; the 1/et

Edg&r C<&€ttb$C ;

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

363 Gibson (Bp.) The Old Testament in I
New : Warburtonian Lectures, cr. £,l
cloth, as new,. 2s. 3d. 1

The Old Testament in the New

UtiirS EMtion.
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND
ITS MESSAGES.
BY THE RIGHT REV.
EDGAR C. S. GIBSON, D.D.,
Bishop of Gloucester.
Crown 8vo.t cloth. 3s. 6d.
' Dr. Gibson has studied the Old Testament, and his
thoughts are new as well as true. If the publishers will
give us more of this, we shall be thankful.' — Expository
Times.

The Old Testament
in the New
The Warburtonian Lectures
for 1903— 1907

By the
Right Rev. Edgar C. S. Gibson, D.D.
Bishop of Gloucester

London
Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., Ltd.
3, Paternoster Buildings, E.C.

Yale Divinity Library
New Haven. Conn.

1907

Preface

It is obvious that these Lectures make no claim
to form a complete treatise on the ' Old Testa
ment in the New.' They are simply intended to
furnish illustrations of a line of thought which
students of the Bible may profitably follow up for
themselves, and from which, I believe, they may
learn much. It was impossible in the time at my
disposal as Warburtonian Lecturer to do more
than supply an introduction to a subject which
covers so large a field ; and it was therefore
necessary deliberately to omit all reference to
many branches of it. One notable omission
may be mentioned here. There is nothing said
of the New Testament references to the Jewish
conception of the Messiah and the Messianic pro-
, phecies of the Old Testament. My reason for
^this was that if I had begun to discuss these there
' would have been no room for anything else, and
i'l was desirous to draw attention to portions of
J the general subject which might be less familiar
s-to my hearers : and even among these I had to
'make a selection, as the course was limited to

vi Preface
twelve lectures. There was, however, a real
advantage from the lecturer's point of view in
thus making some of the lectures complete in
themselves ; for the arrangements under which, by
the kindness of the Benchers, the lectures are per
mitted to be delivered in the chapel of Lincoln's
Inn, involve a considerable interval of time between
the delivery of some of them. It is therefore very
difficult to present a connected argument followed
up throughout the whole course in such a form
that it shall be intelligible and interesting to the
hearers. Consequently it seemed to me better
to offer a series of separate illustrations of a single
line of thought ; and since the principle underly
ing the argument is in every case the same, I hope
the connexion is sufficiently close to justify the
general title under which the work is now
published. I regret that I was not aware of the existence
of Eugene Huhn's Die Alttestamentlichen Citate
und Reminiscenzen im Neuen Testamente (Tubin
gen, 1900) until the course was too far ad
vanced for it to be of service to me. It is the
most complete collection of the references and
allusions to the Old Testament in the New that
I have met with ; and it, together with Westcott
and Hort's edition of the Greek Testament, should
enable any student to work for himself on the
lines indicated in the lectures. I should also like

Preface vii
to express my sense of the value of Grinfield's
Editio Hellenistica of the New Testament. It is
an old book now, and much has been done for
the study of the LXX since it was published,
notably by the publication of Hatch and Redpath's
Concordance, and the Cambridge edition of the
LXX itself, together with Dr. Swete's Introduction
to the Old Testament in Greek. But there is an
immense amount of useful material collected in
it, and it ought not to be suffered to fall into
oblivion until there is something else to take its
place. E. C. S. G.
The Palace,
Gloucester,
April 27, 1907.

Contents i
Introduction
T. ... PAGE
2 lim. 111. 15 : 'From a babe thou hast known the sacred
writings, which are able to make thee wise unto salva
tion through faith which is in Christ Jesus ' (R. V.) - 1
II
Redemption
1 Pet. i. 18, 19 : 'Ye were redeemed, not with corruptible
things, with silver and gold ... but with precious
blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without
spot, even the blood of Christ ' (R.V.) 15
III
The Jewish and the Christian Church
Exod. xix. 5,6: 'Ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me
above all people . . . and ye shall be unto Me a
kingdom of priests and an holy nation ' 3 1
IV
The Day of the Lord
1 Thess. v. 2, 3 : 'Yourselves know perfectly that the day
of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For
when they shall say, Peace and safety ; then sudden
destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a
woman with child ; and they shall not escape ' 47

x Contents V
The Discourse on the Mount of Olives. — J PAGE
St. Matt. xxiv. 34-36 : ' Verily I say unto you, This
generation shall not pass away, till all these things be
accomplished. . . . But of that day and hourknoweth
no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the
Son, but the Father only' (R.V.) - - 63
VI
The Discourse on the Mount of Olives. — //
St. Matt. xxiv. 29, 30 : ' Immediately, after the tribulation
of those days the sun shall be darkened, and the
moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall
from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be
shaken : and then shall appear the sign of the Son
of man in heaven ' - 79
VII
The Discourse on the Mount of Olives. — HI
St. Matt. xxiv. 30 : 'Then shall all the tribes of the earth
mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in
the clouds of heaven with power and great glory ' 95
VIII
The Discourse on the Mount of Olives. — IV
St. Matt. xxiv. 31: 'And He shall send His angels
with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall
gather together His elect from the four winds, from
one end of heaven to the other ' 109

Contents xi
IX
The Apocalypse. — I PAGE
Rev. i. 3 : ' Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear
the words of the prophecy, and keep the things
which are written therein' (R-V.) 123
X
The Apocalypse. — II
Rev. i. 3 : ' Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear
the words of the prophecy, and keep the things
which are written therein ' (R.V.) 139
XI
The Apocalypse. — 77/
1 Cor. x. 1 1 : ' These things happened unto them by way
of example : and they were written for our admoni
tion, upon whom the ends of the ages are come'
(R.V.) 157
XII
The New Testament and the Apocrypha
St. Matt. xiii. 52 : ' Every scribe which is instructed unto
the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an
householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure
things new and old ' . 177

I
Introduction
2 Tim. iii. 15 : 'From a babe thou hast known the sacred
writings, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation
through faith which is in Christ Jesus ' (R.V.).

I
Introduction
Treatises have sometimes been written on the
subject of the use of the Old Testament in the
New.* But for the most part, so far as I am
aware, they are confined mainly, if not exclusively,
to the consideration and elucidation of those
formal and express quotations which are intro
duced as part of the argument and prefaced by
some formula of citation, as ' all this was done
that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the
Lord by the prophet, 'f or, 'then was fulfilled
that which was spoken by the prophet.'^ Of
fulfilments of prophecy such as these I do not
propose to speak in this course of lectures ; and
yet my subject may have as its title, ' The Old
Testament in the New.' For there seems to be
room for a larger treatment of the subject than
has hitherto been attempted, since, as a matter of
fact, the use of the sacred writings of the Old
Covenant in those of the New is by no means
confined to a certain number of formal citations
easily recognised and verified. Over and above
* E.g., Dr. Taylor's The Gospel in the Laiv.
t S Matt. i. 22. \ St. Matt. ii. 17.
3 I — 2

4 The Old Testament in the New
these there is a mass of references, allusions, and
unacknowledged quotations which it requires care
and research on the part of the reader to detect,
but which really, in many cases, supply us with
the only clue to the meaning of the passages in
which they occur.
It is these unacknowledged quotations, then,
which are to form the subject of investigation in
the present course of lectures : and the general
thesis that I wish to maintain is that it is only by
attending carefully to them, and discovering their
meaning and reference in their original connexion,
that we can understand the teaching of our Lord
and His Apostles. This was built up, as I have
indicated, to a far larger extent than is commonly
recognised out of the teaching of those older
Scriptures which they must have known almost
by heart ; and it is only when we have realised
this, and are on the look-out for allusions, refer
ences, and glances back to the Old Testament,
which in some books abound on almost every page,
that we have taken a first step on the road towards
the right understanding of the New. It is, how
ever, no easy matter for the English reader to do
this. A great part of the Old Testament, say
the majority of the prophets — and the minor pro
phets in particular — is so unfamiliar even to many
devout and earnest students who know their New
Testament well that it requires a great effort of
mind and a special training for them to throw
themselves back into the position of the men to
whom our Lord's words were first spoken, or
those who were the earliest recipients of the

Introduction 5
Apostolic Epistles, and realise how (as shall pre
sently be shown) they would be quick to catch
the allusions and understand the references to
books which formed part of their everyday life far
more than even the Gospels do of ours. We are
for the most part practically compelled to approach
the study of the Old Testament through the New,
whereas if we could invert the order we should
really start on the study of the latter in a better
position to understand it, since we should be put
back into the position of those for whom it was
first written ; for we must never lose sight of the
fact that the Jews in general possessed a fami
liarity with the letter of their Scriptures far beyond
anything of which we have experience, and thus,
as just stated, the hearers of our Lord's discourses
and the nucleus of Jewish members of the early
Churches would at once recognise the allusions,
would be familiar with their original context and
meaning, and would know how to interpret them.
This assertion of the familiarity of the average
Jew with the text of his Scriptures may perhaps
need justification ; and it will be well, therefore,
to indicate what is known of the state of religious
learning among the Jews generally at the time of
the Incarnation. The subject is one on which a
good deal of light has been thrown by recent
research, and the results of these investigations
which have been made are worth placing before
you. The education of the child began from his very
earliest years in the home. ' It is,' says the
Talmud — and the words are true of the period

6 The Old Testament in the New
that we are considering — ' the duty of the father
to instruct his son in the law.'* Nor were the
daughters neglected, for we read in the Apocry
phal history of Susanna that ' her parents taught
their daughter according to the law of Moses. 'f
That the duty was for the most part adequately
performed, and that Timothy was no exception in
having learnt the sacred writings ' from a babe,'
we have ample evidence. To this Josephus and
Philo bear witness. The former says : ' We take
most pains of all with the instruction of children,
and esteem the observation of the laws and the
piety corresponding with them the most important
affair of our whole life.' J In like manner the
great Alexandrian : ' Since the Jews esteem their
laws as divine revelations, and are instructed in
the knowledge of them from their earliest youth,
they bear the image of the law in their souls.'§
And that the instruction was not confined to the
Law of Moses, but included also the prophets and
the other books, is shown by an interesting pas
sage in the Fourth Book of Maccabees. This book
not being included in our Apocrypha, is but little
known to English readers, and therefore I make
no apology for quoting the passage in full. In the
eighteenth chapter there is a beautiful description
of the way in which a Jewish father would teach
his children. The widowed mother of seven
youths, who were first tortured and then martyred
for their faith, is introduced as exhorting her
children to constancy, and is represented as re-
* Kiddushin, 29a. t The Story of Susanna, verse 3.
.{ Apion,.\. 12. § Legal, ad Caium, § 31.

Introduction 7
minding them of the religious instruction they had
received from the lips of their father. ' He used
to teach you,' she says, ' when yet with you the
law and the prophets. And he read to us of Abel
who was murdered by Cain ; and of Isaac, who
was sacrificed, and of Joseph, who was in prison.
And he told us of the zealous Phineas ; and taught
us concerning Ananias, Azarias, and Misael in
the fire. And he praised Daniel who was in the
den of lions, and called him blessed. And he
reminded you of the scripture of Isaiah, which
says: " If thou pass through the fire it shall not
burn thee." He chanted to you David the
Psalmist, saying, " Great are the troubles of the
righteous." He recited to us proverbs, even
Solomon, saying, " He is a tree of life to those
who do His will." And he affirmed the truth set
forth by Ezekiel, saying, "Can these dry bones
live ?" For he did not forget the song which
Moses taught and its teaching : " I will kill, and I
will make alive. This is your life and the pro
longing of your days." ' *
Thus the education of the child in the Scriptures
began in the home. But it did not end there,
The home lessons were supplemented and carried
on further by the instruction given in the syna
gogues, which were at this time established in
every town and village throughout the land ; and
beyond it, wherever there was a congregation of
Jews to be found. The object of the services
held in these buildings was not public worship
in the stricter sense, but religious instruction;
* 4 Mace, xviii. 9 et seq.

8 The Old Testament in the New
above all, instruction in the Law. On this point
there is a good deal of misconception. It is
commonly assumed that attendance at the syna
gogue was for prayer and praise, and consisted
largely of Psalms, as was certainly the case in
later days. But, as a matter of fact, all the earliest
witnesses unite in testifying that at this period the
Jews were gathered together in these buildings
primarily for instruction rather than worship.
Originally it was a Bible-class rather than a
Church Service which was conducted Sabbath
by Sabbath in them. So in the New Testament
it is always 'teaching' that is spoken of when
our Lord enters the synagogue,* and the only
features of the service mentioned by Philo and
other early writers, as well as found in the notices
in the New Testament, are the reading of the
Scriptures and the exposition of them.t This of
itself must have done much to familiarise the
Jew with the letter of the Old Testament. But
there was more done for him still, for already
the schoolmaster was abroad, and there was a
thorough system of elementary education estab
lished throughout the country. Jewish tradition,
which in this matter is upheld by modern criti
cism, assigns the establishment of this system
of national elementary education to Simon ben
Shetach (b.c. 70)4 and it is tolerably certain that
* See, e.g., St. Matt. iv. 23, ix. 35, xiii. 54, etc.
¦f See St. Luke iv. 16 et seq. ; Acts xiii. 15; and cf. The
Expositor, fourth series, vol. ii., p. 26, and Schurer, The Jewish
People in the Time of Jesus Christ, Div. ii., vol. ii., p. 76.
\ See Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, vol. i., p. 649.

Introduction 9
at the time of the Incarnation there was attached
to every synagogue an elementary school — Beth
Sepher, as it was called, ' the House of the Book.'
Thus the teachers of the Law, of whom we read
in St. Luke's Gospel as having ' come out of
every town of Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem,'
sitting by and listening to our Lord's teaching,*
could only be the teachers in these elementary
schools, for higher colleges for the deeper study
of the law and professional training were confined
to Jerusalem and one or two other centres, and
the smaller towns of Galilee and Judea would
have only these elementary schools.
In these — while reading, writing, and arithmetic
were taught — it must never be forgotten that the
only text-book was the Scripture. ' Indeed,' says
Wellhausen, ' the Bible became a spelling-book,
and the community a school.' t And while it was
thus used as the only text-book, the chief method
of teaching it was by repetition and learning by
heart, so that the ideal school-boy was likened to
' a plastered cistern that loseth not a drop,'| and
the result of this was an extraordinary familiarity
on the part of the Jews at large with the letter of
Scripture. ' If anybody,' says Josephus, ' do but
ask one of our people about our laws, he will more
readily tell them than he will tell his own name,
and this in consequence of our having learnt them
immediately as soon as ever we became sensible
of anything, and of our having them, as it were,
engraven in our souls. '§ To such an extent were
* St. Luke v. 17. t Quoted in Hastings, loc. cit.
X Pirqe Aboth, IL, xi. § Apion, ii. 19. 2

io The Old Testament in the New
the powers of memory cultivated that St. Jerome
(speaking, of course, at a much later date) tells us
of the Jews in his days, that ' in childhood they
acquire the complete vocabulary of their language,
and learn to recite all the generations from Adam
to Zerubbabel with as much accuracy and facility
as if they were giving their own names. '*
These facts which have now been summarised
as to the character, method, and extent of
elementary education among the Jews at the time
of the Incarnation are important, not only because
they furnish us with a simple and natural explana
tion of the marvellous familiarity with the text of
the Old Testament shown in some of the dis
courses of our Blessed Lord, as well as in the
works of the various writers of the New Testa
ment, all of whom, with the exception of St. Paul,
and probably the writer of the Epistle to the
Hebrews, may not unfairly be described in the
words actually applied in the Acts of the Apostles
to two of their number, as ' ignorant and un
learned men'f — i.e., men who had received no
technical or professional training, nothing, that is
to say, beyond an ordinary elementary education.
But the facts do more than this. They indicate
that there is ample ground for the statement
previously made, that the teaching was addressed
in the first instance to an audience who would be
able to catch the allusions and understand the
references without difficulty, and who were thus
* Comment, in Epist. ad Titum, chap. iii. ; Opera (ed. Migne),
vol. vii., p. 735.
f Acts iv. 13.

Introduction ii
in a far better position than most moderns for
estimating the meaning of those parts of the new
teaching which were not really new, but based
upon the ancient Scriptures, which they had
learned from their childhood. The Jews were in
very deed the people of a book ; the Old Testa
ment formed for the mass of the people their
entire literature. The nearest approach to any
thing of the same kind by which we can illustrate
it is the position of the English Bible among the
Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
in our own land, when, to use the words of John
Richard Green, ' England became the people of
a book, and that book was the Bible.' * ' The
power of the book over the mass of Englishmen
showed itself in a thousand superficial ways, and
in none more conspicuously than in the influence
it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed the
whole literature which was practically accessible
to ordinary Englishmen ; and when we recall the
number of common phrases which we owe to
great authors — the bits of Shakspere, or Milton,
or Dickens, or Thackeray — which unconsciously
interweave themselves in our ordinary talk, we
shall better understand the strange mosaic of
Biblical words and phrases which coloured English
talk two hundred years ago. The mass of
picturesque allusions and illustrations which we
borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were
forced to borrow from one ; and the borrowing was
the easier and the more natural, that the range
of the Hebrew literature fitted it for the expression
* Short History, p. 447. 2  2

12 The Old Testament in the New
of every phase of feeling. When Spenser poured
forth his warmest love-notes in the "Epithalamion,"
he adopted the very words of the Psalmist as he
bade the gates open for the entrance of his bride.
When Cromwell saw the mists break over the
hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the
song of David: "Let God arise, and let His
enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke van-
isheth, so shalt Thou drive them away." Even
to common minds this familiarity with grand
poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave
a loftiness and ardour of expression that, with all
its tendency to exaggeration and bombast, we may
prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of to-day.'*
Green's words in this passage will apply, mutatis
mutandis, to the Jewish nation two thousand
years ago. And there are large portions of the
New Testament teaching which we shall never
understand aright unless we have firmly grasped
this truth. My endeavour, then, in subsequent
lectures will be to show in detail its bearing on
some of the greater Christian doctrines and con
ceptions, and to indicate the sources in the Old
Testament from which they spring. We shall
see how the figure or metaphor of ' redemption '
for our Lord's atoning work comes straight from
the Old Testament, and how it is due to simple
ignorance or forgetfulness of this fact that some
of the most unfortunate notions that have ever
disfigured Christian theology have arisen. We
shall see that many of the terms and expressions
applied to the Christian Church, and to Christians
* History of the English People, vol. iii., p. n.

Introduction 13
living in the world, are simply borrowed from
language previously used of the Church of the
Jewish Dispensation, and that here also we run
great risk of seriously misinterpreting them, unless
we trace them to their origin, and take full account
of their source. We shall see how our Lord's
teaching on what we commonly call ' Eschatology '
is largely built up out of Old Testament materials,
and cannot be properly appreciated unless we can
discover the quarry whence the stones were hewn.
We shall see also that it is absolutely impossible
to understand the Revelation of St. John the
Divine without investigating its sources, and that
a flood of light is thrown on its meaning by
constant reference back to the Old Testament.
The Old Testament comes in for a good deal
of depreciation in the present day. It is usually
regarded as of very subordinate importance, and
the study of it is sadly neglected by a large
number even of earnest Christians. But they
were the ' sacred writings ' of the Old Covenant
alone (for there were at that time no others col
lected) which Timothy had known ' from a babe,'
and which were ' able to make him wise unto
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.' They
have lost none of their power to-day ; and used
in the manner in which I have tried to indicate,
it will be found that ' GoD-inspired as they are '
they are ' profitable for teaching, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness, that
the man of God may be complete, furnished com
pletely unto every good work.'*
* 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17.

II
Redemption
i Pet. i. 18, 19: 'Ye were redeemed, not with corruptible
things, as silver and gold . . . but with precious blood, as of
a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of
Christ' (R. V.).

II
Redemption
There is no expression in the New Testament
applied to the Saviour's work for mankind that
has taken firmer hold on the heart of Christendom
than that which speaks of it as Redemption. ' The
Redeemer ' is one of the commonest titles ascribed
to H im ; and no aspect of His work is more familiar
than that in which it is regarded as a redeeming
or ransoming mankind from the power of Satan.
Such language is common throughout the New
Testament from the Gospels to the Apocalypse.
We meet with it even before the Saviour's birth.
The earliest occurrence of the phrase is in the Song
of Zacharias, which begins with a benediction of
'the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and
redeemed' — or wrought redemption for — 'His
people.'* Our Lord Himself is represented as
using the same kind of language, for, as reported
by St. Matthew and St. Mark, He says quite
definitely that He ' came to give His life a ransom
for many, f St. Paul, in his speeches and Epistles,
has constant allusions in varied expressions to the
same conception. In addressing the Ephesian
* iTroirjcre XvTpwcnv (St. Luke i. 68).
t Xvrpov dvTi ttoXXxov (St. Matt. xx. 28 ; St. Mark x. 45).
17 3

18 The Old Testament in the New
Elders at Miletus, he charges them to ' feed the
Church of God, which He hath purchased with
His own blood.'* Writing to the Corinthians,
He reminds them more than once that they are
' not their own, for ' they ' are bought with a
price. 'f ' Redemption that is in Christ Jesus,'
'redemption through His blood,' redemption
' from the curse of the law 'J — these are phrases
which are often on his lips; and in close dependence
on the words of our Saviour Himself, he tells
Timothy that the ' one Mediator ' between God
and man 'gave Himself a ransom for all.'§ So
St. Peter, in the passage I have already read to
you, tells his converts that they were ' redeemed
not with corruptible things, as silver or gold . . .
but with precious blood, even the blood of Christ ' ; ||
and in his second Epistle he mourns over the
coming of false teachers who ' shall privily bring
in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that
bought them'; If while in the Apocalypse, when
the Seer in Patmos is granted his vision of ' the
Lamb as it had been slain,' he hears the four and
twenty Elders, the representatives of the Church
from the beginning to the end of time, ' sing a
new song before the throne, saying, "Thou art
worthy to take the book, and to open the seals
thereof, for Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed
(or bought) us to God by Thy blood." '**
* Acts xx. 28. f 1 Cor. vi. 20, vii. 23.
X Rom. iii. 24; Eph. i. 7 ; Gal. iii. 13.
§ avTikvrpov virlp iravTwv (1 Tim. ii. 6).
|| 1 Pet. i. 18, 19. 11 2 Pet. ii. 1.
** i)yopa(ras (Rev. v. 9).

Redemption 19
All these passages which I have collected
together — and the number might be considerably
increased — indicate how thoroughly the New
Testament is saturated from end to end with
the thought of redemption or ransom through the
blood of Christ. It is no casual figure that drops
just once from the lips of a single speaker in the
heat of the moment — a figure which you feel it
would be unfair to press or hold him to. On the
contrary, it is one of the most frequent conceptions
of the work of Christ, common to a number of
different teachers, and sanctioned by our Blessed
Lord Himself; so that it is no wonder that when,
in after ages, men set themselves to draw out from
the words of Scripture a consistent theory of the
Atonement, they fastened upon these phrases, and
constructed out of them a dogmatic system in which
the idea of redemption or ransom was the most
prominent feature. The expressions before them
naturally suggested to men brought up in Greek
or Latin modes of thought questions to which the
New Testament itself returned no direct answer,
but questions the answers to which, they held,
would be legitimate inferences from the language
of Scripture.
Now, the idea of ransom, or redemption, which
is most familiar to us, is something of this kind :
A traveller falls into the hands of brigands, and
is carried away to some cave in the mountains,
where he is closely guarded ' as a prisoner.
Negotiations are presently opened, and his friends
are told that he will be restored to liberty on pay
ment of a certain sum of money as a ransom.
3—2

20 The Old Testament in the New
Finally, finding that there is no other way to
secure his release, a bargain is struck ; the sum
agreed upon is handed over to his captors, and
the man is set at liberty. In the ancient world
the idea was much the same, only, as slavery was
then an established institution, and captives were
frequently sold as slaves, there was added a sort
of notion that the owner had acquired rights over
those whom he held in bondage, and that he had
a legal claim to receive the sum of money agreed
upon by way of ransom. So these ideas were
not unnaturally called in to aid the interpretation
of the language of Scripture. Attention was
directed to those numerous expressions already
cited in which men are said to have been
'redeemed,' 'ransomed,' 'bought back,' and in
which the blood of Christ is spoken of as the
'price' wherewith they were 'purchased.' It was
held that such language implied that man was
regarded as a captive slave in the power of
Satan, a state from which he was freed, not by
the employment of force, but by the payment of a
price to his captor ; and hence there was gradually
built up a theory that through the Fall Satan had
gained rights over man, and that, since it would
not have been in accordance with the justice of
God violently to deliver man from his power,
Christ offered to him as the price of our redemp
tion His own life or blood; and that Satan, who
' would have had a ground of complaint if, having
taken man captive, he had been forcibly robbed
of his prey,'* voluntarily accepted the price, and
* See St. John of Damascus, Defide Orthod., iii. 18.

Redemption 21
thus man was freed from his dominion. That,
broadly speaking, is the theory of the Atonement
which dominated Christendom and held sway
over the thoughts of men for a thousand years.
Some traces of it appear in very early days.
Irenseus is the first of the Fathers to reason on
the subject before the close of the second century.
He clearly teaches that, in order to vindicate
God's justice, it was requisite that man should be
released from his bondage to Satan, not by force,
but by a sort of agreement, being bought back,
or ransomed, by consent.* But the real father of
the patristic theory was Origen, some forty or
fifty years later. He speaks more definitely of
a ' kind of bargain 'f made between God and
Satan ; and from his time onwards it became
' the orthodox opinion among theologians ' that
such a bargain was struck and issued in the
liberation of man from the thraldom of Satan.
One quotation may suffice to show the kind of
teaching current among representative Fathers of
the Church. It is taken from the great 'Cate
chetical Oration ' of Gregory of Nyssa, one of
the famous Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth
century. 'What,' he asks, after speaking of
man's position as the slave of Satan, ' under these
circumstances, is justice ? It is not the exercising
any arbitrary sway over him who has us in his
power, nor the tearing us away by a violent
* See Trenaeus, Adv. Heer., V., i.
t 'AvT<iX.Xayp.a. Origen, Com. in Joan., ii. 21; in Matt.
xvi. 8; in Rom. ii. 13. Cf. Bethune Baker, Introduction to
the Early History of Christian Doctrine, p. 337.

22 The Old Testament in the New
exercise of force from his hold, thus leaving some
colour for a just complaint to him who enslaved
man through sensual pleasure. For as those who
have bartered away their freedom for money are
the slaves of those who have purchased them . . .
on the same principle, now that we had volun
tarily bartered away our freedom, it was requisite
that no abitrary method of recovery, but one
consonant with justice, should be devised by Him
who in His goodness had undertaken our rescue.
Now this method is in a measure this : to make
over to the master of the slave whatever ransom
he may agree to accept for the person in his
possession. What, then, was it likely that the
master of the slave would choose to receive in
his stead ? He would require, says Gregory,
'something higher and better in the way of
ransom . . . and therefore, when he saw the
miracles and mighty works done by Christ, he
thought he saw in Him an opportunity for an
advance in the exchange upon the value of what
he held, and for this reason he chooses Him as
a ransom for those who were shut up in the
power of death.'* Here, in this passage, the
patristic theory is nakedly stated, and there is no
doubting what Gregory means. The precious
blood of Christ is the ransom paid to Satan,
and paid as a matter of justice and by agreement,
in order that man may recover his freedom from
the slavery into which he has sold himself. It is
true that here and there a voice is raised against
it, as by Gregory's own friend and namesake,
* Gregory of Nyssa, Oralio Catechetka, xxii, xxiii.

Redemption 23
another of the great Cappadocians, Gregory of
Nazianzus, who repudiates with horror the notion
that Christ's blood could have been paid as a
price to Satan. 'If,' he cries, ' it was paid to the
Evil One, shame upon the insult that the robber
should not only receive a ransom from God, but
receive God Himself — a payment so much exceed
ing in value his own tyranny.'* But Gregory of
Nazianzus is a voice crying in the desert, and in
spite of his eloquence and moral earnestness the
theory maintained its ground. It was held by
leading theologians like Ambrose of Milan, and
Augustine of Hippo, and Gregory the Great,
the Bishop of Rome, to whom we owe the
mission of the other Augustine to our own shores ;
and, as I have said, it continued the ' orthodox '
opinion in the Church, and practically dominated
the thought of Christendom for a thousand years
until the days of our own Anselm of Canterbury,
who is almost the first to question it, and to whose
influence its disappearance is due. But not even
so, as I have represented it, was the theory com
plete. It required to be supplemented by another
notion yet more repulsive to our moral sense, for
when the question, To whom was the ransom paid ?
had been answered by the assertion that it was
paid to Satan, a further question at once arose :
How came Satan to accept so bad a bargain, and,
for the sake of a temporary triumph, to consent to
lose his lasting hold on man ? To this the Fathers
did not shrink from replying that Satan was out
witted by God in the transaction, and, indeed,
* Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat., 45.

24 The Old Testament in the New
they sometimes gloried in this as a proof of the
'wisdom ' of God, just as the bargain was a proof
of His 'justice.' The Godhead was veiled beneath
the manhood. The devil, therefore, overreached
himself, ' not realising,' so says Origen, ' that the
sinless soul of Christ would cause him such
torture that he could not retain it.'* Or, to put
it as Gregory of Nyssa states it, ' the flesh veiled
the Deity sufficiently to preclude the fear which
Satan would otherwise have felt, and hence he
eagerly accepted the proffered exchange, and, like
a ravenous fish, having gulped down the bait of
the flesh, was caught by the hook of the Diety
which it covered.'! In much the same spirit
Augustine, in more than one of his sermons, and
notably in a passage which was copied with
approval seven hundred years later by Peter the
Lombard, the ' Master of the Sentences,' whose
work became the text-book of the schoolmen,
exclaims that ' the Cross is a mouse-trap, with the
Blood of Christ as the bait.' J Language such
as this sounds so strangely in our ears that it
requires an effort on our part to realise how
common it once was, and how the teaching which
I have been endeavouring to summarise was the
accepted and ' orthodox ' teaching of the Church.
It was based, as we have seen, on the language
* Origen, Contra Celsum, vii. 17. Cf. Fisher, History of
Christian Doctrine, p. in.
t Gregory of Nyssa, ubi supra.
% 'Crux est muscipula.' See Augustine, Sermons cxxx.,
cxxxiv., cclxiv., and Peter Lombard, Libri Sententi, iii. 19,
where the passage from Augustine, Sermon cxxx., is quoted.

Redemption 25
of the New Testament itself, and, whatever may
be said of that part of the theory which taught
that a deception was practised on Satan, the main
thought of a kind of bargain, and of a price paid
as a ransom to man's captor, might plausibly claim
to be a legitimate inference from the statements
of apostolic writers, and even from the words of
our Lord Himself, as to the redemption wrought,
the ransom paid, and the purchase of the Church
with the precious blood ; and if, as our whole
nature compels us to do, we reject the inferences
which the Fathers drew, we may fairly be asked
to explain and account for the language which
seemed to justify them. It was due to the moral
earnestness and insight of St. Anselm that the
theory was dropped and replaced by another on
which we need not enter here.* But Anselm
rejected it on the broad ground of principle, as
contradicting God's goodness and omnipotence,
without dealing adequately with the Scriptural
grounds on which it was based. It is, however,
of importance to do this, as even now there are
many persons who are puzzled and almost
scandalised by the strong expressions of the New
Testament which I have cited. Let us, then,
see whether, by tracing these expressions back to
their source, their difficulty may not be removed.
In my first lecture it was pointed out that the
Old Testament was the quarry whence the
language of the New Testament was drawn, and
that only as we hold the former in one hand can
we hope to interpret the latter. To understand
* See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo. 4

26 The Old Testament in the New
the teaching of our Lord and His Apostles aright
we must always be on the look-out for allusions
and references in their words to the language
of the ancient Scriptures, which they and their
hearers must have known by heart. Apply this
thought here, and you will find that the Scriptural
expressions of the doctrine we have been consider
ing furnish us with a most striking example of
the truth thus stated. For what are the facts of
the case? In no fewer than four of the passages
in which redemption or ransom is mentioned in
the New Testament the words employed are
direct citations from the Old Testament,* and are
actually marked as such in Westcott and Hort's
edition of the Greek text ; and in all the other
cases it is easy to see that the idea or thought is
borrowed immediately from the Jewish Scriptures
in their Greek dress. There the Greek words
for ' ransom ' and ' redemption 't are habitually
employed as equivalents for the two leading
termsj in which the Hebrew writers speak of
God's great acts of delivering His people, first
from Egypt, and secondly from the Babylonish
captivity. It was the former of these great events
in their national history that fixed once for all the
conception of redemption in the mind of the Jews.
Again and again it is under this image that they
speak of the deliverence. As early as Exod. vi. 6
* St. Luke i. 68 is from Ps. cxi. (LXX. -ex.) 9 ; Acts xx. 28
from Ps. lxxiv. (LXX.-lxxiii.) 2 ; Titus ii. 14 from Ps. cxxx.
(LXX.-cxxix.) 7 ; and 1 Pet. i. 18 from Isa. Iii. 3.
f XvTpOVV, XvTpiO(TlS.
t ht& ms.

Redemption 27
— that is, before the passage of the Red Sea —
God is represented as charging Moses to ' say
unto the children of Israel, I am the Lord, and I
will bring you out from under the burden of the
Egyptians, and will rid you of their bondage ; and
I will redeem you ' (there is the word* so often
used in the New Testament) ' with a stretched
out arm and with great judgments.' So in the
Song of Moses in Exod. xv. we read : ' Thou in
Thy mercy hast led forth Thy people, whom Thou
hast redeemed . . . and the nations shall be still
as a stone till Thy people pass over, which Thou
hast purchased.' Nor are these isolated occur
rences of the expressions, for in the discourses in
the Book of Deuteronomy God is constantly said
to have ' redeemed His people out of the house of
bondage from the hand of Pharaoh.'* And the
language is taken up alike by psalmist and by
prophet. ' O think upon Thy congregation,'
cries the Psalmist, ' which Thou hast purchased
and redeemed of old ';t and the words used of that
first great deliverance were freely employed again
in the later days when once more the people were
' sold ' — it is the regular phrase} — into the hand
of their enemies, and looked forward to an inter
position on the part of God Himself parallel to
that which He made at the Exodus. So all
through the latter part of Isaiah, when the return
from the Babylonish captivity is in view, nothing
* See Deut. vii. 8, ix. 26, xiii. 5, xv. 15, xxi. 8, xxiv. 18.
t Ps. lxxiv. (LXX.-lxxiii.) 2.
j See Deut. xxxii. 30; Ps. xliv. 12 ; Isa. 1. 1 ; Judg. ii. 14,
iii. 8, etc.
4—2

28 The Old Testament in the New
is more frequent than language in which God is
invoked as the Redeemer of His people, or the
people themselves are spoken of as the ransomed of
the Lord. ' Ye have sold yourselves for nought '
— here is a single instance out of many — ' and ye
shall be redeemed without silver.'* And notice
that, as the passage quoted above from the Psalms
must have suggested to St. Paul his language in
Acts xx. about ' the Church ' or ' congregation '
(the Greek word e/c/cAWa being the same in the
Psalm and the Acts), which God ' purchased,' so
these words of the prophet must have suggested
to St. Peter the thought of the verse which I
have taken as my text this morning : ' Ye were
redeemed not with corruptible things, as silver or
gold, but with precious blood, even the blood of
Christ.' Only let this fact be once firmly grasped,
that in applying the terms ' ransom ' and ' redemp
tion ' to the work of Christ the writers of the
New Testament are transferring to the Atonement
language already consecrated to a religious pur
pose by its application to previous deliverances,
and the whole structure of patristic inferences falls
to the ground like a house of cards. We move
in the sphere of Hebrew rather than of Greek or
Latin thought. To the Jew the question To
whom was this ransom paid ? would never have
occurred. To a Greek or Latin it was natural
enough. But plainly a Jew would never have
thought of asking it, for he was accustomed from
his earliest years to hear the terms which we
render in English 'ransom' and 'redemption'
* Isa. Iii. 3.

Redemption 29
applied to that mighty interposition whereby
God's people were rescued and emancipated from
Egypt ; and it is obvious that there no thought
could possibly arise of ' rights ' acquired by man's
captor, or of any ' price ' paid to Pharaoh. There
was certainly no bargain made with the Egyptian
monarch and no compensation paid to him. On
the other hand, ' there is everywhere present,'
says Bishop Westcott, ' the idea of the exertion
of a mighty force, the idea that the redemption
costs much.'* And not only so, but there was
also prominent in the narrative the thought of the
blood of the paschal lamb — a lamb (it is expressly
stated) 'without blemish,' f as in some mysterious
manner contributing to the deliverance. Is it not
easy, then, to understand how New Testament
writers could transfer these ideas quite naturally
to the work of Christ, and could say that it ' cost '
Him His life to deliver His people from the
power of Satan, and that His blood was the
' price ' He was called upon to pay ? But in so
saying there would be no thought in the back of
their minds of any power which could claim the
price from the Son of God, or had acquired any
' rights ' over man of which justice demanded the
recognition. Such notions might be natural
enough to men who read their New Testament
without previous training in the language of the
Old. But once let us grasp the truth which it is
the purpose of this course of lectures to enforce
and illustrate, and the idea of such a thing
* Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 296.
t See Exod. xii. 5.

30 The Old Testament in the New
vanishes altogether. We gain in its place, from
the consideration of what the redemption of Israel
from Egypt really was, a truer and nobler con
ception of its ' perfect spiritual antitype,'* the
redeeming work of Christ for His Church. It
is a real rescue from the dominion of Satan,
and though nothing was paid to him by way of
compensation, it gives Christ the Redeemer a
claim upon us as His own, for we are bought
with His precious blood. That is the part which
concerns us, and which really matters. WTith
that we may well rest content, not pressing for a
further analysis of the conception, but striving
so to order our lives here as men who not only
realise their emancipation from the power of sin,
but also recognise the need of absolute loyalty to
Him who has the right to claim a whole-hearted
service from those whom He has ' purchased with
His own blood.'
* Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, loc. cit.

Ill
The Jewish and the Christian
Church
Exod. xix. 5, 6 : 'Ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me
above all people . . . and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of
priests and an holy nation.'

Ill
The Jewish and the Christian Church
In my last lecture an endeavour was made to
trace to its source in the Old Testament the
Christian conception of redemption. It was then
shown that this is ultimately based on the account
of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, which is
habitually described in the Jewish Scriptures as
a great act of redemption or ransom. By it God
rescued His people, emancipated them from slavery,
and ' purchased ' them, so that they henceforth
were bound to Him by a personal tie as no other
nation was, and became in a special way His own
property. Similarly, we are taught in the New
Testament, our Lord and Saviour, by His incar
nation and atoning death, rescued His people,
emancipated them from slavery to sin and Satan,
and purchased the Church, so that it, like Israel
of old, became in a special way ' His own.' At
this point we take up the subject this morning,
passing on to consider (i) what was really involved
in this claim which God possessed over Israel in
virtue of His redemption of them ; and (2) the
manner in which the Old Testament doctrine on
this subject is applied by Apostolic writers to the
33 5

34 The Old Testament in the New
new condition of things, and made the basis of
much that is very significant as to the character
and office of the Christian Church under the New
Covenant. i. What, then, was involved in the claim which
God possessed over Israel in virtue of His redemp
tion of them ? For the answer to this, the primary
passage is Exod. xix. 5, 6. The great act of
deliverance is over. God has interposed. Egypt
is discomfited, and Israel is liberated from its
bondage. The hosts, at present little more than
disorganised hordes, without order, cohesion, dis
cipline, have come to Sinai, and there their leader
is summoned by the voice of God to the Mount,
where he is addressed as follows : ' 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 earth is
Mine, and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of
priests and an holy nation. These are the words
which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.'
These, then, are the terms on which the covenant
is made, and Israel is constituted God's Church
or £/ckXi)(tio. God has rescued the people and
brought them to Himself. Let them but obey
His voice and keep His covenant, and three
things are promised to them: (1) They shall be
God's peculiar treasure ; (2) they shall be a
kingdom of priests ; and (3) they shall be an

Jewish and Christian Churches 35
holy nation. These three titles are all full of the
future, prophetic types of what shall come after ;
and as such we find that they are constantly
appealed to by later writers, as embodying the
fundamental ideas of Israel's relation to God and
position among the nations of the world. So, in
an early discourse of Deuteronomy, a strong
caution against the perils of idolatry is made to
rest upon this thought : ' Thou art an holy people
unto the Lord thy God ; the Lord thy God hath
chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto Himself
above all peoples that are upon the face of the
earth.' * And here I ask you to notice the appear
ance of another term — ' chosen,' or ' elected '; for
the two words are the same. The term has played
a large part in the history of Christian thought,
and profoundly influenced the destinies and for
tunes of men in after ages. But it is here that
we meet with it for the first time as a theological
term, and used, be it noted, in what we may call
a corporate sense, of the nation collectively in its
historic aspect, and not of individuals. The idea
that God has 'chosen' or 'elected' Israel is neces
sarily involved in the thought of Israel as God's
own ' peculiar people,' or ' peculiar treasure'; and
so, adding this passage of Deuteronomy to the
primary passage in Exodus, we get a group of
four special phrases used of Israel in its new
relation to God. They are — (1) God's peculiar
treasure ; (2) His chosen or elected ones ; (3) a
kingdom of priests ; and (4) an holy nation. It is
in these titles that the true conception of Israel's
* Deut. vii. 6.

36 The Old Testament in the New
mission lies wrapped up, and we can never under
stand God's purpose as revealed in Scripture unless
we study them carefully. The one nation was
chosen out of all the rest as God's peculiar treasure,
and dowered with a rich heritage of blessing. Why ?
Not as a bit of favouritism, as when a king showers
monopolies upon some unworthy courtier ; not for
Israel's own sake, as if it had an exclusive right to
God's favour (that is how the later Jews regarded
it), but far other was the meaning of its election in
reality. It was an election to service rather than
to privilege. The nation was chosen as a minister
rather than as a favourite.* It was selected as a
depository of God's blessings, in order that it might
be the medium of extending them to others ; and
therefore it was ' an holy nation,' separated and
consecrated in a special way to God's service, for
that is the true meaning of the holiness ascribed
to it, and it was to exercise a sacred ministry of
priesthood to the other nations of the world. As
priests its members were to mediate the blessings
of redemption to the world at large : as kings they
were to be the armed hosts of God to subdue the
nations to His sceptre.f It is nowhere implied
that every member of the nation was personally
holy, or that they were elected to life everlasting.
The nation is always regarded as a whole ; and
in virtue of their membership in the nation the
members were all alike God's 'elect,' and all alike
' holy' in that they were separated and consecrated
to Him. However mournfully they fell short of
* Cf G. A. Smith, Isaiah, vol. ii., p. 237.
t Cf. Briggs, Messianic Prophecy, p. 103.

Jewish and Christian Churches 37
the ideal and the high standard, these titles re
mained theirs. They were something that could
be appealed to alike by lawgiver and psalmist
and prophet, to remind the people of God's
purpose for their lives, and of the lofty destiny
He had prepared for them. Thus throughout the
Book of Deuteronomy they form the groundwork
of repeated appeals to the congregation to walk
worthy of their high calling. ' Ye are the children
of the Lord your God : ye shall not cut yourselves,
neither make any baldness between your eyes for
the dead.' These heathenish and defiling practices
are forbidden to them ; and why ? ' For thou art
an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the
Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people
unto Himself, above all peoples that are upon the
face of the earth.'* And a little lower down : ' Ye
shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself ... for
thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy GoD.'f
And once more, as the great discourses draw to
a close, in a passage of remarkable solemnity we
read : ' This day the Lord thy God commandeth
thee to do these statutes and judgments ; thou
shalt therefore keep and do them with all thine
heart and with all thy soul. Thou hast avouched
the Lord this day to be thy God, and that thou
shouldest walk in His ways and keep His statutes
and His judgments, and hearken unto His voice ;
and the Lord hath avouched thee this day to
be a peculiar people unto Himself, as He hath
promised thee, and that thou shouldest keep all
His commandments ; and to make thee high
* xiv. 1, 2. t xiv. 21.

38 The Old Testament in the New
above all nations which He hath made, in praise
and in name and in honour ; and that thou mayest
be an holy people unto the Lord thy God, as He
hath spoken.'*
So, as we pass on, in psalm and prophecy the
same titles are found to be in constant use. ' O
ye seed of Abraham His servant, ye children of
Jacob, His chosen ones.' ' He brought forth His
people with joy, and His chosen ones with sing
ing.' ' O visit me with Thy salvation, that I may
see the felicity of Thy chosen ones, and rejoice in
the gladness of Thy people.' ' The Lord hath
chosen Jacob unto Himself, and Israel for His
peculiar treasure.'! Here are a few instances out
of the Psalms ; while in the latter part of Isaiah
no thought is more prominent than that of God's
choice or election of His people, the fact being
constantly appealed to as involving an assurance
that the people cannot altogether be forsaken by
Him who has thus chosen them. ' But thou Israel
My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed
of Abraham My friend ; thou whom I have taken
hold of from the ends of the earth, and called thee
from the corners thereof, and said unto thee, Thou
art My servant, I have chosen thee, and not cast
thee away. Fear thou not, for I am with thee :
be not dismayed, for I am thy God.' J And one
more passage may be cited from the last of the
prophets, Malachi, whose words contain a refer
ence — obscured, indeed, in the Authorised Version,
but clear in the Revised Version as in the original
* xxvi. 16-19. t Ps. cv. 6, 43, cvi. 5, cxxxv. 4.
X Isa. xli. 8-10. Cf. xiii. 1, xliv. 1, 2.

Jewish and Christian Churches 39
— to God's election of Israel as His peculiar
treasure : ' They shall be Mine, saith the Lord of
Hosts, in the day that I do make (or " am pre
paring"), even a peculiar treasure.'*
We have now traced the use of this group of
terms applied to Israel throughout the Canonical
Books of the Old Testament, from the Pentateuch
to Malachi. Similar allusions might easily be
gathered from the books of the Apocrypha. f But
I omit these, and turn to the New Testament.
And there what do we find ? We find that the
terms are still in constant use. But there is this
difference : whereas all through the Old Testa
ment they are applied to the Jewish Church, in
the New Testament they are boldly and without
question transferred by the Apostolic writers to
the Church of the new dispensation, the ' Israel
of God.' Nothing can show more clearly than
this how it was taken for granted by the first
believers that the Christian Church was the
inheritor of the promises and privileges of the
Jews, and had stepped into the position which
God's ancient people, by their failure to respond
to His call, had forfeited. Like Israel, it had
been ' redeemed ' and ' purchased,' and had thus
become God's ' own possession,' or ' peculiar
treasure.' Its members, too, were all alike 'elect '
* Mai. iii. 17. The word rendered 'jewels' in the Authorised
Version is in the original H j'JlD. the same word that is used in
Exod. xix. 5 and in all the other passages cited above where
' peculiar treasure ' or ' peculiar people ' occurs.
t See, for example, Wisd. iii. 9, iv. 15; Ecclus. xlvi. 1
(chosen, e/cAe/cros).

4o The Old Testament in the New
or ' chosen '; all alike ' holy ' or ' saints '; all alike
' kings and priests unto God.' Thus St. Peter,
quoting directly the language of Exod. xix., and
combining with it phrases from Isaiah and Hosea,
used primarily of the Jewish Church, tells his con
verts to Christianity : ' Ye are an elect race, a
royal priesthood, an holy nation, a people for
God's own possession, that ye may show forth
the excellencies of Him Who hath called you out
of darkness into His marvellous light, which in
time past were no people, but are now the people
of God : which had not obtained mercy, but now
have obtained mercy.'* And St. Paul, in writing
to Titus, speaks of our Lord as having 'given
Himself for us that He might redeem us from all
iniquity, and purify unto Himself a people for His
own possession, zealous of good works ';t and
again, in writing to the Ephesians, he has the
striking phrase, ' the redemption of God's own
possession, '| once more borrowing the language
of the Old Testament and referring to the promise
at Sinai that Israel should be God's peculiar
treasure, for the Greek in each of these three
passages just cited makes it absolutely clear that
there is direct allusion to this.' § Again, in the
Apocalypse, in doxologies and hymns of praise, the
thought of the royal priesthood of all believers is
* i Pet. ii. 9. Cf. Exod. xix. 5, 6; Isa. xliii. 20 et seq. ;
Hos. i. 6-8, ii. 23.
t Titus ii. 14. X Eph. i. 14.
§ Aads £ts Trepnroirjviv (1 Pet. ii. 9). Cf. ets TrepnroiTjo-iv
(Mai. iii. 7). Aabs ire/no-ira-ios (Titus ii. 14), as LXX. in Exod.
xix. 5, xxiii. 22; Deut. vii. 6, xiv. 2, xxvi. 18. Trepiirolricri's in
Eph. i. 14.

Jewish and Christian Churches 41
prominent. ' To Him that loveth us, and loosed
us from our sins by His blood, and He made us
to be a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and
Father.'* ' Worthy art Thou to take the book
and to open the seals thereof, for Thou wast slain
and didst purchase unto God with Thy blood men
of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation,
and madest them to be unto our God a kingdom
of priests. 'f And, further, what a flood of light is
thrown by this line of thought that we are follow
ing out on the meaning of those titles by which
the Apostolic writers habitually speak of their
converts and the members of the communities
which they founded. There is scarcely an epistle
in which St. Paul does not address them as
' saints,' the Greek word being that which is
regularly used throughout the Old Testament for
Israel as an ' holy 'J nation. He speaks of them
freely as the elect of God, as also does St. Peter,
whose first Epistle is directly addressed ' to the
elect, who are sojourners of the dispersion.' We
are so familiar with this language that it requires
an effort on our part to realise that there is any
thing remarkable about it, or that it is worth
calling attention to. But if only men had always
marked its origin in the Old Testament, a good
many false inferences which have done serious
mischief to the cause of God might have been
avoided. Take, for example, the term ' elect.'
What controversies have gathered round this
word ! What meanings have been read into it !
What tragedies have resulted from the misinter-
* Rev. i. 5, 6. t Rev. v. 9, 10. X S-yios.
6

42 The Old Testament in the New
pretation of it! It has been taken as the basis of
a mighty theological system — interpreted with no
regard to history, and made to speak of a meta
physical problem, and not of an historic posi
tion. No work of the sixteenth century exer
cised so profound an influence over the minds of
men in its day as did Calvin's Institutes of the
Christian Religion, in which election is habitually
taken as meaning election to final salvation and
eternal life, involving the reprobation, or neces
sary and predestined rejection, of all those who are
not elected ; while ' the elect ' (a phrase that is con
tinually on the author's lips), cannot perish or fall
away from their faith. They alone are partakers
of Divine grace, and ' all who know not that they
are the peculiar people of God must be miserable
with perpetual trepidation.'* Such a system as
is there built up had a strange fascination for the
age in which the book appeared ; nor has it yet
entirely lost its hold over men. But it could only
be rendered plausible by isolating those passages
of the New Testament which speak of God's
elect, and ignoring altogether their historical con
nexion with the similar passages of the Old Tes
tament in which the very same term is used of
Israel, where it is obvious that the title can only
be intended to speak of the election of a people
collectively, not of individuals, and of election to
an historic function or mission, and not of election
to an eternal destiny. Or, take the expression
'the saints,' and realise that this, too, is a term
borrowed from the Jewish Scripture, where it is
* Institutes, Book III., chap. xxi.

Jewish and Christian Churches 43
used of Israel collectively as God's consecrated
people, and its true meaning in the New Testa
ment is at once made manifest. We are no longer
haunted by notions of an * invisible Church,' ' an
holy congregation ' and assembly of all faithful
believers, who are chosen and predestined to eter
nal life — a select body independent of all external
organisation, to which the promises are supposed
to be really made — a notion which has intruded
with disastrous results into much of our popular
theology ; for we understand that when an Apostle
writes to ' the saints ' that are at Rome or Ephesus
or Corinth, he is addressing the whole body of
professed Christians in each locality, as the in
heritors of the promises made to Israel of old,
and as, like Israel, consecrated to God's service,
and in virtue of that consecration ' an holy nation.'
Or think of St. Peter's words, ' Ye are a royal
priesthood.' How often are they quoted as if
they established the fact that under the new
covenant there is no room for a special priest
hood of a particular class. It is constantly said
that under the Christian dispensation every man
is his own priest, and has the right of immediate
access to God without the intervention of another.
That every man has such a right of access to God
is indeed a blessed truth. But it rests on our
Lord's own invitation, and not on these words of
His Apostle. And the fact that the whole Church
collectively has a royal priesthood, and that Christ
has made us ' kings and priests ' unto God, cannot
reasonably be held to be incompatible with the
belief that within the Church there is a special
6—2

44 The Old Testament in the New
order of men set apart for priestly functions, since
just those very passages of the New Testament
which speak of this collective priesthood of all
Christians are, as a matter of fact, all of them
quotations from the Old Testament, simply trans
ferring to the Christian Church language origin
ally used of Israel. In the case of Israel, it can be
shown to demonstration that the collective priest
hood of the nation was consistent with the exist
ence of a very special priesthood of a certain order
of men within the nation ; and if it was consistent
with this in the one case, you cannot fairly main
tain that it is inconsistent with it in the other.
But the fact that these glorious titles of the
Christian Church are transferred to her directly
from the Church of the older covenant is not to
be used merely as a safeguard against the revival
of errors which, if not actually dead, have already
lost much of their vitality. It throws a real light
on the true position of the Christian Church, and
the purpose for which it exists. Israel, as we
have seen, was elected to service rather than to
privilege, as a minister and not a favourite. Its
mission was to keep alive a knowledge of the true
God, and to be, in God's own time, the means
of extending the blessings of redemption to the
whole world. That is how the people, collec
tively, had a priestly character. The thought is
not of personal and immediate access to God, but
of a ministry to be exercised for the benefit of
others. The very same thing holds good of the
Christian Church to-day. ' Ye are an elect race,
a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a people for

Jewish and Christian Churches 45
God's own possession.' These titles which are
ours — yours and mine — in virtue of our member
ship of the Church of Jesus Christ, are a standing
reminder to us of our responsibilities. They are
not intended to minister to a comfortable sense of
our privileges. Rather they are a rebuke to our
selfishness, and to the notion that religion is a
matter of saving our own souls and nothing more.
Israel, of old, failed sadly to realise the high
destiny to which God, in the very same words,
had appointed it. As a consequence Israel was
rejected, and in the Christian Church, gathered
out of all nations, a new instrument was chosen
to take its place. Like Israel, the Church has
been terribly slow to recognise the Divine in
tention in its calling. But its day of grace is not
yet at an end, and if only Churchmen can be
roused to a sense of the duties that, simply in
virtue of their Churchmanship, are laid upon
them, the ancient prophecy may be fulfilled sooner
than men expect, and the ' kingdom of this world
become the kingdom of our Lord and of His
Christ.' It is to bring about this blessed consummation
that God has claimed us as ' His own,' that we
are chosen, and consecrated, and made ' kings
and priests unto God.'

IV
The Day of the Lord
i Thess. v. 2, 3 : 'Yourselves know perfectly that the day
of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when
they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction
cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child ; and
they shall not escape.'

IV
The Day of the Lord*
The main theme of these lectures has now been
illustrated by the consideration of two important
doctrines — viz., the doctrine of Redemption and
the doctrine of Election. In this lecture and
some following ones I propose to investigate the
bearing of the same general line of thought upon
the teaching of the New Testament on what is
called Eschatology, or the doctrine of the last
things. It is a subject which is specially appro
priate to-day, on this first Sunday in Advent,t
when even the most heedless are startled into
sudden and unwonted seriousness by the words of
the Collect, and its call to ' cast away the works
of darkness and put on the armour of light,' and
its reminder of ' the last day ' when our Lord
Jesus Christ, shall come again in His glorious
majesty to judge both the quick and the dead.'
' The last day.' It is a phrase which is very
* I have ventured here to repeat some paragraphs from a
sermon on the same subject in The Old Testament and its
Messages. t The lecture was delivered on the first Sunday in Advent,
1904. 49 7

50 The Old Testament in the New
familiar to us now. But it is singularly little used
in the New Testament. Indeed, it is there con
fined to what is probably the latest written of all
the books in the Canon — viz., the Gospel
according to St. John, where it occurs six times.'*
Elsewhere we read, as in St. John's first Epistle
and 2 Peter, as well as in St. Matthew's Gospel,
of ' the day of judgment/t or 'the great day,'| or
' the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous
judgment of God/§ or ' the day of our Lord Jesus
Christ,' 'the day of Christ,' 'the day of Jesus
Christ. '|| Sometimes it is, with a significant re
serve, simply ' the day, 'IT or ' that day ' ;** but the
oldest name of all, occurring in what is almost
certainly the earliest book of the New Testament
to be committed to writing, is ' the day of the
LoRD,'tt and it is to the examination of the mean
ing and history of this phrase especially that I
invite you to-day.
There is no question among critics who recog
nise the authenticity of the books of the New
Testament that the Epistles to the Thessalonians
were the first to be written of all St. Paul's
Epistles. They belong to the time of his second
missionary journey, and his first visit to Europe.
* St. John vi. 39, 40, 44, 54, xi. 24, xii. 48.
t St. Matt. x. 15, xi. 22, 24, xii. 36 ; 2 Pet. iii. 7 ; 1 John
iv. 17.
X Jude 6. § Rom. ii. 5.
1 1 Cor. i. 8; 2 Cor. i. 14; Phil. i. 6, 10, ii. 16.
U Rom. xiii. 12 ; 1 Cor. iii. 13.
** St. Matt. vii. 22, xxiv. 36; St. Mark xiii. 32; 2 Thess.
i. 10; 2 Tim. i. 12, 18, iv. 8.
it 1 Thess. v. 2. Cf. 2 Thess. ii. 2 ; 1 Cor. v. 5

The Day of the Lord 51
They may, therefore, confidently be set down as
prior to the Gospels and Acts, and to every other
book of the New Testament. Now in each of
these two Epistles we have a remarkable passage,
in which the Apostle enforces and develops the
teaching which he had previously given by word
of mouth to his converts on what he calls ' the
day of the Lord.' ' Concerning the times and
seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write
unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that
the day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the
night. For when they shall say, Peace and
safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them
as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall
not escape.'* And in the second Epistle, 'Now
we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering to
gether unto Him, that ye be not soon shaken in
mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit nor by
word, nor by letter as from us that the day of the
Lord (R.V.) is at hand.'t Here are the earliest
instances of the use of the phrase in the New
Testament. But, in itself, it is far older than the
Epistles to the Thessalonians. It was no inven
tion of the Apostle Paul. He took it straight out
of the Old Testament, where it is found many
times in the prophetical books. Its use in them
would be perfectly familiar to the Apostle, and if
we would understand his teaching and explain the
associations which were connected in his mind
with the phrase, we must first turn back to the
Old Testament and discover the meaning of the
* 1 Thess. v. 1-3. t 2 Thess. ii. i,*2.
7—2

52 The Old Testament in the New
term there, and the ideas which it presented to
the Jews. Now the range of its occurrence in
the Old Testament is limited. It is never found
in the Pentateuch, nor in the historical books,
nor (where we might well have looked for it) in
the Psalms. It is confined to the writings of the
prophets, if I may be allowed to include in them
the Lamentations of Jeremiah, where the kindred
phrase, 'the day of the Lord's anger,' occurs.*
The prophets who use it are these : Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Zepha-
niah, Zechariah, and Malachi. Of these, the
earliest in order of time is probably Amos, for to
Joel, who was formerly considered the earliest
of the prophets, there is now assigned by the
majority of critics a far later date, after the return
from the Babylonish captivity. We may then set
down Amos v. 18 as the earliest known historical
use of the term ' the day of the Lord.' But even
so we are not quite at the beginning, for the
language of the prophet implies that it was no
new phrase of his own coining, but rather a
popular one which was often on the lips of the
people whom he addressed, and which he took
up and appropriated, and stamped with a new
significance, ' turning it upside down,' as a famous
critic has said.t ' Woe unto you that desire the
day of the Lord ! To what end is it for you ?
The day of the Lord is darkness and not light
. . . even very dark, and no brightness in it.'
The phrase was clearly a popular one, and was
* Lam. i. 12, ii. 1, 22.
t W. R. Smith, The Prophets of Israel, p. 396.

The Day of the Lord 53
used by the people for a time when there should
be a signal and triumphant manifestation of
Jehovah in vindication of His rights. That is,
so to speak, the idea that underlies the phrase,
and the frivolous populace who used it in the days
of Amos, led away by false prophets, imagined
that they must necessarily have a share in its
glories, whatever their life and character might
be. They were always talking of it as a good
time coming, and something that should be wist
fully longed for, until Amos turns upon them with
the stern reminder that to them it may prove
anything but the joyful time they anticipated, for
unless they repent it will mean ' darkness and not
light.' ' A signal and triumphant manifestation of
Jehovah in vindication of His rights.' That, I re
peat it, is the idea underlying the phrase wherever
it occurs. It is used of various manifestations in
volving deliverance of the righteous and destruc
tion of sinners. Thus it is used by Isaiah and
Zephaniah of the coming judgment on the Jewish
people by means of the great world-powers of
Assyria and Babylon, as in that wonderful de
scription in Isa. ii. — a description in which the
prophet carries on that most pathetic appeal to
his people to repent contained in chapter i., and
enforces it by the thought of the dreadful and all-
consuming judgment that is so soon to fall, when
' the lofty looks of man shall be brought low, and
the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, and
the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. For
there shall be a day of the Lord of Hosts upon all

54 The Old Testament in the New
that is proud and lifted up ; and it shall be brought
low : and upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are
high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of
Bashan, and upon all the high mountains, and
upon all the hills that are lifted up, and upon
every lofty tower, and upon every fenced wall,
and upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all
pleasant imagery. And the loftiness of man shall
be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall
be brought low : and the Lord alone shall be
exalted in that day.'*
So elsewhere in Isaiah the very same phrase,
' the day of the Lord,' or ' the day of Jehovah,' is
used to sum up the thought of the judgment that
was to fall on Babylont and on Edom ;J while
Jeremiah and Ezekiel use it of that which was in
store for Egypt ;§ and after the downfall of some
of these great world-powers, and the removal of
the sceptre from Judah, it is employed by the
prophets of the period of the return from the cap
tivity in a wider and more extended sense of the
coming manifestation of God's righteousness on a
yet larger scale, to which, in spite of all disap
pointments and catastrophes, every Jew had the
courage to look forward, when Jehovah should —
whether in His own person or in the person of
King Messiah matters not to us now — claim His
kingdom, and assert His sway over men, destroy
ing in that act everything that was opposed to His
rule. So we find it used in Joel, in the famous
* Isa. ii. 11-17. Cf. Zeph. i. 14, ii. 2.
t Isa. xiii. 6, 9. } Isa. xxxiv. 8. Cf. Obad. 15.
§ Jer. xlvi. 10; Ezek. xxx. 3.

The Day of the Lord 55
passage in which, under the figure of the devour
ing swarm of locusts, he announces the approach
of the doom which it will bring on unrepentant
sinners : ' Alas for the day ! for the day of the
Lord is at hand, and as destruction from the
Almighty shall it come. . . . Blow ye the trumpet
in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy moun
tain ; let all the inhabitants of the land tremble :
for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh
at hand ; a day of darkness and gloominess, a
day of clouds and thick darkness.'* So it is used
also in a difficult Apocalyptic passage of probably
post-exilic date in Zech. xiv. ;f and so, lastly,
in Malachi, in a passage of strangely mingled
tenderness and severity : ' Behold, I send My
messenger, and he shall prepare the way before
Me : and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall sud
denly come to His temple ; and the messenger of
the covenant whom ye delight in. Behold, he
cometh, saith the Lord of Hosts. But who may
abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand
when he appeareth ? for he is like a refiner's fire,
and like fullers' soap. . . . For, behold, the day
cometh, it burnetii as a furnace ; and all the
proud, and all that work mischief shall be stubble :
and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith
the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither
root nor branch. But unto you that fear My
name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with
healing in His wings.' J
This, then, is the range, and this is the mean-
* Joel i. 15, ii. 2. t Zech. xiv. 1.
X Mai. iii. 1, iv. 2.

56 The Old Testament in the New
ing of the phrase in the Old Testament. But
there is a further question which deserves con
sideration. It has been acutely observed that
men can only represent the future to their minds
by means of pictures. There is a kind of mental
scenery which stamps itself upon their imagina
tion. By degrees they come to recognise that it
is crude and imperfect, but it serves as a rough
working instrument of thought.* We ask, then,
What is the picture which this phrase, ' the day of
the Lord,' must have called up before the Jews,
and what is the mental scenery which would have
stamped itself upon their imagination ? Is it a
picture of the calm judicial proceedings of the
law court — the great assize, the Judge on the
judgment-seat, the books opened, and the sen
tence pronounced ? Assuredly not. In all the
passages where the phrase occurs the thought
is very different from this. The imagery is
drawn, not from the judgment hall, but from the
battle-field. The day of Jehovah is the day of
His victory over His foes. The thought of judg
ment is not absent, because the victory of the
Lord over His enemies involves as its conse
quence their sentence and destruction. But the
mental scenery is not that of the assize and the
law court. It is rather that of the sack of the
conquered city — some Jericho that was placed
under the ban, the swift, short shrift meted out
to the conquered on the field of battle. It is
only in this way that the thought of judgment
* See H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul's Conceptions of the Last
Things, p. 36.

The Day of the Lord sy
comes in. But when read with this other
thought of the battle-day in the mind, the
imagery and symbolism of the prophets is at
once easily understood. Passage after passage
is explained by it. We see, now, the appro
priateness of the summons, not only to ' sound
the trumpet ' — that might do for either — but to
' sound an alarm,' and to ' set up the standard,'
and the dreadful significance of Joel's ' blood and
fire and pillars of smoke ' is immediately apparent.
These have nothing to do with the law court, but
they set before us in its awful reality the sack of
the conquered city.
And now, turning back to the New Testament,
we are in a position to understand better than
before the meaning of this phrase, ' the day of
the Lord,' and kindred expressions there. Three
things may be especially noticed :
i. First, the phrase is no longer used, as in the
Old Testament, of lesser preliminary judgments,
such as those on the several powers of the world,
but only of that
' One far-off Divine event
To which the whole creation moves.'
For this the way had been prepared by the
broadening out of the original conception, which
we have seen in the post-exilic prophets ; and it
was only natural that from the very first the
Christian Church should appropriate the time-
honoured phrase, borrowed from the Old Testa
ment, the ' day of the Lord,' to that last and
most signal manifestation of God's righteousness

58 The Old Testament in the New
to which, when the event had taught her to
distinguish between the two ' comings ' of the
Lord, she still looked forward. It was only
natural, too, that she should learn to describe that
manifestation as ' the last day ' — that is, not
merely a sort of note of time, the close of a
succession of periods of twenty-four hours, but
far more emphatically the ' last ' of a series of
'days of the Lord,' or of manifestations of His
righteousness, to which all previous manifesta
tions led up.
2. Secondly, we notice that the same picture is
still called up by the phrase, and the same mental
scenery is suggested by it as in the Old Testa
ment. Take, for instance, the earliest occurrence
of it in the Epistles to the Thessalonians. St.
Paul's language is based throughout on the Old
Testament. The imagery of the prophets under
lies the whole section. ' Yourselves know per
fectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a
thief in the night. When they are saying, Peace
and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon
them, as travail upon a woman with child ; and
they shall in no wise escape. But ye, brethren,
are not in darkness, that that day should overtake
you as a thief: for ye are all sons of light,
and sons of the day : we are not of the night,
nor of darkness ; so then let us not sleep, as do
the rest, but let us watch and be sober. For
they that sleep, sleep in the night ; and they that
be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us,
since we are of the day, be sober, putting on the
breastplate of faith and love, and for an helmet

The Day of the Lord 59
the hope of salvation.' Once realise that ' the
day ' is the day of battle, and you see it all clear.
The picture is that of the Conqueror bursting in
upon the unconscious city. Men are sleeping in
careless security when destruction comes upon
them and sudden anguish ; and the figure so
often used in a similar connexion by psalmist and
prophet is taken up and repeated : ' Fear came
upon them, and sorrow, as upon a woman in her
travail.' And what force the ' scenery ' of the
day as a day of battle gives to the charge that
follows, to put on the breastplate and helmet !
Exactly so is it in Rom. xiii. 12:' The night is
far spent, and the day is at hand ; let us there
fore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put
on the armour of light.' What, it may well be
asked, is the connexion of thought between the
dawning of the day, and the putting on of
armour ? It was never a man's ordinary ap
parel. The only explanation of it is that the
Apostle's thoughts about ' the day ' are still
coloured by the associations of the Old Testa
ment, and that He thinks of it as the day of the
Lord's victory over His foes, and therefore
summons his Christian readers to buckle on their
armour and take their stand upon the Lord's
side in the battle. The same is true in other
passages also, notably in those in the Apocalypse,
which describe ' the war of the great day of
God ' ;* but leaving these, I pass on to mark —
3. Thirdly, a very significant fact, with the
notice of which I must end to-day. As we
* Rev. vi. 17, xvi. 14.
8—2

60 The Old Testament in the New
examine the various passages in which ' the day
of the Lord ' is referred to in the New Testament,
we find that a new and different conception of it
makes its appearance, and gradually supersedes
the older one. The associations of the battle
field and of the sack of the conquered city are
sometimes lost sight of — the imagery is changed.
Instead of these we read of the tribunal or
'judgment-seat of Christ,' before which ' we must
all appear.'* We hear of ' the great white throne,'
on which the Judge is seated ; of the ' books '
which are 'opened,' so that 'the dead are judged
out of those things that are written in the books
according to their works'jt and the day itself is
definitely spoken of by a new name, as ' the day
of judgment.'^ In this way the centre of gravity
is, so to speak, shifted. The dominant thought
is now that of the judgment-hall, and the scene
set before us is that of the court of justice, the
Judge upon His throne, and the calm judicial
proceedings of the Roman basilica. In this matter
the contrast between the Old and New Testament
is most instructive. The old language is still
used, but it is clothed by degrees with new
associations, which show us what a real advance
in the whole conception of justice has been made.
In ruder ages the only way in which right can be
enforced and justice secured is by the appeal to
the sword, and the proof given on the field of
battle by the side on which right lies showing
that it is the stronger. Hence, when the Jew
* 2 Cor. v. io. Cf. Rom. xiv. io.
t Rev. xx. 11-15. + See above, p. 50, note.

The Day of the Lord 61
would think of God manifesting Himself as the
Righteous Judge, it was under the image of the
Conqueror that he conceived of Him, and Jehovah's
day was the day of battle, in which He was
victorious over His foes, and consigned them to
their merited doom. But, after all, such justice
as is enforced by the appeal to the sword is
anything but exact. Given an army of Galahads,
and the perfect justice of the cause on the winning
side, yet at what a cost is the victory secured!
To win a battle is only less dreadful than to lose
one. There are widows and orphans on the side
of the victors as well as on the side of the
vanquished. The sufferings entailed by the cam
paign fall heaviest on those who deserve them
least. The cottages and homesteads of the inno
cent peasants go up in flames before ever the
castles and towers of the tyrants are reached.
Substantial justice may be done in the end. But
the picture which the thought of the battle-field
sets before us is not that which we have learnt to
look upon as the representative of perfect, even-
handed justice, which metes out to every man
individually, personally, according to his deeds.
For this you must look elsewhere, as you here
know better than I can tell you.* You must
draw your illustration of it from the calm, dis
passionate sentence of the Judge who sets free
the innocent and falsely accused, and who, while
rendering to the high-handed evil-doer according
to his deeds, yet knows how to balance the guilt,
and in awarding his sentence takes into con-
* rl he lecture was delivered in the chapel of Lincoln's Inn.

62 The Old Testament in the New
sideration the weakness of human nature, and
recollects that
' Earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.'
And therefore it is that when we pass from the
preparatory teaching of the Old Testament to
the final revelation which God has made in His
Son, we find that, while the use of the old phrase
is continued, the associations which surround it
are gradually changed, and that the dominant
thought is no longer that of the battle, but of the
tribunal of the Judge. This is free from all
associations of undeserved suffering. This has
no terrors for the peaceful and law-abiding. This
can right one wrong without creating another,
and it is because of these things that it is better
fitted than the other figure to set before us that
triumph of Divine righteousness, that rendering
to every man according to his deeds, and that
victory over sin, and consequent condemnation of
all that has been ranged on the side of evil and
opposed to God, for which we look at ' the last
day.'

V
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives. — I
St. Matt. xxiv. 34-36 : ' Verily, I say unto you, This
generation shall not pass, till all these things be accomplished.
. . . But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the
angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only' (R.V.).

V
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives. — I
In pursuance of the general subject of this course
of addresses — the Old Testament basis of New
Testament thought and language, and following
up the special topic of my last lecture, viz., the
bearing of the general subject upon the Escha-
tology of the New Testament, I propose to
consider next our Lord's great discourse upon
the Mount of Olives, the report of which is
contained in St. Matt, xxiv., and the parallel
passages in St. Mark and St. Luke. The present
address must be chiefly confined to the preliminary
work of clearing the ground, and may seem to
have but little to do with my main subject. But
it would not be possible to make plain to you
the importance of approaching the study of the
discourse through the Old Testament without
first establishing certain positions, to which, in
order not to weary you, I must confine myself
to-day. Let me begin, then, by reminding you of the
occasion of the discourse. It was spoken on one
of the days in the holy week that led up to the
65 9

66 The Old Testament in the New
Passion. Our Lord had just uttered His lament
over Jerusalem, and proclaimed the approaching
disaster that was to overtake the Temple. ' Be
hold, your house is left unto you desolate.' The
disciples were unable to believe in the coming
destruction of what was so massive and stately,
and therefore as they departed from the Temple
they called their Master's attention to the solid
and imposing character of the building. ' His
disciples,' we read, 'came to Him for to show
Him the buildings of the Temple,' one of them
exclaiming (so St. Mark tells us), ' Master, behold
what manner of stones, and what manner of
buildings !'* In answer to this our Lord reiterates
with added emphasis the announcement of coming
destruction. ' Verily I say unto you, there shall
not be left here one stone upon another which
shall not be thrown down.' The little company
passed on down the Temple steps, along the
streets of the city, and out through the gates,
across the brook Kedron, and up the slope of the
Mount of Olives, and there, as He sat over
against the city with the Temple in full view,
the inner circle of the twelve, Peter and James
and John and Andrewf came unto Him, and asked
Him privately, saying, 'Tell us when shall these
things be ? and what shall be the sign of Thy
coming and of the end of the world ?' To these
questions the answer was given in the discourse
which we are now to consider. The questions, it
will be noticed, spoke of at least two events
* St. Mark xiii. i. j St. Mark xiii. 3.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 67
distinct from each other, even though in the
minds of the disciples they may well have been
confused or identified in time. ' These things,'
in the question, ' When shall these things be ?'
refer, of course, to what had been already spoken
of — viz., the desolation coming upon the city and
Temple, and their impending destruction ; but
the disciples ask also about the ' coming ' of our
Lord and the ' end of the world.' Accordingly
we naturally look for reference to both events in
our Lord's answer. Nor do we look in vain.
It is universally admitted that our Lord begins
by describing the events which should precede
the destruction of Jerusalem, and that by the close
of the discourse His thoughts have passed to ' the
end of the world.' Thus all writers are prac
tically agreed in taking the first section on ' the
beginning of sorrows,' with its description of
'wars and rumours of wars,' and the persecution
of the disciples, as referring to what should
precede the destruction of Jerusalem ; while the
words, ' of that day and hour knoweth no one,' in
verse 36, obviously and admittedly refer to the
end of the world. But the difficulty is to know
where the reference to the former event ends,
and that to the latter begins. At one moment
it seems as if our Lord's words had to do with
the destruction of the city ; at the next as if they
spoke of the end of the world ; and then, again,
there seem to follow words which point once more
to the former event. Thus in verse 14 we read,
' This Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached
in the whole world for a testimony unto all the
9—2

68 The Old Testament in the New
nations, and then shall the end come' — words
which at first sight look as if our Lord's thoughts
had already travelled forward to that ' one far-off
Divine event to which the whole creation moves.'
But immediately afterwards we hear of ' the
abomination of desolation ' standing in the holy
place, and the counsel is given 'to them which
are in Judsea' to ' flee unto the mountains ' — words
which we naturally apply to the events of the
immediate future and the time of the siege. Still
more apparent is the difficulty later on in the
central part of the discourse, where, in verse 29,
after reference made to the coming of false
Christs and false prophets, and the gathering
together of the eagles over the carcase — language
which obviously may be applied to the period
that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem
by the Roman armies under Titus — we read :
' Immediately, after the tribulation of "those days
the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not
give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven,
and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken :
and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man
in heaven : and then shall all the tribes of the
earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man
coming on the clouds of heaven with power and
great glory. And He shall send forth His angels
with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall
gather together His elect from the four winds,
from one end of heaven to the other.' Such
language would be connected by most persons,
not with anything that preceded the fall of
Jerusalem, but with the end of the world, and

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 69
the signs that shall usher in the second advent
of Christ. But then, again, a little later on in
the discourse, after a brief reference to the fig-
tree and its parable, we read : ' Verily I say unto
you, This generation shall not pass away until all
these things be accomplished.' ' This generation '
— i.e., if the words are to be given their natural
meaning, that period (as often in Holy Scripture)
of forty years — which (roughly speaking) might
be regarded as the life-time of those present ; and
' these things,' obviously all that our Lord had
just been speaking of, including, be it remembered,
the darkening of sun and moon, the falling of
the stars, the appearance of the sign of the Son
of man in heaven, His coming with the clouds,
and the mission of the angels with the great
sound of a trumpet to gather together God's
elect. Read the whole passage over, and you will at
once feel something of the perplexity which has
so exercised the minds of commentators upon the
discourse. The two events seem so inextricably
interwoven with each other, and the difficulty of
disentangling the references to either is so great,
that it is no wonder if it has led to all kinds of
shifts and non-natural interpretations on the part
of expositors. Many of them have adopted a
theory of ' double reference ' throughout, which
enables them to assert that in any given verse
the primary reference may be to one or other of
the events, while the Words are supposed to contain
a secondary allusion to the others as well, the
blending of the two alone explaining our Lord's

jo The Old Testament in the New
language. So one devout and earnest writer tells
us that ' for the understanding of this necessarily
difficult discourse it must be borne in mind that
the whole is spoken in the pregnant language of
prophecy, in which various fulfilments are involved.
The chief error in explaining it seems to have
arisen from confining too much to one event that
which was spoken of more than one. An inter
preter may very properly trace out one course of
fulfilment only, but the error is when it is confined
to one sense to the exclusion of the other ; and it
may be observed that the prophecies in Scripture
not only combine usually many events analogous
to each other in the same description, of which
the former may be the pledge and warning of the
latter and more important, but often use words
strictly applicable to one fulfilment only, and pass
from them to words strictly applicable only to the
other.'* Other writers, without going so far as
this, yet hold that difficult passages in the dis
course may be explained by the notion of an
indirect reference to one of the two great events,
while the primary reference of the section in which
the difficulty occurs is to the other. Thus Dean
Alford, who believes that all up to verse 28 in
St. Matthew's report refers in the main to the
period that terminated with the destruction of
Jerusalem, says that ' in what follows the Lord
speaks mainly and directly of His second great
coming. Traces there are, as in the literal mean
ing of verse 34, of slight and indirect allusions to
the destruction of Jerusalem, as there were in the
* Isaac Williams, The Holy Week, p. 245.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 71
former part to the great events of which that is
a foreshadowing, but no direct mention.'* This
theory, however, of the blending together of two
distinct events, and the rapid passing backwards
and forwards from one to the other, creates more
difficulties than it solves. It sacrifices altogether
the coherence of the discourse, and is open to the
grave objection that it makes our Lord, instead
of answering the questions of His disciples, simply
confuse them by indiscriminately mixing up in His
reply the two events, between which there lay — as
the event has shown — some 2,000 years at the
least. It leads, further, to extraordinarily forced
interpretations of the words actually employed.
For example, it will be noticed that in the dis
course there are distinct and definite notes of time
inserted by our Lord Himself connecting those
very events which are by most writers taken as
the signs of the end with the calamities that were
to precede the downfall of Jerusalem. Of these
calamities verses 15-28 clearly speak. They refer
to the setting up of the abomination of desolation ;
they give the counsel of hasty and immediate
flight, the woe to them that are with child and
give suck, the warning of false Christs and false
prophets — of all which things there is abundant
historical evidence of the fulfilment in the days
preceding and during the siege. But then, the
remarkable thing is that the very next section,
which speaks of the darkening of the sun and
moon, the falling of the stars, the appearance of
the sign of the Son of man in heaven, and the
* Greek Testament, in loc.

72 The Old Testament in the New
sending forth of the angels, is directly attached
to the foregoing passages by a note of time.
'Immediately, after the tribulation of those days
shall the sun be darkened,' etc.* In the face of
such a very definite indication, and words so
precise, it is surely beside the mark to assert, as
Alford does, that ' the Lord is speaking without
regard to the interval'! — an interval which has
already extended to well-nigh 2,000 years ! No
words could have been chosen which would more
definitely have connected together by a note of
time the events of which our Lord was speaking ;
nor is the unsatisfactory character of the interpre
tation referred to lessened when it is remembered
that it is immediately after these verses that there
occur those other words already referred to, in
verse 34, which directly imply that all that has
been prophesied up to that point should happen
in the lifetime of those then on earth. ' Verily I
say unto you, this generation shall not pass away
till all these things be accomplished.' ' All these
things,' I repeat, must allude to what has just
been spoken of in the previous part of the dis
course, and the words ' this generation ' can mean
nothing but what we should naturally understand
them to mean — viz., the existing race and nation
of the Jews, then living, in whose time all these
things were to happen. To make our Lord's
statement mean anything else, e.g., to say that
it only means ' this new and last dispensation of
God, which has no other dispensation to follow
it,' is playing fast and loose with words, and if
* St. Matt, xxiv. 29. f Greek Testament, in loc.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 73
such a method of interpretation be adopted, then
' anything may mean anything.'
The discourse is indeed a perplexing one ; it is
no wonder that in recent times some writers,* dis
satisfied with such explanations as those of which
I have been speaking, have in despair taken
refuge in a theory of interpolations, and have
suggested that into the middle of the report of
a genuine discourse spoken by our Lord there
has been thrust what is called a ' little Apocalypse,'
a Jewish-Christian document written at the begin
ning of the distress of the final Roman invasion
under Titus. The theory of interpolation is a
favourite one with modern writers whenever a
difficulty occurs. It seems to offer a 'short and
easy ' method of dealing with perplexing passages
and awkward facts which will not fit into a theory.
But it does not really help us much. Indeed, it
raises more difficulties than it solves. If adopted
here, we might fairly be asked to explain how it
came about that writers like the Evangelists, ' so
manifestly veracious in spirit and so careful to
report the sayings of Jesus, as far as might be
possible, in the form in which they were remem
bered, should have thought it consistent with
either reverence, veracity, or common-sense, to
put into the lips of the earthly Jesus, as if spoken
a day or two before His Passion, 'f the words of
a book which on this hypothesis was written in
their own time, and contained revelations, real or
* E.g., Wendt, Joh. Weiss, and others.
t Muirhead, The Eschatology of Jesus, p. 40 et seq., where
see the theory criticised. IO

74 The Old Testament in the New
supposed, made during the horrors of the siege.
We should further have to account for the fact
that, instead of incorporating this ' little Apocalypse'
bodily into the text of the discourse, they broke it
up into small sections, dovetailing it in with the
original discourse,* and thereby creating tangled
sequences, as perplexing as those the existence of
which gave rise to the theory !
But I need not discuss this theory here,
because I believe that a simpler and truer ex
planation is at hand, and that a solution of the
puzzle may be found in the frank recognition of
the fact that, while our Lord completely answered
the first of the questions which His disciples
asked, and gave them in great detail the signs
whereby they might know when the destruction
of Jerusalem was imminent, He declined alto
gether to encourage speculation on the date of
the ' end of the world,' or to give the signs of
its approach ; just as on another occasion He said
so emphatically : ' It is not for you to know the
times or the seasons which the Father hath put
in His own power. 'f The disciples in their ques
tions had failed to distinguish between the two
events, each of which was so markedly to be a
'coming' of their Master. That Master in His
answer did discriminate. He gave full details
in prophetical language, and (as we shall see in the
next lecture) in imagery borrowed from the old
Testament concerning the former of the two
* According to Wendt, the original Apocalypse consisted of
St. Mark xiii. 7-90, 14-20, 24-27, 30 et seq.
t Acts i. 7.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 75
events, and marked out its date as to take place
within the lifetime of some of His hearers ; while
of the second and yet greater coming at the close
of all things He distinctly refused to tell them, and
grounded His refusal upon the statement, which,
startling as it sounds, we can only accept in
simple loyalty to Him Who is the Truth, that
' of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even
the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the
Father only.'
If this view can be established, then the whole
discourse up to verse 34, ' Verily I say unto you,
This generation shall not pass, till all these things
be accomplished,' must be taken as referring
simply and solely to the destruction of Jerusalem.
So far as verse 28 there is no real difficulty
in so taking it. Indeed, so far most commenta
tors are fairly well agreed. It is only here and
there that an isolated expression causes a
moment's difficulty — as, e.g., that which I referred
to earlier in verse 14 : 'This Gospel of the king
dom shall be preached in all the world for a
witness unto all nations, and then shall the end
come.' But, after all, such words do not really
go beyond St. Paul's words, which distinctly
assert a preaching of the Gospel to all the world
in his own day ; as, for instance, when he writes
to the Colossians, and says, ' The Gospel is
come unto you, as it is in all the world,' or when,
in writing to the Romans, he asks the question,
' But I say, Have they not heard ?' and answers
it thus : ' Yes, verily, their sound went into all
the world, and their words unto the ends of the

76 The Old Testament in the New
world.'* Similarly, we may well take our Lord's
words as fulfilled in the fact that before Jerusalem
fell every province of the 'Roman Empire — that
' all the world ' which Augustus had caused to be
enrolledf (the phrase is the same) — had heard
the proclamation of the Gospel. Not till that
had happened, and the future of the Catholic
Church was assured, could ' the end ' of the old
dispensation come in the downfall of the city and
Temple. The real difficulty begins with verse 29,
and lies in those verses which I have already
read to you, but which for the sake of clearness I
must repeat : ' Immediately, after the tribulation
of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the
moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall
from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall
be shaken. And then shall appear the sign of
the Son of man in heaven ; and then shall all
the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see
the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory. And He shall send
forth His angels with a great sound of a trumpet,
and they shall gather together His elect from the
four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.'
It is impossible to enter upon a detailed examina
tion of these verses to-day. I will, therefore,
only say in conclusion that I hope to show in
my next lecture that everything which our Lord
describes in these verses was taken by Him
straight from the prophetical books of the Old
Testament ; and that, just as in those books from
which He borrows, the reference is not to literal
* Col. i. 6 ; Rom. x. 18. t St. Luke ii. 1.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives yy
portents in the physical heaven, but the language
is to be symbolically understood, and is figurative
imagery applied to the destruction of cities and
empires of the world, so here also it should be
taken in exactly the same way, and be given no
other meaning.
We may seem to have travelled far from the
proper subject of this course of lectures this
morning, but the digression has been unavoid
able. It was necessary, in order to clear the
ground ; and if in the following lectures I can
establish my contention with regard to these
admittedly difficult verses, then I may fairly claim
that the key which unlocks the meaning of the
whole discourse lies in the Old Testament ; that
failure to use this key is responsible for the wide
spread misinterpretation of it that prevails ; and
that if the reverent study of the Old Testament
thus enables us to interpret aught in our Lord's
own teaching and prophecies, then indeed these
Scriptures of the Church of the Old Covenant
are still, as they were in the days of Timothy,
' able to make men wise unto salvation.'*
* 2 Tim. iii. 15.

VI
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives.— II
St. Matt. xxiv. 29, 30 : ' Immediately, after the tribulation
of those days the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall
not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the
powers of the heavens shall be shaken : and then shall appear
the sign of the Son of man in heaven.'

VI
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives.— II
Our work now is to enter upon the consideration
of verses 29-34 in the Great Discourse spoken
upon the Mount of Olives in answer to the ques
tions of the disciples : ' When shall these things
be, and what shall be the sign of Thy coming and
of the end of the world ?'
We have already seen that there are grave
difficulties in the way of the ordinary interpreta
tion of the discourse, and that, in view of these
difficulties and of the natural meaning of verse 34 — ¦
' This generation shall not pass away till all these
things be accomplished ' — there are strong prima
facie grounds for interpreting the whole discourse
up to this point as referring to the ' coming ' of
the Lord in the destruction of Jerusalem and the
establishment of the Christian Church, and con
sequently for thinking that the reference to the
' end of the world ' only begins with verse 36 : ' But
of that day and hour knoweth no one ' — ' that day '
being a standing designation in the New Testa-
81 11

82 The Old Testament in the New
ment for what we have come to speak of as ' the
last day.'*
We saw, further, that the only serious difficulty
in the way of adopting this interpretation was
raised by the language of verses 29-33 ; and the
lecture was closed with an assertion that these
verses, like the preceding ones, might well be
taken as having been fulfilled in the events con
nected with the downfall of the Jewish dispensa
tion and the establishment of the Christian
Church ; and together with the assertion a pro
mise was made to endeavour to justify it in the
following lectures. This promise I must to the
best of my ability now fulfil ; and I hope to do it
by showing that everything which our Lord de
scribes in these verses was taken by Him straight
from the prophetical books of the Old Testament,
and that as in those books the language is not to
be held to predict literal portents to be looked for
in the physical heaven, but should be symbolically
understood as figurative imagery applied to the
destruction of cities and empires of the world, so
here also it should be taken in the same way, and
be given no other meaning.
Let me first read you the verses in question
before entering on their explanation.
' Immediately, after the tribulation of those days,
the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not
give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven,
and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken :
and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man
* See St. Matt. vii. 22; St. Luke x. 12; 2 Thess. i. 10;
2 Tim. i. 12, 18, iv. 8.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 83
in heaven : and then shall all the tribes of the
earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man
coming on the clouds of heaven with power and
great glory. And He shall send forth His angels
with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall
gather together His elect from the four winds,
from one end of heaven to the other. Now from
the fig-tree learn her parable : when her branch is
now become tender, and putteth forth its leaves,
ye know that the summer is nigh ; even so ye also,
when ye see all these things, know ye that He is
nigh, even at the doors.'
Of these verses, the first (verse 29) describes
the portents in the heavens, the darkening of
the sun and moon, the falling of the stars, and
the shaking of the powers of heaven. To us such
language is startling, and it is difficult to take it
in any but its literal sense as describing such a
cosmic catastrophe as is commonly expected to
accompany ' the last day.' But I ask you to notice
carefully the use of similar language in more than
one of the prophets of the Old Testament, and its
meaning there. For instance, Ezekiel, in his
' Lamentation for Pharaoh, King of Egypt,' says,
' When I shall extinguish thee, I will cover the
heaven, and make the stars thereof dark ; I will
cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall
not give her light. All the bright lights of heaven
will I make dark over thee, and set darkness upon
thy land, saith the Lord.'* So in Isaiah xiv., in
the famous lament over the King of Babylon, the
prophet addresses him as if he was one of the
* Ezek. xxxii. 7, 8. II — 2

84 The Old Testament in the New
great constellations or lights in the heaven, ex
claiming, ' How art thou fallen from heaven, O
day star, son of the morning ! How art thou cast
down to the ground that didst weaken the
nations!'* Still more striking are two other pas
sages contained in the same book. In ' the burden
of Babylon,' preceding the ' lament,' we read in
xiii. 10, 'The stars of heaven and the constella
tions thereof shall not give their light : the sun
shall be darkened in his going forth, and the
moon shall not cause her light to shine '; while in
xxxiv. 4, in a prophecy of the doom about to fall
upon Edom, we are told that ' all the host of
heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall
be rolled together as a scroll : and all their host
shall fade away, as a leaf fadeth from off the vine,
and a fading leaf from the fig-tree.' Indeed, so
close is the correspondence between our Lord's
words and these last two passages that it is not
too strong to say that He is directly referring to
and quoting from them ; and it is worth noticing in
this connexion that the ' Parable of the Fig-tree,'
which follows a little lower down in the discourse
in verse 32, may be taken as an indication that
the latter of the two passages from Isaiah, with its
allusion to the ' fading leaf from the fig-tree,' still
lingers in His memory and influences His diction.
But the point on which I would lay real stress is
this. In every one of those passages of the Old
Testament to which I have referred, the allusion
is not to the end of the world, but simply to a
local catastrophe involving the destruction of some
* Isa. xiv. 12.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 85
great world-power — Egypt, or Edom, or Babylon.
As Delitzsch truly says, in writing on Isaiah xiii.
and xiv., 'It is not the judgment of the world
which the prophet is describing, but a historical
catastrophe of the nations drawing the whole earth
afar into sympathetic suffering.'* Thus physical
symbols are used to describe spiritual realities.
We can all see the appropriateness of the once
high and mighty King of Babylon being spoken
of in his degradation and humiliation as the ' day-
star fallen from heaven.' We can feel what is
meant when the moral darkness which overwhelms
the fallen empires — once centres of light to the
surrounding nations — is described as the failing of
the light of the sun and moon in heaven ; and if
such expressive imagery drawn from the darkened
heavens and fallen stars might be used by the
Hebrew prophets with no other thought than that
of describing historical catastrophes in the near
future, why should we shrink from admitting that
the same thing holds good in the case of our
Lord's words also ? And is it not clear that the
references would at once be caught by the Apostles,
whose minds were steeped in the literature of the
Old Testament ; and that they would see that
their Master was taking up the language in which
the prophets had described the destruction of the
world-powers, and was applying it to the Holy
City, which, for its sins, should become as Babylon
or Egypt, whose sins it was imitating ? This, it
seems to me, is to give the words their natural
meaning, and to take them in the sense in which
* Commentary on Isaiah (E. T.), vol. i., p. 297.

86 The Old Testament in the New
they would naturally have been understood by their
first Jewish hearers, whose familiarity with the
letter and substance of the Old Testament would
enable them without difficulty to catch references,
and detect allusions, which we for the most part,
owing to our sad want of familiarity with the Old
Testament, can only painfully discover by patient
research and the use of concordance and lexicon.
Let me pass on to the consideration of the
next phrase in verse 30, 'And then shall appear
the sign of the Son of man in heaven.' ' The
sign of the Son of man.' It would be an un
profitable task to collect all the suggestions that
have been offered as to what this ' sign ' may be.
The favourite explanation in modern as well as
in ancient days identifies it with the cross, the
visible appearance in the heavens of this symbol
of man's salvation being expected by many before
the last day, somewhat as, according to the tradi
tion, a luminous cross in the skies with the words
iv TovTut viKa preceded the victory of Constantine
over Licinius, and heralded the Christianising of
the Imperial power. But there is really no need
whatever to think that any such visible and quasi-
physical manifestation is intended, or even that
the words refer to the ' last day ' at all. Very
strangely, it has entirely escaped the notice of
commentators that the actual Greek word for
' sign ' which is here used in the Gospel (arifiuov)
is, either in its exact form or in a kindred one,*
* o-rjuala (Isa. xxx, 17), o-vo-o-Tjfwv (Isa. v. 26, xlix. 22,
lxii. 10). a~qp.dov elsewhere — e.g., Isa. xi. 12, xiii. 2, xviii. 3,
xxxiii. 23; Jer. xxviii. 12, 27 (Heb. Ii. 12, 27).

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 87
the ordinary word employed in the LXX. version
of the Old Testament for the ' banner ' or
' ensign ' which forms a prominent feature in pro
phetic imagery, occurring several times in passages
that speak of a ' Day of the Lord ' about to come
upon the nations, and sometimes in close con
nexion with the mention of the ' trumpet,' which,
be it remembered, is also spoken of by our Lord,
just below in verse 31 : ' He shall send forth His
angels with a great sound of a trumpet.' Let me
cite a few of these passages. In Isa. xviii. 3, in
a prophecy of the destruction of Assyria, there is
a fine rhetorical passage summoning all nations
to be spectators of Jehovah's crowning act of
retribution on this great empire, which runs as
follows : ' All ye inhabitants of the world, and ye
dwellers in the earth, when an ensign (or signal)
is lifted up on the mountains, see ye ; and when
the trumpet is blown, hear ye." Very sensible,
surely, is the comment on this passage which I
find in a recent work on Isaiah : ' Since the whole
process is supernatural, it is idle to inquire what
the "signal" (or "ensign") and "trumpet" signify.
The verse is simply a summons to be pre
pared for the moment of Jehovah's decisive
intervention.'* Again, in Jer. iv., in a pro
phecy announcing the impending destruction of
Jerusalem by the Chaldeans, there is the same
combination of the two figures. ' Blow ye the
trumpet in the land ... set up a standard (or
* J. Skinner in The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
— Isaiah, vol. i., p. 141.

88 The Old Testament in the New
signal) towards Zion';* and later in the same
book, when the prophet is declaring the judgment
on Babylon, he cries, ' Set ye up a standard in
the land, blow ye the trumpet among the nations' ;t
while in more than one passage descriptive of
Messianic days Isaiah employs the former of these
two images, and proclaims the setting up of the
standard : 'In that day there shall be a root of
Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the
people . . . and He shall set up an ensign for
the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of
Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah
from the four corners of the earth. '\ ' Behold, I
will lift up Mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up
My standard to the people, and they shall bring
thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be
carried on their shoulders.' § ' Go through, go
through the gates, prepare ye the way of the
people ; cast up, cast up the highway ; gather out
the stones ; lift up a standard for the people.'||
Whether our Lord spoke in Greek may of
course be doubted, but whether His language
was Greek or Aramaic matters not. For in view
of the use of this word 'sign,' orifiiiov, by the
LXX. translators for ' standard,' or ' ensign,' I
think that there is little room for doubt, in the
light of the passages just cited, that — whether
the word 'sign' or ar\jxiiov is due to Him or to
the translator of the discourse — His words were
really intended to speak of a standard or banner,
and that He was adopting the familiar imagery of
* Jer. iv. 5. f Jer. Ii. 27. { Isa. xi. 10-12.
§ Isa. xlix. 22. || Isa. lxii. 10.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 89
the prophets, and declaring that when the judg
ment of which He was speaking was imminent,
His banner should be raised on high as a signal
to all men. ' Then shall appear the sign of the
Son of man in heaven.' But if so, what follows?
Surely this : that His words should be interpreted
according to the interpretation given to the pro
phecies from which He was borrowing ; and that,
just as we should think a writer foolish if he asked
what precisely was the ' standard ' or ' signal ' of
which Isaiah or Jeremiah spoke — or thought of a
literal flag in connexion with their words — so also
those commentators on the New Testament are
wrong who try to fix a literal, half-material mean
ing on our Lord's words — as wrong, as a man
would be who took the words of Bishop Heber's
fine hymn au pied de la lettre,
' The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain ;
His blood-red banner streams afar :
Who follows in His train ?'
and gravely inquired of what material that banner
was made.
And further, if the words be interpreted figura
tively according to the analogy of prophecy,
there is nothing unreasonable in connecting them
with the events that preceded the destruction of
Jerusalem and the establishment of the Christian
Church. If, when God destroyed Babylon, or
Assyria, or Jerusalem, at the hands of the Chal
deans, there were premonitory events which
served as warnings of what was coming, so that
12

90 The Old Testament in the New
it seemed to God's prophets that a ' standard ' or
signal was set up to the nations, so surely in the
events which were the precursors of that awful
catastrophe which overtook the Jewish nation at
the hands of Titus we may find a signal an
nouncing the downfall of the old dispensation,
and see clearly in them ' the sign of the Son of
man in heaven.'
We have now considered the first two images
in this difficult passage, and, interpreting them in
the light of the Old Testament, have seen that
there is nothing in either of them inconsistent
with the view that refers them entirely to the
coming of our Lord in the destruction of Jerusalem.
It would be impossible within the limits of this
lecture to examine with the same minuteness the
remaining expressions in these verses ; and with
out detailed examination of them justice could not
be done to the interpretation for which I am plead
ing. I therefore leave them for the present,
hoping to return to them on a future occasion.
But before I conclude to-day, I desire to guard
against a possible misconception of the position
advocated, by emphasising the distinction not
always recognised between the actual meaning of
the words of the prophet as he spoke them and
legitimate applications of them which may be sub
sequently made by others. We are often told, as
1 mentioned last time, that there is a ' double re
ference ' throughout this discourse of our Lord, as
throughout a large part of Old Testament pro
phecy. Such a view I believe to be artificial and
misleading. The prophet of the Old Testament

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 91
spoke to the men of his own time, and his message
dealt with concrete facts, with Babylon, and Edom,
and Egypt, and with the kingdom of God on earth.
But by recognising and making use of this distinc
tion between the meaning of his words and legiti
mate applications of them, we can, I believe, avoid
the serious difficulties of the theory of the ' double
reference,' and at the same time retain whatever
is really valuable in it. Why was it that the
prophet could announce beforehand the downfall
of the world-powers and the triumph of God's
kingdom ? Simply because he could see into the
mind of God. Insight, rather than foresight, was
the real gift of the prophet. It was not so much
that he had foresight of the incidents and details
which were afterwards to be written down in the
pages of history, but rather that he had clear in
sight into the mind of God, so that he could unveil
the eternal laws which govern His dealings with
men, and through this insight could anticipate
with unerring certainty that, given certain condi
tions on the part of men, certain results were sure
to follow. His foresight, then, so far as it existed,
was the result of his insight into the principles of
God's government. But though he only described
their application to particular events in which the
men of his time were interested — as, for instance,
to the moral evils of a power such as Babylon —
yet, as the principles are eternal, where the circum
stances are the same, there a like application may
be rightly made. It is in this sense that the
saying is true that ' history repeats itself,' or, as
our Lord Himself tells us, ' wherever the carcase
12 — 2

92 The Old Testament in the New
is' — be it Jerusalem, or Rome, or London, or
Paris, or New York — 'there will the eagles be
gathered together.' * So the lessons of prophecy
are for all time, and applications of the prophet's
words to all kinds of occasions are legitimate,
even though an expositor in tracing the prophet's
meaning, and endeavouring to give a coherent
sense to his utterances, is bound to protest against
this theory of a ' double reference,' and to explain
the words used with reference to their context.
Exactly the same thing holds good of our Lord's
words. He Himself made application of the
lessons of the Old Testament prophets to the cir
cumstances of His own time. When He spoke of
the darkened heavens, and the falling stars, and
the ' sign ' (or ensign) to appear in the heavens,
He was borrowing words and phrases from the
utterances of the prophets concerning Edom and
Babylon and Egypt, and was applying them to
the doom about to fall on God's ancient people
and the 'day of our Lord,' that was prepared for
them, because the conditions of moral corruption
were repeating themselves. And we, in our turn,
if only the prophetic gift of insight were ours,
might take His words spoken of the destruction
of Jerusalem, and apply them to the future ; for if
the Christian Church fails, as the Jewish Church
did, then indeed once more there must appear the
signs of impending judgment. Again will it be
found that ' history repeats itself,' and there will
be a 'day of the Lord upon every one that is
proud and lofty, and upon every one that is high
* St. Matt. xxiv. 28.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 93
and lifted up ;' * and once more ' the sun shall be
darkened, and the moon shall not give her light,
and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers
of the heaven shall be shaken ; and then shall
appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven,'
the banner of the one who goes forth as the
rider on the white horse — ' conquering and to
conquer.' "f
* Isa. ii. 12. | Cf. Rev. vi. 2, xix. 11 et seq.

VII
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives.— Ill
St. Matt. xxiv. 30 : ' Then shall all the tribes of the earth
mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the
clouds of heaven with power and great glory.'

VII
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives.— Ill
In order to make good my main position, and to
establish the fact that all the language of the dis
course on the Mount of Olives up to verse 36
of St. Matt. xxiv. is really appropriate to the
destruction of Jerusalem, I have now to show
that the words in verses 30 and 3 1 may naturally
and without straining be referred to it, and do not
necessarily apply to the end of the world. The
words are these : ' Then shall all the tribes of
the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of
man coming in the clouds of heaven with power
and great glory. And He shall send forth His
angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they
shall gather together His elect from the four winds,
from one end of heaven to the other.' To the
consideration of these words we must now address
ourselves. Four separate expressions require
elucidation : (1) The mourning of the tribes,
(2) the coming of the Son of man, (3) the
mission of the angels with the sound of the
trumpet, and (4) the gathering together of the
97 13

98 The Old Testament in the New
elect. These must be considered singly, and
unless I can show that each one of them may
reasonably be explained as referring to the cir
cumstances connected with the destruction of
Jerusalem, the interpretation of the whole dis
course for which I am pleading must fall to the
ground. ' Then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn.'
Now here, to begin with, I would call attention
to the fact that our Lord's use of the word
' tribes ' ((pvXal) seems to take us at once on to
Jewish ground — tribes, not nations or races — for
everywhere else in the new Testament where this
word occurs (save only in the exhaustive enumera
tion in the Apocalypse of ' every tribe, and tongue,
and people, and nation') it is used quite definitely
of the twelve tribes of Israel. Nor does the
mention of ' the earth ' militate against our so
interpreting it here ; for the Greek word {f\ yfi)
may equally well be rendered ' the land,' and be
taken to refer, as in very many other passages,
to the land of Israel, 'the tribes of the land'
being a perfectly natural way of speaking of the
Jews. Then, further — and this is most important
— the whole expression, ' Then shall all the tribes
of the land mourn,' is taken by our Lord directly
from the Old Testament. It comes with very
little alteration of form, except condensation,
from Zech. xii. 10-14 : 'And they shall look unto
me whom they have pierced, and they shall
mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son,
and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is
in bitterness for his first-born. In that day shall

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 99
there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the
mourning of Hadadrimmon in the Valley of
Megiddo. And the land shall mourn, every
family apart ; the family of the house of David
apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the
house of Nathan apart, and their wives apart ;
the family of the house of Levi apart, and their
wives apart ; the family of the Shimeites apart,
and their wives apart ; all the families that
remain, every family apart, and their wives apart.'
The ' tribes ' of our Lord's words are obviously
to be identified with the ' families ' of the prophet
— indeed, the Greek word is the same (<pv\ai) in
the LXX. as in the New Testament, so the refer
ence bears out what I have just said about our
being on Jewish ground. But, when we try to
interpret the prophet's words, it must be frankly
admitted that they are very difficult, and it has
been said by one eminent critic of the prophecy
in which they occur that ' probably no entirely
satisfactory explanation of it is now attainable.'*
Even if this were admitted, it would still be worth
pointing out that the opening words of the
section which I have cited are quoted by St. John
in his Gospel t as having received a fulfilment at
the Crucifixion, and where they are quoted again
in the Revelation^ it is thought by many critics
that they refer to the events connected with the
destruction of Jerusalem rather than to the
Second Advent. This leads us to think that the
* Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament,
P- 33i-
t St. John xix. 37. X Rev- '• 7-
13—2

ioo The Old Testament in the New
words which follow, ' all the tribes of the land
shall mourn,' may really have their reference to the
era that commenced with the Crucifixion and all
the events that followed close upon it, rather than
to a far-distant future separated from it by thou
sands of years. Indeed, it would, I believe, be
true to say that their fulfilment began as soon as
the actual ' piercing ' of the Saviour took place,
when ' all the people that came together to that
sight, beholding the things that were done, smote
their breasts and returned.'* It was continued
on the day of Pentecost, when those to whom it
was said, ' God hath made that same Jesus, whom
ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ,' were
' pricked in their hearts.' f It went on in the years
that followed, when thousands of Jews were con
verted, and turned in penitential sorrow to the
Redeemer of the world. But there was another
side to it also, for along with the penitential
sorrow of those whose hearts God had touched,
there was also the enforced ' mourning ' and wail
ing of those who rejected the Gospel, and were
overwhelmed in the catastrophe which overtook
their city and nation. To either of these the
prophet's words may well be applied. Nor is
there any reason to seek a further reference in the
words of our Saviour, which are so manifestly
borrowed from them : ' Then shall all the tribes
of the land mourn.' The words were abundantly
fulfilled in the events of the period between the
Crucifixion and the destruction of Jerusalem, and
though on the principles already explained in an
* St. Luke xxiii. 48. £' , f Acts ii. 36, 37.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 101
earlier lecture such an application of them to the
Second Coming of our Saviour as is made in the
familiar words of our Advent hymn,
' Every eye shall now behold Him
Robed in dreadful majesty ;
Those who set at nought and sold Him,
Pierced and nailed Him to the tree,
Deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see,'
is perfectly justifiable, yet, as a matter of strict
exegesis, we need not look beyond the circum
stances of the earlier time to find a natural and
complete accomplishment of them.
More difficult is the next phrase, to which we
must now pass : ' And they shall see the Son of
man coming in the clouds of heaven with power
and great glory.' No doubt as they hear these
words the minds of almost all persons travel
forward to the ' last day, when He shall come
again in His glorious majesty, to judge both the
quick and the dead.' It is perfectly natural that
they should do so, for the words, if they stood
alone, might well refer to this. And yet before
we set down such an interpretation as certain or
necessary, I would ask you to pause and consider
the very remarkable words in St. Matt. xvi. 28,
spoken shortly before the Transfiguration :
' Verily I say unto you, there be some of them that
stand here which shall in no wise taste of death
till they see the Son of man coming in His king
dom.' If words mean anything, this saying must
mean that He was to ' come in His kingdom '
during the lifetime of some of the Apostles ; and

102 The Old Testament in the New
therefore, unless our Lord was mistaken, the
words cannot refer to the Second Advent, but
must be interpreted of some nearer event to be
witnessed by some of those then present, and we
can scarcely doubt that the establishment of the
Christian Church on the ruins of the old dis
pensation was the event of which our Lord was
speaking. So Professor Swete of Cambridge, in
the latest and best commentary on St. Mark's
Gospel, finds the solution ' in the coming of the
Spirit and the power manifested in that trium
phant march of the Gospel through the Empire,
which was already assured before the death of
some, at least, of the original apostolate.'*
Still more striking is the parallel with the pas
sage before us afforded by the majestic utterance
of our Lord on the night of His betrayal in answer
to the high priest's adjuration : ' I adjure Thee
by the living God that Thou tell us whether Thou
be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto
him, Thou hast said : nevertheless I say unto you,
henceforth ye shall see the Son of man sitting at
the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds
of heaven.' f Here I must specially call your
attention to the fact that the ' hereafter ' of the
Authorised Version, which might well speak of a
distant future, is changed, and rightly changed, in
the Revised Version, to ' henceforth ' (enr' apn),
which suggests an immediate vision, and in the
parallel passage of St. Luke it is even more
definitely so (avo rov vw ),J ' from this time forth.'
* Swete, The Gospel according to St. Mark, p. 176.
t St. Matt. xxvi. 63, 64. X St. Luke xxii. 69.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 103
Once more, such a note of time forbids us to
interpret our Lord's words as referring to what
we have learnt to call His Second Coming at the
end of the world. It indicates decisively that He
was speaking of something in the more immediate
future, and we can hardly doubt that (as in the
earlier passage just referred to) He was thinking
of that judicial ' coming ' which began at once
with the foundation of the Christian Church to
take the place of the Jewish, and was consum
mated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the
rejection of the Jewish people. He then 'came'
indeed ' with the clouds of heaven ' — clouds as so
often symbolising His judgments — ' and with
power and great glory.' Thus twice over, on two
occasions of greatsolemnity — just before the Trans
figuration, and when He stood on His trial before
the high priest — the note of time which He Him
self gives us compels us to interpret His words
about His coming with power and the clouds of
heaven to this nearer event, and the spiritual
vision to be granted in this life to those with eyes
to see ; and why, with our eye on these remark
able parallels, need we hesitate to interpret the
very similar words in the discourse before us in
the very same sense, especially when, as we have
already seen, the notes of time and the whole
context point to their fulfilment in the immediate
future ?
Nor is this all, for we may go a step further,
and say that such an interpretation is the natural
one to put upon this saying of our Lord three
times repeated — when the source from which He

104 The Old Testament in the New
drew it is fairly considered ; for the saying was not
a wholly new one. It was undoubtedly based on
words occurring in the great prophecy of Daniel
in his seventh chapter : ' I saw in the night
visions, and behold, there came with the clouds
of heaven one like a son of man, and He came
even to the Ancient of Days, and they brought
him near before Him. And there was given him
dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all the
peoples, nations, and languages should serve him :
his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which
shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which
shall not be destroyed.'*
Now these words most certainly refer not to the
consummation of the kingdom at the last day, but
rather to the setting up of the kingdom here on
earth — i.e., the historical establishment of the
Christian Church ; and, if this is so, then there
should be no hesitation in interpreting our Lord's
words founded on, and borrowed from them, in
precisely the same sense. That this is the mean
ing of Daniel's words may, I think, be made clear
by referring to the prophecy as a whole, and to
the context in which the verses cited originally
stand. The prophet sees in mystic vision four
beasts arising out of the sea — the first ' like a
lion,' the second 'like a bear,' the third 'like a
leopard,' and the fourth beast ' terrible and power
ful, and strong exceedingly.' And then after this
he says : ' I saw in the night visions, and behold
one like a son of man came with the clouds of
heaven.' ' A son of man,' for, as Dr. Driver
* Dan. vii. 13, 14 (R.V.).

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 105
notes in his commentary on the Book of Daniel,
' the rendering of the Authorised Version, " the
Son of man," is quite untenable ; the expression
of the original is indefinite, and denotes simply
in poetical language a figure in human form.'*
Then follows the explanation of the vision as
made to the prophet. The four beasts are four
kings or kingdoms'; it matters not how precisely
we interpret them, whether of the Babylonian,
Medo-Persian, Greek or Roman, or whether of
the Medes, the Persians, the Greek, and the
Roman. In any case, they belong to the Old
World before the Incarnation ; and fitly are these
world-powers symbolised by figures that stood for
brute force — as the lion, or the bear — and fitly do
they come forth from the tossing, tumbling sea,
the very emblem of confusion and instability.
But, proceeds the interpreting angel, ' the king
dom . . . shall be given to the people of the
saints of the Most High.'f In sharp contrast,
then, to what goes before, the kingdom of heaven
is symbolised by the human form divine, and
comes from heaven, and is set up on earth. It
is thus not the last judgment, but ' the solemn
inauguration of a Divine kingdom on earth,' J that
the prophet is describing ; and our Lord, by sub
stituting His own special title, 'the Son of man,'
for the indefinite ' one like a son of man ' of the
prophet, does but claim for Himself that, as the
ideal representative of Israel and humanity at
* The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges — Daniel,
p. 88.
t Dan. vii. 27. % Driver, op. cit.

106 The Old Testament in the New
large, it is His to fulfil the promise of dominion
made to the saints of the Most High, and that
His kingdom shall begin to be set up at once in
its power on earth. ' From this time forth,' were
His words to the high priest in the judgment-
hall, ' shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the
right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of
heaven.' Exactly so is it in His great prophecy
on the Mount of Olives. Up to this point, as we
have seen, everything has pointed to the events
connected with the downfall of the Jewish race
and nation. The destruction of Jerusalem ' was
the evident close of a theocracy which up to that
time had for ages counted on a divine guarantee,
and which looked forward to ending only in the
consummation of a Messianic triumph. It was
the apparent extinction of the visible kingdom of
God on earth : the doom pronounced by the course
of events on claims and hopes which to those who
lived under them seemed the most sure.' But in
reality it ' cleared the ground for the Christian
religion and the Christian Church, in which was
visibly and permanently set up God's kingdom
on earth, a kingdom that was to embrace all
nations. The two events cannot be dissociated
the one from the other. There was, as the writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews so forcibly puts it,
a ' removing of those things that are shaken, that
those things which are not shaken may remain';*
and therefore, after announcing the judgment on
Jerusalem under the figure of the darkening of the
sun and moon and the shaking of the powers of
* Heb. xii. 27.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 107
heaven, our Lord passes on at once to proclaim
that His standard shall be set up, and that 'the
Son of man shall come on the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory ' to set up His kingdom
on earth.
There is given, I maintain, in this way a natural
and clear fulfilment of His words, which not only
makes them fit in with the context in which they
occur, but also gives them the very same meaning
when they fall from His lips which they have in
their original setting in the Scriptures of the Old
Covenant from which He drew them.
And here we must end for the present, reserving
for another lecture the consideration of the follow
ing words in verse 31, and the summary of the
whole argument on this great discourse, so full,
however we interpret it, of lessons of solemn
warning for us on whom the ends of the world are
come. 'Wherefore' — to quote once more from
the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who
wrote when our Lord's words were in the act of
receiving their fulfilment, and the catastrophe
which overwhelmed His people was imminent —
' wherefore we, receiving a kingdom which cannot
be shaken, let us have grace whereby we may
serve God acceptably with reverence and godly
fear. For our God is a consuming fire.'*
* Heb. xii. 28, 29.

14-

VIII
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives.— IV
St. Matt. xxiv. 31 : 'And He shall send forth His angels
with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together
His elect from the four winds, from the one end of heaven to
the other.'

VIII
The Discourse on the Mount of
Olives.— IV
To-day's lecture completes what I have to say on
the subject of our Lord's discourse on the Mount
of Olives, the consideration of which has already
occupied us during the last three lectures of this
course. The immediate subject before us now is
verse 31, the last of that group of very difficult
verses which I am trying to show you may reason
ably be interpreted as referring directly to the
events connected with the destruction of Jerusalem
and the establishment of the Christian Church,
rather than to the end of the world, to which it is
more commonly referred. It is only if this con
tention of mine can be satisfactorily established
that we are able to give to the words that follow
almost immediately their natural meaning : ' Verily
I say unto you, this generation' — i.e., those now
living — ' shall not pass till all these things ' —
i.e., the things just spoken of — ' be fulfilled.'
But if the interpretation for which I plead can
stand, then the whole connexion of the discourse
is clear and straightforward, and everything falls

112 The Old Testament in the New
into its right place. Full details are given of the
events which were to precede the downfall of the
Old Covenant and the establishment of the New,
but of the details of the last day our Lord is silent,
and tells His disciples the reason : 'But of that
day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels
of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.'
Let us, then, take the two clauses of verse 31,
and see what is the natural explanation to be given
of them.' He shall send forth His angels with a great
sound of a trumpet.' Undoubtedly to the Christian
reader- the most obvious thought here is that
where the sound of the trumpet is spoken of
elsewhere in the New Testament, it is directly
connected with the signs that shall usher in the
end of all things and announce the final judgment.
So in the great passage in chapter xv. of St. Paul's
First Epistle to the Corinthians — in words familiar
to everybody from their occurrence in the Burial
Service of the Church : ' Behold I show you a
mystery : we shall not all sleep, but we shall all
be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an
eye, at the last trump ; for the trumpet shall
sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.'* Still earlier in point
of time is the other great passage in the Apos
tolic Epistles in 1 Thess. : ' The Lord Himself
shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the
voice of the archangel and with the trump of
God ; and the dead in Christ shall rise first : then
we that are alive, that are left, shall together
* 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 113
with them be caught up in the clouds to meet the
Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the
Lord.'* With these passages in our minds no
wonder that our thoughts at once travel to the
last judgment, when we hear the very similar
words of our Lord in the Gospel : ' He shall send
forth His angels with a great sound of a trumpet.'
But it must ever be remembered that those who
first listened to our Lord's saying had not before
them St. Paul's words ; while, on the other hand,
their minds were steeped in recollections of the
Old Testament and the prophetical language there
used. And in this the sound of the trumpet is
frequently employed as an image or symbol to
indicate a summons to war or judgment in con
nexion with historical catastrophes of all sorts
and the fall of great empires. Indeed, in St. Paul's
expression, ' the last trumpet,' we catch an allusion
to the fact that there were these previous sound
ings, and that the trumpet of which he speaks was
only the last of a series bringing in the final
judgment of which there had been so many fore-
shadowings in the catastrophes that had overtaken
the great world-powers of the earth. You will
remember also that, as we have seen in a previous
lecture, ' the day of the Lord ' is often used, not
of the last day, but of these preliminary and pre
cursory judgments ; in the same connexion the
setting up of the standard or ensign (like the ' sign
of the Son of man ' here), and the blowing of the
trumpet, appear as the natural symbols, appealing
to eye and ear, that God is going forth to war.
* 1 Thess. iv. 16, 17. J5

114 T^e Old'Testament in the New
So it is in Isa. xviii. 3 : ' See ye, when He lifteth
an ensign upon the mountains ; when He bloweth
a trumpet, hear ye.' Or Jer. iv. 5 : ' Blow ye
the trumpet in the land. . . . Set up the
standard towards Zion'; or li. 27: 'Set up a
standard in the land, blow ye the trumpet among
the nations.' Again, with still more direct reference
to 'the day of the Lord,' in Joel ii. 1 we read:
' Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm
in My holy mountain : let all the inhabitants of the
land tremble, for the day of the Lord cometh,
for it is nigh at hand.' Or Zech. ix. 14: 'The
Lord shall blow the trumpet and shall go with
whirlwinds of the south.' Or Zeph. i. 16, where
the ' day of the Lord ' which the prophet antici
pates is described as ' a day of the trumpet and
alarm against the fenced cities and against the high
towers.' Very similar to such language as this
are the words here used by our Lord : ' Then
shall appear the sign (or standard) of the Son of
man in heaven . . . and He shall send forth His
angels with a great sound of a trumpet,' and they
must surely be interpreted in the light of these
earlier passages, and be taken as descriptive of
the tokens of a coming catastrophe about to fall
upon the holy city. They need not necessarily
refer to that last and final catastrophe when the
whole world shall be wrapped in flame. But
there is more yet. For it is not only the case
that there is a general similarity in character and
imagery between our Lord's language here and
that employed in the prophetical books of the Old
Testament, but they seem, moreover, actually to

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 115
contain a definite verbal allusion to a particular
passage — viz., to Isa. xxvii. 12, 13, where the
prophet, looking forward to the restoration of
captive Israel, says : ' Ye shall be gathered one
by one, O ye children of Israel ; and it shall come
to pass in that day that the great trumpet shall
be blown, and they shall come which were ready
to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts
in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord
in the holy mount at Jerusalem.' The coincidence
in idea and expression is so close that it is impos
sible to doubt that this passage was in our Lord's
mind when He uttered the words, ' He shall send
forth His angels with a great sound of a trumpet,
and they shall gather together H is elect from the
four winds, from the one end of heaven to the
other.' And if this is so, it is only natural to
interpret our Saviour's words in the light of those
of the prophet, which would be so familiar to His
hearers, and to take them as referring to the
summoning of God's people together into that
kingdom of God on earth which, as we have
seen already from previous references, was to be
set up on the ruins of the great world-powers.
That something of this sort was what the prophet
Isaiah, or whoever wrote the 27th chapter in the
book bearing his name, foreshadowed is, I think,
certain. The earlier verses of the chapter contain
an announcement of judgment on the ungodly
powers of the earth, represented symbolically by
' leviathan the piercing serpent, leviathan the
crooked serpent, and the dragon that is in the
sea ' — fit emblems of Egypt, and it may be of
15—2

116 The Old Testament in the New
Assyria and Babylonia as well. Then follows
a summons to God's people to repentance, and
the chapter closes with a vision of a day when, by
a greater deliverance than that from the Egyptian
bondage, God shall gather His own people together
into a church or society, and those who were
perishing in captivity shall be summoned by the
sound of a great trumpet, and come ' to worship
the Lord at Jerusalem.'
Now, whatever this means, it is certainly not a
description of the last judgment. To this much
of the language is utterly inappropriate, and the
only explanation that appears at all possible is
this : that the words refer to the setting up of the
Christian Church — the Israel of God— on earth.
Exactly so may we take our Lord's words, which
are so manifestly based on those of the prophet.
It is not only that they speak of the ' sound of the
great trumpet ' to be blown, but there is also in
them a reference to the ' gathering together of
God's elect ' — a thought which meets us not only
in this passage of Isaiah, but in various other
passages of the Old Testament as well. Thus a
striking and suggestive parallel is afforded by
Zech. ii. 6, in its Greek form ; for where the
Authorised Version has, ' I have spread you
abroad as the four winds of the heaven,' the LXX.
version gives words which are almost identical
with those here used by our Lord, ' I will gather
you from the four winds of heaven ' ;* and if any
* Zech. ii. 6 : eK tuv Te<r<rdpii>v dvep.oiv tov ovpavov uvvd^io
vp.as. Cf. St. Matt. xxiv. 31 : kTna-vvd^ovvLV tovs JkAektovs
avrov ck tS>v re<rcrdp(i)v dvepxov.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 117
further proof be needed to show that our Lord
is here but echoing the words of earlier writers,
we may find it in Deut. xxx. 4 : 'If any of thine
be driven out from the one end of heaven to
the other' (for so again does the LXX. render it),
' from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee.'*
Thus the gathering together of God's elect of
which our Saviour speaks is clearly that which
had been foreshadowed in the. Old Testament,
and, we may add, it is the same ' gathering ' which
is described by the Apostle St. John when in his
Gospel he sums up the work which his Master
had come to do by saying that Jesus should
'die, not for that nation only, but that also He
should gather together into one the children of
God that were scattered abroad. 't It is the
gathering of Christians from all parts of the
world, ' from the four winds, from the one end of
heaven to the other ' — not, indeed, literally and
locally, but spiritually — as partakers of a common
life and relationship through Christ, which makes
them to be one Church and one Communion, so
that, as St. Chrysostom says, 'The Christian at
Rome feels the Indian to be one of His members,
and Christ the Head of all. 'J It was in this
spirit and in the realisation of this truth that, as
we find from one of the most ancient Christian
* Deut. xxx. 4 : 'Edi> fj r/ Siacnropd crov dir' a-Kpov tov ovpavov
etos dupov rov ovpavov eKtWev o"wa£ei ae Kv/hos 6 Oeos o-on.
Exactly so in St. Matt. xxiv. 31 we have the words dir' aKpwv
ovpavuv eeos aKptov avrxov.
t St. John xi. 52.
X Horn. lxv. in Joan, quoted in Westcott, Commentary on
St. John, in loc.

118 The Old Testament in the New
writings outside the New Testament that has
come down to us, the Teaching of the Twelve
Apostles, the early Church offered this prayer
over the consecrated bread of her Eucharistic
feast : ' As this broken bread was once scattered
in grains upon the mountains, and being gathered
together became one, so let Thy Church be
gathered together from the ends of the earth unto
Thy kingdom.'* And as this ' gathering together
of God's elect ' began with the admission of the
Gentiles into His Church on earth, so we may
truly say that the ' great sound of a trumpet ' was
heard when the Apostles went forth to proclaim
the message of salvation. It was a trumpet-call
addressed to all mankind, and they bore their
message far and wide ; and though it has gone on
from that time to this, yet in some sense the
Gospel was preached to all nations before the
end of the old dispensation came in the destruc
tion of Jerusalem, for some years before that
event St. Paul could say to his Colossian converts
that ' the Gospel is come unto you as it is in all
the world ' ;t and in writing to the Romans still
earlier could point to its spread as a fulfilment of
the Psalmist's words, ' Their sound went out into
all the earth, and their words' unto the end of the
world. '\ In this preaching of the Gospel and
the formation of the Christian Church, gathered
* The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, chap. ix. Cf. chap, x.:
'Remember, O Lord, Thy Church to deliver her from all evil,
and to perfect her in Thy love; and gather her together from
the four winds (o-vva^ov avrrjv dwb Ttav Tto-o-dpwv dvipxov).'
t Col. i. 6. X Rom. x. 1 8.

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 119
together out of all nations, we may surely find an
adequate fulfilment of our Lord's words, nor need
we seek any other. And very touching is it in
this connexion to discover that in the service of
the Jewish synagogue, among the ' Eighteen
Prayers,' the Shemoneh Esreh — the most ancient
part of the service, going back to immemorial
antiquity — there stands to this day the following
petition, full of reminiscences of just the very
same passages of the Old Testament to which
our Lord here makes reference : ' Sound the great
trumpet to announce our freedom, upraise the
banner to collect our captives, and gather us
together from the four corners of the earth.'*
Very pathetic, surely, is this prayer still offered
up in their daily worship by the Jews, when one
thinks that nearly 2,000 years ago the trumpet was
sounded, the banner was raised, and the gather
ing together of God's elect began, and Israel
knew it not. Their eyes were blinded, and their
ears were dull of hearing. What a mournful and
pathetic commentary is furnished by this daily
prayer of theirs on St. Paul's words which tell
us that ' blindness hath happened unto Israel,'
and that ' until this day remaineth the same
veil untaken away in the reading of the Old
Testament. 't
I have now finished almost all that I have to
say on this 31st verse, but before leaving it alto
gether a word should, perhaps, be added on the
mention of the angels — ' He shall send forth His
angels ' — as this may possibly be urged as an in-
* Daily Prayers, p. 49. t Rom. xi. 25 ; 2 Cor. iii. 14.

120 The Old- Testament in the New
dication that the last judgment is in view. But a
little thought will show that there is really nothing
in this mention of the angels to militate against
the interpretation proposed. Undoubtedly angels
are frequently mentioned in connexion with the
summons to the last judgment, but we are surely
not prepared to confine their ministry to that one
event and deny it elsewhere. If angels minis
tered to the Son of man on earth, were they not
also agents in the establishment of the Church
which He came to found ? Once grasp the fact
that in this discourse He is speaking of the whole
subject from the heavenly standpoint, and de
scribing scenes not visible to outward eyes in
their literal meaning, as the falling of the stars
and the setting up of the standard, and it will
appear only natural that He should here mention
those unseen ministers who 'by His appointment
ever succour and defend' His earthly agents
going forth to proclaim the message of His
Gospel. And now I pass on to the close. The next
two verses require no comment. They contain
a warning which, if applicable to all ages, was
peculiarly so to that which witnessed the downfall
of the Old dispensation and the establishment
of the New. ' Now from the fig-tree learn her
parable : when her branch is now become tender,
and putteth forth its leaves, ye know that the
summer is nigh : even so ye also, when ye see all
these things, know that He is nigh, even at the
doors.' This brings us to verses 34-36 : ' Verily,
I say unto you, This generation shall not pass

Discourse on the Mount of Olives 121
till all these things be fulfilled. Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass
away. But of that day and hour knoweth no man,
no, not the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but
My Father only.'
Everything here points to a contrast, which is
emphasised by the two pronouns employed.
' These things,' — i.e., the things just spoken of —
shall take place within this generation. But ' that
day' — i.e., the day of the last judgment (for
which the expression ' that day ' is a standing
phrase in the New Testament*) — is known to none
but the Father. The two events are clearly dis
tinguished the one from the other. The king
dom of Christ announced by the prophets of the
Old Testament shall be manifested to this genera
tion. The consummation of His heavenly king
dom shall be brought in at a time which God
only knows. Give the words their natural mean
ing, and I see not how any other explanation can
be given to them. It is only by forced explana
tions and such a non-natural interpretation as that
' this generation ' means the race of mankind — a
meaning which it never bears anywhere else — that
this obvious sense can be evaded, and any other
meaning be read into them ; and even so, the
contrast between ' these things ' and ' that day ' is
ignored. No such shifts, I am persuaded, would
ever have been adopted had it not been supposed
that the previous verses, 28-31, offered insuper
able objections to a natural explanation, because
their language referred unmistakeably to the last
* See ahove, pp. 81, 82. 16

122 The Old Testament in the New
judgment. This, however, I claim to have shown
to be a mistake. The great aim of the last four
lectures has been to make it plain that they con
tain no such reference, and that without straining
or forcing their meaning, we may take them all as
referring to what was so soon to happen — viz.,
the downfall of the old dispensation, and the rise
of the new — in other words, the destruction of
Jerusalem, and the establishment of the Christian
Church. It is only because we are so little
familiar with the language of much of the Old
Testament that such an interpretation appears
strange to us. To those who first listened to the
words it would have appeared the most obvious
one. To them the vivid symbols and picturesque
figures employed by the prophets were as familiar
as the Gospels are to us to-day. To these their
thoughts would at once have recurred, and what
is a difficulty to us would have been to them no
difficulty at all. Only let us come to know as
much of the Old Testament as they did, and we
shall see with their eyes and hear with their ears.
It is the fashion in the present day to disparage
the Old Testament, and to think that for Chris
tians its value has largely, if not altogether, passed
away, and that it may safely be neglected by
them. Such a view I believe to be wholly wrong.
We have yet much to learn from the writings of
the Old Covenant. To our Blessed Lord they
were the Scriptures which 'cannot be broken.'*
It is in them that we find the key which unlocks
the meaning of His words.
* St. John x. 35.

IX
The Apocalypse. — I
Rev. i. 3 : ' Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear
the words of the prophecy, and keep the things which are
written therein ' (R.V.).

16-

IX
The Apocalypse. — I
The main principle that has been advocated in
this course of lectures is that, in order to a right
understanding of the New Testament, the ap
proach to.it must be made through the Old, and
that the reader must ever be on the watch, not
merely for formal quotations, but still more to
catch allusions and references which often give
the key to the meaning of the passage before
him, and alone enable him to understand the true
significance of the words and teaching of the
Apostles, and even of our Blessed Lord Himself.
We have examined more than one of the lead
ing phrases and conceptions connected with the
Christian Church, and have seen that they can
only be rightly understood by tracing them back
to the Old Testament. From this we passed to
consider the eschatological teaching of the New
Testament ; and a great part of one discourse of
our Lord — viz., that on the destruction of Jeru
salem and His 'coming' again, delivered on the
Mount of Olives — was examined verse by verse,
and shown to be largely influenced by the phrase
ology and ideas of the Jewish Scriptures ; and now
125

126 The Old Testament in the New
in the next three lectures I propose to apply the
same principle in a similar manner to one particu
lar book of the New Testament — a book which
from its difficulty is perhaps less closely studied
by ordinary Christians than any other, viz., the
Revelation of St. John the Divine. Now, it is a
remarkable fact that in this book there is not a
single formal and acknowledged citation from the
Old Testament. I mean, that nowhere in it do
you find what occurs so frequently in the Gospels
and Epistles — viz., some words of the Old Testa
ment directly adduced as proof or illustration of
the point in hand, prefaced by a formula which
calls attention to the fact that the words are
borrowed, as 'It is written in,' or 'as saith the
Lord by the prophet.' Not once does any
such phrase occur in the Apocalypse. And yet
the book as a whole teems with references to the
phraseology of the Old Testament. Chapter
after chapter is full of unacknowledged quota
tions. The language and imagery of the Old
Testament have affected every part of it, and the
quarry out of which its materials are hewn will be
found to lie in those Jewish Scriptures which
St. John must have known almost by heart. It is
no exaggeration to say that there is scarcely a book
from Genesis to Malachi which has not left its
mark upon it. If you study the book in such a
work as Westcott and Hort's Greek Testament,
where all the phrases borrowed or quoted from
the Old Testament are printed in different type
from that ordinarily employed, you cannot fail to
be impressed by the manner in which whole

The Apocalypse 127
chapters and sections are literally built up out of
materials quarried from the Old Testament ; and
if you count up the exhaustive list of references
at the end of the work, * which explains the texts
printed in this special type, you will find that the
sum of the passages of the Old Testament alluded
to in this single book of the New amounts to
the astonishing number of 350 ; or, to put it in
another way, which is, perhaps, still more im
pressive, out of the 404 verses into which the
book is divided, there are no fewer than 278
which contain references to the Jewish Scrip
tures, f It is obvious that such a fact as this
must be taken into account in the interpretation
of the book. If the origin of St. John's language
and the groundwork of his symbolism lie to such
an extent in the Old Testament, it would surely
be a grievous error on the part of the interpreter
to neglect the primary passages which gave birth
to the figures and language employed by the
Apostle in describing what was revealed to him.
In some cases it may be that he merely adopted
words from those already used in the sacred
writings, because they served to express his
meaning, without intending thereby to denote
any close connexion of subject. Such instances,
however, will probably be exceptional. More
often we shall find that the adoption of the same
symbols points to similarity, if not identity, of
subject, and it would clearly be wrong to employ
one method of interpretation for the Apocalyptic
* Westcott and Hort, Greek Testament, vol. ii., p. 184.
t Cf. Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John, p. cxxxv.

128 The Old Testament in the Ne

w

writings of the Old Testament, and to adopt an
entirely different system in explaining the same
or similar language in the New. It is only by
the most careful attention to the language and
symbols as they stand in their original setting
that we can ever hope to arrive at a satisfactory
interpretation of their meaning in their new
surroundings. Before, however, I attempt to
illustrate this in detail by citing particular pas
sages to establish the point, it is desirable to
indicate two distinct claims which the writer of
the book makes, both of which serve directly to
link on his work to the Old Testament Scriptures,
and to furnish a guide to the method of its inter
pretation in a most remarkable manner.
i. In the very first words with which the book
opens the writer claims that what follows is a
'revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him
to show unto His servants, even the things which
must shortly come to pass.'* A 'revelation':
literally an Apocalypse, a disclosure. The word
is a remarkable one. It is almost a technical
term, and is applied not to ordinary prophecy,
though that, indeed, contains disclosures, whether
respecting the will of God generally, or respecting
the future, but to particular writings in which the
disclosure or revelation is of a specially marked
and distinctive character. And the recognition of
this fact has an important bearing on the inter
pretation of the book before us. Until quite
recently the Apocalypse has been isolated and
treated as if it stood alone. It has been inter-
* Rev. i. i.

The Apocalypse 129
preted with very little reference to other books,
and the result has been that, having no standard
of comparison, and nothing by which to illustrate
the book, commentators have gone on their way
regardless of anything but their own imagination,
inventing what seemed to them plausible explana
tions of its symbols, and have given us those wild
schemes of interpretation against which common
sense revolts — schemes which have brought so
much discredit upon expositors, and have been
largely responsible for the neglect of the book by
sober-minded Christians. Of late years, however,
there has been a change. It is now recognised
that the book belongs to a class, and that it cannot
rightly be treated as if it stood quite by itself.
The key to its origin and interpretation, we are
told, ' has only been put into our hands in recent
years, through the discovery and critical examina
tion of a considerable mass of literature to which
the general title of " Apocalyptic " may be given.'*
The best-known specimens of this class of writing
are probably the famous Book of Enoch, referred
to by St. Jude,f which, after having been lost for
centuries, was rediscovered by the traveller Bruce
in Abyssinia in the eighteenth century, and is now
familiar to scholars in more than one version ; and,
together with this, the second or fourth Book of
Esdras, which finds a place in our Apocrypha,
though not regarded as Canonical by the Roman
Church. But there are many others beside these in
* Anderson Scott, The Century Bible — Revelation, p. 13.
t Jude 14. 17

130 The Old Testament in the New
existence, a considerable number of which have
recently been edited in convenient forms and made
acceptable to students, e.g., the Apocalypse of
Baruch, the Assumption of Moses, the Ascension
of Isaiah, and a portion of the so-called Sibylline
Oracles. All these books have close affinities
with one another. They belong, broadly speaking,
to the same period, viz., the centuries immediately
preceding and following the Incarnation. They
have a common aim in view ; they deal with a
common subject, and are cast in a common form.
The aim is 'to solve the difficulties connected with
a belief in God's righteousness, and the suffering
condition of His subjects on earth.'* The subject
is the consummation of the kingdom of heaven,
the triumph of the righteous, and the judgment
upon sinners. The form is that of vision, as dis
tinct from ordinary prophecy, — vision in which
symbolism plays a very large part, many of the
symbols employed being, so to speak, common
property, and having a recognised value and
meaning. To this class of writing it is now seen
that the Revelation, or Apocalypse of St. John the
Divine, belongs, and much has been done of
recent years to illustrate the book from these
other writings of the same class, and to interpret
it in accordance with principles which apply to
them as well. In all this there has been a real
gain, and we have come to understand the book
better than we ever did before. But, at the same
time, it is possible that critics have allowed their
attention to be given too much to these other
* Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, vol. i., p. no.

The Apocalypse 131
contemporary, or nearly contemporary, Apoca
lypses, and to seek in them too exclusively the
sources of St. John's ' visions,' while they have
neglected what is really the source and ground
work of this whole class of writings, and more
especially of the Revelation of St. John. Thus
they have pronounced the ' writer or writers ' of
the Revelation to be 'steeped in Jewish Apoca
lyptic literature ';* and often have postulated a
number of 'lost Jewish Apocalypses,' from which
they have imagined that some of the most difficult
parts of the book are borrowed, being transferred
with little or no alteration to the pages of the
Christian seer. Such a method of accounting for
what a critic cannot otherwise explain is a favourite
one with some writers — we have seen in a previous
lecture how it has been applied to our Lord's
own wordsf — and, resting as it does so largely on
guesswork and ignorance, it is, of course, peculiarly
difficult to refute directly by positive evidence,
even when the mind remains wholly unconvinced
by the arguments for it. But in the case before
us a strong analogical argument against it may
be fairly constructed by pointing to facts which
none can dispute. We have, as I have already
mentioned, a number of these Jewish Apocalypses
still existing, and by an examination of them we
can easily test the extent to which St. John is
indebted to, or has borrowed from them. Such
an examination has lately been undertaken by
Dr. Swete, and his conclusion, after a survey of
* R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch, p. 42.
t See above, p. 73. 17 — 2

132 The Old Testament in the New
the whole known literature of this class, is that,
while the parallels are sufficiently close and
numerous to ' show the writer of the Christian
Apocalypse to have been familiar with the Apoca
lyptic ideas of his age, they afford little or no clear
evidence of his dependence on Jewish sources
other than the Books of the Old Testament.
Certainly he does not use these sources with any
thing like the distinctness with which he refers to
Isaiah, Ezekiel, or Daniel, or to sayings of Christ
which are in our present Gospels. The most that
can be safely affirmed is that he shared with the
Jewish Apocalyptists the stock of Apocalyptic
imagery and the mystical and eschatological
thought which was the common property of an
age nurtured in the Old Testament, and hard
pressed by the troubles and the dangers of the
times.' ' This consideration,' the Professor pro
ceeds in words to which I would draw your special
attention, 'does not encourage the view which
regards the Apocalypse of John as a composite
work, largely made up of extracts from unknown
non-Christian Apocalypses. If it cannot be shown
that the author availed himself to any extent of
sources still extant, including the well-known
Book of Enoch, it is certainly precarious to
build theories upon the hypothesis that he was
indebted to lost works of which not a trace
remains.'* These are the words of sober and judicious
criticism, and they point us to the right quarter in
which to find the true source of the imagery and
* Swete, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, p. cliii.

The Apocalypse 133
form of the Revelation — viz., what we may call
the Apocalyptic parts of the Old Testament. It
is in these, rather than in contemporary Jewish
literature, that the writer of the Revelation of
St. John is really 'steeped,' and it is from them
that the more difficult parts of his work may for
the most part be explained. Such prophets as
Ezekiel, Joel, and Zechariah deal largely in
visions and symbolical figures, while the Book of
Daniel may fairly claim to be pre-eminently an
' Apocalypse,' and to have set the type so widely
followed in later days. From it are undoubtedly
borrowed many of the conceptions and symbols
which later on became ' Apocalyptic ' conventions,
part of the framework or setting in which, as it
were, Apocalyptic ideas must be set forth. Thus
it has been pointed out that ' the representation of
the kingdoms of this world under the symbol of
different monsters, of their kings as heads of " the
beast," the " abomination of desolation," and the
computation of the end by means of cryptic
periods, are only some of the features derived
from Daniel which reappear in successive Apoca
lypses.'* In all these books of the Old Testament
just referred to you find yourself moving in a
world of strange and weird figures — locusts of
unearthly appearance, horses of varied colours
with riders seated upon them, winged creatures,
and many-headed beasts — or you are carried away
in the spirit to a city built by no earthly hands,
whose measurements and specifications would be
the despair of an earthly builder, while the river
* Anderson Scott, Revelation, p. 32.

134 The Old Testament in the New
in its streets, and the trees on its banks, are
unknown to any earthly geographer or botanist.
Further, colours and numbers are significant, and,
endowed with mystic meaning, stand as the repre
sentatives of certain ideas ; while familiar objects,
such as trumpets and candlesticks and horns, and
many other things, form the common ' properties,'
so to speak, out of which vision after vision
is constructed. Now, when all these features
reappear in the Revelation of St. John, it is
obvious that they are not original, but borrowed,
and that a knowledge of their significance in their
original position is a first necessity for a right
interpretation of them. The student of the book
is sure to go wrong unless, like its writer, he is
' steeped ' in the Apocalyptic literature of the
Old Testament. There alone can we find the
explanation of much that is bewildering and
puzzling, and it is because they are so sadly
unfamiliar with the more difficult parts of the Old
Testament that the last book of the Canon
remains for so many Christians a sealed volume.
But this is not all, for (2) there is another fact
also which links the Revelation on to the Old
Testament, and to a considerable extent marks it
off as distinct from the contemporary Jewish
Apocalypses to which reference has been made.
' Apocalypse,' we are often told, takes the place of
the earlier 'prophecy.' It belongs to a period
when prophecy has ceased, and is ' sharply dis
tinguished from it.' It was a 'form of religious
instruction to which men had recourse who were
conscious that for them there was no longer any

The Apocalypse 135
open vision.'* Now, this may be perfectly true of
such books as Enoch or 2 Esdras ; but it is em
phatically not the case with the Revelation of
St. John. That claims to be not only an Apoca
lypse, but, quite definitely, a prophecy. It is so
styled in the opening benediction — ' Blessed is he
that readeth, and they that hear the words of this
prophecy, and keep the things which are written
therein '; f and again, at the close, we have the
injunction, ' Seal not up the words of the prophecy
of this book,' J and, once more : ' I testify unto
every man that heareth the words of the prophecy
of this book, if any man shall add unto them, God
shall add unto him the plagues which are written
in this book ; and if any man shall take away from
the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall
take away his part from the tree of life, and out of
the holy city, and from the things which are
written in this book.' § This fact, again, as I say,
links the book on very closely to the Old Testa
ment, and materially helps us in the interpretation
of it. In recent years we have learnt much about
the character of Old Testament prophecy, and
there can be no question that our views of the
right method of interpreting it will have a most
important bearing on our method of interpreting
the one prophetical book of the New Testament
as well. What I mean is this : We have learnt
that the prophet of the Old Testament was not
merely a predictor of future events — that he was
not so much a foreteller as a forth-teller — that
* Anderson Scott, op. tit., p. 25. t Rev. i. 3.
X Rev. xxii. 10, § Rev. xxii. 18, 19.

136 The Old Testament in the New
insight rather than foresight was the special gift
of the seer. Concerned with the future as well as
the present the prophet most certainly was. It
was his task ' not only to announce the Divine
purpose, but also to prepare the way for its
realisation.'* He did this, however, not (as was
formerly supposed) by simply writing down the
incidents of history before they came to pass.
' Prophecy and fulfilment,' says a thoughtful writer,
'were once supposed to be related as the reflection
in a mirror to the object reflected. The complete
course of future events was thought to have been
mapped out in a way intelligible to the prophet
and his contemporaries. Prophecy was considered
throughout as inverted history.' f Even Bishop
Butler could say that ' Prophecy is nothing but
the history of events before they come to pass.' J
If this view could be maintained for the Old
Testament, it might well be thought to hold good
for the New Testament also. But if it be dis
carded for the one, there need be no reluctance in
discarding it for the other also. For the Old
Testament it is widely given up. We have learnt
that the prophet of the Jewish Church had fore
sight of the future mainly because he had deeper
insight than others into the principles of God's
government. It was that which distinguished him
from his contemporaries and made him a prophet.
Similarly, when we pass from the Old Testament
to that one book of the New which alone claims
the title of a ' prophecy,' we may well be content
* Kirkpatrick, The Doctrine of the Prophets, p. 15.
t Ibid., op. cit., p. 15. X Analogy, part ii., chap. vii.

The Apocalypse 137
to turn aside with a sigh of relief from all schemes
of interpretation, whether 'futurist,' or 'continuous
historical,' or ' present,' which regard it as simply
so much history written down beforehand, looking
for the literal fulfilment of its visions in certain
definite incidents which are supposed to have been
seen beforehand by the seer in Patmos. Happily
there are signs that a more reasonable interpreta
tion of the book is gaining acceptance, and men
are coming to recognise much more widely that it
contains a series of symbolical pictures, represent
ing spiritual truths, but dealing with principles
rather than with the incidents of history — starting,
perhaps, from scenes which were actually before
the Apostle's eye, but illustrating from them the
action of principles which hold good for the Church
of all ages, so that, wherever the conditions are
the same, there the scene will be repeated ; and
the fulfilment will be sought, not in any accidental
coincidence or arbitrary connexion of events
which have really nothing whatever to do with
each other, but in the recurrence of similar con
ditions bringing about similar results.
Taken in this way the book possesses a per
manent value for the Church, and Christians in
every generation can draw guidance and inspira
tion for their life from its passages. It will speak
to them of the dangers which beset their path on
earth, as it traces their trials and temptations to
their source in 'the beast,' or 'the false prophet,'
or ' the dragon.'
It will tell them of heavenly consolations which
are theirs now, if they will only receive them. It
18

138 The Old Testament in the New
will reveal to them the ideal which should ever be
present before them, for themselves and for the
Church, and which, when kept steadily before the
mind, may be a vision which need never ' fade into
the light of common day,' but may remain even to
old age as one of the greatest helps and encourage
ments possible towards enthusiasm and activity.
They will interpret its promises and glowing
pictures of heavenly bliss not so much of a
' heaven ' which is to be theirs in some future
state ' behind the veil ' under entirely different
conditions hereafter, but rather of a ' heaven '
which may be theirs here and now upon earth,
into which they must enter by no change in their
environment, but only by a change in themselves,
and by the acquisition of that purity of heart with
out which it is given to no man to ' see God '
either here or hereafter.

X
The Apocalypse. — II
Rev. i. 3 : ' Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear
the words of the prophecy, and keep the things which are
written therein.'

X
The Apocalypse. — II
We saw in my last lecture that, whether we regard
it as an ' Apocalypse,' or as a ' prophecy,' the
Revelation of St. John the Divine takes its form
and character from the Old Testament. We have
now to see how, in addition to form and character,
much of the material of the book comes from the
same source ; and how whole chapters are built up
out of thoughts and phrases borrowed from the
Jewish Scriptures, so that, if the reader is to
understand the book aright, he must literally be
'steeped in the Old Testament,' the primary
passages in which again and again supply the only
satisfactory clue to St. John's meaning. In order
to establish and illustrate this, I propose this
morning to examine the descriptions of what I
may, without irreverence, term the dramatis
persona of the book — the principal figures and
actors in the scenes which the seer brings before
us. And, first, let me remind you that even the
language used of Him Whose the Revelation is,
viz., the glorified Christ Himself is largely based
on expressions already employed in the Old

142 The Old Testament in the New
Testament, and thus familiar to the earliest
readers of the book. It is not only that such
titles as 'the Lion of the tribe of Judah,' 'the
Root of David,' and the ' Lamb as it had been
slain,' take us back in thought to Jacob's blessing
of Judah in Gen. xlix., to the great Messianic
passage in Isa. xi., as well as to the prophet's
marvellous picture of the suffering servant of
Jehovah, who was 'led as a Lamb to the slaughter,'*
but more important is it to notice that the whole
description of the 'One like a Son of man,'t
whom St. John saw in the midst of the seven
golden candlesticks, and almost every detail in it,
is either borrowed from the visions of Daniel in
his seventh and tenth chapters or taken from
language previously used either by Ezekiel or by
Isaiah. The primary passage is the vision
described in Dan. vii. of 'the ancient of days,'
whose 'garment was white as snow,' and the hair
of whose head was ' like the pure wool ' — to whom
is brought ' one like a son of man '; but the ' eyes
like a flame of fire,' and the ' feet like unto
burnished brass,' are taken from Dan. x. 6,
while the ' voice as the voice of many waters '
comes from Ezek. i. 24, and the priestly
' garment down to the feet,' from Ezek. x. 2 ;
the ' sharp sword proceeding out of the mouth '
being suggested by Isa. xlix. 2 ; and the pro
clamation, ' I am the first and the last,' being
drawn from the words of the Almighty, repeated
* Cf. Rev. v. 5 with Gen. xlix. 9 and Isa. xi. 1, and
Rev. v. 6 with Isa. liii. 7.
t Rev. i. 12-16.

The Apocalypse 143
with such emphasis in Isa. xliv. 6 and xlviii. 12.
To this I would draw special attention ; for very
remarkable is it, when you consider it, that, in this
vision of the exalted Christ, St. John should not
only borrow language used in the Old Testament
of the Messianic King or the suffering servant of
Jehovah, but that he should fearlessly draw some
details of his imagery * from descriptions of the
Almighty Himself, and hear from the lips of the
speaker claims which are not only proper to God
alone, but are actually attributed to Jehovah
Himself in the Old Testament. ' I am the first
and the last.' None can say this but God alone :
and only one inference is possible from the use
made of the words in the New Testament. It is
the inference which the Church has always drawn,
viz., that He Who appeared to the beloved
disciple in Patmos, and Who by His claim that
He ' was dead and is alive again ' expressly identi
fied Himself with the Jesus of history, claimed
also to be, and indeed is, One with the Jehovah
of the Old Testament, Very and Eternal God.
But if it is the case that the figure of the
glorified Christ is described in language taken
from the Old Testament, the same is also em
phatically true of the figure which in this wonder
ful book of contrasts is expressly set over against
Him as the protagonist of evil, the 'dragon ' who
first makes his appearance in chapter xii., and
who after the last great conflict is finally cast into
the lake of fire and brimstone. It is not only
that twice over * he is directly identified with ' the
* Rev. xii. 9, xx. 2.

144 The Old Testament in the New
old serpent ' of Gen iii., and the ' Satan ' of
Job i. and Zech. iii., but the actual figure of
the ' great red dragon, having seven heads and
ten horns, and upon his head seven diadems,'
whose ' tail drew the third part of the stars of
heaven and did cast them to the earth,' * is also
suggested by the Old Testament. The details as
to the heads and horns and diadems are borrowed
from the description of the beasts in Dan. vii. ;
and the phrase that his ' tail drew the third part of
the stars' comes from Dan. viii. 10, where it is
said of the ' little horn ' that it ' cast down some of
the host and of the stars to the ground '; while
the whole conception of the dragon is taken from
that series of passages in the Old Testament
where the mysterious, half- mythical figure of
Leviathan, or the dragon of the sea, stands for the
embodiment of the power of evil in hostility to
the kingdom of God. Thus, in Isa. xxvii. i we
read, in a passage of markedly eschatological
import, ' In that day the Lord with His sore and
great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan,
the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked
serpent ; and He shall slay the dragon that is in
the sea.' Again, in li. 9 of the same book the
' arm of the Lord ' is apostrophised, and bidden
to ' awake and put on strength as in the ancient
days,' for was it not that arm which ' cut Rahab in
pieces, and pierced the dragon' ? So the Psalmist
in similar terms makes allusion to the passage
of the Red Sea and the destruction of the power
of evil then incarnate in the persons of Pharaoh
* Rev. xii. 3, 4.

The Apocalypse 145
and the Egyptians. ' Thou didst divide the sea
by Thy strength : Thou breakest the heads of the
dragons in the waters. Thou breakest the heads
of Leviathan in pieces,' * while in a totally different
connexion in the Book of Job we have more than
one allusion to the same monster — e.g., in iii. 8 :
' Let them curse it that curse the day who are
ready to rouse up Leviathan'; and xxvi. 12, 13:
' He stirreth up the sea with His power, and by
His understanding He smiteth through Rahab.
By His spirit the heavens are garnished ; His
hand hath pierced the swift serpent.'
It is now generally recognised by commentators
that this strange symbolical monster takes its origin
in the Babylonian myth of Tiamat, the dragon or
monster, whose defeat by God was described in
the Babylonian epic of which the Creation tablets,
originally deciphered by George Smith, formed a
part, the monster being subdued and confined
within the bounds of the ocean. From this ancient
myth the form under which the power of evil is
represented in the poetical passages of the Old
Testament to which reference has been made may
have been taken, and from them it has passed,
with additions from later works, into the Apoca
lypse. But there appears to be no sort of reason
to think, as some have done, that the vision in the
twelfth chapter of the Revelation is based directly
on Babylonian materials, embodying a myth of
the birth of the sun-god, and the persecution of
the young child by the dragon, the deity of winter
* Ps. lxxiv. 13, 14. 19

146 The Old Testament in the New
and night.* It is quite arbitrary to describe the
section as a ' foreign intrusion,' f nor is there the
slightest need to pass beyond the borders of the
Old Testament in the search for the materials out
of which it is constructed. Indeed, the whole
scene of the woman and her child, and their per
secution by the dragon, is little more than a
pictorial representation under the conventional
form of ' Apocalypse,' with embellishments from
other parts of the Old Testament, of the scene
described in the protevangelium of Gen. iii. 1 5 :
' I will put enmity between thee and the woman,
and between thy seed and her seed. It shall
bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.'
The dramatis persona are the same : the woman
and her seed ; the serpent and his seed — viz.,
the ' dragon and his angels.' The conflict is the
same, and the result is the same. In the per
secution of the woman and her seed, and its
partial success, we find the counterpart of the
bruising of the heel ; while the bruising of the
serpent's head is represented by the complete
defeat and casting down of the devil and his
angels. The whole vision affords a most instruc
tive instance of the manner in which entire sections
of the Apocalypse take up conceptions of the Old
Testament and carry them forward, using the old
materials in new combinations ; and, did time
permit, the subject would bear working out much
more fully. But I must pass on from the scene
in chapter xii. to that in chapter xiii., where, save
* So Gunkel, Schopfung und Chaos.
t Encyclopedia Biblica, art. Apocalypse, vol. i., col. 209.

The Apocalypse 147
for an anticipatory allusion in chapter xi. 7, we
have the first mention of the ' beast.' Of this
strange monster St. John writes as follows : ' I
saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten
horns and seven heads, and on his horns ten
diadems, and upon his heads names of blasphemy.
And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard,
and his feet as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as
the mouth of a lion ; and the dragon gave him his
power, and his throne and great authority . . .
and there was given unto him a mouth speaking
great blasphemies ; and there was given unto
him authority to continue forty and two months
. . . and it was given unto him to make war with
the saints and to overcome them.' * Now here it is
obvious that the whole conception is based directly
on the famous vision in Dan. vii. ' Four great
beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from
another. The first was like a lion. . . . And
behold another beast, a second, like to a bear . . .
and after this I beheld, and lo, another, like a
leopard . . . the beast had also four heads, and
dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the
night visions, and beheld a fourth beast, terrible
and powerful, and strong exceedingly . . . and it
was diverse from all the beasts that were before
it ; and it had ten horns. I considered the horns,
and, behold, there came up among them another
horn, a little one . . . and, behold, in this horn
were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth
speaking great things . . . and the same horn
made war with the saints and prevailed against
* Rev. xiii. 1-7.
19 — 2

148 The Old Testament in the New
them.' * No words are needed to emphasise the
fact that the connexion between the two passages
is of the closest possible character ; though
St. John is no slavish copyist, but makes the
freest possible use of the materials borrowed from
Daniel, and rearranges them in an entirely inde
pendent fashion. Thus, whereas Daniel sees four
beasts in succession — like a lion, like a bear, like a
leopard, and after the fourth beast, 'great and
terrible,' sees a fifth symbol in the ' little horn,'
and is told that they represent successive kings or
empires, in St. John it is but a single beast com
bining in itself the several features of the five
symbolical figures seen by Daniel. Clearly, then,
the beast of the Apocalypse is to be regarded as
a supreme manifestation of the world-power in
opposition to the kingdom of God — a manifestation
more dreadful than any seen in those old historical
powers such as Babylon, or Media, or Persia, or
Greece, or even Antiochus Epiphanes, for it
combines in itself the characteristics of all these,
blending together the massive strength and
brutality which we associate with the lion and the
bear with the swift dexterity and vigilance which
mark the leopard ; nor is there room for doubt
that the whole description is symbolic of the great
world-power of St. John's own day, viz., the
mighty Roman Empire under Nero or Domitian
— that power which in its state religion and
deification of the Emperor did indeed speak
blasphemies against God, and claimed for its
head Divine worship, and which, like Antiochus
* Dan. vii. 3-8, 21.

The Apocalypse 149
of old, ' made war with the saints of God,' and
had ' power to continue for forty and two months.'
Of this mystic period, which is identical with, and
borrowed from, ' the time and times and half a
time,' during which the ' little horn ' was to con
tinue, I hope to speak more fully in my next
lecture. Omitting for the present the interpreta
tion of this and of various other details, I proceed
to speak of the last of the dramatis personce of the
Apocalypse — viz., the great harlot of chapters xvii.
and xviii. ; for here again the study of" the Old
Testament may materially help us in deciding the
meaning of the symbol. The woman is seen by
St. John ' sitting upon a scarlet-coloured beast,
full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads
and ten horns '; and she is 'arrayed in purple and
scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones
and pearls ; and had in her hand a golden cup
full of abominations, even the unclean things of
her fornication ; and upon her forehead a name
written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother
of harlots, and of the abominations of the earth.' *
The beast is confessedly identical with that seen
earlier, coming up from the sea, and represents,
as we have just ascertained, Satan's world-power
as manifested in the Roman Empire in its oppo
sition to God ; and St. John has himself told us
up to a certain point the meaning of the woman
seated upon the beast : ' The woman whom thou
sawest is the great city, which reigneth over the
kings of the earth.' t So far all is clear. But
now we come to the question which, almost more
* Rev. xvii. 3-5. t Rev. xvii. 18.

150 The Old Testament in the New
than any other, has divided interpreters of the
book into different schools. Granted that by the
' harlot ' Rome is signified, yet what is meant by
' Rome '? Is it pagan or papal Rome ? Is it a
heathen city, or is it an apostate Church ? Upon
the answer given to these questions must ulti
mately depend the scheme of interpretation
adopted, not merely for the few chapters in which
the harlot is mentioned, but for the whole book
from beginning to end. It is, therefore, the most
momentous question that can be raised in con
nexion with the work ; and I claim that in
arriving at the answer to it the determining factor
is really to be found in the Old Testament.
Those only who, like the first readers of the book,
come to its study with their minds ' steeped in the
Old Testament ' are in a right position to interpret
the symbol ; and they, I believe, will have little
doubt that the figure which St. John saw is
intended to represent the mistress of the world, as
he knew it, and that, though in other parts of his
work — notably in the Epistles to the Seven
Churches — the doom of an apostate Church is
surely announced, yet it is not here in the descrip
tion of the harlot's downfall that we are to look
for it. Let it be granted that papal Rome in its
worst days may have arrayed itself in the harlot's
attire, and gone far by its actions to justify the
application made of St. John's language by so
many writers ; yet this should be regarded only
as an application, and not as an interpretation,
for, apart from other considerations, the argument
from the Old Testament appears to be conclusive

The Apocalypse 151
that the figure was intended by St. John to repre
sent the pagan city rather than the apostate
Church. Three distinct considerations may be
mentioned, all tending to the same conclusion.
First, the symbol of the harlot is employed
many times by the prophets in the Old Testament,
and it does, as a matter of fact, in several instances
stand for the apostate Church of the Old Covenant;
but in every case in which it is so used it is made
perfectly clear that the harlot's sin is the sin of
the unfaithful wife. She has been the bride of
Jehovah, and her guilt takes a deeper dye because
she has known Him and forsaken Him. So
Isaiah, ' How hath the faithful city become an
harlot!'* So also Jeremiah and Hosea in most
pathetic passages, in which Jehovah pleads with
the faithless, erring wife, who has gone astray
and 'played the harlot.' f Elsewhere, however,
where the symbol is employed to represent heathen
nations, there are no such charges of apostasy
brought against them. They are, indeed, de
nounced for their sins, for their arrogance and
pride and cruelty, but not for unfaithfulness to
Jehovah. Thus the title of 'harlot' is applied by
Isaiah to Tyre, the mistress of the world's
commerce, | and by Nahum to Nineveh, the centre
of the mighty Assyrian Empire, which is denounced
as ' the well-favoured harlot, the mistress of witch
crafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms,
and families through her witchcrafts.' §
Now it is with these last allusions that the
* Isa. i. 21. t Jer. ii. ; Hos. i.-iii.
X Isa. xxiii. 15-18. § Nah. iii. 4.

152 The Old Testament in the New
reference in the Apocalypse must be brought into
line, for there is no shadow of a trace anywhere in
it that the scarlet woman, the harlot of chapter xvii.,
is to be identified with the ' woman clothed with
the sun ' of chapter xii., or that she is regarded as
having ever been the bride of the Lamb. Read
the chapters in which her sins are denounced, and
you will not find a single instance of a reproach
for unfaithfulness such as those addressed to Judah
and Israel by the prophets of old. On the con
trary, the terms employed in the description of
her seem expressly chosen to identify her (spiritu
ally) not with the apostate Church of God's Cove
nant, but with the heathen empires of old, whose
successor she was as the mistress of the nations,
supported by and resting on the world-power of
Satan. For instance, are we told that she ' sitteth
upon many waters '? The phrase is taken direct
from Jeremiah's apostrophe to Babylon : ' O thou
that dwellest upon many waters.' * Is it said that
'the kings of the earth commit fornication with
her '? So of Tyre it was said by Isaiah that ' she
shall play the harlot with all the kingdoms of the
world.' f Is she seen with 'a golden cup in her
hand full of abominations,' so that ' they that dwell
in the earth were made drunken with the wine of
her fornication '? Exactly so we read in Jeremiah
that ' Babylon hath been a golden cup in the
Lord's hand that made all the earth drunken.'^
It would be difficult to find expressions more
clearly indicating that the spirit which lived on in
* With Rev. xvii. 1, cf. Jer. Ii. 13.
\ With Rev. xvii. 2, with 1st. xxiii. 17.
X With Rev. xvii. 2, 3, cf. Jer. Ii. 7.

The Apocalypse 153
Rome, and which St. John intended to describe, was
the spirit of the old pagan cities in their hostility
to the Church of the Old Covenant, and not the
spirit of that Church in its apostasy from the love
of its espousals, and its falling away into idolatry.
Then, secondly, another consideration points
in the same direction. Chapter xviii. contains
the lament over the fallen city, the language
of which is to a great extent borrowed word
for word from the Old Testament ; and the
passages on which the seer has drawn, and the
expressions which have influenced his language,
are not those which it would have been natural
for him to select had his purpose been to speak of
the fate of an apostate Church, viz. — those (and
they are numerous) which are descriptive of the
sin and apostasy of the chosen people, with the
judgments to which they led — but they are taken
exclusively from those sections of the prophets
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel which describe the
downfall and doom of the great world-powers of
old, powers which were the embodiment of
hostility to the kingdom of God, and were thus
the forerunners of pagan and imperial Rome, but
which, having never been brought into covenant
with God, are nowhere charged with apostasy or
falling away from truth revealed.*
* The following are some of the most striking parallels in
the Old Testament with the lament in Rev. xviii. : With verse 2,
cf. Isa. xxi. 9; Jer. ix. 11; Isa. xiii. 21, xxxiv. 14. With
verse 3, cf. Jer. Ii. 7, xxv. 16, 27; Isa. xxiii. 17. With verse 4,
cf. Jer. Ii. 6, 9, 45. With verse 6, cf. Jer. 1. 29. With verses 7, 8,
cf. Isa. xlvii. 7 et seq. With verse 9, cf. Isa. xxiii. 1 7 ; Ezek.
xxvi. 16 et seq. With verses 11-20, cf. Ezek. xxvii.
20

154 The Old Testament in the New
And, lastly, not only is the language used of the
destruction of Babylon and the symbolical act of
casting a stone into the sea to mark its downfall
transferred directly to the harlot city,* but the very
name of Babylon is attributed to it. Upon the fore
head of the great harlot was the name inscribed,
' Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots
and abominations of the earth '; and the opening
words of the proclamation of the angel which
introduces the lament are, ' Fallen, fallen, is
Babylon the Great.' f This of itself seems con
clusive, for right through the Old Testament, even
from Genesis onward, and the story of the Tower
of Babel, Babel, or Babylon, is the type and repre
sentative — the incarnation, so to speak — of the
world-power in its hostility to the kingdom of
God. It would simply be to introduce utter con
fusion into the symbolism of Scripture to make it
mean anything else, and to take it as the type of
a fallen and apostate Church. Let anyone examine
for himself the passages of the Old Testament
which speak of Babylon, and he can scarcely fail
to see for what the name stands. The Jews saw
it clearly enough, and, even before St. John wrote
the Apocalypse, it had become natural to them to
transfer the name to Rome as they knew it — that
is, to the pagan and imperial city, which had taken
the place of the persecuting heathen powers of
their national history. Even within the canon of
the New Testament the name is so employed, for
it appears to be quite certain that when St. Peter,
* With Rev. xvii. 21-24, cf Jer. Ii. 63 et seq.
\ Rev. xvii. 5, xviii. 2.

The Apocalypse 155
in his first Epistle, sends greeting from the Church
that is in Babylon,* he is alluding to Rome, from
whence his letter was written ; and the title is
employed with the same reference in such works
as 2 Esdras, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and the
Sibylline Oracles.f This fact clenches the argu
ment, and leaves no room for doubt as to the
significance of the term in the Apocalypse. It is
the doom of the seat of that world-power which
loomed so large in St. John's own day that he
sees. The fulfilment of his prophecies is not to
be sought in the history of the medieval and
modern papacy, to which so many have referred
it. To some extent it may be found in the details
of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as
they were visible to the eyes of the later historians,
but still more in those events which are little
noticed at the time, for they belong to the unseen
and spiritual order of things, which, however,
though men mark them not, are silently preparing
the way for the destruction of all that exalts itself
against God, until in the end it is found that ' the
kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom
of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall
reign for ever and ever.'J
* 1 Pet. v. 13. Literally, 'She that is in Babylon, elect
together with you.' The words may possibly refer not to the
Church, but to St. Peter's wife (see Bigg, 'St. Peter and
St. Jude,' International Commentary, p. 77, where the view
that Babylon means Rome is adopted).
t 2 Esdras iii. 31 ; Apoc. Baruch., xi. 1 ; Orac. Sibyl., v. 158.
X Rev. xi. 15.

20-

XI
The Apocalypse. — III
i Cor. x. ii : 'These things happened unto them by way
of example : and they were written for our admonition, upon
whom the ends of the ages are come ' (R.V.).

XI
The Apocalypse. — III
The Apocalypse has been rightly called not a
history, but a philosophy of history. It portrays,
indeed, in outline the character of the conflict that
is ever going on here between good and evil, and
prophesies with the calm tone of absolute cer
tainty the ultimate triumph of good with the com
plete vindication of God's righteousness ; and so
far it may be said to contain history. But it should
be regarded as an unveiling of the hidden forces
which are at work in the world, and an explana
tion of the course which history takes, by refe
rence to the principles which govern action, rather
than as a narrative of the events which succeed
each other in the order of time as the centuries
pass. When so taken, it is only natural to find
that those books of the Old Testament which had
described God's dealings with His people of old,
and the works of those prophets, whose insight
into the spiritual world and its secrets had enabled
them to declare God's judgments upon sinners
and His eternal purpose for the righteous, should
have profoundly influenced the thought and lan
guage of the last of the Apostles, to whom was
*59

160 The Old Testament in the New
given the insight to contemplate the mystery of
the last great struggle which leads up to the com
plete manifestation of God's righteous judgment
and the final vindication of His ways to men. Ac
cordingly, there are two sections of the Old Testa
ment the influence of which, more than that of
any others, we can trace upon the book before us
as having modified its thought and suggested its
language — viz., the account of the Exodus and
the writings of the prophets.
The subject is so large, and the references to
the Old Testament are so numerous, that it is
impossible in the course of a single lecture to deal
with it with the fulness that it merits. I must
content myself with giving some few illustrations
of it, reminding my readers that they are only
illustrations, and that they might be multiplied to
a very large extent.
t. The Exodus of Israel from Egypt was the
first great manifestation on a large scale of God's
redemption of His people ; and (as was shown in
an earlier lecture)* as such it fixed once for all the
type and character under which redemption was
conceived of by the Jews, as a mighty exertion of
God's power and the rescue of His people from
the hand of the oppressor. One feature, how
ever, there is which stands out with startling-
prominence in the narrative — viz., that mercy is
accompanied by judgment. The deliverance of
God's people is accomplished by the infliction of
chastisement and penalties upon their foes. It is
only by these that the power of evil can be broken.
* See above, Lecture II.

The Apocalypse 1 6 1
Plague after plague must fall on Pharaoh and the
Egyptians before Israel can be saved, for not
without a signal manifestation of His power over
the ungodly and oppressor is the deliverance of
God's people from their bondage effected. With
this thought in your mind turn to the Revelation
of St. John, and study those sections of it which
contain the visions of the ' seven trumpets ' of
judgment,* and the ' seven vials ' of wrath, f and
you will see that the thought is the very same.
The vindication of God's righteousness and the
redemption of His people from the power of the
evil one must be accompanied by warning and
punitive judgments passed upon the worshippers
of the beast and his image ; and the symbolic
forms under which the judgments are depicted-
while containing many features drawn from other
sources or found in the Apocalypse alone — are
based to a very large extent on the account of the
plagues of Egypt, one after another of these re
appearing in the Apocalyptic visions. Once more
the waters are turned into blood ; J once more great
hailstones from heaven must smite the land, and
fire mingled with hail ;§ once more the light of sun
and moon must fail, and the earth be enveloped
in darkness ;|| once more ' noisome and grievous
sores ' must afflict the ungodly ;f and once more
must plagues of locusts and frogs — ' the unclean
* Rev. viii. 2 — xi. 19. t Rev. xv., xvi.
X Rev. viii. 8, 9, xvi. 3-6. Cf. Exod. vii. 17 et seq.
§ Rev. viii. 7. Cf. Exod. ix. 24.
|| Rev. viii. 12, xvi. 10. Cf. Exod. x. 21.
IT Rev. xvi. 2. Cf. Exod. ix. 9. 21

162 The Old Testament in the New
spirits of devils' — proclaim that the day of the
Lord is at hand.* How, precisely, the details of
the symbols in each case are to be understood
and spiritually interpreted opens up a question
which cannot be entered upon here.f It belongs
more properly to the commentator upon the text
of the Apocalypse. It is the principle with which
I am concerned, and the general lesson from the
facts summarised above is clear. It is that which
St. Paul affirmed after his reference to the early
history of Israel in the First Epistle to the Corin
thians : ' These things happened unto them by way
of example, and they were written for our admoni
tion upon whom the ends of the ages are come.' J
The Old Testament has been called ' the epitome
of God's dealings with men in all time;'§ and
the principle which underlay the method of His
redemption of Israel and the infliction of penalties
on Egypt holds good still, for the connexion
between mercy and judgment is as close to-day as
ever it was. The Apostle's words stand firm,
* Rev. ix. i-ii, xvi. 13, 14. Cf. Exod. viii. 2, x. 12.
t Cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Ha-r., IV., xxx. 4 : ' The whole exodus
of the people out of Egypt, which took place under Divine
guidance, was a type and image of the exodus of the Church
which should take place from among the Gentiles; and for
this cause He leads it out at last from the world to His own
inheritance, which Moses, the servant of God, did not bestow,
but which Jesus the Son of God will give for an inheritance.
And if anyone will devote a close attention to those things
which are stated by the prophets with regard to the end, and
those which John, the disciple of the Lord, saw in the
Apocalypse, he will find that the nations receive the same
plagues universally as Egypt then did particularly.'
X 1 Cor. x. 11. § Dr. Vaughan.

The Apocalypse 163
that ' God will render to every man according to
his works : to them that by patience in well-doing
seek for glory and honour and incorruption, eternal
life : but unto them that are factious, and obey
not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be
wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish
upon every soul of man that worketh evil,'* and
this is the truth which under imagery borrowed
very largely from the Old Testament the Apo
calypse enforces and emphasises.
2. A second illustration may be given which is
closely connected with the foregoing, for what
light is thrown on the very difficult vision of
chapter xii. by a reference to the history of the
Exodus and the redemption of God's people from
Egypt ! ' When the dragon saw that he was cast
down to the earth, he persecuted the woman which
brought forth the man-child. And there were
given to the woman the two wings of the great
eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness unto
her place, where she is nourished for a time and
times and half a time from the face of the serpent. 't
The subject here treated of is obviously Satan's
persecution of the Christian Church represented
by ' the woman.' ' The wilderness' as the place
of the Church's probation and trial is, of course,
suggested by the wanderings of Israel for forty
years in the wilderness of Sinai. But what puzzles
so many readers is the reference to ' the two wings
of the great eagle ' on which the woman is borne
away to be ' nourished ' in a place of safe protec
tion from evil. Yet, surely, a simple and natural
* Rom. ii. 6-9. t Rev. xii. 13, 14.
2 1 — 2

164 The Old Testament in the New
explanation of the figure is afforded by the
language used in the Pentateuch of Jehovah's
fostering care of Israel. The primary passage is
the great saying in Exod. xix. 4 : ' Ye have seen
what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare
you on eagles' wings, and brought you to Myself.'
But the Song of Moses in Deut. xxxii. is also
partly responsible for the image, for there we read
of God's protection of Israel as follows : 'He
found him in a desert land, and in the waste
howling wilderness ; He compassed him about, He
cared for him, He kept him as the apple of His
eye. As an eagle that stirreth up her nest, that
fluttereth over her young, He spread abroad His
wings, He took them, He bare them on His
pinions.' * Here we have the image of the eagle's
wings fully developed, and a little lower down in
the same song it is worth noticing that where the
English versions (following the Hebrew) have the
expression ' God that gave thee birth,' the LXX
version has the very same Greek word that is used
by St. John here, 'God, that nourished thee.'t The
conclusion is irresistible. The thought to which
the seer would give expression is this : that, just
as of old God Himself had intervened and borne
His people away from the dangers that menaced
them, and had watched over them with tender
care in the wilderness, so now, whensoever the
powers of hell are stirred up against the Church of
* Deut. xxxii. 10, 11.
t Deut. xxxii. 18 (LXX) : i-n-eXdOov 0eoi" tov TpetpovTos ere.
And cf. Deut. i. 31 : 10s irpo(f>ocf>6prjo-e o-e 6 0eos, where the
thought is the same.

The Apocalypse 165
the New Covenant, she may rely on the very same
Divine support and sustenance. She, too, is
borne away on eagles' wings, and nourished by
God Himself, as was Israel in the wilderness, for
the appointed time of her trial.
3. This brings me to a third illustration sug
gested by the same passage in the Revelation, but
drawn not from the Pentateuch, but from a later
book of the Old Testament. The duration of the
woman's sojourn in the wilderness is said to be ' a
time and times and half a time.' * It has been
spoken of earlier in the chapter as 1,260 days f —
i.e., according to the Jewish reckoning, three years
and a half — a period which is thus indicated by the
curious expression, ' a time and times and half a
time.' The same period is mentioned in other
passages of the Revelation. In chapter xi. 3 we
read that God's two witnesses are to 'prophesy a
thousand two hundred and three score days,
clothed in sackcloth '; and in chapter xiii. 5 we
are told that to the beast, the vicegerent of the
dragon, ' there was given authority to continue
forty and two months.' Why the period should
be calculated at one time by days, at another by
months, and at another by years, I am unable to
say, but it is obvious that the same length of time
is indicated by all these different expressions; and
it will be noticed that in each case it is a time of
trial and suffering, during which God's special
protection is needed, that is spoken of. The
number is, I believe, like all the other numbers in
this book, symbolical. It would be a mistake to
* Rev. xii. 14. I Verse 6.

166 The Old Testament in the New
take it literally, and search for an actual period of
three and a half years in the Church's history to
which we might apply it. It is a sort of label, and
stands for the time during which the Church is
called to undergo suffering and trial. But why
should three and a half years bear this significance,
and be thus the stamp of the period of the Church's
trial ? Is there any explanation of its origin forth
coming ? Yes, there is ; and it may be found in
the Old Testament. Twice over in the Book of
Daniel the expression ' a time and times and half
a time ' occurs. In chapter vii. it is said of the
' little horn ' — that incarnation, so to speak, of the
power of eVil, of which the ' beast ' of the Apo
calypse is very largely the counterpart and
successor — that ' he shall speak words against the
Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the
Most High ; and he shall think to change the
times and the law ; and they shall be given into
his hand until a time and times and half a time.' *
Again in chapter xii. of the same book we read as
follows : ' I heard the man clothed in linen, which
was above the waters of the river, when he held
up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven,
and sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever
that it shall be for a time and times and an half,
and when they have made an end of breaking in
pieces the power of the holy people, all these
things shall be finished.' f Now in both these
passages in Daniel there is almost certainly a
definite historical reference in the expression, and
most recent interpreters take it of the three and a
* Dan. vii. 25, t xii. 7.

The Apocalypse 167
half years from June, 168 b.c. to December 165,
during which the persecution of Antiochus
Epiphanes lasted.* That persecution was the most
dreadful experience that the Jews were ever called
upon to undergo. It was a deliberate attempt to
heathenise them, and stamp out the observance
of the Law. Circumcision and the observance of
the Sabbath were forbidden on pain of death.
Sacrifices of unclean beasts and of swine's flesh
were established. A heathen altar was erected
upon the altar of burnt-offering in the Temple,
and sacrifices were offered upon it to Zeus. The
courts of the Temple were polluted by indecent
orgies. Systematic search was made for copies
of the Law, which were deliberately destroyed,
death being the penalty for being found in posses
sion of one ; and the Jews were compelled at the
point of the sword to apostatise and take part in
the festivals of heathen gods established not only
in Jerusalem, but in other cities also.f No
wonder that the persecution stamped itself upon
the imagination of the Jews, and that Antiochus
himself became the very type of Antichrist, and
the period of his persecution a standing designa
tion of the time during which the Church should
undergo suffering and trial. As such it is un
doubtedly used in the Revelation ; and the ex
planation here given affords, I believe, a natural
and satisfactory account of the phrase employed.
It was borrowed by the seer from the Book of
* See Driver's Daniel, in loc.
t For the account of the persecution, see 1 Mace, i., and
cf. 2 Mace. vi.

168 The Old Testament in the New
Daniel, and taken as the label or stamp denoting
the time, however long it may be, during which
the Church had to undergo her chastening and
probation in this world.
4. One more illustration of the debt of the
writer of the Apocalypse to the Old Testament
shall be given, and as it is the last, it shall be
drawn from the closing chapters of the book con
taining the vision of the ' new heaven ' and the ' new
earth,' together with that wonderful description of
' the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from
God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband.'* The question which arises in the
mind of the student of the book is this : Are these
chapters descriptive only of what we are to look
for hereafter in the Church triumphant, after the
judgment, when the final award has been made ; or
are they to be regarded as an ideal description,
couched indeed in poetic and highly figurative
language, of what the Church at least begins to
be here on earth, and of the position which God
means her to fill even while the present order of
things still continues ? The splendid imagery of
these chapters has become the common property
of hymn-writers, and has passed into the familiar
language of Christendom to describe the glories
of a future state, and the hope to which the re
deemed look forward hereafter when the trials
and toils of this mortal life are ended, when the
rest of paradise is past and the bliss of heaven
itself is begun ; and at first sight no doubt this
interpretation appears to be the natural one. Yet
* Rev. xxi. 1, 2.

The Apocalypse 169
it may be permitted to express a doubt whether it
is correct. Even as we read the chapters carefully
we notice details which make us hesitate before
adopting the common interpretation ; for it appears
that at the time of which the seer speaks there are
still nations to be healed, for ' the leaves of the
tree,' we read, ' are for the healing of the nations.'*
Again, how can we account for the presence of
those ' nations,' not, as in the Authorised Version,
'nations of them that are saved,' a late and inde
fensible gloss, but, according to the true text,
simply ' nations,' who are to ' walk in the light' of
the Church ?t Who are they? and who, once
more, are those ' kings of the earth ' who ' bring
their glory and honour into ' the city ?| If the
description refers to what is to happen after the
general resurrection at the last day and the close
of the present dispensation, we should expect that
all such ' nations ' and ' kings of the earth ' would
have passed away, and that there would be place
for them no longer. The use of such expressions
as those just cited may well be thought to indicate
that the present order of things is still going on,
and that there is a continuance of those outward
surroundings which are all about us now.§ Still,
-when the New Jerusalem has come down from
* Rev. xxii. 2. t Rev. xxi. 24. j Rev. xxi. 24.
§ Should it be said that the words of Rev. xxi. 4, 'And
death shall be no more,' preclude the interpretation suggested
in the text, the objection may be met by a reference to our
Lord's words in St. John xi. 26: 'Whosoever liveth and
believeth in Me shall never die.' If the death of the body
can be overlooked as unworthy to be called ' death ' in the
one case, it can equally well in the other. 22

170 The Old Testament in the New
heaven, are there nations of the earth to be healed
and walk in the light of the Church ; still there
are kings to bring their treasures, and consecrate
them to the service of the sanctuary. Thus, from
a simple consideration of the words actually used
by the seer we are led to think that after all the
description is not necessarily a description of the
future glory of the Church, but rather an ideal
account of what she should be even here and now.
And this conviction is strengthened when we dis
cover that much of the most exalted language of
these chapters comes straight from the Old Testa
ment, where it occurs in passages which confes
sedly refer to the Messianic age, and the kingdom
of heaven set up upon earth in the Christian dis
pensation. The primary passage is Isa. lxv. 17,
where (as here) we read of the ' new heavens
and the new earth ' which God will create, and
' the former things shall not be remembered
nor come into mind.' This is followed imme
diately in the prophet by a description of Jeru
salem created as a rejoicing and her people as a
joy. In the Revelation we read that God will
' wipe away all tears from their eyes.'* But these
words again come straight from another passage
in the same prophet, where by general consent
the. words refer to something in this life.f Again,
the description of 'the holy city, new Jerusalem,'
with its ' wall great and high ' and its ' twelve
gates, and names written thereon, which are the
names of the twelve tribes of Israel,' recalls the
account in the later chapters of Ezekiel, wherein
* Rev. xxi. 4. t Isa. xxv. 8.

The Apocalypse 171
the prophet is described (as here) as carried away
and ' set down upon a very high mountain,' and
shown the vision of the holy city whose name is
' the Lord is there,' and whose gates are twelve,
and named ' after the names of the tribes of Israel,
three gates northward, on the east side three
gates, at the south side three gates, at the west
side three gates.'* Further, the description which
follows immediately in the Apocalyptic vision of
the building of the wall of jasper, and of the city
as pure gold with foundations of all manner of
precious stones, is based on God's promise made
in Isa. liv. 11, 12 to restored Jerusalem : ' I will
set thy stones in fair colours, and lay thy founda
tions with sapphires. And I will make thy pin
nacles of rubies, and thy gates of carbuncles, and
all thy border of pleasant stones ' — a passage which
has clearly influenced the language of Tobit xiii.
16, 17: 'Jerusalem shall be builded with sapphires
and emeralds and precious stones ; thy walls and
towers and battlements with pure gold. And the
streets of Jerusalem shall be paved with beryl and
carbuncle and stones of Ophir '—words which also
may well have been in the mind of St. John when
he penned the passage before us. And if the
seer tells us that the city which he beheld ' had
no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine
in it ; for the glory of God did lighten it, and the
Lamb is the light thereof,' he is after all only
giving a Christian form to the words of Isaiah :
' The sun shall be no more thy light by day ;
neither for brightness shall the moon give light
* Ezek. xlviii. 30-35. 22 — 2

172 The Old Testament in the New
unto thee, but the Lord shall be unto thee an
everlasting light, and thy God thy glory ';* while
the announcement that ' the kings of the earth do
bring their glory and honour into it,' and that ' the
gates thereof shall not be shut at all by day, for
there shall be no night there,' comes straight from
another verse of the same chapter in Isaiah : ' Thy
gates also shall be open continually ; they shall not
be shut day nor night, that men may bring unto
thee the wealth of nations, and their kings led with
them.'f I might go on and speak of the close con
nexion of the vision of the river of water of life, and
the tree of life with its twelve fruits, J with the vision
of the healing waters, and the very same tree in
Ezek. xlvii., but sufficient has now been said to
establish my point that the vision as a whole is
based throughout on the Old Testament ; and if,
as I believe, all the visions of the prophets of the
Old Covenant refer to the glories of God's Church
on earth, and find their fulfilment in the blessings
of the Christian dispensation, it seems to me im
possible to resist the conclusion that the same
holds good of St. John's vision also, and that no
unfair strain is put upon his language when the
same interpretation is proposed for it as is given
to the language of the old prophets which so pro
foundly influenced him.
There are few things more inspiring or better
calculated to fill us with a noble enthusiasm than
to read the Apocalypse with this view of it in
mind, and to say to oneself after reading these
glorious descriptions of the New Jerusalem : That
* Isa. Ix. 19. J Isa. Ix. 11. :[: Rev. xxii. 1, 2.

The Apocalypse 173
is the picture of the Church as God would have
her to be, as God means us to make her. After
all, it is only man's sin and man's weakness and
man's unfaithfulness which prevent the ideal from
even now being realised. If the Church could
but grasp this, if she could rise to a full sense of
her Divine calling, then it would be no longer
' only an ideal ': it would be realised as an actual
living fact : the kingdom of God would indeed
be set up in its perfection among men, and we
should see ' the New Jerusalem corning down from
heaven.' It is indeed a grand view of our heritage, and
of the mission of the Catholic Church, that is
opened out before us. But oh, what a come
down it is to the sights and scenes which meet
our earthly gaze, and the machinery whereby the
Church is compelled to work !
The poet has described in simple and pathetic
words, which linger in the memory, the fading
away of the maiden's vision of green fields and
flowing waters as she wakes from her reverie in
the heart of the crowded city. One moment
1 She looks and her heart is in heaven — but they fade —
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade —
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.'
So it is too often with us. From the vision of
the ' new heaven and the new earth ' we wake to
the sordid realities of actual life. Not to speak of
the sickening squabbles and the petty pride that
mar so much of the Church's work, the suspicions,

174 The Old Testament in the New
misunderstandings, prejudices and unfairness
which keep men apart, there is the degrading
sense of work all around us crippled for lack of
means; there is the squalor and want and wretched
ness with which we are daily brought face to face
in our work; the blank indifference, and the
desperate, high-handed defiance of God, which
makes us stagger back, sick at heart, as we realise
something of the ' depths of Satan.' ' Yes,' men
say, ' you may dream your dreams and see your
visions, but ' — and we are forced sometimes sadly
to confess that it is so —
' The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from our eyes.'
And yet, need this be so ? It must be if we
allow our visions and our daily tasks to be kept
apart. If the vision be a vision and nothing more,
then he who sees it is in danger of becoming the
dreamer whom practical men will mark and avoid,
or else, letting his vision die away as age creeps
on him, he will end, if not as a cynical disbeliever
in all lofty designs, at least as the man of common
place aims, without enthusiasm himself and without
the power of kindling it in others.
But what if we carry the vision with us into
everyday life and make it a spring of action and
an inspiration for work ? As such, it can dignify
what were otherwise vulgar and ignoble. It can
create an enthusiasm for work which were else
distasteful. It can become a source of strength,
ensuring a tenacity of purpose which will enable
us to face difficulties without flinching. Here in

The Apocalypse 175
the Revelation of St. John we have the unveiling
of heavenly mysteries, a vision of the Church as
she should be, and of all that God means her to
be, to the toiling masses of humanity. Let us
ever keep our eyes open to it. At least it will
give us a worthy object to work for — to make the
reality correspond to the ideal. But it will do
more. It will teach us to look below the surface,
and amid all the sin and wickedness that surround
us, to seek for tokens of God's presence among
men, and signs that the ' New Jerusalem ' is even
now coming down from God out of heaven ; and
those who look with the desire to find will discover
that their eyes are opened, and they will not have
far to seek. And it may do yet more than this.
The vision may remind us that we ourselves are
builders of the heavenly city, and if there seems
nothing else we can do, at least we can all do this,
— we can look to it that we build to the best of
our power that portion of the outer wall of the
city or of the inner shrine of the sanctuary — it
matters not which — where God has called us to
labour.

XII
The New Testament and the
Apocrypha
St. Matt. xiii. 52 : 'Every scribe which is instructed unto
the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an house
holder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new
and old.'

23

XII
The New Testament and the
Apocrypha
So far in this course of lectures we have been
considering the unacknowledged influence of the
Canonical books of the Old Testament upon the
thought and language of the New. ' The un
acknowledged influence,' I say, because I have
excluded all reference to formal and acknowledged
quotations introduced by some such formula as
'It is written,' or 'as saith the Lord by the
prophet,' where the appeal is obviously to a recog
nised authority. My endeavour has been to show
that in cases where no such appeal is made there
is constant reminiscence of those books, and that
this reminiscence has often coloured the language
of the New Testament, and sometimes alone fur
nishes an explanation of the thought and meaning
of its writers. To-day I purpose to pass beyond
the limits of the Canonical books of the Old
Testament, and to consider whether something of
the same kind does not hold good in regard to
that group of books which the early Church called
' ecclesiastical,' but which we (rather unfortunately)
179 23 — 2

180 The Old Testament in the New
have learnt to style the ' Apocrypha '; but which,
though thus known to us by a different name, are
yet accorded by us precisely the same position
which was given to them by the early Church —
viz., the position of books which are worthy to be
read for example of life and instruction of manners,
but which are not to be applied to establish any
doctrine.* Now, it is well known that the Church
of Rome differs from the Church of England in
holding that these books, which have come down
to us in a Greek dress, are, in the strict sense of
the word, ' Canonical,' and that the decree of the
Council of Trent upon the subject makes no differ
ence whatever between them and the books of the
Hebrew Canon,f which alone were anciently, and
are to this day, regarded as authoritative by the
Jews, as by us ; and controversial writers, in
defending the Anglican position against Rome,
have often laid stress upon the fact that while in
the New Testament nearly every book of the
Hebrew Canon is cited, not one quotation occurs
from any one of those books which form part of
what is now called the Apocrypha. Thus Bishop
Cosin, in his Scholastical History of the Canon
of the Scriptures, writes as follows : 'In all the
New Testament we find not any one passage of
the Apocryphal books to have been alleged either
* Article VI. of the Thirty-nine Articles.
t An exception must be made in regard to 3 and 4 Esdras,
and. the Prayer of Manasses, which are included in our
Apocrypha, but are not regarded by the Roman Church as
Canonical. The decree of the Council of Trent was passed
in the fourth session of the Council, in 1546.

The Apocrypha 1 8 1
by Christ or His Apostles for the confirmation of
their doctrine ; no example produced from them,
no advertisement given, no mention made of them
(more than of other foreign writings) at all.
Which is an evident sign that, what account so
ever they had in them besides, yet they never held
them to be of the same equal and divine authority
with the prophetical and canonical Scriptures
themselves ; whereof (over and above the high
and venerable characters that they give of them
in general) they mention not much fewer than
three hundred passages in particular.' * To the
same effect in later days writes Bishop Harold
Browne. ' Our Lord and His Apostles, when
they gave the sanction of Divine authority to the
Jewish Scriptures, quote perpetually nearly all the
books of the Hebrew Canon, and quote none
besides.'f The facts thus stated are undoubtedly true, if
' quotation ' be understood to mean formal and
acknowledged quotation. Most certainly there is
not one such in the New Testament from any of
these books. Nowhere are they cited by name ;
nowhere are words from them introduced by such
a formula as, 'It is written.' From this we may
reasonably infer that they were not regarded by
our Lord and His disciples as authoritative in
the same way as were the books of the Hebrew
Canon to which they made such constant appeal.
But that some of these books were known and
used by them is, I think, beyond controversy, and
* Cosin's Works, A. C. Lib., vol. iii., p. 23.
t Exposition of the Thirty -nine Articles, p. 152.

182 The Old Testament in the New
in not a few cases a reference to them as their
original source will throw light on Apostolic
words and explain their meaning. Indeed, so
close are the coincidences of thought and language
between one book of the Apocrypha — the Book of
Wisdom — and one book of the New Testament —
the Epistle to the Hebrews — that an ingenious
conjecture has been made, and seriously defended,
that both works really come from the pen of the
same author, Apollos, the Alexandrian Jew, who
was mighty in the Scriptures, the Book of Wisdom
being written by him before, and the Epistle to
the Hebrews after, his conversion to the Christian
faith.* I cannot think that there is really any
solid ground for this conjecture. The similarities
between the two books are indeed remarkable,
but they may easily be explained by the theory
that one writer borrows from the other ; while the
dissimilarities are so great as to point conclusively
to different authors. But it is not only between
the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of
Wisdom that coincidences can be found : there
are many also between this last-mentioned book
and some of those Epistles which are the un
doubted work of the Apostle Paul. For instance,
the coincidences of language between the descrip
tion of the Christian's armour in Eph. vi. 13-17,
and a passage in Wisd. v. 17-20, is so close as
to leave little or no room for doubt that the pas
sage in question suggested to the Apostle the
form in which he cast his words. ' Take up,' so
* So Plumptre (after Noack) in The Expositor, vol. i., first

The Apocrypha 183
writes the Apostle, ' the whole armour ' (the
panoply) ' of God, that ye may be able to with
stand in the evil day, and having done all, to
stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins
with truth, and having put on the breastplate of
righteousness, and having shod your feet with the
preparation of the gospel of peace ; withal taking
up the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be
able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God.' Some
phrases in this magnificent description are prob
ably due to reminiscence of words and phrases
found in the prophet Isaiah ;"" but I cannot doubt
that the following from the Book of Wisdom was
that which, more than anything else, served to
colour the Apostle's thought and mould his
imagery : ' He shall take his jealousy as complete
armour' — as panoply y the very same rare word that
is used by St. Paul | — ' and shall make the whole
creation his weapons for vengeance on his enemies.
He shall put on righteousness as a breastplate '\
— observe once more the phrase adopted by the
Apostle § — ' and shall array himself with judg
ment unfeigned as with a helmet ; he shall take
holiness as an invincible shield, and he shall
sharpen stern wrath for a sword ; and the world
* See Isa. xi. 4, 5, xl. 3, 9, xlix. 2, li. 16, Iii. 7, lix. 17.
T Travo-rrXia occurs nowhere else in St. Paul's writings. It
is rare in the LXX., and is not used in any of the passages in
Isaiah referred to above.
X lySikrETCu diopaKa h'lK.aioo-vv'qv,
§ evSvvdp.evoi rbv dwpana -ri)9 Sikouoo-iV^s (Eph. vi. 14).

184 The Old Testament in the New
shall go forth with him to fight against his insen
sate foes.' So, too, in another famous passage in
Rom. ix. 19-21, where the Apostle works out
the illustration of the potter and the clay, and
speaks of the potter's ' power over the clay ; from
the same lump to make one part a vessel unto
honour, and another unto dishonour,' the resem
blance between his words and those of Wisdom
xv. 7 is so striking as to make it almost a moral
certainty that the illustration was suggested to
him by a reminiscence of these words of the
earlier writer : ' The potter, tempering soft earth,
fashioneth every vessel with much labour for our
service ; yea, of the same clay he maketh both the
vessels that serve for clean uses, and likewise also
all such as serve to the contrary : but what is the
use of either sort, the potter himself is the judge.'
Again, the natural theology of the first chapter of
the Epistle to the Romans, and the manner in
which the Apostle dwells upon the inexcusable
character of the error of the Gentiles, who failed
to recognise the Creator by the study of the
creature, so recalls the substance and phraseology
of Wisd. xiii. i-io as to suggest that the whole
passage must have been in St. Paul's mind when
he wrote; while the remarkable expression in
Rom. iii. 25, 'the passing over ' (not 'the for
giveness ') 'of the sins done aforetime, in the for
bearance of God,' is really anticipated in Wisd.
xi. 23 : 'Thou overlookest the sins of men to the
end that they may repent '• — a passage which con
tains the germ of a thought to which St. Paul
gives expression not only in the Epistle to the

The Apocrypha 185
Romans, but also in his speeches at Lystra and
Athens.* These parallels are generally acknowledged and
referred to by commentators, and therefore I pass
over them here without dwelling further upon
them ; nor need I stop to call your attention to
the manner in which the Epistle of St. James is
influenced by the teaching of the Book of Eccle-
siasticus ,f and I need say but little of the remark
able illustrations of the language of Heb. xi.
afforded by the stories of the Maccabean martyrs
in the books of the Maccabees. I will only observe
in passing that 2 Mace. vi. 18-28, which gives
the account of Eleazar, 'one of the principal
scribes,' who, because he refused to eat swine's
flesh, was martyred, and, as the writer tells us,
' went to the instrument of torture ' (rvnwavov),
explains the most unusual expression in Heb.
xi. 35, 'Others were tortured' (irvfiiraviadrtaav) — an
expression found nowhere else in the New Testa
ment ; while the record in 2 Mace. vii. of the
seven brethren who ' were shamefully handled
with scourges and cords to compel them to taste
of the abominable swine's flesh,' and who one
after another were ' brought to the mocking,' and
died with the confession of their faith in ' the
resurrection unto life ' upon their lips, furnishes
* Cf. Acts xiv. 15-17, xvii. 30, and see The Expositor,
vol. iv., secpnd series, p. 213, where the coincidences are
worked out more fully.
+ See the parallels as given in J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of
St. James, p. Ixxiii, and Plumptre, The General Epistle of
St. James {The Cambridge Bible), p. 32. 24

186 The Old Testament in the New
the only explanation of the allusions in the same
verses of the Epistle to the Hebrews to those
who ' had trial of mockings and scourgings,' and
were tortured, ' not accepting deliverance, that
they might obtain a better resurrection.' Turn
from the Apostolic Epistle and read the sixth and
seventh chapters of 2 Mace, and you will see
at once to what stirring scenes in the national
history of the Hebrews the Christian writer was
referring. But, as I have said, all this is generally
acknowledged, and I need not, therefore, dwell
upon it. But what is not so generally acknow
ledged is that in the teaching of our Blessed Lord
Himself it is not seldom the case that the germ of
His thought may be found in a book of the Apo
crypha, and that in several instances the influence
of these books may be traced upon His words.
One, at least, of His parables seems to be really
an expansion of a saying of the son of Sirach.
Read the parable of the rich fool who said to him
self, ' Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for
many years ; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be
merry,'* and then turn to Ecclus. xi. 18, 19, and
say if it is not probable that we have the germ of
our Lord's teaching in these words : ' There is
that waxeth rich by his wariness and pinching,
and this is the portion of his reward : when he
saith " I have found ease, and now will I eat of
my goods "; yet he knoweth not what time shall
pass, and he shall leave them to others and die.'
Again, the petition for forgiveness of our tres
passes, ' as we forgive them that trespass against
* St. Luke xii. 16-21.

The Apocrypha 187
us,' which our Lord has enshrined in His own
prayer, gives a Divine sanction to the lesson
which the same son of Sirach had inculcated to
the men of his generation, when he wrote ' forgive
thy neighbour the hurt that he hath done to thee,
and then thy sins shall be forgiven when thou
prayest.' * I see no reason for doubting that
these words were in our Lord's mind when He
gave His disciples that prayer, or when He said,
' Whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have
ought against any; that your Father also which
is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.'
Let me give a further instance in which it is
a reasonable inference that another saying from
the same work has influenced the form of our
Lord's words. In Ecclus. xxiv. (as in Prov. viii.)
the Divine Wisdom is personified and introduced
as the speaker in a passage of splendid eloquence,
in the course of which occur words which were
afterwards taken up by St. Bernard and applied
to our Saviour personally in a hymn which, in its
English dress, is familiar to us all :
' Jesu, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills the breast ;
But sweeter far Thy face to see,
And in Thy presence rest.
=1= * * -.:-
' Celestial sweetness unalloyed,
Who eat Thee hunger still ;
Who drink of Thee still feel a void
Which only Thou canst fill.'f
* Ecclus. xxviii. 2.
t ' Jesu dulcis memoria
Dans vera cordis gaudia,
24 — 2

1 88 The Old Testament in the New
That is little more than a paraphrase — in the
original the resemblance is even closer than in
English — of the words of the Divine Wisdom as
given by the son of Sirach.
' Come unto me, ye that are desirous of me,
and be ye filled with my produce. For my
memorial is sweeter than honey, and mine in
heritance than the honeycomb. They that eat
me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me
shall yet be thirsty.'*
But many centuries before St. Bernard applied
these words to Him our Lord Himself seems to
have had them in His mind, and to have taken
them as the basis of His teaching on Himself and
the relation of His followers to Him. ' I am the
Bread of Life : he that cometh to Me shall not
hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never
thirst'f Only notice the difference between the

Sed super mel et omnia
Dulcis ejus praesentia.
# * * *
' Qui te gustant, esuriunt,
Qui bibunt, adhuc sitiunt.
Desiderare nesciunt
Nisi Jesum, quem diligunt'
Mone: Hymni Latini Medii
yEvi, vol. i., p. 329.
* Ecclus. xxiv. 19-21. The Vulgate, from which, of course,
St. Bernard borrows, is as follows : ' Transite ad me, omnes
qui concupiscitis me, et a generationibus meis implemini :
Spiritus enim meus super mel dulcis, et hsreditas mea super
mel et favum : Memoria mea in generationes satculorum. Qui
edunt me, adhuc esurient, et qui bibunt me adhuc sitient.'
t St. John vi. 35.

The Apocrypha 189
old and the new expression. In the work of the
Hebrew wise man the Divine Wisdom was intro
duced as declaring that the desire of her would be
increased by feeding upon her. ' They that eat
me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me
shall yet be thirsty.' Our Lord, while appro
priating and making His own the figure and ex
pression, turns it into a declaration that in Him —
the perfect wisdom of God — every desire can find
complete satisfaction. ' He that cometh to Me
shall not hunger ; he that believeth on Me shall
never thirst.' It was He who said on another
occasion that ' every scribe which is instructed
unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man
that is an householder, which bringeth forth out
of his treasure things new and old';* and, acting
on His own maxim, we here see Him draw out of
His treasure one of those 'old things ' which He
had learnt perhaps in His boyhood at Nazareth,
and in the very act of drawing it out of His
treasure He makes the old thing new.
One more example I will give, and it is in some
respects the most interesting of all. It is found
in ' the golden rule ' of the Sermon on the Mount,
in which our Lord sums up the teaching of the
law and the prophets. ' All things, whatsoever
ye would that men should do to you, do ye even
so to them, for this is the law and the prophets. 'f
Some of you may perhaps remember the charac
teristic sneer with which Gibbon speaks of this,
and tells us that he happens to have read it in a
treatise written centuries before the publication of
* St. Matt. xiii. 52. t St. Matt. vii. 12.

190 The Old Testament in the New
the Gospel ;* and the sneer has been repeated in
later days by Haeckel.f with the evident desire
to detract from the originality of our Lord's teach
ing, and from its superiority to the ethics of previous
teachers. Is it indeed so ? Are we to give upas
borrowed and secondhand that which we have
been accustomed to point to as almost the most
striking and original of the ethical maxims of our
blessed Lord and Master ? Well, the fact is
that not only may parallels be found in heathen
writers — as Isocrates, whom Gibbon quotes — but
also in the Jewish Book of Tobit, written in the
second century B.C., and it is very probable that
in this last work our Lord may have found the
source of His word, for in Tobit iv. 14, 15, in the
charge given by the aged Tobit to his son, we
read as follows : ' Take heed to thyself, my child,
in all thy works, and be discreet in all thy be
haviour ; and what thou thyself hatest, do to no
man.' These last words formed just the kind of
maxim that Jewish parents would be likely to
teach to their children ; indeed, they are repeated
as part of his characteristic teaching by the
famous Rabbi Hillel ;J and I cannot but think
that it is probable that our Lord may have learnt
* Decline and Fall, chap. liv. , note.
t Confessions of a Man of Science (E. T.), p. 64. ' "Do to
others as you would they should do to you." This natural
and highest command had been taught and followed thousands
of years before Christ said : "Thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself." In the human family this maxim has always been
accepted as self-evident.'
X Lightfoot, Horce Hebraicce on St. Matt. vii. 12, vol. i.,
p. 158. Cf. Taylor, Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, pp. 141, 142.

The Apocrypha 191
the words in His childhood. But, granting this,
it is still true that He has coined the thought
anew, and that it comes to us fresh from the mint
of His teaching, with His own stamp upon it.
For in Tobit, as in every other earlier parallel
that can be cited, including that to which Gibbon
refers,* the saying is cast in the negative form,
' What thou thyself hatest, do to no man.' It
was reserved for our Blessed Lord, and for Him
alone, to take it and coin it afresh in the positive
form — ' Whatsoever ye would that men should do
unto you, even so do ye unto them '; and the
difference between the two is incalculable. The
one might do something to prevent such crimes
as murder and theft ; but it would never do more
than act as a check upon sin. The other has
proved potent to start thousands in every age on
careers of active beneficence and life-long service
of self-denying love, to which the world can show
no parallel before the old saying in its new form
flowed from the lips of the world's Redeemer.
Nothing is really taken from the grandeur and
originality of our Lord's teaching by admitting,
as I think we ought to admit, that a saying and
maxim drawn from one of the books of the Apo
crypha furnished Him with a starting-point for
that golden rule to which the world owes so much.
It is only another instance of the manner in which
He ' makes all things new.'
The Apocrypha is less read in these days both
in public and in private than it was in former
* In Isocrates it runs as follows : "A irdo-xovres vcj>' krkpuiv
opyt^eade, ravra tois dXXois p.r] iroieiTi.

192 The Old Testament in the New
ages of the Church. But if I am right in my
argument, and if the illustrations I have given
carry conviction to your minds that our Lord and
His Apostles must have known and loved some,
at least, of the books in the collection, then surely
you will feel with me that we have no right to
neglect it. If to these books we can trace the
source of some of the most characteristic teaching
of the New Testament, then indeed we shall be
wise if we study them for ourselves ; and I venture
to think that we shall find in them much that may
be of lasting help and comfort to us. Our ex
perience in this matter may be similar to that of
John Bunyan, who tells us in his autobiographical
sketch entitled ' Grace Abounding ' that once,
when ' greatly assaulted and perplexed, and ready
to sink with faintness in his mind,' suddenly ' that
sentence fell with weight ' upon his spirit : ' Look
at the generations of old and see ; did ever any
trust in the Lord, and was confounded ?' At this
he was ' greatly lightened and encouraged in his
soul.' But having looked in his Bible, he failed to
find it, nor could any of those whom he questioned
show him where it was. For more than a year
he searched in vain, until at last, ' casting his eye
into the Apocrypha,' he found it in Ecclus. ii. 10.
' This at the first,' he says, ' did somewhat daunt
me ; but because by this time I had got more
experience of the love and kindness of God, it
troubled me the less, especially when I considered
that though it was not in those texts that we call
holy and canonical, yet, forasmuch as this sentence
was the sum and substance of many of the pro-

The Apocrypha 193
mises, it was my duty to take the comfort of it,
and I bless God for that word, for it was of God
to me. That word doth still at times shine before
my face.'*
I will only add that there is many a word besides
this in the Apocrypha of which we, too, may ' take
the comfort,' and which we may often find to
' shine before our face.'
* Grace Abounding, § 62.

THE END

WELLS GARDNER, DARTON AND CO., LTD., LONDON