ meant it, really supports their defective views, and is not rather a confirmation of the Church’s faith in Christ as her Redeemer. If the notion of a kingdom of God, or a perfect kingdom or state in general, presents itself to men as an ideal, a thing to be desired and longed for, this must be because man is by nature a social being, and finds his good and happiness, not by himself alone, but in union and combination with his fellows. The individual realizes his own end, only in so far as he lives in and for the entire community of which he is a part. This is a really moral society, one based on righteousness and mutual regard. Without this, man cannot really attain his end ; but this has ever been only an ideal, longed and striven for but never reached, often, too, longed and sought for unconsciously and blindly by men impelled by an instinctive feel¬ ing of want, but not knowing distinctly what they wanted. In order then to see how the Gentile world has been seeking and feeling after that fulfilment of man’s end as a social being which is given in the kingdom of God, we must look at the rise and progress of civil society among men, and trace the various forms it has been made to assume in the effort to make it as perfect and comprehensive as possible. Probably the earliest form of human society was the family ; and larger combinations of men grew LECT. I.J PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY. 15 from that and partook of its nature. The theory of a state of nature as one of individual independence or universal war, and of governments being formed by mutual contract for self-defence, has been useful as a hypothesis in political reasoning ; and something like it would be the conclusion to which we should be led, if the scientific theory of man’s evolution from a brute or savage state by natural selection and survival of the fittest was established as a fact. But this cannot be said to be so, and the historical evidence seems to point to the patriarchal or clan form of association as the most primitive. In the early state of society there were no nations, but men were united by kinship or religion, very often by both ; and many remains of this sort of society are to be traced even yet in India and elsewhere.1 The pure clan consists of the kindred of some hero who is eponymous, and not seldom is worshipped as divine. The tie that connects its members is the natural one of birth, and the authority that rules over them is that of the head of the family, who is not always the heir according to the modern principles of primogeniture, but the ablest man among the near kindred of the chief. The laws of such a society are family customs and traditions, and these limit the power of the chief. The whole clan is treated as a family, the members of which may not intermarry ; but there is also, besides the narrower circle of affinity within which marriage is not allowed, reaching as far as kindred could be 1 See Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social , by Sir Alfred C. Lyall, K.C.B., C.I.E. Murray, 1882. 16 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [lect. I. traced, a wider circle of other clans outside of which they may not marry.1 In many cases the connection by blood becomes in course of time ficti¬ tious, as members might be introduced by adoption or by means of imaginary genealogies, and in order to facilitate marriage a large clan might sometimes be subdivided. Thus the original family character of the unity might be obscured or variously modified ; but in spite of all changes this general form of social organism has in some parts of the world lasted long as the means by which order and government are main¬ tained. It is probably, of all forms of society, that which is most directly based on physical relations ; yet even this form of a kingdom may be said to be of God, inasmuch as it rests on the divine institution of mar¬ riage as its indispensable foundation, and has also been generally associated with religion as its sanction. It need not be said that this form of social life cannot possibly be regarded as an ideal or ultimate one : it has in it no gaiarantee for the righteousness and beneficence of the governing power, and in so far as it limits mere arbitrary despotism, it does so merely by old custom, which may be unwise and unsuitable. It is also of a narrow and isolating; character, tending; to limit sympathy and regard to fellow-clansmen, and not to extend those benevolent feelings to others. It can create no large and comprehensive community ; and has continued on an extensive scale only where, as in India, it has been worked into the religious J O 1 Something like this seems to have been the case in Israel. Num. xxxvi. 3, and 1 Chron. xxiii. 22, seem to presume that marriage was usually to another tribe, but it must be within the twelve tribes of Israel. LECT. I.] ARISTOCRACY OF BLOOD. 17 system of Brahmanism, with its elaborate arrange¬ ment of castes, which has formed such an obstacle to the moral progress of that great country ; or when it was similarly embodied in the feudal system of the Middle Ages, which proved also a hindrance to human progress.1 The patriarchal clans of an early age, when they became united in larger bodies, gave to the entire communities thus formed the element of race or caste distinctions, producing an aristocracy or oligarchy of blood ; as is seen most clearly in the distinction of patricians and plebeians in Rome. The evil of this form of aristocracy is, that it interposes insuperable barriers between the different strata of society. Each man must continue in the rank, or it may be the very employment, in which he was born, however well fitted and desirous he may be for another ; and more particularly all power and rule is inalienably con¬ fined to the members of certain families, or of a certain race. This exclusiveness inevitably creates separate interests, and by degrees comes to be felt as repugnant to justice. Hence, in the history of most peoples, at a certain stage a struggle arises betwen the un¬ privileged and the privileged ranks, a rising of the lower races or castes against the system by which they are hopelessly debarred from the powers and advantages enjoyed by those above them. This struggle, in the case of peoples that had a future before them, ended in the long run, sometimes after many vicissitudes, in the overthrow of the old aris- 1 Sir Alfred Lyall, in the work quoted above, points out the analogy between the state of India and that of mediaeval Europe. B 18 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. tocracy of blood, and the substitution of either a democracy or an aristocracy of wealth and ability, in which there were no impassable barriers or im¬ movable lines of separation between classes. But sometimes in the course of the struggle men of power and ambition arose as leaders of the people against the nobles, and established themselves, and in some cases their families, as tyrants, exercising an absolute sway over all the community alike. In this way the normal development of peoples from clans or aggregations of clans into free commonwealths was in many cases interrupted or entirely broken off, and despotism became a temporary or a lasting form of government in many nations. In India, where the system of caste distinctions was more thoroughly interwoven with religion than any¬ where else, the revolt against it took the form, not as in other countries, of a political movement, but of a rebellion against the Brahmanic religion, in the appear¬ ance of Buddhism, which embodied a special protest against the principle of caste in the older system. But this religion, though it had an extraordinary amount of success among the Turanian peoples, and has become the faith of a great part of the human race, was in its native land overcome and expelled by the older Brahmanism. Thus in India the ancient patriarchal system, with its rigid distinctions petrified by caste and consecrated by religion, has weighed upon the people down to the pre¬ sent day; while Buddhism itself, though in its original form showing some wonderful resemblance to Christian principles, in its universal scope and its substitution of the ethical for the ceremonial in religion, yet from its LEOT. I.] ORIENTAL EMPIRES. 19 atheistic and pessimistic character, never could he the foundation of a good or hopeful social state. This, however, belongs to a later age, and to that movement of the race in which the human side of the perfect society was most thought of, while its divine sanction and head was overlooked. In the earlier stages of history the tendency was the other way, to neglect the rights and interests of men, and to look to a supposed divine authority in some absolute sovereign. In the plains of Mesopotamia, there early began that series of great empires which played so important a part in the history of the ancient world. The earliest of these seem to have been mere works of brute force, successful warriors using their power, at first for plunder, and then for enslaving and dominating over their wTeaker neighbours. Such ambition and greed, being in their own nature insatiable, led to the thought and desire of universal conquest. At first the con¬ querors aimed only at accumulating tributary provinces, and this clearly would not lead to the formation of an empire, though the wave of conquest sweeping over foreign lands would destroy the old clan system, and sweep the ground clear for new forms of society. Later, however, the kings of the East sought to make their conquests permanent, by bringing the subjugated peoples into some sort of order of government, and transform¬ ing them from mere tributaries into subjects. Then arose the idea of a universal empire, which had that element of world-wide extension that the patriarchal or clan system lacked. But this could hardly be called a form of society, as the other wTas, since it was a mere despotism, having for its law the arbitrary will of one 20 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. man imposed by force of arms. His rule might be stern and cruel, like that of Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar, or mild and fatherly as that of Cyrus was said to be, or wise and calculating as that of Darius Hystaspis ; 1 but its character depended entirely on what his might be. He might be regarded as sent by Heaven, or himself worshipped as a deity ; but the god who so manifested his will could only be conceived as a god of mere almighty power, not as an essentially holy and just and good being. O O The Bible very suggestively describes these ancient Oriental empires as taking their origin from Nimrod, who was a mighty hunter before the Lord (Gen. x. 8-11), and the beginning of whose kingdom was Babel, where the sons of men attempted to build a tower up to heaven that they might not be scattered abroad on the earth. What they called “ the gate of God,” the Hebrew writer calls “ confusion ; ” and through all the records of revelation Babel, or Babylon, the great ungodly city, founded on mere might in disregard of the natural ordinances of God, by which mankind are divided into families and nations, that they might seek him, is the type of every such ungodly world power, opposed to the true city of God. Most of the Oriental empires had a religious cha¬ racter, and might be regarded as in some sense king¬ doms of the gods. The monarchs of Assyria and Babylon, who in their long buried and recently recovered inscriptions narrate with boastful and tiresome iteration their campaigns and conquests, habitually speak of themselves as appointed and raised to their thrones by 1 See Herod'otus, iii. 89. LECT. I.] THEOCRATIC IDEAS. 21 the gods, sometimes as sons of gods, a title which seems often to be used in a figurative or conventional sense ; they describe the deities as arming them, helping them, and fighting for them; and sometimes they describe themselves as enforcing the will of the gods, and im¬ posing their laws, institutions, and ordinances on the peoples they conquer. Nay, they speak of being guided by seers and dreams, and receiving answers to prayer in token of the favour of the gods.1 In all these things there is a striking resemblance to the theocratic kingship in Israel ; which shows that the notion of the king being the son of God, the viceroy of heaven, and carrying out in his dominion the will of God, is not altogether peculiar to the people who enjoyed a special revelation from God ; but is rather one of those religious ideas that are anterior to the special dealing by which God sepa¬ rated the seed of Abraham to himself, a part of the primitive patriarchal religion, only distorted by poly¬ theism. But while we find in these ancient records the idea of the king being the servant and vicegerent of the deity, we do not observe in them any trace of the people being regarded as standing in a direct relation to the gods whose will and law their kings enforced. The king might be regarded as divine, and his rule as the rule of heaven, and it might be said in that sense that the government was a theocracy; but this sort of theocracy, if it may be called so, is the very opposite of the old ideas of the Semitic clans, that the deity is essentially and naturally connected with the tribe or people of his worshippers, that he is lord and father not of the king alone and as distinct from the other 1 See Appendix, Note B. 99 —i TIIE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. members of the clan, but of them all, and that bis rule is exercised, not through the arbitrary will of the king, but through the old customs or the magical divinations that bind both the king and all the people. The theo¬ cracy of Israel is of this latter kind, only more pure in the moral character of its rule, and possessing a living power of advance and growth, because there was in it a true fellowship with the living and holy God. The extended conquests of the ancient Oriental empires, while they destroyed the old patriarchal governments in the clans and tribes, each reverencing a tutelary deity as their lord and father, substituted no general govern¬ ment or religion for the people ; but made religion and a relation to heaven a concern of the king alone directly, and of his subjects only through him. The ideal and perfection as it was of this tendency, which appears in the records of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian kings, may be seen in the Chinese Empire, with its paternal despotism and official State religion, resulting in this, that for the mass of the people practically there is no religion at all.1 It is not in this direction that any fruitful progress towards a kingdom of God could be made. It was in Greece that the idea of a free common¬ wealth was first conceived and attempted to be carried out. That is a society of men in which order, and right, and the general good should be secured, not by the will of a despot enforcing, it may be a divine command, or it may be his own pleasure, on subjects, but by a power working from within through the voluntary recognition of the members of the State. 1 See Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 137. LECT. I.] GREEK STATES. 23 The tribes of Greece early passed through that critical stage of progress which, according to Dr. Arnold,1 marks the transition of a state from childhood to manhood ; when the ascendency enjoyed by a nobility of blood or a conquering race gives place to an .ascendency of wealth, that is, to a state in which political power and influence are at least open to all the citizens without distinction of blood, or in other words, in which all are citizens. Such a constitution may indeed be more or less popular, and there may be violent conflicts and changes in it ; but it has left behind the state of things in which birth is the essential political distinction, and the commonwealth is not really one nationality. The Hellenic States attained their political manhood comparatively early ; and the danger to which the transition is exposed of a despotism being established by some king or military leader was happily and quickly escaped, so that before the power of the Persian Empire began to loom in the eastern horizon the tribes of Greece had so far advanced in the ideas of liberty as to make it their boast that they were not slaves or subjects of any man.2 They were not, however, lawless anarchists, but well- ordered polities, held together by laws and principles that were understood and prized by the people. Of these polities there were two main types, different in spirit and character, which in the Peloponnesian war came into fatal internecine conflict, though they stood together in their successful opposition to the 1 Arnold’s Thucydides, vol. i. Appendix I. 2 Oinivoi Sot/Xoi KiK^rivrui (puros oi/3’ t/7rsj kooi. ^Esch. Persse , 242. 24 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. Persian invasion. These were Sparta and Athens, and the great historian of their war enables us to understand their respective ideals and principles. The Spartans boasted at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, that they had long inhabited a city at once free and crowned with glory, and that this was due to their being trained in habits of order and obedience, so that they had acquired a wise self- command (crwfypoavvii t/Mjipcov), of which a sense of shame and a manly spirit formed the main ingredients. They had been taught what was most necessary for the defence of their freedom, and did not trouble them¬ selves with superfluous accomplishments. In a word, it was discipline, the maintenance of wise order and established custom, to which they looked to maintain their polity and freedom. Hence may be explained their conservative and military character, and their comparative simplicity of life, and indifference to the cultivation of literature, philosophy, and arts, which flourished at Athens. These features and principles of the Spartan character are brought out in the speech which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Archidamus, dissuading his countrymen from rashly engaging in war with Athens (i. 84) ; and the spirit of them appears on the epitaph on the 300 at Thermopylae : “ 0 stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws ” (Herodotus, vii. 228). On the other hand, the principles and spirit of the Athenian polity are indicated in Pericles’ funeral oration over those who fell in the first year of the war (Thuc. ii. 35-46), and these differ in some important points from the Spartan ideal. Their constitution was a LECT. I.] THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY. 25 democracy, in wliicli all citizens are admitted to a share in the government, under the conviction that all can contribute something to the common cause. All had liberty in regard to their manner of life, without interference or molestation from those who might differ from them ; it was not thought necessary to impose a rigid discipline on all, like that to which the Spartans were subject, for the sake of maintaining order and military defence. Yet the Athenians held themselves no less safe with their public spirit and general resources, and were ruled by a respect for the laws, and for those unwritten principles of justice and generosity whose only sanction was the shame attached to their violation. They cultivated the arts and enjoy¬ ments of life, and made their existence joyful with feasts and exhibitions, yet without extravagant ex¬ pense ; and they pursued the study of philosophy and literature without being thereby made effeminate. This is an ideal very different from that of Sparta, and it is in its own way a very beautiful one. Its fundamental principle would seem to be the fullest liberty in the State, and the freest use of all the faculties and means of developing and enriching their nature, while for the right and safe guidance of these liberal and unrestrained tendencies reliance was placed on the spirit of patriotism, the enlightenment of wisdom, and the love of esteem and praise. Public spirit, liberality, culture, fame, were the motives trusted to, as conserving and directing agencies in the Athenian republic. We find an echo of Pericles’ description in the Athenian poets of that day, especially the three great 2 G THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [DECT. I. tragedians ; and the way in which they celebrate the praises of their city shows that the spirit of its polity was indeed that of freedom and spontaneity, not seeking to maintain order and right by mere force, but trusting: to the character of the citizens, their reverence for law, their public spirit, their culture and wisdom. By iEschylus their freedom is set in contrast with the despotisms of the East ; the host of Xerxes is described as consisting of kings subject to the great king, and following at his awful command ( Pers . 24, 58) ; while the Greeks call no man master (ib. 241, 242), and are united by common interests and patriotism (ib. 402-405). On the other hand, in a passage in the Ewnenides, he brings out the more conservative elements in the Athenian polity which he was anxious to maintain and strengthen. There Athene says, in reference to the Areopagus — “ Here, Athenians Shall reverence of the gods and holy fear That shrinks from wrong, both night and day possess A place apart, so long as fickle change Your ancient laws disturb not ; but if this Pure fount with muddy streams ye trouble, ye Shall draw the draught in vain. From anarchy And slavish masterdom alike my ordinance Preserve my people 1 Cast not from your walls All high authority ; for where no fear Awful remains, what mortal will be just ? The holy reverence use, and ye possess A bulwark and a safeguard of the land Such as no race of mortals vaunteth.” (Eum. 690-702, Blackie’s translation.) Sophocles does not so directly picture the Athenian polity, and his famous chorus in praise of Colonus (CEd. Col. 663-719) dwells entirely on the natural beauty and mythological glories of his native land. LECT. I.] FALL OF ATHENS. 27 But the thought of the blessings of free and good government in general is frequent with him, and his conception of it is thoroughly Athenian. The disposi¬ tions of city life ( aarwopov' ? Spuds') are mentioned, along with speech and lofty thought, among the highest achievements of man (Antig. 355), and at the same time the sacred eternal unwritten laws of the gods are recognised as inviolable and paramount to all human ordinances (Antig. 450-7 ; (Ed. Tyr. 865-71). In Euripides we begin to hear the echoes of philosophy ; and wisdom becomes more prominent as the pillar of the State than the reverence or law celebrated by the older poets. He paints Athens as the home of the Muses, where happy people, children of the blessed gods, draw from the land itself glorious wisdom with all delight, and to whom the Goddess of Beauty sends loves that dwell with wisdom as helpers to all kinds of virtue (Medea, 824-45). All these are but the poetical and imaginative re¬ production of the picture which Thucydides represents Pericles as drawing in the language of thought and reflection ; and they show that the conception really was one generally entertained. This bright picture is presented by the great Athenian statesman as not a mere ideal, but a reality ; and so perhaps it was for a season. But hardly had the city attained that full bloom of liberty and culture, when it began to degenerate ; and though Athenian literature and art for ages continued, and indeed still continues, to be a power in the world, the ideal democracy of Pericles was irretrievably lost, and Athens was no longer what he had declared her to be, a model in 28 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. political institutions to other States. This was due in part not to any defect in the principles of her polity, but to the fact that these principles, especially that of liberty, were not fully carried out. Besides the mass of slaves that lay unregarded beneath the surface of all the states of heathen antiquity, the allies or subject states of Athens had no share in the liberties of the citizens, and it was the jealousy and irritation caused by this that led to the Peloponnesian war at first, and caused the final defeat of Athens in it. Had the liberty and fraternity that reigned within the city been extended to the allies and tributary states, so that they should all have been heartily united in one ; the Athenian power would have been able to defy the assaults of the Peloponnesians, and to maintain its independence for ages. So far, its failure is due, not to a defect in the ideal, but to the incompleteness of its realization. But though this may account for its external defeat, the internal decay of the Athenian constitution was undoubtedly due to the insufficiency of its fundamental ruling principles. If patriotism, and honour, and culture could be counted upon to be animating motives with all the citizens, Athens might have continued, even though deprived of its external empire, a free and well - governed city ; but to a large and fatal extent patriotism was overborne by selfishness or faction ; honour gave place to shameless impudence ; and wisdom was overborne by artful flattery or sophistical declamation. The motives that were cal¬ culated to secure a free compliance wfith the laws of justice, sobriety, and prudence, proved quite inade- LECT. I.] GEEEK PHILOSOPHY. 29 quate ; and liberty degenerated into licence and disorder, which in turn paved the way for oligarchy and tyranny. Yet the Athenian polity, though it proved a failure, was surely much better than any government the world had then seen, better far than the cruel and crushing despotisms of the East, better in some respects than anything that had existed in Israel, either in the dis¬ orderly times of the judges, or in the semi-Oriental monarchy of David and Solomon ; better in freedom, in culture, in humanity, than the oligarchy of Sparta. It aimed at least at government for the common good of all, and allowing the utmost possible liberty to all ; and anticipated, though only in a transient way, the liberal constitutions of modern times. The degeneracy and defeat of the liberal democracy of Athens exercised great influence on the philosophy of Socrates and Plato, who lived just at and after its fall. They perceived the need of some principle of order to correct the excesses and corruptions of unbridled liberty ; and they looked in the direction of that rule of discipline that had given permanence to the Spartan government. But they did not attempt to reproduce the mere practical austere military training of Sparta, they sought for a training in the principles of philosophy ; still it was in education that they looked for a principle that should be more powerful and permanent for the right guidance of a State, than those generous instincts had proved on which the Athenians had relied. A leading principle of Socrates’ philosophy was, that all wickedness comes from ignorance, and that no man is willingly bad ; if he could only be rightly instructed he 30 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. would be in no danger of going wrong. For a perfect society, then, right education is the primary and all- sufficient requisite. This is the principle of Plato’s ideal republic, it aims at training men by means of philosophy to their respective functions in the State ; and is, as has been said, really a great university, since education is the main thing in it. The ideal is in one respect very different from that of the Athenian constitution. Instead of allowing, as that did, the freest scope to the individual, it would bring all into a certain uniform mould, which was deemed the best. Hence, like all systems that are mainly educational, it had a larg;e admixture of the communistic element. Private interests are as much as possible discouraged, in order that the principles that are to rule the whole may have free scope ; and in order to secure uniformity and harmony of action, goods and enjoyments must be, as far as may be, in common. Plato’s republic never was or could be realized ; but it remains as a great and influential form of thought, the type of a conception that has been entertained by some in all ages, the notion that a perfect human society can be held together and guided by knowledge and education. Some of Plato’s ideas have been re¬ produced in most of the ideal sketches of perfect States in later times ; and some of these have even been attempted to be realized. Its principle still appears in the present day as the great rival of the principle of liberty and individuality that was adopted by ancient Athens. Already Aristotle1 pointed out the weak points in 1 Politico,, ii. c. 1, 2. LECT. I.] GREEK AND HEBREW AIMS SIMILAR. 3 1 Plato’s ideal republic, showing that it was impossible in practice, that it erred in carrying to an extreme the unity of the State, that it precluded the virtues of temperance and generosity, and that it proceeded from the idea that a State was to be made good by instruc¬ tion alone, and not by character, and philosophy, and laws. This criticism shows an insight into the real state of the case, and has been confirmed by subsequent discussion and experience.1 These political efforts and speculations of the Greek states and philosophers may seem to have little or nothing to do with our theme ; but they have at least this in common with the anticipations of the Hebrew prophets, that they contemplate, as the end to be aimed at, a social state, not merely the good of individuals, but the union of fellow-countrymen in a free, well-ordered, and stable society. The prophets of Israel looked for a reign of righteousness and peace, such as had never been fully established ; the Greek sages desired a state in which the ideal of righteousness might be realized ; and the history, both of Jews and Greeks alike, showed that the great problem to be solved in order to this is, to find some motive that shall be at once spontaneous and powerful enough to rule and guide men’s conduct. The Hebrews passed from a state of anarchy, in which every man did that which was right in his own eyes, to a monarchical government, that united the nation under a king, but that very soon sowed seeds of discontent and fresh division ; the Greeks either maintained a lasting order by a system of stern and austere discipline, or found freedom 1 See Appendix, Note C. 32 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. and culture degenerate into licence and selfishness. Neither a divine law, nor a king ruling for God among the Jews, nor the strict discipline of Sparta, nor the liberal patriotism of Athens, could secure a perfect, or even a really permanent form of society. The need was felt ; but how it was to be supplied did not appear. Plato’s republic, even were it the best, could only be realized when either kings were philosophers or philosophers were kings ; and the reign of God in Israel could only begin when Messiah should come. Thus there were insuperable difficulties in realizing a right polity even within the narrow limits of the Hebrew and Greek nationalities : still greater then would be the obstacles in the way of a more compre¬ hensive society embracing other nations and even all men, when that idea occurred to the mind. It was indeed involved, though only obscurely at first, both in Hebrew prophecy and in Greek philosophy ; and it was perceived that the notion of a perfect State or kingdom of God would not be complete unless it was a universal State. Socrates is said to have called himself a citizen of the world,1 and, according to Plato at least, laid down a principle of universal philanthropy.2 Afterwards the Stoics had much to say of a universal society or community of men.3 By the conquests of Alexander, 1 Cicero, Tusc. v. 37. Zeller, however, thinks this story unworthy of credit. Socrates and the Socratic Schools, p. 136. 2 Crito, 49 D. Rep. i. 335. Xenophon, indeed, puts the more limited and popular maxim in his mouth, so that it is doubtful whether the other is really Socrates’ or only Plato’s. See Zeller, ib. p. 139. 3 They held, as stated by Schwegler, that “ the separation of men into a variety of hostile States is a contradiction to the notion of the State ; but the entire race ought to form a single community with the same principles and laws. Thus Stoicism originated the idea of cosmopolitanism” ( History of Philosophy, p. 129). LECT. I.] ALEXANDER’S CONQUESTS. 33 Greek culture was brought into connection with the old Oriental world-empires ; and this tended to enlarge the thoughts of men, and to bring together different nations. Alexander, the Hellenic sovereign of a non- Hellenic people, made it his aim, not only to conquer the world, but to spread the civilisation of Greece over the barbarian nations of the East. His policy was not to make Macedonians the ruling race over all the rest, but to treat all nations as equals, and mingle them with one another as much as possible. By the foundation of Alexandria and the maritime discoveries made in his distant expeditions, he did much to unite the nations by the bonds of commerce ; and he also made the Greek language and culture a common possession of all his empire. But he established no constitution or organized government, he was not at all a legislator, he simply assumed the position of a Persian king, and governed all his subjects through satraps with a despotism that endeavoured to be equitable and wise. Hence, while his conquests did much to ameliorate the state of the world, and diffuse Greek civilisation and political ideas, he founded no empire, and immediately after his death his dominions were divided and contended for by his generals. The Roman Empire was very different. It was the rule not of a man but of a people ; a people which had been originally composed of different races of which at first one was dominant and had exclusive power, but which before it began its career of conquest had passed the crisis of transition to an obliteration of race distinc¬ tions. This principle, too, Rome continued to apply in its foreign victories. The conquered nations were after a c 34 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. time admitted to the privileges of Roman citizens ; this was what secured the stability and constant progress of the Roman arms ; and thus it came about, that what was imposed on the nations was not a Roman king or conqueror, nor the supremacy of a race or caste of Romans, but the authority of Roman law. Law was a subject studied by the Romans as by no nation before, as the rule of the rights and duties of citizens. Their fundamental idea of a republic was a consent and community of law,1 and law was that to which they looked to secure the permanence of order and well¬ being in the community. The Roman law was influenced largely by the principles of the Stoic philo¬ sophy ; to act according to nature, and to render to every man his due, being among its maxims. By establishing a system of jurisprudence based on such principles as these, the Romans did make an important and lasting contribution to the quest of the perfect society in which mankind has been always more or less consciously engaged. They laid down rules which have been very generally recognised in subsequent ages as the best fitted to secure the maintenance of righteous¬ ness and peace between man and man in civil society ; and the philosophical basis on which they proceeded imparted to their work a cosmopolitan tendency, and made it a source of international as well as of civil law. Thus they gave a practical application to the doctrines of Greek philosophy, and showed in what way these might be applied to the manifold relations of actual life. Most of their work, too, was in the direction of that perfect social state which Christianity sets forth as 1 Cicero, de Rep. i. 2. 25. LECT. I.] ROMAN EMPIRE. 35 the kingdom or city of God, for in so far as the philo¬ sophical basis of the Roman law was true, it was at one with that of the Christian revelation. But after all a code of law, even were it perfect, can but provide the machinery for a perfect government ; in order to secure its actual exercise and enjoyment a motive force is needful ; and the Roman law had no other force to maintain it but that of civil power. That power, too, long before the rights of citizenship had been extended to the provincials, had become first a military despotism veiled under republican forms, and then an undisguised absolutism of the Oriental type. Instead of the majesty of law, enforced by the officers of a sovereign and free state, there had come to be dominant simply the will of an unlimited monarch. How crushing and humiliating that empire was to all that was noble, and enlightened, and free, we may learn from the pages of Tacitus or Juvenal. Not only was it oppressive to the provinces, which were plundered and desolated, so that the Jews on the one frontier and the Britons on the other wTere stung to fury and roused to mad efforts of revolt ; but to the Romans them¬ selves, the rule of a Nero and a Domitian seemed the lowest depth of slavery, when they had lost the very memory of former freedom. Better days might indeed come under a Trajan or an Antonine ; but these were short and uncertain ; the empire came to be in the gift of the Praetorian guards, and their favourite was made the deity practically worshipped by the civilised world. Was this what men’s efforts at a perfect society had come to ? Verily, no kingdom of God, but a kingdom of the worst and vilest passions of men, the kingdom of 36 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I tlie beast, as Jolm calls it in the Revelation. The benefits that the Roman law was destined to bestow on mankind as an auxiliary agency to the Christian kingdom of God were not realized then, and but for Christianity never would have been realized, since without Christianity the Roman Empire and law could not have survived the fall of the ancient world.1 Thus it should seem as if the attempts of mankind to establish a really good and lasting polity had been wasted in a sad and fruitless circle, returning to the point from which they started after having been driven by the failure of each successive plan to adopt another, which in turn broke down, and led them back on their wandering footsteps again. Neither family affections, nor loyalty to a divinely-endowed king, nor strict train¬ ing in ancient and austere customs, nor free patriotism and sense of honour, nor philosophic education, nor reverence for law, had proved forces sufficiently strong to overcome those selfish passions of men, whether as rulers or subjects, that tend to the dissolution of civil society. Yet the path that mankind thus trod was not entirely a fruitless round. Every one of the forces called into play in the course of this long effort is good and useful in its place and degree ; many of them have, either singly or in combination, preserved a tolerably good social order in single nations for considerable periods of time. Even in the ancient world they did not altogether fail in this ; for many of its states did not fall from internal decay, and might have been lasting had they been safe from external attack. Where these principles absolutely broke down was in forming 1 See Appendix, Note D. LECT. I.] NO UNIVERSAL PEACE. 37 any general society or friendly alliance among mankind. The nearest approacli to anything of this sort was the mutual intercourse among the nations produced by the general diffusion of Greek culture and commerce in consequence of the conquests of Alexander. This did to a large extent give the civilised world a common language, common ideas, and common interests ; but it did not produce universal peace or harmony. The ideas of despotism and forcibly constraining men to accept Greek manners and civilisation were still domi¬ nant ; and the monarchs of the line of the Seleucidse and Ptolemies were really but Oriental despots with a superficial tincture of Greek culture, but with nothing of the spirit of manly intelligent freedom that had marked the leaders of the Greeks in their best days, or even of the liberal and enlightened policy of Alexander himself. So also, though the Roman conquests did do a certain amount of good to the nations, in uniting them by one system of law, as well as by language and culture, yet by the time the empire came to be consolidated into one, it had degenerated into a corrupt and oppressive despotism ; and thus, notwithstanding the many and various attempts made in different parts of the world to establish a satisfactory political society, mankind had come back, after a fruitless circle of abortive schemes, to that despotism which was the earliest form of universal government attempted. Indeed the hopeful view of human history, according to which there is to be ex¬ pected a gradual progress in an upward direction and an ultimate stale of goodness and happiness, was entirely foreign to the ideas of the ancient world. Its philo- 38 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. sophers and poets either regarded the course of mankind as a continual degeneracy from a golden age in the past, or as a vast cycle in which there was a continual return or reproduction of the same events and states of things. Cicero and others applied this theory to the succession of forms of government in different States ; and philosophers such as Plato and the Stoics applied it more generally to all mundane things. So Virgil, even when giving loose rein to his fancy in the descrip¬ tion of a golden age to come, and perhaps using Jewish materials, can only describe it as a return of the past, “ redeunt Saturnia regna,” and anticipates a reproduc¬ tion of the former events, “ erunt etiam altera bella;^ and so Celsus 2 derided the efforts and hopes of Christians for the improvement of the world on the ground that evil is inherent in matter, and all things must go round in a never varying cycle. The idea of the perfectibility of mankind, and of the gradual and steady improvement of the race in the course of time, which has been so largely used by those who reject Christianity, and which enables them to make light of the supernatural 1 Eclog. iv. 6, 35. Bishop Horsley, in his Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Messiah dispersed among the Heathen , maintained that the anticipa¬ tions of a golden age in Virgil’s Pollio were derived from genuine Gentile Sibylline verses, which were mutilated and adulterated transcripts of ancient patriarchal prophecy. More recent writers on the subject, how¬ ever, think that the resemblance between this poem of Virgil and the prophecies of the Old Testament must be explained by the assumption that some of the Jewish imitations of the heathen Sibylline oracles had found their way into the collection made at Rome to replace those lost in the time of Sylla. See Hengstenberg’s Christology of the Old Testament , Appendix II. Messianic Expectations among the Heathen ; Liicke, Einleitung in die Offenharung Johannis, § 8 ; Friedlieb, Oracula Sibyllina Einl. § 17. The consideration of the contents of the extant Sibylline verses belongs therefore more properly to the next lecture, in connection with which they will be noticed. 2 Origen, c. Celsum , iv. 65-68. LECT. I.] NOTION OF CYCLES IN HISTORY. 39 grounds of hope for the world that Christians cherish, was entirely strange to the pre-Christian ages ; 1 and though it may be due in part to the progress of science, yet is much more to be ascribed to the promises and the truths of revelation. At least it may be said with truth that Christianity, and more particularly the Christian idea of the kingdom of God, furnishes the only solid ground for such hopes for mankind.2 The idea of the ceaseless cycles of the world’s history occurs also in Eccles. i. 9, 10, iii. 15, as part of Koheleth’s complaint of the vanity of all things ; but this clearly is not to be taken as the final and deliberate utterance of Israel’s faith and hope. How different from the heathen ideas was the view of the world’s future that prevailed in Israel ! There, a prospect of final blessedness was never absent from the minds of prophets and wise men, however dark and calamitous the present might be ; and that prospect was not merely the return of something that had been in a golden age of the past, and that was to be brought round again in the circle of the suns, only to lead to the same consequences as before : what the Hebrew believer looked for was a new thing in the earth that would be a real, and satisfying, and everlasting good. In many of the pictures of this blessed time, it is not merely Israel, but all the nations that are to be thus blessed. There is hope for the world as well as for the chosen people of God. The hope for both alike, for the nation that God has taken into covenant with himself and for 1 An exception to this statement may be found in the Zend religion, which in some respects was the least corrupted of the Gentile forms of faith. 2 See on this subject Hare’s Guesses at Truth , p. 313-339, ed. 1877. 40 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. all the nations of the earth that are to be blessed in it, rests ultimately on faith in the creative power and saving grace of God. This comes out in various places in the Old Testament, where God is praised as the Creator in immediate connection with his promises and the hopes of his people for the future. So we read in Amos, “ Seek the Lord, and ye shall live . . . that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night : that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth ; The Lord is his name : that causeth destruction to flash forth upon the strong, so that destruction shall come against the fortress” (vers. 6-9). 1 In a similar spirit Jeremiah says: “Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for light by night, which stirreth up the sea so that the waves thereof roar ; the Lord of hosts is his name : If these ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever” (xxxi. 35, 36). Again wTe read: “Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out ; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it ; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein : I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles ; 1 In quotations from the Old Testament, where it is necessary to depart from the Authorized Version, I adopt the renderings given by Cheyne and Driver in the Variorum Teachers’ Bible, published by Eyre & Spottis- woode. 1880. LECT. I.] THE HOPE OF ISRAEL. 41 to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house ” (Isa. xlii. 5-7 ). So also in Ps. lxxiv., where the people call on God in distress, and appeal to his mighty works of old, the ultimate ground of their plea is creation (vers. 16, 18). It is also worthy of observation that the earliest express asser¬ tion in Israel of creation out of nothing occurs in the words of the mother of the seven sons who were tor¬ tured to death by Antiochus for their faithfulness to Judaism : “I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven and the earth and all that is therein, and con¬ sider that God made them of things that were not ; and so was mankind made likewise. Fear not this tormentor, but being worthy of thy brethren, take thy death, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren” (2 Macc. vii. 28, 29). Eeference is made to this story in Heb. xi. 35. Faith in their God as the Creator of the universe was a sufficient ground for the hope of Israel for themselves, for their nation, and ultimately for the world, such a hope as not even the most enlightened of the Gentiles had. In modern times the discoveries of science in its investigation of the works of creation have tended to awaken in men’s minds a similar hopeful spirit, so that the gradual and sure advance of mankind to perfection has been accepted almost as an axiom or self-evident truth by many who do not accept the religious basis on which it rested in Israel. But it may be doubted whether, apart from a belief in God as the Creator of the universe, and at the same time the God of grace and salvation, there is any solid foundation for such a 42 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. hopeful view of the world’s history. The rise and pre¬ valence of pessimistic views in modern times serves to show this ; and some of those who are most sanguine about the prospects of mankind, apart from revelation and Christianity, acknowledge frankly that there can be no certainty of this on a merely natural basis, and that possibly after all we may have to fall back into pessimism.1 The attempt at a perfect state in the heathen world failed, because it never could be a city or kingdom of God. Not that they lacked the idea of a divine Being, or failed to connect the laws by which they saw that states must be governed with such a Being. Nearly all the governments in the ancient world were regarded as in some way or other divine. Either the king was the vicegerent of the gods, or was himself worshipped as divine, or the laws were regarded as of divine origin and inviolable sacredness. Men in early ages did not doubt, and seldom perhaps failed to feel, that they were under law to a supernatural power. Whether the law was the ancient custom of a family or tribe, or the rules of a priestly caste, or the command of a powerful despot, or those dictates of nature and conscience that men heard in their own breasts, it was regarded with reverence as a law of deity. In this sense their govern¬ ments were believed to be of God, and were doubtless really so as truly as that of Israel. For, as Paul says, there is no power but of God. But the fatal want in the heathen world was, that they did not know God. They identified the deities to whom they felt themselves under law with the powers of nature or the Providence 1 See Appendix, Note E. LECT. I.] FAILURE OF HEATHEN STATES. 43 that guides human destinies ; but when they attempted to see the deity who gave them laws in the course of nature, they fell into perplexity and darkness. Nature and history did not seem to follow the laws of justice ; those who disregarded these laws often seemed to pros¬ per, while those who sought to observe them suffered. If the powers of nature were worshipped as divine, many of these might be opposed to each other and to the laws of human society ; or if the deity were a power above nature, it seemed a dark mysterious destiny. Evil came indeed upon sinners ; but it seemed to come upon whole houses, generation after generation, involving the inno¬ cent with the guilty, and often falling with greatest weight on the purest and the best. Even if they believed that the laws which held together their states were divine, what assurance had they that the God from whom they came was really ruling in the world, and that it would be possible to establish and maintain a society in which they would be observed ? They needed to know God, not merely as the giver of the moral law, but as making provision that it should be observed by men, and that they should attain their true happiness thereby ; they needed to be assured of just what Paul proclaimed at Athens, that God has made of one every nation of men, . . . that they might seek him. If it be so that the God of righteousness, from whom the eternal laws come, is indeed ruling over all events, and arranging them all in order that men may seek him, then it is no vain hope that a city of God may be realized ; and if he has so made all men of one blood, that city of God may be a universal and not a merely national one. 44 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. I. The idea of national deities watching over a city or race, and caring for their progress, was indeed familiar to the heathen world ; and so also was that of a supreme power working for righteousness ; hut these were not conjoined ; the local gods were mere nature-powers or deified heroes, and the supreme principle of righteous¬ ness was but a fate or destiny, indifferent about any particular men or states. There was no assurance that the tutelary god of any nation cared for its be¬ coming a just and well-ordered state, or that the supreme power cared for any of the nations of men. As long as the two conceptions of deity could not be brought together, there could be no certain hope of a perfect human society ; men could only raise altars to an unknown God. But let it be revealed that the God of righteousness is the Creator of all men, that he and no other watches over their life and habitations, and that he designs that they should seek and find him : then we may have a sure hope that human history is not to go on in a hopeless round of changes returning upon themselves, but that a perfect society may be realized in a kingdom of God which shall be the highest good of mankind. Nay, we may see that there was some positive pre¬ paration even in the heathen world for such a kingdom. Not only was it made manifest that all human societies formed on a merely secular basis had in them elements of decay that led to their dissolution or fall ; but some of the principles that must find place in any perfect commonwealth had been brought to light ; and though only partially and ineffectually applied, had yet become the possession of mankind. Such was the Greek love LECT. I.] PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY. 45 of liberty, and conviction that in a true commonwealth men must not be slaves of a despot, but free citizens under equal laws : such was the teaching of Socrates and Plato, that righteousness is essential to the well¬ being of a State : such was the Stoic conception of a universal society. These were truths that were never entirely lost as ideas and things to be desired, however far they were from being realized in fact. Hence even when under the Roman Empire the world seemed to have returned to a despotism worse than that of Nim¬ rod or Nebuchadnezzar, and the golden head of the image seemed to have given place to feet of iron and clay ; still it was not entirely the same as then. There were more bitter cries of humiliation and misery, just because men had known better things ; there was the longing for freedom, that could only be satisfied with the true freedom that the Son of God gives ; there was the philosophy that told men to aim at likeness to God as far as possible, and would welcome the image of the invisible God ; and there was the cosmopolitan spirit, that could understand a kingdom that was to embrace all nations. Such things the nations needed, and in so far as they were led in their struggles after a perfect commonwealth to feel their need, was not this the hand of God preparing for the establishment of that kingdom which cannot be moved ? ' . . LECTURE II. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. Exodus xix. 3-6. — “And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel. Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people ; for all the eai'th is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” LECTURE II. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. fpHE natural foundation of the kingdom of God, or perfect society, is the divine institution of the family, as based upon the physical and moral nature of man. “ The family,” says Rothe, “ is the primary institution of God for killing, or rather choking in germ, the natural self-seeking of the human individual; the further and only completely sufficient is the moral commonwealth as that of national humanity.” 1 From the family, through the clan, sept, or tribe, have been formed the states of civilised men ; from which should arise the brotherhood of the whole human race, which is the perfect moral society. Had the development and progress of mankind been normal, these successive stages might have been realized in a thoroughly satis¬ factory way ; and states formed, securing to their members liberty, order, and peace, and drawing nations more and more together in mutual amity and good offices. But, as we have seen, the actual course of history has been very different. Nowhere have men found it possible, when left to themselves, to form really good and stable states, still less to construct a universal state, that should realize a brotherhood of 1 Theologische Ethih , § 327, note. D 50 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. mankind. Such a perfect moral society must be originated and erected by God, not only working in nature and providence, but revealing himself in grace. God begins this work from the foundation. At the time when the families of mankind were forming them¬ selves into peoples and empires, and wandering over the face of the earth in quest of habitations, God separated one family from the rest. The migration of Abraham and his household was in many respects, and to all outward appearance, just the same as the many similar movements of tribes or clans in that age ; but it differed from them in this, that it was prompted, not merely by natural motives, but by a divine call and a divine promise. God made himself known to Abraham as gracious, showing a special favour for him, giving him special promises, and a special call. Abraham came to know God, not merely as a nature-power, but as a personal holy God, wTho was his shield and reward, and who trained him to avoid the sins of the people among whom he dwelt. From this God he received blessing in his own happiness and peace of mind in walking with him, and he had the promise that his seed should become a great nation and be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Through faith in these promises the family of Abraham was kept separate from the other tribes among which it dwelt, and grew into a people, which by its sojourn and oppression in Egypt was still preserved from being lost, and made ready for occupying a land of its own. The remembrance of the God of Abraham was revived by the mission of Moses and the wonderful events of the exodus ; and so a people wras formed with a faith in God’s love to them, LECT. II.] THE COVENANT OF SINAI. 51 and promises of blessing to them, and through them to all mankind. The name and the reality of the kingdom of God first appear in history after the exodus of Israel from Egypt, when the family of Jacob had grown into a people and gained independence by their deliverance from bondage. They recognised this as the work of their God, who thus showed himself to be greater than all the gods of Egypt, and faithful to his gracious covenant with their fathers ; and now that they had become a free people, the title appropriate to their God in his relation to them was, not merely Lord, or Shepherd, as he had been called by the patriarchs, but King, as he is called in the song of Moses (Ex. xv. 18). But the formal beginning of the kingdom of God in Israel was made by the transactions at Sinai. In Ex. xix. 3-9 we read how God offered to become King of Israel, and how the people accepted the offer. It was made on the foundation of what he had done for them, smiting the Egyptians, and bearing them on eagles’ wings to bring them to himself ; it presupposed God’s sovereign right of property over all the earth ; but it proposed to bring Israel into a more special relation as his prized treasure, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. The meaning of this is, that Jehovah is Israel’s King, and Israel is J ehovah’s people ; hence, as being in immediate relation to him, they are priests, i.e. servants of God, and they are holy, i.e. dedicated to him.1 All the earth indeed is his ; but the other nations have forsaken him and know him not ; and as yet he has revealed himself in his grace only to 1 See Appendix, Note F. 52 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. it. the seed of Abraham, and brought them near to him¬ self. The establishment of God’s covenant with Israel, which made them his kingdom, is ever represented as done in fulfilment of the promise to Abraham, that his seed should be a great nation and blessed of God. This implied two things, which Israel was very apt to forget; on the one hand, that this privilege wTas bestowed on them of God’s free grace, and not on account of any merit by which they could claim it ; and, on the other hand, that it was not given for their sake exclusively, but in order that through them all the families of the earth should be blessed, according to the promise made to Abraham. If the covenant had about it a character of exclusiveness, that was only temporary, for it was an integral part in a greater divine plan, which aimed ultimately at the whole world being included in the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. By the solemn conclusion of the covenant at Sinai (Ex. xxiv.), Israel became the people of God, and he became their King. It is from this relation, for which Josephus (c. Apion. ii. 17) introduced the name theo¬ cracy, that the whole conception of the kingdom of God has arisen, and accordingly it is of great import¬ ance to understand rightly wherein the theocracy in Israel really consisted. It did not consist simply in the nation having no human king ; for though Gideon (Judg. viii. 22, 23) and Samuel (1 Sam. viii. 6, 7) regarded the proposal to appoint a king as inconsistent with Jehovah being their King ; yet afterwards, when kingly government "was established in Israel, it was not held that the theocracy LECT. II.] THE THEOCRACY IN ISRAEL. 53 had ceased. In psalms and prophetic books written long after the nation had become a monarchy, God is still spoken of as the King of Israel ; and the Book of Deuteronomy, which emphasizes so strongly the theocratic idea, makes provision for a human kingship in Israel. The constitution was indeed modified when that was set up, and it may be called, as it is by Ewald, a basileo-theocracy, instead of a pure theocracy ; but the kingdom of God, in the sense in which it was real and valuable in Israel, continued in spite of that change. On the other hand, we cannot adopt the view that the kingship of God over Israel consisted in a special or miraculous administration of providence, according to which earthly prosperity came to the righteous, and adversity, suffering, and death to transgressors of the divine law. This was the theory of Warburton, on which he based his argument for the Divine Legation of Moses. He maintained that the Hebrew lawgiver was able to dispense with the sanctions of rewards and punishments in a future life, which all other legislators had deemed necessary for the stability of their govern¬ ments, because there was in Israel a special providence of retribution in this life, which lasted till the fall of the Jewish nation ; and that the complaints and questionings that we find in so many of the Old Testament books about the unequal distribution of earthly weal and woe, are due to the cessation of this special providence when the theocracy came to an end.1 1 The same view was held by Dr. John Erskine ( Theological Disserta¬ tions : I. The Nature of the Sinai Covemant ) ; and it is still maintained by the Rev. Edward Garbett in his Boyle Lectures ( The Divine Plan of Revelation , p. 350-354), mainly on the ground of the expression “he 54 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. But there is no sufficient evidence of such a special retributive providence having any existence ; as the passages that seem to favour it may all be more naturally understood of those general principles of the divine government, in virtue of which, on the whole and in the truest sense, it is well with the righteous, and ill with the wicked, though the particulars of the earthly lot of each man do not always correspond to his character. There is no indication that individuals in Israel were under a more exact retributive providence than mankind in general ; or that this was connected with their being the kingdom of God. According to the Old Testament representations, the theocracy in Israel really consisted in this, that Israel was in covenant with God; they were his peculiar people, and he was their God and King. More particularly the privileges that they thus enjoy are indicated in Deut. iv. 7, 8, to be these, that they had God near to them, and had a righteous law given them by him. The same idea appears in Deut. xxxiii. 3, 4 ; Ps. cxlvii. 19, 20, cxlviii. 14. This certainly implied a providential govern¬ ment exercised over the people, such as is signalized in the Book of Judges, where it is specially brought out, that God chastised Israel for their unfaithfulness to him by giving them up to their enemies, and again had mercy on them, when they were humbled and penitent. This is what is brought out in Amos iii. 1-8, when the prophet protests against the idea that God’s relation to shall be cut off from his people,” used as the sanction of many laws, which he understands of a judgment to be executed by God himself on secret sins. But the phrase seems simply to mean separation from the people of Jehovah, which would imply the loss of all blessing and salvation ; and is too narrow a foundation for a theory which assumes a continual miracle. LECT. II.] SCRIPTURAL NOTION OF THE THEOCRACY. 55 Israel was a merely natural one, such that he must be on their side no matter how they acted. It is a moral relation, requiring agreement, and implying chastise¬ ment for iniquity. It also appears from that passage, that it was through prophets that God’s dealings in this way were explained : the people were to look for guidance, not to diviners or such as practised magic arts, but to those men whom God should raise up from among them to declare his will as taught them by God. The promise of a prophet in Deut. xviii. is closely con¬ nected with the prohibition of imitating the heathen divinations. It was by these that men sought some supernatural guidance for their life and conduct, and such guidance is indeed needful ; but God promises to give it to his people through men from among them¬ selves, speaking plainly and intelligibly as they have been taught of God.1 o What distinguished Israel from other nations was, not the idea that their God was their King and they his people, for that was common to almost all ancient nations ; not the fact that the power of their leaders and kings was limited by the authority of laws reverenced as of divine authority, for that also was usual in early societies ; but the fact, that in Israel these laws did come in a special sense from God, and were interpreted and developed by men who were in spiritual communi¬ cation with God. We say the laws of Israel came in a special sense from God ; and the proof and test of that is their pure and healthy morality. Whatever was 1 Cf. Num. xxiii. 23 : “ Surely there is no enchantment in Jacob, neither is there any divination in Israel : at the (due) time shall it be told unto Jacob and unto Israel what God worketh.” 56 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. good and true in the laws of any nation must be regarded as in a sense from God ; and when the heathen reverenced such laws as divine, and did by nature the things of the law, they were obeying God as their King, by whatever name they called him. But in none of the heathen peoples was the traditional code which was reverenced as the law of the deity morally pure : along with some sound elements, they all contained much that was perverted and wrong ; and so the peoples that followed them were not really under divine law in a great part of their conduct, but very much the reverse. In Israel, however, the law was really the result of a divine communication, and though in some respects its morality was not the very highest, yet it was not in any way positively impure or perverted, and was the best possible then, suited for their stage of moral development, and fitted to lead them on to higher things. The proof that this is so, that Israel was under a specially revealed divine law, and so was really a theocracy, while other nations only fancied themselves to be such, is to be found in the lasting and salutary effect which their law had on the moral character of the people. But the reign of God over Israel implied, not only that the law had been originally in a special sense given by God, but also that he raised up from time to time prophets to develope its meaning and guide the people in their course. Prophecy served to keep up a living connection between Jehovah the King and Israel as his people. Such a connection was supposed to be effected in other nations by magical arts, auguries, divinations, and the like. These all wrought, or were believed to LECT. II.] HISTORY OF ISRAEL. 57 work, through the lower faculties of man’s nature and the world of sense : for as heathenism was essentially nature-worship, so heathen divination consisted in men bringing themselves into some communication, real or fancied, with the powers of nature, in dreams, or mad¬ ness, or ecstatic trance. In Israel the messengers of the Divine King to his people were men whose higher nature was enlightened, who had communion with God in clear intelligence and sound mind, and whose words appealed, not to the superstition and credulity of the people, but to their consciences and hearts.1 Thus Israel was truly in fellowship with the one living and true God, having a law which really came from him and expressed his character and will, and enjoying the guidance of men who were really in com¬ munication with him, and were sent to them from time to time. But still the mass of the people were not directly taught of God themselves, but only instructed and guided by those who were. This appears from the course of the history of Israel. In the earliest periods of that history, even after the people as a whole had been taken into covenant with J ehovah, there was little or no national unity among them. During their migra¬ tion to Canaan they were kept together by the pressure of common dangers without, and the powerful personal influence of Moses and Joshua as their leaders. But when they settled here and there in Canaan, each tribe and family in its own allotted portion, they were divided by separate interests, and each cared only for itself, and was often at feud with its neighbours. There was no central government, and very little patriotism or public 1 See Appendix, Note G. 58 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. feeling among them. They were in danger of losing their distinct existence entirely, and being merged in the tribes among whom they dwelt. From this peril it was their faith in Jehovah as their God that saved them. The Judges were men raised up in times of oppression, rallying the tribes in the name of Jehovah to battle against their enemies ; and it was only through them that Israel obtained any measure of freedom and peace. Their final safety was not achieved till the general religious revival under Samuel, which brought the mass of the people to a more living faith in Jehovah, and so knit them more together as a nation than they had ever been before. Now perhaps Samuel hoped the reign of God was to be established in Israel. Jehovah would be acknowledged and followed, not only as their leader in war against their enemies and oppressors, but as their King, ruling them in righteousness and peace. But the nation was not ripe for that. They thought it necessary to preserve national unity and good order in the same way as all other nations had endeavoured to do so, by putting themselves under the government of one man as king. They had not yet enough of faith in God and loyalty to him as their unseen King, to make it sure that when he raised up for them a deliverer and leader the people as a whole would obey and follow him : it would still too probably be as before with Gideon or Barak, that his own tribe or clan would follow him, but others would be indifferent or jealous. Had they such faith and public spirit as to discern and follow the men whom God would raise up as their leaders from time to time, marked out by nothing but fitness and signs of God being with them, Israel might LECT. IT.] HUMAN KINGSHIP IN ISRAEL. 59 have been really a nation governed directly by God as its King. But they were not able to rise to such an ideal ; and their safety and order had to be secured by the appointment of a king, who would command the allegiance of all the tribes in virtue of his official posi¬ tion and the visible symbols of authority with which he would be invested. The demand for a king was thus a sign of the failure of Israel to rise to the position of a kingdom of priests, having Jehovah alone as its King, and being directly governed by him. But it cannot exactly be called a declension.1 It was simply, as the narrative indicates (1 Sam. viii. 8), the continuance of the same spiritual incapacity that they had shown all along. The mass of the people had failed at first to recognise their heaven-sent deliverers, or to be obedient to them when their personal interests were affected ; and it was just the same danger of failure that made them seek a king. They were now conscious of their weakness ; and though the kingly government came short of the ideal, it was a real and great blessing to Israel. The reigns of Saul and David freed them from the attacks and domination of the Philistines, and welded the tribes into one nation. Nor did it make them less the people of Jehovah than before. The king was chosen by the Lord, and endowed with special kingly gifts of his Spirit ; he was the Lord’s anointed, and ruled in his name. That in the hands of David at least the kingly government was exercised in this spirit, as under the authority of Jehovah recognised as a holy and righteous God, and as carrying out his will in the enforcement 1 So Kiehm represents it. Messianic Prophecy , p. 61. 60 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [DECT. II. of a law of righteousness among the people, seems evident from the Psalms, especially those that may with reasonable probability be ascribed to David. In Ps. xviii., which is generally admitted to be his, there is a warm expression of devotion to Jehovah, followed by a vivid and sublime description of his interposition to deliver the psalmist and raise him to be king. In a way that was to him as wonderful a theophany as that on Sinai of old, Jehovah has delivered him from the floods of ungodly men (or “ torrents of wickedness,” ver. 4), and has raised him to rule his people, and to be head of the heathen (vers. 42-47). And God has done this, not merely in special favour for his servant, but in righteousness, because of his obedience, his innocence, his uprightness. J ehovah is most distinctly recognised as having a moral character, purity, righteousness, mercy (vers. 20-26). These expressions in this psalm, which have caused perplexity to many evangelical expo¬ sitors, because of their seeming tone of self-righteous¬ ness, are really most valuable, as showing David’s view of the character of God, and the nature of the rule he was to exercise for him. He does not exclude his grace ; on the contrary, that is implied throughout ; but in those days, when heathen kings and nations appealed to the favour of national deities, apart from any moral considerations at all, it was more important to show that the God of Israel was essentially righteous, and saved and exalted a righteous king to enforce righteousness on his people. Even more striking are the last words of David, recorded in 2 Sam. xxiii. 1-7, where in beautiful poetic language is described the blessing of one ruling over men, just, and ruling in the lect. ii.] david’s theocratic ideal. 61 fear of God ; and the prospect of this is declared to be the object of David’s chief desire and hope, founded on the sure covenant God had made with him. The king seems pervaded with the consciousness that his govern¬ ment had not brought to the people all the blessedness that should flow from this ideal, but yet he has the full confidence that it shall one day be realized, and that in the monarchy of his house. Very similar in tone and spirit is the 72nd Psalm, though that is a prayer for the king, not by him. It presents the picture of what a king of Israel should be, ruling for God, administering justice and judgment, protecting the poor and oppressed, and so proving a blessing to the people. The 101st Psalm is also the language of a king, either David him¬ self, or one of his successors, expressing the two ideas that are the fundamental principles of the monarchy in Israel, that the king owes his elevation to God, and rules in his name, so as to establish righteousness in the nation. He sings of mercy and judgment, not merely as shown by God to him, but as the peculiarly kingly virtues in which he desires to be God-like. The same thing appears in Ps. xlv., to whatever king it may have been originally addressed : “ Thou lovest right¬ eousness and hatest iniquity, therefore God thy God hath anointed thee.” 1 David was the king of Israel who most nearly realized the theocratic ideal of a king ruling in the name of Jehovah, and securing the observance of his righteous law among the people. He was called to the kingship by the voice of God through Samuel ; but he took no step himself to gain the throne ; what he did was 1 See Appendix, Note H. 62 TFIE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. simply to use faithfully and courageously his powers in the cause of God and of Israel, with a childlike faith in God’s help. He goes to meet Goliath in the strength of faith ; he does all the work assigned him by Saul diligently and wisely ; he is forced into exile, but raises no rebellion, and spares the king’s life when in his power, and waits patiently, following the guidance of Providence, till he is called to be king, first by the tribe of Judah and then by all Israel. When on the throne he recognises that he has been raised to it by God, and that it is for his people Israel’s' sake (2 Sam. v. 12). His first care, after defeating the Philistines, and securing the external peace of the land, w*as to provide in his own capital a national sanctuary for the ark of the Lord’s covenant, and so to make the unity of the people religious as well as political. He was for the most part in thorough sympathy with the prophets Nathan and Gad, and had himself the prophetic spirit ; yet even in his hands the royalty began to show some of the evils of an Oriental despotism. David apparently thought it necessary, in order to keep up the state and dignity of a king, to take many wives and concubines ; and this not only proved the occasion of the worst blot on his character, but introduced the system of court intrigues and palace conspiracies that makes the most important pieces of public policy depend on the most unworthy persons. When the king had to be influenced by such devices as that of Joab and the widow of Tekoah, we cannot doubt that there must have been ground for the complaints of lack of justice which Absalom used to steal the hearts of the people from David. Also the numbering of the people must LECT. II.] DECLINE OF THE THEOCRACY. 63 have been intended to lead to a consolidation of the nation’s power, such as would have made it a military monarchy like the great empires of the East. Solomon began his reign with anxious care for the administra- tion of justice, and by the building of the temple com¬ pleted David’s plan for the religious unity of the nation. He also by his alliances and commercial undertakings drew an influx of foreign commodities into the land, and brought Israel into relations with other and distant nations. But the tendency to keep up a splendid court and large seraglio that had begun in his father’s reign increased, with all its attendant evils, and the inter¬ course with foreigners brought in foreign customs and foreign religious rites. Thus this peaceful and brilliant reign was not an unmixed blessing ; and it left the people at its close oppressed with taxation and pervaded with secret discontent. The Old Testament theocracy had reached its highest point ; it could not retain permanently its power, and speedily began to degenerate. Though it sought the security of civil order and peace in the fear of Jehovah as the righteous God of Israel which animated the best kings, the mass of the people was still far from such a moral and spiritual conception of Jehovah, and it was only by the authority of the king that they were made more obedient to the law than formerly. The theocracy worked on them by means of external force, by the commands of civil law enforced by pains and penalties ; and what is brought about merely by such means never can be permanent. Force always, sooner or later, awakens a reaction, by which wdiat has been gained is either overthrown or made the subject of conflict 64 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. between opposing powers. More particularly a sepa¬ rate nation, having the law of God as its civil con¬ stitution, and tolerating no violation of it, could not continue to exist among the nations unless it had power enough to resist or conquer them all. Israel did, under David, through the strength that union and moral discipline gave, conquer the tribes immediately sur¬ rounding it, and made them tributaries. But when it came into contact with the more powerful nations of Tyre, Syria, and Egypt, it must either enter into alliances on equal terms with them, and in that case, if there was to be any intercourse at all, their idolatrous religions must be tolerated in Israel, as was done under Solomon and under the house of Omri in the northern kingdom ; or else Israel must stand aloof from alliance and com¬ merce with all other nations, in order to keep pure its monotheistic and moral religion ; and in that case it ran the risk of provoking enmity and hostility, and in the end being crushed by more powerful neighbours. This at least was the actual issue of the history. Whether or not it may have been possible, had Israel consistently maintained from the first the position of isolation marked out for the nation by its religion and law, to have remained independent, a monotheistic people of pure morals, among nations following a licen¬ tious nature- worship ; the fact is that they compromised themselves deeply with these other nations and their religion, so that when they attempted to go back to a severer policy, as they did under the influence of Elijah and Elisha, it was too late to arrest the operation of those causes that were disintegrating and destroying the nation. It proved impossible to restore the old state LECT. II.] MORAL SENSE IN ISRAEL. 65 of things ; and in consequence of their internal divisions and corruption, first the northern kingdom and then the southern fell before the advancing power of the empires of the East, and the people were carried captive out of their land. Thus it might seem as if the whole of what had been done by the deliverance of Israel from Egypt was undone. Israel was again merely a tribe of captives, and the theocracy, that had been established at the exodus, seemed to have come to an end, and vanished, leaving no trace behind. But it was not so. The kingdom of God in Israel, though it had not proved, and could not prove per¬ manent, had yet important and imperishable effects on the character of the people, and formed a necessary preparation and a sure foundation for something higher. It produced in Israel a moral sense, such as we do not find in other nations. Among the heathen, religion had no connection with morality ; the favour of the gods was propitiated by ritual observances, often of a licentious or cruel nature, and there was no deep sense of the obligation of moral right and the evil of wrong. The wrath of heaven might be provoked by the neglect of some ceremony or offering as easily as by a moral offence, and required to be appeased, not by repentance and confession, but merely by some arbitrary and external sacrifice. Hence we do not find in heathen literature any controlling sense of the authority of conscience and the moral law, or any deep conviction of sin. How different in this respect is the Hebrew literature ! We find in it that religion is ever con¬ nected with morality. In the Psalms, for example, we meet with such expressions of the authority and E 66 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. excellence of God’s law, and such acknowledgments and confessions of sin, as show that the people by whom such hymns were composed and used, whatever may have been their moral defects and faults, had yet a deeper sense of right and wrong, of the obligations of moral duty, and of the evil of sin, than any other ancient nation. The same thing appears to a certain extent in the historical books. The way in which the sin of David with Bathsheba, and that of Ahab in regard to Naboth, are treated in the narratives, testifies to the existence of a strong moral sense in the people. The law, given and received as the will of God, the King of Israel, did produce a knowledge of sin, a sense of obligation to the great moral duties, and a feeling of guilt and ill-desert when these were neglected or trans¬ gressed. Thus, though the theocracy did not secure the actual observance of the divine law, or the per¬ manent continuance of a nation ruled by it, it did establish the conviction that the moral law ought to rule, and train up a people impressed with the idea that that law is the will of their God and King, to which they are bound to be obedient. But there was in Israel, not only a strong sense of the obligation of moral duty as the law of Jehovah, but also a belief and hope that the fulfilment of that law would be realized in the future. The Hebrew religion was distinguished, not only as one of morality, but as one of hope ; and this was founded on the belief of the grace of Jehovah to them and their fathers. This comes out especially in the prophets. They not merely rebuked the sins of the time, and denounced LECT. II.] THE HOPE OF ISRAEL. 67 the judgments that would come on these, but they called the people to repentance, and gave promises and predictions of the future obedience and prosperity of Israel. Even in the worst times and amid the most awful denunciations of judgment, there is ever a back¬ ground of hope in their pictures ; and blessing is almost always their last word. These hopes for the future only became more prominent as it became increasingly evident that the theocracy of the time then present was unable to secure its end, and was doomed to extinction. In the earliest prophecies of Israel’s restoration, those given in the times of division and war between the two kingdoms, it is simply a return of the reign of David that is promised, when the people have been sifted by judgment. The happy time contemplated is one when a king shall reign over Israel in the manner and spirit of David, and shall be crowned with blessing and success as David was. Amos and Micali seem to con¬ template nothing more than this, a people reformed and reunited by a new David, protected by divine power, and dwelling securely in the midst of the nations, drawing them all to Jehovah. The deliverance from the Assyrians is portrayed as a repetition of the deliverance from the Philistines under David, and a restoration of the reign of David in its better aspects, in which it appeared idealized in the popular memory. In this prophetic picture there was a great truth ; for the spirit in which David wrought the deliverance of Israel in his day is that in which all true deliverance must be wrought ; and that deliverance was a type of the highest and most perfect of all. But a literal 68 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT II. reproduction of the past there could not be : if the work of David was to be really done over again, some¬ thing more must be done also ; for the very evils of the time, which make Amos and Micah long for a new Davidic kingdom, were a proof that the Davidic kingdom had not been perfect. Hence the people must not be allowed to forget that the Davidic kingdom itself came far short of the ideal of the kingdom of priests, of whom Jehovah himself and he alone was king ; and so in the prophecy of Hosea we find it pointed out, not merely that the rule of the kingdom is to become once more like that of David (iii. 5), but that the people are to return to Jehovah, and enter anew into covenant with him (ii. 15-20, xiv.). The ideal is now pitched higher up : it is not merely a restoration of the kingdom of David, but of the covenant of Sinai. The same thing is presented in Isaiah’s prophecies from a somewhat different point of view. In his picture of the future blessedness of Israel, one great element is a king and princes ruling wisely and justly, every one of whom shall be as a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest (xxxii. 1, 2). But over and above this just and beneficial civil government he places the promise that the Lord himself shall reign over his people (xxiv. 25, xxxiii. 22), and the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord (xi. 9), and he recognises that this can only be when the Spirit of the Lord is given not to the king only, but to all the people (xxviii. 6, xxix. 24, xxx. 21, xxxii. 15-17). What he looks forward to is still in substance the restoration of the government and pro¬ sperity of Israel as it had been before ; but it is its LECT. II.] TIIE NEW COVENANT. 69 restoration in a more perfect and durable form ; and he gives at least hints that it is to be more perfect and durable, because Israel as a whole shall have learned to know, and trust, and obey Jehovah as their true King. But the ideal of prophecy must be carried higher up still. The kingdom of God cannot be the restoration of the covenant, unless it is a better covenant than that of Sinai. The renewal of the covenant with Jehovah by the godly and reforming kings Hezekiali and Josiali might seem to many to be a fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecies of the king who was to reign in righteous¬ ness and peace, and through whom Jehovah was to rule Israel. But the issue proved that it was not so. The improvement effected by these reformations was but partial and transient ; and hardly had the personal influence of these godly kings been removed, when the old moral and social evils showed themselves in as great force as ever. Thus it became clear to Jeremiah, that for a true kingdom of God there must be a new covenant, with better promises than the former, in which God would write his law on the people’s hearts, and be merciful to them and forgive their sins (Jer. xxxi. 31—34). In the same strain Ezekiel and Joel predict the pouring out of the Spirit of God on all the people, and the giving of a new heart, that they may love and serve the Lord continually (Ezek. xxxvi. 25-28 ; Joel ii. 28-32). Thus then, after the fall of the state of Judah, the kingdom of God appears, not merely as the restoration and perfection of David’s government, nor even as the realization of the theocracy of the Sinaitic covenant, but as something higher and 70 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. quite distinct. Then, too, it would begin to be seen why the founder and king of this kingdom of God must be so great as the prophets represented him. To restore the rule of David, a mere man, Hezekiah or Josiah, might suffice ; to restore even the Sinaitic theocracy, a second Moses might be found in an inspired prophet like Isaiah ; but to be the mediator of a new covenant, to dispense blessings greater than it gave, needed one whose name should be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlast¬ ing Father, the Prince of Peace. Yet even in the highest views of the kingdom of God it is not severed from the nation of Israel. It is in his people Israel that God is to reign, and through them he is to bless all nations. The promises of the new covenant are connected with the house of David (Isa. lv. 3 ; Jer. xxiii. 5-8), and in a series of prophecies of this period the promised deliverer and king seems to be viewed as the representative of the people and called by their name. In the views of the future of Israel given by the prophets there are two different lines that seem to be at variance with each other. On the one hand, we find the representation, that Israel is to be sifted by judgment, the sinners among the people destroyed, and a remnant who remain faithful saved. This is the issue contemplated by Amos, Micah, Habakkuk, and Zeplianiali. On the other hand, however, there is the view, that Israel is to be converted, humbled, and brought to repentance by God’s chastisements, and renewed by his Spirit. This prospect is presented more or less fully by Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, LECT. II.] THE HOLY SEED. 71 and Zechariah. The key to the reconciliation of these apparently conflicting views may be found in Isaiah, by whom they are both given, especially chap. vi. 13.1 The vision in that chapter is to be regarded as the final sentence of the Divine King of Israel on the theocracy. It occurred in the year that king Uzziah died, i.e. at the end of the last reign under which the people enjoyed anything like independence and prosperity, and after which their career was one of inevitable declension towards final subjugation. The prophet sees the true King of Israel, who dwells in the temple, and hears the proclamation of his holiness, and of his glory filling all the earth. He is pierced with a sense of his uncleanness and that of his people, but his lips are touched with a live coal from the altar, i.e. with sacrificial fire, and he is cleansed. Then he hears the King inquiring for a messenger, and he offers himself and is accepted. The effect of his message is described as that of hardening, but the contents of it are not mentioned ; it must, however, consist in an announce¬ ment of what he had seen, that the King of Israel is the Holy One, and that the whole earth is full of his glory. The issue of the rejection of this message by Israel is to be the entire desolation of the land, and the removal of the people far away ; and the vision closes with these words : “ And if there should yet be a tenth in it, this shall again be consumed : yet as the terebinth and the oak though cut down have their stock remaining, even so a sacred seed shall be the stock thereof” (Isa. vi. 13). Here it is not said merely, 1 The meaning and importance of this passage are beautifully brought out by Maurice, Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament, p. 224-229. 72 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. that a remnant of Israel shall be saved from the im¬ pending judgment, and that that remnant shall be the better part of the people and the stock of a new Israel. On the contrary, the judgment is described as universal. All the outward community of Israel is to be carried away ; it is compared to a tree entirely stript of leaves, and cut down to a bare stump ; but yet in that stump there is a germ of life, a seed of holiness. That seed of holiness is not merely a section of the people, who have kept themselves from the prevailing sins, but what lies beneath that, and is far more precious, the presence of the Holy One as the true King in Israel. He had purged Isaiah’s lips ; and he was ever there to purge the lips of all who sought him like Isaiah ; and even though the judgment should leave no remnant at all, though the tenth part that escaped should again be consumed, yet there was hope that the bare stock would again revive. Thus, though, as Isaiah elsewhere describes it, the judgment was to be indeed a sifting one, showing the vanity of all worldly confidence, and leaving no help, except for those who would trust in the Lord, and who should be but a remnant of the people ; yet they were to be saved, not because they were better than others in their own character, but because God brought them to himself by means of judgment and grace : and those who were thus converted and saved in virtue of the holy seed in the midst of Israel would be not a mere fragment of the people, but the people itself, restored to new life. Thus the two apparently opposite representations are but two different aspects of that new kingdom of God that gradually dawned on the eyes of the prophets of Israel. DECT. II.] ISAIAH AND HIS DISCIPLES. 73 In the following prophecies of Isaiah, given in the reign of Ahaz, we find the actual historical realization of what the Lord had said of the holy seed being the stock of Israel. The assault upon Judah by Syria and Israel combined, under Pekah and Rezin, was one of the signs and beginnings of the downfall of the nation ; and when king Ahaz, instead of trusting in Jehovah, sought help by calling in as an ally Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, the doom of his kingdom was sealed. Once drawn into the vortex of Eastern politics, and brought within the range of Assyria’s ambitious plans, there was no hope of such a small and poor kingdom retaining its independence. Jehovah would bring upon Judah, as an overflowing flood, that very empire of Assyria from wdiich they now sought help (Isa. vii. 17, viii. 10). Seeing the king and people bent on this infatuated course, Isaiah is instructed by God to hold aloof from their confederacies and fears, and to wait on the Lord, even when he was hiding his face from the house of Israel. He and his children and disciples form a little band, fearing and trusting Jehovah, and among them the testimony and instruc¬ tion, that God has given, but the nation has rejected, is to be bound up and sealed, i.e. kept safely and handed down to the time when it would be received by the people (viii. 11-20). This event marks a turning-point in the history of Israel. A society or church is formed within the nation, having faith in God for its uniting principle, and treasuring his word as its guide ; and the existence of this prophetic party, nourishing its faith on God’s revelation, is what made it possible, that the religion of 74 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. Jehovah should survive the utter destruction of the nation. This was actually in history the stock of Israel, formed by the holy seed, i.e. the presence and recognition of the Holy One, in the midst of it, which made it possible that a new and better kingdom of God should spring up after the earthly one fell. The hopes based upon this ground speedily extended beyond the people of Israel, and became universal in their scope. It is true, indeed, that the most immediate subject of Messianic prophecy is the restoration of Israel as the people of Jehovah, and of Jehovah’s reign over them, which is described in various ways. But this is sure to the prophet’s mind, only in so far as he recognises Jehovah as the only living and true God, the God of all the earth ; and therefore the prospect of the re-establishment of his kingdom in Israel carried with it that of a universal dominion over all nations. Such a dominion was indeed looked for even before the fall of the monarchy of David’s house. The 2nd Psalm, whatever its exact date or original occasion, must have been composed while the kingdom was still standing, and it predicts a universal sway for the King of Israel, who is the Lord’s anointed and his Son. In Psalm lxxxix., similar promises are looked back to from a time of humiliation and overthrow, as having been given before. Of this kind are Amos ix. 11, 12, and Micah iv. 11, v. 15. In these places what is foretold is simply a dominion of Israel and her theocratic king over the heathen nations that had been rebellious or hostile. The king is to crush his enemies in battle, and to establish an empire that shall include them all. But along with these there are also prophecies that LECT. II.] EMBRACING ALL NATIONS. 75 indicate that the Gentile nations are to be joined to the people of Jehovah in worship, and allegiance to the king who is to save Israel. Such are Micali iv. 1, 2, where a direct reign of God is spoken of, and the union of the nations under him is a religious one ; Ps. lxxii., where the king is described as feared and obeyed by all nations because of the gentleness and benignity of his sway. But above all, the catholicity of the predicted reign of God is seen in Ps. lxxxvii., and in the oracle in Isa. xix. 23-25, on which that psalm seems to be based. In these places it is distinctly declared that Egypt and Babylon are to be included in the city or kingdom of God, and that not merely as conquered and tributary subjects, but as citizens, with a right equal to that of birth, and privileges equal to those of Israel. These are the most distinct references to a universal kingdom of God, in the Christian sense, that are to be found in the Old Testament. Other psalms, that invite all nations to praise and worship Jehovah, and declare that they all see, or shall see, his glory, may have been simply expressions of the monotheistic faith, that found such striking manifestation in Israel after the exile. Because Jehovah is the only living and true God, he is to be recognised by all mankind ; and his judgments on Babylon make him to be thus recognised ; but it does not obviously follow, that other nations were to be admitted to the privileges of Israel, or that the special blessings of the kingdom of God were not exclusively to belong to the chosen nation. Yet, even if the utterances of such psalms as the 96th, 98th, 100th, do not directly teach the admission of all nations into the covenant people of Jehovah, they at V 6 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. least imply that the worship of Jehovah is to be universal. That seemed to be made possible by the signal interposition of God for the deliverance of his people by the world-famous event of the fall of the Babylonian Empire with all its idols. This is the view given, in the second part of the Book of Isaiah, of the conquests of Cyrus. He is Jehovah’s servant, his shepherd, his anointed, whom he has girded, and to whom he has given victory over the nations, “ that they may know, from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am Jehovah, and there is none else ” (Isa. xlv. 6). The confusion of all the heathen gods and their worshippers will lead all the ends of the earth to look to J ehovah and be saved ; and he has sworn that all shall do homage to him, and so enjoy blessing from him (Isa. xlv. 22-25). But the conversion of the nations to the true God is not described in this prophecy as due merely to the wonderful manifestation of his power and glory in the triumph of Cyrus over Babylon, but to the ministry of the servant of Jehovah, spoken of in that series of oracles. The servant of Jehovah is called Israel (xli. 8, xliv. 1, 21, xlix. 3), yet in some places he seems to be clearly distinguished from the mass of the people (xlix. 5, liii. 8). Indeed, the whole passage, lii. 13- liii. 12, can only be understood as speaking of some one distinct from the people. The person thus spoken of must have some intimate relation to Israel as a nation, since he bears the name of Israel : and it would seem as if he were introduced as its representative, after the literal Israel had failed in the work to which it was called by God. That failure is described in LECT. II.] THE SUFFERING SAVIOUR. 77 chap, xlviii., which closes with a bitter lamentation of God over Israel’s disobedience (vers. 18, 19), and then a new series of oracles begins with the announcement of one wTho bears the name of Israel, and is to accomplish perfectly the work of bringing the salvation of God to the Gentiles, even to the ends of the earth. Now the prophecies of a personal Deliverer and King of Israel had been given before, Isa. xi. 1-9, Micah v. 2-5, and also in Jer. xxiii. 5, xxx. 9, Ezek. xxxiv. 23, 24, xxxvii. 24, 25, which, on the supposition of the later date of the second part of Isaiah, were also earlier. Since the Jews were undoubtedly led by their prophecies to expect a personal Messiah, as they did in the time of Jesus, there seems no reason to doubt that such a passage as Isa. xlix. w'ould naturally be understood of that great Deliverer, whom the people had been taught to expect, and through whom Jehovah was to establish his kingdom over Israel and all nations. In this prophecy, too, we find the picture of a Saviour and King who is to accomplish his work and attain his kingdom, only through deep humiliation and severe suffering. This is nowhere so fully depicted in the Old Testament as here ; yet the idea is one which is quite in harmony with the suggestions and analogies of other places. The servants of God had often to endure hardships, opposition, and affliction in their life of faith in him, before they were raised to positions in which they were means of blessing to others. So it was with Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David. There were always ungodly men and hostile nations, whose enmity caused such sufferings to the servants of God. That the great and final Deliverer, of whom 78 TIIE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. these were types, should have to encounter similar opposition, and suffer in the conflict, could not be thought strange or impossible.1 In several of the psalms the establishment of the kingdom of God over all the nations is connected with the suffering of one or more of his people, and his deliverance of them from that suffering (Ps. xxii., xl., lxix.). In each of these the psalmist speaks as a servant of God, trusting in him, and suffering, on account of his faith in Jehovah, from the persecution of enemies. He pleads with the Lord for deliverance, and confidently hopes that it will come, and that he shall have cause to praise God for his salvation. It is also anticipated in these psalms, that the deliverance wrought by God for his afflicted and persecuted servants will be the means of making his name known far and wide, and leading all the ends of the earth to turn to him. Thus we find here the idea of the reign of God being brought in through the suffering of his servants and his deliverance of them ; but in Isa. liii. we have the additional ideas, that the suffering of the servant of Jehovah is to be even unto death, and that he, sinless himself, bears their sins as a sacrificial victim, and makes intercession for them. The only approach to this in the Old Testament is the prayer of Moses to be blotted out of God’s book for the sake of Israel after their sin in the worship of the golden calf. What he had offered, but could not be permitted to do, the servant of Jehovah, of whom the prophet speaks, is really to do, and so save his people from their sins. But while these anticipations of a universal kingdom 1 See Appendix, Note I. LECT. II.] THE RETURN FROM THE EXILE. 79 of Gocl appeared in the prophets, and the events of the exile showed that the religion of Jehovah, as the one living and true God, could be kept alive in Israel, even when their independent nationality was destroyed ; the time had not yet come for the true religion to be set loose from its connection with a nation. The seed of Abraham was beginning to be a blessing to the nations, by diffusing among them the knowledge of the true God and of his promised salvation ; it began to be possible and not uncommon for proselytes to join themselves to Israel ; but the nations of the world wrere as yet too isolated and mutually hostile for the formation of a catholic Church as a purely religious community : the society of the true religion must still for a time be a political or national one ; and therefore Israel’s first task, when delivered by Cyrus, must be to return to their land, and re-establish their national and religious institutions. These formed a centre for the whole people so far as they retained any national identity, not only for those who actually returned to Judea, but also for the greater number who remained in exile. In their relation to these Israelites of the dispersion, we may see the importance of the stand which those who returned took against the offer of the Samaritans to work along with them. That is apt to look like a narrow-hearted action, putting away from them an opportunity of gaining over a Gentile nation to the service of Jehovah along with them. But, apart from the danger of corruption from their half-heathen religion, the Jews could not have fraternized with the Samaritans without cutting themselves off from their brethren of the dispersion, and it was of more service, 80 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT II. even for the ultimate conversion of the Gentiles, that the Jews scattered everywhere among them should be kept in connection with the historical centre of their religion and its hopes, than that one nation, who sought to join them from interested and worldly motives, should be admitted at that time to their fellowship. We need not therefore doubt, that the policy of Zerubbabel and his associates was a wise and right one. The Samaritans at first knew Jehovah only as “ the God of the land,” and desired to be associated with the Jews only because they dwelt in the land, not because they desired to know what Jehovah was to Israel, or to share in the spiritual hopes that the better part of the Jews had. If they had come in the spirit in which the heathen are described as coming, impressed with a sense of the greatness of Israel’s God above all idols (Isa. xlv. 14), it would have been a different matter ; but they showed nothing of that spirit, and to have accepted their offered help would have been to become lost among them, and to forfeit the position of the people of God. For the same reason it was necessary to exercise severity, as Ezra did, against those of the Israelites who had married heathen wives, and to preserve the purity of their race. There was the more need of such rigid separation from other peoples, because the restored Jewish colony had no separate political existence. It was, along with the neighbouring tribes, merely a part of the Persian Empire ; and though it was allowed to regulate its own internal affairs, yet it could only maintain its distinctness by so ordering these, as to keep up and enforce its peculiar position as the people of Jehovah. LECT. II ] CESSATION OF PROPHECY. 81 Accordingly the people under Ezra and Nehemiah -entered into a solemn covenant to observe the law of Jehovah, as they had never done before (Neh. viii.-x.). They still regarded themselves as the people of God, and recount, as the ground of their faith, all that God had done for their fathers from the call of Abraham onwards (Neh. ix. 7-31). But they acknowledge that they have lost the kingdom that God gave them (vers. 22, 24, 25), and are now servants to the kings whom God has set over them, i.e. the Persian monarchs (vers. 26, 27). But as that subjection consisted mainly in the payment of tribute, and in a general control by which the king might prevent any movement that was displeasing to him, it allowed them in many respects to carry out the provisions of the law of Jehovah as their true and heavenly king. The aim of the most patriotic and religious among them now was to make that law an actual power, ruling them as much as possible. After the final establishment and acceptance of the law as the constitution of the people, the voice of prophecy in Israel ceases. There appear no more of those messengers from God, who by their utterance of words from him maintained the present connection of Israel with Jehovah as a living God. It would seem as if they were now left merely to the rule of the letter, the book of the law, interpreted by the priests and the scribes, who now begin to appear and to play an important part in the history of Israel. So among the things which the Jews say were wanting in the second temple, were the Urim and Thummim, and the spirit of prophecy ; yet it is remarkable that the prophets F 82 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. of the restoration speak of the continuance of the Spirit of God with his people, as guaranteed by his covenant, and as the basis of their encouragement and hope of success. Jehovah says by Haggai (ii. 5) : “ The word which I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, and my Spirit remainetli among you : fear ye not;” and Zechariah has the vision of the candlestick ever supplied with oil, explained by the words : “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord ” (Zecli. iv. 6). We cannot but connect these sayings with the references in Neh. ix. 20-30, and Isa. lxiii. 10, 11, to the Spirit of God as given to Israel in the wilderness. Yet we cannot interpret these sayings, either as promising a continuance of prophecy, or as pointing directly to the New Covenant, promised by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. They seem rather to refer to a work of the Spirit even then, not on prophets or specially commissioned men, in the way of supernatural inspiration, but on ordinary Israelites in the way of gracious enlightenment and influence, though that was not as yet to be so general as after the Messiah came. For we cannot suppose that Paul’s distinction between the Old Covenant, as that of the letter, or law, and the New, as that of the Spirit (2 Cor. iii. 6-18), is an absolute one ; or that such a statement as John vii. 29 is to be literally understood. The Holy Spirit was given in Old Testament times, not only to prophets and kings, but to many simple and unknown souls ; and when the prophetic revelation was no longer given, because it had done its work, there was still a channel of direct communication with God for humble and belie vino1 o souls. The Spirit of God made his word, as far as then LECT. II.] THE SPIRIT STILL PROMISED. 83 revealed in the law and the prophets, a sufficient means of keeping up a personal communion with him, and we can see this in the expressions of faith and devotion in the psalms and other religious literature of the Jews. But before the full revelation of God in his incarnate Son, the full power of the Spirit could not be put forth, and comparatively few would be taught by him ; while the mass of Israel could only be governed by an external code of law. It was the error of the scribes, that they did not look for the teaching of the Spirit, and enforced the law in a merely external and literal way. The position of Israel as a nation under the Old Testament theocracy may be regarded as analogous to that of an individual man under the law or covenant of works. Conscience is, as Thomas Goodwin1 strikingly says, the faculty through which God exercises his moral government over men : it is as it were a castle or fortress in the soul, that is ever open to communications from God, and that never can be overthrown or taken by the power of evil. This gives the knowledge of good and evil, issues commands in the name of God, and con¬ demns, yea executes sentence in the feelings of remorse for wroim-doing;. Yet it cannot secure the obedience of the will or the love of the heart to what is right ; and in the covenant of works the law is only written on the conscience, not on the heart, as God promises to do by his Spirit in the New Covenant. So in the corporate body of Israel, the prophets were, as Delitzsch well says, the conscience of the state.2 They had direct communi- 1 T Yorks, vol. vi. The Work of the Holy Ghost in our Salvation , Bk. vi., especially p. 259, 260. 2 Messianic Prophecies , § 9. 84 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. cation with God, and were taught by him, and spoke his word to the people with a power that could not be silenced ; they were as a defenced city and a brazen wall. But they could not always influence the people to obey the will of God, which they proclaimed ; often they were disregarded and opposed by the party in power in the state. From this came the many judgments and calamities which the nation incurred in consequence of their unfaithfulness to their God and violation of the principles of their religion. The last of these, the Babylonian captivity, had, along with the words of the prophets, the effect of weaning them from idolatry and the idolatrous worship of Jehovah, and establishing the law of the Pentateuch as the supreme and authoritative code. The people now solemnly bound themselves to the service of Jehovah at the one sanctuary according to the Levitical ordinances, and to observe the moral and social precepts of the law. The last of the prophets enforces this as the great duty of Israel, and promises God’s blessing to them in connection with this (Mai. iv. 2-4) ; and from thenceforth the greater part of the people were earnestly and resolutely set on carrying out the provisions of the law. They became the people of the Book ; the law as read in the synagogues Sabbath by Sabbath took the place of the messages of the pro- phets, and was to them the voice of God. But still the gift of the Spirit was not bestowed on all the people, and the voice of God in the law was to the nation as a wThole but as the voice of conscience in a natural man, commanding with divine right, but not securing obedi- ence with divine grace and power. As the law had to be interpreted and enforced by priests and scribes, the k 1 T LECT. II.] TEACHING OF THE SCRIBES. 85 theocracy assumed the form of a hierarchy ; and as those who were the organs of the government were not necessarily or always spiritual men, their interpretations and regulations were often wrong and misleading, and a false view of the law was brought in. Under the teaching of the scribes the Jews gradually lost sight of those prophecies that spoke of a new cove¬ nant, the peculiar blessing of which would be the gift of the Spirit of God to all his people, to write God’s law in their hearts, and give them all a direct knowledge of him and access to him (Jer. xxxi. 31-34 ; Ezek. xxxvi. 26, 27 ; Joel ii. 28, 29). Failing to understand these promises, the utmost that they sought was the outward observance of the law, and so much freedom from foreign domination as would enable them to carry that out ; and the prophecies of a happy and universal reign of God they interpreted as meaning a restoration of the glories of David and Solomon, and a subjugation of all nations under their king. This notion of an earthly kingdom is found in connection with different views of the way of its establishment in different sections of the people. The Sadducees, or party of the priestly aris¬ tocracy, looked for it in the reign of the Asmonean princes and high priests that had been established by the Maccabees, but was threatened and finally over¬ thrown by Herod and the Romans : the Nationalist party of the Zealots sought it also by human means, only not by wise policy, but by a popular enthusiastic rising and war of liberation : the Pharisees thought the great requisite was to secure the perfect fulfilment of the law, and then God would miraculously deliver his people and set up his reign : while the Essenes gave themselves i , < 86 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. to tlie study of apocalyptic prophecies, to determine the successive kingdoms that were to precede that of the Messiah, and the signs of its coming. From an examination of the nature and history of the theocracy in Israel, it appears that it really was simply the special moral and religious training of that people -by God, its speciality consisting in this, that it was a training not merely by nature, in which God is hidden, but by revelation, in which his grace and mercy is un¬ veiled. God is training all nations, did they but know it : he has determined “ the seasons and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him, and find him ” (Acts xvii. 26, 27). He says to Cyrus, “I have called thee by name : I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me ” (Isa. xlv. 4). But Israel knew God : he was not merely guided in darkness and unconsciousness, but called to the knowledge of God and of his work and way. This essential privilege, to know the living God and to be known of him, is what is described, from different points of view, by the terms covenant, theocracy, revelation, education. Each of these names describes a different side or aspect of the thing ; but the thing itself that is denoted by them is one and the same ; and accordingly we find expressions corresponding to them all in Scripture. The one great word the Law (Torah), so dear to the true Israelite, implies them all. The Law is God’s revelation of himself ; for it is equiva¬ lent to the Word of the Lord, “ The commandment is a lamp ; and the law is light ; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life” (Prov. vi. 23). This also shows that the idea of education or training is contained in it, JjECT. II.] THE FUNCTIONS OF THE LAW. 87 as is expressed in such a passage as Deut. viii. 10 as well. Then, further, the Law was the covenant between God and Israel ; the tables of the Law are also called the tables of the covenant ; and the Law is also the heart and soul of the theocracy, since it is by the Law that God rules over Israel. Only if we give the Law this central position, we must understand it in its true sense as God’s instruction to his people, and as including all his words and revelations of himself ; and not like the Jewish Rabbis, limit it to the mere written record of the Pentateuch, or even of the Bible as a whole. This had the effect of shrivelling up their notion of God, and making them incapable of seeing the perfect reign of God when it came ; and it will have a similar effect on us. If we take the wider view, we can see both the reality of the preparatory kingdom of God in Israel, and its fitness to lead on to the true, and universal, and everlasting reign. Israel seemed indeed to have failed in its striving- O after a national society just as much as the other peoples vTho had been working at the same problem in so many different ways ; and in a sense it did fail, in so far as it did not completely solve it. But it contributed elements that formed the basis for its real solution, and made that possible. This people acquired a sense of the obligation and sacredness of morality, and a hope of the realization of a perfect moral society, such as were not to be found among the heathen. There are noble moral sentiments in the ancient heathen writers, and some great philosophical principles of ethics have been dis¬ cussed and established by these sages ; but their prac¬ tical moral code lacked authority ; and even in their 88 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. most enlightened and pure-hearted writings we do not meet any of those expressions of a conscience feeling the guilt of sin that are so frequent and so touching in the Hebrew psalms and other Scriptures. The deep spiritual sense of the evil of sin was indeed obscured and perverted by the teaching of the scribes ; but it was not entirely obliterated, and even under that superficial and literal teaching the moral state of Israel was less degraded than that of the heathen. Israel also had a hope of better things, to which the Gentile world was strange. Even in the darkest times there is no tone of despair in the Jewish literature. The Book of Ecclesiastes is the only one in which anything like it can be perceived; even here it is corrected and renounced at the close ; and elsewhere the expression of hope and confident expectation of ultimate deliverance and blessing appears amid the most terrible denunciations of judgment. The issue was indeed often conceived by the common mind in false and un¬ worthy ways, and sought by wrong and bad means ; but still the hope was there ; and those who were guided by the genuine teaching of the Law and the prophets might learn to look in the right direction, however obscurely they might see. The history of this nation under the influence of their law and prophets gave them these two things, a moral sense and sensitiveness to sin, and a hope for the future, that the heathen world had not. In this we have the historical proof that they were under the special teaching of a holy and gracious God, and that his law was to them, and to the world, a schoolmaster to lead to Christ, the shadow of good things to come, though not the very image of the things. SUPPLEMENT TO LECTUEE II. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN POST-CANONICAL JEWISH LITERATURE. TN order to understand the various views of the kingdom of God that prevailed among the Jewrs when Jesus appeared, and to estimate the relation of his teaching both to them and to the prophetic teaching, we must take notice of the period that intervened between the last of the Old Testament prophets and the appearance of John the Baptist, and see what informa¬ tion we can gather from the history and literature of that period as to the hopes and expectations of the Jews on this subject. The expectations of a time of deliverance and blessed¬ ness under the reign of Jehovah that were awakened in Israel by the teaching of the prophets continued to be cherished by the godly ; and after the voice of prophecy had ceased, were moulded into various forms in the post-canonical literature by the reflection or imagination of writers, taking hold now of one and again of another side of the prophetic teaching. In the various produc¬ tions of this literature we may trace the incipient divergence of the great parties of the Pharisees and Sadducees. But little is to be gathered from what is probably the earliest of these, the Wisdom of Ben Sirach. It professes to unfold the instruction contained 90 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. in the Scriptures, and does so in the form of practical precepts of religion and morals, with exhortations to trust in God’s providence watching over the pious. Wisdom is described, as in the Book of Proverbs, as dwelling with God in the beginning and coming from him ; and this divine wisdom is identified with the law given to Israel (chap. xxiv.). There appears in the book no very keen sense of oppression ; and the longing for deliverance finds decided expression only once, in a prayer (chap, xxxvi. 1-17, E. V., xxxiii. 1-11, xxxvi. 16-22, Gr.) that God would have mercy on his people, and remember his covenant, smite in sunder the heads of the rulers of the heathen, gather all the tribes of Jacob together, and inherit them as from the beginning, fill Zion with his oracles, and his people with his glory, raise up prophecies in his name, and hear the prayer of his servants, “ according to the blessing of Aaron over the people, that all they which dwell upon the earth may know that thou art the Lord, the eternal God.” These hopes are connected with the blessing of Aaron, and the writer seems to attach special importance to the priesthood. In chap. vii. 29, 31, reverence for the priest and giving him his dues is joined with the fear of the Lord as a condition of the blessing for individuals ; and in chap. xlv. 24-26 the covenant of the priesthood to Aaron and Phinehas is closely associated with that of the kingdom to David, and it is added, “ God give you wisdom in your heart to judge his people in right¬ eousness, that their good things be not abolished, and that their glory may endure for ever.” Then the book closes with an enthusiastic description of the high priest Simon, son of Onias, in the glory of his sacerdotal func- SUPPL.] BEN SIRACH, BARUCH. 91 tions. It would seem, therefore, that Ben Sirach looked for a time of blessedness, in which the priesthood and kingship should both exist in Israel, and be together the means of its wellbeing and happiness. These ideas are most closely connected with the prophecy of Zechariah, and there is also taken from Malachi the expectation of the coming of Elijah to turn the heart of the fathers to the children. In the special prominence given to the priesthood in this book, we may see a beginning of that line of thought afterwards followed by the Asmonean princes and the Sadducees, looking for the kingdom of God, in Israel being an independent nation, in which the priests should have authority beside the princes, or, as it came to pass, have secular authority in their own hands. The Book of Baruch is probably of nearly the same date, and is one of the earliest in which the literary artifice is used of putting imaginary discourses in the mouths of ancient worthies, as in this case of Baruch, the companion of Jeremiah. It too contains hopes for the restoration of Israel, founded on the old prophecies ; but the only thing that is emphasized as the necessary condition or means to that, is the faithful observance of the law. That is described more fully than by Ben Sirach as the eternal wisdom, which was with God, and which he has given to Jacob his servant (chap. iii. 9, iv. 2). Israel has been afflicted and oppressed because they did not keep the law ; but they are called to repent and obey it anew,4 and assured that, if they do so, God will have mercy on them and restore them (chap. ii. 29-35, iii. 7, iv. 1, 2). The views and liojDes of the kingdom of God in this book are chiefly founded 92 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. on Deuteronomy and Jeremiah ; and they have a leaning towards the Pharisaic rather than the Sadducean ideal, though the divergence at this point would hardly he noticeable were it not for the light that subsequent history throws upon it. The course of that history turns largely upon the ideas held as to the kingdom of God in Israel, and serves in turn to illustrate these. The First Book of Maccabees describes the conflict of the Jews with the Syrians under Antiochus Epiphanes, and the subsequent struggles and political movements that led to the establishment of the independence of Judea ; and the writer seems to sympathize with the aims and policy of the Asmonean princes, whose history he records. The movement at first set on foot by Mattathias was a purely religious one, roused by the attempt of Antiochus to force Greek customs and religion on the Jews. Mattathias was moved by zeal for the law (1 Macc. ii. 19-26) ; and he and his followers were strict in observing its precepts. They would not at first even defend themselves on the Sabbath (chap, ii. 34-38), and they followed the law as exactly as possible (chap. iii. 46-56). Those who joined them were a company of Assideans1 ( Hasidim , pious), those who were voluntarily devoted to the law (chap. ii. 42). What they desired was not political independence, but freedom to observe the law. This no doubt implied the possession of the temple of Jerusalem, and also power to carry out the sentence of death against Jews guilty of idolatry ; but it was not inconsistent with their being subjects as before to the civil government of the Syrian 1 This reading seems well supported, and is given in Fritzsche’s text. surPL.] TIIE MACCABEES. 93 kings. But practically, in the circumstances, the religious liberty that they desired could best be secured by gaining political independence as well ; and this was the more felt, because, though they had gained their first successes by the heroism of a devoted people taking advantage of the natural strength of their mountainous O O country, they had latterly owed their safety to the skill of Jonathan the wary, taking advantage of the feuds and civil wars of the rival claimants of the throne of Syria, and being careful to be on the side favoured by the Romans. The issue was, that Jonathan, and after him his brother Simon, not only succeeded to the high priesthood, but were invested by the Syrian kings with the authority of princes of Judea. On the final establishment of Simon in this dignity, the writer of First Maccabees says : “ Thus the yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel in the hundred and seventeenth year” (i.e. of the Seleucid era=143 b.c., 1 Macc. xiii. 41). Two years later a great assembly at Jerusalem resolved that Simon should be their gover¬ nor and high priest for ever, until there should arise a faithful prophet, i.e. Messiah (1 Macc. xiv. 41). Evidently the tendency of the historian was to regard this as a restoration of the kingdom of Israel, and to make little or no account of the hopes connected with the Messiah, whom he only speaks of as a prophet. The main object of the priestly party certainly was, to maintain their ascendency and independence of foreign powers. But a government that owed its origin to a wise policy in relation to foreign and heathen powers, could not be very strict in carrying out the require¬ ments of the law, and so, though it never went back 94 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. into anything like the Hellenizing ways of the party originally opposed to the Hasidim, yet the more earnest maintainers of the law became gradually dis¬ affected to the Asmonean government. The Pharisees, or separatists, as they began to be called, did not share the political aims of the priests ; they did not care much for civil independence ; they desired to have the law fully and perfectly observed, and in order to attain this, the scribes had begun to make a hedge round the law, and enlarge it by traditions which must be observed with equal care. The first indication of an open breach between the two parties occurs towards the end of the reign of J ohn Hyrcanus, the son and successor of Simon. According to Josephus, he had been attached to the Pharisees, and endeavoured to please them ; and when he had reigned twenty-eight years, he assembled them at a feast, and after protesting his desire in all his govern¬ ment to act according to the law, he invited them to point out anything in which he had failed to do so. They all bore witness to his faithfulness; but one, Eleazar, said, that if he desired to obey the law, he should lay down the high-priesthood, because his mother had been a captive among the Gentiles. The rest repelled this charge, which Josephus says was false ; but as they did not pronounce so severe a sentence on Eleazar as Hyrcanus thought necessary, he suspected them all of secretly sympathizing with the charge, and thereupon went over to the party of the Sadducees (Ant. xiii. 10). Josephus’ representations are somewhat distorted by his mistaken idea of the Pharisees and Sadducees of that time being theological sects ; and it would perhaps SUPPL.] PHAE1SEES AND SADDUCEES. 95 be more correct to say, that the Pharisees, i.e. the party of the scribes, left Hyrcanus, than that he left them. The Sadducees were simply the party of the priestly aristocracy, and were not distinguished at first by those negative theological opinions that were their chief characteristic in New Testament times. They differed indeed from the scribes, in seeking the deliverance of the people by political means, instead of expecting that a perfect obedience to the law would be rewarded by a supernatural interposition of God to give them the Messianic kingdom. They did not need to lay much stress on the resurrection of the dead, which formed a prominent and essential element in the Pharisees’ ideas of the future ; and as their opposition to the Pharisees grew more decided, they might be led to reject this doctrine entirely. How the idea of a present external theocracy tends towards the omission of the doctrine of a future life, appears in Warburton’s once famous but now exploded theory of the Jewish theocracy, in which an essential position was, that the Mosaic revelation contained no teaching about a state after death, because it was sanctioned and supported by a special providential government in the present. The connection of ideas may have been similar in the system of the Sadducees. The political character of the Sadducees appears even after the fall of the independent Asmonean princes. In the days of Jesus, while the scribes and Pharisees were offended at his transgressing the traditions of the elders (Matt. xv. l), and being in their view not careful enough about the Sabbath law, the chief priests, who were Sadducees, were concerned lest, in consequence of the movement raised by Jesus, the Komans would 96 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. come and take away their place and nation (John xi. 48), and afterwards lest the apostles’ preaching Jesus as the Messiah should bring his blood on them (Acts v. 28). Alexander Janneeus, the second son of Hyrcanus, who succeeded his elder brother Aristobulus as high priest and king of the Jews in 105 b.c., was strongly opposed to the Pharisees, and engaged in violent contentions and civil wars with them. They still maintained the objection to the legitimacy of his priesthood from the alleged servile birth of his father. But when he died in 79 b.c. , he advised his wife Alexandra to endeavour to gain over the Pharisees by giving them the direction of affairs. This was accordingly done. Her elder son, Hyrcanus, a man of peaceful and unambitious character, was made high priest, and the party of the scribes held sway in the state, re-establishing the observance of the traditional law. After the death of Alexandra (69 b.c.) came the civil war between her sons Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, the former being supported by the scribes and Pharisees, the latter by the priests and Sadducees (Josephus, Ant. xiv. 2). When Pompey appeared as arbiter between the rival claimants and parties at Damascus in 63 b.c., the body of the people, who were animated by the Pharisaic principles, desired that the kingly power should be abolished, and complained of both the brothers as attempting to bring them into servitude. They would acknowledge Hyrcanus as high priest, but neither him nor his brother as prince ; and they would have the civil power in the hands of the Sanhedrin (Joseph. Ant. xiv. 3. 2). When Aristobulus afterwards took up arms against the Romans to restore SUPPL.] TIIE PSALMS OF SOLOMON. 97 the old Maccabean independence, Hyrcanus and the Pharisaic party admitted Pompey’s army into Jerusalem; and while the priests defended themselves in the temple until it was taken by the Poman general, were willing to submit to the political sovereignty of Pome, though they were offended at the desecration of the holy place (Joseph. Ant. xiv. 4). The views and aspirations of the Pharisees about this time are expressed in the remarkable collection of poems called the Psalms of Solomon.1 These psalms must have been written after the death of Pompey, as they refer to his capture and profanation of the temple, which is regarded as a judgment on the wickedness of Israel, but for which the haughty Poman is to be himself punished. This is expressed thus in the second of these psalms : — 1 When the wicked man was exalted, he cast down with the ram strong walls, And thou didst not hinder. 2 Strange nations have gone up on thy altar : They have trampled with their shoes in pride ; 3 Because the sons of Jerusalem polluted the holy things of the Lord, Profaned the gifts of God by lawlessness. 4 Because of these he said : Cast them far from me, I have no pleasure in them. 5 The beauty of their glory was set at nought ; Before God it was dishonoured for ever. 6 Our sons and our daughters are in an evil bondage, Their neck under a seal, a sign among the Gentiles. 7 According to their deeds he hath done to them, For he hath left them to the hands of the mighty ; 8 For he hath turned his face from mercy on them, Their young men, and their old men, and their children together ; 9 For they did evil together, not to hear. 10 And the heaven was indignant, And the earth abhorred them ; 11 For no man did upon it what they did. 1 Ya.'huol 2x*.oftuvTos. Libri Apocrypki V. T. grcece, ed. O. F. Fritzsclie. Appendix. G 98 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. 12 And the earth shall know all thy judgments that are righteous. • •••••••* 16 I will justify thee, O God, in uprightness of heart ; For in thy judgments is thy righteousness, O God ! 1 7 For thou didst render to the sinners according to their deeds, According to their sins that are exceeding wicked. 18 Thou didst discover their sins, that thy judgment might appear. 19 Thou didst blot out their memory from the earth. God is a righteous judge, and will not regard persons. 20 He tore down her beauty from the throne of glory, For the Gentiles put Jerusalem to shame in trampling her down. 21 She girded herself with sackcloth instead of goodly raiment, A rope round her head instead of a crown. 22 She took off the glorious mitre which God put upon her. 23 Her beauty is cast away to the earth in dishonour. 24 And I saw, and besought the face of the Lord, and said, Let there be enough, Lord, of thy hand being heavy on Jerusalem in bringing up the Gentiles ; 25 For they mocked and spared not in anger and fury with animosity ; 26 And we shall be consumed, unless thou, Lord, rebuke them in thine anger ; 27 For they did it not in zeal, but in the desire of their soul 28 To pour out their own anger on us in rapine. Delay not, O God, to recompense upon their heads, 29 That the pride of the dragon may yield in disgrace. 30 And God delayed not, till he showed me His insolence pierced upon the mountains of Egypt, Set at nought by the least upon land and sea, 31 His body rotting upon the waves with great insults, And there was none to bury. 32 For he set him at nought in disgrace. He considered not that he is a man ; And he regarded not the latter end. 33 He said, I shall be lord of land and sea : And he knew not that God is great, Strong in his great might. The reference to Pompey is unmistakable, and the poem shows the view that the writer took of the reason of the calamities of his people. It is a view very similar to that of many of the prophets, and doubtless derived from them. The Gentile invasions are judgments on Israel for their sins ; but, on the other hand, God’s mercy continues over his people, and the selfish ambition of the heathen brings down in turn judgments on them. SUPPL.] THE PSALMS OF SOLOMON. 99 What were the particular sins for which he regarded the afflictions of the time as a judgment, appears in some measure from other passages of these psalms. The fourth is directed against those who live in hypocrisy among the saints, the men-pleasers, who are described as sitting in the Sanhedrin, though their heart has departed far from the Lord, abundant in words of fair profession, hard in judgment against sinners, but secretly practising licentiousness and fraud. The character of severity in judgment is one that is ascribed to the Sadducees in contrast with the Pharisees, one of whose maxims was to lean ever to the most favourable side ; 1 and the other features would naturally be those of a wealthy and politic aristocracy. A similar descrip¬ tion is given in Psal. viii. 7-14 ; and thereafter it is said that on this account God brought against J erusalem from the end of the earth him that strikes mightily (i.e. Pompey), and poured on them a spirit of error, so that they opened the gates to him, and received him in peace, whereupon he shed much blood and carried many away captive. In point of fact it was the Pharisees who opened the gates to Pompey, while the Sadducees resisted him in the temple ; so that this representation does not seem to be quite accurate. But it is not perhaps necessary to identify the “ rulers of the land” (Psal. viii. 18) with the sinners before described, and after all that which caused the calamity was, not the admission of Pompey by the Pharisees, but the resistance of the Sadducees. The writer of these psalms seems to have been led by his patriotic feelings of indignation at Pompey to a somewhat 1 Weber, System der altsynagogalen pahestinischen Theologie , p. 11. 100 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. rhetorical rather than strictly accurate representation of the events. In another passage he expresses the objection that was taken by the Pharisees to the rule of the Asmonean family as not of the line of David (Psal. xvii. 5) : — 5 Thou, Lord, didst choose David to be king over Israel, And thou didst swear to him concerning his seed for ever, That his kingdom should not fail before thee. 6 And in our sins there have risen upon us sinful men ; They set upon us and thrust us out ; They to whom thou didst not promise robbed with force, 7 And they did not honour thy glorious name ; They set a palace in glory for their loftiness ; 8 They desolated the throne of David in the haughtiness of their boasting ; But thou, Lord, shalt cast them down, And shalt take away their seed from the earth ; 9 When there rises upon them a man foreign to our race ; 10 According to their sins thou shalt render to them, 0 God. Let it be found to them according to their deeds. Then follows another description of the foreign invader, who desolates the land and sends its children captives to the west ; and then again there is a refer¬ ence to the sins of the princes, judges, and people, that deserved such judgments. After this comes the principal Messianic passage in this work, showing the writer’s view of the kingdom of God in the future : — 23 Behold, Lord, and raise up to them their king, The son of David, for the time which thou knowest, O God, To reign over Israel thy servant : 24 And gird him with strength to crush unrighteous rulers. 25 From Gentiles treading it down in destruction cleanse Jerusalem In wisdom, in righteousness : 26 To thrust out sinners from the inheritance, To root out the haughtiness of sinners, As potters’ vessels with an iron rod to crush all their substance, 27 To destroy lawless nations by the word of his mouth, That nations may flee from his face at his threat, And that he may rebuke sinners in the word of their heart. 28 And he shall gather a holy people, which he shall lead in righteousness ; And he shall judge the tribes of a people sanctified by the Lord his God ; SUPPL.] THE PSALMS OF SOLOMON-. 101 29 And he shall not suffer unrighteousness to harbour in the midst of them. And there shall not dwell with them any man that knoweth vice ; 30 For he shall know them that all are sons of their God ; And he shall divide them in their tribes upon the earth ; 31 And a sojourner and a stranger shall no more dwell with them. He shall judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness : 32 And he shall have the peoples of the Gentiles to serve him under his yoke ; And he shall glorify the Lord with an ensign for all the earth ; 33 And he shall cleanse Jerusalem in sanctification as at the beginning, 34 That nations may come from the ends of the earth to see his glory, Bringing as gifts her sons that are weakened, 35 And to see the glory of the Lord with which God hath glorified her. And himself shall be a righteous king taught by God over them, 36 And there is no unrighteousness in his days among them ; For all are holy, and their king is the Lord’s anointed.1 37 For he shall not trust on horse, or horseman, or bow ; Nor shall he multiply to himself gold and silver for war, Nor shall he gather hopes with arms for the day of battle. 38 The Lord himself is his king ; the hope of the mighty is by hope in God. And he shall raise up all the nations before him in fear ; 39 For he shall smite the earth with the word of his mouth for ever. 40 He shall bless the people of the Lord in wisdom with joy ; 41 And he is himself pure from sin to rule the great people, To rebuke rulers, and to remove sinners by strength of word. 42 And he shall not be weak in his God all his days ; Because God made him powerful in holy spirit, And wise in counsel of understanding, in strength and righteousness. 43 And the blessing of the Lord shall be on him in strength, And his hope shall not be weak on the Lord. 44 And who can resist him, Strong in his works and mighty in the fear of God, 45 Shepherding the flock of the Lord in faithfulness and righteousness ? And he shall not suffer any in them to be weak in their pasture. 46 In piety he shall lead them all ; And there shall not be in them haughtiness to be overpowered in them. 47 This is the comeliness of the king of Israel, which God decreed, To raise him over the house of Israel to chasten it. 48 His words are tried in the fire above the most precious gold ; In assemblies he shall discriminate the people, the tribes of the sanctified. 49 His words are as words of holy ones among sanctified peoples. 50 Blessed are they that live in those days, 1 The Greek is Xptv to; xvpio; ; but this is in all probability a mistransla¬ tion of nvr irtw, as in the LXX. of Lam. iv. 20. 102 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [DECT. II. To see in the assembly of the tribes the good things of Israel, which God shall bring to pass. 51 May God hasten his mercy upon Israel, Deliver us from the uncleanness of profane enemies ! The Lord himself is our king for ever and ever. Here we liave obviously an echo of some of the prophetic descriptions of the Messianic times, and a reproduction of some of the leading ideas of the Old Testament. That Israel is the people of God, that their prosperity depends on their faithfulness to him and to his law, that he chastens them for their sins by means of the heathen nations, but will ultimately judge these nations and sift his people, separating the hypocrites from those who truly trust in him, that God is to raise up a son of David to reign over Israel in righteousness and peace, and to have dominion over all nations, and that this kingdom of God is to be established, not by worldly might or policy, but by a divine power, which is to be rested on by faith : these ideas expressed in these psalms are genuine utterances of a heart that has taken in a large portion of the prophetic oracles, especially those of Amos, Micah, Habakkuk, Zeplianiah, and parts of Isaiah, which speak of Israel being sifted and purified by judgment, the sinners being destroyed, and the believing remnant saved. But there is no echo in these poems of that other line of prophetic teaching that is given especially by Hosea, Joel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and foretells the conversion of Israel by God’s gracious chastisement, and the pouring out of his Spirit. In the picture of the Messianic kingdom given in these psalms, there is no word of the new covenant, or of God’s gift of the new heart, as necessary in order to real obedience to SUPPL.] THE PSALMS OF SOLOMON. 103 the law, or of the writing the law in the heart. So far from this, the writer looks for deliverance by a judgment that shall destroy the sinners and save the righteous. Even these, indeed, are not perfect or free from sin, they are chastened, and that is a blessing to them. But it is by their own will that they turn from sin, and by their repentance and confession to God they obtain his mercy. This appears in Psal. ix. : — 7 O God, our works are in the choice and power of our soul, To do righteousness or unrighteousness in the works of our hands. 8 And in thy righteousness thou visitest the sons of men. 9 He that doeth righteousness treasureth life to himself with the Lord ; And he that doeth unrighteous things is himself the author of his soul’s destruction. 10 For the judgments of the Lord are in righteousness on each man and house. 11 To whom shalt thou be good, O God, but to those who call on the Lord ? 12 He shall cleanse his soul from sins, in confession, in praise. 13 For to us and our faces is shame for all things. 14 But to whom shall he forgive sins, but to those who have sinned 1 15 Thou shalt bless the righteous, and not exact for the sins they have done, And thy goodness is to sinners in repentance. The mercy of God is indeed spoken of, but it is to the righteous as forgiving their shortcomings and sins, but there is no word of salvation and grace for those who have more grievously sinned. All that is looked for is a coming of the Messiah to judgment, to destroy the wicked and to establish his kingdom with the righteous. So, also, the attitude of the author towards the Gentiles is an exclusive one. Messiah’s reign is indeed to be universal, but only in the way of subduing all nations and crushing all who oppose him, not by extending to them the blessings of the kingdom. Those prophecies that describe the kingdom of the Son of 104 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. David in the language of war and conquest are re-echoed and apparently understood in a literal sense ; but there is no trace of the influence of those that speak of outside nations as incorporated among the people of God, and sharing their privileges as equals and brethren. It is just what might be expected from the other features of these psalms, that there does not at all appear in them that idea of a suffering Messiah, which, in the later Book of Isaiah, Zechariah, and some of the Psalms, is closely connected with the representa¬ tion of the deep moral renewal of the hearts of the people needed for their regeneration. In short, we find here self-portrayed the Pharisaic spirit, both in its strength and in its defects. There is a real zeal for God, a genuine enthusiasm in the utterance of his praises, and in the confidence ex¬ pressed in him. But there is a spirit of legalism about the piety thus expressed ; and the blessedness of the future is looked for as something entirely apart from the present, that is to come by an abrupt, supernatural, and, as it were, magical interposition of God. Another apocryphal writing, probably somewhat earlier than the Psalms of Solomon, may be referred to here, as indicating the transition towards the Alexandrian form of Judaism, afterwards more fully developed by Philo. The Wisdom of Solomon speaks of the righteous as sons of God (ii. 13, 18, v. 5), and declares that they shall reign with him (iii. 8); and in one remarkable passage (v. 15-23) it describes how God shall establish his kingdom. In language closely resembling Isa. lix. 16-18, he is represented as arming himself with a panoply of zeal, a breastplate SUPPL.] THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 105 of righteousness, a helmet of judgment, a shield of holiness, and a sword of wrath. But then, instead of the declaration of the moral work of God’s word and Spirit that follows on this in the evangelical prophet (Isa. lix. 19-21), the Alexandrian author of this hook merely portrays physical convulsions, in which the world fights along with God against his enemies. The righteous raised from the dead are to take part with God in judging their enemies and reigning over the world ; but there is a curious mixture of Platonic and Jewish notions, which makes it impossible to gather from this book any distinct idea of wliat the author conceived the kingdom of God to be. We see here the historical notion of the kingdom of God fading away into an abstract idea, which is all that we find in the writings of Philo corresponding to it. In the course of the conflict between Hyrcanus, whom the Pharisees supported, and Aristobulus, with whom were the Sadducees, the former party proved successful, chiefly through the energy and policy of Antipater the Idumean, and father of Herod the Great, who, availing himself of the necessities of the contending factions in the Boman state, and taking the side of the most powerful, succeeded in bringing to an end the Asmonean line of priest-kings in Israel, and the domination of the Sadducean priestly aristocracy. But Antipater and his sons, especially Herod, were far from being animated by the Pharisaic principles, and it soon became plain that their ambition aimed simply at establishing a rule of their own. They paid no regard to the law, for which the Pharisees w^ere so zealous ; they defied the authority of the Sanhedrin ; and they adopted and 106 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. introduced among the people foreign and heathen customs. Thus they established a dynasty that was as much opposed to the Pharisees’ ideas as that of the Asmoneans had been, and that was besides of foreign origin, and reigned in entire subjection to Roman power. Hence the party of the Herodians in the time of Christ seems to have been distinct alike from the Pharisees and the Sadducees, though it had some points of affinity to both. Along with those great ecclesiastical parties, there are also to be considered the ideas about the expected reign of Cod held by those who were rather visionary dreamers, without any definite practical scheme to pro¬ pose or carry out. Their expectations are to be found in the apocryphal apocalyptic literature of the Jews in the times before Christ. In the later times of Old Testament history, the utterances of prophecy assume in some cases what has been called the apocalyptic form. By that is meant the mode or garb in which the future of the Messianic kingdom is represented in the Book of Daniel, and parts of Ezekiel and Zechariali, in the Apocalypse of John, and such apocryphal writings as the Book of Enoch, Sibylline oracles, the Testaments of the twelve patriarchs, the Fourth Book of Ezra, and the Ascension of Isaiah. What all these have in common is the allegorical style of representing historical events by fanciful symbols, artfully woven into imaginary narratives. Such a use of symbols must have formed part of the art of inter¬ preting dreams, so common in all ages ; for the lawless fancies of the sleeping brain could only be made to correspond to any real events by being treated as SUPPL.] APOCALYPTIC FOEM OF PEOPHECY. 107 symbols. Tlie same thing must have been done in all other kinds of divination. Then the converse process of representing actual events by symbols became a literary fashion, of which instances may be found in most languages, and which came into use especially when artificial kinds of composition were admired rather than the more simple. Such a period seems to have come in Hebrew literature about the time of the captivity, and it was therefore natural that prophecy should adopt it. It was also suitable to the circumstances of the times that the essential hope of the ultimate establishment of a world-wide kingdom of God should now be presented in such a form. Israel was then under the dominion of the Babylonian Empire, and the triumph of the kingdom of God, of which Israel had the promise, must imply the fall of that empire. Any prophecy of the kingdom, therefore, which should be suited to the times, must include the future of the Babylonian Empire as well. The history of the people of God, from this time on, was interwoven with the general history of the world, in a way in which it had not been before ; and the symbolical mode of representation was not only suited to the taste of the time, but the best adapted for giving a view of the general outline and leading principles of the future, without furnishing a detailed history beforehand. The symbols were used partly to describe events of the past or relations of the present, and by these their meaning was made intelligible ; and then the representation was projected into the future, and the eye of the seer looked onwards to the final consummation of all things, or at least to 108 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. the triumph of the good cause. So we may observe in the parable of the two eagles and the vine in Ezek. xvii., representing Israel between the empires of Egypt and Babylon, part of it refers to past events, and part points forward to the future. In general, such apocalyptic visions are clear and precise only in reference to the past and the present of the. writer ; and in reference to the future give nothing more than general outlines. This is true, not only of the apocryphal compositions of this kind, but also of many of the biblical ones, such as that parable of Ezekiel, and the visions of Zechariah (i.-vi.). If the Book of Daniel in its present form was written between the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, it would afford an excep¬ tion to this, for chaps, viii. and xi. undoubtedly describe with much precision of detail the events of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes. It is possible that this was so, and reasons have been suggested why there should have been this exception to the general rule ; but it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that these chapters were composed in the Maccabean time. The idea that a kingdom of God was to succeed the last of the world-kingdoms, and that this last world- kingdom was to be the most wicked and ungodly of all, was taken into the popular mind of Israel from the visions of Dan. ii. and vii., and made the basis of further imaginative development in apocalyptic litera¬ ture, such as the Sibylline oracles, the Book of Enoch-, and the like. But these popular anticipations over¬ looked one feature in the visions of Daniel, the remarkable distinction indicated between the kingdom of God and the world-kingdoms. In chap. ii. they are parts of an SUFPL.J APOCKYPIIAL APOCALYPTIC LOOKS. 109 image, i.e. a work of man, degenerating in excellence from gold to iron and clay ; it is a stone cut out without hands, i.e. a work of God. In chap. vii. they are wild beasts rising out of the sea, each more fierce and cruel than the last ; it is a son of man, coming in the clouds of heaven. This contrast might have taught men that the kingdom of God was to be different in its nature and in the way of its establishment from the empires of this world ; and had the visions of Daniel been taken in connection with the plainer utterances of other prophets, it might have been seen that God’s kingdom was to be set up by spiritual means, and not by mere power. But the expectation of many was that a divine judgment should destroy the last of the world-empires, and that the king of the new theocracy should literally come in the clouds of heaven, raise the godly dead from their graves, and reign with them on the earth in peace and plenty, with abundance of all earthly delights. This is the view generally presented in the apocryphal apocalyptic books, and it was doubtless widely current. Any great outburst of wickedness, oppression, or perse¬ cution, on the part of heathen rulers, awakened in enthusiastic minds the thought, this must be the worst and last outbreak of evil, it will soon end, and then will come the Messiah and the kingdom of God. This idea found literary expression in imaginary prophecies by some ancient seer or patriarch, leading up to the times of the writer, and describing the future as he expected it. This view of the kingdom of God, which is generally known as the chiliastic or millennial, would seem to have arisen from a onesided and superficial study of 110 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. the book of Daniel ; onesided, because it looked at it apart from the utterances of the earlier prophets ; and superficial, because it overlooked the indications in these visions themselves, that the kingdom of God was to be essentially different from the earthly kingdoms. That the book of Daniel does not really teach such a view of the kingdom of God, appears from the fact, that Jesus, whose teaching was most decidedly opposed to such chiliastic ideas, referred with special frequency to that book, and borrowed some of his favourite expressions from it. He may have done so indeed, just because the book of Daniel had been made the basis of such earthly ideas of the Messianic kingdom, and in order to vindicate its true meaning ; but anyhow, the teaching of the book was in his eyes very different from those wild enthusiastic anticipations, and we can easily see a vast difference between its brief and comparatively simple pictures and their extravagant fancies. The Sibylline oracles are one of the most curious and interesting relics of antiquity, and have had a very remarkable history. Ancient legends give different accounts of the number and country of those women believed by the heathen to have been prophetesses, and called Sibyls or revealers of the will of the gods. There were from an ancient time verses current under this name in different countries ; and at Eome there was a collection, believed, according to the well-known legend, to have been bought by Tarquinius Priscus, preserved under the care of special priests, and consulted on emergencies. These books seem to have contained, not predictions of future events, but directions for appeasing the deities in times of public distress ; and were probably SLTPL.] THE SIBYLLINE OEACLES. Ill consulted by drawing out a leaf at random. They were destroyed in the burning of the Capitol in 82 B.c. ; and thereafter envoys were sent to collect from various cities in Italy and Asia Minor such Sibylline oracles as could be found, to replace them. Many seem to have been found, and others were brought forward from time to time ; several of the Roman emperors gave orders for examining those that were current, destroying the spurious, and keeping under the control of the priests those deemed genuine. What was the character of the new collection at Rome is not easy to say. Cicero seems to admit that they contained pre¬ dictions of a great and universal king, and that they were not favourable to the Roman religion (De Divina- tum, ii. 54); and Virgil professes to derive from the Sibylline oracles the picture of a golden age about to begin, which he draws in his fourth eclogue, and which ha3 such a remarkable resemblance to some of the Old Testament prophecies. Many of the Christian fathers regarded the Sibyls as true prophets of the Gentiles, and quoted from poems extant under their name ; others thought that there had been a Hebrew Sibyl, who had given true oracles, though the others were deceivers. In modern times there have been recovered twelve books and some frag¬ ments of Sibylline oracles. This collection is very varied in character and date. Some parts are obviously forgeries by Christians, generally of a Judaizing tend¬ ency ; others are the work of Jews, and these again are of widely different ages. There seem also to be intermixed or interwoven with the mass some ancient heathen oracles ; and the whole is thrown together 112 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. without any order or arrangement. The greater part of the third book, which is the oldest portion, is a Jewish composition, not later than the time of the Maccabees ; and it is quite possible that this, or something like this, may have found its way into the collection made and preserved at Rome. But its chief interest lies in the insight it gives into the Messianic views of a portion of the Jews at that time. The writer was a Jew in Egypt, whence most of such literary productions seem to have proceeded, and either for the purpose of deceit, or merely as a rhetorical exercise, composed a poem in the style and verse of current heathen Sibylline oracles, as an imaginary prophecy by one of these legendary seers. It contains descriptions of successive kingdoms that are to reign in the world. The Macedonian Empire is expressly and distinctly spoken of, and the Roman power more vaguely hinted at, described as still republican ; then it is said, the people of the great God shall again be strong and be guides of life to all men (Sib. iii. 194, 195). This is considered by critics to refer to the establish¬ ment of Jewish independence in the time of the Maccabees. Then there is an outline of the history of Israel from the exodus to the seventy years’ exile ; and the restoration by Cyrus and rebuilding of the temple are described. Then comes a series of denunciations of calamity against various cities and countries for idolatry and immorality, and the Greeks especially are exhorted to repent and worship the true God, bringing sacrifices to his temple. There shall be terrible wars and battles, in which the ungodly nations shall be destroyed. Then God shall send a king from the east, who shall put an SUPPL.] THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES. 113 end to war and enrich the people of God with all wealth and glory. But the kings of the earth shall again invade the holy land ; and when they approach the sacred city, God shall scatter them with his voice, and overwhelm them with fire and hail from heaven. There¬ after comes the kingdom of eternal peace and happiness, when all men shall serve and worship God, and all creatures shall be at peace (vers. 702-94). A piece of much later date, though placed earlier in the collection, predicts that a holy prince shall come, who shall wield the sceptres of the whole earth ; that then an adversary, called Beliar, shall come showing false miracles ; but that God shall destroy him and all who follow him ; and by tremendous cosmical changes shall melt down all the elements, and bring out of them a new and pure world (vers. 46-96). This portion bears evidence of having; been written about the time of the second Roman triumvirate. In these curious poems we see the popular form of the Messianic expectations of the time. Many parts of them are copied very closely from some of the pro¬ phecies, especially of Isaiah ; but they have imitated chiefly the more external features of his description of the future kingdom of God. It is conceived simply as a worldly dominion, in which peace and plenty, wealth and prosperity, abound ; and it is to be ushered in by terrible judgments against the heathen enemies of God’s people, and terrible convulsions of nature. No spiritual promises are given, and there is no indication of a change of the law and ordinances of Israel. Sacrifices are still to be offered, and a temple still kept up as the place of worship. The personal Messiah, too, is of very H 114 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. little importance. He is indeed mentioned, but no special work is assigned for him to do ; the conflict with the evil power is described as merely physical ; and the final result is expected to be attained simply by mighty supernatural works of divine judgment. Naturally therefore we find no trace of a suffering and atoning Messiah. It is a onesided reflection of the prophetic teaching, in which what is outward, striking, and attrac¬ tive to the eye of sense is made exclusively prominent ; and while we must recognise in the writers of these poems moral and religious earnestness and strong hope, such as distinguish them from heathen poets, we see also a want of spirituality that would make them most unsafe and misleading guides to those who might form their thoughts of the promised kingdom of God on them. The book of Enoch, though similar in its general form, is in some respects very different in its contents from the Sibylline oracles. In it the person of the Messiah, instead of being thrown into the background, is remarkably prominent : he is called the Elect One, the Son of man, and in one place the Son of God : he is described as pre-existent, and is associated with God in a way that closely approaches the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The symbolical representation of the history of Israel seems to ex¬ tend down to the time of Herod, or even to that of the Jewish war ; and there are some passages in which it is very difficult to avoid seeing the hand of a Christian, while other portions wTould seem to be the work of a Jew, who had gained some knowledge of Christian phrases and ideas, and been partly influenced by them. It seems impossible to appeal with any con- SUPPL.] THE BOOK OF ENOCH. 115 ficlence to this extraordinary production for the opinions of the Jews before the time of our Lord. In its general features, indeed, it is thoroughly Judaic, and may be regarded as a specimen of that class of Messianic antici¬ pations that lookedfor a sudden supernatural catastrophe, and a divine judgment that should overthrow the wicked and establish a kingdom of God. But where so much is fanciful and extravagant, and there is so strono; sus- picion of interpolation, it is hardly possible to form any distinct idea of what sort of a king;dom the writer expected. At the time when the Baptist appeared, there was a general expectation of the coming of the reign of God ; but very different ideas of the way in which it was to come. At the head of the nation was the priestly aristocracy, which had indeed lost much of its power since the rise of the Herodian family, and the subjection of Judea to the direct government of Rome, but was still a strong and wealthy body, with the greatest influence in the Sanhedrin. Their aim was to maintain as carefully as possible what remains of independence Israel still had. Their Sadducean views left them no faith in any supernatural divine inter¬ position or miraculous appearance of a kingdom of God ; that must be looked for, they thought, through ordinary political means ; and as political wisdom gave no encouragement to a popular uprising, they were shut up to a cautious temporizing policy, and deprecated any violent excitement. Then there were the scribes, who aimed at the rigid observance of the letter of the law, with the traditions that they had raised up as a fence round it, and who looked for a sudden miraculous 116 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. II. interposition of God for Israel, if only it would perfectly keep the law. This party had the favour and support of the great body of the people. Some, however, were not satisfied with waiting in peace and inaction for a miraculous deliverance ; but, zealous for the law, and provoked to action by public violations and insults offered to it, took up arms, and attempted to imitate the deeds of Mattathias and his sons, who had delivered Israel from the yoke of Antioclius Epiphanes. John’s proclamation did not agree with the pro¬ grammes of any of these parties. It was too open and bold an announcement of the kingdom of God to please those who thought that the hope of Israel lay in wise and cautious policy, and in avoiding anything that might provoke the suspicion or jealousy of the Roman Empire. A popular preaching of the reign of God at hand would create disturbance ; and once the unstable equilibrium of the national existence were disturbed, no man could tell what might be the issue. To provoke a conflict with Rome would be to lose the last poor remains of independence, and that in their view was the only hope of the promised kingdom of God. To the Pharisees, the movement might not be so immediately obnoxious. As they looked for a supernatural deliverance, a prophet like Elijah might be its herald ; nor was a call to amendment of life in their view an unsuitable mode of preparation, if only it had been a call to strict observance of the law, oral as well as written. Had John given himself out as a literally supernatural being, Elijah, or one of the prophets actually risen from the dead, they might have more readily acknowledged him (see John i. SUPPL.] JOHN THE BAPTIST. 117 19-25). But lie made no such claim; and it was not legal observances, but moral goodness, that he insisted on ; and so the Pharisees soon found that his move¬ ment was utterly opposed to their ideas. Still less could the Zealots sympathize with one who did not enjoin publicans and soldiers to leave the service of the heathen, but only to be honest and contented. But while differing from all these ideas and plans of the time, the Baptist’s teaching was just in the line of the old prophets. They, too, had precisely the same tendencies to contend against. The politicians of Israel and Judah, who sought the safety and establishment of the kingdom from alliances with Egypt and combina¬ tions of neighbouring states against Assyria, were the forerunners of the Sadducees of that day ; those who thought that by many sacrifices, fasts, and ritual observances they would win the favour of Jehovah, were of the same principles and spirit as the scribes and Pharisees of John’s day ; while the Zealots were animated by the temper of their last kings, who rushed fanatically into a mad and fatal rebellion against the Chaldean Empire. In the face of all these, the prophets had urged the duty of true humiliation before God for moral evils, repentance and reformation of these, and trust in God ; and it was precisely these things that John inculcated.1 1 See Appendix, Note J. . LECTUKE III. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE TEACHING OF CHRIST. Mark i. 14, 15. — “Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand : repent ye, and believe the gospel.” LECTURE III. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE TEACHING OF CHRIST. "Y\TE have to proceed now to the central and most " " important part of our subject, the kingdom of God as proclaimed and established by Jesus. The phrase kingdom or reign of God , or of heaven , was often on his lips ; and he spoke of it as a thing that had been indeed promised and expected, but was now to be made a reality by him and his work. The object of our inquiry must be, not to ascertain all that he taught about the kingdom of God, for that would imply an exposition of his whole theology, but to learn what was the actual thing; that he brought into existence, and called by that name ; and more parti¬ cularly, whether it was indeed that kingdom, or blessed society of men, for which Gentile nations had been craving, and Israel had been taught to hope. Did he use the name merely by way of adaptation to the ideas of his countrymen, while his work would be more truly described as teaching a new religion, founding a church, or giving spiritual life and salvation to individual souls ? In that case, the name would be a mere form of repre¬ sentation, and the study of it would only illustrate our Lord’s mode of teaching. Or is it the most proper and literal designation of what Jesus actually brought in, giving a more adequate view of its nature than any of 122 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. these other descriptions, true and important as they are ? Then in studying it we are actually studying, not merely how Jesus sometimes described his work, but that work itself as a great reality ; and as the Old Testament theocracy was, as we have seen, a real and active training of his people by God, so the Christian kingdom of God is the higher and more universal training for which that was designed to prepare. We must pursue this inquiry by considering the substantial meaning of the sayings of Jesus, especially of his main and central ones, in which he gave, not mere incidental statements, but announcements of his great and chief work, and by observing whether, when we apprehend these as realities in the most direct way, the idea of a kingdom or reign of God falls off as inadequate and confusing, or whether it shows itself to be still appropriate, and, indeed, comes into view where we would not expect it, and proves to be the very thing that gives reality and consistency to varying figures and descriptions. If we find the latter alternative to be the fact, we cannot hesitate to conclude that the kingdom of God is not a mere figure of speech, but the direct designation of a great reality. According to Matthew (iv. 17) and Mark (i. 14, 15), Jesus began his public work by repeating the same proclamation that had been made by John the Baptist, “ Repent, for the reign of heaven 1 (or of God) is at hand.” The only difference, if any, in the initial announcement would seem to be, that in Jesus’ mouth it is more distinctly described as glad tidings. This is suitable to the circumstance, that while John declared 1 See Appendix, Note K. LECT. III.] JESUS’ INITIAL PROCLAMATION. 123 himself to be merely the herald of the approaching reign of God, Jesus appeared as invested with authority and power actually to establish it. John did not aim at forming a new community ; his aim was to prepare the people as a whole for the reign of God, which he who came after him should set up. He baptized those who confessed their sins and professed repentance, but he did not form them into a distinct body.1 But Jesus from the beginning of his ministry attached disciples to himself, and these not only as the pupils of a Babbi, but as the members of the kingdom of God which he proclaimed. His disciples were not only the few who followed him personally and received his instruction from day to day, but a much larger number, from whom he chose the twelve (Luke vi. 13), and who were found in Judea and Samaria (John iv. 1, 41) as well as in Galilee. The Sermon on the Mount is addressed to his disciples in the larger sense, and it addresses them as members of the kingdom of heaven. It seems clear that Jesus represents the reign of God either as already present or at least as so near at hand that men could truly enjoy its blessings and come under its power. His call to the people was to believe the glad tidings about the reign of God, and to yield themselves to it. In order to understand our Lord’s teaching about the kingdom of God, we may consider — I. The nature of the kingdom. II. Its righteousness or fundamental constitution. III. Its king. I. When Jesus began his public work with the pro- 1 See Weiss, Leben Jesu, i. 302, 303. 124 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. clamation, the reign of God is at hand, he was not introducing a new idea, but announcing the advent of what had long been expected and longed for, the blessed time foretold by the prophets when God would manifest himself as the deliverer of his people, and reign over them in righteousness and peace, defending them by his power, and giving them perfect and everlasting happiness. But there was no outward token of the sort of deliverance that they expected, no appearance of the downfall or removal of the Boman supremacy, no signs from heaven indicating super¬ natural judgments impending, like the plagues of Egypt, on the heathen power. At first those who looked for such things might be content to wait in the hope that by and by they would appear. The miracles of Jesus might even seem to them precursors of the more glorious things they looked for, though they were not themselves the signs from heaven that were to be seen when Messiah should come. But soon it became apparent that Jesus did not contemplate at all such an earthly deliverance as they expected ; and that while he was declaring the prophecies of the reign of God to be fulfilled, it was in a very different way from what they looked for. The chief points on which our Lord’s teaching about the kingdom of God contradicted that current in his day were these : — 1. He represented its blessings as not external but spiritual. 2. He declared the way of entering it to be, not by works of the law, but by faith in himself as revealing God’s grace. LECT. III.] ITS BLESSINGS SPIRITUAL. 125 3. He described the power that rules in it as being not force but life. In all these points his teaching was in the line of the Old Testament prophets, and carried out their spirit ; but in them all he went beyond what had been dis¬ tinctly revealed or understood in the former dis¬ pensation. 1. We have very little information as to how Jesus explained the kingdom of God to those whom he addressed for the first time on the subject, since in most of his discourses some knowledge of it is pre¬ supposed ; but what throws most light on his way of introducing men to it, is the account of his discourse in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke iv. 17-30). Though he had before this been preaching and doing miracles in other places, and the evangelist may not have put it in its chronological connection, yet it was evidently his first address to that audience. He read part of Isa. lxi. and declared that prophecy to be then fulfilled. Now that passage is one of those that describe the glory and blessedness of the restored people of Israel under a new reign of God.1 That expression does not indeed occur in the place read by Jesus, but it is found in Isa. lii. 7, where the whole announcement of the coming deliverance is summed up in one sentence. What Jesus declared to the Nazarene congregation to be fulfilled before them was, not merely the proclamation of the blessings described in the passage that he read, but the actual bestowal of them, or at least such a pro- 1 It is pointed out by Dr. Edersheim ( Life and Times of Jesus , i. 454) that Isa. lxi. 1, 2 was regarded by the Eabbis as one of the three passages where the Holy Spirit is connected with the promised redemption, the others being Isa. xxxiii. 14, 15, and Lam. iii. 50. 126 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. clamation as is also a bestowal. When, too, he says afterwards, “ Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself,” he assumes that he presented himself to them as a physician, i.e. one who brought a remedy for the evils under which they suffered, and that they were unwilling to accept him as such, because he did not seem to have delivered himself from these evils. For they thought only or mainly of the outward evils that they suffered, since the independence of their nation was gone, their religious feelings wounded by heathen customs, and themselves impoverished by the extortion of Roman tax-gatherers, and liable to have their blood mingled with their sacrifices by Roman soldiers. This preacher of the reign of God was as poor as they, he was making no attempt to shake off the hated yoke ; the only thing about him that could incline them to regard him as a deliverer was that they had heard of mighty works done by him elsewhere ; but these he was not doing among them ; and yet he was asking them to believe, that they might have even now the blessings described by Isaiah. Jesus answers these thoughts of theirs by pointing out, from instances in Old Testament history, that divine works of outward blessing were done, not for Israelites as such, but for the widow of Zarephath, who trusted Elijah as a prophet when he was a poor and houseless wanderer, and for the Syrian Naaman, when he brought himself to take Elisha at his word. All this shows that what Jesus proclaimed was a reign of God whose blessings were spiritual, and could be enjoyed at once. This attracted to him those who really cared and longed for spiritual blessings ; while it LECT. III.] THE DISCOURSE AT NAZARETH. 127 repelled those who only cared for earthly things. He proclaimed that the reign of God was come, not because God was delivering his people from the heathen yoke by a new David or a new Moses, but because he had sent him to dispense to them spiritual blessings, forgiveness, rest, joy, freedom, righteousness. When men give them¬ selves to Jesus for these blessings, God reigns over them and in them, and theirs is the kingdom of heaven.1 It was not enough that people should come to him for earthly blessings, such as healing of sickness in themselves or their families ; he would have them feel their need of blessings for their souls, and look to him for these. He did indeed do many cures for those who did not become his disciples, since whenever he found the sick trusting in his power to heal, he seems to have healed them ; but in such cases he generally forbade them to make it known (Matt. viii. 4, ix. 30, xii. 16) ; for he did not want to become famous as a mere physical benefactor or wonder-w'orker. Where there was more than mere trust in his power of healing the body, he gave no such injunction, as in the cases of the centurion and the paralytic ; and after curing the Gadarene de¬ moniac, which was a distinctly spiritual deliverance, he bade him tell it to his kinsmen and neighbours. Jesus’ teaching in regard to the blessings of the kingdom he proclaimed is most fully and emphatically expressed in the beatitudes with which he opened his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. v. 3-10 ; Luke vi. 20-26). The blessing on the poor in spirit is just an expression of the principle repeatedly declared by Jesus, in full accordance with the Old Testament, “ He thathumbleth 1 See Appendix, Note L. 128 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. himself shall be exalted,” most strikingly illustrated in the parable of the publican, whose humiliation expressed itself in the prayer, “ God be merciful to me a sinner ” (Luke xviii. 13). The poor, the humble, the afflicted, are often in the Old Testament designations of the people of God as a whole in times of oppression and trouble ; and such a time it surely was then. None who had any genuine interest in the cause of God or the people of God could be really happy in such a state of things, when Israel was in subjection to the Gentiles, and there was so little real fear of God or appearance of his blessing. The priests and rulers indeed were wealthy and luxurious, clothed in purple and fine linen, and faring sumptuously every day. The Pharisees were satisfied with their own legal righteousness, and thought that if they only main¬ tained that, the kingdom of the Messiah would speedily come, and they at least would enjoy its blessings. Such were like those described by the prophet Amos (chap, vi. 3-6), enjoying themselves, and satisfied with them¬ selves ; “ but they were not grieved for the affliction of Joseph.” Such as really waited for the consolation of Israel would not generally be found among the rich, at least they would not be those that trusted in riches ; they would be really poor in all that enriches the spirit, whatever their outward lot might be. The following beatitudes describe them as reduced still lower, mourning, i.e. feeling their poverty, meek, i.e. weaned from all haughtiness of heart, even absolutely hungering and thirsting for righteousness. This is surely that conversion and becoming as a little child that Jesus elsewhere speaks of, that change of mind for which both John the Baptist and he called. Does it not just LECT. III.] THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 129 describe wbat had been promised by the prophets of old, that God would take away the hard and stony heart from Israel, and give them a heart of flesh ? The beatitudes really announce the fulfilment of those pro¬ mises, which were connected with the New Covenant and kingdom of God, but were precisely those aspects of it that the Jewish scribes had overlooked and neglected. If there is a hungering and thirsting after righteousness, is not the law written in the heart, as God had promised to do ; and does not this exactly correspond with what Jesus said to Nicodemus about the new birth ? Yes ! when such a state of heart is produced ; God has really given new life to dead souls, and the graces mentioned in the following beatitudes, mercy, purity, peace-making, are the fruits and proofs of that. Then, when Jesus goes on to say, that those who are thus described are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, does he not show how by means of this new birth of souls they become the nucleus of a community, and the means of extending the blessings they enjoy far and wide ? The beatitudes speak of states and experiences that are individual, and from them alone we could not see how a kingdom is to be set up ; but taken in con¬ nection with what follows, they present to our view a clear picture of a community of renewed souls, checking corruption, and diffusing light among those around them, and thus forming a people or kingdom of God in the world, a stone cut out without hands, that is to become a great mountain and fill all the earth. The announcement that the kingdom of God is to be established by men being brought into such a state of i 130 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. spiritual poverty as is described in our Lord’s beatitudes, is in perfect accordance with the sayings of the prophets. By Hosea the Lord says of Israel, “ I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak to her heart, and give her the valley of trouble for a door of hope” (Hos. ii. 14, 15; cf. iii. 4, 5, v. 14, 15, xiv. 1-3). Isaiah says, “ The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down ; and the Lord alone shall be exalted on that day” (Isa. ii. 11, cf. 17 ; also, v. 15-17). The blessing is to come “ when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof, by the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning ” (Isa. iv. 4). Promises are continually given to the poor and needy as distinct from the proud and self-reliant ; and God’s dealings alike in his judgment and in his grace are designed to produce such a poverty of spirit. So by Zephaniah he describes the final salvation thus : “ Thou shalt no more be haughty because of my holy mountain. I will also leave in the midst of thee an afflicted and poor people, and they shall trust in the name of the Lord. The remnant of Israel shall not do iniquity, nor speak lies,” etc. (Zeph. iii. 11-13). In a similar way the process of humiliation and repentance is described by Jeremiah (chap, xxxi.) as the prepara¬ tion for the New Covenant. Of the same kind are the representations of Ezekiel (xvi. 52-64, xx. 23-44). Thus the conception of the kingdom of God implied in the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, however different it misfit be from the ideas of it then current O among: the Jews, was in full accordance with Old Testa- LECT. III.] BLESSEDNESS IN AFFLICTION. 131 ment prophecy ; and if Jesus’ words seemed strange to his hearers, it was only as those of Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah seemed strange and seditious to those who in O their days placed all their hopes on earthly policy, or thought that God must save them because they were in covenant with him. Yet there was in Jesus’ teaching something more. The idea of the blessings of the kingdom of God being really enjoyed in the midst of outward poverty and affliction was one never fully apprehended before. Prosperity was the blessing of the Old Testament ; and in the earliest times that was the only token of God’s favour that men could appreciate. As the divine grace and faithfulness came to be more and more known, there was a gradual rise to more spiritual views. Men were taught that they might often have to wait long for the blessing that God would surely bestow on them. So they lived in hope, still regarding prosperity as the only thing that could give them complete blessedness, but resting meanwhile on the expectation that it would be theirs in due time. Such is the spirit of Ps. xxxvii. The Book of Job marks, and perhaps indeed effected, the transition to a higher view. Not only will God deliver his people out of all their afflictions, but he will be with them and bless them even in their afflictions, so as to make them really happier than the most suc¬ cessful wicked men. This idea and experience is expressed in Ps. iv. 6-8, lxxiii. 23-28, and also, though more from the moral point of view, in Prov. xv. 16, xvi. 8. Yet even at its highest point of spirituality Old Testament piety never rose so high as to see that the enjoyment of God’s blessing and the light of his 132 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. countenance is tlie all-sufficient blessing of his kingdom. For the people of God was still a nation ; and even when the full enjoyment of God’s salvation was dis¬ sociated from earthly prosperity in the individual, it could not be conceived separate from the prosperity of the nation. The Israelite must seek the peace of Jerusalem, and put that above his chief joy ; and as long as his Jerusalem was an earthly city and nation¬ ality, he could not conceive of perfect blessedness apart from outward prosperity, if not to himself at least to the nation. When Jesus proclaimed the fulfilment of the Messianic promises apart from a restoration of the kingdom to Israel, and announced the blessings of the kingdom as belonging even now to the poor, the mourn¬ ing, the oppressed ; he took a step beyond any advance that had been made before, though it was directly in the line in which the earlier revelation had been leading; godly men onwards. Now that which enabled him to do so was the conception of the kingdom of God as spiritual. For the Christian doctrine of the blessedness of the believer even in suffering is essentially distinct from what might seem a kindred doctrine of the Stoics, the happiness of the wise man in whatever state he may be outwardly. The Stoic ideal is gained by denying any real goodness in outward things, and holding happiness to consist only in what is within the power of the soul itself ; the wise man despises alike pleasure and pain, and finds his only good in reason and virtue, his happi¬ ness is from within himself ; he is self-sufficient, and therefore proud and arrogant ; while, on the other hand, his morality is of an ascetic, unreal character. He LECT. III.] THE CHRISTIAN NOT THE STOIC IDEAL. 133 seeks to triumph over the evils of the world around him by denying them to be really evils at all, and finding the only true good within himself. Besides the fatal objection that this theory does violence to facts and outrages nature, it tends to deaden sympathy, since he who trains himself to despise pain will be so much the less able to feel for it in others. How possible it was for Jews in times of adversity to adopt such ideas, appears from their occurrence in some of the apocryphal books, more especially 4 Maccabees, where a philoso¬ phical argument for the supremacy of reason over the passions, conducted on Stoical principles, is illustrated by a rhetorical account of the martyrdom of Eleazar, and the mother and her seven sons under Antiochus Epi- phanes. At the same time the divergence of this philosophy from the genuine spirit of the Old Testament may be seen by comparing this with the simpler and earlier narrative of the same events in 2 Maccabees. In the older record, the endurance of the martyrs is made to rest on faith in the creative power of God ; in the later, it is grounded upon philosophical principles, and used to illustrate the power of reason to subdue and overcome the strongest passions and feelings of human nature. Now when Jesus announced the blessings of the king¬ dom of God as present even in adversity and affliction, he did so not at all in the Stoical spirit. He did not teach men to seek their happiness only within them¬ selves and in what is in their own power, to become independent and self-sufficient, despising pain and sorrow as no evils. No ! he represented the blessedness of the poor, the mourning, the destitute, as consisting 134 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. in this, that theirs is the kingdom of God ; they can look to God as caring for them, and if they see God, and are the children of God, they have all sufficiency, not in themselves, as the Stoics would say, hut in God. This comes out in that section of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. vi. 19-34) which speaks of the relation of the children of the kingdom of God to the things of the world, which Keim thinks was originally a separate dis¬ course delivered probably earlier than the other parts. The treasure we are to seek is not, as the Stoic would say, virtue in our own minds, but it is in heaven ; and it is really the blessing of fellowship with and enjoy¬ ment of God as our Father. This secures and involves perfect blessedness, whatever be our lot in this world, not because earthly things are indifferent to a wise man, but because they are all in the hands of God who is our Father. The blessings belonging to the kingdom of God, which make it worthy of being sought as the chief good, are described by Jesus very fully both in figures and in direct language. It is compared to a treasure for which a man would joyfully part with all he has, a pearl of great price, a great feast, a marriage entertainment. It is described as giving forgiveness of sins (Matt. ix. 2, G, xviii. 23, 27, xxvi. 28), for when forgiveness is empha¬ tically said to be given by the Son of man, and his blood said to be that of the covenant shed for the remission of sins, that blessing is certainly connected with the kingdom. Peace and rest to the weary and burdened soul is closely connected with this as its fruit. See Matt. xi. 28-30. Life, eternal life, is also identified with the kingdom, or used as a parallel and synonymous LECT. III.] ETERNAL LIFE. 135 expression (Matt. vii. 14, 21, xix. 16, 23, 24, xxv. 34, 46). The same parallelism is found in the Gospel of John (iii. 3, 5, 15, 16), and this is one of the points of contact between the synoptic Gospels and that of John. The former represent Jesus as speaking most commonly of the kingdom of God, but in several places show that the same thing may be denoted by the phrase eternal life. John reports discourses of Jesus in which this latter phrase habitually occurs, but in one place shows that it was also called by him the kingdom of God. Sonsliip to God is another blessing made very prominent by Jesus among the good things of the kingdom he pro¬ claimed (Matt. v. 9, vi. 4, 8, 9, etc.) ; and with this is connected freedom from anxiety about earthly things (Matt. vi. 25-33). These blessings are all inward and spiritual ; and Jesus’ teaching includes no cliiliastic views of earthly enjoyments in the kingdom of God, but rather impli¬ citly excludes them. Heaven and earth are to pass away, while the children of the kingdom inherit eternal life ; their life cannot therefore be in this world, nor can their enjoyment consist of earthly blessings. Jesus asserts indeed the resurrection of the dead ; but he clearly explains that it is not to an earthly life, but to one like that of the angels. 2. In regard also to the way of entering the kingdom of God, Jesus’ conception was utterly opposed to the views that prevailed among the Jews of his time ; and from the beginning of his career he set his teaching in opposition to that of the Scribes and Pharisees. To them the law as an external code of duty had become everything : God’s reign was the reign of the law ; and 136 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. when all its precepts were perfectly fulfilled, then deliver¬ ance and happiness would come to Israel. Jesus said that that observance of the outward letter of the law, on which they laid all stress, was nothing, for God looks to the heart ; and he also said, that the blessings of the kingdom come now to all who repent and turn to God, and are not to be purchased by obedience to the law, Thus, on the one hand, he set up a higher standard of duty than that of the Pharisees ; but on the other hand, he brought a more gracious message of mercy to the sinful and lost than they could. It was this last-mentioned point of contrast that came out most prominently in the work of Jesus, as is seen in the fault found by the Pharisees with him and his disciples for eating with publicans and sinners, and in the way in which Jesus vindicated his conduct in so doing, on the ground that he came as the physician of souls, not for the whole, but for the sick, not for the righteous, but for sinners. Yet, with all its contrariety to the received teaching of the time, Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God was founded on the Old Testament, and wTas the genuine outcome of it. He did not introduce foreign ideas, but founded his teaching on the law and the prophets, and made continual appeal to them. At the same time he appeared not merely as an interpreter of the law, he was taken notice of from the beginning as speaking with authority, and not as the scribes. He called men to follow- him, and, if need be, forsake all things in order to do so. The following or coming after him did not always imply a literal going along wTith him in his journeys about the country. It meant that in the LECT. III.] FOLLOWING JESUS. 137 case of the twelve, who are sometimes called especially his disciples ; and they actually left their worldly occu¬ pations, and lived with their Master on charity. But as he had many disciples in a wider sense who did not thus follow him, he seems often to have used the expres¬ sion, “ forsake all,” in a less literal sense, to denote a severance of heart and affection from all outward things. It is parallel to hating one’s father and mother, and one’s own life also (Luke xiv. 25, 33), not loving father or mother more than him (Matt. x. 37), denying oneself. This again corresponds with the warning in the Sermon on the Mount against laying up treasure on earth. The requirement of an actual abandonment of all might be used as a test, as in the case of the rich young man ; but it does not appear that it was actually required in every case, and the essence of the condition was a heart detached from the world, and ready willingly to give up all for Jesus, and to suffer anything, even to the death of the cross, for his sake. This giving up all for him is elsewhere described as taking on his yoke ; but it is coming to him as sent by God, and so is also spoken of as doing the will of his Father in heaven. This brings men into fellowship with him as brethren, and makes them partakers of true and lasting blessedness. If they have to give up all that they have, they shall have treasure in heaven ; if they lose their life for his sake, they shall find it. Such seem to be the fundamental elements of Jesus’ teaching, and if we put them together we may see how they make up the notion of the kingdom of God. When men became his disciples, they entered on a state of things in which God indeed was their King ; they gave their 138 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. hearts to him through Jesus his Son, and they did so because they had also, through Jesus, the present enjoy¬ ment of forgiveness and rest to their souls, and the assurance of all they needed to have from God’s fatherly love. This was in fact the realization of the Old Testa¬ ment idea of the kingdom of God, so far as it could be realized by individual men. It was not as yet the full realization of it, for that implies a society whose mem¬ bers are all divinely ruled and blessed ; indeed, ulti¬ mately it implies that this society shall be coextensive with the world. But every one who believed in Jesus and accepted him as Lord and Master, did really enjoy the blessedness of being guided and defended by God as his King and Lord, which was the special blessing of the theocracy.1 3. A further difference from the current idea, and a very essential element in Christ’s idea of the kingdom of God, is indicated by his comparing it, or the word of it, or the members of it, to seed, in the parables recorded in Matt, xiii., Luke viii., Mark iv. At a certain stage of his teaching, Jesus seems to have begun the use of this form of instruction ; and he told his disciples that the reason why he did so was the dulness of comprehension in his hearers (Matt. xiii. 11-13). Though they heard his teaching, they did not understand it, and they were not influenced by his exhortations. They thought only of an earthly kingdom of God, and looked for Jesus to raise a war of independence against the Roman power, and claim the throne of Israel. The more he spoke in plain language of the kingdom of God, the more would they think of this, and misunderstand all that he said. 1 See Appendix, Note M. LECT. III.] PAKABLES OF SEED. 139 The only way in which he could safely go on with his teaching about it was by clothing what he had to say in figures, the meaning of which would be dark to those who had such earthly ideas, but which would be more intelligible to those who were willing to learn that what he promised were spiritual blessings. At least those who really desired to learn of him would be led to inquire the meaning of his parables ; and he was ever ready to explain them to those who were in earnest to know the truth. Now, in at least four of these parables, he employs the image of seed. In that of the sower, the word of God, of the kingdom, is compared to seed. It is the word of God, as coming: from him, — the word of the kingdom, as proclaiming it ; and it is sown by being proclaimed to men. What the fruit of this seed is to be is not said in this parable, but there can be no doubt, from our Lord’s use of the same image elsewhere, that it consists of works pleasing to God, righteousness and goodness. The parable teaches that the word of the kingdom has a living power in it, when received into the heart, to develop and work itself out in a holy life, adorning a bare and barren soul with a crop of virtues and good works. In the parable of the seed growing secretly, preserved only by Mark (iv. 26-29), it is the kingdom itself that is compared to seed, and its gradual and imperceptible growth is brought out ; and the com¬ parison is the same in that of the mustard seed, which makes prominent especially its great progress from a small beginning. In the wheat and the tares, the good seed represents the children of the kingdom, sown by the Son of man. 140 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. But these different representations are not hard to combine. The kingdom of God comes to men by being proclaimed in the word ; when they believe and obey that proclamation, they receive the kingdom itself, and become its members or children. If it were merely an outward power by which this kingdom rules, then these things might be distinct, the rule itself, the proclama¬ tion of it, and the subjects of it. But since the power of the kingdom is a vital one, a power of life ; those who receive it, and bow to its proclamation, receive it not only as a power over them, but as a power in them, which as a power of life is inseparable from their own life. This general principle has several important applica¬ tions in Jesus’ teaching. It appears in his repeated declarations, that any real moral improvement in man must be from within outward, and not from the outside inward. So he says in the Sermon on the Mount, that good fruit must come from a good tree (Matt. vii. 27, 28), and this was one of the main points of his contro¬ versy with the Pharisees, that while they laid stress on outward purifications and acts of righteousness, they thought little or nothing of the state of the heart (Matt, xv. 1-20, xxiii. 25, 26 ; Luke xi. 39-42). They thought to secure the righteousness of the people by a strict observance of the outward precepts of the law : he taught that there was no true righteousness that did not begin in the heart and proceed from it. With this is also connected another contrast between J esus’ teaching and the Pharisees’. They taught that the law must be perfectly observed by them and all the people, and then the reign of God would come ; God would in a miraculous way deliver Israel from subjection LECT. III.] THE NEW BIRTH. 141 to tlie lieatlien, and give them independence under liis own reign. Jesus taught that the reign of God is not the reward of perfect obedience, but the means of secur¬ ing that, that it is established in each heart that is willing to yield to him, and will bring them more and more under its influence. Hence his teaching was good news to the guilty and sinful, the publicans and harlots, for whom the Pharisees had no message of glad tidings, and whom they could only exclude from the kingdom they looked for. With this is connected further his sayings about the need of being converted and becoming as little children. If the heart is to receive the seed of God’s reign, it must be an honest and good heart, not like the trodden way- side, that will not even attend seriously to the word ; nor like the stony ground, that admits only a superficial impression ; nor like the thorny ground, preoccupied with the love of the wrnrld. From the heart of man proceed all evil thoughts and deeds (Matt. xv. 19, 20), and in order that it may become a source of good, there must be a poverty of spirit, mourning for sin, meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness ; in a word, a new life in the soul, springing from heartfelt dissatis¬ faction and abhorrence of the old life. When the revelation of God’s grace that Jesus brings is received in faith, and awakens love, filling the heart, then there is a new life, in such as Zacchseus the publican and the harlot in Simon’s house. These various sayings of Jesus, and the incidents recorded in the synoptic Gospels, fully bear out and illustrate his teaching about the new birth or regenera¬ tion, in John iii. 3-15. To be begotten again, or from 142 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. above, is to have a new principle of life imparted to the soul, a principle that is secret and mysterious in its own nature and working, but manifest in its effects, as it makes one a member of the kingdom of God, i.e. a willing and loyal subject of God as his King. This life comes from the Spirit of God, and implies a cleansing of the whole man as by water. It is received by us when we believe the love of God to the world, as revealed in Christ’s life and death, and trust in him for our salva¬ tion. Such, in brief, is the teaching of Jesus to Nico- demus, and it just sums up, in a striking form, what is implied in various sayings and doings scattered through the other Gospels. Another feature, still more obviously implied in the representation of the kingdom as seed, is that it has stages of growth and development. This admits of its being spoken of in different aspects, as both present and future at the same time. Some of our Lord’s sayings clearly imply that the reign of God which he announced was already, in the experience of his disciples, a present reality (Matt. xi. 12, xii. 28) ; at other times again he speaks of it as coming in the future (Matt. vi. 10 ; Mark ix. 1). It is not necessary to suppose that the kingdom is used for two different things in these various statements, nor to explain away the natural force of either set. For if the kingdom of God is a vital prin¬ ciple, it must necessarily have its growth and its various stages. The time of our Lord’s personal ministry was especially the seed-time of the kingdom ; but God’s reign was to come, both in the world and in the hearts of his people, by a growth of the vital inward principle of the new life implanted by Christ ; and it was to have LECT. III.] TIIE LAWS OF THE KINGDOM. 143 its harvest-time when it should come to maturity and full manifestation. II. We have next to consider the righteousness of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. For the idea of a kingdom requires for its completion not only a supreme authority exercising itself over the subjects, but also certain relations of these among themselves, fixed by the law of the realm, and making them one organized whole. So, when God set up his kingdom in Israel of old, immediately after the covenant by which he made them his people, he gave them a body of laws regulating their mutual relations and rights, in virtue of which they became, not a mere host under a supreme leader, but a body politic. In like manner Jesus, setting up the kingdom of God in the New Covenant, laid down, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, the laws, or in Old Testament phrase, the righteousness of the kingdom. In doing so, he solemnly disowned any intention to subvert the law or the prophets, i.e. the fundamental constitution of the old theocracy ; and declared that the object of his coming was in general not to destroy, but to fulfil, or to ratify in its full extent and intended meaning. He does indeed go on to give precepts that go deeper and reach further than what is expressed in the Old Testament; but in no case do these overturn the old law, but conserve its principle, and secure its observ¬ ance. He is, however, directly opposed to the current interpretation of the law. The points in which the righteousness of the kingdom is to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees are mainly two, its inwardness and its universality. 144 TIIE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. The former appears in that not only murder, but anger is forbidden ; not only adultery, but unlawful desire. This was the best and truest way of securing the observance of the law. The Pharisees tried to do this by making a hedge round the law, as they phrased it, i.e. adding a number of outward positive precepts, that might keep men from coming near the act of transgres¬ sion ; but Jesus does it by enforcing the application of the law to the first beginning of evil in the heart. But what he thus enforces is the Old Testament law of love, as comprised by him in the golden rule (Matt, vii. 12), which is expressly given as the sum of the law and the prophets. Only he extends the application of that principle beyond that generally given to it by the Pharisees, and distinctly makes it include all men, strangers as well as fellow-countrymen, enemies as well as friends (Matt. v. 38-43; Luke x. 25-37). This is the second point of difference between the righteousness Christ inculcated and that of the Pharisees. Now the laws of a state determine the rights of its subjects and their mutual relations. In Israel each Israelite owed certain duties to others, and could claim certain rights from them. Within this law he might stand in various relations to his fellow-citizens, as ruler or subject, master or servant, creditor or debtor, but in each he had certain rights as an Israelite, which other Israelites were bound to respect. Others outside the nation did not share these rights ; the resident strangers had certain partial rights, and other foreigners none at all. In these the nationality consisted, and from the nature of them it derived its specific form. Now the law that Jesus laid down for his kingdom very much LECT. III.] A BAND OF BROTHERS. 145 simplified the relations of its citizens. Each owed to each to abstain from even a desire or emotion tending to injure them, and positively to do for them what he would have them do to him. That is, as he put it on another occasion, they are to be all brethren (Matt, xxiii. 8). This excludes all distinctions, as of masters and servants, in the kingdom, and gives equal rights to all. It does not, indeed, abolish all distinctions. Jesus very expressly took up into his kingdom the natural and domestic relations, vindicating the sanctity of mar¬ riage and parental authority against the teaching of the Pharisees, which infringed on it (Matt. v. 31, 32, xv. 3-6). He also speaks of differences in the kingdom, some in it being great and others less or the least. But he says, he is great who most perfectly fulfils the law of the kingdom (Matt. v. 19), who humbles himself as a little child (Matt, xviii. 4), who is willing and able to do most service to his brethren (Matt. xx. 26-28). Thus, in respect of rights and privileges, there are no distinctions at all ; there are no castes, ranks, or orders, in this band of brothers. Now, how was it possible to make such a kingdom a reality, and not a mere ideal of what ought to be ? Only by making men really brothers, revealing God to them as the Father, and bringing into their hearts the assur¬ ance of his forgiving love, so implanting in them the germ of a new life. Thus the constitution of the king- dom is determined by the nature of the power that originated and upholds it, as in general the fundamental laws of any state are to be explained by its origin. So the various orders of the people of Rome, and their mutual legal relations in the commonwealth, are under- K 146 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. stood by the circumstances from which they originated. So, too, the constitutional laws of the people of Israel may be seen to depend on the creation of the nation by God’s deliverance of them from Egypt, and giving them possession of Canaan. Because they are redeemed from bondage by God, all Israelites are his servants, and are not to be slaves of men ; because their land is God’s gift to them, it is not to be sold for ever, and so on. But that outward redemption could found only outward rights ; the inward deliverance from sin, and bestowal of a new life, by which the Christian kingdom of God is founded, lays a basis for those spiritual heart-searching laws that Christ gives, and provides a motive and a power by which they can be fulfilled. This law of the kingdom may indeed be transgressed, as long as the new life has not reached its full maturity and perfection ; and some provision must be made for that. The provision that Christ has made is the law of forgiveness (Matt, xviii. 15-35), flowing from the forgiveness that all the members of the kingdom have received. If any one of them has been wronged by another, he is to forgive him as a brother, however often the wrong may be repeated. Not that he is to be indifferent to the wrong as an act of sin on the part of his brother : he is to seek to lead him to repentance by faithful brotherly remonstrance and expostulation, first speaking to him personally and alone ; then, if that fail, taking one or two others as witnesses, that he may see that it is not merely one individual wdio has been grieved and offended by his conduct ; and finally bringing the matter before the congregation or assembly of the king¬ dom as a whole. It is not necessary to inquire here LECT. III.] THE LAW OF FORGIVENESS. 147 more particularly how this is to be done ; we are only concerned at present with the general precept here given. It is the only thing in our Lord’s teaching at all resem¬ bling the setting up of a system of jurisprudence for his kingdom, providing for the way in which offences are to be dealt with. They are to be, if possible, removed by the faithful efforts of Christian love, seeking to bring the sinning brother to repentance ; but the possibility is admitted that these may fail, and what is to be done in the last resort is, that the impenitent offender, who will not give heed to the voice of the Church, is to be no longer treated as a Christian brother, but as a heathen man or a publican, i.e. one outside the kingdom of God. In giving these directions, Jesus assumes that a brother has really been guilty of sin, and on that assumption he encourages his disciples to the performance of the neces¬ sary acts of discipline, by assuring them that, when they are thus putting away an impenitent sinner from among them, their action will be ratified in heaven. He is not here contemplating a case in which, by mistake or ill- will, they might condemn an innocent brother ; but the proper effect of what he said would be not only to strengthen them for the faithful exercise of discipline wdien sin was clearly proved, but also to solemnize them and guard them against a rash exercise of it, by the assurance that their Master would be with them in all their meetings. We must remember also wThat he taught on other occasions about the judgment that is to be when his kingdom has reached its maturity, and he comes to sit on the throne, of his glory. Then he will right all wrongs that may have been done in his name, and gather out of his kingdom all that offend and such 148 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. as do iniquity, while he gathers his own from the ends of the earth. Meanwhile his people are to deal one with another’s sins in the spirit of brotherly love, and in the last resort, if sinners are still impenitent, simply to treat them as no longer brethren. But another peculiarity of the constitution of the kingdom here comes into view. It prescribes the same love and kindness to those outside as to those within it (Matt. v. 43-48). Jesus speaks indeed of an im¬ penitent brother being to us as a heathen man, and that implies that we make a certain difference ; but the difference is not to lie in our love or willingness to do him good, but only in what we think and say of him. We dare not call a man a brother or a child of God, if his conduct makes it clear to us that he is not so ; that would be to call darkness light, and evil good. But we are not to love him less on that account, or be less ready to pray for him and to do him good. Thus the law of the kingdom not only gives all its citizens equal duties to each other, but extends that even to those who are not its citizens at all. It is thus a universal society in a very peculiar sense ; for it not only offers but actually gives equal rights and privileges to all men, to strangers and enemies, as well as to its own members ; it lays its citizens under the same obliga¬ tions to those outside as to one another. The kingdom O of God is therefore a universal society in a very high and emphatic sense. It makes its members not only brethren among themselves, but brethren to all men, even to those who will not be brethren to them. It claims all men as its citizens ; but inasmuch as the power by which its rule is established and enforced is LECT. III.] A UNIVERSAL SOCIETY. 149 that of love, it carries out that claim by seeking, not to subdue all men by force, but to win them by love. The duties and obligations of the citizens of God’s kingdom are just those that would be theirs if it really embraced all men. The blessings of the kingdom are not only offered to all men, but in so far as these consist in the love of the citizens, they are really extended to all, whether they become members of it or not. But if, as we saw before, the brotherly love required in the kingdom of heaven is only made possible by the fact, that through the new birth in Christ all Christians are really brothers ; how, it may be asked, can the same brotherly love be extended to those outside, unless it be assumed that they also are really brothers in Christ ? The answer is, that the possibility of brotherly love depends not upon him whom we love being born of God, but upon our being so ourselves. We can love one another as brethren, in the spirit required by Christ, not because our brethren are born of God, but because we are. The fact of a man being outside the kingdom, and an enemy to it and its citizens, prevents him from loving them, but does not prevent them loving him. He is a stranger and an enemy by his own fault and will, not by the will of God. The King would have him to be a citizen ; he calls, invites, and entreats him to come in, and he is ready to give him all the blessings of citizenship ; and as one of the same nature as themselves, and for whom their King and Father has such good will, the citizens of the kingdom are called to extend their love and interest to every brother man. The believer is indeed 150 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. a child of God, in a sense in which the unbeliever is not, but he is a child of that Father who makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust ; he enjoys a love of God to which others are strangers, but that is the love of God to the world, to man as such, not to Jews, or to Christians, or to good men, or to believers, but to man. Unbelievers do not enjoy that love, not because it is not theirs, but because they forsake their own mercy. The love of the brethren is theirs, the love of God seeks them ; and would they but accept it, they need no other right to the highest blessings of the kingdom, than just this, that they are men. The universality of the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus appears also from all those sayings of his, which declare it to be an inward, vital, spiritual power, not coming with observation, but working like leaven hid in the mass of meal, or seed hid in the earth, and also from the fact that he gave no instruc¬ tions about any outward organization for the society that he founded, but laid exclusive stress on those great moral principles and precepts that have regard to the state of the heart. These things plainly implied that the kingdom which was so described could not be limited to Israel, or conditioned by the acceptance of Israel’s external law and ritual. But Jesus did not himself explicitly draw those conclusions, as it was not his part to exhibit the systematic and logical connec¬ tions of divine truth, but to proclaim and accomplish the great work of redemption. He even asserted the inviolability and perpetual obligation in his kingdom of the law (Matt. v. 17-20 ; Luke xvi. 17). From LECT. III.] LIMITATION OF JESUS’ PERSONAL MINISTRY. 151 these sayings, strictly pressed, we might deduce the position held by the Pharisees who believed, that all Christians must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses (Acts xv. 1,5); and this would imply that the national theocracy of Israel was still to be maintained, as seems to be assumed in a saying recorded in differ¬ ent connections by two evangelists (Matt. xix. 18 ; Luke xxii. 29, 30). These sayings, along with our Lord’s express limitation of his own and his disciples’ ministry to the house of Israel (Matt. x. 5, xv. 24), have led some to hold that Jesus had really no idea of a universal kingdom, but was merely a Jew, with all the narrow and exclusive notions of his race. This view, however, cannot be maintained without disregard¬ ing sayings to an opposite effect, that are as well attested as these (e.g. Matt. viii. 11, xxi. 43, xxii. 9, 10), and also doing violence to those ideas, which, as we have seen, are not merely expressed in single statements, but form the most central and characteristic elements of Jesus’ teaching. It is to be observed also, that when our Lord asserts the perpetuity of the law, he conjoins it closely with the prophets, and proceeds to interpret it in such a way as to show that he regards not the letter but the spirit of it. In what way he meant it to be maintained in his kingdom, is illustrated by his mode of dealing with the Sabbath law, in defence of which he appealed to God’s saying by the prophet: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice,” putting the moral above the ceremonial part of the law. That Jesus extended his gifts of healing on certain occasions to Samaritans and Gentiles who sought them, is attested by all the records of his life, 152 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. though, on the other hand, his limitation of his own proper work and that of his disciples to the house of Israel, is confirmed by the subsequent conduct of the apostles and Church of Jerusalem. He found the Jewish nation the field plainly marked out to him by Provi¬ dence, as that in which he should carry on his work and found his kingdom. In it were those previous convictions and hopes that formed the basis of his teaching, and should have prepared a soil for its reception, the belief of one only living and holy God, and of his moral government of the world, the sense of the evil of sin, and the hope of redemption from it through God’s mercy. His glad tidings of the kingdom of God were really in harmony with the spirit of the religion of Israel, as shown in the law and the prophets, although opposed to the Pharisaic interpretation of the law. The people of Israel, as the nation to whom God had given this revelation of himself, ought to have been the first to receive such a message, and by their receiving it, it might have gone forth with the utmost purity and power to other nations. But there are clear indications that Jesus did contemplate the ultimate extension of the gospel to all mankind. Especially in the later period of his ministry, when it became apparent that Israel as a whole was to reject him, he indicated in various parables that the kingdom which they rejected would be given to the Gentiles (Matt. xxi. 41-43, xxii. 9, 10, xxiv. 14, with the parallels in Luke). It is possible, indeed, that our Lord’s last commission to his disciples, to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature (Mark xvi. 15), to make disciples of all nations (Matt. LECT. III.] DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS’ PRINCIPLES. 153 xxviii. 19), was not given in such plain and unmistake- able terms as these. It was certainly not so understood by the early Church at Jerusalem (Acts x. 45, xi. 2, 3, 18, 19, 22), when they had so much doubt and scruple as to the preaching of Christ to the Gentiles. Neither in Paul’s argument with the Galatians, nor in the recorded discussion of the apostles and elders at Jeru¬ salem (Acts xv.), is appeal made to any saying of Jesus, but only to the general spirit of revelation, and the manifest teaching of God in the conversion of Gentiles. It may therefore be the case, that the actual sayings of Jesus were more obscure and less fitted to decide the question than they seem to be, as given in the Gospels, and that the evangelists, writing after the freedom and universality of the gospel had been fully established, gave to our Lord’s words a form more distinctly expressing the meaning they were then seen to have. But if so, then we can hardly doubt that the form into which they cast them is substantially true, and faithful to their real meaning and intention. For the whole spirit and tendency of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God as a spiritual society, having as its law love to strangers and enemies, pointed to a religion not limited to one nation, or bound by ritual observ¬ ances, but open and free to all mankind. If he could not openly proclaim this at once, because of the necessity of building his teaching on the ground pre¬ pared for it in Israel, this reserve was only for a season, and it was a true development of his principles, by which his disciples were led to throw down the barriers of Jewish ordinances, and invite all men to the full privileges of Christian fellowship. The universalism 154 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. of Paul was but the full logical following out and justification of the principles that underlay the teach¬ ing and work of Jesus, though by many believers in him they were not perceived or recognised. III. It remains that we consider what light is thrown on the Christian kingdom of God by our Lord’s teaching about himself as its king. While the great subject of Jesus’ teaching was the kingdom or reign of God, there can be no doubt that he also spoke of himself as king of Israel. He thus seems to have conceived the king¬ dom of God, at least in its initial and growing stage, not as a pure theocracy, in which God should rule directly, but as one in which God should rule through him as his representative. In that view he sj^eaks of himself as in a special sense Son of God, and of God as his proper Father (7 rarepa '[htov, John v. 17, 18) ; he declares that all things have been given to him by the Father, and that none knows the Son but the Father, and none knows the Father but the Son (Matt. xi. 2 7 ; Luke x. 22). The sonship which he claims is not a mere title belonging to him as king ; it indicates that perfect one¬ ness of mind and heart with God that makes his reign the reign of God. The claims that Jesus made in this connection were on several occasions (Mark ii. 7 ; John v. 18, viii. 51, x. 31, 33, 39) regarded as implying divine honour, and therefore, if not true, as blasphemous ; and this was the ground on which he was formally con¬ demned by the Sanhedrin at last (Matt. xxvi. 63-66). These facts form the basis of the evidence for the deity of Christ as believed by the Christian Church. But Jesus’ main object was, not to teach a theological doc- LECT. III.] THE SON OE GOD. 155 trine about his person, but to show his moral oneness with God. He speaks of himself as the representative and embodiment, as it were, of righteousness, which is the character of God and aim of his kingdom. To be persecuted for righteousness’ sake is the same thing as to be persecuted for his sake (Matt. v. 10, 11 ; Luke vi. 22) ; he places his own saying on a parallel with that of God in the law (Matt. v. 21, 22, 1 27, 28, 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44), and thus he was recognised as teaching with authority, and not as the scribes. Still it is his Father’s will that is to be done in the kingdom (Matt, vi. 10, vii. 21, xxvi. 39, 42) ; and when he sits on the throne of his glory, it is his Father’s blessing that he . pronounces on his true disciples (Matt. xxv. 34). He speaks of himself also as the bridegroom whose presence is necessary and all-sufficient for the joy of his people (Matt. ix. 15) ; he claims supreme affection (Matt. x. 37 ; Luke xiv. 26, 27) ; and he offers peace and rest to all (Matt. xi. 28-30). We may thus gather from our Lord’s teaching that his position in the kingdom of God is a necessary and fundamental one. He is not merely a teacher who has revealed it, and who may then pass away, or one who has by a great act founded it, and then left it to stand by itself. He is not merely like Moses, who received the laws of the Old Testament theocracy from God, and gave them to Israel. Jesus is the king of the new 1 I accept the rendering of the Revised Version, “ to them of old time,” as grammatically preferable to the old translation. But it is to be observed that Jesus does not say that the sayings which he quotes and supersedes with his own were really what God had said to the fathers, but what his hearers had heard, i.e. from the scribes, that God had said. Still he does not merely correct their version of an old law, but gives a more explicit law by his own authority. 156 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. theocracy, in and through whom God reigns. This would seem to be indicated, really though not obtru¬ sively, in the name by which he habitually designated himself, the Son of man. The phrase Son of man (chn 13, ty'ijs }3, bok "i3, wo? avdpdiiTov) is frequently used in the Old Testament as a synonym for man, and in contrast to 13 (Ps. xlix. 3) it denotes man as frail, weak, mortal, homo as distin¬ guished from vir. So it is used in Ps. viii. 4, cxliv. 3, for man in contrast to God, where, however, the honour and dignity bestowed on mortal man by God are de¬ scribed. The phrase in the vocative cna |3 is habitually used as the address of God to the prophet Ezekiel in his book, and as that book begins with a full descrip¬ tion of a most glorious appearance of God to the pro¬ phet, and the address “ Son of man ” occurs first in the midst of that vision (Ezek. ii. 1, 6, 8, iii. 1, etc.), its use may very naturally be explained as being for the purpose of making it plain that one so highly favoured with visions and revelations of God was still a man. Anyhow, there as in the Psalms, it means simply man, mortal, as distinct from God. In Dan. vii. 13 it occurs in a different contrast. After the vision of four beasts, there appears in Daniel’s dream “ one like a son of man ” 333), fie. a human figure, for that is all that is directly meant by the phrase. But here the contrast is not with God, but with the lower animals. The four beasts symbolize (ver. 17) four kings or empires, and the bestial form of the symbol indicates that they are empires of brute force and wild rapine. The human figure represents the kingdom that shall succeed them, which is that of the saints of the Most High (ver. 18), LECT. III.] THE SON OF MAN. 157 the kingdom of God (see Dan. ii. 44, and particularly vii. 27). It is symbolized by a human figure, to show that it is to be of a nobler and more humane nature than the kingdoms of the world, a kingdom imbued with reason and humanity, in which the rights of man are respected, and “ a man is more precious than gold, even the golden wedge of Ophir.” Thus “son of man” is here expressive, not of lowliness and weakness, but of excellence and dignity, but it still has its proper and original meaning as a synonym for man ; and in this, as in all the places where it occurs in the Old Testament, it is indefinite or generic merely, not the name of a parti¬ cular person or office. It may be that the figure described in Dan. vii. 13 is meant for an individual person, the same who is afterwards called Messiah (ix. 25) ; but this is not certain ; and in any case, the name “ Son of man” does not by itself mean more than simply man. The peculiarity of our Lord’s use of the title is, that in his mouth it is uniformly definite, both nouns having the article, 6 vm rod avdpdmov , the Son of man. As we know that Jesus regarded Dan. vii. 13 as about to be ful¬ filled in his establishment of the kingdom of God, there is a probability that the definite phrase referred to it. “ The Son of man” would thus be equivalent to “ that human figure seen in vision by Daniel, the representa¬ tive of the kingdom of God,” and so would denote the Messiah, though it was not one of the usual titles by which he was known. Such a reference as this seems to be necessarily implied in those sayings of Jesus in which the title is used in connection with claims and privileges as their ground, as, for instance, when he says, “ The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive 158 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. sins” (Matt. ix. 6; Mark ii. 10; Luke v. 24). The forgiveness of sins is one of the blessings of the new covenant (Jer. xxxi. 34), by which the kingdom of God is founded, and therefore is properly dispensed by him who proclaims and founds that kingdom. On the other hand, however, there are sayings of Jesus which show that while he had regard to the passage in Daniel, he understood also the meaning of the appearance of a son of man there. It denoted that the kingdom of God was to be, not one of brute force, but of a truly human character. The representative of such a kingdom must also be the representative of humanity, a true and genuine man, ruling his fellows by reason and moral power, not domineering over them by force. This is, in a sense, a humble view of the kingdom, and so the title Son of man, while it is used by Jesus as a Messianic name, is one that brings out the lowliness of his mission. That it is a title peculiarly adapted to the humiliation of Christ, is proved by the fact that after being so con¬ stantly employed by Jesus himself, it was entirely disused by his disciples, the single exception of its use by Stephen (Acts vii. 56) being fully accounted for by his design of calling attention to Jesus’ own saying before the very court that was judging him.1 Kegarding it as a title of humiliation, we can under¬ stand both why it was so frequently used by Jesus of himself, and why his disciples nevertheless avoided using it of him. It has, in fact, two sides, denoting on the one hand the Messiah as the founder and representa¬ tive of God’s kingdom, and, on the other, the true and 1 The phrase in Rev. i. 13 is not Jesus’ self-designation, “the Son of man,” but simply the indefinite, “ one like a son of man,” i.e. a man. LECT. III.] THE PERFECT MAN. 159 perfect man, the representative of humanity. This latter idea is implied in such a saying as Markii. 27, 28, and is more distinctly expressed by Paul when he calls Jesus “ the last Adam,” “the second man” (1 Cor. xv. 45, 47), “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. ii. 5). Both ideas are combined by the consideration that the king¬ dom of God is a universal one, embracing mankind as such, and giving all equal rights. Jesus is the true sovereign of Gods kingdom, just because he is the head and representative of that humanity that is its realm. Hence even to himself as king he applies the principle of unselfish love that is the fundamental law of the kingdom. He that is great in the kingdom is he who does the law of love, he that is the servant of his brethren. So he, “ the Son of man, came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” He is king because he has made the greatest sacrifice, and done the greatest service for the kingdom ; indeed, by that service he has founded the kingdom. His blood is that of the new cove¬ nant, and in Scripture the covenant and the kingdom are correlative terms. The old theocracy began with the covenant of Sinai, and if Jesus by his voluntary laying down his life establishes a new covenant, by that very act he erects a new kingdom of God. Another form in which he represents his work in founding the kingdom, is as a conquest of Satan. Jesus speaks of Satan having a kingdom (Matt. xii. 26), and compares him to a strong man armed keeping his house (Luke xi. 21), who must first be stripped of his arms, and bound, by a stronger (Luke xi. 22 ; Mark iii. 27), before his possessions can be rescued from his power. Thus 160 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. Jesus appeals to the fact of his casting out devils by the Spirit of God, as a proof that the kingdom of God is come. It is to be observed that the force of our Lord’s argument is derived from the moral character of his work, as opposed to Satan. It was conceivable enough that Satan might enable a man to cast out some demons, in order thereby to deceive men ; but one who not only systematically cast out demons, but carried on a successful warfare against the moral influence of the evil one, could not possibly be in league with him. It is the same argument by which Origen meets Celsus, ascribing the miracles of Christ to magic. “ There would indeed be a resemblance between them, if Jesus, like the dealers in magical arts, had performed his works only for show ; but now there is not a single juggler who, by means of his proceedings, invites his spectators to reform their manners, or trains those to the fear of God who are amazed at what they see, nor who tries to persuade them so to live as men who are to be justified by God.”1 The victory over Satan, to which Jesus alludes as enabling him to deliver those who were his captives, seems most probably to refer to his resistance to the temptation at the beginning of his public work. Thereby he maintained his invulnerability to all his attacks ; the prince of this world came, and had nothing in him (John xiv. 31) ; and his refusal of all the offers and seductions of Satan virtually determined the whole course of his life and work. He chose, in spite of all temptation, a course that implied his gaining his king¬ dom by no compromise with Satan or tire world, but by triumphing over them in the endurance of the cross. 1 Against Celsus, I. c. 68. LECT. III.] REPRESENTATIVE OF GOD AND MAN. 161 The motive power by which Jesus would draw men to himself was the revelation of the grace of God to sinners. He carefully avoided the use of any political hopes or ideas of a Messianic kingdom ; he discouraged those who were attracted merely by his miracles, or by external benefits received from him ; but he freely admitted to fellowship with himself, and treated as his friends those who felt their need of forgiveness as sinners, and were willing- to trust to him for it. Jesus is thus O the king of God’s kingdom, because he is the perfect representative of God, both in that forgiving grace by which he draws men to himself to be subjects of the kingdom, and in that perfect righteousness by which he rules and directs them in it. In both he is also one with men as their head and representative, because the Spirit of God, which was given to him and dwelt in him as Messiah, is also given to them to animate them with new life as members of his mystical body, and to enable them to live as he lived, serving and glorifying God as he did. This notion of the vital and spiritual union between Christ and his disciples is indeed fully brought out in our Lord’s teaching only in the discourses of the fourth Gospel, especially those in chs. vi. and xiv.-xvii., where it is illustrated by the figures of the bread of life and the true vine. But there are in the synoptic Gospels some indications that point towards it, as when Jesus speaks of what is done to his disciples as done to him (Matt. x. 40, xxv. 40-45), and of being with them always (Matt, xviii. 20, xxviii. 20). In view of this, and also of the fact that the mystical union is not a peculiarly Joannine idea, but one found as prominently in the writings of Paul, there seems good ground to believe L THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 162 [lect. III. that it was originally derived from the teaching of our Lord himself. Thus the representation that Jesus gives of himself, as the king who is at once the Son of God, and there- fore the perfect representative of his Father in his forgiving grace and absolute righteousness, and the Son of man, and therefore one with mankind, and able to make all who believe on him sharers in his Spirit, har¬ monizes perfectly with his teaching about the kingdom of God, as being in its nature a spiritual dominion over the hearts of men, and in its character a fulfilment of that righteousness which consists in supreme love to God as our Father, and equal love to men as our brethren. Jesus was to enter on his glory as Messiah through his sufferings and death, and important light is thrown on the nature of his kingship by what passed at his two trials, before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate. By the Sanhedrin he was condemned on the ground of his own statement (Matt. xxvi. 64 ; Mark xiv. 62 ; Luke xxii. 69, 70), in which he confessed himself to be the Messiah, and applied to himself the prophecy in Dan. vii. 13, 14. The figure of the Son of man in that vision seems to be explained in vers. 22 and 27, as representing simply the saints of the Most High who are to possess the kingdom ; but apparently it had come to be understood as pointing to the person of the Messiah as their King and Head. Jesus spoke of the fulfilment of that prophecy as about to take place soon, and within the observation of his hearers (dir’ dpn o^ecrOe). This seems to require us to understand his words as pointing to a spiritual event in the immediate future. He was to be raised by God to supreme power, and they were to perceive it. Do we LECT. III.] JESUS’ TESTIMONY AT HIS TK1ALS. 163 not find in the 2nd chapter of Acts the record of the fulfilment of this word ? Peter testifies that J esus has been exalted to the right hand of God ; and in proof of this points to the visible signs of the gift of the Holy- Spirit. In these signs they could see the Son of man seated at the right hand of power ; and this was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, that the Lord would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. Christ reigns then as King, in that he sends his Spirit into the hearts of men ; and this again is connected with the promise of the new covenant. The Son of man is the King; in God’s kingdom, as the dispenser of the Spirit, by which the law is to be written in men’s hearts, and obedience to it secured. The same thing appears from another point of view in his testimony before Pilate, as recorded by John. All the other evangelists tell us that, when brought before the Roman governor, Jesus declared himself to be the King of the Jews, and yet that Pilate pronounced him innocent of the charge of sedition. These statements imply that Jesus must have explained to Pilate that his claim was not a political one, and so that there must have been some such conversation as that recorded by John. There Jesus declares that he has come into the world to bear witness to the truth, and that his subjects are all they that are of the truth. Such is the nature of his kingdom. This harmonizes with the parable of the sower, in which the Son of man sows the word of the kingxlom. O J Thus Christ’s kingly power is exercised by his Word and Spirit; and as these are the Word and Spirit of God, his reign is the reign of God. He continues to reign by 164 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. these means, since he has left the world and gone to the Father ; and if he appoints men as rulers under him in his kingdom, their only power is to teach what he has commanded, by the aid and blessing of his Spirit. There are indeed a number of parables in which Jesus speaks of himself as a householder or a king, leaving his disciples to carry on the affairs of his house in his absence till he shall come again ; and in some of these he speaks of certain of his disciples as set over others as stewards. But it is ever indicated that all alike are his servants, and are to be called to account at the last for the use they make of the gifts and authority entrusted to them. It is also plainly said that the use they ought to make of them is to serve their brethren, in the spirit, and after the example, of their Master. But while Jesus speaks of his kingdom as a present spiritual reality, he also warns the people that its appearance is not to be immediate (Luke xix. 11). He is to depart to receive his kingdom, as is described in the parable of the pounds ; which seems to be the earliest clear intimation on record given by him of his departing and coming again.1 But he has servants who work for him even in his absence, and are ready, unlike his fellow-citizens who hate him, to recognise him as kino;. “ The Son of man coming; in his kingdom ” (Matt. xvi. 28) is equivalent to “ the kingdom of God coming in power” (Mark ix. 1) ; and that was to be seen by some then living. Jesus undoubtedly refers to some outward manifestation of 1 The words about the bridegroom being taken away (Matt. ix. 15 ; Mark ii. 20 ; Luke v. 35) are but vague, and have no definite historical reference ; and the parable in Luke xii. 35-38 is given by Mark (xii. 33-37) as part of Jesus’ prophetic discourse at the end of his ministry. LECT. III.] JESUS COMING AGAIN. 165 his royal authority, and most probably, as in his words before the Sanhedrin, to the outpouring of the Spirit, which was to be the proof of his exaltation, and to have visible evidences of its reality. The personal coming undoubtedly spoken of in Matt. xvi. 27 is not necessarily the same as that in ver. 28 ; the terms in which it is described are different in all the Gospels ; and the solemn saying of ver. 28 may have been added, not so much to strengthen the warning of judgment, which was strong enough in itself, as to confirm the promise in ver. 25, that he that losetli his life for Christ’s sake shall find it. This is sure, because even in the lifetime of some then present the Messianic kingdom shall be clearly seen to be established. In other say¬ ings, however, Jesus passes over this nearer historical manifestation of his kingdom, and goes forward at once to its final appearance.1 The purpose of his coming again he declares to be to judge his people. The ideal or perfection of a kingdom of God such as Christ set up, is that all its members should be perfectly taught and guided by his Word and Spirit. This is not the case in any outward society on earth. But such a pure and perfect kingdom of God was foretold by many of the prophets, and they indicated that it was to be brought about by means of a judgment that should sift the people. Hence John the Baptist expected that the Messiah would undertake such a work at once in beginning the kingdom of God. But Jesus declared in many of his parables, that this sifting judgment was not to be till the end of the ag;e. O 1 See Appendix, Note N. 166 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. This final judgment, however, is simply to be the completion of the work that Christ is carrying on now by his Word and Spirit and through the ministry of his servants. The exercise of discipline in the Church is, as Owen says, “ an evidence and pledge of the future judgment,” 1 and Tertullian calls it futuri judicii praejudicium. Even the work of Jesus in his earthly ministry made a division among the people, and gathered to him those who were willing and prepared for a spiritual kingdom ; and Jesus recognised this himself (Matt. xi. 25, xxii. 11-17), and as Messiah he pronounced the forgiveness of sins to those who believed (Matt. ix. 6).2 He sometimes said emphati¬ cally, that he had come into the world for judgment (John ix. 39, xii. 31), and this effect of his work is also recognised in Luke ii. 34. Hence Ritschl thinks that this corresponded to the judgment foretold by the prophets.3 But, on the other hand, it must be considered that Jesus distinctly taught that his work in sowing the seed, however it might bring- to light the different states of mind among the people, would not produce a perfectly pure society, and that there is to be a searching and final judgment at the end of the age ; further, that except in the few places just quoted, he always speaks of judgment as future (John v. 28, 29, xii. 48), and declares that he came then not to judge the world, but to save it (John iii. 17, viii. 15, xii. 47). These sayings seem to show that in his view the judg- 1 Inquiry concerning Evangelical Churches , "Works, xv. p. 26. 2 Cf. John v. 22, where judgment is described as a function of the Son of man. 3 Rechtfertigung und Versohnung, ii. 36-42. LECT. III.] REVELATION OF JUDGMENT. 167 ment announced by the prophets was, in its full and open realization, a thing of the future, to take place, not at the beginning, but at the end of the develop¬ ment of the Messianic kingdom.1 Yet that is not a contradiction of Old Testament prophecy. For the final judgment is just the manifestation of the results of that process of sifting that the establish¬ ment of a spiritual kingdom necessarily implies. Christ’s work of salvation does separate those who accept from those who reject it ; and thus it virtually begins a judgment, that shall be made open and complete when his kingdom is perfected. 1 So Weiss, New Testament Theology, p. 50. Dorner, Glaubenslehre , ii. 920, 929. SUPPLEMENT TO LECTURE III. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN THE TEACHING OF THE APOSTLES. JN the Epistles, the idea of the kingdom of God does not take such a commanding position, or occupy so large a space, as it does in the teaching of our Lord recorded by the synoptic evangelists. The different writers of the Epistles seem to have conceived the great blessing which Jesus brought to the world, and which they proclaimed, in different aspects, according to their turn of mind, and the different sorts of people to whom they had to proclaim it. Paul, having to meet the errors of Pharisaic self-righteousness, conceives the gospel mainly as the revelation of God’s gift of righteousness ; the Epistle to the Hebrews, addressed to those who clung to the old temple ordinances, speaks of the new covenant, with its better priesthood and freer access to God ; Peter enlarges on the privileges and hopes of Christians as the spiritual people of God, to encourage them under trial and persecution ; and John, in opposition to those who thought knowledge was everything, unfolds the contents of the gospel message as eternal life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us. But though these con¬ ceptions of Christianity seem to be different from one another, and from the way in which Jesus is repre- SUPPL.] EPISTLE TO TI1E HEBEEWS. 169 sented in the first three Gospels as describing his work ; yet it will be found that they are all con¬ nected with the idea of the kingdom of God, and that this is the more general and comprehensive notion, of which they are but subordinate parts or aspects, and which in its totality includes them all. This is proved, not merely by the fact that we can by a process of abstraction and comparison reduce them all to aspects of the kingdom of God, while we cannot so reduce the kingdom of God under any of them ; but by their being closely connected with it in Scripture, and by our finding in the Epistles the mention of the kingdom along with these more peculiar ideas of each of the apostles. Thus the notion of covenant, which has such a lead¬ ing place in the Epistle to the Hebrews, is in the Old Testament correlated to that of a kingdom of God. It was by a covenant that Israel was made God’s peculiar people and kingdom of priests ; and Jesus, while habitu¬ ally speaking of the kingdom of God, described his death as the foundation of a new covenant. All that is said, then, in exposition of this idea in the Epistle to the Hebrews, is but an unfolding of one particular aspect of the kingdom of God ; and in one place the very expression “ kingdom ” occurs (xii. 28), as describing in one great word the privileges and blessings of Chris¬ tians. This seems to show not only that the writer’s conception of Christianity as the new covenant is in fact a particular aspect of the kingdom of God, but also that this connection of the covenant with the kingdom was present to his mind, though on account ol the state of mind of those whom he addressed, and probably 170 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. also liis own habitual mode of viewing the subject, he made the notion of the covenant more prominent. It is also doubtful wdiether he means by the expression (xii. 28), “ receiving a kingdom that cannot be moved,” to describe the kingdom as present, and not merely as future. Unquestionably, in the previous context he is speaking of the present privileges of Christians (“ ye are come,” etc., ver. 22). Believers are in some way brought into connection with the scenes and companies thus described. Yet as elsewhere the writer expressly says, “ here we have no continuing city, but we look for one to come ” (xiii. 14) ; and as even in the passage before us he calls that city “the heavenly Jerusalem,” and in previous places speaks of the world to come (ii. 5, vi. 5) ; his real thought probably is, that we receive the kingdom now by that faith which is “ the substance of things hoped for ; ” but that in actual enjoyment it is a thing of the future. Very similar is the conception that we find in the first Epistle of Peter. While he is, as has been often remarked, very specially the apostle of hope, giving the first place in his thoughts to the heavenly inheritance, to the hope of which God has begotten us again by the resurrection of Jesus Christ (i. 3-5), and describes Christians as strangers and pilgrims in the earth (i. 1, 17, ii. 11, 12) ; yet at the same time he gives to the Christian community all the glorious attributes of Israel as the covenant people and kingdom of God (ii. 5, 9, 10), and his descriptions of their redemption by the blood of Christ (i. 18-20) are drawn from the passover at the Exodus, and those of their sanctifica¬ tion and blood-sprinkling (i. 2) from the covenant at SUPPL.] PETER AND JAMES. 171 Sinai. The conception that is suggested to our mind by the whole strain of the Epistle is that of Christians as the people of God, redeemed by Jesus the Messiah, and journeying through the wilderness to the land of promise. This indeed answers to the radical idea of the kingdom of God in the Old Testament, but not to the complete realization of it as foretold by the pro¬ phets. That seems, in Peter’s view, to be still a thing of the future, and in his encouragement to believers in affliction and persecution he falls back on the Old Testament thinking, as expressed in Ps. xxxiv. (l Pet iii. 9-12), not representing affliction itself as a blessing so distinctly as Paul does. He does not so emphatically as Jesus describe the kingdom of God as a present reality and the sum of all blessings, though his thought moves in the same line as that on which our Lord’s teaching proceeded. He has the conception of God as the Shepherd of souls (ii. 25), which is both an Old Testament idea, and one of Jesus’ own, and he also represents God as Father, and his people as his children (i. 14, 17). The Epistle of James is so entirely moral and prac¬ tical, that it is only by incidental suggestions that we can gather from it anything like a connected system of doctrine. The expression kingdom of God occurs once in it (ii. 5) ; and then it is spoken of as a thing of the future. There is, however, hardly any¬ thing that can be regarded as distinctly expressing the characteristic ideas to which Jesus gave expression in the phrase. Thus in the Epistles that represent the teaching of the original apostles, or were addressed especially to 172 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. Jews, we find that though the idea of the kingdom of God is not entirely absent, it is for the most part conceived as a thing of the future, of which believers in Jesus had indeed a sure hope and expectation, but not present enjoyment. This view was still that of the Old Testament and of John the Baptist ; but did not come up to the full measure of the teaching of Jesus, which represented the kingdom of God as already present, in germ at least, and needing only to be developed, not to be introduced, in the future. The great difficulty in the way of the understanding and acceptance of this view was, that it implied a very spiritual conception of the nature of the kingdom of God, such as most men found it hard to apprehend. During our Lord’s earthly life, his disciples do not seem to have understood the spiritual nature of the kingdom of God which he proclaimed, any better than the mass of their countrymen. They did indeed cleave to him even after his refusal to be made a king by the Galilean populace had alienated many who had formerly regarded him as the Messiah : they did so from personal attachment to him, because his words were life to their souls ; they saw him to be in a peculiar sense the Son of God, and he revealed God to them as a Father. But still they could not understand what he meant by speaking of dying and rising again ; they thought that his king¬ dom was to be established immediately by some supernatural interposition, and they dreamt of earthly thrones being assigned to them in it. Hence, when Jesus suffered himself to be taken, and condemned, and crucified, their hopes were dashed to the ground. SUPPL.] IDEAS OF THE APOSTLES. 173 They did not look for a resurrection, least of all such a resurrection as they afterwards believed and testified, and as is described in the Gospels. Yet the hints given as to the risen body of Jesus point to its being just such as he spoke of in his answer to the Sadducees about the resurrection, which had an important bearing on the question between Jesus and the Jews about the kingdom of God. It was not to be, as the Sadducees thought, a mere development of the hierarchy in this world, without any resurrection; nor yet, as the Pharisees imagined, an earthly sovereignty to be ushered in by a supernatural interposition of God and a resurrection of the pious dead to a life under earthly conditions in this world. The disciples saw Jesus alive again, and recognised him as the Master whom they had known, and who had been crucified ; but he no longer lived among them under the same earthly conditions as before : he came and went mysteriously, and he ate with them apparently not so much to satisfy hunger as to convince them of his true humanity. They could not doubt that he had conquered death, and that thus his claim to be the Messiah was confirmed : he had entered into his glory, all power was given unto him, and he promised to be with them always. But there had been no such signs from heaven and world- convulsions as the Pharisees looked for ; only they felt themselves to be new men, filled with hopes, and courage, and joy, such as they had never known before. Jesus had gone into heaven, and the Spirit of God came upon them manifesting itself in the usual way by ecstatic prophetic utterances. Hence they testified that even now Jesus was reigning ; and while they 174 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. still looked for him to come again when Israel should repent and all things be restored as the prophets had foretold (Acts iii. 19-21), they yet declared in the same breath that God had fulfilled his promise to Abraham, and sent his servant to bless them (ib. 26). It is, however, worthy of observation that in the book of Acts the preaching of the original apostles, before the mission of Paul, is never described as proclaiming the reign of God, but that Paul’s preaching is repeatedly described in that way (Acts xvii. 7, xix. 8, xx. 25, xxviii. 31). So also is that of Philip, the associate of Stephen (Acts viii. 12). This seems to indicate that Paul, from the time of his conversion, saw more distinctly than the original disciples what was implied in the resurrection of Jesus. For it was the conviction of that great event that at once altered all his previous opinions. He had felt, more strongly than most others, the opposition between the recognition of J esus as Messiah and all the received views of the Pharisees as to the king;dom of God ; he was exceedingly zealous for the traditions of the fathers, and he saw that if Jesus were indeed the Messiah, these must be given up or altered : the teaching ascribed to Stephen was the natural consequence of belief in Jesus ; and hence Saul consented to his death, and bitterly persecuted those who shared his faith. But when once he was convinced that Jesus was indeed risen, all this was altered. The Sanhedrin had been wrong in condemning Jesus, and therefore wTrong also in that whole view of the kingdom of God that logically forced them to condemn him. It could not be by SUPPL.] CONVERSION OF PAUL. 175 carefully observing the law and keeping up the hedge about it that the kingdom of God was to be hastened ; it must be true, as Jesus proclaimed, that that kingdom was already come. Moreover, since he had risen, not to an earthly life, or to set up a worldly kingdom, but to bless his followers with inward peace and joy, and to enable them to meet death, as he had seen Stephen do, with calmness and hope, the kingdom must be inward and spiritual. Hence for Paul the glad tidings of the reign of God was the announcement that the Saviour promised of old had been raised up of the seed of David, and had been raised from the dead, and thus had established the reign of God. This is the way in which the substance of the glad tidings, to the proclamation of which he was set apart, is set forth in Rom. i. 3, 4 ; and in a very similar strain he is represented as preaching at Antioch in Pisidia (Acts xiii. 32-39). Indeed, in the opening of most of his Epistles we can trace the idea of the kingdom of God in his thoughts, though it is sometimes so merged in the special subject of which in each case his heart was full, as not to be readily distinguishable. In the opening of the first to the Corinthians, he addresses them as a congregation of God called to be his holy ones, and to the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord(i. 2, 9). In writing to the Galatians, he makes prominent the negative idea of deliverance from this present evil world. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, the idea of the Church, as the object of God’s eternal love, is more prominent ; but in the parallel one to the Colossians the kingdom of God’s beloved Son is described as a present enjoyment of believers. In 176 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. writing to the Christians of the Roman colony of Philippi, Paul enlarges on the heavenly citizenship of Christians ; and to the Thessalonians he speaks of the kingdom of God in connection with their turning from idols to serve the living and true God. But the notion of the kingdom of God appears more distinctly in the practical than in the doctrinal teaching of Paul. In Pom. xiv. 17 he uses the phrase “the kingdom of God ” incidentally, as if referring to some¬ thing which he did not need to explain ; and says that it is “ not eating and drinking, hut righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit ; ” and he gives that as a reason for the lesson he is enforcing in the preceding sentences, that Christians ought not so to exercise their liberty in regard to meat and drink as to do moral harm to their brethren. The argument in vers. 4-12 shows that he viewed believers as servants of Christ, neither living nor dying for themselves, but being in life and death the Lord’s, each one doing everything as to the Lord, and responsible to him alone ; and he quotes a passage from one of the prophecies of the reign of Jehovah in proof of this (Isa. xlv. 23). The reign of God, then, is that dominion over men which Christ has acquired by dying and rising again (ver. 9), and it consists not in outward observances as to food and drink, but in righteousness, peace, and holy joy, i.e. in moral purity and love. Further, we may notice that the idea of Christians as one body under Christ, which underlies the exhortations here and onwards to the end of the Epistle, comes in as early as xii. 4, in the figure of the many members of the one body, which is a favourite one with Paul, and also in 1 Cor. xii. SUPPL ] PAULINE DOCTRINE. 177 We may say, therefore, that the notion of the king¬ dom of God, though it is expressly mentioned only in one place, underlies the whole of the practical part of the Epistle to the Romans, and is the presupposition of Paul’s whole idea of Christian duty as there expressed. It does not hold such a leading place in the doctrinal part of the Epistle ; though in y. 21 grace is spoken of as reigning, and in vi. 12, 13, which is however an exhortation, a reign of God over Christians is implied. But in his greater Epistles Paul views the salvation of Christ under the notion of the righteousness, rather than the kingdom, of God ; though it is worthy of notice that the title Lord (icvpios), constantly given to Jesus, seems to rest upon a view of his work as being the establishment of the kingdom of God (cf. Rom. xiv. 9-12 with Phil. ii. 9-11). In 1 Cor. iv. 21, the kingdom of God is spoken of in the same sense as in Rom. xiv. 17, though with a reference to Paul’s apostolic authority. Parallel, though somewhat more comprehensive, and approaching the use of the phrase in the Synoptic Gospels, is Col. iv. 11. When Paul uses it distinctively for the blessings brought by Christ, he generally speaks of it as a thing of the future. So 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10, xv. 50 ; Gal. v. 21 ; Eph. v. 5 ; 2 Thess. i. 5 ; 2 Tim. iv. 1, 18, and perhaps also 1 Thess. ii. 12, though this may possibly refer to the present. The only place where he certainly speaks of the kingdom as the sum of blessings, and also as present, is Col. i. 1 2, and there it is the kingdom of God’s Son. On the ground of 1 Cor. xv. 24-28, it is maintained by Weiss1 and others, that Paul distinguished the king- 1 Bibl. Theol. des N. T., § 99, n. c. M 178 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. dom of Christ, which he viewed as mediatorial, and having an end, from that of God, which he repre¬ sented as future and eternal. That passage indeed speaks of the mediatorial reign of Christ as coming to an end ; for in the light of ver. 28, where it is said that when all things shall have been subdued to him, the Son also shall be subject to the Father, ver. 24 must be understood of such a giving up of the kingdom that Christ shall cease to reign, and not merely of his restoring the kingdom to God in such a sense that he may continue to be king with God. The passage rather teaches, that when Christ in his royal power has put down all opposing powers, there shall cease to be any mediatorial reign, and God’s dominion shall be direct over all, because in all. This is true ; and it suggests important thoughts as to Paul’s conception of Christ’s kingship and mediatorial office in general. But it would not be safe to conclude from this, that wherever Paul speaks of the kingdom of God he refers to this final consummation, and distinguishes it from the kingdom of Christ as that which is now present. He seems to use the two phrases synonymously, and some¬ times, as in Eph. v. 5, combines them.1 Christ is now raised above all principality and power ; but the kingdom that he exercises may be truly called God’s 1 According to the grammatical rule for the use of the article, roD Xpiarov xxi Qtov should denote only one person, and be rendered, “of Christ and God,” i.e. of him who is Christ and God. It is exactly parallel to ru 0£w xxl Trxrpi (ver. 20) ; and there is no exegetical reason why it should be interpreted differently. If it be understood of one person, the passage speaks of the kingdom of Christ, probably though not quite necessarily, as a thing of the future ; and in any case, it is very improbable that Paul would have written so, if he had uniformly distinguished between the kingdom of Christ as present, and that of God as future. SUPPL.] PRESENT REALITY AND FUTURE REVELATION. 179 kingdom, since lie reigns in God’s name, and God reigns through him ; only whereas God’s reign is now mediated through Christ, at the last it shall be direct and immediate. Or, to put it otherwise, the future kingdom of God shall be the revelation of that kingdom O O of Christ which is real, though unseen, now. It is a Pauline idea, that the final judgment is to be a mani¬ festation of what is real, though only perceived by faith now. In the passage, 2 Cor. iii. 1-v. 10, he represents Christians as having already life, righteousness, the glory of God ; but these are not manifest as yet, but are concealed by our mortal bodies and the things of earth, and are to be revealed at last (iv. 10, 11, v. 10). Closely connected with this is the idea of the day of judgment as “ the manifestation of the righteous judg¬ ment of God ” (Rom. ii. 5 ; 1 Cor. iii. 12-15) ; of the final end for which all creation longs as the revealing of the sons of God (Rom. viii. 18, 19). So also he speaks of the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Tit. ii. 13), and of the appearing of Christ in connection with his kingdom (2 Tim. iv. 1). What hinders the manifestation of the kingdom and glory of God, is partly the unbelief of men, who are blinded by the god of this age (2 Cor. iv. 3, 4), and partly the fact that the whole creation has been made subject to vanity (Rom. viii. 20). Both these shall be done away when Christ has subdued all his enemies ; then consequently shall be the manifestation of the kingdom in its full glory, and then, as God shall be all in all, manifestly reigning entirely in all hearts, the reign as mediated by Christ may be said to have come to an end. 180 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. As to the precise meaning of the Son’s being subject to him that subjected all things under him, it is wisest not to affirm anything with confidence, since it is one of those ideas which occur only in a single passage, and on which, therefore, it is not safe to build a doctrinal conclusion. But the views given generally in Paul’s writings serve to show that the contrast in his mind between the present and the future was not of two different kingdoms, the one of Christ, and the other of God, but rather between the spiritual reality and the outward manifestation of the kingdom, which is essen¬ tially one and the same, and is both God’s and Christ’s. The fact that the idea of the kingdom of God, which is the leading thought in the teaching of Jesus according to the synoptic evangelists, is so much less prominent in the Epistles and in the discourses of the fourth Gospel, has been generally recognised by modern theologians, though in earlier times it attracted little or no attention. An explanation of it has been sought in two different and indeed opposite ways, some regarding it as an indication of advance in the concep¬ tion of Christian truth, and others again seeing in it a proof that the apostles did not fully apprehend or retain the great ideas of the Master. The former view is, that the notion of the kingdom of God is not the highest and most adequate represen¬ tation of the salvation brought by Christ, but one borrowed from the Old Testament, and used by our Lord in his earlier discourses, because best adapted to the prevalent ideas and expectations of the Jewish people. In his later communications, however, with his own disciples, he chose rather to express the SUPPL.] WHY LESS PROMINENT IN THE EPISTLES. 181 truth as to our relation to God through him by means of personal ideas and relations, such as life, fellowship, fatherhood, and the like ; and these have been more fully developed by the apostles, especially by John. On this view, the conception of the kingdom of God is a merely transitional one, that was used mainly for historical and pedagogic reasons, but designed to give place to those expressions of vital union and relation that are truer representations of the reality.1 This view, however, can hardly be borne out his¬ torically. According to the representations of the synoptists, Jesus used the phrase “ the kingdom of God,” not only in his earlier teaching of the people, but also in some of his latest conversations with his disciples, as in his prophetic discourse on the Mount of Olives (Matt. xxiv. 14, xxv. 1), and even at the Last Supper (Luke xxii. 16, 29, 30) ; and after his resurrection, it is still described as the theme of his instruction to them (Acts i. 3). According to these statements, Jesus did not lay aside in his later and more familiar teaching this notion of the kingdom, but still used it, at the very time when he gave those pro¬ found spiritual views that are contained in the closing discourses recorded by John. We should be obliged to suppose, if we are to carry out the view indicated by Newman Smyth, that the synoptic evangelists were less exact in representing the real historical form of our Lords teaching than the fourth Gospel. Now, though there might be no doctrinal objection to such an assumption, yet it is, on historical grounds, as a 1 See Newman Smyth, The Religious Feeling , pp. 124, 125. 182 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [lect. III. matter of fact extremely improbable, since all the circumstances of the case, and all the available evidence, external and internal, rather point to the conclusion, that the synoptists have more exactly portrayed the outward form and manner of Christ’s teaching, however truly and profoundly John has expressed its spirit and higher side. Further, we must observe that the idea of the kingdom of God is very prominent in the Apocalypse ; if, then, John had gathered from the later discourses of Jesus that that idea was to be left behind or laid aside in favour of more adequate conceptions, we can hardly conceive him to have written a book so full of it, and should be almost forced to the opinion that the Apocalypse was not written by the apostle, but by another John. This is indeed quite possible, but it is hardly safe to adopt a view that requires it as a necessary assumption on a priori grounds. In a word, this theory cannot be maintained without ascribing such an exclusive and determining authority to the Gospel and Epistles of John, historically as well as doctrinally, as cannot be verified by the known facts of the case, and endangering the trustworthiness of the synoptic representations. However true it is that the idea of vital and spiritual union to Christ and God, as developed by Paul and John, is an advance on the merely external and legal relations which predominate in earlier and Old Testament modes of thought ; this is not to be interpreted as if the notion of the kingdom of God was left behind as a merely outward one ; we must rather recognise that the gospel proclaimed by Christ has elevated the theocratic idea to a truly spiritual one, as we find that in our SUPPL.] DIFFERENT EXPLANATIONS. 183 Lord’s teaching it is viewed as a vital growth in the parables of the sower and the seed, and is connected with the fatherhood of God in the Lord’s prayer. The other explanation of the comparatively little prominence of the kingdom of God in the Epistles, is of an opposite nature, and supposes that it marks, not an advance in the development of doctrine, but rather a falling back, or failure to apprehend the full depth and height of the thought of Jesus. So Ritsclil,1 after a full and elaborate discussion of the question, comes to the conclusion “ that the writers of the New Testament Epistles, while they care for the moral health of the congregations of the Christian religion, use for this end all possible relations of the idea of the moral kingdom of God, yet have not kept in view the essential destination of the religious congregations to the realization of the moral kingdom of God, and in this respect have failed to reach the high level of Christ’s circle of thoughts.” A somewhat similar view is taken by Krauss,2 who thinks that our Lord’s idea of the kino;dom of God as a spiritual and unseen fellowship of men with God and with one another, gives place in the Epistles to the notion of the Church as a religious society, which as such must be outward and visible, and the kingdom of God, in Christ’s sense, is spoken of mainly as a thing of the future. This he believes to have been inevitable, because for Christ indeed the reign of God was perfectly realized in his own person as a present fact ; but by the apostles it could only be grasped by faith in him, 1 R echtf u. Versohnung, ii. 292-300. 2 Dogma von der unsichtbaren Klrche, p. 172. 184 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. and so was thought of by them mainly as a thing to be realized in the future, when he should appear again, and be with his people in person. In favour of this explanation there is this to be said, that the process to which it ascribes the difference between the conception of the Epistles and that of Jesus’ own teaching, is one which we know as a fact to have taken place in the age after that of the apostles. The Church very soon ceased to understand the real meaning of the Pauline doctrines, and in the writings of even the best of the Fathers, we find an external, shallow, distorted conception of Christianity taking the place of the profound, spiritual, and far-reaching ideas of the New Testament. It might seem, indeed, that to recognise traces of this process in the writings of the apostles who enjoyed the special enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, is somewhat dangerous, and may impair the regard we ought to have for the New Testament writings as the authoritative exposition of the principles of Christianity. But clearly the question is one of fact, and if we keep to what are the facts of the case, we shall not be led to any conclusion at variance with scriptural views of the authority of the apostolic writ¬ ings. It is not the case, nor is it supposed by Ritschl or Krauss, that the Epistles contradict the teaching of Jesus, or give any view of Christianity that is incon¬ sistent with his representations of the kingdom of God. If they for the most part conceive of Christians as a church or religious society, this is a notion that Jesus himself had taught them ; and the other more compre¬ hensive notion of the kingdom of God is not altogether absent from their minds, nor is it conceived in a wray I SUPPL.] FULNESS OF CHEIST’S TEACHING. 18 5 essentially different from that in which Jesus put it, though it is less prominent in their teaching. We must consider, also, that the form and selection of the truths insisted on by the apostles in their Epistles, was in large measure determined by the occasion of their writing, and more particularly by the great contro¬ versies they had to carry on in defence of the gospel, Paul against Judaic legalism, and John against incipient Gnosticism. Though they wrere taught by the Spirit to understand the truth more fully than they could know it during the earthly ministry of their Lord, they never could come to apprehend it as fully as it was in the mind of the Lord himself ; and his words are still the most pregnant and comprehensive. “We know in part, and we prophesy in part,” says Paul, even of himself and his brethren, who were under the teaching and inspiration of the Spirit. But in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge : he has a perfect comprehension of the truth of God, and his words, spoken out of that perfect knowledge of the wdiole, are more full and adequate than any of his disciples’. Now the kingdom of God seems to be the most com¬ prehensive idea in Christ’s teaching ; and the fact that the knowledge and prophecy of the apostles, though unfolding in many ways the import of Christ’s words and work to meet the wants of the Church, were yet only in part, may sufficiently explain the less pro¬ minence they give to this great theme. In the Apocalypse, the name and notion of the kingdom of God, or of Christ, occur very frequently ; and it may indeed be said to be the main purpose of the book to exhibit the opposition of the kingdom of 186 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. III. God and tlie powers of evil in the world, and the final victory of the former. While it is much occupied with the future, and describes with great fulness and pic¬ torial vividness the glory of God’s eternal reign in the New Jerusalem, it also recognises his kingdom as a present reality, and founds all its representations not less on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels than on Old Testament prophecy. At the very outset, Christ is called “ the ruler of the kings of the earth,” 6 ap'ywv rwv fiaaiXecov TrjVVvv MV Vj 196 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. [LECT. IV. form would contain the same meaning, only not so fully expressed, as in the longer form. According to this explanation, then, the kingdom or reign of God would consist in his will being; done on earth as it is in heaven : and that the will of God here meant is that expressed in the law of righteousness and love, appears from the whole tenor of the preceding chapter of Matthew. (2.) Matt. xii. 28 ; Luke xi. 13. “If I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then is the kingdom of God come upon you.” This saying shows that the kingdom of God is brought near by the Spirit of God as a power working on the side of moral goodness, casting out the spirit of Satan as the leader and representative of moral evil. With these may be compared the Joannine sayings about the new birth of the Spirit as necessary for entering the kingdom of God (John iii. 3-8). (3.) Luke xvii. 20, 21 shows that the reign of God was even in the days of Jesus a present reality of an inward and spiritual nature.1 Along with these particular utterances, we must take with us the general truth embodied in our Lord’s teaching as a whole, that the kingdom of God is essen¬ tially and inseparably connected with his own person as the Son of man. From the materials already gathered, looked at from the points of view indicated by these sayings, which approach the nearest to giving us an idea of the essential nature of the kingdom of God, we may now, with a view to clearness of thought, endeavour to frame a definition of it as conceived by Christ. Various 1 See Appendix, Note P. LECT. IV.] DEFINITION PROPOSED. 197 definitions have indeed been given already by eminent theologians, and sometimes in the symbolical books of the several Churches,1 but these are so diverse, and some of them so open to criticism on various grounds, that there seems to be room and need for proposing another, that may bring out simply and precisely the essential elements in the notion of the kingdom of God. The following may be taken as a basis at least for an exposition of the idea : — The gathering together of men, under God’s eternal law of righteous love, by the vital power of his redeeming love in Jesus Christ, brought to bear upon them through the Holy Spirit. The definition must clearly be verified by a careful examination of each part of it, to see whether each is well founded in the teaching of Christ, and whether any important part of his teaching about the kingdom of God is omitted. As we proceed with this examina¬ tion, we shall have the opportunity of comparing our definition with some of the others that have been given in regard to the points in which they differ. 1. By taking as the generic notion of the kingdom of God “ a gathering together,” we can retain the comprehensive sense of the Greek word /3a